Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWe're not talking about your vacuum cleaner!
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Hey, Orgey, what do you think is the most impressive thing humanity has ever built?
Hmm, that's a pretty good question. Let me think about it for a second. I think I would have to say probably the most impressive human achievement is the refrigerator, pasely. I mean, the refuse it every day. I couldn't live with without it. It's pretty awesome.
That's a cool answer. I was sorted thinking things like, you know, the Great Wall, or the Golden gate Bridge or the Burge Khalifa. You know stuff that would inspire awe. You know things that like last for generations.
Well, you know there is still in my fridge that's been there for generations.
I don't know. I look at these projects sometimes, and I think, you know, humanity can really accomplish great things when we work together. It's really sort of impressive what we can pull off and we all work together.
Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean I once ate everything in my fridge all by myself. I mean I didn't need the rest of humanity for that.
Yeah. Well, you can accomplish great things by yourself. But it makes me wonder sometimes, like what future humans will build, Like what are the great what's the Great Wall of the twenty first century? You know, what kind of achievements will we with? Kind of monuments will we leave behind for future humans?
The Great Refrigerator of China.
That's right, a huge refrigerator in.
Space that you can see from space, that you.
Can see from space that it needs to be cleaned.
Hi, I'm Poorge. I'm the cartoonist behind the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper or PhD Comics.
And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And I smash protons together at the Large Hadron Collider to try to figure out what the universe is made out of. And together we wrote a book called We Have No Idea, which explores all the things we don't know about the universe.
Right now, you're listening to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we try to mix accessible science with a huge quantity of low quality jokes.
What do you mean, Are you saying my jokes are low quality.
Or no, I'm saying we spray a huge number of jokes and our editor just picks out the ones that are best so that our listeners think we're funny.
Yeah, are awesome editor, exactly.
Our producer who we should give a shout out to.
For sure, Taylor, Thank you so much for making us funny.
Thank you for making us sound funny. And speaking of human achievements, today's podcast is all about monumental constructions and accomplishments. What can civilizations do when they get together and build something enormous? Yeah?
What can humans? What are humans capable of making?
Like?
What are the limits of our ingenuity and resources and our ability to work together? That's right, because you know, there are a lot of problems right in the world, like global energy consumption and global warming, and.
That's right, and some of those are being tackled right, Like we're developing solar power so that we can get energy just from the sun and not burn fossil fuels and to meet the global energy demands. Right, But if you extrapolate forward and you think, like, what is humanity going to need? Our global energy consumption is just increasing and it seems unlikely unless we have some cataclysmic event in our civilization that that's ever going to turn around. So if you project forward, you might wonder, like, how is humanity going to meet it's energy needs in the future if we don't invent some fantastic new form of fusion, Right, what can we do to rapidly increase the amount of energy we have accessible?
And that's the question two of our listeners had, and so they sent us questions via Twitter and via email.
That's right. So we owe a shout out to Everton Chin and to Steve Davis for requesting this topic.
So today on the podcast we'll be covering the topic what is a Dyson sphere?
That's right?
Yeah, So the Dyson's fhere, Daniel, So this is the idea that you know, we could maybe build something that can really take advantage of all that amazing power that's coming out of the sun, Right.
That's right. If you think about like grabbing solar power and you think, well, we might need a huge amount of it for your first instinct is like, let's just put a bunch of solar panels in the desert, right, Let's just like build solar panel after solar panel. After all, nobody's really using that land. There's a lot of sun out there, right. But as humanity gets more and more greedy about energy, you might think like is there enough room on Earth to put enough solar panels?
Right? So is that true? Like? What if we covered all of the Sahara Desert in solar panels? Would that not be enough?
I think that would be enough today. Like actually, I think today all you'd need to do is cover like Delaware with solar panels, and you'd have enough energy to power the entire United States or maybe even the Earth.
What really?
Yeah, exactly, solar sold. You were just ready to Delaware.
It means Delaware. That's where all those fake companies are set up, aren't they.
We probably have listeners in Delaware, so you might want to check with them before you're doing.
They might appreciate the shade, you know.
Being relocated. Sorry, we have authority here from Hojrahea Cham a podcast host or We're gonna raise your house and.
Put solar panels eminent podcast main that's being moved out of Delaware.
Well, I just checked numbers, and it turns out Delaware is actually a bit too small. I think you'd need to add Maryland to Hope. That's okay with Maryland. No, But the point is that I think today human civilization can survive using energy captured by a pretty small fraction of the Earth's surface. But imagine in the future, right, what if we want to build a huge civilization, what we want to construct enormous things, we want to send ships across the stars. We're going to need incredible amounts of energy, and you know, we're not gonna be able to burn coal to do that, and we're not going to be able to necessarily cover the Earth and solar panels, and so people started thinking big. People started thinking what's the limit, Like, what's the maximum number of solar panels you can make?
