Meteorite Doorbells, Space Treaties & Panspermia Possibilities: #489 - The Great Cosmic Debate - Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi there, thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts
once again. My name is Andrew Dunkley. It's great to
have your company. We have got a lot On this
particular episode. We're going to talk about something that was
said during the inauguration speech of one Donald Trump. We're
going to listen to a meteorite striking somebody's front door

(00:21):
in Canada or close enough. And we're going to look
at a couple of space launchers, one that had a
bit of a disassembly and one of them that was
successful or there was a bit of an issue with
sticking the landing on that one as well. Pan sperm
is in the news again, and if we can fit
anything else in, we will. That's all coming up on

(00:42):
this edition of Space Nuts fifteen, Channel ten nine Ignition
Space Nuts or three two Space Nuts An bought Neil's good.
Yes indeed, and it is good to welcome again. Johnty Horner,

(01:05):
professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland, sitting
in for Fred who's gallivanting around the Northern Hemisphere somewhere
up in the deep cold looking at stuff. Johnty, Hello, Hello.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
And yeah, I'm continuing to be the substitute Yocraman this week.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
So that's yes, it's good to be here. It's great
to have you doing a fabulous job. And yeah, we're
really really.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Pleased to have you.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
I wanted to start this week with the inauguration speech
of one Donald Trump, who had select guests in his audience.
They had to actually move it for the first time
in forty years because it was so bitterly cold, and
so there was a limited audience.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
One might who was all talking about people being snowflake
snament tracked possible.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
And there's been a lot of reporting on some of
the things that Donald Trump said in his opening speech
in his inauguration speech, and one of them was, we
will pursue our manifest destiny to plant the stars and
stripes on planet Mars. Now this sort of follows on

(02:20):
from his desire to increase US territory. Now, isn't there
some kind of space treaty that bans us owning anything
off planet?

Speaker 2 (02:34):
There is this Cis Space Treaty buck in nineteen sixty seven,
and it's an interesting one of how the world has
changed because back then the only people really involved in
doing anything in space were a few select Messro States
who were doing a lot of things as a way
of proving that they were bigger and stronger than their
rivals as much as anything else, but this was a

(02:54):
un declaration that the US is a signaturiteur. And one
of the many things covered in the Space Act, it's
the fact that there is no ownership of things off
the Earth, the idea that things should be for everybody
rather than for select states, and that's never really been
challenged because we've never had the wherewithal to occupy and
take over things in space. We can land there, we

(03:15):
can drive stuff around, but it's like the moon. You know,
the US can land on the Moon, but there's no
way they can stop China landing or over on the moon.
They can't claim things and protect them in any way. Now,
there's two sides to this Donald Trump thing. On the
one hand, fabulous that to some degree that support there
for space exploration going forward. And it does seem like
it's been an ongoing tennis match for sixty years of

(03:38):
one side saying we'll go to the Moon, then four
years later the other side saying, nah, we'll scrap going
to the Moon. We'll go to Mars and back and forth.
So it's really positive seeing some continued engagement with outside
of space stuff. On the flip side, the language is
a little concerning. So I mean, you know, you get there,
you put the flag in to say we got here.
That's one thing. If you're putting the flag in as

(03:58):
a point of ownership, then that's an entirely different thing.
And it'll be very interesting to see what that sparks
in terms of reaction from China, for example, who also
have aspirations to go to Mars, and whether any of
this is enforceable. Now there's been a lot of discussion
about the Space Treaty anyway, and the context of the
commercial use of space, because, like I said, when it

(04:18):
was put together, very few nations were involved in space,
and it was a nation thing, and now it's a
commercial thing. A great bulk of launchers to space and
no longer research missions launched by governments. They're commercial initiatives
launched by companies, and that's a very different way of
doing things, and legislation just hasn't kept up. You know.

(04:40):
There's a lot of discussions about the likes of Stylink
and the proposed that Amazon Mega Constellation and many many others,
and what the legality of that is and should we
be doing it all and how do people have a
right to control what is put in the sky above them?
And none of that's really covered because the legislation hasn't
kept up, So it's very much like the Wild West,

(05:00):
and this is just you had another reflection of that
in terms of it's all well and good having a
treaty that is more than sixty years old that says
you can't on things in space, we can't build a
presence there. But the reality is if they go there
and put the flag in and say this is Amas now,
and they have the wherewithal to defend that claim, which
is another thing entirely, who's going to stop them?

Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah, well, yes, that's the sixty four thousand dollars question.
And his richest supporter wants to put a colony on Mars.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
So there's every.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
Change that they've had a bit of a chat about
this pre direction speech too.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Well. I remember many years ago el On the Great,
what a wonderful character. I have opinions there which I
probably shouldn't begin too much, but he said that he
has this great aspiration that he should be the first
person to die on Mars, and I think if you
talked to a lot of astronomers there's some interesting thoughts
on whether that would be a good thing or not.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yes, and yes, there were a few other things that
the inauguration speech and the after party, if we can
call it that, that we're not going to go into
involving Elon, but he got plenty of coverage on that
in the news as well.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
But yeah, it's a.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
Really dicey one and one wonders what will happen going forward.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
You mentioned China.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
They were invited to the inauguration. I think the vice
president or the Vice Premiere or whatever the title is
for China did go. So maybe that's a good sign
that relations between the two countries might be warming up
a bit. But we'll have to wait and see. It's
early days, but the next four years will be fascinating,

(06:37):
to say the least. Yes, indeed, let's move on to
something as interesting but completely different, and this is where
household technology has become such an amazing thing. I remember
when I first got a camera at my front door
at a house we used to live in. It actually

(06:58):
recorded a lightning strike, which was amazing. Over in Canada,
the other day, a meteorite strike was recorded by a
door cam and they not only got a vision of
the thing hitting the porch, they got the audio and
it sounded something like this. That's a quite a record.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
I think I've got it again. There we go.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
That's fascinating, Johnny, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Oh, it's just so awesome. I mean, one of the
first things I thought about on this when I saw
the photos and the footage was hang on, this is Canada,
which is notoriously cold and snowy, and all the footage
is green and verdant. Turns out that this event actually
happened in July last year, but we're only now getting
to hear about it because there's been an official naming
of this meteorite after the town that it landed in.
So see the Charlottetown meteor right now. And that's why

(07:51):
this has finally come out as a story. So it's
one of these interesting things with stories like this that
you don't often hear about the news when it's new.
Some of you have about it when something triggers that release.
But it's absolutely fabulous. So there's actually a photograph I've
got upon my other screen at the minute showing where
this meteorite hit, and it's hit on the Redstone driveway essentially,

(08:13):
which is why you hear that smashing shattering sound because
this was a chondritic type meteorite, so it was quite fragile, friable,
and so when it hit the ground, and it hit
the ground traveling at what you describe as terminal velossity,
so it wasn't coming in at klomid as a second
at this point, it's coming in a couple of hundred
miles an hour because that's the atmosphere had slowed it

(08:34):
down essentially, so it landed essentially like if you'd dropped
a rock from an aircraft or dropped a rock from
a couple of hundred meters up hit the ground. The
ground was hard when this thing shattered, so the noise
you're hearing it's the initial impact and then all the
bits scattering around. This was a single impact, and you
see this beautiful spray distribution on the driveway on this
photograph that looks very much like a ray greater on

(08:55):
the moon. Very similar but also very reminiscent of a
similar fact that happened in the UK just a couple
of years ago. That was also a chondrite that hit
somebody's driveway, and they did a really good job of
collecting it. So it's really nice to see the similarities.
And just looking at that debris and the scatter pattern,
you can tell that this isn't an iron meteorite, that
it was something quite light and fragile even before the

(09:18):
bits got Analyze the fact that on the video feed
from this, you know, doorbell camera, you see a freeze
frame and you can actually see the rock if it's
coming in because the frame rate was high enough that
the frame before the impact happened, there's this black speck
in front of the sky that is a rock just
before impact, and that has to be unique. I don't

(09:39):
think there's ever been any record like that of an
impact as it happened. When it happened from close up.
We saw commed Schumachalevin nine hit Jupiter, but even then
the impacts were around the back of that planet. We've
seen a few impacts on Jupiter's face since, but that's
seen event at six hundred million kilometers separation is very different.
Seeing a doorbell camera showing a rock six foot of

(10:03):
the ground that is about to hit that is a
part of a celestial object. That's just awesome. It is awesome.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
They collected some fragments and that sort of prompted you
to think about how this should or shouldn't be done.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, there's some really good and really bad examples of
what to do if you think you found a meteorite.
And this aside nineteen nine point nine percent at the
time when people think they've found a meteorite on the ground,
they haven't. But a common thing people do is touch
what they've found to a magnet because iron meteorites will
be trapped to the magnet. This is really bad. So

