imagine a galaxy being fully crawlonized at 0.1% of light speed, and then someone finally figures out ftl and all those civilizations that have been evolving independently for thousands of years are suddenly connected to each other again, including hundreds of lost colonies that forgot they ever were colonies, and dozens of systems who claim with some degree of legitimacy to have been the original starting point
Depending on the length of time, we might by then all be actual aliens to each other by diverging so much over time. But at any rate the first colonies of Earth by then would be alien to even Earth IMHO.
@@cosmicpearl5497 And one who has been used multiple times, usually involving an war on earth. in the interval. And yes after some thousand years with generic engineering you would probably be pretty alien.
@@cosmicpearl5497 Sounds similar to the warhammer 40k lore. Humans had an empire and then space travel became impossible for a certain amount of time. Various worlds fell into chaos as they basically imported all their goods. Those worlds died. Some worlds managed to survive. Eventually space travel becomes possible again and humans from earth want to make a new empire. They find various worlds. Some are caveman primitive. Some are quite advanced. All are brought back into the empire whether they like it or not. At least this is what I remember.
Isaac, this year I published a book about traveling to Barnard's Star called "Exo to Barnard." If it wasn't for your SFIA series, and me trying to explain to my significant other on a napkin how to travel between stars, I never would have finished it. Even if it is a short story. Thank you. You're an inspiration to us all.
7 years ago I was living in China as a teacher and I stumbled upon this channels very first video. Since then I’m enjoyed every video and the hopefulness that it brings. Every time I hear I your voice Issac it brings a smile to my face. I know that I’ll be educated but more importantly I’m renewed with hope for a better future
PBS Spacetime just recently released a video postulating that the difficulties of fast interstellar travel could be a boring but reasonable solution to the Fermi paradox. It also implied that "crawlonizing" the galaxy may be the only practical way to do it.
I watched that, and the conclusion was that the risks of higher relativistic travel up to 20% light speed were manageable. Not great, not easy, but if you're planning a colony in another solar system and have drives that could get you up to 0.2 C, you could probably manage the shielding.
@@karlwest437 agreed but they're gonna really hard to spot given the number of stars we'd have to look at before finding them. After all at 200 light years it'd be difficult to detect our own civilization.
If you are building a colony ship then you want it big, an O'Neil cylinder size 10km long. You would carry a lot of water to provide hydrogen for fusion, which would be your armour against radiation and particles too. A mass driver throwing out iron could provide decent acceleration. Pushing iron up to 60% light speed in 10km should easily be possible meaning the ship might get to 20% light speed.
I didn't like it. For example a species can be or become immune to radiation, removing some of the difficulties. They could also be or become able to hibernate and travel slow enough to be safe. Or send an AI with a gene library and breed your colonists on arrival. Many ways that we or aliens can overcome the distance and time problems. If it's only hard, but not impossible, someone will have done it and it only takes one
IDK, entropy and the ability to maintain complex working tech at those time scales is a concern. Look at the last couple thousand years of our history, how many wars and genocides did we put ourselves through? Imagine Rwanda on a technologically fragile spaceship, or a group that just decided the environmental constraints set thousands years ago are a myth, set by "the elites" to keep them down - followed by an environmental collapse. My feeling is that trying to yeet meatbags across interstellar distances, just results in a massive necropolis drifting between starts. Trying to crack the hard problem of consciousness seems the better solution - earth's children that colonise space are going to be have to be designed for that environment and look nothing like their ancestors - just share our culture and history. Hauling vast amounts of solids and volatiles, just to sustain bloated waterbags, seems kind of ridiculous tbh. Imagine how simpler and reliable your ship design gets if you can ignore providing gravity, bothering to pressurise the vessel, radiation shielding, complex biospheres and their support structures, etc etc. Just a few decentralised massive RTGS, manufacturing pods and a bunch of distributed computing capacity - for whatever virtual environments they want to play at - assuming they wouldn't find the ship structure as natural as we find a lush meadow. PS. Why even bother trying to climb down another gravity well, after you spent millennia crawling out of it - it feels like modern society coming up with a Rube Goldberg solution for going back to being hunter gatherers. Yes, we'd advert the climate crisis, wealth inequality, WMDs and ability to genocide, so it is a 'viable solution to current problems' - but we changed too much to seriously invest effort in it.
A mere blink of the eye for the age of our species. Remember that the epic Gilgamesh started with reference to "the days before bread", and here we are a mere 6,000 years later, less than 2% of the age of the species. Imagine what we could achieve (if we can keep politicians from wasting every penny on crooked vote buying schemes) in another 10% worth of time.
@@lucidnonsense942 by the time we've made all those changes to colonize the galaxy, we could have just sent machines in our place, and without the need for raw materials to sustain life, there's really not much motivation to colonize every cubic centimeter of matter from rim to rim anyway. We can build tech that is insanely robust, particularly once we have the means to consider colony ships and O'Neil Cylinders. Once you stop needing to fret about every gram sent into LEO, and you're just building these structures in orbit to begin with, a lot of things get simpler, and skew towards more massive and more redundancy built in. We likely will change on this timescale anyway, as a lot of technologies are kinda converging to make exploring space more possible, but I reckon it's AND, not XOR. My only real hope is I get to live long enough to see which way it ends up going, even if I don't get to go along for the ride.
There's a neat game called Hardspace Shipbreaker that had an interesting little detail, namely that all the ships had very thick outer hulls. And the larger ships had increasingly thick hulls, up to appearing to be metres thick plates made up of nanocarbon alloys to protect against debris strikes when zipping around the solar system. I thought that was a nice touch. :) Fun game too!
Moreover, the ships that run between Earth and space require very thick hulls, to make it through the veritable swamp of orbital debris made of rocketry litter.
At such high speeds, I think perhaps sending ahead probes on several different paths to the same destination would be wise. You essentially follow the probes flight path, and switch lanes depending on what they report back to the main ship following behind. While not perfect, it at least should provide some help.
Yes. Lots and lots of little Starshot-style probes would be good. Some larger ones too. Probably a good idea to launch several every few years since they'll be moving away from the ship. ...and some will break.
@@TheArklyte Yeah, there's already going to have to be a solution for clearing particles out of the path. Another thing probes would be good for. I'm not suggesting useless probes. I think everyone understands that they will need to be fairly hi-tech probes.
Seriously. I’m running low and I almost went splat whilst rounding the neutron star in my neighborhood. Unacceptable when you really think about it! $6,000,000 Galactic Credits for .0000000001 grams of the stuff?! It’s nuts.
Survey-Question: This Channel assembles Sci-Fi-Nerds, one would assume, so how many people here have internalized LGBT-Hate? I legit wonder. How many love Science (let alone the ideals talked-about in this specific video here) but still look down on people for what they are?
@@nenmaster5218 Politics is a lot more nuanced than the News makes it out to be. 99% of the country is not the blue haired crazies or Nazi crazies that the media portrays both sides to be. I voted in the Republican Primary in 2012 and wrote in Donald Trump in that General Election, but when Trump actually ran in 2016 and 2020, I voted in the Democratic Primary and wrote in Bernie Sanders in those General Elections. I'll probably be back to wasting my vote on a Republican in 2024. Politics for real people is nuanced. I think that a tiny percentage of people have a problem with LGBTQ, and 90 something percentage of people just don't care. There's some extreme people way far on the right who probably disavow anything other than cisgendered people because of devout Religious beliefs, but those people are uncommon. Personally, and I think this applies to nearly all conservatives on the issue, I don't want to be told what to do by the government. Gay people, and by extension LGBTQ people, can get married, I think that's fantastic because the government doesn't get to decide who you can and can't marry. LGBTQ people can do whatever they want with other LGBTQ people, perfect, that's exactly as it should be in a free society. Probably, LGBTQ, or rather sexuality in general, should be a federally protected class like race and gender, where an employer or institution is federally prohibited from discriminating against people for employment or services based on sexual orientation, because I don't think sexuality is currently protected like the other protected classes. I don't care, it's not my business, and for damned sure it's not the government's business, what orientation you are and how you choose to live your life. BUT, this doesn't just apply to LGBTQ people, this applies to everyone. A tiny percentage of the country is LGBTQ, it's just as unconstitutional for them to force their beliefs on me as it would be for a religion to. I'm not going to memorize pronouns or all these crazy orientations, in fact I'm already pretty aggravated just having to remember "LGBTQ" instead of "gay" because it seems like every time you turn around there's more unremarkable letters being strewn on that mean nothing to me. If a female wants to be called him/he, that's totally fine, they can ask me nicely and I'll try my best to do it, but at no point should I be forced. And that's 99% of people, if asked nicely by someone we will absolutely have no issue using whatever pronouns they prefer, but we will fight tooth and nail the government or corporations forcing us to memorize and use nearly useless information. The whole Trans thing is being forced onto ordinary people, that's why there's pushback. Scientifically, there are people with Double X chromosomes (females), people with XY chromosomes(males), and a few rare men with genetic abnormalities like XYY or XYX. People with Double X and XY are anatomically different, thus they should compete separately in sports. Someone's personality can't change their DNA. Most people don't want children being sexualized at a young age, so there's pushback against indoctrinating children by teaching them about LGBTQ stuff. There's all these big corporations who don't give a damn about anyone's well-being, pretending to care, that will forever try to push LGBTQ stuff onto everyone else. The goal for a free society is to make it blind to sexuality, race, religion, or whatever else. Rather than forcing acceptance, it's more authentic if it isn't ever a factor in people's decision making. We're all just people with different shapes, colors, and personalities, the less we focus on our differences the less they matter, and they shouldn't matter.
@@SpecialEDy Of course i know its complex, but thats no reason to shy-away from it. Or for me to shy-away from recommending not just Sci-Fi-Stuff to Sci-Fi-Fans (cause why not) but 'SOme More News' and even 'Second Thought' to my fellow Sci-Fi-Fans Because its food-for-thoughts and brainstimulating.
@@SpecialEDy Your comment signals that you wanna sound grounded but it yells loudly at multiple points in your comment ‚I just guess wildly about percentages and dont know how hostile towards lgbt the world still is’. I dont try to talk down to you or anything, but really, your comment shows off that you know very little and youre way too casual about lots of stuff. You are clearly uninformed about lgbt issues, let alone Radicailization-Wave that rampaged and still rampages in the Republican-Party, documented well by people like Telltale Fireside, Holy Koolaid, and those they collabed with.
I would jump at the chance to crew a multigenerational colony ship (preferably a gardener fleet, but whatever). The fact I would never see the other end does not matter. A small, focused community brought together to produce a culture that will in the fullness of time seed the galaxy with life sounds just like the town I would love to live in.
@@spaceman081447 this channel explains it best in another episode but its a fleet of ships that plants colonies in a system then moves on to the next one. Rather than stoping permanently at one system.
Risky move. You never know how the culture on the ship could morph into a dystopia. You can't walk out, whereas you can more of less always flee from a bad country. That fact alone is a real issue for which we don't have a reliable solution yet. Another aspect is that life might be very specific to a planet and its evolution. You might end up on a planet whose physical conditions are akin to Earth but where the biology would be poisonous, or just as incompatible with ours as pieces of plastic can't be digested.
Something you didn't mention is that stars aren't fixed. They move around relative to each other. When you're talking about real crawlonizing, you can just wait for other stars to go by, and hitch a ride. On time scales of tens or hundreds of millions of years, you can go pretty much anywhere in the galaxy without ever having to travel more than about one light year through deep space!
At 5% or 1% or faster that would not matter much. And almost not travelling AT ALL? You are forgetting you inherit your starting velocity from the speed the sun has.
@@Emdee5632 If you are going 0.05c then sure, you don't have to hitch rides on passing stars. But if your ships go less than 0.001c it is a great way to travel.
The problem with this is that people like me are too impatient, LOL. But it is still something to keep in mind. Like with the Andromeda galaxy is coming towards us as we speak. This should make it easier to find intelligent aliens like us. Hopefully they are willing to share their technology with us and we show them what we have. If we can even communicate with them of course.
Actually larger sizes favors higher speeds. There are a couple of things going on: 1. The difficulty with fusion is largely a scale problem. Say you use nuclear bombs for propulsion. Fission is best at relatively small sizes. H-bombs favor huge sizes. If you are going to spend so much on a large ship, the size of the h-bomb means you spend a fixed amount on the fission core and going to larger and larger h-bomb means you spend a trivial small amount extra for the fusion material. You can get into giant fusion sails where you have a huge thermonuclear explosion, but the 'sail' is a ways away, allowing the explosion to cool and expand quite a bit before hitting the fusion sail. In other words you get the high energy density explosion with very fast matter shooting out, but because there is some space between the explosion and the fusion sail, the hot plasma cools while maintaining the high speeds and spreads out enough for the fusion sail to get hit by and reflect the blast for maximum acceleration without being damaged in the process. Getting away from h-bombs, just doing fusion directly today you need big machines. Bigger fusion machines tend to be more efficient. This is why the ITER for example is so big is they could do fusion with a smaller machine, but they would never make enough energy to counter-balance the energy consumed running the machine. So the ITER is big enough to help ensure they will have a net surplus of energy. 2. When dealing with collisions in space, you can have better shielding and better shielding schemes when working at the large scale. You could for example have vessels in front of the main ship taking the impacts of detectable objects ahead and turning the impactor into a diffuse plasma that won't really hurt the main ship. A great thing about space is space for energy to be safely released if harnessed right. On the ship itself, economies of scale allows for more spread out layers to take an impactor and have it spread out so the energy is more disperse before it impacts the next layer. Whatever energy is in the collision gets more and more spread out and absorbed over a wider area until it stops somewhere in the shielding of a large vessel. Then of course with a large vessel and large impactor, you do some repair work so you are fully ready for the next major impact, which may be years or even decades later. There is also a deal where a larger ship can have more systems and have those systems more sensitive for detecting debris in the path of travel. Say you have a small craft with a little eyepiece to look at for debris. It is not going to see much in terms of traveling at relativistic speeds. You get into massive O'Neil cylinders and maybe you have multiple JWSTs looking for debris and maybe even massive space lasers illuminating objects way out and even pushing some of the smaller debris out of the way. Maybe you have some weapon systems to explode next to the object to alter its course to avoid your ship. In other words, with size, there are more options to protect your ship at high speeds and those options can be a lot better and more powerful / sensitive than with a smaller ship.