What's the biggest solar panel you can build?
Yes, exactly, and where would you put it?
Okay, So this is where the question of what is a Dyson's fear comes from?
Exactly This is a thought, a thought experiment by Freeman Dyson, a famous physicist, to think about, what is the biggest solar panel? Is it possible? Could we build one? How would you do it? And could we see if other civilizations are doing it? Wow?
That's amazing, all right? So we, as usual, we're wondering how many of you out there actually knew what a Dyson's sphere was. Like if someone approached you on the street and asks you, hey, have you seen any Dyson spheres? Or hey, do you know what it is?
Or would you contribute ten dollars towards building a Dison sphere?
So, as usual, Daniel went out into the streets and asked people randomly out there if they knew what a Dyson's fhear was.
Yeah, here's what people had to say, have you ever heard of a thing called a Dyson sphere?
Enough? Okay, I know it in the context of looking for other life on other planets, because it's basically like a ring that you can build around a star to harness its light. So for energy, you look at the light patterns. If something interferes with the patterns and like in a certain way, it can lead to the assumption that maybe there's a dicen sphere around it and there's something awesome. Yeah, okay, yeah, it's this gigantic thing that you put around like a solar system and then you can harness all the energy.
I heard of it.
I don't know what it is. Cool.
No, all right, so pretty much no across the board.
Well, I would say we got our typical set of binary responses, a bunch of no's. I got a bunch of weird looks too. People were like, is he making this up? Like is that a thing? Really? Is this like a test? You know?
I wonder how many people thought you were talking about the diceon vacuum cleaner.
That thing really sucks. No, I think I think it was like people thought maybe it was a control question, like I was making things up, like have you ever heard of the you know, smith Gabbat Kabui or whatever, and because it.
Was like a trick question, like to see if you if you try to make up some funny things.
Yeah, which actually gives me the idea I should do that, right, We should have a trick question and see if people spout off. You know, Oh yes, I told I saw a Nova episode about that and it's involves a you know, electrophons and whatever.
What would it be about let's see dark It should be like dark, a dark black hole about that?
Oh, you know what, that's actually really cool. And people have written in asking whether you can have a black hole made of dark matter? Oh, which is a really awesome question, which we should talk about in a different episode.
But it meant an anti dark matter black hole, the.
Dark matter black hole. Yeah, isn't that a cool idea?
An anti dark matter black hole.
Oh?
Well, we don't know if dark matter has anti particles. We don't even know if dark matter is made of particles, so we don't know if there is such a thing as anti dark matter. But we know there is dark matter, and we know there are black holes. So people have this tendency to like ram them together anyway.
So nobody thought you meant the vacuum cleaner, because you know, the dice and vacuum cleaners they're known for having this like sphere out front that they that you used to pivot and to roll around and like it twists the head of the vacuum cleaner as you tilt and turn.
Did you get some like check from dicing company because I didn't get one. I don't understand why you're promoting the diceon vacuum. You're going.
If you'd slash.
Or hey got a check.
Slash and didn't share it with Daniel. Well, let's break it down for people. Then what is a Dyson sphere?
So Dyson sphere is basically the idea of maximal solar panels. Right, you want to build solar panels, you cover the Earth. The Earth captures a tiny fraction of the energy from the Sun.
Right, It's like a tiny, tiny fraction right Like to the Sun, the Earth just looks like a little marble way out there in space exactly, and so it's barely catching any of its rays exactly.
So imagine a sphere and the radius of the sphere is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Right. So, now imagine a sphere that's basically the size of the Earth's orbit.
It's like a ball centered on the Sun that reaches all the way to Earth exactly, and it's made out of.
What well, I mean, just imagine the sphere for now geometrically, and think about what fraction of that sphere is covered by the Earth. Right, this is the point you were making before it's like a tiny dot. Most of the Sun's energy just gets radied out into space. Right. It maybe hits a Jupiter or Saturn, but the vast majority, ninety nine point nine percent of it just gets shot out into space. Right. So the idea is, if you really want to go big, if you want to build a huge project, you know, then could you build solar panels that capture a significant fraction or even dare I say all of the Sun's energy? Right?
All? Wow, So it's like a giant solar panel that surrounds the Sun completely.
