May 23, 2019 • 44 mins
We're not talking about your vacuum cleaner!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, or hey, what do you think is the most
impressive thing humanity has ever built? It's a pretty good question.
Let me think about it for a second. I think
I think I would have to say probably the most
impressive human achievement is the refrigerator. Obviously, I mean the
refuge every day. I couldn't live with that without it.
(00:28):
It's pretty awesome. That's a cool answer. I was sort
of thinking things like, you know, the Great Wall, or
the Golden gate Bridge or the Birge Khalifa, you know,
stuff that would inspire all you know, things that like
last for generations. Well, you know, there is still in
my fridge that's been there four generations. I don't know.
I look at these projects sometimes and I think, you know,
(00:51):
humanity can really accomplish great things when we work together.
It's really sort of impressive what we can pull off,
and we we all work together. Yeah, well, I don't know.
I mean I once ate everything in my fridge all
by myself. I mean I didn't meet the rest of
humanity for that. Yeah, well, you can accomplish great things
by yourself. But it makes me wonder sometimes like what
(01:11):
future humans will build, Like what are the great what's
the Great Wall of the twenty one century. You know
what kind of achievements will we what kind of monuments
will we leave behind for future humans? The Great Refrigerator
of China. That's right, a huge refrigerator in space that
you can see from space, that you can see from
space that it needs to be cleaned. Hi, I'm poor.
(01:49):
I'm the cartoonists behind the comics are piled Higher and
Deeper or PhD comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist.
And I smash protons together at the Large Hagon Collider
to try to figure out what the universe is made
out of. And together we wrote a book called We
Have No Idea, which explores all the things we don't
know about the universe. And right now you're listening to
our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production
(02:12):
of I Heart Radio, in which we try to mix
accessible science with a huge quantity of low quality jokes.
What do you mean? Are you saying my jokes are
low quality or no? I'm saying we spray a huge
number of jokes and our editor just picks out the
ones that are best to our listeners. Think we're funny, Yeah,
are awesome editor exactly our producer who we should give
(02:32):
a shout out to for sure, Taylor, thank you so
much for making us funny. Thank you for making us
sound funny. And speaking of human achievements, today's podcast is
all about monumental constructions and accomplishments. What can civilizations do
when they get together and build something enormous? Yeah? What
can humans? What are humans capable of making? Like, what
are the limits of our ingenuity and resources and our
(02:55):
ability to work together? That's right, because you know, there
are a lot of problems right in the world, like
a global energy consumption and global warming, and that's right,
and some of those are being tackled, right, like we're
developing solar power so that we can get energy just
from the sun and not burn fossil fuels and to
meet the global energy demands. Right, But if you extrapolate
(03:16):
forward and you think, like, what is humanity gonna need?
Our global energy consumption is just increasing and it seems
unlikely unless we have some cataclysmic event in our civilization
that that's ever going to turn around. So if you
project forward, you might wonder, like, how is humanity going
to meet its energy needs in the future. If we
don't invent some fantastic new form of fusion, right, what
(03:37):
can we do to to rapidly increase the amount of
energy we have accessible? And that's the question two of
our listeners had, and so they sent us questions via
Twitter and via email. That's right. So we owe a
shout out to Evertenson and to Steve Davis for requesting
this topic. So today on the podcast we'll be covering
the topic what is a dycen sphere? That's right? Yeah,
(04:03):
so the dycen sphere? Daniel, Um, So this is the
idea that you know, we could maybe build something that
can really take advantage of all that amazing power that's
coming out of the sun. Right. That's right. If you
think about like grabbing solar power and you think, well,
we might need a huge amount of it for your
first instinct is like, let's just put a bunch of
solar panels in the desert, right, Let's just like build
(04:25):
solar panel after solar panel. After all, nobody's really using
that land. Is a lot of sun out there, right.
But as humanity gets more and more greedy about energy,
you might think, like is there enough room on Earth
to put enough solar panels, right, So is that true? Like?
What if we covered all of the Sharad Desert in
solar panels, would that not be enough? I think that
would be enough today. Like actually, I think today all
(04:48):
you need to do is cover like Delaware with solar
panels and you'd have enough energy to power the entire
United States or maybe even the Earth. What really, yeah, exactly,
solar pan So you're just ready to Delaware, Delaware. That's
where all those fake companies are set up, aren't they. Um,
(05:09):
we probably have listeners in Delaware, so you might want
to check with them before you. They might appreciate the shade,
you know, being relocated. Sorry, um all we have authority
here from J. H. Cham a podcast host, or we're
gonna raise your house and put solar pants emin eminent
podcast main being moved out of Delaware. Well, I just
(05:31):
check the numbers, and it turns out Delaware is actually
a bit too small. I think you need to add
Maryland to hope. That's okay with Maryland. No, But the
point is that I think today human civilization can survive
using energy captured by a pretty small fraction to the
Earth's surface. But imagine in the future. Right, what if
we want to build a huge civilization, what we want
(05:52):
to construct enormous things? We want to send ships across
the stars. We're gonna need incredible amounts of energy and
you know, not gonna be able to burn cold to
do that, and we're not going to be able to
necessarily cover the Earth and solar panels, and so people
started thinking big. People started thinking what's the limit, Like,
what's the maximum number of solar panel solar panels you
(06:12):
can make? What's the biggest solar panel you can build? Yes? Exactly?
And where would you put it? Okay, so this is
where the question of what is the Dyson's fear comes from? Exactly?
This is a thought a thought experiment by Freeman Dyson,
a famous physicist, to think about what is the biggest
solar panel? Is it possible? Could we build one? How
would you do it? And could we see if other
(06:34):
civilizations are doing it? Wow? That's amazing? All right? So we,
as usual, we're wondering how many of you out there
actually knew what a Dyson's fear was Like If someone
approachedate on the street and ask you, hey, have you
seen any dicens fears? Or hey, do you know what
it is? Or would you contribute ten dollars towards building
a Dicen sphere um. So, as usual, Daniel went out
into the streets and ask people randomly out there if
(06:56):
they knew what a Dyson's fear was. Yeah, here's what
people had to say. Have you ever heard of a
thing called a Dyson sphere? I know it in the
context of looking for other life on other planets, because
it's basically like a ring that you can build around
a star to harness its light for energy. You look
(07:17):
at the light patterns. If something interferes with the patterns
and like in a certain way, it can lead to
the assumption that maybe there's a Dicen sphere around it.
There's something awesome. Okay, yeah, it's this gigantic thing that
you've put around like a solar system and then you
can harness all the energy. I heard of it. I
(07:39):
don't know what it is, all right, So pretty much
no across the board. Well, I would say we got
our our typical set of binary responses, a bunch of news.
I got a bunch of weird looks too, people like
is you're making this up? Like is that a thing?
Really is this like a test? You know, I wonder
how many people have thought you were talking about the
(07:59):
dice and vacuum cleaner. That thing really sucks. Um No,
I think I think it was like people thought maybe
it was a control question, like I was making things up,
like have you ever heard of the you know, um
smith gabakabui or whatever, And because it was like a
trick question, like to see if you if you try
(08:20):
to make up some funny things. Yeah, which actually gives
me the idea I should do that, right, We should
have a trick question and see if people spout off. Um,
you know, Oh yes, I told I saw a Nova
episode about that, and it's in balls, you know, electrophons
and whatever. What would it be about? Let's be dark?
Should be like dark, a dark black hole about that?
(08:40):
Oh you know what, that's actually really cool. And people
are written and asking whether you can have a black
hole made of dark matter, which is a really awesome question,
which we should talk about in a different episode. Um,
but an anti dark matter black hole? Dark matter black hole? Yeah,
isn't that a cool idea? An anti dark matter black hole?
Oh well, we don't know if dark matter has anti particles.
(09:00):
We don't even know dark matter is made of particles,
so we don't know if there is such a thing
as anti dark matter. But we know there is dark matter,
and we know there are black holes. So people have
this tendency to like ram them together anyway, So nobody
thought you'd meant the vacuum cleaner because you know the
Dyson vacuum cleaners. They are known for having this like
sphere out front that that you used to pivot and
(09:21):
to roll around and like it twist the head of
the vacuum cleaner as you tilt and turn. Did you
get some like check from Dicing company? Because I didn't
get one. I don't understand why you're promoting the Dicing
vacum Maybe if you used to link if you used
to link Dyson slash or he got a check slash
(09:42):
and didn't share it with Daniel. Well, um, let's break
it down for people. Then what what is the Dyson's fear?
So the dycens vary is basically the idea of maximal
solar panels. Right, you want to build solar panels, you
cover the earth. The Earth captures a tiny fraction of
the energy from the sun. Right, It's it's like a tiny,
(10:04):
tiny fraction right like to the Sun, the Earth just
looks like a little marble way out there in space exactly,
and so it's it's barely catching any of its rays exactly.
So imagine a spear, and the radius of the sphere
is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Right. So,
now imagine a sphere that's basically the size of the
Earth's orbit. It's like a ball centered on the Sun
(10:25):
that reaches all the way to Earth exactly, and it's
made out of what well, I mean, just imagine the
spear for now geometrically, and think about what fraction of
that sphere is covered by the Earth. Right, this is
the point you're making before. It's like a tiny dot.
Most of the Sun's energy just gets rated out into space,
right it. Maybe it hits a Jupiter or Saturn, but
the vast majority of it just gets shot out into space. Right.
(10:49):
So the idea is, if you really want to go big,
if you want to build a huge project, you know,
then could you build solar panels that capture a significant
fraction or even dare I say, all of the Sun's energy? Right? All? Wow,
So it's like a giant solar panel that surrounds the
(11:09):
sun completely. Yeah, I mean, like, let's do with the
thought experiment. Let's think as big as possible. How much
energy would that be? Um, you know, how would you
do it? And could you tell if other people had
done it? And so this is the origin of it.
