Starship Satellites, Alternatives to Black Holes, The Best Lifeform | Overtime Q&A 8

could we communicate faster than light could we detect planets at Alpha centuri and what could we launch with Starship all this in more in this week's overtime question show hey everyone well we've reached the end of the overtime question show segments and that's because the regular question show is coming back and that's because we're now doing the live streams on Monday nights again and so this is the last episode of the content that we recorded right at the end of the last season I hope you enjoy it all right let's get into the questions chrison knits any past upcoming missions will test out the ability of two Quantum entangled electrons to communicate with each other faster than the speed of light there's no need because there's no way for two entangled electrons to communicate faster than the speed of light and like obviously you know we know that there's quantum entanglement that you can have particles that can you know if if you entangle the particles and then one is spin up then the other one will be spin down but that doesn't allow to communicate any information the analogy that I always use is if I take a coin and two boxes and I put the coin into one box and I give you one box randomly and I give your friend one box you guys both go home and then at the time of your choosing you open up the box and find out whether or not there's a coin in your box and you open it up and you're like NOP no coin and your friend opens theirs up and goes oh coin well you know that the other person had the opposite of what you had but there's no information that is being transmitted between you you can't go open your box open your box with your psychic powers and so until you call them up and go I opened my box and I got a coin and they're like I open my box and I got no coin now you're communicating at the speed of light and so you don't get to communicate fast in the speed of light so no there are no missions because it is it won't work Rob Hawk why do we focus on proximate centari when the other two stars in the system could have better planets will we ever be able to detect those other planets I mean you focus on proximate centari because the star is not very bright compared to any planets that are nearby and in fact planets have been discovered using the transit method at proximate centari and that's be you know it wouldn't have been possible if the the stars were a lot brighter um I guess it probably would have but people have looked for planets around Alpha stenor and they haven't found any and the big part of is that the stars are so bright however uh there was a really cool Mission idea that's been that's in the works and should launch pretty soon called tan and what it's going to do is it's going to you know because you've got these two stars that are orbiting around each other you've got these two reference points and what it's going to do is it's going to look at one star and like Center it in its Optics and then it's going to look for any little wobble in the other Star as the star is orbiting around and if it detects a little wobble then it might be able to detect the presence of a planet and then it's going to switch targets look at the other star in Alpha centari and it's only going to be looking at Alpha satari its only job is to search for planets at Alpha satari and it doesn't have to be very big it's a cube sat scale Mission probably going to launch next year I think and could give us an answer relatively quickly on whether or not there are planets at Alpha centuri so you know the current crop of space telescopes aren't able you know we know that if there are planets at Alpha centari they aren't lined up perfectly in a way that we could detect their presence with the transit method so that leaves the radio velocity method and this this mission that I mentioned toan I've got an interview that I did if you search for toan t o l i m an you know it's an hourong interview all about the search for planets at Alp centuri but I can't expect you to have watched every single video I've ever made I understand that Joe Andrew will satellites get more complicated or less with Starship other enough customers take advantage of a Starship the launch mass of James web was about seven tons and that was sort of the most launch MK that could fit within the Aron 5 rocket it wasn't the size of the payload area it was the mass that it was capable of launching and so the major engineering hurdle to building James web was to make it fulfill its functions but also to shave off all of the weight and so every time they were looking at any part on James web they have to say could we have this be lighter is there a way that we can remove some of this mass and they just had to go this process again and again and again and had to re-engineer things to get the mask down until finally they were able to make the whole thing fit within what the Aron 5 was capable of launching in if Starship when it gets into this place it's actually launching payloads into space It should be able to launch in you know in a 9 meter fairing just enormous amounts of mass and what that does is it makes the job of the mission designer so much easier so instead of you having to go and and create this this super lightweight version you think about like cycling right you want to buy a nice bike you can go buy a bike for 50 bucks or you can buy a carbon fiber composite bike where every part has been shaved down to the minimum weight and now you're spending $10,000 or $20,000 and it's just like how much time do you want to spend to make this thing lighter and better and still perform the function of of letting a human being ride a bicycle and so the same thing is with satellites and so with Starship you've got this enormous payload area and a capability of launching an enormous amount and so maybe we do something really simple so instead of making a really fancy comp LIC ated Space Telescope you just you literally just take a big mirror like a the equivalent of an observatory and you jam it inside Starship and you set it a space and now you've got an 8 meter telescope bigger than James web in space and there's nothing complicated about it it's a primary mirror you you take one of these mirrors that are that are built for the different world's observatories you just put one of those on a telescope and you send it to space and now you've got an 8m telescope in space yeah you're going to need some power and blah blah blah but But but so I think that that there is a whole generation of mission planners who had to figure out how to shave the weight out of everything that they were building and now suddenly they don't have to do that anymore and I think it's going to be this this entirely new learning experience if they're able to get a launch on Starship you know they're going to have a hard time coming up with ways to use up all that m so yeah it's going to get pretty weird for a while goat Lord can we detect radioactivity on other worlds as in a nuclear winter and will this be considered a techno signature so this is one of the Techno signatures that has actually been proposed by astronomers there's a list of out there somewhere that I really want to get my hands on that lists all the technos signatures that have been brainstormed so far and this is one of them yeah that you would detect the radioactive fallout in the atmosphere of a planet now that's a thing that you would and then you'll be like oh those poor suckers just wrapped up a nuclear war but it isn't necessarily something that we are capable of detecting but there are certain amounts of like imagined particulates in the atmosphere so they they're proposing you know astronomers were proposing ways that you could identify a planet that just went through a nuclear war yes that has been considered a Tex of signature it's terrifying Astros surveys will New Horizons visit other dwarf planets it has fuel in the tank to visit more targets but so far uh none have been selected yet I think ver ruin is going to find Targets that then will be considered you know in the future flight cone of of what New Horizons is capable of and then they may very well try and do them so it can do more flybys just doesn't have any Targets yet rev Keith Carter can you explain the virtual Landing of the if4 units were there computer simulators for precise spots or was there just general areas when super heavy returned you know they landed in the ocean but the question is can you land this thing at the launch platform at the you know will the Chopsticks be able to grab it and I didn't hear that they were performing an extremely accurate simulation of what it was going to be like like they were just coming in now we saw a an additional footage from a buoy that was out in the Gulf of Mexico and they came close to that buoy so in other words they knew where they were going to try to land out in the ocean but they weren't they didn't have like a simulated Chopstick area out in the ocean and then of course with Starship because of all of the problems it was having with the re-entry it was about 6 kilomet off of its expected landing spot so they were not precise at this point but they have to be precise um if they're going to work I mean they have to work every time without fail or they destroy the launch system system that's scary I I don't know I I don't know how they're going to get around you can never fail yeah Nom what do you think the new heat shield is going to be like we don't know uh so actually in the video that after review we talk a lot about the heat shield and what and what the new plans are so right now there the heat shields are attached there's like a pin and then the heat shields are attached to that and so they're not welded onto the outside of Starship but one possibility is they're going to weld these things down try to make them stronger the other possibility is is maybe some kind of ablative gel or um adhesive that'll go under the heat tiles so that will be an adhesive for the for the tiles but also provide another layer of of cooling so we we kind of don't know what their plan is to increase the heat resistance for Starship I mean the big challenge is the hinges the things that you know we saw as Starship was coming through we saw those gases making their way into the hinge system we saw the thing just like on fire with bits and pieces and things were melting and just tearing away and and and that has to survive because that's how you have your control so all eyes are going to be on how do they provide some kind of flappy control Sur surface that is all Al incredibly resistant to the re-entry from space and um and I don't know what that's going to look like but you know I think safely we can say they're just going to keep adding heat shielding until the thing is safe and as they add more heat shielding then that decreases the amount of payloads that they can launch into space and they will finally reach some number where like okay you know we thought we could deliver 100 tons to orbit or 110 or 200 tons or whatever was going to be the number but now we're down to 75 tons or 50 tons or 25 tons or whatever there will be a final number that incorporates all of the structural elements all of the you know the hot fire staging capability the heat shielding that will make this thing rapidly reusable and I think that's fine you know it would be great if they could launch a 100 tons at one go but because the thing is theoretically going to be rapidly reusable then you launch for of them and they dock in space and then they fly off together so I'm not that worried about it Taran panti are we any closer to discover some new physics anytime soon well I mean like if we knew then we would discover those physics there are large problems in existing physics there are big questions there are places where people know things are incomplete like how do you make quantum mechanics and gravity work together what is the nature of dark matter what is the nature of dark energy energy why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe did inflation happen so there are all of these these unknowns that we have but then there are new physics that we don't even know that we don't even know um and sometimes those can be found just uh randomly by people who happen to be working on the right things so um you know you're kind of asking are we at the end of physics and people have always predicted the end of physics and I I don't think we're anywhere you know we're nowhere near the end of physics and especially back to that question we had earlier on about about AI I mean AI is coming online to be able to help search for new physics at an accelerated rate you know imagine if you fed quadrillions of particle collisions into a large language model but it wasn't a large language model it was a large particle model and then you as to start looking for patterns and Trends and make predictions and stuff who knows what kinds of of physics might turn out from that so I think like I'm way more interested in AI being used for scientific applications like Alpha fold like searching for new medicines like new meta materials things like that and physics and cosmology I've got two interviews coming up with different teams who are looking at how they can use AI for astronomy and so I really you know it's a thing that I'm obsessed with right now and I want to get to the bottom of it fisel Sahar how does the discovery of structures like the Hercules Corona Borealis Great Wall challenge our understanding of the universe of and the cosmological principle you know I don't think that things like that you know these large scale structures of the universe challenge your understanding Universe to size like at the largest scale you have this distribution of matter that is based on the distribution of dark matter that is concentrating particles you know galaxies Stars into these large scale structures and as you get the expansion of the universe the gravity of the universe is pulling the mass of material together it's opening up these voids in between these large walls and structures like that and you know currently the Lambda cold AR model you know theory of the universe explains the large scale structures and now astronomers have made really complicated simulations on supercomputers where they they incorporate all the particles of dark matter all the particles of gas and dust and the forces involved and then run the simulation and get those kinds of large scale structures of the universe and so at this point I don't think you know any of these things that have been seen these all been you know these this current crop of simulations the theories match the observations that's sort of the point and that's why the things that James Webb is finding early on in the universe or the crisis in cosmology the you know the the difference in the expansion rate of the universe is so interesting because those aren't easily explainable and so there's there's additional physics ideally will be fall will be found to explain them Bob hedor any missions planning on checking out near Earth asteroids or quasi moons out of system missions take so long okay so yeah there's a there's a new mission in the works called Neo surveyor and that is going to be looking for potentially hazardous near Earth asteroids so that's the closest that we've got and there's a lot of groundbased stuff that's going to be looking for them but yeah it sucks that the solar system is so big and there's all these really interesting places but you got to say oh really like to go to Neptune but are you willing to take 10 years to do it oh maybe not that's the problem always n how close do you think we are to from finding other life forms we don't know we have no idea we're we're taking our best crack at it right we've got Rovers on the surface of Mars that are looking for any kind of evidence of past life on Mars we have missions in the works to go to Europa to look for any kind of evidence of plume at Europa and maybe there's going to be the presence of of life in those plumes we've got SEI researchers that are looking for signals from intelligent civilizations and then you've got things like James web which could potentially detect the presence of biological signatures in the atmospheres of other planets would tell you there's life there although that's a really tough one but it could also potentially detect the presence of pollution and techno signatures so we have no idea I mean it all depends on whether or not we're alone in the universe and you know some of you know how I feel about that Scott's asttr photos will the N Roman telescope reside at L Grange point and if so which one yeah so nany Roman launching in 2027 is going to be going to the Earth Sun L2 LR point so that's the same place as James Webb as Gia as euklid it's the best parking spot if you want to keep the Earth the Sun and the Moon all in the same spot of the sky away from you um and be able to look in the other direction Jinger what are your thoughts on black hole stars or quasi Stars the first stars that had a black hole at the core which is one explanation for Black Hole the Galaxy Court so I don't have opinions I'm just a science journalist and so quasi stars um is it like grav stars like it's a bunch of alternative ideas for things that could give off the same characteristics of black holes and one of the amazing things about the Avent Ariz in telescope was that it was able to measure the Event Horizon around two black holes and they measured the predictions that were made by Einstein for what you would expect to see around a black hole and so um there are still alternative theories for what could be these enormous very massive dense regions in space but the black holes are the one that is are widely accepted by the scientific Community Church discography what is your favorite life form swallows swallows are pretty great Swifts and swallows I think I like mammals birds I like birds favorite bird yeah I'm going to go with swallow they look like little jet fighters they're so cool Dave Swinson in the search for Life Pastor pres of Mars has landing on the polar ice cap and taking core samples been considered the Phoenix Lander went near the polar area on Mars and in fact it was what helped us understand the level of perchlorates that are in the Martian regolith it was able to help measure the amount of water ice that's mixed in with the regolith on Mars near the polar areas so no Mission actually gone to actually land on the polar ice cap but they've gone pretty close to the ice cap no name has anyone considered having LR floating chronographs or secondary mirrors to avoid the noise from the support so I don't know about the lrange point but is anyone so I mean that's essentially an interferometer but are you saying like you have a telescope that is free floating compared to its secondary mirror and then some method is keeping the secondary mirror and the primary mirror aligned with one another to avoid the noise from the support I think you know coming up with a way to maintain the position of the primary mirror and the secondary mirror to fly in perfect formation is harder than to just remove a little bit of data because of the additional you know the the the defraction spikes that are coming from your supports I haven't seen anybody say here's a great