alt.hn

5/17/2026 at 3:25:23 AM

I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

 https://medium.com/@breid.at/ultra-pure-quantum-crystals-from-an-abandoned-mine-in-a-mysterious-desert-93cc87d12314

by vi_sextus_vi

5/19/2026 at 1:38:08 PM

I was arguing with a Chilean friend who moved a few years ago to the USA. He was telling me how Chile doesn't do good science. I challenged his claim saying Chile actually had great scientists that were severely underfunded (Chile's investment in science and research is ~0.4% of the GDP versus the OECD average of ~2.7%).

I think it's sort of a big consensus with people that have never been involved in science work, in Chile, that science is sort of a "lazy-man" type of work. Chilean universities put a lot of emphasis in foundational science research. It should be the industry, in my opinion, that helps bridge the gaps between foundational research and applied science. But the major industries in Chile don't need to do that, why put money into R&D when you can already be a billion-dollar industry by exporting rocks. Chile's main export is not actually copper, it's rocks that have copper in them. We (I'm Chilean) export the rocks and buy back the copper cables.

Recently the newly elected president criticized foundational research saying it doesn't "turn into jobs" and instead "ends up in an expensive book abandoned in a library". It really reminded me of my friend's words, it's the attitude of someone that doesn't understand the importance of foundational science.

This research is interesting, although the article is quite technical, and I'm very happy to see the involvement of Chilean scientists in it.

by jerojero

5/19/2026 at 2:08:30 PM

That's actually a bit wild that Chile isn't refining or smelting copper.

Is it because there's not the energy capacity to run smelters? I thought Chili had a pretty abundant energy grid (mostly hydro as I recall).

by cogman10

5/19/2026 at 3:33:32 PM

Australia behaves the same way, exports ore to China and buys back the refined products. Both countries have abundant energy (hydro and solar) but have old fashioned mining interests in charge.

by ninalanyon

5/19/2026 at 4:31:02 PM

Why do the mining interests prefer exporting it to selling to some local processor? you could probably get similar prices and the transport wouldn't be as complex, right?

by nemomarx

5/19/2026 at 5:29:00 PM

Smelting and other processing of raw materials tends to be a dirty process and might face difficult or impossible permitting and regulatory hurdles locally. Easier to outsource it to a country that is too poor or too corrupt to care.

by SoftTalker

5/19/2026 at 7:44:55 PM

From 30-second googling: purifying Cu to from rocks to ~99% purity is done by mixing CuFeS2 found naturally with C and CaCO3 and smelting. This yields Cu2S. Then S is released by bubbling with O2. This process releases gaseous SO2. From there, Cu is further purified by electrolysis in CuSO4aq.

The whole process is going to need a ton of coal and calcium carbonate and heat, and you have to have a way to safely dispose of SO2 gases and CuSO4aq liquids. And there don't seem to be anything that sounds safe and clean about this process.

by numpad0

5/19/2026 at 8:15:16 PM

SO2 is typically scrubbed and used to produce sulfuric acid. It's not a _clean_ process, but its waste stream is fairly well-controlled.

The amount of carbon used in the reaction itself is totally neglibile, compared to other overheads.

by cyberax

5/19/2026 at 7:55:46 PM

Extraction and metallurgy are different problem domains. Vertical integration can be more profitable, but not when regulatory burden is high. What you’re seeing is an arbitrage of regulatory costs. The government is much more tolerant of ecologically hazardous in industrial processes in the Australian government. I don’t want to go into why that is, but I think most would accept that as true.

by opsnooperfax

5/19/2026 at 5:27:58 PM

I wonder if they just prefer the bigger contracts that they can (presumably) get from overseas customers? Why negotiate twice, especially if somebody in China says “yes, as much as possible.”

by bee_rider

5/19/2026 at 5:15:47 PM

The cost of refining ore varies widely based on electricity, regulatory, and other costs. Proximity to the end user of the refined product also figures into it. Shipping bulk materials is very inexpensive. Buyers in other countries with low refining costs can pay prices that would bankrupt a local refiner and still make a profit.

This is common for bulk industrial materials. For example, it is cheaper for many countries to send their crude oil to the US to be refined than for them to refine it themselves.

by jandrewrogers

5/19/2026 at 4:47:42 PM

Given the comparative economies of scale, you would probably get lower quality of product, and potentially higher prices, if a local processor exists at all.

by ImPostingOnHN

5/19/2026 at 5:01:42 PM

Sure, which is bad for the consumer of copper. But the mining companies don't have an obvious reason to be unhappy about that? the smaller local market won't have any alternative sources and might have to pay them more if it existed so you'd think they would be encouraging some small local smelters or etc if anything. It would be everyone else who buys copper who has reason to be against doing it locally

by nemomarx

5/19/2026 at 5:08:21 PM

> the smaller local market won't have any alternative sources

Ea-nāṣir will still receive complaints, presumably.

by bigyabai

5/19/2026 at 10:58:00 PM

isn't it literally the same company, Rio Tinto?

by sidewndr46

5/20/2026 at 3:19:27 AM

> Is it because there's not the energy capacity to run smelters?

