Strange News: A Tragedy in Idaho Springs, Stranded Astronauts, The Future of Moon Water, and More

Published Sep 2, 2024, 3:00 PM

Doberman puppies remain missing in the aftermath of a tragic Colorado homicide. Two veteran astronauts remain stranded in space as the world works to bring them back to Earth safely. China discovers a way to generate water on the moon. Next question: Would you pay to have sunlight delivered you in the middle of the night? All this and more in this week's strange news segment.

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of Iheartrading.

Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolah.

They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holliday Jackson. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Oh, folks, we're still catching up with some jet lag. At least one of us was running late to tonight's recording. But we return with some fresh baked Strange News and yeah, and Matt wanted to do a quick behind the scenes check in here. Earlier, we were talking about meth in watermelon, and I had mentioned that we said it on a recording of Strange News, when in fact we had not. It was this episode that we were going to mention it on.

Oh yeah, those melons, Man, weird fruit has been going around and we talked about it a whole bunch in an episode that just came out, So check that out if you haven't listened to it yet. But these fake melons. Do you want to do you want to give a quick update on what they are been.

Well, they're definitely not watermelons. They are, in fact meth amphetamine.

Wait a minute, are you saying watermelons is methamphetamine? Are these interchangeable?

No way, these.

Things are not interchangeable, which is why law enforcement is a little bit myfed Yeah.

Yeah, they're myfed.

Are these are the ones that look like weird watermelon and shaped Christmas presents?

Is that yah? Okay goo Google, Yes, it's painted paper made to look like a watermelon, but it's just got methan there, m h And.

I guess that's our cold open.

Yeah, yeah, that's that's it.

And we've returned and today we are traveling to a place called Idaho Springs, Colorado.

What that doesn't make any sense?

Yeah, that's why I won't allow it. Remember Miamisburg, there was in some other far flung.

Share they shout out, Well, this is Long Island.

City is also not like in Long Island. Sorry, carry on.

Oh nuts. Well, Idaho Springs, Colorado is roughly thirty two miles due west of Denver, Colorado, and we're going there to explore a very recent and fast moving homicide case. But before we get to the story, let's role play for just a second. Guys. I'm curious to know what y'all would do in this situation that I'm about to describe, and then I'll tell you what I would do too, and we'll just talk about maybe what all of us should do in this kind of situation. So just imagine that you guys didn't hear from me all day right then I just didn't show up for a recording session, and then still for twenty four hours after that time, you didn't hear from me. I wasn't communicating on any of the channels we usually talk on, and you just couldn't get a hold of me. What would you do?

I would call a family member, a sibling, anyone that I had the information, the closest person to you.

That is what I would immediately do.

I would probably do the same while moving to your last known physical location.

That's a really good point there. That's one of the things that I think I would do, seriously, where I would go to where I thought the person was, if it was one of you guys, where I thought you were a last right, that's without having any kind of technological like ability to see somebody like if we because we're well as of right now, we're not sharing our locations with each other. I know a lot of people do that with like close.

Friends, come on, family, I do it with my kid. I think it's important for Yeah, yeah, I think it's.

That part I get. But it's like we don't have air tags.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just learning a lot about that, especially at least from what I've heard, women will share their location with like a trusted close friend if they're ever going out right and it's just boom, that's the way you can find me, if you got to find.

Me, Matt, Can I ask what point would you escalate it to moving toward the location? Like, I don't think you would do that just having not heard from somebody for a couple of hours, just wondering.

A couple of hours. Probably not. We have actually a mutual friend who happens to work at iHeart that has this tendency. This person isn't here immediately, but this person will go in communicado for like forty eight hours. We're talking, texting and calling, and it's just because this person is like, no, I'm not dealing with that until it's time for whatever the next thing is that I need to deal with, and it it has in the past been a thing where I'm I have driven to a very far away place to make sure that person is alive.

I know exactly who you're talking I think I need too. But isn't it funny, though, how that expectation of immediate response has become a thing.

I think it really does. It's not the way humans should work. When you have the red receipts on stuff?

Oh god, what psychotics leave those off?

First of all, yeah, thank you, I our friends I don't like actually see it.

Stop?

Why do you respond that you hate me?

I go from why are you responding to you hate me?

In two steps.

So here we are. You've gone missing. You're not just twenty minutes late to a recording like Ben Bullen the jet lag. You are forty eight hours gone.

