Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
Earlier this month I travelled to Kourou in French Guiana
with euronews to watch the launch of Vega Rocket, if it happened while I was there. Waiting at the
observation point with only minutes to go, the launch was postponed because of weather. Even though the rocket scientists were using Comic Sans, the rocket it didn't take off until the day after I had to be back in London. But it made me think.
We can send satellites into orbit and people to the moon and predicts solar eclipses thousands of years into the future but yet we cannot reliably predict which way the
wind will be blowing in the next our or so. How can such
monumental cosmic movements light minutes or light years away from
us be understood, whereas the weather, which happens in the
very same layer of the atmosphere we live in every day, remains such a mystery?
Well, it has to do with the limits of what we know and what we can know.
Planetary positions and terrestrial weather in the future
are determined by their initial conditions. But over a short time scale predicting
the future position of a planet involves fewer variables than the weather. In order to accurately predict the
weather, you need to know the complete and exact conditions of every molecule of air on Earth.
How those molecules will interact with each other and the earth and how they will feedback
and influence themselves by changing other molecules. This makes it incredibly
difficult to predict the weather more than a week in advance.
And this problem isn't going to go away. It is fundamental to our relationship with the universe. Given enough time small, unnoticeable, unmeasurable, unknowable factors get magnified again and again slowly until eventually their impact is vastly significant and our predictions today are hopeless. Neil deGrasse Tyson mentions this in his
brilliant "Death by Black Hole," where he points out that the recoil
from the launch of a single space probe can influence our future in
such a way that in about 200 million years the position of Earth and its orbit around
the Sun will be shifted by nearly sixty degrees. Edward Lorenz gave this phenomenon
its popular name. "Predictability; Does the Flap of a Butterfly's wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" The butterfly effect.
A small change, like a butterfly deciding to flap its wings, can lead to a whole chain of events
were bigger and bigger processes change just enough
to leave the even more significant changes until finally an entire storm occurs somewhere different or not at all.
The discipline that such thinking kick-started is known as chaos theory. When the present determines the future,
but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. To us the universe is full of "if". But all things considered, we
are pretty good at predicting the future and preparing for it, but some things are or were prepared for a future
that hasn't occurred yet or never did.
And knowing more about those things sheds amazing perspective on the limits of our knowledge. Speaking of limits, let's begin with your life, carpe diem.
An online tool that when given your birth date uses the latest life expectancy data to
give you back a grid of squares.
One square represents one week - seven days. The lighter ones are
the weeks that you have already been alive, the darker ones are what you have left. Check "sleep" to see how many of your previous and future weeks will be spent sleeping.
Of course, it's just an approximation, it's difficult to know if you will have more or fewer weeks to come.
It's hard to know when it will all end. It's even more difficult to document, unless you are Reynaldo Dagsa, a councilman from the Philippines, who took this photo of his family on New Year's Day at the very same second that he was assassinated.
The photo was later used to catch the killer.
We can't predict everything, but in the event of an anticipated catastrophic event - severe weather, an incoming nuclear attack or asteroid - how would we all know what was going on? Well, many countries have systems in
place to allow them to speak to as many people as quickly as possible. The United States has the Emergency Alert System.
When triggered, the system interrupts all programming on radio and television with messages generated using text-to-speech automated voices.
The warning tones are known, so what's kind of scary is that today we can take a peek and see what it would look like and what
it would sound like if a catastrophic event occurred.
In this example a nuclear attack that threatened life
across the entire country. First of all, you would likely here sirens and then, as you went tune into, say TV, this is what you would hear and see. We interrupt our programming. This is a national emergency.
The following message is transmitted at the request of the United States government. This is not a test. A nuclear attack is
occurring against the United States. Four nuclear missiles have been
launched from unknown locations and are expected to strike the United
States within the next 15 minutes. Due to the uncertain facts of these
missiles, all residents of the United States should seek out and prepare to take shelter immediately. Stand by for a message from
the President of the United States. If a catastrophic event occurred of global proportions, what would humanity do next?
Well, there might be survivors. People hidden
away in fortresses that we have built, like the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD.
Built into solid granite, shielded by steel plating to
protect computer systems from electromagnetic pulses and supported on springs, so as to safely sway in the event of an earthquake,
NORAD can protect humans and equipment from a 30 megaton nuclear blast just a mile away. After the event, it's places like this that would literally be humanity's last,
best chance of continuing life. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is on
the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
Buried 390 feet inside a mountain, it safely stores and protects 250 million individual seeds for growing plants and crops, if their vulnerable living relatives on the surface are all destroyed. Soviet technology existed to put people on the Moon, of course, they never did.