Most mines are in the north, but the hydro capacity is far from them in the south. That's one challenge, but to me doesn't explain why. Chile nationalised copper with aims to develop our industry, but then the US decided to sabotage our democracy.

by dietr1ch

5/19/2026 at 5:44:14 PM

These systems aren't in place by accident. The US doesn't typically purchase roasted coffee beans or chocolate bars from South America either.

by compass_copium

5/19/2026 at 6:55:28 PM

Roasted coffee loses flavor after roasting.

Chocolate requires various ingredients to make that changes the characteristics of the chocolate. It also, famously, doesn't ship well.

Copper ingots, however, weigh less than copper ore and if they are actually too low quality they can be resmelted into a more pure level.

The only reason I can think of why you might actually want the ore is you also want and are extracting other secondary minerals.

by cogman10

5/19/2026 at 7:52:14 PM

I had a Chilean coworker who earned his degree in molecular biology while in Chile. He emigrated to the US (sometime in the early-mid 90's) as he claimed there was little opportunity for scientists in Chile. He worked a basic job that paid the bills while he built up a side business exporting appliances secretly stuffed with gun parts. He was able to retire back to Chile on that money.

by MisterTea

5/20/2026 at 1:51:03 AM

I am the submitter and I am sorry for leaving out, indeed, dismissing the core contribution of the Chilean anthropologists and geologists. The author wouldn't have approved of my editorialising.

I am only slightly relieved that HN have bubbled up a conversation about the self-reinforcing north-south divide in "cultural wealth" instead of making it even more exploitative than it was

Your friend's contribution to the cultural wealth of Chile is ironic. Maybe (some) Southies now have a better (non-fungible/modular) understanding of precision machining, gun-metallurgy or even biochemistry compared to their NorAm counterparts because of his actions.

by vi_sextus_vi

5/19/2026 at 3:05:03 PM

You described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

by tomaskafka

5/20/2026 at 2:14:07 AM

>As of at least 2023, there is no academic consensus on the effect of resource abundance on economic development[4]

Interesting. Do Japanese, and now Dutch, planners think they are free of the resource blessing?

[4] Alssadek, Marwan; Benhin, James (2023). "Natural resource curse: A literature survey and comparative assessment of regional groupings of oil-rich countries".

>For instance, the oil sector frequently requires technical solutions to improve offshore oil drilling. This might create positive knowledge externalities to support other sectors. If these sectors trade with the oil boom sector in the economy, then learning-by-doing spill-overs in the overall economy are expected. In this scenario, the implications of the Dutch disease would not be evident, and natural resources may in fact be a blessing rather than a curse.

by vi_sextus_vi

5/19/2026 at 3:53:13 PM

the newly elected president criticized foundational research saying it doesn't "turn into jobs" and instead "ends up in an expensive book abandoned in a library".

That isn't the Dutch Disease, it's anti-intellectualism. It is where Pol Pots come from eventually, and it never leads anywhere good.

by throwaway5752

5/19/2026 at 6:21:50 PM

Or, you know, the Chilean US puppet Augusto Pinochet who killed, jailed, or exiled professors, intellectuals, students etc.

by subw00f

5/19/2026 at 6:33:59 PM

Pinochet was a garden variety kleptocrat and villain, not an ideologue. Where Milei falls remains to be determined.

edit: also no reason to make this thread deeper, but you seem to be missing the idea that I am insulting Pinochet. He didn't do it for any reason other than power and money. That is worse. For whatever reason, you appear to think I have views I do not, and are assuming the worst of my replies. I will not reply further.

by throwaway5752

5/19/2026 at 9:23:38 PM

You seem to be confusing Chile and Argentina. Milei is president of Argentina, not Chile. The new president of Chile is José Kast. I suspect the substance of your comment is unaffected by this, however.

by pdabbadabba

5/19/2026 at 7:01:20 PM

Funny, and here I was thinking that neoliberal authoritarianism, Cold War anti-communism, and neofascism were all ideologies. But I guess it's only ideology if the bad guy was propped up by the USSR or the PRC?

by subw00f

5/19/2026 at 2:05:19 PM

¿Para que inventar nosotros ? Que ellos ya lo inventan. - A Spanish politician in the first years of XX century to a Spanish inventor working with early radios.

by Zardoz84

5/19/2026 at 6:52:48 PM

I think some of it ties into incrementalism versus "great man" theory. I believe we dramatically underestimate how much of any new thing is (A) not actually as new as it looks and (B) absolutely required a thousand smaller things like precision screws or pure materials.

