3I/ATLAS Comet Special | Q&A 355

How can we know if 3i Atlas is an alien spaceship or not? Can we turn an interstellar comet into a transmitter? Would the government suppress information about a dangerous asteroid? And in Q&A+, why aren't there more asteroids outside the Solar System? All this 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. Visto Tutti, how can we tell 3i Atlas as a comet instead of Avilobe-style alien space junk? We actually covered this idea in Space Bytes this week, that there are people, Avilobe is one of them, but there are others who are proposing that some of the interstellar objects that are passing through the Solar System are not actually just dumb pieces of rock, collections of hydrogen, gas, dust, water, ice, that they are in fact alien probes that are passing through the Solar System, von Neumann probes. And on the one hand, I find that idea very compelling. You know, I am a huge fan of the idea that if there are advanced civilizations out there in the Milky Way, then one of their go to things they're going to do is send self-replicating robot probes to other star systems, that they'll go to a star system, they'll collect up material, they'll build copies of themselves, then they'll send spacecraft out to other nearby star systems. And over the course of about a million years, if you're going say 10% the speed of light, you will have sent these von Neumann probes to every single star system in the entire galaxy. 100 to 400 billion stars, you will have eyes on the ground in that star system. And imagine you're building this Encyclopedia Galactica and you're sending all this material back home and you're cataloging it all as each one of the spacecraft sends its baby spacecraft to other solar systems. And you're collating all of this data and you know all of the planets in each star system and which ones have life and what the moons are and the weird, cool, interesting things like the deepest chasm and the largest mountain and the weirdest planetary system, you know, the answers to all these questions, because you sent one spacecraft out one time. And because it was able to, you know, had had 3d printers on board and was able to find an asteroid belt made more copies of itself. You just waited and you're patient, you waited a million years, and you got your answer. And I find it a really compelling idea. I think it's great. But we need to reserve our belief in the things that we have evidence for. We can have a hypothesis. Yes, it makes sense that that's what aliens would do. But if somebody says, well, look, 3i Atlas is a is an alien probe. You've got to say, OK, what's the evidence? And we need compelling evidence. We need an we need a an interstellar object to do a thing that a comet or an asteroid can't do. It needs to be made of something that that an asteroid or a comet is definitely never, ever possibly made out of glass. Right. And nothing else. It needs to move in a way that just outgassing from an object can't account for it. But the most important thing is that ideally you want to see some kind of signal. You want to see that it's got a radio transmitter or a laser and it's sending information. You know, it's sending out a request for us to upload Wikipedia as it passes through the solar system so it can take it on to the next and send that all back home to the main Encyclopedia Galactica. And so people are going to make claims that they're that things are unusual, that they are alien probes. But then you have to say, well, like demonstrate the evidence. And that's where it all falls short, that as long as these objects are doing things that are plausible for natural objects to do, you have to say it's, you know, right now, they're comets, they're asteroids. But hopefully one day we will detect the Von Neum probe and it will be obvious that it is doing something that we were not expecting from, you know, an asteroid or a comet. They do very predictable things. Jerra King, what's going to happen when 3i Atlas goes through the asteroid belt? So the asteroid belt is this region in between Mars and Jupiter filled with asteroids. And there are countless asteroids, millions of them, billions of them. And they range in size from the size of your house, well, smaller than that, to Ceres and Vesta, which are in the hundreds of kilometers across. And although you think, you know, science fiction has led us to believe that the asteroid belt is this jumbling pile of spinning rocks. And that if you want to try and pass through the asteroid belt, you have to very carefully dodge back and forth or you're doomed, doomed. Think about Star Wars or Star Trek or any of those shows, right? That's an asteroid belt. Well, the distance of objects in the asteroid belt are actually so far apart that it is astronomically unlikely that anything passing through the asteroid belt is going to hit something else. It is more likely that you are going to just pass directly through. You have to actually have engines on board your spacecraft or your interstellar object to change your trajectory so that you can get close to actually even take a picture of an asteroid. And that's why nobody is concerned when they send spacecraft out from Earth through the asteroid belt to get out to, say, Jupiter. It's more that is there any asteroid that's kind of within range that we could maybe use a little of our fuel to be able to do a flyby of and take some cool pictures before we get to Jupiter or Saturn or Pluto or whatever when we're going to the outer solar system? So we don't have to worry. Now, I don't know the exact trajectory of 3A Atlas. It's not necessarily coming in on the plane of the ecliptic. And so it's not going to necessarily exactly cross the asteroid belt, but it's going to be going past asteroids. But again, just the distances are so big. They are millions of kilometers apart. BuzzUka, could we detach a device onto a comet to send out signals to potential other civilizations? I get this question all the time. And there's sort of two parts to the question. One is a bit of a misunderstanding about how velocity in space works. But the second part is a fantastic idea. So I'm going to sort of tackle this. One, why it might not be realistic to what you think. And then the second part is why I'm going to enthusiastically recommend what you're proposing. So the thing with comets, really with anything moving in space, is that there is no friction in space. And so if