Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseListener questions about alien tech, the Earth's orbit and its future!
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Hey, Daniel, what's your favorite part of living in California?
Oh?
That's easy, is it?
The frozen yogurt, the celebrity sightings, every time you look in.
The mirror, that's all great stuff. But no, it's the sunshine.
The sunshine makes you happy.
Yeah. I've spent enough time in cold and dark places to appreciate when I moved here how happy the sunshine makes me.
Mm Are you saying photons are like little bundles of joy?
Yes, they are. They're like little quantized packets of happiness. That's my quantum happiness theory.
I'm not so sure about your theory. Does that mean that every time you put on sunscreen you're blocking out happiness?
Yeah? Or maybe nobody can be happy at night? I guess maybe I should stick to physics.
Hi am hororhandmade cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And even though photons make me more massive, I do appreciate them. I thought they made you more light that too, and nicely tanned and some burnies and a little red happy red and light and massive and massive. Exactly, it's a little appreciated that every time you're heated up by the sun, you also get a tiny bit heavier.
Yep, because light has energy.
That's right, and mass is reflection of energy. So as you get hotter, you get heavier.
That's a massive revelation.
That's right. You want to get hot, just soak up the rays.
But welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we make light of the heaviest things in the universe, the deepest questions, the craziest concepts, the biggest mysteries in the universe. We ask questions about the very beginning of time, then nature of time, how time will end, how this entire bonkers universe comes together and makes sense, or whether it does. We like to think about anything and everything out there in the universe because our goal is to take the entire universe, slice it up into quantized packets of understanding and shoot them at you.
Yeah, because it is a massive universe full of interesting and cool phenomenon that we like to illuminate you on so that you can share it with the rest of the universe.
And it's amazing to me sometimes that it just sort of works, like there are laws of physics out there apparently describing and defining what's supposed to happen in the universe, and it just sort of seems plugging along. Nothing ever, like breaks down.
You're surprised the universe works, like, like, what's it good? It do not work well.
No program that I've ever written has ever worked the first time. But you know, hey, the universe there's no bugs to.
Report so far right right, Maybe you should stick to physics, not programming.
I should stay away from universe design.
Yeah, thankfully you weren't in charge of programming the universe.
Whoever did it did an incredible job because it seems so remarkably self consistent. You know, every time we discover something we think doesn't make sense, we can always, in the end find an explanation for it, a parsimonious and beautiful description of the underlying mathematics. So it's fascinating to me that there are these mathematical stories that underpin the universe and are understandable by our tiny human brains.
Maybe we're not the first version of the universe, Like, maybe we're you know, Universe three point zero or Universe Leopard or universe, you know, n t or Vista.
I see. So that suggests there are future improved versions of the universe to come, right, What are those going to feature? You know, like more taco trucks in every corner.
We have to wait for the update, and of course it's going to come at the worst time. You're like on a deadline and suddenly the universe is going to be like, hold please, while we update your universe.
How big is that update? Ten to the ninety bytes or something like that.
Might be waiting for a while looking at that little hour turning and turning. But yeah, it is a pretty wonderful universe, full of interesting things to discover, and full of questions to ask about it, and full of interesting answers to get from those questions that eliminate us to how everything works.
Yeah, And part of the process of physics is taking our understanding the way we think the universe works and asking questions about it and wondering like, hmmm, does this make sense? I think that this should happen. Why does that happen? Instead? That's the process of doing physics. That's what we do on this show is to try to apply our knowledge of physics to the crazy bonkers universe that's out there. And that's what we love to encourage in our listeners to take your understanding of physics and look at the universe around you and wonder, do I understand how this all fits together?
Yeah, because it's not just physicists and working scientists who ask questions. Everybody has questions. Everyone from little kids to the old and retired, we all have questions about the universe because we all look around and we think, boy, why is it like that? Or how does that work? Or how can we ever understand what's going on?
Yeah, curiosity belongs to everyone. I used to have a pretty common experience back when I was flying on airplanes that i'd sit next to somebody and they'd say what do you do And I'd say I'm a physicist and they'd say, oh, I hated that in high school. And then there'd be an awkward silence, and a couple of minutes later they'd say, hey, can you explain to me how the Big Bang works? Or something like that. There's always some sort of physics question that bubbled up inside them. Because it's not just academic physicists who want to understand the universe. It's a human thing. Everybody wants to know how this crazy universe works.
Yeah, well that's what you get for talking to strangers, Daniel.
That's why I stopped flying. It wasn't COVID.
It's just that that's right, right. Or just tell them you're an astrologer. It's'll really get them interested or turn off, which works out either way.
They might have even more questions in that case. But then I can just make up the answers and it's all kosher, right, There are.
No rules that true. Yeah, yeah, you can just predict the future. But yeah, we love questions. We'd like to celebrate questions, and sometimes we even like to answer questions on this podcast. We like to sometimes take good questions we get from listeners through Twitter or through email, and questions we definitely get right, Daniel.
Oh, we certainly do, and we love them. So if you are thinking about the universe and there's something that doesn't quite sit right with you, or you've heard us explain something but doesn't mesh with something else you understand, or some scenario where you don't understand how it works right to us to questions at Danielandthorge dot com, or engage with us on Twitter at Daniel and Jorge. And we're even on Discord so you can come and discuss and chat with other listeners about crazy things you heard on the episodes.
