Lost Wanderer Podcast for 10/19/2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Time for this nation to take a clearly leading role
in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the
key to our future on Earth.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
M one all fair program on file.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Today is a day from morning and remember Nancy and
I are gained the core of the tragedy of the
Shuttle challenge. The following program may contain false language, adult teens,
and bad attempts of.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Human Listen a discretion if ADVID.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
What is President Trump's goal?

Speaker 4 (01:07):
What is his vision? He wants to put an American
flag on Mars.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Burthen Anguality days here the angle landed.

Speaker 4 (01:32):
I am J. Eblef also known as a cosmic bard
over on X and this is the Lost Wonder podcast
for October nineteen, twenty twenty five, coming to you from
the ACS Serenade Observatory, orbiting high above the night side
of Earth. Tonight rockets that almost touch perfection, nations turning

(01:53):
orbits into advertising space, and a universe that just might
be thinking about us as much as we think about it.
There's a certain sound that only happens when a human
creation succeeds at the edge of possibility. Is not the

(02:14):
roar of engines or the cracks of plasma it's that
sudden silence in mission control when everyone realizes nothing exploded.
Let me fix this one little thing here, Sorry about that.
Here we go. On October ninth, twenty twenty five, Starship

(02:36):
rose from Bocachica for it's eleventh integrated flight test, and
this time the word was quote near perfect for SpaceX,
that's practically flawless. For the rest of us, it means
one more line crossed off the list, or maybe a
hundred of things we thought were impossible. They say every

(02:59):
launch is a symphony of a thousand things that could
go wrong. This time almost all of them decided, Eh,
we're gonna set this one out. Stage separation was clean
at T plus two minutes and forty five seconds, All
six vacuum raptors burned steady telemetry state CRISP, and the
vehicle climb passed two hundred kilometers before performing its controlled

(03:20):
reentry burn. Sixty three minutes after lift off, Starship Stainless
Steel Hall splushed down in the Pacific near Hawaii, the
first time a full stack completed its integrated flight profile,
and it hovered. It hovered before landing, and I'm sorry
it wasn't. Hawaii was in the acean area. But it's

(03:42):
kind of interesting to think that there was a time
when rockets were miracles, and most of our lifetimes they
were miracles. When the first Saturn five left Earth, it
carried a kind of a religious energy, thunder, smoke and prayer.

(04:02):
The entire Apollo era used just thirteen of them. Space
X can match that number of orbital launches now in
just a month. The Shuttle years made us casual about orbit.
Falcon nine has made us efficient about it. But Starship,

(04:24):
Starship makes us bold again. It's not just a rocket,
it's a monument to human human stubbornness. Every panel of
stainless steel reflects the sunlight like a mirror aimed at
the future. Every weld, every energy bell is a small
defiance against gravity's monopoly. And when it lights up, oh

(04:46):
it's not subtle. It's the loudest reminder that our species
is still reaching, still dreaming. Steel just a little bit
insane now. That near perfect flight was more than a milestone.
It was the sound of confidence returning after so many
fiery lessons. Ten plates that, let's face it, most more

(05:06):
than its fair share ended in tumbles, tears, and telemetry blackouts.
They kind of got the rhythm right on this. I
don't know what was loud, or the engine or all
the engineers at SpaceX exhaling at one time of success. Now,
of course, while the headlines were shouting, SpaceX quietly fired

(05:30):
off another starlink group ten to fifty nine from Cape Canaveral,
Just another Tuesday for SpaceX standards. Another fifty three satellites
tossed into orbit like seeds into an infinite field. In
twenty twenty five, the cadence averages once every three to
four days, a schedule that would make the Shuttle program

(05:54):
blush an envy a decade ago. One successful launch with Champagne. Now,
it's all right, that happened. But that's the weird part
of progress. It sneaks up on you until the miraculous
becomes well. I hate saying this word mundane. If you've

(06:18):
stood outside on a clear night and watch these pearls
of lights slide across the sky, you know it's impossible
not to feel something all Maybe you know or unease.
We're writing constellations that move. Some see it as innovation,
others call it orbital graffiti. Either way, this guy is

(06:39):
no longer silent. Our planet humes with metal, each node
whispering pockets of data, memes, stock trades, and more often
than not, arguments. The emn condition has officially gone orbital.
That said, there's still paperwork, because every revolution eventually has

(07:00):
to file for a permit. In early October twenty twenty five,
the US Space Force authorized up to one hundred SpaceX
launches per year from Vandenburg Space Force based through twenty
thirty five. So for those one math because it is
Sunday and we do do math here, that's an average
of ten launches from Vandenburg per year. Let's face it,

(07:24):
this is no longer just exploration. This is infrastructure that's
turning spaceflight into logistics, orbit into a kind of an interstate.
Somewhere in a Pentagon office, a colonel with a cup
of coffee sign in the future like it was just
another requisite order. Maybe maybe just that's that's a real milestone,

(07:47):
the moment when our greatest technical marvels become part of
the supply chain. If you're anything like me, we used
to dream about launching rockets. Now we schedule them. The
frontier has a flight manifest and a barcode, and I'll
be honest, there is a bit of a strange comfort

(08:08):
in that, because it means the dreams of our youth
survive long enough to almost get boring. And that's how
you know a civilization is growing up when its miracles
become borderline routine. Fire once belonged to the gods, now

