The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Technology

For those interested in ASML, and how much engineering goes into being able to make EUV lithography work reliably at scale for 3nm nodes (by hitting individual droplets of tin with highly accurate lasers and turning them into plasma!), I highly recommend this recent (Dec 2025) Veritasium video about them: ▶ this video For more: link (There's something incredible and downright "alchemical" about the fact that the reason our sand can "think" is because we use light to vaporize tin which then carves intricate glyphs into the sand!)

Veritasium has a nice video about it ▶ this video Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time: > 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story Now contrast this with the current academic reality — "publish or perish" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture that "depends" (arguably in self-inflicted manner, that's not 100% the case) on quarterly repots. ASML is just a recent story, but if you look back, you'll see that most revolutions have a similar pattern of people crazy enough to deviate from the herd. The rest— the immense financial risk, the 5000 suppliers, etc. came as a result of having the ability to see through all the noise and the grit to to follow through when everyone calls you an idiot for not doing something "useful"

I just watched the Vertasium video[1] on ASML's EUV lithgoraphy machines over the weekend, and I think the qualifier they used was "most complex machine _you can purchase commercially_". I can't remember if it was an ASML representative that said that, or if it was an overlaid asterisk that popped up on the screen at some point - but I definitely remember thinking about the space shuttle and Saturn V/Apollo and those sorts of things before I saw the qualifier. [1]: ▶ this video

The whole process was deep magic to me before I watched that video. It didn't seem less magical after I've watched it. More so, if anything. Asianometry[0] has a number of videos on EUV lithography that cover some of the mind-blowing advances in the years since. Veritasium[1] recently also made a video on the subject. [0] link [1] ▶ this video

Here is the Veritasium video where they review ASML's EUV lithography in depth: ▶ this video High thermal conductivity, inertness, and low absorption of the EUV wavelength used are the primary characteristics needed, and purity is needed to eliminate contamination of numerous ultrasensitive stages. AI summarized it as follows: EUV tools require ultra‑high‑purity helium, typically grade 9N (99.9999999%) or better, with strict ppb‑level limits on: Nitrogen, Oxygen, Moisture, Hydrocarbons, Refractory compounds, Particulates. How helium is used: - Cooling the EUV plasma source - Purging and protecting optics - Maintaining inert, ultra‑clean environments - Leak detection

> ▶ this video PSA: the si (along with pp ) parameter is used for tracking purposes: ?si=kEPSicC2WXYhcQ6L consider cutting whenever possible.

IIRC from the Veritasium video[0] there is actually some hydrogen gas flowing at quite a high speed though the laser chamber to carry away the tin debris so that it does not accumulate on the mirrors. [0] ▶ this video

Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact plenty of people do know but people also often conflate knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're doing. People who have studied programming, electrical engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics, & so on know what is going on inside the computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really understands billions of transistors even though a single transistor is understood well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k: ▶ this video . Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few billion human understanding stops but we still know how it was all assembled together to perform boolean arithmetic operations.

> This is an important distinction because there are things like microprocessors, which no single person knows how to make. But also: no single person could alone build something that has anywhere near the same capability I recently watched this: ▶ this video The levels of advanced _whatever_ that we've reached is absurdly bonkers. It seems to me that at some point in the last 50 or so years the world went from "given a lot of time I can make a _crude_ but reasonably functional version of whatever XYZ in my garage" to "it requires the structural backbone of a whole civilization to achieve XYZ". Of course it's sort of a delusion. Maybe it's more about the ramp appearing more exponential than ever.

Do you mean AMSL? There was a great video recently on the company + techniques used for cutting-edge lithography. ▶ this video

ASML's secret sauce is not that secret or uncopyable. The Chinese are already working on their clone of the Twinscan tools. Veritasium recently made a good video on the ASML machine design: ▶ this video The outcome may seem like magic, but the input is "simply" hard work and a big budget: billions of dollars and years of investment into tuning the parameters like droplet size, frequency, etc... The interviews make it clear that the real reason ASML's machines are (currently) unique is that few people had the vision, patience, and money to fund what seemed at the time impossible. The real magic was that ASML managed to hang on by a fingernail and get a successful result before the money ran out. Now that tin droplet EUV lasers have not only been demonstrated to be possible, but have become the essential component of a hugely profitable AI chip manufacturing industry, obtaining funding to develop a clone will be much easier.