The Next ISS, Europan Life, Heat Death of The Universe | Q&A 403

What are the plans for the next space station? What type of European life could Europa Clipper detect? Could we spot the rotation of our supercluster? And in Q&A+, is the Moon necessary for life? 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, we'll gather them up and I'll answer them here. All right, let's get to the questions. We select you. What are the plans for the next international space station? Yeah, so the International Space Station is due for deorbit before 2030, probably 2028, but maybe 2030. Even if it doesn't get deorbited, the Russians are expecting to detach their chunk of the station away from the main International Space Station. So whatever happens, by the end of the decade, the ISS is going to come down. The plan is to launch the Deep Space Gateway, the Lunar Gateway, as the replacement for the International Space Station. So astronauts will fly up to the Moon, essentially be in orbit near the Moon, and then be able to transfer from the Lunar Gateway down to the surface of the Moon and back. The Trump administration has been trying to cancel the Gateway. Congress has continued its funding. And so that is the plan. So right now, Artemis 2 is going to be the flyby around the Moon. Artemis 3 is going to be people landing on the Moon. The construction of the Deep Space Gateway will probably start around Artemis 4. So probably nearing the end of the decade, 2830, we should see the first module of the Deep Space Gateway become operational. But the United States will have no working space station in low Earth orbit. So the only one is going to be the Chinese Space Station. That said, there are a bunch of private companies. The one that seems furthest along is a really cool design. They've got this sort of modular design where they can just kind of add more modules and grow the space station kind of indefinitely, just sort of like this big disc that just gets bigger and bigger with more modules. So hopefully, we'll see the vast station launch before the International Space Station comes down. But right now, you know, I always say that private space exploration is a very expensive business, and there's not a lot of return on investment. And so any company that goes into this could lose everything, it could go bankrupt. And so really, launching a large space station requires the resources of a country, or a collaboration, an international collaboration of countries. Wayne R. 777able, what type of proliferation of life would we need to be present on Europa for the Europa Clipper to make a positive confirmation of discovery? So the Europa Clipper isn't designed specifically to detect the presence of life on Europa. And, you know, its job is to map the surface of Europa, to search for geysers on Europa, and specifically to measure the depth of the ice under the surface of Europa. Try and find pockets of water deep down. When does the ice end? If there is a subsurface ocean, when does that ocean begin? And Europa Clipper has the tools to be able to do that, to measure the magnetosphere, understand its interactions with Jupiter. But there are a couple of ideas that would get you some kind of stronger proof that there is life. One is the presence of various chemicals on the surface of Europa. And actually, we saw some evidence of this from the Galileo spacecraft that went to Jupiter, and it was able to image the surface of Europa and gave us a lot of the sort of modern thinking, showed us the very complex surface of Europa that seems very fresh. We don't see a lot of impact craters on Europa. And recently, astronomers detected the presence of various chemicals on the surface of Europa that could go hand in hand with life, organic molecules. They don't necessarily mean life, we see organic molecules everywhere. But that there is some kind of process that is making them fresh on the surface of Europa, that these chemicals should be blasted away by the radiation of space. And therefore, if you see them on the surface, then it has to be relatively fresh. The even better thing would be if Europa has geysers in the same way that Enceladus has geysers. Now, there's no evidence of this that we know of today, there's hints of geysers on Europa, but nobody has actually seen them. But if there are geysers on Europa, then we would probably see Europa Clipper doing the same thing that Cassini did with Enceladus, which is that it would fly through the plumes. And then astronomers would be looking for specific kinds of chemicals in the plumes of Europa. So you'd be looking for not only water coming from down below, you'd be looking for dissolved hydrogen in the water, which is essentially food for bacteria. And then you'd be looking for the kinds of chemicals that are associated with life, organic chemicals, things like that. But Europa Clipper does not have any way to really detect the presence of life beyond, you know, helping them figure out these chemicals are there. But people have proposed missions that would do exactly what you're talking about. More to Enceladus though, not to Europa. So people are proposing a spacecraft that would fly to Enceladus, would fly through the plumes at Enceladus, and would collect samples of the plumes, and then would have a lab on board the spacecraft that would digest the samples and search for any kind of evidence of life. And you might not find like, you know, life can come in all kinds of different ways. And so this is a sort of an ongoing discussion among astrobiologists is what is a good agnostic way of detecting the presence of life? How do you