How can you wrap your head around the true scale of the universe? Will humanity ever colonize gas giant moons? Can ISS missions compare to future Mars missions? And in Q&A Plus, did James Wem produce any good science papers? All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show, your questions, my answers, as always wherever you are, across my channel. If a question pops in your brain, just write it down, look at them up, and I will answer them here. Alright, let's get into the questions. Chiroptol. Fraser, I've heard you mention that you see humanity inhabiting the entirety of the solar system to see us colonizing gas and ice giant moons or more interplanetary space stations. Yeah, people always think that I'm like Mr. Buzzkill about human space exploration and you know, clearly someone was listening, which is that while I may feel that our short term space exploration plans are going to be less adventurous and less exciting, then science fiction had led us to believe long term, we're going to completely dominate this solar system. It feels kind of inevitable and and that inevitability just comes from our sort of continual growth of our economy. You can look at the growth of the economy for thousands of years and it is this exponential growth that just keeps going. Now we're growing at say 2 percent per year and you chart that forward hundreds of years and that's more than planet Earth can support, which means like either we go extinct, we flat line our growth or we go to space and I prefer space and you just keep going. And within a couple of hundred years, we are using a large amount of all of the materials in the solar system. Now what exact form that's going to take? We don't know. Hopefully we'll have the wisdom to do that in a way that is, you know, of ethical. But you know, look at how we treat planet Earth, right? Like we just sort of move into a space and we just take over and we just keep taking over and taking over and getting bigger and bigger. You know, that will probably do to space too. So like what exact form is that going to take? We don't know the inner solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, the asteroids, they have the metal, the rock, the outer solar system, the moons of Jupiter, the comets, the Trojans. They have the ice and all of the volatiles and all of these are required for us to be able to continue on in our economic growth. And so like what exact form will that take? You know, I always say that gravity wells are for suckers. And so my preference is that we don't go back down into gravity wells that we do build those giant space stations, those O'Neill cylinders. I think that's a sort of cooler idea. Then we can kind of leave the planets and have them be wildernesses that we can go down and visit. There are a lot of health concerns about trying to live long term on a place like Mars or even the moon. We don't know what lower gravity is going to do to the human body over long periods of time. One possibility is it's fine. You know, we can go down to one third gravity on Mars, one sixth gravity on the moon, and that's enough gravity for the human body to function properly for an entire human lifetime. But another possibility is that it's not that you can't gestate babies, you can't grow them to term, you can't have your bones form properly in that lower gravity that anybody tries to live on Mars for any long period of time is going to experience tremendous health effects. And so instead you go to space where you just rotate your space station and you get to dial in the exact gravity that you want. So who knows what form it's going to take. But I think seeing the rise of technology, it seems amazing. It seems like it's just going faster and faster and faster. And when you take an sort of a exponential perspective on the growth and the speed of how things are growing, then things make more sense. They're still baffling, but they make a little more sense. And so you can kind of take that idea of exponential thinking and think about the future of human society and get some glimpses of the directions that you think humanity is going to go in. The specifics are a mystery. Nick Stokes, what is one of your favorite ways of imagining or contemplating the scale in the universe? It's really difficult to wrap your mind around the universe. And part of that problem is that we know that when we're looking out into space, we're looking back in time, that we are seeing the moons that looked a second ago. When we look at the sun, it's eight minutes ago. We're looking at Andromeda. Two and a half million years ago. And when you're looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation, it is 13.8 billion years ago. And so it's not what's there now. And it's not even where there is now that we're seeing the light that was given off back then. But now that stuff has moved farther away. So, for example, the light that left the cosmic microwave background radiation was 13.8 billion years. But now that actual location of that place that gave off that light is about 46 and a half billion light years away. What we see is how the universe looked when it was 380,000 years after the Big Bang. But those places have continued to evolve in the same way that we have here in the Milky Way. What looks like just this diffuse red glow shortly after the universe has evolved into probably a galaxy. That is the same age in maturity as we are. And it is 46 and a half billion light years away from us. And so it's really hard to kind of contemplate the size of the universe and not have your brain switch into one of those modes. Right. Because like all of the pictures that we see when we look at pictures taken by James Webb, we are seeing galaxies as they looked 800 million years after the Big Bang, 500 million years after the Big Bang. We're not seeing them as they look today. When we see pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, we're seeing the Sombrero galaxy. OK, now we're tens