Space Derelicts & Trash Worlds

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Issac, have you done a video on the future of Recycling? We could technically recycle matter down to the atomic level, if we put the resources into it. What sort of technologies could we deploy to clean up the environment, and make sure that nothing goes to waste?

👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/chadlupkes 📅︎︎ Aug 29 2019 đź—«︎ replies

The space station at the 4:53 mark is terrible. People inside the rings would be subjected to continuously shifting pseudogravity, and the bearings the rings are mounted on would suffer huge torques all the time from gyroscopic effects.

Perfect background for a video titled "trash worlds", though. :)

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/FaceDeer 📅︎︎ Aug 29 2019 đź—«︎ replies

First thought on seeing the title: the scene with the Junkions and the Planet of Junk, from The Transformers: the Movie, as an example of a "trash world".

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/StrumWealh 📅︎︎ Aug 29 2019 đź—«︎ replies
👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/herkato5 📅︎︎ Aug 31 2019 đź—«︎ replies

You could probably do a whole episode just on dealing with waste heat.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Wise_Bass 📅︎︎ Sep 01 2019 đź—«︎ replies
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This episode is sponsored by Brilliant Science fiction and fantasy loves to show us brave archeologists and tomb raiders uncovering some ancient ruins of a lost civilization, but one day there might be whole civilizations devoted to it. One of the most popular plots in science fiction is where our brave adventures encounter a ruined ship, typically of some ancient and long dead alien race, or xeno-archeologists hunting among such ruins. These make for great stories, but lack an element of realism in the context of the Fermi Paradox and Galaxy-spanning civilizations. You need some serious handwaves or plot contrivances to explain not why a ship got abandoned or planetary civilization fell or went extinct, but why nobody else found it or re-settled such a world almost immediately on astronomical timelines. Analogies to our own lost ships and civilizations don’t really work out well in space or by the capabilities of spacefaring civilizations. These days when a ship sinks we know where and can go hunt that thing down, our ancestors couldn’t go SCUBA diving to reclaim their lost treasures. We also want to keep in mind that a lot of the archeological past is either composed of trash our ancestors didn’t care about or repurposed, like using broken pottery in following rounds of construction and repair, or had cultural or religious significance. We don’t find abandoned tracts of useful land, just abandoned tombs or temples and the like, and typically ones subject to many rounds of ravaging or repair or reuse or robbery. That’s not likely to happen to an entire planet, unless it’s been subjected to such destruction that ruins probably wouldn’t exist, or was the only one some civilization had, in which case it would imply they aren’t overflowing with advanced technologies by the standards of any civilization able to get there and dig it up. If you’re able to launch expeditions to investigate worlds around alien suns, it means you have the technology to reach and colonize those worlds too, meaning if you find a world with a dead civilization on it, it either was very primitive compared to you or had a very stay-at-home attitude to the galaxy, as otherwise one if its other colonies would come by and reclaim that world. You’re also not likely to have planets used as waste dumps, to any high-energy civilization, throwing garbage down on a planet instead of recycling that garbage or dismantling that planet for raw material is like throwing money into a trash can and setting it on fire, except that your trash can is also made out of gold. If you’re settling other worlds it’s because you have very good automation or very good energy production, and probably both, and your bottleneck is always raw materials. This would seem to really mess up this popular fictional trope, but another area where authors often mess up in science fiction is scale, not just of how vast and huge our galaxy and the civilizations in it would tend to be, occupying huge amounts of space, but also of time. And that revives this notion of ruins and derelicts and trash planets and the folks who explore them for fun and profit. A couple weeks back we were looking at how we might go about maintaining all the vast megastructures we hope to one day fill the solar system with, and eventually even the galaxy. We’d expect to build trillions of them throughout just our own solar system, as we move toward building a Dyson Swarm and becoming Kardashev-2 civilization. I noted there that even if we’re incredibly good at maintaining those structures, in many cases they would end up wearing down and get abandoned, destined to float around until they get recycled. Even if they lasted as long as our own civilization has, call it ten thousand years, and only spent a decade abandoned and scrapped, that would still mean one in a thousand would at any given moment be sitting there as a derelict. And mind you, that’s a way better reclamation rate than we have in our civilization, where a lot more than one in a thousand structures is sitting around vacant and nominally abandoned, or occupied by squatters. Such being the case, these sort of megastructures, each meant to be home to hundreds of thousands if not millions or far more, and themselves numbering in the trillions, would represent the equivalent land area of a million Earths, just in this solar system alone. They’re a small fraction of a vaster civilization that dwarfs them, but are just so numerous that they dwarf us. Even if these decommissioned space habitats and industrial megastructures were only a thousandth of their civilization, and even if they only supported populations of hold outs, squatters, or scavengers a thousandth of our own population density, you’d still be talking about many trillions of people in any given fully developed, Kardashev-2 