Exporting Earth

In order to terraform new planets, we will need to be able transport entire ecologies & ecosystems through interstellar space in the future. Today we will examine how we could build and maintain such environments inside vast arks, generations ships able to colonize our galaxy, and the challenges these starships will face maintaining not just stores of DNA and genetic material but living organisms which depend heavily on other members of their species and other species to survive and thrive, not least of which is human ourselves.
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Credits:
Exporting Earth
Episode 150, Season 4 E36
Writers:
Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Darius Said
Gregory Leal www.gregschool...
Jerry Guern
Konstantin Sokerin
Laura Graham
Mark Warburton
Matthew Acker
Sigmund Kopperud
Stuart Graham beyondnerva.wo...
Producer:
Isaac Arthur
Cover Artist:
Jakub Grygier www.artstation...
Graphics Team:
Darth Biomech www.artstation...
Fishy Tree www.deviantart...
Jarred Eagley
Jeremy Jozwik www.artstation...
Katie Byrne
Ken York / ydvisual
Krisitijan Tavcar www.miragedere...
LegionTech Studios
Sam McNamara
Sergio Boterio www.artstation...
Narrator:
Isaac Arthur
Music Manager:
Luca DeRosa - [e-mail]
Music:
Dracovallis, "Golden Meadows" dracovallis.ba...
NJ Mandaville, "Intrumental Background 1" / nj-mandaville
Kevin Macleod, "Infinite Wonder" / @incompetech_kmac
Chris Zabriskie, "Candlepower" chriszabriskie.com
Kai Engel, "Endless Story About Sun and Moon" www.kai-engel....
Lombus, "Amino" lombus.bandcam...
Aerium, "Windmill Forests" / @officialaerium
Epic Mountain, "Rising Sky" / epicmountain

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

Just hit me that this is episode #150, admittedly 150 isn't 100 or 250 special and our chronology is a touch arbitrary, but it's hard to believe we've done 150 of these already :) Here's to 150 more!

[@shanerooney7288]

Let's do some _rough_ math for that..... 150 episodes ~ 30 minutes per episode 150 x 30 = 4,500 minutes = 75 hours = *3 days and 3 hours* I'm new to this channel, so I've got _plenty_ to catch up on.

[@matc87]

There all special...but congratulations on #150 isaac

[@KariAlatalo]

Best channel ever!

[@AEB1066]

Congratulations on #150 - know get to work on the next 150!!! More seriously this has to be one of the best channels of its kind.

[@TheFazz01]

Great job Isaac, your video's are fantastic!

[@Madhijz]

In the year 3000 there will be a Brilliant course on how to manage recently Re-sleeved elephants, the future is weird.

[@7lllll]

in that case brilliant would become a filesharing site because we would directly download that knowledge into our brains. we wouldn't need a time consuming and effort intensive course to learn that.

[@jmorley1147]

Why waste brain space downloading the course? Just access the hive knowledge file via the Bi-Fi.

[@dirus3142]

@@7lllll Better than having a chip jack installed in your head.

[@Rcdvst808]

Being an ecologist in the future is going to be an awesome job. Habitat creation from the ground up...

[@grouchypus]

omg ikr

[@gumunduringigumundsson9344]

Fucking brilliant epic privegelge to even come near to a project like that... a privelage so great you are locked in with it in a zone of progress and genius wellbeing.. and are responible for maintaining that peace in a fun and good manner. Good luck! God be with you. Just does not hurt to say. Thank you for giving it your best!

[@couchgrouches7667]

I imagine that far in the future we may possess the capabilities of engineering entirely new species to fulfill specific ecological roles in specialized alien biomes.

[@gumunduringigumundsson9344]

@@couchgrouches7667 It might come in handy.. But.. It is obviously best to treat such matters with extreme prejudice and educated respect in a big open discussion.. never ever let private hands on such privelage.. duh.. I assume..😉 for you are responsible for your actions... ect... and some peeps are simply ill the brain so... no to privatized new life creation inc.. we have all seen that movie lol! Great point you made. Mhm.. we have to be careful and tread lightly on such matters for we might accidentally tread on theyre dreams.. Gl hf!

[@kylekissack4633]

Hell yeah man sign me up!

[@seasong7655]

The tsunami on the O Neil cylinder would be a paradise for surfers and they could go around the cylinder without stopping!

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

lol, I'll have to remember that if we ever get around to that episode on sports in space

[@snm359]

The Alpine cylinder would be one of my favourite zones, the variation in gravity as you descend would add an whole new level to the winter sports. Sure would be nice to take holidays in all the different environments, I suspect tourism would be a big part of the interstellar colony fleets attraction for would be colonists.

