Could we build a particle collider on the moon?

Daniel and Katie talk about what such a huge collider could reveal, and whether it would be a good idea.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
So, Daniel, how much did it cost to find the
Higgs Boson? Well, do you want the answer in dollars,
in euros or in aircraft carriers? His aircraft carriers a
real unit of currency. Yeah. Absolutely, The large hage On collider,
for example, cost one aircraft carrier. Awesome, that sounds like

(00:28):
a good deal. And so how much is that in dollars?
It's about thirteen billion dollars per aircraft carrier. Okay, now
it's sounding a little bit out of my budget, and
that's exactly why we quoted in aircraft carriers. Actually, maybe
we should have made the collider cost like point nine
nine aircraft carriers to make it sound cheaper. Sold, I'll

(00:49):
take two. Did you want a plastic bag with that?
Or did you bring you around? Hi? I'm Daniel. I'm

(01:10):
a particle physicist and a professor UC Irvine, and I
would love to go shopping for bigger colliders. And I'm
Katie Golden. I'm the host of Creature Feature and I
always take my reusable bag when buying aircraft carrier's worth
of Hadron colliders because I like to live sustainably. And

(01:30):
welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe
in which we aim to buy all of the knowledge
in the universe. There's nothing out there we don't want
to know, and we will encourage humanity to spend, spend,
spend until we figure it out. We want to know
what's on the inside of black holes. We want to
know all about the soup that's in neutron stars. We
want to understand the tiniest buzzing particles in the passage

(01:53):
of time, the origins of the universe and its final fate.
We dig into all of this on this podcast, and
it's playing all of it to you. My friend and
co host Jorges not here today, so we are lucky
to be joined by one of our favorite guest co
host Katie. Katie thinks very much for joining us today.
Always a blast coming on here, sometimes literally. So, Katie,

(02:15):
what is the biggest thing you have put in a
reusable bag? Oh, that's a good question. I mean I
want to go with like a huge supply of toilet
paper is probably the most accurate answer. The heaviest thing
probably be when I got like weights from the store

(02:36):
and you know, like exercise weights, and they're really heavy
and I'm carrying them back to my apartment, and I'm thinking,
this sucks. This is so heavy. But then when I
just lift them voluntarily, it's like, this is great, this
is exercise. But when I had to carry them back,
that's when it sucks. Well, I think that in our house,
the thing that's most commonly put in bags are other bags.

(02:57):
I don't know if you end up with the same scenario,
but we have like bags stuffed with bags filled with
other bags, and eventually we're like, why do we even
have these bags if they're just to hold other bags,
But you need bigger bags to hold the bags that
are holding the smaller bags. It's like we're afraid will
be caught out without the right size bag at some moment,
so we end up just being like drowning in bags.

(03:20):
I reorganized our garage the other weekend, and I feel
like it was about fifty just bags. Maybe that's the
true sort of gray goo that's going to overtake the
earth as bags and bags and bags. I think. So
when the aliens do come, they will find the remnants
of our civilization buried in plastic bags. But I hope
that we as a civilization can aim higher than just

(03:40):
producing more plastic bags or even sustainable bags. I hope
that we can produce great works of science and technology.
When I look at something like the Golden gate Bridge,
I think like, wow, go humans, Look what we have accomplished,
something that a single human could never build on their own.
But a bunch of people coming together and putting their
brains to it and designing it and spending years and

(04:03):
of course millions of dollars have accomplished something really incredible.
And the same is true for some of our great
science experiments. The International Space Station floating above the Earth,
large ha John Collider underground. These are like enormous monuments
to the human intellect, don't you think? Yeah? I mean
I'm thinking a sort of theme park on the moon
where we have like a Golden gate Bridge, maybe a

(04:26):
statue of liberty. Would that be a good waste of
our money? Or maybe we should do something a little
more scientific. Maybe we should take a bunch of bags
and recycle them into a huge monument for humanity. Mm
I like that. Yeah. What would you say are some
of the great monuments to science in biology? Like what
can you point to and say, look what we have built?

(04:47):
I mean, when we're talking about biology, it's sort of
on a very small scale, right. I feel like some
of the greatest monuments to our knowledge and biology are
the smallest things, like our ability to make vaccines and
to have these really precise surgeries. So when it comes
to biology, these really tiny, little, itty bitty discoveries are

(05:08):
the most incredible things, like a COVID vaccine, which can
totally change the course of human history and save thousands
or millions of lives. Right, it is really incredible what
biology has accomplished, exactly. Yeah, But with physics, sometimes you
need to go big to even find the teeniest, tiniest particle, right, Like,
it seems like the smaller and more elusive the particle,

(05:30):
the bigger the structure around it has to be to
actually measure it. That's right, And that's the history of
particle colliders. We started in the fifties with EO. Lawrence
in Berkeley building cyclotrons and these things, you know, like
one or two mems around so the electrons could get
up to what at the time felt like very high energies.
And then they just got bigger and bigger, and we

(05:51):
had colliders all over the world. We have colliders in
Chicago that were kilometers long, and now we have one
in Geneva which is tens of kilometers long, and people
are talking about building even bigger colliders and bigger colliders,
and so a fun question to consider is like, well,
how big can we go? Should we aim for? Like
Solar system sized colliders, galaxy size colliders? Are there aliens

(06:15):
out there that have already built galaxy sized colliders? Are
we part of an aliens collider? You know? Joking aside?
There is it really fun mystery there because the Earth
is bombarded by very high energy particles from space cosmic
rays that nobody can explain. And one ridiculous but fun
theory is that maybe it's pollution from alien particle physics experiments.

