Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / Cosmic Questions, Angular Momentum & the Mysteries of the Expanding Universe
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Space Nuts. I am
- 0:03Speaker 1: your temporary host for today, Heidi Compo, and I'm here
- 0:07Speaker 1: with the wonderful again delightful Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large.
- 0:12Speaker 2: Fifteen second Guide the Channel ten nine.
- 0:17Speaker 3: Ignition Think Wench Space Nuts NY four three two Radio
- 0:24Speaker 3: one Space Nurse.
- 0:26Speaker 1: As when I reported Neil's good.
- 0:29Speaker 4: Hi Fred, how are you doing, Heidi?
- 0:33Speaker 1: I'm just doing lovely here in Space City, Houston. It's
- 0:37Speaker 1: actually a quite dreary evening. I think we have rain
- 0:41Speaker 1: lined up all week long, but it's absolutely necessary. It's
- 0:45Speaker 1: just probably not the best time with all of us
- 0:47Speaker 1: grad students going into final exams. I was hoping for
- 0:50Speaker 1: some sunshine to motivate us in the last few weeks.
- 0:55Speaker 4: I can have the opposite effect. I remember when I
- 0:58Speaker 4: was a student having to do a exams in June,
- 1:01Speaker 4: when the sun was gloriously shining and you're sitting inside
- 1:06Speaker 4: an examination hall. I found that I found it easy
- 1:09Speaker 4: to work when the weather was dreary. I have to say, oh.
- 1:12Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you know, the rain. Rain can be
- 1:14Speaker 1: really good for studying, but it just it kind of
- 1:18Speaker 1: brings your mood down. I think. I mean, I mean
- 1:20Speaker 1: some sunshine to break it up. We've got straight rain
- 1:22Speaker 1: this whole week, all through the weekend. We've got all
- 1:25Speaker 1: week of rain. But you know it's not a buzzkill
- 1:30Speaker 1: or a bummer. Is our questions for today?
- 1:33Speaker 3: Yep.
- 1:33Speaker 1: So we have some really fun questions lined up for you,
- 1:37Speaker 1: and I think we're going to just jump right on
- 1:39Speaker 1: into those. So our first question of the day is
- 1:43Speaker 1: from Buddy and Buddy from Oregon asks.
- 1:48Speaker 2: Greg, could you give me could you explain the other
- 1:51Speaker 2: end of angular momentum to me? I know you explain
- 1:53Speaker 2: how well angulars been faster as they compressed, but what
- 1:57Speaker 2: about when things expand because have the exact opposite effect
- 2:02Speaker 2: nick things. Will it spread things out differently or Nick
- 2:04Speaker 2: things want to be different?
- 2:06Speaker 1: Or how does that work?
- 2:08Speaker 5: And would that with the expansion of the uniform universe
- 2:13Speaker 5: have that reverse ingram momentum like from the from the
- 2:16Speaker 5: Big Bang on? Could that have been with the Scalpe
- 2:20Speaker 5: kind of what they talk about the Scalpel team or
- 2:21Speaker 5: the of the universe?
- 2:24Speaker 2: Could that bee what caused it?
- 2:26Speaker 3: All?
- 2:26Speaker 5: Right?
- 2:26Speaker 2: Just sort it out there, thanks guys, A huge fan.
- 2:29Speaker 4: Yeah, some great questions. Buddy always does, so it's it's true.
- 2:36Speaker 4: That angular momentum. It's the energy of objects spinning. If
- 2:44Speaker 4: you compress an object which is spinning, it will spin
- 2:47Speaker 4: more rapidly. And the classic experiment, of course is the
- 2:52Speaker 4: office chair, where sitting at an office chair, you have
- 2:56Speaker 4: your legs stretched out, you spin yourself around, pull your
- 2:59Speaker 4: legs in, and look, sure enough, you're spinning faster. I
- 3:01Speaker 4: used to do that when I had an office chair
- 3:03Speaker 4: in an office and really annoy people when it was
- 3:07Speaker 4: a you know, it's a common area, so that's correct. Yep,
- 3:14Speaker 4: I could be annoying, I know most of the time. Actually,
- 3:17Speaker 4: I think the opposite is true. If you've got something
- 3:21Speaker 4: that's spinning and it expands, then it will spin more slowly.
