A river may be a bad idea using heat differential power but those floating venusian colonies could probably hang water pipes and turbines into the hotter atmosphere to produce steam power for their colony.
On the topic of mining asteroids, How would you mine solid metal asteroids like Psyche? or would you just build a giant furnace and melt it down in one big chunk?
Physicist say that all the matter in the universe is just “leftovers” of an annihilation event between matter and antimatter near the beginning of the universe. It is also said that the universe could be infinitely big with an infinite amount of matter in it. How is it possible to have an “infinite” amount of leftovers of something?
@@RaVNeFLoK the reason theres matter at all is because there was an imbalance of matter and antimatter. If there was an infinite amount of matter and antimatter how did matter get even more infinite? I dont think that makes sense
@@keviscool why do you presume the infinity of matter is a higher level of infinite than it is of matter and anti-matter? Logically it would be very much the opposite. I don’t see a paradox as we don’t know how high the infinites of matter and anti-matter were originally. Just like x times 1000 (where is all possible numbers) is a higher infinity than x times 10. The original infinity of matter and antimatter could be a higher infinity than the infinity we currently have of the matter that’s left afterwards.
On moon. Water is in cold dark. Man and solar in sunshine. How can you build a pipeline across public humanity's vergen territory without concent on long-term contamination . And rental.
Why biuild a panama canal? We just don't need it. Actually, I agree, a little. Building space infrastructure for any single purpose is silly. But why build a transcontinental railway? Because Having the infrastructure has a value all on its own. interstate highways? We would need Millions of trucks! Can you even Imagine such a thing? There's no market! Let us not ask, "Why?' ... let us ask instead "Why Not?"
Humans have got to cheer up and focus on the future instead of being miserable and focusing on the past and present. We are on the cusp of an extreme transformation on the way we live.
There was already a demonstrated need for the Panama Canal when it was built - The problem was the technology needed to built such an ambitious project. There was a need for a transcontinental railroad that had been demonstrated by hundreds of wagon trains going to California and the West Coast, and the need for the Interstate Highway System had been demonstrated in 1917 an d the Germans had proven one could be built… We believe Starship will reduce the cost to orbit to less than $100/kg and deep space to less than $1000/kg. That would enable people to start asteroid mining and mining and manufacturing on the moon. ATP, there will be a demonstrated need for the kind of space infrastructure people have described.
Question: do we know that the Solar System formed in the Milky Way, or is it assumed that we weren't formed in a satellite galaxy that has since been consumed by the Milky Way?
"Could a Venusian balloon use temperature differentials to generate power?" "nO iTs tOo hOt oN tHe sUrFaCe." "nO wE wOuLd hAvE tO hAvE a rOvEr oN tHe sUrFacE." Or, you know, a balloon at cloudtop with a long tail of smaller balloons supporting a heat exchanger loop below cloud top. Optimal steam temperature is, on the low end, 566C, which equates to around a 12km long heatexchanger, but it certainly doesn't have to go to the surface. The bigger problem is how you maintain a heat exchanger over such a vast difference in pressures without it rupturing or collapsing. The pressure range goes from 1bar to over 9 bar.
Bespin. International law says nobody can claim international waters, but China has done so even building artificial island military bases to assert its claims. Chile & Peru made claims to Antarctica during WW-II and 1952, Eisenhower got the twelve nations active in Antarctica to sign an agreement not to make claims and only do research, and allow inspection of bases; China was not one of the twelve but claims to have ratified the agreement in 1985 when it built its first base in the Australian research area, China has subsequently built four more bases in 1989, 2009, 2014, and 2022. China has not disclosed what research is conducted at its bases and objected when Australia proposed using drones to monitor the area. During the past thirty years China has been increasing military investments including nuclear submarines and development of conventional aircraft carriers to later be supplemented by nuclear aircraft carriers (thusly reason Australia became keen to have some nuclear submarines to discourage idea that China would enjoy impunity). What does China want on the Moon, it does not share much info, therefore does not seem to be a promotional issue. Despite what Fraser has argued the Moon has incredible potential for financial, material and habitat expansion; is China aware of the potential, only Xi knows.
Alderaan! About competition on any marketing... Freaking yes! As more, the better! Anyway, thanks for the Q&A, Fraser! 😊 Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Honestly the only parts of the moon worth taking right now, is the South Pole. And the first few countries that get there (most definitely US and china) Will claim as much as they possibly can. Who knows? Maybe it will be divided up like Antarctica?
Dagobah-- I actually made a pitch on how this might be realized. But that was a few hours after I pitched the question, so you probably did not see it. however I am happy to repeat myselv ^^. basicly you use water as one of the lifting gases for the balloon. At low attitude you boil the water with the ambient heat and power a turbine with the steam. The vapour fills up the balloon, your buoyancy increases and you gain attitude. At high attitude you use the big hull of the balloon as a heat exchanger to condense the water vapour. so question: would that work and is anybody working on that?
Tatooine - Would a lunar magnetic launcher system be able to deliver resources to earth, say Tritium, Helium4, or something that takes advantage of low gravity manufacturing. Should we be concerned about the potential for something like this to be used as a weapon ala: Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" - If the people who live on the moon have this kind of tool, can they declare independence and claim ownership of the moon despite treaties?
in order to be praxtical, we would need a factory (i.e., infrastructure) to make pfotovoltaic cells, on the surface of Luna. What a preposterous idea. There's no market.
Yes to all of it, but the real reason to do it right now is to launch e.g. metals into space where their orbit can be circularized, and the materials can then be use to construct bulk components (pressure hulls, cables, struts, large antennas, massive arrays of solar cells etc.) for use in space.
Hoth, and I absolutely cannot wait for these new Telescopes to start observing the Universe!!!! The Coronagraph assisted observations look amazing, and would definitely be revolutionary if they work as well as proposed!! Thanks for the show, it's always interesting to hear all of the questions and explanations!
Tatooine In my favorite novel of all time, Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, rail guns play a prominent part. In the novel, people who remain on the moon more than a month or two can no longer handle Earth gravity. So the moon became a penal colony. But by the time the novel starts, most of the lunar population were either born free or had completed their sentences. The Moon is the bread basket for an over populated with rice and grain shipped to Earth by being launched by a rail gun. One man realizes that if they keep shipping everything to Earth, without any waste being shipped back they will eventually be unable to find water and fertilizer. Their closed cycle had a massive leak. So they launch a revolution. Their weapon against Earth is to use the rail gun to launch rocks at Earth. They construct a second hidden rail gun so that they aren't defenseless when Earth bombs the main one. But having that bombed was what they wanted to happen as it ends food shipments to Earth until it can be fixed, also allowing a rail gun to be built on Earth to have water and fertilizer shipped back to the moon. So far as who can own the Moon, just because there is a treaty that requires something does not mean that all signatories will do what is required (or forbidden). China signed a treaty with Britain promising to allow Hong Kong to keep its democracy for at least 50 years. After 20, they started removing democratic rights from Hong Kong. Russia signed an agreement promising to ensure Ukraine's borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. Almost the whole world opposes Russia, but China is on their side because they want to take Taiwan by force. If China felt like they could take ownership of the Moon, I don't doubt they would. A treaty is just a piece of paper unless it is enforceable.
I think you made a mistake on the owning the moon question. I believe the treaty forbids nations from owning celestial objects. It doesn't forbid private companies or individuals from claiming ownership of anything.
If you send a payload from the Moon to the Earth, the payload can use flypasts and air breaking to slow down, if it is launched precisely at the right time and angle, which I'm sure it would be. But people have discussed sending stuff to a Lagrange Point - how did they propose to slow it down when it got there? Would they include retro-rockets as part of the payload?
Question: related to mass drivers. How about using them for space exploration? I'm imagining a mass driver in space, killometers long that can accelerate a probe at % of light speed. You could power it with solar pannels so no cost for electricity and the probe could be nestled inside an insulating casing to protect it from the electromagnetic field. Would this method compare to laser pushed probes? Anyone researching this? Also Tatooine!
