Interstellar Empires

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In all of human history, no empire has ever united the entire planet. Ruling over an entire solar system, let alone thousands or billions of them, is a far more daunting task. Today we are discussing the notion of interstellar empires, civilizations so large they encompass many solar systems and perhaps the galaxy itself, and we are going to look at some of the problems doing so and how they might be overcome or circumvented. Of course, the biggest problem from the outset is the speed of light, to the best of our knowledge there’s no way to exceed it. So if you rule over some mighty empire of a thousand stars spread over a hundred light years, one of your outlying planets might rebel and you wouldn’t even know they had for a century. If you immediately dispatch a fleet to go crush the rebels, it will take them at least another century to arrive, meaning the great-grandchildren of the soldiers you sent will land to re-conquer a planet who regards their rebellion as ancient history. This is even more exacerbated in a full galactic empire, where the edge isn’t a hundred light years away but a hundred thousand. It might easily take a million years for you to hear about a problem and get a fleet there to deal with it, and on those kinds of timelines, even without genetic engineering as an option, you might as well be invading an unknown alien species. As I’ve said before, while there probably aren’t any alien civilizations in this galaxy, you just have to be patient because they’ll arrive eventually and they’ll be related to you because Earth will be their original planet too. So there is often a feeling that no interstellar empire is possible unless you have either FTL (Faster than Light), travel or communication, or a way to let people live much longer, life extension technology. In our SFIA book of the Month, sponsored by Audible, Frank Herbert’s Dune, they had both, and from the same source too, the Spice Melange that extended human lifespans and allowed them to safely use the FTL system they had, as it granted some precognitive abilities. A unified empire is a bit more realistic there too, as you’ve got only one place that provides the spice, the desert planet Dune, and only one group that provides space travel, the Guild. It’s hard to keep systems unified even with FTL, as we’ll discuss, but Monopolies are a decent approach, and Dune examines such concepts in an exciting and thought-provoking way that has made it one of the greatest classic of science fiction. You can pick up a free copy of Dune today and get a 30-day trial of Audible, just use my link, Audible.com/Isaac or text isaac to 500-500. Dune also does a good job showing both how immense in space and time such empires almost have to be, which is something a lot of our fictional examples fail at horribly, though it’s a difficult task. Quite a few will say that they’ve got an empire of a million worlds, but what they show us seems like maybe a few dozen that themselves seem more like single cities or small states. Even then, saying you’ve got a million planets spanning the galaxy still implies you’ve only colonized about 1 in 100,000 solar systems. If you want a million solar systems, you don’t need a whole galaxy either, there’s about that many within 400 light years of Earth. If you’ve got a map of the galaxy on 1080p screen, each pixel would be about 100 light years and such a million-system empire would be about 8 pixels wide. Even a single pixel, a diameter of 100 light years or a radius of 50, should contain a couple thousand systems with most probably having at least one planet that was no harder to terraform than Mars or Venus are. Fictional galactic empires are always woefully underpopulated, the galaxy ought to contain at least a billion planets close enough to Earth in gravity, temperature, and day length that you’d have problems noticing the differences and given the technologies most are shown possessing, and also that we are often shown them including planets that are very non-terrestrial, they ought to have trillions of planets, not millions, and that’s without even getting into megastructures and artificial habitats, which let you house a whole billion-planet empire in a single solar system. If you’re a channel regular and know all about Dyson Spheres and Kardashev 2 civilizations, then you already know that if you are talking about some empire containing billions of worlds each with hundreds of thousands or millions of people, like most sci fi planets seem to have rather than being fully populated, you aren’t talking about an interstellar empire, you’re looking at an interplanetary one that at most controls a single solar system. If we jumped to our solar system’s future a couple thousand years from now, and assumed it was one where people are mostly like they are today and no huge changes of basic physics have been found, you’d expect to see a huge spherical cloud of habitats around the Sun composed of several trillion rotating habitats, each of which qualified as a modest city state or small country on its own, all forming a tight inner sphere that would be the equivalent of the system’s urbanized area. Out past that would be a more disc-shaped and lightly populated region less dependent on sunlight qualifying as a bit of a suburb, and out past that in the Oort Cloud a hazy sphere of a trillion or so mini-worlds counting as the system’s rural area. See last week’s episode, Colonizing the Oort Cloud for details on that. We’d expect that place to have a total population of perhaps 10^20, or 10 billion times our current population of a bit under 10 billion. 