Freeman Dyson thought about this and he wrote a paper
about it, and he thought, could you build one of
these things? And if another civilization around another star had
(11:31):
done this, could we tell and could we use that
to find alien civilizations? This is like a legit physics paper.
This is a a legit physics paper is published in Science,
one of the top journals, and really yeah, And the
thing I love about that is about it is that
it's visionary. It's like, what would we do in a
thousand years, what would we do in a million years?
And could we use those ideas if we could predict them,
(11:53):
could we use those ideas to discover super advanced alien civilizations?
Like let's not look for other civilizations at the same
level as us. Let's look for civilizations that are like
a million years or a billion years ahead of us
and trying to anticipate what they would do and how
we would spot them. So I love that kind of
visionary thinking, like if if you use your imagination wildly,
(12:14):
where could humans go? And then that we could maybe
see or get evidence of from other civilizations out in
the universe. Yes, exactly right, exactly like trying to think
of what the grown ups they're doing, because we're basically kids.
You know, we are pretty new to this whole universe.
We've been intelligent for you know, maybe tens of thousands
(12:35):
of years. We've been technological for decades, right, we've been
communicating for you know, less than that, And so we
are brand new on the universe stage. And there may
be a pimples voices cracking if we're not even there. Man,
we're not a puberty. We're growing hair and from places. No,
we are still pooping our pants. Um, from the civilization
(12:58):
point of view, like literally mean literally and here we're
filling it with pop. We are pooping the bed, that's true. Um.
And so you know, you might ask like what are
the growing ups doing? And the same way it's hard
for kids to anticipate, like what is an adult life like?
And how would you tell what's going on? It might
be hard for us to predict what super advanced civilizations
(13:21):
would do and how they would live and how they
would get energy. So that was the idea of Freeman Dyson.
He thought, can we spot other stars being wrapped by
their feet by these spheres? Um to what kind of
physics is was he? Oh, he's famous for being really broad.
He's like, he's done all sorts of physics. I think
he even did some chemistry. Um, he did quantum mechanics.
He's thought about consciousness. He's one of these modern day
(13:43):
you know, renaissance men who have like thought endabbled in
all sorts of different kinds of physics. I wonder if
your name affixed that, you know, like, if you go
around with the name Freeman Dyson, is it just the
expectation that you really amazing personality? What that you only
have that expectation because there's a guy in the him
that who has an amazing hum But that's what I mean.
It's like he's got the perfect name to be a
(14:05):
renaissance man. It's the other direction. Man, he was a
renaissance man, and now therefore his name is connected with
being a renaissance man. It doesn't work the other way.
It's not like you're born He's like the original cool guy.
It's not like they're like Galileo that sounds like could
be a great scientist. Yeah, No, I think it's the
other direction. Um, But he does have sort of a
(14:25):
mystical name. I always thought his name, you know, I
always connected his name with like the Freemasons, you know,
Freeman Dison. He sounds like he's probably the member of
a secret society somewhere. Yeah, like cool people who are
trying to build names, trying to build mega structures. Even
that word is fun to say, right, mega structures. So
he had this idea, he thought, hey, what could we
(14:46):
possibly what could have aliens civilization much more advanced than us.
What could they possibly be doing that we could maybe detect?
And he had the idea that maybe they figured out
a way to capture all of a sun energy, like
building something basically like wrapping up a sun. Yeah, exactly.
And that's pretty hard to do. I mean imagine, as
(15:08):
you were saying before, that you had to build something
that size, right, Like the radius of it is millions
of miles, right, So you're gonna construct something that wraps
the whole Sun at like the distance from the Earth
to the Sun and grabs all that energy. I mean,
the size of it is is boggling like um, the
inside of that sphere did a few calculations, inside of
(15:30):
that sphere would have the surface area of five hundred
and fifty million earths. Wow, which sounds doable. Maybe, I
don't know. It's it's hard to build something that big.
I mean, in order to build something that big, you
need stuff, right, you need materials, You need like, you know, matter,
And if you're gonna build it, you need to basically
(15:51):
use all of the matter in Jupiter and Saturn and
the asteroid belt. You use up like all the stuff
in the Solar system just to build that shell. Like
it's just barely enough stuff to build a shell all
the way around the Sun. But why does it need
to be the radius of where the Earth is? Couldn't
you just make it smaller and be more convenient to
(16:11):
make make it the radius of what's the mercury the
closest one, you know, as small as sphere around the
Sun and then just have like a cable running to
us to Earth. Yeah, you have to balance, right, the
closing extension cord extend. The closer you get to the Sun, um,
the hotter things get and things melt and it's harder
(16:32):
to work, you know, So you want to balance there.
You don't want you don't want to be like immediately
surrounding the Sun. You don't want to be really far
away because that's to be bigger um between tents to
build something that close to the Sun. Yeah. The other
advantage if you built it at the radius of the
Earth is then you'd have an awesome livable surface, right,
you people could live on the inside of that sphere,
(16:53):
Like you could put dirt down and plant crops and
you'd be at the be in the habitable zone. Right,
you'd be the right distance for the Sun to have
the right temperature. Oh, you build it at the rates
of this Earth and where the Earth is, then really
it could be like um, sunny Florida all year round exactly.
I mean, let's all around the solar system. Yes, let's
(17:15):
think big. Let's think like, you know, we're gonna do this,
what would be the best thing to do, Like humanity
is gonna be huge and having a huge amount of energy. Um,
then let's like, let's prepare for the future of humanity
and build five hundred and fifty million times the land
of the Earth. The amount of energy to this thing
with capture is just ridiculous. Like if you captured all
(17:36):
of the energy of the Sun every year. There's this
number which is pretty hard to understand. It's three hundred
and eighty four yatta watts, right, what's being stive energy
and yatta being at a lot of what a whole
lot of exactly? No, it's um three point eight times
(17:56):
ten to the twenty six watts, right, Like, it's just
a ridicul list number. So I thought, well, let's explain
in terms of how much energy humanity currently uses. Right,
So currently the power use of humanity is one thirty
three trillion the energy put out by the sun WoT
three thousand billion times how much we use right now? Yeah,
(18:20):
so we don't really need this thing today or tomorrow
or next year. Right. This is the kind of thing
that would that would support a civilization with enormous energy consumption.
You know, the kind of thing where you're like building
huge spaceships and you're pushing them to other star systems
with like lasers, you know, like light sales that capture
laser beams, Like, you would have an incredible amount of
(18:41):
energy if you could really capture all of the energy
output of the Sun. Okay, I have a lot of questions,
but first let's take a quick break, all right, So
(19:01):
that's a dicense fear. It's this idea that you can
maybe build a shell around the Sun and capture all
of the energy that's coming out of it. And you
would want to build it kind of far away from
the Sun because otherwise it would just melt. Uh. And
but it would be humongous. It would be bazillion times
the surface of the Earth. Would take a lot of
(19:22):
stuff to to build that shell. You take a lot
of stuff. It would be enormous. And there's a lot
of other problems, Like problem number one is you'd have
to be really strong. I mean, this thing is going
to have a huge amount of weight on it, right, yeah,
like a and and just like it would get toussled around,
right because it would have to hold together. Yeah, and
it doesn't. You wouldn't also have any gravity, right, like
the gravity we experienced from walking around on Earth comes
(19:45):
from Earth. But if you're if you build a huge
shell the size of the Earth radius and and build
it around the Sun, then it's balanced gravitationally, right, you
don't feel it doesn't feel the Sun's gravity. There's no
net gravitational force on it for the Sun, so it'd
be sort of like floating around the Sun, nothing to
keep it in place, which means it could like drift,
(20:06):
you know, and like one side of it could get
too close and maybe bump into the Sun or something.
It would be pretty hard to maintain. You need like
jets on it to keep it in the right place.
I think an interesting idea is that just the idea
that you can envelop a sun, right like it, you know,
your intuition. My intuition tells me that if you cover
it up the Sun it would snuff out, but not
(20:28):
so right like you could. The Sun doesn't need any feedback, right,
it's just pumping that energy out. It doesn't need It
doesn't need or care, doesn't need to know or care
about what happens to the photons and protons that it's
flying out. Yeah right, that's what I mean. Like you
could you could capture a sun literally, yeah exactly, and
it would burn happily inside your you're pumping out energy,
(20:50):
yeah exactly. And you know, that's basically what we want
to do here on Earth. On a much smaller scale,
I mean that's fusion, right. Fusion says, build a little plasma,
make it really hot, have it burned, and have a
pump out radiation which we then capture. That's energy. Um,
So we want to do that, and you know, we
want to do that in a miniature way on Earth
and a controlled way. But we basically have a huge
(21:11):
fusion furnace already and it's going pretty well and it's
not too far away. So some people say, let's just
capture that energy, right, Why have fusion here on Earth
when it's already going in the center of a whole
lot of you exactly, um, giant trillion size shell. That
sounds much easier. Yeah, and uh, and so you might
(21:32):
be thinking also, like, all right, well a huge shell
sounds like too much, Like you don't need to complete
the shell, right if if you don't need thirty three
trillion times our energy, what if you just build a
partial shell, right, Like, I mean, that's basically every solar panel, right,
the one you have in your roof right now is
a tiny little bit of a Dicen sphere, right, It's
a tiny little license sphere element. So you might think
(21:52):
we don't have to go all the way. It's not
like a you have just a few little solar panels,
or you have the whole thing. You might just build
you know, part of a shell, like half a shell,
or just a ring of the shell or a patch
of the shell. Yeah. Yeah, like a good middle ground
is like a ring. And you can imagine putting them
like in Earth orbit, right, so they're all in the
same orbit, so they don't bump around each other. You
(22:15):
got a bunch of like really big solar panels in
Earth orbit gathering all this energy um and and sending
it back to Earth. But you know you were you
were saying earlier, like and then you just put out
a big cable. That's actually kind of a tricky problem,
Like how do you get this energy and bring it
back to Earth? I don't know, you can't. You can
just run an extension cord. Yeah, you need a whole
(22:38):
lot of yadda extension chords. Um yea yeat a mile.
