Jupiter the Destroyer, Part 1

Did the planet Jupiter, like a reckless god, wreak havoc on a young solar system? Join Robert and Joe and they consider the red planet’s destructive powers on Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the production
of My Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and today we bring you ill omens
from the planet Jupiter. Today is gonna be the first

(00:22):
of a two part series where we're going to be
looking at the planet Jupiter and how Jupiter interacts with
some some specific mythology about the wars before the world
we know, and how that also relates to some very
interesting scientific theories concerning the fate of the planets in
our solar system and in star systems beyond throughout the galaxy.

(00:44):
But I start I wanted to start off today by
talking about the belief that the motion of the planets
can have dire effects on the fate of creatures here
on Earth. Of course, this is a long time tenant
of many of the world's different traditions of astrology. But
like if you read astrology today, Rob, I don't know
if you've had this experience, there's little sense in in

(01:07):
astrology today that like the planets are literally doing physical
things to you, like they're reaching down with I don't know,
with like gravity or winds or something to have physical
effects on your life. Rather, the mechanism that is believed
to to link the movement of the planets or the
constellations or whatever uh to your fate is is a

(01:28):
more obscure one. It's a kind of like invisible almost
kind of young gian um anti causal relationship. Would you
would you agree? Yeah, yeah, I would think so. And
I mean not that I spent a lot of time
in the astrology sections, right, but sometimes people have believed
that the movement of the planets or the constellations have
more direct physical effects on the Earth that can absolutely

(01:52):
influence the fate of people or the fate of nations.
So I wanted to talk about one example that we
discussed way back when we did an episode on miasthma theory.
And I remember the miasma theory was a it was
a theory of disease that predated modern germ theory. It
was the idea that disease was often was spread by

(02:13):
like bad vapors or foul smelling odors, winds that went
from you know, that that might come up from the
earth or down from heaven and would bring the plague
or would bring malaria or something like that. And so
the example I wanted to look at was how in
the year thirty this was during the Second Plague pandemic,

(02:34):
when the Bubonic plague was sweeping through Europe. It was
devastating towns and cities. Of course, people had no understanding
of what was actually causing the disease. So King Philip
the sixth of France called in scholars from the medical
faculty of the University of Paris to see if they
could figure out what was going on. And the scholars

(02:54):
discussed things, they researched the matter, and they eventually came
back with an answer. And there answer was this. On
marchty five, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn had all lined up
in conjunction and it happened within the House of Aquarius.
And this was bad because to these scholars, uh, there

(03:15):
was a causative story to tell here. The conjunction of
Jupiter and Saturn to them was said to bring death
and calamity, and the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars was
said to bring pestilence on the breeze. And then this
was both of those things happening at the same time.
So here I'm gonna quote from a historian named ole
Jorgan Benedicto from his book The Black Death to thirteen

(03:40):
fifty three quote. In this astrological theory of epidemiology, Jupiter
was assumed to be warm and humid and to draw
malignant vapors both from the ground and from water, while
Mars was assumed to be hot and dry and therefore
had the capacity to kindle such malignant vapors into infective fire.

(04:02):
So under this theory, the movement of the planets would
be directly responsible for calamity here on Earth. Now, obviously,
scientists today do not put a lot of stock in
the motions of Jupiter and Mars in determining our fates,
but we did want to talk about some ways that
in a very real and material sense, local gas giants,

(04:23):
and in our case that would be Jupiter in particular.
We can also talk something about saturn Um can indeed
shape the fate of creatures dwelling on inner rocky planets.
And so that's what we're going to focus on for
the next couple of episodes. A number of scientific ideas
about ways that the planet Jupiter could like the Jupiter
of myth that we're going to talk about in a

(04:44):
few minutes, be a kind of cosmic destroyer or a
cosmic creator deciding the fortunes of earth bound mortals like us.
Without Jupiter, could we even exist? And how long could
life go on? So this should be a fun one.
If you know some of you out there, you might say, well,
I'm not as crazy about the space episodes. And some
of you might say, well, you know, I'm not crazy.

(05:06):
It's crazy about the mythology episodes. Well we're gonna have
a little bit of mythology and a little bit of
of of space just spread throughout here. Um. So if
you hate both topics, I guess it's time to click off.
But I think we've heard from anybody who said that, No, no, no, Um,
I just I know, uh, some people are maybe maybe

(05:26):
it's my mom. I can't remember my mom that might
be less into the space episodes. Uh. I guess one
of the things about space, in talking about it is
I always feel that it is nice to have some
sort of human element there, uh, to to sort of
uh attach us to it. Now, A lot of times
that human element is just imagining if we were there,

(05:47):
you know, or or talk about how we might get
there one day and just sort of put it in
in in that kind of human context. And there's gonna,
I guess, be some of that here. But for the
most part, uh, the mythology provides that there's like the
mytholotical idea of who Jupiter is, and then there is
the planetary idea of what Jupiter the planet is, and

(06:08):
I it's ultimately a lot of fun to compare the two,
right though there might not be a lot of I
don't know, human interest or drama and looking just at
the icy ridges of Yapidus or something, right, but those
are some good icy ridges. But yeah, well, we'll try
to give you some some narrative context here when when
talking about the planets. So one of the first things
I wanted to mention was I was recently reading about

(06:32):
the etymology of the word Jupiter and came across something
that I did not know but I actually found really interesting. So,
of course, the English word Jupiter comes to English through Latin,
where it is a Jupiter spilt with an eye at
the beginning. A lot of Latin words that start with
a J in English actually start with an eye. There
was no j in Latin, and this of course, was