by Terr_

5/19/2026 at 2:13:34 PM

> Recently the newly elected president criticized foundational research saying it doesn't "turn into jobs" and instead "ends up in an expensive book abandoned in a library"

Guess what the other far right president of the region says (Argentina's). Makes me sad.

by igleria

5/19/2026 at 6:25:36 PM

It's the same for the whole region, friend. Shut up and keep mining, harvesting, or raising these cows for the gringos, ain't no need to get clever about it.

by subw00f

5/19/2026 at 6:43:26 PM

Unless the PRC is a gringo now, you should not limit your concern to the US. The easiest propaganda technique - and trivially easy to accomplish with basic agents and existing social platforms - is divide and conquer.

Get people fighting about who is exploiting them, and they cannot unite against anyone exploiting them.

edit: no need to make the thread deeper. I agree with your reply, too. Two things can be correct at once, and usually are.

by throwaway5752

5/19/2026 at 6:50:15 PM

I'm well aware of the share of commodity exports that goes to China. I'm also well aware of the history of US intervention and its brutality in South America and what it did to keep the region its backyard. Now, if the PRC wants to do the same, they need to seriously step up their game, because it was a LOT.

by subw00f

5/20/2026 at 12:47:44 AM

[dead]

by abreidenbach

5/19/2026 at 3:17:02 PM

[dead]

by nidayewo

5/19/2026 at 11:38:07 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

5/20/2026 at 12:45:38 AM

Hi everyone! This is Dr. Aaron Breidenbach, the author of the article.

I’m very excited to see so much engagement here, and I just wanted to share a few updates and thoughts.

The first is that The Department of Energy recently recognized my thesis work as proving the quantum spin liquid state in Zn-Barlowite, which represents a major scientific breakthrough (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aaron-breidenbach-65363b133_l...) . Certainly, there’s still plenty of doubters in the condensed matter physics community, but I’m quite proud of this recognition.

The second thing I’d like to mention is that I got approved to do both of the measurements I suggested in this article at National labs (Argonne and Oak Ridge). These are to investigate the consequences of the higher purity of the natural crystals. If successful, many of my colleagues have said that this would represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of these materials. I’m quite excited for this!!

Unfortunately, in spite of all this, I’m out of a job and broke . I’m hoping that this will change soon, but academia can be a very tough and political environment… I’ll leave it at this for now. If anyone knows an angel investor or person that writes drop science grants that might be willing to help support me while I run my experiments, please contact me at abreidenbach@alumni.stanford.edu .

Thank you for listening!

Dr Breidenbach

by abreidenbach

5/19/2026 at 10:12:17 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_spin_liquid

Neat

by zeusdclxvi

5/19/2026 at 3:24:08 PM

The animation is great though I don't understand how the collapsed singlet can exist in proximity to the superimposed ones. I would expect the presence of the defined spin to create an "observation" of a neighbor and immediately collapse the entire material.

by ticulatedspline

5/20/2026 at 1:43:29 AM

At a quick glance, I did not see the term "collapsed" in wiki. It isn't a collapse. (The concept is still relevant[0]!)

What was drawn like a "defined spin" for pedagogy should only have been coloured different. The lone spins are always part of a longer-range quantum superposition, maybe better represented as blue blobs. The lowest "excitations" are (superpositions of) triplets, for example.

Btw I put quotes around excitations because you touched on a mysterious aspect of these systems called the "spin gap". TFA mentions it. They don't even know whether this spin gap exists! Indeed, the term "liquid" means there might not be a spin gap. (It'd be best to colour the singlet blobs orange-red and the triplet blobs red-orange)

[0] In your parlance, a "collapse" literally means dropping to a macroscopic ground state across a gap, but a liquid is already "arbitrarily" close to the ground state. "Collapsing into defined spins" will take the system _out_ of the ground state, so it can't happen spontaneously... Or so it's believed..

by vi_sextus_vi

5/20/2026 at 1:41:57 PM

Admittedly I didn't go over the whole article just watched the video. around the 90 second mark they mention that the spin sate can drop into a superposition called a spin singlet.

then they show heating the material to break a spin singlet and demonstrate the broken singlet atoms moving around the liquid (~2:00 mark). I'm referring to that breaking as a "collapse"

I would expect that a singlet in superposition could not coexist with an adjacent "non-collapsed" atom because it's defined magnetic field would need to interact with it's neighbors breaking the superposition.

by ticulatedspline

5/20/2026 at 2:09:28 PM

The animation is a good intro but takes many liberties.

It is more accurate to think of the spins as always interacting with one another.. at 0K temperature only singlets are allowed, increasing the temperature by just a bit, both singlets and triplets coexist, etc. even that is just a picture.