Yeah, I mean, like, let's do the thought experiment. Let's think as big as possible. How much energy would that be? You know, how would you do it? And could you tell if other people had done it? So this is the origin of it. Freeman Dyson thought about this and he wrote a paper about it, and he thought, could you build one of these things? And if another civilization around another star had done this, could we tell and could we use that to find alien civilizations?
This is like a legit physics paper.
This is a legit physics papers published in Science, one of the top journals. And really yeah, and the thing I love about that is about it is that it's visionary. It's like, what would we do in a thousand years, what would we do in a million years? And could we use those ideas if we could predict them, could we use those ideas to discover super advanced alien civilizations? Like, let's not look for other civilizations at the same level as us. Let's look for civilizations that are like a million years or a billion years ahead of us and try to anticipate what they would do and how we would spot them. So I love that kind of visionary thinking.
Oh, like, if you use your imagination wildly, where could humans go? And then that we could maybe see or get evidence of from other civilizations out in the universe.
Yes, exactly right, exactly like trying to think of what the grown ups are doing, because we're basically kids, you know, we are pretty new to this whole universe. We've been in tell gent for you know, maybe tens of thousands of years. We've been technological for decades, right, We've been communicating for you know, less than that, and so we are brand new on the universe stage. And there may be a.
Full of pimples, voices cracking.
We're not even there. Man, we're not a puberty, we're grown. No, we are still pooping our pants from the civilization point of view.
Like literally, I mean literally poop.
We are poop in the bed. It's true. And so you know, might ask like what are the grown ups doing? And the same way it's hard for kids to anticipate, like what is an adult life like? And how would you tell what's going on? It might be hard for us to predict what super advanced civilizations would do and how they would live and how they would get energy. So that was the idea of Freeman Dyson. He thought, can we spot other stars being wrapped by these spheres?
Wo? What kind of physicists was he?
Oh, he's famous for being really broad. He's done all sorts of physics. I think he even did some chemistry. He did quantum mechanics. He's thought about consciousness. He's one of these modern day you know, renaissance men who like thought of it and dabbled in all sorts of different kinds of physics.
I wonder if your name affects that, you know, like if you go around with the name Freeman Dyson, is just see expectation that you were this amazing personality what that.
You only had that expectation because there's a guy named that who has an amazing Uh.
Well, that's what I mean. It's like he's got the perfect name to be a renaissance him.
It's the other direction, man, he was a renaissance man, and now therefore his name is connected with being a renaissance man. It doesn't work the other way. It's not like you're born.
See, he's like the original cool guys and they're like Galileo.
That sounds like you'll be a great scientist. Yeah, No, I think it's the other direction. But he does have sort of a mystical name. I always thought his name, you know, I always connected his name with like the Freemasons, you know, Freeman Dyson. He sounds like he's probably the member of a secret society somewhere.
Yeah, from like cool people who.
Are trying to build trying to build mega structures. Even that word is fun to say, right, mega structures.
So he had this idea, he thought, hey, what could we possibly what could a few alien civilization much more advanced than us? What could they possibly be doing that we could maybe detect exactly? And he had the idea that maybe they figured out a way to capture all of the Sun's energy by building something basically like wrapping it up the Sun.
Yeah, exactly, And that's pretty hard to do. I mean, imagine as you were saying before that you had to build something that size, right, Like the radius of it is millions of miles, right, So you're going to construct something that wraps the whole Sun at like the distance from the Earth to the Sun and grabs all that energy. I mean, the size of it is boggling, Like the inside of that sphere. Did a few calculations, the inside of that sphere would have the surface there are of five hundred and fifty million earths.
Wow, which sounds doable. Maybe, I don't know.
It's it's hard to build something that big. I mean, in order to build something that big, you need stuff, right, you need materials. You need like, you know, matter, And if you're going to build it, you need to basically use all of the matter in Jupiter and Saturn and the asteroid belt. You use up, like all the stuff in the Solar system just to build that shell. Like it's just barely enough stuff to build a shell all the way around the Sun.
Why does it need to be the RTUs of where the Earth is. Couldn't you just make it smaller and be more convenent to make.
Yeah, it's like that.
Make it the radius of what's the mercury, the closest one, you know, the smallest fhere around the Sun, and then just have like a cable running to.
Us to Earth. Yeah, you have to balance, right.
The closer you get extension cord, extension cord.
The closer you get to the Sun, the hotter things get and things melt and it's hard to work, you know, So you want to balance there. You don't want you don't want to be like immediately surrounding the Sun. You don't want to be really far away because that has to be.
Bigger between tents to build something that close to the Sun.
