This Episode is brought to you by Brilliant.
One of the most fun but inaccurate tropes
in science fiction is the
crowded harrowing Asteroid Belt,
navigated by an ace pilot on a quick interplanetary
jaunt.
But once humanity fills vast open stretches
of space with artificial habitats,
that trope might actually turn out accurate.
So today we are back to the Megastructures
series here on Science & Futurism with Isaac
Arthur, and I am your aforementioned host,
Isaac Arthur.
Normally in this series we talk about this
or that giant artificial structure humanity
might create, but today we’ll be looking
at them from a different perspective, how
folks might navigate between them and how
that might impact both the creation of these
structures and the civilizations living on
and near them.
However there are many different types of
structure to discuss, many of which lend different
approaches to travel, and while we’ll briefly
explain each one, in the interest of brevity
I’ll also reference other videos that detail
these concepts in greater depth.
Nonetheless this will be a long discussion
so now’s a great time to grab a drink and
a snack, and if you enjoy the content, don’t
forget to hit the like & subscribe buttons
while you’re at it.
So, what’s the big deal about navigating
between megastructures?
You’re in space afterall, so it would seem
like the obvious mode of transportation would
be spaceships.
But it’s not quite that simple, especially
when you’re building truly *mega* structures
-- and building a lot of them.
We’ll start by defining what we mean by
a megastructure.
The term basically means anything really big
that we build, but in this episode we’re
focusing on ones we build in space.
That can include habitats we build to live
in or farm in, like rotating O’Neill Cylinders
which use centrifugal force to emulate gravity,
or Birch shell-planets built around a star
or a supermassive black hole, or even planets
built in the shapes of discs, sombreros, or
donuts that we’ve discussed in some of our
more theoretical episodes.
There are also non-habitat megastructures
built to disassemble planets or stars for
raw materials, accelerate spaceships to enormous
speeds, or to move entire stellar systems
themselves.
Not to mention computation and artificial
intelligence or simulated intelligence focused
ones, like the Matrioshka Brain, where transportation
might simply be by radio waves or communication
lasers.
Travel between these objects obviously is
going to vary a lot from size to size and
purpose, not to mention available technology.
Normally on this show we try to stay firmly
inside known physics but we also don’t like
to bypass theoretical options and things like
artificial gravity, anti-gravity, and wormholes
all have a big impact on our discussion if
they are available technologies.
Artificial Gravity, meaning gravity not created
naturally by mass or emulated with centrifugal
force, something like the gravity plating
we often see in science fiction starships
and space stations, lets you get by without
rotating things, which is a problem for coupling
objects together.
Anti-gravity lets you get around the issue
of them needing to orbit very fast around
planets or stars in favor of just hanging
in place effectively stationary to whatever
they are orbiting or each other.
Wormholes, if you can make them small and
basically portals like we see in sci-fi not
only makes transit between two megastructures
easy but opens up whole new types of megastructures.
We have some tricks that will let us mimic
in whole or part some of these effects that
we will discuss today too.
Another big factor in navigating around is
density of people and structures.
For much the same reason you do not build
a freeway between your house and your neighbors
or a sidewalk to run freight between two metropolises.
Or passengers for that matter too.
If we are talking about a planet with just
a pair of space stations, one in low orbit
and one in high, with maybe a few thousand
people on each, then a little shuttle probably
is sufficient.
Alternatively we need to keep in mind that
something like a Ecumenopolis, a planet wide
city of a few trillion people, which might
be portrayed in science fiction as a great
galactic empire capital having a few dozen
shuttles flying around the sky at any moment
in reality probably needs to move a billion
people and a billion tons of cargo back and
forth from orbit on any given day, so that
at a given moment there might be a million
ships flying around there.
So too, some of our megastructures are designed
for millions of people to live in, others
billions or even trillions, and some of the
truly monstrous ones like the Birch Planet
might have trillions of trillions of people
calling them home.