(06:55):
the name of the sky god and the chief of
the Roman pantheon, Jew Pitter or Jove or Upiter or Yove. Yeah,
that's why we refer to the moons of Jupiter as
the Jovian moons, right, synonymous in the Latin context. But so,
so I was reading about Okay, well what goes back
before that? It seems that the Latin word Upiter traces

(07:18):
back to a Proto Indo European route. And I apologize,
I don't know perfectly how to pronounce this, but it's
something like deuce fatter. And remember, of course Proto Indo
European is a prehistoric lost language, so nobody speaks it today.
In fact, nobody spoke it at any time that anybody

(07:38):
was writing anything down. So this is a This is
a prehistoric, pre written language that was the direct ancestor
of a huge number of languages spoken throughout Europe and
Asia today. It was probably originally spoken by people living
somewhere around modern day Ukraine or southern Russia. But it

(07:59):
is a lane which that has to be reconstructed by
linguists by looking at all these different languages around the
world and sort of tracing back their common roots in
this Proto Indo European language, do you Spotter would have
meant something like daylight sky father, and this would have
been the sky god of the reconstructed Proto Indo European religion. Now,

(08:23):
if you hear in that there, Juice Potter, you can
hear where we get Jupiter from that. But you can
also probably hear where the word Zeus can be derived
from that, right, Juice. And so again there is a
reconstructed form of this religion. We don't have any written
records of this religion. It existed before writing, but scholars
can conclude some things about it with pretty high confidence

(08:46):
by looking at what common elements appear in very geographically
separated religions that have a Proto Indo European linguistic root.
And this deity, this deuced patter one uh, it seems
to be very common to religions that are spread out
all over the place. For example, this name formulation also

(09:08):
appears in the Sanskrit rig Veda, where you get a
god named like Diaos or something roughly equivalent to that.
But in Roman religion in particular, this ancient sky god
tradition that of course had been channeled through the Greek
stories of Zeus. Remember, the the Roman mythology and the
Roman gods are extremely close copies of the of the

(09:29):
Greek gods, and there might be there are some appreciable differences,
but there is enormous overlap between them. So for all
practical purposes, Jupiter is Zeus. But in the Roman tradition,
this god, this sky god, this chief of the pantheon,
came to be associated with the planet Jupiter, which had
been known since ancient times since it could be seen

(09:50):
with the naked eye. And of course Jupiter, the planet
has mythological significance beyond the Roman connection. One example is
that in the ancient Babylonian religion, the planet Jupiter is
associated with another chief god, mar Duke, the chief god
of the city of Babylon Uh. He's the slayer hero
of the epic poem the Enuma a Leash, where there

(10:12):
is a primeval chaos monster named Tiamat, a sort of
saltwater dragon that arises from a previous generation of divine beings,
and then Tiamat threatens to destroy the younger generation of gods,
and mar Duke becomes sort of president of the God
Club by going out to slay Tiamat and the monsters
at her command. And there are some interesting parallels here,

(10:35):
because a mar duke like Zeus and like Jupiter is
sort of a sky god. Now, I think it's interesting
that the broad contours of this story in the Enuma
a Lesh have a very strong echo in Greco Roman mythology,
where Zeus, who would later become Jupiter to the Romans,
also has to overthrow and destroy a pre existent class

(10:59):
of divine beings to sort of pave the way for
the younger generation of gods to take power. And in
the Greek case, this earlier generation of divine beings were
the Titans. This conflict in Greek religion that pits Zeus
and the gods of Olympus versus the older beings of
the previous divine generation is sometimes called the Titanomicy. The

(11:21):
War of the Titans is what that means, Yeah, the
the Titanomicy is an example of what is sometimes referred
to as um a theomicy like theo and then uh
at the beginning of it, you know, a war of
the gods. So the Titanomicy is just one in the
Greek tradition. In the Trojan War, is also essentially a theomicy.

(11:42):
There's also the Gigantomici, which occurred after the war against
the gods. This is the war between the Olympian gods
and the giants who are the offspring of Gaia and
the blood of chronos Um. Now, of course, there are
plenty of other religions that feature theomachies. Of course, there's
a Norse uh god between the Aser and the van Ear.

(12:03):
There's the Vedic wars of the Davas and the Astras.
There's the Water War of Chinese mythology that that pitted
the destructive water god Gong Gong against Zoo Wrong, the
fire god. And then, of course, in Christian tradition we
have this idea of a war in heaven uh and
and I'm sure there there are numerous other examples we
could point to. Yeah, it seems to be very common

(12:26):
throughout the myths of the world to imagine that it's
some ancient time there was a conflict between a pre
existent class of of divine beings and then some like
newer or younger class of divine beings. It doesn't always
break down along generational lines like that, but it certainly does.
In the Greek example. Yeah, we kind of get into
this in our head, this idea of like, Okay, we

(12:48):
have the King of the gods, and he shall reign
forever and ever. But I feel like things feel a
bit more tenuous with these earlier models, because it's like, well,
this have been He's been ruling for a good three
or four years. Now, there are some there's some other
guys that came before him. I don't know what will
come next. He has he doesn't get along with everybody.
Heavy lies the crown. Yeah, I mean it makes sense

(13:11):
too if you're basing your ideas of divine rule, uh
in a mythological sense on the on the examples of
rule that you see in the world around you. I mean,
that's just the nature of things. Yes, uh So, Now
I want to move to reading a section from a
an ancient text known as Hesiod's Theogomy. This is the