Yeah, and we even accept nubes on Discord, right and pro gamers.
Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, I'm kind of a Discord nube. I had to have my fourteen year old show me how it works. Woa.
All right, welcome to the Internet. But yeah, so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling listener questions Number twenty three. This is our twenty third episode in which we answer, or at least we try to answer questions from listeners. These are real questions that people send in.
These are if you write us a question, you will definitely get an answer. And if you write us a super interesting question that I think other listeners might want to hear the answer to, then I'll ask you to send us an audio recording so your voice can be heard on the pod and so we can all discuss your fascinating question.
Oh man, now you make it sound like it's a contest. People are going to try extra hard to send you interesting questions.
Now that sounds great. I don't know if these people have won or lost though, you know, we featured on the podcast as our prize or punishment.
Interesting, Well, at least they'll be podcast famous just like we are.
Yeah, they can catch that in for retirement, I'm sure.
Yeah, for little photons of joy. Yeah. We like to answer questions, and today we have three pretty interesting questions from listeners, both young and old, and they have to do with Earth's orbit, about the growing sun, and also about alien technology. Now we're not just talking about the new iPhone, are we.
We're talking about the whole universe, which apparently youth is some sort of technology, some sort of software, as.
Long as it wasn't made by Windows.
Well, basically, physics is trying to reverse engineer the universe, right, so we're trying to unravel the rules by which it works.
Wait, are you saying that physicists are actually engineers?
Like at their core, we're all engineers in our hearts, in our hearts.
Are you saying they're reverse engineers? They're like the anti engineer.
There you go, you collide a physicists and an engineer. Boom, you get comedy.
That's right, engineers, we're trying to make things better. Physicists are doing the reverse.
There's always got to be balanced to the universe. Man, there's always a dark side. Haven't you watched enough science fiction to know that.
I thought Star Wars was fantasy.
There's no dragons in it, so I don't know.
But yeah, So let's jump right into these questions. These are all pretty interesting questions. And the first question we have is from Scott, who has a question about the Earth's orbit.
Hello, my name is Scott. Now I'm writing to you from Spokane, Washington. I love the show and please keep up the great work. My question to you is in regards to solar sales. I understand the very basic theory of solar sale. Photons bounce off of a surface and ampart momentum to the object. Planets around start bombarded with photons and all the other junk of star shoots at them all the time. Planets have a fairly large surface area to absorbable at energy. Why are plants not pushed away from stars? Thank you for your time and have a great day.
All right, thank you? Scott. Speaking of not having sunshine, he's from Spokane, Washington, where I think it rains like eleven months a year, right.
I think he's wishing there was more solar radiation pushing against the Earth.
Maybe that's why he was thinking about sunshine.
Yeah, well, he has a fascinating question about why the Earth is not blown out of the Solar system by all of that solar radiation. Mmm.
Yeah, because we've had episodes about solar sALS, and it turns out you could sort of surf the solar windout there if you have a big enough sale, the sunshine from the Sun will actually push you, and it could maybe push a spaceship out of the Solar system.
That's right, And these solar sales are an analogy to the kinds of sale as you find on a sailboat. There's not literal wind in space the same way we have wind here on Earth, and we have streams of air molecules, but there are particles moving through space that we can call wind. The solar wind is a stream of protons and electrons and other kinds of radiation that the Sun is pumping out, and so you can capture that energy and grab its momentum and use it to accelerate a very small, lightweight spacecraft that can get going really kind of shockingly fast.
Mmmm. Yeah. Because there's a lot of stuff coming out of the Sun, and if you catch it, you could write it out of the Solar system. But I guess Scott's question is, like, you know, the Earth is pretty big, so it's almost like a giant sail and it's catching all this, you know, stuff from the Sun. Why doesn't that push the Earth out of orbit?
It's a great question, and the Sun is pushing on the Earth. He's totally right. The Earth is like a big solar sail, and the Sun's radiation doesn't just heat it up, it also pushes on it. And so I had to do a little bit of a calculation to figure out, like how big an effect is. That turns out the Sun puts out about a thousand watts per meter squared. It's like how much energy is deposited on a square meter of Earth by the Sun.
M that's a lot. That's like a you know, a couple hundred light bulbs.
It's not a tiny amount. So when I got that number, I thought, uh, oh, we might be in trouble. You know. I felt like if I got the wrong answer, I might blow the Earth out of orbit.
Or you maybe figured out that Scott had uncovered some kind of deep secret that nobody had thought about.
Well, that's the really fun thing about these questions is like, well, you know the Earth is in orbit. You just have to understand like why it works. Clearly, the universe is functioning somehow, the Earth is staying in its orbit. But the name of the game in physics is to understand how all these mechanisms work together to explain that. So I love this kind of question because here Scott is saying, like, you explain this to me, how does that mesh with what I already know over there?
Right? Because you know, so far we're still in orbit around the Sun. As far as I know, we haven't been blown out of this solar system. And so I guess the question is why is that? You know, like why doesn't all that sunlight pushes out?