This reminds me of a short story I read once. Pretty sure it was Arthur C. Clark. They used an artificial iceberg at the nose of the ship to prevent the destruction of their ship by erosion. Low tech high speed. One of those old golden age stories that stuck in my mind.
Songs from distant Earth? It fit the description but he could have used the iceberg shield in other novels and short stories. But Songs of distabt earth was one of his later publications. It actually concentrates the story around the crews interaction with the people of an earlier colony that they make a short stop at to rebuild the iveberg shield. It is possible that he took an earlier story, dust it off and used it as inspiration or a base structure for a rewrite. Isaac Asimov did the same with his story Nightfall, took an earlier story improved upon it many years later.
Oh man this reminds me of a Star Trek The Next Generation novel: The Last Stand. Basis of the story is that a two species the same star system fight a war, destroy their worlds, and then leave the system. They don't have FTL so they are indeed crawlonizing (spelling?)
Great video as always. Regarding interstellar travel. In his book Songs of Distant Earth, Arthur C Clarke had his ship have an ablative shield made of reinforced ice to survive the interstellar trip. Could a slow boat use this method the sheld can always be used to start the colonization at the target planet and water is a good radiation shield.
I read ''Songs of Distant Earth'' too! ''The problem of the emerging Scorp civilization was that their attempt to go out of the water and look around on dry land happened during Owen's 2nd adminstration - a completely illegal, ruthless and very efficient administration...''
The advantage with an ice shield is that it easily re-assembles itself from that material ablated off of it. You'd think that a higher melting point would help the material to do that, but if your shield is made from metal, any ejected material very quickly turns into metal dust. With ice, the ablated steam turns into snow, and once that has fallen onto your shield, the drag from the intergalactic gas might heat it to close to 0°C. If your drag isn't strong enough for that, you could simply make your primary impact shield 2 cylinders, like a meat grinder in order to rotate the snow towards your ship where you can shine an infrared lamp onto it. Of course that design necessitates a secondary shield to cover the decreased thickness where the cylinders touch. The recovery wouldn't nearly be complete, but even saving 1% on the weight of your heat shield could save you a bunch of fuel.
PBS SpaceTime just had a great hard science episode specifically on the risks and capabilities of traveling at around 0.2c. Expect about a millimeter of frontal surface to vaporize in a trip to Alpha C, for instance. At these speeds, space isn't empty at all.
Patience to slow boat the galaxy? People in the comments don't even have the patience to finish the video lmao, I have my doubts. Really though, thank you for another fantastic video. This is going to be my morning routine and drive to work today.
Here's the thing. Any society that is capable of interstellar travel probably has controlled hibernation/long lifespans. I think our impatience is a result of our limited time and the fact there is so much potential things to do so we tend to speed-run things.
Well, much like Musk back in university I looked at space as the future. I figured we needed at least three things to truly colonize outer space, we needed artificial gravity (it's a form of energy), fusion or better power, and terrific food generation inside. LEDs have solved the latter, we can actually outpace by quite a margin, water usage, and efficiency of production by growing food inside now. However, we are not even close on artificial gravity and fusion will not be commercially available in my lifetime.
I used to read Amazing Stories when I was a kid. I remember reading one story in which a great interplanetary ship used water ice as an ablative shield. As long as there was water at the ship's destination, rebuilding/repairing the shield was simple and cheap. I wish I could remember the name of that story.
I have a similar question. *_Analog - Science Fiction Science Fact_* had a story that falls in The Grate Filter category. In the near future astronauts are exploring a lunar lava tube, accessed via a "skylight" crater. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube They find alien artifacts. The POV switched to intelligent dinosaurs discussing the "Belters" desire for full independance and the Homeworld's demands. The two sides threw big rocks at each other in the First Interplanetary War. Everybody dies.
Very cheap! If I'm not mistaken, there's ice pretty-much anywhere it's not too warm, so basically, everywhere outward from the outer edge of the habitable zone of every star system. But this will be wrong if oxygen is not as common as I think; oxygen-poor systems would be ice-poor.
@@eekee6034 I never thought about it before, but maybe another ice would work. Ammonia seems pretty common, and would be stable as ice until you approach a star's inner system.
That's how the lighthuggers from revelation space series allege to deal with it but I'm pretty sure ice isn't going to be able to survive high relativistic speeds lmao. Great for other kinds of shielding applications though.
Imagine arriving at a planet already full of warehouses full of building materials, habitats, arable fertilized land, factories already built. ...but if you could have all that done remotely, you could also build any number of McKendree Cylendars. Then you wouldn't need to bother traveling to any of these "planet" things.
@@capturedflame ...I guess... but after our first Dyson Sphere, cranking out McKendree Cylendars with fusion reactors ought to be near free. I can't see much point in wanting to freeze ourselves for centuries when we have perfectly nice habitats to live in. If you have a few little mini-stars inside each of your cities, you wouldn't need to freeze yourself and travel to a big natural star millions of miles away. ...but, sure, we can do that too.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 and those McKendree cylinders would have to be maintained for thousands of years with no one living in them, they are machines after all. Planets after all, if they are selected properly, don't need maintenance, much like Earth doesn't. The life on Earth make the Earth habitable for humans, not machines! What happened to Earth to make it habitable for us is what these probes would be doing to these selected exoplanets, they are selected very carefully. A planet is selected that is the right distance from its star and has a whole host of physical features that would make it habitable for humans once an atmosphere and biosphere is selected. These planets are not like Mars or Venus, they don't require artificial structures to keep them habitable once made so.
@@capturedflame Well, yeah. I'd probably do it right now given the chance. But mostly because I don't already have an amazing McKendree Cylender. I can't really see having a different star in the sky as that big of a deal. I don't see how moving my habitat over to a different star would make much difference. Could just adjust the lighting to match another star for a few months if we were bored. We'd already be in a world designed to our specifications. It'd be pretty much the same if if was somewhere else...
@@capturedflame ...also, I share Andrew's worries about being asleep for that long. Even if the technology was perfect, a lot can happen when you are watching for several hundred years.
Isaac, you have really drawn myself and my kids in. We go way back. When you used to apologize for how you talked we all gasped in horror because we love your kind and humble demeanor. You’re you, that’s good enough. Semper Fi! 😂
Barrow and tipler also said we could colonize the milky way in 3 million to 300 million years depending on the speed of the ships. Awesome video keep up the great work.
In terms of debris in interstellar space? we would have to send a swarm of small ships rather than one big one. Losses are inevitable - but chances of success are greatly increased.
The square-cube law says that the same amount of armor on a single large ship will be much thicker than the same amount of armor spread over several smaller ships with the same internal volume. I think that optimizing for mission success would result in fleet sizes of 2-3, maybe 4 tops. Expect 2 if there's traditional money involved, lol. Exactly the lowest number to call it "redundant" and still hit the lowest possible material and energy costs.
One of the additional hazards of speeds above 1% C is that interstellar gas and particles will glow in the ionizing radiation range from impact with the ship. The shielding mass required to protect carried biologicals such as crew from radiation is likely to be much greater than the shielding mass for protection from the kinetic impacts. This would make speeds of 10-20% C probably impractical due to the mitigations for safety for manned trips. Might be possible for unmanned cargo ships
Love your work Mr. Arthur. However, after binge-watching your back catalogue, and grabbing a drink and a snack whenever advised, I now have diabetes. On the plus side, I am now able to calculate the relationship between the surface area of my expanding belly, its total volume, and its mass. So I suppose that's something.
This is cool stuff! I've long discussed white dwarf slingshots. They are truly the sweet spot for slingshot maneuvers. The problem with neutron stars and black holes is that the acceleration requirements are way too high. You zoom around the neutron star of black hole so fast that you need a ludicrous amount of acceleration for the desired Oberth effect. In contrast, you slingshot around a white dwarf slowly enough that a simple solar thermal rocket will provide the ideal Oberth effect without outrageous acceleration requirements.
Stars are in Brownian Motion relative to each other. So, if a society is patient, another star will happen by within a lightyear of distance every now and then. Thus, even if voyage time were a constraint for some reason, the galaxy could still be populated/explored by our descendents in a relatively short amount of time. Once it is fully populated, an A.I. mind could travel by light beam anywhere in the galaxy in zero subjective time. However, the real-time (latency) to cross the galaxy would still be on the order of 100,000 years.
Thank you Isaac Arthur! I love all of your episodes, but I felt this one was a lot more informative than previous ones. So I loved this one especially much!
Speed is irrelevant when you live in a self contained orbital habitat. A century or a millennia to get between stars As long as you have fuel, you have time
@@robertgraybeard3750 If you can use stored DNA samples, maybe to the point of having it stored as data code there would be no need for an arcship. Once the AI onboard finds a suitable place to settle it start to crank out humans from the artifical womb systems and clone works that it built once it arrived in the system. If a target world have a bit higher gravity and more ultraviolet radiation coming in the AI select, or design human DNA codes for dark skinned dwarfs.
@@michaelpettersson4919 that "suitable place to settle" will probably not be a planet but rather a large habitat in free space rotating for artificial gravity that it and its "minions" build by eating comets and asteriods. Every solar system will surely have somets and asteroids. th-cam.com/video/DM88sUBTTRM/w-d-xo.html *_The Roundtable TV Interview_* by Harold Hays, NYC PBS 1975 Space Studies Institute Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, scientist and futurist of O'Neill Colony fame with Dr. Isaac Asimov chemist and science commentator and science fiction author
While what if you are take a trip about 1200 light years by jump into hyperspace to quantum tunneling portal, which would be 1.2 hours traveling time on starship. That's possibly doesn't need to some snakes or drinks.🍮🍫🍬🍧🍪🍹🍸🍡🍩🍰
Ok I know this is stupid but that bit about the thought process of colonists thought processes in justifying Sending out colonists of their own brought a literal tear to my eyes. I didn't realize just how beautiful that concept was until you said it.
Still have a major problem with attempting to conduct interstellar Colonisation using 0.01c ships, unless you know that your propulsion technology will never improve beyond 1%c. Simply put, if propulsion technology is improving, it’s ultimately faster to wait until you have better propulsion systems. If by 2100CE we can go at 1% to alpha Centaurus in 500-years but if we wait until 2200CE you can expect to have 0.1c capabilities, setting out in 2200CE 10%c gets you there in only 50years. A saving of 350-years. At that point even if in 2300 you expect ships travelling at close light speed, it makes sense not to wait and build the 0.1c ships. 10-20% the speed of light looks to me to be the sweet spot for interstellar travel.
@@Emdee5632 Yeah, that's a serious issue. Would need plenty of redundancy and the ability to essentially rebuild the entire ship on ship. You not going to be constantly using the engines (whatever they end up being) but you can't have your engines going out with no backups when you are 100 years from the nearest system with (hopefully) the resources you need to fix them.
@@rogervanaman6739 ...which means that you'd have to be already fully independent of stars. Which raises the question of why you are trying to get to another star in the first place. ...since you don't need a star.
Declaring "first" and planting a flag is a powerful motivator. We didn't wait until self powered ships before exploring the oceans, that started as soon as someone said "yeah, this ship will *probably* survive a week or two on the ocean, as long as there are no storms!" It's safe to expect prior behavior to continue :)
@@oldmankatan7383 Aye. Very true. Buuut, that was all long before we could manufacture whatever we wanted. If we don't have robots, we have a motive to capture land and enslave humans. But, once we have ro-buts, and self-replicating manufacturing dudes, all of that becomes silly.
Years ago, i loved the german Sci-Fi Lightnovel-Series "Perry Rhodan". And in one of their older Story-Lines (written somewhere in the 1970s if i remember correctly) the found one of their older ships in a far distant Galaxy - trapped for centuries, slowly drifting through this cosmic region. And the roughly 100.000 People on Bord (Humans and Alien-Species) adapted over generations to a life in space and in a spaceship. This ship was their one and only home. Planets where only used to mine for needed ressources - for this task they used robots, because most of the people where afraid of leaving their ship and they refused to live on a planet. Despite of other issues (like civil wars, epidemic diseases, collisions, terrorism / sabotage or degeneration and downfall in primitive civilisations) i think always about this one problem, which could accure to space-travel spanning centuries or even millennia. In the end the colonists might reach their destinations but won´t colonize other worlds and will continue their secluded life in their space-habitats. Could you really call this colonisation of space then? But thanks to Isaac Arthur and some of his previous videos i now know, that the colonisation of different planets with all their own characteristics is pretty difficult, dangerous and maybe in many cases even impossible, so i have the relief, that the colonists have a way better life in their O´Neill-Cylinders and similar habitats. If you read all this: thank you for your time and please pardon my bad english.
I imagine a ship that behave like that but DO colonise planets as well by the means of leaving behind some people that either want off the ship or get kicked off for being subversive elements. In any case, the fact that the crew is mixed with aliens are an interesting take their arrival must been an interesting part of their history.
So we become a species of Space Van Lifers sharing TH-cam videos with tips on asteroid boon-docking and showing how cool living out of an old space van is? If people can live that way now outside of Quartzite, Arizona then doing it in space can't be much worse.
