I actually prefer episodes about smaller structures, because I find things that are remotely possible (given present technology or technology that we may reasonably hope to have in the near future) more interesting than stuff that is so far outside the realm of our technological capabilities it may as well be magic.
Yeah, As a Galaxy Population Minister, our cabinet decided we'll go for continent-size type only. I know, I know, many of you are disappointed but our Galaxy Budget is under revision because we need to weed out corruption our AI detected. Please be patient, on stardate 75/662/5 we'll have an announcement for future plans. Thanks.
@@alpha007org Lots of people might bad-mouth you guys, but I, for one, am an enormous supporter of our current GPM administration. Keep up the good work, guys!!
The only thing worse than the evil that is Ancient Egypt (Insert Star Wars Empire theme here) is putting it in space. (Insert Star Wars Empire theme here, but *harder* ) [Atop The Fourth Wall reference]
I love the idea of trees with different canopies having significantly different ecosystems than the forest floor because of a significantly lower gravity. A drum left to just ecosystem could generate a really cool species gradient between the different heights in the jungle.
This was legitimately interesting, and this is more or less the videos I actually come here for. The thing that's great about the O'Neil (or Oberth if one is German) is that we can already build them. It's the economic expense that's unjustifiable in the hellsociety we live in, not technological feasibility.
Economic expense for the first O'Neill "Island One" or the Stanford Torus, was like many large industrial of infrastructure developments down here. Much less than a small oil war. 3-5x the Apollo program (during the same timescale as Apollo, the US spent as much on cosmetics and large States spent more on liquor). About the same cost as building and maintaining maybe 3 of our CVNs and their air wings and escorts and logistics infrastructure to deploy them. The first small habitat for workers finished by '08, with all the launch and in-space infrastructure to reproduce it. The cost is paid for along with the national debt and several years of greatly expanded budget, but shipments of previously rare metals from NEAs. The fist entity that returns even a few kg of loosely sorted metals owns the world's markets in rare and precious and monetary metals and will never have a budget crunch again. IDK what money will be then, but owning large amounts of gold in vaults or oil underground won't be it. And this isn't something for a few centuries from now, but within 20 years of starting the effort.
I don't remember exactly what video of his I watched first, but I think it was part of his outbound series. At the very least, those videos are the first ones I remember watching.
Agreed. Space habitats (at least a few initial, more moderately sized prototypes) are something that, if humanity were to throw its weight behind the project, we could reasonably hope to complete in a lifetime or two; whereas even the most modest terraforming project would take many centuries at the least and require a far greater amount of resources than we can muster at this time.
We'll need to build rotating habitats to even get started doing anything in space, including terraforming. After a a certain amount of time, I can't help but think our habitats will get so good that people will question why we're bothering to terraform.
@@adamlytle2615 Well, the amount of material and time you'd need to build enough space stations to house as many people as a terraformed Mars could, would be quite a lot. Once Mars is done terraforming, you'd have far more living room than if you spent the same amount of time building lots of spin stations.
@@dgd947a15fl Well, that's questionable. Mars has 145 million km² of surface area. That's approximately 11 Mckendree cylinders, assuming radius of 460km and length of 4600km for each of them. That would represent a lot less mass than mars itself. As to how long it would take to mine said material from the asteroid belt and various moons, I don't know. But very possibly less time than required for the terraforming of mars.
A cylindrical-centrifugal structure is going to need some ribbing for stiffness, like on a tin can. If you build the skin too flexible, the cylinder is going to turn into an extruded ellipse the first time you get too much weight in one place. You could make the skin in ridges and valleys, like a concertina, and maybe put habitats inside the ridges. Or you could build stiff structures up from the ground, like faux Roman aqueducts or monorail tracks.
Regarding weather, wouldn't we see an accumulation of gas particles at the center? There is no gravity, so it seems as though anything that evaporates, or otherwise is lower density than the general atmosphere will become stuck there. Perhaps this could be taken advantage of as a sort of "filtration" system for the atmosphere?
@@musafawundu6718 and its not just a theory it was actually created in real life in 2016 were they managed to get photons to start behaving as if they were atoms creating actual solid light of course only one single atom of it
@@wilmagregg3131 Yes. I have since my comment learned of that... There are so many other states of matter beyond solids, liquids, gases, and plasma. That is one of them...
Hmm, in this and some of the recent episodes I've had a bit of difficulty keeping up with scales and math when you read them out fast like that. Either slowing down when math comes up or using visuals (as in, show the math written out) would help quite a bit. In addition, since things of huge scales comes up so often on this channel, maybe have some kind of a custom visual that lets me see at a glance the rough ballpark of "hugeness" we're at in any given moment. Like, say, a scale at the top of the video that has an arrow pointing at "we're here now" and some additional points of interest around it to give a sense of scale for these somewhat mindbendingly huge structures. The same would work wonders on the other end of things too, it's kind of hard to get a good feel for how tiny things like nanomachines and exotic materials' structures can get.
I agree, as a tip for the future; I usually have subtitles on for these type of episodes so I can read along and quickly reference the text if I missed a huge number. Its also very helpful that the subtitles are of very good quality.
scale is a wierd problem in the sciences. once u get much larger than a small mountain(or the upper edge of microscopic on the small end of things)any intuitive sense of scale is pretty much lost. the human brain just isn't designed for these scales and anything outside the human scale becomes just a number
If you want to know how ridiculous it is to think of scales in these circumstances, here's the volume comparison of the sun in liters and an average human in liters. 1,409,272,569,059,860,000,000,000,000,000 liters is the rough volume of the sun, and the average volume of a human, is 62 liters. Let's rewrite that, a little bit, A human is 6.2×10^2 liters. The sun however is 1.4×10^31 liters. This is like comparing a human to the size of an atom, after all a Hydrogen atom has a volume of 6.2×10^-28 liters. So literally comparing a Human to the sun is like comparing an atom to a human. Do you even understand how ridiculous it is to even trying to picture things on these scales now?
@@hithere5553 well you see given that the universe is inclined to slowly decrease to a lower energy state over time, it lacks the energy to do so. In other words the universe is too lazy to fight.
Sometimes the only thing that reminds me a week has gone by is a new video from Isaac Arthur and company. Lockdown has been so strange! Thanks for the steady supply of optimism during these dark days.
