April 23, 2022 • 51 mins
Did the planet Jupiter, like a reckless god, wreak havoc on a young solar system? Join Robert and Joe and they consider the red planet’s destructive powers on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. (originally published 3/25/2021)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In it's Saturday,
We're going into the vault. This episode originally aired on
March and it is the sequel to the one that
ran last Saturday. This is Jupiter the Destroyer, Part two.
Ready yourself, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production
(00:29):
of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our discussion of
Jupiter the Destroyer. In the last episode, we ended up
talking about some of the myths of Zeus and Jupiter,
(00:52):
Zeus's war against the Titans, and how that related to
some ideas in astrophysics about how an early forming Jupiter
in the solar nebula of our of our young Solar
system may have played a very important role in the
destruction of early forming super Earth's in the inner Solar System,
leading to or clearing the way for the eventual creation
(01:13):
of rocky planets like the Earth we live on today.
So that last episode was kind of it was kind
of a mash up we had we had some planetary science,
we had some mythology. It's like we had two turntables
and uh, and we had two different records and we
kind of mixed and mashed them both. Uh. So we're
we're kind of like your DJs. We well, we we're
(01:34):
your hosts, except no substitutes. Uh. And we're gonna have
more of the same in this episode. We're gonna have
plenty of planetary science, but we're also gonna have mythology.
So uh, if you love both, stay tuned, because you're
gonna get everything you love. If you lean more towards
one direction of the other, well it's still hang on
because we're gonna take you on a ride. But if
(01:54):
you're only interested in when we talk about the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre movies and stick around anyway because who knows
what will come up. Well that that movie also is
astronomical in its own wise, that's true. So maybe I
thought we should start just by doing a brief refresher
on one of the studies we talked about in the
last episode, because it kind of ties into some of
the stuff I'm going to talk about right after. Um. So,
(02:15):
one of the studies we looked at last time was
published in in p N A. S. And it was
by Constantine Batigan and Greg Laughlin, and it's called Jupiter's
Decisive Role in the Inner Solar System's early evolution. And
the rough outline is that the authors here argue that
they put together a simulation that assumes a version of
what's known as the Grand tax scenario, and that's where
(02:39):
in the early solar nebulas, So when the Solar system
is first forming, it's this big disc of gas and
dust all swirling around this newly forming Sun. When that's
going on, a young Jupiter migrated from somewhere around five
astronomical units out in radius from the Sun into about
one point five astronomical units and then reversed course and
(03:02):
went back out to a larger orbital radius when it
was pulled outward by the gravitational influence of Saturn. And
the authors here right quote, we proposed that the primordial
nebula driven process responsible for retention of Jupiter and Saturn
at large orbital radii and sculpting Mars low mass, is
also responsible for clearing out the Solar systems innermost region. So,
(03:25):
like we talked about last time, this would be wiping
out these early forming super Earth's or mini Neptunes that
were forming near the Sun and thus making room and
freeing up some materials for rocky planets like Earth and
Venus to form. And if you remember the details we
talked about last time, this would have happened according to
these authors here via a what they call a collisional cascade.
(03:49):
So Jupiter's inward migration would hurl all of these planetesimals
into um what they call mean motion resonances low order
mean motion residences, shepherd ng and exciting their orbits, so
basically just causing chaos in the inner Solar System where
things would smash into each other and then ultimately spiral
into the Sun and be vaporized down there in the
(04:10):
bottom of the Solar System. And then finally, they write,
in this scenario, the Solar systems terrestrial planets formed from
the gas starved mass depleted debris that remained after the
primary period of dynamical evolution. So under this scenario, it
is the gravitational influence from a coalescing Saturn that finally
(04:31):
pulls Jupiter back out of the fray back into the
outer Solar System. But I wanted to think about another
way that gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, or like
if you imagine another solar system somewhere else in the galaxy,
multiple jupiters can interact with one another in catastrophic ways
(04:51):
that have major influence on the other planets in that
star system. Because going to the mythological analogy, one Zeus
or one Jupiter is bad enough. Got a couple, you
you're really running into trouble. Wow, they're not going to
tolerate each other, that's right, though, it is funny that
literally in our Solar system, if you look at the
mythological counterparts of the three the first three outer planets
(05:13):
you get to after the asteroid belt, you've got Jupiter,
you got Saturn, and then you got Uranas and there
if you look at their mythological counterparts, each one ascending
out there is the father of the other who was
defeated by the Sun. So Jupiter or Zeus defeated Chronus,
which is Saturn, and dethroned him, throw him into Tartarus.
But Chronus previously the Titan had defeated Uranos or Uranus
(05:38):
by castrating him and throwing his genitals into the ocean. Yeah,
so like if you've been to thrown, you get pushed
further out of the solar hierarchy. Yeah, I guess so. Now,
now that's an interesting question, which is more like Tartarus
being cast into the sun like these early super earths
may have been, or being cast farther out into a
greater orbital radius where you're you're very cold and very
(05:59):
lone lee. I guess I go with the cold and
lonely uh interpretation more again, just in terms of thinking
about what mythological punishments would be, like I tend to imagine, uh,
the prison of the Titans as being cold and lonesome.
But anyway, I wanted to, uh now now talk about
the idea of Jupiter's going eccentric, and uh, usually the
(06:24):
word eccentric, how do we use that? We use the
word eccentric to mean weird, but in kind of a
harmless way, like it's the nice version of weird, or
the or the at least the rich version of weird,
right right, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what
you mean by that. But now in this case, this
would be uh eccentric in a way that is that
(06:45):
is not at all harmless and potentially could be world ending.
Uh So I wanted to look at a blog post
by an American astrophysicist living in France named Sean Raymond,
who I wanted to bring this up because I think
reading his blog on his website was one of the
reasons I ended up wanting to do this pair of
episodes about Jupiter. I was originally reading his website because
(07:08):
he was one of the authors of a study about
moons of moons that I talked about for an episode
of The Artifact, where I was saying like, like, how
many levels of orbits can you go down? You know,
the the so the our our Sun orbits the center
of the Milky Way galaxy, and then the Earth orbits
the Sun, and then the moon orbits the Earth. But
could the moon have its own moon? And it turns
(07:31):
out the answer is yes, there's nothing in physics that
prevents moons from having moons. But of course, every every
step you go down that ladder of orbits within orbits,
the maximum size of the orbiting object gets smaller and smaller,
And if you include really small stuff, I think moons
of moons can have moons. But anyway, through that, I
ended up reading some posts on this guy's website. So
(07:53):
he's a professor of astrophysics at the University of Bordeaux
in France, and his blog is fun. He he sometimes
like writes poems about astrophysics, and that's weird stuff on there.
But there was this one post that I thought was
really interesting and got me thinking about this topic and
reading other stuff about it. And it was a post
called how planets die when good Jupiters go bad? And
(08:15):
the gist of this post here is about how planets
like Jupiter have the potential to destroy the solar systems
that they dwell within and in other planetary systems around
other stars in the galaxy. There is evidence that gas
giants like Jupiter have indeed already destroyed other planets in
in their solar systems. Uh Now, of course, as we
(08:38):
talked about in the last episode, Jupiter is the largest
planet in our Solar system. It's more than three hundred
times more massive than Earth. What was it was like
three hundred and seventeen times as massive as Earth or something,
I mean, just huge. And of course the Sun is
the largest gravitational influence in our Solar system, but Jupiter
is second in that regard, and Jupiter has more effects
(08:59):
on what happens to the rest of the objects in
the Solar System. Then you might imagine Raymond talks about
some stuff that we didn't really get into in the
last episode. Like one of the things he mentions is
that Jupiter probably would have blocked large icy bodies from
the outer Solar System from invading the inner Solar System
when the Solar System was first forming. It would have
(09:21):
cleared this large gap in the solar nebula disc that
was forming around the early Sun uh and with its
gravity it would prevent large icy objects from migrating inwards.
Of course, we already talked about that Batigan and Laughlin
idea that if it's correct, during Jupiter's Grand tach or
the movement in and then out again UH, it would
(09:42):
have had these catastrophic implications for early forming super Earth's
or many neptunes close to the Sun through this collisional
cascade uh and would have allowed small rocky planets like
Earth to take shape in the aftermath. But Jupiter also
we should remember, and this is one thing we're gonna
look at in several different ways today. Jupiter plays a
(10:02):
major role in influencing what kinds of space objects crash
into Earth and at what rate and at what velocity, Because,
to read from Raymond here quote, Jupiter's gravity determines how
comets enter the Inner Solar System and how long they
spend near the planets with the potential to crash into
(10:23):
Earth before launching them into interstellar space. And this has
implications both ways. So it means that Jupiter can act
as a kind of destroyer, flinging objects in our direction
in a dangerous way. But Jupiter can also act as
a kind of protector, shepherding objects away from Earth and
keeping us safe. And so Jupiter's effect on the movements
(10:45):
of space objects in the Inner Solar System, like asteroids
and especially comets, I think will have powerful effects on
things like the water contents of Earth and the biological
development of Earth, which will come back to as we
go on. But coming back to the idea of eccentric
jupiters now, I mentioned in the last episode that sometimes
when we look out at other stars in our galaxy,
(11:08):
we can see that they have large exoplanets, large gas
giants in very eccentric orbits. The orbits of most of
the planets in our Solar System are nearly circular. They're
not perfectly circular, but they're pretty close. I mean, you know,
roughly circular. If you look at the orbit of some comets, though,
it is a completely different story. There are comets that
(11:30):
orbit the Sun in these incredibly squashed, squeezed out oval trajectories. Uh.
And these orbits that deviate from near circularity are called eccentric.
And of course the more squashed out they get, the
more highly eccentric they are. So if you're trying to
picture it, you can think of a more eccentric orbit
is like a rubber band being stretched out instead of
(11:53):
allowed to just like sit slack in a circle. And
in fact, exoplanet research reveals that around other ours in
the galaxy there are gas giants like Jupiter that have
orbits more like these comets. So imagine a Jupiter or
a Saturn with a highly eccentric orbit more like a
stretched out rubber band. These types of planets exist, and
(12:16):
the question is, well, how does that happen? Well, Raymond
discusses one way, when gas giants act upon one another
in dangerous ways. So large gas giants exert gravitational influence
not only on comets, not only on the moons that
orbit them, but also on one another. You know, if
you have like two jupiters orbiting a star, they will
(12:39):
have influence on the paths that they each take. Uh.
