Yup i thought that he had maybe grew up in china and moved to usa later in life as they can somtimes have issues with R's etc, Obviously that thought was quite fleeting. Regardless this channel is a newly found jem for me. :)
Speech impediment? I understand you perfectly so don't be down on yourself ever (not that you were). You sure don't have a MIND impediment like so many on TH-cam... power to you!
65,000 subscribers is nothing less than bloody good imo, especially on this subject, the majority of people out there are really only into crappy soap dramas or watching their favourite football team get murdered in a final...
Up until a conversation a few days ago, I had never heard of a Dyson Sphere or a Dyson Swarm. When it was brought up, this video was directly referenced. Super interesting stuff, and I enjoy your explanations of it. Seems like I've got some catching up and some learning to do!
+Stephen InGermany Yeah Brandon Liew does some wonderful compositions and I've been looking for an excuse to use that song for a while. I was actually worried it might be a bit over-the-top, thundering in there :)
This may be a bit of a weird (and possibly massively flawed) way of looking at the fermi paradox, but what if human civilization is one of the older ones currently in the universe. The reason for this thinking is that, even though the universe is hella old, the necessary materials for creating intelligent life (and most technologies) aren't really present in large enough quantities until at least first generation (and possibly some second generation) stars have done their thing and then blown up. And since second generation stars aren't really all that old at this point, the time required for intelligent civilizations to emerge, reach the required level of technology and energy generation and spread out to nom all the nearby stars is yet to elapse. Also, really enjoying this series, thanks Isaac
is it not more likely that the level humans are now is very rare cause it is very low and go by very very quick at a cosmic level and it would be like finding a needle in a haystack to find another civ that uses our level of tech. our type of comunication. have the same understanding of energy, dimensions, time, consiousness and spirituality may be so low that we simply dont notice anyone else cause our lvl fly by so qickly are so far beyond us?
Well, someone has to be first, so why not us? I'd like to think we actually are the most advanced civilisation, at least in our "close neighbourhood", and that in the future we will turn out to be those pesky aliens that abduct representatives of other species for probing and testing, and leaving crop circles on other planets as a self-referential joke :D
You know. Crop circles and rectal probes as a form of entertainment is definitely not outside of human behaviour. You only need to take a look at the behaviour of alcohol fuelled teens to see the truth of that. another million years of development isn't likely to change our sick sense of humor.
@@B3RyL I'm certainly looking forward to the day when we have the technology to get to other stellar systems, visit their planets and their more primitive civilisations - just so I can land my ship right next to some poor fool that no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him while wearing antennae on my head and making "meep meep" noises...
Author's Note: The image of Michael Hart is actually author Paulo Coelho, there's an annotation about that in the episode but those are not visible on all platforms such as most mobile devices. Sadly TH-cam doesn't allow corrections to videos any other way.
Isaac Arthur why would you need to colonize a galaxy? If your goal was maximizing your chances of survival, then you could expand to three or four systems, then repopulate anytime one of them suffered a disaster. The odds of say, all the planets in a couple systems suffering a civilization ending event faster than you could repopulate them is so low the stars would die in way less time. If you wanted, you could set up another outpost or two a few thousand light years away to avoid GRBs, but building bigger than that would be pointless. Bigger empires are generally harder to maintain, and this would be especially true given the lagtime of lightspeed. Also, you've talked about M.A.D. among kardeshev 2 civilizations before. Maybe "stay in your neck of the woods" is just a part of that policy.
Isaac Arthur I agree that we may be unique in the galaxy, but not why. As many have pointed out, GRBs used to be way more common, and would have sterilized or greatly harmed countless worlds, meaning most planets with life may be as old or younger than earth. If panspermia is valid, and life only popped up once (whether throughout the galaxy or more interestingly, the cosmos) for whatever reason, then it could take a while to crawl accross the galaxy; landing on a planet, waiting a billion years for a big asteroid that could throw a good spray of rock into space, waiting another billion to spread, getting etc. Finally, rocky planets are becoming more and more common with time alongside the increasing metalicity. I'm not saying filters are out completely, but maybe none are the "great" one, just ones greaf enough to tip the scales. This could have concequence on the "near" future of the universe. Rising possibility of life could tip the scales in the coming ages. Maybe 2,000,000,000 AD will look a bit like your dyson dilemma.
Awesome video! I use to have speech therapy in middle school for my "R"s. Every day I had to hold my tongue and say "RA, RE, RI, RO, RU" over and over. It taught me how the "R" sound was formed and helped with muscle memory. Later I lived in Japan for 3 years I taught many Japanese people this technique. They have the same issue because "R" is never used in their language. It worked for them.
I've found your channel yesterday and started watching EVERYTHING:) first of all - thank you!; second of all, your speech is fine english is my.. mm.. fourth language - and I can understand you perfectly. Anyway - question - has anyone in the comment section heard anything new about that formation around one start that most probably is just comets, but maybe, just maybe, is the actual birth of alien dyson swarm? Because if it is - we have to up our game, I believe it was in our galaxy, or am I wrong? If yes - and it is another civilization - we have to stop talking, and start investing in these projects, we will have to face them someday, and they are currently winning. Go team people =)
Isaac Arthur yip, didn't knew it had a name =) last time I read about it it was just numbers, now I see there's a successful kisckstarter campaign that raised enough money to study it for a year - even if it's nothing (which most probably is) - still awesome; go team people! and yes - it is in the plain of milky way, so if it's a dyson swarm - you know the drill people - we need more kickstarters to raise um.. several billion dollars to start building our own=)
Lol, dyson swarm kickstarter :) Actually I put it [Tabby's Star] up as one of three options for the next video in a poll on Ecumenpolises, to my absolute surprise, while it was close to being a 3-way tie, it did come in consistently as 3rd place even though I expected it to crush the other two options, since I get asked about it so much.
I'm sure I'll get to it in the not too distant future, if I get too many topics built up in the queue I can 4 or 5 slap abridged versions into one video.
The best thing about these videos is that you revisit them. Repeated and more in-depth explanations help me understand the concepts better. And this one is so far my favorite in that respect.
This is probably my favorite video of yours, because it completely destroyed my long held belief that aliens have to be everywhere and we just can't see them for some reason. It really does seem like the nearby universe is empty of other advanced civilizations. Strange and terrifying, but so very intriguing.
Your videos have infinitely commendable quality, especially for such a vast library.. practically a true Docu-Encyclopedia. Even providing subtitles, excellent my friend. I've however never had to use the text. I know you must inspire many people with all of this, including young minds... The time this must take.. I am sure it's more than worth it. Thanks a lot, Keep it up.
I just started watching your videos and they are fantastic! Your speech is clear and easy to understand. You are incredibly gracious for making the effort to include CC on all your videos. Thank you for the intelligent and thought provoking content!
Wow! if not ANYTHING else youtube is a success just because it made this channel possible. Awesome work putting all this together Isaac. I am sure i will spend countless hours on this channel - and spreading the word too. Thanks
After having watched many of your videos as well as John Michael Gotier’s, I’m thinking we may be among the first civilizations to arise. While it’s true that our universe is hella old, at least in comparison to us, you have to realize that based on estimates, we’re not even 1% through the life of our universe. I think looking at the Fermi paradox on a universal scale, we could safely assume we’re among the first. I won’t say it’s definite, just a favored theory that seems more plausible to me.
I have proof that the reality is actually otherwise. We are in the beginning of the last stage of existence in this universe. It will last billions of years but still it is the last. It also will not be nearly as exciting as any other age.
Jack O ́neil , There is absolutely zero evidence for there being any other universe besides the one we are inside of. To be able to have any evidence of there being a universe outside of this universe, you would first need to be able to look outside of this universe or leave it. Everything that scientists talk about with other universes is just an attempt to make their theories be more accurate. They have zero evidence for it, and actually they rely heavily on faith alone
So, there are a couple considerations for the dyson dilemma that are rather important. This applies in two main scenarios, either FTL is impossible, or FTL is easy, in the middle, with FTL being workable, but comparatively slow and resource intensive you'll tend to expand to any reasonably acceptable system, regardless of the problems. Even if you have a civilization capable of interstellar travel and dyson sphere construction, not all stars are suitable for a dyson sphere. Any star that's unstable, or too near an active area in a galaxy should automatically be eliminated, since establishing life there is inherently risky and a civilization spreading dyson spheres would likely be thinking long term. This also allows you to rule out stars that are too young (likely unstable, in either output or active with flares and flashes) or too old (not worth the effort). After that it depends on the type of construction that the civilization intends to do (to an extent), however most low metallicity stars should also be disregarded as unsuitable even assuming cheap transmutation in an established sphere. This brings us to the 2 considerations, in the first a civilization will be forced to be choosy and in the other case the civilization is likely to be choosy given the 6th condition, comfortable expansion. From this we can get a rough estimate that of the 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy somewhere around 0.01%, around 1-4 million would be ideal for dyson swarm construction. This by itself suggest that in an unlimited amount of time, or the civilization in the second consideration with easy FTL, which will spread at essentially the rate they feel like, galaxies won't go dark, they'd dim by a fractional amount and increase their infrared output by a tiny bit overall, but a single civilization with easy FTL could spread between galaxies and there's no reason to think that we'd observe their progress in the minuscule amount of time that our technological civilization has existed pretty much if they aren't on our side of the milky way. Additionally a civilization like this may also leave systems alone with habitable planets out of some morality, simply because it is easy for them to find candidate star systems. A similar thing may happen on a much slower timescale with slower than light travel being the only way to go (and probably without morality protecting habitable systems), however as described below there are a number of factors that may act as a firewall for this. In the other consideration interstellar travel is slow. Fully utilizing the resources of a solar system like our own results in limitations of power rather than physical resources, bringing a maximum carrying capacity for a solar system to the order of 10 trillion earths. If only the more easily available resources are utilized (no planet cracking) we're closer to 10 billion earths worth of potential carrying capacity. Fully utilizing the available resources to the point where expansion is needed would not be a quick process, presumably construction (of habitable regions) would take thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years on the first swarm that any civilization constructs before they face resource pressures that make the serious proposition of a journey that will itself likely be somewhat risky, logistically very difficult and would take hundreds or thousands of years to a good candidate. What is done at this point depends on the mindset of the civilization, but assuming they are expansionist, they'd likely send out some form of automated construction ahead of time and wait for confirmation that the process started, which in total would likely take several thousand years before confirmation that the the automated builders arrived successfully, and began building, before the first colonists could reasonably be sent. This has a few consequences, namely that they might start well before running up against resource pressures, and that they will target as many potential systems as they can to prepare them for potential colonization. With the challenges involved, it's unlikely that the majority of the construction will be done ahead of time unless they've also developed AI to a considerable extent which brings up the question of whether they'd ever reach that point, since AI can represent an existential risk to technologically advanced civilizations. Following the potential colonization, the whole process from start to finish likely taking 10,000 years, each sphere will be an isolated civilization, with a starting population limited by the resource investment from a parent sphere that they know will never be recouped, assume maybe 10,000 colonists. From such a small population it would take several thousand years to reach the carrying capacity of this new system assuming no simple population controls, with some population controls, or if the population naturally trends towards the replacement rate (and this is true for the original sphere as well), there may never be a need for expansion, and it still doesn't make a lot of sense for their civilization as a whole, since any new spheres would be inherently isolated. Since a slower population growth rate for our hypothetical highly advanced civilization is more probably than not, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the doubling time for spheres to be on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, assuming each isolated civilization on these spheres don't wipe themselves out before expanding again. This becomes relevant when considering the time likely required in a galaxy before a technologically advanced civilization is likely to develop. The Milky Way is an old galaxy at 13.7 billion years old. The Sun is a population I star, type G2V main sequence star 4.6 billion years old. One fair, though technically anthrocentric, assumption, is that a only high metallicity star systems have a significant potential to give birth to technologically advanced life. Given the amount of time before stars with metallicities similar to the Sun (say at least 0.8x the metallicity of our star) became "common", population I stars still only account for 2% of stars, the Milky Way was 6 billion years ago, though most stars with similar or greater metallicities are younger. There are a number of barriers for life to overcome, from simple (which seem minor, based on the history of our planet), to complex life (which took considerably longer), to life capable of producing technology (which took much less time than simple -> complex). Whether civilization survives to become star faring is a question we haven't answered yet here, but assume that it's also a barrier to development. With some rough approximations of probabilities, despite the age of this galaxy there's not likely to be a civilization that both developed advanced technology and survived long enough to create not just one dyson swarm but also begin expanding more than a few hundred million years ago, with the chance that it still hasn't happened yet, assuming no FTL. The odds of an observable "rapidly" spreading dyson civilization increase rapidly if there is easy FTL, since the original location of the civilization becomes a far weaker barrier since spreading between galaxies should be simple, however we still likely wouldn't be able to observe one yet unless they were developing our galaxy in a region not occluded from view, and even then due to the ease of travel, in all probability the proportion of candidate stars actually colonized may be less than 10% given their ability to be extra picky. The short version is that when you consider additional factors, the likelihood of a civilization expanding in an observable blob of dyson spheres from what we can observe is quite small even with FTL, and perhaps simply hasn't happened yet within the observable part of our galaxy, while without FTL it may not be worthwhile for a civilization to build more than one Dyson swarm.