To start with an everyday analogy. if you know you have 51cents in your piggy bank, but not what the precise breakdown is. Then you must have at least one penny. But you don't know exactly how many pennies you have unless you take a look.

Unlike pennies though, the singlets and triplets cannot be distinguished from one another. One can only measure how many "excess" triplets there are, one cannot point to where these triplets are hiding. The measurement doesn't "cause" a collapse, after the measurement, you know there is some spin imbalance but it is still in some superposition

Anyways.. to fully get what I am going with this, you will have to play with the math on your own. I have, but it's hard to translate all that to English. I'm just trying to point out that the interesting part is not in "collapse" but rather the "failure to collapse"--- the failure to take the system out of superpositions. Because the spins are always interacting.

Or maybe I just don't understand enough to explain it like Feynman.. heh.. but if you turn some of what Feynman has said in plain English into math, you would see that some of his stuff is also.. misleading

IBM must have some sims you can run on your PC, ask ChatGPT to solve and draw a small "Heisenberg model" that imports their libs. If you can take Taiwanese:

https://youtu.be/hHbUytvNLeE

by vi_sextus_vi

5/19/2026 at 11:05:57 AM

The animation is pretty good and helps to easily understand the phenomenon

by Razengan

5/19/2026 at 4:05:02 PM

For real, not what I expect to come across when checking out more in-the-weeds topics. Super accessible, even for a layman like me.

Not a big fan of the music though, sounded like I left another video playing in the background at points.

by perching_aix

5/19/2026 at 3:10:33 PM

this looks like those bot comments on youtube videos.

by dekhn

5/19/2026 at 4:15:37 PM

Maybe you're a bad judge of what comments are botted?

by perching_aix

5/19/2026 at 4:29:10 PM

I didn't say it was a bot comment, I said it looks like a bot comment. Many of the shorts Youtube shows me are almost identical to that message.

by dekhn

5/19/2026 at 4:41:28 PM

So are you like, tentative about it, or did you conclude that it isn't a bot comment in the end? If the latter, what was the ultimate rationale? Did you check their post history or something?

by perching_aix

5/19/2026 at 11:04:47 PM

Based on this thread, I do not think it was a bot comment. As far as I can tell, it was an organically sourced, honest opinion that just happens to look identical to a common bot post on youtube shorts

by dekhn

5/19/2026 at 4:58:53 PM

Rather you're a bad comprehender of what words mean.

What they said was what it looks like, and in fact it does look exactly like what they said.

The comment contains the exact same content and value as a bot comment. It doesn't matter who or what wrote it, the critique of the comment itself holds water.

So the critique was not "a bot wrote this" it was "either a bot wrote this, or a human wrote a comment that is no better than the ones bots write".

You know what else a human might do even worse than a bot a lot of times? A bot would read this and apologize for getting something so wrong.

by Brian_K_White

5/19/2026 at 5:30:42 PM

It wasn't even a critique of the comment. I was just pointing out the text of the comment resembled a bot comment on youtube shorts- almost an exact keyword match.

by dekhn

5/19/2026 at 6:09:40 PM

y'all be crazy af

Do you even realize the irony of your unnecessary complaint about potential bots generating more noise than actual bots?

by Razengan

5/19/2026 at 9:42:12 PM

It wasn't even a complaint! I was mainly commenting on the similarity of the text (I've seen text extremely close to that in youtube shorts comments). If it was a genuine, organically sourced comment, you can simply ignore my message.

by dekhn

5/19/2026 at 5:17:45 PM

I can play this game too:

I never actually said they are a bad judge of what comments are botted, just merely suggested it as a possibility.

Otherwise:

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html

https://youtu.be/IJEaMtNN_dM

Suffice to say, I'd thus kindly reject being a "bad comprehender of what words mean", thank you very much. It was a perfectly reasonable initial reading of their comment as far as I'm concerned. It's ambiguous. Happens.

The fact that "is this AI? this is AI." is a damn near fixture of every thread these days, doesn't help.

by perching_aix

5/19/2026 at 3:27:54 PM

"I didn't expect to understand this topic like with most articles about weird shit on Wikipedia but wow, that animation actually brought the DC of grokking that knowledge within the reach of my INT modifier! Like super cool, dude!"

How's this? Is it more human-like now?

(your feedback may be used to improve the model for everyone)

by Razengan

5/19/2026 at 10:56:45 AM

By the same author: "Altered States from the Inside Out: A Physicist’s Embodied Journey Through Seizures, Psychedelics, and Consciousness"[1]

[1] https://medium.com/@breid.at/seizures-crystals-psychedelics-...

by Animats

5/19/2026 at 11:26:03 PM

At first I thought you were playing the Ad Hominem card there, but reading the article I'm assuming you mean to point out that the author seems like a rather interesting individual.

