How Cold Are Moon Shadows, Why Are Dark Matter Halos Spherical, War For The Moon | Q&A 251

How cold are the permanently shadowed craters on the moon why does Dark Matter form a Halo and not a flattened disc and how long until there's a war for the moon all this and more in this week's question show it's time for the question show your questions my answers wherever you are across my channel if a question pops into your brain just write it down in the YouTube comments down below I will gather them up and I will answer them here all right let's get into the questions col them wilst 1810 how cold does it get in the Shadows on the moon on the sunlet side does it get as cold as on the night Side of the Moon the Moon is a very strange environment it's actually a lot more hostile in terms of temperature than even Mars and when we think about how Mars temperatures dip down to -100 cels and they get up as high as 100 or 20° at the equator that's nothing compared to the moon so if you're in the day side Side of the Moon then temperatures can get up to 121° C if you're just sitting on the surface of the Moon and the Sun is up you can get up to 121 and then as soon as your spot on the moon goes into Shadow then the temperature will drop and it gets down to about -133 C so do the math you've got 121 in the daytime to - 133 that's like no that's 250° CS change from day to night and it happens very fast there's no atmosphere on the moon and so the moment the sun goes down things start to cool down you're going to have a little bit of leftover radiation coming from the regolith around you but pretty quick you're going to get to that incredibly cold temperature but that is not as cold as it gets on the surface of the Moon the coldest place is on these eternally shadowed craters on the moon now you asked just about how cold does it get in the Shadows on the moon and that is that number that minus 133 but there are these places at the South Pole and a little at the North Pole where the Sun never comes into these shadows and so the temperatures get dramatically colder in fact the coldest temperature that was ever measured on the surface of the Moon was minus 246 Celsius so that's a lot colder than even nighttime on the moon and so this is one of the big reasons why it's believed that you've got these eternally shadowed craters on the moon containing large reserves of water ice because atus 246 the ice is solid like rock there's no radiation that's hitting it to evaporate it away and so in theory if you can get into those regions then you're going to be able to address it and this is the big reason why all of these spacecraft die as soon as you reach the lunar Knight that you've got to have a spacecraft that can handle operating in above 100° C and then the moment you go into Shadow then the temperature drops to minus 100° C or more and we know that very very cold temperatures are very bad for Batteries if you have you know you have a laptop battery you have an electric bike a car they're very concerned with the temperature that your batter is going to go in so if your really fancy batteries are in incredibly cold temperatures for 2 weeks then they don't stand a great chance of being able to come back but then you're probably wondering um what about the permanently lit parts of the Moon and in fact there probably aren't any places on the moon that are always in Eternal sunlight there's this idea of the the peaks of Eternal sunlight that there are these mountains that are the opposite of those craters and the problem is the craters can go really deep and so you can have these places where the sunlight never gets in but the Peaks don't go that high and they they're not dependably in full sunlight probably the best place on the moon is Shackleton crater which is one of these craters that is right at the very South Pole of the Moon and there are places around Shackleton crater that are almost in Eternal sunlight for about 40 hours or so it can be dark in those craters all depends on sort of where the Moon is in its orbital inclination compared to the Sun and so on but there's just no place on the moon where you can ever be in Eternal sunlight and so uh it's a tough environment and you can see why all of these spacecraft are having such a hard time Not Just landing on the moon but also just surviving for a single lunar night which makes the fact that slim Lander came back so incredible that it was able to handle that temperature variation so good job everybody at Jacko I'm sure you noticed the Star Trek planet name that appeared above my shoulder on that first question and you're wondering what's that for well this is a way for you to vote to tell us what you thought was the best question of the week and so last week everybody voted for Jesus soless if satellites are the first products being used to build the space economy what is the next product it was a great question and I'm glad everybody enjoyed the answer so I'm going to answer a bunch of questions in this episode a different Star Trek planet name is going to appear above my shoulder wait till the end of the episode and then just put the name of that Star Trek planet name in the comments down below we'll also have references down in the show notes you can see what all the names are all right don't forget to vote jmz 604 if the regular matter in our galaxy flattened out into a rough disc why did The Dark Matter remain as a rough sphere so astronomers think while the galaxy The Milky Way for example is in this flattened disc in sort of the same way that a solar system is in a flattened disc the Halo of dark matter that surrounds the Milky Way is more like a sphere and you might