How to become a world-dominating supervillain for a measly $55 billion

Are you a fan of superhero comics who identifies more with the Big Bad? Do you dream of riding around on your own cloned dinosaur and kicking back after a long day's evil-doing in your floating, secret supervillain base? Good news: Ryan North has you covered. He's the author of a new book called How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain, and there's frankly nobody better qualified to guide the reader through a step-by-step process toward world domination. North is something of a webcomic pioneer, having started Dinosaur Comics (aka Qwantz) way back in 2003. The strip's signature six panels are the same every time, consisting of simple dinosaur clip art that North found on a CD; only the text changes. T-Rex is the main character, with Utahraptor appearing as a comic foil in the fourth and fifth panels. A third dinosaur, Dromiceiomimus, is featured in the third panel. North has said he did it this way because he can't draw. It's been a staple of nerdy webcomics ever since. That early success led to North becoming the writer for several Marvel Comics series, most notably the Eisner Award-winning The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (a personal favorite) and Jughead. It was only a matter of time before he wrote his first popular science book: the delightfully irreverent (and best-selling) How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler. In each chapter, North demonstrated how the reader could invent any number of modern conveniences from first principles, as well as answering the burning question of whether it's possible to tame a giant wombat. How to Take Over the World takes a similar approach, providing a practical blueprint to help readers become the criminal mastermind of their dreams. The supervillains in comic books invariably get their comeuppance when the superheroes foil their evil plans, but North asked himself: What if the supervillain didn't have to lose? In How to Take Over the World, North outlines practical ways to set up a cool secret base; start your own country; hold the weather hostage; destroy the Internet; and become immortal, dutifully summing up the pros and cons of each scheme. And yes, one chapter covers cloning a dinosaur. "Every supervillain wants to make a good entrance," North writes. "The best entrance it's possible to make is on the back of a dinosaur." The catch: funding. North estimates that aspiring supervillains will need $55,434,551,900 USD to actually bring every scheme in the book to fruition, an amount only 20 people currently living on Earth could afford. Ars sat down with North to learn more.

Ars Technica: What was your inspiration for writing about supervillainy? Ryan North: The first book, How to Invent Everything, used a fictional premise of going back in time and finding your time machine is broken to justify learning about the nonfiction. I really liked that. The fictional coding for this new book was, "OK, so I'm a comic book writer. I've come up with all these supervillainous schemes, I've written them all down and priced them out, and now we can find out what we actually need to dig to the Earth's core, have a secret base, ride around on a dinosaur, and all that stuff." Once you have that fictional premise, it gives you a reason to care about all the cool science and technology. I like the empowerment one feels at the end. If you read a book about being trapped in the past, you know that if you did get sent back in time, you'd be a really competent time traveler. If you read a book about taking over the world, now you know that if you had $64 billion, then you could work on sending information into deep time or trying to figure out if we could solve the problem of human mortality. The fun of it is what attracted me to the idea. Ars Technica: Every good superhero needs a good supervillain. Why it that so important, and what makes the best kind of supervillain? In the book you talk about "enlightened supervillainy." Ryan North: It's important because the hero needs someone to fight, to challenge them. The best villains are the ones where you think, "Well, he's kind of got a point there. He's going about it the wrong way, but I see where he's coming from." That's the type of villainy I tried to capture in the book. I didn't want garden-variety villainy where you're just robbing banks or taking people hostage. That felt too close to the actual, horrible things in the world. I wanted the kind of fantastical supervillainy where you're taking over a floating base and things like that. These villains are a lot like the heroes. Both want to change the world and want to do it outside of existing power structures. They see an issue, a problem, that they think they can fix, and they try to do it. A hero does it in a way that is ultimately beneficial to everyone, and a supervillain tends to do it in a bit more of a self-centered way. But the goal is usually similar.

If Spider-Man was trying to stop people from ever having to die, that would be a positive. If Doctor Doom was trying to become a immortal person for his own selfish reasons, that would be a negative for society. Although in the book, I argue that if people were immortal there would be a ton of downsides, and it actually is the most ethical thing to only become immortal yourself and then keep it a secret from everyone else. All the benefits, none of the downsides. Ars Technica: So, we're talking about villains like Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War or Samuel L. Jackson's uber-wealthy supervillain in Kingsman: The Secret Service, who decided to wipe out most of humanity to save the Earth from climate change. Ryan North: I haven't seen [Kingsman], but that's a classic argument. People always point to Killmonger in Black Panther as being a really good villain, where you think, "You know what, he has some points." And Thanos is concerned with balance; he's really concerned with sustainability at the end of the day. The solution is wild, short term. Kill half the people, we will be fine. But his main concern is that he wants a universe that is sustainable for everyone. I think we all want that. So, #ThanosIsRight. Ars Technica: So who is your favorite supervillain? Ryan North: My favorite supervillain is Doctor Doom. He is a guy who, A) speaks about himself in the third person. Ryan loves it when he does that. B) He's got a cape. C) He's a scientist. But D) he also knows magic, which is real in the Marvel universe. He's this brilliant scientist who can also summon demons to do things for him. Plus he has an amazing costume design: a metal suit over his entire body, which gives him this permanently furious expression. He's like the supervillain's supervillain. He's peak everything. He's the most.

