Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Embedded Files
Sources – Barrow Scale
Sources – Barrow Scale
We thank the following experts for their feedback:
Caleb Scharf
Senior Scientist for Astrobiology, NASA Ames Research Center
Clément Vidal
Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel
This script is based on the Barrow scale, introduced by John D. Barrow in 1998:
#Barrow, John D. (1998): "Impossibility : The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits”, Oxford University Press
https://www.google.de/books/edition/Impossibility/2J3mCwAAQBAJ
—ate most of the large animals
#Svenning, Jens-Christian et al. (2024): “The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene.”, Cambridge Prisms: Extinction, vol. 2, e5
#Bergman, Juraj et al. (2023): “Worldwide Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene population declines in extant megafauna are associated with Homo sapiens expansion rather than climate change”, Nature Communications, vol. 14, 7679
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43426-5.pdf
#Broughton, Jack M.; Weitzel, Elic M. (2018): “Population reconstructions for humans and megafauna suggest mixed causes for North American Pleistocene extinctions”, vol. 9, 1, 5441
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1
— felled a third of all forests
#Our World in Data (2025): “The world has lost one-third of its forests, but an end to deforestation is possible”
https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests
Quote: “Shortly after the end of the last great ice age — 10,000 years ago — 57% of the world’s habitable land was covered by forest. In the millennia since then, a growing demand for agricultural land means we’ve lost one-third of global forests — an area twice the size of the United States. Half of this loss occurred in the last century alone.”
—and burned mountains of dead plants for energy.
#Evans, Simon (2021): “Analysis: Which countries are historically responsible for climate change?”, Carbon Brief
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-historically-responsible-for-climate-change
Quote:“In total, humans have pumped around 2,500bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) into the atmosphere since 1850, leaving less than 500GtCO2 of remaining carbon budget to stay below 1.5C of warming.”
#NOAA (2016): “Which emits more carbon dioxide: volcanoes or human activities?” (retrieved 2026)
Quote:“Human activities—mostly burning of coal and other fossil fuels, but also cement production, deforestation and other landscape changes—emitted roughly 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2015. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, more than 2,000 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide have been added to the atmosphere by human activities according to the Global Carbon Project.”
—And our appetite isn’t slowing down – it’s accelerating. The more we progress, the faster we devour the planet.
#Our World in Data (2025): “Global primary energy consumption by source”
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution
—Based on this idea of “more”, scientists came up with a system to categorize civilizations by their energy consumption on the macro level, the Kardashev scale. A Type I civilization harnesses its home planet. Type II controls its star system. And Type III has taken over its galaxy, becoming a vast empire of engineered stars, terraformed planets, and titanic ships among the stars.
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Kardashev scale” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/science/Kardashev-scale
—Our ancestors built the pyramids: an immense technical achievement on a scale 100 times their own.
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Pyramids of Giza” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pyramids-of-Giza
Quote: “The designations of the pyramids—Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure—correspond to the kings for whom they were built. The northernmost and oldest pyramid of the group was built for Khufu (Greek: Cheops), the second king of the 4th dynasty. Called the Great Pyramid, it is the largest of the three, the length of each side at the base averaging 755.75 feet (230 meters) and its original height being 481.4 feet (147 meters).”
—But at a scale 100 times smaller, they created something incomparably more impactful: writing.
One can write with characters of any size, but the first forms of writing were in the scale of centimeters:
#Spar, Ira (2004): “The Origins of Writing”, Timeline of Art History at New York Metropolitan Museum of Art
https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-origins-of-writing
—We turned air into fertilizer, feeding billions.
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Haber-Bosch process” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/technology/Haber-Bosch-process
Quote: “Haber-Bosch process, method of directly synthesizing ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen, developed by the German physical chemist Fritz Haber. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918 for this method, which made the manufacture of ammonia economically feasible.”
#Flavell-While, Claudia (2010): “Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch – Feed the World”, The Chemical Engineer
https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/features/cewctw-fritz-haber-and-carl-bosch-feed-the-world
#Smart Fertilisers (2025): “Significance of the Haber-Bosch Process” (retrieved 2026)
https://smartfertiliserhub.org.au/publications/blogs/significance-of-the-haber-bosch-process/
Quote: “In 1908, Fritz Haber filed his patent for the “synthesis of ammonia from its elements, a discovery that would fundamentally transform global agriculture and earn him the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Scaled up by chemical engineer Carl Bosch, the Haber-Bosch process enabled humanity to convert abundant atmospheric nitrogen into reactive nitrogen compounds that plants could utilise.
