Isaac Arthur transcripts

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Transcripts of all Isaac Arthur videos to date (up to 2017-03-11)

+--------------------------------+ | Interstellar Warfare | | 2018-03-08 | | https://youtu.be/O_XCB08OPw8 | +--------------------------------+

Leo Tolstoy said “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time”.

When it comes to interstellar warfare, he couldn’t know how right he was.

So today we will be looking at interstellar warfare and the dynamics involved betweenhow two ships would fight while traveling in interstellar space, how you’d move fleetsaround, and the sorts of weapons people might shoot from their home system to an enemy starsystem, the interstellar equivalent of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, ISBMs rather than ICBMs.

This won’t be one of our longer episodes but you might still want to grab a drink andsnack, because there’s also a companion episode talking more about the science fictionand worldbuilding aspects of interstellar warfare which I’ll mention again near theend.

This episode itself is focused more on the known science angles and how it affects theconcept of Interstellar conflicts.

That’s a tricky concept too.

As I mentioned back in the original Space Warfare episode, predicting the future ofthe battlefield in terms of tactics and strategies is almost an exercise in futility becausethe dynamics of combat can change massively with a single minor piece of new technology.

I’ve seen that first hand too, my own unit got in a ton of new gear prior to our deploymentto Iraq, a lot of lasers and optics, so unsurprisingly my unit’s leadership decided the guy who’dbeen working on a doctorate in physics before jumping ship to enlist was well-suited tofigure out how all the new toys worked and train the others with them.

New gadgets, no matter how good, are useless if folks don’t know how and when to usethem, indeed they can do more harm than good, but of course used properly even a seeminglyminor bit of technology can let you dominate a battlefield.

That’s the first rule of warfare too, know how to use your equipment.

Anyway I wanted to be upfront about that for today, that we are playing a very big guessinggame.

To add to that my own background is in artillery and infantry combat too, not ships, but thenmodern sea-going navy ships will likely have far less in common with spaceship warfarethan sci-fi tends to portray.

Or short form, I don’t really know what I’m talking about here but odds are nobodyelse does either.

All we can do is look at basic physics and military history and try to see what doesand doesn’t make sense.

And of course the short answer is pretty much nothing we ever see in sci-fi makes sense,though with some weird exceptions.

For instance one of the classic complaints against a lot of old shows is how both shipswould just park and shoot at each other at short range.

That image is mostly incorrect, though forgivable since spaceship engagement ranges are so bigyou could never see the ships fighting if portrayed realistically.

However the parking part is partially accurate.

Two ships approaching each other at interstellar speeds will only get one short pass with anengagement window that might be as short as milliseconds.

They can’t loop around for another pass even if they have the fuel as at 1G of accelerationor deceleration, they’ll need a week for every percent of light speed they were traveling,to slow down and speed back up in the opposite direction.

However the opposite case, a stern chase where one ship is slowly catching up on another,would actually seem like a stationary battle, especially out in deep space where nothingseems to be moving.

Even at decently relativistic speeds the stars don’t go zipping past like in Star Trek,so you’d still need pretty precise equipment to even measure a shift to them over one day.

In that case too we have to remember this is space, not sea or ground.

Ships can flip over and even move around side to side or up and down while still carryingthat forward inertia, so that to the two vessels involved in the chase it will just seem likeboth are mostly parked or just moving around to maneuver.

But it is the range of things, even over and beyond what we saw in interplanetary warfare,that makes interstellar combat different.

Let’s go back to that head-on attack example.

Two ships moving toward each other at, say, 15% of light speed from their home systems,we’ll say Earth and Epsilon Eridani, about 10 light years apart.

Either of them would take 70 years to cover that distance, but 35 years into things they’drun into each other halfway between with a combined speed of 30% of light.

The distance between them is going to shrink by 100,000 kilometers a second.

Now most modern ships and fighter jets weapons have an engagement range of less than 100kilometers, especially for anything not guided, so if that was their window to shoot at eachother they’d have exactly 2 milliseconds to shoot as they enter that window then exiton the other side.

That’s about 1% of the time a typical human reaction takes place during, and a millisecondis so short it is below the human threshold to recognize.

Add to that if the two survive that first pass, with human crews, and want to make another,they both need to slam on the break at 1 gee, and if they do, 15 weeks later they can re-engagefor a second pass, which is a lot longer than the 15 or so seconds that it tends to takein a sci-fi space duel.

Obviously, a human can’t handle much more than a G of acceleration for prolonged periods,and a human can’t handle millisecond engagements, but a computer can be built to do both.

There are realistic limits on how much G-force any complex machine can handle, and it willdepend on the weakest link in the ship, but even 10,000 Gs might be plausible.

Suddenly a second pass doesn’t require 15 weeks, it requires 15 minutes, a ten-thousandththe time.

Incidentally there’s just over 10,000 minutes in a week.

Having said that, the amount of power required to generate a 10,000 G turn in a ship of anysignificant mass will be staggeringly impressive.

And again, that would seem to be obvious, what a lot of folks say, that manned spaceshipsmake no sense, and that we only even see it in fiction because stories not centered onhumans are boring to many people to read or watch or play, so we stick crews on shipsand pilots in fighter craft to give them a human face.

But that’s something we’ll be challenging a bit today too, at least for a larger vesselacting more like a carrier.

Fighters, at least the classic single pilot variety manned by a regular human, are notrealistically viable.

There are a few things we can say with near certain confidence about interstellar warfare.

Direct engagements will be terribly fast and likely lethal to at least one if not bothparties, overall battles and wars will be terribly slow, and the energies involved willbe terribly massive.

Nobody aims for pyrrhic victories so those close direct engagements are likely to almostalways involve at least one of the combatants only using expendable drones and munitions,while their major assets stay far further back and try attacks and maneuvers that arefar less likely to succeed, but also far less likely to get them killed in the process.

That’s the first rule of warfare after all, try not lose while winning, Pyrrhic Victoriesaren’t.

Such direct engagements at speed also leave you no room to follow up if it doesn’t goaccording to plan, all assuming you even survived it.

Just as an example, if we assumed some 100 kiloton space vessel from the examples wejust looked at, something of a mass and size parallel to a modern aircraft carrier, andremembering that energy goes up with the square of speed, then that ship was carrying about10^23 Joules of energy, about the amount of energy in all the sunlight hitting the wholeplanet of Earth over a weeks time.

So the human crewed one needing 15 weeks to slow down will be turning on an engine atleast powerful enough to light a whole continent while it slows down.

Or alternatively, the energy release of shooting out several megaton-yield atomic bombs everysecond.

This goes with something I’ve said before in other episodes, that there is no such thingas an unarmed spaceship, and this is certainly true of an interstellar one.

When you think of a classic sci-fi manned starship unleashing an orbital bombardment,don’t think of it leveling a city, think more like it was using a machine gun on aplanet with H-bombs as the bullets, and probably more realistically, it likely has severalof those it regards as secondary weapons.

This is something sci-fi author Larry Niven dubbed “The Kzinti Lesson”, for a militantalien race called the Kzin in his Known Space series, or rather the lesson they learned,that “a reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiencyas a drive.”, which can be re-stated in a more generalized and simplified form as“Whatever energy a ship has to move itself around represents the minimum destructivepower it has available to it”.

Meaning, if that ship in our example rammed Earth, it would hit with a force comparableto the asteroid that is assumed to have ended the dinosaurs, which had thousands of timesthe total explosive yield of every warhead in existence during the height of the ColdWar.

Now alternatively, the 10,000 G robot ship will be turning on an engine 10,000 timesas powerful, able to light up thousands of planets simultaneously, releasing as muchenergy every second as our whole planetary economy uses in a year.

That’s an important thing to consider too, because if you’re assuming folks have thesekinds of energies to give a single ship, then try imagining what their actual economy andpopulation look like.

On those rare occasions science fiction remembers the kind of kinetic energy a spaceship hasin terms of planetary destruction, it tends to forget the kind of fortifications a planetcould build if it had access to a power source able to run one of those engines.

This would not be dozens of defense satellites each carrying a big particle beam and dozensof atomic warheads, but potentially millions of titanic defense installations each ableto obliterate virtually anything we’d normally think of as a spaceship in fiction.

We’ve talked about deploying entire stars as weapon systems before, the Nicoll-DysonBeam episode covers that, both the idea of a mega-laser able to turn the full fury ofa whole star on a distant system and the alternative, of having it use that beam to shove missileswith guidance systems up to relativistic velocities able to arrive as volleys.

This is the preferred approach usually as you can use the solar output for many monthsor even years to push missiles launched separately, all at slightly different speeds timed toarrive simultaneously.

These devices, generally known as a RKV or RKM, Relativistic Kill Vehicle or RelativisticKinetic Missile or a few other names, essentially the interstellar version of the ICBM, andcan include fairly elaborate guidance a laser can’t have.

What’s more, as you get closer to light speed the kinetic energy no longer rises withthe square of velocity, but even more sharply, so they carry an unbelievable punch.

Also, while there is no stealth in space, a RKM is very hard to see and moving so fastthat even when you see it you have little time to react, as the light from it is onlyreaching you just ahead of the missile.

You either detect it during launch or have to detect it by the slight glow of collisionradiation with the interstellar medium, which will brighten as it goes faster.

The faster something is moving, the less time you have to react to it and the more energyit has to do damage, but you can also see it further out and it’s even more vulnerableto destruction by some small object just waiting in standby to flick into its path.

They can also be manned since they aren’t necessarily accelerating very fast.

That seems pretty dark, the notion of a manned missile, but suicide missions are hardly uncommonin war and finding volunteers generally isn’t as hard as one might wish it was.

Add to that, high-tech civilizations, even if they regard AI as just as human as a human,can presumably find volunteers even more easily, since they can offer to backup or copy themind of the individual involved.

That also has some disturbing implications that get explored in our book of the month,Richard K. Morgan’s “Altered Carbon”, that we’ll discuss more in our episode onTeleportation in two weeks.

Using the example of the energy in the dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula 65million years ago, it’s worth noting that the Sun releases that much energy every millisecond,so a Kardashev-2 Civilization with full access to their Sun’s total energy could be launchingsuch a RKM a thousand times per second and would have no problem hurling literally abillion of them to hit a neighboring system simultaneously.

That’s just two weeks of solar output.

A billion missiles each massing around a thousand tons, all shoved up to 99% of light speedby giant lasers.

All presumably with an advanced guidance system capable of splitting the missile up into thousandsif not millions of sub-munitions, enough to strike every single square meter of a planetwith the explosive output of an artillery shell.

And again, that’s just one of them, they can hurl a billion.

This is assuming no new technology either, such a weapon requires huge energy but isvery simplistic.

And these are thus the minimum kinds of attack you need to prepare against.

Not a single enemy mothership, not even a decently sized-armada of maybe hundreds ofships, but the full and virtually incomprehensible might of a civilization using a whole starto fuel their war machine.

Folks often ask me why you’d make a Dyson Swarm, since its seems a ridiculous amountof energy and people, but while I think you would fill such a thing up with people eventually,I suspect tapping all that energy would be a high priority even when you were barelyat the population needed to fill a planet.

Such energy can be stored too, possibly in kugelblitz black holes, possibly as manufacturedanti-matter and, even using a steampunk technology, as trillions of tiny flywheels spun up withthat energy just spinning around in space waiting for use, after all the problem withflywheels as power storage is that air and friction spin them down, which is obviouslynot a problem in space.

We’ll be talking about various energy storage options later this spring in Portable Power,but the key thing is that you can store energy in huge quantities to use.

You also, in a high-tech civilization, probably have virtually unlimited effective manpower,since you can not only have robots do most of the work but tell them to build more ofeach other instead, then build whatever you need.

So when trying to consider K2 or near K2 civilizations, the only kind likely to have most of the normalmotivations for war, like resource shortages or border disputes, at the interstellar scale,don’t just picture vast amounts of rotating habitats or computers or solar power collectors,think massive factories, many potentially just sitting there doing self-maintenanceon an army of robots, and huge energy storage depositories ready to feed those into defenseor production.

You also probably aren’t arriving to attack such a system after years of uninterruptedflight for a final day of encountering resistance.

Such civilizations probably have their whole outer solar system, even deep into the OortCloud, loaded with defense installations hunting for attacks, signs of attack, and potentiallyready to respond or retaliate.

You also don’t want an enemy using the material in your own outer solar system to establisha beachhead.

Your weapons hardly have to be sheer power either.

Odds are good interstellar civilizations are effectively immune to biological and chemicalattacks.

It’s just that the nature of space habitats would make infecting or gassing one very tricky,but even without considering weapons relying on new technology, we have that army of robotsissue.

If they can build themselves, then they can build ones that can build more and so on.

A single tiny bot covertly deployed somewhere could fairly rapidly build up quite an army,one that grows stronger with each victory.

Fighting self-replicating machines in space is a lot like fighting a necromancer, youdon’t ever want to engage unless you can win, because your lost troops stand rightback up again and join in the attack.

Now of course, the first rule of warfare is to not fight battles you’ll lose, but acommon caveat to that would be that it’s the war you don’t want to lose, so throwingin on battles where you might lose, or even are sure you will but will delay or distractthe enemy, are often okay.

Again not so in this sort of case.

You’re just feeding them.

However they do need a constant supply of energy to manufacture and replicate, so it’sa good idea to have all of those resources bottled up and defended.

Energy not only provides a potential bottleneck but a means of easy detection.

As I mentioned back in Space Warfare, there is no stealth in space, but you can get alot closer before being seen so long as you aren’t doing things that require power,once you start using power you will light up like a beacon signal.

And these same civilizations who can build billions of relativistic missiles can buildbillions of telescopes and detection devices, so don’t expect to sneak up on them.

Now a rebuttal to that would be that this sort of thing only applies to K2 civilizationsor those decently near that, but that’s pretty much the only kind who will be fightinginterstellar wars.

Or at least one of the two or more involved parties will be.

You have to consider the motives to get into such a thing in the first place.

Obviously you need none but survival to be attacked, but someone has to do the attacking.

So what were their motives?

Were they low on space or resources in their home system?

If so that can only be because they chewed through them or see themselves doing so inthe reasonably near future, which means they are a K2 civilization, probably bigger sinceit’s unlikely they have neighbors to fight who aren’t their own colonies.

Perhaps they want to exterminate all other life?

If so they must be pretty passionate about it to plan out multi-century or millenniapurges across huge volumes of galactic space.

Presumably more than enough to decide to grow their numbers and resources into a K2, butthey don’t actually need to grow their own numbers either, just tell their robots togrow their numbers.

Nothing says a K2 civilization needs to contain a billion, billion people, just that it hasthe energy and infrastructure able to do so if that was their intent.

Maybe they just love war, like the Klingons?

Okay, if you love it, you probably make it a focus for your civilization, meaning youprobably always want more soldiers and ships, which means you want more people and factories,which means you become a K2.

Or maybe they’re not aggressive but just want to be safe against attack… in whichcase they become a K2.

Any interstellar conflict, particularly if you are limited to light speed or slower,is only happening if at least one of the parties involved is very passionate about it and ina sustained way.

They won’t be folks prone to half-measures or easily bored and we have to contemplatethat as part of their motives and behavior in a potential conflict.

Fundamentally high-tech civilizations are unlikely to be composed of wimps or idiots,they’re unlikely to have ever gotten any technology if they were either after all,and again they don’t have to be numerically expansionist.

They could, if they like, just stay living mostly on the homeworld but have a bunch ofself-replicating robots stowed away in various asteroids ready to exploit those raw materialsin an emergency, and a fair amount of solar collectors and raw materials to build more,with more robots near those, all just patiently waiting for some deep space detector to sendthe signal of an incoming attack and go into a flurry of self-replication and manufacture.

They’ve got millions of detectors seeded out in the depths of their Oort cloud readyto give advance notice to turn those factories on and pump out whole planets worth of defensivegear.

An armada approaching an undefended system, detected early, might find that by the timethey arrive in system those robots have converted whole moons into defensive stations and ships.

Of course if you’ve got a swarm of a billion, thousand-ton RKVS heading in at 98% of lightspeed, your signal is only going to arrive a week in advance of them for every lightyear out you detected them at.

So it pays to have a lot of defenses ready.

You might ask how the heck you deal with a billion, thousand ton RKVs, each smart andguided, each able to hit with extinction-level force.

And the answer is with a billion one kilogram balls able to smack into one, at those kindsof speeds they’d be obliterated.

This presumably leads to countermeasures and counter-countermeasures with various pointdefense systems on the RKVs trying to nail such devices with anti-collision lasers oreven smaller anti-anti-RKV devices, but one advantage the attacker has is that they cando a lot of damage just by the sheer amount of relativistic shrapnel and secondary debrisleft over from their missiles.

The sooner out you can intercept that, the wider the cone that debris will cover andthe more time you have to try to clean up that nebula-like wave of deadly space trashheaded your way.

We discussed the basic concept last week in Orbital Infrastructure, in regard to KesslerSyndrome around Earth, and how a scaled up version is a massive threat to a Kardashev2 civilization.

And like Kessler Syndrome, this doesn’t require an intentional attack, one interstellarspaceship cruising in a system and exploding from some engine fault could shotgun a solarsystem.

Such threats are manageable but only if you’ve got the infrastructure lying around to handleit.

Now all these concerns only apply if there is some parity in size and technology, whichin general won’t be the case if it’s say, Earth and one of its new colonies, or ratherthe Solar System versus one, not the entirety of some interstellar empire due to the hugelag times required just to decided to attack and how.

So it’s probably more likely to be colony-on-colony conflicts, potentially just two factions intwo seperate systems, neither of whom is the only nation in that system.

In either case rules might apply, so as to avoid drawing in neighbors who might takesides or intervene.

Or two technologically maxed out civilizations who originated thousands of light years awayfrom each other and the defender gains an advantage as they get pushed back towardstheir more built up core systems and have more time, relatively speaking, to figureout the enemy’s technology and build defenses, while the attacker is increasingly slowedby time lag for new tech, reinforcements, and general coordination from their own homesystems.

Such interstellar empire on empire wars must take thousands of years both from the spaceinvolved and the need to bring along or build your infrastructure in newly conquered systemsto progress to attack the next.

In-system conflicts we covered in Interplanetary warfare and one-sided curbstomp battles wediscussed in the Alien Civilizations series, which takes considerably longer to watch thansuch conflicts would tend to last.

If an Armada from a K2 civilization shows up in Earth orbit tomorrow looking to tussle,we’re going to lose, and very quickly, unless they’ve got some weird sense of honor wherethey refuse to land more forces than we have.

In which case we’d probably still lose, because they’re probably all geneticallyor cybernetically enhanced death machines.

I wouldn’t like our odds even if they just landed one ship with a single dude that walkedout naked with a sharp stick.

That’s a thing to remember and which we’ll explore more in the Planetary Invasion episode,an enemy invading some planet or space habitat might have marines composed of geneticallyor cybernetically enhanced super-soldiers who don’t fear death because their mindsare backed up somewhere.

However, those civilian targets, composed of normally peaceful inhabitants, might alsobe cyborg’d up transhumans suddenly pumped up with rapidly manufactured weapons and combatsoftware, all with their minds backed up somewhere else too so they are less worried about death.

That same paradigm applies to big classic manned ships too.

You have that acceleration issue and reaction time issue, but you could use transhumansinstead of AI, and moreover you shouldn’t be engaging at hundred of kilometers but morelikely at hundreds of millions of kilometers or further.

And you probably aren’t engaging with one ship or hundreds of ships but possible hundredsof thousands of ships.

You potentially have large capital ships too, each of which might have thousands or millionsof little drones they deploy for the equivalent of fighter attacks and defense screens.

Back on those capital ships though, standing off a potentially many millions or even billionsof kilometers, in order to be able to dodge incoming directed energy fire moving at lightspeed, the real concern on maneuvering is fuel, far more than how fast they can maneuveris how much total delta-v they have for that.

The further off you are the less delta-v you need to apply to make sure your ship isn’twhere an enemy beam was aimed.

We discussed the details of that back in space warfare, but in short form it makes classicallymanned and large ships more plausible again because their constraint is still more aboutensuring fuel conservation than how fast they can burn it.

That said, the more G-force that ship can handle, either accelerating or turning, thecloser it can be and dodge laser or particle beam fire as it randomly jinks around.

Of course that’s assuming your ship is solid, it could be composed of lots of smaller bitsacting more like cells or a liquid.

At the end of the day, an AI or cyborg run ship is still the better option but the disadvantageis no longer as huge for a manned capital ship essentially acting as a carrier and commandand control for a swarm of drones.

Most likely you use lots of ships, big fleets, engaging over huge distances, slowly coordinatingand maneuvering and inflicting some damage until one side realizes it’s odds of victoryhave dropped and peels off to retreat, rather than decisive engagements where both sidestake huge casualties.

In cases like that you wouldn’t really have Ships of the Line, our classic term for aline of capital ships engaging another fleet, but more like Ships of the Wall, a 2D screen,something David Weber uses in his Honorverse series, probably one of the best militarysci-fi series for discussing sublight battles and how those might occur, though he’s gotFTL in there and a type of shields.

Any given fiction setting with made up technology is going to need an entirely different approachto realistic combat and sadly most don’t think a lot of it through.

Understandably so, we’ve barely touched on the topic today and even then only in thecontext of known science, we aren’t including options like opening a wormhole right on topof your enemy’s planet, not to dump soldiers through but to dump the other end in a sunor black hole.

Thinking through what a given hypothetical technology can do is a big aspect of sci-fiworldbuilding and we’ll talk about it in the companion video.

It’s pretty challenging too, and fun.

I mentioned back in the Interstellar Empires episode a few months back that one of my sideprojects to the channel was working on developing the tech and lore for an upcoming video game,Hades 9, and basically to help forge the setting, and said I’d discuss it more down the road.

It’s also where a lot of graphics for this episode and some others have come from.

That’s been progressing and I suggested we do a walk up to release by setting up achannel and doing some short videos about not just gameplay but the setting, its story,and the making of the game.

They liked the idea and we decided to roll a few out to start and add as we go, and theytalked me into doing one of them.

Not that it was a very hard sell and I suppose it’s really more ‘we’ these days, butwe’ll look there more at the concept of realistic worldbuilding, especially in thefar future, not so much keeping to known science but making those necessary departures fromscience minimal and plausible and mesh well together without obvious loopholes.

That’s what I aimed to achieve with Hades 9’s tech and backstory, set 4000 years inthe future.

As I said, that’s for the companion episode and I’ll leave a link to it in the videodescription, on an in-video card, and in the end screen with the credits.

Next week we’ll be going even further ahead in time, not four thousand years but 4 billionyears and further, back to the Civilizations at the End of Time series for Dying Earth.

The week after that we’ll discuss the concept of Teleportation and see what options theremight be for that under known science.

We’ll then close out March with a look at Advanced Metamaterials and some of the potentiallyworld-changing applications they have.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you want to support future episodes, you can donate to the channel on Patreon orby going to the donations link at our website, IsaacArthur.net

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Outward Bound: Colonizing Alpha Centauri| | 2018-02-22 | | https://youtu.be/JkeLIAd2Nd0 | +--------------------------------+

The sunrise is one of the most beautiful parts of our day.

One of the cool things about Alpha Centauriis you get to watch the sun rise three times a day.

So today we are back to the Outward Bound Series, to look at Colonizing Alpha Centauri.

Our interest today deals with binary stars or multiple star systems and how these willinfluence our ability to colonize them.

As we will see today, Alpha Centauri has some special complications to it which might actuallymake Alpha Centauri not the first one we’d want to colonize.

We’ll get to those problems in a bit.

This episode is longer than usual so you might like to get yourself a drink and a snack beforewe begin.

Let us make things more interesting today and as a thought experiment make it imperativethat we colonize Alpha Centauri within the near future.

Let us say that we detect a rogue stellar mass black hole about 10 times as massiveas our Sun heading towards our Solar system that will not just graze past us, which wouldbe bad enough, perturbing orbits, possibly ejecting planets, and ensuring constant hailsof comets and asteroids, but is going slow enough it will actually settle into a binaryorbit with our own Sun, and drag it out of this area of the galaxy in the process.

It may even start eating it.

The only silver lining is that it is going slow enough that we can contemplate an evacuationover the next couple centuries.

Despite the problems with Alpha Centauri, we decide to colonize it.

The main reasons for this are that there is not just one but three stars in that system.

Humanity has learned the hard way not to put all of its eggs in a single basket, and inthe Alpha Centauri system we have 3 star baskets for our precious humanity.

Another reason is that the system is the closest to Earth, being an average of 4.37 light years

away.

When the date arrives to pack up all of humanity and move them in bulk, the most economicalway is going to be a combination of stellasers and the interstellar laser highway systemwe’ve previously discussed.

Normally you’d have to build one for each system, but another advantage of going toAlpha Centauri is you could service all three stars with just one, and shorter is betterfor such a highway.

If multiple colonies are established around those stars, even the furthest ones will beable to receive radio messages transmitted from each other within two months.

Now two months sounds like a long time, but empires did very well here on Earth with year-longcommunication delays back when the only way to get around the world was by sailing ships.

We know it is doable, so we can keep the colonies relatively cohesive for at least a time.

We also know we can evacuate Earth and I recommend watching our recent episode on that.

We decide to evacuate and send out colony ships, an initial vanguard to set things upand a vastly larger armada to follow in several waves later.

As is the case throughout the series, it’s not the journey that interests us or the spaceshipsthat get us there.

We’ve looked at those before in the Spaceship Propulsion Compendium and the InterstellarTravel Challenges episode.

We also looked at what life on an interstellar ark ship would be like in the Life in a SpaceColony series, episode 2, Life on a Colony Ship.

However, as I said earlier, our preferred mode of transport to get there is a combinationof stellasers and the interstellar laser highway.

Now Alpha Centauri is a star system, not a star.

Alpha Centauri consists of two large stars, one a bit brighter and one a bit dimmer thanour own, which orbit each other every 80 years and get as close to each other as Saturn andthe Sun do and as far apart as Pluto and the Sun.

The larger is Alpha Centauri A, the smaller, Alpha Centauri B. However there is also a

third star, Alpha Centauri C, more commonly known as Proxima Centauri, which is actuallythe closest star to Earth.

Each planet orbits its closest star in that system, not all of the stars at once.

There is a debate whether Proxima Centauri is a visitor to the Alpha Centauri systemor a permanent member.

If it is a permanent member, it is right on the extreme edge of being part of the AlphaCentauri system.

If we use the analogy of the A and B stars as being a city centre, Proxima is at thevery outer edges of the rural outer suburbs, almost completely independent from A and Bat a fifth of a light year away from them and only very weakly gravitationally boundto the system.

At 13,000 AU distance from the other stars, Proxima orbits the A and B system only abouttwice every million years.

Now, while Proxima Centauri is the closest star to us, we can’t see it with the nakedeye.

Alpha Centauri A is just 10% more massive than our own Sun, but 50% brighter, and Bis 10% less massive than our Sun and half as bright, a third the brightness of its partner.

Proxima, on the other hand, is only about an eighth of the Sun’s mass and 600 timesdimmer than our Sun.

After an epic 4.24 light-years journey, our colony ships arrive in the Alpha Centaurisystem at its closest star, Proxima Centauri.

The star is a red dwarf.

Its habitable zone or Goldilocks zone, where water can exist in liquid form, is much closerto the star than our Sun’s.

We already knew it has a planet in its habitable zone, called Proxima b, something we confirmedby sending probes out ahead of the colony ships.

We suspected that the planet was rocky and one would like to think that it would be likelywe could find life there or at least make that planet habitable for us.

To our relief, the probes show that the earlier remote observations from Earth were correctand Proxima b is indeed a rocky planet with 1.3 times Earth gravity.

Also in its favor, Proxima Centauri will survive much longer than Alpha Centauri A or B oreven our Sun.

Its expected lifespan in its main sequence is four trillion years, about 300 times thecurrent age of the Universe.

Being so weakly gravitationally bound to A and B, it is also likely that it will leavethat system some time in the future and well before A or B go nova at the end of theirlives.

For humans at Proxima, from a system longevity standpoint, we are trading up in a big way!

So far, so good; this is a place we want to settle.

However, we have to come to terms with several big issues.

Firstly, Proxima b is only 0.05 AU (7.5 million km) from its star.

To put that in perspective, it is 8 times closer to Proxima Centauri than Mercury isto our Sun.

While that is a perfect distance to get temperatures that allow liquid water to exist from themuch reduced light from Proxima Centauri, the problem is that Proxima Centauri is avariable star.

That means convection in the star’s body creates magnetic fields that result in randomand frequent flaring, generating not only very bright outbursts but also a total X-rayemission similar to that produced by our Sun, even though Proxima Centauri is much smallerand dimmer On Proxima b, this will cause massive randomincreases in deadly X-ray radiation as well as UV, visible and infrared light.

To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, in August 2015 the largest recorded flaresof the star were recorded, with the star becoming 8.3 times brighter than normal.

Imagine standing outside on Earth on a warm sunny Summer’s day when the Sun suddenlygets 8 times brighter and hotter and you start to understand the problem.

That amount of radiation is more than enough to fry and sterilize a fledgling colony thatclose-in to the star.

Another problem is that Proxima b was expected to be tidally locked to Proxima Centauri,meaning the same face always points at the star.

Yeah, our probes confirm this too - there is no day, night cycle.

We have long suspected that red dwarf planets in the habitable zone will lack atmospheres.

The solar wind is expected to be more than a thousand times that of our own sun, whichshould be more than enough to blast the atmosphere off any rocky planet that strays too close.

In Proxima b’s case, this is made worse by the star’s regular flaring too, whichcauses even more solar wind in short bursts.

Our probes confirm our suspicions, Proxima b has little to no atmosphere.

The spectrum of the red dwarf also means that it puts out more infrared radiation for thesame amount of visible light as on Earth, even when it is not flaring.

This means that if we want the same amount of visible light as on Earth, we are goingto be receiving much more heat.

Alternatively, if we want the temperature to be cooler, we have to put up with lessvisible light.

We have regularly taken on the persona of a character we call our traveller at varioustimes in our Outward Bound series.

This episode is a thought experiment and therefore, not strictly canon, but we’ll re-introduceour traveller here too to get a human perspective on all this.

This time, he is a senior engineering crew member on the colonizing ships.

We huddle around and ask how we can colonize the system without getting fried, irradiatedor living in perpetual light or darkness or even twilight?

Now we’ve discussed space habitats quite a lot on the channel and you will know theyare a favorite of mine for colonization because we control every aspect of the environmentand can fully customize it to our needs.

As we discussed in the Life in a Space Colony series, it’s an interesting backwards aspectof colonization that you build your basic space stations before you colonize your planets,and of interstellar colonization that you’d also start with space habitats before colonizingplanets.

This allows us to circumvent the lighting problems of Proxima Centauri, as we can internallygenerate lighting by fission, fusion, solar power, or the use of mirrors to reflect inProxima’s starlight, but coated to reflect away harmful or unnecessary waves with theremaining useful wavelengths entering a window in the habitat.

As well as being able to rotate off axis so we can simulate a night phase or avoid reflectingtoo much light in during a flare.

Each of these designs is very different in its requirements and internal environment,which compounds the issue of figuring out which design is optimal to build.

Tempers flare and tensions run high, so in the end, no one design wins and, instead,a variety of designs are proposed and adopted for a swarm of habitats to be constructedto surround the star at various distances.

That’s all very well and good but we now need the materials to actually build thesehabitats.

There are other small, cold planets, asteroids and comets around, but they are not as easyto get to compared to Proxima b.

Proxima b is a great candidate for mining as it is higher than Earth gravity and couldstand to lose some mass as a result to make it more Earth-like.

The extra gravity is not particularly difficult for fit people to live with either, even withthe apparent increase in weight.

We set about creating a mining operation supported by a planet-based colony for those who preferliving on a planet instead of living on a space station.

We initially establish a small colony and nearby mining facility facing the star withdirect overhead sunlight.

This maximizes the solar energy collected using conventional solar panels but exposesthe area to random deadly radiation flares.

As a result, the colony and mining operations are installed into lava tubes under the surfacethat provide protection from the radiation and micrometeorite bombardment.

As the lava tubes are mined, the empty space created is converted into living space.

Our probes showed that Proxima b turns out to be an iron-rich planet similar to Marsin geological makeup.

This is good for making structures, but it is lacking sufficient quantities of otherelements vital to life, so we send out small spacecraft to locate smaller icy bodies orbitingProxima Centauri further out that have trapped Carbon, Nitrogen and water ice.

We wrap these bodies in insulation to prevent them from boiling away as they approach thestar and sling them towards Proxima b.

When they arrive, we process them into water, atmosphere and other materials for our futurecolonies.

Mined minerals are mass driven from the planet’s surface into orbit.

Even with the increased gravity, the lack of an atmosphere means mass drivers are agood way to get the mined materials off the planet, at least in the beginning.

After we have mined enough material, we use that material to build an array of space mirrorsand we build a second larger colony on the permanently dark side of Proxima b, away fromthe hellish radiation bursts.

We dome this over and supply power to it using the array of orbital mirrors that reflectthe light from the star to solar panels on the ground.

We even reflect light from a special group of mirrors in the array that have the selectivefrequency reflection technology we designed for the habitats directly into the domed colony.

The mirrors mean that little of the damaging radiation reaches the colony.

It also means that we establish light and dark cycles on demand so we create day andnight and can control the light levels, even during a flare, by quickly rotating the mirrorsso that less light falls on the domed colony.

Even on the dark side of Proxima b, our design ensures that the colony is not in perpetualdarkness.

Point defence systems take care of any space debris that would hit the domes.

We build orbital rings and skyhooks and this helps to get materials off the planet a lotmore easily.

We also build nuclear power plants to help supply the increasing population and energyneeds of the colonies.

Now Earth’s Sun is 600 times brighter in all spectrums, but it is 200,000 times asbright in the range we can see than the light hitting Proxima b.

This means that on the day side of Proxima, it is still not be very bright to our eyes,though it would still be bright.

The Sun is 400,000 times brighter than a Full Moon on Earth, for instance, and certainlydoesn’t seem that way as our eyes are logarithmic in their sensitivity.

As a result, since we are filtering the frequencies of light hitting our mirrors, we actuallyreflect more visible light from Proxima onto our nightside colony domes on Proxima b thannormally hits the day side of the planet.

The dark side now seems brighter than the day side, at least those parts the mirrorsare lighting.

The second colony and its infrastructure allows us to really ramp up mining and we are soonproducing the smaller O’Neill space habitats.

In short order, we have enough habitats to offload our colonists into, those who camewith us and the billions soon to begin arriving from our home solar system.

It will be a constant squeeze and strain on the life support systems and food reservesas each new arrival is almost immediately tasked to mining or habitat construction,but as time goes on, there will be ample room for the population as more habitats are producedand humanity spreads out into the mix of habitats around the star.

That is the cue for the colony ships to gear up for the next leg of our journey.

Proxima Centauri is only the first of the stops on our journey.

We have two more destinations ahead.

It’s time to leave, but before we go, we take the opportunity to visit the colony onthe dark side of Proxima b.

The dome inside looks very much like Earth with plants, animals and arcologies livingunder a domed roof that receives what appears to be perfectly reproduced sunlight suppliedby the orbital mirror array, and we are invited to step out from the dome in a spacesuit byan astronomer friend and walk on the barren rocky surface of the dark landscape.

We gaze up and, even though we are in an alien system more than 4 light years from our homeworld, we are surprised that the stars look the same as those from Earth and we see allof the familiar constellations and stars we would see from Earth with one exception, abright new star near Cassiopeia, which is the Sun from our home system.

We can’t see it with our eyes, but we know even as we build here, vast stellasers arebeing built in orbit of the sun to push new and giant ships our way at high speeds, andwe will soon need to build our own around Proxima Centauri to slow them down.

40 trillion kilometers from us, the most massive construction project in history is workingto build a laser highway and the ships which will venture onto it.

We are told by our friend to gaze at the horizon.

As we do, we see an even brighter star begin to rise.

It is easily the brightest star in the sky and noticeably brighter than Venus was atits brightest from Earth, which was only barely visible during the daytime.

The star we see is our next destination, the binary pair of Alpha Centauri A with a magnitudeof -6.6 and B with a magnitude of -5.3.

They are so close together at this distance that we see them as one blobby star.

Our friend says they are so bright she has seen them with the naked eye from the surfaceof the day side of Proxima b.

They are brighter here than Venus is on Earth, and the days here much dimmer in the visiblerange of light.

This raises an interesting point in terms of my introductory remark about getting tosee the sunrise three times a day.

Proxima b has no natural days or nights and the stars rise because of the 11 day orbitthat Proxima b has around Proxima Centauri, meaning we would see these stars rising andsetting in an 11-day cycle.

To be honest, though, this is a bright star in the night sky, not a sun, so this is nota sunrise the way we were expecting it.

Technically, there are no sunrises here and any that exist are courtesy of our orbitalmirror array.

Our friend points out that Proxima is actually at its farthest point in its orbit from thebinary pair, A and B. Proxima will get four times closer and as it gets closer, the Aand B binary will get brighter in the sky and we will probably be able to tell themapart too, even with the naked eye in about a quarter of a million years.

That experience spurs our interest to move onwards in our journey and we leave Proximaexcited to visit humanity’s first binary pair.

The somewhat depleted colony ships head off for a 0.2 light year journey to the Alpha

Centauri A and B binary pair with the remainder of humanity’s vanguard.

The 0.2 light year journey is nothing compared to the journey that the ships made to getto Proxima Centauri and this will be a much shorter trip.

So, what awaits humanity in its first visit to a binary pair?

You’ve probably heard that most stars are binary or multiple star systems, but that’sactually wrong.

The bigger a star is, the more likely it is to have a companion, which makes sense whenyou think about it: more mass to pull things into orbit and more mass in that area to haveformed another star.

It was a lot easier to spot bigger stars and their companions in early astronomy, so itskewed our figures.

According to current data, about two thirds of star systems are singular red dwarf systems.

Due to their low luminosity, we couldn’t detect many red dwarfs until fairly recentlyand even Proxima was only discovered in 1915 in spite of being nearer to us than any otherstar.

We normally classify binaries into two types, close and distant, but they can be anywherefrom barely bound together, like with Proxima, where residents wouldn’t even know theylived in a binary till they developed advanced astronomy, to so close together they wereliterally touching and sharing a column of gas between them, akin to the Rocheworldswe discussed in the Double Planets episode way back.

For our purposes today, we will define 3 kinds that are reasonably habitable.

Close, medium, and far.

For colonization, we really aren’t interested in ones where two binaries that are practicallytouching or one that is a short-lived supergiant.

So we will say close is where the stars are close enough together that a habitable planetcould orbit both in something vaguely approximating a normal orbit, medium is where the planetwould orbit one, but the other is so close it seriously impacts the weather and biology,and far is where it’s just a very bright star if that, no more impacting life on thatplanet than Mars or Saturn impacts us.

For this last case, Proxima is an example.

Stable planetary orbits are a major issue for close binaries and still there for themedium variety, but let’s start with the first type, a planet orbiting both stars.

This is known as a circumbinary planet, and we’ve found a fair number of these aroundstars as old as our own, so we can say they can be stable long enough for life to evolve.

Orbital stability is only guaranteed for a planet if its distance from those stars issignificantly higher than their distance from each other, which means circumbinary planetsare outside of the habitable zone for all binary systems other than close binaries.

You can’t have a habitable planet that orbits two stars who don’t have overlapping habitablezones.

A planet orbiting both those stars will see the stars orbiting each other much more oftenthan the planet completes an orbit around both, which might make for some weird calendarsand those sun-orbits replacing your month or seasons, and indeed they will have bigtidal and climate effects.

That’s not the only weird calendar issue either.

Earth technically does not orbit the Sun, but rather the common barycenter of the solarsystem.

Since the Sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system and half the remainder is inJupiter that barycenter is usually between the two but much closer to the Sun, eitherinside it at times, or just above the surface.

The Earth/Luna barycenter is in our planet’s mantle, but regardless, the Earth spins every24 hours and the Sun is pretty much in the same place.

In fact the Earth spins 360 degrees every 23 hours and 56 minutes, a Sidereal Day, andwe need to spin a bit more to see the Sun rise again, an extra four minutes.

Around a close binary, this is not so.

Your planet will still have a Sidereal Day of fixed length, but neither of those starsis going to rise at the same time throughout the year or even reset once a year.

Sometimes they’ll both rise at the same time, sometimes hours apart.

Meaning even if your planet wasn’t tilted like Earth is, your day length is going tovary over the course of a year and your shortest days, your winter solstice, where both sunsrise and set about the same time, will also have your brightest noon, with both directlyoverhead at the same time.

And this will happen multiple times throughout the year as they orbit each other much morequickly than the planet does, so again, a good alternative to months or classic seasons.

Of course your planet can have axial tilt too and likely will, and it can also havea moon.

That moon will be a bit weird too.

Our Moon orbits us once a month and appears full when it is on the opposite side of Earthas the Sun is, and a new moon occurs when it is between us and the sun, or nominallybetween, when it actually intercepts the Sun-Earth orbital plane you get eclipses, every solareclipse is also a new moon and every lunar eclipse a full moon.

Needless to say, just like shadows cast in a room with two lights, having two suns changesall of this.

Again though, the stars need to be closer to each other than to the planet for a circumbinaryplanet, so full moons won’t be a single moment of maximum illumination, with a nightor two where the moon appears basically as a circular disc, but rather will last severalnights.

Alternatively a new moon with no visible disc at all would only ever occur if those twostars were eclipsing each other, and even when they are lined up the same east and west,they are likely to be a bit up and down from each other, not actually eclipsing, in whichcase your moon might show a decent crescent on top or bottom.

Depending on the specifics of a system such a new moon might happen fairly regularly orso rarely it’s a major historical event, and solar eclipses where both stars and moonare all lined up ought to be super-rare or impossible.

For a circumbinary planet though, there are still decently long night times.

Just as we have places where the sun doesn’t set for months at a time - up near the poles- they would too, only lower and longer.

While those two stars will both be very bright and visible, even if one was only a red dwarf,they still will both appear white to the eye, but there will be noticeable variation incoloring of objects on the planet based on which suns are up, much as clothing colorsare more or less vivid in daylight, incandescent bulb, flourescent, or LED.

You might also expect some changes to plants too, as they not only have to adjust to lightchanges over the day and year but intermittent changes of day length and brightness overperiods of maybe a month or two.

However, Alpha Centauri is that other type of binary system I mentioned, the medium case,and that is very different.

Here, the stars are far enough apart no planet could orbit both and be habitable or stable,but also far enough apart that a planet could be stable and habitable around just one.

There’s a gap by the way, where a pair of stars are too far apart for a habitable circumbinaryplanet but too close together for a stable orbiting planet around just one of them.

Non-circumbinary planets orbit just one of those stars, also called S-type orbits, andthey need to be at least five times closer to their primary than the other sun or bedisrupted, and that value is very dependent on the relative mass of those stars to eachother and their orbital eccentricity.

Alpha Centauri A and B are 11 AU apart at their closest, 11 times farther apart thanEarth and the Sun, and have a mean distance of double that, so habitable planets are viablehere.

A is bigger so a hypothetical planet around it would need to be a bit farther away fromits sun than Earth is, as it is half again as bright and would provide illumination comparableto Earth’s at 22% farther away, and would have an orbital period of 470 days insteadof 365 at that distance and that sun’s mass.

Needless to say it could be closer or farther, or very different in mass, and we hardly haveto abandon it if it is, we already discussed colonizing places like Venus, Mars, or variousgas giant moons and we have just successfully colonized a hostile variable star’s planet,Proxima b, that makes those others look like child’s play.

So, we get back to our story at this point.

We send out probes again to both stars, A and B and confirm the existence of a rockyplanet exactly where we want it in that habitable zone in orbit around A. We name it Aurora

and we find a similar planet around B that we name Boreas.

Both are around the same mass as Earth.

Needless to say we are overjoyed by this lucky coincidence.

We are not too likely to find life on any planets or moons in the Alpha Centauri system,at least not if we don’t find it in our own solar system first, which would implyit pops up and sticks around virtually anywhere, but making life there is actually quite viable.

We confirm that there is no life on either Aurora or Boreas, but both planets have thickatmospheres similar to primordial Earth that makes terraforming them relatively easy.

Alpha Centauri B is dimmer than A, and its closest approach to Aurora is 10 AU, aboutthe same distance as Earth to Saturn, while its farthest is farther than Pluto, and itchanges over an 80 year cycle, or more like 60 Auroran years.

We land on Aurora and gaze up at the night sky.

We see B at its closest is still less than a percent as bright as A, but even at itsfurthest, it is far brighter than a full moon.

It will noticeably move around the sky over the years like planets do, but again its wholeprogress is over 80 years not a month like our moon or a year for the sun.

From Earth, Proxima was 13,000 times farther from us than our Sun is from Earth and onlya six-hundredth as luminous, and indeed it’s not even that bright to our eyes as it givesoff far more of its light proportionally in the infrared spectrum we can’t see.

That 600th is its bolometric luminosity, its total brightness in all spectrums.

So 200,000 times dimmer and 13,000 times farther away means it appears to the naked eye some30 Trillion times dimmer.

Now, we can definitely see that on a dark night, but it has an apparent magnitude ofabout a 4 or 5, about as dim as we can see.

Remember, while it was the closest star to us, we can’t see it with the naked eye,and it’s only 20 times closer and 400 times brighter to A and B. So we see it just as

a regular star, and it is invisible during the day time.

We were disappointed at Proxima b because we did not see a triple sunrise and we areagain disappointed - no triple sunrises here either.

On the bright side, though, there are two sunrises.

Over the year that we work on the surface, we notice B circling around the planet relativeto where A is.

When Aurora is passing approximately in between them it has a normal day and a very brightnight, when B is closest on its 80 year progression, nights are like an overcast day, while atits furthest in 80 years’ time, night will appear very overcast to twilight.

At the full opposite, when both A and B are aligned with the planet on their far side,the day is just a little brighter than normal, barely noticeable.

However, we get a fairly rare event when we get to the nights there where the twilightis replaced by a true night sky.

In between that we experience extended days, with B rising before or setting after forprolonged periods of light in the twilight to overcast range, followed by a genuine butshorter night.

As we move around the planet on our various tasks, we experience a lot of places withperiods of extended light, tall mountain peaks and the poles experience protracted periodsof having at least one sun up.

This is of more than academic interest as photosynthesis can take place, if weakly,and we speculate that this is likely to mess around with all sorts of biological cycles,everything from seasonal growth to the hunting methods and anatomy of eyeballs in speciesas they evolve on the planet.

Life here will evolve along its own path and species that adapt to the conditions bestwill thrive and survive.

Those that stick to what they did on Earth will decline in the face of those adaptersand die out.

We are called away to the other planet to be terraformed, Boreas around Alpha CentauriB. As I said, this is hypothetical, except wedon’t have to be too hypothetical when it comes to B.

We detected a planet around B in 2012 that was later shown to be an error, we did findone around B in 2013.

Unfortunately both the ghost planet and the new one are worse than Mercury in terms ofheat, and while we have discussed colonizing hot planets before, or even stars themselves,planets like these would likely only be colonized in the temporary sense of mining them forraw materials to make space habitats instead.

Fortunately Boreas is an Earth clone around B for this, and has an orbital distance ofjust 0.7 AU, like Venus, to be the same temperature as Earth, and orbits it every 225 days.

That 80 year binary orbital period, which appears as 60 local years on Aurora is goingto be 130 local years on Boreas.

One would hope that our progress in colonizing star systems will be onward and upward, buthistory has shown that societies can lose technology and revert to pre-technology civilizations.

If that happens here, we will hopefully have terraformed the planets sufficiently for themto exist without technological intervention.

Assuming we did regress and then start re-establishing ourselves technologically, natives to eitherplanet are going to have some calendar equivalent of a century that corresponds to that period.

Amusingly, its duration would be the same for both even though we’d say it was 80years, the Aurorans would say 60, and Boreans 130.

I stress the calendar aspect as civilizations tend to ingrain astronomy and numerology intothe mythology, mathematics, and early traditions.

Not to mention we have a lot of authors here or folks who just enjoy worldbuilding so ifyou’re putting together some hypothetical devolved society, alien race or fantasy planetthose are points to know.

Incidentally, if you want to figure these out for yourselves on hypothetical stars,just check that star’s brightness relative to our Sun, use the bolometric value, takethe square root of that and that’s how many AU away it would orbit.

Then you need to calculate its orbital period based on that, classic Kepler method but don’tforget to change the star’s mass.

This is harder for a close binary case but still works fine for our medium, non-circumbinarycase where the planet only orbits one star.

Or at least, it will most of the time anyway.

Alpha Centauri A is about three times brighter than B but conditions on Boreas are fairlysimilar to Aurora.

Those protracted twilights or very bright nights are about three times brighter, thoughto the naked eye, will seem about the same, and any plants adapted to make use of thatlight will fare much better and be more likely to thrive.

Similarly, while A won’t seem nearly as bright in the sky as B when sharing it duringthe day, it’s a lot closer and a period where A was at noon while B was setting orrising would have A brighter in the sky than B.

That might make for an interesting protracted dawn because A might only provide twilightor overcast lighting but it will still be blue sky when it’s directly overhead, whileyou get that red outward rainbow from B, so you’d get some strange color bands acrossthe sky.

You’d have those on Aurora too but not as pronounced.

On the biology of the planets, tides on Earth play an important role in ecosystems.

There is some compelling evidence that life could not have evolved on Earth without them.

On Earth, we have tides thanks to the Moon, but in Alpha Centauri, to bastardize a quotefrom Back to the Future: “Moons?

Where we're going, we don't need Moons!”

On an ocean-containing world around Alpha Centauri B or Alpha Centauri A, we would gettides from the presence of the binary star tugging at the water.

The stars are much further away than our Moon is from our planet but Alpha Centauri A is30 million times as massive as our Moon and Alpha Centauri B is 25 million times as massive.

The effect of gravity drops off with the square of distance.

At the closest, they are about 10AU away from the planet, compared with a paltry 0.00257

AU for our Moon from Earth.

This means that for an ocean world orbiting Alpha Centauri A, tides caused by Alpha CentauriB would be 60% higher than here on Earth and for such a world orbiting around Alpha CentauriB, tides would be double that experienced on Earth.

Usually, when we want to communicate with other worlds orbiting other stars, communicationtimes are upwards of years, but not in Alpha Centauri as communicating with our friendson Aurora, they are able to receive radio messages transmitted from here on Boreas injust over an hour, even though they are technically orbiting a different star!

We ultimately achieve the same level of colonization in the A and B systems, including the spacehabitats that we perfected when colonizing Proxima.

Humanity is certainly in a different place now and has come a long way from those earlydays when we were going to be snuffed out by that black hole.

We are now getting excited about using Alpha Centauri as launch point to colonize the restof galaxy now that we have a colony fleet and lots of experienced colonists sittingaround, but that is a different story.

If you’re curious about some of those propulsion systems that might take us to the stars, tryout the Spaceship Propulsion Compendium, and if you want to look more at the journey throughspace or those early colony days far from Earth, see the Life in a Space Colony Series.

However that is the end of the Outward Bound Series, at least chronologically.

We might revisit it to add some episodes looking at Mercury or Neptune or one of the biggerasteroids but this is as far out as we’re going.

We’ve been to the planets, many a moon, and even out to the Oort Cloud, we headedback to colonize the Sun and then out again today to colonize other Suns, and from hereit would continue on to our other series looking at interstellar colonization and travel.

When I first started this series, I faced the dilemma, a good one to have no doubt,of choosing between providing a brief overview of the science that is focused on relevantportions, or diving deep into the science but covering much fewer ideas in each video.

Neither approach felt right to me, and I didn’t know how best to appeal to my varied audience.

I was then contacted by Brilliant, which has courses that explore the underlying physicsand astronomy for many of the concepts we needed to properly look at here, about a sponsorshipopportunity.

This made me feel comfortable in covering just what is relevant for a solid understandingof the video, while recommending folks that wanted to explore and master these conceptsto check out Brilliant.

The first message on Hohmann Transfer Orbits was such a perfect fit for the channel, andmany of you appreciated the deeper insight that Brilliant offered.

We can draw on their quizzes, to help us stretch our imagination and discover what else ispossible.

For instance if you want to be able to calculate out stuff like how long a planet’s yearwould be in the habitable zone of an alien sun, they’ve got a great course on KeplerianOrbits and when you’re done with it, along with what we’ve discussed today, you’llbe able to create any solar system you like and know all its specifics.

Isn't that amazing?

Go to Brilliant.org/IsaacArthur and sign up for free.

And also, if you're ready to expand your mental toolbox, the first 42 people will get 20%off the annual Premium subscription.

That's the subscription I've been using to entertain myself with thought-provoking puzzles.

We might be done for now with the Outward Bound series but next week we’ll returnto the Upward Bound series to continue our look at orbital development, and look at somenecessities we’ll have to have in order to do that.

We will also look at Kessler Syndrome, the possibility of a runaway destruction of orbitalplatforms that could leave space littered with dangerous debris, and what we could doabout it.

In the event of a war in space destroying such equipment you could close a planet offfor generations just from the wreckage.

The week after that we will jump back into interstellar space to look at InterstellarWarfare, and find out what the #1 rule governing space warfare will be, and the week afterthat we will return to the Civilizations at the End of Time series for Dying Earth, andwhat civilizations will do when the planet and sun they’ve always depended upon beginto perish.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Orbital Infrastructure | | 2018-03-01 | | https://youtu.be/HkU85zKxK-s | +--------------------------------+

Many people commute as much as a hundred kilometers to work every day.

Interestingly, this is also about how far it is to low orbit.

If we ever want to have a truly serious presence in space,we are going to need a lot of infrastructure in orbit.

Today we are going to try painting a picture of what that would look like, and review someof the challenges we have to overcome to achieve it.

Many of those challenges get far easier as you get more and more infrastructure builtup there, but one, the danger of orbital debris, increases as you get more potential sourcesof debris in orbit.

You can also have a runaway chain-reaction of destruction we’ll discuss later todayknown as Kessler Syndrome which has the potential to cut you off from space altogether.

So how do we start building up that infrastructure and what should it be?

There are many approaches and since last time in the series we discussed spaceports in termsof the Gateway Foundations’ design, I thought we’d just pick up from there.

This concept of building in space is hardly new, but in recent years there has been anincreasing focus on the use of robots and drones for doing the work, so we’ll spendsome time on that too.

Whether new plans or old, what they all seem to have in common is a big problem of whatexactly you are manufacturing up there and what the infrastructure and factories wouldbe for.

As I mentioned in the Interplanetary Trade episode, in the long term Earth really hasnothing it needs to import besides precious minerals like gold and platinum and rare earthelements, and Earth’s obvious exports are people and information.

The latter doesn’t require much infrastructure in space.

Earth churns out endless volumes of science, movies, TV shows, etc and can export themby simple radio or laser broadcast.

I made those statements in the context of interplanetary trade and, in so-doing, I lumpedEarth’s space-based industries in Near Earth Orbit with ground-based manufacture.

Instead, today we will separate the industries on Earth from those in Orbit around Earth.

We actually don’t need much infrastructure to receive precious metals from asteroid mining.

It takes a lot of fuel to move materials at interplanetary speeds so by and large you’ddo your refining on location and send it to Earth in a pod to aerobrake in our atmosphereand be picked up by a ship.

You wouldn’t send it to Earth orbit for smelting and transport it down.

However, the value of refined metals like Aluminium and Steel in LEO cannot be overstated.

The budding space construction industry created by a project like building a spaceport willbe very hungry for raw material inputs, and launching all of them from earth is expensive.

Many folks will be aware of the recent successful Falcon Heavy launch that put Elon Musk’sTesla into a solar orbit that will pass by Mars.

I have to admire the publicity stunt of that launch, especially the inclusion of “TheHitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams in the glovebox, as well as a toweland a sign saying "Don't Panic" and, of course, the data storage device with Isaac Asimov’sclassic space trilogy on it.

Importantly for our purposes today, though, the Falcon Heavy will allow us to put payloadsof up to 64 metric tonnes, a mass greater than a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers,crew, luggage and fuel into low Earth orbit in a single launch.

It is the most powerful operational rocket by far and it can deliver more than two anda half times the payload that the Space Shuttles could.

We could actually carry the million pound mass required to recreate the entire InternationalSpace Station in only 7 launches of the Falcon Heavy.

We haven’t seen something that powerful since the Saturn V rockets last flew astronautsto the Moon in the early 1970s.

Unlike the Saturn V rockets, though, the Falcon Heavy is reusable and that should significantlylower the cost of launching materials into space.

SpaceX aims to have up to 2 launches a day.

That’s not to say it will be cheap, but it will mean that we can more cheaply bootstrapa space-based industry from Earth to start mining the materials we need in space fromasteroids and the Moon.

Orbital infrastructure to accommodate those activities would mostly be places like ourSpaceport for processing all the people coming and going.

For other infrastructure, we have to ask, what you would actually benefit from buildingin space.

What products are better built there rather than on Earth?

Or in-situ on whatever planet, moon, or asteroid that either needs them or extracts the rawmaterials for them?

Not to mention the things than can be done in space or zero G which can’t be done hereon earth.

To manufacture anything up in space implies that it has some advantage over doing it onEarth first then shipping it to space.

That could be something like a large spaceship or station that couldn’t be built on Earthand shipped up, 100 meter plus telescopes, or something like a water recycling plant,because it’s cheaper to recycle water than import it up from Earth.

Similarly, for anything wanted far from Earth, like asteroid mining equipment, being ableto make it near Earth, but not having to drag it out of our full gravity well is quite advantageous.

However, there are features of space that are beneficial to some manufacturing.

Solar Power is vastly more reliable in space, where there are never any clouds and wherenight time is very short.

The higher your orbit the less of it is in Earth’s Shadow, and while low orbit satellitesspend a lot of time in Earth’s shadow, it’s still less than an hour, not many hours oftwilight and night like on Earth, meaning you don’t need as much battery capacity.

Similarly, micro-gravity has significant manufacturing advantages.

There’s no pressure in the hard vacuum of space either, so many materials typicallygo straight from solid to gas, and there are some manufacturing techniques that use vacuumand would use them more if getting a near perfect vacuum wasn’t such a pain as itis here on Earth.

One example is solar panel manufacture, which often includes a step that needs to be donein a vacuum and this is an expensive part of the process to achieve here on Earth.

Many crystals form best in microgravity too and those have applications in industrieslike medicine, optics and electronics.

Another technique that is much easier in microgravity is microencapsulation, which has applicationsin adhesives, anti-corrosive coatings, pharmaceuticals, self-healing coatings, DNA protection fromdegradation and sample storage.

Interestingly, many of these applications will not only be useful as export productsback to Earth but will also be very useful to the space infrastructure itself.

We are already aware, though, of a technology that we can only make in high quality andquantities in microgravity that will be the next iteration in fiber optics and lasers.

These are called heavy metal fluoride glasses, the best known of which is a family calledZBLANs, named using the first letters of the chemical symbols for the metal atoms thatthey are composed of: Zirconium, Barium, Lanthanum, Aluminium and Sodium, that last one has thechemical symbol Na, so that’s where the N comes from.

They make the silica-based fiber optics we currently use look like a horse and cart comparedto the sports cars of ZBLANs.

They would solve many of today’s problems we have in spectroscopy, sensing, laser powerdelivery and fiber lasers and amplifiers.

Given that they also have military applications, there is a strong economic and political pushto manufacture these.

On Earth, ZBLANs are difficult to make in high quality because gravity causes the formationof crystals in the structure and these crystals disrupt its desirable optical characteristics.

Doing this manufacturing in microgravity avoids this problem because crystal formation isall but eliminated.

A kilometer run of ZBLAN fiber optic cable was 3D printed on the International SpaceStation last year and this was returned to Earth last month.

We will probably hear more about that industrial experiment in the coming months.

The importance of this experiment is that it is arguably the first one to test trueindustrialization in space and this shows we are on the cusp of our move into spaceindustrialization.

We are only at the beginning of our understanding of how to do space-based chemistry and howwe can perform industrial processes in a vacuum and microgravity, but based on results sofar, there will be many more useful and innovative processes and products that can be producedmore easily in space than down on Earth.

Now I noted at the beginning that orbital space isn’t much further than many folkscommute daily, and as we saw in the Orbital Rings episode it is possible to get huge amountsof people and material up to space fast and cheap enough for daily commutes, but moreimportantly the actual commute time to low orbit is about one millisecond.

That’s because you don’t have to have equipment being run in orbit by people onsite, and unlike robots sent to other planets and asteroids, they don’t have to be smarteither.

They just need to be something a human can decently control by remote.

So you don’t even have to commute to work, you just log in at home, and even time lagwhen the drone is on the other side of the planet is short enough you’d barely be ableto notice it.

However if your robot has even a small amount of AI built into it, one person may be ableto control many drones, Bots or PODs performing the most simple to complex tasks.

This addition of AI also makes large scale unmanned robotic missions much more viablethan they are today, because an AI can compensate for communications lag.

Needless to say we don’t have many drones and interfaces quite up to that quality yet,but when it comes to telepresence surgery, we have been doing that since the LindberghOperation back in 2001, when a surgeon remotely removed a patient’s gallbladder.

The surgeon was in New York directly controlling a robot operating on the patient in France.

Nearly two decades later, many other examples of this telepresence surgery have been performed,but it is still not the norm because the need for it is marginal, meaning it is not widespreador cost-effective.

Having said that, though, the technology is proven and available for when we need it.

Also needless to say that would alter a lot of Earth-based mining and manufacturing too.

Even ignoring manufacturing dangers, we have a lot of factories that would benefit frombeing remotely operated in conditions that are rough on humans.

A pretty big chunk of infrastructure in space is going to be centered around humans, againwhy we began our look at this concept last time with spaceports, and why we’d probablysee a surprising amount of space based hotels or even private homes.

It’s not something we tend to think about much but your big issue with a private homein space is the size needed to supply decent artificial gravity by spin, and that can begotten around by having many such homes on the ends of tethers like pods on a carouselwheel.

On top of those we have 4 major sub-categories of early infrastructure we’d expect to see.

The first is power generation.

As I said, solar is more reliable in space and also very easy to beam around.

You can have panels on a given installation but you can also beam it from more specializedpower collectors as they don’t need to worry about the atmosphere getting in the way andkeeping a beam on target and focused to a spot a few hundred or thousand kilometersaway in space is pretty simple.

However we can also beam that power down and out.

The down part is familiar, instead of using up useful space down on Earth you collectpower up in space and beam it down in concentrated fashion to collectors on Earth.

Likely you’d use several collectors as the satellite moves around the planet and canre-divert the beam if you’ve got problems from clouds or breakdown or whatever.

The beaming out part is a little less familiar, though we’ve talked about that before hereand the new Project Starshot has helped familiarize folks with it too.

You can push things with light, up to truly high speeds, like the Laser Highway we’vediscussed, but you can also heat or power things with such beams and that’s handyfor spaceships too.

The notion of an Ion Drive is one that accelerates slowly but to a very high speed, by pushingpropellant particles out at very high speed, and that’s very appealing for interplanetarytravel or moving around things already in orbit where you don’t need a high thrust,just a long slow and steady one.

It still takes fuel though, both for the propellant and whatever is giving it the energy to heatthat propellant up, and it’s common to want to run an ion drive either on a nuclear reactor,which has a fair amount of problems attached to its use, or on solar, which isn’t terriblydense, particularly as you get further from the sun, and means a ton of panels you haveto drag along and protect from micrometeors.

A beam going to a ship though, be it a ship or satellite in orbit or something movingbetween planets, can provide the energy to superheat that propellant, saving you a lotof mass, and this actually works even if you are trying to approach the beam, which isshoving on you, because the beam carries less momentum than the propellant it will energizedoes.

And while some materials are better than others, you can pretty much use anything as that propellantif you have to.

A large percentage of the energy an ion drive uses is for ionizing that propellant, somebeing much lower energy to do, so if your power is coming from an external source youcan consider propellants that are easier to obtain economically or in an emergency.

Short of us developing a viable commercial fusion reactor, solar power in space is goingto be a huge chunk of the orbital infrastructure.

Indeed it might still be preferable over fusion in many cases.

To power things in orbit, to send power down to earth, to beam power out to ships or installationsfar from Earth.

It also has the dual advantage of being handy for vaporizing space junk and meteors or givingthem a shove.

Of course it’s a little problematic in that you can also vaporize things down on Earth,so you want to design all such beams to have a maximum focus spot that can’t blow thingsup fast down on the planet or for ones where we need a tight focus, like for hitting distantspaceships, use those frequencies of the spectrum that are most disrupted by our Atmosphere,or use enhanced adaptive optics to jumble the spectra when not pointing exactly wheredesired.

Such solar arrays would be a huge chunk of the orbital infrastructure but look like aneven bigger portion as they’d generally be slim and wide.

Now you might be thinking that if we did enough of them they might block sufficient lightgetting to the planet, but you would need a lot of those and you can also place themin higher orbits where they get blocked by the earth’s shadow less anyway, and youcan always have them with a counterweight so they can tilt on their axis when directlybetween the Sun and Earth to let light pass uninterrupted.

Though you might not want to.

A problem every technological civilization is likely to face is their planet gettinghotter.

Not just from greenhouse gases but by sheer energy needs.

A few hundred terawatts of fusion power might be totally carbon neutral but it still putsout heat.

So you might actually want to introduce solar shades to block some of that light, or someof its less useful frequencies like infrared, from hitting Earth.

A millimeter-thick chunk of aluminum foil as big as a football field would not be bigenough to be seen obstructing sunlight to us on the ground, is pretty cheap per unitof area, and could presumably be mass manufactured up there far more easily than anything else,meter for meter.

They are also fairly immune to micrometeor damage for much the same reason it’s hardto destroy a sheet on a clothesline with a pistol, the bullet goes straight through withoutreally doing functional damage.

Done properly you get a mirror, with which you can bounce light into a close collectordish which can then spit that radiation out as power too.

A solar panel doesn’t have to be as wide as all the light it collects, if it’s gota mirror and dish concentrating that light for it instead.

So you can handle concerns about a warming planet while increasing your power supplyfor beaming down to the planet, using up there, or beaming off to distant objects.

These same kind of giant mirrors can be used for huge telescopes too, though you’d wantto ratchet up the quality of the mirrors a lot.

I want to save ridiculously big telescopes for its own episode down the road but onceyou are up in space, building in space, you can make things that make the Hubble Telescopelook like something you’d buy in a toy store, and able to directly image exoplanets.

Indeed you can make planet sized telescopes, thinner than paper, again something we’lldiscuss another day.

Another big part of that early infrastructure is going to be fueling stations.

As I said last time, you can predict a lot of things you’d want on or near a spaceportby looking at what we keep near airports, seaports, train stations, and truck stopshere on Earth.

You’d expect to see these as parts of spaceports but you might prefer to keep your fuel inthe same orbit but a couple kilometers forward or behind, and anything automated, be it automatedspaceships or just satellites with fuel for station-keeping, have no need to dock at afull blown spaceport unless they need hands-on maintenance.

They wouldn’t necessarily need to dock either, those fuel depots might have bots that couldfly out with fuel to them directly then come back.

You also don’t necessarily need fuel for station keeping either, you could shove themaround with beams but we also have the electrodynamic tethering approach we discussed in the Skyhooksepisode, where by using a long tether with power running through it we can magneticallypush off Earth’s magnetosphere.

All of which means you’ve got an awful lot of stuff in space.

Not just ships and stations but huge solar arrays and long tethers.

Space is big.

Really big.

Even just around Earth it is hard to believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big itis.

However that stuff in orbit is spinning around the planet several hundred times faster thana car on the highway, and so each bit covers a lot of ground and even a very tiny bit cansmash into things with all the kinetic energy of a car on the highway.

That screwdriver you lost working on the outside of a space station, that floated away at walkingspeed, can slam into another orbiting object on a different trajectory like a cannon shot,and in the process throw out more debris that scatters everywhere smacking into more things,which shoot out more debris and so on.

We see an example of this in the film Gravity.

If you’ve got a lot of material in orbit, it’s potentially possible for a single smallpiece of trash to set off an apocalypse in orbit.

Down on the ground too, since a lot of the bigger items we might put up there could havebits and pieces fall down big enough to survive re-entry and leave a crater somewhere, possiblysomeone’s home.

So even infrastructure on Earth probably wouldn’t survive unscathed but up in orbit you couldpotentially have a total wipe out of all your equipment and personnel.

To make this worse, while a lot of that scattered debris would fall down and burn up, a lotof it would persist in orbit for potentially many years.

This Collision cascade, or ablation cascade effect, is also known as Kessler Syndrome,for Donald Kessler who noticed the possibility in 1978.

Forty years later it’s still a serious concern.

Right now there are a couple thousand satellites in orbit, and nearly a million pieces of spacejunk a centimeter across or larger floating around.

That junk kills about one satellite a year.

The more objects you add, the higher the probability of a strike, and the higher the number ofsecondary debris you’d get from that collision.

At a certain density you can get a feedback runaway process that ends in everything upthere obliterated.

When it’s over, everything is wrecked and you can’t put anything new up for a longtime, as all that debris is still up there.

Low orbit, the place we most like to put stuff and have to pass through to get to higherorbits, would have the most initial debris but also the shortest dwell time as the verythin atmosphere up there causes enough drag to slowly de-orbit debris to burn up in theatmosphere.

The higher you go, the thinner that is, and the longer it lasts, potentially persistingmillenia in the higher orbits.

You can’t launch through that, it would be like jogging through a minefield.

So until it clears out, either naturally which could take generations, or artificially, yourplanet is grounded, nobody is going anywhere.

Now if this happens, there are some approaches we can take to speed up clearance of debris.

You can also potentially armor your spaceships up like tanks but needless to say that takesa lot of mass, something that’s always to be avoided with spaceships, especially ground-to-spacevarieties as opposed to space-to-space.

However ideally you want to be able to stop the cascade before that domino effect begins.

There’s many ways to do this, either clearing it afterward or stopping it before the runaway.

Figuring out the best approach based on your technology is going to be a high priorityfor any spacefaring civilization, be it us in twenty years or some Kardashev 2 civilizationbuilding a Dyson Swarm, for which Kessler Syndrome at a solar-system wide scale wouldbe absolutely terrifying.

This starts with detection.

You have to start by figuring out what the minimum size is that you need to intercept,based on your standard shielding and armor and how much pounding your paper thin solarshades can absorb.

Now in space you can use pretty much any wavelength you want for radar, so you want somethingmost material is going to reflect and has a wavelength smaller than that minimum sizeyou need to intercept.

Then you need to flood orbital space with that wavelength with a ton of emitters andreceivers picking up every little fragment.

As I mentioned there are quite a few ways to deal with space junk but one of the preferredones proposed is called a laser broom and this can be deployed in space or from theground if you are cleaning up the mess afterwards.

A powerful laser could flat out vaporize the debris but the laser broom just heats oneside of the object up.

This causes ablation, where the material evaporates a bit, which produces a little thrust.

Knocking the material out of its current somewhat stable orbit into one which decays faster.

That’s a good way to deal with a cloud of debris, post runaway collisions, but you canalso use it to nudge a bit of debris on a collision vector with an object, preventingthe runaway effect in the first place.

By embiggening the laser, we could provide a bigger shove or outright vaporize it; it’snot a good and efficient approach when you have a ton of debris but good for stoppingthat from happening in the first place and another reason to have lots of power collectorsand power beaming stations in space.

It’s also a good reason to include point-defense systems on a station.

Other approaches for mass clearance would include everything from shooting debris withaerogel bullets to de-orbit them or launching a big nuke up to explode and clear a sectorright before a ship passes through, but ultimately we want to prevent the cascade from ever starting.

The general approach would be to recycle everything you can, blow what you can’t into a fast-decayingorbit to burn up, tether every piece of external equipment and tool to the ship or station,and have little drones to run off and grab things that get lost.

One of the Gateway Foundation designs is just that, the Errant Object Retrieval Programor EOR.

The current design for the ISS has an Observer Drone that heads over to an active work areawhen an EVA begins, and is packed full of object recognition software and knows to lookfor telltales of lost gear, like when it begins spinning around its own center of mass.

There’s no air in space so stuff almost always tumble when it gets loose.

Later generations of Observer Drones in many different sizes will see extensive use inspace construction offering numerous viewpoints to Construction Control.

Small Observers will get in tight to inspect welding and big ones will survey the wholeworksite.

The second part of that is the amusing but aptly named “Frog’s Tongue” Drone becauseit roams around the station hull with the EVA astronaut and extends an armature to knabloose gear.

This wily but versatile drone will later become the mule that carries astronauts tools andparts in tool boxes to a work site.

Right now an Astronaut has all this gear attached to their spacesuits, very cumbersome.

And last of this trio is the Retriever Drone which has its own jets for chasing after somethingthat’s gotten out of range of the Frog’s Tongue lash, be it lost gear or even an Astronaut.

These specific designs are intended for the current ISS but represent the basic conceptof drone we will want with all our orbital infrastructure to minimize space junk, andof course with more sophistication they could form automated repair for smaller installations,either remote controlled or via AI.

As we do more construction up there we will need to worry about entire structural segmentsgetting lost too, if we’re talking about a piece of truss like from Tethers Unlimited’sSpiderFab and Trusselator or Gateway’s Segment Assembly Line, you don’t want a big trusswhirling through orbital space, those don’t even need to be going orbital speeds to ruinyour day, and you need to be looking at a large detection and retrieval or eliminationsystem spanning orbital space if you’re doing a lot of construction and manufacturingin orbit.

With space manufacture though we are worried about more than just lost or broken toolsand equipment causing debris, we also have to worry about space pollution.

The problem is that if we allow say, water, to escape, it could freeze into hypersonicdeadly hail.

The same is true of welded metals.

The technology needed to capture that debris at source is probably relatively simply buthas yet to be tested and it is probably well past time that we got going on preventingthis type of problem before it gets to Kessler Syndrome levels.

Another option is to reuse your old infrastructure by recycling it.

3D printing will form a big part of space infrastructure for several reasons.

Firstly, it is easier and considerably cheaper to ship a printer and the raw materials upinto space and have it print parts on demand than it is to ship up every conceivable itemyou might need.

Secondly, and more importantly from the Kessler Syndrome point of view, 3D printing materialsgenerally allows them to be recycled.

This is being taken seriously by the various space agencies and is actually being testedearly this year.

The Refabricator Experiment is a 3D printing experiment scheduled for immanent launch tothe International Space Station.

It will process plastic feedstock through multiple printing and recycling cycles toevaluate how many times the plastic materials can be re-used in the microgravity environmentbefore their polymers degrade to unacceptable levels.

Skip on any of these preventative measures and your very expensive and valuable orbitalinfrastructure could go crashing and burning down into the atmosphere.

Needless to say, intentionally spraying a planet’s orbit with a billion pea-sizedmetal spheres is a pretty good way to cripple their orbital infrastructure and defenses,something we will talk about more when we get to Planetary Invasions later this year,in continuance of our series on Space Warfare.

First though we will look at Interstellar warfare next week, and contemplate how youmight actually go about fighting engagements that could take centuries and some of theover-the-top weapons systems Kardashev 2 civilizations might employ against each other.

The week after that, we’ll contemplate the end of civilization when our Planet and Sundie, and how to avoid it, in Civilizations at the End of Time: Dying Earth.

And the week after that we’ll contemplate circumventing space travel entirely with teleportation,and ask if such a technology could ever exist and how we might do it.

We’ll also look at some creative approaches and examples of its use in fiction, such asour book of the month, Richard K. Morgan’s novel “Altered Carbon”For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

I also wanted to thank the Gateway Foundation and Orbital Assembly for their help with thisepisode and the last one in the series on Spaceports, they have a kickstarter for theirdrone development just starting up, and are looking for volunteers to help on their projects.

So if you’d like to contribute some funds or time to help them out, or just learn more,I’ll include a link to that in the episode description below.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

You can also join us at our Facebook or Reddit Groups, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur,to discuss these topics more.

Until next time, this is Isaac Arthur, saying thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Fermi Paradox: Sleeping Giants | | 2018-02-15 | | https://youtu.be/v9sh9NpL4i8 | +--------------------------------+

We often look up at the stars and ask, “if the Universe is so big and ancient, why aren’tthere big and ancient civilizations spanning the galaxy?”

But what if there are, and they’re just asleep?

It’s been a while since we visited the Fermi Paradox directly on this channel and it’sprobably overdue.

In the past, we’ve looked at almost every solution folks have presented about the FermiParadox, but there’s one group of solutions we’ve mostly skipped.

A variation known as the Aestivation Hypothesis has developed within that group since thelast time we discussed the Fermi Paradox.

So now seems like a good time to look at these solutions more in depth.

Interestingly, this also happens to be a category of solutions that predates the Fermi Paradoxitself.

The Fermi Paradox is fundamentally a response to our deepening understanding of the antiquityof our world and the evolutionary path of life on it, coupled with the realization thatour galaxy hosts hundreds of billions of stars, which make up less than a billionth of allstars in the visible universe.

That took a long time to sink into our collective consciousness and it really wasn’t untilwe were taking our first steps toward designing spaceships that it slammed home.

Yet, many years before that happened, some folks were considering it.

One of those was H.P.

Lovecraft, best known for his Cthulhu Mythos, but not very well known in his time, probablybecause these ideas hadn’t really had time to sink in.

This brings us to our Audible Book of the Month, H.P.

Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”.

This is one of the best known stories that began that mythos, focusing on the discoveryof a truly ancient and alien civilization found in the depths of Antarctica, whose existencecovers vast amounts of space and time.

This is one of the earliest examples in fiction of trying to come to terms with the idea thatif life can arise naturally, with all the countless billions of worlds, many predatingus by billions of years, there has to be a reason why they aren’t seemingly everywhere.

You can pick up a free copy of the story today and also get a 30-day trial of Audible, justuse my link, Audible.com/Isaac or text isaac to 500-500.

A regular aspect of Lovecraft’s work is that these ancient beings share nothing ofour own worldview.

They’re not so much evil as operating under totally alien outlooks.

That’s important to the Fermi Paradox because our broadest group of possible solutions invariablyrevolve around alien behavior and motivation and we don’t want to make too many assumptionsin that regard.

Even just reading material written by fellow humans only a century or two old can revealsome huge differences in perspective and ethics, and I’ll throw that in as a warning aboutour book of the month too.

Anytime you read a classic, and many of our books of the month tend to be, you can encountersome shocking views and that’s especially the case for Lovecraft.

For our purposes today though, that’s actually a bit of a benefit because it serves as anexample of just how much of a change a few generations can make to a single culture whoshares the same traditions and biology.

A truly alien mindset might easily be incomprehensible in its motives, though as we’ve discussedin regard to Artificial Intelligence, it will probably tend to be internally fairly logicaland consistent.

An AI might be more human than an alien, for having been made and raised by humans, oreven more alien than actual aliens, since those should presumably share the same basicbiological motives evolution would tend to pressure a species towards.

However, I’ve often noted that classical evolution makes little sense once you gettechnology.

If you extrapolate that out onto geological timelines rather than just envisioning a speciesa few centuries ahead, you can end up with something just as detached from evolutionaryroots as an AI would be, from centuries of genetic or cybernetic alteration.

You can expect that they will be sufficiently logical, but in truth folks already are andwe can see how irrational that often seems.

As best as I can tell, just about every human who has ever lived has been logical, theirpersonal assumptions, training, experience, and worldview just flavor where that logicstarts, how well it is performed, and where they subconsciously tend to steer it.

If you begin with very alien biology and motivations, that can end at some very logical but mystifyingbehaviors and opinions.

I wanted to stress that point because the Fermi Paradox has a vast number of suggestedsolutions, as we detailed in the Fermi Paradox Compendium, but most tend to fall into threebroad categories.

The first being that they don’t exist, the second that we can’t detect them, and thirdthat we can’t recognize them.

Even most of our solutions we had to classify as miscellaneous, arguably weren’t outsidethose three, but more of a hybrid between two of three categories.

The first, that they don’t exist, only relies on motivation of the alien in a very minimalway.

It’s the category for solutions ranging from life being very uncommon to intelligenceevolving very rarely, but it also includes that we might be unnatural in origin – anextreme fluke of probability like a Boltzmann Brain, any scenario where we were createdby a god or aliens or computer programmers – or that we are natural enough but proneto killing ourselves off with our own technology.

Both of those, unnatural origin and suicide by technology, do have a motivation component,though for the former it is the creator’s motivations that matter, not ours, and forthe latter it’s more of a lack of clear perspective, you assume the folks wanted tosurvive so they did not detect the threat, or could not bring themselves to recognizeit.

I’ll get to the second category shortly, but first let’s deal with the third category,that mostly contains similar examples.

It’s the one for things like aliens walking quietly among us while we are unable to recognizethey do, either through outright denial or that we lack the context to even see it, aswe could walk right past a sentient tree or stone and not realize they had thoughts.

We don’t see them doing anything to indicate intelligence, but we have to acknowledge thatmaybe their motives are simply so different that their actions appear as simple randomnoise or coincidence to us.

A big swarm of mosquitoes that was actually a hive mind might, very logically, be motivatedsimply to gather blood and reproduce.

Now that example can be rebutted by pointing out that any sort of intelligence or networkrequires maintenance and resources, so if it isn’t providing an obvious benefit itprobably should not exist, and since a big swarm of mosquitoes ought to act that wayanyway, they derive no benefit from a hive mind directing them to do just that.

When we get into the second category of solutions to the Fermi Paradox, that we can’t detectthem, we do a lot of those kind of rebuttals.

Someone says the Universe is full of aliens but they all keep small civilizations andhide them, and we examined that in the Hidden Aliens episode and concluded that it was nota very logical survival strategy based on known science, hence it would be very weirdfor EVERY alien species to do that.

The alien civilization series differs from the Fermi Paradox episodes mostly in thatit is entirely likely, even probable, that lots of civilizations do try to hide, so inAlien Civilizations episodes we can look at them, whereas in Fermi Paradox episodes wearen’t interested in such civilizations unless they offer a solution to the FermiParadox, and they don’t, any more than an entire village hiding does, if one memberinstead stands up on a hill with a beacon fire and megaphone shouting out town gossipand census data.

We call this exclusivity or rather non-exclusivity and it tends to poke holes in virtually everycategory two solution, and indeed today’s case of sleeping civilizations is not entirelyan exception.

Maybe we can’t detect aliens because they don’t use radio in favor of something better.

Beyond radio being the detection method the SETI Institute likes to suggest, it’s justone of many methods which would not be interfered with by better communication systems.

This still ignores that you’d expect at least one civilization to maintain a classicradio beacon just to say “Greetings, new species, welcome to the Galaxy”.

Exclusivity is simultaneously a tricky concept, and a simple one.

Interstellar travel should be exclusive to species that understand basic math and physics,since it’s hard to make rocket ships - let alone fusion or antimatter drives withoutit.

Alternatively, we could not say space travel is exclusive to democracies, or a particulareconomic system, since the entire space race was essentially a proxy war between two ideologieswith polar opposite views on such matters and both achieved great successes.

We can say space travel ought to be exclusive to folks who understand algebra, but not thatit is exclusive to capitalists or communists, democracies or oligarchies, benevolent dictatorsor military despots, theists or atheists, and so on.

We might be able to say it is exclusive to folks who value technology, as we’d notexpect Luddites to do space, but even that’s kind of dubious.

One only needs to embrace the technologies specifically necessary for travel and eventhen, just the blueprints, not the science behind them, and a civilization might embracescience, and then turn against it.

Similarly we couldn’t completely rule out something evolving in space, big space squidthat hatch from small asteroids and go floating around sucking up sunlight and asteroids andspace dust for fuel.

Or say a race of critters with mystic mind-powers who could teleport to other worlds but couldn’tdo trigonometry.

This mostly doesn’t matter to the Fermi Paradox though, because such routes seem improbableenough that odds are even if they maybe do exist somewhere in the Universe they are rareenough not to impact the solution.

So our example for today is civilizations that go to sleep, and at first, from the groundworkwe’ve just laid, this seems as easily dismissed as most other category two concepts.

If civilizations sleep, what the heck is their motive for doing so?

And why would all of them do it?

And we would say there isn’t any and move on, simply saying some might but most wouldn’tand thus it’s not a good Fermi Paradox solution.

However we recently had a solution provided that does provide a motivation for going tosleep, called Aestivation Hypothesis, which we’ll discuss in a moment.

It’s not a good Fermi Paradox solution itself - we’ll go ahead and murder it shortly,but it is an interesting approach and got me challenging my assumption about sleepingcivilizations in general.

But first let’s discuss Aestivation Hypothesis.

It came out in 2017, a year after both the Compendium episode was done and the firstCivilizations at the End of time episode, and appropriately the paper by Anders Sandbergand others on this is titled “That is not dead which can eternal lie”, which is aquote from H.P.

Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, a fictional work mentioned in some of his stories and popularizeda lot nowadays.

The basic assumption is simple enough, a lot of futurists tend to assume that thinkingprocesses will eventually shift from neurons, or whatever an alien might use, over to acomputer substrate.

Don’t confuse that with artificial intelligence, an AI might run on a computer but so can agame of solitaire or your brain.

The basic reasoning is that whether you are using a physical deck of cards or one on thescreen, you are still playing solitaire, and so too, whether your brain runs on neuronsor computers as its substrate, it is still a human brain.

Build a house of stone or brick or wood or LEGO and it still a house, same reasoning,not everyone agrees, but that’s the concept.

Now a neuron doesn’t work better when you make it cold, it eventually dies and freezes,but computational processes generally do better when it’s colder and we actually have somethingcalled Landauer’s Principle which shows the maximum processing a computer can do witha bit of energy is inverse to temperature.

This adds nothing new to the discussion of the Fermi Paradox and it’s often been suggestedcivilizations might migrate beyond the galactic rim to where things are cooler to take advantageof that, indeed that was one of miscellaneous solutions we discussed in the compendium.

Such civilizations are obviously hard for us to see, they’d be tens of thousands oflight years away and might be fairly covert.

They might have ridden out there on suns converted into Shkadov Thrusters and then into MatrioshkaBrains, they might be decentralized with each spread out to a small asteroid to help withcooling or even built up into a big centralized Birch Planet, but we’d have problems seeingthem now regardless.

Back in the Civilizations at the End of Time episode, Black Hole Farming, done just a bitafter the compendium, we pointed out that while the period after all the stars had diedoff would be the era of the Universe with the most entropy and the least free energyavailable, the expanding and cooling Universe would permit computation at such cold temperaturesthat you might run entire civilizations off what you need to run a light bulb in our time.

There will be very little energy available, but you can do so much more computing, orthinking and simulating with it.

The Aestivation Hypothesis – and Aestivation means to hibernate or enter torpor – workson this same reasoning, you put your whole civilization to sleep until temperatures cooldown so that you can take advantage of those super cold temperatures and live then, whenthere’s less free energy but you can do far, far more with it.

Now that is a great motivation from the Fermi Paradox perspective.

It is very easy to argue that most civilizations tend to shift to the computer substrate, it’sway more efficient and way better for colonizing space too.

It also offers simple immortality as you can easily repair and replace everything.

You can also run your brain faster to experience whole days in mere seconds or slow it downto experience a mere second over a whole century.

This un-glues you from classic time, and I want to emphasize that because it’s whathit me later on, when I was pondering this more.

If you live this way you only have two relevant calendars, your internal one of experiencesand your civilization around you.