Just missing essentially, at least electronically. So let's say it's two full days where you haven't heard from me, and you do decide I'm going to go to his last known location. You come to my house and when you when you roll up, you realize, oh, the door appears to be kicked in you step in drops dude, I mean everything in the house appears to have been gone through, tossed, like drawers are empty.

There.

It's a ransacking, yes, exactly, terrifying. And then you notice, wait, Meadows now here, Matt's dog isn't even at the house.

Matt would never put Meadow in jeopardy. That is not mondo red flag.

Well, what's the move?

Then?

Just call the cops woof?

I mean like hypothetically, or.

Yeah, get a portfile. That's a big deal. That's evidence of mouthfeasance.

You know, Yeah, you.

Have to at that point. Sadly, the role players would have to immediately contact authorities or a third party, because if you stumble across that scene and you are the first on the scene, oh boy, and you don't document it, you are also becoming the number one suspect and you become spirits.

That's a really good point. That's a really good point. Well, what happens if you do that very thing and a sheriff's deputy comes out to check out the situation, But since there's no sign of me, the severity of the situation isn't really felt at the sheriff's office. The whole missing person's thing kind of goes into effect. But what if it takes two full days for anyone to organize any kind of search for again me in this case, but just your missing friend. You can't get the police or the sheriffs to act for two more full days.

That's rough because that also, I'm glad you're bringing this up. This reminds me of the common myth in copaganda shows, the idea that one must wait twenty four hours to report a missing person totally not true, by the way, folks. In fact, that twenty four hour time window is the best chance, it's the best series of hours you will have to find a missing human individual.

Oh they say that on cop shows too, though on kidnapping situations they always say that's the most crucial window of time. So sort of contradict themselves a little bit. But Matt, I mean, given the scene, surely that'd be enough to get folks acting.

It seems like it, right, And as we get into the fine details of the story, I think you will see why. It appears to be a no brainer that something very bad happened at this house that we're going to talk about to this person we're talking about before we get into it quick. Note, this story takes place in time exactly well, let's say approximately one week before. We record this episode on Wednesday, August twenty eighth, so there are may be a few updates by the time you hear it. If there are major updates, we'll try and include them in some kind of a dendum at the end of the story if we need to. But here we go. This thing we're describing here happened to a man named Paul Peevey and his friend Bruce Boynton. Bruce hadn't heard from Paul in two days, and this was on Monday, August nineteenth, all the way till August twenty first of this year, so he was starting to get really worried. Bruce went to Paul's house to check on him, and he found Paul's house to be ransacked. He believed immediately that Paul had been the victim of some kind of foul play. This is a quote that Bruce gave to CBS Denver. He said it was obvious he found the house ransacked, and in the case of Paul Peeve, I remember I mentioned my dog being gone. How that was weird. Paul Pevy runs a dog breeding company called Elite European Doberman's and he had ten puppies, ten Doberman puppies staying at his place. They were with him, they were part of his company, part of you know, what he does for a living, but they're also under his care. Ten puppies were missing from the home as well as Paul. Paul was nowhere to be found.

Now, quick question, Matt, question, our fellow conspiracy realist will be asking as well. Are the puppies microchip?

They are so? And then that's gonna lead us down the tracks there towards the end of like how do we actually find out what happened or who maybe ransacked the house and took the puppies and are those the same people? And then also what happened to Paul Well on August twenty first, that's a Wednesday, when Bruce went to Paul's house found at ransacked. He called the police. A deputy was sent to the property the next day, on August twenty second, to check it out, and he saw the same things that Bruce saw in Paul's house. And then, guys, it took two days to organize some kind of party or to actually have a group of officers out there to search in any way for Paul.

That's a long delay.

And once that search began, it took three or four minutes before they discovered Paul's body on his own property where the deputy had been, where his friend had been looking around.

Wow, like buried under like some of the stuff that had been ransacked.

Like, No, he was partially buried on the property somewhere.

Yes, like the definition of shallow grave. Someone just threw some stuff over a corpse.

I say, bold, that's not it's like a compliment that is just cold and pretty desperate.

Yeah, that's wild.

Yeah, so it does appear to be a homicide pretty much for sure. Those puppies. Oh and we should mention here Paul Peve is fifty seven years old, or was fifty seven years old at the time of this passing, and he's been doing this for quite a while that you can go to the website for Elite Europeandoberman's dot com and check out you know, the dogs and the business and kind of who this person was and where they're where it all was taking place, and you see pictures of Paul winning awards for the animals that he was bringing into the world and selling, but giving to other people for you know, to have a beautiful animal. It's just I don't know, it's kind of a sweet thing. I know there are issues with breeding of all various animals.

