Refuelling the Sun, Rogue Planets Auroras, Space Nukes | Q&A 249

how can rogue planets have auroras how can we extract water from lunar regali and are there really going to be nuclear weapons in space all this and more in this week's question show it's time for the question show your questions my answers as always wherever you are across my channel if a question Pops in your brain just write it down I will gather them up and I will answer them here all right let's get into this week's questions spr 83640 apparently have a misunderstanding about auroras I thought they came from the Sun how does a rogue planet have auroras so this question is about the recently discovered jumbos the Jupiter Mass binary objects and these are rogue planets roughly the mass of Jupiter sometimes down to the mass of Saturn that are in the Orion Nebula and astronomers using James web found like well over 500 of them but a large percentage of those were in binary pairs since that was sort of an amazing Discovery and side note I'm going to be interviewing one of the people who discovered that shortly so stay tuned for that but recently a team of radio astronomers confirmed the discovery of one of these objects so they looked at a bunch of them and they were looking for a radio signal coming from these binary objects and they were able to find a radio signal coming from one pair of them jumbo 24 and so the question that you're asking is how could they see a radio signal coming from Jupiter Mass planets orbiting around each other and yeah so here in the solar system we see radio signals coming from Jupiter and lesser we see them from Saturn and other places in the solar system and that is caused by the auroras on the planet and the auroras are caused by the trapped radiation that is captured by the magnetic field around the planet that is pulled from the Sun so the sun is blasting out uh the solar wind the solar wind part particles are getting captured by Jupiter's magnetosphere they're whirling around they're getting directed by the magnetosphere towards the poles and that gives you the auroras the northern lights and the Southern Lights like we have here on Earth and those interactions release radio waves out into space and so you can look at Jupiter in the radio spectrum and what you're seeing is the auroras and so the question this question I got I got a whole bunch of these so I'm sort of tackling one and this is the like this is to answer everybody's questions and so you're asking like if you've got a like a Jupiter Mass planet or even a pair of Jupiter Mass planets how could they be generating auroras without a star and so there is a recent discovery that is sort of related and that was back in January astronomers announced the discovery of an Ultra Cool brown dwarf a solitary brown dwarf that seemed to be giving off radio missions as well it had some kind of Aurora an alra iCal brown dwarf is like a really big Jupiter you know maybe it's 20 times the mass of Jupiter and so it's the same process without a star how is this thing emitting radio waves and so there's like like we don't know right the the right now people aren't entirely sure but there are a couple of theories so one theory is that we see in Jupiter and Saturn most of the radio waves that are coming from those planets are coming from this trap radiation from the auroras but there is also a signal that's coming from the process atmospheric processes happening at the surface of the planet that we know that there is storms going around on the surface of the planet various gases are mixing together we see methane production in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter and that this methane can be sort of getting out of the planet interacting with the magnetosphere around Jupiter and generating radio emissions so that's one possibility another possibility is you can have a moon so say you've got a moon that is orbiting around the planet it's interacting with the with the planet it is sort of releasing material into the environment around it that's getting caught up in the magnetosphere and that's causing a potential Aurora maybe the clue is that you've got these two objects in orbit around one another and so one of them you don't necessarily get um the radio emissions coming from but maybe you get it from a binary pair so like this is brand new um you know the the discovery of an cool Brown DF that's giving off radio emissions this is just like two months ago uh and then the jumbos about the same amount of time so we are just months into the discovery and I think like if it turns out that astronomers find more examples of these small round dwarves that are giving off radio emissions if they find other examples of even smaller rogue planets single rogue planets that are giving off radio emissions then this could change our understanding of sort of how how these smaller planets work and how they can interact with their environment maybe they're capturing particles just from the interstellar wins so it's it's a brand new field and it's pretty exciting at this point you probably noticed the Star Trek planet name that has appeared above my shoulder and that's a way for you to vote for you to tell us what you thought was the coolest question the best answer the best combo whatever um go ahead watch all of the episode and then when you've decided go ahead put the planet name into the comments down below you could like put the name and then ask your question