These ironically might have low traffic simply
because while they have Earth-like gravity
on their surfaces, they are so enormous that
their escape velocity is a decent fraction
of light speed and off-world travel might
be very rare, except by something like digital
transmission, a kind of teleportation where
we’d just move a digital copy of someone’s
mind to an android or cloned body instead
of moving them.
Not that you need to travel much off a Birch
Planet, even the smallest of them has more
living area than an entire galaxy’s worth
of planets while most versions would have
more living room than we’d expect to find
on every single planet in the Observable Universe,
so you don’t have much need for off-world
tourism.
Of course, we might not need much travel between
more mundane megastructures either.
After all, remote-work and remote-tourism,
whether more classic options like the internet
or virtual reality, or the mind-digitizing
and transfer method, may be quite common things
in the future to the exclusion of transport.
Indeed, many systems might frown on non-vital
physical transport simply for all the navigation
and debris issues involved, which we will
also get to today.
One type of Megastructure is what we call
a Dyson Sphere, or usually a Dyson Swarm,
which is less an individual structure than
a vast cloud of many of them englobing a star
to make use of all its light.
We also have a smaller and denser version
of this called a Planet Swarm, which is essentially
when you fill all the orbital space up around
a planet with various megastructures.
Scale in astronomy is always so hard to convey
but your typical O’Neill Cylinder Habitat
is bigger than a large metropolis or mountain,
they are enormous and on the small side of
what we consider a megastructure.
It would take about a million of them to equal
the living area, and solar cross-section,
of Earth, and we’d need a couple billion
Earth’s worth of living area to absorb all
the Sun’s Light and use it for artificial
land and ecosystems, so you’d be talking
about sticking over a million-billion of them,
a quadrillion, in orbit around our Sun.
A Planet swarm is far more modest, relatively
speaking, in that it might only be a few billion
such stations orbiting that planet, but again
denser as they are packed into an area maybe
a million kilometers around Earth rather than
a volume around a million times larger than
that around a Sun.
Sounds cluttered in either case, and on the
one hand it is and on the other it is not.
Megastructures are hardly limited to habitation
cylinders and we’d never expect a Dyson
Swarm to be composed of nothing but O’Neill
Cylinders and evenly spaced at that, but if
they were, we’d except each to be the sole
occupant of a volume of space a couple thousand
kilometers wide while themselves only being
a couple dozen kilometers across.
That’s no denser than a continent with two
or three cities or mountains on it and empty
space between, and only considers it in two-dimensions
rather than a volume.
Planet Swarms are denser affairs, but would
still tend to have an average density, especially
in higher orbits, of hundreds of kilometers
between such titanic space habitats.
When it comes to traffic between them though,
we should still not picture one lone shuttle
going between two O’Neill Cylinders.
At these sort of distances you could build
cheap and simple spaceships no bigger than
a personal automobile, and no more high tech,
that could flit across the distance between
the two much faster than a car could and on
a great deal less fuel, as there is no air
or road trying to slow you down, just vacuum.
Such being the case, you would expect a lot
of back and forth travel.
Such a cylinder habitat can house around million
people, and if we assumed most folks needed
to fly to their neighboring habitat on average
once a week, then you’d have a personal
shuttle launching between them about once
a second, and a big long chain of spaceships
between them much akin to a stretch of freeway
between two cities.
In something like a planet swarm, and if folks
drove around as often as we tend to, you might
see several trillion spaceships flitting around
that planet’s orbital volume at any given
moment.
Needless to say, that is quite the traffic
nightmare, and you might have all sorts of
local or system wide laws, treaties, regulations,
and discouraging fees or taxes to minimize
personal vehicle usage just to limit this
congestion and high-speed collision and debris
concerns.
Though again all things being relative, those
ships might tend to move in columns through
space but evenly distributed would still have
many kilometers between them.
They also don’t have to be moving very fast
relative to everything around them, two space
stations on the same orbital path are effectively
stationary relative to each other, and if
a thousand kilometers apart you wouldn’t
expect to ever see folks going between them
at much faster than airplane speeds.