100 Quintillion people, none lacking in elbow room or comfortable amounts of food and other resources. You could go a lot higher if you wanted to and that’s without even embracing certain options like Transhumanism to go around in a more efficient cyborg body or upload your mind to a computer. Even a doorstopper fantasy novel of a thousand pages is usually well under half a million words, so you could fill an entire long book series just listing the names of all the planets and nothing else, in a million world empire. There’s a game called Warhammer 40k that I like to give some extra credit as a science fiction setting, even if the science part of that is laughable, for at least portraying the idea that such empires have billions of ships and conquering planets with countless millions of soldiers and can lose one, or even outright destroy it, without it qualifying as big news. They do a good job with the age part too, with their empire being thousands of years old and feeling like it’s held together by inertia and duct tape, not to mention its absolute ruthlessness. Your classic Space Opera author legitimately tends to feel you have to have FTL travel to do the whole many-worlds approach, but you can do that just in one solar system. I think the only author I’ve seen do that is Alastair Reynolds in his novel Revenger, and I don’t think most readers catch that it’s set in a decaying Dyson Swarm. I’m not spoiling anything saying so here, since the clues that indicate it are stuff channel regulars will recognize, and it doesn’t really matter to the plot, which feels like classic galactic space opera, traveling from world to world, in spite of staying inside our own solar system. Reynolds’ also does a good job hammering home the impact of huge amounts of time in his various novels. That’s a big one even if you do have FTL, but as we mentioned earlier, without it your empire has some serious issues at an interstellar scale. Even just enforcing your will on neighboring systems is a lot like having a rebellion occur while George Washington was president, getting news of it when Andrew Jackson was, getting your fleet there when Teddy Roosevelt was, getting news of their success back when Franklin Roosevelt was, and getting the fleet home today. Think about how much the United States has changed between now and then, and that’s just for neighboring systems. You start talking about systems a thousand light years away, still in your own galactic backyard, and you’ve got timelines that have the insurrectionist planet rebelling against some ancient borderline mythological ruler like the Yellow Emperor or the Scorpion King and just getting word of it now. If we did the whole Stargate or Ancient Alien Astronauts thing and assume the pyramids and the like were all interstellar gateways and these guys actually ruled over stellar empires, we might find out there were planets that used to be loyal to one of those ancient kings and broke away. Can you imagine us doing so and deciding to go and punish the rebels in the here and now? Loyalists fleets sent out to crush rebellions only to come home and find out we’ve had a couple dozen rebellions of our own since they left? That would seem fairly absurd. Historically, it’s very hard to keep any sort of even nominally centralized empire coherent if routine travel and communication times inside it take more than a year from edge to edge. That makes keeping control over even your own Oort Cloud a dubious proposition without FTL. Let’s consider what advantages a future civilization might have to expand beyond that one-year zone. Since time is our biggest problem, in a lot of ways, let’s start there. Things change over time, and that’s your real problem more than light lag itself. I don’t need to send a fleet from Earth to re-conquer some rebel planet, not when I can have a loyalist governor bordering on them get word of their rebellion and just take action to deal with it. It doesn’t even have to be from another system. Even ignoring the Dyson Swarm scenarios, the very nature of the technology that lets you settle other solar systems, which is extreme energy abundance, ensures just about every planet and moon and decent sized asteroid looks like a nice place to colonize. It’s unlikely most of these worlds would have the entire planet rebel at once, just some state on it, but their neighbors in the system are likely to have not rebelled either. After all, we often dislike our neighbors more than folks living far off. So such a rebellion might be dealt with in-system. If not though, if you need to send in inter-stellar fleets, keep in mind you are not relying on just one loyalist system maybe 10 light years away. Space is three dimensional, so wherever your nearest neighboring system is, you will generally have a dozen or more other systems off in every direction not much further away. So you don’t have to wait for word to get back to Earth, or even to some sub-sector capital, if everyone knows what they’re supposed to do in such an eventuality. You definitely need a coordinated plan, a strategy for commanders to follow if certain things happen. As everybody knows, that’s the first rule of warfare, always have a plan for every reasonable eventuality. It’s a little more important when your admirals and generals are trying to coordinate their actions, and signals take a decade to travel back and forth. That’s assuming a lot though, since it would be like relying on giving Charlemagne instructions on what to do and expecting that both the instructions and willingness to follow them would have been passed onto Angela Merkel, or that Emperor Hadrian could expect Queen Elizabeth II to have maintained that wall he built. However, we’ve got three ways of dealing with stuff like this in the future. One is our existing method, we try to pass on what’s important and why it’s important to our successors, and that can be effective if you are good at placing an emphasis on traditions and pick those carefully. We do have a lot of multi-generational projects and institutions. Some of which have been running for several centuries and without too much drift from the original intent. Not very many though, and most that have lasted centuries have mutated far away from the original. That could possibly be improved as we better understand psychology and sociology. We’d probably never get anything with the kind of predictive power of Asimov’s Psychohistory, as we explained in the episode on that, but you could get quite good at figuring out how to pass on traditions and goals stably to future generations and keep colonies from mutating away from the original founding concepts. On this channel, and in science fiction in general, we tend to focus a lot on the physical sciences, but it’s important to remember the social sciences could be a lot more important to maintaining giant civilizations than what powers your rocket ships. But technology offers us another possible alternative, out of biology and medicine. We’ve talked about life extension on the channel before, and I’ve joked many a time about how it or Dyson Spheres tend to seem less believable to people than Faster than Light travel, even though one flat out violates the known laws of physics while the other two do not. See the life extension episode for details on that, but short form, there’s no physical laws preventing us from making tiny microscopic machines. You can have several trillion