Can SpaceX Get Starship to Mars? Featuring Fraser Cain

this video is brought to you today by the great courses plus an in-depth online learning platform that lets you access courses taught by top academics and even institutions like national geographic and the smithsonian you can learn at your own pace with no schedules or testing yet gain every bit of the knowledge you'd get from a university course more on that later so for a free trial head over to the great courses plus at www.thegreatcoursesplus.com forward slash event horizon with spacex recent successful star hopper test in bocachico texas elon musk and the company have moved one step closer towards the reality of sending a crew to mars starship spacex's fully reusable launch vehicle will have six raptor engines at least in the current design and numerous other points of potential failure which will require many more hurdles and tests all of which if successful will open up an entirely new way to use space surrounding our very own planet and solar system this includes starlink a constellation of low earth orbit satellites that could in theory provide global broadband internet to not only underdevelop nations but be a test run of something that could be used around mars for a future colony to have its own ready-made global network so what will the next decade bring us from this company my guest today covers that and more on his youtube channel and website universe today welcome to event horizon with john michael gaudier [Music] in today's episode john is joined by fraser kane creator and publisher of universe today one of the world's largest portals of space and astronomy news with over 140 000 subscribers 2006 fraser joined with dr pamela gay to create astronomy cast which is among the top-rated and most popular podcasts in the natural sciences welcome everyone to event horizon with me john michael gautier if you enjoy what you hear fall into the event horizon hit the like button and become an active subscriber by ringing the bell fraser kane welcome back to the program happy to be here fraser it's been i don't know what about a month or two since we last talked yeah in person in person yeah which was delightful yeah it was fun that was actually a highlight of my summer was uh sitting out there in joshua tree looking through telescopes seeing the night sky yeah the the uh the one that got me was the 20-inch telescope the 20-inch jobsonian was astounding it's it's you know i always am so disappointed when you look through a telescope at like some deep sky object that you're quite familiar with like oh this nebula or that galaxy and yet with a telescope that big you look through them and boom you're seeing astrophotos with your own eyeballs yeah yeah you're seeing color other than you know you're seeing just greens and things that you don't see in an eight-inch telescope for sure yeah and so when i ever tell people you know you're gonna look through a telescope you're not gonna see what you're expecting with the 20-inch telescope you absolutely see what we'll see what you're expecting yeah you see spiral structure and yeah galaxies and things like that that's crazy i'll take two please yeah binoculars the unfortunate thing is now i want one i've been shopping around for 16-inch telescopes lately so i'm like man you know aperture fever yeah aperture fever and uh anyway so what's been going on what is the the story and science news lately that's exciting you the most wow i it has been crazy actually this summer there's too many i would say very much so i mean there's been some really exciting things that just dropped like literally today but i would say the big story over the summer has been the the steps that spacex is taking with the starhopper prototype they're sort of scaled down version of the starship which is going to be this amazing two-stage fully reusable rocket that's going to be capable of lifting i don't know the empire state building or something right into space and we saw them make some really significant serious steps forward with the star hopper and who knew a water a tower could fly it was amazing that test watching yeah well both tests and watching star hopper just sort of hover out there with that yeah and i think what i think what i what fascinates me most is we're looking at a sort of a interesting type of rocket here this is a methane you know driven rocket and you know you see this really clear mock diamonds coming out of that thing yeah and i was yeah i was very excited but i think what what what astonished me most is elon talking about starship 2.0 being a much bigger version well there's the mark right so i mean the great thing about this is that they've got the two facilities got the one at boca chica in texas they got the other one in florida and the two teams are kind of competing with each other on who can build a better next version of the prototype one that's going to be closer to the full scale with multiple raptor engines capable of flying to multiple kilometers of of altitude it's a pretty innovative idea and these things are coming together fast i've seen some pictures of what this thing is is going to look like it's pretty uh amazing how much this is starting to look like the real starship they're they're putting it together almost with slices um and so we should actually see this and then of course it's just an offhand comment elon musk mentions that in fact the next plan is to build an 18 meter diameter version of the starship something that would then be