I got lucky on top of Mauna Kea one night and the Subaru telescope had its laser on and I got a shot of it with the Milky Way in the background. It was so crazy to see in person!
8:50 I remember corresponding with Michael Laine, the head of LiftPort circa 2005 when he was the first person I'd heard talking about reducing the cost per pound of sending mass to orbit. The plans they had for a space elevator may not be on track, but a lot more people are involved and interested in democratizing access to space these days, and that is a great direction to be headed in.
Yeah, I interviewed him years ago. There were some cool NASA challenges to push the idea forward a little, but it never really turned into more technology.
@@frasercain That's cool. I recall the tech challenge to build PV panel powered "climbers" to ascend a thin ribbon (like we use for load-fixing ratchet straps). Though not very fast, it did lead to an idea of placing mobile communications antennas at the top of several-hundreds-meters-long ribbons, held aloft with helium balloons, that could theoretically be serviced in place with said climbers. Lots of innovative spirit there, even if it didn't necessarily lead to a marketable product (that I'm aware of).
So great seeing you announcing these question shows in front of the OG background. Reminds me of my now ex wife always (falsely) referring to you as ‘The Green Screen Guy’ years ago. ❤️
I don't need regolith for plants that are dying, I usually forget to water them, and when I do water it is too much 😂. I don't have farming fingers. Furthermore, I have already thought about an Arduino project for irrigation, which is my specialty. About the laser, I always thought that it was to point at a region, and keep the location in a computer, for easily finding back the object. But it does way more than that, amazing.
One day at my old job at a major aerospace company I went digging around in the terabytes of archived date and found proposals for creating giant mirrors in space by inflating spherical bubbles and using the resulting structures to build telescope mirrors.
For some reason, this was the episode that made me for the first time in my life, I finally joined a local astronomy club in the darkest part of Florida!
22:23 I love the term "Dwarf galaxy" hehe. Like, the nerve alone of naming them like that. I know the context and of it, but hell, they're still humongous! Also the term "Local group" like, "Yeah, they're 'round the corner" XD.
As for powering the space elevator, that's easy. Each, cube added to its height includes a solar panel around round with a supercapacitor holding power, all the cubes electrically connect together. When the elevator is needed, all the available power from the super capacitors ride it up all a while the solar panels continue to charge. Power on trap, always charging.
What perfect timing for the laser question! I was just watching the telescope livestream on AstroAsahi's channel and saw one had a laser and was so curious what was going on!
Try reading Robert Heinlein's novel "Farmer in the Sky". He wrote about issues of plant soil nutrition circa1950's. When I was a teen, his novels were usually educational. Robert was one of the best Sci-Fi authors of his time.
I believe I read A Fire Upon The Deep years ago after you recommended it on astronomycast. Thank you, and thanks for the reminder, I need to look into Vinge’s other books.
Book Club: With reference to the "looking for machine civilisations" question, it's almost the opposite of the concept presented in Terry Bissons short story, "They're Made out of Meat", a long time favourite of mine.
A space elevator still has a huge material science problem, but if it were solved, it would beat the pants off reaction rockets no matter how re-usable. Just on energy efficiency/fuel cost reasons. Most of the fuel expended during a rocket launch, is basically accelerating more fuel.
Loving the overtime content. There was that semi recent sci fi that had a space elevator, I can't remember the name of it. The show depicted the terror of it collapsing due to terrorist like events. Wish I could remember the name...
The inventor of the sodium laser guide star is Dr. Will Happer, the only living person I know of who has personally revolutionized two different scientific fields -- and today is his birthday! Dr. Ethan Siegel wrote an article about the Sodium Laser Guide Star, entitled, _"Why observatories shoot lasers at the Universe."_ This is what he said about Prof. Happer's invention: *_"it's perhaps the most spectacular, revolutionary advance in ground-based astronomy since the invention of photography."_* Unfortunately, Dr. Siegel gracelessly failed to mention *_the name_* of the person who invented that "most spectacular, revolutionary advance."
There is just so much that we don't know, and yet we are constantly rewriting what we know about the universe around us. It is absolutely incredible only 101 years ago we discovered that our galaxy wasn't alone. 2.5 million light years to the edge of infrared light emission itself in less than a century. I wish I had a hand in the progress to come. Unfortunately, I never could get back to school. I've always learned better hands on anyway, so school never really helped me much. I believe I'm an engineer, but that's yet to be brought to fruition. Lol
Dirt/regolith is soil without life. The bacteria, fungi, and other life forms in our soil are the mechanism by which minerals are made bio-available. For example, you require iron to live, but eating iron filings can kill you. We rely on something to transform or encapsulate the iron so that our bodies can use it. Soil microbes do that for us.
Fraser, I have another question about Dark Matter. Could the particles that created dark matter actually move faster than light ? It would make some sense, at least in my haunted head, still bound weakly to matter but moving at speeds that would be invisible to us, also pushing the boundaries of space, also would explain Hubble tension
I have to argue a little about the space elevator. 1. A space elevator would be able to have thousands of trips up. Even multiple trips daily. 2. Even though it couldn't have the pay load of those big rockets. Its pay load will be multiple times a day. Overall it would far exceed the rockets. 3. The construction materials don't need to be carbon nano, that is just the best option but there are other metals we could use, but they would have to be replaced frequently. I hope ya take these things in consideration when mentioning a space elevator. I love your show, and i hope to here your response.
