Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / DKEU Listener Questions Volume #3

Transcript

DKEU Listener Questions Volume #3 · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Hello friends. One of my favorite parts of co hosting
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: this podcast with Daniel is that it's given me the
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: chance to meet and interact with a bunch of you.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: I've really enjoyed learning about your backgrounds, your interests, and
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: some of you have cracked me up in some of
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: the emails. You're a funny bunch, and in particular, I
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: love getting your questions. Y'all ask some incredible questions and
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: often there are questions I had never thought about before,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: and Daniel and I love that we get to find
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: answers to questions that keep you up at night. So
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: today Daniel and I are going to tackle three questions
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: that we've received from listeners. And we take the responsibility
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: of finding answers to your questions quite seriously. So after
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: we have an answer to these questions recorded, we check
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: back with the listeners to see how we did with
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: the answers. Essentially, we let you all grade us, and
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: if we fail to give a clear answer, we're gonna
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: try again, and in this way you all can help
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: us learn how to explain things even more clearly. So
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: thank you. If you want to send us a question,
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: you can either join us on our discord channel or
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: you can send us an email at questions at Daniel
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: and Kelly dot org. We hope to hear from you,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: and welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: I'm Daniel, I'm the particle physicist, and I love getting
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: your questions.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites, and as you already
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: know from the opening, I love getting your questions too.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: Do your kids ask you science questions you can't answer? Kelly?
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So my daughter asked me a good science
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: question that I sent to you the other day, so
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: I know the right people. And every once in a
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: while she will ask a question that's like at a
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: very deep level of why, and I won't know the
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: answer and she'll stump me sometimes. But she also doesn't
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: like talking to me about biology too much because she knows,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: which is such a bummer. But uh, is that.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: Because your answers are too long? Is that why?
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: That's exactly why it is. That's exact exactly why we
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: have Yeah, oh yeah. Do your kids ask you questions
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: you can't answer?
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: They do sometimes ask me questions I can't answer, but
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: they always stopped me after a few sentences and Hazel's
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: favorite line is like, I didn't ask for a college lecture.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, your dad's a college professor. That's what you're
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: going to get.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: And your mom too, Yeah, that's right, what do you expect?
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: But it's fun. I love their questions, and I love
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: the challenge of trying to answer it within that teenager
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: attention span of like six seconds.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: It certainly forces you to be succinct and clear. It's good,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: it's good fortice, yes exactly, but it's not naturally how
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: I roll. But that's okay because with at least twenty
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: minutes to answer each one of these questions, so we
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: can go ahead and get into a nice bit of detail.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Our first question is you know exactly the kinds of
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: amazing questions that I hadn't thought of ahead of time,
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: but I love getting a chance to think about. So
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: the first one is about you know, soil on Mars
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: and what makes soil? And I just thought this was
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: such a fantastic question, but I didn't know the answer.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: And so it's also a great chance to bring a
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: friend on the show.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: Hello, Daniel and Kelly.
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  Speaker 3: After two Mars episodes, a question or two popped in
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  Speaker 3: my brain Mars does not have soil now, but if
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: that was live a long time ago on Mars, could
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: there be soiled deeper down in the ground. Also, if
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: they used to be like on Mars, could that have
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: created oil deep on the ground. Can single cells produce
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: oil or do we need at least bigger life than that?
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: Thank you for the podcast, Kind to your guards.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Yost Okay, So this sounds like a geology question, and
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: lucky for me, I have a geology friend. He was
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: my poraranteine buddy in the pandemic. So we're bringing onto
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: the show Callen Bentley, who's an associate professor of geology
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: at Piedmont Virginia Community College and he's co author of
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: the free online textbook Historical Geology. Callen, what's up?
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  Speaker 4: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: We're happy to have you here. So I read this
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: question and I remembered that I had a conversation with
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: you once about what's the difference between regolith and soil?
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: And I think I remember you just sighed and walked
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: away or something. It was something like my sense was that, oh,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: these it's just jargon, But so what can you tell
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  Speaker 1: me what is the difference between soil and just dirt
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  Speaker 1: and regolith.
• 4:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so dirt doesn't really have a scientific meaning, but
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  Speaker 4: regolith does and soil does. And the difference between them
• 4:49
  Speaker 4: is that soil has organic matter in it, which we
• 4:53
  Speaker 4: call humous here on this planet, not to.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: Be confused with the delicious dip with the heeny in it.
• 4:59
  Speaker 4: That's right, That is hummus, and there is a difference
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  Speaker 4: of one m here on Earth. Humus gets added from
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  Speaker 4: the top. So basically, like this time of year, the
• 5:09
  Speaker 4: leaves are dropping off of many of the trees in
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  Speaker 4: the northern hemisphere, and that's basically a rich source of
• 5:14
  Speaker 4: organic matter and that drops onto the soil and those
• 5:18
  Speaker 4: leaves fall apart or they get tugged underground by earthworms
• 5:22
  Speaker 4: and basically get mixed in with the rock, fragments and
• 5:27
  Speaker 4: mineral grains that make up the other sort of solid
• 5:30
  Speaker 4: bulk of the soil. It's important to realize that soil
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  Speaker 4: actually consists of, you know, solid stuff, but also a
• 5:35
  Speaker 4: lot of empty space which can be filled with either
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: air or water depending on whether you're in a drought
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  Speaker 4: or it rained recently, or how deep you are on
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  Speaker 4: the soil. So you know, if you went and looked
• 5:47
  Speaker 4: at the Apollo astronauts' footprints on the Moon, those are
• 5:52
  Speaker 4: in regolith because there's no organic matter on the Moon.
• 5:56
  Speaker 4: We don't know about, you know, sort of thet of
• 6:00
  Speaker 4: Mars as well as we know about the Moon, because
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  Speaker 4: we haven't been there and picked up samples and you
• 6:04
  Speaker 4: know it brought them back, and you know, we've done
• 6:06
  Speaker 4: a few sort of remote experiments. But the sort of
• 6:09
  Speaker 4: mechanism of folding organic material into the you know, putative
• 6:14
  Speaker 4: Martian soil would seem to be lacking and so at
• 6:18
  Speaker 4: least in the present day now if it existed in
• 6:20
  Speaker 4: the past. You know, that's I suppose a possibility if
• 6:23
  Speaker 4: Mars had a thicker atmosphere in the past and a
• 6:25
  Speaker 4: more pronounced greenhouse effect, you know, perhaps there was life
• 6:29
  Speaker 4: there in the terrestrial realm at that time that could
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: produce organic material and add it to the regulith and
• 6:36
  Speaker 4: turn it into soil. And it is indeed possible, as
• 6:39
  Speaker 4: the listener asks, that those old soils could be buried
• 6:43
  Speaker 4: under subsequent sedimentary layers, perhaps with zero organic content. We
• 6:48
  Speaker 4: have examples of buried soils here on Earth. We call
• 6:51
  Speaker 4: them paleo sols, and there are a lot of examples
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  Speaker 4: of them. They have various characteristics that are signatures of
• 6:58
  Speaker 4: the conditions under which they formed, just like sedimentary rocks
• 7:01
  Speaker 4: contain signatures of the circumstances under which the sediments accumulated.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: Do you make soil in the surface and then it
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: can get buried And so you're saying, if you had
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: life a long time ago, you would have made soil,
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: and then life all died out, you continue to make layers,
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  Speaker 2: and that buries the old soil into is that paleosoil.
• 7:18
  Speaker 4: Paleo soal? So they drop the eye. Yeah, soils are
• 7:22
  Speaker 4: a little bit weird. They call the soils themselves by
• 7:25
  Speaker 4: these names that all end in sols, like arit asols
• 7:29
  Speaker 4: and gelisols, and I don't know a bunch of them.
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  Speaker 4: Soil scientists are really into classifying things. They've like organized
• 7:36
  Speaker 4: all of the planet Earth's soils into like nineteen thousand
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  Speaker 4: soil orders or soil series, and then those are grouped
• 7:43
  Speaker 4: into like a dozen or maybe fourteen soil orders. Honestly,
• 7:47
  Speaker 4: it's not my area of expertise. The main thing that
• 7:50
  Speaker 4: seems to be a driver for my sort of basic
• 7:54
  Speaker 4: level understanding is that the climate really controls what sort
• 7:57
  Speaker 4: of soil you get in a given area. So soils
• 8:01
  Speaker 4: and deserts tend to be really jacked up in terms
• 8:03
  Speaker 4: of their evaporate mineral content because water gets wicked through them,
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  Speaker 4: carrying material in solution, and then that gets precipitated as
• 8:11
  Speaker 4: the water goes into the atmosphere, So they tend to
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  Speaker 4: be very hard and calcareous. Soils in the tropics tend
• 8:18
  Speaker 4: to be really clay rich because the most common mineral
• 8:21
  Speaker 4: in the crust of the planet, feltzbar rots underwarm, wet
• 8:24
  Speaker 4: conditions and it makes clay, so you get these bright
• 8:27
  Speaker 4: red iron oxide stained clay rich tropical soils.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: So Mars has red soils like that. Is there any
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: similarity there or am I just reach in.
