I think the Kardashev Scale is dumb. There's just no reason to think that a civilization would progress linearly from all of planet's energy, to all of star's energy, to all of galaxy's energy.

Humans are not capturing "all the energy on Earth" but we are already collecting some of the energy in space on satellites off-Earth.

You don't need anything like a full Dyson sphere in order to send a ship to Alpha Centauri. Humans will be collecting SOME of the energy of the Sun and SOME of the energy of Alpha Centauri long before humans capture ALL of the energy of the Sun.

https://preview.redd.it/t5uzt8tem18e1.png?width=270&format=png&auto=webp&s=01425ff9a39f05ac5585e3b3ed28d5a7d507d38b

Earth needs to 'discover' Orbital Rings, there is no excuse for high acceleration to get off the planetary surface, that's just barbaric and archaic.

7 years later and anyone I mention this to looks at me like a deer in the headlights and says, "huh". This video needs to be spread around otherwise it will be forgotten, because the last few years has seen rockets built that could plausibly lift enough material for a beginner ring with only a dozen launches.

Send it to writers and game developers, send it to people that work at aerospace firms, send it to engineers, send it to billionaires and politicians.

Let's say we found a Dyson swarm in the process of being built around a star 100 light years away. We can see that they have enough structure to occlude about 5% of their star so it's about a K1.8 civilization.

What should we do? Should we try to contact it? Ignore it? Run away in the other direction?

Reading about the "flying orbs" in some subreddits that are just aircraft in air traffic heavy areas, it got me thinking about what first contact would actually look like. Do you think aliens would prefer to stay hidden and study us in our natural habitat? Or they would came here with massive colonization fleet, leave one ship behind and be like "Here we are dudes. How's it going? Want plans for antimatter engines?"

At the risk of giving future aspring spice barons ideas...

What technological developments (of any variety) would result in a civilization that is highly stratified and decentralized? What I mean is what sort of developments would be able to counteract the sheer brute force of (nominally) egalitarian civilization?

For example, take Dune. Spice is naturally scarce, and confers upon its users a variety of advantages. At the same time, the prevailing ideology prevents other technological choices to said advantages.

However, none of that is really scientifically plausible. Yes, there's narrative reasons that make sense, but outside of a narrative story, it wouldn't happen. The spice monopoly would never last anywhere near as long.

So, the question becomes: what could be developed that would end up with people accruing so much of an advantage that we can see feudalism in space!?

No: any given social or economic system that prohibits widespread use or introduces artificial scarcity doesn't count (so whatever your preferred bogeyman is, not for this discussion). I'm actually looking for a justifiable reason inherent in the technology.

What would a naturally scarce technology be? As an example: imagine a drug that has most of the (non-prescient) benefits of spice, but requires a large supply of protactinium or some other absurdly rare elements, such that your civilization would have to transmute vast quantities (itself quite prohibitive) in order to make enough just to supply 1% of the population.

Hear me out:

The Space Shuttle used a parachute to slow down. It also slowed down via drag with the Earth's atmosphere. The Space Shuttle's re-entry speed was 7,500 meters per second. A full landing (i.e. a full deceleration from 7,500 m/s to 0 m/s) took about one hour.

https://preview.redd.it/6lwnoy7ixg7e1.png?width=281&format=png&auto=webp&s=d6ab197c3ec053d519a2d5c358507e356b15b2eb

An interstellar spaceship going at 1% light speed is much faster than the Space Shuttle... but a star's corona is about a trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere!

The spaceship could fly close by the star and deploy parachutes to brake via drag in the star's plasma.

The star's corona is thicker than the diameter of the non-corona part of the star, so there's plenty of room to fly through.

Idea #1

Increased strength of structure made entirely out of nanobots. Line them up, and weld them together. Assuming their shells are made of graphene or other high strength materials, it would be pretty strong. Stronger than steel, and can compute stuff. I believe this is another adaptation of the mediatronic paper, described in The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.

Idea #2

Helicopter, but balloon. Replace the rotors with a balloon, filled with vacuum. Lighter, more fuel efficient. Do you think this will replace regular helis? Probably slower, bigger target.

Idea #3

In a universe where we can open wormholes, but can't send stuff through, can we open and close them strategically, in Morse code, to send information? This is for a story I'm writing, so don't destroy it too harshly, please.

Let me know what you think!

About the same altitude as the International Space Station, a Bernal Sphere with a diameter of 500 meters could orbit here. One of the advantages is that it is under the Van Allen radiation belts, so it doesn't need much radiation shielding, and since it would be in low Earth orbit, it could be visited by Starship without the need for orbital refueling. Maybe this could be launched from Earth, assume it's walls can hold in one bar of air pressure inside, it also needs an airlock and docking port. Artificial lighting means it doesn't need to be in a high orbit to get constant sunshine a constellation of solar power satellites could lead and trail the Bernal Sphere in its orbit such that some are always collecting solar energy, converting it to laser or microwaves and beaming it to adjacent satellites until it reaches the Bernal Sphere powering it's systems and artificial lighting.

I was rewatching Isaac's video on how Earth could hold 1 trillion people, as I wanted to share it with someone who is far more malthusian. I found it a little light on math and it was also pretty well focused on Isaac's audience (you know, the usual casual mentions of uploading ourselves to computers or cybernetic augmentation, typical fare for us).

With that in mind, I'd like to explore the basics of supporting 1 trillion people on Earth, in relative comfort, but restricting ourselves to modern technology. I know that is, in reality, an absurd restriction (the technological output of a trillion person civilization would be tremendous, coupled with the fact that it would take centuries to reach that point), but it should help convey the feasibility to your unfriendly neighborhood Malthusian.

