Why Don't We Hear About LUVOIR Anymore? [Q&A Livestream]

Confirmation. Start the recording. And the recording. There you go, Chad. Okay. What? That's weird. Sorry. Um, the question, the pre-tag question. Oh, okay. Okay. Uh, boom. Okay. Charles J96. So, what's going on with Louvir? Are they still going to build it? So, a couple of years ago, NASA did a sort of a deep inquiry into what were going to be the next generation telescopes that astronomers were looking for. uh like you know we've got the great observatories Hubble Space Telescope uh Chandra Grey observatory we had Spitzer uh I think Coobe was the other one um and then what were going to be the next generation of the great telescopes and so then uh the astronomical community came back and they had sort of four recommendations. So one was links which was a next generation X-ray telescope. Uh there was HABEX which was going to be a telescope capable of observing uh earthsized worlds orbiting around sunlike stars. And then one was Louvoir which was just going to be this giant successor to the Hubble Space Telescope kind of a jack of all trades. And so it would have a uh similar to James Webb. would be folded up and then deployed in space and would have anywhere from a 9 to a 20 meter uh primary aperture and then the astronomers came together based on that and you know knew that budget was going to be an issue and then um did a what's called the uh the decal survey and this is where the astronomers essentially the astronomical community makes its priorities known to funding agencies, NASA, the National Science Foundation and so on. And in that they then combined a couple of the telescopes. So they combined this idea of HABEX with Luvoir. Luvar stands for the large ultraviolet optical infrared observatory. So it's you know it's all of those wavelengths and that's very similar to what Hubble does. Hubble is in the ultraviolet uh ultraviolet optical infrared range while James Webb is in the mid and far uh infrared range. And so uh or near mid and a little bit into the far and so after that and then they also had sort of learned the lessons of how difficult it was to get the James Webb Space Telescope built and launched and so they said well let's make a telescope that combines some of the capabilities of HABEX with Louvoir and so the new telescope that came out of that is called the habitable worlds observatory and this is got some of the bits of Louvoir and havoc. So, from the Louvore side, you've got that same range, ultraviolet, uh, optical, and near infrared. And from the haboc side, one of the really cool ideas for that was going to be both a coronagraph on the telescope as well as this free floating star shade. This um satellite that would fly out at tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope and would occult would go in front of whatever star the telescope was observing and then that would allow the planets to be observed around the star. And so the HWO, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, will probably be the same size as James Web

so 6. 5 meter main aperture and then we'll have that uh that star shade maybe. But you know, I've been doing a lot of interviews about the Haber Worlds Observatory. I've been interviewing people about the coronagraph. This is going to be the device on board that is going to uh block the light coming from the stars. you can reveal the fainter planets nearby and I just recently interviewed the architect of the telescope um which is Lee Fineberg and he talked about some of the ideas sort of where they're homing in on the size range when it'll probably launch what vehicle it'll probably launch on uh and then one of the sort of neat ideas that they're considering is an offaxis telescope. So in a traditional telescope uh you have the primary mirror and then you have the secondary mirror is sort of positioned on struts in front of the primary mirror. And so the light comes into the primary mirror but is slightly blocked by the secondary mirror and the struts and then bounces off the mirror, goes into the secondary mirror and then is bounced again down into whatever are the uh the optics that you have, whatever instruments you're trying to use to analyze the light. And so the idea of an off-axis mirror is that the mirror will be designed so that as the light comes in, it then bounces off to the side and is focused. And then you have the secondary optics off to the side of the primary mirror. And so you don't block any of the primary mirror with the secondary optics. This is more complicated optically, but gives you essentially no problem in the sort of you don't get any of this block of light. you lose about 20% of light because of the secondary optics and the struts that are in the way. And when you look at say pictures from the James Web Space Telescope, it has that very famous uh lines that you can see um on the side of it. And then of course James Web has that strange six-pointed uh star, but actually it's eight. Six of them are coming from the shape of the mirrors. And then you have two more that are coming from the struts on James Webb. And so you'll be able to do away with a lot of that. So right now the Habitable Worlds Observatory is probably due to launch in late 2030 2030s maybe early into the 2040s and I wish uh that it would go faster and but there's a lot of moving parts and there's a you know we're still in the very early stages and at the same time uh science funding and space funding is very difficult. I mean, I was talking to Lee Fineberg. He had just retired from NASA as the architect of the Habber World Observatory and then has about a one-month retirement and then he's going to join ETH Zurich to be the architect for the life uh mission which is the large interpherometer for exoplanets which is kind of like the European version of the habitable worlds observatory. So, so at this point, you know, Louvoir was a prototype. So, at this point, Luvar, you know, was a prototype idea, a way to express the desires of the astronomical community and then uh HWO andor life will be the followon telescopes that will live up to that dream. So, it's all still in the works. It is astronomers top priority. observe an earthsized world orbiting around a sunlike star. Try to search for any presence of life on that planet. And that is what the astronomers want next. Okay. Uh so that was my opening that now we will sort of leave that on the channel and so when people uh see the thumbnail then they'll go and they'll watch this and then now I will explain what this is. So, this is the live question show that I do every Monday. Uh, this thing lasts for two hours and I will be answering your questions live about space andor astronomy. I've answered it. Okay. Um, so go ahead and put any questions that you might have into the YouTube comments. Uh, you only need to do it once. We've got um a database here that I will see all of the questions and I'll be able to highlight the questions that I've chosen that will be in the chat. Um some ground rules. I am a journalist not a scientist and so I cannot provide you an opinion about any scientific theory. I just report on the scientific consensus. Um I am uh try to give emphasis to people who've never had a question answered before. So, I can see in the uh in the chat in the questions uh how many times you've had your question answered before. Uh so far uh everybody has had their question answered before. No, wait. March chart 591 hasn't had their question, but um

but yeah, so if you want to make it be a question so it shows up in my list, make sure that it has a question mark at the end and uses the who, what, why, where, you know, or uses when, how. Yeah. And so that will trigger as a question, then I will review them. So, you know, if you just ask a question without using punctuation, I might not notice it. Um, and then the last thing is, you know, I get a lot of the same questions and I try to mix it up. I try to keep it keep things fresh. So, if uh you ask a question, and we've had this a lot, or I don't know the answer, it's going to require too much math and research, uh, I probably won't be able to tackle it. So, uh, okay, let's get started on this week's episode of the question show. All right. So, um, let me grab see if I understand what that is. Yeah. So, there's a question about the time delay. commas cosmography and I haven't dug into it deeply. So I just and I just did an interview that's actually very similar. Um I apologize because so the interview that I did was about building a giant interferometer to try and measure uh distance in the universe directly using uh astrometry. But um let me just I want to get that I'd love to go into that but so maybe I'll make that a thing later on. Yeah, it's a great question. Oh, okay. Okay. All right. So, I'll do my best to answer this question. in Armstrong. I was wondering if you have an opinion about time delay cosmo cosmography. Also, what future telescopes might best suit this new exciting way to measure time. So, I'm not sure I think you sort of we have the right concept together here, but I'm going to sort of explain what this is and then hopefully you'll get the answer that you need out of the question. So, so this is a approach to try and measure the Hubble constant which is the expansion rate of the universe and there are sort of multiple ways that are used to do this. One is that you measure relatively nearby objects using this thing called the distance ladder. So you measure uh sephiid variables, you measure um uh type one supernova and you get one number for the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe and then the other method is to measure it in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Of course, the fact that the two numbers aren't the same gives you this tension. And another way to sort of think about the Hubble tension is to think about the age of the universe that these numbers give you. So that the expansion rate of the universe if you know if you just calculate it backwards then it tells you how long the universe has been expanding. And so when you measure it via say sephiid variables you get that the universe is 13 billion years old. And when you measure it via the cosmic microwave background radiation, you get that the universe is uh 13. 8 billion years old. And so this discrepancy of 800 million years and this is weird and it should be the same number and yet it isn't. So why? So astronomers are trying to develop other methodologies for measuring this expansion rate and ideally ones that are independent that don't require the distance ladder. So uh and so one of these ideas is the concept that you just mentioned the time domain

