Thanks Fraser. Have you heard of any plans to build a large space based radio telescope? I was recently reading about some of the satellites the NRO uses and they allegedly have a 100m + dish in geostationary orbit used for signal intelligence on earth. I have no idea how it works but I imagine it's something like a fold up umbrella. It seems the technology is out there to build a similar sized one dedicated to radio astronomy.
Is your channel growing as fast as I think it is? I don't know which I like more, your awesome interviews with some of the greatest minds in their fields or your Q&A videos. Thanks for all your hard work and congratulations on your success. The sky is *not* the limit 😉
Simple - ease. Stars like ours - stable, long-lived - make up only about 2.5% of all stars. They are also very small and make it difficult to see a planet transitting let alone trying to find them in the vastness of space.
When will we see a time lapse of the pilars? I think were missing out on a chance to make the best space images and some of the easiest to make. thats the best bang for your buck out there.
Just a clarification on Apollo 8's trajectory: while it was initially on a free return flyby trajectory as a fail safe back up in case the service module propulsion were to fail on the way to the moon, it actually went into orbit around the moon and spent 10 orbits at the moon before the service module was fired to return Apollo 8 to the Earth. Artemis 2, on the other hand, is planned to stay on a free return trajectory and not go into orbit around the moon.
I remember a part of a story that had a connecting structure between Pluto and Charon, they claimed the two are circling each in a perfect enough circle. That structure could hold huge amounts of stuff and would have reasonable gravity at either end.
God, imagine the horror as it carved out a 30000 kilometre long ditch. Seriously it’d be pencil thin and moving as fast as air resistance would allow, what do you expect to happen? It certainly wouldn’t be good, but it would not be devastating. And “inevitable” is debatable. It’d have to be severed in a particular way far above the atmosphere. Also, the cables would probably be nearly as tough as diamond and there’d be plenty of backups and spares.
@@oldschoolman1444 Well, space elevators are inevitable if they’re physically possible, it’s just that it’d take several centuries before we have enough of a demand for space stuff that one would be worth building. Habitable planets I agree with you on - if it was 100% earthlike then there’d already be something living there, you’re probably not going to get anything much better than a big mars, and by the time we have the ability to get there the colonists might not even want to live on a planet.
Hi Fraser, question for a future Q&A hopefully: How much should we be concerned about the current build-up of space debris in our orbit? Are there any missions in any stage of planning to attempt to reduce the amount of trash in orbit?
It is a MAJOR concern, indeed!! We are tettering on the edge of a catastrophic Kessler Effect that will effectively seal us inside our Gravity Well for many nanny years. .. All proposals to clean it hit the Veto of almost all the Nations involved, which do not want anyone to have a close look at their dead safekeeping and or debris....
5:40 Andoria, yes, was about to comment the exact same thing.. Been waiting for it for ages, apparently still in implementation. 1618 Searching Our Closest Stellar Neighbor for Planets and Zodiacal Emission PI: Charles Beichman Co-PI: Dimitri Mawet
Thank you for the Great News! The problem is there is only one JWST. What it sees is phenomenal, but it's like throwing a very sharp dart at a wall ten thousand miles square. No matter how many times you toss the the dart, you will always miss most of the wall. It reveals pinpoints in our very wide sky, and everyone clamors for their favorite pinpoint target. I want Tabby's star just when it begins its next dimming and again at max dimming and then just finishing dimming. I also want it focus on one of the seemingly empty intergalactic spots associated with a sudden radio burst. And every other anomalous sighting, the weirder the better. Let lesser tools look at what we think we understand. Save James Web for those we argue most about.
I’ll say this about the space elevator and that is if they build like a normal elevator with a counter weight then the lifting cost is dramatically lower
If I could do a space project with no financial restrictions, I'd build Star Fleet! OK, don't know how I'd get the warp drives and things but ... well, can't think of anything cooler!
Regarding the interferometer topic: With the advent of cube satellites, it seems like we should be able to launch enough of those to make a space-based interferometer any size we want.
A space elevator would always be more effective than rockets once it was built. The problem is that we’re still a few centuries away from needing to put enough stuff in space to justify one.
A couple of these videos have talked about the idea of a custom filter to look at a specific star and block it out to see planets around it. What if you had something like TV or computer monitor with an extremely dense and small set of pixels that it could block out as an overlay, have it project an obstruction over the telescope. If you had something along those lines, you wouldn't need new filters for each star you wanted to look at, you could simply load a filter file on the computer controlling a telescope. You could cheat the small sizes by having multiple screens that you reflect the previous image over to be filtered at each screen.
i LOVE the idea of a solar gravitational lens, which is why i have to ask... can we use the moon, and especially a new moon, to do the same thing? it has no real atmosphere and its kinda stable so our telescopes wont just fly out of range. question is, can it work?
40 planets without atmospheres isnt enough tp give up on red dwarfs, I dont think. Because of the possible combination of very old, less active red dwarfs, with planets featuring exceptionally strong magnetic fields.
Here is a question for you. Why does e = mcsquared. Say we expressed e in BTUs, m in pounds and c in miles per hour. The formula would become e = kmcsquared where k is a constant to make the units come out right. The only way e = mcsquared could be true is if one of the terms in the SI units was defined in terms of the other two. As far as I kinow, each term was independently determined so it would be a great coincidence of the formula came out exactly with no constant needed.
