Mars Rovers On The Moon, Satellite Management, Life Near Blue Giants | Q&A 250

Why won't NASA send a copy of Perseverance to the Moon? Can life exist on a planet around a blue giant star? How do satellites stay safe in orbit and don't collide with each other? Answering all these questions and more in this week's Q&A show.
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👉 Oxygen Bottleneck paper
arxiv.org/abs/2308.01160
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00:00 Start
00:26 [Andoria] Why won't NASA send Mars-style rovers to the Moon?
05:15 [Vulcan] How to get your discovery to the scientific community?
09:56 [Risa] Can life exist near blue giant stars?
13:41 [Aeturen] Can fire be the solution the Fermi paradox?
16:13 [Vendikar] Should you study journalism in a university?
19:26 [Remus] Robin Hanson's grabby aliens
24:21 [Janus] How do satellites stay safe in orbit?
28:39 [Cait] How do supermassive black holes form?
32:56 [Betazed] Will we become a Kardashev Type I civilization?
37:20 [Cheleb] Shape of the Universe
39:43 [Nimbus] Why some planets have no surface?
41:59 [Belos] Should we preserve Earth or find another home?
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[@adastraspace]

HUGE thank you for the shout out and kind words!! I’m a huge fan on Universe Today and just getting started on KZbin, so I very much appreciate it.

[@frasercain]

Thanks, keep up the good work. You're crushing it!

[@GrouchyHaggis]

Vulcan: More people need to understand this, very well explained Fraser.

[@hunterpdx7061]

Vulcan: Another option, rather than pretending to study for your PhD, is find a local conference or meeting in that particular field of study that is also open to interested members of the public. There are often presentations, seminars, and live chats and/or panels that have scientists willing to answer questions. Do not underestimate the power of networking.

[@RectalRooter]

I like your idea.

[@macysondheim]

Don’t bother going to “peer reviewed” journals for scientific discoveries you have made. Or corrections you may have for a lot of the false scientific data. These ppl aren’t interested in truth… Their main concerns lie with pushing their atheistic left-wing agendas.

[@RectalRooter]

@@macysondheim Sounds like a mainstream science " whatever that is " conspiracy theory.

[@ReinReads]

Expanding one’s knowledge in a field, they are obviously interested in and hope to impact, is far from pretending to get one’s PhD. Without being able to have a deep discussion of the topic one will likely be dismissed out of hand by those who’ve dedicated a significant portion of their life to understanding the field.

[@RectalRooter]

@@ReinReads Was My thinking wrong ? I took his statement was something akin to -- instead of taking all that time to learn all the stuff needed to correctly write up a paper - - was to talk to like minded people to pass along your idea.

[@steveschaps2178]

Fermi Paradox: The nearest intelligent extraterrestrial is 10,000 light years away. At that distance, we cannot detect their brightest lights or radio waves.

[@spacemanmat]

With regards to the looking after earth vs going to mars argument, I actually think that the lessons learnt for survival on mars will be very helpful for survival on earth.

[@737smartin]

Agreed!

[@RectalRooter]

Aeturen I remember there being a PBS documentary -- Maybe Hunting the Elements -- Which fully explains that very question. Even with visual experiments

[@SodThisGiveMeABeer]

Fraser, something I think you're missing with the oxygen bottleneck (which may of course be dealt with in the paper - i haven't read it) is that combustion was crucial for early humans being able to cook food and increase their brain size, which i would guess is a core tenet of the theory. It doesn't matter what chemistry or engineering might be possible to overcome an oxygen defecit if the lifeform hasnt evolved the intelligence to exploit it!

[@filonin2]

Exactly! Not to mention the other survival bonuses like scaring away predators at night and driving away biting insects with smoke. Once we had fire, we had a "magic" to fight the darkness with for the first time.

[@leonmusk1040]

Gotta love the fact that the very oxygen we rely so heavily on caused one of the great extinction events.@@filonin2

[@Smo1k]

I haven't read the paper in question, either, but my understanding of the oxygen bottleneck is not about us higher lifeforms and the ability to make a fire, but the bottleneck between having a pressure/temperature point where carbon dioxide is a gas soluble in liquid water: There are four nope-won't-happen-zones, four well-it-could-happen-maybe-in-a-quadrillion-years-zones and only one zone (like, Earth...) where we can say that it could absolutely happen, because it *did*. Having an open fire is a bottleneck of sorts, but as bottlenecks go, it's small change compared to the bottleneck of whether the oxygen is primarily stuck in crystalline form, or the bottleneck of whether a carbon-based lifeform can form to keep control of the oxygen inside vs outside; You have to start somewhere, which basically means that you need conditions where there's a significant difference between methane and ethane, dissolved in water, which in turn requires that there's no appreciable free oxygen around. Only then do you have the lego to make it to step 2, a lifeform which produces free oxygen. And that's prerequisite for land-based lifeforms, open fire and having time to look at the stars 🙂

[@mick_hyde]

That first question is THE question. [Andoria] 👏👏👏

[@bluesteel8376]

Create samples for astronauts to pick up would be silly. Just have the astronauts take their own samples. Humans will be on the moon within a few years so no need to go over board with a super expensive rover that would hardly get anything done compared to what humans could do in a few days.