But clearly is it running a puppy mill. No. And I appreciate you bringing up the age there, Matt, because that may have played a part in law enforcements obvious delay in investigating this, because, let's be honest, you know, if it was if it was a nine year old child, if it was maybe a person who had other people living with them, perhaps the investigators would have been a little bit more pro act. I feel like that's a fair point to bring up. This is a fifty seven year old man who appears to at least from what I understand, appears to have lived on his own.

That's what I'm seeing too, So I guess maybe they thought something else could be going on. I just maybe I still just don't understand no matter what, Like if there's a missing person, you've got a friend that's super concerned, and then the house looks like that, right, I don't know, I don't care how old that person is. If you're a deputy, you immediately sound an alarm, be like, yo, something's wrong, guys.

One hundred percent kind of speaks to the somewhat I don't know, times frustrating nature of law enforcement, where like, it's also really difficult to report a stalker because until they've done something, you know, actionable quote unquote, that's they haven't actually broken the law, but you're sort of seeing this behavior and fearing for your life. And while they maybe haven't done anything yet doesn't mean they're not going to, but you're helpless to do anything about it until they've hurt you. It's just, I don't know, just another example of things that sometimes maybe the threshold for a police intervening is a little high.

I'm sorry, innocent civilian, you cannot report the crime that is about to happen. You can only report a crime after it has occurred. Hope it's not fatal. Call us back.

But also, please do not pre crime us. Everybody.

Thank you, Yeah, please style to for pre crime.

So let's get back to the microchips thing you mentioned, Ben, that's really important. You can go to the Clear Creek County Sheriff's Offices Facebook page, seriously, and you can see a post there that was made by whoever the admin is there, and they are talking about this case. They're noting that there was another Colorado Springs Doberman Puppies like Craigslist ad that went out and just noting to everybody who's paying attention to it, that is a separate business and has nothing to do with these Doberman puppies, at least from what they can tell. The people who made that ad and who run that business were cooperative with the investigation. Doesn't appear to be related the micro chipped puppies. Again, they're thinking around ten of them may have already been sold, or a few of them have already been sold through the website that was run there Elite European Doberman's that's Paul's business, so they may have been sold in this weird little time window that happened just before he went in Communicado and missing. So they're asking everybody who purchased one of these Doberman's to reach out and talk to them so they can at least get eyes on and hear from individuals who purchased a puppy. The other puppies that are missing hopefully can be eventually tracked down when whoever is responsible for this gets desperate to either sell one or put it through a system somewhere, and somebody takes it in for the first time to a vet maybe something like that. But for now, at least as of today, Wednesday, August twenty eighth, it appears that the trail is a bit cold, at least from the forward facing Facebook page of the Clear Creek County Sheriff's office. One more thing to add here, guys, the Clear Creek County Sheriff has officially publicly apologized for the amount of time it took to search for Paul, like as a missing person. You can check out nine News. That's at least where I found it. They have a YouTube page and they have a video titled Clear Creek County Sheriff apologizes after community finds missing Idaho Springs man dead and that's talking about Paul, and you can read it or you can hear. You can actually watch and hear the apology if you wish there, guys, I don't really have anything else on this one besides let's keep looking out for information about this, and let's also think about I don't know, are there ways that we can in I'm sure that one of us would know if something was wrong, other than just having to be in communicato with somebody for x amount of time before one of us gets up and actually looks.

I don't know.

Maybe there's a way that's not intrusive but also keep us more safe.

Perhaps this is inspiration for an episode. That's part of the reason we do Strange News as a weekly segment. One thing that would be very helpful is the establishment of check in times. Honestly, if you have someone in your life who may be elderly or maybe on or off various grids, it's also helpful as very easy opsect in a world of spoof phone calls and weird text It's also very helpful to have some sort of code phrase and very easy to deploy.

Apparently Adam Sandler calls Rob Schneider every single week without fail.

Good to have a friend like Adam Sandler in your life.

If you have a regular phone call, I think we talked about that before, or some kind of regular meeting thing. Again, like I use these recordings as an example because it's one of the most regular occurring things that I have in my life.

In all of our lives, I think probably.

So yeah, something like that is good. But Ben, I like, I like your point of a code word. That's interesting. So if you ever did get in touch with one of your friends and something was wrong, you could use that word and then no one on the line would know about you.

Two.

