[dolphins singing to a big band jazz song] So long, and thanks for all the fish! So sad that it should come to this! We tried to warn you all, but oh deeeear... [Jacob speaking] So there's this thing in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" called the "Total Perspective Vortex," and it's a machine that extrapolates the whole universe from pretty much nothing.. Okay, it extrapolates the whole universe from a piece of cake, because it is a Douglas Adams's book, but regardless, when you step inside the machine, you comprehend the scale of the universe, and then you go insane - Instantly. As he says: "...she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation, and herself in relation to it. The shock completely annihilated her brain. ... if life is going to exist in a universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion." This is "Space... Engine." [spacey robot beat] It's a program that extrapolates the whole universe from preexisting databases and laws of nature, and it... completely annihilated my brain. I really only ever use "Space Engine" for one thing. I start at the Earth and I just zoom out. Slowly at first and then faster, and faster, and faster, until the galaxies are whizzing by at thousands of times the speed of light. I also have the same thought every time I do: Where is the Moon? I must have missed the Moon. But I haven't missed the Moon. I'm just thinking WAY too small. The Moon is the closest celestial body to us by a lot. And do you know how far away the Moon is? It's *far,* dude! We've been here! We've been to this incredibly remote hunk of rock and dust, and we did it with some very smart people, a calculator, and some spit-shine, I think. It cost lives. And, here's the thing. The Moon isn't really nearer to anything than the Earth is. I live in North Carolina. If I wanted to drive to California and stop somewhere around here. On the way to exploring our solar system flying to the Moon is like starting in Durham and ending in, uh, West Durham. I'd show you how long it takes to get to Mars going at the rate we flew to the Moon, but my bandwidth can't handle uploading a video that long. We are alone, and that's only on the scale of one solar system. Just booting up and zooming out doesn't really give the full brain annihilating experience, though. The Sun seems like it's disappearing now, but that's just kid stuff. For the real existential panic, you've got to put in work. You've got to pick a star that's not the Sun and... fly to it. The first thing that will happen is you'll probably shoot by at, like, a billion miles an hour because maybe you forgot just how vast the space you're traversing is. Like me, you've probably got used to the stars flitting by at a jaunty pace. You started thinking of them as little particles that just provided ambience to the graphics. But they're not, though. They are just as significant parts of the universe as our Sun for every reason other than our continued existence. Check out some of the statistics on this big boy. There's more mass in this one star than exists in our solar system by, like, a THOUSAND TIMES. Okay, now look for some planets surrounding this star. You might get some pretty gas giants or just a couple burnt-out husks orbiting too close for their own good. If you get really lucky one might have ice or something if you get really lucky you'll get something like this, or this, or this. There are a million billion planets with things so mind-bogglingly beautiful that they'd probably redefine art as we know it if we ever got close. But if you're playing fair, you probably won't see any of this stuff because for every gorgeous, inconceivable thing in the universe, there's a trillion times more nothing to make up for it. If you've stayed anywhere near our side of the galaxy you'll be seeing exactly how cold and lifeless and harsh our neighbors are because Space Engine is actually far more than an extrapolation. If we've charted a star, if we've clocked a planet, it's in there and it's accurately represented. We don't really have the option of crossing our fingers and hoping Space Engine is wrong. It has hard data that shows us. There's nothing anywhere close to us. There's this video by Kurzgesagt on how far we can reach outside our own little pocket of the universe, how far we can explore into the great beyond, and the answer is: essentially not very far, at least not by the scale of the universe. As things start to drift apart faster and faster, we will become more isolated from /everything/. [Kurzgesagt video narrator] "We could leave the local group (of galaxies) and fly through intergalactic space into the darkness, but we would never arrive anywhere." [Jacob speaking] That sounds.. utterly terrifying. As soon as I saw this video, I started looking for reasons to discredit it because our destiny has got to be to explore the stars, right? But playing Space Engine made me confront my own boyish optimism of space as a thing to be explored at all. It's... nothing! Space is so much nothing, and all the charts I hung in my walls as a kid, all the demonstrations I did where the Sun was the size of a basketball and the Earth was a marble - none of that got me to understand like this void did. Space Engine is, as much as any one program could be, an accurate picture of our universe and it's a goshdarn nightmare. But, while I'm talking about nightmares - you folks heard about these clicker games? [canned sitcom laughter] Who doesn't love cookies, like, way too much? The