Unless the lecturers are willing to change their style quite a bit I don't think you'll do well without a cameraman in the room.
In my experience lecturers move around quite a lot, and sometimes you need to pull back to get their body language, at other times you need to zoom
in on the black- or white-board to see what they are writing or pointing at.

There are some reasons. If you assume that life is based on complex chemistry in the first place (and not say magnetic fields in a gas cloud or electrostatic patterns in clay or naturally evolved electronic circuits or .... -- and here the looking under the streetlight theory applies) then there are surprisingly few choices. To have complex chemistry you need the possibility of lots of kinds of large molecules. Metals don't do that, so you are down to non-metals. If you have mostly atoms that form 1 or 2 chemical bonds each they can't make a large molecule except a simple chain (sulphur makes chains like this, for instance) and there isn't enough choice. That eliminates halogens, oxygen. sulphur, noble gases, hydrogen,... leaving basically nitrogen, phosphorous, carbon, silicon and maybe germanium and antimony. Although nitrogen could make large molecules in principle, the NN triple bond is so stable that these molecules fall apart into nitrogen gas. Phosphorous, silicon and the rest prefer to bond with oxygen than each other. Complex phospenes and silanes might be possible in the absence of oxygen especially at low temperatures, but oxygen is a more common element than phosphorous or silicon, so this seems unlikely (although not impossible). That leaves carbon.

Probably next plausible possibility is large molecules where the "backbone" is alternating silicon and oxygen atoms. This makes quite stable silicone polymers, with scope for a wide variety of structures.

Any reason to believe ORNL aren't using the heat from their supercomputers for offices or whatever?

But battery swaps would work great for a taxi -- you're usually close to base and have competent drivers and even competent staff at the base.

The article says 2.2MW, which is roughly 2W/GFLOP.

The atmosphere is mostly CO2, there is relatively little hydrogen (although obviously some in the sulfuric acid clouds. Also it's at the bottom of a pretty deep gravity well. You're better off mining ice on Mars and splitting it with solar or nuclear power, or even seawater from Earth. Apart from research, Venus seems like a remarkably useless planet so far.

Basic question is what you mean by "colony". My personal guess is that what you will get are initially expeditions where a few humans visit, do research, leave instruments and go home. After that you get "mining camps" -- long-lived outposts where humans are based for a few years to do jobs that can't be done by robots managed from Earth. The ISS is a very minimal example of this in LEO. If the work is producing sufficient return (in science or good or whatever) then these camps gradually expand as it becomes convenient to base people there for longer and to make them less dependent on services from Earth. Eventually you get something which actually can survive on its own and trade with Earth on a more equal basis.

The moon is surely the first target for expeditions, followed by near-Earth asteroids, then the moons of Mars, then Mars itself, then maybe more distant asteroids.
Which, if any, of these ever progress to the "mining camp" stage depends on what is discovered. We might want to mine the moon for He3 or for mass for orbital construction, but it's fairly easy to teleoperate machinery on the moon from here.

Asteroids might be targets for actual mining, aiming to shop back metals carbon and (maybe) volatiles to Earth orbit, or even eventually to Earth. The problem is that they are very spread out. There's no obvious place to have a colony or camp which is more convenient for very many asteroids than Earth is.

Mars might be a source of volatiles (ice) for Earth orbit, or a research target -- for example if life, or clear evidence of complex past life was found.

Everywhere else is really too far away and/or too hostile to be a near future target.

Might also relate to larger climate cycles. The earlier part of this data would, if I recall correctly, come from before the last cluster of ice ages.

In this chart, that's true. Of course the underlying raw data might show more than the chart.
From what I've read elsewhere, I'm pretty sure it doesn't show any values as high as present values.