Galactic Domination: Strip Mining the Galaxy

this episode is sponsored by audible it is quite likely that before this century is out we will be mining our moon and asteroids for resources it is almost beyond conception how much resources they contain and yet they are but tiny modes of dust compared to what the galaxy offers so today we'll be continuing our look at galactic domination we started a few weeks back in eternal empire and i mentioned there that we wanted to look at possible motivations for trying to take over a galaxy the big ones that tend to come up in discussion for any empire are be it earthly or galactic our desire for empire for its own sake to be king of the world a desire for resources or desire for defense from hostiles which might include preemptive attacks today we'll be discussing that desire for resources why someone might want or need a whole galaxy's worth of them and how they might go about doing that were we drawing from discussions in science fiction along with what is right or wrong about the pictures they paint but this is likely to be an issue we will encounter in real life as we have to the stars and maybe sooner than we might expect and when i say we i do mean you and me because some of the associated technology is potentially near future and while it's always hard to forecast how technology will develop some of the more optimistic scenarios might allow us to be sending out interstellar probes within our lifetimes this is also part of the reason for the choice of episode title strip mining is a term that has some pretty negative overtones these days compared to say resource utilization but a big aspect to the topic for today is going to be whether life intelligent or not might be on some planet we decide to mine many of the options available to us early on for harvesting the galaxy would involve not knowing if the place was inhabited before sending harvesters out and a pretty good case can be made that if you send an order out to harvest a planet without knowing if it's inhabited you bare the guilt of ordering a planet with inhabitants to be exploited even if it turns out the planet in question was a lifeless rock this is a concept that comes up a lot in science fiction where the aliens in the story have in some way harmed us and the politicians and generals are all going for military action while a brave and kind scientist says we misunderstood and no violence was intended for example in the ender's game series the buggers treat some capture humans rather badly because they didn't realize that humans were individual beings who were suffering immensely that could indeed be the case but i've seen this applied in story lines even when they are actively targeting ships and cities and it brings up concepts like due diligence and a reasonable expectation to know larry niven and jerry purnell in the classic novel the moting god's eye point out that any given alien race sending out a probe has a duty to ensure that said probe has safeguards in place in this case not to fire anti-medial defenses at the ship this duty is often best highlighted by looking at it from our perspective not theirs because the excuses seem a lot thinner that way while we often warn folks of seeing things from a human perspective when think about alien psychology it doesn't change whether or not firing on or mighty inhabited planet is right or wrong strip mining is the process in which one has a large and valuable deposit of something most often coal buried under a field of soil and rock so you move a long strip of that rock and soil to get the buried minerals or materials it's debatable if this is any wars or better ecologically than many other mining methods but from a visual and public relations standpoint it tends to look awful and has become synonymous with exploitative processes it is also pretty ghastly concept on a stellar galactic scale the notion that an alien harvester might land peel off our biosphere and grab the resources below now there are a couple problems with this specific endeavor first it is true that earth has enormous mass and vast resources roughly equaling every other rocky planet moon and asteroid in our solar system combined in terms of raw material with venus as a close second and making up the bulk of that remaining material however it is at the bottom of a gravity well it is the nature of gravity that the more mineral wealth you have in raw terms the more expensive your shipping and transport bill is going to be for getting it so plants like earth are your last stop for easy minerals except for gas giants which have vastly more and stars themselves which have even more and also supply the power needed for that harvesting see our episode on starlifting in the 2013 film oblivion starring tom cruise morgan freeman and jaime lannister spoilers following features an alien agency trying to strip earth of its precious water for fusion fuel this would be a pretty illogical plan given that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the universe and on the fairly short list of things more abundant than it are molecular hydrogen and deuterium there are two things water might contain that you would be interested in using for fusion with helium-3 is one other alternative water hydrogen deuterium and helium-3 are vastly more abundantly available in our gas giants like saturn which is where incoming aliens first arrived in that movie and there's no good reason they'd bypass it in favor of earth if you've mastered fusion power mining fuel from gas giants is vastly easier and therefore more economical see our outward bound series episodes on colonizing the various gas giants for discussion of that like colonizing neptune we also see this in the 1996 film independence day which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in which i remember being one of the first films that got me really thinking about scale of alien empires and threats in there we meet a race of harvesters who take apart plants to fuel their massive mothership nearly the size of a moon but it's not clear why a ship even that big would need anything like a whole plants raw materials to run on nor that they had any interest in our biosphere as is apparently the case with famous comic book planet eater galactus who apparently needs them for their life force taking apart an entire inhabited planet because you want some raw