March 5, 2020 • 42 mins
If we needed to move the sun, could we do it?
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, if you could travel to another solar system,
would you sign up to do it? Oh? I would
so love to be in another solar system, but I'm
not sure I'm up for actually taking the trip. Or really,
do you get spasic easily? Yeah, especially after forty years
of eating the same food. Well, why don't you just
take the Red Eye? You know, like you go into
hibernation and then you wake up when you get there.
(00:29):
That's kind of like teleporting almost. I do like naps,
but I'm not sure I'm up for a forty year nap.
I have to pay for economy plus in or to
have enough room to really sleep. Come from me to
sleep well for forty years. Well, if you could visit
another solar system without actually traveling there, how about that?
Would you be up for them totally? If I could
just sit on my couch and then like open the
door to see another world, I'd be in Oh. Man,
(00:52):
Then I've got an idea for you. I just need
four trillion dollars. If you have that in your pocket,
let's crowdsource it from our list. O Nurse. Hi, I'm
(01:17):
or I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi,
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I dream about
traveling the universe from my couch. Welcome to our podcast
Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, a production of I
Heart Radio, in which we take mental trips all over
the universe, from the heart of neutron stars to what's
happening inside a black hole, to crazy stuff at the
(01:39):
microscopic level, and try to explain all of it to
you in a way that also maybe makes you laugh. Yeah.
I think of us as your audio guide to in
your tour of the universe as you travel from the
farthest reaches to the smallest places in the universe. That's right,
And we might not just be limited to a mental trip.
It might be possible to actually take a trip somewhere
(02:01):
else in the galaxy. Maybe someday, sometime in the future,
humans will actually set foot on planets in other solar systems. Yeah,
it's been a dream of humanity for a long time.
I think, right, it hasn't it been to travel to
another star and discover new world and maybe discover different
civilizations out there in space. But it's always been kind
of a difficult thing to get out into space and
(02:23):
to travel somewhere because the distances are so big and
it's a pretty hostile environment out there in space. Yeah.
Do you think it's a dream of humanity as a
species or like of all humans, because I would love
for difference between NY and all humans. Well, I would
love for humanity to explore the galaxy and learn all
(02:44):
these things and send us pictures back. But I don't
particularly want to be in a spaceship or be an astronaut,
though I'm like a big proponent of the humanity doing
it one small step for some other man. Oh, I see,
you just want to sit back, But you don't want
to be the one who had discovers another world or
to be the one who's who travels to another world.
(03:04):
So even if we discovered another world, you wouldn't want
to go there unless I could do it from my couch.
You know, I'm not up on I don't even like
going skiing, you know, So I'm not that up on
like physical danger. I see, But you just want to
know that somebody else went there. Yes, totally. I will
pay more taxes and encourage people to work on these projects,
and I want us as humans to do it. But
(03:26):
I don't necessarily want to be that one. I wonder
how common that a feeling is, though. I wonder if
everybody else out there who's pro space travel also actually
wants to do it themselves. Yeah, I can see what
you mean. I mean not maybe not everyone can get
over the fear of possibly dying while you're exploring, but
everyone probably thinks it would be cooled for someone else
(03:47):
to discover a new place. Yeah. And I think for
some people that fear of death is living. You know.
Some people really want that thrill of living on the
edge and doing something dangerous and uh, I want to
hear all about it when they get back to live
in the centers, comfortably, in the center of things. I do.
I like my couch. Well, it is sort of an
impediment for you know, A big challenge for humans to
(04:09):
travel into space is a space is sort of big,
and there's really nothing out there, and you can die
at any moment because it's such a hostile there's no oxygen,
you know, the vacuum would kill you, the temperature would
kill you. It's a it's a pretty big barrier to
overcome if we want to discover other things out there. Yeah,
and one classic solution is, you know, try to take
(04:29):
what you need with you, make a little box and
fill it with air and food and all that stuff,
and sort of take the minimum human survival necessities and
pack them with you. But you know, that's sort of
like camping. You know, it's fun for a while, but
it can be a little uncomfortable, and you know you
don't want to do it for forty years or forty
thousand years. And so people are wondering, like, is it
(04:52):
possible to maybe explore the universe without ever leaving your home?
You mean teleporting and we teleport your couch, you and
your couch. Can we a couch that teleports Daniel somewhere else?
You know, that's a good question on Star Trek. How
come they have to stand up when they're in the teleporter?
Why can't they just be a chair there? We can't
even get to do stand up to teleport. You're like,
(05:15):
I've just stand up. Forget about it, Get about it,
I forget about it. I'm turning into an old man.
Every time I go somewhere, I'm always looking for a chair.
You know, where can I sit down? Are you laying
down as you were recording this Daniel on Advisive Counsel.
I refused to answer that question. Well, this is a
pretty big topic and a pretty big question, and and
(05:38):
so one of our listeners had maybe a good idea
or came upon a good idea for maybe how we
could travel comfortably to other solar systems. Yeah, I got
a wonderfully hilarious email from one of our listeners who
heard our podcast about terraforming and found that it came
in handy in a random conversation he had. So here's
(05:59):
what Daniels Saunders from London wrote to us. He says, Hi,
I just want to say thanks for the terraforming episode.
It came in surprisingly handy. When I was loading my
groceries onto the checkout at the supermarket to checkout assistance,
we're talking across to each other about whether or not
we could ever move to another planet, maybe Mars. They
didn't seem to have much idea on the subject. So
(06:21):
after a minute or two, I couldn't help myself and
I began explaining all the things I learned from your podcast,
making a magnetic feel, the giant mirror for heating, dumping microbes,
et cetera. They were pretty amazed that some random guy
happened to know these things. I gave credit where credit
is due and pointed them to your podcast. But then
they asked me if it would ever be possible to
(06:41):
physically move our planet or our solar system somewhere else
in space. So I'm writing to you to ask, Wow,
what an awesome email? And what is where is this
supermarket where people talk about science at the checkoutline? Nowhere here.
I've never overheard somebody asking such a complicated physics question
in public where I feel like, that's what I got
(07:05):
a PhD in physics for. So somebody would be like,
what is the branching ratio of the top cork from
the bottom cork? I wonder if anybody knows. At the
checkout line, you're like, oh my god, this is the
moment I've been preparing for for thirty years. Or you're
on airplane they're like, excuse me, is someone have a
PhD in particle physics on the plane. We have an
emergency calculation we need to do. Never happened to me.
(07:26):
We have an emergency particle collision. We need to analyze.
What are these courts? We don't know what to do
with them. But he does raise a fascinating question. So
I'm really glad that Daniel in London had this interaction
and generated this wonderful, fascinating question. Yeah, it's awesome to
think that our listeners are having these conversations with other people,
(07:46):
and even more awesome that they're telling them about our podcast.
That's right. So if you are one of those checkout
assistants from that supermarket, welcome to the podcast and thank
you for listening. This one is for you. But it's
an interesting idea. And so the idea is that Daniel
wrote in about is that you know, it is sort
of hard to pack everything with you to go on
a trip into outer space to another solar system, because
(08:09):
you know, you're you have to build your house your spaceship,
and you have to bring in a food and air
and be able to recycle everything. And so I guess
the idea here is that instead of building a spaceship,
think of it as us already being in a spaceship
called Earth. That's right, Yeah, just make Earth our spaceship,
like Earth is now a mobile home or a camper van, right,
(08:30):
take your house with you as you travel, or not
even just the Earth, the entire solar system could be
our you know, our camper. Yeah, well, I think you
need to bring the sun. Otherwise you'd end up in
the Rogue Planets episode that we just did, and that
would be pretty cold. That's a whole different episode. We
actually in a Netflix that I know you've seen it,
(08:51):
where they something like I think either a meter meteor
is coming or the Earth gets knocked out of orbit
until they build these giant engine to push the Earth
to anoder another solar system. Wow, and would you rate
the physics in it as excellent? I would rate these
special effects? Is not bad? Not bad? By not answering
(09:12):
the question, you've answered the question, and so the question
will be tackling today. Is is it possible to move
our solar system somewhere else? I think that sounds like
a wonderful way to explore the galaxy. I stay on
my couch and you just let me know when we're
getting near another solar system. You know, but then what
(09:33):
would you do? You wouldn't even want to visit the
neighbors because you would be like have to stand up.
What Well, you could just train the telescopes, you know,
we could like turn hubble on those near now nearby planets.
I see, you just want to look at pictures while
sitting on your couch. And if we get if we
get close enough to some alien solar system and there
are aliens, I'm sure they'll come meet us and we
(09:55):
can send our you know, strapping young representatives, young men
and men of our species to go and meet them.
It doesn't need to be some forty five year old,
grumpy business podcaster. Right, I'm not the prime candidate to
meet aliens. What if everyone refuses? Everybody refuses, It's like
(10:16):
he's staying in his couch. Why should I get up?
But it risk my life. We're all five years old, now,
all right? If nobody else will do it, I will
sign up. I will go. Really, yes, I'll take one
for the team. Absolutely. Let's let's let's write up the petition.
Who wants to go into space? No? One, Daniel Europe.
I'm pretty sure this is not a situation I'm ever
(10:38):
going to actually encounter. So I'm comfortable volunteering in that scenario.
You're comfortable in the craziness of other human beings to
do more recklessly. Yeah, people want to do that stuff.