Remember thinking again about the way that a Saturn may
have pulled Jupiter back out of the inner Solar System
according to the Grand Tach hypothesis. So if you have
two gas giants that are affecting one another gravitationally, it
can throw their orbits off course. And sometimes these gravitational
(13:01):
interactions can even put them into orbital patterns, uh, such
that one gas giant gets gravitationally ejected out of the
Solar System by the gravitational influence of the other. Like
it does sort of a gravity sling shot like we
might do with a with one of our space probes,
but on a planet, and just like throws it way
out of there, and then the other one remains, but
(13:23):
in this stretched out eccentric orbit. And as you might
well imagine, these gravitational disturbances in the orbits of gas
giants can have horrible effects on the planets nearby. So
if there are earthlike inner planets in one of these scenarios,
they tend to get cast into the pit of Tartarus. Uh.
And this could actually this could be either of the
Tartarus scenarios we were talking about earlier in the in
(13:46):
the closest thing to a literal sense, right, They either
get cast way out into nowhere, into space, or they
get thrown into the Sun or destroyed by collisions, possibly
with gas giants themselves or with other rocky planets or planetestimals,
and then those the debris from those collisions can spiral
into the Sun, or they get ejected and then just
(14:08):
plunge forever into the void. Yeah, it's the thing about
the Amokies. They tend to they tend to throughout the
old order in place it was something new. You know.
This reminds me of one of the possible explanations for
Umu Mua, that object, interstellar object that we did a
couple of episodes about that. Some people, I think, probably
very prematurely, we're trying to say it was an alien probe,
(14:29):
and I don't think there's good evidence of that. But
one of the ideas about what this object probably is
because it had strange characteristics, like it's kind of elongated
and seemed to be moving in a kind of tumbling motion.
One of the ideas is that it is part of
an object that was destroyed or rejected from its host
star system by a gravitational disturbance like this. Now, most
(14:51):
of the time, when a Jupiter turns murderous, when when Jupiter,
you know, when when his hand flashes with power, as
it says in the in has He, it's the agony
um when a gas giant goes rogue and destroys the
other planets. Most of the time it happens early in
the formation of the Solar System, shortly after most of
the material and the nebula disc is dissipated and absorbed
(15:14):
by newly forming planets. And the reasoning here is that
without the stabilizing presence of this cloud like disk, a
jupiter like planet can start going off the rails very quickly.
But sometimes a gas giant can turn into the destroyer.
Its hand can flash with power later in its lifespan,
for example, if its orbit is disturbed by external influence.
(15:38):
An example here could be another star passes too close
to the Solar System and this uh this causes gravitational disturbances,
throws the orbit of the jupiter like planet off course,
and then the same thing happens. It just it starts
this cascading series of effects on the orbits of other planets.
And you know, many of these inner rocky planets are
just destroyed, they're they're sent down into the sun on Well,
(16:01):
you know, if we're to to to draw in comparison
to maybe not literal the literal mythology, but just sort
of the nature of mythologies and belief I'm reminded of
what happens when a foreign um religion or foreign deity
uh comes too close to an establish religion and deity.
You know, it can also result in a fair amount
(16:22):
of disorder uh and a realigning of the order of things. Yes,
the realignment of a pantheon in the presence of a syncretism.
Right when we emerge to religions together. If you merge
to two stars gravity is too close to one another,
this can definitely realign things and possibly result in a monotheism. Yeah,
more on that in a bit. So, Yeah, I do
(16:44):
want to be clear, we're not saying there's any reason
to think that this is likely to happen to our
solar system anytime soon like that that that's not the
implication here, but it is scary to imagine that it
does sometimes happen around other stars, and at least is
possible in theory that you know, you can have this
influence from some kind of external object, another star passes
too close or something. This can nudge the orbit of
(17:07):
a previously pretty stable Jupiter like planet, leading to a
cascade of effects like we just talked about, and then
the Earth like planets have an appointment with the wicker Man.
And uh. One interesting thing that Raymond mentions in this
blog post is he does some rough calculations and guesses
that about half of the stars in the Milky Way
(17:27):
galaxy with gas planets have annihilated the rocky planets through
a process like this. And remember that it's much more
likely for to happen early during formation, when when the
disk is first sorting itself out, but it can, in
some rare cases happen later. And I guess this all
comes down to the fact that we have a Jupiter
(17:49):
and we still exist. So it looks like in in
some sense we're one of the lucky ones. But it's
also true that the influence of Jupiter or gas giants
in general, especially Jupiter in our case, doesn't stop there.
I mean the influence on Jupiter on the history of
the planet Earth appears to be pervasive. I was looking
(18:09):
at one study by A. Lisa V. Quintana, Thomas Barclay,
William J. Baruki, Jason f Row, and Johnny Chambers from
the Astrophysical Journal called the Frequency of Giant Impacts on
Earthlike Worlds, and I was reading some write ups of this,
and basically, these researchers did some simulations of what happens
(18:30):
in different types of Solar System configurations where you have
a Jupiter present, or where you don't have a Jupiter present,
where you have multiple jupiters, and their simulations revealed that
in general, gas giants like Jupiter have complicated effects on
rocky inner planets like Earth. So young Jupiter, they think,
probably flung material into the cores of newly forming rocky
(18:52):
planets when the Solar System was young, and this would
have helped planets like Earth come together faster than rocky
planets in the Solar System without a nearby gas giant.
But at the same time, by hoarding materials to themselves,
gas giants limit the number of rocky planets that form
around a star. So if you have a star without
a planet like Jupiter, it can have way more rocky
(19:15):
planets out there. Um. And then if you don't have
any nearby gas giants, young rocky planets are subjected to
a much longer period of early bombardment where they're just
constantly being hit with impacts from space by smaller objects
from the solar nebula cloud. And a planet like Jupiter
makes that cloud disappear faster and thus makes the early
(19:39):
bombardment period last a shorter span of time. But then again,
you can also look at ways that a planet like
Jupiter ends up accelerating larger objects like comets into the
inner Solar System and controlling how long they stay there
in the Inner Solar System. Uh. And of course those
things can lead to impacts later on down the line
(19:59):
that a act Earth life. So Jupiter is once again
sort of protecting and attacking in tandem. Yeah. I guess
the relationships between humans and gods that they tend to
be a little bit unhealthy. But then again, I mean
there there are reasons. I guess what we've gone through
here kind of uh, you know, justifies the ways of
God demand uh to some extent than well, Rob I
(20:28):
don't know about you, but I am ready to mount
an apologia for Jupiter pluvious. Yeah, let's do it. Let's
let's talk Jupiter the god a bit more. Um Again,
I think this comparison between planet Jupiter and the god
Jupiter is is increasingly apt the more you look at it. Uh.
And in this episode, we're talking a good deal and
we're still talking about Jupiter the destroyer and Jupiter um
(20:52):
of of passionate lashing out against a humanity. But but
also Jupiter the protector, Jupiter the Lord of Earth, because
he enforces his order upon it and he is in
many ways its protector. And he was also expressly stated
to be the protector of the Roman state. The White
Ox was his favorite sacrifice, and it could afford an
(21:13):
entire year's protection uh from the Lord of the gods. Uh.
And he probably took this sort of thing seriously, seeing
as how he was also the god of oaths and treaties.
It's kind of a rules Yeah. Yeah, so you know
he's lawful. Whatever else he is, he's he's lawful. Uh.
So I was, well, maybe he's the emblem of lawfulness
(21:35):
to others. I don't know, does he have to follow
the laws himself. Well, I mean he's he's in. It's
here in a tough spot, like if you can't, who
are you going to report him to write? Uh? I
was reading the Imperial Ideology of Rome and the Principalities
and Powers in Romans eight thirty one through thirty nine
by Sun Cho Hong in scripture and interpretation from two
(21:58):
thousand and eight, and Home points that imperial Roman propaganda
expressly stated that the safety of the entire human race
lay in the hands of mighty Jupiter. And this is
the point pressed by Cicero, among others. And I believe
in the particularly in on the ends of Good and Evil.
I want to read a quote here from it, uh,
And this is not I want to stress that Cicero
(22:21):
goes into a lot more detail about all this, and
he's he's crafting a much greater point, uh than this.
This is just a fragment. But he does a right
or he does say. Quote, when we call Jupiter all
powerful and all good, and likewise, when we speak of
him as the salutary God, the hospitable God, or as state,
or we mean it to be understood that the safety
(22:42):
of men is under his protection This reminds me of
like when when presidents of the United States will say, like,
the president's first responsibility is to keep America safe. This
seems like a very close analogy. It's just like, first
of all, I am, I am the daddy, and it
is it is all protection from me. Yeah, so this
seems to be again Cicero's saying all other things in
(23:04):
this work, uh, I mean additional things, but this seems
to be like a major talking point for just Roman
propaganda in general. But so there's the thing that's kind
of interesting about Jupiter that I think we would recognize
as commons say in like Indian religion, uh, that gods
can have multiple manifestations or faces. Yes to the Romans
(23:25):
didn't exactly have one Jupiter. They had multiple aspects of Jupiter.
Now sometimes these are referred to more as uh as epithets,
you know, just a just different descriptions of of Jupiter.
But ultimately, I think the line between the two, you know,
you can see where it enters a gray area, Like
if you're just describing different properties of the same being,
(23:47):
you know, it's it's only a short hop and a
jump to having different uh different you know beings entirely,
you know, in the Christian tradition, you see, you see
some of this right because on one hand, and you
it's what you can talk about like God the Father,
and you can talk about like different divisions of the
same being. But on the other hand, you see throughout
(24:08):
you know, Christian history a a tendency to want to say,
focus on, say that the feminine aspects of Christ uh
in you know, certainly in in visual representation, but also
then embodying different ideas of what Christ was. And then
that maybe um stamped down out of fear of heresy,
the idea that if people keep going in this direction,
(24:30):
it will butt off into an alternative Jesus. So you
can you can tell how how the sort of thing
can lead to the division um. Even at the same time,
it's kind of like saying, okay, we have all these
instead of having just a dozen gods, we could have
maybe have um. We could you know, still have other gods,
but we could also have just like a dozen different
(24:51):
versions or different um incarnations of the same being. And
that's kind of what you see with Jupiter here. Yeah,
the Romans had an idea of what we now call superstition,
you know, that comes from a Roman idea meaning basically
being too religious, because picking up off what you were
just saying, there is a pattern I think throughout the
(25:11):
religions of the world where when people get incredibly invested
in their religion, like very passionate about it, they are
prone more often too too religious innovation, and religious innovation
can lead to you know, you start really focusing on
maybe one aspect of an existing God or something, maybe
that becomes a new God, and then you've got a
(25:32):
new cult, and that that new cult could maybe undermine
things that came before. Now, there was in the Roman Empire,
while the Romans were incredibly tyrannical, there was a kind
of weird religious pluralism there where there there could you know,
you could have a lot of different kinds of religious
beliefs in the Roman Empire and it would be mostly
okay as long as you weren't causing trouble. But there's
always I think a certain fear of religious innovation stemming
(25:55):
from too much interpretive interest in the nature of God's
in religious matter is among the existing religious authorities. That
makes sense, Yeah, yeah, totally. Um so, so I know
I was reading all this, it didn't it did raise
an interesting question for me, like, given all these different
aspects of Jupiter, and I'll get into what they are
here in in a minute. Uh, you know the fact
(26:17):
that Jupiter had his own priests and that Romans tended
towards syncretism, which we already mentioned. This is the combining
of different theological ideas, like instead of hearing about a
new God, uh, for instance, in a territory that you
have absorbed into your empire, instead of saying, okay, that
God's out. Wait whatever you're doing to that God, forget it,
instead saying, well, actually that God is part of our pantheon,
(26:39):
or that God is actually Jupiter, that sort of thing. Well,
I mean, I look at the way that the Romans
essentially just adopted almost wholesale, originally the mythology of the Greeks. Yeah.