cosmography. I have a hard time with that. Maybe it's because it's too similar to cosmology. And the gist of this is that you use a strong gravitational lens. And you know, you you're probably familiar with these strong gravitational lenses or Einstein crosses are one example where you've got this foreground galaxy cluster and then you've got some background object like a galaxy and that galaxy is being lensed. So the light is leaving the background galaxy. It is taking paths, multiple paths around the foreground object and then you're seeing a bunch of different versions of the same object. And then where this becomes very powerful is that you can have a supernova go off in the background object and then you see the light appear in the different supernov in the different galaxy lenses at different times. And so that means that the light took a different amount of time to make the journey to be able to show up, right? And it could be off by a matter of months or even a couple of years which is pretty incredible. So astronomers have figured out how you can use this as an independent way of measuring the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe. And what they do is and the important thing is that you have to know the mass of the object that is doing the lensing. So the galaxy cluster that is in the way and you can measure them the if you know if you can figure out work out the mass of the lensing object and then you can trace the journey then that the light took to be able to come around the lens to take up its position. And from that you can then calculate right one part of the light is taking one amount of time or you know is traveling a certain distance another light is traveling another distance and so this expansion rate of the universe is you know because the light has been traveling for potentially billions of years before it even got to the gravitational lens and went around it and then several more hundred million years to get to your eyes or to our telescopes. And so that time that it's spent going through uh intergalactic space is going to be different as it's going around the lens following these different journeys and you can actually calculate the Hubble constant in an independent way and ideally eventually this will become very accurate and you'll be able to have this number that will then be useful to calculate that it's totally independent. There's a bunch of these other sort of ideas about uh independent ways of measuring the Hubble constant. The one that is most exciting actually is gravitational waves because you know all of the other methods are by measuring different aspects of electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves are you know different and they are independent from radiation. And so you would essentially when you measure two black holes spiraling in and merging with each other, you get you can determine the distance to that uh collision just by measuring the sort of final moments before they collide. The problem is that the air bars are just way too big that they are just so they're not useful because they're so wide right now. But eventually if we get better uh gravitational wave telescopes, we'll be able to measure that as another fourth independent way of measuring the expansion rate of the universe. Eventually we will figure out we will solve the Hubble crisis or the Hubble uh the Hubble tension. Eventually we will solve the Hubble tension. Jesse no, in the case of World War II or any other major conflict, were the satellites to be a target? Do you think the space debris could prevent us from going to space? NPS for how long? Um yeah, so this is a capability that all of the major space fairing nations have demonstrated. So the Russians, the Americans, the Indians and the Chinese have all demonstrated that they can launch missiles from an aircraft and then that missile will fly up into space and take out a satellite. Um now all of the nations have been testing them on their own satellites but the result is space debris and a sort of disturbing amount of space debris that not only sort of go maintains at the orbit that they were at but actually can fly into higher orbits and can even risk the international space station. And then of

course if you send a lot of debris like in the case of a war uh taking out your enemy's ability to see the battlefield, communicate, get GPS, weather. Um it's a big goal and I guarantee that all of the nations know the locations of all of the satellites that they would destroy if it actually went to war. and they have missiles with that satellite's name on it. And yeah, it would be a disaster for the near space environment. You would be causing thousands of pieces of debris for every satellite that you destroy. And so if you're going to destroy hundreds of your enemies satellites, you're going to create hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris. That debris is going to hit other spacecraft satellites. It's going to cause more debris and it's going to be a mess. And that is the bad news. Well, I mean, apart from the war, right? Like the war is the bad news. And but also we're going to have this mess. But the good news is that this is all in low Earth orbit. And so these satellites are in the, you know, three to 500 600 uh kilometers altitude. and that space debris at that altitude will clean itself up relatively quickly in the you know 5 to 10 years range. So there would be a time when existing satellites would take an enormous amount of damage. We would see a lot a much higher failure rate that people would consider the risks of trying to do some space flight launching humans to space maybe is going to be too extreme to actually consider it. But then over time the all the debris would be cleaned up would all reenter the earth's atmosphere and then it would be kind of pristine again. The more worrying thing would be if people actually started to go after their higher satellites. So the ones that are in the say 2,000 kilometers altitude because those can take hundreds or even thousands of years to re-enter the atmosphere. And so if you turn those into debris, you know, those are like where weather satellites are, GPS satellites, you know, if you turn those into debris, uh, then there's just no cleaning that up in, you know, for the for hundreds if not thousands of years. And now it's a much bigger volume of space, but still, uh, it would be a big problem. So yeah, let's, you know, we don't want people to go to war and if they do go to war, we don't want them to be destroying satellite networks. And if they do, uh, then we want them to limit it to lowaltitude satellites and not the high ones. Whoa. Casey Ree, will spac suits ever change much? So, there's some really cool ideas for the upcoming space suits. So, the Axiom spac suits that are being developed for NASA for the upcoming artist missions have a really interesting feature which I am going to explain. Um so normally when an astronaut wears a spacuit um the spacuit is uh so the problem is that you have to balance the internal pressure of the spacuit. So if you try to just say inflate your spacuit to normal oxygen levels or to normal atmospheric levels then the spacuit is kind of like a balloon that you're inside a rigid balloon that you cannot move in. And so what they do is they actually inflate the spacuit to about a third of its normal pressure. Now this isn't enough uh atmospheric pressure for the astronauts to breathe. And so they put them in an environment of pure oxygen. So they have 100% oxygen and then a lower air pressure. And so now they can move and have be flexible inside their spacuit. The problem with that is that um you have to take time. You know, it's sort of similar to how divers work with you have to adjust your body to that lower pressure environment and then to come back from that lower pressure environment to the higher pressure environment. And if you don't, then nitrogen bubbles can build up in your joints and you can get what's called the bends. And so they have to go through this process where your body will essentially push out all of the nitrogen so that you then don't get the bends. And so with the Axiom spac suit, the idea is that it it'll have a range of pressure capability. So you'll get into the spacuit and it'll be at normal atmospheric pressure and then it will slowly dial down the pressure in the

spacuit while you're beginning your spacew walk. So you're walking out onto the surface, you're starting to to, you know, interact in the environment, and then it'll get you to the sort of target pressure, and then before your mission is over, it will bring that pressure back up. And so you sort of lose, you know, sometimes the astronauts will sleep in the um in the airlock just so they can save time when they actually have to begin their spacew walk on the next day. And so you can imagine with the upcoming moon mission, the astronauts will get into their space suits, they'll start to bring down the pressure and they'll be able to just go out onto the surface of the moon and then come back in and then bring that pressure back up. So it's a very cool idea. And so that's one example. The other idea, and this one is, you know, people have been trying this out, but no one has been able to really kind of pull this off yet. But, you know, the way spacuits work is that they put an artificial environment, an atmosphere around your body because if you don't have that atmospheric pressure, it's very bad for your skin. um you know you bruising ble internal bleeding like it's very bad for you to not have that pressure the atmospheric pressure um and so but air does it you know you've got the entire column of the earth's atmosphere bearing down on you on what is it 15 pounds per square inch you've got this pressure of the entire atmosphere of the planet pushing down on every part of your body and they simulate that with the spac suits but you don't need atmosphere sphere. What you actually can use is elastic. You can use some kind of u system that essentially pushes against your skin with the same amount of pressure as the atmosphere does. And so people are designing suits that are sort of like they look more like bodysuits. They're very sleek, very kind of futuristic looking. Uh and so you don't actually need to have the big bulky space suit. Now you would still need some kind of obviously helmet on so you could breathe and one of the real challenges is at the joints. So uh you know you can say surround your forearm in this elastic material to handle the pressure issue but you need to be able to have a joint like your elbow and to be able to uh you know and that's a very difficult to just sort of imagine how hard it would be to have something that is always perfectly continuously putting the right amount of pressure inside your joints places like inside your groin inside your knees. So, so those are the challenges to that idea. But there's a woman at MIT who is working on a bunch of prototypes and has sort of gotten things pretty far along in that development. So, it might be that they'll solve this with some kind of materials or maybe some kind of hybrid approach where you've got the um you know, you've got the elastic material for the parts of the body that you can do that and then you've got uh pressurized joints or something like that. Uh but it's a very cool idea. So yeah, there are still ideas, but in general, you know, a spac suit is a little spaceship. You're bringing a little piece of Earth with you, and there's only so many ways to be able to do that. Visitor, since gravity travels at light speed, is that massive gravitational wave of the Big Bang still on its way to us? Uh, yes. Um but it and it just passed us by and then and now another one by. Uh we just experience the gravitational waves from the big bang over and over again in the same way that we are always seeing the cosmic microwave background radiation. You know, when we look out into the cosmos and we are looking in microwaves, we are detecting this first this last scattering this light that was released by the cosmic microwave background radiation into space. And that this was when the entire universe was like the surface of a red star. And then that light has been traveling through space. And right now the light that has been traveling for 13. 8 billion years just got to us. And then one second later the next light that has been traveling for 13. 8 8 billion plus 1 second has gotten to us and then two seconds and so on, right? Um and so the same thing has happened with the gravitational waves from the big bang. Like there was a lot of mass moving around during the big bang. You know, we know this idea of this of inflation where the universe expanded many orders of magnitude to a larger size. That was mass moving very quickly and anytime you move mass then that generates gravitational waves. And so there is this idea of primordial gravitational waves. And what's great