Yeah? Because the Earth is pretty big, right. The Earth has ten to the fourteen meter square of area. So if you take the Earth and you sort of look at its image from the Sun, it would look like a disc. And you can ask how big is that disk? And you know, ten to the fourteen meter squared is a big number, Ten to the twelve is a trillion, ten to the fifteen is a quadrillion, So we're talking about like one hundred trillion square meters of area times one thousand watts per square meters, So.
How much show why ditch is that?
So that's like ten to the seventeen watts, which is an enormous amount of energy, right, But you know the Earth is pretty massive, and so it takes a lot of energy to have sort of any real impact on the Earth.
Well, how does that translate into force? Like what's the overall force of all that sunlight?
There's one more step involved in figuring that out, because watts is energy per second. But we do know the energy of photons that hit the Earth since we know their wavelength are in the visible light. So we can convert that to the number of photons per second, which is about ten to the thirty five photons per second. That's a huge number, and each one has a certain amount of momentum, and since force is basically a change in momentum, we can get the total force. So the effective force of all that sunlight is one billion newtons, right, and so for example, the force on you is nine point eight times your mass in kilograms, So like the force of the Earth on a one kilogram object is about ten newtons. So this is a billion newtonts, which is not a trivial amount.
Of force, right, it's also not a phraser here every day a billion mutants. I don't think i've ever in my forty five years of life i've heard that this tours said at the same phrase.
It makes me think of that whole like infinite monkey's room, you know, typing out hamlet. If you had a billion Isaac Newton's in a room, how many different theories of physics could you come up with?
Well, as long as they stop unking around, they can probably solve the secrets of the universe.
And so a billion newtons sounds like a big force, but it's actually pretty small compared to the other forces on the Earth. Like the force of the moon on the Earth, you know, the thing that gives us tides and stuff like that. That's ten to the twenty newtons. So it's like more than ten to the ten times bigger than the force of the Earth as a solar sail.
Wow. So it's like maybe like a trillionth or half a trillionth of the amount of force it gets from the moon. M hmm.
And the force of the Sun on the Earth from its gravity is ten to the twenty three newtons, so it's like almost a quadrillionth of the force of gravity from the Sun. So the Sun is pulling on us with gravity, and that's an attractive force, and it's also very gently pushing on us. About one quadrillionth of the force of its gravity is repulsive because of the solar radiation in the solar sale effect.
So we are getting pushed by the Sun, but it's a really tiny amount compared to all of the forces and the mass of the Earth that are going on.
So it's almost negligible. But you know, you can never really discount stuff in astronomy because the Earth has been going around the Sun for billions of years, So even a very small change in the force of gravity would have an impact on the Earth's orbit eventually, right, And so the real answer to Scott's question doesn't actually depend on how strong this force is. The force from the solar cell could be really, really huge. The real answer is that it's already accounted for in the Earth's orbit. So the effect of a solar cell basically reduces the strength of the Sun's gravity and changes where the Earth can orbit. So the Earth's orbit already accounts for the fact that the Sun is gently pushing on it as well as very strongly pulling on it.
Interesting, like, it's there. It's a quadrillionth of the force from the Sun, but it's there still, right, Like, it does affect the Earth's orbit, and it is part of kind of what holds it and balance.
Exactly. If you, for example, turned off solar sale effects somehow because you were a master of the universe, then the Earth wouldn't be in the right orbit anymore. Right, gravity would get a tiny little bit stronger, and eventually the Earth would spiral into the Sun because the Earth doesn't have enough velocity to be in this orbit if gravity is stronger, so the Earth is in just the right place, has just the right orbit, the direction, the velocity for all these forces to keep it in a stable place.
Wow, makes you realize just how precarious our orbit is, right, Like, if you added a quadrilling of the mass of the Sun to the Sun, then we would spiral in, or if you took out that much, we would spiral out.
Yeah, although it's not an accident that we're here, right, We're here because a chunk of stuff found itself in a stable orbit. So it's sort of like a selection effect. All those preplanetary blobs that ended up falling into the Sun, no life evolved on them. To ask questions of podcast hosts, right.
Well, technically it is an accident, but we're just the lucky ones that survive.
Yes, it is an accident. And it's also a really cool idea to think about other things in the Solar System because it's a useful way to very gently nudge objects. If you, for example, discover an asteroid that's going to hit the Earth in you know, like a thousand years or one hundred years, you could change its orbit slightly by like painting it with really bright white paint so that reflected the Sun more dramatically and would tweak its orbit a tiny bit.
Interesting. You could maybe spray painted with gold or something, you know, why not, right, go a little fancy, you'll be more reflective.
Yeah. In fact, I was reading a paper this morning that just came out. They calculated that an asteroid that's like a Tunguska class, you know, like one of these really massive ones, like fifty meters in diameter, if you covered it with like one micron of lithium or sodium metal, which is very reflective over its surface. You could change where it would hit on the Earth by a thousand kilometers for every hundred years of its orbit. So if you wanted it to miss the Earth, you'd have to like spotted a couple hundred years in advance, send out a spacecraft to like paint it, you know, like spray painted with metal or something, and then you could basically save humanity.