(06:39):
Like somebody out there has built an ginormous collider and
we're basically the beam dump. Is this an accident or
maybe alien crimes? Maybe it's messaging, right, They've built this
collider to send these particles to us to like tell
us the secrets of the universe, and we just don't
know how to decode it. Yeah, I mean it would
be something if we thought this was a message and

(07:01):
then we just realized it's garbage from space that they've
been shooting at us. But we don't just build these
colliders bigger and bigger because we think it's fun and
because we want to build larger and larger monuments to physics.
This isn't Ausimandias, right. We build these colliders larger and
larger because the bigger the collider, the more I can
tell us about the nature of the universe. You can

(07:23):
think about these colliders sort of like microscopes. The bigger
the collider is, the smaller the thing it can see,
the more it can peer into the nature of matter
and tell us like, what's really going on down there,
what's inside the particles that we think are fundamental are
their new particles out there? And so it's not just Hubrius.
It's not just because we want to have a bigger

(07:45):
collider than the next guy. It's because we really want
to answer these questions about the universe. And it's sort
of like the pinnacle of modern particle physics to build
these huge cathedrals to investigation. Now, it is a little
counterintuitive that they're so big, because when I think about
studying something small, I'm thinking of having to shrink down

(08:06):
to the size of the small thing to be able
to see the small thing. So why would you need
such a big structure to study something so small? Because
in our universe, as opposed to the marvel cinematic universe,
where antman can just shrink himself down to the quantum scale,
we can't do that. We have to stay at our size,
and so we have to tear apart quantum objects, which

(08:29):
requires huge energies. You want to pull apart the nucleus
of the atom. That stuff is really tightly bound together.
You want to peer inside the proton. The gluons inside
the proton are really holding it together. So you need
really really powerful hammers basically to smash these little bits
so that you can see them. Sounds a little dangerous.

(08:50):
I would recommend getting in the way of that hammer,
no matter how many layers of plastic bags you have
wrapped around you. But physicists are talking about this kind
of thing seriously because these collider take decades to build.
They take even more decades to plan and to fund
and to organize the politics of getting the billions of
dollars all lined up to build them. And right now
particle physicists are engaged in a project to plan out

(09:12):
the next ten twenty fifty years of particle physics, and
so people are talking about what should we build next?
And there are practical suggestions for what the next collider
might be, and they're also fanciful ideas for what the
next or next next collider might be. I bet there
are a lot of not in my backyard types who
don't want a h drawn collider in their backyard. But oh,

(09:34):
sure in someone else's backyard. You joke, but that is
part of it. And so on today's episode will be
exploring one of these crazy ideas for a new particle collider,
will be answering the question should we build a particle
collider on the Moon? Well nineteen something something called and

(09:59):
they want their Austin Ours movie building back. It does
sound like something you would build while stroking your white
cat and sitting under your volcano in your layer. So
when I first sent you this idea, did you think
it was totally ridiculous? What do you think? Wow? I
would be amazed if humans could do that. I mean,
we put Tartar grades those little tiny water bears on

(10:19):
the Moon, So I don't see any reason why we
shouldn't put a particle collider on the Moon and then
let the tartar grades run it. That's the actual next
step for you. You're like, if they're tartar grades there,
we should put a collider there. Yeah, why not? There
are tartar grades everywhere. They're tarte grades in the Pacific Ocean.
She would put a huge particle collider in the Pacific. Well,
as long as it doesn't get in the way of

(10:39):
any like snapping shrimp mating strategies, then maybe. Well, as
we're leading into on today's episode, you'll find that putting
a particle collider on the Moon might answer some deep
questions about physics and solve some problems about existing colliders,
but it comes with its own unique set of challenges.
And so, as usual, before we dug into the topic,
I went out there to ask people what they thought

(11:00):
about this question. Would it be practical to build a
particle collider on the Moon. So thanks to everybody who
volunteered to answer random questions in their inbox from a
physicist without the opportunity to do any googling. If you'd
like to participate and here yourself baselessly speculate on difficult
topics on the podcast, please don't be shy right to

(11:20):
me two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. So
before you hear these answers, think to yourself, should we
build a particle collider on the Moon. Here's what people
had to say. Yes, we should definitely build a particle
collider on the Moon, but we should use such financial
resources to achieve fusion and I'm sure we can survive
on this planet. First, I'm assuming this question is being

(11:43):
asked because there's a lot of space up there, and
you don't have to go around buildings, and it's quiet,
there's no electromagnetic disturbances. I don't know if those benefits
would outweigh the detriments of it being so far away
and so hard to maintain and so hard to staff.

(12:05):
It sounds like a fun idea, but probably not the
best use of our resources. I don't know how much
the effects of gravity impact our design of particle accelerators,
but that and possible interference from ground traffic, earthquakes, all

(12:30):
those sorts of things that can potentially disrupt experiments, UH
could all improve the results from testing That would be
seriously expensive. If we could conduct experiments up there that
we just couldn't do down here, then yeah, I'd be
all for it, and I think we should build it um,

(12:51):
But if the experiments aren't going to be that different,
then I think those resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Of course, we should be the particle collider, even on Marth. Well,
I think we should do this all these things because
you never know whant to go, what you're gonna find.
Let's create jobs. I think we should definitely build a

(13:12):
particle collider on the Moon, maybe even around the entire Moon.
I have no objections to that. I say why not.
I'm gonna say now, because the Moon has a lot
of different particles in there are Earth. Well, because there's
a lot of the plants on Earth and there's basically
no plants on the Moon, that that is quite true.

(13:34):
I don't know. Maybe there's a maybe because it's in
vacuum and cold, maybe we could do something with superconductors. Yeah,
so maybe it would be easier to have more electricity there.
We can actually make it go a bit faster or something.
I think it would be interesting to build one of
the Moon, at least not maybe not a very large

(13:56):
HC or the Fermi lat form, but I think it
would be possible to build quite uh, small particles collator
in the moon, see some interesting stuff without the gravity.
Go bigger, go home? Definitely, why not even bigger? Let's

(14:16):
build one the size of our solar system so we
can really measure some gigantic things. Where we get money
for this? I have no idea. I really like the
answer of we should do it, but maybe not a
very large one, just a little one, you know, just like, yes,
we should have one, but let's be reasonable people, Let's

(14:37):
make it, you know, medium size. You know, it's so
reasonable to build a little any medical eider very very
far away when nobody can get to it. No. I
like the one that says, let's go big, build one
the size of the solar system. I mean, while we're
spending a jillion dollars, why not spend a budget jillion dollars? Right?
It all just feels like made up money at this point. Yeah,

(14:59):
I mean, you know, if we turn our currency into
aircraft carriers, maybe we're gonna get somewhere. Joking aside, I
think there is an important point there. These things feel
really expensive to us, like ten billion dollars. I mean,
it's so much more than you and your entire family
will earn your entire lifetime. I mean, I don't know
what you've invested in, but I'm imagining not a billionaire.