8:00 the point of asteroid mining is not to bring anything back to earth. that would be quite silly. the point is, to not have to bring the material from earth. It is not about pressures metals. It is about water.
@@absalomdraconis perhaps at a later point in time. But to make use of stuff like aluminium you need way more infrastructure than for processing water. And you dont't have as much use for it. Soi for decades to come serious asteroid mining is all about finding out which NEAs have what water contend and how can we extract it.
Saying that no one can own anything in space or Antarctica is like saying there is no such thing as a gun. People are fickle. Never trust their promises. Whether you know it or not, you are owned by someone. It may not be apparent throughout your entire life but when push comes to shove, you are the one who will suffer long before your owners. Hate to break the news but humanity has a gigantic cross section of temperaments. To be not owned is to be completely self sufficient which nearly no one is and especially not alone--those people are either invisible or dead.
Re: Degobah. : A system of hoses (massive fire hoses) lowered below a floating habitat in Venus' atmosphere should easily get a temperature difference if it were at least 500meters long. Pump in cool water, get back steam. It might need to be a bit longer, but not more than 1km, I would hope.
1 km is a bit short. here is how I propose to make use of the temperature difference: basicly you use water as one of the lifting gases for the balloon. At low attitude you boil the water with the ambient heat and power a turbine with the steam. The vapour fills up the balloon, your buoyancy increases and you gain attitude. At high attitude you use the big hull of the balloon as a heat exchanger to condense the water vapour.
30:20 competition leads to advances. It forces new thought processes, different perspectives, a willingness to spend resources and time developing new ideas and approaches. Competition creates different technologies to approach the same problems, and leads to developments in other fields as a natural bi-product. Competition good, monopolies bad
If you could park anything in the Earth Moon L4 and L5 points what would it be? I think two telescopes designed to work together. Do you think this is possible?
I think what was left out of this video is that in a polar orbit, you still would be able to target the moon, Mars and the outer planets or the inner planets for that matter. It's just that getting to orbit will cost you about 990 miles per hour more Delta V.
1)If you would use railgun on asteroid, then whole asteroid would start to spin. In this case it wouldn't be so easy to use it more than once. 2)Claiming celestial bodies (planets, moons or asteroids) by countries is just a matter of time. Nobody would spend money to share hard earned resources with anyone else. If I would meet alien, then I would ask about: science, space, technology, other aliens, other planets and many more important questions. :)
Note that a rmass driver makes a pretty good reaction drive. Just have to make sure the slugs Don't end up in the vicinity of other space artifacts. So, it makes good reaction drive to raise orbit, since the slugs are going retrograde, they will end up falling back to Earth.
Tatooine! Nominally I don't participate but this tech is hugely underrated, especially when considering sending things other than raw materials into space. A lot of advanced tech can survive the high G forces of being "driven" into orbit and so on. Hopefully one day we can make all complex items in space but in the meantime imagine being able to send 50 tons of semi conductors or other high tech items to space without needing a rocket.
Hoth! I meant to say "detect" not "see" but you covered it all, great answer! Curious if you know of any universities, organizations, or even private individuals with hopes to take advantage of Starship rideshare prices? I know it's early but I love to imagine a near future where there are hundreds of probes scattered throughout the solar system, hope people are preparing for small but cool missions.
Mustafar - Although the competition only becomes competition if their services are competitive as in the case of Vulcan Centaur v. Falcon 9. Rocket Lab is competitive because RL serves a part of the market SpaceX sort of serves (small sats who need to be put in very specific orbits). Starliner isn’t & can’t be competitive with Crew Dragon even under idea circumstances, while Dreamliner could be competitive… Blue Origin won’t be competitive until they actually get a few New Glenns into orbit. And, Starship would make them all non competitive once it starts flying.
Tatooine.. I've been meaning to ask a question along these lines for a while. I was thinking of a bigger project starting with constructing a very long accelerator on the moon, designed to launch crewed and freight missions to Mars and powered by solar energy... As you say, the economics of the whole thing would likely prevent it, unless the job could be largely delegated to automated, self sufficient swarms of robots ... Thanks for your continuing excellent work on all this!
The thing is that probably it _can_ be delegated to drone swarms, with only semiconductors needing to be launched after the initial mission or three. However, note that you probably wouldn't launch straight to Mars: if you just build some thrust capability onto your payloads, then you can circularize their orbits enough to allow in-orbit drones to drag all of the payloads to a centralized depot, where small payloads can be used to build much larger objects, allowing a smaller accelerator facility to still launch a large Mars (or other) vehicle/mission.
2 minutes at 3-G would give you 7.2 k/s (27,920 K/h) would allow you to get something to Mars in 6 months or less, especially if you used gravity assist (earth) or VASIMR or other high output / High ISP drive system… But this only works if everything related to this is built on the moon.
@@absalomdraconis - I think we would be able to built huge facilities once we start mining and processing lunar materials to build the complexes & what was being launched from them. ATP, Larger will always be better up to a certain point.
Tatooine -- I was at collage park UMCP in the seventy's where the L5 Society was giving talks About the O'Neil cylinders and rail gunning mass drivers pumping resources to the space city. So cool, sorry I am going to miss this.
Its taken Voyager 45 years to reach a "pitiful" 156 AU... Even if we could triple the speed of the spacecraft, we are looking at almost 100 years to get something out to the 1000 AU distance. What technologies do we have visibility to that could 1) power the space craft for that period of time (RTG's do not last forever), 2) communicate at that distance, and 3) get it to said distance inside say a human lifetime.
1) Huge solar reflectors focusing light onto a thermocouple system, 2) the same solar reflector used to focus radio waves once far enough for it to be worthwhile, 3) and ion engines comparable to designs that we already have (no, really, some NASA guy did some relevant studies already).
@@brien9648 It relied on the slingshot effect for almost all of its speed, once it left Earth's effective gravity range. It applied extra power only for course adjustments.
Hey Fraser, love your work. Regarding the acceleration of Oumuamua: An actual theory suggests outgassing in the broader sense, right? But why would it 'outgas' only in the direction of the propulsion? Wouldn't it outgas in all directions and thereby equal out the impulse? Thanks!
Hi Fraser. Do you own a telescope? if so, have you ever done Astrophotography? And do you have any upcoming interviews with any Astrophotographers like you had with Trevor from Astro backyard? Thanks, Jason Akers
You got my name! I have rarely seen anyone with the last name of Akers much less my full name of Jason Wayne Akers. Just curious are you in the U.S. I'm in Oklahoma city. I thought for a second I had made this comment and had just forgotten. If you watch today's live stream Frasier leads off with my question about planet size limits.
In regards to ownership of the moon, any country that wants to take ownership just needs to dissolve their participation in the Outer Space Treaty, establish a permanent colony, and prevent other nations/organizations from following in their footsteps. Then they will no longer be bound by its decree. And since the treaty has few provisions regarding the penalties for breaking the treaty and no way to enforce any penalties, it would lead to minimal consequences. This isn't a legality problem, this is a diplomacy problem. And odds are that any claims on the moon will echo the disputes between the Spanish and Portuguese colonies when the Catholic Pope tried to regulate them. Which means that the outer space treaty probably isn't worth the paper it was printed on.
And if anyone thinks that the United States would go to war against someone who claimed parts of the moon in violation of the treaty, I remind you that the US won't even go to war with Russia, even after bluffing and claiming that they would. And aside from China and the US, no other country currently has the launch capabilities to even attempt an off-planet military exercise, let alone a war. Heck, the US isn't even gutsy enough to economically sanction China, regardless of the circumstance. Also, the Moon is an extremely valuable strategic position, as you can fire artillery from the moon and hit any point on the surface of the Earth. It doesn't even need to be overly good artillery. Ownership of the moon would be an extremely valuable reusable bargaining chip that could be used back on Earth to make the enterprise well worth the investment.
