What Would Happen During a Glass Moon Eclipse?

[Music] the eclipse is cool and all but have you ever wondered what would happen if the Moon was instead made out of glass well I have a whole lot uh-oh uhoh would it create a death raid that would burn us all like ants or would something very surprising happen you see the answer was so unintuitive I just had to make a video I'm going to prove the answer by using both computer simulations and practical photography and oh yeah plenty of cosics this one's going to be a fun one so stay tuned grab a cool drink and find some shade cuz we're about to find out how hot it can really get this is a simple magnifying glass and I'm sure you're familiar with what happens when you focus sunlight into a spot it gets really bright and therefore really hot that's because this is basically just a funnel for light it's capturing all the light passing through through the circle and focusing it down to a point just hot enough to singe some wood and even start a fire if you really work at it that took like 5 minutes but if you want more heat you just need to funnel more light by using a larger magnifying glass now this one is four times larger than the small one meaning that it funnels four times the amount of sunlight and if I focus the light down to the same size that means this spot is getting blasted by four times the amount of light and therefore four times the amount of heat God it's so bright I can barely look at it and if we scale our magnifying glass up even further like the backyard scientists did there's enough sun power getting funneled down to a focal point that even metal begins to melt completely melted so what if we could scale that up even further I mean let's get crazy let's get nuts what if we had a magnifying glass the size of the Moon the total sunlight hitting the Moon is 13 Patt of power that is 13 million billion Watts that's a lot like over 4,000 times more power than the entire human race uses kind of a lot and if all of that light got concentrated down to the size of a city it would indeed create a solar death ray focusing a moon-sized magnifying glass down to an area 10 Mi wide would result in the instantaneous vaporization of literally everything in its pth the temperature on the ground would increase at a rate of 4,000 C every single second in mere moments the temperature down here would surpass the melting and boiling point of literally every material in the known universe leaving behind a river of molten slag as it moves across the world you see this is what I imagined when I consider the Moon being made out of glass the eclipse would hit and we'd all just vaporize but imagining is not good enough for me I got to know so in order to find out I decided to actually simulate the eclipse so I've replicated the solar system within Cinema 4D here and I've aligned the moon with the Sun and the Earth which means if I turn on the moon here I should get an eclipse look at that okay that looks just like the actual pictures of an eclipse from space pretty close man that's pretty close but what would happen if I change the material from Rocky Moon surface to Glass it okay no it's there it was just there's no bounce light in outer space it's hard to see this stuff what happens if I actually give it a bunch of craters it's going to make it appear more like frosted glass than a magnifying glass yeah this isn't going to work it's like scratching your lens for billions of years I'm just going to go back to the regular glass there we go that's cool anyway but what we're interested in is the eclipse I'm going to render out two images both viewed of the earth here but one using the moon texture and the other one using the glass texture so let's let that render um they look identical it's glass it's seethrough why is it casting a shadow that seems to be the exact same as the regular Eclipse I'm certain I did not make a mistake I got my CICS turned on we're definitely using the photon Tracer I got a lot of samples this all should be working accurately all right you know what I think I'm going to try to double check this experiment by replicating it in real life all right I guess that means I need to buy something while we wait for that package to arrive I actually thought of a new question what if the moon was actually Square in space cuz you know this video is sponsored by Squarespace Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online whether you're just launching or your brand is already in orbits Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website all in one place their flexible website templates are perfect for any project showcase your art start a blog or launch a store with templates tailored to your needs and the fluid engine reduces the need for orbital mechanics by letting you design every detail of your site with drag and drop techn technology that's out of this world and if you need some autopilot there's the blueprint AI squarespace's guided design system that's there to help you craft the perfect site and if you want to sell merch squarespace's custom merch feature is your mission command you design your products and then they handle the production the inventory and the shipping if you're ready to take your online presents to the Moon just click the link in the description to get a free trial and when you're ready to launch just go to squarespace.com Corridor crew and you will save $10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain did you hear