twice as tall twice as wide just a whole other level of complexity and of course that sent us all in the space news world scrambling to figure out the details because you get a off-handed tweet from elon and there's you know there's no details so we have to fill in the pieces what would it be possible what would that look like how you know how many engines i think someone did the math it would require 135 raptor engines to take off 135 raptor engines yeah to fly that's amazing so yes please i will absolutely take a uh a rocket capable of of lofting uh several times the uh the weight of the starship which is significantly bigger than any rocket that's ever been built before so we gotta wonder what yeah we're in uncharted territory you gotta wonder with that kind of power i mean and and it probably will drop launch costs even more because that's what sort of heavy and that that trend is yeah it's it's funny we actually we're just talking about this on the weekly space hangout how spacex is now because they reuse these rockets and they're so ready to go that that they're actually now getting ahead of the payloads right and so the payloads aren't ready in time and the rockets are just sitting and waiting and and with a rocket that big you could just take the entire manifest of every uh spaceship that's planned for the next year pour them all in one just have it go up they you know and then spacex would be like what else what else can we launch for you um but of course you i know if you heard spacex said that they're gonna launch 24 starlink uh launches now each one of those is going to consist of 60 starlink satellites they're going to launch 1200 ish starlinks next year and of course 24 launches of any rocket will be dramatically more than any rocket company has ever done and this is just going to be their own satellites to provide a worldwide constellation of of high-speed internet so i know that that's kind of a dicey topic where do you come out on that one so i come at it from the objective of providing human beings with high-speed internet where they live on the globe so right now there are four million uh cell phone towers and when you look at these new these 5g networks they're actually going to have smaller towers and they're going to be more of them so let's say for us to you know and right now about half of the world has access to the internet and so to provide internet access to the other half of the world you're gonna need to build at least another four million cell phone towers you're gonna have to dig cables across the planet you're gonna have to lay undersea cables through all kinds of sensitive marine environments it will cause dramatic damage to the environment that's interesting yeah that's an interesting point because of wood yeah yeah it does yeah it would it would and so and so like i think that like i think i get and you know especially as an amateur astronomer who wants to be able to look through a 20-inch telescope and not see streaks of light passing through my telescope every few seconds um i get that we don't want to have the night sky clouded up by these satellites and you know the the starlinks at this point it looks like they're not going to be visible to the unaided eye so you're going to go outside and you're going to look up and you're not going to see them unless you're in really perfect conditions and it's fairly recent after they were launched but they're absolutely going to be going through the eyepiece of the professional astronomers and their life is going to be made substantially worse so that's the price we pay and so the question then is if we if there is now a mechanism for providing high-speed internet to the underserved in the world it's a price i'm willing to pay it's a price i'm willing to pay i know a lot of other people deeply disagree with me and you know i've gotten into all kinds of arguments with this but like then what what is your alternative right do you think that these people are not should not be allowed to access the internet right that there's there's the haves and the have-nots and if you already got your internet you know if we can have an argument on the internet about who's allowed to access the internet it seems a little exclusionary to then say but all those other people they don't get to go on my internet uh just me and my four billion friends i have to come out and say i agree with you i think that the benefits of it outweighs the cost yeah um and pretty dramatically actually um and that there was no way we were ever going to avoid not having huge satellite constellations no matter what it was gonna yeah and so if you know if you get to this place where eight you know seven billion people can access the internet and now suddenly all these people in various developing nations who can now access global markets sell their goods buy things at discounts be able to collect together to be able to communicate issues that they face be able to deal with children can educate themselves from anywhere on the globe i mean it is a it is a tremendous tremendous good and if the price that we have to pay is that it makes it a little harder for us to get science done it's got to be worth it right it's also worth mentioning too that this this the spacex constellation is not permanent those things are easily orbited so you could drop the whole thing if you really wanted to oh yeah yeah they will they will deorbit within just a couple of years on their own if they're not constantly thrusting themselves so yeah