[@maclennanld]

Neat, well as the craft that was shown the tsunami would slam into the ends of the rotating cylinder likely blowing them out and venting the atmosphere. But if the ship was built like a paint roller I guess you could transfer the force into a rotational one which would have its own problems but the surfers would be happy. The waves would be really weird in a way I can't instinctively picture due to the competing forces involved from multiple acceleration vectors. This craft would house the most unique experience the sport has ever seen.

[@carloguerrero6583]

Ooh. Yes please!

[@MartinCHorowitz]

I was at the Raw Science Film Festival a few years ago, people who were trying to start a space sports game league were there.

[@kittybeans8192]

Kind of a small point I know but, at the beginning you alluded to zipping an image incurring some data loss. This is actually not (necessarily) true! Zipping is a lossless data compression method; it will never distort the data being compressed. What you're most likely thinking of is the Jpeg format; that incurs loss, even at "100% quality", takes about 10 generations of saving and resaving an image before some pixels are just barely noticeably corrupted. Zip needs to be lossless because, while a few barely altered pixels is okay for most images, but even 1 altered bit in a program could mean it won't run at all.

[@SimonClarkstone]

From the descriptions I have heard of how JPEG works, the introduction of errors is likely to be idempotent, because a decompressed image has exactly the distortions that compression introduces already present. So recompressing an image unchanged with the same parameters as before doesn't change anything (parameters here includes the exact table of the numbers you divide the magnitude of the cosines by).

[@jmorley1147]

He was referring to the data lose when you transfer from analog to digital. Yeah, Fourier transforms.

[@michaelryder1804]

Kitty Beans b

[@johnwang9914]

Actually gzip is a format, It actually supports several compression algorithms and the utility actually tests them on a sample of the data provided to determine which algorithm is most likely to be the most efficient, it does have a flag to try lossy algorithms. Not all gzip utilities are the same, some have proprietary algorithms in addition to the open sourced algorithms.

[@problemecium]

"...elephants are the most space demanding..." Am I the only one who immediately started thinking about exporting whales?

[@dustinmullings2672]

Once again I'm humbled and inspired by how awesome this week's episode of S.F.I.A. is. Isaac, this channel just keeps getting better and better. Thank you for the weekly inspiration and reminder of what we could be.

[@roflcopterkklol]

The animations you make are just getting better and better, well done. Already better than you see on many made for TV documentaries.

[@CatcherofPearls]

Do a video on retirement planets! Like lower gravity for joints and what not.

[@KariAlatalo]

Oh man, recreational aging and diseases! A bit more grim than Isaac usually handles, but I'd watch it just as merrily!

[@CatcherofPearls]

@@KariAlatalo Thanks! Just an inevitability in a universe that Isaac has created. I like to hear it from a kardashev two point of view.

[@mastergecko1178]

I’d be surprised to see a civilization that is capable of specializing entire planets for retired ppl but still have no idea on how to stop aging...

[@muninrob]

Heinlien's future history series covers that - especially the works that show the moon & mars as fully colonized.

[@flyboypat]

By time we would have planets for the aging, we won't have aging humans!

[@joefarah06]

I’d love to see a herd of elephants in a space habitat when the spin stops and the gravity goes away

[@ENCHANTMEN_]

*panicked trumpeting*

[@c19rc]

Painted pink!!

[@johnwang9914]

Stopping the spin of such a large structure would take a lot of energy. The artificial gravity would be very hard to just stop simply because of inertia.

[@supershenron9162]

That's like... unedited cartoon cruel man. The kind of funny that you feel guilty laughing at. But you can't hold it back because..... it's just too damn funny lmao, the comedy version of the train wreck effect.

[@supershenron9162]

@@ENCHANTMEN_ it's space! If your not in there watching or have some kind of video feed it may aswell be a silent movie D:!!

[@gdexter9620]

Talking of exporting earth, there's a Bob Shaw short story about exporting earth's art treasures... The aliens that do this send our Raphaels and Rodins through a portal and give us trinkets in return, such as cigarette lighters that still work when you drop them in a swimming pool. Great channel.

[@AnimalFacts]

I love that your videos don't assume an FTL technology be used to colonize new grounds. Also, I found this video quite insightful on how we would take Earth species along with us.

[@TheExoplanetsChannel]

Great video. Humans will definitively have to build spacecrafts better than the Avalon, in the movie 'Passengers', which btw I recommend watching !

[@QuinSkew]

The Exoplanets Channel Do you wanna be a part of the dirt industry?