How many cars could you put on the cable? Can cars go up while others go down? What other metals can be used for space elevators on Earth? I haven't heard of anything with the tensile strength high enough.
@@frasercain The only limit to simultaneous cars on the cable is the tensile strength of one particular cable segment -- see any modern gondola ski lift, where the cabins get taken off the cable to be boarded, then slowly inserted onto the cable, moved between cable segments etc.. For something not entirely reliant on tensile strength of a cable, see funiculars. Paternoster lift was a silly example, but it gives you a quick idea why it is not limited to cabins going one way. As to the structure of the lift itself, there is of course active support, where you don't have to rely on tensile or compressive strength -- but it is technologically more difficult to build and needs power to stay up. Pretty much every part of this apart from active support has already being used somewhere on Earth for decades. BUT... it is something that is so expensive to build, that it is a catch 22 - it would only pay off if there was already a lot of need to transfer things from and to orbit, which there simply won't be without existing semi-affordable access to space. So, on my part, I think, Starship is the road there, without Starship we won't need a space elevator any time soon. With Starship, we won't need it for a while, but for a different reason :-)
Space elevator really is the strategy in the later game, when we have an orbital ring with infrastructure and manufacturing. You won't be having tenths of thousands of Starships flying every day. This isn't the Expanse
An artificially intelligent civilization's Dyson swarms would likely be, more specifically -- in terms of primary function -- Matrioshka Brains (providing a truly immense amount of computation). Whether you could tell a garden variety Dyson swarm apart from a Matrioshka Brain, from a distance, I do not know. RIP Vernor Vinge. I think _A Deepness in the Sky_ (a prequel, of sorts) may be even better than _A Fire Upon rhe Deep._ _Rainbows End_ was pretty cool also, and a must-read for people interested in augmented reality.
Regarding the book that you plug at the end of this episode, what would Galactic positioning have to do with the advancement of a civilizations technology? Is it because of time dilation and the center of the galaxy having more mass due to supermassive black hole so their clocks run slower than the clocks on the outer perimeter of the galaxy? Or do they even explain this phenomenon?
The space elevator will be constructed of carbon nanotubes bound with diamond matrixes. Green Mars explained all of this. They will absolutely work on the Moon and maybe Mars.
Question Sir: I let chat GPT do some runaway math which indicated that refilling a disposable superheavy booster in orbit and attaching it to a refilled Starship would give a delta V of around 11,000 m/s to play with, which would be enough to get the Starship to slingshot around Jupiter and then back to Earth orbital insertion with a total travel time of around 5-6 years, give or take a gravitational assist, and if a landing burn was needed vs earth orbital transfer to a reusable starship. Would you take that trip? It would be almost as long as the original run of Star Trek Voyager! I wonder how boring and lonely it might get, or if a ship loaded up with telescopes and observational hardware would make it like being aboard JWST mobile observatory for 6 years would be the best nerdfest ever.
Maybe I should condense that. Two stage starship to orbit, then a refilled 2 stage burn to Jupiter and back could take around 6 years. Would you take that trip with the ship packed with astronomical equipment?
Question, how would you go about setting up a GPS system on the moon? Seems it could be useful for everything we are planning on doing there. Maybe not geoscnc, could we do a GPS system with non geo sync satellites around the moon in a modified starlink setup or something?
Heres what I hate about space elevators: people underestimate the danger and difficulty of handling long high tension cables. I have worked on research ships. Dealing with a 7mile long cable can be difficult and dangerous. Imagine one thousands of miles long. Then imagine hurricanes tornadoes and thunder storms. Imagine it getting hit by lightning like constantly. One of the worst part of operating submersible robotics and ROVs is handling the tether.
Telescopes firing lasers into the sky produce 'guide stars' that allow astronomers to correct the huge distortion produced by earth's atmosphere. That's true, and the technology to make this work is amazing. But, for me, it's even more mindblowing to know WHY this works. If you shoot a random laser at the sky, you won't create a guide star - your laser beam will just head off into the universe never to be seen again*. The adaptive optics laser beams have to be exactly the colour of those sodium lights that used to turn our cityscapes orange at night, before (excellent) outdoor LED lights became commonplace everywhere. This only works as a result of the incredible chance chemical and physical behaviour of our atmosphere. It just happens that there is a band a few kilometers thick around 90 km above sea level where uncharged sodium atoms can be found. Above this band, sodium atoms tend to be ionised. Lower down sodium tends to be bound in chemical compounds. The sodium in the atmosphere comes from meteors burning up at around this altitude. So we can create guide stars at 589 nm wavelength in this narrow band only. Knowing how high they are allows accurate correction to be applied. Nature conspires to make the unthinkable possible! * Rayleigh scattering beacons, an alternative technology, operate at near UV wavelengths, and so not visible, and at lower altitudes.
