“They went through Geneva unnoticed, they passed through Jodrell Bank without even a blip, which was a pity because it was exactly the thing they had been looking for all these years.”
Nomadic cultures bumping into and migrating to and away from each other is a major theme of central Asian history. The Turkic language family can be found from Crimea all the way to Sibera. It's kind of the same with Polynesian cultures. I wouldn't at all be surprised if this was th case in the future.
Except same reason can apply here, as why it stop being a thing on larger scale with development of the feudal states. Even if I don't think that civilizations would be particularly mobile due to issues of lag in transparently more broadband communication dependent future. It doesn't mean that whole Dyson Swarms couldn't move as they absolutely can. But that doesn't apply to infrastructure. Automated mining stations, observation and military outposts naturally would spread over specific region ensuring safety of the civilization. There are no reason why at least automated scientific outpost wouldn't be placed in each system just in case if something would pop up. And nomadic civilization entering such regions could trigger response of the defenses, especially as it is hard to say what they could do to the network. Of course it is up to debate how much widespread those are and what is they usual policy (free movement could be a thing). But in my opinion only for safety reasons it would be more probable to nomadic civilization migrate on they own territory then entering unknown regions of the space. But in the end it is all just speculation.
@@TheRezro I think that we are talking about two different periods of time here. Semi-nomadic and nomadic living (in Central Asia) existed up until the expansion of the Russian Empire to the Pacific. That lifestyle was made possible by the domestication of the horse.
Yes, all territories with migrating tribes. Arabic penninsula, Northern Africa. Very often Slave traders, headhunters... Star Wars desert planet, Riddick...
@Romano Coombs People always did fight. We see that in Pre-Colombian America where bloodshed between Hunter-Gather societies and absolutely no peaceful matriarchs was the norm. Blaming crop farming for that is downright ridiculous hippie mambo jumbo. Nomadic fleets are downright asking to be raided by the pirates. They would be absolutely militarized, like you know... European merchant fleets during colonization era. Because that is exactly what those fleets would be. Prehistory was horrible 0_0
Knights of Sidonia will always have one of my favorite nomadic civilizations, the ship is incredible. Insomnia: The Ark also has an interesting nomadic civilization based on diesel-punk aesthetics and a ship that has long since fallen to ruin with its citizens having all but forgotten the original functions of the ship.
To touch on Star Trek - because of course that's the most important thing about this - the notion of the "flagship" meaning the biggest and fanciest ship wasn't really a thing in the original series. TOS was much more respectful of military protocol. They even remember to call visiting captains "Commodore." Even in TNG, on the occasions that they gather a fleet together for a planned operation, they do remember to at least put an admiral in charge, such as in "Best of Both Worlds." Not sure what the ship the admiral is on is called, though!
Something that is rather nebulous in STNG and its following series is that they always mention that Star Fleet is NOT a military organization, even though it uses military styles and culture. I don't know if the franchise ever really delved into exactly how different the organization of Star Fleet and the UFP is from a modern day military.
Space Mongols lol. This episode got me thinking, what about a Nomadic civilization so big that they can afford to stop for a few centuries and dismantle entire solar systems, including the star, and then move on to the next one?
They screwed themselves, endangered all non synthetic life trying to play god and now they're a bunch of secluded germaphobes with a severe attitude problem and a 'their own mistake' sized chip on their shoulder. Gotta love Sci Fi.
We need to get Isaac to make a scifi show somehow, I'd love to watch the journey of these realistic fleets of colony ships and the various misadventures along the way
You should write science fiction books. I think it'd be cool (I would buy) if you wrote either a series or even just a short story. You could incorporate so many of your video topics, or none if you want. You'd be the author so I'll support whatever you do.
@@Aconspiracyofravens1 not really. Vacuum decay moves at the speed of light. So: 1. You can't detect it beforehand. 2. You can't outrun it. That, of course, considering light speed as a limit. But if it's not, nomadic fleets are obsolete.
@@LoisoPondohva yeah that's what makes it so scary also, you can link two atoms together using quantum bullshitery and use it as an instant warning system
@@Aconspiracyofravens1 nah, information cannot be transmitted by quantum entanglement. Not 'we can't do it yet', but in concept. Might be something else. But we don't know.
You know, every time I watch these episodes with the story elements in them, I can't help but feel a special appreciation for these. We spend so much time pondering at the possibilities of the future like immense megastructures & other technological marvels that we can only dream of today, but we tend to forget about the individual's place in all of this. The individual needles of a mighty cosmic pine tree spanning across time; each one a story unto itself waiting to be told & understood. It is always fun to remember that despite how far we have come since the days of hunting & foraging, we in the 21st century are still little more than the sapling of this great tree of Humanity - still basking in the afterglow of the Big Bang. A tree that will blossom into something truly incredible indeed.
@@isaacarthurSFIA I always do... can I just say congratulations to you and you lovely wife... I only watched the video with that at the end the other night. It looked a beautiful ceremony even with the social distancing. I wish you an eternity of happiness.
@@mayankraj2294 at the end of one of Isaacs videos it shows his wedding. I was saying a belated congratulations as I have only just watched it! Was quite self explanatory really
How about "Downbelow Station" and the culture of the Alliance in the Alliance-Union series by C. J. Cherryh. A culture of traders bound to their ships - starting out as Sub-light and only later developing FTL.
Alastair Reynolds "House of Suns " has also sort of nomadic family "lines". It tells a story about the Gentian line that travels around galaxy... check it out.
@Isaac Author 4:40 Instead of so much strife, I see this part reminiscent of past rural America with much of the farms and trucking companies being family owned and operated supplying the cities. Fast forward to the future you speak of, I see it as eventually becoming rural space.
Much of the strife in the world today, exists simply because it is no longer a simple thing to just “load up a wagon and go west.” Humanity undeniably NEEDS “new frontier” to expand into... We NEED for space exploration to become affordable for all... so that “common folk” can once again “load up a wagon and go west”...
You are nowhere the first.. Nomads can be thought of everywhere. It's because we already know it and some of us already are and have been for years. No big leap to imagine them in space.
I wrote a short story a few years ago about frozen colonists arriving at a planet after thousands of years asleep. Only to find that humans have populated those worlds for thousands of years once they arrived. "The Wait Time Calculation"
5:29 That sounds very Warhammer 40k: In the grim darkness of the far future, the noble House of Pineapples of the Navis Nobilite seeks to corner the market of glorious golden fruits bound for the Throneworld!
It is rare that any creator can put out such a sheer volume of consistantly high quality content on such a regular basis...his episodes never seem stale, old or run of the mill. Todays episode did it's job of firing the imagination and sending us far into the deep-dark. Isaac is a master of this. By far the best channel of this type on YT.