Hey Frasier! I really loved this episode. I’ve watched on & off for a few years. I’ve been subscribed, but I don’t always get your notifications due to the fact I’m subscribed to quite a few channels. While that sounds like I’m a subscriber to anyone, I assure you it’s anything but. I’ve had a Social Media Company and needed to promote a boat load of channels. Thousands, BUT…. Yours is one of my few cherished. Anyway, you make a great point about Alpha Centauri …and I agree that it’s been a less interesting target. Still… hmmm? Why hasn’t it been. Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it is intriguing. I would love a follow up episode on this subject specifically although I know that’s not your MO currently. Hopefully you get this and understand that I support you fully! Keep up the good work!
0:50 The planets orbiting Trappist is that the tidal forces of the planets in the 'habitable' zone would make them unlivable for our type of life. Due to their orbital proximity, as well as the other inner planets, they would pull cometary debris into each other. Their stable lagrangian points would be far too small to capture and hold slower moving orbital debris. It's also a red dwarf system, so their orbital velocities within the very constrained habitable zones would create even more gravitational havoc. The problem with alpha/proxima centari is that they're a close binary system (paired stars are within a light year of each other) . The energy that their individual planets receive would be far too unstable to create and sustain atmospheres tenable for life forms we are familiar with. The highs and lows would be far too extreme. And planets orbiting *both* would be, most likely, entirely frozen or jovian giants with their own internal heat, either form being entirely inhospitable for recognizable life. Just think... why does the northern hemisphere have 'dog days of summer'? Because of Sirius which is over 8.5 light years from our solar system, yet it can elevate temperatures sufficiently to be noted long before civilization even understood that other solar systems existed. Two sun like stars within 1 light year would cook the planets orbiting where they would be exposed to the energy of both stars, and that would be planets limited to each star individually. Planets orbiting beyond the pair would be frozen and any somehow caught in a lagrange point between the two stars would be cooked. 7:20 A space elevator by current envisioning would not work because of one very necessary component: The tether (i.e. the elevator). As mass is moved up and down the elevator the tether will stretch, contract, and transfer gravitational forces along its entire length which, at the point of the orbital station node in the lagrange point (L1), would be considerable. Energy would need to be continually exerted to keep the station in a stable location, in the L1 or otherwise. One anchored on Earth would be in an even worse position and could *never* be maintained in a lagrange point.
Proxima Centauri has two confirmed planets and a disputed candidate for a third planet. These were discovered by doppler spectroscopy measuring the radial velocity from us as it varied due to the gravitational pull of the planets. They could not be detected by the way most exoplanets are found, which is by detecting the change in the light from the star as a planet transits in front of and behind the star. This is because the orbital plane of the planets is tilted from our viewpoint so the planets do not transit the star.
It's a matter of station keeping at the optimal focal point on the other side of the Sun from the Exoplanet. The problem then becomes... Are you in Orbit of the Sun and only observe occasionally? Or are you expending energy to maintain a constant position, therefore also having limited, but constant observation.
The real question should be what are we going to do with all of the space debris there in 10 years could literally preclude us from sending anything into orbit without causing damage or having a collision
Space elevator might be theoretically possible, but 🤔 the smallest lateral disturbance would start it wobbling eventually flailing about until it destroyed itself
Telescopes assembled in space (unlimited budget): Voyager Station / Orbital Assembly introduced in space construction of rotating ring space stations some 200+ meters in diameter; build 2 rings and put mirrors & lens inside them to have a 200+ meters wide, or however larger, telescope in space, ion/plasma driven, can be placed at any orbit, Lagrange point, or anywhere in our solar system! Such a space station would be a university, space academy, small city, akin to JPL & Berkeley, but not too industrious to disturb its main mission as a space telescope. Give it half a century, maybe just a quarter (in my post retirement lifetime), the way things are moving. If not WW3 before it.
Question, Fraser!!?? You think that a advanced star-faring civilization might build some mega-structure to contain a red dwarf star to make it safe to mine the planets like the TRAPPIST-1 system? Then build prefect cities in that space about this tamed flare star i.e. O'Neill Cynlinders?
I second traveling to see the total eclipse. I went to South Carolina for the 2017 eclipse and it was well worth it. I’d seen partial eclipse’s before and there was just no comparison being in totality. Not just what it looked like but how it felt. To say it was awe inspiring was an understatement. It was as if someone had poked a hole in the sky. Videos don’t do the experience justice.
With light taking so long to leave the core of a star, what does the initial start of a star look like? Do we expect that a stars core would ignite under its pressure a significant time before we’d be able to tell on the outside?
Orion flight SW Programmer here, Lockheed employee, there is a delay as of right now, there are some delays due to the Heat shield issues, and some other software problems. So currently looking at 2025. But possibly delayed again, Artamis 3 and 4 are currently on track with no delays.
Hello Fraser First Thanks a lot for your wonderful channel. Regarding the first question: Isn't the Trapist1 system preferable because it stroke the luck that its planets revolve in the same plane that coincide to our line of sight, so they make eclipses with their star?
Instead of trying to build up with a space elevator, wouldn’t it make more sense to put some kind of manufacturing system in geosynchronous orbit, and then build down?
Dont know how i lucked out, but i live in the line of totality for the upcoming eclipse. I will literally be able to stand outside my front door to experience it. Im in Rochester, NY... im really looking forward to it!🎉
Aaron Smith is the man’s name. He does for Scientology what you do for spaceflight, sort things out so lazy, pseudo intellectuals like me can speak with authority without doing the heavy lifting. Thanks bro.
