Here we are past the halfway point of another month. They do seem to fly by these days, don't they? Sometimes, I wish the world would slow down just a bit ...

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Interstellar Space Travel Will Never, Ever Happen — In the late 1980s, I wrote an essay about the impossibility of humanity conquering space. Nice to see someone else writing about that for the layperson, and taking the idea several steps further.

From the article:

The concept of interstellar travel as it exists in the public imagination is based entirely on that public being physically incapable of understanding the frankly absurd distances involved.

When you hear that the next star is 4.25 light years away, that doesn’t sound that far—in an average sci-fi TV show, that trip would occur over a single commercial break. But that round trip is 50 trillion miles. I realize that’s a number so huge as to be meaningless

The Rise and Fall of Urbit — A blockchain-based internet, conceived by the person who's the spirit animal of many a horrible Silicon Valley tech bro. Sounded like a surefire winner, didn't it?

From the article:

Urbit has come to resemble Web 2.0: an enshittified infrastructure controlled by a small handful of actors immune to democratic accountability. If Yarvin’s political vision proved to be an unsound model for governance for a company, one can only imagine how it would play out on the scale of a country.

The Coke Factory — A fascinating look into one person's encounters with a hellscape facility that turned coal into a fuel and reducing agent used in making steel.

From the article:

In the dark, the atmosphere of the place dominated each the individual object. It became, in a way, like an enormous interior stage set on that forlorn shoreline. The curtain rose at dusk. As the sunlight died, so did the rest of the world, and the smoky, hissing drama of fire and steam took over.

The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy — I always find it more than a little ironic that certain digital tools used circumvent government snooping were funded in some way by one government or another. And I'm surprised that those governments don't do more to crack down on the civilian use of those tools.

From the article:

The NRL researchers behind Onion routing knew it wouldn’t work unless everyday people used it, so they reached out to the cypherpunks and invited them into conversations about design and strategy to reach the masses.