that I think our package is here all right you ready for this check this out oh boy look what's arrived this is a crystal ball made out of quartz and it's basically my new favorite thing I mean look at this spherical Optics are pretty great is my eye big even though this thing is the size of a bowling ball it weighs more than twice as much because I mean it's literally a rock I'm going to take this downstairs to see if I can actually replicate the results I got on my computer all right so I have the glass sphere here to replicate the glass moon but I've also 3D printed the moon here at the same size so that we can compare the two and the sun will be replicated by this Spotlight here shooting a really intense blast of light over at this paper right here so that when I put the moon between the light source and the paper it casts a shadow that I can then measure but now for the million-dollar question is this going to cast light or Shadow it looks exactly the same so in post I can literally measure the luminance values of the Shadow the percentages are identical so no wonder I couldn't tell a difference with my eyes I feel like this basically proves that the real Moon versus a hypothetical glass Moon would have identical Shadows but why where is all the light going when light hits a clear material some Physics happens causing the light to bend this is called refraction and the amount of bending is called the index of refraction action or the refractive index with no material or medium such as the empty vacuum of space the refractive index is simply one meaning no refraction as this number gets bigger light gets bent more such as with water with an index of 1.3 but glass actually bends light even more than that with an index of 1.5 diamond on the other hand takes this significantly further with an index of 2.4 the refraction inside a diamond is so intense that it actually bends different color wavelengths more than others this chromatic operation is why diamonds appear so strikingly beautiful dang they do be that pretty since the amount of bending is also related to the angle of the surface the light rays hit something interesting happens when you begin to curve the surface outwards now the light gets bent in multiple different directions causing the light to converge into a single focal point just like what we saw with our magnifying glass photographers will understand this because camera lenses do the same thing the distance from the glass to the focal point is called the focal length a really short focal length creates really wide angle images but a long focal length creates really zoomed in images the only difference between these two shots is the curvature of the glass so when your lens is a perfect sphere where is the focal point it's really easy to find out as I bring this piece of paper closer to the ball eventually the focal point will actually focus on the paper but I'm still going ah oh no no I'm getting closer and it's still not here yet eventually the light converges into a focal point right about here look at that right off the edge of the surface if the moon was made out of glass it would still create a death ray but just like right here next to the Moon certainly not near the Earth remember the Moon is so far away from us that you can literally fit every planet in the solar system between the Earth and the moon although if you're an astronaut approaching the moon you should be careful cuz if you go through this death rate you will literally vaporize it's so beautiful however this does give us a clue as to why the glass Moon casts a shadow after light passes through the focal point it continues on completely missing the Earth dispersing out into the universe cuz after all what is a shadow if not a lack of light dang it's it's literally throwing shade oh my God yeah it's dude that's crazy this is also why the view through a crystal ball is upside down the light rays literally get flipped around that's not the whole story because some of the light does make it through the glass to hit the earth remember refraction is a function of the angle at which it hits the surface but if that angle is perfectly headon there's no refraction at all and you can clearly see this with the laser whenever I hit dead center of the sphere and you can also see a beam of light right in the center of the smoke right here which is really cool that means that during the glass Eclipse you would still see the Sun but what would that look like this part's pretty cool to understand we just got to look at cameras that use a glass ball as a lens you might already be familiar with this type of camera because I use them all the time they're called 360 cameras each lens of a 360 camera is essentially a glass sphere split in half I know technically these aren't half spheres I don't exactly know how the Optics of this are working maybe there's an additional lens inside of it that I don't know about if only you could break One open to see oh no oh I think I I understand now it is a half dome inside of it there's a cavity on the inside of the lens that is perfectly half spherical I think I just learned a little bit about how 360 camera lenses work all you got to do is break them these lenses are so wide angled that they can see stuff perfectly Sideways from where they're aim the light actually refracts so far as to exit the sphere a full 90° to the side in this example we are getting some crazy Reflections on both the outside and the inside of