(08:28):
it cooks our breakfast, or if it was once unreachable,
now it's a line item. In the fiscal year, you
can almost feel the planet exhale every time one of
these booster lands upright, stringing off gravity like it doesn't exist,
or it's in old habit. When you think about if

(08:49):
Falcon nin has now flown over three hundred and twenty
times with more than two hundred and fifty successful booster recoveries,
and some stages have flown mission twenty or more times.
Every time those grid fins open and the rocket tilts
into a controlled fall, and if you didn't catch the

(09:11):
launch today, ho lee hell. It looks less like a
technology and more like a choreography. And tonight's mission was
the epitome of that, with a visual on the booster
from launch to landing, the entire time seeing the curvature
of the earth busting through max Q where for half

(09:34):
a second, Starlink lost communication and froze the entire time,
beaming down high quality graphics we could never have dreamed of,
and yet they're happening. Of course, routine has its own risk.
When the extraordinary becomes Tuesday, we do sometimes stop paying attention.

(10:00):
We forget that each of these launches is a smell
rebellion against gravity itself, the oldest law we've ever broken.
It's easy to scroll past another flame, another tower, another
cloud of steam, amidst that we're still weighed writing the
next chapter of the human story, one ignition at a time. Now,

(10:24):
Starship isn't just about Mars. It's about proving the big
impossible things are still possible, like trying to put together
a kale or in play, that ambition doesn't have to
die just because budget's due. That maybe somewhere between bureaucracy
and burnout, theres is still room to allow ourselves to wonder.

(10:46):
And sure you know, the memes will write themselves. Every
launch gets a dozen Union versus Gravity jokes before the
engine's even cool. But beneath the noise there isn't an
undeniable truth. Nobody else on Earth flying machines like this
No One Blue origins getting close.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
Now.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
The engineers don't post threads about inspiration. They're building it.
Every weld, every test, and every fuel line, humming with
liquid methane. All of it speaks the same quiet language.
Let's try again. And somewhere right now, someone is probably
tightening a bolt on the next booster, running a simulation,
or dreaming of a rocket that can reach a place
we haven't yet named. Because that's how the story goes,

(11:34):
one launch at a time, one more flame in the dark.
Womenon doesn't care whether we notice it, while we agree
about or why we argue over who owns the sky,
while governments drag their pins across orbit leases. Somehow, some way,
the engines keep burning. Factories in Texas, pads in Florida,

(11:56):
control rooms in Hawthorn, all humming to the same rhythm again, again,
again again. This is the same beat that drove the
Right Brothers, that echoed in the vab At Kennedy, that
whispered throughout the launch pads of Bachanor and Tennis Guaha
and Winshang. It's the sound of Hu man A refusing

(12:19):
to stay where it's comfortable because we're not very good
at sitting still. Every age has its own frontier. This
one just happens to start one hundred kilometers up. The
real trick will be remembering why we went, because the
higher we climb, the easier just to forget the view

(12:39):
from the ground. We could build an entire civilization that
orbits Earth and still never see it. Not really, if
we forget what it means to look homeward. And maybe
that is a price of progress. Each a scent texas
further from the world that built us. But maybe that's
the reward too. Sometimes distance can change your perspective from

(13:06):
up there. Borders can vantage politics, politics can blur, and
even the loudest voices of ego can sometimes fade in
the static. And maybe, just maybe that's why I still
get goosewumps every time a rocket clears the pad, Because
for all the noise, all the corporate logos, all the
memes and manifestos, there is still at least one unshakable truth.

(13:30):
When the engines ignite, we all rise a little. The
first spark is human, the second spark is hope, and
by the time the booster or lands, we've proven again
that gravity is only half the story. That the rest
of It is us we build because we must, because

(13:50):
every time we light the sky on fire and nothing breaks,
the universe nods just a little and lets us keep climbing.
And when the ex off fades and the cameras turn away,
the engines keep burning in silence, in factories and labs,
and more importantly, in the imaginations of the people who
refuse to be done. Every orbit landing near perfect tests

(14:13):
is just another verse in a song we've been singing
since we first looked up and wondered, is there anybody
out there? We have turned the wonder into welds and
guidance code and the reusable miracles and burnt fingerprints, and
still still sometimes that is not enough, because somewhere ahead
there's another version of starship, sleeker, lighter, maybe faster, and

(14:37):
behind it, another team, another spark, and another dream that
refuses to stay grounded. The sky is open for business, sure,
but it's also open for belief. And if you listen closely,
above the noise of ambition and the humma bureaucracy, you
can still hear it, a faint, endless rhythm of engines

(14:58):
that never eight stop. Now a starship's roar towards tomorrow,
Orbit's oldest resident, sadly is ready ready to dim its lights.
After a quarter century circling above us, the ISS is

(15:20):
almost ready to come home, for when a frontier becomes familiar,
it starts to feel like home. For nearly twenty five years,
humanity's home above Earth has been a patchwork of aluminum
and perseverance that is called the International Space Station as symbol.
For more than one hundred launches between nineteen ninety eight
and twenty eleven, it has hosted over two hundred and

(15:43):
eighty astronauts from twenty one different nations and carried out
well over three thousand scientific experiments, and has watched the
sun rise sixteen times a day every day since it's
late nineteen nineties, long enough for an entire generation to
grow up never knowing an Earth without people in orbit.

