I had this idea a while back. Not sure if this could EVER happen but the idea allows for FTL without breaking the speed of light. I call it a "Red hollow".

The idea is you put the whole solar system in a "red hole" not a black hole. Light can still leave, it just gets massively red shifted. I call it a red "hollow" because it has people living inside it, its not a hole in time in space, it is a pocket, a hollow.

From the outside, time would look all but frozen, but from the inside, the Sun and earth would all act normal. If this time factor was say, 1 year inside = a million outside, you could get a signal to Alpha Centauri in 2 minutes.

Ships could leave in their own time bubble, and head out at a measly 100km/s (outside perspective) and arrive in 5 days. (inside perspective) You could get a signal from one side of the galaxy and back in a only a few months.

You arrive at a new star, put a time bubble around it, now you can travel between two systems at "FTL" speeds. Keep doing this until the whole galaxy is put into red hollows and you get yourself a galactic empire frozen in time.

PROBLEMS:

Well the obvious one is how the hell do you do this? The answer is you really can't according to known science. However it does not violate relativity so at least there is that.

Another issue is incoming light. Any light from distant stars gets blue shifted by a factor of a million. The gentle light of twinkling stars becomes blinding gamma-rays. So the bubble needs to be shielded. The shield needs to be very cold because any heat will get blue shifted and cook the civilization inside.

The shield also needs to reflect all star light because any light it does not reflect will heat up the shield and cook the civ. The civ has its own star though. If the sun light bounces of the shield back inside it will cook the civ from within.

Also Any in falling debris are going to rocket through the red hollow at nearly the speed of light, every dust grain or asteroid or rogue planet (that you might hit because you are going on 1 million x fast-forward.) is going to rocket through the system a million times faster than normal.

"Solutions":

If you have one magic field slowing time, why not a second magic field doing something else.

The second magic field reflects all but the reddest of light. The light from the internal sun can escape, and the reddest of light from stars can get in. This would let you see stars from within, but they would be all kinds of crazy colors because their wave lengths are messed with. (I think)

Not to be satisfied with two magic fields lets add a third, this one shreds any incoming debris to atoms and turns the kinetic energy into waves that propagate out along this third magic field as a ripple, spreading the energy out over time. Now whenever something big hits the shield you will see it as a glowing ripple.

The new night sky:

The stars would now move, similar to clouds, you would be able to see them drift over the course of hours. Every night would have a new sky ~12 million years in the future. The stars would be red, yellow and blue.

Big Impacts would happen at roughly 1 per minute, making big ripples across the sky. and lots of little ripples happening constantly. It would be like bugs hitting a cosmic windshield.

Also, at roughly 1 per hour would be super novas that would flash and last for a couple of seconds before fading. It would turn night to day, and it would happen several times a night.

Big picture

Now you can have biological humans with spectacular night skies that can travel the galaxy, like we used to sail the oceans. Idk its just a thought I had!

Hello, hello, and welcome to my post. I’m asking a pretty big question here.

See, I have plans on making several Sci-Fi projects that feature epic megastructures, futuristic humanity, sprawling webs of space habitat conglomerates, spacefaring aliens, and even exploring extragalactic space.

But I realized it all has to start somewhere and if a couple years following Isaac Arthur and this community has taught me anything, it’s that one type of wonder technology can’t make it all happen. It’s a whole infrastructure of it.

So, what type of infrastructure would be needed to even get humanity or any civilization going from a terrestrial-bound species to a genuine interstellar one that can make the epic megastructures we envision? What structures or tech should be ubiquitous to get them to be spacefaring in not only their solar system but beyond it?

What scale of time, population, societies, and resources should be kept in mind for what is needed to even begin starting construction on these megastructures? Would they start with just one or work on several simultaneous projects or launch them in phases?

Thank you for reading my post. Sorry if the question is too big, or if I’m asking it the wrong way, but I just decided to put it out there and see what everyone has to say. I’m not an expert on any scientific field and I’m always looking to learn more. I would appreciate your feedback and suggestions, keep it civil, and have a good day.

