Close Encounters of the Hexagonal Kind

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores the challenges and opportunities in decarbonizing one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, ocean freight shipping. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. producer kalyani sexena how much do you love space and can you give it to me in some sort of space metric i love space as much as like four jupiters whoa but i am scared of space as much as 10 Neptunes. Wow. Okay. All right. I like it. So we are here to talk about a couple of space stories today, both of which have come like signals traveling the great expanse to us via Reddit. And one thing that I like about the space communities on Reddit is that they are vast also, just like space. There's a lot of them. and they're like, just like any good subreddit, they kind of develop their own space jokes, but they're also full of nerds and experts. Yeah, the sweet spot, the space sweet spot. Do you know the phrase, it's always the Pleiades? No, but it does make me think of like a Greek tragedy and I don't know if that's accurate. Well, you know, you're not far off on the Greek, right? Because, you know, a lot of our names for particular stars and star clusters and things like that are derived from Greek, right? And the things that we, you know, when we were first observing the stars, right? And Greek mythology and things like that. So the Pleiades is a group of stars. They're also sometimes called the seven sisters and they are visible with the naked eye in the sky. And so one of the things that I think is kind of funny and that I watched kind of develop on Reddit a few years ago now, is people kept going into the stargazing subreddit, r slash stargazing, and I think also the astronomy subreddit. And like with pictures that they had taken, like they'd seen it with their naked eye, they took a picture with their latest iPhone, and then they would like post it and be like, what is this? You know, just kind of like, you know, what is this thing? I see where this is going. The answer is that it's always the Pleiades. And it was this thing that was like at first it was like kind of annoying to people. It was like, dude, it's like, please like stop posting this thing. Because again, you can just see it. You can walk out and, you know, walk outside if you're in a place with low light pollution and you can see this star cluster. But if you're coming into a space where like everybody knows a little bit of something about something, they're like please come on come on come on come on so the thing that of course like that happened which i think is ultimately the always the the final destination of this kind of thing is there is now a subreddit called it's always pleiades really what i want to talk about today is just the level of nerdery and you're going to tell us a little bit about the level of conspiracy theories that connects to the various space subreddit the galaxy if you will of space subreddits yeah the the great space mysteries out there Exactly. And by the way, yes, I live in Western Massachusetts, which means, yes, listeners, I also know that the Pleiades is also the logo on every Subaru I sit behind as I drive around Western Mass. Okay. Recently, I came across a post that piqued my interest and a comment, a top comment that I really loved. It's from phys.org, P-H-Y-S.org, which is obviously a science website. The post has, in quotes, astronomers discover long period radio transient of unknown origin. Hmm. Okay. All right. Tell me more. This is essentially a regularly occurring radio signal. It occurs at regular intervals. And whenever we discover this kind of thing, I think to the lay person, that can feel like, oh, my God, is it aliens? Right? Right. Is someone trying to talk to us? Yeah. Definitely. Is someone trying to talk to us? And of course, we've sent out signals. And anyway, this is where people's heads go automatically. Spoiler alert. it's not aliens no i mean sorry to let you down i'm disappointed and reassured at the same time so um funnily enough the top comment is from a user who is actually an astronomer actually she's kind of famous on reddit her name is yvette sendis she's an assistant professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Oregon. She studies a bunch of stuff, like tidal disruption events, when stars, dying stars, get pulled into black holes. She looks at exoplanets, all these kinds of things that, as she says, I think, go bump in the night. But she has the top comment on this, like, oh my God, is it aliens post. And she always starts her comments or often starts her comments with, radio astronomer here. TLDR, still probably not aliens. She explains very clearly and concisely that there are lots of things in space that have a periodic signal. She says the most famous are pulsars, which are neutron stars that spin rapidly and have a radio beam leading us to see a radio, quote, pulse every few seconds. So, you know, she is pointing out that this latest signal that's been discovered, it has a stable pulse profile over a 36-minute period, which is definitely unusual. And while we don't know, you know, the authors of the latest paper don't know what's causing it yet, it could be an unusual white dwarf store, the core of a dead star, like what the sun will be someday. It could be a number of things. But long story short, it is not, probably, not aliens. Probably. Yeah. Well, it's good. She's a good scientist. She's caveating. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like any good scientist. She does say, finding unusual signals that repeat in weird timescales isn't that unusual and happens somewhat often in radio astronomy. She says her favorite example called, quote, the great galactic burper was observed to burst 10 minutes every 77 minutes and did so for several years, but hasn't been recorded since 2007. I just loved that detail, like burping, belching stars that just for some reason that cracks me up. Yeah, like the concept of a star doing what happens to me after I eat a bunch of dairy is like, it's crazy. I mean, we share that. So I did call Yvette up to make absolutely sure she didn't think it was aliens and also to get a very simple description of what radio astronomy is. It's not listening to things so much. It's really studying radio waves and radio waves are part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum of different kinds of radiation, right? You've got visible light. You've got X-rays. You've got gamma rays. And then you've got radio waves, which are below 100 gigahertz. And radio waves are really special because they can represent these kind of different physical processes that happen in space but are not observable in the other parts of the spectrum. So one example is the environment, for instance, around a black hole. This is a place where there's not a lot of light escaping. And we can't see radio waves. But if something happens that's really big, it creates shock waves. And then that makes electrons spin in a certain way. This is according to Yvette. And you're only really going to see that or be able to get data or information from that kind of thing or from around a black hole, for instance, with radio waves. Mm. Okay, that makes sense. The good, maybe bad news is that it's never aliens, and it's actually never been aliens since radio astronomy was invented. Yvette told me this, that she said the guy who invented radio astronomy like as soon as they started observing radio waves and radio information in this way people were like is it aliens And even from jump the first person who invented radio astronomy, you know, said it's not aliens. And that's been happening since it was invented over 50 years ago. Which is not that long of a span of time when you consider how long space has been around. So I don't think we should say never aliens because you never know. it's never aliens it's never aliens so far it's never so far exactly um but shout out to yvette and her lovely posting on reddit she uh goes on reddit by the name andromeda 321 so if you want to follow her or follow the work that she does on reddit you can find her that way and shout out to all the nerds and space lovers on the various space subreddits who are interested in this stuff and asking questions and doing the fun stuff. Whenever we're talking about the possibility of aliens, we can dip into the weird zone. And Kalyani, you have a story about that. It's been kind of like a long running theme, at least that I've seen on Reddit. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. What's up, Nords? I mean, nerds? Or do we in fact mean Nords? We do. If you're a nerd like us, you probably know about NordVPN. The company has 9,000 servers across 130 countries. 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You can send us a voice memo. Just say WhatsApp to us at endlessthread at WBUR.org. All right, we're back. Kalyani, you have yourself gone on an expedition like any brave astronaut. and you've come back with some information. So I did actually have to be quite brave for this story. I had to go back to geometry and learn about a very intriguing shape at Saturn's North Pole. And I'm going to send you some pictures now from NASA. Take a little look-see, if you will. Okay. So what sticks out to you from this picture? What's notable about the shape? Well, I'm sort of cheating because I asked you to look into this and I know from which you speak. And it is, of course, a hexagon. And I know that because the only math I was ever good at was geometry. So it was a hexagon. Yeah, so that shape that you're seeing, it looks a lot like a storm. It's right at the top of the planet. And NASA has described this hexagon as a hurricane-like vortex. And to be clear here, from what I understand, it's not quite like our hurricanes, which rely on water and heat. So for the purposes of this conversation, it's safest to call the hexagon a vortex. And it's huge, by the way, twice the width of Earth. And the eye itself is about 50 times larger than a typical hurricane on this planet. So like you're saying like you're saying just like lock the windows or whatever? Lock the windows. You got to get some like real industrial strength locks. Fill the bathtub? Yep. Because there's some crazy winds going on here. Like the hex has wind speeds double that of Earth's strongest cyclones. So I don't know if your windows are going to do the job. Yeah. So you're saying the candles and the playing cards that I have set aside and the snacks is not going to protect me? They're going to be vanquished by the winds of Saturn's hexagon. And we've actually known about this hexagon for a pretty long time. I mean, at least like a long time in human years. Saturn's hexagon was first spotted by both of the Voyager spacecrafts in the early 1980s. We step out of our solar system