What If We Smashed Mercury Into Mars? (And Other Questions) | Lightning Round

went too far hey everybody um today's gonna be a little bit different so in the early days of my channel i answered questions from my audience hence the name answers with joe i kind of got away from that after a while but there is a level in patreon above which you're supposed to be able to get a question answered in a video that's like the perk and um i've been terrible about that so today i'm going to answer questions from people like you on patreon so there's going to be several different answers here different questions that i'm answering sort of a lightning round video but if there's any of the topics that you want to see me expand on let me know down in the comments it could become a full video of its own anyway that's all you need to know gonna be a little bit different it'll still be a lot of fun let's get to the questions [Music] our first question comes from john regal he asks does having a sense of the true size of the universe through the answers with joe's subject matter make you feel more or less significant cool let's start with something easy all right so i'm not going to lie yeah it messes with my head a little bit my worldview has changed a lot in the time that i've been doing this channel not just because i've learned new things but because i've learned how much there is to learn about things it's that whole dunning-kruger effect thing no matter how narrow and specific a topic might be there's there's always a rabbit hole there's always some deep well of knowledge that i didn't know was there and yeah part of that is coming to grips with the fact that um we are only temporary occupants of this thing we call existence and ultimately in the grand scheme of things nothing we do really matters and no that's not a fun thing to think about actually it makes me think of a meme that i've seen where there's like an existentialist on one side and a nihilist on the other side and the existentialist is like you know depressed and decrying the fact that nothing matters and the nihilist on the other side is like celebrating that nothing matters like it's simultaneously the best and worst news you can possibly hear because yeah when i'm having a particularly lovely panic or anxiety episode thinking about all that is not great but you know when i'm laying in bed at night unable to sleep because i'm cringing about something i said to that girl in the ninth grade uh the idea that nothing i've ever done will ever matter is a oh that's quite reassuring now i want to be careful in not trying to make it sound like i've really got this figured out because i very don't i struggle with this quite a bit but one way of framing it that sort of helped me out a little bit is to think of it almost like a quantum reality versus macro reality thing like there are different levels of reality that only vaguely interact with each other and they kind of have their own rules but they're still equally valid so i mean what i mean by that is like no the problems that you and i deal with on the grand scheme of things don't matter you know when you think of galaxies and the cosmos and all that they don't matter at all but in the micro scheme of things the sort of quantum reality that we're living in the way we act towards each other our behavior our actions they matter a great deal so you have sort of these two different realities but they're both equally valid and i don't know maybe that's enough by the way this is a good opportunity to promote my new audio podcast which is going to be launching this week um i actually talked to somebody not on the episode that's not in the first episode in the second episode i talked to somebody who has spent a lot more time thinking about this kind of stuff and we we talk about this um i don't want to give too much away because it's really exciting it was a pretty big one but uh i'll put a link down in the description so you can go see what the podcast is all about you can check it out down there john regal also asked why did dogs tilt their head when you're talking to them because it's cute and they're manipulating us they're in charge you know now i've heard is that they do that when something when they hear something that catches their attention because it's kind of like they're recalibrating their listening device i don't know it's almost like echolocation like they they move they pivot a little bit these are these are my ears you know they pivot a little bit to give just a slightly different angle on the sound so that their mind can kind of triangulate and get a better idea of exactly what they're looking at or get a more accurate reading on it might be a better way of saying it all this is unconscious and instinctual of course they're just reacting to a sound that they enjoy which is why zoey always does it whenever i say the word food mike reed asked will tesla's full self-driving beta kill people or save lives what's the future of autonomous cars and will humans drive at all in 30 years alright i'm going to make a prediction real quick tesla's full self-driving system will absolutely lead to some deaths i'm pretty sure i have no doubt about that i will make another prediction though you know what else is going to cause a whole lot of deaths all the other kinds of cars according to the national highway traffic and safety administration 38 680 people died in car crashes in 2020 that's about 108 a day that's with humans driving the cars so that's how that's going so obviously the question isn't will it kill people it's will it kill fewer people and i think over the long run yes that's true for the simple fact that a self-driving car