The one thing that I worry about at this kind of speeds is that over the couse of the travel (taking centuries, if not millenia) - what if a civilisation evolves on that planet? I mean we see the planet on earth as it was some hundreds of years ago and found no traces of civilisations, so we sent a ship and it takes a couple thousand years to arrive, only to find a species that is technology-wise about as far as late-rennaissance... We wouldn't have detected them from that far away at any rate. In fact, to an outside observer, mankind is only "visible" since about 100 years with the dawn of television (after all, light travels faster so the first aired images have already surpassed the first aired radio-shows), which means any planet farther away than 100ly, wouldn't even know our planet to have a population (spectral-dating the atmospheric composition could easily be mistaken as some abnormal natural behaviour by an outsider who has no clue how Earths ecosystem works). So what if some alien civilisation saw our planet some 15,000 years ago, determined that there must be no sentient life-form there, sent a ship, and they will arrive tomorrow, finding us....
You can even go a little sideways with that, you can arrive at your destination to find a few years before a comet or meteor or even volcano rendered the surface lifeless or unable to support life!
@@TheEvilmooseofdoomIndeed. Although I would argue that this course of events would be beneicial tot he late colonisers, who, coming in basically arc-ships, could use their torus-ships or ring-ships or whatever to terraform the planet to support their life like tailored.
Thank You for finally giving me the insight I need to not compare kilometers to miles but building a mental structure using Light years broken down into kilometers like you have done here. I don't mean to say it's original but if it is; more praises to you. I have heard many voices speak in these terms but never articulate them as you have worded. Granted I had to pause the video and thoroughly observe the charts about 6 mins in but I felt that clear understanding I needed to finally "Get Kilometers".
They are all very rational analyses. Love everything you do. Thank you. in the picture @ 14:55 : If the artist would make the closer stars red and the distant stars blue (regardless of their movement relative to us) it would make it clearer where they lie in depth. @ 16:42 I would assume that some ships would keep cruising knowing that their competitors would peel off at the first habitable planet. The extreme outliers would wait a very long time indeed. 1/2 cruising speed may be conservative imo *edit; missed "at least" half cruising speed.
I think it would be fun if we made a planet or a moon a spaceship... I'm not sure if I heard that on this channel or Event Horizon but it sure was an interesting idea
If we spread from star to star very slowly, the primary force spreading life won't be colony ships every few thousand years, it will be the fact that the systems we settle are drifting further apart EVERY year. We can colonize the entire galaxy in about four galactic years If we travel at one ten-thousandth of light speed, each settled world sends only one colony ship per thousand years, and they never send them to any system more than four light years away. This is true even if we don't do any fancy maneuvers or develop any technology or infrastructure to increase our speed EVER. And we CAN'T take much longer than that no matter how slow we go, because we can't make stars drift apart more slowly. Even if our ships are ten times slower and our colonies send them out only half as often, it takes only a tiny fraction longer.
We won't have colonies at large distances. Basically, if communication time goes beyond half a lifespan, you can consider the places as completely separate for all intents and purposes.
As I understand it there is a star out there heading towards us that are predicted to intersect with the outskirts of our solar system eventually. I cannot remember if the timescale was hundreds of thousends or millions of years in the future but events like that are opportunities. We probably already had such visits before, something that may have disturbed the Oort cloud and maybe caused planets to alter their orbits. And why not drop off a colony on some visiting interstellar asteroid? They mine the astroid in transit and make it their home. Maybe it will look more artificial then natural when it arrives somewhere.
Go out to the Oort cloud and find a stable comet. Tunnel into it to create living space using the material for fuel, breathable atmosphere , and other things. Attach a couple of fusion drives and point it on a trajectory to whatever star you want.
Considering they are talking about how old the ISS is we will need materials that will last much longer and designs for easy replacement of panels etc. Maintenance will be top priority so we don't die nearing the finish line of a failed $6 bearing.
@@magnemoe1 Tell that to Elon Musk that goes for a stainless steel approach just so his ships can be more robust. I seen a video sequence of a rocket just collapsing due to its own weight. That is how fragile light materials can be, a rocket collapsing like a stepped on beer can.
If you can colonize out to the edge of the Oort cloud, you can wait for another star to pass within a light-year or so, and "hop" onto it's Oort cloud. It
Would using a stellar engine to push our star around not also count as "ultra low speed" colonization? The primary difficulty of colonizing other systems is money and resources, since those things are practically never coming back to the sender nor providing them with profit from the venture in their lifetimes. On the other hand making a swarm that can serve other local purposes while acting as a thruster to turn Sol into a mobile home is easier to justify, even if it takes longer to get to the end result.
Depends on where you want to go. But yes. We could probably get the Sol system into near relativistic speeds on a long enough time line. We before send probes and ships out the other way before we get going.
Yeah that's why we will most likely go extinct in the solar system we evolved in (also the most likely Fermi Paradox solution, all the aliens just stayed home due to the difficulty and expense and are too distant to detect). If it's not profitable (1-way trip) or can't be done in the investors' lifetimes it's probably never going to happen. Energy will probably never be truly free (even solar panels cost $ to produce and don't last forever, even if the sun did) and it takes a lot of it to move a hollowed out asteroid or whatever form a generational ship takes at even 1% lightspeed.
The thing is, that only lets you get so close to the next star system before you start having some negative consequences on both your system and theirs. You'd still need to navigate distance probably on the order of a lightyear or more, and then slow down to the target system's speed.
@@colinsmith1495 Of course, but the leeway you have to give will still be many times shorter than the regular travel distance from our "stationary" position to other systems. There are two ways you can go from there; send colony or robotic ships to develop the new star and rendezvous with Sol later, or immediately cannibalize the system for resources and star refueling, maybe (very painstakingly) pull some desirable objects into Sol orbit.
I´ve always wondered, in most science fiction there´s the concept of a "Galactic empire" , an empire or state that controls the majority of a galaxy. Has there ever been one with a Universal scale? Likewise, even with faster than light, how viable would an universal or galactic cluster empire be?
I mean even if you could get to 1000x the speed of light, getting across 1 galaxy would take centuries. I can't even conceive the logistics involved in uniting multiple galaxies under a single banner.
it's always been hard for me to imagine what even a Galactic "Empire" would mean. What resources would the empire "collect" from other stars as taxes? Asteroid matter? what would be the purpose of making a colony send you material if you can manufacture everything you need? Would the "capitol" want to have "colonies" deliver more mass to their star system? Even with ftl, an "empire" sounds in an enormous amount of effort for exactly zero benifit.
I figured out some years ago that once permanent large scale space habitats exist with perhaps a million inhabitants living for generations, then after a few century or three, it's a small step to decide to drive the entire habitat across to a new solar system. Even if it takes a 100,000 years, it's not significantly different for the inhabitants from staying in one locale.
Or even at far lower to no speeds. Stone age man colonized six out of seven continents simply by just building a village just a days walk away, basically over the next hill. Our recent observations of asteroids from outside the solar system and of rogue planets and brown dwarf stars tells us there are resources even in interstellar space so just building large space habitats such as O'Neill Cylinders, Bernal Spheres and even the Stanford Torus would be sufficient to spread to the stars without even trying. Space colonization isn't space colonization till we colonize space not planets and moons.
@@VainerCactus0 Stone age man just going to where the food was is still colonization as they continued to live where they moved to and it wasn't where they lived before. It's not as if the descendents of settlers ever conscientiously decided upon where they were to be born. Intent to colonise is not a requirement, just look at how dandelions have colonized our lawns.
I recall reading an explanation of the "slingshot" manouver, and it said that the spacecraft can gain up to twice the difference in velocity between it and the gravity body. It obviously works. But the velocity gain is somewhat modest -- I'm not sure how one would go "much, much faster" using flybys, unless there were a lot of objects moving at very high speeds.
You aren't limited to unpowered slingshots. Powered slingshots or Oberth manoeuvres get your more bang for your buck by exploiting the Oberth effect. Diving just above the horizon of a black hole and doing a burn there can net an enormous energy change compared to an equivalent burn done in deep space.
Even at 20% light speed, heat and friction from atomic dust and gas will become a nightmare. Cosmic rays will sterilize the rest. Sheilding for these increases your fuel payloads dramatically.
Yes... But. We also have to look at the ability for materials to stay intact. Remeber, a crystalline lattice, and all molecular bonds for that matter, will not remain intact if it is moved faster then the speed of sound through the material Meaning that not all of that energy is going into the hull of the ship or the people inside. Quite a lot of that energy is remaining on the ship while you make a little dust shaped hole throughout. And the energy for that is dramatically lower, by the time your at relativistic speeds its nothing. And yes, I did just suggest that everyone on board gets dust and sand sized holes in them, but humans already deal with that daily, our body's are quite amazing. As to genetic damages, there is a light of hope that came from agent orange. Reaserch that started with the goal to repair those effected has lead to promising DNA repair therapies and even the ability to undo aging in mice. We've a long way to go, but a mouse does have all the complexity of a human so most of that way is taking extra time for our safety.
@@virutech32 the point of this video is honestly a bit too optimistic. Not going fast enough would create all sorts of other problems for the crew (even if IT'S just an AI), the spacecraft etc. Saying that interstellar travel is an absolute certainty is a bit of a reach
@@humanistwriting5477 I don't think that cancerous bombardment 20-30 times greater than that of Earth's conditions from the Sun is generally healthy, and we aren't talking about simply photons here, this is heavy atomic particles, not to mention high energy cosmic rays coming from every direction. The human body is amazing- ON EARTH.
The effectiveness of "doing a slingshot" around any object depends greatly upon both mass and the radial distance at which you pass. Higher mass with a dangerously close pass is best. Using your drive as you pass the minimum distance (periapsis) will maximize any benefit you get. Slingshots can be used to accelerate, decelerate, or radically change directions in ways that your unassisted drive simply cannot manage... I've had a lot of fun experimenting with slingshots in Kerbal Space Program.
There'd have to be an immense robotic exploration first before crawlonization. And that exploration would have to have found a human-friendly planet out there. Hard to believe anybody would join a colony ship with a 10,000 year voyage without a clear destination for future generations.
The ship itself is a suitable long term habitat. The destination star system is a place to get raw materials for building more space habitats. Planets are not very good colonization targets compared to space habitats.
I’m potentially including this concept in my own universe where, due to most electronics and computing being unable to work, a very low-tech, low maintenance generation ship that takes thousands of years to travel even a few light years becomes the norm I’m fascinated with the idea of a ship where so much time and generations pass that when they arrive they are a fundamentally different culture than the founding one
If we went fast enough, we wouldn't have to consider stellar drift as much. But, at what speed would have to consider stellar drift when making decisions about interstellar colonization?
Great episode. It's so weird to contemplate the time scales involved with these sorts of undertakings; i.e. there's so much happening every single day in such a massive civilization, and yet centuries and centuries of travel time...
That's why slow colonization won't happen unless we get way better communications nobody invests in a return they'll never see and that will belong to someone else.
@@nothingnobody1454 For immediate and tangible gains, perhaps colonization efforts are government sponsored and are used as tax write-offs (or just gouging taxpayers directly). There's also non-monetary rewards (i.e. vanity, end-of-life spending of fortunes, spreading an ideology, etc.). Besides, in a developed solar system with trillions of people even '1 in a million' demographics or interests would still number in the millions.
@@nothingnobody1454 ROI is irrelevant for slow colonization. Any space hab can just decide to set off at any point. It's the sort of thing that becomes trivial for a K2 civ where u could crowdsource a colony ship via donations from a tiny percentage of the pop who just think it's a kinda cool idea
@@rhuiah why would the state pay all that money to found a colony that womt exist for a thousand years and won't be administrated by its financiers? Without at least rapid communication it becomes hard to find a motive. What voter is going to elect someone to do this bad idea? Remember that every dollar and minute you spent on it could have been spent to build orbital infrastructure here on earth for processing resources from in system, or building a Dyson sphere around our own star. Slow colonization is pointless from a social, political, or survival perspective.
Imagine starting out this way and when you FINALLY reach your target system you find it fully colonised by some other group that started out a long time after you did but by using faster ships.
Survey-Question, cause i wanna know: This Channel assembles Sci-Fi-Nerds, one would assume, so how many people here have internalized LGBT-Hate? I legit wonder. How many love Science (let alone the ideals talked-about in this specific video here) but still look down on people for what they are?
Scientists have over estimated their powers and reached immediately for the power of the sun, we need to build fusion engines first and build our understanding, it will truly be a miracle if those torus designs succeed.
I agree. And we skipped the last levels of the ocean biome. I believe if we fully understand the ocean, we will have the tools to colonize space. Pressure changes, and less oxygen. Not to mention whales can't get cancer, and bioluminescence could be a 2 for one on producing lights and food. We need to know more!
what are u on about? The sun is the easy mode for human exploitation. Fusion reactors need to creat conditions that far exceed those found at the core of any natural sun. More importantly tapping the sun for energy only requires the advanced technology of aluminum foil & solar panels. As apposed to the superconductors, dynamic control electronics, gyrotrons, neutron beams, etc. that fusion requires. Thas like saying "space is hard. we should learn how to live in the mantel first". You don't start with the harder tech regardless of distance since distance isn't really an issue here. Energy is
@@captainhakob814 I'm picturing O'Neil Cylinders with the entire floor being a couple hundred meter deep shallow sea filled with life, and people can go swimming in it if they want, or just stand over windows that let them see into it.
