Can we engineer the sun?

24:24Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply. Select plans only. Not available in all areas. Use a fiber coaxial cable.

24:44All right, we're back. Daniel has scared the pants off of all of us. We're going to burn up or we're going to fall into the sun, but we're probably not going to actually fall into the sun. We're just going to be in its hot atmosphere layers. Anyway, we're dead. So, Daniel, how do we avoid this whole we die in billions of years thing? We turn to the engineers and we ask them, hey, can you solve this problem? We think we understand enough of the physics of the sun to figure out when it's going to grow and get hotter. And so in principle, we should be able to engineer a solution. And there was a paper in the 80s by a guy named David Criswell coined this phrase star lifting to imagine that maybe we could prevent the sun from getting so big and so hot by making it more like longer lasting stars by making it smaller.

25:32That's why it's called star lifting. It's like take stuff off of the sun. Essentially, could we go in and take a big scoop off of the sun? And this is a little bit delicate because you don't want to turn the sun like into a red dwarf. A red dwarf is cooler and then the earth wouldn't be in the habitable zone anymore. What you want to do is scoop off just enough to keep the sun from getting too big and too hot. So it sort of like maintains the same temperature throughout its lifetime and lasts a lot longer. Removing some mass would lower the pressure at the center as the helium accumulates. And so that's the sort of basic idea.

26:08It was revived in 2017 in a paper by Greg Matloff. And then a couple of years ago, a really interesting paper by Matt Scoggins and David Kipping dug into the details of exactly how you would do this. And so I thought it'd be fun to talk about this engineering task and whether it's possible at all. First of all, this is fascinating. I will note that when you started introducing the topic, you said a lot of we think and presumably. And I feel like before we start tinkering with the sun, we should be like, we are sure about. And it is absolutely the case that. But presumably these papers had all the right qualifiers in them.

26:43And this is just getting the conversation started. Yeah, this is definitely let's have a first conversation about whether this is possible at all. not let's have a policy discussion about whether we understand the risks and decide whether the balance of risk and reward is a good one, which we definitely should have before we do anything like this, the same way that we should before we do any geoengineering. But it's still reasonable to say, hey, what is possible? And these papers are just like the very first steps towards what is possible. As you'll hear, like the solutions are so outrageously expensive and elaborate that They aren't anything we could hope to imagine doing in the next few centuries.

27:22But, you know, scientists and engineers a few centuries from now will be glad that we thought through some of the details here to make their work easier. But you're right. The policy question is separate. Okay. Yeah. I don't know. That sounds like wimp talk to me. Let's just. Wimp talk. And so, yeah, I'm not advocating for any of these things, right? I just, I think it's fun to think so big and to imagine what's possible. And the same way I'm awestruck by what humans have built, I'm awestruck to imagine what we might build. But of course, yes, we do have to do it carefully. Just because you want to drill a hole through the center of the earth to drop a ball through and see what happens doesn't mean that you should.

28:01Yeah, that's right. I really like your approach to engineering. Think it through first. All right, so let's talk about the first proposal for how you would do this. Yeah, so there's a few ideas. One is called the thermal-driven method. And the idea is to tap into something that's already happening, which is the solar wind. The sun is already shedding mass. It's a huge ball of plasma in space, and it's mostly confined by gravity. But the atmosphere is one of the hottest parts of the sun. And so it's constantly shooting off particles. You know, yes, photons, obviously, we're absorbing those and we enjoy those on a sunny day, but also protons and electrons.

28:39That's what we call the solar wind. And if you're out there in space as an astronaut, this is the kind of thing you have to be wary of because for you, it's radiation. Very high-speed particles shooting out from the sun fill all of space. So don't imagine space as empty. One of our episodes about interstellar travel talks about the dangers of radiation in space, and it's serious. And this is where it comes from. It comes from the sun, and then, of course, other suns and black holes and all sorts of stuff out there in space generate wind. And by wind, we don't mean air molecules. We mean high-speed particles.

29:10So one idea is, can we enhance that? Can we get the sun to shed more of its mass, to crank up the solar wind? Okay, wow. So the fact that we're proposing that we're going to heat up the sun sounds incredible to me. How can we make a dent in the hottest thing that we know about? But go ahead. Let's see. What are proposals for making the sun even hotter? And it doesn't sound like the kind of thing you'd want to do, right? The whole problem we're trying to solve is that the sun is going to get too hot. So somebody comes along and says, the solution to making it too hot is to make it hotter. Hold on a second.

29:43Am I in a solar engineering conference or an insane asylum or both? Could be some overlap in those communities. It could be some overlap. Exactly. Choose your venue carefully. The idea is not to heat the core of the sun, but to heat the atmosphere. This is where the solar wind happens, right? It's the outer layers of the sun that are super crazy hot, super high energy particles that reach escape velocity from the sun. So instead of heating up the core, you wanna heat up the atmosphere, which will help strip the sun of some of these particles. So all you gotta do in this case is basically reflect the sun back at itself.