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  Speaker 4: There's definitely oxidized iron in the what I would call
• 8:40
  Speaker 4: regolith and sedimentary rocks of Mars. So yeah, that's a
• 8:46
  Speaker 4: similarity that the iron there reacted with oxygen. And under
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  Speaker 4: what circumstances that occurred. I couldn't tell you whether that
• 8:53
  Speaker 4: was in the open air, you know, whether it was submarine,
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: or whether it was you know, in a fresh water system,
• 8:58
  Speaker 4: or whether it was underground due to ground water. You know,
• 9:00
  Speaker 4: there's a lot of possibilities there.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: How much do we know about the surface of Mars.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, I know we've had rovers there for decades
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: and they like pick up rocks and they drill into them.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: But half far like down, have we dug into Mars?
• 9:12
  Speaker 4: Not far? Yeah, there was an attempt a few years
• 9:15
  Speaker 4: back to you know, basically drill the deepest hole yet
• 9:20
  Speaker 4: dug on Mars in the service of installing a seismometer
• 9:24
  Speaker 4: so we could listen for marsquakes.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: Love that word marsquakes.
• 9:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And I don't think it got very far. I
• 9:31
  Speaker 4: think it got stuck, and so it was sort of
• 9:32
  Speaker 4: an abortive kind of thing. Kelly's nodding, so maybe she's
• 9:36
  Speaker 4: more familiar with the history of that.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: I think it was more than one problem one. I
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: think things were more compact than they had expected them
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: to be, so it's harder to get through. And then
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: also it was having trouble gripping and staying in one spot.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: It got only a fraction of the goal of the
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: depth that it was shooting for. It's just hard to
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: work in space.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: My Wikipedia research tells me that the deepest hole on
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Mars is nine and millimeters deep, which is not very impressive.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: Oh man, So if there's soul on Mars, probably it's
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: just bacteria. Uh that that's adding the like lify component
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: to it. Is there anywhere? There's probably nowhere on Earth
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: where it would be just like that. Probably anywhere else
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: you'd also find like nematods and stuff.
• 10:14
  Speaker 4: Well, yeah, not anymore. There certainly would have been paleo
• 10:17
  Speaker 4: environments on Earth when it would have just been microbial,
• 10:20
  Speaker 4: and those would have lasted for a very long time
• 10:22
  Speaker 4: for you know, the first several billion years of Earth history.
• 10:25
  Speaker 4: You know, some of those microbes would be prokaryotic of course,
• 10:28
  Speaker 4: and then eventually you carry out show up as well.
• 10:31
  Speaker 4: But yeah, probably it would be unicellular, if anything big
• 10:35
  Speaker 4: If could.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Having just unicellular organisms result in oil? Or do you
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: need bigger stuff to get oil?
• 10:42
  Speaker 4: Oh wait, wait, we're going into oil now. I thought
• 10:44
  Speaker 4: we were talking about soil. So have we dropped the.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: S You dropped the eye and went to soils, and
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: now we're going to drop the S and good oils?
• 10:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, So with with oil the story is a
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: little different. It's a little more complicated. So when I
• 10:59
  Speaker 4: think of soils, I am thinking of terrestrial regalith with
• 11:04
  Speaker 4: organic material being added from the top and then gradually
• 11:07
  Speaker 4: getting mixed in, but the organic content would decrease the
• 11:10
  Speaker 4: deeper you.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: Go, Holnd did just say terrestrial regolith? That means on Earth?
• 11:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you so much for asking that clarifying question
• 11:18
  Speaker 4: about the words I'm using. What I meant was not underwater,
• 11:21
  Speaker 4: not in the ocean, So I meant on the land,
• 11:24
  Speaker 4: all right. So you know, my default setting would not
• 11:27
  Speaker 4: be to call marine sediments by the name soil. I
• 11:30
  Speaker 4: would call them sediments, and they might have a high
• 11:33
  Speaker 4: organic content or they might not. But that is not
• 11:36
  Speaker 4: what I'm saying when I'm talking about soil. So I'm
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: talking about land based settings. So that's what I mean
• 11:42
  Speaker 4: by terrestrial.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: But you said terrestrial realith. You use the R word.
• 11:46
  Speaker 4: Originally it would have been regalith, right, and then eventually,
• 11:50
  Speaker 4: sometime in Earth history it started becoming soil through the
• 11:53
  Speaker 4: addition of this magical ingredient of humans.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: This cleared up an argument Daniel and I had.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: In the past.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: It turns out you turn regolith into soil just by
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: adding hummus or hemus.
• 12:04
  Speaker 4: You could add, yes, you could do the job with
• 12:06
  Speaker 4: hummus or other forms of humous.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: Bhemi is like magic, really, it sort of life giving.
• 12:12
  Speaker 4: The scientific community argues at meetings like a geological meetings
• 12:19
  Speaker 4: like the Geological Society of America. There are periodically sessions
• 12:23
  Speaker 4: about the terrestrial biosphere during the Cambrian and what they're
• 12:27
  Speaker 4: not saying there is the biosphere on Earth. They're talking
• 12:30
  Speaker 4: about the biosphere on land. So we have a much
• 12:33
  Speaker 4: better geologic record about what was happening in the oceans
• 12:37
  Speaker 4: because that's a place where sediments tend to get deposited
• 12:40
  Speaker 4: and tend not to get eroded, whereas the land is
• 12:44
  Speaker 4: a place where sediments tend to get eroded and tend
• 12:46
  Speaker 4: not to get deposited, at least in the long term sense.
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: We do have terrestrial here again, I mean land deposits
• 12:53
  Speaker 4: of sedimentary rocks, but they are far less common, fewer,
• 12:57
  Speaker 4: and further between than marine eediments.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: We were going to get back to oils, So.
• 13:02
  Speaker 4: That's basically what I was saying for soils, Okay, And yeah,
• 13:06
  Speaker 4: basically we don't know when the humans started getting added.
• 13:08
  Speaker 4: People argue about that, and they look at various you know, biotracers,
• 13:11
  Speaker 4: geochemical signals, things, like that. As far as oil, oil
• 13:15
  Speaker 4: is a liquid hydrocarbon cocktail that is formed due to
• 13:21
  Speaker 4: cooking algae, cooking phytoplankton. All right, so I'm using algae
• 13:27
  Speaker 4: here in the most inclusive sense. But basically, you know
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: phytoplankton photosynthesizing in the upper sunlit portions of bodies of water,
• 13:38
  Speaker 4: usually the ocean, but potentially also you know large lakes
• 13:40
  Speaker 4: and things like that. They capture energy from the sun
• 13:44
  Speaker 4: doing photosynthesis, they lock that up in their organic molecules.
• 13:48
  Speaker 4: Then they kick the bucket and they die, and if
• 13:50
  Speaker 4: they avoid getting eaten, then they fall down and their
• 13:53
  Speaker 4: little dead bodies accumulate on the bottom of that body
• 13:55
  Speaker 4: of water. They are likely to accumulate there if there's
• 14:00
  Speaker 4: not a lot of things that are grazing them trying
• 14:02
  Speaker 4: to eat them, and oxygen levels are relatively low. So
• 14:06
  Speaker 4: if you bury this organic rich stuff and you warm
• 14:12
  Speaker 4: it up, then you can cause chemical reactions to take
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: place that produce the stuff that we call oil and
• 14:19
  Speaker 4: the stuff that we call natural gas, which again is
• 14:22
  Speaker 4: a cocktail of a bunch of different ingredients. Button in
• 14:24
  Speaker 4: the case of natural gas, they are in the gas state,
• 14:26
  Speaker 4: not in the liquid state, So with accumulating that phytoplankton
• 14:31
  Speaker 4: here on Earth. You know, there's certain conditions that we
• 14:34
  Speaker 4: need to kind of go through to get that stuff
• 14:37
  Speaker 4: and get it down to the bottom of the ocean,
• 14:39
  Speaker 4: and then it has to be buried, and then it
• 14:41
  Speaker 4: has to warm up to the right temperature. So before
• 14:45
  Speaker 4: we started our podcast today, I made a cup of coffee,
• 14:48
  Speaker 4: and that's about the right temperature that you need to
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: warm up your dead phytoplankton in order to get them
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: to produce oil. If you don't heat them up enough,
• 14:56
  Speaker 4: they don't make the oil. And if you heat them
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: up too much, it basically it reacts away and makes
• 15:01
  Speaker 4: other compounds that are not capable of flowing and being
• 15:04
  Speaker 4: pumped out of the ground. So the happy place for
• 15:07
  Speaker 4: oil production is around one hundred degrees celsius. Okay, the
• 15:11
  Speaker 4: temperature of an espresso.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: This sounds kind of complicated and not so easy to arrange.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: How is it that we have so much oil on Earth?
• 15:18
  Speaker 4: Well, we would have more if it wasn't sidaran complicated,
• 15:21
  Speaker 4: and you know, we have some, but we don't have
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: an infinite amount. So it's these circumstances might sound really
• 15:29
  Speaker 4: far fetched and unlikely to occur, but they have occurred,
• 15:33
  Speaker 4: and if they hadn't, you know, we would probably be
• 15:36
  Speaker 4: living very very different lives.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: So Mars used to be warmer because it had flowing
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: water at one point was it that warm.
• 15:44
  Speaker 4: So what I am talking about is not the temperature
• 15:47
  Speaker 4: at the surface. And if if the temperature at the
• 15:50
  Speaker 4: surface was one hundred degrees c, you wouldn't have flowing water,
• 15:52
  Speaker 4: you'd have you know, water vapor right or you know,
• 15:55
  Speaker 4: the transition between those. What I'm talking about is burial conditions.