Potentially that saves a lot of fuel and twice
over since you don’t need to push as much
mass around at slower speeds since you don’t
need to have thick armor on your ship to avoid
being killed by all the random space debris
floating around.
And you will need armor on your ships because
space is very empty and things moving between
it need to move very fast, and at those kinds
of speeds even something very small can ruin
your whole day if it hits you.
And just because two stations on the same
orbital path are relatively stationary and
the ships between them wouldn’t likely move
very fast, doesn’t mean any of the debris
from other orbital paths or ships crossing
lanes, so to speak, would not be going at
normal orbital speeds.
So even if the ships are just intended for
short jaunts between neighboring habs, they
either still need thick armor or the system
needs very good debris clearance, or both
– we detailed more issues with debris in
our Megastructure Maintenance & Space Janitors
episode, and realistically you need a decent
amount of heavy armor even with good clearance,
and armor is proportionally heavier for smaller
vessels because of the square-cube law.
If ships need 10 centimeters of steel plating
to protect against the sorts of debris that
commonly escapes routine debris clearance
methods then it needs 10 centimeters over
all its surface whether it is the size of
a car or a bus, or a basketball and a city
for that matter.
Some basketball size sensor, maintenance,
or delivery drone needs that same armor – maybe
less of a safety margin as its more expendable,
but it’s cargo capacity generally rises
with the cube of it’s width whereas it’s
armor needs will rise with the square of width,
so some bulky mega-freighter just isn’t
using much of its mass for armor even if it
has thicker armor than a personal space yacht.
The thing is, armor doesn’t need to move,
which is why space stations can get away with
having so much more mass and protective hull.
For the stations that are not moving relative
to each other we can get away with physical
connections like tunnels and tethers, or tethers
with an armored tunnel around them, and while
a vacuum tunnel is a handy transport method
since there is no air drag, you do have the
option of pressurizing them for folks to walk
through.
Except they can’t walk because there is
no gravity, so they float… except such a
tunnel can be a long cylinder and thus be
spun like any other cylinder habitat, so long
as it's wide enough not to cause big differences
in gravity from your feet to your head or
a vertigo feeling.
Bigger habitats in the same orbital path might
opt to connect via vacuum trains on tethers
inside an armored shell or they might connect
with something like a ten meter radius long
spinning cylindrical tunnel complete with
gardens and boulevards and bike paths.
Or both or combinations of both, a wide cylinder
but with a train along the central access
tether.
This is a key notion for space habitats though,
because as long as the tethers are reasonably
sturdy, you can use them to lash habitats
together not only on the same orbital path
but off to the side a bit too, creating conglomerations.
Generally you could lash two small stations
a hundred meters apart with nothing more sturdy
than some yarn, and two very large space stations
together separated by a couple kilometers
with nothing more advanced than the sorts
of cables we use in a suspension bridge, let
alone the superstrong tensile materials like
graphene we often envision building these
habitats out of.
They’re also mobile so you could be detaching
them or lengthening or contracting them with
winches if things weren’t quite stationary
or you wanted to move the stations.
These also become great for moving people
and cargo down at essentially no fuel expenditure
and also as high-bandwidth communication or
power lines.
Or other utilities too.
As I’ve mentioned, the O’Neill Cylinder
is on the small side of megastructures – and
we’ll get to the bigger ones in a bit – but
it is still huge and not only will they tend
to outnumber all the bigger megastructures
by quite a lot, but they are also likely to
be vastly outnumbered by smaller structures.
These could be smaller human habit drums just
a couple dozen meters in radius and length
or support facilities, like factories, spaceship
docks and dockyards, low-gravity, low-armor
space farms or big huge but light solar panels
or great big armored mirrors for bouncing
and concentrating light to smaller solar collectors
while providing extra collision barriers to
the space habitat and it’s ancillary stations.
Either way, you might be transmitting more
than power between such small facilities,
like water or air recycling, a smaller station
having its own supply tanks for backup probably
but relying on more centralized or specialized
places for production, recycling, and primary
storage.