(13:31):
the Genealogy of the Gods by the ancient Greek writer
has He had to give some color to this story
we're telling. But first I need to set the stage
before I get to the part that we're going to read.
So I'm necessarily doing a bunch of condensing here because
there are a whole bunch of stories about like which
divine beings emanated and gave birth to what. But the

(13:53):
short version is there have already been a couple of
generations of divine beings by the time we get the
Olympian gods. Uh. The Earth deity Guia and the sky
deity Oranas or Uranus Oranas together have a bunch of offspring.
And these offspring include these beings called the Hecaton Curries
or the hundred Handers. Uh. There were there were three

(14:16):
of them, these three brothers, and they had some amazing
body plans, you might say, Yeah, fifty heads, a hundred arms.
It's great. I really enjoyed looking up, uh, mostly modern
illustrations of what this could have looked like, because there's
a there's a temptation to want to kind of draw
a turbo goro. You know. Um, it's been it's just

(14:36):
too many heads and too many arms. It just becomes
this mass of limbs and heads. But I've seen some people,
some artists push this more in the direction of kind
of like an amorphous being, you know, like it's the
thing or some sort of a show goth or something.
You know, yeah, just to kind of rat king god. Yeah. Now,
Guya and Uranas also gave birth to the Cyclopes, who

(15:00):
you know, we know about those. And then finally they
gave birth to a bunch of gods that were called
the Titans, and two of these titans Chronus and Raya.
They together then sire a new generation of gods with
names that might be more familiar Poseidon, Hades, demiter Hera, Zeus. Yeah,
the members of the proper Greek pantheon of gods, right,

(15:23):
But as we mentioned, Heavy lies the crown and Chronus.
At this point, Cronus has assumed the throne of the
of the heavens after castrating his father Uranas, so Chronus
is in charge now. But Chronus is jealous and paranoid
like like many kings of Greek myth are like a Chrysius,
you know. In the Perseus narrative, he fears his own

(15:44):
offspring um and be because he's been given an omen
that one day he would be dethroned by his own offspring.
So every time Reya gives birth to one of his offspring,
Chronus would eat the newborn child. But then Zeus is born,
and I guess Zeus is the youngest of the brood.
Of the Olympian gods. And here Ya plays a trick

(16:05):
on Chronus. She feeds him a rock. It's a very
good trick. Instead, she she sends the real Zeus off
to hide away in a cave and swaps out Zeus
for a stone in a blanket and hands it over
to Chronus, and Chronus just eats it up. And then
Zeus is just training in a cave like a big
training montage, getting ready for the rebellion against his father. Right,

(16:27):
it's like Rocky four when he's out in the snow,
you know, lifting the logs and everything getting ready. And
so you have to imagine Chronus here is Ivan Draco
and Zeus is Rocky and what's going to happen? Well,
when Zeus has grown up, he somehow tricks Chronus into
vomiting up all of Zeus's siblings, who are then able
to join Zeus in making war on Chronus and the

(16:51):
Order of the Titans. And they also enlist some of
their allies, like some of the other primordial beings come
to fight on the side of Zeus and the Olympians.
The cyclopese Is and the hecaton Cries they had previously
those last two classes of beings had previously been imprisoned
in the underworld of Tartarus, and they're sort of set free,
and they joined in the fight. Zeos says to them,

(17:13):
put down your chainsaw and listen to me. It's time
for you to join in the fight, and they do.
Now Here, we're gearing up for battle. And Robert, are
you ready for us to read some from the theogony?
That wasn't from the theogony that you just quoted about
the Shain's house. No, no, no, that that was from
a weird al dared stupid right, well, then then carry on.
This translation appears in Thomas G. Palma's Anthology of Classical

(17:37):
myth Primary Sources in translation from Hackett Publishing, two thousand four.
So the Olympian gods take their position. Quote they stood
against the Titans on the line of battle, holding chunks
of cliff in their rugged hands. Opposite them, the Titans
tightened their ranks expectantly. Then both sides hands flashed with power,

(17:59):
and the unfathomable sea shrieked eerily. The earth crashed and rumbled,
the vast sky groaned and quavered, and massive Olympus shook
from its roots under the immortals onslaught a deep trimmor
of feet reached misty tartarus, and a high whistling noise
of insuppressible tumult, with heavy missiles that groaned and wind

(18:21):
in flight, and the sound of each side shouting rose
to starry heaven as they collided with a magnificent battle cry.
And now Zeus no longer held back his strength. His
lung seethed with anger, and he revealed all his power.
He charred from the sky, hurtling down from olympos in
a fury of lightning, hurling thunderbolts one after another, right

(18:44):
on target from his massive hand, a whirlwind of holy flame,
and the earth that bears life roared as it burned,
and the endless forest crackled in fire, and the continents melted,
and the ocean streams boiled, and the barren sea. The
blast of heat enveloped the Thornian Titans, and the flame

(19:04):
reached the bright stratosphere, and the incandescent rays of the
thunderbolts and lightning flashes blinded their eyes. Mighty as they were,
heat so terrible, and engulfed deep chaos. The sight of
it all and its sound to the ears was just
as if broad Heaven had fallen on Earth. The noise
of it crashing and of Earth being crushed would be

(19:26):
like the noise that arose from the strife of the
clashing gods. Winds hissed through the earth, starting off tremors
and swept dust and thunder and flashing bolts of lightning
the weapons of Zeus, along with the shouting and din
into both sides, reverberation from the terrible strife hung in
the air, and sheer power shone through it. I love it.