I so feel your pain with regards to ranks and roles in my (mostly TV) science fiction. One of my favourite Sci-Fi series is the Honor Harrington series. No such problem there. The only issues in that series, is that the protagonist is more than a bit marysueish.The world building is very good, and the fleet tactics are taylored on the technology. Space battles are so often unsatisfactory in Sci-Fi (and yes, I have issues even with the Expanse on this, while weapons shown seem realistic in of themselves, the distances at which battles would actually start, and its consequences for attack and defense are not at all taken into account).
I get the marysue accusation, but I have to disagree with it. She's always been shown as being horrible at trying to do navigational math intentionally, to the point of almost having panic attacks over the subject. (Although she does seem to have some ability to do it instinctively, that's not something she can do reliably.) Also, a number of her more admirable traits...... well..... kinda tend to bite her in the ass sometimes. Like her lack of any ability to consider the possibility of engaging any sort of reverse gear. (A trait that's served her well in combat, sure.... but is also arguably why she has so many cybernetic parts.) Let's face it. Honor does have a habit of.... displaying.... well.... 'more balls than brains' sometimes. Even when she's smart enough to know that she shouldn't do something, sometimes she just can't help herself. She's also, well, to put it delicately, a bit of a psychopath. A well controlled one, sure..... she has an incredibly strong moral compass and sense of honor that keeps her from becoming a monster, but when 'The Salamander' comes out, even her husband is kinda freaked out by how bleak and ruthless that aspect of her personality is. She's also portrayed even outside of her Salamander aspect as being pretty traumatized. She's had a lot of people die on her, and that kind of pain leaves a mark.
A year ago they made a post saying the game is not dead, and that was basically the last major news we heard from the devs. Reading comments on their subreddit and messages on their Discord, it sounds like they just ran out of money; they don't even have enough funds left to keep their website online right now. I haven't been following the project, but at a glance, it appears they ran out of resources in November last year, and have been limping along since then. Development is continuing, but it's at a hobbyist's pace, and updates are small and sporadic.
@Romano Coombs I'm not really sure where you're going with that, I brought up Hades' lack of funds being a problem since development has basically ceased, to the point the project doesn't even have a website anymore. They still have a volunteer development team, but very little progress is being made since almost anything that requires time or money has been slowed or outright halted.
12:25 I think locating, contacting, and uplifting every single slower-than-light generation ship that was previously sent out will be a moral imperative that rises to the top of the ToDo list if FTL ever gets invented. In fact, I think that should be considered the default course of action, and any story that posits an FTL ship effectively “driving past a generation ship without stopping” needs a damn good reason why that’s done. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s a special case of the Fermi Paradox: The occupants of the generation ship can be reasonably confident that FTL hasn’t been invented as long as nobody from their home civilization contacts them, because any reason for NOT contacting them would have to be universal enough that not even one single FTL ship ever even visits them for long enough to send a broadcast with FTL instructions. If you’re still not convinced, consider this: Humans aren't like the fictional profit-focused Ferengi from Star Trek and hopefully never will be, but even profit-crazed Ferengi would visit generation ships if for no other reason than to exploit the situation by extracting a king's ransom in exchange for the FTL blueprints. They might only do so before racing forward to steal the destination's prime real estate anyway, before the generation ship can build the tech from the blueprints. Heck, the FTL ship might even give the generation ship a set of _fake_ blueprints just to screw them over. But, crucially, they would _still contact them_. For these reasons and others, I think a situation in which a slower-than-light Earth-originating generation ship arriving at a planet and finding it already colonized by their own civilization is something that would almost never actually happen if FTL were invented.
I tend to agree that it would be morally problematic to race ahead of a slower colony ship and "steal" their destination. Definitely an action to be forbidden by a categorical imperative. Such an action might be considered so repugnant that it could start a war... something you want to avoid when starships tend to have nuclear power and blueprints for weapons of mass destruction on board.
@@lukasmakarios4998 I said nothing about not telling them, but even with 3d printing and construction capabilities, i am not so sure about a colony ship in the middle of nowhere being able to implement all new technologies, especially stuff like FTL, something i image would not all be that easy. Even with no FTL, heck especially with no FTL, ships in transit might just not be something you cannot effectively help, simply because your new shiny faster travel mode still needs to speed up and slow down. And just leaving their destination to them might not be an option, if there are other competitors in play.
loved the final comparison of a gardener ship to Earth from the view of it's inhabitants it its stationary and everything else is moving. Einstein would be proud
Have you ever played Stellaris? I'm quite amazed that most alien civilization you describe somewhat exist in that game. The nomad fleets will probably get started as a trading prospect, vast amount of merchants , cargo haulers forming their independent company/government
Wow! One of the best episodes ever! There were many questions about Gardener Ships that were answered and so many more things talked about that I hadn't considered before. That's why I love SFIA. Great job as always Isaac and crew.
Here's the thing: Discovery Channel i pay for should give air time to M. Arthur's YT presentations. I don't understand why Discovery Channel has such low brow crap content and the best stuff is here on YT
I can listen to your thoughts on all this type of stuff all day Sir. You make awesome content!! You have a gift for making longer videos not at all boring. A rare gift I think. Always excited to see your videos pop up!
I always ask why everyone wants to go to Mars if it is clearly more interesting and easy to just build space bound structures like the iss or even bigger structures. The iss is such an successful project. Just imagine if we could build larger structures... Why go to a planet why look back down🤷🏼♂️
Jeez Isaac, you come up with hypothetical scenarios for single episodes of your show that could easily be fleshed out into novels. I wanna know what happens with your fleet! Does the founding of Kepler Town go according to plan? Does Pioneer's Gamble become a thriving deep space colony unto itself? Does the tension between the two opposing directives lead to violence? Please write books.
Thank you very much for creating videos that get straight to business. It's a welcome departure from your peers' trend of padding content with unnecessary fan fair. I salute you sir.
I kinda came up with an idea for a near light speed ship myself, it would never be intended to stop. It just collects matter in it's way, using hydrogen as fuel and rest of materials to build much smaller offshoot capsule, that would later be decelerated with 1G of force using lasers until it stops with excess of population near star system. Neat feature of it is using mirror multiple times to bounce between ships, until it red shifts too much, also decelerates colonist real fast, without main ship ever stopping.
Cool! You could colonize an intermittent path across the galaxy in only 100,000 years, leaving maybe 2,000 colony pods in your wake. Hopefully, the drop-offs have enough skills and tools to build whatever they need wherever they land. It's a neat idea, to do the most in one trip. Interesting to think how your trail would look, as the Sun and Earth might have traveled 40% of a galactic orbit in that same time.
@@thomashager1424 thanks for the story to read Wish sci-fi, especially hard sci-fi was so popular like creepypastas. Haven't seen narrating channels reading bunch of sci-fi fan works created by aspiring writers or fans.
So nice to see a return to the storytelling-style episode. I think this is really more effective than ones where the script is basically reading off a spreadsheet of exponents. The future is so big -- so utterly swarming with bigness -- you have to find a personal-sized space to concentrate on as an example, a little arrow that says, "You are here!" before pulling back to see the vast tapestry into which that fits.