Now you need some sort of wireless energy transfer, which
is pretty tricky. I mean, we know how to do this,
but it's not it's not that easy. Basically, it's lasers,
right for long distance energy transfer. The only way we
know how to do it is lasers. So so you're saying,
let's build a giant laser out into base and pointed
(23:01):
at the Earth and shoot and point out at the Earth. Exactly.
It's like um or you can think about more like
a magnifying glass. Like basically it's like take the Sun's
rays and focus them on the Earth, right, you know,
so we're basically like you know how you take a
magnifying glass when you're a kid and like fried little bugs.
We're basically doing that to ourselves. So it's that's pretty dangerous, right.
(23:22):
You need some sort of way to absorb that energy
here on Earth in a safe way, and you know,
there's a lot of things to figure out, but as usual,
we can just leave that to the engineers. Okay, So
let's see you're saying, it's kind of an alternative to
what if you just cover like the Sahara Desert. Wouldn't
(23:43):
that set us up for the next billion years or
something that would set us up for a while. Yeah.
I think there are people who own the Sahara Desert though,
so they might have something to say about that. Um
they can move to Delaware. You were just solve some
problems all over the place Man Global Solutions by or
hit chand Um. So we we definitely do not need
this any time in the near future, Like like we
(24:05):
if we invested in solar power, we would be set
up for a while. Oh, I see you're saying we
don't need it, but maybe aliens needed. Well I'm saying
we don't need it now, but like, let's think big, right,
Let's think about like what is humanity needed a thousand years,
in a million years. Let's if you're gonna build this thing,
you got to start thinking about it now so you
can figure this stuff out. And it's always fun to
think aspirationally, like could we build this? You know, is
(24:28):
it possible? What technology would you need? Because often that
spurs ideas, right, people like m I wonder if you
could transfer laser from an orbiting ring of solar panels
to the Earth. How would you do that? And then
they get interested. Then they come up with some invention
which makes, you know, for better Hamburgers or something. But
a lot of cool stuff comes out of just like
thinking aspirationally. I say, you're saying, like, what if in
(24:50):
a thousand years there are thirty three trillion yodda people
in on Earth? And we need all that energy. Maybe
we should think about these kind of crazy he is
in advance, Yeah, exactly, before we have covered Delaware. We
covered the Sahara. It's not enough. Yeah, so you could
do the whole sphere, which seems a little crazy because
you need all this material. You could do a ring
(25:12):
right of orbiting orbiting solar panels. That's sort of um,
you know, intermediate, but there's also a lot of other purchase,
Like you could have a few rings, right, you have
like different rings at different radius or you know, orbiting
different directions or something they have to think about, you know,
collisions and shadows and stuff like that. But that kind
of stuff is pretty practical, isn't that a famous science
(25:33):
ficture novel like the ring idea where a ring around
the Earth? No ring world. The Hillary niven Um had
this idea of a ring world. I don't know if
he had a son in the middle of it or not,
but yeah, definitely you could build a ring and you
could be spinning, you know, so you could live on
it that kind of thing. Um. Okay, so that's one idea. Ring.
You can also do like a patch, right, or like
(25:54):
small patches. Yeah, exactly, you have these small patches, and
some people are thinking about the idea of uh, they're
not satellites. They're called stat heights because they don't move,
But they're basically just big floating patches of solar panel
and they they avoid um flow falling into the sun
because they partially absorbed the Sun's energy. That's where you
(26:15):
get the energy for the solar panel, but they also
partially reflect it. Right, think about what happens when you
reflect energy. Basically you're getting a push, right If A
if a photon comes and bounces off of you, then
you're getting a little push from that photon. So if
a if a big solar panel is half reflective and
half absorbent, then half the energy goes into you know,
(26:37):
electricity or whatever, and half of it keeps the solar
panel from falling into the sun. So these things could
basically like float on the solar wind um, which I
think is pretty cool. There's something beautiful about about all
these like huge super thin solar panels out there floating
on the solar wind um. Half half the energy keeping
them a light, and half of them the energy keeping
(26:58):
our televisions on. They're not fling around the Earth they're
just floating out in space and we would kind of
swing by them every year. Yeah, exactly exactly, and they
would be stationary with respect to the Sun. Right, they
wouldn't be orbiting the way we are. Um. And that
would be pretty cool something something really cool about that, um. Right.
And I think the thing that God Freeman Dyson thinking
about this is if aliens were doing this, how could
(27:21):
we spott it? How could we tell if somebody was
doing this? And initially you think, well, if they build
a whole sphere, then they're blocking out their sun. We
wouldn't even know their son exists, right, So how would
we even know anybody is there? There could be out
there tons of stars covered up in these days, in spheres.
I mean, I'm sure they call it something different unless
(27:42):
Freeman Dyson is an alien, which would explain as cool
is but um, you're right, like, there could be stars
out that there are covered up by alien civilizations. We
just don't know it because we can't see them. Yeah.
So he actually had a cool idea. He said, all right,
if you build these things, it will block out the
light of the Sun. But if it's made of matter
and it's absorbing the energy, of their sons. Then it's
(28:04):
gonna glow, it's gonna get hot, and it's going to
give off infrared radiation. So you won't see the stars
the way you normally would, you know, in the visible
spectrum and all that stuff, but you would see sort
of a black patch of sky plus a bunch of
infrared radiation, which shows you that there's something hot there. No, really,
(28:24):
you would attribute that to an alien civilization building a
shell the size side a giant shell around this area,
and not just some like hot rock or well, how
do you get a hot rock? How do you get
something out in the middle of space, not next to
a star that's warm? Right? Are there stars that are
like basically like cinders kind of? Yeah? There are some. Yeah,
(28:45):
Well this is the point of his paper. He's like,
how could you see this? And he had the idea like,
let's look for infrared radiation. And I'm sure you know
reviewer number two had your reaction no, come on, um,
But he talked in the paper about like other things
that might mimic the signal and how you could tell, etcetera. Um,
but it's a good idea, right, Like, how else could
(29:06):
you spot these things unless you saw them building it. Right,
Unless you watch them building, you could see the star
like winking out year by year as they're constructing this thing.
That would be super awesome. But wouldn't it take them
like hundreds of years to build it? Right? I mean
even an advantage. We're talking about hypothetical super advanced aliens.
I could say anything. Right, maybe they spend like a
(29:28):
million years building it and then it's just like unfolds
in one year or something. Right, who knows just as
we're looking at their star. Yes, you'd have to be
super lucky. Right, So I think either you're super lucky
because you're seeing them build it, or you see these
things radiated. And people have done this. People have like
looked out in the night sky and said, are there
(29:49):
places where all we see is infrared emission? Right? And
and um, so people did this third way and they
found seventeen candidates, seven team candidates, and um most of
them they were able to explain due to other astronomical things.
You know, it's a dead star, wars, it's this, or
is that? But there were four candidates. I looked at
(30:09):
the paper and they described in this way. And I
have to quote it directly because I've never seen this
in a scientific paper where they say that four of
these candidates have been named quote amusing but still questionable,
which means like what people call me, I mean they
feel so connected to the to the universe. Now, yeah,
I mean tells you what scientists find funny. But there
(30:31):
is something hilarious about like finding things out there and
not really understanding them, and like what is going on
out there in space? And the thing I love about
looking at in space is that every time you do
it you find something weird. Is you're always surprised. There's
always something weird out there. What do you think they
meant by amusing but still questionable. I think they meant
we can't rule out alien megastructure. And that's what's amusing
(30:54):
about it, right, Like it makes you seriously consider that,
you know, And if you're an astronomer, we don't know
what's amusing in the sense of like it makes you think,
it makes you muse about it, or it makes you hope.
You know, astronomers always have to keep in mind that
they might that today might be the day they discover
alien civilizations. Right, it's a it's a low, it's low
(31:16):
on the list, right, they gotta rule out a thousand
other things first. But one day I think we will
discover alien civilizations, right, and somebody will be it will
be today for somebody, It'll be right now for somebody,
and so you always got to keep that in mind. Right, Wow,
all right, let's get into it. But let's take a
quick break first. Okay. So Dyson's fears are this idea
(31:50):
that you can surround the whole Sun with some kind
of structure to capture all of its energy. And Dyson
proposed this as a way to maybe detect alien civilizations.
That's right, And he said, let's look for let's look
for stars that might be blocked by alien megastructures. And
so you're saying that we actually maybe found one of
these stars. Yes, a couple of years ago, there are
(32:13):
astronomers that were looking at stars and they saw this
one and they were watching it, and the light from
it did this weird thing. It wasn't constant, right, most stars,
the life from this constant. I mean you see a
little bit of twinkling from the dust between us and them,
but mostly the lights pretty constant. And astronomers look at
these stars sometimes to see if they can spot planets
(32:34):
in those solar systems, and the way they do it
is they look to see if the planet goes in
front of the star, and if that happens, if you
see a little dip and how bright the star is,
because it's basically a little mini eclipse, but that dip
is like, you know, one percent maximum, Like if you
were watching our Sun from really far away and Jupiter
went in front of the Sun, the Sun's brightness would
dip like one percent. So that's the kind of thing
(32:56):
people are doing. They're watching stars looking to see if
they dip. And then they found this star and they
saw a dip not one percent, not two, but like
twenty percent, like a huge fraction of the star's brightness
just went away. But then it came back, and then
it went a way again, and then it came back
and then like it's not regular, right, it's not like
(33:20):
you know, if if a planet is orbiting a star
and blocking it, then it's regular. And you can use
that to figure out like how quickly does the planet
orbit the star? Right, what is the period of it?