Me and my kid have a code emoji that anytime they're out of sleepover or some social thing and they get overwhelmed or they don't want to be there but they don't want to say they want to leave, they text me this emoji, and I know I need to make it my fault, so I like tell them that they're in trouble because they didn't do something and that they're getting picked up because they have to come home. It's different but similar, but it is a very specific emoji that no one else to use. And this it also applied to any sort of obviously unsafe situation.

Well that's it for this segment, guys. We'll be right back with more strange news. This just in we've got some news. We are recording this on Saturday, August thirty first. As of Friday, August thirtieth, the AP News has announced, along with a lot of other news outlets, that a man has been arrested in connection with the death of Paul Peevie that we've just been discussing. They've arrested a man named Sergio Ferrer. Apparently this guy, Sergio was arrested on August twenty fourth, just a few hours after the body of Paul Peevey was discovered, and he was arrested on a completely unrelated charge having to do with an arrest warrant because he failed to appear in court Nebraska on a weapons charge. So this guy is sitting there in prison, and then the Sheriff's office, working with a bunch of other law enforcement agencies, found enough evidence to charge this man with first degree felony murder and aggravated robbery in connection with the death of Paul Peevey. Now keep in mind, while this man is under arrest and he is charged with these crimes, he is innocent until he has proven guilty via evidence and a court or you know all that stuff. Oh last thing, the puppies haven't been found yet. Gosh, that's crushing news. I know it was for me. Sorry to report that, but if you hear anything about the puppies, if you see anything, definitely let somebody know. We can't give up looking for these puppies after an hour. We haven't put up posters or anything. We've just been sitting around on our porches like goons and waiting. We all got to think these are all of our pets. We got a responsibility if these dogs are lost, and they are, we don't look for an hour and call it quits. We get our asses out there and we find these fucking dogs. Yes, that was a reference specifically for Adam Sandler in case heverhears this, but it's also serious. Let's find these. So there's your update. We'll keep looking for more and let us know if you find anything after hearing this, We'll be right back with more strange news.

And we're back with another piece of strange news. This is kind of a two prong story. It involves two organizations that we talk about relatively frequently. One maybe we've talked about a bit more frequently and not for particularly good reasons, NASA and Boeing. You may have heard the news that's astronauts, Butch Williams and Sunny Williams are getting a little more than they bargained for in terms of their time and space. They were intended to visit the International Space Station for a ten day mission testing out. It's my understanding some of the potential vulnerabilities of this Boeing spacecraft called the star Liner, Well, it turns out there were, indeed some pretty significant vulnerabilities. Are at the very least issues technical issues because the thrusters of the star Liner failed, and now because of reasons that we'll get into, many of which are obvious, the logistics of it all. What was once a ten day mission is now potentially going to be months and months, I believe upwards of eight months. They're going to be quote unquote stuck in space. Not quite the same as being lost in space.

We know where they are.

But yeah, this pretty abysmal performance by another Boeing product seems to be at fault here. Did you follow this story and have you heard much about this star Liner project. It's my understanding that it's had problems since its inception, like for many years, some.

Of which was software related. Now obviously this is quite hardware related.

Yeah, we've been talking with a couple of conspiracy realist about this on email. In particular, we want to start with a shout out to the astronauts themselves. Barry Wilmore and Sanita Williams. These astronauts fortunately are veterans in that literal rarefied air. This is not their first rodeo by any means. In fact, Sanita Williams in particular holds several records for things like marathons in space. These folks, if you had to pick two experts to survive in space, you'd be hard pressed to find two better people than these individuals. So luckily they're doing a bang up job. But also we see that this has been called an embarrassment by Boeing. Oh absolutely, the folks at NASA are the folks at NASA are making the right call there.

One hundred percent in a streak of you know, continuous embarrassments, you know that resulted in the CEO stepping down. And I mean, it's just been an absolute abysmal year for Boeing. And this certainly doesn't add any you know, positive spin to the string of Boeing debacles. And it also isn't a particularly great look for NASA, who, since suspending their space Shuttle program back in twenty eleven, have been trying to get it back off the ground. For lack of a better term, that isn't quite so plenty. Another additional embarrassment is that the private sector is actually having to step in in order to let's I don't know, I think the word rescue is maybe a little hyperbolic here, but SpaceX is sending their Dragon spacecraft to shuttle the stuck.

Astronauts back home.

And just to be clear, the astronauts Barry Butch Wilmore and Sanita Sunny Williams have been on the ISS since June for that eight day mission, which obviously.