There's always like thousands and thousands of people applying to
be astronauts, so there's no need for me to try
to elbow my way in there. Well, it's sort of
I'm surprised that this idea is out there, you know
that that um people have and thinking about this, and
(11:00):
it sounds like you did some research and you found
some stuff in it. Yeah, they're definitely people have been
developing concepts or how this could be possible, and it's
kind of important. There are reasons why we might want
to move our son, not just out of curiosity, not
just out of the desire to explore the universe and
be lazy on our couch, but also, you know, for
the survival of our solar system, there could be times
(11:22):
we need to move it. So I thought it was
a fascinating question. But as usual, we were wondering how
many people out there had even heard of this idea
much let's think that it's possible, And so as usual,
Daniel went out there and asked people in the street
if they thought it's possible to build a machine that
could move a star. So here's what people had to say, Yes,
(11:43):
but maybe in the far future, not what the materials
we have right now. How would you do it. Maybe
some concepts involving stretching the space behind star and condensing
it in front over like a warp drive, like a
warp drive. Yes, and don't think so. I don't think
the technology is therey yet right now, but I think
(12:04):
it might be possible. I think it would be hard
with the resources on the planet here, just because we
have such finite resources, you know what. We have to think, well,
how much are we taking away from Earth to try
and move something that's even bigger than the Earth. And
it's kind of hard. But I think it's a maybe
for me, And I wouldn't say no, I wouldn't say yes.
You might not fund it. Do you think it's possible? Yeah? Probably,
(12:26):
I believe to be possible because photons do carry momentum,
so if you were able to harness the energy from photons,
you wouldn't but like also like being able to put
that force into the Sun, you would be able to
move the Sun to use the Sun's own energy. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's impossible. Impossible, No, but I think we
could get away with lyon about it all right. You
(12:50):
have to be a very strong machine expensive. Is it possible?
I don't know. I feel like it caused a lot
of have ECU the whole circulating around its systems. That
would make it a bad idea, not impulsible, not impossible, yes,
all right, not a lot of confidence in the concept.
(13:12):
People were shocked. Sometimes I had to repeat myself because
people thought they must have misheard the question, because it
was so ridiculous to move a star, not none necessarily
a son, but just like a star is there and
you're moving it. M m m. Yeah, it's a crazy concept.
In fact, it's the central feature of one of my
(13:33):
favorite science fiction series by Alistair Reynolds, where they try
to tackle this problem of having an interstellar empire, you know,
where the distances are so vast it takes forever to
travel or even communicate, and they solve the problem by
dragging a bunch of stars close to each other so
they can have an interstellar empire that's not actually that big.
And so, you know, it appears in science fiction, it's
(13:55):
it's in the realm of people's thought. But not most people.
Most people thought this is a crazy idea. Oh, I see,
you've read about this in a science fiction novel. Yeah, yeah,
it's a cool idea, and you know, all best ideas
start in science fiction novels. All right, but it's a
crazy concept. Everyone out there thought it was kind of crazy.
It's just the idea of moving a star, much less
our star. Um, So there's all kinds of questions here.
(14:17):
Why would you want to do it, how would you
do it? What would it mean to do it? So
let's dig into all of these crazy questions. But first
let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, So moving
(14:40):
a star? How do we move a star? Why would
we want to move a star? And how could it
even be practical or plausible to move an entire star
like our sun to somewhere else in the galaxy. It's
a crazy idea, mostly because stars are really really big.
I mean, the mass of our Sun is tend to
the thirty ms, and it's a lot of kilograms, you know,
(15:05):
it's uh, it's like a million earths. It's more than
a million earths, and the Earth already pretty big. Of course,
the Sun is already moving, it's orbiting the center of
the galaxy, and what we're interested in is changing its motion. Right,
And because F equals m, a tells you that you
need a force in order to move something with mass.
You want to accelerate the sun, move it somewhere else.
(15:26):
You've got to apply a force, and then I am
in the bigger something is the harder it is to
move it. Yeah, so it's it's hard to get Daniel
off the couch. Imagine getting the Earth off the couch,
and now imagine moving one point three million earth couch.
You know, since you're suggesting I'm so massive, maybe we
should be measuring the Sun and the units of Daniel
right here you go. Isn't it about to say one
(15:48):
point three million Daniels? That's right, I am the Earth.
I have eaten everything. Um, it's big. So you need
a really big force, Like we're talking cosmic scale engineering,
which is awesome to think about and to read about
in science fiction novels, but very difficult to actually pull off. Well.
To the basic idea is that you would build like
an engine or how would you even approach this problem
(16:12):
of moving a whole star? So you need a lot
of energy, and you need something that produces a lot
of energy, and the only thing nearby that sort of
produces enough energy to move a star is a star.
I mean a star is a huge fusion engine and
it's pumping out an enormous amount of energy, and the
simplest idea is to think about all the fusion energy
(16:34):
that is pumping out, mostly in terms of photons and
protons and stuff like that, and that's not creating a
force in the star because it's pointing in every direction.
Like the Sun pushes out and it pushes down and
pushes left to pushes right. Every time it shoots out
a photon to the left, that gives a little bit
of force to the right. But on the other side,
it's shooting out photons to the right, which gives it
(16:55):
a force to the less. It's balanced. It's like a rocket,
but it's shooting in all directions at the same time. Yeah,
exactly what would happen if you attached eight rocket engines
to yourself and set them all off at once, right, Well,
you wouldn't go anywhere, like in all different directions. Here
it perfectly balanced, perfectly balanced in all different directions. I
guess they would just squish you. But um, that's essentially
(17:15):
what the sun is right now. So the idea is,
instead of having the Sun pushing in all directions, to
somehow get it to only push in one direction, so
it uses its own energy to fly through the galaxy. Wait,
this is one idea. So one idea for moving the
Sun is to somehow coax it or fool it into
only shooting in one direction so it naturally moves. Yeah,
(17:36):
and you can't really change the way the Sun operates.
What you gotta do is sort of like reflected. So
you remember once we talked about solar sales. We talked
about like sailing through space by capturing the momentum of photons,
and the idea there was basically, have a huge mirror
and when a photon hits the mirror, it bounces off
and that pushes the mirror. Well, if you build a
(17:58):
really big solar sale, like the size of the Sun, okay,
and you put it next to the Sun, what he
would do is bounce some of those photons ones that
hit the solar sale, that would bounce it back the
other direction. So what did the sail get blown away?
The sale would definitely get blown away because it's a
huge solar sale, and that's the idea. But if you
(18:19):
could somehow attach it to the sun, right, attach it
to the Sun. The small problem building a sale the
size of the Sun and the small problem of attaching
it to the Sun. Well, actually that problem is not
that tricky because the Sun has a huge amount of gravity,
and so if you just put it in the right place,
then the amount of pressure you're getting on the solar
(18:41):
sale is balanced by the gravity of the Sun pulling
on it, and it would sort of stay in the
same place, would become in a sense part of this
like larger gravitational system of the Sun plus the sale,
so the Sun would hold it in the right place,
given like a gravitational chain there to to attach it to. Yeah,
so actually attaching a solar sale to the Sun not
(19:01):
physically like strapping it to the core of the Sun,
which is you know, sort of the way it works
in your brain, But you can do effectively the same
thing gravitationally. Did you actually run the numbers, like, wouldn't
it need to be super heavy for it to have
a gravitational effect on the Sun? Yes, But anything you're
building that's going to be the size of the Sun
is going to be heavy. If you build this thing
(19:22):
and it's like a micron a very thin aluminium or something,
a micron of thin aluminium, that's you know, one a
U y that's ninety million miles wide. That's still a
lot of aluminium. That's a lot of microns. But these
are even that much aluminium that we in in our
solar system. That's such an engineering question, man. I see,
(19:45):
if we could magically create matter that's what you're saying,
and make it a decize at the Sun, then no problem.
Now we probably do have enough materials if we like
liquidate you know, a planet or two, or you know,
some asteroids. There's probably enough stuff out there. Um, But
actually fabricating that there, I mean, we'll talk about that later.
(20:05):
It would cost a lot of money. The physics of
it sort of does make sense, yeah, And and the
reason is that, you know, the Sun puts out a
lot of energy. It makes like ten to the forty
five photons per second, and so it's pumping a lot
of energy. So you're saying, capture some of it and
have it pulled the Sun along with it gravitationally. Yeah.
(20:27):
So you'd imagine having a huge mirror, for example, in
the position this mirror next to the Sun, and half
of the photons will come out of the Sun would
get reversed in their direction and go the other way,
and so the net force would be. It would be
like if the Sun just had a huge flashlight and
it was shining it off into space, that would push
the Sun. It would get pushed in the direction away
(20:47):
from this beam, so in the direction of the solar
sale and so that would move the Sun. It would
accelerate the Sun. Now there's some limitations there, like you
can't have this solar salem in the plane the planets,
you know, like if you have in the plane of
the planets, then it's shooting a huge beam of photons,
you know, into the Solar system. You could like fry
(21:08):
a planet. We don't want to do that, So you
sort of limited also in the direction you can aim
this thing. You don't want to strap a huge rocket
to the Sun and pointed at the Earth for example.