And they watch it um for many periods and they
figure these things out. You can measure the mass the planets.
It's really awesome. But there was no pattern here, right,
There was like dips and then days would go by
when it would be bright again, and then more dips
(33:41):
would come, and then it was like two years when
there were no dips, and then another huge dip came,
and so people were like, what is going on with
the brightness of this star? What is this? And so
immediately that little voice in everybody's head was like, could
this be Aliens? Aliens? Could this be it? Could we
be watching an alien megastructure be constructed? Really? That was
(34:03):
the first thing that came to people's mind. Of course,
was of course it was anybody anything strange, You're like, Aliens,
that's right, Aliens. I've never seen a car like that before. Aliens?
What is this fruit called? Aliens? How did you do
that magic trick? Card trick? Aliens? Exactly? How can one
(34:25):
man eat so many bananas? Aliens? Aliens? Yes, it's always
on our minds, right, And of course the first thing
they did it's like, all right, let's kind of try
to come up with other explanations. What else could explain this?
And so they went through a long list of reasons
to explain it. But it's really unusual. We have not
seen another star like this. It's not like you see
this all the time. And so you have a bunch
of ready explanations, right, people have to really stretch their
(34:47):
minds to imagine how you could block like twenty percent
of the light of a star and not be an
alien megastructure. How do you know it was one star
and not like two stars. I think they know the
star pretty well. I mean you can you can tell
the difference between one star and two stars. I mean
two stars would orbit each other. Um, I think you
could resolve them. But I don't know. It doesn't matter.
I don't know me. Um. But what they think, hey,
(35:10):
maybe let's consider other all turn out as besides then,
what they did is they looked. They did something really
interesting is they went back through historical measurements and they said,
you know, people have been taking pictures the night sky
for decades and decades, and not all of his digital
(35:30):
and not all of his as good as recent data,
but we have pictures of lots of the night sky
going back like a century. So what they did is
they went back and they looked for pictures to this
star over the last hundred years, and what they found
is that over the last hundred years, this star has
been gradually fading, like getting less bright, yeah less right,
Like it's twenty percent less bright than it was a
(35:52):
hundred years ago, but it's steadily Yeah. Well, we don't
have really constant data over the last hundred years, right,
we have like snapshot and then the snapshot in the
snapshot in the snapshot. Recently, because we've noticed the stars weird,
people have been watching the star a lot more and
so they've been seeing a lot more of these dips
and trying to understand them. Um. But the dips can
be very dramatic and they're not regular, um, and it's
(36:15):
kind of hard to explain, all right, So um, so
you're thinking it could be aliens, it could be alien.
How how would alien? What would aliens be doing? You're
like just flipping the switch on and off kind of
like my kids do know they would be building a
dicen sphere, right, Maybe why would go on and off?
Maybe they're partially maybe they're part way done with constructing
(36:35):
their dicensphere, right, And what we're seeing is like orbiting
the Sun and blocking it. Rights, it's irregular. Over the
last hundred years they've been building it up, and now
you're saying it's might be operational and it's rotating and
that causes these dips. Yeah, exactly. And when the dicensphere
is between us and their star is when the is
when the when the light from that sun gets dimmer.
(36:58):
It's it's hard to have. It's hard to come up
with other explanations for irregular dips in the light. And
so let's go through them. Though, because it's um in
the end, people think it's probably not aliens, which is
you know, the story of every scientific discovery ever um.
But there's not really one convincing explanation. Okay, so what
are the possibilities here? The leading possibilities are that it's
(37:21):
a it's like a lot of dust, like a huge
cloud of dust. And but it's not regular. It's not
like our asteroid belt where like the asteroids are sprinkled
all the way around the Sun. It's some like asymmetrical
cloud of dust. I mean like a patchy like a
patchy clumpy. Yeah, it's like spread up. You know what
you need in that case, then you need a dice
(37:42):
and vacuum cleaner. Fear somebody clean up with it's a mess.
Got the best section the code dice and dot com
slash to anyone. Exactly. It's like mega made from spaceballs.
Somebody's cleaning up that system. Um. Yeah, so like maybe
(38:02):
like a huge patch of dust. And what they did
is they looked at the light from the star and
they noticed that the light from the star is not
dimmed equally across all wavelengths. Right. Remember light has different
wavelengths from the reddish to the bluish and the invisible
wavelengths as well. It doesn't dip the same at all
frequencies of light. Yeah, and you know, one the basic
(38:25):
idea that Dyson had was let's look for light. Let's
look for stars that are basically only emitting in the infrared,
because that's what a huge mega structure would emit. But
the direction of the spectrum which light is absorbed in
which light is coming out, suggests that it's dust. It
looks like the kind of thing you would get if
there was a big dust cloud, would maybe like pockets
(38:46):
where the sun shines through. Yeah, exactly, And that's what
the are. And so maybe what we're seeing is basically
the profile of this dust cloud. But that's not really
a satisfying explanation, because like where does this dust cloud
come from? You know, most stars don't have dust clouds
around them for several reasons, like especially old stars like
young stars who's like just been formed, that it's being
(39:06):
formed inside a huge cloud of gas and dust. Then, yeah,
you expect a lot of um of gas and dust.
So like stellar nurs certainly, let me guess, Let me guess, Daniel,
you think it could be Aliens? I always random guess
to what physicist might think it is Aliens. Well, you're
both right and wrong, like one possibility is. So the
point is you don't get dust around old stars usually, right,
(39:30):
because that dust gathers together and forms planets or or
even just gets blown away by the solar radiation. Right,
Like solar radiation pushes dust out of these systems. So
maybe a planet blew up, right, maybe it's Aliens and
they had a huge war and like one of them
blew up the other one's planet, And what we're looking
at is like planetary debris or something. What that would
(39:51):
be super awesome. Right from this fully operational battle station,
you're seeing the remnants of the Death Star. Yeah, but
but before people get too excited about that one. That
one doesn't really hold together because in that case, you
would see it would be like warm, right, because like
the planet blows up, you got these big blobs of
glowing matter um, and it would glow in the infrared.
(40:13):
But we don't see that. So it's consistent with cold
dust um, which is kind of hard to explain, Like
we don't understand how you can get this rear, irregular
blob cold dust around the star. What if it was
a planet destroyed by like a cold freeze ray aliens?
What is that superhero that that shoots freeze rays? Yeah, yeah,
(40:34):
ice Man, the Ice Man. Yeah exactly. Ice Man came
and froze their planet and it's shattered into a bunch
of fruit. Might as well offer that as an explanation.
I see. So you're scoffing on my explanation of aliens,
and but instead as a more likely explanation, you're suggesting
the Iceman came and froze. Yeah, that's what I always
(40:55):
go to first, superheroes. You know that's true. I guess
the cartoon is would go to superheroes first as an explanation. Um,
I'm just saying I think I think I should get
a physics degree. You know, I have a stow upon
you from Daniel and Jorge University, an honorary PhD in
superhero physics. Oh man, that should be a great product
for a store. And you know how how much value
(41:18):
I put in honorary PhDs. That's why you have three
of them. That's why I have exactly zero of them. Um.
And so another explanation, another idea is that maybe it's
just a really weird star. Maybe there's no dust there.
Maybe the star is just like doing something weird inside
of it, Like it's not glowing constantly as something weird
going on inside. It's like flickering, you know, it's not
(41:40):
burning consistently, but there's something inside it's like absorbing at
the energy, or it's sputtering a little bit. Um an
unstable star. Yeah, yeah, some some kind of weird process
that gives variable light. But the problem with all these
explanations is that it's a big universe and we've looked
at a lot of stars and we've never seen anything
like this. But for and so, any process you propose
(42:03):
to explain this have to also explain why it's only
happening to this star. And not to any of the
other zillions and gazillions of yadas and yadas of stars
that we've seen, right, Right, Like, if it's a cluster
of comets or of planet that blew up like you
would expect, if it's not totally impossible, that would be
happening dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions of times
(42:24):
we've seen other ones. So that's the real puzzle. That's
what makes this star interesting is that it really does
seem unique, right, So maybe we're seeing something really really unusual, right,
that could happen um or maybe it's aliens because you're
seeing we're seeing we can see like billions and trillions
of stars, right, that's just one of them that's doing
something weird. Yeah, well, our soulars, our galaxy has you know,
(42:46):
hundreds of billions of stars. That's a lot, and so
we can't see all of them, of course, but yeah,
we've observed a lot of them and we've never seen
anything like this, So it's pretty weird for one star
to stand out in the galaxy. Wow, So it could
be an alien license fear, yeah, or could be the
you know, the villain's layer for Iceman. Well, you know
(43:08):
Ice alien exactly. Yeah, all right, so that answers the
question what is the dicens fear? And hopefully people out
there founded amusing but not questionable. That's right. And maybe
someday we will build a dicense fhere and aliens far
far away, we'll be having a podcast talking about could
(43:29):
we see if they had built a dicense fhere around
their son um? You know, maybe humanity will be able
to accomplish these great enormous infrastructure projects and work together
and not just to ourselves. It makes me hopeful to
think that one day we could we could build such
a vast projects and have that much energy at our fingertips. Yeah,
that would be cool, and it would spare dela like
(43:50):
a refrigerator. So everybody in Delaware, no need to pack
up your bags anytime soon. We're not taking over. That's right.
Rest easy, Delaware, Sleep well tonight another day when we
didn't find aliens. All right, Thanks for joining us. I
hope you guys enjoyed that. We'll see you next time.
Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question
(44:20):
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's
one Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and
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
(44:43):
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, or hey, what do you think is the most
impressive thing humanity has ever built? It's a pretty good question.
Let me think about it for a second. I think
I think I would have to say probably the most
impressive human achievement is the refrigerator. Obviously, I mean the
refuge every day. I couldn't live with that without it.
(00:28):
It's pretty awesome. That's a cool answer. I was sort
of thinking things like, you know, the Great Wall, or
the Golden gate Bridge or the Birge Khalifa, you know,
stuff that would inspire all you know, things that like
last for generations. Well, you know, there is still in
my fridge that's been there four generations. I don't know.
I look at these projects sometimes and I think, you know,
(00:51):
humanity can really accomplish great things when we work together.
It's really sort of impressive what we can pull off,
and we we all work together. Yeah, well, I don't know.
I mean I once ate everything in my fridge all
by myself. I mean I didn't meet the rest of
humanity for that. Yeah, well, you can accomplish great things
by yourself. But it makes me wonder sometimes like what
(01:11):
future humans will build, Like what are the great what's
the Great Wall of the twenty one century. You know
what kind of achievements will we what kind of monuments
will we leave behind for future humans? The Great Refrigerator
of China. That's right, a huge refrigerator in space that
you can see from space, that you can see from
space that it needs to be cleaned. Hi, I'm poor.
(01:49):
I'm the cartoonists behind the comics are piled Higher and
Deeper or PhD comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist.
And I smash protons together at the Large Hagon Collider
to try to figure out what the universe is made
out of. And together we wrote a book called We
Have No Idea, which explores all the things we don't
know about the universe. And right now you're listening to
our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production
(02:12):
of I Heart Radio, in which we try to mix
accessible science with a huge quantity of low quality jokes.
What do you mean? Are you saying my jokes are
low quality or no? I'm saying we spray a huge
number of jokes and our editor just picks out the
ones that are best to our listeners. Think we're funny, Yeah,
are awesome editor exactly our producer who we should give
(02:32):
a shout out to for sure, Taylor, thank you so
much for making us funny. Thank you for making us
sound funny. And speaking of human achievements, today's podcast is
all about monumental constructions and accomplishments. What can civilizations do
when they get together and build something enormous? Yeah? What
can humans? What are humans capable of making? Like, what
are the limits of our ingenuity and resources and our
(02:55):
ability to work together? That's right, because you know, there
are a lot of problems right in the world, like
a global energy consumption and global warming, and that's right,
and some of those are being tackled, right, like we're
developing solar power so that we can get energy just
from the sun and not burn fossil fuels and to
meet the global energy demands. Right, But if you extrapolate
(03:16):
forward and you think, like, what is humanity gonna need?
Our global energy consumption is just increasing and it seems
unlikely unless we have some cataclysmic event in our civilization
that that's ever going to turn around. So if you
project forward, you might wonder, like, how is humanity going
to meet its energy needs in the future. If we
don't invent some fantastic new form of fusion, right, what
(03:37):
can we do to to rapidly increase the amount of
energy we have accessible? And that's the question two of
our listeners had, and so they sent us questions via
Twitter and via email. That's right. So we owe a
shout out to Evertenson and to Steve Davis for requesting
this topic. So today on the podcast we'll be covering
the topic what is a dycen sphere? That's right? Yeah,
(04:03):
so the dycen sphere? Daniel, Um, So this is the
idea that you know, we could maybe build something that
can really take advantage of all that amazing power that's
coming out of the sun. Right. That's right. If you
think about like grabbing solar power and you think, well,
we might need a huge amount of it for your
first instinct is like, let's just put a bunch of
solar panels in the desert, right, Let's just like build
(04:25):
solar panel after solar panel. After all, nobody's really using
that land. Is a lot of sun out there, right.
But as humanity gets more and more greedy about energy,
you might think, like is there enough room on Earth
to put enough solar panels, right, So is that true? Like?
What if we covered all of the Sharad Desert in
solar panels, would that not be enough? I think that
would be enough today. Like actually, I think today all
(04:48):
you need to do is cover like Delaware with solar
panels and you'd have enough energy to power the entire
United States or maybe even the Earth. What really, yeah, exactly,
solar pan So you're just ready to Delaware, Delaware. That's
where all those fake companies are set up, aren't they. Um,
(05:09):
we probably have listeners in Delaware, so you might want
to check with them before you. They might appreciate the shade,
you know, being relocated. Sorry, um all we have authority
here from J. H. Cham a podcast host, or we're
gonna raise your house and put solar pants emin eminent
podcast main being moved out of Delaware. Well, I just
(05:31):
check the numbers, and it turns out Delaware is actually
a bit too small. I think you need to add
Maryland to hope. That's okay with Maryland. No, But the
point is that I think today human civilization can survive
using energy captured by a pretty small fraction to the
Earth's surface. But imagine in the future. Right, what if
we want to build a huge civilization, what we want
(05:52):
to construct enormous things? We want to send ships across
the stars. We're gonna need incredible amounts of energy and
you know, not gonna be able to burn cold to
do that, and we're not going to be able to
necessarily cover the Earth and solar panels, and so people
started thinking big. People started thinking what's the limit, Like,
what's the maximum number of solar panel solar panels you
(06:12):
can make? What's the biggest solar panel you can build? Yes? Exactly?
And where would you put it? Okay, so this is
where the question of what is the Dyson's fear comes from? Exactly?
This is a thought a thought experiment by Freeman Dyson,
a famous physicist, to think about what is the biggest
solar panel? Is it possible? Could we build one? How
would you do it? And could we see if other
(06:34):
civilizations are doing it? Wow? That's amazing? All right? So we,
as usual, we're wondering how many of you out there
actually knew what a Dyson's fear was Like If someone
approachedate on the street and ask you, hey, have you
seen any dicens fears? Or hey, do you know what
it is? Or would you contribute ten dollars towards building
a Dicen sphere um. So, as usual, Daniel went out
into the streets and ask people randomly out there if
(06:56):
they knew what a Dyson's fear was. Yeah, here's what
people had to say. Have you ever heard of a
thing called a Dyson sphere? I know it in the
context of looking for other life on other planets, because
it's basically like a ring that you can build around
a star to harness its light for energy. You look
(07:17):
at the light patterns. If something interferes with the patterns
and like in a certain way, it can lead to
the assumption that maybe there's a Dicen sphere around it.
There's something awesome. Okay, yeah, it's this gigantic thing that
you've put around like a solar system and then you
can harness all the energy. I heard of it. I
(07:39):
don't know what it is, all right, So pretty much
no across the board. Well, I would say we got
our our typical set of binary responses, a bunch of news.
I got a bunch of weird looks too, people like
is you're making this up? Like is that a thing?
Really is this like a test? You know, I wonder
how many people have thought you were talking about the
(07:59):
dice and vacuum cleaner. That thing really sucks. Um No,
I think I think it was like people thought maybe
it was a control question, like I was making things up,
like have you ever heard of the you know, um
smith gabakabui or whatever, And because it was like a
trick question, like to see if you if you try
(08:20):
to make up some funny things. Yeah, which actually gives
me the idea I should do that, right, We should
have a trick question and see if people spout off. Um,
you know, Oh yes, I told I saw a Nova
episode about that, and it's in balls, you know, electrophons
and whatever. What would it be about? Let's be dark?
Should be like dark, a dark black hole about that?
(08:40):
Oh you know what, that's actually really cool. And people
are written and asking whether you can have a black
hole made of dark matter, which is a really awesome question,
which we should talk about in a different episode. Um,
but an anti dark matter black hole? Dark matter black hole? Yeah,
isn't that a cool idea? An anti dark matter black hole?
Oh well, we don't know if dark matter has anti particles.
(09:00):
We don't even know dark matter is made of particles,
so we don't know if there is such a thing
as anti dark matter. But we know there is dark matter,
and we know there are black holes. So people have
this tendency to like ram them together anyway, So nobody
thought you'd meant the vacuum cleaner because you know the
Dyson vacuum cleaners. They are known for having this like
sphere out front that that you used to pivot and
(09:21):
to roll around and like it twist the head of
the vacuum cleaner as you tilt and turn. Did you
get some like check from Dicing company? Because I didn't
get one. I don't understand why you're promoting the Dicing
vacum Maybe if you used to link if you used
to link Dyson slash or he got a check slash
(09:42):
and didn't share it with Daniel. Well, um, let's break
it down for people. Then what what is the Dyson's fear?
So the dycens vary is basically the idea of maximal
solar panels. Right, you want to build solar panels, you
cover the earth. The Earth captures a tiny fraction of
the energy from the sun. Right, It's it's like a tiny,
(10:04):
tiny fraction right like to the Sun, the Earth just
looks like a little marble way out there in space exactly,
and so it's it's barely catching any of its rays exactly.
So imagine a spear, and the radius of the sphere
is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Right. So,
now imagine a sphere that's basically the size of the
Earth's orbit. It's like a ball centered on the Sun
(10:25):
that reaches all the way to Earth exactly, and it's
made out of what well, I mean, just imagine the
spear for now geometrically, and think about what fraction of
that sphere is covered by the Earth. Right, this is
the point you're making before. It's like a tiny dot.
Most of the Sun's energy just gets rated out into space,
right it. Maybe it hits a Jupiter or Saturn, but
the vast majority of it just gets shot out into space. Right.
(10:49):
So the idea is, if you really want to go big,
if you want to build a huge project, you know,
then could you build solar panels that capture a significant
fraction or even dare I say, all of the Sun's energy? Right? All? Wow,
So it's like a giant solar panel that surrounds the
(11:09):
sun completely. Yeah, I mean, like, let's do with the
thought experiment. Let's think as big as possible. How much
energy would that be? Um, you know, how would you
do it? And could you tell if other people had
done it? And so this is the origin of it.