(19:49):
One can imagine like led Zeppelin or Rage against the
machine ring in the background. Yeah, or Chronus is like
the witch king of Angmar and Uh. But anyway, as
Zeus and the Olympians are, of course the victors in
this war, the titanomic he breaks in their favor. The
Titans are defeated, and they are chained up in Tartarus.
So they're cold, sort of thrown down into this hell

(20:12):
like underworld and and imprisoned there. And and there are
a few other disparate fates, like some of these primordial
being side with the Olympians. Uh Atlas is one of
the Titans. In particular, he's punished by being made to
hold up the heavens forever. But it'll be interesting to
keep this in mind later on when we talk about
some of the astrophysics today. Is that this idea that

(20:34):
Zeus or his Roman counterpart Jupiter would have been these
prolific destroyers that paved the way for the status quo
of today, the you know, the way things have been
ordained today by defeating this ancient class of gods that
had existed since the beginning or shortly after it. And
of course, and another funny thing about Zeus and Jupiter

(20:56):
is that the slaying doesn't stop there. I mean, they
are these these gods are prolific destroyers throughout all time
of myth. Yeah, because you know they they won the
crown through war, and then wars are required to maintain
the order. And then also you just have individuals who
step out of line. Uh. And you know, maybe in

(21:16):
a way that is meaningful, but also sometimes the idea
is just in a way where mortals are are not
are not allowed to question the gods or or or
in any ways like them. Than so I thought we
might run through some of the the murders or I

(21:37):
don't know, executions, I guess attributed to Jupiter and Zeus um.
So first of all ones that seem to be more
specifically aligned with the Roman Jupiter. There's the story of
Tillis Hostilius, who was killed by lightning bolt for botching
the reading of a sacred right. Um. So you know

(21:58):
it makes sense. Rights are important to religion. All of
this is it's it's it's part of the framework that's
holding up the cosmic order of the universe. This guy
is getting it wrong, so Zeus sends a lightning bolt
down on him. Could you imagine if Seth could throw
lightning at us every time we screwed up reading something? Oh,
it would it would be it would be a blood path. Uh.

(22:20):
Now we mentioned in Um the Titano mocky. Sorry. Now,
during the Titanomicy, the war against the Titans, it's also
said that Jupiter killed his father the Titan Saturn right,
and Saturn is basically the equivalent of the Greek Titan
Chronus right. You get into different versions of it, particularly,

(22:40):
I think some of the Greek variations of it, it's
it's less a clear picture of him having killed. Sometimes
it's the dividing up. I mean, it's It's kind of
like when you do them with a titan or a god. Uh.
You know, sometimes that kind of marvel uh universe system
comes into play where nobody really dies. There's always a
way they could come back. Now murders attributed more properly

(23:02):
to Zeus. Um boy, there there are a number of
them here. First there's Asclepius, and uh, this one's interesting
because he was essentially killed by Zeus for practicing necromancy,
for raising the dead. Asclepius was some kind of healer figure,
wasn't he. Yeah, but you're not supposed to heal too
much because when you're miss you're interfering with the divine

(23:23):
order of things. That's over the line. Now there's salmon As,
who is executed for essentially pretending to be Zus. That's
a no no. Then there's another Titan here, the Titan Minnotius,
who is also killed during the war against the Titans.
And then when you get into the myth of like
Hayn the like Haan was this individual. There's a whole

(23:44):
cool story to this. I think we've we've touched on
it before on the show. But essentially, uh, he was
punished by being turned into a wolf, but he had
a number of sons, and a lot of those. If
you look at lists of people that were killed by Zeus,
his son's make up a whole subsection of that list.
And then there faith On, the son of Helios, who
is essentially executed for bad driving. Uh but bad driving

(24:06):
with the sun chariot. So you know, that's that's one thing.
If if if you're just you know, misusing a normal chariot,
but if it's the chariot of the Sun itself, well
that's dangerous. And now you're toying with the gods. But
of course, beyond specific murders or executions or killings however
you want to establish them, Jupiter or Zeus, you know,
he tended to punish gods, mortals, and titans with various imprisonments, transformations, tortures.

(24:31):
He is the king of the gods, after all, and
then he has to dish out this punishment to maintain
cosmic balance. But but also due to sort of the
outside nature of his own powers and his otherwise humanoid demeanor,
you know, he is still essentially a king, and while
a human king with human cravings and imperfections, certainly has

(24:52):
an outsized ability to create chaos. Uh, it's even more
so with the God of gods. So he's a being
of intense gravity and mass, and those who involve themselves
with him risk just being crushed by that mass. Right.
And this brings us back, of course to the planet, which,
as we mentioned earlier. You know, as you can tell

(25:14):
from the from the English word for the planet, the
Romans came to associate this chief of their pantheon with
the bright light in the sky that actually is the
planet Jupiter. Yeah. So obviously Jupiter is big. I don't
think that's gonna come as a as a surprise to
anyone out there. And some of the facts that we're
gonna lay out for you here are kind of sort

(25:35):
of the typical songs of Jupiter that we must sing
just to remind you how big Jupiter is in relation
to Earth. Uh So let's refresh. First of all, Jupiter
is eleven times larger than Earth. That's in terms of diameter, right, Yeah,
if you're gonna line them up, Jupiter is more massive
than all the other planets of the Solar System combined.

(25:57):
That is incredible, because there's some there's some other once, right,
Jupiter is three hundred and seventeen point eight times as
massive as Earth, and you could fit almost thirteen hundred
earths inside of Jupiter. So basically, if Jupiter was a
gumball machine and you were putting Earth's inside it, that's
about how many you could fit. Uh. So these are

(26:19):
pretty standard facts. I got these from NASA and from
Universe Today, And yeah, you've probably heard them before, but
I think it it just bears reminding just how big
Jupiter is, and therefore how massive, how just gravitationally potent
and powerful. You know, I bet you could fit more
earths inside Jupiter Earth was cube shaped rather than round.