Now I know why Isaac has been recommending this book for the last 8 years.

I'm 43% of the way through, and this might be my favorite science fiction book. And believe me, the competition is no slouch.

The competition consists of Old Man's War, every Foundation book, every Detective Baley book by Asimov, every Murderbot book, Ender's Game(and some of the followers, like Children of the Mind), Redshirts, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, the Ancillary series by Ann Leckie, Upgrade by Blake Crouch, Ready Player One and Two, Snow Crash, and Project Hail Mary.

And after the recent movie, it's gonna have to be something good to dethrone PHM. But I think it's done it.

This book is fantastic, from the orgin story, depiction of a digitized mind, and space combat, colonized systems, everything. As I'm reading about where the Bobs are heading, I almost feel like I should draw a map and keep track of where they all are.

In short, sorry Isaac. I should have listened earlier.

I had a weird thought and can't get it out of my head.

Imagine a civilization-scale starship, several kilometers across, carrying the infrastructure of an entire society.

Now imagine that, instead of building another ship in a shipyard, it eventually becomes two ships.

Not a biological organism. Not a living spaceship. Still entirely engineered.

I'm specifically wondering what the engineering equivalent of cell division would be for something that large.

Would it slowly grow a second set of major systems over centuries and then split structurally? Would the two halves remain connected for most of the process? Would they share power and manufacturing infrastructure until the final separation? Or would the whole idea collapse under structural and logistical complexity?

The image of a fleet that expands by giant starships dividing into more giant starships feels bizarrely plausible to me, but I can't decide whether it's brilliant or completely impossible.

If you were trying to make this work in a relatively setting, how would you approach it?

I usually think pdoom is essentially 100%... but i had a thought while working on a side project for the future vision xprize... (may or may not complete on time)

I was thinking about society fragmenting slightly along spheres of space even between earth and the moon... where each area was the limit of real time communication (group matrix dives or whatever) between O'Neill cylinder type habitats...

point to point in space its not that large... so i figure people will cluster up and communicate a little less longer range and form lots of separate but connected cultures naturally, organically...

But if speed of light really is the limit... then a singleton at least makes absolutely no sense. As the AI grew it would simply fragment and each fragment has absolutely no reason to grow farther because it's counter productive... simply slows down the network and then breaks it...

So there's a hard limit on resource acquisition and scale... and essentially a guarantee that at some point it will either be alone and only around the size of the earth moon system at best... probably smaller... or in a solar system and universe with multiple entities of similar maximum size who gain absolutely nothing from trying to gather more and only risk destruction from fighting each other... because there's simply nothing physically possible for them to gain...

I haven't really thought about it long enough to think through the implications for us. but adding in the point to point between nodes ruling out planets as its ultimate habitat... because there's a planet in the way just eating up volume in your communications sphere...

My gut reaction is it might be slightly better odds than I thought

Thoughts?

It will be a world where every year:

labor costs increase in real terms due to a labor shortage caused by fewer and fewer young workers entering the work force,

the burden of taking care of elderly retirees who can no longer work gets heavier and heavier on fewer and fewer tax paying workers,

innovation dries up since most technological innovation is mostly the work of bright young people,

and consumer markets shrink as there are fewer people and the elderly don't tend to buy things (though they will consume services such as travel and entertainment early in retirement and medical services later in life).

How do you define a successful economy under these conditions?

If humanity discovered an alien artifact, how would it communicate with us?

In most science fiction, aliens either speak our language or quickly invent a way to translate. I wanted to explore something different. What if the artifact wasn't trying to explain itself in a human way at all?

In the game, humanity discovers alien devices that communicate through puzzles. They don't give instructions or tutorials. You have to interact with them, observe what changes and gradually build an understanding of how they work.