(10:41):
everybody I know who works in meteorites studies strongly, strongly,
strongly says, please, please, please do not bring magnets anywhere
near them because one of the cool things about meteorites
is they preserve the history of the LSL system. One
of the things locked in them is any evidence of
weak magnetic feels back then. And if you bring a
magnet now, but you wipe all that history a hard drive. Absolutely, Yeah,

(11:05):
it's a bit a little bit sad. The other thing
I've seeing that a couple of people have done that
is really fabulous is if you get there very quickly.
When something's fall and it's not going to be steaming hot,
boiling hot like you see in the movies. It'll actually
probably be clap cold and water will be condensing on it.
But if you want to pick it up. One of
the things about freshly fallen meteorites that's exciting is they

(11:27):
are preserving evidence of another celestial body, and people are
interested in things like possible precursor compounds to life. Could
there have been life there or proto life or things
like that, Where does it have come from? Now, if
you go and grab it with your sweaty human hand
covered with oils and all the rest of it, you
contaminate it. Now, I've got a couple of dogs. One

(11:48):
of them is asleep here, and when we take them
for their walk, they sometimes decide to do their business.
And we've got very skilled at getting these little plastic
bags and putting the bag over our hand, and then
picking the unmentionables and putting the bag over it so
that there's no contact between human flesh and that which
you wish to not touch in this case, and the
same kind of thing would work for meteorites. So if

(12:09):
you found if you observe this happened on your ring,
door bell or other products are available. You know, see
this happen, don't go pick it up with your hand.
If you can bag it as if it's seriously and
then if you can store it in the freezer. So
there's a fabulous story of a meteorite that fell in
Canada again, that fell on a frozen lake in the
middle of winter and was recovered and they actually managed

(12:32):
to bag it and store it in the freezer. And
the people who did that, the scientists are thrilled with
them because it turned out that that meteorite was incredibly
rare in that it is pretty much the only one
we found with volatile materials still in it, and if
it had fallen somewhere where it was above freezing, that
would have just melted and dribbled out of it. But
what it saught is that that may well have actually

(12:53):
been more cometary material than asteroidal material. And all the
things that we were able to learn from it were
ensured by the fact that the people found it a
it was preserved. It fell somewhere really cutl so it's
stared Christine. But then when it was collected, they bugging
it up the right way. They put it in the
free room, they stared it. Now a lot to remember.
And the odds are nobody listening to this will ever

(13:13):
have the good fortune of having a meetea Rutland on
the driveway. But if you ever do, it's good to
do the right thing because makes something that's already very
valuable even more precious to scientists. And yeah, that's good advice.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
And some more advice if you do, you know, practice
what you preach and pick up the dog poo. Don't
put it in the freezer next to the sausages, so
don't mix it up with the media rite fragments, because
you know that could be very to that. Yeah, but
a great story and quite amazing footage. If you haven't
seen it, jump online and have a look for the

(13:49):
I think it was a ring camera that they were using.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
It was m Okay, this.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Is space Nuts Andrew Duncle here with Joddy Horner. Let's
take a little break from the show right now to
tell you about our sponsor in Cogny. Now, when it
comes to your online security, there are lots of options
out there, plenty of things being offered to protect you
from hackers and scammers.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
And who knows what.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
But wouldn't it be better if you could cut them
off completely before they find you instead of dealing with
the problem after something happens, get ahead of it with
our sponsor in Cogni. Now, this is an amazing piece
of kit, as Fred would say, an amazing piece of
software that takes all the hard work out of protecting

(14:34):
you from any number of Internet related risks. In Cogni
will act on your behalf, deal with any issues or
even objections, and get you off the radar and you
don't even have to think about it. All you have
to consider is signing up within Cogni and let them
do the rest. And it's not expensive. There are quite

(14:56):
a number of options available depending on your needs. And
right now space Nuts listeners can take advantage of an
exclusive sixty percent off discount.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Just log into our special URL.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
Go from there in Cogni dot com slash space nuts.
That's in cogni I ncog n I, incogny dot com
slash space nuts for a special sixty percent off deal.
What happens after that is kind of like magic spam calls,
drop away robocalls to and your exposure to scams and

(15:30):
cyber attacks will diminish significantly because you're so much less
visible online. And don't forget they're thirty day money back guarantee.
If you're not happy, go to the url in Cogni
dot com slash space nuts and click on get in
Cogni and see for yourself in Cogni dot com slash

(15:51):
space nuts our sponsor. Now back to the show three.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Space nuts.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
Next story Johnty involves space X and this was a
test flight of one of the mega rockets, the Starship,
and well things went well and not well. I think
they got the big bit back with the chopsticks, but