10:21 that's not how it works. A flagship is simply the best or most valuable ship in fleet. Admirals typically do not command ships except temporarily under extreme circumstances. Another misconception. Also for the record a commodore is an admiral. It's an outdated term rarely used in modern vernacular but it refers to the lowest rank Admirals. In the US Navy it's what we now call Rear Admiral Lower Half.
In space, the chant and the yoik are free to fill all the hollows, reverberating among the myriad connections of the vast structures, until the harmonics may fill an entire galaxy. The cosmos is a song waiting for you to sing it, from the depths of the past to the far reaches of the future. "Eivør - Salt (Lyric Video)" From the seas of the Cambrian Explosion, to the Sea of Stars, the note resounds, ever-remembered and yet ever-anew.
The space nomadic civilization is possible if the humanity don't have Faster than Lights technology because finding another home planets are hard due to the condition. Plus, space nomadic civilization are easy to defend as well. Great video 🙂
In the original BSG, the Cylons were not made by Man, but by a reptilian race also called the Cylons (per the first three episodes). But the robotic Cylons did still rebel against their makers and exterminate them.
@11:15 I think you missed a fundamental philosophy of Star Trek. The Enterprise is not a military ship, the Federation is more technological culturally which enhances its militaristic counter part. if you want to use star trek to ratify militaristic ranks look at the dominion or even the Klingon. I like the pace of progress so far in the approximations of what space gypsies would look like. multi generational ships. ive done some deep dives into this subject and i havent heard you say anything about this yet (im @ 11:15 paused for this comment.) but biological evolution would also play a macro factor when simplifying massive amounts of time and space. lol in our mental experiments the biological factor will clash with the nomadic culture since evolutionary markers often provides a competitive edge in a Darwinian ideology kind of thing. this is fun im having a great time. im about to roll this second blunt and hit play. lol
I just found out you live in Ashtabula. I live not far away in Youngstown and I listen to your videos every day while fixing the house, for some reason I'm really productive when your videos are playing! You rock!
That enemy civilization that's chasing you might be a splinter group that was once part of your parent civilization. Maybe their ships adopted slower but more efficient engines, and your ancestors saw them as the enemy because of the dufference of opinion on adopting those engines.
I always thought of the ships on Star Trek as Submarines, since they do rely on sensors rather than sight, and you do have a Captain in charge of a sub. right?
The unlimited boundary of imagination and endless possibilities explored by Isaac Arthur can become an academia major alone. I'd want to binge everything from the past 400+ ep but yet would take a lot more time to process, digest, and enjoy all of the contents he's bless us with. Horray to Sire Arthur!
The whole Grand Pioneer and Keplertown scenario is so fascinating, fantastic ! So much to consider, so many quandaries in society, morality, legality, technology - shows the future has so much challenge, as in the ethical problems in AI, immortality, and on and on Use of 'mutation' to describe long term change
Well now I need to know what happens next! Do they make their timeline? Does this rock in deep space become a new hub? I'm invested in their future already!
Lagrange point colonization? Oh my goodness yes! I was also curious to ask you and wasn't sure if you had answered this before, wouldn't it be smarter to colonize the orbit of Mars or it's moons before settling on the physical ground? I was wondering since it would seem more sensible to get an efficient and reliable way of logistics for the Mars colonies pre-colonizing the actual surface. Rather than colonizing it and work your way up into orbit again.
A nomadic civilization that subsists in and on asteroids and Oort objects is pretty much the same as a non nomadic civilization living in and on the same... with the minor difference that they are moving their object of choice. Objects at the orbit of Jupiter and farther have a lot of water, and are probably the better choices. None of this has to be urgent, and large margins of safety for fuel and resources are easily done. But yeah, no drama is boring LOL. In this context, a large colony ship is just a giant Rube Goldberg, completely unneeded, difficult to build, and lacking sufficient radiation or meteor shielding. Why go to all the trouble of building gargantuan cargo holds to carry raw resources, when you can just move the whole mass of an object rich in all the materials you need? Shielding and resources outside, instead of inside. Stuff you don't want becomes reaction mass. Sending out high speed scouts to many possible destinations, either automated or manned, is an excellent strategy as well. Building multiple O'Neil cylinders inside a hollowed out object is an ideal solution, as it provides huge amounts of shielding, and huge amounts of resources. Using some of the resources as fuel/reaction mass, allows moving to another star system before fuel and resources run out. Just accelerating at 0.005 G (one twentieth of a meter or 5cm per second per second ) can get you to another star system in about 1 human lifetime where you can grab one or more Oort type objects, and multiply the colony. Then people that want to go to different stars, or stay at the one they just arrived at can group up and do so, they could even decide and move between O'Neil cylinders years or decades before arriving at a given star system. The people that choose to stay could even periodically send out more colonies in various directions, as well as being a communications hub. If you think about it, building several large rotating habitats inside an Oort object or several of them, and then moving said object(s) in the direction(s) of curiosity sounds like a rather interesting future. Pick a properly sized object, and it can sustain a civilization for a very long time, and still be moved. Multiple O'Neal Cylinders provide redundancy for many possible disasters. A good backup plan would be to choose an object that has enough resources to make two journeys (or shave down a larger one), in case the destination has nothing that can be used or is occupied by hostiles.
I really like the idea of nomadic space civilizations, setting laser highways between the stars. But I am under the impression that kind of job would be better suited, to self-replicating machines, than "humans" people in charge of a such task.
As a fellow veteran, I can 100% relate to that annoyance with unrealistic military command structures in sci fi. I've also had my share of experiences with micromanagement within commands.
It's nice that you picked up my suggestion(from two months ago) about galactic nomads, but I don't think a fleet of nomads will bother to stop on every single one solar system, if they put ships in a long line can use a fleet as a mobile interstellar highway every time are passing near a solar system can decelerate a payload to a near zero speed (in this way can gain speed for each ship in the fleet), or can pick a slow moving ship and accelerate to the fleet speed. So transportation will be main merchandise that nomads will sale.
The usage in Star Trek was often the naval term you're thinking of, with several "flagships" of various fleets, such as the Enterprise serving as the flagship of the fleet used to form a tachyon web to stop the Romulans interfering in the Klingon civil war, or the doomed flagships of every redshirt admiral that fought the Borg. The "Flagship of the Federation" moniker, though, was the other definition of flagship - The most important or best example of something. I particularly liked "Building Harlequin's Moon" by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper that told a similar story of a long-term colony ship making a stop along the way and having to deal with diverging priorities. They used cryosleep instead of life extension to make people live longer, and it was a case of fleeing a society they didn't agree with, but it hit several of the same notes and did an amazing job of spanning a compelling story across thousands of years.
The Macross franchise. Except they got handed a boat load of advanced technology before deciding to set out in colony fleets to colonize the galaxy in decades rather than millennia, thanks to hyperdrives and fold tech.
