The chances are still unfortunately very high that our civilisation is going to destroy itself in some way. We need a rudimentary backup.

Recently I’ve been hearing multiple people mention the Tesla Roadster than Elon put up into space a while back. It’s in some crazy orbit near Mars or something. I wonder whether we shouldn’t try to expand on this idea, and put the equivalent of a space pyramid up there in orbit. Something that would be there for several billions of years.

That way any future civilisation that rises from the ashes of ours, that reached the same level of technology as us now, would at least know life existed previously on Earth / in the solar system a long time ago, even if there is still no sign of life anywhere else. That would be very useful to know.

Of course it would need to be much bigger than a car, probably something more like a football field, in order for it to be easily findable by telescopes.

I would guess that the fact that there is no such thing in our solar system, suggests strongly that we are the most advanced civilisation that has ever existed orbiting this star. That in itself is an interesting thought. It’s quite a responsability.

I'm going to try something a bit different this week as far as the newsletter goes. I usually just listen to podcasts throughout the week, sometimes taking notes, and wait until the end of the week to put it all together into an issue. This week I’m going to try, as much as possible, to write the podcast reviews as soon as I listen to an episode that I star, and create a link on the linkblog. That way at the end of the week I’ll only have to write the newsletter intro, and just gather up all the reviews, which will already be written.

I suppose it could be a bit of a spoiler if you already read the blog and linkblog and look forward to the newsletter. On the other hand perhaps it’s a nice way to encourage newsletter readers to read the website more regularly. The newsletter intro will of course always be original content written at the end of the week. The new way might even improve that part because I won’t be as burdonned by the weight of writting the reviews, and the reviews might be better because they will have been written while the episode is fresh in my mind.

Let’s see how it goes.

I wish there was more information out there about people trying to use memecoins / altcoins for serious projects. There’s lots of talk about memecoins, about celebrities starting their own memecoins, most seem to eventually fail. I haven’t read about many folks actually seriously trying to put these new technologies to good use over and above just glorified pump and dump schemes.

I was looking at pump.fun earlier in the week, but it really just looks like a scam site. I thought the description as the 4chan for memecoins was kind of interesting. I think I'd be looking for something a bit more like the reddit for memecoins or the hacker news for memecoins. All this is very vague because I have hardly any idea how this would manifest, or what it would look like.

It’s not clear to me how folks are using these coins with their projects. Is it purely for investment, or are they being used for governance too? If it is for investment, how do the launchers of the coin get value from it?

But there are people trying out interesting modern digital ways to fund projects. I’ve read about decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), sounds great but it’s almost all theoretical. How do you actually set one of these things up?

What do you actually need to start a memecoin? Can you do it just from your mobile phone?