[@RectalRooter]

Inline with Andoria I think a lot of the launch weight is used up to safely make blasting nuclear material into space. I wonder if there is plutonium on the moon letting more weight be the probe.

[@kolbyking2315]

Returning anything from Mars requires a ~5.5x bigger rocket than from the Moon. Not comparable in terms of difficulty. It's been done 4 times, most recently by Chang'e in 2020.

[@Rattus-Norvegicus]

​@@bluesteel8376It isn't silly, it'd be cheaper and safer. It'd also free up valuable time for the astronauts to deploy/perform other experiments.

[@Smo1k]

@@bluesteel8376 As the answer showed, a comparable mission is in the works. Are you seriously calling NASA silly? The question has merit, if you don't tight-beam focus on the sample-return part, but think about the "Where to land our astronauts to look at the interesting brink between different zones, rather than in the middle of a dust bowl" side of things.

[@robshaw2639]

I really liked the fire question paired with the non-scientist question. Hearing the fire question, it was something insightful that I never considered, but seems so obvious once you hear it...

[@leonmusk1040]

Yeah a lot of volcanic vents and and chemical ways to make metals thinking that only path forward is fire is a bit limited. We have to remember to not anthropomorphise the evolutionary process squids wouldn't have to get too much smarter to give us a run for the money and things like manganese balls could become a source of reaction fuel we just haven't learnt to exploit the ocean but one of our biggest tech solutions will be nodule mining it basically lets nature do you're refining for you.

[@pastelink6767]

You forgot about primordial black holes. Supermassive black holes are candidates for primordial black holes. Primordial black holes are not constrained in size in either direction. They are also a candidate for dark matter.

[@RectalRooter]

Vulcan Start by emailing / talking to your local community college, then move higher to a university college. Remember -- it's human nature to be involved in new or novel discoveries. Most likely they will help move up the food chain.

[@saeedafyouni619]

Risa respect to Fraser for reading out the Arabic name loved the episode Thank Universe Today and Fraser

[@leonmusk1040]

Yeah I oft get a little frustrated at the lack of western understanding of the great golden age of the Arabic nations. It's just a shame to see the west falling into the same problems of education golden age easy life no ambition for education. Followed by rampant rise of right wing religious groups to fill the education vacuum and collapse of the golden age.

[@jimswanson643]

thanks for hyping up Ad Astra, i just stumbled on her channel a few weeks ago and i have been impressed by her knowledge of the stories on her channel.

[@michaelgian2649]

Vulcan Addresses a pet peeve of mine. Hope this message finds its target audience.

[@minorityofthought1306]

Now I know what t to do with all my data on mitigating the affects of gravity. It mostly consists of data related to laying flat in soft pillows for long periods. Now I can be recognized for my hard work! ;)

[@Locut0s]

@Fraser it's really nice to hear you mention about how you used to feel that writing a 300 word essay was exhausting and thinking "how do you do this?". Because I think this kind of emotional hurdle is at the heart of almost every single personal accomplishment and endeavour. It always seems impossible and the road to the goal to convoluted etc until you start doing it. I have this experience with workouts, running and hiking which are some of my favourite things but it never used to be thigs way. I was pretty out of shape most of my life.

[@badnewswade]

I've got one for you! Could the supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies be the primordial black holes or topological defects from the early universe we've been looking for all this time? How else could they have formed?

[@deepfriedwater7650]

Yes! thats a current theory, in the early universe (when everything cooled enough to form atoms) there wasnt perfect homogeneity and because of that particularly dense areas would have massive stars forming that are large enough that they could form black blackholes at the core feeding off the star while the star was still growing off the surrounding area which explains the massive gap in backhole size aswell as the supermassive black holes themseves

[@kolbyking2315]

Chang'e 4 is a rtg-warmed, solar-powered lander and rover pair that have been operating on the far side of the moon for the last 5 years. Pretty Perseverance-like imo.

[@12pentaborane]

Wow it's still operating? I know both Lunokhods used radioistopic heaters for substantial longevity. I'm a little surprised countries like India and Japan didn't include them on their probes.