into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. When the Voyager spacecrafts flew by Saturn, they couldn't get a great picture of the hexagon. But it did sort of capture our first encounter with the Saturn hexagon, if you will. Close encounters of the hex kind. Exactly. So it's pretty odd, actually, because normally when you think of a vortex, you know, like a cyclone, a hurricane, you're thinking of a circular curved shape, a little curvy storm. You don't usually see straight lines or a hexagon. And that's got people online tingling with curiosity. I mean, who doesn't love a space mystery? And I want to flag one Reddit comment that really speaks to that, which is someone who wrote, Why is it a hexagon in the first place? I'm fine with it. I'm not judging it. I respect it. But I'm curious. Spoken like a true Reddit commenter who's absolutely terrified of being piled on. You don't know, but it's actually a source of a lot of mystery. People online are really interested in where this came from, and it's sparking a little bit of conspiracy. I would say there's like two camps with the conspiracy. There's people who are having fun, and I want to talk about those people first, because we've got to have a little fun before we have a little... Not fun? Not fun, yes. Before we have some bad times. Here's some comments from a Reddit post that really made me laugh. One of them says, astronomers need to look out for the giant Allen wrench that was used to assemble our solar system. Someone else has said, it's most likely bees, right? Which I actually think makes the most amount of sense, because if you look at honeycombs, they're kind of like hexagonical, right? All right, pause. It's Kalyani from after we recorded this episode with a note to my past self. Past Kalyani, the word you are looking for here is hexagonal. I know that sounds like a pompous British aristocrat, but it is right. I did a lot of reading of that word before recording, but not a lot of saying it out loud. So you will hear this pronunciation a few more times in this episode. Trust me, I know. Hexagonal. Okay, back to the past. Yeah, that's right. It does vaguely resemble a beehive So anyways aside from the jokes and fun that people are having with the hexagon there also a contingent of people who take this pretty seriously Oh, boy. Yeah. We're going to need a few deep breaths before we get into some of this. There's some pretty detailed conspiracy theories. In my research, the main one that came up was a sect of people who believe in something called Saturn's black cube. Have you ever heard of that? You know, I feel like I've been just very slightly down this rabbit hole and then immediately forgot everything that I ever learned, maybe for the best. But my oxygen is flowing through my spacesuit. It's okay. I'll be okay. Let's go. So let me do a little of explaining on what this is. I need to issue a caveat here, which is that, like, I don't have a mind for conspiracy. I'm not very good at it. So I found sort of breadcrumbs is how I would describe my journey down this conspiracy rabbit hole. And it started with a post on Reddit from about seven years ago that was called Saturn and Saturn Black Cube Symbolism. It was super, super long. I have to be real, I skimmed a lot of it. But here's the section that I found interesting, and I'm going to read a little bit from it. The Saturn Black Cube is derived from the shape one can superimpose upon an image of the hexagonal storm that rages continuously on Saturn's North Pole. Theorists submit that pretty much anything cube-shaped in mainstream society is a secret devotion to Saturn. And then they give a few examples here. The black cube at Mecca, the Jewish tefillin, various images in pop culture and advertising. Additionally, they believe that Saturn is satanic, an alien slash reptilian, and represents Illuminati and NWO-esque machinations at play. Is it machinations? Machinations? How do you say that word? I don't know. It's kind of like a Uranus Uranus situation, to be honest. Exactly. I don't know what NWO is, but I'm sure it's a layer of something. I'll tell you what. It's a new world order. Oh, OK. And I believe it refers to conspiracy theorists who think that like the globalists, the globalists are trying to take over. OK, we're going to get there. From there, I started looking a little further, and then I found my way to a subreddit called r slash Saturn Storm Cube. This is how it describes itself on Reddit. The first line is, light has no fellowship with darkness. We are committed to exposing the global occult agenda. All related aspects are covered, such as God, the concealed primeval cube, alien entities, the day of the storm, the time matrix, agendas of ancient and modern secret fraternal orders, and secret messages contained within an ancient art and modern media. Um. Yeah. The Saturn Cube—we're not even at the kicker yet. The Saturn Storm Cube theory is the theory that a secret cult in devotion to Saturnian power controls the world governments, religions, banks, societies, etc. If only all these theorists had gone through the part of sixth grade where you had to, where like the part of, the part of school was like basically like, what you need to do is like the first sentence of the paragraph has to actually then be explained by the rest of the paragraph. These people are like the kitchen sink energy of these people is completely out of control. Guys, get an editor. Come