civilization. And that’s just assuming long-lived well-maintained habitats being only briefly out of play before being recycled in some fashion. It doesn’t include the countless quadrillions of ships probably meandering around that solar system or scenarios like one being abandoned for reasons like a war, an economic or fashion shift, or repurposed because its inhabitants or maintenance AI went a bit weird in the head. Such places could easily just age out, not from maintenance issues, but because in a long-lived civilization with life extension, they might fill up quick and be left with nominal immortals. Those folks wouldn’t last forever, they might die or transition to a digital existence, uploading their mind, and their neighbors who have known them for centuries might want to effectively entomb them and their way of life rather than give that home and parcel of land to someone else. The same could happen on Earth, as we noted in “Civilizations at the End of Time: Dying Earth”, when building on a planet you don’t have space issues, you have energy and heat removal issues, so a culture with strong building materials and automated maintenance might be prone to just powering down someone’s home and building over top of it in endless layers, a rising planet-wide city or Ecumenopolis, a Kardashev-1 Civilization. They don’t really care about their possessions much, as a raw material source, because it’s not going anywhere, and they might not even know if someone actually died or just uploaded their mind or went on ice for some centuries out of boredom. Unpowered facilities don’t really count to them, only those drawing a lot of energy and producing a lot of heat matter. Given a few million years, even if people tended to live thousands of years on average, that planet is going to be more necropolis than ecumenopolis. Same, if some habitat gets grey-gooed or overwhelmed by some killer AI or super-virus, it’s as likely to be quarantined as blown up. Even if you opt for that route with it, or recycle your abandoned habitats, you still need to drag that off somewhere safe if you can, plus a full-blown Kardashev-2 civilization has that same waste heat issue an Ecumenpolis has, plus the debris issue. You don’t nuke a dangerous or derelict megastructure in the middle of the Swarm if you can avoid it, you give a push outside the main swarm to a place where it represents no navigational hazards or heat production limits or a vacant and valuable lot in your solar englobement. And they are quite likely to be towed off to some facility that specializes in handling the wrecks, or storing them till they can be handled, those could easily begin to resemble the classic Space Hulk of lumped-together stations and ships, scrapyards of astronomical proportions, and such a storage facility might be a minor planet too, since it’s nice to have just enough gravity to keep your debris from floating away. Probably some mined-out asteroid or moon that had all its smelting facilities still but nobody particularly wanted to settle in a big way. Indeed, much as communities often invite landfills or prisons into their backyard for the extra jobs and funds, while far more are happy not to have them in their own backyard, places fallen on harder times might fight to become such repositories. When we start looking at the sheer numbers involved, even if we are ultra-conservative and optimistic about it, it’s not that these things are the norm, it’s just that they are outliers of such an enormously massive sample that they are everywhere. This is a bit of a recurring concept in our Rogue Civilization series, that many of these less than utopian staples of science fiction could pop up as phases places go through or simply be so numerous by the sheer size of the main civilization that even though they are rare, they still outnumber our own modern civilization many times over. One quick note on this waste heat idea, and the notion of time. Assuming you are still bound by the Laws of Thermodynamics, you can never use more power than you can get rid of as heat, and this places a lot of constraints on many of the projects we discuss here that tend to get overlooked and why I so often pound the drum about waste heat as the bottleneck on advanced civilizations. Ultimately heat can only be gotten rid of by radiating it away, which is based on your total surface area and your temperature. You can spread out to allow you to use more heat, but for something like a Dyson Swarm this means longer and longer travel times and signal lag not only over the whole thing, but between individual components. Volume rises with the cube of radius or diameter, surface area only with the square, that results in an inverse relationship between population and density, because a civilization a hundred times more numerous in terms of energy use needs a hundred times the surface area to radiate that heat away, meaning it is ten times wider and thousand times larger in volume. Everybody has ten times more space, meaning they are the cube root of 10, 2.15, times further away from each other than before. Every signal takes 215% as long to arrive, every trip takes longer or requires more energy, and thus more heat, and those signals, even if as concentrated beams, need a bit more power to deliver their message, and thus more heat. It also means you don’t really want people smelting down a habitat in a grand display of energy wealth right in the middle of that swarm, nor do you want to push it out of that swarm really fast, because heat is money in these places, not energy. But this has another aspect too, because you can’t expand a planet to increase how much it can radiate, so if you’re trying to disassemble a planet for raw materials or terraform it with nanotech, there is actually a maximum speed you can do this at or you’ll smelt all your equipment or little robots or terraformed organic material. It’s just an aspect of high-tech civilizations, even ones we’d think of as post-scarcity, waste not, want not, especially when it comes to using energy inside the main portion of a built-up civilization. As another quick note, you might wonder, considering how much energy is involved