[@TheTamriel]

IMO Yutu-2 is heated by an RHU since RTGs convert heat into electricity

[@dellaroccia]

On the subject of the "habitable zone": Rigel has 46000 times the luminosity of the sun. A planet would therefore have to orbit Rigel at a distance of 214 AU (AU = distance Earth-Sun) in order to receive the same energy as the Earth. This corresponds to approximately 4 times the distance of the Kuiper belt.

[@erkinalp]

yeah I too realised Fraser based his calculations off of visible light only, which is misleading

[@marumiyuhime]

but much of that engergy would be delivered in hard uv sterilizing everything

[@erkinalp]

@@marumiyuhimefluorescent atmosphere + purple plants that use green light can alleviate that

[@marumiyuhime]

@@erkinalpbuddy no it can not i guess you dont know the power of uv c it kills everything as it is ionizing radiation it would just ionize what ever chlorophyll analogue that would be there. absorbance is not the solution with uv c reflection is. have you ever worked with uv c i have

[@marumiyuhime]

@@erkinalpnot going to happen thats more scifi than cybremen

[@TheJimtanker]

The Moon should be THE priority right now. Colonizing the Moon must come before colonizing Mars. We need to build the infrastructure and develop the methods to be used in other places in the Solar System on the Moon.

[@tonywells6990]

Elon has his own Mars thing going. Mars is important if we want to find out if life existed on another planet, so sending real people out there is important.

[@TheJimtanker]

@@tonywells6990 We can send people to Mars after we learn how to live off of Earth and develop the technologies we need.

[@tonywells6990]

We can send people to Mars, yes.@@TheJimtanker

[@BabyMakR]

Agreed. Not to mention the fact that it is far easier, cheaper and safer to send cargo to Mars from the Moon than it is from Earth.

[@tonywells6990]

@@BabyMakR Nobody has ever maintained, fuelled and launched a rocket from the Moon to anywhere.

[@dickyvee]

The videos are getting longer and I love it!

[@11000038]

Some great questions and even greater answers. Thank you!

[@ThatBoomerDude56]

Already subscribed to Ad Astra's channel last week. 😀😎

[@h2o40fpv]

Great video like always thank you.

[@garyswift9347]

Thanks again. Your content is always great.

[@cheset]

Love your videos Fraser! Thank you!

[@leafflowerbud4345]

Great episode. Good stuff.

[@fkaMilo]

I really enjoyed this episode !

[@MistSoalar]

Risa: planetary, thermal habitable zone questions are always my ❤❤

[@alan2here]

Zoning: Maybe we need a zone that starts at some specific altitude (a little above the ISS), and extends out to just below geostationary orbit, where the rules on craft are more restrictive. In time with more space infrastructure maybe we can do some tidying of the largest bits of junk within that zone as well.

[@cavetroll666]

thanks for the content cheers from Toronto.

[@idvarhurd]

Belos: exploring Space helps us understanding how our planet works and we use that knowledge to better preserve it. many of NASA's inventions were later introduced into civil-use products. It's not or-or, those things work together.

[@douglaswilkinson5700]

Fraser, Rigel's bolometric luminosity is 120,000 times the luminosity of our Sun.* I doubt that its Goldilocks Zone is just a few AU. * "The Astrophysical Journal". 747 (1) pgs 108-115.

[@JAGzilla-ur3lh]

Andoria was the most interesting topic and gets my vote. An honorable mention goes to Vulcan for your thorough, honest answer. Also, will you people please do your dishes so Frasier will let us climb Mt. Everest?😢

[@irwanshahabdullah9663]

In shipping, vessels are kept apart using traffic separation schemes. This can be found in narrow navigable waters such as the Straits of Malacca. Even on the High Seas, the Collisions Regulations dictates how a ship should be navigated. Sooner or later, space will need a similar set of rules. Love the channel. Keep up the good work.

[@robhenderson490]

Aeturen: Gonna try to tune in to Mondays Q&A - I'm in the UK.

[@danw331]

I have several points: 1. You are the Brian Cox of America 2. I can't tell you how many long shifts, sleepless nights you've got me through 3. Hearing all this makes me realise how dumb I actually am 😂 good job someone else can explain it to me in layman's terms.

[@frasercain]

Hah, I appreciate that. Of course, I'm not American, so that title is still up for grabs. :-)

[@danw331]

@@frasercain nah you can still have it! Brian Cox of the world!

[@leonmusk1040]

love it that's why you're the best American presenter 🤣@@frasercain

[@RectalRooter]

Has Earth ever been a StarTrek planet name ?

[@BabyMakR]

That's a good question.