or just put the word and we will count up all those votes and we will celebrate them here the winner from last week was for rev msj what would be considered an unequivocal bio signature so thank you everybody who voted and uh congrats to revm and congrats to rev msj music cassette how exactly would we extract water from regali my idea is that we grind it down expose the fine powder to the sunlight so the sun can drive the water out of it and then we provide a shadowed area where the water vapor can freeze it out would that work probably I mean that's sort of a traditional way that you get water out of stuff is you heat it up the water evaporates and then you condense it and you've got your water we know that there are these large regions of permanently shadowed craters at the South Pole of the Moon and in those craters there is large amounts of water ice it's just the sunlight has never hit it it's never sublimated off into space And so there's a higher concentration of water not to mention that but there's also appears to be just water mixed in with the regali across the surface of the Moon even at the equator there's some amount of water and we talked about this in space bites that the solar wind is interacting with oxygen molecules on the surface of the Moon and they are creating water kind of in place and then the constant stream of microm meteorites are churning up the regul and mixing those particles down into the regul and there's like about a water bottle's worth in every cubic meter of lunar regolith so that water is there so the question is how do you get it to go after the stuff that's at the South Pole of the moon is going to be higher concentration and so it's going to be easier to get but it's still an incredibly energy intensive process and there's been like a lot of proposals suggested on how you might do this but the gist is is that you have to have some kind of heavy Earth moving equipment that you dig up this regolith you take it back to some kind of extraction facility where you put this stuff into like an oven and then you heat it up and then that causes the water vapor to boil off you condense it separately and then you've got the fresh water and then you dump out the the baked dry regolith and then you put in another batch and you do it some more but it is very energy intensive and so there's been some really interesting ideas that have been proposed so one that I really like is called aqua factorum and this is a niyak proposal from Phil Meer who is sort of one of my favorite lunar regali thinkers out there I've interviewed him in the past couple of times I think and so he got a niak grant to study this idea and so his proposal is that because it's so cold on the moon and you've got these microm meteorites that are smashing to the moon and they are just like mixing up the regali that you don't want to heat up the legth with the water in it until you've separated and then in fact when it's dry and cold you can actually sort it and then and then once you've sorted it you're going to get the ice crystals separate from the rock shards and then that part you just want to then heat up and condense out any remaining contaminants and that will get you the water so his proposal probably Knocks The amount of energy that you would be required down by a factor of about eight so so maybe from an 800 watt oven down to a 100 watt oven that would get you that water so I mean we are still in the early stages of this there are going to be a whole bunch of experiments going to the moon the um the Chinese for their chonga 8 probe is going to be a Lander designed to test out different ideas of extracting resources from the lunar reg they're going to try to extract water they're going to try to build bricks out of lunar Reg and just find out which of these techniques is going to work for a future where people want to actually build some sort of long-term habitation on the moon Olin 4317 curious about the space nuke news it sounds likely that it could be an EMP or laser device using an actual nuke on a satellite seems like Overkill but could that potentially reduce the debris risk so I had a bunch of people ask some flavor of this question this week so I thought I would tackle this as well so this is the news that the US us intelligence Committee in Congress are have learned that the Russians are threatening to put some kind of nuclear weapon into space this idea is very old it's been tested out a few times so back in the 1960s the Americans learned that if you detonate a nuclear weapon at high altitude then it will cause Electronics to fry what's happening is you got all these particles that are blasting out of the nuclear explosion and they are inducing a charge in electronics and they're essentially overloading them and if you're within say let's not about 100 kilometers of the explosion then any equipment is completely fried and then the farther you away you are then the sort of the lower and lower chance you're going to have damage and so in the 1960s the Americans tested out an explosion about 500 km in space you know way above um like where the atmosphere ends and the explosion was visible from Hawaii like almost 1500 kilometers away uh electronics were destroyed on Hawaii so again 1500 kilometers away uh lights went out you know all kinds of Power Systems went down so it was a big problem um and so this idea this is an electromagnet pulse and so people always have this idea like oh could you