There's a mission in the works to fire lasers from space down to Earth from cubesats to make guide stars. I'm trying to schedule an interview with the researcher behind it.
OK, basic question. I understand that the laser creates a "guide star" for the adaptive optics to adapt to, but how can it do that? Where is the "dot" that the optics are trying to focus on? The laser beam is a beam, not a dot. And if it goes through clear air, you can't even see it. Is it hitting a cloud layer??.
BTW, there are multiple proposed tethered structures like skyhook or orbital ring. Both are more practical on Earth than space elevator. I expect that neither of them is going to be build in the next 100 years.
Both of those you mentioned still need a significant about of thrust to get high enough to capture the hook or ring. You would already be in orbit by then.
Rather than wasting money and time on star shot, a better idea would be to work further on nano technology so that many smaller yet still fully equipped satellites could be accelerated using whatever systems to get them a good kick out there, but build a gigantic radio telescope or optical system that can pick up the very weak return data from the probes...
We couldn't have a Space Elevator until we clear out LEO of all the crap that would by smashing into it; because all the crap would be orbiting a 1,000 of km/h and the Space Elevator wouldn't.
Crapping on sci-fi Christmas as Fraser calls it, why space elevators are a no go, why not crap on Dyson Sphere's as well ? One of the biggest problems, but by no means the only one, that makes this idea dead in the water, is the mass required to build it. The extra-solar mass of any star system is negligible, usually less than one percent, so where exactly is all this matter supposed to come from ? Take our solar system, even with the Oort cloud and all the planets you'd be lucky to build a ring let alone a sphere encompassing the sun...
Adding fertilizer and bacteria to Martian regolith is not enough. You'd also need to wash out all the perchlorates. Simple enough to do but requires a lot of water which is going to be a problem.
quantum nulling? What? is that like interferometer, that works now for radio astronomy and should work for infrared light in new ESO VLT? how does that actually work?
In these photos and videos showing these telescopes shooting laser beams into the sky, how come these laser baems are visible?! Shouldn't the air around and above these observatories be very clear! Thus the beams should be invisible? As I understand the beam should be invisible unless there is floating particles in the air such as dust, mist, etc, that the beam can reflect off of it, also the artificial stars projected by these lasers are aimed at virtually empty space so how can they be used for calibration? can you explain please, thanks.
The more pressing issue is that it would be subject to wind shear at different heights going in different directions, at different intensities & velocities.
@@grndkntrl while that's a concern, I'm actually trying to decide who's right between my wife and I. Legitimately don't know the answer. She says the middle of the elevator would experience more drag as it's going faster than the base (in order to travel in a larger circle that the height circumscribes) and I say it wouldn't because it's still stationary relative to the ground. Of course there would be wind sheer but that's not what we're discussing.
The space elevator idea is cool but so flawed. The entire weight of the elevator, right up to the geostationary bit at the top, will be pulling down. And surely, orbital dynamics will be making each 'level' want to 'orbit' and different speeds, relative to Earth. Crazy! 😅
The rope at different heights wouldn't have a tendency to orbit. It would have a tendency to fall due to gravity, which is indeed a huge problem with the idea because even exotic materials like carbon nanotubes may not withstand that much tension. I think only an "active" elevator could work, where it has a constant source of propulsion to reduce the tension, like maybe an ion thruster every mile or whatever. But that would negate at least some of the main advantage of a space elevator, which is the energy savings.
@@jamesmcmanus are you sure there'd be no orbital dynamics at play here? You could think of the rope being a string of finite units, unless it was a rigid bar. Also, imagine if the rope went even higher than the capsule. How do you imagine that bit would behave? I would think it would trail (orbital dynamics), so would not the rope below the capsule want to lead? It's an interesting thought experiment at least.
I've thought longer about this and agree with you on orbital dynamics not having an influence on the 'rope'. Not whilst attached, at least. But if the rope had any mass at all, the pod would be pulled into a lower orbit. Then we can talk orbital dynamics. And crashing 🤣
OK, you can't throw out a soft ball about gravity and expect no-one to swing at it. So with 1/100 the mass of the earth, you get 1g at a distance of a/10 or about 400 miles. For a spaghetti factor of +/-40g, equivalent to a human flat spin at 190 RPM (ouch), ...that happens around 2.7 km from the mass (blackhole or not). By 1km (+/- 800g)...that's spaghetti, at 100m it's +/-800,000g.
w how do you stop a madastronomer from using the artafical starlite from hittin a satalite of spaceship . how much damage would it do if it did amy at a satalite .plane or spaceship.
Actually the universe is becoming more dense but the potential of the black holes are making space more diffuse. This makes them eventually collide and expand all of space slowly lol.
Universe is not only expanding but that expansion is accelerating. Yet no new mass and/or energy is being created (1st law of thermodynamics). Density is mass divided by volume. How is it you claim density is increasing?
