This Is What a Godlike Civilization Would Look Like



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We imagine advanced alien civilizations building gigantic spaceships, Dyson spheres and empires spanning entire galaxies. But what if true technological progress goes in exactly the opposite direction? Not outward into space, but deeper and deeper into the smallest layers of reality?

What is the Barrow Scale? How powerful could a civilization become by mastering DNA, and even fundamental particles, and could the universe already be filled with godlike civilizations hiding in plain sight?

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49 Comments

  1. Something that also makes sense about this is it doesn’t require the same infinite energy infinite resource type things as traditional thoughts of what advanced civilizations require. Sure it might require more resources or energy than current stuff, but simply due to scale it doesn’t scale exponentially with advancedness, instead it likely gets slower the more advanced we get. And that just makes a lot more sense than eating up everything infinitely.

  2. Do ants look up and say "look humans run!"? No. They run around in circles without any sense of what is attacking them. I expect it would go along the same lines.

  3. While this video presents a fascinating philosophical look at the Barrow scale, it relies on several fundamental scientific inaccuracies and laws-of-physics violations to make its narrative work: first, claiming that CRISPR was discovered "about 10 years ago" is historically incorrect, as the CRISPR sequences themselves were discovered in 1987 by Yoshizumi Ishino and even their adaptation into a programmable gene-editing tool by Doudna and Charpentier occurred back in 2012; second, stating that DNA is "the densest information-storage system on Earth" is only true for natural biological systems, since physicists have already engineered atomic-scale memories—such as single-atom chlorine-vacancy hard drives and single-molecule magnets—that store data at densities orders of magnitude higher than DNA; third, the central premise that moving down the Barrow scale eliminates the need for Kardashev-scale energy and macro-structures like Dyson spheres completely ignores quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, because probing and manipulating smaller scales requires inversely proportional, monumental amounts of energy (which is why probing elementary particles requires a 27-kilometer collider, and manipulating the Planck or "Omega-minus" scale would require a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way); and finally, suggesting that civilizations could build fist-sized datacenters or compute inside atomic nuclei at "sextillions of operations per second" without expanding outwards violates both Landauer's principle and thermodynamic heat-dissipation limits, as packing that much computation into a tiny volume on a single planet would instantly vaporize the device into plasma and boil the planet's biosphere from the waste heat alone.

  4. 9:55 this is exactly why Ai solving the millennium problem is huge. It no longer is a question of if, rather it now is “how much will it cost”. Humans are amazing at making things more efficient, the hard part is to get it to work

  5. "oh humans when they will learn that size does not matter and if something is important it does not mean is tiny! diminute! like the size of a marble or a jewel" – frank "the dog" MIB 1997

  6. This entire concept is very “three body problem”

    Unfolding a proton into 2 dimensions in order to program it to do whatever you’d like remotely (and that was only the beginning).

  7. No matter if they delve INWARD or OUTWARD, any civilization would need to protect itself from extinction-level events from BOTH directions. From cascading microscopic novas, to solar novas and asteroids.

  8. I think this calls up ethical questions as much as expanding outwards. The types of technologies humans develop is a reflection of humans themsleves. As much as manipulating matter sounds really cool and can play an important role in adapting to climate change, seeing ourselves as "god-like" can still keep that entitlement and hunger that caused the climate crisis (and global inequality) in the first place.

  9. It's like the aliens from three body problem that destroy and create pocket dimensions to kill off other civilizations and hide their own. Maybe the key to longevity of our species isn't expansion and Dyson sphere's but doing everything we can to not draw attention to ourselves

  10. 2 minute advert hol-eee for the love of life go show that to the trillion dollar oligarch groups poisoning mine and my children's world Please, why is it in a YOUTUBE VIDEO.

  11. 🌏🌐⛓️ own nothing, be happy. Tyranny under the guise of safety, inclusivity and convenience. 1984 x black mirror. UBI, blockchain, Al, track, trace and database, highly surveilled, highly regulated, less rights, less freedom, less choice, diminished human experience and art and culture, digital “utopia”.

  12. Depending on time of development, there might be civilizations star hopping already. (I say hop, the hop might take a year)
    But that's a dangerous business.
    We won't be able to for quite some time

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