I like one of the introductory sentences where he says, "I am a strange person who has had a strange life, even relative to that of my strange and high achieving peers here."

by pugworthy

5/19/2026 at 12:48:13 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

5/19/2026 at 11:48:53 AM

Quantum crystals sound more like something out of a video game than reality

by Havoc

5/19/2026 at 1:50:26 PM

The quest: Recover data stored in the quantum crystal matrix by building a tachyon pulse emitter.

by riskable

5/19/2026 at 3:24:26 PM

Simple. Just reverse the polarity.

That solves every problem that a warp bubble can't.

by IAmBroom

5/19/2026 at 3:27:26 PM

And blow out all the Heisenburg compensators on board? I won't do it, captain!

by pavel_lishin

5/19/2026 at 5:34:21 PM

Somehow the technobabble of reversing the polarity of the quantum crystal matrix doesn’t quite work…

Clearly we must either reverse the polarity of the tachyon emitter (this voids the warranty), or shift the phase of the quantum crystal matrix (that’s in spec).

by bee_rider

5/19/2026 at 6:42:44 PM

>Simple. Just reverse the polarity.

ngl I enjoyed the "Unipolar magnets" in Dyson Sphere Program (excellent game btw if you're into factorio style mechanics).

by Havoc

5/19/2026 at 2:03:43 PM

My immediate thought upon seeing the title was Outer Wilds

by incognito124

5/19/2026 at 10:27:12 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator

by contingencies

5/19/2026 at 2:49:25 PM

Ah, vintage VX junkies

by adzm

5/19/2026 at 4:23:29 PM

Imagine the efficiency gains if you replace prefabulated Amulite with premalleated Herbertsmithite!

by mindcrime

5/19/2026 at 7:07:50 PM

I just want to say, kudos to the author for the excellent captions. So many articles include images with no captions whatsoever and expect the reader to somehow just know what they're looking at. Even when it's pretty obvious, it never hurts to state it plainly with a short caption.

by pimlottc

5/20/2026 at 5:53:56 AM

[dead]

by abreidenbach

5/19/2026 at 9:47:12 AM

One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits.

It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.

by rbanffy

5/19/2026 at 10:35:30 AM

It’s gotta be coins though.

Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists.

At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals.

So the King created a vast medal series (Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings.

These bronze and gold medals were intentionally buried in the foundations of monuments like the Louvre, specifically waiting for future generations to excavate them.

So the key is: durable materials, widely spread.

by baxtr

5/19/2026 at 10:47:48 AM

If humanity suddenly died tomorrow the world would be littered with handy rectangular glass pieces all over the world.

Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.

by nntwozz

5/19/2026 at 11:00:43 AM

They're clearly a ceremonial artifact, and their reflective surface is used to perform some religious ritual or other, probably related to the sun.

by tdeck

5/19/2026 at 11:20:21 AM

21st century humans had notoriously poor light receptors, so they used these "smart" devices to reflect more sun into their eyes in order to see while hunched over

by jareklupinski

5/19/2026 at 12:35:30 PM

Watching cat videos feels a lot like that.

by fanatic2pope

5/20/2026 at 12:37:59 AM

They indeed were used as part of a mating ritual.

by evilduck

5/19/2026 at 12:00:25 PM

"They clearly stare into the black void to make themselves feel better!"

by hnthrow0287345

5/19/2026 at 10:58:40 AM

Shame that dopant drift would render the chips inoperable eventually.

But if the Antikythera Mechanism is anything to go by, I think they would at least figure out it was an electronic communication device.

by Tade0

5/19/2026 at 3:00:19 PM

“…used for religious purposes and/or tribal rituals.” (Far-future Archeologist, Zarb-7854)

Which, joking aside, isn’t too far from the truth.

by Mtinie

5/19/2026 at 12:55:24 PM

https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/life-in-general/marbles.h...

"""Civilization will not survive more than a few centuries into the future. If that sad assertion be true, then what will the earth look like in the far future? There was a television show some years ago entitled “Life After People”. It did a good job of showing how the artifacts of civilization would decay, erode, disintegrate, and disappear. What’s surprising is that most of the stuff won’t last more than a few centuries. Our big cities, freeways, bridges, skyscrapers, and so forth will be untraceable within a millenium of the collapse of civilization. What will survive for longer?

...