of them in your body and use those to repair or replace damaged sections of your body or damaged DNA in your cells. Doing so is a lot easier said than done, and there may turn out to be easier ways to extend lifespans, but it is certainly physically possible. This doesn’t make you immortal, see the “Digital Death” episode for how even the most extreme forms of life extension can breakdown against the immensity of astronomical timelines, but it offers an option that would mean your interstellar colony ships aren’t arriving at their destination crewed by the great-great-grandchildren of the original crew, but by the original crew, and possibly also their great-grandchildren. Interstellar journeys being rather boring, raising kids gives you something to occupy your time and making them helps break up the boredom. This is a handy approach for sending in interstellar armies too. You can launch a fleet with skeleton crews and have them arrive fully manned, like compound interest for people. This saves on the cost of salaries too, though how you are paying people or taxing distant colonies in a no-FTL universe is a tricky topic as we saw in the Interplanetary Trade episode. But, if suddenly people are living centuries or even potentially thousands of years, the game changes a lot. The colonial governor of some distant planet of billions founded a few thousand years ago might have been born on Earth. We’ve been using the term empire a lot even though we just mean a coherent civilization, be it democratic and free or tyrannical despotism, but neo-feudal civilizations are a staple of science fiction and this is one area where it might be kind of right. Even if you have a working democracy, and a genuine one not just for show in a civilization where people don’t die of old age, you are probably going to be mostly governed by very, very old people. Gerontocracy is a pretty common system throughout human history, even if it is almost never the official one. A lot like meritocracy or plutocracy, rule based on merit or wealth, it’s rarely the official form of government, but often a major de facto aspect of them. We like age and experience in our leaders, mostly, but obviously if you pick the very oldest people to govern, you will constantly be replacing them from failing vigor, senility, and death, all of which cause problems. Hereditary rule is another one of those methods that often comes up as an unofficial form of government, but has been official a lot too. Indeed it remains the default method of passing on power and assets, we just tend to exempt governance from that. The problem with this method was never a secret, the heir might be a drooling incompetent, spoiled brat, or total sociopath. With life extension though, you have the upside that the eldest no longer has a huge experience gap over their siblings, if you live to be a thousand you’ve probably got thousands of potential heirs to pick a competent one from and groom them, and people have had centuries to either identify that person’s faults or get comfortable with them. Nor can one ignore that technology can potentially deal with these problems. If your biology and psychology is good enough, you can probably fix people who are morons or sociopaths. Disturbingly, you also can genetically tailor people to be better at certain tasks and accidentally end up with an inherited caste system too. That’s been historically popular as well after all. Add to that, everybody knows beyond any reasonable doubt who made the place. That planet or habitat was terraformed or built by specific folks with specific legal contracts. Those claims don’t rest on oral history and tradition. It’s a little different if you have solid records, video, genetic testing, and so on backing up the assertion that your ancestor literally made the place you live. It’s even more different if that ancestor, Beth, still lives down the road and can break out their photo albums and scrapbooks from that period, and has been sitting on the town council since it was founded. Everyone knows Beth and even the folks who might not think she is super-competent consider her a known factor and one with centuries of experience at what she does. Even if they’re officially a democracy, even if they genuinely are one, that person is likely to get elected over and over again simply by inertia and being a known commodity. A key point then is that extended lifespans could have a massively stabilizing influence on colonies. For good or ill, those folks who left Earth might still be around, and their siblings might still be around on Earth and exchange heavily delayed family gossip and birthday cards. Now the other one that comes up for keeping the original crew as your colonists on an interstellar ship is to stick them all on ice or in stasis, and that is one option that sometimes gets raised as an option for beating light lag. Everybody agrees to freeze themselves for a decade, wake up for a year, then go back on ice. A variation on this, Aestivation Hypothesis, got suggested as a Fermi Paradox Solution recently too. The notion being that civilizations might sleep until the Universe was colder, which would generally mean computation was far more efficient, as we discussed in the Civilizations at the End of Time episodes. It doesn’t work unless everyone really, really wants it to though, since I can’t imagine why I would voluntarily go into slumber for a century just so folks on another planet could feel up to date. Even if you can get people to do it, whole civilizations, you are really leaving yourself vulnerable to anyone who disobeys or who is from outside. Beyond that, all the resources of the galaxy are hardly static and eternal, stars keep burning their fuel and asteroids full of handy material keep crashing into them, so there’s no advantage to waiting to gather those. It does work in the specific post-stellar era we discuss in Civilizations at the End of Time because everything is all gathered up already and it’s the only real option, and you’re not freezing yourself, you’re slowing yourself down. You can speed back up if you need to but you, and any rivals, won’t want to do that because the whole system we discussed there relies on keeping cold, and it takes a very long time for any components you are using to cool back off every time you use them. Prior to that glacial existence you were grabbing up every bit of matter and energy you could, and twiddling your thumbs on ice for the galactic equivalent of daylight savings time is not a practical approach to doing that. When you