you want to be able to hitch a ride on a comet, on an asteroid, on a planet, you need to be able to match the velocity of that object. And so, you know, imagine if you've got this comet that's flying past and you want to hitch a ride on the comet. Well, you use enough propellant so you're now going the exact same speed as the comet and will drift on exactly the same trajectory as the comet forever, right? You don't have to use one more ounce of fuel and you come back a billion years later and there's the comet and there's your spacecraft and you are just drifting together. Drifting together. All right. For billions of years. Because there is no friction. You're just going to keep drifting. And so there's no point in trying to hitch a ride on a comet. There's no fuel saved. But, and here's the part where I love this idea, a comet or an asteroid is a repository of material. It is like clamping on like a parasite to a shopping mall and then using every part of the asteroid or comet for this long, long journey. And so you can land your von Neumann probe, your self-replicating robot probe onto the comet and then it can start to dismantle the comet, building energy production, building radiators, building more compute units, building actuators, building telescopes, building whatever you need so that a transmitter that you can then use to send out signals to other star systems when your spacecraft gets close. And the problem is that we don't know how to make a spacecraft last for a long period of time. They all, they all die within 50 years. But if you could set up shop on a comet or an asteroid that's passing through the solar system, then you could last for billions of years, as long as you are careful and use the comet or the asteroid in a very responsible manner. You can make that last and you can just keep preparing your your spacecraft, building new components. And you can stick around for the long haul to be able to send out messages and send out little mini probes to other star systems as you happen to drift past. In fact, it sort of feel like if you're willing to be patient, it is the most cost effective way to explore the galaxy. You let time and just random flybys of various objects bring you close on a platform that allows you to sustain your spacecraft. So I think it's a great idea. I hope we can do it someday. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above. Darnayn, Alexander Krosh, Lee W. Benjamin, Lucas Johnson, Ethan Richards, Kurt Linville, Peter Gray, Kevin Mace, Adam Rios, and Jay Rohnert. Join the club at patreon.com Todd Szafranski, do you think MRO will get good images of 3i Atlas? I love that we're now just in these various acronyms at this point. So MRO, that is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is a spacecraft that is orbiting Mars and is looking down with a 50 centimeter telescope on the surface of Mars and is producing images that are incredibly detailed, that it can resolve features down on the surface of Mars, I think, less than half a meter. And they've developed new techniques to be able to bring that down. And so we see rovers on the surface of Mars. We've even seen pictures of spacecraft landing on Mars. You can see the parachutes that's making its way through the atmosphere of Mars. It's an incredible spacecraft. And it is going to have the closest view of 3i Atlas as it passes through the solar system. It's going to come within point two astronomical units, and I guarantee NASA is going to be turning MRO in the direction of 3i Atlas and to take some pictures as best it could. And they've practiced doing this kind of thing already. They will occasionally turn MRO and take pictures of Phobos and Deimos, which are two of its asteroid-like moons orbiting around Mars. And that's just a demonstration that it can take pictures of things that aren't the surface of Mars. And so they're ready to go. And hopefully the pictures that it can take will be better than the pictures that you can see from James Webb or Hubble Space Telescope or whatever. But, you know, there's always this trade off, right? Like, do you want the biggest telescope that you've got to take your pictures, but from farther away? Or do you want a smaller telescope to take pictures from closer away? Scott S. If a giant meteor were heading towards the Earth, would the governments tell us or try to suppress it for as long as possible? So if a giant meteor was heading towards the Earth, if there was an asteroid or a comet on a collision course with planet Earth, the governments would not be the place where you would hear about it. It would come from the astronomers themselves, that the people who are using the big telescopes and making discoveries, they announce their findings immediately to each other. They don't go through governments that the discoverer of 3i Atlas, the discoverer of Oumuamua, the discoverer of Borisov, the discoverer of various large asteroids, Apophis, things that have been potentially dangerous in the past, 2025 YR4, that when astronomers find an object, they announce it to the public immediately. And then other astronomers will look over their work and confirm their observations and check to see whether or not they're right. And it's too late. Governments can put that back in the bag. It's not like an astronomer, every night, does all their observations and takes everything they've looked at and they bring it to the government and go, Hello, government, here's what I looked at last night. Can you look through this and tell me if there's anything that you want redacted? It doesn't work that way. Astronomers are just people, they report and announce what they found to each other and to the public and to the press and to me, right? They call me and they tell me what they found. And then I report it. And the government had nothing to do with it. So like, I think there is this, this hilariously wrong expectation that the government is involved in the potential suppression of information about the universe. Government has no role. The role of the government is they fund a telescope, and then they get out of the way. And then they come back later, if the checks to have these things built. Now, there are a few examples, like say, the Department of Defense working with the Vero Observatory, you know, they helped fund the telescope. And they are scrubbing out images of US spy satellites from the images. Okay. Right. But apart from that, there is