Weird 3I/ATLAS, Weird Saturn Storm, Weird Space News | Q&A 362

What's going on with the weird comet ThreeI Atlas? What's going on with the weird storm on Saturn? And how do you know which space news to trust? And in Q&A plus the best space documentaries ever made. 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. William Halman, what are your thoughts on threei Atlas and the chances of it being not natural? In the most recent space bites, uh I was talking about three Atlas and I was saying that, you know, it's a comet and what's it going to do? It's going to behave like a comet. It will continue to behave like a comet until it leaves the solar system. And and then I had a bunch of people in the YouTube comments tell me that I was being uh ridiculous. Um how can I know that it's a comet? That that is not a very scientific argument to say with 100% certainty that this is nothing other than a comet. And that is absolutely right. That for me to say with absolute certainty that that thing is a comet is closing off the possibilities that it is not a comet. and that it could be something else, you know, not natural, but like it could be artificial or it could do something really weird. And so there is always a possibility that that the thing that you're looking at is not what is most likely. And so this comes down to probabilities. Um, you know, the example is you go out and you buy a lottery ticket and that there are uh, you know, your chances of winning the lottery are one in 500 million. And so, are you going to win the lottery? Probably not. Are you certain to not win the lottery? No. There is a chance that you could win the lottery. But if you were a betting person, you would bet that you're not going to win the lottery because the chances are very low. So that is the sort of situation that we find ourselves in and that is the same thing to which I'm approaching and which the scientific establishment is approaching comet 3i Atlas which is that we have experience with comets. We have seen thousands of them of of you know that do comedy things. They pass down into the inner solar system. They grow a tail. They have a coma. Various volatile chemicals start to spew off of them. You're able to measure their carbon dioxide ratios, their carbon monoxide ratios, their nickel to iron ratios, cyanide amounts and quantities, as well as their water, silicon. Like you can get a sense for what these things are made of because they are spewing these chemicals into space. and the the time in their orbit or their you know what the farther away they are from the sun the less of these chemicals that they are producing and then as they get closer and closer to the sun the more of these chemicals they produce because they're getting hotter and so if you sort of imagine that the outside of the common is covered in a bunch of different kinds of chemicals and then each chemical has a point where enough temperature will cause it to sublimate and blast off into space and that gives you a chance to sort tell exactly what this comet is mostly made out of. And of course, in addition to us being able to analyze the chemical composition of probably hundreds of these comets that have come from the or cloud, we've also had the chance to study many comets that are repeat visitors. So, Haley's comet. And then we have even had a chance to go and do a flyby through a comet tail with the Stardust mission and even issa's Rosetta mission has gone into orbit around a comet 67P. And so we have plenty of examples of comets. We also know a lot about asteroids. We have examined again we know of a million asteroids in this in the solar system. So we have this understanding of the kinds of objects. We understand how orbits work. We understand how movement works. And then we have experience with three interstellar objects. Omoa Borosov and now comet 3i Atlas. And you can extrapolate these this understanding of the motions of objects both for what we see with the long period comets as they come into the solar system and they follow these very specific orbits. They generate their tails. They generate multiple tails depending on how far away they are from the sun and what kinds of chemicals are in them. They developed this coma. Borosov did that was weird but not like spaceship weird just didn't come from the solar system weird. And now Atlas is doing its own version of weird but again not spaceship weird just didn't come from the solar system weird. So the ratios of carbon dioxide to other chemicals in its coma are much higher. Has a lot more carbon dioxide and that this carbon dioxide started to sublimate a lot earlier than you normally expect. It started to produce its coma a lot earlier which means that it has a lot of chemicals that are more easily sublimated when it's farther away from the sun. The ratio of the carbon monoxide is different than than what you would expect. And then the ratios of nickel and iron that are mixed in with it. And of course, comets aren't just balls of snow. They are dirty rocky snowballs where they've got some amount of water, other volatiles mixed in, as well as material that's kind of like soot, carbon compounds, various organic chemicals. They also have silicon uh chemicals, you know, rocks, and then they also have various metals mixed in with them. And a lot of these metals like the iron and nickel and other metals are often connected with organic molecules with carbon molecules on the outside of these comets. And so this is why people are talking about the nickel to iron ratio is that at a certain point when the comet heats up these chemicals sublimate and you are able to measure the presence of iron or nickel in the coma around the comet. And so, comet 3i Atlas, interstellar object 3i Atlas is doing all of these things. It is following with mathematical precision the hyperbolic orbit that it has been following all the way in so far. We've been seeing it since July 1st and now