know life when you see it? Especially how do you know life that isn't anything like Earth life? What if it doesn't use DNA and RNA? All of our labs are designed to search for those kinds of things. And so it appears to be it's in complexity of the chemicals, that life tends to produce more complicated chemicals than non-life. And so if you flew through the plumes at Enceladus with your spacecraft, you then sort of examined all the chemicals that were found in this. If you seem to have a lot of complicated chemicals, that is a good indication that life is producing this, as opposed to, you know, volcanoes or geothermal vents under the surface on Enceladus. So we're still a long way. And really to get to Enceladus to actually see if there's life on Europa, you want to go under the ice. And that's going to require sinking down through the ice, melting through 10 kilometers plus of ice down into the ocean underneath. And then you swim around inside that and look for the European space whales. Dougal, if the entire supercluster of galaxies that we are a participant of was rotating, and we were rotating with it, is there a way that we could tell there's a rotation? Yeah, absolutely. Astronomers can tell the sort of independent movement of the Milky Way in the cosmos. The way you do that is you measure our movement compared to the cosmic microwave background radiation. We are moving at about 550 kilometers per second with respect to just the cosmic microwave background radiation. And you can also measure the rotation of the various things that we are a part of. We are part of the Virgo supercluster, we're part of the local group, we're part of the Virgo supercluster, we're part of the Laniakea supercluster, and these things are rotating. But it's really important to understand that while these things might be rotating, and they're going to take hundreds of millions, billions of years to fully rotate, that the expansion of the universe is tearing them apart. That really, any structure that is bigger than the local group, bigger than about, say, five million light years apart, is just going to be pulled away by dark energy into more little groups. So you sort of imagine we are actually bound gravitationally to Andromeda and M, the Triangulum Galaxy and a bunch of dwarf galaxies around us. And in the far, far future, these galaxies will eventually merge together into one giant elliptical galaxy. Although some people argue that Andromeda is actually not going to join us in the local group. But anyway, some combination of galaxies will join into this larger elliptical galaxy. And then the galaxies that are about more than five billion light years away from us, they are just moving too quickly, and they're going to be accelerated by dark energy, and it will go away from us. So at a certain point, it no longer makes sense to say things are part of an object. Like, yes, we are gravitationally bound to nearby galaxies, but we are not gravitationally bound to galaxies that are 10s of millions of light years away from us. We are gravitationally influenced by them, right? The movement of the Milky Way is changed by the gravity of those other galaxies, but we are not bound to them. And so eventually, they will move farther and farther away, they will be hundreds of billions of light years away, they will fall over the cosmic horizon, and there will be no evidence that they ever existed to future astronomers. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above. Universivo, Shobhana, Robert Millis, Rudy Hardy, Dawn, Jules Verne, Stephen Butcher, Michelle Connor, Chris Purtle, and Zonk13. Join the club at patreon.com slash universe today. We'll stack. We have to overcome the rocket equation to viably travel interstellar space. Is there an antimatter equation that would show a specific impulse delta v for, say, a proposed visit to Proxima C? The stars are really far away. And we want to be able to travel to another star system in a human lifetime if possible. In fact, we want to travel really quickly. I'm rewatching Stargate right now. And you want to just walk through the gate and come out on the other side on this other planet. That would be ideal. But warp drives would be fine. The hyperdrive in Star Wars is also fine. But right now, this incredible distance, all we have are chemical rockets. This sucks. Our current chemical propulsion systems can carry us to other stars. The Voyagers are on an escape trajectory out of the solar system. It'll just take them about 50,000 years to reach the nearest star system, say Proxima Centauri. And when engineers have looked at all of the options that we have available to us as ways of propulsion, you look at ion engines not fast enough, you look at even fusion rockets, fission rockets not fast enough, that there's really only two viable ways to be able to get to another star system. One is that you don't carry any propellant on board your spacecraft, that you are hitting a solar sail with a powerful laser or a series of lasers that are imparting energy momentum to the spacecraft that allow it to cross the distances. People have proposed that a laser sail could be accelerated within the solar system to say 10% speed of light, and then it would take 40 years to get to Proxima Centauri, wouldn't be able to slow down. So that's a whole other challenge. But maybe eventually you can imagine some far future where we've got a series of big lasers in the solar system and then a series of big lasers at Proxima Centauri. And then laser sails go down this chute, virtual chute, where the lasers speed them up and speed them up and speed them