I always hear that it's too hard to recreate the event horizon telescope with optical telescopes, because it gets incredible hard to make interferometers work with higher frequency light. Do you think that we can make this happen with the help of AI, or are there other problems that limit the use of interferometers beyond the data analysis?
Quxyun.....ASKING.ANSWER. NEWARS..No ELECTRICK on BATTERY MAGNET COIL TO CHARGE REQTIFY PUSH YLLUMINIUM PULL IQRN TWO FORCES TWO ELEMENT JLQY IQRN QUREINTJ VULTSTAGES
If you want to make an asteroid mining company, what you first need to do is make a spaceship company that focuses on robotic nuclear powered space craft. Mining materials in space will likely start on the moon, to feed manufacturing on the moon. However we will likely soon learn that manufacturing on the moon is inefficient if we want to build space craft or habitats or power generation etc. Then we will likely start mining asteroids to feed manufacturing plants, Once we have enough manufacturing in space, it will likely be more efficient to make stuff in space, and then send it to earth for consumption. Certainly more green.
Hi Fraser. The article in New Atlas, titled "Giant galaxy redefined after flipping jet to point straight at Earth", talks about how scientists have just discovered for the first time, a quasar's highly directed beam of light and near light speed particles, changing its direction to point directly towards us, turning it into a blazar. Can you help explain this? I don't know much about quasars or blazars, but, in a similar way to solar sails being used to propel spacecraft away from the Sun, could a sail be used to propel a spacecraft over much greater distances and speeds, riding the beam of a quasar? And with a blazer pointing toward us, could it be used by a space faring civilization specifically to get here? If somehow the direction of the quasar can be controlled by an advanced civilization, this could be very helpful for getting around the universe! Just some fun thoughts. Thank you for all your great insights and sharing! -Joe Note: I tried posting this a few times and it immediately disappeared (I'm new to this). So this time I'm trying with no link to the article, in case that helps - but you can find it.
If you have been reading my comments regularly then you have read me referring to the Railgun on the Lunar Surface to send the mined resources to the orbit of the Moon to be collected by a Space Tug, ‘a Nuclear Starship?’… Fraser Cain answers the question, “Who came up with the idea, and how we could use the Rail Gun?”, he pretty much tells us what I already commented about… Oh, I kind of knew, but he shared the history of the rail gun not being put in a 10-kilometer hole to shoot telephone poles; I did comment about telephone poles but they were not going up… Fraser did explain that we won’t be putting Rail Guns on Asteroids any time soon, we first need to get there.?? Can’t we use the Rail Gun to get there??? Yes, let’s start digging the 10-kilometer hole??? Seriously, after we have a landing pad on the Lunar Surface we should start on the Mag-Lev rail lines as a fast and inexpensive transport on the Moon. Not until the shipping container reaches the end at speeds that could send the resources or what is made from the resources to L4 or L5 would it turn into a gun… So, to get the funding we will call the Mass Driver, the Speedway used to transport goods and people on the Lunar Surface, until you reach the end at top speeds, boom to orbit you go… ‘I’m not implying that we will be shooting people off the Moon.??’ Fraser Cain talks about what dark matter is, all I have to say is if we knew what it was it wouldn’t be called dark matter… ‘“Dark” translate to unknown…’ Then he talks about Stars that should have Earth-sized Planets and how we are searching for them, and we will be able to see what is on them, to make them less dark… exoplanets.nasa.gov/eyes-on-exoplanets/#/ Space Port at Nova Scotia, Canada is on the northeast coast of North America where we can send Spaceships to a Polar Orbit. The Cape Canaveral launch sites are on the southeast coast of North America where we can send Spaceships to everywhere else, maybe not, but it’s in the United States… spaceline.org/cape-canaveral-launch-sites Maritime Launch Service is Canada’s First Commercial Spaceport! For more information about the construction of the Launch Site and first Launch; maritimelaunch. com We need more Commercial Launch Sites to reduce the prices, so it is cheaper to get resources from Asteroids than it is to dig a hole…
Alderaan. If a person claimed to be extra-terrestrial, then what questions would you ask to confirm that he's not just crazy? A pre-interview interview. Lol. ;-)
Instead of a straight line... make the 'rail gun' mass driver a circular loop with a diameter of 100km or 500km, then the payload could make multiple loops around and around until it reaches required velocity. With the large diameter, to the payload, it would be effectively a straight line due to the very shallow curvature over distance. Payloads could start with a low velocity and increase at a rate keeping the payload (humans) at 3 to 4G. The constant acceleration at say 3.5G, perhaps it might be three loops or thirty loops, but eventually the required velocity would be reached to 'fire' the human cargo capsules into orbit. Other payloads such as Water or Dirt (to grow foods) could be whipped around and around at maximum Revolutions to reach the velocity for the payload mass/weight. You mentioned the amount of Joules for a telegraph post... it is within the realms of what is (has been) humanly possible to create of source of electricity (hydro, solar, nuclear, wind, etc...) and store the power in what ever size is required Lithium Battery - same as the first urban one in Adelaide, South Australia. What ever the amount required for the launch mass, weight... can have the Lithium Battery Farm constructed to house the power. We could then totally eliminate the stage one and in many cases stage two chemical burn rocket engines. The payloads could either be larger than chemical burn rockets or there could be multiple rapid launches only minutes apart. Electric is the future of Earth to Space payloads. :)
Hoth. Hey Fraser! I have a question. Using the current (backwards) way of numbering Star generations, when will the Gen-0 stars start being born? Will they be the last generation? Thanks!
Monetarily sovereign nations that issue their own currency ( eg: China, US, Canada, Japan, etc ) can never involuntarily go "bankrupt". They ALWAYS have the ability to pay debts denominated in their currency. If China stopped exporting goods to the US it would destroy the US economy, not the Chinese. China could just redirect those goods to their domestic population or other nations. Exports are a net loss for a country. You want to import more than you export, get more than you give.
29:41 "No reason to own it." OH-CON-TRARE my good sir 😅 If Jeff Basos can setup a solar panel factory on the moon and launch those into orbit around the Earth and the Moon Jeff Basos would become the richest man in the history of mankind which then he could funnel his emense wealth into further Moon and space development. He would have all the power... no pun intended haha 😅😂😅😂
I'm starting to put a bit of a thought experiment together...about if the contents of big chunks (quantum bubbles?) of space/time can become persistently entangled. I'm led to believe that 'man-made' causes of quantum micro-effects will collapse once there's been 'too much' interference from the environment - with said manufactured micro-effects inevitably succumbing to the order imposed by a universal wave function that seems to pervade what we assume to be 'the rest of the universe.' While these manufactured quantum effects exist, they are resisting conforming to the universe itself. Puts me in mind of how a fridge magnet can overcome the gravity of the entire earth. We don't know for sure what all the _mechanics_ are behind observed quantum effects, but we're for sure getting better at altering environments and manipulating particles to make it happen, and for longer periods, and with ever-larger groupings of particles entangled. *_What if_* there are observable pockets within our universe - physically reachable pockets - that have the sufficient environment to 'exclude' the greater wave-function of the greater universe; on a temporary basis? Of course, 'temporary' could mean half-a-billion years or so....I guess it could even mean infinity/2. Perhaps the concept of time is simply irrelevant when it comes to these 'quantum bubbles' looked at from our ant-view. Puts me in mind of the point-like qualities of black holes - where the universe can be held at bay until Hawking gets his way. I guess they fit the bill for one type of localised event. Such 'quantum bubbles' would surely have a measurable mass...but even trying to see it would be impossible. After all, us humans are pretty much stuck in a persistently macro universe with invisible fields and must ourselves conform to our quantifiable macro-limitations. If such bubbles exist 'naturally' then, just as with black holes, there will be an invisible barrier of sorts where reality meets singularity - where only field-like interactions can occur between the singularity and reality. Something 'invisible' and indistinguishable from gravity. One more thing to add in...Hawking radiation. Where does it go? Aren't the escaping particles kind of trapped in an entangled state? Considering the coordinate infinity of the 'surface' of a black hole, then couldn't it not be impossible that such particles could come off a black hole in a veritable cloud? Entangled...subject to what their non-escaped partners are being exposed to within the singularity. Virtual particles made real...with no way to shrug off their entangled state due to the custodianship of the singularity. Just building up over billions of years. With mass but with no visible properties. Ring any bells? If you read this far, then thanks for humouring me 🙂
The problem with asteroid or lunar mining companies is that they all want to be Wal-Marts in space. Being the technology creator and provider, eqiupment manufacturer, mine operator, logistics hub and what have you. All at once. Everything being part of one company. is that a good aim? Yes. But that's not how this (resource extraction) industry works.
