Artificial Gravity, Trusting SpaceX, Neutron Stars VS Magnetars | Q&A 311

what's the current state of development of artificial gravity with spinning space stations do I trust SpaceX to get us to Mars will China be the first to get there and in the free edition of Q&A Plus on Patreon why won't NASA just launch upgraded versions of the Voyagers answering all these questions and more in this 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'll gather them up and I will answer them here all right let's get into the questions gabulous what is the next concrete step in artificial gravity research for human beings to remain healthy for the long term in space we need to do some kind of artificial gravity uh and the only one that we know how to do is with a rotating space station where the space station is turning you're experiencing an outward force as you walk around on the station and that will help keep your bones strong and your muscles strong and help the fluid return to the right places in your body and so far it just hasn't been done because it hasn't been necessary that yeah it we know that being in space for say a year is bad on the human body but we can work around it that as long as the astronauts exercise for two and a half hours every day uh then they can stave off uh most of the effects of being in space and that is much cheaper and easier than sending a giant rotating space station into space but if we do want to live longterm in space if we want to set up on the moon if we want to go to Mars uh if we want to understand what lower gravity does to the human body or if we want a way to live in space without dealing with low gravity then we're going to have to figure out an artificial gravity and it's crazy you know I always talk about this how all of the big ideas that we have today they were all tested out back in the 1960s at NASA that there are amazing video of people in rotating space stations on Earth where they're like hooked up in this harness and they're walking around on this turning wheel and then trying to do various things so they can understand what it would be like and there was a plan to build a attachment to the International Space Station called Nautilus X uh back about 10 years ago and people even proposed much smaller ones tiny little centrifuges that you could go and sit in so instead of working out every day for 2 and a half hours you could sit in this tiny little centriuge for a few hours or maybe you sleep in it it would be very uncomfortable um and then that would give you this artificial gravity for a while and then you would go back into the weightlessness and go back and forth so there's a lot of different ways that we can do this and right now there are people who have their mind set on colonizing Mars and we don't know what one-third gravity will do to the human body what it'll do to a pregnancy and so the only way for us to find out is for us to simulate it for us to go and build a space station that rotates provides one-third gravity um or go to the moon but you know and if you can survive in one sixth gravity you know if the monkeys are able to gestate on the moon in 1/6th gravity then they'll probably be okay on 1/3 gravity but you build the space station you run your experiments and you learn what low gravity does to the to the human body or at least to you know to monkeys so we're just we're not ready to live on Mars yet uh and yet people are just going to go for it just going to run that experiment on their babies find out what happens so uh yeah I think we should have you know artificial gravity should be a high priority aaron Skinner speaking of spinning space stations is there a certain size that would prevent motion sickness so one of the downsides of being on a spinning space station is you get this corololis effect where if the station is small enough then you're experiencing a different amount of gravity on your feet than you are on your head and it's expected that this will cause motion sickness now you'll probably overcome it but still it won't feel like you're walking around on Earth it'll feel weird uh depending on the direction that you're walking you know if you're walking the direction that the station is spinning if you're walking the opposite direction and the solution to this is a bigger station and I don't remember the exact size but it feels like it's on the order of like a kilometer across like you get to a certain size and the the effect is so slight that it feels that you're walking around on Earth but that's a big station jasmine Flores what level of trust do you have in SpaceX getting us to Mars so I'm just going to start this conversation with a plea for people to settle down on wherever you stand on this i'm going to attempt to discuss what I think is a fairly nuanced view of this um in a time which is very politically uh divisive so so that's my disclaimer out of the way uh don't fight so you know obviously I've been watching SpaceX for my entire journalism career from when SpaceX was founded to their first test flights to the first tests of the Falcon 9 uh to the first time that they were able to successfully land a booster to the announcement that they were going to do the Dragon the cargo Dragon the Crew Dragon uh the announcement of the Falcon Heavy took 10 years the final launch of the Falcon Heavy um and then the announcement in 20 feels like it was 2016 of Starship and then of course watching all of the various tests of of Starship so I've been there this entire time watching and reporting on all of this stuff and the larger perspective that I have is that space is really difficult and that the timelines for this kind of thing take a lot longer than anyone ever expects and so we always used to joke that you would have like Elon time so he would say something was going to happen and you just like double and add three years or whatever was the number you wanted that but yet you can watch like a Falcon Heavy take off and then the two side boosters land side by side near