of millions of light years away. So tens of millions of years ago. It's kind of the same. But the farther away you look, then the more this stuff is now a snapshot of the past. And when we think about the universe, the observable universe, it is sort of like it's a universe of time because the universe has had 13.8 billion years to send these photons to your eyeballs. And it's not how the universe truly looks. So you sort of for me anyway, I don't know how it works for you, but my mind just kind of goes flips back and forth. I think about the universe sequentially in time. And then I think about the universe as it must look today. And I can't hold those two thoughts in my brain at the same time. But both cause wonder, right? Both cause amazement in my mind, probably more so that we're looking back in time. You know, I could sort of imagine a galaxy like the Milky Way, but just think about events unfolding that we are looking at. We're seeing slices of the cosmos back in time that blows my mind. And I have trouble holding it together in my head without just kind of going, whoa. So, you know, you ask, what's my favorite way? Like, I don't even know if it's possible to not just have your brain break when you try to think about this kind of thing. It's time to shout out all the new five dollar patrons at above. Don Carr, Eric Rundquist, Harry Hodge, Tom Clark, Garrett Carver, Jonathan Poe, Rhythm Chameleon, Josh Brandt, Mari and Bryce. Join the club at Patreon and a ComSush Universe today. Santiago T-75. Frisor, isn't it a bit disappointing to know that our eyes would not really see space the way we see those beautiful pictures if we were out there? Yeah. Like, whenever you watch a science fiction television show, think about Star Trek or the Orville or really any science fiction show, they're going to show pictures of nebulae around the spacecraft. And the reality is that that's not what you would see, that even if you were right next to a giant nebula, the Orion Nebula or something like that, you wouldn't see the colors and all of that. That the only way you could see that would be with a long exposure. Our eyeballs just can't store enough photons to be able to give that view. And also, as you get closer to one of these objects, they fill up more and more of your field of view. And so the kind of average amount of light that's coming from it is averaged out across that entire size. And like a good example is that we are embedded within the Milky Way, that we could not be closer to the Milky Way, right, that we're in it. And it is this giant band of scars, you know, that is thousands of light years wide that we are embedded within. And we are staring from the from the the disk of the Milky Way towards the center of the Milky Way. And yet, if you go outside, even in the purest, darkest skies, what do you see? You know, it kind of looks like a cloud, right? You could sort of tell you wouldn't see this beautiful grand spiral galaxy sweeping out in front of you. Andromeda is huge in the sky. It is about nine times as big as the full moon. Think about the size of the full moon. Andromeda is like imagine a square that is nine times the size of the full moon. It's right there in the sky. And you don't know where to find it. Like, like I know where to find Andromeda because I've looked at it with the telescope. I can go outside and I can I can spot its location and I can point it out to someone. I was like, you know, in perfectly dark skies, like, oh, look at that fuzzy bit over there. That's Andromeda. Like, no, yeah, that's that's it right there. And then you look through binoculars and you see like a bigger fuzzy bit. You look through a nice telescope and you see an even better fuzzy bit. But it's only when you start taking a picture when the photons can collect over minutes or hours do those beautiful nebulae pictures actually start to come together. And so science fiction has told you a lie. You would not see that. And so you don't need to wish you could go and fly your spacecraft out to the edge of the Orion nebula. So you could stare out into the vast, beautiful, purple clouds of the Orion nebula. It would be disappointing only when you turned the, you know, took your camera out and started capturing long exposure pictures. Would you see something that would make you really impressed? And it would look very impressive once you had the camera going. It is heartbreaking to tell that terrible truth. The film are six month missions on the ISS simulations of Mars missions. Not exactly. You know, the missions to the International Space Station are science missions to better understand how to live and work in weightlessness in the low Earth orbit environment. Going to Mars brings on a whole bunch of additional challenges and additional risks and so on. But there is really valuable things that are being learned about the International Space Station. When you think about some of the technologies that are being done on the station, you've got launching from the Earth in a rocket, docking to spacecraft in orbit, moving around in weightlessness, putting on spacesuits, going out and and working on your spacecraft, reclaiming oxygen and water, handling waste, being able to do science experiments when you're in a difficult environment, being trapped in a tin can with a bunch of other people who may get on your nerves, dealing with the issues of having a medical emergency, which is the thing we learned about this week. So those are all generally applicable to spaceflight. And once you go to other places, let's say you want to go to the moon, then there are additional challenges that you have to layer on top of that. You have one sixth gravity on the moon so that you no longer weightless. But is, you know, what are the challenges of trying to live and work and walk around in that one sixth gravity? When you look at the videos of the astronauts on the moon, they were falling around. It was pretty hilarious tripping. They're having a hard