@@colinsmith1495 now imagine that a thousand times over, with a bigger 'casing' of a cammand ship/ civilian ship welded and integrated in a hurry, one AU in length with its own solar system type magnetosphere and a chunk of earth in the middle and that's the ship in my book, the Terra Carda (earth heart)
What a excellent episode! The more I think about this and the more about I think about a Bussard ramjet, maybe they are not feasible as an interstellar drive but not only was a breaking system but a way to provide energy for life support for a colony ship? Maybe a population on that ship might leave colonists at a system but some to prefer to slingshot around the star to raise the next generations for the next star? Can anyone suggestion a course at Brilliant or some other source to learn the skill to assess this question and maybe design such a probable thing? And I learned today, when looking for a mate, I need to hang where actuaries gather!
Like a bus dropping of some passangers at every stop, picking up a few more if the system was already colonized, and producing more on the way to the next, well that last one is a bit rare during bus travel thou...
I like the thought of in some remote system two colony ships (or a ship arriving at an established colony) meeting, and greet eachother as friends even though they don't look alike since well, they have a common origin! Then as they get more in contact, it turns out they're ACTUALLY alien to one another, just expanding in the same fashion.
What about the brute force approach to interstellar debris? Just put a thin shield a thousand km ahead of your ship that will convert debris into a splatter of microscopic dust that is diluted by the time it hits your actual ship, then just repair your umbrella with a patch.
5:40 I came up something like that for a story I'm writing. Prior to FTL, the humanity settled worlds in Proxima Centauri and Tau Ceti by ships using solar sail, laser and torch drives to accelerate to .2c
Issac, I need to thank you for your wonderful suggestion to watch the Amazon Prime series "The Expanse". I'm in the middle of season 5 and love how they try to follow known physics. And am amazed at how much I recognize from hearing it on your channel.
Assuming thermal shielding you should be able to get up to 300km/s using the Oberth effect on a solar slingshot - 10-20 km/s of delta V can easily give you 100+km/s of hyperbolic excess velocity. If you want to use white dwarfs as trip bookends you can probably get to 3000km/s, brake slightly on a hyperbolic pass to exit the destination dwarf at a few hundred Km/s hyperbolic excess velocity and then drift to a much nearer normal star 100x closer than your original starting point, saving 90% of your travel time for little additional energy. Anything beyond this needs neutron stars and the mother of all forward shielding/armor.
Few questions. Once you get outside the solar system is it difficult to determine your relative speed? Also once you reach maximum speed, can you then cut off your thrusters and maintain that speed without slowing down because you’re in the vacuum of space. Or would you begin to slow down once your engines are off?
There are a lot of really predictable pulsars in the galaxy we can use as a "galactic positioning system" to solve the relative speed problem! And yes, if you turn your thrusters off at speed, you won't slow down unless an outside force acts upon your ship (you hit something). Space is really empty, but not perfectly empty. Those little grains Issac talked about act like the drag from air molecules in our atmosphere to slow you down. So it's like a really, really thin atmosphere with just a tiny bit of drag that will barely slow you down. That tiny bit can add up over centuries though!
What about some type of aerogel-like molding around the craft. sort of like an otterbox for your phone, designed to allow the "dust grains" to penetrate and slow down before coming into contact with the actual hull. like a spongy cushion.some grains might not even make it halfway through if they could come up with just the right material to make it out of.
Humans are more known for procrastination than patient long term planning. A foreseen extinction event is pretty much the only thing that would initiate crawlonization. We do need to keep making progress on the technology we would need (as well as our ability to foresee extinction events), so that we have time to build and send off some ships before the foreseen extinction event.
I believe that much of our procrastination are done because we are unable to fulfill the destiny we would had been going for due to lack of opportunity. Right now there are essentially just Antarctica left to colonize without the locals objecting too much. Some of us are suitable to be pioneering but if there is no place out there to go for there isn't much to do about it. Now if we can get the technology for effective and resonable cheap space flight we can start out again. The lazy people are not going to move to Mars anytime soon and when the do, there should be a new frontier somewhere else. Extinction events may also cause people to take cover to live through them. After all Earth has been through several global extinction events and many more local ones but life oushed through. And people with stone age technology survived the last ice age.
In space, stopping is remarkably similar to starting. I was fascinated to learn of some differences in this video; sails dragging on interstellar gas and dust, and even a form of aerobraking in the atmospheres of red giant stars! I never imagined sail drag, and when playing Kerbal Space Program I'm not (yet!) crazy enough to try aerobraking in the stellar atmosphere! :D
@@eekee6034 I would be very glad to be proved wrong, but my sense of it is that for a ship traveling at 10% c all those measures would be totally inadequate.
@@wynnschaible Just accelerate using your engine at the start of the journey and then flip over and use it to decelerate at the end, like eekee said stopping is exactly the same as starting
@@trolley01 Begging your pardon, you have accelerated using photons from high-powered earth-based lasers or else by consuming tone if not megatons of onboard propellant. And just like Apollo/Space shuttle deorbiting, you do not have any (or at least WAY short of enough) propellant to use for deceleration!
@@wynnschaible Just have more propellant?? You could even have a detachable acceleration stage so as to avoid having to also decelerate the dead weight of your empty fuel tanks It probably wouldn't be anything like our chemical engines anyway, it might be fusion or fission or something very efficient like that
On the matter of Oort cloud colonization without fusion power ... there are some possible means of self sufficiency. For example, you could use a mass driver to launch solar sail drones toward the nearest star. The drones use a solar sail to accelerate back toward the Oort cloud object at a much higher speed. Upon arrival, the colony briefly opens up a door to a deep shaft. The drone collides with the base of the shaft, replenishing heat for geothermal power generators. The slagged material eventually gets recycled into more drones. The point is, you don't need the "home system" to build and maintain power beaming infrastructure. The colonies themselves manufacture the drones they need.
I love your videos, so many of them are so far in the future, so far that sometimes when I think "Oh I wish I was born in the year 22000" but actually I don't I'm content right now. Its just who knows what's really going to be going on? What would it be like on Earth in 22000? I just doubt I could still walk out my back door and take a stroll in the woods where there are deer, elk, rabbits, squirrels, foxes, racoons ect. I like being able to do that.
Maybe there are plenty of alien civilisations that has managed to contact each other just to find that they have odd similarities in their DNA and no one has a clue where this panspermia life came from.
Could any known meta material be used to make solar relays or fusion reactors easier by controlling when and if said meta material interacts with light and/or how it does so and in what direction? Is there a way to use that same concept to make a “shield” or meta material that can interact and change the effects of it or redirects it back into a less efficient way to fuel your ship while it’s moving?
Here is another solution for galactic crawlonization, but not using massive generation or sleeper ships. Make tiny "starshot style" Von Neumann probes, accelerate with lasers and sails, but not too fast for the ISM to be overpoweringly lethal. Send a bunch, because some won't make it; it's a numbers game. Once they reach a nearby star system (Proxima is a fair choice), beam information to them, activating tiny onboard 3D printers or other similar nano-constructor technology. They will find a spot near some low gravity-well objects, like asteroids or comets with the right composition, to begin pumping out increasingly larger and more complex structures, generation after generation, as per the ongoing beamed information from their home-world. Eventually, they'll get to the point where larger constructors are building habitats, life-support, embryonic tanks, and embryos to go into them. The first generation will have to be raised by the machines. After that, you will have a fair replica of your species, in a nearby star system, that can contact you, and explore further. Moral of the story: you can send information at the speed of light, to effectively build everything, starting with the arriving nano-replicators and building up, in a manner that avoids the ISM, and doesn't break any known laws of physics, nor exceeds technology we can at least envision today (if not build to completion, yet, but soon, maybe).
I've been pondering an extra wrinkle to this sort of idea - interstellar lithography. Basically, it is possible to focus an X-ray laser across interstellar distances with a reasonably sized zone plate and gravity lensing, to etch a probe out of an asteroid. The initial etching isn't even a probe, it's just a crude zone plate lens suitable for focusing the beam into a finer beam for etching an actual autonomous probe. We're still talking crude electronics etched out of mediocre iron-nickel ore and vacuum for insulator. But it will make second generation probes with more capability, and so on. Interstellar lithography completely sidesteps the challenge of accelerating a probe up to relativistic speeds, while avoiding the travel times of "slow" interstellar travel. Unfortunately, there's the problem of detecting a suitable asteroid across interstellar space. This is ... difficult.
@@eekee6034 I am fully convinced that Issac’s voice is one of the main reasons that he is so wildly popular. I’ve been subscribed since 2017 and I’ve never found the videos difficult to understand or listen to. I think the older ones are quite relaxing, actually! 💖
I'm guessing this Crawlonizing will speed up significantly once engineers will get bored enough with slow speeds once they'r done with life extension research :D
I have a memory of a story where a ship in transit got a visit from a ship from back home that installed new and improved engines for them. In any case, even if it was thousands of years since the ship started out it could be improved upon continuously using tech updades transmitted on radio with perhaps the latest from a century ago when it was transmitted out. And the travellers may come up with their own ideas.
*We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there is only one direction, and time is it’s only measure.*
6h 15k 1.5k 250th. It's really hard to realize for how many videos has this been going. When I first found this, I thought it was really advanced. That's how much time passed....
because it get's overhyped by popsci even though it's currently useless, might always be, & at any rate occurs at exceptionally low concentrations making it extremely hard to mine. The overhype is what makes it kinda infamous since it's used as a reason for lunar colonization by ignorant popsci folks when it's more or less useless to us.
What about space travel for people with special physical needs, either as a passenger or even crew/pilot of the vehicle, such as I am missing most of the ribs on my right front of my chest, but my right hand is smaller than my left because I have only 2 bones in each finger instead of 3. Other than not able to grip a basketball or something like some can, it never bothers me and actually useful when I can squeeze my hand into spaces only a toddler typically could (ok, it's about the size of a 4 or 5 year old, but still... Just curious what options may be available or what about limited vision and having other ways to navigate... I think I would feel safe with a competent pilot and not so concerned about any physical limitations, especially on a space journey or something. As long as they are able to process and react to incoming data, maybe they are actually better suited for it because they are more aware in certain ways then someone else. I'm sure we'll figure it out and it should be interesting! 🍻🍿🌎❤️🚀🎶🕺
imagine a galaxy being fully crawlonized at 0.1% of light speed, and then someone finally figures out ftl and all those civilizations that have been evolving independently for thousands of years are suddenly connected to each other again, including hundreds of lost colonies that forgot they ever were colonies, and dozens of systems who claim with some degree of legitimacy to have been the original starting point
Depending on the length of time, we might by then all be actual aliens to each other by diverging so much over time. But at any rate the first colonies of Earth by then would be alien to even Earth IMHO.
thats an awesome premise for a sci fi story
@@cosmicpearl5497 And one who has been used multiple times, usually involving an war on earth. in the interval.
And yes after some thousand years with generic engineering you would probably be pretty alien.
@@cosmicpearl5497 Sounds similar to the warhammer 40k lore. Humans had an empire and then space travel became impossible for a certain amount of time. Various worlds fell into chaos as they basically imported all their goods. Those worlds died. Some worlds managed to survive. Eventually space travel becomes possible again and humans from earth want to make a new empire. They find various worlds. Some are caveman primitive. Some are quite advanced. All are brought back into the empire whether they like it or not. At least this is what I remember.
If you have ftl, then you could quite literally go back in time and arrive at those remote planets before those original colonists ever arrived.
Isaac, this year I published a book about traveling to Barnard's Star called "Exo to Barnard." If it wasn't for your SFIA series, and me trying to explain to my significant other on a napkin how to travel between stars, I never would have finished it. Even if it is a short story. Thank you. You're an inspiration to us all.
I bought it off this comment, and im midway through it. Definitely an interesting read!
@@rishidronadula7260 thank you so much, I'm glad to hear it!
The number one rule of interstellar warfare is to put sand in your enemy's path.
LOL just like a fight pocket sand!
I hate sand.
Snowflakes will work, too.
@@N0TYALC it's course, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
@@ObsceneSuperMatt Coarse*
7 years ago I was living in China as a teacher and I stumbled upon this channels very first video. Since then I’m enjoyed every video and the hopefulness that it brings. Every time I hear I your voice Issac it brings a smile to my face. I know that I’ll be educated but more importantly I’m renewed with hope for a better future
PBS Spacetime just recently released a video postulating that the difficulties of fast interstellar travel could be a boring but reasonable solution to the Fermi paradox. It also implied that "crawlonizing" the galaxy may be the only practical way to do it.
I watched that, and the conclusion was that the risks of higher relativistic travel up to 20% light speed were manageable. Not great, not easy, but if you're planning a colony in another solar system and have drives that could get you up to 0.2 C, you could probably manage the shielding.
@@karlwest437 only if they actually exist
@@karlwest437 agreed but they're gonna really hard to spot given the number of stars we'd have to look at before finding them. After all at 200 light years it'd be difficult to detect our own civilization.
If you are building a colony ship then you want it big, an O'Neil cylinder size 10km long. You would carry a lot of water to provide hydrogen for fusion, which would be your armour against radiation and particles too.
A mass driver throwing out iron could provide decent acceleration. Pushing iron up to 60% light speed in 10km should easily be possible meaning the ship might get to 20% light speed.
I didn't like it. For example a species can be or become immune to radiation, removing some of the difficulties. They could also be or become able to hibernate and travel slow enough to be safe. Or send an AI with a gene library and breed your colonists on arrival. Many ways that we or aliens can overcome the distance and time problems. If it's only hard, but not impossible, someone will have done it and it only takes one
The cosmic equivalent of cooking yourself dinner by picking up a handful of wild grass seeds and settling in to breed wheat.
Is this a Minecraft feature yet? Its been a long time since I played.