(15:21):
It just seems like an unimaginedly vast sum of money,
doesn't it. But it's not that much money on the
scale of societies, you know, collectively, the financial power of
a country is enormous, So that like ten billion dollars
is a tiny blip in the US budget. It really
is just like one more or one fewer aircraft carrier.

(15:41):
You know, the US Congress spends five billion dollars without
even thinking about it too much. When you're talking about
unlocking the secrets of the universe, we're like in the
store where they sell the secrets of the universe, and
we have enough money in our pocket to buy it,
we're just deciding not to because we want to go
down the street and go to the aircraft carrier store instead.

(16:02):
So these things really are achievable, either by the US
or by the global community. It's just a question of
whether we want to do it. Yeah, And I feel
the perhaps more important metric isn't necessarily money directly, but
the idea of the carbon cost of things. So is
it too much of a carbon cost to build something

(16:24):
or is the knowledge that we get from it worth
that kind of you know, exchange in terms of the
amount of fuel we would need to get to the
moon or something. But that's not really reasoning that we
use often when we're building aircraft carriers. I don't think
we think about, hey, the cost of the environment of this,

(16:44):
But that would be my my only sort of concern
in terms of the budget on uh, building a big thing. Yeah,
that's interesting point. I wonder if Elon Musk is designing
an all electric aircraft carrier, you know, Tesla's first aircraft carrier. Well,
let's take into the question, and I think maybe the
place to start is to try to understand why particle

(17:06):
colliders have to be so big. I mean, it's not
just that we like to build big things, but there's
a reason why these things are massive, right, Yeah, So
this is what I want to find out more about
because I think of a really tiny thing. You know,
what's with all of this extra space. Surely you don't
need that much storage space for like a little cork, right,

(17:31):
That's right. It's not about like having a big enough
bag to hold a cork. It's about tearing that cork
out of the bonds that it's held in. And there
really are two different things that we want to do here,
but both of them require a lot of energy. One
is take the particles that we know and try to
break them into pieces, like find out what's inside a cork.

(17:51):
Is a cork made of smaller little bits, maybe strings
or sub corks or quirkinos or whatever you would want
to call them. I'm sure we should consult Jorge when
the time time comes you know what are they made
out of? And what we've discovered in the last few
decades is that as you go deeper and deeper into
the atom, the bonds get more and more powerful. Right Like,
the bonds that hold an electron to the nucleus are

(18:13):
very strong. They're much more powerful than gravity, for example,
which is the force you deal with on everyday basis.
And the bonds that hold the nucleus together are the
strong force, which are even more powerful, which is why
fission and fusion and nuclear power have so much capacity
to release energy bound in the nucleus. So we suspect
that as we go deeper and look inside the proton

(18:34):
and then inside the cork, will need even more energy
to tear that apart. The second reason we need a
lot of energy in these collisions is that we want
to make new stuff. We want to discover new particles
we haven't seen yet. And sometimes those new particles are very,
very heavy, Like the Higgs boson is a hundred and
twenty five times as massive as a proton, So to

(18:55):
make it, you can't just toss two protons together gently.
You've got to give those roton is a lot of energy.
That's the whole E equals mc squared thing. So the
short answer is you want a lot of energy in
your collider in order to answer the deep questions of
the universe. So my understanding of atom smashing is somewhat
limited to nuclear explosions. So when I think about smashing

(19:20):
an atom, I think of mass destruction. How do you
make a collider not explode? That's a great question, and
that's not a question I've ever been asked before, Like,
why don't we have a nuclear bomb every time two
particles collide? That's a great question, But the answer is
basically that we do. The thing is that we don't

(19:42):
have a sustained reaction. So what happens is you smash
two protons together for example, and the protons collide and
they get broken apart, and the corks inside them interact,
and you do get a massive release of energy, but
the energy is like fairly small compared to a nuclear bomb.
A nuclear bomb you have like killing rams of fuel
and the nuclear reaction starts and then it goes off

(20:03):
in the chain reactions. So you have like you know,
ten to the twenty six protons all releasing their energy
simultaneously in a very short amount of time. That's a bomb.
You have a single proton releasing its energy. It's not
actually that much energy. It's just one proton. So the
reason we don't have like nuclear explosions all the time
is that we had to do one proton at a time. Basically,

(20:24):
I say, so, you're really only in danger if you
stand on the target area, probably with a bunch of
warning signs around for you not to stand there. Yes,
nobody should stand in the beam or near the beam.
There is radiation produced in these collisions. You smash two
protons together and a bunch of particles fly out of
very high energy. And that's why these collisions are usually
done underground, like large hadron collider in Geneva is about

(20:48):
a hundred meters underground, and that's enough ground to absorb
all the radiations, so nobody on the surface should feel
a thing, and people down operating the collider they protected
by lead or or some kind of shield. Absolutely surround
the whole thing with concrete and with layers of lead,
and the people who are operating it are usually actually
up on the surface, and so there's nobody down at

(21:09):
the beam level when the thing is running. That's a
clever way to tell me that there aren't a secret
society of more people operating these colliders. Maybe there are,
but it's a secret. But the key thing is that
you want a lot of energy so you can peer
inside the nature of matter or maybe make new weird particles,
particles that haven't existed since the beginning of the universe.