(16:21):
the other bit.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Well, it created quite a large show. Absolutely, And this
came very quickly to my attention when I got up
that morning and looked on various platforms, and there's the
most astonishingly beautiful footage taken over the Turken Care Coss
Islands of what's clearly space Hunk. So it's coming in
much too slowly to be a meteorite or something from

(16:45):
beyond the symmedia environment. They come in much much quicker.
You've got this beautiful shower of sparks moving slowly across
the sky. Slowly is a relative term, slowly compared to
when you've seen Metea showers and viaballs, fast compared to
a helicopter and aircraft high up, but incredibly multicolored, incredibly bright,
visible during the daytime. And it was very quickly make

(17:08):
clear that this was the remnants of the upper stage
of the Starship test launch. So the launches rocket that
is one hundred and twenty three meters tall, which should
boggles my mind to begin with. Yes, after the first
stage separated, the lower stage, which is a bigger bit,
successfully came back and landed, which is an incredible achievement.
They captured it, landed safely, ready to reuse again. But

(17:30):
about eight and a half minutes into the flight, the
upper stage encountered a problem and self destructed. It's what
spacects have coined, a rapid unscheduled disassembly, which I think
is kind of whimsical, but that's lovely, and it was
exploded deliberately. When something goes wrong, you don't want it
going out of control, so things are terminated. And then

(17:52):
it fell back to through the atmosphere and a blatd
burned up high in the sky, putting on a spectacular show.
Now a lot of people go, oh, no, things have
blown up. That's terrible, and SpaceX are fairly positive about it,
because I guess with spaceflight, the argument is, you don't
make an omelet without breaking eggs. The entire history of

(18:12):
spaceflight is success built on failure, and when something fails,
that's actually a real success in its own right because
it allows you to identify something that could go wrong
and fix it so that it never goes wrong again.
So this kind of thing has been a standard part
of SpaceX's history, and their great success is that they
accept these things and build on them. They did have

(18:34):
some interesting kind of side effects. So I saw an
interesting thread on Reddit from a pilot who had been
in the air when this happened, and they'd had to
divert because obviously that strewn field where this is coming
down has to become closed air space for I think
he said the rules and regulations were thirty minutes after
it finishes, in order to be just in case, just

(18:56):
to be safe, because the odds of one of these
fragments hitting an aircraft are vanishingly small, but they're a
lot higher than if there's not one of these events happening.
So it's a safety thing, and it turns out that
aircraft only have a relatively small margin a fuel error,
so a couple of the planes involved had to declare
what they call a fuel emergency, which is as bad
as it sounds. I found this really fascinating reading through it.

(19:17):
He was very detailed in it. A fuel emergency is
not saying, oh my god, we're doomed. It's saying, when
I want to our backup fuel, so you need to
bump us up the landing schedule. So it's not panic panic,
it's more give us a priority landing. But it's still
really interesting that you don't necessarily connect immediately spacextween a
rocket launch and somebody on an aircraft having to divert

(19:39):
or having to be delayed because a rocket launch went wrong.
And at the minute, we have more rocket launches happening
per week, per day than there has ever been before,
and that's only going to get more and more common
as the commercially space gets even more common. So this
kind of suffs an interesting insight into how all this
stuff plays together, as well as putting on an incredibly
spe tacular leisure. I mean, the footage is well working

(20:02):
out and looking for success dunning it is. It's quite extraordinary.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
I had to laugh though, because the SpaceX has this
this habit of stating the bleedingly obvious. So starship is
a starship, and the upper stage that actually they had
to destroy is called ship. Yes, okay, all right, well,

(20:32):
I mean that's what it is. It's a spaceship, so
they just called it ship.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Gosh.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
I guess it doesn't really matter what you call anything.
But people look back in the future the history of
these pioneering events and go ah, they really didn't put
much thought into that.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
They've actually done quite a good job about getting people
on board and actually giving things whimsical names, you know,
things that are stick in the mind. So my memory is,
and you know, feel free to correct me if I'm
wrong here, but my memory is that the platforms that
they bring the best craft back to are named after
some of the ships from the culture novels Buying m Banks,

(21:14):
which are fabulous, fabulous bucks. And that's all of a
little touch because those names themselves are a little bit
quirky and a little bit whimsical, and there's a fairly
good history of giving things quirky names and also kind
of almost arthropesizing things. We saw this with the Master
of Us when they got their own Twitter accounts back
in the day, and people really got hooked into the