[...]
Studies estimate that the Haber-Bosch process is responsible for feeding approximately half the world’s population, with nearly 48% of people globally depending on crops grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.”
—We pushed all the way down to the quantum level and found how to convert sand into transistors, compressing room-sized computers into machines no bigger than a hand and millions of times more powerful.
#ASML. “The basics of microchips” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.asml.com/en/technology/all-about-microchips/microchip-basics
Quote: “A microchip (also called a chip, a computer chip, an integrated circuit or IC) is a set of electronic circuits on a small flat piece of silicon. On the chip, transistors act as miniature electrical switches that can turn a current on or off. The pattern of tiny switches is created on the silicon wafer by adding and removing materials to form a multilayered lattice work of interconnected shapes.
[...]
Silicon is the material of choice in the chip industry. Unlike the metals normally used to conduct electrical currents, silicon is a ‘semiconductor’, meaning that its conductive properties can be increased by mixing it with other materials such as phosphorus or boron. This makes it possible to turn an electrical current on or off.
The good news is that it’s everywhere! Silicon is made from sand, and it is the second most abundant element on earth after oxygen. Silicon wafers are made using a type of sand called silica sand, which is made of silicon dioxide. The sand is melted and cast in the form of a large cylinder called an ‘ingot’. This ingot is then sliced into thin wafers.”
A common measure of computing power is FLOPS (float operations per second). Modern iPhones can perform around 2× 1012 FLOPS.
#Check-Mac: “Apple iPhone 16 6.1" (2024): Benchmark results” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.check-mac.com/en/product_benchmark-apple_iphone_16_6.1_2024-fp32
Quote: “The theoretical computing power of the graphics card with single precision (32 bit) in TFLOPS. TFLOPS indicates how many trillion FP32 floating point operations the graphics card (GPU) can perform per second. The larger this number, the faster the graphics card is.”
While the FLOPS metric is not directly applicable to ENIAC, we can estimate a FLOPS equivalence:
#ENIAC Day. “ENIAC trivia: Blow Your Mind - Compare ENIAC to Today's Supercomputers!” (retrieved 2026)
https://eniacday.org/eniac-trivia
Quote: “ENIAC was estimated with a performance of 0.00289 MIPS (million instructions per second). You might've heard of flops (floating point operations per second), which is a more reasonable metric for performance, but is not always available for older computers. The ENIAC was weird in that it directly stored decimal digits instead of binary numbers the way it's done today, so getting a performance number isn't one to one. However, these were decimal numbers with 10 digits stored, so we can say that the ENIAC would be doing basically one flop per instruction (or 0.00289 megaflops).”
So, in comparison:
2 × 1012 FLOPS/ (0.003× 106:FLOPS)= 6 × 108
That is, the modern iPhone is hundreds of millions of times more powerful than ENIAC.
—This is the Barrow scale, which measures progress by your level of control of the small world.
#Barrow, John D. (1998): "Impossibility : The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits”, Oxford University Press
https://www.google.de/books/edition/Impossibility/2J3mCwAAQBAJ
Quote: “In practice, therefore, we have found it much more cost effective to extend our ability to manipulate the world over smaller and smaller dimensions rather than over larger and larger ones. So, let us extend our classification of technological civilizations downwards as Type I-minus, Type II-minus, . . ., and so on, down to Type Ω-minus, according to their ability to control smaller and smaller entities. These civilizations might be distinguished
as follows:
Type I-minus is capable of manipulating objects over the scale of themselves: building structures, mining, joining and breaking solids;
Type II-minus is capable of manipulating genes and altering the development of living things, transplanting or replacing parts of themselves, reading and engineering their genetic code;
Type Ill-minus is capable of manipulating molecules and molecular bonds, creating new materials;
Type IV-minus is capable of manipulating individual atoms, creating nanotechnologies on the atomic scale and creating complex forms of artificial life;
Type V-minus is capable of manipulating the atomic nucleus and engineering the nucleons that compose it;
Type VI-minus is capable of manipulating the most elementary particles of matter (quarks and leptons) to create organized complexity among populations of elementary particles;
culminating in.