For your bit about asteroid mining having no market: ruclips.net/video/O9X7nSz4SWs/видео.html We need MILLIONS of pounds of minerals if we are to transition to green energy. And we currently don't have the infrastructure or the will to extract it from Earth. Also, love the channel and the content. Keep it up.
The reason companies have gone bankrupt trying to start an asteroid mining company is because Space is too big for a single corporation to own. Weyland-Yutani doesn't exist, which means you have to rely on governments to actually build the infrastructure so corporations can use space for their own reasons. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Hilton Hotel didn't own the space station, they were merely renting the space... (7:44)
Bespin- I think the political implications of colonizing other bodies in our solar system is an interesting discussion. I wish more serious minds would talk about this more often. The Hobbesian social contract theory all but assures these outposts will become independent from Earth once established. I can't imagine a worse example scenario than something like Uranium being discovered on the moon in an environment of political tension. We should bite the bullet and learn from the past and have these discussions ahead of time. Likely we will end up having to accept that these outposts will be politically/territorially isolated from Earth and will want to govern themselves. In my opinion, the English/US comparison should be the goal. The benefits would still be a political history, insurance policy against natural disasters and potential aid in times of danger. Including a repository of critical knowledge and agricultural heritage etc. Establishing these outpost will be hard enough without allowing any political tensions to develop... I like Alderaan also: Carl Sagan's book 'Contact' has a part involving an interview with an alien. [Spoiler Alert!] Carl, who helped create the Golden Record on the Voyager probe actually included an image of a circle as the calibration image. This is an easter egg referencing that part of the book. Comment on Dagobah: The best possible design of any machine that converts a temperature difference into work is limited by that differential. This maximum efficiency is called the Carnot efficiency and is found by (Th - Tc)/Th, Th and Tc, are hot and cold temperatures in absolute. Its interesting to me when I see acres of condensers releasing steam into the atmosphere near a nuclear plant and I know the heat came from a block a few yards on a side and with something like 40% efficiency locked in by the laws of thermodynamics. 60% of the heat is wasted to make the whole thing work as efficiently as possible...
Bespin: I disagree. There is clearly value on so many levels in the Moon... Clearly the wealthiest people in America think differently also. I imagine several hundred years ago when somebody said, "Thiers no money to be made in harvesting resources in the new world...."
Coruscant … You said scientist have know since the 1930s that galaxies must have more mass keep them together than they calculated existed. Since back then they did not know about exoplanets, could dark matter simply be the possible billions upon billions of existing exoplanets?
There has just been a breakthrough in Boron Deuterium fusion. The Stellarator fusion reactor looks like it will work and probably work more reliable than the tokamak. These reactors need fuel and the bestbfuel from a clean energy low shielding point of view would be a He3 burning Stellarator. He3 is extremely valuable because it allows direct electrical power generation from radiation rather than having to go through lossy thermal conversion. He3 is abundant in the top two inches of regolith on the moon and the asteroids as it is deposited there by the solar wind. I can see robotic combine harvester type machines harvesting the He3 from the top soil on the moon. 50 t of that stuff could power the entire planet. So, these surfaces will be very desirable. The outer Space Treaty is all well and good. However the Superpower USA has shown very little regard for treaties where the interests of its moneyed elites collide with them. Granted if little Germany or Francevwould claim a part of the moon the US would come with sanctions that may harm the country, like what we saw done in Cuba, Sudan and lately Russia. The USA will claim whatever they feel like and cancel the Outer Space treaty. The current policy of the USA is putting China increasingly into a position of economic isolation. If this policy of economic separation of China from the West continues at the current pace, China may just give the USA and Europe the middle finger and just take an area if the moon they like, if there is sufficient economic interest. Did you notice that most of the Chinese Moon activities are on the far side? So we would not even see it from terra firma amd would have to launch lunar spysats to see what is going on.
Dagobah Would it be possible to detect a planet that has its whole surface covered by mirrors? Imagine if we would sometimes observe what looks like two stars whenever the mirrors reflects the nearby star towards us. And would we possibly mistake it for a black hole?
Just because you/we can see no value in space exploration, doesn't mean it's not there. It does, however, justify procrastinating that kind of procedure.
Owning something in space: As soon as anyone start asteroid mining they will in all practical purpose "own" the asteroid, even if they call it something else. Thought experiment: If China would capture a 50meter asteroid, put a net around it, and start chopping it up. Could the US then go there and say they want to mine it? Of course not. So ownership in space will occur soon.
Why has no one thought to use Compound Coils in a rail gun?... or compound rails? If group of coils = X speed... what if you packed 2 or 3 times the number along the same area, and activated them in Sync... thus getting ever more power out of a shorter area?
how do you not brake a maSS DEIVERS PALOAD
Always excited when I see a new question show, thank you for all the work!
A river may be a bad idea using heat differential power but those floating venusian colonies could probably hang water pipes and turbines into the hotter atmosphere to produce steam power for their colony.
On the topic of mining asteroids, How would you mine solid metal asteroids like Psyche? or would you just build a giant furnace and melt it down in one big chunk?
Nova Scotia is actually closer to the equator then Baikonur.
Hoth! Great Job Again.
Great
Tatooine
Meanwhile the latest IPCC report says were not going to make past end century at latest .
Physicist say that all the matter in the universe is just “leftovers” of an annihilation event between matter and antimatter near the beginning of the universe. It is also said that the universe could be infinitely big with an infinite amount of matter in it. How is it possible to have an “infinite” amount of leftovers of something?
If it’s left overs from an infinite amount of matter and anti-matter it would make sense for matter to be infinite wouldn’t it?
They say infinite because they can establish minimums, but _can't_ establish maximums, and so the possibilities continue up to infinity.
@@RaVNeFLoK the reason theres matter at all is because there was an imbalance of matter and antimatter. If there was an infinite amount of matter and antimatter how did matter get even more infinite? I dont think that makes sense
@@keviscool why do you presume the infinity of matter is a higher level of infinite than it is of matter and anti-matter? Logically it would be very much the opposite. I don’t see a paradox as we don’t know how high the infinites of matter and anti-matter were originally.
Just like x times 1000 (where is all possible numbers) is a higher infinity than x times 10. The original infinity of matter and antimatter could be a higher infinity than the infinity we currently have of the matter that’s left afterwards.
On moon. Water is in cold dark. Man and solar in sunshine. How can you build a pipeline across public humanity's vergen territory without concent on long-term contamination . And rental.
Bespin.
Why biuild a panama canal? We just don't need it. Actually, I agree, a little. Building space infrastructure for any single purpose is silly. But why build a transcontinental railway? Because Having the infrastructure has a value all on its own. interstate highways? We would need Millions of trucks! Can you even Imagine such a thing? There's no market! Let us not ask, "Why?' ... let us ask instead "Why Not?"
If you build it...
@whatelseison8970 he's going to come? Is that it?😊
Humans have got to cheer up and focus on the future instead of being miserable and focusing on the past and present. We are on the cusp of an extreme transformation on the way we live.