It was a bit hard for me to get over you're lisp, but your show is all the better and much more enduring not only because of it, but mostly from your tremendous insight in to all of these topics made clear for a layperson such as myself. Thank you Mr. Isaac Arthur, you've quickly propelled yourself to one of my most favorite discoveries on youtube, what little that means
I think the 6th point is probably the most likely. If a civilisation goes artificial and its computing speed goes in millions of time out real time thinking speed its greatest enemy is distance, as even a few kilometers would mean years of livetime to communicate between each other. The society divergence in such case would be a real issue, so much so that making another colony off planet would seem fairly pointless as they would be completely alien to each other within days.
Well, even if they just want to hang in a swarm around their own star, they probably want more computing power ad infinitum, and more computing power means you need to get more materials and you might even harvest near by stars for hydrogen and or move them to make a mega-dyson swarm
@@piguyalamode164 If that's the case, they can get significantly more computing done around a black hole. It's a much bigger energy source compared to a star, and everything is much closer together. From a distance their infrared glow would look like brown dwarfs, which we now know are super common, even more so than red dwarfs. They might even consider black holes to be the only kind of systems to be worth colonizing, since the limit to their expansion might be controlling for divergence rather than energy or time.
@@djinn666 And, as pointed out in the civilizations at the end of time series, black holes output power very slowly, so an intelligence using one for power would have to run slowly, which may even kill the speed of light by irrelevancy(ie you experience time so slowly that light lag is irrelevant)
I'm Re re binge-watching every video on the channel this week. Best week ever! Isaac Arthur is easily the second best presenter of awesome information that has ever existed, right behind Richard Feynman of course.
As someone who grew up watching Looney Tunes with Elmer Fudd being one of my favorite characters, I understand you just fine. Trying to understand my children when they were young toddlers, now that is a challenge. LOL
Very informative (and yet depressing, since it suggests we most likely are alone). I've wondered why dark matter could not just be Dyson spheres floating around and this video explained it, thanks!
In a PBS Space Time episode, the inevitability of Dyson Spheres was countered with the creation of a _partial_ Dyson Sphere with the resulting energy put into creating a Kugelblitz. From there you theoretically get all the energy you want/need from multiple Kugelblitz's. An additional alternative was utilizing black holes for energy. Any counters to these counters?
You're referring to this video? th-cam.com/video/jW55cViXu6s/w-d-xo.html I know the guy jokingly says "Fermi Paradox solved" but you're still running into the expansion issue on cosmic timescales. Even if you have access to a Type III power source in a Type II volume you're going to want to keep acquiring more matter to convert into energy at near-perfect efficiency, and more energy to spark up more Kugelblitzes. If anything, it's an argument for why all of the lost energy of a star can be seen as even more valuable than we are currently assessing it, meaning a species that's sufficiently advanced to create stable Kugelblitzes might be even more inclined to expand that one that is just relying on Dyson Swarms because every fragment of lost matter to convert into power represents enormous extensions of the life of their civilization that they're just allowing to be wasted for literally no reason. The thing about fighting entropy forever is that there is no such thing as "theoretically getting all the energy you want/need." Even if we were acquiring more than we can use at the time we can store it.
Tom Ashley if your opponent can sidestep entropy that may explain why there are no expansionist aggressive civilisations... it would by like declaring war on the Q continuum ... or god ... once you stopped being entertaining or threatened their other entertainment you are obliterated it stopped from having existed...
Hi, Isaac. I found your channel through Universe Today and the 2-parter about the inner and outer solar system you did with Fraser. Your videos are great and the topics are super interesting. They should be mandatory viewing for aspiring sci-fi writers. Keep it up and I'll keep watching. And FYI: You mention your speech impediment quite a bit. To be honest, until you mentioned it, I just thought you had a thick creole accent. Either way, after watching a couple of episodes it sounds completely normal. Just saying it's not a big deal; your production, timing, writing and progression are all awesome. So your voice just adds to your unique signature that makes your videos great. Cheers!
And I don't think they would construct Dyson spheres/swarms even if they did exist - they seem just so overly-complex and a civilisation capable of building such structures would almost certainly already have the means of producing sufficient energy to meet their needs and thus would not to require such things.
So glad I finally discovered your channel. This is exactly what was missing in my life :) it's bloody fantastic. Thanks for all this work en effort. One thought and possible answer I have in regards to this... What if any advanced civilisation acknowledges the best way for survival is to reorganise by living in harmony with its planets biodiversity, thus reorganising towards a global confederation of ecological, cradle-to-cradle and local city-states? In the sense of "Fellow humans, we've grown, and we understand our place on this planet now. It's time to stop the global industrial revolution once and for all, stop consumerism, follow other value systems based on population stability and individual and collective life value... it's time to tone it down". Mankind would lose its desire and drive to discover, reach out and surpass itself as an intelligent and almost-boundless species. A behavioral evolution, infused by self-determination, possible bio-engineered or ordered by empowered AI, trying to solve the planets and its biodiverse survival, AI protection of life as it has been encrypted to do so. If all advanced civilisations would be bound to end up like this, as a general rule to maximise survival and planetary stability, it could be a reason why dyson structures would not be seen around. In other words : it could very well be that advanced civilisations are are only capable of surviving its knowledgeable and scientific advancements by 'toning it down' and returning to their natural roots, finding a way back, self-enforced, genetically engineered or AI-enforced to finding stability and harmony on the advanced civilisations' own home planet. This could also very well be after a mass extinction due to loss of biodiversity and epidemics, as a lesson pulled from an inevitable mass extinction of every advanced civilisation. It could thus very well not be just black or white - self-destruction or interplanetary and interstellar expansion - it could very well be grey : accepting that the most qualitative growth path for the advanced civilisation is to find a way to have its species live in harmony with its home planet. The species mindset would alter over the generations, maybe even genetically enforced, to dissolve these urges to expand, discover and conquer. If advanced civilisations are meant to survive their own advancement, it could very well be that a condition towards survival is self-limitation and thus : surviving advanced civilisations could very well exist in mass, without emitting any proof towards other advanced civilisations.
I got used to your voice in about 2 minutes. I have zero trouble understanding you and it kind of strikes me as a pleasant accent when I happen to notice it.
So I subscribed like a week ago. In the course of watching this video, I've queued up 10 more to watch. Fascinating stuff, and very impressive production qualities. I look forward to ploughing through your back catalogue.
Problem Number 3: Stars have multiple planets/moons with life on them. Building a Dyson sphere could adversely affect life on a fellow moon/planet, so most civilizations don't do it. If we built a Dyson sphere, practically all chances of life on Mars and Titan would be extinguished given that the atmospheres would freeze to the ground. The Sun probably raises the temperature of Europa's icy shell an appreciable bit too. Making it colder could adversely affect life there, if it exists. Most of humanity has evolved empathy for other creatures. Building Dyson spheres would adversely affect environments throughout the solar systems. Not to mention the devastation it would have on photosynthesis and therefore the food chain of Earth. A Dyson sphere would cause us to have to re-engineer everything.
No, it would not. Now one might want to disassemble planets for construction material, allowing many thousands of times more living area to be made for the native critters, but it is quite easy to keep those planets illuminated normally if you wish to leave them be.
There's nothing forcing you to build the swarm _inside_ the planets' orbits - the total energy obtained by covering 4π of sky (or any angle, for that matter) at 1 AU will be the same as 4π at 100 AU, minus the negligible fraction absorbed by planets, asteroids, and dust.
Stop apologizing for the R thing. You explain things well and speak quite clearly! I just found your channel and am enjoying your content. Keep on keepin' on!
The Dyson sphere concept has a few additional problems. What if the civilization is not expanding ? Aka cause the individual lives "forever", the amount of individuals doesn't need to increase in the proposed exponential rate. The sphere is proposed to be the key solution to gain the most out of the star it revolves around, fusion technology can bypass all that ... there's no need to have one giant one as multiple smaller ones will be able to do the "same" thing, in a smaller scale. Which is why the stars won't disappear, but might be a little more darker than they originally were, as you probably can harvest the resource without taking the whole thing away. And so on...
Why would you fly really far away for another 10% of a star of power versus grabbing the next 10% at home? Doesn't seem to make much sense. It's not like you'd be sneaky, any significant amount taken at all will make you extremely visible.
hedgehog3180 why wouldn't we? You don't have to watch it all the time to notice that. You only need to photograph the same section of sky more than once over YEARS to notice that. Then look more closely at "huh look at that odd anomaly" I.e. extremely noticeable.
@@gavinjenkins899 yes but only if it happens during the span of time that you are watching. Many of these projects will take more then the few decades we've been watching, and indeed for many of the telltale signs we will be looking for evidence of one's that have long since down their dimming and therefore without the before and after pictures
Great job! V1 of this was probably my favorite video from yours until this. I think that if anything, the Fermi Paradox proves one of three things: either our predictions on future technology and exploration are ENTIRELY wrong, we're living in a simulation, or intelligent technology-spawning civilizations are unfathomably rare.
Another limiting factor that maybe wasn't considered in the 1950's: internet lag. Who would choose to be farther from the core of an IT-heavy civilization? Who would want hundred (or hundred thousand) year latencies? Colonists would tend to stay as close as possible, making for maximally dense, immobile civilizations. If ET is as addicted to the internet as we are, then there's no Fermi paradox.
But supposing they have similar genetic reproduction to us, which a lot should, there would only need to be TWO out of a vast number of them around a single star system out of what seems like it should be billions of intelligant civalizations who has decided that the internet is stupid for some reason or other and had the capacity to move to a different system, presumably not all that hard given the number of samples, and the entire paradox doesn't work again. It really doesn't seem that hard considering the number of people on earth who believe that jet contrails are a goverment conspiracy to poisin everyone or that the earth is flat.
It sounds like you are proposing an addiction to the 24/7 "news" cycle as a solution to the Fermi paradox. It's an interesting idea, but as Isaac Arthur frequently points out, it's only a solution if ALL citizens of ALL civilizations had that condition (and still doesn't explain why we can't see their electromagnetic emissions). It would only take one or two small groups of reactionaries deciding to break away from their home culture and this solution breaks down. Since our own history has many examples of such groups, it seems likely that at least SOME other civilizations would have similar counter-cultures at some point as well.
I wanted to say that you’ve vastly improved your speech since I’ve been listening... but this is an early video! Although you likely have been working on it and worrying about it all this time, I don’t think about it at all while listening to you speak. You take your audience millions of lightyears away and millions of regular years into the future, and we’re honored to be allowed to listen to someone as thoughtful and intelligent as yourself... You’re also showing everyone who has a similar issue that one day, way more than a half a million people might hang on their every word. Thank you!