wake up, there’s less stuff to harvest, even assuming someone didn’t do it while you slept. I wouldn’t expect rebels to politely go to sleep to wait for your fleet to arrive either. But I wanted to mention that option, it’s impractical but does allow you to circumvent light lag and helps you maintain a unified culture. Absent options like this you’ve got the issue that folks are not only going to diverge from your parent civilization, but that civilization will alter too. It’s not rebellious kids but rebellious cousins. This all assumes you want stasis of cultures, which is dubious since that concept is almost antithetical to a lot of modern civilization, which tends to embrace change, or at least says it does. Some we embrace, some we reject, but more importantly there have been a lot of civilizations which staunchly desired cultural stasis and pushed hard to maintain it. That mindset probably is not very conducive to improving technology, since better technology is almost by definition culturally disruptive. However, they might have plateaued on their research, either not particularly feeling a need for more tech or just slamming into brick walls on further research. Most fictional interstellar empires are technologically stagnant anyway, or at least not gaining new technology at an accelerating rate, and that’s probably one area authors get right. We are nowhere near maxing out our own technology but we could hit a brick wall on science in even just a couple of centuries. Giant empires don’t necessarily help with that either, since a breakthrough in science in one part of it will take centuries to reach the other end, and possibly have gotten discovered dozens of times independently just from light lag. That is one reason to be part of an empire though, particularly if it is just a loose coalition, you can get the science and art of a thousand systems and those should all travel at light speed. You don’t necessarily need benefits to be in an empire, historically, many have operated with the lone benefit that non-membership results in death, but if you are running something more civilized, it’s hard to get taxes out of places that are decades away and rather self-sufficient, since it’s hard to offer them any service. Also hard to convince an entire fully-populated planet, let alone a whole star system, to agree to alliances. I think you could convince people to stay part of an alliance that just agreed to exchange signals and maybe use the same basic measurement units, language, and currency, but even that is nigh impossible at a galactic scale unless you agree to no change. For the conquest and coercion options, those are a little trickier and we’ll save them for the Interstellar Warfare episode in the spring. Language especially would seem very difficult, but places could have their own changing local tongues and just some agreed on non-changing basic language, or that all changes to it must come only from a specific committee on Earth. Which sounds nuts as a concept but remember it wouldn’t be the day-to-day language and computers would probably do all the translating, so you are mostly agreeing to use the same basic code so two planets or ships can talk to each other by speaking to their computers who speak to each other and translate. There is obviously a lot of leeway in what we mean by ‘empire’ too, I’m just using it as a blanket term for some sort of cohesive civilization. Earth, just a single planet, has never been unified and I honestly doubt we ever will be unless we have some external threat making us be. The same applies to any Star League, they’ve got no external threats in any situation where they can’t remain unified just by light lag, since it implies war is very nearly impossible on a galactic scale, but if such threats and wars were viable, so too would be a unified civilization. If it’s not, there’s not much reason for hostilities either, so maintaining loose alliances with neighbors, defensive or trade pacts, would still make sense and probably not be hard to engage in. And you can have conflicts between neighboring systems, a decade really is not an absurd timeline for conflicts and as we discussed last week, odds are good they have territory genuinely bordering each other, with potentially overlapping Oort Cloud settlements and possible feuds over rogue planets that might be just days not years away from other inhabited locations. Space isn’t static either so stuff would slowly drift in or out of someone’s bubble around their own star. Like the banks of rivers moving, and of such things are conflicts born. Even in such cases though, where there is a proximity of days not decades, you need to have clever people with a lot of leeway to act and take the initiative because they won’t be able to call home for advice and permission. You can’t plan for every eventuality, after all, and as everybody knows, the first rule of warfare is that no plan survives contact with the enemy. So you need folks on the scene who can adjust and tweak implementation at least. So while we can see some options for large coherent civilizations without FTL, one can see why most authors choose to use it. I’d probably do it too if I ever wrote a book meant to be set in an interstellar period, though I’d probably write one in a proto-Dyson Swarm instead. In fact I did use FTL in one setting. Folks ask me a lot if I’ll ever write something, fiction or not, and I usually say the channel keeps me too busy, but in point of fact I do actually consult and provide technical advice on a lot of projects. It’s a lot of fun to work with an author or with a big team of game and graphics designers. For the upcoming 2018 video game Hades, I did include a Faster Than Light system. I’m a big believer any handwave science or solution should be kept to a minimum, so I had a lot of fun trying to connect every aspect to just one, up to and including why humanity found the galaxy free to colonize without existing alien empires in the way. Realism is important, especially now that graphics have reached the point you can genuinely model something that huge in detail, and it was a lot of fun to include tons of giant ships and megastructures instead of the traditional single-biome planets. I think if you are going to have ships kilometers long manned by millions they need to actually show it. Why is the ship that big? Why has it got a crew that big rather than computers running it all? Why do fleets pound on each other at short range? Why did their empire emerge as it did? What’s the economy and motivations