The one that I always immediately imagine when I hear the word megastructure is The City from Blame. While we don't ever get any clear numbers on just how big it is, there was an empty space about the size of Jupiter in one spot. It seems to be a Dyson sphere that takes up most if the mass in the solar system, and maybe most of the space too since Nihei, the author, said it was probably the diameter of Jupiter's orbit. The main selling point of the manga is the atmosphere though. He really sells the idea of this thing being not only mind-bendingly gigantic, but so insanely old and decrepit. 11/10 wonderful manga.
I'm pretty sure that you are right and he said that the city proper, or rather the layers of 'Megastructure' extended to Jupiters orbit, but that the city itself expanded beyond that to the edge of our solar system.
City from Blame is one of the biggest megastructures in fiction, I believe that near the end of the manga Killy walks beyound oort cloud. The only bigger structure in science fiction I can think of is gate from Xeelee Sequence and universe sized city from Manifold.
If I could make a recommendation since we're alluding to grand-human structures, Paolo Soleri, an Italian Architect, came up with some breath-taking mega-structure designs I used to look at as a kid in the local library all the time. I'd recommend Curious Archive to do a follow-up series of megastructures alluding to the Arcology systems Soleri postulated, maybe of the types of centric cities from Futurist Jacque Fresco, there are so many!
The Ringworld is essentially an extremely squat O'Neill Cylinder, isn't it? And the spherical one is kind of just a smooshed O'Neill Cylinder, isn't it? What I'm saying is, I want O'Neill Cylinders, dang it. Also, Helium-3 from Jupiter would be a good source of energy.
@@bobdole8830 it would be for a civilization that can make a Dyson sphere for energy, but to get the energy required to make one in a new system, or as an engine in interstellar space (assuming no FTL), fusion would be better.
Megastructures are so fascinating but I'll always prefer good old earth. Kinda glad to be in an age where we can imagine these incredible structures without having to worry about living on one. Another amazing video, CA! edit: if you want to read a story about the anxieties of living in a rogue megastructure try the manga Blame!, its legitimately one of the best sci fi epics out there
As will I. Not only due to the difficulty of maintaining such a life, but also due to how mundane life on such a structure would be. We praise and seek the future, because it is alien and unbelievable to us. But if we could live in our ideal world, in which every possible technology which we desire could come to us, it would cease to be interesting, because it would be familiar to us. Imagine being able to travel between worlds in a matter of hours, and to move to other solar systems. To our modern minds, that seems like magic, but if we had that sort of technology, we would think of it as another mundane part of life. Only things that are unfamiliar to us hold any interest to our minds, as our minds are always bent on progress. Once we reach one level, that level will lose its appeal. So I am content to live in our rather primitive modern world, in between the futuristic ideal and the traditional world of old. I am glad that I can think of the future in theory and still enjoy the past as well.
You've touched on my favorite topic of discussion in SciFi! There is SO much back history of megastructures that this barely scratches the surface. Could you possibly do more research into this and put out at least one more video? Neil Blevins is not the only one who has put pen to paper and made a compilation of these objects, and he's certainly not the first. I would love for you to dig deeper into this subject and possibly add to this with earlier works (and their artists) of such structures. I feel that it was remiss not to include the names of the primary designers when their well-established work was mentioned outside the sphere of copyright law; such as Dyson Spheres, Clarke Space Elevators, the Niven Ringworld (in particular, using the ring with the "shadow squares" belongs exclusively to Larry Niven). Perhaps we should give credit where it's due... PLEASE do more videos on this subject!
The ringworld you described sounds exactly like the one was envisioned by Larry Niven in 1970 his book "Ringworld". I would highly recommend reading it to anyone who hasn't done so.
The colonies from the Gundam series always fascinated me due to how they integrated a day and night cycle , solar energy harvesting and their cylindrical shape, with inhabitants building smaller structures horizontally in relation to the colony; sth akin to an elongated ringworld.
One of my favorite megastructures would have to be a "Celestial Factory." The idea that a civilization could construct a planet with exact specifications for the civilizations needs.
Always loved Anderson Disks as a concept, and this artist's take on it is honestly the most gorgeous I've ever seen I also love the nicoll dyson beam structure
Remember, if output or anything is out of control, as authur said: "Might destroy the planet". That means we would be having more requirement or focusing lens to be smaller, but weaker to terraform that planet, artificially.
@@macmcskullface1004 mabye it could have an extra prism lense that can split the beam into different streams. Just split a small stream off of the main one and fire it at the planet, and send the rest off into solar arrays, extract the Hydrogen to use as rocket fuel or just fire it off into space
Ngl YOU NEED A MILLION SUBS. 5 reasons why: you make a variety of amazing content. you have an amazing voice like david attenbrough good. you also talk about unpopular topics and science fiction. also you just seem so cool to accept fan suggestions
Honestly Mega structures are basically the real life equivalent of making a utterly massive-scale minecraft farm, like the ones you might see on the Hermitcraft server. They both take insane amounts of resources and technology to make, but in the long run, boy are they worth it.