absolutely if we find that in fact it's it's not worth it and and this is of course going back to that assumption that this is going to provide internet to the rest of the world at an affordable price so if elon musk goes back on that and it's only available to the rich on their yachts then forget it right those then he has but then the might the model wouldn't work anyway i mean you have to have a lot of people subscribe the thinking actually is that these things because they're transmitting through space the speed of communication is going to be faster right now it's the speed of light as opposed to traveling through a fiber optic cable which is like about 75 percent the speed of light so it'll actually be incredibly valuable to say discount trading brokerages people who are so so in fact it'll be useful both to to all of humanity but also especially uh banks so so unfortunately there's a real risk that that that the richard is going to get richer on it too so so i made elon musk if you go back i made him publicly say that the goal here is to provide access to all of humanity yes i saw that on twitter right and so if he goes back on this then we just get to drag this tweet forward and go elon you promised us that this was for humanity not for rich bankers oh i think he you know i i'm not 100 on board with him on everything but in this case i think he'll probably do the right thing and make it available i mean i hope so i hope so i think he actually has a genuine interest in improving the human condition in in the ways that he can so and if it's not his 12 000 satellites and it'll be jeff bezos in his twelve thousand satellites eighteen thousand i bet he would out do them oh yes oh of course cylinder and all sorts of things exactly um yeah so that's definitely on my radar um now one other thing one thing about spacex though before we move on there's also the idea of using starship as a a an intercontinental transport system for people and goods and anywhere in the world in a half hour essentially or under an hour no thank you you're not going to be taking a flight on that anytime soon no no sir i will not be flying i mean i'm sure at some point when it's totally safe and elon's grandma uses it regularly but no you know flying it uh ten plus thousand kilometers per hour on a hyperbolic orbit um entering the earth's atmosphere on a on a what is essentially a bomb uh yeah passing through the atmosphere no i think i will just i will take the train i will drive with something that's basically a controlled brick falling through the atmosphere with no no you know real surfaces to fly or do anything yeah no it sounds terrifying at the same time though 100 years ago there were people saying that about airplanes so yeah like like for me hopping on an airplane and taking 12 hours to go to australia or 15 hours to go to australia it's just a wonder of modern science compared to the three hours that it could take going on the starship but but who knows i may be convinced and and come around to the idea well imagine how long it took um in say 1850 to go from north america to australia on a boat imagine how long that took sure yeah yeah and now we have it down to 12 hours that's pretty astonishing yeah so that's fine i'm good with that i'm good with 12 hours at you know a perfectly safe thousand kilometers an hour yeah as long as i can sleep i'm okay with it if i can't sleep then it's boring but what can i say yeah yeah and we'll be back in a moment with fraser kane recently i interviewed dr sean carroll on this program on the subject of quantum mechanics a very in-depth topic indeed that we only just scratched the surface on but over at the great courses plus dr carroll has an extensive series of courses on that subject and others including in-depth multiple lecture discussions of the higgs boson dark matter and dark energy and the physics of time which is a 24 installment series of lectures that looks at times unique role in physics from the arrow of time or why it only goes in one direction times role in quantum mechanics canopy reversed and even entropy and boltzmann brains in addition to science courses the great courses plus also offers extensive selections including health and fitness cooking philosophy finance language and many many more including another subject that's very close to me it's history and if i wasn't doing science channels i'd be doing history channels and they have some wonderful material on there ranging from ancient to modern history spanning across the world all taught by top educators in their fields as i said in the beginning it's university level education but done at your own pace with no tests or reports only pure learning and best of all it's very easy to navigate and access whether you're on your computer phone or tablet with the great courses app with over 10 000 lectures available to choose from learn at your own pace when and where you want to and here's the best part you can try it for free by going to www.thegreatcoursesplus.com forward slash event horizon or click on the link in the description below to start your free trial check out the great courses plus today fraser welcome back to the program so fraser let's talk about the moon we have things going on there as well yeah everyone knows the moon is my enemy um purely as an amateur astronomer you know someone who's trying to go out and observe the sky in half of the month the moon dominates and you have no choice but to look at the moon so yes the moon is yeah by all means