This is why I occasionally dig a deep hole — perhaps two feet deep — on my land, drop a marble into it, and cover it up again. I always dig such holes on flat land halfway between the slope and the creek. The soil erosion here is slowest. For many years, the rains will slowly move dirt down the slopes toward the creek. On this flat section of land, the process will be very slow, and the loss of dirt to the creek will be matched by the gain of dirt from above. But eventually the former process will outperform the latter process, and dirt will start eroding away from above the marble. Eventually, all the dirt over the marble will be washed away and it will be exposed. """

by ramses0

5/19/2026 at 4:33:25 PM

They’ll last thousands of years, but not millions.

by rbanffy

5/19/2026 at 11:22:34 AM

it's more likely that they used our planet as a "greenhouse" to grow these crystals for themselves, and we're just the lichen that happens to grow on the walls as a consequence of their process

by jareklupinski

5/19/2026 at 10:24:51 AM

I was literally thinking ancient civilizations/aliens throughout the whole article.

by mgaunard

5/19/2026 at 4:34:28 PM

It’d need to be really ancient in this case. To the point only mineral traces and no structure would remain.

by rbanffy

5/20/2026 at 5:40:25 AM

[dead]

by abreidenbach

5/19/2026 at 11:03:01 AM

Oil

or rather Petroleum

I mean, can an ant tell that a highway or skyscraper is artificial?

by Razengan

5/19/2026 at 4:29:20 PM

From their individual perspectives, it has been there since the beginning of time and will remain there long after they are gone.

by rbanffy

5/19/2026 at 10:28:42 AM

It is. I wish the conspiracy theorist 'the pyramids could not have been built by humans' etc etc crowds didn't exist, because I wish there was space to theorise about pre-human, pre-ape intelligent culture just for fun.

Same with UFOs. It seems to have changed in the past few years, but for a long time interest in them was associated with wackiness, and it was not something you could really discuss with a genuine sense of interest without the stain of appearing to believe something you didn't. It's intellectually and socially important to be able to be able to be curious and speculate without the appearance of belief in something.

by vintagedave

5/19/2026 at 10:51:43 AM

That ol' Silurian Hypothesis is fun, but, knowing how damn smart birds are, it's not inconceivable that the theropods could have become advanced enough to be at least tool-users.

Of course, now, we know they probably had as much similarity to lizards as we do.

Another interesting thought experiment is an octopus civilization. They are probably smart enough to have also developed along those lines.

Depending on what that civilization would have looked like, there might not be much left.

I remember reading an essay (probably linked from here), that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization. They posited that the only evidence of our civilization, in a few million years, would be marbles.

by ChrisMarshallNY

5/19/2026 at 12:25:44 PM

> that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization.

It depends who comes searching. u235 has a half-life of ~700m years, so finding it in enough places (i.e. rocket silos, even if underground) and obviously processed into spheres, would raise some advanced alien eyebrows. There's also a chance that some things we left on the Moon / in high orbits will survive for a few million years. (also the test tubes on Mars and the rovers themselves, some have RTGs which, even if "depleted" of usable energy might still register as artificial)

by NitpickLawyer

5/19/2026 at 2:15:27 PM

Items degrade but what often remains is imprint of it in surrounding material, that over time becomes rock. We dumped enough shit all around us that is too smooth/right angled/whatever to look like natural product. If anybody digs enough, they will find enough evidence, direct or indirect.

That is, till all currently-up tectonic plates submerge for melting. But since they don't move by same speed, some of it will probably remain around till sun inflates and scorches surface or even absorbs Earth. That will be probably it, melted surface will hide or destroy all of it. But thats what, 1 billion years in future?

by kakacik

5/19/2026 at 4:27:10 PM

It all depends on how long. Eventually all the current surface will be sucked under tectonic plates and come out after passing some time in the mantle. We can plan for that by planting evidence in places that aren’t likely to go through that, but, give enough time, most of the crust will be recycled.

by rbanffy

5/19/2026 at 10:37:32 PM

the earth is old though, i'd think that the sun will have expanded and made the planet uninhabitable before all the crust is recycled. i've heard there's only 500million years left, assuming we don't destroy it before then.

by ekaryotic

5/20/2026 at 7:10:08 PM

I heard 100 million, so. Anyway, it seems we might Earth’s last chance to seed other planets and stars.

We gotta start working seriously on fusion torch drives and fully self contained space habitats that can operate without any external materials for thousands of years. That and power plants that can last that long.

by rbanffy

5/19/2026 at 4:24:05 PM

In a couple million years, what you’ll see are the mineral deposits where dumpsters are today, with all the materials that are not economically viable to recycle, but that will remain as they were for very long times - metal alloys, rocks that shouldn’t have formed at that time and place, oil deposits where plastics were that appear much older than the adjacent substrate in carbon dating, and so on.

The shape is erased, but the chemical composition mostly remains.

by rbanffy

5/19/2026 at 11:04:09 AM

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by natureiskino

5/19/2026 at 10:33:45 AM

Was the sense of wackiness wrong though? Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous. It's useful to play around with ideas, yes, but it's also important to acknowledge that some ideas simply are wishful thinking.

by Etheryte

5/19/2026 at 10:52:05 AM

>Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous.