@ReinReads I am not sure what I meant. You guys seem to think of space development weirdly. It should be easy to link the curvature of spacetime to dark matter and get rid of dark matter and simply incorporate it into dark energy as a dynamic coupling.
I never thought the Dyson sphere is a sane idea. To build that, you need so much energy and material, that you have to be so developed technologically, that at that point you will have many different and way better method to create energy than a dyson sphere. I think that is just a waste of time, material, energy. The idea comes from humans with limited imagination and technological, scientific knowledge. But it is a hype currently, so people are crazy about it. The same is true to SETI I am afraid. Looking for radio broadcasts?? Really? Why are we not looking for smoke signs, or flying stone plates with engravings on them?? lol... We can not even imagine how a technologically advanced civilisation will communicate or travel or make their energy. Even we are using fibre optics to communicate instead of those old super strong radio broadcasts... Come on people...
Congress is going to cancel a project that went over budget after they have already spent the money, instead of adding the rover which has been completed after congress actually paid the cost overrun, they have elected to spend even more money to send up a concrete block in its place. So, instead of a rover full of instruments to do things like find a good place to land and even find water so that a lunar base can be built, they are going to send up a block of concrete. I see! They must be planning to build that base one concrete block at a time. What a clever idea! Just think of all the money they can embezzle, oh, I mean save! 🤑🤑🤑
I think for any culture developed on any extraterrestrial base would make putting on the pounds extremely taboo. It would probably be because it's hard to grow food.
You are completely ignoring the fact that fueled rockets are so polluting that the reason to build space elevators, sky hooks, rail guns and slingshots is to greatly reduce the environmental impact. Does your channel recognize that environmental pollution is a thing..?
@@frasercain 1) That doesn't avoid ozone layer damage. 2) It won't be pulled out of the atmosphere because it is far less expensive to drill/mine it. 3) The planet is hitting serious climate crisis tipping points now and that means we need to not only cut emissions to neutral, but draw down carbon aggressively. 4) Methane is not necessarily optimal for Earth based launches and won't be use where it is not. 5) The slingshot technology is almost ready for prime time and we should be shifting to it.
I got lucky on top of Mauna Kea one night and the Subaru telescope had its laser on and I got a shot of it with the Milky Way in the background. It was so crazy to see in person!
Tks for leaving us these episodes while on vacation. Have fun..
8:50 I remember corresponding with Michael Laine, the head of LiftPort circa 2005 when he was the first person I'd heard talking about reducing the cost per pound of sending mass to orbit. The plans they had for a space elevator may not be on track, but a lot more people are involved and interested in democratizing access to space these days, and that is a great direction to be headed in.
Yeah, I interviewed him years ago. There were some cool NASA challenges to push the idea forward a little, but it never really turned into more technology.
@@frasercain That's cool. I recall the tech challenge to build PV panel powered "climbers" to ascend a thin ribbon (like we use for load-fixing ratchet straps). Though not very fast, it did lead to an idea of placing mobile communications antennas at the top of several-hundreds-meters-long ribbons, held aloft with helium balloons, that could theoretically be serviced in place with said climbers. Lots of innovative spirit there, even if it didn't necessarily lead to a marketable product (that I'm aware of).
What a great choice for favorite SciFi book!
Thanks Mr Cain. I enjoy your channel 🌎
I really enjoy this question and answer sessions. Some of these things I’ve pondered. I certainly find them very fascinating.
So great seeing you announcing these question shows in front of the OG background. Reminds me of my now ex wife always (falsely) referring to you as ‘The Green Screen Guy’ years ago. ❤️
I don't need regolith for plants that are dying, I usually forget to water them, and when I do water it is too much 😂. I don't have farming fingers. Furthermore, I have already thought about an Arduino project for irrigation, which is my specialty. About the laser, I always thought that it was to point at a region, and keep the location in a computer, for easily finding back the object. But it does way more than that, amazing.
One day at my old job at a major aerospace company I went digging around in the terabytes of archived date and found proposals for creating giant mirrors in space by inflating spherical bubbles and using the resulting structures to build telescope mirrors.
The triggering of another set of memeories, peoples and inventions. Does me good. And your love and passion on the subject, reawakenkng in me..tyvm
For some reason, this was the episode that made me for the first time in my life, I finally joined a local astronomy club in the darkest part of Florida!
Love the greenscreen at the start!
22:23 I love the term "Dwarf galaxy" hehe. Like, the nerve alone of naming them like that. I know the context and of it, but hell, they're still humongous!
Also the term "Local group" like, "Yeah, they're 'round the corner" XD.
As for powering the space elevator, that's easy. Each, cube added to its height includes a solar panel around round with a supercapacitor holding power, all the cubes electrically connect together. When the elevator is needed, all the available power from the super capacitors ride it up all a while the solar panels continue to charge. Power on trap, always charging.
What perfect timing for the laser question! I was just watching the telescope livestream on AstroAsahi's channel and saw one had a laser and was so curious what was going on!
Great answers as always. I think a crashing space elevator might become a bit of a problem too, even if all the other problems could be fixed.
Beautiful setting!
