“Conflict is always easier to sell,” he replies when I ask why he thinks so much sci-fi imagines a nihilistic future. He might be above average when it comes to his knowledge of the cosmos, but he’s not above a bit of drama. He gets enough of those in his everyday life as an astronomer with a fascination for small celestial bodies that have the “potential for crashing into Earth and causing drama”, as he puts it. As part of a large alliance, he doesn’t have to worry about stripping asteroids of their raw materials. He has no interest in becoming a fleet commander, he’d much rather be a cog in the war machine, locking on and firing missiles or performing scouting missions. They don’t feel that they’re always having to log in and try to work to make money.”įor Manley, who’s a member of EVE Online’s largest alliance, Goonswarm, this socialist aspect works perfectly for him. If you want to win battles, you need to make sure that your people have got a ship, they’re taken care of, and they feel good. “Basically, making sure all our pilots are taken care of – because if a pilot is having to earn their own money, they’re distracted. “What I find fascinating is that EVE Online has this market system, which is like hyper-capitalist, but the most successful alliances are ones which operate on socialist principles,” Manley says. EVE sees that portion of humanity thriving once again as a starfaring species, but we’ve simply repeated the mistakes of our past – here is a capitalist hellscape where tribalism runs rife and wars are fought over internet comments. Without equipment for a colonization mission, our species was sent back to primitive times. Manley has a knack for taking complex topics like this and unfolding them so they’re more easily understood by people without degrees in astrophysics.ĮVE Online is a game where humanity ended up stranded far away from the Milky Way. Now fold the paper in half so the two points touch, and imagine a short tube connecting them together across a much shorter distance. Draw a line between the two points, showing the distance to travel as the space crow flies. One of the easiest ways to explain the theory behind wormhole travel is to mark two points on opposite sides of a piece of paper. He also has dozens and dozens of videos on Kerbal Space Program, in which he explains the real-life physics behind rocket technology and space flight.
The inquisitive and intelligent YouTube star originally made his name through EVE Online videos, explaining the mechanics of an extremely complex game in a way we mere mortals can understand. Inside his head, though? There’s definitely some kind of thought-based nuclear fusion happening. Manley is haunted by the idea that one day the universe won’t even be able to sustain thought, because there’s simply no energy for it.
“I would love to know how humanity survives into the future, or just maybe not even humanity… the spark of consciousness.” “Is there something that’s so complex we can’t really understand?” he answers with another question, not missing a beat. Maybe we’re just part of a complex digestive tract, incomprehensible to us in the same way that we are to a microscopic organism, I reply. We could fly to other stars and survive longer, but those stars, as far as we know, burn out in a trillion years.
“And billions of years from now, what’s gonna happen? Sure, we can imagine humans moving from Earth to other planets, but eventually, the sun’s gonna burn out. “How does humanity exist?” YouTube rocket scientist Scott Manley asks me at EVE Fanfest.