• 15:59
  Speaker 4: So deep in the earth, and you know, there's usually
• 16:01
  Speaker 4: some amount of overburden, some amount of pressure of overlying
• 16:05
  Speaker 4: sedimentary layers weighing down on this sort of pressure cooker
• 16:09
  Speaker 4: where these phytoplankton are getting simmered, and that's the right
• 16:12
  Speaker 4: condition to produce the oil. Then if that is up
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: near the surface of the earth, you're on Earth. If
• 16:17
  Speaker 4: it flows out at the surface, then a couple of
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: things happen. One is it can devolatilize, and so that
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: will release the stuff that kind of keeps it low viscosity,
• 16:28
  Speaker 4: and it tends to get more gooey and sticky and
• 16:31
  Speaker 4: tar like at that point, and ultimately the high levels
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: of oxygen in ER's atmosphere will react with those leaking
• 16:40
  Speaker 4: petroleum deposits on the surface, and ultimately, you know, they
• 16:44
  Speaker 4: will release their energy through reaction with oxygen, but in
• 16:47
  Speaker 4: a way that's not conducive to humans capturing that energy
• 16:51
  Speaker 4: and putting it to work. So there are places where
• 16:55
  Speaker 4: that occurs, and you you know probably have heard of
• 16:57
  Speaker 4: the LaBrea tar pits or the beaches at Carbon Drhea
• 17:00
  Speaker 4: in California. Those are places where petroleum is actively leaking
• 17:04
  Speaker 4: out onto Earth's surface naturally, all right, But in order
• 17:08
  Speaker 4: to utilize oil, what we do is we try and
• 17:12
  Speaker 4: find places where that hasn't occurred, but where it has
• 17:15
  Speaker 4: pooled in the subsurface. So, Daniel, if you thought it
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: was complicated before, there's actually another step, which is that
• 17:20
  Speaker 4: we need to take the oil out of these nice,
• 17:23
  Speaker 4: warm source rocks and then move it into some place
• 17:27
  Speaker 4: where it will pull in an accessible sort of setting.
• 17:30
  Speaker 4: And so you know, ideally that would be some sort
• 17:34
  Speaker 4: of subterranean trap. We call them, and one of the
• 17:37
  Speaker 4: most common ones is a fold in the rock layers
• 17:40
  Speaker 4: that goes up in the middle. It's so called anticline.
• 17:43
  Speaker 4: And if you have a sort of sandwich of less
• 17:47
  Speaker 4: permeable and more permeable and less permeable rock layers such
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: as shale sandstone shale. Then that provides a nice little
• 17:55
  Speaker 4: and then you fold it into like a rainbow shape.
• 17:58
  Speaker 4: The sandstone can soak up lots boil and natural gas,
• 18:01
  Speaker 4: and the shale basically keeps it from leaving that arch. So,
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: because oil is less dense than water, it rises to
• 18:08
  Speaker 4: the top of the arch, but then it can't rise
• 18:09
  Speaker 4: any higher. The overlying shale acts as like a ceiling
• 18:13
  Speaker 4: and keeps it from escaping.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: This is like a geological Rube Goldberg machine.
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah, man, it is. And so people have tried to
• 18:20
  Speaker 4: shortcut this, you know in some places where they've you know,
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: said like, hey, we've got these tarsands up in northern Alberta.
• 18:27
  Speaker 4: They're full of petroleum, but it hasn't yet escaped the
• 18:31
  Speaker 4: source rock. But we can make it escape by grinding
• 18:34
  Speaker 4: up those things and then boiling them essentially, and then
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: we can let the oil out and then we can
• 18:39
  Speaker 4: burn the oil. But that takes a lot more energy investment,
• 18:42
  Speaker 4: and so that really only becomes viable economically if oil
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: prices are really high, like higher than one hundred and
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: fifty dollars a parel.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: So I bet they'd really like to have oil on
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: Mars though, And if you're already spending all that money
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: to get to Mars, maybe you're willing to spend as
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: much as it takes to get the oil out. Is
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: it in difficult places or does Mars just not have
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: the right conditions?
• 19:03
  Speaker 4: I mean, I think Mars does not have the right
• 19:05
  Speaker 4: condition So if we think about the various things that
• 19:08
  Speaker 4: are necessary, like, did Mars have oceans in the past, Yeah,
• 19:13
  Speaker 4: maybe probably? Did those have life in them? That seems
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: like it's a little less likely. Did Mars have a
• 19:20
  Speaker 4: sufficiently active surface environment to bury sediments? You know, enough
• 19:25
  Speaker 4: subsidence in these areas where you'd get organic sediments buried.
• 19:28
  Speaker 4: Mars certainly doesn't have plate tectonics, which is what crumples
• 19:31
  Speaker 4: those sedimentary layers up into those folds that concentrate the oil.
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: But maybe there would be some other equivalent trap on Mars.
• 19:39
  Speaker 4: It does seem like though each of these things is
• 19:42
  Speaker 4: far less likely on a planet like Mars than it
• 19:45
  Speaker 4: is on a planet like Earth.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: How likely do you think it is? In general? We
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: took a random planet and I said, there are oceans
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: and there was microbial life. What are the chances that
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: it has oil on it? Are we talking like one
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: in two one in two million?
• 19:58
  Speaker 4: Insufficient data, Daniel, insufficient data. So we do not know
• 20:02
  Speaker 4: that the parameters of these different exoplanets. But like one
• 20:06
  Speaker 4: of the things that's necessary here on Earth to bury
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: the phytoplankton in their little graveyard at the bottom of
• 20:11
  Speaker 4: the sea is you need to have something to bury
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: them with, right, so you need to have sediments. Well
• 20:16
  Speaker 4: where are those sediments coming from. They're coming from terrestrial
• 20:19
  Speaker 4: and again I mean land source areas here where rocks
• 20:22
  Speaker 4: are being weathered and they're shedding off particles big and small.
• 20:26
  Speaker 4: But if you have a planet that's completely aqueous, where
• 20:28
  Speaker 4: it's it's got no land, then what is going to
• 20:31
  Speaker 4: bury those things in the first place? There's no source
• 20:34
  Speaker 4: for sediments other than like chemical precipitates from the ocean itself.
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: So there's no way I could put a number on
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: how likely it would be. I appreciate the question, it's
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: worth articulating, but I cannot answer that.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: We have focused on single cell organisms because we got
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: this great question that focused on single celled organisms on Earth.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Is all of our oil from algae or is it
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: also from like dinosaurs and stuff, because that would be cooler.
• 20:59
  Speaker 4: Okay, so it's not from dinosaurs and stuff. So dinosaurs
• 21:02
  Speaker 4: and stuff are terrestrial organisms. They live on the land,
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: they wander around on the land. When they die, they're
• 21:08
  Speaker 4: very unlikely to be preserved in the fossil record. You know,
• 21:11
  Speaker 4: we are very attracted to dinosaurs, we go to museums
• 21:14
  Speaker 4: to see their fossil remains. But the reality is that
• 21:18
  Speaker 4: they are far, far, far far less common than marine organisms,
• 21:22
  Speaker 4: particularly marine invertebrates. So the fossil record is strongly biased
• 21:27
  Speaker 4: towards things that live in the ocean, things that don't
• 21:30
  Speaker 4: have backbones, things that lived a long time ago, like
• 21:33
  Speaker 4: during the Paleozoic, Dinosaurs, you know, were limited to a
• 21:36
  Speaker 4: relatively brief window of geologic time. And also the fossil
• 21:40
  Speaker 4: record is biased towards things that have hard parts, such
• 21:43
  Speaker 4: as bones or shells or teeth. Dinosaurs do have bones,
• 21:46
  Speaker 4: of course, but you know, three of those four are
• 21:50
  Speaker 4: kind of stocked against dinosaurs basically entering the fossil record
• 21:54
  Speaker 4: in the first place. Usually when a dinosaur dies, it's
• 21:57
  Speaker 4: flesh rots away because it's out here in the open
• 22:00
  Speaker 4: atmosphere where there's lots of oxygen that wants to react
• 22:03
  Speaker 4: with all the carbon in its body. And that's if
• 22:07
  Speaker 4: it doesn't get eaten or scavenge. Right, So what we
• 22:10
  Speaker 4: really want is circumstances where you know a dinosaur, maybe
• 22:16
  Speaker 4: you know, dyed, bloated with gas, a flood washed it
• 22:19
  Speaker 4: out to sea, then out at sea it popped, and
• 22:22
  Speaker 4: then its skeleton and its remains could join the oil
• 22:26
  Speaker 4: forming process. But that is really unlikely because that's not
• 22:30
  Speaker 4: its natural habitat. No, it's not dinosaurs. But basically it's
• 22:34
  Speaker 4: anything organic that could enter these low oxygen settings where
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: sediments will then bury them and they'll get warmed up
• 22:43
  Speaker 4: to the right temperature. Let me maybe at this point
• 22:46
  Speaker 4: invoke an organism that you may have heard of or
• 22:48
  Speaker 4: may not have, the conodont. Do you guys know what
• 22:50
  Speaker 4: connodants are?
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: No?
• 22:52
  Speaker 4: Okay, So for a very long time, geologists are trying
• 22:55
  Speaker 4: to figure out how old sedimentary layers are, and we
• 22:58
  Speaker 4: figured out that the fossils in those sedimentary layers change
• 23:02
  Speaker 4: through time. So for instance, you find dinosaurs in some layers,
• 23:06
  Speaker 4: you find trilobites in other layers, you find woldy mammoths
• 23:10
  Speaker 4: in other layers still, right, So there is a time
• 23:14
  Speaker 4: progression to the geologic record where the fossils change in
• 23:18
  Speaker 4: a regular and predictable way. This is awesome on many levels.