- 3:27Speaker 4: It's just the way angular momentum works. But the question
- 3:33Speaker 4: whether the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang
- 3:36Speaker 4: could be related to what body calls a sort of
- 3:40Speaker 4: reverse angular momentum, and you know, whether that concept ties
- 3:46Speaker 4: into the idea of what we call the We actually
- 3:50Speaker 4: call it the cosmic web, that sort of scaffolding on
- 3:53Speaker 4: which the galaxies are built, forming the universe's large scale structure.
- 3:59Speaker 4: I think that's an interesting idea that you've got the
- 4:04Speaker 4: universe expanding.
- 4:05Speaker 3: Now.
- 4:06Speaker 4: I have seen a headline recently that says that some
- 4:10Speaker 4: of the things that I didn't read the article, but
- 4:13Speaker 4: I might do it for next time. Some of the
- 4:15Speaker 4: things that we are mystified by about the universe today
- 4:20Speaker 4: could be solved if the universe is spinning. But it's
- 4:25Speaker 4: hard to imagine an object that is everything spinning. What's
- 4:29Speaker 4: it spinning in relation to, well, we don't know, but
- 4:32Speaker 4: that spin, you know, it is possible it could be
- 4:36Speaker 4: linked in the way that Buddy is describing. I should
- 4:40Speaker 4: go and chase up the headline on the spinning universe
- 4:44Speaker 4: and see whether it does link to the sort of
- 4:47Speaker 4: cosmic scaffolding that we see and to things like the
- 4:51Speaker 4: mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, which we so
- 4:55Speaker 4: poorly understand at the moment. So thank you, Buddy. That's
- 4:58Speaker 4: a good question, and it will set me off on
- 5:00Speaker 4: the track of investigation which I hope might lead to
- 5:03Speaker 4: some more more succinct answers than the one you find
- 5:06Speaker 4: this morning.
- 5:08Speaker 1: That can be a fun article to break Andrew back
- 5:12Speaker 1: into the swing of things with Hey, Andrew, We're going
- 5:14Speaker 1: to be talking about the entire universe and relationship to
- 5:18Speaker 1: things we don't even understand. Good way to bring in
- 5:21Speaker 1: the gustole.
- 5:23Speaker 4: That's what we do every week.
- 5:24Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true, it's true. Well, our next question is
- 5:28Speaker 1: from Scott on your side of the world. So Scott
- 5:31Speaker 1: Moonsier from Sindey says, it appears to me that the
- 5:36Speaker 1: hyperinflation of the universe in the first ten and then
- 5:41Speaker 1: he has in parentheses negative thirty four seconds can be
- 5:44Speaker 1: better explained by time dilation due to the extreme gravitation
- 5:48Speaker 1: experience at that time in the early universe, at the
- 5:52Speaker 1: very first moment after the Big Bang, time would be
- 5:56Speaker 1: virtually standing vietually standing still. From the outside observer, time
- 6:02Speaker 1: would then be speeding up as the expansion progressed. So
- 6:05Speaker 1: would so for an outside observer such as us, it
- 6:08Speaker 1: would appear that the universe is much younger than it is.
- 6:12Speaker 4: Please explain, Please explains a very famous comment made by
- 6:18Speaker 4: a politician a number of years ago, and it's got
- 6:20Speaker 4: all kinds of connotations here in Australia which you won't
- 6:23Speaker 4: be aware of, Heidi, So please please explain. Well I will,
- 6:28Speaker 4: but I'm not sure I can give the answer.
- 6:30Speaker 3: But there is.
- 6:35Speaker 4: There is time dilation. When we look back at the
- 6:40Speaker 4: early universe, and you can measure that because you can see,
- 6:45Speaker 4: for example, how long supernova take these are exploding stars
- 6:51Speaker 4: to rise to their peak brightness and then fade away.
- 6:53Speaker 4: That length of time changes. When you look in the
- 6:56Speaker 4: early universe, it's actually stretched out because of time dilation.