Type Ω-minus is capable of manipulating the basic structure of space and time.”
—It has been only 60 years since we cracked the genetic code and about 10 since we discovered CRISPR, one of the most powerful tools of genetic engineering to date.
#EBSCO Information Services: “Cracking of the genetic code” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/cracking-genetic-code
Quote: “The groundbreaking work of scientists like Francis Crick and Marshall Nirenberg led to the understanding that groups of three DNA or RNA bases, known as codons, correspond to specific amino acids. This triplet coding system allowed for the potential of 64 different codons, which could specify the 20 amino acids, including the discovery of "stop" codons that signal the termination of protein synthesis. Additionally, transfer RNA (tRNA) plays a crucial role in this process by serving as an intermediary that brings the appropriate amino acids to the ribosome based on the codon sequence of the mRNA.”
#The Nobel Foundation: “Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1968” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1968/summary/
#Nirenberg, Marshall W.; Matthaei, J. Heinrich (1961): “The dependence of cell-free protein synthesis in E. coli upon naturally occurring or synthetic polyribonucleotides.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 47,10
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC223178/
https://www.nature.com/articles/1921227a0
#Lander, Eric S. “The Heroes of CRISPR”, Cell, vol. 164, 18-28
https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5
https://www.broadinstitute.org/files/news/pdfs/PIIS0092867415017055.pdf
Quote: “It’s hard to recall a revolution that has swept biology more swiftly than CRISPR. Just 3 years ago [in 2013], scientists reported that the CRISPR system—an adaptive immune system used by microbes to defend themselves against invading viruses by recording and targeting their DNA sequences—could be repurposed into a simple and reliable technique for editing, in living cells, the genomes of mammals and other organisms. CRISPR was soon adapted for a vast range of applications—creating complex animal models of human-inherited diseases and cancers; performing genome-wide screens in human cells to pinpoint the genes underlying biological processes; turning specific genes on or off; and genetically modifying plants—and is being used in thousands of labs worldwide. The prospect that CRISPR might be used to modify the human germline has stimulated international debate.”
#The Nobel Foundation: “Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2020/summary/
—The jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its cells to an earlier stage, making it virtually immortal.
#Osterloff, Emily (2021): “Immortal jellyfish: The secret to cheating death”, The Natural History Museum, London
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/immortal-jellyfish-secret-to-cheating-death.html
Quote: “An adult jellyfish is known as a medusa. Jellyfish belong to a group called Cnidaria, which also includes sea anemones and corals. As animals, they are subject to the cycle of life and death - though one species is known to bend the rules.
The hydrozoan Turritopsis dohrnii, an animal about 4.5 millimetres wide and tall (likely making it smaller than the nail on your little finger), can actually reverse its life cycle. It has been dubbed the immortal jellyfish.
When the medusa of this species is physically damaged or experiences stresses such as starvation, instead of dying it shrinks in on itself, reabsorbing its tentacles and losing the ability to swim. It then settles on the seafloor as a blob-like cyst.
Over the next 24-36 hours opens in a new window, this blob develops into a new polyp - the jellyfish's previous life stage - and after maturing, medusae bud off. This phenomenon has been likened opens in a new window to that of a butterfly which, instead of dying, would be able to transform back into a caterpillar and then metamorphose into an adult butterfly once again.
The process behind the jellyfish's remarkable transformation is called transdifferentiation and is extremely rare.
[...]
This life cycle reversal can be repeated, and in perfect conditions, it may be that these jellyfish would never die of old age.”
#Khedkar, Sneha (2025): “An “Immortal” Jellyfish Offers Clues into Biological Aging”, The Scientist
https://www.the-scientist.com/an-immortal-jellyfish-offers-clues-into-biological-aging-73346
#Bavestrello, Giorgio; Sommer, Christian; Sarà, Michele (1992): “Bi-directional conversion in Turritopsis nutricula (Hydrozoa)”, Scientia Marina, vol. 56
Cell immortality and age reversal has not been achieved in humans and it may not be possible without currently unacceptable risk of developing cancer.