(21:33):
For example, the way that we discovered the top Cork
was by smashing particles together at energies. Nobody's ever done
it before, and because we created enough energy in one
tiny little spot, we were able to turn all that
energy into a new massive particle. The reason the top
Cork took so long to discover, decades of searching, was

(21:53):
because it was more massive than anybody expected, so we
had to put more energy into it than anybody expected.
So we have to build a whole series of larger
and larger colliders to get to those high energies. So
when you're building this larger collider, I'm imagining sort of
a an area where some kind of beam is focused.

(22:16):
But to put it in very simple terms, because I'm
going to need that to understand it, what is the
shooty part, Like, how does the shooty part work? And
what is it doing when it is sort of shooting
this energy into into these particles. It's a great question.
Colliders come in two varieties. There are linear colliders that
are like a straight line where they accelerate the particles

(22:36):
and smash them together. Or particles come in the circular variety,
right like the large Hadron collider, where the particles go
around a lot of times before they collide. And the
advantage of the circular one is that you can push
the particles many many times to get them up to
even higher speeds before they collide. So in a circular collider,
which you have our little sections that push the particles,

(22:57):
and these are just sections that have like electromagnetic waves
that push the particles of particles like surf on these
electromagnetic waves there. RF cavities have a lot of energy
in them, and any particle that goes in there that
has a charge like an electron or a proton, is
going to get pulled out the other side. So that's
sort of the shooty part. It pushes the particles. We
only really know how to do that in a straight line,

(23:19):
like we can't really make a bendy accelerator. We can
make a little straight line accelerator. So to make an
accelerator that goes in a circle, which you need are
a bunch of these RF cavities, the shooty parts that
give the particles a kick, and then you need something
to bend it. So we have magnets. So these really
powerful electromagnets will bend the path of a particle. So

(23:39):
when a particle hits a magnetic field, it curves. That's why,
for example, the magnetic field of the Earth protects us
from particles from space because it bends them and deflects
them away from hitting the surface. So a big collider
like large hadron collider, has parts that push the particles
and then bend and then push them bend and then
push them bend and there's like twelve magnets all the

(24:00):
way around this thirty three kilometer ring. Wow, don't get
your computer near that thing. I've learned that it'll wipe
your credit cards in just a moment. But yeah, that's
essentially the shooting part. And that's also why these things
have to get bigger and bigger, because if you want
the particle to get higher and higher energy, you need
more of those bits that push on it that make

(24:20):
it go faster. You know, imagine particles are going around
the ring and each one is giving it a little kick,
so sort of like you're running through a room with
your friends and everybody gives you a little push as
you go by. By the time you get out the
other side of the room, you're going really fast, and
so you want to go faster and faster, you need
more of those things that push it. At the same time,
the faster you're going, the stronger the magnets you need,

(24:42):
or the more magnets you need to keep it going
in a circle. So you can either have like really
strong magnets or you can have a really really big ring.
So it's like the world's biggest and most expensive game
of curling. Shout out to all the Canadians. You're listening exactly.
So you want higher energy so you can explore the

(25:02):
universe more deeply and answer some of the big open questions.
But the more energy you have, the bigger the collider
has to be, so you have more of those pushy
bits that make it go faster, and also so you
can effectively bend it in a circle because you can
go around many, many times that you can get your
particles up to even higher and higher energies because you
can reuse those pushy bits and at a large change

(25:23):
on collider before the particles smash into each other. They
go around the ring billions and billions of times. It's
lots of laps before the end of the race for them. Well,
so how long does it take for a particle to
go around the loop? A billion times? That's a great question.
So you know, these particles are basically going at the
speed of light. It's like point C and they're going

(25:43):
thirty three kilometers, So it takes about one micro second
for a proton to go all the way around the
ring fast. It's pretty fast, right, thirty three kilometers in
a microsecond. That's the speed of light for you. But
it goes around lots and lots of times, and actually
we inject the beam, which is like this little cloud
of protons that whizzes around the collider, and the beam

(26:05):
lasts for you know, tens of hours before eventually enough
protons have collided and the beam has gotten sort of
diffuse that they dump it and they start again with
a fresh beam. So an individual proton can be in
the large Hadron collider for like a day, day and
a half sometimes, which means it makes a lot of
trips around. It's a lot of laps. Wow, you get
to take home the stale protons after after work or

(26:28):
is that not advisable. That's a great question. I've never
seen what they do with the used up protons um.
I think they just smashed them into a beam dump
and nobody uses them. You know, they should sell them
in the gift store. Though this proton was in the
large haye On collider, it's not a radioactive So I
want to talk some more about why we want to

(26:49):
build bigger and bigger colliders, the secrets of the universe
that we might unlock, and then why people are talking
seriously or semi seriously about building one on the moon.
But first let's take a quick break and I'm going
to look up those used protons on the black market.

(27:15):
All right, we're back and we are starting our Etsy
store selling used protons from the Large Hadron Collider. How
much food be sell them for? Look, I'm feeling generous today,
so maybe half of an aircraft carrier, that's right, and
but bring your own bag. Right, this is definitely a
B Y O B kind of Styes, re usable, reuse, recycle.

(27:36):
We're sustainable here. So people out there might be wondering, like,
why do you want to build a bigger collider? What's
left to figure out? After all, didn't we discover the
Higgs boson, which is called the last piece of the
standard model? What mysteries are there left to unlock? Are
you guys just wanting to build bigger colliders because you
like building big stuff or they're real scientific questions left

(27:58):
to be answered in a real as killed But you know,
while the Large Hadron Collider was amazingly successful in discovering
the Higgs boson, which is a triumph for modern physics,
and blah blah blah. Regular listeners to the podcast will
definitely be familiar with the open questions of particle physics.
There's so many things that we don't know about the universe.