[@denniscastillo478]

Blowing my mind,hope to see Antarctica video and we're so exited

[@jblob5764]

Auturen- definitely got my interest

[@jonathanbare7093]

The moon is tidle locked to the earth and moving away from the earth a small amount every year. Could we put a thrust generator on the moon's equater to increase or decrease its orbital velocity and change or stabilize it's orbital distance, allowing us to manipulate tides, plate tectonics, weather or climate?

[@thabzmad7265]

The idea vastly overestimates our capabilities, its hard enough to launch something the size of a medium car and the moon is a gizillion times more massive. While there are ways to tractor (using smaller bodies to slowly affect gravitational pulls) heavenly bodies and manipulate orbits, the effort is still astronomical in ernegy and time requirement (multi generational) as to be not worth it in my uneducated opinion.

[@user-ei6tt6er1p]

Moon moves about an inch a year.

[@crowlsyong]

18:55 Matt O’Dowd!! I love this guy, he is a great person for PBS Spacetime.

[@crowlsyong]

23:15 and you are familiar with Rational Animations?! My man!! Love that channel too.

[@georgeteppitt-jg2mj]

Thanks!

[@gregzsidisin]

Why not a Perseverance rover on the moon? Cost. A lunar version might be cheaper than the Mars version, but still very expensive. And as said, the suite of experiments would be very different, since the questions are very different. I think a version of the Skycrane delivery system should be considered. But now that NASA has farmed out lunar delivery systems, it would be for a private company to propose and advocate for that. It's a pity to me that there isn't a plan to do much more to land many small instruments over multiple lunar regions. Obviously the poles are of particular interest, but there's so much more to learn.

[@JeffTheisen]

"There isn't really any specialized knowledge that a university could teach you, that you couldn't pick up just doing the work" You just described 90% of all jobs out there that require a degree from a university.

[@leonmusk1040]

More as there are participation awards like religious degrees ffs lmao

[@agentdarkboote]

Does the habitable zone calculation take into account the presence or absence of the greenhouse effect, ie account for different kinds of atmospheres?

[@Smo1k]

Regarding question 2, how to get my stuff looked at by the scientific community: Write the most clear-cut 2-3 pages paper you can on your subject and go to the person(s) who taught you science, and ask them to take a look. If they were your teacher at one point, they are the most likely to afford you the time once more. And the most likely to point you where to go from where you are.

[@ElitePhotobox]

Scott Manley learned every thing he knows about Rockets 🚀 from Kerbal Space Program

[@GantryG]

Energy=life in many ways. 🤔

[@PongoXBongo]

Could the Moon's gravity support a small sat constellation? Like a Lunar extension of StarLink? A key addition to a lunar colony would be 24/7 realtime communication with Earth.

[@bbartky]

I know the Chinese launched a small relay satellite to communicate with their lander and rover on the Moon’s far side. So, yea, I think eventually we will have some sort of communication satellite system around the Moon.

[@leonmusk1040]

There's actually a peanut shaped orbital that would work really well the moon had a little friend that shared us and it for a while@@bbartky

[@trenttan3779]

Hi Fraser. 1) When is solar maximum for the current cycle and what are the chances of getting something like the Carrington event? And would it be dangerous to be in a plane? 2) Would launching powerful magnets into space help collect space junks, or would they just contribute to the junks?

[@trevinom69]

Could you set up a satellite on an orbit that allows it to collect sunlight with solar panels and use a laser to send power to a rover on the 'dark' side? You should be able to use a tracking system to maintain the laser on the probe's collector plates.

[@BabyMakR]

Mirrors would probably be easier. Fewer energy conversions plus, any light that doesn't hit the rover would light up the ground for cameras to do science with.

[@kiwicanable]

[Belos] great analogy 😂 Instead of chasing down Oumuamua, can we visit objects identified by Gaia orbiting on a different plane than the planets, suggesting the objects are captured interstellar items of interest which aren’t running away?

[@tomv5782]

With journalism under attack around the world, it is a vital field to keep alive. But seems like there are things about it that go beyond love of topic and practice practice practice. Ethics, sources, stuff like that. Maybe university isn't required, but in some way the best practices and integrity need to be preserved.

[@Nolan1410]

Could blue super giants have other stars in stable orbits similar to planets?

[@ReinReads]

Blue giants have been observed as parts of binary and 3+ multiple star systems. Latest estimate is 85% of stars are part of multi-star systems. Due the the short lifespan of the blue giant primary the other stars would be ejected when the the primary goes nova.

[@BabyMakR]

@@ReinReads I always wondered if a supernova would have enough energy to eject a partner star. I thought that the fact that there are main sequence stars in orbit of neutron stars and black holes, that maybe they weren't thrown out.