#Velasco-Muñoz, Valentina (2025): ”Regenerative characteristics of the immortal jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, and their potential implications for human aging”, Revista Española de Geriatría y Gerontología, vol. 60, 3, 101607
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0211139X24001410
Quote: “The jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii (T. Nutricala) is a cnidarian of the Oceaniidae family that lives in the Mediterranean Sea. It is known as the immortal jellyfish since, through a process of cell development called transdifferentiation, it manages to return to a polyp state.[...]
How to induce transdifferentiation in humans in order to give a more efficient and safer therapeutic alternative in several diseases, for example using cytokines such as IL-17 and IFN- in inflammatory skin disorders to spinal cord injury has been studied for the
past years. [...] The main limitation is that transdifferentiation fosters the generation of oncogenic activity, but also increases cancer’s metastatic dissemination, and treatment resistance. [...]
Why does jellyfish T. dohrnii manage to use transdifferentiation to trick nature while in humans it increases oncogenic activity through aging? Cellular reprogramming in the jellyfish had DNA synthesis and related mechanisms genes overexpressed, but cell division and mitotic related genes were underexpressed. There, DNA quality is a priority over cellular division. In humans DNA damage like telomere dysfunction, is what promotes transdifferentiation and also links it to oncogenic activity, although it is not exclusive. Translational medicine seeks to convert these concepts into practical aspects and, why not say,the clinicians involved represent a change in the evolution of diseases in people in general and in the elderly in particular.”
—Maybe even creating a new Cambrian explosion on Earth, thanks to genetic engineering.
We thank expert Clément Vidal for his comments on this script:
Quote: “[T]his is often not appreciated, but we are on the verge of being able to explore and create a huge surge of biodiversity. A new Cambrian explosion enabled thanks to genetic engineering.”
—Today we can manipulate them through chemistry but Type 3-minus and Type 4-minus civilizations have the ability to move and combine individual molecules and eventually atoms with the same ease we stack bricks to build a house.
This chapter of the script is based on Richard’s Feynman “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” 1959 talk, updated to take into account later developments in material science.
#Feynman, Richard P. (1960): “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, Engineering and Science, vol. 23, 5, 22-36
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1976/1/1960Bottom.pdf
We are now capable of single-atom manipulation under certain conditions, though it remains prohibitively expensive and only possible with highly specialized equipment:
#Tripathi, Mukesh et al. (2018): “Electron-Beam Manipulation of Silicon Dopants in Graphene”, Nano Letters, vol. 8, 8, 5319-5323
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b02406
Quote: “Although single-atom manipulation using scanning probe microscopy was established already 25 years ago, (1,2) it continues to provide impressive technological advances, such as atomic memory arrays, (3) as well as insight into physical phenomena including quantum many-body effects. (4,5) However, only relatively weakly bound surface atoms far below room temperature can typically (6) be affected due to the limited interaction energy with the atomically sharp tip.
[...]
In conclusion, we have shown how targeted electron irradiation with an ångström-sized electron probe can reliably move Si impurities through the graphene lattice. The improved degree of control reported here demonstrates the power of scanning transmission electron microscopy as a capable tool for single-atom manipulation in covalently bound materials.”
There even is an atom-scale stop-motion short film:
#IBM (2013): “A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&list=PLaFe0BJiho2ofZqEVA5H6RZMJiusN-WSL&index=1
—Fabrics that shift texture with the weather or a coating that can turn into a screen. Roads and bridges that self-repair before cracks spread. Buildings able to react to light, sound, or stress by opening, insulating or reinforcing themselves.
Design of responsive fabrics and construction materials are an active area of research in materials science:
#Xu A. Zhang et al. (2019): “Dynamic gating of infrared radiation in a textile”, Science, vol. 363, 619-623
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau1217
#Amran, Mugahed et al. (2022): “Self-Healing Concrete as a Prospective Construction Material: A Review.”, Materials (Basel, Switzerland), vol. 15, 9
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9106089/
#Sommese, Francesco; Badarnah, Lidia; Ausiello, Gigliola (2023): “Smart materials for biomimetic building envelopes: current trends and potential applications”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, vol. 188, 113847
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032123007050
—Today, the densest information-storage system on Earth is DNA. But DNA is not magic, it’s just atoms arranged so precisely that the enormous amount of information needed to run a cell can fit inside the cell itself.