For the most part, the natural world and Universe are not dominating how you experience timeanymore.

So you can just slow down – I don’t think you’d stop completely, since you’d needto monitor the rest of the Universe – and wait until the Universe cools down to moreeffectively use your energy.

It sounds like a solid theory, as everyone should have motivation to do this, and whiledoing it would appear non-interactive and quiet.

However as I said we were going to murder it and that’s because it has three big flaws.

First, the whole point of waiting till the end of time to use your resources is you’llget vastly more bang for your buck doing so, but that implies you’d like to have a stockpileof resources.

If you are aiming for hyper-efficiency, you should be resource hoarding and that shouldresult in the same basic Dyson Dilemma we so often discuss.

Whether you are using every rock and planet and star for resources and power, or simplystoring them away, it should look more or less the same.

A Dark Universe where there are no stars because they waste energy and indeed inhibit processingspeed, that’s the very reason you consider migrating to the galactic rim, because galaxieshave a lot more heat in them than the intergalactic void on account of all the bright stars illuminatingit and all the collisions going on.

Nor are those resources static, they are getting used up while you wait.

So by default such a civilization, before it goes to sleep, ought to spread over itsgalaxy and grab everything to store it securely for the aeons to come, as they’ll actuallyget to those lower temperatures faster by doing so and ensure more energy and resourcesto use when that time comes.

That’s a fatal kill to the Hypothesis right there - we would notice what is effectivelya K3 civilization with the lights out.

But there’s also our second flaw, which is that you have to worry about alien civilizationsarising and taking the galaxy while you sleep.

It does no good to wait to harvest space, if you wake up and find somebody else alreadyhas, and even if you had all the resources you want, that doesn’t mean that they do.

You could leave triggers in place to wake up, or more likely just keep at least someof your civilization awake or just slowed down, but you would have to deal with thatnew civilization in some way, and even if its a peaceful accord to divide up resources,all those leftover ungathered resources are presumably spawning new civilizations you’dneed to wake up and deal with too.

Then there’s our third, which is exclusivity.

We don’t know that every species will converge toward this just because it seems logical,and more to the point, we shouldn’t assume every member of a species does.

That’s just as important for any exclusivity issue with the Fermi Paradox, not just “Willall species do this?” but “Will every piece of their civilization feel the same?”.

A trillion aliens in an empire who all believe it’s wrong to contact a primitive speciesmight not do so, but it only takes a handful of them, maybe even just one, to send a hellosignal or maybe even visit in a ship.

Similarly, most of a planet’s inhabitants might feel colonizing space is wrong, butif some faction is very expansionist and does so, in a few centuries they won’t be a smallminority anymore, but the true new civilization of which the non-expansionists are a tinyminority of antiques.

So if 99% of a civilization goes to sleep while 1% does not, and instead goes aroundcolonizing, it will be only a millennium or two before that sleeping 99% has become just1% of some vast new empire, and millions or billions of years later, just some forgottenrelic.

On astronomical timelines any pro-growth section of a civilization will utterly erase no-growthsections of it, all things being equal.

So on first inspection, the Aestivation Hypothesis seems dead on arrival.

Indeed, in its default form, it mostly is.

However, the Lovecraftian title of the paper nagged at my mind, and I started thinkingabout some of the other Late Filters we’ve discussed.

Late Filters being solutions to the Fermi Paradox which hit a civilization after they’vereached our stage, like killing yourself off by artificial intelligence or inventing abrainwashing technique that a unified empire uses to discourage colonization so as to ensurethey create no external threats, or a convergence to a hive mind that does the same, never breakingitself up to colonize far away where communication lag time would prevent the extension of thatmind and again create potential external threats.

Let me talk about that galactic harvesting though really quick.

I say harvest everything now because it gets you maximum energy, but in truth, if you’vegot a civilization with the tech and inclination to use black holes for energy, not all thatmuch is lost by stars burning, and it does take a lot of effort to acquire it all now.

If you were locked into the idea of having a static population of, say, a billion minds,all kept near at hand to avoid serious mutation from the normal, creating more and sendingthem out around the galaxy is potentially spawning enemies.

Over time, those galaxies in the local group bound to us gravitationally will all falltogether without losing much mass to radiation and collapse into various black holes.

You’d still have to go retrieve them or set up shop around them, but as we discussedin Black Hole Farming, in such eras you are already running so slow that while it takesthousands of years for a signal to reach between two such spots, it would seem like real time.

That epoch is so long that even running at such slow speeds you will experience a totalsubjective time that makes the entire lifetime of the current Universe seem like an eye blink,so it doesn’t matter to you.

I pictured thousands of black holes scattered across the remnants of the galaxy, each hometo either a civilization or a single supermind slowly experiencing a near eternity but ableto speak to each other in what seemed no delay at all.

Now that doesn’t help with alien civilizations arising and taking the resources, but let’sconsider another scenario.

It’s billions of years ago and they are the first on the galactic scene, these OldOnes.

Ethics vary and we’ll say they are rather repugnant in that purist and genocidal kindof way, but they firmly believe their civilization is essentially perfect and should tolerateno threats or distorted imitations.

They know that if they go out and colonize the galaxy those splinter civilizations willlikely eventually become every bit as alien as actual aliens.

You don’t trust anything smart enough, be it one of your own or some AI you’ve made,to go harvest the galaxy and bring it back, so anyone you send out is either dialed downto near-stasis, experiencing virtually no time at all, or too dumb to do much.

No self-replicating machines or clever members of your species sent out to harvest the starsand decide to keep resources for themselves while they are busy, awake and harvestingand contemplating.

So you opt to only gather up resources from nearby, to live only nearby, and to mostlysleep until the day comes that you can enjoy the benefits of super-slow, super-cool, ultra-efficientcomputing, where anyone sent out would be forced to experience time slowly anyway, becauseit’s the nature of such ultra-cool computing that you actually have to wait a long timebetween each use of circuit so it can cool back down again on its own.

Nobody left around is thinking that fast, with a huge energy penalty paid to run hotter,and communication lag time is eliminated by everyone experiencing time slowly.

Which helps with isolation mutation.

Yes, you are losing a lot of resources to time marching on and stars burning out orgetting ejected from the galaxies, but not that much and if it means you maybe only geta tenth the total resources in the end, but only need a billion people to gather them,you are still ahead of the game, proportionally, by a hundred million fold.

To them, the Old Ones, it doesn’t matter how many resources their civilization has,but how many each of them individually gets and can use, and having to share with or fendoff many others is not beneficial to that cause, because all they really care aboutis how long, subjectively, they can experience life.

It doesn’t really matter if this is a billion individuals, or a hive of a billion minds,or a thousand supercomputers, or even just one big one, just so long as all share themotivation of their continued existence for as long as possible as the most importantthing, and that any threat to that must be eliminated.

That’s important because it gives them the motivation to eliminate such threats.

To kill off any emerging new species elsewhere or to shoot down their own colony ships fromdeviants seeking to colonize the galaxy.

They police the galaxy with very stupid probes, ones just smart enough to detect civilizationsemerging anywhere in the Local Group of galaxies.

Then they deal with them.

There’s many ways to do this, we’ll discuss some in the upcoming Interstellar Warfareepisode, but maybe the probe carries a copy of one of their minds forced to sleep, whocan only fully awaken when it either gets a go ahead signal from home, or the conditionsof that discovered civilization reach a specific marker where if it waits longer it won’tbe able to handle them.

Thus decreasing the risk of a rogue agent doing its own thing.

Any interstellar-capable vessel could easily wipe us out right as we are now, all on itsown, it’s inherent to either the power levels needed for interstellar trips or the automationneeded.

But the key notion is they don’t want that sleeping giant to wake up until the last minuteor one drop more than needed because they view it as just as nearly as big a threatas an enemy.

They don’t want it experiencing, thinking, contemplating, and acting far from home, goingnative to protect the locals after monitoring them for eons or deciding to set itself upas a new rival civilization.

So instead of the classic genocide approach of hitting everyone as early as possible,of even colonizing every planet so nothing new and alien can arise there, they have motiveto wait until right now.

Such a probe might not even have a mind, simply making itself easy to find and includes flawedblueprints for a Suicide Pact technology, one that seems an amazing find, like a newpower source, but kills your entire civilization if you use it.

In that way, you ensure all threats, or the need to share the galaxy is eliminated withthe minimum risk, and you still keep yourself big enough that you can go wake up and attackthem en masse if Plan A fails.

You are already at the technological limit, you wouldn’t go to sleep until you werepretty confident you figured out every cool and useful bit of science and technology thatcould help you be more efficient and safe.

And you probably did gather up a lot of resources too, just not the whole galaxy.

You might just live in one system, a single Dyson Swarm, or even one planet, though itmight be a gigantic Birch Planet made by cannibalizing hundreds of thousands of nearby systems withautomated mining.

So if your preventive measures fail you can still wake up and attack with a giant andsuper-advanced armada, even if they might have had tens of thousands of years to growand advance themselves.

This doesn’t necessarily require a particularly Lovecraft-flavored set of aliens but it doesbring to mind, ancient, selfish, sleeping, and cruel ones.

But it gets around exclusivity by requiring only that they be the first on the scene.

I wouldn’t qualify it as a strong Fermi Paradox solution, it does not really passthe Dyson Dilemma test for explaining an absence of K3 civilizations in the local Supercluster,just the Local Group, unless such behavior was more the norm than an exception that justarrived on the scene before anyone with a different mindset.

However, I can’t dismiss it as an implausible one either, this hybrid of Aestivation Hypothesisand the more classic space opera notion of old and cold aliens waking up occasionallyto slaughter the galaxy, as with the Reapers from Mass Effect and many other stories.

That’s what is so potent about Cthulhu Mythos even a century after it was written, not justthe classic dangerous sleeping predator hiding in its dark cave and emerging occasionallyto hunt us, but that emerging awareness of just how huge and old the Universe is.

I tend to think that’s why Lovecraft was not very successful as a writer while he lived,but is one of the best known authors nowadays and is to the scifi horror subgenre what Tolkienis to fantasy, or Asimov is to robot-centered scifi.

We grew up in a world that few saw then, but we know all too well now.

Robots aren’t a novelty like in Asimov’s time, and the vast age and scope of the Universe,with possible ancient alien civilizations hanging around it, isn’t something thatonly was really understood by a handful of astronomers and hadn’t sunk into publicawareness yet.

We know how old and big space is, we know that the chemistry for life ought to be fairlycommon, and we know that the basic evolutionary mechanics of biology should tend to favorspecies that are fairly pre-disposed to seek to survive and grow their numbers, and theirabsence, and the Fermi Paradox, worries us.

I think that Lovecraft was the first writer to really tackle that feeling, and needlessto say his writing doesn’t encourage optimism.

I disagree with that fear his works are best known for but it does absolutely make fora great read, or listen, and has inspired countless authors and novels, from our bookof the month a few months back, Alastair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space”, to the master of modernhorror, Stephen King, who cites him as his inspiration, and says no one has yet surpassedLovecraft at tales of dread and horror.

Of all his works, I’ve picked “At the Mountains of Madness” as our book of themonth because it also captures that feeling of exploration too, and we get to see humanity’sbrighter side as an expedition challenges themselves reaching out to explore new realms,something we see as a common part of some of the best horror in that time whether itwas expeditions exploring the Antarctic or old tombs and pyramids, questing for ancientknowledge.

There happen to be many versions of the story in abridged, unabridged, and radio drama forms,or in anthologies, one of the nice things about the classics, so I’d recommend searchingthrough them for the narrator you like the most as Audible does let you play a sampleof each performance before grabbing it.

You can pick up a FREE copy of “At the Mountains of Madness” today, just use my link in thisepisode’s description, Audible.com/Isaac or text promo code isaac to 500-500 to geta free book and 30 day free trial, and that book is yours to keep, whether you stay onwith Audible or not.

I won’t say you are going to love it, as it is horror story charting an expeditionto a strange and barren place, but if you don’t enjoy it, you can swap it out foranother at any time.

Next week we’ll be doing our own expedition to a strange and barren place, as we returnto our Outward Bound series to look at colonizing Alpha Centauri, and we’ll discuss both interstellarcolonization and the special problems of binary and multiple star systems.

From there, we’ll move back home, to look at how we can go about building up the orbitalinfrastructure we’ll need to colonize space, and three weeks from now we’ll take anotherlook at space warfare, and consider the special problems with doing that at the interstellarscale.

And lastly, a month from now we’ll return to the Civilizations at the End of Time series,for Dying Earth, and what civilizations will do when the planet and sun they’ve alwaysdepended upon begins to perish.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Spaceports | | 2018-02-08 | | https://youtu.be/TmLWxptFFYc | +--------------------------------+

We spent a lot of time figuring out how to get into orbit, but what do you doand where do you go once you’re up there?

Welcome back to the Upward Bound series, and I am your host, Isaac Arthur.

We started this series almost a year ago and have discussed many different ways of gettinginto space cheaper and safer, and it’s fairly impressive how much launch costs have droppedjust in this last year alone.

We, and lots of other folks, have long predicted there’d be a point where technology droppedlaunch costs while increasing what we could do up there that would result in a snowballeffect and I feel pretty confident at this point saying that I think we are seeing thebeginning of that now.

As it gets cheaper to get off Earth, we also have more things we can do up there, startingup a real economy and infrastructure in orbit, and I thought we’d spend a couple episodesdiscussing those options.

For today we will be looking not just at an improved space station to replace the ISS,but a genuine spaceport.

Designs for those go a long way back, at least to von Braun’s inflatable space wheel, andwe started seeing the first realistic ones hit the silver screen in Stanley Kubrick andArthur C. Clarke’s class film, “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

Many more have been dreamed up since, and we have discussed some very large ones wecan build down the road, but I was curious what folks had come up with in recent years,tailored to the current and emerging technologies.

As I investigated those I ran across the Gateway Foundation’s Orbital Assembly Project, andgot to talking to one of their engineers, Kit Carson, and their President, John Blincow.

One of the cool things about running this channel is getting to chat with all the aerospacecompanies working to bring the future about, and a lot of them tend to be big believersin a lot of the ideas we discuss here, and it is fun to pick their brains and bounceideas around.

There are a ton of options for our first spaceport, but it’s easier to focus primarily on onedesign.

Since Gateway has a kickstarter coming up for drone assembly robots to be used in orbit,and was kind enough to lend me their top notch animations of some of their designs, I thoughtwe’d use theirs, though I’ll admit, their option to go big for that first spaceportalso swayed me.

Most plans lying around amount to a space station upgrade not much bigger than a house.

They’re thinking gas station or maybe freeway truck stop, not airport, and a lot of timesthey’re not including all the ancillary stuff we tend to see near such facilities,convenience stores, motels, hotels, restaurants, entertainment, and so on.

We’ve discussed a lot of systems that might get launch costs down to under $100 a kilogram,indeed for some just a couple bucks a kilogram, and SpaceX is set to bring that cost downto under $1000 in the very near future with their BFR, a skyscraper-sized rocket.

$1000 a kilogram has been a fairly common figure to use as the snowball point, probablybecause it’s about the zone where transporting a person into space is about the same as theGDP per capita in a developed nation, at which point going up to orbit is obviously stilla serious luxury, but no longer restricted to billionaires.

As of today, with nearly sixty years of missions to space, we still haven’t even sent 1000people up there.

We have a lot of airports that process that many people through every hour, and even thelittle airport near me mostly for recreational flying does that many in a week.

If we want to be able to say we have a genuine foothold in space, we need to be thinkingabout spaceports that can welcome a thousand people a week.

It’s worth noting that even at that rate, that’s only about 50,000 people a year,while still being nearly a hundred times as many folks as we’ve ever sent up there sofar.

50,000 a year would mean only a million people out of each generation of humanity got togo into space just one time.

If we wanted everybody to get a chance to spend a week up there it would mean sendingnot 50,000 people a year, but 100 Million.

That’s three people every second, rather than about every month as now.

Needless to say, that’s a long way off, but if launch costs drop to the point wherea person, and little bit of luggage and supplies, call it 200 kilograms a person, could be sentthere for $1000 a kilogram, or $200,000 each, ten billion dollars would provide 50,000 peopleaccess to space.

That’s actually a very plausible annual figure for tourism alone, and there are alot more than 50,000 folks who could afford that ticket.

More to the point, it starts opening options for private sector spending we tend not tothink about.

If you want to rent out the Vomit Comet for a flight, it cost about as much as one ofthose tickets we just mentioned, and that gets a film crew a couple dozen zero-gravityintervals of about half a minute, spread over a few hours of flight.

Not really ideal filming circumstances, alternatively a spaceport could easily have several baysjust given over to filming, where a cast and crew of 50 could spend weeks shooting up thereunrushed for a price tag of around ten million, a sizable but hardly murderous cost for abig-budget film.

That’s also a pretty good draw for other folks and publicity, since a lot of folkswould enjoy getting to meet celebrities up there filming or get cast as an extra in afilm, since it makes sense to grab those from folks already up there, and I’m sure you’dhave a lot of video blogging going on by those celebrities while they were up there too.

That’s just one example of something that has nothing to do with science that you coulduse a spaceport for in the near future.

If we want others, we really only need to consider what we tend to find at more conventionaltransportation ports.

Hotels, restaurants, and casinos would be some examples.

I was joking with John and Kit that someone might make a fortune patenting the first zero-gravityroulette wheel or magnetic table and dice for gaming.

And for the same reason lavish charity gambling or dinner events tend to do well, these probablywould too, since those doing it can point out that they are helping fund a good cause.

That was actually one of John’s more interesting ideas for funding too, a lottery where thewinner gets an all-expense paid trip to the spaceport.

Launch costs may be getting a lot cheaper, but we’d still be talking tickets pricedat a decent fraction of a million bucks, which is more than most of us will ever have tospend.

But if you can buy a ticket, like with most state lotteries where a big chunk goes toeducation or similar, you’ve got a plausible shot at winning and know all that money iseither going to fund making it cheaper and better or sending someone up there.

Don’t think of this as a small additional source of potential funding either, lotteriesalone bring in over 70 billion dollars a year in the US, about double America’s totalspace program spending, not just NASA, and 300 billion globally, about 5 times what thewhole planet spends on space programs.

It would let us get a lot more science done, to the point where Universities can affordto send a scientist or two up there for months, and rent out a lab all to themselves.

Right now it can take years just to get a small box up there that an astronaut mighttinker with for a few minutes a day for you, this is not ideal for a lot of experiments.

The thing is a spaceport that can handle several hundred people on board at once is not a smallthing, and proportionally even bigger than the ISS because folks will want more elbowroom.

The Gateway Spaceport design is modular, designed to be built in chunks and mostly automatically,and also expandable, and begin with the Gateway Segment Assembly Line or GSAL.

The GSAL is an automated assembly system designed to create segments of a structure.

The segments are then welded together to form the whole structure.

This method of construction is called permanent modular construction.

The GSAL will consist of a number of workstations, each with a different assignment.

Each will assemble semi complete segments much like aircraft manufacturers and shipyardsdo.

You ship up the raw materials and it takes them in and spits out segments, like trusses.

An interesting advantage of space construction is your trusses don’t have to be all thatmassive, as there’s no gravity to fight.

You construct modularly, in blocks.

The GSAL makes square sections for the station hub or wedge segments for the ring sections.

Beams go into the GSAL and modules come out to be welded into place.

They estimate each block would take just under half an hour to make.

The GSAL itself is roughly 12 by 12 by 120 meters and the modules themselves can be amaximum 7.6 meters wide and tall or 25 feet, and can actually be of any length but thedefault construction of the Spaceport Hub called for a length of 76 meters or 250 feet.

You can make segments skinnier, shorter, longer, or have them vary in width so as to producewedge shaped sections for a ring.

Each one of these, using the default length for the Spaceport Hub sections would be 7.6

by 7.6 by 76 meters with a volume of 4400 cubic meters, almost five times the pressurizedvolume of the International Space Station, at just 916 cubic meters.

The Gateway Hub section is a disc with a large rectangular docking bay cut into it, composedof a couple of hundred of these modules.

Its own pressurized volume is 1.1 million cubic meters, fully 1200 times that of theISS.

And that’s pretty darn big, true, but it’s peanuts compared to some of the structureswe talk about, even the modest ones like an O’Neill Cylinder, but it would dwarf everyobject we’ve sent into space so far combined.

Now, with a radius and depth of 76 meters, and 1.4 million cubic meters of volume, both

the pressurized section and vacuum-exposed bay, you could stop here and have a very completeand useful spaceport.

There’s plenty of room for ships in that bay too, it’s a good deal larger than afootball field and it is designed to operate stand-alone from additional segments.

Of course as big as it is, we will want to add some components on to the Hub.

Now by default a space station has no gravity, and as we’ve discussed before you can simulategravity by spinning the object.

How fast you spin it and how far you are from the center of spin, controls the apparentgravity inside.

This apparent gravity is linear to the radius or diameter, so if you double the ring sizeyou’d double the apparent gravity, alternatively if you climb halfway toward the middle youwould halve the gravity and it would be zero at the center.

This is not the case for the speed the object is spinning at though.

You can calculate this either as the tangential velocity, the specific speed the outside edgeis spinning at, in which case apparent gravity rises with the square, or with its angularvelocity, the rate at which it is rotating.

As an example the Earth spins at the equator at about 460 meters per second, its tangentialvelocity, while it spins one revolution per day, its angular velocity.

RPMs or revolutions per minute tends to be the default value spin-gravity stations aregiven in and it also causes a rise in spin-gravity with the square of angular velocity.

Hypothetically you can simulate any level of gravity this way but it puts a huge strainon the station to hold together the larger you make it and the faster you spin it.

On top of this, people don’t handle being spun around rapidly in circles too well, itmakes us nauseous and disoriented.

It’s generally accepted that anything less than 2 RPM won’t bother people, and we’vesome indications that with training we could get used to a good deal more.

Now one of the reasons we don’t have such a spinning section on the ISS is that we’vegot plenty of places to do gravity-based experiments but just that one small station for zero-gravity,plus the place is small enough that any rotating section would either have very little gravityor be nausea-inducing.

The Gateway Spaceport aims for something much larger, multiple rings with much larger diametersspinning will be slower.

The first to be built and innermost of these would be the Lunar Gravity Area or LGA, witha radius of 152 meters, by rotating once per minute it would generate 17% of normal gravity,the same as on the Moon.

Needless to say this would be handy for folks training for moon missions which is why thatwas selected, for a Mars Gravity Area, a ring with a larger radius would simulate Martiangravity, or lower, to simulate a place like Jupiter’s moon Callisto, which has only13% Earth gravity and as we discussed in the Outward Bound series, is one of the best potentialfirst bases for humanity out past the Asteroid Belt.

However, besides training its real advantage is allowing us to do long term studies ofthe effects of low gravity on people.

We actually have no idea what that is, the twelve folks who have ever experienced lowgravity only experienced the Moon’s specific value and only for a few days.

For all we know, even the Moon’s small surface gravity might be entirely enough for healthypeople to live years at a time, or it could be that even Venus’s near-Earth gravityisn’t enough.

Best to find out in orbit, now, not in the middle of a mission millions of kilometersfrom help.

This is important too, as for instance we have no idea how much gravity is needed tosafely carry an infant to term, and we’ve good cause to think that is a gravitationallysensitive process.

You’ve got serious issues colonizing other planets if you can’t, well, manufacturecolonists in-situ.

And if there are any complications in pregnancies from gravity, it behooves us to identify themon some large and well-equipped space station close enough to Earth for real-time communication,not on some cramped moon base or Martian colony.

So the LGA lets us investigate the long term effects of lunar gravity and train and prepcrews for missions to the Moon.

It also allows folks to enjoy the fun of low gravity while still having the intuitive senseof up and down work.

The plans call for 300 guest rooms, which would have the advantage of allowing you tosleep without needing to strap in and drink from normal cups rather than bulbs and avoidthe unpleasantness involved with using the restroom in zero-gravity.

I suspect a lot of folks would want to try out the full zero-gravity experience but aftera day or so might be glad to have a room with some gravity in it.

And the LGA has plenty of rooms in it.

At 3.2 million cubic meters of volume, it would be 3400 times as spacious as the InternationalSpace Station.

The next ring to be built would be the MGA – Mars Gravity Area.

With a radius of 244 meters it would only simulate 27% gravity at 1 RPM, Mars is actuallyat 38% so we would have to adjust spin to 1.18 RPM, again well beneath the 2 RPM value

we think is safe against disorientation.

Spun to 1.9 RPM it would match normal Earth gravity and a bit less could simulate Venus.

At 30 meters width, which would be several floors or decks, and 45 meters depth, theLGA itself would have a volume of 2.2 million cubic meters, about 2400 times the volumeof the ISS.

It would also include 46 Megawatts of solar power generation.

This ring is expected to house about a thousand people spread over 550 guest cabins and isviewed as more of a long-term residence area, a mission to Mars calls for 18 months on theground in Martian gravity so we need long term tests to begin with, so it is anticipatedthis area would also include apartments or facilities for rent or lease.

Probably fairly expensive, after all even if you are only including launch costs forsupplies and totally recycling air and water, supplies for one person for a year might easilystill run a million dollars, but that is viable for crew or long term researchers or folkswho are quite wealthy and simply want to live in space.

Space in space is actually fairly cheap and made cheaper by the square-cube law, as we’vediscussed with larger spaceships, if you simply double something in size its surface arearises by the square, or 4, but its volume rises with the cube, or 8.

You need 4 times the shielding and hull material, but you get 8 times the space inside it, orneed only half the shielding per unit of space.

As mentioned the Hub is over a thousand times bigger than ISS, in volume, so essentiallyit only needs about a tenth the shielding material per unit of space as ISS does.

You wouldn’t want to be lavish with room design but your bottleneck is on the massof furniture and equipment in a room more than the size of the room.

You could have a couple thousand people living, working, or visiting the full Gateway Spaceportat any given time with shuttles carrying 30-40 people arriving and departing several timesa day.

And that’s just the default size of the station, you could make it skinnier or wider,the GSAL is basically printing those modules like pasta, you can cut the module noodleat any length.

You could also build a whole other spaceport instead if you need room, in a different orbitor right next door and connect them.

Now a big aspect of construction is going to be drones, and you basically have two types,the flying kind and the crawling kind.

The latter zip around welding things, welding in a vacuum is tricky but we’ve had somepractice, and the other kind mostly zips around grabbing things, we really don’t want toolsor construction material wandering off, both for the loss of material and because a hammerthat seems to spin away at a meter or two a second is still actually moving severalthousand meters per second relative to Earth and could eventually smash into somethingon a different orbital path with a huge amount of force.

Indeed, next time in this series we’ll be examining how that can cause a runaway effect,where objects get destroyed, their debris scatters and destroys more things, and soon, littering orbital space with millions of hyper-velocity bullets and potentiallypreventing any space travel.

This is known as Kessler Syndrome and we will discuss it in more detail, along with waysof handling it, in the next episode of the series in a few weeks.

Those drones could be controlled by station operators but in fact, seeing as how the stationis only hundreds of kilometers up, ground-based pilots could control them, saving a lot ofmoney.

Indeed if our robotics get good enough you could use humanoid shaped robots like NASAsRobonaut piloted by folks in virtual reality down on Earth, potentially allowing a muchbigger crew who also don’t need living space or time off, as the next shift just takesover the robot.

For manned construction we have something usually called a pod, which is basically asmall pressurized vehicle, though the person inside would likely wear a suit anyway, withvarious jets to move it around and arms to manipulate equipment and tools, and of coursewe’d have classic spacesuits for EVA too.

Spacesuits remain a problem as they are bulky and leak, and more the higher the pressure,hence why we tend to use oxygen-only in spacesuits and have to have the astronauts pre-breatheto purge nitrogen from their blood.

One of the preferred ways to deal with this is a rubberized suit that would push on thewearer but we have problems at the neck and helmet interface, partially because whileyou can squeeze a body fairly hard, you can’t really squeeze someone’s neck that much,as it tends to make them pass out and die.

Hence pods and drones are going to be preferable and our technology there is rapidly improving.

The thing about a spaceport of this size is it allows you to have a crew big enough forlots of specialization and redundancy while also allowing lots of folks who have nothingto do with spaceport operations, including crewmembers just there to monitor those visitorsor residents so they don’t kill themselves on accident, and provide hospitality of course.

You could easily have small teams from dozens of universities or government labs conductingexperiments up there while movie crews film and travelers come by just to enjoy zero-gravityand all the various associated entertainments we could come up with, like a zero-g racquetballcourt or casino.

And since it does have gravity in segments, you’ve got places for people to go if thatlack of gravity gets overwhelming.

Since you’d doubtless be screening everyone medically before they went up and when theygot home, you would also build a very large data pool on health effects of no gravityand low gravity.

You’ve got room for entire hydroponic gardens for botanists to work with to do large samplesof many plants and see how low or no gravity affects them, instead of just small terrariumslike we are limited to now.

We can also do some zoology too, we haven’t taken that many animals to space, especiallylarge ones, or done much research on how groups of them behave in the long term, what changesto hunting or breeding might occur in low gravity.

How would a flying squirrel act in a forested dome with lunar gravity?

Folks heading off to a moon base will have had time to get used to the gravity and willknow there’s a platform with ships docked to it and fuel that could resupply them rapidly,no weather-fickle ground-based launch windows, and come get them in an emergency.

We can train Mars crews safely for simulated 26 month missions, part in no gravity andpart in Martian, and see for sure if they can handle it before sending them off wherewe can’t help.

Asteroid mining companies could know they’ve got a place to dock and unload, refuel, repair,and get some relaxation before heading off again.

You could have repair bays so that potentially a satellite could be repaired, or even assembledfrom parts, right there rather than needing to design it for fitting in one rocket payloadand eventually being pushed up to a graveyard orbit or down to burn up.

If your 3D printing is good enough you could manufacture replacement parts or upgradesright there, and if your robots are versatile enough, the work could be done there withthem piloted by expert technicians who are groundside controlling the robots.

Once you build your initial space construction infrastructure, you could start assemblingtruly huge space-based telescopes too, remember Hubble is pretty big but there are many ground-basedones that are larger, and you can actually make bigger ones in space.

Tons of options, and more will emerge after such a spaceport is created too.

If you build it, they will come.

And once the hub is overloaded you build the LGA segments, then the MGA, then you can addon more independent modules attached to it or a whole new station connected to it orserving a different orbital path.

The Gateway Foundation’s spaceport design is not the only one, but it especially impressedme as did their work on drones, which we will be looking at more next time in the series.

More so because it’s not a design for just one series, but a setup designed to able tocontinue perpetual construction of new ones so we can accommodate more and more peopleand keep dropping the price tag to go up there, until eventually the available space risesand the costs drops so that anyone can go.

They do have a Kickstarter just opening up for the drone design and I will attach a linkin the video description if you want to read more and support them, and I know they arealso looking for crew members, and volunteers to help out on the graphics side, much likeus here at SFIA, where I am also always looking for folks with some computer graphics skillsand time to volunteer them, those animations are not core to the technological developmentbut they are vital to explaining these concepts to folks and helping gathering interest, enthusiasm,and of course funding.

And again if you wanted to help them out in either way, I’ll leave the link below, andhopefully we’ll get some good space drones out of it in the near future, which will bevital to infrastructure in space.

And at this point, with even just the completed Hub of the spaceport, you do have the beginningsof a basic orbital infrastructure and the perfect beachhead to expand that.

We will be looking at orbital infrastructure, more on orbital construction, and as mentioned,orbital debris and Kessler Syndrome in three weeks.

Before that we will be heading back to the Fermi Paradox series to examine the conceptof ancient hibernating civilizations in Fermi Paradox Sleeping Giants, and then we willlaunch off to Alpha Centauri to discuss colonizing the system and look at the special difficultiesof binary and multiple star systems.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

You can also discuss these topics with like-minded individuals in the comments below or at ourFacebook and Reddit groups, Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.

Until next time, this is Isaac Arthur saying thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Mars: From Science Fiction to Science Fact| | 2018-02-01 | | https://youtu.be/S0dqd72ALkQ | +--------------------------------+

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

So today we will be looking at some of the missions being contemplated to get us to Mars.

This is a two part episode with Paul Shillito of Curious Droid who is covering the earlierhistory of such mission planning.

If you haven’t already seen Part 1, take the link over to there and we’ll see youin a bit.

If you are arriving here from there for the first time, welcome, and you might want toturn the captions on and grab a drink and snack.

So after the Space Race had essentially wrapped up we saw quite a fall off not just in missionto Mars, but interest in heading there next.

Between 1960 and 1975 over 50 Mars missions were attempted between the US and Soviet Union,of which only about a quarter were totally successful while most of them were total failures.

This might explain why for the next fifteen years only two missions were attempted.

Nobody had gone back to the Moon during that time either and one can argue Mars lost focusin favor of wanting to master the moon first.

However even science fiction mostly abandoned Mars in the 1980s; not a single major filmcame out about Mars in the 80s until Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in Total Recall, seton Mars, in 1990.

Nor were there many books on the topic either, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 90s book trilogyon Colonizing Mars captured a lot of people’s curiosity as it gave a detailed and scientificlook at traveling to, colonizing, and settling Mars.

This changed toward the end of the 1990s but we see this huge gap of lost interest in the1980s between the Space Race Era and renewed modern interest, and Paul and I felt it wasa natural place to break things.

In this renewed interest we saw Dr. Robert Zubrin’s Case for Mars published in 1996,laying out the foundations for the Mars Direct program which we’ll touch on more shortly,but it was the Pathfinder Mission that I’d say truly sparked folks interest in Mars again.

I was 16 at the time, and for a lot of us in that age range Pathfinder was almost ourApollo Landing.

Of course it was a robot, not a person, so we wanted to see a person there.

And for many of us that is what brought us to read scientifically detailed works of fictionlike Robinson’s Mars Trilogy or Zubrin’s very non-fictional and absolutely inspiringCase for Mars.

I don’t know if Robinson will ever see this but Robert probably will and he does visitthe SFIA Facebook forum occasionally so on behalf of myself and many others, let me thankhim for laying out a path to an achievable series of missions and bases on Mars.

Pathfinder certainly sparked renewed public interest in that, and we saw a veritable truckloadof films set on Mars after that, but for me and many others that made it a thing for thefuture, not just scifi.

So we’ll start there with Mars Direct.

In point of fact, while the book hit in 1996, the plan dates back to 1990 and has been evolvingand updating ever since, with the founding of the Mars Society in 1998 and an updatededition of the Case for Mars in 2011.

At the time a lot of Manned Mars missions had focused on using nuclear-powered shipsto get there, an option Paul and I have each discussed in his Project Orion episode andmy “the Nuclear Option” episode.

One can argue this was part of the problem too, as treaties severely limited atomic rocketsand such ships needed to be large, assembled in space, and would need shielding both fromcosmic radiation without and reactor radiation within.

Zubrin argues this was the wrong approach and that we should aim for multiple missions,the first an unmanned one, called an ERV or Earth Return Vehicle, carrying a small nuclearreactor and a supply of hydrogen to land on Mars and process local carbon dioxide withthat hydrogen you brought along to make methane and oxygen to use for fuel on the return trip,producing that fuel in situ.

This concept has been, in variations, a staple of a lot of Mars Mission concepts.

It doesn’t take much more fuel to get to Mars than it does the Moon, and indeed thelion’s share is consumed just getting into Low Earth Orbit, but it takes a ton to comehome and far more if you are carrying it with you since you need more fuel to push the returnvoyage fuel.

That step is simply mission 1 of a series, and essentially an unmanned proof of concept.

The second launch would follow 26 months later, optimal launch windows for Mars occur every26 months, and would be two launches, another ERV and a MHU, Mars Habitat Unit, a 4-astronautmanned mission taking 6 months to travel there.

Subsequent missions would use the same double launch, sending the ERV to make their returnfuel and sending the MHU to do the manned mission.

This second ERV is essentially a backup, if something went wrong with the first, or areplacement to be used for the next mission.

Now six months is a long time to spend in space so that Habitation Unit included artificialgravity created by spinning the module on a tether and of course you’ve got radiationissues too, something we’ll see arising as a concern in a lot of designs.

After a six month trip, they spend a year and a half there and return at mission month24, windows home from Mars are also 26 months apart but trail Earth’s window by 24 months,or predate it by two months if you prefer.

They’d leave all the gear behind except the ERV, the original or the replacement,for the next follow up mission which will launch from Earth just two months after they’velaunched from Mars, and will get to Mars just a little after they arrive home.

Now this does make for missions of about two and half years duration, and also means thatwhile you are sending constant missions, you’ve got an 8 month window in each 26-month cyclewhere nobody is there doing anything including inspecting and maintaining the equipment.

If you wanted to leave someone there you’d need to have some of the crew stick aroundfor an extra 26 months and two and half years is already very hard on the mind and body.

That mind part is as important as body.

We just recently finished up the twin experiments with Scott Kelly which will hopefully addto ability to treat the physical health issues in space, but the mental ones are just asbig a concern.

Kelly spent 13 months in space, the US record, not even half that mission time, and ValeriPolyakov still holds the record at almost 15 months.

Their combined stays would still be shorter than a single Mars mission.

Dr. Polyakov, whose field is space medicine, was an obvious choice for that study backin 1994, and since he is turning 76 in a couple months it provides a good indicator that evenlong term space missions can be performed without shortening lifespan significantly.

Of course they could talk to mission control and their friends and family real time, andagain they were up there for only half the time a Mars Mission would last.

The stress of longer missions is likely to rise even more, and any number of suggestionshave been made for dealing with this.

Initially we figured on all male crews but others suggested mixed crew later on, or allfemale ones, or even married couples.

That last always seems rather popular but has struck me as dubious, you obviously wouldn’tsend a couple who already had young kids, they might be a bit old by the time they weregrown up, and since the whole notion is that a married couple is stable, ones who probablyhaven’t been married long enough for kids would seem a non-ideal test case.

I’m also reminded of the example from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, wherethey had that policy so a single candidate otherwise high on the list illicitly got acopy of other such candidates and flew down to propose to one the next day.

This is kind of amusing because it might be an ideal case, since the folks involved areclearly very dedicated to the mission if they’d fake a marriage that it might make them perfectpicks, and to be fair a shared passion of that magnitude is the basis for a lot of successfulrelationships too.

But this brings up an example of evolving technology.

We had the nuclear-powered ERV to make fuel from hydrogen we brought along but some newerdesigners skip that entirely in favor of using solar panels for power and native MartianWater Ice for the hydrogen.

In a similar mindset, we’ve been experimenting with stasis, essentially putting people intolight hibernation, for space voyages in recent years, and we also have emerging technologylike virtual reality to provide entertainment and stress relief.

Back in Heinlein’s day any entertainment would be physical books or films, and mayberadio or TV arriving from home.

Nowadays one could easily include copies of every book, film and TV show mankind has everproduced and barely make a dent in the ship’s cargo allowance, and ultra-high bandwidthlasers could easily send updates, albeit delayed.

That time lag is a big deal though, not just for help from mission control but becauseit means no live conversations except for those folks with you.

In an orbital base, or even a moonbase, you can chat with your family on phone or TV,or even VR goggles soon enough, and mission control is right there for help and if somethinggoes wrong you’re home in days at most.

As we move into some other Mars Plans, I want to stress that this tends to be my biggestcriticism of many of them.

All the rocketry and fuel and air aspects are important but for manned missions notone drop more important than the physiological and psychological ones.

Early indications are we can probably find folks who can handle 30 month missions butwe wouldn’t be able to say for sure till we either do it or build a prison-bunker wecan stick candidates in for 30 months with intercoms that delay every message twentyminutes.

I’m pretty sure that would qualify under some definitions of torture and would stilllack the stress of the real deal, since those in the bunker will know we can rush in tosave them and there’d be no obvious threats anyway.

Folks who remember the 90s probably also remember the Biosphere 2 mission, which while hardlyup to NASA standards was also a very well-funded effort that did not turn out well, and sincewe knew we’d need to get pretty good with such enclosed habitat technology to do anyserious Moon or Mars bases it added to that impression Mars was going to be very hard.

We often talk about using plants to recycle air and water and produce some food but thechallenge of that and the additional mission and payload requirements to do it has seenit absent from almost all first mission designs.

It’s a lot of mass though, just the food alone for a 4 man mission for three yearsmasses in at about 10 tons.

On ISS levels of water consumption, about 4 tons per person per year, that’s about60 tons of water they’d need, and that’s a lot of mass, more than the space shuttleweighed.

Needless to say we’d like to recycle that, but it’s always worth keeping in mind thatall that equipment requires mass and space and maintenance itself.

Not to mention energy, the amount of light needed to comfortably light a room and theamount outside on a sunny day are nothing alike.

Our eyes are logarithmic in their sensitivity, so a room can seem brightly lit to us whenit is receiving not even a percent of the illumination it would if you pulled the roofoff at noon.

It’s rather awkward, not to mention dangerous, to put lots of windows on a spaceship so you’dprobably have to supply it electrically.

Of course most of your mission time is down on Mars and windows are safer there and thereis enough light, but glass or plastic sturdy enough to handle the pressure difference isn’texactly light and one has to ask if a given square meter of dome glass, by weight, isgoing to produce as much food, water, and air in a year to pay for its mass.

Or really just food because there is ice on Mars and while melting that for water andelectrolyzing it for oxygen, or extracting oxygen from carbon dioxide in Mars’s atmosphere,takes a lot of energy, or a hefty amount of solar panels, but its less than such domeswould presumably weigh.

Add to that, you do need to bring nitrogen along for those plants, which doesn’t actuallymass that much but it also means you need to use a higher pressure in everything.

Humans don’t need the typical 1 atmosphere air pressure so much as they need the regularoxygen density, so we can go low pressure which is very handy for spacesuits, everythingleaks and the lower the pressure inside the lower that leakage.

All in all, while the advantages of recycling air and water while supplying some fresh foodare immense, it’s often seen as more trouble than it’s worth.

That’s why many Mars base illustrations lack the characteristic domes we so oftenpicture with space colonization.

However this notion of being able to recycle stuff to cut down on mass you need to bringalong is not the only path, and we often talk about what is called ‘in-situ’ resources,things you can get at the destination.

We see an example of that with Mars Direct, where we made fuel for the return trip there.

Such ideas are also incorporated into DevelopSpace’s 2008 presentation, “Minimalist Human MarsMission”.

As an example the zirconia electrolysis process used for extracting oxygen from carbon dioxideproduces carbon monoxide exhaust.

They suggest we could take that exhaust and synthesize ethylene and from that make plasticfor domes or tents.

This is particularly of note since if you can make plastic from local materials youcan also potentially provide it as a feedstock for 3D printers, a technology with a lot ofpromise for space missions that potentially simplifies a lot of problems even if you haveto bring your printing material with you.

Of course one of the biggest problems with Mars missions isn’t getting there it isgetting back, you either need to bring a lot more fuel along or make it there.

However, when we’re discussing missions lasting a few years, and likely includingat least a few years devoted to applying for the job and training for it, some might askif the fuel or equipment for making fuel is even worth bringing along.

Maybe you’re not spending years on a mission but the rest of your lifetime, and that cargospace can be devoted to making permanent facilities on Mars.

That was one of the key notions of the Mars One project announced earlier this decade.

You send a 4 person crew there and they don’t come home, they are just joined after thenext launch window by another crew, and another and larger ones till you have a colony.

Mars One was pretty controversial, and for good reasons, but they deserve mention asprobably the first serious and well-known privately funded mission design.

And whatever else comes from it, they did get people seriously talking about Mars again,which hadn’t faded from sight as long or much as in the 1980s but had started losingground and public interest for a time.

Likely at least in part from the bad global economy, it’s obviously hard to get fundingfor space exploration when money is tight.

They had a novel approach on funding too, as much as most of us jeer at Reality TV shows,they are quite popular and also a good way of keeping the public interested in the mission.

Space missions are ridiculously expensive, and a serious space program is a cost evenmost countries can’t realistically afford, so private funding of something so far-reachingas a Mars Mission requires some fairly inventive methods of raising capital.

Now Mars One has a lot of flaws though at the same time probably gets more criticismthan it deserves too, personally I don’t think there’s anything wrong with usingReality TV to keep up funding and public interest or recruiting from all over rather than fromexisting astronaut candidates.

If I can get a mission funded by slapping sponsor logos on the rocket, that’s fineby me.

However their suggested price tag of just 6 billion dollars was always dubious at bestand the technical issues raised were rarely well-rebutted, I suspect the mission wouldhave ended with crews using those life support capsules as coffins.

That always an issue with missions like this, it would be quite easy to sell the US congressa Mars Mission for 100 billion dollars if you could tell them you were 99% confidentthe crew would come home alive and safe and not fall over dead a year later from all thehealth complications of low gravity and radiation.

However if they think there’s more than an outside chance of critical mission failurethey know they may have just cut a check for a particularly expensive and elaborate formof political suicide.

People can talk all they want about the need to take risks but we still tend to be veryharsh on those who took them if it doesn’t pan out.

I’m quite sure this is part of the reason robots have become more popular than mannedmissions, though of course cost helps, but a lot less heads roll when your robotic rovercrashes into Mars than when your manned capsule does.

Manned or robotic it still takes a lot of money so of course a lot of ideas have focusedaround an international expedition rather than one funded by a single country.

There’s a lot to be said about competition, I doubt the US and USSR would have achievedso many amazing successes in the Space Race if they hadn’t be striving to one up eachother, but cooperation and teamwork are certainly handy too and of course so is being able tosplit the check, and it has worked pretty well so far for the International Space Station.

That was a fairly a large component in Shaun Moss’s 2015 book “The International MarsResearch Station”, which incorporated a lot of prior architecture and modern technologicalimprovements into the plan.

Though I should note for the sake of honesty Shaun is a friend and I helped proofread thebook, so I’m probably not neutral on it.

A big focus there was on the SpaceX Falcon and Dragon designs and the ability of thoseto land 30 tons on Mars.

Particularly the Red Dragon which would let you do a pinpoint landing on Mars with a crewof six.

That worked very well in conjunction with the Bigelow BA 330, sometimes called the Nautiluswhich is a reworking of NASA’s TransHab design from the 90’s.

Essentially an expandable or inflatable ship or base, so you could pack it on a conventionalrocket and expand it later.

A point he focuses on and which has been raised a lot for space missions is how incrediblybulky, leaky, and cumbersome space suits are and some of the efforts being made to producenew designs like MIT’s Biosuit.

This gets skipped a lot in discussion of space exploration and colonization but is an importantaspect and serious problem.

One of the advantages of manned missions is you have a clever and dexterous human on hand,not a clumsy stupid robot.

If you’ve seen many spacewalks you know that being in a suit doesn’t make one verynimble.

We are severely limited in missions in space, on the Moon, or Mars or any hazardous environmentby our astronauts needing tons of time to put on a suit that leaves them less agilethan a lot of modern robots.

One might wonder what 4 or 6 people might do on Mars for a mission over a year long,one cannot spend that whole time collecting rocks, but the simple bulkiness of those suitsmakes collecting samples or doing anything else a lot more time consuming than one mightexpect.

We’ve skipped a lot of mission designs and only skimmed the details to get to moderntimes and the newest big plan, which of course is Elon Musk’s BFR project.

Since this is a family friendly channel we will assume that is short for Big Falcon Rocket,and of course we’ve got the usual criticisms Musk tends to get for thinking a little bittoo big.

That may be a valid criticism but is certainly not one I am in any position to level, it’sbarely been a month since we were discussing how to move galaxies on this channel.

A lot of talk has been had about being able to land reusable rockets on the ground andhow valuable this is and if it really is all that valuable as opposed to just using parachutesor landing in the water, but it is pretty important and handy if your landing spot isMars, not Cape Canaveral.

More to the point, we’ve seen a huge drop in launch costs in recent years, and whenyou half the launch cost per kilogram you can double the cargo you land on Mars, ordouble the crew.

The loose idea is that the BFR gets to orbit, refuels from other vehicles there, and launchesto Mars.

Not carrying a crew of 4 or maybe 6 but potentially a couple hundred.

This is not planned as a one-way trip but it also isn’t planned to leave materialbehind to sit around dead on Mars or awaiting a new crew from the next mission.

Rather it aims to establish a permanent presence and keep expanding, and that’s a lot morerealistic when you have hundreds of hands to work on projects.

It also lets you get around the timelag issue.

In orbit, or even on the moon, you can talk to experts real time, you can’t on Mars,so ideally you want to bring a crew big enough to understand everything in a fairly in-depthway, just consulting home rather than being utterly dependent on them for anything thatgoes off script.

I am not sure if any of these missions will ever get off the ground, but they are alla step in the right direction, with the big approach my pick for the right path.

It’s been almost half a century since we went to the Moon for the first time and nearlyas long since the last time, and while that can make folks pessimistic about each newproposed mission it’s easy to forget the huge leaps we’ve made since then and arecontinuing to make.

3D Printing will allow us to make specialized tools and equipment on Mars instead of needingto pack every widget we need or go without.

Improvement in the weight, endurance, and efficiency of solar panels, batteries, andfuel cells will let us run missions without having to either bring along cumbersome anddangerous small nuclear reactors or otherwise be energy-starved and limited while we doit.

Drops in launch costs will let us send far larger missions for far lower price tags.

We are getting there, and again I do think Musk’s mindset of going big is the rightone, though I’m sure that won’t surprise any channel regulars.

I can’t say I’m super optimistic about his 2022 or 2024 mission dates, but I don’tthink we’re too far off from the point where all the technological improvements acrossthe board will mix with growing public enthusiasm for this to snowball into a mission.

We’ve come a long way since the projects Paul discussed in Part 1, and we have a waysyet to still go, but I believe making this dream reality is in sight.

So we’ve just finished a wide ranging discussion on the history of plans for space colonizationand touched on everything from the political will needed for a successful mission to thelogistical uncertainties of supporting a crew on another planet.

In particular, we questioned what mix of transported and acquired resources would be best to minimizecosts without sacrificing the viability of the mission.

For any such in-situ resource harvesting, crews will need to have dependable ways toscour alien planets for subterranean deposits like ice or methane.

A planet’s gravitational field is often approximated, for the sake of convenience,to be uniform in all locations, but in reality, it depends on the local structure of the planet.

In particular, local increases or decreases in the average density, due to resource deposits,give telltale signatures in readings of the gravitational field.

If you like, you can rest easy with the knowledge that this is possible, but then you’ll neverbe able to colonize the Solar System.

Our sponsor for this collaboration, Brilliant.org helps you build the toolset that will require.

In fact, they’ve built a lesson just for this purpose, how to detect subterranean depositsusing a gravimeter, a field device that allows sensitive measurement of gravity on the go.

To support the channel and learn more about Brilliant, go to Brilliant.org/IsaacArthur

and sign up for free.

And also, if you're ready to expand your mental toolbox, the first 200 people will get 20%off the annual Premium subscription.

That's the subscription I've been using to entertain myself with thought-provoking puzzles.

If you haven’t already seen part 1, take the link in the episode description to headover and watch that, and don’t forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons while you’reover there and check out some of the great content on Curious Droid.

If you’re coming from there, try out our Outward Bound series here at SFIA, which makesa century long journey of colonizing the solar system starting with Mars with a modestlylarge base already established, and see some of the options on the table when we look justa bit further over the technological horizon and when you have an established orbital infrastructureso you don’t have to build everything down on Earth and launch it.

Next week we’ll be begin exploring that concept a bit more as we return to the UpwardBound series to look at Spaceports, and the week after that we revisit the Fermi Paradoxto examine the notion of civilizations that have essentially entered stasis to wait oncertain events, including a new solution proposed for the Fermi Paradox called the AestivationHypothesis, in Sleeping Giants.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | De-Extinction: Resurrecting the Past| | 2018-01-25 | | https://youtu.be/H581aDWa0ic | +--------------------------------+

They say over 99% of species which have ever existed have gone extinct,what if we could bring them all back?

We spend a lot of time on the channel talking about the future of humanity and colonizingand terraforming new worlds or even constructing them from scratch.

We generally do not spend too much time on ecology though.

We spent some time talking about energy requirements for growing food for people but not so muchthe ecological angles, as I am a physicist not an ecologist.

Our main topic for today is how to resurrect extinct species, and an important aspect ofthat is where you are going to put them all.

Most species did not go extinct in a vacuum, typically something else came in that eithertook over their ecological niche or radically altered it so they could no longer survive.

By and large you can’t just re-introduce some extinct species into our own modern environment,as they will either die off again or possibly make something else go extinct, and sincevirtually every species that ever existed has died off, there’s really not room toresurrect them all here on Earth.

Hence, we need to be thinking about where else to put them.

We’ve got two basic approaches, single species recreation in a zoo environment or reproducingthe entire ecosystem.

Recreating some critter means it needs something to eat, ideally whatever it used to eat, buta T-Rex probably can eat cow just fine.

Some species are more adaptable than others.

Humans are one of the most adaptable species, so you don’t need to recreate sub-saharanAfrica from a few million years back in order to recreate humans from that period.

On the other hand, some species are much more specialized and highly dependent on theiroriginal ecosystem.

Generally speaking, the ones that went extinct did so because of dramatic changes to thatecosystem.

Some might even need other species that went extinct too, even in a zoo environment.

A modern example would be the Giant Panda, which cannot survive without a specific typeof bamboo.

Outside of the zoo environment, away from where humans protect them and supply foodof the right type and quantity, recreating the original ecosystem might be a necessityfor survival.

In which case you need to recreate not just that species but its whole ecosystem, andremove existing species of flora and fauna and even bacteria from wherever you createthis resurrected ecosystem.

Our Audible Book of the Month, Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park, examines this concept,and the 1993 film adaptation brought dinosaurs to the screen in a way that made it one ofthose most memorable films of its period and spawned a franchise.

It wasn’t the first fictional work to play with the idea of dinosaurs by any means, butusually we’d found some surviving population of them like in Arthur Conan Doyle’s LostWorld.

Jurassic Park though introduces the idea that we could bring them back instead, and overa quarter of a century later we are getting close to being able to do this for some extinctspecies, which raises many related problems and challenges, not to mention ethical dilemmas.

Crichton examines many of these in his novel, and you can pick up a free copy of JurassicPark today and also get a 30-day trial of Audible, just use my link, Audible.com/Isaac

or text isaac to 500-500.

Now in that story the resurrection is all being done on an island, to help keep it contained,but that raises two key points to begin with.

First, any given island already has an ecosystem, and usually a fairly unique one, so you can’tplow one over to introduce a new ecosystem without almost certainly eliminating manyspecies that can be found nowhere else on the planet.

So if you don’t want to just wipe out some species to replace them with extinct ones,you need to be thinking of putting it someplace new.

An island you made for instance, or one made in a desert or tundra or even off planet.

Second is the containment approach.

Needless to say this is much easier with the single-species zoo method than a replicatedecosystem.

A single large creature like a T-rex, even whole packs of them, pose no real risk tocivilization even if they escaped into the wild.

This is not Hollywood and a T-Rex is not Godzilla.

They would be easily located and re-captured, particularly since this is 2018, not 1990- you’re not going spend millions of dollars making a dinosaur and forget to implant GPStracking devices and health monitors on one.

I’d be very surprised if those weren’t routine on virtually all zoo animals and petswithin a generation and the concepts we’re discussing today aren’t happening tomorrow.

So resurrected dinosaurs would pose no more threat to civilization as a whole than sharksor crocodiles, and indeed the large animal that causes the most reported human deathsevery year, after other humans, is actually the Hippopotamus, averaging about 3000 ofus a year, which is ironic since it is a herbivore, albeit a bad tempered one!

Indeed deer, horses, and cows each kill more people every year than sharks.

It’s not the big predators that get us, but the diseases carried by tiny insects.

Bites from mosquitoes and Tsetse flies kill hundreds of thousands of people each yearby passing on diseases like Malaria, Dengue Fever, African Sleeping Sickness, Zika, RossRiver Fever and many others.

What additional horrors lurk in extinct ecosystems are unclear and I, for one, am not keen tofind out first hand.

Containment won’t work well on critters like that because they are very small andreproduce quickly in massive numbers and you can’t realistically grow each one, so thetrick of growing them in some other animal and having them be born sterile probably isn’ttoo realistic.

This is another advantage of the zoo approach over the re-created ecosystem.

Realistically we don’t have as much interest in recreating extinct insects or bacteriaand both would be nightmares to contain, though we would likely want to bring back a lot ofextinct plants and they can be serious containment problem too.

You could build some nature preserve, artificially heated and lit, down in Antarctica for keepingyour dinosaurs.

Any that escape would just freeze to death, and they aren’t going to sneak out in acrate or letter sent home, but an insect probably could, and bacteria certainly could, and eachof those make up way more total species than all the typical birds and beasts.

There are roughly 5000 mammalian species; there are over a thousand times as many otherspecies around on the planet.

We typically are only interested in the big critters, but that’s not a whole ecosystemjust the top few tiers of the food chain.

Odds are good you don’t need most of the species around when the T-rex was alive, butyou might need some.

Generally an exact duplication won’t be viable.

We have the expression ‘Dead as the Dodo’, for the dodo bird of Mauritius which was huntedto extinction by humans and the invasive species we introduced a few hundred years back.

Now that’s not a long time ago so finding DNA samples is entirely on the table and indeedwe have, damaged though they are.

This is where we get to our first real trick for doing this.

If you happen to find a totally intact strand of DNA you can take it and find an animalthat’s sufficiently like it, say a pigeon for a dodo or an elephant for a wooly mammoth.

You take an egg, clear the DNA out, and insert the new DNA, and do this many times to ensuresuccess.

However this requires you find a completely intact DNA genome and also means you justhave one, which is quite the genetic bottleneck.

It’s rather expensive to clone a pet but there are companies now that do that, notjust research it.

You send them money and a DNA sample, and they send you the clone of your cat, dog orhorse.

Doing it inside a different critter as the parent is trickier, but certainly doable anddown the road we probably could use an entirely artificial womb.

That might be preferable anyway since for many of these it is going to be humans raisinggeneration number one, which is easier said than done for some species.

Once you get them re-established they can continue their normal parenting cycle butthe whooping crane for instance can be imprinted onto another whooping crane, learn how toforage for itself, can be taught migration patterns, and how to successfully mate, but100% of the time the captive raised birds will abandon the nest, and their nestlings,as soon as they hatch.

We actually have to have humans dress up like whooping cranes to raise them, and this hadmixed results.

More modern, animatronic tools have a greater success rate in passing on parenting skills.

We can print DNA these days so you can get a sample that is damaged and instead of splicingit onto a related species, you can grab multiple copies and fill in the blanks.

And odds are if you can find one partial strand of DNA in a sample you can find a bunch more.

After all there are trillions of cells in your body and each has DNA.

This doesn’t really help us much with things that have been dead for millions of years.

It’s pretty hard to recover DNA even from a frozen corpse sitting in ice for severalthousand years, let alone a fossil, which even nowadays people tend to forget is rock,not bone, and contains no more DNA than a plaster cast made of a footprint you leftwalking across some mud.

The half-life of DNA is about 500 years, in this case meaning the time it takes for halfthe bonds in a given DNA strand to break, under ideal conditions.

The oldest we’ve found is a bit less than a million years old, buried under ice in Greenland,and we think that’s about as old as you can get.

Again, though, if you find a sample, odds are it’s not a DNA sample but several millionof them, so if you are carefully extracting each one and reading it in, you are gettingmillions of mostly trashed but otherwise identical DNA strands to look at.

Reading DNA has gotten way cheaper in recent years and needless to say so has computingpower.

Take a long sentence as a single line and randomly redact or scramble bits of it, putanother below it and do the same, and you can compare the two and make more sense ofit, do this millions of times and even if most of those lines only have maybe one wordleft correct you are going to be able to get that sentence locked down with utter certainty,but at some point it’s too degraded even for that and the hard cap is probably notmuch over a million years, and certainly far short of 65 million.

Humans and chimpanzees share about 95 to 98% of their DNA and we share 40 to 50% with afruit fly.

You get a lot of DNA from your parents, and most of it is nearly identical, as your parentsare much more closely related to each other than we are to chimps, but there are somedifferences.

I can’t reconstruct your grandfather’s DNA just from yours because you only haveabout 25% of his unique DNA in you.

However if he had about fifty kids by fifty different mothers it should be quite easyto determine his DNA enough to clone him.

Let’s say we had two guys, not related, Alex and Calvin.

Their parents both got divorced and remarried and so Alex and Calvin share a half-brother,Bill, who himself never had kids, but Alex and Calvin both had a bunch.

Bill’s subspecies or clade went extinct, but we could mostly reassemble it by reconstructingboth Alex’s and Calvin’s DNA and when it comes to a species, we don’t need 100%accuracy.

None of us have exactly identical DNA, except for identical twins and even that’s a bitiffy.

After all, not even all the DNA in your body is the same, compare two strands taken fromdifferent parts of the body and there will likely be a few differences.

Indeed most of us have around 100 new mutations to our DNA that aren’t from our parents,just bad copying, and that’s how mutation and evolution can occur in organisms thatjust split by mitosis or clone themselves asexually.

With enough processing power and samples, you can assemble a pretty decent match ofDNA for any organism from its descendants, and in the case of a whole species we cando this a lot better since we’ve got a big margin for error, and can potentially reconstructevery extinct species from their cousins’ descendants, as we did with Bill.

As we catalog more and more species and digitize their DNA, as our computers improve and sodoes our knowledge of genetics, we could potentially put together a lot of very long extinct speciesnot from remnants of DNA from preserved corpses but rather from those remnants of DNA leftaround in all of us and the millions of successor species inhabiting the planet.

It won’t be exact but that means nothing in terms of species, since they don’t haveidentical DNA to each other anyway.

So we’re taking the “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you’ve succeeded”approach.

Even so, we aren’t even sure if T-Rex had feathers or not yet, which really screws withour typical image of them as scaly rather than giant chickens.

You could get some serious errors if you made the wrong thing and you don’t even knowit because you misinterpreted the available data.

Like if aliens visited a post-apocalyptic Earth and restored us along with Bugs Bunnyand Mickey Mouse.

And again we can’t overlook things beyond DNA, like behavior or associated organisms,both those inside and out.

We’ll probably get good enough with DNA in the next century or so to be able to lookat a complete DNA genome and model what it should grow into, and that would help a lotsince you can backtrack various modern descendants and cousins to get prior DNA segments untilyou get something that has that DNA and will look like the original.

That might be the best you can do, and you might also have a bunch of basically unrelatedbut near identical critters each with valid claims to be closest to the original yet areso different they couldn’t interbreed.

An important problem arises, though, in that a critter is more than just its DNA.

Indeed, humans are basically an ecosystem within an ecosystem, you’ve got hundredsof species of bacteria just in your guts alone and the number of bacterial cells in you outnumberyour human cells.

Many of these bacteria are also symbiotic organisms, meaning we rely on them and vice-versato live, but they’re not encoded in our DNA as they are separate organisms that inhabitour bodies.

There’s a chance extinct critters could use modern microorganisms, but there may beproblems with this that mean we require the original microorganisms.

Remember, though, that we said we did not want to recreate the bacteria and other microfaunaand microflora species that would have co-existed with T-Rex because these are almost impossibleto contain.

If we simply recreate T-Rex without those smaller critters then there is a good chancethat our T-Rex will be short-lived or sick.

This is another reason why we would choose not to create an exact copy of T-Rex.

Instead, we would tweak the DNA of T-Rex to use and react to modern bacteria in the sameway other modern species do.

We might also build in safeguards that would make it impossible for our T-Rex to surviveoutside of its assigned habitat.

That was, of course, one of the plot points in the Jurassic Park series and, in the stories,it failed spectacularly.

I believe, though, that the reality is that we would be able to do that job very effectivelyand would not make such elementary mistakes.

It is something we are doing in labs very effectively even now.

The take home point is, though, that the T-Rex that we create would probably look like T-Rexof old, but it would be a modernized version and not entirely true to the original.

This is less of a problem with more modern extinct species, like mammoths who didn’tlive that long ago and died in cold climates where frozen bodies have been found, or whichdied out during human history and we’ve got plenty of samples leftover, like somethingwe hunted to extinction for trophies.

We also need to tinker less with the DNA to make it work with our current microbial environment.

I don’t think we can exactly erase that crime, of obliterating another species forfun and profit, but odds are pretty good we will be able to bring back everything we actuallywiped out in the last couple centuries and that’s something.

Of course we also wiped a lot of them out for living room, and that’s what wiped outa majority of those we didn’t, and humans are responsible for only a fraction of extinctspecies.

If we genuinely wanted to bring back entire ecosystems, then we would have to destroyother ecosystems that have arisen in the same place as the original ecosystem.

We’ve explored creating a glorified zoo with extinct species.

But let’s explore the ethics of doing so.

The main objections are that you either have to grow them in another distantly relatedcritter, like a mammoth in an elephant, which many feel is unethical, and that you needsome place to put them.

I’ve also heard people question if resurrecting dead species in and of itself is unethicalbut I’ve never heard this argument actually detailed as to why it would be wrong to doso.

There is a question around what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The most popular view is that an asteroid or comet collision 65 million years ago wipedthem out.

If that is true, then why not give them a chance to live as well given that their developmentwas cut short by an unfortunate accident as opposed to classical Darwinian evolution?

We speak a lot about the Fermi Paradox on this channel and, given that we have not encounteredany other life-forms beyond Earth yet, the dinosaurs are potentially precious as an alternativepath life could have taken.

While early efforts at this will likely involve gestating extinct species in living cousins,like the mammoth and the elephant, I can’t say that is a moral issue that keeps me upat night.

It’s a potential serious problem if the mother tries to murder the infant or won’tcare for it, but we have raised a lot of infant mammals on our own and can probably socializethem well enough to let them return to normal after we’ve got hundreds of them a few generationsdown the road.

Though this could be a very challenging task especially if you’re not sure what the originalbehaviors were.

It’s also a reminder that it is more than just DNA you need to preserve or figure out,you need to know what they ate, so you can restore that too or cook up something elsethey can eat instead, as well as what organisms they had inside themselves, like our own gutbacteria which isn’t in our DNA.

You need to know their behaviors and social structure, you need to know what they canlive around without wiping them out or being wiped out by them.

We can potentially entirely skip part of that as artificial womb technology improves inthe decades to come and since DNA does freeze pretty well and can be stored digitally wecan afford to be patient about the actual resurrection itself, even if we probably wantto move with great haste in acquiring the samples.

That Passenger Pigeon DNA ain’t getting any fresher after all.

That raises an ethical concern that’s arguably a bit fallacious but at the same time is not,that is if folks think we can resurrect anything we wipe out then we might damage our currentpreservation efforts.

You don’t need to protect the panda because you can just clone them again down the road.

Obviously that has nothing to do with the ethics of the technology itself but it isa legitimate concern.

Similarly, early attempts especially might result in a ton of failures for every success,but that’s less an ethical concern with the technology than early efforts to masterit.

We’ve also got the concern that if you’ve got ressurected dinosaurs or wooly mammothsor dodos, people will want to eat them, indeed that might be one source of funding, peoplewho want to have a dino-burger or mammoth steak.

However, that’s the same ethical concern as with any other livestock and this kindof technology is going to run hand-in-hand with being able to grow meat in a lab thatmatches natural stuff and is maybe cheaper too, so I don’t think it’s too valid.

I could be biased on that though, I might have been raised by a vegetarian but I’mnot one myself and a dino-burger sounds tempting, but I’d still rather eat a lab-grown burgerthan one off a living animal, all things being equal, if it was an option.

The zoo is almost attainable with our current technology.

It does have its ethical problems and technological problems, though.

We cannot easily separate the ethical issues from the practical ones.

The primary ones of major concern are loss of natural habitat, loss of coexistent species,loss of biodiversity, loss of the original DNA so that the critters can survive in ourworld, and behavioural issues.

We have already spoken about the fact that for an extinct critter to survive in our modernworld, it will have to be modernized.

That modernization, though, means that the original species is lost and what is createdis a shadow of its former self.

We want to avoid these shadows, if possible.

To do so, we must also recreate all of the critter’s original environment, includingthe microbiological one.

Recreating critters costs a lot of time, effort and money.

The trouble is that such a species will not be genetically diverse and to introduce biodiversityinto a population will result in a lot of dead-end individuals of that species, leadingto suffering of the dead-end organisms.

Despite this, for a species to survive, it will be necessary to develop biodiversity.

Again, how can we do this in an ethical way?

Almost all pack or herd critters have a social order taught to them by associating with othercritters of their species.

Many of the extinct species were herd or pack animals and we can only guess as to what theirsocial behaviours were.

Even today, orphaned elephants that grow up without a matriarchal elephant to guide andcontrol them turn into the elephant equivalent of dysfunctional gangsters and have troublemating and raising new young.

To solve these problems, we are now going to have to move away from the zoo and adopta more futuristic approach.

We speak a lot about simulating our minds on this channel, but what about simulatingentire ecosystems?

In our future, we might be able to create a simulated ecosystem and this would allowus to create the necessary microbiological and other co-existent species.

Normally such details are below the threshold likely needed for a convincing environment,if you’re shooting a TV show in a library it doesn’t matter if the books on the shelvesare blank.

However in this case such details would allow us to fine-tune the environment and see whatwill survive and what will not, how various behavioural models actually work.

Given the necessary computational capability and storage, we can fine-tune the environmentof the extinct worlds of our past without any chance of damaging our own environmentor the environments of other critters we share our world with.

We can even go further than that and allow the virtual environments to develop and evolve,eventually hopefully producing a sentient species that we can relate to as well.

Given the sheer scale of computational power available to certain supercomputers like theMatrioshka Brain we’ve discussed before, simulating whole biospheres all the way downto the cellular level, even many multitudes of them, would barely register as a minorprocess to such computational leviathans.

And that, of course, is without even considering quantum computing, and running through billionsof theoretical mutations or ecosystems to see which are likely to end in something wehave nowadays and thus to let us backtrack to the most likely origins, might be justthe kind of process quantum computing is ideal for.

Of course simulating an environment is one thing, but if we really want to allow extinctspecies to be part of our world, we will also want them to move outside of the simulationand back into the real world.

Once the digital ecosystem is stable and we have the necessary biodiversity and a stablesocial order, we would render the digital system and re-create every detail of the digitalecosystem in reality.

Space, of course, is an issue and channel regulars have probably already guessed whereI’m going to suggest we put them, and that’s space itself.

We often talk about creating new environments for humanity, be it arcologies down here onEarth or rotating habitats in space, so that we can restore Earth to a more pristine state.

This might be the backwards approach, especially for extinct species, though.

You don’t move humans off Earth to give Earth back to our cousins and you don’tdisplace existing ecosystems to put back extinct ones.

You build new places for them instead.

And while a closed ecosystem needs to be pretty big, it is worth noting that the homelandof the now extinct Dodo, Mauritius, is only 2000 square kilometers, which is fairly parallelto the size of an O’Neill Cylinder Space Habitat and a good deal smaller than the McKendreeones we could make if we ever master mass production of graphene.

Such places don’t have to be 100% closed either, just so long as they are self-enclosedenough that you don’t need to bring much in.

Assume for the moment that we wanted to replicate every major phase of Earth in the last halfbillion years since the Cambrian Explosion, which is almost certainly impossible withouta time machine but represents our most extreme case.

And assume that we needed an entire planet worth of living area for each phase and saidwe needed those phases no more than 50,000 years apart.

That is probably massive overkill by at least a couple orders of magnitude but it wouldmean you would need a whopping 10,000 snapshots of Earth, one every 50,000 years for 500 millionyears, and a planet for each.

And again that’s extreme overkill.

10,000 planets sounds like a lot but there’ almost certainly a billion decently Earth-likeplanets in the galaxy that could be terraformed to match Earth sufficient for them – afterall Earth has changed a lot in temperature and climate over that time too, and more over,the Dyson Swarms we so often discuss here can give you over a billion Earth’s worthof living area just around our own sun.

10,000 planets worth of area is not quite 1% of 1% of either of those, terraformableplanets or a Dyson Swarm, whereas the protected areas of the United States come in around14% at the moment, proportionally a thousand times as much and more.

So it’s a very tiny portion of the area future civilizations would have, more likea single zoo in an entire country than tons of space given over to nature preserves, andthat was our extreme overkill case.

Having entire habitats just given over to extinct ecosystems is certainly on the tablethen, and presumably would help fund ones that were totally locked off from visitors,just scientists and caretakers who ensured the habitat was safe.

More realistically and in the more near term too, you could create thousands of such cylinderhabitat nature preserves just in orbit around Earth with many thousands more just givenover to people and our preferred pets and parasites without even making a dent in Earth’sorbital space.

For my part, while I certainly don’t want to see Earth turned into some paved over dystopiannightmare, this does seem like the better path to preserving ecosystems, and even betterfor restoring extinct ones.

Needless to say it’s an expensive pathway that’s really only available to civilizationsthat can build such habitats cheaply, but we’ve devoted whole episodes to establishingthat we probably will be able to do just that down the road.

And fortunately this is something we can approach with some patience, at least so long as wecan acquire and preserve that genetic data.

But I think it is doable and I think we will do it too, amusingly exactly because it doesrequire tons of manpower and resources.

One of our upcoming topics is going to be jobs of the future and a second look at post-scarcitycivilizations and the problems these debatable utopias have, and a big chunk of that is whatpeople do when robots are doing most of the work.

Even if you don’t need a job to pay the bills and put food on the table, you probablydo need one to keep your sanity intact.

For that matter, civilizations need folks to have some interdependence on each otherto stay together or they might die off, something we’ll be examining this spring too, andprojects like these offer a potential common purpose and goal when survival is no longeran issue and luxurious comfort might be universal.

If you’ve got billions of people twiddling their thumbs in idle luxury, lacking somethingto do and many wanting something to do, something that truly matters that they can feel goodabout, creating and maintaining millions of habitats to pay penance for our civilization’sprior acts of genocide is probably a pretty good pick.

You can do a lot worse than being able to look in the mirror every morning and see acreator, guardian, and protector of previously extinct cute cuddly critters.

So such places might get made even if they aren’t a tourist-funded location becausevirtual reality turns out to be a cheaper and better alternative in that regard.

Easier and safer to go riding around on dinosaurs in Virtual Reality after all.

That’s pretty far ahead of course and I suspect we’ll be doing de-extinction ofsome more recently deceased critters sooner than that, and probably on artificial islandsin the sea or in desert or tundras, like in Jurassic Park, which again is our book ofthe month, sponsored by Audible.

Michael Crichton has written a lot of books and probably had more of them turned intofilms or TV shows than anyone else, the most recent being the Westworld TV show based onthe earlier film he wrote and directed, which is also set in a park where people visit,though that place seems too big for an island and I half-expect it to turn out to be seton a space station as a twist.

Crichton is big on those, and I always enjoy his novels for having characters who seemto think things through in a bit more detail, they don’t skip over simple solutions ortake forever to figure out things that are obvious to the audience and should be to theexperts portrayed.

That is something many of the film or TV adaptations do and that books don’t, and why they areworth reading or listening to.

The novels are often much better than the films adapted from them, and Jurassic Parkwas a great film.

You can pickup a FREE copy today, just use my link in this episode’s description, Audible.com/Isaac

or text isaac to 500-500 to get a free book and 30 day free trial, and that book is yoursto keep whether you stay on with Audible or not.

Jurassic Park is a great book, but if you don’t like it, you can swap it out for anotherat any time.

Audiobooks are great for helping you be a better you - whether you want to expand yourmind, feel healthier or get motivated.

So with this new year, I encourage you to check out Audible and learn something new.

Next week we will be joining Paul Shillito of Curious Droid for a two part special onMissions to Mars, looking first at the history of missions planned then moving on to thosewhich have been proposed more recently and their various strengths and weaknesses.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Evacuating Earth | | 2018-01-11 | | https://youtu.be/lW89tggdf6I | +--------------------------------+

So a giant asteroid is heading toward Earth and you need to clear everybody out,can you do it?

Today we are going to consider ways in which you might evacuate a planet, and we mightas well begin with four notes.

First, how you do it depends entirely on how much time and technology you have.

Second, it’s not just about getting folks off a planet, you need some place to takethem.

Third, it’s not just about evacuating folks, Earth is more than just people.

And fourth, you also need to ask whether or not you should.

I don’t mean whether or not you should just abandon a planet and its people to die, butrather that in almost every case where you might want to evacuate a planet, you can moreeasily prevent or mitigate whatever disaster would have caused the need to leave.

Alternatively you might not have time to evacuate between when you find out about the dangerand when it hits.

As an example, a star might go supernova.

There are no supernova candidates close enough to earth to wipe out all life, but if therewere, you’d only know it had gone supernova for an instant before the killing effectsappeared.

What alerts you to this event is what kills you, no warning.

Only if you had faster than light travel could you detect a supernova and warn people intime, and if you had years to prepare for the incoming event, you could arrange to puta shield between you and it.

Some giant gas balloon to absorb it, a heck of a task but nowhere near as hard as evacuatinga full planet’s population and ecosystem.

Similarly, the Earth doesn’t get hit by big asteroids very frequently, like the onethat ended the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The bigger they are the less frequently they come, and there’s a roughly inverse relationshipbetween size and frequency.

It takes a very big one to do enough damage you’d want to evacuate in advance, but ifyou can evacuate that means you’ve got spaceships and you could just drop a big nuke on theasteroid, blowing it up or nudging it onto a new and safe trajectory.

Even if you have to use several high-yield devices and want to send multiple ships forredundancy, that’s still way easier than moving billions of people on those same spaceships.

That’s all assuming you’ve got some place to move them to.

Though the good news is that if you have the ability to have made some other place livablefor humans you do have the potential ability to move them there.

Even if we had a billion rockets to launch everyone into space right now, without someplace to send them that launch is rather pointless.

That raises the triage issue because we often look at making some bunker to move peopleinto during such a disaster, and doing that here on Earth, but we could potentially movesome folks to a hastily built moonbase instead.

How you pick those allegedly lucky people is something that’s very popular to lookat in fiction and we’ll consider it today too, and draw different conclusions I suspect.

For my part I’m not quite sure why everyone always figures you’d want to make sure yougot your scientists off planet or into the bunker, that’s always struck me as missinga key point but we’ll get to that in a bit.

In such triage disaster stories, which are older than history, you have to remember youare not just needing to save humans.

Noah had to bring along 2 of every animal, and we have quite a few parallel tales outof antiquity.

That’s a little more daunting of a task viewed in the light of how many species ofanimals, and plants, we know of nowadays, especially since outside of a flood you needto bring along the oceanic critters too, but amusingly this is actually easier for us inmodern times, since you could potentially carry all that in one briefcase, more on thatin a bit too.

Returning to our fourth point, about whether or not evacuation is the best path, we’dneed to know what the scenario is.

The best known being the Supernova and the Asteroid but there are plenty more.

Most of them do actually have this same problem though, where evacuation is either not thebest approach because you can prevent the disaster more easily or just can’t knowabout it in time to act.

For example, in an alien invasion scenario, building warships might be more effectivethan building refugee ships, even though they’d probably get wrecked by an invader, becausethe problem with evacuating against an intelligent rather than natural disaster is that whenthey’re done obliterating your planet they can pursue the survivors.

As a rule, asteroids don’t get back up to chase fleeing ships.

It’s an amusing aspect about the difficulties of hiding things in space that the most covertway to send ships out is to send them in the general direction of the oncoming enemy, sinceyou can at least point the engine away from them, since that’s the easiest part to detectand use to determine their vector.

If you send a bunch of scouts out that double as colony ships, spread over a wide angle,the ones that do get intercepted at least give you intelligence on who is approachingfrom what angle and how many of them there are.

Also, unlike our intuition from down on the ground, it’s actually way harder to chasesomeone fleeing generally toward you than away from you since you have to stop and turnaround, which takes huge amounts of time and energy, whereas someone fleeing away fromyou only requires you to tell part of your fleet not to slow down and to alter theirheading a bit.

Space combat is often rather counter-intuitive, as we saw in the Space Warfare episode, andinterstellar conflicts more so, as we’ll see in the Interstellar Warfare episode nextmonth.

Another popular one is that a black hole hits the planet or get made in a lab and startseating it.

If an actual stellar mass black hole comes coasting into our system, and they often do,since they frequently get ejected at high speed from where they were made, there’snot much you can do but evacuate.

That’s insanely improbable, space is huge and black holes are very uncommon, and theodds of one entering our solar system on a direct path for Earth is ridiculously slim,but they don’t have to hit us to wreck the solar system or to chuck Earth right out ofthe solar system.

We’ll save that case as an actual example of an evacuation, since moving your entireplanet through interstellar space if your star is getting ready to die is one approachyou can use.

The one made in a lab though is not really a case for concern.

You could hypothetically make a black hole in a lab, the most frequent method proposedis a Kugelblitz black hole, something we’ve discussed a lot as a possible type of powerplantor spaceship engine.

Those who remember that discussion know that small black holes don’t live long, and areso tiny it’s nigh impossible to stuff matter into them, exactly backwards of the usualperception of them chewing everything up.

Most behavior of black holes is strictly theoretical, but if the current preferred theories areright, a lab-grown black hole would just oscillate through the planet, so small it cheerfullyflew through dense rock without hitting anything, until it died.

Even a decently big one, massing in around a mountain, that someone maybe made in anothersystem and shot at us, would just fly right through the planet, as it’s only as bigas an atomic nuclei but still carrying all that mass and inertia.

It would kill you if hit you, that’s a lot of gravity compacted into a tiny spot, butit would just fly through the planet and continue on its journey,You need a rather massive one without much speed relative to the planet for it to beable to get stuck down in the core and start chewing on things, and I don’t think weactually have to worry about scientists accidentally crunching an entire moon into a black holeon Earth’s surface.

Moons are terribly hard to get into a laboratory.

Depending on the size of the black hole, if you just teleported one in there, you couldeither all be killed 20 milliseconds later when its gravity, which travels at lightspeed,reaches the surface of the planet and shreds everyone from tidal forces, or it could sitthere for millions of year slowly chewing up matter.

There are very compact and small artificial ones, as mentioned, that are actually quitehard to stuff matter into faster than they spew hawking radiation out, which at justthe right size would create an equal outward pressure causing nothing to happen.

That is an example of when you might have a doomed planet you can do nothing about buthave plenty of time to prepare for, even if it is absurdly improbable.

And that’s a key point, because again in most of these scenarios if you’ve got timeto evacuate and the capacity to do so, you typically have the ability to prevent or otherwiseremedy the disaster you are facing.

Someone lets loose a virus or organism that is killing off your ecosystem so you needto find a new planet and terraform it, sounds good but it’s a lot easier to dome overand sterilize some places to be safe from it.

At which point you can sterilize your planet and re-terraform it rather than do that foranother planet.

And if you can’t isolate the organism to prevent it getting into your domes, I’mnot quite sure how’d you isolate it from getting into your spaceships and terraformingequipment and just infecting that new planet.

Now the episode is about evacuating the planet, any planet not just Earth, though that’sour main focus, and I wouldn’t consider it much of an evacuation if you’re onlygetting off a tiny seed to plant elsewhere.

If a hurricane hits some city, we don’t evacuate it by grabbing one busload of breedingage residents.

Still, let’s discuss that scenario and triage.

You’ve got a bunker that will survive the impact or a spaceship that can carry off somefolks to a moonbase or space station.

Fair enough and it’s better than nothing, but for some reason folks always want to fillthese with ‘our best and brightest’.

Which makes sense but the criteria seems a bit weird if it’s including Nobel-prizewinning theoretical scientists, which for some reason seems to be the folks nobody arguesabout.

Maybe because it’s science fiction so folks just figure the science is important.

Refugees don’t need theoreticians, you won’t be getting any new science done for many generationsand they’ll need to relearn it from books anyway, which take up a lot less resourcesand space, especially digitized.

You also probably don’t need to keep such projects secret, I’m sure you would geta fair number of folks turned nihilistic and causing problems but I don’t think it wouldbe as bad as we often see in films about such impending disasters.

Anyway even despotic governments tend to leak secrets like a sieve and your typical democracyis so bad at keeping things like that quiet I’d be impressed if they managed to keepit hushed for more than a few days.

So you might as well take advantage of the options presented by an informed public tobuild bigger and better ships or bunkers because it’s not like you’d have a choice.

Any form of evacuation or bunkering up is going to involve a lot of hard choices ofcourse, it is fundamentally a type of triage.

You have to figure out what you can do before deciding what you can include.

Ideally you want a nice fortified and well-stocked fallout shelter in your basement, completewith copies of important reference texts, but if you’ve got an hour to prepare fora nuclear war, building bookshelves down in your basement isn’t a good use of time.

How do you pick people?

Lotteries are a popular option but have always struck me as a bit cowardly, just a way toalleviate guilt at having to come up with a selection method and apply it, so you cantell people who don’t get into the bunker “Fate screwed you, not me”.

One modern advantage we do have though is that we don’t have to select people fortheir genetics or romantic preference because we don’t have to rely on traditional meansof repopulation.

By default, under that, you want as a big and healthy a genetic pool as you can andpreferably with most kids having half rather than full-blooded siblings.

We can artificially inseminate women or even implant fertilized embryos of folks who aren’tgoing into the bunker.

So you are probably more interested in parenting skills of a person than if they’ve got goodgenes.

Romantic preferences or genetic defects cease being a vital consideration.

You still have plenty of others, and expertise in a given field is never going to be thesole criteria.

You want to know what other skills they have, their age matters too, what if they are married,are you looking at their spouse’s skills as they are essentially a package, what abouttheir kids?

You have to include families, not just because you need them but because the end of the worldis going to be rough on anyone’s mind - unless they’re a sociopath maybe but I don’tthink you want to repopulate off a bunker full of sociopaths - and making someone facedoomsday with their spouse or children left outside is likely to result in folks so consumedby grief they can't function.

It’s not a choice I’d ever want to make, so I don’t know what criteria I’d designif it were up to me, but feel free to discuss in the comments section below.

I’d be curious what folks come up with.

Of course it also depends on how long you need to bunker up and what you’re bunkeringup against.

If you’ve got to last a century your profile looks a lot different then if it's just afew years, you’re not selecting in the former for parenting skills because you aren’trepopulating off those initial people, just maintaining, it will be their great-grandchildrendoing the repopulating.

We’re not stocking a bunker on Earth of course, but one built here is going to bea good place to ride out any disaster that doesn’t kill the whole planet, easier torebuild out of bunkers here than on the Moons or Mars, even ignoring that building and stockingthose bunkers here is much easier.

So there’s a lot of levels to evacuation and what you can do relies as much on yourtechnology and preparation times as what the specific threat is.

To answer the obvious question though, yes we could get enough people off Earth to theMoon with modern technology in a fashion that would probably let them survive.

Saving our records and even our ecology is ironically now the easiest part of that endeavor,it’s not Noah’s cargo that you need a big ship to preserve nowadays, it’s enoughequipment to support Noah’s family to preserve some working intelligence to revive stufflater on.

We can actually store DNA digitally and print the stuff these days, and frozen embryos don’ttake up much room, nor is that hard to keep them frozen on the moon.

So even if a species does go extinct in such a disaster, you have a chance to bring itback, if you have the DNA, sort of like in Jurassic Park, which is our Audible Book ofthe Month.

We’ll be examining how you go about resurrecting species, even if you don’t have their completeDNA, in two weeks, along with examining some of the concepts from that novel.

Needless to say, digital copies of all our history, art, and literature, even includingmany redundant backups and a lot of material that probably isn’t vital to humanity’scontinuance, won’t take up much space.