the launch facility and that this the the main booster lands on the barge out in the ocean like these things eventually go like the cargo dragon the crew dragon is a very safe and dependable vehicle for getting astronauts to the International Space Station starship has been a bit more of a a bumpy ride and that's because it is a entirely new spaceship right that you've got a fully reusable two-stage rocket something that doesn't have to be thrown away in between your missions and so far getting both parts of this to function have been very difficult and that's not surprising like it is entirely new rockets entirely new technology it's caught by this giant tower to be able to uh service it but in the question that you asked like what level of trust do I have in SpaceX getting us to Mars getting to Mars isn't that hard um you know sending robots to Mars it's been done with lots of different rockets it could be done with a Falcon Heavy no problem um and even in its current configuration uh I you know if if you're willing to throw away Starship and Superheavy it could carry payloads to Mars but I think the question that you're asking is you know what trust do I have in SpaceX sending human beings to Mars on a regular basis um and that's a different question right that that is a vastly more complicated thing i've talked about many times that we don't know what just being on Mars does to the human body for long periods of time that that it doesn't make sense for people to live long term on Mars they need to be able to come home and so you need to be able to have Starships go to Mars land on the surface people to be able to get out safely Starship be able to be refilled with fuel for them be able to get back on a Starship maybe not the same Starship and come home and there's a gigantic stack of technologies of tests of things that need to be done for that to be accomplished that the super heavy booster needs to be able to launch the Starship needs to be able to detach needs to be able to go to orbit needs to be able to refuel um and it needs to be safe and then needs to be able to carry people and it's got to have facilities on board this Starship for months for to be able to make the journey to Mars it's got to be able to enter the atmosphere on Mars it's got to be able to decelerate it's got to be able to land safely it's got to be able to refuel it's got to be able to take off it's going to be able to come home like there's a lot of steps to do that and each one of those steps is going to take a lot longer than anyone thinks is going to happen and so you know it with unlimited funding and unlimited runway I think that this is an engineering challenge that either SpaceX or other rocket companies would be able to figure out over time how do you get people to Mars land them on the surface and then return them safely home to Earth but I don't think it's going to be easy and I think that there is this expectation and there's just going to be this steady stream of starships blasting off and going to Mars and settling down and building this city and I don't think it's going to be that i like I think that Mars sucks and that there's really a fairly small limit of people who are going to want to live on Mars it won't be self-sufficient for hundreds of years so it's going to be this gigantic cost that that Earth is going to have to bear and I don't think there's going to be a lot of appetite for that after a while like oh you want you know are we going to spend another $500 billion this year on keeping the Mars colony alive you know maybe that's too much money to spend what if we cut that budget right so I think that it's going to be a lot more complicated than anybody thinks and I think that we don't want the outcome as much as we think we do and those two things are going to conspire together to make it eventually just stop happening that there will be missions to Mars there will be humans going to Mars maybe one day we'll have a research station on Mars but that is a vastly simpler thing than trying to create a self-sustaining colony on Mars that could last for a long time so it's not about trust in SpaceX for me I am unconvinced that that's even a goal that humanity will have the stomach to pursue and to pay the price that it's going to cost in terms of human lives in terms of the billions of dollars it's going to take to make it happen um and that I think that there you know eventually the technology will be used on the ways that make the most sense the ones that make the money the ones that we have the need for launching new space telescopes launching u communication satellite networks sending missions to the moon who knows but you know it's like we could build a colony on Mars but we probably won't want to it's time to shout out and celebrate all the new $5 patrons scott Hendrickson Kevin Kren Shane Bulis Marcu Nolan Roger Russell Pever Parapet Bill Hammond Matt Esbrook Dwayne and Dana Pearson join the club at patreon.com/universeto today booger man you think China will be the first to Mars right now I don't think it's clear who's going to be the first to Mars um you know the Chinese are going to set foot on the moon by 2030 and that's the plan they've hit all of the other milestones uh there's no argument in China about whether or not this is a thing they're going to do they have a plan uh and they are following it to the letter and so they're building their lander they're building the rockets are going to take them to the moon i think they're going to pull this off so 2030 we should see Chinese astronauts set foot on the moon and then the plan is to go to Mars next and I think they're aiming to be there by 2040 so will some other nation send humans to Mars before 2040 um you know like Starship is taking longer than anybody thought but it seems feasible that they will get the technology under control by 2040 uh like I know that's not the timeline that they're saying but it still feels like they could beat the Chinese to Mars so I still I wouldn't pick who's going to be first on Mars it's going to be somebody on a Starship or somebody from China on a Chinese version of a starship vaggie what's the difference between a neutron star and a magnetar and how are they made well a neutron star is the remnant left over from a supernova if you have a star that has between 8 and 20 times the mass of the sun then as it is doing fusion in its core it has enough mass pushing in that allows the temperature to get very high allows the pressures to get very high and it's able to move way up the chain of elements it's able to get through carbon nitrogen oxygen and eventually runs out of fusible elements in its core and then collapses in on itself and then detonates as a supernova and you get like all this collapsing material the pressure creates a neutron star and neutron stars magnetars and pulsars they're all the same thing they're all neutron stars but they all behave kind of differently so generally when the just after the supernova happens then you get the pulsar and that's because all of the angular momentum caused by you know that was in the star before it detonated as a supernova that is still maintained in the object that remains but before you had something that was this gigantic star many times the size of the sun and now you have this thing that is like 10 km across it's like the size of a city and so now they spin very very quickly they can spin up to 700 times a second and then over time they will slow down as they sort of bleed off rotational energy through gravitational waves over time and they also will can uh fire out large amounts of radio emissions and then because these things are rotating very quickly and the radio emissions are sort of coming out of their poles then you get this wobble and you'll see the radio emissions on a very regular schedule and that's why pulsars are so regular so that's one type and then the other type of thing that you can get after a supernova goes off is a magnetar and magnetars have ludicrously intense magnetic fields around them and the circumstances that create a magnetar are still not entirely known but probably has something to do with a binary companion star to the supernova star that goes off and you get these really really intense magnetic fields they could tear you apart at an atomic level if you got too close um but then they probably slow down as well just like pulsars do and over time the radio beams shut off the intense magnetic fields shut off and you're left with just this rotating neutron star and then it will just continue to do that for you know the age of the universe and when they first are formed they're about 600,000 Kelvin um and then they slowly cool down over time so hopefully that describes the difference did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free we call it Q&A Plus this week's bonus question is all about launching a new fleet of Voyagers and I'll put a link in the show notes you can check that out all right those are all the questions that we had this week thank you everyone who watched us live as well as everybody who put in your questions into the YouTube comments now we do the live show every Monday somewhere around the world at 5:00 p.m uh but you know obviously that's very random and so there is going to be an event for when the next recording is going to be so just make sure you subscribe to the channel click on the notifications bell and hopefully YouTube will tell you when the live event is about to happen next now I'm going to give you some updates on some anime that I have been watching but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston Andrew Gross Barely Griffin Brian Bod Keredwin Chuck Hawkins Commander Bailock Sai Nelson David Gilton and David Matz Dustin Cable Evan Pro Greg Phy Hen Schultz Hudson Ward Jay Graves James Clark Jeremy Matter Jim Burke Jordan Young Marcel Smiths Michael Purcell Modso Paul Robuk Raidu Rob Sean Sergeant Stannis Elarv Steven Fer Munley Thomas Els Scadan Vlad Shiplin and Wolf Gang Clots who support us at the master of the universe level and all our patrons all your support means universe to us so as some of you might know I am an anime afficionado an enjoyer and uh there's been a couple of really cool anime that have come out and um the wife and I have been watching them so the first one and this is like very traditional anime and this is Sakamoto Days and it is like what if John Wick retired put on a lot of weight and managed a convenience store and that all of the assassins of the world are trying to take him out there's bigger and bigger bounties to take him out and he has become uh mostly very peaceful and he somehow is able to not only stop the assassins but put them to work in his convenience store and it is like many times funny very charming and at the same time has some great action sequences so uh but it's very anime so you know I don't you may like that kind of thing you may not but but I'm enjoying it uh the next one that I'm watching is called Devil May Cry and this is based on a video game series and this is terrific uh the animation is really good it's like a western written so I don't like the actual production I'm not entirely sure but but I think it was written in the US and then you know combination of animated in Japan I think Korea and other countries and it's good very funny uh but also great action and very violent and you know well written and uh and so I' I've been really enjoying that i I haven't played the video game i have no context for it now uh another couple of shows that I've been watching with uh one of my kids is Hasbin Hotel which is on Prime and I've really been enjoying that and then you can watch this other show by the same creator called Hell of a Boss which is on YouTube bizarrely and you know has tens of millions of views on these videos i can't believe they're able to release these videos just on YouTube all right let me know what anime you're watching and I will add it to the queue i'm always hungry for watching more stuff