#Service, Robert F. (2017): “DNA could store all of the world's data in one room”, Science
https://www.science.org/content/article/dna-could-store-all-worlds-data-one-room
Quote: “Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they've come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks. But whether the technology takes off may depend on its cost.”
#Erlich,Yaniv; Zielinski, Dina (2017): “DNA Fountain enables a robust and efficient storage architecture” Science, vol. 355, 950-954
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaj2038
Other very dense forms of storing data exist and may be available in the future, but they tend to face issues of information degradation. However, these issues may be solved in the future.
#Loth, Sebastian et al. (2012): “Bistability in Atomic-Scale Antiferromagnets”, Science, vol. 335,196-199
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1214131
#Courtland, Rachel (2012): “IBM Makes Tiny (Though Impractical) 12-Atom Magnetic Bit”, IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-makes-tiny-but-impractical-12atom-magnetic-bit
—“Utility fogs”, swarms of billions of nanobots, could gather into everyday objects like tools or furniture. Matter might turn into hardware that we could guide with software. If this also sounds incredibly dangerous, that’s because it probably is.
Nanobot swarms are an active area of research, specially for medical applications:
#European Commission (2025): “Shaping the future of biomedicine with smart nanobot swarms” (retrieved 2026)
Quote: “Can nanobots be made to move collectively like flocks of birds and schools of fish? Replicating the complexity of movement and cooperative behaviour found in systems in nature is no small feat, but the i-NANOSWARMS project has accepted the challenge. The project is developing smart enzyme-powered nanobot swarms capable of propelling themselves using biocompatible and bioavailable fuels, and also of cooperating, communicating and interacting between each other and with their environment.”
#Griffin, Matthew (2019): “World First as Scientists Create Nanobot Swarms Capable of Performing Surgeries in Humans” (retrieved 2026)
Quote: “A ground breaking new method of controlling nanobots that “emulates natural swarm behaviour” has been unveiled by scientists in Hong Kong in the first step in what is hoped could lead to a major medical advancement in the treatment of blood clots, and one day enable these tiny robots to perform complex in vivo surgeries within humans – something that’s been the stuff of science fiction since the sixties.”
#Yu, Jiangfan et al. (2018): “Ultra-extensible ribbon-like magnetic microswarm”, Nature Communications, vol.9, 1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05749-6
If a robot can do surgery inside you, it can also be used as a weapon. The military has invested in nanobot swarms, though for now proposals are limited to manufacturing applications:
#Ackerman, Evan (2011): “Navy Wants Robot Swarm That Can Autonomously Build Stuff, Apocalypse Unlikely”, IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/no-the-navy-is-not-trying-to-start-the-robot-apocalypse
—10,000 times smaller than atoms are atomic nuclei. Tiny cores that define what atoms are and the fuel that lights up the universe.
#Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2000): “Guide to the Nuclear Wall Chart: The Nucleus” (retrieved 2026)
https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/02/2.html
Quote: “It is found that nuclear radii range from 1-10 × 10-15 m. This radius is much smaller than that of the atom, which is typically 10-10 m. Thus, the nucleus occupies an extremely small volume inside the atom.”
#US Department of Energy: “DOE Explains… Fusion Reactions” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsfusion-reactions
Quote: “Fusion reactions power the Sun and other stars. In fusion, two light nuclei merge to form a single heavier nucleus. The process releases energy because the total mass of the resulting single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei. The leftover mass becomes energy. Einstein’s equation (E=mc2), which says in part that mass and energy can be converted into each other, explains why this process occurs. If scientists develop a way to harness energy from fusion in machines on Earth, it could be an important method of energy production.”
—Fusing the hydrogen of a mid-size lake could sustain present-day humanity for millions of years. So a civilization that can control atomic nuclei has access to all the energy they can ever need.
Although currently we do not have the technology to use fusion reactions for energy at an economically-viable scale, we know it is physically possible to produce these reactions in large quantities because it happens in stars, including the Sun:
#US Department of Energy: “DOE Explains… Fusion Reactions” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsfusion-reactions
Quote: “Fusion reactions power the Sun and other stars. In fusion, two light nuclei merge to form a single heavier nucleus. The process releases energy because the total mass of the resulting single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei. The leftover mass becomes energy. Einstein’s equation (E=mc2), which says in part that mass and energy can be converted into each other, explains why this process occurs. If scientists develop a way to harness energy from fusion in machines on Earth, it could be an important method of energy production.”