(16:07):
That said, even the best built homes wear out. NASA
has confirmed the station's controlled de orbit for around twenty thirty,
after nearly three decades of duty. Controllers will guide it
into the South Pacific for a fiery farewell, modules glowing
like falling stars as they return every barred atoms back

(16:27):
to Earth. Now, admittedly it sounds brutal, but that's that's
the way of orbit. Skylab lasted six years, Mirror held
on for fifteen. The ISS will have doubled that. Metal
fatigue seals age, micrometeorids stop never knocking on the door,

(16:48):
and maintenance now costs roughly three billion with a B
dollars a year. So the plan is to hand the
keys over to the private sector. Instead of one vast
government complex, NASA will rent time on a smaller commercial
station such as Axiom, maybe vast Haven one and whatever
else follows. O Haven one aims to launch in twenty

(17:11):
twenty six, small enough for a single Falcon nine and
designed to host four crew for a month. Axioms first
module will attached to the ISS before branching off to
become its successor. It's sort of an odd cond of progress,
leaving one grand out post for a constellation of orbiting startups,
kind of like a well well I can describe it

(17:34):
is a motel chain of low Earth orbit, but maybe
that is the new shape of exploration, public dreams funded
by private wallets. The ISS was born from ashes of
the Gold War One. Russians and Americans decided to alter
their futures together instead of maybe pointing missiles at each other,
even though those missiles have been constantly pointed at each

(17:57):
other and for a generation at work because of treaties,
but because people kept showing up for work. The quiet
cooperation might actually be the ISS's greatest legacy. But when
the final module falls and the sea swallows of sparks,
it won't be a funeral. It'll be a migration. A
new astronaut will float inside a privately built module, look

(18:20):
out a new window and see the same sunrise the
ISS crew saw thousands of times before, the hard fact.
But home isn't the hardware, it's the habit of coming
back to it. And whether the wall says NASA or
AXIOM or some other name, it's still the same thin

(18:40):
line between humanity and the void. So when the station
finally burns across the Pacific sky, don't call it an ending.
Call it proof that we stayed for a quarter century,
thirty years. By then, we kept a human heartbeat circling
the earth. Now, wow, one, I can't believe I have to.

(19:10):
I have to find this. You're all good, you'all are
gonna be so disappointed in me. I don't know, Oh,
I don't know what to do here because it's not
loaded up. Why is it not loading up? I don't know.
It's like I'm unprepared. I'm never unprepared. I think you

(19:31):
all caught me in a moment of unpreparedness. Mark this
down because I don't have the music. While one generation
of explorers prepares to bow out, another seems to seems
busy turning orbit into a billboard. It's once a time

(19:54):
again for the crowd favorite segment where diplomacy meets dumb
ideas and the dumb ass hosts. This show does not
have the music ready, So I'm just gonna say it.
Let's go to assholes in space. Dun dun, dun, dun, dun, dun,
dun dun. I can't believe I don't have it ready.

(20:19):
There's an old saying space is hard. Apparently it's also crowded,
especially if you are China, who seems determined to turn
orbit into a cosmic traffic jam. This week, Beijing pulled
off a surprise long March launch, their six hundred mission

(20:41):
in the series, sending another batch of Internet satellites aloft.
Even state media caught it quote ahead of schedule, unquote
which is code for we didn't tell anybody. We didn't
tell anybody. International trackers scrambled to find out that, well,
you know what's just peered over the Pacific? Should we

(21:01):
be alarmed? Because if China's space program has a model,
it's basically surprise everybody. Now. It wasn't just a single
launch either, that was to be noted. Private Chinese company
CIS Space tasted tested a new sea based rocket firing
off the deck of a converted offshore barge. Oh yes,

(21:23):
this is the same technology SpaceX toid with a decade
ako in the Chinese stole or whatever, only this time
there's a giant red flag painted on the hull of
this vessel. In theorycing launches reduced the risk to land
populations and more importantly cow populations. And also you know,

(21:44):
in practice they let you drop all I don't know,
spent boosters wherever you went and call it international water.
I said, they're not done yet. While the rest of
the world was clapping for Starship's precision landings, see Space
quietly announced plans for a bigger, paler capacity and rapid
reuse systems, essentially a Starship Light, which they probably stole

(22:10):
barred took whatever the plans from so Yes. While Elon's
making memes about Mars, Beijing seems quietly building the wish
dot Com version of Boca Chica, and at the same time,
the CSA, the Chinese Space Agency, has begun testing new
de orbit systems, robotic arms and drag sales meant to

(22:31):
collect orbital debris. Yes, al, if you're listening, they're stealing
your idea, because that's what they do. They steal everything. Now,
on paper, it's a noble, goal less junk say for skies,
until you remember telling that Chinese are responsible for a
fair share of it. It's kind of like, you know,

(22:56):
the arsenalists may be applying to you know, I don't know,
be a five or marshal or something. But that said,
the technology works. The prototypes have gravity funk satellites and
nudge them into re entry and would also make a
great space weapon to pull other countries' satellites down. But
we won't go there yet because you know, the real

(23:19):
concern is whose satellites they might start to quote unquote
cleaning up, because let's face it, orbital salvage is one
diplomatic incident away from space piracy. But meanwhile, inside the
te Young Space station, a crew celebrated the mid Autumn
festival in far more wholesome way. And why why is

(23:42):
it the Chinese that brings me food, not the Russians,
not the Americans. I get space food from the Chinese.
You know how much this pisses me off? Anyway, because

(24:03):
the mid Autumn festival it's being celebrated, they decided to
livestream a feast of spicy lamb mooncakes. They floated packets
of chili paste and toasted earth from orbit. I'm not