material seems not just villainous but lazy wasteful and stupid we'll examine both notions more this weekend in our sci-fi sunday episode annoying aliens anyway earth-like planets certainly have resources but it's much easier to access those resources from comets asteroids moons and lesser planets without atmospheres or such deep gravity wells they also have far less of those resources than the gas giants or stars which again can supply energy for their own disassembly see your episode disassembling the solar system for discussion of how we do that as well as why we might want to earth is not worthless not by any means but ought to be on the bottom end of the list for extraction from an economic perspective and earth makes up less than one percent of one percent of the metal resources of this solar system and even smaller fraction of things like hydrogen and helium even if every earth mass planet or galaxy had life and you felt obliged to skip them all for that reason you wouldn't be missing out on much economically speaking so civilization has to be pretty ruthless to run mineral extraction on an inhabited world once they have interstellar travel given that it is only a tiny sliver of available resources and comparatively inconvenient when you have a technology like fusion or star lifting of course greed is a plausible enough motive for being ruthless getting that planet after you've gotten all the low-hanging fruits but that brings up the second problem with this endeavor namely a biosphere is a lot more valuable than all the stuff beneath it a given biosphere is fairly unique we can assume and contains untold billions of species and you could probably make a ton of money just selling exotic pets aquariums or botanical samples from one that's before we consider exotic molecules created in ecosystems some of which we can be used to make medicine or for other chemistry so you're not really scraping out the dirty life forms to get the cash buried below you're scraping off the cash to get the fairly mundane and plentiful stuff below we mine earth because it's the only place we can mine right now and virtually everything we build is for use here so there's no added transport cost due to the gravity well the reason we talk about mining asteroids all the time is because it's so much easier once you've got a spaceship while trying to build stuff for use off earth we cannot assume aliens are ethical obviously especially if we're using our standards for ethics but if they are if they do value life even alien life that would only leave the concern that they might unintentionally mine an inhabited planet that's a real possibility one looked at in sci-fi occasionally and maybe most memorably in the original star trek episode the devil in the dark where they are mining a dead rock only to find out that it's inhabited by silicon based life this seems to raise the issue of not recognizing something as a life form but let us put some caveats on that first while that is a great episode it's got some plot holes second it wasn't being silicon based that made them unrecognizable as life though that gets set a lot in discussing the episode is that they had an extremely bizarre life cycle which caused them all to die off every 50 000 years except one member who guarded their eggs it's nice in fiction to have strange life forms but the premise is not recognizing them as alive and involves missing it because the critical trait is something that is absurd from an evolutionary standpoint it probably isn't a good example of how we should be looking for potential life in the real universe so this is the key notion it's probably pretty hard to miss life on a planet no species capable of designing and using spaceships should be able to look at earth and think oh this probably is all random geological formations when looking at trees buildings and people the silicon life form the horta in that star trek episode are conveniently the only life form on a planet with no other ecology they build nothing and then they mysteriously die off leaving only eggs every so often every plausible model of evolution tells us that intelligence and complexity arise from ecological and evolutionary pressures predator prey cycles and so on so it's just not very plausible you'd have highly intelligent life as the only life and which left no trace except its eggs and the tunnels it made while meandering through the planet no other life no buildings no monuments or art in a case like that yes you have an excuse for your explorers not knowing its inhabited planet but again it's an extreme stretch of plausibility of course the alternatives are that you might be smart but your probes are not you use stupid robots or that you do see those life there you just don't care we will get to the robots in a bit but let's consider the indifference angle again you might find value in life for strictly non-altruistic reasons selling alien pets or billion places a tourist trap but you might not value that life or once you have samples and studies you might torch out the biosphere and get to those minerals your civilization or hive mind or monolithic plant brain with darwinian tendencies and genocidal hobbies might just not care there is life there indeed it might care a lot in a very hostile way but if your goal is exterminating all other life forms you don't do it through strip mine the galaxy even if your reason for exterminating our life is to have a free and clear claim on all those resources you do your exterminating well in advance of your harvesting might someone do this sure killing folks off and taking their stuff is a pretty time-honored approach to existence for my part i do not view morality and right and wrong as being subjective and relative just that we are often flawed and determined what they are but a lot of folks do think it's relative and make a good case and even if i'm right that there are things that could be considered universally good or bad or evil does not mean a given alien race holds that view i cannot see anything explicitly preventing a civilization evolving and getting out into space that revolved around them hating all aliens it would seem pretty likely that in most cases the development of specialized economies and technology would tilt toward having some concepts for tolerance of differing views and natures but it would be hard to build a case for it being