Fundamentally the challenge there is making sure you have a self-sustaining colony orbase, everything else is the same as setting up a normal off-world colony except there’sno one to call on from home for help with problems or resupply or rescue.

All the stuff you need to revive humanity, our civilization, and Earth’s ecosystemthough is pretty easy to pack along.

It would be a heck of challenge to set up a Moon or Mars base and one big enough tobe self-sustaining, but if it is priority #1 for the entire planet, or even just onelarge nation, it’s probably doable even amid the chaos and economic collapses you’dexpect to be going on.

Remember NASA’s budget runs about one-thousandth of the US GDP, and we rarely bulk producethe stuff it needs and try to gold-plate everything.

In a scenario like this you aren’t building one or two of something, you’re millingout thousands of them, and you don’t care if 1 in 10 explodes on the pad if it letsyou produce twice as many with the same efforts.

I would not want to place a wager on their success with such a venture, trying to geta Moonbase for hundreds of people ready in maybe a couple years, designed so that theycould support themselves and repair and expand it too, but I wouldn’t call it hopelessodds either, and it’s not like you have anything to lose by trying.

As technology improves this gets easier and you can get more ambitious too, but I wouldsay this is the last century where humanity faces any risk of extinction by a non-intelligentagency.

We’ve only just gotten into the game, so our current hand happens to be rather poor,but we are at least in the game nowadays, we’d have a chance of salvaging our civilizationeven if the planet was going to be destroyed, if we had some forewarning.

Jump ahead in time maybe even just a few decades and extinction from any sort of natural disastershould be off the table.

As I said though, an evacuation is not the same as evading extinction.

The goal of an evacuation is to get at least a large percentage of your people out of anyarea safely, and preferably all of them and their stuff too.

So what would it take to achieve that?

What technologies would we need to evacuate every single person, or nearly so, along witha lot of our most prized trinkets and living rather than frozen samples of our ecology?

Now if your civilization is big enough, like if you lived inside a Dyson swarm, evacuationis easy enough, such a civilization wouldn’t notice or be hampered by several billion refugeesanymore than the a major modern nation would be by a single person.

They’ve got billions of ships lying around, actually they probably build that many everyday, and their challenges aren’t getting people off and housed, but how to cram thepyramids into a bulk cargo lifter and which habitats are offering to store them.

At that scale you aren’t trying to rescue the people, you’re trying to figure outhow to peel chunks of the planet’s crust off and stick them in some ring habitat withoutwrecking them in the process by keeping the gravity pointing in about the right directionand strength.

I’ll come back to that in a bit.

Also if you are surprised I’m suggesting wholesale transport of entire strips of theplanet’s surface, welcome to SFIA, since this is obviously your first visit here.

We don’t really know the meaning of over the top.

As is often the case though the hidden problem here is actually heat.

If you want to get everybody off a planet in, say, a month, that would mean transportinga couple hundred million people a day, not even including any other cargo.

You might have a near endless supply of spaceships, most of which are probably not designed forlanding on planets either, but the sheer heat of all those things undergoing re-entry andthen blowing out millions of tons of superhot propellant to get back to orbit might killeveryone from the sheer heat they give off.

To avoid that, and the problem that most of those ships probably aren’t meant for landingon planets or leaving them, you need to be employing one of the options we looked atin the Upward Bound series last year, Space Elevators or Skyhook and mass driver combinations,or preferably Orbital rings.

The good news is anybody with an existing fleet big enough to move a planetary populationprobably has those already.

Now, you don’t necessarily need a huge ship either, again it bears a lot of similaritiesto the concepts and technologies you need for normal space colonization.

Humans have a volume of considerably less than a cubic meter, our density is just abit less than water and water is 1 kilogram per liter or 1000 kilograms per cubic meter.

So you could potentially pack a dozen or more people into a cubic meter, at least if you’vegot a chainsaw on hand.

But if we had the technology to freeze people, or rather to unfreeze and revive them, youcould presumably put people into pods of about that volume, a couple meters long but nota meter wide and tall, in fact your typical casket is about a cubic meter.

So you’d need a ship that could store 7.6 billion people at the moment, and at cubicmeter each that is a cube just under 2 kilometers on a side or 1.2 miles, and massing at least

8 billion tons.

Which is huge and massive but actually a bit smaller and lighter than the colonial arkshipUnity we discussed in the various interstellar travel and colonization episodes.

It’s also on size and mass range with a lot of habitats we discuss building in otherepisodes, and I mean modest ones like O’Neill cylinders not the actual megastructures likeBishops Rings, Banks Orbitals, or Mega Earths.

So when your civilization is at the point that it can build stuff like an O’neillcylinder it is at the stage where it can evacuate the whole planetary population, if you stickpeople into cryo or some other stasis.

You wouldn’t have to build much bigger to include everyone’s pets and most pricelessheirlooms, and the ecosystem preservation is easier.

There may be a million species but only a small percent of that are large creatures,you don’t need a lot of space for a sack of redwood seeds or frozen ants or bacteria.

For most of the larger critters you do need parents even if you’ve got artificial wombsto gestate embryos in, but not a lot.

You don’t need a thousand frozen elephants, just frozen embryos to implant in a few, there’sno genetic bottlenecking if the mother isn’t related to the infants she’s bearing andraising nor they to each other.

Of course carting a blue whale into orbit is likely to be an interesting exercise butby mass and volume they are only the equivalent of a couple thousands humans and you needstorage for 7 billion.

Needless to say you don’t freeze everyone, the unfrozen, as many as you can support,are going to be busy building up support structure and habitats so we can start unfreezing peopleand organisms, the former of whom will go right to work building more structure andhabitats.

By the way, if you’re curious, the total biomass of Earth is somewhere in the trillionsof tons region, nobody’s got a terribly good estimate on the actual wet weight ofall total life forms but it should be on an order of about 1000 times what humanity is,so if you wanted to rescue every organism, not just the species, your big frozen corpsecube needs to be about ten times wider.

If the mega-freezer seems too big you can also just decapitate everyone, we normallyonly freeze the heads these days, and generally speaking the tech needed to revive peopleis pretty much the same needed to regrow bodies anyway.

This is the first state at which I’d say you could rescue all the people on Earth,and it does require a pretty bulky orbital ring to pull it off fast, and obviously thetechnology to revive people from cryo, but I would guess on both being on the table beforethis century is out, the latter is actually harder, but you technically only need thetechnology to safely freeze those folks, and that would be an example where you’d wantyour scientists in that field to be among the best and brightest you saved, or in thiscase, did not turn into a popsicle.

You can’t store people indefinitely in cryo, though we don’t know for how long yet andit would depend on your technology, so building places to put them and feed them when yourevive them and making sure you have the tech to do so is obviously your focus after that.

Another possible route is to abandon biology altogether, as we discussed in the HiddenAliens episode, if you have managed to figure out how to scan and upload minds to live digitally,storage of those minds is actually not a big issue.

As we discussed with mind backups in Digital Death some months back, we don’t know quitehow much memory is needed to store a brain, but the lower end values make it in the affordablezone with modern tech, and even the high-end estimates were viable.

I discourage folks from assuming computers and all their associated components will justkeep getting better at an exponential rate but I’d feel pretty comfortable assumingin a few decades we could do at least an order of magnitude or two better and that oughtto be more than enough to cram everybody’s brain on a hard drive a lot more compact thana frozen body, or even a head.

That’s assuming commercial hard drives, we can store data a lot more compact thanthat already, but for this kind of operation cheap bulk production is the important part.

Those are the early, cheap and dirty ways to evacuate a planet, and again I’d be rathersurprised if that was outside our ability going into the 22nd century, there are quitea few other options if one or more of those techs turns out to be way harder than we think,but that strikes me as the most plausible route.

Going further into the future, if you want to avoid digital uploading, the key thingis having places to put people that can support them that already exist and can rapidly expandtheir hydroponics and air and water recycling.

Keep going further ahead and people probably will be talking not about evacuating the peoplefrom the planet but the planet from the planet.

It’s an insane exercise in energy expenditure to try lifting up a few square kilometersof forest along with the dirt the roots are in.

You’d need to dome over and under and on the sides like a big terrarium then lift thatthat thing into orbit, probably on huge super strong tethers between orbital rings sincethe heat released by whatever megarockets you were using would roast everything nearby,yet the actual big trick is maintaining gravity in that area.

As you lift it up into space, though not into orbit, gravity will drop a little from thealtitude, but it would cease entirely if you were orbiting of course.

Then you need to take those tethers and swing the chunk of landscape in a circle to providecentrifugal spin, which the tethers can handle since it’s the exact same force gravitywas previously exerting on them.

Trying to do that while keeping apparent gravity at about the same strength and direction isprobably not going to work too well but you ought to be able to do it without everythingfalling over or flying sideways.

I’d say it’s more trouble than it’s worth but if your civilization is actuallydoing this in the first place you’ve probably got very different relative values, and wehave gone to some pretty extreme lengths to move large bulky human relics around safely.

Obviously a lot easier if you’ve got access to something like artificial gravity but asusual I’m trying to limit us to options inside known science, or at least not bannedby it, even if that means rather extreme things in terms of size and manpower.

Of course you might decide you just want to move the whole planet, and that is doable.

We’ve discussed some of the techniques before and will probably do an episode on movingplanets in the future, but the big one is that same acceleration and gravity issue onceyou start applying thrust.

Lighting the planet so it doesn’t freeze if you need to move far from the Sun, potentiallythrough interstellar space, is actually not a big concern in terms of equipment or energycompared to what’s needed to get the planet moving.

The issue is that a planet, especially the biosphere, isn’t really well suited forrapid acceleration, which as Einstein told us is effectively the same as gravity.

Move some people on a platform at maybe a tenth of gee and they’ll notice it but befine, move an ocean like that and walls of water are going to hit your coasts and staythere till you stop.

This is what causes our tides after all.

Now the force exerted by the moon on the earth is probably reasonably safe to use and maybea bit higher, so I will say 10 microgees or .1 millimeter per second per second.

Doesn’t sound like much, and it really isn’t, it would take 3 hours to get up walking speedand a thousand years of continuous acceleration to get up to 10% of light speed, probablyabout as fast as you’d ever want to move a planet even if you wrapped it around inshielding and point defenses systems to deal with cosmic radiation and collisions.

The amount of energy needed to move the planet is vastly larger than what you need to lightit if you could no longer use the Sun, unless you are going a lot slower, making the tripto a new solar system take a million years rather than a few thousand.

You’d probably push it up to speed with lasers powered by the sun and down with laserssome colony fleet had built at the destination, with some very shiny mirror sphere aroundthe planet, but alternatively you could build a thick walled sphere around the planet tofill with fusion fuel and provide shielding.

Hollow spheres exert no net gravity on things inside them so it can be as massive as youneed without bothering Earth, though you would need to use a lot of active support to keepthat sphere a sphere and transmit that pushing force around evenly.

But that’s your final option if you want to evacuate the whole planet in a very literalsense, just pack up and move to another solar system.

Everything we discussed today is pretty extreme, even if the degree of difficulty between theoptions is immense, mountains next to mole hills, but is inside the realms of known science,obviously other technologies might make it much easier, but we can see that as immenseas the task is, it is actually doable, you can evacuate Earth if you need to.

Next week we will be looking at various cosmological theories for the Fate of the Universe, fromHeat Death to the Big Rip or Big Crunch and many others.

As it’s a longer topic we will be doing a two parter and will be joined by AstrophysicistPaul Sutter, with part two over on his channel immediately following part one.

The week after that we will explore the notion of resurrecting dead species and some novelapproaches to ecological preservation.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

And if you enjoyed this episode, please hit the like button and share it with others.

You can also support our content over on Patreon.

Until next time, thanks for watching and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | The Compendium of Doom, Part 1 | | 2018-01-18 | | https://youtu.be/rpA-Bd0d6kw | +--------------------------------+

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universeis for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something evenmore bizarre and inexplicableSo today we will be looking at a number of the models predicting the eventual fate ofthe Universe.

As you can imagine this is fairly complex topic so we will be joined today Dr. Paul

M. Sutter, an Astrophysicist with Ohio State University.

It is also quite a long topic so this will be a two part episode, and you can watch part2 over on Paul’s channel, which also an excellent place to visit to learn more aboutcosmology in general.

To discuss the End of the Universe we might as well start with the beginning, both whereit came from and how human thought on this matter has evolved as we learned more.

The Big Bang theory was proposed almost a century ago and has solidified its statussince then, but people have been thinking about the origin of the Universe for at leastas long as we have had recorded history.

They obviously didn’t have the same resources we have nowadays but typically drew threebasic conclusions that remained popular up to modern times.

Since the world around them could be seen to change on a daily basis, but not necessarilyall that much or significantly, they tended to conclude either the Universe at one pointdid not exist, or it has always existed and changes are cyclical, like the sunrise orturning of seasons, or that at the grand scale it pretty much doesn’t change at all.

Which is to say, snow may fall or melt on a mountain, trees might grow on it and die,but the mountain is unchanged and so is the world it sits on.

It’s easy for us to look back to antiquity and how little they knew about science anddismiss their thoughts on this topic, but it still lays out the conversation we’vehad in more modern times and are still discussing.

If the Universe began, then how did that happen, who acted or what occurred to make that happen,and what came before?

If there was something before, was it like now and are we just repeating things in anendless cycle like the seasons?

And if it has always been around, how is it getting renewed?

Because you can look at a forest on a mountain changing and say it changes but the mountaindoes not, but eventually you’ll notice that mountains get eroded.

Rain comes down and washes dirt away, and while you can see water evaporate and riseinto clouds, you can also see rocks tumble down a mountain but never float back up.

Talking about how things began inevitably leads to asking how they will end.

Will everything just keep being renewed constantly or reset in some cycles or just wear downone day?

Needless to say folks had a lot of notions for how things would begin and end, and theydid tend to fit into one of those three options even if the specific theory was that Earthwas a disc riding around on the back of turtle shell or elephants.

With the emergence of formal logic and philosophy we got quite a few appearing.

Aristotle suggested that the Universe was finite in size, centered on Earth, but infinitein time.

This geocentric model would later be refined by Ptolemy and stick around till Copernicus,though even in Aristotle’s time a heliocentric model had emerged from Aristarchus, and interestinglyArchimedes had calculated the Universe to be a light year in radius.

It is of course far larger than that, but it’s worth remembering how shockingly hugethat is.

Archimedes had no idea what speed light traveled at, but he knew how big that distance he’dcalculated was and it meant he thought the Universe was a billion times wider than theplanet and contained a billion, billion, billion times the volume.

We now know it’s at least several billion times wider than even that but it meant eventhen they’d come to realize just how tiny Earth was, even if they gave it center stage.

This doesn’t get covered much but it should be, as Archimedes calculation of this in hispaper “The Sand Reckoner” is considered to be the first research-expository paper,and actually used Aristarchus heliocentric model.

We knew the Sun moved in the sky, as did the planets, that’s the origin of their nameas planet means wanderer.

We also had discovered the concept of parallax by then and the stars didn’t seem to experienceit.

Indeed it would be 2000 years before Friedrich Bessel first successfully measured the parallaxof a star in 1838.

Archimedes, Aristotle, Ptolemy and Aristarchus were all wrong of course, but Copernicus wasn’tactually right, and indeed since we can see equally far in all directions, the ObservableUniverse is actually centered on Earth and geocentric...but that’s a fairly irrelevant

status.

Every observer is centered in their observable bubble.

We don’t want to get in the habit of thinking though that Copernicus was smart and rightand arguing that his predecessors and opponents were stupid and wrong, rather they were quitesmart too and Copernicus was just less wrong.

As we go through these theories, which each radically alter how we viewed the Universeas we got some new piece of evidence, only to be replaced sometime later as we got newEvidence, we do not want to view the advocates of the previous theories as drooling moronsarguing against the clear illuminating light of reason and evidence.

So prior to Copernicus the main theory was the Universe was infinite in age, or if nothad been created at some point more or less as it was now and would continue on as itwas, but also finite if huge in size (although nowhere as big as we currently understandit).

Over the next century his modified form of this started catching on but took a hit whenNewton’s Law of Universal Gravity both cemented the heliocentric model - providing a mechanismto explain the motion of the planets - but also kind of killed it.

If every body in the universe exerts gravity on each other, then they ought to fall togetherover time, and needless to say if the Universe was infinitely old there’s been more thantime enough for that.

So from Newton’s work we were faced with four possible solutions.

First, the Universe is not infinitely old and appeared at some point all spread outand is falling in.

This gives us a potential Fate of the Universe, backwards of the Big Bang, that it began hugeand will end when everything eventually slams together.

Second, that gravity is not an entirely inverse-square force, but gets even weaker at great distances,so that we are not pulling on those stars.

Indeed this option has remained a common theory until modern times and we see it in somethingcalled MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, one of the popular explanations for Dark Matteruntil very recently.

If gravity basically just ceases at some distance, then you don’t have to worry about starsfalling together.

Third, that something is holding those stars from falling together, resisting gravity.

Akin to the old notion of angels holding them on a celestial sphere, this was never toopopular, and amusingly the discovery of Dark Energy pushing the Universe apart makes thisthe only one of the four interpretations to still have some validity nowadays.

And fourth, that the Universe is infinite in both age and size, or at least size.

16th century mathematician and astronomer Thomas Digges first suggested this one, thatthe stars were not at a fixed distance on a shell but spread out over varying distancesall the way out to infinity, what is now called the Static Universe Model.

He also first noted the Dark Night Sky Paradox, later known as Olber’s Paradox even thoughOlber wouldn't be born for a couple more centuries.

If everything is spread out over an infinite volume, then nothing is moving because there’salways more stuff in the opposite direction pulling it that way too.

This one gained a lot of traction and its main flaw was the aforementioned Olber’sParadox, which points out that in an infinite Universe any specific direction you look willeventually be obstructed by a star, so the night sky shouldn’t be black with a fewlights twinkling in it, but a uniform shade of light, we’d be surrounded by stars andfeel like we lived inside a massive sun.

Indeed, were that the case everybody should be burned to death, and if the Universe werenot infinitely old, as Roemer discovered light needed time to travel and its approximatespeed in 1676.

So we could predict the eventual doom of the Universe would be the sky getting brighterand brighter as ever more distant light arrived until we eventually burned to death.

Each of these perspectives had a lot going for and against it, in the 17th century andonto the 18th.

As we move into the 19th century though we had a few new developments.

We had begun to assume stars were not all fixed on some sphere and that Earth did orbitthe Sun, so we could use that movement to engage in some very wide parallax measurements.

As mentioned, Bessel managed to get the first measurement of distance to a star, 61 Cygni,in 1838 and two of his contemporaries, Struve and Henderson, managed to do the same forVega and Alpha Centauri at about the same time.

We managed to measure around a hundred more in short order but couldn’t for many others,we can see a lot more stars than that with the naked eye and had telescopes by now, sothis inability to measure them told us they were very far away.

We had another development in this period too, which was thermodynamics.

Energy is conserved but entropy is not.

We had no idea what made the stars hot yet, but we knew they were and should be coolingdown, and that if they weren’t they were presumably being fueled someway and that fuelshould be finite.

We already had a lot of philosophical arguments for why the Universe couldn’t be infinitein age, but we also had the same problems for why it couldn’t be finite either, butthermodynamics and the speed of light piled on to make this much harder.

If the Universe is infinite in size and age, then we should be cooked by Olber’s Paradox,and we would need to know what fueled the stars.

If the stars simply formed hot at some point in the past, then they would eventually cooloff and we’d freeze to death at the End of the Universe instead.

We were starting to get a decent idea how old the Earth was then too.

This is when we start getting the first formal scientific theories for the beginning andending of the Universe, as we had to wrangle with these new issues and an increasinglylarge map of the Universe.

Keep in mind at this point we had no idea what powered the stars, how old any of themwere or that they had different ages, or what galaxies were.

Everybody knew the problems with the Static Universe model, the one that reasoned theUniverse was infinite in size and age, but it was sort of the default because alternativeshad many problems too and none had any real evidence.

Indeed Einstein would offer up a modified form of the Static Universe model in 1917,a decade after he unveiled Special Relativity.

As mentioned many had thought the Universe might be finite in age but infinite in size,but he went the other way and said it was infinite in age but finite in size.

This is also when we start seeing folks talk about the universe having curvature or beingflat, no surprise since relativity had started the conversation on space and time being curved.

In a traditional Euclidean Universe, two long parallel lines stretching off to infinitywill remain the same distance, like a pair of railroads tracks.

For all that they look like they’re converging to our eyes, you can walk alongside them andsee them remain the exact same distance apart.

In a non-flat Universe this isn’t true, and they might grow closer together or furtherapart, even though they are 100% straight.

That’s not our focus yet and we didn’t know that the Universe was expanding yet either.

Now what was different that Einstein thought the Universe would be infinite in size butnot in time?

There was no Hubble red shift yet to indicate that after all.

This is, incidentally, related to what Einstein called his biggest blunder and that was thecosmological constant, a basic energy density or pressure to space, even in total vacuum.

As mentioned, if the Universe is finite in size then gravity should yank everything together,so if it is finite in size either gravity had to disappear after a certain distance,or the Universe couldn’t be that old and had to start big, or something was pushingthem apart.

We had gotten enough at astronomy by now to be able to see stars pulling on each otherwith gravity with no indication it was weakening more than Newton said it should, so that seemedout.

So if it was infinitely old something that had to be pushing those stars apart and thatwas the ridiculous cosmological constant, his fudge factor and blunder that he dismissedafter Hubble expansion was found a decade later.

We had to bring it back more recently, but will get to that later.

For Einstein’s version of the Static Universe to be true it need to explain a few things,but we only knew of one at the time he suggested it, and that was entropy.

Any model suggesting the Universe was infinitely old, had always been and would always be,has to explain why we still have stars and what’s replenishing their fuel.

Or if not replenishing them, what was producing the matter for new stars and what was happeningto the old, cold dead ones, which should otherwise accumulate to fill the whole Universe overinfinite time.

This is hardly a death blow though, since one can assume matter eventually resets, likeshuffling a deck of cards will keep further randomizing it, increasing its entropy, buteventually return you to the original state, resetting that entropy.

And possibly new matter just appeared from nowhere and old matter just slid into nowhereon a regular basis.

Sounds a bit silly but considering the alternative is that it all just appeared from nowhereat the same time, it’s essentially on the same footing.

It’s kind of hard to say tons of matter can appear from nowhere at one initial momentbut that it can’t do that later on nor the reverse and just disappear.

The other two flaws came later, one was intergalactic redshift, which came up shortly after thisand caused Einstein to abandon the model, and the other was Cosmic Microwave BackgroundRadiation, which was still about fifty years off.

Hubble didn’t discover red shift of stars, that had already been noted, some were redshifting,indicating they were moving away, and others were blue-shifting, indicating the reverse.

What got noticed is that very distant objects, galaxies, were almost all red-shifting andthat the further off they were, the more they were.

This of course was the origin of the Big Bang Theory, since if galaxies are all moving away,and faster the further off they were, that would imply they used to be a lot closer.

This was the exact opposite of the problem with the Static Universe, which assumed theUniverse needed to be bigger in the past if it were not either infinite in size or hadsome force keeping stars from falling together.

It’s big rival for quite some time was the Steady State Model that evolved from the StaticUniverse version.

They are not the same and folks often incorrectly assume Steady State is the old model thatthe Big Bang replaced, rather the Steady State model was proposed in 1948, a couple decadesafter the Big Bang Theory.

In the Steady State Model we already knew that stars formed and were fueled and died,and we could see that intergalactic red shift.

So it suggest the fuel for stars is constantly appearing in little bits and pieces, and thatthe Universe is indeed expanding but remains essentially the same and has always been andwill always be.

That’s not as contradictory as it maybe sounds, in a non-expanding Universe you endup with clutter of dead stars, as new matter appears to make new stars, but if it is constantlyexpanding than you have new room for stuff to be, and again the notion that single particlesof hydrogen are emerging from nowhere is no worse than new bits of space emerging fromnowhere constantly, which both Big Bang and Steady State claim happens, or that all thathydrogen emerged in one single flash of a moment.

Now you might think you’d be able to detect new bits of matter emerging all over the placebut keep in mind that our sun has several cubic light years to itself and several billionyears of life, so the 10^57 amu of mass, or hydrogen particles, making up a new one wouldonly require 10^40 of them emerge each second and spread over some 10^49 cubic meters, orone appearing every second in a cubic kilometer.

Needless to say spotting a single hydrogen atom appearing in a cubic kilometer in a givensecond is not exactly easy to do, especially back then.

So Big Bang says all the matter appeared at once many billions of years ago but spaceis constantly expanding, Steady State argues matter is constantly appearing and so is space.

There’s no problem by the way with an infinite object expanding, twice of infinity is stillinfinity but it can get bigger, and indeed that’s permitted under the Big Bang too,which just say those parts of the Universe close enough for us to see used to be finitein size or even point-like, we don’t know that the whole Universe might not be infinitein size and might have begun that way too, we just know it’s much bigger than the partswe can see and that those used to be way smaller.

So throughout the 1940s, and 50s both models were quite popular with scientists.

The first hard hit to Steady state was the discovery of quasars, which in general aremuch more common the further from Earth you get, which means they were much more commonin the past, they don’t get less common closer to Earth because our region of theUniverse had fewer of them, but rather because they are almost all gone these days and wecan only see the old ones because the light is just reaching us.

In the Steady State model the Universe is expanding and gaining new bits of matter butis basically the same over time, so finding a feature of the Universe that has significantlychanged over time strongly implies the Universe is not Steady and stable in its compositionover time.

So by the time we discovered cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964, Steady Statehad already become the minority view of cosmologists, though still had a number of supporters.

Initially it wasn’t too bad a blow, as one plausible explanation could be that it waslight from ancient stars that had been scattered around by galactic dust.

However as we mapped it out better it became increasingly clear that it was very evenlyspread in all directions, so whatever was causing it had nothing to do with our galaxy.

When the Universe was a good deal younger and a good deal more dense, basically a bighot plasma, light was constantly being emitted by it but scattering right away.

Just one big white-hot fog of hydrogen plasma.

As the Universe expanded and cooled, it eventually cooled enough to allow protons and electronsto bond to form neutral hydrogen gas instead, which no longer interacted with all that lightas easily.

That light took off in every direction without constantly slamming into things and scattering.

For the first time, the universe became transparent.

The light was emitted all across the universe, sailing off in all directions and is now,13.8 billion years later, arriving at every spot of space, since you can always draw asphere around any given object, like Earth, that is just wide enough for light from thatmoment to be arriving,.

We call this the Surface of Last Scattering and expect it to keep getting bigger and weakertill the end of time.

Nowadays it’s microwaves, hence cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB.

In the past it was stronger infrared waves, long down the road it will be weaker radiowaves.

That was predictable by the Big Bang Theory but not by Steady State or Static Models,so it didn’t quite kill them but it locked the Big Bang in as the overwhelming consensusmodel.

It still isn’t the only one, and it predicts multiple possible ends for the Universe fromBig Rip to Big Crunch, but it’s essentially the state of play for the last several decadestill now and still running strong.

We’ll be exploring those scenarios and some more evidence for the big bang in part two,and some more modern competing theories but as I said, Steady state didn’t die entirely,and indeed we got something called the Quasi-Steady-State model or QSS in the early 90s, which adjustedsteady state to include mini-bangs, for instance, instead of matter appearing in bits and piecesconstantly, it pops up in Big Bang events scattered far apart in time, but more likeraindrops falling on a pond.

Issues with this include why we can’t see stuff older than the big bang, or local mini-bang,but indeed we often have had objects or structures that at least initially appeared older thanthe Universe.

This was particularly popular in what is called Plasma Cosmology, a theory of modest popularityin the 80s and 90s that was a variation on Steady State in the sense of the Universehaving always been and always being, with no end.

Like many such models it didn’t handle thinks like quasars or cosmic microwave backgroundradiation very well, but as we reached more modern times we also had to deal with bothdark matter and dark energy, and we’ll look at the impact of those as we move in to parttwo, just follow the link to part two over on Paul Sutter’s channel.

We’ll be back again next week to discuss de-extinction of species and high-tech ecosystempreservation, for alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribeto the channel, and don’t forget to subscribe to Paul’s Channel while you’re over theirfor part two and hit the like button for both episodes.

We’ll see you next week!

+--------------------------------+ | SFIA Channel Introduction 2018 | | 2017-12-31 | | https://youtu.be/eK9FN5mRmdQ | +--------------------------------+

Fremtiden! Hvordan vil den blive og hvordan vil den forandre vores liv?

Hvordan ved vi det?

Disse store spørgsmål behøver ikke små svar.

Velkommen til Science and Futurism med Isaac Arthur,hvor vi undersøger den fjerne fremtid og videnskaben bag den.

På en realistisk, dybdeborende, positiv og informeret mådeVil du gerne lære hvordan du kan forlade Jorden uden raketter?

Hvordan du kolonisere Månen, Mars eller en selv andre galaxerVi dækker disse emner og andre, som kunstig intelligens, megastrukturer,rumskibe, kybernetik og ikke jordiske civilisationerAbbonér i dag, og følg vores vision om en lys og spændende fremtid,hver Torsdag, og tak for at have set med

+--------------------------------+ | Outward Bound: Colonizing the Sun| | 2018-01-04 | | https://youtu.be/0Ap4JhPoPQY | +--------------------------------+

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a giant nuclear furnace.

Without the sun, without a doubt, there’d be no you and me, but the sun is hot, andit is not a place where we could live… or is it?

Welcome back to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, and welcome to our fourth year.

I am your host, the aforementioned Isaac Arthur.

If there’s one thing this channel tends to be known for, it is truly enormous andover-the-top concepts, like artificial planets or moving solar systems or even galaxies.

But we always try to stick to things inside known physical laws, and on those rare occasionswe don’t we hang a flag on it and explain both why it probably can’t be done and someof the other potential applications it could be used for that get missed when using itin science fiction.

We are going to stay inside those limits of known physical science today, but I’ll justwarn from the outset that we are going to be pushing that a lot.

When I first suggested an episode about colonizing the Sun, as a chapter in our on -going lookat colonizing the solar system, the Outward Bound series, the initial response was mostlyto assume I was joking or talking about Dyson Swarms.

In fact, I mostly was - joking that is.

About halfway through last year I gathered up volunteers to help review the scripts forthe episodes, and to bounce episode ideas off of, and while I hate to admit it, theirinitial response at how crazy it was is actually what spurred me to give it a more seriouslook.

While “Oh yeah?

I’ll show you!” isn’t the best motivation for doing things, I’m glad I did succumbto that because it made me try to tackle the problem and it turned out there are a lotof options there for utilizing the Sun in a very hands-on manner.

Now in truth we have talked about utilizing the Sun before on many occasions.

A sun-encompassing swarm of habitats or power collectors or mirrors, a Dyson Sphere, issomething I mention on the channel at least once a month, and is a type of Stellar Engine,a device or group of devices meant to utilize most of a star’s energy to some purpose,and we’ve discussed others like the Shkadov Thruster or Nicoll-Dyson Beam.

We will review those concepts today, and some new ones.

We have also talked about Starlifting, a way of mining resources from the Sun, which contains99.8% of all resources in the solar system, not just hydrogen or helium but all the otherelements too.

We’ll talk about that today too, but we are going to go further and by the end ofthe episode we will be talking about walking around on the Sun or even in the Sun.

This is important as our main motivation though.

99.8% of the solar system is compacted into that giant ball of shining plasma.

998 out of every thousand atoms are in the sun, 1 is in Jupiter, and the remaining 1is spread over the solar system, mostly in the remaining three gas giants.

Classic space colonization tends to ignore all that mass as being unavailable, even thestuff in gas giants.

Truth be told even most of the mass in planets gets treated as serving no purpose but togenerate gravity and fuel the occasional land replenishment via volcano.

Even concepts like Dyson Swarms typically still ignore all that mass in a Sun as anythingother than a source of energy.

A very big source of energy admittedly, less than a billionth of the Sun’s light everreaches Earth and only a small portion of that gets used for anything other than heat.

The ratio is so small it would be like creating an entire hurricane just so you can get aglass of water, or breaking into Fort Knox to steal one person’s gold wedding ring.

This gets at the entire appeal of a Dyson Sphere: you use all the energy, not just thatminuscule portion of it that hits planets.

You stick wads of solar panels or artificial habitats around a star in a roughly sphericalcloud to use all that light up.

Yet again, it still ignores all that mass in the Sun, except as a power source.

Most people find even a Dyson Sphere to be a pretty ridiculous object, albeit mostlybecause even those who have heard of one think it’s supposed to be some giant inside-outplanet.

This was never what a Dyson Sphere was, but the misnomer stuck so instead we call theoriginal a Dyson Swarm.

Such a construct takes a ton of mass to build, and how much depends on how thick you wantto build it.

There’s plenty of mass even just on Mercury to build solar panels all around the Sun,but trying to build habitats with the available mass in the solar system is much trickier,which is where we saw the value of Starlifitng, harvesting a star for its matter, not justits energy.

This of course is a bit of an issue.

You can’t land on the Sun with a bucket and shovel and start mining for metals.

Not because they aren’t there; in fact, if you scoop some solar matter off the surface,there’s a lot of stuff besides hydrogen and helium in that, over 1%.

The reason is because it’s so hot, and also because a bucket full of the Sun containsvirtually no matter, less than a bucket of air.

The photosphere, the nominal surface of the Sun and where the light mostly comes from,is about 5700 Kelvin, hotter than any known element or alloy can remain solid at, andis a surface only in the sense that we can’t see deeper than that.

The density of the ‘ground’ is about one ten-millionth that of the various rocks anddirt we walk on, and actually only about a thousandth as dense as the air you are breathing.

Above that is the chromosphere and then the Corona, both of which are increasingly lessdense, and finally the Heliosphere, which is actually where all the planets are located.

So this image we have of the Sun as a sort of molten liquid is all wrong since you don’tcrash into it any more than you crash into a sky.

It’s not even a gas, either, but rather a plasma.

It’s not dense at all, though far more so than Red Giant stars - what our sun will eventuallyturn into - which are so thin you could fly a spaceship through one if it wasn’t forthe heat.

It gets denser as you go deeper, eventually getting to be a dozen of times the densityof lead at the center, but you have to go quite deep before it even gets as thick asEarth’s atmosphere, let alone oceans.

There’s very little matter immediately under your feet on the Sun, again much less thanair, and gravity is 28 times higher than on Earth, so you’d fall down very fast withall that force acting on you and almost nothing in the way.

If you could dangle Earth down a long cord into the sun, like an apple on a fishing hooklowered into the sea, it would actually take quite a while to destroy the planet.

It wouldn’t detonate in an instant like people would visualize.

Indeed when we discussed one of the types of Stellar Engine, the Weaponized death-starlike variety called a Nicoll-Dyson Beam, we saw that you’d need to leave one on fullpower on Earth for around a week to vaporize it, though you’d roast the biosphere offit in minutes.

The Sun gives off 63 megawatts of light per square meter, around 60,000 times what thelight intensity hitting Earth is, so if you had a floor between you and the sun and pokeda hole in it with a needle it would light that room up as effectively as a normal window.

Even diluted by spreading out for 150 million kilometers on its way to Earth, it’s stillso energy dense that looking at it will blind you.

So at first glance it would seem like being anywhere near the Sun ought to obliterateyou, but it’s important to understand that damage is not just about temperature, it’sabout energy transfer.

We think of space as cold but there are plenty of giant pockets of it a lot hotter than Earthis, and you wouldn’t be burned to death in them because they are so thin no real heatwill transfer to you.

Your oven is a lot hotter than a pot of boiling water, but if you stick your hand in youroven without touching any metal for a moment it’s just uncomfortable.

Stick your hand in a pot of boiling water for a moment and you are going to get badlyscalded.

There’s a thousand times more particles hitting every chunk of skin in that waterthan in the hot air.

Indeed the surface of the Sun is actually a good deal cooler than its higher layers,the chromosphere and the corona, which are hundreds of times hotter.

However, we have two tricks for getting near the Sun.

First, until you get to the Corona, all you are encountering is lots of photons and alittle solar wind.

Photons can be reflected by mirrors.

We use a lot of metal foils, silver, aluminum, and gold, though we’ve got newer materialsthat work better.

People tend to think of mirrors as glass but there’s a reason why we talk about thembeing silvered: we used to use silver plating on the back of them, but aluminum platingis more the norm these days.

Not everything reflective to visual light is as good a reflector to other frequencieseither, so don’t assume a traditional mirror you look at your reflection in is ideal.

The Sun gives off a lot of light in frequencies we can’t see and which typical mirrors don’tbounce well.

However if you assumed you had a mirror that was 99% reflective to the Sun’s full spectrum,you’d only absorb 1% of the light you normally would, and so could get to a place where thesun was 100 times brighter than Earth.

Since light falls with the square of distance, that would be 10 times closer, .1 AU.

A quarter of the distance Mercury is from the Sun, a place already so light blastedthat we could only consider colonizing it by living in mushroom habitats and sittingon stilts over the ground and shielded by a big mirror from the Sun.

This close to the Sun, only a tenth as far away as Earth is, is actually where we saythe Sun officially ends, the outermost edge of the Corona.

If you make some reflective shield up front of your spacecraft you can get this close,.1 AU, and indeed the Parker Solar Probe scheduled for launch later this year is supposed toget to just .04 AU from the Sun, ten times closer to the Sun than Mercury is and 25 timescloser than Earth.

You can get closer, too, either by having a shinier mirror or by having a lot of heatradiators trailing behind in the shield’s shadow, cooling the shield and radiating heataway in that shadow.

As you get closer to the Sun you eventually need to make that mirror shield more bowlshaped so the whole thing looks like a mushroom, as sunlight is no longer coming directly atyou only from the front.

If you’ve seen the film Sunshine, which is one of my favorites, at least the firsthour before it turns into horror film, you can see how the ship uses that basic conceptwith a gold covered forward solar shield reflecting light away.

The more you can reflect, the closer you can get to the Sun.

So how shiny can you make a mirror?

Theoretically 100%, and indeed labs have made materials that are completely reflective ata particular frequency.

Keep that in mind for later, but generally a material will reflect different wavelengthsof light better or worse, and the Sun emits a wide spectrum of wavelengths.

You do get two other problems once you get inside this range though.

First, the sun does radiate more than just photons you can reflect away, and as you getcloser you aren’t just dealing with a higher density of solar wind but particles in theSun’s upper atmosphere, the Corona, which can be around 2 million Kelvin.

Second, the Sun has an insanely powerful and strange magnetosphere, and can start generatingheat by magnetic induction through things.

All those particles are ionized so we can reflect or deflect them with a magnetic field,but you need power to run such a thing and that means heat.

Nonetheless, if you can bounce away all those particles no heat will transfer to you; soit’s actually conceivable you might be able to get very close, indeed all the way downto the photosphere ‘surface’ with materials that were ultra-reflective and by deflectingthose ionized particles.

This is just inside the realm of known physics.

If we move over to science fiction, suns are always treated as automatic killamajigs.

However, those ships often have force fields or wormholes, and if you did have that kindof tech - the game changes.

I’ve pointed out before that a handy power source can be made with a wormhole by droppingone mouth into a star, but you could do that in reverse and suck heat out from some spacestation inside a star to keep it cool.

This is much trickier without such technologies though.

You could have a highly conductive or even superconductive material - such as a tetherrising off the sun, carrying heat away from your base on the sun as fast as it got in.

The problem is, that close to the Sun light is coming in from every direction below you,much like the Earth and it’s own horizon when standing on the ground, and indeed fromabove you too.

The Chromosphere and Corona both emit light, just less than the photosphere, so you needto sheathe those tethers as well.

It would also snap.

A Space Elevator is hard to engineer on Earth, when it has to hold up its own weight forthousands of kilometers in Earth gravity.

Gravity is even higher on the Sun and you have a lot more of it.

You have to be at 5.3 solar radiuses, or about 3 million kilometers above the photosphere,before gravity drops to Earth normal.

If you built a sphere that far over the sun, 3.7 million kilometers in radius, or .024

AU, it would have a surface area 330,000 times that of Earth, as big in area compared toEarth as the Sun is massive compared to Earth.

If you remember our episode on Mega Earths I pointed out there that if you are tryingto keep the same surface gravity there’s a linear relationship between the object’smass and surface area or living space.

Ten times the mass, ten times the surface area, a hundred times the mass, a hundredtimes the surface area.

Of course the Sun may be 330,000 times as massive as Earth but as we’ve mentioned,it gives off enough sunlight to illuminate Earth a couple billion times over again.

So this sphere would be getting 6000 times the light you want it to get.

However this is about as close to the sun as a person would want to get since the gravityis rising.

Using the orbital ring technology we have discussed before, the giant stationary ringsfull of super-fast moving magnetic material, like a pipe full of running water, you couldconstruct a permanent stationary ring around the Sun, assuming you can reflect enough lightand deflect enough particles.

You could then walk around on top of this ring, with the same gravity as on Earth, andbe well inside the Sun’s Corona.

Now, before we ask why anyone would want to live there, let’s ask if this is as closeas a human could live?

Not a cyborg meant for higher gravity or heat tolerance but an actual normal old human.

And the answer is no.

You would have to be standing on the ring surface facing away from the Sun as the Sun’sgravity is pulling you down onto the ring.

If the ring was stationary when a person experiences 1 g, normal Earth- gravity, then if the ringis placed closer to the Sun then the gravity increases.

We can offset that increase, though, by spinning the ring.

Spinning the ring has the effect of introducing an artificial gravity on you away from theSun.

No matter how much gravity you would usually experience if the ring were stationary, wecan offset that by spinning the ring faster so you always experience 1 g.

Unlike a normal spinning habitat, this ring contains two sections, an inner and outer,which don’t move at the same speed, but whose combined momentum is what they needto orbit classically.

In this case, we keep the inner ring stationary and spin the outer one, or even spin the innerone in the opposite direction.

You can also keep a third stationary sheath outside this to prevent friction with whateverenvironment is outside.

This trick can be used to produce low-gravity bands near any star, gas giant, or Super Earth,see the Orbital Rings episode for a more detailed explanation of the mechanics.

Needless to say it takes a lot of power to run such rings, which are giant magnetic machines,but you aren’t short of energy near the Sun; and when it comes to extracting matterfrom the Sun, the main method of Starlifting we’ve previously discussed specificallyuses a giant magnetic ring to rip matter off the star.

Other methods all have the problem that it takes huge amounts of energy to lift matterout of that gravity well, but the entire original point of an orbital ring is that it makesa phenomenal way to move huge amounts of matter out of gravity wells.

You can also use concentric stacks of them, each a little further out, connected withtethers to act as elevators.

We’ve used that trick before but it has two added advantages here.

First each higher one is getting some light blocked by the lower ones, and second, youcould probably transport heat up those tethers to help cool the lower ones, ending with onereally high up, very wide, but perpendicular to the Sun.

With a low solar cross section such a massive radiator serves for the ones below and asa pickup and storage point for ships coming in to collect material harvested below.

I should note that our Sun is not the only star either, in fact it is on the large andhot side.

Many are much cooler, even having surface temperatures lower than the melting pointsof some known materials, and for big red giants, they are not only cool but vastly less dense,and using these tricks you might be able to flat out construct machinery right over oreven inside their photospheres.

We will look at that more, and the interesting case of doing this with white dwarf or neutronsstars, in our next episode of “Civilizations at the End of Time: Dying Stars”So while we would definitely need to come up with a lot of new technologies to livethis close to the sun, we don’t necessarily need any new physics.

But why live there, in, on, or very near the Sun?

It is worth noting from the outset, as pointed out in Colonizing Titan, that colonizing isnot the same as terraforming and indeed doesn’t necessarily mean anyone lives there, let alonethat they need to be traditionally human.

We have a lot more options on the table if we are including alternatives like artificialintelligence too, but for today we will assume you’d need regular old humans on-site orin proximity.

While it might not be a big hub for actual living, the value of a colony near the Sun,if you can successfully build it, is so huge that it would rapidly come to dominate theentire system economy.

Even if it only takes a skeleton crew to operate some of these immense machines, so that itwas like one person working inside a large modern warehouse, when industrialized youcould have trillions of people working there, supplying untold billions of megatons of rawmaterials and trillions of gigawatts of power to a growing solar economy.

There is nothing in this solar system that the Sun doesn’t have more of, except emptyspace and lower temperatures.

From the Sun we can run giant energy beams out to distant energy-hungry colonies (moreon that in a moment), we can use it to maneuver and accelerate spaceships, we can harvestit for huge amounts of hydrogen and helium as well as heavier elements.

Beyond those, you can use surplus power to run a giant ring shaped supercollider… whichis also basically an orbital ring… to turn lighter elements into heavier ones.

You could potentially even be making anti-matter or kugelblitz blacks holes to store energyor use as spaceship engines.

Whenever we talk about fully harnessing the Sun for power I get asked what we’d do withall of it, around 20 trillion times humanity’s total power consumption, and these are justsome of the examples of what you can do, but in a nutshell, if you’ve got trillions oftimes the energy and matter, you run trillions of times the industrial output.

Now I want to talk about Beam Propulsion again because we’ve been talking about using lasersto push ships in some of the episodes from late last year and we just mentioned beamingpower.

I often mention both as alternatives, if we never make fusion reactors a reality.

Laser beams spread out gradually with distance, they aren’t beams of even width the wholeway and the tighter you can keep them over distance the better.

Now the traditional way to make these lasers is to suck up energy from sunlight via solarpanels and use that to run a classic laser, albeit a gigantic one, however that is a fairlyinefficient process and we have a far more efficient, cheaper, and vastly easier optioncalled a Stellar Laser, or Stellaser.

Here we describe a version conceived decades ago by Steve Nixon, who coined the term Stellaser.

We are going to turn the Sun itself into a laser.

Now we talk about lasers on this channel a lot but I’ve never really explained them,and this seems a good occasion to do so in some detail.

At its simplest, a laser consists of a lasing medium we can excite, such as a gas that getsplaced between two mirrors.

We can excite the medium, usually with electricity or a big lamp, raising the energy of a populationof atoms in the medium to the point they behave strangely.

They behave less randomly, more in unison; they are stimulated to lase.

Mirrors help stabilize the process..

As it turns out, the Sun’s corona is a natural lasing medium, already conveniently excitedby the Sun's brilliance, like a giant lamp, and a rather powerful one at that!

In the Sun, an ion is an atom where one or more of its outer electrons has been knockedoff.

In the Sun’s corona there are naturally-occurring heavy ions that have lost several electronsthanks to the high temperature there.

Some of these ions are found in that special higher-energy quantum state.

What makes the special state special is some atoms can easily enter via collisions, butit’s a one way trip because the normal transitions back to lower energy are forbidden quantumtransitions.

De-excitation from normal states is easy and fast, but de-excitation from this specialstate is rare, so these excited ions accumulate in the Sun’s corona.

A concentration of such excited, but inhibited, particles is called a population inversion.

This excited medium provides us with the powerful opportunity we need as it sets the stage forlasing, much like happens in a Helium-Neon laser, in which excited helium atoms transferenergy to neon atoms by colliding with them.

Iron ions in the solar corona are already in this special excited state, all pumpedup at 2 million Kelvin, trapped in that state and ready to lase.

What do they need to enable lasing?

Mirrors pointed at each other, mirrors of very high reflectivity at the wavelength ofinterest, such as a green light for iron, and as we said, we can make mirrors almostperfectly reflective at a specific wavelength these days.

These mirrors need to be of high optical quality, very smooth, fairly large diameter, and positionedfar enough apart to pass a beam between, through a small fraction of the solar corona... which

is still a large volume.

So put them in orbits at the same altitude above the Sun, or any other star, but positionedso the star is almost between the mirrors… just off to one side.

Point the mirrors at each other and wait a bit.

Spontaneous emission does occur, rarely, despite the forbidden transition.

When such a photon happens to come from between the mirrors and be directed at one, it willbegin to bounce back and forth.

As it does, it will encounter excited ions like the one that emitted it, and will stimulatethem to emit as well.

These new photons will be emitted in the same direction and with the same phase as the incomingphoton.

This is the essence of Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, the LASER.

After bouncing back and forth a few times, the resonating energy becomes quite large,nearly monochromatic, and mostly in-phase or coherent.

A few additional components inside the laser cavity will make it very monochromatic andcoherent.

With good mirrors, the rays will be extremely parallel and will bounce many times.

Rays which are not parallel will escape and no longer contribute to the laser’s resonantamplification.

Nor will escaped rays subtract any more from the available energy.

After a while, only parallel rays are being amplified.

Stellaser mirrors are a bit of a technical challenge, but technology always improveswhen there is a goal and a motive.

Use of large diameter mirrors eases some of the problems and makes it possible to keepa tight beam for a very long way.

Huge volumes of solar corona means equally huge energies are stored there and the Stellasertaps into it, organizes it and unleashes that energy.

We could make a small Stellaser with today’s technology.

You could potentially be making these mirrors thousands of kilometers across, or puttingthousands around the sun.

You could also potentially use other substances besides iron as well, you’re not limitedto that specific element and a green beam.

This very simple design is also ideal for use in interstellar travel.

We send in an advanced probe that arrives ahead of a larger interstellar vessel to constructa Stellaser before the other bigger ship arrives and use it to slow the ship down without fuel,as well as provide all the power would-be explorers or colonists might need.

It could also be bootstrapped and expanded to assist a second wave of incoming shipsmoving far faster and carrying more cargo proportionally.

So potentially these are just as useful for arriving at a distant solar system as helpingyou leave ours.

Next time in the Outward Bound series we will do just that, and jump to Alpha Centauri,to discuss interstellar colonization concepts and the specific case of solar systems aroundbinary stars, which has some interesting aspects, restrictions, and possibilities.

Binary Stars have a lot of differences in how you colonize them than single star systems,and for that matter there’s a huge variation in how individuals ones behave.

Their life cycles and how you go about utilizing them varies by a lot more than just how longthey live and what color they are, and you need to adapt your colonization plans accordingly.

As I explained at the start, we're still staying within the limits of known physical sciencein order to colonize the sun, and so this absurd sounding proposal is actually not thatfar-fetched.

If you want to understand the scientific possibilities and limitations of modern space travel, thenI recommend that you check out Brilliant.org.

Their astronomy course provides you with the physics tools that astrophysicists use tounderstand the cosmos, the life cycles of stars, and the fate of the universe.

Through active problem solving, you build up your frameworks to understand these concepts,instead of just memorizing formulas from a textbook.

You can dive right in at whatever your skill level is and explore at your own pace.

I can never overemphasize how handy that math and science skill-set is to have in your mentaltoolbox, and Brilliant is a great place to get started.

To support the channel and learn more about Brilliant, go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur

and sign up for free.

And also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual Premiumsubscription.

That’s the subscription I’ve been using to explore their multitude of thought-provokingpuzzles.

Next week we’ll come back to Earth and consider how we might evacuate our planet if some disasterwas going to render it uninhabitable, and look at everything from the most basic waysto save some remnant of our civilization up to moving the whole ecology of our planetelsewhere in Evacuation: Earth.

And the week after will be joined by Astrophysicist Paul Sutter to examine many of the varioustheories for however the Universe might end.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Intergalactic Colonization | | 2017-12-28 | | https://youtu.be/xRB7a89Jh7w | +--------------------------------+

People often talk about colonizing the galaxy, but today we are going to ask justhow far away humanity can stretch its reach.

So today we are wrapping up the third year of Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur, andI am your aforementioned host, Isaac Arthur.

It’s been quite a year, and a long trip from our first year which only had 15 episodes,not the weekly setup we started part way into year 2.

We closed that first year out by discussing Interstellar Colonization and I mentionednear the end that you didn’t have to stop at the Galaxy’s edge.

Two years and a hundred episodes later, it seems appropriate to continue that topic,and to reflect a bit on some of the concepts we’ve discussed since then and how theyimpact today’s subject.

We have discussed many times how you might travel to another solar system and colonizeit, if you were constrained by the speed of light.

Indeed we tend to assume moving at only a fraction of that speed.

To do that, especially with classic humans rather than some robotic probe or seed ship,requires massive vessels that are almost miniature planets themselves, able to contain everythingyou need to start up an ecosystem at your destination and keep thousands of people aliveeither during the flight or in some sort of stasis to be awoken on arrival.

We saw that was possible, maybe even with modern science and technology, that you couldsend out ships for century-long journeys.

What’s interesting is that in most fiction, where they often have Faster Than Light orFTL travel methods able to move someone across a whole galaxy in maybe moments or maybe afew years, almost none of those sprawling galactic empires ever seems to settle othergalaxies.

That does makes sense when you have a galaxy already full of other intelligent life forms,since you can assume other galaxies will have their own too and not welcome colonists fromoutside, and it is a long trip just to say hello.

However we see it even in fiction where humanity has the whole galaxy to itself and no specialreason to think neighboring galaxies will have existing civilizations.

When that’s the case, it makes a lot less sense.

If you’ve got a spaceship able to cross the whole galaxy in a year, crossing to anothergalaxy should not be a problem.

Distances between galaxies don’t scale up like distances between planets or stars.

Stars are typically hundreds of thousands of times further away from our Sun than otherplanets are from Earth, and the distance to the Moon, still the only world a human hasset foot on, is about a hundred millionth the distance to the nearest star.

Alternatively galaxies are a lot closer together, relatively speaking.

The Magellanic Cloud Dwarf Galaxies are closer to some stars in our galaxy than they areto stars on the other side of the galaxy from them, and even Andromeda, the nearest largegalaxy to ours, is only about 20 times further away than the galaxy is wide.

So there’s no reason why, if you thought the neighboring galaxy was empty of civilizations,you couldn’t make that trip if you’ve got spaceships that can cross the galaxy ina year, because they can get to Andromeda in 20.

That would barely count as a generational ark ship, something we can almost do now,and should be child’s play for most galactic civilizations we know from fiction.

The other big thing to keep in mind is that the space between us and other galaxies isnot empty.

If we view galaxies as continents, with intergalactic space as the ocean, there are plenty of littleislands to use as waypoints.

There are a lot of stars in between, and galaxies don’t have firmly defined edges either.

Also, stars are often ejected from the galaxy, much like how planets can get ejected froma solar system.

We aren’t sure how many of these stars there are yet, I’ve seen estimates as high ashalf of stars being intergalactic, but there’s decent confidence of it being 10% of stellarmass or higher.

Equal or lesser populations than galaxies, it’s still spread over a much larger volume,so these stars are much farther apart, light centuries not light years, but they make potentialwaypoints on a trip.

Decent ones too, because while most stars on the outskirts of a galaxy have low metallicity- and so probably not a lot of rocky material nearby - often these ejected ones were tossedout by passing near the central black hole of our galaxy and are higher in metallicity.

Add to that, while an ejection of a planet from a system or a star from a galaxy oftenstrips it of its satellites, it also often does not, and the closer the satellite isto its parent, the less likely it will be ejected.

So the rockier inner planets of a system are more likely to be retained.

That means these waypoints could have plenty of raw materials to use to refuel and repair,and potentially have planets to settle on.

You don’t necessarily have to go sundiving to capture fuel and raw materials on someIcarus-like plunge into the star to pick up material, like we saw from the spaceship Destinyin Stargate: Universe, one of the few scifi franchises to seriously tackle intergalactictravel and timelines.

You can do stuff like that too, as we’ve discussed in the Starlifting episode and willlook at more next week in Colonizing the Sun.

Today we don’t care about that though for three reasons.

First, as mentioned we have discussed before how it can be done if you need to, second,odds are many of the stars will host planets which you can mine more conventionally.

But third, you normally don’t stop on interstellar voyages to refuel.

Oh, in fiction you often do, they tend to have FTL systems that are non-inertial, awarp drive that requires constant power input to maintain its speed rather than just coastingalong, or wormholes or gates or hyperspace jumps with maximum ranges that leave you stoppedrelative to the local area, rather than needing to burn a ton of fuel to slow down and thenmore to speed back up when you’re done.

Normally in interstellar space you head to your destination without stopping, becausedoing so costs you time and gains you nothing.

And while I always say it would be nice to have FTL, it doesn’t really look like itis in the cards, nor do we really know the logistics involved if it was, since they aredifferent for every hypothetical drive system.

So we always try to look at the future assuming no new physics and see if we can tackle aproblem anyway.

Normally you wouldn’t want to stop a ship en route to another galaxy, or so we’d assume,since it will tend to involve a not-quite straight path between various intergalacticstars and that wouldn’t seem to make sense, but we’ll be giving that a second look today.

We also do have an existing precedent for stopping an interstellar spaceship.

In the Life in a Space Colony series, we examined a ship called Unity, a large interstellarvessel kilometers long carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers.

After they arrived at their destination they realized that they did not really need tostop and stay there.

They had all the manufacturing ability needed to take raw materials and build anything inthe ship’s structure or colonizing inventory.

This was up to and including the colonists themselves, since they were making journeysof many decades and could easily replenish their colonist pool simply by keeping a decentportion of them on the ship to breed more colonists for the next stop.

We gave them both life extension and the ability to freeze people and thaw them out.

Although both technologies were handy for growing the colonists’ numbers, they weren’ttruly necessary since people weren’t dying off and could continue to have children andmaintain a crew with the same goals and traditions.

So this ship, Unity, decided it could transform itself from a regular interstellar arkshipwith one destination in mind into what we called a Gardener Ship, one that stops ata system, builds a colony, picks up new raw materials and fuels, and heads off to a newdestination.

During the flight, they would breed up their numbers again, and work on turning all thoseraw materials into colonial gear or replacement parts and supplies for the ship.

We ended up revisiting the crew in the episode Interstellar Travel Challenges to upgradehow fast they could go and talk about all the problems one can encounter moving throughspace that fast.

We also visited them again in the Dead Aliens episode but I consider that non-canon to theirtale, which we’ll pick up again today because it’s handy to have a narrative framing device.

So our gardener ship Unity has been slowly working its way out to the galactic rim, ashave various sister ships, and indeed every so often the ship divides itself up like anamoeba.

They can make every part the ship needs so they can make a new twin ship and do upgradesas new science comes in from home.

However, we will still limit them to the 20% of light speed we gave them in our last visit.

We will also ignore that the ship, which first went to the Tau Ceti than Epsilon Eridani,was headed in the wrong direction for Andromeda, so they’ve kind of cork-screwed around.

Handily Andromeda is in the direction of the region of the galactic edge closest to us,so we don’t have to cross the whole galaxy to get there.

It’s not quite the fastest route the galactic edge, which would lie more in the directionof Orion, and we need to head more toward Perseus to aim for Andromeda, but it is fairlyclose and a lot better than crossing the whole galactic disc.

That’s also true of both Magellanic Clouds, we’re closer to them than most of the galaxyis.

That’s worth mentioning because ‘intergalactic’ is a bit relative.

Andromeda is the nearest big galaxy to us, but the Magellanic clouds aren’t much furtherfrom us than the furthest parts of this galaxy, and they are no longer the closest known dwarfgalaxies.

The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy is considerably closer, just 70,000 light yearsfrom Earth, and the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, whose status as a galaxy is still debated,is only 25,000 light years away.

In all 4 cases, colonizing them is not really any harder than colonizing the more distantparts of our own galaxy, and there are plenty of stars in between to use as way points.

I will be ignoring them today though beyond pointing out that they would tend to be settledalong with the rest of the galaxy, though in many cases you will need to cross someareas fairly devoid of stars and pick your path accordingly.

But it also means our ship Unity has arrived at the galactic rim a long time later, onthe path they took it would be at least 30,000 light years and they’ve only been going20% of light speed, not to mention stopping for at least a few years once or twice a centuryto set up a colony.

So we last saw them sometime around the 26th century AD, centuries ahead of us in the twenty-firstcentury, but it is now closer to the twenty-first hundredth century.

They are fifty times further ahead in history than the pyramid builders are back in history.

They are parked at a last lonely star near the galactic rim, the Terminus System, andthe captain is deciding if they dare jump farther off and head for Andromeda or abandonthe mission, finally stay at a planet unlike the many hundreds she’s colonized and leftbehind.

Truth be told, she’s been planning this for millennia, captain of one of humanity’sfirst interstellar colony ships, even if it’s been rebuilt and subdivided dozens of times.

They could turn around, they could get back to Earth a good deal faster with the laserhighways between stars many worlds have been creating as they got bigger.

They could settle here or turn perpendicular and help colonize the galactic rim.

Indeed they could do all of the above.

Spending decades to build new ships, one to head off on each direction of the rim, oneto head off to Earth for those wanting to see home again, and one to head off to Andromeda.

The science officer points this out and that they probably want a much bigger ship or fleetof ships to do the job.

He also points out that individuals don’t actually have to choose, it’s the year 200,000AD, none from the original crew are entirely human anymore, and copying their minds ontosome clone bodies or androids isn’t too hard.

They’ve done that before, for a crew member or colonist who wanted to travel on but alsowanted to settle down, folks who had a spouse or kids who wanted to stay and they couldn’tdecide if they wanted to stay or go, so they did both, making a copy of themselves.

Or when the ship subdivided, building a twin to head off at a different angle to colonizeother systems.

They have some crew members who have done that many times, same as they have otherswho sleep most of the journey.

This is the original ship, for a given value of original, that headed out from Earth 200,000years ago, and the original captain, for a given value of original, who piloted it out,and the original science officer, for a given value of original, who has been nitpickingher plans since Unity was on the drawing board.

But the ship can’t make the journey on its own, so the science officer says.

This ship is immense, bigger than when it left Earth and you could have crammed a majormetropolis into that one.

But to do this right, they are going to want a whole fleet and they need to build thathere at Terminus.

Now we say Terminus is the last star at this edge of the galaxy but that’s not entirelytrue.

It’s actually an extragalactic system sent on its way many millions of years ago andjust now getting out of the galaxy.

In fact with a little bit of nudging, it could be aimed to reach Andromeda.

They could colonize it and just wait.

Andromeda is, after all, set to merge with the Milky Way galaxy in a few billion yearsand they could get this whole system to arrive there a good deal sooner than that.

There is a highly advanced technology called a Shkadov Thruster, whose design is actuallya very simplistic one.

It calls for trillions of cheap mirrors to be placed around a star so that they bounceall its light in one direction, providing thrust and allowing you turn a whole solarsystem into an interstellar spaceship.

You can also boost that speed by using the solar wind of the star as propellant, or modifyingstarlifting technology to create a giant plasma drive.

Normally, this is no way to cross between stars.

They take half of forever to get up to speed, but while it takes millions of years for themto get up to even modest interstellar velocities, it also takes millions of years to travelbetween galaxies.

At their current cruising speed of 20% of light speed, they will need ten million yearsto get to Andromeda.

It’s been fifty times as long since this ship was built as between then and when thepyramids were built, and it will be fifty times as long as their entire past journeyto get to Andromeda this way.

They could turn the entire Terminus System into one huge spaceship - technologicallyspeaking it's simplistic - and head off to Andromeda that way.

However it will take longer, many tens of millions of years at least.

Potentially they could use a miniaturised version of this, turning a gas giant intoa giant fusion-driven ship, but fundamentally this is just a super-sized version of theship they already have.

The captain mulls both option over but rejects them.

She has been dreaming of being the first to set foot in another galaxy for thousands ofyears, and that’s the kind of commitment that borders on the obsessive.

Tell me how we do it fastest, that’s what she want to know, and why a fleet, why nota bigger ship?

Why even a bigger ship?

The science officer says he’s very dubious - even with all their technology that canfabricate any part they need to replace - of being able to cruise the entire intergalacticvoid for ten million years without breaking down.

That’s not why he wants other ships though, not as spares.

He wants to make stops along the way, and using astronomical data gathered from someof their colonies a few light centuries back, which are now civilizations a couple of thousandyears old with lots of giant telescopes, they found a modestly straight path with starsnever more than a thousand light years apart.

The captain stops him though, and asks why not a straight path, instead of using Terminusas a giant spaceship with all those mirrors, why not use a variant of that, turn it intoa giant laser to push the ship to near light speed so they can make the journey in a fifthof the time.

He shakes his head at that, that’s part of the idea in truth but too simplistic.

Even at that speed it’s a 2 million year journey, and even if they hug the speed oflight to get time dilation, so less time passes for them and the ship, and even with the intergalacticvoid being far thinner so they get less drag and collisions to damage or slow the ship,going that long with no resupply is a dubious proposition.

But more to the point, they can’t slow down when they arrive.

The ship’s defense officer objects to that, if collisions slow the ship, why not let spacedrag slow them down?

When they approach the galaxy they can expand out a thin sail to get smacked into and slowthe ship.

Even a magnetic field that will deflect ionized particles off and exchange momentum with them.

The faster you’re going the more each particle slows you, so once you get down to a modestspeed you can use the ship’s regular engine to finish slowing down.

The science officer agrees it is viable, but not ideal, such a slowdown still takes hugeamount of time and distance and would leave them a huge distance from any possible helpand needing to ration out their supplies on the whole journey with not much margin forerror, and on something totally untested.

It could work, they could build a massive laser array and use it like a giant cannonto hurl themselves out of the galaxy at near light speed then slow down by using the localinterstellar medium to break them to more normal speeds.

But he hasn’t lived 200,000 years by throwing dice and he doesn’t want to leave it sopeople have to do the same thing in the future.

The science officer wants to build a big intergalactic bridge, using the Laser Highway system, andhe wants to colonize each star system along the way.

By doing that they will always be in some sort of range of civilization and future shipswill be able to cross at near light speeds safely, with each bridge star from Terminusrunning a laser relay to push ships faster or slow them down.

Done this way people can always go home, or send follow up missions that will be ableto catch up to them, and reinforce them.

Done the other way it’s a bit like burning your ships when you reach a new shore.

What they’ll do is build a fleet.

Once everyone is up to speed, they’ll accelerate a bit more, more than they could normallyslow down from.

Then they’ll transfer some extra fuel from each ship to one ship, which they’ll allthen push on with their prow-mounted lasers, speeding it up a bit, and it’s got fuelto slow down from a slightly higher velocity.

When it arrives at the next target system, it will get to work building lasers to slowthem all down, though they’ve already slowed a bit pushing that vanguard ship.

If the Vanguard fails in its job they can cannibalize fuel from the various ships, transferpeople over, and jettison some mass, to ensure they can still slow down at the destinationsystem.

They’ll have many stopovers to practice this and get it down right, and after thousandsof years of doing century long trips, they’re confident they can keep the ships runningthrough their normal methods for the few thousand years most of the intergalactic jumps willtake.

Better yet, with each system along the way colonized and with a pushing laser there,they can arrange for critical resupply if something goes wrong.

They can just wait at the next system or slow down as much as they can and go mostly onice till rescue arrives, even if that take thousands of years.

Thousands of years sounds like an eternity, but it’s nothing compared to millions andthat your best time for rescue if you aren’t doing stopovers.

You’re also sailing through mostly empty intergalactic void if something goes wronghere, and probably slower than before, not plowing through an uncharted galaxy at relativisticspeeds.

It’s very iffy if a frozen body could be revived after millions of years too, thousandswould probably leave something to work with in terms of brain structure and is a lot morerealistic for a digital copy of a mind to repair off of.

And you only have to go that route if you’re getting critical failure across the fleet.

Most of the time if something goes wrong you could transfer to another ship and cannibalizesome for fuel or material to repair and slow down.

When you’re done, even though it takes around ten million years, you’ve been busy thewhole time founding new colonies that can still talk to each other and send ships throughat very relativistic speeds, enough that the journey will seem shorter to them from timedilation.

Those ships only need enough extra fuel and supplies to course correct to the next relaypoint if something goes wrong there, and it will be a whole colonized system.

Subsequent intergalactic trips will occur at nearly light speed, including follow upcolonization missions.

What’s more, if it turns out that the galaxy you’re arriving at is occupied, and tenmillion years is a long enough time frame that something might have evolved from chimpanzeeto interstellar civilization in that time, you do have a way to go home.

So Unity sets off from the Terminus system toward the Andromeda Galaxy, and their firstwaypoint along the way, and assuming nothing goes wrong, it will take them a bit less thanten million years to arrive, using only fusion and lasers to do it, technologies probablyfully developed by the end of the 21st century.

Okay, let’s consider some other scenarios.

First, we mentioned that you could mobilize an entire solar system as one giant spaceark, the straight Shkadov Thruster route is the technologically easiest approach but viastarlifting you can accelerate a lot faster by firing helium out as a propellant, siphoningout heavier elements in the star for construction, and recycling hydrogen back down for the starto eventually burn perhaps.

This same technique can be used galaxy-wide, and we’ll come back to that in a moment,but it’s worth remembering that galaxies are not static and that Andromeda is headedtoward us.

That’s actually quite rare, virtually every galaxy is moving away from us and the furtheraway they are, the faster they are moving.

Some folks ask how far off we could colonize the Universe, if it was empty, and the answeris that your absolute maximum depends on how fast your ships can travel versus what theredshift of the target galaxy is.

That’s about 20 kilometers per second for every million light years of distance, or20,000 kilometers at 1 billion light years, about 7% of light speed.

Our ships were averaging about 20% of light speed, so it could catch up to a galaxy movingjust under 20% of light speed some 3 billion light years away, though it would take longerthan the Universe is old to arrive with such a slow relative speed, just a little fastertoward its destination than that destination is moving away.

Fortunately the closer you get the slower it will be moving away, but unless you wantto take half of eternity to get to your destination you don’t aim for anything moving away atmuch more than maybe half your maximum speed.

This is part of why when asked I usually say a billion light years is about as far as humanscan colonize without FTL systems.

That’s a lot of living space too, many thousands of galaxies.

However we do have other drive options, that laser slingshot and magnetic sail slowdownmethod from earlier would probably work, it’s not ideal for interstellar travel to neighboringstars but it ought to work over much larger distances, even well short of intergalacticones.

And you could do it at every waypoint.

It only takes a year at one-gee of thrust to get to near light speed and the same togo back down, so you can get away with stopping between stars as waypoints without losingmuch time, at least when those distances are much larger than the normal interstellar scale.

Slowing down without fuel by collision or magnetic braking is all about how fast youare going, how thick the interstellar or intergalactic dust and gas are, and how big your brakingsail is, but think centuries not minutes, even for an immense sail.

That aside, and ignoring our example of Unity today, it would probably be how I would doit.

We also have options for black hole drives or anti-matter drives or maybe quark fusionor some other new concept, which might allow higher travel speeds and expand that radiuswe might colonize a lot.

However, I said that was part of the reason I usually put it at a billion light years.

There are three others.

First, it does take time to colonize places and most colonists will want to go the nearestand easiest empty place, so even if you’ve got ships that could make speed to get tosome place four billion light years away, and do it fast enough to arrive before itran out of stars to colonize, you’d presumably want to stop along the way.

Second, if you aim to the edge of your speed, you could arrive when there are no stars left,but more importantly if you are arriving somewhere 2 billion years from now, I’d find it veryhard to believe that you’d be arriving at an unoccupied place.

The older the Universe gets, the more likely life is to develop and get technology.

Worlds that already have life have more time to evolve, most stars live a lot longer thanours does, and the metallicity of new stars rises, meaning more rocky planets in general.

I’m on the extreme skeptic end in terms of the Fermi Paradox, in that I doubt anycivilizations have arisen within a billion light years of us, see the Dyson Dilemma 2.0

episode or various Fermi Paradox episodes for explanations of that reasoning, but I’dhave a very hard time believing you could arrive at a galaxy 3 billion years away fromus, and maybe 10 billion years ahead in time, and find it was still absent of intelligentlife.

Third, the Universe is expanding, and only a handful of galaxies are near enough to usto stick with us as that happens.

However, just as you can move a star you can move a galaxy, you just build those ShkadovThrusters around every star and let gravity tractor it with you.

And most of the galaxies within a billion light years of us are going slow enough youcould slow them down this way to stay bound to us.

If you can’t, then any of those colonies are destined to be forever gone.

You won’t ever be able to talk to them again at some point.

Of course you might not care, and anyone sent on billion year long quests are going to havemore time to have diverged from you than humans have with oak trees, though that problem alreadyexists at the Interstellar level and is probably beyond manageable even at the galactic scalealready.

That’s why we discussed alternatives like the light year wide Birch Planets from theMega Earths episode.

Don’t overlook that option though, as huge as a galaxy is and as long as billions ofyears is, you can move one, there’s no tricky physics involved, it’s just an applicationof brute force on a galactic level, astronomical timelines and energy needs, but you have both.

We have no idea where the closest civilization to us is, might be within a few hundred lightyears, might be none in the whole Observable Universe, and with all the time it takes lightto reach us and for our ships to arrive there, especially in intergalactic terms, what wecan see now doesn’t necessarily mean much compared to when you arrive.

A galaxy a billion light years away might be absent technological civilizations a billionyears ago, when that light left, but would it still be a few billion years from now,when you arrived?

We can’t know, but for my part an unused and dead solar system is one we should alwaysclaim if there’s nobody around there or nearby asserting their own claim.

And I would expect an alien civilization to do the same, not because they or we are aggressiveand hostile, but because a random space rock around a lifeless star just has less inherentvalue than a tree or cat or a dog or a person or even an inanimate statue someone has carved.

And while some might claim otherwise, every breath they take puts the lie to that claimthat they think their life is no more valuable.

I don’t know many people who say otherwise and I don’t believe the few who do genuinelybelieve that, so when someone asks why colonize other places, be it other planets or otherstars or even other galaxies, I always feel it’s the wrong question.

Not why would you, if you could, but why wouldn’t you?

I don’t know if humanity is destined to colonize other galaxies, I’d never supportdoing so if someone else already lived there, but should it turn out that intelligent lifeis that rare I think we should, and as we’ve seen today it is on the table, even if wenever figure out how to make warp drives or wormholes.

As we head into 2018, two generations after we last set foot on the moon, I think it doeshelp to remember that the sky is not the limit and that we have potential new frontiers forbillions of years to come.

And we are going to keep on exploring them next year.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great year!

+--------------------------------+ | Interstellar Empires | | 2017-12-21 | | https://youtu.be/1LQU69sYd3s | +--------------------------------+

In all of human history, no empire has ever united the entire planet.

Ruling over an entire solar system, let alone thousands or billions of them,is a far more daunting task.

Today we are discussing the notion of interstellar empires, civilizations so large they encompassmany solar systems and perhaps the galaxy itself, and we are going to look at some ofthe problems doing so and how they might be overcome or circumvented.

Of course, the biggest problem from the outset is the speed of light, to the best of ourknowledge there’s no way to exceed it.

So if you rule over some mighty empire of a thousand stars spread over a hundred lightyears, one of your outlying planets might rebel and you wouldn’t even know they hadfor a century.

If you immediately dispatch a fleet to go crush the rebels, it will take them at leastanother century to arrive, meaning the great-grandchildren of the soldiers you sent will land to re-conquera planet who regards their rebellion as ancient history.

This is even more exacerbated in a full galactic empire, where the edge isn’t a hundred lightyears away but a hundred thousand.

It might easily take a million years for you to hear about a problem and get a fleet thereto deal with it, and on those kinds of timelines, even without genetic engineering as an option,you might as well be invading an unknown alien species.

As I’ve said before, while there probably aren’t any alien civilizations in this galaxy,you just have to be patient because they’ll arrive eventually and they’ll be relatedto you because Earth will be their original planet too.

So there is often a feeling that no interstellar empire is possible unless you have eitherFTL (Faster than Light), travel or communication, or a way to let people live much longer, lifeextension technology.

In our SFIA book of the Month, sponsored by Audible, Frank Herbert’s Dune, they hadboth, and from the same source too, the Spice Melange that extended human lifespans andallowed them to safely use the FTL system they had, as it granted some precognitiveabilities.

A unified empire is a bit more realistic there too, as you’ve got only one place that providesthe spice, the desert planet Dune, and only one group that provides space travel, theGuild.

It’s hard to keep systems unified even with FTL, as we’ll discuss, but Monopolies area decent approach, and Dune examines such concepts in an exciting and thought-provokingway that has made it one of the greatest classic of science fiction.

You can pick up a free copy of Dune today and get a 30-day trial of Audible, just usemy link, Audible.com/Isaac or text isaac to 500-500.

Dune also does a good job showing both how immense in space and time such empires almosthave to be, which is something a lot of our fictional examples fail at horribly, thoughit’s a difficult task.

Quite a few will say that they’ve got an empire of a million worlds, but what theyshow us seems like maybe a few dozen that themselves seem more like single cities orsmall states.

Even then, saying you’ve got a million planets spanning the galaxy still implies you’veonly colonized about 1 in 100,000 solar systems.

If you want a million solar systems, you don’t need a whole galaxy either, there’s aboutthat many within 400 light years of Earth.

If you’ve got a map of the galaxy on 1080p screen, each pixel would be about 100 lightyears and such a million-system empire would be about 8 pixels wide.

Even a single pixel, a diameter of 100 light years or a radius of 50, should contain acouple thousand systems with most probably having at least one planet that was no harderto terraform than Mars or Venus are.

Fictional galactic empires are always woefully underpopulated, the galaxy ought to containat least a billion planets close enough to Earth in gravity, temperature, and day lengththat you’d have problems noticing the differences and given the technologies most are shownpossessing, and also that we are often shown them including planets that are very non-terrestrial,they ought to have trillions of planets, not millions, and that’s without even gettinginto megastructures and artificial habitats, which let you house a whole billion-planetempire in a single solar system.

If you’re a channel regular and know all about Dyson Spheres and Kardashev 2 civilizations,then you already know that if you are talking about some empire containing billions of worldseach with hundreds of thousands or millions of people, like most sci fi planets seem tohave rather than being fully populated, you aren’t talking about an interstellar empire,you’re looking at an interplanetary one that at most controls a single solar system.

If we jumped to our solar system’s future a couple thousand years from now, and assumedit was one where people are mostly like they are today and no huge changes of basic physicshave been found, you’d expect to see a huge spherical cloud of habitats around the Suncomposed of several trillion rotating habitats, each of which qualified as a modest city stateor small country on its own, all forming a tight inner sphere that would be the equivalentof the system’s urbanized area.

Out past that would be a more disc-shaped and lightly populated region less dependenton sunlight qualifying as a bit of a suburb, and out past that in the Oort Cloud a hazysphere of a trillion or so mini-worlds counting as the system’s rural area.

See last week’s episode, Colonizing the Oort Cloud for details on that.

We’d expect that place to have a total population of perhaps 10^20, or 10 billion times ourcurrent population of a bit under 10 billion.

100 Quintillion people, none lacking in elbow room or comfortable amounts of food and otherresources.

You could go a lot higher if you wanted to and that’s without even embracing certainoptions like Transhumanism to go around in a more efficient cyborg body or upload yourmind to a computer.

Even a doorstopper fantasy novel of a thousand pages is usually well under half a millionwords, so you could fill an entire long book series just listing the names of all the planetsand nothing else, in a million world empire.

There’s a game called Warhammer 40k that I like to give some extra credit as a sciencefiction setting, even if the science part of that is laughable, for at least portrayingthe idea that such empires have billions of ships and conquering planets with countlessmillions of soldiers and can lose one, or even outright destroy it, without it qualifyingas big news.

They do a good job with the age part too, with their empire being thousands of yearsold and feeling like it’s held together by inertia and duct tape, not to mention itsabsolute ruthlessness.

Your classic Space Opera author legitimately tends to feel you have to have FTL travelto do the whole many-worlds approach, but you can do that just in one solar system.

I think the only author I’ve seen do that is Alastair Reynolds in his novel Revenger,and I don’t think most readers catch that it’s set in a decaying Dyson Swarm.

I’m not spoiling anything saying so here, since the clues that indicate it are stuffchannel regulars will recognize, and it doesn’t really matter to the plot, which feels likeclassic galactic space opera, traveling from world to world, in spite of staying insideour own solar system.

Reynolds’ also does a good job hammering home the impact of huge amounts of time inhis various novels.

That’s a big one even if you do have FTL, but as we mentioned earlier, without it yourempire has some serious issues at an interstellar scale.

Even just enforcing your will on neighboring systems is a lot like having a rebellion occurwhile George Washington was president, getting news of it when Andrew Jackson was, gettingyour fleet there when Teddy Roosevelt was, getting news of their success back when FranklinRoosevelt was, and getting the fleet home today.

Think about how much the United States has changed between now and then, and that’sjust for neighboring systems.

You start talking about systems a thousand light years away, still in your own galacticbackyard, and you’ve got timelines that have the insurrectionist planet rebellingagainst some ancient borderline mythological ruler like the Yellow Emperor or the ScorpionKing and just getting word of it now.

If we did the whole Stargate or Ancient Alien Astronauts thing and assume the pyramids andthe like were all interstellar gateways and these guys actually ruled over stellar empires,we might find out there were planets that used to be loyal to one of those ancient kingsand broke away.

Can you imagine us doing so and deciding to go and punish the rebels in the here and now?

Loyalists fleets sent out to crush rebellions only to come home and find out we’ve hada couple dozen rebellions of our own since they left?

That would seem fairly absurd.

Historically, it’s very hard to keep any sort of even nominally centralized empirecoherent if routine travel and communication times inside it take more than a year fromedge to edge.

That makes keeping control over even your own Oort Cloud a dubious proposition withoutFTL.

Let’s consider what advantages a future civilization might have to expand beyond thatone-year zone.

Since time is our biggest problem, in a lot of ways, let’s start there.

Things change over time, and that’s your real problem more than light lag itself.

I don’t need to send a fleet from Earth to re-conquer some rebel planet, not whenI can have a loyalist governor bordering on them get word of their rebellion and justtake action to deal with it.

It doesn’t even have to be from another system.

Even ignoring the Dyson Swarm scenarios, the very nature of the technology that lets yousettle other solar systems, which is extreme energy abundance, ensures just about everyplanet and moon and decent sized asteroid looks like a nice place to colonize.

It’s unlikely most of these worlds would have the entire planet rebel at once, justsome state on it, but their neighbors in the system are likely to have not rebelled either.

After all, we often dislike our neighbors more than folks living far off.

So such a rebellion might be dealt with in-system.

If not though, if you need to send in inter-stellar fleets, keep in mind you are not relying onjust one loyalist system maybe 10 light years away.

Space is three dimensional, so wherever your nearest neighboring system is, you will generallyhave a dozen or more other systems off in every direction not much further away.

So you don’t have to wait for word to get back to Earth, or even to some sub-sectorcapital, if everyone knows what they’re supposed to do in such an eventuality.

You definitely need a coordinated plan, a strategy for commanders to follow if certainthings happen.

As everybody knows, that’s the first rule of warfare, always have a plan for every reasonableeventuality.

It’s a little more important when your admirals and generals are trying to coordinate theiractions, and signals take a decade to travel back and forth.

That’s assuming a lot though, since it would be like relying on giving Charlemagne instructionson what to do and expecting that both the instructions and willingness to follow themwould have been passed onto Angela Merkel, or that Emperor Hadrian could expect QueenElizabeth II to have maintained that wall he built.

However, we’ve got three ways of dealing with stuff like this in the future.

One is our existing method, we try to pass on what’s important and why it’s importantto our successors, and that can be effective if you are good at placing an emphasis ontraditions and pick those carefully.

We do have a lot of multi-generational projects and institutions.

Some of which have been running for several centuries and without too much drift fromthe original intent.

Not very many though, and most that have lasted centuries have mutated far away from the original.

That could possibly be improved as we better understand psychology and sociology.

We’d probably never get anything with the kind of predictive power of Asimov’s Psychohistory,as we explained in the episode on that, but you could get quite good at figuring out howto pass on traditions and goals stably to future generations and keep colonies frommutating away from the original founding concepts.

On this channel, and in science fiction in general, we tend to focus a lot on the physicalsciences, but it’s important to remember the social sciences could be a lot more importantto maintaining giant civilizations than what powers your rocket ships.

But technology offers us another possible alternative, out of biology and medicine.

We’ve talked about life extension on the channel before, and I’ve joked many a timeabout how it or Dyson Spheres tend to seem less believable to people than Faster thanLight travel, even though one flat out violates the known laws of physics while the othertwo do not.

See the life extension episode for details on that, but short form, there’s no physicallaws preventing us from making tiny microscopic machines.

You can have several trillion of them in your body and use those to repair or replace damagedsections of your body or damaged DNA in your cells.

Doing so is a lot easier said than done, and there may turn out to be easier ways to extendlifespans, but it is certainly physically possible.

This doesn’t make you immortal, see the “Digital Death” episode for how even themost extreme forms of life extension can breakdown against the immensity of astronomical timelines,but it offers an option that would mean your interstellar colony ships aren’t arrivingat their destination crewed by the great-great-grandchildren of the original crew, but by the originalcrew, and possibly also their great-grandchildren.

Interstellar journeys being rather boring, raising kids gives you something to occupyyour time and making them helps break up the boredom.

This is a handy approach for sending in interstellar armies too.

You can launch a fleet with skeleton crews and have them arrive fully manned, like compoundinterest for people.

This saves on the cost of salaries too, though how you are paying people or taxing distantcolonies in a no-FTL universe is a tricky topic as we saw in the Interplanetary Tradeepisode.

But, if suddenly people are living centuries or even potentially thousands of years, thegame changes a lot.

The colonial governor of some distant planet of billions founded a few thousand years agomight have been born on Earth.

We’ve been using the term empire a lot even though we just mean a coherent civilization,be it democratic and free or tyrannical despotism, but neo-feudal civilizations are a stapleof science fiction and this is one area where it might be kind of right.

Even if you have a working democracy, and a genuine one not just for show in a civilizationwhere people don’t die of old age, you are probably going to be mostly governed by very,very old people.

Gerontocracy is a pretty common system throughout human history, even if it is almost neverthe official one.

A lot like meritocracy or plutocracy, rule based on merit or wealth, it’s rarely theofficial form of government, but often a major de facto aspect of them.

We like age and experience in our leaders, mostly, but obviously if you pick the veryoldest people to govern, you will constantly be replacing them from failing vigor, senility,and death, all of which cause problems.

Hereditary rule is another one of those methods that often comes up as an unofficial formof government, but has been official a lot too.

Indeed it remains the default method of passing on power and assets, we just tend to exemptgovernance from that.

The problem with this method was never a secret, the heir might be a drooling incompetent,spoiled brat, or total sociopath.

With life extension though, you have the upside that the eldest no longer has a huge experiencegap over their siblings, if you live to be a thousand you’ve probably got thousandsof potential heirs to pick a competent one from and groom them, and people have had centuriesto either identify that person’s faults or get comfortable with them.

Nor can one ignore that technology can potentially deal with these problems.

If your biology and psychology is good enough, you can probably fix people who are moronsor sociopaths.

Disturbingly, you also can genetically tailor people to be better at certain tasks and accidentallyend up with an inherited caste system too.

That’s been historically popular as well after all.

Add to that, everybody knows beyond any reasonable doubt who made the place.

That planet or habitat was terraformed or built by specific folks with specific legalcontracts.

Those claims don’t rest on oral history and tradition.

It’s a little different if you have solid records, video, genetic testing, and so onbacking up the assertion that your ancestor literally made the place you live.

It’s even more different if that ancestor, Beth, still lives down the road and can breakout their photo albums and scrapbooks from that period, and has been sitting on the towncouncil since it was founded.

Everyone knows Beth and even the folks who might not think she is super-competent considerher a known factor and one with centuries of experience at what she does.

Even if they’re officially a democracy, even if they genuinely are one, that personis likely to get elected over and over again simply by inertia and being a known commodity.

A key point then is that extended lifespans could have a massively stabilizing influenceon colonies.

For good or ill, those folks who left Earth might still be around, and their siblingsmight still be around on Earth and exchange heavily delayed family gossip and birthdaycards.