I'm not overly convinced by this argument truth be told. I am a bit of a 1b kinda guy too but this notion of the inevitability of Dyson swarms given the time periods involved strikes me as a bit contrived. there is going to be a certain amount of diminishing returns on constructing a swarm, even socially... if you're going to live in a habitat you might as well live in one going somewhere long before ewe run out of parking space in a swarm. that said the lack of some sort of obvious stellar engineering is spooky, not sure if it would or should lead to a dark sky. depends on the starting date too I guess. further, we look away the further back in time and a less diverse mix of elements for planets life etc.... ok ten million yrs is nothing, but a 100 million less so. life may be really really recent.
Oh I personally hate the theory, the problem is that in the two and a half years since I flushed it out and put it out there, nobody's raised a strong objection to it, including myself, and I try punching holes it at least once a month. If you can increase your numbers with no loss of livelihood, you will tend to do so, or at least some cultures will, on astronomical timelines you will tend to max things out in a way that either produced Dyson's or something functional equivalent. So the flaw to it has to be something preventing folks from either wanting or being able to do it, and base don our current knowledge that would seem improbable.
well here the exclusivity thing works against the Dyson argument, I think. ...perhaps? the reason being is the construction period of a swarm is immense compared with even evolutionary timescales that stumbling on a reason to stop and do something else rises in probability. here the culture that sticks with it to the end, IE: the one that didn't will result in a smattering of IR objects? I think the uniformity of cultural enterprise or identity is fighting against the time spans of these projects. if you could knock one up in a 1000 yrs or so then they get built on mass before obsolescence of the idea. I guess the build rate to obscuration must be calculable on the back of an envelope based on growth.if they can grow quicker than they travel? or vice versa? there is something not quite right about this idea but I confess it is largely an intuitive bias kinda feeling.
intuitively I think the universe and its development/evolution as opposed to its base properties can be understood as a set of comparative rates of change... call it my religion if you will :)
@mididoctors I honestly think you are missing one critical point in your theorizing .. " the construction period of a swarm is immense compared with even evolutionary timescales " You base this assumption on what? The idea that humans would be building one item in the swarm at a time? The only math you would need is exponential growth. The more habitats there are the higher the population (and growth rate) is and so to the demand to build more. It would certainly start "relatively" slow, relative to the eventual rate of expansion but the swarm would be full far faster than evolution could keep up. Hundreds of years, rather than millions..
I've been a fan of yours for years... and it still makes me sad that people who are capable of appreciating your genius give you shit for your manner of speaking. The fact that you exist at all gives me hope for people, the fact that you're given grief for facts that are beyond your control (and yet you still contribute to our lives in the way you do) takes way some of that hope. Never dull your shine.
I just wanted to let you know that I am watching your videos since the beginning and your speech impediment is a non-issue i perfectly able to understand everything you say without any problems and thank you for intelligent eloquent enlightening videos
One problem with your logic is that is may be too logical. One must allow for the possibility of illogically motivated reasons as much as those that are logically motivated or we run the risk of becoming too logical to notice illogic. Anyway your channel is at least as entertaining as those produced by flat earthers. Thx.
I've been thinking about this and I think I have a possible solution. If we take ourselves as an example, any technological civilization will be a society of free thinking individuals. If we consider each of them (just like every human) a variable, then the more of them exist, the harder it is to arrive to a consensus on a particular issue, since everyone has their own opinion. Take a look at mankind's current status, there are plenty of wars going around, and space is not a priority. You will argue that in a few thousand years that will change, but I don't think we have made such significant mental progress in the past 200 years to justify that hypothesis. Governing vast populations spread over millions of independent territories is probably not possible with any societal structure. As such, I think the only way a civilization will consider expanding would be if their social structure is that of a hive mind. In other words a society that operates on the premises of a single idea. I'd say only about 1% of humans currently see themselves as living on a planet, rather than a country. Unless every individual (or at least most of them) arrive to the same conclusion, expansion will not happen. As far as I know, a hive mind is not a naturally occurring social structure of a species. And so far, the only time humanity has seen a consensus on an issue, was on the doorstep of a common threat. So unless it turns out that the Sun has 1000 years of life left in it, I don't see us (and therefore others) bothering with Dyson Swarms. If we assume that tech civs are extremely rare, and that at the most a civilization that is not hive minded will build only one Dyson (much later at a star's lifetime, or until pressed by an external danger), then it is highly probable that we have either missed that 1 Dyson, or no species have simply arrived at a mutual agreement to build such a structure. I'm sure there is some flawed logic here, but I'm extrapolating from mankind so flaws are the name of the game really. Ultimately, I think that unless there is a chance for Hive Minded species to naturally occur AND arrive to technology, then it's highly unlikely that we'll actually spot an expanding civ, be it with our current or future detection techniques.
+Jintaro Kensei Remember non-Exclusivity from the original Solutions video, your advancing that only a Hive Mind is capable of expansion, yet that has routinely occurred throughout human and pre-human history without it. You'd also need to be a bit more rigorous with your definition of a Hive Mind, but its important to keep in mind that expansion efforts will vary on the technology involved. As an example if we did find, tomorrow, a way to mass manufacture something a bit strong then graphene we could have space elevators and fairly cheap ones. Space ships built in space, and only for space, and without mass as a critical control factor, are stupid-easy to construct, you throw in even slightly better automation and 3D printing then we have now and you could have small groups of just a couple hundred self-funding their own little rotating hab inside an asteroid somewhere, expanding as need required. You throw fusion into the mix and its a hundred times easier. So you're working from a premise that this can only be done by a world-wide collaboration but we've got good indicators it won't even require a major effort by a medium-sized nation-state for much longer. Were that the case I think it breaks your model.
+Isaac Arthur You have a point, but I'm not excluding expansion. Hive mind or not, I think there's is a rather high chance that any tech civ will go to space. My point is that such an expansion would be mostly for curiosity's sake. Look at Mars One, something similar would be bound to happen with the aliens when first interplanetary travel with live subjects occurs. I'm making the argument that if there is no Hive Mind structure to drive expansion as a universal goal across the population, such a massive undertaking like a Dyson sphere will probably not happen due to lack of direction. Even using automation, such automation must be set up, and the being setting it up must have a motive for that. Money, survival, curiosity, whatever it is it must be shared with a particular number of it's kind. After all, while trivial, the amount of work required to set up such an automatic building system for a Dyson sphere would still be too much if the group involved is too small. If we take humans as an example again, interest in space has drastically dropped worldwide. I'm not talking about the space efforts, since there still are, I'm talking about the general population. As a race, mankind has little motive to go to space, at least for now. Were that not the case, we would have populated lower orbit long ago with living quarters and solar panels. Heck, there's been a space station in orbit since 1986, you'd at least expect space beer to have become available by now (first space brewery, heh). Anyway, what I'm saying is that from what I've learned and seen so far, humans are unlikely to undertake a Dyson sphere unless completely starved for energy, and honestly I doubt there can be anything man-made that can utilize all of the Sun's energy every second, so unless there's some pretty fancy way to store it, Dyson is again a no-go in my opinion. Even if we do manage to turn black holes into batteries and achieve all these theoretical marvels, I'd say fusion would still be preferred as the path with least resistance. It's highly possible that we'll run on fusion (especially with that reactor in Germany) and will simply utilize H for our energy needs. Unless by some miracle enough people see the benefits of having a star heat up your water. By proxy, any alien society where individuals don't share the same motives, will have a similar response to expansion. They will most likely be prone to population curbing, like in current day China where only 1 child per family is allowed. It will simply be an easier route to take, especially when there is no threat, be it from a space event or domestic. On the other hand, since everyone on earth have different agendas, they get different ideas and that in turn drives our tech. Hence, I don't know if a Hive Mind would even arrive at tech in the first place. But if it did, then I'm certain it would arrive at a Dyson conclusion. It just seems that a Hive Mind with tech is highly unlikely, since it would probably be overtaken by more versatile species.(I'm not talking about a single brain controlling trillions of others, I mean when everyone share the same eerm, concious space?). Let's face it, humanity could've started brute-forcing a Dyson Swarm since the year 2000. Wouldn't have been an elegant approach, but I'm sure it would've been taken if the pressure existed. We haven't done a lot about this, so neither would potential aliens.
+Jintaro Kensei It's really important to remember that 'Dyson Swarm' is an engineering project like 'metropolis' or 'state' is. It requires no individual great undertakings, you do it incrementally with need, and the only cooperation is the agreement not to build in someone else's orbital path or sunlight, making it a bit akin to water rights and ocean navigation. That requires some cooperation but not until you're already pretty dyson'd up and there's already be an emerging wad of Case Law, Stake Claims, and Treaty by then for precedent. A cooperative attitude certainly helps but it wouldn't even require levels of it routinely engaged in even in early history. If they were, for instance, owning and taxing/renting cross-sections of the sun, and those began getting too high, people use those ones less, or if over all people start shifting out to cheaper places run on fusion reactors or around other stars. I would never say cooperation wasn't necessary, and the more the better, but I don't think it would require too much or a central ruling body. Sunlight is currently 'free', if the combined rent, tax, regulatory hassle, and panel construction & maintenance 'costs' exceed buying fusion fuel then people do that instead, though I would bet they'd tend to equalize out. That's what I meant in the Interstellar Colonization video about thinking of stars more as metropolises with suburban and rural sprawl out to the Oort Cloud, rather than lonely islands of civilization light years apart.
+Isaac Arthur You also said in one of your Habitat videos that the most efficient and rational way to create living area would be to keep pumping out artificial planets/rings/whatever-is-most-cost-effective, with which I agree. So ultimately, whichever the case may be with xeno civs, chances are they won't go beyond one Dyson, and that one Dyson is a best case scenario in my opinion. Conflict rates and scale tend to rise with population volume. I simply can't see a society consisting of trillions of people, living in habitats around a star in separate habs and never having any trouble between each other. I realize a Dyson swarm is basically a Lego project where you have to make your own pieces, but I'm still convinced that it's a highly unlikely outcome in any societal structure similar to the one employed by the majority of the human race.
+Jintaro Kensei I'm not seeing your reasoning Jintaro, your acting like all these habitats, whose residents don't have centuries old disputes from ancestral territorial claims, will hold grudges worse then most of them do and also flex their muscles worse than most superpowers, even though each hab would be less than the equivalent of a single person on Earth now. I'm usually viewed as a touch pessimistic about us outgrowing irrational aggression but even I cna't see these people fighting so much and so frequently that they couldn't share a Dyson, remember it's a trillion boats all miles apart form each other on a huge sea, with only a couple staying in proximity to you from day to day.
"A condition sadistically named so..." Isaac, you made my day! And you totally don't have to worry, your speach is completely understandable. Actually, it's much easier to understand you than many other youtube guys.
What if as our morality has evolved with time, most if not all civilizations realize that giving birth is immoral? You are after all throwing someone into a potentially horrible life without their consent.
Then they'll be erased form the Universe by their own stupidity I should think. But races aren't homogenous like that, if some movement started on Earth saying that having kids was immoral its followed would rapidly cease to exist while those who rejected it would grow in number.
"if some movement started on Earth saying that having kids was immoral its followed would rapidly cease to exist while those who rejected it would grow in number." One already exists: The Shakers. There are three of them left. Not even the prospect of inheriting all they have, is apparently sufficient to get people to join them.