• 23:21
  Speaker 4: It's a record of past biological evolution on our planet.
• 23:25
  Speaker 4: But it also is kind of a tool for figuring
• 23:27
  Speaker 4: out how old the sedimentary layers are, and when coupled
• 23:31
  Speaker 4: with other tools such as isotopic dating, say, have a
• 23:34
  Speaker 4: granite dike that cuts across a trilobyte bearing shale. You
• 23:38
  Speaker 4: can then figure out, by dating the dike how old
• 23:42
  Speaker 4: the shale must be. The shale must be older than
• 23:44
  Speaker 4: this igneous rock that cuts across it. So we've been
• 23:47
  Speaker 4: using this principle of relative dating by fossil succession for
• 23:52
  Speaker 4: centuries now to figure out how old sedimentary rocks are.
• 23:55
  Speaker 4: Leonardo da Vinci even practice this all right. So these
• 23:59
  Speaker 4: fossils are most useful when they are distinct and recognizable,
• 24:04
  Speaker 4: when they're very cosmopolitan and widespread all over the planet,
• 24:07
  Speaker 4: not limited to some particular habitat or land mass or
• 24:11
  Speaker 4: island or whatever, And when they are limited to a
• 24:14
  Speaker 4: brief period of geologic time. So those three characteristics make
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: for a good index fossil. Cockroaches are lousy index fossils
• 24:22
  Speaker 4: because they've been around for hundreds of millions of years.
• 24:25
  Speaker 4: So you find a rock with the cockroach in no
• 24:27
  Speaker 4: big deal. It doesn't really tell you that much. But
• 24:30
  Speaker 4: connidants are powerful index fossils. So they are these little
• 24:35
  Speaker 4: things shaped kind of like teeth or spike balls, or
• 24:41
  Speaker 4: they look like sort of sadistic ice skates or something
• 24:43
  Speaker 4: like that. They are made out of a mineral complex
• 24:48
  Speaker 4: called hydroxyl appetite, and they're found in sedimentary rocks the
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: world over from the Cambrian period of geologic time up
• 24:55
  Speaker 4: through the Triassic or Jurassic. Sometime in the Middle mesozo
• 25:00
  Speaker 4: and people were like, hey, these things are awesome. You
• 25:03
  Speaker 4: can really use them to tell these rocks apart. But
• 25:05
  Speaker 4: they're different ages. We had no idea what they were, right,
• 25:09
  Speaker 4: So they were just these things that we could find,
• 25:11
  Speaker 4: these entities, and we were like, Okay, they're useful, but
• 25:14
  Speaker 4: we don't know what they are. And recently they found
• 25:17
  Speaker 4: out that they're part of the head region of an
• 25:20
  Speaker 4: eel like critter, so a very small, little thin fish
• 25:25
  Speaker 4: where the other parts of its skeleton are not hard
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: enough to enter the fossil record, but they found one
• 25:30
  Speaker 4: of these rare fossil occurrences where we've got the soft
• 25:34
  Speaker 4: tissues preserved, the muscle blocks and some of the skin,
• 25:37
  Speaker 4: the eyeballs. They've got great big eyes, so they look
• 25:39
  Speaker 4: to be like sort of gill support structures or something
• 25:42
  Speaker 4: related to the mouth, but not traditional teeth like you
• 25:44
  Speaker 4: or I have. And these things are really neat because
• 25:47
  Speaker 4: they can not only tell us time, but they change
• 25:50
  Speaker 4: color when they get different temperatures. So a geologists at
• 25:54
  Speaker 4: the United States Geological Survey, Anita Epstein, figured out that
• 25:58
  Speaker 4: you could use the color of Kanada to figure out
• 26:01
  Speaker 4: if the rocks had gotten to the right temperature to
• 26:04
  Speaker 4: generate oil. So they would basically go from sort of
• 26:07
  Speaker 4: a yellow color to an orange to a burnt umber
• 26:11
  Speaker 4: kind of orange brown to a gray brown to black,
• 26:15
  Speaker 4: and you could figure out exactly the temperature that they
• 26:17
  Speaker 4: were cooked at, and that could tell you whether the
• 26:19
  Speaker 4: rocks at that depth got to be the right temperature
• 26:22
  Speaker 4: for oil production. A pretty neat trick. They call it
• 26:26
  Speaker 4: the connidant alteration index. And there's a nice little article
• 26:30
  Speaker 4: on Wikipedia you can read if you're interested in exploring that.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: More So, when people are like trying to figure out
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: where oil is. If they find one of these things
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: and it's the right color, are they like, Okay, now
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: we need to dig in this area a lot more.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: And that's like an indicator that you're in the right spot.
• 26:43
  Speaker 4: Yes, and if it's the wrong color, don't bother.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Okay, and mars, we'll have none of this. So we're
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: we're out of luck there. But that's awesome.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: My last question is do all these names they give
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: to soils and rocks maneuver? Do these actually make sense?
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: Or is it a big pile of nonsense the way
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: it is in astronomy, with arbitrary dotted lines that date
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: back to like some old man in robes in seventeen
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: hundreds who gave something the wrong name.
• 27:09
  Speaker 4: I mean, I'd love to tell you that it all
• 27:10
  Speaker 4: makes perfect sense, but you know, like the English language,
• 27:14
  Speaker 4: the geological lexicon has adopted words from other traditions, other languages.
• 27:21
  Speaker 4: I really like thinking about the origins of these different words.
• 27:25
  Speaker 4: I think kana dant. I'm sure that breaks down into
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: something like cone shaped tooth in terms of its etymology.
• 27:33
  Speaker 4: But geology is very rich with words from French, Italian, Scottish,
• 27:38
  Speaker 4: even Indonesian Bahasa. Indonesia has contributed major words to the
• 27:42
  Speaker 4: geological lexicon, and I love that sort of melting pot
• 27:46
  Speaker 4: aspect of the science. It's very appropriate for the Indonesians
• 27:50
  Speaker 4: to have a word for a volcanic mudflow, a lahar,
• 27:53
  Speaker 4: but you wouldn't expect that to originate from Scotland. But
• 27:56
  Speaker 4: it's very appropriate for the Scots to come up with
• 27:59
  Speaker 4: words like esker and turn, which described glacial features. So
• 28:04
  Speaker 4: it tells you something sort of almost anthropological about the
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: place where these words originate.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: There's like sentiments of words that build up over time.
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: That's a good way of thinking of it. And probably
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: some of these words are almost like index fossils, right
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: where they come into fashion for a while, they're used,
• 28:21
  Speaker 4: and then you can only find them in the deepest,
• 28:23
  Speaker 4: dustiest pages of the literature, which is.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: Where we love to explore. All right, well, thank you
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: so much, Callen. This was super helpful, and we're going
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: to send your answer to Ust and he'll tell you
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: if he feels like his question was answered right on.
• 28:36
  Speaker 4: Okay, good luck, everybody.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: I love talking to geologists. They rock.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: I bet Callen has never heard that.
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: Sure, Hi, Kellen, Daniel and Kelly, thank you for those
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: rock solid answers. I'll put my plans for a oil
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: company on Mars on a hold.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: Now, thank you.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, I am so glad that youst felt
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: like he got his question answered. And so now let's
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: take a break and we'll move on to a question
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: from Scott, who unfortunately is from California. We don't all
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: get to pick where we're from.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: All right, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: like you. If you have a question about the universe
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: that nobody you know can answer, send it to us.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: We will answer it for you. We write back to everybody.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: Send us an email to questions at Danielankelly dot org.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: Well try to get you an answer. Not all questions
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: have answers, but we will do our best. But I
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: guess there's no answer is also a kind of answer.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Yeah. The answer nobody knows is unfortunately the
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: answer to most questions. And today we have a thorny
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: question from Scott from California. He's asking about a famous
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: physics experiment. It leads to all sorts of tricky philosophical wrinkles.
• 30:02
  Speaker 5: This is Scott from California. I have a question about
• 30:06
  Speaker 5: the double slit experiment. I am imagining a probability wave
• 30:10
  Speaker 5: of a particle approaching the first barrier that has the
• 30:12
  Speaker 5: slits in it. As the wave approaches that first barrier,
• 30:16
  Speaker 5: I'm assuming that the universe has to make a decision
• 30:18
  Speaker 5: about whether the particle is going to hit the barrier
• 30:21
  Speaker 5: or go through a slit. That is, the wave function
• 30:24
  Speaker 5: would collapse, and the particle would find itself hitting somewhere
• 30:27
  Speaker 5: on the barrier, or perhaps find itself right where a
• 30:30
  Speaker 5: slit is. If it finds itself right where a slit is,
• 30:34
  Speaker 5: does the wave function then instantly uncollapse such that it
• 30:37
  Speaker 5: goes through bow slits simultaneously. This question has been bothering
• 30:41
  Speaker 5: me for a long time, so I'm really looking forward
• 30:43
  Speaker 5: to getting an answer. Thank you so much, oh Man Scott.
• 30:47
  Speaker 5: That is a great question.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: And I have vague memories of the double slit experiment
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: from freshman year of college, but I guess that's twenty
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: years ago now. Oh my gosh, So Daniel, well refresh
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: my aging memory. What's the double slit experiment?