(26:41):
You ever look at that like the packing efficiency of
ball shapes versus other shapes. Yeah, I guess, I guess so. Uh.
But it also it makes you wonder how many humans
could fit inside Zeus or Jupiter the god. How many
gods can fit inside Chronus? Seems like a lot, you know,
well the baby gods, that's true, are smaller than Yeah.
How big was that rock you think that Cronus had

(27:03):
to eat like to trick him into thinking it was Zeus?
I mean, are we are we talking just like a
you know, hand sized rock? Or is this like a
Mountain that he ate. I think it's like, well, I
mean it's it's size the size of a baby guide.
So then I guess the question is how big is
a baby god? I don't know. Uh. There Uh so
the difference between Earth and Jupiter is so great that

(27:25):
it can even play into our sci fi models and
uh and I think this is great because this is
also I think helps make our point here. I was
reading reading about this. This is some work from David
Boulderstone from the University of Leicester. He asked a couple
of questions regarding Jupiter and planet sizes and energy. Back

(27:45):
in twenty eleven, this would have been an article titled
That's no Moon by Boulderstone at All, published in the
Journal of Special Topics, University of Leicester, Department of Physics
and Astronomy. Yeah, this is this journal is fun. It's
an undergraduate journal, but it's for papers by physics students,
like working out the math of weird problems involving superpowers

(28:07):
and destroying planets. I think I recall one paper on
there that was about whether you could drive a boat
in Jupiter's atmosphere That was really funny. Uh. It's it's
stuff like that, so you can find a lot of
really fun topics. The topics are quite special in fact. Yeah,
and as you can guess from the title, that's no Moon.
This paper concerns the Death Star. So the main questions

(28:28):
asked by this paper and you should look it up
if you can find it for free online, if you
if you're if you really want to geek out on
your your star wars and uh science here first of
all asked, is it possible for something the size of
the Death Star so uh physical construction more or less
the size of of Earth Moon, uh, to generate enough
power to destroy a rocky planet like Earth. And in

(28:49):
the secondary question, if so, would it be possible to
generate enough power to destroy a gas giant the size
of Jupiter. So a lot of this paper is about,
you know, doing the math, can a number of necessary assumptions, uh,
and without you know, geeking out too hard on questions
about well, what does a chiber crystal really do to
energy and so forth? But ultimately they decided that the

(29:12):
Earth is well within the star, the Death Star's energy budget,
so it could totally blow up our planet. No questions asked?
Cool but good? But Jupiter Jupiter this would be a challenge. Quote,
Jupiter requires much greater energy demands and would put considerable
strain on the Death Star. To destroy a planet like Jupiter,

(29:32):
it would probably have to divert all remaining power from
all essential systems and life support, which is not necessarily possible. Okay,
So granted this is not like. This is not firm
and set side is just a speculation on the power
of the Death Star. But think about that. That is
how massive and tough the planet Jupiter is. H If

(29:55):
it was Jupiter versus the Death Star, the death Star
would not completely win. Uh. Late, the death Star is
not powerful enough to destroy Jupiter. No, Jupiter absolutely is
a local bully. Jupiter has a mass and a gravitational
influence that is unrivaled in the Solar System, of course,

(30:16):
apart from the Sun itself. This does make me think
of Percy Shelley's verse play Prometheus Unbound, where the god
Jupiter is the villain. He's this cruel, tyrant god who
has to be destroyed in order to free the world
from his grip. And he's destroyed with the help of
this being of the void called the Demogorgon, which we
explored in a was it was it last October that

(30:38):
we did that episode, or maybe two octobers ago. Maybe
it was two ago. Yeah, but yeah, there's one part
where the spirit of the Earth itself is speaking of
Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound, and it says, I dare not
speak like life lest heavens fell king should hear and
link me to some wheel of pain more torturing than

(30:58):
the one where on role. So Earth is already on
a wheel of pain? What what if it gets worse?
Could could Jupiter put Earth on a worse wheel of pain?
The answer is yes, thank okay. So here I wanted
to shift to talking about some astrophysics, and specifically I

(31:23):
want to get to a hypothesis put forward in in
one interesting paper that came out a few years ago
that has some parallels to the titanomicy. So first, I
think we should look at some exoplanets, because you know,
it's weird. I can still remember a time when the
idea of planets orbiting other stars was mostly a matter
of speculation, you know, with a few stray bits of

(31:45):
evidence here and there. But within the past decade or so,
exo planet research has just exploded, and I think this
is largely due to a number of new telescopes coming
online and new detection techniques. But I remember one of
the big moments here in the history of exoplanet research
was this dump of data on hundreds of new exoplanets

(32:06):
from the Kepler Space Telescope. I think this was in
Do you remember when this happened, Rob, Yeah, yeah, vaguely so. Yes,
it was hugely illuminating. But it also raises these questions
about what kinds of planets are out there, and what
kind of differences do we see when we compare our
Solar System to the types of stellar systems that are

(32:28):
common throughout the galaxy. And so here I wanted to
turn to something interesting I was reading. It was a
blog post by the astrophysicist and science writer Ethan Seagull
called this is why you must never try and colonize
a super Earth planet. You've probably heard this term super
Earth so but that term can actually be fairly misleading,
and this post gets into why that is. And I