On the notion of armoring a solar panel or
mirror.
A Solar panel in space can be very light and
thin, and a mirror more so, and thus is quite
vulnerable to damage as well as being pushed
around by sunlight and solar wind, or eddies
of spaceship exhaust, so you might opt cover
them in armor as ballast and shield and wrap
you space station and all its ancillary stations.
That lets you use smaller craft internally
with little need for protection as the whole
conglomeration.
This is a key notion though, conglomerations.
In something like a Dyson Swarm or Planet
Swarm you do need your overall density of
structures to be low but they hardly need
to be spread out at the local level.
You probably would see conglomerations of
habitats well into the billions of people
all lashed together sharing ancillary facilities
also lashed together and inside some big protective
framework of collision armor and point defense
systems, which helps minimize incoming debris
issues and also outgoing junk.
See the Life on board an O’Neill Cylinder
episode for more discussion of this notion
of tethers and connected structures.
What about more isolated megastructures?
Or much bigger ones?
Ones with their own gravity or where the atmosphere
isn’t kept inside a can that ships dock
externally with?
And how about moving around inside them?
As we saw in our episode Continent-Sized Rotating
Habitats, cylinder and ring habs can potentially
be made very large, essentially worlds unto
themselves or bigger.
For them, someone coming in might dock externally
on the rotating section, or some non-rotating
protective superstructure.
Or they might come down the rotating axis
to a hub port in the center of the cylinder
cap.
Assuming it has one.
Stations might opt to have curved ends, internally
those places would curve up to the axis and
have low gravity as you rose up to them, and
it is arguably structurally better to have
a curved end to your cylinder then a flat
cap.
But the bigger ones do not need this cap to
go all the way to the central rotational axis.
Things like McKendree Cylinders – essentially
an O’Neill Cylinder but a hundred times
wider and longer – only need a rim wall
to keep the air in and much like our own atmosphere
it thins out to near-nothing eventually so
above that height no rim wall is needed and
you can just fly right in.
That’s handy for slowing down, which costs
fuel in the vacuum of space, just as much
as speeding up and indeed more since you need
more fuel to speed up initially since you
also need to accelerate your slow down fuel,
meaning you need more than double the fuel,
often far more than double.
A ship that can slow down by plowing into
air in an open-air megastructure is much more
economically efficient.
So too, the Rocket equation that makes that
the case also only applies to rockets and
ships carrying all their fuel, and such megastructures
will often be quite capable of hurling a spaceship
away at high speeds, saving them all or at
least a good fraction of their fuel.
On such stations you might have ships landing
on the rotating sections and departing by
them to save some launch and stop fuel, quite
a lot on these larger ones too as a McKendree
Cylinder might be spinning a few kilometers
per second or ten thousand kilometers per
hour, a decent speed to be traveling inside
a solar system where habitats are only thousands
of kilometers apart not millions like planets.
The bigger ones like Banks Orbitals and Niven
Ringworlds would hurl you off at about hundred
or a thousand kilometers per second respectively.
You can dock – very carefully – using
this same trick to save fuel.
Assuming the outside is a rotating cylinder,
and on these bigger ones they might be.
However you can also run a big mass driver
right down the central axis of these bigger
habitats, a thousand kilometer long rail gun
gives quite a shove to a spaceship, you could
exit at standard orbital speeds of around
10 kilometers per second from one.
Plus it’s just a long shaft so there’s
no reason you can’t make it even longer
by extending it out past the end-caps or rim
walls of the hab.
Indeed if you were docking ships at the central
axis of a cylinder or ring hab rather than
on the outside rotating part, you might tend
to do a long extended axis out to spacedocks
just to keep them fairly clear of your habitat
and give you extra length to shoot spaceships
out via mass driver.
As a sidenote, we tend to see ships docked
in open space in science fiction, except in
a drydock meant to be pressurized, but that
exposes them to all sorts of radiation and
debris and while they are designed for that
while traveling, it’s quite likely a spacedock
would tend to have a protective shell around
it’s docked ships, even if it wasn’t pressurized,
as that at least protects drones or maintenance
crews working on the outside from debris or
needing bulkier armor or spacesuits.