(I'm also interested in making a short video to share this woth others)

So, to start, does anyone know what the current maximum annual calorie yield per acre/hectare for any given farming practice is? I've seen various sources on potatoes yielding between 9-20 million calories, with the higher range generally being for greenhouses. Those ranges don't seem to incorporate use of specific wavelengths of LED grow lights, so the current possible yield could be higher.

EDIT: Lets sum up the conversation so far, shall we? We've got multiple people advocating for communism, others claiming it can't be done at all, others than it shouldn't be done, and some saying that growth rates will stay too low for it to happen.

Great. Now, who wants to discuss the topic itself?

Lets use the crop yield calculation. The Earth's surface area is 126 billion acres. 20 million calories/acre gets you 2.5 quintillion calories/yr. A human being needs 730,000 calories/yr. That means if we covered Earth in greenhouses, we can feed 3.4 trillion people.

No, we wouldn't do that. But those are the numbers we get. Cut the number down by 1/3 to account for only using land and not sea (and yes, we could use mariculture). Now, we're at 1.1 trillion people. How much of the land do we want to devote to greenhouses? 1/4th? Great, build 4 story tall greenhouses. 1/10th? 10 story tall. You get the idea.

I believe it may have been about the Fermi paradox and in particular, it was something along the lines of a signal being beamed to many planets with instructions to build something that turned out to be some monstrous machine or hostile AI that then also turned them into a signal spreading machine leading to a visually dark galaxy. It's been along time since I've seen the video but I can vividly remember Isaac discussing this if anyone could help I would really appreciate it I've been trying to find it for awhile.

Thank you!

I know that in O'Neill cylinders you can arrange any conditions, be it climate, relief, atmosphere and even pressure with gravity. But I had a question, is it necessary to change the weather inside the colony at all? Does man and fauna need a change for winter, spring, summer and autumn, or will something like a Mediterranean climate suit everyone?

I just wrapped up Isaac's latest space elevator video on Nebula. Set aside all the other utility of space elevators and orbital rings and how much better they are in conjunction (they're amazing).

I am generally in agreement with Isaac about the inherent safety of these systems. Let us assume, however, that society is more skeptical of the safety margins.

If we put an orbital ring at every, say, 1000 km of height along a space elevator, that would seem to provide a reasonable level of redundancy for the space elevator. At no point could the entire tether just fall down to Earth - you would be limited to 1000km at any one point.

I don't know the technical term for what I'm describing, but I think a cybernetic immune system could be extremely useful given the increasing risks of infectious diseases due to the climate crisis, and the potential for engineered bioweapons. I think having it so you could easily remove it in case anything happens would be a crucial safety feature, but I'm not sure what the term for that would be. Thus my use of the word wearable in the question.

If you think about all the ways our immune system is tied in with aging, and health in general it's clear that the immune system could be the door to eternity. There are already implantable devices that manipulate genes using small jolts of electricity to deal with diabetes. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02461-4 Imagine being able to download a new vaccine and use the machinery of life to make it. Imagine being able to get your own body to make nanotechnology to keep you healthy. It seems like we are so close to this being possible. If we could interact with our bodies/immune system consciously I think that could save countless lives. There would be risks, which is why it should always ask permission and notify your doctors before it takes any actions. The only exception would be if a person was unconscious and unable to give consent to a lifesaving treatment that they have indicated they want in the past.

Like asking him to write right reports

Does anyone know what the first rule of warfare is? I’ve been trying to find a list

For a rotating habitat, the centripedal force pulling it apart should be by far the biggest concern, so one can just use that to figure out what it's limit is.

What about a 0g habitat? What do you think would be the biggest concerns and limits this structure would face, and how much bigger or lighter than it's rotating counterpart could it get before stuff starts falling apart?

Okay so this is a fantasy world-building question, I hope that’s okay! In my world there is a giant floating ball of water that floats above the landscape that is a essentially a comet that was stopped by a very powerful character in my world’s history, the ice was melted and this sphere still floats there because this character’s spells or “songs” as I call them don’t go away, they sort of shape the world in that regard. When I was creating the map for this world I was designing one of the nations and it is very much centered around this floating ball of water. They even use some of the water from it in trade because it sort of powers the lights and industry of the world because the water doesn’t stop floating when it leaves the big sphere. (I don’t really know how it does this but if anyone can touch on how an engine might be created that is powered by magical floating water that would be awesome too). But my main question is this: I sort of had an idea that the sphere of water could be used as a lens for a telescope, and then I had this idea of a telescope that is built on a circular track on the ground beneath the sphere, and is built at the distance that corresponds to the focal point of star light passing through the sphere. So how big is this track? How big should I make the ball? How high is the ball off the ground, given these measurements? Am I not understanding something about the physics of telescopes? I want it to be grandiose, but not like ya know, out of control, my thinking was at least a couple dozen miles for the diameter of the sphere (let’s just say 25 I guess to make it a nice round number). There is going to be a city that is sort of built into the inner and outer walls of this track structure. This is the only sub I could think of that might not mind answering a dumb question like this. And if there are any objections or limitations you think of that this magical telescope might have please let me know that too. Of course I want the world to be internally consistent and I’d rather not hand wave too much.

In the future would you want a brain-computer interface (BCI) (see video), complete with augmented/virtual vision and hearing? Would you want to scroll 24th century Reddit or watch SFIA with your mind, projected in your sight? An entire computer in your skull, linked to your brain, complete with all the pros and the cons...

This dovetails off a recent discussion we had, and the last time I asked was 2 years ago so I'm curious to see how the results compare.

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