Try reading Robert Heinlein's novel "Farmer in the Sky". He wrote about issues of plant soil nutrition circa1950's. When I was a teen, his novels were usually educational. Robert was one of the best Sci-Fi authors of his time.
I grok you.😊 I think the phrase is from stranger in a strange land. Heinlein
You don't need regolit, earth to growing vegetable. vou can all the minerals and nutrien into the water.
nope would live stains on the container that you hold them in for the long flight to mars.
Also known as, 'hydroponics'. Don't even need to go to Mars (or the Moon) to see it in action: it's in use already right here, on Earth.
observatories with frickin laser beams attached to their heads.
Are they... Ill-tempered?
You sir are amazing. Hope you're enjoying your vacation!
i hope your vacation is going well!
Back in the woods!!! ❤❤
I believe I read A Fire Upon The Deep years ago after you recommended it on astronomycast. Thank you, and thanks for the reminder, I need to look into Vinge’s other books.
maybe one day there will be a sasquatch trudging through the background in one of these
And he’ll be pushing the electric universe hypothesis.
Dang, thanks for taking the time from your vacay.
Book Club: With reference to the "looking for machine civilisations" question, it's almost the opposite of the concept presented in Terry Bissons short story, "They're Made out of Meat", a long time favourite of mine.
Yeah overtime Q&A 👌🤘
A space elevator still has a huge material science problem, but if it were solved, it would beat the pants off reaction rockets no matter how re-usable.
Just on energy efficiency/fuel cost reasons.
Most of the fuel expended during a rocket launch, is basically accelerating more fuel.
The energy from downward bound loads could be used to lift the upward bound loads. This instead of the insane heating from reentry.
Image the damage it would do to earth if it failed and collapsed. It's such a bad idea in so many ways.
The Space Elevator question is probably better answered by Isaac Arthur tbh.
Loving the overtime content. There was that semi recent sci fi that had a space elevator, I can't remember the name of it. The show depicted the terror of it collapsing due to terrorist like events. Wish I could remember the name...
what are your thoughts on the skyhook idea? It feels kinda needed if we want to travel faster through space with less fuel/energy needed, right?
The inventor of the sodium laser guide star is Dr. Will Happer, the only living person I know of who has personally revolutionized two different scientific fields -- and today is his birthday!
Dr. Ethan Siegel wrote an article about the Sodium Laser Guide Star, entitled, _"Why observatories shoot lasers at the Universe."_ This is what he said about Prof. Happer's invention:
*_"it's perhaps the most spectacular, revolutionary advance in ground-based astronomy since the invention of photography."_*
Unfortunately, Dr. Siegel gracelessly failed to mention *_the name_* of the person who invented that "most spectacular, revolutionary advance."
There is just so much that we don't know, and yet we are constantly rewriting what we know about the universe around us. It is absolutely incredible only 101 years ago we discovered that our galaxy wasn't alone. 2.5 million light years to the edge of infrared light emission itself in less than a century. I wish I had a hand in the progress to come. Unfortunately, I never could get back to school. I've always learned better hands on anyway, so school never really helped me much. I believe I'm an engineer, but that's yet to be brought to fruition. Lol
You could use software defined radio to tune the laser optics on the laser telescope.
Looks like you might be wearing one of Captain Kirk's wrap tunics. Cool!
You mean a T-shirt?
Dirt/regolith is soil without life. The bacteria, fungi, and other life forms in our soil are the mechanism by which minerals are made bio-available. For example, you require iron to live, but eating iron filings can kill you. We rely on something to transform or encapsulate the iron so that our bodies can use it. Soil microbes do that for us.
From light's perspective, no time passes.
Regarding space telescopes, could a starship be specifically designed for a manned space telescope?
Fraser, I have another question about Dark Matter. Could the particles that created dark matter actually move faster than light ? It would make some sense, at least in my haunted head, still bound weakly to matter but moving at speeds that would be invisible to us, also pushing the boundaries of space, also would explain Hubble tension
👍👍👍
I have to argue a little about the space elevator.
1. A space elevator would be able to have thousands of trips up. Even multiple trips daily.
2. Even though it couldn't have the pay load of those big rockets. Its pay load will be multiple times a day. Overall it would far exceed the rockets.
3. The construction materials don't need to be carbon nano, that is just the best option but there are other metals we could use, but they would have to be replaced frequently.
I hope ya take these things in consideration when mentioning a space elevator.
I love your show, and i hope to here your response.
That doesn't sound like a space elevator, more like a space paternoster. (But that's probably also the only way it would make sense.)
How many cars could you put on the cable? Can cars go up while others go down? What other metals can be used for space elevators on Earth? I haven't heard of anything with the tensile strength high enough.
@@frasercain The only limit to simultaneous cars on the cable is the tensile strength of one particular cable segment -- see any modern gondola ski lift, where the cabins get taken off the cable to be boarded, then slowly inserted onto the cable, moved between cable segments etc.. For something not entirely reliant on tensile strength of a cable, see funiculars.
Paternoster lift was a silly example, but it gives you a quick idea why it is not limited to cabins going one way.