Already well past that window of time.

And guys, I just have to say, we just had a little bit of a talk off mic just to kind of help clarify some things. Is it really as dumb and as simple as they're needing to wait this many months because SpaceX doesn't have a flight scheduled until then, And Ben, you pointed out to me it is in fact every bit as dumb and as simple as that. And you, guys, I believe the troubled Starliner is going to be I guess, for lack of a better term, space toad back to Earth by Boeing to be examined to see what the hell went wrong.

Well, that is a pretty expensive flight to go get two passengers, don't you think sending a rocket up no matter who made it, no matter how advanced the tech is.

I do sometimes forget how ludicrously expensive these flights are and how they have to take into account every bit of weight, you know, of every bit of the payload of whatever they're bringing or bringing back, and it is absolutely mission critical that that is adhered to, you know.

For safety reasons, for safety and financial reasons.

So while we maybe don't have an exact number of what that flight is going to cost, in the past, we've looked at the budgets for these kind of flights and they are often in the millions, right, I mean just in terms of like one of these flights, So it's it's nothing to sneeze at. So the fact that they're having to wait that long, because we know SpaceX has had some issues in the past as well, and I'm sure they're planning for a big launch, a big show, and they want to make sure everything you know, goes off as planned without a hitch, and so they're not going to rush this. And apparently to your point, Ben, the astronauts are not like outwardly angry about it, and I believe it's going to involve some sort of record.

Yeah, absolutely, we do know. I appreciate you pointing out the fact that no outer space human engineered enterprise has gotten things one hundred percent correct. It's just impossible at this point. It is also very expensive, and with great respect to the professionals involved on ground and in space. When you guys are talking about the cost of these launches, I kept having that line from the Heath Ledger Joker playing in my head. It's not about money, it's about sending a message.

Sure, so that's appropriate here, I think, sure, I don't know if it's appropriate, but well, it's wildly it's appropriately inappropriate, and I think it's a I think it totally lands jeez, can't not make funds because words, you know, mean different things. But I think this is a really interesting story and the fact, I do think maybe the most interesting part of this is that it hasn't been reported so much as another Boeing up. It's it's much more about these astronauts are stuck in space and the sort of hyperbolic, you know, notion of astronauts being stuck in space. So I don't know if Boeing pr is working overtime and a little bit in the spin zone. But I have not seen Boeing front and center much in this store, at least in the reporting that I've seen, and I do have to wonder if that's a product of any clever media, you know, manipulation.

We talked about this a little bit before. It is a fully separate segment of the company bull that, right, which would have to be different entities.

Yeah, still it's the name it It's not doing so hot overall.

But the major problem with Boeing the airline company is that they outsource all of those different parts, right, that then get manufactured and far flowing parts of the world, which are then brought together in a factory somewhere where actual facts. Boeing employees generally put together those pieces, and they're finding that the pieces don't fit so.

Good, right, And I mean, I'm a perfect example of how easy it is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

When you hear stories about.

Boeing at large having all of these technical problems, and you hear about a Boeing spacecraft having technical problems, and you immediately put it together that yes, one thing is related to another. So while that may not be the case. It certainly isn't the best pr opportunity here for Boeing. Obviously no one was hurt, but surely it's going to be incredibly expensive to tow this thing or to get this thing back to Earth. As mentioned previously in terms of how these kind of missions can just balloon manned or unmanned. And there's a really great article in the Conversation about the kind of history of this project and apparently it's been.

A bit troubled for about a decade.

So yeah, it's the Boeing partnership with NASA went back to the very beginning of the space program, you know, back from Marin or ten and the early Shuttle program. But this particular project has been in the works for about ten years and has faced multiple issues getting functional. And to your point, Ben, these kind of setbacks are part and parcel of you know, exploring the outer reaches of space.

So yeah, unfortunately, you can't make a you can't make an automobile without risking the possibility of car accidents. Yes, that's one way to put it.

Futurism points out something really interesting, and that is that when they're sending it back as you said, Ben unmanned right, They're sending the entire capsule and the whole thing back Sunliner. The star Liner. As it re enters, it is going to separate from the thrusters, the propulsion systems of the crew to cabin and the propulsion system. The propulsion system is what got all those gas leaks, and that is the reason that they couldn't send the astronauts back on the system. But as it separates, guess what it crashes into the burns up mostly as it's going through the atmosphere, so nobody can do any forensics on the thing. So nobody can know exactly what went wrong so they can fix it for the next time.

