Isaac Arthur

Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur is presented by Isaac Arthur, a physics graduate and president of the National Space Society in the United States. He began the channel in 2014 with a video about megastructures.

The channel explores future technology and space exploration, with some science fiction mixed in. Episodes cover space habitats, space elevators, mining other planets and how civilisations might survive over vast timescales. Videos are long and narrated in a calm, detailed way, with the aim of staying within known science even when the ideas are far beyond current technology. Most episodes run for half an hour or more, and some special features last several hours, so they suit watching in several sittings.

Some highlights include:

An episode on the first space elevator and where on Earth it would make most sense to build one.

An exploration of how large a rotating space habitat could be, and what limits its size.

A long feature on space habitats, the giant structures people might one day live in.

The channel has over 1.1 million subscribers.

Many of these ideas are really engineering problems on a huge scale. How strong does a cable need to be? How do you keep people alive and fed in space? Thinking them through touches on materials science, structural engineering, aerospace and energy. The channel suits students who enjoy asking how something would actually work, which is the habit good engineers rely on.