The story goes that in the heat of the Space
Race, NASA spent astronomical sums of money - as much as $12 billion - on a ballpoint
pen that could write in the depths of space. Meanwhile the USSR just used pencils. It’s a great cautionary tale about wasting
your time and money... too bad it’s not true. What really happened was that both Russia
and America used pencils in space missions until 1968, but they came up with some big
problems. Pencils have a bad habit of breaking and,
when they’re not, they’re flaking off lead instead. In low gravity conditions lead can work its
way into the equipment and cause major system malfunctions - problems that NASA wanted to
avoid after 3 astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire. But when the solution finally came along,
they didn’t even ask for it. Paul C. Fisher, of Fisher Pens, spent $1 million
of his own company’s budget on developing a pen that would work in a vacuum and between
-150 and +200 degrees Celsius. And crucially, the pen wouldn’t burn in
an oxygen-rich space shuttle. And here’s the kicker, NASA just straight
up bought them from Fisher for under $1,200 for 400 pens. So that initial $12 billion rumor was only
off by about $11.9 billion, no biggie. Contrary to popular belief, not to mention
a certain sitcom theme tune, it’s extremely unlikely that the Big Bang was the true start
of everything. Our universe? Almost certainly. But that’s not the whole story. To make things clear, the Big Bang theory
specifically describes the expansion of the universe from a singularity of infinite density
about 13 billion years ago. Thanks to the existence of cosmic radiation,
which is leftover heat from the Big Bang, we can be fairly sure that it did indeed happen. But the problem is that the theory says nothing
of the actual point at which time began, simply that at some point the order of the universe
drastically changed. And here’s where it gets tricky. Scientists are pretty sure that something
came before, but the existing framework of quantum physics doesn’t allow for it - and
they have no idea what it would even be. Boatloads of theories have been put forward,
like another older universe collapsing to form the singularity behind our big bang,
or that it’s an event that happens cyclically in trillion year cycles. But at this point they’re just shots in
the dark, and they all contradict Einstein’s theory of general relativity - which isn’t
a great place to start from. You’ve seen it countless times in pop culture
- someone falls out of the airlock, they struggle for a second and then explosive decompression
causes their eyes to go all Total Recall. But as dramatic and disgusting as it would
be, that’s really just a trope and nothing more. The reality isn’t quite so cinematic, let
alone as gruesome. What actually happens when a person is exposed
to the vacuum of space is that they die of suffocation long before anything more disgusting
can happen. After experimentation on chimpanzees in the
1960s, we know that you might be able to survive for as long as two minutes without permanent
physical or mental damage. But that’s only if you exhale immediately. You see, while the decompression won’t explode
your eyes, it will rupture your lungs if you hold your breath. You might experience symptoms like skin swelling,
sunburn, and, in the case of one astronaut, tongue boiling. But none of those will actually kill you. In 1971 the 3 astronauts aboard the Soyuz
11 capsule tragically suffered decompression in their descent. As far as the post-mortem could tell, the
men died shortly after passing out, but they landed with their bodies intact and no apparent
indication of any violent deaths. There are a couple things going on here that
we’ll get into, but the bottom line is that meteorites are nothing like what movies would
have you believe. Hey, that’s why it’s called science fiction. First of all, they aren’t all that rare. While it seems like a noteworthy event when
a chunk of asteroid falls to earth, according to the Royal Astronomical Society’s 1996
findings it happens between 18,000 and 84,000 times a year. Most of them are so small that they never
reach the surface, but potentially serious meteorite strikes still occur between 5 and
10 times a year on average, and there have been about 34,000 known collisions of that
type since 2,300 BCE. There was a particularly serious impact in
2013 when a blast with the power of around 300,000 tons of TNT occurred over the skies
of the Ural region of Russia, injuring 1,000 people. And while we’re busting myths, if meteorites
aren’t rare, they certainly aren’t glowing hot. That’s because, while atmospheric entrance
will create an enormous amount of heat, it also wears away the outside layers of the
rocks as they’re being heated. On top of that, since asteroids spend millennia
cruising through the icy cold of space, and they are poor conductors of heat to begin
with, meteorites tend to be lukewarm on impact at best. Black holes suck, right? Because if sci-fi is to be believed, black
holes are funnels of ceaseless hunger that will consume the all life, the universe and
everything. Well, sorry but that’s a myth. While it is true that if anything passes the
event horizon of a black hole it will never be able to escape. Even in a black hole, the rules of gravity
still apply. Gravitational fields are determined by mass,
so there is a strict relationship between the matter in a black hole and its pull, just
like suns, planets, or any possible object. And while they do have a far greater mass
than anything else the same size, on account of their incredible density, the mass is not
infinite, so there are limits to their attraction. To contextualize that, if you had a black
hole three times the mass of our sun, the event horizon would be just a few kilometers. And if our sun was replaced with a black hole
of equal mass, the solar system would remain intact and behave in pretty much the same
way. We would be really cold and very dead though. You know how the sky isn’t really blue? Well the same is true for the color of the