(32:50):
wanted to kind of follow his logic here. So first
of all, you can observe that here in our Solar
System we've got two kinds of planets pretty much. You
have small rocky planets with a thin atmosphere or no atmosphere,
and those are those are closer into the Sun. So
you've got Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars rocky core, very little

(33:10):
atmosphere relative to gas giants. And then further out you
have these larger gas planets with some kind of solid
or metal core surrounded by dense gases extending out for
thousands of kilometers in radius. How do these different types
of planets form. Well, the leading theory on the formation

(33:31):
of the planets is that our Solar system began as
a huge cloud of interstellar gas and dust floating in space.
And this would have been made up of atoms and
molecules that were partially left over from previous generations of
stars that may have exploded in a supernova or been
torn apart in other events, you know, neutron star collisions

(33:52):
and things like that billions of years ago, or just
hydrogen that's been floating around out there in space since
the Big Bang. But so you've got all this gas
and dust just floating around, and at some point this
huge cloud of gas and dust collapsed, meaning it started
to fold in upon itself and become much denser and

(34:13):
there are certain they're there are different things that could
have caused. This could have been caused by gravitational or
magnetic disturbances, maybe another star exploding nearby, sending material and
a shock wave through the cloud um But when the
cloud collapsed, all of that dense matter pulled together by
gravity at the center of the cloud started to become

(34:34):
a star, which would be our sun. But in this
kind of larval stage, it would be known as a
solar nebula. It's a cloud on the way toward becoming
a sun. So you can picture a kind of huge
wheel of spinning gas and dust orbiting around a dense
hot center and getting more thinned out as you move
out from the center. Now, eventually gravity pulls things together

(34:59):
so much that the material at the center of the
spinning disk under under all this heat and pressure, as
it gets denser and denser, starts to cause hydrogen atoms
to fuse into helium atoms. And this is the beginning
of the nuclear fusion reaction that powers our sun. And
of course this releases tremendous amounts of energy in the process.
You get radiation, heat, and sunshine. Meanwhile, the outer parts

(35:23):
of this spinning wheel they keep spinning around the newborn
star at the center, and eventually clumps of gas and
dust inside this spinning disk start to be attracted to
each other and to attract more gas and dust to
themselves because of gravity, and they form these larger and
larger clumps of matter still in orbit around the star.

(35:43):
And of course these accumulating clumps would eventually turn out
to be solid stuff like planets, moons, comets, and asteroids,
and one of the biggest of these early forming clumps
would become Jupiter. Now, this is a normal way for
for star systems to form. But coming back to that
that blog post by Seagull that I was talking about.

(36:03):
Sometimes we would just assume that other stellar systems should
be like ours, with small rocky planets towards the you know,
in smaller orbits are closer orbits around the Sun, and
then bigger gas giants farther out. But actually it looks
like our Solar system is rather unusual in this regard.
To read from seagull quote, When we look at our

(36:23):
most successful exoplanet hunting missions, Kepler and tests, the most
abundant class of world that they found is an in
between type commonly known as super Earth's. Despite the allure
of a planet that might be Earth like, only larger
and with more room for life forms on it, super
Earths are nothing like our science fiction imaginings. Here's why

(36:45):
you must never try and call an ice one. So
in our solar systems, smaller rocky planets are close to
the star within what's known as the frost line, as
a certain distance out from from the host star, and
the outer planets beyond the frost line are these gas giants.
But actually we know now from exoplanet surveys that this

(37:06):
is somewhat arbitrary. Planets of any mask and any size
can orbit in very close to the host star. You
can have a planet as big as Jupiter orbiting really
close to our Sun, making a full circuit within days.
You've probably heard about these types of planets that referred
to as hot jupiters, so it doesn't have to be

(37:27):
the way it is here and uh and as Siegel said,
the most common type of planet we've actually found out
there are these super earth So these would be planets
of two to ten Earth masses. So once you get
to about double the mass of Earth, you're in super
earth territory. Now, an important thing to point out here
is that to some extent, by necessity, our picture of

(37:51):
what kind of planets are out there is going to
be influenced by our detection methods, like what types of
planets we are particularly good at spot using the methods
available to us. So it's possible that these types of
planets may be overrepresented in surveys. But still it does
appear that there are lots and lots of super Earths
around stars throughout the rest of the galaxy. And despite

(38:14):
the name, these super earth planets are not necessarily much
like Earth at all. One factor is how much gas
these planets retain around them as they form. Because when
you think about a planet, you know whether it's a
rocky planet like Earth or a gas giant like Jupiter.
There are gonna be a couple of things working against

(38:36):
each other that helped determine what types of volatiles you
can keep stuck to you. One is going to be
your mass and thus your gravity that really helps keep
the atmosphere stuck to you. But then another thing is
going to be is going to be solar radiation, because
the Sun is always going to be blasting you with
solar winds and solar radiation that want to strip away

(38:58):
volatiles from the planet and blow them out into space,
and this is something we can see happening to other planets,
like I think you know. One of the theories of
how Mars ended up with such a thin atmosphere today
is that it once may have had a thicker atmosphere,
but the Sun kind of blasted that atmosphere further out
into space over time. Now it's nice for us that

(39:18):
Earth is able to maintain an atmosphere because we need
it in order to breathe, but actually having too much
mass and thus too much gravity and thus too much
atmosphere can really make it impossible for creatures like us
to survive on a planet. To read from seagull quote,
as long as the mass remains below a certain threshold,

(39:39):
the radiation from the nearby star will hit these easily
boiled gases and hit them with enough energy that they'll
escape from the planet in question. But it rise above
that threshold, and even the ultraviolet radiation and solar wind
particles emitted from the star within the Solar System won't
be able to kick those light atoms and molecules away.