How about to design your space habits projects(i.e. ships, settlements, interstellar gates and portals, etc), that's would be easier to get through some darkness.
Just wanna say; Listening to Issac on my studio monitors, chilling in bed with my PSVR helmet, and sculpting abstract landscapes in that Dreams game with motion controllers has never been more relaxing. We literally live in the future! 💎
So, would it ever be preferable to build those side walls or retaining walls out of plasma? I'm referring specifically to the whole plasma window concept. I imagine you might not want that at lower elevations, but higher up it could make it easier to retain atmosphere without adding much mass to the structure, it would be nearly invulnerable to micrometeorites as they would just pass through without causing any loss of containment. It could make it easier for space craft to land. I imagine it might even possible to design it to block harmful radiation. But of course, this is stretching modern engineering of plasma windows pretty thin, as the last I heard, the only plasma windows in existence are measured in millimeters.
I've been listening to the 'Heaven's River' Audiobook that I got through your Audible sponsorship promo. I'm a big fan of Dennis E. Taylor's 'Bob-iverse', as well as 'Singularity Trap' and several others! Thanks for bringing his work to my attention, back in 'Self-replicating Starships', I believe. 😊
The '70s NASA Ames / Stanford space settlement studies found that the largest 1G, shielded, pressure vessel we could build with then-known technologies was ~30km diameter. A torus is one thing, a drum or "Kalpana" shape is another. Maybe not continent sized, but province or large island sized. When you mention O'Neil habitats, everyone defaults to looking at the "Island 3" giant cylinders. These were purely theoretical examinations of what we could do, and O'Neill wrote that they're probably as far off from the reality of ~80 years after the first habitat, as "futurists" of 1900ad were accurate about 2000ad. The first generation "Island One" or Stanford Torus was done with no new inventions needed, within 30 years from start, for cost like any other large infrastructure or industrial developments down here. Yes, you could use active means to stabilize the inherently unstable long cylinder of an Island 3: The Space Shuttle is one glaring example of how short-sighted it is to rely on complexity to overcome severe inherent flaws in a design. For stability you want a massive spinning mass around the rim. This could be layers of underground decks of space. Your mountains don't need to be aerogel, but rock and steel and inhabited, and counterbalanced around the habitat. 3 mountains perhaps staggered around the middle of the length of a tube, could be the massive stable spinning rim it lacks. Attaching a second counter-rotating cylinder habitat is for pointing: to eliminate gyroscopic forces that make pointing difficult. It's a clumsy brute-force way to counter the axial instability suffered by any long structure that will want to tumble end over end. Giving it a massive stable spinning rim or separation of multiple heavy masses about the rim, eliminates the tendency to always want to wobble more. A river in a Stanford Torus could go from high ground all the way around to low ground and a lake, and pumped back up to go around again. In a long cylinder it could go from a mountain range around the middle, to either end. As for the cosmic spaghetti, How flexible are tubes of rock and steel many kilometers across going to be, spinning around themselves like twisting a hula hoop? I've never understood how people can talk about extending the cylinder habitat and looping it around, still spinning. Are habitats of graphene going to stretch and flow like taffy as it lengthens and around the outside of the tube and compresses going around the inside?s
These type of megastructures would probably be built in the asteroid belt, out of the asteroids that are there. That would be plenty of materials, if you didn't go too big. And if you have the tech to get out to the asteroid belt and back and travel that distance on a regular basis, you could just leave the megastructures where you built them (instead of moving them to a desired location). By leaving them where there were built, you have the benefit of having a human habitat out that far, and it makes us not go extinct if something disastrous/ devastating happens to earth. Sounds good to me. I liked this video. I'll be praying. Great video, keep up the good work. God bless. Have a nice day/night. -------------------------------------------------------- sincerely a nerdy Christian.
I once started a project called AROL ONE - Amazing Ring Of Life If I remember it correctly, the best diameter for the ring would be about 10 km, because you'd get way less revolutions per minutes for the same amount gravity achieved. I think I also calculated that the cost to build such ring would cost a few trillions of dollars and could generate revenue of a few hundreds of billions a month from tourism, agreculture and asteroid mining. Very interesting, and I never posted it anywhere. Maybe I should, just to "plant the seed" and see if anyone contributes to the calculations.
I remember reading something like that though it was 12 miles in diameter, .9 miles in height, and having a 300 foot thickness for its rind layer though it was meant to be set near the asteroid belt and the Orts Cloud as well.
@@xermasboo5401 I think I had aproximately the same thickness calculation. Also, the only way to properly build it would be using huge 3D printers that use mined metal from asteroids that are melted with direct sun light, and the prints should be chicken-wire-like. And finally, different types of 3D printed patterns are used depending on where the structural integrity is needed.
@@bloodaid Its getting out that far away with a good intensity because we talking about something around 400,000,000-760,000,000 miles away from the sun, and to have it to at least 2 points to at most 60-100 points within the general area range. What I said was actually far more simple than what it would actually entail.
I love how blunt the video title is. Most episodes have a title that references some obscure concept, but this one just outright states it's about enormous spinning space buildings.
@@procrastinator99 Who needs clickbait when you're talking about things like "Continent-Sized Rotating Habitats" or "Let's Dismantle the Solar System!"? :)
I love O'Neill cylinders because there feasible/ realistic and provide gravity while given a real sci-fi experience there my favorite mega structure gundam origin anime depicted them at there best .
I have been eaglery waiting years for a highly detailed episode on very large space habitats since Isaac Arthur first mentioned about very large rotating space habitats such as Bishop Rings and McKendree Cylinders over three years ago...
The thing I've always had a hard time visualizing and can't find anything to simulate it is, say you have a 10 mile diameter habitat. Inside you put a giant LED covered cylinder a half mile or so up to display clouds. When you're looking towards spin or anti spin, what does the horizon look like? Would the horizon just be a flat line where the 'sky' meets the seemingly upward sloping ground? Can you make a convincing illusion of a natural horizon by scattering hills to break up that line? How big a diameter habitat would it take to hide the illusion of the ground sloping up? The only way I can think of to make it look natural is to divide the surface area into a bunch of low mountain ringed regions so that it looks like you're living in a series of mountain valleys.