- 7:00Speaker 4: But it's not enough to give rise to this phenomenon
- 7:09Speaker 4: that we call inflation. This period exactly as Scott mentions,
- 7:16Speaker 4: for about the first ten to the minus thirty four
- 7:18Speaker 4: seconds after the Big Bang, the universe expanded by a
- 7:23Speaker 4: colossal amount. It was, you know, something like changed by
- 7:28Speaker 4: a factor of ten to the power fifty in a
- 7:32Speaker 4: length of time alike ten to the minus thirty two
- 7:35Speaker 4: of a second. Something we just simply cannot get our
- 7:37Speaker 4: heads around. And that is necessary, not it's necessary, And
- 7:46Speaker 4: the reason why we believe that happened is that otherwise
- 7:49Speaker 4: you've got a real problem in the homogeneity of the universe.
- 7:54Speaker 4: That basically things are more or less the same in
- 7:58Speaker 4: every direction of what going to it now. But that's
- 8:01Speaker 4: what that inflation scenario was actually introduced for to explain
- 8:08Speaker 4: that overall uniformity so time. So it's not an artifact
- 8:14Speaker 4: of time dilation. We know, it's a real phenomenon. Time dilation,
- 8:18Speaker 4: as I said, does exist. It has been measured, but
- 8:21Speaker 4: it's not anything like the kind of violent expansion that
- 8:26Speaker 4: was necessary to give rise to a universe that looks
- 8:29Speaker 4: the way it does as we see it today.
- 8:32Speaker 1: Good question, though, very very interesting. Our next question is
- 8:38Speaker 1: from Philip and his six year old son Enrique from Portugal,
- 8:43Speaker 1: and they have a very interesting audio question that we're
- 8:46Speaker 1: going to play for you here now.
- 8:48Speaker 3: Good evening. My name is Philip and I'm here with
- 8:51Speaker 3: my six year old Rike. We're sending this from Portugal.
- 8:58Speaker 3: We listen to your show every night before falling asleep,
- 9:02Speaker 3: and Enriquel loves it. He left space and all things
- 9:07Speaker 3: Cosmos and he's been wanting to send you a question
- 9:11Speaker 3: since forever now, but we didn't have a great question
- 9:17Speaker 3: to ask you. But the other day Ricu remembered something
- 9:22Speaker 3: and he thought of a question that he is curious about.
- 9:25Speaker 3: So I'm gonna let him do his part. Now.
- 9:30Speaker 2: Is a universe figh nite or infinite? And if it's infinite,
- 9:37Speaker 2: what is your teach spending into?
- 9:41Speaker 3: Okay, so that's our question. Bye bye, say bye bye bye.
- 9:48Speaker 4: Yeah, a question, like so many of the ones we
- 9:51Speaker 4: get from our listeners, And this is fantastic coming from
- 9:54Speaker 4: young Enrique, who's six years old. I wouldn't have thought
- 9:57Speaker 4: of a proud, profound question like this when I was
- 10:00Speaker 4: six years old, because I probably didn't know what infinite
- 10:02Speaker 4: meant in those days. So it's a question that astrophysics
- 10:11Speaker 4: and cosmology simply don't have an answer to. Is the
- 10:14Speaker 4: universe finite or infinite? We know that there are horizons
- 10:19Speaker 4: in the universe beyond which we cannot see, and perhaps
- 10:23Speaker 4: the best known one is the cosmic microwave background radiation,
- 10:29Speaker 4: which corresponds to us looking back in time to a
- 10:33Speaker 4: time in which the universe was still glowing brightly and
- 10:39Speaker 4: was opaque. Actually you couldn't see through it. It was an
- 10:42Speaker 4: opaque fog of brilliant radiation visible light. In fact, now
- 10:48Speaker 4: that the ifact put it this way, the opaqueness of
- 10:52Speaker 4: the universe came to an end relatively quickly. It became
- 10:56Speaker 4: transparent over a fairly short period of time, and that's
- 10:59Speaker 4: what enables us to look back to see this wall
- 11:03Speaker 4: of radiation, which we call the cosmic microwave background radiation.