Yeah. The other advantage if you built it at the radius of the Earth is then you'd have an awesome livable surface, right, You'd people could live on the inside of that sphere, Like you could put dirt down and plant crops and you'd be at the you'd be in the habitable zone, right, you'd be at the right distance for the Sun to have the right temperature.
Oh, you build it at the radius of this Earth and where the Earth is. Then really it could be like sunny Florida all.
Year round exactly. I mean, let's all around the.
System.
Yes, let's think big. Let's think like, you know, we're going to do this, what would be the best thing to do, Like humanity is going to be huge and have a huge amounts of energy, then let's like, let's prepare for the future of humanity and build five hundred and fifty million times the land of the Earth. The amount of energy this thing with capture is just ridiculous, Like if you captured all of the energy of the Sun every year. There's this number which is pretty hard to understand. It's three hundred and eighty four yata watts, right, watts being an innertive energy and yata.
Being lot of ones, whole lot, whole lot.
Of ones exactly. No, it's three point eight times ten to the twenty six watts, right, Like, it's just a ridiculous number. So I thought, well, let's explain it in terms of how much energy humanity currently uses. Right, So, currently the power use of humanity is one thirty three trillionth the energy put out by the Sun.
Wow, so thirty three thousand billion times how much we use right now?
Yeah, so we don't really need this thing today or tomorrow or next year. Right. This is the kind of thing that that would support a civilization with enormous energy consumption. You know, the kind of thing where you're like building huge space ship and you're pushing them to other star systems with like lasers, you know, like light sales that captured laser beams, Like you would have an incredible amount of energy if you could really capture all of the energy output of the sun.
Okay, I have a lot of questions, but first let's take a quick break.
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All right, so that's a dice. It's this idea that you could maybe build a shell around the Sun and capture all of the energy that's coming out of it. Yeah, and you would want to build it kind of far away from the Sun because otherwise it would just melt. But it would be humongous. It would be bazillion times the surface of the Earth. Would take a lot of stuff to build that shell.
You take a lot of stuff. It would be enormous. And there's a lot of other problems, Like problem number one is you'd have to be really strong. I mean, this thing is going to have a huge amount of weight on it, right.
Yeah, Like and just like it would get toussled around, right because it would have to hold together.
Yeah, and it doesn't You wouldn't also have any gravity, right, Like the gravity we experienced from walking around on Earth comes from Earth. But if you're if you build a huge shell the size of the Earth's radius and build it around the Sun, then it's balanced gravitationally, right, you don't feel it doesn't feel the Sun's gravity, and there's no net gravitational force on it from the Sun, so it'd be sort of like loading around the Sun. Nothing to keep it in place, which means it could like drift, you know, and like one side of it could get too close, maybe bump into the Sun or something. It'd be pretty hard to maintain. You need like jets on it to like keep it in the right place.
I think an interesting idea is the just the idea that you can envelop a sun right like it. You know, your intuition, my intotion tells me that if you cover it up the sun it would snuff out, but not so right like you could.
The Sun doesn't need any feedback, right, it's just pumping that energy out. It doesn't need It doesn't need or care, doesn't need to know or care about what happens to the photons and protons that it's flying out.
Yeah right, that's what I mean. Like you could capture a sun literally.
Yeah exactly, and it would burn happily inside your dike, so you're pumping out energy, yeah exactly. And you know that's basically what we want to do here on Earth on a much smaller scale. I mean, that's fusion, right. Fusion says, build a little plasma, make it really hot, have it burn, have it pump out radiation, which we then capture. That's energy. So we want to do that, and you know we want to do that in a miniature way on Earth, in a controlled way. But we basically have a huge fusion furnace already and it's going pretty well and it's not too far away. So some people say, let's just capture that energy, right, Why have fusion here on Earth when it's already going in the center.
Of the solar Build a whole lot of yotta watts exactly giant trillion size shell. Yeah, that sounds much easier.
Yeah, And so you might be thinking also, like, all right, well, a huge shell sounds like too much, Like you don't need to complete the shell, right, if you don't need thirty three trillion times our energy, What if you just build a partial shell, right, Like, I mean that's basically every solar panel, right, the one you have on your roof right now is a tiny little bit of a dice and sphere, right, it's a tiny little dison sphere element. So you might think, we don't have to go all the way. It's not like a you have just a few little solar panels, or you have the whole thing. You might just build you know, part of a shell.
Like half a shell, or just a ring of the shell, or a patch of the shell.
Yeah. Yeah, Like a good middle ground is like a ring. And you can imagine putting them like in Earth orbit, right, so they're all in the same orbit, so they don't bump around each other. You got a bunch of like really big solar panels in Earth orbit gathering all this energy and sending it back to Earth. But you know, you were you were saying earlier, like and then you just put out a big cable. That's actually kind of a tricky problem, Like how do you get this energy and bring it back to Earth.