about these is that they would be present in the universe earlier than the cosmic microwave background radiation. That is the earliest that we can see light is 380,000 years after the big bang. Before that, the entire universe was like the surface or even the interior of a star. And so how do you observe the you know the interior of a star? It is opaque. It's like being trapped inside the earth and trying to observe the earth. The earth is opaque. It is rock, right? So, uh, but the gravitational waves moved through the universe. And so, right to the very beginning and astronomers have been trying to figure out ways to be able to observe this primordial gravitational waves. One idea is that you would see the gravitational waves moving through the material that made up the cosmic microwave background radiation and that it would change the the light coming from the the cosmic microwave background. Unfortunately, that hasn't panned out yet. But the next way is to use the pulsar timing array which is the method where you have pulsars that are located all the way around in the sky and they are sending us these signals with tremendous accuracy. Right? They're sending signals with tremendous regularity and astronomers can measure them as accurately as they measure an atomic clock. And so that we've already detected the background gravitational waves from merging super massive black holes. So we know that these large background gravitational waves are there. There might be this second signal, the ones left over from the big bang. And if not, there have been proposals to build a gigantic version of LISA, which is the large interferometer space antenna, which is going to be detecting directly detecting uh merging super massive black holes. But if you build like a much bigger version, it's called the big bang observer. would have 12 LISAs in this giant uh sort of grid and they would be able to potentially detect the gravitational waves coming from the big bang itself. So, oh, and another one of those another gravitational wave just went past us, right? Like we are always every second that goes by we are experiencing another second's worth of gravitational waves from the big bang. It's just that they are extremely faint, that they are incredibly difficult to detect. That uh a car driving around on a road uh is putting out more gravitational waves, you know, or is, I guess, shaking your detectors more than the gravitational waves that you would be able to detect. So, it's just going to take new technology and new investment, but is theoretically within our ability. Keep that handy. Um, Ari Fraser, what do you know about charged black holes? I thought black holes only had mass and spin, but yesterday I saw a video from David Kipping where he mentioned charged black holes. Yeah, so black holes can be measured by three numbers. The mass, the spin, and the charge. And these are made up of essentially the raw material that went into the black hole. So you know the mass one is relatively straightforward. All of the gas and dust and light and antimatter and planets and you name it uh had mass or had the mass equivalent from the energy equals m^ squ right and that added to the mass of the black hole and then so that number that total mass becomes the mass of the black hole. Same thing with the spin. all of that material as it's going into the black hole or had some kind of spin associated with it before it went into the black hole and the black hole preserves that spin and spins. So whatever direction the black hole is spinning and whatever speed the d this is the sum of all of the material that has fallen into the black hole and then generally they end up spinning at relativistic speeds you know close to the speed of light which is crazy. Um, but the last number is the charge. And so every particle that goes into the black hole will have had a charge. Uh, and then the black hole is going to be the average charge of all of that material that fell into it. The thing is that charged material is generally balances out. So you have positives, you have negatives, and so generally a black hole is going to be roughly neutrally charged. But theoretically it could be, you know, if you only fed a black hole on positively

charged material, then the black hole would gain a positive charge. And the crazy part is that then if you had say something that was negatively charged, then you would attract it in addition to the gravitational, right? And if it had something that was also positively charged, it would be repelled by the black hole. So uh yeah, so black holes can have their mass, their spin, and their charge. Stanton, how drastic do you believe the changes coming through AI will be on the education system? Are we staring down the barrel of a complete change in education? Will be AI agents running the teachers? Um, you know, like I can imagine a dystopian future where AI completely controls education and it's a and that students are using AI to avoid their schoolwork. Like you think about how chat GBT hit us in the first place that a couple of years ago people realized, hey, I can just get chat GPT to write my college essay. And so suddenly you don't have to learn the material to be able to get your grade and get an A from your uh from your teacher. congratulations. Um, but like that's counterproductive that you are essentially going to school, paying all this money, and you're walking out without knowledge, and then you go and try and get a job, and you lack critical thinking skills, you lack the ability to write, communicate with your peers, and you are considered a uh a bad hire, and then they let you go because you actually weren't qualified for the job that you tried to apply for. And so then that reflects poorly on the educational institution and teachers and they have to reform the entire system. There's a great quote I forget who said it but um IPZ Moscowitz but uh AI is the greatest tool that has ever been developed if you want to learn something and AI is the greatest tool if ever developed if you don't want to learn something right that in both cases it all comes down to the user are you going to use the AI to teach you things to help you interrogate a subject to give you practice information to help you figure out your weak spots and compensate for them and drill and get much better and practice uh communicating in unusual circumstances and just become a stronger, more well-rounded person overall. Like I use AI for my language learning and it is great. I write sentences. I learn different pieces of vocabulary. I practice them with variations and I drill and drill to get the stuff into my head. Um, in a way that would be very boring for me to try and talk to another person or even have a teacher or professor. Um, but on the flip side that you can imagine students like right now the students are running roughshot over the um over the educational institution at their own peril, right? like they are using the tools, they are having it do the work for them, they are not having to think and then they are uh suffering the consequences from not actually doing the hard work. Like hard work makes you stronger. You want to chase down uh and you know you want to embrace the suffering of hard work because that's what makes you better at what you do. It's the times when you're forced to stretch and uh and go above and beyond what you thought you were capable of to push through and do the deliberate practice when you become more capable. And so anyone who is using this stuff to just surf through at class is harming themselves. In a lot of the cases this is happening because the teachers aren't doing you know they're providing information or you know I think sometimes this is happening because the teachers aren't creating good curricula or they're putting too much work onto the students or they're focusing on the wrong things that are actually relevant to the u you know to the employers out the other side of this. So education I is now in the crosshairs and is going to get overhauled stem to stern that hopefully people are going to come up with curricula that are more useful for the modern world that we live in that uh values the uh you know what are the things that employers are actually looking for what are the skills that students are actually expected that the things that are easy to just have an AI I do those stuff are could be gone and you're going to have to do stuff in real time maybe with a pen and paper, right? To be able to show your ability to communicate to show that you've use the AI tools correctly. Um, and so you can imagine it kind of fragmenting into a

bunch of different ways. One way is like if the AI gets really good, then you can imagine every person being able to have a custom tutor that teaches them some skill that they want in a way that is actually really great. Um, that seems entirely feasible to me. Um, or you can imagine the teacher working with the AI to be able to develop this kind of curriculum, something that is fine-tuned for each student. So as always you know whenever new technologies are developed people use it for good and evil and so right now people are mostly using it for evil. They are using it so they don't have to do as much work at school and then the teachers are using it so they don't have to do as much work either right um or they're using AI tools to automatically check to see if the thing was written by AI tools. than other students are coming up with methods to write their essays without them looking like they're written by AI. So, I think it's going to be a mess for a while and I think as a student because I think you know most of the people who are watching this are going to be students. uh you have to have a really good long think about why you're going to school because you know the days of you just like having ch do your homework and then you come out the other side and then you just get a job that is going to fall apart and so you have to say am I challenging myself am I being doing harder and harder things am I actually getting out of this education what I am what I should be or am I uh sabotaging myself down the road because you'll be found out. As a as an educator, you've got to change. You just can't use the system the way you did before. You can't come up with the same kind, you know, tests, uh, take-home things, uh, busy work, like it's got to be, you got to come up with ideas where you work in tandem with the students, maybe with AI at the same time to help them become to understand the material, understand what's expected. And then at a larger curricul uh what's actually relevant in education because it's you know there's a mismatch between you know a lot of times you go through four years of university you come out the other side you didn't you know you learned you wrote some philosophy papers you learned to communicate you met a bunch of people um and you demonstrated that you're willing to kind of suffer for four years. That's what the employer is looking for is does this person have the ability to jump through these hoops for four years. Maybe I can give take a chance on them. I don't think that's going to cut it anymore either. So yeah, I don't know what the answer is going to be, but like I have a ton of faith in humanity. We will figure it out. We will come out the other side with a balance, something that we've discovered all of the downsides. We've dealt with most of them and we are uh so we've got a new status quo for how things work from this point on. But I'd be interested to hear what you think. Um not many eclipses left. What is the most important long-term information mankind will acquire from creating a permanent presence on the moon? Well, I mean, the most important thing that we will learn is how to live in space. Like, that's that is really the beginning and the end of why we should be sending humans into space. That, you know, if what you want to do is science, you send the robots. asteroid mining, you send the robots. that the thing that the reason we will send humans to the moon, Mars, uh, is because that's how we will learn to live in space. And there's no way to do it but to do it. And there are so many little lessons. You know, when you think about how people have learned to say live on the sea, right, where people are sailors and they have all of these things about reading the weather and and fixing their equipment and um navigating and then doing their job, whatever their job is, right? If they're fishing or if they're uh you know, running a cruise ship or whatever, that everything is made that much more difficult on the ocean. And it's the same idea that um you know once you go to the moon, you have to bring your entire environment with you. There's nothing you can there's no oxygen, no atmosphere you can breathe. It doesn't rain. Plants aren't growing. You can't go down to the ocean. You can't, you know, go to a river to pick up things. Like you have to bring everything. You have to recreate the entire earth uh