(21:35):
human journey of this artificial lander on Mars. And I
think companies are becoming aware of this and thinking it's
a really good way of helping the public opinion and
getting people more aware of what's going on. And these
things stick a lot better in your head than a barcut. Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
I was just trying to look up some of the
names of the SpaceX landing pads, but they are not
out in front of me, but yeah, I've heard some
of them, and then, yeah, you're right, they are very,
very very unusual some of them. While we're talking about
the SpaceX disassembly, we can't really go past Blue Origin,

(22:18):
which is probably going to become SpaceX's most direct competitor
amongst others. And they've had success with and here's another name,
the launch of New Glen.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yes, and this has been a long time coming. It
was initially meant to launch in about twenty twenty, but
they've taken it careful, postponed, improved, postpond improved. Now, this
was a smaller rocket and when I say smaller. I
think it was only about nuineti meters toll. But this
is looking like it's going to be the big rival
in long term future to SpaceX, certainly in terms of
competing for American grants and mather opportunities. Blue Origin have

(22:54):
got interest, just like SpaceX have been involved in the
ongoing artemists of trying to get stuff to the Moon. Yeah,
and it's a really interesting mirror to the SpaceX launch
because with the SpaceX launch, the lower stage landed and
was captured beautifully, but the upper stage detonated with New Glenn.
Their primary focus was to just get the roocket toward it.

(23:14):
That was the goal. It's the first ever test flight,
and that was achieved perfectly. They had a secondary goal though,
was trying to land their main booster back on their
launch PAB and it didn't quite work. So SpaceX has
got the first part right, Blue Origin got the second
part right. But it's a really nice bit of evidence
that things are moving forward. And me again, if we

(23:35):
go back to when I was a teenager in the nineties,
if you told me then that you'd have had reusable
launch vehicles that are a commercial thing that we're doing this,
it'd blown me away, and now it's become commonplace. You know,
we have so many launches of sacllites for commercial purposes
going on that nobe ever hits about them unless they're
really enthusiastic, or something happens that shouldn't or something happens. Yeah,

(23:59):
it's usual thing of Nobby's interested in a new story
saying that something happened and it weren't perfectly smoothly and
it's perfectly mondane. But when something goes wrong it's big news. Yeah, yeah,
it is. So.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
In both cases they had success and failure, and both
parties basically said, no, look this is good because we
learned from these mistakes. And again, you know you're looking
at names. I didn't look up what New Glenn stood
for where it came from. But it's an odd name

(24:32):
for a spacecraft.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yes, there's so many of these little things go on.
But again it's six in the head. It's better than
rocket one one seven four b Yeah, true, true.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
I found some of the name SpaceX uses for its
landing sites. These were the barges I think that they
were using. Just read the instructions.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
Of course, I.

Speaker 1 (24:55):
Still love you and a shortfall of gravitas.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
Uh, link back to these culture novels where I read
them a long time ago, and you've got this hyper
advanced future society kind of thing where anything is possible,
and you've got these spaceships are sentient eyes that are
far more intelligent than anything else, but just kind of
vaguely tolerate humans and all the other aliens as their
passengers and have their own private inner lives and communications

(25:23):
with each other. Yeah, they're quite heavy going books at times,
but that side of it's just lovely. Yeah it is.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, well, you know, I'm all more a big believer
in quirky, so I I don't really have a problem
with it. But Ship, I think was probably you know
that falls a bit short, Yes, but yeah, if you
want to chase up those stories, you can read them
on space dot com. This is space Nets with Andrew

(25:51):
Duntley and Professor John de Yoanna. Okay, we take a
space nuts now, Johnny. This is sort of a follow
on story to something that Thread and I discussed more
than once in recent times, and that is looking at
whether or not there might be life in the atmosphere

(26:13):
of Venus, and a new paper has been released that
is actually suggesting that not only could there be life
in the atmosphere of Venus, and they're not saying there
is could be, it may well have come from Earth.
That's that's interesting in itself, and they've backed it up

(26:36):
with some.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
Well data that they.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
Believe suggests it's a it's a it's a possibility it is.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
And this is all best automatic called punkspermia, that when
it was first proposed, was firmly considered by the establishment
at the time to be in the crunk box, to
be absolutely bond because it couldn't work. It's the idea
of that life can be transferred from one plummet when
not carried on the back of meteorites. So you have
a big impact on Earth, digs upload of rock, fling

(27:07):
some of that rock into space, and eventually some of
those rocks land on another planet and life spreads a
bit like the common cold on a bity train. You know,
that whole thing of don't go near Earth. It's got
human ze contageous. And when this first came out, everybody
just saw it sounded bonkers because firstly, life can't exist
in space. Too hard not going to happen. Then you've