It also helps with docking and berthing which
can be time consuming while you wait for all
your connections and pressure tests and matching,
all the more so if you have to use big sturdy
docking collars and ports designed to handle
constant erosion from space dust and radiation
or the need for spacesuits to be on during
docking and berthing in case of rupture or
leak.
There’s also a big difference between a
spacesuit that just keeps air in, and which
you don’t mind if it leaks because you can
recapture that air leaking into your enclosure,
and a suit meant for long outside use and
radiation and debris issues.
This might be a hard shell structure always
in place or something that folded out to cover
ships or even inflated around them, and again
might not need to be air tight unless you
wanted it pressurized.
Often you wouldn’t since spaceships mostly
wouldn’t be designed for operating in atmospheres
too so might have been built without air and
corrosion or pressure issues in mind.
They could dock at some relatively remote
spacedock - in terms of both distance and
personnel on board - then take a train into
the habitat down that long axis shaft, which
might also be a mass driver or other style
of space catapult.
You can also slow ships with Mass Drivers
too, like a runway for an aircraft, but that’s
a very tricky and precise thing to do.
Of course piloting spacecraft generally is
and when it comes to coming and going around
megastructures in space the odds are the human
pilot ain’t piloting jack, the on board
computer is and probably has a required override
switch for traffic control to activate.
Accident and terrorism are also big worries
with spaceships so I would not be too surprised
if all ships had to have an active transmitter
that included a direct line override that
was constantly being tested to make sure it
worked by traffic control, and if it didn’t,
automated defense cannons started tracking
that ship.
If you’re operating a private or commercial
spaceship you’re essentially flying a nuclear
bomb with all that kinetic energy, so they’re
going to want assurances that you’re not
going to strike them by distraction, neglect,
accident, or malice and they will probably
want more than your word of honor that won’t
happen.
This is even more extreme for interstellar
spaceships which might be moving at a high
fraction of light speed, where a single truck-sized
vehicle represents a major threat to an entire
planetary civilization let alone a megastructure…
though we should never assume megastructures
are particularly fragile and indeed the folks
living inside them are arguably better shielded
than planet-bound folks since all that protective
rock is under you on a planet whereas on a
megastructure it will generally be between
you and whatever is colliding.
You live inside the land, not on top of it.
We could probably adapt a lot of our current
aircraft and maritime control to this, including
the difficulty of matching different rules
between different nations and polities but
that is one key difference, spaceships are
weapons of mass destruction and will be known
to be that from Day 1, unlike aircraft in
the early days of the 20th century let alone
the first person to ever hollow out a canoe.
They are also very fast, which is not only
why they are so destructive but a big issue
for control, as you might have to make near
instant decisions.
For this reason you might tend to have large
no-go zones around megastructures where only
auto-pilot or even tugboat approaches were
used.
Tugboats might be drones designed to attach
to hard-points on a ship hull, though we also
have options for things like laser-propulsion
being used as something like a Star Trek Tractor
Beam.
But a very good deal of the traffic might
not be from self-propelled ships in favor
of tether connections to spacedocks some way
off from the main structure or via mass driver
launch.
Now this mass driver approach to launching
is likely to be even more the case on natural-gravity
habitats, the ones that actually produce gravity
by sheer mass rather than spin, be they a
classic sphere or something more exotic like
donut-shaped hoopworld or flat earth.
These don’t have no-gravity areas anymore
than Earth does so you can orbit them and
you do have to pay all that energy to launch.
However unlike our planet they are artificial
and often work using a ton of active-support
technology like the Atlas Pillars or Orbital
Rings we’ve discussed building them out
of in those episodes.
Such being the case it would be very easy
to make mass drivers under the surfaces during
construction and which protruded out above
their atmospheres via space towers using the
same core technologies you built the thing
out of.