So so given given this, and given that the situation
with the different aspects of Jupiter, um, I was wanting
do do we see in this at least a movement
toward monotheis him, Because that, of course is one of
(27:01):
the things about the Roman Empire is that it eventually
it becomes a Christian empire. There's this movement towards monotheistic
Christian belief. Well, I don't know if this helps with
the point you're developing. But the but the secular biblical
historian Bart Irman, who's a previous guest on the show,
he was on the show last year. He's got a
book about why Christianity eventually overtook the Roman Empire and UH,
(27:25):
and his theory on that, which seems very reasonable to me,
is that the main thing going for Christianity is that,
unlike all of the other religions in the Roman Empire
at the time, or most of the other religions in
the Roman Empire at the time, Christianity was evangelical and
it was exclusive, so they were trying to convert people
to it. And unlike the existing Roman religions, you couldn't
(27:47):
add other gods into Christianity, or you weren't supposed to.
I mean, some people probably did, but mostly Christians were
preaching that no, once you're a Christian, you can only
believe in Jesus and you have to forget all these
other gods. And over time those dynamics led to effects
where Christianity would just grow and grow and it would
push out because every new Christian wasn't just like a
pagan adopting one additional god. But now like they weren't
(28:10):
a pagan anymore that you want, you weren't to lay
allowed to keep your old gods as well, right, Yeah, yeah,
because I think even though if we're looking at this,
we're thinking, okay, you're you're going to the temple that's
just to Jupiter. You're worshiping Jupiter, maybe in different aspects,
but you're you're you're pretty much focusing on him. Even
if you did not worship any of the other gods
in the Roman pantheon, that wouldn't be monotheism. That would
(28:31):
be what is called hino theism, which is the adherence
to one particular god out of many. So saying like, yeah,
all these other gods they're they're fine, they exist, but
this is my guy, this is my gal. Yeah, And
that that was common in the Roman Empire, that you
believe in the other gods, and you would maybe respect
the other gods, but you might have like a personal
favorite god who you were really devoted to. Yeah. Like
(28:52):
even in that work on a Sistero that I was
quoting earlier, Um, he's he's mentioning adherence to Jupiter, but
he's also in the same work mentioning adherence to smaller
household gods. So yeah, you can you can see that
if if suddenly you're like, no, you can't keep your
household gods, you have to pretty much abandon the old way,
uh and and and take to this new one. Uh.
You know, you have to cut off the other gods
(29:12):
from your life. I could see that being maybe something
that keeps you from drifting back into another one. Sure.
Like like if you if you have to get this
new video game and you have to throw out all
your other video games, well, if you get bored with
the new one, you're not going to go back to
the old ones because they're not in the house anymore. Okay,
so you only got one game. Now you get bored
with it. What you start doing is looking for glitches
in the game to exploit and start trying to break
(29:34):
the physics, which you could look at it for in
religious point of view. You start maybe innovating how the
religion works, thinking about maybe I've received a new vision
that tells me that the priests don't have it exactly right.
This is the version. Yeah, yeah, new new fan theories
about exactly what what Mario means to the franchise, et cetera.
Now I was I was looking around about at this
(29:56):
about this question of of monotheism and polytheis him in
the Roman Empire? And uh, there's an interesting sounding book.
I don't know if you're familiar with this author, but
it came It was by Stephen Mitchell, who I think
has done a lot of work in religion and involved
in some translations of various works such as the Guita.
But he has this book called One God, Pagan Monotheism
(30:18):
in the Roman Empire, and it discusses the complexity of
the shift from polytheism to monotheism, but also it deals
with this idea of quote pagan monotheism. And apparently historians
have some historians have considered the various Roman cults to
be something we might interpret as monotheistic structures. Um, so
(30:39):
this kind of thing might be worth a deeper dive
in a later episode, because it's apparently it's not a
cut and dry issue. Rob. I was just trying to
look up and figure out I'm not quite sure the answer.
If this is the same Stephen Mitchell who did one
of my favorite poetry translations A translation of Rainner Maria
Rilka's Archaic Torso of Apollo into English. It's uh, I
don't know if you've ever read this. His translation is
(31:01):
the version that ends an English thing for here there
is no place that does not see you. You must
change your life. Oh wow, No, I don't think I've
read that, but but it it might bob be him.
It looks like he's He was involved in a number
of translations and adaptations, including like the Guida, but also
like the Iliad. Uh, you know various some some Chinese
works in their um you know, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
(31:24):
So there's a lot of stuff. Well, I'm not sure
if it's the same Stephen Mitchell, but if so, that
that's a good translation of that poem Archaic Torso of Apollo,
you can look up um So. I didn't have time
to to really dig into this one God book, but
I just want to read a quick quote that I
found in it from author Stephen Mitchell on this topic. Quote,
Pagan polytheis did not individually become monotheist, but through philosophy
(31:48):
and the comparing of religious ideas, by adopting and inventing
new cults and learning how to individualize and express religious experience.
They transformed ancient religion into a terrain of human experience
where much, including monotheism, was possible. Oh that's interesting looking
at the possibility that a trend towards monotheism could actually
(32:09):
emerge from the kind of commerce of religious ideas that
you would have in a very uh pluralistic, multicultural empire. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah,
it kind of gets back to the point where you
were you're mentioning earlier. So let's get into some of
these aspects of Jupiter, these different Jupiter sub brands, if
you will, that were available under the Roman Empire. Uh
(32:31):
so um. In addition to sense of the sources I
mentioned already, I was also looking at aspects of Jupiter
on Coins of the Roman Mint by Philip V. Hill
from this is from nineteen sixty. But this one, this
particular article is one that dealt more exclusively with aspects
of Jupiter has represented on coins, um, which is also
pretty interesting. So let's start with Jupiter stature, who we
(32:55):
mentioned earlier. That's that's who Cistero is referring to. And
this is he who stays panic in battle. Uh. This
is uh, this is Jupiter depicted with a scepter and
a thunderbolt. And this is the Jupiter that gives you courage,
that gives you resolved to not be crushed by fear. Okay,
so it stays panic means like holds back panic, not
(33:16):
like he keeps you panicked right right now. So so
that's obviously a big one. You know what, what one
of the reasons to appeal to a god is like
for strength, right, Like give me that strength, give me
the resolve to to not run away, especially if you're
dealing with a warring empire. Likewise, along those lines, another
big one was Jupiter Victor, the giver of victory, depicted
(33:39):
it as seated and holding a statue all victory and
a scepter or spear. This was especially prominent on coins,
and then it might be invoked. This version of Jupiter
might be invoked either celebrate an actual victory that occurred
or in anticipation of an upcoming victory. So this is
Jupiter the conqueror, Jupiter what is best in life? Right? Yes?
(34:03):
What to crush the Titans see them driven before you
hear their lamentations from Tartarus. Yeah, but of course the
Jupiter I mean, presumably God also has to govern, and
certainly the Roman Empire would have realized that as well.
It's one thing to conquer, but then you need to
hold your territory. And that's where the next aspect comes
in Jupiter conservator. Uh, this is a Jupiter that holds
(34:25):
a thunderbolt, but he's holding it above the image of
the Roman emperor, so he's kind of a preserver of rule.
That's a kind of a halo concept. I think, you know.
It's like saying, like the will of Jupiter resonates through
the emperor, and he was the one who rules over
these lands. Now one of the big ones is Jupiter
(34:46):
Optimus Maximus or Jupiter Optimus Maximus capital Linus. And this
is the most powerful aspect of Jupiter, all powerful as such,
the temple of Jupiter optimist Maximus was the most important
temple in ancient Rome, local gated on Capitol Line Hill. Now,
some other versions you had Jupiter full gore. This is
the lightning Jupiter, but not passively so like Jupiter often
(35:07):
has lightning, but this is like Jupiter with the aggressive stance,
like he's going to smite you, gonna hurl the thunderbolt
for some reason when you said that I pictured not Jupiter,
but I guess uh, an analog to Jupiter Marduke holding
holding this. Yeah, that's the famous image, but Marduke is
often pictured in kind of a fighting stance from the side. Yeah,
(35:29):
there's one that was referred to as a Jupiter Dolicinus.
And this was the focus of a Roman mystery cult,
originally a local hit tight hurry and god of fertility
and thunder. So here we see an example of of
of the of Romans combining ideas. Another deity from another
land is taken in and becomes an aspect of Jupiter.
(35:50):
Then you have a Jupiter ruminus. This is the breast
feeder of all life. And then as we mentioned earlier,
Jupiter pluvious. This is this cinder of rain. In times
of drought, special sacrifices were made in the name of
Jupiter Pluvius, and these were called aquilsum. Uh. So this
is where we're getting back to consideration of not only
(36:13):
the mythic Jupiter, but but the the Jupiter the planet
as well. Uh. The idea of Jupiter as as he
who delivers the rain, he who delivers the water. Yeah.
And so we already talked about some ways that Jupiter
has has influenced what kind of stuff smashed into the
the forming and then the early Earth to determine its composition,
(36:36):
what size it would grow to, and what was on
its surface and what kind of volatiles it had in
terms of an atmosphere and possibly surface water. Yes, uh,
and so in this I mean, we're still talking about
the planet Jupiter pelting the rocky planets with stuff, you know,
like it's still ultimately a violent relationship. But but the
(36:59):
idea here is that is Jupiter is not only throwing thunderbolts. Uh.
The Jovian bombardments might have included water or would be water,
specifically hydrogen rich material. And this wind's up locked into
Earth's crust and mantle and emerges later to bond with
oxygen to become water. Uh. So one of the sources
we're looking at with this, as Nola Taylor red article
(37:20):
for Smithsonian dot com from back in focusing on the
work of French astronomer Shawn Raymond, who we've already talked about, uh,
whose models predict this possible gas giant thrown delivery of
water rich material to the inner planets. Also key is
the work of andre Isadoro, who along with Raymond, published
a paper on this in seventeen titled Origin of Water
(37:42):
in the Inner Solar System. Okay, so what do they argue? Okay?
So the idea here is that four point five billion
years ago, the massive center of the and in this
I'm gonna touch on some stuff we've already gone through.
