Book summary “How to Take over the World”: summary

Introduction

You want to improve global civilization, but standard political methods move too slowly to solve urgent problems. Comic book villains routinely design brilliant schemes for world domination, only to fail because narrative convention demands that heroes always win. Without real-life superheroes to stop you, you can take those exact comic book plots and actually make them work.

You can apply rigorous scientific principles and creative world-domination schemes to independently improve global civilization.

The book explores how to build sustainable secret bases, claim sovereign Antarctic land, and engineer dinosaurs or cool the planet. You will discover how to dig subterranean data tunnels, compromise foundational software, achieve biological immortality, and preserve messages across deep time.

• How do you construct a secret base that feeds you and generates infinite power?
• What legal loopholes let you claim unclaimed territory in Antarctica?
• Can you actually reverse aging and live forever?

1. Every Supervillain Needs a Secret Base

To maintain long-term self-sufficiency, a secret base must provide adequate space for agriculture, air, and water recycling per person.

Building a sustainable secret base requires balancing agricultural space, power generation, and psychological isolation.

Historical land measures and modern agricultural calculations show that a sustainable European meat-eating diet requires thousands of square meters of farmland per person. Closed systems like Biosphere 2 demonstrate the extreme challenges of maintaining life, air, and caloric intake in a sealed environment.

During the 1991 Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona, eight volunteers lived sealed inside a 12,700-square-meter complex for two years. They experienced severe weight loss, dietary restrictions, oxygen drops, and intense interpersonal fracturing into hostile factions.

Secret Base Requirements

Forced isolation in confined spaces reliably induces severe interpersonal conflict and psychological distress among human crews. When you pack humans together with minimal privacy and no escape from social friction, groups consistently fracture into extreme hostility, violence, or severe mental deterioration.

At the Arctic T-3 ice station in 1970, 19 scientists were isolated. A dispute over a stolen jug of raisin wine ended in a fatal shooting, while biospherians in Biosphere 2 split into hostile groups of Us and Them that refused to speak.

Achieving true self-sufficiency requires an independent power source, which can be provided by small modular nuclear reactors. Small modular nuclear reactors offer high power generation with limited radioactive material, automated emergency shut-downs, and compact footprints suitable for mobile or remote bases.

In 2019, Russia activated the Akademik Lomonosov, a 144-meter floating nuclear power station. It was equipped with two KLT-40S SMR nuclear reactors generating 35 megawatts of electrical power and 60 megawatts of additional heat.

Bases in the Sky

Scaling up a geodesic sphere causes its enclosed volume to grow much faster than its surface area, making the structure weight negligible compared to the heated air inside. According to the square-cube law discovered by Galileo and applied by Buckminster Fuller, a giant geodesic sphere filled with air slightly warmer than the outside atmosphere generates massive lifting force due to buoyancy.

Buckminster Fuller calculated that a geodesic sphere 1.6 kilometers in diameter would enclose 2.14 cubic kilometers of air. It would generate millions of kilograms of lifting force when warmed by sunlight.

Building a colossal floating sphere requires materials with an exceptionally high strength-to-weight ratio, such as Kevlar and carbon nanotubes. Breaking length measures how long a vertical column of material can be before snapping under its own weight, highlighting advanced synthetic fibers like Kevlar and carbon nanotubes as extreme limits of material science.

Stainless steel has a breaking length of 6.4 kilometers, whereas Kevlar reaches 256 kilometers and carbon nanotubes exceed 4,700 kilometers.

2. Acquiring Land and Antarctica Strategy

Establishing sovereign territory is nearly impossible through traditional land claims but remains viable in Antarctica.

Under international law based on Roman traditions, land and sovereignty can be acquired in only four ways: by finding it, being given it, making it, or taking it. Finding land requires discovering an uninhabited area unknown to other nations. Ceded land occurs when another nation voluntarily gives it up via purchase, treaty, or adjudication. Making land happens through geologic activity or human reclamation. Taking land involves stealth, force through conquest, or soft force via revolution.

Finding new land is completely impossible today because satellite imagery and global exploration have left no undiscovered and unclaimed spaces on Earth. Historically, humans migrated across the Beringia land bridge during the last ice age, discovering untouched continents and hunting local megafauna to extinction. In modern times, satellite technology confirmed no uninhabited islands remain.

In 1992, Christopher McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness to find an unexplored world and starved to death alone on someone else's land.