Exactly, Isaac. That point about diversity in alien civilization needs to be made more clearly everywhere, including your videos. Notice that no sane person ever says "People will all simply come to agree on the wrongness of X, and then forever afterwards, X just won't happen." That's because we know that people are diverse. Some people become aroused by farts. Some want to crank out armies of kids. Some want to sneak away from society in favor of the frontier. Some think they belong to a chosen people who deserve their own promised land to rule. With growing wealth, these sorts of priorities are becoming more prominent, not less. And there is every reason to think that other intelligent creatures have just as much diversity in their ranks as humans do. Why wouldn't they be just as resistant to a global ruling authority, just as eager to escape the jurisdiction of an authority with whom they don't agree? Star Trek always showed each planet with one kind of people, or maybe two kinds, who were at war. Once you've met one backassian, you basically know what the other 20 billion are like. Just about every planet depicted in fiction is more culturally homogeneous than Earth is. And I've never encountered a fictional society in which there is significantly more individual diversity than there is on Earth. That's part of what lulls us into stupid thoughts like "Well maybe dem aliens can but don' wanna!" I mean, name one thing which we humans can do but no human wants to?
Everywhere we look, we see stars and galaxies. If I understand the logic, we should expect to see visible evidence of civilized megastructures such as these Dyson doohickies instead. But what if we don't see them because the stars and galaxies themselves are the megastructures we should be looking for? Our assumption that megastructure civilization would just be a scaled-up version of ourselves is a bit like primitives expecting skyscrapers to be scaled up versions of mud and straw huts. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love these videos. But instead of invoking Paradox when observation doesn't match our assumptions, maybe we should scrutinize our assumptions a bit more. Maybe the night sky is filled with evidence of intelligent life on a scale we cannot comprehend as such.
Well the reasoning is that since we don't see them, they are probably not there, and most likely because nobody is around to build them. It clearly does rely on assumptions, I listed them out, and if there's one you thing is genuinely flawed, by all means let me know, I don't particularly like my own conclusion on this matter in the first place. The problem is that in the two years since the original episode was released no one has come up with a demonstrable flaw in it.
"Everywhere we look, we see stars and galaxies. If I understand the logic, we should expect to see visible evidence of civilized megastructures such as these Dyson doohickies instead. But what if we don't see them because the stars and galaxies themselves are the megastructures we should be looking for?" 1: The only reason people think there is likely to be extraterrestrial life (which could evolve to become intelligent and have technology) is because there are a lot of other stars with planets out there, and thus many opportunities for life to arise and evolve as it did on this planet. In such a scenario, the star and planet have to exist first and give rise to technological life, not vice versa. 2: It would make no sense for a civilization to go to the trouble of creating an artificial star and then not use the energy that the star generates. And if they wanted to use all or most of the energy of their artificial star (or a naturally occurring star) they would need to build a Dyson Swarm.
We might as well assume that the galaxy and/or universe has already been colonized. Since we use such a tiny fraction of the resources available in the solar system, they created a simulation for us to live in that lets us see the universe as wide open for us to use, while they use the real system. There was a hint of this in the first Star Trek movie.
If we assume we are in a simulation, then we have no basis at all to make any assumption about how many stars/planets/resources/etc exist outside the simulation in the "real system", or what percentage of those resources have already been colonized/used. All we could say in that case is that (by all observational evidence) there are vast amounts of simulated stars/planets/resources within this matrix that are not being used by any other (highly advanced) simulated species. That could be because the programmers felt like wasting a lot of computing power simulating distant stars and galaxies we can not reach, or because the other species the programmers put in those places were put there recently enough that they are still too insufficiently advanced for us to detect them, or because they want to put other species in later, or because they want to see how far we can get if they let Sims Humanity run for eons, or for some other reason. The relevant point is that the Fermi Paradox and Dyson Dilemma apply to this universe - whether it is the real universe or a simulated universe with an internal set of physical laws programmed in.
This discussion was very intriguing. It got me thinking. If an advanced alien civilization built all the stars in the sky, the how and the why cannot be assumed. It seems to fly counter to our understanding of the Big Bang and cosmology, but it tickles the imagination to play with the idea. One possibility: they wanted to create a roadmap with beacons and lights to guide them as they travelled through... whatever was here before the stars. Perhaps there was originally something different. Another option: Maybe there was just one galaxy, (theirs) or just a few, and they fabricated others as an experiment, perhaps to see if life would evolve?
I have never had a hard time understanding you without cc, and English isn't even my first language. If people have a hard time understanding you they must have a really poor understanding of language... Watched a ton of your videos and I intend on keep doing so, so em coming!
I have to say after hearing you explain your speech impediment i had to say i actually could listen to you speak for hours on your uploads. i just thought you had an American accent i had not heard before (i'm English). Thank you
It’s 3:51 in the morning, but I just had to watch this one. And I’m gonna watch the Fermi Paradox Solutions next. Only you and John Michael Godier have that power and influence over me! Fortunately it’s a Friday night, and I don’t have to go into work tomorrow! This was fantastic, as per usual.
I've watched every video on your channel at least twice. I'm so happy I came across your channel. You explain so many concepts and futurism without dumbing it down yet without getting drudged down in complex mathematics (my algebra is fantastic, but I lacked the focus to really succeed in calculus). Do you have any recommendations on any other similar channels or other individuals to follow? I love recommending you to like minded friends, and I absolutely love your personality and the way you present the material. Keep up the excellent work Isaac, I'll be following you for years to come.
Thanks! Calculus tends to kill people from the algebra, ironically, so if you're an ace at that it might have just been an instructor you didn't sync with well, its easier understood sometimes just by using it directly with the physics it was basically originally designed for. Recommendation-wise, I've a few on the the channel's main page, if you click on my name it will take you to that and they're on the right side, scroll down a bit. Very different styles and focuses but science channels I enjoy.
your linking of previous videos seems like an infinite recursion! I have found your channel 4 days ago and keep going into the sublinked topics please consider reminding people to eat and drink. Impressive how much effort just the watching is, hard to imagine to write speak and cut... not mentioning the research must be >9000
It took about two videos for me to get used to your speech impediment, but after that I was good to go. I enjoy your videos thoroughly, and keep up the great work your Fermi Paradox videos are my favorite.
Thank you for these thought provoking uploads, You have given my best friend and myself many hours of extremely interesting conversation and lots of quiet reflection and contemplation. I didn't think you had a "speech impediment" I thought you had a strange accent, but you would no doubt, think I have a strange accent. I understood you saying "rare, recent, paradox rebellious, worried etc" you seem to sound "R" in the same way a French person speaking English would and I had no trouble understanding you, Thanks again......J
Hi Isaac, Interesting and lovely Video like always! Keep it up! Have you ever thought about loading your audio track to iTunes as a Podcast? Don't understand me wrong, your Videos improoved alot and the visualls are getting better with every new one. But it would be nice to consume those even without an Internet Connection.
+Doc Erk I actually haven't since I don't know how, though its an interesting notion, the audio and script is in most cases done entirely before the visuals which are added as a supplement rather than an integral parts so most would be convertible.
I got so used to your speech impediment that I'd now frown if you didn't have it anymore. I'm sure you're perfectly understood by everyone and your speech impediment is actually beloved. Keep up the crazy good work.
Ever swiping through TH-cam and stumbled across a channel that is perfect for you and wonder how you never found until now? This is that channel for me.
Dude for some reason after getting used to your voice I find it easy to go to sleep listening to you. It's not because I find the topics boring, it's stange listening to anything else while I try to sleep would just keep me up.
Wow, exstordonary set of docs. I'd lost hope, I've seen every thing worth watching. BBC stuck in a time loop and same old 15 year old facts. going to watch all yours from the beginning. thanks for feeding us with great new subjects
I find your Rhotacism actually refreshing to hear, a bit jarring from the beginning but I start to appreciate that the speaker IS you and nobody else. In fact I tend to miss it if I don't watch your video
Issac, did you have a cold in this video? You sound stopped up! But seriously, I've been bingeing on your videos for weeks now, and I'm almost caught up. Love them all and I joined your Patreon. I hope things are going well!
Hmmm... Early April so quite probably yes, also I still hadn't switched to a better mic and was just learning basic sound editing. I always want to redo every episode more than a year old though :) And yeah things are excellent, I keep knocking on wood waiting for something bad to happen since I've had a perpetually great year starting just about when this episode came out.
Im so impressed Isac I see myself as quite clever with a messured IQ about 146 but you just are blowing my mind and I love your videos - keep up the work
man, youre really cool to make such an elaborate video with graphics and all, considering that the only way you make money off it is what youtube pays you. respect!
Hi, I think you're very brave commenting with a speech impediment. I also have a speech impediment, which doesn't allow me to say an "r" as well. Fortunately it only applies when I'm speaking in my native tongue (Afrikaans). Excellent channel. Thank you
mr Arthur your deep knowledge on topics regarding your videos more than makes up for the speech thing i wish you didnt feel you have to put a disclaimer but do know you sound very intellectual and informative thank you for the videos
Other than it sounding like you have an accent I can understand you just fine. A lot more well spoken than most of the people on youtube.
Everybody has an accent
P Holmes what about those who are mute? What accent do they have?
Yup i thought that he had maybe grew up in china and moved to usa later in life as they can somtimes have issues with R's etc, Obviously that thought was quite fleeting. Regardless this channel is a newly found jem for me. :)
Am mute. People think I’m from the Netherlands.
If you watch at 1.5x or 2x speed its impossible to notice
Speech impediment? I understand you perfectly so don't be down on yourself ever (not that you were). You sure don't have a MIND impediment like so many on TH-cam... power to you!
Well said! :)
you deserve way more views and subscribers
+dzigerica666 share it everyone .....
I was thinking the exact same thing while watching this video.
65,000 subscribers is nothing less than bloody good imo, especially on this subject, the majority of people out there are really only into crappy soap dramas or watching their favourite football team get murdered in a final...
Azazel Zel almost 100k now! been here since like 8k
Yeah it's not bad consider 99% of people will have no idea wtf he's talking about.
Up until a conversation a few days ago, I had never heard of a Dyson Sphere or a Dyson Swarm. When it was brought up, this video was directly referenced. Super interesting stuff, and I enjoy your explanations of it. Seems like I've got some catching up and some learning to do!
The production quality on these videos are getting better and better! The beginning to this looked really great!
+Stephen InGermany Yeah Brandon Liew does some wonderful compositions and I've been looking for an excuse to use that song for a while. I was actually worried it might be a bit over-the-top, thundering in there :)
+Isaac Arthur Do you think KIC 8462852 could have been a Dyson sphere?
This may be a bit of a weird (and possibly massively flawed) way of looking at the fermi paradox, but what if human civilization is one of the older ones currently in the universe. The reason for this thinking is that, even though the universe is hella old, the necessary materials for creating intelligent life (and most technologies) aren't really present in large enough quantities until at least first generation (and possibly some second generation) stars have done their thing and then blown up. And since second generation stars aren't really all that old at this point, the time required for intelligent civilizations to emerge, reach the required level of technology and energy generation and spread out to nom all the nearby stars is yet to elapse.
Also, really enjoying this series, thanks Isaac
Thank Butool, glad you;re enjoying it, and yeah it's a popular explanation too though its got its flaws.
is it not more likely that the level humans are now is very rare cause it is very low and go by very very quick at a cosmic level and it would be like finding a needle in a haystack to find another civ that uses our level of tech. our type of comunication. have the same understanding of energy, dimensions, time, consiousness and spirituality may be so low that we simply dont notice anyone else cause our lvl fly by so qickly are so far beyond us?
Well, someone has to be first, so why not us? I'd like to think we actually are the most advanced civilisation, at least in our "close neighbourhood", and that in the future we will turn out to be those pesky aliens that abduct representatives of other species for probing and testing, and leaving crop circles on other planets as a self-referential joke :D
You know. Crop circles and rectal probes as a form of entertainment is definitely not outside of human behaviour.
You only need to take a look at the behaviour of alcohol fuelled teens to see the truth of that.
another million years of development isn't likely to change our sick sense of humor.
@@B3RyL I'm certainly looking forward to the day when we have the technology to get to other stellar systems, visit their planets and their more primitive civilisations - just so I can land my ship right next to some poor fool that no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him while wearing antennae on my head and making "meep meep" noises...
As always, great video, Isaac. Easy to understand, insightful, intelligent, and very thought provoking. Thanks for putting these out in the world.