(28:21):
For example, we've discovered the nature of the matter that
makes us up, but we still don't know what most
of the universe is actually made out of. Right, five
of the universe is made out of the familiar particles
quarks and electrons. That accounts for things like stars and
gas and dust and the visible galaxies and hamsters and

(28:41):
lava and plastic bags and aircraft carriers. But this twenty
five percent of the universe is made of something else,
dark matter, which is not made out of quarks and electrons.
And so that's a pretty big open question. Is dark
matter of particle? Could we make it the large Hadron collider?
What is it made out of? Just one example of
the kind of questions about the universe that remain open. So,

(29:04):
if we can make colliders here on Earth underground that
are safe, why would we even need it on the
Moon in the first place. Well, it's a great question.
We can build colliders here on Earth that are safe,
but they're getting sort of awkwardly big, Like the collider
that we have now is thirty three kilometers in circumference,
and it's so big that it crosses two countries. It's

(29:27):
partially under Switzerland and partially under France, and has the
energy of thirteen trillion electron volts, which sounds like a lot,
and we're upgrading it this year actually to thirteen point
six trillion electron volts. And people are talking about bigger
and bigger colliders. But as you get bigger, it's harder
to figure out, like where are you going to put
this thing. People don't like having colliders, like right underneath

(29:50):
their house, and to find enough space to put something
that's like a hundred kilometers in circumference is a little awkward.
So we got to go to the moon. We gotta
go to the moon. There are plans for like a
hundred kilometer circumference colliders, maybe in China. People are talking
about maybe putting one in Europe. There's an idea for
a collider called collider in the sea, a floating collider

(30:12):
in the Gulf of Mexico. But these things get a
little awkward, right, you have to invent all this new
technology to have this thing floating. It's a little crazy.
So people thought the moon is right there. There's a
lot of land there that nobody's using. Maybe we could
put one on the moon. Yeah, that's pretty real estate.
So all right, we want to put a collider on

(30:33):
the Moon because that solves the land issue. But the
Moon is really different from Earth. I mean, it's a moon,
it's not a planet. So would the physics even work
to put a collider somewhere where gravity is different and
we don't have an atmosphere and you know where the
ground is all sharpened powdery, Yeah, you don't need gravity

(30:55):
for a collider. Like the fact that we have gravity
on Earth basically is a relevant for these protons. They're
traveling at basically the speed of light, so we can
ignore the effected gravity. And also remember protons are super
duper tiny. They have almost no mask compared to like
an apple, and so the effect of gravity on them
is very very small, and so we can basically ignore it.
And you know, building a collider on the Moon where

(31:17):
there's less gravity, that's not a problem. Also, colliders operate
in near vacuum, like inside the collider the bean pipe
itself where the protons go around. We try to get
that down to basically a vacuum so the protons don't
bang into other stuff along the way. So operating without
an atmosphere also not a problem. With one exception. We
build our collider here on the surface of the Earth,

(31:39):
and the atmosphere is actually a protectant. As rocks hit
the Earth, for example, meteors and all sorts of other stuff,
the atmosphere protects us from their collision. So you build
your experiment on the surface of the Earth, you don't
expect to come back and have it be like a
crater because some rock from space has killed it. But
the Moon has basically no atmosphere, which is why its
surfaces pop marked with craters from all these rocks that

(32:02):
slam into it all the time. So if you build
your collider basically on the surface of the Moon, then
it's destined to be smashed into by these rocks, and
so you need some other way to protect it. Giant
Space umbrella patent pending my idea. All right, so we
have already an issue we would have to, in addition

(32:23):
to building the collider, build some kind of protection. Is
the Moon too small to be able to build a
subterranean collider or is it too difficult to excavate the Moon. No,
that would actually be a great idea because another problem
with putting a collider on the surface of the Moon
is that the temperatures on the surface are bonkers because

(32:44):
it has no atmosphere. Because if it's weird tidal locking,
the surface of the Moon gets like superheated during its
day and then super cold during its night. So during
the day it's like a hundred and twenty seven C
and during the night it's like minus a hundred and
seven the six s and those kind of temperature variations
are not great for like high precision scientific equipment, right,

(33:07):
And so we could bury it, but would we basically
look up at a moon that we see this giant
just like giant excavators and cranes on and would that
change the surface of the Moon. That would be cool
though if you could see it from Earth. The idea
is to build a collider just like a few meters

(33:28):
underground on the Moon, because if you dig down like
a few meters, the temperature variations are much smaller. It's
basically pretty stable temperature wise, except for the surface. And
so you bury this thing like a meter or two,
and then you build it all the way around the
Moon like a belt around the moon, and yeah, you
might be able to see it firm earth. I don't

(33:48):
know if that's a good thing or a bad thing,
And people would feel like, hm, you kind of spoiled
this incredible natural view, but you would be like a
line across the moon. I mean, I feel like we
just gotta a sort of take a poll of everyone
on Earth and see if they're cool with it. Shouldn't
be too hard. You know, it sounds like you're making
a joke, but I think that there's something serious there.

(34:08):
You know, when we take steps that affect all of humanity,
we really should think about how to make these decisions.
It's a similar question when we think about like should
we try to message aliens or if we get a
message from aliens, how should we respond. We had Jill Tartar,
head of the Study Program, on the podcast recently and
she was talking about like how to include all different

(34:30):
kinds of cultures in this decision about how to write
back to aliens. And in a similar way, I think
it would be important to think about like how people
look at the moon and how it important it is
to them. You know, science can't just be like we're
going to come and take this land and do what
we want with it. For science. Yeah, we can't colonize
the Moon. I mean we can, but we shouldn't because

(34:51):
the Moon doesn't really belong to anyone, which is I mean,
we may like to think it does sometimes, but I
think that is something that's kind of charming about the
Moon and the planets is that nobody can really claim them.
So to build a collider on the Moon, to build
this this moon belt, as incredible and amazing it would

(35:14):
be for unlocking these mysteries, it would also require some
astronomical pun intended levels of cooperation between countries and people's
you're right, and not just the people who would benefit
from it and who would pay for it, but basically
everybody for whom the Moon is important, which is basically
everybody on Earth. You can't just like scribble on the

(35:34):
night sky and say hey, I did it. And that's
an issue you know, with for example, Elon Musk, Right,
he's launching these Startlink satellites which are in low Earth orbit,
which are changing our view of the cosmos, and he
basically just got permission from one US regulatory authority, you know,
But like, are they in charge of the sky. It's
crazy to imagine one US government agency is making decisions

(35:58):
for all of humanity. So I create it's a really
important question. Yeah, it's something I feel like could go
two ways, Like it could be this incredible cooperations amongst
nations and people, or it could be something where it's
seen as kind of a foisting our our desires from
like a few rich nations onto the rest of the world.

