You are vey correct—the talk and link have nothing to do with Soma.
I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.
The author of this piece—which I am—is reporting on Huxley’s MIT talk. He predicted a drug that improves mental efficiency/focus. And the talk discusses alternative non-pharmacological approaches.
You are welcome to either actually read my piece or, better, listen to his talk. There is no judgment against the substance but a call for additional approaches to enhance a person.
Appreciate the thought—my comments in Claude's analysis are now added on the margins.
The exercise is not meant to do much else but spot patters in my thinking that I can reflect on. Nothing particularly novel here from Claude but it is helpful, for me, to get external feedback.
This post is updated now to have these reflections on the margin notes. No need to scroll down. I was not done with this post when whoever found it here linked to it.
Usually that’s what I typically do in talking with Claude but my first vault is so haphazard at this point that it’s a bit of a lost cause.
This prompt to find contradictions was merely to see where the contradicting notes are, as a little toy experiment.
I still have to annotate this post as it allows me to see what I do and don’t agree with Claude on.
However, this half-baked “AI slop” post is making me reflect on my style of working with my site; it usually gets little traffic so I put whatever I want on there but clearly someone has it in their feed and posted one of the less interesting posts here IMHO.
A better prompt could have been used—I literally was just getting started on this as a fun little thing to discuss with a friend that is travelling. It was not meant to show up here. facepalm moment
Thanks for the thorough comment—yes, the heat pipes etc haven’t been accounted for. Might be a future addition but the idea was to look at some key large parts and see where that takes us in terms of launch. The pipes would definitely skew the business case further. Similarly, the analysis is missing trusses.
Don’t even get me started on the costs of maintenance. I am sweating bricks just thinking of the mission architecture for assembly and how the robotic system might actually look. Unless there’s a single 4 km long deployable array (of what width?), which would be ridiculous to imagine.
analyzed Starcloud’s whitepaper (a fun read!) claiming a 40 MW orbital data center could be launched for $8.2M in a single Starship flight. Using ISS-proven solar and radiator systems as conservative baselines, the same system requires:
* ~400 tonnes of solar arrays
* ~900–1100 tonnes of radiators
Total launch mass exceeds 1,700 t — or 17–22 launches, not one. At realistic $500–$1,000/kg launch costs, that’s $850M–$1B, not $8M.
This doesn’t invalidate the concept of space-based computing — but it does suggest the near-term economics need major revision unless radiator mass drops by 10×. Solar array deployment mechanisms face similar hurdles.
(Note: The draft is still rough and slightly repetitive — I’ll be cleaning it up further soon. Feedback welcome.)