for folks to do stuff? Why are people desperate or poor when their tech should easily provide comfort for all? Why aren’t they using various and very obvious applications of that technology to live in a Utopia? If you’re designing a futuristic fictional setting, you don’t have to answer all those questions, but I think you should, and with realistic or at least plausible scenarios, even if it does feature Clarketech or Unobtainium. If there’s no ancient alien empires still around, what happened to them? Always tricky to come up with a both plausible and novel solution to that, and I think I did for Hades, and I’ll probably discuss it more in a future episode. That last is a point I always make about interstellar empires and the Fermi Paradox; that you don’t have to be cohesive to keep expanding, previous pioneer colonies grow up and send out more pioneers to neighboring empty systems. So you can’t forget about all those old empires that might have existed millions of years back that would still be expanding even if the core collapsed, because they don’t care about that anymore than most of us care about the collapse of some Egyptian or Chinese dynasty a few thousand years ago, indeed less since it takes them millennia to even hear from their homeworld and they feel no more kinship to them than we do to a chimp or bonobo, or they to each other. Or that the borders of the universe don’t end at the edge of the galaxy, so neither does their civilization have to. Our topic for next week, Intergalactic Colonization, will look at how you can do that even without FTL. Don’t think of FTL as a magic handwave that automatically allows interstellar empires either, it obviously helps and may be impossible without it, particularly anything close knit, but you’re still talking about many, potentially billions, of individual Kardashev-2 civilizations. Of those, each individual one would have a population and resources so big that most fictional galactic empires would fit inside a small corner of one. A tiny local nation that most inhabitants of that system would barely recognize the name of. A realistic galactic empire, even just one with only planets inhabited, should have billions of planets and if each had a representative, just one for the whole planet, they would need their own planet just to meet on, with no room left over for any family, staff, guards, or service industries. But if you do have FTL to do such things, it’s not just a galaxy of planets, or even a Kardashev-3 galaxy of Dyson swarms you have to consider, but intergalactic or inter-dimensional empires, with bits and pieces in alternate realities. Again, the Universe doesn’t end at the edge of the galaxy. Frank Herbert was always a little unclear on that in the Dune Novels, and canon on that is very iffy even if you don’t include the ones his son and Kevin J. Anderson wrote, which is a subject of much fan feuding. But as best as I can tell, that interstellar empire was not set in just one galaxy or even necessarily one Universe, it’s suggested at one point that Guild Navigators might travel between Universes to parallel or alternate ones, always picking systems that are safe, as they are precognitive, to settle people in. Instant FTL to any place makes settling a planet on the other side of the Universe as easy as the one next door after all, so your empire isn’t necessarily a contiguous region of space, and indeed giant empires inside a single system Dyson swarm probably wouldn’t be either since all the habitats are orbiting and moving and indeed mobile, able to turn on an engine and migrate to another nation. Dune, which again is our book of the month sponsored by Audible, is one of my favorite novels and series, because it has such a sense of vastness and deep future. You really feel like you’re in some distant time of an immense and ancient empire where people aren’t entirely human anymore, but a bit superhuman. It’s a good pick for audio too as it’s been made into an audiobook more than once and one of those has a full cast, rather than a single narrator, and that always adds some extra depth. Those full-cast productions are like a movie or TV show, that you can listen to while driving or doing anything else where you need your hands and eyes free. You can pickup a FREE copy today, just use my link in this episode’s description, Audible.com/Isaac or text promo code isaac to 500-500 to get a free book and 30 day free trial, and that book is yours to keep whether you stay on with Audible or not. You are going to love Frank Herbert’s Dune, but if you don’t, you can swap it out for another at any time. Speaking of audio, I’ve been getting asked a lot in comments recently if I’d ever consider putting the episodes out audio-only and I realized it’s been a long time since I mentioned it, but every episode is available on soundcloud and iTunes as audio-only for download, both with music and without, and I do always put a link to those in the videos descriptions right with the links for the channel’s website, social media locations, patreon donation link, and the link to all the cover art and thumbnails we use here, by artist Jakub Grygier. I tend to forget to mention such things because there’s already a lot of repetition of individual key concepts and references to old episodes with more details, and when I forget to include those I tend to get asked stuff like “Hey Isaac, could you do an episode on Wormholes or Quantum Entanglement?”, though that’s partially my own fault since I don’t like to reference older episodes with inferior audio and visual quality. And let me thank our Patreon supporters for funding all those improvements and all the volunteers who’ve been helping making graphics or doing script review these last few months, I feel it’s really improved the channel over previous years. Again next week is Intergalactic Colonization and that will end Year 3 of the channel, but we’ll be back the very next week to start the year off big by looking at Colonizing the Sun itself, and see just how far we can push the limits on what modern science might let us do there. For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!
Info
Channel: Isaac Arthur
Views: 403,048
Rating: 4.9044538 out of 5
Keywords: interstellar, nation, government, space, interplanetary, Dune, Kardashev, Dyson, Frank Herbert, Science Fiction, space travel, spaceship, empire, warfare, settlement, exploration, future
Id: 1LQU69sYd3s
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 34min 54sec (2094 seconds)
Published: Thu Dec 21 2017
Reddit Comments