impossible or even pretty improbable for an alien civilization to hit the galactic stage with the intent of clearing of other actors of course we are not just necessarily talking about actors in the context of intelligence seems you might have a civilization that was fine with alien life but not rival intelligent life you could have ones that wouldn't lay a finger on a planet with intelligent life but would cheerfully colonize or even disassemble a plant that only had very basic life forms on it there are some pretty good reasons to think our galaxy is devoid of any complex life see our fermi paradox great filter series for discussion of that and we may find that the most common life we find out in the galaxy is the most common type we find here bacteria and other non-sentient organisms it just might be the best most words have it would be highly problematic and honestly probably unrealistic to quarantine a planet for billions of years hoping the pond scum on its surface would develop complexity in art and science i suspect where such words are concerned any interstellar civilization would undertake an effort to study them take samples set up preserves probably off planets in artificial habitats and then proceed to use the planet if that was what they valued indeed that might be the case even if it had intelligence and as we discussed before given the very real chance that intelligent life might be prone to going digital artificial intelligence or post-humans mentally uploaded to computers they might do their preserving of intelligent planets by killing everything on it just quietly and via mind upload they aren't likely to view it as murder and may view it as a gift of near immortality and near eternal safety i could definitely see a civilization with ethics not too unlike our own encountering a species they thought were worrisome as a threat or competition and uploading the whole planet to a simulated reality kept safe somewhere indeed raiders an outside chance that someone already did that to us key notion though as we move into how you would harvest the galaxy for resources which would generally be accomplished with robots is that you probably can't send out probes or identify wars with life or not they can do the job very effectively you also have no reason to go for the big plants first if you're just harvesting raw materials and can do this sort of thing in waves to ensure life bearing or life purple plants are being left alone until you can eyeball them in detail and pick a course of action indeed it would not be that tricky to even engage in full-blown starlifting or solar and globin for power collection while leaving an inhabited planet untouched shielded from solar wind blow off and with the proper amount of sunlight routed to still hit that planet the usual fear and a decently valid one is that someone would send out robots designed to explore resupply and explore some more send resources home or build things locally with them like more themselves perhaps we often call this a hegemonizing swarm where some machine intelligence be it bacteria dumb or super intelligent just sweeps through the galaxy converting everything into more of itself it is fairly similar to the paperclip maximizer or grey goo scenarios and probably deserves an episode in this series all to itself but for now let's look at why that might happen in the first place and how it might treat life let's say someone managed to put together a self-replicating machine in the next decade or two this does not imply microscopic machines or nanobots incidentally as those are usually assumed to be self-replicating because otherwise you need to make trillions of them by conventional manufacturing to do even the smallest job so micro machines as medical aids in the body or for a great greener planet are assumed to be self-replicating if you have them however while human life might have started microscopic and evolved to modern larger forms for machines it is likely to be the other way around you start big with what we call a clanking self-replicator which might be something like an automated factory on some asteroid or moon that has complete blueprints for itself are all the machines it uses for building and its components and for the robots it sends out to gather resources and also make some product say metal plates for building space habitats and maybe packed up egg equivalents of itself to send to other asteroids indeed a clanking self-replicator is probably more analogous to a biological cell or normal sized animal than some tiny little virus or machine even smaller such as the classic universal assembler full of blueprints and subfactories or organs and organelles that do specialized tasks this isn't easy but i suspect we could actually do it right now if we wanted we have no real motivation to do so in our own terrestrial economy which is already self-replicating and which has established transport and distribution infrastructure a self-replicator isn't necessarily an economically advantageous approach to manufacturing or getting jobs done it just has the option of being packed up small and sent someplace new akin to senior covered wagon outside oregon on the trail back in the day rather than running in trains and trucks between 10 000 facilities handling various bits of a given supply chain most of which are also involved in hundreds of other supply chains too so don't think of this really high tech or free once you build the original the latter is true but only in a first order look as it ignores opportunity cost because it's great for getting the foot in the door at some new place with no existing infrastructure but once you do you probably want to be able to upgrade to a more complex system this means you have to be able to shut things down which raises the whole mutation and robot rebellion and safeguards issue i mean it's nice to have a quadrillion robots run out to the galaxy and do all your mining for you but you have to worry about them deciding they want to use the resources to build an armada and come home for some pointed discussions about labor relations one way to minimize the risk of your robots going out the deep end is to keep them very simple and stupid to the point they are no smarter than an amoeba and d there's no particular task involved in building machines or mining the galaxy that would require those performing it be