IDK, entropy and the ability to maintain complex working tech at those time scales is a concern. Look at the last couple thousand years of our history, how many wars and genocides did we put ourselves through? Imagine Rwanda on a technologically fragile spaceship, or a group that just decided the environmental constraints set thousands years ago are a myth, set by "the elites" to keep them down - followed by an environmental collapse. My feeling is that trying to yeet meatbags across interstellar distances, just results in a massive necropolis drifting between starts.
Trying to crack the hard problem of consciousness seems the better solution - earth's children that colonise space are going to be have to be designed for that environment and look nothing like their ancestors - just share our culture and history.
Hauling vast amounts of solids and volatiles, just to sustain bloated waterbags, seems kind of ridiculous tbh.
Imagine how simpler and reliable your ship design gets if you can ignore providing gravity, bothering to pressurise the vessel, radiation shielding, complex biospheres and their support structures, etc etc. Just a few decentralised massive RTGS, manufacturing pods and a bunch of distributed computing capacity - for whatever virtual environments they want to play at - assuming they wouldn't find the ship structure as natural as we find a lush meadow.
PS. Why even bother trying to climb down another gravity well, after you spent millennia crawling out of it - it feels like modern society coming up with a Rube Goldberg solution for going back to being hunter gatherers. Yes, we'd advert the climate crisis, wealth inequality, WMDs and ability to genocide, so it is a 'viable solution to current problems' - but we changed too much to seriously invest effort in it.
@@lucidnonsense942 I find your concerns valid. In my opinion Transhumanism is a blasphemous aberration.
A mere blink of the eye for the age of our species. Remember that the epic Gilgamesh started with reference to "the days before bread", and here we are a mere 6,000 years later, less than 2% of the age of the species.
Imagine what we could achieve (if we can keep politicians from wasting every penny on crooked vote buying schemes) in another 10% worth of time.
@@lucidnonsense942 by the time we've made all those changes to colonize the galaxy, we could have just sent machines in our place, and without the need for raw materials to sustain life, there's really not much motivation to colonize every cubic centimeter of matter from rim to rim anyway. We can build tech that is insanely robust, particularly once we have the means to consider colony ships and O'Neil Cylinders. Once you stop needing to fret about every gram sent into LEO, and you're just building these structures in orbit to begin with, a lot of things get simpler, and skew towards more massive and more redundancy built in. We likely will change on this timescale anyway, as a lot of technologies are kinda converging to make exploring space more possible, but I reckon it's AND, not XOR.
My only real hope is I get to live long enough to see which way it ends up going, even if I don't get to go along for the ride.
Thursdays are my favorite days of the week. I love spending it with you guys. Live long and prosper my friends 🖖🏻
There's a neat game called Hardspace Shipbreaker that had an interesting little detail, namely that all the ships had very thick outer hulls. And the larger ships had increasingly thick hulls, up to appearing to be metres thick plates made up of nanocarbon alloys to protect against debris strikes when zipping around the solar system. I thought that was a nice touch. :) Fun game too!
The Homeworld series that was made by the same crowd also leans towards very thick hulls.
Hardspace Shipbreaker is pretty fun
Moreover, the ships that run between Earth and space require very thick hulls, to make it through the veritable swamp of orbital debris made of rocketry litter.
At such high speeds, I think perhaps sending ahead probes on several different paths to the same destination would be wise. You essentially follow the probes flight path, and switch lanes depending on what they report back to the main ship following behind. While not perfect, it at least should provide some help.
Yes. Lots and lots of little Starshot-style probes would be good. Some larger ones too. Probably a good idea to launch several every few years since they'll be moving away from the ship. ...and some will break.
So you want to launch MORE trash into the path of colony ship?
@@TheArklyte No not trash. Probes.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 what happens to a small probe that suffers a relativistic collision with interstellar dust? It becomes interstellar dust.
@@TheArklyte Yeah, there's already going to have to be a solution for clearing particles out of the path. Another thing probes would be good for.
I'm not suggesting useless probes. I think everyone understands that they will need to be fairly hi-tech probes.
And by the way. Avoiding these impactors at these speeds is just one more reason the spice must flow
Seriously. I’m running low and I almost went splat whilst rounding the neutron star in my neighborhood. Unacceptable when you really think about it! $6,000,000 Galactic Credits for .0000000001 grams of the stuff?! It’s nuts.
Happy Arthursday! If you're only traveling at 1% of light speed, then I hope you enjoy streaming this video at 99.995% playback speed
Survey-Question:
This Channel assembles Sci-Fi-Nerds, one would assume,
so how many people here have internalized LGBT-Hate?
I legit wonder. How many love Science (let alone the ideals talked-about
in this specific video here) but still look down on people for what they are?
@@nenmaster5218 Politics is a lot more nuanced than the News makes it out to be. 99% of the country is not the blue haired crazies or Nazi crazies that the media portrays both sides to be. I voted in the Republican Primary in 2012 and wrote in Donald Trump in that General Election, but when Trump actually ran in 2016 and 2020, I voted in the Democratic Primary and wrote in Bernie Sanders in those General Elections. I'll probably be back to wasting my vote on a Republican in 2024. Politics for real people is nuanced.
I think that a tiny percentage of people have a problem with LGBTQ, and 90 something percentage of people just don't care. There's some extreme people way far on the right who probably disavow anything other than cisgendered people because of devout Religious beliefs, but those people are uncommon.
Personally, and I think this applies to nearly all conservatives on the issue, I don't want to be told what to do by the government. Gay people, and by extension LGBTQ people, can get married, I think that's fantastic because the government doesn't get to decide who you can and can't marry. LGBTQ people can do whatever they want with other LGBTQ people, perfect, that's exactly as it should be in a free society. Probably, LGBTQ, or rather sexuality in general, should be a federally protected class like race and gender, where an employer or institution is federally prohibited from discriminating against people for employment or services based on sexual orientation, because I don't think sexuality is currently protected like the other protected classes.
I don't care, it's not my business, and for damned sure it's not the government's business, what orientation you are and how you choose to live your life. BUT, this doesn't just apply to LGBTQ people, this applies to everyone. A tiny percentage of the country is LGBTQ, it's just as unconstitutional for them to force their beliefs on me as it would be for a religion to. I'm not going to memorize pronouns or all these crazy orientations, in fact I'm already pretty aggravated just having to remember "LGBTQ" instead of "gay" because it seems like every time you turn around there's more unremarkable letters being strewn on that mean nothing to me. If a female wants to be called him/he, that's totally fine, they can ask me nicely and I'll try my best to do it, but at no point should I be forced. And that's 99% of people, if asked nicely by someone we will absolutely have no issue using whatever pronouns they prefer, but we will fight tooth and nail the government or corporations forcing us to memorize and use nearly useless information. The whole Trans thing is being forced onto ordinary people, that's why there's pushback. Scientifically, there are people with Double X chromosomes (females), people with XY chromosomes(males), and a few rare men with genetic abnormalities like XYY or XYX. People with Double X and XY are anatomically different, thus they should compete separately in sports. Someone's personality can't change their DNA. Most people don't want children being sexualized at a young age, so there's pushback against indoctrinating children by teaching them about LGBTQ stuff. There's all these big corporations who don't give a damn about anyone's well-being, pretending to care, that will forever try to push LGBTQ stuff onto everyone else.
The goal for a free society is to make it blind to sexuality, race, religion, or whatever else. Rather than forcing acceptance, it's more authentic if it isn't ever a factor in people's decision making. We're all just people with different shapes, colors, and personalities, the less we focus on our differences the less they matter, and they shouldn't matter.
@@SpecialEDy Of course i know its complex, but thats no reason to shy-away from it.
Or for me to shy-away from recommending not just Sci-Fi-Stuff to Sci-Fi-Fans (cause why not) but 'SOme More News' and even 'Second Thought' to my fellow Sci-Fi-Fans Because its food-for-thoughts and brainstimulating.
@@SpecialEDy Your comment signals that you wanna sound grounded but it yells loudly at multiple points in your comment ‚I just guess wildly about percentages and dont know how hostile towards lgbt the world still is’. I dont try to talk down to you or anything, but really, your comment shows off that you know very little and youre way too casual about lots of stuff. You are clearly uninformed about lgbt issues, let alone Radicailization-Wave that rampaged and still rampages in the Republican-Party, documented well by people like Telltale Fireside, Holy Koolaid, and those they collabed with.
I would jump at the chance to crew a multigenerational colony ship (preferably a gardener fleet, but whatever). The fact I would never see the other end does not matter. A small, focused community brought together to produce a culture that will in the fullness of time seed the galaxy with life sounds just like the town I would love to live in.
Plus, as you getting closer to the destination over the years, on board telescopes will get new and better images of the Galaxy. That's worth it.
@Sean Dees
What is "a gardener fleet"?
@@spaceman081447 this channel explains it best in another episode but its a fleet of ships that plants colonies in a system then moves on to the next one. Rather than stoping permanently at one system.
Risky move. You never know how the culture on the ship could morph into a dystopia. You can't walk out, whereas you can more of less always flee from a bad country. That fact alone is a real issue for which we don't have a reliable solution yet.
Another aspect is that life might be very specific to a planet and its evolution.
You might end up on a planet whose physical conditions are akin to Earth but where the biology would be poisonous, or just as incompatible with ours as pieces of plastic can't be digested.
Thats like The Big Brother show in space.
Something you didn't mention is that stars aren't fixed. They move around relative to each other. When you're talking about real crawlonizing, you can just wait for other stars to go by, and hitch a ride. On time scales of tens or hundreds of millions of years, you can go pretty much anywhere in the galaxy without ever having to travel more than about one light year through deep space!
At 5% or 1% or faster that would not matter much.
And almost not travelling AT ALL? You are forgetting you inherit your starting velocity from the speed the sun has.
@@Emdee5632 If you are going 0.05c then sure, you don't have to hitch rides on passing stars. But if your ships go less than 0.001c it is a great way to travel.
The problem with this is that people like me are too impatient, LOL. But it is still something to keep in mind. Like with the Andromeda galaxy is coming towards us as we speak. This should make it easier to find intelligent aliens like us. Hopefully they are willing to share their technology with us and we show them what we have. If we can even communicate with them of course.
Actually larger sizes favors higher speeds. There are a couple of things going on:
1. The difficulty with fusion is largely a scale problem. Say you use nuclear bombs for propulsion. Fission is best at relatively small sizes. H-bombs favor huge sizes. If you are going to spend so much on a large ship, the size of the h-bomb means you spend a fixed amount on the fission core and going to larger and larger h-bomb means you spend a trivial small amount extra for the fusion material. You can get into giant fusion sails where you have a huge thermonuclear explosion, but the 'sail' is a ways away, allowing the explosion to cool and expand quite a bit before hitting the fusion sail. In other words you get the high energy density explosion with very fast matter shooting out, but because there is some space between the explosion and the fusion sail, the hot plasma cools while maintaining the high speeds and spreads out enough for the fusion sail to get hit by and reflect the blast for maximum acceleration without being damaged in the process.
Getting away from h-bombs, just doing fusion directly today you need big machines. Bigger fusion machines tend to be more efficient. This is why the ITER for example is so big is they could do fusion with a smaller machine, but they would never make enough energy to counter-balance the energy consumed running the machine. So the ITER is big enough to help ensure they will have a net surplus of energy.
2. When dealing with collisions in space, you can have better shielding and better shielding schemes when working at the large scale. You could for example have vessels in front of the main ship taking the impacts of detectable objects ahead and turning the impactor into a diffuse plasma that won't really hurt the main ship. A great thing about space is space for energy to be safely released if harnessed right. On the ship itself, economies of scale allows for more spread out layers to take an impactor and have it spread out so the energy is more disperse before it impacts the next layer. Whatever energy is in the collision gets more and more spread out and absorbed over a wider area until it stops somewhere in the shielding of a large vessel. Then of course with a large vessel and large impactor, you do some repair work so you are fully ready for the next major impact, which may be years or even decades later.
There is also a deal where a larger ship can have more systems and have those systems more sensitive for detecting debris in the path of travel. Say you have a small craft with a little eyepiece to look at for debris. It is not going to see much in terms of traveling at relativistic speeds. You get into massive O'Neil cylinders and maybe you have multiple JWSTs looking for debris and maybe even massive space lasers illuminating objects way out and even pushing some of the smaller debris out of the way. Maybe you have some weapon systems to explode next to the object to alter its course to avoid your ship.
In other words, with size, there are more options to protect your ship at high speeds and those options can be a lot better and more powerful / sensitive than with a smaller ship.
fascinating ☀️
This reminds me of a short story I read once. Pretty sure it was Arthur C. Clark. They used an artificial iceberg at the nose of the ship to prevent the destruction of their ship by erosion. Low tech high speed. One of those old golden age stories that stuck in my mind.
Songs from distant Earth? It fit the description but he could have used the iceberg shield in other novels and short stories. But Songs of distabt earth was one of his later publications. It actually concentrates the story around the crews interaction with the people of an earlier colony that they make a short stop at to rebuild the iveberg shield. It is possible that he took an earlier story, dust it off and used it as inspiration or a base structure for a rewrite. Isaac Asimov did the same with his story Nightfall, took an earlier story improved upon it many years later.
@@michaelpettersson4919 I'm pretty sure you are correct. It's been a while, like 20 years, but "Songs From a Distant Earth" sounds very familiar.
Oh man this reminds me of a Star Trek The Next Generation novel: The Last Stand. Basis of the story is that a two species the same star system fight a war, destroy their worlds, and then leave the system. They don't have FTL so they are indeed crawlonizing (spelling?)
Checkmark for your spelling
A part of my brain died reading this post
I read that when I was a kid. Good book.
