As with any journey into uncharted territory,
unforeseen problems will almost definitely arise. And when they do, you better hope you
have the means to solve these problems, because no one is coming to help you in space. The
Apollo missions to the Moon where no exceptions and did indeed encounter a few issues along
the way. A problem no one could have foreseen however, was moon dust. The moon
is covered with an extremely fine powder-like substance. At first glance, it's harmless.
I mean after all, it's just dust. But as the Apollo astronauts would discover, it wasn't
as harmless as it first seemed. Moon dust is created by micrometeorite impacts which
completely pulverize the lunar surface. Because there's no wind or any other natural elements
on the Moon which can gradually erode these tiny particles and fragments they remain
extremely sharp. This moon dust prevented space suits and other equipment from working as intended. For example,
astronauts had trouble moving their arms during moonwalks as the joints of the suits became
damaged by the moon dust. It's so corrosive that it even cut through 3 layers of Kevlar-like
material on one of the astronaut's boots. To make matters worse, it's also electrostatic
which makes it cling to anything it comes in contact with. After long moonwalks, the
space suits where covered in this black soot that both looked and smelled like gunpowder.
As it was more or less impossible not to bring the dust back into the lunar module, it caused
some pretty significant issues for the astronauts themselves. It got so bad during the Apollo
12 mission that the astronauts were forced to keep their helmets on inside the module
to prevent as much of it as possible from getting into their eyes and lungs. Does life exist beyond the Earth? I've talked about this many times before and of course the answer is always.. ..we don't know. But that isn't technically true. We can almost certainly say that life does exist on both the Moon
and on Mars. When NASA and other space agencies send stuff and people to other worlds in the
solar system, they go through meticulous stages of sterilization. But there's a great irony
in this sterilization process. Because while these harshly sterilized environments do indeed
get rid of bacteria and other microbial lifeforms that we do not want to contaminate other celestial
bodies with, they also provide the perfect conditions for bacteria that can survive in
space and thus other planets. Essentially, we're able to remove almost everything, except
the things that have the greatest chance of surviving in space. However, just because
they hitch a ride to another world does not mean we'll see Martians or Moontians anytime
soon. It's more than likely that these extremophiles will eventually die instead evolving into
something new. Still it is now, for the first time in our history, technically wrong to
say that the Earth is the only place in the universe with life. Ever since the discovery of Saturn people
have been fascinated by the planet's rings. It really makes Saturn stand out from the
rest of the planets and makes it easily recognizable. But since the 1970s, we've discovered that
Saturn isn't such a special snowflake after all. In fact, we now know that all the gas
giants in our solar system have these rings. In order of their discovery, these include
Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, and Neptune. But aside from Saturn, these ring systems are
composed of mostly dust and particles which makes them extremely faint. But there's actually
one more body in the solar system known to have rings. It's neither a planet, dwarf planet,
nor a moon but instead something classified as a centaur. A centaur is a minor planet
that orbits the sun between Jupiter and Neptune and crosses the orbits of one or more planets.
And yeah, they're named after the mythological beings of the same name. The centaur known
as 10199 Chariklo is the largest one to be discovered so far and it just so happens to
also have rings. It's the first of it's kind and before its discovery, no one thought it
was even possible for small bodies like these to have a ring system. Personally, I think one of the most amazing
things about space is weightlessness. Floating around without the constant struggle against
gravity must be an incredibly alleviating sensation. But weightlessness causes the human
body to behave in ways that make completely normal things not so normal. For example,
you can't burp in space. The reason we burp is because air enters our stomach while we
eat and drink for example. But our stomach doesn't really like air and other gases so
it tries to push it back out. All the food and liquids stays at the bottom while the
unwanted gases are pushed to the top. But it's only able to do this because of gravity. In
the absence of gravity or in microgravity, all the gas, liquids, and food are unable
to separate which makes it difficult to only push gas back out again. This will cause you
to slightly vomit instead of simply burping and is known as a wet burp. Another annoyance
comes with urinating. Our body normally lets us know that it's time to pee when our bladder
is around 1/3 full. But in low-gravity environments the fluid will just keep bouncing around.
