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You'll never see any of these gargantuan projects completed in person. But soon,

you'll know exactly what it would feel like to witness the launch of every multi -generational super construction project ever conceived.

From the realistic to the absolutely insane.

What would it be like to stand on these megastructures?

Could we ever realistically build any of these?

And could humanity ever finish a project that outlives everyone who starts it?

Now, what is a megastructure?

And do we have any already underway?

Well, simply put, a megastructure is just an extremely large man -made structure, like a building.

It's a project that, if completed, would overshadow any other object completed before it.

Think of what a skyscraper would look like to a caveman, and then multiply that by a million.

And while you're thinking of skyscrapers, imagine the biggest one you can.

The Burj Khalifa, at nearly one kilometer tall, is a structure that took six years to complete.

That's pretty impressive, right?

Well, lay it on its side and extend that out 170 times.

Now you've got a modern -day megastructure, and one that's actually being worked on today.

Ever heard of The Line?

That's its name, not something I came up with.

It's a 170 -kilometer -long city drawn ruler straight across the desert of northwestern Saudi Arabia.

When it's finished, it will house 9 million people living behind a mirrored wall

that rises half a kilometer above the shifting dunes.

The initial budget for this project was a jaw -dropping $500 billion U .S.

The line's design uses state -of -the -art construction techniques and environmentally sustainable practices.

It was designed to be a vision of what the future holds, a different concept of human livability.

All your daily needs are within a five -minute walk.

For longer trips, there's a high -speed rail system that transports you underground.

It will only take 20 minutes to go from one end to the other of this line.

Construction kicked off with thousands of workers and hundreds of machines.

And soon, we started to see a city emerging from the desert.

But work was suddenly suspended in September of 2024,

even though they'd only completed a tiny 2 .4 -kilometer section of the foundation.

Remember, the plan was 170 kilometers.

The project had already burned through 8 billion dollars.

Everything about the line is technologically feasible.

Nothing was missing from an engineering standpoint.

It could easily be the city of the future, so why the sudden stoppage?

A leaked audit estimated that the project was going to take 50 years longer than originally claimed,

and the actual cost would be $8 .8 trillion dollars.

That's roughly 1 ,600 times over budget.

Megastructure meet financial reality.

Fund managers got spooked and slammed on the brakes.

If this kind of mismanagement can kill a decades -long project like

The Line, well, megastructures in space take way longer.

How can a thousand -year project ever hope to be completed.

I mean, the ISS was built in 13 years with the cooperation of 15 countries,

but the projects we're talking about will take so long to complete

that multiple generations will live and die before construction is complete.

Is building them even possible?

In all of human history, do we have any examples of humans being coordinated and motivated enough to actually build something like a megastructure?

Now, you might already be thinking of an example of a megastructure built, like the Great Pyramids.

Mega monuments of towering stone built to carry the pharaohs into the afterlife, which surely took an eternity to build.

Well, written accounts from around

that time suggest it took about 20 years to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu not exactly the multiple lifetimes

we're looking for.

However, there is one interesting example of a building whose construction outlasted its architects and master builders by hundreds of years.

Though not necessarily intentionally.

The Cologne Cathedral.

It was the megastructure of its time.

Started in 1248, the drawings laid out the plans for the world's largest Gothic cathedral.

The design for the nave reached a staggering height of 43 .5 meters, that's 143 feet.

On the outside, the tower facade would be 157 meters, that's over 500 feet high.

The average person in 13th century Europe would have looked at it the way we look at a space shuttle launch,

or even a future moon base under construction.

And if you think about the relatively primitive construction technology they had at the time, it's nothing short of a miracle.

All the stone was quarried and cut by hand.

Only simple machines were available to help.

Ropes and pulley systems were used to hoist heavy stone blocks into place tens of meters into the air.

Remember that in 1248, the average lifespan of an artisan was only 40 or 50 years.

Three generations of master builders supervised the first phase, which lasted 200 years.

Generations of carpenters and stonemasons worked on it, passing down their skills and their jobs to their children and their children's children.

But then things changed.

Pilgrims stopped visiting.

Finances dried up and the work stopped.

The cathedral stood half -completed with an abandoned construction crane hanging from its south tower for 375 years.

It looked like it might never be completed, but new money was raised and luckily the original plans were found.