I don't know you can. You can't just run an extension cord.
Yeah, you need a whole lot of YadA extension cords, a mile YadA mile. I No, you need some sort of wireless energy transfer, which is pretty tricky. I mean, we know how to do this, but it's not it's not that easy. Basically, it's lasers, right, for long distance energy transfer. The only way we know how to do it is lasers.
So you're saying, let's build a giant laser out in space and points it at the Earth and shoot and point into the Earth exactly.
It's like, or you could think of it more like a magnifying glass. Like basically it's like take the Sun's rays and focus them on the Earth, right, you know, so we're basically like you know how you take a magnifying glass when you're a kid in like fry little bugs. We're basically doing that to ourselves. So that's pretty dangerous, right. You need some sort of way to absorb that energy here on Earth and in a safe way, and you know, there's a lot of things to figure out. But as usual, we could just leave that to the engineers.
Okay, So let's see you're saying it's kind of an alternative to what if you just cover like the Sahara Desert. Wouldn't that set us up for the next billion years or something that.
Would set us up for a while. Yeah. I think there are people who own the Sahara Desert though, so they might have something to say about that.
They can move to Delaware.
Want you were just solved some problems all over the place, man, just global solutions by fororhe Cham. We definitely do not need this anytime in the near future, right, Like we if we invested in solar power, we would be set up for a while.
Oh, I see you're saying we don't need it, but maybe aliens needed.
Well I'm saying we don't need it now, but like, let's think big, right, Let's think about like what is humanity need in a thousand years, in a million years, let's if you're going to build this thing, you gotta start thinking about it now so you can figure this stuff out. And it's always fun to think aspirationally, like could we build this? You know, is it possible? What technology would you need? Because often that's spurs ideas, right, people are like, hmm, I wonder if you could transfer a laser from an orbiting ring of solar panels to the Earth. How would you do that? And then they get interested. Then they come up with some invention which makes, you know, for better Hamburgers or something. But a lot of cool stuff comes out of just like thinking aspirationally.
M I see you're saying it, like, what if in a thousand years there are thirty three trillion yachta people on Earth and we need all that energy? Maybe we should think about these kind of crazy ideas in advance.
Yeah, exactly before we.
Have covered Delaware, we covered the Sahara. It's not enough.
Yeah, so you could do the whole sphere, which seems a little crazy because you need all this material. You could do a ring, right of orbiting orbiting solar panels. That's sort of you know, intermediate, but there's also a lot of other appurches, like you could have a few rings, right, you could have like different rings at different radius, or you know, orbiting in different directions or something. They have to think about, you know, collisions and shadows and stuff like that. But that kind of stuff is pretty practical.
Isn't that a famous science ficture novel, like the ring idea, Ring around the Earth?
No ring world. Yeah, Larry Niffn had this idea of a ring world. I don't know if he had a son in the middle of it or not, but yeah, definitely you could build a ring and you could be spinning, you know, so you could live on it that kind of thing.
Okay, so that's one idea ring. You can also do like a patch, right, or like small patches.
Yeah, exactly. You got to these small patches, and some people are thinking about the idea of they're not satellites. They're called statites because they don't move, but they're basically just big floating patches of solar panel, and they avoid float falling into the sun because they partially absorb the Sun's energy. That's where you get the energy for the solar panel, but they also partially reflect it. Right, think about what happens when you reflect energy. Basically you're getting a push, right, If a photon comes and bounces off of you, then you're getting a little push from that photon. So if a big solar panel is half reflective and half absorbent, then half the energy goes into electricity or whatever, and half of it keeps the solar panel from falling into the sun. So these things could basically like float on the solar wind, which I think is pretty cool. There's something beautiful about about all these like huge super thin solar panels out there floating on the solar wind. Half the energy keeping them alight, and half of them the energy keeping our televisions on.
They're not floating around the Earth. They're just floating out in space, and we would kind of swing by them every year.
Yeah, exactly exactly, and they would be stationary with respect to the Sun. Right, they wouldn't be orbiting the way we are, and that would be pretty cool. Something really cool about that right, And I think the thing that God Freeman Dyson thinking about this is if aliens were doing this, how could we spot it? How could we tell if somebody was doing this? And initially you think, well, if they build a whole sphere, then they're blocking out their sun. We wouldn't even know their sun exists, right, So how do we even know anybody is there?