I don't know. It's it's sort of sounds to me
like like if you're in a boat and you put
up a sail and then you blow in it with
your mouth and expecting that to move you across the sea,
Like you know, you're blowing on it, and somehow it
(21:31):
feels like it kind of feels like a closed system.
You're exactly right, if you were only blowing on the sail,
you'd go nowhere. But if you're blowing on the sail
and your friend is blowing the other direction, right, your
friends blows will actually push you somewhere. So if we
could just turn off half of the sun, that would
be great. This is effectively like turning off half of
the Sun and having it only blow in one direction. Oh,
(21:52):
I see, but and then but then and then the
sail would push also pull the sun. Yeah, well, that
the Sun would actually be pushing itself, right, to be
pushing itself because it's the photons that are going away
from the sale would be I'm pushing the Sun effectively.
And then the Sun would have this sale sort of
captured in its gravitational system, and so hopefully it would
(22:13):
be stable. But that's one of the problems is that
it's it might not be that stable a situation. You know,
if this thing like gets twisted of tiny bit, then
all of a sudden it's unstable and it's falling into
the Sun, and your four trillion dollar engineering project is
literally toast and the whole reason that you um melted
down Mars could have been for nothing. And the Martians
(22:37):
are pissed, all right, So that, but that's just one idea.
One idea is to use like a giant solar sale
and focus the Sun in one direction. What's another way
that we can maybe move the Sun. Another way is
to sort of use the fuel of the Sun to
power an enormous rocket. So you know, if you were
like a five year old and you thought how would
I do this? You say, okay, well, I'm just going
(22:58):
to build a huge rocket and attach it to the Sun.
And that's basically this idea. Um. But you know, a
rocket like that is going to take a lot of energy,
and fortunately the Sun is you know, it's a huge
ball of fuel. Basically it's helium, it's hydrogen. So if
you could build a big enough rocket, then you can
just use the fuel from the Sun itself to power
(23:19):
that engine and push the Sun. Wow. And how would
you push it again gravitationally? That's a great question. Like
you know, if you build an engine and you want
to move something, you imagine like strapping it to something.
But you don't want to strap this thing to the Sun,
and nobody can build a leather strap the side of
the Sun, so you'd actually have to build a two
directional rocket. So one that sort of pushes the rocket.
(23:40):
Another one that pushes the sun, so it keeps the
sun sort of in front of it. Imagine it's sort
of like a tug boat pushing a really big ship.
You can't touch the ship, so it has like a
little like a particle accelerator or a rocket to sort
of keep the sun in front of it. Does that
pause mean that made perfect sense or no sense at all?
No sense that helf to me, So so maybe step
(24:03):
me through it. So you build a rocket, you build
like a little space ship, right, and then you put
it out and in front of the sun for a
form in front of the in the direction you want
to go, or behind the sun the direction you want
to go. You put it behind the sun. So the
sun is in the direction you want to go, and
the rocket is behind it, and the rocket is burning
away from the sun. Huh okay, so the rocket is
(24:24):
pushing towards the sun. But then so that the rocket
doesn't fall into the sun, it shoots out a beam
in front of it that pushes the sun. Oh, you're saying,
shoot a beam of of what of whatever? You know, hydrogen, helium,
whatever comes out of your reaction. You can push anything
sort of blow on the Sun to get it to
movie blow on the Sun. Yes, so you're you're imagine
(24:48):
you're pushing some enormous ball or you have some like
twenty meters high basketball and you have trying to push it.
You're running and you're pushing, you're blowing on this thing
to keep it in front of you. Yeah, oh boy,
all right, it's complicated. My rocket is getting energy from
the Sun. Yeah, you're stealing matter from the Sun to
fuel it. So you have to like slurp stuff off
(25:09):
of the Sun, you know, the Sun's plasma and the
winds and all that stuff in order to fuel this thing.
Oh like the straw, how would you scoop things up
from the Sun. That's what. You could use magnetic fields
to sort of channel large areas of the Sun's radiation
(25:31):
into this thing to sort of grab it. Or you
might have to build like a dice in sphere to
capture more of the Sun's emissions and focus that into
your rocket. So it would be pretty complicated, built like
a giant catchers mid you sent to power your rocket
and whatever it is you're throwing at the Sun to
push it, so you grab some of the stuff it's
(25:53):
shooting out and you use it to push it back out.
That's right. And if you're worried that this would like
eat up the sun pretty quickly, the sound is pretty
big and even this ridiculous contraption would take a pretty
small fraction of the energy of the sun, so we
don't have to worry about that, all right. So those
are I think, two pretty um solid ideas. I don't know,
(26:15):
they seem pretty both pretty crazy, but they're out there.
Those ideas are out there, and they're not I guess
what you're saying is they're not impossible. They're physically possible,
but um, maybe maybe they might be engineeringly impossible. I
just quote it coined that term. Um. But but at
least they're technically possible to do these things. Yeah, there's
sort of like what you would come up with if
(26:37):
you had a chalkboard and ten minutes, uh to solve
this crazy problem. And we haven't really gotten that much
further than those first ideas, because it's a great minute.
That's the total amount of time. I think we're talking
about these ideas more than anyone has actually thought taught
them through. You know, there's a whole field and people
like published papers thinking about the details of these things
(27:00):
in more depth, but in sort of you know, big
idea concepts. How could you attack this problem, not like
the gritty details of how you would actually build this
How could you attack this problem? In general? There haven't
been that many more like great ideas for directions to
attack other than the solar sale and the massive engine.
Is there an actual journal where people discuss these things?
(27:20):
The International Journal of Physics, fan Fiction, International Journal of
Absurd Concepts, the Journal Engineeringly Impossible Concepts, engineeringly um. Alright,
well they're plausible, at least at least in the chalkboard.
(27:40):
They work, um, But I guess maybe a bigger question
is why would we want to do this? And is
it even practical or feasible? And so let's get into
those questions. But first let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel. So,
(28:06):
also on the table on our trukboard is this idea
of moving the sun our sun to another solar system
as a way to you know, see the see the
sites out there in the universe. And so we talked
about ways in which we could do it. Possibly they
sound kind of crazy, but it sounds possible now. But
now the question is why would we want to do it?
Why would we you know, we were pretty good here
(28:28):
in this part of the galaxy, things are pretty stable.
Why would we want to get off of our solar
system couch. I don't know. You sound kind of skeptical.
When we started out, you were sort of excited by
the possibility of doing something crazy that I told you
what the plans were. Now you seem like, I'm not
so sure this is going to happen. Well, engineeringly, he's
kind of ridiculous. To be honest, as an engineer, I'm
(28:51):
just like, you know what, to stay on the couch.
This is not this is not anywhere near a plausible
but you know, it's fun to think about. And so
or maybe maybe the reason the need isn't great enough,
you know, maybe if there was need, I would, you know,
get off my couch here and all right, let's talk motivation.
Let's motivation problem. Well, one reason, of course, it's just exploration,
(29:14):
Like if we wanted to explore other parts of the galaxy,
that this is one way to do it, and you
could effectively move all of humanity and all of our
resources and you wouldn't have to build spaceships. And send
people out there into space. And you know, space travel
is annoying, and who wants to be born on a
colony ship and die in a colony ship and never
sit but on a planet. That sounds kind of depressing.
And so you could sort of just gradually explore the
(29:37):
whole galaxy, you know, imagine like taking our star instead
of just sort of floating along and the galactic swirl
going the other direction. Then we could be like every
few years or so visiting a new solar system, maybe
like being on a cruise, maybe without the coronavirus. Yeah. Um,
so in the ideas that we would then then get
close to other stars so we can look at the
(29:58):
better or actually they like, you know, send probe out
to visit other solar systems. Both. I mean, you wouldn't
want to get too close because you don't want the
gravity of that star to interfere with the gravity of
our solar system and perturb some orbits and cause you know,
cataclysmic events. But close enough that you could send probes
in a reasonable amount of time. Yeah, and hey, it's
(30:18):
like a cruise, you know. You can either get off
and go explore the local scenery, or you could stay
on the boat. You're saying it's more practical to build
a giant engine around the Sun than it is to
just go a little bit further with a probe. I
think it's um, it's sort of a longer term plan.
You can build a ship to go visit one solar system,
(30:39):
but this is a plan to like visit all of them.
This is you're retired and you bought an r V
and you want to see the country, and so you
decide instead of taking a lot of little trips, you
just drive all around in your house. All right, So
the exploration is one reason, um, to get off the couch.
But what are some other possible needs that we might
have to do this. Well, we might see a day
(31:00):
injer to our solar system, and we might have a
lot of warning, Like we track all the other stars
in the galaxy, and it might be that, you know,
one swirl around the galaxy, we see something coming another
star is headed for a near collision with ours, or
you know, close enough that it could steal some of
the planets, and we might want to change the trajectory
(31:20):
of the Sun in order to sort of get out
of the way. If there's something that might destroy our
solar system, and then we might want to move it
somewhere else, yeah, or move our solar system out of
the way precisely like a rogue planet, or like a
rogue star. Well, a rogue planet would be really hard
to see far in advance because they're not bright, So
it has to be a star that's on a near
(31:41):
collision course with ours. You know, earlier in the history
of the galaxy, I think more of this kind of
stuff happened, and things are sort of calm er now
because all the bumps that have happened have mostly happened,
but there could still be more. And you know, in
the very far future when we collide with Andromeda, then
there's gonna be a lot of chaos, and so, you know,
long term planning, we might want to be able to
(32:02):
sort of shift where our house is. You know, you
might want to jump ship, yeah, or just take your
ship with you. You know, like if you saw a
huge rock about to fall in your house, it'd be
nice if you could wheel your house over to the
next block, right, Oh, I see, Instead of getting off
the couch, you'd be like, move my couch, Please call
the movers. Move the couch with you in it to
(32:25):
or move the whole house. Yeah, And it doesn't have
to be just that a star is going to collide
with us. We might, for example, spot a star and
be able to predict that it's going to go supernova,
and that could be really dangerous. If it's a star
goes supernova close enough, you know, within fifty or a
hundred light years, you could fry the Earth the X
rays and the gamma rays. It's a huge amount of radiation.