[@filonin2]

@@BabyMakR It's not the fact that there is a supernova, the issue is that the mass of the star they were orbiting spread out in every direction so they can't orbit it anymore and so they fly off in a straight line, exactly like a string breaking on a weight swung around your head.

[@ChrisNZ2]

Did Fraser just suggest 'One Ring to Rule Them All' ? (To keep satellites safe)

[@RectalRooter]

lol Yeah and we doo soooo well with keeping trains from crashing into each other Public Space metro lol

[@DerpyPenguin4747]

20:00 THE BOB!

[@kyleknox4129]

The best argument for living on Mars is to develop the tech to live on earth when we make it more like Mars.

[@RectalRooter]

lol

[@johno1544]

The problem is Earth is heading toward Venus like rather than Mars like

[@kyleknox4129]

@@johno1544 either way. Nothing advances efficient life support tech like dying when you go outside.

[@serg3y]

@frasercain, Question: Does the "Mediocrity principle" apply to time, suggesting we likely exist during an average period in history, and if so, does this imply that far past and far *future* Earth and Universe are less likely to support life?

[@Etopirynka]

Question. When did first black holes form? Do we know that? Is it possible that in the opaque stage of the big bang there were conditions that made smbh possible? Or do we know that at first there were only stars?

[@brotherjongrey9375]

"A nuclear battery rover on the moon would be super duper" Super duper doesn't pat the bills. That's why

[@frasercain]

Space exploration doesn't pay bills, it costs money. You have to decide how to spend limited resources.

[@RectalRooter]

Space exploration also adds too and evolves our science and technology. I feel it's a good return on investment.

[@leonmusk1040]

It cost's a drop in the bucket compared to education and let's face it that's been wasted money in the last fifteen years can we get a refund and put that on space research?@@frasercain

[@bbbf09]

Being able to free up oxygen from rocks via some technologial industrial process - and thereby access fire/combustion - presupposes you have technology/ industrial processes in the first place. Which is difficult (impossible?) to ever achieve without having free access to fire initially .....which I think that was the point. Catch 22.

[@leonmusk1040]

chemical fires burn water or under it so meh might make the initial intellectual jumping off point much higher but that just means it'd catch up quicker down the back straight

[@ekaa.3189]

On life being all over: "Life finds a way." is the saying I use. Wherever there is energy to be exploited, life finds a way to use it to perpetuate it's self.

[@aldentindall9688]

Question: Why does NASA not regularly reuse probe designs? Couldn’t we have more explorers if we settled for quantity over quality? We should have a new horizons at every planet by now!

[@RectalRooter]

I believe NASA has done this. I cant find the info right now. -- Mariner, Pioneer, Ranger, Surveyor, Viking, and Voyager These had many probes of each. For reason I remember a deeper connection between some of them.

[@bbartky]

@@RectalRooterNASA did this with the Mariner program in the ‘60s and ‘70s and with the exception of Mariner 5 and 10 built them in pairs to increase the chance of success. Mariner 1 (failed) and 2 (success): Venus flyby Mariner 3 (failed) and 4 (success): Mars flyby Mariner 5 (success): Venus flyby Mariner 6 (success) and 7 (success): Mars flybys Mariner 8 (failed) and 9 (success): Mars orbiter Mariner 10 (success): Venus flyby and three Mercury flybys In addition, the Magellan Venus orbiter used spare parts from Voyager. And there been proposals to build a pair of Cassini-like orbiters for Uranus and Neptune.

[@RectalRooter]

@@bbartky Nice work. That last paragraph info gave me the problem in find the info.

[@leonmusk1040]

I'm surprised thin film and topology haven't seemed to hit rtg tech yet to any big degree any ideas on hold up's?

[@chrismullin9437]

Relative to Janus, I don't think we have three dimensiomns to work in. We just have two. Satellites circle the Earth, so an orbit at one altitrude crosses every other orbit at that altitude. we can put lots of satelliters in that orbit following each other, but other orbits either have to coordinate with other satellites to pass through gaps in their orbit, or else they will collide.

[@frasercain]

Airplanes don't crash into trains or submarines. That's sort of like different orbits.

[@yghhhhrffv]

Say we find water underneath the ice of one of Jupiter’s moons- can we just drink them as is or is it different than water on earth?

[@RectalRooter]

I don't know Coming up with new inventions to answer that question helps us evolve are science and technology

[@bluesteel8376]

It would be like drinking out of the oceans on Earth. The water would most definitely not be fresh. It would contains salts and other stuff.

[@battragon]

Water is water.

[@PongoXBongo]

@@bluesteel8376Indeed. It would also likely contain alien organisms like bacteria and parasites that might be toxic to humans. Forget space sharks, the space legionella will get us first.