Oh, there could be out there tons of stars covered up in these Dyson spheres. I mean, I'm sure they call it something different unless from Dyson is an alien, which you could explain his coolness. But yeah, right, like, there could be stars out that there are covered up by alien civilizations. We just don't know it because we can't see them.
Yeah, so he actually had a cool idea. He said, all right, if you build these things, it will block out the light of the sun. But if it's made of matter and it's absorbing the energy of their suns, then it's gonna glow, it's gonna get hot, and it's gonna give off infrared radiation. So you won't see the stars the way you normally would, you know, in the visible spectrum and all that stuff, but you would see sort of a black patch of sky plus a bunch of infrared radiation, which shows you that there's something hot there.
No, really, you would attribute that to an alien civilization building a shell the size side a giant shell around this cern and not just some like hot rock or.
Well, how do you get a hot rock? How do you get something out in the middle of space? Not next to a star that's warm? Right?
Aren't there stars that are like basically like cinders kind of?
Uh?
Yeah, there are some. Yeah, Well, this is the point of his paper. He's like, how could you see this? And he had the idea like, let's look for infrared radiation. And I'm sure you know reviewer number two had your reaction, no, come on, But he talks in the paper about like other things that might make make this signal and how you could tell et cetera. But it's a good idea, right, Like, how else could you spot these things unless you saw them building it?
Right?
Unless you watch them build it. You could see the star like winking out year by year as they're constructing this thing. That would be super awesome.
But wouldn't it take them like hundreds of years to build it? Right? I mean even an advance we're.
Talking about hypothetical super advanced aliens. I could say anything. Right, maybe they spend like a million years building it and then it's just like unfolds in one year or something, right, who.
Knows just as we're looking at their star.
Yes, you'd have to be super lucky. Right, So I think either you're super lucky because you're seeing them build it, or you see these things radiated. And if people have done this, people have like looked out in the night sky and said, are there places where all we see is infrared emission? Right? And so people did this survey and they found seventeen candidates. Seventeen candidates, and most of them they were able to explain due to other astronomical things. You know, it's a dead stars, it's this, or is that. But there were four candidates. I looked at the paper and they describe it in this way, and I have to quote it directly because I've never seen this in a scientific paper where they say that four of these candidates have been named quote amusing but still questionable. Wow, which means like.
What people call me. I mean, I feel so connected to the to the universe.
Now, yeah, I mean it tells you what scientists find funny, but there is something hilarious about like finding things out there and not really understanding them, and like what is going on out there in space? And the thing I love about looking at in space is that every time you do it, you find something weird. It's you always surprised. There's always something weird out there.
What do you think they meant by amusing but still questionable?
I think they meant we can't rule out alien megastructure. And that's what's amusing about it, right, Like it makes you seriously consider that, you know, and if you're an astronomer, we don't know what's appen.
It's amusing in the sense of like it makes you think, yeah, it makes you muse about.
It, or it makes you hope. You know. Astronomers always have to keep in mind that they might that today might be the day they discover alien civilizations. Right, it's a low, it's low on the list, right, They got to rule out a thousand other things first, But one day I think we will discover alien civilizations, right and somebody will it be today for somebody, It'll be right now for somebody, And so you always got to keep that in mind, right.
Wow, All right, let's get into it, but let's take a quick break first.
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Okay, So Dyson's fears are this idea that you can surround the whole Sun with some kind of structure to capture all of its energy. And Dyson proposed this as a way to maybe detect alien civilizations.
That's right, And he said, let's look for let's look for stars might be blocked by alien megastructures.
And so you're saying that we actually maybe found one of these stars.
Yes, a couple of years ago. They are astronomers that were looking at stars and they saw this one and they were watching it, and the light from it did this weird thing. It wasn't constant, right, most stars, the light from it is constant. I mean, you see a little bit of twinkling from the dust between us and them, but mostly the light's pretty constant. And astronomers look at these stars sometimes to see if they can spot planets in those solar systems. And the way they do it is they look to see if the planet goes in front of the star, and if that happens, you see a little dip in how bright the star is because it's basically a little mini eclipse. But that dip is like, you know, one percent maximum, Like if you were watching our sun from really far away and Jupiter went in front of the Sun, the Sun's brightness would dip like one percent. So that's the kind of thing people are doing. They're watching stars looking to see if they dip. And then they found this star and they saw a dip, not one percent, two percent, but like twenty percent, like a huge fraction of the star's brightness just went away. But then it came back, and then it went it went again, and then it came back, and then like how often it's not regular? Right, It's not like you know, if a planet is orbiting a star and blocking it, then it's regular. And you can use that to figure out like how quickly does the planet orbit the star? Right, what is the period of it? And they watch it for many periods and they figure these things out. You can measure the mass the Planet's truly awesome. But there was no pattern here, right. There was like dips, and then days of would go by when it would be bright again, and then more dips would come, and then it was like two years when there were no dips and then another huge dip came and so people were like, what is going on with the brightness of this star? What is this? And so immediately that little voice in everybody's head was like, could this be Aliens? Aliens? Could this be it? Could we be watching an alien megastructure be constructed?