I did the math. Or rather, Chat-GPeter did the heavy lifting. :P The very slow rotation of the moon means that a Lunosynchronous orbital altitude is ~117,000 kilometres above the surface. And so we can easily dismiss this as so completely inefficient as to be a total nonsense. In fact, I had a tremendously engaging conversation with Chat-GPT, where it got quite a few things wrong; trying to tell me the L1 point was 1500 klicks above Earth, for example. When I pointed out the errors, it dutifully corrected itself, and then we had a great chat about how stupid the idea of a Dyson Sphere is. Chat-GPT and I definitely see eye to eye on that subject. :)
To Fraser You have done a video or two on Fermi Paradox. What is your own personal conjecture about aliens existing? In the event aliens do not exist, what would you think about that?
No limit budget,huh... A flotilla of large ezekiel wheel starships 450 metres long, with a 250 metre toroidal habitat, and take off for saturn, build floating cities in its atmosphere.
Is it actually possible to focus a gravitational wave observatory? Other than making sure it’s turned on and hoping its orientation lines up? Or were you talking about Lisa where they could potentially reorient to the optimal layout?
Question: I've heard a million times that the moon helps keep Earth's axis of rotation fairly stable and that's one reason Earth is friendly to life. But looking at the other rocky planets, they all seem to have roughly as vertical an axis as Earth. None of them rotate on their sides. So is it really true about the Earth's moon, or are we just in some kind of very unlikely coincidence?
Perhaps spend some of the unlimited funding on some futuristic weaponry so we could conquer new words? Collect gold and silver, spices and strange fruits, it could make us to rulers of the universe
Sadly, military has advanced technological development in the past. There are better ways, though, like just investing in technology as opposed to investing in technology for war that happens to provide side benefits.
Fascinating video. I relate to the gentleman that stated he didn't really delve into mystic contemplation until he moved out into the wilderness. Same here. I never questioned life or history until I retired. I appreciate the open minded reflection of the archeologists too. I believe it's going to take a younger mind questioning the narrative in order to really change academia.
i know they’re being safe and everything, but sending a mission to flyby the moon to prove we can still do it 60 years later with exponentially better technology. like yall think we forgot how to do rocketry or-?😭
29:25 I don't know how long ago this was recorded before posting, but NASA announced a delay for Artemis 2 a few days ago. Pushed back to September 2025
Good Morning. Love your channel! I have a question for you. What are your thoughts on manufacturing in space? what will be the first things created in orbit and Moon for export to earth and used for off world project?
Hey Fraser, fantastic video! If we colonize the Moon, how would solar eclipses affect our settlements? Would they only occur on the dark side, or would the Earth's shadow touch inhabited areas? Also, would an eclipse significantly increase harmful radiation? Would we need artificial protection, like a man-made ozone layer? Sorry a few extra questions in there 😅
CAIT Thank you for an excellent show Fraser, I always enjoy catching up with these, but as i'm in the UK, the 5pm Pacific timeslot for the live show isn't very practical. My question is about space elevators: How exactly do they add angular momentum to the payload as it rises? It would have to be extremely rigid, or very strongly braced to prevent it buckling as any payload rose up, surely? You get the energy into the payload by taking it from the rotation of the Earth. And if you have a counterweight, you would have to keep adding energy to it to prevent it from losing orbital speed over time, which might end up just being less efficient than using rockets anyway.
Great episode. Now, if someone decides to actually bring back one of the Voyager probes, they're gonna have to deal with Carl Sagan's ghost. That shade is going to be throttling the HELL outta them! That is the polar opposite of what he wanted!
Speaking of space elevators, how fixed are the LaGrange points; i.e. do they drift based on the elliptical nature of all orbits? Just thinking how this might affect a tensioned cable from the moon to its end: would it wiggle like a noodle?
You can't imagine how to tell if there is life in our ocean moons? How about fly a sample-return mission through one of the plumes being fired directly from one of those oceans?
I have a question if you build a space station and tethered it into space on the dark side of the moon, would the centrifugal force create gravity within?
Re the space based interferometer why have we never done this on the ISS it has a truss the length of a football field and the redundancy in the electronics plus people there to service it. You could probably put something together with off the shelf components. About the only issues I can think of are vibrations from those pesky humans exercising and being sprayed by a leaky Soyuz (Remus)
You could also make an orbital ring around earth and hook the lunar elevator onto some kind of rail on the outer edge of that. It’d need a lot of repairs though.
Pretty sure you can't have solid objects like that in orbit, you'd have to continuously propel it and control it. Same reason you can't make a Dyson sphere, only a Dyson swarm, as a sphere would inevitably collide with the sun.
@@RWMAirgunsmithing It’d certainly require some serious RCS thrusters, or maybe a lot of tethers, but it is hypothetically possible. There’s always a way around pesky physics - like how you can actually make a Dyson sphere by floating microscopically thin solar panels/mirrors on the solar wind.
@@oberonpanopticon ohh, orbital in the colloquial sense, sorry my brain was in science mode after watching a science video. So yes, i agree, we could make a giant earth sized ring shaped rocket and continuously propel it 24/7 so it wouldn't crash into the earth....
@@RWMAirgunsmithing There’s always active support too. But a thin ring / incredibly wide and thin torus around the earth, whilst unstable, wouldn’t be all that unstable. For the most part it’d just stay in place.
