La luna de los 400 volcanes： Ío, el hijo de fuego

Beyond the asteroid belt, the empire of the king of the planets, Jupiter, emerges. A colossal world that governs its own stirpe. More than 90 moons dance obediently around the giant. But among all of them, there is one that defies the wildest imagination. A place whose surface, tortured by the gravity of the father to which it orbits, never remains silent. Condemned to host the flames of hell. A world consumed by fire. In worlds where the rock breaks under the tyranny of a giant, knowledge is the only thing that remains. The only thing capable of going through eras, extinctions and renaissance. Because in the end, all civilization is based on the stories it decides to preserve. And speaking of knowledge, I want to show you something that I love about collecting, I think it's really a jewel. The people of Hungry Minds have sent me this. The Book, the definitive guide to reconstructing civilization. And they sponsor today's video because I really think they've done something unique. The Book is a work of art in the form of a book, literally. A collection piece built in 23 chapters, as a journey through everything that has defined humanity. Ancient civilizations, architecture, medicine, animals, agriculture, social organization, science, construction of utensils. And each of those more than 400 pages is accompanied by incredible illustrations, all hand-made, nothing IA, that make you get fully into each chapter. A book of those that you open after a long day on any page and you end up caught by a story, an invention or an idea. More than a book to study, it is a book to enjoy calmly. And the quality is so good, it feels and looks so good, that it is the jewel of the crown of your shelf. A project born from Kickstarter, now a bestseller. And it is also useful. If you like to learn at home, if you are curious to know how the tools and utensils that have brought us here were made, or if you want to teach your children in a visual and pleasant way, this book is perfect. What I have enjoyed the most is the chapter about optics, where they even explain how to build a mirror. Something that we have all asked ourselves at some point. Because Hungry Minds, and especially this work, is born from those innocent but so important questions that we ask ourselves when we are children. The more than 50 professionals who made it, turned curiosity into scientific research, history and, above all, art. A book to open when you need inspiration, to remember how far our species has come, and to imagine what we could rebuild if one day everything disappeared. If you want it for yourself or as a gift for someone who likes collectivism, in the description of the video and in the pinned comment you have the link with my promotional code. I hope that those of you who buy it enjoy it as much as I am doing. So thank you very much to Hungry Minds and The Book War for sponsoring the content. And now, we leave you with the video. When Voyager 1 left our world, it had engraved a destiny. To cross the borders of the Empire of the Sun and get lost in the lands between the stars. 546 days later, it reached the first of its goals. It had reached the kingdom of the giant. During the approach, it captured thousands of images of the planet and its moons. The look of the ship was deposited in Io, the closest Galilean satellite to Jupiter. A moon that, since its discovery in 1610, we considered a dead land. A world covered by strange colors, but without atmosphere or signs of geological activity. But in one of those photographs, taken when it flew over it 20,000 kilometers away, something impossible appeared. An arch, suspended next to the edge of the satellite. It was not an optical failure. It was not another moon, letting itself be seen on its horizon. It was a column of volcanic material, rising hundreds of kilometers towards the void. For the first time in history, we saw volcanic activity outside the Earth. Voyager had revealed the secret of a tiny world that possessed hundreds of active volcanoes. About 400, according to estimates. A living surface, devoured by hell, marked by lava rivers, burning lakes and eruptions on a difficult scale to conceive. The most colossal of them, Loquipatera, was not a simple volcano. 21,000 square kilometers of a sea of fire. A lava lake, 200 kilometers in diameter. So extensive, so powerful, that molten rock waves sail through its surface. But the truly disturbing thing was not to discover that hell. It was to understand that its own existence made no sense. And that the fires should be fed by the giant that dominates its skies. The scale of Nile volcanism is difficult to understand. There are more than 400 active volcanoes in a world no larger than our Moon. Something that means that the origin of those volcanoes cannot be the same as ours. Here on Earth, volcanism mainly comes from, in addition to the radioactive decay around the core, the internal heat that is still preserved from its formation. In Io, this cannot be so. Such a small world would have to be completely cold. The heat that was trapped inside it was lost billions of years ago. The energy that feeds its volcanoes has to come from elsewhere. Jupiter is the most massive planet in the solar system, about 300 times the mass of Earth. Its gravitational field is, by contrast, the most powerful of all the planets. And Io, so close to it, is the direct target of all that gravitational tyranny. The orbit of Io around Jupiter is not perfectly circular. It is elliptical. This means that in a 42-hour cycle, which is what takes to complete a lap, it will have approached the world a lot and then it will have moved away. This is introducing extremely violent tidal forces. The process is fundamentally the same that explains the tides here on Earth, caused by the difference in gravitational attraction between the closest part to the Moon and the farthest, which causes the water of the world to move towards our satellite. If the Moon is able to do that with us, moving entire oceans, with Io, Jupiter