with moving things at interplanetary speeds, if they might find smelting something down inside the swarm energy cheaper than shoving it away, but they can reclaim most of that energy used to push it up to speed away from them, and such derelicts also make a handy place to adjust habitat orbital paths with, by pushing off them, using the various beaming or mass driver techniques we’ve discussed elsewhere. So long as they can push the habitat away using less net heat than smelting it there would take, they will shove it away, and slowly, so its voyage may take many years. So we’ve got all these derelict ships, ghost town habitats, and all these abandoned layers of Ecumenopolises that might be sitting around not in use by the main civilization for any number of reasons. A given world might not do that Necropolis approach we mentioned of course, indeed I’d not expect most would, but there’d be many such places and on some you’d probably have teams of people who hunted around them. Legally or not, a world might have some rule that if no one heard from the owner in a century they’re allowed to pry the place open or auction the rights off to pay back taxes, like we often do with homes or storage units. Such things would vary from world to world, and it might be very rare and orderly, or it could be a totally illegal black market thing. It might attract romantic adventurers or scoundrels, it might be some small club of bored dilettantes or some university-style archeology department. And remember time here too, if you’ve had some isolationist habitat that utterly closed up its shutters and ran on reserves of fusion fuel and raw material, as they likely all could do, it might finally go dark hundreds of centuries later and when you crack that open you might find layers of ruins and fossils and inhabitants at the end who looked like morlocks and were effectively an alien civilization right in your own backyard. Same, we’ve often talked about generation ships meant to plow through interstellar space for centuries, or even hundreds of centuries, and if one got abandoned or damaged, or left behind a colony in its wake that just didn’t take off, someone is eventually going to want to investigate that matter. This isn’t like poking around one small tomb or one wrecked ocean going ship, these things are huge and old and could occupy whole towns worth of experts for generations dissecting what happened. And you probably need to move slow about that too, odds are their data is encrypted and trying to find the 3M post-it note someone conveniently left on their terminal with their password might take a while, or you might be negotiating with some half-mad ship computer for access, only to find out that it went nuts at failing to save its crew from a space debris collision and later find out in truth it had also wiped out the handful of survivors in a berserk attempt to cover its shame. You might get some fairly crazy crew on board a lot of these ships too. If you’ve been one of skeleton crew running a ship for generations it’s not hard to imagine getting a bit neurotic, or having been, to have signed on for such a job in the first place, and that ship might be brimming with weird traps, hidden vaults, killer robots, feral pets or genetically tailored maintenance organisms, or some axe-crazy lunatic who murdered the other crew and went on ice to await fresh victims to add to his skull pile. You send a team in there looking for information or treasure, and you might find you bit off more than you can chew, like they kept gene-hacked or cyborged animals around for pit fights and the ultra-redundant interstellar space freighter has still got life support running partially millennia after the dozen crewmembers, or even lone crewmember, died somehow. In Warhammer 40k, a setting notorious for its utter disinterest in scientific realism that still somehow manages to nail many ideas more realistically than most scifi, they have folks forever boarding derelict ships and spacehulks or abandoned lower layers of Hive cities and running into mutants and aliens or leftover ancient and crazy technology, that might occasionally happen in the future when folks go in to investigate or loot such places. Not just plunder for artifacts or memorabilia, you might have insurance investigators poking around for years figuring out what happened and salvage teams dragging them back to holding yards where they might take centuries to arrive and as long to get processed through a court for who owned this or that or was liable for what. You could easily have an underfunded storage yard of derelict ships or habitats under lockdown while they waited for the courts to settle the case, which might take centuries even if they were expeditious just from many of the litigants not living in the same star system. That’s quite an opportunity for anyone shady too, both to occupy those places or take a bribe to look the other way or to deal in goods looted or produced in such places. We’ll save space piracy for another time, like quietly invading some isolationist and primitivist habitat to use as a base, but any place where the rule isn’t finders-keepers on salvage, there’s likely to be that long drawn out investigation period and given the potentially ultra-hazardous junk inside, even when the authorities do investigate it’s likely to be slow and super-cautious. If your job is to go in and investigate such places, filled with potential death-traps of automated defenses or broken bits, you might be quite glad to look the other way as a silent partner to some team of illicit scavengers seeking treasure and excitement, who will deal with most of the hazards themselves and give you a cut of the plunder, if they live. For that matter, for every habitat being decommissioned there’s going to be a period where most folks don’t want to live there anymore but it’s still rather habitable. That’s very ideal for squatters and rogues, and the nominal owner or oversight authority might actually be inclined to turn a blind eye as a disreputable crowd of squatters or looters might encourage those folks still stubbornly living there to vacate so they can turn off the lights and bust it down for