make an EMP bomb well EMP bomb is a nuclear weapon like the way you send out an EMP pulse is you detonate a nuclear weapon and so in theory any nation that wanted to could put a nuclear weapon into a satellite launch into space have it sit around in space just going in orbit and then whenever they need they just press a button and the thing explodes and any satellites that are nearby get overloaded satellites that that are not so nearby have a chance to get overloaded and deactivated and taken offline and you could imagine I mean if you time it right you could take out every single satellite in orbit uh that would be a problem so um so needless to say this is uh of concern to the International Community and there is a treaty the outer space treaty that was signed by pretty much every nation on Earth including the Soviets now the Russians that says you just you don't put nuclear weapons in space it's just it's a thing you don't do it's it is not it is forbidden and so if they actually do this they will be in a violation of the treaty and you know who knows what happens to Nations who violate treaties so um would it reduce debris dis no I mean firing off an EMP firing off a nuclear weapon in space would be devastating to increasing debris risk because you've got all of these satellites that are capable of firing their thrusters and avoiding each other and changing their orientation and now they're all offline and so now they're just dumb metal that is orbiting around the earth they can't stop themselves they can't change their Direction and so you increase the chances that these things are going to collide because satellites have to change their orbits all the time to sort of Dodge potential impacts with other satellites so this would be a terrible idea it would be a violation of many treaties and I really sincerely hope that nobody ever considers it Jason pocklington what's happening with laser communication and could we broadcast a message out into deep space so one of the big kind of revolutionary new technologies being tested by NASA and other people is laser Communication in space so the psyche mission is equipped with a laser that can communicate at a very high bandwidth back to Earth and a couple of months ago they tested it and they were able to receive like a really high bandwidth cat video um and we talked about this on Space byes last week um that NASA has adapted one of the deep space Network radio telescopes to be a hybrid so it both can receive radio transmission and it can also has a tiny optical receiver as well where it can receive uh laser transmissions and they found that when they use this hybrid approach from psyche they were able to get 40 times more Communications bandwidth coming from the spacecraft than was done with just purely radio transmission so clearly lasers of the future it's not like it's really close it's really far away we know that the starlinks are communicating with one another with lasers so this idea is is really good and you're going to see this get adopted by many missions you're you know their their main method of communication is going to be a laser and then they're going to have a backup communication that's going to be some sort of radio antenna so they can send commands to get the laser operational again so could you broadcast a message out into deep space you could absolutely in fact you know SEI always thinks about what are the things that we could do let's look for examples of other civilizations doing those things and so one of these things is it's called Optical C and so in this case it is like seti where you're trying to receive messages radio messages from other civilizations but in this case you're trying to receive laser messages and what's great about Optical seti is all you need is a telescope you just stare into the sky watching various stars and you're looking for any Star to change in its brightness because that means that a very powerful laser is being pointed at the Earth and someone is sending signals and they're changing the you know the brightness and the frequency of the laser and hopefully we can detect it and so if you you know you're watching this guy for long periods of time and you notice that uh you know you know you you know where all all of the variable stars are you know all the seph variables and all the various stars that are that are happening and you realize that some of them are going to be from transiting exoplanets that dims the star but you get really interesting stars that are changing in brightness over time uh that could very well be a message from another civilization and so could we do that we could theoretically sure but the kind of power of a laser that you would be required is enormous so right now there have been messages sent into space people have used radio transmitters to send a targeted transmission to like a globular cluster many light years away um so no nobody has seriously tried to communicate to space but we do not have the technology to create a bright signal that another civilization would see so for the time being we're going to have to watch other people send us signals but maybe in the future when we have powerful enough lasers to be able to say send breakthrough star shot to other star systems maybe we can also communicate with the same laser and tell them that we're coming so uh you know stay tuned for that Potter Productions I have the best question of all time are we alone in the universe we have