Colonizing Space Staking & Jumping Claims

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This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream.  Get access to my streaming video service,   Nebula, when you sign up for CuriosityStream  using the link in the description.   Many of our ancestors risked everything to try  to make lives for themselves far from where they   were born, staking a claim on some unsettled bit  of land. Perhaps our descendants will as well.  

So it’s Scifi Sunday again here on SFIA, where  we look at popular concepts from science fiction   and ask how they might function in  the real future and I thought for   this afternoon we’d take a look at how folks  would actually go about claiming asteroids,   planets, whole solar systems, or even potentially  galaxies or uninhabited Parallel Universes.   And the immediate worry about that, once you’ve  gone and staked a claim on some nice rock you’re   going to mine for space gold, is someone sneaking  in and jumping your claim. Or for that matter   strolling in to serve you some official papers  saying your rock is their rock, or just kicking   your teeth in and taking it by force. They might  be pirates or hired thugs or the legitimate new  

owners sending in their military – for a given  interpretation of the word legitimate obviously.   It probably goes without saying that any race  into space is likely to involve a lot of folks   heading out hoping to make a buck or a new home or  both, and the morality of them, their neighbors,   their own governments, and rival governments, is  likely to play a huge role in how this goes down.   There’s a lot of legit reason to worry about  equality of access to space, with the sheer entry   cost to get a space program running, though the  good news is space is huge compared to humanity.   Nonetheless we are likely to see many of the  classic dynamics of colonizing and pioneering   arise, good and ill. New spaces open up and people  flock to them, often even if someone’s already  

there, either having staked a claim earlier  or even much, much earlier, like an indigenous   group displaced by conquerors or colonists. Again though, space is huge, and appears to   be uninhabited for thousands if not millions of  light years, so for the next several millennia   we probably don’t have to worry about encountering  natives, or even other intelligent life except for   earlier human colonists, or human creations like  artificial intelligence or engineered or uplifted   lifeforms. But this could still cause issues,  since even vastly abundant and widely available   resources have logistical nightmares, mess-ups,  and flat out corruption in their distribution.   We have plenty of historical examples of the kind  of problems that even something seemingly minor   such as free land grants can cause. The Homestead  Act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862,   gave citizens and future citizens the ability  to claim as much as 160 acres of public land,   so long as they lived on it, improved it, and  paid a small registration fee. The Homestead act  

and its siblings resulted in millions of acres  and millions of immigrants settling new areas,   and indeed new Homesteading policies in the  US didn’t come until the Federal Land Policy   and Management Act of 1976. All that  being said, it seems like a solid basis   to use as one of our main examples for today. In many ways, those Homestead Acts are what made   the US what it is today, and their history is a  long and glorious mess of courage, corruption,   creation, theft, honor, treachery, generosity,  greed, dreams, and nightmares. I’m no historian  

so I’ll leave it to our better qualified  colleagues to discuss that, but as probably   the largest and best recorded example of this sort  of expansion effort, it’s a good example today.   It is entirely possible that future acquisition of  space will be a tightly controlled and regulated   effort, or a well administered one. We  really are much better at logistics and   administration than we used to be, especially  with computers, and we get better every day.   However the scale of space is to previous  expansion efforts on this planet what this   planet is to a single lone house on it,  so it seems likely to be a bit of a mess,   especially given that everything in space moves,  constantly, not like a map. And even the annually   shifting edges of many a river or creek has caused  huge problems in determining who claimed what.  

Now there’s a lot of ways to colonize space but  Homesteading is our main perspective for today   because it also is common in science fiction,  indeed an awful lot of scifi from the 20th century   was just stories of pioneering the Wild West  with aliens and laser pistols substituted in.   We should probably take a moment to define what  homesteading is though, especially since the term   is in common use in the United States in recent  years with a variation, as more of lifestyle   choice inspired by that history. That lifestyle is  of self-sufficiency, in whole or part, and in many   different versions and flavors, and comes from  the original attraction of these homestead grants.   Here is a giant bit of land in the middle of  nowhere that you may have if you go live there   and improve it. You can buy it and not live there,  sometimes, or pay someone else to improve it, but   to get it free, or for some small registration fee  or the equivalent of Earnest money, you go there   and live there and since no one else is already  there you need to be pretty self-sufficient.  