Freeman Dyson thought about this and he wrote a paper
about it, and he thought, could you build one of
these things? And if another civilization around another star had
(11:31):
done this, could we tell and could we use that
to find alien civilizations? This is like a legit physics paper.
This is a a legit physics paper is published in Science,
one of the top journals, and really yeah, And the
thing I love about that is about it is that
it's visionary. It's like, what would we do in a
thousand years, what would we do in a million years?
And could we use those ideas if we could predict them,
(11:53):
could we use those ideas to discover super advanced alien civilizations?
Like let's not look for other civilizations at the same
level as us. Let's look for civilizations that are like
a million years or a billion years ahead of us
and trying to anticipate what they would do and how
we would spot them. So I love that kind of
visionary thinking, like if if you use your imagination wildly,
(12:14):
where could humans go? And then that we could maybe
see or get evidence of from other civilizations out in
the universe. Yes, exactly right, exactly like trying to think
of what the grown ups they're doing, because we're basically kids.
You know, we are pretty new to this whole universe.
We've been intelligent for you know, maybe tens of thousands
(12:35):
of years. We've been technological for decades, right, we've been
communicating for you know, less than that, And so we
are brand new on the universe stage. And there may
be a pimples voices cracking if we're not even there. Man,
we're not a puberty. We're growing hair and from places. No,
we are still pooping our pants. Um, from the civilization
(12:58):
point of view, like literally mean literally and here we're
filling it with pop. We are pooping the bed, that's true. Um.
And so you know, you might ask like what are
the growing ups doing? And the same way it's hard
for kids to anticipate, like what is an adult life like?
And how would you tell what's going on? It might
be hard for us to predict what super advanced civilizations
(13:21):
would do and how they would live and how they
would get energy. So that was the idea of Freeman Dyson.
He thought, can we spot other stars being wrapped by
their feet by these spheres? Um to what kind of
physics is was he? Oh, he's famous for being really broad.
He's like, he's done all sorts of physics. I think
he even did some chemistry. Um, he did quantum mechanics.
He's thought about consciousness. He's one of these modern day
(13:43):
you know, renaissance men who have like thought endabbled in
all sorts of different kinds of physics. I wonder if
your name affixed that, you know, like, if you go
around with the name Freeman Dyson, is it just the
expectation that you really amazing personality? What that you only
have that expectation because there's a guy in the him
that who has an amazing hum But that's what I mean.
It's like he's got the perfect name to be a
(14:05):
renaissance man. It's the other direction. Man, he was a
renaissance man, and now therefore his name is connected with
being a renaissance man. It doesn't work the other way.
It's not like you're born He's like the original cool guy.
It's not like they're like Galileo that sounds like could
be a great scientist. Yeah, No, I think it's the
other direction. Um, But he does have sort of a
(14:25):
mystical name. I always thought his name, you know, I
always connected his name with like the Freemasons, you know,
Freeman Dison. He sounds like he's probably the member of
a secret society somewhere. Yeah, like cool people who are
trying to build names, trying to build mega structures. Even
that word is fun to say, right, mega structures. So
he had this idea, he thought, hey, what could we
(14:46):
possibly what could have aliens civilization much more advanced than us.
What could they possibly be doing that we could maybe detect?
And he had the idea that maybe they figured out
a way to capture all of a sun energy, like
building something basically like wrapping up a sun. Yeah, exactly.
And that's pretty hard to do. I mean imagine, as
(15:08):
you were saying before, that you had to build something
that size, right, Like the radius of it is millions
of miles, right, So you're gonna construct something that wraps
the whole Sun at like the distance from the Earth
to the Sun and grabs all that energy. I mean,
the size of it is is boggling like um, the
inside of that sphere did a few calculations, inside of
(15:30):
that sphere would have the surface area of five hundred
and fifty million earths. Wow, which sounds doable. Maybe, I
don't know. It's it's hard to build something that big.
I mean, in order to build something that big, you
need stuff, right, you need materials, You need like, you know, matter,
And if you're gonna build it, you need to basically
(15:51):
use all of the matter in Jupiter and Saturn and
the asteroid belt. You use up like all the stuff
in the Solar system just to build that shell. Like
it's just barely enough stuff to build a shell all
the way around the Sun. But why does it need
to be the radius of where the Earth is? Couldn't
you just make it smaller and be more convenient to
(16:11):
make make it the radius of what's the mercury the
closest one, you know, as small as sphere around the
Sun and then just have like a cable running to
us to Earth. Yeah, you have to balance, right, the
closing extension cord extend. The closer you get to the Sun, um,
the hotter things get and things melt and it's harder
(16:32):
to work, you know, So you want to balance there.
You don't want you don't want to be like immediately
surrounding the Sun. You don't want to be really far
away because that's to be bigger um between tents to
build something that close to the Sun. Yeah. The other
advantage if you built it at the radius of the
Earth is then you'd have an awesome livable surface, right,
you people could live on the inside of that sphere,
(16:53):
Like you could put dirt down and plant crops and
you'd be at the be in the habitable zone. Right,
you'd be the right distance for the Sun to have
the right temperature. Oh, you build it at the rates
of this Earth and where the Earth is, then really
it could be like um, sunny Florida all year round exactly.
I mean, let's all around the solar system. Yes, let's
(17:15):
think big. Let's think like, you know, we're gonna do this,
what would be the best thing to do, Like humanity
is gonna be huge and having a huge amount of energy. Um,
then let's like, let's prepare for the future of humanity
and build five hundred and fifty million times the land
of the Earth. The amount of energy to this thing
with capture is just ridiculous. Like if you captured all
(17:36):
of the energy of the Sun every year. There's this
number which is pretty hard to understand. It's three hundred
and eighty four yatta watts, right, what's being stive energy
and yatta being at a lot of what a whole
lot of exactly? No, it's um three point eight times
(17:56):
ten to the twenty six watts, right, Like, it's just
a ridicul list number. So I thought, well, let's explain
in terms of how much energy humanity currently uses. Right,
So currently the power use of humanity is one thirty
three trillion the energy put out by the sun WoT
three thousand billion times how much we use right now? Yeah,
(18:20):
so we don't really need this thing today or tomorrow
or next year. Right. This is the kind of thing
that would that would support a civilization with enormous energy consumption.
You know, the kind of thing where you're like building
huge spaceships and you're pushing them to other star systems
with like lasers, you know, like light sales that capture
laser beams, Like, you would have an incredible amount of
(18:41):
energy if you could really capture all of the energy
output of the Sun. Okay, I have a lot of questions,
but first let's take a quick break, all right, So
(19:01):
that's a dicense fear. It's this idea that you can
maybe build a shell around the Sun and capture all
of the energy that's coming out of it. And you
would want to build it kind of far away from
the Sun because otherwise it would just melt. Uh. And
but it would be humongous. It would be bazillion times
the surface of the Earth. Would take a lot of
(19:22):
stuff to to build that shell. You take a lot
of stuff. It would be enormous. And there's a lot
of other problems, Like problem number one is you'd have
to be really strong. I mean, this thing is going
to have a huge amount of weight on it, right, yeah,
like a and and just like it would get toussled around,
right because it would have to hold together. Yeah, and
it doesn't. You wouldn't also have any gravity, right, like
the gravity we experienced from walking around on Earth comes
(19:45):
from Earth. But if you're if you build a huge
shell the size of the Earth radius and and build
it around the Sun, then it's balanced gravitationally, right, you
don't feel it doesn't feel the Sun's gravity. There's no
net gravitational force on it for the Sun, so it'd
be sort of like floating around the Sun, nothing to
keep it in place, which means it could like drift,
(20:06):
you know, and like one side of it could get
too close and maybe bump into the Sun or something.
It would be pretty hard to maintain. You need like
jets on it to keep it in the right place.
I think an interesting idea is that just the idea
that you can envelop a sun, right like it, you know,
your intuition. My intuition tells me that if you cover
it up the Sun it would snuff out, but not
(20:28):
so right like you could. The Sun doesn't need any feedback, right,
it's just pumping that energy out. It doesn't need It
doesn't need or care, doesn't need to know or care
about what happens to the photons and protons that it's
flying out. Yeah right, that's what I mean. Like you
could you could capture a sun literally, yeah exactly, and
it would burn happily inside your you're pumping out energy,
(20:50):
yeah exactly. And you know, that's basically what we want
to do here on Earth. On a much smaller scale,
I mean that's fusion, right. Fusion says, build a little plasma,
make it really hot, have it burned, and have a
pump out radiation which we then capture. That's energy. Um,
So we want to do that, and you know, we
want to do that in a miniature way on Earth
and a controlled way. But we basically have a huge
(21:11):
fusion furnace already and it's going pretty well and it's
not too far away. So some people say, let's just
capture that energy, right, Why have fusion here on Earth
when it's already going in the center of a whole
lot of you exactly, um, giant trillion size shell. That
sounds much easier. Yeah, and uh, and so you might
(21:32):
be thinking also, like, all right, well a huge shell
sounds like too much, Like you don't need to complete
the shell, right if if you don't need thirty three
trillion times our energy, what if you just build a
partial shell, right, Like, I mean, that's basically every solar panel, right,
the one you have in your roof right now is
a tiny little bit of a Dicen sphere, right, It's
a tiny little license sphere element. So you might think
(21:52):
we don't have to go all the way. It's not
like a you have just a few little solar panels,
or you have the whole thing. You might just build
you know, part of a shell, like half a shell,
or just a ring of the shell or a patch
of the shell. Yeah. Yeah, like a good middle ground
is like a ring. And you can imagine putting them
like in Earth orbit, right, so they're all in the
same orbit, so they don't bump around each other. You
(22:15):
got a bunch of like really big solar panels in
Earth orbit gathering all this energy um and and sending
it back to Earth. But you know you were you
were saying earlier, like and then you just put out
a big cable. That's actually kind of a tricky problem,
Like how do you get this energy and bring it
back to Earth? I don't know, you can't. You can
just run an extension cord. Yeah, you need a whole
(22:38):
lot of yadda extension chords. Um yea yeat a mile.