(32:46):
So if we get to a point where are the
science of supernovas is better, because right now it's really
hard to predict exactly when they blow. Then and we
see one coming, then we might want to get out
of the way before we all get sterilized. We'd have
to move the entire our solar system to be safe, right,
to sort of continue Earth as it is, yeah, or
we all have to get on ships and hope to
(33:06):
land on another solar system. But it seems to me
like we have one. We like, let's just move it
out of the way rather than abandoning it. It's starting
to seem more and more practical now. Huh Yeah, yeah,
I guess if it's that or getting fried by a supernova.
Let's do it this giant crazy rocket slash solar sale.
And there's just one more idea I wanted to put
(33:28):
out there, which is we're sort of far from the
galactic center, where like thirty thousand light years from the
center of the galaxy, which is a comfortable distance right now,
and you wouldn't want to be any closer because the
center of the galaxy is filled with crazy radiation from
all the stuff that's happening at the center. You've got
the black hole, gas and dust. He's getting squeezed and radiating.
So it's like a death zone. And we don't know
(33:49):
sort of the future of that death zone. Like as
the black hole in the center of the galaxy grows
and eats more stuff, that radiation from the center of
the galaxy might get larger and larger as you get
out to sort of the suburbs, and so we might
need to sort of like escape that radiation by pushing
ourselves further out and having a larger radius. Oh I see,
So get away from the dangerous part of the galaxy.
(34:11):
Moved to the suburbs, moved to the excerpts right with
our house, to the sub to the suburbs that just
moved to the suburbs. You know, put your house and
wheels and move it to the suburb. Yeah, we're already
in the suburbs, so this would be like moving to
a small town in the middle of nowhere. Might be safer,
all right, but then we wouldn't be able to explore anything.
We wouldn't be But you know, and thinking really really
(34:32):
long term, like we could use this strategy to go
visit other galaxies. We could like leave the Milky Way behind.
We could float our Sun and like go to Andromeda
or go to another galaxy entirely. Yeah, because we have
our own little bit battery pack, which is the Sun. Yeah,
we don't need anything else in the galaxy. It's not
doing anything for us. So our star and planets together
(34:53):
could survive out there in intergalactic space for a long
long time as we float towards another galaxy. All right, Well,
it's getting to the final part of this, which is easy.
Is it even practical? Let's say we did have a
big need to do it to move our solar system.
Is it even practical or feasible? I will say it's
definitely not. In the near future. You basically have to
be a civilization that's capable of building a dycen sphere already, uh,
(35:18):
in order to make this possible. And we are far
far from that, right because we don't even you need
don't where do you get all these materials and the
energy to build it? Yeah, you need a lot of
wrong materials, and so you need a very vigorous like
space mining operation. There are asteroids out there that are
just like, you know, a trillion tons of platinum or whatever.
(35:38):
You probably can find those materials, but that means you
have a heavy industry in space that can go search
these things and tow these asteroids and and fabricate these
things and put them together. I mean, we're talking about
a thousand years of technology. We haven't even started on
well a thousand years, I don't know. I mean, these
things accelerate rapidly, so it's hard to make very far
(36:01):
future predictions. But I can't imagine we're gonna have a
heavy space industry in the next forty years. So we're
just not there in terms of the industry required to
do it. But it let's say we even if we are,
is it it's still possible? Like it wouldn't be like
I feel like, if you move the Sun, wouldn't that
leave all the planets behind or disturb their orbits or
(36:22):
you know, just kind of you're risking throwing the whole
Solar system out of whack. I was really worried about
that also, and all of my reading I didn't find
anybody addressing that. You know, if if you give a
push to the Sun, you're not giving a push to
the planets, and so the planets are going to fall
behind a little bit, yeah, exactly, so they can go
into a different orbit. Yeah, or you could just lose
(36:44):
them entirely, and that would not be a good outcome.
So definitely, what if you blow on that too, Daniel,
What if we attach rockets and everything we want to keep. Well,
the problem is you can't build a solar sale on
the Earth because it's not solar, right, it doesn't produce photons.
And you don't want to build a rocket on the
Earth and then like have it push on the Earth
(37:06):
because that would be really destructive. So if you have
to just get tugged along by the gravity of the Sun,
which means you have to be pretty gentle, Like you'd
have to start out really slowly to not perturb all
these other orbits. You ramp up slow enough, then the
planets would follow, because I guess the orbits are sort
of stable and they would sort of stabilize. Yeah, but
(37:28):
I don't think we know that very well. And you
have to do a lot of calculations. You know. It's
it's like somebody is spinning plates on their fingers and
now you want them to also start running. Probably they
could do it, but you'd want to start really really gradually.
All right, Well, we'll we'll make those calculations annually and
submitted to the Journal of Physics. Fans fit. But the
(37:49):
good news is that none of these engines are that powerful.
I mean, even if you built this solar sale, it
would take like two hundred million years to go just
a hundred light years. And that's because the Sun is
just really massive and moving. It takes a huge amount
of energy. So this engine would just sort of like
(38:09):
very very gently, um push the Sun. It would take
two hundred and thirty million years before we even see
the next star. Well, the next star is only a
few light years away, but you know, a hundred a
hundred light years, it's not that far on galactic distances.
You know, the galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across,
so you're not visiting the entire galaxy very quickly using
(38:32):
that solar sale. And that's one reason why people are
thinking about the rocket engine approach, because even though it's ridiculous,
you know, to build a rocket engine that could push
the Sun, it is more powerful and has more potential
to push the Sun. Oh I see, that would do
it in a less amount of time. Yeah, you could
do it, like you could go a hundred light years
and only like two million years. But still it's a
(38:54):
that's a huge long term project. Like humanity has been
around for thirty thousand years. You're saying, let's have a
project that last two million years. Yeah, let's take a
trip the last two million years. Yeah. It's like you've
been dating somebody for a month and you propose going
on a fifty year cruise, Right, what could go wrong?
(39:14):
The coronavirus? Maybe those folks are going to be on
that cruise ship for fifty years. You never know that
never let him out? All right, So it's um, well,
but again it all depends on the knee. Like if
we have to move the Sun, then we have to
move the sun, even if it takes a few million years,
that's right. You know. Sometimes you just gotta call Bruce Willis,
(39:35):
whether you have the budget forward or not, because you
just got to solve the problem, and you know, freeze
him so he lasts million years and only bring him
out at critical moments. I think my favorite aspect of this, though,
is not thinking about how humanity might do it, as
awesome as that is, but thinking about aliens doing it,
because if aliens pull this off, we might see them
(39:58):
doing it, and that could prove they exist the same
way like spotting an alien civilization, building a dice in
sphere could prove that there are aliens. If we see
a son like doing weird things moving non gravitationally, that's
a clue that there's something interesting happening. I see. That's
like options. See like you know, option A Daniel does it,
(40:18):
Daniel doesn't want to do it. Option be somebody else
does it, some other human does it, No other human
wants to do it. To see, hey, look somebody else
is doing it. I'm done. That's all I needed to
And that's the ultimate stay on your couch, because then
the aliens do all the work and they take the trip. Right,
You're like, why don't you come visit us at our house.
We'll just make dinner. Just put a big sign out
(40:39):
saying open for dinner. Yeah, free bananas movies for any
aliens who come to visit. And it's not just spotting
aliens who are doing this so we can see that
they exist. But maybe they would come and visit. You know,
they could drag their star on their tour around the
galaxy and they could stop over here and tell us
all about the mysteries of the universe. All right, Well,
it's super fun to sort of think about these crazy
(41:01):
ideas and giant engineeringly complex projects, um, because you know,
it kind of forces you to think about what is
possible and how physics works out there in the universe. Yeah,
and a lot of things that are very normal, very
banal every day in our society seemed impossible and crazy
just a couple of hundred years ago. And so what
(41:23):
seems crazy to us now could be ho hum in
the future, you know, and maybe this is a thing
that our children's children's children's children will enjoy, getting to
pick the next solar system that humanity visits. You know,
you don't even need to get off the couch to
make more children. So that's that all works out. This
plan is perfect, all right, Well, I guess until then,
(41:44):
couch potatoes keep on dreaming. There's a lot that humanity
can do just thinking about these things from the comfort
of your couch. I prefer to refer to this community
as couchstronauts. Couch I see, fearless, non explore exactly explores
of the mind. All right, We hope you enjoyed that.