let's talk about the moon so okay so we're casting a paul on the moon we don't like the moon um yeah unless you actually want to look at it through a telescope because yeah that's always interesting but it never really changes much no and if you look at it through a 20-inch telescope i would imagine that's probably going to damage your retinas it's like a laser beam laser beam yeah yeah now india has tried to land and didn't work what happened do they know well i don't think we know what happened exactly so india of course with the chandrayaan-2 mission they had you know they were one-upping themselves their first mission was really the mission that helped discover that there was water on the moon in the first place down in the in the permanently shadowed uh ice caps in the southern pole of the moon and so india was coming back with round two and this time they were going to send an orbiter to the moon and they were also going to drop a lander down and the lander had a rover on board and so the lander was going to was going to land at the south pole of the moon and then the rover was going to deploy and for one lunar day the this for 14 days it was going to crawl around on the surface of the moon until it went into shadow and got too cold and and everything died and so just a couple of days ago from when we're recording this uh india did a live broadcast as they attempted to put their lander down on the surface of the moon and in sort of very similar to israel's attempt to land a a spacecraft on the moon everything looked good for a while and then numbers that's the velocities the trajectory started to go in the wrong directions and and then everybody got quiet for a little while and there was no real solid information and at that point india lost contact with the with the lander and the the thinking now is it's crashed and they think they've spotted the wreckage on the surface of the moon they're still trying to communicate with it which would be incredible you know it would mean that you know landings on the moon are a lot easier than anyone ever thought all you gotta do is just smash something into the moon but yeah i know it looks like they've lost it and this is par for the course i mean uh the soviets sent many landers at the moon lost a bunch they've sent many landers at mars lost a bunch israel of course and and uh don't forget beagle and beagle and mars yeah i mean and then everything that happened tried to get in through venus so now we've got you know the soviets have landed on the moon the the americans and uh most recently of course the chinese with their changa 4 mission which seems to have been quite the success actually yeah apparently they've discovered some kind of goo on them some gel but we don't know what it is yet what do you use what are you favoring i'm wondering if it's just sort of like so many so much lunar gardening has happened that a little bit of melt happens and you get this sort of yeah crust going maybe something like that yeah i mean when you say lunar garden you're talking about like just micro meteorites yeah yeah you get these these situations where a chunk of like you'll have a an asteroid get hit on the moon and then another asteroid will hit that site and churn up the material and then another one will hit that and churn up the material and they get turned into glass again and merged together and then broken up and so you know until the rover actually tastes it with its tongue and pokes at it with a prod to know if it really is some kind of gel i would assume it's some kind of glassy substance made in one of these impacts if you think about it you know just go out during a meteor shower like the perseids or something like that and just imagine that happening for billions of years to a surface that doesn't really you know have anything else going on and it's easy to imagine that glass might form from that sort of heat so that's kind of what i'm favoring well they discovered a um a rock that probably came from earth right an asteroid had smashed into the earth dug out a chunk of the earth early on in its history it flew out into space hit the moon and then another chunk hit the moon dug it down deep under the surface of the moon and then others dug it back up broke it apart mashed with other things and then the apollo astronauts brought it home so yeah all kinds of shenanigans have been happening on the moon for a long period of time that's actually an interesting idea because with stuff getting blasted off of earth early in its history you know our geologic record only goes back so far yeah so we might conceivably find rocks from earth very early on that we just don't have here there was a piece of research that i saw someone was saying that we could actually probably find dna from ancient earth life on the moon preserved on the moon now that that brings up another question with the israeli effort which was a private effort as i recall they had they sent uh yeah they covered everything in tardigrades yes which one does brings up the question is i mean earth life you know people freaked out about it but earth life has to be contaminating the moon right i mean it it's got to be bombarded by this stuff and it's everywhere and it's probably not going to survive anywhere up there no there was a my favorite right so you know the israeli lander had some tardigrades on it and and based on you know the water bears these indestructible little animals that can handle vacuum and freezing temperatures and and you know radiation