(24:24):
gonna lie to use spicy lamb mooncakes actually sounds either
a something really delicious or the name of the stripper
I saw in ninety two could be either one, but
in a way it is. I'll give the China credit.
It is an oddly charming contrast. While their ground teams

(24:45):
that are playing hide and seek with launch schedules, the
astronauts themselves are just trying to have dinner without drifting
into the air filter. And somewhere in Beijing there's probably
a propaganda official insisting the meal represents quote the triumph
of socialist cuisine unquote and honestly badly because the freaking
Americans and freaking Russians and everyone else who goes up

(25:08):
there doesn't tell me what they're sending up in food,
because food spaced food is awesome. It kind of does
represent a triumph of cuisine. So it wouldn't be an
assholes in space segment if we didn't mention a competition. Yes,

(25:32):
over in Russia, lat them up Pulton, just to prove
plans to let private firms project advertisements from orbits. Yes,
literal glowing billboards in the sky, fleets of microsatelets bouncing
sunlight into recognizable logos. So we have the possibility of

(25:58):
looking at the night sky and seeing it pepsi ads
sailing past Orion's belt. And if you thought astronomers were
pissed off at starlink, I got news for you now.

(26:18):
The ESA has called it a hazard to observation, and
somewhere in use in a NASSA flight controller muttered, of course,
of course it's Russia that's doing this now. The official
justification coming from Russia is new revenue shrooms for the
space sector. Translation where poor as fuck and the ruble

(26:40):
isn't what it used to be. So yes, we have
China filling this guy with secret satellites enjoying some spicy
lamb moon pies. Russia is painting over the stars, and
everyone else is just trying to keep clear signal to
talk to their mars over. But there is a in

(27:01):
all the absurdity, there is brilliance behind some of the chaos.
China's launching faster than any other country, more than seventy
emissions already in twenty twenty five. Now, I say nations
because it is important to remember SpaceX is a private entity.
Even though it is heavily influenced by military and US

(27:24):
government launches, most of the launches are private. Also, China's
TIONG space station is operating smoothly by all accounts. Their
quote unquote private to the government sector is growing, and
their astronauts are live streaming holidays meals to millions and
millions and millions of viewers, the proving the propaganda in

(27:50):
progress aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. You can cook dinner and
conquer orbit. It's the same time. And yeah, there is
a bit of strange term in this assholes and space spegmen.
They frustrate us absolutely. They hide their schedules, they ignore
orbital traffic laws, they kill cows with one out of

(28:12):
every six launches, and they occasionally get to eat snacks
on camera. I'm gonna take a breath, go into the
next story, shall we. Now we have map stars for millennia,

(28:32):
and we still don't know if maps has edges from
Astronomers say the universe is infinite, no walls, no borders,
just expansion forever. I call that kind of communists bullshit.
Others think it's vast but finite, the cosmic balloon, stretching
as it inflates, where travel far enough in one direction

(28:54):
might someday bring you back to where you eventually started.
The current problem is we can't step outside to check,
not at all. We can only measure what light has
had time to reach us. The visible sphere, the observable universe,
is about ninety three billion let years across, a bubble
of everything whose light has arrived since the Big Bang

(29:17):
some thirteen point eight billion years ago, give or take
a billion. Beyond that we can't see, but physics suggests
there is more. Maybe maybe, Oh remember when your math
teacher said the infinity symbol was wrong? But maybe there
is a possibility of infinity if it truly has no boundary.
That means somewhere out there, past the last boton, we

(29:37):
can detect another version of us might exist. Maybe they're
hosting this same show, wondering the same thing, argue about
whether to name their ship after a song lyric feeling
seen by my own comment here, But infinity has a
way of humbling even the loudest of civilizations. Finit or not,

(30:00):
Verus does have a horizon. Cosmic expansion, driven by what
we call dark energy, is pulling galaxies way faster than
light can even close the gap, and roughly one hundred
billion years most galaxies will slip so far beyond our
reach that even they're light will never arrive. Future astronomers
will look up and go, huh, nothing up there. It's

(30:24):
just the lonely sky. And that's why telescopes like James
Webb and Hubble still matter so much to us. There
are our lighthouses in the dark, sending beams both ways
outward and curiosity at inward and perspective. A web has
already spotted light from galaxy s forms when the universe

(30:45):
was less than a billion years old, tiny smudges that
proved there was some order even amidst the chaos, every
proton that catches a time capsule saying.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
Hey, hey, we're here.

Speaker 4 (31:00):
This is just like those behind recentspace dot com reports.
I've started asking whether information itself may be the real
fabric of reality, whether space and time emerge from patterns
of data. If that's true, infinity might not be a
place at all, but a process, an endless computation, forever running,
forever updating. And that just means consciousness ours, yours, whomever's

(31:24):
is part of that process. We are not just in
the universe. We are something the universe is doing, and
that's admittedly part. I can't shake every new discovery, push
to the boundary of known a little further, but the
effect is always the same. We feel a little bit
smaller as I view gets a little bit bigger. It's

(31:45):
as if creation keeps dimming the lights ahead of us
just enough that we have to keep moving forward, chasing,
chasing that next glimmer. Infinity is terrifying, sure, but maybe
it's also mercy because if the universe ended abruptly, if
they're it was a wall, a final coordinate, we'd lose
the wonder that maybe drives us every everything and everywhere else.