Wow, so graffiti could save the human race, Like Banksy could be like the ultimate hero in the next Armagennon movie.
Yeah, exactly. Who needs Bruce Willis now we need banks.
Yeah, So that's a pretty interesting question. My question now is like when physicists model the Solar system you do predictions about orbits. Do you take into account the solar wind or did you say, oh, it's like a trillionth of the effect, we're gonna ignore it.
It really depends on the question you're asking, And that's sort of the cool thing about physics is that when we ask questions, we're always using some approximate description in the universe. We're never including every tiny detail because it'd be impossible. So when you do physics. A big part of the work is figuring out what to include and what to neglect. You know, we might also, for example, include the gravitational effect of Andromeda when you're calculating where your baseball is going to go. But obviously you can ignore it. So this is the kind of thing that's really really small. And so if you're asking questions about what's going to happen in the next one hundred years or one thousand years, you can ignore this stuff. If you have questions about the very long term stability of the Solar system, then you might need to take it into account.
Interesting, Yeah, you might need to shed some sunlight into your calculations. All right, Well that's as Good's questions. Why is Earth not pushed out of order by the Sun's light? The answer is that the suns light does push on the Earth. It is an effect, but it's pretty insignificant compared to all of the other forces that are going on.
And it's already accounted for in determining our orbit. So even if it was like half the strength of gravity, the Earth would be in a place appropriate to that balanced force.
Yeah, I think you mean, like the order we're in is also due in part two because of that sunlight. All right, let's get into our two other questions, one about alien technology and the other one about the growing sun. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we are answering listener questions, trying to give our best answers. Daniel was thinking philosophically speaking, can you have an answer without a question? And if we didn't have questions, will we have answers?
I don't know what it would mean to have an answer without a question. It's like, you know, no tree falls in the woods, does it make a noise anyway?
So if a physicists asked a question and the forests and doesn't have any equipment to measure the experiment with. Do they really learn anything?
Yeah? I think, you know, the beautiful thing about answers is that they come from questions, and they are matched with that question, find by that question. And so I think you got to have questions in order to have answers. Hmmm.
And without answers, we wouldn't I guess, know things about the universe.
Right, Yeah, It's sort of part of the way our mind works.
You know.
We don't just have questions and answers. We have stories that we tell ourselves. We describe the universe in terms of cause and effect, and this happens because of that. It reveals a lot about the way the universe works. But it also might reveal a lot about the way our minds work, which is why I'd be super fascinating to learn about, you know, alien science, to see if what they've learned about the universe is similar, which suggests that maybe we've learned something universal, or whether their stories about the universe are completely different, or if they even think in terms of stories, which might tell us that everything we've learned about the universe is really just very human.
M Yeah, what's a good story without a good question in it? And so that happens to be our next question. This one is from Craig and he has a question about alien technology.
Hey, Daniel Jrage, this is Craig York from Dallas, Texas. I have a fun mind bending question for you guys, which you guys will absolutely thrive off of.
Well, I hope.
So anyway, here we go. If scientists found three functional alien anti gravity guns, what process would they use to understand the physics and technology underlying that gun? Basically, how would they reverse engineer it? Okay, as of right now, you are officially in charge of the project. I give you all the greatest scientists on Earth and a five hundred billion dollar budget. How would you pull it off? Which leads to the big Kahuna question. If we got our best physicists together with alien physicists, could our physicists even grock or understand their super advanced science and technology. And this is assuming they were super patient like nurturing aliens and empathetically carefully walked us through the concepts. And I appreciate your time for this podcast. Every episode opens an entire universe for me, both from a physics as well as from a philosophical perspective. So thank you guys very much.
All right, awesome question, Craig. And I feel like Craig could use his own podcast, like that question was totally entertaining in itself.
I got questions for Craig.
Oh my gosh, pretty cool question. And apparently it comes with resources. So he's given us some billion dollars to answer this question.
Well, yeah, maybe you can have a billion. I heard him say five hundred billion, So that's four ninety nine billion for the physicists and one billion for the engineers.
For me, But then you also have to build stuff to make it work right exactly.
It's a super fun question, you know, imagining if a piece of alien technology like fell out of the sky landed here, how could we figure out how it works? How could we reverse engineer to learn some physics from an existing working piece of technology.
Yeah, yeah, And I feel like Craig was very specific, like he didn't just want us to talk about how to reverse engineer technology, but he had a very specific example, like what if we found three anti gravity guns and then how we we figure out how those work.
Yeah, and that's a really cool target because anti gravity is something we would love to see, we would love to understand. We don't even know if it's possible. You know. Currently, our understanding of how gravity works is that you have massive objects which change the way space is bent, and that's bending of space that affects how masses move. But anti gravity is something completely different, something repulsive gravity is not something we have seen except in very special cases. Maybe dark energy might be repulsive gravity. So a demonstration of repulsive gravity would already revolutionize and reorient all of our physics research. You know, just like knowing that something is possible is a huge benefit, is a huge clue when you're doing research.
Well, I guess I have a question for Craig, which is like, what is an anti gravity gun?
Like that?