They might even emerge naturally, infrastructure builds out w the aid of a local orbiting body, that object continues along its path. The colony over estimated its relationship to another colony, and is left to drift for a few centuries. Where it either dies or survives with pride. At a population scale of trillions, there are bound to be nomad civilisations. Much like the Hunter gatherers before us, there may be civilisations that just follow where the game is.
Probably the best scene of flag captain vs admiral is in Legend of Galactic Heroes: My Conquest Is the Sea of Stars, where the flag captain chews out the admiral over giving orders for the ship directly.
I'm bad at writing but I've had this idea for quite some time and I've never actually seen it in SF so here it is - if anyone good at writing wants to write a story or a novel around it you have my blessing: One alternative to having a fleet is consistency of population. There's this thing called a ring species. Simplified to it's outmost it means you have three individuals, A, B and C. A and C can't reproduce with one another but both can reproduce with B - thus they are technically one single species. Should be B die though they'd become separate species. An alternative to those expressed in this episode as to why you'd want to have a fleet of ships, and one that goes between already colonized worlds at that is to ensure that the human species *technically* remains one species. A species that lives long enough in an environment will adapt to it. Humans that live long enough on a planet will adapt to that planet. If they spend too long not connecting with people from other planets they might end up becoming defacto different species - even if they're not that legally. If on the other hand you have a fleet that forces population migration from one system to the other then you can make sure that at least neighboring systems and planets are technically occupied by the same species. Expand that galaxy wide and you can make sure that the entire galaxy is one big ring species.
[1] The fact that the culture is a nomadic fleet versus a settled fleet mainly affects how the members of the culture view their future evolution. [2] If the fleet is under-resourced for some reason, you have the makings for a drama. Since a nomadic fleet by definition does not have the resources of a planetary system at their disposal, being under resourced becomes more probable. [3] Any culture whose subunits can secede has to deal with that potential. If remaining subunits are self-sufficient, no problem. Otherwise, if the seceding subgroup is potentially taking essential resources with them, you have an existential problem. The rational solution is to duplicate or partition the essential resource - if possible.
A really good example of this idea is a Star Trek book trilogy called Vulcans soul where a part of the population of the planet Vulcan went into exile and left on a group of generation ships to go out and find a new world. It is an excellent story and they encounter many problems along the way but eventually make planet fall on a new world they call Romulus. But the story is a great example of the challenges that would arise during such a journey.
Neat. I like idea of this happening. It would very cool. Why is this not something that talked about more often in scifi? I think it would be interesting if a scifi series was based on something like this.
Scientifically possible space nomads are something of a pet topic of mine. I would like to point out that while probably getting left behind, a nomad fleet cutting ALL contact with the outside world could be a pretty interesting thing, as they'd do research and development and science of their own and may come up with different technologies (since, like you said, they're not a small group either, possibly many billions). Might make for a good first contact situation with aliens sometimes in the far future, until eventually figuring out both used to be the same species.
A small ship big enough to support a family that was equipped with a hyper drive, A.I robotic medical doctor and energy to matter replicators don't need the support of any nomadic convoy and would likely venture out into deep uncharted space or even to another galaxy. If they run into trouble they are on their own.
For some reason I feel that hundreds or thousands of years from now, Isaacs videos will be used during the start of galactic travels. He will be seen as their Einstein. People will speak of the few things he got wrong. They will speak more of all the things he happen to get right. And generations of 100s of thousands of scientists, engineers and more will use his work as a base guideline. Hello future citizens!
Be born into a multi-generational fleet. What is my purpose? You deliver strawberries.
🤣🤣🤣ooonmmgggg
“We’re going that way.”
“What’s there?”
🤔
“More ‘that way’.”
Beats the hell out of self sealing stem bolts
I base my Covid timeline on when my favorite UA-camrs drop videos. It must be Thursday.
I do the same thing
Two days till Arthursday, must be Tuesday
I use "time to work out or eat/drink" as a daily mnemonic index... "Time to bring garbage out" for weeks. It's been less-than-ideal
“They went through Geneva unnoticed, they passed through Jodrell Bank without even a blip, which was a pity because it was exactly the thing they had been looking for all these years.”
I never could get the hang of Thursdays
Nomadic cultures bumping into and migrating to and away from each other is a major theme of central Asian history. The Turkic language family can be found from Crimea all the way to Sibera. It's kind of the same with Polynesian cultures.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if this was th case in the future.
Except same reason can apply here, as why it stop being a thing on larger scale with development of the feudal states. Even if I don't think that civilizations would be particularly mobile due to issues of lag in transparently more broadband communication dependent future. It doesn't mean that whole Dyson Swarms couldn't move as they absolutely can. But that doesn't apply to infrastructure. Automated mining stations, observation and military outposts naturally would spread over specific region ensuring safety of the civilization. There are no reason why at least automated scientific outpost wouldn't be placed in each system just in case if something would pop up. And nomadic civilization entering such regions could trigger response of the defenses, especially as it is hard to say what they could do to the network. Of course it is up to debate how much widespread those are and what is they usual policy (free movement could be a thing). But in my opinion only for safety reasons it would be more probable to nomadic civilization migrate on they own territory then entering unknown regions of the space. But in the end it is all just speculation.
@@TheRezro I think that we are talking about two different periods of time here. Semi-nomadic and nomadic living (in Central Asia) existed up until the expansion of the Russian Empire to the Pacific. That lifestyle was made possible by the domestication of the horse.
@@LucasDimoveo Not my point, so I don't disagree with what you said.
Yes, all territories with migrating tribes. Arabic penninsula, Northern Africa. Very often Slave traders, headhunters... Star Wars desert planet, Riddick...
@Romano Coombs People always did fight. We see that in Pre-Colombian America where bloodshed between Hunter-Gather societies and absolutely no peaceful matriarchs was the norm. Blaming crop farming for that is downright ridiculous hippie mambo jumbo. Nomadic fleets are downright asking to be raided by the pirates. They would be absolutely militarized, like you know... European merchant fleets during colonization era. Because that is exactly what those fleets would be. Prehistory was horrible 0_0
If only someone reminded me to get a drink and snack so I could watch this video...
☕🥨
It’s not too late! I recommend you get both and rewatch the episode.
This drink and snack are gonna be a long one, so why not grab an Isaac Arthur video while it's all cookin'?
"How did the star nomads die out?"
"Insufficient supplies. If only they'd thought to bring a drink and a snack."
Right it was like his calling card
Knights of Sidonia will always have one of my favorite nomadic civilizations, the ship is incredible. Insomnia: The Ark also has an interesting nomadic civilization based on diesel-punk aesthetics and a ship that has long since fallen to ruin with its citizens having all but forgotten the original functions of the ship.
To touch on Star Trek - because of course that's the most important thing about this - the notion of the "flagship" meaning the biggest and fanciest ship wasn't really a thing in the original series. TOS was much more respectful of military protocol. They even remember to call visiting captains "Commodore."