(32:07):
The mystery is the motive. So maybe the answer isn't
whether universe ends, but weather curiosity does. As long as
someone's still asking the question, the late stays on and
before we had to break, I do want to say
hello to everyone in chat Ordy. I think I saw
Delaney in there and VC and over at SHR, I

(32:30):
see Kiwi and BZ. So thank you everyone for tuning in.
I appreciate it. I think it's time we grab a drink,
maybe stretch our legs, check to make sure, you know,
maybe our own personal orbit is still stable. When we
come back, we'll drop back down the earth a little
bit sort of maybe and see what the universe has

(32:51):
been up to while we weren't looking. This is the
Lost Wonder Podcast and we will be back in three minutes.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
Seize Gone A climb the tower.

Speaker 5 (33:21):
The whim still arms across the stone, A light of flame.

Speaker 3 (33:30):
The noe foul.

Speaker 6 (33:33):
Move mores re turns from me long.

Speaker 5 (33:45):
The glasses cracks keep signing, still silence.

Speaker 6 (34:00):
Me sa lands a shot beg so.

Speaker 5 (34:08):
Muscade shot we signed two minutes.

Speaker 6 (34:23):
We signed you cross the l shouts we shot.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
Retire, we are another.

Speaker 5 (35:02):
Hard repeats my phrase lots away.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
Square lots of lot shore the show We shure.

Speaker 6 (35:28):
We should.

Speaker 4 (35:53):
Intermission is now complete. You're listening to the Lost, Lost
Wonderer podcast and it's time for the second half of
the night. It's broadcast because the universe didn't stop expanding
just because we decided to have a couple of SIPs
of our wine and take a break. Now, the fun
thing about science is we always are learning new things.

(36:15):
We keep finding planets that refuse to behave. For instance,
now the newest culpriate orbits to start roughly one two
hundred light years away in the constellation Leserta, and astronomers
are they're still kind of scratching their heads a little bit.
It's what we call and I wish I was making
this up. A super puff world, not a powerpuff world,

(36:40):
a super puff world about the size of Jupiter, but
with the mass of a cotton ball. Okay, okay, maybe
not literally a cotton ball, more like one tense the
density of water. If you could drop this planet into
an ocean big enough to hold it, technically, it would float. Now,

(37:00):
this discovery came courtesy of the super Rute telescope. Now,
not to be confused with you know, a super ru
dealership in Vermont, where half the astronomer club parks a
certain direction if you catch my meeting, mister Frodo. But
it was follow up data that came from tests NASA's
Transiting Exoplanet Survey satellite that showed us more that the

(37:22):
light from the parents star dips rhythmically every few days,
revealing the planet's orbit. Now, that part, of course, is routine.
What isn't routine is what the numbers said afterword. The
planet's radius is enormous, but its gravity barely tugs on

(37:44):
its star. It's like weighing a beach ball and finding
out it's full of fog. Models can't quite explain how
something so large and so light can exist without actually
being torn apart. Now right now now. The leading theory
is heat, lots and lots of heat orbiting close to

(38:05):
its star. This puffy world may be super inflated by
constant stellar radiation, its atmosphere sort of swollen and leaking
like steam from a kettle. And another idea is that
it's young, still cooling from formation, its gases have not
yet compressed into a tighter ball. Either way, it's a
reminder that nature doesn't care how tighty. Your spreadsheet looks

(38:28):
and now Schronimer's catalog. These outliers with polite phrases like
unexpected morpholity what they really really mean to say but
aren't allowed, But I am because this is my show.
What they really mean is what the hell is that? Now?
Every time we think we understand planetary formation, some overachiever

(38:50):
steps in and decides to ruin it. And we started
with a simple model, small rocky planets near the star
with big gas giants further out. Then came hot Jupiter's neptunes,
and now and now this planets so fluffy they could
double as parade balloons. And yes, somewhere the ghost of
Johann's coupler is probably rolling his eyes. But these anomalies

(39:16):
actually matter. Each one stretches the range of what we
consider possible. And that's how science survives by being proven
wrong in interesting ways, because science is never settled. For
every new telescope image that matches prediction, there's another that doesn't,
and that's the one that changes the textbooks. The James

(39:37):
West Face Telescope has started peering into some of these atmospheres,
searching for fingerprints of hydrogen, helium, and exotic molecules like
titanium oxide. The more we look, the more chaotic it
ends up getting. Some planets have clouds made of quartz,
Others rain molten glass sideways at five thousand miles per hour.

(39:58):
Now compared to those, a weird little puffball here seems
downright polite. But still the question lingers, how stable can
a world like this actually be? If it's bleeding atmosphere
in the space, it may not last more than a
few million years. A cosmic may fly if you will.
One day it gases, well, then it's horrible shrink. It

(40:19):
will vanish into a faint wisp of dust orbiting in
an indifferent star. Yet here it is, in this brief
window of existence, bright enough for us to actually notice
a reminder that imperenance isn't failure, it's just physics doing poetry.
Worlds calm, and worlds go, shapes form, and they fade
and in between someone with a telescope besides to write

(40:41):
it down. So the next time you hear an astronomer
talk about quote rules of planetary formation unquote, remember the
universe itself never signed an agreement on what were the
rules of planetary formation. The Cosmos itself is more pirate
than professor. And as we always say, the rules were

(41:04):
always more like guidelines. Now that said, Mars keeps getting
all the headlines. But the closer we get, the more
obvious it becomes. The hardest part won't be the distance,
It'll be each other. A new study from NASA funded
researchers this month looked at crew dynamics and long duration