Honestly, along with Mega Cities and a Trillion People on Earth, this is my favourite SFIA video. I prefer continent sized rotating habitats such as McKendree Cylinders and Bishop Rings to O'Neill Cylinders, though a very large number of O'Neil Cylinders connect to form a Rung World with surface areas of space that are continent sized or greater is OK with me.
this is our future. i can see it. obsessed with this topic. makes perfect sense. Ian Banks, Peter Hamilton. yes. yes. yes. please more content like this! want to get into the weeds of how you recreate the rock cycle/water cycle, etc.
Might actually lessen the weight load as well, as then the cylinder don't have to bear the weight of the whole tree. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the physics.
Never commented before. Loved your topics so much, never thought to comment. Keep up your great work. Seems I've been enjoying your videos for decades...
Incredible how a channel like this was able to hide from me for so long. Fantastic stuff! What kind of accent is this? Never heard something qute similar. Subscribed 👍
Been hoping to see more things on the likes of the McKendree Cylinder (the topic alone deserves it's own super long episode as there is very little that's actually been done on them thus far). Given material limitations, how nuts could you go in trying to replicate environments (part ocean filled with life, rainforests, urban skyscraper cities etc, etc). One thing that you maybe could have touched on in this ep would have been a supersized torus a la Elysium style. Using CNT/Graphene, how big could it theoretically go without the need for active support etc. Probably due an episode of it's own as well. The Torus &/or Cylinder is probably the route we're going to go down (& stick by), so hopefully more on these scaled up habitats to come would be great.
Loved this episode, its so classic SFIA! Thanks as always for the great content Isaac and the team. I'm always so proud to be a patron for this channel, its a vision of hopeful and bright future and gives us all hope. PS. cool new studio for the live streams.
I need to watch more of these megastructure videos. The potential fantasy settings on them is awesome. The mythology that would arise... and the wonder and mystery that a reader or player would go through as they tried to figure out how the way the world was described could make any sense... it's awesome. Who needs flat planar worlds when you can have a Ball Topopolis made by the gods?
Issac you truly are an inspiration (you are by far and away my fave youtuber) you attempt to answer the largest of questions an the grandest of scales. But you still haven't attempted to answer the biggest questions:- i.e. What's the point? What are we doing? Do we know what we are doing? Whats the endgame? How do we unite and all together dance towards this endgame? I suppose that the simple answer is love - but we have kind of known that forever and it has still not united us???? So right here, right now..................... (and this is where I reach my limit ) would really love to hear your take on this, for the love :) x
probably, I used to but there's a horrible tendency when I do that to get a bit distracted and have a typo in them that no one catches, and I tend to cringe when one makes it to air with an extra zero or such. Probably not a good reason not to have them on there though :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA Do it! Also, another suggestion from these comments was to add in an in-depth logarithmic scale that goes from nanomachines and atoms to galaxies and super voids, so when you start discussing huge habitats you can zoom in to that part of the scale as a visual aid for what we're talking about. If an error ever makes it though, you can just add a little annotation or pin a comment (I guess YT removed annotations for some reason).
Love your videos of what might happen in the future it’s like a window to look into the future of a thousand years a place where we can’t go with are life span but we can go there in the mind !
Are these ships maneuverable? You would think that they wouldn't be built where they will spend their time. Try to imagine just what engines and fuel you would need to move these leviathans around.
"We can't artificially generate normal gravity under known science." Sure we can. Build a black hole and stand on a structure built around it. It's hilariously mass inefficient, as, for example, to generate 1 G on a habitat 1/1000th the scale of Earth, you need a black hole a millionth the mass of the Earth. Which means it has a mass efficiency that's equal to Earth's.
:) Peter, we have whole episodes on that idea and even discussed it in this episode, we're talking about stuff like gravity in spaceships or habs without mass or rotation there
At least garbage and nuclear waste wouldn't be a problem. Just make sure you drop it straight down as you wouldn't want an accretion disc blasting out X-rays for decades!
@@SocksWithSandals a black hole of that size would only have a event horizon of a few millimeters. Accretion disk won't be an issue because if you drop matter spinning the other direction it will only released as much energy as it had initially with potential energy until it falls into the black hole. If you drop two things an opposite spins the disks will collide with each other
12:38 I am extremely disappointed. The "Helical Stellar Topolois" you displayed has such an obvious name that I can't beliieve you (or I any of the dozens of times I've watched this episode) didn't come up with it sooner! "A Springworld"
Isaac Arthur if ur seeing this then I just want to say ur one of the people who expands my imagination and I always like sci-fi cause I have an interest in space and technology that’s why I want to become a businessman so I could join in colonizing space
I came here from Heaven's River because I had a hard time visualizing the topopolis. This is fascinating; thank you! (Also really cool to hear that you collaborated on that part of the book!)
Isaac talks about active support a lot, and it is a cool concept - but I don't think he's ever addressed the safety aspect: "What if the power goes out?" It seems to me that any structure relying on active support will not be able to tolerate an hour of power outage without ripping itself apart - possibly not even a minute. Maybe not even a second (eg. by triggering oscillations/resonances). (Although I'm happy to be corrected by someone who can run the relevant engineering calculations.) Even 99.99% uptime means you'll have 90 hours of downtime per century; and the very first active support structure is unlikely to have even one "9" of reliability, let alone the 7+ 9s that you'd need in order to have a chance of surviving a century. And, while it's fairly possible to sustain 99.99999% reliability for a few years, sustaining it for decades/centuries/indefinitely is, at best, problematic. Frankly, I think that this concern is going to hold us back from using active support on public structures for a long time - unless there's an easy solution that I'm missing. (By "public", I'm pointing out that sparsely-populated and isolated structures for research/military/etc have different safety considerations - but, equally, these types of projects are not normally in the scope of this channel. By "a long time", I mean that we will be delayed for a long time *after* we have the technical capability and power capacity to build such a thing.)
Here is a project to get started on: A topopolis world that is two AU in diameter, goes around the center of the galaxy and has stars inside of it for the day/night cycle.