no idea Rusty Gwyn why is it so difficult to get a spacecraft to the sun yeah people don't realize that but the sun is the most difficult place to reach in the solar system like people would say oh you know what we should do to get rid of nuclear waste let's just throw it into the Sun but one does not simply throw things into the Sun the problem is is that here on Earth we are orbiting around the Sun at 30 km/ second and that is our orbital velocity and so if you wanted to reach the sun you would have to cancel that 30 kilometers per second of orbital velocity and that's a lot like to go from 30 kilometers per second to zero a Delta V of 30 kilom per second that's a tremendous amount of speed just to go from the surface of the Earth to lowth orbit is like just shy of 9 kilometers per second and like you think getting off Earth Earth is the the hard part but it's you know that's a fraction of what you need to go to the sun and the problem is that if you don't cancel out that orbital velocity then you won't get close to the Sun you will just be in a different kind of orbit and so the fastest spacecraft that was ever sent from Earth is the Parker solar probe which was you know sent to the Sun and Not only was it sent at sort of one of the fastest velocities ever launched from Earth but it then has been having to make a series of gravitational slingshots around the inner planets to get to change its orbit to get closer and also to sort of get it into a position where it can actually get close to the Sun so um it's actually easier to go away from the Sun go all the way out to the ort cloud and then fall back into to the solar system so you know right now say we're going 30 km/ second around the Sun the farther you go away from the Sun then your orbital velocity slows down and so it's about it's about 12 kilometers per second of Delta V to get all the way out to the point where you'd be having zero kilometers per second in or in orbital velocity and then you can just fall back down and so weirdly the less energy intensive plan is to fly out of the solar system and then fall back into the sun then to actually try to burn down towards be able to get to the sun if you want to support the work we do at Universe today consider joining our patreon club your support Let's us have a minimum of ads and no sponsorship messages patrons get no ads on university.com for Life want the extra parts of the live stream that aren't in this edited version you can sign up for a special Patron only podcast feed and get the overtime segments as well as other special behind the-scenes episodes including our monthly Patron only question show thanks to everyone who's already subscribed and welcome to the recent newcomers Leah and Ryan silid Phoenix Jake Howen Tom michelene Zack hoit D Harrison Mir Killian Joseph Spiegel Scott Maxwell Chris X and Laura sandburn join the club at patreon.com Universe today Kyle Perry how will Starship change space probes more capability commercial science so let's imagine the best possible version of Starship and that is a fully reusable two-stage rocket that can be refueled on the ground launched into space the first stage booster rocket lands is reused the upper stage goes to orbit delivers its payload or refuels an orbit or flies off to some other place in the solar system system so what does that get you so in theory and again we're sort of you know I'm like I'm imagining the best possible version of this not the realistic version that I'm anticipating maybe we'll get to that later um but but you aren't throwing away your rocket and so like that is the biggest cost of launching a rocket is that you have to destroy your rocket after you've launched it and so we've already seen that SpaceX has been able to bring down the costs of launches because they're able to reuse the first stage it's not as fast as they were hoping like they still take a while to refurbish but you know many Falcon 9 Rockets have launched more than 10 times at this point and the launch costs are the lowest in the industry but in theory launching on Starship fully reusable where you're really just refilling the fuel that is orders of magnitude cheaper and so you know like won't be orders and B to cheaper on the first few launches like maybe it'll be half price or a third of the price but you know you could imagine as competition heats up and other people follow this technique then the P the cost of rocket launch has come down and you know what does a cheaper launch get you it gets you more Mission gets you more spacecraft and um you know NASA when NASA people are planning their missions they typically sort of split it 50/50 50% of the cost is to build the mission and 50% of the cost is to launch the mission and so if you can make the launch cost go down dramatically then you get to spend money on the mission so that's sort of like your first Advantage it's just it gets cheaper and then the second Advantage is that with a more powerful rocket and a larger payload fairing like obviously you could launch a bigger spacecraft but really it lets you not have to be so careful about making everything perfect so like one of the big problems with launching the James web Space Telescope was that not only did this thing have to fold up inside a 5 meter Fairing and then be able to get into space but in fact the weight it was right at the limit of what the Aron 5 rocket could handle and so the engineers at Nessa had to go through bolt by bolt