+Jesse Taylor Your welcome Jesse, glad you enjoyed it!
Thank You, Mr. Arthur... these videos are truly enlightening, and I really enjoy the way you cover the alternatives, building a solid argument.
Author's Note: The image of Michael Hart is actually author Paulo Coelho, there's an annotation about that in the episode but those are not visible on all platforms such as most mobile devices. Sadly TH-cam doesn't allow corrections to videos any other way.
This is hilarious! Added entertainment value :D
Isaac Arthur why would you need to colonize a galaxy? If your goal was maximizing your chances of survival, then you could expand to three or four systems, then repopulate anytime one of them suffered a disaster. The odds of say, all the planets in a couple systems suffering a civilization ending event faster than you could repopulate them is so low the stars would die in way less time. If you wanted, you could set up another outpost or two a few thousand light years away to avoid GRBs, but building bigger than that would be pointless. Bigger empires are generally harder to maintain, and this would be especially true given the lagtime of lightspeed. Also, you've talked about M.A.D. among kardeshev 2 civilizations before. Maybe "stay in your neck of the woods" is just a part of that policy.
I was thinking to myself when I was watching, dang this guy reminds me a lot of the author of the alchemist...
Love your accent and speech impediment dude :)
Isaac Arthur I agree that we may be unique in the galaxy, but not why. As many have pointed out, GRBs used to be way more common, and would have sterilized or greatly harmed countless worlds, meaning most planets with life may be as old or younger than earth. If panspermia is valid, and life only popped up once (whether throughout the galaxy or more interestingly, the cosmos) for whatever reason, then it could take a while to crawl accross the galaxy; landing on a planet, waiting a billion years for a big asteroid that could throw a good spray of rock into space, waiting another billion to spread, getting etc. Finally, rocky planets are becoming more and more common with time alongside the increasing metalicity. I'm not saying filters are out completely, but maybe none are the "great" one, just ones greaf enough to tip the scales. This could have concequence on the "near" future of the universe. Rising possibility of life could tip the scales in the coming ages. Maybe 2,000,000,000 AD will look a bit like your dyson dilemma.
I love your channel, and now that I'm used to it your voice is actually really soothing to the ears and I understand you fine.
This is now my favourite science channel. THANK YOU.
Dyson swarm sounds so alien, until you realize it's satellites around the sun.
And a really low tech version is a solar panel, or a Mars rover
Two Issac Arthur Eps today? Awesome. Awesome to the max.
Ultra radical!
Drew McTygue hey, it's the spaceship propulsion compendium guy! I knew your name sounded farmilliar
Awesome video!
I use to have speech therapy in middle school for my "R"s. Every day I had to hold my tongue and say "RA, RE, RI, RO, RU" over and over. It taught me how the "R" sound was formed and helped with muscle memory.
Later I lived in Japan for 3 years I taught many Japanese people this technique. They have the same issue because "R" is never used in their language. It worked for them.
Your channel is by far the best one I have ever visited. Thanks for your great job!
I've found your channel yesterday and started watching EVERYTHING:) first of all - thank you!; second of all, your speech is fine english is my.. mm.. fourth language - and I can understand you perfectly. Anyway - question - has anyone in the comment section heard anything new about that formation around one start that most probably is just comets, but maybe, just maybe, is the actual birth of alien dyson swarm? Because if it is - we have to up our game, I believe it was in our galaxy, or am I wrong? If yes - and it is another civilization - we have to stop talking, and start investing in these projects, we will have to face them someday, and they are currently winning. Go team people =)
Are you referring to Tabby's Star?
Isaac Arthur
yip, didn't knew it had a name =) last time I read about it it was just numbers, now I see there's a successful kisckstarter campaign that raised enough money to study it for a year - even if it's nothing (which most probably is) - still awesome; go team people!
and yes - it is in the plain of milky way, so if it's a dyson swarm - you know the drill people - we need more kickstarters to raise um.. several billion dollars to start building our own=)
Lol, dyson swarm kickstarter :) Actually I put it [Tabby's Star] up as one of three options for the next video in a poll on Ecumenpolises, to my absolute surprise, while it was close to being a 3-way tie, it did come in consistently as 3rd place even though I expected it to crush the other two options, since I get asked about it so much.
Isaac Arthur
oh well, I still have a biiig backlog to go though , so maybe someday you'll still do a Tabby's star video:)
I'm sure I'll get to it in the not too distant future, if I get too many topics built up in the queue I can 4 or 5 slap abridged versions into one video.
This is one of the most ambitious and inspired channels on youtube! Thank you for this content. Much love Mr Arthur
The best thing about these videos is that you revisit them. Repeated and more in-depth explanations help me understand the concepts better. And this one is so far my favorite in that respect.
Isaac, i got to say, another amazing video... thank you and please keep up the awesome work
This is probably my favorite video of yours, because it completely destroyed my long held belief that aliens have to be everywhere and we just can't see them for some reason. It really does seem like the nearby universe is empty of other advanced civilizations. Strange and terrifying, but so very intriguing.
Isaac, you are never boring, and it does not matter you have an impediment. Your videos are incredible.
Your videos have infinitely commendable quality, especially for such a vast library.. practically a true Docu-Encyclopedia.
Even providing subtitles, excellent my friend. I've however never had to use the text.
I know you must inspire many people with all of this, including young minds... The time this must take.. I am sure it's more than worth it.
Thanks a lot, Keep it up.
Dude - you're the ultimate geek magnet! I can't stop watching your stuff.
I just started watching your videos and they are fantastic! Your speech is clear and easy to understand. You are incredibly gracious for making the effort to include CC on all your videos. Thank you for the intelligent and thought provoking content!
when humans get dyson spheres all over the Milkyway-
"First!"
Wow! if not ANYTHING else youtube is a success just because it made this channel possible. Awesome work putting all this together Isaac. I am sure i will spend countless hours on this channel - and spreading the word too. Thanks
Thanks Ganesh, glad you're enjoying it!
After having watched many of your videos as well as John Michael Gotier’s, I’m thinking we may be among the first civilizations to arise. While it’s true that our universe is hella old, at least in comparison to us, you have to realize that based on estimates, we’re not even 1% through the life of our universe. I think looking at the Fermi paradox on a universal scale, we could safely assume we’re among the first. I won’t say it’s definite, just a favored theory that seems more plausible to me.
I have proof that the reality is actually otherwise. We are in the beginning of the last stage of existence in this universe. It will last billions of years but still it is the last. It also will not be nearly as exciting as any other age.
specUVdust oooook?
@@joepersch6779 UFOs are proof that we are not alone, we are not the firsts, and that the are even more universes/realities from where they come from.
Jack O ́neil UFOs, by definition, are unidentified. So no, they’re not.
Jack O ́neil , There is absolutely zero evidence for there being any other universe besides the one we are inside of. To be able to have any evidence of there being a universe outside of this universe, you would first need to be able to look outside of this universe or leave it. Everything that scientists talk about with other universes is just an attempt to make their theories be more accurate. They have zero evidence for it, and actually they rely heavily on faith alone
Your videos are nothing short of some of the best content created on this site.
So, there are a couple considerations for the dyson dilemma that are rather important. This applies in two main scenarios, either FTL is impossible, or FTL is easy, in the middle, with FTL being workable, but comparatively slow and resource intensive you'll tend to expand to any reasonably acceptable system, regardless of the problems.
Even if you have a civilization capable of interstellar travel and dyson sphere construction, not all stars are suitable for a dyson sphere. Any star that's unstable, or too near an active area in a galaxy should automatically be eliminated, since establishing life there is inherently risky and a civilization spreading dyson spheres would likely be thinking long term. This also allows you to rule out stars that are too young (likely unstable, in either output or active with flares and flashes) or too old (not worth the effort). After that it depends on the type of construction that the civilization intends to do (to an extent), however most low metallicity stars should also be disregarded as unsuitable even assuming cheap transmutation in an established sphere. This brings us to the 2 considerations, in the first a civilization will be forced to be choosy and in the other case the civilization is likely to be choosy given the 6th condition, comfortable expansion. From this we can get a rough estimate that of the 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy somewhere around 0.01%, around 1-4 million would be ideal for dyson swarm construction. This by itself suggest that in an unlimited amount of time, or the civilization in the second consideration with easy FTL, which will spread at essentially the rate they feel like, galaxies won't go dark, they'd dim by a fractional amount and increase their infrared output by a tiny bit overall, but a single civilization with easy FTL could spread between galaxies and there's no reason to think that we'd observe their progress in the minuscule amount of time that our technological civilization has existed pretty much if they aren't on our side of the milky way. Additionally a civilization like this may also leave systems alone with habitable planets out of some morality, simply because it is easy for them to find candidate star systems. A similar thing may happen on a much slower timescale with slower than light travel being the only way to go (and probably without morality protecting habitable systems), however as described below there are a number of factors that may act as a firewall for this.
In the other consideration interstellar travel is slow. Fully utilizing the resources of a solar system like our own results in limitations of power rather than physical resources, bringing a maximum carrying capacity for a solar system to the order of 10 trillion earths. If only the more easily available resources are utilized (no planet cracking) we're closer to 10 billion earths worth of potential carrying capacity. Fully utilizing the available resources to the point where expansion is needed would not be a quick process, presumably construction (of habitable regions) would take thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years on the first swarm that any civilization constructs before they face resource pressures that make the serious proposition of a journey that will itself likely be somewhat risky, logistically very difficult and would take hundreds or thousands of years to a good candidate. What is done at this point depends on the mindset of the civilization, but assuming they are expansionist, they'd likely send out some form of automated construction ahead of time and wait for confirmation that the process started, which in total would likely take several thousand years before confirmation that the the automated builders arrived successfully, and began building, before the first colonists could reasonably be sent. This has a few consequences, namely that they might start well before running up against resource pressures, and that they will target as many potential systems as they can to prepare them for potential colonization. With the challenges involved, it's unlikely that the majority of the construction will be done ahead of time unless they've also developed AI to a considerable extent which brings up the question of whether they'd ever reach that point, since AI can represent an existential risk to technologically advanced civilizations. Following the potential colonization, the whole process from start to finish likely taking 10,000 years, each sphere will be an isolated civilization, with a starting population limited by the resource investment from a parent sphere that they know will never be recouped, assume maybe 10,000 colonists.
From such a small population it would take several thousand years to reach the carrying capacity of this new system assuming no simple population controls, with some population controls, or if the population naturally trends towards the replacement rate (and this is true for the original sphere as well), there may never be a need for expansion, and it still doesn't make a lot of sense for their civilization as a whole, since any new spheres would be inherently isolated. Since a slower population growth rate for our hypothetical highly advanced civilization is more probably than not, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the doubling time for spheres to be on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, assuming each isolated civilization on these spheres don't wipe themselves out before expanding again. This becomes relevant when considering the time likely required in a galaxy before a technologically advanced civilization is likely to develop.
The Milky Way is an old galaxy at 13.7 billion years old. The Sun is a population I star, type G2V main sequence star 4.6 billion years old. One fair, though technically anthrocentric, assumption, is that a only high metallicity star systems have a significant potential to give birth to technologically advanced life. Given the amount of time before stars with metallicities similar to the Sun (say at least 0.8x the metallicity of our star) became "common", population I stars still only account for 2% of stars, the Milky Way was 6 billion years ago, though most stars with similar or greater metallicities are younger. There are a number of barriers for life to overcome, from simple (which seem minor, based on the history of our planet), to complex life (which took considerably longer), to life capable of producing technology (which took much less time than simple -> complex). Whether civilization survives to become star faring is a question we haven't answered yet here, but assume that it's also a barrier to development. With some rough approximations of probabilities, despite the age of this galaxy there's not likely to be a civilization that both developed advanced technology and survived long enough to create not just one dyson swarm but also begin expanding more than a few hundred million years ago, with the chance that it still hasn't happened yet, assuming no FTL. The odds of an observable "rapidly" spreading dyson civilization increase rapidly if there is easy FTL, since the original location of the civilization becomes a far weaker barrier since spreading between galaxies should be simple, however we still likely wouldn't be able to observe one yet unless they were developing our galaxy in a region not occluded from view, and even then due to the ease of travel, in all probability the proportion of candidate stars actually colonized may be less than 10% given their ability to be extra picky.