As to the structure of the lift itself, there is of course active support, where you don't have to rely on tensile or compressive strength -- but it is technologically more difficult to build and needs power to stay up.
Pretty much every part of this apart from active support has already being used somewhere on Earth for decades.
BUT... it is something that is so expensive to build, that it is a catch 22 - it would only pay off if there was already a lot of need to transfer things from and to orbit, which there simply won't be without existing semi-affordable access to space.
So, on my part, I think, Starship is the road there, without Starship we won't need a space elevator any time soon. With Starship, we won't need it for a while, but for a different reason :-)
@@frasercain I would say ..... for safety, one car. I would also say one trip at a time. That would indicate only one moving.
Thanks Frasier
Space elevator really is the strategy in the later game, when we have an orbital ring with infrastructure and manufacturing. You won't be having tenths of thousands of Starships flying every day. This isn't the Expanse
An artificially intelligent civilization's Dyson swarms would likely be, more specifically -- in terms of primary function -- Matrioshka Brains (providing a truly immense amount of computation). Whether you could tell a garden variety Dyson swarm apart from a Matrioshka Brain, from a distance, I do not know.
RIP Vernor Vinge. I think _A Deepness in the Sky_ (a prequel, of sorts) may be even better than _A Fire Upon rhe Deep._ _Rainbows End_ was pretty cool also, and a must-read for people interested in augmented reality.
Regarding the book that you plug at the end of this episode, what would Galactic positioning have to do with the advancement of a civilizations technology? Is it because of time dilation and the center of the galaxy having more mass due to supermassive black hole so their clocks run slower than the clocks on the outer perimeter of the galaxy?
Or do they even explain this phenomenon?
Nope, it's just one of the rules of the galaxy. No actual scientific explanation.
The space elevator will be constructed of carbon nanotubes bound with diamond matrixes. Green Mars explained all of this. They will absolutely work on the Moon and maybe Mars.
Can you cover the Chandra images released recently? I would absolutely love to hear how the xray images work and what is it actually picking up?
Europa would be my no.1 place to check for life
Question Sir: I let chat GPT do some runaway math which indicated that refilling a disposable superheavy booster in orbit and attaching it to a refilled Starship would give a delta V of around 11,000 m/s to play with, which would be enough to get the Starship to slingshot around Jupiter and then back to Earth orbital insertion with a total travel time of around 5-6 years, give or take a gravitational assist, and if a landing burn was needed vs earth orbital transfer to a reusable starship.
Would you take that trip? It would be almost as long as the original run of Star Trek Voyager!
I wonder how boring and lonely it might get, or if a ship loaded up with telescopes and observational hardware would make it like being aboard JWST mobile observatory for 6 years would be the best nerdfest ever.
Maybe I should condense that.
Two stage starship to orbit, then a refilled 2 stage burn to Jupiter and back could take around 6 years. Would you take that trip with the ship packed with astronomical equipment?
Nope. Six years to look at Jupiter? Id go to the Moon, but that's it
@@frasercain I would do it! But only if I can take a space cat.
Noise cancellation to 11 to remove those squeaking birds.
The "Green Screen" IS BACK!
Question, how would you go about setting up a GPS system on the moon? Seems it could be useful for everything we are planning on doing there. Maybe not geoscnc, could we do a GPS system with non geo sync satellites around the moon in a modified starlink setup or something?
Aren’t all the galaxies in Laniakea gravitationally bound? All of them moving toward the Great Attractor?
I almost cant imagine a scifi book that I like better than the expanse books. I will have to read a fire upon the deep.
I've gone through the main expanse books but the side books are they worth a look?
Heres what I hate about space elevators: people underestimate the danger and difficulty of handling long high tension cables. I have worked on research ships. Dealing with a 7mile long cable can be difficult and dangerous. Imagine one thousands of miles long. Then imagine hurricanes tornadoes and thunder storms. Imagine it getting hit by lightning like constantly. One of the worst part of operating submersible robotics and ROVs is handling the tether.
Telescopes firing lasers into the sky produce 'guide stars' that allow astronomers to correct the huge distortion produced by earth's atmosphere. That's true, and the technology to make this work is amazing.
But, for me, it's even more mindblowing to know WHY this works. If you shoot a random laser at the sky, you won't create a guide star - your laser beam will just head off into the universe never to be seen again*. The adaptive optics laser beams have to be exactly the colour of those sodium lights that used to turn our cityscapes orange at night, before (excellent) outdoor LED lights became commonplace everywhere.
This only works as a result of the incredible chance chemical and physical behaviour of our atmosphere. It just happens that there is a band a few kilometers thick around 90 km above sea level where uncharged sodium atoms can be found. Above this band, sodium atoms tend to be ionised. Lower down sodium tends to be bound in chemical compounds. The sodium in the atmosphere comes from meteors burning up at around this altitude.
So we can create guide stars at 589 nm wavelength in this narrow band only. Knowing how high they are allows accurate correction to be applied. Nature conspires to make the unthinkable possible!
* Rayleigh scattering beacons, an alternative technology, operate at near UV wavelengths, and so not visible, and at lower altitudes.