be wondering if the same forces are going on that you've got this this galaxy that is rotating and all of the gas and dust and all the stars are going into this flattened disc why isn't the Dark Matter doing the same thing and part of the problem is that whatever dark matter is I mean still we don't know what dark matter is right so so whenever you say like why does Dark Matter behave like such and such well you don't know what it is but one of the characteristics that dark matter probably has is that it doesn't interact not only with regular matter but it probably doesn't interact with itself except for gravity and so particle physicists they give a term for this they call it the crosssection of the particle and when you think about just regular stuff atoms clouds of hydrogen gas that as this this cloud is swirling around all of these particles of hydrogen are in this giant cloud and they are bumping into each other and as they bump into each other they start to lose some of this this momentum that's carrying them around and the whole thing is able to start flattening out another example is like when you have a black hole you have a black hole material is trying to fall into the black hole it maybe it's too much material so the black hole can't feed on it and so it starts to form this Cloud around the black hole but then these particles are bumping into each other and they get flattened out into this disc Dark Matter probably behaves in a very different way because has no cross-section you could take a cloud of dark matter you could spin it up and you're not going to get that same kind of interactions between the particles that cause it to flatten out into this larger cohesive Mass every individual Dark Matter particles on its own journey and isn't going to be interacting and bouncing into other particles and you know a lot of people ask this question like would Dark Matter go into black holes if it is a particle sure it's going to go into the black hole but it's not going to form this accretion disc around the black hole in the same way that regular matter does it's going to have gravitational interactions with all of the particles that are around the black hole and the black hole itself and so on but it's not going to Bonk into each other to then fall down into the black hole and so it's that same idea you're not getting that that interaction that friction between the Dark Matter particles and so you get a more spherical Halo shape although I mean the actual shape is still under AR you know is it is it more like a egg um is it blobs and clumps that are orbiting around the Galaxy that are providing this additional Mass to the Galaxy you know this is all still part of the work that astronomers are doing to figure out exactly what's going on with dark matter obi-1 celery are we alone in the universe Fraser gave the perfect politici answer I have to say I was disappointed I was expecting Fraser to put his love of science before his reputation what reputation I'm a journalist you know if you got like scientists journalist so uh I I have no reputation to protect um now the I think this question was like a couple of weeks ago and someone asks me are we loone in the universe and the answer was we have no idea and like the the point was just to give a really quick Snappy answer and then move on now those of you watch the channel you know that I have a sort of deeper more nuanced view of whether or not we're alone in the universe but I think that we don't know is a perfectly viable answer to give to a question where there is no scientific consensus on the answer so far what is dark matter we don't know what is dark energy we don't know is there life in the universe we don't know what what happens after you die we don't know where did the universe come from we don't know it's okay to say we don't know to an answer you're not being a politician you're answering the question with the most honesty you possibly Poss can CU as soon as you give an answer is there life in the universe oh yeah I think so well how do you know what's your evidence well my evidence is that it just seems like there must be that is not evidence that's an opinion that's like I like vanilla ice cream instead of strawberry ice cream what is dark matter well Dark Matter can't be some kind of particle oh what's your evidence well you know it just feels wrong feels like scientists have made this up kind answer is that so and I think that people are uncomfortable with hearing the answer I don't know now for me when I hear the answer I don't know that's a person being honest person saying that I have not accumulated enough information to form an intelligent position on this matter and so for the sake of transparency and honesty I'm just going to admit my ignorance in this situation um and for me being a journalist doing this job for as long as I have I find that I know less than I thought I did over time and I understand very carefully about which are the things that I can that I think there is a scientific consensus of in the things that there aren't and so uh it's it's it's weird to me for someone to hear the answer I don't know and to be disappointed like educate me on the true answer provide the evidence and the second there is an overwhelming evidence that gives the information that I will gladly change my mind you know I believe that we're alone in the universe but I don't have evidence that tells us that therefore the answer that I have to give is that I don't know and I can't wait to be wrong so uh yeah yeah it's not a politician answer it's an honest answer which is the opposite of a politician right politician is going to give you an answer