Plants respond to not only length of light exposure, but to differing radiation levels at perihelion and aphelion. Their growth/dormancy and reproductive/herbaceous cycles are programmed into their genetic structures to produce a variety of behaviors in response to these stimuli. As I've never seen you give any real consideration to the problems this implies for extraterrestrial habitat designs, I can only imagine that you think these problems easily overcome. Even if you can genetically alter the plants to produce different behaviors from different stimuli, the gene complexes responsible for these behaviors are not so simple and contiguous in helical loci as to produce predictable and useful results from such manipulations with ease. The work and technology required to make this possible would probably require a far greater advance in knowledge and investment of resources than the construction of the habitats themselves.
Unlike the original concepts for an O’Neil cylinder, I don’t think McKendree cylinders would rely on natural light. The builders of something like this would presumably control all the variables, so why not simply vary the periodicity and quality of light to mimic earth normal as needed?
It occurs to me that even if we had the capacity to alter the genomes of the organisms we were trying to transplant, perhaps part of the aim would be to maintain the biological and ecological legacy of our home world. You wouldn’t change the colors of a treasured work of art because it didn’t look as good under the lights in a new museum. You would simply change the lighting in its new home....
Something I have been wondering ever since I watched the first video about this sort of structure. How would convection and heat distribution work in a closed cylinder habitat. On a planet as you increase altitude the volume of available space increases (as the diameter increases) and as you go higher you get closer to the "heat sink" of the atmosphere radiating into space cooling the top of the convection cell and encouraging cooler air to sink. On a ring habitat the volume would decrease significantly with altitude, meaning convection may not function in the same way as there is nowhere for warmer air to rise into. The other problem would be if you were using a central heat/light tube at the axis; The rising air would be getting closer to the heat source in a closed habitat. Further complicated, because now you have all the hottest air trapped furthest away from your heatsink (the outer shell) Thus have restricted ability to cool the "top" of the convection cell.
Nice video! I don’t understand the drive to colonize Mars especially considering the gravity considerations and their affect on human health, when it seems to me the building large structures in space would be so much better in terms of the quality of the habitat and probably not necessarily as difficult as colonizing mars. Certainly, it would be much easier to “terraform“ a large habitat in space then it would ever be to terraform mars.
Today Issac gave his brain a rest, he only thought of creating something that was continent sized, rather than moving the entire Galaxy.
I actually prefer episodes about smaller structures, because I find things that are remotely possible (given present technology or technology that we may reasonably hope to have in the near future) more interesting than stuff that is so far outside the realm of our technological capabilities it may as well be magic.
antred11 I like that Isaac talks of what is more possible to us in the near term and also about the hypothetical stuff
Yeah, As a Galaxy Population Minister, our cabinet decided we'll go for continent-size type only. I know, I know, many of you are disappointed but our Galaxy Budget is under revision because we need to weed out corruption our AI detected. Please be patient, on stardate 75/662/5 we'll have an announcement for future plans. Thanks.
@@alpha007org Lots of people might bad-mouth you guys, but I, for one, am an enormous supporter of our current GPM administration. Keep up the good work, guys!!
A few of those structures were 100X larger than the Earth.
Thanks for setting a modest goal for humanity Isaac! This is the future i hope we'll realize as a species.
Me too
Drew McTygue
*Presses play at 9:45
Yep... Modest.
Honestly, I think _we'll make it though. Maybe even in my lifetime!
The term "Space Egypt" is the best thing I've heard
Imagine an anime having done just that, but instead of using "space" they added "Neo" in front of it (its what G-Gundam did)
The only thing worse than the evil that is Ancient Egypt (Insert Star Wars Empire theme here) is putting it in space. (Insert Star Wars Empire theme here, but *harder* )
[Atop The Fourth Wall reference]
The Necrons have entered the chat.
Timestamp ples
@@gamingchamp6728 i dont think he specifically says "Space Egypt" but the topopolis part ~13:00 is what I think theyre referring to
I love the idea of trees with different canopies having significantly different ecosystems than the forest floor because of a significantly lower gravity. A drum left to just ecosystem could generate a really cool species gradient between the different heights in the jungle.
I dub this kind of thing a "babylon can" in honor of the hanging gardens of babylon.
Your channel is condensed positivity about the future and i love it
@Seth Hultkrantz epic
Blaze10523
I think it's _realism_ compared to doomer's takes, but same!
This was legitimately interesting, and this is more or less the videos I actually come here for. The thing that's great about the O'Neil (or Oberth if one is German) is that we can already build them. It's the economic expense that's unjustifiable in the hellsociety we live in, not technological feasibility.
Yeah, we have around 80-90% of the technical knowledge to do things like this but 0% of the orbital infrastructure.
@@alexandernorman5337 Gateway Station will bump that up to 1%, so there is that.
@@therealist3495 who OP?; thought the dark haired girl was cute
edit, and last i checked "cute" and feminist don't tend to fit together,
Economic expense for the first O'Neill "Island One" or the Stanford Torus, was like many large industrial of infrastructure developments down here.
Much less than a small oil war. 3-5x the Apollo program (during the same timescale as Apollo, the US spent as much on cosmetics and large States spent more on liquor). About the same cost as building and maintaining maybe 3 of our CVNs and their air wings and escorts and logistics infrastructure to deploy them.
The first small habitat for workers finished by '08, with all the launch and in-space infrastructure to reproduce it.
The cost is paid for along with the national debt and several years of greatly expanded budget, but shipments of previously rare metals from NEAs. The fist entity that returns even a few kg of loosely sorted metals owns the world's markets in rare and precious and monetary metals and will never have a budget crunch again. IDK what money will be then, but owning large amounts of gold in vaults or oil underground won't be it. And this isn't something for a few centuries from now, but within 20 years of starting the effort.
22nd century TH-cam: Topopolis is flat!
😂
This guy is fricking genius I discovered him when I was looking up on black holes and I discovered his”black hole farming”video
Black hole farming would be cool!
That's the same video that brought me to him and it blew my mind wide open. Been coming back for more ever since.
I don't remember exactly what video of his I watched first, but I think it was part of his outbound series. At the very least, those videos are the first ones I remember watching.
It was this video for me also that had me click the subscribe button. Come a long way huh
Give a little credit to his parents for the physics knowledge. He was raised on this shit and even helped his parents out in the labs.
Ooh, awesome! Your videos about space-habitats are my absolute favorites! IMO that's where our future should be, not in terraforming other planets.