In the main fusion process taking place in stars, protons are converted into one helium nucleus through a chain of fusion-reactions. In this process, a little mass is lost and converted into energy:
#ESA (2002): “Measuring the Distance to the Cat’s Eye Nebula”, The ESA/ESO Astronomy Exercise Series.
https://sci.esa.int/documents/34439/36575/1567254560036-5-exercise3-low.pdf
We can therefore ask how efficient this process is; i.e. what percentage of the initial mass is converted into energy.
In atomic units of mass, the mass of one hydrogen nucleus is 1.007825:
#PubChem: “Protio”, National Library of Medicine (retrieved 2026)
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hydrogen-1
Quote: “Protium atom is the stable isotope of hydrogen with relative atomic mass 1.007825”
while that of one helium nucleus is 4.002603:
#PubChem: “Helium-4 atom”, National Library of Medicine (retrieved 2026)
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Helium-4-atom
Quote: “Helium-4 atom is the stable isotope of helium with relative atomic mass 4.002603”
So we see that, in stars:
(4 × 1.007825 – 4.002603) / (4 × 1.007825) = 0.7%
of the initial hydrogen mass is converted into energy. The remaining 99.3% stays as mass in the form of helium.
Another way of saying this is that the efficiency coefficient Eeff of the reaction is of 0.7%, and so that the energy produced in the stars per mass of hydrogen “fuel” is:
E=Eeff × m × c2 = 0.7% × m × c2
Water has a density of approximately 103 kg/m3, and a molecular weight of 18 g/mol.
#PubChem: “Water”, National Library of Medicine (retrieved 2026)
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Water
Of these, 2 g/mol are hydrogen.
#PubChem: “Hydrogen”, National Library of Medicine (retrieved 2026)
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hydrogen-1
So the mass of hydrogen in a volume of water is:
dH (in water)= ((2 g/mol) / (18 g/mol)) * 103 kg/m3 = 110 kg/m3
Present day humanity consumes around 200,000 TWh of energy each year:
#Our World in Data (2025): “Global primary energy consumption by source” (retrieved 2026)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution
So, if we came up with a method to extract energy from fusion of the hydrogen in water with the same efficiency as the Sun, the energy generated per volume of water Vwater would be
E= Eeff × mH × c2 = 0.11g = 0.7% × dH (in water) × Vwater × c2
Then, the necessary volume of water to supply a civilization like present humanity with energy for a million years through hydrogen fusion is:
Vwater = 106 × E / ( 0.7% × dH (in water) × c2 )= (7.2×1026)/ (0.007 ×110 kg/m3 ×(3×108)2) = 1010 m3 = 10 km3
That is roughly the amount of water in the Cayuga Lake:
#World Lake Database: “Cayuga Lake”
https://wldb.ilec.or.jp/Lake/NAM-17
Lake Como has twice this amount:
#World Lake Database: “Lake Como”
https://wldb.ilec.or.jp/Lake/EUR-208
Of course, it is likely that a civilization deploying technologies like the ones we have described has larger energy requirements than present day humanity, but we do not know by how much, since their technology could also be much more energetically efficient.
—Inside nuclei, protons and neutrons pulse with “heartbeats” sextillions of times per second – billions of times faster than any transistor can flip a bit today. So if it were somehow possible to harness them for computation, nuclei would give rise to an entirely new class of machines. Computers powerful enough to design entire new forms of life, matter, and approach the final secrets of the universe.
#Bertsch, G. F. (1983): Vibrations of the Atomic Nucleus. Scientific American, Vol. 248 (5)
https://archive.int.washington.edu/users/bertsch/general_interest/scientific_american_1983.pdf
Quote: “If a nuclear vibration is to be excited, the first and simplest condition to be met is that the energy imparted to the nucleus must be equal to the energy associated with the vibration. The nucleus vibrates at extremely high frequency; the energy of the vibration is equal to the frequency multiplied by Planck’s constant, and so the energy is also comparatively high. A typical vibrational frequency is 5 x 10^21 hertz, which corresponds to a vibrational energy of 20 million electron volts (MeV)”.
All computers have a system clock to synchronize their operations.