and they're going to justify it and they're going to they're going to give you a bunch of uh mumbo jumbo magic tricks to distract you and no we don't know I don't know I don't think anybody does that's okay A B how far away are we from a war for the moon there is no reason to claim the moon and then want need to defend the moon there is only downside if you try to claim the moon and you say the Moon is ours that the moment you do that then you're going to you're going to make other nations on earth a little grumpy they can be like wait a minute didn't you sign didn't we all sign the outer space treaty and we said that nobody can own the Moon and now you're saying that you do now obviously you know it's just a treaty and it's barely enforcable but still you know it's it's kind of a jerk move to say that you now own the moon so you're going to start with that and then what are you going to get so now you've pissed off all of your neighbors you've pissed off everybody on Earth saying that you own the moon everyone's really mad about it and so what do you get for this claim of the Moon nothing you you you can barely you know nobody we saw what happened with multiple space spacecraft just barely being able to reach the surface of the Moon upside down tumbled over with many spacecraft dying as they try to make this just like step one land on the moon not to mention uh Gathering resources from the Moon which there aren't very many I mean there's really almost nothing that you can't get on the moon that you can't you know you just get on earth like people said you get helium 3 you can get helium 3 on Earth it's maybe not as concentrated but also you don't have to go to the Moon to get get it so uh there's no value in going to the moon and it's sort of like there's no value in claiming Antarctica like what are you going to get you're going to be lord of the Penguins you're going to be you're going to have a lot of snow and ice which you can make in a refrigerator obviously if you really could dig down below the snow and ice and start mining on Antarctica then maybe you could start making some money but you can do that anywhere else on Earth why try to start with Antarctica and that's one of the big reasons why it Antarctica is is part of the Antarctica treaty because it's a very special place very sensitive environment there's no money to be made so people are fine with not anybody trying to own it and it's the same thing with the moon there's nothing you can get from the Moon that you can't just get down here on Earth and so so there's no reason you've already pissed off all your friends there's no benefit of going to the moon and now you got to defend it like what what are you going to do are you going to send spacecraft filled with Space Marines to the surface of the Moon are the spacecraft going to flip upside down are their Landing legs going to break and they're going to fall over and then the Space Marines are going to Tumble out and then what are they going to do there on the surface of the Moon is going to wait for somebody who is going to try to take your helium 3 mines away from you so how far away are we from the moon I I I would say conservatively forever um yeah I'm just going to go with forever uh but you know if if something changes I'll let you know but for now I don't think there will ever be a war for the moon Roa what are you obsessed with well played Roa this is of course one of the questions that I ask people that I interview them and this came fairly new I guess within the last six months year or so um and it came from me realizing that when I'm interviewing a scientist they're not thinking about the work that they've just published in a research journal in many cases that is old news to them they published a pre-print six months ago a year ago and then they got it into a journal and then the journal accepted it and then it's been published and then there's a press release and there's a giant Delay from when they thought about the idea to to when they're talking to me and they've moved on but the the you know we're they're essentially describing the research that they've just published they're not going to talk about the the next research the future research but I can get a hint of what comes next what the future holds by asking them what they're obsessed about and and so I find it really interesting it gives me a psychic prediction about what's going to come in the future you know imagine you could interview I don't know Christopher Nolan and ask him what he's obsessed with and you realize that he's giving you the plot for his next movie and so that would be really cool so what am I obsessed with man so my one of the things every month we do a special Patron only question show plugg for the patreon uh patreon.com Universe today um and I spend the first probably half hour talking about what I'm obsessed with and so that changes every month like right now at the time that we're recording seen a couple of these these episodes I'm really fascinated by solar sales laser sales uh Institue resource utilization how can we make stuff in space from stuff in space and I'm also really interested in the direct observation of exoplanets going beyond the transit method the radio velocity method to actually being able to directly image planets I'm really fascinated about what we can discover because right now we only see about 1% of the exoplanets that are out there when they happen to pass directly in front of their star but that is not the vast majority of the planets most of them are going to be in just any random configuration compared to the star and also the planets that are probably going to be the