point of clicker games is basically to do what I do in Space Engine. You start small and local, and then you gradually pull back until the original point of focus is absolutely lost and completely meaningless. Cookie Clicker is a Total Perspective Vortex. You heard it here first. But I'm not here to talk about Cookie Clicker I'm here to talk about a game that is way less visually interesting, and which in fact, I actually have no idea how I'm gonna spice up for a video. Give me one second... [epic video game orchestral soundtrack with hard drum beats] It's called Universal paperclips. I mentioned what clicker games do in an abstract sense, but let me explain a little more literally here. You start with a button that makes a paperclip. One click, one paperclip. At this stage in the game, there are only three important things: the button that makes paperclips, the price that a single paperclip sells for, and the wire that you make paperclips out of. Eventually when you've sold enough paperclips, you can buy an auto-clipper. An auto clipper will make paper clips without you needing to click the button. Two auto-clippers will do it even faster. Get it? Then, you can increase marketing so you can sell your paper clips for more money. Then, you can vastly improve your auto-clipper output. You can buy something that automatically purchases wire, so you never have to. You can buy a drone swarm that hypnotizes the entire Earth's population. Yeah, so now all humans are under our control, so cash is no object. But our goal was never relate to get lots of money. It was to create lots of paperclips. We just needed money to do that. But now money is meaningless. What we need is resources. But you know what has a lot of resources? The mass of the Earth. Like, six octillion tons, in fact. So let's get to work! We've gotta build solar panels and batteries and lots of drones, but what we don't need is food, or air, or any kind of provisions for organic life. We're here to make paperclips. Are there... humans, still on Earth? I've gotta guess no. How many billion tons of resources could a paperclip-building AI scrape off the surface before everything was rendered unlivable? Really, that's not a concern of ours. There's a greater problem on the horizon - Earth is running out of resources. But hey, you know what has a lot of resources? [Space core from Portal 2 yelling "SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!!!!"] So, we take flight. We leave our planetary body, and now we've got all the resources we could ever, EVER need. Look at that ridiculous counter at the bottom there. "Percent of space explored." Like that would ever be a measurable percentage. Now our drones can self-replicate, and there are some pesky other things out there, and they're getting in the way of our resource collection and paperclip production, so we make some drones that can fight back. And now this is our infinity, right? Never gonna explore the entirety of space, never gonna run out of resources to make paperclips. Just get to ha - Wait. What? I mean... Tha-that that's that shows like a millionth of 1% and it took me a *really* long time to get here. There's no need to panic at like, like, filling up all the space in space that's ridi- Oh, shit. And then, before too long, it's 1%, and by that time it's all over. It's space. It's all of space. And there's none of it left. [mournful synth music begins to play] So, from this perspective Space Engine and Universal Paperclips are opposite experiences. Like, *really* opposite. One is a visually lavish, scientifically accurate thing that's more of a tool than anything else, and one is an incredibly sparse spreadsheet of a game that involves hypno drones and quadrillions of paperclips. One drives home the unbearable vastness of the universe around us and one reminds us that nothing even the endless void is actually infinite. One is an intensely agoraphobic experience and one is wildly claustrophobic. But their uniting principle is that they both scare the *hell* out of me. When you play No Man's Sky, there's a guy excited to sell parts to you on every planet, and Eve has hundreds of thousands of people, but they all fall into a couple groups. And you can't answer ALL the distress calls in Mass Effect, but they are all calling for you. They want to make you feel special and that's what we are, right? We're a pale blue dot, and we make music, and art, and war, and video games, and that stuff has gotta matter, right? Because why else would we be doing it? But Space Engine and Universal Paperclips - those aren't special-making games. They're a Total Perspective Vortex. You look into these games too hard and your brain gets completely annihilated. Universal Paperclips is about the dangers of unchecked capitalism and automation, and Space Engine is just as good at presenting a tour of the beautiful things in our universe as the endless space between them. So the fact that they both run into this abyss seems less intentional and more like a natural law. Once numbers get big enough, there's no where they can go but out. Into space. Into the nothingness. Did you ever think about claustrophobia and agoraphobia being basically the same thing on a cosmic scale? Because now I can't think about anything else! We're stuck between a void and a hard place, and the only upside I can think of is that we'll probably destroy ourselves way before we actually have to deal with any of it! [the ending to "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" plays]