Attempts to create artificial land through human engineering fail because neighboring states will claim jurisdiction or the structures will erode. If new land appears or is built within territorial waters, it is automatically claimed by the originating nation. If built in international waters, it requires immediate defense.

In 1971, millionaire Michael Oliver used sand barges to build the Republic of Minerva on the Minerva Reefs, but a Tongan expedition chased them away in 1972 and the island washed underwater.

Declaring independence on purchased land or squatted structures fails to gain international recognition and often collapses under financial or legal pressure.

Australian farmer Leonard Casley declared his farm the Principality of Hutt River in 1970, which survived until his son sold it back to Australia in 2020 to cover over $2 million USD in back taxes.

Claiming the unclaimed land of Bir Tawil fails because the land is actively administered by Egypt, disputed with Sudan, and utilized by local tribes. Due to conflicting British border drawings from 1899 and 1902, both Egypt and Sudan claim the Halayib Triangle and designate Bir Tawil to each other.

In 2014, American Jeremiah Heaton traveled to Bir Tawil to plant a flag and claim the Kingdom of North Sudan for his daughter, but his crowdfunding campaign raised only $10,638 and his claims were dismissed as colonialist fantasy.

Antarctica Strategy

Antarctica is the most viable location for establishing a new nation because it is the largest legally unclaimed landmass on Earth and has no permanent military, police, or press. Marie Byrd Land is an unclaimed slice of Antarctica that must remain unclaimed under the Antarctic Treaty ratified by over 50 nations. You can build a scientific research base there by following specific steps:

• Select Marie Byrd Land as the target location in Antarctica.
• Secure the support of an existing nation by offering to set up your scientific base under their flag.
• Construct necessary infrastructure and scientific facilities, budgeting for higher caloric food needs and supplies like Doritos.
• Maintain operations until the Madrid Protocol review in 2048 thaws territorial disputes.
• Secure sovereignty through prescription, negotiation, or your sponsoring nation, then negotiate final independence.

3. Cloning Dinosaurs and Geoengineering

Recreating prehistoric traits through genetic manipulation and cooling the planet via stratospheric aerosols offer powerful planetary control.

Creating Dinosaurs

Recovering viable prehistoric dinosaur DNA is impossible because DNA degrades over time with a half-life that leaves nothing useful after millions of years. DNA has a half-life of 521 years, meaning all DNA is completely gone after roughly 6.8 million years, making recovery from non-avian dinosaurs extinct over 65 million years ago completely unviable.

In Jurassic Park, dinosaur DNA was extracted from a mosquito trapped in amber, but in real life, no DNA has ever been recovered from ancient mosquitoes or anything that old.

Instead of using extinct DNA, you can recreate dinosaur traits by chemically interfering with chicken embryo development to wake up suppressed ancient genes. Evolution is additive, and birds are descendants of dinosaurs. By interfering with gene timing and activation during gestation, scientists can suppress traits like beaks or wings and trigger the growth of tails, teeth, and snouts.

Paleontologist Jack Horner co-wrote How to Build A Dinosaur in 2009 and worked on producing a theropod-like tail in chickens, while Bhart-Anjan Bhullar led a team in 2015 to produce snouted chicken embryos using sonic hedgehog or SHH protein suppression.

Geoengineering Plan

Directly cleaning up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using machines or trees is economically and practically unfeasible at scale. Carbon capture is difficult because carbon dioxide makes up only a tiny fraction of the air, and planting enough trees would consume nearly half of Earth's arable land, risking mass starvation. Removing excess carbon via nuclear-powered capture systems would require 4,688 active nuclear reactors and cost $13.75 trillion per year over eighty years.

A supervillain can cool the global climate by creating an artificial volcanic effect, spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight.

When sulfur dioxide reaches the stratosphere, it forms sulfuric acid droplets that act as a giant lampshade, reflecting a small percentage of sunlight back into space and cooling the planet. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused a global temperature drop of 0.7 degrees Celsius, creating "The Year Without a Summer" in 1816.

You can execute a geoengineering plan for an upfront cost of $7 billion for modified aircraft and gear, plus $2 billion a year for operational costs. To maintain planetary cooling, you must follow specific steps:

• Collect some sort of chemical precursor like sulfur dioxide.
• Get your chemicals up to the stratosphere.
• Spray them out in tiny droplets so they form an aerosol.
• Repeat this process at least once a year.