It is a known scientific fact that if you execute an overhand swing with a garden rake in outer space, you are unlikely to impale a chipmunk with the same frequency that you can on Earth.
I vote for Betazed, which beats Cait due to supernovas being observable esp. With warning shots of neutrinos. Possible life in water worlds encased by ice is interesting, but it will take a quantum leap in observational power/cleverness to get enough data from under miles or tens of miles thick ice.
I understand that we haven't necessarily observed every star and thus don't know if there always are planets orbiting a star, but have any of the stars we've been able to observe been confirmed to NOT have planets? Barring a star's death, shouldn't we expect that stars would always have planets orbiting them, given how they form?
Love your show. I have a curiosity/question. I keep hearing that hot jupiters cannot form near the star because the gas needs to be cool for it to condense into a planet. Instead they must have migrated in. But the star itself is a gas giant. So why doesn't that apply to the star too? I mean as soon as a star is big enough to ignite, then it should not be able to get any bigger because now all the gas is hot. So all stars should be the same size. But clearly they are not. Another way to ask the question is, how do we know the hot jupiters didn't form at the same time as the star and so was that big before the gas even became hot?
But wouldn't red dwarf stars be good for colonies/terraforming powered Dyson spheres since they should should block some radiation, regarding Proxima obviously since it's the one close enough to be realistic?
19:47 The minute the science community does that ... a few decades later someone discovers a Red Dwarf system that defies human knowledge that has atmospheric planets. Other factors Fraser doesn't take into consideration during his diatribe > Do all Red Dwarf Stars that have planets that orbit as close as TRAPPIST-1 does - is this the Norm or the Exception for planets around a Red Dwarf or are these types of systems peppered witha range of planet orbits? An example is Proxima Centauri > has an Earth-like planet in its habitable zone at roughly a little farther away from its Star than Mercury is from our star. Which has a different orbit distance and contrast to the planets around TRAPPIST-1. The orbit of the Centauri planet would also place it slightly farther out from any erratic flares the star sends out > not that it would be much safer (potayto/potahto); but an orbit around a Red Dwarf beyond that of Mercury vs as close as the Jupiter Moons would still be a significant difference.
Catching up to the Voyagers would be very expensive. We would have to end all our wars and do a massive collaboration. But humans love fighting each other too much to let that happen.
I said that TRAPPIST-1 has 6 planets. I should have said 7.
Very nice of you, to also count the not discovered yet exo-Pluto :P
Seven that we know of ;)
Thanks Fraser. Have you heard of any plans to build a large space based radio telescope? I was recently reading about some of the satellites the NRO uses and they allegedly have a 100m + dish in geostationary orbit used for signal intelligence on earth.
I have no idea how it works but I imagine it's something like a fold up umbrella. It seems the technology is out there to build a similar sized one dedicated to radio astronomy.
Another correction: the moon's gravity is almost exactly 1/6th that of Earth, not 1/5th (1.62 m/s² vs 9.81 m/s²).
Will you grow a secondary atmosphere on your head Fraser?
Is your channel growing as fast as I think it is? I don't know which I like more, your awesome interviews with some of the greatest minds in their fields or your Q&A videos. Thanks for all your hard work and congratulations on your success. The sky is *not* the limit 😉
You always come across as such a humble and kind soul. Love your calm and harmonious style!
Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Always wondered why we were looking at Red Dwarf type systems instead of the sun like star systems similar to our own. Need more of Andoria! thanks x
Simple - ease. Stars like ours - stable, long-lived - make up only about 2.5% of all stars. They are also very small and make it difficult to see a planet transitting let alone trying to find them in the vastness of space.
...also we don't want to alert the Tri-Solarians to our existence ;-)
They're just easier with current tech.
Budget no limit? 1) super-Hubble or Hubble 2; 8 metre space telescope with coronagraph AND/OR 2) 16 metre telescope on far side of the moon.
Anyway, this one video especially in second part is pure genius. Big thanks for inspiring thoughts! 👌
When will we see a time lapse of the pilars? I think were missing out on a chance to make the best space images and some of the easiest to make. thats the best bang for your buck out there.
Just a clarification on Apollo 8's trajectory: while it was initially on a free return flyby trajectory as a fail safe back up in case the service module propulsion were to fail on the way to the moon, it actually went into orbit around the moon and spent 10 orbits at the moon before the service module was fired to return Apollo 8 to the Earth. Artemis 2, on the other hand, is planned to stay on a free return trajectory and not go into orbit around the moon.
I remember a part of a story that had a connecting structure between Pluto and Charon, they claimed the two are circling each in a perfect enough circle. That structure could hold huge amounts of stuff and would have reasonable gravity at either end.
Isaac Arthur imagined a similar structure. The two are an ideal location for a space elevator!
@@oberonpanopticonthat’s where I’ve heard that idea from also.
ua-cam.com/video/TNRQFKVV68I/v-deo.htmlsi=48JFsk4SpA6E8Pdh
The problem I have with some of the logic you presented about the downsides of the space elevator is that the idea of a space elevator is cool af 🤔
I've always thought a space elevator was one of the dumbest ideas, imagine the destruction when it inevitably fails.
God, imagine the horror as it carved out a 30000 kilometre long ditch.
Seriously it’d be pencil thin and moving as fast as air resistance would allow, what do you expect to happen?