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's useful to nail down exactly what
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: we're talking about. So we can figure out how best
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: to answer Scott's question. This is a famous experiment that's
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: been done in many ways, with changing interpretations over time.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: So the first version of this experiment was done with light.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: You have some source of light, a light bulb or
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: a laser or whatever, and you shine it on some
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: barrier and most of the light is absorbed, but you
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: have two little slits in the barrier, and where those
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: slits are the light can go through. So now on
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: the other side of the barrier you have these two
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: little narrow slits which act like sources of light themselves, right,
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: almost like you have two little light bulbs right there.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: And then the light that comes from these slits hits
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: some screen, and that's where you're observing it. You see
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: on the screen, it's not just like light from the
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: two slits. You see an interference pattern. You see that
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: in some places it's dark even though the light hits it,
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: and other places it's very bright. And that's explained by
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: light being a wave and canceling out in some places
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: and adding up in other places. So the first earliest
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: version of this experiment showed us that light had these
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: wave like properties because it interfered with itself on the screen.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm following that, but I feel like I also
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: have a vague memory of physicists talking about light as
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: a particle. Yeah, what's going on there?
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: So now it gets weird. Remember, the crucial explanation for
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: why do we have interference is that we have light
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: coming from both slits, right, Each one is like a
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: little source, and sometimes their waves go up and the
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: other one is going down, and sometimes they're both going up,
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: so they add up. But the crucial thing is you
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: have two sources, which is why you have interference. So
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: then slow the experiment down. Now we know light is
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: actually made out of little packets. It's not like a
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: continuous stream. Right when you turn on your flashlight, it's
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: actually shooting out little packets of light, these things we
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: call photons. And so you can make this experiment more
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: interesting by slowing it down and saying, what happens if
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: we only have one photon in the experiment at a time, right,
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: instead of huge numbers of photons which you're interfering with
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: each other, what happens you have a single photon and
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: then you see something very strange, which is the interference pattern.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: Builds up gradually on the screen. So one photon comes
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: through and it lands in one spot, another photon goes
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: through it lands in a different spot, and then the
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: third one in another spot. But if you do a
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: million of these, it adds up to give you the
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: same pattern you saw when you illuminated it with a
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: huge amount of photons all at the same time. So
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: the confusing thing there is, and I can see Kelly's
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: faces going hot, is what's doing the interfering Because in
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: the earlier version I explained that the interference pattern is
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: coming from having two sources. But if the one photon
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: is in the experiment at a time, what is it
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: interfering with? That's the big puzzle.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: Is the answer going to be quantum entanglement or something?
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: Why do you all always make this so complicated?
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: The answer is definitely quantum mechanical, though not entanglement. What's
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: happening here is that the photon is not like a
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: little particle that has a specific path and it goes
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: through this slit and then hits the screen. The photon
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: has a probability to go through one slit or the
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: other slit, or to get absorbed by the barrier. Right,
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: we don't know where an individual photon is going to go,
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: and it's that uncertainty, that probability that's doing the interfering.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: So remember that picture I painted in your mind of
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: light going through the experiment and coming out of the
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: slits as little sources and then interfering with itself. You
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: can use that exact same picture, except instead of thinking
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: about it in terms of light, think about it in
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: terms of probability for one photon. So you send that
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: photon against the barrier, it has a probability to hit
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: one slit or the other slit. That probability passes through
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: both slits, right, And then that probability interferes with itself
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: and creates a probability distribution on the screen in the back.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: Then the universe has to pick, Okay, where is this
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: photon actually going to go? So I can put it
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: somewhere on the screen, and it draws from that probability distribution,
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: and it puts one photon, So that probability distribution guides
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: each individual photon. It puts more where the probability is
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: U is high, in other words, where the interference pattern
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: is bright, and fewer where it's dark, So that it
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: gradually it builds up the same interference pattern you saw
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: when you shown the light brightly. So you just replace
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: the concept of light waves with probability waves and all
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: the same math works.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: Awesome. I think I had been imagining when we were
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: sending a particle through the slits that we had directed
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: it to one slit in particular, not that it could
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: have gone through both. But it's not like I had
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: the probability stuff in my head. So I still, yeah,
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: anyway makes sense now, awesome.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's crucial that you don't know in advance which
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: slid it goes through, that you have the possibility for
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: it to go through both slits, because then the other
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: version of this experiment is, well, what if we check.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: What if we put a little detector like a camera
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: or something that can tell whether the photon went through
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: slit A or slit B. Then what happens, Well, then
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: the universe picks witch slid it went through because you
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: put a detector there, So you've collapsed the probability. Instead
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: of allowing for the possibility that the photon goes through
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: either slit, you now force the universe to pick which
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: slid it goes through. So then the inner feference pattern disappears,
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: and you just get photons going through one slit or
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: the other slit, and you get a geometric shadow instead
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: of an interference pattern because there isn't probability coming out
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: both slits because you force the universe to pick and
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: now it just sends a photon to one slit or
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: the other slit. This is this bizarre process we don't
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: fully understand of how possibility becomes reality when the quantum
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: meets the classical.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: It still absolutely blows my mind that just measuring it
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: changes the pattern that you get on the back wall,
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: Like is it just shy? And like you know, what
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: is the leading theory for why observing it changes things.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: It's not something we understand very well. And this is
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: called the measurement problem in philosophy of physics. It's really
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: a puzzle. I mean, we have this quantum theory that
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: says things of the quantum level follow these equations of probability,
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: and that's the Shirtinger equation, and they can have weird
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: properties like not having a specific location but instead having
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: a probability to have several locations, or having ability to
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: be spin up or spin down. You can maintain a
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: superposition of different possible outcomes, different possible properties for yourself.
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: That's what quantum objects can do. But we know that
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: classical objects can't. Like when you have a screen, the
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: photo either hits here or there. It doesn't like half
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: hit here and half hit there. Or when you flip
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: a coin, it's either heads or tails. It's not like
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: half heads and half tails. So we have these two
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: different worlds, the quantum world where you can have superpositions,
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: and the classical world where you can't, and we don't
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: really understand the transition between them. It's confusing because everything
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: in the classical world, like quarters and me and you,
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: are made up of quantum things. So the leading theory
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: is sort of nonsensical. The leading theory, called the Copenhagen interpretation,
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: says that all right, you have quantum stuff, and it
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: can have multiple possibilities, and it can do all sorts
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: of crazy wavel like things like interfere with itself and
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: its own probability. But then when you interact with a
• 37:53
  Speaker 2: classical object like an eyeball or a detector or a screen,
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: then the wave function collapses and the universe to pick says,
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: instead of this whole spectrum of possibilities, you just pick one,
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: and that allows us to have classical outcomes like hey,
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: it's up or it's down, the photon is here, photon
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: is there. This collapse theory doesn't really work because number one,
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: it violates like basic quantum mechanical rules like quantum information
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: is never lost. And also it's not really well defined.
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: Like when I said a quantum object meets a classical object,
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: I wasn't clear on, well, what is a classical object exactly,
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: because as I said earlier, all classical objects are made
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: to quantum objects, and that's the puzzle. Nobody can define
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: the barrier between quantum and classical objects, so we don't
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: really understand it. We don't have a great explanation. It's
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: one of the biggest open questions in philosophy of physics.
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: Still so much left to do, still so much leve
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: to do, exactly. So let's get to Scott's question. And
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: Scott is thinking about what happens when the photon is
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: approaching that barrier, and I think that he's imagining that
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: either the photon hits the barrier and is absorbed, or
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: hits one of the slits and goes through and I
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: think Scott is thinking that maybe the universe collapses it
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: at that moment when it either hits the barrier or
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: goes through a slit, because it sort of encountered some
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: big classical object, and then he's confused about how later
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: we can say it maybe went through both slits and
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: is there some uncollapse, Like how do you get multiple
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: possibilities through that barrier? I think is essentially Scott's question,
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: And the answer is that hitting that first barrier doesn't
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: collapse the wave function because you've still left multiple possibilities.
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: It can go through slit one or go through slit two,
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: so both those possibilities propergly forward. So the short answer
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: is the first barrier doesn't collapse the wave function unless
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: you have a detector there that's saying like, hey, did
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: you go through slit one or slit two? Because you
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: allow the possibility of multiple slits, you allow the quantum
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: mechanical properties to maintain and for there to be a
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: superposition of two possible outcomes, and so then both of
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: those possibilities go through the slits, and then you get
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: the interference from those two two possibilities.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: So if it collapses at the two slits. Instead, you
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: get a totally different answer.
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if you collapse it at the two slits, which
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: you can do if you put a little detector there
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: and you say, I want to know which one it
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: went through, then you get a totally different answer exactly,
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: you get a different pattern on the screen. And crucially,
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: you can't uncollapse Like when you collapse the wave function,
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: you go from here a whole bunch of possible outcomes
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: to now there's just one, and you can't ever uncollapse it.
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: You've lost information, which is why it's so confusing. And
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: we've said on the podcast before, like you can't lose
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: quantum information. It can't be deleted from the universe. But
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: this collapse theory does violate that principle of quantum mechanics,
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: and people out there might be like, hold on, aren't
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: you contradicting yourself? Yeah. Absolutely, And this is one reason
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: why we haven't really figured this problem out, like we
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: have this best explanation we have violates other things we
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: know about the universe, so it's like a work in progress.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this is one of the really fun things I
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: think about podcasting with a physicists. I hadn't realized there
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: were so many works in progress, but it's exciting that
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: there's so much left to discover. So I feel like
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: I understood that. But let's go ahead and test ourselves
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: and ask Scott if did we actually answer the question
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: that you were asking, and if so, was the answer
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: clear that's right?