Just go to Isaac Arthur's Youtube channel and start at the beginning of the endless amount of videos. It is beyond amazing and very bingeworthy

👍︎︎ 37 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Dec 26 2017 🗫︎ replies

[removed]

👍︎︎ 37 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Dec 26 2017 🗫︎ replies

Love his videos, he does have CC available but I didn't have much trouble understanding him. His voice adds a unique character to the videos.

👍︎︎ 19 👤︎︎ u/Methosz 📅︎︎ Dec 26 2017 🗫︎ replies

Funny how redditors are more obnoxious about his speech impediment than YouTube commentators. You'd think it would be easy to be a little bit classier than YouTube comments.

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Dec 26 2017 🗫︎ replies

Yeah guys he has a lisp.

Anyone feel like actual discussing any of the points he presented? I know my sci-fi settings are going to be much more localized now...

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/FoxFluffFur 📅︎︎ Dec 26 2017 🗫︎ replies

I really don't think there is any way to keep a multi-star empire going without FTL. The second you launch your colony ship it will start diverging culturally and genetically. It could be that every time you launch a colony, you create a potential future enemy. Perhaps most civilisations realised this and just decided to burrow into simulations and live in starships that travel together.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Planetariophage 📅︎︎ Dec 27 2017 🗫︎ replies

I believe he has rhotacism.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/aghamenon 📅︎︎ Dec 26 2017 🗫︎ replies
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