But then the massive center of the cloud of gas
and cosmic dust begins to form into a central star,
our Sun. But the remaining cloud remained and its contents
(38:04):
would in time form into the planets. But the water
rich region of the disc would have been located several
astronomical units away from the Sun. The temperature in the
inner region was too high, so that water then ultimately
has to move back to the inner planets to become
a part of them so that we can have water
on Earth. So this would have occurred um between during
(38:28):
a five to ten million year period between the Sun's
formation and the dissipation of the gas disc. During this time,
the gas giants formed, and quote Jupiter's rapid growth gravitationally
disturbed thousands of water rich planetismals, dislodging them from their
original orbits. Okay, so we see yet again, Jupiter as
(38:48):
it's coming together, begins to throw its weight around, it
exerts gravitational influence, and in this case would have started
pulling in these uh, these planetesimals, these these objects, you know,
objects that might be I don't know, asteroid sized or larger,
that have some kind of water hydrogen content on them,
(39:08):
and then slamming them into the inner solar system. Right.
It's it's basically you know, what it reminds me of
is I don't know if you've seen these sort of
vaudevillian skits where like you have your your your bad comic,
you're sort of Fozzy Bear type, and he's on stage,
he's bombing. I mean, he's just really dogging it up. Uh,
And so that the audience is of course pelting him
(39:29):
with fruits and vegetables and he either catches one in
his mouth and begins to eat it, or catches something
like catches the carrot and starts eating it. So like
they're they're pelting and they're engaging in violence, but they're
throwing nutrients at him and he is like, yes, I
am hungry, I shall eat that is that's kind of
the relationship going on here. Um, well, the fozzy bear effect,
(39:50):
I'm going to call it anyway. UM. I was reading
some more about this. Um uh Isidoro had provided some
quotes about this that were used in press really as
and write ups, in particular one that was on Eureka
alort dot com. And this is what they said, quote
in our own Solar system. The model shows that ice
is from the outer Solar system snowed down on the
(40:12):
Earth in three waves. The first came as Jupiter swelled up,
the second was triggered during Saturn's formation, and the third
would have occurred when Uranus and Neptune migrated inward before
being blocked by the other two and sent back to
the outskirts of the Solar system. Ah, and that ties
into something that I was talking about earlier when I
was mentioning that blog post by Sean Raymond, one of
(40:34):
the authors here that the early forming Jupiter, and I'm
not sure if he's saying also maybe Saturn too, but
at least definitely Jupiter and perhaps also Saturn would have
prevented these icy bodies ran Us in Neptune from migrating
inward towards the inner Solar system. And messing with the
planets that were forming down in closer to the Sun. Yeah.
I mean, ultimately, if you have an all powerful guide
(40:55):
like Jupiter, one of the things that that they're supposed
to do is keep keep his dreaded father and grandfather
from taking over creation again, right, I mean, that's why
we're putting up with all of this right right now.
One other neat thing about this that the authors point
out is that, you know, it might not just be
a quirk of our own Solar system. It might not
just be the peculiar peculiar story of of life on
(41:18):
Earth and life in this system. This could be going
on anywhere that you have both giant planets and terrestrial planets. Um.
So this is the sort of thing that if this
is true, this would be another thing to look for
in our exoplanet surveys. Look for situations where you have
like the right proportions and right arrangements of gas giants
(41:40):
and rocky inner planets where this same bombardment of water
could happen. Yeah, this is really interesting and uh. And
of course in the specific case of Earth, it of
course goes without saying that we couldn't have life on
Earth without surface. You know, plenty of surface water on Earth.
So so this is something that uh, if if this
mottle of the early Solar System is correct, this would
(42:02):
again be crucial to us being here at all. Thank you,
thank you, thank you. Now I've got another thing that, again,
a an astrophysical theory that, if correct, would be crucial
for us being here at all. Uh. And this would
have more to do with the history of life on Earth.
(42:25):
Once you've already got the rocky planet Earth, and you've
already got Earth life, what happens to shape the course
of evolution on the surface of this planet. Well, there
is a new paper published in uh Nature Scientific Reports
in one so I think it was just out last month.
It was in February of this year by I'm here
(42:45):
Sarage and Abraham Loeb or Avy. Loeb called the breakup
of a long period comet as the origin of the
dinosaur extinction. Uh. And so I was briefly reading a
Harvard gazette right up of of this study. Not gonna
go super in depth about it, but basically what the
authors argue here is that Jupiter's gravitational field influenced objects,
(43:07):
a comment probably originating from the Ort Cloud. So that's
way out there past the Kuiper Belt. You know, this
huge sphere of icy objects, way way out in the distance,
beyond the orbit of Neptune, beyond the orbit of Pluto,
beyond the Kuiper Belt. Even that Jupiter disturbed the orbit
of one of these comets from the Ort Cloud, and
(43:29):
this disturbance of its orbit sent it really close to
the Sun where tidal forces then broke the commet apart.
And this would increase the rate of comets that would
bombard the Earth. And these commets would include objects like
the chicks Alube impact object, which hit the Earth about
sixty six million years ago, and according to the leading
(43:50):
theory today, is probably the main thing responsible for the
extinction of the non avian dinosaurs. And so Lowe Ban
Saraj here argue that it is the gravitation sational influence
of Jupiter that increases these kinds of impacts through the
mechanism I just described, And Sarage is quoted in this
Harvard Gazette piece where he says, quote, basically, Jupiter acts
(44:12):
as a kind of pinball machine. Jupiter kicks these incoming
long period comets into orbits that bring them very close
to the Sun. When you have these sun grazers. It's
not so much the melting that goes on, which is
a pretty small fraction relative to the total mass, but
the comet is so close to the Sun that the
part of it that's closer to the Sun feels a
(44:33):
stronger gravitational pull than the part that is farther from
the Sun, causing a tidal force. You get what's called
a tidal disruption event. And so these large comets that
come really close to the Sun break up into smaller
comets and basically on their way out, there's a statistical
chance that these smaller comets hit the Earth. So huge
(44:54):
icy objects from out in the Orc cloud getting diverted
by the gravitational influence of Jupiter so that they pass
really close to the Sun. They sort of shatter as
they do so because the tidal forces from the Sun
are so strong, and then they turn into a kind
of buckshot blast of huge icy objects in the inner
Solar System that can hit Earth and potentially cause mass extinctions.
(45:15):
And I think one of the arguments that they also
bring up is that the is that it looks like
the carbonaceous content of the object that caused the KPg
extinction is more similar to stuff you're you're likely to
find in these deep space or cloud objects then in
things you're more likely to find closer to the inner
Solar System, like in the asteroid belt. So again, this
(45:37):
is another argument that is based on simulations and statistical analysis.
But if this is correct, it is yet another one
of the many ways that Jupiter would be responsible for
the fact that we exist at all. While it was
you know, calamitous for the non avian dinosaurs, it paved
the way for the age of mammals. I like that
(45:58):
if if this worked true, this is true, we we
might need a new aspect for the god Jupiter, maybe
Jupiter or extinct or god of extinctions, you know, yeah,
good with He could be shown holding a lizard in
one hand and a thunderbolt in the other, like he's
about to like smash it in his palm. His hand
flashes with power, but it's against a bunch of had restaurs.
(46:19):
They're trying to guard their eggs, and he's like, well
he was probably his thinking was, probably look these these
these life forms. They're not worshiping me. Now, Honestly, I
don't think they're going to be worshiping worshiping me anytime soon.
Unless I really shake things up. I'm just gonna smite
a lot of them, right, you know what I really like.
I really like the look of that rat like creature
(46:41):
down there, and it's gonna be twinkle in its I
think some some good things could happen if I give
the rats a chance. Though, it does make me wonder,
you know, did I wonder if Jupiter slash Zeus got
up to you know, his normal tricks. Did he go
down and take the form of different uh dinosaurs and
mate with the dinosaur ors to create like certain demi
(47:02):
god dinosaurs that would have been just you know, extra
powerful amid their dinosaur brethren. What would the dinosaur mythology
version of the minotaur be would be like a Tyrannosaurus
rex with the head of a triceratops, I guess. But
but then again, I don't know. I feel like like
the minotaur is one of those beasts that's kind of
(47:23):
born out of um feuding with the gods and disobeying
the gods. I don't know. I guess the dinosaurs, just
by refusing to worship, are just not being capable of it.
You know, the gods could have taken that the wrong
way and dished out some punishment. But um, I don't
know like this, I think this would be a rich
area for I don't know, an action figure line or
(47:43):
maybe a comic book like the The The Age of
of Gods and Dinosaurs. Um, what would that have been like? Also?
I mean if if humans weren't even in the game yet,
I guess uh, any form that the Jupiter took would
be that of a dinosaur, So like, how would he appear?
Would he appear as a as a great t rex
(48:05):
or some sort of enorma I mean, he is a
god of the sky. Maybe he takes the form of
a of of an enormous um of you know, flying reptile.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Jupiter is quetzalcoatlas. Oh yeah, that
would be fitting, especially since you know humans found those
bones and named it after a god. So what what
better form for the sky god to take? We're all
(48:26):
but I think we gotta call it there. But this
has been a lot of fun. Yeah, this has I
love getting the switch back and forth between the planetary
and the mythological. I should mention, however, we mostly speak
of the Roman gods as figures of the past, just
as we do with Greek deities in ancient Egyptian deities.
But we should also mention that there are modern worshippers
as well, not only of of of Greek deities in
(48:46):
ancient Egyptian deities, but also of of Roman Jupiter. Um.
You know, after all, just as modern humans reach for
new models, entirely new models of religion, uh, you know,
drawing things even out of popular culture like Star Wars
or The Dude, we also reach for the old ones
and reconstructions of the old ones. Thus we do see
Roman polytheistic reconstructionism uh in several different groups and forms.
(49:11):
So um uh just always worth worth mentioning. I don't
think we we blasphemed too much in this regarding Jupiter,
but uh an a right, if anyone out there who's
actively involved in a religion or some sort of spiritual
movement that that that reveres Jupiter, I would I'd love
to hear from you. I'd love to know you know,
(49:31):
how do you think of Jupiter? How does how does
this material sit with you? Um? So yeah, I always
find that kind of thing interesting. We have in the
past heard from at least one listener who um engages
in a religious model that incorporates Egyptian deities. Oh yeah,
that's true. Yeah, all right, Well, if you would like
to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
(49:54):
you know where to find them. Find them in the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed That is where
core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published on
Tuesdays and Thursday that's the main show. That's the main event,
but then we also have listener mail on Monday's. On
Wednesday's we do the artifact episodes unless they've been preempted
for some reason, and then on Friday's we do Weird
House Cinema. That's our time to just cut loose and
(50:16):
discuss some weird movies, and then we run a little
rerun over the weekend in the form of a vault episode.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(50:44):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts. For my
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wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. The present, Joy Joy,
Thy po
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In it's Saturday,
We're going into the vault. This episode originally aired on
March and it is the sequel to the one that
ran last Saturday. This is Jupiter the Destroyer, Part two.