smarter than an amoeba either simple life forms do very complicated tasks they're just hardwired to do them they don't learn them or think about them you can do the same for machines of course that raises the grey goo issue since that's basically what an amoeba is green goo a very simple machine that harvests resources locally to make more of itself in galactic colonization exploitation terms it really doesn't matter if the life doing it is naturally evolved or artificially created carbon or silicon just if it's smart or not and given her own existence apparently began a billion generations back as amoeba-like things a galaxy colonized by hordes of mutated and dumb machines might just result in silicon forming it long down the road rather than terraforming it which is arguably six of one half dozen of the other in the grand scheme of things we are a carbon-based life form some type runny on silicon or one of the other chemistries we looked at in our non-carbon-based life episode if it's simply starting off as some equivalent to simple organisms be they microscopic or big dumb asteroid miners acting as cranking self-replicators really should amount to the same thing in galactic scales and timelines if those machines began mutating into thousands of varieties forming an ecosystem in each of a billion different solar systems in our more personal concerns though a critical thing to keep in mind is that natural evolution has no overriding reason to evolve a resistance to mutation mutating mutation resistance would seem a bizarre evolutionary path however it is a lot easier to program in we often talk about how amazing dna and rna are about copying themselves with minimal errors but that's pretty relative and mostly in the context of folks playing telephone or transcribing things or photocopying them over and over from successive copies we do actually have a ton of data integrity techniques and there's plenty of ways to set up a self-replicating machine to be less likely than not to mutate even one time over the course of the entire history of the universe and even if every gram of matter was turned into copies of itself so if it is something we want to do i think we would have the technology to launch that this century even if it might take millions of years to percolate out to the galactic rim and probably with something smart enough to notice obvious signs of life to not mind those systems or at least those planets yet still be no real risk of mutating to something we might regret the issue though might be a rush so whoever sticks a claim first on a place might enjoy an advantage in court decisions of ownership and more importantly might enjoy the advantage of having already built up a lot of infrastructure in that system when someone comes by to object which might include a lot of guns this is potentially the sort of environment where rush jobs that design and programming can happen potentially with folks trying to copper together their own personal spaceship and self-replicator to send off to any of a billion random stellar systems to stake a claim for themselves and now we get to why we might want to do this in a bit of an organized and deliberate fashion last time we suggest you might want to establish an empire simply to ensure none of your colonies were a threat to you and each other they might through malice or negligence end up breeding or brewing up some galaxy ready fleets and technologies on some isolated system they inhabit far from watchful eyes so you might want to harvest all those resources or get the process underway just to make sure they aren't lying around for others to grab and misuse one upside though is that spaceships have to slow down to mine or colonize something whereas a missile does not and thus anytime someone builds and sends an unauthorized colony ship or probe or miner you can see its massive rocket flame or dry source and you can send something much smaller and quicker that does need to slow down and rendezvous with it but can instead use its slowdown fuel to speed up even more and slam into it so we also don't want to assume folks could be sending things out without anyone being able to stop them however the capability in physical terms doesn't mean they will and i would have a hard time seeing any nations or international treaties agreeing to shoot down each ship they're trying to leave the solar system without permission nobody is going to be up for a suicide pact where some agency just gets to take her asteroids part in our system to manufacture a trillion robotic sea chips to claim every star in the galaxy for themselves however that's a lot different than trying to make laws that involve chasing down and shooting a starship one is naked provocation the other is a public relations disaster but a ship sent by some seemingly benevolent and minor group to one star system could always get there or spawn copies and proceed to launch those trillion seed chips from alpha centauri or delta bonus instead now we are phrasing this throughout the episode as a fairly unfriendly or unethical process the title itself is pretty prejudicial talking of galactic domination strip mining but what is likely to be the process in our own galaxy and is this likely to happen yes we are probably going to strip mine our galaxy at least in terms of stripping down for resources indeed i would argue it is nearly inevitable that any species capable of practical interstellar travel will do this given long enough and likely very quickly on galactic timelines we've got the obvious scenario eventual classic galactic colonization where folks settle where they can and grow new families and communities and empires this usually assumes they eventually start doing mineral extraction for large artificial habitats like o'neill cylinders until the whole star system is transformed to what we call a dyson swarm some collection of artificial walls and industries and power collectors in global entire star to make use of all its energy known as a kardashev 2 civilization this comes in a lot of forms and varieties we discussed in other episodes the next step kardashev 3 is when this happens on a galaxy wide scale to every star there are alternative scenarios and some interesting varieties with one being that we won't grow up and spread wide across the galaxy but instead stay home and miniaturize you don't need a galaxy's worth of resources