OMG I did’t think the Bobiverse was still going! I’m excited for a fourth installment, doubly so knowing you collaborated on it!
Your videos on space habitats are always my favourite, they seem so much more exciting than terraforming planets.
Agreed. Space habitats (at least a few initial, more moderately sized prototypes) are something that, if humanity were to throw its weight behind the project, we could reasonably hope to complete in a lifetime or two; whereas even the most modest terraforming project would take many centuries at the least and require a far greater amount of resources than we can muster at this time.
We'll need to build rotating habitats to even get started doing anything in space, including terraforming. After a a certain amount of time, I can't help but think our habitats will get so good that people will question why we're bothering to terraform.
In many ways, building spacestead habitats would be better than trying to terraform a planet or moon.
@@adamlytle2615
Well, the amount of material and time you'd need to build enough space stations to house as many people as a terraformed Mars could, would be quite a lot.
Once Mars is done terraforming, you'd have far more living room than if you spent the same amount of time building lots of spin stations.
@@dgd947a15fl Well, that's questionable. Mars has 145 million km² of surface area. That's approximately 11 Mckendree cylinders, assuming radius of 460km and length of 4600km for each of them. That would represent a lot less mass than mars itself. As to how long it would take to mine said material from the asteroid belt and various moons, I don't know. But very possibly less time than required for the terraforming of mars.
I feel this would be an amazing alternative to start to colonizing other planets like Venus, to have a structure orbiting it.
So we get these structures in orbit, a few satilites for communication, and a surface mining base, this will make interstellar colonization a reality.
Alternatively, floating continents could be constructed on Venus around 50km above the ground.
The background music brings back Master of Orion 2 memories.
That moment you build a yarnball-style topopolis and actract space cats.
Fermi paradox SOLVED!!!
Mega Space Cats; the bane of sloppy topopoli [yeah, I am going with that as the plural] all across the observable universe!
The cats would have to be bigger than Jupiter for that!
@@chexhcatialo3889 fooking space cats. At least they keep space rats in check...
A cylindrical-centrifugal structure is going to need some ribbing for stiffness, like on a tin can. If you build the skin too flexible, the cylinder is going to turn into an extruded ellipse the first time you get too much weight in one place.
You could make the skin in ridges and valleys, like a concertina, and maybe put habitats inside the ridges. Or you could build stiff structures up from the ground, like faux Roman aqueducts or monorail tracks.
5 years and still interesting information. Really appreciate the content. Thank you.
Regarding weather, wouldn't we see an accumulation of gas particles at the center?
There is no gravity, so it seems as though anything that evaporates, or otherwise is lower density than the general atmosphere will become stuck there.
Perhaps this could be taken advantage of as a sort of "filtration" system for the atmosphere?
Just got home and there's an SFIA video! Yeah. Imma chill and watch. Thanks to all involved!
Arthur, have you ever heard of "solid light?" Can you make a video about it?
possibly, it's an interesting idea
Solid light... Like the hard light in Halo, huh? That would be awesome...
@@musafawundu6718 Everything is a Halo reference.
@@musafawundu6718 and its not just a theory it was actually created in real life in 2016 were they managed to get photons to start behaving as if they were atoms creating actual solid light of course only one single atom of it
@@wilmagregg3131
Yes. I have since my comment learned of that... There are so many other states of matter beyond solids, liquids, gases, and plasma. That is one of them...
The first word of the title already *_blowed my mind_*
It got dun blowed it
@@kindlin what does that sentence mean? (No offense intended).
Best thing about Isaac’s videos is when I finish my meal and expect the video is likely over, I click and see it’s only halfway done. Yay!
Hmm, in this and some of the recent episodes I've had a bit of difficulty keeping up with scales and math when you read them out fast like that. Either slowing down when math comes up or using visuals (as in, show the math written out) would help quite a bit. In addition, since things of huge scales comes up so often on this channel, maybe have some kind of a custom visual that lets me see at a glance the rough ballpark of "hugeness" we're at in any given moment. Like, say, a scale at the top of the video that has an arrow pointing at "we're here now" and some additional points of interest around it to give a sense of scale for these somewhat mindbendingly huge structures. The same would work wonders on the other end of things too, it's kind of hard to get a good feel for how tiny things like nanomachines and exotic materials' structures can get.
I agree, as a tip for the future; I usually have subtitles on for these type of episodes so I can read along and quickly reference the text if I missed a huge number. Its also very helpful that the subtitles are of very good quality.
Great ideas!
scale is a wierd problem in the sciences. once u get much larger than a small mountain(or the upper edge of microscopic on the small end of things)any intuitive sense of scale is pretty much lost. the human brain just isn't designed for these scales and anything outside the human scale becomes just a number
If you want to know how ridiculous it is to think of scales in these circumstances, here's the volume comparison of the sun in liters and an average human in liters.
1,409,272,569,059,860,000,000,000,000,000 liters is the rough volume of the sun, and the average volume of a human, is 62 liters.
Let's rewrite that, a little bit, A human is 6.2×10^2 liters. The sun however is 1.4×10^31 liters. This is like comparing a human to the size of an atom, after all a Hydrogen atom has a volume of 6.2×10^-28 liters. So literally comparing a Human to the sun is like comparing an atom to a human. Do you even understand how ridiculous it is to even trying to picture things on these scales now?
lol i have discalculus (number dislexia) so you can imagine the problems i have but if i see it visually it really helps me understand it much better
This is d20 future campaign gold. Thank you.
You might like the website: orionsarm
It's pretty much wikipedia from the year 12,000 and Isaac crated some of the articles there too.
I first learned of the Bob series of books on this channel. 3 books later I am so hyped to learn of another installment
In your face, extinction
lol
Can’t wait to get into space!
Please don't tempt the universe.
@@andreproudian7032 if the universe is so big, why won’t it fight me?
@@hithere5553 well you see given that the universe is inclined to slowly decrease to a lower energy state over time, it lacks the energy to do so. In other words the universe is too lazy to fight.
I am really glad to find out that Isaac consulted on the bobiverse!
Sometimes the only thing that reminds me a week has gone by is a new video from Isaac Arthur and company. Lockdown has been so strange! Thanks for the steady supply of optimism during these dark days.
How about to design your space habits projects(i.e. ships, settlements, interstellar gates and portals, etc), that's would be easier to get through some darkness.