most interesting the earthlike planets orbiting around sunlike Stars they take let's say 300 plus days to go in orbit around the star and so you have to not only get this moment where the the star and the planet perfectly line up you've got to wait a year to see that second Transit and you got to wait another year to get a confirmation but if there's some kind of direct Imaging system where you could just take a picture of the star system delete the sun delete the star and then see all the planets orbiting around that star that would be amazing and that's what the habitable world's Observatory is going to do that's in theory what the extremely large telescope is going to do and we're in entering this new era of direct Imaging of exoplanets and I am all for it so that's what I'm obsessed with right now but I guarantee like by the time you watch this show what I'm obsessed with will have changed if you want to support the work we do at Universe today consider joining our patreon club your support lets us have a minimum of ads and no sponsorship messages patrons get no ads on universetoday dcom for Life want the extra parts of the live stream that aren't in this edited version you can sign up for a special Patron only podcast test feed and get the overtime segments as well as other special behind the-scenes episodes including our monthly Patron only question show that's like 3 hours long thanks to everyone who has already subscribed and welcome to the recent newcomers Randall llant Chris Ryan kameir Christa Maria fut Chris Stockbridge Jessica Marshall kri s Brian and Laurel samansky Jeremy Holland pow pick and Spencer join the club at patreon.com Universe today ianai what do you think is going on with dark matter any trends that you've noticed we're really interesting time right now for the search for dark matter because this is one of the largest mysteries in Astronomy Today astronomers would really love to know what is the cause of dark matter what is this invisible mass that is pulling on all these galaxies that is causing these weird rotation curves that is changing the structure of the cosic microid background radiation that's causing clumping of galaxies that's causing gravitational lensing like there's all of this evidence that this dark matter is out there but nobody knows what the actual particle is what the mechanism is and so there's two main fronts where astronomers and physicists really are trying to get to the bottom of this one is can we make better observations to pin down the characteristics of dark matter at the largest scales try to confirm some theories try to disprove other theories get to a point where you're left like All That Remains has to be the answer and then on the particle side people are building ever more interesting particle accelerators particle experiments where they're attempting to capture Dark Matter particles directly and and be able to see their interactions even if it's incredibly rare kind of like how nutral work and and where we are right now today is that many of the big astronomical projects are about to begin so one of the ones that we've been reporting on is the uclid mission this is this Mission that's doing an all sky survey of the entire universe over the course of 6 years it's going to image the entire sky in both visible light and infrared and try to map out the distortions of gravity across the entire Sky by all of the mass that is sort of squishing it and because when you have say a Galaxy and then you have a blob of dark matter in front of it the blob of Dark Matter acts like a natural lens that changes and distorts the shape of the Galaxy and so astronomers are going to be able to see and map all of these distortions across the entire sky and that's going to be coming from the ukl mission very similar work is going to be done with the NY Grace Roman telescope which is launching very soon and then there's another mission that's being launched by NASA cult Sparx which is going to be kind of similar to the uclid mission and then you got the work on the ground from the ver ruin Observatory and so when you add this all up together you're going to get many separate instruments which are all going to work together to really try and constrain dark matter and that will eliminate a lot of ideas and then on Earth you've got a lot of really interesting experiments that are designed to test one specific possible aspect of of a dark matter particle to detect it moving whether it's if Dark Matter might be axons or whether Dark Matter might be some other kind of non-interacting particle and then you know there's some really interesting work that's being done with the Gaia Observatory wow did I just get a TW for I just mentioned ver Rubin and Gaia in the same question you all get your bingo right there um but the guy Mission has been doing these observations of wide binary stars and so people are thinking that this might be evidence for mon although other people are saying this is definitely not evidence for M and so I mean you can even see hardcore Dark Matter Skeptics like saine hosenfeld are starting to come around to the particle idea of of dark matter so the trends are that astronomy and particle physics has caught up to the complexity of the challenge and they've brought serious instruments to bear on this problem and so now we got to wait for these experiments to run and my hope is that we'll get a much better explanation coming out the other side of this we might not get the answer but that's fine this is a mystery it's unfolding enjoy the ride Vador speaking of solar Sals I'm wondering if we could catch up with omu with a solar sail probe of a very small payload