Ready yourself, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production
(00:29):
of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our discussion of
Jupiter the Destroyer. In the last episode, we ended up
talking about some of the myths of Zeus and Jupiter,
(00:52):
Zeus's war against the Titans, and how that related to
some ideas in astrophysics about how an early forming Jupiter
in the solar nebula of our of our young Solar
system may have played a very important role in the
destruction of early forming super Earth's in the inner Solar System,
leading to or clearing the way for the eventual creation
(01:13):
of rocky planets like the Earth we live on today.
So that last episode was kind of it was kind
of a mash up we had we had some planetary science,
we had some mythology. It's like we had two turntables
and uh, and we had two different records and we
kind of mixed and mashed them both. Uh. So we're
we're kind of like your DJs. We well, we we're
(01:34):
your hosts, except no substitutes. Uh. And we're gonna have
more of the same in this episode. We're gonna have
plenty of planetary science, but we're also gonna have mythology.
So uh, if you love both, stay tuned, because you're
gonna get everything you love. If you lean more towards
one direction of the other, well it's still hang on
because we're gonna take you on a ride. But if
(01:54):
you're only interested in when we talk about the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre movies and stick around anyway because who knows
what will come up. Well that that movie also is
astronomical in its own wise, that's true. So maybe I
thought we should start just by doing a brief refresher
on one of the studies we talked about in the
last episode, because it kind of ties into some of
the stuff I'm going to talk about right after. Um. So,
(02:15):
one of the studies we looked at last time was
published in in p N A. S. And it was
by Constantine Batigan and Greg Laughlin, and it's called Jupiter's
Decisive Role in the Inner Solar System's early evolution. And
the rough outline is that the authors here argue that
they put together a simulation that assumes a version of
what's known as the Grand tax scenario, and that's where
(02:39):
in the early solar nebulas, So when the Solar system
is first forming, it's this big disc of gas and
dust all swirling around this newly forming Sun. When that's
going on, a young Jupiter migrated from somewhere around five
astronomical units out in radius from the Sun into about
one point five astronomical units and then reversed course and
(03:02):
went back out to a larger orbital radius when it
was pulled outward by the gravitational influence of Saturn. And
the authors here right quote, we proposed that the primordial
nebula driven process responsible for retention of Jupiter and Saturn
at large orbital radii and sculpting Mars low mass, is
also responsible for clearing out the Solar systems innermost region. So,
(03:25):
like we talked about last time, this would be wiping
out these early forming super Earth's or mini Neptunes that
were forming near the Sun and thus making room and
freeing up some materials for rocky planets like Earth and
Venus to form. And if you remember the details we
talked about last time, this would have happened according to
these authors here via a what they call a collisional cascade.
(03:49):
So Jupiter's inward migration would hurl all of these planetesimals
into um what they call mean motion resonances low order
mean motion residences, shepherd ng and exciting their orbits, so
basically just causing chaos in the inner Solar System where
things would smash into each other and then ultimately spiral
into the Sun and be vaporized down there in the
(04:10):
bottom of the Solar System. And then finally, they write,
in this scenario, the Solar systems terrestrial planets formed from
the gas starved mass depleted debris that remained after the
primary period of dynamical evolution. So under this scenario, it
is the gravitational influence from a coalescing Saturn that finally
(04:31):
pulls Jupiter back out of the fray back into the
outer Solar System. But I wanted to think about another
way that gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, or like
if you imagine another solar system somewhere else in the galaxy,
multiple jupiters can interact with one another in catastrophic ways
(04:51):
that have major influence on the other planets in that
star system. Because going to the mythological analogy, one Zeus
or one Jupiter is bad enough. Got a couple, you
you're really running into trouble. Wow, they're not going to
tolerate each other, that's right, though, it is funny that
literally in our Solar system, if you look at the
mythological counterparts of the three the first three outer planets
(05:13):
you get to after the asteroid belt, you've got Jupiter,
you got Saturn, and then you got Uranas and there
if you look at their mythological counterparts, each one ascending
out there is the father of the other who was
defeated by the Sun. So Jupiter or Zeus defeated Chronus,
which is Saturn, and dethroned him, throw him into Tartarus.
But Chronus previously the Titan had defeated Uranos or Uranus
(05:38):
by castrating him and throwing his genitals into the ocean. Yeah,
so like if you've been to thrown, you get pushed
further out of the solar hierarchy. Yeah, I guess so. Now,
now that's an interesting question, which is more like Tartarus
being cast into the sun like these early super earths
may have been, or being cast farther out into a
greater orbital radius where you're you're very cold and very
(05:59):
lone lee. I guess I go with the cold and
lonely uh interpretation more again, just in terms of thinking
about what mythological punishments would be, like I tend to imagine, uh,
the prison of the Titans as being cold and lonesome.
But anyway, I wanted to, uh now now talk about
the idea of Jupiter's going eccentric, and uh, usually the
(06:24):
word eccentric, how do we use that? We use the
word eccentric to mean weird, but in kind of a
harmless way, like it's the nice version of weird, or
the or the at least the rich version of weird,
right right, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what
you mean by that. But now in this case, this
would be uh eccentric in a way that is that
(06:45):
is not at all harmless and potentially could be world ending.
Uh So I wanted to look at a blog post
by an American astrophysicist living in France named Sean Raymond,
who I wanted to bring this up because I think
reading his blog on his website was one of the
reasons I ended up wanting to do this pair of
episodes about Jupiter. I was originally reading his website because
(07:08):
he was one of the authors of a study about
moons of moons that I talked about for an episode
of The Artifact, where I was saying like, like, how
many levels of orbits can you go down? You know,
the the so the our our Sun orbits the center
of the Milky Way galaxy, and then the Earth orbits
the Sun, and then the moon orbits the Earth. But
could the moon have its own moon? And it turns
(07:31):
out the answer is yes, there's nothing in physics that
prevents moons from having moons. But of course, every every
step you go down that ladder of orbits within orbits,
the maximum size of the orbiting object gets smaller and smaller,
And if you include really small stuff, I think moons
of moons can have moons. But anyway, through that, I
ended up reading some posts on this guy's website. So
(07:53):
he's a professor of astrophysics at the University of Bordeaux
in France, and his blog is fun. He he sometimes
like writes poems about astrophysics, and that's weird stuff on there.
But there was this one post that I thought was
really interesting and got me thinking about this topic and
reading other stuff about it. And it was a post
called how planets die when good Jupiters go bad? And
(08:15):
the gist of this post here is about how planets
like Jupiter have the potential to destroy the solar systems
that they dwell within and in other planetary systems around
other stars in the galaxy. There is evidence that gas
giants like Jupiter have indeed already destroyed other planets in
in their solar systems. Uh Now, of course, as we
(08:38):
talked about in the last episode, Jupiter is the largest
planet in our Solar system. It's more than three hundred
times more massive than Earth. What was it was like
three hundred and seventeen times as massive as Earth or something,
I mean, just huge. And of course the Sun is
the largest gravitational influence in our Solar system, but Jupiter
is second in that regard, and Jupiter has more effects
(08:59):
on what happens to the rest of the objects in
the Solar System. Then you might imagine Raymond talks about
some stuff that we didn't really get into in the
last episode. Like one of the things he mentions is
that Jupiter probably would have blocked large icy bodies from
the outer Solar System from invading the inner Solar System
when the Solar System was first forming. It would have
(09:21):
cleared this large gap in the solar nebula disc that
was forming around the early Sun uh and with its
gravity it would prevent large icy objects from migrating inwards.
Of course, we already talked about that Batigan and Laughlin
idea that if it's correct, during Jupiter's Grand tach or
the movement in and then out again UH, it would
(09:42):
have had these catastrophic implications for early forming super Earth's
or many neptunes close to the Sun through this collisional
cascade uh and would have allowed small rocky planets like
Earth to take shape in the aftermath. But Jupiter also
we should remember, and this is one thing we're gonna
look at in several different ways today. Jupiter plays a
(10:02):
major role in influencing what kinds of space objects crash
into Earth and at what rate and at what velocity, Because,
to read from Raymond here quote, Jupiter's gravity determines how
comets enter the Inner Solar System and how long they
spend near the planets with the potential to crash into
(10:23):
Earth before launching them into interstellar space. And this has
implications both ways. So it means that Jupiter can act
as a kind of destroyer, flinging objects in our direction
in a dangerous way. But Jupiter can also act as
a kind of protector, shepherding objects away from Earth and
keeping us safe. And so Jupiter's effect on the movements
(10:45):
of space objects in the Inner Solar System, like asteroids
and especially comets, I think will have powerful effects on
things like the water contents of Earth and the biological
development of Earth, which will come back to as we
go on. But coming back to the idea of eccentric
jupiters now, I mentioned in the last episode that sometimes
when we look out at other stars in our galaxy,
(11:08):
we can see that they have large exoplanets, large gas
giants in very eccentric orbits. The orbits of most of
the planets in our Solar System are nearly circular. They're
not perfectly circular, but they're pretty close. I mean, you know,
roughly circular. If you look at the orbit of some comets, though,
it is a completely different story. There are comets that
(11:30):
orbit the Sun in these incredibly squashed, squeezed out oval trajectories. Uh.
And these orbits that deviate from near circularity are called eccentric.
And of course the more squashed out they get, the
more highly eccentric they are. So if you're trying to
picture it, you can think of a more eccentric orbit
is like a rubber band being stretched out instead of
(11:53):
allowed to just like sit slack in a circle. And
in fact, exoplanet research reveals that around other ours in
the galaxy there are gas giants like Jupiter that have
orbits more like these comets. So imagine a Jupiter or
a Saturn with a highly eccentric orbit more like a
stretched out rubber band. These types of planets exist, and
(12:16):
the question is, well, how does that happen? Well, Raymond
discusses one way, when gas giants act upon one another
in dangerous ways. So large gas giants exert gravitational influence
not only on comets, not only on the moons that
orbit them, but also on one another. You know, if
you have like two jupiters orbiting a star, they will
(12:39):
have influence on the paths that they each take. Uh.
Remember thinking again about the way that a Saturn may
have pulled Jupiter back out of the inner Solar System
according to the Grand Tach hypothesis. So if you have
two gas giants that are affecting one another gravitationally, it
can throw their orbits off course. And sometimes these gravitational
(13:01):
interactions can even put them into orbital patterns, uh, such
that one gas giant gets gravitationally ejected out of the
Solar System by the gravitational influence of the other. Like
it does sort of a gravity sling shot like we
might do with a with one of our space probes,
but on a planet, and just like throws it way
out of there, and then the other one remains, but
(13:23):
in this stretched out eccentric orbit. And as you might
well imagine, these gravitational disturbances in the orbits of gas
giants can have horrible effects on the planets nearby. So
if there are earthlike inner planets in one of these scenarios,
they tend to get cast into the pit of Tartarus. Uh.