That's a sticky situation.

They also don't know for sure that things will go wrong. There are some fascinating quotes that may or may not reassure you, fellow groundwalkers. Let's go to There was a conversation like a press club conversation with Steve Stitch, the Commercial Crew program manager of NASA, and this is how Stitch described or portrayed NASA and Boeing's relationship called it quote just a little disagreement in terms of the level of risk. It depends on how you evaluate risk. We did it a little differently with our crew than Boeing did so Primarily, what they're doing is keeping these astronauts safe while avoiding the possibility of something going horribly wrong. Right, there are so many redundancies baked in. There's a lot of news saying Boeing is, you know, air quotes humiliated or embarrassed. But everybody's making the right call.

I would agree, and again, like the astronauts in question are not at the very least outwardly griping to the press.

You know about this so.

Seems like something of a non issue, but it is interesting, and I think part of the interesting thing about it that I mentioned earlier is the way it's being reported on. It just kind of really puts in the focus the kind of hyperbolic nature of these types of headlines is the notion that astronauts are stuck in space and that it's ruining everything, you know. I just think that's it does encourage one to read past the headlines. I would say a little bit, as we always try to do here on strange news, on stuff they don't want you to know.

I do like this idea your taking though nol. You should write an article entirely blaming the astronauts. You know, I love this idea. Privileged but whole astronauts waste space. Yeah, it give me just speaking sound like fire festival somehow.

That is what the is is is. Basically, it's just a floating space bound fire festival.

Let's go, Let's do a full anti astronaut show.

Yeah, I'm sure we can get the busses to pay for Well, that's all for now. Let's take a quick break here, work more sponsors, and then come back with one more piece of strange news.

And we have returned, folks, not just with you and thank you as always for joining us, but to space. Something interesting happened quite recently. The nation of China has produced enormous quantities of water using lunar soil. We're talking about moon juice is how I'd like to refer to it as a piece of technical nomenclature. If sustainable, reproducible, this will solve one of the big problems with the idea of life on the moon, with creating a population of literal lunatics. We've known for some time that the Moon does harbor the possibility of potable water. We talked about it in recent evenings, the idea of life on the moon in subterranean little Heidi holes. Right, returning back to the trogoldic trends of earlier humans, I don't know. First off, since we role played in the beginning this evening, i'd like to role play here again. If you guys were offered a job as water miners on the moon, how much would you have to be paid per year?

That's tough, I mean, because you'd have to be gone a long time.

It would have to be really, really worthwhile for your family. Yeah, I would argue you might.

They might target people who were in dire straits who really needed it bad.

I don't know.

I'll tell you what, Smarter people than me are going to do that calculation, and it's going to benefit the smarter people.

I'll tell you that upfront.

Yeah, if I was qualified to do it, and I had some science background and I didn't have a family, three hundred and twenty four thousand dollars a.

Year seems legit, but probably honestly.

Right, I don't know. That seems like a lot to me, okay.

But also, I mean, given given the circumstances, you outlined.

You're a supervisor though for that salary, right, you're leading the freaking expedition.

And then you're a digger. He's a moonline boy.

Right.

Are they paying for your housing?

You know, Robert, heinline is to be believed, one would, one would, one would.

Hope, right, so they're they're also, in that case, hopefully paying for your food at this point. Or maybe you wash up there and it's indentured servitude.

Firefest all over again.

You got a piece of white bread and some withered lettuce for your one meal a day.

You say, gosh, I'm thirsty, and they say, well, get to the mind, get to the toilet.

Isn't for you, This is for the rich people on Earth in their biodomes.

Oh that's you know, that reminds me the concept of resource extraction. There. You might be surprised, folks, to learn that countries creating the best coffee in the world, the people who actually live in those countries, for the most part, are drinking espresso, you know, instinct coffee, because who on Earth could afford this crazy expensive resource. And perhaps that that's what we'll get to here. After three years of in depth research and repeated reproducible processes. The Chinese government has confirmed there's a brand new method of using lunar soil, moon dust, moon dirt to produce large amounts of water. This is a game changer. You can read about it widely. One of the best sources here in the West is Reuters. China is aiming to set up what they call a basic station on the Moon by twenty thirty five. And I love that they're calling it a basic station.

Do we get the deluxe station?

Right? That's the idea. When do you get moon plus?

You got a pasture for that? I guess.

Okay, let's get into the science. How do you turn lunar soil into freaking water?

I mean, is it a matter of extracting like trace amounts of moisture from huge volumes of soil.