You know, what does it do? Does it shoot anti gravity? Does it make the thing you shoot it at, you know, not have gravity? Or what does that mean? What is it? What do you think this gun does?
I'm imagining you pointed at something and then gravity basically just can't affect that thing. So, for example, you pointed at the Empire State building and then any little kid can come by and just like pick up the building because it basically weighs nothing.
I see, like you think you shoot at once or do you have to keep the trigger on?
You know?
Is it like a ray or is it like a like a burth man?
It sounds like you want to read the manual for this alien tech.
Well, we're going to reverse engineer. I gotta know how it works, right.
Yeah, so I guess according to Jorge, first step is like play with a gun, see what it can do. Figure out right with a bunch of stuff.
Right, something gives you an anti gravity gun through reverse engineer, You're not just gonna like start to take it apart. You gotta see what it does first, right. I guess that's what I would do as an engineer, see what it does right?
Right. But in a realistic scenario, you know, like an alien ship crash lands and the aliens are dead and all we have is their technology. We don't know that this thing is an anti gravity gun, because nobody's told us. The aliens haven't been like Merry Christmas, here's an anti gravity gun. Figure it out. We just have some piece of technology. Now you're telling me whog is just going to start like mashing buttons and pointing in it things to see what it does, Like I want to get pretty far away.
Mm I see. I see. You're saying, like, what if we just found this thing and didn't know it was an anti gravity gun?
Yeah, what would you do? Like what is this thing is like a black hole machine or creates warp bubbles? Yeah, an alien piece of technology. There's effectively own limits on what it could potentially be.
Well, I guess then that's a different question, right, You're not trying to reverse engineering, You're just trying to figure out what it does. You're trying to like reverse use it.
Yeah, because it could be, for example, something that opens up a wormhole to the center of the sun and then all of a sudden you have like a stream of plasma shooting out Like so it could be pretty dangerous. But if you do already somehow know what it is and know what it can do, maybe Craig's question is about, like how would you figure out the physics of it? How would you detect the mechanism on which it's based.
Yeah, I think that's more of his question, Like if you knew what it does, and specifically this idea of anti gravity, how would you know how it works. So I'm assuming that the Aliens label all of their weapons or.
Tools, yeah, in which case, I hope they also label the inside of it, so they tell us like, oh, here's the graviton generator, and here's the graviton tuner, and here's the graviton lens.
Or I guess. First of all, I hope they brought a dictionary so they can read these.
It would be, on one hand, a tremendous clue, right to know that this is possible. So now we can sort of try to extend our theories of physics to accommodate it. On the other hand, it would still be tremendously confusing because you don't necessarily know anything about how it works. And this technology could rely on physics which could be you know, hundreds or thousands or millions of years ahead of hours, and so it would be quite difficult. You know, imagine, for example, dropping a laptop in Galileo's time. Would he be able to reverse engineer it and understand all of the physics that are inherent inside of it, you know, semiconductor technology and quantum mechanics. Could he reverse engineer all of that from a laptop? It would be totally impossible. That's basically the situation we're in.
Yeah, especially if you don't give him the password. You don't give him the password, he's stuck in the welcome screen and he wouldn't even know what this thing does.
He typed, you know, password in in Italian, and that's like he's not going to get anywhere.
It's going to lock him out. It's gonna have to call the genius bar and that'll take a few hundred years forget it.
So, you know, practically speaking joking aside, I think it might be impossible unless we're very, very lucky to figure out how it works, like the underlying physical principles. Unless it's like a direct step forward from what we are doing already, that I think it might be impossible. And that's sort of what he was laying out, like, maybe it uses gravitons, which is a theoretical idea about how gravity might be married with quantum mechanics. If in fact this thing is like an intense source of gravitons, then we might be able to detect that.
Well. I think we were on the right track before when we said that the first thing that you would do to reverse engineer. This is to see how it works, Like you would, you know, sort of treat the object as a thing, not try to get into its inside or to see what the insides do or how it's put together, but just to sort of understand it as a black box. Like if I do this to the black box, what does the black box do? What can it do? You know, like what kind of signals can you read off of this black box? Does it sucking energy? Does it output energy? I think that would be a first step, wouldn't it at least as an engineer, That's that's what would make sense.
Sure, But aren't all engineers famous for taking things apart? You know? Didn't you take toasters apart as a kid? Are you not going to be tempted to take apart this alien gun and see what's going on inside of it?
I think that would be step two. I think, you know, like I think step one. You know, when you get a new toast, When an engineer gets a new toaster oven, we don't just like, hey a new toaster. Oone is take it apart. We're like, oh, what can this toaster do? Let's press this bum, let's press that bump, Let's put in three slices of bread and see if it explodes.
Yeah, so we could try to do that, and you know, gravitons are something that we are looking for. We could, for example, try to see if this thing is emitting quantum gravity particles. But gravitons are very very difficult to see if they even do exist. And the reason is that gravity itself is really really weak, and so gravity as a force is you know, the weakest force among all of them. It's much weaker than electricity and magnetism, or the strong force or the weak nuclear force. And that's important because it means that gravitons, which if they exist, would be like the basic building block of the force of gravity, are also super duper duper duper faint. So even if you had something that generated gravitons, it'd be difficult to pick up individual gravitons. We might not be hard to see like quadrillion gravitons altogether, but to understand that they are gravitons is tricky. We see like the power of the Sun's gravity all the time. If those are gravitons, then there's just like you know, quadrillions of gravitons all the time to discover gravitons, you have to see them sort of like separated, individually quantized, and that's tricky even if you have a gun that can create them.