solar sales are awesome I just want to like preface everything that I'm about to say by first stating that solar Sals are amazing now the problem with solar sales is that they work less and less the farther you get away from the Sun and if the goal is to catch up with an Interstellar object that is speeding away from the solar system then you're going to need a propulsion system that goes very fast and just like a straight up if you launch a solar sail from here on Earth you're going to get a little bit of boost leaving Earth orbit but you're not going to get fast enough to catch up with UAA you need some other trick so there are a couple of Tricks one is that you use a laser so you point your laser at your solar sail and now it becomes a laser sail and you can accelerate the the sail and depending on the mass of your solar seal you can accelerate it fast enough to be able to catch up with uua assuming you've got the aim right um you want to get very close and like this is the idea that's been proposed to send tiny spacecraft to Proxima centari at 20% the speed of Lights you could absolutely catch up with Oma mua now anyone spacecraft is probably going to have problems maybe you know your aim is going to be off but you send a swarm of maybe a thousand 1 M across so laser sail powered uh solar sales to catch up with aumu and do a flyby of it the other option is you actually weirdly go inwards to the solar system so if you can get really close to the Sun you can do a sort of special kind of maneuver where you're able to get close to the Sun accelerate your spacecraft and then you slingshot out the other side away from the Sun then you could try to chase down uua but it's going to be going really fast that's probably not going to work the other idea is mag sales and electric Sals so in addition to the light that is coming off of the sun there's also the steady stream of particles the solar wind and that you can have a spacecraft that has like this giant net around it and you run an electric current through that net you interact with the particles that are coming from the Sun and that gives you a boost and so that has been proposed as a way to chase down uo but you you don't really need a solar sale like we have the technology today to chase down Oma if we wanted to spend the money you take a falcon heavy you fill it up with fuel you have a really powerful upper stage and then you have a teeny tiny little spacecraft a Chase spacecraft and then you fire it off and away it goes maybe you do one of these orbits around the Sun to get going faster oberth maneuver and then you're able to chase down within oh I don't know 50 years you could catch up with UA and do a fly flyby of omu mua and there's been even more interesting exotic ideas for how you could potentially do a even a sample return Mission from omua where for example you could take an RTG which is the kind of power system that's on curiosity perseverance on the voyagers like it lasts for a long time produces electricity ongoing and then you just bolt on an ion Engine with enough propellant and then all it is is really engine it's got a nuclear battery that is providing electricity and that it could accelerate and give you enough speed to not only reach a mua mua maybe send down a sample return and then return back to Earth with that so there's a lot of ideas that we could use but right now the astronomical Community is saying uua is gone like yes if we wanted to spend tens of billions of dollars we could chase down uua but instead let's just wait for the next Interstellar object to pass through the solar system there there's a couple of ideas in the works that will be an Interstellar Interceptor so you've got this spacecraft that will loiter around say the Earth Sun L2 lrange Point like where James web is wait for an intercell object on the right trajectory to pass through the solar system and then it fires its engines and goes for an interception to do a flyby of that object right now we only know of two Interstellar objects that have been found so far but when the ver Rubin telescope comes online it's going find dozens hundreds maybe even thousands of these Interstellar objects passing through the solar system and so one of them is going to be on the perfect trajectory for a minimal amount of fuel for an inexpensive spacecraft you can do a flyby maybe you could figure out a way to do a Lander an Orbiter and learn a tremendous amount about an object that came from another star system now I mean UA is obviously very special uh weird uh it would be be great to know specifically more information about that but my guess is that after a while we'll see enough of these objects passing through the solar system that you one's as good as another RM what are the particles that are theoretically created during the process of black hole evaporation electrons quarks complete protons neutrons the vast majority of the particles that are going to be theoretically evaporating from black holes are just photons just radiation light at different wavelengths when the black hole is very large you're going to see very low energy photons and as the black hole gets less and less massive smaller the radiation coming from it is going to get hotter and hotter eventually you'll get this Final Flash of gamma radiation and then the black hole be gone and I guess there's the potential for other particles as well but the vast majority is going to be photons grigor kayari what caused the Big Bang we have no idea Bryce rowy how do solar panel satellites transfer energy down to earth so one of the possible applications for the future of space exploration is that we can build space Power satellites