[@SPACETVnet]

The Exoplanets Channel nice channel you have there. Subbed and will be liking and sharing your vids on our site.

[@HungryGuyStories]

That was an interesting ship design, but those diagonal torus rings made absolutely no sense. Two or three "normal" torus rings would have made more sense for a number of reasons. Though I realize that producers need to come up with a "new" ship aesthetic for each new film for dramatic reasons that don't make scientific sense...

[@libertopaeurekananarch7562]

We might need multiple giant spaceships to carry ecosystems and antique items from our history. One ship DEFINITELY WON'T cut it! It would probably take a spaceship at least as big as Russia to carry a few thousand people and a few of every other species on Earth. A majority of the species of plants and animals might have to be left behind. Each ship could have an ecosystem, there might be a desert spaceship, one with a tropical ecosystem inside, another with a grassland and afew lakes and rivers, etc.

[@AugustusBohn0]

@@libertopaeurekananarch7562 maybe a ship for every nation with a recreation of their usual biome(s) in the ship?

[@dennisbeers]

Thank you Isaac for another interesting and wonderful video!

[@zj6074]

This week has gone by at an absolute snail's pace and sucked every minute, despite being only a four day week for me. Then I saw the notification and remembered it's SFIA Thursday, and my day got much much better.

[@King_Dogspeed]

I now live in Japan. I am SO greatful for your episodes. Thank you!

[@melvinhogberg]

I live in Sweden.

[@enlightedjedi]

I live :)!

[@ToneyCrimson]

I dead in death.

[@Ryukachoo]

What brought you to Japan?

[@joemclaughlin5661]

I also live in Japan and I watch all the new videos on ArFridays !

[@ironmanh8sall]

I don't really watch TV or even very many movies. Most of my down time is spent watching KZbin videos... You are hands down, my favorite.

[@IntrepidDawn]

Another fantastic video Issac! Your work keeps improving weekly. I hope to get on your level someday.

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

Looks quite well put together IMHO, production-wise anyway, I've never really played Stellaris or KOTOR though so I can't really say.

[@IntrepidDawn]

It's my writing that is the weakest point for my story based empires. Your writing along with the visuals in your videos is damn impressive. I'd imagine it takes hours to write one episode.

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

Oh yes, though for me the main writing phase is fairly short, I tend to do stream of consciousness so I sit and type till I'm done, anywhere from 4-7 hours, surrounding that is a ton of prep time, research, brainstorming, editing later, etc and about half the time junking it and starting over, but the core time typing isn't too bad. Visuals just improve as you get access to more resources and experience editing it, can't advise on writing, it's so different for everyone based on their style and genre or topic.

[@prakadox]

Isaac Arthur - creates a 30 minute video that becomes the basis of entire universities in the future. That sounds about right..

[@calamusgladiofortior2814]

5:10 Putting beavers on spaceships is just looking for trouble. Beavers are like honey badgers with an engineering degree.They managed to shut down a water sanitation plant in my city - they didn't like the sound the outflow pipe made, so they dammed it up.

[@n.l.g.6401]

Elephants! In! SPAAAAAACE!!! One of my favorite episodes so far :)

[@Ryukachoo]

16:49 Isn't water pressure dependent on gravity though? Like at .5g doesn't the pressure at any given depth go down? A lot of the deep water species need specific exterior pressures or they...don't end wel

[@PhoenixNL72-DEGA-]

Depends. in an o neill cylinder you control the pressure. Just add pumps that try to push in more water in a cylinder that is completely filled with water and you can make any pressure you need or want by dialing in the power of the pumps to the desired level, just like they do with the water-mains in your city. And you can basically do the same thing for air, though you would need a much larger extra air supply to feed the pumps with because air is compressible unlike water. But the maximum pressure you can get does depend on the strength of your outer hull though.

[@zell9058]

Every Thursday my narrow views of time, space and human possibilities are expanded! Thank you Arthur !

[@valrond]

So early today!. I just finished eating, then comes Arthursday. BTW. Congrats on the 150th episode. 300k subs coming in very soon.

[@Alexis-hx3yd]

Arthur, your channel has enriched my life and I am sure many others with its' optimistic but grounded hope for the future. This hope is something we direly need in the turbulent times we live in today, so please stay healthy and keep it coming for the next er... I would say at least couple of thousand years. Much love ❤️

[@HuplesCat]

Issac I think we need to terraform the Earth right now :-( Great video as ever

[@applecrafts615]

I love how you name everything "critter", haha

[@pyrotash]

Your episodes just keep getting better 150 and still awsome content thanks for all your time.

[@nil981]

Great video as always. Man I swear your videos keep getting better and better by the month!