(36:20):
And so I'd like to think it would end up
in the more cooperative sort of building a more connections
between people on Earth. But you never know. It seems
often that we just kind of strong arm other people
into accepting like, yep, now we've got Elon Musk's name
and brand on the moon, deal with it. No, you're right.
It is a really fun show called for All Mankind,

(36:42):
which explores this issue in some depth. Imagine some alternative
history with the space race didn't peter out, and the
US and the Russians landed on the Moon and built
elaborate Moon presence and basically started, you know, a wars
on the Moon because they're valuable resources there and everybody
was afraid of getting cut out. And we might be
looking at that in our future. I mean, NASA has

(37:04):
plans to build a Moon base to make a quote
sustainable presence by t It's part of the new Artemis program.
They want to explore the entire service of the Moon
with humans and robots and have plans to place like
large scale lunar infrastructure, and so a lot of these
other questions arise, like can we just put a base
on the Moon and not get anybody else's okay? Would

(37:25):
we be okay with other countries just like grabbing a
chunk of the Moon and saying, hey, we're building here,
this is our spot, Get off our lawn. Seems like
we need a globally elected Moon president and I'll do it.
All right, Fine, I'll do it. That was quite a campaign.
Would you like to be president of the Moon? Really?

(37:45):
Where did that job come with? Where are the benefits there?
Seems like it would come with a really cool hat
and outfit though, So that's my main motivation. But ethics acide,
which I love to say all the time, ethics acide
and politics aside. If you have a collider on the Moon,
let's say we could even get it up there, which

(38:07):
seems difficult given it seems pretty heavy, and how does
it get power because you can't run like a plug
from the US all the way to the moon. That's right,
That thing would get so tangled up. Oh my gosh,
it would be a nightmare. I mean, notice how every
rope always get knotted up. Like if you have headphones
in your pocket they come out, they're always knotted up.

(38:28):
It's some like property of a string. It's most relaxed
state seems to always be in a knock. Does this
dude to small particle behavior or is it pocket gremlins?
I think pocket gremlins are definitely a part of it. Also,
there's something in there about statistical mechanics, about just having
like the number of ways that a string can be configured,

(38:48):
the configurations without a knot, or like a small fraction
of that. So if you just like randomly rearrange a
string and will away end up in a knock. But
you raise a great question which is powering this thing?
And as you get up too high and higher energies
in your collider, you need exponentially more power. The amount
of power we use the large dron collider is not
that much, but as you get your particles up to

(39:09):
higher energies and then you curve them around this collider,
then they radiate away more energy. Every time you bend
a particle, you're curving it. That's acceleration, and acceleration happens
through radiation. Like when a particle wants to turn left,
it can't just turn to conserve momentum. It's got to
like throw something off in the other direction. It radiates

(39:29):
a particle, so they lose energy. You need a lot
of energy in those little bits that push it just
to keep the particles at that energy. And for the
Moon collider, we're talking about energies a thousand times higher
than our current collider, which is like terribly exciting from
a particle physics point of view, like the kinds of
things we could discover, but really tricky from a power
point of view. So this thing would need about ten

(39:52):
terra lots of energy. That's similar to hearing the number
like a hundred billion dollars, since only becomes meaningless to
me because I can't conceive of tin tara wats of energy.
Tin tara watz is a lot, you know, for scale,
the entire human population uses about eighteen tara wats over
a year or over a day, like or in total

(40:15):
tara watts is energy per second, and so it's like
the rate of energy use. And so this thing would
have a constant use of about fifty percent of the
entire budget of the Earth, all the energy we produce.
So even if you could run a line from the
Earth to the Moon, it would not be advisable because
you need to increase the Earth's energy budget by a

(40:36):
huge amount. Probably a fuse, right exactly, That'd be a
very thick cable. You just need one person trying to
run their hair dryer and the fuse to blow out
on all of Earth exactly. And so people have thought
about like, well, how could we power such a collider?
Definitely you need a power source on the Moon. And
one attractive thing to think about is like vision, you know,
could you build nuclear power plants on the moon in

(40:59):
order to power the thing? And you know, getting into
like the ethical issues of producing nuclear waste and staring
it on the moon is a whole other rabbit hole
we could even dig into, because fish and plants are
not even practical. Like all the fishing plants we have
currently produced about four hundred giga watts of energy, so
you need like fifty times the amount of fission power
plants we have operating now on Earth suddenly running on

(41:22):
the Moon. I mean, it just seems impossible, right, But
there's gotta be other types of plants that you could
have on the Moon, right absolutely. And one thing that
the Moon does have is a lot of sunlight, Like
there's lots of land out there and planning of places
to build solar panels. And you know, you don't have
clouds on the Moon. There's no weather on the Moon.

(41:43):
So solar power on the Moon is actually much more
stable and reliable than it is even here on Earth.
The biggest problem people have with solar power on the
Earth is what do you do on a cloudy day
or what do you do during winter or when it's raining.
But on the Moon, there's nothing between you and the sun.
So you could actually power this thing with point one
percent of all the solar power that hits the Moon.