- 11:07Speaker 4: As I think I've said before, I call it the
- 11:09Speaker 4: cosmic wallpaper because it's behind everything we can see in
- 11:13Speaker 4: the universe. That radiation is a horizon that we can't
- 11:17Speaker 4: penetrate with any of the technologies available to us today. Eventually,
- 11:23Speaker 4: maybe neutrino telescopes and gravitational wave telescopes might penetrate beyond that,
- 11:29Speaker 4: but at the moment we're limited to our electromagnetic wave
- 11:34Speaker 4: telescopes and we can't see any further. So that is
- 11:37Speaker 4: an artist It's like an artificial horizon. It's like it's
- 11:41Speaker 4: not artificial in the sense that it's human made. It's
- 11:44Speaker 4: an illusion. It's like when you when you're on a
- 11:47Speaker 4: vessel and an ocean, you look all the way around,
- 11:49Speaker 4: you can see a horizon which is the edge of
- 11:52Speaker 4: the limit of your visibility. But we know the ocean
- 11:55Speaker 4: goes on a long, long way beyond that, and so
- 11:59Speaker 4: it's the same sort of thing. And the question is
- 12:02Speaker 4: how far beyond that does it go in terms of
- 12:05Speaker 4: the universe, not the ocean, the universe, and the answer
- 12:08Speaker 4: could be infinite. It could be that it is infinite.
- 12:11Speaker 4: That's not ruled out by the cosmological models that we
- 12:15Speaker 4: have today. Now, the idea of it expanding into something
- 12:20Speaker 4: is again it's illusory. All we know is that it's expanding.
- 12:26Speaker 4: But we also know that the shape of space changes
- 12:29Speaker 4: dramatically on very large scales, and so it might not
- 12:33Speaker 4: need anything to expand into. It might be an entity
- 12:36Speaker 4: of its own right, which is either infinite or finite.
- 12:41Speaker 4: It's easier to imagine it when it's finite. That sort
- 12:43Speaker 4: of folds back on itself, and so it doesn't have
- 12:46Speaker 4: to have something to expand into. Of course, you can
- 12:50Speaker 4: always invoke the multi universe theories and perhaps suggests that
- 12:55Speaker 4: there are extra dimensions that we don't see. We've talked
- 12:57Speaker 4: about this before, that the universe might be expanding into,
- 13:01Speaker 4: but all that is not yet supported by observations. It
- 13:05Speaker 4: got you know, it's conjecture mostly so Enriquet, you're asking
- 13:10Speaker 4: fabulous questions. You're asking perhaps one of the most fundamental
- 13:13Speaker 4: questions that astronomers can ask, along with a few like
- 13:18Speaker 4: what is the nature of time? And things of that sort.
- 13:20Speaker 4: But is the universe infinite? I think is a great question.
- 13:23Speaker 4: Maybe as you grow up, cosmology will advance to the
- 13:28Speaker 4: state where we can put an answer on it, and
- 13:30Speaker 4: we can say from the observations we can make of
- 13:33Speaker 4: things like the cosmic microwave, background cosmic wallpaper, we might
- 13:37Speaker 4: be able to say that there is a limit on
- 13:39Speaker 4: whether it's finite or infinite, and we hope maybe we'll
- 13:43Speaker 4: talk about it on Space Nights as well well.
- 13:46Speaker 1: I just I love that question from Enriqueer. I remember
- 13:48Speaker 1: being probably around that age, and I was laying in
- 13:50Speaker 1: bed one day and my little mind was just starting
- 13:53Speaker 1: to think of these big ideas and I was trying
- 13:55Speaker 1: to wrap my head around infinity. And I just remember
- 13:58Speaker 1: walking out of.
- 13:59Speaker 6: My room and Mom, I have a headache, and I
- 14:02Speaker 6: was like, oh, my head hurts so much, and She's like, why,
- 14:04Speaker 6: what's wrong. I was like, I'm thinking about infinity and
- 14:07Speaker 6: it hurts my head. I was just I could wrap
- 14:10Speaker 6: my little tiny brain around it. And so I'll say
- 14:13Speaker 6: this to you and Rieque, if these are things that
- 14:15Speaker 6: interest you and you would like to be somebody who
- 14:19Speaker 6: helps solve these problems one day, you want to do
- 14:22Speaker 6: good in school, especially with math, because math is what
- 14:26Speaker 6: they are using to define these things. So do good
- 14:29Speaker 6: in school. Okay, all right.