Just wanna say; Listening to Issac on my studio monitors, chilling in bed with my PSVR helmet, and sculpting abstract landscapes in that Dreams game with motion controllers has never been more relaxing.
We literally live in the future! 💎
Even more hyped for bobiverse 4 now... didn't think that was even possible...
Happiness finds me again this Thursday.
Arthursday
Arthuwsday
So, would it ever be preferable to build those side walls or retaining walls out of plasma? I'm referring specifically to the whole plasma window concept. I imagine you might not want that at lower elevations, but higher up it could make it easier to retain atmosphere without adding much mass to the structure, it would be nearly invulnerable to micrometeorites as they would just pass through without causing any loss of containment. It could make it easier for space craft to land. I imagine it might even possible to design it to block harmful radiation. But of course, this is stretching modern engineering of plasma windows pretty thin, as the last I heard, the only plasma windows in existence are measured in millimeters.
Every Thursday I tune in, always. It makes for a great break from work while working from home.
I have been watching for about five years ago. Every video is very educational and always gives me something to think about. Please never stop.
I've been listening to the 'Heaven's River' Audiobook that I got through your Audible sponsorship promo. I'm a big fan of Dennis E. Taylor's 'Bob-iverse', as well as 'Singularity Trap' and several others! Thanks for bringing his work to my attention, back in 'Self-replicating Starships', I believe. 😊
Yes, please
The '70s NASA Ames / Stanford space settlement studies found that the largest 1G, shielded, pressure vessel we could build with then-known technologies was ~30km diameter. A torus is one thing, a drum or "Kalpana" shape is another.
Maybe not continent sized, but province or large island sized.
When you mention O'Neil habitats, everyone defaults to looking at the "Island 3" giant cylinders. These were purely theoretical examinations of what we could do, and O'Neill wrote that they're probably as far off from the reality of ~80 years after the first habitat, as "futurists" of 1900ad were accurate about 2000ad.
The first generation "Island One" or Stanford Torus was done with no new inventions needed, within 30 years from start, for cost like any other large infrastructure or industrial developments down here.
Yes, you could use active means to stabilize the inherently unstable long cylinder of an Island 3: The Space Shuttle is one glaring example of how short-sighted it is to rely on complexity to overcome severe inherent flaws in a design.
For stability you want a massive spinning mass around the rim. This could be layers of underground decks of space. Your mountains don't need to be aerogel, but rock and steel and inhabited, and counterbalanced around the habitat. 3 mountains perhaps staggered around the middle of the length of a tube, could be the massive stable spinning rim it lacks.
Attaching a second counter-rotating cylinder habitat is for pointing: to eliminate gyroscopic forces that make pointing difficult. It's a clumsy brute-force way to counter the axial instability suffered by any long structure that will want to tumble end over end.
Giving it a massive stable spinning rim or separation of multiple heavy masses about the rim, eliminates the tendency to always want to wobble more.
A river in a Stanford Torus could go from high ground all the way around to low ground and a lake, and pumped back up to go around again.
In a long cylinder it could go from a mountain range around the middle, to either end.
As for the cosmic spaghetti, How flexible are tubes of rock and steel many kilometers across going to be, spinning around themselves like twisting a hula hoop?
I've never understood how people can talk about extending the cylinder habitat and looping it around, still spinning. Are habitats of graphene going to stretch and flow like taffy as it lengthens and around the outside of the tube and compresses going around the inside?s
Liked the bobavers sneak peek glade you are having input love the books
oh god Isaac, another video that's posted just after midnight on a worknight... didn't need that sleep anyway
I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favourite video about the Citadel!
I love these episodes
Subscribed to isaac way back. watching this channel grow just shows how good the content is . I look forward to watching thursday vids 👌
Your channel is incredible, I have learned a lot. I watch it almost every night. Even repeating videos. Thanks.
Thank you for sparking my creativity in space
"... unless your unobtanium building material..." -- hahahaha that caught me off guard, tears in my eyes from that.
These type of megastructures would probably be built in the asteroid belt, out of the asteroids that are there. That would be plenty of materials, if you didn't go too big. And if you have the tech to get out to the asteroid belt and back and travel that distance on a regular basis, you could just leave the megastructures where you built them (instead of moving them to a desired location). By leaving them where there were built, you have the benefit of having a human habitat out that far, and it makes us not go extinct if something disastrous/ devastating happens to earth. Sounds good to me.
I liked this video.
I'll be praying.
Great video, keep up the good work. God bless.
Have a nice day/night.
-------------------------------------------------------- sincerely a nerdy Christian.
Great videos with fantastic content. Thanks Isaac
I once started a project called AROL ONE - Amazing Ring Of Life
If I remember it correctly, the best diameter for the ring would be about 10 km, because you'd get way less revolutions per minutes for the same amount gravity achieved.
I think I also calculated that the cost to build such ring would cost a few trillions of dollars and could generate revenue of a few hundreds of billions a month from tourism, agreculture and asteroid mining.
Very interesting, and I never posted it anywhere. Maybe I should, just to "plant the seed" and see if anyone contributes to the calculations.
Sounds lit
I remember reading something like that though it was 12 miles in diameter, .9 miles in height, and having a 300 foot thickness for its rind layer though it was meant to be set near the asteroid belt and the Orts Cloud as well.
@@xermasboo5401 I think I had aproximately the same thickness calculation.
Also, the only way to properly build it would be using huge 3D printers that use mined metal from asteroids that are melted with direct sun light, and the prints should be chicken-wire-like.
And finally, different types of 3D printed patterns are used depending on where the structural integrity is needed.
@@xermasboo5401 you could just focus the light on a relativelt small point on the metal anf melt it.
No need to complicate stuff.
@@bloodaid Its getting out that far away with a good intensity because we talking about something around 400,000,000-760,000,000 miles away from the sun, and to have it to at least 2 points to at most 60-100 points within the general area range.
What I said was actually far more simple than what it would actually entail.
I love how blunt the video title is. Most episodes have a title that references some obscure concept, but this one just outright states it's about enormous spinning space buildings.
This is definitely one of the most direct, anti-clickbait channels out there.
Absolutely loved it...