(40:00):
So in other words, if you are too low in
mass and too close to the star, the star will
blast away your atmosphere. But if you raise a planet's
mass beyond a certain threshold, its gravity is going to
get so strong, strong enough to withstand that solar assault
and hold onto its volatiles like gases and water. And
you get enough mass together in one place, and it

(40:21):
will start suctioning up material from all around it. It
will become this great accumulator. And of course, if it
gets enough mass that atoms at its core start undergoing fusion,
then you've just created a new star. But if you
if you're not, if you don't have quite that much mass,
what you end up creating is a gas giant, a
gas planet, even even smaller than Jupiter and Saturn. Planets

(40:44):
more on the on the scale of Neptune are going
to have these thick accumulated atmospheres that will make the
surface uninhabitable. So Seagull calls attention to a really important
paper from published in the Astrophysical Journal by Jinging Chin
and David Kipping called Probabilistic Forecasting of the masses and
radii of other worlds. And this is basically a survey

(41:07):
that says that there are pretty much four types of
planets that you expect to find in our in our galaxy,
you get rocky worlds like Earth, and then you get
gas planets with with big what was called volatile envelopes,
like Neptune. And then you get very big gas giants
like Jupiter, and then you get basically fully fledged stars.

(41:30):
Just a planet gets so big that it's a star
in its own And one of the important things for
us here is that category of the Neptune like planets.
Seagull points out that if you're talking about a planet
with a density roughly equal to Earth's, which is about
six grams per cubic centimeter, you can really only get
about thirty percent larger in radius than Earth is and

(41:52):
still be a rocky planet. You start getting bigger than that,
and your mass means that you will be less like
Earth and more like Neptune, a minor gas planet clinging
to a deep blanket of hydrogen and other gases with
maybe thousands of times the atmospheric pressure of Earth at
the surface. So I feel like we don't appreciate this

(42:13):
enough when we think about this idea of you know,
super Earth's orbiting other stars that you don't have to
go much bigger than Earth before you're starting to turn
into an uninhabitable gas planet, or at least uninhabitable for
the kinds of life that we understand. And these kinds
of planets litter the galaxy, Planets that are a little
bit bigger than Earth, probably enveloped in a gas cloud

(42:36):
that would make the surface fully uninhabitable for us uh
seagull rites quote. Once you get to about twice as
massive as Earth, or just about twenty five to thirty
larger and radius than our planet, you're no longer rocky
with only a thin atmosphere, but are overwhelmingly likely to
be Neptune like with a full fledged, large envelope of hydrogen,

(42:57):
helium and other light gases. And so for this reason,
if you hear references to the abundant super Earth's in
the Milky Way, these are not good places for humans
to colonize, probably not at least, and probably not great
places to look for life that is a close analog
to Earth life. Some people have seen calling them many
Neptunes rather than Super Earth's. But this brings us back

(43:20):
to an interesting question about our own solar system. Why
does our Solar System look like it does. Why does
it have a planet like Earth rather than a bunch
of these infernal super earths like so many other stars
in our galaxy? And there was a paper published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in that offers

(43:40):
one hypothesis to answer this, So why does our Solar
system look the way it does? This paper is called
Jupiter's Decisive Role in the Inner Solar System's Early evolutions
is by Constantine Batigen and Greg Laughlin. Now, in addition
to this paper, I was looking at a couple of
write ups on it that quoted the authors, one inh
NA Geo by Andrew Physicis and one in Scientific American

(44:05):
by Lee Billings. And so the short version here is
that the authors of this study in argue that in
the newly forming Solar System, Jupiter briefly migrated inwards from
the place where it first formed, and as it moved
inward into the Inner Solar System, it caused a series

(44:25):
of cascading effects that would have smashed other early forming
super Earth's in its wake, and that the current inner
planets like Earth are actually formed from the debris left
over after this catastrophic series of collisions caused by Jupiter's
inward migration, and this broader hypothesis about the ancient inner

(44:46):
migration of Jupiter is sometimes called the Grand Tach hypothesis. Basically,
it goes that lots of astronomers used to think that
planetary orbits were as a rule, highly stable and nearly circular,
unlikely to change. But when we look at other stars again,
that's just not what we find. Sometimes we see weird
kind of changes or eccentricities in planetary orbits. And so

(45:10):
to explain the Grand Tech hypothesis, I'm going to quote
from this article in Scientific American by Lee Billings called Jupiter,
Destroyer of Worlds may have paved the way for Earth,
where Billings describes the Grand Tach hypothesis by saying that
it posits quote, in the first few million years of
our Solar systems existence, Jupiter migrated into and then back

(45:32):
out of the inner Solar System, following a course similar
to a sailboats when it tacks around a buoy. Back then,
Jupiter would have still been embedded in a gas rich disc.
Much of that gas was spiraling down towards the Sun
so much that the action would have sapped some of
Jupiter's angular momentum too, causing the giant planet itself to

(45:55):
spiral into the vicinity of where Mars is today. Jupiter
would have kept falling in towards the Sun if not
for being caught by the subsequent formation of Saturn, which
began drifting in as well. As the two giant planets
came closer together, they were caught in an orbital resonance.
This resonance expelled all the gas between them, gradually reversing

(46:18):
their death spirals and causing them to tack back out
to the outer Solar System. So this Grand Tach hypothesis,
if true, would explain several things. It would explain why
Mars is so small when we might expect it to
be larger, in the words of Billings. It would also
explain the distribution of icy and rocky bodies in the
asteroid belt and other strange features of the Solar System.