(27:30):
got it would take millions of years on average for
a bit to get from one place to another, and
that's still long, so it couldn't happen. And finally, if
a rock's ejected from a planet, then it's been in
a begin impact and that should statilized it, so it
should never happen. But then as time's gone on, all
of those kind of concepts have fallen down a bit.
We found meteorites on Earth from the Moon. We found

(27:51):
them from Mars. You know the Allen Hills meteorites, one
of the famous ones which led to claims of life
on Mars a couple of decades ago that were eventually
shot down. We know that rocks get transferred from planet
to planet fairly straightforwardly. When I worked at the Open University,
this is from two thousand and six to two thousand
and nine, there were people there who were working on
this kind of stuff, looking into it. And what it

(28:13):
turns out is that when you get a fallow large
impact up to the kind of dinosaur co cling size impact,
but the kind of thing that forms a substantial creater
on Earth, the closer you are to the middle, the
more intensive shockwave than the more damaging it is. And
the further out you go, the less intensive gets. So
the further away you are, the less strong the shock is.
But that gradient is actually shallower, the bigger the impact is,

(28:34):
it falls off more slowly. What that leads to, bizarrely,
is that there is a range of distances from the
impact where that shock wave is strong enough to eject
rocks from the safes of the earth out of the atmosphere,
particularly given that the thing that just hit as has
created a hole in the atmosphere to make a bit easier,
and that those rocks can be ejected intact, and the
shocks involved in the rock are weaker than the amount

(28:59):
of shock you'd need to step in. Other words, bacteria
could be ejected to space on the back of these
rocks without being killed. So that's another thing in its favor.
And then you get studies that have looked into the
viability of bacteria in the vacuum of space with UV
radiation that suggests that they can remain viable, but a
much longer period of time than you think, because when

(29:20):
they guarding space, they kind of go into this statis
spore form and UV damage kill some of them. I'm
actually working with a PhD student down in Victoria who's
looking at this doing some experiments into the fact that
the dead cells on the outside provide extra shielding. And
that's even before you consider that they can be bacteria

(29:41):
on the inside of the rock weather rock shields and
they detests. They put bacteria on the outside of the
space station, left them a few months, brought them back inside,
and they culture them happily. You all, A step seem
to be that despite the fact this sounds ridiculous, the
outlandish idea, it's perfectly reasonable to think that life could
be passed around the Solar System like a tennis ball

(30:01):
bouncing around at the Australian Open going from planet to planet.
So that's become an established possibility. It's like to all
lot of discussions. There's interesting philosophical things. If we ever
find life on Mars, and that's still an if. Will
it be life that has a separate origin to life
on Earth, or will it be life that shares an
origin with life on Earth? And that's not necessarily saying

(30:22):
life start on Earth. We could be Martians, you know,
life could have beiger on Mars and been transferred to Earth. Yeah,
we just don't know. But there are some predictions you
can make, and one of them is that if we
ever find life on another body in the Solar System,
there's a good possibility that will share a heritage with us.
So that brings us, after a lot of jaunty waffle
to this story about Venus, and it's bringing together that

(30:45):
other story, which is the potential detection of this gas
called phosphenee venus, which was quite controversial. I know the
lead scientists quite well who did that work, and I
felt very sad for her some of the abuse and
vitriol that were directed to their team over the results.
But it was a really interesting detection right at the
edge of sensitivity for their instruments. And what they said

(31:07):
was that we found this gas called phosphine on the Earth.
The only way that is produced is through the action
of life or through human industry. There's no other chemical
process on Earth we know of that can make this.
That doesn't mean that there aren't other possibilities, it's just
we don't know of them. So there is a possibility
that this could be being produced by life, but it's

(31:28):
not a detection of life. And there was a whole
cavalcade of arguments and stories that followed on from that,
but inspired by that, the team that have done this
paper have looked to say, if there is life in
the clouds of Venus, in this temperate layer where the
conditions are more similar to those on Earth than you
would have on Venus as surface, could that life actually
be earthlife? Could it be contamination from the Earth with

(31:51):
bacteria that have been transferred there through this panspermia route.
And they've done some calculations. There is a certain degree
of speculation and to try and figure out how much
material is being ejected from the Earth other time, how
much it reaches Venus, and to try and put that
into a sense of how many discrete bacteria would reach
Venus in a billion year period. And they've got this