ecosystem or you have to create the entire environment that a human being needs to survive by yourself with your technology. You have to handle generating oxygen, generating water, generating food, dealing with waste, dealing with energy, dealing with materials, repairing stuff, right? Like there's just like the laundry list. It just goes on and on. And we don't know, you know, we think we know at large scale how to do some of this stuff, but we just don't. We have no we have orbital experience which has taught us a lot about the effects of being in weightlessness on the human body. We've learned about we developed better methods for toilets and recirculating water systems and oxygen as well as how to refuel the International Space Station and send it resupply. So, we've learned a ton in lower Earth orbit. But that but now we have to take those lessons and extend them out to a place that is farther away and more dangerous like the moon. And the moon is still baby steps compared to going to a place like Mars. Like at the moon, you're just a couple of days away from uh being able to send rescue supplies from being able to evacuate somebody from a moon base back to Earth. Once you go to Mars, you are on your own. You are looking at months, if not years, for you to be able to bring someone home. What if someone gets appendicitis, right? What if someone has a tooth abscess? What if somebody is pregnant? What if um your uh carbon dioxide scrubber breaks down? like these are all the kinds of challenges that we're going to have to figure out. Uh and so let's figure them out close to home before we try to figure it out things farther away. So that's it. Like if they don't do one lick of science, they don't step outside and pick up any rocks, it will still be valuable to send humans to the moon. Now, of course, you get the science as the bonus, right? Like absolutely do science while you're there, but I don't think we should lose sight of the reason why we're going to a moon base, and that is to learn to live in space. And that from then we can learn to live on an asteroid and Phobos Mars and then we can learn to live on other places, right? maybe in the cloud tops of Venus and eventually on our giant spinning O'Neal cylinders. And some point 300 years from now, we will be a true solar system spanning civilization. Church discoraphy. What kind of animal would make a good space pet? That's a good question. Um, a spider, you know, something that can hang upside down, think in three dimensions, uh, has a line that it can use to tow itself around. Now, I've just been reading Children of Time um and by Adrien Chaikovski and that has uh intelligent spiders in it who eventually uh sort of interact with human beings and the spiders are actually in this book are just naturally good space fairers. So, spiders might be good. Yeah, if you had like a tarantula, but I mean obviously your tarantula is not going to be a great friend to you, but people keep tarantulas, right? A bird, you know, a bird would have to figure out how to fly in weightlessness, but I think they would figure it out quickly enough. So, a bird would be kind of fun. Uh, but of course, it's going to go to the bathroom everywhere in a way that a tarantula wouldn't. So, I think any animal pet that you bring is going to cause is going to be more trouble than it's worth. James Deian, do fish care about living in a microgravity environment? Those might make good pets. Uh yeah, they've done fish in space and the fish are disoriented when they first get up into space and then they figure it out. You know, it's funny. You think that you're in weightlessness when you're in water, but you're not. You're still experiencing the pole of gravity on your internal organs, even though you might be, you know, oriented in different ways. And so fish, this is an issue for them for sure. Um, and so there's video of fish like they do like little um, oh, I forget the name, tetras, the like the tiny little neon tetras, like little fish have been to space and they got pretty confused in the beginning and then after a while they figured it out. So yeah, fish would, you know, if they're in water would eventually be pretty well equipped to deal with weightlessness. I want I wonder, you

know, give the fish a little spacuit and then he can swim around inside the space station. I like these recommendations. Uh, tardigrades, uh, flying squirrels, that's a good one, too. Um, I oi. I was going to ask you why we can't do digital interferometry between telescopes. I don't know what digital interferometry is. So is this like quantum light sensitial? I don't know. Yeah, I'm gonna have to look into this. I'll try and find uh someone. So I found a paper professor Kirk McKenzie does did a story about digital interpherometry. So I'm going to leave this up except center for gravitational astrophysics. So it sounds like people are thinking about this idea and I will try and do an interview because this is the kind of thing that I'm interested in. Connecting two telescopes over wires. Okay. All right. Um, So, so I mean the challenge with just interferometry is that you need to be able to combine the actual wavefronts from the photons. So, if you just have like one telescope and another telescope and they are gathering images of the sky and they're producing a photograph, that is not interferometry. That is two photographs that you're just going to put on top of each other. that will help you reduce the noise in your so it's like doing a longer exposure right it gives you twice the telescope but it doesn't give you the baseline in between the two sc telescopes and that's what interferometry gives you so if you just connected two telescopes with wires and you were combining the images coming from those telescopes then it's the equivalent of you just having your two times as much telescope that's it and that's kind of how a uh like when you do long exposures, you know, you do multiple exposures of some object. You do a 30- secondond exposure. That's as if you had one telescope, then you do another 30-cond exposure. That's like as if you had another telescope, then you do another one, right? And so then and then you are combining the light of those three exposures. You're detecting what is actually signal and what is noise in that image and you're rejecting the noise and you're keeping the signal. And so if you just, you know, when you are taking multiple exposures with your telescope, that's effectively what you're doing. And you can do that faster if you had two telescopes side by side and they were both cap grabbing images of the same spot in the sky, you would then be able to combine the light of those two telescopes to get more signal and less noise. But that's not the magic of interpherometry. The magic is that if you had two telescopes that were 10 meters apart, you would have the equivalent of a telescope that is 10 meters across. So essentially the size of the biggest telescope on earth. If you just had two one meter no if you had two 10 cm telescopes one 10 meters apart then they would behave they would give you the resolution of the biggest telescope on earth. That's what interferometry gets you. Uh people are asking about project hail Mary. I'm going to see it on Tuesday. Okay. So, I haven't watched it yet. Uh, Jimmy James, pineapple on pizza. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm Canadian though, so I think we invented the ham and pineapple pizza. Uh, yeah. Yeah, I like ham and pineapple. And I know that this will now split the community. It's fine. I don't care. I have a drink. What direction James Webb has to look at to see the big bang. Um so James Webb can't Uh James Web is not sensitive to the kind of light that the big bang emitted. Um and in fact no telescope act can actually see the big bang. Um you have

to be able to man. All right. So let me do this again. Um so there's kind of two parts to this question. So the first thing is that the big bang happened everywhere. And so uh anywhere that James Webb looks and in fact anywhere you look with your eyes you are seeing if you were able to look far enough where the big bang happened. It happened everywhere that it was not in any one specific location and then there was an explosion. It's that the all of space is expanding or getting less dense over time. So big bang happened everywhere. But the issue is that James Webb specifically doesn't have the right frequency that it can observe to be able to see the big bang. Um, and in fact, no telescope can because for the first 380,000 years of the universe, that entire universe, right, was opaque like it was this it was like a star. And so you can't see through it. It's only after that 380,000 years when the universe had cooled down. Light was able to escape that you could actually see into the universe. And James Webb sees in the infrared and that light has been traveling for so long and so much expansion of the universe has happened that even though that light started out kind of reddish colored, it is now um in the microwaves. And so you need a microwave telescope to be able to observe it. And so astronomers do have microwave telescopes. They look in all directions and they see this afterlow of the big bang that happened everywhere. But like exactly where you're standing right now, your chair, the big bang happened there. And where I am, the big bang also happened right here. You are at the center of the universe. Hangman 747. Tin Man do light speed a photon experiences no time. Does a photon experience time when it's slowed down in a medium? No. Uh but it is an interesting idea, right? That um that light experiences that photons experience no time. That if you sort of calculate the time dilation, you put in the speed of light into it, things cancel out and the amount of time that is experienced is zero. And so for a photon that's traveling at the speed of light. So the photon never experiences time. It always feels like it is moving at the speed of light. But there's a like there's an interview that's coming out and the reason I sort of want to talk about this question is that when light passes through um like a medium or like gas, dust, things like that, then you can actually get wavelengths arriving a little bit slower. You know, you know that light travels at a different speed through water and that you can actually then measure the uh what the universe is made of by how that light arrives at different times to your eyes. That different wavelengths uh are sort of split apart by different stuff in between. It's a crazy idea. But there's an interview coming out. You got to hear about this. As farren, why does the universe appear to be the same size in every direction? Because what you're seeing is the age of the universe that light has been traveling for 13. 8 billion years since the big bang minus 380,000 years, right? The cosmic microwave background. And it has been traveling that long in all directions to reach you specifically that you know we always talk about this idea of the universe we talk about the observable universe and the observable universe is just the amount of the universe that you can see uh where the light has traveled for 13. 8 8 billion years to arrive at your eyeballs and I see a different observable universe than you do and that you know this tells us that the um you know and it assumes that the speed of light is constant that the cosmic microwave background radiation has been traveling for 13. 8 a billion years from all directions to reach you. But yeah, you were seeing your personal observable universe. The actual size and shape of the universe is unknown. Could be infinite, might be finite, uh could have some weird topological shape that matches the geometry that they measure in the universe, but um it is uh you know what you are seeing. And so you know the analogy that I always use is that you're in fog, right? And so you're standing in fog and you can see your hands very close to you but far away