@@procrastinator99 Who needs clickbait when you're talking about things like "Continent-Sized Rotating Habitats" or "Let's Dismantle the Solar System!"? :)
Can't get any more direct than that!
I would have shrunk the title a bit but I couldn't think of any genuinely descriptive but shorter titles :)
This is one of the more specific titles :)
This video is looking great!
@@aruspice thank you.
I love your videos Issac, so informative
I love O'Neill cylinders because there feasible/ realistic and provide gravity while given a real sci-fi experience there my favorite mega structure gundam origin anime depicted them at there best .
They are too small for me. I prefer Bishop Rings and McKendree cylinders.
I have been eaglery waiting years for a highly detailed episode on very large space habitats since Isaac Arthur first mentioned about very large rotating space habitats such as Bishop Rings and McKendree Cylinders over three years ago...
It seems he did one right around the time you left this comment: th-cam.com/video/tqs1iQlvV-g/w-d-xo.html
Happy Arthursday, everyone! Looking forward to this one.
Bobiverse #4 is out? That's awesome!
September, first on Audible, Then later the regular book.
These videos are why I look forward to Thursdays
The thing I've always had a hard time visualizing and can't find anything to simulate it is, say you have a 10 mile diameter habitat. Inside you put a giant LED covered cylinder a half mile or so up to display clouds. When you're looking towards spin or anti spin, what does the horizon look like? Would the horizon just be a flat line where the 'sky' meets the seemingly upward sloping ground? Can you make a convincing illusion of a natural horizon by scattering hills to break up that line? How big a diameter habitat would it take to hide the illusion of the ground sloping up?
The only way I can think of to make it look natural is to divide the surface area into a bunch of low mountain ringed regions so that it looks like you're living in a series of mountain valleys.
y should it be a copy of earth.where we cant tell the difference.
I love your videos. I find your voice very soothing, and I appreciate the mental stimulation. Thanks for being awesome.
Honestly, along with Mega Cities and a Trillion People on Earth, this is my favourite SFIA video. I prefer continent sized rotating habitats such as McKendree Cylinders and Bishop Rings to O'Neill Cylinders, though a very large number of O'Neil Cylinders connect to form a Rung World with surface areas of space that are continent sized or greater is OK with me.
this is our future. i can see it. obsessed with this topic. makes perfect sense. Ian Banks, Peter Hamilton. yes. yes. yes. please more content like this! want to get into the weeds of how you recreate the rock cycle/water cycle, etc.
When Isaac tries for the *_Guiness Book of World Records,_* he's competing in the category of record sizes of worlds.
I would imagine that trees on one of these would grow much larger than the ones on earth would be interesting to see.
Might actually lessen the weight load as well, as then the cylinder don't have to bear the weight of the whole tree. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the physics.
Thanks again for the high-quality content!
Never commented before. Loved your topics so much, never thought to comment. Keep up your great work. Seems I've been enjoying your videos for decades...
I straight up read "continent sized space inhabitants"
We can have those too
That's what genetic engineering is for. That might be its own episode.
:)
Incredible how a channel like this was able to hide from me for so long. Fantastic stuff! What kind of accent is this? Never heard something qute similar. Subscribed 👍
Not an accent, just a small speech impediment.
Been hoping to see more things on the likes of the McKendree Cylinder (the topic alone deserves it's own super long episode as there is very little that's actually been done on them thus far). Given material limitations, how nuts could you go in trying to replicate environments (part ocean filled with life, rainforests, urban skyscraper cities etc, etc).
One thing that you maybe could have touched on in this ep would have been a supersized torus a la Elysium style. Using CNT/Graphene, how big could it theoretically go without the need for active support etc. Probably due an episode of it's own as well.
The Torus &/or Cylinder is probably the route we're going to go down (& stick by), so hopefully more on these scaled up habitats to come would be great.
Loved this episode, its so classic SFIA! Thanks as always for the great content Isaac and the team. I'm always so proud to be a patron for this channel, its a vision of hopeful and bright future and gives us all hope. PS. cool new studio for the live streams.
I need to watch more of these megastructure videos. The potential fantasy settings on them is awesome. The mythology that would arise... and the wonder and mystery that a reader or player would go through as they tried to figure out how the way the world was described could make any sense... it's awesome. Who needs flat planar worlds when you can have a Ball Topopolis made by the gods?
Listen, I know you posted this 2 years ago, but I'm currently writing a fantasy novel set on a Banks Orbital!
I've been waiting for an episode about looped space stations / halo ringed space stations for ages!
Issac you truly are an inspiration (you are by far and away my fave youtuber) you attempt to answer the largest of questions an the grandest of scales. But you still haven't attempted to answer the biggest questions:- i.e. What's the point? What are we doing? Do we know what we are doing? Whats the endgame? How do we unite and all together dance towards this endgame? I suppose that the simple answer is love - but we have kind of known that forever and it has still not united us???? So right here, right now..................... (and this is where I reach my limit ) would really love to hear your take on this, for the love :) x
Isaac Arthur, you are a man after my own heart. Thank you.
Hey. Isaac.When you discuss equations, it is nice if you just edit in some text that shows the equation as you discuss it.
probably, I used to but there's a horrible tendency when I do that to get a bit distracted and have a typo in them that no one catches, and I tend to cringe when one makes it to air with an extra zero or such. Probably not a good reason not to have them on there though :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA
Do it! Also, another suggestion from these comments was to add in an in-depth logarithmic scale that goes from nanomachines and atoms to galaxies and super voids, so when you start discussing huge habitats you can zoom in to that part of the scale as a visual aid for what we're talking about.
If an error ever makes it though, you can just add a little annotation or pin a comment (I guess YT removed annotations for some reason).
I was happy with giant space gantries. I was impressed you gave us interstellar lasers. This is BIG.
Cool to hear you consulted with Taylor, that's awesome! Love both of your work!
Love your videos of what might happen in the future it’s like a window to look into the future of a thousand years a place where we can’t go with are life span but we can go there in the mind !
Nice video i really love your content
I watch your material over network all the time so far you and jmg are my favorites
Are these ships maneuverable? You would think that they wouldn't be built where they will spend their time. Try to imagine just what engines and fuel you would need to move these leviathans around.
Quality content as always!
TBH, I always love seeing artwork about content sized megastructures.