where like down on the surface of the Earth solar panels only work during the daytime they don't work at night but if you could put your solar panels into space then you wouldn't have to deal with weather you wouldn't have to deal with the day night cycle you would just have full maximum sunlight falling on your panels all the time the tricky problem is that they're out in space and so now you have to get that power from space back down to earth and so the main proposal is that you would do that with microwaves and this has been tested that people have been able to test sending microwaves for long distances being able to transfer power it's very inefficient but it does theoretically work and so you would have the power generating satellites flying above the Earth they would be beaming their power down to the surface of the Earth to some collection station that would be taking that and then converting that into electricity but you know that's in theory and every few years we get an announcement of a different organization that is planning to do you know a paper about the feas a feasibility study of space Power and it never goes anywhere and that's just because right now putting solar panels down on Earth even though they're not as efficient it's they're just dramatically cheaper than launching them into space and so you just don't need to send things to space well we still have parking lots and buildings that you can put solar panels on top of the cost per watt just goes down year after year after year the other mild issue is that when you have a satellite in space you're capturing sunlight that maybe wouldn't have hit the earth you know it's the stuff that's going to fly above or to the side of the earth and you're now beaming that towards the Earth and so you're going to be increasing the heat budget of planet Earth now I'm not sure it's a a gigantic input and when you consider how you could be reducing your Reliance on other greenhouse gases then maybe you can make the whole thing work out net net that it's actually a more effective use of our energy Budget on Earth but I doubt that any of these solar power projects will work because it's so expensive because capturing solar energy down on Earth is so inexpensive it just never makes going to make any kind of feasible sense the thing that you do want to do though is beam power from space to space so we talked about earlier on that there's those permanently shadowed craters on the moon and if you're going to want to have your Rover exploring the bottom of one of these craters at - 250° C you're going to need a way to provide it with electricity going to need a weight for it to be able to keep itself warm in those cold temperatures and so you have a satellite that is orbiting overhead that is collecting sunlight it's then using microwaves to beam down and there very concentrated beam down to your Rover and then your Rover has a collector and it's able to soak up all of that energy and to be able to keep doing its work and so I think we're going to see applications of using space Power where your beaming power from space to space Maybe to places like Antarctica or the Arctic Circle how can the people in Antarctica get power in the middle of a Long Winter in Antarctica you beam them power from space so so there are some potential applications for it here on Earth places where just other forms of power just are totally infeasible but uh I think for the longest time we're going to see applications of space power used in space but that's how Andrew fish has anyone postulated the dark energy will eventually Decline and be exhausted like no energy if it has increased over time can the reverse be true I mean we don't know what dark energy is but Dark Energy appears to be just part of space itself that you know if you have a cubic meter of space and you remove all of the mass so there's no atoms whatsoever there's no particles buzzing through this cubic meter and you remove all the energy there's no photons going through there's nothing there still is something and that is that there is still this background fields that are oscillating in space itself and so the discovery that there is some kind of energy that is inherent in space itself just Falls from that naturally and you know what implications that had on the Universe I think was a big surprise but you know when you talk to astronomers and particle physicists and you say you know is there's this inherent repulsive force in space itself they're like yeah that that's what you would expect so as long as you get more space then you're going to get more of that energy but the question is does the amount of energy inherent in each cubic meter of space increase or decrease over time the assumption is that it just remains exactly the same that if you have one meter of space it's going to last for billions trillions quadrillions of years and will always be having the same amount of this expansive energy that is coming out of this cubic meter but one of the big questions that astronomers wanted to know is is this amount changing over time that if it does increase for example that's how you get these weird outcomes like the big rip and if it decreases that gives you other weird outcomes I guess with a you still get an expansion in the universe but it wouldn't be accelerating anymore so right now it's too soon for us to know and you know I talked about earlier about how there's all these interesting experiments that are being done to understand the true nature of dark matter and the same thing is happening with dark energy there's a bunch of interesting experiments that are being done to help astronomers understand the