item by item and shave weight off of it to bring it down of course when you shave weight off of something when it's also expected to handle the vibration of space then you know you're sort of like you're all have all these cost benefits and so if you have much more launch mask that you can handle then you don't have to think about it and if it can fit inside a larger fairing then you don't have to think about it but the reality is that we don't know what the future holds like when there are new technologies like commercial airlines or Railways or steam ships like like we don't or the personal car we don't understand we can't sort of anticipate what the potential is for that technology until it starts to operate and people start to realize what the possibilities are and they start to develop things for that capability and so in the near term we're going to see missions that would have launched other Rockets now be launched on Starship then we're going to see bigger versions of missions or simpler versions of of missions but eventually we can't kind of even imagine what could be launched on a fully reusable two-stage rocket with a 9M fairing so I'm sort of like looking forward what that future holds and again that was the most optimistic view um I think there's a lot of possibility that Starship doesn't provide that most optimistic view that refueling in space doesn't work very well is very difficult and more expensive than anybody thought that the really fast reusability doesn't come together the way anybody was expecting that the re-entering from the Earth's atmosphere puts a lot more wear and tear on your rocket than anybody was anticipating until these Rockets aren't able to sort of be reused right away that they require more refurbishment and that adds cost and that adds time and so I think in the near term as people try to figure out this technology we're going to see the costs come down but they're not going to be down by a factor of a 100 you know we're not going to see $100 per kilogram to launch into orbit you know maybe we're going to see 750 down from 3,000 but then you're GNA see competitors come into the market and people are gonna figure out all you know smooth out all the rough edges and they're going to crack this problem and so I think the far future of this is like impossible to predict there's so much you know it's such a GameChanger Sanctuary crypted could we refuel the Sun so the sun is a mass of incandescent gas you know sun is this gigantic ball of hydrogen and helium mostly hydrogen little bit helium and at the core it is turning hydrogen into helium uh through the process of fusion and that core accounts for a part of the Sun and then surrounding the core is the radiative zone and this is a region where the temperature and the pressure aren't high enough that you can get Fusion happening and so it's kind of like this wall around the core where the fusion is happening in the core photons are being generated you know start out as gamma radiation they random walk they go into the radiative zone and then they heat up various particles in the zone and they finally make it out to the convective zone and the convective zone is like this big lava lamp where where Blobs of hydrogen rise and fall releasing energy out into space and it sort of looks like the top of boiling water and so when when you think about like fueling the sun the sun actually has an enormous amount of fuel and it's only going to use a fraction of that fuel it can only use the stuff that's down in the core so right now it's fusing hydrogen into helium eventually it'll run out of hydrogen in the core and then it'll start fusing helium into heavier elements and just keep going up this chain until it no longer has the temperature and the pressure to keep going and yet just around the core there's that entire radiative Zone and then around that there is the entire U The convective Zone and none of that will ever make it into the core and so even though the sun will still have a tremendous amount of fuel available it won't be able to actually turn it into fusion and won't be able to use it for energy and so like you know could you refuel it well like how would you refuel it would you send it more hydrogen and helium well we know that when you give a star more mass more hydrogen more helium that actually shortens its life that now they burn hotter um and they will explode a supernova if you make them big enough and so by giving the sun more fuel you would actually be shortening its life so the weird irony is that the way that you refuel the Sun the way you extend the sun's lifetime is you break it up into little pieces that if you can take the sun you can break it up into I think it's like 13 equal-sized red dwarf stars then now you'll have these tiny little stars that are fully convective and so now they're using up all of the hydrogen fuel in the entire star they don't have those layers the way the sun does and so they can use all of it very efficiently they also last for a long time they'll last for trillions of years and so ironically uh the way that you refu the sun I guess one is you just take a big spoon and you mix up the sun if you could do that then you could get that fresh fuel down into the core and then it would be able to keep burning and whenever it had run out of fuel in the core you mix it again and then you get it going again um or you break the sun into little pieces each one Burns for you know vastly