Smelling Outer Space

ding-dong who's there knock-knock knock-knock who it's Michaels toys over the weekend I was in Portland Oregon and I visited the peculiarities some of this stuff I'm not even sure is legal but you know what I'm not afraid of prison anyway they're in here I'll show you I'll show you a couple of them first of all we got ourselves a double headed quarter this one I'm a little bit worried about showing because it looks and feels exactly like a regular quarter except instead of having a head side and a tail side it has a head side and another head side so my fear is that this is pretty much a counterfeit quarter I could pass this off and have made 25 cents I really would have actually lost eleven dollars and 75 cents because it costs $12 if owning stuff that's this passable as currency is illegal well then ladies and gentlemen we got him I don't own this I'm just holding it under citizen's arrest you're welcome look this is what we're really here to talk about this weird thing Comet vomit what is Comet vomit well we can tell what chemical compounds exist out there in outer space beyond Earth there's a number of techniques to do this and what we mainly find out there is well stuff like hydrogen and helium right the most common elements in the universe they're very important very fascinating but it becomes a little monotonous right well in 2014 we landed a probe on a comet called comet 67p CG it's a bit like a rubber duck it's got these two big lobes connected by a neck at its widest it's about 4.3 kilometers long and it's traveling at a max speed of 135 thousand kilometers per hour the most mind-blowing visual from the entire mission was this one put together by Twitter user Landru 79 it is an animation made up of a series of images taken by Rosetta over the period about 25 minutes a lot of measurements were taken and a lot of different chemical compounds were detected including 16 organic compounds that's pretty amazing it leads more credence more evidence to the claim of panspermia panspermia hypothesizes that because we know that organic compounds and complicated arrangements of them in things that we would call life can survive in the vacuum of space for extended periods of time despite being bombarded by cosmic rays and intense radiation comets and asteroids fragments and space dust could transmit the building blocks of life from planet to planet life here on earth may have begun on Mars or in some completely different solar system with a completely different Sun billions of years ago only to have arrived here because some wayward comet crashed into Earth in its early days put those compounds in to our oceans for instance and then give it a little bit of time we arrived now because we're discovering organic compounds outside of Earth well it might be a pretty good theory now back to the comet vomit a list of the 16 organic compounds found detected on comet 67p CG was published and there are things many of which that you can easily get and sell the people so the fine purveyors of Comet vomit took that recipe and put those chemicals into a vial so that you can smell them and take a whiff of what a comet might smell like if it was here on earth I have no idea what is in this file I don't know which of the compounds detected on comet 67p CG they put in it they do say that they did not include the dangerous gases so I guess that's good but let's go through some of the things that were found on the comet one of the most important was glycine the simplest amino acid at the lambing which has an ammonia like odor I bet I'll smell something like that in this file propylene glycol was detected on the comet which is used frequently here on earth to create a stage fog it's also used in vaporizers to deliver medicine or drugs to those who wish to inhale it not a vape nation but a vape calm they made comet also detected on the comet a sedima which has a bond similar to the essential bond between amino acids and proteins acetone which is commonly found in paint thinners and nail polish removers it's also produced and disposed of in our bodies through metabolism it is found in our blood and urine propionaldehyde was detected both in this comet and also elsewhere in the universe like the molecular cloud Sagittarius b2 near the center of the Milky Way galaxy now it has apparently a slightly irritating fruity odor uh-huh guys look comets outer space in general is kind of sticky it's just that you can't go there and take a whiff of it because if it's near vacuum you die pretty quickly but if you could bring pieces of the gas clouds back to earth or if you brought a comment back down to earth and took a whiff of it it sounds like it would be irritating ammonia like but also a bit Baroody so I'm excited to take a whiff of this concoction which contains many of the things we know exist in the Comets of outer space the reason I'm nervous is that one of the chemicals detected on comet 67p CG which is what this file is based on was methyl isocyanate which wikipedia says is quote a highly toxic ating an irritating material it is extremely hazardous to human it was the principal toxicant involved in the Bhopal disaster which killed nearly 3,700 87 people initially and officially 19,000 787 people in total I hope they didn't put any of that in this file there's only one way to find out we're gonna take a whiff of a comet comet vomit are you guys ready here we go okay I feel like this might be really old here's the vial alright and as you can see the amount of liquid in here is just tiny it's just like three or four drops of liquid I don't know if it's evaporated out because this product is old or if this is about all they could manage to put in there safely or affordably here we go I'm gonna unscrew this would take a whiff oh it's actually pretty good wow wow so it does smell a bit like nail polish remover but like it's scented like it's scented but it's just it's like chemicals like like cleaning chemicals it definitely just smells like cleaning chemicals which I guess makes sense because we know that there's ethylamine in here which has an ammonia like odor but the fruitiness kind of that might be the propionaldehyde it also smells like fingers and I'm wondering if it's my own hands that I'm smelling come on guys you got smelly fingers right oh man there's not much liquid in here I wonder if it's evaporating really quickly come on get out oh yeah there we go oh okay yeah it's a little bit gross to like glue it like gluey or something anyway comet 67p CG also is made up of a bunch of you know ice and and molecular oxygen stuff like that that might not have much of an odor to us but this is pretty neat I don't know why there's so little inside of it I feel like I'm not getting that strong of a whiff but if you concentrated it's really alright so a gift you can give to those who love space or those who just don't like comet bonnet a whiff of outer space outer space isn't just something to look at it's something that we can also stick in our nose holes now so thank you innovators and product creators I'll see you next time guys and as always thanks for watching

Channel: D!NG

Views: 1,464,554

Rating: 4.9306641 out of 5

Keywords: vsauce, michael stevens, comet, outer space, organic compounds, astronomy, lander, nasa, esa, organic chemistry, glycine, ding, d!ng, dingsauce

Id: ilesY9CUCmE

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018