(41:24):
isolation missions analog environments built to mimic a Mars base.
The conclusion was simple, brutal, and probably familiar to anyone
who's ever shared an apartment. You don't want six alphas
on the same damn planets. The experiment ran inside the
Human Exploration Research Analog at Johnson Space Center, using small,

(41:45):
mixed gendered crews sealed in two story habitat for simulated
missions lasting up to forty five days. They tracked mood, communication,
and cooperation using biometric sensors and daily reports. What they
found was that the groups comprised entirely of dominant, highgately
competitive personalities. People who score high on traits like assertiveness
and ambition burned out the fastest. Conflicts rose, cohesion, collapse,

(42:10):
and productivity nosed by day twenty cruise with more diverse
personality mix, however, kind of remained calm and efficient. Teams
that included one or maybe two natural leaders, a couple
of steady collaborators, and at least one empathetic mediator not
only functioned better, they actually liked each other at the end,

(42:33):
oh gasp. In a way, it turned out space doesn't
necessarily reward command, it rewards chemistry. Now this isn't necessarily
news to a psychologist or chemist, but it's becoming more
mission critical. A Mars expedition will trap people together for

(42:55):
nearly three years round trip, six months each way, and
more than a year waiting for the planets to realign.
There's no door to slam, no way to walk to
clear your head, and delay in radio signals means you
can't even rage text mission control. If something goes wrong,
it's on the crew to either fix it or fail

(43:15):
it together. Now, this study echoes early results from Antarctic
research stations and the Russian Mars five hundred simulation of
twenty eleven, where isolation led to things such as fatigue, anxiety,
and what the report politely called reduced emotional bandwidth and behavior.
In other words, cabin fever, which is a more scientific

(43:37):
that are branding. So NASA is learning to engineer compatibility
the same way it's engineers actually do a hunt with hardware.
Future astronaut selections will weigh empathy, patients, and humor right
alongside endurance and IQ, because when you are two hundred
million miles from home, the ability to tell a joke

(43:57):
at the right time might matter more than say, how
much can you bench bro? But it does raise a
bit of an interesting philosophical point. We spent centuries designing
machines to survive face. Do we have to design humans
for it. We're kind of learning that the trades we

(44:20):
want to dismiss maybe a soft listening compromise emotional intelligence,
or maybe some strength that can be added to the
structural material for going into space. And there is some
saying among test pilots, check your ego at the hatch

(44:41):
from Mars. That might need to be etched right into
the airlock as the inter because if humanity ever does
get the chance the planet its flag on the Red planet,
the most important tool won't be the rover, or maybe
even the rabbit, the habitat, or the radiation shield. It
will be the ability to look across the module. Someone
who's driving you insane, you'll be able to hands them

(45:02):
a wrench. Now, with that said, let's go out a
little further to stars, because every star dies eventually. Well,
let me rephrase that every star dies eventually except Keith
Richards who was here before us, and we'll probably be
here after everyone else is gone. But for the rest

(45:23):
of the cosmos, death is inevitable. It's just a question
of how do you want to leave. Now. In a
corner of the sky about twenty million light years away,
the James Webspace Telescope recently called a rare cosmic premonition,
a red super giant wrapped any shroud of dust moments
before it went kabluey. Astronomers have catalog countless supernova, but

(45:46):
almost never the exact moments before. It's like catching a
candle just as this flame turns inward. The star, known
by its survey named s N twenty twenty four ad
w hike quietly in a nearby spiral galaxy. When Web's
infrared I picked it out in late twenty twenty four,

(46:08):
it looked wrong. It looked too dim, It looked too dusty.
It looked too restless. Follow up images showed in expanding
haze material already escaping the surface. Within weeks, the inevitable happened.
The outer layers collapse, the core rebound it, and late
from the explosion out shun the entire host galaxy for
days now. Much like redheaded women in our world, red

(46:33):
super giants are the drama queens of the stellar world.
Yes they may be pretty, we know they're going to
blow at some point. They live fast to swallo up
to one hundreds of times the Sun's diameter, then spend
their final centuries shredding masks like glitter at a parade.
Most die without warning, but this this one actually gave
a bit of a heads up. A super pre nova

(46:55):
a bit of a tantrum visible throughout dust that only
Web's infrared cameras could pierce. By measuring the spectrum of
that dust, astronomers confirmed it wasn't just smoke. It was
chemistry and progress because chemistry matters. By measuring the spectrum
of the dust, astronomers confirmed it wasn't just smoke, just awesome.

(47:16):
Catching a red super giant before detonation help refines models
for stellar death, giving us more warning signs to watch
for elsewhere. For decades we've had theories about how much
material star must lose before collapse. Now we actually have
kind of the evidence. A here in mid act. Now

(47:38):
the event also highlights by telescopes like James Web Space
Telescope are rewriting astronomy and science. Once again, science is
not settled. Where Hubble would see beauty, Web is now
seeing process. It's infra red vision cuts through obscuring dust
to reveal the machinery beneath. There is a twist to this, though,

(48:01):
the data suggests. The data actually suggests that this star
knew it was dying. Stay with me here. In its
last months, it was ejecting gas at a rate of
a thousand times higher than normal, as if trying to
lighten the load before the final collapse and after physical

