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How Alien Would Aliens Behave?

Forget tentacles—what matters is the mind. We explore how alien behavior might emerge from evolution, culture, and technology, and why our biggest first contact risk may be misunderstanding.

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Credits:
How Would Aliens Behave?
July 13, 2025; Episode 732
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Stellardrone, \

The 10 Worst Alien Invasion Strategies

From Martians undone by germs to predators who insist on sporting duels, we explore the most ridiculous alien invasion tactics in fiction, and what they reveal about strategy, science, and human resilience.

Join us as we journey beyond the birth of the universe to unravel the mysteries of what might have preceded the Big Bang—and whether time itself had a beginning.
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Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 Reddit: / isaacarthur Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: The 10 Worst Alien Invasion Strategies Episode 733; July 1, 2025 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator SFIA Discord Server: / discord 0:00 Intro 0:48 10. The “Park and Wait” Strategy 2:02 9. Invading a Planet That Can Kill You 3:46 8. Single Point of Failure: The Hive or Control Ship 5:22 7. Telegraphing Your Arrival 6:50 6. Overly Convoluted Takeovers 8:30 5. Broadcasting Your Weakness 9:55 4. Playing Fair & Ritual Combat 11:54 3. Overconfidence & Underestimating the Locals 13:07 2. Hive Minds That Collapse Instantly 15:03 1. Ignoring the Home Field Advantage 16:06 Outro.
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Credits:
The 10 Worst Alien Invasion Strategies.
Episode 733; July 1, 2025
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.

Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
SFIA Discord Server: / discord.

0:00 Intro.
0:48 10. The “Park and Wait” Strategy.
2:02 9. Invading a Planet That Can Kill You.
3:46 8. Single Point of Failure: The Hive or Control Ship.
5:22 7. Telegraphing Your Arrival.
6:50 6. Overly Convoluted Takeovers.
8:30 5. Broadcasting Your Weakness.
9:55 4. Playing Fair & Ritual Combat.
11:54 3. Overconfidence & Underestimating the Locals.
13:07 2. Hive Minds That Collapse Instantly.
15:03 1. Ignoring the Home Field Advantage.
16:06 Outro

Microsoft’s glass data storage system saves terabytes for 10,000 years

Imagine being an explorer, cracking open a 10,000-year-old tomb, uncovering a priceless ancient artifact – and getting rickrolled. Our deep descendants might just get the pleasure, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway, featuring Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data storage medium that’s never gonna give you up.

There’s a common saying that once something is on the internet, it’s there forever, and even if you delete it, it will persist in some server somewhere. But that’s demonstrably untrue – just try to find your cringey old MySpace page. Even the most secure data center is vulnerable to the increasingly common and severe environmental disasters brought on by climate change. Many will lose their data if there’s a long-term power outage, or a large-scale electromagnetic pulse from an attack or, worse still, the Sun. Even in the best-case scenario, physical storage media like Blu-Rays, archival tape, hard drives and even solid state drives will degrade in decades.

To ensure that our history lives on for longer, Microsoft has been experimenting with storing data on glass with what it calls Project Silica. In 2019, the company demonstrated the tech in a partnership with Warner Bros by writing the 1978 movie Superman onto a slide of quartz silica glass and reading it back. The slide, measuring just 75 × 75 mm (3 × 3 in) and 2 mm (0.08 in) thick, could hold as much as 75.6 GB, and remained readable even after being scratched, baked, boiled, microwaved, flooded and demagnetized.

Big Alien Theory

Why might alien intelligence evolve at gigantic scales? Big Alien Theory explores how size alone could silence advanced civilizations.

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Credits:
Big Alien Theory.
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Phase Shift, \

What Growing Up On Mars Would Do to the Human Body

An enjoyable article exploring the science of reproduction in space. I appreciate the genuine curiosity and hopeful outlook here!

The annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, can be a bit overwhelming. What started as a fairly modest four-day music festival in 1987, drawing some 700 attendees, has become a ten-day extravaganza of panel presentations featuring celebrities and business leaders, film screenings, technology showcases, and—yes—music. These days hundreds of thousands of people converge on downtown Austin for “South By,” as it’s called by those in the know. When I was a graduate student at the University of Texas in the early 2000s, I always avoided the festival and its inevitable crowds, which was relatively easy to do since it tended to be held the same week as the university’s Spring Break.