can see in all directions at the same time and never gets distracted like it's almost unfair to even compare a human driver to a self-driving car on that aspect of course humans have intuition and we have the ability to sort of navigate in unfamiliar places we can kind of predict what other people will do and that's something that we might not ever really be able to get a computer to understand in the same way that we do inherently but on that note self-driving cars record massive amounts of data and insurance companies can use that to tell which person is at fault in an accident and as the systems get better i really do think that it's the insurance companies that are going to push people toward self-driving cars because it's going to cost less money to insure a self-driving car not just because they might be safer further down the way but also because they'll be able to have data on whose fault it is in an accident so yeah i think there'll be a time further down the road when it's just more expensive to insure a non-self-driving car than to get a self-driving car and that's just going to push more people into doing it so i do think it'll be cracked the whole self-driving car thing and i do think that tesla is way ahead of everybody else on that right now um i am more cynical than other people about the timeline on which this is going to happen though like at this point i would chalk up any full self-driving accidents on irresponsible drivers and i've always done that with autopilot as well because you're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel you're supposed to be ready at all times to take over the car like i keep seeing these videos of people you know sleeping in the car while it's driving down the road i don't even know how that works because it's constantly prompting you to wiggle the wheel and give some kind of response to let it know that you're you're paying attention i don't i don't even know how they're able to do that but yeah that's just irresponsible driving and that's what causes accidents in all kinds of cars and look i've seen videos of the new fsd system galley russell has been posting some really cool stuff about that and it's super impressive don't get me wrong like i'm kind of blown away by where they've gotten with it so far um but there's a big gulf between it's super impressive and i will trust this with my life and uh i think it's just gonna be a while before we get there before we get to that 99.9999 you know string of nines i think that last you know tenth of a percent or whatever is probably going to be the hardest to get to now there's been a bit of a rumor since the last tesla earnings call that this next car that they might introduce the 25 000 car that we've all been we've all been calling it the model 2 this whole time um that they're actually going to call it robo taxi and that's what it's going to be it's going to be a robo-taxi and it won't even have a steering wheel in it and that sounds optimistic especially considering that you know for years now tesla's been saying that it'll be feature ready by the end of the year and we never quite get there but you know knowing tesla this car might be introduced and unveiled in like 2022 or 2023 but not come out until 2025 2026. it has been four years since the new roadster was unveiled and if you remember correctly it was called the 2020 roadster at the time we're now finishing up 2021. just saying so i don't know considering the pace of development with fsd maybe by the time that car is actually on the road it'll be ready for that kind of use case um i guess we'll see and it would definitely fit with tesla's pattern of removing things from the steering column i mean starting with the early model s to the model 3 they got rid of a whole bunch of buttons the new model s they got rid of the stalks and with the yolk they basically got rid of half the steering wheel so yeah i guess the next step would be no steering wheel but ultimately i do think that self-driving cars will make the roads safer that they will be safer down the line than human drivers especially as more of them get on the road and uh and especially they can communicate with each other to avoid accidents and stuff you know humans we are messy distracted unpredictable and i think the fewer of those on the road and the more computers that are none of those things that are on the road uh ultimately the safer it will all be but you know having said that people love driving driving is like synonymous with freedom you know they say hit the open road it's you know people love that there's gonna be a lot of hesitation and resistance to it and it's gonna be interesting for sure but i think it's gonna be a long time before we really get there before self-driving cars are the norm i mean maybe maybe 20 years even that's just my opinion so spaketh jostradamus brian beswick asked if the u.s or other large country were to change our building codes to require white roofs how much of an impact on climate change could we make through increased albedo okay i'm going to go on a i'm going to go on a rant real quick it has always bewildered me that of all the colors of the rainbow that here in the u.s anyway we have chosen the darkest most heat absorbing color possible for our roofs i mean i get it if you're up north and and it's cold all the time and you're trying to you know absorb as much heat as possible but here in texas i mean we spend so much time and energy and money on insulation in our attics and radiant barrier and stuff like that and then on the top of our houses we put this crazy heat absorbing tile on it it makes no sense i feel like there are so many like passive heating and cooling