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For humanity to explore space and distant worlds, we will need to construct enormous artificial habitats in space with diverse ecologies.
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Credits:
Space Habitats
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 384, March 2, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Briana Brownell
David McFarlane
Graphics by:
Apogii.uk
Cameron Scott
Jarred Eagley
Jeremy Jozwik
Neil Blevins
Katie Byrne
Ken York
Rapid Thrash
Steve Bowers
Udo Schroeter
Music Courtesy of
Markus Junnikkala, “Plotting a Course”, “We Roam the Stars”
Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Between the Rings”
Miguel Johsnon, “Far From Home”, “So Many Stars”
Aerium, “Fifth Star of Aldebaran”
source
My main problem with even attempting to consider "space colonies for humanity to avoid the problems of overpopulation" is the very premise of overpopulation itself. We seem to be hyper fixated on leaving this planet rather than utilizing our home world in different ways. We have an extraordinary amount of space here that is massively underutilized, preferring instead to congregate into densely packed city centers where crime, disease, pollution, and tyranny necessarily become the norm based on human nature. There's a lot of land with zero infrastructure and limitless possible expansion, but that also will remain the case in any future location as well. Besides, the modernized countries across the globe are suffering from reduced population where there is no replacement to the elderly generations. It's one thing to consider the future of humanity across several thousand years, but trying to make ourselves a spacefaring civilization within a century is somewhat of a pipe dream.
Isaac, you are just as inventive and creative as Neal Stephenson in explaining how great and interesting the future could be
That's kind of an odd thought, saying that frozen sperm or embryos may be transported to a space habitat. If it's something you know you're going to need on a fairly regular basis, it'd be more economic at that point of technology to just have fabrication systems available on-site to harvest the sperm or embryos from the local wildlife, then modify it intentionally, and replace it afterward. Taking anything and trying to ship it long distances, even despite the concept of personal interstellar starships, is still a huge waste of resources compared to just on-site maintenance. It's like the difference between the old refrigerators which used a big block of ice cut from an iceberg, vs the modern day refrigerators which use compression to put the heat outside of the fridge. One of these still exists, the other does not, and for good reason.
Otherwise good stuff, I just think there was a hiccup in assuming our gene editing technology would remain as clunky, slow and expensive as it is today. Most likely it'll be reduced in size, cost and speed considerably, especially for situations like these.
Great thing about space habitats is that you get to specialise. One habitat for mining, one for energy, then you build a research hab and one each for consumer goods and alloys. By the time you start meeting aliens your economy is leagues ahead of them and you can just conquer them with your fleets.
Hi Isaac. I was trying to contact you about extended warrantee for your space habitat.
This man’s so called speech impediment is alright with me.
30:30 unicorns and rhinoceros are the same thing. sea serpent is oarfish, behemoth is hippopotamus, Vikings sold narwhal horns as unicorn horns
One very nice thing about large diameter (5 km or more) is that you can have earth or near earth gravity at very low spin rates (0.5 RPM or slower)
At the end of the podcast, I’m just so impressed. So interesting. But also your positive attitude and optimism. If everyone was like you, these futures would really happen.
12:58 ooh you really want to get the yards/metres thing sorted pretty early on.
"Which like some private island retreat, might include some nightmares". Hmmm 🤔 what could the reference be alluding to? 😁👍
I'd like to think that if we do ever get off of Earth in some meaningful manner, we would hedge our bets with high tech space habitats mixed with low tech planetary and planet-like living environments.
Never know what might happen.
The IA Algorithm has been re-homed.
Rats: Cute and cuddly AND incredibly well suited to living in a concrete jungle. They even eat the same things we do.
Now if you could only do some fun things with their genome to make them live significantly longer you would have the perfect pets for small area living, intelligent, robust… And an ecological menace if you couldn't also make sure they were infertile after production.
My week has actually been pretty great, thanks Isaac!
Risu incidentally meaning Squirrel in Japanese.