and they just laugh it off or they go into hibernation and they wait and you think about this my favorite title for a story that was written about this was yes tardigrades are probably probably survived on the moon but they're not happy about it which is like they're it is not their ideal environment being on the surface of them no and we know from space that yeah they can survive it but they can't exactly reproduce up there or no they're not thriving they have no they have no normal life yeah they're not dead yet they're not dead yet eventually that said there are bacteria out there that maybe could i don't know about the moon i mean they could again they could go into some kind of hibernation state but i don't know whether they could actually replicate without any in vacuum and cold and such right well i don't know if they outside of an atmosphere i don't know if they could either but but they can't survive the radiation there's one well yeah there was an interesting experiment that was done on the international space station it just wrapped up actually where uh it was a german experiment they put uh this these little soil samples with various extreme life forms that come from earth different kinds of lichen and mosses and cyanobacteria and and things like that and they put them into these little capsules and then they put them outside on the space station and then they opened them up and so they had some earth dirt and they had some martian regolith simulant and then they left them just open to the vacuum of space for the better part of a year so they had radiation and cold and all of that and then they closed them up and then simulated the surface of earth and the surface of mars to see what would happen and what they found was many of the creatures were perfectly happy and they got cranked back up again on the surface of earth but more amazingly some of them especially the cyanobacteria were able to get going again on the surface of mars so they spent years exposed to the vacuum of space and then began to thrive in the simulated environment of mars that has great implications on things like panspermia it really does yeah so it shows that we have life forms here on earth that are just they're ready to go like send send us in chief we'll we'll terraform mars now living on other worlds are you aware of any research spacex might be doing on just how do you live in a mars colony are they doing any any research on that are they just saying we're going to provide the transport yeah yeah i really think you know spacex at this point has just been like we will take spaceships to mars what happens to you on mars is your problem not ours and of course the reality is that we still have no idea what are the long-term implications of of uh 15 gravity on the moon 35 gravity on mars is it you know we know that microgravity is very hard on the human body for long periods of time we have no idea what what's going to happen to a person who is on you know can you gestate human fetus can you bring them to term uh will it be birth defects we don't know and and then really until we have anyone said any kind of experiment it is bordering on a crime against humanity yeah to have people go to mars without knowing the answer to some of those questions yeah and it seems to me like for example to get into ethics the first human born on mars it's a gamble no matter what yeah and you know what it what what right do we have to have someone born off world without knowing what what would happen yeah and those are things we're going to have to face because it certainly looks like this mars colony thing is going to happen in some form or another yeah and and it feels like we could get close to some of these answers right you set up a base on the moon you have some astronauts live on the moon for a few years you'll get a sense right away of whether living on the moon is dramatically different than living say in in orbit around earth so that that'll tell us that 15 grand if 15 gravity is fine and they've and they've taken a bunch of you know rabbits and mice and various rats and various animals with them and and they're doing fine then it raises the possibility that mars is going to be even more fine and if there's serious medical complications then you know that that that more testing is required before anyone tries to live on mars for any long period of time and so yeah if they're going to just fly hundreds of people at a time on one-way trips to mars those people are going to make more people it's kind of what people do right and until that's been figured out i mean you know you think about some of the birth defect controversies that have happened here on earth what if you've got these people stuck on mars and they know 100 of the time their children are not viable that's awful so i you know more research is necessary and that means like i hate to be the guy suggesting that we put on the brakes a little bit uh so instead let's i i want to be the guy who wants to encourage us to send centrifuges to space where people can can test out different levels of artificial gravity o'neill cylinders baby right let's have some some centrifuges people can spin up see if we can deal with some of the problems of of microgravity let's send animals uh and see what happens and we've got a lot more learning to do so that brings up another question bezos and the o'neill cylinders right yeah which you know bezos was actually a student of gerard o'neill did you know that i did not know that yeah he