@@rommdan2716 True, however, with many "mega farms" they require an immense amount of time and resources. The key thing that most mega farms do is they basically are the same auto machine copy/pasted again and again to the absolute limit.
Most of the things in this video are sheer fantasy. No more realistic or possible than Bugs Bunny vs Marvin the Martian. OTOH, the O'Neill "Island One" Bernal sphere or the "Stanford Torus" are near-term real-world possibilities that require only desire and will. No new inventions needed (since the '70s), cost like many other large infrastructure or industrial developments down here. Much less than an oil war or the bailouts we've seen. The payoff is access to the resources of the Solar system.
The Ringworld was first envisioned by Larry Niven in the early seventies, but, by having it spin around the sun like a wheel rim, it has an inherent problem. Any gravitational differential from the sun on the Ringworld’s structure, or any slight impact on the structure itself, would cause a gravitational imbalance, and pull that area towards the sun, increasing in speed as it got closer. The end result is one part of the hoop intersects the sun. Trying to counteract and balance so much moving mass would a Herculean effort, probably requiring more energy than was needed to create the Ringworld. The Iain M. Banks _Culture_ novels imagined ringworlds millions of kilometres in diameter, but just free floating in a solar system, rather than using the sun as a central gravitational hub.
It also implies a structural materials with tensile strength like the strong atomic binding force. Like most of the things in this video, if you can build it, you're gods and don't need it to live on.
I think Megastructures should be among the last things we as a species work on. Colonizing our orbital range, the lunar surface should take priority given feasibility. Followed by Terraforming Mars as a duplicate-back up of the Earth could be a good start, maybe Venus, the Moon. Then Europa and other possible Gas Giant satellites. Once we habitat all over the solar system and have the gross financial and resource capabilities to do so, then we could think about mega-structures while hopefully by that point, 1000 yrs from now, we'll have the pool, manpower and wisdom to construct massive megastructures. There is one thing that concerns me about these mega-structures. Should a bolide collide with one, wouldn't that cause catastrophic damage to the structure given these are man-made ore-composite based designs? Even if you create some sort of force field-NEO alert system that screens out a majority of astronomical objects, wouldn't there still be the risk of massive 500 meter+ objects that could cause monumental damage should their orbits intersect? Maybe by that point we will have literally managed and cleaned up the entire inner solar system, kuiper belt and oort cloud of all potentially dangerous objects and have a god-almighty pool of asteroids n comets we can harvest to our heart's content XD That's not even including the megastructure's ability to withstand solar flares (helluva electrical grid to survive that), gamma ray bursts. Still, this is one hell of a video. It got my brain clickin. Good show Curious Archive! Everyone who watches this dude NEEDS to subscribe!
An Earth-like atmosphere offers a good protection against smaller meteors. One can rationally suppose any sufficiently advanced civilisation would be able to detect the more massive types of asteroids that are a danger to their megastructure. Remember that light goes absurdly faster than matter (at least in most cases ) and therefore the hypothetical civilisation would be able to see it coming. These megastructures might even simply survive an impact passively (though that would damage things). I'm thinking megastructures are things built with Von Neuman machine, or a system that is composed of separate robots but effectively act like one. by the way, it's likely that money will be a concept of the past in a thousand years. Money only makes sense if scarcity being a thing. Once we master our solar system, we should be post-need and money would be an antiquated concept. I'm thinking energy production (or harvesting) is a better metric for development of a civilisation (kardashev's scale also classifies civilisation in that manner). Number of solar system reached might be another one. There's a number of ways you could fight a solar storm, from the passive protection of an electromagnetic field produced by the internal dynamo of a planet like object to a massive generator in libration between the sun and the megastructure. Some structure don't even need a protection, like O'neill cylinders who can be thick enough that these radiation don't amount to a problem.
You are doing good work. Spreading wonderful ideas and preparing viewers for the near-future, astronomically speaking, u deserve more subs. Keep up the good work! More people should share your content
considering how much sci fi fantasy is out there it makes sense. this specific niche of fantasy presenting it as being scientific just turns off all the fantasy nerds
Your channel has given me the inspiration to finally start properly working on a speculative alien planet I've been imagining for over 3 years. Everything from "fish" capable of water and air movement to "glowworms" spearing you from above, lots of wacky ideas to try and make scientifically believable. Thank you for re-igniting the spark of inspiration that I and I'm sure many others had
Okay but you missed my favorite kind of megastructure DYSON SPHERES. It was alluded to with the Dyson laser but man do I want to see art of what it would look like to live inside a Dyson sphere . Maybe it's in the full book?
@@no_bitches420 they are both in the book, follow the link in the description for the list of all 40 megastructures covered. As for whether they’d be possible, that’s a different story. The book describes the physics behind the ideas, but a lot of crazy advances in technology would have to happen first. So many would likely remain as dreams
I have to admit, when I first saw the Ringworld? I chanted out the Halo theme. Also, with the undersea city? Let's just hope they don't find any sea slugs, able to produce a miracle compound, that ultimately leads to their demise.