(42:04):
So it's like a set of solar panels about the
size of Delaware power this thing. Okay, So as long
as we're okay with seeing Delaware on the Moon all
the time, we could probably power a collider exactly, and
you wouldn't want to build it in just one spot,
because then part of the time it would be in darkness.
The idea is to build the collider in a big

(42:26):
ring around the Moon, and then to cover it with
solar panels, so you have like a big ring of
solar panels around the Moon, so part of it is
always in the sunshine. Could we make it like a
smiley face, because I think that might sell it better
to you, the people of Earth. I'll put that front
of the committee. I think that's a great idea. But
I think we should have a competition, you know, for

(42:46):
like what designs we'd like to put on the Moon.
You know, maybe a spiral would be good. We should
have all the artists of the Earth contribute. All right,
So let's dig into a little bit more about the
practicalities of how actually build this thing on the Moon.
What we would build it's out of how we get
the materials there, and then let's talk about what we
might learn from it and whether we think it's a
good idea. But first, let's take another quick break. I'm

(43:09):
going to drop some plans for the shapes I want
to see on the moon. All right, we're back, and
we're talking about scribbling on the face of the Moon.
Is that a good idea? I did draw a kittyicap

(43:31):
that I think people will like universally. So would that
require building little ears let's stick off the top of
the moon. That doesn't sound expensive at all. I'm sure
we do that it'll be worth it. So, you know,
we do have realistic plans to build the next collider,
the hundred TV collider, it's a hundred kilometers long, and
thoughts about how much it might cost cost about a

(43:53):
hundred billion dollars using current technology, current magnets and current
RF technology and the detectors and all that stuff, which
sounds like a huge amount of money, And it's definitely
a good political question to ask, like is that worth
spending our money on? Which we can dig into. But
when you're talking about building a collider on the Moon,
something that's thousands of times bigger than even the large

(44:14):
Hadron collider or that next collider, you have to wonder
like how much is this thing gotta caused? And where
can you even get the materials? Like how do you
actually go about building this thing on the moon? Do
we even have enough fuel to transport that amount of
materials to the Moon. So people have gone through this
exercise and wondered about that very question, and just like

(44:37):
that with the question of power, I think the best
idea is not to find the stuff on Earth and
lifted to the Moon, because that would be incredibly expensive
every launch is, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars,
but instead to try to build it with the materials
that are already on the Moon. So, for example, one
of the most difficult elements of a particle collider are

(44:58):
these magnets. Magnet are hard to build and hard to
make powerful, and so we tend to use super conducting magnets,
magnets that have very very low resistance, so they have
very very high magnetic fields when you power them with electricity.
But a lot of these use rare Earth elements, things
like gatolinium or euterium or other elements I don't even

(45:19):
know how to pronounce. And because they're rare Earth elements,
they are rare and there's not a lot of them,
and there are other industries that want these things, like
battery industries, which are going gangbusters here on Earth, and
so it'd be hard to like divert a huge amount
of Earth's rare earth elements and launch it up to
the Moon. Current estimates are that you'd need like sixties

(45:42):
six hundred tons of rare Earth elements to make the
super conducting magnets you'd need for this collider on the Moon,
So that sounds like a no go for sure. So
le mean, guess there's got to be a planet out
there somewhere with like giant blue, really attractive aliens where
they have all these rare metals abundance that we can plunder.
That's right, but they are charging an arm and a

(46:03):
leg literally. Yeah, you know, there might be asteroids out
there filled with these rare Earth elements, and there's a
whole fun question about like mining those asteroids and what
you can do with them. And eventually, if we do
build heavy space industry, we will have to tap into
those resources because it's ridiculous to launch these things from
the gravity well of the Earth. You definitely want to
find them already out there. But then there's that whole

(46:24):
other question who owns these asteroids and how you regulate
that complicated question. But people think that the Moon might
have other materials which would make for good magnets, like
probably there is a lot of iron on the Moon,
because you know, there's iron all over the Solar system.
Most of the rocky stuff that's out there in the
Solar system has huge quantities of iron and nickel, And
people are working on technology where you can combine iron

(46:46):
with arsenic and with phosphorus to make iron based superconductors.
And so it might be possible eventually, when we're ready
to build this thing, to find a way to build
it using materials that are already on the Moon. So
we would need moon miners to be up there, and
so would we send humans up to go work on
the Moon or would that be the job of robots?

(47:09):
And then should the robots have labor rights? They should
definitely get royalties, you know, for the songs they write
while working on the moon collider, like the classic one
zero zero zero one zero one, which is covered by
one zero one zero zero zero one exactly. That has
got quite a beat. No, it's a real question, you know,
we're talking about building lunar infrastructure anyway, like a smoon collider. Aside,

(47:33):
NASA wants to have effectively a permanent presence on the
Moon by later this decade, and so we're talking about
having people up there. But I think that a lot
of this work would be pretty dangerous, and so you'd
want robotic miners and robotic construction. And this is not
something we know how to do today or tomorrow or
even really project about when we'll be able to figure

(47:53):
it out. But a project of this size would require
either an enormous labor force or rob audit mining and construction.
So I think you definitely want to go to the
robotic side. Have you seen that movie Moon? I have
seen that movie that with a guy like gets in
a time lapse or like kills various copies of himself
or something. Yeah, yeah, spoilers alert if you ever want

(48:14):
to see it. But yeah, so there's this guy who
is on the moon doing basically moon mining work like
we're talking about, and spoiler alert in case you haven't
seen it yet. He turns out he is just one
clone in an endless line of clones. The mistake happens
where there are two clones at once, and so you know,

(48:36):
plot ensues. But it is an interesting idea of like
the ethics of you know, his original bodies signed away
his rights to these clones, and now this endless line
of clones who don't know their clones are laboring on
the Moon. But the I guess, in terms of our conversation,
the question of is it ethical to have a labor

(48:58):
force on the moon because what kind of quality of
life would people lead and would people feel pressured into
doing it due to, you know, the need for money,
and is that right? It's a great question. And you
definitely have to have enough protections for those folks who
the Moon is a pretty inhospitable place and the cancer
rates would be a lot higher because you don't have
atmospheric protections or magnetic fields, so you need a lot

(49:20):
of shielding and definitely be very dangerous. You need people
to be fully informed for sure before they went up
there to work on this project, something that reams and
reams of lawyers. I'm sure we'll be arguing about for
a decade if we ever decided to build this thing.
And you know, it's hard to even figure out, like
what would a price tag be for a project like this.
You know, the large HHN collider cost ten billion dollars.