M Well, I think the hard part is that gravitons are the particles that supposedly transmit gravity, right, the force of gravity. Right, So this gun probably wouldn't shoot gravitons, right, would it? Like shooting graviton would just mean that you're pushing or you're attracting it.
According to our understanding, this anti gravity gun is totally possible. You're right, even if you shoot gravitons. If we build a gun that shot gravitons, it would not accomplish anti gravity. So but there might be some way that we don't understand that gravity works at a deeper quantum level. So maybe gravitons can cause them like destructive interference, to cancel out local gravity somehow. I mean, I'm just totally speculating.
Can it suck gravitons? Like maybe it's actually a graviton vacuum cleaner.
Not to my understanding, Like, currently there's no way to have anti gravity. We had a whole episode about anti gravity, and you know, essentially you'd have to change the local shape of space. You have the empire state building, and you wanted to not have any gravity. Instead of space being curved by the mass of that object, you have to somehow uncurve space so the space is not curved by that object's mass, so there's no force of gravity on it. So gravitons would have to come in and like somehow distort the shape of space in a way that's opposite that mass usually does. And so maybe you need like negative mass particles, exotic particles, you know, negative mass to counteract the mass of these objects. Like here again we're just totally speculating.
Yeah, yeah, Well we've talked before about how mass is kind of like a label, like the spin of an electron or something. Did you shoot something and maybe like reverses the polarity of your mass or flips your mass to antimass.
Negative mass is not something we've ever seen. It's a hypothetical concept that was invented for example, to like hold wormholes open. It's not something we really understand if it even can exist. But you know, if we're talking about alien ideas of physics and we see that it works somehow, then we got to throw our ideas out the window and be open to crazy new ideas. And that's gonna be helpful because it's gonna be a bunch of theorists be like, all right, well we thought that was impossible, so we didn't explore that. Now let's try it. Let's sit down and try to work out a theory where what you just described is possible and see if we can make it come together. That's why, you know, seeing these things work in practice is a very important clue because it tells you, like, look, there is an answer. There is a way to make this work, because we see it happening in the universe.
Right right, Well, I think all of this just kind of gives us some clues as to how these guns might work, right, And I think the general idea is that you would sort of break down what you know of the theory of gravity and see how this gun might be doing what it's doing. Like we just name some possibilities, right, like maybe's shooting anti Yeah, like maybe's shooting anti mass particles or somehow flipping the mass of the particles, or maybe somehow like changing the shape of space around this object.
And so that would be pretty interesting. But you know, I'm not optimistic that it would be very easy that even having this kind of gun in front of us would make like a rapid explosion. It's not like you get this gun and then a year later we are masters of space and time. You know. I think it could shift the direction of theoretical physics. But if we didn't have like the gun's inventor there to explain it to us, I think it could take us decades or hundreds of years to gain all of its insights. It's the kind of thing which would probably like inform physics for a thousand years. Physicists in five hundred years would think of news questions about this new ideas that might be inspired by this gun that we don't even think of today, right.
But it would blow people's mind, right, Like it would show physicists that it's possible. And then there's something about gravity we don't understand, and this might help us like figure that.
Out absolutely, and you know, just to sort of like give people a scale of the problem, Like it's not easy to reverse engineer, like even human technology, it's not easy to do this, like figuring out how somebody has solved the problem, what techniques they have used to what loss of physics that relies on is not a trivial task, and so engineering like future human tech also very difficult. Engineering alien tech, like, wow, that is a struggle. And I don't mean to sound pessimistic about it, like I would be very excited to be part of that team. That would be a dream come true. But I don't want people to imagine that we would like suddenly understand the universe much more deeply.
Right, but it would be accelerated, right, Oh, for sure, just having this gun around you could do things. Maybe you could do experiments with it, right.
Mm hmmm, very potentially dangerous experiments. Yes, you certainly could do experiments. You might go through a few engineers.
Though, right right, which we know are actually physicists, and so let's throw those in first.
They're physicists with the opposite mass.
Yeah, that's right, they're reverse engineers. All right. Well, that's a christ question. Thank you for your question, and when we get your check for five hundred billion dollars, we'll get right on it.
That's right, And also, don't forget to send us the alien guns.
All right.
We have one more question, this one from Adriel Jiosephine, who has a question about the growing sun, so we'll answer her question, but first let's take a quick break.
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All right. We are answering listener questions. We've answered questions about Sun's light, the alien technology, and now we have one from eight year old Josephine. Here's your question.
Hi.
My name is Justine.
I eight years old and living in Clumbus, Ohio. My dad and I enjoy looking into space to see other galaxies, of the planets and all the stars. My dad has showed me that the Sun will expand to get so big that are really easier. My question is that could we make a shield that would protect the Earth from this happening.
Thank you.
I'll look forward to hearing my answer.