Needless to say one problem with this approach  from the outset is it only made sense in a   subsistence farmer culture, where most folks would  support themselves on the land. The assumption   presumably being the fraction of folks who  don’t farm would move to a place with many   new farmers to serve as their local blacksmith,  lawyer, doctor, or retail shop. Or take a claim,   doing the bare minimum to it, then rent or  sell the excess land to others down the road.   We could see this in space too, indeed a  post-biological civilization might use the   surface area of a solar system around its sun  as the source of power to run their processors,   but it would be more likely to come  with a more three dimensional approach   and that raises that whole scale issue again. Grabbing up acres or hectares of a classic planet   like Mars, or places like the Moon or Ceres,  translates well enough, and technology will   let us carefully survey spots in advance in ways  pioneers didn’t get to when making claims. This  

doesn’t work as well for asteroids and we’ll come  back to that, but for planets and bigger rocks it   would make a lot of sense for nations to negotiate  – or coerce – each other into having an agreed   on region of that rock – possibly in its entirety  but probably chunks of it – which they could then   parcel out as they saw fit and treaty permitted. But those rocks really are not that valuable,   the real attraction to going and colonizing  Mars is that in a few millennia, you’ve got a   colonized and possibly terraformed planet. If you  want that to happen then you need to incentivize   people going there, and the harder the effort is,  the harder it is to get folks to engage in it.   You have to promise a bright new future to them –  you can lie through your teeth to them but to get   their butts on the boats, as it were, you either  need them to come voluntarily or force them,   something we looked at more in our  Space Prison Colonies Episode.  

There are also many methods folks can use  to legally abuse the various homestead acts,   to screw their neighbors or Uncle Sam, so  I’m betting any future-space form of them   will involve a lot more incentives then  160 acres of dead planet and a lot more   registration and legal forms than in the past. An alternative of course is a more feudal   approach, where the entity with  the sovereign claim sells, rents,   or grants big parcels to a person or group  that is expected to build the community,   and I suspect we would see that a lot more with  artificial space habitats like O’Neill Cylinders.   Anyway, odds are good the incentives for a place  like Mars are going to need to include the cost of   passage, and probably a lot of initial resources  and goods too, what with it being a big dead rock.  

These would likely be the target for thieves  more than the land itself. A hacker or conman   might – and probably would – figure out ways to  steal claims or forge fake applications. Indeed   I’d bet forging a fake claim then selling bits of  it to others might be a common headache especially   as its hard to deal with stolen goods bought in  good faith – or good-ish faith anyway – especially   when your goal was to get someone to develop  the place and that’s now happening, even though   a big chunk of it was fueled by some fraudulent  effort a generation back that just got uncovered.  

How big a stake would you get? Well it  fundamentally depends on what it takes   to get folks there and we might be talking  about huge tracts of land on Mars, or even   entire planets in other solar systems. Technology  might make such incentives easy to offer though.   A post-scarcity civilization with good  self-replicating robots might actually be able   to give a colonist a spaceship of their own with a  cargo hold full of goods and consider it a trifle,   and thus not need to offer some huge claim of  land. Alternatively, they might be able to send   that person with a small suitcase of personal  goods on a packed ship, simply because space and   mass was at a premium and all they needed was the  self-assembling self-replicating colonizer they   had in their pocket that needed thrown in a sunny  place near rock and will do the work from there.   Of course, they might not need to incentivize  it or deal with the riff-raff cultural rejects   willing to hop on ship for the new  world because home offers them little,   because they might just clone or copy their  ideal citizens with ideal ideologically loyalty.   We also have some stake options that aren’t  land or are only indirectly so – mineral   rights for asteroids is one bigger example, but  a planet might grant certain unique resources.   There’s an example of that in the Constitutional  Monarchy and Aristocracy of Manticore   from David Weber’s Honor Harrington series,  where folks who get knighted or added to the   peerage might get a chunk of Crown Land but also  might get something like piece of radio spectrum,   every TV or radio channel or cell tower using that  band of frequencies for broadcast has to pay you   rent on them. Something similar might apply  to orbital space, especially that small ring  