Wouldn't each habitat essentially be an island? With the same evolutionary forces be in effect. Aka island gigantism/dwarfism.
If you had a bunch of copy paste self contained habitats. Eventually they would diverge from one another. And we would see a visual representation of evolution. By comparing the differences between each habitat.
I don't know if you've read the Schlock Mercenary comics, but in the course of the comics there are a couple different cylinders and the weird ways they behave. I'd be interested to hear your take on what the physical experience inside would feel like compared to how the comics present it.
You mention the bottle neck effect. Would the human culture encourage mating outside the native human pool (or using sperm from outside), much as indigenous American tribes did?
mirrors seems way better or fiber optics..LED? uggh. but then space debris could destroy your mirrors no? fiber optic would avoid that issue?
Yes but let's be real here if there was a space habit. It will be the rich that lives there Not any of us.
@Isaac Arthur – Is it just my imagination, or have you been attending speech therapy? I'm noticing your… was it rhoticism? – less.
And keep up the good content too.
On spacehabitat XY221 due to software glitch the squirrels circumvented the "food for trash" system by trading in food for larger amounts of food. This was eventually fixed but several critters had to be hospitalized due to severe obesity.
wow this is the future of humanity. god bless thanks so much for the incredible content!
This whole video, @IsaacArthur, is pretty much straight out of my Ceres 2525 setting's compendium of world builds. Which currently exists in my head and a very few written brainstormy places, including past chats below some of your videos. I'm just a tad behind you in writing it all out in my book series. Thanks for the boot-to-aft treatment, bro.
I just realised that there may exist drafts for Jurassic World exist where it was on an O'Neill Cylinder.
VERY good video Isaac. I,personaly, enjoy more your videos about practical things than philosophical discussions or obscure fermi paradox solution. I will again bother you with suggesting topics like mining atmospheres like that of Venus or Uranus for all that carbon,nitrogen and water we need for habitats and terraforming.
I would also like an episode on balloon worlds like a terraformed Uranus or Saturn or ice giant planets around other stars. An episode about heat rejection might sound dull, but it is so central on an advanced civilization. I have calculated that if you could channel a millionth of the sun's energy at 10% efficiency on terrafrming Venus you could remove all that atmosphere and leave the planet's surface in a hard vacuum in about 60 years.
I hope my suggestion were useful
Sorry, but you cannot live outside the Van Allen Belt & you cannot reproduce in space & you cannot do agriculture in space. Biology forbids all of these activities. Not that it ever will be attempted.
Humankind's civilization on Earth has an all-time expiration date: 2040. A significant curtailment of all space activity arrives no later than 2030.
I think we'll need these on earth before it's over with
I wonder about the problem of people being unwilling to leave their habitats to explore? Humans are infinite in their triggers but common in their reactions.
Great as always
There's an argument to be made for sky panels on cylindrical habitats. A large enough habitat (Island 2 or larger) will have it's own weather system, and that will mean rainfall. Naturally, the rain will fall on the sky panels as well as the land panels, so somebody (I don't remember who) suggested having the sky panels double as lakes. Light will pass just fine through a few meters of water, and that also provides extra radiation shielding. Imagine taking a sail across the water, and the sun is beneath you!
I dropped everything I was doing to listen to Isaac Arthur talk about space habitats again! Any excuse to talk about these "Astro Earths" and I will listen.
Slight problems, the genetically modified garbage collecting squirrels on Risu have "collected" three giant wandering walking litters.
Since they know the garbage receptacles don't store enough reward pellets for all that litter weight.
They request the appropriate reward payment in two hours, or they will disposed of the litter in the traditional no-recycling way!!
Do you really think 19th century Mississippi is a good "culture" to replicate?
I imagine private hellworlds being mostly clone worlds where one can torture copies of one's enemies. Truly horrifying.
The type of content you make here is bar none on YouTube.
Thank you for contributing such a wealth of ideas, I look forward to any and all future content you make.