[@dirus3142]

Kim Stanly Robinson's Aurora. The colony ship had two large rotating habitation rings. The rings were segmented into different environments. Savanna, tropical, steps, desert and so on. The people living their adapted to a culture for that environment. All the wile keeping their education. The ship was a generation ship, and it had an AI managing the ship.

[@mikedrop4421]

Man, this is episode 150 and I've watched/listened to every episode and some of them many times. That's so much time spent enjoying the content. Thank you Isaac for hours of the best content on KZbin.

[@axelbostrom3606]

Man I really hope infinite life extention comes within my life because man do I want to see this stuff happen

[@axelbostrom3606]

@@doedee1536 well I think if we get a couple hundred years, we can probably go way beyond that as well. Once you have a start, innovation should follow I hope.

[@axelbostrom3606]

@@doedee1536 yah there is probably some end to it, but maybe you could refresh it once you get towards the end or something like that. I'm not too into the whole how it works though, I just hope it comes in the next 30 years

[@7lllll]

indefinite life extension instead of infinite life extension

[@jessegauthier6985]

+Doe Dee Why not? What are you basing this off of?

[@olgadotson2152]

Plus. Who REALLY gets this technology? A average bloke like you or me? Hah

[@OrbitalAstronaut]

Another tremendous arthursday. Thanks for all your hard work.

[@daviddalton2177]

Keep up the good work issac and team.

[@merbst]

There are some nice videos of Sharks enjoying being hugged by people!

[@VangoghM]

'that would be boring' not ' that would be impossible'. I love this channel

[@musafawundu6718]

These videos never cease to amaze. I was a Science Stream in High School student and I am a Mechanical Engineer, so I've got the grasp of the fundamental concepts, but the level of imagination and the detail of the explanations just blows the mind.

[@PhoenixNL72-DEGA-]

Fun fact @ 2.20 Isaac is talking about the earth not being a closed eco system because the sun and moon affect it a lot. Actually most raindrop are seeded by space dust (dust left over from micro meteors disintegrating and space dust dropping down) because raindrops need a seed impurity for the water vapor to condense into water or ice crystals (depending on the temperature. Mostly ice crystals if I remember correctly). Without it you just get super cold water vapor. Just like without impurities in water you heat up you can get super heated water which can blow up when disturbed, which can cause a class of distilled water heated in a microwave to instantly change into steam and engulf your hand if you take it out to soon after the microwave is done. So when it rains, it's literally space raining down on you. :)

[@taotechnique]

As always, excellent thought provoking video!

[@theintrovertadventurer9640]

Saw the Patreon notification and came right away. Thank you Isaac for what I'm sure will be another great video.

[@mortimerhasbeengud2834]

Issac Arthur always keeps his ideas, clever as they are, kept within the limits of physics as we know it today. This understanding of things like the Standard Model (a few flavors out there) have served us well. However, with an expanding cosmos, we have little chance of reaching anything beyond the closest stars-if that. Having said this, with the discovery of entanglement experiments and Einstein - Rosen bridges (same thing) there is a modest amount of theoretical work done by physicists concerning transverable wormholes. Its all work on paper essentially, but having said this, FTL travel isn't as impossible as it once seemed. We don't need negative matter or energy, or exotic matter, as it turns out. But we do need a god-awful amount of electricity to push a Millennium Falcon through one of these. We also better have a secondary wormhole opener, to push our trusty crew back to the old solar system-unless we like one-way journeys? What is the cost in producing one of these suckers? Well, one early estimate had it where we had to burn on Jupiter mass up to get the Falcon over the threshold. This has since been revised downward many times by different physicists. I'd say, unless super-AI comes up with this, it will be many centuries before we Star Trek-way past Century 23. I still love IA's brainy ideas.

[@animistchannel2983]

