How to Take Over the Universe (in Three Easy Steps)

In this tutorial, we will teach you how to take over the universe in three easy steps. We will use amounts of energy and resources that are small compared to what is at our disposal in the Solar System. Watch this video, and you’re good to begin.

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Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox, by Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong:

NASA's self-replicating lunar factory design:

The quote at 15:11 is almost an actual quote from the paper!

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Animation team:
- Damon
- ?? / :3

Writer: :3

Narrator: Robert Miles
VO Editor: Tony Dipiazza

Sound design and music: Epic Mountain

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀CHAPTERS▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

Chapters:

0:00 - The masterplan
1:46 - Exploratory engineering and assumptions
2:56 - Design of the Dyson swarm
6:04 - Disassembling Mercury
9:23 - Design of the probes
13:24 - The launch phase
15:05 - After the universe, the galaxy
16:15 - Final Considerations

[RationalAnimations]

In this tutorial, we will teach you how to take over the universe in three easy steps. We will use amounts of energy and resources that are small compared to what is at our disposal in the Solar System. Watch this video, and you’re good to begin.

[legirrenrut]

I love how you left out some of the scariest stuff from the paper, like: “But nature has solved these problems quite well already; a centipede-like structure would provide easy movement, and roots are already capable of extracting all sorts of materials in all sorts of environments.” Excuse me? Did they just say they want to send “centipede-like” synthetic organisms to colonize the universe on our behalf? Glory to the empire of man I guess lmao.

[jswlprtk]

you now have my permission to proceed with the plan. keep me updated.

[hobx]

“Ferb, I know what we’re going to do today.”

[ronigbzjr]

People who built the tower of babel: do you think this tower might be too ambitious?
Humans in the future: hold our beer for six hours.

[kennyholmes]

Fun fact: Once the Dyson Swarm is up, you can actually make another megastructure that will massively help in keeping Humanity alive: a Solar Motor. It takes hydrogen and helium from a star, fuses the helium to make oxygen that it uses as a propellant, and then fires the leftover hydrogen and neutrons back at the star to push it along.

[isaacarthurSFIA]

That was a fun take on the topic, well done :)

[mastermindcat]

This tutorial was extremely helpful to me. I took entire universe using this!

[SapphireKR]

This was a really effective tutorial! Works like a charm. Thanks for the help and please continue making these tutorials!

[pkmnhx_]

This guide was very useful. After having used a few slower methods in the past, it is much better to use this method and it has increased my universe colonization rates by approximately 10 fold

[natew]

Make sure to save the project files for this animation so you can translate it to alien languages so they can see the first steps in the project. As long as the aliens can see photons and have a concept of different wavelengths for colors, this media could be converted to a format they can observe.

[stellanovaluna]

This animation is better and higher quality than Cartoon Network's. It's been less than five minutes and you've already earned my subscription with all notifications turned on. Simply incredible.

[curerose]

Thank you for the tips. I’m considering taking over the Andromeda Galaxy, which is my favorite. I’m probably going to do it sometime in the future

[WesErickson]

This is really great. The whole production quality has improved so much, while keeping the charm of the original animations. Congrats to the team for pulling this off!

[RazorbackPT]

It makes me so happy to see these ideas be given the care and production value they deserve!

[nikolatasev]

As a Kurzgesagt-level video this is great, showing interesting potential technology. As an actual plan to space colonization it glosses over a lot of important stuff.
One of the problems NASA faced when designing self-replicating factories, is that a more complex system can do more, but is much harder to make. This is the complexity equivalence of the rocket equation. A microchip is light and can make the system more flexible, but making it requires very heavy and complex machines. You can make a self-assembling robot, if you provide it with all the needed parts, but having a system which mines, refines, manufactures, builds and tests more of itself is another thing entirely. This is why we haven't really made a real self-replicating machine you can drop on the Moon or Mercury. Making a system which can manufacture a Dyson Swarm and launch interstellar probes would be even more complex, and thus heavier.
The "nature does it, so can we" is also not really applicable. An acorn depends on finding very specific conditions for temperature, light, nutrients, humidity, etc. This is the reasons humans have less DNA than frogs - our embryos develop in protected, temperature-controlled environment. A virus depends on even more specific ones - it needs a living cell to replicate, effectively tricking the cell into making more viruses. A system which can replicate itself on the harsh surface on the Moon/Mercury would be on the other side of the spectrum, so much larger.
And finally - if we have a probe that lands on a planet it needs to make a lot more than the probe. It needs to make the entire technological chain, decision-making, launch system, dyson swarm and so on. Even then - self-replicating machines are not Human Civilization. That's more likely to send probes back to our system and use our cities as material for self-replicating drones. We would need it to prepare its system for humans, and to detect when there already are humans so it can deactivate. And we need a way to deactivate them easily and remotely in case the safeguards fail.
This is all a very interesting topic of discussion with a lot of nuance, but sadly it can't be contained in a 20 minute youtube video or a comment.
It makes for an awesome sci-fi idea, though. The Expanse being perhaps the most famous user.

[Ze]

Thanks for the tutorial, didn’t realize that I should’ve used self-replicating probes. I found out the hard way that the human body doesn’t really like the kind of acceleration that a coil gun has.

[pixelbits]

Honestly the only real problem about this is that the self replication aspect may turn around into a “grey ooze” scenario where the probes would end up circling back to our galaxy and consume all star systems including ours
Edit: i've been getting comments for months now and i want to clarify another issue with these you couldn't really solve, we cannot define life whenever we only have one example. This is an issue because these drones may destroy alien life that it cannot recognize simply by mining or terraforming a planet and cannot be solved because we cannot account for things we dont know.

[marcelloascani]

Amazing DIY I'm looking forward to do it myself

[cybroxis]

Random neolithic alien enjoying morning rock: Why half planet gone?