As a kid in the late 70s, I was immersed in the living space habitat of John Varley's "Titan" trilogy – and would love to see that as a scripted film or TV series! Heard that "Rendesvous with Rama" will be given the film treatment by Denis Villleneuve, after he finishes "Dune 2".
It will be a sad day when I finally catch up on every SFIA episode and need to wait a week to watch the next one.
Isn't the issue with O'Neill Cylinders and Toro Rings habitats losing structural viability more affected by the air and air pressure inside the habitat rather then the load weigh being applied to the "floor" of the structure by the inhabitants? I could be totally wrong but I thought the concern for the superstructure would be less to do with static (or mostly static) loads on the floors capacity limits and more to do with the dynamic loads and nearly fluid like omnidirectional pressures the atmosphere would generate causes sections of the structure to flex, oxidize, wear, and microfracture much quicker. I assumed this is the reason real world designs for structures like this when compared to most sci-fi designs require two outer hulls placed around an inner superstructure and hull that are all left in vacuum conditions as a sort of fail safe against any sections of the inner hull suffering from fatigue and giving out; this way your atmosphere and resources don't get lost directly to space but have a chance of being recovered if the outer hulls can stand up to the stock load of the leaks pressure until the leak can be fixed.
How would you go about seasonal changes to simulate earth environments?
Have you heard of genedrives, Isaac? Your conservationist notions regarding population seem to be behind the science. There are far more reliable and targeted genetic options already being tested, with planned deployment dates.
See the work of Kevin Esvelt, a colleague of Doudna (Nobel Prize for CRISPR), Church (Father of Genetics), Venter(his private company beat the Human Genome Project & he created the first synthetic life replete with encoded websites…), Lander et al (Human Genome Project leader)
I think Kevin Esvelt's work is the single most important piece of science right now, which nobody is paying enough attention to. It is FAR more dangerous than AI, and the bio-security threat it implies will impact our future even more harshly than the events of 9/11 or 2020.
I can't even tell you who founded the lab where this tech was invented without being censored, first, and totally insane if you're not pointed toward the 10 primary sources proving it.
23:44 I am now using the term “safety sphincter” at every possible opportunity.
Thanks, Isaac!
I've got a question for you Isaac. Have you ever done any videos about mining Phobos & Diemos? You might pair up with the Angry Astronaut for that 🙂
I'm a firm believer space habitats are the future but there is one giant problem with them that has me concerned. As with all things man makes, they will break down over time requiring constant maintenance and upkeep. If for any reason technology fails, the habitat is quickly doomed.
Living in space really depends upon how economical it is to build, maintain, and travel to such habitats. Sometimes seeing the leap between our current space capabilities and the advanced future this video depicts can seam difficult to comprehend. This is primarily because we have no space based mining, and are only on at the very beginning of manufacturing. Another major challenge is the cost of transportation from earth to any space based location. Most of the cost of transportation is getting up to orbital velocities, but once you are at that speed changing your orbital trajectory is much less costly. Transportation cost can be lowered with a combination of greater privatization and completion, better and more rapid reusability, orbital refueling, new or more optimized propultion methods or more.
The rate of humanities expansion into space is hard to predict because technological capabilities doesn't always track with the social or political decisions of the day. We had the technology to send humans to the moon several decades ago but chose not to continue to do so for political and economic reasons. Instead our robotic and unmanned space technology has continued to advance rapidly.
I could easily see a future where there is a lot of off world industry, but sometimes the disadvantages can be overlooked.
I think that space habitation will become viable as the price for travel and living in space drops and/or the price of land on earth rizes. This may take longer than anticipated simply because building and travel on earth is so much easier than travel and conduction off earth. That being said I think we will see perminant or semi-perminant bases farther from earth like on the moon or mars soon. this is because the economy isn't the only push for such endeavors there are scientific and political reasons for wanting to establish a off world perminantly enhabitated colony.