When construction resumed in 1823,

it was a testament to their genius that the engineering in the original medieval era plans were still sound.

And work continued for another 57 years.

Now when it was finally completed in 1880, 623 years after the first stone was laid,

the Cologne Cathedral was the world's tallest building.

And it's still considered to be a marvel of engineering and technological innovation.

And in some ways, it's never really complete.

Even today, it takes over 100 craftspeople to maintain it.

So yeah, I guess people can actually build something that takes multiple generations.

So what could people actually achieve with today's technology?

In the 1970s, physicist Gerard O 'Neill challenged the assumption that

Earth is the best place for humanity.

He thought that, frankly, we can do better.

And he came up with an idea to prove it.

But it was going to take a megastructure.

It was a simple solution, but on a grand scale.

Two massive counter -rotating cylinders turning in space at one rotation every two minutes.

The centrifugal force of the tube's rotation draws everything inside to the surface and replicates

Earth's gravity at a steady 1G.

Three strips of land contain cities, and three strips of windows let in sunlight.

A mirrored shutter system creates a light cycle to mimic

Earth's day and night.

The two structures are large enough to hold 7 million people.

Looking up from anywhere inside of its surface,

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the ponds, gardens, and buildings of your neighbors hanging upside down above you are 8 kilometers away.

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And looking down the full 32 kilometers of its length, the haze of the atmosphere would blur the tube's end.

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Human -powered flight would become a popular pastime because as you left the interior surface,

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the effects of the centrifugal force would fall away.

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The closer to the center you propelled yourself, the lighter you'd become.

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And at the very center of the tube, you'd become weightless.

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Now, O 'Neill didn't invent the basic concept here.

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He wasn't the first to design using the idea of centrifugal force, but he was the first to work out the details scientifically.

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and to prove the feasibility of a cylindrical space colony.

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He was as interested in imagining the possibilities as he was in actually building it.

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Actually building it, that's always the problem, isn't it?

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You see, we can dream up these plans and even start them here on Earth, but to actually start them up there,

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where structures really go mega?

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we're going to need efficient, constant access to space from Earth.

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A permanent structure, like a tethered space elevator, is a must -have for humanity to take the next steps.

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And like the O 'Neill Cylinder, the theoretical engineering of the space elevator has already been worked out.

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It's an unimaginably strong cable made of a carbon nanotube composite,

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and it's anchored to a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean.

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From there, it stretches skyward 100 ,000 kilometers to its endpoint.

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It can lift payloads of 18 tons at speeds of up to 320 kilometers an hour.

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A trip to low

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Earth orbit, first floor, would take an hour.

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This could happen.

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It's just around the corner, cosmically speaking.

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Now, the materials needed to build a space elevator will have to be two or three times stronger than anything we currently have,

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but we're quickly closing the technological gap.

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Now, what if there was a faster way?

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In 1980, British scientist Paul Birch proposed an orbital ring system for access to space from Earth.

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It's a thin ring surrounding the planet in low Earth orbit.

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The cables would be tethered to it and hang down to Earth.

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How is this better than a space elevator?

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A space elevator needs a geostationary anchor out in space to function.

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An object connected to a cable 36 ,000 kilometers long.

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No cable we can make is strong enough for a distance that long.

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But Birch's orbital ring gets around this by building a ring in low

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Earth orbit about 500 km high.

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It would move faster than orbital speed, which is what would hold it up.

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The ring is the anchor, so the cable only has to reach about 500 km down to the ground,

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and a shorter cable needs far less strength.

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The orbital ring around

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Earth could be a great ladder to get our civilization up into space.

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Birch's orbital ring, like O 'Neill's cylinder though, is limited by its creator's restrictions to only use real materials of the age.

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But nanotechnologist Tom McKendry worked out what a space cylinder could be

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if built from materials that don't exist yet diamond -like structures made with molecular nanotechnology.

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His version of a space habitat has a radius of 460 kilometers.

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It's more than 100 times O 'Neill's.

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Now, at some point, the limitations of strength and resources become secondary,

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and the factor holding us back from building more sophisticated and wilder megastructures is energy.

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Today, Earth only intercepts a billionth of the Sun's total energy output.

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But what if we could capture nearly all of it?