here we are middle of October and it is still following with mathematical precision the laws of gravity, Newtonian gravity as it is falling towards the sun. It's going to reach its parhelion at the end of October. And so now you've got to say is it a spaceship or is it a comet? And the the proper scientific way to say that is there is no way to know with 100% certainty whether it is a spaceship or whether it is a comet. But you can analyze all of the evidence that has been gathered so far about this its movement, the kinds of chemicals, the way it's produced a coma, the way it's produced a tail, and say that is behaving very cometlike and is very similar to the other objects that we have seen. or it is a spaceship. But the thing is that we have no examples of alien spaceships to compare it to. Do alien spaceships have this ratio of nickel versus that ratio of titanium versus what kinds of signals do alien spaceships tend to send to us? We don't know. And so so far we're not getting any signals from it. um the ratios of the various chemicals are in some cases a little out of whack, but that's the what you might expect from an object that came from another solar system. And again, you know, I always say I'm I'm just a journalist. I'm not a scientist. And so I read the papers. I read the science papers that are coming out every day. There are about a hundred science papers that have come out on comet 3i Atlas. 98 of them are talking about it has a coma. Here's the pictures that we took. Here's the movement. You know, what star systems did it pass in the in its history? Where in the Milky Way did it probably originate from? What are our chances to be able to take images of it when it goes past Mars, when it goes past Jupiter, uh, and so on. And then there's like one paper that says it could be an alien spaceship. And it goes through a whole bunch of stuff that says here's why it's weird. And then at the in the last chapter it goes and we can't rule out that it's an alien spaceship. Right? But you can say that about anything. You I can't rule out that my car is an alien spaceship. I can't rule out that my house is an alien spaceship. I can't rule out that that YouTube is an alien spaceship. Right? Because when it can do anything, right? Can the alien spaceship that looks like my car pretend to be like a car? Yes. Can I plug in the alien spaceship to recharge its battery? Yes. Can I put tires on the alien? Of course you can. Right. And then all kinds of other things like when the explanation can do anything then it actually offers no predictive powers at all. It gives you it is no explanation. And so this is where we're at. And so when you look at the, you know, the people who are saying that that this is a spaceship, you know, again, there's a chance can't be we can't rule it out. You know, we must not be close-minded. But then you have to say what is the preponderance of the evidence? What is the evidence that you are using to make the compelling case that this is a spaceship? And and so far the case that people are making kind of sounds made up in many cases, you know, when they're talking about stuff or they are taking something that is has been legitimately discovered and then are extrapolating it to where it shouldn't go, right? Why does it produce a tail? Well, you know, the alien spaceship could be having some kind of tail to cloak itself so that it makes people think that it's a comet so it can take close-up pictures or when it goes behind the sun, then it can change its trajectory and do something really sneaky and crafty. Right? We're going to have this conversation every single time there's an interstellar object until we're bored of it, until we're at our thousandth interstellar object. And they've all done exactly what interstellar objects have all done. And we've learned a tremendous amount about other star systems and none have exhibited an alien spaceship behavior. And yet, as I mentioned in in another previous video, the most likely way for an advanced civilization to spread from star to star is to send robotic spacecraft from star to star. That they go into these stars, they go to the asteroid belt, they build more copies of themselves, they go to the star systems. like that is, you know, when you sort of do the the thought experiment of how that might go down, that makes a ton of sense. So, I think I am ready to be wrong. I can't wait to be wrong, but if I was just going to like go and place my bets, place my odds, it's a comet. An interstellar comet. Isn't that wonderful enough? It's time to shout out our new patrons of the $5 level and above. Techaron, Julie Kelly, Januz Yosephine, James Holden, Tom Weights, Scott Schulter, Colin Houseworth, Mark Van, Richmon, and Kurt Milholland. Join our community at patreon.com/universe today. Sean Young, are there any photos of ThreeI Atlas? There have been a whole bunch of photos of three Atlas uh taken over the last couple of months. I'd say probably 10 observatories have gotten into the fund. The best image would have come from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, but then the government shutdown happened and I don't know if they were allowed to go into work and to schedule taking the pictures. But the European Space Agency has the Mars Express spacecraft and they're able to take pictures. So, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next couple of weeks we're going to see some pictures from at least Mars Express, hopefully from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. like, oh, what a tragedy if because of the shutdown, we weren't able to get pictures when it made its closest approach. But then we're going to get some other chances when it goes past Jupiter, although Juno might have been shut down. W Robert Shaw, can you explain why there's a huge hexagon storm on Saturn partially? You can actually do this experiment if you have like a science center. Uh the one that I had