things are harder to see and eventually all you can see is just the fog. And then you know your friend might be standing beside you. You say like why is the the sphere of fog around us always the same size? What's that about? Right? Um why does the fog appear to be the same size around us right now? Well, because it's how well the light can get to you through fog particles and that if there was less fog, you would be able to see uh farther. This is where it kind of falls apart. Um, but it is custom to you that I see a different fog averse than you do. Phoenix. Let me see. So, let's look up one number here. 3900 EU. So it's 06 light years. Okay. Known unknown. How large compared to the solar system is a 30 billion solar mass black hole? Um, so I I'm not sure what a exactly what a 30 million 30 billion solar so I'm not exactly sure what a 30 billion solar mass black hole would be, but the biggest one uh what is the event horizon of Phoenix A? Um, two, see the Phoenix. Let me get the number here. Hold on. Because that's the biggest one right now is Phoenix A. 100 billion. There you go. That's a big number. So, the most massive black hole that we know of is called Phoenix A, which is a super massive black hole in the Phoenix cluster. And it probably has somewhere on the order of a hundred billion times the mass of the sun. And so here's the part that's crazy. The event horizon of a black hole that big is 3,900 astronomical units or 06 light years. So 6% of a lightyear. Uh when you think about the distance from the sun to Pluto, it's about 50 astronomical units. So you can sort of do the math. It's like less than 100 times the 100 times the distance from the sun to Pluto. So it's big. It's very big, but it is not very big compared to like you could hold it within the entire solar system and yet it would have the mass of actually it wouldn't have them even the mass of the Milky Way. So the Milky Way has about 1. 5 trillion solar masses in it and the Phoenix A black hole has 100 billion. So it's maybe less than 10% the mass of the entire Milky Way, but it's still a very big black hole. oldtimer. Andromeda is predicted to collide with the Milky Way. But is it traveling towards us? Are we traveling towards it? Or both? Yeah, it's both. um you know we are attracted to Andromeda and Andromeda is attracted to us um it's a mutual attraction and so now Andromeda is the more massive galaxy so it has roughly they think it might be about three times as massive as the Milky Way and so it is doing the majority of the gravitational attraction

but the two galaxies are essentially moving towards a common center of gravity between the two of them. Now, there is still an argument about whether or not Andromeda will and the Milky Way will actually merge that it might just be that it's a close flyby and then the threebody interactions between Andromeda and the Milky Way and the triangulum galaxy will cause them to not actually merge in the end. But still so we are moving towards Andromeda. Andromeda is moving towards us. That's why when we look at the light from Andromeda, it is blue shifted. While almost every galaxy that we see in the entire universe is redshifted that the galaxies moving away from us, Andromeda is one of the few that is actually moving towards us. uh fester festral day. Is that the event horizon of the singularity? That's the event horizon. Tricky Mick. What is the process for flagging and following up on objects reported by the Verum Observatory? Given how many objects will be reported, do they have protocols to say what gets investigated first? So I think you misunderstand how this works. So there is no they and there is no protocols and there are no plans that there Ver Rubin's job is to capture these images every single night and then the data pipeline is sent to a bunch of data brokers and the data brokers filter the information trying to specialize in the kinds of events that they are uh that they they're best handled to equip that and then the data brokers filter through the information to try to present the information that's useful to their audience. So, Verubin generates about 800,000 events a night. So, you're looking at variable stars, supernova, asteroids, comets, planet 9ines, although you know, no planet 9 has been seen so far. Um, and uh black holes eating stars, all kinds of things. And then the different data brokers will take that stream of data and then they will make it available in their system in a database. And so you will then perform a query on the data from the data broker and say, "Show me all of the objects that were uh brighter than magnitude 15 located in the Centaurus constellation between 5:00 a. m. and 6 a. m. And then you will get a list of all of the things and the photographs objects that were taken. So then it's up to you as the astronomer to do your follow- on observations. So you then go and get time on a telescope to observe this object that you're interested in. If there was a supernova you want to do follow on observations, you then get time on your telescope or on time on James Web or whatever. And so there is no like there is no centralized plan for what happens with all of these data. they are just being disced into the internet and then it's up to the astronomers to do that. You can do this too. Like you can just go to one of the data brokers. Uh one is called Antares, which is the one that um uh sort of from the Noir lab. And I actually did an interview within the last couple of weeks on with one of the people behind this data broker system. And you can write you can access their API. you can write code that queries their system and sends you alerts every time something that matches the criteria that you're hoping for shows up and you know they try to categorize this as best they can from the ver rubin sides to say this was probably a supernova this is probably an asteroid this is probably a you know a variable star but then it's up to the astronomers to actually do the following observations so and you can do this too so you can just build into their API run queries find objects You can then do fallen observations with your telescope with your small telescope to see the thing that was in the Ver Rubin image. So, you know, for example, um you know, I've got a bunch of telescopes behind me. So, I've got the sea star and I've got the Veyonus telescope here. And both of those are capable of seeing down to magnitude of like 15. And so Ver Rubin is finding uh thousands of objects every night of magnitude 15. And so you could pick one of those objects and then you could do a follow- on observation with a small telescope and confirm the

discovery of a supernova all by yourself. You don't need there's no centralized group that decides whether or not you're allowed to look at the V Rubin data and point your telescope at the sky. And I think it is there's too much like it's hard to get across. You know, if you want to discover asteroids, you could just do this. You could find thousands of asteroids a night if you wanted to just by uh looking through writing code. You know, it is a gold rush right now. You could probably discover comets and maybe you'll be the person to discover planet 9. Get to work. Epic Quest Bio. Has anyone considered using rail guns to launch ultra high aspect ablation shielded microgram payloads to escape velocity from their backyard? Um so people have been working on ideas for uh using uh rail guns to launch payloads into space. The problem is, and this is like a you know people have proposed using rail guns for shipmounted weapons as well because wouldn't it be great? You just take uh a ton of electricity, you accelerate the rail gun, you send projectiles just using electricity. You don't need to carry uh gunpowder on your ship. You just need to be able, you know, as long as you can generate electricity, you can be firing off of propellant, projectiles. The problem is that it causes enormous strain on the rail gun itself. And there's a sort of a joke in the military community which is show me a rail gun that can fire twice. So the rail gun can fire once but then it has mangled itself and if it tries to fire a second time it is no longer functional. And so you know the amount of engineering that needs to go in to be able to make a rail gun actually work at the kinds of velocities that are comparable to what a shell can do is still science fiction. Um but people have proposed various ideas on how you could try to use rail guns to accelerate payloads into orbit. The problem is that you well there's a bunch of problems. So the first problem is that you are hitting the thickest part of the atmosphere the moment you let go of your uh payload that you're at the bottom of this ocean of air of atmosphere and then you have to be able to send this thing up through that and at the kinds of speeds that you want to go to be able to have enough momentum to be able to get up into orbit you are going to explode your projectile. So that is challenge number one because you got to go 28,000 kilometers per hour. You gota go really fast or what's the ski velocity? 7 point or orbital velocity I think it's like 7. 66 kilometers per second. Like it's really fast. So that's your first problem. And then of course there's the problem of you tearing apart your rail gun. And then of course there's the problem that if you're going to try to get that kind of acceleration, you are going to have to exert tens of thousands of gs of force on your payload. and you need very special payloads that can handle those kinds of forces. It's not out outside of the realm of possibility, but it still is very difficult. And so, uh, all attempts so far to build rail guns of any size, you know, I don't know about anyone's using ablation shielded microgram payloads, but they still run into the same problems, which is you better have a really good ablation because you're going to hit the brick wall of the atmosphere the moment you get out of the um the vacuum for where you were accelerating your particle and then it's going to ablate completely to death. IRS sim researchers from countries that funded v room will get first access to that data right I thought the general public could only access data up to a month or two ago right no it's all live right now you can go the tons of people built really cool gadgets for processing data from v rubin you can go to the data brokers I think there's seven data brokers you can pick the one that you want. One specializes in, you know, supernova, variable stars, others specialize in things in the solar system. And you can start quering it. It is publicly available. There is no gatekeepers on this whatsoever. Nope. Everyone is free to access it right now. The only check is that it goes through the department uh of energy and they run filters to remove uh military satellites from the data. So they remove those alerts from the data. Apart from that, it's free to use. Go crazy.