And this could actually this could be either of the
Tartarus scenarios we were talking about earlier in the in
(13:46):
the closest thing to a literal sense, right, They either
get cast way out into nowhere, into space, or they
get thrown into the Sun or destroyed by collisions, possibly
with gas giants themselves or with other rocky planets or planetestimals,
and then those the debris from those collisions can spiral
into the Sun, or they get ejected and then just
(14:08):
plunge forever into the void. Yeah, it's the thing about
the Amokies. They tend to they tend to throughout the
old order in place it was something new. You know.
This reminds me of one of the possible explanations for
Umu Mua, that object, interstellar object that we did a
couple of episodes about that. Some people, I think, probably
very prematurely, we're trying to say it was an alien probe,
(14:29):
and I don't think there's good evidence of that. But
one of the ideas about what this object probably is
because it had strange characteristics, like it's kind of elongated
and seemed to be moving in a kind of tumbling motion.
One of the ideas is that it is part of
an object that was destroyed or rejected from its host
star system by a gravitational disturbance like this. Now, most
(14:51):
of the time, when a Jupiter turns murderous, when when Jupiter,
you know, when when his hand flashes with power, as
it says in the in has He, it's the agony
um when a gas giant goes rogue and destroys the
other planets. Most of the time it happens early in
the formation of the Solar System, shortly after most of
the material and the nebula disc is dissipated and absorbed
(15:14):
by newly forming planets. And the reasoning here is that
without the stabilizing presence of this cloud like disk, a
jupiter like planet can start going off the rails very quickly.
But sometimes a gas giant can turn into the destroyer.
Its hand can flash with power later in its lifespan,
for example, if its orbit is disturbed by external influence.
(15:38):
An example here could be another star passes too close
to the Solar System and this uh this causes gravitational disturbances,
throws the orbit of the jupiter like planet off course,
and then the same thing happens. It just it starts
this cascading series of effects on the orbits of other planets.
And you know, many of these inner rocky planets are
just destroyed, they're they're sent down into the sun on Well,
(16:01):
you know, if we're to to to draw in comparison
to maybe not literal the literal mythology, but just sort
of the nature of mythologies and belief I'm reminded of
what happens when a foreign um religion or foreign deity
uh comes too close to an establish religion and deity.
You know, it can also result in a fair amount
(16:22):
of disorder uh and a realigning of the order of things. Yes,
the realignment of a pantheon in the presence of a syncretism.
Right when we emerge to religions together. If you merge
to two stars gravity is too close to one another,
this can definitely realign things and possibly result in a monotheism. Yeah,
more on that in a bit. So, Yeah, I do
(16:44):
want to be clear, we're not saying there's any reason
to think that this is likely to happen to our
solar system anytime soon like that that that's not the
implication here, but it is scary to imagine that it
does sometimes happen around other stars, and at least is
possible in theory that you know, you can have this
influence from some kind of external object, another star passes
too close or something. This can nudge the orbit of
(17:07):
a previously pretty stable Jupiter like planet, leading to a
cascade of effects like we just talked about, and then
the Earth like planets have an appointment with the wicker Man.
And uh. One interesting thing that Raymond mentions in this
blog post is he does some rough calculations and guesses
that about half of the stars in the Milky Way
(17:27):
galaxy with gas planets have annihilated the rocky planets through
a process like this. And remember that it's much more
likely for to happen early during formation, when when the
disk is first sorting itself out, but it can, in
some rare cases happen later. And I guess this all
comes down to the fact that we have a Jupiter
(17:49):
and we still exist. So it looks like in in
some sense we're one of the lucky ones. But it's
also true that the influence of Jupiter or gas giants
in general, especially Jupiter in our case, doesn't stop there.
I mean the influence on Jupiter on the history of
the planet Earth appears to be pervasive. I was looking
(18:09):
at one study by A. Lisa V. Quintana, Thomas Barclay,
William J. Baruki, Jason f Row, and Johnny Chambers from
the Astrophysical Journal called the Frequency of Giant Impacts on
Earthlike Worlds, and I was reading some write ups of this,
and basically, these researchers did some simulations of what happens
(18:30):
in different types of Solar System configurations where you have
a Jupiter present, or where you don't have a Jupiter present,
where you have multiple jupiters, and their simulations revealed that
in general, gas giants like Jupiter have complicated effects on
rocky inner planets like Earth. So young Jupiter, they think,
probably flung material into the cores of newly forming rocky
(18:52):
planets when the Solar System was young, and this would
have helped planets like Earth come together faster than rocky
planets in the Solar System without a nearby gas giant.
But at the same time, by hoarding materials to themselves,
gas giants limit the number of rocky planets that form
around a star. So if you have a star without
a planet like Jupiter, it can have way more rocky
(19:15):
planets out there. Um. And then if you don't have
any nearby gas giants, young rocky planets are subjected to
a much longer period of early bombardment where they're just
constantly being hit with impacts from space by smaller objects
from the solar nebula cloud. And a planet like Jupiter
makes that cloud disappear faster and thus makes the early
(19:39):
bombardment period last a shorter span of time. But then again,
you can also look at ways that a planet like
Jupiter ends up accelerating larger objects like comets into the
inner Solar System and controlling how long they stay there
in the Inner Solar System. Uh. And of course those
things can lead to impacts later on down the line
(19:59):
that a act Earth life. So Jupiter is once again
sort of protecting and attacking in tandem. Yeah. I guess
the relationships between humans and gods that they tend to
be a little bit unhealthy. But then again, I mean
there there are reasons. I guess what we've gone through
here kind of uh, you know, justifies the ways of
God demand uh to some extent than well, Rob I
(20:28):
don't know about you, but I am ready to mount
an apologia for Jupiter pluvious. Yeah, let's do it. Let's
let's talk Jupiter the god a bit more. Um Again,
I think this comparison between planet Jupiter and the god
Jupiter is is increasingly apt the more you look at it. Uh.
And in this episode, we're talking a good deal and
we're still talking about Jupiter the destroyer and Jupiter um
(20:52):
of of passionate lashing out against a humanity. But but
also Jupiter the protector, Jupiter the Lord of Earth, because
he enforces his order upon it and he is in
many ways its protector. And he was also expressly stated
to be the protector of the Roman state. The White
Ox was his favorite sacrifice, and it could afford an
(21:13):
entire year's protection uh from the Lord of the gods. Uh.
And he probably took this sort of thing seriously, seeing
as how he was also the god of oaths and treaties.
It's kind of a rules Yeah. Yeah, so you know
he's lawful. Whatever else he is, he's he's lawful. Uh.
So I was, well, maybe he's the emblem of lawfulness
(21:35):
to others. I don't know, does he have to follow
the laws himself. Well, I mean he's he's in. It's
here in a tough spot, like if you can't, who
are you going to report him to write? Uh? I
was reading the Imperial Ideology of Rome and the Principalities
and Powers in Romans eight thirty one through thirty nine
by Sun Cho Hong in scripture and interpretation from two
(21:58):
thousand and eight, and Home points that imperial Roman propaganda
expressly stated that the safety of the entire human race
lay in the hands of mighty Jupiter. And this is
the point pressed by Cicero, among others. And I believe
in the particularly in on the ends of Good and Evil.
I want to read a quote here from it, uh,
And this is not I want to stress that Cicero
(22:21):
goes into a lot more detail about all this, and
he's he's crafting a much greater point, uh than this.
This is just a fragment. But he does a right
or he does say. Quote, when we call Jupiter all
powerful and all good, and likewise, when we speak of
him as the salutary God, the hospitable God, or as state,
or we mean it to be understood that the safety
(22:42):
of men is under his protection This reminds me of
like when when presidents of the United States will say, like,
the president's first responsibility is to keep America safe. This
seems like a very close analogy. It's just like, first
of all, I am, I am the daddy, and it
is it is all protection from me. Yeah, so this
seems to be again Cicero's saying all other things in
(23:04):
this work, uh, I mean additional things, but this seems
to be like a major talking point for just Roman
propaganda in general. But so there's the thing that's kind
of interesting about Jupiter that I think we would recognize
as commons say in like Indian religion, uh, that gods
can have multiple manifestations or faces. Yes to the Romans
(23:25):
didn't exactly have one Jupiter. They had multiple aspects of Jupiter.
Now sometimes these are referred to more as uh as epithets,
you know, just a just different descriptions of of Jupiter.
But ultimately, I think the line between the two, you know,
you can see where it enters a gray area, Like
if you're just describing different properties of the same being,
(23:47):
you know, it's it's only a short hop and a
jump to having different uh different you know beings entirely,
you know, in the Christian tradition, you see, you see
some of this right because on one hand, and you
it's what you can talk about like God the Father,
and you can talk about like different divisions of the
same being. But on the other hand, you see throughout
(24:08):
you know, Christian history a a tendency to want to say,
focus on, say that the feminine aspects of Christ uh
in you know, certainly in in visual representation, but also
then embodying different ideas of what Christ was. And then
that maybe um stamped down out of fear of heresy,
the idea that if people keep going in this direction,
(24:30):
it will butt off into an alternative Jesus. So you
can you can tell how how the sort of thing
can lead to the division um. Even at the same time,
it's kind of like saying, okay, we have all these
instead of having just a dozen gods, we could have
maybe have um. We could you know, still have other gods,
but we could also have just like a dozen different
(24:51):
versions or different um incarnations of the same being. And
that's kind of what you see with Jupiter here. Yeah,
the Romans had an idea of what we now call superstition,
you know, that comes from a Roman idea meaning basically
being too religious, because picking up off what you were
just saying, there is a pattern I think throughout the
(25:11):
religions of the world where when people get incredibly invested
in their religion, like very passionate about it, they are
prone more often too too religious innovation, and religious innovation
can lead to you know, you start really focusing on
maybe one aspect of an existing God or something, maybe
that becomes a new God, and then you've got a
(25:32):
new cult, and that that new cult could maybe undermine
things that came before. Now, there was in the Roman Empire,
while the Romans were incredibly tyrannical, there was a kind
of weird religious pluralism there where there there could you know,
you could have a lot of different kinds of religious
beliefs in the Roman Empire and it would be mostly
okay as long as you weren't causing trouble. But there's
always I think a certain fear of religious innovation stemming
(25:55):
from too much interpretive interest in the nature of God's
in religious matter is among the existing religious authorities. That
makes sense, Yeah, yeah, totally. Um so, so I know
I was reading all this, it didn't it did raise
an interesting question for me, like, given all these different
aspects of Jupiter, and I'll get into what they are
here in in a minute. Uh, you know the fact
(26:17):
that Jupiter had his own priests and that Romans tended
towards syncretism, which we already mentioned. This is the combining
of different theological ideas, like instead of hearing about a
new God, uh, for instance, in a territory that you
have absorbed into your empire, instead of saying, okay, that
God's out. Wait whatever you're doing to that God, forget it,
instead saying, well, actually that God is part of our pantheon,
(26:39):
or that God is actually Jupiter, that sort of thing. Well,
I mean, I look at the way that the Romans
essentially just adopted almost wholesale, originally the mythology of the Greeks. Yeah.