true nature of of dark energy the same spacecraft ukp Nancy Grace Roman ver Rubin they're all going to be doing this work to try and help us understand what impact dark energy has been having on the universe itself and it could very well be that dark energy on per cubic meter of space is increasing or decreasing and both of those would be really interesting outcomes would be surprising to discover and would have deep implications for the future of the universe basil cury what's your take on large solar flares is the risk overblown or unappreciated I think I've gone on record several times that that solar flares are probably the largest threat that we Face from space asteroids I mean they're scary but the chance that an asteroid is actually going to crash into the Earth and cause wild scale damage that happens on a tens of thousands if not millions of years schedule and we saw with the dart Mission we can push an asteroid out of its trajectory and so now suddenly for the first time in the history of planet Earth the planet can defend itself from asteroids black holes passing through the solar system very rare chance Supernova going off in our vicinity there aren't any that are in a dangerous distance to us so we don't really have to worry about that but yeah really big solar flares happening while we have this highly interconnected electrical system with satellites in orbit would be a very bad day and we've seen events like the Carrington event which happened in the 1800s that lit Telegraph poles on fire people saw auroras near the equator it was pretty exciting and yet we didn't have this technological interconnected Society but we've seen examples say in Montreal there was a solar flare that took down a chunk of the electrical grid and that wasn't a really bad one and there have been events in the tree records that show uh solar flares that were dramatically more powerful than the Carrington event so every few hundred years we will probably get a solar flare that hits the Earth with enough power to cause a severe disruption to our planet's electrical Grid or whatever you know the side facing the Sun and then we will have a hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of cleanup to do to swap out bad components fix telephone lines that caught on fire so yeah yeah I think it's a big problem and scientists have gotten a lot better at predicting when damaging solar flares are on the way and being able to help people at least know that we're an hour away from a bad solar flare but we haven't made any changes to the just the raw infrastructure of of how Society Works to be able to prepare for this so we now understand the scale of the problem and now the question is can we mitigate it we can I mean there's no technological reason why we can't the question is just do we have the will to do so and can we think of other wide Planet wide risks that require uh a you know a serious solution to combat the problem I think we can think of a bunch so uh we will behave towards solar flares exactly how we've behaved towards other potential threatening planet-wide issues all right those are all the questions that we got today thank you everyone who posted your questions into the YouTube comments and everybody who joined me for the live stream we do this show every Monday at 5:00 pm Pacific Time right here on the YouTube channel there should be a notification somewhere on the channel where you can see where the next one is going to be uh so definitely come if you want to see the show is twice as long it's about two hours long we get into a ton more questions after we finish recording the main show so if you want uh even longer QA experience come join the live show now I'm going to recommend another small YouTuber but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston Andrew M gross Antonio lilara David Gilton and douge Stewart Dustin cable Jeremy murn Jordan young Josh Schultz Mark anest Paul roorbach Steven kraki Steven fellerer Munley and Vlad chiplin who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other patrons all your support means the universe to us all right so last week I asked everybody to give me your recommendations for YouTubers who are doing a great job who are just putting their heart into this and yet for some reason they just don't have a gigantic following and we're here to fix that so this week I want to recommend Norah's Guide to the Galaxy I had a bunch of people recommend her Channel and I hadn't seen it before and she's great uh she used to work at NASA JPL she has a PHD in astronomy and astrophysics and has been doing a bunch of explainers things like about binary planets um Universal constants uh and also does various news segments and uh you know it's great to see somebody who has this technical knowledge and not just a journalist like me um but the one that I really liked was she did a recent episode on flat rotation curves this is one of the big pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter and when you see just how Rock Solid the observations are like you can't say dark matter is nothing it's something we just don't know what it is and so I thought her explainer on that was great so definitely check out Norah's Guide to the Galaxy she only has 4,000 subscribers so see if we can fix that all right thanks everyone for watching this week's episode thanks for all the questions and we'll see you all next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 41,760

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, perseverance, science, habitable zone, great filter

Id: f3JrIf3Lu_U

Length: 42min 20sec (2540 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024