Yonatan quantum jump does not say anything about distance. So there is a nonzero chance that any particle could pop into existence in any micrometer of space at any time. Virtual particles. So yeah. So, so particles what we think of as stuff is actually fields that there are these fields and quantum fields and that they you know because of probability you know all of the atmosphere in your room is most likely almost sure to be in your room but there is a slight nonzero chance that all of the air inside your room could relocate could actually be on Mars that you know if you collapsed the you know observe ve the field for your the atmosphere in your room it's actually on Mars and then you would suffocate uh but in general you know what we experience is that the stuff is where we left it uh that remains because it is very high probability to be in that location but it is not zero and so there are plenty of ideas and sort of this is the idea of a Bolton brain that you can have you know in an infinite universe in infinite time that you could then theoretically have a conscious entity appear uh because of this sort of random fluctuation that you would have you know although it's the chances are almost zero they're not completely it's not completely impossible therefore it will happen inevitably in infinite time and you know the sort of the the sort of philosophical challenge of the Boltzman brain is that if Uh if collapsing the wave function requires observation, how can you get uh an entity capable of making an observation without it being observed without the right? So how can you get a mind capable of observing a quantum event if nobody observed the event? And that's sort of the philosophical challenge of the Boltzman brain. But theoretically, you not only could get a single conscious entity appearing randomly, uh you could get a planet Earth appearing randomly. Milky Way galaxy an entirely new big bang appearing randomly. And so maybe that explains where the universe came from was that, you know, there was a previous universe. It went on for an almost infinite amount of time. And if you waited long enough, you got the equivalent of the big bang just appearing uh randomly in the cosmos. Um Jonathan, I was thinking more of a virtual particle appearing randomly, not a macro object. Well, yeah, that happens all the time. So, um you know, the this idea of virtual particles is a real thing. uh these particles and their antiparticle pairs appearing and then recombining. But really that's sort of one way of looking at the sort of fields that exist across the universe. How the thing what we experience as uh particles are actually fields. But this is like a Sean Carol question, not me. Um what is hidden variable seti? Yeah, I don't know what that is. Um, Frosty Winnipeg, could a telescope on Earth use the moon, New Orle crescent, as a star shade? Uh, no. Um, but there is an idea that you could launch a star shade that telescopes on Earth could use them. So there's actually a NYAK grant that was awarded a couple of years ago and this is sort of making the rounds again. There's a new paper that just

came out about how you could just like instead of needing to launch say the Haborlds observatory and have it have a separate star shade that it uses, you could have a star shade that you just launched that is then used by observatories on Earth. and it would have to follow a very specific trajectory and would kind of loiter in front of the star that you want for as long as you can before it runs out of propellant. Um, and so there's some really cool ideas about being able to do that and then that would save you wouldn't have to try to maintain, you know, we could do a lot of really interesting tests in the short term with um these star shades. So uh hopefully before we see the Hav worlds observatory launched with a star shade we will have already seen a star shade launch. You know I think their estimate was it would have to be about 100 meters across. It would be you know very thin but it's definitely you know it's an engineering challenge but definitely within the realm of what we can do because it doesn't have to be very thick. And so uh and then you could use say the upcoming extremely large telescope. could use that star shade to be able to directly observe planets orbiting around a sunlike star. So hopefully we'll see a star shade launch long before we see HWO. Gioondo, how do we know if dark Gioondo matter is possibly in our solar system? I mean it all depends on what dark matter is but uh you know it's believed that there is dark matter everywhere. So uh you know the actual concentration of the dark matter is would be very low inside our solar system like probably on the order of an asteroid a small asteroid's worth of dark matter or mass because you know dark matter is there is this giant halo that surrounds the Milky Way galaxy and it accounts for most of the mass in the Milky Way. But space is very big. And so when you kind of spread that mass out across this entire volume of space, the amount of dark matter that is present in any small area is actually going to be very small. So in the solar system, most of the solar systems mass is not dark matter. It is planets and the sun. But there would be roughly an asteroid's worth of mass in the solar system that is dark matter. Nomad 77. Is there a limit to how many telescopes we could put out at L1? So L1 and I'm assuming you're talking about the Earth Sun L1 Lrange point is the point that is in between the Earth and the Sun. So I mean there are some telescopes there. They're mostly observing either the Earth or the Sun. But I think you're probably talking about L2 which is the one that's on the other side of the Earth. And you know is there a limit? Of course there's a limit. I mean space is big but it's not infinitely big. But there is not a practical limit that you know even James Web is not perched on this specific point out at L1. It is orbiting around the average location of the L1 or the L2 point. L2 Lrange point and so you know it's not at L2 specifically and you could have lots of spacecraft that are orbiting in that area that they would never get within hundreds of kilometers even thousands of kilometers of each other and so there's tons and tons of room for as many telescopes as humanity could ever imagine launching and there would be no problem. Space is big. Um, IO said, "I just found that Nyak request. It's called uh the inflatable star shade for Earthlike exoponence. " Yeah. So, I did an interview with John Matherther here on the channel. So, just do a search for John Matherther Starade um on YouTube and you'll probably get the interview that I did with him and then you'll learn all about it. And of course, John Matherther is the mind behind James Webb. So, uh yeah, Nobel Prize winner.

fester all day. If a civilization isn't detected by SETI, did it even exist? All those poor potential people. Um, sure. Yeah. If we don't detect a civilization uh through either indirectly or directly like if we don't detect them sending a signal at us or if we don't detect the sort of leaked radiation from their television broadcasts, uh they're still there. You know, tree falls in the forest, nobody hears it. Doesn't make a sound. Yes. Makes a sound of a tree falling. Um, but you know, there's this idea in SETI about sort of quiet aliens versus loud aliens that that advanced civilizations will probably fall into these two categories. So, the quiet ones are going to be the ones just chill out at their home planet that they instead of using uh radio transmissions, they switch to fiber optic. They are concerned about being discovered by other civilizations. And so they go quiet. You know, this is the sort of dark forest idea. While loud aliens are going to be broadcasting, but are going to be conquering. They're going to be taking over other star systems that they're going to be sending, you know, they're going to go to a star system. They're going to manufacture vonom probes. They're going to send those vonom probes at close to the speed of light. They're going to be uh extracting the resources from that home star system. they're going to be growing their uh empire and it's the kind of thing that you would be able to detect. And so we won't detect the quiet aliens. We will only detect the loud ones. And so you know people always ask like why do aliens have to be loud? Like why like conquering large amounts of space? They don't. And if they don't then we won't detect them. But, you know, if a civilization doesn't want to expand, then that leaves room to the ones that do and like the Borg. And so, it only takes one to go full BorgMix. If white holes were to exist in this universe, would they be detectable? Uh, yeah, theoretically. So, you know, we still don't entirely know if a white hole is actually feasibly possible. You know, it is a is an offshoot of the math that uh sort of work with black holes and essentially that if you just turn uh one number uh negative or positive, forget which way it goes, then you get a white hole, right? And so while a black hole is sort of accumulating material then a white hole theoretically should be spewing out material. Maybe black holes and white holes are connected. We don't know right but it is almost certainly just a mathematical construct. There's no reason to believe this is a thing that actually exists. Just because you can do the math for something doesn't mean that thing is real. But if white holes do exist, then they theoretically would be firing out energy and that's a thing that you would detect. And so astronomers have considered that you could do scans of the sky with things like Ver Rubin, for example, would be perfect for this kind of thing that you'd be looking for a certain wavelength of light. brightness, certain change in brightness as uh radiation was pouring out of a white hole. And that's the kind of thing you could theoretically detect. So, uh, you know, it all depends on whether or not these are real. And if they are real, then there are plans. There have been ideas on how you might detect them. Visit does SEI have access to the V Rubin data stream or does NSA filter out all the aliens in the data? Everybody has access to the Ver Rubin data stream. All of it. There is no limit. There's no filter. There's no one is stopping anyone from doing anything they want at all except for locating the positions of US military satellites. The Department of Energy is filtering those out. But apart from that, everything else is in there, especially the alien spacecraft. Um, so no, nobody is filtering out the aliens in the data that we know of, but no, like this is like if there was an alien armada on its way to Earth and you know they had they were reflecting sunlight off of the sun or they were firing their thrusters to decelerate themselves then they would