Sun. While it looks like daylight is coming from
that big yellow ball in sky, our star is actually white - maybe with a slight peach tint. It’s all to do with the comparative heat
of the sun. On the Kelvin scale, which is a true measure
of temperature from absolute zero upwards, any star below 5000 kelvin will appear red
and anything over 7000 will appear blue. It just so happens that our sun sits at 5780K. Not only is that the sweet spot between the
Earth being an icy wasteland and a nightmarish hellscape, it also means it shines white,
just dipping into a tint of red - hence the peach. So how comes it looks yellow to us? Well, like the sky, it comes down to our atmosphere. The green, blue, and violet shades of the
sun’s light have a shorter wavelength and scatter through the atmosphere. The effect intensifies as the sun goes down
or the air becomes more polluted, which is why it can sometimes even look a tiny bit
blue at high noon. You probably shouldn’t check that one out
yourself though, not if you enjoy having eyes that work. In 1932 Ripley's Believe it or Not made the
claim that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made landmark that’s visible from
the moon, and since then it’s crawled its way into folklore. But you should probably go with the ‘Not’
side on that one, because it’s totally false. According to Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean,
all you can see is the oceans, land, and weather formations. It’s slightly more true that you can see
the world wonder from the international space station, but only with a little help. Parts of the nearly 9,000 km wall are just
about visible from the Station’s imaging systems, but only when skies are clear and
snow creates a contrast with the structure. What’s keeping it from being seen under
normal conditions is the color of the materials blending into the landscape, so the only reliable
way of seeing it is through radar imagery. But with the naked eye, it’s probably a
lost cause. When Yang Liwei, the first Chinese man in
Space, made his first trip up in 2004, he confirmed that it couldn’t be seen – much
to the annoyance of the Chinese government, not to mention textbook writers the world
over. You’ve might’ve seen photos of formations
in space like the Pillars of Creation, the Red Spider Nebula and the Crab Nebula, which
are some of the great wonders of the cosmos. Well, I hate to break it to you, but supermodels
would blush at the amount of Photoshopping going on. That’s because for all the wonders of the
Hubble telescope, it can’t capture color. So in order to produce the awe-inspiring images
that we’re used to seeing, it takes separate monochrome images through as many as 40 different
filters - some of which don’t even capture visible light - and Earth-bound scientists
assemble them manually. That leads to shots in what NASA imaging specialist
Jim Bell calls “approximate true color”, as the people compositing the images have
to take some amount of artistic license based on the data. Just to be clear, no one is trying to misrepresent
what space looks like, except on occasions where it helps scientists when analyzing - for
example with the surface of Mars. Other than that, NASA is trying to best represent
space according to the information available, so before you go accusing them of cover-ups,
you might want to look elsewhere. It’s definitely true that in space, no one
can hear you scream. So don’t go trying to correct Ridley Scott
on that one. But what’s not true is that it’s because
there’s no sound out there. There is, it’s just impossible for us to
hear. And that’s where our good friend science
comes in. As I’m sure you remember your grade-school
science teacher telling you, sound travels in waves through vibrations in particles - the
denser the material, the better it travels. So it makes sense that sound wouldn’t travel
in the vacuum of space. But here’s the problem: space isn’t completely
vacuous. Thanks to the tiny particles of dust and gas
that scatter throughout the cosmos, there are places where the makeup of space is dense
enough to carry sound, but the frequency is far too low to be perceptible. To put it into context, the lowest sound the
human ear can perceive is at 20hz - or 20 oscillations per second. But don’t even think that it’s close to
the lowest tone, which comes from the Perseus Black Hole droning at approximately 20 trillionths
of a hert, or once every 10 million years. And just in case you were wondering, it’s
in B flat. Now this one’s a real heartbreaker. Try as we might, there’s a very strong chance
that we’ll never make it out of our solar system - let alone to another star. But it’s not because it’s physically or
mathematically impossible - for once, the laws of nature aren’t getting in the way
of our sci-fi dreams. It’s for the very sober reason that Earth
doesn’t yield anywhere near the fuel resources needed to travel those sorts of distances. Using a projected model of global energy production,
NASA scientist Marc Millis found that Earth would likely not be able to drum up the 20
quadrillion joules of fuel needed to reach Alpha Centauri until 2200. And that’s just for a non-propellant mission. For one that was traveling at any kind of
pace, it would take until the year 2500 to produce the necessary 5 quintillion joules. This is all theoretical, but to put it in
some kind of context, another scientist predicted that it would take as much as 100 times the
world’s current fuel output for the mission to reach its goal. And that’s not to mention speed. Without an incredible leap in propulsion technology,
like using antimatter, it would take 50,000 years to actually get there using conventional
rockets. Better find a good book, or maybe a freezer,
for the trip. That was 10 lies you still believe about space. Which one surprised you the most? Let us know in the comments and make sure
to like and subscribe. While you’re at it, check out these great
alltime10s lists.