Okay, I don't generally like to multipost, but the more I think about it, the more I think that terraforming planets is both unnecessary and undesirable except as a long-term experiment in wild evolution. Once you can make O'Neill cylinders, you would be better off just making more of them. The minerals/metals from even a small planet could make enormously more living & ecology space than the surface of that planet, and you would control factors like gravity, climate, etc. Planets are messy, relatively immobile, and subject to stellar lifespan. Mobile habitats, on the other hand, can go wherever the space/energy is good for them. For that matter, if you wanted to orbit a star to collect free solar energy, you would pick a red dwarf that will last for trillions of years, and there are tons of those available. At this point in the star-formation period, we are only at the 1% point in their lifespan. This is a valid solution to the Fermi Paradox. Once you come to this conclusion, interstellar civilization would be undetectable as long as they didn't crowd a given system so densely as to noticeably dim the host star's light. If the cylinders/habitats were running on fusion power, and/or if they were insulated enough for their internal operations to maintain a stable temperature (which wouldn't take much), there would be no reason to keep them near a star at all. There could be bazillions of them drifting in open space around the galaxy, and our current technology wouldn't have a clue for spotting them. Given the sensibility that "if I can think of it, so can the aliens" we can expect the galactic civilization to be a loose confederacy of independent space-faring ecologies that are not particularly tied down to any particular solar system. They might dip in to snag a few free resources from a star system, but there's no reason to be any more anchored or dense than that. Once a civilization hits the sustainable habitat stage, they would be better served by spreading out rather than clumping together, and the interstellar voids have room enough for all. To understand these post-scarcity/post-conflict situations, you have to fully embrace the concept. There is zero need or use for greed or empire when you can just slurp up a few space rocks and get whatever you need, and recycle what you have for the next time. Most sci-fi ties itself down to 19th century Malthusian colonialism in ignorance or denial of the unlimited resources of nature. In reality, there would be no motivation for it when you could be richer in quietly dispersed peace than you could in obvious war. "Space is big... really big... I mean, you might think it's a long way down to the chemist, but that's nothing compared to space..." This doesn't make for a dramatic, conflicted storyline. You don't get heroes and emperors fighting for a throne. What you do get is maximum life and maximum enjoyment for the maximum number of people. It's the natural way for things to progress.

[@ihaveyoud9553]

Thanks for uploading, I’ll be donating platelets tomorrow, so I’ll save the video for it.

[@greypoet2]

I never considered the societal implications of seeding other planets with Earth fauna. Brings to mind the possibilities of cryo storage. Hopefully that may become an option. Also, I am amazed! You even made the advertisement interesting. lol. First time I haven't skipped ahead. Thank you for your insights. Jim.

[@jkj420]

Great video and your speech has improved a lot too!

[@DonTekNO]

An upload?! BRB .. have to cook dinner first. No true Arthursday without having dinner while watching the episode .... YES even last weeks episode ! That tounge eating fishparasite tho .. that was a tough one....

[@Ramiromasters]

Aren't you over thinking this Arthur? I mean you could just tell a drunk carpinter and his family to build a boat and to put 2 of each animal there and done! Foolproof incontestable plan!

[@edeniaAJ]

I actually don't imagine our population expanding that much beyond 10-11 billion people. Once Africa, South America, and South Asia have industrialized and have access to advanced medicine and reproductive facilities, along with quality education, the population growth in those regions will slow down. I think in the future, when we are building Orbital habitats that can sustain millions of people each, we will actually have a steady state population that will enjoy more resources and land between each person. As we expand out into space and gain access to abundant extraterrestrial resources, we will be able to sustain our population's demands without much effort, and with very little impact on the ecosphere of earth and other habitats. If you create an environment similar to earth on a megastrucutre like a ring-world, each individual out of those billions of people could enjoy perhaps thousands of acres of land to themselves.

[@robertgraybeard3750]

Isaac Arthur at 13:28 and following . . . not be done by heartless jerks. Indeed!

[@RJL738]

When you said herds of robotic antelope with lap grown meat on them it made me think of a bunch of terminator antelopes.

[@Terroreyes-j8l]

I wonder if exporting animals from Earth to another planet is key to terraforming a near earth like planet. We always envision us and machines doing it but the creatures who life with us are heavy influencers as well.

[@dudefromearth3644]

The idea of uploading is often discussed in relation to further possibilities. It would be great to hear a discussion on the Proposed mechanisms of uploading.

[@AnonyMole]

Mentioned this a few years ago: rotate the axis for the habitat cylinders 90 degrees. This eliminates the Coriolis effect (corkscrew through space) and any sloshing of internal material. Imagine a huge bicycle in space where people live on the inside of the tires. The only impact would be a +/- sensation of gravity as the habitats rotate.

[@heyimharlz]

Congrats on 150 Issac! Another fantastic video, cant wait to watch the next 150! If we had the tech to build these ships, Ai, Robots etc I'd like to guess that would could just build a sleeper ship for the animals so they need next to no space each other than a box. Then just keep them on ice while in orbit as terraforming happens, they'd just need a few baby sitters during the trip.

[@zak7181]

Katie Byrne's graphics are always amazing and take your videos to the next level. The others are fine, and illustrate your point well enough, but hers really capture my imagination so much that I find I'm tuning you out to watch the graphics, and I need to rewind to see what I missed.