- 14:33Speaker 1: Our last question for the day comes from Kevin in Melbourne,
- 14:38Speaker 1: and Kevin says, love the show guys, and love sharing
- 14:41Speaker 1: insights with my high school science class. Oh, I love
- 14:44Speaker 1: to see it. We're going from the little kids to
- 14:46Speaker 1: the older kids. So Kevin has a question about the ISS.
- 14:51Speaker 1: What is the temperature on the inside of the ISS?
- 14:55Speaker 1: Does it vary from the side facing the sun to
- 14:58Speaker 1: the side in relative shade? Does it increase when the
- 15:01Speaker 1: ISS is in full sun? And does it drop when
- 15:03Speaker 1: the ISS goes behind the Earth. Does it make a
- 15:06Speaker 1: lot of noise as it expands and contracts. How is
- 15:10Speaker 1: the temperature maintained at a level compatible with human life?
- 15:14Speaker 1: Have a great day and thanks to the podcast, you could.
- 15:18Speaker 4: Probably answer this question. Heidi or aficionado of human space flight.
- 15:24Speaker 1: And well, I don't know what the temperature is, but
- 15:28Speaker 1: I do know that you can follow the ISS on YouTube.
- 15:33Speaker 1: There's a few channels where they have live streams going
- 15:37Speaker 1: where they have some really fantastic camera angles of the ISS,
- 15:42Speaker 1: and it goes straight from NASA. You can see it
- 15:44Speaker 1: on the official NASA channel, so you can watch it
- 15:47Speaker 1: go around the Earth. And it's I don't have this
- 15:50Speaker 1: number off the top of my head. I could hotly
- 15:52Speaker 1: type it in really quick, but it's what seventy two
- 15:54Speaker 1: times seventy two sunrises in a day.
- 15:58Speaker 4: It's no it's it's so it's about I think it's seventeen.
- 16:03Speaker 4: I think you've got the numbers the wrong way around. Yeah,
- 16:06Speaker 4: so it's every every ninety minutes you get a sunrise,
- 16:10Speaker 4: and every ninety minutes you get a sunset, So you
- 16:12Speaker 4: get one of them every forty five minutes. So I
- 16:16Speaker 4: think it's seventeen of each that you get during the day.
- 16:18Speaker 4: It's an easy calculation. I can't do it in my
- 16:20Speaker 4: head anyway. I think in terms of no that this
- 16:24Speaker 4: is a great question and it's a tribute to the
- 16:27Speaker 4: engineering behind the ISS that you can do this sort
- 16:31Speaker 4: of thing at all. So the I think the internal
- 16:36Speaker 4: interior temperature on the ISS is about twenty degrees celsius,
- 16:41Speaker 4: maybe twenty one something like that. I can't do it
- 16:44Speaker 4: in my head. Oh wait a minute, twenty is sixty
- 16:46Speaker 4: just sixty eight DearS for Ahow is that right? Yeah?
- 16:48Speaker 1: They keep it between sixty four to seventy nine degrees
- 16:51Speaker 1: fair and hey.
- 16:52Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so there you've got Thanks for looking that up.
- 16:54Speaker 1: I hope that's on the that's official NASA. Careful careful
- 16:58Speaker 1: where you get your space news.
- 17:00Speaker 4: Absolutely, that's right. So it's a sort of ambient temperature,
- 17:03Speaker 4: that and that and that, and that allows astronauts to
- 17:07Speaker 4: work in shirts, leaves and things of that sort without
- 17:10Speaker 4: overcoats on. But it's artificially controlled. So that's all governed
- 17:16Speaker 4: by air conditioning units that actually heat and cool the atmosphere.
- 17:21Speaker 4: Because you're absolutely right, the as the spacecraft goes in
- 17:26Speaker 4: and out of direct sunlight, it's it's temperature, the amount
- 17:31Speaker 4: of radiation it's feeling varies enormously. That in itself needs
- 17:39Speaker 4: to be controlled as well. So on the hot when
- 17:43Speaker 4: when it's being heated up by the sun, you've got
- 17:45Speaker 4: to try and get rid of that heat into space,
- 17:47Speaker 4: and there are radiators.
- 17:48Speaker 3: That do that.