time walking and eating, drinking like it's all going to get weird when you're in that one sixth gravity. You're no longer protected by the Earth's magnetosphere when you're on the moon. And so you have to have better protection from radiation. You're three days away. And so if you want to come home, you have an emergency and you've got to come home. You're still looking at minimum, you know, three days to a week to be able to go from the moon back to Earth before you can splash down. The speeds that you are reentering the Earth's atmosphere when you come back from the moon are much higher because you're falling into this gravity well from farther up. On the moon, you have the long day, night cycle where you've got 14 days sun, 14 days darkness. You have to sort of manage that the time period. Once you go to Mars, then there are all kinds of additional challenges. So now you've got the six to nine month journey to Mars where you're in wait lists. You don't get that gravity and you're also experiencing that full radiation of being in space. You have to definitely deal with reclaiming your oxygen and your water. You're dealing with being able to generate your energy while you're getting farther and farther away from the sun. So there's all kinds of challenges. If there's a medical emergency, that's just too bad. You are on your own, right? Because you are you are on a trajectory that's going to got to take you past Mars first before you can come home. Once you get to Mars, then you've got to do the the descent and landing onto the surface of Mars. Now you're dealing with one third gravity, which maybe is easier to work with. But still, you're still exposed to pretty much the same amount of radiation on the surface of Mars. Now you've got. Oh, and I didn't even mention the regolith on the moon. You've also got the regular on Mars that is getting into everything covering your solar panels. It's got to be cleaned up on a regular basis. You've got the toxic perchlorates in the regular that you have to to deal with. There are a lot of challenges, all of the food you need to have brought all of the food and all of the water and all of the air. Although you can make some of that stuff locally on on Mars once you get there. But you're going to have to have brought all that stuff with you and you have to be able to manage it while you're on the surface of Mars. So so that is a lot of the challenges. So I don't think, you know, like NASA doesn't see the International Space Station as this direct analog to Mars, where they're training people to live on Mars. It's just that there are lots and lots of skills that are that we will learn about being in space that will be applicable to when we go to the moon and when we go to Mars. But there are these Mars analogs. So several countries, the US and China do analogs where they put researchers, volunteers into a simulated Mars environment. Obviously, you're still going to have Earth gravity. Obviously, you're still going to have the oxygen of the Earth. It's very easy to deliver food and water to you. But they try to simulate the experience of being on Mars. They have to put on their space suit when they want to leave their base. They have a communications delay, depending on the distance from Earth to Mars. You know, it can be up to like 20 minutes for one way communication to Mars. And so they simulate all of that and try to see what are the breaking points, what technology fails, what what challenges do the simulated astronauts encounter as they're trying to to go about their business on simulated Mars? And it's a great idea. And then the Chinese have a project called the Lunar Palace. It's kind of like Biosphere 2, where they can seal a bunch of people up in an environment and then test to see how their oxygen lasts, how their food lasts and so on. And can they grow plants and get by in a fully cyclic environment? So there are there is some work being done, but not as much as I would like. Like it would be it would be great if the Biosphere 2, for example, and I always bring this up, which is Biosphere 2 was this amazing experiment in Arizona where they built this self-contained habitat where it was sealed off from the environment. And then a bunch of people will go and live inside of it. And they grow their own food, they breathe their air and they'd have animals and that they would would find out whether or not it's even possible to do we know enough to run an environment? And, you know, in the end, there was a problem with the concrete and it was sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere as it cured. And so the bionauts, I forget where they were called, were running out of oxygen. And so they had to give them more air and they covered it up. They didn't tell people what was going on. And it was kind of humiliating and it shut down the whole experiment. And now it's kind of an embarrassment. But the facility is still there. I've been to it and checked it out. It is awesome. And they're still running science experiments in the Biosphere 2. But I think, you know, if we're going to want some kind of long term presence on the Moon or Mars, we need more of these kinds of experiments. So we need to do proper closed loop environments where we really dial in being able. And ideally, we do this in space, a closed loop environment in space where we are we are not having to send water and oxygen and food to the astronauts on board the station, that they are growing everything and they understand what it takes to be able to live in this closed loop environment. That's what it's going to take. And very little of that work is being done. Lots of people are talking about the big rockets that they want to send to Mars. Very little energy is being spent talking about all of the vast array of technologies that are going to be required to keep people alive on Mars when they get there. And that should tell you that the plans aren't very serious yet or that people are just going to