be visible. Ver Rubin would probably be the telescope that would detect them first. And someone would be looking would have you know someone right now can make a filter that will look for the kinds of things that an alien attack fleet would give off on its way to the solar system. Now the challenge is coming up with the right filter. Like how do you describe that perfect filter that tells you that you're seeing an alien attack fleet and not just another supernova. That's your challenge. But there is nobody stopping anybody from looking for this kind of stuff in the data. You want to find aliens? UFOs, fill your boots. Like, like this is the part like and I know you already know this system, but this is the part that just kind of kills me is like people think that this information No, go use Chat GPT or go use Claude. have it teach you how to connect up with the API of these data brokers, write code, come up with a really cool interface that shows you all the stuff that you're interested in the Ver Rubin data, right? It's all there. It's ready to go. You have exactly the same tools that the astronomers have. There's no difference in what the regular person can access and what the astronomers access. It is all the same, all publicly available. like there is no um you know anyone can discover the next asteroid that is on its way to the earth. You just have to create the right query to look through the ver Rubin data sitedron. So, are we going to trust the most corrupt government in modern history is honest about what is filtering from the data? Like, how can you control this? 800,000 alerts every single night. It's expected that number is going to go up to probably 7 million alerts a night once the uh enough data has been gathered by Ver Rubin that it's starting to really detect changes from night to night. Yeah, if you know the positions of your satellites, then you can scrub them from the data because those are a known quantity. They have whatever a 100 satellites. They need to make sure that they're not revealed in the data. But how do you scrub unknown things from 7 million events that have happened that night? Like so like you are suggesting a level of competence by the government any government this government to be able to scrub through that information and clean that up. Like what a makework project. You imagine you're going to have to take all 7 million alerts that are happening every single night. You're having to run really complicated state-of-the-art uh tools. You're going to have astronomers in the tens of thousands looking through and filtering out this stuff every night in a way that is undetectable to the astronomical community. Because remember, you can go on to Ver Rubin, you can say, "Alert me when a supernova goes off that I can see with my telescope. " And then you get an alert and then you take your telescope, you look at that galaxy, you're like, "Yep, there's a supernova there. " Right? So, how do you still allow this stuff to be in essentially real time within seconds of when it was uh detected by Ver Rubin and then made available to the astronomical community and at the same time be able to filter out the stuff that you want to keep secret like the aliens which are random, right? So yeah, if you knew if you know where your satellites are and you know exactly where they are in the field of view, then you can remove them. And so they're going to be removing the positions of their reconnaissance satellites. But apart from that, there is just no possible way unless they are incredibly competent. But I think those run counter. So I don't know how you would do this. Very emotional response. Are you the alien filtering the data? Maybe. Um

Paul Wilson, the moon is tightly locked to the earth, but will the earth sun? Uh, no. And not within the lifespan of the solar system. So, you know, the moon is relatively close to the earth and so it's tidily locked. All the major moons are locked to their planets. So, the major moons of Jupiter are all locked to Jupiter. The major moons of Saturn are locked to Saturn, Neptune, etc. Right? Um, in theory, like even Mercury isn't tidily locked to the sun and Venus definitely isn't. Now, if there were no other planets in the solar system, then maybe Mercury would eventually lock to the sun or if Mercury was a lot closer to the sun, then it would tightly lock. But, you know, in the age of the solar system with all of the gravitational interactions, nothing can stably lock to the sun. Now that said over uh about a hundred billion years uh gravitational interactions are going to steal away the planets one by one from the solar system and eventually the sun will be left with one planet and that planet will be tidily locked will eventually probably tidly lock to the sun although the sun will have turned into a white dwarf by then but if that planet is close to the star then it would tidly lock to Uh, Nomad 77, is there any code already written for public use for those who don't code? Uh, I mean, probably. Uh, I've had a couple of people send me emails that they've followed my recommendation and you know they're programmers and they built a tool to access the API from say the entire data broker. But the you know if you aren't a coder then I would recommend that you just use chatbt or claude. So just go to Claude or Chad GPT and say can you help me create a uh web app that connects to Entur's data broker and filters out the V Rubin data for supernova that are brighter than magnitude 15 or go to I forget the one I think it's like think or something like that the one for the data broker for the solar system stuff and you could say show me all of the asteroids or the asteroids that are moving uh that are near-earth objects and so on. So, you know, I think you can, you know, if you don't know how to code, um there are probably, you know, people are already developing really cool portals, ways to visualize it. I'm probably going to do this at some point. Um but you can also just do this with Claude. And I keep meaning to this like I'll just sit down and like run a demo with Claude where I just make one of these things so you can see how it's done. Terry Hardway, do gravity waves move at the speed of light? Yes. This was one of the incredible sort of confirmations from the kilanova event. This was the collision between neutron stars seen almost 10 years ago. um where you know we detected the electromagnetic radiation from the colliding neutron stars and the gravitational waves at the same time sneeze. Um, and it was always assumed that gravity moved at the speed of light, but the time that the gravitational waves arrived perfectly matched up with the time that the electromagnetic radiation arrived from the uh from the kilanova over hundreds of millions of light years of distance. And so you know if there was any difference in their speed they would arrive at different times but they arrived precisely uh in relation to each other. So yep gravity moves at the speed of light. I mean not just gravitational waves just gravity moves at the speed of light like the sun is 8 minutes and 20 seconds light you know time away from us like light from the sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds on average to get to us. And so if the sun disappeared, the Earth would continue in its current orbit for eight and a half minutes before the LA it no longer felt the gravity from the sun and then it would just fly off into space. Casey re which planet will the sun be left with as a white dwarf? I don't think we know which specific one but essentially it'll take a hundred billion years for all of the planets to be stolen from the solar system. And

that process is also happening from all of the other star systems. So all of the star systems are stealing all of the planets and kicking them off into space. And so 100ish billion years from now, none of the star systems will have planets anymore. And all of the stars are being kicked out of the galaxies. And so in about I think it's like about a trillion years all of the galaxy the Milky Way will have lost all its stars and there will just be the super massive black hole. Maybe it's 100 trillion but it'll be some big number. Uh but say 100 trillion years from now there will be no galaxies. There will just be black holes and free floating stars that will have no planets. Uh James Don, any nutrinos detected from the Kilano event? I don't think so. Let me just I'm just going to double check. No, it was really far away. So, I'm gonna say absolutely not. No. Nope. Yeah. So, so no, the the kilnova was 500,000. Let me see how far away it was. GW170817. 144 million. Okay, so it was 144 million lighty years away and like detecting nutrinos. Astronomers have detected nutrinos from the supernova 1987a but that is like 168,000 lighty years away. So it is very close. Uh now we are detecting cosmic nutrinos all the time but we just don't know what the source is. To detect them from some specific event it would have to go off very close. You know, I've talked in previous weeks about the supernova early warning system where, you know, if something goes off, say, 500 light years away from us, we would detect the flash of nutrinos and to be able to orient to know where the supernova is going to happen. But, but farther than that, we can't predict it. You know, the problem with nutrinos, they just barely interact with anything. It's very rare. church discoraphy. My hero wants to know if aliens have souls. That's a that is a uh a different theological that is a very difficult theological question that you might want to talk to your priest about. I can't help you with that one. I'm sure someone's in like science fiction about that, you know. Do aliens have souls? I'm sure religious people talk about that. I don't know. Tell me in the chat. Let's find out. Let's just do Let's do a Let's just do a vote, a poll right now. So, here we go. Uh, okay. Here you go. So, I can't give you the answer, but the a the live stream crowd could give you the answer. So far, we're 50/50. 64% yes. 56. And so it's trending towards yes, aliens have souls. There you go. There's your answer. Uh 62% of the audience believe that extraterrestrials have souls. Nice. Um, Nat Chambers, what if I don't believe souls are a thing in general? Well, so, uh, then I would say no. You would answer no to that question. Um, Johnny Apples Seed. So, our destiny is the Buddhist void or created by aliens? Is that was that a question? H