actually has a direct connection back to him and um i've always found that idea pretty amazing this idea of artificial gravity and what could you do with an o'neill cylinder it seems to me that that's a much easier way to or not easier but a much uh more viable way of doing this rather than colonizing another planet maybe we should colonize space itself what do you think well yeah that's i mean anyone who's watched my channel and knows that's where i stand you know i think that the moon and mars are fascinating places to explore for us to send some kind of of research station where people go for whatever is the amount of time that is healthy and safe to explore and learn to live on another world but for really the long-term viability of of humanity in space it's going to be that orbital colony direction and and jeff bezos uh sort of came out in that camp um in may of this year 2019 and he presented these beautiful imagery and animations of these gigantic space stations that he would like to build in in space and i think the you know the fundamental argument that he's making and it's one that really does resonate with me is we are churning up the environment of earth faster than the earth can handle it we are filling the atmosphere with pollution we are dumping plastic into the oceans we are using every energy source we can get our hands on because we're human beings and either we run against this brick wall where where we have exploited the resources of planet earth as best we can and now we just have to face the decline and rationing that will happen or we move out into the solar system itself and we start to use all these resources that that no one cares about and that there is no environment to pollute apart from space junk in low earth orbit you know you dismantle an asteroid it's a rock so so that we should you know jeff bezos really feels like we should be shifting the you know our utilization of resources from planet earth out into space let's generate our power in space let's grab our raw resources from from asteroids let's manufacture things in space let's toss the waste out into the universe who cares right it's a big universe no one will ever see it and and that that is the way that humanity can continue enjoying a high standard of living and that if we don't make that transition to space then really it's just a matter of time before we are forced by the laws of physics to downgrade our existence to what the planet can handle and i don't think anyone wants to live that way and so and so the earth is the best place in the universe for life so let's let it do that let's let it be the best place for for life and so basil's really doubled down on this idea of you know o'neill cylinders and and so we did this big presentation and some people got it and a lot of people really derisive about it like you know we need to deal with the problems here on earth before we for the millionaires and the billionaires head off to space and live in their elysium space colonies but but i think the the worry the existential worry that jeff bezos has and i definitely share it it's that same conversation that we had at the beginning of this episode right it's just like everybody wants a better standard of living and if they all do what then who gets to decide that they don't who gets to decide and so instead let's just punt that problem down let's go to space let's grind up asteroids let's use the power from the sun let's manufacture things in space and let's not worry about polluting the environment of earth so i'm a huge fan of that plan because i don't like the alternative the alternative is is we run out of the resources on earth and we make this beautiful planet nasty well i mean the most poetic thing about bezos's vision which he had like an elon musk moment there where he laid all that out i was like i've never seen this guy talk this way yeah i know and um i think the most poetic thing is that earth becomes a nature preserve and that everything manufacturing everything moves off into space and the planet just becomes its natural crucible of life you know and and it's weird to see the arguments against like who doesn't want earth to be a nature preserve i think it'd be beautiful and especially if the o'neill because look at if you think about an o'neill cylinder you could probably make that much nicer to live on in principle than living on earth because you don't have hurricanes you don't have earthquakes you don't have any of that and you don't have things like crop failures because i i'm yeah i mean i'm not 100 convinced that that we'll want to like i wouldn't want to live in space i mean i i want to be able to walk out into forests and go to oceans and i want to be able to travel the world and i want to be able to do these things but i but i like the idea of not having an environmental impact of that that all of the things all of the garbage that we create all of the manufacturing that we do all the the power that we require all of the the dinosaurs that we burn up in our cars none of that has to happen because we're we're doing all of the manufacturing and and resource acquisition out in space and we get to instead enjoy living on a planet that is that is as close to nature as humanly possible well and the other thing too is you know you have the full energy of the sun out there too when for which to run your own eel cylinders so you don't really have to you have a different it's a game changer you don't have the same sort of fuel and energy requirements