If only, but no. Thanks to equally ubiquitous video and image editing and now AI and the profit potential of social media there are more such claims than anyone can count.

The sitting president of the US is even intentionally stirring the pot releasing obvious AI photos of himself walking with aliens while the government is releasing "evidence" that isn't any more credible than the stuff you find on Reddit and Youtube. A significant number of Americans already believe the government has confirmed the existence of aliens and UFOs on Earth thanks to "whistleblowers" like Grusch and the Tic-Tac stuff, even though the government's official position has never changed, and most of that "evidence" has been debunked, and Grusch et.al have yet to provide anything conclusive.

Far from going away, the whole thing has become normalized and I feel like we're going to reach the point where more people believe in interdimensional space elves than believe humans ever landed on the moon by the end of the decade.

by krapp

5/19/2026 at 1:10:52 PM

> If only, but no. Thanks to equally ubiquitous video and image editing and now AI and the profit potential of social media there are more such claims than anyone can count.

That's a more recent development. UFO sightings surge when the technology aligns with them: when the camera is blurry or you're not expected to carry one, or when faking with editing or AI is trivial. But there was a long middle when everyone had access to phone cameras yet editing/faking was hard, and UFO sightings by civilians became rare.

Same with the Loch Ness monster, the Yeti, Big Foot, etc. These monsters were apparently very shy during the phone camera era, but I bet you with AI image editing they will overcome their shyness!

by the_af

5/19/2026 at 1:06:16 PM

Most common video seems to be a balloon filmed sideways from a fast flying aircraft, with parallax giving the illusion that the balloon moves very fast.

by Gravityloss

5/19/2026 at 12:03:49 PM

Building the pyramids is the easy part. You need food, labor, stone. Designing the bastards is where the true mystery lies for me. And it doesn't seem that we have very good history on the design process. Unlike the building one.

by ReptileMan

5/19/2026 at 1:07:52 PM

Design in what way? A pyramid is the natural shape any pile of stuff takes when created because it is the most stable.

Heck, when just playing in the dirt or sand as a little kid you sort of instinctually learn that.

So once you have that, what is left to learn of the design process? Cutting and assembly.

Cutting we figured out already, with copper tools you can use the desert sand as a diamond abrasive (has microscopic diamonds in it). Put sand on block, move a saw blade with no teeth back and forth.

Assembly: we do have some idea of the assembly process, but yes we will never know for certain because it was either taken for granted in that age (like we take for granted how to use modern technology), or written on parchment long since destroyed.

Design: we have countless examples in the region of pre-giza pyramids that have different height/width ratios. And how the older ones are less stable due to having more height to width (taller than wide).

So yeah, designing really is do it at smaller scale. Heck hand held bricks would give you a lot of practice and design reference when building the real thing, for a fraction of the cost.

And you missed the most obvious thing we learned, (a) they had a ton of time (no YouTube), (b) they built it in the off-season and paid the workers in food - not slaves. It was a public works project, that was used to keep the citizens fed.

by doctorwho42

5/19/2026 at 10:53:38 AM

Or, it's just another spin of the anthropomorphism bias we have. If anyone found those mineral what, 50 years ago? or let's say 150 to predate every quantum theory possibility... well, they would have been just nice and weird crystals with 0 importance, just because we didn't know about their properties.

But now they have suddenly a meaning so hey, maybe it's somebody like us, smart as us, that created them many eons ago to harness quantum capabilities back in the day.

by darkwater

5/19/2026 at 11:16:30 AM

They were in fact discovered 54 years ago. The quantum properties weren’t recognized until 2012.

by jameshart

5/19/2026 at 12:28:06 PM

What does it matter when something was realized versus its anthropomorphism?

Didn't some guy use a huge rock as a doorstop before someone realized it was gold and worth a lot.

It was gold before it was realized it was gold. What did it's discover matter? It didn't change what it was. The worth as 'gold' is totally superimposed by the humans.

by FrustratedMonky

5/19/2026 at 12:45:05 PM

There are a bunch of stories about people using valuable rocks as a doorstop, meteorites, gold, amber etc

by somewhatgoated

5/19/2026 at 5:07:06 PM

It means that if you remove the meaning humans give to to, it's much easier to explain it as a coincidence, something that is produced naturally and it just happens to have the right property (for any value of property).

by darkwater

5/19/2026 at 4:39:58 PM

I think the funniest part is the purity. I wouldn’t expect a natural material would be purer than something made in a lab with the explicit goal of making it pure and regular. Structure being regular could be an effect of conditions that we don’t want to pay for in the lab, but the purity is weird. I am sure the explanation (and there is a natural one) is very interesting and might open up some avenues for simpler manufacturing of the material.

by rbanffy

5/20/2026 at 1:01:51 AM

Yeah, I’m hoping to replicate the higher purity natural growth pathway in synthetics. The bottom line is higher purity means more zinc for us, and it’s a common enough ion in the earth’s crust. This mine in particular has a lot of Zn dense minerals, so there’s just a lot of zinc here. Most natural crystals might be less pure, but it grows so commonly in nature, it’s less surprising that some are more pure from that perspective

by abreidenbach

5/19/2026 at 5:37:10 PM

I wish the author had not used the words "Abandoned Mine in the Atacama Desert" Abandoned mine would've been fine. But now you've communicated the value of your find and given a basic hint of what mines to look up. The bright side is so far, author is probably fine because nobody's buying quantum crystals yet in a futures market.