is able to deform the entire world. The tidal forces stretch and compress the Moon constantly, generating tidal waves of rock that move the crust of the world about 100 meters in each cycle. A cycle that lasts 42 hours. That repeated vibration, of dilation and contraction, produces enormous friction inside Io, and the friction generates heat. It is gravity that feeds the volcanoes of Io. The heat generated by the friction of the tidal forces of Jupiter maintains a melted interior, probably with oceans of magma under its surface, that roars through the volcanoes of that hell, embodied in a moon. In all the scar on his skin, tortured by the heat of his heart, lava will emerge with the fury of the gods. In the infrared photos of Io taken this last year, we see hot spots that light up and go out. We see volcanoes, but we also see a heat that radiates into space. Part of the heat that is generated in its depths is being lost into space. It is logical, but it ceases to be so when we take into account that if you eliminate energy from an elliptical orbit, it becomes more and more circular. And if the orbit were circular, then the heat from the tide, which depends on that ellipsis, would disappear, and the volcanoes would go out. If everything depended only on Io and Jupiter, then Io could not look like this. Something different. It also had to be feeding hell. Like a pilgrim who surrounds a colossus, waiting to understand his secrets, since 2016, NASA's Yuno probe has been orbiting around Jupiter. The mission that would transport us to the kingdom that hides behind the clouds of the king of the planets, that would navigate the fiercest environment of the solar system, that would patrol the skies of a giant, with the hope of contemplating his heart, and that would follow the disturbing brightness of the corrupted son. On February 3, 2024, Yuno made the closest approach to Io, in an overflight to less than 1,500 km from its surface, caressing the fire of its skin, of the monsters of molten rock that govern it. Its infrared camera gave us those instants that reminded us that the gravity of Jupiter is not enough to preserve the anger of its volcanoes. And all the gazes led to the same place, to the two sisters with whom it shares the same ocean of gravity. In astronomy there is something known as orbital resonance, a phenomenon in which two or more celestial bodies interact gravitationally because their orbital periods keep a relationship of whole numbers. Io navigates in orbital resonance with two of the other Galilean satellites, Europa and Ganymede. These three moons are in a resonance of 1, 2, 4. For each round of Ganymede around Jupiter, Europa gives exactly 2 and Io 4. This perfect synchrony makes the three moons periodically align and exert a gravitational influence on themselves that, in the case of Io, prevents the orbit from circling again. The influence of its sisters is replenishing the lost energy. It maintains the ellipsis and the internal furnaces lit. Juno had arrived at the doors of the giant to study the origin of its magnetic field, but his attention deviated for a while towards a phenomenon that had disconcerted us for decades. Jupiter's auroras. Larger, more intense than those of our world. A show, hidden in the ultraviolet, which, however, could not be explained by the influence of the Sun, too far to be responsible for those lights. The probe then discovered that the auroras were not distributed uniformly. There were hot areas, regions in which huge amounts of particles were impacting the atmosphere of the giant. A bombardment of radiation emitted from somewhere that was igniting the colossus' invisible lights. And when the scientists from Earth reconstructed the path of those particles, the trail did not lead to the Sun. It led them to that little world of rock and fire. The origin lay in the great hell of the solar empire. In Io, each of the eruptions was throwing material hundreds of kilometers into the void. In a world almost without atmosphere, the feathers can rise as pillars that extend into the abyss and that the weak gravity of the Moon cannot contain. That December 27, 2024, Juno captured the most colossal volcanic eruption ever recorded in history. In the southern hemisphere of the world, a volcano had released an energy six times higher than the production of all the electrical plants on Earth combined. About 80 trillion watts of thermal energy radiated. That was when we understood it. That material thrown from its depths with so much violence could not disappear without more. Its fire could not vanish into the void of space. It had to return to the arms of the Father who lies on the horizon. The particles that Io expels are trapped by Jupiter's magnetic field, accelerated by its invisible lines, and move at an immense speed until they precipitate over the skies of the giant. In its clouds, it triggers the reactions that generate its auroras. Io's volcanoes feed the light of Jupiter. Father and son are joined by an invisible thread. The bowels of the Moon melt, tormented by the inevitable gravity of the colossus. But that same energy, after being released by the volcanoes that roar on its surface, returns to the King, turned into a show of lights. Io is the only world besides ours in which we have seen molten rock sprout from the scars on his skin. A world trapped by the tyranny of a Father who guards and molds it through forces that surpass everything we know here on Earth. A world that is doomed to burn, that is built and destroyed at the pace of gravity. It is the hell of the solar system. A son of fire that boils under the gaze of his Father. The living proof that even in the most remote places where light and the heat of the sun can barely breathe, that invisible architect can light the bowels of the worlds. And while he remains trapped in that dance, while his sisters keep him in the place where the fires germinate, he will continue to be what he is today. A lava kingdom suspended in eternal night. A world that reminds us that even in the dark, monsters can roar.