Really, that was the first thing that came to people's mind. Of course it was of course, it was anything strange. You're like aliens, that's right, You're like, where are my keys? Oh, Aliens?
I've never seen a car like that before? Aliens? What is this fruit called? Aliens?
How did you do that magic trick? Card trick? Aliens?
Aliens? Exactly? How can one man eat so many bananas? Aliens?
Aliens?
Yes, it's always on our minds, right, And of course first thing they did is like, all right, let's kind of try to come up with other explanations. What else could explain this? And so they went through a long list of reasons to explain it. But it's really unusual. We have not seen another star like this. It's not like you see this all the time. And so you have a bunch of ready explanations, right, People had to really stretch their minds to imagine how you could block like twenty percent of the light of a star and not be an alien megastructure.
How do you know it was one star and not like two stars.
Oh, I think they know this star pretty well. I mean you could you can tell the difference between one star and two stars. I mean two stars would orbit each other. I think you could resolve them. But I don't know it does it matter.
I don't know they know. But what they said, hey, maybe let's consider alternatives besides aliens.
Then what they did is they looked. They did something really interesting is they went back through historical measurements. They said, you know, people have been taking pictures of the night sky for decades and decades, and not all of its digital, and not all of it is as good as recent data. But we have pictures of lots of the night sky going back like a century. So what they did is they went back and they looked for pictures of this star over the last one hundred years. And what they found is that over the last hundred years, this star has been gradually fading.
Like getting less bright, yeah, less.
Bright, Like it's twenty percent less bright than it was one hundred years ago.
But it's steadily.
Yeah, Well, we don't have really constant data over the last hundred years, right, we have like a snapshot and then a snapshot and a snapshot and the snapshot. Recently, because we've noticed the Star weird, people have been watching the Star a lot more and so they've been seeing a lot more of these dips and trying to understand them. But the dips can be very dramatic and they're not regular, and it's kind of hard to explain, all.
Right, So so you're thinking it could be aliens, It could be aliens. How would aliens? What would aliens be doing, like flipping the switch on and off kind of like my kids do.
No, No, they would be building a Diceon sphere, right, Maybe why would go on and off? Maybe they're partially maybe they're part way done with constructing their dison sphere, right, And what we're seeing is this Dicen sphere like orbiting the Sun and blocking it. Right, it's irregular.
So over the last hundred years they've been building it up. And now you're saying it might be operational and it's rotating and that causes these dips.
Yeah, exactly, And when the dison spheres between us and their star is when the is when the when the light from that sun gets dimmer. It's hard to have. It's hard to come up with other explanations for irregular dips in the light. And so let's go through them. Though, because it's in the end, people think it's probably not Aliens, which is you know, the story of every scientific discovery ever. But there's not really one convincing explanation.
Okay, so what are the possibilities here?
The leading possibilities are that it's it's like a lot of dust, like a huge cloud of dust. And but it's not regular. It's not like our asteroid belt where like the asteroids are sprinkled all the way around the Sun. It's some like asymmetrical cloud of dust.
I mean like a patchy, like a patchy, clumpy.
Cloud of dust. Yeah, it's like spread up.
You know what you need in that case, then you need a diceon vacuum cleaner sphere.
Somebody clean up. It's a mess.
Got the best section maybe that if you use the code dice in dot com slash to anyone orhe exactly.
Yeah, it's like mega made from spaceballs. Somebody's cleaning up that system. Yeah, so like maybe like a huge patch of dust. And what they did is they looked at the light from the star and they noticed that the light from the star is not dimmed equally across all wavelengths.
Right.
Remember, light has different wavelengths from the reddish to the blueish and the invisible wavelengths as well.
It doesn't dip the same in all frequencies of light.
Yeah, and you know, one the basic idea that Dyson had was let's look for light. Let's look for stars that are basically only emitting in the infrared, because that's what a huge megastructure would emit. But the direction of the spectrum which light is absorbed and which light is coming out suggests that it's dust. It looks like the kind of thing you would get if there was a big dust.
Cloud with maybe like pockets where the sun shines through. Yeah, exactly, And that's what the dips are.