around a planet that is the geostationary orbit  that always hangs directly over the same spot.   So you might get the Baron of FM Radio  101 to 110, or the Duke of Geostationary.   That series has many interesting examples  of how colonization might go down,   but in the case of Manticore they basically  colonized the place with three classes of folks.   The people who could pay to help fund the  expedition, the people who could roughly pay   their own way, and the folks who needed subsidy  to get there, and it plays in nicely to another   popular scifi setting trope we see a lot besides  Wild West, which is that neo-Feudal aristocracy   and knights and samurais flavor. As a minor side  note, it's probably not a coincidence that the US,   UK, and Japan have been the biggest source  of scifi novels and films and shows in the   20th century and that we often see bits of  their past adapted to future space opera,   and as we see a lot more scifi geek culture  emerging in others places in the last generation   or so, it has resulted in a lot broadening of the  prior worldbuilding cliches in science fiction,   and fantasy for that matter too. We’re mostly  focused on those cliches for today though.   And that nobility and vassalage thing is also one  of those scifi cliches whose historical basis is   pretty broad, so it does strike me as one of the  more common options along with homesteading for   future space colonization. Different flavor,  it may or may not be hereditary and I really  

can’t imagine it will involve the regional baron  dressing up in a suit of armor – or giant mecha,   cool as that sounds – to go battle the  invading hordes. They’re more likely to   dress up in a business suit, or their culturally  significant astronaut mining suit in the style   worn by their ancient founders. Your barons  might be AI, cyborgs, or transhumans too.   Coming back to the cloning and copying option,  if you could do that, and you could get on a ship   and spend ten thousand years on ice to emerge at  an empty solar system far away from here, around   one of the billions of stars in our corner of the  galaxy, we might see people do that. I don’t know   how much it costs to buy a solar system, you can’t  actually buy stars right now, or even their names.  

The International Astronomical Union doesn’t sell  them, they don’t even bother naming them anymore,   just numbering them, and it's not like they have  any legal power backed by treaty or something.   Those ‘name a star’ groups might be  selling so much fluff but I hear folks say   ‘only the IAU can name stars’ and that’s  nonsense too, the IAU is the biggest and   most influential entirely voluntary group of  astronomers out there but it’s got zero legal   authority. But it does have de facto authority  – something which really does matter in emerging   colonial space environments I expect –  for the same reason any non-governmental   group does – popularity and inertia. Consider, to sell a planet ten thousand light  

years away, you either have to be able to make  it easier for someone to get themselves to it,   or make them afraid of trying to take it without  your okay. Now that might really be doable,   someone might say they’ve got automated fleets of  enforcers who show up and sterilize worlds without   suitable claim documentation – but while a colony  getting wiped out by a robot armada for failing   to give the proper CD-Key – Colonial Development  – might make for good fiction, I don’t think we   want automated extermination fleets wandering the  galaxy… though that’s one way it might happen.   And might be okay with folks too. If our society  gets good enough with automation that anyone could   afford to buy a spaceship with a freezer, a  loyal AI, and a 3D printer, then it's also   one where black or gray markets might provide  templates for cloneable or copyable slaves. Go   hop on your spaceship, fly on ice far away, even  to some isolated star ejected from our galaxy, and   let the computer set you up as the immortal ruler  of some world it’s populated with people for you,   all brainwashed or chipped to behave properly.  And unlike the virtual world version of this,   it's not likely the egomaniacal god-king of the  personal paradise is employing simulated humans   with no sentience like a big and elaborate video  game. In a simulated reality, using less processor  

power for simulating nameless people you’ll rarely  encounter means cheaper worlds or bigger ones,   in colonizing in the flesh, it does not. In such a case, you might have a big push for   controlling who settles what, and making sure they  follow certain rules. Of course, concerns covering   that might actually have the opposite of the  intended effect, since they could serve as a means   for an authoritarian tyrant or group to convince  people they should be the only ones who have those   powers. At a local level too, that’s a pretty  decent reason for setting up a feudal state,   it is not too hard to imagine a collection of  asteroids or the rocks orbiting as the ring   of a gas giant might fear predators and  end up swearing allegiance to one of the   tougher and more likable ones for protection,  offering a cut of their production as payment.   Many a pirate or brigand has ended up with  their great-grandkids as the honored and   respected nobles of some land under this model. So I’m not even sure that is an extreme or weird   case, but we need to contemplate what we’d  actually do if we came across civilizations   like that. It is very likely expansion of our  civilization will fall into a slower wave than  

actual colonization of the galaxy. This is  part of what we mean when we quip on the show   that if there are no aliens, we only need to  wait a few thousands years and there will be.   If technology does evolve to allow many small  groups or individuals to grab a speedy spaceship   and head off to parts unknown, then given that  civilization itself is likely to head out slower,   we would probably find ourselves constantly  bumping into our rogue colonies founded   a few centuries or millennia earlier.  And that's a bit ethically problematic   since we’re now talking about running into human  civilizations that are effectively indigenous.  