The short version is that when you consider additional factors, the likelihood of a civilization expanding in an observable blob of dyson spheres from what we can observe is quite small even with FTL, and perhaps simply hasn't happened yet within the observable part of our galaxy, while without FTL it may not be worthwhile for a civilization to build more than one Dyson swarm.
That's a lot of text.
care to elaborate?
At least one person hasn't drank the Fermi Paradox Kool-Aid lol
Very clear reasoning, thanks for posting that :-) Saves me from complaining about some clear problems with the assumptions haha
It was a bit hard for me to get over you're lisp, but your show is all the better and much more enduring not only because of it, but mostly from your tremendous insight in to all of these topics made clear for a layperson such as myself. Thank you Mr. Isaac Arthur, you've quickly propelled yourself to one of my most favorite discoveries on youtube, what little that means
Well it means a lot to me, I particularly appreciate the folks who have a hard time with the speech impediment and still stick it through.
I think the 6th point is probably the most likely. If a civilisation goes artificial and its computing speed goes in millions of time out real time thinking speed its greatest enemy is distance, as even a few kilometers would mean years of livetime to communicate between each other. The society divergence in such case would be a real issue, so much so that making another colony off planet would seem fairly pointless as they would be completely alien to each other within days.
Well, even if they just want to hang in a swarm around their own star, they probably want more computing power ad infinitum, and more computing power means you need to get more materials and you might even harvest near by stars for hydrogen and or move them to make a mega-dyson swarm
@@piguyalamode164 If that's the case, they can get significantly more computing done around a black hole. It's a much bigger energy source compared to a star, and everything is much closer together. From a distance their infrared glow would look like brown dwarfs, which we now know are super common, even more so than red dwarfs.
They might even consider black holes to be the only kind of systems to be worth colonizing, since the limit to their expansion might be controlling for divergence rather than energy or time.
@@djinn666 Yes, but then they would send dumb robots out to make more black holes near by and make a black hole kempler rosett
@@djinn666 And, as pointed out in the civilizations at the end of time series, black holes output power very slowly, so an intelligence using one for power would have to run slowly, which may even kill the speed of light by irrelevancy(ie you experience time so slowly that light lag is irrelevant)
Dude I can understand you just fine. I love your videos. You are unmatched on youtube. Keep it up brother
I never put on subtitles, I can understand you perfectly fine.
I'm Re re binge-watching every video on the channel this week. Best week ever! Isaac Arthur is easily the second best presenter of awesome information that has ever existed, right behind Richard Feynman of course.
As someone who grew up watching Looney Tunes with Elmer Fudd being one of my favorite characters, I understand you just fine. Trying to understand my children when they were young toddlers, now that is a challenge. LOL
I love the optimistic outlook on the challenges we face exploring the galaxy, great channel sir!
Has this video always skipped over where you say "rascally rabbits", or did TH-cam do something weird?
Very informative (and yet depressing, since it suggests we most likely are alone). I've wondered why dark matter could not just be Dyson spheres floating around and this video explained it, thanks!
In a PBS Space Time episode, the inevitability of Dyson Spheres was countered with the creation of a _partial_ Dyson Sphere with the resulting energy put into creating a Kugelblitz. From there you theoretically get all the energy you want/need from multiple Kugelblitz's. An additional alternative was utilizing black holes for energy.
Any counters to these counters?
You're referring to this video?
th-cam.com/video/jW55cViXu6s/w-d-xo.html
I know the guy jokingly says "Fermi Paradox solved" but you're still running into the expansion issue on cosmic timescales. Even if you have access to a Type III power source in a Type II volume you're going to want to keep acquiring more matter to convert into energy at near-perfect efficiency, and more energy to spark up more Kugelblitzes. If anything, it's an argument for why all of the lost energy of a star can be seen as even more valuable than we are currently assessing it, meaning a species that's sufficiently advanced to create stable Kugelblitzes might be even more inclined to expand that one that is just relying on Dyson Swarms because every fragment of lost matter to convert into power represents enormous extensions of the life of their civilization that they're just allowing to be wasted for literally no reason.
The thing about fighting entropy forever is that there is no such thing as "theoretically getting all the energy you want/need." Even if we were acquiring more than we can use at the time we can store it.
I laughed so hard about your description of Rhotacism. Good stuff. Thank you for your service. I was a Staff Sergeant. Keep up the good work.
lol.. Those !@!@(*&($ didn't share their technology with us! Get em!
Tom Ashley if your opponent can sidestep entropy that may explain why there are no expansionist aggressive civilisations... it would by like declaring war on the Q continuum ... or god ... once you stopped being entertaining or threatened their other entertainment you are obliterated it stopped from having existed...
Hi, Isaac. I found your channel through Universe Today and the 2-parter about the inner and outer solar system you did with Fraser. Your videos are great and the topics are super interesting. They should be mandatory viewing for aspiring sci-fi writers. Keep it up and I'll keep watching.
And FYI: You mention your speech impediment quite a bit. To be honest, until you mentioned it, I just thought you had a thick creole accent. Either way, after watching a couple of episodes it sounds completely normal. Just saying it's not a big deal; your production, timing, writing and progression are all awesome. So your voice just adds to your unique signature that makes your videos great. Cheers!
I fear that technological civilizations are infinitesimally rare and may not be present now, in the past or in the future in most galaxies.
Abedi-abedi-abedi that's all folks!
And I don't think they would construct Dyson spheres/swarms even if they did exist - they seem just so overly-complex and a civilisation capable of building such structures would almost certainly already have the means of producing sufficient energy to meet their needs and thus would not to require such things.
So glad I finally discovered your channel. This is exactly what was missing in my life :) it's bloody fantastic. Thanks for all this work en effort.
One thought and possible answer I have in regards to this...
What if any advanced civilisation acknowledges the best way for survival is to reorganise by living in harmony with its planets biodiversity, thus reorganising towards a global confederation of ecological, cradle-to-cradle and local city-states? In the sense of "Fellow humans, we've grown, and we understand our place on this planet now. It's time to stop the global industrial revolution once and for all, stop consumerism, follow other value systems based on population stability and individual and collective life value... it's time to tone it down". Mankind would lose its desire and drive to discover, reach out and surpass itself as an intelligent and almost-boundless species. A behavioral evolution, infused by self-determination, possible bio-engineered or ordered by empowered AI, trying to solve the planets and its biodiverse survival, AI protection of life as it has been encrypted to do so.
If all advanced civilisations would be bound to end up like this, as a general rule to maximise survival and planetary stability, it could be a reason why dyson structures would not be seen around.
In other words : it could very well be that advanced civilisations are are only capable of surviving its knowledgeable and scientific advancements by 'toning it down' and returning to their natural roots, finding a way back, self-enforced, genetically engineered or AI-enforced to finding stability and harmony on the advanced civilisations' own home planet. This could also very well be after a mass extinction due to loss of biodiversity and epidemics, as a lesson pulled from an inevitable mass extinction of every advanced civilisation. It could thus very well not be just black or white - self-destruction or interplanetary and interstellar expansion - it could very well be grey : accepting that the most qualitative growth path for the advanced civilisation is to find a way to have its species live in harmony with its home planet. The species mindset would alter over the generations, maybe even genetically enforced, to dissolve these urges to expand, discover and conquer.
If advanced civilisations are meant to survive their own advancement, it could very well be that a condition towards survival is self-limitation and thus : surviving advanced civilisations could very well exist in mass, without emitting any proof towards other advanced civilisations.
I got used to your voice in about 2 minutes. I have zero trouble understanding you and it kind of strikes me as a pleasant accent when I happen to notice it.
So I subscribed like a week ago. In the course of watching this video, I've queued up 10 more to watch. Fascinating stuff, and very impressive production qualities. I look forward to ploughing through your back catalogue.
Problem Number 3: Stars have multiple planets/moons with life on them. Building a Dyson sphere could adversely affect life on a fellow moon/planet, so most civilizations don't do it. If we built a Dyson sphere, practically all chances of life on Mars and Titan would be extinguished given that the atmospheres would freeze to the ground. The Sun probably raises the temperature of Europa's icy shell an appreciable bit too. Making it colder could adversely affect life there, if it exists.
Most of humanity has evolved empathy for other creatures. Building Dyson spheres would adversely affect environments throughout the solar systems. Not to mention the devastation it would have on photosynthesis and therefore the food chain of Earth. A Dyson sphere would cause us to have to re-engineer everything.
No, it would not. Now one might want to disassemble planets for construction material, allowing many thousands of times more living area to be made for the native critters, but it is quite easy to keep those planets illuminated normally if you wish to leave them be.
There's nothing forcing you to build the swarm _inside_ the planets' orbits - the total energy obtained by covering 4π of sky (or any angle, for that matter) at 1 AU will be the same as 4π at 100 AU, minus the negligible fraction absorbed by planets, asteroids, and dust.
Another great video. Very interesting stuff explained perfectly. I always enjoy watching your videos
how in the hell do you only have 2700 subs? I just don't get it.
He has now 36,000+ :)
56,072
70,430
it seems like the algorithm is doing good for the channel now.
(Recent Sub, channel showed up on my feed recently as well)
140k! here we come pewdiepieeeee
162k Let's gooo...
Stop apologizing for the R thing. You explain things well and speak quite clearly! I just found your channel and am enjoying your content. Keep on keepin' on!
The Dyson sphere concept has a few additional problems.
What if the civilization is not expanding ? Aka cause the individual lives "forever", the amount of individuals doesn't need to increase in the proposed exponential rate.
The sphere is proposed to be the key solution to gain the most out of the star it revolves around, fusion technology can bypass all that ... there's no need to have one giant one as multiple smaller ones will be able to do the "same" thing, in a smaller scale. Which is why the stars won't disappear, but might be a little more darker than they originally were, as you probably can harvest the resource without taking the whole thing away.
And so on...
and zero point energy
Why would you fly really far away for another 10% of a star of power versus grabbing the next 10% at home? Doesn't seem to make much sense. It's not like you'd be sneaky, any significant amount taken at all will make you extremely visible.
Gavin Jenkins If they're just taking from home that does solve the Dyson dillemma, because we'd hardly notice just one star getting smaller.
hedgehog3180 why wouldn't we? You don't have to watch it all the time to notice that. You only need to photograph the same section of sky more than once over YEARS to notice that. Then look more closely at "huh look at that odd anomaly" I.e. extremely noticeable.
@@gavinjenkins899 yes but only if it happens during the span of time that you are watching. Many of these projects will take more then the few decades we've been watching, and indeed for many of the telltale signs we will be looking for evidence of one's that have long since down their dimming and therefore without the before and after pictures
Great job! V1 of this was probably my favorite video from yours until this. I think that if anything, the Fermi Paradox proves one of three things: either our predictions on future technology and exploration are ENTIRELY wrong, we're living in a simulation, or intelligent technology-spawning civilizations are unfathomably rare.
+Emperor Corning Well it could be all three at once :)
It definitely could :)
Another limiting factor that maybe wasn't considered in the 1950's: internet lag. Who would choose to be farther from the core of an IT-heavy civilization? Who would want hundred (or hundred thousand) year latencies? Colonists would tend to stay as close as possible, making for maximally dense, immobile civilizations.
If ET is as addicted to the internet as we are, then there's no Fermi paradox.
But supposing they have similar genetic reproduction to us, which a lot should, there would only need to be TWO out of a vast number of them around a single star system out of what seems like it should be billions of intelligant civalizations who has decided that the internet is stupid for some reason or other and had the capacity to move to a different system, presumably not all that hard given the number of samples, and the entire paradox doesn't work again. It really doesn't seem that hard considering the number of people on earth who believe that jet contrails are a goverment conspiracy to poisin everyone or that the earth is flat.
