The galaxy is a harsh place full of desolate and barren planets, but some worlds may be so deadly they actively seek to kill those who dare to travel to them.
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Credits:
Death Worlds
Episode 432; February 1, 2024
Produced, Written & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Alex Civitello
Graphics:
apogii.uk
Music Courtesy of
Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator
Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Ultra Deep Field”
Sergey Cheremisinov, “Labyrinth”, “Forgotten Stars”
source
Obligatory Australia joke.
"Everytime you brush your teeth, you commit genocide" – Isaac Arthur probably
The good ol' "it used to be a nice place' planet.
I always loved the concept that to alien life in most galaxy species, the earth is a death world
2:38 YOU EXIST AS A VICTOR UPON A 4 BILLION YEAR OLD PILE OF SKULLS! ACT LIKE IT! RAHHHHH 🦅🌎🦅🌎🦅🌎
An idea for a potential topic to discuss: Strange abiogenesis. Could something like a robot race come about as a result of abiogenesis-like processes? Could a form of abiogenesis occur which was somehow scattered so that even the basal life forms were forced to adapt and colonize a wide range of environments? Could there be a scenario where robots, or some other type of being we'd normally consider "artificial", come first and then invent biological life later?
I'm not sure if any of those questions are feasible to answer but the concept of nonstandard abiogenesis seems intriguing enough on its own. It could be taken in a lot of directions. Maybe there's a mineral which naturally forms crystal lattices with logic gates in them or something, and over time, some of them started "working" through piezoelectricity.
So, Australia is a deathworld?
Great video. Coldfire Trilogy!
🥰
Never thought I'd hear a Burroughs quote on this channel, but I'm not complaining; he wrote some pretty crazy dystopian fiction.
I was away in México so this treat is a nice, vicious welcome home!
At this point I wonder how many times I’ve “accused” actual human artists of being AI while watching space-stuff on YouTube.
Something I've wondered about thats vaguely related to your point near the end of the episode. When do we go from fighting climate change itself, to engineering the biosphere to better handle the changed climate? Theres this natural is better bias in humans that's severely stifling our efforts in that front. We genetically engineered crops from the dawn of civilisation, and there is no environment on the planet that hasn't been touched by human civilisation, but the idea of deliberately screwing with the environment instead of "accidentally" doing it is really unpalatable to a lot of people.
At some point we either have to terraform earth back to how it was pre-warming, or we have to make the ecology better suited to the warmer planet. And I suspect the latter might be easier than the former. In a hypothetical future where wolves and other top order carnivores have gone extinct, we need something to fill their role in the ecosystem. Humans live apart from nature, so human hunting is not capable of creating the landscape of fear that a carnivore like a wolf can. So we'd either need to engineer a new predator to scare deer and other herbivores into line (which has huge effects on things like erosion and pollution of rivers from deer grazing and defecating around the water for example), or deploy some kind of drones to operate in the area full time and attack herbivores in order to create that effect. We'd essentially be creating a predator to improve the environment.
I could see this applying in a death world scenario too. If humans wiped out a particularly belligerent native species and then discovered that its absence was destabilising the local ecology, they might have to create something just as bad to replace it.
Your speech impediment is getting better great job man keep it up!!
I hope people back up youtube for a few thousand years. Imagine the access to history our distant descendants might have, getting to listen to this man's predictions for their time. The sheer volume of work you've put in man, I feel like you'll one day be seen as important as Asimov, as a curator of future history. Love ya work
Adventure Time is one of the gentler looking examples.
I will never tire of Isaac's goofy stock footage of aliens
Laughs in Australian
Man you're not kidding about what a few thousand humans can do if they were sent back to dinosaur time. People would be eating T rex spicy wings. Humans have turned every animal into prey or pet and it's only other humans that prevented it from going further.
Jesse bandit
Tolkien was always so much better at this sort of thing than everyone who came after, he damn well named the lake that fed the fields in Mordor.
Deathworlds as a scifi trope is really interesting and usually a catalyst for some really interesting world building if done well.
On the other hand, ametures like to have Earth a it exists now or now more or less, be a Deathworld categorized as such by some larger interplanetary civilization of many alien species. This has never made sense to me. As far as we can say, Earth is the most habitable planet. We have no reason to believe other habitable worlds are going to be much more stable than Earth. Why the fixation that humans are somehow some kind of physical Apex predator to survive such a Deathworld in addition to being slightly cleverer than average?
Regarding ever-changing worlds and deathworlds being periodic disasters, the games Caves of Qud and how it teaches the player its story is a great example
Please, consider adding some pauses between sentences.
Thank you for the episode, how about life on megastructures and the ramifications of living on one. Or how about living inside a black hole like heechee rendezvous?
what is going on
The problem with custodian AI going a haywire and trapping their population in a hellscape. What happens if that population threatens or makes good on mass suicide?