that you have to you know manufacture things down here and there's always a possibility that you can manufacture stuff better in zero gravity than yeah than anything else but i did the math right you know you would need 45 000 starship launches to build an o'neill cylinder so so that's not realistic the only way to do this is with space-based manufacturing and acquisition of resources so the next big step right is we've got to learn how to gather material from space be it energy water and rock and we need to be able to assemble and manufacture things in space and those are the two key technologies that need to come next when those are clearly starting to roll that's when we're going to know that we're off to the races with all of the other stuff that everybody wants the colonies on other planets the o'neill cylinders the exploration of the solar system at a serious scale and and even attempts at going out to to other star systems it's it's got to be resource acquisition and manufacturing in space and we'll talk more about that in a minute but we have to take a break i'm joined today by fraser kane publisher of universetoday and prominent youtuber check out his stuff well i hope you're enjoying this interview with me and i want to take a second to let you know about all the other cool stuff that i'm doing of course you can follow my youtube channel here right on youtube i'm the publisher of universe today and have been so for 20 years so if you want to get space news every day come join us at universetoday.com but i think the best thing if you want to get regular space news on a weekly basis get all the information that you need to know get my weekly email newsletter it's ad free shows up in your inbox once a week go to universetoday.com newsletter to sign up totally free and we're back with fraser kane so fraser new exoplanet with water detected in the atmosphere tell us about that yeah good timing to have this interview one of the biggest stories of the year just broke today so in fact i my video is written we haven't even published it so you're going to get the the sneak preview of what we're working on but yeah so astronomers from everywhere announced today that they have found water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star in the habitable zone so just to kind of break uh this up into all the different pieces so the the the planet is called k218b and it is one of the planets that was discovered by the kepler space telescope and it was actually found back in 2015 it was done using the transit method you know where the where the planet passes in front of the star and it dims the light of the star and so they're able to detect that the planet exists it was found to be orbiting this this red dwarf star every 33 days and then another team of astronomers were able to do these follow-up observations with the radial velocity method and they were able to get at the mass of the planet and they were able to find that it has a mass of eight times the mass of the earth so it's about double the size of the earth and about eight times the mass of the earth and when you take those two things together you get a density that's a that's a that is less than the earth and so the the thinking was okay well maybe it's got like some big puffy gassy atmosphere or maybe it has a lot of water in it with some kind of rocky core and it happens to orbit within the habitable zone of this red dwarf star it takes only 33 days but red dwarf stars give off less light and so the average surface temperature of this planet is about 10 degrees centigrade and just for comparison earth's average temperature is 14 degrees centigrade and then with global warming you know 15 let's try to keep it under 15.5 if we can please so right and so then uh the hubble space telescope had been doing observations of this planet during 2016 and 2017 and so astronomers took this data that had been gathered by hubble watching as these transits happened and they were able to use these new algorithms to tease out that there was water vapor in the atmosphere of this planet and so for the first time in the history of exoplanetary research astronomers have detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet that is orbiting within the habitable zone of a of another star and this is this is big news because we've suspected that there's water there liquid water could be there in one of these habitable zones and now suddenly water has been found now this there are implications to this um i literally just heard about this this uh story and i'm thinking about it and okay so red dwarfs one of the concerns of those regarding habitability is that they tend to bathe their planets in ultraviolet light yeah ultraviolet light should destroy water right yeah so where is this coming from is there an ocean there good question right so one idea because the density of this planet is so low it could be a water world and not just like water world in the kevin costner sense of the word but like water world in the floating blob of water going around a planet right and so you're detecting water vapor in the atmosphere because it's constantly bathed in radiation and it is getting the water is getting blasted off the planet and out into space and that's being detected but so there could be water there and you're exactly right you know the thinking with these these red dwarf stars is they're a lot more temperamental than stars like our sun they're capable of blasting out flares that are tens hundreds of times more