It sounds like you are proposing an addiction to the 24/7 "news" cycle as a solution to the Fermi paradox. It's an interesting idea, but as Isaac Arthur frequently points out, it's only a solution if ALL citizens of ALL civilizations had that condition (and still doesn't explain why we can't see their electromagnetic emissions).
It would only take one or two small groups of reactionaries deciding to break away from their home culture and this solution breaks down. Since our own history has many examples of such groups, it seems likely that at least SOME other civilizations would have similar counter-cultures at some point as well.
I wanted to say that you’ve vastly improved your speech since I’ve been listening... but this is an early video! Although you likely have been working on it and worrying about it all this time, I don’t think about it at all while listening to you speak. You take your audience millions of lightyears away and millions of regular years into the future, and we’re honored to be allowed to listen to someone as thoughtful and intelligent as yourself... You’re also showing everyone who has a similar issue that one day, way more than a half a million people might hang on their every word. Thank you!
I'm not overly convinced by this argument truth be told. I am a bit of a 1b kinda guy too but this notion of the inevitability of Dyson swarms given the time periods involved strikes me as a bit contrived. there is going to be a certain amount of diminishing returns on constructing a swarm, even socially... if you're going to live in a habitat you might as well live in one going somewhere long before ewe run out of parking space in a swarm. that said the lack of some sort of obvious stellar engineering is spooky, not sure if it would or should lead to a dark sky. depends on the starting date too I guess. further, we look away the further back in time and a less diverse mix of elements for planets life etc.... ok ten million yrs is nothing, but a 100 million less so. life may be really really recent.
Oh I personally hate the theory, the problem is that in the two and a half years since I flushed it out and put it out there, nobody's raised a strong objection to it, including myself, and I try punching holes it at least once a month. If you can increase your numbers with no loss of livelihood, you will tend to do so, or at least some cultures will, on astronomical timelines you will tend to max things out in a way that either produced Dyson's or something functional equivalent. So the flaw to it has to be something preventing folks from either wanting or being able to do it, and base don our current knowledge that would seem improbable.
well here the exclusivity thing works against the Dyson argument, I think. ...perhaps? the reason being is the construction period of a swarm is immense compared with even evolutionary timescales that stumbling on a reason to stop and do something else rises in probability. here the culture that sticks with it to the end, IE: the one that didn't will result in a smattering of IR objects? I think the uniformity of cultural enterprise or identity is fighting against the time spans of these projects. if you could knock one up in a 1000 yrs or so then they get built on mass before obsolescence of the idea. I guess the build rate to obscuration must be calculable on the back of an envelope based on growth.if they can grow quicker than they travel? or vice versa? there is something not quite right about this idea but I confess it is largely an intuitive bias kinda feeling.
intuitively I think the universe and its development/evolution as opposed to its base properties can be understood as a set of comparative rates of change... call it my religion if you will :)
I wish I was smarter and could do the math not to mention more eloquent to express my arguments. there i'm done now. back to work.
@mididoctors I honestly think you are missing one critical point in your theorizing .. " the construction period of a swarm is immense compared with even evolutionary timescales " You base this assumption on what? The idea that humans would be building one item in the swarm at a time? The only math you would need is exponential growth. The more habitats there are the higher the population (and growth rate) is and so to the demand to build more. It would certainly start "relatively" slow, relative to the eventual rate of expansion but the swarm would be full far faster than evolution could keep up. Hundreds of years, rather than millions..
I've been a fan of yours for years... and it still makes me sad that people who are capable of appreciating your genius give you shit for your manner of speaking. The fact that you exist at all gives me hope for people, the fact that you're given grief for facts that are beyond your control (and yet you still contribute to our lives in the way you do) takes way some of that hope.
Never dull your shine.
Brown Dwarf = DysonSphere ... Or Dark Matter = DysonSphere [my theory]
I just wanted to let you know that I am watching your videos since the beginning and your speech impediment is a non-issue i perfectly able to understand everything you say without any problems and thank you for intelligent eloquent enlightening videos
One problem with your logic is that is may be too logical. One must allow for the possibility of illogically motivated reasons as much as those that are logically motivated or we run the risk of becoming too logical to notice illogic. Anyway your channel is at least as entertaining as those produced by flat earthers. Thx.
Or the logical might just not appear logical with our current evidence.
I just discovered this channel yesterday. I've been binge watching all weekend. Amazing series. Just a quick nit-pick on this one: Fair-me.
I've been thinking about this and I think I have a possible solution.
If we take ourselves as an example, any technological civilization will be a society of free thinking individuals. If we consider each of them (just like every human) a variable, then the more of them exist, the harder it is to arrive to a consensus on a particular issue, since everyone has their own opinion.
Take a look at mankind's current status, there are plenty of wars going around, and space is not a priority. You will argue that in a few thousand years that will change, but I don't think we have made such significant mental progress in the past 200 years to justify that hypothesis. Governing vast populations spread over millions of independent territories is probably not possible with any societal structure.
As such, I think the only way a civilization will consider expanding would be if their social structure is that of a hive mind. In other words a society that operates on the premises of a single idea. I'd say only about 1% of humans currently see themselves as living on a planet, rather than a country. Unless every individual (or at least most of them) arrive to the same conclusion, expansion will not happen.
As far as I know, a hive mind is not a naturally occurring social structure of a species. And so far, the only time humanity has seen a consensus on an issue, was on the doorstep of a common threat. So unless it turns out that the Sun has 1000 years of life left in it, I don't see us (and therefore others) bothering with Dyson Swarms. If we assume that tech civs are extremely rare, and that at the most a civilization that is not hive minded will build only one Dyson (much later at a star's lifetime, or until pressed by an external danger), then it is highly probable that we have either missed that 1 Dyson, or no species have simply arrived at a mutual agreement to build such a structure.
I'm sure there is some flawed logic here, but I'm extrapolating from mankind so flaws are the name of the game really. Ultimately, I think that unless there is a chance for Hive Minded species to naturally occur AND arrive to technology, then it's highly unlikely that we'll actually spot an expanding civ, be it with our current or future detection techniques.
+Jintaro Kensei Remember non-Exclusivity from the original Solutions video, your advancing that only a Hive Mind is capable of expansion, yet that has routinely occurred throughout human and pre-human history without it. You'd also need to be a bit more rigorous with your definition of a Hive Mind, but its important to keep in mind that expansion efforts will vary on the technology involved. As an example if we did find, tomorrow, a way to mass manufacture something a bit strong then graphene we could have space elevators and fairly cheap ones.
Space ships built in space, and only for space, and without mass as a critical control factor, are stupid-easy to construct, you throw in even slightly better automation and 3D printing then we have now and you could have small groups of just a couple hundred self-funding their own little rotating hab inside an asteroid somewhere, expanding as need required. You throw fusion into the mix and its a hundred times easier. So you're working from a premise that this can only be done by a world-wide collaboration but we've got good indicators it won't even require a major effort by a medium-sized nation-state for much longer. Were that the case I think it breaks your model.
+Isaac Arthur You have a point, but I'm not excluding expansion. Hive mind or not, I think there's is a rather high chance that any tech civ will go to space. My point is that such an expansion would be mostly for curiosity's sake. Look at Mars One, something similar would be bound to happen with the aliens when first interplanetary travel with live subjects occurs.
I'm making the argument that if there is no Hive Mind structure to drive expansion as a universal goal across the population, such a massive undertaking like a Dyson sphere will probably not happen due to lack of direction. Even using automation, such automation must be set up, and the being setting it up must have a motive for that. Money, survival, curiosity, whatever it is it must be shared with a particular number of it's kind. After all, while trivial, the amount of work required to set up such an automatic building system for a Dyson sphere would still be too much if the group involved is too small.
If we take humans as an example again, interest in space has drastically dropped worldwide. I'm not talking about the space efforts, since there still are, I'm talking about the general population. As a race, mankind has little motive to go to space, at least for now. Were that not the case, we would have populated lower orbit long ago with living quarters and solar panels. Heck, there's been a space station in orbit since 1986, you'd at least expect space beer to have become available by now (first space brewery, heh).
Anyway, what I'm saying is that from what I've learned and seen so far, humans are unlikely to undertake a Dyson sphere unless completely starved for energy, and honestly I doubt there can be anything man-made that can utilize all of the Sun's energy every second, so unless there's some pretty fancy way to store it, Dyson is again a no-go in my opinion. Even if we do manage to turn black holes into batteries and achieve all these theoretical marvels, I'd say fusion would still be preferred as the path with least resistance. It's highly possible that we'll run on fusion (especially with that reactor in Germany) and will simply utilize H for our energy needs. Unless by some miracle enough people see the benefits of having a star heat up your water.
By proxy, any alien society where individuals don't share the same motives, will have a similar response to expansion. They will most likely be prone to population curbing, like in current day China where only 1 child per family is allowed. It will simply be an easier route to take, especially when there is no threat, be it from a space event or domestic.
On the other hand, since everyone on earth have different agendas, they get different ideas and that in turn drives our tech. Hence, I don't know if a Hive Mind would even arrive at tech in the first place. But if it did, then I'm certain it would arrive at a Dyson conclusion. It just seems that a Hive Mind with tech is highly unlikely, since it would probably be overtaken by more versatile species.(I'm not talking about a single brain controlling trillions of others, I mean when everyone share the same eerm, concious space?).
Let's face it, humanity could've started brute-forcing a Dyson Swarm since the year 2000. Wouldn't have been an elegant approach, but I'm sure it would've been taken if the pressure existed. We haven't done a lot about this, so neither would potential aliens.
+Jintaro Kensei It's really important to remember that 'Dyson Swarm' is an engineering project like 'metropolis' or 'state' is. It requires no individual great undertakings, you do it incrementally with need, and the only cooperation is the agreement not to build in someone else's orbital path or sunlight, making it a bit akin to water rights and ocean navigation. That requires some cooperation but not until you're already pretty dyson'd up and there's already be an emerging wad of Case Law, Stake Claims, and Treaty by then for precedent.
A cooperative attitude certainly helps but it wouldn't even require levels of it routinely engaged in even in early history. If they were, for instance, owning and taxing/renting cross-sections of the sun, and those began getting too high, people use those ones less, or if over all people start shifting out to cheaper places run on fusion reactors or around other stars. I would never say cooperation wasn't necessary, and the more the better, but I don't think it would require too much or a central ruling body. Sunlight is currently 'free', if the combined rent, tax, regulatory hassle, and panel construction & maintenance 'costs' exceed buying fusion fuel then people do that instead, though I would bet they'd tend to equalize out. That's what I meant in the Interstellar Colonization video about thinking of stars more as metropolises with suburban and rural sprawl out to the Oort Cloud, rather than lonely islands of civilization light years apart.
+Isaac Arthur You also said in one of your Habitat videos that the most efficient and rational way to create living area would be to keep pumping out artificial planets/rings/whatever-is-most-cost-effective, with which I agree. So ultimately, whichever the case may be with xeno civs, chances are they won't go beyond one Dyson, and that one Dyson is a best case scenario in my opinion. Conflict rates and scale tend to rise with population volume.
I simply can't see a society consisting of trillions of people, living in habitats around a star in separate habs and never having any trouble between each other. I realize a Dyson swarm is basically a Lego project where you have to make your own pieces, but I'm still convinced that it's a highly unlikely outcome in any societal structure similar to the one employed by the majority of the human race.
+Jintaro Kensei I'm not seeing your reasoning Jintaro, your acting like all these habitats, whose residents don't have centuries old disputes from ancestral territorial claims, will hold grudges worse then most of them do and also flex their muscles worse than most superpowers, even though each hab would be less than the equivalent of a single person on Earth now. I'm usually viewed as a touch pessimistic about us outgrowing irrational aggression but even I cna't see these people fighting so much and so frequently that they couldn't share a Dyson, remember it's a trillion boats all miles apart form each other on a huge sea, with only a couple staying in proximity to you from day to day.
