## FANDOM

562 Pages

Obviously, the first action took by an advanced civilisation with sufficient resources is to perform some intense projects. This blog post is going to look at a few potential categories that could be performed.

## Matter Generation

One thing that you can do with a whole bunch of energy is to somehow turn that energy directly into matter. If you're running low on planets, this is a very inefficient way to get more and why on earth would you ever want to do this you could just starlift but no those bureaucrats up in the Capitol Bubble want a planet out of energy.

The mass of various objects, and their energy equivalents, are as follows:

Object Mass (kg) Mass-Energy (J)

Civilization

Asteroid 1 × 1012 9 × 1028 2.2
Planet (Earth) 6 × 1024 5 × 1041 3.4
Star (the Sun) 2 × 1030 2 × 1047 4.0
Galaxy (the Milky Way) 1 × 1042 9 × 1058 5.2
Universe 5 × 1052 4 × 1069 6.2
Multiverse 2 × 1063 2 × 1080 7.3

Assuming that a civilization can bring around 10 seconds of its energy around on any single project (the equivalent of humanity launching two Saturn V rockets), then the scale of civilization needed to perform a project can be calculated. These can be seen in column three of the chart.

## Transportation

So, it turns out that generating matter out of energy is prohibitively expensive. The solution, of course, is to just get the matter from somewhere else. This depends heavily on how fast you want the thing to go; energy increases quadratically with velocity at the object and hyperbolically with velocity outside the object.

One way of calculating this is to decide on a distance and acceleration and then assume a brachistochrone trajector. An object under constant acceleration, moving a distance r, has a total work done of W = ma.r. Freitas gives a velocity for interstellar transport of 1%c, which corresponds to around 1000 years to travel a short hop of 100 light years (a reasonable interstellar distance). This corresponds to an acceleration of 0.002 m s-2, and hence the associated energies for interstellar transport (100 ly) are

Object Mass (kg) Energy (J) Civilization
Asteroid 1 × 1012 1 × 1027 2.0
Planet (Earth) 6 × 1024 1 × 1040 3.3
Star (the Sun) 2 × 1030 4 × 1045 3.8

For intergalactic transport (10 million ly), these energies are

Object Mass (kg) Energy (J) Civilization
Asteroid 1 × 1012 2 × 1032 2.5
Planet (Earth) 6 × 1024 1 × 1045 3.8
Star (the Sun) 2 × 1030 4 × 1050 4.3
Galaxy (the Milky Way) 1 × 1042 2 × 1062 5.4

For interfilament transport (10 billion ly), these energies are

Object Mass (kg) Energy (J) Civilization
Asteroid 1 × 1012 2 × 1035 2.8
Planet (Earth) 6 × 1024 1 × 1048 4.1
Star (the Sun) 2 × 1030 4 × 1053 4.6
Galaxy (the Milky Way) 1 × 1042 2 × 1065 5.7

Energy costs for universal and multiversal travel, unfortunately, aren't as straightforward to calculate.

And it turns out that this is also prohibitively expensive: moving matter between galaxies is actually more expensive than just condensing it out of energy at the building site (the maximum distance for cheap transport is found at $r = \frac{c^2}{a}$; at .0002 g this is 4753 ly, at 1 g this is 1.4 ly, at 106 g this is 31 light-seconds, and at the planck acceleration this is 1 planck length). As a plus, the galaxy gets enough energy from its motion that you actually have a piece of radiation the size of a galaxy.