There was already a demonstrated need for the Panama Canal when it was built - The problem was the technology needed to built such an ambitious project. There was a need for a transcontinental railroad that had been demonstrated by hundreds of wagon trains going to California and the West Coast, and the need for the Interstate Highway System had been demonstrated in 1917 an d the Germans had proven one could be built…
We believe Starship will reduce the cost to orbit to less than $100/kg and deep space to less than $1000/kg. That would enable people to start asteroid mining and mining and manufacturing on the moon. ATP, there will be a demonstrated need for the kind of space infrastructure people have described.
severe lack of understanding of economics from OP here lol
Question: do we know that the Solar System formed in the Milky Way, or is it assumed that we weren't formed in a satellite galaxy that has since been consumed by the Milky Way?
"Could a Venusian balloon use temperature differentials to generate power?"
"nO iTs tOo hOt oN tHe sUrFaCe."
"nO wE wOuLd hAvE tO hAvE a rOvEr oN tHe sUrFacE."
Or, you know, a balloon at cloudtop with a long tail of smaller balloons supporting a heat exchanger loop below cloud top.
Optimal steam temperature is, on the low end, 566C, which equates to around a 12km long heatexchanger, but it certainly doesn't have to go to the surface. The bigger problem is how you maintain a heat exchanger over such a vast difference in pressures without it rupturing or collapsing. The pressure range goes from 1bar to over 9 bar.
Bespin. International law says nobody can claim international waters, but China has done so even building artificial island military bases to assert its claims. Chile & Peru made claims to Antarctica during WW-II and 1952, Eisenhower got the twelve nations active in Antarctica to sign an agreement not to make claims and only do research, and allow inspection of bases; China was not one of the twelve but claims to have ratified the agreement in 1985 when it built its first base in the Australian research area, China has subsequently built four more bases in 1989, 2009, 2014, and 2022. China has not disclosed what research is conducted at its bases and objected when Australia proposed using drones to monitor the area.
During the past thirty years China has been increasing military investments including nuclear submarines and development of conventional aircraft carriers to later be supplemented by nuclear aircraft carriers (thusly reason Australia became keen to have some nuclear submarines to discourage idea that China would enjoy impunity). What does China want on the Moon, it does not share much info, therefore does not seem to be a promotional issue.
Despite what Fraser has argued the Moon has incredible potential for financial, material and habitat expansion; is China aware of the potential, only Xi knows.
Alderaan!
About competition on any marketing... Freaking yes! As more, the better!
Anyway, thanks for the Q&A, Fraser! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
"I claim this planet in the name of Mars!" 🛸
No... I do!
Honestly the only parts of the moon worth taking right now, is the South Pole.
And the first few countries that get there (most definitely US and china)
Will claim as much as they possibly can.
Who knows? Maybe it will be divided up like Antarctica?
"You want Jeff Bezos to succeed."
Pretty sure I don't. Someone else, sure, but not Bozos.
Mustafar - even Elon would vote for your answer on this one. He wants many organizations to be able to go to space.
Dagobah-- I actually made a pitch on how this might be realized. But that was a few hours after I pitched the question, so you probably did not see it. however I am happy to repeat myselv ^^.
basicly you use water as one of the lifting gases for the balloon. At low attitude you boil the water with the ambient heat and power a turbine with the steam. The vapour fills up the balloon, your buoyancy increases and you gain attitude. At high attitude you use the big hull of the balloon as a heat exchanger to condense the water vapour.
so question: would that work and is anybody working on that?
Wouldn't polar orbits be ideal for Elon's communication satellites?
I love your show!
Tatooine - Would a lunar magnetic launcher system be able to deliver resources to earth, say Tritium, Helium4, or something that takes advantage of low gravity manufacturing. Should we be concerned about the potential for something like this to be used as a weapon ala: Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" - If the people who live on the moon have this kind of tool, can they declare independence and claim ownership of the moon despite treaties?
helium 3 actually
why would you wanna throw stuf down the gravity well?
in order to be praxtical, we would need a factory (i.e., infrastructure) to make pfotovoltaic cells, on the surface of Luna. What a preposterous idea. There's no market.
@@MusikCassette same reason we flush the toilet? Nagh, how about,
Acceleration?
Yes to all of it, but the real reason to do it right now is to launch e.g. metals into space where their orbit can be circularized, and the materials can then be use to construct bulk components (pressure hulls, cables, struts, large antennas, massive arrays of solar cells etc.) for use in space.
(Bespin) That “answer” was adorable. LOL
You keep thinking that buddy. You’ll sleep better.
imaine olypus mons with a mass driver on it
One up, one down, another around the base, all forming a flexible transport system to make travel to and from simply easier.
who determines the legally alouud targets for mass drivers
Universe Today , is my go to read of the week for all things astronomy. First rate newsletter. I love it! Well done. And, thank you.
Didn't they use a mass driver to launch Fireball XL5? 🤔
OK, I just watched episode 1, and it looks like they used reaction mass, not a mass driver. 🤨
Hoth, and I absolutely cannot wait for these new Telescopes to start observing the Universe!!!! The Coronagraph assisted observations look amazing, and would definitely be revolutionary if they work as well as proposed!! Thanks for the show, it's always interesting to hear all of the questions and explanations!
Tatooine In my favorite novel of all time, Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, rail guns play a prominent part. In the novel, people who remain on the moon more than a month or two can no longer handle Earth gravity. So the moon became a penal colony. But by the time the novel starts, most of the lunar population were either born free or had completed their sentences. The Moon is the bread basket for an over populated with rice and grain shipped to Earth by being launched by a rail gun. One man realizes that if they keep shipping everything to Earth, without any waste being shipped back they will eventually be unable to find water and fertilizer. Their closed cycle had a massive leak. So they launch a revolution. Their weapon against Earth is to use the rail gun to launch rocks at Earth. They construct a second hidden rail gun so that they aren't defenseless when Earth bombs the main one. But having that bombed was what they wanted to happen as it ends food shipments to Earth until it can be fixed, also allowing a rail gun to be built on Earth to have water and fertilizer shipped back to the moon.
So far as who can own the Moon, just because there is a treaty that requires something does not mean that all signatories will do what is required (or forbidden). China signed a treaty with Britain promising to allow Hong Kong to keep its democracy for at least 50 years. After 20, they started removing democratic rights from Hong Kong. Russia signed an agreement promising to ensure Ukraine's borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. Almost the whole world opposes Russia, but China is on their side because they want to take Taiwan by force. If China felt like they could take ownership of the Moon, I don't doubt they would. A treaty is just a piece of paper unless it is enforceable.
I think you made a mistake on the owning the moon question. I believe the treaty forbids nations from owning celestial objects. It doesn't forbid private companies or individuals from claiming ownership of anything.
If you send a payload from the Moon to the Earth, the payload can use flypasts and air breaking to slow down, if it is launched precisely at the right time and angle, which I'm sure it would be.
But people have discussed sending stuff to a Lagrange Point - how did they propose to slow it down when it got there? Would they include retro-rockets as part of the payload?
Question: related to mass drivers. How about using them for space exploration? I'm imagining a mass driver in space, killometers long that can accelerate a probe at % of light speed. You could power it with solar pannels so no cost for electricity and the probe could be nestled inside an insulating casing to protect it from the electromagnetic field. Would this method compare to laser pushed probes? Anyone researching this? Also Tatooine!
8:00 the point of asteroid mining is not to bring anything back to earth. that would be quite silly. the point is, to not have to bring the material from earth. It is not about pressures metals. It is about water.
Water, and aluminum, and other bulk materials.
@@absalomdraconis perhaps at a later point in time. But to make use of stuff like aluminium you need way more infrastructure than for processing water. And you dont't have as much use for it.
Soi for decades to come serious asteroid mining is all about finding out which NEAs have what water contend and how can we extract it.
1st thing I would ask from aliens is:
"Can I join your team?"
2nd thing:
"What's for dinner?"