(48:26):
terms that actually could be considered awareness, not consciousness, mind you,
but a kind of physical self knowledge written in equations
of pressure infusion. A star can't fear death, yet it
still prepares for it. It spends its last energy're creating
the dust dot will one day becomes something else. Planets

(48:47):
comments maybe beings like us who look up and tell
its story every telescope image of thatting fading red light
is a reminder endings and beginnings often share the same
color temperature, sure that ashes of one sun can become
the dawn of another. In for centuries, we've tried to

(49:08):
describe the universe in terms of what it's made of matter, energy, fields, forces.
But what if all of that is just a front
end interface, that the real operating system underneath is something
simpler that we touched on earlier. Information Because this is
a radical idea gaining ground in modern cosmology, researchers studying

(49:32):
dark matter with dark energy, you're beginning to suspect that
information itself might be the fundamental ingredient of reality, the
thing from which space and time will actually emerges. Now,
the math is what started whispering this first. When you
strip quantum mechanics down to probabilities, what you get isn't
position or momentum. You get bits. Every electron, every photon,

(49:57):
every field. Fluctuation can be described by binary outcomes. Ye
no spin out, spin down one zero. The universe, it seems,
is fluent in computer logic, and that actually led physicist
John Wheeler to coin the phrase it from bit. He
meant that every physical thing. Every it arises from an

(50:18):
informational bit. Matter isn't just data that's been or matter
is just data that's been rendered. And the more we
learn about quantum entanglement, the more that sounds less like
philosophy and more like diagnostics. And where we get some
conspiracy theories from dark matter and dark energy still make

(50:39):
up about ninety five percent of the universe, and we
have no no clue what they are. But if their
manifestations of hidden information, their ghostly effects start to make sense,
it's simply data we can't read, influence influencing code we
actually can in a sort of weird way. Gravity would

(51:00):
be the emergent bug report of the cosmos. It also
reframes one of physics's strangest facts that black holes actually
do store information. When a star collapses, the data about
everything that fell into it isn't destroyed. It becomes encrypted
on the event horizon, like a cosmic backup drive. That's

(51:24):
actually Beckenstein Hawking formula, the same math that links entropy
in area in a universe made a data. Nothing truly disappears,
It just gets compressed into unreadable format. Like already says,
dark matter equals cobol. Yes, yes, and I hate that
that makes sense. But here's where it does get a

(51:47):
little bit weird as well as if it wasn't already.
If information is the real substance of reality, then consciousness
isn't an exception to the role. It's part of the
rule set. Every act of observation, every measure, every awareness
is a form of data processing inside the cosmic network.
We don't just live in the universe where nodes in

(52:08):
its ongoing computation, which means when you stare up at
the night sky, the universe in a very real sense
and really uneasy feeling is staring back because you're both
running the same code. It's not mesticism. It's math wrapped

(52:30):
in metaphor. Every cubit that flips, every folkon the travels,
every atom that vibrates in another line, execute it into
the grand program of existence. Dark matter could be the
hidden variables, dark energy, the unrolled recursion driving expansion. It
could be ten, create universe, twenty repeat ten. The cosmics
might not be infinite space. It might be infinite processing power.

(52:53):
And that makes human curiosity feel less less like vanity
and more like function. We ask questions because universe asks
them through us debugging itself, line by line, each telescope,
each experiment, each midnight thought is part of the great
to compile. Somewhere between superstition and simulation theory, there's a

(53:13):
truth that it is taking shape. Reality is keeping perfect logs.
Energy can't be destroyed because information can't be deleted. The
past didn't advantage it just is archived beyond our reach.
So the next time you lose your keys, maybe you
didn't misplaced them. Maybe the universe just moved that file
to different storage. Now, whether it's true or not, the

(53:38):
idea does carry a strange comfort. If all of existence
is information, even the smallest signal matters. Every word, every breath,
and every spark of that thought is another bits of
information written into the cosmic card drive, which means that
somewhere in the great database of being, this little itty
bitty broadcast my voice, your your signal moment is already

(54:01):
recorded because the universe never forgets. So if everything is information,
I guess it's time to process something truly mysterious, something

(54:22):
scientists still can't quite categorize. Let's talk uranus. Try to
do this like an adult. Try it's the key word
here every few years, astronomers is something discover something new

(54:44):
about Uranus, and the rest of us try heroically, if
I may add, to get through the headline with a
strange face. But this time the science is worth the snickers.
New data suggests Uranus and it's blue green sibling, Neptune,
might not actually be ice giants after all. For that

(55:04):
term dates back to the nineteen eighties, when Void two
flybys should both planets made of mostly of water, methane
and ammonia. Ice is under the hydrogen atmosphere, cold distant,
quiet two frozen bookends to the Solar System. Except new
modeling drawn from NASA's Juno data and fresh high pressure

(55:25):
lab experiments paints a bit of a stranger picture. Inside
Urinous and inside Neptune, it may contain far less frozen
water than we thought. Instead, their cores may be packed
with super ionic fluids, matter so compressed that oxygen atoms
lock into a crystal grid while hydrogen ion swimfully freely

(55:46):
through it like electrical current. Somehow, that's not ice. That's
more of a conductive nightmare masquerading against this new cone.
Ill temperature near its core reach eight thousand degrees fahrenheit
under pressure two million times greater than Earth's atmosphere. That is, oh,

(56:07):
if you're going to be technical, or actually not technical
but derivative here, that's less frozen wasteland and more lava smoothie.
But the new interior models also explain Urinus's weirdest quirk
It's magnetic field. Unlike Earth's tidy diphole, Uranus's field is tight,
tilted nearly sixty degrees an offset from the planet's center.