if you stick to one planet or dive into virtual worlds of your own creation on computers or so goes the usual reasoning anyway unfortunately this has some holes in it first if we're talking about a civilization going digital with uploaded artificial minds that does not imply slow growth or maximum expansion indeed it arguably encourages more if you view the rest of the universe as only a source of energy and raw materials for building computer chips and source of power then you're even more omnivorous so to speak since you can grow and exist at incredibly fast rates and with enormous density and the university's laws are going to be on your side when it comes to colonization or harvesting resources with things being tipped significantly more in your favor than it would be for a classic human population your appetite is probably huge eager to swallow up whole suns now some folks would suggest digital civilizations can't miniaturize and indeed they likely would but this is not a fermi paradox solution because miniaturization should not be assumed to be something you can constantly improve on or necessarily improve on fastening or growing if you can cut the resources you need for an individual down by a half but the time that improvement took to research and implement was the same as it took your population to quadruple you are still needing more resources than before trying to use a single atom as a computer switch or like a neuron is pretty tricky and i don't have a clue how you would go even lower but that would just mean that if you only need one atom to simulate the equivalent of one human neuron and need a hundred billion of those like we have that a given human only needs a hundred billion atoms to exist digitally which is really tiny enough that you could get the whole current human population on some chunk of matter less massive than a grain of sand problem is it is still a finite thing so if your population is doubling every generation be that a couple decades or a couple millennia and indeed it might be a couple nanoseconds for digital civilization you still use up an entire planet every atom in just 100 generations that's exponential growth for you now populations don't grow exponentially in real terms they grow quickly like that but in hiccups as the environment permits they fill it up and hold there until a new improvement allows more growth it is very easy to imagine a civilization cotillion's growth because it needed to we've done this for most of our history but there has to be some reason why you are otherwise anyone who feels like it and has the resource to grow exponentially will do so and the whole point of harvesting a galaxy is that as best as we can tell the stuff is all sitting there unused and waiting for us except it's not really sitting there unused waiting for us patience is not a virtue in resource utilization some metal rich asteroid we detect today has a decent chance of being shattered into hard to collect dust or falling to a planet or gravity well you can extract metals from a star but it's harder indeed even black holes can be very useful to a civilization but every minute that passes more entry builds up and the universe decays trying to tell folks that they have to let chunks of lifeless dead rock or burning globes of precious fuel sit around being wasted when they would like to use it for some productive end is hard especially when it isn't likely to be a strictly philosophical issue for abstract discussion it will be real uses like raising a family or crafting artificial wonders or supporting libraries and archives of knowledge and art or powering resource facilities trying to figure out how to beat entropy the galaxy is full of valuable resources wasting away to an advanced civilization an untapped star isn't a pretty object but rather a monstrosity akin to washing a campfire made of books and food since it can supply life every moment it's wasting its fuel not doing so is life being burned away only in scenarios where they are not of value either because you cannot practically make use of them or have some better source can really be long lasting arguments against taking over the galaxy and utilizing all its resources otherwise it only represents a temporary or local delay if you decide not to grow or harvest it does not matter unless each nation on each planet you have also decides to and then every generation the issue comes back up again and they must each decide to continue not growing or harvesting of course i said planets there and the assumption of plurality might be premature one common objection to this is that folks while they live on a computer or in some nutri tank or mansion with a headset on would skip on space colonization in favor of staying at home in virtual utopias this doesn't work either though because any virtual reality that could feel real enough to be universally appealing to potential space colonists so they stay home is also sophisticated enough that it's got smart machines that can pass for human in the vr settings which takes way way more complexity than programming a simple cranking self-replicator to disassemble rocks and turn them into computer hardware vr support equipment and more copies of itself to be sent on spaceships to other systems honestly very little sophistication is involved in interstellar travel or harvesting asteroids are smelled into raw materials so everybody might dive into vr and also refuse to leave the solar system where a light light would interfere on sinking updates but that does not imply they left the galaxy alone quite to the contrary with no one interested in colonizing wards and all of them sublimely convinced vr or simulation is better it still only takes one small group to adapt their technology to make harvester probes and they ought to have the tech for that longer they can make virtual worlds so good they match reality in terms of environment or simulated characters for interaction if you can program a virtual human to carry on a conversation or life in a sim you can program one to follow a star chart hunt for giant rocks and run mineral extraction the former is orders of magnitude harder than the latter so you should be able to do the latter long before virtual utopias become universally addictive if that is what happens which raises the question how much processing power do you need and how much can you jam