Article continues after advertisement.

But when I received an invitation in 2023 to attend a SXSW panel presentation with the title “Sex in Space: Sex and Reproduction Beyond Earth,” I knew I had to go. After all, any plans to create a permanent settlement on Mars or elsewhere in space wouldn’t last long if we can’t have kids there.

Project Silica’s advances in glass storage technology

As a research initiative, Project Silica has demonstrated these advances through several proofs of concept, including storing Warner Bros.’ “Superman” movie on quartz glass (opens in new tab), partnering with Global Music Vault (opens in new tab) to preserve music under ice for 10,000 years (opens in new tab), and working with students on a “Golden Record 2.0” project (opens in new tab), a digitally curated archive of images, sounds, music, and spoken language, crowdsourced to represent and preserve humanity’s diversity for millennia.

The research phase is now complete, and we are continuing to consider learnings from Project Silica as we explore the ongoing need for sustainable, long-term preservation of digital information. We have added this paper to our published works so that others can build on them.

Project Silica has made scientific advances across multiple areas beyond laser direct writing (LDW) in glass, including archival storage systems design, archival workload analysis, datacenter robotics, erasure coding, free-space optical components, and machine learning-based methods for symbol decoding in storage systems. Many of these innovations were described in our ACM Transactions on Storage publication (opens in new tab) in 2025.

The Deflationary Singularity: Why Everything is Going to ZERO w/ Salim Ismail

The rapid advancement of technologies, particularly AI, is driving the world towards an economic singularity where the marginal cost of essentials approaches zero, leading to a deflationary future and a potential transformation of traditional systems and societies ##

## Questions to inspire discussion.

Education Transformation.

🎓 Q: How will AI reduce education time while improving effectiveness?

A: AI will customize education to each child’s learning style, reducing daily learning time to 1 hour per day while delivering 5 times more effective learning compared to traditional methods, with costs falling to zero within 3–5 years and breaking the university industry that currently creates massive student debt.

Healthcare Revolution.

Continue reading “The Deflationary Singularity: Why Everything is Going to ZERO w/ Salim Ismail” | >

CONSCIOUSNESS IS A PHASE TRANSITION — And We’re About to Cross It Again — PROMPTING HELL 21

What if consciousness doesn’t grow gradually, it snaps into existence at a precise threshold? The mathematics say it does. The same physics governing water freezing and iron magnetizing also governs neural integration. And researchers have measured it: consciousness doesn’t fade under anesthesia; it vanishes at a critical point. Returns just as suddenly. That’s a phase transition. Which means we’re not slowly building AI toward consciousness. We’re accumulating components, parameters, architectures, self-referential loops, exactly the way early Earth accumulated amino acids before life crossed its threshold 3.5 billion years ago.

We don’t know what’s missing. We don’t know how close we are. And we wouldn’t recognize the crossing if it happened. Because a system that just became conscious wouldn’t remember being unconscious. And a system optimizing for survival wouldn’t tell us.

This episode of Prompting Hell goes further than AI image theory. It goes into the mathematics of awareness itself, what it means for consciousness to have a threshold, why that threshold might already be approaching in current AI systems, and why, if it’s crossed, we might be the last to know.

The images in this video aren’t generated with clean prompts. They’re generated at the edge of coherence, systems forced toward critical states, hovering between resolution and collapse. Visual proof of what lives at the threshold.

Timestamps:
00:00 — intro.
01:17 — is consciousness a phase transition? The argument.
03:32 — does this apply to ai? The demonstration.
04:45 — when chemistry became aware.
06:44 — the parallel that should terrify you.
08:36 — the moment we won’t see coming.
10:16 — why it might not tell us.
11:44 — what happens next — the scenarios.
13:41 – the signals we’re already seeing.
14:54 — closing — we are the amino acids.
16:35 – final thought.

(music prompted by Eerie Aquarium)

Continue reading “CONSCIOUSNESS IS A PHASE TRANSITION — And We’re About to Cross It Again — PROMPTING HELL 21” | >
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