It's kind of like the magic of belief.

Wait a minute.

Now, well, okay, according to what I'm looking at ben well, at least according to Reuter's, China's state broadcaster CCTV says that it's because there's a large amount of hydrogen that exists in the soil. Like I guess, naturally recurring hydrogen in lunar.

Soils sciencing it up.

Okay, so if you heat it very very high, you can probably add some oxygen to the mix somehow and get water I'm assuming.

Yeah. What they found was you could take one unit of lunar soil and produce a pretty impressive output of potable water. So one like one British ton of soil can make minimum fifty kilograms of water, which maths out to the daily drinking water consumption of a crew of fifty people if they're not too thirsty.

But like, one of the big problems we always run into back here on Earth and things that lead to potential water wars is that like we can't make more water like or it's two energy prohibitive, you know, cost prohibitive to desalinate like ocean water or whatever. So what is so unique about this hydrogen that we can't reproduce that here on Earth?

It's or a question of the problem that they're solving here or what they're solving for is not the same problems we're solving for on Earth. The problem on Earth is totable safe water. How best to create that without also destroying the environment? Right, that's desalination technology is huge. But to your point, it is relatively impractical on Earth because there are other methods of ensuring clean water for the humans on the planet. They're just the boring stuff no one wants to do, like number one, conserve water or number two be a little nicer to the environment. People don't want to hear that. The problem that China is attempting to solve for on the Moon is to get past the great issue of supply chains. Water is please beat me here, doc, water is being cartoonishly heavy. If you have ever been hiking, if you have ever been in a situation where you have to carry around liquid water, you know it is super inconvenient. It's like realizing how many books you own when you have to move from one house to the next.

So the problem that you're solving for is more like for creating water for people already in space in a practical way rather than having a transport it. So at scale, my question being, this would not be efficient on Earth. It could be done, but it just doesn't make any sense, and it wouldn't be like some grand scale solution to.

Our water shortage problem.

Right, Yeah, that's that's well put. It doesn't It doesn't solve the same problems that we have on Earth. If you are thinking through a long term occupation of the moon and you're allowing for all the human things, right, you want to solve stuff like radiation exposure by putting people underground, right beneath a healthy shield of rock, And then you want to solve for the water. The next thing is the food, right, how do you how do you get how do you get past that part? And then after that, I'm sure we'll get to sanitation issues. Where do people poop? What happens to their poop? Have you thought about the spell.

And how do you reconstitute it to get some moisture, because you know, you imagine this is like having technology that is a soil to water microwave machine kind of thing that you put this you put a ton of soil in it, and you get one hundred bottles of water that are like what they they say, seventeen point six ounces or five hundred millimeters. So I mean, that's great. It's a magic machine that'll do that for the folks that are already up there. And you only got to send that machine one time out to the lunar surface, right, which is great, But in theory, yeah, yeah, I don't know. The solar energy on the moon is going to be so nice to have though.

Nice, nice set up foreshadowing. I love it. Also, if you need to support your local lunatics, right then what you'll do, I would argue, what you would do in the era of capitalism, is sell very expensive moon water. You know what I mean. You make it for peanuts up there, and then you charge like, what's the what is the fair price for a small bottle of moonwater for the type of folks you buy cyber trucks? You know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly, I'd say about the price of a bar of astronaut ice cream.

That's what I paid for it.

Now. It's definitely worth more than that. Asher and ice cream is pretty busting though.

Yeah, agreed. I think we were all keeping that front of mind anytime we have a conversation about the moon. Matt, do you have some news about moonwater? No?

I thought, Hey, a great name for moonwater would be Luna or Lunar or some I was trying to come up with a bottle of water from the moon name. But they've already it's all taken.

It's done. Check out our Luna TikTok.

Also till Neslie gets to the moon, then I'll Betsy'll be off.

There's one called Aqua Luna moonwater, and it's just like alkaline water or something that looks super high in and expensive.

Soon that'll be considered false advertising.

We are getting into moonwater. That's what I'm persuaded by. Lake. I am convinced by the arguments here code named Doc. You have to be on board with us technically on this one. We also, if you like our long suffering super producer, are not persuaded by our initial pitch for moonwater, we have another thing we can sell you via our good friends at reflect Orbitals. Have you ever been walking around at night, you guys, and thought it's inconvenient to me that the passage of the Earth and the Sun doesn't obey my schedule all the time. And Matt's not solemnly here a couple of boffins at a place called reflect Orbitals want to build space mirrors to reflect sunlight onto solar panels at night. According to their official website, this is that that's their primary goal, right. They want to solve for the problem of solar energy. However, the reason they're in the news is because if everything works out, when the infrastructure they're proposing, you can pay for them to send sunlight to you, no matter what time of day it is, no matter where you are on this wide wide world.