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In 1960, a scientist named Freeman Dyson came up with a concept for a sphere the size of Earth's orbit.

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It would be a shell that encompassed the Sun

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and captured all of its energy output it it's a mind -blowing megastructure in concept size

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and ambition it's the kind of technological device

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that would give the human species access to an almost infinite energy source

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and power a quantum leap in our civilization's development it would be a necessary energy upgrade

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and star powered springboard to explore our galaxy.

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Now, unfortunately, the sphere is mechanically impossible to maintain, and Dyson knew it.

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It was theoretically sunk by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687, 273 years before Dyson even thought of it.

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Newton's Shell Theorem states that a rigid shell around a gravitational object would feel the pull of gravity evenly everywhere,

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until a tiny external force hits it, and then the whole thing would immediately begin to drift,

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eventually crashing catastrophically into the star itself.

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Dyson's beautiful sphere gets destroyed by physics.

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In Dyson's 1960 paper, he used the word shell to describe his idea.

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Science fiction writers ran with the idea of the solid continuous sphere, but Dyson knew better.

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In follow -up letters, he described a swarm of independent objects, each with its own orbit around the sun.

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Each object is a relatively simple piece of technology that we could manufacture today.

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Really, what keeps us from doing this is the quantity of objects needed to orbit around the Sun.

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And even if we could somehow build that many

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Sun satellites, getting these objects to the right place, orbiting the Sun, would be a megaproject in itself.

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It might sound like a question from a science fiction novel,

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but have we ever seen any evidence that anyone else has built a Dyson Swarm?

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Have we detected any alien civilizations in the universe that might have built one of these things?

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Well, it's not so far out of a question because Dyson himself proposed it even as he was originally imagining his swarms.

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He reasoned that if an extraterrestrial civilization were capturing or reprocessing the power of their sun with technology like a Dyson Swarm,

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there would be a measurable shift in the infrared spectrum of light from that star.

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It's something called a techno -signature.

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In 2024, a group of researchers found seven potential candidates.

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Patterns observed in their sun's brightness were consistent with those expected if an alien civilization had built a swarm around their sun.

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But in 2026, in a follow -up,

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all these examples were dismissed as naturally flaring stars rather than a sign of megastructures.

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So we have no evidence of a Dyson swarm existing elsewhere in the universe.

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Is it even possible to build one of these?

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Where would we even get the enormous amounts of metal and materials needed for such a massive project?

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And where would we even start?

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Well, according to Oxford futurists Armstrong and Sandberg, the project would start on the surface of Mercury.

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And it would begin with a simple one square kilometer area of solar panels.

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And 90 % of the energy from these panels would be used to break down chemical bonds

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and process raw materials from mercury.

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And 10 % would be used to propel these materials into space.

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The materials are used to build solar collectors, which are placed in orbit around mercury

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and beam energy back to the surface for further processing and to launch more material into orbit.

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The process expands exponentially.

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Based on a series of five -year cycles of replicating, processing, and launching solar collectors,

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the project takes 31 years.

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In that time, more than half of mercury would be dismantled and processed into solar collectors that get distributed around the sun.

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The result is a Dyson swarm, and humans capture the entire power of the sun.

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And leveling up to highly speculative science fiction territory,

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writer Larry Niven ran with Dyson's concepts and invented the wildly imaginative Ringworld.

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It's a ring like a gigantic wedding band that circles the sun.

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It might look like a fragile, narrow band from a distance, but Ringworld is a true megastructure.

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It would be 1 .6 million kilometers wide from edge to edge and have 3 million times the surface of Earth.

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Building this would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

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We'd have to strip mine half the solar system to get resources to build this.

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But now that we've conquered the output of the sun, what's left to build?

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Well, there's more.

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There's so much more.

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So, you're a future super president of the solar system, and you decide we all need to go visit another galaxy.

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So what do you do?

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Build an Earth -sized spaceship to send us off to Andromeda?

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Maybe the best way to travel between galaxies is to take the thing we can't live without along with us.

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Thank you.

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A shakadov thruster is a theoretical mirror big enough to push the sun

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and all the planets gently across the galaxy on the pressure of radiation alone.

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This is space travel in style.

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A massive sun -sized engine pushing us through the galaxy

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while a swarm of sun satellites captures all its available power feels pretty majestic.