Now you need some sort of wireless energy transfer, which
is pretty tricky. I mean, we know how to do this,
but it's not it's not that easy. Basically, it's lasers,
right for long distance energy transfer. The only way we
know how to do it is lasers. So so you're saying,
let's build a giant laser out into base and pointed
(23:01):
at the Earth and shoot and point out at the Earth. Exactly.
It's like um or you can think about more like
a magnifying glass. Like basically it's like take the Sun's
rays and focus them on the Earth, right, you know,
so we're basically like you know how you take a
magnifying glass when you're a kid and like fried little bugs.
We're basically doing that to ourselves. So it's that's pretty dangerous, right.
(23:22):
You need some sort of way to absorb that energy
here on Earth in a safe way, and you know,
there's a lot of things to figure out, but as usual,
we can just leave that to the engineers. Okay, So
let's see you're saying, it's kind of an alternative to
what if you just cover like the Sahara Desert. Wouldn't
(23:43):
that set us up for the next billion years or
something that would set us up for a while. Yeah.
I think there are people who own the Sahara Desert though,
so they might have something to say about that. Um
they can move to Delaware. You were just solve some
problems all over the place Man Global Solutions by or
hit chand Um. So we we definitely do not need
this any time in the near future, Like like we
(24:05):
if we invested in solar power, we would be set
up for a while. Oh, I see you're saying we
don't need it, but maybe aliens needed. Well I'm saying
we don't need it now, but like, let's think big, right,
Let's think about like what is humanity needed a thousand years,
in a million years. Let's if you're gonna build this thing,
you got to start thinking about it now so you
can figure this stuff out. And it's always fun to
think aspirationally, like could we build this? You know, is
(24:28):
it possible? What technology would you need? Because often that
spurs ideas, right, people like m I wonder if you
could transfer laser from an orbiting ring of solar panels
to the Earth. How would you do that? And then
they get interested. Then they come up with some invention
which makes, you know, for better Hamburgers or something. But
a lot of cool stuff comes out of just like
thinking aspirationally. I say, you're saying, like, what if in
(24:50):
a thousand years there are thirty three trillion yodda people
in on Earth? And we need all that energy. Maybe
we should think about these kind of crazy he is
in advance, Yeah, exactly, before we have covered Delaware. We
covered the Sahara. It's not enough. Yeah, so you could
do the whole sphere, which seems a little crazy because
you need all this material. You could do a ring
(25:12):
right of orbiting orbiting solar panels. That's sort of um,
you know, intermediate, but there's also a lot of other purchase,
Like you could have a few rings, right, you have
like different rings at different radius or you know, orbiting
different directions or something they have to think about, you know,
collisions and shadows and stuff like that. But that kind
of stuff is pretty practical, isn't that a famous science
(25:33):
ficture novel like the ring idea where a ring around
the Earth? No ring world. The Hillary niven Um had
this idea of a ring world. I don't know if
he had a son in the middle of it or not,
but yeah, definitely you could build a ring and you
could be spinning, you know, so you could live on
it that kind of thing. Um. Okay, so that's one idea. Ring.
You can also do like a patch, right, or like
(25:54):
small patches. Yeah, exactly, you have these small patches, and
some people are thinking about the idea of uh, they're
not satellites. They're called stat heights because they don't move,
But they're basically just big floating patches of solar panel
and they they avoid um flow falling into the sun
because they partially absorbed the Sun's energy. That's where you
(26:15):
get the energy for the solar panel, but they also
partially reflect it. Right, think about what happens when you
reflect energy. Basically you're getting a push, right If A
if a photon comes and bounces off of you, then
you're getting a little push from that photon. So if
a if a big solar panel is half reflective and
half absorbent, then half the energy goes into you know,
(26:37):
electricity or whatever, and half of it keeps the solar
panel from falling into the sun. So these things could
basically like float on the solar wind um, which I
think is pretty cool. There's something beautiful about about all
these like huge super thin solar panels out there floating
on the solar wind um. Half half the energy keeping
them a light, and half of them the energy keeping
(26:58):
our televisions on. They're not fling around the Earth they're
just floating out in space and we would kind of
swing by them every year. Yeah, exactly exactly, and they
would be stationary with respect to the Sun. Right, they
wouldn't be orbiting the way we are. Um. And that
would be pretty cool something something really cool about that, um. Right.
And I think the thing that God Freeman Dyson thinking
about this is if aliens were doing this, how could
(27:21):
we spott it? How could we tell if somebody was
doing this? And initially you think, well, if they build
a whole sphere, then they're blocking out their sun. We
wouldn't even know their son exists, right, So how would
we even know anybody is there? There could be out
there tons of stars covered up in these days, in spheres.
I mean, I'm sure they call it something different unless
(27:42):
Freeman Dyson is an alien, which would explain as cool
is but um, you're right, like, there could be stars
out that there are covered up by alien civilizations. We
just don't know it because we can't see them. Yeah.
So he actually had a cool idea. He said, all right,
if you build these things, it will block out the
light of the Sun. But if it's made of matter
and it's absorbing the energy, of their sons. Then it's
(28:04):
gonna glow, it's gonna get hot, and it's going to
give off infrared radiation. So you won't see the stars
the way you normally would, you know, in the visible
spectrum and all that stuff, but you would see sort
of a black patch of sky plus a bunch of
infrared radiation, which shows you that there's something hot there. No, really,
(28:24):
you would attribute that to an alien civilization building a
shell the size side a giant shell around this area,
and not just some like hot rock or well, how
do you get a hot rock? How do you get
something out in the middle of space, not next to
a star that's warm? Right? Are there stars that are
like basically like cinders kind of? Yeah? There are some. Yeah,
(28:45):
Well this is the point of his paper. He's like,
how could you see this? And he had the idea like,
let's look for infrared radiation. And I'm sure you know
reviewer number two had your reaction no, come on, um,
But he talked in the paper about like other things
that might mimic the signal and how you could tell, etcetera. Um,
but it's a good idea, right, Like, how else could
(29:06):
you spot these things unless you saw them building it. Right,
Unless you watch them building, you could see the star
like winking out year by year as they're constructing this thing.
That would be super awesome. But wouldn't it take them
like hundreds of years to build it? Right? I mean
even an advantage. We're talking about hypothetical super advanced aliens.
I could say anything. Right, maybe they spend like a
(29:28):
million years building it and then it's just like unfolds
in one year or something. Right, who knows just as
we're looking at their star. Yes, you'd have to be
super lucky. Right, So I think either you're super lucky
because you're seeing them build it, or you see these
things radiated. And people have done this. People have like
looked out in the night sky and said, are there
(29:49):
places where all we see is infrared emission? Right? And
and um, so people did this third way and they
found seventeen candidates, seven team candidates, and um most of
them they were able to explain due to other astronomical things.
You know, it's a dead star, wars, it's this, or
is that? But there were four candidates. I looked at
(30:09):
the paper and they described in this way. And I
have to quote it directly because I've never seen this
in a scientific paper where they say that four of
these candidates have been named quote amusing but still questionable,
which means like what people call me, I mean they
feel so connected to the to the universe. Now, yeah,
I mean tells you what scientists find funny. But there
(30:31):
is something hilarious about like finding things out there and
not really understanding them, and like what is going on
out there in space? And the thing I love about
looking at in space is that every time you do
it you find something weird. Is you're always surprised. There's
always something weird out there. What do you think they
meant by amusing but still questionable. I think they meant
we can't rule out alien megastructure. And that's what's amusing
(30:54):
about it, right, Like it makes you seriously consider that,
you know, And if you're an astronomer, we don't know
what's amusing in the sense of like it makes you think,
it makes you muse about it, or it makes you hope.
You know, astronomers always have to keep in mind that
they might that today might be the day they discover
alien civilizations. Right, it's a it's a low, it's low
(31:16):
on the list, right, they gotta rule out a thousand
other things first. But one day I think we will
discover alien civilizations, right, and somebody will be it will
be today for somebody, It'll be right now for somebody,
and so you always got to keep that in mind. Right, Wow,
all right, let's get into it. But let's take a
quick break first. Okay. So Dyson's fears are this idea
(31:50):
that you can surround the whole Sun with some kind
of structure to capture all of its energy. And Dyson
proposed this as a way to maybe detect alien civilizations.
That's right, And he said, let's look for let's look
for stars that might be blocked by alien megastructures. And
so you're saying that we actually maybe found one of
these stars. Yes, a couple of years ago, there are
(32:13):
astronomers that were looking at stars and they saw this
one and they were watching it, and the light from
it did this weird thing. It wasn't constant, right, most stars,
the life from this constant. I mean you see a
little bit of twinkling from the dust between us and them,
but mostly the lights pretty constant. And astronomers look at
these stars sometimes to see if they can spot planets
(32:34):
in those solar systems, and the way they do it
is they look to see if the planet goes in
front of the star, and if that happens, if you
see a little dip and how bright the star is,
because it's basically a little mini eclipse, but that dip
is like, you know, one percent maximum, Like if you
were watching our Sun from really far away and Jupiter
went in front of the Sun, the Sun's brightness would
dip like one percent. So that's the kind of thing
(32:56):
people are doing. They're watching stars looking to see if
they dip. And then they found this star and they
saw a dip not one percent, not two, but like
twenty percent, like a huge fraction of the star's brightness
just went away. But then it came back, and then
it went a way again, and then it came back
and then like it's not regular, right, it's not like
(33:20):
you know, if if a planet is orbiting a star
and blocking it, then it's regular. And you can use
that to figure out like how quickly does the planet
orbit the star? Right, what is the period of it?