(32:13):
handway of a number of the billion bacteria in a
billion years. Now that's showing you how big deep time
is more than anything else. And what they say is
that doesn't mean there's one bacterium per year reaching Venus.
It'll be clumpy. You'll get a rock delivering tens of
thousands of a time. But the idea is that if
you've got that level of delivery going on, all it

(32:34):
takes is a very small number of them to be
viable for life to suddenly become present there. Now you've
then got all the additional challenges of how does it
get into the atmosphere, all the rest of it. But
this is just an interesting thing pointing out again that
once you bring transpermia into the picture, you can no
longer say that when we found life elsewhere in the

(32:55):
Solar System, that means we've shown that life originated there. Also,
as a total side point, it makes the efforts we
go to in steadilizing our spacecraft seem less relevant because,
for example, when we send space craft to Jupiter to
the icy moons, I can, under some way we statilize
them this planetary protection thing. But material from Earth carrying

(33:16):
bacteria has been bombarding those moons for billions of years.
If Earth life is going to get there, it's already there.
So there's a lot of interesting spins from this. But
it's interesting that an idea that, again when I was young,
was viewed as been really stupid and you know, extreme
and only talked about bi cranks, is now sufficiently mainstream

(33:36):
that this kind of research is going on to invistiate
the what ifs and to try and drive on from
that to make predictions. You know, the ultimate extent of
this is if we find life on Mars, if we
find life on Venus and we're able to isolate a
sample of it and study it, the prediction from this
is that we'd find that it shares a common heritage
with us, a share shares a common universal ancestor, I guess, fascinating. Yeah,

(34:00):
and what do you very night?

Speaker 1 (34:03):
I have often discussed this. Do you think that day
will come where we might find something and we'll be
able to test whether or not it has a shared origin.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
I'm absolutely an optimist, and I think if there is
life to be found in the Solar System, we will
find it. It's just a question of when rather than if.
That is a big question, is if there is life there,
we've got places to look. You know. Obviously, with every
decade that goes, our focus shifts a bit because we'll
earn more. So, for example, if we've been having this
chat a decade ago, we'd have been talking about Mars.

(34:36):
We'd have been talking about the equator of Mars and
following what the wonderful rover missions are doing there. And
then there was that astonishing discovery of liquid water in
Mars of south polar cap that an Australian astronomy professor,
Graciela Caparelli, was very involved with with the Italian team
that did the red ass that this and suddenly it's
harder to get to Mars's South Ball, but suddenly that

(34:57):
looks a really promising place to go. Because on Earth,
if you drill down into contact, can you find these
lakes of liquid water that have been separated from the
rest of the Earth for ridiculous periods of time and
they're still teeming with life? Mad's ever had life? Maybe
it's still there in the waters at the south Pole,
So our focus shifts a little bit. We've also got
the icy moons of droop from Saturn, and the more

(35:18):
we look, the more we realize there's a lot of
places we could look for life. And I'd love to
think that ten years, twenty years down the line, in
a future spased on this episode, we'll be talking about
the fact that we've definitely got some and people are
playing with it in a pew traditional learn more about it.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah, and then it escapes and kills humans all over
the planet.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
They're killy with shampoo, right. That was the way the
movie worked.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
That's right, Yes, yes, I know the one you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
That Yeah, probably, Yeah, it silly, silly film, but such evolution.
I think it was called it. Yeah, that's a great film,
very funny. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
If you'd like to read up on pain, Spermia and
the the new paper has been released.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
It is available online.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
You can also read the preceed version of it at
space dot com. Before we go, Johnny, just quickly, we're
we up to with comic twenty twenty four. J threetlas
Is it still alive? It is still a live ish
I appreciate it as a wonderful non answer. I got
some lovely photos of this comet back on Sunday evening,

(36:27):
which I'm really pleased.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
With, really happy with. I went out last night and
there was one cloud in the sky and it was
right in front of the comet. Always the way it goes,
So I'm going to keep trying the next few nights.
It's still relatively easily visible with the naked eye from
southern Hemisphere locations, but the photos of it people are
turning up from around the globe now are looking interesting.
So there is a suggestion that the snowball at the

(36:49):
heart of the comic. The nucleus actually fell apart unfragmented,
about a week ago. As we record this other fourteenth
fifteenth of January released a copious amount of dust. And
of the nature of how comets work, that means that
the comet hasn't really started faid yet. It's en hamster
comet's tail, possibly even making it a bit more spectacular
for us now, but we'll probably hasten the demise of