"A condition sadistically named so..." Isaac, you made my day! And you totally don't have to worry, your speach is completely understandable. Actually, it's much easier to understand you than many other youtube guys.
What if as our morality has evolved with time, most if not all civilizations realize that giving birth is immoral? You are after all throwing someone into a potentially horrible life without their consent.
Then they'll be erased form the Universe by their own stupidity I should think. But races aren't homogenous like that, if some movement started on Earth saying that having kids was immoral its followed would rapidly cease to exist while those who rejected it would grow in number.
Isaac Arthur Unless of course immortality had been achieved by then.
B-b-but the elves in my fantasy books aren’t like that!
"if some movement started on Earth saying that having kids was immoral its followed would rapidly cease to exist while those who rejected it would grow in number."
One already exists: The Shakers. There are three of them left. Not even the prospect of inheriting all they have, is apparently sufficient to get people to join them.
Exactly, Isaac. That point about diversity in alien civilization needs to be made more clearly everywhere, including your videos. Notice that no sane person ever says "People will all simply come to agree on the wrongness of X, and then forever afterwards, X just won't happen." That's because we know that people are diverse. Some people become aroused by farts. Some want to crank out armies of kids. Some want to sneak away from society in favor of the frontier. Some think they belong to a chosen people who deserve their own promised land to rule. With growing wealth, these sorts of priorities are becoming more prominent, not less. And there is every reason to think that other intelligent creatures have just as much diversity in their ranks as humans do. Why wouldn't they be just as resistant to a global ruling authority, just as eager to escape the jurisdiction of an authority with whom they don't agree? Star Trek always showed each planet with one kind of people, or maybe two kinds, who were at war. Once you've met one backassian, you basically know what the other 20 billion are like. Just about every planet depicted in fiction is more culturally homogeneous than Earth is. And I've never encountered a fictional society in which there is significantly more individual diversity than there is on Earth. That's part of what lulls us into stupid thoughts like "Well maybe dem aliens can but don' wanna!" I mean, name one thing which we humans can do but no human wants to?
22:41 - ROTFL the first time I ever heard you curse! And I've been watching your channel for quite a while!
Everywhere we look, we see stars and galaxies. If I understand the logic, we should expect to see visible evidence of civilized megastructures such as these Dyson doohickies instead. But what if we don't see them because the stars and galaxies themselves are the megastructures we should be looking for? Our assumption that megastructure civilization would just be a scaled-up version of ourselves is a bit like primitives expecting skyscrapers to be scaled up versions of mud and straw huts. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love these videos. But instead of invoking Paradox when observation doesn't match our assumptions, maybe we should scrutinize our assumptions a bit more. Maybe the night sky is filled with evidence of intelligent life on a scale we cannot comprehend as such.
Well the reasoning is that since we don't see them, they are probably not there, and most likely because nobody is around to build them. It clearly does rely on assumptions, I listed them out, and if there's one you thing is genuinely flawed, by all means let me know, I don't particularly like my own conclusion on this matter in the first place. The problem is that in the two years since the original episode was released no one has come up with a demonstrable flaw in it.
"Everywhere we look, we see stars and galaxies. If I understand the logic, we should expect to see visible evidence of civilized megastructures such as these Dyson doohickies instead. But what if we don't see them because the stars and galaxies themselves are the megastructures we should be looking for?"
1: The only reason people think there is likely to be extraterrestrial life (which could evolve to become intelligent and have technology) is because there are a lot of other stars with planets out there, and thus many opportunities for life to arise and evolve as it did on this planet. In such a scenario, the star and planet have to exist first and give rise to technological life, not vice versa.
2: It would make no sense for a civilization to go to the trouble of creating an artificial star and then not use the energy that the star generates. And if they wanted to use all or most of the energy of their artificial star (or a naturally occurring star) they would need to build a Dyson Swarm.
We might as well assume that the galaxy and/or universe has already been colonized. Since we use such a tiny fraction of the resources available in the solar system, they created a simulation for us to live in that lets us see the universe as wide open for us to use, while they use the real system. There was a hint of this in the first Star Trek movie.
If we assume we are in a simulation, then we have no basis at all to make any assumption about how many stars/planets/resources/etc exist outside the simulation in the "real system", or what percentage of those resources have already been colonized/used.
All we could say in that case is that (by all observational evidence) there are vast amounts of simulated stars/planets/resources within this matrix that are not being used by any other (highly advanced) simulated species. That could be because the programmers felt like wasting a lot of computing power simulating distant stars and galaxies we can not reach, or because the other species the programmers put in those places were put there recently enough that they are still too insufficiently advanced for us to detect them, or because they want to put other species in later, or because they want to see how far we can get if they let Sims Humanity run for eons, or for some other reason.
The relevant point is that the Fermi Paradox and Dyson Dilemma apply to this universe - whether it is the real universe or a simulated universe with an internal set of physical laws programmed in.
This discussion was very intriguing. It got me thinking. If an advanced alien civilization built all the stars in the sky, the how and the why cannot be assumed. It seems to fly counter to our understanding of the Big Bang and cosmology, but it tickles the imagination to play with the idea.
One possibility: they wanted to create a roadmap with beacons and lights to guide them as they travelled through... whatever was here before the stars. Perhaps there was originally something different.
Another option: Maybe there was just one galaxy, (theirs) or just a few, and they fabricated others as an experiment, perhaps to see if life would evolve?
Best channel on TH-cam. This is my second listen through. Thank you for the consistently amazing content!
+John Cena Glad you're enjoying John!
Great video Isaac, on a note mostly unrelated to the content, I love the footage of the squirrel at 38:21. So cute!
I have never had a hard time understanding you without cc, and English isn't even my first language.
If people have a hard time understanding you they must have a really poor understanding of language...
Watched a ton of your videos and I intend on keep doing so, so em coming!
I have to say after hearing you explain your speech impediment i had to say i actually could listen to you speak for hours on your uploads. i just thought you had an American accent i had not heard before (i'm English). Thank you
It’s 3:51 in the morning, but I just had to watch this one. And I’m gonna watch the Fermi Paradox Solutions next. Only you and John Michael Godier have that power and influence over me! Fortunately it’s a Friday night, and I don’t have to go into work tomorrow!
This was fantastic, as per usual.
P. B Amygdala try the channel curious droid ..
Your speech impediment takes absolutely nothing away from your intellect and the terrifically fascinating videos you produce - keep 'em coming!!
I've watched every video on your channel at least twice. I'm so happy I came across your channel. You explain so many concepts and futurism without dumbing it down yet without getting drudged down in complex mathematics (my algebra is fantastic, but I lacked the focus to really succeed in calculus). Do you have any recommendations on any other similar channels or other individuals to follow? I love recommending you to like minded friends, and I absolutely love your personality and the way you present the material. Keep up the excellent work Isaac, I'll be following you for years to come.
Thanks! Calculus tends to kill people from the algebra, ironically, so if you're an ace at that it might have just been an instructor you didn't sync with well, its easier understood sometimes just by using it directly with the physics it was basically originally designed for. Recommendation-wise, I've a few on the the channel's main page, if you click on my name it will take you to that and they're on the right side, scroll down a bit. Very different styles and focuses but science channels I enjoy.
your linking of previous videos seems like an infinite recursion!
I have found your channel 4 days ago and keep going into the sublinked topics
please consider reminding people to eat and drink.
Impressive how much effort just the watching is, hard to imagine to write speak and cut... not mentioning the research must be >9000
Yeah I've gotten lost on TVtropes or wiki like that many a time. And yeah, the videos are very time consuming :) Fun though.
Mate, I can not get enough of your videos. So though provoking.
It took about two videos for me to get used to your speech impediment, but after that I was good to go. I enjoy your videos thoroughly, and keep up the great work your Fermi Paradox videos are my favorite.
Thank you for these thought provoking uploads, You have given my best friend and myself many hours of extremely interesting conversation and lots of quiet reflection and contemplation. I didn't think you had a "speech impediment" I thought you had a strange accent, but you would no doubt, think I have a strange accent. I understood you saying "rare, recent, paradox rebellious, worried etc" you seem to sound "R" in the same way a French person speaking English would and I had no trouble understanding you, Thanks again......J
I don't have anything intelligent to add-- but I want to say that I love your videos, Isaac. They're always fascinating. Keep 'em coming.
i love the way u explain ideas, and how u present new ideas, i didn't even realize u had a speech impediment, i thought it was an accent!!! thanks
Hi Isaac,
Interesting and lovely Video like always!
Keep it up!
Have you ever thought about loading your audio track to iTunes as a Podcast?
Don't understand me wrong, your Videos improoved alot and the visualls are getting better with every new one. But it would be nice to consume those even without an Internet Connection.
+Doc Erk I actually haven't since I don't know how, though its an interesting notion, the audio and script is in most cases done entirely before the visuals which are added as a supplement rather than an integral parts so most would be convertible.
The production quality of your vids has improved so much! This is superb. Good job!
+ApEnNy4YoUrThOuGhTz Thanks!
Absolutely love the content. New subscriber here. Your impediment as you call it is a boon to you. Your voice is relaxing af
Thankyou for your time Isaac
I could listen to you all day, Issac Arthur. Screw those who have a problem understanding you.
Thanks!
I got so used to your speech impediment that I'd now frown if you didn't have it anymore. I'm sure you're perfectly understood by everyone and your speech impediment is actually beloved. Keep up the crazy good work.
At least you are recognisable. When i realised it was you I was glad because I love your content , its very interesting.
Ever swiping through TH-cam and stumbled across a channel that is perfect for you and wonder how you never found until now? This is that channel for me.
Dude for some reason after getting used to your voice I find it easy to go to sleep listening to you. It's not because I find the topics boring, it's stange listening to anything else while I try to sleep would just keep me up.
Wow, exstordonary set of docs. I'd lost hope, I've seen every thing worth watching. BBC stuck in a time loop and same old 15 year old facts. going to watch all yours from the beginning. thanks for feeding us with great new subjects
I am addicted to your channel brother. Thank you
I find your Rhotacism actually refreshing to hear, a bit jarring from the beginning but I start to appreciate that the speaker IS you and nobody else. In fact I tend to miss it if I don't watch your video
Just found your vids tonight. Can't wait to dig in to this! Cheers and thank you for all the hard work!
Glad you're enjoying them, welcome to the channel!
Issac, did you have a cold in this video? You sound stopped up! But seriously, I've been bingeing on your videos for weeks now, and I'm almost caught up. Love them all and I joined your Patreon. I hope things are going well!
Hmmm... Early April so quite probably yes, also I still hadn't switched to a better mic and was just learning basic sound editing. I always want to redo every episode more than a year old though :) And yeah things are excellent, I keep knocking on wood waiting for something bad to happen since I've had a perpetually great year starting just about when this episode came out.
I am facinated by your speech impediment (and your videos) thanks issac I'm glad this universe made u so someone so unique could ponder it.
Throw away all the ,,R’s“ in the world, the Content on this Channel is just awesome and so inspiring!
New theory: intelligent civilizations inevitably lose the ability to pronounce the letter R - thus "sphere" or "swarm" - and can't go Dysonian. XD
Im so impressed Isac I see myself as quite clever with a messured IQ about 146 but you just are blowing my mind and I love your videos - keep up the work
man, youre really cool to make such an elaborate video with graphics and all, considering that the only way you make money off it is what youtube pays you. respect!
Thank you for sharing your views on this complex subject....keep up the videos...
Hi, I think you're very brave commenting with a speech impediment. I also have a speech impediment, which doesn't allow me to say an "r" as well. Fortunately it only applies when I'm speaking in my native tongue (Afrikaans). Excellent channel. Thank you
mr Arthur your deep knowledge on topics regarding your videos more than makes up for the speech thing i wish you didnt feel you have to put a disclaimer but do know you sound very intellectual and informative thank you for the videos