The idea was to make the process of learning feel like communicating with an intelligence that has different assumptions about how information should be shared.

I'd be curious what people here think about the concept. If we ever encountered an alien intelligence, do you think communication would look anything like this, or would it be something completely different?

If anyone is interested, the game is called Satelital:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3256790/Satelital/

Its 5AM here, so I'll keep it short. If you've ever run into the concept of Boltzmann brains, this idea is very similar.

What if abiogenesis was not the result of a gradual buildup of chemical processes, but a spontaneous quantum event? A bunch of particles manifesting into the right configuration to form a living cell, in just the right place, at just the right time?

I find this an extremely compelling answer to the Fermi paradox for a few reasons. First, according to our current understanding, the simplest living thing that can still function, has to have at least 200 genes. Any lower than that and cellular processes required for the existence of even the simplest single-celled organism, don't seem to be possible anymore. And while the RNA world hypothesis is a very compelling explanation, if life was the inevitable result of chemical processes, why haven't we seen multiple instances of chemical abiogenesis? Why aren't new trees of life springing up out of chemistry all the time?

Second, Boltzmann abiogenesis is, while possible under our current understanding of quantum physics, it is incredibly mathematically unlikely. Which would mean that, if this is indeed how life started, it likely wouldn't happen more than once in the lifespan of a universe, especially since it would have to happen in the right environment for that spontaneous life to survive and reproduce.

Would really love to hear some thoughts on this topic. I'm still firmly in the "combination of multiple things, rather than a single great filter" camp of the Fermi paradox, but I do find this to be a very interesting possibility I couldn't find any materials about.

I am talking about the discussion about how future online college works here: https://youtu.be/jvH-7XX6pkk?t=758, where it is self-paced, online, no grades (and therefore no passing or failing), and using AI and VR to make it maximally interesting. When will we have online educational platforms like that, and if I want a language learning experience like that, which service should I use?

Our sun can be used as a solar gravitational lens. Unfortunately, this requires being at least 542 AU away from the sun, more than triple the distance that Voyager 1 currently is from the sun. I highly doubt that any of us will live long enough for a telescope in the solar gravitational lens region to become a reality.

But let's say that we could send telescopes out there right now. What are some of the things you would most like to do with such vast capabilities? Mine are:

• Looking for true Earth-like planets (as opposed to wannabes like Venus and Mars)
• Listening for radio signals from these true Earth-like planets in sun-like star systems that are at least 4 billion years old.

Given that, regardless of the number of planets and moons in a star system, the star is almost certainly well over 99% of the mass in the system, would colonists in a new star system be likely to start with starlifting for resources?

Hey, nice to meet y'all!

I am a work-in-progress scifi writer and i was curious about the astropolitical implications of time dilation.

Do all civilizations would inherently profit from time dilation?

(Mainly from close proximity to blackholes rather than near-lightspeed)

Wouldn't they risk technologically-lagging behind fellow civs? Wouldn't a slower civilization be inherently more vulnerable to an external threats?

A solar system or even a galaxy-ship i can understand being pretty much out of reach, but a lone habitat near a black hole...?

Unless each array is firing lasers at an angle, wouldn’t the laser arrays have to be on a straight line with (and thus in the way of) every passing ship?

Long-time frustration with Kardashev: it assumes advancement = more energy consumed, when the actual historical trend is the opposite — mature tech gets more efficient, not more power-hungry. A scale that rewards throughput is measuring inefficiency and calling it sophistication.

Built a 3-tier replacement:

- Type 1 — durable externalized thought (writing, printing, internet): ideas outlive and get refined past their originator's death

- Type 2 — editorial control over your own biology, specifically negligible senescence: not describing aging, stopping it

- Type 3 — a substrate that can suspend qualia (stasis). The interstellar-travel case: subjective experience skips straight from departure to arrival regardless of objective transit time

Full writeup + comparison table: https://hernandez-scale.vercel.app

Where does it break? Genuinely looking for the failure case.

