Awesome / Isaac Arthur

• Serious credit should be given to Isaac using established math and physics to demolish Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale and make even the most inconceivably large megastructures seem real. If anything, he proves that sci-fi should think even bigger
  • If the entire Earth's surface were turned into a Ecumenopolis one layer tall, and everyone was given a comfortable 10,000 square feet of living space for everything they needed, the planet could house 546 billion people. Scale that up even further, with 2,000 levels reaching into space and deep beneath the surface, and you could have a planet with a population of one quadrillion. As he points out, it's not resources or living space that holds the population back, but waste heat. And even then, a society like this could use that heat as a power source or vent it somewhere else using miniature wormholes.
  • A Dyson Swarm around the sun could house another 100 trillion people easily.
  • Space elevators? Awesome. Orbital rings? Even better!
  • In the face of a planetary disaster, why hold a lottery to see who gets to leave the planet? Just move the whole thing. By enclosing the Earth in a protective shell and gradually pushing it with a laser highway system, it's entirely possible to move the whole planet to another system like Alpha Centauri in less than a single human lifetime.
  • Isaac has even come up with his own megastructures, like the Hydroshell. This is a hollow Shellworld that's entirely covered in an ocean ten kilometers deep, home to a mixture of artificial 3D reefs, thermal vents and yet has pressure equal to or less than Earth's oceans. Such a concept could be scaled up to be larger than planets, stars or even star systems, and could have artificial sun-like structures serving as mobile power plants within its waters. And by his own admission, he barely scratched the surface of the concept in its debut episode.
  • Perhaps the most impressive, however, is the Birch Planet, the largest possible megastructure you could build under known physics. It's a shellworld enclosed around a supermassive black hole- with a cap of 1.5 trillion solar masses- with a series of shells reaching light years in diameter, where each shell has a billion times more living area than an entire Dyson Swarm, and the whole thing surpasses galaxy-spanning empires in terms of total area. It would be so huge that the inner shells would experience time much slower than the outer ones.
• Even some of the concepts he's mentioned in passing sound impressive. In "Megastructure Death", because they're huge in terms of size and time, he speculates many megastructures could become home to entire unique civilizations. One idea he suggests is a giant space gun built for war between K2 Dyson swarms, one so big that pressurized environments could exist with cracks and valleys of the barrel and magazine, that becomes its own world after the war ends.
  Isaac: Forget a cultural mythos of your world being on the back of a giant turtle, your world was forged by the gods to kill worlds and you're the post-apocalyptic tribes whose hundred-times great-grandparents used to maintain it.
• While Isaac has explored the concept, he's also gone in detail about why he's sure FTL Travel is impossible, comparing it to asking if you can have -5 kilograms of something. Yet he's also demolished the notion that this means we'll never reach the stars, going into detail about how we could not only explore the Milky Way, but reach other galaxies even with the light speed limit. That alone is amazing