on. Get an editor, get a focus group. So the subreddit was founded in 2021. But as far as I can tell, there's still new folks that are finding their way to this conspiracy. Here's one post that I found from three days ago. The title says, starting to see the cube everywhere, looking for real sources. The person says, I really want to understand the bigger picture of the concealed primeval cube without getting lost in too much noise. Thanks for any help. Is how I feel about that. To me, there's a couple of things that are mentionable here. Number one, like when I hear lizard people in cabal, obviously alarm bells go off for me because of the nature of some of these conspiracy theories. but also like I'm down with like a certain level of mysticism like if you want to tell me about like ancient civilizations and the possibility of aliens like I'll get down with you and watch some ancient aliens or whatever but like I'm not going to take that stuff seriously without without actual like scientific evidence do you know what I mean people really start to lose it when they start to just like lean into symbolism so hard that it just becomes this like extremely chaotic energy. And also they just like lean hard always in the same direction, which is there's the secret guys who are going to get there controlling everything, you know, and it's just, I just, I don't buy it. Humanity's too messy for that. Yeah, and I'm glad that you flagged that because that's like kind of the main thing that I really wanted to talk about, which is that this Saturn's Black Cube conspiracy theory is treading really familiar conspiracy theory ground. Like, there is some very clear anti-Semitic dog whistles, tropes there, the use of the word cabal, the idea that there's a secret group of people controlling banks and society. Like, those are really dangerous and harmful tropes that have been used to demonize Jewish people through, you know, through history. Yep. I think it's pretty important that we say that and we point that out. And I also think that, like, you commented on this earlier, but this is like a mishmash of a ton of different conspiracy theories. We've got a little bit of the Illuminati, a little bit of aliens, like there's just like a real... Kitchen sink. It's real kitchen sink vibes. Kitchen sink, yeah. Like a big stew. Yeah, it's a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of ideas. Yeah. For me, it was so odd to go from, oh, this is a cool feature on Saturn to, oh my God, we're at harmful conspiracy theories in like three to five clicks. You know, it didn't take me long to get there. And that was stunning. Yeah. And it's, you know, on this subreddit, I was looking through the rules and the community guidelines. And one of the guidelines says certain posts directly calling out a certain group are removed to safeguard the sub from removal. And then they go into depth saying, Wow. So they're like walking right up to the line of hate speech, but not putting a toe over the line because they know they'll get bonked by the Reddit admins. There is also a level... When you get into this kind of subreddit, we should also acknowledge a level of shitposting and silliness that happens where it's like there are people just trying to be edgelords and trying to post jokes and stuff like that. But it's still like often kind of like teeters into this zone where it's like, you're just being a jerk, man. So conspiracies aside, I actually do want to talk briefly about some of the actual science going on here. Scientists are pretty interested and intrigued by it, too. It actually took NASA until 2006 to get a really good picture of the hexagon, which shout out to the Cassini space probe, which got us those pictures. It's unfortunately burned up in Saturn's atmosphere on purpose in 2017. R.I.P. Cassini space probe. You did your big one. R.I.P. Cassini. Scientists were really taken aback when they got these visuals. In a 2007 statement from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Kevin Baines who was an atmospheric expert and a member of the Cassini team said we never seen anything like this on any other planet But experts do have some explanations that are based in science that they've come up with in the years since we've gotten these pictures. I want to start with a clip of a 2014 New York Times video, which features former cosmic affairs correspondent Dennis Overby. The hexagon is a narrow jet stream that circles the North Pole. researchers think that friction with the slower clouds on either side of it creates eddies mini storms that push the jet stream into a wave-like shape as it goes around by spinning columns of water at different speeds scientists have been able to reproduce the six sided pattern in the lab so that's kind of a basic explainer i'm liking it i like the prayer Bells as well. That's nice. Yeah. And there's one other piece of information to consider here, which I got from NASA and I'm going to do my best to explain, which is that we talked a little bit earlier how unusual it is on Earth to see a hexagonal cyclone or hurricane. You just you wouldn't see that. And what NASA says is that Saturn's conditions are simply different than Earth's, which makes sense. They're different planets. So Earth is not a uniform planet. It has water, land, ice, snow, all of those different things cool and heat at different rates. Earth also has mountains which go up into the sky and disturb the