Great, now I'm going to have to call my bannermen and go up and defend the patch of the lunar surface that was sold to me back in 1983.
Saying that no one can own anything in space or Antarctica is like saying there is no such thing as a gun.
People are fickle. Never trust their promises. Whether you know it or not, you are owned by someone. It may not be apparent throughout your entire life but when push comes to shove, you are the one who will suffer long before your owners.
Hate to break the news but humanity has a gigantic cross section of temperaments. To be not owned is to be completely self sufficient which nearly no one is and especially not alone--those people are either invisible or dead.
Re: Degobah. :
A system of hoses (massive fire hoses) lowered below a floating habitat in Venus' atmosphere should easily get a temperature difference if it were at least 500meters long. Pump in cool water, get back steam. It might need to be a bit longer, but not more than 1km, I would hope.
1 km is a bit short.
here is how I propose to make use of the temperature difference:
basicly you use water as one of the lifting gases for the balloon. At low attitude you boil the water with the ambient heat and power a turbine with the steam. The vapour fills up the balloon, your buoyancy increases and you gain attitude. At high attitude you use the big hull of the balloon as a heat exchanger to condense the water vapour.
The Spaceport Canso got the green light last year. Very cool! In the South Bay (Redondo, Hermosa, ...) we can watch launches from Vandenberg..
30:20 competition leads to advances. It forces new thought processes, different perspectives, a willingness to spend resources and time developing new ideas and approaches. Competition creates different technologies to approach the same problems, and leads to developments in other fields as a natural bi-product. Competition good, monopolies bad
We already own the moon. There are 6 American flags planted by 12 American astronauts already there. But we are willing to share it.
If you could park anything in the Earth Moon L4 and L5 points what would it be?
I think two telescopes designed to work together. Do you think this is possible?
The dust would be a huge challenge to overcome for a telescope
asteroids waiting to be mined for water.
Build the first large hab.
Humanity is too barbaric as a whole... not as individuals but as a whole to be made first contact with... or anything public.
awesome, thanks.
I think what was left out of this video is that in a polar orbit, you still would be able to target the moon, Mars and the outer planets or the inner planets for that matter. It's just that getting to orbit will cost you about 990 miles per hour more Delta V.
On the ownership of space resources, I was wondering why you didn't mention the Artemis Accords?
1)If you would use railgun on asteroid, then whole asteroid would start to spin. In this case it wouldn't be so easy to use it more than once.
2)Claiming celestial bodies (planets, moons or asteroids) by countries is just a matter of time. Nobody would spend money to share hard earned resources with anyone else.
If I would meet alien, then I would ask about: science, space, technology, other aliens, other planets and many more important questions. :)
Note that a rmass driver makes a pretty good reaction drive. Just have to make sure the slugs Don't end up in the vicinity of other space artifacts. So, it makes good reaction drive to raise orbit, since the slugs are going retrograde, they will end up falling back to Earth.
do you mean Reactionless drive
China can't own the moon because..... I DO!!! *insert evil laughter here*
Tatooine! Nominally I don't participate but this tech is hugely underrated, especially when considering sending things other than raw materials into space. A lot of advanced tech can survive the high G forces of being "driven" into orbit and so on. Hopefully one day we can make all complex items in space but in the meantime imagine being able to send 50 tons of semi conductors or other high tech items to space without needing a rocket.
Dagobah - got to feed that obsession Fraser😊. Spot on q&a as usual. Ray R
Hoth! I meant to say "detect" not "see" but you covered it all, great answer! Curious if you know of any universities, organizations, or even private individuals with hopes to take advantage of Starship rideshare prices? I know it's early but I love to imagine a near future where there are hundreds of probes scattered throughout the solar system, hope people are preparing for small but cool missions.
Mustafar - Although the competition only becomes competition if their services are competitive as in the case of Vulcan Centaur v. Falcon 9. Rocket Lab is competitive because RL serves a part of the market SpaceX sort of serves (small sats who need to be put in very specific orbits). Starliner isn’t & can’t be competitive with Crew Dragon even under idea circumstances, while Dreamliner could be competitive… Blue Origin won’t be competitive until they actually get a few New Glenns into orbit. And, Starship would make them all non competitive once it starts flying.
Tatooine.. I've been meaning to ask a question along these lines for a while. I was thinking of a bigger project starting with constructing a very long accelerator on the moon, designed to launch crewed and freight missions to Mars and powered by solar energy... As you say, the economics of the whole thing would likely prevent it, unless the job could be largely delegated to automated, self sufficient swarms of robots ... Thanks for your continuing excellent work on all this!
The thing is that probably it _can_ be delegated to drone swarms, with only semiconductors needing to be launched after the initial mission or three.
However, note that you probably wouldn't launch straight to Mars: if you just build some thrust capability onto your payloads, then you can circularize their orbits enough to allow in-orbit drones to drag all of the payloads to a centralized depot, where small payloads can be used to build much larger objects, allowing a smaller accelerator facility to still launch a large Mars (or other) vehicle/mission.
2 minutes at 3-G would give you 7.2 k/s (27,920 K/h) would allow you to get something to Mars in 6 months or less, especially if you used gravity assist (earth) or VASIMR or other high output / High ISP drive system… But this only works if everything related to this is built on the moon.
@@absalomdraconis - I think we would be able to built huge facilities once we start mining and processing lunar materials to build the complexes & what was being launched from them. ATP, Larger will always be better up to a certain point.
Tatooine -- I was at collage park UMCP in the seventy's where the L5 Society was giving talks About the O'Neil cylinders and rail gunning mass drivers pumping resources to the space city. So cool, sorry I am going to miss this.
Its taken Voyager 45 years to reach a "pitiful" 156 AU... Even if we could triple the speed of the spacecraft, we are looking at almost 100 years to get something out to the 1000 AU distance. What technologies do we have visibility to that could 1) power the space craft for that period of time (RTG's do not last forever), 2) communicate at that distance, and 3) get it to said distance inside say a human lifetime.
1) Huge solar reflectors focusing light onto a thermocouple system,
2) the same solar reflector used to focus radio waves once far enough for it to be worthwhile,
3) and ion engines comparable to designs that we already have (no, really, some NASA guy did some relevant studies already).
@@absalomdraconis how big would the reflectors needs to be? Huge seems to be selling it short.
Voyager wasn't built for speed; it was built to observe.
@@friendlyone2706 but it's one of the fastest spacecrafts we have built...
@@brien9648 It relied on the slingshot effect for almost all of its speed, once it left Earth's effective gravity range. It applied extra power only for course adjustments.
Hey Fraser, love your work. Regarding the acceleration of Oumuamua: An actual theory suggests outgassing in the broader sense, right? But why would it 'outgas' only in the direction of the propulsion? Wouldn't it outgas in all directions and thereby equal out the impulse? Thanks!
Can we not have background music? Thanks!
You could switch the narrative and say that everyone owns the moon
Disney should own the moon and put 2 big as mouse ears on it. 😂😅
Last I checked, the Moon has our flag on it, so it's ours.
Luvex… that reminds me of Tuvix… rip.
Hi Fraser. Do you own a telescope? if so, have you ever done Astrophotography? And do you have any upcoming interviews with any Astrophotographers like you had with Trevor from Astro backyard? Thanks, Jason Akers
I've done my share of astrophotography, but I've never been that good at it. Yeah, I'll get some more interviews going with some pros.
You got my name! I have rarely seen anyone with the last name of Akers much less my full name of Jason Wayne Akers. Just curious are you in the U.S. I'm in Oklahoma city. I thought for a second I had made this comment and had just forgotten. If you watch today's live stream Frasier leads off with my question about planet size limits.
@@Jason-io2vy Hello. I am from St. Louis, MO
Dagobah. I love the idea of pumping cooling fluid down from a big balloon to a rover. It's crazy, so it will probably work
or your vehicle could just be the balloon and fly into higher regions to condensate the cooling fluid. So you can evaporate it again in the next dive.