Great video as always. Regarding interstellar travel. In his book Songs of Distant Earth, Arthur C Clarke had his ship have an ablative shield made of reinforced ice to survive the interstellar trip. Could a slow boat use this method the sheld can always be used to start the colonization at the target planet and water is a good radiation shield.
I read ''Songs of Distant Earth'' too!
''The problem of the emerging Scorp civilization was that their attempt to go out of the water and look around on dry land happened during Owen's 2nd adminstration - a completely illegal, ruthless and very efficient administration...''
The advantage with an ice shield is that it easily re-assembles itself from that material ablated off of it. You'd think that a higher melting point would help the material to do that, but if your shield is made from metal, any ejected material very quickly turns into metal dust. With ice, the ablated steam turns into snow, and once that has fallen onto your shield, the drag from the intergalactic gas might heat it to close to 0°C.
If your drag isn't strong enough for that, you could simply make your primary impact shield 2 cylinders, like a meat grinder in order to rotate the snow towards your ship where you can shine an infrared lamp onto it. Of course that design necessitates a secondary shield to cover the decreased thickness where the cylinders touch.
The recovery wouldn't nearly be complete, but even saving 1% on the weight of your heat shield could save you a bunch of fuel.
PBS SpaceTime just had a great hard science episode specifically on the risks and capabilities of traveling at around 0.2c. Expect about a millimeter of frontal surface to vaporize in a trip to Alpha C, for instance. At these speeds, space isn't empty at all.
Wouldn't a layer of armour or just a big 5mm thick shield do the job though?
@@commandercody6937 do you know a layer of armor that can withstand a needlepointed jackhammer?
@@cosmictreason2242An asteroids surface reporpurposed into armor.
Oooh you’re spamming uneducated nonsense. I shouldn’t have replied in the first place.
Patience to slow boat the galaxy? People in the comments don't even have the patience to finish the video lmao, I have my doubts.
Really though, thank you for another fantastic video. This is going to be my morning routine and drive to work today.
And they aren't colonizing the galaxy.
Last!
Here's the thing. Any society that is capable of interstellar travel probably has controlled hibernation/long lifespans. I think our impatience is a result of our limited time and the fact there is so much potential things to do so we tend to speed-run things.
Well, much like Musk back in university I looked at space as the future. I figured we needed at least three things to truly colonize outer space, we needed artificial gravity (it's a form of energy), fusion or better power, and terrific food generation inside. LEDs have solved the latter, we can actually outpace by quite a margin, water usage, and efficiency of production by growing food inside now. However, we are not even close on artificial gravity and fusion will not be commercially available in my lifetime.
Well, it only takes a few visonaries to start it up. The masses never _cause_ leaps in human technology.
Watched an Isaac Arthur video after a hiatus. The jump in animation and writing quality is unreal.
Same here. It's crazy and I'm happy for him.
I used to read Amazing Stories when I was a kid.
I remember reading one story in which a great interplanetary ship used water ice as an ablative shield.
As long as there was water at the ship's destination, rebuilding/repairing the shield was simple and cheap.
I wish I could remember the name of that story.
I have a similar question. *_Analog - Science Fiction Science Fact_* had a story that falls in The Grate Filter category. In the near future astronauts are exploring a lunar lava tube, accessed via a "skylight" crater. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube They find alien artifacts. The POV switched to intelligent dinosaurs discussing the "Belters" desire for full independance and the Homeworld's demands. The two sides threw big rocks at each other in the First Interplanetary War. Everybody dies.
Very cheap! If I'm not mistaken, there's ice pretty-much anywhere it's not too warm, so basically, everywhere outward from the outer edge of the habitable zone of every star system. But this will be wrong if oxygen is not as common as I think; oxygen-poor systems would be ice-poor.
@@eekee6034 I never thought about it before, but maybe another ice would work.
Ammonia seems pretty common, and would be stable as ice until you approach a star's inner system.
@@jimbojones9665 Good point! I never thought of other ices before, either.
That's how the lighthuggers from revelation space series allege to deal with it but I'm pretty sure ice isn't going to be able to survive high relativistic speeds lmao. Great for other kinds of shielding applications though.
When one goes slow, there is the option of sending fast probes ahead that can replicate themselves and terraform a planet before the colonists arrive.
Imagine arriving at a planet already full of warehouses full of building materials, habitats, arable fertilized land, factories already built.
...but if you could have all that done remotely, you could also build any number of McKendree Cylendars. Then you wouldn't need to bother traveling to any of these "planet" things.
@@capturedflame ...I guess... but after our first Dyson Sphere, cranking out McKendree Cylendars with fusion reactors ought to be near free. I can't see much point in wanting to freeze ourselves for centuries when we have perfectly nice habitats to live in.
If you have a few little mini-stars inside each of your cities, you wouldn't need to freeze yourself and travel to a big natural star millions of miles away.
...but, sure, we can do that too.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 and those McKendree cylinders would have to be maintained for thousands of years with no one living in them, they are machines after all. Planets after all, if they are selected properly, don't need maintenance, much like Earth doesn't. The life on Earth make the Earth habitable for humans, not machines! What happened to Earth to make it habitable for us is what these probes would be doing to these selected exoplanets, they are selected very carefully. A planet is selected that is the right distance from its star and has a whole host of physical features that would make it habitable for humans once an atmosphere and biosphere is selected. These planets are not like Mars or Venus, they don't require artificial structures to keep them habitable once made so.
@@capturedflame Well, yeah. I'd probably do it right now given the chance. But mostly because I don't already have an amazing McKendree Cylender. I can't really see having a different star in the sky as that big of a deal.
I don't see how moving my habitat over to a different star would make much difference. Could just adjust the lighting to match another star for a few months if we were bored.
We'd already be in a world designed to our specifications. It'd be pretty much the same if if was somewhere else...
@@capturedflame ...also, I share Andrew's worries about being asleep for that long. Even if the technology was perfect, a lot can happen when you are watching for several hundred years.
"might cost less than gasoline does nowadays"
that wouldn't be much of an achievement haha
You might be able to partially clear a path with a Dyson Beam without killing planets. It would be useful for pushing a lightsail as well.
Isaac, you have really drawn myself and my kids in. We go way back. When you used to apologize for how you talked we all gasped in horror because we love your kind and humble demeanor. You’re you, that’s good enough.
Semper Fi! 😂
Barrow and tipler also said we could colonize the milky way in 3 million to 300 million years depending on the speed of the ships. Awesome video keep up the great work.
In terms of debris in interstellar space? we would have to send a swarm of small ships rather than one big one. Losses are inevitable - but chances of success are greatly increased.
The square-cube law says that the same amount of armor on a single large ship will be much thicker than the same amount of armor spread over several smaller ships with the same internal volume.
I think that optimizing for mission success would result in fleet sizes of 2-3, maybe 4 tops.
Expect 2 if there's traditional money involved, lol. Exactly the lowest number to call it "redundant" and still hit the lowest possible material and energy costs.
One of the additional hazards of speeds above 1% C is that interstellar gas and particles will glow in the ionizing radiation range from impact with the ship. The shielding mass required to protect carried biologicals such as crew from radiation is likely to be much greater than the shielding mass for protection from the kinetic impacts. This would make speeds of 10-20% C probably impractical due to the mitigations for safety for manned trips. Might be possible for unmanned cargo ships
Thank you for this one, and all of these for that matter. I really appreciate it.
New Isaac Arthur just in time for bedtime. Something calming about the epic scope and scale of your videos.
Love your work Mr. Arthur.
However, after binge-watching your back catalogue, and grabbing a drink and a snack whenever advised, I now have diabetes.
On the plus side, I am now able to calculate the relationship between the surface area of my expanding belly, its total volume, and its mass.
So I suppose that's something.
Thank you for that, I needed that laugh!
This is cool stuff! I've long discussed white dwarf slingshots. They are truly the sweet spot for slingshot maneuvers. The problem with neutron stars and black holes is that the acceleration requirements are way too high. You zoom around the neutron star of black hole so fast that you need a ludicrous amount of acceleration for the desired Oberth effect.
In contrast, you slingshot around a white dwarf slowly enough that a simple solar thermal rocket will provide the ideal Oberth effect without outrageous acceleration requirements.
Stars are in Brownian Motion relative to each other. So, if a society is patient, another star will happen by within a lightyear of distance every now and then. Thus, even if voyage time were a constraint for some reason, the galaxy could still be populated/explored by our descendents in a relatively short amount of time. Once it is fully populated, an A.I. mind could travel by light beam anywhere in the galaxy in zero subjective time. However, the real-time (latency) to cross the galaxy would still be on the order of 100,000 years.
Thank you Isaac Arthur! I love all of your episodes, but I felt this one was a lot more informative than previous ones. So I loved this one especially much!
Speed is irrelevant when you live in a self contained orbital habitat.
A century or a millennia to get between stars
As long as you have fuel, you have time
30:00 Passing close to an white dwarf will generate tides who will have an effect on an massive ship. Probably more useful for flyby probes
Alright, who's the genius that said we could launch on a journey of 1200 years without stocking drinks and snacks?
“Hydroponics” they said, “it’ll be great!” they said.
*angrily drinks kale smoothie*
@@ksmi9109 a giant arc ship will have to have every bit of the full Earth ecology and the DNA database to recreate whatever parts die off.
@@robertgraybeard3750 If you can use stored DNA samples, maybe to the point of having it stored as data code there would be no need for an arcship. Once the AI onboard finds a suitable place to settle it start to crank out humans from the artifical womb systems and clone works that it built once it arrived in the system. If a target world have a bit higher gravity and more ultraviolet radiation coming in the AI select, or design human DNA codes for dark skinned dwarfs.
@@michaelpettersson4919 that "suitable place to settle" will probably not be a planet but rather a large habitat in free space rotating for artificial gravity that it and its "minions" build by eating comets and asteriods. Every solar system will surely have somets and asteroids. th-cam.com/video/DM88sUBTTRM/w-d-xo.html
*_The Roundtable TV Interview_* by Harold Hays, NYC PBS 1975 Space Studies Institute
Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, scientist and futurist of O'Neill Colony fame with
Dr. Isaac Asimov chemist and science commentator and science fiction author
While what if you are take a trip about 1200 light years by jump into hyperspace to quantum tunneling portal, which would be 1.2 hours traveling time on starship. That's possibly doesn't need to some snakes or drinks.🍮🍫🍬🍧🍪🍹🍸🍡🍩🍰
Ok I know this is stupid but that bit about the thought process of colonists thought processes in justifying Sending out colonists of their own brought a literal tear to my eyes. I didn't realize just how beautiful that concept was until you said it.
Still have a major problem with attempting to conduct interstellar Colonisation using 0.01c ships, unless you know that your propulsion technology will never improve beyond 1%c. Simply put, if propulsion technology is improving, it’s ultimately faster to wait until you have better propulsion systems. If by 2100CE we can go at 1% to alpha Centaurus in 500-years but if we wait until 2200CE you can expect to have 0.1c capabilities, setting out in 2200CE 10%c gets you there in only 50years. A saving of 350-years. At that point even if in 2300 you expect ships travelling at close light speed, it makes sense not to wait and build the 0.1c ships. 10-20% the speed of light looks to me to be the sweet spot for interstellar travel.
Longer travel times are likely going to coincide with more technical failures.
@@Emdee5632 Yeah, that's a serious issue. Would need plenty of redundancy and the ability to essentially rebuild the entire ship on ship. You not going to be constantly using the engines (whatever they end up being) but you can't have your engines going out with no backups when you are 100 years from the nearest system with (hopefully) the resources you need to fix them.
@@rogervanaman6739 ...which means that you'd have to be already fully independent of stars. Which raises the question of why you are trying to get to another star in the first place. ...since you don't need a star.
Declaring "first" and planting a flag is a powerful motivator. We didn't wait until self powered ships before exploring the oceans, that started as soon as someone said "yeah, this ship will *probably* survive a week or two on the ocean, as long as there are no storms!" It's safe to expect prior behavior to continue :)
@@oldmankatan7383 Aye. Very true. Buuut, that was all long before we could manufacture whatever we wanted.
If we don't have robots, we have a motive to capture land and enslave humans. But, once we have ro-buts, and self-replicating manufacturing dudes, all of that becomes silly.
This channel, along with PBS Spacetime, have taught me so much about space colonization. The future is going to be awesome!
Years ago, i loved the german Sci-Fi Lightnovel-Series "Perry Rhodan". And in one of their older Story-Lines (written somewhere in the 1970s if i remember correctly) the found one of their older ships in a far distant Galaxy - trapped for centuries, slowly drifting through this cosmic region. And the roughly 100.000 People on Bord (Humans and Alien-Species) adapted over generations to a life in space and in a spaceship. This ship was their one and only home. Planets where only used to mine for needed ressources - for this task they used robots, because most of the people where afraid of leaving their ship and they refused to live on a planet.
Despite of other issues (like civil wars, epidemic diseases, collisions, terrorism / sabotage or degeneration and downfall in primitive civilisations) i think always about this one problem, which could accure to space-travel spanning centuries or even millennia. In the end the colonists might reach their destinations but won´t colonize other worlds and will continue their secluded life in their space-habitats. Could you really call this colonisation of space then?
But thanks to Isaac Arthur and some of his previous videos i now know, that the colonisation of different planets with all their own characteristics is pretty difficult, dangerous and maybe in many cases even impossible, so i have the relief, that the colonists have a way better life in their O´Neill-Cylinders and similar habitats.
If you read all this: thank you for your time and please pardon my bad english.
I imagine a ship that behave like that but DO colonise planets as well by the means of leaving behind some people that either want off the ship or get kicked off for being subversive elements. In any case, the fact that the crew is mixed with aliens are an interesting take their arrival must been an interesting part of their history.