It certainly wouldn’t be good, but it would not be devastating.
And “inevitable” is debatable. It’d have to be severed in a particular way far above the atmosphere. Also, the cables would probably be nearly as tough as diamond and there’d be plenty of backups and spares.
A space elevator that went from high earth orbit to low would avoid that problem, and still lower the cost to access interplanetary space.
Space elevators and habitable planets are wishful thinking. Even if we did find a habitable planet it would take many generations to get to it.
@@oldschoolman1444 Well, space elevators are inevitable if they’re physically possible, it’s just that it’d take several centuries before we have enough of a demand for space stuff that one would be worth building. Habitable planets I agree with you on - if it was 100% earthlike then there’d already be something living there, you’re probably not going to get anything much better than a big mars, and by the time we have the ability to get there the colonists might not even want to live on a planet.
Hi Fraser, question for a future Q&A hopefully: How much should we be concerned about the current build-up of space debris in our orbit? Are there any missions in any stage of planning to attempt to reduce the amount of trash in orbit?
It is a MAJOR concern, indeed!! We are tettering on the edge of a catastrophic Kessler Effect that will effectively seal us inside our Gravity Well for many nanny years. .. All proposals to clean it hit the Veto of almost all the Nations involved, which do not want anyone to have a close look at their dead safekeeping and or debris....
GO 1618 look it up on the JWST approved science programs! That program will indeed observe Alpha Centauri with JWST, and one of its chronographs
5:40 Andoria, yes, was about to comment the exact same thing.. Been waiting for it for ages, apparently still in implementation.
1618 Searching Our Closest Stellar Neighbor for Planets and Zodiacal Emission PI: Charles Beichman
Co-PI: Dimitri Mawet
Thank you for the Great News!
The problem is there is only one JWST. What it sees is phenomenal, but it's like throwing a very sharp dart at a wall ten thousand miles square. No matter how many times you toss the the dart, you will always miss most of the wall. It reveals pinpoints in our very wide sky, and everyone clamors for their favorite pinpoint target.
I want Tabby's star just when it begins its next dimming and again at max dimming and then just finishing dimming.
I also want it focus on one of the seemingly empty intergalactic spots associated with a sudden radio burst.
And every other anomalous sighting, the weirder the better. Let lesser tools look at what we think we understand. Save James Web for those we argue most about.
Thanks a lot, I didn't realize it had gone into the queue. I'll be watching...
I’ll say this about the space elevator and that is if they build like a normal elevator with a counter weight then the lifting cost is dramatically lower
New subscriber here, just found your channel and wanted to say what an awesome job you have done explaining what's going on out there in space. 💯❤
[Risa] no doubt. And im glad to see you are managing expectations regarding trappist 1 accordingly.
If I could do a space project with no financial restrictions, I'd build Star Fleet! OK, don't know how I'd get the warp drives and things but ... well, can't think of anything cooler!
Regarding the interferometer topic: With the advent of cube satellites, it seems like we should be able to launch enough of those to make a space-based interferometer any size we want.
A space elevator would always be more effective than rockets once it was built. The problem is that we’re still a few centuries away from needing to put enough stuff in space to justify one.
Google "Sky Hook"
A couple of these videos have talked about the idea of a custom filter to look at a specific star and block it out to see planets around it. What if you had something like TV or computer monitor with an extremely dense and small set of pixels that it could block out as an overlay, have it project an obstruction over the telescope. If you had something along those lines, you wouldn't need new filters for each star you wanted to look at, you could simply load a filter file on the computer controlling a telescope.
You could cheat the small sizes by having multiple screens that you reflect the previous image over to be filtered at each screen.
i LOVE the idea of a solar gravitational lens, which is why i have to ask... can we use the moon, and especially a new moon, to do the same thing? it has no real atmosphere and its kinda stable so our telescopes wont just fly out of range. question is, can it work?
No, the lower the gravity, the farther it becomes a lens. You'd need to go halfway to Andromeda
@@frasercain nuts
Moving towards a non Extinction space movement.
40 planets without atmospheres isnt enough tp give up on red dwarfs, I dont think. Because of the possible combination of very old, less active red dwarfs, with planets featuring exceptionally strong magnetic fields.
Here is a question for you. Why does e = mcsquared. Say we expressed e in BTUs, m in pounds and c in miles per hour. The formula would become e = kmcsquared where k is a constant to make the units come out right. The only way e = mcsquared could be true is if one of the terms in the SI units was defined in terms of the other two. As far as I kinow, each term was independently determined so it would be a great coincidence of the formula came out exactly with no constant needed.
SI units were defined in such a way that the constant of proportionality in E=mc^2 is 1 and the formula is always quoted given SI units.
Hey Frasier! I really loved this episode. I’ve watched on & off for a few years. I’ve been subscribed, but I don’t always get your notifications due to the fact I’m subscribed to quite a few channels. While that sounds like I’m a subscriber to anyone, I assure you it’s anything but. I’ve had a Social Media Company and needed to promote a boat load of channels. Thousands, BUT…. Yours is one of my few cherished. Anyway, you make a great point about Alpha Centauri …and I agree that it’s been a less interesting target. Still… hmmm? Why hasn’t it been. Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it is intriguing. I would love a follow up episode on this subject specifically although I know that’s not your MO currently. Hopefully you get this and understand that I support you fully! Keep up the good work!
