Not all stars shine, but some still burn with promise.

We've spent a lot of time thinking about bright and shining things in the cosmos,

great blue giants blazing like cosmic blow torches, or warm yellow suns like our own.

But the universe has always had a soft spot for the dim and the quiet.

Lurking between the stars are objects too big to be planets,

too small to be stars, and just write for every science fiction writer, whoever wanted to ask,

what if home was a place without a sunrise?

These are brown dwarfs, the failed stars, never quite made to hydrogen fusion, but still glow with their own internal heat.

They shimmer rather than shine, embers in the galactic night, whispering infrared warmth

into the void for billions, even trillions of years.

And as it turns out, these dim wanderers may be some of the most common stellar objects

in the galaxy.

More numerous than sun-like stars. More elusive than planets.

And just possibly, it's not the best long-term real estate the Milky Way has to offer.

Today we'll be asking what it would take for humanity to colonize these faint and lonely worlds.

How to build habitats around an object that barely glows, how to find enough energy in a place

where daylight never really arrives, how moons, magnetic fields, tidal heating, and megastructure

engineering can turn a failed star into the beating heart of a thriving deep-space civilization,

and why brown dwarfs might be some of the earliest interstellar civilizations as well as

the perfect

homes for late-universe cultures, hiding in the dark long after the ordinary stars have grown cold.

We also introduced two new megastructures, the Don Belterrey and the Equinox shell.

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