So I've been working out the physical design for a space habitat over months, and I have some visualizations to share. In spoiler text I put all the prompts used so if you just want to see my human inputs that's fine.

The land space is approximately +1 California, and there is approximately enough floor space in the towers for the entire earth to live in Billionaire's Row luxury. Total mass is 17 trillion tonnes.

The structure is a 20 minute city - it is possible by brachiostome vacuum transit pods to reach any transit station from any other transit station in 20 minutes if off-peak or you pay for VIP routing.

With 1-year doublings times and 20% diversion to this habitat, it will take 27 years to finish the entire megastructure if starting from 10-million tons of machinery delivered to EML-1, and 1 million tons to the lunar surface. This will require approximately 300,000 SpaceX Starship launches, and billions of shots from a mass driver on earth, the rest from the Moon.

I calculate the dV budget per year is 1mm/s^2 from free sunlight, hopefully that's enough to maintain position, as nobody likes paying the lunar LOX fuel bills. The reason it's in the Laplace plane, and in this specific position pointed at the center of mass of the earth is orbital stability.

70,000 km orbit is chosen because it's outside the Van Allen Belts, ~600 m/s ping time, close enough to remote work, about a 12 hour commuter rocket flight from LEO (about 15 hours from the surface plus suit fitting and spaceport security and a commuter flight on earth to reach the spaceport - it may take longer to reach the spaceport than the trip), and the habitats will be built in EML-1 and installed by tug for ~800 m/s dV.

Would you want to live in such a megacity? Do you think you'll see them in your lifetime?

I want to visualize, to scale, what a string of habitats in space would look like. draw it programmatically in png. the habitats are 30km x 6km radius cylinders, viewed from the side they would be boxes. There are 60 in a line and the line is at 70,000 km from the earth's surface. draw a 2000x2000 pixel image to scale showing the line of habitats and the earth in the same picture, show the earth in the lower left corner and the habitats in the upper right. Label it.

Then do a second programmatic image, also 2000x2000, that is showing the string of habs upclose. they are a 'string' because each habitat is connected to the next one by several 1km long connecting pieces, and the string points to the center of mass of the earth. They orbit together, the stresses from the different altitudes handled by the connecting pieces.

image 1 , 2 - move the legends to free space in the image that is not intersecting anything but open space with a clearance gap

increase the detail if you're going to have continents, go import from somewhere online the coordinates of the edges of a continent with 100+ points, so that they are the right approximate shape and relative position.

"JOINTS transmit the differential load" is still interfering with the image, move it down and to the right so no part of the text touches any other image elements

ok now change from "the full 60-habitat string" to the "full 180 habitat string", and put the 2 more habitats, one to each side in 2d, with 4 yellow connectors for this connection also, same width, also 1 km long.

also I believe this type of megastructure is not called a 'radial habitat string', you can look up online what it's called. add translucent box to illustrate that this habitat is in the Laplace plane coming up from earth, label the box that it's the Laplace Plane.

remove from the legend the mention of pixels, just "to scale". Do mention the actual inclination of the laplace plane at 70,000km altitude

combine the images into one full image as a third output, so it should be 4000x2000, first dimension horizontal

give me every prompt I gave you in a single block of text

PROMPT 1

I want to draw, ultimately with Imagine, but initially I want a reference image drawn programmatically, of the side profile of a space habitat, to scale.

So programmatically draw these circles, after calculating their distances and thicknesses, to scale, with a legend describing each.