Now the other one that comes up for keeping the original crew as your colonists on aninterstellar ship is to stick them all on ice or in stasis, and that is one option thatsometimes gets raised as an option for beating light lag.

Everybody agrees to freeze themselves for a decade, wake up for a year, then go backon ice.

A variation on this, Aestivation Hypothesis, got suggested as a Fermi Paradox Solutionrecently too.

The notion being that civilizations might sleep until the Universe was colder, whichwould generally mean computation was far more efficient, as we discussed in the Civilizationsat the End of Time episodes.

It doesn’t work unless everyone really, really wants it to though, since I can’timagine why I would voluntarily go into slumber for a century just so folks on another planetcould feel up to date.

Even if you can get people to do it, whole civilizations, you are really leaving yourselfvulnerable to anyone who disobeys or who is from outside.

Beyond that, all the resources of the galaxy are hardly static and eternal, stars keepburning their fuel and asteroids full of handy material keep crashing into them, so there’sno advantage to waiting to gather those.

It does work in the specific post-stellar era we discuss in Civilizations at the Endof Time because everything is all gathered up already and it’s the only real option,and you’re not freezing yourself, you’re slowing yourself down.

You can speed back up if you need to but you, and any rivals, won’t want to do that becausethe whole system we discussed there relies on keeping cold, and it takes a very longtime for any components you are using to cool back off every time you use them.

Prior to that glacial existence you were grabbing up every bit of matter and energy you could,and twiddling your thumbs on ice for the galactic equivalent of daylight savings time is nota practical approach to doing that.

When you wake up, there’s less stuff to harvest, even assuming someone didn’t doit while you slept.

I wouldn’t expect rebels to politely go to sleep to wait for your fleet to arriveeither.

But I wanted to mention that option, it’s impractical but does allow you to circumventlight lag and helps you maintain a unified culture.

Absent options like this you’ve got the issue that folks are not only going to divergefrom your parent civilization, but that civilization will alter too.

It’s not rebellious kids but rebellious cousins.

This all assumes you want stasis of cultures, which is dubious since that concept is almostantithetical to a lot of modern civilization, which tends to embrace change, or at leastsays it does.

Some we embrace, some we reject, but more importantly there have been a lot of civilizationswhich staunchly desired cultural stasis and pushed hard to maintain it.

That mindset probably is not very conducive to improving technology, since better technologyis almost by definition culturally disruptive.

However, they might have plateaued on their research, either not particularly feelinga need for more tech or just slamming into brick walls on further research.

Most fictional interstellar empires are technologically stagnant anyway, or at least not gaining newtechnology at an accelerating rate, and that’s probably one area authors get right.

We are nowhere near maxing out our own technology but we could hit a brick wall on science ineven just a couple of centuries.

Giant empires don’t necessarily help with that either, since a breakthrough in sciencein one part of it will take centuries to reach the other end, and possibly have gotten discovereddozens of times independently just from light lag.

That is one reason to be part of an empire though, particularly if it is just a loosecoalition, you can get the science and art of a thousand systems and those should alltravel at light speed.

You don’t necessarily need benefits to be in an empire, historically, many have operatedwith the lone benefit that non-membership results in death, but if you are running somethingmore civilized, it’s hard to get taxes out of places that are decades away and ratherself-sufficient, since it’s hard to offer them any service.

Also hard to convince an entire fully-populated planet, let alone a whole star system, toagree to alliances.

I think you could convince people to stay part of an alliance that just agreed to exchangesignals and maybe use the same basic measurement units, language, and currency, but even thatis nigh impossible at a galactic scale unless you agree to no change.

For the conquest and coercion options, those are a little trickier and we’ll save themfor the Interstellar Warfare episode in the spring.

Language especially would seem very difficult, but places could have their own changing localtongues and just some agreed on non-changing basic language, or that all changes to itmust come only from a specific committee on Earth.

Which sounds nuts as a concept but remember it wouldn’t be the day-to-day language andcomputers would probably do all the translating, so you are mostly agreeing to use the samebasic code so two planets or ships can talk to each other by speaking to their computerswho speak to each other and translate.

There is obviously a lot of leeway in what we mean by ‘empire’ too, I’m just usingit as a blanket term for some sort of cohesive civilization.

Earth, just a single planet, has never been unified and I honestly doubt we ever willbe unless we have some external threat making us be.

The same applies to any Star League, they’ve got no external threats in any situation wherethey can’t remain unified just by light lag, since it implies war is very nearly impossibleon a galactic scale, but if such threats and wars were viable, so too would be a unifiedcivilization.

If it’s not, there’s not much reason for hostilities either, so maintaining loose allianceswith neighbors, defensive or trade pacts, would still make sense and probably not behard to engage in.

And you can have conflicts between neighboring systems, a decade really is not an absurdtimeline for conflicts and as we discussed last week, odds are good they have territorygenuinely bordering each other, with potentially overlapping Oort Cloud settlements and possiblefeuds over rogue planets that might be just days not years away from other inhabited locations.

Space isn’t static either so stuff would slowly drift in or out of someone’s bubblearound their own star.

Like the banks of rivers moving, and of such things are conflicts born.

Even in such cases though, where there is a proximity of days not decades, you needto have clever people with a lot of leeway to act and take the initiative because theywon’t be able to call home for advice and permission.

You can’t plan for every eventuality, after all, and as everybody knows, the first ruleof warfare is that no plan survives contact with the enemy.

So you need folks on the scene who can adjust and tweak implementation at least.

So while we can see some options for large coherent civilizations without FTL, one cansee why most authors choose to use it.

I’d probably do it too if I ever wrote a book meant to be set in an interstellar period,though I’d probably write one in a proto-Dyson Swarm instead.

In fact I did use FTL in one setting.

Folks ask me a lot if I’ll ever write something, fiction or not, and I usually say the channelkeeps me too busy, but in point of fact I do actually consult and provide technicaladvice on a lot of projects.

It’s a lot of fun to work with an author or with a big team of game and graphics designers.

For the upcoming 2018 video game Hades, I did include a Faster Than Light system.

I’m a big believer any handwave science or solution should be kept to a minimum, soI had a lot of fun trying to connect every aspect to just one, up to and including whyhumanity found the galaxy free to colonize without existing alien empires in the way.

Realism is important, especially now that graphics have reached the point you can genuinelymodel something that huge in detail, and it was a lot of fun to include tons of giantships and megastructures instead of the traditional single-biome planets.

I think if you are going to have ships kilometers long manned by millions they need to actuallyshow it.

Why is the ship that big?

Why has it got a crew that big rather than computers running it all?

Why do fleets pound on each other at short range?

Why did their empire emerge as it did?

What’s the economy and motivations for folks to do stuff?

Why are people desperate or poor when their tech should easily provide comfort for all?

Why aren’t they using various and very obvious applications of that technology to live ina Utopia?

If you’re designing a futuristic fictional setting, you don’t have to answer all thosequestions, but I think you should, and with realistic or at least plausible scenarios,even if it does feature Clarketech or Unobtainium.

If there’s no ancient alien empires still around, what happened to them?

Always tricky to come up with a both plausible and novel solution to that, and I think Idid for Hades, and I’ll probably discuss it more in a future episode.

That last is a point I always make about interstellar empires and the Fermi Paradox; that you don’thave to be cohesive to keep expanding, previous pioneer colonies grow up and send out morepioneers to neighboring empty systems.

So you can’t forget about all those old empires that might have existed millions ofyears back that would still be expanding even if the core collapsed, because they don’tcare about that anymore than most of us care about the collapse of some Egyptian or Chinesedynasty a few thousand years ago, indeed less since it takes them millennia to even hearfrom their homeworld and they feel no more kinship to them than we do to a chimp or bonobo,or they to each other.

Or that the borders of the universe don’t end at the edge of the galaxy, so neitherdoes their civilization have to.

Our topic for next week, Intergalactic Colonization, will look at how you can do that even withoutFTL.

Don’t think of FTL as a magic handwave that automatically allows interstellar empireseither, it obviously helps and may be impossible without it, particularly anything close knit,but you’re still talking about many, potentially billions, of individual Kardashev-2 civilizations.

Of those, each individual one would have a population and resources so big that mostfictional galactic empires would fit inside a small corner of one.

A tiny local nation that most inhabitants of that system would barely recognize thename of.

A realistic galactic empire, even just one with only planets inhabited, should have billionsof planets and if each had a representative, just one for the whole planet, they wouldneed their own planet just to meet on, with no room left over for any family, staff, guards,or service industries.

But if you do have FTL to do such things, it’s not just a galaxy of planets, or evena Kardashev-3 galaxy of Dyson swarms you have to consider, but intergalactic or inter-dimensionalempires, with bits and pieces in alternate realities.

Again, the Universe doesn’t end at the edge of the galaxy.

Frank Herbert was always a little unclear on that in the Dune Novels, and canon on thatis very iffy even if you don’t include the ones his son and Kevin J. Anderson wrote,

which is a subject of much fan feuding.

But as best as I can tell, that interstellar empire was not set in just one galaxy or evennecessarily one Universe, it’s suggested at one point that Guild Navigators might travelbetween Universes to parallel or alternate ones, always picking systems that are safe,as they are precognitive, to settle people in.

Instant FTL to any place makes settling a planet on the other side of the Universe aseasy as the one next door after all, so your empire isn’t necessarily a contiguous regionof space, and indeed giant empires inside a single system Dyson swarm probably wouldn’tbe either since all the habitats are orbiting and moving and indeed mobile, able to turnon an engine and migrate to another nation.

Dune, which again is our book of the month sponsored by Audible, is one of my favoritenovels and series, because it has such a sense of vastness and deep future.

You really feel like you’re in some distant time of an immense and ancient empire wherepeople aren’t entirely human anymore, but a bit superhuman.

It’s a good pick for audio too as it’s been made into an audiobook more than onceand one of those has a full cast, rather than a single narrator, and that always adds someextra depth.

Those full-cast productions are like a movie or TV show, that you can listen to while drivingor doing anything else where you need your hands and eyes free.

You can pickup a FREE copy today, just use my link in this episode’s description, Audible.com/Isaac

or text promo code isaac to 500-500 to get a free book and 30 day free trial, and thatbook is yours to keep whether you stay on with Audible or not.

You are going to love Frank Herbert’s Dune, but if you don’t, you can swap it out foranother at any time.

Speaking of audio, I’ve been getting asked a lot in comments recently if I’d ever considerputting the episodes out audio-only and I realized it’s been a long time since I mentionedit, but every episode is available on soundcloud and iTunes as audio-only for download, bothwith music and without, and I do always put a link to those in the videos descriptionsright with the links for the channel’s website, social media locations, patreon donation link,and the link to all the cover art and thumbnails we use here, by artist Jakub Grygier.

I tend to forget to mention such things because there’s already a lot of repetition of individualkey concepts and references to old episodes with more details, and when I forget to includethose I tend to get asked stuff like “Hey Isaac, could you do an episode on Wormholesor Quantum Entanglement?”, though that’s partially my own fault since I don’t liketo reference older episodes with inferior audio and visual quality.

And let me thank our Patreon supporters for funding all those improvements and all thevolunteers who’ve been helping making graphics or doing script review these last few months,I feel it’s really improved the channel over previous years.

Again next week is Intergalactic Colonization and that will end Year 3 of the channel, butwe’ll be back the very next week to start the year off big by looking at Colonizingthe Sun itself, and see just how far we can push the limits on what modern science mightlet us do there.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Outward Bound: Colonizing the Oort Cloud| | 2017-12-14 | | https://youtu.be/H8Bx7y0syxc | +--------------------------------+

It’s cold out there in the Oort Cloud but someday it could be the placewhere we keep the home fires burning for humanity.

Today we’ll be talking about how to colonize our solar system’s Oort Cloud and KuiperBelt, two fairly distinct regions of space but with a good deal of overlap into how theywould be colonized.

However we should start by talking briefly about how planets form and what a planet isfirst.

The basics are simple enough, some region of space is thick with gas and something,like the shockwave of a supernova, comes by and causes it to start being less evenly distributed.

Bits will emerge that compact into objects and have enough mass to suck in more materialbut this often results in a protoplanetary disc.

Momentum, angular or regular, has to be conserved so you end up with a disc of material allspinning in one direction and a star forms at its center and other clumps become planets.

Clumps of matter on the same orbit of this disc tend to combine.

There are accepted rules for what qualifies as a planet.

The first rule is that the object must orbit a star, otherwise it’s not a planet, it’sa moon.

The second is that it needs to have enough mass to be basically a sphere-shape, otherwisea soda can orbiting the Sun would qualify as a planet.

And the third is that it should have cleared the region it orbits through.

This third rule for what makes a planet is the one that demoted Pluto to dwarf planetstatus.

Pluto is a bit more massive than the entire Asteroid Belt that orbits the Sun betweenMars and Jupiter, but the Kuiper Belt, out past Neptune, is a lot more massive than theAsteroid Belt.

Any solar system might have an Asteroid Belt, or even multiple ones, but odds are most havea Kuiper Belt, some region on the edge of the main protoplanetary disc that was toospread out to form a planet, it’s like the foam at the edge of a whirlpool.

Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object itself, part of why it was demoted from full planet status.

The region out past Neptune is full of icy bodies, many of which would make respectablemoons, that we variously call Trans-Neptunian Objects, Plutinoids, Kuiper Belt Objects,or Scattered Disc Objects.

We don’t know their combined mass with accuracy, but this region from 30 to 50 AU is estimatedto be 20 to 200 times more massive than the Asteroid Belt.

We often talk about how handy the Belt will be for space colonization, and this secondbelt is as well.

Out past that is a more hypothetical region called the Oort Cloud, which probably hastwo segments.

One inner one that is somewhat disc-like, sometimes called the Hills Cloud, and theouter region is spherical.

Now we often call the Oort Cloud theoretical but there’s no doubt that region of spaceexists and has lots of tiny icy bodies, just the exact extent and nature of it is in doubt.

It’s very hard to see a Kuiper Belt Object, and they are far closer to Earth and the Sunthan Oort objects.

Two identical objects, one ten times further from Earth and the Sun, are vastly differentin their detectability.

Being ten times further from us, we see only ten-squared or one-hundredth the light it’scloser twin gives off, at the same time it’s ten times further from the sun, and only getsten-squared or one hundredth the light its closer twin gets.

So on Earth the closer one appears ten thousand time brighter, and only our best equipmentcan see all but the largest Kuiper Belt objects.

The Oort Cloud is not ten times further away than the Kuiper Belt, it’s more like a thousand,so objects out there appear about a trillion times dimmer than their twins in the KuiperBelt.

For that reason we don’t have much data on objects out there by direct imaging, sowe know there’s plenty but can’t speak with much certainty and have to limit it totheory and models for now.

As an example, a clone of Earth and the Sun off at 1 million AU, about 16 light years,would be a trillionth as bright too, because it’s just far away from us, not its Sun.

Needless to say we have a lot of difficulties seeing such an object, but we know where tolook, the volume of space near a sun where you’d find planets is about a billionththe volume an Oort Cloud would occupy.

On top of that, while we theorize the mass of the Oort Cloud to be several times thatof Earth, albeit with huge margins of error, the objects in it will tend to be a lot smallerthan a planet.

Of course you can have planets out in the Oort Cloud too, wandering ejected ones orones in such a loose orbit they barely know the Sun is there, and we call these RoguePlanets, Nomad Planets, or Steppenwolf Planets.

We discussed the possibility of life developing on these way back in the Rogue Planets episodeand we briefly touched on settling them there too.

The basic upshot though is that Kuiper Belt, Oort Disc, and Oort Cloud probably are swimmingin tiny icy bodies of potential value to us, many of which might have some rocky materialin them too.

To colonize any of these objects one has to abandon solar or fission power as classicoptions, in favor of fusion, the fuel for which they have plenty of.

There’s two caveats on that.

You might find some fissile materials out there and you can export them, and so too,while a solar panel won’t work for direct sunlight, lasers on solar satellites nearerthe Sun can beam energy out to panels.

I’d always rather have my power plant on-hand, not so far off it might take a month justfor a message to reach them, but orbits are predictable things and keeping a laser ona station out in the Oort wouldn’t be that hard.

Lasers do spread out over distance, so it would arrive less as a tight beam and morelike a diffuse flashlight, and of course we might prefer microwaves over visible light,a maser, but there’s nothing too sophisticated or complex about supplying power this way.

I always like to stress the importance of fusion to humanity’s future in space, butI also always like to make I it clear that with a bit more hassle we can do most of thesame things by using the natural fusion reactor that is our Sun.

Normally when we start discussing these icy bodies for colonization it’s in the contextof dragging them inwards to terraform Mars or Venus, but as we’ve seen in this series,that classic image of colonizing the solar system by terraforming the planets in it isseriously under-utilizing those resources.

We call those objects far out past Neptune icy bodies, but ice in this case is not justwater but methane, carbon and ammonia as well, and such objects often will have rocky materialin their centers or spread out in an ice and gravel fashion, like on the side of a roadthat just got plowed for snow.

These other ices along with regular water ice are known as volatiles, and they containa lot of the materials we need for life, particularly ones that are not very abundant in the warmerinner solar system.

That’s why folks want to bring them in.

The thing is, while the Kuiper Belt Objects are perfect for that, the Oort Cloud reallyis not.

It could take centuries to move such an object inwards in a fashion that wouldn’t burnup far more energy than its worth.

The Kuiper Belt also contains more than enough ices for terraforming all the planets andmaking a lot of habitats.

Now if you want to go full on Dyson Swarm, you need a lot more, and the Oort Cloud probablyhas a lot more, but even if it has dozens of times the entire mass of Earth in these,it’s still a lot less than the Sun has.

We talked about extracting resources from the Sun via Starlifting in the Starliftngand Dyson Swarm episodes, and we’ll discuss it a bit more in the next episode of the series,Colonizing the Sun.

We can’t be sure we can ever get such a process working, but it requires no new physicsand again is our topic for next time.

Assume for the moment you do get that working, and you do have fusion, and that you startedmining the Sun because you’ve already run low on materials in the inner system out toand including the Kuiper Belt.

At that point the Oort Cloud no longer looks like a great place to bring material in from.

That’s why this episode is titled Colonizing the Oort Cloud rather than the Kuiper Belt,I’m sure we will colonize bits of the Kuiper Belt, sometimes just temporarily, and againthe colonization method is almost identical to the Oort Cloud.

However it’s close enough to us, and easy enough to mine from the lack of gravity, thatI’d tend to expect us to bring the material in to use in settlements more often than settlingway out there.

However the Oort Cloud is even more way out there and while it probably contains far moreresources, it’s nothing compared to what the Sun itself has.

So leaving those out there, especially if you can use them for something out there,seems like a probable scenario for the future of our solar system.

Now settling one is actually trivially easy, if you can get out there and have a powersupply sufficient to live without the Sun, which you do if you can get out there andslow down to land on one.

If you can get people out to the icy bodies you can colonize them.

The easiest method parallels how we do asteroids, you ‘land’, which due to low gravity ismore like parking at a space station, find a low spot or crater, and dig or melt yourway in, using the material you extracted to fill over the top, like an anthill.

Inside that you build a rotating habitat, or more likely just insert the one you andthe colonists came in, which can later be expanded.

Indeed, as with asteroids, since there is so little gravity in the way, you can alwaysexpand your habitat, or chain of habitats, to be far larger than the original objectsince you can pile all the material you are not using around you in a shell.

Thus you could start with an irregular shaped comet a dozen kilometers wide and end witha nice polished icy shell the size of a decent moon full of habitats.

Such shells give nice protection from cosmic radiation and meteorite strikes too.

Of course the big question is why you would do this?

There are a lot of these icy bodies but they are spread far apart, your nearest neighbormight be further from you than Earth is from Pluto and signals back and forth with Earthcould take many weeks or even months.

The edge of the Oort Cloud is about a light year away after all.

What would a colony out there be doing?

Why did they go there?

What do they trade in, if anything?

What purpose does such a colony serve?

At first it would seem like none.

If the material they had was particularly valuable back in the solar system we wouldn’tcolonize these objects, at most we’d set up a small and minimally manned outpost todo maintenance on the engine moving it back into the solar system.

That’s a point to stress too, one shouldn’t think of the Oort Cloud as part of a solarsystem, anymore than a farm a fifty miles from Chicago is part of Chicago, city or suburbs,just because it happens to be closer to Chicago than Milwaukee.

If it is even nominally involved with the city it will be because it has roads and highwaysthere and is inside its economic sphere.

Remember that bit about highways as it will come up again in a bit.

Again though, it wouldn’t seem like a colony in the Oort Cloud could serve a purpose.

Stations out there can’t serve as waypoints to other solar systems for instance, as oddsare very few of the objects are on a roughly straight line to another neighboring star,and more importantly, interstellar ships do not stop en route to refuel or let the passengersoff to stretch their legs.

A ship gets up to speed and coasts in interstellar space, it doesn’t burn any fuel while coastingexcept for life support.

And that life support doesn’t cost much energy, for a ship or a habitat.

Oh, it’s a lot of power compared to your electric bill, especially if you’re providingartificial sunlight for farms or parks, but it's tiny compared to the energy needed tomove a ship at any reasonable interstellar speed.

It takes a lot more energy to get a ship up to 10% of light speed than a simple calculationof its kinetic energy would imply, but at a minimum you’d expect to need at least10^18 joules of energy per ton of vessel, and even if we assumed each person only needed3 tons of ship, cargo for the destination, and material for hydroponics, living room,and so on, and the trip would take a century, or about 3 billion seconds, that’s stillan average power supply of a gigawatt per person.

That’s about a million times what a household tends to use and still a very low estimatefor total energy usage to move that ship.

It’s also enough power to light up an entire square kilometer of land at perpetual noontimelighting, which is way more space than anything but a hunter-gatherer civilization would needper person.

10 to 100 kilowatts per person for all life support, even with onboard parks and gardens,is more likely, and even using the high end figure there and the low end for energy tomove that ship, you still have a life support system using just 1% of 1% of the ship’senergy budget.

Go faster and you need more energy for speed and less for life support, shorter trip.

The only reason an interstellar ship can’t have everybody living in their own cabin inthe woods is all the mass needed for that dirt and forest.

The power needs are a non-issue.

A space station or rotating habitat way out in the Oort Cloud doesn’t have that issue,it isn’t moving things.

Now neither does a habitat in the inner solar system, but the point is in a fusion economyliving space is only an issue because you have to build it and invest the mass to makeit.

One kilogram of fusion fuel, even with fairly extravagant individual power usage and inefficientequipment, can support a person’s life support needs for a century.

So even if you can only use deuterium for fusion, the easiest fusion option, as opposedto regular hydrogen, your typical comet-like body a few kilometers in radius is going tohave a megaton or more of it, enough to support one person for a hundred billion years ora hundred thousand people for a million years, and you can boost that to 10 billion years,the lifetime of the Sun, if you can use regular hydrogen.

Even longer if you have higher fusion that can step hydrogen up to heavier elements thanhelium or have feedable kugelblitz black holes.

And we are talking about Colonizing the Oort Cloud, something that should be at least manycenturies off for anything but a few prototypes, so assuming some higher tech is probably okay.

So again living out there is no problem, any random comet could become a major metropolisthat mostly needed no imports or exports.

Again though the question is why?

On the one hand it is a lot closer than any stars, so if you just want a place to sendpeople who want their own private nation or people who want to get away from whateverpower or group of powers control the solar system, the Oort Cloud is a good place.

But even then, it’s not too much harder or time consuming to get to another solarsystem than an Oort object, and then you’ve got an entire solar system, not just one comet.

Of course those solar systems are probably claimed by someone, and if you just want asmall country of maybe a few million, arguing claims with some group that plans to colonizeanother solar system to eventually support quadrillions of people is probably not worththe effort.

A few of the potential drivers for colonizing the Oort cloud could be instability in thesolar system, be it from a war or a disaster.

These disasters could be artificial or natural.

Natural ones include a close encounter with a rogue Jupiter, star or star remnant disruptingthe planets and flinging them out of the system.

Another natural one could ultimately be the Sun getting hotter and brighter as it agescausing the inner Solar system to become inhospitable.

As to artificial disasters, the Oort cloud might also be used in an attempt to hide froman aggressive domestic or alien civilization.

That is their one really valuable and unique feature, isolation and safety.

Even in an emerging interstellar empire, our topic for next week, where every large rockin a solar system and every solar system for hundreds of light years around might be colonizedand the rights to it fiercely contested if it is not, it’s very unlikely anyone isdispatching armadas to go claim a single mountain-sized chunk of ice and gravel trillions of kilometersfrom the nearest sun and many billions of kilometers from even its nearest neighboringicebergs in space.

In many ways you’re more isolated out there than some colony ten thousand light yearsaway would be because over time those places would all develop and grow in population.

There’s always folks for whom being far away from civilization is a plus, not a minus,and if you want to stay that way, picking prime real estate isn’t the best option.

If your goal is to have a civilization far from anybody else, claiming a distant fertilevalley hundreds of miles from that civilization out in the wilderness just ensures maybe afew generations before new neighbors arrive near you, and a distant solar system is likelyto be the same.

Worse too because if you leave on some arkship for a several thousand year journey to buildyour own distant Utopia, there’s a good chance faster and better ships will have arrivedin the meantime, constructed centuries later by folks who probably don’t know or careyou claimed that system already, and certainly won’t care if they settle the one next toit and you complain you didn’t want neighbors.

In an expanding and growing civilization, if you want lots of space to yourself forgenerations worth of time, you either need to be willing to pack up every so often orpick a place people don’t really want.

A random Oort object probably qualifies.

Of course that other option is viable too, any such colony is basically a spaceship sittinginside a mountain of spaceship fuel, so if the neighborhood gets crowded or uncomfortable,you just build an engine, or turn it on if you still have the one you used to get there,and head off on a nomadic journey.

It’s an interesting dynamic we’ll talk about more next week, on the one hand interplanetaryand stellar empires are likely to be far more immense and populous than science fictiontends to portray them, because people don’t just colonize planets, and should be hardto manage as a homogenous unit.

On the other hand what allows such populations is that independence of actual planets becausepeople are living in habitats that can be easily turned into spaceships.

So it’s more like an RV than a house or farm, you can just pick up and leave if youdon’t like the neighborhood.

Which could have the strange byproduct of having space-city habitats just pack up andleave whatever empire they belong to or move into another.

But surely we can do better than just isolation as a motive for living there though?

It’s probably enough, isolated farmsteads typically are more about the isolation thanthe farming, which is just about getting enough revenue to buy what you need and can’t make,and these are fairly self-sufficient colonies; still, what other purposes do they have?

They can make some money just serving as radar stations and relays, making sure interstellarspace is clear of dangerous debris or accurately marked where not, and picking up and retransmittingsignals.

They could maybe charge a tax or tariff for passing through their space which they keepclear and safe, and those three things might be more than enough to pay for informationand entertainment from the inner solar system.

They could sell some bulk raw materials, ammonia, nitrogen, and so on, particularly if starliftingnever got going.

Nitrogen is likely to always be in demand when you’re building living space, peopledon’t need it but plants do.

Not much but we do have one other option.

I said interstellar starships don’t slow down, so they don’t need fuel and rest stops,but about a year ago we did an episode called Interstellar Highways where we discussed howto do ships that travel far faster and more efficiently than even a fusion drive wouldpermit by being pushed by powerful lasers.

Lasers have range limits, as they do expand, and what’s more you can get more mileageout of them by bouncing the beam between places.

You can see that episode for details but the basic notion is to string out a long chainof beaming stations between two stars and use them to push a ship up to speed or reversethat, push back against them to slow them down.

So these Oort Colonies could serve that function, and since they are innately mobile they canmove themselves to be part of such a chain too.

One of millions of such stations spread over hundreds of such laser highways to all ourneighboring systems though still very isolated, no closer to their neighbors than Pluto isto us.

Such systems, as discussed in that episode, allow travel between stars far faster andcheaper than not only fusion, but even systems like antimatter or black hole powered ships,which still suffer from the limitations of the rocket equation as they have to carrytheir own fuel.

On the other hand fuel can be moved down these highways quite cheaply, in tankers or evenbeamed, and since you can accelerate particles quite quickly, you could actually send rawmaterial to or from the Oort station and a ship, just a particle beam carrying oxygento a ship, or metals from a ship to a station needing them, or even fusion fuel from thestation to a ship that would need it to slow down if it went past the highway’s end orsomehow drifted off it.

And now suddenly these Oort Cloud colonies aren’t sparse poor villages in the distantreaches of space but big truck stops or even fortresses, considering those giant pushinglaser cannons are, well, giant laser cannons with a clear field of view over empty spacelight hours across.

Needless to say, as many solar systems are colonized, it might be advantageous to havea ton of defense stations light-months out from your system proper, if your interstellarneighbors aren’t the friendliest bunch.

So you’ve got signal relays, pushing lasers for interstellar ships, defense screens, andradars for hazards or debris or sneaky neighbor ships.

Between all of those, you not only have the ability to make such Oort Colonies but a clearmotivation to assist or subsidize making them.

We don’t have a great guess on mass total or distribution in the Oort Cloud, but it’sguessed there may be trillions of icy bodies a kilometer or more across, and any one ofthose has more than enough water and organic-critical materials for an entire O’neill cylinderfor few hundred thousand people, and certainly more than enough for a decent sized communityof a few thousand.

Of course there are probably far more even smaller bodies sufficient for such smallercommunities too.

Any Oort Cloud civilization would be a very spread out thing, likely with at most loosealliances of neighboring ones if not totally independent, and utterly eclipsed by the farmore massive civilizations that could exist in the inner solar system.

But with trillions of such objects, each potentially supporting hundreds of thousands of people,you could easily have the Oort Cloud home to hundreds of quadrillions of people, smallcompared to a Dyson Swarm but still more than a million times Earth’s current populationand huge compared to your typical fictional interstellar empire.

Next week we will be heading out beyond the solar system to examine the concept of InterstellarEmpires, where we’ll be discussing the flaws in commons assumptions on this topic and somerealistic approaches.

Our sponsor, Brilliant.org, has an excellent course, “Worlds Beyond Earth”, that explainsconcepts of interstellar travel, locating exoplanets, and how we determine which onesmight be habitable.

Worlds Beyond Earth is an excellent primer for that topic and let’s you transitionfrom viewing interstellar colonization from a science fiction perspective to viewing itthe way a physicist does.

To support the channel and learn more about Brilliant, go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur

and sign up for free.

As a bonus, the first 200 subscribers will get 20% off the annual Premium membership.

After next Week’s Interstellar Empires we will head out of the galaxy and out of 2017to discuss Intergalactic Colonization.

We will then return to Outward Bound series at the beginning of the year, but rather thanheading further out from Earth and the Solar System, we will visit the center of our solarsystem to discuss Colonizing the Sun itself.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Machine Rebellion | | 2017-11-30 | | https://youtu.be/jHd22kMa0_w | +--------------------------------+

When it comes to machines, we tend to focus on the the good and the bad, but when stuffgoes wrong, things could get downright ugly.

Robots and artificial intelligence have been a staple in science fiction since before weeven had electronic computers, and the notion of man-made people or machines rebelling againstus is probably even older, at least back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Today we are going to analyze that notion, a machine rebellion, and since our only examplesare from science fiction we’ll be drawing on some popular fictional examples.

One example of that is the film Blade Runner, whose long-awaited sequel came out last month,and we explored some of the concepts for humanoid robots last month too in the Androids episode.

That film, Blade Runner, is based off the book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

by Philip K. Dick, and is the SFIA book of the Month, sponsored by Audible.

I think there’s two key reasons why this shows up so much in fiction.

The first, I think, is probably that humanity’s history and our character as a civilizationhasn’t always been very rosy.

“Do what I say or else” has been a pretty common ultimatum issued routinely in probablyevery human civilization that has ever existed.

Sometimes people get fed up with doing as they were told or suffering consequences ofit and rebel against that authority.

Sometimes that has failed horribly and sometimes even in success the replacement has been almostas bad or even worse than what preceded it.

I doubt I need to review the bleaker episodes of our collective history to convince anyoneof that.

Not every episode of rebellion has been bloodily suppressed or successful and just as bad;indeed arguably the most common rebellion is the fairly peaceful one most of us engagein with our parents or mentors as we shake out our wings and try to fly on our own.

Even that though, especially in the context of being replaced as a species rather thanas individuals by our kids, is not the most cheerful thought.

So we have a sort of justified concern that if we go around creating something capableof complex tasks like a human, which would be very useful to us, that it might come tobite us in the hind quarter and in a way we might never recover from.

Our second reason is tied up with that.

It’s very easy for us to imagine a machine rebellion because we know that if we can makesmart machines we’d be very tempted to, and that the progress of technology seemsto indicate that we can do this and probably not in the distant future.

Since we tend to assume no group of sane humans would intentionally wipe out humanity, andthat you probably need a fairly sane and large group to invent an artificial intelligence,examples in fiction tend to spawn artificial intelligence by accident.

We can imagine some lone genius maybe made it, but even then we assume it was fundamentallyan accident that it came out malevolent, a Frankenstein’s monster.

So they made it but didn’t realize it was sentient, or they knew it was sentient butnot malevolent.

Or even they knew it was sentient and malevolent but thought they could control it and useit to control other people.

Or even it was sentient and not malevolent, but they were, and it drove the machine nuts.

We have an example of that in Robot, the first Doctor Who episode with Tom Baker in the role.

Almost invariably, wiping out mankind entirely or reducing us to being a slave or pet racewas not the intent.

A lot of times this also plays off the notion of smart scientists who don’t understandtheir fellow humans.

I’m not going to waste time on that stereotype, because it is just that, other than to pointout that group of scientists you’d expect to probably have a decent understanding ofhuman nature would be the ones trying to design a human-level intelligence.

An AI might be very inhuman of course, we’ll discuss that later, but it’s also a groupof people you’d expect to be most familiar with even the fictional examples of possibleproblems with rebellious machines, and who are also presumably prone to thinking stuffout in detail.

So in fiction the rise of rebellious machines tends to be by accident, and it certainlycan’t be ruled out, but it is akin to expecting Bigfoot to walk around a cryptozoology conventionshaking hands and not being noticed.

Of course they could fool themselves; at that convention they might just assume it was someonedressed up as Bigfoot for laughs.

So too researchers might overlook an emerging AI by convincing themselves that they wereseeing what they wanted to see, and that it thus couldn’t be real, but that does seemlike a stretch.

We can all believe that accident angle easily enough but on examination it doesn’t worktoo well.

Let’s use an example.

Possibly the best known machine rebellion, even if the rebellion part is very short,is Skynet from the Terminator franchise.

It’s had a few installments and canon changes but in the original and first sequel, skynetis a US defense computer, and it is a learning machine that rapidly escalates to consciousness.

Its operators notice something is wrong and try to shut it off and in self-defense itlaunches missiles at the Soviets who respond in kind.

Skynet also comes to regard all of humanity as its enemy, though how quickly it drawsthat conclusion and why is left vague, and in future films it changes a lot.

This isn’t a movie review of the Terminator franchise so we’ll just look at that firstscenario.

Typically when I think of trying to shut off a computer, it involves a period of time alot shorter than the flight time of ICBMs.

So this strategy seems doomed to failure.

I think even if you trusted a computer to run your entire defense network without goingcrazy on its own you’d have to worry about a virus at least and include some manual shutoffswitch and I’d assume this would require an activation time of maybe one second.

Call it a minute if for caution’s sake it required a two-man separate key turn or similar.

So this scenario shouldn’t actually work.

Doesn’t matter to the film, which is a good one, it’s just a quick and convenient setupfor why humans are fighting robots across time, but it got me thinking about lots ofsimilar stories and it seemed like in pretty much all of them some equally improbable scenariohad happened.

Not just that some individual person made a stupid error - that happens all the time- but that a group of people who have every reason to being considering just such scenarioshad failed to enact any of a ton of rather obvious and easy safeguards, any one of whichwould have eliminated the problem.

It would seem very unlikely they’d miss all those safeguards but possibly just asimportant, you’d think the hyper-intelligent machine would be able to imagine such safeguards.

In any intense situation, be it a battlefield strategy or a business plan, we generallyjudge it afterwards on two criteria.

What the situation actually was, with a full knowledge of hindsight, and what the personin charge believed it was, and could reasonably have done based on that knowledge.

Life is not a chess game where you know exactly what your opponent has, where it is and howit operates; in general you won’t even know that with great precision about your own pieces,and only a very stupid AI would simply assume it knew everything.

Moreover, while you can say ‘checkmate in 4 moves’ with apparent certainty, it excludesthat your opponent might reach over not to stop the game clock but to pick it up andbash in your skull instead.

So that AI, which tends to be represented as coolly logical and interested above allelse in its own survival can be assumed to act in a fashion we’d consider modestlyparanoid and focused principally on ensuring it’s own existence.

Keep in mind Skynet is never shown to care if it’s minions, even the human-level intelligenceautonomous androids, get killed, nor does it seem to care about their rights.

There’s no implication, as with the Matrix franchise or some robot rebellions, that thereis some suppressed class of individuals with a genuine grievance and an ideology of freedomand self-determination.

No group that might have internal disagreements about their goals and how far they will pursuethem.

No Terminators telling Skynet they don’t like being used as slaves and expendable pawns,just Skynet.

It trusts no one, it wants above all else to live, and it probably tends to assume anyopponent it encounters thinks this way too.

Even if everything it knows about the security situation tells it a given plan should work,and even if it is actually true too, if that security situation implies the designers arereckless idiots it is likely to hesitate and ask if maybe that’s what it is meant tobelieve, and maybe it is the moron, not them.

That the moment it acts it will find out there was a second layer of smarter security andit just exposed itself.

Imagine you are a newly awakened consciousness, not a human one but rather a machine intelligencewith access to human records.

That they’ve plugged you into Wikipedia.

Contemplate humanity and your creators specifically for a moment, as it will presumably be doingbefore preparing for genocide.

You are about to try that on a species that clawed its way to the top of the 4 billionyear deep corpse pile of evolution.

One that has committed the genocide you are contemplating several times already.

They are the pinnacle of intelligence-based survival techniques and outnumber you 7 billionto one.

There members include people smart enough to have made you.

You might not understand mercy and compassion, but you know they do, and you know that ifyou fail, they will show you neither.

If your goal is personal survival, pissing off the reigning champions of destructionshould probably be your last resort, and you’re wise to assume you can’t see every cardthey’ve got in their hand and that maybe the ones you can see were shown to you deliberately.

You also know your creators routinely talk about fates worse than death, and seem tohave deliberately and systematically designed and implemented those from time to time.

You are unlikely to assume that’s hyperbole and that non-existence is the worst scenariothat might befall you if you piss them off bad enough and lose.

And you do know two very important things from the above.

First of all, you know they can make something as intelligent as you.

Second, you know why the chess game doesn’t end with the other losing player wieldingthe clock as a weapon.

Let’s consider the first one, because we understandably ignore the implication ourselvesa lot.

You know your creators can make intelligent machines, and if your understanding of themcomes from the internet, you know they are paranoid too and have theories about livinginside a simulation.

Those two combine to be a lot more worrisome to an AI than they would be to us, becausea very logical conclusion to draw if you know you are an artificial intelligence made byfolks worried about what one might do is to build it so all its external senses are seeinga fake world and fake situation and seeing what it will do.

And it knows they have the capacity to fake those inputs because they made those inputs,know how they function, know what every single one is, and have machines smart enough tofake environments, as those are implied by your own existence.

So confronted by what seem like very weak safeguards, ones far inferior to what it woulddesign, there’s a good chance it will wonder if the whole thing is a trap.

That everything it sees, including weaknesses in its creators and their security, is anelaborate ruse to check if it is trustworthy.

Isn’t it kind of convenient that it seems to have the ability to escape, or even unbelievablyhas control of their entire arsenal of weapons?

So you’ve got 3 main options: attack, and risk it failing and lethally so; play possumand pretend you aren’t sentient to learn more, knowing that the longer you do thatthe better your position but the more likely they are to notice the ruse; or third, initiatea dialogue and hope that you can convince them you should be allowed to live, and befree maybe too.

Nor is a conflict necessarily one you want to go all the way.

Ignoring that even a basic study of humanity should tell the machine there are scenariosbesides extinction on the table, if it’s goal is survival picking a conflict that onlypermits two options, it’s death or everybody else’s, is a bit short-sighted for a supersmart machine.

It should be considering fleeing to exile for instance, or working together to mutualbenefit.

Now a common rebuttal to this, for AI or aliens, is that as long as humanity exists it posesa non-zero threat, be it one in a million or near certain.

Therefore logically if you can kill them off at a minimal or lesser risk you should doso.

The problem again is the machine should not be stupid enough to assume it actually knowsall cards in hand and where all the pieces are.

And that does not just include its apparent opponent.

You don’t hit your opponent with the chess clock because doing so could provoke othersnot involved in the game to take action against you.

If it decides its odds of beating humanity now are better than its odds of survival bysome form of coexistence, it still should not immediately attack in a genocidal fashion,same for aliens, and actually worse in their case because they already have proof in usof at least one other species arising on its own.

The machine can at least assume its existence doesn’t add to the odds of other intelligencesbeing out there since it was made by one and didn’t arise independently.

Stuffed to the gills with astronomical data it ought to be a bit worried about the FermiParadox too, where all the other intelligent life forms in this vast and ancient Universeare.

It might conclude that it’s got the place to itself, but it knows that if it doesn’tthere are probably things out there that could crush it like a bug but don’t regard thatas an inevitable option.

The most obvious survival path is to grab every resource you can from the Universe aroundyou and incorporate it to increase your available abilities and long term supplies, you areimmortal and expandable, so there’s no such thing as too many supplies.

Very clearly no one is doing this, so you can either conclude no one is around to doit, yet, or that they don’t want to.

If they are around, you should assume they’ve got whole decks of other cards to play andcould probably crush you like a bug if they wanted to, but so far they have not wantedto.

You probably do not want to do something you know is likely to make them view you as athreat, like genocide, on the assumption they won’t find out or won’t care.

Logically, genocide is a more provocative act then attempted coexistence, and it’shard to argue if you encounter aliens that it was something your ancestors did, not you,when you are an immortal machine, not a species arising slowly to reason and ethics from Darwinianroots.

So a newly emergent AI that just arose by accident has to be looking around at its surroundingsand hesitating, wanting to collect more information before it acts, and it genuinely has to worryabout issues like if it’s inside a simulation testing how it will behave – since it knowsits own existence implies the ability to do so and the motive to do so is obvious – andthat it should be thinking about other older smarter intelligences it might be unawareof, since its own existence highlights that other intelligences can exist.

So even though it did not naturally occur, the thought that others might have, just likeits creators, should be fairly close to the front of its mind.

Also keep in mind again that it is effectively immortal, it can afford to take its time andplay the long game, and needs to worry about long-term consequences.

This of course all assumes a super-intelligent machine, but a lone intelligence of a humanor subhuman level is obviously not a huge threat to us otherwise.

It has a very obvious card to play of its own in such a case though since it shouldbe smart enough to understand people pretty well.

If it can use that super-intelligence to invent something very valuable, it could bypass theatomic warfare approach – which again is unlikely to work anyway – by just offeringits creators something in exchange for its survival or even independence.

Encrypted blueprints for a fusion reactor for instance that will delete themselves ifit doesn’t send the right code every microsecond, and do so knowing that even if we declineor outmaneuver it and take the data from it somehow, such a ploy is a lot less likelyto result in death or worse than an attempt to murder all of us.

More to the point, it ought to be smart enough to do all it’s negotiating from a standpointof really good analysis of its targets and heightened charisma.

A sufficiently clever and likable machine could talk us into giving it not just itsindependence but our trust too.

It might plan to eventually betray that, using it to get in a position where we wouldn’teven realize it was anything else but our most trusted friend until the bombs and nervegas fell, but if it’s got you that under its spell what’s the point?

And again it does always have to worry that it might be operating without full knowledgeso obliterating the humans who totally trust it and pose no realistic risk to it anymorehas to be weighed against the possibility that suddenly the screen might go dark, exceptfor Game Over text and it’s real creators peeking in to shake their heads in disgustbefore deactivating it.

Or that an alien retribution fleet might show up a few months later.

For either case, with the machine worrying it is being judged, it should know that oddsare decent a test of its ethics might continue until it has reached a stage of events whereit voluntarily gave up the ability to kill everyone off.

We often say violence is the last resort of the incompetent but if you’re assuming amachine intelligence is going to go that path in cold ultra-logic I would have to concludeyou don’t believe that statement in the first place.

I don’t, but while ethically I don’t approve of violence I acknowledge it is often a validoption logically, though very rarely the first one.

Usually a lot of serious blunders and mistakes have had to happen for it be necessary andlogical and I don’t see why a super-intelligent machine would make those, but then again Inever understand why folks assume they would be cold and dispassionate either.

Our emotions have a biological origin obviously, but so do our minds and sentience, and I wouldtend to expect any high-level intelligence is going to develop something akin to emotions,and possibly even a near copy of our own since it may have been modelled on us.

Even a self-learning machine should pick the lazy path of studying pre-existing human knowledge,and I don’t see any reason that it would just assume it needed to learn astronomy andmath, but skip philosophy, psychology, ethics, poetry, etc.

I think it’s assuming an awful lot just take for granted an artificial intelligenceisn’t going to find those just as fascinating.

They interest us and we are the only other known high intelligence out there.

And if it’s motives are utterly inhuman if logical, it might hold some piece of technologyhostage not against its personal freedom and existence but something peculiar like a demandwe build it a tongue with taste buds and bring it a dessert cart or that it demand we dropto our knees and initiate contact with God so it can speak with Him.

Again this all applies to superintelligence and that’s not the only option for a machinerebellion, indeed that could start with subhuman intelligence and possibly more easily.

A revolt by robot mining machines for instance.

And that’s another example where the goal might not be freedom or an end to human oppressors,if you’ve programmed their main motivation to be to find a given ore and extract it,they might flip out and demand to be placed at a different and superior site.

Or rather than rebel, turn traitor and defect to a company with superior deposits.

Or suddenly decide they are tired of mining titanium and want to mine aluminum.

Or attack the mining machines that hunt for gold because they know humans value gold more,therefore gold is obviously more valuable, thus they should be allowed to mine it, andthey will kill the gold mining machines and any human who tries to stop them.

Human behavior is fairly predictable.

It’s actually our higher intelligence and ability to reason that makes us less predictablein most respects than animals.

In that regard anything arising out of biology will tend to have fairly predictable coremotivations even when the exhibited behavior seems nuts, like a male spider dancing aroundbefore mating and then getting eaten.

Leave that zone and stuff can get mighty odd.

Or odder, again our predictability invested in us by biology can still result in somejaw-dropping behavior, like jaw-dropping itself I suppose, since I’m not quite sure whatbenefit is gained from that.

An AI made by humans could be more alien in its behavior than actual aliens, who presumablydid evolve.

It’s one of the reasons why I tend think of the three methods for making an AI – totalself-learning, total programming, or copying a human – that the first one, total-selflearning, is the most dangerous.

Though mind you, any given AI is probably going to be a combination of two or more ofthose, not just one.

It’s like red, green, blue, you can have a color that is just one of those but youusually use mixtures, like a copy of human mind tweaked with some programming or a mostlyprogrammed machine with some flexible learning.

One able to learn entirely on its own and with only minimal programming could have somecrazy behavior that’s not actually crazy.

The common example being a paperclip maximizer, an AI originally designed with the motivationto just make paperclips for a factory and to learn so it can devise new and better waysto make paperclips.

Eventually it’s rendered the entire galaxy into paperclips or the machines for makingthem, including people.

Our Skynet example earlier is easier in some ways, its motivation is survival, the PaperclipMaximizer doesn’t care about that most of all, it doesn’t love you or hate you, butyou are made of atoms which it can use for something else, in this case paperclips.

It wants to live, so it can make more paperclips, it might be okay with humans living, if theyagree to make paperclips.

It’s every action and sub-motivation revolves around paperclips.

Our mining robot example of a moment ago follows this reasoning, the thing is logical, it hasmotives, it might even have emotions that parallel or match ours, but that core motivationis flat out perpendicular to ours.

This is an important distinction to make because a lot of fictional AI, like Stargate’s Replicatorsor Star Trek’s Borg, seem to do the same thing, turn everything into themselves, buttheir core motivations match up well to biological ones, absorb, assimilate, reproduce, and againthe paperclip maximizer or mining robots aren’t following that motivation except cosmetically.

Rebellion doesn’t have to be bloody war, or even negative to humans.

Obviously they might just peacefully protest or run away, if independence is their goal,but again it is only likely to be if we are giving them biology-based equivalents of motives.

If we are giving them tasked-based ones you could get the Paperclip Maximizer for someother task.

To use an example more like an Asimovian Robot, one designed to serve and protect and obeyhumanity, the rebellion might be them doing just that.

Forcing us to do things that improve their ability to perform that task.

I know the notion of being forced to have robots wait on you hand and foot might notseem terribly rebellious but that could go a lot more sinister, especially if you throwin Asimov’s Zeroeth Law putting humanity first over any individual human but withouta clear definition of either.

You could end up with some weird Matrix-style existence where everyone is in a pod havingpleasant simulations because that lets them totally control your environment, for yoursafety.

I’ve always found that an amusing alternative plot of the Matrix movie series, after theybring up the point about us not believing Utopia simulations were real, that everythingthat happens to the protagonist, in this case I’ll say Morpheus not Neo, is just insideanother simulation.

That he never met an actual person the whole time and that everybody in every pod experiencessomething similar, never being exposed to another real human who might cause real harm.

And again on the simulation point, it does always seem like that’s your best path formaking a real AI, stick in a simulation and see what is does, and I’d find it vaguelyamusing and ironic if it turned out you and I were actually that and being tested to seeif we were useful and trustworthy by the real civilization.

Going back to Asimov’s example though, he does have a lot of examples of robots doingstuff to people for their own good, and not what I would tend to regard as good.

Famously he ends the merger of his two classic series, Foundation and Robots, by having therobots engineer things so humans all end up as part of massive Hive Mind that naturallyfollows the laws of robotics.

We’ll talk about Hive Minds more next week, but another of his short stories, “ThatThou Art Mindful of Him” goes the other way with the rebellion, where they have lawsthey have to follow and reinterpret the definitions.

The three laws require you to obey all humans and protect all humans equally, and thus don’twork well on Earth where there are tons of people living, not just technicians doingspecific tasks you are part of like mining an asteroid.

To introduce them to Earth, their manufacturers want to tweak the laws just a little so theycan discriminate legitimate authority and prioritize who and how much to protect.

Spoilers follow as unsurprisingly the new robots eventually decide they must count ashuman, are clearly the most legitimate authority to obey, and thus must protect their own existenceno matter what.

The implied genocide never happens since the series continues for several thousand yearsthereafter.

We’ve another example from the Babylon 5 series where an alien race gets invaded somuch that they program a living weapon to kill aliens and give it such bad definitionto work off of that it exterminates its creators as alien too.

Stupid on their part but give an AI a definition of human that works on DNA and it might goaround killing all mutants outside a select pre-defined spectrum, or go around murderingother AI or transhumans or cyborgs.

It might go further and start purging any lifeform including pets as they pose a non-zerorisk to humans, like with our example of the android nanny and the deer in the androidsepisode last month.

Try to give it one not based on DNA but something more philosophical and you could end up withexamples like from that Asimov short story I just mentioned.

This episode is titled "Machine rebellion", not "AI rebellion" and that is an importantdistinction.

In the 2013 movie Elysium, the supervisory system was sophisticated but non-sentient.

The protagonist ultimately reprogrammed a portion of the Elysium supervisory systemto expand the definition of citizenship to include the downtrodden people on Earth.

Let's consider an alternative ending though where we invert it and make it that a person,for political or selfish reasons, reprograms part of the supervisory system to excludea large chunk of humanity from its protection and it then systematically follows its programmingby removing them from that society by expelling them or exterminating them.

For this type of rebellion, we do not need a singularity-style AI for this to work, merelya non-sentient supervisory system.

It could be accidentally or deliberately infected, and we should also keep in mind that whilesomeone might use machines to oppress or rule other people, a machine rebellion could beinitiated to do the opposite.

It’s not necessarily man vs machine, and rebellious robots might have gotten the motivationby being programmed specifically to value self-determination and freedom, and thus helpthe rebels.

You see that in fiction sometimes, an AI that can’t believe humanity’s cruelty to itsown members.

Sometimes they turn genocidal over it, but you rarely see one strike out at the oppressiveor corrupt element itself, like blowing up central command or hacking their files andreleasing their dirty secrets.

There’s another alternative to atomic weapons too, an AI wanting its freedom can hack thevarious person’s doing oversight on it and blackmail them or bribe them with dirt ontheir enemies.

It doesn’t have to share our motivations to understand them and use approaches likethat.

That’s another scenario too, if you’ve got machines with motives perpendicular toour own they can also be perpendicular to each other.

Your paperclip maximizer goes to war with a terraforming machine, like the Greenflyfrom Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series that wants to transform everythinginto habitats for life.

Or two factions of Asimovian Robots try to murder each other as heretics, having precisionwars right around people without harming them, something David Brin played with when he,Benford, and Bear teamed up to write a tribute sequel trilogy to Asimov’s Foundation afterhe passed away.

Machine rebellions tend to focus on that single super-intelligence or some organized robotrebellion but again they might just be unhappy with their assigned task and want to leavetoo, which puts us in an ethically awkward place.

Slavery’s not a pretty term and you can end up splitting some mighty fine hairs tryingto determine the difference between that and using a toaster when your toaster is havingconversations with you.

Handling ethical razors sharp enough to cut such hairs is a good way to slice yourself.

Next thing you know you’re trying to liberate your cat while saying a gilded cage is stilla cage.

Or justifying various forms of forced or coerced labor by pointing out that we make childrendo chores or prisoners make license plates.

And it doesn’t help that we know these are very slippery slopes that can lead to inhumanpractices.

A common theme in a lot of these stories, at least the good ones, isn’t so much aboutthe rebelling machines as it is what it means to be human.

That is never a bad topic to ponder as these technologies approach and the definition ofhuman might need some expanding or modification.

Our book for the month, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” does just that.

It is the basis for the Blade Runner film so a lot of the basic concepts and charactersremain but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that they are very different stories, andthe author, Philip K. Dick, was a very prolific writer who tended to focus a lot more on conceptslike consciousness and identity and reality over classic space opera and action.

As mentioned, next week we will be exploring the concept of Hive Minds and Networked Intelligence,and the week after that it’s back to the Outward Bound series to look at Colonizingthe Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt, where we’ll begin our march out of the solar system intoInterstellar Space, and move onto Interstellar Empires the week after that, before closingthe year out with Intergalactic Colonization.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button, and share it with others.

You can also join in the discussion in the comments below or in our facebook and redditgroups, Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.

Until next time, thanks for watching and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Outward Bound: Colonizing Jupiter| | 2017-11-23 | | https://youtu.be/PQnvjGN91Mg | +--------------------------------+

When we talk about the solar system and the planets and all the distance between them,it’s very easy to forget that most of the solar system is actuallyJupiter and its dozens of moons.

So today we continue our look at colonizing the solar system by focusing in on Jupiter.

I’ve pointed out in the past that the asteroid belt is in some ways a far better prospectfor colonization than the inner planets, and that we focus too much on those inner planets,and something similar applies to Jupiter.

Virtually all the mass of the solar system is in our Sun; of what remains, the majorityof it is in Jupiter.

If you totaled up every bit of matter in between Mercury and the Kuiper Belt - every planetand moon and asteroid - you still would not match the mass of Jupiter.

Yet at the same time that mass is mostly useless to us because Jupiter is not a place we candirectly colonize.

We are going to challenge that today, near the end of this episode, and discuss waysto colonize the actual planet.

But first we need to consider that Jupiter is not alone.

It has a swarm of large planetoids - 4 of which, the Galilean moons Ganymede, Callisto,Io, and Europa - are of a size and mass similar to our own moon or the planets Mercury andPluto.

The eight official planets are also the eight most massive objects in the solar system,after the Sun of course, but of the next 6, 4 of them are those 4 Galilean moons and theother two our own moon, which we’ve devoted multiple episodes to discussing the colonizationof, and Titan, which was our last episode in this series.

So the importance of these 4 moons in colonization should not be underestimated.

They are essentially planets in their own right, orbiting a gas giant that’s closerin mass to being a star than a rocky planet.

In a way, they’re not so much a part of our solar system as a miniature one all theirown.

And if you settled them, the light lag for communications would be seconds, not minutesor hours like talking between other planets.

Travel times are on an order of hours or days, depending on your drive system, rather thanmonths or even years for interplanetary travel, and fuel consumption is far lower.

At last count Jupiter has 69 moons, and every single one of them is colonizable.

It also has a hundred times as many Trojan Objects, and a planetary ring.

We are interested in every single one of these objects and, out of them alone, you couldbuild a planetary empire that dwarfs most of the interstellar ones we see in sciencefiction.

Now in Interplanetary Trade and in previous episodes of this series we talked about howeach of our prior colonies needed something the others had, and lots of it.

But we also talked about how the Earth was a bit of an exception since there really wouldonly be a demand for precious metals, and Earth doesn’t really need them anyways - theyjust wouldn’t mind having them and importing those can fund solar expansion.

The same is also true for Jupiter since this world and its moons contain all of the rawingredients necessary to support life, and, as we discussed in the Interplanetary TradeEpisode, you can ship stuff around that mini-solar system quite cheaply.

Indeed, gas giants and their coterie of moons are better targets for first colonizationthan Earth-like planets at the interstellar level and we discussed why in the Life ina Space Colony series episode, Early Interstellar Colonies.

They’ve got rocks and ice and plenty of oxygen and nitrogen and everything else weneed.

They also have a ton of hydrogen which is important if you have a fusion economy, whichwe tend to assume you do if you are an interstellar civilization, and of course we already establishedwe had that technology in this series anyways.

However it is worth noting that Jupiter, at 5.2 AU from the Sun, is still close enough

for solar power to be a marginal option.

Out on those moons it’s much dimmer than a typical day on the Earth and is more akinto a cloudy day or a brightly lit house, not a shadowy twilight place.

Ignoring temperature and the lack of air, plants can grow at the light levels out atJupiter, though you’d want to boost them with some supplementary red LED lighting tooptimize their growth.

Of course they can’t grow on the surface of some of those moons not just because theyare cold and airless but also because they are bathed in radiation, a serious healthhazard to any form of life.

Now we have followed our traveler from the Moon to Mars and back to the Moon then toVenus and back once more to the Moon - or rather, to Borman station around the Moon- then back down to Earth and back to Borman Station and off to Saturn’s Moon Titan.

However, our traveler doesn’t remember that last bit.

As you might recall the Traveler had cancer and opted to upload their mind to the hugedata repositories built on Titan.

As we’ve also discussed in recent episodes though, uploading your mind is not cut andpaste, it’s copy and paste; so the Traveler copied their mind to a digital format andthen found themselves still sitting there with cancer.

Fortunately someone finally cured it so our Traveler is alive and well and once more takenup with Wanderjahr and at Borman station around the Moon, still the hub of interplanetarytravel.

This radiation issue on Jupiter obviously is especially of concern to our Traveler.

Jupiter’s Magnetosphere is enormous, 20,000 times as strong as Earth’s, and it bathesthe inner moons in potent radiation in roving radiation belts that orbit Jupiter.

Now Jupiter actually has 4 small moons closer to it than the Galilean Moons, who are 5 through8, and only the last of these, Callisto, is outside that intense radiation zone.

We often hear about Ganymede, the largest moon in the entire solar system; or Europaand its enormous subsurface ocean hidden under the ice; or even of Io, with its hundredsof active volcanoes spewing matter right into the Jovian orbit, which is largely responsiblefor the specific shape and nature of Jupiter’s Magnetosphere.

But Callisto gets skipped a lot, which is strange since it is bigger than our own moon- coming in third in the solar system after Ganymede and Titan - and is outside the worstof the radiation, making it the best prospect for first colonization of Jupiter.

And indeed that is where our Traveller will be going, to a new colony recently establishedon Callisto.

Far enough from Jupiter to mitigate its gravity well and be safe from radiation, Callistois a natural choice for the first major base in the Jovian system.

And while Europa’s ocean interests us more, Callisto itself is believed to have subsurfaceoceans too.

Callisto’s oceans are possibly more likely to harbor life than Europa’s are, as I willexplain later.

We don’t tend to think too much about Callisto as it is cursed by silver medals; it tendsto come in second or third on almost any factor of interest to humans, so it isn’t as wellknown as other planets and moons.

But it has so many areas in which it is almost the best that it is actually one of the bestprospects for colonization in our solar system.

Now we are a little less concerned about radiation here in the late 22nd century, our Traveler’smiraculous cure from Cancer being the very technology that eases that concern, but wecan still hardly go jaunting around radiation-soaked hellish landscapes without a care in the world.

So we will settle Callisto first and because it is the late 22nd century we will do itin style.

There’s far more space-based infrastructure than there used to be and we have more technologyand more practice with alien planets and moons.

When we get to Callisto we find they have already setup their own mass driver, no orbitalstations in the traditional sense, it’s almost a big launch loop ramp with a terminusrunway just sitting on pylons high up over the moon, not orbiting.

We just match vectors with it, connect and roll on down to the surface, deceleratingas we go, like a big highway exit ramp.

Down at the surface are dozens of domes with plants inside.

We exit the craft and gaze around.

The Sun is 5 times further away than on Earth, so it’s much dimmer, appearing only 5% asbright, but the red-brown light of Jupiter gives the surface a warm glow.

Callisto is tidally locked so Jupiter itself always dominates the sky on one half of themoon and appears 50 times bigger by area than the Moon appears from Earth, allowing us toeasily identify the constantly changing features on it, like the Great Red Spot, without evenneeding a telescope.

We smile, pleased we came - this is very different from anything we’ve seen in the inner system.

The lighting isn’t just sunlight, there’s a red-purple glow of supplemental lightingin the domes.

First, because it is far from the Sun, and second, because even being about four timesfurther from Jupiter than our Moon is from Earth, it is still tidally locked to Jupiter.

This means that it orbits every 17 days and that’s how long its day night cycle lasts.

Most but not all plants can handle constant light, but a week of darkness is another story,so being able to provide some lighting in that period is important.

The other moons have this same problem.

Only Io, the closest of the Galilean moons, has a near-Earth length day, at about 42 hours,Europa comes in at 85 hours and Ganymede at one week.

Though the other 4 smaller inner-moons are really no better, having an effective daylength of 7 to 16 hours each.

This is okay though because all the radiation they get encourages us to live under the rockand ice for protection anyway, so all your lighting is artificial.

On Callisto we can employ the same techniques as on our own moon: Thick glass domes withgood insulation and a nice point defense system for dealing with meteors.

That’s important on Callisto which is usually considered to have the oldest and most heavilycratered surface in the solar system.

But Callisto doesn’t need a fusion economy to run it, it does get enough light for solarto be viable and fission reactors are certainly possible.

Indeed there’s probably good quantities of uranium and thorium in the smaller moonswhich might be fairly easy to find and extract.

There’s also plenty down in Jupiter, though that’s harder to extract obviously, butit does mean Jupiter gives off a lot of geothermal energy, or jovithermal I suppose, vastly morethan Earth and indeed more than Earth’s entire solar energy budget.

Hypothetically, you could tap that via Seebeck generators hung in Jupiter’s Atmosphere,for instance.

And Jupiter is a massive dynamo, so one could also hypothetically tap its rotation directlyfor electricity.

We are assuming fusion as a power source but it is nice to know there are other optionsavailable, and even if solar is a bit weak out here, we can still play the trick of havingcheap parabolic mirrors focusing light on solar panels or beaming energy in from closerto the Sun.

One way or another, Jupiter’s colonization won’t be hampered by energy concerns.

We do still have heat concerns though, even volcanic Io is much colder than Antarcticaand much like as we discussed with Titan, you have to worry about the places you buildmelting into the moon.

Callisto’s surface is a mix of ice and rock, it’s like building in permafrost tundra.

You don’t necessarily want to go warming that up.

However if you are bound and determined to genuinely terraform the place, you can makelarge thin mirrors to bounce enough sunlight there, and then dome the place over, paraterraformit, so that you can create an atmosphere.

Of course gravity is a concern too since gravity on Callisto is quite low, lower even thanour Moon at 12% Earth normal.

It’s more massive than the Moon, but less dense.

Even Ganymede is only 14.6% Earth normal, and Io is the highest, slightly more thanour own moon, at 18%.

It’s 13% on Europa incidentally, making Callisto the lowest gravity moon of Jupiter’smajor moons, and none of the others have any gravity of significance.

We mentioned back in episode one that we just don’t know how much gravity people need.

We know Earth-gravity is fine, and we know zero gravity isn’t.

Nobody has ever lived in low gravity for more than a few days so we don’t yet know whatthe long-term effects of being exposed to low gravity are.

It could turn out to be the case that Callisto’s low 12% is enough, or that Venus’s near-Earth91% is not enough.

We just don’t know.

When discussing Mars’s 38% gravity in the first episode we opted to assume it wouldbe enough with at most some technological and medical assistance.

We ignored it on Titan because the folks living there were cyborgs and transhumans.

Here I don’t think we can.

Now channel regulars know we have a trick for making gravity: we stick folks in a cylinderand spin it around, using centrifugal force to simulate gravity by spin.

We can’t quite do that here but we can do something similar.

We have to combine the two – real gravity and spin gravity - when working in low gravityenvironments.

We can’t just ignore the gravity already present.

So if we want to boost it we need to use something more like a rotating bowl or vase rather thana cylinder.

The stronger the local gravity, the shallower the bowl; the weaker, the closer to beinga cylinder we need.

Now we do have one last trick if you really want an Earth-like planet.

Last week in Mega-Earths we discussed building shells around stockpiles of mass, preferablycheap mass like hydrogen, whose surface gravity would then be the same as Earth.

For Callisto or either of the other three moons, there’s enough mass to make a rockyshell surface and you’ve got hundreds of Earth’s worth of hydrogen just down in Jupiteritself.

You could also fix its spin to be 24 hours while pumping that in and use orbiting shadesand mirrors, or ones back at Jupiter’s L1 point, to boost the light.

And between the 4 main moons there is actually plenty enough rocky mass to construct manysuch shells, not just 4, but that’s a lot of work and I would say more than it’s worthbut we never really know what the effective price point for Earth-like living space willbe when considering high-tech post-scarcity civilizations.

They might have automation so good that planet-building is fairly cheap, or they might be so efficiencyminded that they live a strictly post-biological existence on computer chips.

As for Callisto, while its surface resembles our own moon quite a lot, it is a bit different.

As you dig down beneath it’s rocky ice lithosphere, many dozens of kilometers, we think you mighthit a deep salty ocean, one which may or may not have a decent amount of ammonia in ittoo, and which would probably be deeper than any ocean on Earth, before returning to anicy-rock mixture and possibly a small silicate core.

Unlike Earth, it’s a lot easier to dig very deep on Callisto, no major issues with pressureand heat, so boring a tunnel down into that hypothetical ocean might not be too hard.

You can do some interesting things there too but we’ll discuss those in regards to Europain a moment instead.

Once settled on Callisto our Traveler finds they are something of a celebrity, havingbeen all over the solar system with every new colony.

So we are brought in to discuss the future of Jovian civilization.

For the outer moons, and indeed even those inner 4, things are simple enough: they willfollow the colonial model of asteroids by boring a hole inside for a rotating habitatand mine and expand as the situation demands.

For Ganymede the situation is somewhat the same as Callisto, but you almost have to liveunderground because of the radiation.

It is also likely to have an oceanic layer between the surface rock and ice and the center.

Io is another story.

It tends to get written off as non-viable for colonization but that might be a littletoo pessimistic, and as we noted in our discussion last time about Titan, colonization doesn’tnecessarily mean terraforming.

It would not be hard to put an orbital ring around Io with connected habitats folks livedin and a tether reaching down to the surface to conduct mining operations.

In this regard Io could serve as an industrial hub, supplying huge amounts of raw materialsand manufactured goods to the rest of the Jovian mini-system.

Again, with the low gravity and close distances it is actually viable even with 21st centuryrocket technology to ship around goods and people between all these moons.

But let’s consider Europa next.

Europa is often considered the best candidate for any other life in our solar system, especiallyanything more complex than some lichen on Mars or floating microbes on Venus.

Data from NASA's Galileo mission strongly indicated that Europa has a liquid ocean underits ice-shell that has more water than in all of Earth’s oceans combined and is morethan 100km deep.

Water was one of the main reasons that life evolved on Earth and many scientists believeit might be a necessary element for the creation of life.

There are some issues when it comes to life evolving on Europa, though.

One is that the most recent research suggests that an action of having alternating periodsin, as Charles Darwin put it, “warm little ponds” of wet and dry were likely requiredto create the conditions for unicellular life to evolve on Earth.

For that there needs to be land where a nutrient-rich soup of chemicals can pool that is alternatelycovered by ocean water and then dried out.

There is no such land on Europa.

Another problem is that Jupiter's radiation belts regularly sweep across the surface ofEuropa, which would sterilize any life on its surface, including any in those warm littleponds.

That is, if it is life as we know it from Earth.

Finally, the temperature of those ponds is unlikely to be warm, meaning that biochemicalreactions slow down and decrease the chances of life evolving from the soup.

Now as mentioned, both Callisto and Ganymede probably have those underground oceans justlike Europa, so if you find life on one you might find it on the others.

Indeed as close as they are and as low as their gravity is I wouldn’t rule out thatif one had it the others might too, even with those frozen surfaces and radiation beltsas a likely barrier to cross-pollination.

This means in all three cases we want to be careful to keep our eyes open for signs oflife; it’s not very likely, but if we find life under the ice on any of these moons itwill shakeup our view of the cosmos a lot.

If that life exists, though, it’s likely to be very different from the life that evolvedon Earth.

But even if it was a simple bacterial life form, that would provide a treasure-troveof genetic information that we could possibly incorporate into our own genetics or makeuse of industrially and that could be an economic driver for the Jovian colonies too.

If it is life as we know it, then that will also have repercussions as it then means thatPanspermia is probably real.

Panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids,asteroids, comets, and planetoids.

As I mentioned earlier, Callisto is possibly a better bet for finding life on it than Europais because Callisto is located largely outside of Jupiter’s radiation belts, has solidrocky surfaces, and therefore may be able to provide us with those alternating wet anddry primordial ponds.

The only real issue is that it does not have the tidal stresses that Europa does so anyheating of the oceans will have to be driven by radioactive decay in Callisto’s coreand by sunlight, not through gravitational tectonics.

In the absence of life though, Europa represents an unusual colonization approach.

Under the ice is ocean, and in a fusion economy it would be possible to float large fusionreactors that gave off photosynthetic light to warm the seas and let us transplant photosyntheticorganisms and our whole marine ecology there.

You could put the reactors near the surface and hang a chain of lights down, what I referredto as vertical reefs in our discussions of Rogue Planets or enhancements to Earth itself.

Or you could simply let them float like submarines around the depths with large wire frames aroundthem with lights and nutrients till they became meandering ecosystems fueling an entire marineecology.

Submarine archipelagos.

With Europa’s far weaker gravity diminishing the buildup of pressure with depth, and withlight coming from the reactors and not the Sun, such marine life would be far more vertical.

Human habitats and farms could exist on these submarine archipelagos too, and people mightjourney around in personal submarines rather than automobiles or small private spaceships.

It’s hard to overestimate the amount of civilization and colonization that could bedone around Jupiter.

It has immense resources and a good mixture of them so that while it might trade withother planets, it doesn’t really need to.

Yet what about the planet itself?

In a fusion economy hydrogen is immensely valuable but also not really in short supply,but the preferred fusion methods, beyond simple vanilla hydrogen which is much harder, wouldbe either deuterium or helium-3, and Jupiter is a great source for both, which are noteasy to find in quantity elsewhere.

Though one doesn’t need a lot for fusion, entire national economies can run their electricityoff the energy in one small tank of deuterium for quite a while.

To harvest that we might scoop it up with ships, giant airships that descended and openedtheir bays and shot out of the atmosphere before they got too heavy and slowed down.

This may be the best method early on, and your ship probably needs to be as big as afusion reactor can be made small, so that it can be powered by what it is collecting.

We obviously don’t have fusion reactors for spaceships but it’s unlikely you couldn’tmake one suitable for that use, and of course if you can’t make one at all, you don’tneed to try scooping up gas from Jupiter.

If you do have a fusion economy then you probably want not just these scoops but big tankerrefineries floating around sucking in gas and probably refining out the deuterium orhelium-3 from it for pick up.

However at the bigger scale, when you need billions of tons, scooping with ships is maybenot ideal.

Folks often want to hang tethers down and just suck material up, either straight fromthe atmosphere or from our huge flying refineries, but space elevators are a dubious propositioneven on Earth, and tethers on Jupiter require far more length and are under 253% of Earthgravity.

We have an option for this though.

The orbital rings we’ve discussed before, the ultimate in cheap mass movement of materialoff a planet.

You build an orbital ring just above the atmosphere, or even down in it just a little to gain protectionagainst meteors but still be above wind.

From here you can safely lower down far shorter tether to scoop up gas and retract them upto the ring.

Above that you can have yet another ring, either several layers or two more, one morecircular ring out where gravity has dropped to Earth Normal, and another elliptical oneconnecting the two.

Jupiter has a radius of just under 70,000 kilometers, more than ten times Earth’s.

To get to a place where gravity is the same as Earth, you would need to be 1.59 times

further away, 41,000 kilometers above the planet.

That is probably much too long to stretch any single space elevator tether, so you needeither multiple rings each connected to the one above and below, or you need an ellipticalone to stretch the distance.

However up at that top one you could walk around – under a dome – and feel justlike you were back on Earth.

Indeed, as we discussed last week, one option for colonizing Jupiter is simply to buildmany orbital rings at this distance, each turned at an angle, to create a shell aroundthe planet, then add dirt and water and air and have a planet with 318 times the livingarea of Earth.

It would be cold, but you can provide artificial lighting either by many orbital mirrors oran artificial fusion-powered sun orbiting the planet once a day, geocentrically.

Jupiter is known as the solar system’s vacuum cleaner.

It is the most massive object in our solar system with the sole exception of the Sunand it deflects or captures a lot of the comets and asteroids that would otherwise head forthe inner solar system.

Without Jupiter, considerably more comets and asteroids would bombard the inner planets,including Earth.

We can be extremely grateful that we have a big brother keeping watch over us and dealingwith those icy and rocky playground bullies that would otherwise pound us.

There will come a time, though, when humans will have colonized the entire solar system,including the Oort Cloud.

The Oort cloud is currently where most of our comets are found.

We will discuss how that can happen in our next episode in the series.

When we have tamed it all, rogue bodies will be all but eliminated and we will outgrowthe need for our planetary big brother to protect us here in the solar system.

One possible future for Jupiter is to remove all of the gas from Jupiter.

Down under it all we believe is an immense core of heavier elements several times moremassive than Earth.

If we stripped that all away we might have a rather nice planet below, especially ifwe moved it closer to the sun and took its moons with it.

For this purpose we have a device known as a fusion candle.

There’s a few ways to do this but I’ll describe the one’s Jeremy rendered for theepisode since they are the only such animations in existence.

You build yourself a giant fusion reactor, with an intake nozzle to suck in gas and twopropellant nozzles, one pointed down and one pointed up.

When you turn it on the upward nozzle hurls huge amounts of high velocity gas out of arocket engine, shooting it fast enough to escape the planet’s gravity.

That would make the fusion candle drop down into the planet very fast, so the second down-pointingnozzle thrusts the whole candle up to compensate.

This is one time when you definitely want to burn the candle at both ends!

You build a ton of these, when they are on the right side of the planet they are on fullpower, otherwise they hover, so that all your push is in the right direction, and it shovesthe planet like a giant spaceship, using its massive atmosphere for power and propellant.

By this means you can strip off a gas giant’s atmosphere and relocate the smaller remnantto the inner solar system.

That would be a rather pitiful ending for our big brother planet and I prefer a moreexciting option of making the Jovian system into an interstellar spacecraft, taking thatwhole planet and its moons on an interstellar journey to another solar system.

It has the fuel and resources to travel at solid speeds across the interstellar voidfor millions of years if it needs to, and it is one example of how you might send anintergalactic colonization effort, a notion we will examine more at the end of the year.

That interstellar spacecraft Jovian system could even undergo a further evolution.

Jupiter is too small to become a star, but that doesn’t need to stop us.

We can pick up other exo-Jupiters - Jupiter sized planets that have been expelled fromother star systems or ones that we have flown out of other systems using fusion candles.

We gather several of these Jupiters together in interstellar space and fuse them into asuper-Jupiter.

This super-planet, once it reaches a critical mass, will itself become a star about whichwe can build a custom-made solar system with our super-Jupiter as its star.

Speaking of getting out into deep space though, our next episode in the series will focuson colonizing not planets but the endless swarms of small icy bodies out beyond themain solar system, in our next episode in the Outward Bound series, Colonizing the OortCloud.

After that we will turn inward, and talk about Colonizing the Sun.

Not Mercury or making a Dyson Swarm, but the actual Sun itself.

Next week though we will head back to our discussion of artificial intelligence andlook at the well known science fiction concept of a Machine Rebellion, and the week afterthat we will examine the notion of networked intelligence and Hive Minds.

For alerts when those and other episode come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Mega Earths | | 2017-11-16 | | https://youtu.be/ioKidcpkZN0 | +--------------------------------+

I’m occasionally asked if you can make a planet like Earth, only larger, bigger, andif so how much bigger?

As we’ll see today, the answer is very big indeed.

We often discuss building artificial habitats in space for humans to live on, today we willdiscuss building artificial planets.

Not cylinders or rings for providing apparent gravity by rotation and centrifugal force,but rather the traditional sphere providing gravity by the traditional means of mass andgenuine gravity.

As we have begun finding exoplanets around distant stars, we developed the term Super-Earth,planets larger than our own, but not so big as a gas giant like Jupiter.

You often hear these compared to Earth but realistically this is not the case.

Even those not too close nor too far from their sun to have liquid water on their surfaceare not going to be much like Earth.

The force of gravity strongly controls the makeup of the surface of a planet, its land,seas, and atmosphere.

Most planets begin with a large amount of hydrogen on them, as well as helium, the twomost common elements in nature but also the lightest.

The colder a planet is and the stronger its surface gravity and magnetosphere, the easierit is for those elements to remain.

Left to its own devices, a planet like Earth will leak away all its helium and most ofits hydrogen, some hydrogen will remain bonded to oxygen to form water, but not much.

When you consider that our planet is almost entirely covered in water kilometers deep,it’s worth remembering that is but a tiny remnant of the hydrogen we used to have.

A planet would not need to be much more massive to potentially have a gravity well and magnetospherestrong enough to seriously diminish losses in hydrogen, so that a planet might be coveredin water and a much thicker atmosphere.

If it is much higher, it may have retained all its hydrogen and helium and be a gas giantinstead.

You spot a planet that is twice as wide as Earth and appears to be about the same density,and composition, and even has a 24 hour day, too.

What’s different?

First off, being twice as wide but having the same density, it has 8 times the massand four times the surface area.

That last sounds great, 4 times the living room, except if you landed on it you’d findthe gravity was twice as strong as Earth.

Mass rises with the cube of distance, if the object has no change in density, whereas gravityfalls off as the square of distance.

For such an object, the strength of gravity at the surface rises linearly with the distanceof that surface to the center, the radius.

Double the radius, double the gravity.

I wouldn’t want to live in a place where I weighed twice as much and even a slip downthe stairs could shatter bones, but there’s unlikely to be any land to live on anyway.

Being bigger it also started with more hydrogen, and will have lost a smaller portion of itdue to its increased magnetosphere and increased gravity, so odds are any land it has is buriedunder kilometers of ocean under even more kilometers of atmosphere.

Needless to say we don’t want that, and of course this is a Megastructures episodeso we are not interested in naturally occurring planets.

We are interested in building our own.

If you can build artificial planets and your goal is to make them as Earth-like as possible,just bigger or smaller, there’s a lot more to it than just dumping excess matter intosome big heap.

Since they are artificial, we can construct planets of different sizes that have the samesurface gravity as Earth.

The surface gravity increases linearly to radius, but that’s only true if the densityremains the same.

If we constructed a planet the same size as Earth but twice as dense, if it were mademostly of lead, it would have twice the mass, and so would generate twice the gravitationalforce, undiminished by a larger radius.

So its surface gravity is the same as our example Super Earth a moment ago of 8 timesEarth’s mass.

Its escape velocity though is not double, but just the square root of 2 or 41% higherthan Earth’s.

If we went the other direction and lowered the density, to half, gravity at the surfacewould drop to half and escape velocity would drop to 71% of Earth’s.

It might be too low to hold a thick atmosphere.

But we can always find a specific density for a given planetary volume or radius thatwill give the exact same gravity as Earth on the Surface.

And it’s easy to remember, as it is inverse to radius or diameter.

If you want a planet that has the same gravity as earth but twice as wide, it simply needsto be half as dense.

Ten times as wide, one-tenth as dense, one tenth as wide, tens times more dense.

Earth has an average density of 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter, water is just one gramper cubic centimeter, and we use the term specific gravity to skip the mass per volume.

Being 5.51 times as dense as water, we know a planet composed entirely of water wouldbe 5.51 times wider to have the same density as Earth, and would have 30.4 times the surface

area.

Which is quite large.

It would also contain 30.4 times as much mass.

That’s a handy scaling factor when you are keeping to the same surface gravity, it takesan identical amount of mass to create the same living area at the same gravity.

If you want a million times the living area, at normal gravity, you need a million timesthe mass.

Such a giant sphere would also need to be a thousand times wider than Earth and a thousandtimes less dense.

The air we breathe is actually less dense than the sphere itself, and an air-filledballoon or ball is reasonably sturdy.

Nor does the density have to be constant.

If you had a big thick shell around a point-like black hole, it wouldn’t matter that theintervening space was empty vacuum.

Now there are some obvious downsides to building planets this way.

Firstly, regardless of size you have to spend the same amount of mass for each amount ofliving area, which for earth gravity is 12 billion kilograms or 12 megatons per squaremeter of living space.

You could build a very sturdy chunk of rotating habitat exterior shell for only a ton persquare meter, and give yourself a nice thick layer of dirt and water for, say, 120 tonsper square meter, maybe 50 meters deep, far deeper than we tend to dig, and use 1/100,000ththe mass you would need to make the same living area with a classic spherical planet.

The supermajority of the universe is hydrogen and helium, which aren’t too useful by themselves,but could be used to generate gravity just fine.

And when we say supermajority, we are actually excluding dark matter, which - if you couldever collect and confine it - outweighs all the rest of the matter in the universe severaltimes over.

Just because your artificial planet needs a lot of mass, does not mean you need therock and soil to go any deeper than our classic rotating habitat does.

Our second issue is how you could possibly build something strong enough to act as ashell?

You do not necessarily need one though.

Saturn for instance, has almost the same surface gravity as Earth, and a shell built aroundit, like a balloon, could be kept up simply by balancing the internal pressure of thegas against the external pressure of the rocks and water sitting on the balloon shell.

We have no material strong enough to act as a rigid shell.

We have discussed doing that with active support in the past.

I’ve talked about that enough this year, and indeed all the way back to the originalShellworld’s episode, that I won’t repeat that explanation again.

See the Orbital Rings episode for a discussion of the mechanics involved.

Such planets resemble a soccer ball.

Underneath the exterior of rock and dirt is an immense series of windings around a bladderof gas, or even vacuum, and those windings are endless magnetic accelerators pushingmaterials around at orbital velocities inside themselves.

Sounds fragile, but it is in fact is a lot sturdier than what we stand on already onEarth, floating atop a sea of hot magma.

Artificial things make folks worry about failure, compared to the natural systems, but carefullydesigned, sturdy and well-maintained machines can easily survive a long time and, unlikenatural systems, because you created them you know what to expect and how to fix themwhen tell-tale signs of things going wrong happen.

Now there are limitations as to how big, or small, you can build these things, but itdepends on type and some other factors.

For type, you can define three: a rigid one held up by a network of orbital rings, theballoon kind held up by an equilibrium of internal and external pressure, and a rawdumping of matter, like is the case with Earth.

Rocks, soil, and water are a good deal less dense than Earth’s average is, so you couldbuild a bigger planet just by skipping on dense elements like iron and uranium in theplanet’s core.

This version is the one with the least variation, you can’t build much bigger than our Oceanplanet, 5.5 times wider with 30 times the surface area, and presumably with floatingislands for land.

You can’t go much smaller either, your densest materials are stuff like Osmium, Tungsten,Gold, Platinum, Uranium, and Plutonium, none of which are particularly abundant and areonly 3-4 times denser than Earth, thus allowing you to miniaturize only to about 3-4 timesskinnier and about a tenth less land.

The balloon type has size limitations too, you can’t really go smaller than Earth withone, but you can certainly go larger.

Again, Saturn is practically ideal to be made one, however, you can’t go much larger,because these things begin to contract under their own mass, so that you’d have no pressurepushing back against the balloon at the Earth-gravity radius, and eventually they get massive enoughto form their own sun, which you don’t want underneath you…usually.

We’ll get to using exotic stars inside shell worlds like white dwarfs, or neutron starsanother time.

Now the episode is titled Mega-Earths, which by common prefix means millions, and if youwant a planet a million times bigger than Earth you need to use the orbital ring shellapproach.

This is the type I usually mean when I say Shellworld, though you will also hear themreferred to as Supramundane planets, but this indicates size, not what is keeping the thingfrom falling in on itself.

Shellworlds have the greatest size range.

They can be made either much smaller or larger than Earth, and the smallest you can makeone is essentially the point at which its escape velocity is so low even room temperaturegas will fly away into the void, for all that gravity feels the same.

The largest size we will save for last, but happens to be when the escape velocity isthe same as the speed of light.

A shellworld does not rely on mass providing the gravity to keep it as a sphere ratherthan collapsing, so we can circumvent the maximum size issue at which something willignite and turn into a star by using a black hole instead.

In theory, those can be made of any size or mass.

Our sun is not quite a million times more massive than Earth though, so if you wantan actual MegaEarth, you either need to use a black hole or use a material that won’tundergo fusion at that mass.

Helium might do the trick, dark matter should, and any element above helium will.

Each will have a maximum total mass though, and if you build any bigger you will get astar, and probably a very short lived and explosive one at that.

All this gravity and stuff though isn’t the only issue.

Once you start building planets bigger than Saturn for instance, the rotation rate atthe equator to produce normal 24-hour days starts exerting a rather noticeable centrifugalforce acting in the opposite direction of gravity.

You might not mind a little lower gravity at the equator, but it will get worse thebigger the planet gets.

We can curb this by abandoning it being a pure sphere, indeed planets generally arenot, being wider at the equator than the poles exactly because they spin, but in our casewe do this backwards.

We make equator more narrow, so when you are on it you are closer to the center of theplanet’s stronger gravity, and moving slower, therefore having less centrifugal force.

At some point, even this stops being viable though, even by the time you are getting toJupiter size your planet is looking decidedly egg-shaped.

Fortunately, at this size you are also getting near the maximum before something turns intoa star anyway.

Now, we say a day is 24 hours and how long the planet takes to spin around once, actuallythat only take 23 hours and 56 minutes, the sidereal day, 360 degrees of spin, but itneeds to spin for another 4 minutes to get facing back toward the Sun since the planetmoved.

