What If We Had Another Earth Instead of The Moon? | Q&A 423

What would happen if we had another Earth as a binary companion? Will the Moon become the new ISS? Will humanity ever try panspermia? And in Q&A+, how to apply your coding skills for astronomy? 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 will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions. Dan Chamby, if the Moon was like a second Earth, would our space technology be way more advanced at this point? Yeah, absolutely. So if Earth was a binary planetary system, and you had two Earths that were orbiting around a common center of gravity, and they were going around the Sun, and they were identical, they were the same size, same mass, same gravity, same atmospheric composition, which would be tricky because, you know, our atmospheric composition comes from life. Then, and if there was life there, and life had maybe been spreading back and forth, panspermia-ing from Earth to other Earth and back and forth, then we, and only say an intelligent civilization, only humanity had evolved here on planet Earth, then we would absolutely be going there on a regular basis, because it would support human habitation. And the best example of this is like back in the age of exploration, you know, in the times of the 1400s, 1500s, people were sailing around the world, you had Magellan, they were going to these various places around the world on a little boat. And if they needed more food, they fished, or they stopped at a forest and they picked a bunch of stuff, or they stopped at a village and they purchased food, or stole it. If they need water, it rained on top of them, they needed to breathe, they just breathed, right? If they needed more trees to repair the ship, they could stop and get all the stuff they needed. So all of the supplies that they required were just there and available. We won't have any of that in spaceflight. Now there might be, you know, later on, our technology will allow us to pull in the resources that we require from some other world, whether we're going to use regolith for building material or whatever. But really, every place that we're going to want to go in the solar system is the worst parts of And we're going to have to live there. But if there was this other Earth right over there, vegetation, maybe shared a common ancestor, and we can get there. And then once you're there, then you can cut down trees and drink the water and, you know, introduce Earth's animals. Then we would turn this into the other Earth, and then there would be trade back and forth. Or at the very least, there would be people commuting back and forth from these two planets once you had a foothold. So it just comes down to are the places that you're going habitable, which they are not in the solar system. If they are habitable, then you can, then you have a toehold, then you can continue on and grow a civilization out of almost nothing. This is this is a thing that human beings are very good at. But we need to be able to just breathe, drink water, find food, mine metals, these are the things we need to be able to do. And right now, all space exploration is going to require us doing this stuff the hard way. Ray B, would there ever be a point where humans decide to try to panspermia on Mars? I mean, you could say that we've already tried to panspermia on Mars. Every time we send spacecraft to Mars, they're covered in Earth bacteria. And so we know that there are various forms of Earth bacteria, you know, they're hardy enough to withstand the process designed to kill them to get them off the spacecraft, and they radiate them to heat them, they cool them, they expose them to vacuum, and yet they then travel through space for a year, land on Mars, and they're still alive. And theoretically, if they find the kinds of conditions that would make them happy, they could restart and keep growing. So we've already done this, there are microbes from Earth that are asleep on Mars waiting for the right habitat to awaken and dominate the local ecosystem. So we already done a panspermia. But when people talk about these ideas of terraforming Mars, then that, you know, one big offshoot one flavor of that is that we use very hardy Earth life forms as a way to jumpstart the process of trying to make Mars more habitable, you want to thicken the atmosphere, you want to regulate the temperature, you're going to want to have life give you a hand with that. We have lichens, we have mosses, we have fungi, we have cyanobacteria, archaea, there's a lot of really extreme life forms that will get the process started. And then as conditions improve, then more and more life forms will be able to come online and be able to participate in this process. And so isn't that panspermia, right, where we are spreading Earth life intentionally to Mars to try and make the planet more livable. Would fungi grow in regolith? Yes. In fact, researchers are developing methodologies to build bricks on Mars out of regolith and fungi. So you would have a bioreactor on Mars, something that was brick shaped, and you would put into it various fungi, and you would put various growth factors for the fungi, you know, the food that the fungi needs, and it would grow its mycelium networks and would solidify this brick into this combination of brick of regolith and dried mycelium. And then you would be able to use this as a as a as building material. They've also have bioreactors they're building with, say, bacteria. So there's a lot of ideas on how we can use life to make things on Mars. So it's not just digging up bricks of regolith and baking it and then turning it into a building material. But actually, you could do because then you can do things like repair, you could have, you know, parts of your habitat are cracked, you can actually stimulate the the fungi in the wall to help repair it, which is pretty cool. So there have been neck awards donated or there have been neck awards that have been awarded for this kind of thing. So yeah, people are thinking about how we can use bacteria, fungi, other life forms to help aid in building construction materials and stuff on Mars and the moon. It's time to Larry Kamen, Jerry Adams, Sabina, Mehmet Yusuf, Daryl Schnepp, John Aschenbrenner, John Tomaras, Joe Rolfe, Kenny Chris, and Gene Libshin. Join the club at patreon.com slash universe today. Arjun, so is the moon supposed to become the new International Space Station, meaning there will eventually always be a group of astronauts doing experiments on the moon instead of in orbit? The hope is that we will have both that we will have a group of astronauts in orbit around the Earth at the International Space Station or some version like obviously the ISS will eventually come down, but there will be some version of a space station, then there will be a permanently inhabited base on the moon and there will be astronauts there and you can like look up at the I mean, it's really incredible that from when the International Space Station was launched until now, like it was 1999. Here we are 2026. Closing in on 30 years, there have always been people in space. Is that amazing? And so we will reach this point where there will always be people