atmospheric flow. So that's like things that Earth has that Saturn does not. So essentially, Saturn has like less things in its atmosphere that would disrupt the formation of that kind of hexagonal shape is another explanation that NASA put forward at one point. I mean, also way more likely than Satanist lizard people or whatever it is. Like, I just, all of these things, and they're amazing in and of themselves. Like, these different theories from actual scientists are really cool. It's really cool to think about this different surfaces of planets and how that, you know, how that would contribute to the way that weather moves on a planet. That's fascinating to me. I also just think like the only reason that we know there is even a difference between a cube or a square and a hexagon is like that stuff surrounds us in nature. So I find it weird that we like would see a simple shape that like already exists in nature around us, which is even the reason that we have a name for a shape like hexagon. And then we like, and we're like, oh, no, no, man, on Saturn, it's weird. It's weird on Saturn. It doesn't make sense on Saturn. It's weird. And like, that's what good science is, I think, in a lot of ways, is like exploring these things that capture our attention. But pretending that it's like some sort of mystical, magical thing, like I just, I just don't get it, man. There are still two small little mysteries here for scientists to figure out, which is that they're not quite sure why Saturn has a hexagonal jet stream only in the north and not in the south. And they also, and this is kind of the kicker, they don't know why this hexagon has been going on for so long. Like after all these decades, it was first spotted in the 1980s. And this storm, if it is a storm or a vortex, has been holding the same shape for decades. That's pretty, that's pretty striking. But they don't know why yet. But I'm sure we'll figure it out at some point, maybe. Yeah, as soon as we find that hex wrench, we'll know the answer. As soon as we find that hex wrench. Or a little Cassini that we can send out there. We need another couple of little Cassinis. We need a little more Cassini in this, in this solar system. Well, I promised that I was going to play you a little bit more audio just for some fun, which is that before Cassini was plunged into Saturn's atmosphere, it actually did gather radio emissions from the planet, which NASA converted into sound. you know what it sounds like a hexagon it's a real hexagon sound yes and i mean it gives me it gives me a little shiver of my spine it sounds like what space should sound like and it also triggers a little bit of that like primal fear about like oh we are so small in such a big vacuum Agreed. It's a lovely sound. It's a wild sound. So Kolyani, before we go, I want to return briefly to our friend from the top, Yvette Sendis, the radio astronomer, also known as you slash Andromeda321 on Reddit. But believe it or not, she has commented on some of the most popular posts and a recent post about Saturn's North Pole. Wow, full circle. Tell me more. Full hexagon. Full hexagon. Full hex. Full hex. So she did recently comment just days ago, and she started her comment. Can you guess how she started her comment? I'm a radio astronomer, real-life radio astronomer. Astronomer here. Oh, there we go. Short, concise. She says, this makes it sound more mysterious than it really is in talking about the fact that we can't explain why this storm is hexagonal. She says, it has something to do with turbulent flow in the gas giant atmosphere, of which there are a lot for all gas giants. And there are multiple detailed simulations and experiments that can give you a hexagon shape at the end of it. But we have no good way of distinguishing between them to find the correct one at this time. Source, I teach a solar system class sometimes. Ooh, well, that's basically what we unpacked a little earlier. And I love that, like, anytime there's a question about gas, like space gas, she's on the scene. She's got the answer. She's on the scene, man. and ancient alien Paul Vykus. The rest of our team is Amory Sievertson, Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernadeau, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Samatha Joshi. Endless Thread is a podcast about the blurred lines between online communities and the great galactic burper. Have an online space mystery, untold history, or other wild story from the internet? Email us at endlessthread at WBUR.org. Thank you. of Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech on whether the ocean freight shipping industry can reach net zero emissions by 2050. It's technically feasible. That's a very simple question. Will we get there? Will it all be deployed? We're going to see. I just want to add in there that, yeah, we've talked a lot about the difficulties for shipping in getting to net zero. This is not the only thing that's going to be going on. Aviation is seeking to do the same thing, maybe even faster, and the other uses of petroleum are all transitioning, you may think, and in some ways that makes the problem even bigger. There are other ways that it makes it easier. Some of the fuels that are used for shipping are very similar to those used for aviation. So as infrastructure gets built out, shipping can benefit. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Morotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.