Makes me hope we see them in Homeworld 3
A 4th Bobiverse book? Thanks for the info!
"We can't artificially generate normal gravity under known science."
Sure we can. Build a black hole and stand on a structure built around it. It's hilariously mass inefficient, as, for example, to generate 1 G on a habitat 1/1000th the scale of Earth, you need a black hole a millionth the mass of the Earth. Which means it has a mass efficiency that's equal to Earth's.
:) Peter, we have whole episodes on that idea and even discussed it in this episode, we're talking about stuff like gravity in spaceships or habs without mass or rotation there
"Sure we can. Build a black hole and stand on a structure built around it." lolol... get back to me when you get that working brah.
At least garbage and nuclear waste wouldn't be a problem. Just make sure you drop it straight down as you wouldn't want an accretion disc blasting out X-rays for decades!
@@SocksWithSandals a black hole of that size would only have a event horizon of a few millimeters. Accretion disk won't be an issue because if you drop matter spinning the other direction it will only released as much energy as it had initially with potential energy until it falls into the black hole. If you drop two things an opposite spins the disks will collide with each other
@@schvanger There's actually an episode on black hole civilizations here if you're interested.
12:38 I am extremely disappointed. The "Helical Stellar Topolois" you displayed has such an obvious name that I can't beliieve you (or I any of the dozens of times I've watched this episode) didn't come up with it sooner!
"A Springworld"
thanks to Issac now Arthur Dent finally can get the hang of Thursdays!
Isaac Arthur if ur seeing this then I just want to say ur one of the people who expands my imagination and I always like sci-fi cause I have an interest in space and technology that’s why I want to become a businessman so I could join in colonizing space
I came here from Heaven's River because I had a hard time visualizing the topopolis. This is fascinating; thank you! (Also really cool to hear that you collaborated on that part of the book!)
04:57 - Upper left hand corner, someone made the World Trade Center in space.
Isaac talks about active support a lot, and it is a cool concept - but I don't think he's ever addressed the safety aspect: "What if the power goes out?"
It seems to me that any structure relying on active support will not be able to tolerate an hour of power outage without ripping itself apart - possibly not even a minute. Maybe not even a second (eg. by triggering oscillations/resonances). (Although I'm happy to be corrected by someone who can run the relevant engineering calculations.)
Even 99.99% uptime means you'll have 90 hours of downtime per century; and the very first active support structure is unlikely to have even one "9" of reliability, let alone the 7+ 9s that you'd need in order to have a chance of surviving a century. And, while it's fairly possible to sustain 99.99999% reliability for a few years, sustaining it for decades/centuries/indefinitely is, at best, problematic.
Frankly, I think that this concern is going to hold us back from using active support on public structures for a long time - unless there's an easy solution that I'm missing.
(By "public", I'm pointing out that sparsely-populated and isolated structures for research/military/etc have different safety considerations - but, equally, these types of projects are not normally in the scope of this channel. By "a long time", I mean that we will be delayed for a long time *after* we have the technical capability and power capacity to build such a thing.)
Love Denis E Taylors work!
The Bobiverse books are soooooooo good. Can't wait until Heavens river comes out. I would recommend them to all here.
agree the BOBverse books are amazing ^^ all hail the BOB!
I can't wait for the audiobook!
@@charadremur333 Scheduled release: In 74 days, 24-09-20
Love this guys voice! Sounds like Louisiana!
Here is a project to get started on: A topopolis world that is two AU in diameter, goes around the center of the galaxy and has stars inside of it for the day/night cycle.
Cilender hab maps would be just straight up better than normal maps
Ooooh, the next Bobiverse novel is coming soon? Good stuff that
Wait what?!? My favorite TH-camr helped make my favorite book??? I’m beyond mind blown right now … just wow 🙏🏽
I truly am shocked that your channel isnt closer to millions of followers... Shows that a huge amount of the masses lack true intelligence.
Wait, you are jumping to the conclusion that TH-cam’s viewership is a representative sample of humanity.... There might be a flaw in your logic.
Plants respond to not only length of light exposure, but to differing radiation levels at perihelion and aphelion. Their growth/dormancy and reproductive/herbaceous cycles are programmed into their genetic structures to produce a variety of behaviors in response to these stimuli. As I've never seen you give any real consideration to the problems this implies for extraterrestrial habitat designs, I can only imagine that you think these problems easily overcome. Even if you can genetically alter the plants to produce different behaviors from different stimuli, the gene complexes responsible for these behaviors are not so simple and contiguous in helical loci as to produce predictable and useful results from such manipulations with ease. The work and technology required to make this possible would probably require a far greater advance in knowledge and investment of resources than the construction of the habitats themselves.
Unlike the original concepts for an O’Neil cylinder, I don’t think McKendree cylinders would rely on natural light. The builders of something like this would presumably control all the variables, so why not simply vary the periodicity and quality of light to mimic earth normal as needed?
It occurs to me that even if we had the capacity to alter the genomes of the organisms we were trying to transplant, perhaps part of the aim would be to maintain the biological and ecological legacy of our home world. You wouldn’t change the colors of a treasured work of art because it didn’t look as good under the lights in a new museum. You would simply change the lighting in its new home....
Something I have been wondering ever since I watched the first video about this sort of structure. How would convection and heat distribution work in a closed cylinder habitat.
On a planet as you increase altitude the volume of available space increases (as the diameter increases) and as you go higher you get closer to the "heat sink" of the atmosphere radiating into space cooling the top of the convection cell and encouraging cooler air to sink.
On a ring habitat the volume would decrease significantly with altitude, meaning convection may not function in the same way as there is nowhere for warmer air to rise into. The other problem would be if you were using a central heat/light tube at the axis; The rising air would be getting closer to the heat source in a closed habitat. Further complicated, because now you have all the hottest air trapped furthest away from your heatsink (the outer shell) Thus have restricted ability to cool the "top" of the convection cell.
www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/cschsi/removing_waste_heat_from_an_oneill_cylinder/
Nice video! I don’t understand the drive to colonize Mars especially considering the gravity considerations and their affect on human health, when it seems to me the building large structures in space would be so much better in terms of the quality of the habitat and probably not necessarily as difficult as colonizing mars. Certainly, it would be much easier to “terraform“ a large habitat in space then it would ever be to terraform mars.