up. And then they coast from the sun to Proxima Centauri. And then the lasers on the other side shoot and shoot and shoot and slow these things down and put them into orbit around the planet at Proxima Centauri. That'd be cool. The other method is you carry propellant on board, but it is the most energy dense propellant that is really possible. Antimatter. And so you take antimatter, you take matter, you combine them and you get pure gamma ray energy, which you can then harness. You can fire the photons at the back of the rocket. You can use that to to heat up some kind of propellant and be able to fire that out the back of the rocket. Antimatter is the way. But antimatter is incredibly expensive. So last time I looked, it was like sixty five trillion dollars per gram for antimatter. And you would need a few kilograms to get to rapid velocities more. So we just don't have the antimatter production honors to be able to handle it. Could it work? Yeah, absolutely. You know, antimatter is the thing that if we put a huge amount of the world's energy production into making antimatter and then storing that antimatter and then putting that onto a spacecraft, we could accelerate a spacecraft to relativistic speeds and then slow it back down again. And that's the key to be able to slow it back down again. And so if you haven't already read Project Hail Mary, that's kind of what they did in Project Hail Mary. But the movie's coming out in March. So you'll be able to watch sort of what it would be like for the world to be throwing a huge amount of its energy into something like antimatter production to be able to allow a mission to be able to fly to another star system. So I can't do the math, but is there a specific impulse delta V? Yes, you can calculate the power of an antimatter rocket. Nit Stiles. I get confused with gravitational lensing. If we were to reach the gravitational lensing point of the Sun, what would we see? Would we only see objects directly behind the Sun magnified? Right. So this is the solar gravitational lens, which is located about 550 astronomical units away from the Sun. So you've got the Sun, the Sun's gravity is acting like a natural telescope lens. You know, we know that gravity distorts spacetime. And so as photons are going around the Sun, and they would be heading off into space, the gravity of the Sun bends them back and focuses them at that point, 550 AU. So what would you see? Well, it would look very similar to traditional gravitational lenses, where you have a foreground galaxy cluster that is lensing some background galaxy. And the galaxy has been turned into this kind of mushed arc that is around the galaxy. And sort of the most perfect ones are called an Einstein ring, where you actually get the central galaxy cluster that's providing the gravity. And then you get this ring that is around the galaxy. There aren't a lot of them, but they're really cool. And they're useful when astronomers find them. And so the light from this, this galaxy that would be pretty much invisible, has been magnified by by 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of times you get this, this bright ring around the foreground galaxy. And that's kind of what you would see with the solar gravitational lens, except the Sun is essentially a perfect looking sphere. And so while the galaxy cluster is this weird blobby thing made up of a whole bunch of different galaxies all orbiting around each other, the Sun is this sort of sphere. And so you would see an Einstein ring around the the Sun of the thing that is being lensed. But will you only see objects that are directly behind the Sun? Yes, you have to think have lined up your telescope perfectly with the thing that you're trying to observe. So it can't be off by any amount. And so that's why the solar gravitational lens mission, when it finally does launch, and oh, it had better launch, it will only be able to have one target that it will fly past the Sun, or fly on the sort of, you know, on the opposite side of the Sun at the solar gravitational lens. And it has to stay in this tiny little cone, as it moves farther and farther away from the Sun. And as long as it stays in that little cone, then it will be able to use the Sun as a telescope to see one target. One exoplanet, for example, is all that the solar gravitational lens will see. And there's like an infinite number of things that you could use the Sun to lens, you just have to put an infinite number of spacecraft at different locations. And they're all looking using the solar gravitational lens to observe them. Hangman, Tin Man, even at the heat death of the universe with systems like Jupiter and its Moon, Io still exists and their gravity interactions still generate heat. So eventually, like when you about the heat that's being generated on Io, it's a gravitational interaction between Jupiter and Io and the other European moons. And so over time, like vast periods of time, all of the orbital differences between all of the moons around Jupiter will eventually even out, that they will end up in a way that they're no longer causing these residences with each other, that will no longer cause these perturbations that is leading to the tidal flexing that's happening with Io. Even that will settle down over vast periods of time. And then in addition, the gravitational interactions will peel away the moons from Jupiter one at a time. You know, interactions with Saturn, their orbits will get farther, their interactions will get more complicated, moons will be peeled away, and eventually even Jupiter will no longer have moons, and the Sun will have no planets. I think it's like five trillion years, all of the planets will be stripped away from the white dwarf that was once the Sun, just through interactions with the Milky Way. And that over hundreds of trillions of years, all of the stars in the galaxy will be stripped away. So just nothing can hold over long periods of time. 