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: Or did we just collapse his brain? Okay, So it's
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: my pleasure to welcome to the podcast, Scott Goldman. Scott,
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: thanks so much for running in with your really fun question.
• 41:21
  Speaker 5: Yes, thank you.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: So tell me you heard me and Kelly talk about
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: the double slit experiment and what happens to the wavefront
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: as it hits the first barrier and interferes afterwards. Tell
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: me does that make sense to you? What questions do
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: you have or meaning?
• 41:34
  Speaker 5: So it makes sense to me, I guess it all
• 41:39
  Speaker 5: comes down to one question, and that is, every time
• 41:44
  Speaker 5: a particle is shot at that double slit, the barrier
• 41:49
  Speaker 5: with the double slit, and there's a probability wave that
• 41:52
  Speaker 5: comes to that barrier, it goes through both slits, interferes
• 41:55
  Speaker 5: with itself, and when it gets to that detector screen
• 42:00
  Speaker 5: the universe at that point then I guess has to
• 42:02
  Speaker 5: make a decision where it hits. My question is does
• 42:06
  Speaker 5: every particle that is shot at that barrier with the
• 42:11
  Speaker 5: double slits go through and then hit the detector screen
• 42:16
  Speaker 5: or do some particles not hit the detector screen because
• 42:21
  Speaker 5: they actually hit the barrier somewhere instead of going through
• 42:23
  Speaker 5: the two slits.
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, great question. The answer is the second one. Not
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: every particle makes it through butt, and there's always a butt.
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: Every particle has a probability of making it through, so
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: there's sort of a lot of different outcomes. One outcome
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: is you make it through one of the slits and
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: you end up somewhere on the screen as a dot.
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: Another possible outcome is you don't make it through at all.
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: So imagine that probability wave approaches the first barrier, or
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: the one with the slits in it. Some of the
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: probability wave makes it through and interferes with itself and
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: gives it a probability to hit the back screen, but
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: a lot of it, as you say, hits the barrier.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: So then when you force the universe to roll the
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: dice and say what is the outcome for this particular particle,
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: A lot of them are going to hit the barrier,
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: and most of the descriptions of this experiment. They sort
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: of ignore that part because that's not so interesting. We
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: pay attention mostly to the ones that go through because
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: those are the ones that do the interfering. But yeah,
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: a lot of them. If you ask, like, hey, what
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: happened to this particular particle, you'd ance it would be
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: that a lot of them hit the barrier and don't
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: make it through.
• 43:22
  Speaker 5: Okay, So that's the part I guess where I'm having
• 43:26
  Speaker 5: trouble understanding because I'm imagining this probability wave approaching the barrier,
• 43:32
  Speaker 5: and then when it gets to the barrier with the slits,
• 43:35
  Speaker 5: the universe has to decide like, oh am I going
• 43:38
  Speaker 5: to hit the barrier, or no, I didn't hit the barrier.
• 43:43
  Speaker 5: I happen to I'm gonna be right in this little
• 43:47
  Speaker 5: space where there's a slit. But then it goes through
• 43:51
  Speaker 5: both slits.
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah, So the universe doesn't necessarily have to decide there, right.
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: What it can do is have several possible outcomes. The
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: wave approaches the barrier, and now there are three possible outcomes.
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: You go through one slit, you go through the other slit,
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: or you reflect or maybe get absorbed, depending on the
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: nature of the barrier. So the probability is sort of
• 44:10
  Speaker 2: fragment there. But they don't have to collapse, right, They
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: only collapse when you insist, you know. But if you
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: don't insist, you know, you're like, well, I'm just going
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: to allow the universe to keep doing its thing. Keep
• 44:20
  Speaker 2: that within a black box or keep my eyes closed
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: for that part of it, equivalent. Then it can continue
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: to propagate all three possibilities that it reflects back, or
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: that it goes through one slit, or that it goes
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: through the second slit. It can maintain all of those,
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: and it's maintaining the uncertainty that allows it to make
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: that interference pattern.
• 44:37
  Speaker 5: So some of the probabilities go through the slit, and
• 44:40
  Speaker 5: then when it gets the detector screen, at that point
• 44:43
  Speaker 5: it decides whether it actually made it through or hit
• 44:46
  Speaker 5: the barrier.
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: Mm hmmm, yeah, exactly. It doesn't have to collapse when
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: it hits the barrier.
• 44:50
  Speaker 5: Oh gosh, sorry.
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's yeah, it's amazing. It's sort of crazy.
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: But the way to think about it is that it's
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: allowing some of that probability. You can also think of
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: it another way. You can think, you know that the probability,
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: most of it gets zeroed out and only those two
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: little narrow slits of probability remain. But there's still uncertainty there.
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: You don't know which way, and so that's what allows
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: for the interference. And I think a lot of people
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: are confused by that. They're like, well, why doesn't the
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: barrier collapse the wave function?
• 45:21
  Speaker 6: Right right?
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: And you can think about it that way also, and
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: you can, for example, add detectors to the barrier so
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: that the only possibilities for the particle are that it
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: goes through a slit or it hits the detector, and
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: that doesn't collapse the wave function completely. That just says,
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: if it hits the barrier, then I want to know.
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: If it doesn't hit the barrier, there's still uncertainty because
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: they could still go through either slit and then you'll
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: still get the interference pattern. So that scenario you could
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: sort of partially collapse the wave function. You'd be like,
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: if it hits the barrier, I want to know. Otherwise
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: I'm going to allow for the uncertainty to propagate through
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: both slits. So this is an infinite number of confusing
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: and amazing ways to do this experiment. All right, well,
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: I hope that helped you understand. Thanks so much for
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: asking the question.
• 46:05
  Speaker 6: Thank you, and we're back.
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: Our final question of the day is a question from
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: Lewis on Discord, and here is his question.
• 46:33
  Speaker 7: Hi, Daniel Kelly, I was wondering what kind of adaptations
• 46:37
  Speaker 7: might we make to humankind, whether genetic or bionic or anything,
• 46:46
  Speaker 7: to help us to live on a place like Mars. Thanks,
• 46:52
  Speaker 7: looking forward to hearing your answer.
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: All right, Oh my gosh, there's so many problems on Mars?
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: Which ones should we try to solve?
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: I'm excited that you're optimistic about this. I thought your
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: answer might be like, it's impossible to give up.
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: I mean, the back of my mind is saying that,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: but I'm gonna let's try to have some fun. Let's
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: start with the problems that could kill us. And so
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: those problems are probably radiation, partial gravity, and depressurization. So
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: I think those are the top three. What do you think, Daniel?
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: Are those the top three worst problems on Mars?
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: Those sound pretty bad, yeah, and I think I'd love
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: to hear solutions to those. And this is great because
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: it gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your optimistic side
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: instead of just throwing cold water on humanity's prospects.
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: Oh man, I hope that doesn't mean this is going
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: to be a bad answer, because it's not in my
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: skill set to be optimistic.
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's see, all right, let's hold.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: Off on the depressurization problem till the end because the
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: initial set of solutions that I have are not really
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: good for depressurization. So one problem is radiation. So, as
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: we've discussed on a couple other episodes, space has different
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: kinds of radiation then we typically encounter on Earth. So
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: you have solar flares and solar part of events, and
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: these are like shooting protons.
• 48:02
  Speaker 6: Boo boo, boo boo.
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: You can dive right away from something like radiation sickness
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: just shuts a bunch of your organs down all at once,
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: or you can get cancer which will kill you slowly. Also,
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: we have galactic cosmic radiation, not one hundred percent sure
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: where it comes from. Could be from exploding stars in
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: black holes, but we don't really know, right.
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: Daniel, Yeah, exactly, Yeah.
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: All right, So the galactic cosmic radiation tends to be bigger,
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: like charged ion particles. I saw this one paper it
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: was an old paper from like the seventies, but they
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: got a gel that was meant to be sort of
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: like the human body, and they shot an iron ion
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: through it and it blew a hole the size of
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: a human hair, which like, does I mean usually like, oh,
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: size of a human hair that's used to indicate something small,
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: but like, I don't want holes the size of a
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: human hair in my brain. Like that's no good, no.
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: And that's a great image because it reinforces the message
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: that these things are not like little fuzzy quantum objects
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: that somehow interfere with you. They are basically space bullets. Right,
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: Space is shooting at you, and we have a bulletproof
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: vest here on Earth. Right our atmosphere is protecting us.
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: It's absorbing all that kinetic energy and we're lucky. And
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: so yeah, how do we deal with life on Mars
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: without our atmospheric bulletproof vest Kelly?
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: The easiest solution is probably something related to shielding. But radiation, well,
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: space makes everything complicated. But one way radiation is complicated
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: is because of something called spellation. So when galactic cosmic
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: radiation hits your habitat, it hits particles that it then
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: breaks into other kinds of particles that are also radioactive
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: and now rain down on you and what's called a
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: nuclear shower. See, Daniel, you asked me for a solution,
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: and I'm giving you reasons why it's worse. My pessimism
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: is winning, all right, I'm backing up.
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: Okay, So you're saying, if I walk around Mars with
• 49:42
  Speaker 2: like an umbrella of some very heavy duty material to
• 49:45
  Speaker 2: protect myself from radiation, it's actually just going to generate
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: like showers of radiation underneath.
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: The umbrella, depending on what the umbrella is made out of. Yes,
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: so there are some particles that are better at absorbing things.