30:19So imagine building a bunch of mirrors which just reflect the sun's light back to the sun. That will heat up the sun's atmosphere. You know, it's sort of like putting a fire in an insulated box will help make the fire hotter. Whereas if you don't, then the heat from the fire bleeds out into the atmosphere. And so if you have these mirrors or you like have solar panels, which gather the energy and then beam it back, you could heat up spots on the sun's atmosphere. Okay. All right. I think, and I think I'm just being too picky because if you put a fire in an insulated box, it's going to run out of oxygen and burn out.

30:53Right? No, you're right. Yeah. But we understand what's happening with the sun better. We're not going to snuff out the sun accidentally. i'm not impressing you with my level of detail daniel please don't put out the sun come on engineers do better you don't want to wake up one morning get an email from daniel uh bad news i accidentally put out the sun last night well and as we discussed in a prior email that would be a high information email yes that would be surprising that would be surprising yeah it'd be a good lesson in shannon entropy so at least you gain something, right? That's right. I'm sure everybody would be thrilled.

31:32No, you're right. That analogy is not perfect for that reason. But in this case, you're either just having huge mirrors to reflect energy back into the sun to heat up spots on its atmosphere, or you have some more complicated system where you're absorbing the energy using like photovoltaic cells, and then you're beaming the energy back using like microwaves. Do you remember we once had a conversation about solar power in space? This is basically that same system. You have solar power, you generate energy, and then you build a beam. Instead of beaming it to the Earth's surface where you're going to use it to charge your phone, you're just beaming it to the surface of the sun to heat it up, to make these hot spots.

32:08Okay, and this is going to buy us more time. This is going to buy us more time because it's going to create more solar flares. Like solar flares, or what we call solar weather, right, are moments when the sun has like a huge eruption of plasma, which then floats out into space. And sometimes it like washes over the earth and causes incredible damage. There was this Carrington event in the 1800s where a huge solar flare lashed out and the earth basically went through a plasma plume and like fried all the electronics on the earth, which at the time, fortunately, were pretty simple. So we had some fires from like telegraph wires going haywire.

32:43But if it happened now, it would be very, very bad. But what we're talking about now is creating hotspots on the surface of the sun, which would generate solar flares. So like huge strands of plasma floating out into space. And obviously, you don't want that happening in the direction of the earth, right? You might be thinking, Daniel, again, now you're creating like bad things, right? Bad solar weather is bad for satellites. It's bad for the earth. It's bad for all these things. Why would you risk this? So the idea is, yes, you create these hotspots, and those hotspots create solar flares, and you get this plasma ejected.

33:15But then you try to guide it. So plasma is electrically charged, right? It's positive and negative. There are protons and there are electrons there. So you build a huge magnetic field around the sun to guide all this stuff so it doesn't go along the ecliptic where the planets are, like the sun's equator, but it goes up to the poles. Okay. Okay. And so then are we going to be in any trouble if we're not getting that stuff? Like, will we cool down or will we just not get hit with radiation? Yeah, that stuff would be bad. And so it will cool the sun a little bit, but that's the goal, right? We want to keep the sun from getting too hot.

33:49So if we pull this stuff out of the sun by creating these hotspots, having it spew it, and then shepherd it up to the north and south poles, we're safe because we're not being blasted by these huge plasma strands. And we're slowly reducing the mass of the sun, which is the whole goal, right? The goal is to take mass off of the sun. All right. So it seems pretty important that you get all of this stuff heading in the right direction because you don't want to accidentally spew a lot more radiation towards the Earth or a Mars settlement if we ever get one. How do we control where this stuff goes?

34:19So this is my favorite part because it involves building a particle accelerator, yay, that goes all the way around the sun. So essentially, you need to build a magnetic field that pushes stuff towards the sun. And so to build a magnetic field, as we talked about in a recent episode, you need currents, you need moving electric charges. And so a good way to do this is to build a particle accelerator, which shoots particles around the equator of the sun. Or you have a few of these things stacked on top of each other, which basically shepherds this stuff up to the poles. And at the same time, you can answer a bunch of really important fundamental physics questions, because now you have a particle accelerator with an enormous radius and super high energy.

35:00And boy, wouldn't that be awesome for other reasons? I wouldn't want to have to write that grant because I bet the money for the LHC was a tough sell. I mean, it's awesome, but I'm sure it was expensive. I can't imagine the price of this. I'm not even going to try to put dollars on this. I mean, the price of the next collider on Earth is going to be something like 50 to 100 billion dollars. