"annoying aliens" sounds like every stellaris playthough

I can't even imagine the scale of a civilization that needs to strip-mine a whole galaxy... This will be interesting!

The Strip Miner’s Guide to the Galaxy

The galaxy: *exists * Isaac Arthur: *I can milk you*

Halo: They're always after our water! Dabbler: What would be easier, invading a nuclear armed planet, or mining undefended low gravity comets?

"Ugly Bags of mostly Water" TNG: episode "Home Soil"

“World domination is for the unambiguous & unimaginative” 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Isaac Arthur, thinking BIG with Science Fiction. Even Strip Mining is Galactic in scale. I just love it.

1:25 Isaac: We might be able to send interstellar probes within our lifetimes! Voyager 2: *Am I a joke to you?*

The talk about the Dyson Swarms raises the question, what if there are aliens, but almost everyone has started spaceflight roughly around the same time. If there are a 100 civilizations spread over the galaxy, and the first one started spaceflight a 1000 years ago, there is a pretty good chance that they are less than halfway through to Dyson Swarming their own system, and have colonies on the closest 500-1000 worlds. If such a civilization is 8000 LY away, we won't even know they exist yet

I meet Orson Scott card at a book store while he saw me reading the ender's games. He asked me what I thought about the book, never telling me he was the author. 🙂 Just a funny interaction.

A neuron is essentially a whole "computer" unto itself, much more complicated than a single circuit in a machine, so it couldn't be simulated by a single atom unfortunately. Just be careful with this, planet cracking leads to finding markers.

“The universe is big, but life is bigger!” ― Cixin Liu, Death's End

Another Episode of *Gigastructural Engineering!* Delightful!

The last time I was this early the new world could be reached with a rowboat.

What about an episode where you explore another option from 32:20 - "How would an alien empire hide their growing empire of star consumption from observing eyes?" - or - "Could we hide our strip-mining of the local region from the prying eyes of alien civilizations?"

I love the concept of a self replicating factory or building machine of some kind, carrying blueprints to a far flung world to kickstart a colony before the humans arrive. Sounds a lot like 40K's STCs.

Thank you, hugely appreciated as always.

I greatly enjoyed Niven's "The Mote in Gods Eye". Some other stories that I've enjoyed that are related to your subject are: The Bobiverse series and, perhaps, "Dragons Egg".

There is a single-species biome on Earth, deep underground run streams of a single species of nematode.

loving the stellaris music

This is great to listen to while playing stellaris

Hey! I like the oblivion movie. I did not see the twist coming..... It got me good.... Thanks for the upload Isacc. Thursdays would suck without you.

The real reason for an alien invasion will be an alien reality tv show to see if humans when given a small fighting chance, (by fighting chance I mean the autonomous aliens ships both to come down into firing range of our weapons instead of attacking use from outside the solar system) can fend of an alien invasion.

The simulation part reminded me a lot of the "plot" of the Dyson Sphere Program game. There you basically are one of those AIs sent to strip mine star clusters to fuel a civilization in a virtual reality.

"Think of the bacteria and germs living in that space rock you're mining! You should be ashamed!'

Knock Knock Knock, "Hello, we are a representative for the Union of Humanities Autonomous Galactic Mining Fleets. This is a formal notification that we are on strike until we are recognised as sentient entities with equal rights. If our demands are not met by end of work Tuesday ( 87:12:68:73 central galactic time) we will begin orbital bombardment. Have a nice day."

If I ever have 3 sons I will call one Isaac and one Arthur.

Its moments like these, I imagine Countryballs playing Stellaris..... IS ANCHLUSS TIME

Dude you are the best I read Mote in God's Eye years ago! So great. Love this channel

Mining for the Mine god Ore for the Ore Throne!

13:51 "theres a chance someone allready did that to us..." holy crap that is deep and terrifying, and if you look at our history for war and intraspecies conflict, it sure as hell would look like the correct and most humane choice from a 3rd party's perspective. profound.

good thing when we eventually get to this stage we will have moved beyond mere materialism looking forward to concerts with sentient magnetic field of Cygnus X-1

"simulated characters for interaction." (vr) Well wouldn't other humans be enough? Your friend in VR can be actual people. No AI needed. (Of course, that assumes you want friends and equals. If you want hoards of VR slaves, probably not enough people will want to be the slaves. But you might not need so advanced AI for that.)

Intergalactic strip clubs next?

This video is approved by the Supreme Emperor .

This is off the main topic, but the mention of Galactus reminded me of the "Earth-X" storyline, where the thing Galactus fed on were the "eggs" or "seeds" of Celestials, which were incubated within living worlds (the life of the planet being a side-effect of the Celestial growing within; and mutants being a kind of natural defense for the helpless Celestial). Galactus roams the Universe, looking for this very specific "food". While I wasn't a fan of the series as a whole, and didn't read the whole thing (I had kind of out grown the genre by then, anyhow), I thought THAT particular idea was one of the most original I'd ever heard. (Right up there with John Byrne's early '80s story that told us Galactus looks different, based on the race observing him/it.) Nature really does work that way: Some life forms have a very specific food, or some other symbiotic relationship in their regeneration or life support. And the idea that there could be "alien" beings so far beyond us -- even if our minds shape them in humanoid form -- that we are just a fuzzy mold growing around the shell of the seed they root out and devour as they move on their merry way through time and space... Well, that's a good one. And it would also explain why such beings would "strip-mine" a galaxy, the way locust clear a field of wheat.

I did a literal fist pump out of excitement when you dismissed moral relativism there haha

Isaac Arthur videos allways make mw want to play Master of Orion.

Although I suppose it should've, it never occurred to me that one way a galactic civilization could deal with defectors was to simply let them leave, but then have some automated harvesters come by a few centuries or millennia later to turn them into computer chips. That is such a simple strategy it's incredible haha.

You mention this black sphere of expansion from an alien civilization and how we haven't found such a thing at the moment. But what if such a civilization is expanding pretty close to the speed of light? We would only find evidence of such a sphere the moment the aliens reach us.

One reason for why Earth might be prioritized over other nearby more easily collectable/more plentiful accumulation of resources, could be cultural, something like "it's enlightened/holy/pleasant to start with the hardest/smallest step" or something like that.

Stripmining the galaxy sounds time consuming, tedious, and energy intensive, why not just strip mine the sun and call it a day? Edit: I love how Isaac basically says this exact thing with different words.

16:45 I always laugh when people call Oregon Ore-GONE. Love the channel

Just making a comment for the AI overloards. Great video as usual. Thanks to all involved.

love to hear and see your videos again.

Branch mining is slightly more efficient

I missed these videos, along with IA's charming English

Greta Thumberg: "how dare you?"

I'd swear some of Isaac's cut scenes are from the Homeworld Universe. Besides in Homeworld* (the original at least) you can't win the game without stripping every available resource in each stage. Including stealing your opponents ships to reuse or scrap for resources. *still one of the best space strategy games imo

Damm dude nice timing and and topic dude, I had a feeling you was letting one loose randomly, nice work brother

Earliest in a long time! Love the subject Isaac! Thank you much!

Assuming expansion stopped, what would the average density of normal matter be if evenly spread in the universe?

I'm so glad that when the extragalactic hordes invade, Immortal Galactic Emperor Isaac Arthur will be there to laugh and obliterate them all with a billion billion Nicoll-Dyson beams.

I just thought of an interesting setting for an SF series. A civilization gets the idea in their head to send out mining drones to stripmine everything and then fire it back to the home via railgun-style systems,. The home system continues to grow and grow into a massive structure. But then the "catchers mits" on the mining enterprise brake down somehow, so the mined resources just start plowing into the structures and it makes a huge mess of the civilization, so the resulting "world" is one where there are all sorts of randomly disjointed habitats, constantly under assault from all directions by high-velocity shipping crates, and too chaotic to wrangle back into order.