You would also probably tend to incorporate
those as your routine on-world long-distance
transport systems too, same as we often discuss
using vacuum trains or hyperloops for cheap
high-speed transit on Earth and since you’re
building them in from the outset it makes
it much easier to do, plus you only build
these sort of megastructures if you have really
mastered the core technologies needed for
such devices anyway as they all operate on
the same basic principle of accelerating mass
magnetically down long vacuum shafts.
You would probably see some sort of vacuum
trains on any megastructure too, or even larger
spaceships.
It is probably nice to go for a long walk
or car drive or flight through your garden
landscape in such a thing but time is money
as they say and moreover you don’t care
if your commercial freight vehicles and drones
are getting to enjoy the scenic landscape
and would not want the extra delay and cost
of them doing so.
It is neat to think of sailing down the world-river
of a Topopolis - a super long skinny rotating
habitat that might be tens of kilometers wide
but millions or billions long, see the Continent-Sized
Rotating Space Habitats episode for details
- but neat as that is, you still stick access
ports for ships on the outside and vacuum
trains in the hull, for when speed matters.
Interestingly that means many folks might
tend to have their equivalent of a garage,
driveway, or front door in their basement
on such structures, as traffic might tend
to mostly arrive via underground shafts.
Of course as we discussed in Life on board
an O’Neill Cylinder, same as smaller stations
in conglomerations could detach and move to
another one if they liked, the hulls of many
rotating habitats might be designed to have
house-ships come dock and rise up into the
internal landscape in some high-tech far-future
version of mobile homes or houseboats.
You just rent, lease, or buy a plot of land
with a house-hub dock in it and move there
and move on when you want.
I don’t think most folks would opt to commute
that way but then we don’t know that many
folks would commute to work in the future,
in favor of either remote work or simply because
we might not tend to have classic employment
in a post-scarcity future where robots do
nearly everything.
Which is another point, most traffic in, around,
and between megastructures is probably robots
and a lot of the remainder is probably robot-piloted
passenger vehicles.
I mentioned the Topopolis a moment ago though,
and earlier that you could connect two megastructures
together with a long skinny rotating habitat
corridor and two really big structures, or
a long chain of them, might just use a Topopolis
as a connection method.
However, if we are talking very big megastructures,
potentially self-gravitating ones, could we
connect them with land bridges?
Or at least pressurized tunnels?
Could we connect two planets together so you
could walk between them?
And without any Clarketech like artificial
or antigravity?
As so often is the case, the answer is yes
if you have a nearly limitless supply of money
and manpower and really want to… and civilizations
that build artificial worlds generally meet
these qualifications.
There’s nothing stopping you from building
a Topopolis all the way through an orbital
path, as a big long circle, and you could
have all sorts of cylinder habitats hanging
off the sides of it connected to its non-rotating
protective sheath, or have two such rings
with habitats in between them like rungs on
a Ladder, what we call a Rungworld.
Though the junction on these is a bit tricky
especially if you want to maintain the sensation
of gravity as you transfer.
You are not limited to circles, so you could
also do an ellipse like Earth’s orbit around
the Sun is.
Such being the case, there is nothing stopping
you from building one right over or under
Earth’s poles and held from dropping by
a massive space tower protruding several thousand
kilometers up.
Then you just build a big spiral ramp up that.
Gravity would begin to drop off from Earth
– unless you are really good with making
micro-black holes or containing ultra-dense
materials like neutronium and suspend them
along the path to compensate for the lower
gravity as you ascend.
You then enter the Topopolis.
Now that is spinning and still getting some
gravity from Earth, but as I mentioned earlier
cylinder habitats don’t have to have flat
end caps, they can curve to narrow down, and
a long skinny hab can have sections that get
skinnier too and thus spin slower in terms
of their tangential velocity… though at
the cost of lower gravity at that spot.
You can potentially play around with having
many separate segments that spin at different
speeds, especially if you’ve got ultra-low-friction
materials so that you get a tiered ring setup
that amounts to a long series of steps around
the interior but that might be more trouble
than it's worth.