die by the droves. Right. You take 100 people to Mars and you open up the door and just let them go outside. And then within a couple of hours, they're all dead. So no, you've got to be serious about keeping everybody alive on Mars. And so you'll know that we're in that direction when you see really impressive closed loop environments developed and run for years on end. On the surface of the earth in low Earth orbit and on the moon. That's what it's going to take before we know that we're ready to go live on Mars. And not just YOLO. Derek Dibble, have any good papers been released from James Webb? I would say that there is a paper to every day that is using James Webb data in some way. And so like, are they good papers? I mean, we report on the news coming from James Webb almost every week. Exoplanet atmospheres that have been studied. Galaxy scene at the beginning of time. Surveys of large galaxies doing imaging of supernova after they've gone off. Exploring the afterglow of Kilanova observing objects within the solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Ganymede. That telescope is is running white hot and is generally fulfilling multiple projects every single day. You can actually go and see what James Webb is is observing right now. And you can see the schedule of all of the things that they're going to be observing. And in general, they're fulfilling sometimes five plus 10 plus science objectives every single day. You get 40 minutes with James Webb and then James Webb is moving on to the next target. And then the next people are getting their amount of time with James Webb. And there are several thousand. I forget the total number, but there are thousands and thousands of proposals that have been approved each year to use James Webb. And then they take all of these papers, all these proposals. They schedule them all out so that web spends the minimum amount of time slewing around to look at different targets. And they just run that telescope as quickly as they can. So yeah, James Webb is is producing a mountain of good papers. And at this point, I would say it feels like five percent, 10 percent. Like when I'm looking through all of the papers on archive, which is like the pre press for papers. Yeah, I see probably a dozen papers that reference James Webb. Every day. So it's a very busy telescope. All right, those are all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you, everyone, who put your questions into the YouTube comments. Everybody who joined me for the live show. We were off last week until there was a delay, but we're going to be back until the next live show will be Monday at five p.m. Pacific time. Now, I'm going to sort of tackle a question that was asked about how we structured the interviews. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Padrelli, Bairdley Griffin, Brian Bodie, Caroline Sharkhawk, and Commander Bailock, Darkfinger, David Gilton, David Matz, Evan Dotpro, James Clark, Janice Smith, Jeremy Matter, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smith, Michael Purcell, Nord Space, one sir friend, was Dorg. Please follow mine if you VBrick694, Ray Keidoo, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Steve Finlay, Mollye, Team 49, Teleships Canada, Vlad Chippell, and Wolfgang Klotz, and Zeldemore Galactic Defender, who support us at the master of the universe level. And all our patrons, all your support means the universe to us. So I got this comment from Music Cassette. The topic is very interesting, but the way the interview turned out was a bit hard to follow. I think we need a structured summary. So with the interviews, I am sort of giving you the audience a peek behind the scenes of what it's like to watch a journalist do their work. That up until a couple of years ago, I still conducted all of these interviews. I just never made that process public. I would reach out to a researcher, I would ask them a bunch of questions about their work, and then I would use that to inform videos that I was working on or stories that we're working on for the universe today. And we still do that, right? I am still, in many cases, breaking news by doing these interviews, talking to people, then pass along this information to the writers who are working on some of these stories. But I'm also live streaming or recording these interviews, and then you get to watch them. And in many cases, we're just kind of following my curiosity about the subject. I don't really know where the story is going to go. I don't know what the plan is beyond, you know, I have parts of my knowledge that I know are incomplete, and I'm trying to fill those pieces gaps in my knowledge. And it's a very instinctive process, right, that I sort of identify the terrain, where the gaps in my knowledge, ask the expert those questions and get the answers in their, sort of in their words. But it would be interesting to me to know how these interviews could be more useful to you as an audience. In this case, music, because I was saying, well, you know, could we have some sort of a structured summary? You know, obviously, these are the kinds of things that we can generate. And sometimes AI bots will drop into the comments and provide a structured summary already. But would that be useful, some kind of summary of what was discussed? Follow on resources? Like, my hope is that you will, like me, have this curiosity about some subject, you will trust that I will ask the kinds of questions that will give you more information, and you'll walk away with a better understanding of that subject matter. You're not then going to be assigning stories to your writers in the way that I will, but the hope is that you'll be able to to follow along better. So I would just love to know what could we do that would make the interviews more valuable to you as an audience, while still fulfilling its primary purpose of allowing us to do journalism for the universe today. So let me know. All right, we'll see you next time.