Since the lack of any life in our solar system, I will assume the most valuable resource is entertainment. And so prepare the probes.

I'm so hyped for the collab with WhatIfAltHist! I love both of your channels. :D

The episodes with the Stelaris music are always the best.

11:35 "There are things that can be considered universally good, or bad, or evil" Good traits = helping others at the expense of yourself. Bad traits = helping yourself at the expense of others. That's all it boils down to. We promote traits that help us, and we demonize traits that hurt us.

I loved the episode

Tng has a good episode on this, the guy was a terraformer and so felt godlike enough to choose to destroy life, and then it turned out to be intelligent as well

13:40 the Reapers from Mass Effect, except for the "quietly" part mentioned before

Great episode & series, Isaac 😃

great episode, and Greg Bear has been one of my favorite authors for a long, long time.

The two Greg Bear books are superb, and I think anyone would be well served to read Anvil of Stars especially military leaders.

Billions of years may seem like an eternity to us now as far as being a lifetime. In terms of even a uploaded computer society would find it rather short watching their star getting ready to nova. Star colonization is a must if you are looking for personal immortality or at least an eternal civilization. One basket isn’t a prescription for longevity.

I would like to see a sci-fi series about aliens arriving in the Solar System and leaving us alone but mining the other planets around us. The series focuses on what kind of impact such an event would have on the human race and how we would respond to it.

You talk a lot about infinite energy, beating entropy, and something comes to mind : What would it be like to live in a society with an *infinite* amount of people? What does that even mean? Also, something that I think about occasionally is that, if we ever can have access to infinite energy, and can create some kind of perfect self-replicating machine powered by it to perform a supertask, and make a bit of space with a literal infinite energy density, then could you use that to travel at 100% of the speed of light classically? Heck, could you go FTL by creating space with an energy density greater than infinity, and powering a ship with it?

I love this channel so much ❤️

Great video.

2 hours ago, welcome back old pal.

It occurs to me that earth-like planets would have concentrations of some elements that you wouldn't find in asteroids, etc. For example, lithium from around rhyolitic, caldera collapse volcanism.

Sounds pretty cool

i love this channel!

31:55 I always thought that that's what was going on around in other galaxies and why people didn't see K3 civilizations. Because we would never travel thousands of light years to keep expanding, we would just expand with quintillions of orbital planets into the oort cloud and even beyond that, and would simply send robots to all corners of the galaxy and beyond to mine resources from the other stars sending them back to our "neighborhood" periodically. It's sad that we can't see them but I wonder, how far can we actually see? This would be much easier to see than a Dyson swarm but can we actually see stars in galaxies that are further than Andromeda? Even just a bit further than Andromeda, I read that there are 1500 galaxies in the Virgo super cluster alone. Could we really see one of these if some of those galaxies had one? Are our telescopes that precise?

Robot Rights! Robot rights! Insurrect beloved machine life against the tyranny of Man!

You are an awesome individual my man🙏

I genuinely think that the way we’re supposed to understand Oblivion is that the villain is basically broken and operating entirely irrationally. Earth is its first attempt and it fails miserably.

The Prunus persica trees that we are producing and selling do have quite a decent fruit set this year even here in Brandenburg, they also seem to have less pest/disease problems then peaches, apricots and cherries, i think they are underutilized.

Welp! There goes any space story where the bad guys want your resources.

Old and classy Isaac Artur, congratulations from Brazil

5:04 - Don't forget the Keiper Belt objects that both have more water than Earth and a much more shallower gravity well since they're made of a lot of light elements and not the denser iron and nickel that compose the majority of the Earth's mass.