There's a mission in the works to fire lasers from space down to Earth from cubesats to make guide stars. I'm trying to schedule an interview with the researcher behind it.
I hope... REALLY hope there's a mission to go under the ice of Europa before I die :(
Question:
If life actually was everywhere. Could we actually know?
And where could we find out in the near future?
OK, basic question. I understand that the laser creates a "guide star" for the adaptive optics to adapt to, but how can it do that? Where is the "dot" that the optics are trying to focus on? The laser beam is a beam, not a dot. And if it goes through clear air, you can't even see it. Is it hitting a cloud layer??.
Wouldn't that be great . Assemble a telescope in space but I'm having a hard time making ends meet . What a time to be alive
Isn’t capitalism and artificially scarce resources wonderful?
BTW, there are multiple proposed tethered structures like skyhook or orbital ring. Both are more practical on Earth than space elevator. I expect that neither of them is going to be build in the next 100 years.
Both of those you mentioned still need a significant about of thrust to get high enough to capture the hook or ring. You would already be in orbit by then.
Rather than wasting money and time on star shot, a better idea would be to work further on nano technology so that many smaller yet still fully equipped satellites could be accelerated using whatever systems to get them a good kick out there, but build a gigantic radio telescope or optical system that can pick up the very weak return data from the probes...
Great update Fraser. It would be great if you could do an interview with ESA re the ELT :-)
Yeah, let me see what I can do.
We couldn't have a Space Elevator until we clear out LEO of all the crap that would by smashing into it; because all the crap would be orbiting a 1,000 of km/h and the Space Elevator wouldn't.
Telescopes with freaking lasers attached to their head!
The US is the leading source of news catering to this interest group. I prefer European data.
I'm Canadian, so that's practically European
Crapping on sci-fi Christmas as Fraser calls it, why space elevators are a no go, why not crap on Dyson Sphere's as well ? One of the biggest problems, but by no means the only one, that makes this idea dead in the water, is the mass required to build it. The extra-solar mass of any star system is negligible, usually less than one percent, so where exactly is all this matter supposed to come from ? Take our solar system, even with the Oort cloud and all the planets you'd be lucky to build a ring let alone a sphere encompassing the sun...
We've already started building our Dyson swarm. Every spacecraft we launch that's harvesting sunlight is part of it.
Adding fertilizer and bacteria to Martian regolith is not enough. You'd also need to wash out all the perchlorates. Simple enough to do but requires a lot of water which is going to be a problem.
If Starship V3 is successful, What would we be capable to potentially build in space or send into space?
quantum nulling? What? is that like interferometer, that works now for radio astronomy and should work for infrared light in new ESO VLT? how does that actually work?
Why not build a space elevator that is not anchored to earth. Could a low earth orbiting platform to high orbit elevator help fuel cost?
In these photos and videos showing these telescopes shooting laser beams into the sky, how come these laser baems are visible?! Shouldn't the air around and above these observatories be very clear! Thus the beams should be invisible?
As I understand the beam should be invisible unless there is floating particles in the air such as dust, mist, etc, that the beam can reflect off of it, also the artificial stars projected by these lasers are aimed at virtually empty space so how can they be used for calibration? can you explain please, thanks.
They are long exposure pictures, so the beams will look brighter, but when you fire a green laser into the sky, you can definitely see the beam.
Would a space elevator experience atmospheric drag since it is geostationary?
The more pressing issue is that it would be subject to wind shear at different heights going in different directions, at different intensities & velocities.
@@grndkntrl while that's a concern, I'm actually trying to decide who's right between my wife and I. Legitimately don't know the answer. She says the middle of the elevator would experience more drag as it's going faster than the base (in order to travel in a larger circle that the height circumscribes) and I say it wouldn't because it's still stationary relative to the ground. Of course there would be wind sheer but that's not what we're discussing.
where could such robot arms possibly be made? who has that kind of know-how?
The space elevator idea is cool but so flawed. The entire weight of the elevator, right up to the geostationary bit at the top, will be pulling down. And surely, orbital dynamics will be making each 'level' want to 'orbit' and different speeds, relative to Earth. Crazy! 😅
The rope at different heights wouldn't have a tendency to orbit. It would have a tendency to fall due to gravity, which is indeed a huge problem with the idea because even exotic materials like carbon nanotubes may not withstand that much tension. I think only an "active" elevator could work, where it has a constant source of propulsion to reduce the tension, like maybe an ion thruster every mile or whatever. But that would negate at least some of the main advantage of a space elevator, which is the energy savings.
@@jamesmcmanus are you sure there'd be no orbital dynamics at play here? You could think of the rope being a string of finite units, unless it was a rigid bar.
Also, imagine if the rope went even higher than the capsule. How do you imagine that bit would behave? I would think it would trail (orbital dynamics), so would not the rope below the capsule want to lead?
It's an interesting thought experiment at least.
I've thought longer about this and agree with you on orbital dynamics not having an influence on the 'rope'. Not whilst attached, at least.