0:50 The planets orbiting Trappist is that the tidal forces of the planets in the 'habitable' zone would make them unlivable for our type of life. Due to their orbital proximity, as well as the other inner planets, they would pull cometary debris into each other. Their stable lagrangian points would be far too small to capture and hold slower moving orbital debris. It's also a red dwarf system, so their orbital velocities within the very constrained habitable zones would create even more gravitational havoc.
The problem with alpha/proxima centari is that they're a close binary system (paired stars are within a light year of each other) . The energy that their individual planets receive would be far too unstable to create and sustain atmospheres tenable for life forms we are familiar with. The highs and lows would be far too extreme. And planets orbiting *both* would be, most likely, entirely frozen or jovian giants with their own internal heat, either form being entirely inhospitable for recognizable life.
Just think... why does the northern hemisphere have 'dog days of summer'? Because of Sirius which is over 8.5 light years from our solar system, yet it can elevate temperatures sufficiently to be noted long before civilization even understood that other solar systems existed. Two sun like stars within 1 light year would cook the planets orbiting where they would be exposed to the energy of both stars, and that would be planets limited to each star individually. Planets orbiting beyond the pair would be frozen and any somehow caught in a lagrange point between the two stars would be cooked.
7:20 A space elevator by current envisioning would not work because of one very necessary component: The tether (i.e. the elevator). As mass is moved up and down the elevator the tether will stretch, contract, and transfer gravitational forces along its entire length which, at the point of the orbital station node in the lagrange point (L1), would be considerable. Energy would need to be continually exerted to keep the station in a stable location, in the L1 or otherwise.
One anchored on Earth would be in an even worse position and could *never* be maintained in a lagrange point.
Proxima Centauri has two confirmed planets and a disputed candidate for a third planet. These were discovered by doppler spectroscopy measuring the radial velocity from us as it varied due to the gravitational pull of the planets. They could not be detected by the way most exoplanets are found, which is by detecting the change in the light from the star as a planet transits in front of and behind the star. This is because the orbital plane of the planets is tilted from our viewpoint so the planets do not transit the star.
The solar gravitational lens sounds great but how do you point it at the exoplanet you want to observe?
It's a matter of station keeping at the optimal focal point on the other side of the Sun from the Exoplanet. The problem then becomes... Are you in Orbit of the Sun and only observe occasionally? Or are you expending energy to maintain a constant position, therefore also having limited, but constant observation.
Space elevator is a grand idea but I think that it would provide a nucleation point for Magnetic, Gravitational, Electrical, induced Plasma.
Why such effort to basically just duplicate the Apollo 8 mission from a half century ago? Why are we reinventing the wheel with Artemis?
that's why the most likely place for et;s and uap's are in our oceans and are USO's that went under the surface after ancient solar storms etc
The real question should be what are we going to do with all of the space debris there in 10 years could literally preclude us from sending anything into orbit without causing damage or having a collision
Unlimited funding!!! Off the the Cassini moons we gooo 🚀✨🌔✨
For a second, I thought you meant off to the casinos! 😃
Space elevator might be theoretically possible, but 🤔 the smallest lateral disturbance would start it wobbling eventually flailing about until it destroyed itself
Has anyone noticed any intense flairs on Trappist-1? I’m praying it’s a more calm red dwarf and these 3 planets are ripe for life.
Telescopes assembled in space (unlimited budget): Voyager Station / Orbital Assembly introduced in space construction of rotating ring space stations some 200+ meters in diameter; build 2 rings and put mirrors & lens inside them to have a 200+ meters wide, or however larger, telescope in space, ion/plasma driven, can be placed at any orbit, Lagrange point, or anywhere in our solar system! Such a space station would be a university, space academy, small city, akin to JPL & Berkeley, but not too industrious to disturb its main mission as a space telescope. Give it half a century, maybe just a quarter (in my post retirement lifetime), the way things are moving. If not WW3 before it.
Question, Fraser!!?? You think that a advanced star-faring civilization might build some mega-structure to contain a red dwarf star to make it safe to mine the planets like the TRAPPIST-1 system? Then build prefect cities in that space about this tamed flare star i.e. O'Neill Cynlinders?
We need to start Spinning Up Mirrors in Space!!!
I love that Book Series… 😎
Great content as always!
My favorite question/answer was CAIT
I second traveling to see the total eclipse. I went to South Carolina for the 2017 eclipse and it was well worth it. I’d seen partial eclipse’s before and there was just no comparison being in totality. Not just what it looked like but how it felt. To say it was awe inspiring was an understatement. It was as if someone had poked a hole in the sky. Videos don’t do the experience justice.
With light taking so long to leave the core of a star, what does the initial start of a star look like? Do we expect that a stars core would ignite under its pressure a significant time before we’d be able to tell on the outside?
What about red giants? Could stars like Betelgeuse have planets orbiting them?
For the total solar eclipse, I'm heading to ontario/niagara falls. wish me luck on weathers
Orion flight SW Programmer here, Lockheed employee, there is a delay as of right now, there are some delays due to the Heat shield issues, and some other software problems. So currently looking at 2025. But possibly delayed again, Artamis 3 and 4 are currently on track with no delays.
I thought Artemis 3 was pushed back to 2026.
@@frasercain Artemis 3 is slotted for 2026. No delays at this time
Hello Fraser
First Thanks a lot for your wonderful channel.
Regarding the first question:
Isn't the Trapist1 system preferable because it stroke the luck that its planets revolve in the same plane that coincide to our line of sight, so they make eclipses with their star?