[@libertopaeurekananarch7562]

As well as preserving ecosystems by transporting them to space and possibly to another planet or large moon, it would also be great to preserve human history by shipping artifacts up from Earth. Clearly, we aren't going to bring the Egyptian pyramids or Roman Colosseum to outer space, but how about some artifacts from each era. Apart from the necessities like food, water and pressurized air, historical items should be the next things taken to another planet.

[@SailorBarsoom]

For artifacts I think the "Data Ship" approach might be best. Scan the bleeding heck out of everything from a Stradivarius to the Great Pyramid, from Paul McCartney's hand-written first draft of "Yesterday" to the Great Wall of China. Rebuild it at the destination.

[@gregcampwriter]

An ion drive has a low enough acceleration as to be no problem, and water surrounding the part of the ship that the humans inhabit would be an excellent radiation shield.

[@fsmoura]

14:32 IS ANYONE HERE A MARINE BIOLOGIST??? The sea was angry that day, my friends.

[@jimstanley_49]

LOL!! We need an emergency golf ball-ectomy!

[@syferpolski4344]

I have no idea who Fishy Tree is, but those new animations look awesome

[@kmcd9574]

Awesome video as usual.

[@rhuiah]

Great episode.

[@RyanJones567]

I wonder of we can increase the radius of the orbit of earth around the sun so that as the sun expands and increases in brightness, the earth continues to be in the habitable zone.

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

Yeah we've talked about it in a few episodes, most recently the collab with Joe Scott.

[@mrjava66]

Yes. Taking advantage of the moon as both barren rock and a massive somewhat rigid body. If you put a fusion based drive on the moon’s sub-earth point and ran it pushing thrust in the right direction, you could quite simply move the earth out at a rate of 0.5% per 100M years. I.e, 0.5 miles per year.

[@lukasmakarios4998]

helix427 - of course!

[@SimonClarkstone]

Alternatively, nearby mirrors for which light pressure balances Earth's gravity. They don't direct light at Earth so Earth only feels their gravity not any extra light pressure. This gradually changes the orbit.

[@johnwang9914]

The current proposal to enlarge Earth's orbit is to manipulate a near Earth asteroid so that it crosses Earth's path just ahead of Earth in it's orbit thereby acting as a gravitational tractor increasing Earth's velocity in it's orbit. The danger is that a miscalculation could result in the asteroid hitting the Earth. Another proposal is to place mirrors on the surface of the Earth and reflect the Sunlight in such a way as to accelerate the Earth in it's orbit but as the Sun only shines during the daytime, this would also change Earth's spin unless you place the mirrors in the polar regions.

[@justindeloach6732]

You are my favorite futurist on KZbin. Thank you!

[@chrisrus1965]

Elephants don't have packs. Elephants have herds.

[@mrjava66]

chrisrus1965 herbivores are generally herds. Carnivores are generally packs. Good catch.

[@lukasmakarios4998]

A herd of pachyderms ...

[@marcoshalberstadt7646]

Maybe elephants will be carnivorous in the future? That sounds like horror movie material...

[@musaran2]

Apparently a group of elephants is called a "parade". I would have suggested "encumbrance".

[@antifusion]

Man! I love forgetting it's thursday and then BAM!! New VIDEO!!

[@jetflaque8187]

Congrats on the 150'th episode Arthur

[@simplesimon8586]

“Elephants…because they are the most space demanding”. Unless we consider aquatic species like the blue whales. However then we could just call up Scotty and his transparent aluminum.

[@commentguy4711]

Just got listening to Mechina Progenitor, grabbed a snack, plus a Scooby snack, Arthursday is today. It's going to be a good day.

[@patar3323]

This should be on tv

[@patar3323]

Though I guess this is the future, who needs industry recognition

[@Ryukachoo]

18:45 Newfound respect for any aquatic species that wants to make a habitat-like O'Neill cylinder, instead of just aquatic space suits. Gotta suck to make orbital habs, or just habs in general

[@SailorBarsoom]

Another great ep, Isaac Arthur! We'll probably have wildlife parks in space well before we're ready to colonize other stars, so we'll have a few decades (or centuries) to figure it out, and not have to learn on the way to Proxima.

[@astrophonix]

I think the ideal configuration for a rotating habitat is a beaded torus made up of a ring of domes. Each dome would have it's own independent power generators and life support systems for multiple redundancy, and could replicate a variety of diverse regions like tropical, tundra etc. Each dome would have an artificial sky which is a HD video screen with a fusion lamp that traverses the dome to create a day/night cycle and a sprinkler system to create rain. Some domes could be configured as islands with a central land mass surrounded by a moat to replicate the sea.