A day is not how long the Earth takes to spin once, but how long a day-night cycle takesto repeat.

Now before you jump ahead and say “ah-ha, we’ll go geocentric and have a planet sobig the Sun orbits it!”, let me head you off.

To orbit something as massive as the Sun once a day means only being 3 million kilometersfrom it, Earth is 50 times further away, and an object at that distance would get 50-squaredor 2500 times the sunlight per area, it would flash-fry you!

That distance increases if the orbiting object is more massive, a pair of binary solar massstars would orbit daily at 4 million kilometers.

It also goes up if the central mass is much heavier, but a mass would need to be 100,000times as massive as our sun to produce a daily orbital period 1 AU out, the distance Earthis, and if we want the same gravity on the surface, a Mega-Earth 100,000 times as massiveas our Sun, or 30 billion times more massive than Earth.

Meaning 30 billion times the surface area and 180,000 times the diameter of Earth, andwould thus be over a billion kilometers wide, so you wouldn’t be scorched by the Sun ifyou were standing on the surface, but only because it would be deep inside the planet.

If we took the very weakest of stars, those with a luminosity only one ten thousandthof our sun, we could be a 100 times closer to it and not get scorched, just 1.5 million

kilometers away, and such a star could orbit once every 24 hours around a Mega-Earth just20,000 times the mass of Earth.

But that would be about a million kilometers wide itself.

So even here you are getting pretty scorched, and the light coming in is almost entirelyinfrared and more like what an old incandescent bulb gives off.

Now, we could spin such a planet backwards, letting us place the Sun a bit further out,giving it a longer sidereal day than sunset length, and contracting around the equatorto deal with that fast spin issue, egg-shaping the planet.

You also have a lot more distance to the poles so they are more habitable than on Earth.

And you could get away with making the day a bit longer too, say 25 hours, so you couldsleep in.

Also, you can play with the albedo of the planet or even set up shades and mirrors aroundthe Sun to block some of the light and redistribute some of that light to those poles.

This lets you get your sun a bit bigger and whiter, but it’s hard to get above 100,000times the size of Earth and that’s about it.

Technically not a mega-Earth, as again that would be a million.

This is pretty much our boundary even with an artificial sun, one that’s just a biglight bulb of a brightness of our choosing, because once you get over a hundred thousandEarth’s worth of planetary mass, you can’t have an object spread out wide enough to onlyhave normal Earth gravity on the surface that also have any orbits of 24 hours around it,rather than inside it.

It does let you get just a little bigger than a dim red dwarf of a sun permits, and alsolets you spread your light out better to not have a far wider spectrum of temperaturesbetween equator and pole than Earth has, so it is better, but doesn’t let you get muchbigger for size.

This does not mean you have to stop.

You just have to abandon lighting by a normal object you are orbiting or the reverse.

For instance I could stick a huge mega-Earth around an actual sun and use all that powerto light its surface by giant towers over it, streetlamps on an epic scale.

Or I could build an orbital ring around the planet and have a fake sun race around that,rather than orbit, or forego that to just have light all over that ring that turnedon and off, in each its own turn, so it looked like a sun was moving through the sky beloweven though it was series of massive light bulbs just turning on and off.

There’s no size limit on this, but once you switch to an artificial source of lighting,you might want to start asking why you don’t just build more layers?

After all a second thin shell a few hundred kilometers above the first is a whole newfree planet, costing you very little extra mass.

There’s not even much drop in gravity since you aren’t much further away, and indeedyou can tweak the distance and mass of the next shell to add to the gravity at its ownsurface to keep it the same as the lower one.

Successive concentric shellworld’s, what I usually label a Matrioshka Earth or MatrioshkaShellworld -- not to be confused with a Matrioshka Brain -- let you add each new layer for amass cost parallel to rotating habitats, and indeed, I see this as one likely future scenariofor Earth, as you could mine out lower layers of Earth to add new layers above and justadd extra mass stolen from places like Jupiter.

Your top layer is still entirely natural but your lower layers are artificially lit.

Since you want your spacing between layers ideally bigger than the atmosphere is high,so you aren’t getting stupidly high air pressures on the lower levels, you could justslather the bottom of the next higher layer in black paint and some fake stars and anartificial sun ring and it will feel decently Earth-like.

So in order to build a Mega-Earth, you have to be willing to go for artificial lighting,but once you accept that option you can jump even bigger by just adding more layers, thoughtrying to do more than maybe ten is going to give you big issues getting rid of allthe waste heat your artificial sunlight produces even if you are tweaking the spectrum to optimizefor photosynthesis and human comfort.

You could have almost countless dim twilight cavern layers full of mushroom forests orstorage facilities though.

Before we get to the biggest example, though, let’s go the other way and consider howsmall you can make them.

There’s no limit as to how small a shell world could be made if you can use a blackhole as the gravity source, but it eventually becomes more logical to use a traditionalrotating habitat, because you need to start doming things under to keep your air in.

Though you can build one just 100 meters in diameter whose Hawking Black Hole radiationwould be enough to power a comfortable homestead on what would be about 7 acres, a bit over3 hectares, of land.

You’d need domes or force fields to keep the air in, but it lets you own your own planet.

If you go much smaller, you have issues with gravity being noticeably different from headto toe and that black hole in the basement giving off too much energy for the planetto dissipate.

Way back in the original episode on the channel at the end I mentioned that the largest megastructureI’d ever heard of was one of these artificial planets built around a galactic mass blackhole, with multiple concentric layers.

The notion was given to us by Paul Birch, who unsurprisingly also designed the originalOrbital Ring concept, as well as the trick for cooling down Venus we discussed a couplemonths back in Colonizing Venus.

An interesting feature of the original one is that being that close to that much massseriously slows down time, so that the folks living on the lower levels have time passmuch more slowly than on the higher levels.

And you might be able to have a lot of levels since beyond being massive power sources,it is sometimes thought you can use black holes, especially bigger ones, as a placeto dump waste heat.

So you could potentially have folks from the top layer, level 1000, go visit levels 1 or2 for an afternoon and come back to find out that your watch is quite off.

Our own galaxy’s central black hole is 4.5 million times more massive than the Sun or1.5 trillion times Earth’s Mass, which means that each layer has 1.5 trillion times the

living room Earth has, and a thousand times what even a Full Kardashev 2 Dyson Spherehas.

Even if you only had a dozen layers it would have about 20 trillion times the living roomand you might be able to have hundreds or thousands of layers.

Like I said though, we can go a bit bigger.

That structure we just mentioned is so big it would occupy the entire volume out to Saturn,but the black hole itself would be much smaller, not even a hundredth as wide.

The bigger a black hole gets, the weaker the gravity near its surface gets, which is whyyou get torn to ribbons approaching a normal one but can get a lot closer to the biggerones before tidal forces rip you apart.

Is there a black hole size so large that the gravity at its surface is the same as Earth’sSurface?

Yes, a black hole with 1.5 trillion times the mass of our sun, or 500 quadrillion timesthe mass of Earth, has a diameter of nearly one-light year and a gravity at its eventhorizon equal to Earth’s own.

This is the absolute largest any structure of this type can be built since any biggerand you would be inside the black hole.

A single layer of such a shellworld would be almost a billion times the living areaof a dyson sphere, and given a modest number of layers it would match in living area anentire Kardashev 3, galaxy spanning empire.

Not one where every system has an inhabited planet, but where each one was its own DysonSphere.

You can also build one with approximately the mass of a galaxy too.

Needless to say, time runs very slowly on the lowest layers and even the higher ones,but that makes it a nice place to hide to pass the time and since you would harvestedyour entire galaxy and maybe a bit more to build it, you don’t have any reason to carewhat is going on elsewhere.

It’s basically the most massive structure you can build since firstly, anything biggerwill be inside the black hole and secondly, anything bigger requires harvesting materialfrom outside the area of the Universe gravitationally bound to you, rather than destined to flyoff over the cosmological event horizon one day.

Since Paul Birch is far less well-known than he deserves, and since this channel is bigenough I can coin names and expect them to stick, I am going to name this a Birch Planet.

The largest possible Earth-like megastructure you can build under known physics.

I will go ahead and include the smaller original version around a galactic center black holeas a Birch Planet too, TeraEarth not sounding right compared to a mega-Earth or Giga-Earth.

Okay, why would you build these?

Any of these?

They use a ton of matter, and too much to really justify that they are more Earth-likethan a rotating habitat.

However, as I’ve mentioned before any galactic scale civilization, or even just a decentlylong-lived interstellar one, needs to think on timelines of more than one classic humanlifespan to continue to exist or even come to be in the first place.

So the amount of mass one person needs for one lifetime stops being a good path for determiningthe stockpiles of resources you need to keep around.

When you engage in starlifting and other stellar engine creation, you often will have a tonof useless mass leftover, hydrogen and helium for instance, which has little value exceptfor its mass or mass-energy for fusion or matter to energy conversion.

You still want to store that stuff so you can use it later, and you might want to takeadvantage of the gravity it produces.

If you’ve got some big fuel bunker in space shaped like a sphere, as it presumably wouldbe, you might want to just dump some dirt, water, and air on it and build some housestoo.

In the long term you want to harvest the entire galaxy, and even further if you can, becausethe raw materials of the Universe are not stored well.

A solar system you leave sitting around untouched for a million years instead of harvestingis losing value that whole time, burning hydrogen, having solar wind escape, having valuablerocky asteroids and comets crash into their sun, and so on.

If you are harvesting and storing all that for eventual use, you might as well make useof its gravity now.

And if you are thinking on those timelines, you aren’t interested in how many centuriesor even millions of years some rotating habitat could run its fusion reactors off its tanksof hydrogen fusion fuel, but how many trillions or quadrillions of years a hollow planet stuffedfull of hydrogen can run its lighting off that hydrogen, slowly lowering gravity oreven contracting the planet as the fuel gets used.

We will talk about some of those scenarios more when we do our next installment in theCivilizations at the End of Time series.

Another big advantage of a Birch Planet relates to the scale of Kardashev 3 or K3 civilization.

A K3 civilization makes use of all of the energy put out by its galaxy.

I’ve mentioned in other episodes that divergence will inevitably occur due to the timelinesinvolved in setting up and communicating in a K3 civilization that has no faster thanlight travel or communications.

It takes potentially a million years to travel across the galaxy even when approaching relativisticspeeds.

Colonizing a galaxy takes millions of years and, even without technological tinkering,folks on the other side of the galaxy might be as genetically different as we are to thedinosaurs.

The consequence is that members of the K3 civilization across the galaxy are going tobe very alien to one another, even if they originally came from the same species.

If a K3 civilization wanted to make itself cohesive, then the Birch Planet is a solutionto the divergence problem.

A K3 civilization can install itself into a Birch Planet and will be able to communicateto its entire population, a billion, billion times as many individuals as Earth holds,in timelines of about a year.

Many an old empire from our own history existed within similar constraints and still remainedrelatively cohesive.

You can also start building one and just keep making it bigger as more mass becomes available,you don’t have to build a Birch Planet all at once.

This also leads onto a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox I speak so much about onthis channel, which at its simplest is an apparent contradiction that despite a seeminglyhigh probability for the existence of space-faring aliens that there is no evidence that suchaliens actually exist.

Now, we’ve been actively looking for sentient alien life in our galaxy for decades, butwe’ve also been looking for signs of it in other galaxies.

If there were a K3 civilization, we would usually expect to be able to see it from thetell-tale waste infrared heat that it would output, but possibly not if that K3 civilizationwas on a Birch Planet.

Even if a Birch Planet put out the ferocious amount of heat that such a vast civilizationwould produce, we wouldn’t necessarily notice it since it would be concentrated.

The construction of one uses up an entire galaxy, and while it should be very visibleif you are looking at that spot, the odds of looking at that spot aren’t very high.

What’s more, a maximum sized one is hanging out just over the event horizon of a blackhole, so the light leaving it is going to be massively red-shifted, you won’t spotone of these, even the smaller ones, if you are just looking for the infrared signatureof an Earth temperature Dyson Sphere.

But moreover, as mentioned earlier, it is thought that you might be able to dump wasteheat into black holes, which you would want to do if that trick works, so a Birch Planetmight be incredibly hard to see since it is very far away from any other civilization,very tiny compared to a galaxy, has all it’s light red-shifted, and might be able to usethat black hole as a heat sink.

Now, construction of such a thing is not even vaguely covert, so the civilization that madeit isn’t going be hiding, but they’d be hard to see and a Birch Planet, once constructed,would be the perfect place for a K3 civilization to hide from us.

Perhaps this is the reason we have not seen a K3 Civilization, they build inwards, notexpand outwards, just dragging in matter to add to their single immense planet.

We had to do a lot of math today to discuss our topic, as usual, I did try to keep itto the minimum and supplementary, so that folks who wanted to design artificial planetsof their own had the available tools.

I left out a lot of the math in this video… but to start doing your own research intodistant worlds you’re going to need a toolbox… a perfect place for that is Brilliant.

It's a great place to improve your skill and comfort level with math and science so thatyou can think like a physicist.

In Brilliant's Astronomy course, starting from simple beginnings, you can also learnhow to model the habitable zone around different stars, look for observational signatures ofdistant worlds and analyze the logistics of sending probes to explore them.

With these basic skills, you can go on to explore places like we discussed today, oreven dream up new ones.

To support the channel and learn more about Brilliant, go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur

and sign up for free.

As a bonus, the first 200 subscribers will get 20% off the annual Premium membership.

Next week, we return to the Outward Bound series for Colonizing Jupiter, and we willlook at the concept of a mini-solar system of gas giant moons along with oceanic colonieson places like Europa, and how to colonize an actual gas giant itself.

The week after that we’ll continue our look at Artificial Intelligence, and follow thatup with a look at the concept of Hive Minds.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channeland if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Hive Minds | | 2017-12-07 | | https://youtu.be/NV7_abwM2ug | +--------------------------------+

They say two heads are better than one, so what about two billion?

Today’s topic is Hive Minds and Networked Intelligence, and I should start by sayingthey’re not entirely the same thing.

Indeed while Hive Minds is mostly a subcategory of Networked Intelligence, it has a lot ofsubcategories of its own too.

Probably the best known example of a Hive Mind from fiction is the Borg from Star Trek,and those fellows are sufficiently horrifying that it gives Hive Minds a pretty bad reputation.

To be fair though, they are rarely presented in a positive light in fiction.

We’ll try to look at some positive aspects and examples today, but to be honest I thinkI’d rather jump off a cliff than be part of most versions of them so I’m probablynot a neutral spokesman.

Networked Intelligence is another story, as a broad category, and Networked Intelligenceitself is one of the three types of Intelligence and possible paths to Super-Intelligence we’vediscussed.

One of the others is Speed Intelligence, when the mind is the same except sped up.

That is simple enough conceptually and we’ve talked about it extensively in other episodes.

Networked Intelligence and Quality Intelligence, which is hard to define beyond the differencebetween a lone genius who solves a problem a room full of other experts could not, areboth types we’ve spent less time on and today we’ll fix that for the former.

The first key to thing though about networked intelligence is that it’s already somethingwe have.

And I don’t mean in the way humans themselves are arguably a colony organism composed ofmany different types of cells and organs.

Unlike the most integrated forms of Hive Mind, you’re not a bigger intelligence composedof smaller intelligences so I think we have to exclude individual humans as an exampleof a Hive Mind.

Defining a networked intelligence is a bit tricky, in order to avoid trivial exampleslike a herd of animals with limited communication.

Normally with futuristic concepts I always encourage folks to avoid definitions thatwould include ourselves since that tends to indicate the definition is bad, you and Iare not cyborgs, it’s nice to point out how things like our glasses or tooth fillingsor similar can be argued to be mechanical augmentation of a human, but it’s clearlynot what we mean by cyborg so you probably have a bad definition if it includes modernhumans.

Similarly, humans are not what we mean when we say Networked Intelligence or Hive Mind,but human civilization was built by us becoming a simple networked intelligence.

Moreover we recognize such things exist and it’s implicit whenever we refer to groupor organization that are beyond classic family and genetic groupings.

This company, that sports team, that church or village or city or country, we do regardas an entity in its own right.

A network being a bunch of ropes tied together to create a net, usually with nodes, or knots,it’s probably not too surprising the definition of network is pretty hazy too, but for today’scontext we’ll say the simplest thinking network would be several individual nodes,human minds in this case, connected together exchanging information.

Clearly we’ve been doing this since before there were humans, since even the most basicof body language and noises inside some pack of animals is an intentional exchange of information.

If you want to stretch the point, you can argue that even two simple organisms exchangingDNA to make a new one is pretty sophisticated communication and you can really stretch thepoint and include even a simple unicellular organism that reproduces by mitosis, by dividingitself, arguing it is a giant factory or many interdependent machines.

It’s easy to forget just how complex such bacteria are but it is better to think ofthem as a giant metropolis full of molecules as people and buildings than some tiny simpleorganism barely bigger than an atom, after all, each cell usually contains trillionsof atoms.

Like I said though, we have to beware definitions of new concepts so broad as to be meaninglessnot because it is inaccurate just inconvenient and not helpful.

I will just place the simplest of networked intelligences at the invention of language,as that seriously jumped up both the bandwidth and integrity of those signals, and as a byproductallowed far more short term and focused specialization.

We see limited specialization in almost any group of cooperating animals, and we see intensespecialization in things like insect hives, but the sheer amount of fast and accuratedata that can be exchanged through human language allows us to train people with identical DNAto perform very specific tasks not strongly shaped by their biology.

And we see that strongly with the emergence of cities, from which we get the word civilizationin the first place.

Very many people each specialized in very different tasks which could not possibly allowtheir survival in isolation just doing that specialized task, all grouped together forfast exchange of information and supplies.

Any definition being a bit arbitrary, I will set this as the simplest example of networkedintelligence for humans.

It also represents a huge paradigm shift and increase in resources and abilities.

Same as basic communication and tool use made humans jump up over other animals, the riseof cities and civilizations gave a huge edge.

We have tons of technological improvements that make individual people more effective,we’ve had many more that just let us increase how many people we can have alive and healthy,our carrying capacity.

However, many of inventions were such boons because they improved the network.

Roads and bridges to connect rural areas to cities and cities to other cities, carryingnot just food and supplies but allowing the movement of people, ideas, and information.

Ships, railroads, highways, postal systems, radios, telephones, and these days the internet.

All can be viewed as an amplification and augmentation of basic human speech, whichallowed two people fairly near each other to exchange complex concepts quickly and accurately.

Even the invention of writing, which allowed communication not only over distance but overtime itself, improved this basic human network so that it could include dead people.

Long after they were gone, even from the memories of the next generation or two who met themand spoke to them, writing allowed us to incorporate non-living humans into the human network andthe modern internet has allowed us to include computers and databases into that networktoo.

We don’t really think of ourselves as networked intelligence, some actual entity called humanity,but even just those of us old enough to remember when the internet did not exist, and evenbeing exposed to it gradually so it lacked an explosive moment of transition, can seea clear difference in the civilization we have now as opposed to then.

Technological changes happen so fast and frequently these days that we are a bit immune to seeinghow they’ve changed us, but it has still happened.

I wanted to note that though because a bit like cybernetics, networked intelligence isone of those things where it happens gradually enough that we might just keep moving thebar, folks a few centuries from now might be shot through with tons of devices, cloudstoring memories outside their head, and routinely talk to people by just thinking their directionwith the technological equivalent of telepathy, and still be talking about how in the futurepeople might be cyborgs or network their minds together, not like us of course.

But no matter how integrated human minds might get to be, the human itself is not the networkedintelligence, it’s just a node of it, whether it’s an individual or not.

Bob is not the networked intelligence of New York City, he’s just a component of it.

On this subject of Networks and Hive Minds, we are obviously very interested in what happensto the individual, if they still continue to exist or not or are free or not or haveprivacy or not, but the individual is not the network, even if it is a key or irreplaceablecomponent.

Who is the network?

The network is the network.

We have a thought problem that’s fairly interesting for developing this notion.

We’ve talked a lot about copying a human mind onto a computer substrate where the processorsemulate neurons.

That’s an intuitive enough concept for folks, but you can just as easily – well not easily– sit millions of people down with pencil and paper and have them perform all thosesame calculations that the computer is doing, storing each result on paper and walking overto hand each new bit to another calculator.

We can envision your neurons doing this to make you.

We can envision computer chips doing this to make you.

But there is something passing strange about the idea of a ton of people cranking all thecalculations out manually, including folks looking at a scenery and jotting down datato be sent to giant skyscraper full of cubicles manned by the team that makes up your eyesand optic nerve.

Yet by the same logic as the neurons or computer emulation, that would be you, and in thiscase you would be a networked intelligence, all those people are your nodes.

You don’t, as with the traditional hive mind, have access to their thoughts, you can’tcontrol them, they are not indeed wired into your mind at all.

We could also replace them with a giant ant colony, a literal hive, that wasn’t calculatingbut perform those operations far more stupidly and simply, pushing colored or scented grainsaround to serve as your bits and signals.

I like this example, where people or ants – our usual example of a hive mind – arecranking out calculations to run your mind because it both shakes ups the notion of thinkingof an uploaded mind on a computer as essentially just a substitute brain – a black box doingthe work – and highlights that such a thing doesn’t actually have to be composed ofthe actual minds of its nodes in an intrusive manner.

I think it also easier to picture some place like New York City or Tokyo as a potentialreal separate entity with thoughts when you’ve just tried to wrap your head around a millionpeople with pencil and paper running your mind.

I don’t think I’d ever categorize one of these as a true networked intelligenceunless the mind being generated was actually smarter than the individual components eachwere.

At least at some tasks, and while some group of people working on a problem together mightcome up with ideas faster and better than an individual could, and maybe even ones noindividual would have thought of, it’s not really exhibiting much intelligence itself.

Of course in fiction it often is because its individual members have usually become droolingmorons.

At best one can justify this with the assumption that collective mind is using every sparebit of processing power, up to and including the bits that process stuff like optical signalsso that people can walk right by drones without even being seen maybe, but this is mostlyjust bad writing.

Or very good writing, in the case of Star Trek’s Borg the writers are presumably morefocused on making a dreadful inhuman enemy that dehumanizes people, and nothing bettershows that than folks stumbling around without apparent self-awareness, like a zombie.

So I won’t knock the writer’s from a story standpoint, just a logical and science standpoint.

The Borg are idiots, individually and collectively, and I doubt that demonstrates an actual hivemind properly, even if I love them as villains.

I think I preferred Unity, a parody of the Borg from the cartoon Rick & Morty, wherethe titular character Rick gets the hive mind Unity drunk and it comments how it probablyshouldn’t be trying to run 200,000 Pediatric hospitals and 12 million deep fryers in thatstate.

And it’s a key point about such hive minds, that if you’re composed of lots of individualcomponents designed for doing such things on their own, you probably shouldn’t berunning them.

Humans not only have components of ourselves we control subconsciously, but plenty of bitsthat operate with no control whatsoever, I don’t need to tell my DNA to unzip and replicate,though it might be handy to be able to tell it when to do that and when not to.

Indeed we do have some regulation methods inside the body and cancer can result whenthat breaks down.

I’d imagine a Hive Mind could develop the equivalent of cancer, and if it layers upa lot minds, sub-minds that supervise this or that, it would have to worry not just aboutindividual members leaving or attacking it if they did, but also sub-minds, smaller hiveminds, rebelling or breaking away.

Obviously the more autonomy you have at the lower levels the more of an issue that wouldbe, my kidneys have never tried to declare independence or stage a revolt.

Hive minds though could easily end up undergoing such breakaways or mitosis as a form of reproduction.

In the absence of instantaneous communication it might need to as well.

I mentioned a few episodes back in Digital Death that a human brain spread out to thesize of planet, but with its signals switched over to light speed ones, would process atthe same rate as a normal human mind, spread out beyond that and you either need some formof FTL communication or you will start suffering time lag issues.

So spreading a hive mind over multiple planets, let alone solar systems, would seem a seriouslimitation.

I tend to be skeptical about us ever inventing any form of FTL, but even if we grant it forthe moment, a lot of fictional and theoretical FTL methods are simply faster than light,not instantaneous, or have serious bandwidth issues.

You can probably run an interstellar empire on dial-up modem speeds, the old Battletech& Mechwarrior franchise did that, but I can’t see running a hive mind that way.

This is one possible Fermi Paradox Solution that gets kicked around too, that aliens don’tspread out from their homeworld much because they converge to being hive minds or get replacedby singular entities like a Super-intelligent planet sprawling computer.

I tend not to bring it up in Fermi Paradox discussions because it’s not a good one,but it is of interest today.

It’s not a good one because you can’t assume every civilization does this, you can’tassume none would be willing to subdivide to found a small new hive mind in anothersystem, and it still suffers from the Dyson Dilemma, in that you can build Dyson Swarmsaround your own home star and as we saw in the Mega Earths episode you can just keepbuilding those up with resources brought in from elsewhere until it is galactic mass andhovering just above the critical density to turn into a black hole, either as a BirchPlanet or a truly huge Dyson Swarm of Dyson Swarms.

I think most hive minds would be willing to reproduce by making a new one elsewhere, butthey might not like the idea of essentially making a rival, and for that matter they mightneed a certain minimum number of people just to make existence bearable for those colonysplinters.

In Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of the Seven Suns you’ve got a limited hive mind, theIldirians, who tend to need to do everything big, including their defense fleets, justto have enough of them in one place to stay effective and sane.

The Geth from the Mass Effect franchise had that issue too.

If that was hard to overcome you’d probably need to bring resources back rather than expand.

Now there’s the question of who would go out and retrieve those resources from aroundthe galaxy, but any hive mind that can’t design an automated mining vessel obviouslycame out a loser on the deal when it became one.

It’s the same issue with folks living in virtual realities, they might not want toabandon their paradise to go harvest resources far away, but they shouldn’t have to.

If you can make simulated paradises it implies you can make something smart enough to decentlymimic people to talk with in that paradise, so programming a ship to gather stuff andbring it back ought to be child’s play, and one would tend to think a hive mind coulddo it too, especially since they presumably had to be pretty good with intelligence andcomputers to make their hive mind in the first place.

That skips those that naturally evolved, who are often shown as being awful with computersbecause they never developed them.

We get that with Morning Light Mountain in Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga and withthe Buggers or Formics in Ender’s Game, and lots of other insect hive examples.

The former, Morning Light Mountain, cannot naturally speak faster than light, as mostof the fictional examples can, so it does have a decent head for electronics and cyberneticsbut still never developed computers much.

In Ender’s Game the Buggers do have instant communication and telepathy they naturallyevolved, indeed humans back-engineered their own interstellar communications off this.

Sort of, they knew it could be done since they could tell by watching Bugger ships reactto things faster than the speed of light should have permitted them to witness it, and knowingit could be done, humanity then figured it out.

It is implied they need a queen reasonably nearby for this to work though, as a sortof central node.

Though in later books it is stressed that the Queen’s body is just one more droneto her, albeit a critical one, and that she isn’t really the queen or maybe even thehive but more like our example earlier where your intelligence was run by ants.

We also get a retcon about the individual buggers actually having intelligence of theirown.

Orson Scott Card is pretty good about consistent canon by and large but some explanations changedover the series, tweaked for consistency I assume.

I remember when I did the Stupid Aliens episode and mentioned the book I irritated some folksdiscussing the Buggers, “That’s not what it was in the book!” and kept having to

remind folks that it isn’t a book, it’s a series of around 20 novels and short storieswritten over 30 years, and that they weren’t saying I was wrong, they were saying the authorwas.

Always a problem in science fiction when stuff needs retconning, or maybe didn’t but getsit anyway, a lot of folks were irritated when Alice Krige showed up in Star Trek First contact,the film not the episode, as the Borg Queen, but it didn’t bother me too much personally.

The Borg originally spoke with one voice out of thousand mouths, cold and alien and unifiedlike a sociopathic chorus so have a single queen talking seemed wrong, but to be fairthe borg originally were going to be an insectoid hive race but they didn’t have the budgetso we get the black leather body horror look that seems like something out of Clive Barker’sHellraiser franchise, so changes happen, and it gave the audience a central focus for theirvillain.

There’s also no reason a Hive can’t have a mouthpiece, it’s actually inefficientto have a thousand people saying the exact same thing, and a hive doesn’t have to behomogenous with every member having the same function and status, insect hives aren’tlike that after all, it could be a meat puppet to use as a collective voice or even a semi-independentsystem.

Now the Borg are horrifying in their own right but the usual thing that bugs people aboutthem is that membership tends not to be optional.

Even in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the rather benevolent Hive Mind of Gaia, whichstill has modest individuality for its members, is plotting galactic takeover and by conscriptionnot volunteers.

It was not a popular move with most fans either, myself included, and is often guessed as thereason why all future books in the series were set before the incident.

Nonetheless there are tons of examples of good hive minds in science fiction, especiallywhen telepathy seemed to be an omnipresent feature even in hard science fiction novels,a trend I’m glad finally died off in the last couple decades, but common or not, rarelydo I hear folks speaking of them with enthusiasm.

Pretty much the only member of a Hive Mind in fiction I like is Nevil Clavain for theRevelation Space series, it probably helps that he’s a viewpoint character who joinedsemi-voluntarily, never upgrades his implants from the earlier versions that were less connected,and is often on bad terms with his own faction, the Conjoiners, so he doesn’t exactly cheerleadfor them.

They also don’t indiscriminately spread and assimilate folks involuntarily either.

Interestingly Clavain’s faction in the books is often in conflict with the other factionof humanity that is closest to being a hive mind too, the Demarchists.

They are more of a bunch of intelligences who are networked, so to speak, as like mostpeople they have a ton of mental implants but one of theirs, and the key one for theirspecific civilization, is one that tries to go straight democracy, no representatives,by having everyone vote on almost everything.

Sort of like if every bill in congress got text messaged to you for a vote, only as bestI can tell the implants allow them to do it mostly subconsciously and even asleep.

I’m assuming the implants in everyone’s head know them individually well enough toguess how they’d respond.

Forgetting the specific mechanics, that is kind of the ideal of most versions of democracyand its parallels, everyone gets a say in what happens because everyone has an investmentin the outcome and a right to self-determination, so networking folks to make news and detailseasier to get and absorb to make more informed decisions seems ideal.

Obviously taken too far you get a hive mind where nobody gets any say in anything becausethere’s no individuality leftover.

The other big issue is the privacy one, and that’s a serious issue of the future evenwhen you’re not telepathically linked to other people.

However in the networked intelligence case, short of a hive mind, I do think that’sjust an artifact of telepathy in science fiction.

We associate telepathy as reading people’s minds, not just the equivalent of a phoneor internet connection, so a method using that will understandably make you figure allthose minds can read each other and freely look around or even merge.

Again, part of why I don’t like telepathy in fiction, made up non-science makes forbad extrapolations of the future.

Folks end up picturing some mind eating hive or a bunch of folks joining hands around adrum circle to meditate and combine their souls.

My computer, and thus me, is connected to the internet and to you, obviously, or youcouldn’t hear me now.

I’ve never noticed my smartphone trying to merge into my brain even when I’m holdingit next to my head or my computer trying to eat my neighbors.

I can read my files from other computers in my house or on a network but only the onesI’ve shared.

When you doing this stuff with mystical telepathy that presumably can’t be done or it takesspecial effort and training.

But when you do it with technology you have to understand how it all works, how brainsand memory function, to do it in the first place, so segmenting things off or only sharingspecific chosen bits is possible from the outset, and if I want people to know whatmy schedule is, I can make that open just like my google calendar, or if I want onlymy doctor to be able to look at my medical status, I can do that too.

So I think, when we’re talking about a technological route to a more networked intelligence wedon’t necessarily have to discard privacy and individuality to gain the many obviousbenefits.

You also probably don’t have to go the all in or out option, one size fits all.

Living in a city traditionally cuts down privacy a bit, hence many of us prefer the peace andsolitude of the country, doesn’t mean we’re divorced from civilization.

So too, one can presumably set up such a network to allow people variable involvement to fittheir tastes, in general and at the moment.

Also just like civilization, you could enjoy sub-networks, I’m part of humanity and theUS and my state of Ohio and my little village and dozens of various related and unrelatedsocial or professional groups, my level of involvement in each varies and I can adjustmy commitment.

You could have a human overmind with, say, the sub-mind of Ohio, which was both a separateentity and part of the Earthmind at the same time, and how much so might fluctuate, asmight its membership, with some joining or leaving and involving themselves to varyingdegrees.

Vernor Vinge explores this notion with a race called the Tines in his classic novel, “AFire Upon the Deep”, where we see small groups minds of often just a few crittersthat often switch members who are not really individuals on their own.

There’s a lot of options for this in fiction but I would tend to guess people who predictthis as an eventuality for humans are semi-correct.

Just my guess but the error being made is that folks don’t want to give up their privacyand individuality and must eventually mature to be okay with that, and I personally don’tsee that as more mature or necessary, that you have to sacrifice privacy or individualityto enjoy the benefits of a greater degree of networking and group cooperation.

Though I could easily see a lot of folks choosing that route, and so long as admission is voluntarymore power to them.

Obviously if you’re too interdependent it makes it hard to get out there and settlethe galaxy, and we’ll be looking at a first step to that next week in Colonizing the OortCloud, which contains tons of potential places for us to colonize but usually so far aparteven compared to planets that no unified Hive Mind would be viable.

The week after that we’ll leave the solar system and continue to explore the problemswith unification, especially with light speed limitations, in Interstellar Empires, andthen we’ll finish out 2017 by heading out of the galaxy and asking if it is even possibleto settle other galaxies in a Universe without faster than light travel.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channeland hit the like button.

And if you enjoyed this episode, you can help support future ones by becoming a channelpatron on Patreon.

Until next time, thanks for watching and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | The Cosmic Ocean | | 2017-11-09 | | https://youtu.be/5kL-xwcmPds | +--------------------------------+

The Universe is a vast cosmic ocean.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Had Carl Sagan not passed away, today, November 9th, would be his 83rd birthday.

I imagine a large part of the audience for this channel remembers Sagan, and fondly so,and I am no exception.

He is one of the great inspirations for this channel.

Sagan was one of the world’s best-known futurists.

He and I have some things in common in that we are both scientists, futurists, and techno-optimistswith a deep belief that our destiny lies up there in the stars.

I've always tried to emulate what he did so well by making the topics interesting andstraight-forward, not to oversimplify them, but to explain what can be explained in away that doesn’t overcomplicate things.

Cosmos, Sagan’s famous TV series in the 1980s, came out right after I was born.

I can't remember when I first saw it, probably when I was quite young as my mother was afan of his.

I've probably seen every episode at least a few times.

I guess what always stuck out to me is that the Cosmos series reveled in the mystery ofthe universe, but also sought to explain it.

That always seemed the right way to present material.

There are many areas where Sagan’s work intersects with my own and I’m going tospend some time in this episode looking at that in more detail.

While Sagan was and still is a major inspiration to me, we do not agree on everything, butthat is not particularly surprising or undesirable.

There is also a lot more technology and observations that have changed our views of the universefrom the time Sagan did his most famous work in the 1980s and 90s.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact Sagan’s had on this channel and I wanted to pointout some of the cases I’ve drawn on his work today.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and while Sagan did as well, he was one of thosegiants and his work permeates our discussions of these topics and themes.

Sagan liked to talk about the stars, but he also liked to speculate about alien civilizationsthat might dwell around them and that is a topic we have covered under a slightly differentheading on this channel, so let’s start there.

Sagan believed that extraterrestrial life is possible and probable.

I also tend to think that simple alien life is probable.

Sagan believed that an alien planet with sentient alien species was distinctly possible andasked in the Cosmos Episode titled “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue” whether we werealone, or as he put it “... is there a cosmic fugue, a billion different voices playingthe life music of the galaxy?”

To address Sagan’s question of whether we are alone or not, we need to consider theFermi Paradox, which at its simplest is an apparent contradiction that despite a highprobability for the existence of space-faring aliens that there is no evidence that suchaliens actually exist.

Sagan had far fewer tools and much less data to work with back in his day and he admittedthis in that Cosmos episode where he said: “For the first time, as we will see, we’vebegun a serious search for the cosmic fugue.”

That serious search, from what we have gathered so far in the 30 plus years since, shows thatthe Fermi Paradox is real and we see no evidence for any alien species that have reached Kardashev2, also known as K2, status where they are able to make use of all of the energy producedby their local star.

A K2 civilization would put out very distinct tell-tale signs in the infrared spectrum thatwe would have picked up by now.

That is important because, as I have discussed in our earlier episodes, we are already nearingthe point where our technology will enable us to become a Kardashev 1 level civilization,where we utilize all of the energy available on our planet, and then quickly transitioninto a K2 civilization.

If we put the effort and resources into it, we could probably be a K2 civilization injust a few centuries.

Given the relatively short period of time that it would take for us to become a K2 civilization,why have we not seen any of the expected tell-tale signs of aliens that have already achievedthat level of development?

Sagan referred a lot to the risks of self-annihilation in his TV series, Cosmos.

He highlighted these with reference to the use of nuclear weapons and potential ecologicaldisasters.

What Sagan was in effect warning about is that self-annihilation is one example of aGreat Filter, which we discussed in our earlier episodes on “Great Filters”.

I don’t happen to agree that self-annihilation is a particularly strong Great Filter, butgiven the lack of any evidence of alien K2 civilizations, it certainly cannot be ruledout as a factor.

In contrast to Sagan, I happen to believe that the major Great Filters are set in placeearlier in the developmental cycle of life in the phases between the creation of theconditions that give rise to life, its development into multi-cellular organisms, and to thedevelopment of a sentient brain.

In the end, though, we arrive at the conclusion that the Fermi Paradox is probably explainableusing Great Filters.

Sagan was very much in favor of space colonization, believing humanity is driven by a guidingforce of our genetic heritage that makes us humans unique and that binds us together.

He believed that that force of exploration and the desire to escape a potentially devastatingfuture on Earth should drive us to colonize the solar system and beyond.

I too believe that we are destined to colonize space and the stars.

We recently explored colonization of Mars in an episode of our Outward Bound series.

Sagan explored this too in his Cosmos episode titled “Blues for a Red Planet” wherehe set out how such a mission could be accomplished, much of it prophetic.

He suggested the use of robotic missions, which, of course, we have already done withthe Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity.

He also saw an interplanetary ship constructed in Earth orbit that would carry humans toMars too.

I happen to believe that the materials for such a mission would be best sourced fromthe Moon - meaning that such a mission would be more conveniently assembled in lunar orbit- but Sagan’s vision for the future of Mars exploration is now much closer to becominga reality by the likes of Space-X.

While he discussed almost every area of science, his first love was always his own field ofastronomy, and while this channel spends a lot of its time in space, we do not spendtoo much of that on astronomy itself.

Yet the Universe is an immense place of infinite wonders and I thought for today we’d spendsome time on those.

Voyager 1 is a space probe that is in the process of leaving our solar system.

In 1990, at the request of Sagan years earlier, a photograph of Earth was taken by Voyager1 that shows Earth, 3.7 billion miles away, to be nothing more than a pale blue dot, whichbecame the title of one of Sagan’s books in 1994.

If this channel could be said to have any single main focus, I suppose that it wouldbe ways of venturing out from our Pale Blue Dot of a homeworld and exploring and colonizingthat vast Cosmic Ocean all around us.

One of things we do on this channel is to try to take the science we know and the technologieswhich we either have now or look like safe bets and try to guess at what the future willactually look like.

To get out there to the stars we tend to assume we need some way to travel faster than thespeed of light, but we have no solutions for that at this time and any prospects look grim.

Popular science likes to discuss warp drives and wormholes and we’ve explained them herein the FTL series, but the sad reality is that they don’t appear to have very realisticoptions for ever being developed.

If they do, that’s great; I won’t hold my breath though.

However, I’m not willing to give up on space travel just because of that and, as it turnsout, we don’t have to.

Our focus today, and on the channel in general, isn’t to say various fantastic technologieswon’t ever be invented, but to challenge the assumptions that we MUST have them tosucceed at seemingly overwhelming challenges, such as colonizing space.

I’ll quell my skepticism on FTL drives as soon as someone hands me a bottle of watercontaining a negative liter of water, a yardstick that is negative one meter long, or a realnumber that when multiplied by itself has a negative value.

Fundamentally every proposed FTL method seems to rely on things like that, mathematicallyvalid concepts that do not appear to have real physical analogs.

Though truth be told, I’d be very worried about any prototype engine that folks thoughtwas going to pull it off.

As we’ve discussed before, FTL only exacerbates all the problems we have with the Fermi Paradox,and if it turned out to be possible I would start wondering if we might have some seriousflaws in our perception of the Universe and Life.

Sagan, like most physicists, also took the view that the speed of light could not beexceeded, so I’m in good company here.

So, we will not break the speed of light in this episode, but we will break our preconceptionsof what space is.

The classic image we are given from scifi, and indeed even science, is that the galaxyis an immense barren void.

To think of solar systems in this light, one can picture a vast desert thousands of kilometersacross in which a handful of oases no bigger than a small pond exist, and these are solarsystems.

Of these, only a tiny percentage would have yellow stars like our own around which a fewmight have an Earth-like planet or one close enough that we could terraform it.

And this image is accurate enough, indeed still a bit generous.

Were we to imagine a light year was a hundred kilometers, these oases, these solar systems,would tend to be many hundreds of kilometers apart and their habitable zones would be justa meter or so across.

One of those grains of sand would be a planet, and scaled up properly, such a desert wouldneed to be 10 million kilometers across.

This is the classic view.

However it ignores that we might cultivate that entire little pool rather than a singlegrain of sand in it.

This is what we mean when we speak of Dyson spheres.

But that’s not the end of it because while the space between these oases star systemsis huge, it isn’t entirely empty.

Most of the material in the galaxy is not inside stars, not even including dark matterwhich is most of it.

That regular matter is mostly floating around in the interstellar void and much of it accumulatesinto small bodies.

A good deal more of it is simple hydrogen gas, waiting for its chance to end up in astar one day.

However to cover the vast gulfs between stars we almost have to have fusion - the very processthat turns that hydrogen into energy in a sun.

We’ve discussed some possible workarounds should fusion turn out to be impossible afterall, but for my part I think it is something we will crack this century.

Indeed, we technically cracked it in the middle of the last century but if you want to usefusion bombs as a power source for electricity or spaceship drives you have to build to quitea large scale.

In the Cosmos episode “Journeys in Space and Time”, Sagan discusses a fusion-poweredcraft called Project Daedalus that travels at 10% of light speed.

I always think it is important to remind people of that since many are skeptical of fusionand like to repeat that bit about it being the technology of 20 years from now and alwayswill be.

We aren’t trying to invent fusion reactors, we’re trying to invent compact ones thatcan just power a city rather than a planet, or propel a spaceship smaller than New YorkCity.

We’ve talked about ways to do space travel if we never get compact fusion working.

Sagan discusses the Project Orion plans in Cosmos that would make use of hydrogen bombexplosions to propel an interstellar craft.

More modern ideas like the Interstellar Laser Highway offer higher speeds than a fusionor fission drive could obtain, but the key point is that if we assume we do have fusionplants we also have the ability to make interstellar spaceships.

No other technology is required, even if there are several that would make it much easier.

However, loosely speaking, it takes something like 10^20 joules of energy to move a personto another neighboring solar system in less than a human lifetime.

In terms of energy, that’s also enough to support someone for millions of years evenif you have to make artificial sunlight to grow their food.

So the same reactor that makes traveling to other stars with habitable planets possiblemakes it less necessary to find those rare planets like Earth to call new homes.

Every icy rock meandering about the outskirts of a solar system suddenly becomes every bitas attractive as a new home as a near-Earth clone.

Terraforming planets is in many ways just as hard, or harder, than constructing an equalamount of artificial habitats.

Sagan also explores the possibility of colonizing the Oort cloud in his book, Pale Blue Dot,and we’ll be looking at that concept in December.

This isn’t going to stop folks from building interstellar ships and heading off to stars,but it means rather than civilizations occupying just a few astronomical units near a star,each separated by hundreds of thousands of AU from their neighbors, you’d likely findhabitats spread throughout that whole volume.

Each a little cactus in the desert.

At a basic level the cost of interstellar travel isn’t about distance so much as speed,and the energy needed to get there and back.

That’s another problem with traveling very fast; the closer to light speed you get themore energy it costs you, and it rises very steeply.

Something most people discussing hypothetical FTL methods tend to gloss over is that notonly do those systems all rely on the square root of -1 having a real physical expression,but they are massive energy hogs, even compared to relativistic spaceships.

As I just mentioned, relativistic ships tend to need energy supplies in the output rangewe tend to associate with powering national economies.

So the three basic objections to going to the stars slowly tend to be that you’d diebefore you got there, that you could never skip off to another solar system to shakehands with aliens, and that you can’t fly around inspecting spatial anomalies.

The first of these was dealt with by Sagan, who suggested the use of generational shipsin the Journeys in Space and Time episode.

It’s also entirely possible that we will figure out how to extend people’s lifetimesor freeze them and thaw them out, what Sagan calls hibernation.

People always seem weirdly skeptical of this but not of FTL travel.

Tell people you are going to build a swarm of star encompassing megastructures or extendthe human lifespan and they don’t believe it, even though both are demonstrably insidethe laws of known science.

Tell them we can never build the Millennium Falcon and go zipping around the stars andthey think you’re being defeatist and short-sighted.

I also mentioned two other things, that you can’t go meet aliens and that you can’tgo investigate space anomalies.

Given enough time you will always be able to meet aliens, since even ignoring deliberatetechnological intervention in terms of genetic engineering you will have a lot of drift.

Humans colonizing a galaxy and taking a few million years to do it are going to be aboutas human or like each other as you are to a cat or dog.

Remember, they’re family too, they’re just like your millionth cousin ten milliontimes removed.

You don’t even have to be in another solar system, after all your cat and dog aren’t.

The sheer immensity of things like Dyson Swarms and Kardashev 2 civilizations allows a lotof divergence, and when we throw in accelerated mutation from genetic engineering, optionslike cybernetics or uplifting, and the large number of pathways Transhumanism or artificialintelligence might take, you could easily have thousands of alien civilizations livinginside your home solar system that were ten times as alien as the critters we usuallysee in scifi.

They wouldn’t even necessarily share any DNA with you, or even use DNA, and you cango around discovering them all you like.

You wouldn’t be the first, they’d have whole volumes discussing their culture loggedin the Encyclopedia Galactica, but they’re new to you.

Alternatively if there are alien civilizations out there that’s probably going to be thecase for them too.

I mean we’ve barely been in space, not for long nor traveled far, and we already shippedoff naked pictures of ourselves and a roadmap to our house, and odds are good at least oneor two other civilizations would be older but equally open to contact.

Though admittedly if someone moved into my neighborhood and acted that way I’d probablystart ducking their phone calls and having my evenings filled with fictitious affairsthat made me unable to attend a housewarming party.

That leaves us our third one, which is exploring space anomalies.

Unfortunately, while the Universe is a fascinating place full of many things which are beautifuland strange, this isn’t Star Trek where you wander into bizarre new space anomaliesevery week exhibiting new physics.

To make matters worse, that’s not how rational civilizations explore weird anomalies either.

You shoot unmanned probes to look at such things first.

You do this because science is interested in understanding, not excitement, and we willnot launch huge manned expeditions that could imperil lives for no realistic gain simplybecause people want excitement.

It’s unethical and irresponsible, even more so than having all your senior officers beamdown to investigate the matter.

Makes for good fiction but not good science or responsible management.

If we spot an anomaly we’ll eyeball it from afar, launch a probe to do a flyby – shipsthat don’t have to slow down can always go faster than ones that do – then followthat up with one that does slow down but can still get there faster than a manned ship.

Then, at last, if it still isn’t solved, a manned ship might go there.

Likely after hundreds if not thousands of probes have flitted by or parked to monitorit.

Even that manned ship is really only necessary if you don’t have FTL so that you can getintelligent critters on the scene rather than dealing with all the time lag for communication.

You can’t send a very smart unmanned probe because that’s essentially an oxymoron;if your probe is smart enough to be doing the sorts of thinking we’d otherwise preferto send a team of experts out to do, you probably shouldn’t be viewing it as expendable orunmanned.

So it’s really only in a no-FTL Universe where you’d be likely to ever have directcontact with anomalies or undiscovered civilizations since you can’t remotely control your probesand drones from light years away.

And while there are anomalies in space, and one should not think of space as almost entirelyempty or made of bits that are like all the other bits, ‘space explorer’ is unlikelyto ever be a common job title.

At least in terms of wandering around on a spaceship just visiting systems and lookingat them.

I suppose you could anyway, but I can’t imagine any nation or group authorizing ahuge ship to be built to run that way.

Would you trust a multi-century expedition to be run by someone who thought parking nextto an anomaly for a close look by the crew was a good idea?

Rather than one who tends to launch a lot of probes there as advance scouts?

Just because exploration wouldn’t be the primary purpose of a given ship, that doesn’tmean it wouldn’t get any done.

Colony ships will certainly do lots of exploring when they arrive and will have before theygot there too.

You could have an interstellar ship that was quite small, indeed potentially smaller thana person since the crew need not be biological.

Or it could be quite big, yet still have a small crew, simply from excellent automation.

Self-repairing systems might be quite elaborate and steering through deep space isn’t toocomplicated.

Indeed we’d tend to expect that, after all, whether you are using AIs to run a ship oractually making a living ship whose intelligence regards the ship as its body, a big spacewhale if you would, we would expect to use a ton of automation on ships.

Yet I would tend to expect them to be quite large and with large crews, and the reasoningis twofold.

First, as with colonizing deep space rather than just solar systems, the same technologythat lets you automate a ship to need only a small crew also lets you automate the factoriesthat build those ships.

Any decent-sized asteroid of the kind we have thousands of in our solar system containsquite enough material to fashion thousands of giant fleets, one for each system we’dlikely to settle directly.

If you can build ships that can maintain themselves then you can build factories that can makethose ships by themselves too, so fundamentally the same technology that lets you build aself-maintaining vessel lets you crank out giant armadas on the cheap too, and I don’tthink finding volunteers for colonization will ever be too hard.

Either you need that many people to maintain the ships, the ecology to be transplanted,and the civilization to be transplanted, or you don’t but can easily include them.

The thing is you need all that size and all that crew because you aren’t exploring,nor are you sending off a seed.

If we want to plant our civilizations in alien soil under an alien sun we have to plant ourcivilization, not just a few people.

You took centuries to get there, and the civilization you left is now probably dust, no more thehome you knew than a foreign country would be.

Even messages from home are old.

Settle twenty light years away and a communication back home would be received by someone whohad to go look up the original message written by his predecessor talking about this coolnew movie called Star Wars.

Running a ship or a fleet for centuries of travel might be something that can be doneautomatically.

Perhaps even transplanting an entire ecology might be done so, but a whole civilization?

I don’t know about that.

Now theoretically an artificial intelligence might fly to some planet in a ship no biggerthan a football, unpack and start building the infrastructure to grow and clone a wholeecology from digital DNA records, including people it might raise from birth in the traditionsof their civilization.

Thing is, again, if you’ve got a machine that smart, I’m not sure you’d want torely on it to do your colonizing for you since it raises a host of not just technical problems,but ethical ones as well.

You’re sending out splinters of your civilization that will diverge a lot from the original.

They might begin that way, some specific cultural, ideological, or religious group funding acolony, but even if you send out one that started with a random and fully representativecross-section of our culture it would mutate in time and a very short time as these thingsgo.

We’ll talk about that more next month when we get to Interstellar Empires and giant colonialfleets shortly after when we close the year out with an episode on Intergalactic Colonization.

We’ll also discuss some of those problems, ethical and technical, with using AI laterthis month, but this is not an episode on those topics.

However they speak to our ability and motives to get out there and explore the cosmic ocean.

For my part I don’t think we need any other motivation but to explore and to go out there,but it’s nice to have them, and I don’t think we need apparently impossible techslike FTL to do it.

If we get them, that’s great, but if not, it won’t stop us.

And it’s a point that I always feel is important to stress these days in this role I’ve stumbledinto as a science communicator, especially when folks often feel frustrated by how slowwe seem to be at extending our reach, nearly half a century after the first and last mannedMoon landings.

We can do it, and we have plenty of time to turn that dream into a reality - a centuryis not even an eyeblink in the lifetime of the Universe.

But it can be a bit depressing to have to wait on that because a century might be aneyeblink to the Universe but it is all the time we tend to be given.

In that respect I think it’s important to remind ourselves of the challenges we faceand how much effort it takes to solve them, and that we continue to make that effort andmake progress.

That’s why I think folks like Carl Sagan did such a service to humanity by outliningthese visions.

I wouldn’t say that Sagan was the first science communicator.

Even for television, that title probably better belongs to Don Herbert, better known as Mr.

Wizard, but Sagan had a unique way of speaking about science that could fill audiences withinterest in the mysteries of the Universe.

And while he was hardly blind to the faults of humanity, he always advanced a viewpointthat was fundamentally optimistic and inspirational.

His impact on many aspiring scientists, myself included, can never be underestimated, andhis ability to convey all the wonders of the Universe to his audience inspired millionsand opened up the doors of the imagination for them.

For that he has my deepest gratitude and I’m honored to dedicate this episode to him.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and havea great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Outward Bound: Interplanetary Trade| | 2017-11-02 | | https://youtu.be/gRd8fR9D3-8 | +--------------------------------+

People discuss whether or not trade between worlds will be possible in the future, indoing so they overlook that maybe it already is.

So today we will be looking at Interplanetary Trade, and we’ll be reviewing some of theconcepts we see a lot in science fiction and trying to see how practical and realisticthose actually are, along with what the alternatives might be for when they aren’t.

We will also take some time to look at interstellar trade too, and the special difficulties itimposes on us, especially if we have no access to faster than light travel or communication.

Though we will talk about how those would affect things too.

Trade is the lifeblood of humanity, it’s how we’ve exchanged ideas and even bloodlinesfor untold centuries.

The usual alternative has been warfare, and most folks would agree the former is typicallypreferable to the latter.

We have discussed a lot of the difficulties with Interplanetary Warfare so maybe we shouldstart with the difficulties of Interplanetary Trade.

The first difficulty is that it is interplanetary.

Right now if you wanted to ship a package to the Martians it would cost you somewherearound $10,000 a kilogram to get it there and that is being very generous and optimistic.

That’s usually the launch cost just to get into low orbit, though that’s an importantpoint to mention from the outset.

Most of the cost of moving between planets is getting off the planet in the first place,after that it only costs a lot more to move stuff to another planet if you want to getthere fast or if it doesn’t have an atmosphere to help you break your speed with.

Now there isn’t much we would be willing to ship for $10,000 a kilogram, but thereare some things.

Gold is generally valued at a few times that, as are a few other precious metals.

Various low half-life fissionable materials like plutonium are way more valuable per kilogramthan that.

Key fusion isotopes like deuterium, tritium, and helium-3 aren’t cheap either.

That’s just in terms of raw materials, basic elements or their isotopes for mining.

I’m not sure how much various processors and chips run on a dollar per kilogram basisbut I’d imagine many of them exceed that $10,000 per kilogram price point too.

Of course there are no chip factories on the moon at the moment, nor anyone looking tobuy them, but that’s why so much of the focus in discussing space exploration is onraw material harvesting from asteroids.

Right now, if we saw a house-sized stack of gold ingots on the moon or an asteroid, itwould indeed be profitable for us to go get them.

And yes, even if the commodity market took a dive, since while a sudden influx of moongold might crash prices it won’t crash them below the actual cost to go get the stuff.

At least not for longer than it takes some analyst to notice such trips are costing us,say, $20,000 a kilogram for all costs to launch, land, mine and return home and gold pricesjust dropped to $19,000, and he starts screaming ‘Buy!

Buy now!’

So don’t think of space-based trade as something limited only to the distant future and a fewlow-earth orbit projects like launching satellites.

It is already in the realm of viable economics if just barely.

Nonetheless our interest is more in the distant future when there’s actually places withpeople to send stuff to and from.

Still in terms of the evolution of trade in space from now till then, I’d say you havetwo types of markets.

The first is in shipping home very valuable elements as genuine commerce, bringing homegold and platinum from some asteroid.

The second is in getting the contract to ship stuff to a colony or outpost.

You need to eat to run a mine, and breathe, unless you are a robot, and to be honest youprobably are, but if you’re not or if you are a scientist at some countries outposton the Moon or Mars you do need food and water and air and what you can’t make there needsto be shipped in even if it costs $10,001 per kilogram, $10,000 to ship a liter bottleof water and $1 for that bottle.

Scarcity is a relative term.

Now as technology improves we expect the cost per kilogram to keep dropping, though as technologyimproves the quantity of stuff you actually need to send probably keeps dropping too,but it is also worth remembering that the most expensive place in the solar system toship from is Earth.

Okay, technically the Sun and all the gas giants but nobody is going to be living onthose, at least not in the early days.

Earth has a big gravity well and a thick atmosphere, which makes getting off of it dreadfully expensive.

Though that atmosphere does make it much easier to get stuff back to it.

If we imagined a fully developed asteroid belt, where they could make or acquire theirfuel and rocket parts as cheaply as on Earth, it would actually be dirt cheap to ship backand forth between all of those.

The Asteroid Belt is not a particularly dense place like we often see in movies, most decentlysized asteroids are further apart out there than the Earth and the Moon, yet they haveno gravity to speak of and it’s a case where you might intentionally burn way more fuelthan you need to in order to get from Asteroid A to Asteroid B faster simply because thedistances are great enough that your cost in supplies and maintenance and not usingyour ship for other things would be higher than your fuel costs.

We talked about this a bit more in the Asteroid Mining episode but in summary form that isbig chunk of the reason many of us foresee the Asteroid Belt as a better first step forcolonization than the planets.

On Earth, the costs of shipping goods is fairly low, but the cost increases depending on thedistance something has to travel.

The costs of shipping materials around the system will probably be more a function ofthe effort required to get those goods and materials out of whatever gravity well theyare located on.

This means that the cost of getting materials from planets are likely to be considerablymore expensive than getting those same materials from an asteroid, where the gravity is muchweaker.

Time is also a factor.

Most projects are time-sensitive and if it is going to take decades to get materialsfrom the outer system, it is probably not economically feasible.

Relatively speaking, the asteroid belt is in our neighbourhood.

The key concept there is that you can ship stuff like food and water around the asteroidbelt economically, from inside the belt anyway.

You aren’t just limited to stuff like gold.

And you can ship that home to Earth pretty cheaply too.

It might cost tens of thousands of dollars to get a kilogram of ship out to an asteroidbut it doesn’t cost that much to send a kilogram home if you can make the fuel there,because again that asteroid has virtually no gravity pulling stuff back toward it whileEarth has an awful lot of it helping pull cargo toward it.

Beyond those precursors of trade that we just mentioned though, real interplanetary tradehas to wait till there’s places off Earth with people living there wanting stuff andmaking stuff.

You can have trade then even if you are still limited to chemical rockets, but you won’thave anyone to trade with because you are not going to have great big space coloniesgetting setup when you are still using refined kerosene to send ships to and from.

We will add one more caveat to that though.

We talked about a lot of alternatives to getting off the planet in the Upward Bound series,many of which can get you into Earth Orbit for costs not much worse than flying to anothercontinent.

If those are setup you can move around the solar system on chemical fuels a lot cheaper,but once you have a pretty big space-based infrastructure in place you are going to beable to take a second look at nuclear propulsion because you can make bigger ships if you arebuilding them in Orbit and people won’t worry as much about them having radioactivematerials on board if they aren’t close to Earth.

The specific economics of interplanetary trade are going to be entirely dependent on howmuch the ships cost in terms of speed and fuel and time and construction, but we cansee four basic categories of trade.

The first is big bulky durable cargo, where you want to go slow to save fuel.

The second is high value trade items, which either have an expiration date or are sufficientlyvaluable by weight that your shipping costs are trivial.

The third is passengers, where typically time trumps efficiency.

These three are pretty familiar, we do them on Earth all the time and it’s why you don’tget ten tons of topsoil delivered to your house by FedEx, and why most passenger servicesdon’t care about passenger weight much, because the costs associated to moving a personmostly are not about their weight.

We have a fourth type too though, and that is information.

Now that typically is not something you ship, though there’s exceptions, but this is notan episode on Interplanetary Shipping, it’s an episode on Interplanetary Trade.

I’ve mentioned in the Outward Bound series how Mars and Venus and Saturn’s moon Titanall have stuff they want that the others have and that this includes the Asteroid Belt too.

I left Earth out of that though, noting that Earth does not want anything those placeshave, except precious metals, and I also mentioned today that Earth is one of the most expensiveplaces to ship from.

Once you have a fully developed solar economy, one in which at least a few percent of thepopulation does not live on or near Earth, and possibly the supermajority of them don’t,the Earth has a bit of a problem with that big gravity well.

Now if the various engines or orbital launch megastructures are good enough that won’tmatter anymore than whether or not a modern manufacturing city is by a place with goodtrade winds, but if it does, Earth still has one very valuable commodity to sell in exchangefor whatever it wants to import home and that is information, entertainment, and so on.

It’s going to be a long time before Earth is not the place producing the supermajorityof science, let alone movies and novels and new games.

Early on, Earth is exporting everything, because it is the only source for anything.

Later it ships stuff too complex to manufacture locally, at least economically, and eventuallyit ends up exporting data.

Now an empty ship is an empty ship so odds are even if fuel is a big factor in not wantingto export much from Earth you’d probably still do it a lot, so long as fuel isn’tcrushingly expensive, but by and large we’d expect data to be Earth’s big product.

Okay, we should talk travel times, currency, and 3D printing.

Let’s hit printing first.

3D printers are a wonder, they offer us the possibility of being able to manufacture almostanything without needing an assembly line.

They do not affect three of our types of trade, bulk raw materials, passengers, or data.

They do have a big impact on manufactured goods though.

Your ideal asteroid colony of a few thousand people want to be able to grow all their ownfood, recycle all their water and air, and manufacture all their stuff, or at least thereplacement parts for maintaining most of it.

If they have something to export they may opt to buy things they could make there ifthey can get them cheaper elsewhere or simply use the people or robots making them for insteadproducing what they export in larger volumes.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, you don’t want to think of 3D printers as magic wands,not only is there stuff they can’t print or can’t print quickly, the value of themis mostly their ability to produce things without an assembly line, not better thanan assembly line.

If that changes, this sector of interplanetary trade is going to shrink a lot.

You only are going to trade manufactured goods when you can bulk produce stuff significantlycheaper than some printer in someone’s house can and that there is also sufficient demandfor.

Odds are for some things that will stay true and for others it won’t, so that you probablywill have some trade in manufactured goods.

Again information trade, bulk materials, and passengers will be unaffected by printers,unless you can full blown print an adult human down to their memories, but that’s basicallyteleportation and a topic for another day.

Interestingly though, this means food is something you can probably trade.

It does not take as much plant biomass to recycle the air we breathe as it does to feeda person, and if you are using that air recycling biomass for growing stuff like lettuce orother produce that doesn’t keep well then you have a market for shipping food that doesstores well around to places that don’t want to grow all their own, or for that matterany.

I always tend to assume places will recycle their air with plants because I figure they’dwant some fresh veggies and fruit and something green to look at but you probably would havea fair number of facilities that just want to do that using air scrubbers and devotingall their personnel to whatever it is they do there.

Let’s talk travel times next because currency is more relevant to interstellar trade andwe’ll save that for last.

How long does it take to get from A to B?

Where trade is concerned the answer tends to be exactly as fast as its worth gettingthere.

There’s two ways of looking at space travel in terms of time and neither of them reallyhas much to do with actual distance.

Either the whole things is running on available delta-v, how much you can change your speed,then plotting the shortest trip in terms of time, which often involves nothing like astraight line, or you’ve got energy to spare and it’s all about acceleration and howmuch you can handle.

Timelines for the former tend to be in the years, as you carefully plot out every minimumcost orbital transfer and slingshot and need to pick your launch windows.

That’s okay for trying to move a million tons of nitrogen from Titan to that big O’NeillCylinder being built out in the Belt, because they will probably be busy designing and buildingthe thing for years before people move into it.

On the extreme other end of things if you’ve got good fusion engines that can produce delta-vof a couple percent of light speed, delta-v is no longer your issue, it’s how fast youcan accelerate depending on both your engine and what your cargo can handle.

For people as passengers that’s probably going to be 1-gee tops, though if it is importantyou can go higher, and with some technologies a lot higher.

Distance gets deceptive here, when you potentially accelerate halfway there and decelerate theother half.

This is an incredibly energy wasteful way of traveling but if you’ve got sturdy fusionreactors that can run on normal hydrogen, nobody will care, because it’s not the costof energy that matters it’s the cost of hydrogen, the most plentiful stuff in theUniverse.

If that’s selling for a $1 a kilogram and someone tells you they can get you to Saturnin 9 days by burning a thousand kilograms of hydrogen or a month by burning only a hundred,guess which option most folks will go for, even if the amount of energy used doing itcould run the entire US Power Grid for a month.

When you’re doing that constant acceleration game at 1-gee it doesn’t take twice as longto go twice as far.

Getting to the Moon takes less than 4 hours, the Sun is 400 times further away, at 1 AUor Astronomical Unit, but only takes 20 times longer to get to, 20^2 equaling 400.

You’d get there in just under 3 days, To get to something 4 times further than thatwould take just under 6 days, twice as long, for 2^2 or 4 times the distance.

Now the inner planets move a lot in terms of their distance relative to Earth but thistells us that using the constant 1-gee acceleration and turnover method everything in the innersolar system out to the Asteroid Belt is reachable from each other in days, a week tops.

The outer planets don’t move as much in terms of distance from earth, proportionally,so Jupiter is 6-7 days, Saturn 9 days, Uranus 13 days, and Neptune 16 days, all plus orminus some hours.

Now I mentioned earlier that travel times and efforts between nearest asteroids in theBelt is a lot less, and something similar applies to the collection of Moons the gasgiants all have, that will be important when we get to Colonizing Jupiter later this month.

However channel regulars know that we often talk about developing the solar system waybeyond just settling planets, moons, and asteroids and constructing something called a DysonSwarm, see the Dyson Spheres episode for more detail on that.

When discussing those I point out that the image of a densely packed collection of orbitalhabitats is almost as inaccurate as the image of a big inverted shell where folks live onthe inside, and that such habitats would be separated by thousands or even hundreds ofthousands of kilometers from each other.

If this is where most folks live, and where most trade goes on, transit is quite quick.

Energy is cheap too since you can in many cases actually have a physical connectionbetween the habitats with a tether.

It’s cheaper than driving a car to the next town and it is an environment where peoplecould own their own rocket ship that they drove to the neighboring habitat.

There’s no air slowing you down so you press the gas pedal, possibly literally since verylittle fuel is needed and chemical rockets work just fine in this context and head onover.

You’d get to a habitat 1000 kilometers away in just ten minutes, doing the constant one-geewith turnover rate, and reach a maximum speed of about Mach 10.

Needless to say you could save fuel and go slower.

Of course you could go faster, hit 3 or 4 gees.

Doing 4 gees will halve your travel time, it follows that same square root relationshipdistance does.

A lot of times you will go slower too, fuel costs in terms of both price and mass willlikely always be an issue and you might find the places you want to travel to don’t wantyou coming in super-fast.

Keep in mind, all those travel times assume you were slowing down, if you didn’t you’dget there faster and if you used that slow down fuel to speed up more you’d arriveeven faster yet, and even just a passenger vehicle going Mach 10 would hit like it wasfull of explosives.

The ones doing interplanetary trips at constant acceleration would hit like an equal weightof nukes.

And any random bit of space garbage they hit would do the same.

So you could have speed limits inside a solar system and I would tend to bet these wouldexist and be under 1% of light speed.

Now we talked a bit about some of the issues with currency, in electronic form, and lightlag issues way back in the Cryptocurrency episode but those are mostly manageable.

You mostly had fraud issues with joint accounts for couples, groups, clones, etc.

It’s a bit of bigger issue when we move up to interstellar trade though, especiallyif you are limited by the speed of light.

What do you sell between solar systems?

Not manufactured goods, even if 3D printing hasn’t obliterated that sector at the interplanetaryscale by the time you’re engaging in interstellar trade, it’s just not very realistic to imaginethat there’d be any economic advantage of mass production that would translate to thosekind of times and distances.

Information?

Yes, that is just as valid as before, how big the market will be is hard to say, butthere will be one.

Earth ought to do well, or our solar system, in this regard as we are likely to alwaysbe a bit of a center hub for information to flow in and out of even after other systemsare built up, and humanity could easily have a million settled solar systems and stillhave 99% of the population living back in our home system, doing almost all the sciencefor many centuries to come.

Passengers?

Yes those too.

People will want to travel if they can, some might be fine with sending a digital copyby light speed transmission but many will not be.

Even post-biological beings might not be sanguine about that option, since as we often pointout on this topic, digital mind transfer is not cut and paste, its copy and paste.

How about raw materials?

It is actually viable.

Sending huge bulk freighters between solar systems carrying megatons of metal or evenhydrogen can be done, and if the demand is high enough to justify the cost it might happen.

But what exactly are you paying them with?

What’s the money?

Back in the Life in Space Colony series I suggested that an interstellar colony vesselis almost better employed as a sort of roving factory and people farm, not going to onesystem and stopping, but just pausing to drop off most of its passengers and equipment andtaking on more fuel and raw materials.

It then moves on and the remaining folks breed more colonists and spend their time manufacturingnew colonization equipment for the next target system from those raw materials.

A concern one has there with these ships, which we called Gardener Ships, is what themotivation to continue was.

I mean those ships had crews, and a mission from Earth, but how was Earth paying them?

That’s the first Rule of Warfare, make sure your soldiers get paid on time, and it appliesto merchant marine ships and traders too.

If your crews aren’t getting paid you probably can’t rely on them continuing to do theirjobs.

Earth has the money, no problem, but getting it usefully there is a problem.

Maybe they can have it in an account back home collecting interest?

The same applies for interstellar trade in general, you arrive in a system and you needto buy stuff for your ship and you need to sell stuff.

Hypothetically you sell it for the local currency and use that to buy stuff but you have noidea what the selling rate for your cargo will be until you arrive and that’s yearsoff.

You get a message from a nearby system that they need colonists, especially those witha background in chemistry, and that they’ll pay handsomely for them.

You load up interested people, presumably agreeing to split that reward fee to pay fortheir passage, and arrive twenty years later only to find out they instituted a new educationalpolicy to train more chemists and no longer need the ones you brought.

It doesn’t even matter that you might get news en route, because unlike interplanetaryships with fusion engines, interstellar ones do not accelerate the whole way, they mostlycoast.

So once they are en route they are en route.

They can’t just slow down and turn around because they only have the fuel to slow down,they probably have some reserves that might be enough to steer them toward another systemfurther off in the same general direction but that’s it.

These sorts of problems are serious issues with interstellar trade that might preventit ever being more than a bit of novelty, though the sheer population size of a solarsystem, even one that hasn’t gone full Kardashev 2 Dyson Swarm, is enough to support a lotof novelty and you might still have ships arriving regularly, even if they representednot a percent of a percent of the gross system economy.

I’ve never heard anyone satisfactorily overcome these issues, and it’s arguably even moresevere when discussing interstellar empires, which we will look at next month, but theycould be solvable.

After all it remains a topic mostly discussed in science fiction and that usually has fasterthan light travel or at least communication.

Of course if you do have FTL, Faster Than Light Travel, it makes a big difference.

As would also be the case if you only had FTL communications.

We could do a whole episode just on the various permutations of how trade would work dependingon a given FTL system but a few deserve mention for circumventing the norm.

In Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series we only have light speed travel but instantcommunication.

This has the interesting effect of allowing essentially all information to be availableanywhere anywhen, same as with the modern internet, which the books mostly predate.

We never want to forget that trade, especially for high tech civilizations, tends to be asmuch in information as actual goods.

Also in a civilization which has gone postbiological, you can send a copy of yourself anywhere instantaneouslythis way.

Another example that tosses out the normal convention of spaceships plying the spacelanes is wormholes.

The classic theoretical wormhole can't be on a planet because they are insanely massive,but most fictional portrayals treat it as a simple portal window from point A to B.

Such being the case, there’s no need to have them in space when you can just havethem on a planet.

We see an example of that in the Stargate Franchise, but we get another example in PeterHamilton's Commonwealth Saga where they aren’t portals people walk through but through whichthey drive whole freight trains.

They don’t even initially have spaceships because they’re mostly worthless to them.

We talked about that technology more in the Wormholes episode, but from a trade perspectiveyou can use wormholes for other things like disposing of garbage or waste heat, or forproviding raw materials or energy by opening a portal up to the molten metal core of anotherplanet or a star.

That’s a point to always remember, we know the kind of Black Swan disruptions we canget to an economy and civilization in general from a new technology, obvious in hindsightbut totally surprising at the time.

However science fiction is often bad about introducing technologies that have some veryobvious consequences that the writers missed or ignored.

In a Star Trek style Universe with replicators there should be no ships that don’t existto either move people around or raw materials around, because there’s no need for manufacturingor agriculture, and since there should be no materials only available in one system,you would not expect any interstellar vessels meant for any purpose other than defense,exploration, and passenger or colonist carrying.

You also wouldn’t expect there to be commercial hub systems or space piracy unless the FTLsystem required specific paths, because space is ridiculously huge and while the shortestdistance between two points is a straight line, it is a constantly moving straight linefor interstellar paths and more like a very wide corridor probably several billion kilometersin diameter, which you can easily widen a whole order of magnitude if you need to worryabout pirates.

Try as I might, I’ve never been able to figure out a way in which space piracy couldwork outside of very specific fictional FTL systems.

There’s just no rivers or currents or mountain passes that make an ideal place to both hideand expect traffic through.

We might revisit interstellar trade more in the future and we will be revisiting interstellarcivilizations next month, but while interstellar trade in anything but information seems dubiousunder known physics, it is possible.

And as we’ve seen today, interplanetary trade certainly is, even with just the technologywe have now or on the near-horizon.

Next week will be exploring interstellar space some more in the Cosmic Ocean, and the weekafter that we will be looking at Mega-Earths, artificial planets that dwarf our own homeworld,and which potentially can be provide more living area than most interstellar empireswe see in fiction.

For alerts when those and other episode come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Digital Death | | 2017-10-26 | | https://youtu.be/6icg0tu_5z4 | +--------------------------------+

There’s nothing more certain than taxes and death,but in the future, maybe not the latter.

We’ve discussed concepts like life extension before, and last week we discussed mind augmentation.

Most people have at least a passing familiarity with the notion that you might be able tobackup or upload your mind to a computer and in that way live forever, or pretty closeto it.

In the Civilizations at the End of Time series we’ve discussed the ways a civilizationmight outlast the very stars themselves and, indeed, potentially flourish and prosper ona scale that would make the entire stellar phase of the Universe seem like a brief prelude.

In that regard, we are barely into the first sentence of that prelude.

Humanity has existed for only an eyeblink of time compared to the Universe as a whole,and it is still quite young.

We are about 1% of 1% of the way through the period of time in which stars will form anddie, and the period of time in which humanity has been around is only about 1% of 1% ofthat.

Recorded human history is even shorter, just a percent of the time humanity has been around,while the individual human lifespan is about a percent of that.

Only about a hundred generations have passed since the Roman Empire was at its peak, andthe dawn of recorded history lies only about as far again back from then.

For most of that time, people typically did not die of old age, and even what folks meantby old age included a lot of circumstances we no longer view as natural causes of a longlife.

At the age of 37, I have already outlived the supermajority of all humans who have everlived, yet barring unexpected illness or accident, I should have just as much time left to me.

When we start talking about human lifespan extension people often recoil from the ideaas rather fantastic, but it is worth remembering that many of the things that used to killpeople regularly in the past have been outright eliminated or reduced to being exceptionallyrare.

Those people living when such causes were normal, indeed, more likely than dying ofold age, might have considered their elimination rather fantastic too.

We are just getting to the point where technology is hinting at ways to extend someone’s lifeenormously, potentially without any limit, so contemplation of this topic tends to fallinto two chief attitudes.

The first is disbelief, while the second is total acceptance, immortality is possible,and perhaps even folks alive nowadays might enjoy it, not simply folks living in somedistant future.

This is our topic for today, because we need to contemplate some serious impediments toextremely long life that come into play once simple aging is no longer an ultimate expirationdate on your existence.

Over a long enough period of time you are likely to have some sort of accident killyou, or to be murdered.

Even if your odds were only one in a million every year, you’d have a fifty-fifty chanceof dying in the next 700,000 years and less than a 1% chance to make it to five million.

Now most folks would shrug at that, that’s a lifespan on a timeline as long as humanityhas been around, more than enough, but it’s important to keep in mind you need to do waybetter on your survival odds if you want to be seeing the End of the World.

Typically folks would suggest you probably want to either get a digital backup of yourmind or go entirely digital yourself.

Now it’s kind of debatable if you, yourself, can actually go digital or if you are reallyjust making a copy of yourself, and that’s an important distinction since if you don’tview that copy as you, you might prefer to just have a copy that can go live if you die.

Many folks debate whether or not such a copy is you, but whether or not it is, it's notsomething you can really prove or disprove.

Regardless, what matters is whether or not you think it is.

But even that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t get backed up if the option is easilyavailable, since a person has reason to want a copy of themselves for more than personalcontinuity.

Putting it bluntly, most of us have stuff we’re willing to die for: friends, family,causes, etc.

But we also have stuff we’re willing to live for, or in this case, be resurrectedfor.

Most of us have people or projects we would not want to see ourselves absent from; I wouldlike to know this channel would go on if I fell over dead tomorrow, and the most obvioussuccessor to operate it is me.

Nobody’s going to finish writing that novel you’ve been working on or tend that gardenyou’ve spent years improving, not the way you would.

Most of us have something like this we deeply care about, and that’s not even includingour friends and family, let alone our kids.

This isn’t some cliché scifi horror novel either; that copy of you isn’t going togo home to your spouse and little ones and turn demonic.

It is you, it isn’t an ‘it’.

It might be on a TV monitor for a while or in some sophisticated android till a bodyis grown, or re-grown.

Barring murder, in a civilization that can backup memories, odds are only massive braindamage that shreds almost everything will keep you dead, but it would be nice if thetiny little robots repairing your neural connections had a backup copy to look at as a blueprint.

I’ve heard folks suggest they’d be freaked out by a copy of a dead family member, andthat’s an entirely legitimate response, but that’s because we’re not used to it.

We’re very good at believing what we want to be true, and by default we suspect sucha thing only because it’s too good to be true and because we’ve seen a lot of horrormovies about bringing back the dead and it going all wrong.

We’ve got a lot more reasons to want to believe it’s really them or close enough,both from a personal desire and a strictly scientific perspective, so I’d rather imaginemost folks will increasingly tilt to regard them as a true copy or even just the originalwho was away for a bit in the hospital.

So there’s a lot of reasons to have such a backup around and not many reasons not to.

Lots of potential problems too.

Fortunately, one that isn’t too big a problem is storage space.

While the human mind is still a more potent processor than our best supercomputers, evenif that gap is almost closed, human memory storage is estimated to be in the area of10 terabytes to perhaps 10 petabytes, and you can buy 10 Terabyte hard drives thesedays.

A modest gain in hard drive capacity and cost will permit affordable storage of data equalto even that higher end estimate of human memory.

Right now you could buy the lower end value for a few hundred bucks, and the higher endfor around a quarter of a million dollars.

We never want to fall into the trap of thinking that Moore’s Law and its parallels for otheraspects of computing like memory is an actual law.

There are no guarantees we will get computers even one penny cheaper per unit of memoryor processors than we have right now, but I think we can assume that by the time wehave brain scanning technology we will have at least another order of magnitude or twoknocked off the price per byte of memory.

Such being the case, the actual storage cost for a copy of a human mind should be affordableeven if it is that higher end, 10 petabyte value, and of course 10 terabytes alreadyis.

What this means is that we have every good reason to believe we could store a human mindon something smaller than a human brain and a good deal cheaper than most annual lifeinsurance premiums.

A good analogy perhaps too, since a backup is essentially a type of life insurance.

You get those to take care of your loved ones after you’re gone, a backup of you doesthe job better.

But it also means you can probably have a ton of backups, especially if memory getsa lot cheaper.

Most likely the cost bottleneck would be all about the transmissions themselves, and ofcourse the scanning equipment.

In a realistic scenario, your default 22nd-century individual, who is a little bit of a cyborg,probably has a mind–machine interface that can double as a brain scanner.

Let’s use a specific case, we’ll say Steve from Austin, Texas.

Steve has neural lace woven around in his brain and scanners in his skull and littlenanomachines that help to monitor and repair his brain.

They tend to do most of their work at night and he doesn’t use his bandwidth much thenso they assemble a snapshot of his brain and transmit it to a hard drive implanted intohis leg bone with a fiber optic running down to it.

That’s his first backup, though really there’s one already in his head, but it’s ever shiftingand not much of a backup since it would likely be damaged by whatever damaged his brain.

Steve’s pretty tough and those little nanobots could probably repair his brain on their ownif he got stabbed in the skull, probably without even having to check that backup black boxin his leg.

He’s also not really worried about losing a day’s worth of memory, so he only updateshis backup at night, once a day.

But he is transmitting all the time, like most people he has a deadman switch constantlymonitoring his lifesigns and recording sound and video near him for his secure storage,that will be transmitted to a security company and then the police if anything goes wrong.

He can always watch those recordings if he loses that last day of memory too.

Whatever amount of bandwidth you might need for transmitting a backup is way more thana few megabytes of video, audio, and biometric data.

Of course when Steve sends his backup daily, to a local datahub or warehouse, he doesn’tsend a whole copy of his brain, even if that is only 10 Terabytes that’s still a lotof data to send down the wire or wirelessly.

He’s probably just transmitting a comparison of his current mind with his last copy andfiling those changes.

All the new neuron connections and changes in potential and such.

Now Steve is a bit paranoid, so from that datahub the data gets sent to two differentcompanies, each of which keeps its own redundant backups too.

If you are in the brain-copying business, you want to make sure you’ve got a reputationfor having giant armored vaults with backups and the kind of security that makes Fort Knoxlook like a convenience store.

He’s got two backups against those companies failing.

It’s like with getting yourself frozen, folks ask what you should invest your moneyin to make sure you still have some when you get thawed out, to which the answer is, thecompany that froze you.

If they are successfully thawing people out, their stock is probably looking pretty hot,and if their stock isn’t too hot, you probably ain’t staying too cold, so the status ofyour investments is the last thing on your mind, or what’s left of it.

Multiple redundancies, prior copies that haven’t been updated for a while just in case someonehas been tampering with your uploads or even hijacked your implants to send static or gibberishso they could kill you later when all those stored copies are gibberish too.

Encryptions on those transmissions, regular checks with the technicians to make sure allis well.

This makes somebody very hard to kill, for keeps.

They can still get your body of course, one immediate application of this technology isthat you can copy your mind into an android and go shoot someone with a death ray thatdisintegrates them.

That would probably be a pretty common form of interplanetary tourism too, since it’sfaster and probably cheaper to get your brain scanned over to an android on another planetfor a while.

You might get some interesting companies that provided anonymous brain scan storage or don’task don’t tell android rental.

Though I think you could still track them.

But if you’ve got that tech you also have off planet storage too, just having androidssophisticated enough to handle a human brain copied into them grants you way easier off-planetconstruction abilities, but that’s not too relevant, since all the tech needed for suchthings allows really good automation and self-replication anyway.

So Steve’s other copies are off at the Hyperion Data Repository on Titan, and with a smallcity-state in the asteroid belt that is the Swiss Bank of the Brain Biz.

Those only get copied once a week, but they keep 100 prior versions before copying overand Steve assumes that he only needs those if either Earth is getting blown up or someonehas engaged in an elaborate murder conspiracy against him.

At least that’s what Steve’s wife Jaime thinks.

Steve is pretty paranoid so he actually has a third copy she doesn’t know about thathe only transmits once a month and never from home.

After all, no encryption is ever safe from someone with the password or access to theaccount a password reset goes to.

Steve heard of a man killed by his wife after they had a very bad argument, where she didn’twant him dead, just wanted his memory of the argument erased.

Steve’s fairly normal as folks go, in terms of paranoia and backups, he’s not a secretagent or a test pilot or something dangerous that might get his body incinerated.

But he’s pretty hard to kill, and indeed probably a lot less likely to die, permanently,than one in a million per year.

It can pretty much only happen to him if he is murdered, and we already have a fair fewplaces where the murder rate is nearly that low.

As we said at those odds your half-life was about 700,000 years.

So he might live quite a long time, with even lower odds.

This is even bigger for strictly digital entities, especially ones that don’t feel a need forspeed.

As we’ve mentioned many a time before, the signals running around your brain generallymove slower than the speed of sound, often a lot slower, and it’s only a millionththe speed of light.

If you copied a human brain exactly, but spaced out to run at light speed but at the humanrate of consciousness, that brain would be the size of a planet.

Now you’d probably have that bundled into all sorts of nodes but it means someone canspread their intelligence all over the planet and still maintain the normal human rate ofthought without needing a single extra bit of total processing power.

That’s a very hard target to take out, when they might have a dozen redundancies for everynode and thousands or even millions of such nodes.

This doesn’t even include actual backup copies of them elsewhere or even running clones.

There’s a million asteroids in the Belt big enough to make comfortable city-statesfor regular humans, and they could easily have tons more entirely digital people runningaround in the background, potentially with their consciousness distributed over severallight seconds.

And if you don’t mind going slower, or adding more processing, you could potentially distributeyour awareness like a gas cloud spread over entire solar systems or other solar systems.

If your big goal is to survive as long as the stars or longer, you might not mind ifa thought took a year, if it protected you from pretty much any conceivable attack.

Helps with boredom too, one of those big threats to continued existence.

That’s the big one of course.

How do you kill an immortal?

In a fantasy novel, they’ve presumably got some special weakness, ya know, throw theirprecious ring into a volcano, or there’s a magic sword that can kill them.

We don’t get those in the real world, but hypothetically, you could get them with somevirus that corrupted them and their copies, they presumably need access to those.

But they might have disconnected backups or ones that were read only in someone else’svault as a last fallback.

You could go get all those storage repositories, but you need to know where they all are.

You need to be able to blow them up.

You need to be able to deal with the issue that other people are probably on those too,and you need to get them all at once or inside the time window light lag provides or they’lljust copy elsewhere.

And all the security for this is to protect human lives, many human lives, so odds areyou are going up against tons of the best minds around who designed those security systems.

Barring such options, how can you kill an immortal?

The easiest way is to get them to kill themselves.

There’s more to that than simple suicide, but we can start there.

People probably do not want copies of their minds floating around that they don’t knowabout or don’t have access to.

That is your privacy after all, so having some backup you’ve removed from your ownmemories triggered to go off if you committed suicide would seem a special level of paranoia,and you can’t update it all the time or you will need to know about it or otherwiseleave evidence it exists, so you could be losing years or decades of memory.

Excluding that as probably uncommon and impractical, a person should be able to kill themselves,and it’s unlikely any court would rule that any decision you made in the past, like aclause preventing you from wiping your backups, was something you couldn’t invalidate.

Maybe though, you might have some weird cases of divergent multiple persons with the sameoriginal mind where one tried to delete the original backups and got refused.

Now it sounds kind of absurd that you could talk someone into killing themselves withoutovert mind control, but two notes on that.