Instead of trying to build up with a space elevator, wouldn’t it make more sense to put some kind of manufacturing system in geosynchronous orbit, and then build down?
Yes! Especially if the raw materials came mostly from lunar mines.
Absolutely. It's really the only way.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a fairly good novel about a space elevator.
Dont know how i lucked out, but i live in the line of totality for the upcoming eclipse. I will literally be able to stand outside my front door to experience it. Im in Rochester, NY... im really looking forward to it!🎉
I'm jealous, enjoy the show.
Aaron Smith is the man’s name. He does for Scientology what you do for spaceflight, sort things out so lazy, pseudo intellectuals like me can speak with authority without doing the heavy lifting. Thanks bro.
I did the math. Or rather, Chat-GPeter did the heavy lifting. :P
The very slow rotation of the moon means that a Lunosynchronous orbital altitude is ~117,000 kilometres above the surface.
And so we can easily dismiss this as so completely inefficient as to be a total nonsense.
In fact, I had a tremendously engaging conversation with Chat-GPT, where it got quite a few things wrong; trying to tell me the L1 point was 1500 klicks above Earth, for example. When I pointed out the errors, it dutifully corrected itself, and then we had a great chat about how stupid the idea of a Dyson Sphere is. Chat-GPT and I definitely see eye to eye on that subject. :)
Being able to detect a dead Voyager probe after you catch up to it would require a realignment of the lateral sensor array…
To Fraser
You have done a video or two on Fermi Paradox.
What is your own personal conjecture about aliens existing?
In the event aliens do not exist, what would you think about that?
No limit budget,huh... A flotilla of large ezekiel wheel starships 450 metres long, with a 250 metre toroidal habitat, and take off for saturn, build floating cities in its atmosphere.
Yes!!!
Lasers would be your best product to a non sinking titanic Forest communication.
Is it actually possible to focus a gravitational wave observatory? Other than making sure it’s turned on and hoping its orientation lines up? Or were you talking about Lisa where they could potentially reorient to the optimal layout?
Question: I've heard a million times that the moon helps keep Earth's axis of rotation fairly stable and that's one reason Earth is friendly to life. But looking at the other rocky planets, they all seem to have roughly as vertical an axis as Earth. None of them rotate on their sides. So is it really true about the Earth's moon, or are we just in some kind of very unlikely coincidence?
Apollo 8 DID NOT USE A FREE RETURN, while it launched that way it actually did go into lunar orbit. and it had blast back out of it.
With unlimited funding I would want to build the Alcubierre Warp Drive. If it was successful we can only imagine what we could do.
Perhaps spend some of the unlimited funding on some futuristic weaponry so we could conquer new words? Collect gold and silver, spices and strange fruits, it could make us to rulers of the universe
@@doncarlodivargas5497people like you are why I worry about us going interstellar
@@oberonpanopticon - why? It have worked perfectly before?
@@doncarlodivargas5497 I really, really hope you’re being sarcastic and it’s just going over my head.
Sadly, military has advanced technological development in the past. There are better ways, though, like just investing in technology as opposed to investing in technology for war that happens to provide side benefits.
Fascinating video. I relate to the gentleman that stated he didn't really delve into mystic contemplation until he moved out into the wilderness. Same here. I never questioned life or history until I retired. I appreciate the open minded reflection of the archeologists too. I believe it's going to take a younger mind questioning the narrative in order to really change academia.
Start looking at star systems closest to earth. Accessing spectrum analysis for life.
24:00 Remus There might be a future mission to find Voyager to recover the true history of humans on earth.
Great topics as always, very thought provoking, thank you 🤗❤️👍
i know they’re being safe and everything, but sending a mission to flyby the moon to prove we can still do it 60 years later with exponentially better technology. like yall think we forgot how to do rocketry or-?😭
Where do we stand with warping space with nuclear fusion engineering .
Risa, I want to see more space based telescopes and being able to see more than just a single pixel for a planet
For those of us who watched the moon landings, making a Big Deal of circling the moon seems so last century.
I’m excited about the chronograph!❤
29:25 I don't know how long ago this was recorded before posting, but NASA announced a delay for Artemis 2 a few days ago. Pushed back to September 2025
Good Morning. Love your channel! I have a question for you. What are your thoughts on manufacturing in space? what will be the first things created in orbit and Moon for export to earth and used for off world project?
Hey Fraser, fantastic video! If we colonize the Moon, how would solar eclipses affect our settlements? Would they only occur on the dark side, or would the Earth's shadow touch inhabited areas? Also, would an eclipse significantly increase harmful radiation? Would we need artificial protection, like a man-made ozone layer? Sorry a few extra questions in there 😅
CAIT
Thank you for an excellent show Fraser, I always enjoy catching up with these, but as i'm in the UK, the 5pm Pacific timeslot for the live show isn't very practical.
My question is about space elevators:
How exactly do they add angular momentum to the payload as it rises? It would have to be extremely rigid, or very strongly braced to prevent it buckling as any payload rose up, surely? You get the energy into the payload by taking it from the rotation of the Earth. And if you have a counterweight, you would have to keep adding energy to it to prevent it from losing orbital speed over time, which might end up just being less efficient than using rockets anyway.
My dream space telescope will work on moon as well and that can be large too. But we need a lunar base 1st.
