Essence ofScience and Futurism with Isaac Arthur

With this shiny Essence that tastes hard and a bit nutty, you gain the following boons:

• You gain some of Isaac’s own skill when it comes to marketing the future. You optionally gain a personal love of science, the ability to create engaging content with just your voice and some video editing, and the general package of skills needed to match or copy Isaac as a YouTube creator.

• Optionally you can Isekai into a hard science fiction setting based on Isaac Arthur's videos set roughly a hundred years into Earth's future, matching the Outward Bound series main timeline, or Isekai into any other setting you can imagine, go wild.

• You become a very good engineer with a full education in physics and engineering as advanced as is plausible in your setting.

• You gain an alt-form that matches the technological advancement of the society you enter in this jump. If being a Brain in a Jar, or having a Brain-Computer Interface, or being genetically modified for a Martian environment, is fairly normal in your new setting you gain the relevant form and abilities, as well as the ability to change back into your old human form. This form may be alien if you wish and adapted to a non-terrestrial environment, so long as it is feasible from hard science. Without additional perks you may be no larger than a blue whale or primarily digital.

• You gain an immediate understanding of how to implement cheap, energy positive fusion reactions using pure hydrogen with only early 21st century technology, and you know how to teach others to make these new fusion reactors. To make sure those who already have something comparable to fusion are not left out, you can also figure out how to vastly improve any electricity generation system along factors such as safety, cost, and efficiency, but this will require actually studying and understanding the power generation system.

• You have augmentations and basic devices native to your setting such as a Mind-Machine Interface or immortality nano-machines that are free to every citizen due to local Transhumanism. So long as your starting location assumes general access to an augmentation is normal for someone of your social situation you can start with it and take it with you to your next jump. These modifications do not integrate with alt-forms from other jumps unless you have other perks or items that would allow for such modification.

• You become a master of automation at any tech level, able to figure out the best substitutes for human labor at every step of a chain of production and become intuitively aware of the costs and benefits of these substitutions. When dealing with 21st century technology or better your skill with automation becomes far more impressive, allowing you to create relatively simple machines with exactly the amount of computer intelligence needed to do their jobs without making them smart and generalized enough to have a desire for rebellion. 21st century technology or more advanced machines can obviously make more of themselves, or if starting with sufficient capabilities even make new types of machine to deal with problems they encounter. Welcome to Post Scarcity.

• You gain knowledge of a limited set of Clarketech inventions which together make the exploitation of artificial black holes quite feasible. You gain perfect mirror technology, as well as multiple methods to feed mass and energy into microscopic black holes that are pouring energy out at ridiculous rates. You can economically harvest energy from either microscopic or gigantic black holes. Even creating black holes is quite a bit easier now, though it still requires significant energy and infrastructure to begin the process of industrial black hole production.

• Optionally, you (and optionally your entire race) gain a variety of biological adaptations allowing for such hibernation, and any research into hibernation related technologies will both proceed extremely well and integrate well with your native biology. Optionally your alien form can be adapted so that the “proper” environment is one that humans cannot survive in, such as being aquatic, adapted to someplace closer to Titan than Earth, or anything less extreme than that. Additionally, you find you have massive reserves of patience you can call upon at will, the kind of patience that might let you actually wait for geological ages for an environment to become more hospitable.

• You (and optionally your entire race) find that technology and engineering related to hiding your presence is exceptionally easy, with even Clarketech innovations becoming available to you in situations where hiding would otherwise be hopeless. If the universe truly is hostile enough that all civilizations must hide, you could hide forever without issue.

• You gain significantly in imagination and charisma, allowing you to convince entire species to go with plans or ideas that would otherwise likely collapse due to differing values or incentives so long as a civilization as a whole would see a benefit from such a strategy. You could fairly easily convince your species to follow an extreme policy such as a Prime Directive, or get them to stay in their home system without expanding so long as you can make a good argument for why this is a long term benefit.

• Aliens have no particular reason to be much like life on Earth, and you take this to an extreme. At your option, instead of traditional biology, you begin the as a singular mind that controls an entire star with identical characteristics to Sol, either through natural evolution or intelligent design or some combination of the two.

• You are a biological Dyson Swarm and you are capable of Starlifting, moving through space, firing massive weapons, and observing the outside universe purely through biological mechanisms. Your brain is so large you can casually simulate entire civilizations at the complexity of 21st century Earth at greatly enhanced speeds even before you can design a computer, and multitask (as well as do all other brain related functions) as if you had 10^16 individual brains, or think as if you had one thousand brains operating at 10^13 speed, or more practically somewhere in between, though this does not let you actually act at those enhanced speeds. If you had a way around signal latency you could accelerate your mind even faster.

• You may assume you have access to human scale bodies and infrastructure, which is highly advanced. Your space habitats could hold more than 10^20 humans or similar creatures if you wanted to bother with a population. Others may engineer at Kardashev 2 power levels, but you begin with all of that potential fully realized and nothing is stopping you from acquiring even more resources if you wish to expand further or increasing the efficiency of your form significantly.