Only this isn’t Star Trek, there’s no Prime  Directive, and there’s a big moral difference   between not screwing with the world you’ve  encountered that was founded centuries earlier   and has some views or traditions you find alien  versus coming across some place whose ruler is   a Multiplicity Mind of ten-thousand linked clones  of themselves so that they can enjoy dominating,   enslaving, and violating their captive population,  with their ten-thousand avatars. They also might   have been using that population – or automated  robots- to build one heck of a defensive bastion   out of that solar system and so you might  be needing to sacrifice a lot more than your   principles of non-interference to deal with  that monstrosity of a lost colony. It’s a bit   of a reminder that the Wild Wests of the future  might be full of a lot of scoundrels and might   better resemble West World than Little House on  the Prairie without some serious intervention   and policing – which comes with its own risks. In the absence of that, you’ve got to be able to   hold on to what you’ve got. There’s a reason why  there’s a gun culture in the US we don’t see as   much elsewhere, and a lot of that is the fear the  homesteader has that the nearest friendly sheriff   might be days away, might not be very friendly,  and you got to protect yourself, and that mindset   is a fairly natural one for someone willing to go  off to a distant land and fend for themselves too.  

Often including a dislike for authority,  from legitimate ro paranoid reasons.   That’s not the only way colonization can go down,  but it is one I’d rate as highly likely to be   common and we have to keep in mind, we’re not  talking about a gunpowder rifle or six-shooter   when we’re talking space colonization. We’re  probably talking privately owned nukes or worse.   Consider – and also to segue into asteroid  colonization – any ship or mass driver that   can send resources back home can send explosives  too, because the simple power behind such a device   turns a ten tall ball of steel for building with  into ten tons of hypersonic cannon slug that could   wreck most towns, even without any payload  of conventional or atomic explosives in it.   You may have claimed a kilometer-wide asteroid  in the belt to mine. This is plausible enough,   there’s around a million of them, but now you  need to refine your metals or ship them home,   and power all your production and life support  and so on. You’re probably doing this with a   megawatt power supply or better. You probably  got a 3D printer that can produce a lot of parts  

and you’re probably pretty technically skilled. You also know that if someone’s coming in to take   your asteroid claim, they probably are doing  it with a ship that can shoot those 10-ten   hypersonic slugs at you, and probably follow it  up with boarding pods full of killer death bots.   And if you’re looking to attract workers,  investors, family, or friends to come join   you on your rock, your attractive amenities  probably need to include a robust defense system.  

You probably need this even if this is all taking  place inside a civilized and enlightened culture,   because the law is an hour away by message  and maybe months away by gunship and marine   expeditionary force. Pirate stake jumpers might  have more sophisticated options than big guns too,   like brain washing and rewiring to make  you cheerfully sign over your claim to them   and tell the marines or sheriff arriving  months later that all is indeed well.   Asteroids move constantly, some have families  they stick loosely with but by and large they   aren’t even in the same relative place  with their neighbors from year to year,   so your asteroid isn’t in the British Octant  of the Asteroid Belt near the French Octant,   where some commercial raiding might occur. Your  asteroid is constantly changing neighbors, and   ones who might have allies or corrupt officials  who can show them your resource report and quietly   delete or change the tiny little file designating  and mapping your rock to swap it with another that   wasn’t owned or a barren one they already owned.  Then their thugs come in, cut your throats,   throw you in the recycler, and nobody even knows.  Especially in interstellar colonization contexts,  

trying to find out something like that happened  will not only be hard, but getting justice for it   a thousand years later when all the perpetrators  might be long dead is tricky at best.   And mind you, this all assumes a state  of play parallel to modern times,   which are the best recorded and administered  we’ve ever had with the longest arm of the law.   There’s a quote from Sherlock Holmes that always  impressed me with how things shift with time,   having read it in the 1990s as a rural kid when  urban areas were synonymous with high crime rates.   He and Watson are out in the country in the  tale “the Adventure of the Copper Beeches”   and Watson is delighting in the rural beauty and  homesteads but Holmes dislikes it, he says:   “They always fill me with a certain horror. It  is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience,   that the lowest and vilest alleys in London  do not present a more dreadful record of sin   than does the smiling and beautiful  countryside. But the reason is very obvious.   The pressure of public opinion can do in  the town what the law cannot accomplish.  