Only when the bladder is almost completely full do the sides begin to stretch and trigger
the urge to pee. Even something as basic as sleep can be quite dangerous and even life
threatening if not done correctly. What you need to make sure of before you go to sleep in
space is that you have to have good ventilation around you. Because if you don't, there's a risk
that you'll end up with a bubble of your own exhaled carbon dioxide. This will
result in oxygen starvation and best case, you'll wake up with a severe headache struggling
to breath. Being an astronaut requires you to be exceptional
at a lot of things. One example is that you need to be able to remain calm and focused
during very stressful situations. But that's of course easier said than done, given that
when you're out on a spacewalk there's only a suit between you and the vacuum of space.
Now what if, against all odds, your space suit began filling with water. In 2013, this
is exactly what happened to Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano while performing repairs on
the ISS. Roughly an hour into the spacewalk he noticed that his helmet was slowly filling
with water. As he reported this to the people on the ground, the volume of the water just
kept on increasing and at the time they couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Eventually
it was deemed that there was a chance of him actually drowning in his own suit so the mission
was quickly aborted. It was later revealed that the liquid cooling system in the suit
had caused the leak. Of course Parmitano, being a trained professional, remained completely
calm when faced with the possibility of being the first man to drown in space. This is the only photo taken from the surface
of another body beyond Mars. It was taken in 2005 and is from the surface of Saturn's
largest moon Titan. Now, Titan is an interesting place. Just like the Earth it has lakes and
rivers. Unlike the Earth, these are not filled with water but instead liquid ethane,
methane, and propane. You see, the average temperature on Titan is around -180 °C. Because
it's so extremely cold, the probe only remained functional for about 90 minutes after touchdown
and was only able to send this single photograph from the surface. Titan also has a very interesting
atmosphere which consist of a thick haze. The atmosphere is several times denser than
here on Earth and gravity on Titan is several times weaker. If you weighed, say 80 kilo,
you would only weigh around 12 kilo on Titan. In fact, if you could theoretically survive
on the surface and had a wing suite on. Because of the low gravity coupled with the dense
atmosphere, you would be able to fly simply by waving your arms around. In 1936, just before the eruption of World
War II, Adolf Hitler made a speech during the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony which was
broadcasted to 41 countries across the globe reaching millions of people. It's significant
because it was broadcasted at a very high frequency which likely allowed the signals
to get through the Earth's ionosphere. In other words, the signals where able to escape
the Earth and continued out into space. This has lead some to believe that one of the first
things potential aliens might hear are the words of Adolf Hitler. In fact this is the
exact plot for the book written by Carl Sagan titled Contact. It was even made into a movie
in 1997. But this is only within the realm of science fiction and could never actually
happen in real life. You see, many TV-shows and other signals like these will drastically
diffuse over time and at best will only be able to propagate a couple of light years
away before they become identical to background noise. It's something known as inverse-square
law. Even if some of these signals inexplicably made it to some of the closest exoplanets
to the Earth. And we assume that intelligent extraterrestrials do exist on one of these
planets. And these aliens just happens to aim the correct technology able to pick up
these unbelievably weak and quiet signals, towards the Earth. They would still most likely not be able to extract any audio, visuals, or other tangible information from these signals. They would simply be too feeble and diluted once they get there. However, given that they
can detect these signals in the first place, they would likely recognize them as a technological
signatures. Something that could not have occurred naturally in space and would thus
give them a confirmation to the eternal question; "Are we alone in the universe?". When we think of planets, we think of them
as orbiting around a star. In fact a planet is defined as: "A celestial body moving in
an elliptical orbit round a star." But what if something should happen to that star which
leaves the planet all alone. Or if something happens to the planet which causes it to slingshot
away from its star system on an endless lonesome journey through the cosmos. Astronomers have
theorized about the existence of such rogue planets for decades and its only recently