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: I don't think anything's really great at absorbing galactic cosmic
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: radia without breaking up. But could bury your habitat in regolith,
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: which we've talked about before. But you know, human bodies
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: can repair some damage, and some of us are better
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: repairing damage than others. And so let's assume that part
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: of the solution is you're burying your habitat and regolith.
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: But you could also specifically send two Mars people from
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: Earth who are more radiation resistant, and to be honest,
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: I don't know how we pick those people yet. Because like,
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: we don't have a lot of experience with space radiation,
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: but presumably there's variation in this trait. So you could
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: send more radiation resistant people up to space, and at
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: least for the first generation, that might help maybe.
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: Because they are like less likely to get cancer. They
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: have some sort of like genetic predisposition, Like biologically, how
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: does that work? What is it about some people that
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: makes them like more rad proof than others?
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: No, great question? Who knows, right, Here's Kelly, We don't really,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: you know, And so that there are some people who
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: are like, well, you know, we can pick people who
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: are more radiation resistant, and then we could figure out
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: what it is about them that makes them more radiation resistant,
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: and then we could try to use genetic engineering to
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: tinker to make the next generation more radiation resistant, and like,
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: through this combination of crew selection and genetic engineering, we
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: can create people who can survive better in space. Here's
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: a tiny little bit of pessimism. Really quick, I won't
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: linger too long. But you know, most of the important
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: human traits are not controlled by like a gene that
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: you can tinker with. So like our genetic engineering of
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: humans that has gone best so far has involved tinkering
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: with genes that don't get past to babies and dealing
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: with diseases that are caused by like a mutation in
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: one spot. So if radiation is controlled by one hundred genes,
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: you could tinker with all those genes. But the other
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: problem is that genes usually don't just do one thing,
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: so when you tinker with all those one hundred genes,
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: you might be messing up other stuff too. So actually,
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: let's go ahead and say that's not the best solution.
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: And now, because I have a physicist on the show
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: and an optimist, maybe I'm going to kick to you.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: So let's imagine that we are living in an environment
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: where we have where money is no problem, and we
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: have as many nuclear portable nuclear power plants as we
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: could possibly need. Could you use electricity in some way
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: to protect your habitat from space radiation? I know it's
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: energetically expensive, but like, could we super coil?
• 52:23
  Speaker 5: Like?
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: Are what are our solutions here?
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, these things are mostly ions, right, and so
• 52:29
  Speaker 2: these they are charge particles, and those charge particles can
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: be repelled or redirected by electric fields, but they're very,
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: very high energy. The good thing is that the very
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: high energy ones are rarer, so while it'd be much
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: more challenging to redirect the high energy ones, there are
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: less common. The rate falls very very quickly with energy.
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: But yeah, it would cost a huge amount of energy.
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: I mean, really, the better way to do it is
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: a magnet, right, rather than relying on their electric field,
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: because that's what the Earth does. The Earth has a
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: magnetic field, and we deflect a lot of this stuff.
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: There actually is a fun proposal to put a huge
• 53:04
  Speaker 2: magnet between the Sun and Mars to create like a
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: magnetic shadow for Mars to deflect these particles. And I
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: asked a friend of mine who's a planetary scientist who
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: has actually worked on like Mars missions, and he says, quote,
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: this is literally the dumbest idea I have ever heard.
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: I almost fell out of my chair when I saw
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: someone presenting it.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: Okay, I feel like pestimist, I know.
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: And I asked him to elaborate, and he says, quote,
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: there are so many reasons it's stupid. You have to
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: somehow make a giant magnet. You'd have to put it
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: on a ginormous spaceship and keep it in orbit around
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: the lagarage point, and It goes on to point out
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: that not all of the radiation comes directly from the Sun,
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: so the shadow wouldn't even protect you. And a lot
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: of the radiation are UV photons, which do not have
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: a charge and will not be deflected by magnets or
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: electric fields. You really need the combination of a magnetic
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: field for your whole planet, not just a shadow, and
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: you need an atmosphere to absorb the stuff that isn't charged.
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: So yeah, physics doesn't have an answer for this one either.
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: Oh man, okay, well, let's move on to the next problem.
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: I don't have an answer really, And then of course
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: there's all the ethical things that we just completely glanced
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: over with genetic engineering, so that that is something else
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: holding this all back, all right, So then the second
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: problem is partial gravity. So Mars has forty percent of
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: the gravity we find on Earth. We know that astronauts
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: who experience no gravity when they're in free fall lose
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: muscle mass, bone density, and that might explain why they
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: start losing some of their vision or some of them,
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: not all of them. Because the fluids, you know, we're
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: adapted to have gravity pulling our fluids back down. So
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: when we don't have that benefit. Fluids tend to go
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: up and they like push on our brain and they
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: might be changing the shape of our eyes. So forty
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: percent gravity would that solve the problem. We don't know.
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: Like some of those problems maybe bones and muscles, for example,
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: that could possibly be solved by like putting on really
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: heavy weighted outfits that sort of make it so that
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: you're carrying around as much weight as you'd be carrying
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: around on Earth. That might help keep everything nice and strong.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: I don't know if that's going to help with like
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: fluid related problems or like anything else in your body
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: that's associated with partial gravity, but you could, and I've
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: seen proposals for this, create banked race tracks to create
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: artificial gravity, and you could, I don't know, maybe sleep
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: in those and that might be enough. And then I
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: also have seen proposals for what are called sucky pants
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: or sucky sleeping bags, and they they create a different
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: kind of pressure and it pulls the fluids down, and
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: so you could like sleep in these or wear these.
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: They're like you have to tune them well because sometimes
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: when they turn them on like too fast or too strong,
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: the fluids rush out of your brain and people like
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: pass out, which is not great and they don't look
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: super comfy. But so there are some technological solutions.
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: But to be clear, here you saying that we know
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: there are problems in zero gravity, and now we're asking
• 56:03
  Speaker 2: like is forty percent gravity enough? Like do we still
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: have those problems in forty percent? And then what can
• 56:09
  Speaker 2: we do about solving that additional bit? Right?
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Right, So I am assuming that forty percent is
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: not going to solve all of our problems. If it does,
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: then great, we don't need any extra help. If we
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: do need extra help, here are some things we could do.
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: But who wants to live on like a banked racetrack
• 56:24
  Speaker 2: their whole life? That doesn't sound like a fun place
• 56:26
  Speaker 2: to hang out. Or maybe only part of the time
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: you need to be on the racetrack.
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't know. Maybe you could sleep on the
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: racetrack and that would be enough, but I we don't know.
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: Well, what about something like more inherent? Is there something
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: we can do inside the body, you know, like to
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: modify the structure of our bones or chain some fundamental
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: process inside of us that'll just make us more naturally
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: suited to that kind of environment. I'm thinking like really
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: science fiction craziness here.
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: I had fiction craziness. Okay, so right, So one of
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: the questions would be, like, does our current genetic make
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: up include enough variability where we could tinker with things
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: in the right way to make us survive better in
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: these environments? And so you know, maybe there are, for starters,
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: people who have bones that are thicker than thicker than
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: others and would maybe do better in an environment like this.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: And if we can figure out why they have thicker bones,
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: maybe we could tinker with the DNA of future generations,
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: which is a phrase that makes me shudder just thinking
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: about it. But anyway, we could do that maybe and
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: like thicken up their bones so that maybe it wouldn't
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: matter if they're in an environment where you would expect
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: bones to atrophy because they were already stronger to begin with.
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: Like maybe that'll be enough. I really don't know. For
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: this one. I kind of come up at a loss
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: with radiation. I felt like it was maybe a little
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: easier to imagine.
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: Well, my question is like who's working on this stuff?
• 57:47
  Speaker 2: Like can you do any kind of ethical research here
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: in terms of like bioengineering humans or are people doing
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: like bioengineering on rats and dogs and stuff, or just
• 57:57
  Speaker 2: sort of theoretical. Is it possible to do research in
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: this area.
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: So with new Crisper technology, it's easier for us to
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: tinker with genetic information, so to like cut bits out
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: and replace it with other bits that we want, And
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: we have used that to help out with some diseases,
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: so for example, sickle cell anemia. By tinkering with some
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: genes using Crisper CAST nine, we've been able to like
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: make people's lives way better. So we are getting better
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: at using some of these techniques in humans, which is
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: a big step, I think, And so we're getting a
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: little outside of my expertise. I think. The first time
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: that technique was used on babies in a way that
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: it would be transmitted across generations was done in China,
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: and they got thrown in jail for that because the
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: whole international community was like no, no, no, no, no.
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: We were not okay. None of us are okay with this.
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: You jumped way too far ahead. And so I think
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: that research is gonna not move forward, I hope for
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: a while.
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: And if I could press on that for a moment,
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: like I've always wondered, is there a crisp understanding of
• 59:00
  Speaker 2: why it's okay to breed humans by selecting your mate
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: but not by editing their genome is the only answer
• 59:04
  Speaker 2: just like, well, this is a dull enough strategy that
• 59:07
  Speaker 2: you can't like feel too bad if you mess up
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: and you know your kid doesn't have the genetics you
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: want it, or something like is it just the power
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: of this technology to create horrendous outcomes?
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: I think it's a couple things. So one thing is
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: that we as a species have a lot of experience
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: with mating and having babies and seeing how that turns out.
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: But when you start tinkering with things at the genetic level,
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: things don't always go the way you think they're going to.