And they watch it um for many periods and they
figure these things out. You can measure the mass the planets.
It's really awesome. But there was no pattern here, right,
There was like dips and then days would go by
when it would be bright again, and then more dips
(33:41):
would come, and then it was like two years when
there were no dips, and then another huge dip came,
and so people were like, what is going on with
the brightness of this star? What is this? And so
immediately that little voice in everybody's head was like, could
this be Aliens? Aliens? Could this be it? Could we
be watching an alien megastructure be constructed? Really? That was
(34:03):
the first thing that came to people's mind. Of course,
was of course it was anybody anything strange, You're like, Aliens,
that's right, Aliens. I've never seen a car like that before. Aliens?
What is this fruit called? Aliens? How did you do
that magic trick? Card trick? Aliens? Exactly? How can one
(34:25):
man eat so many bananas? Aliens? Aliens? Yes, it's always
on our minds, right, And of course the first thing
they did it's like, all right, let's kind of try
to come up with other explanations. What else could explain this?
And so they went through a long list of reasons
to explain it. But it's really unusual. We have not
seen another star like this. It's not like you see
this all the time. And so you have a bunch
of ready explanations, right, people have to really stretch their
(34:47):
minds to imagine how you could block like twenty percent
of the light of a star and not be an
alien megastructure. How do you know it was one star
and not like two stars. I think they know the
star pretty well. I mean you can you can tell
the difference between one star and two stars. I mean
two stars would orbit each other. Um, I think you
could resolve them. But I don't know. It doesn't matter.
I don't know me. Um. But what they think, hey,
(35:10):
maybe let's consider other all turn out as besides then,
what they did is they looked. They did something really
interesting is they went back through historical measurements and they said,
you know, people have been taking pictures the night sky
for decades and decades, and not all of his digital
(35:30):
and not all of his as good as recent data,
but we have pictures of lots of the night sky
going back like a century. So what they did is
they went back and they looked for pictures to this
star over the last hundred years, and what they found
is that over the last hundred years, this star has
been gradually fading, like getting less bright, yeah less right,
Like it's twenty percent less bright than it was a
(35:52):
hundred years ago, but it's steadily Yeah. Well, we don't
have really constant data over the last hundred years, right,
we have like snapshot and then the snapshot in the
snapshot in the snapshot. Recently, because we've noticed the stars weird,
people have been watching the star a lot more and
so they've been seeing a lot more of these dips
and trying to understand them. Um. But the dips can
be very dramatic and they're not regular, um, and it's
(36:15):
kind of hard to explain, all right, So um, so
you're thinking it could be aliens, it could be alien.
How how would alien? What would aliens be doing? You're
like just flipping the switch on and off kind of
like my kids do know they would be building a
dicen sphere, right, Maybe why would go on and off?
Maybe they're partially maybe they're part way done with constructing
(36:35):
their dicensphere, right, And what we're seeing is like orbiting
the Sun and blocking it. Rights, it's irregular. Over the
last hundred years they've been building it up, and now
you're saying it's might be operational and it's rotating and
that causes these dips. Yeah, exactly. And when the dicensphere
is between us and their star is when the is
when the when the light from that sun gets dimmer.
(36:58):
It's it's hard to have. It's hard to come up
with other explanations for irregular dips in the light. And
so let's go through them. Though, because it's um in
the end, people think it's probably not aliens, which is
you know, the story of every scientific discovery ever um.
But there's not really one convincing explanation. Okay, so what
are the possibilities here? The leading possibilities are that it's
(37:21):
a it's like a lot of dust, like a huge
cloud of dust. And but it's not regular. It's not
like our asteroid belt where like the asteroids are sprinkled
all the way around the Sun. It's some like asymmetrical
cloud of dust. I mean like a patchy like a
patchy clumpy. Yeah, it's like spread up. You know what
you need in that case, then you need a dice
(37:42):
and vacuum cleaner. Fear somebody clean up with it's a mess.
Got the best section the code dice and dot com
slash to anyone. Exactly. It's like mega made from spaceballs.
Somebody's cleaning up that system. Um. Yeah, so like maybe
(38:02):
like a huge patch of dust. And what they did
is they looked at the light from the star and
they noticed that the light from the star is not
dimmed equally across all wavelengths. Right. Remember light has different
wavelengths from the reddish to the bluish and the invisible
wavelengths as well. It doesn't dip the same at all
frequencies of light. Yeah, and you know, one the basic
(38:25):
idea that Dyson had was let's look for light. Let's
look for stars that are basically only emitting in the infrared,
because that's what a huge mega structure would emit. But
the direction of the spectrum which light is absorbed in
which light is coming out, suggests that it's dust. It
looks like the kind of thing you would get if
there was a big dust cloud, would maybe like pockets
(38:46):
where the sun shines through. Yeah, exactly, And that's what
the are. And so maybe what we're seeing is basically
the profile of this dust cloud. But that's not really
a satisfying explanation, because like where does this dust cloud
come from? You know, most stars don't have dust clouds
around them for several reasons, like especially old stars like
young stars who's like just been formed, that it's being
(39:06):
formed inside a huge cloud of gas and dust. Then, yeah,
you expect a lot of um of gas and dust.
So like stellar nurs certainly, let me guess, Let me guess, Daniel,
you think it could be Aliens? I always random guess
to what physicist might think it is Aliens. Well, you're
both right and wrong, like one possibility is. So the
point is you don't get dust around old stars usually, right,
(39:30):
because that dust gathers together and forms planets or or
even just gets blown away by the solar radiation. Right,
Like solar radiation pushes dust out of these systems. So
maybe a planet blew up, right, maybe it's Aliens and
they had a huge war and like one of them
blew up the other one's planet, And what we're looking
at is like planetary debris or something. What that would
(39:51):
be super awesome. Right from this fully operational battle station,
you're seeing the remnants of the Death Star. Yeah, but
but before people get too excited about that one. That
one doesn't really hold together because in that case, you
would see it would be like warm, right, because like
the planet blows up, you got these big blobs of
glowing matter um, and it would glow in the infrared.
(40:13):
But we don't see that. So it's consistent with cold
dust um, which is kind of hard to explain, Like
we don't understand how you can get this rear, irregular
blob cold dust around the star. What if it was
a planet destroyed by like a cold freeze ray aliens?
What is that superhero that that shoots freeze rays? Yeah, yeah,
(40:34):
ice Man, the Ice Man. Yeah exactly. Ice Man came
and froze their planet and it's shattered into a bunch
of fruit. Might as well offer that as an explanation.
I see. So you're scoffing on my explanation of aliens,
and but instead as a more likely explanation, you're suggesting
the Iceman came and froze. Yeah, that's what I always
(40:55):
go to first, superheroes. You know that's true. I guess
the cartoon is would go to superheroes first as an explanation. Um,
I'm just saying I think I think I should get
a physics degree. You know, I have a stow upon
you from Daniel and Jorge University, an honorary PhD in
superhero physics. Oh man, that should be a great product
for a store. And you know how how much value
(41:18):
I put in honorary PhDs. That's why you have three
of them. That's why I have exactly zero of them. Um.
And so another explanation, another idea is that maybe it's
just a really weird star. Maybe there's no dust there.
Maybe the star is just like doing something weird inside
of it, Like it's not glowing constantly as something weird
going on inside. It's like flickering, you know, it's not
(41:40):
burning consistently, but there's something inside it's like absorbing at
the energy, or it's sputtering a little bit. Um an
unstable star. Yeah, yeah, some some kind of weird process
that gives variable light. But the problem with all these
explanations is that it's a big universe and we've looked
at a lot of stars and we've never seen anything
like this. But for and so, any process you propose
(42:03):
to explain this have to also explain why it's only
happening to this star. And not to any of the
other zillions and gazillions of yadas and yadas of stars
that we've seen, right, Right, Like, if it's a cluster
of comets or of planet that blew up like you
would expect, if it's not totally impossible, that would be
happening dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions of times
(42:24):
we've seen other ones. So that's the real puzzle. That's
what makes this star interesting is that it really does
seem unique, right, So maybe we're seeing something really really unusual, right,
that could happen um or maybe it's aliens because you're
seeing we're seeing we can see like billions and trillions
of stars, right, that's just one of them that's doing
something weird. Yeah, well, our soulars, our galaxy has you know,
(42:46):
hundreds of billions of stars. That's a lot, and so
we can't see all of them, of course, but yeah,
we've observed a lot of them and we've never seen
anything like this, So it's pretty weird for one star
to stand out in the galaxy. Wow, So it could
be an alien license fear, yeah, or could be the
you know, the villain's layer for Iceman. Well, you know
(43:08):
Ice alien exactly. Yeah, all right, so that answers the
question what is the dicens fear? And hopefully people out
there founded amusing but not questionable. That's right. And maybe
someday we will build a dicense fhere and aliens far
far away, we'll be having a podcast talking about could
(43:29):
we see if they had built a dicense fhere around
their son um? You know, maybe humanity will be able
to accomplish these great enormous infrastructure projects and work together
and not just to ourselves. It makes me hopeful to
think that one day we could we could build such
a vast projects and have that much energy at our fingertips. Yeah,
that would be cool, and it would spare dela like
(43:50):
a refrigerator. So everybody in Delaware, no need to pack
up your bags anytime soon. We're not taking over. That's right.
Rest easy, Delaware, Sleep well tonight another day when we
didn't find aliens. All right, Thanks for joining us. I
hope you guys enjoyed that. We'll see you next time.
Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question
(44:20):
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's
one Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and
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
(44:43):
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listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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