(42:05):
See you next time. Before you still have a question
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's
one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and
(42:28):
Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcast from My Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Yea
Hey, Daniel, if you could travel to another solar system,
would you sign up to do it? Oh? I would
so love to be in another solar system, but I'm
not sure I'm up for actually taking the trip. Or really,
do you get spasic easily? Yeah, especially after forty years
of eating the same food. Well, why don't you just
take the Red Eye? You know, like you go into
hibernation and then you wake up when you get there.
(00:29):
That's kind of like teleporting almost. I do like naps,
but I'm not sure I'm up for a forty year nap.
I have to pay for economy plus in or to
have enough room to really sleep. Come from me to
sleep well for forty years. Well, if you could visit
another solar system without actually traveling there, how about that?
Would you be up for them totally? If I could
just sit on my couch and then like open the
door to see another world, I'd be in Oh. Man,
(00:52):
Then I've got an idea for you. I just need
four trillion dollars. If you have that in your pocket,
let's crowdsource it from our list. O Nurse. Hi, I'm
(01:17):
or I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi,
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I dream about
traveling the universe from my couch. Welcome to our podcast
Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, a production of I
Heart Radio, in which we take mental trips all over
the universe, from the heart of neutron stars to what's
happening inside a black hole, to crazy stuff at the
(01:39):
microscopic level, and try to explain all of it to
you in a way that also maybe makes you laugh. Yeah.
I think of us as your audio guide to in
your tour of the universe as you travel from the
farthest reaches to the smallest places in the universe. That's right,
And we might not just be limited to a mental trip.
It might be possible to actually take a trip somewhere
(02:01):
else in the galaxy. Maybe someday, sometime in the future,
humans will actually set foot on planets in other solar systems. Yeah,
it's been a dream of humanity for a long time.
I think, right, it hasn't it been to travel to
another star and discover new world and maybe discover different
civilizations out there in space. But it's always been kind
of a difficult thing to get out into space and
(02:23):
to travel somewhere because the distances are so big and
it's a pretty hostile environment out there in space. Yeah.
Do you think it's a dream of humanity as a
species or like of all humans, because I would love
for difference between NY and all humans. Well, I would
love for humanity to explore the galaxy and learn all
(02:44):
these things and send us pictures back. But I don't
particularly want to be in a spaceship or be an astronaut,
though I'm like a big proponent of the humanity doing
it one small step for some other man. Oh, I see,
you just want to sit back, But you don't want
to be the one who had discovers another world or
to be the one who's who travels to another world.
(03:04):
So even if we discovered another world, you wouldn't want
to go there unless I could do it from my couch.
You know, I'm not up on I don't even like
going skiing, you know, So I'm not that up on
like physical danger. I see, But you just want to
know that somebody else went there. Yes, totally. I will
pay more taxes and encourage people to work on these projects,
and I want us as humans to do it. But
(03:26):
I don't necessarily want to be that one. I wonder
how common that a feeling is, though. I wonder if
everybody else out there who's pro space travel also actually
wants to do it themselves. Yeah, I can see what
you mean. I mean not maybe not everyone can get
over the fear of possibly dying while you're exploring, but
everyone probably thinks it would be cooled for someone else
(03:47):
to discover a new place. Yeah. And I think for
some people that fear of death is living. You know.
Some people really want that thrill of living on the
edge and doing something dangerous and uh, I want to
hear all about it when they get back to live
in the centers, comfortably, in the center of things. I do.
I like my couch. Well, it is sort of an
impediment for you know, A big challenge for humans to
(04:09):
travel into space is a space is sort of big,
and there's really nothing out there, and you can die
at any moment because it's such a hostile there's no oxygen,
you know, the vacuum would kill you, the temperature would
kill you. It's a it's a pretty big barrier to
overcome if we want to discover other things out there. Yeah,
and one classic solution is, you know, try to take
(04:29):
what you need with you, make a little box and
fill it with air and food and all that stuff,
and sort of take the minimum human survival necessities and
pack them with you. But you know, that's sort of
like camping. You know, it's fun for a while, but
it can be a little uncomfortable, and you know you
don't want to do it for forty years or forty
thousand years. And so people are wondering, like, is it
(04:52):
possible to maybe explore the universe without ever leaving your home?
You mean teleporting and we teleport your couch, you and
your couch. Can we a couch that teleports Daniel somewhere else?
You know, that's a good question on Star Trek. How
come they have to stand up when they're in the teleporter?
Why can't they just be a chair there? We can't
even get to do stand up to teleport. You're like,
(05:15):
I've just stand up. Forget about it, Get about it,
I forget about it. I'm turning into an old man.
Every time I go somewhere, I'm always looking for a chair.
You know, where can I sit down? Are you laying
down as you were recording this Daniel on Advisive Counsel.
I refused to answer that question. Well, this is a
pretty big topic and a pretty big question, and and
(05:38):
so one of our listeners had maybe a good idea
or came upon a good idea for maybe how we
could travel comfortably to other solar systems. Yeah, I got
a wonderfully hilarious email from one of our listeners who
heard our podcast about terraforming and found that it came
in handy in a random conversation he had. So here's
(05:59):
what Daniels Saunders from London wrote to us. He says, Hi,
I just want to say thanks for the terraforming episode.
It came in surprisingly handy. When I was loading my
groceries onto the checkout at the supermarket to checkout assistance,
we're talking across to each other about whether or not
we could ever move to another planet, maybe Mars. They
didn't seem to have much idea on the subject. So
(06:21):
after a minute or two, I couldn't help myself and
I began explaining all the things I learned from your podcast,
making a magnetic feel, the giant mirror for heating, dumping microbes,
et cetera. They were pretty amazed that some random guy
happened to know these things. I gave credit where credit
is due and pointed them to your podcast. But then
they asked me if it would ever be possible to
(06:41):
physically move our planet or our solar system somewhere else
in space. So I'm writing to you to ask, Wow,
what an awesome email? And what is where is this
supermarket where people talk about science at the checkoutline? Nowhere here.
I've never overheard somebody asking such a complicated physics question
in public where I feel like, that's what I got
(07:05):
a PhD in physics for. So somebody would be like,
what is the branching ratio of the top cork from
the bottom cork? I wonder if anybody knows. At the
checkout line, you're like, oh my god, this is the
moment I've been preparing for for thirty years. Or you're
on airplane they're like, excuse me, is someone have a
PhD in particle physics on the plane. We have an
emergency calculation we need to do. Never happened to me.
(07:26):
We have an emergency particle collision. We need to analyze.
What are these courts? We don't know what to do
with them. But he does raise a fascinating question. So
I'm really glad that Daniel in London had this interaction
and generated this wonderful, fascinating question. Yeah, it's awesome to
think that our listeners are having these conversations with other people,
(07:46):
and even more awesome that they're telling them about our podcast.
That's right. So if you are one of those checkout
assistants from that supermarket, welcome to the podcast and thank
you for listening. This one is for you. But it's
an interesting idea. And so the idea is that Daniel
wrote in about is that you know, it is sort
of hard to pack everything with you to go on
a trip into outer space to another solar system, because
(08:09):
you know, you're you have to build your house your spaceship,
and you have to bring in a food and air
and be able to recycle everything. And so I guess
the idea here is that instead of building a spaceship,
think of it as us already being in a spaceship
called Earth. That's right, Yeah, just make Earth our spaceship,
like Earth is now a mobile home or a camper van, right,
(08:30):
take your house with you as you travel, or not
even just the Earth, the entire solar system could be
our you know, our camper. Yeah, well, I think you
need to bring the sun. Otherwise you'd end up in
the Rogue Planets episode that we just did, and that
would be pretty cold. That's a whole different episode. We
actually in a Netflix that I know you've seen it,
(08:51):
where they something like I think either a meter meteor
is coming or the Earth gets knocked out of orbit
until they build these giant engine to push the Earth
to anoder another solar system. Wow, and would you rate
the physics in it as excellent? I would rate these
special effects? Is not bad? Not bad? By not answering
(09:12):
the question, you've answered the question, and so the question
will be tackling today. Is is it possible to move
our solar system somewhere else? I think that sounds like
a wonderful way to explore the galaxy. I stay on
my couch and you just let me know when we're
getting near another solar system. You know, but then what
(09:33):
would you do? You wouldn't even want to visit the
neighbors because you would be like have to stand up.
What Well, you could just train the telescopes, you know,
we could like turn hubble on those near now nearby planets.
I see, you just want to look at pictures while
sitting on your couch. And if we get if we
get close enough to some alien solar system and there
are aliens, I'm sure they'll come meet us and we
(09:55):
can send our you know, strapping young representatives, young men
and men of our species to go and meet them.
It doesn't need to be some forty five year old,
grumpy business podcaster. Right, I'm not the prime candidate to
meet aliens. What if everyone refuses? Everybody refuses, It's like
(10:16):
he's staying in his couch. Why should I get up?
But it risk my life. We're all five years old, now,
all right? If nobody else will do it, I will
sign up. I will go. Really, yes, I'll take one
for the team. Absolutely. Let's let's let's write up the petition.
Who wants to go into space? No? One, Daniel Europe.
I'm pretty sure this is not a situation I'm ever
(10:38):
going to actually encounter. So I'm comfortable volunteering in that scenario.
You're comfortable in the craziness of other human beings to
do more recklessly. Yeah, people want to do that stuff.