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You might stop to ask, have we reached peak megastructure here?

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Well, what if I told you that a Dyson swarm is actually a rather primitive device?

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Because Robert J.

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Bradbury went a step further.

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A Dyson swarm still has cracks that let some energy through, and its simple design emits waste heat.

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So, what if the sun were surrounded by a series of nested concentric layers,

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each layer capturing the waste heat of the layer inside it, approaching 100 % usage of our star's power?

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This additional energy is what we would need to power a massive sun -sized supercomputer, known as a matryoshka brain.

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It's called a matryoshka brain after the Russian matryoshka dolls that nest inside of one another.

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And its purpose could be a digital utopia where all of humanity's consciousness is uploaded.

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Each person surviving for eternity in paradise.

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It's an insanely long way from being realistic.

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It would need a structure like a space elevator

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or an orbital ring to lift material into space at rates we've never seen before.

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And landings on extraterrestrial soil with the intention to reduce the planet to dust

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and convert all that material into an orbiting mega -computer planet.

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It's nesting interconnected layers, powering civilization into the next level.

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What level is that?

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Well, in 1964, four years after Dyson launched his sphere into the collective imagination,

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Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev introduced the idea that extraterrestrial civilizations could be ranked by their energy consumption.

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Known as the Kardashev Scale, he initially proposed three types.

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A Type 1 civilization has achieved the technological means to harness all the available energy from its home planet.

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We humans are on our way to a Type 1 status, but we've got a few steps to go.

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Well, a lot of steps to go.

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A Type 2 civilization would be a massive step up from

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where we are now it would be a civilization capable of capturing and utilizing the total energy output of its host star.

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Imagine capturing all the Sun's power and being able to use it all.

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These civilizations would have built some variation of a Dyson Swarm or a Matryoshka brain and harnessed the power of their star.

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A Type III civilization would have leveled up way beyond its

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own solar system to tap into the energy at the scale of its entire galaxy.

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And following in the theoretical footsteps of Kardashev, others have added on to his scale.

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So a Type 4 civilization would be a civilization harnessing the energy of the entire observable universe.

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A Type 5 conquering the multiverse.

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Even Omega civilizations that exist in a quantum state, rewriting space, time, and reality itself.

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As a barely type one, we've got our work cut out for us.

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Okay, we've seen that physics can be harnessed, technology can be developed, and energy can be captured in almost infinite quantities,

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but the question that really matters is,

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are we going to be the generation that drops the thread and abandons the line to the Arabian sands?

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Or are we going to be like the generation that picked up the thread and finished building the Cathedral of Cologne?

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Or the generation that came together to build the International Space Station?

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Can we see past our immediate future and launch a vision that lasts millennia?

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Do we have the right stuff to become a Type 3 civilization?

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Click on the video on screen now to find out.

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Because that's a story.

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for another What If.

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Лексика и советы по произношению к этому уроку

Этот урок разговорной практики построен на видео «The Insane Megastructure We Could Build in 31 Years». Чаще всего повторяются слова: space, sun, megastructure, civilization, energy. В этом видео 261 предложений и 3150 слов для шедоуинга. Речь длится 25:10. Говорящий держит ровный темп — около 125 слов в минуту, удобный для шедоуинга. Только 78% слов входят в 3000 самых частых слов английского языка, поэтому лексика сложная.

Ключевая лексика этого видео

15 слов из видео, которые стоит выучить, с произношением и значением:

Слово	Произношение	Значение
civilization существительное	/ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/	цивилиза́ция, культу́ра
orbit существительное	/ˈɔɹ.bɪt/	орби́та
capture глагол	/ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/	захва́тывать, захвати́ть
elevator существительное	/ˈɛləˌveɪtɚ/	элева́тор
orbital прилагательное	/ɔɹ.bət.l̩/	орбита́льный
galaxy существительное	/ˈɡæl.ək.si/	гала́ктика
cathedral существительное	/kəˈθiːdɹəl/	собо́р, кафедра́льный собо́р
sphere существительное	/sfɪɚ/	шар, сфе́ра
output существительное	/ˈaʊtpʊt/	произво́дство, проду́кция
layer существительное	/ˈleɪ̯ɚ/	слой, пласт
shell существительное	/ʃɛl/	ра́ковина, раку́шка
technological прилагательное	/ˌtɛk.nəˈlɑ.dʒɪ.kəl/	технологи́ческий
mercury существительное	/ˈmɜɹkjəɹi/	ртуть, гидра́ргирум
mirror существительное	/ˈmiɹɚ/	зе́ркало, зерца́ло
fiction существительное	/ˈfɪkʃən/	худо́жественная литерату́ра, беллетри́стика