So we become a species of Space Van Lifers sharing TH-cam videos with tips on asteroid boon-docking and showing how cool living out of an old space van is? If people can live that way now outside of Quartzite, Arizona then doing it in space can't be much worse.
Space is dark and cold. I never been in Space but saw a lot of videos, Sci-fi looks good and inspirational.
The one thing that I worry about at this kind of speeds is that over the couse of the travel (taking centuries, if not millenia) - what if a civilisation evolves on that planet? I mean we see the planet on earth as it was some hundreds of years ago and found no traces of civilisations, so we sent a ship and it takes a couple thousand years to arrive, only to find a species that is technology-wise about as far as late-rennaissance... We wouldn't have detected them from that far away at any rate. In fact, to an outside observer, mankind is only "visible" since about 100 years with the dawn of television (after all, light travels faster so the first aired images have already surpassed the first aired radio-shows), which means any planet farther away than 100ly, wouldn't even know our planet to have a population (spectral-dating the atmospheric composition could easily be mistaken as some abnormal natural behaviour by an outsider who has no clue how Earths ecosystem works). So what if some alien civilisation saw our planet some 15,000 years ago, determined that there must be no sentient life-form there, sent a ship, and they will arrive tomorrow, finding us....
You can even go a little sideways with that, you can arrive at your destination to find a few years before a comet or meteor or even volcano rendered the surface lifeless or unable to support life!
@@TheEvilmooseofdoomIndeed. Although I would argue that this course of events would be beneicial tot he late colonisers, who, coming in basically arc-ships, could use their torus-ships or ring-ships or whatever to terraform the planet to support their life like tailored.
Check out the video from a couple weeks ago, Issac describes a very common sense strategy to address that exact issue!
Thank You for finally giving me the insight I need to not compare kilometers to miles but building a mental structure using Light years broken down into kilometers like you have done here.
I don't mean to say it's original but if it is; more praises to you.
I have heard many voices speak in these terms but never articulate them as you have worded.
Granted I had to pause the video and thoroughly observe the charts about 6 mins in but I felt that clear understanding I needed to finally "Get Kilometers".
I think it was A C Clark in ‘Songs of Distant Earth’ the generation ship used a large block of ice as an ablative nose shield.
True but it is possible that he used the concept more then once.
They are all very rational analyses. Love everything you do. Thank you.
in the picture @ 14:55 : If the artist would make the closer stars red and the distant stars blue (regardless of their movement relative to us) it would make it clearer where they lie in depth.
@ 16:42 I would assume that some ships would keep cruising knowing that their competitors would peel off at the first habitable planet. The extreme outliers would wait a very long time indeed. 1/2 cruising speed may be conservative imo *edit; missed "at least" half cruising speed.
If you can build a Dyson Sphere and make it mobile, you don't need to move fast.
I think it would be fun if we made a planet or a moon a spaceship... I'm not sure if I heard that on this channel or Event Horizon but it sure was an interesting idea
@@jn8604 there is an SFIA ep called "Planet ships" cuz of course there is
@@virutech32 I've listened to so many episodes of both shows that it's hard to keep them straight, thank you!
@@jn8604 That's no moon....
@@Arvandor81 🤣 that's what we should send out into the unknown... you know, just in case
Awesome, I get to hear an in depth discussion of colonizing the galaxy from both you and PBS Spacetime in the same week! 😁
If we spread from star to star very slowly, the primary force spreading life won't be colony ships every few thousand years, it will be the fact that the systems we settle are drifting further apart EVERY year.
We can colonize the entire galaxy in about four galactic years If we travel at one ten-thousandth of light speed, each settled world sends only one colony ship per thousand years, and they never send them to any system more than four light years away. This is true even if we don't do any fancy maneuvers or develop any technology or infrastructure to increase our speed EVER.
And we CAN'T take much longer than that no matter how slow we go, because we can't make stars drift apart more slowly. Even if our ships are ten times slower and our colonies send them out only half as often, it takes only a tiny fraction longer.
We won't have colonies at large distances. Basically, if communication time goes beyond half a lifespan, you can consider the places as completely separate for all intents and purposes.
As I understand it there is a star out there heading towards us that are predicted to intersect with the outskirts of our solar system eventually. I cannot remember if the timescale was hundreds of thousends or millions of years in the future but events like that are opportunities. We probably already had such visits before, something that may have disturbed the Oort cloud and maybe caused planets to alter their orbits. And why not drop off a colony on some visiting interstellar asteroid? They mine the astroid in transit and make it their home. Maybe it will look more artificial then natural when it arrives somewhere.
Go out to the Oort cloud and find a stable comet. Tunnel into it to create living space using the material for fuel, breathable atmosphere , and other things. Attach a couple of fusion drives and point it on a trajectory to whatever star you want.
Considering they are talking about how old the ISS is we will need materials that will last much longer and designs for easy replacement of panels etc.
Maintenance will be top priority so we don't die nearing the finish line of a failed $6 bearing.
Agree, now ISS was build as light as possible bur so would these ships as an lighter ship can go faster with the same force.
Someone misplaced the key to a safe so the lookout of the Titanic didn't have any binoculars...
@@magnemoe1 Tell that to Elon Musk that goes for a stainless steel approach just so his ships can be more robust. I seen a video sequence of a rocket just collapsing due to its own weight. That is how fragile light materials can be, a rocket collapsing like a stepped on beer can.
If you can colonize out to the edge of the Oort cloud, you can wait for another star to pass within a light-year or so, and "hop" onto it's Oort cloud. It
I'm shocked a mech ai hasn't taken over earth that way already. All they need is patience and the will to jump from star to planet to orrt cloud etc
Would using a stellar engine to push our star around not also count as "ultra low speed" colonization? The primary difficulty of colonizing other systems is money and resources, since those things are practically never coming back to the sender nor providing them with profit from the venture in their lifetimes. On the other hand making a swarm that can serve other local purposes while acting as a thruster to turn Sol into a mobile home is easier to justify, even if it takes longer to get to the end result.
Depends on where you want to go. But yes. We could probably get the Sol system into near relativistic speeds on a long enough time line. We before send probes and ships out the other way before we get going.
Yeah that's why we will most likely go extinct in the solar system we evolved in (also the most likely Fermi Paradox solution, all the aliens just stayed home due to the difficulty and expense and are too distant to detect). If it's not profitable (1-way trip) or can't be done in the investors' lifetimes it's probably never going to happen. Energy will probably never be truly free (even solar panels cost $ to produce and don't last forever, even if the sun did) and it takes a lot of it to move a hollowed out asteroid or whatever form a generational ship takes at even 1% lightspeed.
The thing is, that only lets you get so close to the next star system before you start having some negative consequences on both your system and theirs. You'd still need to navigate distance probably on the order of a lightyear or more, and then slow down to the target system's speed.
@@colinsmith1495 Of course, but the leeway you have to give will still be many times shorter than the regular travel distance from our "stationary" position to other systems. There are two ways you can go from there; send colony or robotic ships to develop the new star and rendezvous with Sol later, or immediately cannibalize the system for resources and star refueling, maybe (very painstakingly) pull some desirable objects into Sol orbit.
I think this is my favorite video yet from Isaac.
I´ve always wondered, in most science fiction there´s the concept of a "Galactic empire" , an empire or state that controls the majority of a galaxy. Has there ever been one with a Universal scale? Likewise, even with faster than light, how viable would an universal or galactic cluster empire be?
That's a great thought
At that point it would be the Holy Roman Empire on steroids. So decentralized it exists exclusively as an idea rather than an actual state.
I mean even if you could get to 1000x the speed of light, getting across 1 galaxy would take centuries. I can't even conceive the logistics involved in uniting multiple galaxies under a single banner.
@@nathancawley8759
At 1,000c, it would only take a century to cross the galaxy.
it's always been hard for me to imagine what even a Galactic "Empire" would mean. What resources would the empire "collect" from other stars as taxes? Asteroid matter? what would be the purpose of making a colony send you material if you can manufacture everything you need? Would the "capitol" want to have "colonies" deliver more mass to their star system?
Even with ftl, an "empire" sounds in an enormous amount of effort for exactly zero benifit.
I figured out some years ago that once permanent large scale space habitats exist with perhaps a million inhabitants living for generations, then after a few century or three, it's a small step to decide to drive the entire habitat across to a new solar system. Even if it takes a 100,000 years, it's not significantly different for the inhabitants from staying in one locale.
Or even at far lower to no speeds. Stone age man colonized six out of seven continents simply by just building a village just a days walk away, basically over the next hill. Our recent observations of asteroids from outside the solar system and of rogue planets and brown dwarf stars tells us there are resources even in interstellar space so just building large space habitats such as O'Neill Cylinders, Bernal Spheres and even the Stanford Torus would be sufficient to spread to the stars without even trying. Space colonization isn't space colonization till we colonize space not planets and moons.
Stone age man did not really colonise, they just walked to where the food was at.
@@VainerCactus0 ...to where the food was. "At" is superfluous. It has become about the most overused unnecessary word in the English language.
@@VainerCactus0 Stone age man just going to where the food was is still colonization as they continued to live where they moved to and it wasn't where they lived before. It's not as if the descendents of settlers ever conscientiously decided upon where they were to be born. Intent to colonise is not a requirement, just look at how dandelions have colonized our lawns.
I recall reading an explanation of the "slingshot" manouver, and it said that the spacecraft can gain up to twice the difference in velocity between it and the gravity body. It obviously works. But the velocity gain is somewhat modest -- I'm not sure how one would go "much, much faster" using flybys, unless there were a lot of objects moving at very high speeds.
You aren't limited to unpowered slingshots. Powered slingshots or Oberth manoeuvres get your more bang for your buck by exploiting the Oberth effect. Diving just above the horizon of a black hole and doing a burn there can net an enormous energy change compared to an equivalent burn done in deep space.
Even at 20% light speed, heat and friction from atomic dust and gas will become a nightmare. Cosmic rays will sterilize the rest. Sheilding for these increases your fuel payloads dramatically.
I see someone watched the PBS Space Time video, haha
that's literally the whole point of this video that it doesn't matter if we can't go that fast
Yes... But. We also have to look at the ability for materials to stay intact.
Remeber, a crystalline lattice, and all molecular bonds for that matter, will not remain intact if it is moved faster then the speed of sound through the material
Meaning that not all of that energy is going into the hull of the ship or the people inside. Quite a lot of that energy is remaining on the ship while you make a little dust shaped hole throughout. And the energy for that is dramatically lower, by the time your at relativistic speeds its nothing.
And yes, I did just suggest that everyone on board gets dust and sand sized holes in them, but humans already deal with that daily, our body's are quite amazing.
As to genetic damages, there is a light of hope that came from agent orange. Reaserch that started with the goal to repair those effected has lead to promising DNA repair therapies and even the ability to undo aging in mice. We've a long way to go, but a mouse does have all the complexity of a human so most of that way is taking extra time for our safety.
@@virutech32 the point of this video is honestly a bit too optimistic. Not going fast enough would create all sorts of other problems for the crew (even if IT'S just an AI), the spacecraft etc. Saying that interstellar travel is an absolute certainty is a bit of a reach
@@humanistwriting5477 I don't think that cancerous bombardment 20-30 times greater than that of Earth's conditions from the Sun is generally healthy, and we aren't talking about simply photons here, this is heavy atomic particles, not to mention high energy cosmic rays coming from every direction. The human body is amazing- ON EARTH.
The effectiveness of "doing a slingshot" around any object depends greatly upon both mass and the radial distance at which you pass. Higher mass with a dangerously close pass is best. Using your drive as you pass the minimum distance (periapsis) will maximize any benefit you get. Slingshots can be used to accelerate, decelerate, or radically change directions in ways that your unassisted drive simply cannot manage... I've had a lot of fun experimenting with slingshots in Kerbal Space Program.
There'd have to be an immense robotic exploration first before crawlonization. And that exploration would have to have found a human-friendly planet out there. Hard to believe anybody would join a colony ship with a 10,000 year voyage without a clear destination for future generations.
The ship itself is a suitable long term habitat. The destination star system is a place to get raw materials for building more space habitats. Planets are not very good colonization targets compared to space habitats.
I’m potentially including this concept in my own universe where, due to most electronics and computing being unable to work, a very low-tech, low maintenance generation ship that takes thousands of years to travel even a few light years becomes the norm
I’m fascinated with the idea of a ship where so much time and generations pass that when they arrive they are a fundamentally different culture than the founding one
Knowing that this scenario is a best case in terms of speed makes me want to "KMS" so many times over that FTL will be achieved.
Your videos are always fascinating.
Thank you
If we went fast enough, we wouldn't have to consider stellar drift as much. But, at what speed would have to consider stellar drift when making decisions about interstellar colonization?
Great episode. It's so weird to contemplate the time scales involved with these sorts of undertakings; i.e. there's so much happening every single day in such a massive civilization, and yet centuries and centuries of travel time...
That's why slow colonization won't happen unless we get way better communications nobody invests in a return they'll never see and that will belong to someone else.
@@nothingnobody1454 For immediate and tangible gains, perhaps colonization efforts are government sponsored and are used as tax write-offs (or just gouging taxpayers directly). There's also non-monetary rewards (i.e. vanity, end-of-life spending of fortunes, spreading an ideology, etc.).
Besides, in a developed solar system with trillions of people even '1 in a million' demographics or interests would still number in the millions.