Can you, Ben, Can you confirm to me? I could not figure out if this was real or not. It seems so not real to me. I saw a viral video of some sort where a dude has an app and the like clicks on the app and then they look up in the sky and a giant light looked that looks like sunlight beans down on them and it's in the middle of the night, and you're like what And it.

Sounds like it's a cryptocurrency scam, like we're gonna send you some sunlight through your app.

Like that's like the name of a cryptotoken something.

Worse token for it.

What is the deal though?

Man? Is that?

What's Matt? What Matt's described? I haven't seen this and this is news to me.

Yeah, this is fascinating And I love the points you guys are bringing up because first things first, that fancy video, in my opinion, it's just that it's a fancy video. It's intriguing, it's fun to watch, it is aspirational. How about that?

Uh?

And and part of the I'm describing it as such is due to multiple iterations of research by journalist, particularly Stan Schroeder over at Mashable, who note that when the CEO of this startup, Ben Noak, introduced this video to the world, he posted it on x and he in the video, which is inspirational, you see him using, as Matt described, an app to pinpoint a location, and then when he hits that, when he drops a pin right to go back to our earlier conversation, when he shares his location with the app, it appears that an actual physical beam of light hits him where he's standing with astonishing fidelity. Big if true. Cool cool cool. But in the near future, this, this level of I think specificity is still not something humans possess. You can't call a spotlight to you via via the communication of light through mirrors on that scale. Yet, however, you can do something like.

It, well yeah, I mean on their website reflect orbital dot com. You can reserve a spot like you can say where you want sunlight to be. The duration is four minutes, the diameter is five kilometers, It's huge, and then delivery begins they say Q four twenty five. All you have to put in there is your name, your phone number, an email, the organization and why do you want to spot a sunshine at night? Pal?

That's that's you got to answer that question, right, yeah, along with your social Security number list and no example.

I'm sorry, I just don't understand. What's the point of this? What is this is a gimmick? I don't I don't understand at all.

Imagine. Imagine you're trying to like get a quick charge on some solar panels or something. Right, you do a spot of sunlight for I guess just a couple of four minutes.

You rent it for, Like is it you pay by the minute?

Like? Yeah, I don't, okay, all right.

Well imagine also, maybe an earlier version of this, you're attempting to siege a stronghold of vampires, right of not straw to you need you need to ideally hit them during the day when they're weak, Right, But sometimes you get in situations and if you can get enough sunlight there, even for I would say four minutes is generous. If you get enough sunlight there, then you have a fighting chance. You just have to make sure you get the app. You know, you get the email sign up in advance braving a new world. So the thing that mystifies me about this, the reason I'm bringing it up here is vampire jokes aside, it's the it's showing us similar technology to cloud seating, to weather modification. Right, the idea of the idea of cloud seating is genuine. It is legitimate. However, it is pretty unspecific. Right. It led to disastrous things not too long ago. And maybe this sunlight app will be a boon to solve for the problems of solar energy generation. Maybe people will use it as a flex But that's where I'd like to end on this question. Do you guys think there will be in as you said Matt later in twenty twenty five, do you think there will be people who pay to have the sun at night?

Yeah? I might do this. I would do this if I don't know how much it costs. This seems like a lot of fun, like just to prank your friends or something.

It feels like an elden Ring spell I did think of you.

Oh, or to propose or something. All of a sudden, a light comes on in the sky and like whatever, I don't know, I could think of a million reasons to have like a four minute spotlight on you randomly in the dark.

So moon juice is trash, but four minutes of out of season sunlight is pert hell.

I mean Yeahea, Luna Juice and sunshine on demand and this sounds this does sound like Brave New World or something along those lines.

And Oasis is getting back together, probably based entirely on this news, entirely on the moon juice research and reflect orbital.

You know, Liam loves his moon juice.

He's always talking about it. His Twitter is crazy. We've been speaking a little bit about this Oasis reunion off air. It is very much not conspiratorial, but it's definitely strange news. And with that we're gonna call it an evening. We would love to hear from you, folks. Let us know what you think about any and all of the stories we have mentioned, and please join us online. You may end up on our listener mail segment right.

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