longer than the Sun is going to burn Jordan JN I would love to know more about how scientists take data from web and Hubble and turn them into the beautiful pictures that we see if possible thanks so space telescopes like Hubble like James web pretty much any telescope they gather their data in sort of gigantic cameras that are black and white and then what they do is they have a series of filters that are in front of that and so they can put the filter in front and that will filter out all of the light that is coming into the telescope except for the exact wavelengths that the astronomer is looking for so you think about visible light right you can have like all of the colors of light coming at you you put a filter that is a green filter and then suddenly only green is getting through the filter and that would be picked up by your sensor and so what astronomers will do is they will like when they request time on a space Space Telescope they will say I need this amount of time with this filter that amount of time with that filter and this amount of time with this filter and the filters can be just like the three colors that make light you know they could be asking for blue green and red but they can also ask for other wavelengths they can ask for wavelengths in the infrared in the ultraviolet of depends on the capability of the telescope and also very specific wavelengths that correspond to different kinds of chemicals that are located in a nebula or the atmosphere of an exoplanet or that kind of thing and so um it all depends on what the astronomer is looking for so they'll get that data right and that will be captured at the appropriate time you know according to the calendar web or Hubble will turn to this target that will expose at the at the wavelengths that the astronomer is asking for then switch over to the next one and then switch for you know however many they've asked for how much they've been allocated time on the telescope and then all that data will be sent back home from the telescope and then it's stored on giant servers here on Earth and then the astronomer gets a log in they can go in and start access accessing that data many telescopes also have that information just made public and so you can actually go to Raw images for the Hubble Space Telescope raw images for James Webb and you can just download the raw data and they are these separate individual black and white images that correspond to different colors you know different wavelengths of light so how do you get the pretty pictures right and like the thing that's really important to understand is that the pictures that you see of the Orion Nebula or The Pillars of Creation or all of the you know all the pictures that are coming from James web your eyes can't see that right that you can only see true color like like I guess maybe if you put sunglasses on that led you just see red then maybe you could see red but but essentially you're seeing true color while the kinds of images that you're going to see on the web or on the Hubble Space Telescope site or whatever they are made up of these separate black and white images that have been chosen by the astronomers and like for the astronomers that's all they care about they don't care if these pictures look nice they they're all they want is to want to be able to do the science can they see the structures can they see the star forming regions can they figure out the chemicals that are in the Supernova can they detect the quazar that is blasting in the middle of that Galaxy they don't care how these pictures look uh like obviously I'm sure some part of them cares but they're trying to do the science and so the images that we see are done by sort of public relations people and often artists and what they're doing is they are taking these separate black and white images and they are putting them into some program like Photoshop where you can assign one of these black and white images to a color so you can you can say okay the one that corresponds to the emissions from hydrogen I'm going to call that red and then the one that corresponds to the emissions from ionized oxygen blue and then the one that comes from say sulfur will make that green and so now you have three colors and if you mix those three colors together in some kind of Graphics program you're going to get a full color image because different parts of the nebula are going to be emitting hydrogen Alpha radi a different parts going to be emitting you know light from oxygen and different parts going to be emitting from sulfur and you've got these these three images you can also do four if you want you could say these this is red green and blue but I'm also going to make this purple and I'm going to make that one yellow and you know and you can also switch it around you can say I'm going to make the color of hydrogen Alpha I'm going to make that one blue and then I'm going to make the one from oxygen green doesn't matter now there are sort of agreed upon standards which is called called like the Hubble pallet and so various wavelengths are assigned colors that people who are working with these kinds of images tend to use that's why Hubble Telescope images tend to have the same kind of look and a lot of amateur astronomers when they're taking their own images will do the same thing they will assign those colors to uh you know to different wavelengths um but it's a lot of just interpretation from an artistic standpoint and I you know