Even in TNG, on the occasions that they gather a fleet together for a planned operation, they do remember to at least put an admiral in charge, such as in "Best of Both Worlds." Not sure what the ship the admiral is on is called, though!
Something that is rather nebulous in STNG and its following series is that they always mention that Star Fleet is NOT a military organization, even though it uses military styles and culture. I don't know if the franchise ever really delved into exactly how different the organization of Star Fleet and the UFP is from a modern day military.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only... the Great Khan!
*Except for the Mongols intensifies*
KHAAAAAAAAAAN!
Dude beat me to it.
This.
Space Mongols lol. This episode got me thinking, what about a Nomadic civilization so big that they can afford to stop for a few centuries and dismantle entire solar systems, including the star, and then move on to the next one?
“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
― Pablo Picasso
Shout out to Tali’Zorah and the Quarian people!
It's No Simp September
RIP Quarians. ME3 did you wrong.
Keelah'selai !
Cao Cao Games You never were able to get the good choice where both the Geth and Quarians survive?
They screwed themselves, endangered all non synthetic life trying to play god and now they're a bunch of secluded germaphobes with a severe attitude problem and a 'their own mistake' sized chip on their shoulder.
Gotta love Sci Fi.
We need to get Isaac to make a scifi show somehow, I'd love to watch the journey of these realistic fleets of colony ships and the various misadventures along the way
He's making an SF show right now: SFIA.
You should write science fiction books. I think it'd be cool (I would buy) if you wrote either a series or even just a short story. You could incorporate so many of your video topics, or none if you want. You'd be the author so I'll support whatever you do.
Aren't Isaac's videos short stories and novelettes in themselves?
I thought this, but then thought, isn't this better? The story telling, the animation, it is art.
Arthursday! Always a day I look forward to.
Teaching and inspiring me, the future never looks so bleak when watching a SFIA video.
Excuse me as I pause my nomadic wanderings to stock up on drinks and snacks. The journey, it sounds like, will be an interesting one!
Life is a strange and weird journey.
btw would fleeing vacuum decai be another option
@@Aconspiracyofravens1 not really. Vacuum decay moves at the speed of light.
So:
1. You can't detect it beforehand.
2. You can't outrun it.
That, of course, considering light speed as a limit.
But if it's not, nomadic fleets are obsolete.
@@LoisoPondohva yeah
that's what makes it so scary
also, you can link two atoms together using quantum bullshitery and use it as an instant warning system
@@Aconspiracyofravens1 nah, information cannot be transmitted by quantum entanglement.
Not 'we can't do it yet', but in concept.
Might be something else.
But we don't know.
You know, every time I watch these episodes with the story elements in them, I can't help but feel a special appreciation for these. We spend so much time pondering at the possibilities of the future like immense megastructures & other technological marvels that we can only dream of today, but we tend to forget about the individual's place in all of this. The individual needles of a mighty cosmic pine tree spanning across time; each one a story unto itself waiting to be told & understood. It is always fun to remember that despite how far we have come since the days of hunting & foraging, we in the 21st century are still little more than the sapling of this great tree of Humanity - still basking in the afterglow of the Big Bang. A tree that will blossom into something truly incredible indeed.
Best way to start the day, coffee and pondering the vast unknown of the future
One of my favourite channels! Isaac you do a top notch job. Got my brew and biscuits ready
Enjoy!
@@isaacarthurSFIA I always do... can I just say congratulations to you and you lovely wife... I only watched the video with that at the end the other night. It looked a beautiful ceremony even with the social distancing. I wish you an eternity of happiness.
@@Jabbaholl wbat are you talking about?
@@mayankraj2294 at the end of one of Isaacs videos it shows his wedding. I was saying a belated congratulations as I have only just watched it! Was quite self explanatory really
Robert Heinlein "Citizen of the Galaxy."
Larry Niven "The Fourth Profession."
Spacefaring traders; one culture with FTL, one without.
Vernor binge also has the Queng Ho in “A Deepness In The Sky” as a slower than light trading collective.
How about "Downbelow Station" and the culture of the Alliance in the Alliance-Union series by C. J. Cherryh. A culture of traders bound to their ships - starting out as Sub-light and only later developing FTL.
Alastair Reynolds "House of Suns
" has also sort of nomadic family "lines". It tells a story about the Gentian line that travels around galaxy... check it out.
Jan Sergejeff it is very good
@Isaac Author 4:40 Instead of so much strife, I see this part reminiscent of past rural America with much of the farms and trucking companies being family owned and operated supplying the cities. Fast forward to the future you speak of, I see it as eventually becoming rural space.
Much of the strife in the world today, exists simply because it is no longer a simple thing to just “load up a wagon and go west.”
Humanity undeniably NEEDS “new frontier” to expand into...
We NEED for space exploration to become affordable for all... so that “common folk” can once again “load up a wagon and go west”...
I literally just thought of a story about this very topic.
I hope you got some good brainstorming from the episode then, and the writing goes well :)
Nice, I also played with the idea some time ago, just a nice break from being tied down to some capital planet
You are nowhere the first.. Nomads can be thought of everywhere. It's because we already know it and some of us already are and have been for years. No big leap to imagine them in space.
Just gotta have a smart way to make it stick out from the rest. I think that's where the worth lies.
@@Melinmingle right on time comes the ships leader. Captain Obvious
I wrote a short story a few years ago about frozen colonists arriving at a planet after thousands of years asleep. Only to find that humans have populated those worlds for thousands of years once they arrived. "The Wait Time Calculation"
You might be interested in this classic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Centaurus
5:29
That sounds very Warhammer 40k:
In the grim darkness of the far future, the noble House of Pineapples of the Navis Nobilite seeks to corner the market of glorious golden fruits bound for the Throneworld!
It is rare that any creator can put out such a sheer volume of consistantly high quality content on such a regular basis...his episodes never seem stale, old or run of the mill.
Todays episode did it's job of firing the imagination and sending us far into the deep-dark.
Isaac is a master of this. By far the best channel of this type on YT.
For a science fiction author, this channel is a gold mine
I so feel your pain with regards to ranks and roles in my (mostly TV) science fiction. One of my favourite Sci-Fi series is the Honor Harrington series. No such problem there. The only issues in that series, is that the protagonist is more than a bit marysueish.The world building is very good, and the fleet tactics are taylored on the technology. Space battles are so often unsatisfactory in Sci-Fi (and yes, I have issues even with the Expanse on this, while weapons shown seem realistic in of themselves, the distances at which battles would actually start, and its consequences for attack and defense are not at all taken into account).
I get the marysue accusation, but I have to disagree with it. She's always been shown as being horrible at trying to do navigational math intentionally, to the point of almost having panic attacks over the subject. (Although she does seem to have some ability to do it instinctively, that's not something she can do reliably.) Also, a number of her more admirable traits...... well..... kinda tend to bite her in the ass sometimes. Like her lack of any ability to consider the possibility of engaging any sort of reverse gear. (A trait that's served her well in combat, sure.... but is also arguably why she has so many cybernetic parts.)