Ars Technica. One of the things that I love about this book is that you focus on the pragmatic aspects of being a supervillain, namely the funding. Tell us your conclusion about the best way to get those billions we'd need to implement every scheme in the book and take over the world. Ryan North: That chapter began as an exercise. Can we actually do the supervillain thing of digging to the Earth's core and holding it hostage? It turns out that there's no technology on Earth that's even close to being able to handle the heat and pressure at the Earth's core, so that's out. But if you dig sideways instead of straight down, then you can send information instead of gold. Once you have the tunnel, it will send information between stock markets faster than anyone else, so you can know what's going on in one stock market hundreds of miles away from where you are before anyone else in your area does. This effectively lets you see a tiny bit of time into the future. You can then use that to buy and sell stocks before the price changes, propagate to where you are. High-frequency trading is legal and insanely profitable. It could be argued that it's a drain on trade and civilization as a whole and does nothing but incentivize crazy industrial tunnels that do nothing but make money for people who own them. But if you own that tunnel, those downsides probably seem pretty minimal. You can turn that into an almost limitless supply of liquid capital. Of all the schemes in the book, this is the one that's already been done by companies in America. So it is both legal and proven. Ars Technica: What was the most surprising thing you learned while you were writing this book? Ryan North: It was surprising how many of the schemes were viable. So many supervillain schemes tend to be magical. They rely on shrink rays or mind-control helmets—technology that has no comparison in our world. But there's so many technologies that are achievable, or close to it, in our world. Could we actually live forever? There are people working on that. Can we communicate with life that might exist a hundred, a thousand, a million, or even 10 billion years from now? It's not outside the realm of possibility. I think that's really cool.

Ars Technica: You very deliberately set your own constraints on this: You wanted everything in the book to be achievable and based on some kind of real-world science or technology. We tend to think of constraints as being bad because they impose limitations, but I suspect you'd agree that constraints often foster creativity. Ryan North: In some ways, I think I am a poster child for constraints. I've spent 20 years doing Dinosaur Comics, which is always the same pictures and different words. It taught me that lesson. Yes, I've been working with the same six pictures for two decades. But when I sit down to write, I'm not facing a blank sheet of paper—I'm facing a piece of paper with dinosaurs on it. I know that the T-Rex is going to be the star of it. So for me, like you said, constraints are food for creativity. The joy of books like this is the fact that it is real. I could have switched more into science fiction and said, "If we assume shrink rays exist, here's what we could do with it." That felt like it was crossing a line because no one could put down the book and pick up a shrink ray and try to do that. The fact that it's within the reach of the reader I think is the joy of it. That was the reason for the constraints. Ars Technica: You argue that, if you really want to be a successful supervillain, you'll want to be remembered. But for how long? You took that conceit all the way to the heat death of the universe. Ryan North: If you're talking about being remembered, then let's talk about being remembered, using a scale that goes up by a multiplier of 10 every time, until we're dealing with bigger and bigger units of time—and bigger and bigger communication gulfs to cross. It really starts to take apart what we mean when we talk about communication. I studied linguistics, so I love language in general. And I thought it was so interesting that once you get out past around 10,000 years, we have no guaranteed way to communicate, because language changes. There's no way to stop that from happening.

The ultimate expression of that—the way to send information the furthest into time that we can think of—is basically just to put it on a spaceship and launch it as far away from Earth as we can go. It may never be read, but the information could still be there. There's such hope in that. I had a talk with Jon Lomberg who did the Voyager records. He was saying that, from his point of view, the Voyager records—which were communicating into deep time possibly— as much as they were for talking to possible alien life out there in the universe, they were also for Earth. We're telling ourselves that we have sent something out and no matter what happens to the world, now there's some tiny bit of it in terms of metal and gold, a record that is out there in space. Ever since I was a kid and I heard about that, I always found it so comforting. It felt like a checkpoint in a video game almost. No matter what, we have done this, and it will survive all of us. I think that's what you start to touch when you think about, "How can I communicate to the heat death of the universe? How would I have something that survives not just my death, but the death of the universe that everyone else has ever known?" That's getting to the very core of this very human desire to communicate, to share things, to say that at the very least we were here. Ars Technica: Perhaps the most terrifying thing about being mortal is the mere idea of not being. We are all born with an "I," after all, which shapes how we perceive the world all our lives. And one day that "I" just... ceases to exist. It's unthinkable. Ryan North: I was talking about this to my dad the other day, and he was saying how he's not afraid of death. He's afraid of the act of dying. But death itself is a state of nonexistence like it was before he was born, and he clearly didn't suffer from that at all. But we all know people who—we would suffer if they were not there. Being alive is loving someone and then feeling their absence. So it starts with, "Can I send a message a thousand years in the future?" But very soon we're talking about what it means to be human and about death and nonexistence. I love that they're all so tied together. We think we're talking about language; we're talking about ourselves. We think we are talking about making materials that can survive a changing world, and we're still talking about ourselves. In the book, we start with basic supervillain stuff. I want a secret base. I want my own country. I want to ride around on a dinosaur. But by the end, we're like, "I just don't want to be forgotten, and I want to communicate across time." That applies to all of us.