that we actually found them. But they can be incredibly difficult to discover. After
all once they leave their parent star, they becomes near invisible against the blackness
of space. The planet will find itself in an eternal state of night and the only visible
light would come from the galaxy itself. Some estimate that there could be billions of rogue
planets in the Milky Way alone, but so far we've only found a handful. Most of which
could just as well be brown dwarfs, or in other words a failed star. But the concept
of a rogue planet gives rise to a whole set of new questions. One of the most perplexing;
could life potentially exist and survive on a planet without a star? Maybe. If it's a
planet with a lot of water, that water will obviously freeze as it's exposed to the near
absolute zero temperatures of space. But ice is actually a pretty good insulator. So if
the ocean is at least a few tens of kilometers deep, the water will remain liquid at the
bottom because of the heat internally generated by the planets core. Life could then thrive
around hot spots, like hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. Another alternative would
be if the planet had an extremely hydrogen rich atmosphere. It would need to be tens
or even hundreds of times thicker than the atmosphere here on Earth which would then
act as an insulator to retain liquid water even at the surface. Orbital debris, which is any man-made object
in orbit around our planet which doesn't serve any useful purpose, is becoming an increasing
problem. We're currently tracking around 600,000 pieces of debris larger than 1 centimeter.
Roughly 30,000 of these are over 1 decimeter wide. But there's still many hundreds of millions
of pieces which are simply too small to keep track of. What's so dangerous about these
seemingly insignificant tiny fragments is the speed at which they travel. They orbit
the Earth at speeds up to 28,000 km/h. Even something as tiny as flecks of paint can be
disastrous when traveling at these velocities. In fact a number of space shuttle windows
have been replaced simply because of damage caused by flecks of paint. Usually, when a
tracked piece of debris is about to collide with a functional spacecraft, a so called
"debris avoidance maneuver" is performed. This actually happens all the time and even
aboard the ISS in which the entire space station is moved a few kilometers to avoid a potential collision.
But the thing is we may already have crossed a point of no return. Even if we stop sending
anything into space right this moment it will continue to get worse. You see, the amount
of debris which is already in orbit will continue to collide with each other and thus create
even more debris. So far the problem is manageable but a solution needs to be found quickly.
And while NASA and many others are working on solutions, it's not an easy problem to
solve. I mean, the shear scale and cost of resolving this issue is like nothing we've
ever seen before and if we do nothing we will quite literally enclose the Earth in a blanket
of garbage. There's something known as the "overview effect".
Many astronauts and cosmonauts alike have reported a strong sensation of euphoria and
even a significant cognitive shift in their perspective on life as well as themselves
once they saw the Earth from a distance. Many have explained it as an overwhelming sensation
that everything in the universe is somehow connected, that national boundaries completely
vanish, coupled with the realization that our world is incredibly fragile. It sounds
like they're high, right? Maybe someone brought a little something with them on their trip
to space, who knows. But at the same time it seems like a quite reasonable reaction.
Looking back at the Earth from a distance must be an experience like none other. And what makes
it so interesting is that it's not an isolated incident. Many people who
have returned from space after looking back at our planet, either from orbit or from the
Moon, have explained the sensation in a very similar fashion. Psychologists, neuroscientists,
and physicians have all reported that many of these people have had a notable shift in
their behavior and outlook on life and the world. To end this video, here's a quote from
astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell describing what he experienced upon seeing the
Earth from the Moon. "You develop an instant global
consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction
with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about
it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by
the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a
million miles out and say: ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch'."
Look at that you son of a bitch
I really enjoyed this video. It's good that he explaina his choices in more than one sentence, as opposed to how usually these videos go.
I would never have expected this amount of quality from a user named "top10memes".
The most interesting fact for me was the debris surrounding earth. I never would have guessed that there would be so much.