And so maybe what we're seeing is basically the profile of this dust cloud. But that's not really a satisfying explanation because like, where does this dust cloud come from? You know, most stars don't have dust clouds around them for several reasons, like especially old stars like young stars. Who's like it's been formed, then it's being formed inside a huge cloud of gas and dust. Then, yeah, you expect a lot of of gas and dust. So like stellar nurser.
Wait, let me guess, Let me guess, Daniel, you think it could be Aliens. I always gonna throw a redom guess to what physicist might think it is Aliens.
Well, you're both right and wrong, like one possibility is. So the point is you don't get dust around old stars usually, right, because that dust gathers together and forms planets, or it even just gets blown away by the solar radiation, right, Like solar radiation pushes dust out of these systems. So maybe a planet blew up, right, maybe it's Aliens and they had a huge war and like one of them blew up the other one's planet. And what we're looking at is like planetary debris or something. What that would be super awesome. Right from this fully operational battle station.
You're seeing the remnants of the death star.
Yeah, but before people get too excited about that one, that one doesn't really hold together because in that case, you would see it would be like warm, right, because like a planet blows up, you got these big blobs of glowing matter and it would glow in the infrared, but we don't see that. So it's consistent with cold dust, which is kind of hard to explain, Like, we don't understand how you could get this weird, irregular blob of cold dust around the star.
What if it was a planet destroyed by like a cold freeze ray? You know, aliens.
What is that superhero that that shoots freeze rays? Yeah?
Yeah, Iceman, the Iceman.
Yeah exactly. The Iceman came and froze their planet and it shattered into a bunch of fruit.
Yes, I mean yeah, might as well offer that as an explanation.
I see. So you're scoffing on my explanasion of aliens, but instead as a more likely explanation, you're suggesting the Iceman super hero came and throws the planet.
Yes, that's what I always go to first, superheroes.
Yeah, that's true. I guess the cartoonists would go to superheroes versus an explanation.
I'm just saying I think, I think I should you get a physics degree?
You know, I have a stoupe on you from Daniel and Jorge University. An honorary PhD in superhero physics.
Oh man, that should be a great product for a store.
And you know how how much value I put in honorary PhDs.
Right, that's why you have three of them.
That's why I have exactly zero of them. And so another explanation, another idea is that maybe it's just a really weird star. Maybe there's no dust there. Maybe the star is just like doing something weird inside of it, Like it's not glowing constantly, it's something we're going on inside. It's like flickering, you know, it's not burning consistently, but just something inside. It's like absorbing at the energy, or it's sputtering a little bit.
It's an unstable star.
Yeah, yeah, some kind of weird process that gives variable light. But the problem with all these explanations is that it's a big universe, and we've looked at a lot of stars and we've never seen anything like this before, and so any process you propose to explain this have to also explo why it's only happening to this star and not to any of the other zillions and gazillions of YadA and yadas of stars that we've seen, right, right, like if it's a cluster of comets or a planet that blew up like you would expect, if it's not totally impossible that it'd be happening dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions of times. We've seen other ones. So that's the real puzzle. That's what makes this star interesting is that it really does seem unique. Right, So maybe we're seeing something really really unusual, right, that could happen, or maybe it's aliens.
Right, because you're seeing we're seeing we can see like billions and trillions of stars, right, it's just one of them that's doing something weird.
Yeah, well, our soul, our galaxy has you know, hundreds of billions of stars. That's a lot, and so we can't see all of them, of course, but yeah, we've observed a lot of them and we've never seen anything like this. So it's pretty weird for one star to stand out in the galaxy. Wow.
So it could be a giant alien Diyson sphere.
Yeah, or could be the you know the layer for Iceman.
Yeah, well you know ice alien.
Exactly.
Yeah. All right, so that answers the question what is a Dyson sphere, and hopefully people out there found it amusing but not questionable.
That's right. And maybe someday we will build a Dyson sphere and aliens far far away, we'll be having a podcast talking about could we see if they had built a Dyson sphere around their son? You know, maybe humanity will be able to accomplish these great, enormous infrastructure projects and work together and not destroy ourselves. It makes me hopeful to think that one day we could We could build such a vast projects and have that much energy at our fingertips.
Yeah, that would be cool, and it would spare Delaware like a refrigerator.
So everybody in Delaware, no need to pack up your bags anytime soon. We're not taken over.
That's right. Rest easy, Delaware.
Sleep well tonight another day when we didn't find aliens.
All right. Thanks for joining us. I hope you guys enjoyed that. We'll see you next time.
Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot Com. 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 digesters 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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