Let's face it. Honor does have a habit of.... displaying.... well.... 'more balls than brains' sometimes. Even when she's smart enough to know that she shouldn't do something, sometimes she just can't help herself. She's also, well, to put it delicately, a bit of a psychopath. A well controlled one, sure..... she has an incredibly strong moral compass and sense of honor that keeps her from becoming a monster, but when 'The Salamander' comes out, even her husband is kinda freaked out by how bleak and ruthless that aspect of her personality is. She's also portrayed even outside of her Salamander aspect as being pretty traumatized. She's had a lot of people die on her, and that kind of pain leaves a mark.
I'm seeing a lot of footage of Hades 9. I wonder how that game is going along?
A year ago they made a post saying the game is not dead, and that was basically the last major news we heard from the devs.
Reading comments on their subreddit and messages on their Discord, it sounds like they just ran out of money; they don't even have enough funds left to keep their website online right now. I haven't been following the project, but at a glance, it appears they ran out of resources in November last year, and have been limping along since then. Development is continuing, but it's at a hobbyist's pace, and updates are small and sporadic.
@@evilbarrels2506
That's a shame but it's good that there's some news on it.
@Romano Coombs I'm not really sure where you're going with that, I brought up Hades' lack of funds being a problem since development has basically ceased, to the point the project doesn't even have a website anymore.
They still have a volunteer development team, but very little progress is being made since almost anything that requires time or money has been slowed or outright halted.
12:25 I think locating, contacting, and uplifting every single slower-than-light generation ship that was previously sent out will be a moral imperative that rises to the top of the ToDo list if FTL ever gets invented. In fact, I think that should be considered the default course of action, and any story that posits an FTL ship effectively “driving past a generation ship without stopping” needs a damn good reason why that’s done. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s a special case of the Fermi Paradox: The occupants of the generation ship can be reasonably confident that FTL hasn’t been invented as long as nobody from their home civilization contacts them, because any reason for NOT contacting them would have to be universal enough that not even one single FTL ship ever even visits them for long enough to send a broadcast with FTL instructions.
If you’re still not convinced, consider this: Humans aren't like the fictional profit-focused Ferengi from Star Trek and hopefully never will be, but even profit-crazed Ferengi would visit generation ships if for no other reason than to exploit the situation by extracting a king's ransom in exchange for the FTL blueprints. They might only do so before racing forward to steal the destination's prime real estate anyway, before the generation ship can build the tech from the blueprints. Heck, the FTL ship might even give the generation ship a set of _fake_ blueprints just to screw them over. But, crucially, they would _still contact them_.
For these reasons and others, I think a situation in which a slower-than-light Earth-originating generation ship arriving at a planet and finding it already colonized by their own civilization is something that would almost never actually happen if FTL were invented.
That is all fine and dandy, until you get some limitation for your FTL like "can only leave hyperspace near large gravity wells" or something similar.
Not stopping to chat would be the ultimate d*ck move, no?
I tend to agree that it would be morally problematic to race ahead of a slower colony ship and "steal" their destination. Definitely an action to be forbidden by a categorical imperative.
Such an action might be considered so repugnant that it could start a war... something you want to avoid when starships tend to have nuclear power and blueprints for weapons of mass destruction on board.
@@_Muzolf - sounds like a sorry excuse for not communicating to give them the technology, free gratis, as you pass by.
@@lukasmakarios4998 I said nothing about not telling them, but even with 3d printing and construction capabilities, i am not so sure about a colony ship in the middle of nowhere being able to implement all new technologies, especially stuff like FTL, something i image would not all be that easy.
Even with no FTL, heck especially with no FTL, ships in transit might just not be something you cannot effectively help, simply because your new shiny faster travel mode still needs to speed up and slow down. And just leaving their destination to them might not be an option, if there are other competitors in play.
Beltalowda! The Earthers and the Dusters will feel the wrath of the Free Navy!
loved the final comparison of a gardener ship to Earth from the view of it's inhabitants it its stationary and everything else is moving. Einstein would be proud
There is another example in Larry Nevin's ringworld.
Puppeteers [┐∵]┘
The Irken in Invader Zim
@@capturedflame Would you want to do it? Would you want to eat the tree of life and change?
As a man at the age, I say yes.
@@sid2112 I say yes as well.
I think we’re already a nomadic space culture, just sort of stuck on this rock as it hurtles around the galactic center.
Have you ever played Stellaris? I'm quite amazed that most alien civilization you describe somewhat exist in that game.
The nomad fleets will probably get started as a trading prospect, vast amount of merchants , cargo haulers forming their independent company/government
modded stellaris is a hell of a drug
Wow! One of the best episodes ever! There were many questions about Gardener Ships that were answered and so many more things talked about that I hadn't considered before. That's why I love SFIA. Great job as always Isaac and crew.
Here's the thing: Discovery Channel i pay for should give air time to M. Arthur's YT presentations. I don't understand why Discovery Channel has such low brow crap content and the best stuff is here on YT
Because they are cheap. And they think we are stupid. “Let them die!”
I can listen to your thoughts on all this type of stuff all day Sir. You make awesome content!! You have a gift for making longer videos not at all boring. A rare gift I think. Always excited to see your videos pop up!
I love these videos I love science and space thank you
Isaac’s insights and novel perspectives never cease to amaze me. This one was especially good.
I love thinking about this kind of stuff but it makes me feel so envious!!
I always ask why everyone wants to go to Mars if it is clearly more interesting and easy to just build space bound structures like the iss or even bigger structures. The iss is such an successful project. Just imagine if we could build larger structures... Why go to a planet why look back down🤷🏼♂️
Jeez Isaac, you come up with hypothetical scenarios for single episodes of your show that could easily be fleshed out into novels. I wanna know what happens with your fleet! Does the founding of Kepler Town go according to plan? Does Pioneer's Gamble become a thriving deep space colony unto itself? Does the tension between the two opposing directives lead to violence? Please write books.
Parts of this sound similar to Larry Niven's "Building Harlequin's Moon"
The Cielcin from the Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio are nomadic, living in ships that are hollowed out asteroids.
Really enjoyed the logistics of getting and slowing down
Best sc fi videos in UA-cam
I like your shoutouts to Warhammer 40K. As a fan, I am happy that you mention them when and where they are relevant.
Thank you very much for creating videos that get straight to business. It's a welcome departure from your peers' trend of padding content with unnecessary fan fair.
I salute you sir.
I kinda came up with an idea for a near light speed ship myself, it would never be intended to stop. It just collects matter in it's way, using hydrogen as fuel and rest of materials to build much smaller offshoot capsule, that would later be decelerated with 1G of force using lasers until it stops with excess of population near star system.
