Item 3. in this post by Matt Webb is a short one, but I really liked how within just a few paragraphs he goes from a nerdy noticing—“Superionic ice, Ice XVIII, is black, hot, heavy (4x on regular ice), and conducts electricity like a metal.”—to something I’d like to see in a sci-fi novel.
Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice – filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune – than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth. […]
I imagine computing circuits written into Ice XVIII which are able to rewrite their circuits from the inside, 3-dimensional circuits of Ice XVIII alloyed and filigreed by other exotic forms: directed electricity to melt and then reform the ice. It’s the ideal substrate for AI civilisations: they live running in code at the heart of Jupiter-like gas giants, the cores of these semi-stars vast thinking mountains of hot ice computronium.