in space in orbit and there will always be people on the moon and there will always be people on Mars. And then eventually, there will always be people at Asteroid Station Alpha. And that'll just be incredible. You know, people always ask like, why didn't we go back to the moon? Like after we went there in the 1960s and 70s? Why didn't we go back? We didn't go back because it was too expensive because we didn't have the technology that priorities had shifted. And it wasn't the kind of thing that you could just fund and get on with the other things that were going on at the time. Now, even in a relatively small budget for NASA, something in the $25 billion range, if spent well, can allow you to do exploration out into the solar system. And so it's just, you know, we're seeing the rise of reusable technology, we're seeing the miniaturization, we're seeing international collaborations, there's just like a lot of cool things are lining up all at the same time together to make this work. TCAR 925, how much light illuminates the dark side of the moon? Where is it coming from? I forget the exact amount. So the first thing is to remember that, you know, we always talk about the dark side of the moon and the far side of the moon. So, you know, the side that we can see is the near side of the moon and the side that we can't see is the far side of the moon. And that is because the moon is tidally locked to us. And when people talk about the, I'll see you on the dark side of the moon, sometimes the dark side of the moon is the side that we can see because the moon is going through its 28 and a half day cycle, where it goes from light to dark, dark to light. And so when we're seeing a full moon, the light side of the moon is the near side of the moon, when we're seeing a new moon, then the dark side of the moon is the near side of the moon, the parts of the moon that are dark, they are illuminated, and they're illuminated by the Earth. And this is a thing called Earthshine. And this is that essentially, the light is coming from the sun, it's reflecting off of the Earth, and it is illuminating the moon, it is allowing us to see features on the moon, when it is in shadow. And there's this incredible photo of the Artemis 2 mission, where the astronauts took a picture of the Earth while the Earth was in shadow. It was nighttime on Earth. And yet it was being illuminated by the reflected light from the moon. And so you could see the continents and clouds and all of that purely from moonshine. Like normally, the moon's magnitude is minus 12.74. And that's when the moon is full. And that can change, right? Like depending on whether the moon is closer or farther to us in its orbit when it's full moon. And so the new moon, the reflected light from the Earth is magnitude minus three and a half. And that is very bright. When you think about that, you know, you can see down like the magnitude system goes negative number is so weird, but it's negative numbers to zero, and then goes to positive numbers. And so you can see with your unaided eye and perfectly dark skies, down to about magnitude six. And I think it's like every four increases in magnitude are 100 times as bright. So if you go from magnitude six to magnitude two, it's 100 times as bright, from two to negative two, which is very bright, man, so it's so complex, but essentially, it is very bright that minus three and a half is an extremely bright object, Venus is minus four. So the new moon is almost as bright as Venus, it's as bright as Jupiter, but it is expanded into the size of the moon, as opposed to this very bright point like object. But when Venus is up, you can cast shadows. 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, how can you apply your coding skills to astronomy? And I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those are all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you, everyone who put your questions into the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show. As I mentioned in the previous episode, this week, we are off for a couple of weeks with the live shows, but we'll still be producing a lot of content, I'm just going to be on the road. And so it'll be a different background for the introductions. But we've got lots and lots of material to still bring to you because we record so much. Now I'm going to give you an update on all of the shows that I have been watching. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, Brian Bode, Cara Dunn, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baila, Darkfinger, David Gilton, and David Matz, Enthraller Reading and Math for Toddlers, Eric Lindstrom, Evan.pro, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Schultz, Michael Purcell, Nordspace, OneStepAnimal.org. Please follow my nephew at vbrick6994, Ren Kaidou, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Fowler-Munley, Team49, TailslipsCanada, Vlad Shiblin, Wolfgang Klotz, and Zeldamore 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 it's time to give you an update and a roundup of all of the shows that I am watching across all of the things. So I'll give you the one that I'm most disappointed by first, and that is For All Mankind. And I have previously put For All Mankind onto my top 10 list of the best science fiction shows ever made. And I stand by that for the first few seasons of this from when they sort of, you know, when the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon, and then they sort of this leads to a new space race, the kind of thing that we as space nerds would love to see. And then you see the colonization, or like a station on the moon, and then you see humans going to Mars, and then a city on Mars. But this latest season, season five, it's just been kind of boring. And there's been a lot of people, the way I described it is just people walking down corridors on Mars. And it just hasn't been that great. Latest episode was pretty good that I watched. But so far, yeah, it's been disappointing. So if you've been holding off, you can just kind of chill and wait till the whole set is ready or wait next year. And then also on Apple TV, I finished off watching Monarch, which is the second season of this sort of in the Godzilla verse. And it's it's fine. It's okay. The shows that I really loved, we just wrapped up Invincible, which is definitely in my top 10 list on Prime. It's so good. And this season was just amazing. Man, Invincible is so good. And then also on Prime, we've got the final season of The Boys. And this latest season has absolutely been fire. I've just been really enthralled. Best season I think so far of the whole show. And it's really feels like it's coming to a conclusion. You can kind of see how it's all coming together. So highly recommend The Boys. And then just for nostalgia, I went back and watched a couple of movies with my wife that we hadn't seen in a long time to watch Dark City, which is this I can't even describe it. Watch Dark City. You'll love it. And the Iron Giant, which is just one of the best animated movies ever made about a giant robot and his best friend. So definitely check both of those movies out if you haven't seen them. All right. We'll see you next week.