[@BabyMakR]

@@battragon Go on then. Go down to the nearest ocean and drink.

[@ELFinchy]

Hey Fraser, Have a question for you. Is there anyone tracking any possible asteroid strikes with the moon? This would be a cool spectacle to view from the Earth?

[@michaelgian2649]

25:10 28k MPH collision speed may be an exceptionally high estimate. Open question for the audience: describe the maths needed to derive the actual collision speed of two objects in intersecting orbits. My initial preference is to use the frame of reference of one, but this may not be the most elegant approach. I suppose (at the beginning) that most orbits are prograde and basically circular, but at various inclinations and/or right ascension. Next step is to look at increasingly elliptical orbits of one or both. Keep in mind an engram of a sci-fi story (I may be remembering from my youth) where a kinetic shotgun styled weapon is spread retrograde into coincident orbits to remove a superior enemy's satellite system. I think that one used a translunar orbit with appropriate perigee slowing thrust during the deployment. Not a comfortable thought considering its relatively simplicity.

[@rafeller9057]

Listening to you something occurred that I haven't heard before which is what if all the different galaxies are in a slightly different dimension of which we can't see the entire spectrum?

[@bjornfeuerbacher5514]

And what is "being in a slightly different dimension" actually supposed to mean? A "different dimension" implies that you think that we live in _one_ dimension, and the galaxies are in another one? Then already your premise is wrong - we do _not_ live in one dimension, we live in a fourdimensional spacetime. I think you have a misunderstanding of what the word "dimension" actually means.

[@ReggieArford]

For the RTGed Lunar rover, you could find a /good/ landing spot, then drive it (manually, and quickly) to the lunar pole. BTW, why the South pole? Wouldn't the North pole have similar cold sinks and ice deposits? Could there be better landing spots up there?

[@shanent5793]

The North pole probably does have better (read: easier) landing spots. If you look up the pictures of the lunar poles you'll see how boring it is up there. The shadowed area of the South pole looks at least a hundred times bigger

[@RectalRooter]

Lunar drag racing -- I love it 😀

[@Frazec_Atsjenkov]

In regards to the second question: If you think you have found a solution to a scientific problem, there are two things you can do. You don't have to have a degree to get published per se. What matters is that your paper/article has the required quality. If you think it does, you can offer it to a scientific publication. If it doesn't or if you are unsure, at least in my country, you can consult with a university professor and/or follow a course to get proficient at writing articles. Of course, this all assumes that your knowledge base is of an academic level and your idea has merit. You can even use this publication as a basis to get a degree. After all, the end goal of most scientific courses is obtaining the skills required to write a scientific paper that is worth being published. I know examples of people who followed this path. Of course, it has to be said that this path is not the norm. Doing this by yourself as an autodidact is something very few people will be able to accomplish. Also, you should be aware that scientists are busy people. Not everyone will be receptive even if your idea has merit.

[@lovepeaceandrespect8808]

fraser is would be cool if u talked about comets like swift tuttle, or siruis b, end of the world stuff, it's fascinating, and fun.

[@frasercain]

Can you put that in the form of a question? 😀

[@TheTamriel]

NASA's halt of Moon rover exploration on April 27, 2018 may have been due to a budget allocation shift. Moon and Mars are very different environments. *A rover designed to operate on Mars just can't operate on the surface of the Moon.*

[@frasercain]

Yeah, it would be a very different river, but an RTG would be a welcome addition.

[@carsongent8420]

@frasercain Question: Hi Fraser, I have seen an idea to launch a StarShip as a visible wavelength space telescope, about the size of a VLT telescope from the ESA. The VLT has 4 large telescopes which can be combined together. What if 4 StarShip telescopes were launched into space with fold out mirrors like JWST and a fifth one was used in the middle to combine the beams together (interferometry). I have concerns about thermal expansion of the arms. Hopefully the center StarShip could be used as an area were they put all the cool instruments, hopefully upgradable. Just trying to get the idea out there. I will let other people come up with the design, specifications and the check.

[@sidharthcs2110]

USSR did that back in the day with Lunakhod rovers. A radioactive heat source for warming the electronics, but the rover is solar powered

[@Davroz451]

Is there a stable orbit where you could put a satellite permanently in the umbra of the Moon such that you could have a permanent solar eclipse, with the moon acting as a natural coronagraph?

[@CeresKLee]

Offtopic! I discover this neatest thing with Stellarium. The April 8th social eclipse will expose Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and Mars all in the noontime darkness and all greater that First Magnitude. WOW!!! May the clouds be gone at that magic time. Back on topic, I vote for Aeturen!