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 that Q&A Plus. This week's bonus question, is the Moon necessary for life? And I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those are the questions that we had in this episode. Thank you, everyone who put your questions into the YouTube comments. Everybody who joined me for the two hour live stream that I do every Monday at some time zone around the world. I know it's complicated. There'll be the next event here on the channel. All right, I'm going to bring you up to speed with some new media. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, Baird Leigh Griffin, Brian Beaudry, Kerr Dunn, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bailock, Cooper and Allie, Darkfinger, David Gilton, David Matz, Evan Dodd Pro, Greg Feeley, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smits, Michael Purcell, Nord Space, OneStepForAnimals.org, Pearl Buck, Ren Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Fowler-Munley, Team 49, Telescopes Canada, Wolfgang Klotz, and Zeldaborg Galactic Defender, who support us at the Master of the Universe level, and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So last time I brought you up to date on some of the media that I have been consuming. I was reading the book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I finished that, and it's excellent, right to the very end. I really enjoyed that book, and I can't even explain why I liked it, because then it will spoil it. But trust me, it's a great series. Or I think, because I'm now reading the second book of the series, which is called Children of Ruin. I'll let you know how that goes, but I think it's already really good. So what a great series. Next up, we've been watching the series Monarch Legacy of Monsters, which is on Apple TV. And actually, we had sort of just passed on it the first time it came around, season one. And so we were able to just binge all of season one, and season two just came out. And so we watched the first episode of season two. Now we have to wait week by week to watch these episodes come out. I liked it. I liked season one anyway. Now my wife keeps complaining there's too much talking and not enough monsters. And I can see that, that we need more monsters rampaging around, and less people being moody about thinking about monsters. But still, it's a pretty good show. I like it. And to be honest, I'm kind of into this new Godzilla cinematic universe. You know, this sort of reboot of the Monsterverse. The first movie came out in 2014, and I really liked it. The sequel came out, Godzilla, King of the Monsters. And it was fine. I didn't make a lot of money at the box office, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to. I had some problems with the science. Like, how do you have a whole other world inside the world? Like, how does that work? But anyway, yeah, but the series is good. So if you're looking for something you can watch, that's another series. We're pretty deep into Starfleet Academy at this point, and I don't love it. I don't even kind of like it, which is too bad, because the premise was great. Like, imagine, you know, you've had to burn all of the different planets of the Federation, have been torn apart, and now they're having to kind of come together and learn to follow this sort of general spirit of the Federation. And yet these people have been living in who knows what kinds of civilizations. And there's all this chance for drama and sort of these feral cadets who grew up in these different worlds having to learn to try and work together with people who are ideologically different from them, and to re-establish the ideals of the Federation. But that's not what we get. Like, we got what does feel like sort of Star Trek CW, and that is disappointing to me. And it just feels like the show just doesn't have teeth. And, you know, like, I think like a lot of people have concerns about this. This is sort of like it's wokeness. And like, I have, like, I wish it was more woke, or less woke, or whatever. Like, I just wish it confronted me, and challenged me, and got weird. And, you know, because Star Trek always, like, holds a lens up to society at the time. And because a lot of the conversations that we need to have are too uncomfortable, and we've gone into our own silos, we're not having these conversations. Science fiction is a way that we can be presented with these ideas, except that people have, you know, funny makeup. And so you don't sort of see it, it's sort of like more palatable for you to then consider these ideas. And I think Star Trek could be taking on a lot of the most challenging issues that are confronting humanity right now and dealing with it in a way that shows paths forward, the Federation way. And that's how Deep Space Nine worked. And that's how, you know, a little bit the original show worked. And so it would be great if Star Trek Academy did that, but they're not doing that. I mean, like, obviously, I'm contractually obligated to watch everything Star Trek ever made. We all are. But still, I wish I liked it more. Finally, a new Path of Exile League starts on Friday. And so I couldn't be more excited. It If I just fall off the face of the earth, that is why. All right. We'll see you next time.