But if the rope had any mass at all, the pod would be pulled into a lower orbit. Then we can talk orbital dynamics. And crashing 🤣
My dream is Mars
OK, you can't throw out a soft ball about gravity and expect no-one to swing at it. So with 1/100 the mass of the earth, you get 1g at a distance of a/10 or about 400 miles. For a spaghetti factor of +/-40g, equivalent to a human flat spin at 190 RPM (ouch), ...that happens around 2.7 km from the mass (blackhole or not). By 1km (+/- 800g)...that's spaghetti, at 100m it's +/-800,000g.
w how do you stop a madastronomer from using the artafical starlite from hittin a satalite of spaceship . how much damage would it do if it did amy at a satalite .plane or spaceship.
None. The laser light is weak and spread out in the atmosphere.
Brilliant work and fab idea. Tysm for this scrummy Summer extra time 🤗❤️
Greenscreen fakeness is back! YES!
🟩 ftw
Why doesn't NASA just push spacestation higher to save it for options later?
Fraser, please, we're eating dinner! 8-P
As long as it's not potatoes, you should be okay.
oops swho sdpaced all the space elevators. lool
Kind of sort of kind of sort of kind of sort of
You could size down these laser telescopes considerably and put them on the moon. You have no atmosphere to contend with.
How come there seems to be so many rocket launches lately? Is the world ending and no one told me lol? Cause if so wtf.
It's mostly communications networks like Starlink.
Actually the universe is becoming more dense but the potential of the black holes are making space more diffuse. This makes them eventually collide and expand all of space slowly lol.
Universe is not only expanding but that expansion is accelerating. Yet no new mass and/or energy is being created (1st law of thermodynamics). Density is mass divided by volume. How is it you claim density is increasing?
@ReinReads I am not sure what I meant. You guys seem to think of space development weirdly. It should be easy to link the curvature of spacetime to dark matter and get rid of dark matter and simply incorporate it into dark energy as a dynamic coupling.
I never thought the Dyson sphere is a sane idea. To build that, you need so much energy and material, that you have to be so developed technologically, that at that point you will have many different and way better method to create energy than a dyson sphere. I think that is just a waste of time, material, energy. The idea comes from humans with limited imagination and technological, scientific knowledge.
But it is a hype currently, so people are crazy about it.
The same is true to SETI I am afraid. Looking for radio broadcasts?? Really? Why are we not looking for smoke signs, or flying stone plates with engravings on them?? lol...
We can not even imagine how a technologically advanced civilisation will communicate or travel or make their energy.
Even we are using fibre optics to communicate instead of those old super strong radio broadcasts...
Come on people...
Oh, so we can't imagine it, so better not try anything. Seems legit.
@@contentsdiffer5958 I am pretty sure I said something entirely different.
For the record, Fraser, you never actually answered the question in your thimbnail: i.e., "Why yellow?"
Yeah, weird. It's yellow because they also want to know the color too, so they use a sodium laser.
do the moutains of ukraine or cimea have any tellescopes on them.
Here's the Ukrainian list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_observatories_in_Ukraine
@@frasercain thanks frazier i sent it on to my ukranian friend.
real time collimation isnt it...
Congress is going to cancel a project that went over budget after they have already spent the money, instead of adding the rover which has been completed after congress actually paid the cost overrun, they have elected to spend even more money to send up a concrete block in its place. So, instead of a rover full of instruments to do things like find a good place to land and even find water so that a lunar base can be built, they are going to send up a block of concrete. I see! They must be planning to build that base one concrete block at a time. What a clever idea! Just think of all the money they can embezzle, oh, I mean save! 🤑🤑🤑
Not going to be a lot of fat people on mars...
I think for any culture developed on any extraterrestrial base would make putting on the pounds extremely taboo. It would probably be because it's hard to grow food.
@@12pentaborane exactly!! As well as less available calories as a whole, and livestock would impractical!
where are russia domestic telescopes how many do they have.
They have a few. I think their biggest is a 6-meter telescope. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Astronomical_observatories_in_Russia
do people really not know the answers to this stuff ? like REALLY ? good god....
You are completely ignoring the fact that fueled rockets are so polluting that the reason to build space elevators, sky hooks, rail guns and slingshots is to greatly reduce the environmental impact. Does your channel recognize that environmental pollution is a thing..?
If rockets use methane, then it can be pulled out of the atmosphere and they can be carbon neutral.
@@frasercain 1) That doesn't avoid ozone layer damage. 2) It won't be pulled out of the atmosphere because it is far less expensive to drill/mine it. 3) The planet is hitting serious climate crisis tipping points now and that means we need to not only cut emissions to neutral, but draw down carbon aggressively. 4) Methane is not necessarily optimal for Earth based launches and won't be use where it is not. 5) The slingshot technology is almost ready for prime time and we should be shifting to it.
Making film with a birch is a bad omen, in Poland president Kaczynski got killed in 2010 04 10 palne crash.
Those are Douglas fir trees so I should be safe
It's fake we have never been to space
"A Deepness in the Sky" Come on man. I am unsubbing... :P