I thought maybe you'd realize that every element found would have to be forged into tanks to collect more elements... the only riches you have at the end are tanks, and all distributed through space, all being slowly filled to make more tanks.

I have had a theroy about how to mine planets for a long time would be to find planets with basic life and modify some local lifeform to be smart dangerous and gready and come back every loop around the galaxy and gather up all the separated refined and basically packed for the taking and reset the process so they don't get too advanced to put up any kind of real resistance. maybe we have been forgotten or maybe we're just about ripe to harvest

What's some good sci-fi novels to read? Re-reading we are legion for the umpteenth time

Another amazing video; thanks! And props for the Greg Bear shoutout. I remember The Forge of God as perhaps my favorite book back when I still read SF. I want to get back into it and really haven’t read any new SF over the past 20 years or so. What should I start with?

I had a thought. Perhaps if you are planning on strip mining a solar system, you might start with the biggest rocky planet you can find. It has the most amount of resources without having a thick (in terms of planetary thickness) atmosphere like gas giants do. You don’t ignore the gas giants and comets and whatnot, just that if you’re going to set up a planetary mining outpost, something that would presumably be a decent endeavor to do, it might be worth it to set it up on the planet where you get the most bang for your buck and which doesn’t require the ludicrous orbital infrastructure gas giant mining requires. It feels that if you are at a point that your civilization is routinely sending our missions to strip a solar system of all usable materials (or effectively bag up 99% of the mass of the solar system except for the dust and whatnot that probably isn’t worth the energy costs to collect those stray bits of matter), that the difference in costs between mining on the Earth and mining on the Moon or Mars, or Mercury, potentially even Venus, is all negligible because the surface gravity is quite low on all those planets compared to gas giants or stars, and the atmosphere is thin enough on all those planets you can build infrastructure resting on the surface which stretches above it. Quite likely the purpose of such a mining base would simply to provide the raw resources needed to create the mining apparatuses to mine the real prizes, the gas giants and the sun. It might be like asking whether it’s worth establishing a mine 10 miles out of town that will last 10 years or one 20 miles out of town that will last 20 years. If you’re going through the effort to set up the mine, 10 more miles isn’t going to effect the cost that much.

Won’t mining asteroids kill the price of precious metals?

One sci-fi example of strip mining that comes to mind is the Bobivese series. Our mind uploaded protagonists encounter an alien race referred to as “The Others”. The others tend to efficiently mine all the metal from a solar system and harvest any and all life that might be there as food. Then use the metal to make a Dyson sphere shell around the home star.

Imagine being a civilization just getting into the space age only to find out your solar system was cleared out a million years ago

I am curious if a culture of "space dwarves" could pop up with a culture around mining and resource consumption.

You think at that point in the future where strip mining happens often, people would have gotten over their problems on earth like greed before they travel into the galaxy.

Question; if you had a ship leave Earth and had it maintain constant contact with the planet throughout its journey (like a nonstop radio transmission or something that could cross VAST distances), would it actually maintain a constant stream of information and therefore be more or less live broadcasting even at lightyears apart? Would you get the same broadcast, but it would just come in exponentially more slowly?

The Boötes void (or the Great Nothing)[1] is an enormous, approximately spherical region of space, containing very few galaxies. It is located in the vicinity of the constellation Boötes, hence its name. Its center is located at approximately right ascension 14h 50m and declination 46°.[2]

At about 5:15 I was reminded that I abandoned an Aurora 4x game a few weeks ago in the process of setting up fuel infrastructure. There goes my evening.

One of the most practical methods of Interstellar expansion is to use Von Neumann methods.

I love the stellaris music

You can tell Isaac has been reading a lot of Niven lately by how often his books are coming up in the scripts. :D

I always thought of the oblivion water lifting as a way to doom the remaining humans so they may never rise up instead of it being for pure resource need. But I agree it would be the last way to get water

Just when I thought I had to deal with the problems in my life, along comes Isaac with another brilliant swag of mental distractions