no filter where a government could step in and say, so it's like, it's a, it's a moot point. It is a nonsensical question, because astronomers would be arguing about the trajectory of this asteroid for months in advance. And if you ever watch Don't Look Up, they cover that. It's exactly that, that often it's not about people trying to cover up what it is that you found, it's that nobody will listen. Right? You found something concerning, and you're trying to let people know, and nobody cares. Nobody is paying attention, or is arguing with you, or trying to discredit you, or trying to figure out some way to commercialize what it is that you found. And anyone who claims that the government is suppressing their science, is not doing good science, and is just not communicating and working with the system the way it has been developed and has been running for hundreds of years. Sid Vicious, will you please continue to recommend small astronomy channels on YouTube? Any recommendations this week? Yeah, I really enjoy providing recommendations to smaller astronomy channels. The problem is the AI slop problem, which is that, that it's really hard for me to discover new channels that are legitimate, and that the person is like actually talking about science and space and astronomy. And obviously, this is just me not being willing to put in the amount of work that it takes to find these hidden gems. And I'm so happy when I do. But it just takes time, and I have to sift through tons and tons of nonsense before I can find a channel. I'm like, oh, wow, this person is a legitimate space journalist and is reporting on really interesting news. And yet I found some incredible people. It's kind of amazing when you look back at some of the people that I've recommended, you know, a couple of hundred subscribers, and yet they're doing really good work. And I wish I could. So thank you for the reminder, I will double down and keep trying to find good small astronomy channels. I kind of just depend on you all to direct me. And it's funny, because I'm like, can you please recommend some small astronomy channels and people like Dr. Becky, PBS Space Time, Anton Petrov, Astrum? Like, no, smaller, not hundreds of thousands, not more than me, smaller, thousands, hundreds, let's see dozens of subscribers, then I'll be really happy. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? And we call it Q&A plus this week's bonus question. Why aren't there more asteroids outside the solar system? I'll put a link in the show notes. All right. Those are all the questions that we had for this episode. Thank you, everyone who put your questions into the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show. Of course, we do this live show every week. I'll put an event here on the channel so you can go and click on the bell to notify you the next time we go live. You can come and join and ask your questions and I will answer them probably. Now, I'm going to talk about why you should come and visit Canada. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Barilee Griffin, Brian Boddy, Cara Dwyane, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baylock, Stein Nielsen, David DeVerebrioff, David Gilton, David Matts, Evan Pearl, Greg Feely, Hudson Ward, James Clark, Jeremy Matter, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Rosal Smith, Michael Purcell, Monzo, Paul Robach, Frank Haidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Fowler-Munley, Vlad Shiplin, and Wolfgang Klotz, who support us at the Master of the Universe level. And all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So, as you probably know, because I won't shut up about it, I am Canadian and I live on Vancouver Island, which is on the west coast of Canada. And, you know, if you've watched a lot of television shows, I don't know, Stargate, things like that, these are all filmed in southwest British Columbia. And we have a lot of really amazing wildlife, nature, great vistas. The people are super friendly and it's a very safe place to come and visit. And so if you're thinking like, man, what are some places that I'd like to go and take my family and travel and experience another culture, why don't you come check out Canada? Now, where I live on the west coast, it's all about mountains and rivers and mountain biking and skiing and whale watching and boating and fishing. But if you can go inland in British Columbia, the terrain changes. It's much more kind of mountainy and drier. But then you have places like Banff, which is just an unbelievable place to visit, where you see tons of wildlife, mountains just super tall all around you, incredible lakes, glaciers, rivers. And then go across Canada, go to Alberta, which has some incredible landscapes, the Prairie Provinces, Saskatchewan, Manitoba. Ontario, of course, has the largest population in Canada. Some of our sort of most interesting landmarks. You can go to Ottawa, where in the wintertime, the river that runs through the center of Ottawa freezes over and people can skate, ice skate to work. And then, of course, there's Quebec. You've got Montreal, which is a very European city. It stays up all night. The food is amazing. Really great atmosphere, great live music scene. Quebec City, which is sort of small and quaint, and it just sort of has this personality unlike any other city you'll ever go to. And then into the Maritime Provinces, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, where you could see icebergs floating by. You can go to the Bay of Fundy, see the highest tides in the world and just amazing places to go and get outside. And if you're feeling really adventurous, you can go to the north, go to the Yukon, go to Northwest Territories, Nunavut. Just incredible landscapes, really interesting adventures. Canada is a great place. And I've traveled all around the world. I've been to almost every continent except for Africa and Antarctica. But I still love Canada. I still love coming back. Now that I've seen the rest of the world, I choose to live here. And if you've ever thought of moving to a place like Canada, especially if you're in medicine, we could use more doctors, nurses, other health care professionals. There's tons of job openings, places safe, great place to raise your kids, good education. You might want to think about coming and moving to Canada. All right. Anyway, that's enough of a spiel about my wonderful country. We will see all of you next time.