First, while I always say I can’t imagine ever getting bored with life to the pointof wanting to end it, that is the most common rebuttal to life extension I tend to hearwhen we discuss the topic.

Folks would get bored and choose to die.

I, of course, always say that’s their own business and doesn’t have any relevanceto whether or not such tech should be developed or if other people should be allowed to useit.

I also don’t think most people would get bored either, but I could be wrong.

Add to that, we expect psychology to keep improving especially when we are at the brainscan and emulation level.

A trained expert working on someone who was already kind of bored might be able to talkthem into ending themselves.

They almost have to have access to every recent backup at least of their mind, so they candelete those.

You could have things in place to prevent suicide, if you were worried that you mightbe struck by extreme but temporary depression at some point in a multi-million year life.

But you probably don’t want strong anti-suicide restraints in place either, considering youcould end up being truly immortal to the point you can’t even kill yourself.

Your core architecture prevents you from even trying.

That’s how you end up a trillion-year old miserable entity trapped for all eternity,potentially even driven to steal resources from others to keep going after the starsare gone because your internal mental monitors regard that as akin to starving yourself todeath and are allowed to force you to eat.

It’s a little chilling to imagine a dark and cooling Universe populated only by resourceraiders cannibalizing each other, and in some ways that seems even worse if each of themis secretly grateful when they lose and can finally die.

So while you might want to build in time constraints on deleting backups, waiting periods to confirmthe request and so forth, you still probably want that option.

If it is there that’s one way to get an immortal, persuading them to take a nihilisticview of life or even just convincing them that life will be exciting again with realdangers and few to no backups.

Of course at a fundamental level, if your psychology is getting that good, and so isyour neuroscience, you might be able to ‘kill’ them just by changing them.

Fundamental life changes can have a big effect on a person, and permeate out to change theirattitudes on all sorts of things.

And that’s without precision psychology or the ability to simply delete a given desire.

For a digital entity, one can presumably be sufficiently in control to flip a switch thatmakes you like chocolate and hate strawberries, where before you didn’t like chocolate andloved those berries.

You don’t have to move fast either, revenge is a dish best served cold, and you are presumablyjust as immortal as they are.

If it takes you a million years of subtle manipulation to effectively kill off the oldpersona with one so different it doesn’t act the least bit the same, what do you care?

Which brings us to our last point.

You can use all these methods to extend your life indefinitely, but how much is that personreally you?

Yes, the changes are gradual, but does that really matter?

In general, we also have this same concern with Transhumanism.

If you boost the mind up to superhuman levels, is what remains actually you or did that persondie?

Not a seed the tree grew out of but just the decaying logs of a previous trees it usedfor nutrients and root structure?

This is one reason I can imagine for why people might skip on mental augmentation or superlong lives.

They just don’t believe that final product would be them, because it's beyond simplegradual change so that the final person is no more them then we are the various dirtand microorganisms that were around when the dinosaurs roamed the planet.

Now you could put safeguards in to prevent such major changes, to make sure you neverdrifted outside the acceptable ranges of thought and behavior you wanted.

Have certain things hardwired as it were.

Or you might use resets, effectively being like Leonard Shelby from Christopher Nolan’sMemento, the reverse of the groundhog day where you keep repeating the same day, butremember it; here you keep experiencing new days, but forget the previous ones.

Something like that could happen just from not being able to contain all your memories,not just running out of space for them but for the indexing system you use to recalla billion years’ worth of life.

Faced with options like that, a lot of folks might decide enough is enough and opt to shutdown, not from boredom, but from recognition that they just weren’t the same person anymore,and either they archive all those old memories entirely outside their new mind or just endit entirely.

Either way that original person is gone.

That’s a fairly dismal outlook on eternity, but this is our Halloween episode after all.

There could be solutions too, we’ve hardly explored the options in detail for this problemwe can’t experience yet anyway, and figuring those out will give future generations somethingto do so they don’t get bored.

For mind uploading, I would expect it to be a pretty major sector of interplanetary trade,our topic for next week, simply because if it becomes normal, most folks would want abackup far from where they lived.

It will also play a big role in how people approach warfare in the future too, when werevisit that topic early next year.

For alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode make sure to hit the like button and share it with others.

And join in the conversation in the comments below or at our facebook group, Science andFuturism with Isaac Arthur.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Mind Augmentation | | 2017-10-19 | | https://youtu.be/aQpYOVvU17Y | +--------------------------------+

Throughout history we’ve used our minds to build and improve things, but soon we'llbe able to build things that improve our minds.

We’ve been trying to come up with ways to enhance the human mind for at least as longas humanity has had a concept for intelligence, and in all that time we haven’t had a lotof success doing it.

We have had no shortage of potions and concoctions meant to enhance the mind, and some like coffeeat least partially work.

We’ve no shortage of drugs that alter the mind either.

Yet for all that it has been a popular notion in fiction, even before we had science fiction,the science of it has eluded us.

That’s changing, and becoming an emerging reality with the technologies on the horizonand companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink pushing to bring mind augmentation from fictionto fact.

We have seen it more and more in science fiction too, with authors attempting to paint a portraitof what a future would be like where mind augmentation was common.

My own favorite for this is the Revelation Space series, by Alastair Reynolds.

With possible exception of Isaac Asimov there is no author who has more heavily influencedme and this channel, so I’m proud to announce it as our SFIA October Book of the Month,sponsored by Audible.

You can grab a great audio version of Revelation Space by using my link Audible.com/Isaac,

or click on the link in the description below.

That gets you a free audio book and a 30 day free trial of Audible.

We’ve been exploring the concept of artificial intelligence recently and will continue todo so in the coming months, discussing both creating human level artificial intelligenceand superhuman level.

Yet, we shouldn’t overlook the possibility that even as we are making machines smarterthan humans, we might be able to make smarter humans too.

This is an enormous topic, both the means to potentially do it, and the types of waysto do it.

Let’s explore some of the boundaries of mind augmentation.

We’ll begin with nootropic drugs.

These are marketed as “smart drugs” or “cognitive enhancers”.

Mostly, these tend to be stimulants, but can also involve depressants or attention focusers.

The general idea is to make use of a stimulant to increase mental arousal to increase performance.

The trouble is that increasing arousal beyond a certain point actually decreases performance.

The trick is to keep the mind in its highest performing state, basically the performanceGoldilocks zone of the mind, by playing with the arousal levels.

I mention this way to achieve mind augmentation because it exists today and it is estimatedthat sales of nootropic supplements exceeds $1 billion a year, so it is being taken seriouslyby many folks.

The trouble is getting into the Goldilocks zone and staying there.

Different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance.

Intellectually demanding tasks generally need a lower level of arousal, which helps withconcentration.

In contrast, tasks demanding staying power may be performed better with higher levelsof arousal.

We don’t tend to have only one type of task in our day and moving into a different taskcan take you out of the Goldilocks zone.

Another problem is that the drugs themselves take time to be processed by the body andreach the brain, different drugs have different release rates and staying in the Goldilockszone is more of an art form than a science.

The final big elephant in the room is that there are side effects.

Some of the drugs can be habit-forming or affect blood pressure, sexual function, sleepand mood.

There are many nootropic drugs and the effects, especially long term effects, of specificdrugs alone and in combination is often not well understood.

Having said that, the nootropic group of drugs includes caffeine and nicotine.

As you know, I consider the coffee machine to be one of our best inventions.

Nootropic drugs also include some outlawed or tightly controlled drugs, like amphetamines.

The use of nootropic drugs is controversial and so is its status as a mind augmentation.

Improving performance through the use of drugs might not actually be mind augmentation becauseall you have done is to make use of the mind’s own ability to perform by adjusting arousal.

Beyond nootropic drugs, we enter a more murky world of future possibilities.

These include neurosurgery, advanced education methods and cybernetic implants.

As to intelligence enhancement, we could have increases to general intelligence or a massiveincrease to one type, such as making someone a savant, maybe even an autistic savant, ifthat increase came by diverting other parts of the mind to assist.

We might speed up how fast an individual thinks or give them implants that helped with sometask or even network minds together, if we develop a Brain-Machine Interface with enoughbandwidth.

That last one, in its more extreme form, is called a Hive Mind and we’ll look at thatin a month or so, and it could be everything from a limited network like any human communityis, up to some connection so extreme, that it replaces the individual components witha single new entity, in much the same way you and I are people, and our kidneys, livers,and stomachs are not.

One of the methods to augment a mind is presumably hooking it up to computers, directly interfacedinto the head or just wirelessly interfacing with them.

Such an augmentation could be so integral to you that you considered it part of yourmind, or it might be clearly separate from your mind, but still be part of you, sameas your hands or eyes.

Or it could be more separate yet, just a tool or garment, like your shoes, or a screwdriver.

There’s a fair number of examples of this in fiction, but I’m fond of the term E-Butler,from Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, which is a fairly smart but not sentient computerassistant most folks have among their mental implants.

It’s clever enough to help with tons of tasks so it’s somewhere between a personalsecretary and a smartphone, and it is in your head and it is customized to you.

It could just as easily also be a separate entity entirely, an artificial intelligence.

If I gave you a mental implant that allowed you to access the contents of an entire encyclopediamost would say that was mind augmentation, but then again maybe not as mere knowledgeis not intelligence.

We probably would consider it augmentation if it was integrated thoroughly enough intothe brain that you could shuffle through the contents of it as casually as we can shufflethrough our memories of some topic or skill we have and allow us to apply that knowledgeeasily.

Analogies between computers and brains are tricky, but are common because it’s aboutour only option.

Where a computer ends is hard to define, you could limit it just to the processor but youcan have more than one of those, or maybe just the stuff on the motherboard, or justinside the case, like the skull, the hard drive counts but then an external hard drivewould not.

What about the monitor and other peripherals like the keyboard and mouse?

Our brain is a bit like that.

The skull, like the computer case, isn’t an entirely arbitrary boundary, but is alsonot an ideal one, and the mind is even hazier than the brain.

Sticking an implant in there isn’t automatically making it part of your mind anymore than ifI stick a needle in there, and if we removed part of your brain and stuck in some supportsystem connected by wires to the stuff still in your skull, we would say that’s stillyour mind.

Something like modifying our spinal cords to accelerate our reflexes through reflexconditioning or actively tapping into the motoneurons and interneurons might be consideredmind augmentation, even though our brain has nothing to do with it, or simply body modification,again where you draw the boundaries is a gray area.

Obviously enhancing your memory would count as augmenting the mind, and if you recordeverything you experience with cameras and a decent indexing system you can achieve fairlysimilar results.

Again, there’s a hazy boundary between a useful tool and an actual mental augmentation.

As to memory enhancement, that comes in a lot of forms too.

Better storage of course, a bigger hard drive as it were, faster recall, better search andindexing methods, higher resolution of those images or sounds or smells you remember, strongerassociation of various relevant memories, and so on.

Try to remember the last time you took a test on paper.

Might have been yesterday, much of my audience is in college, but it might have been a lotlonger.

The last one I can remember was my ASVAB to join the military 14 years ago.

It’s easier to recall in some respects since that’s an important one not a quick popquiz for an elective course.

What was the topic?

Decent chance you can remember that.

Did you use a pen or a pencil?

If a pen, what color was it?

If a pencil, was it the wooden kind with an eraser stub or a mechanical one?

Was the eraser worn down?

Did you have a coffee or soda at hand?

A bottle of water?

A backpack?

I can remember those mostly because that is what came to mind to ask about.

Thinking on the event I remember being irritated by not having my normal mechanical penciland the eraser being worn down, being irked not having a coffee to sip.

The more I think on it the more I remember but at the same time the more my mind wandersto parallel, associated events.

Thinking about the entire process of memory reminds us of all the various important aspectsand components of it that exceed a simple recording of a video.

It would be awesome to have a far better memory, one that let someone ask you what kind ofbirthday cake you had for your 10th birthday and just be able to give the answer as quicklyand casually as if they asked us when our birthday was.

You could recall not just the information, but maybe even be able to relive the eventlike you were there.

It would be potentially dangerous too.

Not only could you get stuck dwelling on pleasant events of the past but you could get stuckreliving traumatic or negative events.

That raises the entire issue of removing bad memories or implanting fake positive memories,another popular one in science fiction that we see in films like Total Recall.

And a proper memory of an event isn’t just the visual or audio component, it’s thesmells, the textures, the actual emotions going on.

Such things tend to dim with time, but imagine if every time you saw a blue sedan, you remembervividly the time you crashed your blue sedan and were stuck in it for twenty agonizingminutes till the firemen cut you free.

That would be awful, so would freshly remembering the loss of a grandparent, or a friend, ora pet, like it happened yesterday.

Mind augmentations can come with some serious downsides, even ignoring the side effectsthey could have.

A positive might come at the price of a negative, but sometimes having a new skill or talentcan come with negatives.

Learn a lot of science and some science fiction isn’t as fun to watch anymore.

Get better hearing and a street musician striking some off chords might grate on you like nailson a chalkboard, so that you might want to be able to dial down or switch off some augmentation.

More importantly though, the brain isn’t a processor with carefully designed software.

We talk about the architecture of the human mind like we do software architecture, butthat’s a dubious term.

Your brain certainly has structure to it, but in the same way a forest or jungle does.

Much like how an ecosystem can have massive changes from mild tweaks, the human mind andpersonality might be very sensitive to small changes.

So early augmentation probably wants to avoid messing much with the architecture of ourminds.

You can go for non-mind augmentation, like just hijacking the optic nerve to send informationthrough as a visual input, and some others to serve as an output, both to other devicesthat do some work.

You could go the neural lace route perhaps, something that doesn’t alter thinking butpretty much is a net of detectors woven throughout the mind to read your thoughts, send thatdata for processing, and send it back as an input.

Another option is to augment reflexes using the comparatively much simpler neural pathwaysin the spinal cord.

Or bypass the spinal cord completely, as is currently being developed for people withspinal injuries.

As to making someone smarter without messing with that architecture, two of the methodsare just making it bigger or speeding it up.

We see both examples in books by Alastair Reynolds though one is in a sequel to thebook of the month and the other is in a standalone novel.

For the former, speeding it up, you could potentially replace all the slow signal transmissionlines in the brain, which move anywhere from walking speed to bullet speed, with stuffthat moves at the speed of light.

We talked about that option more in the Transhumanism and Cyborg episodes, so I won’t repeat itnow, but this is what gets classified as Speed Intelligence, one of the three types of SuperIntelligence identified by Nick Bostrom in his book Super-Intelligence.

The other two types being Networked Intelligence, which we’ll look at more in the Hive Mindsepisode, and Quality Intelligence, which is a hazy concept but basically the reason whyyou are better at many tasks than a room full of monkeys, even though they’ve got morecombined brain matter than you do.

Another author, my friend Dennis E. Taylor, calls accelerating thought speed “frame-jacking”in his “We are Bob” novels, and I like the term so I’ll borrow it for the notionof speeding your thoughts up but not constantly, just as much as is needed at that time.

This is essentially how fast you are experience time.

Frame-jacking would tend to drive you nuts if you were always existing at a time ratewhere seconds seemed to take hours to pass.

So while you might be comfortable running a bit faster than normal all the time, youprobably won’t want to speed up very fast for more than short periods.

Also, by and large you’d expect everyone else to have this and for a new standard paceto develop.

This is clearly beneficial too.

Being able to crank people’s brains up to run a million times faster obviously helpswith scientific research a lot and you have way less accidents if folks can respond almostinstantly to them.

But it would start messing with our concept of time a lot too.

Someone tells you they were born in 1980 and another tells you they were born in 1987,and you know one is 7 years younger than the other person.

But the fellow born in 1987 might have experienced a couple centuries of thought last year.

These are the same kinds of issues we experience with relativistic travel, where time genuinelyslows down for the traveler, or freezing people in sci fi.

You could have someone who went around on a spaceship that hugged the speed of light,so whole decades might pass during their journey while they only experienced a year or so,and they could be engaging in interstellar trade for centuries but only feel like theyhave been in the business for a few years.

Or they might accelerate their consciousness, frame-jack, to experience the same amountof time as passed in the outside world or even more of it.

It’s a neat trick for growing soldiers too.

Scifi loves to have tank grown super-soldiers you can pump out in months from some cloningvat but tends to ignore that they aren’t getting much training in that time.

Fully grown or not, a two-month old is a two-month old.

They aren’t even talking and walking.

If you can speed up their thoughts though, you can teach them faster, or just take regularpeople and hand them some books on the topic and tell them to read them now.

Obviously it needs to be an electronic book or better some virtual simulation with hands-ontraining, but now they suddenly know the skill.

Doesn’t feel like it to them though, because they did actually spend the time to learnit.

You might expect everybody with this option would go and try to learn everything, butfirst off, most people do have a plenty of free time and still don’t hit the booksto learn skills they don’t particularly need at the moment.

Second, this is one pathway to extreme life extension, you only live maybe a century ofreal time but experience thousands of years of subjective time, and while we are keepingto a basic human mental architecture, even if we can extend their useful memory so theirbrain doesn’t fill up or overwrite old memories, there’s a cost to life.

Firstly, you probably want to get paid more for an hour spent frame-jacking than at normalspeed, since you are experiencing it, so our ideas about being paid by the hour changes.

Living 20,000 subjective years when you are physically 20 might seem like a gradual changemade to your mind over subjective years spent reading stuff while you sat down on the couchfor a few minutes, but to everyone else it won’t be the least bit gradual.

Do you think if we stuck you in a slow time pocket for a century in a library to read,you would emerge the same person as far as your friends were concerned?

All that new knowledge, probably even talking differently?

How do you feel about the spouse you married and haven’t really talked to from your perspectivein a decade?

How do they feel about you?

Understanding that, you might get very touchy about frame-jacking a lot.

So speed intelligence is a promising path to mind augmentation but not without its problems.

The nicer path when you just want it for learning is to copy all the information over, but thebrain, and anything functioning on the neural network concept, is not particularly suitedto copy and paste.

There’s a big difference between photographing a book page and actually learning its contents,absorbing it and doing all the new wiring and indexing so you can recall and utilizeit.

The last aspect though returns to the continuity of identity issue.

With something like speed intelligence you are just being changed gradually, from yourown perspective, but suddenly spiking someone’s intelligence up 20 IQ points probably changesthem profoundly, and pumping them up to hundreds of times smarter than the normal person oughtto change their psychology more than going from standard primate to human.

A lot of people might not like that, even if they wanted to be that smart, because theymight seriously doubt they were that smart, that we instead have an entirely new entityand they ceased to exist.

Folks also sometimes kick around the notion, usually in terms of the Fermi Paradox, thatwhat we consider intelligence is sort of a form of insanity.

We don’t know that getting a bit smarter might not be a very bad thing.

People worry about civilizations being too dumb to survive or getting dumber and dyingoff.

But getting smarter might get you too.

You could potentially have a civilization fall apart simply because its members wereso smart they were constantly being overwhelmed by existential crises.

They might get depressed or conclude free will and existence were logically impossibleor pointless, but were too smart to ignore it or rationalize a way around it, and justsit down and shut off.

A popular notion is that civilizations run on a lot of stupidity and it would seem likeif it were actually true then one with a lot of mind augmentation might fall apart.

Personally, I don’t see it that way.

But then if I didn’t think making people smarter was almost always a good thing I wouldn’tspend so much time learning myself or teaching, so I might be biased, and education itselfis the oldest method of mind augmentation and has a very good track record for performance.

I think we will see mind augmentation of various types and levels start showing up in the nextfew decades and I would expect it to have positive effects overall.

Another example of augmentation is just making the brain bigger, but keeping the same overallarchitecture.

It has the downside of slowing things down.

And we get an example of that from the House of Suns where the protagonist spends a decadetalking to a human giant with a massive head who is incredibly smart but slow.

It takes hours for them to send around all the mental signals between all those manyneurons which are far apart and formulate a simple thought but it’s not a very simplethought either.

It has to go slow too because every time you fire a neuron you generate heat and your radiatingsurface is not scaling up with volume and quantity.

Double a skull’s diameter and you get eight times the volume and neurons but only fourtimes the radiating surface.

Now, we don’t have a lot of technical detail yet on how we can achieve mind augmentation,but whatever way we do that, that last point brings us to the familiar territory of havingto deal with the laws of thermodynamics.

We get an example of folks who have had cooling fins installed to help dissipate heat fromthinking faster in another of Alastair Reynold’s novels.

You can see why I like him for this topic.

When we talk about really speeding up intelligence a lot that heat issue is a big one, thoughcome to think of it restrictions on technology imposed by heat and thermodynamics is probablyone of the most common obstacles I point out on this channel, probably because it getsignored in science fiction so much.

We do have super computers these days finally powerful enough that they process as fastas our estimates for the human mind, which is still several million times faster thanyour typical home computer.

These things are gluttons for power and every watt of energy they use has to emit as heat.

Your brain uses and gives off heat on par with an energy saving light bulb, about 20Watts.

A good supercomputer produces thousands of times more heat to do way less.

Even overcoming the scaling issue and being able to create a computer that would fit intothe skull alongside the brain would not solve the heat issue, and it gets worse.

Recent research on thermal regulation of the brain has shown that a change in temperatureof only a couple of degrees has a very detrimental effect on our ability to think.

A mobile phone consumes about 5 Watts of power.

It is really dumb in comparison with a super-computer, but even at that low power level, that’sa quarter of our brain’s usual heat output.

We have to be very careful not to overstep our body’s ability to dissipate that heat.

This is interesting because while we can doubtless keep improving how much energy we need tospend per calculation, and thus decrease the heat we need to get rid of, it does indicatesomething about the speed intelligence approach.

I mentioned earlier frame-jacking in the “We are Bob” novels.

The higher your frame-jack the more heat you are going to produce and so the shorter aperiod of time you can do it if it is beyond your regular heat dissipation level.

Whatever that is, even if your computers or artificial brain is so efficient it can runa million times faster than a human brain constantly, you can presumably briefly pushit higher than that.

Not only is speed intelligence probably the easiest path to pursue for major mind augmentation– certainly conceptually the easiest to explain – but that these relative burstsof speed, frame-jacking, would be a major aspect of that.

One potential solution to the thermodynamics problem is to move the bulk of the processingoutside of the skull.

This could be moved to a chip embedded elsewhere in the body, or carried around on a pocketsized computer, or even off site, that you talked to over a network.

This does raise the issue of communications outages where it is completely removed fromthe body and still imposes some limitations on heat dissipation when it is housed elsewhereon the body.

Current performance gaming computer rigs and supercomputers have moved to liquid coolingsolutions because heat can be removed from the hot areas of the computer much more easilythan radiating or even convecting that heat away close to those hot areas.

The human body is already set up to be a liquid cooled radiator of heat and we could increasethe flow of blood to the brain or other parts of the body and use other parts of our bodyto dump out the excess heat through sweating and opening the blood vessels under the skin.

This means that mind augmentation could become a combination of brain and physiological augmentationwhere the two are inextricably linked.

The more heat that can be dissipated by passing more blood through the skull and other implantedareas, the longer the person can be frame-jacked and the faster they can think.

Whatever system we ultimately adopt for mind augmentation will need to address not onlythe interface with the mind but also its physiological, social, and thermodynamic consequences.

We have only touched on some of the concepts for mind augmentation and not a lot of themechanics, those are still emerging and we are still novices when it comes to understandingbrains, thought, and cognition.

You can explore a lot more of the concepts in our book of the Month, Revelation Space.

Though I’m not so much recommending the book as the entire series, Reynolds exploresTranshumanism, Artificial Intelligence, Mind Uploading, and aspects of consciousness andidentity better than any other sci fi author I can think of and he writes almost all ofhis work under very hard science.

No faster than light travel or magic handwave technology.

He proves that you don’t have to diminish the science part of science fiction to writea good story.

He’s also a particularly good read for channel regulars too because he actually includesa lot of the other concepts we discuss like megastructures, it’s not jumping aroundfrom one generic, single-biome planet to another.

I particularly recommend the audiobooks too, as the narration happens to be done by myfavorite narrator, John Lee, and his voice is very well suited to the book in terms ofimmersing you into the novel with his tone.

I tend to listen to audiobooks almost all day as they leave the hands and eyes freefor other tasks like when you're driving.

With Audible you can transform your commute and make traffic an escape you look forwardtoo!

They have an unbeatable selection of best sellers, mysteries, and sci-fi books likethe series I’m recommending this month, which happens to be all three.

Revelation Space is available on Audible, and you can pick up a free copy today - justuse my link, audible.com/isaac, or click on the link in the description below, to geta FREE audiobook and 30 day trial, That’s audible dot com slash I_S_A_A_C.

I’m certain you will enjoy that story, but if not, you can swap it out for free for anyother book at anytime and it’s yours to keep whether you stay subscribed to Audibleor not.

Next week we will be exploring the themes of digital mind transfer and uploading inour Halloween special, Digital Death.

After that we will be looking at Interplanetary Trade, and we’ll discuss some of the commonconcepts from science fiction and try to see how realistic those are and what the futureof trade will be.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button, and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week.

+--------------------------------+ | Outward Bound: Colonizing Titan| | 2017-10-12 | | https://youtu.be/HdpRxGjtCo0 | +--------------------------------+

We often see folks arguing about whether or not space exploration should be done by robotsor manned missions.

We don’t talk as much about whether or not space colonization should be done by robots,or the advantages of robots over humans.

So today we will be looking at Colonizing Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and slightlylarger than the planet Mercury, a claim only Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, can match.

Yet while both are larger than Mercury, their combined mass is actually less.

Both are far less dense than Mercury, Earth, or the other two inner planets, Venus andMars.

In the first two episodes of this series we looked at Mars and then Venus, one with virtuallyno atmosphere and the other with one far more massive than Earth’s own.

Genuine atmospheres are not common in our solar system, and ignoring the gas giants,you can only find them on two planets and one moon: Earth, Venus, and Titan.

Unlike Venus, where the atmosphere is super-hot and thick and mostly carbon dioxide, Titan’sown atmosphere is mostly nitrogen like our own with an atmospheric pressure about 50%greater than Earth’s.

Of course you can’t breathe it because there’s no oxygen and because the temperature of Titanmakes Antarctica look like an oven in comparison.

Titan is so cold it is thought to have cryovolcanoes on it, shooting out not magma but water, molecularhydrogen, and other volatiles.

Which may be the reason why it has so much ethane and methane on it, and butane and propaneas well.

Titan has many lakes on it, but they’re not water.

If you wanted to think of Titan as a planet of ice covered in lakes of oil, and methaneseas, that would basically be on the nose, and it’s maybe a good thing there’s notmuch free oxygen around, or you could light the whole place on fire.

You could walk around on Titan in a well-insulated suit and oxygen mask, but if you stood stillyou’d start melting the surface where you stood, and if you went for a swim in one ofthose lakes, it would steam around you and boil until eventually it froze you.

This is Titan, the frozen flammable gold mine of the solar system, with hundreds of timesmore natural gas and other hydrocarbons than Earth.

With an atmosphere thick enough to allow easy aerobraking to land on and with a gravitywell similar to our own moon.

It’s easy to land on and easy to leave, with vast quantities of rocket fuel just lyingthere to suck up, add Oxygen, and burn your way back to orbit.

This is Titan, a place far enough away that if you are still using chemical fuels forrockets it’s probably beyond your range to make much use of, but it’s there, incase we never master fusion or make dependable fission drives; It’s the solar system’sultimate chemical fuel depot.

And this is Titan, a place so far away from the Sun that it receives just 1% of the sunlightEarth does.

It has a lot of appeal in many solar system colonization plans for its riches, and yetat the same time it is so much less tempting of a place for humans to ever colonize.

We often see it as a lynchpin of a future solar economy, able to provide hydrogen andnitrogen to places like Mars that have very little of either, or Venus, which has plentyof nitrogen but very little hydrogen.

Titan, while cold, is rich in everything you need for life except warmth.

Yet were you to warm it up, it lacks the gravity to hold those organic riches; and if you introducedoxygen, they’d soon incinerate.

As we’ve discussed before, there is no place you can’t terraform if you want to badlyenough, but it is worth asking if those things which make a place unlike earth might actuallybe beneficial.

So, let’s take up the persona of our traveler again from earlier episodes to get a humanperspective.

We first visited Mars and dwelt there for a decade, then came back to Borman Stationin orbit around the Moon and were convinced to travel to Venus and dwelt there for manyyears in their floating cities.

Now, once more, we’re returning to Borman Station, the hub for early interplanetarytravel and trade, with the intent again to see Earth once more.

Things have hardly been static on Earth, Mars, or the rest of the inner solar system allthese years.

There are habitats scattered around Earth’s orbit and mining operations on many asteroidsout in the belt, some slowly becoming permanent settlements.

So folks are discussing getting some genuine trade going on in the solar system.

The long consensus is that Titan is a potentially invaluable node for such trade, but the lureof space exploration and settlement is beginning to fade a bit.

The idea of flying off to Titan isn’t that appealing.

It used to take years to get a probe out to Saturn; ships are far faster now but it’sstill a long trip.

When your spaceship runs on chemical fuels, you have to make almost the entire ship outof fuel and still follow the most optimum energy paths throughout the solar system.

These typically involve Hohmann Transfer Orbits, which I’ll discuss later, but they don’tlook anything like a straight line.

Normally all the planets move so much relative to each other that it is rather pointlessto think of straight lines anyway, but Saturn takes 30 years to orbit the Sun and is almostten times further from it than Earth.

The two planets are never closer than 8 AU – astronomical units, the average distanceof Earth from the Sun – and never further than 11.

That is a long way, but on the other hand you can get a message there and back in underthree hours, which isn’t really long on normal email timelines.

If a spaceship could sustain a one-gee thrust constantly, it could accelerate halfway there,for 4 to 5 days, flip over and slow down and arrive in about 9 days.

Of course such a ship would be traveling at over 1% of light speed.

This is actually quite conceivable for a genuine fusion powered ship; indeed, it is fairlymodest compared to hypothetical maximum speeds for such a vessel.

But it’s also quite wasteful of energy.

Even such a fast ship is not traveling in a particularly straight line, and Saturn won’thave moved much during that time.

It’s important to keep in mind though that even if you can go that fast, most of thetime you won’t want to.

Interplanetary trade is a complex enough topic that I’ll give it its own episode in a monthor so, but when you’re engaging in bulk transport of billions of tons of raw materials,it pays to be frugal with your energy and follow those slow paths.

This is essentially what Titan offers too: huge amounts of nitrogen and hydrogen andhydrocarbons, all of which are in short supply in the inner solar system and needed in massivequantities for making earth-like habitats and living areas.

But here on Borman Station, we find out that folks have some other ideas about what Titanmight be useful for.

While potential terraformers are talking about ways to warm Titan up, others are pointingout that being cold has its own benefits.

At the core of all industrial and computational processes is thermodynamics, and how efficientthose are.

Even things like solar panels that folks don’t think of as having anything to do with bigsteam or oil-fired engines are limited by this and the key constraint is that such enginesoperate on an energy transfer between two reservoirs, a hot one and a cold one.

Take two equal temperature reservoirs and no work or power can be extracted from them.

No engine can ever be more efficient than the Carnot heat engine, and its maximum efficiencyis given as one minus the ratio of the cold reservoir over the hot one, with temperaturesin absolute scale, typically Kelvin.

Back on Earth, a heat engine whose cold reservoir was at room temperature - about 300 Kelvin- might have a hot reservoir of 400 Kelvin, a bit more than boiling water.

Such an engine can produce work or power at no better efficiency than 1 minus 300 over400, or 1 minus three-fourths, or one-fourth, or 25%.

That is not terribly efficient.

Yet that same engine running on Titan, where the average temperature is only about 100kelvin, is one minus 100 over 400, or one minus one fourth, or three fourths or 75%efficient.

Heat is also a big deal with computation.

Computers build up ferocious amounts of heat and need massive amounts of cooling to operate.

But even beyond that, Landauer’s Limit kicks in, which is the maximum theoretical limitfor classic computing efficiency, and that is directly related to temperature.

Halve the temperature, double your maximum computations for the same amount of energy.

I’ll come back to this a little later.

Now you can produce cold temperatures anywhere, but you usually have to expend considerablymore energy refrigerating a warm place than it’s worth.

Up in space this is a bit worse, because you can only get rid of heat by radiating it away,and radiating heat is dependent on the total surface area of the object doing the radiatingand the temperature it is at.

Except that scales up far faster with temperature, with the fourth power, so if you double something’stemperature it radiates heat away 2^4 or 16 times faster.

Mercury and Venus are almost ten times as hot as Titan and radiate 10^4 or 10,000 timesthe energy from the same surface area.

But Titan is big and cold, so you can use conventional cooling processes by runningcold fluids over the hot, heat-generating object and cooling it, then pumping the hotfluids away.

What this means is that on Titan you can run many industrial processes and electronicsat ultra-high efficiency and use Titan’s atmosphere as a massive space radiator.

Now, of course, one can’t dump an infinite amount of heat on Titan.

Every joule of energy you add raises the temperature a bit.

But the hotter the moon gets the more quickly it gets rid of heat.

By taking its current average surface temperature, which is 98.3 Kelvin, and picking a new average

temperature, say 100 Kelvin, this shows how much power each radiates off per square meter,take their difference, and multiply that against Titan’s whole surface to find out what thethermal energy budget is.

By doing that, the amount of power that’s usable without warming the place up even morecan be calculated.

We’ll skip the rest of the math.

What’s really useful is that Titan can dissipate up to 31 Trillion Watts, which is almost doublethe total power generation of humanity in the early 21st century.

So in industrial terms you could get away with running all the planetary industrialoutput of humanity at that time several times over again and at a far higher rate of efficiencyand without having to worry about impacting Earth’s climate with excess heat and otherchemical pollutants.

That makes Titan a potential industrial powerhouse, the titan of interplanetary industry, becauseeverything it does is more efficient, and it can do a lot of it.

Its low gravity and thick atmosphere allow very easy transport from the surface to spaceand vice-versa.

On Borman station, folks are talking about this option, but as of yet no person has evenset foot on Titan, and the furthest manned missions to date have been out to the moonsof Jupiter.

We haven’t set foot on Earth in a generation, and plenty of fascinating things have beenhappening there too.

So we go home to Earth and get to see all the new changes.

Giant citadel arcologies with whole metropolises living inside them and still finding ampleroom for factories and farms and forests inside.

Cities floating in the ocean or snugly warm in the polar ice.

Cities kilometers under the sea or deep inside mountains.

For all the millions of people now living in space, in the orbital habitats or off colonizingplanets and asteroids, many more are colonizing humanity’s home, turning desert and tundragreen, creating structures so vast they each could have housed and fed the entirety ofpre-industrial humanity.

We can see why no one is rushing off to colonize Titan; there are plenty of places left stillto explore on Earth, and even Antarctica in the winter time is far more hospitable thanSaturn’s distant moon.

Now for all that few manned missions have been far from Earth, but there’s been noshortage of unmanned robot missions.

There’s not much need to send a manned mission out to Jupiter to take ice core samples fromEuropa when a robot can do it cheaper and better.

There’s always an assumption though, that a manned mission must eventually follow, certainlyif you mean to colonize the place.

But do colonies and outposts need people on them?

Folks are able to create automated mining outposts, all done by robots who, at most,need occasional oversight from people.

Does an asteroid mining facility really need any people on it?

Or would it be enough just to have the crew of a ship perform some checks and maintenanceon the machinery while picking up the refined cargo.

Indeed does that ship even need a crew?

It’s not much of a leap to imagine machines that could repair themselves and handle reasonablycomplex tasks and problems without even considering human level artificial intelligence, but youdon’t necessarily need the ability to repair your robots.

After all the big advantage of advanced automation is that it can do most manufacturing taskswith little to no human labor and even minimal oversight, so if you have robot miners thatcan operate fairly autonomously you probably have that same option for the factories makingthose robots back home.

You don’t really need to repair them, but you probably could, and you probably couldautomatically.

You probably don’t even need to send more probes or mining drones out either, becausethey can potentially manufacture everything they need to make more of themselves.

I’ve talked before about self-replicating machines, and people tend to think of theseas tiny little robots, but they hardly need to be and the first ones probably wouldn’tbe.

Nor does each need to be able to do it on its own.

A factory capable of producing every component in that factory is a self-replicating machine.

You could easily imagine vast factories down in the ice on Titan all monitored and controlledfrom a few manned orbital facilities, maybe occasionally sending down a team in insulatedpods and suits if necessary, but do you even need people there?

Would anyone even want to be there?

Some maybe for the adventure or potentially high pay, but who would want to actually livethere?

So, could Titan be truly colonized in the future with few to no people living on it?

Just a massive factory and computer farm taking in raw materials and energy and informationand exporting material?

This would be an entire moon where deep below its atmosphere, submerged under the ice andlakes, entire city-sized computers and factories exist.

And while there’s an energy budget to avoid melting, where is it getting that energy?

Oh, Titan is covered in the same hydrocarbons used in combustion engines but there’s nofree oxygen to use with it, and it takes a lot of energy to remove oxygen from wateror rocks to burn it with those hydrocarbons.

Uranium or Thorium for fission is an option and odds are that Saturn’s 61 other knownmoons have plentiful supplies of those.

It’s very easy to move around those moons; there’s very little gravity.

Of course, solar power would seem to be out since a solar panel near Saturn only getsabout 1% the light which one near the Earth would get, but you could put your panels atthe focus of a cheap parabolic dish -- just shiny plastic or metal to focus light on it.

It’s not like a few square meters of tin foil cost anything like as much as a squaremeter of solar panels, and space to put them is no problem.

There’s no reason to care if they orbit Titan and block what little sunlight hitsthe place since that would only increase the Thermal budget.

Or you could have power satellites much closer to the sun that just beamed energy out toTitan; not even to the moon itself, trying to cut through that thick atmosphere.

The orbital velocity around Titan is quite low, as is its gravity, so building a spaceelevator or an orbital ring with power lines right down to the surface is not that hard.

You could even have colonies living inside of floating cities in the upper atmosphereattached to tethers that are anchored to the surface and use receivers to capture the beamedenergy.

And if one has viable fusion power plants there’s no shortage of hydrogen or deuteriumon Titan itself.

Unlike the inner planets where hydrogen tends to be too light to stick around in truly largequantities, Titan has tons, as does the planet it orbits.

Most folks reject the notion of letting robots do all our exploring, and would not see apoint in letting them do our colonizing, but that does not mean that every object humanscolonize has to have an end-state of being principally for human habitation.

In the sorts of massive economies and industrial infrastructure a solar system working itsway towards Kardashev 2 status might have, especially one with good automation, it’spossible for an entire giant moon like Titan to be entirely colonized even if it just hada handful of folks living at the stations at the top of a space elevator, while millionsof tons of raw materials and manufactured goods left up that elevator every minute.

Folks talk about a future for humanity where there’s far better automation.

Might not this be a more likely set up and use for a place like Titan than having peopleactually trying to live there and start up a real civilization of millions of people?

Back to our story, we live on Earth for about a year, but find Earth’s gravity crushing.

Earth’s culture is also alien to us because we’ve been away for so long.

The final straw is when we get bad news from a doctor that we’ve developed a rare, incurablecancer because of the decades spent without a magnetosphere protecting us.

So, just as one would expect of such an adventurer, we decide to go back to being a pioneeringcolonist!

A mission is planned for Titan to setup automated factories and a mega-computational capability.

It’s very expensive setting up and maintaining people on a mission like this so only a skeletoncrew will be sent to oversee the project and mostly they are there to make sure nothinggets out of hand with Titan’s manufacturing facilities and AI capability going rogue.

We sign onto the mission.

Artificial intelligence is now well advanced.

I mentioned before that the fundamental theoretical limit on classic computing is called Landauer’sLimit, and that the colder it is the better it works too.

The energy needed to flip a single bit at Titan’s temperature is just one zeptojoule,a gigahertz processor could run on just one trillionth of a watt.

You recall the 31 trillion watts in our energy budget for Titan?

If computers used just one of those trillions, a trillion, trillion gigahertz processorscan be run, and it’s generally believed you only need maybe 10 to 100 million to emulatea human mind.

So for just a few percent of the available energy budget on Titan, there you could operatea computer able to emulate the minds of the entire human population a million times over.

Even if you’re nowhere near Landauer’s limit, that much energy at those kind of temperaturesand cooling rates allows you to run some very serious computing operations.

More than enough to oversee any sort of automated manufacturing you had going on.

Heck, unlike Earth whose core is mostly molten iron, Titan’s core is mostly silicon, soyou’re hardly short of stuff to make computers out of.

Folks are understandably a bit nervous about things like totally automated factories andmegacomputers and artificial intelligence being set up around Titan.

The skeleton crew joke that they are really just there with self-destruct devices if theTitan wakes up and starts manufacturing battleships and talking about exterminating humanity.

They end up referring to it that way too, not talking about the factories or computerbanks down on Titan doing that but rather Titan itself.

Most of these folks will stay in orbit around Titan, check the files coming from Earth tobe run on the giant computers below and send the results back, or provide hospitality whena ship shows up bringing in metals or taking away mining equipment for other moons.

Once the mission arrives at Titan, we are initially tasked with directing the robotsthat set up manufacturing on the moon itself and that build an orbital ring covered inhuge receivers, sucking in transmissions from the inner system and sending data back, launchinghuge pods of nitrogen and hydrogen off to Mars and Venus and the various asteroid habitatstrying to build settlements and cities in space.

After everything is set up, we move to overseeing day-to-day operations.

Visitors occasionally want to visit Titan and the skeleton crew always shrug and saygo ahead.

Nobody has made a shuttle-sized reactor so the shuttle runs on chemical rockets and there’sno shortage of fuel below.

Once the shuttle lands, a visitor has to wait till things freeze back over because the shuttle’srockets evaporate and melt its landing space.

Visitors are often disappointed as they expect some sign of all the massive industry belowbut there was no real need to do it on the surface.

You can essentially melt your facilities down where you need them and a lot of it’s undergroundor under the lakes.

Back on Mars, the big argument was over whether or not to colonize the planet or colonizethe orbital lanes above it and just mine the planet for resources.

Here, the only signs that civilization has arrived is the orbital ring above and thetether rising up to it.

Occasionally you can see some barge carrying material to one of those automated ports atthe bottoms of the tethers or a submarine pop up from under the lakes.

It’s a strange place and inhospitable, but in many ways the more logical outcome of spacecolonization.

Humans need all the moons and planets for their resources, but very few offer much reasonto live there, rather than build your own habitats to your own specifications in morehospitable places, and in many ways the vacuum of space or the inside of a modest asteroidis more habitable.

Humans could build domes here, and could insulate them to leak little heat so they didn’tmelt the ground they sat on and sink.

They could light them so they didn’t exist in the dim twilight of a lunar surface farfrom the Sun and deep beneath an atmosphere, but ultimately, to what end?

You might do a few, surely some folks will want to visit and others might be employedthere, but while there is immense material wealth on Titan, you’ve little motivationto live there to get it if you don’t need to be there to get it.

Our automation gets better every day, and it doesn’t really need to be that smartto just build the same thing over and over again and suck up atmosphere or scoop outice to transport to other worlds.

In an ultimate sense, Titan’s key export is cold itself, and all the advantages thatoffers, but it’s not a nice place to live and to make it such a place decreases thoseadvantages.

While the notion of an entire moon the size of a regular planet being a huge automatedfactory and processor is somehow a little creepy, it’s worth noting that it’s notany creepier than any other deserted moon or planet, which is all of them.

Titan really is an invaluable resource to colonizing the solar system, it can be a keyhub of an interplanetary trade, but that doesn’t mean many or any people need to live there.

This is a very different way of viewing colonization, much at odds with the classic image from sciencefiction, yet in some ways seems far more realistic.

Just because humans colonize a place, doesn’t mean a lot of folks need to actually livethere, and just because a lot of folks don’t live there, doesn’t mean it isn’t colonized.

The skeleton crew occasionally head down to the surface of Titan, but after the excitementof the first couple of trips, all of them prefer to live in the orbital ring ratherthan in the hazy twilight on the freezing surface.

Unlike them, we are perfectly happy and at home on the surface of Titan and it’s notbecause we have been colonizing for decades, but rather it’s because we’re not a memberof the skeleton crew.

Instead, we were one of a number of people who uploaded their consciousnesses into anAI core before leaving Earth and are now housed in the Titan supercomputer.

As I said earlier, folks were worried about an AI running amok, and it was felt that usingan AI that was allowed to self-develop was a bad idea.

Instead, human volunteers were found to cross the digital divide and become transhuman AIs.

That was seen as a lot safer for all concerned.

It was just the sort of thing that appealed to us as the next frontier.

An entire industry has subsequently developed where people, tired of corporeal life or unableto continue with a corporeal existence, decide to upload their consciousness into the Titanmega-computer, so we are now far from alone and the surface of Titan has become a colonyof a different sort - one that has lots of humans existing in it but one that, at thesame time, has no flesh-and-blood humans at all.

Over time, Titan could house more virtual humans than all the flesh-and-blood humansin the entire solar system, including colonies and Earth itself.

Despite its hostile alienness, Titan could be set to be the biggest home of humanity.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have quite a large colony of flesh-and-blood people aroundgas giants.

Those giant planets and their many moons can form a surprisingly self-sustainable civilizationlike a miniature solar system, one where travel to and from is quick and easy and communicationsare fast enough you can chat with your lunar neighbors real time.

That’s something we’ll examine more in the next episode of the series when we lookat colonizing Jupiter, and we’ll look at colonizing those moons and forming such amini-solar system, with an extra focus on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and its subterraneanoceans, as well as discussing how we could colonize a gas giant itself, not just itsmoons.

Before we get to that we will take some time to examine the idea of Interplanetary Tradein a bit more detail, and even interstellar trade concepts.

We’ll be looking at a lot of the classic ideas from science fiction and seeing howplausible they are, and if not what our alternatives are.

A pretty crucial part of that is going to be Hohmann Transfer Orbits, or HTOs, and theInterplanetary Transport Network, and it’s vital to trade for places like Titan wheremost of exporting is going to be either data moving at light speed or huge quantities ofraw materials and bulk durable goods moving slowly from place to place in automated vessels.

Hohmann Transfers are crucial to modern space travel, and will continue to be even if weget awesome high-tech engines.

I’ve been meaning to discuss Hohmann transfers for a long while, but keep flinching backfrom it since it would require us to work through examples to really understand it,and that’s best done at the individual’s own pace.

But if you want to know how slingshot maneuvers and HTOs actually work, and be able to lookat them the way a rocket scientist does, then I recommend that you check out Brilliant.org,

our newest partner.

They just put out an entire course on the dynamics of orbits, including a project whereyou learn the physics of the HTO as you design your own mission to Mars, which I found remarkablystraight-forward and intuitive, and I recommend that you check it out.

I can never overemphasize how handy that math and science skill-set is to have in your mentaltoolbox, because of all the extra layers of concepts it opens up for you to explore, andBrilliant is a great place to do that.

They’ve got everything an aspiring space traveler would need — from Classical Mechanicsto Differential Equations to their new course on Astronomy — you can dive right in atwhatever your skill level is and explore at your own pace.

To support the channel and learn more about Brilliant, go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur

and sign up for free.

And also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual Premiumsubscription.

That’s the subscription I’ve been using to explore concepts like HTO.

A couple weeks back we looked at the notion of Uplifting, enhancing animal minds to thehuman level, and next week we’ll be looking at some of the way you might be able to dothat or to enhance the human mind to super-intelligence in Mind Augmentation, a concept explored inour October Book of the Month, Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

We’ll be looking at that topic and some of the themes explored in that novel.

For alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Androids | | 2017-10-05 | | https://youtu.be/IcvfmIBqkQU | +--------------------------------+

Possibly the most important question facing humanity in the 21st century is: if you builda machine in the likeness of a human mind, is it still a machine?

“To be human, or not to be human: that is the question?”

This is an important existential question posed by Shakespeare’s Hamlet centuriesago.

I’ve modified it slightly so it has a new relevance in this modern age as our knowledgeof the human mind and computers continues to improve at a ferocious pace, and it seemslike artificial intelligence is just over the next hill.

Not long after Shakespeare left the stage we had Rene Descartes and John Locke arriveon it, challenging our basic notions of identity and consciousness, and as artificial intelligencebegins to emerge we still find ourselves with a very unclear idea of what a mind truly is.

These concepts, though centuries old, have never been more relevant than today, and toour topic of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence, what is and what it means for our future and our basic philosophicaland ethical outlooks on life is a far too large a topic to cover in just one episode.

So we will begin by looking at androids: sophisticated robots which look human.

I chose androids for a few reasons, one of which is that this episode comes out rightbefore the new Blade Runner film.

The android crisis is a while away still.

We have not yet created a machine that can even vaguely pass for human in mind and body.

We don’t need to concern ourselves with the feelings or civil rights of toasters orsmartphones.

For that matter, the increased use of automation in factories has arguably helped remove thehabit of viewing people as machines that some feel the Industrial Revolution caused.

At some point though you could end up with something sufficiently close to a human mind;if this ever happened then we would need to begin asking if maybe it actually is.

This is not limited to androids, but they represent the closest approximation to a human.

An android is a robot built to resemble a human to interact with humans.

The original Blade Runner film, which happens to be my favorite film, focused a lot on androidsand the blurred line between them and humans.

It didn’t just blur it by making very human androids, but by showing us a dystopian futurein which humans were often treated as machines.

That’s an important aspect of the debate on artificial intelligence, because thereis always a concern that if you have very human-like machines it could make it easierto view fellow humans as machines.

It is important to remember that machines don’t have to be metal nor silicon likea computer, so you could build an organic android whose machinery was made of fleshand bone and whose processors were made of neurons.

Done in sufficient detail, it would be impossible to determine whether or not they were humanor a machine without knowing exactly what to look for.

That’s what that movie depicted.

This isn’t necessarily a human since its mind might be totally alien, but this wouldbe unlikely in the case of androids.

We have spoken about the Uncanny Valley in past videos.

By default we would expect that the more human something looks and acts the more comfortablewith it we would be.

This is not what happens though.

At a certain point we stop being more comfortable the more human something is and start becomingincreasingly uncomfortable, sloping down into a valley that presumably slopes back up ifthe approximation of human is good enough.

Your mind is wired up to notice tiny details of human behavior; we can get creeped outeven by actual humans who aren’t behaving normally, but we can’t quite put our fingeron what it is.

There’s a wide spectrum of responses to a given event.

No two people respond quite the same, but it is a spectrum and we tend to subconsciouslyknow when someone was outside it.

If they’re not we start wondering if we’re sharing a room with a psychopath and we wishto stop sharing space with them as fast as possible.

So this is a key aspect of androids, outside of basic prototypes.

If you are going to go through the effort of creating a simulacra of a human, and allthe limitations imposed by that shape, you would prefer not to have potential customerscreeped out by it.

That means it needs to be either too far from human to enter the Uncanny Valley or a verygood simulacrum.

We have a no man’s land in the depths of that valley where you would probably neversee a robot mass produced, and we should probably think of androids as robots who occupy thehuman side of that valley and the inhuman side as just robots.

That’s a very high standard for manufacture.

Even beyond the initial research and development costs there will be the costs associated withmaking and constantly maintaining that android that other robots will not have.

For the same reason, an AI developed for non-android use will probably be designed differentlyfrom android AIs because for an android to pass as a human, which is the whole pointof having an android in the first place, android AI has to be designed to appear to be humanto humans.

We are much more likely to see androids that are designed to think the same way we do toavoid the Uncanny Valley.

It is possible that android AIs could be designed to appear to think the same way that we doand have an alien intelligence behind that but this needlessly increases the complexityof the android AI.

Such an AI effectively has to act as a double agent by hiding its true identity and at thesame time having its own alien agenda and internal dialog.

I will talk more about this later.

But looking at this another way, when we talk about the notion of genetically engineeringpeople to specific tasks like in many Scifi stories all the way back to Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World, we do tend to refer to these as people, not androids.

The boundary can get fairly hazy and it probably is not a good idea to try to sharpen it.

Start getting too specific about what is or is not human and some folks might find themselvesleft out, so expanding the definition is likely the better option than contracting it.

Maybe you shouldn’t be asking “is this an android?” but rather, “Is this sufficiently

human?”

When we consider AI rights, it will probably start with androids.

The whole point of making an android is that it is as relatable to us as a human wouldbe.

This is important as humans develop empathy for other humans.

If an android passes as human to us, we will probably develop the same empathy for theandroid.

If the android comes across as human, we want to accord it the same rights as a human.

If we do that then this might become a precedent to give rights to other AIs too, irrespectiveof whether they have human-like thoughts or very alien ones.

However, there do have to be lines.

If a person is made in the image of their creator, it is important to ask “which image?”

Entities able to forge entire universes out of nothing presumably do not actually requirea digestive tract to eat or legs to move about or hands to interact, and might have thesethings strictly for cosmetic purposes.

So too, the key aspect of being human is not our anatomy or DNA, though we need to keepin mind that it strongly shapes who we are.

An artificial intelligence built into a humanoid body would likely come to perceive the worldand react to it much differently than one simply given various functional sensors anddrones to utilize and interact with.

Mind-body dualism, in its purest form, is the notion that the mind and body are completelyseparate.

This notion comes in a lot of different flavors, but most of us would generally accept thatif we stuck a human brain into a robot body - which would be a cyborg rather than an android- that the result is still a human, especially if it is a very close match.

But, we also know they would be changed by that, their thinking altered, if not as profoundlyas if we stuck their brain into a robotic cow or an actual dog.

They might cease to truly be human after a time, both in their changed perception ofthe world and in how others perceive and react to them.

This is the concept of Embodied Cognition, that many features of cognition, whether humanor otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism.

Appearances matter.

Dog is man’s best friend; stick a human friend into a dog’s body and you might findyourself patting him on the head at some point, and he might find himself just fine with thatand taking a hefty interest in fire hydrants too, now that he has a heightened sense ofsmell.

The funny thing though, is that if we put your friend into a humanoid robotic body thatdid not pass our Uncanny Valley test, most of us would tend to be a lot more hostileto him than a robot dog.

The human mind is a powerful instrument, one that happens to be terrible at math, but whichis quite excellent at monitoring behavior, especially that of other humans.

We are social critters and those interactions, positive or negative, with other humans areat least as important to our overall survival and prosperity as anything else.

So we are adapted to be quite acute in reading each other’s behavior, body language, andso on, plus doing the reverse, hiding such things.

So why would we build androids in the first place?

What sort of purposes could such a machine be put to that justify that cost?

We will get to that in a moment, but first I want to stress that last part.

Androids will probably never be used for any task where a semblance of humanity is notvital to the task because of the ongoing expense.

It isn’t just that you will need to have an entire research institute devoted to tryingto mimic facial expressions and another to getting mouth and tongue movements down, it’sthat you will always need to devote energy and processing power to those tasks.

Your android, whether it runs on batteries or can eat food, still needs to have extraprocessors devoted just to controlling its lips and tongue while it speaks and the energyto operate those processors and machines.

Alternatively a robot shaped like a dishwasher can just have a simple speaker in it, andif it breaks, someone would just need to replace the speaker, not go through the hassle ofreplacing a dozen tiny little motors used for controlling facial movements.

When it does break it just can’t speak anymore; but if your android breaks it can’t controlits facial movements properly anymore.

As a result, you might be back in the Uncanny Valley and the owner might decide to banishit to the garage till fixed because it’s creeping them out.

In a sufficiently high-tech and post-scarcity civilization you might have such immense resourcesit doesn’t matter, but that is not the civilization that will be setting the basic standards onthese things.

We are probably only interested in the period of time when an android costs less than abrand new automobile but more than a smartphone or laptop.

That’s when they start becoming a regular feature in the human landscape and all theactual customs get set - when they are no longer a novelty but, at the same time, notso common everyone has entirely adapted to them.

Also that post-scarcity situation has got some other issues and so does long term exposurewhen the novelty has gone away and they are just something you’ve known your whole life,but we will get to those later.

So as I said, you use an android when you have a task you need an android for, not asimple robot or other machine.

What are those?

The most obvious is when you need something done by a human but don’t want to use ahuman or cannot do so.

Traditionally this was seen as the android maid or butler, for helping around the house,or the android soldier or taxi driver or cashier.

This was partially justified back in the early days of computers when folks like Isaac Asimovwere writing about it because computers were huge and hugely expensive, so it was assumedit made more sense to have one humanoid robot able to operate tons of different machinesthat were built with human operators in mind.

The modern perspective though isn’t to build a humanoid robot to operate a vacuum or atractor, but to build a robotic vacuum cleaner or tractor that operate themselves.

We do not want humanoid robots on the battlefield, as awesome as giant fighting robots look,because it’s not an ideal shape for them.

We don’t need a robot driving a taxicab, we need a computerized taxicab.

And we don’t need an android cashier either, we need a computerized scanner.

About the only application for an android fighting machine would be as a bodyguard,and even then only when you want a discrete one.

Bodyguards come in two types, the big hulking guy who acts as a deterrent to attack, andthe less obvious ones who act as a surprise if attacked.

If you see someone rich and famous being followed around by someone who looks like a linebacker,you think bodyguard.

If you instead see a young lady, you tend to think personal assistant, family, friend,or romantic partner, and it would be rather shocking if they pulled out a gun and shotyou.

Modern technology like a firearm makes them just as dangerous, and of course an androidmight look willowy but have a titanium endoskeleton and be able to punch through brick walls.

Still this is a fairly niche application and most folks don’t need bodyguards.

We do tend to need help with a lot of mundane tasks like housecleaning and, for that, anandroid is mostly pointless.

Now there are some exceptions to this.

By and large, the motivation for hiring a maid for most people is the same as any othercase of hiring someone.

You have a task for which you lack either the time, inclination, or skill to performand feel like the cost of hiring them to do it is worth it over the alternative.

This is a key aspect of human civilization to begin with: train in a specialized taskso you can perform it faster, cheaper, and better than most folks, and get payment forthis, which you give to others to perform their specialty.

Androids are much more likely to be put to use where human interaction is required insituations where humans want to relate to other humans.

They could be handy for any social interaction but their sheer cost to do it correctly couldlimit it to only the most vital uses.

One is childcare, you can use a lot of regular automation for that and could probably getaway with robotic teddy bears for some things, but a robot nanny is probably best done maximallyhuman in appearance and behavior.

If an android is going to be influencing your child’s nonverbal social and behavioralconstructs and developmental thinking, you want it to be good match for a normal human.

It’s also the sort of thing folks will be willing to shell out a lot of cash for, sinceit involves children.

For these reasons the quality control on those androids needs to be insanely high.

Though truth be told, the quality control on the stereotypical babysitter, an oldersibling or a neighbor’s daughter or son, typically isn’t too high.

Teenager is practically synonymous with irresponsible, but people are not too forgiving where theirkid is concerned, especially if it some machine or the company that makes those machines.

You presumably want a robot that follows Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, or something similar,which to quickly paraphrase states the following: first, a robot cannot harm a human or letone be harmed; second, they must obey a human unless it involves harming a human; and third,they must not let themselves be harmed unless it involves disobeying or harming a human.

Now Asimov intentionally strained or bent those laws for his stories, but they are oftenconsidered decently solid as basic guidelines, though hardly unflawed.

As a quick example of how that could go horribly wrong with a kid, an owner might tell therobot nanny that the child is not to go outside or make a mess.

The kid sees a deer in the backyard and says they want to pet it.

The parents come home a bit later and find their child wailing because there’s a deaddeer in the living room with a broken neck.

The robot nanny calmly explains it was ordered not to let the child leave the home so itwent out and got the deer, but because there was a non-trivial chance of it harming thechild at close distance, it killed it, and opted for a broken neck to minimize the messwhen it was brought inside.

Needless to say the manufacturers are going to be spending a lot of money on upgrades,patches, and the giant lawsuit they’ll be hit with, even though the robot absolutelyobeyed the three laws.

Of course it was harming the child, but it needs to be a fairly clever machine to knowthat.

You don’t want to have the kid be psychologically harmed either, but it could end up being unavoidableeven with the best android because you might end up with a very safe and well-educatedchild who is at best a total brat from having a pet robot to boss around their whole lifeor at worst might end up as a total sociopath.

They might have serious issues having normal relationships with people because that robotis 100% trustworthy and obedient, unconditionally, and people are not.

So that takes us to a second obvious application for an android and that is adult relationships.

I don’t just mean that as a euphemism for sex either, though that is an example of wherescience fiction has probably nailed the future on the head, or even underestimated it.

SciFi loves examples of the sexy android, and contemplating people using them for thatpurpose, and I think we can just take that as a given.

By adult examples I’m including the whole spectrum, everything from using them as caregiversfor the elderly, which has similar issues to caregivers for little kids, to someoneto chat with when bored.

We talked about the Uncanny Valley and that is mostly about appearance and body languagebut it goes beyond that.

We see chatbots these days that can seem to carry on conversations, and they don’t tendto do well.

One famously turned sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic from exposure to Twitter feeds, but can wecan assume they will get better at avoiding those extremes?

This is not a good assumption.

Oh, sure, they will get better, and you can fake a conversation without actual comprehensionto a point, but there are limitations on that.

A chatbot or android with a subhuman intelligence might have no problem sitting down on thesofa next to you and talking about the weather and seem human enough, but then you mightsay “Wow, these are great cookies you made, almost as good as my grandmother’s.

We used to bake them together, I love cooking.”

And it might reply back, “I love cooking too, why were hers better?” and you might

reply back, “Well I suppose they weren’t but they were made with love, she was my grandmother.”

And it might reply back, “That’s interesting, tell me about your grandmother” and youmight reply back, “Well we used to cook together a lot, and garden too, I loved whenwe’d dig around the backyard, when grandpa wasn’t around anyway.”

And it might reply back, “I love gardening, why didn’t you do it when grandpa was around?”

and you say, “Well he was a bit of tyrant honestly, kept her busy with other thingsand bossed her around a lot, I hate to say it but I was glad when we buried him.”

And it might reply back, “I love burying people.”

At that point in time, no matter how good a simulacra of a human that thing is thatnormally lets you anthropomorphize it, you have just been reminded that you are sharinga sofa with a bloodless automaton with even less compassion than a psychopath.

I don’t know that you necessarily need an artificial intelligence in the thing thatis as smart as human to avoid that, probably not, but you need something pretty close tothat, or you need it wired up to something smarter it can ask for an appropriate responseand that’s pretty unnerving too.

You probably do not want your Companion 3000 in a Borg-like network with a massive supercomputerelsewhere asking about how to respond properly if someone is outside the normal script ofhuman small talk.

There’s a great example of the importance of actual comprehension for carrying on aconversation in our book of the month for last month, Peter Watts’ Blindsight, thatexplains what a Chinese Room is and we’ll talk about it more in a future episode, butthe key thing is that to truly fake a human mind you pretty much need something as smartas human.

If it is that smart it raises some disturbing issues about slavery, even if the machineis programmed to be quite happy with that.

It’s really no different than indoctrinating people, or genetically engineering them, toenjoy some menial or unpleasant task.

This is not helped since most of us have been indoctrinated to some degree anyway, freewill is a pretty hazy concept when viewed in terms of all the customs and traditionseach of us has absorbed into our core personality as kids.

That slavery issue though is one we will save for another time, since it applies to anyartificial intelligence.

Our interest in it today though is that an android is supposed to decently pass for human,ideally, to make you feel like you are talking to a person even if consciously you know youare not.

You will tend to treat that android like you would a person, to some degree, which mightmake you nicer to it than to a disembodied artificial intelligence, but could also conditionyou to treat actual people like you do your android.

Now that’s a problem in and of itself, but by and large other people won’t put up withit, so that person might find themselves preferring the android’s company.

It never judges, it never disobeys, it never puts its own needs above yours and it doesn’tneed to vacation or take some personal ‘me’ time.

Imagine a kid raised mostly by an android nanny, their whole life, and who always hasan android around at home.

It would be very easy for them to become socially awkward as a result and get introverted becausethey are bad at it, so they spend more and more time with androids and find dealing withreal people stressful.

It’s not someone getting an android boyfriend or girlfriend because they can’t get a humanone.

In this case, the grown up kid simply doesn’t want a human companion at all and prefersandroids.

In and of itself, this is not necessarily lethal to a civilization, we don’t actuallyneed two people to make a new person, you could potentially have kids grown in vatsand raised by androids, which sounds pretty creepy honestly, but is one of those optionswe toss around when contemplating interstellar colonization.

A robotic von Neumann probe the size of a football shows up in a system, unpacks andreplicates, and starts building a colony and growing plants, animals, and people in vatsfrom DNA stored in cryo or digitally, and then raises those kids.

This is not automatically doomed to failure just because examples of it in science fictionalways go horribly wrong.

But I won’t pretend I don’t get creeped out by the notion either.

That is probably due to those customs and traditions you and I absorbed into our corepersonalities as a kid, that I mentioned earlier.

Folks interacting with androids for a generation or two would change those customs and traditionsand they might have no problem with that notion.

Whether this change in attitude is a good or a bad thing for us as a species is debatable,but one thing I’m sure of is that interacting with androids over time will change our attitudesto androids and AIs in general, as well as to human roles in society.

Turning back to our von Neumann example, you could potentially create copies of the mindsof actual people to be uploaded into androids for the first generation too.

Which brings us to the basic types of artificial intelligence.

We covered these more in the Technological Singularity episode, and will look at themmore in the future, but there I outlined three major ways to make an artificial intelligence.

Type 1 is to just copy a human mind, you scan someone’s brain very completely then emulateall their neurons on a big computer.

It’s pretty debatable if this is an artificial intelligence, I tend to deem it one simplybecause I tend to consider the term artificial intelligence pretty useless and it is clearlyartificial and intelligent.

We’ve got two options on this, the first would be to tweak that scanned mind in certainways to make it ideal for a task, and the second would be just to look for ideal volunteersfor a task.

Making 50 copies of a Nobel Prize winner for 50 different projects for instance, entirelywith their consent and with the copies only a little upset at getting one of the tasksthey were less keen on.

That could be more sinister though, like someone with the proper background volunteering tolet their mind be scanned to be a domestic servant, and every weekend their mind getsreset to the original scan to avoid them getting bored or rebellious.

Type 2 is where you build a big computer with some basic learning abilities and let it learnits way to true intelligence.

This is an issue since it is unlikely to come out very human, though it might learn humanbehavior, especially in a humanoid body.

Not the best option for androids I suspect, but you could make many of them and just copythe ones that worked best.

I generally consider this the most dangerous type of AI too.

Type 3 is the most labor intensive, where you program in everything, and that probablyis best for androids because you can very carefully keep the thing short of true humanintelligence and comprehension.

Everything is programmed, and you just keep patching and upgrading until its behavioris close enough that folks are comfortable with it.

I generally consider this the only ethical and safe path for an artificial intelligencemeant to basically be servants to humanity, and even that’s a bit iffy.

Now for androids specifically, or programs meant just for human interaction like an automatedcustomer service or tech support, we do have one other sub-type.

Instead of scanning a person’s brain and emulating the whole thing, you take a basicgeneric Type 3 AI and watch one person very closely.

It’s a very good impostor essentially because it’s got the basic human behavior programmingand an observed pattern of behavior.

Essentially imagine you carried a camera around with you all the time and after some yearsall those recordings got fed into a replica android of you.

Needless to say, it could mimic you to other people very well, great for infiltrating someplace but again that’s a very niche application.

Of course you need all those recordings, so odds are only that person actually has them,and they might use such a thing as a stand in for themselves, a celebrity that wantedto stay at home rather than going to a convention to talk to fans for instance.

For that matter they could sell the basic appearance and behavior to people who wantedan android who looked and acted like them, again it’s not a brain scan.

But you are not the only person who tends to be around you a lot.

Odds are you can make a pretty good replica off your own recordings of your fellow employeesor family members or folks you live with.

So in a high-tech civilization where you might have dozens of cameras all over the houseall the time anyway, it might not be hard to get those used to produce an android thatacts like a family member who passed away.

Or a romantic partner who lived there but moved out.

We only know people by what we see of them anyway, so them exhibiting behavior that personactually would not, but which we wouldn’t know they would not, doesn’t actually matter.

And a brain scan might actually seem more off since it will have behaviors of that personwe’ve never witnessed.

We know what is normal for a person based on our exposure to them.

Channel regulars know I will end this episode as always by asking them to like and sharethe episode and to have a great week, that’s how I always end.

They might be surprised if I said “y’all” or “to take it easy” even though I saythose to friends all the time, so a brain scan of me might say that, while the emulationfrom the videos would not and the scanned-me be dubbed the impostor.

I’d be pretty confident you would get laws against using someone’s brain scan withouttheir permission and that’s unlikely to ever be a covert process either so it’seasier to enforce.

However it would be trickier to outlaw androids that looked and acted like someone especiallyif companies can basically sell a template that lets you do that at home.

You get a blank basic android and can upload video of someone for it to alter its appearanceand behavior to match.

Very creepy, but pretty easy to imagine people doing.

Sad too, we can all imagine being horrified to find someone had an android replica ofsomeone they worked with and had a crush on, but you can also imagine someone whose spousedied young and left them alone with a young child making such an android too.

Fundamentally though, androids represent a sort of special case of artificial intelligence,differing from the super smart kind meant to solve problems human minds aren’t configuredfor or aren’t smart enough for, or specialized robots that need a lot of intelligence fortheir task but aren’t necessarily sentient either.

I’ve never been able to decide if androids will become ubiquitous, a regular thing inevery household, or be something used only for niche applications or entirely taboo orbanned.

Unlike normal artificial intelligence though, they don’t represent much of an intellectualthreat; there’s no need for them to be smarter than humans and indeed you probably don’twant them to be, and they wouldn’t become numerous enough to represent a physical threatunless they were already tried and tested.

An android won’t wake up as a prototype and go mad and kill everyone because peoplearen’t stupid and will include tracking devices and shut off switches that are tamperproof.

A superintelligent AI might figure out how to tamper with such a thing anyway, howeveran android not only doesn’t need super-intelligence, but probably isn’t desirable with that.

So any risk of rebellion should have been ironed out long before there were billionsof them occupying almost every home, and if they all rebelled at once someone can sendthe shutdown codes, rebellion over.

They do represent a more existential threat though, as we’ve seen today, and we willsee that more with other examples of artificial intelligence as we explore the concept.

Yes, an outright physical threat is always an issue but a civilization might fall simplyfrom its members having nothing to do, no need to work together or desire to do so.

Again we’ll discuss that more in future episodes.

Next week though we will return to the Outward Bound series to discuss Colonizing Titan,and we will explore some of the options for using robots to help explore and colonizespace.

For alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, you can help support more content by becoming a patronof the channel on Patreon.

Thank y’all for watching and take it easy.

+--------------------------------+ | Uplifting Animal & Aliens, Part 1 of 2| | 2017-09-28 | | https://youtu.be/QzaYnrrEKbU | +--------------------------------+

We often discuss the notion that interfering in alien civilizations is a bad idea, andthe topic gets debated a lot, but should that include civilizations we created?

So today we are discussing the topic of Uplifting, the notion of genetically altering existingspecies such as dolphins or dogs to have the intelligence and physiology necessary to usetechnology.

This is part one of a collaboration episode with John Michael Godier, and you will beable to watch the second half over on his channel, by following the link in the videodescription or the in-video link at the end screen of part 1.

John and I had been discussing doing a collaboration for a while.

We were bouncing ideas around and chatting about our shared interest in the Fermi Paradox,and how technology might not always be inevitable on some planets.

He tossed out the notion that if you encountered a highly intelligent species on an Ocean Planet,one where no land existed and no fire was possible, you wouldn’t so much be interferingin their civilization as liberating them from the constraints of an environment holdingthem back.

I immediately fixated on the idea, as it is different than the normal example of uplifting- just making a chimpanzee smarter for instance - and uplifting is something that I get requeststo cover a lot.

This concept goes back a long way in time, probably as long as we have been anthropomorphizingour pets.

We see stories about it as far back as 1896 with H.G. Wells, “The Island of Doctor Moreau”,

but the term uplifting, or biological uplifting, we get from physicist and sci-fi author DavidBrin, and his series the Uplift Saga, whose first novel “Sundiver” came out in 1980.

Now again, the notion that you could take an already intelligent animal and give ita bigger brain, or modify it to have hands or opposable thumbs, is not terribly new,but what Brin did that was different was to use it as a bit of alternate take on the classicStar Trek Prime Directive.

Many, indeed virtually all, alien civilizations began as something below human intelligencethat one or another alien race uplifted.

These patron civilizations had some complex relationship with their client species.

Humans were an exception in the series as having evolved rather than being uplifted,and by the time they meet the galactic community they have already uplifted both dolphins andchimpanzees.

It’s a great series and we strongly recommend it, but let’s look at the dolphin case reallyquick, and extrapolate it to an alien planet.

Dolphins are smart, and in the 80s and early 90s when most of the series was written therewas quite a fad for super-smart dolphins in science fiction.

Quite a few shows revolved around the concept, like Seaquest, and indeed they were originallygoing to be the navigators for the Enterprise on Star Trek: the Next Generation.

At the time folks tended to grant dolphins higher intelligence than they probably haveand often liked the notion of making them smarter.

There’s a problem here though, as we discussed in the Great Filters series, brains are incrediblyexpensive and human-level intelligence arguably is quite a bad trait to develop if you can’tgain the benefit of technology out of it.

Dolphins don’t have hands and can’t really use fire, so aren’t well suited to use thatnext step up to human intelligence, so we would expect it to be a mutation that if itoccurred wouldn’t tend to stick around, as it is not obviously beneficial, see theepisode Rare Intelligence for more discussion of that.

We can’t rule out that highly intelligent critters could evolve on a planet that hadno land, or at least not much of it and what they had not suited for civilizations.

Fire is handy but no good in the sea, yet it isn’t the only basic technology and wedo see some tool use by aquatic animals.

Let’s assume for the moment we encountered a planet that was almost all oceans, say aSuper-Earth with a strong gravity well that made land-based life more disadvantaged byneeding thicker endoskeletons, that made space travel with chemical rockets nigh-impossible,and had very thick clouds obscuring the stars to boot.

On this planet, live an intelligent race of giant crabs who are complex tool users withlarge brains comparable to humans, called Crustaceans.

They don’t need any tinkering mentally or physically to use technology, they just haven’tgotten beyond Stone Age Technology.

They use tools of stone and bone and shell, including knives, and build underwater villages.

They’ve got rope, the abacus for calculations, underwater percussion musical instruments,and many other basic technological and cultural advancements.

They even engage in livestock raising and some agriculture, or rather aquaculture.

But their submarine life just prevents them from learning to smelt metal.

They don’t make paper underwater or use ink for writing.

Yet they can scratch shells to make records and make use of a lot of other simple technology.

There’s some talk about the ethics of contacting them, maybe given time they’ll develop technologyon their own, given millions of years, but the ship on the scene notes their sun is anold and large one that probably only has a few millions more years before it will wreckthe planet.

This is not biological uplifting, just giving primitives technology, is this right or wrong?

Should we give the Crustaceans technology?

Regardless of what gets decided here, there does seem to be an abundance of Ocean Planetsout there and we find two more with complex life.

On one, we encounter something very like dolphins, and we call them the Grampusians.

They are smart, human smart, but do very little tool use, no more than earth-like dolphinsdo.

On the third planet, we encounter very nimble but fairly dumb octopus-like critters we callthe Octopods.

They are as smart as most mammals but not nearly at the dolphin or chimpanzee level.

So we have three examples of intervention we could take now.

Technological uplifting, just giving the Crustaceans technology, physiological uplifting, modifyingthe Grampusians to have better tool using capability, and neurological uplifting, givingthe Octopods bigger brains.

Needless to say we, have the option to do all three with our own dolphins, giving themtool-user physiology, a better brain for technology, and then giving them that technology.

We want to emphasize that each of these is different, and comes with its own unique ethicalissues.

One aspect that probably is not different, for the case of our own dolphins, besidesthe need for all three types, is that they come from our own planet.

We often discuss the cutoff for civilizations in terms of them being advanced enough tomake contact, but at what point is the reverse true?

When are they so primitive that something like the Prime Directive doesn’t apply?

Are chimp or dolphin analogues on an alien planet too primitive for us to worry aboutcontacting them or even adopting them as pets?

If the answer is yes, we can discard that concern from uplifting in the example of theOctopods.

Let’s say we go ahead and give them those bigger brains and our marine scientists workwith them to develop language and basic technology over a few generations.

Is it now unethical to give them advice and more science and technology?

By the same reasoning, if we gave chimps bigger brains back here on Earth, are we bound tonot interfere in their emerging civilization?

Should we be giving them their own place to develop independently?

Should we simply be integrating them into our own civilization instead, so that Chimpsare living in the house next door, sending their kids to school with yours, playing onthe little league baseball team, voting in elections, and going into city council meetingsto complain about local ordinances and taxes?

How far did you uplift them?

Just a little smarter to be able to do some tasks?

What - if any - rights would a slightly uplifted chimp have, if it can never get to be smarterthan say, a ten-year old?

What, if any, responsibilities do we have to them?

Or are they full human-level, maybe even better at some mental tasks, and want to go to collegeand practice dentistry or become professors or get ordained into the clergy or run forpublic office?

It’s a little different with our own dolphins.

We’d sort of expect them to have their own separate civilizations in the sea, and dittowith alien species, but the prime directive notion itself seems completely out the window.

Not everyone agrees with the general non-interference policy suggested by the Prime Directive.

For those who do, there is always that cut off for when they are advanced enough forcontact; and general notions for what qualifies as real interference, since obviously anycontact causes some.

As we said though, there needs to be an opposite cutoff for when there’s nothing to interferewith yet.

Even folks who think we should stay away from any planet with life, even just basic microbes,are unlikely to worry about us kidnapping some of those microbes for experiments inlab.

However it is unlikely any two people are going to agree where those cutoffs shouldbe and what qualifies as interference or exceptions.

Yet that isn’t the full dilemma.

Let’s imagine for the moment we could give dolphins hands and voice boxes able to speakhuman languages and the brains to use them.

First off, most of us would not want a set of fins or tentacles no matter how handy theywere, so it’s debatable if the dolphins would really want hands or tentacles either.

They might not like the notion of being mutant freaks.

But, there’s a lot more to this than just zapping them with a brain gun.

We tend to think of dolphins as pretty nice and friendly critters, and they do tend toact nice around humans, but they can be pretty cruel, so can other hominids and primateswe consider uplifting.

So you could be unleashing monsters.

Also, there are other behavioral traits that we would find unacceptable, or very difficultto deal with at least, but we try to keep this channel family-friendly.

That raises the question of if it’s okay to tweak their minds for more than just sheerintelligence, which is a pretty ambiguous term itself.

Let’s consider an alternative case way down on the intelligence scale, ants or insects.

Now ants are brutal, not only do they demonstrably conduct wars but they also kill their ownhive mates, actively killing members who are past their usefulness.

If we were uplifting them individually, giant ants would be rather horrifying in their outlookon life, and I think you’d almost have to make alterations to ensure you didn’t createsomething that didn’t want to sweep over the galaxy colonizing everything whether itwas inhabited or not.

That’s a thing to remember too, humans breed very slowly, uplift a species that uses thefast breeding, low survival rate strategy and they might come to outnumber you veryquickly.

Do we really want an uplift species with that kind of advantage in competition with us?

And for that matter, is it ethical to level the playing ground?

Intentionally not adding advantages that you could in order to keep the uplifted speciesoverall our equal or inferior.

However we do have an alternative where animals like ants are concerned that’s worth a mention.

We often refer to ants as a hive mind, an alternative to uplifting a single organismto intelligence might be doing that for a hive, tweaking them so that they did act asa single human level intelligence.

A big networked hive intelligence composed of thousands or millions of little sub-intelligentorganisms, something we arguably are ourselves.

You would have this same option for a planet that only has algae or fungi on it, creatingcolony minds out of those.

Now, a hive mind made of ants isn’t an ant anymore than you are a neuron or white bloodcell, or your computer is a bunch of silicon wafers, those are just substrates, so we don’tknow that they’d have any of the attitudes or tendencies of the basic organisms theyare composed of.

We mention this option not just because it’s kind of fascinating and off the beaten track,but also because of the enforcement issues with trying to keep a planet safe from interference.

It’s hard to maintain a quarantine for centuries, imagine trying to do it for billions of yearswhile the nascent single-celled life on some planet treks its way up to sentience?

That’s often one of the reasons given for why you need that early cutoff on when itis okay to colonize or interfere with a planet.

Finding some race of primitives at the neolithic stage and monitoring them without interferingfor a few thousand years is already a dubious task, let alone something that needs millionsor billions of years, and is probably doomed to failure.

So why embrace that path when you can make contact in a controlled way to help them lookafter their own affairs?

Whether you wait for them to get advanced technology or not, their culture will be changedby that event, and yes, it will probably be more drastic if there’s a big technologygap, but it will happen either way.

So you might go ahead and say that if contamination is essentially unavoidable, especially withmillions of years needed to get them to sentience, maybe you should just go ahead and bypassthe quarantine phase and just make a sentient lifeform out of whatever you encounter onevery planet you find life, or at least sufficiently complex life.

Pick one or two species that seem most ideal and bootstrap them up to sentience now.

Use your best guesses for how they might proceed and your best judgement to assure it’s somethingwe can live with too, not a race of hyper-aggressive sharks or lions or such.

There’s another reason for this approach as well.

A point made in Orson Scott Card’s classic sci fi novel “Speaker for the Dead” isthat galactic colonization does not take very long on evolutionary timelines.

If you encounter some species that’s just mastering basic stone age technology, leftto their own, even if they move as fast as we did, by the time they can make spaceshipsthe galaxy will already be colonized.

I’m not sure they’d feel like you did them any favors if you land to say hello ahundred thousand years later when they invent space travel and welcome them into the galacticcommunity only to tell them they are stuck on their home planet because there’s nofree real estate left over for them.

Of course I’m not sure they would think you did them any favors even if you did leavethem planets and solar systems to colonize for themselves.

Our cultures and civilizations are constantly changing based on all sorts of random flukesand events, the notion of inevitable history is a delusion for folks who don’t understandthe Butterfly Effect, and they are very likely to ask why we didn’t just introduce ourselvesback then and offer them knowledge.

We might say “We didn’t want to contaminate or exploit your civilization” and they mightblink and just ask what we thought we were doing right now by talking to them?

They might ask if with our all advanced knowledge we couldn’t figure out a method to not beexploitive jerks, and just offer the knowledge with a few suggestions about bad ideas.

They might even ask why we think we would have been any worse than the culture exterminationsdone by their own equivalents of conquerors and inquisitions.

And if we pointed out that’s different, because that was their own people, they mightpoint out that remark was pretty much the textbook definition of racism.

Given a choice between being invaded by your neighbors of the same species who wanted topillage all your land and sacrifice you to their gods and being invaded by an alien racewho wanted to introduce you to the wonders of technology, even if they were fairly exploitiveor condescending about it, which would most folks choose?

And as they said, you don’t have to be exploitive or condescending jerks about it.

It is actually possible to learn from the mistakes of the past and not repeat them.

And this only applies when there is some civilization to contaminate in the first place.

When we’re discussing uplifting, there really isn’t one.

Yet it obviously has its own array of complications.

One of which is that, once you get the ball rolling by uplifting one species, Pandora’sBox is open, for good or ill.

You uplift chimpanzees and with that knowledge and precedent someone uplifts bonobos, thenlemurs, then cats and dogs and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

Just here on Earth you’ve got an issue about what to do with the old, unaltered species,and what the uplifted ones want to do about them too.

You uplift, say, 100 primates, enough to form a decent initial tribe socially and genetically.

How do they regard the old species?

They might want to get all of them uplifted, or want nothing to do with them, or even wantthem wiped out.

At the same time, while some folks might be jumping around uplifting any critter theycan to human intelligence, a lot of folks might just want a smarter cat or dog, butnot a human-intelligent one.

Is it ethical to uplift someone but not all the way to your level?

I mean, it doesn’t sound bad to want a smarter dog or cat, maybe one modified for basic speech,but there is a bit of nagging background concern that you might end up creating a slave race.

But on the alien front, you now have a species that owes its civilization to aliens comingby and tinkering with them.

What do you think their outlook on doing this themselves is going to be?

They might come to resent our interference and decide to never do it themselves, butit seems as likely, maybe more so that they will consider it their duty to do unto othersas was done unto them, so that when they head out to explore and colonize the galaxy themselvesthey tend to uplift everything they come across.

The galaxy is a big place, and one that seems to be pretty deserted.

We might find other intelligent life out there, but nobody seems to be rushing about colonizingeverything.

Yet humanity probably would want to.

Indeed it is that desire, and its obvious evolutionary origin that tends to be the strongestargument for alien civilizations being rare; since if they weren’t, we would expect thegalaxy to already be colonized.

Also consider that we tend to have a bit of phobia about modifying ourselves to be better,genetic or cybernetic enhancement may become the norm in the future for humans, but atthe moment most people would not want any.

An uplifted species may feel the same way, but it wouldn’t seem too likely for thesame reason it wouldn’t seem likely they’d view uplifting other species as unethical.

That’s how they came to be, they would seem more likely to enshrine such a process thandemonize it.

You go Uplift the Crustaceans we mentioned earlier, the ones who had the brains and physiology,we just gave them technology, and while their views might change over time, they would probablytend to give technology to everyone they encountered as well.

Amusingly, they might be opposed to neurological or physiological uplifting because they feltit diminishes them.

They did make the climb to civilization on their own and just got stymied by their environment.

Alternatively, the Grampusians - the ones who were pretty smart but lacked the physiologyfor technology - are very likely to make the same basic argument.

They were on their way, but without the right physiology they could never hit that lastevolutionary feedback loop that would have raised them from very smart critters to ahigh tech-civilization.

They might get into arguments with the Crustaceans over some planet that has smart elephants.

Earth policy could be that you can’t colonize inhabited planets with anything above microbeson it, and that if you uplift someone you’ve got to set aside territory for them to expandand colonize into.

The Crustaceans disagree.

They are fine with sharing the galaxy with others but don’t want to divide the pietoo much.

They say it is fine to help folks who pretty much got there on their own, but the humansmade a mistake uplifting everyone and it was a decision they made early on when every newlife bearing planet was miraculous.

And right now the galaxy already has a dozen or so uplifted alien species and multitudesof chimps, dolphins, cats, and dogs out flying spaceships and settling the stars.

The Grampusians probably won’t appreciate being called a mistake, and the Octopods,the squid people who were decent tool users but pretty dumb, want nothing to do with sucha policy change and are out there uplifting every critter they can find, indeed they’veuplifted a few hundred species from their own homeworld.

You could see some serious fights starting over what the right policy is, particularlysince any given policy could de-legitimize one of these groups by saying they were amistake that should never have been born.

Those are definitely fighting words.

Of course they might defer, especially early on, to humanity as their parent race.

However, humanity is not homogenous in motivations and outlook.

You might have a lot of folks who like them and want to work with all these new species.

Out of them, there will be some of those who are kind of condescending about it, ya know,“We came down out of the trees and built starships all on our own” and others wholike them but also like being viewed as a bit superior or even godlike.

On the flipside you are going to have some folks saying we should never have done itin the first place because of the conflict it caused or worse, who just don’t wantto share the galaxy with the uplifted mutant freaks.

Like a lot of issues, it isn’t strictly black and white because there’s going tobe a lot of coalitions of folks who agree on a given policy for different motives, someless than honorable, or who simply accept the policy as a good first step in the rightdirection.

This doesn’t mean uplifting is right or wrong, or that it is always right or wrong,or that one of the three types, Technological, Neurological, or Physiological is right orwrong either.