Either way, be it smooth or rather more clunky,
you are now inside that Topopolis that rings
Earth’s solar orbit – this is an example
of what I sometimes refer to as a Terran Ring
incidentally, though they come in other forms.
You can build the same Topopolis out around
Venus or Mars, a Martian Ring.
These can also be connected between each other
by more Topopolis, stretching from the Terran
Ring to the Martian Ring like spokes.
Though this gets much easier if you adjust
both planets to nicely circular orbits on
the same orbital plane which you can probably
do if you are building stuff like this anyway.
Connecting these spokes to the two rings,
which do not orbit at the same speed, is also
tricky but there’s a few ways you can do
that, including having many Topopolis or habitation
rings between those two primary ones so the
connection speeds were lower and more gradual.
Potentially thousands, after all you’ve
plenty of empty space between them.
It seems pretty neat to be able to walk to
Mars or Venus from Earth - though considering
these structures would have vastly more land
area than all those planets combined it’s
less a highway system than a habitat with
a few smaller hubs of note attached to them.
It would also take a regular human several
thousand years to make that pilgrimage on
foot, but there’s presumably a lot along
the way to see and you probably have radical
life extension long before you build this
sort of stuff so someone probably would give
it a try.
Done properly you can lace together Dyson
Swarms or more mundane solar systems via physical
connections even if it is probably not terribly
efficient, but it certainly is awesome conceptually.
That is the one unifying concept of coming
and going between megastructures, since the
methods vary so much by type of structure,
available construction and transportation
technologies, and motivation for travel.
How you might come and go between them is
hard to predict, all we know is that they
are so numerous and variable, and so awesome
in their scope, that folks will want to build
them and to travel to see them.
So today we were talking about Megastructures
and engineering, and seeing many of the immense
structures we could build under known science,
and if you’re interested in learning more
astronomical concepts, or the math and physics
behind them, I’d recommend Brilliant.
The Universe is an immense and amazing place,
and knowing the math and science behind it
only makes it seem more amazing, and Brilliant’s
thought-provoking, fun, and interactive courses
makes them a great choice for learning, whether
you’re a student, a parent trying to enhance
your kid’s education, a professional brushing
up on cutting-edge topics, or someone who
just wants to use this time to understand
the world better, you should check out Brilliant.
Try adding some learning structure to your
day by setting a goal to improve yourself,
and then work at that goal just a little bit
every day.
Brilliant makes that possible with interactive
explorations and a mobile app that you can
take with you wherever you are.
If you are naturally curious, want to build
your problem-solving skills, or need to develop
confidence in your analytical abilities, then
get Brilliant Premium to learn something new.
Brilliant’s thought-provoking math, science,
and computer science content helps guide you
to mastery by taking complex concepts and
breaking them up into bite-sized understandable
chunks.
You'll start by having fun with their interactive
explorations, over time you'll be amazed at
what you can accomplish.
If you’d like to learn more science, math,
and computer science, and want to do it at
your own pace and from the comfort of your
own home, go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur
and try it out for free.
So we were talking about navigating around
megastructures today, but another common question
is how such immense places would govern themselves
and what governments might be like in the
future while trying to handle trillions of
these colossal habitats in a single solar
system, and in two weeks we’ll explore that
notion in “Government Types of the Future”.
Before that though, we’ll be looking at
alien civilizations this weekend in our bonus
3-part episode “Talkative Aliens & Laser
SETI” which will be a collaboration with
PArallax Nick and the Exoplanets Channel.
Then next Thursday we’ll be back to the
Fermi Paradox series to consider the possibility
of Galactic Disasters.
If you want alerts when those and other episodes
come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,
and if you’d like to help support future
episodes, you can donate to us on Patreon,
or our website, IsaacArthur.net, which are
linked in the episode description below, along
with all of our various social media forums
where you can get updates and chat with others
about the concepts in the episodes and many
other futuristic ideas.
Until next time, thanks for watching,
and have a great week!