[@CeresKLee]

Mercury will there too - but Fourth Magnitude and that never visible in Austin.

[@fisheye42]

18:46 … I think Scott Manley would say he’d do ellipses around you, not circles. 😅

[@JohnBoen]

Okay - let me re-ask the same question. Because I have been thinking about this for 2 years now. Re: scientific publications. I have done a specific set of research and would like to publish the data and my thoughts on how further research could be done. How do you share research that you think others might find interesting? I have an example: I heard needles of graphite line up in a magnetic field and presumed that if the solvent dried while the particles were in alignment they would draw together and be highly conductive. Turns out this is true. In fact, if you make a paper supercapacitor out of this it will work much better. I spent about 3 weeks with a defocused CO2 laser and magnet rig trying to draw conductive lines on paper with thin conductive alcohol ink mixtures. I tried it with several different products and varying titrations of each. I measured resistance and capacitance of samples made with varying patterns of traces along alcohol soaked strips of paper... I have not seen any research on the diamagnetic positioning of graphite in fast-drying solvents - or the hundred other phrases I have sent to Google Scholar. This sort of thing could scale into a process that makes paper supercapacitors with a very low ESR. On the other hand, maybe people already use it... I would like to publish this, but I have no idea how.

[@frasercain]

My advice is still largely the same. If you've got a prototype that actually works, I guess you could make a KZbin video explaining it?

[@zapfanzapfan]

Patent it? Or at least search what other patents there already are?

[@JohnBoen]

@frasercain Now that I am thinking... * I have a 1990 degree in materials science, and I could probably contact the MS&E department to see if anyone is doing similar work or could recommend a way forward. * I bought one of the conductive inks from Robert Murray Smith - another KZbinr. He does science; I should send it to him. Thank you. You made me actually think about it.

[@frasercain]

Yeah, if you're not part of an existing university, research institute, etc, you won't able to directly publish a journal. But if you can collaborate with someone who is, then you can use their credientials and reputation to open the door. Since their reputation depends on the quality of the science you do together, expect them to be extremely skeptical. But a practical demonstration is pretty damn convincing.

[@JohnBoen]

@frasercain I don't think anybody needs a demonstration of an effect anyone could do if they just had paper, graphite ink, and a magnet. It just isn't a valuable thing... I can make parallel fragile carbon lines on a sheet of paper. A lot of my ideas are like this - interesting, but not valuable. Most of my experiments fail, but I still learn something. There should be a way - but everything I can think of seems like a lot of work.

[@Slikx666]

A question. If there's a star with enough resources orbiting it to create a Dyson sphere that is fully enclosed, where does everything emitted from the sun go? Heat can be dumped outside the sphere, but there's all the gasses etc, would an atmosphere be created on the inside?

[@BabyMakR]

Collected and used as fuel for interstellar missions? Maybe collected and ejected out of a port somewhere to move the star?

[@loopernoodling]

Janus: Anton Petrov today discusses 'Fishbowl' planets, where any intelligent life may never be able to reach escape velocity, whatever they do, so all they can do is observe space. I commented there that we are creating our own fishbowl in the form of the Kessler Syndrome! Even a relatively minor war between satellite-equipped nations would massively increase the amount of space garbage out there!

[@frasercain]

Those poor guys. Especially if they have heavy gravity.

[@GIRGHGH]

On the topic of surfaces of planets, the way you described it is kinda confusing. By the method you used to describe it, Venus wouldn't have a surface, as it's "cloud tops that gets hotter as you go down" but I feel like most would describe Venus has having a surface.

[@notgreg123]

I like to think of it as a gas dwarf lol

[@ReinReads]

Venus has a rocky surface that is independent of the atmosphere that is above it. If the atmosphere was stripped away it would be something like Mercury or the moon. If you were to strip away the atmosphere of a gas giant then whatever is below that would become a new atmosphere because the pressure above it, creating the phase change, would be removed.

[@michaelpettersson4919]

So what is needed to design some cold resistant batteries.

[@danoberste8146]

How about if lunar robots scooped up warm regolith while the sun shines to use as thermal mass during the dark periods? Thermal mass is expensive to bring along from earth, but mass collected warm on the moon can be gathered and dumped as needed. (ANDORIA section)

[@tonywells6990]

[Cait] Stellar mass black hole merger theory is the only one we have evidence for, but that seems to be changing quickly and direct collapse will probably be the most likely way supermassive black holes formed since jumping from >1000 solar masses to a million solar masses is much quicker than the much slower process of thousands of

[@ChrstphreCampbell]

One of the things to do very much annoyed me about the Mars missions was that they started off with this assumption that if there were any life on mars, it would be exactly like the life on earth ! I Think it would’ve been far more productive and genuinely scientifically inquisitive if they installed a microscope on the probes and just looked for something squiggling around, with the only assumption that there would been movement or some sort of visible activity involved in their existence ?