- 17:51Speaker 4: At the same time, when you're on the other side,
- 17:53Speaker 4: you you want to try and conserve the heat when
- 17:56Speaker 4: you're when you're on the dark side, when you're in
- 17:58Speaker 4: the earth shadow. So so this this is all taken
- 18:03Speaker 4: care of in the engineering. The metals that here used
- 18:08Speaker 4: are ones whose expansion and contraction characteristics are very well understood,
- 18:13Speaker 4: uh and they you know, they're built in such a
- 18:16Speaker 4: way that there's a lot of self compensation built into it,
- 18:20Speaker 4: a bit like you know, bi metallic strips and things
- 18:24Speaker 4: like that. When you put two different metals together with
- 18:26Speaker 4: different expansion coefficients. Nevertheless, it's a really interesting question that
- 18:30Speaker 4: I don't know the answer to. And I don't know
- 18:32Speaker 4: whether you would hide either, whether it creaks as it
- 18:35Speaker 4: warms up and you know, cools down, whether there's a
- 18:39Speaker 4: noise from the space station as it as it goes
- 18:43Speaker 4: into the sunlight. Mind betting there is.
- 18:46Speaker 3: You know, I would assume. I'd assume there is. I was.
- 18:49Speaker 1: I was at a talk from an astronaut a couple
- 18:52Speaker 1: of years ago, and he was giving the funniest story
- 18:55Speaker 1: about their a red device, which is the exercise device
- 18:59Speaker 1: they use on the spacecraft, and it's if you look
- 19:02Speaker 1: at it, it's it's huge. If you guys go to
- 19:04Speaker 1: your regular gym, probably one of the biggest machines in
- 19:07Speaker 1: there might be something like the light press. So this
- 19:09Speaker 1: looks like that on such a larger scale. And that's
- 19:12Speaker 1: because they have all these vibration mufflers built in because
- 19:16Speaker 1: they can't have yeah, they can't have these exercise devices
- 19:19Speaker 1: creating a lot of vibration, so they have these dampeners
- 19:22Speaker 1: built in. And there's one day where the it wasn't
- 19:25Speaker 1: working like it was supposed to, and the astronauts still
- 19:28Speaker 1: had to get their exercise in, but they didn't want
- 19:30Speaker 1: to have all this vibration rattling apart the station. And
- 19:33Speaker 1: so they solved this problem with the most clever, genius
- 19:38Speaker 1: thing you would think of. Can you take a guess
- 19:40Speaker 1: how they fixed this probably multimillion dollar problem.
- 19:44Speaker 4: Oh gosh, and probably bits of cardboard stuck in between
- 19:49Speaker 4: the US sock.
- 19:50Speaker 1: They shoved a sock in the little squeaky spot and
- 19:54Speaker 1: solved the problem, and it worked just fine. And so
- 19:57Speaker 1: I would assume if we're needed to fix things by
- 20:01Speaker 1: sticking socks in the corners to dampen the vibrations, I
- 20:04Speaker 1: would guess. I think it's probably safe to guess that
- 20:07Speaker 1: it probably does make little creeks and sounds as it
- 20:10Speaker 1: heats up the cools down. But another interesting thing I
- 20:13Speaker 1: learned this past weekend that kind of is a direct
- 20:17Speaker 1: answer to Kevin's question about how does that temperature get controlled?
- 20:21Speaker 1: A lot of it is just complex patents and intuitive machines.
- 20:26Speaker 1: Which is another company in the sabase industry, has recently
- 20:30Speaker 1: partnered with Columbia Sportswear. And you might be thinking, well,
- 20:34Speaker 1: Columbia Sportswear, what does that have to do with space.
- 20:37Speaker 1: So Colombia their patent portfolio for the technologies they put
- 20:41Speaker 1: into their jackets that keep you warm in winter conditions,
- 20:45Speaker 1: their patent portfolios five hundred times bigger than any of
- 20:49Speaker 1: their other leading competitors. And that is technology that I
- 20:53Speaker 1: maybe I can't explain or understand, or maybe I can't
- 20:56Speaker 1: even look at it unless I look. I had an
- 20:59Speaker 1: NDA and was looking at those patterns. But their whole
- 21:01Speaker 1: thing is they want to keep hot things hot and
- 21:03Speaker 1: cold things cold, and sometimes those things are right next
- 21:06Speaker 1: to each other. And that's really I think a very
- 21:09Speaker 1: Kevin's question is so interesting and dynamic and multifaceted, like
- 21:14Speaker 1: it's really, hey, how do we keep people alive and
- 21:16Speaker 1: comfortable up there? And it's the answer is it's very complicated.