So so given given this, and given that the situation
with the different aspects of Jupiter, um, I was wanting
do do we see in this at least a movement
toward monotheis him, Because that, of course is one of
(27:01):
the things about the Roman Empire is that it eventually
it becomes a Christian empire. There's this movement towards monotheistic
Christian belief. Well, I don't know if this helps with
the point you're developing. But the but the secular biblical
historian Bart Irman, who's a previous guest on the show,
he was on the show last year. He's got a
book about why Christianity eventually overtook the Roman Empire and UH,
(27:25):
and his theory on that, which seems very reasonable to me,
is that the main thing going for Christianity is that,
unlike all of the other religions in the Roman Empire
at the time, or most of the other religions in
the Roman Empire at the time, Christianity was evangelical and
it was exclusive, so they were trying to convert people
to it. And unlike the existing Roman religions, you couldn't
(27:47):
add other gods into Christianity, or you weren't supposed to.
I mean, some people probably did, but mostly Christians were
preaching that no, once you're a Christian, you can only
believe in Jesus and you have to forget all these
other gods. And over time those dynamics led to effects
where Christianity would just grow and grow and it would
push out because every new Christian wasn't just like a
pagan adopting one additional god. But now like they weren't
(28:10):
a pagan anymore that you want, you weren't to lay
allowed to keep your old gods as well, right, Yeah, yeah,
because I think even though if we're looking at this,
we're thinking, okay, you're you're going to the temple that's
just to Jupiter. You're worshiping Jupiter, maybe in different aspects,
but you're you're you're pretty much focusing on him. Even
if you did not worship any of the other gods
in the Roman pantheon, that wouldn't be monotheism. That would
(28:31):
be what is called hino theism, which is the adherence
to one particular god out of many. So saying like, yeah,
all these other gods they're they're fine, they exist, but
this is my guy, this is my gal. Yeah, And
that that was common in the Roman Empire, that you
believe in the other gods, and you would maybe respect
the other gods, but you might have like a personal
favorite god who you were really devoted to. Yeah. Like
(28:52):
even in that work on a Sistero that I was
quoting earlier, Um, he's he's mentioning adherence to Jupiter, but
he's also in the same work mentioning adherence to smaller
household gods. So yeah, you can you can see that
if if suddenly you're like, no, you can't keep your
household gods, you have to pretty much abandon the old way,
uh and and and take to this new one. Uh.
You know, you have to cut off the other gods
(29:12):
from your life. I could see that being maybe something
that keeps you from drifting back into another one. Sure.
Like like if you if you have to get this
new video game and you have to throw out all
your other video games, well, if you get bored with
the new one, you're not going to go back to
the old ones because they're not in the house anymore. Okay,
so you only got one game. Now you get bored
with it. What you start doing is looking for glitches
in the game to exploit and start trying to break
(29:34):
the physics, which you could look at it for in
religious point of view. You start maybe innovating how the
religion works, thinking about maybe I've received a new vision
that tells me that the priests don't have it exactly right.
This is the version. Yeah, yeah, new new fan theories
about exactly what what Mario means to the franchise, et cetera.
Now I was I was looking around about at this
(29:56):
about this question of of monotheism and polytheis him in
the Roman Empire? And uh, there's an interesting sounding book.
I don't know if you're familiar with this author, but
it came It was by Stephen Mitchell, who I think
has done a lot of work in religion and involved
in some translations of various works such as the Guita.
But he has this book called One God, Pagan Monotheism
(30:18):
in the Roman Empire, and it discusses the complexity of
the shift from polytheism to monotheism, but also it deals
with this idea of quote pagan monotheism. And apparently historians
have some historians have considered the various Roman cults to
be something we might interpret as monotheistic structures. Um, so
(30:39):
this kind of thing might be worth a deeper dive
in a later episode, because it's apparently it's not a
cut and dry issue. Rob. I was just trying to
look up and figure out I'm not quite sure the answer.
If this is the same Stephen Mitchell who did one
of my favorite poetry translations A translation of Rainner Maria
Rilka's Archaic Torso of Apollo into English. It's uh, I
don't know if you've ever read this. His translation is
(31:01):
the version that ends an English thing for here there
is no place that does not see you. You must
change your life. Oh wow, No, I don't think I've
read that, but but it it might bob be him.
It looks like he's He was involved in a number
of translations and adaptations, including like the Guida, but also
like the Iliad. Uh, you know various some some Chinese
works in their um you know, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
(31:24):
So there's a lot of stuff. Well, I'm not sure
if it's the same Stephen Mitchell, but if so, that
that's a good translation of that poem Archaic Torso of Apollo,
you can look up um So. I didn't have time
to to really dig into this one God book, but
I just want to read a quick quote that I
found in it from author Stephen Mitchell on this topic. Quote,
Pagan polytheis did not individually become monotheist, but through philosophy
(31:48):
and the comparing of religious ideas, by adopting and inventing
new cults and learning how to individualize and express religious experience.
They transformed ancient religion into a terrain of human experience
where much, including monotheism, was possible. Oh that's interesting looking
at the possibility that a trend towards monotheism could actually
(32:09):
emerge from the kind of commerce of religious ideas that
you would have in a very uh pluralistic, multicultural empire. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah,
it kind of gets back to the point where you
were you're mentioning earlier. So let's get into some of
these aspects of Jupiter, these different Jupiter sub brands, if
you will, that were available under the Roman Empire. Uh
(32:31):
so um. In addition to sense of the sources I
mentioned already, I was also looking at aspects of Jupiter
on Coins of the Roman Mint by Philip V. Hill
from this is from nineteen sixty. But this one, this
particular article is one that dealt more exclusively with aspects
of Jupiter has represented on coins, um, which is also
pretty interesting. So let's start with Jupiter stature, who we
(32:55):
mentioned earlier. That's that's who Cistero is referring to. And
this is he who stays panic in battle. Uh. This
is uh, this is Jupiter depicted with a scepter and
a thunderbolt. And this is the Jupiter that gives you courage,
that gives you resolved to not be crushed by fear. Okay,
so it stays panic means like holds back panic, not
(33:16):
like he keeps you panicked right right now. So so
that's obviously a big one. You know what, what one
of the reasons to appeal to a god is like
for strength, right, Like give me that strength, give me
the resolve to to not run away, especially if you're
dealing with a warring empire. Likewise, along those lines, another
big one was Jupiter Victor, the giver of victory, depicted
(33:39):
it as seated and holding a statue all victory and
a scepter or spear. This was especially prominent on coins,
and then it might be invoked. This version of Jupiter
might be invoked either celebrate an actual victory that occurred
or in anticipation of an upcoming victory. So this is
Jupiter the conqueror, Jupiter what is best in life? Right? Yes?
(34:03):
What to crush the Titans see them driven before you
hear their lamentations from Tartarus. Yeah, but of course the
Jupiter I mean, presumably God also has to govern, and
certainly the Roman Empire would have realized that as well.
It's one thing to conquer, but then you need to
hold your territory. And that's where the next aspect comes
in Jupiter conservator. Uh, this is a Jupiter that holds
(34:25):
a thunderbolt, but he's holding it above the image of
the Roman emperor, so he's kind of a preserver of rule.
That's a kind of a halo concept. I think, you know.
It's like saying, like the will of Jupiter resonates through
the emperor, and he was the one who rules over
these lands. Now one of the big ones is Jupiter
(34:46):
Optimus Maximus or Jupiter Optimus Maximus capital Linus. And this
is the most powerful aspect of Jupiter, all powerful as such,
the temple of Jupiter optimist Maximus was the most important
temple in ancient Rome, local gated on Capitol Line Hill. Now,
some other versions you had Jupiter full gore. This is
the lightning Jupiter, but not passively so like Jupiter often
(35:07):
has lightning, but this is like Jupiter with the aggressive stance,
like he's going to smite you, gonna hurl the thunderbolt
for some reason when you said that I pictured not Jupiter,
but I guess uh, an analog to Jupiter Marduke holding
holding this. Yeah, that's the famous image, but Marduke is
often pictured in kind of a fighting stance from the side. Yeah,
(35:29):
there's one that was referred to as a Jupiter Dolicinus.
And this was the focus of a Roman mystery cult,
originally a local hit tight hurry and god of fertility
and thunder. So here we see an example of of
of the of Romans combining ideas. Another deity from another
land is taken in and becomes an aspect of Jupiter.
(35:50):
Then you have a Jupiter ruminus. This is the breast
feeder of all life. And then as we mentioned earlier,
Jupiter pluvious. This is this cinder of rain. In times
of drought, special sacrifices were made in the name of
Jupiter Pluvius, and these were called aquilsum. Uh. So this
is where we're getting back to consideration of not only
(36:13):
the mythic Jupiter, but but the the Jupiter the planet
as well. Uh. The idea of Jupiter as as he
who delivers the rain, he who delivers the water. Yeah.
And so we already talked about some ways that Jupiter
has has influenced what kind of stuff smashed into the
the forming and then the early Earth to determine its composition,
(36:36):
what size it would grow to, and what was on
its surface and what kind of volatiles it had in
terms of an atmosphere and possibly surface water. Yes, uh,
and so in this I mean, we're still talking about
the planet Jupiter pelting the rocky planets with stuff, you know,
like it's still ultimately a violent relationship. But but the
(36:59):
idea here is that is Jupiter is not only throwing thunderbolts. Uh.
The Jovian bombardments might have included water or would be water,
specifically hydrogen rich material. And this wind's up locked into
Earth's crust and mantle and emerges later to bond with
oxygen to become water. Uh. So one of the sources
we're looking at with this, as Nola Taylor red article
(37:20):
for Smithsonian dot com from back in focusing on the
work of French astronomer Shawn Raymond, who we've already talked about, uh,
whose models predict this possible gas giant thrown delivery of
water rich material to the inner planets. Also key is
the work of andre Isadoro, who along with Raymond, published
a paper on this in seventeen titled Origin of Water
(37:42):
in the Inner Solar System. Okay, so what do they argue? Okay?
So the idea here is that four point five billion
years ago, the massive center of the and in this
I'm gonna touch on some stuff we've already gone through.