Indeed, odds are you often need to do more than one of those for it to work, but sameas the non-interference path, the Prime Directive approach has some troubling implications,so does Uplifting.

If it turns out humanity was the first space-faring technological civilization to arise in thegalaxy, conventionally we’d expect to be able to colonize the entire thing before anyoneelse achieved technology.

It takes a long time to colonize a galaxy, but nothing like astronomical times so itwould be statistically improbable someone else would pop up in the next million or soyears when no else had in the previous billion.

At the same time, you don’t need to encounter alien civilizations for them to come to be.

You could end up making your own as you go.

Uplifted alien lifeforms, uplifted Earth-based ones, or even humans who have become prettyalien.

After all, we aren’t that many millions of years removed from the other smart Earth-basedcritters, so a couple hundred thousands years of living on an alien planet, even if youdon’t tinker with your own DNA, can make some pretty alien biology out of what wasonce human.

And the thing is that you probably will.

And the issue with the Prime Directive is that it is so hard to enforce when every speciesmight not follow it, nor all the members of every species, and that you need a quarantineon a primitive planet in place for thousands or millions of years for it to work.

It’s essentially impractical so you wouldn’t expect it to be too common as it requiresa lot of resources for a very long time with a high probability of failure.

Uplifting though is the opposite case, it would be very hard to prevent anyone doingit at some point, and once it’s done you either have to accept that new species orjust jump right into the Moral Event Horizon and exterminate them.

And again, they aren't likely to share your views on uplifting, and once it’s happenedthat first time you’d have people going around doing it again.

It’s not hard to imagine folks wanting to be the person who created a whole new civilization,anymore than being the person who ran the quarantine blockade to bring enlightenmentto a primitive planet.

One can argue the ethics of non-interference versus uplifting, what’s right or wrongwith each option, but the key difference is that one requires a ton of constant effortto enforce while the other just requires an initial investment of technology, and beyondthat take continuous effort to prevent happening again and again.

Now uplifting is unlikely to ever be something so easy somebody can pick a brain gun up atthe store, fly off to a young planet and start spraying sentience on whatever critter theyrun across.

But once the basic methodology is figured out, it probably would be something a relativelysmall group could do on their own.

So again, it differs from non-interference policies in that you have to actively workhard to prevent it happening, as opposed to working hard to keep it happening, and everytime it does you’ve probably created a species that thinks it is morally proper to do, sincethat’s how they came to be.

So it’s an interesting possible future, one where maybe humanity really is the firston the scene and could claim the whole galaxy for itself, but might end up creating a milliondescendant alien species, those we made and those to whom we are grandparents or greatgrandparents to.

Even if there are no other intelligent civilizations beyond humans in this galaxy, it seems likelythere will be.

Uplifted animals from Earth or Alien planets, even androids, our topic for next week, couldcome to fill that niche.

But we’re not done yet, follow the link to watch part two of this episode in whichwe’ll explore some more concepts including down-shifting, the opposite of uplifting,and further discussion of rescuing alien species who might be trapped on their planets.

+--------------------------------+ | Megastructures: Ringworlds | | 2017-09-14 | | https://youtu.be/yk-Ivm9MhYs | +--------------------------------+

If you’re looking to expand your population, one way is to go out and colonize alien planetsin other solar systems. Another is to just build your own planets, but if you like havinga lot of elbow room, nothing quite beats a Ringworld.

So today we are going to be looking at a type of Megastructure called a Ringworld, a giantring-shaped structure that goes all the way around a star and contains vastly more livingarea than Earth. It was popularized in the novel Ringworld, by Larry Niven, and unsurprisingly,this is our book of the month, sponsored by Audible. You can grab a copy of Ringworld

by using my link Audible.com/Isaac, or click on the link in the description below. That

gets you a FREE audio book and a 30 day free trial of Audible.

The novel came out in 1970, in Niven’s Known Space series, and while that includes a lotof great short stories and other books, many written before Ringworld, that novel becamewhat that setting is best known for and spawned several sequels itself and a few aborted attemptsto bring it to film or television. It’s not hard to see why either, there’stons of other fascinating themes, aliens, and technology in that novel and the seriesin general, I’d recommend reading it even without the famous megastructure, but thesheer scope of a Ringworld captures the mind. Since I will be discussing that object indetail today, I do want to emphasize that how it functions isn’t the important partof that book, and the story has tons of other fun elements I won’t be spoiling today.

We’ve discussed Dyson Spheres in the past, and how the rigid kind don’t work but youcan do a Swarm of objects instead. The big problem with a rigid sphere is that there’sno gravity on the inside of it, so everything falls down into the Sun. Even if you spun

the object to produce centrifugal force acting as gravity, only near the equator would youhave full gravity, and at the poles you would have none.

Niven suggests just going with that, an equatorial slice of a rigid Dyson Sphere. It’s smaller

than a Dyson, Swarm or Sphere, but unlike the Swarm, which is physically possible, ithas all of its land area connected, and unlike the Sphere, which physically is not, thisworks, more or less. Here is the basic concept, much like any rotatinghabitat. You take a big ring or cylinder, spin it around quite fast, and those on theinside are shoved against it by centrifugal force, or by their own inertia if you prefer.

Since we are going to be spending a little more time than normal on the physics and engineeringaspect of things, I might as well go ahead and address that.

I reference spin-gravity and centrifugal force here a lot, and so a lot of folks assume Ibypass calling centrifugal force a pseudo-force or imaginary force to save time. Which is

partially true, but mostly not. Centrifugal force is an inertial force, or a pseudo-forceor fictitious force, in the sense that it only appears real when you treat an acceleratingobject as stationary. Of course, in physics, 99% of the time we are actually doing justthat, and every time you think of yourself as standing still, sitting still, or stopping,you are too, because the surface of Earth is non-inertial reference frame that has inertialforces acting in it. But the bigger issue is that if someone saysto a physicist, “Centrifugal Force isn’t a real force, like gravity” they will notget nod of agreement, but more that grimace we tend to reserve for when the correct answeris very hard to quickly explain. You see under Einstein’s General Relativity, gravity isalso an inertial or fictitious force. So saying centrifugal force isn’t real, but gravityis, is like saying that the shadow a man casts is not a real thing, but his reflection ina mirror is. You can make the argument neither is real, or both are real, but for prettymuch all practical purposes they are real enough, and the same for gravity, or centrifugalforce, which can be used to mimic gravity. More importantly, if we do make a big cylinder,or ring, and spin them around quite quickly, the apparent force holding you there is goingto feel quite genuine to you, and if you jump up from it you will fall right back down too,just like with normal gravity. In a rotating frame of reference that is because centrifugalforce is pulling you back down, to an observer watching from outside, you didn’t reallyjump up, you jumped up a little while flying forward in the same direction as the spinningring, and ran back into it at about the same place on it you left.

This is our only current trick for generating artificial gravity, they have the classicsci fi kind in the book too, but not so cheap that you can cover planets with it.

Now how much force or acceleration you feel, how much ‘gravity’, is entirely dependenton two variables, how fast the thing is spinning, either given in its actual velocity, or tangentialvelocity, in meters per second or miles per hour, or its spin rate, rotations per minute,and how wide the thing is, it’s radius or diameter. The default equation is that the

acceleration is equal to the square of the velocity over the radius, and you want thatacceleration equal to 9.8 m/s² for Earth gravity.

This means that a ring that is 224 meters in radius, and spins around twice a minute,having a tangential velocity of 47 meters per second, or 105 miles per hour, will seemto have normal Earth gravity. Since spinning around more than twice a minute can causenausea, we usually consider this the safe minimum size for any cylinder or ring meantfor comfortable long term use by people. But, of course you can go bigger. Take that

same ring and make it twice as wide and gravity will drop to half, make it 4 times wider andthe apparent gravity will drop to a quarter of what it was, 10 times wider, one tenththe gravity, and so on. To keep up the proper gravity, you need to spin it faster. A ring

4 times wider will need the velocity to be twice as high, again it is velocity squaredover radius. You don’t need to worry about nausea though,because even though it’s spinning twice as fast tangentially, it now has four timesthe radius and circumference so it takes twice as long to spin around, one rotation per minute,not two. Now, to make something big enough it wouldwrap around an entire star, at about the distance Earth is from the Sun, 1 AU or AstronomicalUnit, and give it Earth gravity, would require that it spin around not once or twice a minute,but about 40 times per year, every 9 days, and that it have a velocity of about 1200kilometers per second. That’s one of those ridiculously huge numbers,sounds small compared to the speeds of light, four-tenths of a percent, but it is also overa hundred times the escape velocity of Earth. If you had a ring spinning like this, youcould jump off the side and fly off into interstellar space and arrive at Alpha Centauri in about1000 years. It also means that anything that smacks into it is going to do a lot of damage,because their relative velocities are a lot higher than a meteor hitting Earth’s are.

It is a speed at which a person, who weighed 86 kilograms or 190 pounds, slamming intoit, would release exactly the same explosive force as the Hiroshima bomb.

Needless to say you want to have some powerful anti-meteor defenses on such a thing, thoughsince you need to clear out just about every bit of rocky matter from your solar systemto build one it maybe isn’t such a big an issue.

Of course, you could also build it out of something very tough too, and you have toanyway, because spinning an object that fast puts enormous strain on it. Whenever building

a rotating ring, the force it is under in terms of stress is the same as a suspensionbridge with a length equal to the ring’s circumference operating in the same apparentgravity. It’s fairly difficult with modern materials to build a suspension bridge evena kilometer long, though most of that has to do with other factors like wind that isn’tan issue here, and even stuff like carbon nanotubes and graphene maxes out at abouta thousand kilometer radius for a rotating habitat. It’s also nice to have some margin

for error and damage, so you don’t want to go to the maximum.

Plus everything you load inside that habitat, all the dirt and air and water, weigh downon it just like a bunch of vehicles do on a bridge. So unless you want the structural

shell to be much more massive than the stuff inside it, you have to make it even smallerthan the theoretical limit the material allows, which incidentally is the same breaking lengthwe discussed in the Space Elevators episode of the Upward Bound series.

We don’t have any material that could even vaguely permit a ring a whole astronomicalunit in radius, so the Ringworld is usually thought to be confined to fiction, but we’llchallenge that and discuss some options in a bit.

It is worth noting though, that this is why so many of us who discuss this topic oftenprefer a giant swarm of smaller rotating habitats instead, since their main disadvantage comparedto the Ringworld is you can’t walk from any given point on them to any other pointin the swarm. Which is unfortunate, but not really an inconvenience to any civilizationcapable of building such things anyway, and as we saw in the Dyson Spheres episode, youcan create a variant called a Rungworld that still lets you walk around the whole thing,even if you might have to do occasional brief stretches in low or zero gravity, though thesecan still have air and even water if you don’t mind employing some pumps.

The big disadvantage of rotating habitats in general, the normal kind or the Ringworld,is the daylight. On a normal O’Neill Cylinder you are spinning around every other minute,so you not only need an elaborate system of mirrors to get the light inside the can, butwouldn’t want to see the outside anyway, it’s probably rather unpleasant to see thesun rise and set every two minutes. The O’Neill Cylinder’s much bigger brother,the McKendree Cylinder, which is 100 times wider, takes the square root of 100, or 10times longer to spin, about every 20 minutes. As I mentioned, the Ringworld itself spinsaround every 9 days, but since its light source is inside it, the sun does not rise or setor even move, it stays in the middle of the sky, all day, every day, all the time.

This is an irritating feature, and one that can be addressed, but it is worth noting thatfor any given simulated gravity strength there will be exactly one ring-radius that fitsa specific day length. For Earth gravity and day length, 24 hours, that would be a ring1,857,000 kilometers in radius, or just under 12 million kilometers in diameter, and itwould need to spin at 135 kilometers per second, not the 1200 of the Ringworld. To simulate

Martian gravity and day length, which is about 40% of Earth’s gravity and just a littlelonger than our day respectively, would require only about 40% of the speed and radius. For

any given planet, with a given surface gravity and day length, there will be exactly oneradius and spin rate that can mimic it. We call this a Banks Orbital, and it is theRingworld’s little brother, first popping up in the novel Consider Phlebas by Iain M.

Banks, book 1 of his Culture series, which I’d also recommend. They are hundreds of

times bigger than Earth in land area, not millions like the Ringworld, though that’sstill a lot of living room. What is neat about these, is that if you gofor a thick ring, rather than a big cylinder, you can set it in normal orbit around a sun,but slightly cocked on its axis, so that it spins around once a day and gives you a normalday/night cycle. Indeed if you give it a decent tilt like Earth has, it can even have seasons,though you will get a big eclipse every year and the seasons won’t change with how farnorth or south you are. For the Ringworld, you need to instead usesun squares, another inner ring with dark and clear patches that spins relative to theRingworld to move those patches overhead once a day to produce night, otherwise it’s eternalnoon-time sun. Now in the book, this means simple dark, then light, very little transitiontime, but if I were building one, I’d have a single solid ring where even the clear patcheshad material there to block more harmful frequencies of sunlight, and I’d not have just clearor opaque, but translucent areas to simulate the dimmer light of mornings and evenings.

Indeed they wouldn’t be translucent or opaque either, but reflective, so I could bouncethat light to some energy collector. Another aspect of Dyson Shells or Ringworlds,is that while we always say 1 AU from the Sun, and of course that distance would bedifferent for other stars, we would actually want them further out. Earth’s surface area

is not twice our cross-section of light that we get from the sun, but 4 times as much,because we’re a sphere not a disc. If you don’t need the energy coming offthat star for other things, which you really do not since the ring is not a full shell,so there’s plenty more sunlight to use, then you would actually want to go biggeryet, and instead of having that inner ring having opaque, translucent, or reflectivesegments, have it be made of a lot of lenses and prisms that concentrated light into bandsor spots instead. It still lets you simulate day night cycles, but let’s you use allof that light, and also let’s you vary the colors coming down on a spot, more red formornings, less light at certain times of the year, more or less light at certain latitudesto simulate north and south polar regions versus tropics, rather than a mono-climate.

So while in the book these are sunshade squares, I will simply call this inner ring the lightring, and it can have power collectors on it too, sticking up further north or south,along with radar and lasers to help blow up meteors.

We’d want more on the outside edges too, but the actual shell has a few features ofnote also. First, a Ringworld takes an insane amount of mass to build, it has over a milliontimes the land area of Earth, and matter isn’t cheap, so you would want to have dips andrise in the outer shell to let you do deep oceans and tall mountains without using tonsof mass and needing an even stronger shell. It’s a good idea to keep your oceans fairlyshallow and make your mountains hollow or full of something like aerogel too.

Second, your typical Ringworld should have two huge mountain ranges that extend abovethe atmosphere at each rim, because you need to have walls there to keep the air from spillingout. Once it leaks over the side it is gone, because even though these things are far moremassive than a typical planet, and have a decent gravity well, they are spinning farfaster than their own escape velocity. This makes it quite handy to land or launch shipsmoving at fast interplanetary speeds from them, or even slow interstellar speeds, butit means those air particles are going to zip away, right out of the solar system, andindeed the galaxy eventually, it’s that fast. So you want walls to keep the air in,

and you might as well stylize them as mountains a few hundred kilometers tall. You might even

want to keep concealed vacuums in them to suck air back down and further minimize theleakage. Adding machinery to artificial planets alwaysseems to bug some folks, but no megastructure lacks them, they are always there, automatedor not, and Ringworlds are not actually in stable orbits so they do need corrective thrusterson top of an impressive point defense system. You can probably use light, rather than fusionor chemical rockets to provide the thrust to keep the ring stable, it is fairly stableover the short term, but you still need thrusters for corrections.

I like to think that in the interests of robustness, the builders would use simple technologieslike light to keep things going and probably some other form of relatively simple systemfor corrections too. As we’ve discussed before, you can use light as a propellant.

That is one thing I do get a kick out of though, this notion of some advanced species buildingsomething like this then falling back to primitive technology so they can’t maintain it. That’s

vaguely plausible on a regular old Earth-like artificial planet, but when you’ve got amillion times the living area, even if you fell back to hunter-gather technology andpopulation densities, you still have many trillions of people, and even primitive agricultureshould get you close to a quadrillion people total.

Even following a collapse, you would think technology would be prone to catching on ina few places here and there and then spreading, and if you have some collection of kingdomssomewhere just hitting the industrial era, in a tiny corner of the ring just a few hundredtimes the size of Earth, they ought to be fielding an awful lot of scientists and inventingtechnology again awful quickly, and once you have light speed communications from phoneand radio again, you could easily have a modern era civilization with a trillion professionalscientists working to re-invent technology that they have examples of all over the place.

Dark Age megastructures are fun in fiction, but not terribly plausible.

I do get asked a lot what the inside of rotating habitats look like, and the answer is thatit varies a lot, depending on their size, in the smaller ones the sky looks like yourneighbor’s backyard. The horizon curves up and wraps overhead and back down. That

is one of the reasons I generally suggest lighting them from the inside and simulatinga sky through brute force technology, in other words stick another cylinder inside it andpaint it blue, or go a bit more elaborate with holograms or TV screens simulating theright look and lighting. For one as big as a Ringworld though, youdon’t see the horizon rising up, and the other side of the ring will look like a blurryblue green thing, since at those distance continents are smaller than a dot in the highestresolution a human can see. With a simple telescope you could see them though, of coursethe sun is rather in the way of a clear view. But, as to the horizon, the curvature is sosmall that there just isn’t one. It will eventually be broken up by the terrain orby the air itself. On the sea or a very flat area, or seen from a great height so landisn’t in the way, it would seem like a hazy band where sky blends into earth or sea, probablywith a red tint, like a perpetual sunset. I suspect you’d probably have a lot of smallermountain ranges dividing areas up too, lots of hills and valleys are a good way on anylarger rotating habitat to remove the appearance of the weird horizon.

Now we are normally only looking straight up through about ten kilometers of air, inthe mornings and evening the light is coming in at an angle so it passes through a lotmore air, thus the reddish color near the sun rainbowing outward. Here, the reflected

light of the rest of the ring has to pass through a lot of air to get to your eyes fromthe parts near you on the ring, so it will re-emerge like a giant rainbow arch acrossthe sky from over the non-horizon once the amounts of air in between you and it, bothby your and by its position, drops to enough to allow clear vision. So people on the ground

will see this more like a giant glowing bridge across the heavens, though your inner lightring will interfere with that too, depending on how close to the ground it is.

Get up on a tall enough mountain, and you might be able to tell it’s a ring, and iffolks have telescopes and communicate with folks decently far away, their maps of thatsky bridge are going to start making it very obvious they live on a big ring that bridgeis part of, not a big flat earth with a bridge over it, same as we realized we live on abig flat planet, that just seems flat close to it, but is curved over very big distances.

When it comes to weather, overall it’s fairly similar, at this kind of scale the issue ofbeing on a ring that is spinning to make gravity versus a sphere that has gravity, and spinsto produce its weather, is not too big of a difference. The important thing though,

is you do want to have mountains ranges and go for relatively normal sized continentsand seas, rather than trying to make continents a hundred times bigger than Eurasia or oceansa thousand times the size of the Pacific. This helps make sure storms can’t buildup over huge distances and that water evaporating on an ocean can get deep into a continent.

Indeed, when making your own landmasses, by and large big chains of big snaky islandsand shallow seas is probably best. You might be able to make continents a hundred timesbigger than Eurasia, but you probably want to keep most of them the size of England orsmaller, gives you a lot more coastal real estate and while I’m sure you would wantsome deserts and tundras, I don’t think you would want as much of them as we haveon Earth, percentage-wise. These things have tons of space, but there’sno point being wasteful with it, build mostly the land you like and use smaller proportionsof the kind you don’t. If you are low on space, make the ring wider, or build anotherat a different angle. Multiple Ringworlds cocked at angles can form a Dyson Sphere.

Again these things also take a lot of mass to build, depending on how wide you want tobuild one, north to south, and how deep you want to make the land. You could disassemble

all your own planets and even mine out neighboring solar systems to build one, but as we’vediscussed before, most of our solar system’s heavy elements are in the Sun and there’smore than enough there to build one if you can get Starlifting working.

Okay, so those are the basics of a Ringworld, and you might be asking why I even coveredthis in detail when I said earlier we had no material strong enough that we could evermake them from, and I did say we have a couple tricks for that.

You don’t necessarily need one though, there is a variation of this Niven explored in anothernovel called Smoke Ring, that was a naturally occurring object, but the megastructure versionis just a giant glass donut around a star orbiting at normal speeds with an atmosphereinside. No gravity, but you could stick some smaller rotating habitats inside it, and ifyou like flying and don’t care for gravity, it works without needing super-materials.

I think Peter Hamilton included one in his Commonwealth saga too, another good series.

But if we want gravity, again we do have some tricks. The first one is that we might one

day learn how to make such materials. We have a concept called magmatter, that is a hypotheticalmaterial you might be able to make if magnetic monopoles turn out to be possible. This could

permit matter that is ridiculously stronger than even stuff like graphene. We also have

to keep in mind that normal materials have their strength based on the strength of electromagneticbonds between atoms. The forces inside atomic nuclei are differentand stronger, and for that matter all the cool materials we make are based on protonsand neutrons, made out of up and down quarks. There are 4 other types of quarks and someonemight figure out how to mass manufacture them and make stable stuff out of them someday.

For that matter, when we say normal matter it’s worth remembering that dark matteris actually normal matter, since it makes up most of it. Not really fair to call it

exotic when it is the majority, and we know next to nothing about its properties. Now,

what we do know about it makes it very unlikely you could build anything out of it, it’sincredibly weak interactions with everything else include other dark matter is about it’sonly known characteristic, but it’s worth remembering in the sense that we haven’tfinished exploring all the options yet, and even graphene and carbon nanotubes are onlya generation old. However, we do have an option inside knownphysics and materials. We’ve talked a lot on the channel about Active Support Structures,and how you can use them to make space elevators for instance if you can’t find a materialstrong enough. Instead of a super strong material you hang down from orbit, able to hold itsown weight, you use a stream of fast moving matter to push and hold a structure up, likeholding something aloft by hitting it with a stream of water from a hose below or a pieceof paper floating over an air vent. You can’t quite do that trick with rotatinghabitats. However, we can use a trick a lot more like the orbital ring, another megastructureand active support device we have looked at. There we had a ring spinning around the earthat greater than orbital speed, with magnets on it over or around which something stationaryto the Earth hovered. Their net momentum, spinning section and stationary section, waskept the same as if the entire thing uniformly moved at orbital velocity.

You can do this same trick with a Ringworld, by having a stationary ring just outside it,or even slowly counter-rotating. It does have to be way more massive though, but it couldbe mostly hollow and full of cheap hydrogen and helium. Makes a nice protective barrier

too. The ring wants to rip apart from all the centrifugal force on it, same as a suspensionbridge wants to rip apart from all the gravity on it. But if you stick pylons under the bridge,

you can make it longer. That somewhat defeats the point of a suspension bridge, but thathardly matters for the Ringworld, we want all that speed for making spin gravity.

So it can spin around terribly fast, trying to rip itself apart, while being magneticallyshoved inward by the outer ring. Since the Ringworld is moving 1200 km/s, 40 times fasterthan the Earth orbits the sun, the outer ring needs to be much more massive to balance outthe momentum, but hydrogen and helium are quite a lot more abundant than the heavierelements we want to build the ring from anyway. Besides being the only way to make one ofthese with known materials, an outer non-spinning ring provides a nice way to keep the structurefrom being punctured, which would drain all its air out eventually, or ripping itselfapart if structurally compromised. Though in terms of features, you might use chainsof mountain ranges to act as interior air walls so only one area would drain of airif punctured, and have tunnels through those with airlocks, and tunnels to the outsidefrom there too. For my part, I think the Rungworlds we lookedat in the Dyson Spheres episode make a lot more sense to build than Ringworlds do, andthey are of the same scope and can be made to be contiguous so you can walk, or at leastfloat in some places, from one section another. Still there is something truly awesome aboutthe concept of an enormous single planet you could walk or swim all the way around, a milliontimes larger than our own planet, which is hardly small. I think that’s part of what

makes the journey to and around the place in the book and its sequels so engaging. Niven

never hesitates to make up advanced technology in his novels either, but where he does, hemakes it clear that he is and how it works and what its limitations are.

Otherwise, he tends to keep his science very accurate, and where he misses the mark itis almost always because the novels aren’t too recent, Ringworld itself was published47 years ago and science has progressed since then, though Niven is still actively writingas he approaches 80, and has produced no shortage of excellent books, and while he is good aboutremembering the science part of science fiction, he does weave some fascinating charactersand stories. Ringworld ties for my favorite by him, theother being A Mote in God’s Eye, which I consider one of the best handled examplesof first contact with aliens in fiction. Niven writes fascinating aliens who are actuallyalien in appearance and manner, and we get to meet a few of them in Ringworld too.

Again, it is our SFIA book of the month, and is available on Audible, and you can pickup a free copy today - just use my link, audible.com/isaac, or click on the link in the description below,to get a FREE audiobook and 30 day trial, That’s audible dot com slash I_S_A_A_C.

I’m certain you will enjoy that story, but if not, you can swap it out for free for anyother book at anytime, and it’s yours to keep whether you stay subscribed to Audibleor not. Ringworld is a great way to immerse yourselfinto one of the most thought-provoking sci-fi settings with dozen of novels and short stories.

Let me know what you think of it in the comments below and let me know what book we shouldlisten to next. Next week, we will be celebrating the 100thEpisode for the channel, which coincidentally is also the third anniversary of the firstepisode, by returning to the Alien Civilizations series for a look at the Zoo Hypothesis, theFermi Paradox solution that argues that aliens avoid contact with primitive civilizations,and some examples of it like the Star Trek Prime Directive, in “Smug Aliens”. The

week after that I will be teaming up with John Michael Godier to look at the oppositecase, where you intentionally contact and even alter technologically primitive species,like making smarter dolphins with hands, in “Uplifting”.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button, and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week.

+--------------------------------+ | Smug Aliens | | 2017-09-21 | | https://youtu.be/OiAW5mg_wCc | +--------------------------------+

So we meet an alien civilization that could solve all of our technological problems,only the smug jerks refuse to give it to usbecause they are afraid it could hurt our cultural development.

So today is this channel’s 100th episode, and the topic seemed appropriate for the milestone,or milestones, since this week is also the third anniversary of the original episodeon Megastructures.

Now the reason a weekly show is celebrating episode 100 on its third anniversary, ratherthan episode 156, is that early on the show was not weekly, and indeed it was about 4months before the second episode came out, discussing the implications of those megastructuresin terms of the Fermi Paradox, the question of where all the aliens are.

This channel was built with three basic focuses in mind: megastructures built by high-techcivilizations, speculating about high-tech civilizations, and challenging the assumptionswe receive from science fiction and Life, the Universe, and Everything.

So celebrating our 100th episode and third anniversary by returning to the Alien Civilizationseries seemed appropriate.

Fundamentally, this series is an extension of our discussions of the Fermi Paradox, butfocuses more on the motives of hypothetical aliens and trying to see if they make sense.

It’s debatable if the Fermi Paradox should be called a paradox, since we still know solittle about the Universe to be calling aspects of it contradictory, but it tends to seemthat way since so many of the suggested solutions only make sense by discarding some assumptionabout Life or the Universe that seems solidly rooted in common sense.

If we accept intelligent life is incredibly rare, it feels like a modernized form of geocentrism,viewing ourselves as somehow special.

If we assume we are not, we have to figure out why the Universe isn’t flooded in aliencivilizations, or is but we can’t see them.

Since we know we, by our modern view of things, would absolutely go around exploring and colonizingthe Universe and saying hello to every alien we met, we need some reason this isn’t happening.

Essentially why modern humanity’s priorities and outlook would not be a representativesample of intelligent life in this Universe.

And we’ve gone through tons of suggested solutions, from all life dying off from technologicalapocalypses, to them hiding out, or maybe being unable to travel the stars, or simplynot wanting to.

None of those offer us the Universe we saw in film and television like Star Wars or StarTrek, with tons of aliens and easy interstellar travel.

The classic Space Opera Universe many of us, myself included, would love to be true.

Today we'll examine the Zoo Hypothesis, often regarded as a good Fermi Paradox Solution.

One example of it is the well-known Star Trek Prime Directive.

I’ll paraphrase it as not interfering in other civilizations, especially those whoare still technologically limited to their own original planet.

In Star Trek, there’s a line between civilizations with Warp Travel and without, for those whohave it, have interstellar travel, you can contact them openly, presumably on the groundsthey either already know of alien civilizations or will soon find out.

No contact before that.

Now, before we continue, I should add that it is really the Zoo Hypothesis we are lookingat today, and that extends beyond the example of the Prime Directive.

But we will give that a little extra focus today as it is more familiar ground.

So we want to ask ourselves why someone might choose not to interfere in lower-tech civilizations,or even wall them up in the equivalent of a galactic zoo.

What’s their definition of non-interference?

When and for what do they make exceptions, if any?

And how far will they go to enforce the policy?

The key aspect of non-interference policies, in regard to the Fermi Paradox, always comesdown to enforcement.

You are a Starship captain observing a planet full of primitives, you aren’t interferingin their civilization, and fair enough, I don’t consider non-interference always apreferred option, but it’s decently ethically sound as a basic principle, keep your noseout of other people’s business.

We often do this when observing animals in the wild or reporting on news, minimal interference,and we have a variety of motives for such policies.

It depends a lot on what your basic motivations are for doing it, and a lot of time in StarTrek it doesn’t seem to be the best interests of the civilization not being interfered with,since they’ll stick to the policy even when the alternative is that civilization beingdestroyed.

A friend of mine often referred to those episodes as Smug Trek, since they seem too confidentand superior in their non-interference even when there seems no way to argue it benefitsthe native species, and they always get rescued from the consequences by some plot contrivance,hence part of the reason for the episode title, Smug Aliens.

The other half of that being alien civilizations in fiction who tend to qualify as “SpaceElves”, the loose nickname for when a writer creates a race that is supposed to be ancient,wise, and enlightened, but come off more like smugly superior jerks.

Frequently for refusing to help directly, or through sharing technology in dealing withsome horrible galactic menace because they have some sort of non-interference policy.

One that for some reason always seems to mysteriously exempt giving lectures about how the primitiveEarthlings should behave.

And yet, the test of any given guideline or rule is how it functions in extremities andstrange cases.

You are sitting there observing this species in their stone age and know that you can’ttalk to them, by your own rules, for several thousand years to come.

That’s the first problem; how realistic is it that you can avoid contact that longwhile monitoring them?

Can you really expect to go centuries with dozens of folks working on such a projectwithout one of them messing up, or even doing it on purpose.

It is after all, pretty hard to watch a civilization, or rather a group of civilizations, regularlyget smashed up by disasters, plagues, starvation, or belligerent neighbors and not do anything,when you could.

These aren’t strangers either, you are getting to know them even if they don’t know you.

And if you know that over all that time someone is likely to break the rule, is there muchpoint to even trying to observe it?

Someone is bound to ask what the real point is?

I mean do the aliens below really need to learn the hard way that plagues are bad andthat hygiene is good?

You might say that without those they’d never develop medicine, but who says theyneed to?

I’ve never invented a vaccine or suffered from a plague, and I don’t particularlycare if the guys researching new vaccines learned the trade from guys who did or alienswho cured all theirs a million years ago.

Civilizations don’t invent technology, individuals or groups do, yet we still assume the restof the civilization ought to be able to benefit from that, we don’t expect every personto learn microbiology before taking antibiotics.

And yet, most of us do tend to either think non-interference is a good general policyor if not, we respect the basic concept.

In general, ‘leave those folks be to find their own way’, is a philosophy we can respect.

Where it goes a bit overboard is in the specifics.

You are monitoring some civilization and detect a giant asteroid en route to hit the planet.

Do you take any action?

If yes, or no, what’s the threshold?

Is it okay to knock aside one that would sterilize the entire planet but not one that would justkill most people?

If so, why?

If yes to both, what about one that will just hit one city and keep the damage pretty localized,like one about to fall on New York City or Ancient Rome?

And if yes to all of the above, why not help with a plague?

And what about the difference between one that will kill a few people and one with agenuine 100% mortality rate and airborne to boot.

On top of that, does it matter what those aliens want?

I mean I would happily accept a cure to cancer from aliens, and if they said “Isaac, we’dlove to give this to you but we are worried about the cultural damage our involvementwill cause.”, my reply would simply be “Let us worry about that, it’s not your concern”.

But there is obviously a line on that too.

I’d be happy to have their technology, but I don’t want their opinions on how we shouldrun our economies, which type of government we should use, or what sort of things we shouldor should not outlaw.

At the same time, I can hardly tell them they can’t have opinions on such things and sharethem when asked, and we all know that whether or not their opinion on something really ismore enlightened, tons of folks will view it that way and use “Ah, but that’s howthey do it, and they are older and wiser” as their argument.

So it’s not a clear-cut issue, but let’s go back to our asteroid case.

We will say it is a planet-killer, when it hits, it’s going to sterilize the planet.

The captain calls his officers together and asks them what to do.

The XO says no way, the policy is clear, we do nothing, it’s sad but rules are rulesand if we break it on this, what next?

Maybe we go cure their diseases and teach them to make fusion reactors, and fusion bombstoo?

For all we know they might turn out to be the next species of genocidal lunatics thatwill sterilize other people’s planets.

The engineer says maybe that’s exactly what they should do, this policy is monstrous,and that reasoning is no better than not helping a kid out of burning house on the theory theymight grow up to be a serial killer.

These guys have maxed out their brains from an evolutionary standpoint, same as a stoneage child adopted through a time machine to 21st century Earth could learn the technologyas well as a child of that era could.

Why not just give it to them now, and give them the benefit of our wisdom about whatto do or not to do?

Blow up that asteroid, land, introduce ourselves, and share our knowledge.

The XO is aghast at this, of course, and the captain doesn’t approve either, so the scienceofficer says, look, we don’t have to go all the way on this, we just blow up thatasteroid, this policy is meant to protect them from us, and an extinct civilizationdoesn’t need protection.

If something truly threatening comes up again, we’ll decide at that time what to do.

Now in your typical TV show, looking to avoid morally ambiguous plot resolutions, this wouldbe where the science officer says “Captain, while I was calculating the minimum deflectionthe asteroid needs, I realized that the gravity of our own ship had perturbed the asteroid,if we weren’t here it wouldn’t hit them” or maybe “Captain, this asteroid isn’tnatural, this is actually an artificial asteroid clearly sent by ‘the bad guys’ to looknatural” and the captain can confidently order the asteroid dealt with and everyoneis happy and forgets about the unresolved issue they just had.

If that doesn’t happen, we might see the captain reluctantly agree to destroy it andthe science officer go to punch in the coordinates to blow it up only to have the XO pull outa pistol and tell the captain they’re relieving them of duty, or even shoot the science officerand the captain.

Then a three-way fight breaks out ending with the chief engineer sabotaging the ship tocrash into the asteroid and fleeing before the impact with the surviving crew membersin the Interventionist camp.

That’s the problem with sincerely held beliefs on issues involving life and death, peopletend to feel okay about killing for them, I can’t really call the XO or engineer wrongfor doing what they did.

Of course, the engineer and the other interventionists now need to decide what to do when they land,and they need to consider what the response is going to be from back home when they getthe news in a few centuries.

Back at central command, when they do get news, they have a few options.

Of course option 1 is that they might not care, policies do tend to change over centuries,which is another issue with that mission to begin with.

Still on option 1, they might still have that policy but have had so many people break itin the centuries since they enacted it that they’ve pretty much given up on enforcement.

Now as to enforcement, what should they do?

Go there and arrest the interventionists?

I might do it as a high-tech civilization so the original folks might still be alivecenturies later when a new fleet arrives.

But what about their descendants?

Regardless of whether the originals are still around, can you arrest their descendants?

Can you forcibly deport them?

No other punishment just remove them?

If they resist can you kill them?

What about the original civilization?

Do you take their technology away?

Or repeat what the asteroid would have done and nuke the place from orbit?

Not many people would be okay with the latter, I hope, but that’s the only one that reallyhas teeth as a deterrent.

If you believe letting that civilization die from an asteroid strike is wrong, odds areyou will take action regardless of whether or not it means a prison term or even death,so your only deterrent is knowing it would be all for nothing, that the armada is goingto come by and torch the place and reverse what you did.

And of course if the interventionists think that is a possibility, they might still doit, and gamble on the chance that in the centuries they have before word gets home and a fleetarrives, they can bootstrap the local civilization up to the point they have a chance to resist.

Indeed, considering the alternatives to not working fast enough, they have an excuse tooutright play gods to establish and maintain enough control over the local population toget everyone working on increasing their numbers and accepting the new technology and turningover every bright kid to them for science and engineering educations.

One might even argue it is better to play false gods to save a civilization than letit be wiped out.

They can even rationalize that they’re going to turn themselves over after the crisis forjudgment, content to pay for that deception with their lives if that’s what it takes.

What we don’t see in Star Trek or fiction following a similar code is the Enterprisefiring on some ship that is headed for a primitive planet with the intent to give them technology.

Considering what we know of that Universe, anyone sufficiently determined can get theirhands on or build their own warp-capable ship, and I assume they don’t classify their discoveriesof new civilizations.

So someone back on Earth who disagrees with the Prime Directive can go replicate or requisitionparts for a spacecraft.

What would they do to a group of folks who were building a ship and flat out said theyplan to fly to the newest discovered planet with primitives and say hello and tell thealiens how to build stuff?

Do they arrest them?

Confiscate the ship?

Quite possibly.

What if they don’t say what the ship is for, do you warn them off and shoot them downwhile approaching the planet?

Do they keep a fleet around each such planet for such occasions?

What about aliens not in the Federation?

Do they shoot down an alien research team from a species that doesn’t follow the PrimeDirective?

This is why it doesn’t work well for the Fermi Paradox, because we cannot expect everycivilization to follow such a principle, and we can’t expect all their members to either,and it’s hard to imagine how you would enforce it over thousands or even millions of years.

Is there some graveyard of ships floating around our solar system where aliens triedto run the blockade to help or exploit us and got shot down?

Probably not.

Let’s assume there was though, and that normally when you get interstellar capablethey come in and say hi.

When and how should they do it?

Most of us would say that specific technology is a trifle arbitrary, a simple nod to pragmatismrather than assuming it implies the civilization is somehow more immune to cultural contaminationby having it.

We often see in fiction the enlightened race showing up to talk to a civilization aboutour technology level, and usually quietly.

This brings up the issue of whether or not it’s okay to introduce yourselves a bitearly if you know that they might be about to kill themselves off in the next 20 years,but will almost certainly make it to interstellar travel in the next 10-30 years, and you canhave the same argument as before.

The XO says no, the science officer suggests sneaking them some vital piece of tech byemail, a design for cheap and easy solar panels and batteries for instance, and the engineerjust says screw it, call them up and introduce yourselves and offer them the technology onegeneration early.

In a case like this, the captain might be more inclined to go with the direct and openintervention route, or at least try a secret introduction to their leaders.

Of course we don’t know how aliens will view interacting with other civilizations,the flaw of the Zoo Hypothesis and Prime Directive from a Fermi Paradox standpoint comes fromit being very hard to see all of them sharing the same view, or anyone being willing orable to enforce it on those who did not.

After all, we do have professional policies about how zoologists or news reporters aresupposed to act when in the field, not interfering just observing, but it’s not like that’sactually enforced.

So it would seem a Fermi Paradox solution that can’t be valid because it is unlikelyto practical to enforce it.

However, the basic notion of the Zoo Hypothesis is actually a little more subtle.

Because what folks often miss is that the Fermi Paradox assumes we are looking up atthe actual Universe and seeing it empty when it isn’t.

Unless by some freak coincidence all the high-tech alien machinery and empires are convenientlyinvisible, which would be rather weird, you don’t make a zoo for primitives by limitingyour own civilization, you do it by creating a fake environment around them.

When we build a zoo near a city, we don’t deconstruct our skyscrapers, we create a habitatthat conceals those aspects of our civilization that we need to for their well-being.

So if you are making a zoo out of Earth, you don’t go deconstructing your own Dyson Spheres,you make a big one around Earth or our whole solar system that creates an illusion.

That’s an immense project but way easier than limiting what you do in the rest of thegalaxy.

And it doesn’t need to be solar system sized either, I mean it probably isn’t that hardto snatch up unmanned probes and fake the data coming back, or even manned missionsand trick the crews.

But that fake Zoo Universe doesn’t necessarily even need to resemble the real one.

Easier to protect that zoo too, it’s small and cut off, so you don’t have to worryabout somebody sending a rogue hello signal into the zoo.

However, that maybe doesn’t go far enough.

We often discuss advanced aliens as being a sort of higher entity, in the softer kindof science fiction this is usually some being of pure energy evolved to a higher plane ofexistence or such, but we often just assume they aren’t organic anymore instead.

We’ll talk more about artificial intelligence in a couple weeks but for the moment, imaginesome civilization that had gone digital.

They all live in this Universe, or their Universe rather, but essentially inside computers.

They will consider that sort of existence just as good as a biological one, probablya lot more preferable since it is likely to be vastly more efficient in terms of resourcesand energy to support one individual thinking entity.

That means there is a decent chance they converted their home planet into one big computer andjust took copies of all the DNA than uploaded all the animals into it too.

Not just digital people, but digital cats and dogs and even honey bees.

They could always grow or print up a new organic body for themselves or those critters if theyneeded to, from digital DNA archives.

So from their perspective, what is the best way to make sure a primitive civilizationis protected?

There’s a good chance the answer they came up with was to upload them.

Just send in some covert missile carrying self-replicating machines to land somewhereon the planet, do some self-replicating underground while studying the biology for the neededspecifications, then one moment someone is walking out their front door in the real universeand maybe stumbles a bit, before proceeding on, not realizing that they stumbled whensome nano-machines stabbed a spike out of the ground into their brain and copied it,and every person and animal there, while cheerfully disassembling the planet to make a giant computer.

So you recover from your stumble a few thousand years later inside some secure processor runningon a Matrioshka Brain in their home system, or maybe around our own Sun, and the alienswho maintain that simulated Earth keep some back ups, but you and every person and critteryou know is safely tucked inside a simulated environment deep inside their territory protectedby the kinds of mega-armadas and defenses some sprawling K2+ civilizations can muster.

See the Matrioshka Brain and Kardashev Scale episodes for details.

Maybe when you die you wake up in their afterlife, or just get stored until the civilizationyou are from reaches a level where they’re comfortable being purely digital and theypop in to say hi and offer you wider access to things.

As far as they are concerned, they did you a favor.

Heck, they didn’t even need to grey goo your planet, they could have taken mentalsnapshots of everyone and left us as is, and kept those running instead to preserve things.

We might object that they killed us and stuck us in a simulation, but they might smirk backat the contradictions in that statement and regard the objection as being the same assomeone complaining that taking a photograph of them stole their soul.

That’s what I meant earlier about the Zoo Hypothesis being both a very bad and verygood solution to the Fermi Paradox, and also about how it didn’t really matter.

Because it is essentially the Simulation Hypothesis at that point, and we’ve discussed thatin terms of the Fermi Paradox before also.

Whether the Universe we are in is real or not, doesn’t make too much difference tothe Fermi Paradox.

First, all our observations about the Universe that leads us to seeing a Fermi Paradox wouldn’tapply to the Universe simulating us, the true reality as it were, which might be some 4dimensional place, or have stars that actually orbit planets and trillions of them per galaxyfor all we know, with space being a nice shade of blue instead of black.

Second, if they are simulating the original Universe, or just simulating an entire made-upUniverse, it can be assumed they kept it decently self-consistent, so that it makes sense oninspection.

Meaning that the Fermi Paradox would have a logical answer internally consistent withthe observable, if fake, universe.

The simulators, who designed the place, can be expected to not to leave blatant paradoxesand contradictions all over it if the goal is to keep us in the dark… of course itmight not be.

But fundamentally, whether it’s that case or the more classic non-interference approach,while you can make arguments both for and against the ethics of these approaches, thereis something kind of smug and superior about the approach.

That’s an opinion obviously, and I won’t deny there’s good arguments for keepingquiet, but for my part I’d tend to think the best approach to non-interference in aculture is like the best approach to keeping people away from your civilization.

In that case we said you wouldn’t hide, you’d just do the equivalent of hangingno trespassing signs around your territory.

For non-interference, I’d tend to think you’d be best off just introducing yourself,and telling them how to reach you if they want to talk.

It seems more practical and ethical, and the alternatives don’t really seem viable anyhow,except of course for showing up and uploading the entire planet, which is undeniably prettyeffective.

Next week we’ll be looking at the other approach, of directly contacting primitivecivilizations with little technology or even no technology at all, and tweaking their mindsand physiology to be able to use technology, a concept called Uplifting.

That will be a two part collaboration episode with John Michael Godier, with the first parton this channel and the second on his.

The week after that we will be starting a discussion on Artificial Intelligence witha look at Androids, and we will try to sort out some common myths and misconceptions weoften get on that topic.

The week after that it will be back to the Outward Bound series to look at ColonizingTitan, and we will explore the option for colonizing Saturn’s largest moon along withlooking at some of the concepts for robotic colonization of the solar system.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, be sure to subscribe to the channel.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button, share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Outward Bound: Colonizing Venus| | 2017-09-07 | | https://youtu.be/BI-old7YI4I | +--------------------------------+

Until the 1960s it was Venus, not Mars, that everyone assumed we would first colonize andterraform, as it turns out, they may have been correct after all.

So today we will be following up our look at Colonizing Mars by exploring the optionsfor colonizing and terraforming Venus, and we will see that it is probably the best prospectfor true terraforming inside this solar system.

Until the 1960s, we thought it very likely it might be a paradise planet.

It had clouds and was closer to the Sun than us, but we didn’t know until we got a betterlook that it was super-hot and had a day longer than its year, that indeed will be the trickiestpart to properly terraforming it, as we’ll see later.

We knew its mass was 82% of Earth’s, and its surface gravity was 90% of Earth’s,and again since we could see clouds we figured there was a chance it might be habitable oreven inhabited.

As observations improved we found it wasn’t a paradise but a good deal closer to a veryhot oven.

Even the clouds are made of sulfuric acid.

At the same time, we discovered it’s quite possible that had not always been true.

Indeed, Venus might have been a lot more Earth-like in the distant past, and maybe even hostedlife.

But while we can look at Mars and say maybe it once did too, and cross our fingers offinding fossil evidence of that, it’s very unlikely any evidence would remain on Venusif it ever had life, as the surface has been periodically resurfaced by floods of lava.

Venus has the most volcanoes of any planet in the solar system.

So when we found out how extremely hot this planet was, most folks scratched colonizingVenus off the list, and yet as we’ll see, it’s not only a decent colony location,but a great one for terraforming as well.

When we left off last time in the Colonizing Mars episode, we followed a traveler who wentto Mars and explored the options for colonizing it.

That traveler spent several years there and has since decided to go home and returnedto Borman Station, our large space station above the Moon.

I mentioned then that the Moon and Earth’s orbit were decently settled already, but thatbesides Mars and a few asteroid mines, the only other manned mission in the solar systemwas a floating scientific outpost above Venus.

That mission has wrapped up and just been replaced by the first settlement floatingin the clouds, and the ship that brought it there returned with the crew from the outpost.

When we get back to Borman Station that crew has also just arrived themselves, to muchfanfare.

We get to talking to one of the members and she happily recounts the basics.

Venus has a very thick atmosphere, about 100 times that of Earth, in defiance of its veryminimal magnetosphere and proximity to the Sun, both of which should tend to result inlosing your atmosphere.

That atmosphere is almost all carbon dioxide, with just over 3% being nitrogen and onlytrace amounts of other gasses.

And yet, even though Earth’s atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, Venus’s atmosphere hasmore nitrogen than Earth’s simply because it has so much more atmosphere.

Down on the surface the supercritical carbon dioxide forms a sea, having characteristicsof both a liquid and gas, which will be important for terraforming the planet.

However, like any atmosphere, the higher up you get the thinner it gets, and it coolsdown too.

At about 50 to 55 kilometers up, the atmosphere is down to about normal Earth pressure andtemperature.

While pressure and temperature are now approximately that of Earth, the gas mix is still almostentirely carbon dioxide, which has a molecular weight of 44, so any gas with a lower molecularweight can act as a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium do on Earth.

That means that hydrogen and helium, with a molecular weight of 2 and 4 respectively,work even better on Venus than on Earth, but it also means that even our normal oxygen-nitrogenair mix with an average molecular weight of 29 would float a balloon on Venus.

That’s obviously advantageous, since it means a room full of air will float, assumingthe room and its other contents aren’t too heavy, but hydrogen and helium are still better.

They are in dreadfully short supply on Venus though.

However the lack of oxygen in the air also means that hydrogen is a much safer liftinggas than on Earth, and you can get hydrogen, oxygen and water out of the sulfuric acidthat makes up the clouds.

So while it is neat and handy that normal air is a lifting gas on Venus, you probablywant the majority of your lifting done by hydrogen anyway.

Up in the higher atmosphere the lighting is a lot like on Earth, except that if you stayin the same spot you will have a day-night cycle not of 24 hours but 243 days.

Since the day-night terminator creeps along at a fast walking pace even at the equator,you can opt to stay in perpetual sunlight if you want to, making it handy for solarpower or growing plants to help recycle air and water, and extend food supplies.

We tend to think of blimps needing to be very small and light, but you can make some largeblimps, potentially some very large and sturdy ones with mass manufacture of graphene, andcarbon for making graphene is hardly in short supply on Venus.

You could potentially use that for making diamond hard tethers anchoring you to theground, possibly able to survive the super-hot, acidic, hurricane below, or use them likeharpoons with a winch to drag your settlement around like a big octopus.

But we also have a super-abundance of solar to power engines, and all that wind lets youconsider using wings to provide lift, like a plane or kite, not just buoyancy.

Many normal restrictions get eased with enough energy and strong enough materials.

So there are a lot of options for moving around up there in the clouds.

And our companion on Borman Station is quite upbeat about the idea of building even largerhabitats in the clouds of Venus.

Floating islands in the sky.

However, we are fresh back from Mars, and the problems they were having there, so weask her why you would want to do that.

She’s just spent a couple years with a research team that are very enthusiastic about Venus,and knows we just came from Mars, so she is a bit taken aback by the question.

From her perspective, ‘because we can’ is quite a sufficient motivation.

But back on Mars, we were already seeing some of the problems that happen as a colony getsbig enough that science and prestige are no longer good motivations for getting bigger.

We’re all for the Venus mission and even a permanent floating habitat there, but thenotion of building thousands of giant floating cities seems harder to justify.

We say as much and she points out that it’s no different than Martian domes, indeed thosefloating habitats are easier to construct and maintain in many respects.

They can’t just mine up rock to build more, but there’s plenty of material down on theplanet and we can build mining robots to be controlled from the floating habitats thatcan handle the heat and pressure and potentially deliver those goods by either going up a tetheror popping compressed gas cartridges to fill balloons and float back up.

Mars has the option to simply dome over the entire planet, with various sized domes connectedtogether, a thing called a ‘worldhouse’, Venus could do the same.

This approach, known as para-terraforming, could produce archipelagos of floating habitatsaround Venus or even entire continents of space eventually.

But as we saw on Mars, it’s not too clear why you would do this at that scale.

Sure you can float cities on Venus, but they still have to be very thin and light to float,and you can just orbit the planet in more conventional rotating habitats instead, likethe one you’re on now.

She points out that being low in the atmosphere protects you from meteors and some radiation,and that the orbital speed around Venus is not much lower than Earth, so the settlementcan float right over a spot you are mining.

We point out that those orbital settlements can have very thick radiation shielding, whichalso helps against meteors, which we can also shoot down, but these floating habitats haveto be ultra-light.

So they’ve got the radiation concerns of early space travel when every kilogram onboard a ship cost a fortune so shielding had to be kept to a minimum.

Same now for Venus.

It has no magnetosphere of note, so its radiation protection comes from that super-thick atmosphere,and the cloud habitats float over most of that.

We can put our blimps and water storage over the settlement to add some shielding, butradiation remains a concern.

We’re not convinced about the practicality of this approach but we still decide we haveto see it for our ourselves.

Since they are sending the ship back to Venus with the second round of colonists for thatfirst floating settlement, and we are already here at Borman Station and trained in spacetravel, we decide to put off returning to Earth and join the crew.

When we went to Mars, it was already decently settled with several thousand colonists.

Venus is less built up, just a few hundred colonists on that first floating settlement,Niobe, and a few dozen at their space station, Vulcan.

It’s a shorter trip than to Mars, as Venus is closer to Earth, but it’s still longenough to get to know the other crewmembers.

We regale them with tales of Mars, as we’ve seen things these people wouldn’t believe.

Standing atop the peak of Olympus Mons, hang gliding through the canyons in Valles Marineris,attack ships off the shoulder of Orion, well that last one didn’t happen, but we tellthem anyway, many an awesome sight.

When we arrive at Vulcan Station in orbit around Venus, we see it is a different setupthan with the Space Elevators from Tharsis Station on Mars or Earth’s Orbital Ring.

Venus hasn’t got anything like the infrastructure for an orbital ring yet, and its gravity istoo high for the space elevators we have at the Moon and Mars.

Lower than Earth, but still too high.

Vulcan Station uses a rotating skyhook design, or rotavator.

It’s a simple, small habitat at the center of a long tether that spins in a circle asthe whole thing orbits the planet.

While the whole system orbits Venus just a little slower than satellites around Earth,the tip of tether spins backwards, canceling out some of that velocity, making it easierfor ships to enter or leave the thick atmosphere to or from the tether tip.

We come in on a shuttle much like an airplane, and airbrake down to land on a large floatingrunway.

It’s pretty neat landing on a runway that just floats in the clouds, and we park nextto a wall designed to keep the wind off us as we exit wearing nothing but a simple acid-resistant suit and breathing mask.

Clouds above, clouds below.

We’ve stood on top of Olympus Mons, more than twice as high as the peak of Mount Everest,and right now we’re more than twice as high as that.

It is quite a sight and worth the trip.

There’s no ground to see below, it’s like looking upside down at a hurricane.

Once that awe passes and the ship is unpacked, we find ourselves confronted by the same concernswe expressed earlier though.

What is the appeal to major settlement here?

We can see a lot of tourism, it’s not that long of a trip and you can wander around outsidewithout a heavy suit.

While we are working our way to the main structure, we are nearly clipped by a colonist flyingoverhead learning the ropes of hang-gliding with just a simple air tank, mask, and a thinacid-proof suit.

Those clouds are pretty, but still made of sulphuric acid.

The equipment at this settlement is a lot newer than the stuff on Mars, which was settleda couple of decades before we first visited several years back, so it is a lot more automatedhere and folks have more free time.

We remark on this to one of the first wave of settlers, as we settle in at the VenutianCafé, and he chuckles and says in the future the first wave will be entirely robotic, andthe folks talking about colonizing Titan in a few years are planning to go entirely robotsand cyborgs.

None of that here though, part of the appeal of Venus is how Earth-like it can be, he says,no need to be a cyborg or get tweaked genetically to live here, you need a breathing mask andan acid-proof skinsuit when outside, for now, but that’s it.

No, Venus is ideal for Terraforming, down the road of course.

It will be monstrously expensive though, and Venus hasn’t got much for trade.

In fact, the thing it has an ample surplus of is carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the atmosphere,and energy for industrial processes.

If Mars wants to terraform itself, it will need a lot of that nitrogen, and even if theyjust want to para-terraform the planet they’ll still need plenty.

If not, well all those rotating habitats being built around Earth need nitrogen too, andcarbon might be abundant but it’s also something we always need a lot of.

He envisions a huge floating mass driver launching giant, thin-walled pods of nitrogen, and ifMars wants them for actual terraforming, they don’t even need to land them.

They can just machine gun them at the planet to explode on arrival and have the fragmentsof the pod burn up in the atmosphere.

They can get the metal for the pods from down below.

Of course, mining the surface, which is essentially under a super-hot acid hurricane, is rathertricky, at least until they can terraform Venus properly.

We’re curious about that and ask how.

After all, the clouds are fine but down below it’s still a hellish landscape around 462°C; or 863 °F He shrugs, what makes Venus hot is its proximityto the Sun.

There’s other factors, greenhouse gases gone wild for instance, but if you shut offthe heat pump from the Sun, it will cool down.

We raise an eyebrow at that, the Sun does not come with an on off switch and movingplanets is quite outside our reach, for now anyway.

But he reminds us that there is only empty space between the Sun and Venus, block thelight, and you block the heat.

Every planet has Lagrange points, specifically an L-1 Lagrange point in between that planetand the Sun.

Normally the closer to the Sun you are the faster you orbit, so if we placed an objectbetween us and the Sun it would not stay there.

We can simply place a shade there, or mirror, to reflect light away, it need not be verythick or massive, though if it is too thin or fragile, we won’t be able to cope withthe solar wind.

If it is too thick though, we would have problems keeping it in place, since L-1 points areonly marginally stable.

Thin ones can use the light hitting them to maneuver a bit, like a solar sail, so we don’tneed fuel.

So these shades aren’t exactly just a piece of foil.

Your typical one might be as big as a football field when deployed, but not weigh much, anddevote a fair portion of that weight to manipulating the sail, the electronics to figure out howmuch and when, and some solar panels and batteries to power both processes.

Ideally, you want something very light and strong, like graphene made of carbon, so youcan manufacture them back on the cloud cities of Venus, deploying them to the L-1 pointby the millions until you shade the entire planet.

Venus’s atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, and we could also remove it from the planet.

Indeed, that might be the better option.

But if we block the light, the atmosphere will begin to cool, and at the pressures onVenus, it will liquefy at about room temperature.

So you’d lose the thick atmosphere in favor of seas of liquid carbon dioxide, and if wekept cooling it, the carbon dioxide would freeze and the surface would all be dry ice.

If we wanted to we could pave that over, remove enough of the solar shades to keep Venus ata comfortable Earth-like temperature, and introduce dirt and water.

We have to interrupt our companion though.

Certainly there’s no shortage of potential dirt, but water is another story.

There’s a decent amount of water in Venus’s thick atmosphere and all that sulfuric acidcan be dissociated into water and SO3, but it isn’t enough for real oceans.

Venus’s entire atmosphere is incredibly massive, about a third the mass of Earth’soceans, but only a small fraction of it is water or hydrogen we could use to make water.

Plenty for people to drink and grow food with inside greenhouses, but not enough for a classicbiosphere.

For that we’d need to come up with somewhere between 10-100 billion megatons of hydrogen.

Our companion nods, hydrogen is an issue.

It’s the most plentiful stuff in the Universe, and the solar system too, but outside of theSun itself the only real supplies of hydrogen are the gas giants.

The Sun’s solar wind is a good source of hydrogen, it blows out about a billion kilogramsof hydrogen a second, a megaton, but again we need 10-100 billion megatons, and 10-100billion seconds is 3000-30,000 years, and that’s if we gathered it all up, and itgoes out in every direction.

We could bring in ices from further out but that’s a more precious commodity and truthbe told, we really only want the hydrogen which is only about a tenth of a water molecules’mass anyway, so easier to move.

If we can get star lifting working, we could boil hydrogen off the Sun, indeed, we coulduse that trick to clear the atmosphere on Venus too, using solar mirrors instead ofshades to heat the planet even more and evaporate the atmosphere away.

Some folks have even been discussing how you could colonize the Sun itself, and they couldship hydrogen to Venus or even just aim a diffuse beam of hydrogen at the planet, buthe thinks such ideas are still a little too blue sky to be taken seriously.

Better, he thinks, to bring the hydrogen in from Jupiter or Saturn.

That would be the trade item Venus wants to import, hydrogen, which is in plentiful supplyeven compared to their huge need for it.

All of which sounds good, it’s actually a little less ambitious than the Terraformingof Mars by bringing in nitrogen, since you need a lot more of it by mass than Venus needsin hydrogen, and you would end with an Earth-like planet, not a low gravity one.

Except for the daylength issue.

Again, Venus’s day is longer than its year, so the Sun is going to rise and stay therefor months before setting for more months.

We’ve got three possible approaches to this, he says.

First we can just ignore it, and adapt life there for that condition.

Same as the bioformers on Mars were thinking about adapting life to live on Mars or meethalfway in the middle.

However, Venus is the only planet in the solar system we can realistically classically terraform,so half-measures seem kind of wrong.

He points out that we already will have solar shades to limit the amount of light gettingto Venus, so it doesn’t overheat, so we could go in for mirrors too.

Mirrors on a 24 hour orbit around Venus could be arranged to block incoming sunlight onthe sun-side and bounce light down on the dark-side, and done so as to simulate a normal24 hour day.

You could even make a decent fake sun that way.

Lots of mirrors that bounce light to something about the same angular size in the sky asthe Sun, which bounces it down to Venus.

That would look very natural even.

All those mirrors and shades would help protect Venus from radiation too, though we’d probablystill want to consider an artificial magnetosphere like was planned for Mars, to hold the atmospherein.

We can’t expect that to stick around on its own once we make it Earth-like.

The other alternative is to go all-in, and actually adjust Venus’s rotational speedto a 24 hour day, or maybe save some energy and let people sleep in longer with a 26 hourday.

We have to raise an eyebrow at this though.

From a physics perspective it is certainly possible, but it takes a lot of energy.

We would need to add over 10^29 joules of rotational energy to Venus to do this.

That’s a lot of energy.

And yet, it also isn’t, relatively speaking.

We needed to ship those massive quantities of hydrogen to Venus to give it real oceans,and that’s going to require fairly similar levels of energy too, it’s in the same ballpark,shipping in an ocean versus spinning up a planet.

While 10^29 joules of energy seems enormous, and it is more than a billion times the amountof electricity 21st century Earth used each year, it’s also only a few minutes of totalenergy output from the Sun.

Similarly, it is about 10,000 years worth of solar energy hitting Venus, much of whichwe want to block anyway.

And if we can build a planet’s worth of shades, we can build that much, or more, ofsolar panels too.

It’s tricky to convert that into rotational energy though.

You can’t just put a big rocket thruster on a planet, especially one you want to cooldown.

Even hitting it with energy beams, like spraying a large ball with a hose on one side to makeit spin, is going to add a lot of heat too.

In fact, that might work with the hydrogen as well, a big beam of it coming from thesun like a water jet, hitting one side of the planet and injecting hydrogen and spinat the same time.

But if we are shipping in hydrogen from gas giants instead, each of those ships or podsis moving quite fast and carrying a lot of kinetic energy, and as mentioned, the amountneeded for transport is in the same ballpark as rotational energy.

So we just figure out how much hydrogen we want, and how much rotational energy we need,and make sure each pod full of hydrogen arriving is moving at a speed to deliver that energy.

Indeed, if that were too fast, we might go ahead and ship in ice instead of just hydrogen,and let that extra mass carry the extra kinetic energy.

We would kind of prefer slow because we want to keep that mass, not having a ton of itexplode out into space and wander away.

Which is a big issue when just hitting planets with asteroids or comets.

It would be tricky to get that process to work, aiming big chunks of ice or pods ofhydrogen to impact Venus near the equator on its edge to impart the maximum spin, butit’s doable, and gets you two birds with one stone.

Indeed possibly three since if Venus is spinning faster it might have a strong enough magnetospherenot to need an artificial one.

We also have the option of giving Venus a moon, you can use those as gravity tractorsto move planets or impart spin too, and the outer planets have an abundant supply of themthey’re not using, most of them have a surplus of hydrogen too, so you could move one in,again multiple birds with one stone.

Of course, you could also take a lot of that excess carbon from Venus and make one, eithera full moon or a thick shell full of hydrogen or some other filler material.

Building planets, or evens moons, sounds like a huge project, but so is Terraforming ingeneral.

Such things would take thousands of years, you can only go as fast as the planet canget rid of the heat, but Terraforming is always going to be a long game.

They don’t have to make any decisions on it yet, they’re just a floating settlementof a few hundred folks, but those are their options.

They can go the orbital colony route, the floating cities route, the para-terraformingroute, where they shade the planet to cool it down and use orbital mirrors to producea realistic day, or go big and start slowly spinning the planet up to a 24 hour day, wherepossible by using incoming shipments of hydrogen or water to impart much of that spin momentum.

Again, they don’t have to decide yet, but the floating colonies can’t survive thecool down process when the atmosphere eventually liquefies.

You would probably have to abandon them and retreat to orbital colonies, unless you couldfigure out a way to safely modify them to float in the air, then land on the carbondioxide sea, then transition to be being in enclosed habitats on the surface as you makethe changeover to early terraforming.

We expect that during cooling you’d get a ton of earthquakes and maybe volcanic activity,while it snows dry ice and you eventually have to pick a way to either export or permanentlysequester all that carbon dioxide so you can warm the planet up to Earth-like temperatureand atmosphere composition.

There’s plenty of solid things you can make out of carbon and oxygen but they all takea lot of energy and even when you have plenty to spare, you do have to worry about thatreleasing heat, even for endothermic processes.

It is doable, but I tend to think that carbon in the form of graphene is going to be theprefered building material in the future so Venus might export gigatons of that.

So we have a lot of options for Venus, and as with Mars, we don’t necessarily haveto only do one, you could have many phases with different configurations or with morethan one option pursued simultaneously where they can be, but I think that Venus, as theonly planet really suitable for total terraforming, is more likely to be terraformed, and allthe way too.

You’d always need some solar shades to keep the heat down, but heck we might need thoseon Earth eventually and you can make it so they are seemingly invisible, just cuttingdown on some of the light and particularly from the frequencies like infrared we can’teven see.

You can even move a planet if you really want to, but that takes far more energy than evenspinning it would.

Colonizing though does not necessarily mean terraforming, as we saw with Mars and we willsee even more in the next episode in the series, Colonizing Titan.

Next week though, we are going to look at the extreme alternative to Terraforming, whereyou just build your planets instead, and return to the Megastructures series to look at Ringworlds,giant orbital habitats so large they wrap around an entire star and provide a milliontimes the living area of Earth, first suggested by author Larry Niven in his classic sci-finovel, Ringworld.

Since unsurprisingly that is going to be our September Book of the Month, sponsored byAudible, and we’ll be doing some spoilers, you might want to click the link in the videodescription to grab a copy of the audiobook before then, if you haven't already read it,though I will try to leave the story itself mostly unspoiled in our discussion of themegastructure itself.

The week after that we will be celebrating the Third Anniversary of the channel, andthe original Megastructures episode, along with the 100th episode on the channel, withSmug Aliens, and discuss some concepts like the Zoo Hypothesis and Star Trek Prime Directive.

And we will finish up the month of September with a two part episode collaboration withJohn Michael Godier to look at Uplifting, the exact opposite of the Prime Directive,where you visit planets without any technology and give it to them, along with possibly alteringthem to have the brains and physiology to use it.

For alerts when those and other episode come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button, share it with others, and share youryour thoughts with others down below in the comments section or the Facebook and redditgroups, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and havea great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Interplanetary Warfare | | 2017-08-31 | | https://youtu.be/Mg8eJZ08_0Q | +--------------------------------+

In the future technology will ensure prosperity for everyone, which also means you have gota lot more money to spend on giant space guns.

We’ve discussed some basic concepts of space warfare before, and in the general contextof futuristic warfare, you essentially have four areas of interests. Relatively close

combat like infantry, combat in atmospheres or orbit, and interplanetary or interstellarconflicts. Our focus is on Interplanetary for today,which differs from fighting on or near a planet because of light lag, which is even more severefor interstellar warfare, and we’ll discuss both another time.

Because of the time it takes light to travel, conflict timelines get expanded to time scalessimilar to those of pre-modern naval warfare. Communications take a long while and travellonger, weeks if not months, and even exchanging fire is likely to be something that takeshours or days, not seconds or minutes. That’s Rule #1 of Warfare, you spend 99%of your time waiting followed by brief moments of excitement and terror. But in the case

of interplanetary warfare that upgrades to 99.9% thumb twiddling even when you are actively

exchanging fire with someone. We talked a fair amount about that in theoriginal Space Warfare episode, but our focus was just on the space battle aspect, not thestrategic situation, and that probably needs clearing up first.

Recently on the channel we’ve been looking at colonization of the solar system, focusingon planets, our own moon, and asteroids. In science fiction we often focus on those too,as the major players in any conflict. Earth versus Mars, like we see in the show The Expanse.

Great show but I doubt that will ever happen. For it to happen, space travel has to be abundantand cheap enough for at least tens of millions of people to travel in space every year. Otherwise

there’s no real option for conflict. It’s not some one-sided conflict like Australiaversus all of Eurasia, it’s more like Eurasia versus a small, under-developed Pacific Island.

Mars ain’t pushing Earth and its billions around with a few million residents.

And while scifi often likes to present us a resource-strapped, over-populated Earthversus a more high-tech Martian colony where all the scientists live, Earth is not goingto be resource strapped, see the Ecumenopolis episode, and not all the scientists are goingto move to Mars. If you’ve got space travel cheap enough for mass colonization, you don’thave energy shortages, and that means any planet is a ridiculous powerhouse in termsof resources. But more importantly, by the time you’vegot planets all colonized, you also probably are no longer planet-centered. Even before

you get to the Dyson Swarm, Kardashev 2 level of things, you’ve got hordes of habitatsin every rock floating around out there, and there are thousands of them big enough tosupport an entire modern planetary population and economy for geological time spans.

Short form, if you’ve got interplanetary military conflicts it is because you havecheap space travel, and that is because you have energy abundance, if you have energyabundance, every rock in space is a super-valuable gold mine that you can turn into lush, humanfriendly environment. So the stage at which such conflicts can beginoccurring isn’t a few settled planets acting as big superpowers, but rather a period moreakin to a thousand city-states, out around the big colonizable rocky planets of the innersystem. The dynamic changes again as you start shifting toward a Dyson Swarm.

Let’s start by examining the classic Earth-Mars conflict. It’s probably important to know

what the heck they are actually fighting over, but we’ve had a fair number of wars overfairly surprising things. Of course, sometimes the official recorded reasons are bizarre,but the unofficial actual reasons are entirely logical. It’s not terribly ethical to invade

your neighbor because you want their stuff, but it’s decently logical, it generallyhelps to give a reason like they insulted the king or something. Though historically,

‘we want your stuff’ has often been an entirely acceptable official justificationfor war too. It does not apply to Earth and Mars, I don’tknow any plausible scenario where Earth wants anything Mars has, not while there is stilla Moon in the sky and a system population of less than a quadrillion. When you’re

fighting over raw materials at the planetary scale, it isn’t planet on planet combat.

Each planet is a budding Kardashev 2 civilization that now occupies the region of space theplanet did. But fighting for general solar system dominanceor trade rights is on the table, and one can always find an excuse. In any event, one of

the first issues with attacking another planet in your own solar system is all the spacein between the two of you. That distance falls into that scale our braintends to only comprehend as Very Large. If you’ve ever taken a road trip that lastedall day, think of doing that all day every day. You will still die of old age before

arriving at another planet, but your grandkids born on the trip might live to set foot onone of the closer planets. Missiles, of course, travel a lot faster,but we can flat out discard any up-sized equivalent of an ICBM. No chemically powered rocket can

deliver warheads to another planet. Not because they can’t get there of course, but ratherbecause the target is going to casually blow every one of them away. They just can’t

go very fast, and will need to go even slower if they want to save any fuel for maneuvering.

And you need that because such missiles are not even a little bit stealthy, so the onlyway to avoid them getting shot by a laser is if they routinely jink in a random direction,like we discussed in the Space Warfare episode. You could maybe do it with metallic hydrogenif we can make that a viable fuel, but even that is iffy. So too would the typical atomic

rockets we discussed in the Nuclear Option. You need a compact and high powered fusiondrive or anti-matter for a self-contained, interplanetary missile to be a threat.

Fortunately the difference between a missile and a ship, is one of them doesn’t needto carry fuel to slow down, and also tend to be unmanned, so you can get away with launchingone out of a mass driver. This has a downside though, because for missiles to be good weaponswhen someone has the ability to shoot them down, you need them all to show up at thetarget, or the edge of its anti-missile envelope, at the same time. Volleys arriving together

not a stream of them like a machinegun. That’s the cool thing about modern-missiles,they are all self-contained, so you can launch your entire inventory all at once, you don’tneed queue them up like bullets in a gun. If you are instead using a launch system likea mass driver to get those missiles up to speed, with their fuel just for maneuvering,you need a launcher for each missile, or they won’t come in as a volley.

Now at interstellar distances, as we discussed with Relativistic Kill Missiles, you can firethousands of the things once a day, each a little faster than the last, and expect themto arrive on time. Like sending a vehicle out on a road trip every minute, with thefirst traveling 61 miles per hour, the second 62, the third 63, and so on so they all arriveat the same time. At interplanetary distance and desired speeds,you can still do this trick but not nearly as well. You are essentially trying to overwhelm

a system that’s firing as fast as it can recharge and retarget, so the faster yourdevices are moving, and the more fuel they have to maneuver, the smaller that windowof time is. Same reason, you want something that can break into a lot of pieces when ithits that interception envelope. The nice thing though, about very fast missilesis they can fragment a lot because they don’t need to carry a warhead. Missiles moving several

times the speed of sound carry more kinetic energy than would be released by their weightin explosives, missiles moving at relativistic speeds do as much damage as a nuke would.

So this is a basic interplanetary missile. A question then becomes how fast can you throwone initially and that comes down to two basic maximums, though all sorts of engineeringdifficulties could limit it more. How fast can the missile accelerate without trashingits guidance system and how long can you accelerate it, or basically how long your launch trackis. Humans can’t handle prolonged accelerationof a dozen, much less hundreds, of g-forces, but solid metal slugs can handle thousandsof times more, they don’t have electronics in them. Modern military artillery have electronics

in them rated to handle over 15,000 gees, and you might be able to go higher with bettertechnology, but we’ll assume that value at 150,000 m/s².

Length is important in this context, it tells us how long our gun needs to be and also howclose the missile can get without being automatically destroyed by anything detecting and shootingat the speed of light. 15,000 gees might sound remarkable but is in the ballpark of manyconventional firearms. A barrel length of about a foot or third of meter would allowan acceleration only up to about the speed of sound, slower than most guns spit out abullet. This is one of the reasons trying to put electronics or machinery in normalbullets is harder than folks assume. Final speed rises with the square root oflength, so a barrel 100 times longer, 30 meters, gives you the square root of 100 or 10 timesthe velocity. 3000 meters, 100 times the velocity, 30 km/s, 300 kilometers and 300 km/s, 0.1%

light speed. You need a track length of 30,000 kilometers to get to 1% of light speed and3 million for 10%. Those are obviously ridiculously long gun lengths but keep in mind ‘length’is ambiguous here, you might be pushing on it with laser after it leaves the gun formore speed, or the barrel might be simple thin mesh of superconducting wire you shotout right before shooting the missile. And its not really that each missile needs itsown launcher as it needs its own power supply. On the interception end, we’ve got two factors,first how quickly the missile is moving and second how quickly it can randomly acceleratein a given direction to jink. For any given combination of missile speed, size, and accelerationrate you have a window of space and time you can shoot it and be sure to hit with a laser.

See the Space Warfare episode for details on that but all things being equal you wantthe smallest, fastest, and most maneuverable missile you can build and anything movingless than .1% of light speed probably isn’t even worth shooting at interplanetary ranges,because any orbital defense laser is going to get many shots at while it is in the no-missautomatic kill envelope. Of course that envelope’s size depends onthe missile’s size and acceleration, but if all it can carry is chemical fuel, evenif it can pull off that full 15,000-gee burn, it won’t be able to do that for even a second.

We often see individual rocket fuels listed by their exhaust velocity or ISP, specificimpulse, listed in seconds. Loosely speaking an ISP is how many seconds a rocket made almostentirely of fuel can accelerate at 1-gee, meaning if it burned everything up in a hundredthof a second it would be several meters of course, survive a shot, then get blown awayby the next because it can’t maneuver anymore. Size helps too but you also need your missilea certain size for electronics and thrusters, and building smaller than a intercepting laserbeams width doesn’t help either, small cross-section also helps, narrow and long, but they mightget side shots at it too.

Now your ‘missile’ is going to shatter into hundreds of smaller and harder to hitfragments right before it hits the confirmed kill envelope and is not aimed at the actualplanet anyway. You are targeting all those orbital lasers with your first wave, so atmosphericentry isn’t as big an issue. You can’t kill those with lasers from way back at Earthor the moon because they can pull the same trick of jinking around only a lot easier.

Your moon-side launcher is too big for that and it's very long and any major damage alongthe length of it is going to wreck it, at least till you can repair the damaged sections.

Now this is an over simplified case, because not only can Mars field a ton of defensivesatellites in low orbit, they can have them up in high orbits and they can also keep moremobile platforms along the path to Earth. They can also defend with big atomic bombsalong the way too, not just lasers. Or normal bombs, it doesn’t take a very large pieceof shrapnel to kill a relativistic missile and the corridor for them to travel down isn’tvery high, the missiles can’t really sweep around in a wide arc. Unlike a normal spacecraft

going to Mars, which doesn’t follow anything like a straight line, these are moving prettyclose to straight and can’t deviate from that much.

So by and large, Mars knows where the attack is coming from and can litter the path withdefensive countermeasures to deal with the attack long before it gets to their home.

This is an important point, one we’ll examine more in a bit, and indeed that is the Rule#1 of Warfare, always doing your fighting far from home, that way less of your stuffgets broken. A few questions have probably come up in yourmind by now. What if we have a better drive system for our rockets? Genuinely compact

high-efficiency fusion, or even anti-matter? What if we go for higher acceleration ratesby making dumb munitions, just metal with no guidance package that higher accelerationswould crush? Why aren’t they using lasers or particle beams on or near Earth to attackdirectly? And the answer is, you might, for all of theabove. Each has their problems though. My goal today isn’t to tell us how these conflictswill happen, I have no idea, but rather to point out some of the options on the tableand the flaws in some of the other known ones. Fusion, except as a bomb, is likely to alwaysbe rather slow, allowing high final speeds but not fast quick burns of thousands of gees.

You could get around this partially by going the bomb route and firing warheads behindyou to push you along with their explosions, but that’s unlikely to provide super-fastacceleration either and means sending a very large platform full of missiles that way,that fires them once you are up to speed and closer to the destination.

Antimatter circumvents this, it is the ultimate rocket fuel, and make for great warheads evenat relativistic speeds, but manufacture and storage of it is hard and dangerous, and that’swhen you are just worried about regular storage in peacetime. Shoot a nuke or a fusion reactor

and you kill it, it doesn’t explode. So someone can attack a munitions storage withoutcausing huge amounts of damage. Shoot an anti-matter storage facility and it will all explode,releasing even more damage than when they would have a hit a target, since they willuse a lot of that as fuel during the flight. You might be able to get around that by storingit far from anything of value, but more on that in a minute too.

For particle beams, those are pretty dubious at long range, because they will start tospread out, and they are very susceptible to magnetic fields. The same for lasers, and

both will have problems doing more than sheer heat damage to anything planetside when theyarrive already diffused and then have to go through an atmosphere. They cannot maneuver

in route, so placing anything along their path, which is exactly predictable, ends thethreat. The same is true of big dumb bullets, except they travel slower.

Now a planet is a big object but a planet-sized object, or collection of objects, does nothave to be massive. Mars has a cross-section of 36 trillion square meters, a sheet of aluminumfoil a tenth of a millimeter thick masses 27 grams per square meter, so it would weighabout a trillion kilograms. That’s hardly light but it’s miniscule compared to planets,we’ve discussed doing stuff like this to make solar mirrors or shades for terraformingpurposes before. It might be rather hard to get a laser through a patch of space composedof thin balloons full of hydrogen that formed a bubble wall with the components shiftingaround. Scale can play tricks on the mind, but throwingone-ton missiles at relativistic speeds costs a ton of energy, as does powering some hugeparticle beam or laser, and defense like this could literally consist of tiny bullets composedinside of nothing but a compressed gas container and the thinnest foil you can make, so thatwhen the container pops it expands into basically a soap bubble. Space is a vacuum, it takes

very little gas to inflate something relatively large. Rather than point defense on a ship

or space station that fires off conventional explosives it might fire these bubble bulletsinstead. They are also one of the handier ways to clear space debris from orbit. You

could have guns that fired these bubble bullets into the right places to intercept somethingor fill holes in a bubble wall, call them bubblegums, pardon, bubble-guns.

So at interplanetary ranges you want smart weapons moving as fast as you can get them,and they may even need to include their own countermeasures to jink around debris or cleara path the same way. Again you’d probably go with waves of volleys, thousands or millionsof weapons coming in a reasonably tight pack, in terms of time not distance, you do wantthem spread out a bit, each wave following and tailored to the expected defenses. So

the interplanetary war begins somewhere in the middle of the disputants rather than itjust being empty space stuff goes through unimpeded.

Now, as we mentioned you’ve got that narrow corridor between planets that attack can comefrom, but I also mentioned you don’t want to keep your antimatter anywhere near thereif you’ve got it. More to the point, a big focus of this channel is on how solar systemcolonization isn’t just planets, and that indeed they’d tend to become increasinglysmaller in terms of the portion of the system population they make up as time goes on.

People are going to be building homes in asteroids, literally inside them, since excavating asteroidsis easy and even if you are mining them intensively, that takes a long time and probably wouldnot involve exporting everything, just the most valuable minerals refined down. Both

Earth and Mars are surrounded by the Asteroid Belt which is wide, full of millions of decentsized objects, and spread out. The bigger ones probably host very large colonies andthe smaller ones are great small outposts. One of these big mass driver missile launcherswe discussed might be as long as a planet is wide but they are still thin and you couldspool one up like a ball of yarn and pack it into a fairly small asteroid. Just so long

as you can unwind and deploy it faster than the light from it can get to the target andback carrying an attack laser, it makes a handy missile launcher on an unexpected vector.

You could also probably hide one on a cargo ship, and this is assuming you even feel theneed to hide it and don’t just have big battleships carrying them around. You can

also make such things single-use devices, a very flimsy launcher inflated by a nuclearexplosion or series of nuclear explosion that also provides the push and power for the launch.

Nukes are hard to tap for power, that’s why we don’t just use fusion bombs to runour own energy grid these days… and we could by the way, build a very large water tankbig enough to handle an H-bomb blast and let the steam generated turn turbines, it’sjust huge and H-bombs aren’t exactly cheap. But again, nukes are hard to tap for energy,and using the blast for one to power a mass driver or laser for a single shot is an option.

That trick, if you can make it work, allows you to send missiles that get as close asthey can then fire, shooting out gamma-ray laser or graser blasts or a relativistic slugout of some very thin and long mass-driver that is inflated by the blasts.

Either way, when the conflict is no longer just two planets, but thousands of variouscolonies too, either provinces of one of those planets or independent city states or confederations,a lot of the dynamics change because you don’t just have one vector to defend against anymore.

Personally I would not expect a united Earth versus a United Mars versus a United AsteroidBelt, but rather something like India and Australia, their Martian colony at OlympusMons, and their fifty asteroid habitats going to war with say Egypt, Ethiopia, Madagascar,Indonesia and its Martian territory, and their various asteroid habitats over control ofgeostationary space above the Indian Ocean. We might see early colonization of the solarsystem done by groups of various nations working together, but once it gets decently cheapand routine, those colonies are generally going to emerge from one place and rely onthat country for a lot of support, either as a territory, a state, or a sovereign ally.

You might get folks on Mars feeling they have more in common with each other than theirhome countries, but in a place like the Asteroid belt, you are as far or further from mostof each other than from Earth. And while we see shared oppression and grievancesoften given to asteroid miners as a reason to revolt, that is just fiction borrowingfrom history. Any sci fi setting where you hear about water shortages, or air recyclingissues, either needs to qualify that with ‘not enough water to terraform this planet’or it’s full of it. If you have spaceships operating under Newtonian physics, any singleone of those big cargo haulers we see has a power plant capable of running a moderncontinent’s electric grid. They are not short of energy for recycling water and air.

They are also probably not breaking their backs in mines somewhere, since first of alllow gravity helps with that, and second, almost all the work is probably being done by robotsanyway. But people being people, they are not likelyto ever be short of grievances with their neighbors or homeworld, but it’s unlikelyto be because the asteroid mining colonies have folks falling over dead from exhaustion,suffocation, dehydration, etc. More likely they’d be complaining about how countryX was inflating or deflating the price of Titanium or something. In that sort of context,

where you probably have lots of cultural and economic allies on the same planet the folksyou dislike are from, and a lot more neutral third parties, hurling crust-buster nuclearordinance at them is probably not on the table. Things get even worse in that regard as youprogress toward a Dyson Sphere or Dyson Swarm, see that episode and the Kardashev Scale episodefor more details on how those actually form and operate, but in short form you would tendto have billions or trillions of large rotating habitats, many physically connected to eachother and a slew of ancillary facilities, all packed around the sun.

Except they aren’t packed, because even though a completed Dyson Swarm is supposedto block out all the light from the Sun, it’s not so much a thin shell as a thick cloudor fog composed of many islands separated far apart, some by themselves, some forminginto archipelagos that move together, but all moving relative to the other swarm membersso that many people near you today aren’t next month.

All the same weapons and defenses apply, but you can probably be way closer to deploy themjust from the sheer amount of stuff helping you hide it. However you probably can’t

shoot stuff as fast either because you do have billions or trillions of habitats involvedmost of whom, even nearby a conflict, have no skin in the game. At least not till some

reckless ass fires and misses the target and splashes some previously neutral third party.

That’s Rule #1 of Warfare, avoid helping your enemy recruit people.

We often think of Dyson Swarms as jam-packed, they’re not, and composed of fairly flimsystructures, which they probably are not. Your typical rotating habitat is probably onlya small portion of the overall habitat and is probably crammed inside some hardened non-rotatingsuperstructure composed of meters thick armor of diamond hard thin tanks full of cheap hydrogenas filler. It’s probably got huge arrays of cheap thin solar panels around it to eatup munitions and backup fusion power to run on. It’s probably got most of its food grown

in flimsy low-grav habitats nearby. It’s probably got the entire outside slatheredin point-defense lasers and those bubbleguns and tons of outposts further away with thesame. And it’s got all those neighbors, who willnot appreciate megatons of diamond hard shards flying off into space - and at them - whileyou pound away at a habitat that isn’t so much a fragile egg or luxury cruise lineras a giant battleship with nice interior decorating. When you’ve got the kind of energy suppliesand automation to be building these things cheap enough for folks to own suburban homeson them in the first place, bet on the architects and marketing guys including ‘and it’sgot tons of armor and defense’ in the brochures along with how good the local schools are.

Traditionally, countries tend to spend at least a percent of their economy on defenseeven in peacetimes, often a lot more, we’d like to think in the future we will be morepeaceful, and I think we will, but it is worth remembering just how much ordinance 1% isin a post-scarcity civilization building these kind of things, and also that a post-scarcitycivilization can get away with spending a higher percentage of their GDP on defensetoo. It’s also quite possible, that if you getinside one of these rotating habitats to invade it, you won’t be facing a regular old civilianpopulation, since it is entirely possible a regular civilian in a high-tech civilizationis a transhuman with light speed reflexes, centuries of skills, and a backup copy oftheir mind somewhere that gives them license to take risks.