Awesome, thank you, Jase. I mean, what a great question and what a well post question too.
I know that you have to wonder about, you know, making eight year olds have existential angst.
No, I mean it sounds like Jessefied has a pretty cool dad. First of all, it takes her out and to watch the stars and galaxies, and she's thought about these things. She was told something about the universe and she had a question about it.
Yeah, and she's a bit of an engineer. She's like, Okay, this is a problem. We're all going to get fried. What can we do about it. Let's solve the problem.
And she lives in Columbus, Ohio, which it does get some light I think half of the year or at least half of the time each day. All right, So her question is, we know that the sun is going to grow at some point, right, we know that our sun is a special kind of sun, and we know that from looking at other stars. We know kind of what's going to happen to our son. It's going to start to heat up and get bigger, and it's going to grow, and an adventure is going to grow so big it's going to overtake where we are in the Solar system.
Exactly because the Sun is a huge fusion furnace. It's burning hydrogen to make helium, and that helium accumulates in the core, and so then for hydrogen to burn has to burn sort of in the more outer layers, which makes the Sun get bigger and puffier and hot. And it's not just that the Sun eventually will be big enough so that the Earth is inside the outer layers of the Sun. It's also getting brighter year after year after year. So every billion years, for example, the Sun gets about ten percent hotter, which means that global temperatures are going to rise because of the Sun's increase in its output.
Wait, did you say ten percent each year every billion years? That's a big that's a big difference. I was looking forward to a die of this sign of heat next year living in southern California.
No, every billionaires, it's very gentle, it's very gradual. But you know, if like Josephine, you are planning for the very far future survival of the human race, it's something you do need to take into account as you build your planetary defense system. Yeah.
Yeah, So the Sun is going to grow enough to where it's going to be so big we're actually going to be or where we are now, it's actually going to be inside of it. And when is that going to happen.
That's going to happen near the end of the Sun's life. The Sun lasts around ten billion years, and it's about five billion years into that life cycle. It's going to burn happily for a few more billion but near the end of its life, in a few billion years, it's going to start to expand it's going to blow these outer layers out. And as you said, the Sun is really going to get transformed. Like it's pretty big already, it's you know, a million times the volume of the Earth, but it's going to grow so its outer layers really do envelop the Earth. And it's not going to be like super dense hot plasma like exists at the center of the Sun right now, but there will be a lot of solar material out here, a lot of plasma, and it'll get very very hot.
Yeah, And like you said, it's getting hotter ten percent every billion years, and so even that ten percent is probably going to be very lethal to our planet, right, I mean, our planet is so precarious and unstayed in terms of our atmosphere and the balance of life, it seems like a ten percent increase in sunlight would basically toast everything.
Yeah. I was reading one projection that said in a couple of billion years, the global average temperature would rise to one hundred celsius, which means basically no liquid water on the surface, right, it's all vapor, And so that's pretty hot. Now, that's a couple of billion years away. Again, not next week. This is not weather predictions here. This is the very far future of the Earth. But yeah, we need to prepare for that if we're going to somehow keep the Earth at its nice cozy.
Level, right, Right. And so I guess Josephine's answer to this problem is that maybe we can build a shield to kind of like protect us from the growing sun.
Yeah, And while I wish you luck, Josephine, because that is an enormous task.
Yeah, So what do you think she's Do you think she's thinking like a wall between us and the sun, or do you think she's thinking like a shell for the entire Earth.
I'm not sure what she had in mind, but you know, in order to be practical, it would have to essentially reflect an enormous amount of energy. And so we talked earlier about the amount of energy deposited by the Sun on the Earth's surface is currently about a thousand was per square meter. We're talking about a lot more energy now. We're cranking that up by orders and orders of magnitude. So you'd have to somehow effectively reflect that. But if you're reflecting that, then you're getting a momentum transfer, right, Like if you have like something which reflects bullets, when the bullets bounce off, they're giving you still a little bit of a push. So if you build like a really effective shield that reflects all of the Sun's energy, and the Sun cranks up to much much hotter than it is today, then it really might change the Earth's orbit.
Oh wow, we're referencing our first question from the episode.
WHOA yeah, And that might actually be a good way to go. Like, if you need to protect the Earth from the Sun, I think the best thing to do might be like, hey, let's move, let's find a better orbit, because you don't really want to live inside the sun.
Right, So you're saying that you know this. I think maybe she was thinking, like, hey, let's put up a shield kind of like you would put a roof over your head so you don't get as hot in a sunny day. But you're saying that probably won't work, Like just the roof is not going to protect us from the sun because eventually all that heat is gonna you know, seep through the through the roof. Maybe is that why it needs to be reflective. Why does it need to be reflective.
If it's not reflective, then yeah, it's gonna absorb all that heat, and eventually it's just going to get you know, like immolated. Like nothing can absorb that much heat all the time. You know, perhaps you could absorb it somehow. You can imagine building like solar panels perhaps which absorb that and convert it to electricity. And you have an incredible source of power. Perhaps that might be one way to build a shield which absorbs that energy.
Could you use that energy to power like a giant air conditioning in it. I'm only half joking because, right, wouldn't that solve our problem?