But then the massive center of the cloud of gas
and cosmic dust begins to form into a central star,
our Sun. But the remaining cloud remained and its contents
(38:04):
would in time form into the planets. But the water
rich region of the disc would have been located several
astronomical units away from the Sun. The temperature in the
inner region was too high, so that water then ultimately
has to move back to the inner planets to become
a part of them so that we can have water
on Earth. So this would have occurred um between during
(38:28):
a five to ten million year period between the Sun's
formation and the dissipation of the gas disc. During this time,
the gas giants formed, and quote Jupiter's rapid growth gravitationally
disturbed thousands of water rich planetismals, dislodging them from their
original orbits. Okay, so we see yet again, Jupiter as
(38:48):
it's coming together, begins to throw its weight around, it
exerts gravitational influence, and in this case would have started
pulling in these uh, these planetesimals, these these objects, you know,
objects that might be I don't know, asteroid sized or larger,
that have some kind of water hydrogen content on them,
(39:08):
and then slamming them into the inner solar system. Right.
It's it's basically you know, what it reminds me of
is I don't know if you've seen these sort of
vaudevillian skits where like you have your your your bad comic,
you're sort of Fozzy Bear type, and he's on stage,
he's bombing. I mean, he's just really dogging it up. Uh,
And so that the audience is of course pelting him
(39:29):
with fruits and vegetables and he either catches one in
his mouth and begins to eat it, or catches something
like catches the carrot and starts eating it. So like
they're they're pelting and they're engaging in violence, but they're
throwing nutrients at him and he is like, yes, I
am hungry, I shall eat that is that's kind of
the relationship going on here. Um, well, the fozzy bear effect,
(39:50):
I'm going to call it anyway. UM. I was reading
some more about this. Um uh Isidoro had provided some
quotes about this that were used in press really as
and write ups, in particular one that was on Eureka
alort dot com. And this is what they said, quote
in our own Solar system. The model shows that ice
is from the outer Solar system snowed down on the
(40:12):
Earth in three waves. The first came as Jupiter swelled up,
the second was triggered during Saturn's formation, and the third
would have occurred when Uranus and Neptune migrated inward before
being blocked by the other two and sent back to
the outskirts of the Solar system. Ah, and that ties
into something that I was talking about earlier when I
was mentioning that blog post by Sean Raymond, one of
(40:34):
the authors here that the early forming Jupiter, and I'm
not sure if he's saying also maybe Saturn too, but
at least definitely Jupiter and perhaps also Saturn would have
prevented these icy bodies ran Us in Neptune from migrating
inward towards the inner Solar system. And messing with the
planets that were forming down in closer to the Sun. Yeah.
I mean, ultimately, if you have an all powerful guide
(40:55):
like Jupiter, one of the things that that they're supposed
to do is keep keep his dreaded father and grandfather
from taking over creation again, right, I mean, that's why
we're putting up with all of this right right now.
One other neat thing about this that the authors point
out is that, you know, it might not just be
a quirk of our own Solar system. It might not
just be the peculiar peculiar story of of life on
(41:18):
Earth and life in this system. This could be going
on anywhere that you have both giant planets and terrestrial planets. Um.
So this is the sort of thing that if this
is true, this would be another thing to look for
in our exoplanet surveys. Look for situations where you have
like the right proportions and right arrangements of gas giants
(41:40):
and rocky inner planets where this same bombardment of water
could happen. Yeah, this is really interesting and uh. And
of course in the specific case of Earth, it of
course goes without saying that we couldn't have life on
Earth without surface. You know, plenty of surface water on Earth.
So so this is something that uh, if if this
mottle of the early Solar System is correct, this would
(42:02):
again be crucial to us being here at all. Thank you,
thank you, thank you. Now I've got another thing that, again,
a an astrophysical theory that, if correct, would be crucial
for us being here at all. Uh. And this would
have more to do with the history of life on Earth.
(42:25):
Once you've already got the rocky planet Earth, and you've
already got Earth life, what happens to shape the course
of evolution on the surface of this planet. Well, there
is a new paper published in uh Nature Scientific Reports
in one so I think it was just out last month.
It was in February of this year by I'm here
(42:45):
Sarage and Abraham Loeb or Avy. Loeb called the breakup
of a long period comet as the origin of the
dinosaur extinction. Uh. And so I was briefly reading a
Harvard gazette right up of of this study. Not gonna
go super in depth about it, but basically what the
authors argue here is that Jupiter's gravitational field influenced objects,
(43:07):
a comment probably originating from the Ort Cloud. So that's
way out there past the Kuiper Belt. You know, this
huge sphere of icy objects, way way out in the distance,
beyond the orbit of Neptune, beyond the orbit of Pluto,
beyond the Kuiper Belt. Even that Jupiter disturbed the orbit
of one of these comets from the Ort Cloud, and
(43:29):
this disturbance of its orbit sent it really close to
the Sun where tidal forces then broke the commet apart.
And this would increase the rate of comets that would
bombard the Earth. And these commets would include objects like
the chicks Alube impact object, which hit the Earth about
sixty six million years ago, and according to the leading
(43:50):
theory today, is probably the main thing responsible for the
extinction of the non avian dinosaurs. And so Lowe Ban
Saraj here argue that it is the gravitation sational influence
of Jupiter that increases these kinds of impacts through the
mechanism I just described, And Sarage is quoted in this
Harvard Gazette piece where he says, quote, basically, Jupiter acts
(44:12):
as a kind of pinball machine. Jupiter kicks these incoming
long period comets into orbits that bring them very close
to the Sun. When you have these sun grazers. It's
not so much the melting that goes on, which is
a pretty small fraction relative to the total mass, but
the comet is so close to the Sun that the
part of it that's closer to the Sun feels a
(44:33):
stronger gravitational pull than the part that is farther from
the Sun, causing a tidal force. You get what's called
a tidal disruption event. And so these large comets that
come really close to the Sun break up into smaller
comets and basically on their way out, there's a statistical
chance that these smaller comets hit the Earth. So huge
(44:54):
icy objects from out in the Orc cloud getting diverted
by the gravitational influence of Jupiter so that they pass
really close to the Sun. They sort of shatter as
they do so because the tidal forces from the Sun
are so strong, and then they turn into a kind
of buckshot blast of huge icy objects in the inner
Solar System that can hit Earth and potentially cause mass extinctions.
(45:15):
And I think one of the arguments that they also
bring up is that the is that it looks like
the carbonaceous content of the object that caused the KPg
extinction is more similar to stuff you're you're likely to
find in these deep space or cloud objects then in
things you're more likely to find closer to the inner
Solar System, like in the asteroid belt. So again, this
(45:37):
is another argument that is based on simulations and statistical analysis.
But if this is correct, it is yet another one
of the many ways that Jupiter would be responsible for
the fact that we exist at all. While it was
you know, calamitous for the non avian dinosaurs, it paved
the way for the age of mammals. I like that
(45:58):
if if this worked true, this is true, we we
might need a new aspect for the god Jupiter, maybe
Jupiter or extinct or god of extinctions, you know, yeah,
good with He could be shown holding a lizard in
one hand and a thunderbolt in the other, like he's
about to like smash it in his palm. His hand
flashes with power, but it's against a bunch of had restaurs.
(46:19):
They're trying to guard their eggs, and he's like, well
he was probably his thinking was, probably look these these
these life forms. They're not worshiping me. Now, Honestly, I
don't think they're going to be worshiping worshiping me anytime soon.
Unless I really shake things up. I'm just gonna smite
a lot of them, right, you know what I really like.
I really like the look of that rat like creature
(46:41):
down there, and it's gonna be twinkle in its I
think some some good things could happen if I give
the rats a chance. Though, it does make me wonder,
you know, did I wonder if Jupiter slash Zeus got
up to you know, his normal tricks. Did he go
down and take the form of different uh dinosaurs and
mate with the dinosaur ors to create like certain demi
(47:02):
god dinosaurs that would have been just you know, extra
powerful amid their dinosaur brethren. What would the dinosaur mythology
version of the minotaur be would be like a Tyrannosaurus
rex with the head of a triceratops, I guess. But
but then again, I don't know. I feel like like
the minotaur is one of those beasts that's kind of
(47:23):
born out of um feuding with the gods and disobeying
the gods. I don't know. I guess the dinosaurs, just
by refusing to worship, are just not being capable of it.
You know, the gods could have taken that the wrong
way and dished out some punishment. But um, I don't
know like this, I think this would be a rich
area for I don't know, an action figure line or
(47:43):
maybe a comic book like the The The Age of
of Gods and Dinosaurs. Um, what would that have been like? Also?
I mean if if humans weren't even in the game yet,
I guess uh, any form that the Jupiter took would
be that of a dinosaur, So like, how would he appear?
Would he appear as a as a great t rex
(48:05):
or some sort of enorma I mean, he is a
god of the sky. Maybe he takes the form of
a of of an enormous um of you know, flying reptile.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Jupiter is quetzalcoatlas. Oh yeah, that
would be fitting, especially since you know humans found those
bones and named it after a god. So what what
better form for the sky god to take? We're all
(48:26):
but I think we gotta call it there. But this
has been a lot of fun. Yeah, this has I
love getting the switch back and forth between the planetary
and the mythological. I should mention, however, we mostly speak
of the Roman gods as figures of the past, just
as we do with Greek deities in ancient Egyptian deities.
But we should also mention that there are modern worshippers
as well, not only of of of Greek deities in
(48:46):
ancient Egyptian deities, but also of of Roman Jupiter. Um.
You know, after all, just as modern humans reach for
new models, entirely new models of religion, uh, you know,
drawing things even out of popular culture like Star Wars
or The Dude, we also reach for the old ones
and reconstructions of the old ones. Thus we do see
Roman polytheistic reconstructionism uh in several different groups and forms.
(49:11):
So um uh just always worth worth mentioning. I don't
think we we blasphemed too much in this regarding Jupiter,
but uh an a right, if anyone out there who's
actively involved in a religion or some sort of spiritual
movement that that that reveres Jupiter, I would I'd love
to hear from you. I'd love to know you know,
(49:31):
how do you think of Jupiter? How does how does
this material sit with you? Um? So yeah, I always
find that kind of thing interesting. We have in the
past heard from at least one listener who um engages
in a religious model that incorporates Egyptian deities. Oh yeah,
that's true. Yeah, all right, Well, if you would like
to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
(49:54):
you know where to find them. Find them in the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed That is where
core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published on
Tuesdays and Thursday that's the main show. That's the main event,
but then we also have listener mail on Monday's. On
Wednesday's we do the artifact episodes unless they've been preempted
for some reason, and then on Friday's we do Weird
House Cinema. That's our time to just cut loose and
(50:16):
discuss some weird movies, and then we run a little
rerun over the weekend in the form of a vault episode.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(50:44):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts. For my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. The present, Joy Joy,
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