4. Drilling Tunnels and Subterranean Data

The Earth consists of the crust, upper mantle, lower mantle, liquid outer core, and solid inner core. These zones hold massive amounts of heat and precious metals that make the planet theoretically attractive as a planetary hostage.

While reaching the Earth's core is physically impossible, building straight subterranean data tunnels enables profitable high-frequency trading.

The crust is less than 1 percent of Earth's volume, with a typical depth of 35km. Beneath it lie mantle layers and the core, where temperatures reach 7,700°C and an estimated 1.6 quadrillion tons of gold reside. Furthermore, 47 trillion watts of energy continuously flow from Earth into space.

Digging a hole to the center fails because extreme heat causes rocks to behave like plastic. The Kola Superdeep Borehole reached a record depth of 12,262 meters with a 23cm diameter before equipment failure and plastic rock behavior forced a permanent shutdown. Building a wide open-pit mine cooled by seawater would boil the oceans and destroy global climate stability, much like the Bingham Canyon copper mine in Utah measures 4km wide and 1.2km deep.

Subterranean Data Tunnels

As a viable Plan B, you can bypass the physical impossibility of reaching the core by digging shallower, straight subterranean tunnels. By cutting a straight tunnel through the Earth's crust rather than following the surface curve, you can transmit financial data faster than anyone else.

Spread Networks built a secret 1,331-kilometer fiber-optic cable tunnel between Chicago and New Jersey that cut round-trip travel time to 13 milliseconds, charging millions in lease fees. This $300 million project enabled high-frequency trading profits through milliseconds of information privilege.

You can apply the same approach between other major hubs, such as connecting the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange:

• The surface land distance between the two exchanges is 550km.
• A direct subterranean tunnel would reach a maximum depth of 5.9km.
• Fiber transmission through this direct tunnel would take 5.3 milliseconds round-trip.

Exchanges like the Investors Exchange (IEX) use 350 microseconds of unavoidable delay in coiled cable boxes to neutralize speed advantages. Unauthorized international border tunnels violate United States Code Title 18 Section 555, carrying a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. Small domestic hobby tunnels face different scrutiny, such as when Elton McDonald built a 10-meter party tunnel near York University in Toronto before police filled it in.

5. Destroying the Internet and Election Hacking

The internet operates via packet switching over 1,200,000 km of cable connecting computers globally. It was originally designed with decentralized redundancy to survive a nuclear strike. However, the rise of the cloud run by colossal companies like Amazon and Google has centralized massive portions of web traffic. This creates a brittle network where a single data center outage can take down diverse services across the web.

Although the internet was originally designed with decentralized redundancy, modern economic forces have concentrated much of its infrastructure into private cloud services, creating single points of failure.

In November 2020, an AWS outage in just one of 23 regional data centers operated by AWS disrupted Adobe, Coinbase, Flickr, Roku, podcasts, home phone services, robot vacuums, password managers, and major newspapers.

Internet Vulnerabilities

Sophisticated nation-state cyberweapons have successfully attacked air-gapped industrial infrastructure by using targeted malware that reports normal operations while physically destroying hardware. The Stuxnet worm infected Microsoft Windows systems, specifically targeted Siemens industrial control systems used for uranium enrichment in Iran, and surreptitiously manipulated centrifuge rotation speeds.

In 2009 and 2010, the Stuxnet worm caused malfunctions that forced United Nations inspectors to watch around 2,000 out of 9,000 centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment facility be shut down and dismantled. Discovery of the Stuxnet worm occurred in 2010. The Stuxnet code had a June 24, 2012 self-destruct date programmed into it. Building Stuxnet required 30 coders working for upwards of six months.

The Election Hack

High-level programming languages rely on compilers to translate code into binary, creating a critical vulnerability where tampering with the compiler silently compromises every program built with it. Pioneering computer scientist Ken Thompson proved in the 1984 publication of Ken Thompson's paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" that code cannot be fully trusted unless the entire hardware and software stack is built completely by oneself.

Compromising foundational compilers and software allows an operator to execute a high-impact election heist.

By injecting malicious code into a compiler, you create an undetectable back door. You can execute this attack using specific steps:

• Modify the compiler's source code to add a backdoor or malicious rule to every application it builds.
• Add further code instructing the compiler to inject this backdoor into any new compiler it builds when compiling itself.
• Remove the malicious instructions from the initial compiler source code to completely cover your tracks while the compromised behavior persists.