the sphere which is what's creating the cool pin wheel effect so what effect would this have on the eclipse well the glass Moon is literally an extremely wide angle lens it would see half of the entire sky but then compress it down to the size of the Moon as viewed from Earth this means that the sun itself will appear to shrink until it becomes a point no bigger than any of the other stars in the sky and the eclipse that it would create would be absolutely stunning what all of this means is that my simulation was true it's accurate both the real eclipse and the glass Moon eclipse are virtually identical and that's really cool it's also kind of disappointing because I was really wanting to get like that solar death ray from the moon but no it's not possible I mean it would be possible if you moved the moon right next to the Earth but then you would have many more problems than just a solar death ray I mean the gravity alone would end the Earth did a whole video about that but I just wanted to see if a solar death ray was even possible so I kept thinking imagine we get visited by an alien race so much more advanced than us we couldn't possibly understand their technology to them we would seem like ants so imagine they find amusement by uh burning us like the ants we are except they wouldn't need to use glass there's a better option that I have yet to talk about air you see gas also refracts light but only just like barely for instance hydrogen with an index of 1.13 basically doesn't bin light at all until you start to compress it the refractive index of a gas is directly related to its density so as the pressure of a gas increases so does its index of refraction so on their way to Earth the aliens got to stop for gas and the gas station is Jupiter because 90% of Jupiter is just straight up hydrogen which of course they siphon away and store at atmospheric pressure inside an invisible force field and although they only took a tiny share of Jupiter's hydrogen like 0 1% don't forget how freakishly huge Jupiter is this invisible sphere would be 153,000 km wide making it 12 times larger than the earth that's big however down here no one would even notice its arrival it doesn't have enough mass for us to feel its gravity and it wouldn't burn anything either it actually has the exact opposite problem as our glass Moon which focuses way too close the hydrogen lens on the other hand focus is way too far away but this all changes is when the aliens begin shrinking the size of the force field and thanks to the ideal gas law this action actually increases the pressure of the hydrogen that means the refraction also increases which begins pulling the focal point back towards the Earth bringing it into focus by shrinking the sphere the aliens are literally just doing the equivalent of spinning the focus wheel on a camera lens once the sphere is shrunken down to about 29,000 km across the pressure would create the exact index of ref action needed to focus the sun's Mighty power directly on us and boy would it get hot quick because the lens appears 67 times larger in the sky than our sun it would produce 67 times more solar power the temperature would immediately Skyrocket to over, 1500° F people would start to boil that's hot that is hot the hot spot wouldn't be a small Point either it would be over 3,000 km wide entire Forest would night on fire no entire countries would everywhere within this concentrated light would experience civilization ending heat what's more is that all of this light would normally be hitting the rest of the earth meaning where it was once day is now almost night time and would actually be a lot colder kind of like the inverse of a normal Eclipse until the solar death ray visits I love these types of thought experiments because they can lead to such great sci-fi stories and s fight we rarely get a good understanding of how much power Mega Weapons require or how they're even able to achieve them it's like we're just supposed to believe that like oh I guess you just got to like suck up the sun suck this solar death rate however makes sense or at least it does to me does it make sense to you comments I would love to see someone take this concept and run with it and I would love to read about this from a talented author Craig allenson perhaps or Dennis Taylor maybe even Brandon Sanderson I just bet someone could weave a really interesting story using all of this could nailed it I actually designed this magnifying glass and if you want to print one yourself links are down below you'd be surprised how much you can learn by just like holding something in your hands this is so cool I've been doing this for all of like 5 minutes and I feel like I've already discovered like so much about Optics shout out to Scott Manley and minute physics for helping with a lot of the science in this video and maybe check out what would happen if the universal logo was real that was another fun thought experiment that of course destroys the world classic but here is my next idea I'm going to try to do the liquid Terminator effect practically we'll see so stay tuned and thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 578,017

Keywords: science, scale, size, real size, 3d, size comparizon, VFX, cgi, wren, corridor, universe, space, planets, movies, visual effects, scott manley, facts, veritasium, vsauce, tested, eclipse, glass moon, magnifying glass

Id: xBQ59s90TsA

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 14 2024