- 21:20Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting that that link is one that I
- 21:25Speaker 4: never would have guessed would happen. But I'm just thinking back,
- 21:29Speaker 4: you know, to the early days of spaceflights, the Mercury
- 21:32Speaker 4: capsules and the Geminy capsules and even Apollo. Those problems
- 21:38Speaker 4: of how you maintained a comfortable environment for astronauts to
- 21:41Speaker 4: work in were solved at a very early stage in
- 21:45Speaker 4: the history of spaceflight. Not on the same sort of
- 21:48Speaker 4: scale as the space station, which is vast compared with
- 21:51Speaker 4: these other early capsules, but nevertheless they had to deal
- 21:55Speaker 4: with it. They had to work out ways of keeping
- 21:58Speaker 4: the spacecraft comfortable, comfortable temperature inside despite the huge variations
- 22:04Speaker 4: of radiation that it's feeling on the outside. So it's
- 22:08Speaker 4: probably quite all technology, but it's great that it works,
- 22:12Speaker 4: and it's a tribute to the yes to the ingenuity
- 22:15Speaker 4: of humans when it comes to putting human beings in
- 22:18Speaker 4: an environment that they were never meant to be in
- 22:21Speaker 4: in terms of their well being. Maybe we were we
- 22:25Speaker 4: were meant to be in them in terms of our exploration,
- 22:28Speaker 4: but that's a different question.
- 22:32Speaker 1: I just every every time we get together and talk Fred,
- 22:35Speaker 1: I'm just left with a very positive feeling about the
- 22:38Speaker 1: incredibleness of human beings and what we've invented and come
- 22:41Speaker 1: up with. And it makes me just, you know, proud
- 22:44Speaker 1: of our species. We have done wonderful things and we've
- 22:47Speaker 1: continued to create incredible things. I've even seen that some
- 22:52Speaker 1: people have built these devices that are helping refreeze and
- 22:56Speaker 1: rebuild the ice caps and it's like that is a
- 22:59Speaker 1: fantastic invention and it's really cool, just like these engineering breakthroughs.
- 23:06Speaker 4: Absolutely engineering is yeah, it's right up there with science.
- 23:12Speaker 4: Is one of the most important things that we can
- 23:14Speaker 4: do for the well being of our species, and long
- 23:17Speaker 4: may it continue.
- 23:19Speaker 3: Absolutely well.
- 23:20Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Fred for answering all of these
- 23:22Speaker 1: questions today and enlightening us with your knowledge. You're just
- 23:28Speaker 1: a wealth of fantastic information and it has been my
- 23:33Speaker 1: absolute pleasure to be a co host with you these
- 23:36Speaker 1: last few weeks. And for those of you listening, you
- 23:39Speaker 1: will have Andrew back your next episode, so look forward
- 23:43Speaker 1: to him. But I will be signing off for now. Fred,
- 23:47Speaker 1: did you have anything else you've wanted to add?
- 23:50Speaker 4: Just once again, thank you to you Heidi for making
- 23:53Speaker 4: Andrew's absence. I won't say a pleasure, because he'd think
- 23:57Speaker 4: I was glad to see the back of him, but
- 24:01Speaker 4: certainly a delight. It's been very nice to talk to.
- 24:03Speaker 4: Thanks again, excellent.
- 24:05Speaker 1: Well, you guys can have me back anytime, And for
- 24:08Speaker 1: those of you listening, wish me luck on my final
- 24:10Speaker 1: exam so that I can join my place among the
- 24:13Speaker 1: stars of the superstars of the engineers and people part
- 24:18Speaker 1: of this industry. And thank you so much for having
- 24:20Speaker 1: me on space Nuts at Space.
- 24:23Speaker 7: Nuts to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
- 24:32Speaker 7: or your favorite podcast player.
- 24:34Speaker 5: You can also.
- 24:34Speaker 7: Stream on demand at FTEs dot com.
- 24:37Speaker 5: This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.