[@simontown1765]

Their was a project run by sao paulo university in conjunction with the unaeo reserve in 2008 that may be of interest. They took golden lion tamerinds and raised them in captivity to boost the numbers, they slowly acclimatised them to conditions similar to the canopy they would occupy and allowed them to develop the correct behaviours. The first group where released and sadly died as they hadnt correctly modeled the canopy but they ajusted the model and the subesquent generations have thrived. This could be a viable in situ method of raising clones where the initial generation raised by humans in captivity could become wild within 3-4 geberations.

[@eoin2841]

Thanks Isaac

[@12201185234]

My favorite part of Thursday!

[@vahangood5999]

The music at the very end was awesome! In the future videos, can you play the music for a minute or two longer? I think that will totally sweeten the deal! ☺️

[@ToddLarsen]

Another amazing and mind bending episode! Thank you Issac for putting in so much effort and work for us the viewers. Thanks for sharing and as always Keep Building👍

[@charion1234]

This reminds me of something I read today about big horn sheep. Surprisingly they do have something like a culture when it comes to migration. Even an incredibly food rich environment they can do extremely poorly as we've learned in reintroduction efforts which consisted of simply dropping them off in a spot that looks good and assuming they'll figure it out.

[@Wolfphototech]

*Happy Arthur's day everybody .*

[@NezumiM]

Did you play the "the more you know" theme at 25:23?

[@EloquentTroll]

I'm just imagining Elephants in low, but not zero, gravity. They could jump without breaking their bones.

[@RandomEvoTimes]

Honestly this is one of my favourite SFIA episodes, even if he did get that part about sharks being “simplistic killing machines” very wrong. Wish more videos like this were on Isaac’s channel as I could really imagine him doing a whole series on this alone, discussing what species of plants and animal to use in terraforming or to represent their “kind” on a space habitat if one is to continue the Noah’s ark analogy; instead of bringing every species of Toadstool or Cockroach just bring Amanita muscaria and Periplaneta americana for instance.

[@mukkaar]

For really long trip optimal solution most likely would be to put most people unconcious or be in some vr. It would solve a lot of problems of culture changing dramatically or people just getting weird or fed up from long voyage. You would ofc want people awake regularly to do stuff and update their knowledge. But if there was option of being unconcious for most of the who knows how long of a trip. I think depending on lenght of the trip, most would chose to do so.

[@erictaylor5462]

I read that some lab discovered 1500 new species of bacteria from 1 cup of soil from their grounds of the lab, then discovered another 1500 from another cup collected from the other side of the sidewalk.

[@michaelwinter742]

25:13 That is sending scale played a few times in the video. That was really hard for me.

[@MrMonkeybat]

If instead of transporting the entire African savanna with all its mega fauna you just wanted something like the English countryside you could probably get away with a single O'Neil cylinder. As you say at the beginning much easier if you concentrate on the most useful and resilient species instead of the entire ecosystem. There are lots of places in the world that lacked native land animals because of isolation such as islands like New Zealand. If there was a planet like Earth that happened to never have life originate there. I wonder how long would it take to seed the planet with algae and grow a breathable atmosphere? I also wonder how possible it is for panspermia to of seeded some exoplanets with algae already, that would be convenient.

[@VAXHeadroom]

Just finished "Aurora" by Kim Stanley Robinson. Anybody interested in this topic should DEFINITELY read this book!

[@Bluecho4]

I suspect that once we start building up the infrastructure in the solar system, a great deal of these issues will be tested simply as a matter of course. Just moving a habitat from Earth to Earth's orbit and then over to the rungworld around the sun, for the purposes of creating a nature preserve nearby to them, will teach us a great deal about moving and maintaining such environments while in motion.

[@maclennanld]

So that is why they invented those exploding collars on all those SciFi and fantasy stories, they needed to remotly put down a lion before it killed an important member of a key Stone species. Here I though those were just excessive plot drivers

[@Dang_Near_Fed_Up]

Another huge issue that has not been discussed is how do you reintegrate your genetic samples once you arrive on planet? Moving plants and small animals may sound easy, but I assure you it will be far more complicated than you would think. For instance, how do you get a very delicate plant, that will snap under a slight wind, to survive the multiple G forces of planetary reentry? Granted you could grow entirely new plants from seeds but you take my meaning about delicate life forms. How do you get a whale onto a drop ship? How do you even move some species, without killing them or get killed yourself? You can not merely sedate and move everything, as is the most common model shown in science fiction movies. Pressure, gravitation, liquid environments, special requirements like heat or cold, the list is endless of things that would have to be recreated to allow the samples to survive transport.