In regards to ownership of the moon, any country that wants to take ownership just needs to dissolve their participation in the Outer Space Treaty, establish a permanent colony, and prevent other nations/organizations from following in their footsteps. Then they will no longer be bound by its decree. And since the treaty has few provisions regarding the penalties for breaking the treaty and no way to enforce any penalties, it would lead to minimal consequences. This isn't a legality problem, this is a diplomacy problem. And odds are that any claims on the moon will echo the disputes between the Spanish and Portuguese colonies when the Catholic Pope tried to regulate them. Which means that the outer space treaty probably isn't worth the paper it was printed on.
And if anyone thinks that the United States would go to war against someone who claimed parts of the moon in violation of the treaty, I remind you that the US won't even go to war with Russia, even after bluffing and claiming that they would. And aside from China and the US, no other country currently has the launch capabilities to even attempt an off-planet military exercise, let alone a war. Heck, the US isn't even gutsy enough to economically sanction China, regardless of the circumstance. Also, the Moon is an extremely valuable strategic position, as you can fire artillery from the moon and hit any point on the surface of the Earth. It doesn't even need to be overly good artillery. Ownership of the moon would be an extremely valuable reusable bargaining chip that could be used back on Earth to make the enterprise well worth the investment.
Hoth was my favorite this week. Love these episodes
Finally an image from JWST of the Crab Nebula!!! Thanks for the tip Fraser!
I thought The Clangers owned the moon?
Dagobah. I think the atmosphere of Venus gets overlooked as a potential exploration destination.
agreed. when we thought we discovered phosphene I realised how superficial our understanding of the chemestry in its atmosphere is.
I vote for Dagobah.
Thanks
I would love to see a mock alien interview. Please make that happen.
MUSTAFAR!! By FAR, in fact! I just LOVE that you are dead-set against monopolies! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
❤️❤️
Mustafar This is a really exciting time in space exploration.
I always hear that it's too hard to recreate the event horizon telescope with optical telescopes, because it gets incredible hard to make interferometers work with higher frequency light. Do you think that we can make this happen with the help of AI, or are there other problems that limit the use of interferometers beyond the data analysis?
Quxyun.....ASKING.ANSWER. NEWARS..No ELECTRICK on BATTERY MAGNET COIL TO CHARGE REQTIFY PUSH YLLUMINIUM PULL IQRN TWO FORCES TWO ELEMENT JLQY IQRN QUREINTJ VULTSTAGES
Coruscant! I loved learning about the methodology of arriving at the idea of dark matter.
If you want to make an asteroid mining company, what you first need to do is make a spaceship company that focuses on robotic nuclear powered space craft. Mining materials in space will likely start on the moon, to feed manufacturing on the moon. However we will likely soon learn that manufacturing on the moon is inefficient if we want to build space craft or habitats or power generation etc. Then we will likely start mining asteroids to feed manufacturing plants,
Once we have enough manufacturing in space, it will likely be more efficient to make stuff in space, and then send it to earth for consumption. Certainly more green.
thanks so much for taking the time to answer all of these questions. I eagerly await your responses because I always learn something new
Hi Fraser.
The article in New Atlas, titled "Giant galaxy redefined after flipping jet to point straight at Earth", talks about how scientists have just discovered for the first time, a quasar's highly directed beam of light and near light speed particles, changing its direction to point directly towards us, turning it into a blazar. Can you help explain this?
I don't know much about quasars or blazars, but, in a similar way to solar sails being used to propel spacecraft away from the Sun, could a sail be used to propel a spacecraft over much greater distances and speeds, riding the beam of a quasar? And with a blazer pointing toward us, could it be used by a space faring civilization specifically to get here?
If somehow the direction of the quasar can be controlled by an advanced civilization, this could be very helpful for getting around the universe!
Just some fun thoughts.
Thank you for all your great insights and sharing!
-Joe
Note: I tried posting this a few times and it immediately disappeared (I'm new to this). So this time I'm trying with no link to the article, in case that helps - but you can find it.
If you have been reading my comments regularly then you have read me referring to the Railgun on the Lunar Surface to send the mined resources to the orbit of the Moon to be collected by a Space Tug, ‘a Nuclear Starship?’… Fraser Cain answers the question, “Who came up with the idea, and how we could use the Rail Gun?”, he pretty much tells us what I already commented about… Oh, I kind of knew, but he shared the history of the rail gun not being put in a 10-kilometer hole to shoot telephone poles; I did comment about telephone poles but they were not going up…
Fraser did explain that we won’t be putting Rail Guns on Asteroids any time soon, we first need to get there.?? Can’t we use the Rail Gun to get there??? Yes, let’s start digging the 10-kilometer hole???
Seriously, after we have a landing pad on the Lunar Surface we should start on the Mag-Lev rail lines as a fast and inexpensive transport on the Moon. Not until the shipping container reaches the end at speeds that could send the resources or what is made from the resources to L4 or L5 would it turn into a gun… So, to get the funding we will call the Mass Driver, the Speedway used to transport goods and people on the Lunar Surface, until you reach the end at top speeds, boom to orbit you go… ‘I’m not implying that we will be shooting people off the Moon.??’
Fraser Cain talks about what dark matter is, all I have to say is if we knew what it was it wouldn’t be called dark matter… ‘“Dark” translate to unknown…’ Then he talks about Stars that should have Earth-sized Planets and how we are searching for them, and we will be able to see what is on them, to make them less dark…
exoplanets.nasa.gov/eyes-on-exoplanets/#/
Space Port at Nova Scotia, Canada is on the northeast coast of North America where we can send Spaceships to a Polar Orbit. The Cape Canaveral launch sites are on the southeast coast of North America where we can send Spaceships to everywhere else, maybe not, but it’s in the United States…
spaceline.org/cape-canaveral-launch-sites
Maritime Launch Service is Canada’s First Commercial Spaceport! For more information about the construction of the Launch Site and first Launch;
maritimelaunch. com
We need more Commercial Launch Sites to reduce the prices, so it is cheaper to get resources from Asteroids than it is to dig a hole…
Alderaan. If a person claimed to be extra-terrestrial, then what questions would you ask to confirm that he's not just crazy? A pre-interview interview. Lol. ;-)
Instead of a straight line... make the 'rail gun' mass driver a circular loop with a diameter of 100km or 500km, then the payload could make multiple loops around and around until it reaches required velocity. With the large diameter, to the payload, it would be effectively a straight line due to the very shallow curvature over distance. Payloads could start with a low velocity and increase at a rate keeping the payload (humans) at 3 to 4G. The constant acceleration at say 3.5G, perhaps it might be three loops or thirty loops, but eventually the required velocity would be reached to 'fire' the human cargo capsules into orbit.
Other payloads such as Water or Dirt (to grow foods) could be whipped around and around at maximum Revolutions to reach the velocity for the payload mass/weight.
You mentioned the amount of Joules for a telegraph post... it is within the realms of what is (has been) humanly possible to create of source of electricity (hydro, solar, nuclear, wind, etc...) and store the power in what ever size is required Lithium Battery - same as the first urban one in Adelaide, South Australia. What ever the amount required for the launch mass, weight... can have the Lithium Battery Farm constructed to house the power.
We could then totally eliminate the stage one and in many cases stage two chemical burn rocket engines.
The payloads could either be larger than chemical burn rockets or there could be multiple rapid launches only minutes apart.
Electric is the future of Earth to Space payloads. :)
Hoth.
Hey Fraser! I have a question. Using the current (backwards) way of numbering Star generations, when will the Gen-0 stars start being born? Will they be the last generation?
Thanks!
Monetarily sovereign nations that issue their own currency ( eg: China, US, Canada, Japan, etc ) can never involuntarily go "bankrupt". They ALWAYS have the ability to pay debts denominated in their currency.
If China stopped exporting goods to the US it would destroy the US economy, not the Chinese. China could just redirect those goods to their domestic population or other nations.