At least the author has time to secure property rights and buy out old mines.

by sneilan1

5/19/2026 at 6:04:38 PM

The vast copper-producing region of the US has large areas of similar mineralization. If they found it in the Atacama then you can find it in the US as well.

by jandrewrogers

5/20/2026 at 12:56:30 AM

You sure can! Small amounts have been confirmed in Arizona. I wouldn’t be surprised if deposits were quite extensive. Over 10 different confirmed locations worldwide. See the Mindat page on herbertsmithite if you’re curious

by abreidenbach

5/20/2026 at 1:30:16 AM

Good shout for Mindat, I should have searched that immediately (I use it for other things).

Looking at the chemical structure it is a supergene mineral but what makes it unique is that it has zinc without the metals that normally associated with zinc in these deposits. That is an unusual elemental configuration. It seems like a thing you could model but it isn’t surprising that no one has because it wouldn’t have a use in mining.

The places where you would find this ore may not be in places with commercially viable deposit scale as a copper play, especially if it is mostly copper-zinc. The US west is littered with concentrated micro-deposits of diverse copper minerals but no one maps them in a serious way.

by jandrewrogers

5/20/2026 at 5:12:42 AM

What metals normally associate with Zinc? Isn’t copper a pretty normal associate? There’s a lot of sulphates, silicon, silver, iron, etc in other minerals at this mine too

And yeah, it could be a lot of undiscovered places as a supergene mineral. The ones I found were right next to an industrial sized heap mine though. A lot of Chile’s more recent mining efforts target supergene minerals. That’s also why it was measured though…

by abreidenbach

5/20/2026 at 6:32:28 AM

Everyone targets supergene deposits. They have good properties when you find them. I know of some not on any maps.

Elements run in herds. If you see zinc, you often see lead, silver, et al in significant quantities. If you see copper, you often see gold, antimony, arsenic, et al. Both groups are also often found together. If it is a supergene ore, you also often see hematite, limonite, and other iron minerals.

To see zinc and copper together without being contaminated by the rest of either their herd is actually pretty unusual. You can find samples of zinc or copper individually that have chemistry similar to the target mineral but not both together. Your objective is rare for a reason. From a geochemistry standpoint how this mineral happens is a pretty interesting question.

The chloride aspect helpfully limits the search space. Atacama, including where you found your samples, has massive surface salt domes which is undoubtedly where the chloride comes from. You do not see this in vast parts of the American copper belt that are otherwise rich in zinc and copper. That might actually be a way to target it in North America but I suspect it isn’t well-mapped. It would require a modicum of research. On the other hand, it isn’t well-mapped in South America either. I know about it because I was there.

I am a chemist by training and a geology nerd. I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time in both the Atacama and the American Mountain West, both of which are prime search areas. It is probably possible to develop a heuristic for locating concentrated deposits of this specific mineral but that is a research and exploration exercise on its own.

by jandrewrogers

5/19/2026 at 7:53:40 PM

”San Francisco mine” - is that a coincidence?

by lovlar

5/19/2026 at 10:07:14 AM

"In theory, samples with no-interlayer impurities should look something like this in direct measurements"

Can we tell their purity from looking at the photos?

by koolala

5/19/2026 at 7:42:42 PM

I think the materially, even pure, is strongly colored, so you can't easily determine impurities visually, unlike diamonds and sapphires and other colorless-when-pure minerals.

by s0rce

5/20/2026 at 1:03:11 AM

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by abreidenbach

5/19/2026 at 6:08:58 PM

So would these be more suitable for a flux capacitor or warp drive?

by ludicrousdispla

5/19/2026 at 6:39:24 PM

powers the quantum heartbeat detector

by poppafuze

5/19/2026 at 2:33:00 PM

new spice unlocked

by inside_story

5/19/2026 at 10:19:54 AM

Was there a DeLorean hidden in the mine nearby?

by totetsu

5/19/2026 at 11:43:01 AM

[dead]

by felipeyanez

5/19/2026 at 12:35:16 PM

> Herbertsmithite

I read "Hilbertschmidte"

by stared