Yeah? I suppose you could. But even solar panels, right, they do take momentum. A solar panel only absorbs half of the momentum of reflective panel. Reflective panel, because it's changing the direction of the photon, gets twice as much momentum as a photovol take panel, which absorbs a photon. But you still are absorbing all of that momentum. And so if the Sun really does crank up, even if you build like a solar panel to absorb all that energy and so the Jorge can stay nice and cool inside the largest AC unit, Ever, it's still going to start to impact the Earth's orbit. And so my advice still is, let's move the Earth.
Interesting, but couldn't you use some of that energy to like, you know, put some thrusters on the other side maybe and you know, counteract with the push from the Sun.
You certainly could. But like, why stay in the Earth's original orbit. It's no longer a very nice place. Like, Let's pick up shop and move out a little bit further. You know, let's bump Mars out of orbit and take its spot, because suddenly Mars seems to have a much nicer place to live.
Oh, I see you're saying, forget the shield that doesn't sound practical, or maybe that doesn't sound like a good long term solution.
But you need to build an enormous, for example, solar array to capture enough energy to move the Earth anyway. So you know, first step is build a huge solar array sort of as a shield also to that energy, and then use that energy not to keep the Earth in its orbit, but to shift it to a better orbit.
Interesting, I guess the question is, though, you know, the Sun would be pushing us outwards, but that wouldn't necessarily put us in a stable orbit, would it? Like thought I thought, to get into like a wider orbit, you need to pick up speed.
You're right, there is a close connection between how far away you are from the Sun and the velocity, but it works the opposite way. Things that are further out actually travel more slowly than things that are close up. You know, for example, a comet when it falls in towards the center of the Solar system is going fastest when it whips around the Sun when it's really close. But you're right that we would need to adjust the Earth' velocity. We can't just like give the Earth a push and then hope that it ends up in a stable configuration. Most likely that leads to Earth like drifting out of the Solar system and becoming a rogue planet, which would be bad. So it would take some really careful sort of solar system engineering to get Earth in the right place, in another orbit at the right velocity. I see.
So you're saying a shield is not a good long term solution, but maybe a shield is a good idea in terms of like absorbing sunlight energy so that we can move the Earth or propel it to a better orbit that would be safer around the bigger Sun.
Yeah. And I read an analysis that suggested that the amount of energy required to move the Earth, like not a small project, is like five hundred thousand times all of the energy that humanity has ever produced. So it's a pretty big project. And they would require like a solar array that's like ten to fifteen square meters, that's a quadrillion square meters to produce enough energy to power like a thruster you could put like on the South Pole or something to shift the Earth out to a wider orbit.
Interesting. I think I saw that movie on Netflix.
How did it end?
I'm totally seriously, this is a movie on this list where they like build giant thrusters at Earth and they try to move Earth because something's happening to the Solar system.
And how did it end? I'm on.
After movie. So it did not did not think, did not go as expected?
Now, oh well, but probably you know that it was all about the physics they learned along the way.
Right, well, yes, and the friends they lost as.
Well, exactly, and the investments they made in solar power technology.
So yeah, so you're saying that, you know, the shield is a good idea, but let's maybe put the Earth in a safer spot.
And I think that that's an enormous project, well beyond anything humanity has ever conceived or accomplished. But there's no physics that says that it can't be done, and technically we know how to do it, so it would just be like an massive engineering project.
Mmm, I see, and who knows, like it might be a matter of our survival, you know, like we don't do it, then we're toast, literally toast, and so we maybe have to do it in the future, billions of years from now.
And the good news is we have billions of years because while this is inevitable, it's very slow moving, so we can put it off for a little while, but you know, it's important that the next generation start planning.
Yeah, and we should call it the Josephine Plant in honor of Josephine, who asked this question, which planted the seed for our future survival.
Thank you, Josephine for saving all of our lives.
All right, Well, those are three awesome questions. And it's always fascinating I think to hear what people are thinking about and wondering about. You know, we sort of talk about these ideas on the podcast and people kind of take them to the next level.
Yeah, and sometimes the questions are exactly the kind of things that I've been thinking about, and I'm excited to write back to people. And sometimes there are questions I've never heard before that make me think about things in a new way, or maybe me go off and have to research something. Either way, it's super fun. I love it. Please don't be shy write to us with your questions to questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
Yeah. This more probably called to you as you were tinkering with your anti gravity gun in your garage, right.
I was in the middle of a zoom call with the Aliens. When this one came in, I was asking them questions about their gun. Yeah.
Right, except the delays in the alien zoom call are extreme. You have to say a word every what ten years exactly.
It's high throughput but very high latency.
All right, Well, if you have questions, please send them to us. We love to talk about them and answer them. In the meantime, look out into the universe and wonder how it all works.
And encourage the next generation to ask their questions about the universe. Because remember that science is not an institution. It's just a bunch of people who decided to devote their lives to answering one specific question about how the universe works. So if you want more scientists and more technology and fancy er iPhones, we need to train the next generation of curious minds.
That's right, the next generation of anti engineers and also engineers. Just don't put them in the same room together or give them a podcast, because then that just annoys everybody.
Sometimes they figure out how to work together.
All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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