There is no lane so vile that the scream of a  tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow,   does not beget sympathy and indignation among  the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of   justice is ever so close that a word of complaint  can set it going, and there is but a step between   the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely  houses, each in its own fields, filled for the   most part with poor ignorant folk who know little  of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty,   the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in,  year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”  

That’s a thing we need to contemplate for the  future and whichever asteroid miner or potential   interstellar colonist will be thinking about,  before they head out there and certainly when   they settle in. There is not much stopping one  determined and wicked person from wreaking horrors   upon their peers a trillion kilometers from the  nearest police station. I think we can maintain   the rule of law and order in the inner system and  around the bigger planets, even while settling   them, and around those first few prestigious  colonies of Alpha Centauri or Epsilon Eridani.   However, it would be hard to do and probably  won’t hold out in the Oort belt or in distant   colony worlds. Remember that space is 3D, there  may be around ten thousand solar systems within a   light century of us, ten times further away,  there’s 10-cubed or a thousand times more,   ten million solar systems await us in that  space, not a million kilometer wide asteroids   like in our Belt. And ten billion within 10,000  light years of us, one for every person living  

right now. And critically, probably about  one for every person living when the first   interstellar colony ship is built. It’s always hard to guess how populations   might rise, but I would think that by the time  humans number a hundred billion people, we will   have claims on every rock out to the Kuiper Belt  bigger than a kilometer across and we will have   a few dozen well-funded interstellar colony ships  headed to or arrived at new stars. But what then?  

Now that the technology and issues are  well solved and available for any to use.   Now that we have the sort of industrial might we  picture us having in a few centuries. Anybody can   run out to the stars and claim something. Will  we blow up a ship headed to one? Would we even  

see them divert from an authorized trajectory, a  couple light years out, to a new and unauthorized   one? Who's doing the authorizing? And for that  matter, who's protecting unauthorized colonies,   which might be people with good and honest folks  a few generations later, from piratic neighbors,   who may themselves be descended from  once honourable and law-abiding ones?   Sound like a good pitch for a Glorious  Space Empire, but it’s the sorts of   worries real people will be having when  we’re trying to convince them to get on   the ship to travel to dead worlds and bring  them to life, that they may not even make it   there or that they might get buried on that  world after succumbing to human predators,   not the challenges of terraforming. Now to return to asteroids for a moment,   and this applies to solar systems too, there  is that higher-dimensional aspect to claims,   like if you’re buying a wedge shaped chunk of  asteroid rather than a spot of surface area.   But also in the location in space AND time sense,  that fourth dimension, because buying a distant   Kuiper Belt Object and bringing it into the  inner solar system might be an attractive option,   you can smelt the thing en route into a  big wad of solar collectors close to Sun,   turning your cheap 1-kilometer wide metallic  asteroid into a half dozen big O’Neill Cylinders,   each able to house a million folks, surrounded  by a cloud of solar collectors a millimeter thick   and bigger than Texas, sucking in more power than  the entire human civilization produces right now.  

That is likely to be a big objective of a lot of  asteroid developers and of course you presumably   not only need ownership of that chunk of ‘Land’  but also the right to move it. Like owning some   boring little chunk of Idaho you bought for a few  hundred bucks then picked up and plopped next to   NYC or London. So odds are ownership of asteroids  is likely to have some limitations – like it gets   voided or modified if it leaves a certain  orbital path. Also there’s a good chance   ownership in an eternal sense won’t even be  offered, and it would be things like one-century   leases or lease for certain uses, mineral  extraction or building it into space habitats.  

Speaking of higher dimensions, let’s close out by  contemplating other types of space we might claim.   Beyond new planets and asteroids or even the  galaxy, it is quite possible that even without   faster than light travel, fast hyperspace jump  ships or warp drives, that we might see folks   staking claims to whole galaxies. M87 is a massive  galaxy of over a trillion stars 50 million light   years from here, a prize if uninhabited, but a  ship headed there, even at 90% of light speed,   will still take 55 million years to arrive. Indeed  a bit longer from Hubble Expansion during the   trip. A ship moving 91% light speed instead would  arrive more than half a million years sooner, and   in doing so would have the time to colonize every  single one of those trillion stars and raise them   up to Kardashev-2 Dysons Swarms. Ones that could  crush any lone colony ship arriving late to the  