Neat feature of it is using mirror multiple times to bounce between ships, until it red shifts too much, also decelerates colonist real fast, without main ship ever stopping.
Cool! You could colonize an intermittent path across the galaxy in only 100,000 years, leaving maybe 2,000 colony pods in your wake. Hopefully, the drop-offs have enough skills and tools to build whatever they need wherever they land. It's a neat idea, to do the most in one trip. Interesting to think how your trail would look, as the Sun and Earth might have traveled 40% of a galactic orbit in that same time.
Poul Anderson beat you to it in his 1970 novel "Tau Zero."
@@thomashager1424 thanks for the story to read
Wish sci-fi, especially hard sci-fi was so popular like creepypastas.
Haven't seen narrating channels reading bunch of sci-fi fan works created by aspiring writers or fans.
@@thomashager1424 Actually, that's not what he's saying. His idea is sufficiently different.
@@Reyajh You're right. "Tau Zero" is strictly about a colony ship that approaches light speed, but because of a malfunction, is unable to decelerate.
So nice to see a return to the storytelling-style episode. I think this is really more effective than ones where the script is basically reading off a spreadsheet of exponents. The future is so big -- so utterly swarming with bigness -- you have to find a personal-sized space to concentrate on as an example, a little arrow that says, "You are here!" before pulling back to see the vast tapestry into which that fits.
10:21 that's not how it works.
A flagship is simply the best or most valuable ship in fleet. Admirals typically do not command ships except temporarily under extreme circumstances. Another misconception. Also for the record a commodore is an admiral. It's an outdated term rarely used in modern vernacular but it refers to the lowest rank Admirals. In the US Navy it's what we now call Rear Admiral Lower Half.
Even though I don't agree with everything you have to say in your videos, I respect the hell out of you for continuing to make them.
In space, no one can hear your throat singing.
Unless they are condemned to the same ship as you. Where even the deaf could feel the vibrations in everything they touch.
In space, the chant and the yoik are free to fill all the hollows, reverberating among the myriad connections of the vast structures, until the harmonics may fill an entire galaxy. The cosmos is a song waiting for you to sing it, from the depths of the past to the far reaches of the future.
"Eivør - Salt (Lyric Video)"
From the seas of the Cambrian Explosion, to the Sea of Stars, the note resounds, ever-remembered and yet ever-anew.
Klaes Ashford would disagree.
The HU in spaaaacceee!
that realization that we are, in a way, nomad civilizations was the biggest mind blown moment I've ever had on this channel!
I'm curious; where are you getting the clips with live actors from?
The space nomadic civilization is possible if the humanity don't have Faster than Lights technology because finding another home planets are hard due to the condition. Plus, space nomadic civilization are easy to defend as well.
Great video 🙂
This the most excited I've been before watching an episode.
That was a fun episode! Thanks as always Isaac
In the original BSG, the Cylons were not made by Man, but by a reptilian race also called the Cylons (per the first three episodes). But the robotic Cylons did still rebel against their makers and exterminate them.
I had forgotten that I have already subscribed to Isaac Arthur and he is fantastic! ☺️
Damn straight Skippy!
@11:15 I think you missed a fundamental philosophy of Star Trek. The Enterprise is not a military ship, the Federation is more technological culturally which enhances its militaristic counter part. if you want to use star trek to ratify militaristic ranks look at the dominion or even the Klingon. I like the pace of progress so far in the approximations of what space gypsies would look like. multi generational ships. ive done some deep dives into this subject and i havent heard you say anything about this yet (im @ 11:15 paused for this comment.) but biological evolution would also play a macro factor when simplifying massive amounts of time and space. lol in our mental experiments the biological factor will clash with the nomadic culture since evolutionary markers often provides a competitive edge in a Darwinian ideology kind of thing. this is fun im having a great time. im about to roll this second blunt and hit play. lol
These kinds of videos are some of the best on the channel!
I just found out you live in Ashtabula. I live not far away in Youngstown and I listen to your videos every day while fixing the house, for some reason I'm really productive when your videos are playing! You rock!
That enemy civilization that's chasing you might be a splinter group that was once part of your parent civilization. Maybe their ships adopted slower but more efficient engines, and your ancestors saw them as the enemy because of the dufference of opinion on adopting those engines.
I always thought of the ships on Star Trek as Submarines, since they do rely on sensors rather than sight, and you do have a Captain in charge of a sub. right?
good LOTR refrences my nerdy friend
Love your videos man, thanks for taking the time 🤘🤘
The unlimited boundary of imagination and endless possibilities explored by Isaac Arthur can become an academia major alone. I'd want to binge everything from the past 400+ ep but yet would take a lot more time to process, digest, and enjoy all of the contents he's bless us with. Horray to Sire Arthur!
The whole Grand Pioneer and Keplertown scenario is so fascinating, fantastic !
So much to consider, so many quandaries in society, morality, legality, technology - shows the future has so much challenge, as in the ethical problems in AI, immortality, and on and on
Use of 'mutation' to describe long term change
Fantastic video!!! Reminded me of some of my fav old school SFIA episodes 💗
Well now I need to know what happens next! Do they make their timeline? Does this rock in deep space become a new hub? I'm invested in their future already!
Lagrange point colonization? Oh my goodness yes! I was also curious to ask you and wasn't sure if you had answered this before, wouldn't it be smarter to colonize the orbit of Mars or it's moons before settling on the physical ground? I was wondering since it would seem more sensible to get an efficient and reliable way of logistics for the Mars colonies pre-colonizing the actual surface. Rather than colonizing it and work your way up into orbit again.
I just joined the CuriosityStream. Thank you such great interesting stuff!
A nomadic civilization that subsists in and on asteroids and Oort objects is pretty much the same as a non nomadic civilization living in and on the same... with the minor difference that they are moving their object of choice. Objects at the orbit of Jupiter and farther have a lot of water, and are probably the better choices.
None of this has to be urgent, and large margins of safety for fuel and resources are easily done. But yeah, no drama is boring LOL.
In this context, a large colony ship is just a giant Rube Goldberg, completely unneeded, difficult to build, and lacking sufficient radiation or meteor shielding. Why go to all the trouble of building gargantuan cargo holds to carry raw resources, when you can just move the whole mass of an object rich in all the materials you need? Shielding and resources outside, instead of inside. Stuff you don't want becomes reaction mass.
Sending out high speed scouts to many possible destinations, either automated or manned, is an excellent strategy as well.
Building multiple O'Neil cylinders inside a hollowed out object is an ideal solution, as it provides huge amounts of shielding, and huge amounts of resources. Using some of the resources as fuel/reaction mass, allows moving to another star system before fuel and resources run out. Just accelerating at 0.005 G (one twentieth of a meter or 5cm per second per second ) can get you to another star system in about 1 human lifetime where you can grab one or more Oort type objects, and multiply the colony. Then people that want to go to different stars, or stay at the one they just arrived at can group up and do so, they could even decide and move between O'Neil cylinders years or decades before arriving at a given star system. The people that choose to stay could even periodically send out more colonies in various directions, as well as being a communications hub.