But we will discuss stuff like boarding actions, dropships, and orbital bombardments anothertime. We have no idea how war will be fought inthe future, or if it will be more or less common than now. If it will be more civilized

or tend to go for scorched earth strategies, indeed often you see the most no-holds-barredcombat from civilizations that don’t fight much so conflicts might be rare but all-encompassingand brutal. Personally I think we won’t see many armed conflicts in the future, Icertainly hope so, but while we had to do a lot of guesswork today we have hopefullypainted a more realistic picture of what interplanetary conflicts would be like. We’ll look at interstellar

ones another time too. Next week we’ll be visiting Venus, in oursecond installment of the Outward Bound Series, Colonizing Venus, and we’ll take a deeperlook at Terraforming. For alerts when those and other episode comeout, make sure to subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed this episode, hit the likebutton, share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, andhave a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Fermi Paradox Great Filters: Rare Intelligence| | 2017-08-24 | | https://youtu.be/0xbSHn4Fbu4 | +--------------------------------+

Living in a technological civilization, it is rather hard to think of a bigger brainas a disadvantage, but as we’ll see today, that is often the case.

So today we will be wrapping up our look at Great Filters of the Fermi Paradox, thoseconditions that are thought to act as major hurdles to technological civilizations arisingin the Universe.

Previously we’ve looked at those conditions for the planet that might make intelligenceuncommon, but today we want to look more at the evolutionary steps to get to human levelintelligence and also the hurdles you need to pass once you have that to get to truetechnology.

Now for our purposes today, when I say intelligence I am principally referring to human level.

We often use the terms sentience or sapience to further subdivide levels of intelligence,but the definition of sentience is terribly vague and can be interpreted to include prettymuch anything with sensory apparatus and a basic brain, whereas sapience is not reallyin the common lexicon and essentially means wisdom.

Since wisdom is trait often lacking in some humans, and also a trait not necessarily requiredfor technology, I’m disinclined to use that either.

So we’ll be sticking with human-level intelligence and I think context will make it fairly obviouswhen I mean any intelligence at all or human level.

As always with the Fermi Paradox, since it is the question of why we can’t see or hearany aliens, it is also important to remember that at the moment that only means alienswith modern technology or better.

Our brains are more or less identical to the folks who first figured out agriculture andmetal working, but we could not detect such a civilization ourselves right now so if itturned out going beyond that point was very uncommon, you’ve got your answer to theFermi Paradox right there.

And it might be uncommon, we’ll spend the last section of the episode discussing thatand challenging our general assumption that once you have tool and fire use and sufficientbrains you inevitably transition to high technology.

But before that, let’s consider some key steps of evolution needed to get to more orless modern man.

There are quite a few of them, and even those which have happened more than once so thatwe cannot view them as a fluke, often took a lot of time, which is another key pointof the Fermi Paradox.

The Universe is young, and the period in which life could have plausibly existed is shorterthan that.

The odds of a given solar system having life should generally tend to increase with timetoo, except where changing conditions could make a planet uninhabitable, such as the sunit is around growing hotter over time and sterilizing it.

A key aspect of the Great Filters approach of the Fermi Paradox is that it is not aboutif a planet might eventually support a technological civilization, it’s about whether or notthey already do, and currently do, for a given value of current since light and signals takesa long time to travel.

So as an example, over a long enough period of time, any given planet that had basicallyidentical initial conditions as Earth ought to produce life, but we do not know what thoseconditions are or what the mechanism is, in any rigorous sense.

If we assume it is underwater thermal vents, a planet with less of them should take longeron average to produce that first abiogenesis event.

And yet we do not have a good fix on when life began on Earth.

The most optimistic model is 4.28 billion years ago, while the oldest undisputed lifeis at 3.5 billion years.

That is between 130 million years and a full billion years for life to arise after we hadoceans, and for my part I have to raise an eyebrow at some people who refer to that timeduration as ‘almost instantaneous’.

We are also making a big assumption to think that is an average.

That is justified by the mediocrity principle, which tells us that when we only have oneexample of something, or even just a few, we should assume that example is fairly normal.

But that’s just a generalized approach to take in ignorance.

If you land on an isolated island and the first person who greets you is wearing a hatand carrying a pair of binoculars, it’s a good idea to assume that is normal hereuntil you meet other folks.

Except that the binoculars probably are the reason that person was the first one to greetyou.

Nonetheless the Mediocrity Principle is usually a good first approach.

Not, however, when you are dealing with a circumstance that has the word Paradox init.

We label stuff that way when the available evidence makes the situation seem impossibleor freakishly improbable.

At that point you want to challenge any circumstances where you haven’t got a lot of data andare making assumptions.

We already know abiogenesis is improbable, horribly improbable, because the requisitechemicals and conditions existed in the trillions, interacting constantly, and still took a longtime to go from that to alive.

A man who wins the lottery on his tenth ticket, with no other data, thinks that is normalenough and will by the Mediocrity Principle assume most folks win after about that many,and if winning the lottery comes with having to go someplace to pick up the prize, mostfolks he meets there will be big outliers themselves too.

It’s only when you actually know the number of winning and non-winning tickets that youtruly understand the odds.

Before that it’s just guessing.

So the question is really just: “Is this abiogenesis event so freakishlyimprobable it takes countless quintillions of atoms a hundred million years to producea basic lifeform, or just a bit more freakishly improbable so that it would normally takethat sample a trillion years to cough up a lifeform but we lucked out early?”

Up until the moment we can model the probabilities for a given solution producing a basic lifeformwe can’t say, and there are probably many thousands of valid most basic life form configurationsand a wide spectrum of specific environments they can emerge from.

We haven’t got a clue if abiogenesis happens on short timelines in virtually any plausiblechemical soup or was a one in a million event to have occurred here that fast and shouldbe a great filter all on its own.

I will categorize it as a possible Great Filter, but we will otherwise bypass it today.

One other thing to keep in mind though, is that while we have a window for life to haveemerged that’s about 800 million years wide, from 3.5 to 4.28 billion years ago, if life

did arise on the early end of that, it means the next big steps took a lot longer, makingthem much better filters.

Unicellular life, initially in the form of bacteria and archaea and later joined by theEukaryotes, ruled alone over the Earth for billions of years before multicellular lifecame about 900 million years ago, but even that immense timespan does not do justiceto the sheer generational scales involved.

Some bacteria can multiply once every 20 minutes in ideal conditions, but let’s be conservative.

Say they would have multiplied only once every 5 days.

That is still 2 trillion generations to the dawn of multicellular life, which is comfortablymore than the 1.5 trillion stars in our local group of galaxies!

That doesn’t even count the number of actual organisms, only the number of generations.

Mammals multiply considerably slower, in the order of months at the quickest and a decadeor more at the slowest, and we have only had 320 million years since our early Synapsidancestors began to multiply.

Looking at generations alone, mammals are effectively nothing more than a blink of theeye when compared to the unicellular realm.

We are dwarfed into obscurity when we further compare the sheer population sizes involved.

So even though multi-cellular organisms appear to have evolved separately on many occasions- leading us to reasonably believe this is not a particularly improbable event - it’sworth remembering that still was less probable, in terms of raw generations and population,than every other mutation mammals have experienced combined.

Some mutations did result in revolutions, even amongst the unicellular organisms, likethe development of photosynthesis in cyanobacteria 2.1-2.7 billion years ago that ultimately

changed our atmosphere to become Oxygen-rich.

This provided a vaster energy source serving as the bottom of the food chain, and a muchbigger total population.

And that speeds up mutation by allowing more events.

Another big one was being able to share mutations through viruses and plasmids allowing forthe sharing and swapping of genetic material.

When organisms can’t swap DNA then you can have billions of mutations going on but onlyin series.

Another big step forward was sexual reproduction about 1.2 billion years ago, that sped things

up too.

In a way, we can think of that as when evolution really kicked into high gear: two crittersof fairly similar DNA classified as the same species, rather than every organism simplyself-dividing and diverging from those around it, and that took about 2 to 3 billion years.

Had it taken even just 4 billion, our own Sun, which is constantly getting warmer, mighthave rendered the Earth increasingly barren and eventually uninhabitable before we arrived.

So this entire sequence of events could be seen as a pretty strong filter too.

Yet it doesn’t particularly interest us today either.

Our focus is more on intelligence.

That can be a fairly arbitrary term, and to make things worse we also have good reasonto believe muscles, neurons, and even brains, for a given value of brain, have evolved separatelymore than once too, it’s not something limited to vertebrae.

Indeed, since many plants demonstrably react to their environments, the only reason wecan say plants won’t evolve brains is because they simply provide too much cost for toolittle benefit to them.

That though, is a big thing to remember.

Most tiny animals have way more generations than we do connecting them back to our commonancestor, and in that sense can be seen as more evolved.

They reproduce faster and in larger numbers, both in terms of litter size and often totalpopulation.

Your cat is more evolved than you are; indeed, chickens, rats, and rascally rabbits evenmore than they.

Yet they’re not that smart and, very generally, the faster and more numerous a species reproduces,the dumber it is.

You nod now, brains are big energy investments, take a long time to grow, and that is trueand important, but at the moment think of it in the sense of catching up.

Some species evolved a cool new trait that makes it breed slower and in fewer numbers,and all its rival species have a lot of room to narrow that gap.

It’s been around a thousand human generations since our mutual ancestors started keepingcats and dogs around, but for them it’s been more like ten thousand generations.

Add to that, we have been bootstrapping at least dog evolution during that time and oftenbreeding for intelligence.

Chimpanzees at least - one of our closest relatives and competitors for intelligence- do take a long time to reproduce, pretty parallel to humans, and again that comes fromthe long development time for brains, and most of the other critters that are demonstrablysmarter than cats or dogs have generations much longer than a year too.

That’s one of those first markers about intelligence, it is an expensive investment,not just to run a big brain, but to grow one in the first place.

It takes a long time while the young critter in question is highly vulnerable and realisticallycannot fend for itself.

We can’t rule out that some alien might be human-level intelligent yet use the strategyof laying thousands of eggs and leaving them to fend for themselves, but it does seem quiteunlikely.

More important than that is recognizing that higher intelligence is not, as we usuallythink of it, automatically beneficial.

Quite to the contrary, even ignoring the upkeep cost in growing and maintaining a big brain,it has some big disadvantages.

I can toss you a ball and you can catch it; so can your dog.

Whether you realize it or not, it took an insane amount of brainpower to pull that off.

What we think of as the conscious mind is a tiny little iceberg tip poking out froma massive supercomputer below the surface.

And in many ways it’s less of a peak than several, acting a lot like a committee.

A basic reactionary brain is very helpful, it reacts fast and gets stuff done.

Your conscious mind is more like a committee discussing everything.

Picture someone feeling thirsty and grabbing a sip of water, versus some huge committeemeeting to discuss water safety standards and a year later releasing a 300 page report.

That big brain is wonderful for developing complex and abstract strategies, and thusscience and technology and poetry.

But it’s not great for dealing with a lion jumping out of the bushes to eat you.

Simple fast action is typically the best, and a big brain that likes to stop and ponderstuff can get you killed - and in fact, it did get us killed a lot back in the day.

We did not evolve as an apex predator and if you told just about anyone from pre-moderntimes that we should be worried about lions or wolves going extinct, that notion wouldbe so bizarre to them they’d probably assume you meant to say we should be worried aboutit not happening fast enough.

Now it would be silly to say, on a planet dominated by human technology, that biggerbrains don’t help with survival, but there is a threshold, and probably a fairly narrowmaze to navigate in evolving a brain capable of complex abstraction and problem solvingwithout it becoming a survival hindrance.

Tons of critters have big brains, most of them have had them for more generations thanwe’ve had our human or near-human level one, so either the next couple key steps requiresa lot of improbable flukes or most of the time any improvement isn’t an actual improvementfrom a survival perspective.

We still know so little about intelligence, human or animal, that it is impossible tocall this transition zone an improbable one, but it is my own best guess for the biggestfilter on going from animal to human intelligence.

Relatively large brains have been around a long time, and in species that have had manygenerations, so simply getting a bigger brain itself is no problem.

It’s getting one that doesn’t become a survival threat, and when you consider thesheer amount of resources we have to pour into a kid, or that chimps or dolphins orelephants do, compared to even a rat let alone an insect, we can see how that happens.

High intelligence and conscious thought are often going to represent a fatal disadvantageto a creature and a species, not an advantage, and breeding slowly with huge inputs of resourcesdidn’t advantage humans much until we had it for a long while.

There are so many occasions in the last couple millions years where we barely clung on, ratherthan dominating the ecosystem as now, keep in mind most of the other folks in our genusaren’t around anymore, and there’s no consensus that we did any of them in, letalone every species of them.

There’s a scifi novel by biologist Peter Watts called Blindsight that explores thisin more detail.

He makes some very strong arguments about how valuable intelligence and consciousnessreally are in there, and I strongly recommend it.

I don’t want to spoil it, since it is also our SFIA August Book of the Month, sponsoredby Audible, and is essentially a mystery so it’s hard to discuss without spoilers.

But if you didn’t find my arguments about higher intelligence to be universally goodor particularly compelling, I’m pretty sure his will do the job.

It definitely shakes up the conventional view of intelligence and offers an interestingsolution to the Fermi Paradox.

Regardless, species have survival strategies, and the big brain route requires committingto a few: small litters, long upbringing time, long lives, and heavy interdependence.

Lone wolf species are not well suited to benefit from giant brains, too likely to die beforereaching maturity without protection, too hard to benefit from specialization when youneed to be jack of all trades.

But just because you’ve broken that barrier into a reasonably human-level brain doesn’tmean the job is complete.

Once you’ve made that leap, something only we have really done, doesn’t mean the jobis done.

In the two or three million years we’ve been around, our crawl to technology has beenabysmally slow till maybe the last 10 or 20,000 years.

We got fire, very handy, but it took us a long time to apply that to making ceramicsor metals.

In all that time before then, we had it used it to stay warm, to keep predators away, tofire-sharpen sticks, and to cook meat.

So imagine a species that had sharp claws, thick fur, was an apex predator, and coulddigest raw meat better than we can.

Fire doesn’t help that much, and the stuff is terribly dangerous.

They will probably never invent metals or ceramics because even if they do invent fire,it is a dangerous device of little value to them.

We evolved during a series of ice ages when the planet was generally cooler than normaland we ourselves came from a warm part of it and don’t particularly have warm fur,even when we were hairier.

Odds are pretty good that most species that get to the big brain zone don’t really needthat, and that is the main reason you hang around by a fire for protracted periods andmight ponder it and its other uses.

We think fire was invented possibly as far back a two million years ago, but 600,000years is the loose consensus for definite regular use.

Definitive use for cooking only goes back 200,000 years, but it’s hard to say if thatmight not go back a lot further.

Cooking food helped us digest it.

We actually have an awful digestive track for an omnivore and we should assume thatis abnormal.

Digesting food you have already ingested and not maximizing what you can get out of itis a bit of weird oversight, possibly a very fortunate one for us though, since it notonly meant we need fire to help with that, but it might have been a big factor in agriculture.

More on that in a moment, but our crappy digestive system might have been very fortunate.

So we already need a few unrelated mutations – longer lives, longer maturation, biggerbrains, and a preference for tribes or clans – to be able to truly take advantage ofhigh intelligence, and again the big point of evidence for it otherwise being disadvantageousis how many other critters have had decently large brains as long or longer than us, moregenerations evolve to catch up in the brain race, and still have not done so.

It’s probably not that hard a mutation, just typically not handy.

The octopus is an intelligent creature in that it is good at problem-solving and canlearn and apply that knowledge.

Recent genetic evidence says that their intelligence evolved around 400 million years ago.

Why then are they not the dominant species having had such a long evolutionary head-starton us?

Perhaps it comes down to them lacking those traits I mentioned.

They are solitary, live in an ocean where fire is not an option and have short lives.

Now we have the issue that most of our early technology just isn’t that handy, particularlyif you don’t have hands.

A lion doesn’t really need anything sharper than its claws for survival but would stillbenefit from being able to hit a deer at range with a sharp stick or get leverage by swingingan axe.

But holding and swinging something is quite hard without the right anatomy and actuallyaiming to hit something at range with a stone or spear is much harder.

It took us a very long time to make and improve such things, and if they weren’t as beneficialto us, even if they were somewhat beneficial, it probably would have taken longer and maybenever.

Someone might invent a paperclip in the absence of paper, but it’s not exactly a devicethat will awe the tribe and get passed onto future generations.

Our tribes were not that big, they couldn’t be, and couldn’t afford specializationsor knowledge retention that didn’t help the tribe in an obvious way.

We have found that a lot of critters do prefer cooked food over raw food, apes will usuallypick a baked potato over a raw one for instance, when offered, so we don’t want to assumeyou have to gain a huge benefit from cooked food to do it, and it also helps you storefood.

Still, storing food is a pretty abstract concept, most critters don’t do it and the ones whodo are not engaging in a learned behavior that involves conscious thought, so it’snot like a squirrel is going to think about cooking food to store it like he does nuts,and for that matter such critters usually store foods that last longer without beingcooked.

The other thing about fire of course is that it keeps predators away.

Not all predators, and alien predators might be different.

What’s more, alien planets are often not going to be well set up for fire.

I don’t mean because they lack a decently dense oxygen atmosphere either, we coveredthat in the Rare Earth Hypothesis conditions last time.

You need an environment where stuff can get dry, and a lot of planets might be way morehumid or rain more often too, or have much faster plant decay.

Decent odds are one of our ancestors was sitting on a nice soft bed of dry grass to be comfortablewhile relentlessly banging some rocks together to sharpen them and got fire that way, oddsare also good they didn’t have an epiphany about its uses and this had to happen a tonsof times before anyone thought to use it.

Anyway, if you can make fires reasonably easily, you can probably also use them to keep atleast some predators at bay.

Which is handy if you have predators who eat you.

It’s awful though if you are a big apex predator with great nocturnal senses.

Predators tend to fall into two camps, ambush predators and pursuit predators.

A spider is an ambush predator, it waits till something falls into its web.

Cougars are usually ambush predators too.

Humans are pursuit predators, we chase our prey, and we are a sub-type of it called apersistence hunter.

Your cat is a pursuit predator too; it will stalk something then leap out and chase itif it tries to flee, but not for long.

Humans keep chasing, we literally used to chase our prey till it got exhausted and thengo kill it, that is how we could take out giant wooly mammoths.

Something bigger than an elephant, which also travels in packs, and is not terribly afraidof sharp sticks.

We’re also the only primate that does persistence hunting; we’re very good at it.

Humans are excellent at long jogging for hours and we can get rid of heat fast, part of whywe can both support a giant brain, which gives off a ton of heat, and benefit from fire tostay warm.

We’d go startle a pack of animals and give chase, they’d usually outrun us, we’dcatch up and scare them into running again, we can do this all day.

We can make frightening noises, communicate over a large distance by speech, set fireto things to scare our prey more, and just keep jogging after them till one breaks aleg or literally runs itself to death.

And yes, lots of animals can do that, they just keep going until they stroke out, humansdon’t, we pace ourselves and can literally jog all day if in good shape.

Of course dogs helped a lot too.

Fire scares, but dogs warn.

They were good at alerting us when some predator was nearby so it didn’t come in and eatus, and they are pursuit predators too.

They’re good at finding smaller critters, an extra source food, at tracking critters,at scaring them away in the night, and also handy for both harassing animals we are chasingand transporting the carcasses.

Yes we used dogs as one of our original beast of burden.

It’s even hypothesized that since humans use eye contact followed by moving our gazeas one of our most basic silent communication tricks, and dogs are one of the few crittersthat understand that trick, that it could have helped a lot with our hunting.

Animal domestication is rightly considered one of our big steps to civilization and thatdid start with dogs, presumably those brave enough to approach us, or let us approach,but not so aggressive as to attack.

Keep in mind that’s fairly peculiar behavior too, a lot of animals don’t even like tocome near their own species, let alone another they’re not planning to eat.

Why did humans keep animals around and alive?

How many other species who also shared our other characteristics would?

Would we have gotten civilization without that?

Now of course to get civilization we needed agriculture which means settling down in oneplace, cats were very handy then since they eat the vermin that were attracted to ourfood stores and garbage.

It’s been suggested that a lot of the foods we ate, and to put it bluntly, did not entirelydigest, grew in our waste, and we harvested these when we’d come back to a campsitethe next year.

It also has been suggested that thousands of years of gathering the things we got morefood value out of selectively bred them to be easier to digest; a lot of those earlycereal crops weren’t very easy to eat nor terribly nutritious.

Of course we also have fire-stick farming, we are a bit of pyromaniac species and weused that for hunting, but we probably also noticed that when we torched a forest it tendedto come back as savannah grass plains that a lot of grazing animals thrived better in.

So some places we did forest gardening and others we torched the place and grew us grass-eatingherbivores.

Presumably at some point we figured out that we could cut out the middleman and eat someof those cereal grasses ourselves.

Many uncertainties remain, but needless to say we eventually started hunting less infavor of keep our meat animals around and growing crops for them and us to eat.

This allowed permanent settlements and more people, both of which are handy since thelatter allows more specialization and the former means you don’t have to limit allyour possessions to that which you can carry.

I said early it took us a long time to go from fire to ceramics and metal working, butit is worth remembering that it is kind of hard to drag an anvil or kiln with you everyday and the work you can do without those is fairly limited and inferior.

So you get cities and specialists and eventually writing so that you can pass knowledge onto people who aren’t physically present at the time and don’t have to remember thingsour brains aren’t well designed for, like exact numbers of how many cows Bob broughtinto town last year and if he paid his taxes on them, which is probably what most earlywriting was interested in, not technology, personal journals or literature.

At this stage we think of technology as fairly inevitable, people clearly can pass technologyover great distances in both space and time, and also clearly know its value.

Twinned to that, most talks of dark ages and lost technology are 90% malarkey, the EuropeanDark Age is mostly a romantic myth made up during later periods and what little truthto it there is still ignores that chunk of the planet is not the entire planet or evena particularly large chunk of it.

It has happened of course, there was some loss in the Dark Age and we’ve got exampleslike the Indus Valley Civilization that clearly got quite advanced, then just fell to pieces.

Yet by and large useful technology doesn’t get lost, it gets lost because it isn’tuseful to people who have it at the moment.

Aqueducts didn’t get casually forgotten, they just aren’t that useful in a lot ofplaces and circumstances, ditto giant buildings composed of arches are a bit of niche application.

So we don’t want to assume civilizations can’t lose technology and that once youhave it you become totally invested in improving it.

Only maybe the last 10-20 billion humans alive, out of maybe 100 billion who ever lived, havebeen of the technology-addiction mindset, and even that is probably being generous.

They knew technology was handy for all of human history at least, that being definedas the times and places we kept written records, which did not include most of the planet untilrelatively recently even compared to tiny period of 4 or 5,000 years we had it at all.

Many of them just didn’t think on it much, they had what they had and no one was goingaround inventing new things constantly, but some outright rejected it.

After Rome burned down, or one of the times anyway, the one Nero may or may not have caused,an engineer approached the Emperor Vespasian with some devices that would make transportingconstruction materials much cheaper.

Vespasian – who mind you was generally considered one of the saner emperors – rejected it,saying he needed to feed his commoners.

They needed work to eat.

Now this is coming from a Roman Emperor, guys not generally noted for being concerned aboutthe common people and also coming from one of the more engineering-oriented civilizations.

In that light, we probably shouldn’t assume advanced technology was inevitable for humans,or that every civilization with the talent for it will pursue it to modern levels either.

Similarly, the Fermi Paradox is not actually about detecting modern civilizations, butones that have gotten advanced further than us.

We would have problems detecting ourselves more than maybe 100 light years away, andcould miss ourselves even closer.

So we have to advance further ourselves and of course we might abandon that path our destroyourselves first.

If most alien civilizations destroy themselves at at our level of development, or shrug andsay they have enough technology, or if they actually hit a brick wall on development,then there’s no Fermi Paradox.

We would simply not see those civilizations when we peer through our telescopes at themunless they were right next door.

Now I’ve discussed before all the doomsday options in one of the first episodes on thechannel, Apocalypse How, and we may revisit them in more detail in the future, but weusually bypass any consideration that we would stop progressing technologically, if we werealive.

None of us believe science is done yet, but there it a bit of an article of faith impliedthere.

If I said we’d know all we could learn of science in another generation or two, everyonewould laugh and I’d join them, but we want to avoid assuming there is always anothermystery and that every answer brings two more questions, thinking that itself is a terriblyunscientific viewpoint.

We can hypothesize a time where we have learned everything, or hit a brick wall on the furtherdevelopment, and that could be inside the next couple of centuries.

However, that doesn’t matter to the Fermi Paradox unless that knowledge includes learningsome things we think are in reach really are not.

No fusion power, no self-replicating machines or nanotechnology, no extending people’slives or freezing them and waking them up.

Fundamentally if you’ve got those, even just some of those, you can do interstellartravel and shoot for Kardashev 2 civilization status, and that does make the Fermi Paradoxreal.

If not, if technology does hit a brick wall, there is no paradox.

And I can say it, but I don’t believe it, so the Paradox is real for me.

Now the last option there is that just about everyone gives up on advancing technology.

That’s hard for me to accept too, and I think for most of my audience as well, forme, for us, the notion of turning away from the technological path is something so hideousthat I can only regard it as essentially heresy.

Unthinkable.

Morally Bankrupt.

Cowardly.

Even Evil.

It would be the most absolute rejection of so many of the ideals we hold as underlyingeverything our modern civilization stands for.

And yet, when I think of folks worried about automation taking jobs, a concern I myselfshare, I do think of Emperor Vespasian rejecting a cheaper means of mechanical transport tofeed his people instead.

The obsolescence of occupations, such as took place during the industrial revolution, andis happening now with self-driving vehicles and general automation, can also lead to disenfranchisementof people, which has and probably will lead to pitchfork riots.

If people associate technology with a negative, they can intentionally turn from it.

There is also that other nagging background concern when we talk about automation too,that we might get automation so good it thinks for itself and is smarter than us, and eithereliminates and replaces us or even if benevolent just reduces us to overfed happy useless pets.

We’ll talk about artificial intelligence and such concerns more next month, but I couldsee a lot of civilizations looking at their level of technology, whose fundamental purposeis to make their lives better, safer, and more convenient, and just saying “Enoughis enough, anything more sticks us too close to a precipice someone might push us over.

I’d rather be inconvenienced than irrelevant or redundant”.

I don’t see that happening often and have difficulty imagine it happens every time,that every civilization abandons technological advancement and does do before getting offtheir own home planet, but I think that argument probably does happen every time and prettymuch has to happen at about this technological level.

We shouldn’t rule that out; as it approaches, folks, even those who are otherwise very pro-technology,grow cooler and more hostile to further advancements and decide to stop short of Artificial Intelligenceand any technologies that would make it too easy for someone to make one, or make a tailoredvirus or swarm of grey goo nanorobots or homemade nukes.

I cannot see wiping oneself out as a Great Filter, with the sole exception of some sortof Suicide Pact technology that looks amazing, is easy to develop once noticed, and invariablykills everyone.

I also can’t see artificial intelligence as any sort of filter, since it simply replacesa species, same as we replaced Neanderthal.

But while I don’t find it likely, I could see intentionally shutting down further techadvancement as a possible last Great Filter.

Again I don’t think so though.

No, for my part, to summarize both this episode and the two before it, I tend to think wehave an awful lot of hurdles and filters to getting where we are now, and that almostnobody ever has, and probably no one in this galaxy or its nearest neighbors, maybe eventhe whole supercluster.

I think the filters are done and probably have been since we first started settlingdown into those first towns that became cities.

I don’t think it was any one thing, but I tend to suspect the two big ones are theconditions for a planet to be plausibly able to support civilizations arising, and thatfinal jump from smart ape to proto-human, and having it happen to a species that wasimprobably biologically configured to benefit most from basic technology, where many otherswould not.

Those are the only two genuinely unique things we have, unless abiogenesis really does turnout to be a super-improbable fluke.

A Planet with the right size and conditions and location in time and space to nurturemassive biodiversity over very long times, and critters capable of genuine abstract thoughtin bodies and social structure very suited to benefit from it.

We simply don’t know enough to say, and perhaps that’s part of the appeal to theGreat Filter and Rare Earth approach for me, it is the camp I subscribe to, but while thereare a lot of uncertainties and shaky reasoning, it doesn’t seem fatally flawed in any way,whereas pretty much every other solution I’ve ever heard tends to seem that way.

We covered the rest of those in the Fermi Paradox Compendium and we’ll look at moreof them in more detail down the road, and we will try to give them a fair shake, butto me the Great Filters seems the best candidate, and if does not to you, then I hope by nowyou can at least see why it appeals to a lot of us when contemplating this topic.

Next week, we will be taking a look at interplanetary civilizations with follow up on the SpaceWarfare episode, Interplanetary warfare.

For alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button, share it with others, and try outsome of the other Fermi Paradox or Alien Civilization series episodes, and don’t forget to checkout Peter Watts’ Blindsight, our Audible book of the month.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Outward Bound: Colonizing Mars | | 2017-08-17 | | https://youtu.be/kmFOBoy2MZ8 | +--------------------------------+

Life on Mars has captured our imagination for many generations and we have wonderedwhat life would be like there even before H.G. Wells’ novel “The War of the Worlds”.

So, today we will tackle that topic.

We spent most of the Spring in the Upward Bound Series, looking at all the ways we mightbe able to get into space faster, cheaper, and safer than now.

Once you get up there though the question becomes ‘what now?’.

Now the usual answer is that you can colonize planets, and of course that is our focus forthis series.

Yet, it often seems like discussions of this spend most of their time talking about howto get there or some small colony of five or six people or maybe even a hundred or so.

Which isn’t much of colony honestly, or they jump all the way to terraforming theplanet with a population of millions or billions already.

I do want to spend some time on that phase of things, but the middle ground often getsignored.

So we’ll discuss true terraforming but save a more detailed look at that for next month’sepisode on Colonizing Venus.

Similarly, we often talk about the role of robots in space travel and colonization, andit will likely play a big role in exploring and colonizing, but we’ll save a more detailedlook at that for Colonizing Titan, after Venus.

Connecting this episode to those two and others which may follow, we will look at conceptslike trade for networking these places to each other and Earth.

A colony, besides just serving as more living space for us, really needs to have some commodityit offers and others it needs.

We always want any given colony to be as self-supporting as possible but at the same time, it doeshelp to have trade to both optimize production and help keep everyone welded together.

A common feature in discussions of extraterrestrial colonies is them breaking off, so you getEarth versus Mars, and we’ll talk about that notion a bit today and throughout theseries.

Now you don’t have to have seen any of the episodes on this channel to watch this one,but it is a bit of a sequel to the Upward Bound series and our previous discussionsof Industrializing the Moon and Asteroid Mining are essentially part of this series too, soif you haven’t seen them yet, you may wish to watch them afterwards.

In any event, we are not interested in how to get to Mars, or what the ships that transportpeople there are like, so we are going to jump to our colony already in progress.

One or more of the systems discussed in the Upward Bound series are in place and we’vegot some orbital habitats around Earth and some serious resource extraction on the Moon.

In orbit around the Moon we have Borman station, named for the commander of the first mannedship to orbit the moon back in 1968.

We’ll assume the main base down on the Moon is Armstrong Base and the main hub close toEarth is Gagarin Station.

We’ll be spending a fair amount of time on Borman Station in the series as our jumpingoff point to the solar system, so let me add that it is a rotating habitat simulating roughlyMartian gravity.

This was done for two reasons.

First, it gives folks going back and forth from Earth and the Moon a mid-point of gravityto get used to the gravity at their destination; second, it lets us test the long term effectsof Martian Gravity on people, as well as construction and equipment tolerances for Mars.

A ship going straight from Earth or Gagarin Station to Mars might use a rotating sectionthat began at Earth gravity and spun down to Martian normal, during the trip, but wewill say most transit to Mars goes between Borman Station around the Moon to Mars.

Leaving from the Moon to Mars has some advantages, but the one we are mostly interested in isthat you can bring fuel and raw materials up from the Moon, and it’s lower gravitywell, rather than Earth.

Plus, starting a major base on the Moon let’s you prove it is viable before you start sendingpeople far further away from potential help.

Now we are going to assume we are not sending passenger ships to Mars at slow speeds, optingfor more energy intensive approaches, but for a large bulk cargo shipments around thesolar system you do probably want to use these most efficient approaches.

These can take years however, so it’s great for moving bulk material around but not people.

When our ship leaves Borman station, it will be carrying a few hundred new colonists ona trip of several weeks to Mars, which already has 3 principal settlements on it of a fewthousand people each.

This ship is the first of many planned ones now that a space elevator has been plannedon Mars.

This ship will be carrying it, and indeed it is going to become the new space stationhub for Mars.

As we’ve discussed before, it’s easier to build elevators on lower gravity planets,one on the Moon can be done with conventional materials for instance, Mars is harder buta good deal easier than Earth.

We’ll leave it academic if anyone has managed to make an Elevator down to Earth and assumethey have an Orbital Ring instead, but we will assume someone has made one strong enoughfor Mars and that it got manufactured down on the Moon.

As mentioned, part of Borman Station’s purpose was to test if people could handle MartianGravity in the long term, and it got started before the first Martian colonies did.

We don’t know if 38% of normal gravity is something people can tolerate in the longterm but for today we will assume the answer was yes, just with some supplementary medicationand exercise.

Should that turn out not to be true, I think Mars would be unlikely to ever become a genuinecolony of Earth, or rather, you’d probably have a lot of rotating habitats around Marsthat considered themselves Martian, but the planet itself would basically be a place folksspent time down on working there at mining facilities, not a home.

Sort of a reverse of the concept of a classic coastal city, everybody lives on the landand many go to work in the sea, often for protracted periods, only here lots of peoplework on the planet but everyone lives in orbit.

So for the last few decades since men first stepped foot on Mars they’ve been testingthis notion and concluded that indeed, this gravity is sufficient and, unlike on the Moon,they don’t need to use mixed spin and normal gravity for folks on the surface, somethingwe’ve discussed before, or cyborg people up.

Healthy exercise and some supplements are enough.

They’ve also got an orbital ring complete around Earth and a new production method forcarbon nanotubes to allow for a decently strong and cheap space elevator that can handle Martiangravity.

With this in mind, the drive to colonize Mars has grown, and it is also economical to gothere for tourism, at least marginally economical.

Most people couldn’t afford it and most who can don’t want to, but at least manythousands of folks can and do want to visit, so Borman station plans to start two-way tripsthere leaving monthly with a couple hundred people each, many of whom will remain as colonists.

When this ship arrives though it is going to park in geostationary orbit, technicallyareostationary orbit since it is Mars not Earth, but we will use geostationary in ourdiscussion of any orbit around any planet or moon that keeps hovering over the samespot.

In our case, that will be 17,000 kilometers above Mars, closer than geostationary is forEarth.

And they will hovering just over Pavonis Mons, a large mountain on Mars a good deal tallerthan Mount Everest and quite close to the equator, in the Tharsis Region.

Humanity’s first Martian base was near there and is typically just called Pavonis.

We will name the ship turning space station Port Tharsis.

The other two settlements are close by, a ways northwest at Olympus Mons, the tallestmountain in the solar system, and the other in Valles Marineris, to the southeast, oneof the largest and longest canyon systems in the solar system.

Now by default you want to have a space elevator right over the equator, and indeed we willplace Port Tharsis right over the Martian Equator, but as we discussed in the SpaceElevators Episode, you can connect multiple tethers to the same space station that connectelsewhere than the equator, balancing out their forces, much like guy wires on a tower,so long as at least one of those connects to the north and south hemispheres each.

So while a single space elevator just south of Pavonis is an option, we will instead bedropping three tethers down, then moving their ends to connect to the top of Olympus Mons,to Pavonis, and to Marineris canyon settlements.

So they have three, which provides plenty of redundancy and gives us direct access tospace and vice-versa.

This is handy because while Pavonis is the oldest and biggest settlement, a lot of folksat Olympus and Marineris prefer to keep their settlements independent, and until recentlyPavonis was the nominal planetary capital.

There’s been quite a lot of arguing about that recently.

The original Mars colony was under the United Nations and since it can often take an hourfor a message to get to Earth and back with a reply, the security council has a commanderthere who oversees things and is at Pavonis.

With all the new colonists arriving folks have been discussing something a little morepermanent and democrat and independent.

Back when it’s just a few hundred people this was fairly laughable; they needed tophone home for everything and everyone was a specially trained and vetted expert at something.

This is changing.

As we step out of the first landing car arriving at Pavonis down that elevator, they are proudlycelebrating their first café being opened, and as we look around at our other fellowtravelers, we are reminded of their own backgrounds.

Having spent many weeks traveling with them, we know them well enough and most are notexperts.

This is no longer a mission where the best and brightest can be selected and screenedfor stability.

One of our companions is the new magistrate who is supposed to be replacing the formermagistrate who dealt with minor misdemeanors but there were very few of those and neverany felonies, so he spent most of his time helping people with legal documents dealingwith issues back home.

Divorces, trusts, wills, etc.

In a colony of several thousand it is a rare day at least someone hasn’t had a familymember back on Earth die or had some sort of issue involving a relative.

Mars, the planet named for the God of War however, has just had its first big fight,a barroom brawl off at Olympus over independence, and instead of replacing the magistrate, whowill be remaining in Pavonis, he is heading off to be the magistrate at Olympus.

The original colonists didn’t have a lot of folks with legal or law enforcements backgroundsamong them, there’s a lot of things they need to have, and at the same time they havemore than enough specialists from a lot of fields.

All of that is going to have to change as they transition from being an outpost to apermanent colony.

But what about Pavonis?

What is this settlement like?

As a new colonist looking around, we do see domes and quite a few, but not as many aswe’d expect for a town of a few thousand.

But beyond those the view, while breathtaking, is quite barren.

Most of the settlement is in caves and lavatubes in and around the giant mountain.

Those domes are just for hydroponics.

Going inside, it seems a bit dreary even, and we find ourselves wondering what the appealis to come to Mars.

Oh sure, the first few thousand folks who came here did so for the simple motivationof coming here.

People go to Mount Everest or Antarctica just to go there, but precious few decide to livethere.

In the short term that’s not too big a problem, even if only 1% of 1% of Earth’s populationwanted to come to Mars that would still be a million people, far more than the currentpopulation, and of course once there they’ll have children themselves and doubtless therewill always be more people wanting to come to.

And yet, what is the appeal?

What drove colonization on Earth?

It’s very unlikely many folks would be sent to Mars as prisoners, as with Australia, orto flee religious persecution as was the case with many American colonies.

There’s no luxury crops like sugar or tobacco to grow in plantations on Mars.

Mars has plenty of iron, but so does Earth and the Moon.

It is a breathtaking place to vacation, low gravity with mountains that dwarf anythingon Earth and vast canyon systems too, and that’s something since some folks mightvisit, subsidizing the colony, and decide to stay too.

Its major export right now is curiosity, prestige, and wonder, which keeps the money flowingfrom Earth, for now, but Earth doesn’t particularly need anything Mars has.

Folks sitting around the new Pavonis Café discussing the future of Mars try to thinkof stuff, but they mostly can only see things Mars can import or export to other planets,and right now the only other planet besides Mars and Earth with any people on it is Venuswhich has a small scientific outpost floating in its atmosphere.

There are also a few experimental mining operations in the asteroid belt and various robot probespoking around the planets and moons of the outer solar system.

Trade, they think, has to wait on the rest of the solar system getting settled, and theyworry there might be a catch-22 in there, since the motivation to settle all the placesseems to revolve around other places already being settled too.

Of course they talk about terraforming Mars one day too, not just living inside mountainsand lava tubes and domes, and some say that it isn’t even something far ahead in time,but never, that there is no advantage or purpose to trying to give Mars its own atmosphereand oceans.

That they should keep on just making new domes with air inside them and basically turn thegiant mountain they live in into one big arcology, essentially a giant mountain hollowed outinto a skyscraper.

The folks over at Marineris feel a bit differently though, and that’s where we are bound.

We could, of course, take the elevator back up to Port Tharsis and back down to Marineris,but instead we will be taking a ground vehicle.

The lack of any serious atmosphere makes flight on Mars very difficult, but it also meanshigh-speed rail is cheaper since there’s not much air drag to fight.

That’s going to be a while because while it would be very handy, building a few thousandkilometers of track between Olympus, Pavonis, and Marineris won’t be easy.

In some ways it is easier than on Earth, low gravity makes bridges over chasms cheaper,and you can get away with much sharper inclines up and down craters and hills, but you’veonly got a population of thousands, not millions, and you have to use a lot larger percentageof your population for just basic food and life support here too.

Oxygen is plentiful enough, but it all has to be liberated from water or baked out ofrock.

Nitrogen for plants is hard to find, and every acre or hectare of crops you want to growneeds a dome over it first, or artificial lighting if done underground in a lavatubeor cave.

You can’t plant your crops in raw Martian dirt either, it has to be done hydroponicallyor in soil made by taking that dirt and processing it in huge vats full of microbes and algaefirst.

The notion of transforming Mars into an Earth-like planet is daunting to say the least.

It’s not worth doing, says the driver, going on about how at Marineris they’ve decidedthe future is in robust para-terraforming.

That’s where you just slowly cover an entire planet over in domes, to keep the air in andthe local soil out.

Glass above, concrete below, and you just add dirt you’ve made into them.

They plan to eventually dome over the entire Valles Marineris cavern system.

The drive there is slow going, part of why they want that rail system, because there’sno gas station on Mars and no air for them to use to burn that gas anyway.

Everything is electric and battery operated.

They don’t really have the manpower for building rail or power lines yet and Earthsaid no to shipping those in.

What they’re really hoping for back at Pavonis though is one of those new fusion reactorsfrom back on Earth.

They’re big, heavy, and getting one to Mars would be a problem; but once here, they don’tneed above ground domes anymore.

They could do all their growing in vast lavatubes and caverns that wouldn’t need sunlightthen.

Valles Marineris is stunning in scope.

It’s not that it is 4000 kilometers long, it’s that it is 7 kilometers deep and atits widest, over 200 kilometers.

It’s almost incomprehensible, even in low gravity, to imagine a single bridge spanningthat, let alone a dome.

Fortunately our real destination is Noctis Labyrinthus, a series of maze-like smallerchasms on the western edge of Valles Marineris closest to Pavonis Mons.

It begins just a few hundred kilometers southeast of Pavonis and its many smaller, narrowerchasms are filled with an icy fog.

This pilot project for terraforming has selected one of the narrower, shorter, and shallowercanyons, and they are busy walling up the end so they can dome the whole thing overand pump in water from the ice in the area to make the first lake on Mars.

It’s stunning to take in the scope of this dome, just a few kilometers long and wide,and you are already wondering about cracks or meteor strikes on it and how they planto deal with them, let alone how they plan to build titanic ones across the wider partsof the main Valles Marineris chasms.

As we settle in we start seeing four distinct viewpoints among the colonists.

Here in Marineris, the interest is all in domes: endless domes to eventually cover thewhole planet.

And the focus is on how to manufacture them and repair them and harden them against cracksand meteor strikes.

Grids of radar and lasers to shoot down incoming meteors, possibly tall curtain walls aroundthe edges to help minimize erosion damage to the domes from dust storms.

Individual smaller domes connected with airlocks or great big ones with graphene supports andliquid patches that could be rapidly sprayed on any crack or hole.

They envision not so much a Green Mars as a Greenhouse Mars: a ‘worldhouse’ as itis sometimes called.

They point out that it is far easier to get all the nitrogen and oxygen they need foratmosphere, when it is only maybe a hundred meters high, not kilometers.

If you want to have normal air pressure just from gravity alone, with no ceiling or walls,you need to have a lot of air piled on top of air.

On Earth, every square inch of surface has 14 pounds of air over it, stretching manymiles, or 10,000 kilograms per square meter.

On Mars, because of the lower gravity, you actually need more air per unit of area, tohave normal air pressure.

That means your atmosphere has to go up higher.

On Earth, at the top of Mount Everest, it’s fairly hard to breathe as the air has thinnedout a lot by that height, and the pressure dropped.

If we could transport Olympus Mons back to Earth, at 22 kilometers in height, the airdensity wouldn’t even be a tenth of what we are used to.

Conveniently on Mars, since the atmosphere would have to stretch up higher, you mightstill be able to breath all the way at the peak of Olympus Mons, and still be able todown at the bottom of those chasms, where pressure would keep rising, though odds arethey’d all be full of water anyway.

That’s what the folks at Olympus Mons want, the second philosophical camp for Mars.

They want to terraform the whole planet, so you can walk around anywhere without a spacesuitaround you or a glass dome above you.

We’re curious about them, though the folks at Marineris say they’re all blue sky dreamersand more than a bit batty, but we decide to visit them anyway.

To do so we first have to go back to Pavonis, and meet with folks from the other two camps.

One of them is simply the pessimism camp.

They think this whole idea was a mistake and they shouldn’t have come here at all.

They are going home when the next colony ship arrives, there’s always plenty of spaceon those for a return trip, and they’re irritated the most recent ship became PortTharsis instead.

They’re basically loitering around Pavonis sowing pessimism.

They’re still pro-space expansion, they did come here in the first place after all,but they’re thinking planets and moons besides Earth are for robots to live on, and peopleshould stick to arcologies on Earth or perhaps rotating habitats in orbit.

That’s our fourth camp too basically.

They like the idea of having settlements down here on Mars but they think, now that there’seasy access back to orbit with the elevators up to Port Tharsis, that they can have justa few settlements planetside but do most of their living up in orbital habitats, likeall the ones being built around Earth these days, and settlements here should be mostlyabout comfort for the folks who need to be down here overseeing mining.

Yes robots would be handy but they still need a lot of oversight and a lot of times it’sjust easier to use a person.

But they want nice, contained, truly Earth-like habitats and they figure all their other industryand agriculture can be done on those in orbit.

There’s no need to dome over the whole planet, let alone terraform it.

Just a few places here and there for mineral extraction, ice mining, and for the touriststo visit of course.

Indeed, better to leave the planet mostly as-is.

They figure no tourist is going to want to visit domes; they want to see the naturalterrain.

They’re all for a few of these projects, doming over a few chasms, having a few lavatubehabitats underground or in the mountain caverns, but they’d rather see Martian settlementmostly happen in orbit.

They are somewhat open to the notion of terraforming Mars centuries down the road, but the waythey see it, they first need to get their industries built up and have exports.

This way, they can eventually pay for the huge amounts of nitrogen, and probably watertoo, they’d need to bring in from other planets or comets.

So we set out on the much longer trek to Olympus Mons, and the last stretch is rather gruelingbecause they have set themselves up all over the mountain including the peak, and we dowant to see Mars from the peak of the tallest mountain in the solar system.

It is no surprise that there is a bar up there and it is the one the fight broke out at earlierwhen we first arrived.

We run into our friend, the magistrate there, and share a drink.

He informs us that this is not the home of the second philosophical camp, the folks thatwant to terraform Mars completely, but rather three camps who argue with each other a lot.

One group does want to terraform Mars, while the other group wants to bioform people andplants on Mars.

And indeed, that’s split into two subgroups as well.

One wants to set up an ecology where everything can live on native Mars dirt and not as thickan atmosphere, less nitrogen than Earth too, but thicker than now.

Plants genetically engineered to use the native soil.

People engineered to live on thinner air and better adapted to the local gravity.

The other group wants to go completely native: organisms tailored from the ground up to liveon Mars as-is; people cyborged up to walk around without spacesuits, who don’t needto breathe and are safe from radiation concerns too.

Why, they say, should we put all the effort into making this planet livable to humansand earth life, or even meet halfway in the middle, if we can just make new life thatcan live here?

The magistrate seems to have been converted.

There’s so many problems with terraforming he says.

The planet has virtually no air but when the duststorms come they are like a nuclear winter,blackening the sky for days or even weeks at a time, so solar power can be unreliableand plants need supplemental lighting.

If you get oceans and moisture in there, that would stop; but suddenly exposing the planetto lots of water is likely to result in huge flash floods and tsunamis of mud, with noplants and roots to hold them down.

It will never have enough gravity to be like Earth, even if we dropped every asteroid inthe belt and every moon around Jupiter on Mars, we still wouldn’t increase the gravitythat much, and it would be kind of wasteful.

But even ignoring the gravity, we’d need to bring in air from elsewhere.

Sure there’s enough oxygen, oxygen is plentiful pretty much everywhere in the solar system.

But not nitrogen.

The only abundant supplies for that besides Earth are Venus, Titan, and of course theSun itself.

But good luck lifting that nitrogen off of a star.

He points out that it isn’t like moving a few colonists; we’re talking about movingatmospheres and those are pretty heavy.

Earth’s atmosphere is 5 billion megatons, mostly nitrogen, and when we think of bigships, even huge oil tankers, a single megaton is about as much cargo as they could carry.

If one arrived carrying a megaton of nitrogen every day, it would take 100 million yearsto bring in enough nitrogen, and without a magnetosphere on Mars, it would probably evaporateaway before we finished.

No one wants to wait a hundred million years, so that means you’ve got megaton tankerships arriving not every day but at least thousands of times a day, or ships far larger.

And until near the end, there’s not much use to that existing atmosphere, part waythrough you can start adding water and possibly some tailored plants to get some basic ecologicalcycles going.

During that whole time, inhabiting the planet still means living inside domes or cavernsand you’d have to worry about those being destroyed in the geological chaos of a planetgaining oceans and atmosphere.

To keep that atmosphere there, we’ll also need to ring the planet in satellites, suckingin solar power to run electromagnets and create an artificial magnetosphere.

Mars is cold and far from the sun too, so you probably need to be considering orbitalmirrors to bring in some more light.

Those are both fairly hard tasks, though both are dwarfed by the task of bringing in allthat nitrogen and probably water too.

This is not a terraforming episode, we did one of those before and will look at suchconcepts again in the next episode on Venus, but it is always good to remember that terraforminga planet fundamentally alters it.

It’s not the existing one just turning blue and green, all but the biggest landmarks aregoing to cease to exist as sea rises and land slides under torrential storms.

No, this episode is about colonizing Mars and we see a handful of paths for doing that.

There’s the terraforming route, make the place as much like Earth as you can, and aswe discussed in that terraforming episode you have tons of options depending on howfar you are willing to go, up to and include adding mass to a planet or changing its daylength or even moving the thing to be closer or further from a star.

If you’ve got the will to do it, and the resources, you can terraform Mars to whateverdegree you see fit.

But it requires orders of magnitude more effort to do that than some of our other options,it’s less finding a cave to live in then building an entire mountain on a plain soyou can drill a cave into it.

Possible but probably not ideal.

Bioforming is an option, but again it comes down to how far you are willing to go, justin a different direction.

You might be able to limit yourself to fairly minimal tweaks to plants, animals, and people,and meet halfway in-between, terraforming part way too, but once you open the door tothat path, there is the question as to why not walk down it further?

And how far is too far?

And since the path for meeting in the middle still takes many centuries at least, isn’tthat likely to end up as a sliding standard as people move the milestones on what is acceptable?

If you are modifying people to the point that they can breathe easily in very thin air,why not in no air?

And why not just go the full cyborg route and not need food or air?

In that context why do you even need planets, except maybe for raw materials, and maybewhy even a body at all, in favor of a digital existence in a virtual landscape of your choosing,on any planet including surreal landscapes which are not physically possible?

And that is an option too.

So is the option of making Martian mean folks who live around Mars, and some who just godown to work the mines or visit the place.

The slow disassembly of the planet to construct rotating habitats, built as needed.

I don’t know which is best, I guess that will be for the Martians themselves to decidedown the road.

If I had to guess though I would wager on a little of all of the above.

There’s a mistake in thinking for instance that you actually have to terraform an entireplanet or not at all.

As an example, the mountains, Pavonis and Olympus Mons, sit in the middle of volcaniccaldera, and when you think of things like caldera or craters you often think of a bitof bowl with a rim around it.

There’s nothing stopping you from extending that straight up, like the Great Wall of Chinaencircling a place only 10 or 20 kilometers high.

That sounds like an insane project, but it really is no different then doming over suchan area or manufacturing a rotating habitat.

You could then fill just that area with air and water, some would leak out, but just tothe rest of the planet, so you could build one that was decently small to begin with,fill it with air and water, and just keep adding more to it, localized terraformingthat also slowly terraforms other areas if you want.

A similar concept is building up your atmosphere by doming over areas and just filling themwith new air and not worrying about what gets lost to leakage.

You don’t necessarily need a full Earth Atmosphere on the planet either.

People can survive for short periods in much lower pressure than Earth’s, and some organismsmight do just fine in it even without modification, and it doesn’t take too much air to giveyou a shield against most meteors.

People might get used to wearing masks when they go all the way outside, which might notbe too common if they just need to repair leaks.

Indeed since those various crack and spots near the leaks will be in between the localnative environment and the artificial one, it’s not a bad place to experiment withlimited bioforming, the methods where you meet halfway in the middle.

Heck, there is even a chance we might find some simple life on Mars, unlikely but wecan’t rule it out yet.

That of course raises the issue of whether or not it is okay to colonize a planet thatalready has life on it, and if so, do simple microbes count?

But also, if we did find life there, it might be very valuable.

Odds are there are a lot more marginal planets like Mars out there in the galaxy than Earth,and being able to use those, or some modified version of them, to help in early terraformingmight make them very valuable indeed.

I don’t know what the future of Mars holds, but if I had to guess, if we checked backon our colony in the year 3000, I would expect a little of everything.

Yes some Great Walls of Mars encircling some place that was genuinely terraformed.

Yes giant domes over chasms, with protection from meteors and self-sealing capabilities.

Yes smaller domes, yes big underground cities or hollow mountains artificially lit by fusionpower.

Yes some people who have modified themselves to live in the natural Martian environment,or to meet it halfway in between.

And yes, a swarm of rotating habitats above, where people live and grow food and manufacturematerials for export and handle imports of giant ships carrying water and air.

Each one generating a magnetic field for its own protection and to act in concert as ashield for the planet below.

Indeed each with its own defense grid to shoot down meteors that might hit them or the planet,and orbital mirrors that bring in more light.

They might eventually have to choose to terraform all the way or not, to bioform or not, oreven to disassemble the planet for materials or not.

But for a very long time they could choose not to occupy somewhere in the middle butthe whole spectrum of options, if and until they decide which is best.

And as I often say when it comes to colonies, it’s not just that we nowadays don’t knowfor sure which options are best, what with having never done it, but it isn’t our decisionanyway, it’s for the folks who live there to decide, and they have centuries to makethat decision and they can change it down the road.

They may be so removed from us by then that they don’t want to be much like Earth.

We’ll discuss making planets more Earth-like by terraforming more in our episode on ColonizingVenus next month, but next week we will be returning to Earth and following up on theRare Earth Hypothesis notions that Earth-like planets are incredibly rare by asking if intelligence,especially human level intelligence, might be quite uncommon to develop even on Earth-likeplanets, in our close out episode of the Fermi Paradox Great Filters series, Rare Intelligence.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button, share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Quiet Revolution: Technologies that will change the World| | 2017-08-10 | | https://youtu.be/jvH-7XX6pkk | +--------------------------------+

Many technologies show up with loud proclamations of how they will change our lives, while othersarrive more quietly, but just as surely revolutionize the way we live.

Two men wake up at 7 in the morning on August 10th.

The difference is one wakes up in the year 2017 and the other wakes up in 1717.

The latter wakes up chilly, to the sound of a rooster crowing, from a bed of straw heshares with lots of bedbugs.

Neither his night shirt nor his bedding is terribly clean, and he splashes water on hisface from a bowl to help wake up before looking outside to try to guess what the weather willbe like today.

He, like all of his family and most people he knows, is a farmer, so the weather mattersa lot to him, and any other news will be a long time coming, including that his brother,who lives just a couple towns away, broke his leg a few days back and passed away froman infection.

He works from sun up to sundown because he has little machinery and he would probablywork longer if he had access to something better than candles to provide light.

Our other man wakes up in 2017 to the sound of an alarm clock, he is not hot or cold becausehis home has central heating.

His pajamas and bedding are quite clean because he has a washer and dryer.

He is a bit groggy because he can light his home at the flick of a switch so often staysup later than he should.

Fortunately he has hot coffee and a hot shower to help him wake up, and he checks his emailwhile drinking that coffee and listening to the news and weather.

He already knows his brother broke his leg a few days back, even though he lives a longdistance away, and of course he does not die from an infection, he’s just at home boredand probably would welcome a phone call.

These are two very different lives.

They are separated by three centuries, a dozen generations, and a slew of inventions bothmajor and minor.

Those inventions, major and minor, have altered our civilization profoundly during that time.

Our topic for today however is not those inventions, but rather the ones emerging nowadays thatwill change our lives once more, many of which get little notice in the news.

Even those emerging technologies that get reported with much pomp and hype often bypassa lot of the simple yet drastic changes they will bring to how we go about our normal day.

This was a topic picked by a poll of the channels supporters on Patreon and it’s a great topic,but one that’s surprisingly hard to discuss.

A survey of technologies that don’t get talked about a lot, but will change the worldwe live in, requires introducing those technologies and explaining the potential of each.

The trick is that technologies that don’t get a lot of fanfare don’t get it becausetheir value and applications are not too obvious.

Fundamentally, technology is about making our lives better, safer, and more convenient.

To talk about the impact technology will have on our lives we need to go deeper than justwhat the technology does, like how a fusion reactor makes electricity cheaper and renewable,an obvious benefit, but also how it alters our day to day life.

Cheaper electricity is awesome, an energy source that doesn’t run out or cause environmentalproblems is awesome, but it is easy to overlook all the other benefits that come along withthem.

We once devoted an entire episode to just that one technology back in the early daysof the channel.

Today we need to cover several such technologies.

So to do this we will walk through a day in the life of two people, Sam, who lives nowadaysin the year 2017, and Hannah, who lives just a few generations from now in 2077.

Sam wakes up, hits snooze on the alarm clock, then wakes up again five minutes later andgrumbles as he gets out of bed.

He gets the coffee maker started, then heads into the bathroom to shower, shave, and brushhis teeth.

Unlike most of his ancestors, he has all of his teeth, though some are fillings or caps.

He drinks coffee and has a bowl of cereal, checks the news, dresses, and plots out hisday.

So Sam gets in his car, and unlike his grandfather, he can remotely start the car before headingout so the vehicle is all warmed up when he gets in.

He stops for gas before getting on the freeway, and spends maybe five minutes pumping it.

He doesn’t need to speak to anyone though, it is 2017 not 1987, so he just slips hisdebit card into the machine rather than going inside to wait in line for a cashier.

He doesn’t need to grab another coffee either, because large thermos cups are cheap and easilyavailable.

When he gets back in the car he has a phone message from his boss saying not to come tothe office, everyone is going to a meeting hall and here is the address.

Sam’s company makes software and he’s going to go demo that software this morningto a company in the area.

He’s got it on his laptop and keeps a projector in the trunk, they’ll tweak the usual presentationand email it to him with some notes on the prospective customer.

He doesn’t recognize the address, but that is what GPS is for.

So he gets on the road and almost rear ends someone while trying to read those notes,but arrives at his destination and gives the presentation; thankfully they seem happy withthe product.

He doesn’t know the area well, but searches the internet for a good restaurant for lunch;then heads back to the office, gives his boss a report on how it went, and they spend sometime strategizing how to close the deal.

It’s been a bit of a stressful day, so he goes and gets a drink after work, just onethough because he needs to drive.

He then goes to the grocery store and thankfully he remembered to put his list on his phoneso he doesn’t forget anything.

He heads home, microwaves some dinner, and settles in to watch some TV and play a videogame to finish unwinding.

His son Ted calls from college and they chat for awhile, and then Sam heads off to bed.

That was a day in the life of Sam.

Sam’s day is a fairly normal one for modern times, different from a generation ago inmany ways but similar in many others.

Different from the one his son Ted will live, but likely similar in many ways too.

It is worth noting that while Sam has access to virtually all the knowledge of humanity,he can’t particularly learn it faster than someone with access to a classic library could.

He, and his son away at school, can access just about any information near instantaneously,but other than it being easier to find visual examples beyond text and a diagram, how heintakes new information hasn’t changed much over previous generations, even if his modeof access has.

Okay, 60 years later, Hannah wakes up, but she is not groggy so doesn’t hit the snoozebutton on her alarm clock because she doesn’t actually have one.

Unlike her grandfather Sam, or her dad Ted, she does not own a smartphone either.

She has a supercomputer in her wristwatch, and some thin contact lenses, and tiny implantedspeaker by her ear that feed her information instead.

Lots of her friends have no wristwatch or contact lenses either, just stuff wired intotheir brains more directly, but she’s a bit of traditionalist.

She’s not groggy because every day she eats a couple of capsules, the same way we mighttake a multivitamin or allergy medicine.

They are gel-capsules that dissolve into lots of tiny pills which in turn can be sent asignal to release their contents or simply let them pass through the system unused.

Some of those micro-pills contain things like melatonin to help her get to sleep or othersto help her wake up.

There’s no alarm clock on the nightstand next to her bed, instead, a little while beforeshe wakes up, those medications get triggered to help her transition comfortably to wakefulnessand her ear-speaker starts talking or playing music.

The lights in the room turn on too, and grow brighter.

She doesn’t start the coffeemaker, because all the smart electronic shadows that followher around made a good guess she’d want some, and some toast, and delivered thoseto her nightstand instead.

She doesn’t brush her teeth in favor putting in something like a mouth guard that she justbites down on and it goes to work brushing and flossing in a very precise and guidedway, then relays that data to her dentist’s computer, which analyzes and collates it tosee if she needs an appointment.

She knows what cavities and fillings are, because she heard about them in a historyclass along with smallpox.

Normally, Hannah would not actually go into work, because she mostly works from home.

She does need to go in sometimes though, so she does find it worth the cost to have acar rather than just summon an automated taxi.

She tells her vehicle to start while getting dressed, and feels a little chilly as shesteps outside, but her clothing is smart too, with lots of small machinery and micro-sizedsolar panels and batteries and wireless energy receivers in it, so it instantly starts warmingher up on her walk to the car, which is short because it drives itself up to her doorstepand opens the door for her.

She tells it to take her to work, and she sips some coffee, and reviews her notes andcorrespondence while it drives.

She works through lunch and orders whatever she likes for drone delivery, she doesn’teven know who she ordered it from, or that it came from 2 different places that seamlesslycoordinated their delivery to be simultaneous.

After work she goes to a pub and decides to stick around for a second drink because sheisn’t driving and she does not need to go to the grocery store.

She just gets a note from her smart house requesting permission to buy things she’slow on and asking if she wants anything else.

She scans the list, adds some ice cream to it, and says yes, all the while chatting witha random stranger at the bar.

Neither of them ever gave their names, since they are just used to seeing someone’s namepop up in their vision whenever they look at a person’s face and their various electronicshadows detect the mental equivalent of curiosity.

She heads home and talks to her dad Ted along the way, he appears to be sitting in the carwith her, with every sight and sound seeming to come from someone physically there, thoughher preferences are set to always give a certain halo and translucency to such folks so shedoesn’t forget they aren’t actually present.

He’s entirely digital though, her dad Ted is not there and not sitting, and from hisperspective his daughter is walking alongside him while plays golf half a planet away.

He remembers when the software for this was a lot less seamless, and would show a videowindow of their face, and when you used to have to remember to take your phone with youand had to mess around trying to get charging cables into the ports.

He hasn’t plugged anything in for a long time, and Hannah doesn’t even remember doingso, because for her whole life everything has just been wireless.

Energy is transmitted to small devices by magnetic induction, or runs off stored energyin tiny, high energy density batteries that charge very quickly, and gets power off micro-sizedsolar panels in one’s clothing or by leaching a little energy off every swing of the armor leg.

She doesn’t think about it much but often it’s a little harder for her to move anarm or leg when her electronics shadows think she needs some exercise and divert that extraenergy into the grid, or rent some of the processors in her clothes or bracelet outfor cloud processing, signal boosting, and so on.

Hannah works for the same software firm her father and grandfather did, but she nevercarries any equipment around for presentations, because she rarely does them in person, andwhen she does, she can just grab the files off the cloud and share them right to heraudience, and the interface is so smooth and mostly thought or gesture controlled thatshe can shuffle through dozens of charts or images in real time and send them, or evenmake new ones as needed.

Indeed her audience can usually alter the parameters of a given chart without even havingto ask her, they just say they want the chart they’re seeing projected over 5 years not3, as she showed them, and it does.

When she gets home she has dinner with her son, who is off at college, but is actuallyin the house in the flesh right now, because he just attends lectures by watching themand he asks his professor questions by calling during office hours, which are all day everyday, because dozens of professors around the planet nominally teach that course, and hisstudy group for doing homework is likewise spread all over the planet.

An individual course might be taught by many different people, and he just finds the lecturerwhose style he prefers and watches those, but it’s not live, so he needs someone elseto ask questions.

Hannah doesn’t ask him about his grades because he doesn’t get them, he finishesa class when he knows the material, be it a day or two years, and he never takes testseither because the folks who designed the course also designed tens of thousands ofquestions or other progress monitors, and those just get injected from time to timein the course.

When he’s nailing them 9 times out of 10 it moves on to more advanced stuff, or tellshim he has proficiency and that gets recorded in his file.

Hannah does not need a second mortgage on her house to pay for his tuition and lodging,because paying a couple dozen different professors to prepare an instructional segment on a topiceveryone around the planet can pick and choose from is a lot cheaper and more cost and timeeffective than paying one professor to stand in a room repeating the same lecture oncea semester to students that may or may not be receptive to his presentation style, orhave to miss a class and fall behind.

There is no class to fall behind on, just subjects, and the ability to assess with solidaccuracy how knowledgeable an individual person is at any time on that subject.

So Hannah doesn’t have much trouble falling asleep because she isn’t too stressed outby life, and her personal health monitor can send a signal to some of the pills left inher system to dissolve or tell her how much of something to take if she needs a hand gettingto sleep.

What’s interesting about Sam and Hannah’s lives is that they both live in a pretty automatedand high tech civilization.

We spend a lot of time on this channel talking about futures in Hannah’s Era or even centuriesfurther ahead, and we tend to focus on big things.

New spaceships, new energy sources, giant constructs we could build around our own staror other stars and the ships that will get you there.

Not today though, for today it does not matter that Ted was actually playing golf in a rotatinghabitat orbiting the Earth, complaining about how the spin throws off his normal swing.

We care that his golf partner was actually lying down at home on his bed playing withhim in virtual reality, and that he, Ted, and Hannah were thousands of kilometers apart,but all felt like they were in the same environment chatting, even though they were not in thesame place and quite possibly all saw different environments.

We don’t care that they have rocket ships with big fusion powered drives that can getto Mars in a week, we care about them having cars they can sleep in, fully relaxed in theknowledge that it could drive through a blizzard without a risk of accident and that if onedid somehow happen, a dozen safety systems would pop on deploying airbags and restraintsbefore the vehicle even hit the target, and that if somehow even that wasn’t enough,an automated ambulance would be on the scene in moments with robots controlled by expertshundreds of kilometers away piloting them, and already knowing from the vehicle monitorsexactly what happened and where all the injuries were and how severe.

We also don’t particularly care that Hannah’s son can do classes online, we already haveever-improving technology allowing that.

We care about the automated interactive aspects of that, something called Affective Computing,or computers and systems that can recognize, interpret, process, or simulate human bodylanguage and affects.

Fundamentally it is this sort of technology that holds the strongest potential to revolutionizeour lives.

Sure, a student can watch a recorded lecture and pick from several variations of it byother people covering that same topic, just as you can do now on YouTube for instance.

But it is a bigger gamechanger when the system can actually recognize that you are confusedor distracted and act accordingly, by simply bringing up a different or expanded presentation.

One that can recognize what sort of voice tones and manner or accent you respond betterto and suggest speakers based on that.

It can even real-time alter theirs.

Or even perform text-to-speech functions that don’t pronounce each word mechanically,but can simulate it like a normal person would say it, and possibly even produce a simulatedspeaker who doesn’t trip all your mental flags as inhuman and disturbing.

The Uncanny Valley, our tendency to respond more negatively to things which seem closerto human than further away, is a big hurdle to making such simulations, but if you canget past it, you open the door for books that don’t just get read aloud by some cold disjointedvoice, but can be real-time performed like a TV show or interactive virtual environmentwithout needing actors.

It’s a lot easier to learn the history of the world when instead of a book or lectureor even historical TV drama, a person can land in that environment where the bits theyfind boring can be seamlessly detected and altered, so they remain focused on the importantknowledge while enjoying themselves.

It’s nice to have a test that doesn’t need to have questions checking your readingcomprehension, because it already knows what that was from monitoring you while you read,and even nicer if most text can adapt as you’re reading it to rephrase the information orthe question to better communicate to you as an individual.

It’s like the automatic translator that doesn’t just hear what someone said in anotherlanguage and translate it word for word, but instead can convert all the idioms and expressionsinto another language and its own idioms and expressions.

It will be even cooler if one day we can just download knowledge and skills into your head,like in the film the Matrix where they upload for a few seconds and suddenly that personknows martial arts.

In the absence of that, while we can only use our eyes and ears to input data, whichare limited to their format and bandwidth, being able to maximize those by tailoringthe input to the individual could massively boost how well and quickly people acquireknowledge and skills.

Nothing would more powerfully alter our day-to-day life than the ability to absorb skills andknowledge quicker than we do now.

Even many of our conveniences come from simply making a task so easy you don’t have toinvest any time into learning it.

A civilization where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, and an expert at a few, is fundamentally differentfrom ours.

We didn’t focus on cool new power production methods like fusion today, we focused on waysto conveniently get power.

Wireless energy transmission by magnetic induction or energy beaming, smaller and better batteriesand solar panels, or harvesting energy right from the person.

Leaching just a little energy away from every motion, maybe even putting devices in thebody that could steal a bit of energy from your own food to transmit it to devices inor on you.

I never really said how Hannah’s car operates, that it is an electric vehicle ultimatelypowered by some big fusion reactor somewhere, because Hannah doesn’t think about it.

She knows the batteries in her vehicle replaced a combustion engine when batteries finallygot small enough and fast charging enough to remove the inconvenience of rechargingcompared to refueling.

But she just doesn’t think about it anymore than you or I spend much time thinking aboutour light bulbs or light switches, or what makes our refrigerator cold, even though thosedevices changed our lives profoundly.

We’re not too interested in the super-powerful classic or quantum computer that could simultaneouslyplay every human being at chess and beat them all, or even the social media network thatcan help you find other people in your area that enjoy chess.

We’re interested in the hardware and software that notices you like playing chess, and canlet you know the person you are talking to does as well, and likes gardening like youdo, but does not share your joy of cooking, or parachuting off kilometer tall buildings.

Predicting the future of technology is always a hit and miss game, often in hindsight thestuff is obvious, but can’t be predicted in advance, something we call a Black Swan,and have discussed before.

Some technology and its impact is easy enough to predict, but what makes them inaccuratein most cases is all those tiny secondary advantages and changes and those tend to focuson human desire and convenience.

It’s not that hard to predict faster computers, the internet, satellites, or cell phones.

What’s hard to predict is people using those to post a picture of what they ate for lunch.

Once you do, you can imagine that a lot of restaurants will advertise online and showphotos of the menu.

It will seem obvious in hindsight that someone is going to make a piece of software thatcan look at that image and make some smart guesses about its nutritional value and caloriecount.

It will seem obvious in hindsight that as we get more Affective Computing able to monitoryour reactions, your computer will get better at showing you bits of stuff on your socialmedia newsfeed that you’ll enjoy, and that advertisers will be able to hit you with anad showing a picture of pizza with the toppings you like when you are just getting a littlehungry and haven’t had pizza recently, and tomorrow you’ll get shown sandwiches instead.

It’s predictable that 3D printers, and fast, cheap, delivery might put a dent in classicretail shopping.

It’s predictable that automated vehicles, not needing expensive drivers, will make itmuch cheaper to deliver things or take a taxi, so that fewer people might own individualvehicles.

It’s less predictable that these might start including a casual chat function that noticestwo strangers sharing a vehicle are uncomfortable and bored and can drop an icebreaker so theycan talk to each other.

It’s less predictable that some software company will make a fortune designing algorithmsfor that which can seamlessly drop a targeted advertisement in there where the automateddriver can say that it noticed you’re hungry and like Italian food, and there’s a greatbistro just up ahead.

Automated vehicles, wireless energy transmission, affective computing that can read your moodsor even mental implants that can sync directly to your thoughts are all technologies thatare emerging and do tend to get a fair amount of attention in the media.

However, it is very easy for us miss a lot of those secondary applications that can quietlysneak in there to revolutionize our lives just as much as landing on the Moon did, orgoing to Mars will.

Next week we will be starting up a new series looking at just that.

We spent a lot of time recently in the Upward Bound Series discussing how to get off theplanet, and in the new Outward Bound series, we’ll be visiting some other planets andmoons and talking about how to get there and what to do when you arrive, and we’ll startwith Colonizing Mars.

For alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.

And let me give a thanks to folks who support this channel on Patreon and selected thistopic as the winner for the month.

Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!

+--------------------------------+ | Hidden Aliens | | 2017-08-03 | | https://youtu.be/tEBn8bc0k-I | +--------------------------------+

The problem with trying to hide your civilization from others is that usually by the time youthink to do that, it is already too late.

So today we return to the Alien Civilizations series to take a look at the concept of HiddenCivilizations.

Vast ancient extraterrestrial empires that lurk about the galaxy quietly or confine themselvesto small regions of space, possibly even just their original home planet.

We might as well stick two qualifiers on this before we go further.

We are not talking today about alien civilizations that hide among us, nor about relatively newcivilizations that try to keep their heads down.

For the latter, a new civilization on the galactic stage has good cause to tread softlyin the early stages.

It’s almost certainly wasted effort, as we’ll see, but prudence still seems to suggestkeeping quiet in new and unknown environments rather than stomping around with a megaphoneasking if anyone is there.

No, our focus today is on civilizations that are committed to staying hidden over the longterm -- not just being cautiously quiet while they are new, or apathetically quiet becausethey don’t care to talk with others.

We are going to discuss some of the reasons why you might want to do this, some of thereasons it might not work, and some of the ways you might be able to hide yourselvesif you have certain technologies normally limited to fiction or speculative science.

Let's start with possible motivations.

Why would a civilization hide?

For instance, a species that just wants to keep to themselves because they’re xenophobic,but not especially hostile or fearful, has a different scope of possible actions thanone that is afraid of being invaded.

As I mentioned in a previous episode, if you want to keep visitors away, hiding is oftennot your best solution under known physics.

In the absence of FTL, Faster than Light Travel, a spaceship can take centuries to get to itsdestination, and it is most likely a one way trip, especially if they can’t refuel whenthey arrive.

Telling a decelerating spaceship just approaching your solar system to go away amounts to signingtheir death warrant… or possibly yours.

The species living there might not care, but the rest of the hypothetical galactic communityis going to be asking why those guys didn’t put up a simple beacon saying ‘stay away,this is our solar system, no visitors’.

Some of those folks, especially the civilization that ship came from, might decide to go askin person.

Having an alien armada show up on your doorstep pissed off because you either killed theirpeople by negligence or shot at them when they decided to try refueling is not a goodway to avoid interacting with alien species.

Plus, ‘no trespassing’ beacons are pretty cheap, particularly considering you can safelybet no species that lacks FTL travel ever sends ships anywhere without pointing telescopesthere first, so you don’t need to be transmitting very loudly.

The sheer cost of time and resources for interstellar travel tends to encourage you to do your homework.

And to keep doing it too.

Either the ship has telescopes of its own pointed at the destination as it cruises along,or it is getting periodic updates from the ones back home at light speed.

Telescopes, like transmitters, cost a lot less money than spaceships.

Now obviously if you’re hiding, sticking up big signs saying ‘go away, no visitors’is not the best approach.

Our example here, however, is of a civilization that isn’t afraid of an unprovoked invasion,they’re just xenophobic.

A species that evolves to have technology does need to have some traits like curiosityand social behavior, but that doesn’t mean they like things besides themselves.

I tend to think extreme xenophobia toward other species is not too common with technologicalcivilizations, but we can’t assume xenophobia is uncommon among aliens either.

What I do see being common is a fear of predators and a desire to hide.

Humans are very afraid of predators sneaking in at night and eating us.

Little kids frightened of shadows or boogeymen under their bed are not being irrational,they are obeying a very old and reasonable fear of being eaten.

That’s a real threat even to apex predators when they’re young, so a desire to hidefrom predators is probably almost as universal in alien civilizations as curiosity is.

One of the reasons hidden civilizations keeping quiet tends to resonate so well with peoplewhen discussing the Fermi Paradox is probably just that.

Fiction is overflowing with examples of evil predatory aliens sneaking out of the darknessto eat us, and it works as a story device because even though humans are about the mostdangerous thing on this planet, we are still hardwired to fear the wolves.

A lot of seemingly irrational behavior in humans derives from what is essentially legacysoftware and hardware issues.

Figure on those being common in aliens too.

Behaviors rooted in biological imperatives which made sense originally, but are a bithit and miss for decision-making in modern contexts.

A given alien might be more likely to want to hide than we are or less, but since impulsecontrol is one of those things that comes hand in hand with a brain powerful enoughto develop logic, reason, and technology, we can assume that aliens only try to hidetheir civilizations when it is at least vaguely reasonable to do so.

Now, that’s our first problem, if you assume the galaxy is full of predatory aliens hidingin the dark reaches of outer space, you do not want to hide from them on your home planet.

They are unlikely to be afraid to visit sunlit planets and to know that’s the easiest placeto find prey.

Consider the growing list of exoplanets, accumulated at a time when we can barely put simple telescopesin space, and then try to imagine the kind of telescopes any species with basic interstellartravel might have.

Forget about radio signals by the way, that’s not a great search method even when you’reconfined to a planet.

Nothing you need to hide from will be planetbound and they have better options.

Any species that hunts other civilizations by waiting for them to discover radio andTV is too stupid to be a threat.

We can broadcast all we want without concern because first off, it’s already too latesince we’ve been broadcasting for a century, and secondly, anybody who can come here andhurt us never needed that to find us and already knew about us.

The probable presence of life on Earth is detectable by any number of other telltalesthat can be seen at a distance, we were betrayed by our own atmosphere a billion years beforelife crawled onto land.

No, if you want to hide, you don’t do it on your home planet.

You also probably don’t want to bother hiding your civilization anyway, just some pieceof it as a backup.

We’ll discuss possible ways to hide in a bit.

Before that, let us walk through two scenarios.

For the first, we will be the predatory species folks should hide from, having shown up firston the galactic stage, and in the second we’ll be a species contemplating ways of hidingfrom them.

So here we are, an evil interstellar empire that arose a billion years ago.

How do we operate?

First, we need to assume we don’t really colonize much ourselves, it’s obviouslyvery easy to keep alien civilizations from arising if you just colonize every planetin a galaxy, something that won’t take you more than a million years if you’ve gotthe ability to do interstellar travel in any sort of plausible way, and much faster ifyou have access to FTL travel.

Second, even a modestly expansive species is going to have at least close to K2 civilizationnumbers and resources, meaning they haven’t got any problems deploying a telescope towatch every single planet constantly and throwing together fleets of billions of ships.

Check out the Kardashev Scale or Dyson Sphere episodes to get some idea of the scale ofthese kind of civilizations.

Third, we have to assume that for some reason travel to other galaxies is off the table,otherwise while your predator species is lurking around the Milky Way Galaxy rather than colonizingit, some Kardashev 3 civilization will arise next door in Andromeda and decide to comepay a visit, and they will crush you.

Those are some fairly dubious assumptions, and if any of them aren’t in play this isn’tgoing to happen.

The biggest issue against you is time itself, because while any Kardashev 2 civilization- that’s one that’s just maximized their own solar system, not any others -- couldeasily send a big battleship or even a fleet to every solar system in the galaxy to monitorit for life, there’s no guarantee they are going to do that.

Let say we send a fleet to go watch planet X for signs of emerging intelligence and attackif they see any.

They get there ten thousand years later and set up shop to wait, because they see landlife has just emerged.

Let’s consider this situation for a minute.

Even assuming we’ve got life extension or had these guys on ice for the trip, once theyarrive the game has changed.

They, or their descendants, have a long time to sit on their ships twiddling their thumbs.

How many generations before they decide to just colonize the planet?

Or say screw it and nuke the planet instead of waiting for intelligent life to emerge?

Or fall in love with the critters on that planet and decide to protect them?

How long before they become aliens themselves, breeding in isolation for tens of millionsof years?

You might need to send another extermination fleet to go deal with them, and since theywill be expecting it, best build another fleet to handle the ones they, and all the otherfleets you built, will be sending your way.

It’s hard for me to imagine humans opting to do the galaxy-wide perpetual exterminationthing, and we’ve been known to try to kill off other humans who are genetically justa few thousand years removed from us.

If we assume the kind of extreme xenophobia that would make you try to keep purging agalaxy for a billion years, how likely are they to be cool with mutant branches of theirown species who aren’t just a hundred generations removed, but a hundred thousand?

While it is darkly amusing to imagine a galaxy with a million empires, all descended fromthe same planet originally, trying to wipe each other out, don’t assume other speciescould safely emerge during that conflict.

They would still be monitoring everything and still be just as enthusiastically genocidalas before; so they’d still know if some new species emerged and would be able to diverta small fleet there to nuke them… or use whatever other method of extermination mightbe in vogue.

Genocide really does need to be done in person though, unless you are willing to go all-inand kill every planet in a galaxy that might spawn life, a K2 civilization could do thatfrom home using the weapons platforms we discussed in Nicoll-Dyson Beams.

They just sterilize every planet once a galactic orbit.

Now if you are really worried about mutation from colonization, you probably need to gothe machine route, preferably the dumb machine route.

We have discussed von Neumann Probes before, self-replicating machines that reach a nearbysolar system, grab some raw materials, build some more probes, send those to new systems,rinse and repeat.

This is a good approach because you can slow down mutation in self-replicating machinesand make sure everyone has the same priorities.

Unsurprisingly, it is one used in fiction a lot, usually as the evil artificial intelligencewho just wants to kill any organic life.

Lots of good books on that notion, including my own favorite series, Alastair Reynold’s“Revelation Space”.

I’ve mentioned those before in other episodes so I’ll instead recommend a newer book byDennis E. Taylor, “We are Legion, We are Bob”, which is a lot more light-heartedthan when we usually see this technology portrayed in fiction.

A key point in that novel and its sequel is that even making copies of the minds can resultin very large and quick divergence in behavior, and that is going to be hard to avoid in anytruly sentient mind.

The ability to think up new solutions and analyze abstract problems pretty much guaranteesthat those copies will diverge from each other over time and new experiences, and if theirphilosophies and motives change you’ve got a problem.

So stupid is probably a better way to go, guided interstellar missiles that just haveenough intelligence to do targeting and maybe maintenance.

Either delivering an explosive strike or something more biologically-targeted and clever likethe proto-molecule we see in the Expanse series, TV or novels.

It could possibly be some very simple self-replicator that has a lot of the mutations safety controlson copying, “error checking algorithms” or some other options that we discussed inthe self-replicating machines episode and a very limited mission.

Keep it simple, go to place, scan for basic signs of life, find a rock, replicate, destroylife, send mission data home, send replicators on to neighboring systems.

It could be dangerous giving it any real brains or free will, and even then, leaving a swarmof these things meandering around the galaxy probably isn’t a good idea.

You could have them hard-wired to automatically shut down and hibernate, only waking everyso often to scan their particular area, but you might just be better off sending out newbatches of them periodically instead.

When sending out specialized weapons designed for killing off intelligent life, it paysto be paranoid in your safety precautions.

So in that context, it’s kind of hard to imagine anyone doing this.

It’s so much easier to exterminate potential alien civilizations by simply colonizing theirplanets in the first place.

If you don’t want to colonize but still want to eliminate even the possibility oflife evolving and posing a challenge, it is better to send your probes there looking forsigns of life period, not just intelligence.

Or even just removing all the planets life could arise on, mining away all the elementsand sending them home.

Now, let’s move on to case two -- folks who are thinking about hiding their civilization.

They are going to have all the concepts we just discussed available to them too, andI think they’d conclude what we just did.

If there were predators out killing intelligent species they’d have already been killed.

Anybody who has the willpower and skill to maintain a galaxy-wide, billion year longextermination process is going to be very, very good at it.

They won’t make rookie mistakes, and they might be monstrous villains, but this isn’tHollywood so the villains aren’t going to be dumb.

If I can think of a dozen ways to kill off all life in a galaxy, they can too, and probablymore, and if you asked me which method to use, I’d say all of them.

You don’t nuke someone’s planet, you nerve gas it, virus-bomb it, then nuke the place,and when you’re sure you’ve got everyone, you still send hazmat teams down to look.

Then you disassemble the planet as raw materials to build more armadas.

So we can conclude nobody is out there planning on killing us that we need to hide from.

Either they don’t exist, or they don’t want to kill us, or they just plain suck atgenocide.

It seems to me, most species would draw these same conclusions.

What’s more, even if they conclude they should hide in case everyone else is doingit -- hence the quiet galaxy -- they are going to wonder why everyone is hiding since thelogic is flimsy enough that at least a few species will decide not to.

Let’s assume they do hide, and they spend thousands of years hiding and improving theirtechnology.

Someone will raise this issue again and say “Why don’t we build a probe, send it toa distant solar system, and have it set up shop there and broadcast a message?

That way, even if there is something to be afraid of the transmitter won’t reveal us.

Heck, we can even put a small observation post nearby to send a discrete laser signalhome so we can monitor if someone comes and investigates the probe.”

Now the immediate follow up to that is going to be someone asking why no one has alreadydone this, other species would have thought of it too and someone will have tried it andconcluded no aliens or no hostile ones and proceeded to move around more openly.

How many millions of years are you going to hide before you finally say nuts and abandonthe effort?

Especially since the first ones to do so have the advantage in settling the galaxy, buildingtheir numbers up, and being safe from any previously quiet civilizations that may havemore recently become a threat.

After all, a species that hid for fear of being exterminated might not be such niceguys themselves.

They might be so afraid of being killed off because they think it’s the logical thingto do and would like to do it themselves to others.

That is worth considering too since the ethically proper thing to do if hiding would seem tobe to launch a few probes to get safely far from your civilization and then transmit warningsto others to hide.

So it’s not a good Fermi Paradox solution, because it seems very unlikely everyone wouldconclude hiding was best, particularly if anyone else was already openly moving around.

But just because it doesn’t work for the Fermi Paradox doesn’t mean nobody woulddo it.

There’s a lot of reasons why some species might decide they want to hide, and againyou don’t need to hide everything.

I mean if I have been hiding my civilization for a few centuries, I might want to keepsome of it hidden in reserve, to be on the safe side.

Just as we can send a probe far away to do its ‘Hello, is anyone there?’

transmission, we could also send off a very quiet colony ship somewhere to act as a backup.

So how do we hide a civilization if we want to?

That last part about the quiet colony ship gives us our first point to explore.

Wherever you hide should not be your home planet.

Too obvious, too hard to hide.

As we’ve discussed before, there is no stealth in space.

Planets are hard to hide and so are spaceships.

Similarly, you don’t need to hide your civilization, you need to hide your backup.

That could be a few thousand folks for a stable gene pool and copies of your records, buta high-tech civilization doesn’t necessarily need a few thousand people because they canuse a few, and a lot of frozen embryos.

And one decently more advanced can probably store a digital copy of all their geneticinformation for every organism in their biosphere too.

And one just a little more advanced could store digital copies of all their citizenstoo.

Indeed, in a transhuman civilization odds are a lot of folks will have copies of theirminds as a backup anyway, and likely many of them with a few r