(37:11):
the comet. And when we were talking about this previously
talked about how if you've managed to live for another
six hundred thousand years, you'd see the comet return. That's
looking less likely now. I think it's pretty much done
and dusted, probably, but we don't know for sure, and
we'll find out more over the coming week. But in
the meantime, get out there tech photos because it's a

(37:32):
spectacular object. It is reasonably easily visible with the naked
eye if you know where to look. Said in currently
about an hour and a quarter hour and twenty minutes
after sunset for those of us in the southern hemisphere.
Northern hemisphere not so good. You can't really see it.
But on photographs. Digital cameras are making a spectacular job
of showing this, and there's some gorgeous images out there.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, I've just looked at when on sky and telescope
dot org, and yeah, you can see how the tail
has become much more vivid and spread out as a
consequence of Yeah, it's well impending demise.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
I suppose it's an astonishing image on Astronomy Picture of
the Day, the wonderful NASA site for today, the twentieth
of January. As we're recording this, showing the comet as
it was going around the Sun through the Lasco camera
that somebody's put together using different filters from the Lasco camera.
So you've got different colored tails and there's one, two, three, four, five, six,

(38:29):
seven different tails on the comet, which.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
Is just n Yeah I can see that now.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
I just got it up. Yeah that was when it
was only visible in the daylight sky. But it shows
you just how active this thing got because it was
so class to the sun. And there are some discussions
that because it was so incredibly close in a couple
of those sales are actually probably sodium and iron our class.
It got those kind of mineral source kind of materials.
We're getting erupted from the surface to form tails, not

(38:58):
just water, ice and a little bit of gas. Yeah, fascinating.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
Had I tried to have a look yesterday, but I
think I was a bit too early, but I will
make an effort. And the other thing that people are
getting excited about, although you you're suggesting this is a
bit premature, is the upcoming planetary alignment.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah, which is not something that is anywhere near as
rare as the media is making it out to be.
But the idea here is the planets are lining. So
your first ste is, oh, that's great. If I got
my binoculars, I could see them all in the same
field of view. And what it actually is is that
they're all in the same one hundred and eighty degree
arc of the sky. So if you were out a
little bit after sunset, you could see all the naked

(39:39):
eye planets, and if you've got your binoculars and a
telescope out, you could see your own searcher and as well,
all at the same time. What the coverage has left
out is that Mercury is actually not joining the party
at the minute. So this is viewed has been the
evening sky after sunset. The first thing you'll see has
been as Saturn's right next to it, juped as high
to the north as in the southern hemisphere. To the
south of those in the northern hemisphe Mars is rising

(40:01):
over to the east. It's just passed opposition. They're all there.
Urinus and Nection are over roughly in the same part
of the sky as Saturn and Venus, so you can
find them with binoculars in the telescope. But Mercury is
currently visible in the morning sky. For Mercury to join
the party, we've got to wait another month, and that's
going to be at the end of February. So maybe
if you you know, commet Atlas, which is saddler to

(40:22):
the horizon, is masquerading as Mercury for the purposes of
the current discussion, I guess giving us a number of
things to see. But if you really want to see
all of them at once, you're going to have to
wait till a month's time. And at that point, Saturn
and Mercury and Venus will be a fair bit lower
to the horizon, a little bit hard ad spot that
then you will be able to see all the naked

(40:43):
eye planets are all at once in the sky. At
the same time, and then you'll go, well, the spread
out of over one hundred and eighty degrees, isn't that pretty?

Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, I definitely want to have a look at that,
and yah, got plenty of time to do it, so yeah, fantastic.
All right, Thank you Joy.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
As always, I don't forget. If you would like to
follow up on those stories, you can do that in
our show notes.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Don't forget to visit us online at space Nuts podcast
dot com or space nuts dot io and check out
our various pages, including our shop which is full of
all sorts of junk stuff, really good stuff that you
can take a peek at. Thanks Johnny, as always, we'll
catch you on the very next episode.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
Pleasure.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Thanks for having me Johnny Horner, professor of astrophysics standing
in for Professor Fred Watson. And thanks to here in
the studio who didn't turn up today because he actually
got a free ticket on a spacecraft called Ship and
from me Andrew Dunkley. Thanks for your company. We'll see
you on the next episode of Space Nuts.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
Until then, bye bye.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and all your favorite
podcast You can also stream on demand at bytes dot com.
This has been another quality podcast production from fights dot com.

All Episodes

Meteorite Doorbells, Space Treaties & Panspermia Possibilities: #489 - The Great Cosmic Debate

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Meteorite Doorbells, Space Treaties & Panspermia Possibilities: #489 - The Great Cosmic Debate