into a solar system well the answer is that you can really start squeezing stuff down if you want to you could cram the entire galaxy into a volume smaller than what would fit between us and the nearest star without it collapsing into being a black hole we have a concept called a matriarchal brain which can be summarized as a simple but enormous computer with a star in its basement able to virtually simulate entire galaxies with lots of processing power to spare and you can upsize that to galactic terms ditto a dyson swarm of conventional habitats or even the grand daddy of artificial shellwork megaplanets what we call the birch planet which is a single huge planet containing more living space on its surface than every single plausible habitable planet in the observable universe would have see the make it earth's episode for more discussion of that or colonizing black holes now getting to galactic domination as we discussed last time it's very hard to run an empire galaxy wide when signals take thousands of years to move around but we do have empires on earth that have lasted a long while with light times of months between messages traveling from the capital to the provinces a civilization does not need to send colonies to harvest the galaxy they can just send out automated extractors to drag everything home including colonies that got set up without their approval or current approval they can drag it all into a tight core a handful of light years across for their resource storage and probably keep the actual civilization those resources fewer packed in even tighter if they like suddenly a galactic empire seems a lot more plausible probably the best way to set that up is to move early send out automated harvesters as soon as the technology seems reliable that way even if some escape the net there isn't all that much material for them to work with to threaten you it all came home and this is only if you're harvesting everything not just asteroids or whole planets but eating the stars too which can conveniently power the operation if you're only going for asteroids and rocky plants to bring home you probably could squeeze all that material into something not much bigger than our solar system out to the kuiper belt without running risk of a black hole collapse for communication lifetimes of less than a day it's only when you start eating whole stars by the billions that month or year communication lag times become an issue so there you have it and if this was going on somewhere we would expect to see a massive black sphere of space from that direction where stars were being systematically consumed or englobed we do not see that which means either it's something aliens do not do for some reason or they can't do it because they don't exist if the former some other post-galactic domination might be picked instead if the latter well we might turn out to be the epicenter of such an expanding dark sphere in the centuries to come one vast dark galactic empire packed into a tiny pocket of a remote part of the galaxy at least until the hulks or ships arrive to move the rest of the galaxy here one aspect of resource exploitation around the galaxy or other galactic construction programs is that presumably occasionally you have to be engaging in projects that the local population might find less than welcome like a hyper space bypass but someone has to let them know and we see an example of that in the opening of greg bale's nebula award-winning novel the forge of god which opens with humanity receiving an alien signal saying i'm sorry but there is bad news the forge of god and its sequel the anvil of the stars gives us a unique look at conquering the galaxy with self-replicating machines one of the first detailed looks at in sci-fi and about justice and morality in colonization extermination and retribution and i'm glad to name it on july 2021 sfia audible audio book of the month greg baer is one of science fiction's best and most active authors with dozens of wonderful titles to his credit and you can find them all over on audible audible has the largest collection of audiobooks out there indeed it's so large you can hit the play button and still be listening to new titles a few centuries from now and as an audible member you will get one credit every month good for any title in their entire premium selection that means the latest bestseller the buzziest new release the hottest celebrity memoir or that bucket list title even meaning to pick up those titles are yours keep forever in your audible library you also get full access to their popular plus catalog it's filled with thousands and thousands of audiobooks original entertainment guided fitness and meditation sleep tracks for better rest and podcasts including ad-free versions of your favorite shows and exclusive series all are included with your membership so you can download and stream all you want no credits needed and you can seamlessly listen to all those on any device picking up where you left off and as always new members can try audible for 30 days for free just visit audible.com isaac or text isaac to 500 500. so we will be continuing our galactic domination series with the galactic laboratory at the end of this month thursday july 29th but before that we also have our mid-month sci-fi sunday episode annoying aliens this weekend on july 11th then next week we will be discussing whether we should go to mars now or return to the moon and establish a base there first then in two weeks we will jump into the distant future or maybe the not too distant future to look at the end of earth we also have our end of the month live stream q a on sunday july 25th and we'll be teaming up this month with rudyard of what if althist for collaboration episode looking at the geopolitics of space colonization if you want to lose when those and other episodes come out make sure to subscribe the channel and if you'd like to help support future episodes you can donate to us on patreon or on our website isaacarthur.net which i'll link to the episode description below along with all of our various social media forums where you can get updates and chat with others about the concepts in the episodes and many other futuristic ideas you can also follow us on itunes soundcloud or spotify to get our audio only versions of the show until next time thanks for watching and have a great week [Music] you