There's always like thousands and thousands of people applying to
be astronauts, so there's no need for me to try
to elbow my way in there. Well, it's sort of
I'm surprised that this idea is out there, you know
that that um people have and thinking about this, and
(11:00):
it sounds like you did some research and you found
some stuff in it. Yeah, they're definitely people have been
developing concepts or how this could be possible, and it's
kind of important. There are reasons why we might want
to move our son, not just out of curiosity, not
just out of the desire to explore the universe and
be lazy on our couch, but also, you know, for
the survival of our solar system, there could be times
(11:22):
we need to move it. So I thought it was
a fascinating question. But as usual, we were wondering how
many people out there had even heard of this idea
much let's think that it's possible, And so as usual,
Daniel went out there and asked people in the street
if they thought it's possible to build a machine that
could move a star. So here's what people had to say, Yes,
(11:43):
but maybe in the far future, not what the materials
we have right now. How would you do it. Maybe
some concepts involving stretching the space behind star and condensing
it in front over like a warp drive, like a
warp drive. Yes, and don't think so. I don't think
the technology is therey yet right now, but I think
(12:04):
it might be possible. I think it would be hard
with the resources on the planet here, just because we
have such finite resources, you know what. We have to think, well,
how much are we taking away from Earth to try
and move something that's even bigger than the Earth. And
it's kind of hard. But I think it's a maybe
for me, And I wouldn't say no, I wouldn't say yes.
You might not fund it. Do you think it's possible? Yeah? Probably,
(12:26):
I believe to be possible because photons do carry momentum,
so if you were able to harness the energy from photons,
you wouldn't but like also like being able to put
that force into the Sun, you would be able to
move the Sun to use the Sun's own energy. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's impossible. Impossible, No, but I think we
could get away with lyon about it all right. You
(12:50):
have to be a very strong machine expensive. Is it possible?
I don't know. I feel like it caused a lot
of have ECU the whole circulating around its systems. That
would make it a bad idea, not impulsible, not impossible, yes,
all right, not a lot of confidence in the concept.
(13:12):
People were shocked. Sometimes I had to repeat myself because
people thought they must have misheard the question, because it
was so ridiculous to move a star, not none necessarily
a son, but just like a star is there and
you're moving it. M m m. Yeah, it's a crazy concept.
In fact, it's the central feature of one of my
(13:33):
favorite science fiction series by Alistair Reynolds, where they try
to tackle this problem of having an interstellar empire, you know,
where the distances are so vast it takes forever to
travel or even communicate, and they solve the problem by
dragging a bunch of stars close to each other so
they can have an interstellar empire that's not actually that big.
And so, you know, it appears in science fiction, it's
(13:55):
it's in the realm of people's thought. But not most people.
Most people thought this is a crazy idea. Oh, I see,
you've read about this in a science fiction novel. Yeah, yeah,
it's a cool idea, and you know, all best ideas
start in science fiction novels. All right, but it's a
crazy concept. Everyone out there thought it was kind of crazy.
It's just the idea of moving a star, much less
our star. Um, So there's all kinds of questions here.
(14:17):
Why would you want to do it, how would you
do it? What would it mean to do it? So
let's dig into all of these crazy questions. But first
let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, So moving
(14:40):
a star? How do we move a star? Why would
we want to move a star? And how could it
even be practical or plausible to move an entire star
like our sun to somewhere else in the galaxy. It's
a crazy idea, mostly because stars are really really big.
I mean, the mass of our Sun is tend to
the thirty ms, and it's a lot of kilograms, you know,
(15:05):
it's uh, it's like a million earths. It's more than
a million earths, and the Earth already pretty big. Of course,
the Sun is already moving, it's orbiting the center of
the galaxy, and what we're interested in is changing its motion. Right,
And because F equals m, a tells you that you
need a force in order to move something with mass.
You want to accelerate the sun, move it somewhere else.
(15:26):
You've got to apply a force, and then I am
in the bigger something is the harder it is to
move it. Yeah, so it's it's hard to get Daniel
off the couch. Imagine getting the Earth off the couch,
and now imagine moving one point three million earth couch.
You know, since you're suggesting I'm so massive, maybe we
should be measuring the Sun and the units of Daniel
right here you go. Isn't it about to say one
(15:48):
point three million Daniels? That's right, I am the Earth.
I have eaten everything. Um, it's big. So you need
a really big force, Like we're talking cosmic scale engineering,
which is awesome to think about and to read about
in science fiction novels, but very difficult to actually pull off. Well.
To the basic idea is that you would build like
an engine or how would you even approach this problem
(16:12):
of moving a whole star? So you need a lot
of energy, and you need something that produces a lot
of energy, and the only thing nearby that sort of
produces enough energy to move a star is a star.
I mean a star is a huge fusion engine and
it's pumping out an enormous amount of energy, and the
simplest idea is to think about all the fusion energy
(16:34):
that is pumping out, mostly in terms of photons and
protons and stuff like that, and that's not creating a
force in the star because it's pointing in every direction.
Like the Sun pushes out and it pushes down and
pushes left to pushes right. Every time it shoots out
a photon to the left, that gives a little bit
of force to the right. But on the other side,
it's shooting out photons to the right, which gives it
(16:55):
a force to the less. It's balanced. It's like a rocket,
but it's shooting in all directions at the same time. Yeah,
exactly what would happen if you attached eight rocket engines
to yourself and set them all off at once, right, Well,
you wouldn't go anywhere, like in all different directions. Here
it perfectly balanced, perfectly balanced in all different directions. I
guess they would just squish you. But um, that's essentially
(17:15):
what the sun is right now. So the idea is,
instead of having the Sun pushing in all directions, to
somehow get it to only push in one direction, so
it uses its own energy to fly through the galaxy. Wait,
this is one idea. So one idea for moving the
Sun is to somehow coax it or fool it into
only shooting in one direction so it naturally moves. Yeah,
(17:36):
and you can't really change the way the Sun operates.
What you gotta do is sort of like reflected. So
you remember once we talked about solar sales. We talked
about like sailing through space by capturing the momentum of photons,
and the idea there was basically, have a huge mirror
and when a photon hits the mirror, it bounces off
and that pushes the mirror. Well, if you build a
(17:58):
really big solar sale, like the size of the Sun, okay,
and you put it next to the Sun, what he
would do is bounce some of those photons ones that
hit the solar sale, that would bounce it back the
other direction. So what did the sail get blown away?
The sale would definitely get blown away because it's a
huge solar sale, and that's the idea. But if you
(18:19):
could somehow attach it to the sun, right, attach it
to the Sun. The small problem building a sale the
size of the Sun and the small problem of attaching
it to the Sun. Well, actually that problem is not
that tricky because the Sun has a huge amount of gravity,
and so if you just put it in the right place,
then the amount of pressure you're getting on the solar
(18:41):
sale is balanced by the gravity of the Sun pulling
on it, and it would sort of stay in the
same place, would become in a sense part of this
like larger gravitational system of the Sun plus the sale,
so the Sun would hold it in the right place,
given like a gravitational chain there to to attach it to. Yeah,
so actually attaching a solar sale to the Sun not
(19:01):
physically like strapping it to the core of the Sun,
which is you know, sort of the way it works
in your brain, But you can do effectively the same
thing gravitationally. Did you actually run the numbers, like, wouldn't
it need to be super heavy for it to have
a gravitational effect on the Sun? Yes, But anything you're
building that's going to be the size of the Sun
is going to be heavy. If you build this thing
(19:22):
and it's like a micron a very thin aluminium or something,
a micron of thin aluminium, that's you know, one a
U y that's ninety million miles wide. That's still a
lot of aluminium. That's a lot of microns. But these
are even that much aluminium that we in in our
solar system. That's such an engineering question, man. I see,
(19:45):
if we could magically create matter that's what you're saying,
and make it a decize at the Sun, then no problem.
Now we probably do have enough materials if we like
liquidate you know, a planet or two, or you know,
some asteroids. There's probably enough stuff out there. Um, But
actually fabricating that there, I mean, we'll talk about that later.
(20:05):
It would cost a lot of money. The physics of
it sort of does make sense, yeah, And and the
reason is that, you know, the Sun puts out a
lot of energy. It makes like ten to the forty
five photons per second, and so it's pumping a lot
of energy. So you're saying, capture some of it and
have it pulled the Sun along with it gravitationally. Yeah.
(20:27):
So you'd imagine having a huge mirror, for example, in
the position this mirror next to the Sun, and half
of the photons will come out of the Sun would
get reversed in their direction and go the other way,
and so the net force would be. It would be
like if the Sun just had a huge flashlight and
it was shining it off into space, that would push
the Sun. It would get pushed in the direction away
(20:47):
from this beam, so in the direction of the solar
sale and so that would move the Sun. It would
accelerate the Sun. Now there's some limitations there, like you
can't have this solar salem in the plane the planets,
you know, like if you have in the plane of
the planets, then it's shooting a huge beam of photons,
you know, into the Solar system. You could like fry
(21:08):
a planet. We don't want to do that, So you
sort of limited also in the direction you can aim
this thing. You don't want to strap a huge rocket
to the Sun and pointed at the Earth for example.