#Free Online Dictionary of Computation: “Clock”
Although the clock rate is not the main limiting factor that determines performance of a microprocessor, it is one of the factors that influence it. So, in combination with other technical developments that make use of the fast clock rate, computers using nuclear clocks could give rise to much faster machines than we have today.
#Burtch-Buus, Logan (2023): “Optical switching at record speeds opens door for ultrafast, light-based electronics and computers”, University of Arizona Communications https://news.arizona.edu/news/optical-switching-record-speeds-opens-door-ultrafast-light-based-electronics-and-computers
Quote: “Since the invention of semiconductor transistors in the 1940s, technological advancement has centered on increasing the speed at which electric signals can be generated – measured in hertz. According to Hassan, the fastest semiconductor transistors in the world can operate at a speed of more than 800 gigahertz. Data transfer at that frequency is measured at a scale of picoseconds, or one trillionth of a second.”
—Deep below atomic nuclei are elementary particles like electrons, neutrinos and quarks and here reality itself begins to dissolve. Fundamental particles are like ghosts emerging in a quantum vacuum – an omnipresent cosmic fluid whose tiny vibrations give rise to everything that exists.
#Wood, Charlie (2022): “How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything” Quanta Magazine (retrieved 2026)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-physics-of-nothing-underlies-everything-20220809/
Quote: “Nothing started to seem like something in the 20th century, as physicists came to view reality as a collection of fields: objects that fill space with a value at each point (the electric field, for instance, tells you how much force an electron will feel in different places). In classical physics, a field’s value can be zero everywhere so that it has no influence and contains no energy. “Classically, the vacuum is boring,” said Daniel Harlow(opens a new tab), a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Nothing is happening.”
But physicists learned that the universe’s fields are quantum, not classical, which means they are inherently uncertain. You’ll never catch a quantum field with exactly zero energy. Harlow likens a quantum field to an array of pendulums — one at each point in space — whose angles represent the field’s values. Each pendulum hangs nearly straight down but jitters back and forth.
Left alone, a quantum field will stay in its minimum-energy configuration, known as its “true vacuum” or “ground state.” (Elementary particles are ripples in these fields.) “When we talk about the vacuum of a system, we have in mind in some loose way the preferred state of the system,” said Garcia Garcia.”
— Full control of the quantum vacuum could enable the creation of new universes. Our own cosmos might have started as a tiny instability of the quantum vacuum that inflated into everything we see today. If that’s true, then mastering the vacuum could give you the power to seed entirely new universes inside test tubes. At that point, you would become an Omega-minus civilization. An actual cosmic god – of the infinitely small.
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Inflation (in Cosmology)” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/science/cosmology-astronomy/Inflation
The idea that it could be possible to seed new universes artificially has not been fully formalized, and remains purely theoretical.
#Farhi, Edward; Guth, Alan H.; Guven, Jemal (1990): “Is it possible to create a universe in the laboratory by quantum tunneling?”, Nuclear Physics B, vol. 339, 2, 417-490
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/055032139090357J
Quote: “We explore the possibility that a new universe can be created by producing a small bubble of false vacuum. The initial bubble is small enough to be produced without an initial singularity, but classically it could not become a universe — instead it would reach a maximum radius and then collapse. We investigate the possibility that quantum effects allow the bubble to tunnel into a larger bubble, of the same mass, which would then classically evolve to become a new universe.”
#Guth, Alan H. (1991): “Can a man-made universe be created by quantum tunneling without an initial singularity?”, Physica Scripta, 36, 237-246
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991PhST...36..237G/abstract
Quote: “Essentially all modern particle theories suggest the possible existence of a false vacuum state - a metastable state with an energy density that cannot be lowered except by means of a very slow phase transition. Inflationary cosmology makes use of such a state to drive the expansion of the big bang, allowing the entire observed universe to evolve from a very small initial mass. A sphere of false vacuum in our present universe, if larger than a certain critical mass, could inflate to form a new universe which would rapidly detach from its parent. A false vacuum bubble of this size, however, cannot be produced classically unless an initial singularity is present from the outset. The author therefore explores the possibility that a bubble of subcritical size, which classically would evolve to a maximum size and collapse, might instead tunnel through a barrier to produce a new universe. He estimates the tunneling rate using semiclassical quantum gravity, and discover some interesting ambiguities in the formalism.”
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