Фразовые глаголы, которые вы услышите

Слово	Произношение	Значение
come up with глагол		придумывать, приходить в голову
work out глагол	/ˌwɝk ˈaʊt/	рассчи́тывать, рассчита́ть
break down глагол		ломаться, сломаться
find out глагол		узнава́ть, узна́ть
pick up глагол		подбира́ть, подобра́ть
take over глагол		брать на себя́, взять на себя́

Фразы, которые стоит повторять

Короткие законченные фразы из видео, которые пригодятся в повседневном разговоре:

Could we ever realistically build any of these?
That's its name, not something I came up with.
Actually building it, that's always the problem, isn't it?
You might stop to ask, have we reached peak megastructure here?

Грамматика в этом видео

Конструкции, которые говорящий использует чаще всего, с точными словами из видео:

Конструкция	В видео
Пассивный залог be + причастие прошедшего времени — важно, что происходит, а не кто это делает	being worked · was designed · was suddenly suspended
Present Perfect have/has + причастие прошедшего времени — прошлое действие, важное сейчас	has already been worked · have we ever seen · Have we detected
Придаточные определительные who / which + предложение — уточнение о человеке или предмете	everyone who starts · speed, which is · collectors, which are

Произношение, на которое стоит обратить внимание

Говорящий использует 23 сокращённых и редуцированных форм, например we've, we're, you'd. Произносите их коротко, так, как слышите.

Звуки «th»: cathedral /kəˈθiːdɹəl/, theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, thread /ˈθɹɛd/, thin /ˈθɪn/, tether /ˈtɛðəɹ/
Звуки «sh» и «zh»: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, capture /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/, shell /ʃɛl/, fiction /ˈfɪkʃən/, rotation /ɹoʊˈteɪʃən/
Длинные слова — следите за ударением: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, elevator /ˈɛləˌveɪtɚ/, technological /ˌtɛk.nəˈlɑ.dʒɪ.kəl/, humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/, theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/

Звуки, трудные для русскоязычных:

/w/ — губы округлены, это не /v/: quantity /ˈkwɑn(t)ɪti/, quantum /ˈkwɑntəm/, underway /ʌndəɹˈweɪ/, swarm /swɔɹm/
/h/ — лёгкий выдох, а не русское «х»: humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/, harness /ˈhɑɹ.nəs/, habitat /ˈhæb.ɪ.tæt/
Звонкие согласные в конце слова — не оглушайте их: thread /ˈθɹɛd/, primitive /ˈpɹɪmɪtɪv/, surround /səˈɹaʊnd/, impressive /ɪmˈpɹɛsɪv/, sand /sænd/

Как заниматься с этим видео

Прослушайте всё видео один раз молча и выпишите незнакомые слова.
Повторяйте предложение за предложением на обычной скорости, пока ваш ритм не совпадёт с ритмом говорящего.
Запишите себя и сравните с оригиналом, обращая внимание на такие слова, как civilization, orbit, capture.

Что такое техника Shadowing?

Shadowing — это научно обоснованная техника изучения языка, изначально разработанная для подготовки профессиональных переводчиков и популяризированная полиглотом доктором Александром Аргуэльесом. Метод прост, но эффективен: вы слушаете аудио на английском от носителей языка и немедленно повторяете вслух — как тень, следующая за говорящим с задержкой в 1–2 секунды. В отличие от пассивного прослушивания или грамматических упражнений, Shadowing заставляет мозг и мышцы рта одновременно обрабатывать и воспроизводить реальные речевые паттерны. Исследования показывают, что это значительно улучшает точность произношения, интонацию, ритм, связную речь, понимание на слух и беглость речи — что делает его одним из самых эффективных методов для подготовки к IELTS Speaking и реального общения на английском.

Техника шедоуинга: читать полное пошаговое руководство →

Практика Shadowing: The Insane Megastructure We Could Build in 31 Years - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео

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