Stealing an election through targeted software exploitation requires modest financial investment compared to the immense geopolitical payoff of controlling a sovereign nation. You might spend $7.5 million initial investment for 30 developers working 6 months, alongside $1 to $3 million to purchase an unknown Windows exploit. This investment targets a nation whose value is represented by the $20 trillion U.S. GDP in 2019.

6. How to Become Immortal and Literally Live Forever

Humanity has a long history of failed live-long-quick schemes, with a 100 percent failure rate across all civilizations. For thousands of years, people have tried bizarre methods to achieve eternal youth, ranging from drinking mercury and using blood exchanges to consuming poisons and plant extracts, none of which have ever worked.

In 210 BCE, a Chinese emperor was advised to drink deadly mercury for immortality. Across the 13.8 billion years of the universe, not a single human has lived forever.

Francis Bacon recommended ingesting dissolved pearls, gold-soaked wine, crushed emeralds, and unicorn horns, while 1920s practitioners surgically grafted baboon testicles into old men or performed half-vasectomies.

Cryonics and Mind Uploading

Cryonics is not a plan for immortality, but rather an expensive and legally precarious gamble to stay dead until future technology revives you. Cryonics requires surviving multiple improbable steps, including steady medical advancement, the cure of the terminal disease, reversal of freezing damage, and the uninterrupted financial solvency of the cryonics company over centuries.

French doctor Raymond Martinot was frozen in his home cellar in 2002, but the freezer broke down in 2006, causing the bodies to thaw and forcing their cremation.

Mind uploading and brain simulation face insurmountable philosophical and technological roadblocks regarding consciousness and data recovery. Science currently cannot define, test, or create consciousness. Even if a brain is perfectly mapped or simulated, there is no proof that the original conscious subject transfers over rather than merely spawning a separate copy.

The Blue Brain Project, launched in 2005, took over a decade to simulate a tiny fraction of a rat's brain, which has vastly fewer neurons than a human brain. You face the hard reality of modeling 86 billion neurons by the projected 2110 CE timeframe for accurate molecular brain modeling on supercomputers.

Biological immortality requires repairing specific classes of cellular damage and utilizing engineered stem cell protocols.

Dr. Aubrey de Gray categorizes biological aging into 7 classes of cellular and molecular damage that can theoretically be repaired. Instead of waiting to understand the root causes of aging, medical interventions can be designed to directly fix specific types of accumulated bodily damage, such as cell loss, metabolic waste, and mitochondrial mutations.

Aubrey de Gray's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation breaks down repair therapies for each specific class of damage across the estimated 30 trillion living cells in the human body.

WILT Protocol

Achieving biological immortality through WILT requires intentionally sterilizing the body's natural cell division and relying on artificial stem cell replacements. By eliminating the gene that produces telomerase, cancerous cell reproduction is halted. However, this requires routine medical injections of genetically engineered replacement stem cells to keep vital tissues functioning.

Aubrey de Gray proposed Whole-Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres as a conceptual leap that requires chemotherapy and engineered marrow replacement. You must execute these exact steps:

• Use chemotherapy to kill all existing cells in the patient's bone marrow
• Administer injections of new bone marrow containing engineered human stem cells with no telomerase
• Top up artificial replacement stem cells every ten years

Normal human cells reach between 50 to 70 divisions before stopping. Artificial replacement cells are designed with an approximate 10-year lifespan before expiration.

Universal human immortality threatens societal stability through severe overpopulation, entrenched tyrannies, and extreme economic inequality. Curing death removes the natural safety valve of regime change, disincentivizes end-of-life billionaire philanthropy, and creates a dystopian wealth divide where only the rich can afford eternal life.

Andrew Carnegie gave away 90 percent of his fortune in his final decades, a philanthropic urge driven by the finite nature of his life. That amounted to 65 billion dollars in modern U.S. dollars, compared to the 200 ultra-rich individuals who have signed the Giving Pledge.

The ultimate expression of supervillainy is to develop and keep immortality technology exclusively for yourself, saving humanity from the downsides of eternal life. By withholding the longevity treatment and keeping your achievement a secret, you reap the benefits of endless learning and youthful health while sparing civilization from overpopulation, stagnation, and structural collapse.