If Russia had sent men to the Moon,
they would have walked around on it looking like this. The Krechet-94
was designed in 1967 but never used for Soviet manned lunar excursion. Russia did, however, sent the first man into space and the first woman into outer space. They also sent the first dog into orbit
around the Earth. Unfortunately, the dog died too soon
after launch due to overheating. But later they sent Belka and Strelka, dogs on a rocket full of living
organisms that became the very first to orbit the Earth and return to Earth alive.
You can still see them today.
The Moscow Cosmonautics Memorial Museum
has the two dogs preserved.
Stuffed and on display as physical relics of earthlings growing up and leaving their planet.
I was also lucky enough to visit a restaurant in Moscow with menus - yep - that used Comic Sans. Oh, and I ate a star dog, which in the cyrillic alphabet looks like it's called crap dosis. The United States of course did send
people to the Moon, but recently we have learned that NASA
at the time didn't know with the same certainty as other variables whether the first man on the Moon would be able to leave. Just two days before humanity's
historic moon landing William Safire was asked to prepare a speech for President Nixon to read on television to the world if Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became stranded on the Moon.
Thirty years later William Safire explained that Aldrin and
Armstrong were supposed to reunite with the command module orbiting the moon,
but if they couldn't and there was a good risk that they couldn't, then they would have to be abandoned on the Moon, left to die there and mission control would then have to use
their euphemism "close down communication"
and the men would have to either starve to death or commit suicide. And, so, we prepared for that with the the speech that I wrote and the President was ready to to give that.
Luckily, Nixon never had to deliver the Moon disaster speech, but to read it today, thinking of those two guys still alive on the surface of the Moon knowing that they will never get back to Earth is chiling.
Included in that speech were these lines: "fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to
explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their
recovery but they also know that their is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. In ancient days men looked at the stars
and saw their heroes in the constellations.
In modern times we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."
And that's what I took away most from my trip to Kourou. Space isn't just a place for zero-g
tricks or imagining sci-fi technology, space is ever-expanding and full of corners of other worlds that could
one day become mankind's, if we choose to.
And that doesn't minimize Earth. The Vega rocket I went to see sent up
satellites designed to test electric solar wind sails for
interplanetary travel, as well as satellites built to analyze
the health of Earth's vegetation or to predict natural disasters. Just as our bodies benefit from having
doctors and instruments beyond them that can probe, investigate and diagnose, so does the earth. Launch pads, like the one in Kourou I got to visit, are really just hospital waiting rooms for earth. A place where our planet can wait
for researchers and scientists to put their tools, their instruments into use, into orbit.
We may never know if something will or will not happen, but by pursuing space, corners of other worlds, we gain a perspective that can help us shrink the size of that mysterious and often
frightening if.and as always And as always, thanks for watching.
That gave me some intense chills.
If that ever occurs, I just imagine total chaos... That's some scary shit dude
wait, i thought we had the technology to find out the trajectory of the rocket and where it might hit?
I know that Emergency Alerts are also possible through smart phones, but has anyone ever got one? What did it say, and how was it delivered?
Could you conceivably receive a text message telling you of an imminent nuclear attack?
"Nuclear attack in 15 minutes lol."
What's most disturbing about this system is not all of the countless tests I've heard throughout my life as a kid, but now that I'm a working adult if I hear this message, there's a large chance I'll be stuck in traffic away from my family, with no means to get home in 15 minutes. That's really the most terrifying thing to me. With 15 minutes to go, I spend it alone, in my car, creeping along at 15mph on the Long Island Expressway listening to the EAS message. What a way to go. Hope there is something good playing on Classic Rewind at that moment.
A few years ago something similar to this came on when I was watching TV at home alone. All of a sudden the TV just flickered and switched to a blue screen with something like "EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM" with that kind of voice saying something along the lines of "This is the emergency broadcast system. All citizens be aware that all messages transmitted are of critical importance. Please standby for instructions."
Then, fucking silence for like 5 minutes. No joke I was throwing all the non-perishable food into a duffle bag and stockpiling batteries, seriously thinking that it was the fucking end-times.
Then, "This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system. Thank you for your patience, scheduled programming will now continue."
I don't know why the hell there was so long of a gap, but it scared the hell out of me.
Next time I bring a girl home with me, I'm going to have this pop up mid movie. Boom, I'm in.
If you enjoyed that little feeling of dread upon hearing the EAS sounds, you'll enjoy this youtube channel. Lots of different flavours for you to choose from.
I think I know how I'm going to prank my girlfriend tonight...
I'll have to sleep on the couch, but it will be worth it.