If you think about it, building several large rotating habitats inside an Oort object or several of them, and then moving said object(s) in the direction(s) of curiosity sounds like a rather interesting future. Pick a properly sized object, and it can sustain a civilization for a very long time, and still be moved. Multiple O'Neal Cylinders provide redundancy for many possible disasters. A good backup plan would be to choose an object that has enough resources to make two journeys (or shave down a larger one), in case the destination has nothing that can be used or is occupied by hostiles.
I'm currently going through BSG 2004 for the first time! Started season 3 last night!
Great series, you'll enjoy season 4.
I really like the idea of nomadic space civilizations, setting laser highways between the stars. But I am under the impression that kind of job would be better suited, to self-replicating machines, than "humans" people in charge of a such task.
"Riding the Torch" by Norman Spinrad is another such Sci-Fi nomadic civilization. Grim, but interesting.
As a fellow veteran, I can 100% relate to that annoyance with unrealistic military command structures in sci fi. I've also had my share of experiences with micromanagement within commands.
It's nice that you picked up my suggestion(from two months ago) about galactic nomads, but I don't think a fleet of nomads will bother to stop on every single one solar system, if they put ships in a long line can use a fleet as a mobile interstellar highway every time are passing near a solar system can decelerate a payload to a near zero speed (in this way can gain speed for each ship in the fleet), or can pick a slow moving ship and accelerate to the fleet speed. So transportation will be main merchandise that nomads will sale.
Don't forget the members of Secundus. Lazurus Long would be disappointed.
This has become my favorite channel.
Happy Arthursday.
The usage in Star Trek was often the naval term you're thinking of, with several "flagships" of various fleets, such as the Enterprise serving as the flagship of the fleet used to form a tachyon web to stop the Romulans interfering in the Klingon civil war, or the doomed flagships of every redshirt admiral that fought the Borg. The "Flagship of the Federation" moniker, though, was the other definition of flagship - The most important or best example of something.
I particularly liked "Building Harlequin's Moon" by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper that told a similar story of a long-term colony ship making a stop along the way and having to deal with diverging priorities. They used cryosleep instead of life extension to make people live longer, and it was a case of fleeing a society they didn't agree with, but it hit several of the same notes and did an amazing job of spanning a compelling story across thousands of years.
The Macross franchise.
Except they got handed a boat load of advanced technology before deciding to set out in colony fleets to colonize the galaxy in decades rather than millennia, thanks to hyperdrives and fold tech.
You never disappoint Issac. Been a sub since the beginning.
They might even emerge naturally, infrastructure builds out w the aid of a local orbiting body, that object continues along its path. The colony over estimated its relationship to another colony, and is left to drift for a few centuries. Where it either dies or survives with pride. At a population scale of trillions, there are bound to be nomad civilisations. Much like the Hunter gatherers before us, there may be civilisations that just follow where the game is.
The ending makes me think of the ultras from Revelation Space.
Ahh, ALastair Reynolds. I love Ultras :)
That was a really cool perspective and tied up nicely at the end
see “Citizen of the Galaxy” by RAH.
Probably the best scene of flag captain vs admiral is in Legend of Galactic Heroes: My Conquest Is the Sea of Stars, where the flag captain chews out the admiral over giving orders for the ship directly.
I'm bad at writing but I've had this idea for quite some time and I've never actually seen it in SF so here it is - if anyone good at writing wants to write a story or a novel around it you have my blessing:
One alternative to having a fleet is consistency of population. There's this thing called a ring species. Simplified to it's outmost it means you have three individuals, A, B and C. A and C can't reproduce with one another but both can reproduce with B - thus they are technically one single species. Should be B die though they'd become separate species. An alternative to those expressed in this episode as to why you'd want to have a fleet of ships, and one that goes between already colonized worlds at that is to ensure that the human species *technically* remains one species. A species that lives long enough in an environment will adapt to it. Humans that live long enough on a planet will adapt to that planet. If they spend too long not connecting with people from other planets they might end up becoming defacto different species - even if they're not that legally. If on the other hand you have a fleet that forces population migration from one system to the other then you can make sure that at least neighboring systems and planets are technically occupied by the same species. Expand that galaxy wide and you can make sure that the entire galaxy is one big ring species.
Thanks for another cool post. I love your channel, thanks for all your cool work.
[1] The fact that the culture is a nomadic fleet versus a settled fleet mainly affects how the members of the culture view their future evolution.
[2] If the fleet is under-resourced for some reason, you have the makings for a drama. Since a nomadic fleet by definition does not have the resources of a planetary system at their disposal, being under resourced becomes more probable.
[3] Any culture whose subunits can secede has to deal with that potential. If remaining subunits are self-sufficient, no problem. Otherwise, if the seceding subgroup is potentially taking essential resources with them, you have an existential problem. The rational solution is to duplicate or partition the essential resource - if possible.
You should do a series talking about the ships in your videos.👍👌
(That should be worth at least 3-5 videos)
Great work by the way 🤯🤓💪
love you isaac. thanks for all the great content.
A really good example of this idea is a Star Trek book trilogy called Vulcans soul where a part of the population of the planet Vulcan went into exile and left on a group of generation ships to go out and find a new world. It is an excellent story and they encounter many problems along the way but eventually make planet fall on a new world they call Romulus. But the story is a great example of the challenges that would arise during such a journey.
I love that you are so optimistic and tjat you look so bright at the future :)
14:00
That sounds like a nightmare in a politically divisive world. Your shipmates have different scary opinions and no way to avoid them.
Basically Earth today.
Neat. I like idea of this happening. It would very cool. Why is this not something that talked about more often in scifi? I think it would be interesting if a scifi series was based on something like this.
Yes! I've been excitingly anticipating this!
Scientifically possible space nomads are something of a pet topic of mine. I would like to point out that while probably getting left behind, a nomad fleet cutting ALL contact with the outside world could be a pretty interesting thing, as they'd do research and development and science of their own and may come up with different technologies (since, like you said, they're not a small group either, possibly many billions). Might make for a good first contact situation with aliens sometimes in the far future, until eventually figuring out both used to be the same species.
A small ship big enough to support a family that was equipped with a hyper drive, A.I robotic medical doctor and energy to matter replicators don't need the support of any nomadic convoy and would likely venture out into deep uncharted space or even to another galaxy. If they run into trouble they are on their own.
For some reason I feel that hundreds or thousands of years from now, Isaacs videos will be used during the start of galactic travels. He will be seen as their Einstein. People will speak of the few things he got wrong. They will speak more of all the things he happen to get right. And generations of 100s of thousands of scientists, engineers and more will use his work as a base guideline. Hello future citizens!
I like the new format ;Storytime with Isaac Arthur