(56:29):
A sloshing, semi liquid interior could twist magnetic lines like spaghetti.
Neptune shows the same asymmetry, hinting that both worlds show
the same chiootic core recipe. Now, why does it matter
what's inside Other than you know, the obvious late night jokes.

(56:56):
These two worlds define an entire class of actual planets.
Thousands of worlds we found orbiting other stars fall into
that size range. If Uranus and Neptune aren't truly icy,
neither are they, it changes how we model planetary birth, migration,
and atmospheric chemistry across the galaxy. Because science is not settled,

(57:20):
and frankly, I'm gonna say it, Uranus deserves attention for
decades it's been for the punchline of astronomy, despite having
you know, twenty seven moons, thirteen rings, and one of
the strangest tilts in the Solar System. It rolls around
the Sun on the side like a lazy bowling ballet,
its poles taking turns, basking in forty two year seasons

(57:42):
of daylight and darkness. And while it may look calm,
it's winds scream at five hundred and fifty miles an hour,
faster than any Category five hurricane. Now, NASA does plan
to send a dedicated orbiter in the twenty thirties, and
I could wish, Oh my god, I wish I was

(58:03):
making this up, the Erinus orbiter and probe. Yes, they're
sending a probe to Uranus. Oh anyway, I'm trying my
best and trying to be the adult. Mission will map

(58:26):
magnetic field, probe the atmosphere, and maybe settle the debate
once and for all about what lies beneath a pale
heel is. Until then, all we can do is model, observe,
and giggle like a twelve year old kid. Because if
the universe does have a sense of humor, and I
think it clearly does, I think it starts with uranus.

(58:49):
So yes, yes, yes, the joke will never tie, and honestly,
maybe it shouldn't because behind every child snicker is a
spark of wonder, proof that even after centuries of discovery,
space can still make us laugh a little bit, maybe blush,
definitely make us look uranous. So I think it's time.

(59:21):
Let's dim the cabin lights, look up the report together,
maybe look at Uranus together on Pay for You or
corn Hupe. The next two weeks bring the kind of
knights that make autumn worth. The chill, clear, sharp, and
full of quiet drama. The moon we're just past a
hunter's moon, which reach fullness on October sixth. The Abenaki

(59:44):
people called it the Pinnabas Goskenzas or the leaf falling moon.
I hate my executive producer. Sometimes it's glows linger long
after sunset, perfect for the post harvest knights, when you
can see your breath and your thoughts. That's the same time.
Now the moon is slipping toward a new phase on
October twenty ninth, leaving the sky is wonderfully dark for

(01:00:07):
any astrophotographers and viewers out there. If you ever wanted
to see the Andromeda galaxy without a telescope. This this
is your window. Around ten pm, look northeast for Cassiopeias W,
then trace a line slightly down into the right. That faint,
misty oval is M thirty one, a trillion Sun's cruising
toward us at sixty eight miles per second with an

(01:00:29):
eta of about four billion years as far as planets well.
Right now, Jupiter is dominating the night, now, rising just
after dusk and reaching opposition on November second, its closest
greatest point of the year. Even a small backyard scope,
we'll show its swirling bands, or maybe show this shadow
at one of its moons crossing the disk. Saturn is

(01:00:51):
hanging study in the southn southern sky with Aquarius, while
Mars grows faintly low in the morning east, waiting for
its comeback to our next spring. And if you're up early,
why why Venus still steals the pre dawn show so
bright it can cast a shadow if you stand in
the fresh snow, Because yes, some of us are experiencing

(01:01:12):
snow right already. We do have some comment and meteor updates.
Comet Lemon twenty twenty four s one drift near Virgo
through late October, glowing faint green to anyone under dark skies.
It may just scrape naked eye visibility, but even in
binoculars it looks like a cosmic ember tossed into the void.

(01:01:34):
And this week brings us the peak of the Orionid
meteor shower. I actually had to stop and think about that. Yeah,
it's that kind of night anyway. Around October twenty first
and twenty second. Those streaks slicing through Orion's shoulder are
fragments of Haley's comment, still keeping its promised centuries after

(01:01:57):
its last pass. You can expect up twenty meteors an
hour if you're lucky, or fewer if your neighbors system
leaving the porch laid on, because neighbors are bastards. So
between Jupiter's glare and the hush of the new snow
and the shimmer of the comet dusties will be perfect
nights to remember why we look up at all, and

(01:02:18):
as always, maybe maybe take a moment to look at
Uranus one more time. Just don't film it and put
it on only fans. So step outside, find the big
square pegas has followed to Andromeda, and just breathe for
a moment, every photon hitting your eye tonight left their
home millions of years ago, is only to arrive right
on time. So that's it for tonight's transmission. Thank you

(01:02:41):
for tuning in whenever and however you do. Special thanks
to NASA spacexpace dot Com, ARCE Technical, NASA Spaceflight, Popular Mechanics,
and everyone out there keeping humanity's eyes on the stars.
With me at the helm and the executive producer plotting
our next course, and with the ship's computer in the
back with spring star maps or the static, this has

(01:03:02):
been the Lost Wonder Podcast until next orbit. I do
hope you enjoyed the show, learned a little something, and
maybe just maybe had a laugh or two as well.
The universe is a pretty big place.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before.

Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
So if it's just us, it seems like an awful
waste of space right when