[@frasercain]

Why not start with looking for like Fe as we understand it? Water is a fantastic solvent, so start there. If that doesn't work, get creative.

[@zbyseklegindi5017]

Hi, I have a Question. In Our solar system suppose to be a asteroid so heavy, that it can not be from material which is in periodic table. Why wei didnt send the probe there yet? Is nasa thinking about to check it out?

[@frasercain]

It's a pretty controversial result. More research will be necessary before it becomes a target.

[@mikemarcus214]

Wow… sending a Perseverance class vehicle (PCV) to the moon is an excellent idea. For a faction of the cost of sending a man to the moon for a few days, we could send a PCV to operate for several years. Russians were quite successful with their Lunokhod Rovers… using solar panels during the lunar day and using a polonium-210 radioisotope heater during the night (while it slept). This is just another example of the cowboy engineering that seems to have infected our current space engineers… using a modified PCV could be easily achieved… but instead, the new space nerds feel the need to forget our past and reinvent everything. Nuts.

[@codyross5364]

Yes! Clean your dishes! Also Ad Astra rules!!!! they got chops!!!!

[@picksalot1]

An August 2023 Morning Briefing article on Nature states "About 59% of all species live in soil, making the ground the planet’s single most biodiverse habitat." Though the presence of surface water defines if a Planet is in the "Habitable Zone," it does not specify where life may actually be found on the Planet.

[@KOZMOuvBORG]

11:42 outer limit of Rigel's habitable zone is nearly as far as Jupiter.

[@proayeshafatima]

Your content is so informative. Love from Pakistan 🇵🇰

[@seasonallyferal1439]

The moon seems a place where a space based solar system would be helpful. Maybe you could beam energy down to rovers during the night, or is there something I'm missing?

[@frasercain]

Yup, this has been proposed. This is where beaming space power makes sense.

[@Kinann]

I'd argue for the Fermi paradox in fire bottlenecked locations that our civilization was initially exposed to fire via lightning and volcanism. If that's not happening naturally on other planets how will their nascent civilizations evolve to even learn fire exists at all to then artificially create it? They need fire to keep warm to stay alive when there's nothing else available to do that.

[@leonmusk1040]

All life on Earth evolved just fine with out fire. It's requisite to technology not life but a lot of tech could still evolve without fire chemistry in hycean worlds would be difficult but not impossible

[@Hobbes746]

What? No mention of the Lunokhod rovers, which used a combination of solar cells and radioisotope heater units to operate on the moon for 10 and 4 months?

[@ThanosSustainable]

You’ve mentioned on todays episode that the biggest star we know of is around 150 times the mass of the sun. I’ve seen animations that depict really huge stars, enough to engulf the whole of our solar system. And then some. Are the misleading, or are there stars out there that are indeed just 150x the mass of our Sun, but at the same time 10E9 bigger, due to (possibly) much lower density?

[@shanent5793]

The density varies, more massive stars have denser cores but more tenuous atmospheres. The dense cores release more energy which pushes the atmosphere outwards. After our Sun's core runs out of hydrogen, the core will shrink and allow hydrogen in the atmosphere to start burning. When this happens our Sun will also blow up to encompass Earth's orbij

[@dksteiner1]

Possibly a bit bigger channel than you're looking for but a great small channel that doesn't seem to get enough views is ExploreAstro by Jessie Christiansen. She interviews exoplanet discoverers.

[@ch94086]

Betazed: A Kardashev Civilization looks at energy impacting a planet, but what about energy from within the planet? It's a question for another episode How does solar energy impacting our planet compare to geothermal + fission + fusion inherent in our planet? Suppose we develop technology to extract fusion energy from all elements up to the limit? Could we exceed a Dyson sphere? I haven't done the numbers so seems like an intriguing question.

[@leonmusk1040]

Kardishev 1 implies utilising all of the power of a planet that includes geothermal chemical and nuclear so we're about 0.00000001 on the kardashev scale if that

[@leonmusk1040]

Vulcan: Another reason being most people are hyper focused on their own thing. Finding fellows in the field you're looking into going to makerspaces and inventors guilds (It's a thing). It really depends on you're field of expertise as to the avenues for furthering you're research A playstations search engine is better for finding white papers and academic journals just as a cheap lookup tool when other devices let you down you may be surprised at what you find by altering the alliteration of the search some languages will change things preferentially in translation algorithms. Also a lot of back yard chemistry stateside use really old fashioned naming conventions too so that's a thing lol