designs that we used to use way way back in the day that we've just now forgotten and we've chosen to to you know heat and cool our homes by just brute force throwing as much electricity at it as possible um i think it would be good if we went back and kind of relearned some of that other design stuff anyway to answer your question i don't think it would really make that much difference because the the amount of uh rooftop coverage square footage square mileage whatever is so small compared to the rest of the land like i found an article on quora that used a report from the national renewable energy lab that calculated about 5 000 square kilometers of rooftop space in the u.s uh that sounds like a lot but the total area of the u.s is about 3.8 million square kilometers so that's like 0.13 and that's not nothing i mean it might make a little bit of a difference but i mean keep in mind the us is just one small part of the rest of the world oh and most of the world is uh water though it might make a difference in like the heat island effect in urban areas so on sort of a micro climate level maybe but it is still an interesting question because putting more reflective less heat absorbing material on the tops of homes might lower the temperature might lower the amount of electricity needed to heat and or to cool the homes in fact brian referenced uh this new paint by purdue university that has apparently broken records for the most reflectivity of any paint that's ever been created so yeah this is from a purdue professor named zhu lin ruan i'm sure i'm not saying that right but yeah they've created a type of paint that reflects 80 98.1 percent of sunlight the previous record was 95.5 of sunlight they say it's kind of the opposite of vantablack which absorbs up to 99.9 of visible light and according to the professor he says if you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about a thousand square feet we estimate that you could get a cooling power of 10 kilowatts that's more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses it says that it's made with a very high concentration of a chemical called barium sulfate and they use different size barium sulfate particles that reflects the light in different ways to scatter more of the light spectrum anyway it's a super interesting article i'll put it down in the description if you want to go read it but yeah if we if we put it on every home and every building in the u.s that would definitely cut down on the amount of energy that we're having to use to to cool our buildings and you know that would cut down on power generation it would reduce stress on the grid reduce the amount of carbon emissions going up so in that sense yeah i mean it could have an effect on on climate change and you could probably um determine a percentage reduction that it would create for a home and then extrapolate that out to the entire united states to get a full amount of co2 that it would you know keep from going to the atmosphere i got to move on to the next question if one of you guys want to nerd out about it and put that down in the comments feel free to do so mark hoffman asked in the context of a billion plus years from now if whatever became of us were able to become a type 2 civilization what might be the viability of using mercury to attempt a thea type collision with mars could mercury given its abundance of iron but just the right impact angle and velocity create a planetary core capable of producing a protective magnetic field might such an impact also be able to form a satellite coalescent accretion disk to help stabilize axial rotation this is the most bruh question i have ever seen could we terraform mars by smashing mercury into it sure why not what what could go wrong first of all let me just start by saying that if we ever did become a type 2 civilization um mercury would be toast i think we can all agree with that i think i've talked about this in my dyson sphere video because in order to have enough material to create a dyson sphere around uh around the solar system you would you would need to dismantle a planet and let's just be honest mercury's not bringing much to the party right now but smashing it into another planet to try to recreate what happened here on earth raw okay first of all the axial rotation thing i imagine it would be easier to just collect a lot of asteroids from the nearby asteroid belt and either form an accretion disk with that or clump it all together and make a moon-like satellite to stabilize the rotation that way yeah to get a magnetic field working on mars i see what you're saying it definitely needs some kind of a spinning core and uh to do that you got to rearrange its guts a little bit but this by the way is arguably more important than the the accretion disk or moon bit because if we don't have some kind of magnetic protection for the atmosphere on mars even if we thicken it up somehow so that we could live there and terraform it it would still get blown away by solar wind so so that's definitely something we would need to do but a more practical approach was suggested a few years ago at the planetary science vision 2050 workshop by the director of planetary science at nasa jim green he suggested putting a giant magnetic dipole at mars l1 lagrange point and this would block the solar wind from hitting mars directly enough to at least prevent the atmosphere from becoming eroded this is still a massive project that we don't currently have the technology to do but maybe in 50 years or so now we would still be unprotected on the surface from cosmic rays and whatnot that aren't coming directly from the sun so we would still probably need some kind of