(46:42):
But if the Grand Tach is correct, Jupiter's orbit would
have strayed into the inner regions of the Solar System,
and its gravitational influence would have caused the realignment of
the orbits of existing early forming super Earth's sometimes causing
their orbits to overlap one another, and sometimes they would
actually have major collisions. You would really only need one

(47:07):
such catastrophic collision in order to have a chain reaction
that could annihilate these early forming inner planets. One one
crash could lead to what the authors here called a
collisional cascade. The studies author Greg Laughlin is quoted in
the in these news articles by saying, quote, it's the
same thing we worry about if satellites were to be

(47:29):
destroyed in low Earth orbit, their fragments would start smashing
into other satellites, and you'd risk a chain reaction of collisions.
Our work indicates that Jupiter would have created just such
a collisional cascade in the Inner Solar System. And to
quote here from billings quote, the simulation suggested that Jupiter's

(47:49):
inward spiral would send swarms of one hundred kilometer wide
planetary building blocks cascading into the Inner Solar System. The
giant planet's gravity would also sling those building blocks and
the inner planets themselves into overlapping elliptical orbits, creating an
interplanetary demolition derby of whirling, colliding, fragmenting worlds now this.

(48:12):
I mean, this sounds like a titanomic y yeah to me.
I mean this is a war of the gods in
which maybe the gods themselves are not destroyed, but there's
a lot of destruction um going on between them. Yeah,
exactly right. I mean that's why I was making this connection.
And I do want to be very clear, Uh, we
are suggesting a connection based on like metaphorical similarities, because

(48:35):
there are actually people in the more Velakovsky vein who
think that you could draw literal parallels between things described
in myth and ancient movements of the planets, which I
think is not probably not true. Like uh, Emmanuel Velakowski.
One of the things he wrote was that, you know,
like miracles described in the Bible, about like pillars of
fire and stuff like that would have been caused by

(48:56):
ancient planets moving around in their orbits and you know,
stuff like that. I mean, there's no evidence for this
in the modern world, but fantastically weird hypotheses that some
people still believe for some reason, not not actual scientists.
All of this stuff we're talking about would have been
before we even had the Earth as it exists today,

(49:17):
So this would not have been things that people could
have witnessed. But the metaphorical similarity to these uh you know, uh,
theomicy myths is is fantastically cool. Yeah, and you can
you can easily get into comparisons of like, what does
it mean to have terrific power? You know, whether you're
that that power is coming via the mass of some

(49:37):
sort of a planet or it's coming through the you know,
the power of a of a single warrior king in
in history. And I like that it's it's creating this
metaphorical residence that it's not just Jupiter destroying this early
generation of of primordial beings like the Titans, but it's
also creating the new divine order because, according to the

(49:59):
authors here, a second generation of planets after this you know,
destruction cascade within the inner Solar System caused by Jupiter.
If this hypothesis is correct, a second generation of planets
would inform out of the whirling field of debris that's
left over. So the pulverized remnants of these ancient super

(50:19):
earths would have a couple of fates, Like some of
the debris would get dragged down into the Sun, and
then some of the leftover chunks would become the bodies
of planets like Earth and Venus. After Jupiter migrates back
out away from the Sun again. Yeah, it's like in
the aftermath of the war, um, Zeus has to say, well, um,
looks okay, Poseidon Hades, Um, we gotta divvy this up. Uh,

(50:43):
somebody's gotta make the ocean's work. Somebody's got to keep
the underworld running clean. Um, so let's let's get to it.
These are jobs now. Now, the the aftermath of the
war defines our roles. Now. One thing that doesn't perfectly
match up with the story in Greek myth, but does
seem just generally mythologically interesting, is that if the Grand
Tach hypothesis is correct, that Saturn would have been responsible

(51:05):
for pulling Jupiter out of the fray, right, pulling Jupiter
back out away from the Sun. Now, Saturn again is
associated with Chronus, the father of Jupiter, who was actually
the main enemy here. So that part doesn't really line up,
but but I like it anyway. Well, you know, don't
discount the bond between father and son. Who knows, even

(51:25):
after you fought one another in battle, right, I mean,
I just imagine, like the six hour Snyder cut of
this myth, like, can I can imagine this scene where yeah,
they've been battling each other, but then, uh, you know,
Saturn reaches out to him and and and and saves
him from from destruction or something. My son, I am sorry,
I tried to eat you while digesting that stone, I realized.

(51:49):
I'm not sure what he realized. I don't. I don't
think Chronus learns lessons. Chronus does not seem like a
lesson learner. Well, I don't know if any of the
gods do particularly, I mean not really. It's not really
a role for them. It's for mortals are the ones
who learn the lessons. Uh, the gods are the ones
who teach the lessons. Yeah, so I think that's maybe
gonna have to do it for this episode. But in

(52:11):
the next episode, we wanted to come back and look
at more interesting ways that the tyrant Jupiter could indeed
be the decider of the fates of Earth, acting as protector, creator,
and destroyer all in one. So so come back next
time for more Jupiter myths and Jupiter science. That's right,
should be a good time. In the meantime, if you
want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, including past episodes that have dealt with with

(52:34):
Saturn and Jupiter uh, mainly with the moons of of
Saturn and then also the Jovian moons UH. Then you
can find those in the Stuff to Blow your Mind
podcast feed, and you can find that podcast feed wherever
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just ask that you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

(52:56):
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(53:18):
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