You must maintain absolute secrecy, regularly moving identities while letting friends grow old and die. You spend 50 million dollars in estimated annual funding required for longevity research to secure an infinity expected return multiplier on the value of a human life.

7. Ensuring You Are Never Forgotten

Preserving messages across deep time requires durable materials like bronze statues, granite carvings, and deep space probes.

Information published online is routinely copied into private databases, search engines, and archives like the Wayback Machine, making it completely clear why online persistence alone fails. The Wayback Machine contains over 20 years of web history and snapshots of over 439 billion web pages.

Publishing a physical book using linguistically stable words ensures your message remains intelligible even as languages evolve over centuries. Shakespeare's plays and Beowulf require modern translations or annotations because languages naturally drift and become unintelligible over time. In 2021, English had 1.3 billion speakers, Mandarin Chinese had 1.1 billion speakers, and Hindi had 600 million speakers.

Bronze Statues and Statics

Casting your message on a bronze statue and dumping it in the shallow ocean protects it from recycling and utilizes the metal's natural patina to survive a thousand years. Bronze forms a protective layer of oxides called a patina when oxidized, which prevents further corrosion while keeping fine details intact beneath the surface. The Riace bronzes were discovered in 1972 by a spearfisher off the coast of Italy after spending over two millennia underwater.

• Cast your message in a bronze statue measuring 2m long, half a meter tall, and a third of a meter wide.
• Write using letters that are 3cm tall, raised from the surface by at least 3cm.
• Leave 1cm of space between characters and lines to allow room for 1,200 characters.
• Leave your statue in water that is deep but accessible, such as 10m deep some 200m off the coast.

Carving your face and message into a mountain using granite provides legibility for tens of thousands of years by resisting natural erosion rates. South Dakotan granite erodes at a predictable slow rate, meaning deep carvings can withstand weathering for millions of years if protected from freezing crack damage. Mount Rushmore cost nearly one million dollars at the time and required 400 workers 14 years to complete.

• Choose a warm location where temperatures rarely drop below freezing to prevent ice-expansion cracking.
• Carve your granite slowly and carefully.
• Shape your letters so that water flows off them rather than pooling.

Deep Space Preservation

Launching your chilled corpse into deep space inside a custom spacecraft is the ultimate cost-effective method to survive until the end of the universe. Space is cold, empty, and anaerobic, providing ideal preservation conditions that keep a dead body intact for billions of years as it travels beyond the solar system. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 carry golden records containing sounds, greetings, and images from Earth into interstellar space.

• Build a custom Voyager-style spacecraft and launch vehicle.
• Modify the spacecraft to fit your dead body inside, positioned to look impressive and attractive.
• Strap your custom record to your corpse and launch it past Neptune into deep space.

Hiding a heavy synthetic plastic monument in the Mariana Trench ensures survival against ice ages and supervolcanoes for 100,000 years. Synthetic plastics do not biodegrade easily and lack specialized predators in the extreme high pressure and darkness of the deep ocean floor. Ocean probes have photographed disposable plastic bags lying at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Placing a stainless steel monument on the moon protects it from weather and atmospheric rust for tens of millions of years. The moon lacks an atmosphere, protecting artifacts from oxidation and water erosion while subjecting them to extreme temperature swings and meteoroid impacts. The Apollo 11 landing site left behind numerous artifacts, including equipment, flags, and waste bags.

10 Key Ideas

1. You can apply rigorous scientific principles and creative world-domination schemes to independently improve global civilization.
2. Building a sustainable secret base requires balancing agricultural space, power generation, and psychological isolation.
3. Establishing sovereign territory is nearly impossible through traditional land claims but remains viable in Antarctica.
4. Recreating prehistoric traits through genetic manipulation and cooling the planet via stratospheric aerosols offer powerful planetary control.
5. While reaching the Earth's core is physically impossible, building straight subterranean data tunnels enables profitable high-frequency trading.
6. Although the internet was originally designed with decentralized redundancy, modern economic forces have concentrated much of its infrastructure into private cloud services, creating single points of failure.
7. Compromising foundational compilers and software allows an operator to execute a high-impact election heist.
8. Biological immortality requires repairing specific classes of cellular damage and utilizing engineered stem cell protocols.
9. Achieving biological immortality through WILT requires intentionally sterilizing the body's natural cell division and relying on artificial stem cell replacements.
10. Preserving messages across deep time requires durable materials like bronze statues, granite carvings, and deep space probes.