I think like when I explain this people are sad because they think like oh wouldn't it be cool if I could fly out into space I could hover in my spaceship next to the Orion Nebula and I would see what you see in an image from the hobble Space Telescope and the reality is that you wouldn't your eyeballs can't gather enough photons to expose the image the way a telescope that is staring for 50 hours or 100 hours can do your eyes are just not capable of doing that um and they're not bright enough right and that the colors that you see are like in the pictures are just are not colors that our eyes are able to see we can't see infrared we can't see ultraviolet we can't see x-rays right but scientific instruments can now there are objects that you could see and they would look normal to your eyes you could see a cluster of stars and it would look pretty cool you can take a long duration image of a nebula like the Orion Nebula and it will have color in it and if you could make your eyes watch these photons for a long period of time you would see those colors but we just can't watch long enough now I've done a a really interesting interview with a woman named Judy Schmid she is sort of behind many of the kind of amazing images that you've seen from the hobble Space Telescope and James web and has really kind of pioneered the way this process is done and she's got great tutorials to teach you how to do it so you know in this interview with Judy we talk about how she does it how you can do it because all this data is freely available anyone who wants can download it and work with it and in some cases you even make scientific discoveries which is really cool so um I hope that answered the question and if you like have any interest in this as a hobby or anybody who does there's a lot of great tutorials out there to get you interested in in doing astrophotography and image processing Andrew Han if you picked up the Earth and you placed it around the nearest star how much debate would there be that there was really life there that's a really interesting question all right so let's we take Earth and we put it around Proxima centuri which is a red dwarf star that is 4.3 light years away from us um let's assume that it's not actually transiting in front of the star and so the only way we can detect it is with a a powerful telescope that can make a direct observation so maybe the habitable world's Observatory or the extremely large telescope can make this observation and let's assume that we can make an observation that is sensitive enough that we can do spectroscopy on the light that's coming from uh the Earth would we know there's life there um there would how much debate I guess you asked how much debate would there be and there would be an enormous amount of debate you know there is debate still about whether au's Life on Mars whether the Viking Lander found life on Mars you know that was sampled directly whether the methane on Mars is related to life whether um the Mars meteorite has life whether phosphine on Venus means there life so there would be a ton of debate but I do think that if we had it that close there would be very strong signals in the atmosphere of this exoplanet um seeing oxygen ozone methane water vapor and then there would be Trace chemicals and the one that would give the whole thing away would be that the chlorofluorocarbons would be present in the atmosphere and James Webb could detect the chlorofluorocarbons from Earth at a distance to proximus centari and this would only be possible at proximus centari because proximus centari is a red dwarf you can block the light of the star and you can reveal the planet beside it but it's not very realistic right because it's a totally different kind of star it would irradiate the Earth and so we wouldn't expect to find a habitable biosphere orbiting around proximate centuri so let's move it to Alpha centuri right which is a pair of stars they're kind of sunlike and unfortunately now we don't have the ability to detect whether or not there's a planet like if it's not transiting in front of one or both of the stars then we have no way to detect it now there's a mission coming shortly called toan which should be able to detect the presence of a planet orbiting one of the stars at Alpha centuri but it wouldn't tell you anything more than the mass of the planet now when the habitable world's Observatory comes online then it could block the light from the Star reveal the planet and make those same observations of the atmosphere that we talked about with the proximus star version same thing you're going to see the signal of oxygen and ozone and maybe you're going to detect the chlorofluorocarbons so I would say if if we detect the chlorofluorocarbons then that would be that would be done right because that is evidence of a technological civilization beyond that I think the debate would rage on for a long time it would be exciting but people would argue about whether or not there's life on this exoplanet orbiting around Alpha centuri Four decades until you know and there would be just like more and more specialized instruments better modeling some percentage of scientists would be convinced some some percentage of scientists wouldn't and the argument would just go on for a while but it's a great question and you know this idea of Earth as an exoplanet has been studied quite a lot when the Galileo spacecraft flew past Earth astronomers said could we tell if there