Do they plan on any "Time Lapse Photography" of the movement of clouds or anything
I have a question: why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways?
Great episode. Now, if someone decides to actually bring back one of the Voyager probes, they're gonna have to deal with Carl Sagan's ghost. That shade is going to be throttling the HELL outta them! That is the polar opposite of what he wanted!
hi frazer.my vote is for vulcan
Speaking of space elevators, how fixed are the LaGrange points; i.e. do they drift based on the elliptical nature of all orbits? Just thinking how this might affect a tensioned cable from the moon to its end: would it wiggle like a noodle?
You can't imagine how to tell if there is life in our ocean moons? How about fly a sample-return mission through one of the plumes being fired directly from one of those oceans?
Question, When they say after the big bang the universe cooled down, where did the heat go?
I have a question if you build a space station and tethered it into space on the dark side of the moon, would the centrifugal force create gravity within?
Re the space based interferometer why have we never done this on the ISS it has a truss the length of a football field and the redundancy in the electronics plus people there to service it. You could probably put something together with off the shelf components. About the only issues I can think of are vibrations from those pesky humans exercising and being sprayed by a leaky Soyuz (Remus)
You could also make an orbital ring around earth and hook the lunar elevator onto some kind of rail on the outer edge of that. It’d need a lot of repairs though.
You reckon? Probably a lot of really shoddy, Orbital Ring builders out there. Now, my sister was getting a new orbi...
Pretty sure you can't have solid objects like that in orbit, you'd have to continuously propel it and control it. Same reason you can't make a Dyson sphere, only a Dyson swarm, as a sphere would inevitably collide with the sun.
@@RWMAirgunsmithing It’d certainly require some serious RCS thrusters, or maybe a lot of tethers, but it is hypothetically possible.
There’s always a way around pesky physics - like how you can actually make a Dyson sphere by floating microscopically thin solar panels/mirrors on the solar wind.
@@oberonpanopticon ohh, orbital in the colloquial sense, sorry my brain was in science mode after watching a science video. So yes, i agree, we could make a giant earth sized ring shaped rocket and continuously propel it 24/7 so it wouldn't crash into the earth....
@@RWMAirgunsmithing There’s always active support too. But a thin ring / incredibly wide and thin torus around the earth, whilst unstable, wouldn’t be all that unstable. For the most part it’d just stay in place.
I am all ears 😊❤️
What are some major space missions that have failed?
It is a known scientific fact that if you execute an overhand swing with a garden rake in outer space, you are unlikely to impale a chipmunk with the same frequency that you can on Earth.
I vote for Betazed, which beats Cait due to supernovas being observable esp. With warning shots of neutrinos. Possible life in water worlds encased by ice is interesting, but it will take a quantum leap in observational power/cleverness to get enough data from under miles or tens of miles thick ice.
I understand that we haven't necessarily observed every star and thus don't know if there always are planets orbiting a star, but have any of the stars we've been able to observe been confirmed to NOT have planets? Barring a star's death, shouldn't we expect that stars would always have planets orbiting them, given how they form?
Mass drivers are coo...we should build one
Love your show. I have a curiosity/question. I keep hearing that hot jupiters cannot form near the star because the gas needs to be cool for it to condense into a planet. Instead they must have migrated in. But the star itself is a gas giant. So why doesn't that apply to the star too? I mean as soon as a star is big enough to ignite, then it should not be able to get any bigger because now all the gas is hot. So all stars should be the same size. But clearly they are not.
Another way to ask the question is, how do we know the hot jupiters didn't form at the same time as the star and so was that big before the gas even became hot?
Invasion of interstellar private sphere... niiice! 😁
Solar eclipses are awesome. Totality is worth the effort of getting there! ⭕
Is SpinLaunch feasible for sending fuel, oxygen, and other non-sensitive equipment into orbit?
Active support systems like launch loops and orbital rings are more useful and doable for Earth than a space elevator.
Set of six oneal cylinders, each 10km long and 1km in diameter.
What if they took JWST and up scaled it to fit the Starship fairing? How big would it be and how much more effective would it be?
But wouldn't red dwarf stars be good for colonies/terraforming powered Dyson spheres since they should should block some radiation, regarding Proxima obviously since it's the one close enough to be realistic?
Could we send life to other planets ?
Could we put a people sized terrarium in near by space with people on it?
Isn't that the International Space Station?
19:47 The minute the science community does that ... a few decades later someone discovers a Red Dwarf system that defies human knowledge that has atmospheric planets. Other factors Fraser doesn't take into consideration during his diatribe > Do all Red Dwarf Stars that have planets that orbit as close as TRAPPIST-1 does - is this the Norm or the Exception for planets around a Red Dwarf or are these types of systems peppered witha range of planet orbits? An example is Proxima Centauri > has an Earth-like planet in its habitable zone at roughly a little farther away from its Star than Mercury is from our star. Which has a different orbit distance and contrast to the planets around TRAPPIST-1. The orbit of the Centauri planet would also place it slightly farther out from any erratic flares the star sends out > not that it would be much safer (potayto/potahto); but an orbit around a Red Dwarf beyond that of Mercury vs as close as the Jupiter Moons would still be a significant difference.
Catching up to the Voyagers would be very expensive. We would have to end all our wars and do a massive collaboration. But humans love fighting each other too much to let that happen.
Fraser, didn't one of your shows feature someone talking about a Fresnel lens based L2 interferometer?
Yep.