I don't know. It's it's sort of sounds to me
like like if you're in a boat and you put
up a sail and then you blow in it with
your mouth and expecting that to move you across the sea,
Like you know, you're blowing on it, and somehow it
(21:31):
feels like it kind of feels like a closed system.
You're exactly right, if you were only blowing on the sail,
you'd go nowhere. But if you're blowing on the sail
and your friend is blowing the other direction, right, your
friends blows will actually push you somewhere. So if we
could just turn off half of the sun, that would
be great. This is effectively like turning off half of
the Sun and having it only blow in one direction. Oh,
(21:52):
I see, but and then but then and then the
sail would push also pull the sun. Yeah, well, that
the Sun would actually be pushing itself, right, to be
pushing itself because it's the photons that are going away
from the sale would be I'm pushing the Sun effectively.
And then the Sun would have this sale sort of
captured in its gravitational system, and so hopefully it would
(22:13):
be stable. But that's one of the problems is that
it's it might not be that stable a situation. You know,
if this thing like gets twisted of tiny bit, then
all of a sudden it's unstable and it's falling into
the Sun, and your four trillion dollar engineering project is
literally toast and the whole reason that you um melted
down Mars could have been for nothing. And the Martians
(22:37):
are pissed, all right, So that, but that's just one idea.
One idea is to use like a giant solar sale
and focus the Sun in one direction. What's another way
that we can maybe move the Sun. Another way is
to sort of use the fuel of the Sun to
power an enormous rocket. So you know, if you were
like a five year old and you thought how would
I do this? You say, okay, well, I'm just going
(22:58):
to build a huge rocket and attach it to the Sun.
And that's basically this idea. Um. But you know, a
rocket like that is going to take a lot of energy,
and fortunately the Sun is you know, it's a huge
ball of fuel. Basically it's helium, it's hydrogen. So if
you could build a big enough rocket, then you can
just use the fuel from the Sun itself to power
(23:19):
that engine and push the Sun. Wow. And how would
you push it again gravitationally? That's a great question. Like
you know, if you build an engine and you want
to move something, you imagine like strapping it to something.
But you don't want to strap this thing to the Sun,
and nobody can build a leather strap the side of
the Sun, so you'd actually have to build a two
directional rocket. So one that sort of pushes the rocket.
(23:40):
Another one that pushes the sun, so it keeps the
sun sort of in front of it. Imagine it's sort
of like a tug boat pushing a really big ship.
You can't touch the ship, so it has like a
little like a particle accelerator or a rocket to sort
of keep the sun in front of it. Does that
pause mean that made perfect sense or no sense at all?
No sense that helf to me, So so maybe step
(24:03):
me through it. So you build a rocket, you build
like a little space ship, right, and then you put
it out and in front of the sun for a
form in front of the in the direction you want
to go, or behind the sun the direction you want
to go. You put it behind the sun. So the
sun is in the direction you want to go, and
the rocket is behind it, and the rocket is burning
away from the sun. Huh okay, so the rocket is
(24:24):
pushing towards the sun. But then so that the rocket
doesn't fall into the sun, it shoots out a beam
in front of it that pushes the sun. Oh, you're saying,
shoot a beam of of what of whatever? You know, hydrogen, helium,
whatever comes out of your reaction. You can push anything
sort of blow on the Sun to get it to
movie blow on the Sun. Yes, so you're you're imagine
(24:48):
you're pushing some enormous ball or you have some like
twenty meters high basketball and you have trying to push it.
You're running and you're pushing, you're blowing on this thing
to keep it in front of you. Yeah, oh boy,
all right, it's complicated. My rocket is getting energy from
the Sun. Yeah, you're stealing matter from the Sun to
fuel it. So you have to like slurp stuff off
(25:09):
of the Sun, you know, the Sun's plasma and the
winds and all that stuff in order to fuel this thing.
Oh like the straw, how would you scoop things up
from the Sun. That's what. You could use magnetic fields
to sort of channel large areas of the Sun's radiation
(25:31):
into this thing to sort of grab it. Or you
might have to build like a dice in sphere to
capture more of the Sun's emissions and focus that into
your rocket. So it would be pretty complicated, built like
a giant catchers mid you sent to power your rocket
and whatever it is you're throwing at the Sun to
push it, so you grab some of the stuff it's
(25:53):
shooting out and you use it to push it back out.
That's right. And if you're worried that this would like
eat up the sun pretty quickly, the sound is pretty
big and even this ridiculous contraption would take a pretty
small fraction of the energy of the sun, so we
don't have to worry about that, all right. So those
are I think, two pretty um solid ideas. I don't know,
(26:15):
they seem pretty both pretty crazy, but they're out there.
Those ideas are out there, and they're not I guess
what you're saying is they're not impossible. They're physically possible,
but um, maybe maybe they might be engineeringly impossible. I
just quote it coined that term. Um. But but at
least they're technically possible to do these things. Yeah, there's
sort of like what you would come up with if
(26:37):
you had a chalkboard and ten minutes, uh to solve
this crazy problem. And we haven't really gotten that much
further than those first ideas, because it's a great minute.
That's the total amount of time. I think we're talking
about these ideas more than anyone has actually thought taught
them through. You know, there's a whole field and people
like published papers thinking about the details of these things
(27:00):
in more depth, but in sort of you know, big
idea concepts. How could you attack this problem, not like
the gritty details of how you would actually build this
How could you attack this problem? In general? There haven't
been that many more like great ideas for directions to
attack other than the solar sale and the massive engine.
Is there an actual journal where people discuss these things?
(27:20):
The International Journal of Physics, fan Fiction, International Journal of
Absurd Concepts, the Journal Engineeringly Impossible Concepts, engineeringly um. Alright,
well they're plausible, at least at least in the chalkboard.
(27:40):
They work, um, But I guess maybe a bigger question
is why would we want to do this? And is
it even practical or feasible? And so let's get into
those questions. But first let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel. So,
(28:06):
also on the table on our trukboard is this idea
of moving the sun our sun to another solar system
as a way to you know, see the see the
sites out there in the universe. And so we talked
about ways in which we could do it. Possibly they
sound kind of crazy, but it sounds possible now. But
now the question is why would we want to do it?
Why would we you know, we were pretty good here
(28:28):
in this part of the galaxy, things are pretty stable.
Why would we want to get off of our solar
system couch. I don't know. You sound kind of skeptical.
When we started out, you were sort of excited by
the possibility of doing something crazy that I told you
what the plans were. Now you seem like, I'm not
so sure this is going to happen. Well, engineeringly, he's
kind of ridiculous. To be honest, as an engineer, I'm
(28:51):
just like, you know what, to stay on the couch.
This is not this is not anywhere near a plausible
but you know, it's fun to think about. And so
or maybe maybe the reason the need isn't great enough,
you know, maybe if there was need, I would, you know,
get off my couch here and all right, let's talk motivation.
Let's motivation problem. Well, one reason, of course, it's just exploration,
(29:14):
Like if we wanted to explore other parts of the galaxy,
that this is one way to do it, and you
could effectively move all of humanity and all of our
resources and you wouldn't have to build spaceships. And send
people out there into space. And you know, space travel
is annoying, and who wants to be born on a
colony ship and die in a colony ship and never
sit but on a planet. That sounds kind of depressing.
And so you could sort of just gradually explore the
(29:37):
whole galaxy, you know, imagine like taking our star instead
of just sort of floating along and the galactic swirl
going the other direction. Then we could be like every
few years or so visiting a new solar system, maybe
like being on a cruise, maybe without the coronavirus. Yeah. Um,
so in the ideas that we would then then get
close to other stars so we can look at the
(29:58):
better or actually they like, you know, send probe out
to visit other solar systems. Both. I mean, you wouldn't
want to get too close because you don't want the
gravity of that star to interfere with the gravity of
our solar system and perturb some orbits and cause you know,
cataclysmic events. But close enough that you could send probes
in a reasonable amount of time. Yeah, and hey, it's
(30:18):
like a cruise, you know. You can either get off
and go explore the local scenery, or you could stay
on the boat. You're saying it's more practical to build
a giant engine around the Sun than it is to
just go a little bit further with a probe. I
think it's um, it's sort of a longer term plan.
You can build a ship to go visit one solar system,
(30:39):
but this is a plan to like visit all of them.
This is you're retired and you bought an r V
and you want to see the country, and so you
decide instead of taking a lot of little trips, you
just drive all around in your house. All right, So
the exploration is one reason, um, to get off the couch.
But what are some other possible needs that we might
have to do this. Well, we might see a day
(31:00):
injer to our solar system, and we might have a
lot of warning, Like we track all the other stars
in the galaxy, and it might be that, you know,
one swirl around the galaxy, we see something coming another
star is headed for a near collision with ours, or
you know, close enough that it could steal some of
the planets, and we might want to change the trajectory
(31:20):
of the Sun in order to sort of get out
of the way. If there's something that might destroy our
solar system, and then we might want to move it
somewhere else, yeah, or move our solar system out of
the way precisely like a rogue planet, or like a
rogue star. Well, a rogue planet would be really hard
to see far in advance because they're not bright, So
it has to be a star that's on a near
(31:41):
collision course with ours. You know, earlier in the history
of the galaxy, I think more of this kind of
stuff happened, and things are sort of calm er now
because all the bumps that have happened have mostly happened,
but there could still be more. And you know, in
the very far future when we collide with Andromeda, then
there's gonna be a lot of chaos, and so, you know,
long term planning, we might want to be able to
(32:02):
sort of shift where our house is. You know, you
might want to jump ship, yeah, or just take your
ship with you. You know, like if you saw a
huge rock about to fall in your house, it'd be
nice if you could wheel your house over to the
next block, right, Oh, I see, Instead of getting off
the couch, you'd be like, move my couch, Please call
the movers. Move the couch with you in it to
(32:25):
or move the whole house. Yeah, And it doesn't have
to be just that a star is going to collide
with us. We might, for example, spot a star and
be able to predict that it's going to go supernova,
and that could be really dangerous. If it's a star
goes supernova close enough, you know, within fifty or a
hundred light years, you could fry the Earth the X
rays and the gamma rays. It's a huge amount of radiation.