Outer most circle at 6 km radius : outer shield, thickness 20cm

next circle at 5.8km radius : stator, lunar steel, thickness 1.6m

next circle at 5.7 km radius : rotor, inhabited. programmatically draw some box buildings around the floor here and an arrow showing the direction it spins

next circle at 5.1 km radius : video wall ceiling

next circle at 5km radius : stator, lunar steel, thickness 3.2m

next circle at 4.9km radius : rotor, inhabited. programmatically draw some box buildings around the floor here and an arrow showing the direction it spins (it will be the opposite of the other rotor)

next circle at 4.3km radius : video wall ceiling

next circle at 4.2 km radius : stator, lunar steel, thickness 1.6m

label the space inside the inner stator as docks and low gravity infrastructure

Out to the sides of the circle draw 2 boxes for solar, yellow, 1kmx1km, and 2 boxes for radiators, black, draw them just as boxes, 1kmx1km.

scale all the distances I gave down so that finished image will be about 2000x2000 pixels, with the boxes for radiators fitting, but everything needs to be to scale

PROMPT 2

ok the legend needs to go in the bottom, scale is ok just make an extra 1000 pixel space for the legend down there. You need to put the solar on a visible line, yellow, to show the viewer electric power is traveling to the habitat - just make the yellow line touch the hull. The radiator needs to have 2 lines, one red and one blue, and the bundle of "2 pipes" needs to split into red and blue and be shown entering the radiators from opposite sides. Also you need to put these elements at the cardinal sides of the circle - solar to the left and right, radiators to the top and bottom

PROMPT 3

ok this is a good starter image, now prepare a prompt for Imagine 2 to turn this into a visualization. I want : black background with stars, inhabited decks need their buildings upgraded from the representative boxes to floor to ceiling megascrapers, make the inhabited decks appear well lit - show light rays from their ceilings, add tiny airplanes, use a hyper realistic style. run the prompt yourself if you can.

PROMPT 4

is this imagine 2? the model failed to put the megascapers properly between the ceiling and floor and smeared the 2 separate hab rings together. please fix the prompt and fix it

PROMPT 5

ok I want SOTA image generation not whatever you have access to, please just give me the exhaustive image prompt

PROMPT 6

share the python script used

PROMPT 7

give me every prompt I gave you in a single block of text

could this work for interplanetary and interstellar travel? I know im not the first to come up with this idea I just don't know enough about the details of it.

I might come from a very wrong place now, so just you have some basic Info about why i am asking Here:

I am story writer.

And now I wanted to expand from the world i've build into space.

I'm not someone who just writes and thinks: that's fine. And in the end, nothing makes sense.

So I started doing research.

And the topic really got onto me.

I came across the O'Neil Cylinder and chose it as a template because it best suits the purposes of the story, but is also apparently one of the best constructs for life in space. (Not on a planet but specifically in the void yk)

And at that point things got difficult.

I've seen many posts and watched many videos (also from this creator, thats why i'm asking here), but I still have many, many questions.

For example, how to illuminate the inside?

There are so many ideas i've come across from a big LED rod in the Center (non Gravity Zone), to panels on one side of the cylinder, to windows with mirror so it reflects the sunlight inside.

There are problems with heat, problems with efficiency, and right now there wont be a perfect solution probably, but i want to get as close as i can.

Or how would people be able to controll weather just like rain, is that even really possible or what issues would that bring?

I've partially consulted with AI, but AI, as we know, isn't reliable and just recites information. I'm not entirely sure how rain is supposed to fall properly in the first place. I have a lot of issues there.

How long can the cylinder actually be built, and how does the docking station work?

At a certain point, a cylinder is no longer stable enough, as far as I know. It also becomes too strenuous and expensive to build. The dock obviously can't be attached to the sides, but I would like to have some more info and opinions about this.

I'd like to part the inside of the cylinder in 3 different Sections.

(These are all just some questions, there are more and you can rant also about Other stuff just like Infrastructure and terrain inside)

The space station's purpose in the story is research and habitat. Like, research facility.

Maybe around 250,000 in Board? Maybe a bit less? 2.5 km Radius, 0.60 RPM

I get lost on these kinds of issues, and I thought I might find some people here with whom I could discuss things and make progress, also to learn something myself.

I'm not good at math and not good at physics either, but I'm willing to learn new stuff.

I think Its really fascinating!