I meant that the equipment to produce mirrors of that level of fineness has existed for half a century at least. As far as it's concerned, the mirrors on Hubble and KH-11s aren't out of the ordinary for that generation of optics. It might be a high degree of precision, but it's one that's been met for a long time. You, in fact, can purchase a dielectric mirror of that level of precision off the shelf. They're not usually as large as the Hubble primary but they are on the Earth-monitoring cubesats used commercially, as well as higher end amateur astronomical equipment. Of course, those will all probably use aluminum dopant and not the probably exotic materials used by ASML. (Which, a little bit of research I've done says it's probably molybdenum and iridium in precisely controlled alternating layers.)

That's not that special. For example, the main mirror on Hubble, which is also the same primary on the KH-11 spy satellites, is an order of magnitude smoother than this and is designed to work in optical and near-IR wavelengths. While Hubble's primary is doped with aluminum and James Webb is doped with gold, ASML's mirrors would need a different dopant.

China is pointedly not spending a third of their manufacturing on AI. They're also not spending a third of 1940s America's manufacturing output on it. They're not spending even an inflation-adjusted amount of money on AI as was spent on the Manhattan Project. China is not pursuing hyper-scaling as a technique to improve their generators, unlike the US. They've already shown much more progress with a much faster and cheaper process. These new chips, if they ever develop them, will improve those models, but they won't be hyper-scaling them like US companies are.

Hilariously, what will probably happen is they'll start selling chips to compete with Nvidia. There's lots of demand for these chips and not nearly enough supply. There's already a five year backlog of orders for already outlayed data centers. Which is doubly hilarious because these chips run super hot and only have a lifespan of around three years.

It's even more funny once you take the circular financing of "AI" companies into account. Nvidia invests in companies like OpenAI that then spend that money paying data center companies to build more data centers. Those data center companies then buy chips from Nvidia. Nvidia then uses that income to make more loans to AI companies, etc. This is obviously a Ponzi scheme-style financing structure. An introduction of Chinese chips would actually disrupt this scheme just enough to pop the bubble as it's not actually generating wealth; it's just passing the same $10 around between each other and calling it economic activity. If the Chinese firms can pull even a small amount of market share, they'll rapidly deplete the alpha from the industry.

That's a description of a fairly traditional type of mirror called a dielectric mirror. Basically every optical telescope made in the last 75 years uses them. Even most of the higher-end hobbyist telescopes use them. I'm guessing they use something besides the normal aluminum deposited on borosilicate glass for their mirrors. It would need to have lots of electrons to reflect such high frequencies, be relatively durable, and also be shiny/reflective. If I had to guess, I'd say gallium, indium, tin, or some alloy of those.

Once you get to UV-C wavelengths, you stop being able to use traditional optics. I doubt they're using mirrors at all. This is for the rather funny reason that the wavelength starts approaching the size of individual atoms such that you can't make a mirror that appears smooth to the light beam you're using. You start having to use things like grazing incidence mirrors or diffraction gratings to collimate the light.

You could also skip all that by using an electron beam to do your etching. You can easily get down to 3nm resolution, or even smaller, with magnetically steered electron beams. The only problem is speed. It's a much slower process compared to photo-lithography. It makes up for this a bit by being much more reliable. Chip fabs really only have one production line; they just make the highest-end chips. If part of a slab turns out bad during QA, they just disable that part of the chip and market it as a lower tier chip line. But the technology is so different, it requires an entirely different product chain to manufacture. It makes switching over more expensive than it would be worth.

The part most people think of when they think of the Manhattan Project is the designing of nuclear devices. In reality, the bulk of the Manhattan Project was manufacturing the weapons-grade fissile material. That part of the Manhattan Project occupied roughly a third of US industrial capacity during WWII. Was this EUV R&D project consuming a third of China's industrial output? Was it even consuming an absolute amount of manufacturing capacity equal to a third of 1940's-era America? No? Then it's not China's version of the Manhattan Project.

The only electric vehicles that have the potential to meaningfully impact climate change are electric trains. Everything else is just virtue signalling to make people feel better about their consumptive lifestyles.

It will push a bunch of teens off social media and it'll teach a bunch of teens how to use VPNs and hide their identities online. Both are good.

Disgusting.

All these atmospheric and space-based climate engineering proposals are stupid, dangerous, and useless. Their effects are unknown. You can't experiment with it because we have a sample size of 1. Modelling such radical changes to the climate is difficult at best and these companies have very much not spent the time, effort, and money necessary to do them right.

Furthermore, you can get similar effects by simply painting every roof with titanium white exterior grade paint. Doing so will raise the albedo of the Earth enough to offset a significant portion of current GHG emissions. It would counter something over 90% of current emissions. But doing so would be cheap, easy, effective, and also reversible if needed. All things that modifying the atmosphere are not. The reason you don't hear proposals for this is that it would utilize extant supply chains, regulation structures, and distribution channels. It wouldn't let a bunch of VC techbros siphon off large amounts of money in the mean time. Frankly, that's another positive, in my opinion.

There is a Q-factor when dealing with radiation poisoning. Different radiation types have differing quality of damage. For example, gamma rays have very low quality. Human bodies aren't that dense and most gamma rays can pass right through you without even touching your atoms. It take more grays of gamma rays to cause harm than grays of beta particles. Alpha particles can effectively be stopped by your skin; if you get an alpha emitter on your skin, you can just wash it off and be fine. But if the alpha emitter gets inside your body, that same dose starts liquefying your organs.

In the case of radioactive potassium and carbon inside your body, it's much worse than what damage you'd get if that same material was outside your body. Add to that, while the low temperature of a body won't slow its radioactive decay, it will increase the absorption cross-section of your DNA.

That's literally what Egyptian mummification was, as well. Thus my comparison.

Humans are simply too large to cryopreserve like we do embryos. The body can't freeze fast enough and so always forms ice crystals. This destroys tissues at a cellular level. Just think what happens to a strawberry you freeze then thaw. That happens inside your organs.

The technique used in cryopreservation involves replacing the blood with an antifreeze compound. The stuff is toxic and will destroy cells even if the ice doesn't get them. This is more like embalming or pickling than preserving.

The cryopreservation process has to be done after death. If you do it to a living person, it's murder. You can't reanimate a corpse, especially not one that's been pickled.

When frozen, a corpse has yet another reason it can't heal damage done to it. Temperature doesn't affect the decay of radioactive isotopes inside a body. The radioactive carbon and potassium alone would subject a body to LD50 doses of radiation inside of a decade.

Cryopreservation is about preserving a corpse as a death ritual and not a legitimate attempt to preserve a life. It should be viewed more akin to ancient Egyptian mummification than a medical procedure. And it has exactly the same chance of resulting in a reanimated corpse as following the Book of The Dead.

China is a planned economy, not a market economy. I read a report from an analyst of China that the CCP's plan was to pump up the EV market with dozens of manufacturers and then strategically collapse it, resulting in concentration of technologies in two or three manufacturers. This just looks like China following that plan to me. It's a matter of leveraging markets' tendency to over-produce, over-saturate, and follow boom & bust cycles to end up with a stable but varied market on the other end while ultimately retaining a majority state ownership of the means of production.

It doesn't beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else.