(32:46):
So if we get to a point where are the
science of supernovas is better, because right now it's really
hard to predict exactly when they blow. Then and we
see one coming, then we might want to get out
of the way before we all get sterilized. We'd have
to move the entire our solar system to be safe, right,
to sort of continue Earth as it is, yeah, or
we all have to get on ships and hope to
(33:06):
land on another solar system. But it seems to me
like we have one. We like, let's just move it
out of the way rather than abandoning it. It's starting
to seem more and more practical now. Huh Yeah, yeah,
I guess if it's that or getting fried by a supernova.
Let's do it this giant crazy rocket slash solar sale.
And there's just one more idea I wanted to put
(33:28):
out there, which is we're sort of far from the
galactic center, where like thirty thousand light years from the
center of the galaxy, which is a comfortable distance right now,
and you wouldn't want to be any closer because the
center of the galaxy is filled with crazy radiation from
all the stuff that's happening at the center. You've got
the black hole, gas and dust. He's getting squeezed and radiating.
So it's like a death zone. And we don't know
(33:49):
sort of the future of that death zone. Like as
the black hole in the center of the galaxy grows
and eats more stuff, that radiation from the center of
the galaxy might get larger and larger as you get
out to sort of the suburbs, and so we might
need to sort of like escape that radiation by pushing
ourselves further out and having a larger radius. Oh I see,
So get away from the dangerous part of the galaxy.
(34:11):
Moved to the suburbs, moved to the excerpts right with
our house, to the sub to the suburbs that just
moved to the suburbs. You know, put your house and
wheels and move it to the suburb. Yeah, we're already
in the suburbs, so this would be like moving to
a small town in the middle of nowhere. Might be safer,
all right, but then we wouldn't be able to explore anything.
We wouldn't be But you know, and thinking really really
(34:32):
long term, like we could use this strategy to go
visit other galaxies. We could like leave the Milky Way behind.
We could float our Sun and like go to Andromeda
or go to another galaxy entirely. Yeah, because we have
our own little bit battery pack, which is the Sun. Yeah,
we don't need anything else in the galaxy. It's not
doing anything for us. So our star and planets together
(34:53):
could survive out there in intergalactic space for a long
long time as we float towards another galaxy. All right, Well,
it's getting to the final part of this, which is easy.
Is it even practical? Let's say we did have a
big need to do it to move our solar system.
Is it even practical or feasible? I will say it's
definitely not. In the near future. You basically have to
be a civilization that's capable of building a dycen sphere already, uh,
(35:18):
in order to make this possible. And we are far
far from that, right because we don't even you need
don't where do you get all these materials and the
energy to build it? Yeah, you need a lot of
wrong materials, and so you need a very vigorous like
space mining operation. There are asteroids out there that are
just like, you know, a trillion tons of platinum or whatever.
(35:38):
You probably can find those materials, but that means you
have a heavy industry in space that can go search
these things and tow these asteroids and and fabricate these
things and put them together. I mean, we're talking about
a thousand years of technology. We haven't even started on
well a thousand years, I don't know. I mean, these
things accelerate rapidly, so it's hard to make very far
(36:01):
future predictions. But I can't imagine we're gonna have a
heavy space industry in the next forty years. So we're
just not there in terms of the industry required to
do it. But it let's say we even if we are,
is it it's still possible? Like it wouldn't be like
I feel like, if you move the Sun, wouldn't that
leave all the planets behind or disturb their orbits or
(36:22):
you know, just kind of you're risking throwing the whole
Solar system out of whack. I was really worried about
that also, and all of my reading I didn't find
anybody addressing that. You know, if if you give a
push to the Sun, you're not giving a push to
the planets, and so the planets are going to fall
behind a little bit, yeah, exactly, so they can go
into a different orbit. Yeah, or you could just lose
(36:44):
them entirely, and that would not be a good outcome.
So definitely, what if you blow on that too, Daniel,
What if we attach rockets and everything we want to keep. Well,
the problem is you can't build a solar sale on
the Earth because it's not solar, right, it doesn't produce photons.
And you don't want to build a rocket on the
Earth and then like have it push on the Earth
(37:06):
because that would be really destructive. So if you have
to just get tugged along by the gravity of the Sun,
which means you have to be pretty gentle, Like you'd
have to start out really slowly to not perturb all
these other orbits. You ramp up slow enough, then the
planets would follow, because I guess the orbits are sort
of stable and they would sort of stabilize. Yeah, but
(37:28):
I don't think we know that very well. And you
have to do a lot of calculations. You know. It's
it's like somebody is spinning plates on their fingers and
now you want them to also start running. Probably they
could do it, but you'd want to start really really gradually.
All right, Well, we'll we'll make those calculations annually and
submitted to the Journal of Physics. Fans fit. But the
(37:49):
good news is that none of these engines are that powerful.
I mean, even if you built this solar sale, it
would take like two hundred million years to go just
a hundred light years. And that's because the Sun is
just really massive and moving. It takes a huge amount
of energy. So this engine would just sort of like
(38:09):
very very gently, um push the Sun. It would take
two hundred and thirty million years before we even see
the next star. Well, the next star is only a
few light years away, but you know, a hundred a
hundred light years, it's not that far on galactic distances.
You know, the galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across,
so you're not visiting the entire galaxy very quickly using
(38:32):
that solar sale. And that's one reason why people are
thinking about the rocket engine approach, because even though it's ridiculous,
you know, to build a rocket engine that could push
the Sun, it is more powerful and has more potential
to push the Sun. Oh I see, that would do
it in a less amount of time. Yeah, you could
do it, like you could go a hundred light years
and only like two million years. But still it's a
(38:54):
that's a huge long term project. Like humanity has been
around for thirty thousand years. You're saying, let's have a
project that last two million years. Yeah, let's take a
trip the last two million years. Yeah. It's like you've
been dating somebody for a month and you propose going
on a fifty year cruise, Right, what could go wrong?
(39:14):
The coronavirus? Maybe those folks are going to be on
that cruise ship for fifty years. You never know that
never let him out? All right, So it's um, well,
but again it all depends on the knee. Like if
we have to move the Sun, then we have to
move the sun, even if it takes a few million years,
that's right. You know. Sometimes you just gotta call Bruce Willis,
(39:35):
whether you have the budget forward or not, because you
just got to solve the problem, and you know, freeze
him so he lasts million years and only bring him
out at critical moments. I think my favorite aspect of this, though,
is not thinking about how humanity might do it, as
awesome as that is, but thinking about aliens doing it,
because if aliens pull this off, we might see them
(39:58):
doing it, and that could prove they exist the same
way like spotting an alien civilization, building a dice in
sphere could prove that there are aliens. If we see
a son like doing weird things moving non gravitationally, that's
a clue that there's something interesting happening. I see. That's
like options. See like you know, option A Daniel does it,
(40:18):
Daniel doesn't want to do it. Option be somebody else
does it, some other human does it, No other human
wants to do it. To see, hey, look somebody else
is doing it. I'm done. That's all I needed to
And that's the ultimate stay on your couch, because then
the aliens do all the work and they take the trip. Right,
You're like, why don't you come visit us at our house.
We'll just make dinner. Just put a big sign out
(40:39):
saying open for dinner. Yeah, free bananas movies for any
aliens who come to visit. And it's not just spotting
aliens who are doing this so we can see that
they exist. But maybe they would come and visit. You know,
they could drag their star on their tour around the
galaxy and they could stop over here and tell us
all about the mysteries of the universe. All right, Well,
it's super fun to sort of think about these crazy
(41:01):
ideas and giant engineeringly complex projects, um, because you know,
it kind of forces you to think about what is
possible and how physics works out there in the universe. Yeah,
and a lot of things that are very normal, very
banal every day in our society seemed impossible and crazy
just a couple of hundred years ago. And so what
(41:23):
seems crazy to us now could be ho hum in
the future, you know, and maybe this is a thing
that our children's children's children's children will enjoy, getting to
pick the next solar system that humanity visits. You know,
you don't even need to get off the couch to
make more children. So that's that all works out. This
plan is perfect, all right, Well, I guess until then,
(41:44):
couch potatoes keep on dreaming. There's a lot that humanity
can do just thinking about these things from the comfort
of your couch. I prefer to refer to this community
as couchstronauts. Couch I see, fearless, non explore exactly explores
of the mind. All right, We hope you enjoyed that.
(42:05):
See you next time. Before you still have a question
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's
one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and
(42:28):
Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcast from My Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Yea
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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