um but right so that's sort of a follow on from what I just said. Um. Hm. Okay. So, all of the star systems are going to shed their planets through gravitational interactions. And then all of the galaxies are going to shed their stars. And so, the stars are going to be free floating. And they'll be dead, right? Dead stars. They'll be white dwarfs. And the planets will be free floating. And the stars black holes will be free floating. And all the black holes that could have merged with each other will other. And then all the other stars will be free floating. And then the expansion of the universe will be will just be continuing and the acceleration of that will be continuing. And so eventually all of the dead stars will be in enormous gulfs the size of the Buddhist void or bigger, right? That stars will be hundreds of millions of light years apart from each other, billions trillions of light years apart from each other, over the cosmic horizon. That no dead star will be able to see the light from any other dead star because they will all be over the cosmological horizon. So our destiny is the Buddhist void or the equivalent of the Buddhist void. Isn't that like depressing? Um, Terry Hardaway, did three atlas have any effect on objects in the Kyper belt? Could that have happened to a planet rotating on its side? Any other orbital anomalies? So, comet 3i Atlas was maybe 5 kilometers across, maybe 10 at the most. So, it was not a very big asteroid. And so it had a gravitational interaction on objects in the solar system, but almost none. Like it may have caused uh nanommeter changes in the orbits of objects in the solar system and then it was gone. Isn't it weird that we haven't heard anything about three Atlas anymore? Like I wonder what happened to all the people who were wondering whether three Atlas was an alien spaceship or not. Have they found something new to wonder about being an alien spaceship or have they just gone quiet? It's interesting. I wonder like I don't care enough to look but I wonder. Um but yeah, so you know Atlas was moving very fast and didn't have a lot of mass and there are plenty of asteroids with much more mass than three Atlas. It's just another rock moving through the solar system. Uh, Dooall, who has the high score? That's a good question. Let me see who has the high score right now. I think you're pretty high up. So, Ed Skeptic has eight questions answered. Dooall has seven. So, um, yeah, because you guys both ask a lot of questions. Um, uh, James Men new, is it on topic to ask Fraser about his thoughts on Project Hail Mary? Uh, so I haven't seen the movie yet. I've read the book, so I know what happens, but I haven't watched the movie yet. I'm going to go see the movie tomorrow. And so then I will give you my spoiler-free review of the movie. And then whenever the um statute of limitations is raised on giving spoilers to things, then I'll give you the spoilerfilled uh review of the movie. But I'm really looking forward to it. Like I hear it's great and every piece of this looks great. So I can't wait to go see it. Uh, James Yen, is there a score on questions answered? No, I can see the number of times that you have asked a question that I've answered. So, I've answered two of your questions. Now, I've answered three of your questions. Oh, Melinda Green, would you prefer the universe end? Uh, this that's a great

question. H, so I'm like obviously we won't be around for the future of the universe. we will earth beyond let's say a hundred years. Um I'm 54 now like what have I got left? 30 years maybe if I'm lucky. Um, and yet, you know, instead of us thinking about uh making sure that we eat healthy food and keeping track of our dental hygiene, we have these obsessive thoughts about the deep future of the universe. What'll happen if when the sun dies? What'll happen when all of the stars are plucked out of the Milky Way? uh what'll happen when every dead star is at the center of its own equivalent of the Buddhist void um and we have these sort of melancholy thoughts about that future. Um and so like what are your possibilities? The one possibility is that just goes on forever. That all of the white dwarfs eventually, you know, there's a there's one idea that white dwarfs can potentially just explode at the end of their lives. That they're essentially decaying in their cores and they're building up antimatter inside their cores and they just detonate is one possibility. But like take a 10 to the^ of like,00 years and then all of those white dwarfs would all die as one possibility. um or that protons can decay and so eventually all of the particles in a star will one by one decay away and the star will just melt away. But even if it doesn't, that Hawking radiation could cause white dwarfs to decay at like 10 to the power of a hundred years. Like a Google years from now, uh everything will decay because of Hawking radiation. In the same way that like not just black holes, but everything, anything made of mass will decay away into Hawking radiation. And so the entire universe will just be a soup of radiation. there will be no usable uh heat that anyone can do any work with. That's the heat death of the universe. The universe will be cold and dead and accelerating apart. Um but it won't be but it'll still be here as opposed to it ending. And so in the sort of unreasonable choices that we have to consider is that better is a cold dead universe better than a universe that ends that stops existing at some point into the future. I mean it is from our perspective there is no difference but yet we have this emotional connection. I would still prefer the universe, the cold, dead, forever expanding universe over the one that comes to a screeching halt and just ends that snaps out of existence at some point into the future. So yeah, even though both are uncomfortable to think about, uh I would still prefer the one that says, "Well, you're so there's still a chance, right? " That's the one that I prefer. Yeah. It's sort of it's a funny thing with our brains how we will have these emotional reactions to things which are purely theoretical. Instead of us focusing on the things you know that really matter we think about the you know the sort of horrible possibilities for the dark deep future. I don't know. There's some psychologist uh theory in here somewhere. Did you post your movies TV list yet? No. Okay, I'll do it right now. I'm still working on it. So you guys can So I've got 106 items. So here you go. Let's see how this works. Um Oh, that's going to be a mess. Okay, that's not going to work. And it's too Way too big. Okay. That's not going to work. Bummer. Okay. I will post it on uh I will post my movies list before next week. I promise.

Where are we at? Whoa. Four minutes. Okay. Uh, light dark. If you could go back to school to study astronomy, would you? I've thought about doing this if I can retire in 40 years. Uh, no. No, I totally wouldn't. Um, I would not be a very good astronomer. I am too uh curious and interested in too many things that you know I could have been an astronomer earlier on like I had originally gone to university for engineering and ended up working in computers instead and it just was more my speed than being an engineer because like I probably would have ended up in HVAC of designing heating cooling systems for buildings you know if I was lucky I'd end up with an aerospace engineer here, but even that I don't think I would be cut out for it. So, um, you know, I engage with astronomy at the level that I want to, the one that satisfies my curiosity, the one that allows me to talk to astronomers and ask all my questions, but I don't have to dig any deeper. I can flit around with my, you know, with my attention deficit disorder, just move on to the next thing as opposed to having to sit and actually do the deep work of writing papers and doing the research and analyzing the data and doing the statistics and all that kind of stuff and making incremental progress in some very specific field of astronomy, right? I get to um you know so I know I think I've found my exact career calling which is being a journalist right a journalist allows me to dip in understand the information enough so that I could explain it to somebody else and then if I'm still curious about it and I want to go to another level I can just go deeper and then I can go deeper and or I can just stop and switch to something entirely different and do um what did I do? I had just an incredible interview today. I can't wait for you to watch it about a researcher who works on rubble pile asteroids and so and he thinks that Phobos, which is one of the moons of Mars, is a rubble pile asteroid. And so there's this really weird um coincidence. You know, the Phobos is doomed. That in the next 50 million years or so, Phobos is going to crash into Mars and be destroyed. And isn't that weird? Isn't that a strange coincidence that we happen to be here at a time when Phobos is just within a few tens of millions of years of it crashing into Mars and being destroyed. Well, maybe it's not a coincidence. And so what he was proposing is that um that Phobos is a robile asteroid and as it gets really close to the Ro limit where it starts to get torn apart by the tidal forces around Mars, then boulders start to come off of Phobos and will orbit around Mars faster and slower than Phobos will. And these will come back around and start smashing back into Phobos. And that will start to kind of cause Phobos to break up. Parts of it will rain down on Mars, but raise their orbit again. And then mutual gravity will pull those parts back together and you'll end up with a new Phobos. So it might be that Phobos not this is not the first time it has been it is crossed the Ro limit and been destroyed. that in fact maybe this happens every 30 million years or so and has been happening continuously since Phobos formed around Mars in the first place. So it was a you know it was like this really cool idea and it and I was able to engage with this idea as well as the dart mission concepts we talk about and the Lucy mission and all this kind of stuff and it was just like so cool to get into that but now I'm done with it like that was great and now I get to move on. So, um, so no, and I think you don't need to wait to go back to school. Like, if you do want to study astronomy, you don't need to wait that you can go and pick out, you can grab an astronomy textbook. There's open courseware. There's free textbooks you can go, you can also just go down to the your local university and buy the astronomy textbook that people are learning with their astronomy class. And then you could just go through the textbook yourself. I've done this. I've gone I've grabbed an open courseware astronomy textbook and just gone through the whole textbook just to make sure that I had all the fundamentals in my brain. Um and then you could put this to practical use with your small telescope. You know, if you have a telescope that's capable of observing stuff, you can do this kind of stuff as well. V urban data, you can start to look through information. Any concept that you need to learn, look it up, you know, get chatpt to teach you how to do it.

You can do astronomy right now. You don't need anyone's permission and you don't need to necessarily go back to school now. you will if you want to be a full-time researcher and this is what you're paid to do. But don't wait to retire. Just start picking away at it now and you'll be amazed at how far you're able to go. All right, we've reached the end of this week's episode. Thank you everyone for hanging out with me. Thanks to the moderators. Uh I know we got Zapan and Darjon here for helping uh keep the peace. um new QA tomorrow and a lot of interviews. I think we've got six or seven interviews in the pipeline right now to catch up on. So, uh don't be surprised if we hit you with two or three or maybe even four interviews a week for the next couple of weeks. So, uh awesome. All right. Thanks everyone and I will see you all next week.