I don't know if this has been thought of yet, so someone let me know: A mega structure built for the purpose of terraforming a planet. What I'm picturing in my head is a spherical structure surrounding a Mars-like planet acting as a physical magnetosphere of sorts. This structure would also help to build up atmospheric pressure to habitable levels. Alternatively, a ring-like structure built on the planet's surface that generates an artificial magnetosphere and most likely built along the planet's equator. It could also provide planetside habitation for colonists.
Is this channel led by one person?? How is that even possible, the quality is comparable with BBC documentaries, this is an incredible gem of a channel, so glad I came across it.
never understood how Alderson disks create artificial gravity. same with gravity on the outside of the hoop. My favourite though has to be the Birch World.
I don't think Alderson disks have any form of artificial gravity. I think the classic version is just so thick that it produces real gravity from its own sheer mass. Since the habitable surface is perpendicular with its orbit, it can't rotate for gravity like a ringworld could without pushing everyone towards the far edge. I'm not sure about hoops. I would think they wouldn't have gravity on the outside either unless they are super huge.
One of the first times I ever heard of a Ringworld was from the Larry Nevin series by the same name. It is set in the Known Space universe he made. It was built by the ancestors of Humans, who were not from Earth.
Ringworld was built by the "Outsiders" who didn't need it for habitation. It was found and colonized by the Pak. ("A Darker Geometry" Man-Kzin war novel, by Mark O. Martin & Greg Benford) It like many other fantasy things like most of this video, imply technologies that make you essentially gods with all of space/time as your play ground, and you don't need ships or planets or Suns to live.
To be fair, we don’t know the full effects of zero-gravity on important crops. For all we know, they could be weaker with less gravity, producing lower quality yields, but by the time we build such space farms, we’ll most likely be able to genetically engineer them to grow best in zero-gravity with optimal yield quality.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the originator of the concept of a Ringworld -- Larry Niven, in his novel of the same name. And the ringworld itself is derivative of the Dyson Sphere, a theoretical megastructure that would encase an entire star, as proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson. Star Trek: The Next Generation has an awesome episode, "Relics" where the Enterprise visits a Dyson Sphere and rescues the one and only Scotty, stranded for decades in the transporter pattern buffers of a ship crashed on its exterior surface. It would have provided amazing footage for this episode. I'm surprised you didn't mention it or use it. Another notable megastructure is the giant, cylindrical alien spacecraft from Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Rendezvous with Rama". Rama wasn't quite as big -- only a few kilometers long -- but still more impressive than anything we can build. Stick with the original novel, however. The sequels were co-written by another author and frankly suck (like having a Mary Sue protagonist that makes Rey from the Star Wars sequels look good in comparison).
My favorite mega-structure is one that wasn't mentioned. A mega-structure that uses other mega-structures as mere components of its self. That mega-structure is called a planetary ring.
A ringworld of that scale would likely have enough mass to create gravity without spinning. The spinning would be more likely needed to balance with some form of compression force and keep it stable at the proper radius - nobody wants their ringworld to go all floppy-elliptical-ovoid-world. XD
Honestly, Halo Rings that don't encircle a star but are big enough to hold land and air using centripetal acceleration would make more sense, since they are smaller, and not unstable in relation to the host star. Halo ring-like world or Stanford torus would orbit a star just like any other planetoids or asteroids and would require still less amount of material to build one. There's a reason why MIT students called Ringworld unstable whenever Larry Niven showed up.
What's called an "O'Neill cylinder" is a hypothetical that he didn't seriously propose, it was just an extrapolation of things that are possible. The "Island One" or "Bernal Sphere" he designed was near-term, hard engineering about 30 years out (from the 1970s). Also the "Stanford Torus" was near-term real-world. Cost for the first habitat and all the launch and space-mining infrastructure to reproduce it was to be like many other large infrastructure or industrial developments down here. Much less than the oil wars or bailouts we've seen.
The "Orion's Arm" collaborative fiction site makes use of all of these megastructures. In fact, in the Orion's Arm universe, the vast majority of the population of every start system lives in Bernal Spheres, Banks Orbitals, McKendree Cylinders, Bishop Rings, or Dyson Swarms consisting of millions of individual habitat. Barely anyone lives on planets.
I don't get why the Alderson disk has to have huge areas of arid climate and frozen climate? wouldn't it make more sense to just make it smaller so you mostly have the habitable zones?
Very cool ideas. I first came across this when I dived into the Ringworld fiction and other franchise materials (games, etc.) by Larry Niven. Not sure if he was the first one to come up with it, but that's the first time I read about it. Thanks for the vid!
You can create one artificially. If you have the means to create a ringworld, you can also create a magnetic field strong enough to deal with UV and Gamma. Honestly, you may even want to absorb those for energy(or only a portion in the case of UV). We also don’t really need infrared.