in Vancouver had this. There was one in Seattle that did this as well where you have this sort of disc that you turn and inside of it there's sand and some fluid and when you spin it you get these weird shapes that are very kind of hexagonal shapes. And so the effect that's happening on Saturn is probably something that's very similar that you've got rotating storms that are able to go all the way around on Saturn. And the way these cloud decks interact with each other sets up these standing waves that have this this interesting hexagonal shape. And I think there's one on Jupiter as well. Like it's it's a thing that keeps getting repeated. Paige Potter, how do you decide which cosmic mysteries to treat with awe and which to treat with skepticism? For this, I probably have to follow Dr. Paul Sutter's answer for that, which is that if it's interesting, it's probably wrong. So, a lot of the times when some kind of outlandish claim is made, my first instinct is to be skeptical about it. that you know people were talking about. Do you remember the mock drive or the EM drive that came out a couple of years ago? Is it weird how that didn't go anywhere? Right? Or when uh people thought that maybe nutrinos go faster than the speed of light or room temperature superconductor, right? Like these are the big things that people are hoping for. And yet we have to be skeptical about them because you know if it's interesting it's probably wrong that it's more likely that we're going to have the incremental process progress or the result of a big experiment. You know when we got the first images from the uh the event horizon telescope, right? like people had gone and built a telescope that was bigger than anyone had ever used before. Literally turning planet Earth into a telescope and then used it to take pictures of an event horizon around a black hole for the first time and we saw the results you know the shadow of the event horizon of the black hole for the first time. So when James Web came online then we saw new things that we had never seen before because the new powerful new telescope. uh when the LISA mission comes online, we will probably detect the mergers of super massive black holes for the first time. So those I'm not as skeptical about, but when there are claims that are kind of amazing, my first instinct is to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's wait for more confirmation. 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. And this week's bonus question, what do I think are the best space documentaries ever made? I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those are all the questions that we had this week. Thank you everyone who asked your questions in the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show that we record every Monday. Now, by the time you're watching this, the next live stream is going to be on Monday at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time. So, if you want, come and join us live. There should be an event here on the channel so you can be notified when it's going to happen and or watch it afterwards. All right, I'm going to talk about the new media that I am watching right now. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Barely Griffin, Brian Bod, Kedwin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bale, Sign Nelson, David Varboff, David Gilton, David Mats, Evan Pro, Great Greg Phy, Hudson Ward, James Clark, Jimmy Matter, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smiths, Michael Pcell, Monzo, Onestep for Animals.org, or Paul Robbach, Rank Haidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sergeant, Steven Father, Munley, Team49, Telescopes Canada, Vlad Shiplin, and Wolf Gang Clots who support us at the master of the universe level and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So, I am still voraciously looking for uh science fiction related content to be able to watch. And so, now I'm watching stuff that's a little weirder and more out there. And so the first thing that I want to share is like the most treasured thing that I found recently. And this is a French movie called Mars Express. And it's animated. And it tells the story of a PI and her robot partner. And they're trying to chase down a hacker and her robot partner. And once they've chased her down, then they are realized that there's this sort of larger conspiracy going on having to do with robots and uh artificial intelligence and organic life forms. And it very much has this sort of Bladeunner expanse uh Aon Flux Ghost in the Shell vibe to it. And uh all of the technology is cool, the action scenes are cool. It was just terrific beginning to end. I couldn't believe that I had never run across this earlier. So, highly recommended. And then the next movie that we watched that I really enjoyed is called Dead Talents Society. And this is a movie that's on Netflix here in Canada anyway. Um, and it's a Taiwanese movie and it's kind of a I describe it as a cross between What We Do in the Shadows and Monsters Inc. So there are ghosts and the ghosts are sort of kept in reality by the uh by being remembered by their families or people are giving donations or are making offerings to them. But they can also survive by scaring people. And so the most elaborate, most effective ghosts will uh will have a chance of surviving long enough. And so because of this, there's like whole social media among the ghosts. They're attempting to create more and more elaborate productions to scare people. And so all of the horror stories that we see with having to do with ghosts, they're in fact these complex productions put on by teams of ghosts to try to boost their scariness and uh and try to be able to survive longer in the real world. And so uh it's very funny, lots of of great comedy. It's, you know, it's not very scary, but I I really really enjoyed it. So, two movies for you to watch. Mars Express and Dead Talent Society.