Exports are a net loss for a country. You want to import more than you export, get more than you give.
29:41 "No reason to own it." OH-CON-TRARE my good sir 😅
If Jeff Basos can setup a solar panel factory on the moon and launch those into orbit around the Earth and the Moon Jeff Basos would become the richest man in the history of mankind which then he could funnel his emense wealth into further Moon and space development. He would have all the power... no pun intended haha 😅😂😅😂
I'm starting to put a bit of a thought experiment together...about if the contents of big chunks (quantum bubbles?) of space/time can become persistently entangled.
I'm led to believe that 'man-made' causes of quantum micro-effects will collapse once there's been 'too much' interference from the environment - with said manufactured micro-effects inevitably succumbing to the order imposed by a universal wave function that seems to pervade what we assume to be 'the rest of the universe.'
While these manufactured quantum effects exist, they are resisting conforming to the universe itself. Puts me in mind of how a fridge magnet can overcome the gravity of the entire earth.
We don't know for sure what all the _mechanics_ are behind observed quantum effects, but we're for sure getting better at altering environments and manipulating particles to make it happen, and for longer periods, and with ever-larger groupings of particles entangled.
*_What if_* there are observable pockets within our universe - physically reachable pockets - that have the sufficient environment to 'exclude' the greater wave-function of the greater universe; on a temporary basis?
Of course, 'temporary' could mean half-a-billion years or so....I guess it could even mean infinity/2. Perhaps the concept of time is simply irrelevant when it comes to these 'quantum bubbles' looked at from our ant-view.
Puts me in mind of the point-like qualities of black holes - where the universe can be held at bay until Hawking gets his way. I guess they fit the bill for one type of localised event.
Such 'quantum bubbles' would surely have a measurable mass...but even trying to see it would be impossible. After all, us humans are pretty much stuck in a persistently macro universe with invisible fields and must ourselves conform to our quantifiable macro-limitations.
If such bubbles exist 'naturally' then, just as with black holes, there will be an invisible barrier of sorts where reality meets singularity - where only field-like interactions can occur between the singularity and reality. Something 'invisible' and indistinguishable from gravity.
One more thing to add in...Hawking radiation. Where does it go? Aren't the escaping particles kind of trapped in an entangled state? Considering the coordinate infinity of the 'surface' of a black hole, then couldn't it not be impossible that such particles could come off a black hole in a veritable cloud?
Entangled...subject to what their non-escaped partners are being exposed to within the singularity. Virtual particles made real...with no way to shrug off their entangled state due to the custodianship of the singularity. Just building up over billions of years. With mass but with no visible properties.
Ring any bells?
If you read this far, then thanks for humouring me 🙂
The problem with asteroid or lunar mining companies is that they all want to be Wal-Marts in space. Being the technology creator and provider, eqiupment manufacturer, mine operator, logistics hub and what have you. All at once. Everything being part of one company. is that a good aim? Yes.
But that's not how this (resource extraction) industry works.
For your bit about asteroid mining having no market: ruclips.net/video/O9X7nSz4SWs/видео.html We need MILLIONS of pounds of minerals if we are to transition to green energy. And we currently don't have the infrastructure or the will to extract it from Earth. Also, love the channel and the content. Keep it up.
The reason companies have gone bankrupt trying to start an asteroid mining company is because Space is too big for a single corporation to own. Weyland-Yutani doesn't exist, which means you have to rely on governments to actually build the infrastructure so corporations can use space for their own reasons. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Hilton Hotel didn't own the space station, they were merely renting the space... (7:44)
Bespin- I think the political implications of colonizing other bodies in our solar system is an interesting discussion. I wish more serious minds would talk about this more often. The Hobbesian social contract theory all but assures these outposts will become independent from Earth once established.
I can't imagine a worse example scenario than something like Uranium being discovered on the moon in an environment of political tension. We should bite the bullet and learn from the past and have these discussions ahead of time. Likely we will end up having to accept that these outposts will be politically/territorially isolated from Earth and will want to govern themselves. In my opinion, the English/US comparison should be the goal.
The benefits would still be a political history, insurance policy against natural disasters and potential aid in times of danger. Including a repository of critical knowledge and agricultural heritage etc. Establishing these outpost will be hard enough without allowing any political tensions to develop...
I like Alderaan also: Carl Sagan's book 'Contact' has a part involving an interview with an alien. [Spoiler Alert!] Carl, who helped create the Golden Record on the Voyager probe actually included an image of a circle as the calibration image. This is an easter egg referencing that part of the book.
Comment on Dagobah: The best possible design of any machine that converts a temperature difference into work is limited by that differential. This maximum efficiency is called the Carnot efficiency and is found by (Th - Tc)/Th, Th and Tc, are hot and cold temperatures in absolute.
Its interesting to me when I see acres of condensers releasing steam into the atmosphere near a nuclear plant and I know the heat came from a block a few yards on a side and with something like 40% efficiency locked in by the laws of thermodynamics. 60% of the heat is wasted to make the whole thing work as efficiently as possible...
Bespin: I disagree. There is clearly value on so many levels in the Moon...
Clearly the wealthiest people in America think differently also. I imagine several hundred years ago when somebody said, "Thiers no money to be made in harvesting resources in the new world...."
Coruscant … You said scientist have know since the 1930s that galaxies must have more mass keep them together than they calculated existed. Since back then they did not know about exoplanets, could dark matter simply be the possible billions upon billions of existing exoplanets?
There has just been a breakthrough in Boron Deuterium fusion.
The Stellarator fusion reactor looks like it will work and probably work more reliable than the tokamak. These reactors need fuel and the bestbfuel from a clean energy low shielding point of view would be a He3 burning Stellarator. He3 is extremely valuable because it allows direct electrical power generation from radiation rather than having to go through lossy thermal conversion.
He3 is abundant in the top two inches of regolith on the moon and the asteroids as it is deposited there by the solar wind.
I can see robotic combine harvester type machines harvesting the He3 from the top soil on the moon.
50 t of that stuff could power the entire planet.
So, these surfaces will be very desirable.
The outer Space Treaty is all well and good. However the Superpower USA has shown very little regard for treaties where the interests of its moneyed elites collide with them. Granted if little Germany or Francevwould claim a part of the moon the US would come with sanctions that may harm the country, like what we saw done in Cuba, Sudan and lately Russia. The USA will claim whatever they feel like and cancel the Outer Space treaty.
The current policy of the USA is putting China increasingly into a position of economic isolation. If this policy of economic separation of China from the West continues at the current pace, China may just give the USA and Europe the middle finger and just take an area if the moon they like, if there is sufficient economic interest. Did you notice that most of the Chinese Moon activities are on the far side? So we would not even see it from terra firma amd would have to launch lunar spysats to see what is going on.
Dagobah
Would it be possible to detect a planet that has its whole surface covered by mirrors?
Imagine if we would sometimes observe what looks like two stars whenever the mirrors reflects the nearby star towards us. And would we possibly mistake it for a black hole?
Wow, That's a wild thought!
Just because you/we can see no value in space exploration, doesn't mean it's not there.
It does, however, justify procrastinating that kind of procedure.
Sorry buddy, U.S.A. owns the moon unless somebody buys it or takes it away. We stuck our flag on it. Treaty? Haaaaahahahaa!
Owning something in space:
As soon as anyone start asteroid mining they will in all practical purpose "own" the asteroid, even if they call it something else.
Thought experiment: If China would capture a 50meter asteroid, put a net around it, and start chopping it up. Could the US then go there and say they want to mine it? Of course not. So ownership in space will occur soon.
Why has no one thought to use Compound Coils in a rail gun?... or compound rails?
If group of coils = X speed... what if you packed 2 or 3 times the number along the same area, and activated them in Sync... thus getting ever more power out of a shorter area?
Could the magnetic bubbles found by Voyager spacecraft, be what is holding galaxies together?