Channel: Isaac Arthur

Views: 126,644

Keywords: space, galaxy, future, galactic, mining, asteroid, alien, planet, exoplanet, moon, resources, ISRU

Id: k3dvcRttms0

Length: 36min 3sec (2163 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Wise_Bass]

The challenge is that if you want to be the exception to a society that is non-expansionistic, you need enough resources/robots/people in order to actually do it successfully. That number may not be small even with automation.

[u/ArenYashar]

The silicon life form, the Horta in that Star Trek episode are conveniently the only life form on a planet with no other ecology. They build nothing and then they mysteriously die off leaving only eggs every so often. Every plausible model of evolution tells us that intelligence and complexity arise from ecological and evolutionary pressures, predator-prey cycles, and so on. So it's just not very plausible you'd have highly intelligent life as the only life and which left no trace, except its eggs and the tunnels it made while meandering through the planet. No other life no buildings no monuments, or art.

• 09:40 to 10:13

There is one point I would like to address here, /u/IsaacArthur. The Horta are not the product of evolution, as you yourself have suggested by pointing out all the ways that the Horta diverge from what we know of how life evolves up Darwin's Corpse Pile.

The Horta are, if my memory recalls the point correctly (or at least my headcanon that explains this plot hole), the latest (and sentient) revision of another race's (silicon-based organic) mining technology. Designed to make tons of exploratory tunnels, then die off (going dormant to allow that race to swoop in, remove any valuable assets), before vacating to allow the Horta another generation of exploration, slowly mining out the interior of the world until it is time to gather up the Horta "eggs" and translocate them to a new mining planet.

In the case of the TOS episode, that secondary race of aliens is not present, either because they died off in the meantime or they had already exploited everything they wanted from what the Horta uncovered and they will return to Janus VI at some later period.

I seem to remember some corroborating evidence for that in the TNG novel entitled Dyson Sphere, even though that novel in itself has some massive plot holes in it. For one, the whole inside-out 1 AU radius planet about a star concept... shakes head

[u/Wolf359loki]

This is the VHS vs BETA argument. Just because A is better technically than B, B can still win in the end..... Never discard Marketing as a real factor in life.