game. So an authorized vessel making that voyage  with top technology of their day might get passed   en route by some rogue and cheap ship built a  thousand years later for a hundredth the price.   It raises the question of who is presuming  to authorize intergalactic colonies,   but how about those offering to let you colonize  the multiverse? And as we looked at in our   episodes on Multiverses, if they exist and can be  traveled to, a near infinite number of worlds just   like Earth only without humans, Earth 1 Million  BC for instance, then the technology to reach   them might be developed before an interstellar  colony ship even reached Alpha Centauri. How do  

you manage claims on a trillion-trillion-trillion  Near-Earth copies folks can step to through   a simple portal and do you even need to? And for that matter, what about black holes   and baby universes, or staking claims on Universes  someone made in their lab, or that they made on   a computer but which is now home to thousands of  people, some of whom are there by virtual headset,   and some of whom were born there as  digital people? Did creating a colony,   or even a whole Universe, grant you authority over  it and if so, to what degree and for how long?   One thing seems sure, the future is not  likely to be short of the need for lawyers,   in colonizing regular space or weirder space.  Thankfully the one other thing space isn’t   short of, is space, space for a trillion worlds  and more, and maybe in spite of human history,   we’ll play nice with each other and  share when we get out there.   Before anyone can stake or jump claims in  space we are going to need to survey and   prospect those asteroid and there’s a lot of  great videos on our early efforts to do that   over on Curiosuity Stream, including Hayabusa 2,  a look at the Japanese robotic probe that gave   us direct subsurface samples of an asteroid. Now a keystone of today’s topic is that claim   staking of mines and resources is likely to be  a strong motivator for space settlement, and   I thought we would take a few minutes to discuss  the general notion of asteroid mines being full of   wealth and crashing commodity markets back here on  Earth. So we’ll be doing that topic in an Extended   Edition of today’s episode over on Nebula, and  as usual those extended editions replace our   normal sponsor reads and ads with typically about  5-10 minutes of additional content, and those are   essentially sponsored by Curiositystream. Nebula, our streaming service, is a way   for content creators to enjoy additional  creative freedom and let’s folks sponsor   our show there in exchange for getting  those episode a couple days earlier,   ad and sponsor free, and with those extended  editions, and I wanted to thank everyone who's   been helping support that as we’ve upgraded it  and brought on tons of new features and creators.  

Now you can subscribe to Nebula all by itself but  we have also partnered up with CuriosityStream,   the home of thousands of great educational videos,  to offer Nebula for free as a bonus if you sign   up for CuriosityStream using the link in our  episode description. That lets you see content   like Hayabusa 2: Asteroid Explosion, which is just  one of the many amazing videos on Curiositystream,   and all the great content over on  Nebula from myself and many others.   And you can get all that for less than $15 by  using the link in the episode’s description.   Incidentally before we get to our  schedule and finish out Scifi Sunday,   I wanted to give a shout out to “The Teeming  Universe: An Extraterrestrial Field Guide”   written and illustrated by Chrisitan Cline,  which features a bunch of hypothetical alien   races and a discussion of each along with  wonderful pictures and anatomical diagrams.   Definitely a fun read full of good  inspiration for alien biology.  

All right, that will wrap us up for  another Scifi Sunday here on SFIA,   and we’ll be back for another next month where we  will explore the concept of Telepathy. So we’re   winding our way towards new years and only have 3  more Thursday’s to go, starting this Thursday with   a discussion of Vertical Farming, the technology  that may let us nourish many billions of people   while keeping our planet pristine. Then we’ll take  a look at Escaping the Galaxy the week after that,   if we need to get away from someone who has blown  up our planet, before closing out the month and   the year with a look at the Challenges we will be  facing in the next 100 years. Then we will explode   into 2022 with a look at using Nuclear Bombs to  propel Spaceships. After that we will revisit   our most popular series, Alien Civilizations  & Civilizations at the End of Time, first for   a look at hibernating alien civilizations that  might be waiting till nearly the end of time,   then for a look at the Big Rip, the cosmological  model that ends the universe early and by being   shredded, and we will ask how civilizations  might manage that, or manage to survive that.   Now if you want to make sure you get  notified when those episodes come out,   make sure subscribe to the channel, and if you  enjoyed the episode, don’t forget to hit the like   button and share it with others. If you’d like to  help support future episodes, you can donate to  

us on Patreon, or our website, IsaacArthur.net,  and patreon and our website are linked in the   episode description below, along with all of our  various social media forums where you can get   updates and chat with others about the concepts  in the episodes and many other futuristic ideas.   Until next time, thanks for  watching, and have a great week!

2021-12-14

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