powerful than anything the sun ever produces and would strip the surface of a planet of all life would blast away the atmosphere but if you have something that is that has a lot of water then you go down a few tens of meters and you're very well protected from this radiation so it might end up being that in fact a planet like this could could be a perfect place for life the other thing is that of course these planets tend to be tidally locked to their to their star and so one side of the planet could be boiling hot and the other side of the planet could be freezing cold but maybe you get this really nice circulation that carries the temperatures around from the front to the back so with with various convecting currents so it's a it's a fascinating discovery it's going to be one of the first places that things like james webb and other these other monster telescopes that are coming online later on in the 2020s will be pointing at i mean this is going to be one of the most exciting targets to look at for the coming years you know this is this is actually kind of exciting because for the longest time there it seemed like red dwarfs were just dropping off of the list as being anything that you could it could be habitable where life could arise but now did you read that paper a few weeks ago about biofluorescence where the scientists had determined that certain earth life corals can actually deal with ultraviolet simply by re-radiating it as visible light oh interesting they they make the case that well maybe an exoplanet if life arises on it maybe it can handle ultraviolet just simply by reflecting it off and changing its frequency yeah so life can find a way life tends to and it's kind of nice because now red dwarfs are sort of coming back on the table yeah as being habitable unfortunately the ones that i really want to know about are the orange dwarfs the type k i think because those things your habitable zones a little bit further out yeah and it would seem that that might actually be better for life than even our solar system is and unfortunately they're also the really the hardest stars to study for exoplanets in their habitable zones just because of their type yeah yeah it's a i mean these planets are being found around these red dwarf stars because the stars are so small and so when a planet passes in front it's a very significant event and same thing with the radial velocity you know the planet can really yank its star around and have a very significant effect on the light the most interesting planets the one to us right are going to be those sun-like stars they're more massive the planets have less of an effect on them and the planet's going to be out the habitable zone is going to be much farther out where the planet may take say a year to go around so you make an observation one year later you make a second observation and you think you might have had found a planet and then other people are going to then take multiple years to do confirmation so it's all going to unfold in in slow motion these little worlds that are zipping around their stars right now they're going to be the easy ones to find it's going to be the you know the other earths are going to take a while now we could go in the other direction too the main argument against type f stars not being very habitable is the ultraviolet light because they just produce a lot of it but if life can get past that then type f comes on the table now those are shorter lift stars but they still live for billions of years yeah and they have a further out habitable zone than than our own sun does so now those are on the table with this new thinking about ultraviolet it's pretty amazing really yeah all right thanks for joining us today fraser happy to be here anytime so where will we be in 10 years will we have a colony on mars will starship be used to send people and goods quickly around the globe the trend is good for elon and his company spacex and it's quite a unique time in history to be able to watch this modern space race take place while elon wants to be on mars blue origin looks to the moon and o'neill cylinders and nasa is looking further out with plans like the titan copter no matter what this is going to be fun john would you ever live in an o'neill cylinder what yes of course i would well long as it didn't leak and the rocket was safe and the food was decent what do you mean by decent salami and cans of cheese and crackers and cocktail sausages you know the finer things oh dear i see we're about to have the finer things discussion again only the best on my cylinder would that be cylinder eight what you leave that song out of this and on that note joining me next week will have one of several interviews covering the flurry of science news stories that have been coming at me like a fleet of supercharged lebarons see you then [Music] you

Channel: Event Horizon

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Rating: 4.7590804 out of 5

Keywords: Can SpaceX Get Starship to Mars?, Fraser Cain, spacex, elon musk, jeff bezos, john michael godier, event horizon john michael godier, Universe, space, starship, starhopper, starhopper test, starship plans, starship to mars, starship spacex, starlink, starlink spacex, mars, mars spacex, spacex mars plan, mars colony spacex, starship test flight, starship 2019, nasa, science, oneill cylinders, starlink internet, starship update, starship elon musk

Id: sOZ03_gsvDM

Length: 47min 5sec (2825 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019