salvage. Or, if it follows that notion of inhabitants slowly aging and going digital at some point, living in the data cores of the megastructure, they might encourage that so they can divert the energy and resources to more computing. They might be the ones pushing for an exodus too, trying to turn the place into a ghost town in a very literal sense, or the maintenance AI might be wanting to turn the place into a nature preserve to protect the increasingly divergent mutated organisms living there. So much depends on the psychology and society of that civilization, and it’s likely to vary all over the place, in both space and time. In the inner core of a Dyson Swarm you’ve got that energy and heat issue but everybody is pretty self-contained and self-sufficient if they want to be, so that offers a lot of room for divergent cultures, outlooks, and so on. But you’re also likely have millions of Oort Cloud Habitats built by isolationists or as part of border fort and detection system or laser-highway relays, and you could have whole migrant fleets that meandered around those raiding abandoned facilities or squatting in one relegated to neutral status in some border dispute between two neighboring powers. You’d have failed colonies, abandoned stations, derelict ships, scrapyards for equipment or dangerous material, old military hardware floating about, facilities or ships scuppered by their owners or captains for the insurance money or to get out of some obligation. Probably not a lot proportionally, especially in the sort of utopian society we might hope for, ethical, prosperous, and smart, but enough in raw numbers to have whole civilizations worth of people on the fringes engaged in salvage, plunder, or squatting, and even if entirely inside the law, whole facilities devoted to it with staffs big enough and operational times long enough to become their own unique culture. You could easily have some abandoned asteroid mine turned scrapyard peopled by millions whose whole economy for centuries was taking apart dead megastructures towed there, and that’s likely to be a fairly unique sort of place. Same for some settlers coming to a world or habitat that was abandoned or failed halfway done or transitioned to some digital existence, living in the shadow of that prior civilization with it influencing you, all the way down to sneaking around the old dome or subterranean colonial facilities with your childhood friends looking for knick-knacks left by them or by prior generations who set up their clubhouses there. For that matter, if everyone did go digital, they might have whole layers of virtual worlds in those abandoned ghost towns you might be exploring too. And again, time and divergence mean that whoever was there first and whoever is there now could be so different from each other they might as well be aliens. So maybe we never get to experience the classic science fiction scenario of breaking into alien spaceships to find high-tech artifacts guarded by murderous aliens or xeno-archeologists cracking open the tombs of fallen civilizations on dead and sterile worlds sitting for millions of years, but we might end up getting a very close approximation. I’m not sure if that would be a good thing, but at least it would be exciting. One of the points I was emphasizing today was how things like astronomical scales and thermodynamics can place limitations on even very advanced civilizations or make entire civilizations where we’d normally expect just a few folks as outliers. These often get missed in science fiction even by authors who are pretty good about doing their research and knowing their science, and sadly many don’t. But a good understanding of math and science is what lets us try to look at the future in a more realistic way, be it the far future of humanity or just our daily lives and careers nowadays. It’s an area of knowledge whose usefulness cannot be overestimated, something I suspect anyone watching this show needs little convincing about. If you want to learn more math and science, and have fun while you’re doing it, try out Brilliant. Their online courses and daily challenges let you enhance your knowledge of math and science with easy to learn interactive methods from the comfort of your own home and at your own pace. To make it even easier, Brilliant now lets you download any of their dozens of interactive courses through the mobile app, and you'll be able to solve fascinating problems in math, science, and computer science no matter where you are, or how spotty your internet connection. If you’d like to learn more science, math, and computer science, go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur and sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual Premium subscription, so you can solve all the daily challenges in the archives and access dozens of problem solving courses. So we mentioned how all these derelict ships and stations and worlds might offer some excitement in the future, where we’d generally expect things to be pretty prosperous but maybe a bit boring, and while there are a lot of ways we might amuse ourselves in the future, one I get asked to cover a lot is what sports will be like in the future and in space, and next week we’ll take a look at what sort of new options low or zero gravity can offer us for our athletes and audiences in Space Sports. The week after that, we’ll return to Mars to look at how we’d go about terraforming it if we wanted to, in Springtime on Mars. For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notifications bell. And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others. And if you’d like to support future episodes, you can donate to us on Patreon or our website, IsaacArthur.net, linked in the video description below. Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a Great Week!
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Channel: Isaac Arthur
Views: 222,178
Rating: 4.9293919 out of 5
Keywords: space, spaceship, space hulk, ancient, alien, worlds, planets, civilizations, garbage
Id: xMrWF4nOyC8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)
Published: Thu Aug 29 2019
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