was life on Earth Carl San was like oh yeah absolutely other people aren't so sure so this idea of Earth as an analog exoplanet has been quite a lot it's used to calibrate different ideas you know what if we like let's take Earth and let's turn into one pixel of what we would see in the habitable world's Observatory what could we tell is any of that a Smoking Gun bios signature and so far astronomers still haven't figured out the absolute certain bios signature chemicals Wonder platypus how do you feel about the Dark Forest proposition in the three body problem and in real life so the Dark Forest comes up in the second book and or maybe it's the third book I think it's the second book anyway the gist is that we live in a dark Dark Forest and it makes the most sense to stay quiet and don't Reveal Your Presence otherwise other alien civilizations are going to attack you because it makes the most sense to remove a threat from the stage so they don't have to cause you problems down the road and like I don't buy the argument for so many levels um the first thing is is that um you can't hide that if you exist on the you we just we just talked about what it would take to find Earth and yeah it's going to be really difficult for the kind of technology that we have today but let's go forward a thousand years let's build a telescope that is thousands of kilometers across let's send it out to the solar gravitational lens we can see your cities we can see your pyramids we can see you walking around driving in your cars from Lighty years away like it's just a technology problem and so if there are alien civilizations that are with th Striking Distance of us they know we're here and soon we're about to know that they're there so you can't hide you just can't hide And so there's no point trying to hide because you can't hide that um you know and even if it's not like our technological civilization just life itself has been giving out our presence to the universe for hundreds of millions of years you know you point a big enough telescope at Earth and you can see the forest and you go okay there's life there right right and if there's life there then they could be evolving there might be intelligent life there so you can't hide and then I think the question is like does it make the most sense from a sort of Game Theory perspective that the first thing that you do is try to destroy another civilization as soon as you detect it that seems aggressive you know like I think you're going to want to check it out first you're going to want to send probes you're going to want to understand who you're dealing with and then if you're going actually try to deal with another civilization there there's a lot of techniques that you can go through information Warfare is the easiest thing to do instead of sending a bomb to destroy another civilization send them a bad idea right send them the uh the instructions to build a machine that when they turn it on it destroys their Planet uh and you've dealt with a potential foe so so no I think it's a great science fiction book I don't think it's a defensible idea to explain why we don't see evidence of aliens in the universe all right those are all the questions that we had this week thank everyone who asked questions in the YouTube comments but also everybody who joined me for the live show really the bulk of the questions for this episode come from the live show that we do every Monday at 5:00 P PM Pacific Time right here on the YouTube channel it's like twice as long we record this for two hours uh you only see one hour of it but it's much longer so definitely come and join us for the live show there should be a reminder somewhere here on this channel I'm sure there's a way that YouTube lets you get get reminded when the show is about to begin but Mondays 5:00 p.m. Pacific all right I'm going to talk about my campaign to show off smaller media channels but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston Andre gross Antonio lilara David guilan douge Stewart Dustin cable George Jeremy M Jordan young Josh Schultz Mark anest Paul robach Steven kraki Steven fellerer Munley and Vlad chiplin who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other patrons all your support means the universe to us all right so for the last couple of weeks I have been recommending smaller YouTubers who are doing really good scientific work and I asked you for a bunch of recommendations and I didn't get very many like I probably only got five and I'm I'm sort of processing them right now but I just want to take this week and remind you find me YouTubers find me people on YouTube who have small channels channels below 10,000 who are doing really good scientific communication not just in space but they could be doing kind of any field climate Science Biology computer science whatever is helping get the word out there and I got a lot of recommendations for people who are fairly large have large audiences um but I really want to try and give support to the people who don't have a lot of subscribers which is just like they should have more subscribers I should have less they should have more so uh I'm going to just like call it out right now please put in the comments down below the names or even links to I don't know if you can put the links anyway the names to YouTube channels who have less than 10,000 subscribers who doing a good job of science communication all right thanks a lot we'll see you next week