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: You know, you think you understand a system, you tinker
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: with it, and maybe that child will have catastrophic issues
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: they'll have to deal with for their whole life because
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: you decided to tinker with their DNA, but just.
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: To play devil's advocate. The same thing can happen when
• 59:48
  Speaker 2: you choose your mate, Like, for example, if you're in
• 59:50
  Speaker 2: a small community and you choose to select your partner
• 59:54
  Speaker 2: inside your community, you open them up to possible conditions
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: that come from genetic populations, you know, like I'm an
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: Ashkenazi Jew. I know that tasax syndrome would have been
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: a real risk if my partner was also an Ashkenazi Jew.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And so I don't think Zach would mind me
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: admitting that he's a carrier and that I had to
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: get that test because that was a real risk for us.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: But I think that is why we try to have
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: genetic testing, so that you can be aware of these
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: potential issues and make decisions based on that to avoid
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: these worst case scenarios. And so I think we would
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: say we don't want to stop people from marrying and
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: having children with the people that they love, but we
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: do whatever we can to minimize the negative impacts of that.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: I think trying to improve a bad situation you find
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: yourself in is very different than trying to tinker to
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: get something better that you would ideally have. And so,
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: and I think that leads to the second problem with
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: genetic engineering is that there's this concern that people who
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: can afford to tinker with their kids are going to
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: end up having like what often gets called in the
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: press as like designer babies, and that we're going to
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: further see inequality sort of exacerbated by this kind of thing.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: Right, Like I want my kid to be a long
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: jump champion, so I'm going to give them this genetic package,
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: which costs a million dollars or whatever. Yeah, that does
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 2: seem like terrifying. I'm already terrified to make any sort
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: of decisions from my kids, like oh, we're going to
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: this high school or that high school, or you have
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 2: to eat this way or that way, and I wonder
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: that by the consequences for the rest of their lives.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 2: So yeah, I'm glad to not have to have made
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: some genetic decisions.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, and we should have, like you know, maybe
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: maybe one day we'll have a bioethicist on the show
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: to talk about this stuff, because it's complicated and I
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: feel like the more you think about it, the more
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: you're like, oh, but it would be great if we
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: could do that. But it would be catastrophic if we
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: could do that. And like, you know, there are people
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: who spend their whole lives thinking about this much and
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: much more detail than I did.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the technology will be available eventually and then
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: we're going to figure out what to do about that.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: But yes, let's have an expert on who actually knows
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: this stuff.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: So, staying on genetic engineering for a second, there are
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: folks who argue that we need to start doing this
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: kind of engineering now because it's really important that we
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: start having self sustaining settlements on Mars as soon as
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: we can, because we never know when something catastrophic could
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: happen to the Earth, and it seems like a lot
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: of catastrophic things are happening lately. So it's important that
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: as soon as we can we get people living on
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: Mars in a way that can happen sustainably. And so
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: maybe that should make all of our ethical concerns, those
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: concerns should be dwarfed compared to the importance of keeping
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: the human species going. I don't personally buy that argument,
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: but you know, there are these emerging debates about the
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: ethics of doing it, and how those ethics sort of
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: change if we think that this is something we need
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: to be doing quickly for the safety of our species.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 2: Wow, it's so hard to imagine what the future of
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: humanity holds. It can go in so many different directions.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: And because I'm a pessimist, I will go ahead and
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: note the one final way you can get humans that
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: are well adapted to the Martian surface, which is natural selection,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: which every once in a while you'll see noted in
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: the literature as like, oh, well, you know, after enough
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: generations have people who are well adapted to the Martian surface,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: And of course that means many, many people will die
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: and root, and it's not even one hundred percent certain
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: that we have the right kind of genetic variability where
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: eventually there will be people who can survive you know,
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: radiation on Mars are living in forty percent gravity, and
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: so we might just lose a bunch of people, which
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: sounds really awful.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: Also, don't you assume that you start from a pretty
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: large population, Like if you start from ten people, it's
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: unlikely you're randomly going to have the right genetic mutation.
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: You need to start from a pretty big population, right,
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: which means a lot of people are going to die,
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: like big numbers.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: Wow. Agreed, Yes, you know, But you know Musk would
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: argue with Starship he can get a million people there
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: in thirty years, and he can, you know, keep sending people.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: I should clarify, Musk is not the one who has
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: said we're going to let natural selection solve the problem.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: He hasn't been clear on how this problem's going to
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: get solved. Free market somehow, free market something something. The
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: next thing we're going to talk about wouldn't solve the
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: partial gravity problem, but would solve problems related to radiation
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: to some extent, and depressurization. So the problem with depressurization
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: is that when human bodies go from an area of
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: higher pressure to an area of lower pressure, the nitrogen
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: bubbles out of our blood, and if it gets stuck
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: in your joints, it causes the bends because it hurts
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: so much that you bend over in pain. If those
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: bubbles get stuck in your lungs, you get the chokes,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: it's hard to breathe. If they get stuck in your
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: nervous system, you get the staggers, You get these nervous
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: system problems. But if it happens to you in space,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: you're just going to get the death, which unfortunately is
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: what happened to the crew of Solute one they got
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: exposed to the vacuum of space in the seventies. So,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: how do we make a Martian atmosphere thick enough, with
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: enough pressure so that you could go outside without a
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: spacesuit and you wouldn't have to worry about your habitat depressurizing,
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: and Daniel, I think the only solution to that would
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: be terraforming. Could you thicken up the atmosphere and the
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: pressure enough by the proposals that I saw involved like
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: sending nuclear weapons to the poles so that you could
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: blow up the ice there, and that that ice would
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: then distribute itself in the atmosphere and would thicken up
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: the atmosphere, and that might even warm up the planets.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: Could that solve the atmosphere thickness problem and radiation or
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: we just noking a planet for no reason.
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: It's not an easy answer. Like Mars is like one
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: percent of the Earth's atmosphere, so you'd need to increase
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 2: the atmospheric pressure by a lot. And there definitely is
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: CO two and the poles of Mars, and you could
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 2: release some of it. But the problem is that if
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 2: you release too much CO two then the atmosphere becomes
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: poisonous to humans, and so it doesn't really solve the problem,
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: and you'd need a lot of CO two. You need
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: to like scoop up some of it from Venus and
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 2: transfer it over to Mars, So this is not an
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: easy way to manufacture the kind of atmosphere you want. Ideally,
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 2: you want a huge amount of oxygen in the atmosphere
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: so you can walk around without a suit, But oxygen
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 2: is hard to make. You know, you basically need some
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 2: sort of like micro trubes growing on Mars eating this
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 2: theo too and producing oxygen. And my wife is a microbiologist,
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: and she thinks that would take millions of years optimistically,
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: And you know on Earth it took quite a long time.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: And the rocks are going to drink a lot of
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: that oxygen before it even stays in the atmosphere. And
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 2: we know that Mars is like likes to get rusty,
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: and we don't know if you can gobble up more
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 2: of that oxygen. So terraforming is not an easy solution,
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 2: which is why I think this question is actually asking
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 2: for another kind of solution, like what can we do
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: to change ourselves so we can walk around in that
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 2: one percent, Like could we engineer some sort of crazy
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 2: high pressure skin that's basically like a suit, or change
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 2: something fundamental about a biochemistry so we could just happily
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: walk around in one percent atmosphere.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: Daniel nothing's coming to me. Do you have an answer?
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: I mean, even if you had high pressure skin or like,
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: what would high pressure skin be like, like you turn
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: your skin to metal.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: Basically, I just have a natural suit, you know, as
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: part of your body. It's not really an answer. Basically
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: you're wearing a suit, but it's part of who you
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: are now, So technically it might be a solution.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: But like, if you open your eyes or your mouth,
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: aren't you exposing yeah, yourself to the pressure change? Like,
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: I don't see this working.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: Look, I only solve the problem for a minute. I
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: don't know's to lunch?
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: You know, Well you got you know, incremental you gotta
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: let the market something something exactly.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: The first candidate survived until lunchtime and then they depressureize.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 2: So let you know, we take a break and come
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: back and tell the rest of the problem another time. Yeah,
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: I think the answer is that it's hard, right. Pressure
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 2: is important, and we are just really not designed to
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 2: survive in a low pressure environment. You're right. We exchange
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 2: all sorts of fluids and materials with the environment, and
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: so sething ourselves off from it is not really a solution,
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: and it's hard to imagine well, what if we somehow,
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 2: like inflated humans, we lived in a low pressure environment.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 2: I'm imagining like a completely different kind of biological being,
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 2: you know, where, like your insides are actually at lower pressure.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: I can't imagine you'd be able to do that with
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: current genetic variability that's like available, But I mean you could.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: I guess, like every generation you lower the pressure in
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: the habitat, and whoever survives you work with that. But
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: that would take a long time and would not be ethical.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 2: No, not even close to ethical. No, absolutely not. All right,
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 2: so it sounds like we're not going to be adapted
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: to living on the surface of Mars very soon, and
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: even our craziest technological solutions are not really well suited
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: to the task.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: I have to admit, I don't feel like we came
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: up with any super satisfying answers. But let's go ahead
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: and ask Lewis if he feels like we did the
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: best we could.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: I'm terrified what kind of grade we're going to get.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 8: Thanks so much, Daniel and Kelly. I did not appreciate
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 8: quite the cannon Williams. I was looking man, and I
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 8: definitely get the message. I think I'm going to stick
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 8: around on Earth for a little while longer.
• 1:09:06
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