(49:44):
If you just scale that up like per meter per kilometer,
then you get a number for the Moon collider like
almost two trillion dollars, which even in units of aircraft
carriers is a very very big number. And what that
tells you is not this is something we should never do.
It's we can't do this today like our current technology.

(50:04):
It would just be insane. But humans don't just sit
around where clever species. We come up with innovations, and
so that number comes from like needing all those magnets, well,
maybe we can come up with cheaper magnets and needing
all that power, well, maybe we can come up with
a way to make accelerators that don't require so much power,
more effective ways to accelerate particles. And so I think
between us and crazy big astronomical colliders, we need a

(50:29):
lot of layers of innovation, a lot of clever new
ideas for how to make this technology more feasible. Maybe
colliders will go the way of phones and go from
being a big giant brick to being a little little
pocket collider that you can I guess that kind of
goes against our whole earlier premise though, if it needs
to be big and moon sized, but maybe more a
more efficient collider. No, you're absolutely right. If you could

(50:51):
develop incredibly powerful magnets, then you could have small colliders,
even if they're high energy. The only reason that collider
has to be big is because our magnets are not
powerful enough to curve particles in smaller loops, like you
could have particles moving in a one meter loop at
the energies of the large hadron collider if you had
powerful enough magnets we just don't. If you had powerful

(51:13):
enough acceleration technology that we just don't have. But that
doesn't mean it's impossible. And so the dream, of course
is to come up with some new technology that makes
a moon collider ridiculous, so you can have your own
table top large hadron collider where you build one the
size of a tennis court that has the power that
we're talking about for a moon collider, that would be fantastic.
And I think you know, a moon collider is a

(51:34):
pretty ridiculous project, and the real way forward is to
push hard on these technologies and try to innovate there
and to make the next layer of energy accessible with
better technology rather than just bigger. I like that, and
I'm looking forward to all of us being able to
get our own pocket collider, which is very convenient but
also completely obliterates your phone and also probably your body

(51:59):
with the radiation but you know the convenience. That's right, man,
My collider is running so slow. I guess I need
to upgrade my phone. But I do think that these
projects are important, even though they are currently expensive, even
with our current technology. You know, there are questions out
there that we just don't have answers to, but that

(52:19):
we could get And to me, this is a kind
of exploration. You know, the same reason that we want
to land on alien planets and walk around and see
what's there is the same reason that we want to
make collisions at higher energy. Every time you build a
collider with more energy than anybody's ever done before, it's
like exploring another planet. You don't know what's going to

(52:41):
come out of it. When you smash those particles together.
You could see nothing like the way you could land
on a planet and just see rocks and dust, or
you could see crazy new particles, supersymmetry or many black
holes are all sorts of secrets of the universe could
just pour out of it and we just don't know.
And it's exploration because we have no idea if those
secrets are around the corner, Like if we build a

(53:01):
collider twice as powerful as the LHC. Would we discover
these things or if they're really really far away and
we need a really really big collider to find them.
We don't yet know how far away these answers are,
so we don't know how much money we have to spend,
which is what makes us want to go big. I mean,
it seems like instead of having this opposition between well,

(53:23):
we can't spend resources on colliders or this kind of
really expensive science because we need those resources for people now,
it really is more the joy of life is things
like new discovery, and so we need to make sure
that humanity is healthy and living good lives so we

(53:45):
can someday just make these discoveries and enhance the human
experience more. I think it can all go hand in
hand rather than being an opposition to each other. Absolutely,
and just the same way looking at the bridge inspires
people and makes children wonder like, Wow, what can we
build in the future. I think that as a species,
we should be trying to do things at the edge

(54:07):
of our capability, things that twenty years ago seemed impossible.
We should be striving for that. That's really progress, and
I think that it serves all of humanity. You know,
the same way. Like we wonder why would you spend
money on art, it's because it improves the human experience. Well,
why do you try to answer deep questions about the universe?
Not just because one day it might give you some

(54:28):
technological spinoff, but because understanding the nature of the universe
improves the human experience. It's part of who we are
to try to understand the world around us and unravel
its mysteries. So I totally agree with you, And it's
not a question of like, should we spend our money
on this or that? In my view, we should spend
our money on all of these things. You know, these
things are cheap compared to all the things we do

(54:50):
spend money on, and they pay off so much economically, educationally, inspirationally,
it's definitely worth the investment. So if you are out
there and you have rivers of money you could divert somewhere,
please send some money to science. It pays for itself. Less,
fewer giant hammers for war, more giant hammers for smashing

(55:10):
atoms and studying them. Wow, that sounds like a good
campaign slogan for running for president of the Moon. Yeah,
would you endorse me? Is for President of the Moon.
I'll wear a really fancy hat. Well, you put me
on the spot, but yes, absolutely I will back your
candidacy for presidency of the Moon. And I'm looking forward
to the first debate among the candidates going to be
between me and super intelligent Tarte grades on the Moon.

(55:34):
They ask a lot of good questions, all right, So
thanks very much for joining us for this fun exploration
of a crazy idea of building a particle collider on
the Moon. I think all in all it's something which
we could do that we would be massively expensive without innovations,
but it's not clear that it's something we should do.
There are lots of ethical questions and questions about how

(55:55):
to best spend our resources. But what is clear is
that there are a lot of big stories out there
in the universe, and with just a little more ingenuity
and a little bit of effort and a little bit
more resources devoted to science, we could actually get answers
to some of them. Thanks very much, Katy for joining us.
Let us know how your campaign for President of the
Moon goes. Thank you so much, and I will let

(56:17):
you know I'll probably need about a hundred billion dollars
in donations before I get there, but I'm sure it's achievable.
All right. We'll let you all know when Katie's website
is up so you can send your some donations. Thanks
again for joining us. Tune in next time. Thank you
for having me. Bye, guys, Thanks for listening, and remember

(56:41):
that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production
of I Heart Radio or more podcast. For my heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.