idea let's have free floating primary mirrors and secondary mirrors Roger M could Venus atmosphere be terraformed a compound combined in the atmosphere to turn it into H2O so could Venus's atmosphere be terraformed sure theoretically you put a sun shade in front of Venus and that blocks the sunlight coming to Venus and then you cool it down and then all of its atmosphere turns into snow carbon dioxide snow and it just falls down onto the surface and now you've got this deep layer of snow on the surface of of Venus and it no longer has an atmosphere and then you sprinkle some kind of um material down that wants to bind with the carbon dioxide limestone is a thing that you'll be using here on Earth but there's other chemicals magnesium I think that will bind up and sort of turn the atmosphere into rock and then you no longer have that thick atmosphere so you know the problem is that like yeah you could get the oxygen for your H2O but you can't get the H part that's the thing that Venus is missing is the hydrogen so Venus probably had a lot of hydrogen in its past but that hydrogen is gone some of it is in sulfuric acid so if you could break up the sulfuric acid You' be able to get some hydrogen but it's just not enough compared to anything like what Earth has so you really if you want to have big liquid oceans maybe it's trapped underneath on Venus under the surface or maybe you're going to have to deliver it by Smashing comets after you've locked down all of that atmosphere Vladimir I kick what do we know about white holes and we found any so white holes are a mathematical construct that if you take a black hole and you change some of the numbers in the black hole You you turn positives into negatives you get a theoretical white hole but it it's not like it's a real thing it's you know they the imagine you take you know donuts and you have say plus six donuts and then and you give me the donuts and now I have plus six donuts okay fine now what if I just turn the the doughnut number negative what does that mean like does that mean now that that you are born into this universe owing six donuts to somebody um so just because you can change things mathematically doesn't mean that these things are real you know and people have looked so I mean in theory like while black holes will be these places of infinite density where material is falling into them white holes are places where material is coming out of them and maybe black holes and white holes are connected and maybe there's a way for us to detect white holes by looking for places where material is being blasted out into the universe no one's ever seen it um and I think it's pretty I mean I think you pretty safely say that they're probably just purely theoretical math mathematical uh devices Francis Tony which Starship Milestone is the hardest storing propellant in space refilling in space re-entry quick reuse Chopstick Landing business model bankruptcy landing on the moon or other now that Starship has returned from space and the super heavy has and both Starship and super heavy have soft landed in the ocean roughly where they were intended um and we can see what was the hardest part the hardest part was the heat surviving re-entry getting back through the Earth's atmosphere um so right now that is the Big Challenge and and who knows how many iterations how many test launchers are going to have to go through to the point that that it returns back to Earth and and isn't going to require essentially being thrown out God I don't know which of those so the Chopstick Landing you've got to land with Precision at the launch platform both super heavy and Starship one after the other have to be able to land with precision and if you get one mistake then it tears apart your your Landing system and you know we've seen mistakes even with with Falcon 9es that are well proven there's hundreds of launches that have happened every now and then a falcon 9 doesn't land exactly where it's supposed to goes into the ocean or Falls over on the Drone ship or whatever and yet if that happened with super heavy or Starship on the Chopsticks then it will cause significant damage to the launch system so I mean are you ever going to reach a point where these things are landing with 100% accuracy I I can't imagine that you will and so are you just going to be rebuilding launch platforms as the cost of doing business how many are you going to rebuild I don't know do you build a launch platform that can handle the um the destruction of a super heavy is it hits your Landing system too hard maybe you could build one like out of a mountain or something I don't know U maybe you could overbuild them at a certain point storing propelling in space I think it's a solvable problem refilling in space I think it's a survival problem re-entry that's just like how much mass are you willing to spend on hardening your spaceship so Landing sounds like a big one and then quick reuse is a completely separate Milestone there's there's eventual reuse and then there's quick reuse and I think there's going to be a large gap in years where we go from eventual reuse where Starship returns and Engineers pour over each part and component and they swap out bad heat tiles and they replace the landing fins like I I can imagine them replacing the landing fins with every launch until they've until they've really solved this and another one that's kind of crazy is you know you see landing on the moon that's potentially challenging but returning from the Moon is actually pretty scary that in this is the conversation that I had with Scott and Marcus um when you come back from the Moon you're going 40% faster it's a it's a much harder re-entry than just Earth orbit so uh there's a you know you listed a great list I could probably add another 10 things but I think you know because starlink is making money is set to make more money and Starship you know they say Starship is is to send humans to Mars that's not its purpose starship's purpose is to launch starlinks starship's purpose is to launch satellite constellations for other companies you can imagine uh Amazon is going to launch Kyper on Starships and it's going to make so much money doing this so uh you know I personally think thinking about Starship as a Mars sending a colon building a colony on Mars is a total distraction it's almost never going to do that but it is going to make a boatload of money launching 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