[@BlackEpyon]

Thinking of water in O'Neil cylinders... The idea of opening and closing mirror sections for day/night cycles wouldn't work because of conservation of angular momentum. Pull the mirrors in, and the rotation rate of the cylinder speeds up, with the water flooding in the down-spin direction. Open them again, and it slows down while all the water washes over the land sections up-spin. The "mirrors" would have to be trusses supporting multiple mirror banks pivoting on one axis. That way you change the angle of the mirror banks for the day/night cycle, and the trusses stay at a fixed angle to keep the same angular momentum and pseudo-gravity.

[@KarlRosner]

Upload a human mind into an Elephant robot body...hell yeah.

[@amadeus2030]

Now that would be a What the actual fuck? What drug have I taken moment

[@SailorBarsoom]

As long as I'm not an anteater. movie ref

[@francoislacombe9071]

Do you think the Nauvoo, as depicted in The Expanse, would have had a chance of reaching Tau Ceti in any form of viable condition?

[@die1mayer]

Tau Ceti is about 12 light-years away, the Epstein Drive should make about 0.05c(like Epstein's yacht), making it a journey of 240years. It's unclear if the Nauvoo could stay functional and supply its crew of ~4000 for this time span, but the ship was clearly meant for centennial travel.

[@Hyperious_in_the_air]

IIRC they said the mormons would burn to something like 15% light, not 5%.

[@die1mayer]

Then the Epstein drive must be far more efficient and all the values in the expanse wiki are flat-out wrong. In any case, regardless how much of a wondrous engine you got, it would still be bound by the rocket equation. It can't burn indefinitely.

[@hafor2846]

Is it, though? We know that ships in the Expanse can routinely travel with one g of acceleration to simulate Earth gravity. It is never explained how the Eppstein drive works, but if we assume it does, we would have this: C= 299 792 458 m/s ; 10% would be 29 792 458 m/s. With a constant acceleration of one g (9.81m/s^2), you would need 3 055 988.35 seconds (29 792 458 m/s ÷ 9,81m/s^2). That's 848 hours or roughly 35 days of acceleration. Given that the show mentions some ships that are underway for much longer than 35 days, these numbers seem to be possible. At least within the framework of the show, where the Epstein drive exists.

[@aluisious]

" all the values in the expanse wiki are flat-out wrong" Dude, it's a publicly written page about a science fiction show that itself is written to be entertaining more than anything. Calm down. There is no reason to get worked up over "values" in sci fi.

[@TheLightensoul]

Hey @Issac Arthur I have a idea for a future video, In one of your previous videos you mention that generations after the first colonist would heavy diverge from humans if we start colonizing planets. If humans colonist wanted to make sure their decedents don't diverge from human form. What could those colonist do to make sure that their children don't diverge? I'm thinking eugenics would be heavily favorable but lets say that's not a option, then what?

[@mrScififan2]

Arthur’s day!

[@divineknowledge4607]

If the acceleration is slow but steady the oceans will barely move. You'd have to slow down the same way. I still say encapsulate the entire planet and just move it is the best option for certain survival.

[@lazyman556]

I have come to expect this channel to just casually drop some idea I never thought about before, but gonna be honest I didn't call The Matrix For Elephants

[@Pile_of_carbon]

I seriously hope you decide to write a scifi novel (or a bunch of them) at some point. Sort of like Asimov's Foundation series, but centered around an emerging galactic empire and the weirdness that comes with climbing the Kardasjev scale. Thematic titles like Kardesjev 1, Gardener Ship, Kardesjev 2, Shell World, Kardesjev 3, Matrioshka Brain, The Last Star.

[@acaglumac]

Hi Isaac. I love your videos. Keep them coming. I also wanted to let you know, it's "across", not "acrossed".

[@Rickbearcat]

I have watched every one of your videos. All of them take on the form of a macro plan. And while these overarching ideas are fun to watch and give us something to reach towards, they fall woefully short in the how do we get this started category. I would propose to you to start a new series. Something that puts the micro at the front and center. Take one of your topics with the grand idea and move it into the realm of how we can actually get started on this thing. Title it: "The future gets started now: [Put grand idea here]". It doesn't need to be complete, but it would have to introduce clear core concepts to get started on. Something that gets engineers, scientists, biologists physicists, and the like excited and working towards that outcome. You can't build the Great Wall of China without the individual bricks and you can't make the bricks with out dirt. If you feel you want to play a real role in moving the science forward, then we need to move away from the fantasy you present with a video like this one. Because, unless you put forth something more concrete then a video like this, people have much, much more mundane things to think and worry about here on Earth. Please feel free to debate me on this. I promise to make the conversation civil and productive.