@@nothingnobody1454 ROI is irrelevant for slow colonization. Any space hab can just decide to set off at any point. It's the sort of thing that becomes trivial for a K2 civ where u could crowdsource a colony ship via donations from a tiny percentage of the pop who just think it's a kinda cool idea
@@rhuiah why would the state pay all that money to found a colony that womt exist for a thousand years and won't be administrated by its financiers? Without at least rapid communication it becomes hard to find a motive. What voter is going to elect someone to do this bad idea? Remember that every dollar and minute you spent on it could have been spent to build orbital infrastructure here on earth for processing resources from in system, or building a Dyson sphere around our own star.
Slow colonization is pointless from a social, political, or survival perspective.
@@virutech32 I'll believe it when I see it. Only immortals should bother!
Imagine starting out this way and when you FINALLY reach your target system you find it fully colonised by some other group that started out a long time after you did but by using faster ships.
Survey-Question, cause i wanna know:
This Channel assembles Sci-Fi-Nerds, one would assume,
so how many people here have internalized LGBT-Hate?
I legit wonder. How many love Science (let alone the ideals talked-about
in this specific video here) but still look down on people for what they are?
That is why it is important to call dibs before leaving.
It's 6 am, I was just considering going to bed, and now I have to watch this. Because how could I not?
Scientists have over estimated their powers and reached immediately for the power of the sun, we need to build fusion engines first and build our understanding, it will truly be a miracle if those torus designs succeed.
I agree. And we skipped the last levels of the ocean biome. I believe if we fully understand the ocean, we will have the tools to colonize space.
Pressure changes, and less oxygen. Not to mention whales can't get cancer, and bioluminescence could be a 2 for one on producing lights and food. We need to know more!
what are u on about? The sun is the easy mode for human exploitation. Fusion reactors need to creat conditions that far exceed those found at the core of any natural sun. More importantly tapping the sun for energy only requires the advanced technology of aluminum foil & solar panels. As apposed to the superconductors, dynamic control electronics, gyrotrons, neutron beams, etc. that fusion requires.
Thas like saying "space is hard. we should learn how to live in the mantel first". You don't start with the harder tech regardless of distance since distance isn't really an issue here. Energy is
@@captainhakob814 I'm picturing O'Neil Cylinders with the entire floor being a couple hundred meter deep shallow sea filled with life, and people can go swimming in it if they want, or just stand over windows that let them see into it.
@@colinsmith1495 now imagine that a thousand times over, with a bigger 'casing' of a cammand ship/ civilian ship welded and integrated in a hurry, one AU in length with its own solar system type magnetosphere and a chunk of earth in the middle and that's the ship in my book, the Terra Carda (earth heart)
What a excellent episode! The more I think about this and the more about I think about a Bussard ramjet, maybe they are not feasible as an interstellar drive but not only was a breaking system but a way to provide energy for life support for a colony ship? Maybe a population on that ship might leave colonists at a system but some to prefer to slingshot around the star to raise the next generations for the next star? Can anyone suggestion a course at Brilliant or some other source to learn the skill to assess this question and maybe design such a probable thing? And I learned today, when looking for a mate, I need to hang where actuaries gather!
Like a bus dropping of some passangers at every stop, picking up a few more if the system was already colonized, and producing more on the way to the next, well that last one is a bit rare during bus travel thou...
I like the thought of in some remote system two colony ships (or a ship arriving at an established colony) meeting, and greet eachother as friends even though they don't look alike since well, they have a common origin!
Then as they get more in contact, it turns out they're ACTUALLY alien to one another, just expanding in the same fashion.
What about the brute force approach to interstellar debris?
Just put a thin shield a thousand km ahead of your ship that will convert debris into a splatter of microscopic dust that is diluted by the time it hits your actual ship, then just repair your umbrella with a patch.
5:40 I came up something like that for a story I'm writing. Prior to FTL, the humanity settled worlds in Proxima Centauri and Tau Ceti by ships using solar sail, laser and torch drives to accelerate to .2c
Issac,
I need to thank you for your wonderful suggestion to watch the Amazon Prime series "The Expanse". I'm in the middle of season 5 and love how they try to follow known physics. And am amazed at how much I recognize from hearing it on your channel.
Assuming thermal shielding you should be able to get up to 300km/s using the Oberth effect on a solar slingshot - 10-20 km/s of delta V can easily give you 100+km/s of hyperbolic excess velocity.
If you want to use white dwarfs as trip bookends you can probably get to 3000km/s, brake slightly on a hyperbolic pass to exit the destination dwarf at a few hundred Km/s hyperbolic excess velocity and then drift to a much nearer normal star 100x closer than your original starting point, saving 90% of your travel time for little additional energy.
Anything beyond this needs neutron stars and the mother of all forward shielding/armor.
I'd been looking forward to this one, and was not disappointed. Thank you, SFIA
Few questions.
Once you get outside the solar system is it difficult to determine your relative speed?
Also once you reach maximum speed, can you then cut off your thrusters and maintain that speed without slowing down because you’re in the vacuum of space. Or would you begin to slow down once your engines are off?
There are a lot of really predictable pulsars in the galaxy we can use as a "galactic positioning system" to solve the relative speed problem! And yes, if you turn your thrusters off at speed, you won't slow down unless an outside force acts upon your ship (you hit something). Space is really empty, but not perfectly empty. Those little grains Issac talked about act like the drag from air molecules in our atmosphere to slow you down. So it's like a really, really thin atmosphere with just a tiny bit of drag that will barely slow you down. That tiny bit can add up over centuries though!
What about some type of aerogel-like molding around the craft. sort of like an otterbox for your phone, designed to allow the "dust grains" to penetrate and slow down before coming into contact with the actual hull. like a spongy cushion.some grains might not even make it halfway through if they could come up with just the right material to make it out of.
@8:28
Can someone please do a video explaining this on a chalkboard?
🙏
PBS Space Time just did an episode about being hit by grains of sand at relativistic speeds!
Paired black holes seem like a great place for an alien civ to place a navigation beacon...we should look closely at such places.
Humans are more known for procrastination than patient long term planning. A foreseen extinction event is pretty much the only thing that would initiate crawlonization. We do need to keep making progress on the technology we would need (as well as our ability to foresee extinction events), so that we have time to build and send off some ships before the foreseen extinction event.
I believe that much of our procrastination are done because we are unable to fulfill the destiny we would had been going for due to lack of opportunity. Right now there are essentially just Antarctica left to colonize without the locals objecting too much. Some of us are suitable to be pioneering but if there is no place out there to go for there isn't much to do about it. Now if we can get the technology for effective and resonable cheap space flight we can start out again. The lazy people are not going to move to Mars anytime soon and when the do, there should be a new frontier somewhere else.
Extinction events may also cause people to take cover to live through them. After all Earth has been through several global extinction events and many more local ones but life oushed through. And people with stone age technology survived the last ice age.
There are three unavoidable tasks for space colonization. 1) Getting there. 2) Arriving intact. 3) STOPPING! I need more from you on #3 please!
In space, stopping is remarkably similar to starting. I was fascinated to learn of some differences in this video; sails dragging on interstellar gas and dust, and even a form of aerobraking in the atmospheres of red giant stars! I never imagined sail drag, and when playing Kerbal Space Program I'm not (yet!) crazy enough to try aerobraking in the stellar atmosphere! :D
@@eekee6034 I would be very glad to be proved wrong, but my sense of it is that for a ship traveling at 10% c all those measures would be totally inadequate.
@@wynnschaible Just accelerate using your engine at the start of the journey and then flip over and use it to decelerate at the end, like eekee said stopping is exactly the same as starting
@@trolley01 Begging your pardon, you have accelerated using photons from high-powered earth-based lasers or else by consuming tone if not megatons of onboard propellant. And just like Apollo/Space shuttle deorbiting, you do not have any (or at least WAY short of enough) propellant to use for deceleration!
@@wynnschaible Just have more propellant?? You could even have a detachable acceleration stage so as to avoid having to also decelerate the dead weight of your empty fuel tanks
It probably wouldn't be anything like our chemical engines anyway, it might be fusion or fission or something very efficient like that
On the matter of Oort cloud colonization without fusion power ... there are some possible means of self sufficiency. For example, you could use a mass driver to launch solar sail drones toward the nearest star. The drones use a solar sail to accelerate back toward the Oort cloud object at a much higher speed. Upon arrival, the colony briefly opens up a door to a deep shaft. The drone collides with the base of the shaft, replenishing heat for geothermal power generators. The slagged material eventually gets recycled into more drones.
The point is, you don't need the "home system" to build and maintain power beaming infrastructure. The colonies themselves manufacture the drones they need.
I love your videos, so many of them are so far in the future, so far that sometimes when I think "Oh I wish I was born in the year 22000" but actually I don't I'm content right now. Its just who knows what's really going to be going on? What would it be like on Earth in 22000? I just doubt I could still walk out my back door and take a stroll in the woods where there are deer, elk, rabbits, squirrels, foxes, racoons ect. I like being able to do that.
And when the ship arrives, everyone will still be shaking their heads over the word "crawlonizing"
23:00 But the stars aren't constant. Over the very long term they will be in different places relitive to each other.
Fuck yeah, space talk while I weld at work.
There's a very fine line between panspermnia and crawlenization. I like to think we will walk that line every generation of our lives.
Maybe there are plenty of alien civilisations that has managed to contact each other just to find that they have odd similarities in their DNA and no one has a clue where this panspermia life came from.
Could any known meta material be used to make solar relays or fusion reactors easier by controlling when and if said meta material interacts with light and/or how it does so and in what direction? Is there a way to use that same concept to make a “shield” or meta material that can interact and change the effects of it or redirects it back into a less efficient way to fuel your ship while it’s moving?
We'll never get to the outer reaches of our solar system, let alone go to another star.
What if an alien spacecraft isn't a solid object but rather a diffuse cloud? Or a very thin needle ship?
Here is another solution for galactic crawlonization, but not using massive generation or sleeper ships. Make tiny "starshot style" Von Neumann probes, accelerate with lasers and sails, but not too fast for the ISM to be overpoweringly lethal. Send a bunch, because some won't make it; it's a numbers game. Once they reach a nearby star system (Proxima is a fair choice), beam information to them, activating tiny onboard 3D printers or other similar nano-constructor technology. They will find a spot near some low gravity-well objects, like asteroids or comets with the right composition, to begin pumping out increasingly larger and more complex structures, generation after generation, as per the ongoing beamed information from their home-world. Eventually, they'll get to the point where larger constructors are building habitats, life-support, embryonic tanks, and embryos to go into them. The first generation will have to be raised by the machines. After that, you will have a fair replica of your species, in a nearby star system, that can contact you, and explore further. Moral of the story: you can send information at the speed of light, to effectively build everything, starting with the arriving nano-replicators and building up, in a manner that avoids the ISM, and doesn't break any known laws of physics, nor exceeds technology we can at least envision today (if not build to completion, yet, but soon, maybe).
I've been pondering an extra wrinkle to this sort of idea - interstellar lithography. Basically, it is possible to focus an X-ray laser across interstellar distances with a reasonably sized zone plate and gravity lensing, to etch a probe out of an asteroid. The initial etching isn't even a probe, it's just a crude zone plate lens suitable for focusing the beam into a finer beam for etching an actual autonomous probe. We're still talking crude electronics etched out of mediocre iron-nickel ore and vacuum for insulator. But it will make second generation probes with more capability, and so on.
Interstellar lithography completely sidesteps the challenge of accelerating a probe up to relativistic speeds, while avoiding the travel times of "slow" interstellar travel.
Unfortunately, there's the problem of detecting a suitable asteroid across interstellar space. This is ... difficult.
You went for it! “Nuclear” ⚛️ sounded almost as it should! Keep it up brother soldier! You GOT this! Huah!
👍🏽👍🏽
I was very happy to find this video easier to listen to than Isaac's older videos. :)
@@eekee6034 I am fully convinced that Issac’s voice is one of the main reasons that he is so wildly popular. I’ve been subscribed since 2017 and I’ve never found the videos difficult to understand or listen to. I think the older ones are quite relaxing, actually! 💖
I'd say use the salt water nuclear rocket for deceleration but the fuel would radioactive decay over the length of the trip.
But coupled with a breeder reactor for the duration of the trip it might be perfect
I'm guessing this Crawlonizing will speed up significantly once engineers will get bored enough with slow speeds once they'r done with life extension research :D
I have a memory of a story where a ship in transit got a visit from a ship from back home that installed new and improved engines for them. In any case, even if it was thousands of years since the ship started out it could be improved upon continuously using tech updades transmitted on radio with perhaps the latest from a century ago when it was transmitted out. And the travellers may come up with their own ideas.
*We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there is only one direction, and time is it’s only measure.*
6h 15k 1.5k 250th.
It's really hard to realize for how many videos has this been going. When I first found this, I thought it was really advanced. That's how much time passed....
Why Helium-3 is "infamous"? 3:30
because it get's overhyped by popsci even though it's currently useless, might always be, & at any rate occurs at exceptionally low concentrations making it extremely hard to mine. The overhype is what makes it kinda infamous since it's used as a reason for lunar colonization by ignorant popsci folks when it's more or less useless to us.
What about space travel for people with special physical needs, either as a passenger or even crew/pilot of the vehicle, such as I am missing most of the ribs on my right front of my chest, but my right hand is smaller than my left because I have only 2 bones in each finger instead of 3. Other than not able to grip a basketball or something like some can, it never bothers me and actually useful when I can squeeze my hand into spaces only a toddler typically could (ok, it's about the size of a 4 or 5 year old, but still... Just curious what options may be available or what about limited vision and having other ways to navigate... I think I would feel safe with a competent pilot and not so concerned about any physical limitations, especially on a space journey or something. As long as they are able to process and react to incoming data, maybe they are actually better suited for it because they are more aware in certain ways then someone else. I'm sure we'll figure it out and it should be interesting! 🍻🍿🌎❤️🚀🎶🕺