magnetic shield sort of over where we're living locally now as for if it would work i imagine a species advanced enough to pull something like this off would also be advanced enough to ensure that it would work with the right angle and velocity and everything and the mass part of it okay so they wanted to recreate what happened in the theater collision here on earth so the thea planet was supposedly about the same size as mars so i had to look this up so mars is about 15 percent the mass of earth at 6.185 times 10 to the 23 kilograms mercury is 3.285 times 10 to the 23 kilograms which is 51.2 percent the mass of mars so they would probably have to whittle mercury down a little bit to get the the ratio just right anyway they would have to be much smarter than me to pull that off but like i said if they're advanced enough to even attempt it they're probably advanced enough to ensure that it would work now what they probably couldn't do which is the achilles heel of this whole idea is um whittle down the billions of years that it would take for mars to become habitable again which if if making it habitable is the point then that's probably the single craziest way to do it fun thought experiment though you guys chime in what you think down below and last but not least cole parker asked how about this why the hell isn't scotland freezing it seems to be on the same latitude of northern maine or southern sweden sure gulf stream but how is that even a thing and how far are they if it ends someone's salty today you seem really upset that scotland is not a frozen wasteland what does scotland do to you okay point on the doll where william wallace hurt you i actually do have a video on the way about this um not necessarily it's on deck it's not coming up anytime soon but it's it's being thought about anyway so yeah no the gulf stream is interesting and it is weakening and if it were to collapse that would be bad i think that was a premise behind the day after tomorrow which is highly regarded as the most accurate climate change film of all time but yeah ocean currents are weird and it's super complex i mean it's it's fluid dynamics it's it's chaos but no i do fully plan on covering this topic in depth in the future so i'll just kind of give a quick rundown here so the ocean currents including the gulf stream are what are called thermohaline currents thermostanding for temperature and haline standing for salt and they're influenced by a variety of things wind the coriolis effect tides but most importantly density so yeah cold water is more dense than hot water and salty water is more dense than less salty water so thermohaline and denser water sinks down below less dense water which is why you can have currents up top of warm water and deep ocean currents of cold water so the water from the tropics get a lot of sun and it warms up and then the winds create a current that moves that hot water north along the east coast of north america and as it moves into the north atlantic there's less sun the air gets colder so the water gets colder it's also thought that the winds evaporate the water thus making it more salty so now this colder saltier water sinks in giant columns of water like underwater waterfalls apparently more water flows through this column than all the rivers in the world and this is actually known as the atlantic meridian over turning circulation okay i have to look so this creates the cold deep current that then flows back to the tropics gets warmed up and then the cycle repeats itself so yeah they actually call this a heat pump and this this heat pump this system brings as much heat into europe as something like a million nuclear power plants and of course climate change is messing with this because as the arctic ice melts that's fresh water especially on greenland that that glacier water it's fresh it dilutes the salty ocean water and it slows down that current like right in that really important spot so yeah that's that's not great so we're already seeing some signs that that current is slowing down the fear is that it could completely collapse which would basically plunge europe into sort of a mini ice age so yes ironically global warming could cause a new ice age but that would only be take place in europe and other places like in africa which usually is cooled by that cold water coming back down they could see the kinds of temperatures that would make it completely uninhabitable so cole i guess if things keep going your way then soon enough glasgow will be under a mile of glacier ice live your dreams kids but that's all the questions for today thanks to all the patreon members for supporting this channel for these great questions i hope to do some more of these in the future and if the idea the gulfstream shutting down makes you crap your shorts well you're 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kinds of cool stuff you can go to patreon.com slash answers with joe t-shirts available at the store dancers with joe.com store again christmas coming up might be some good stuff there for people that might like stuff i'm a good salesman please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here google thinks you might like this one because they've been watching you that's not creepy you might look down here at the side with all the other thumbnails on my face on them and if you do enjoy them and uh you want to be first in line to see the new videos i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now thank you for watching you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 407,959

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: UDuDQUrOQtI

Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021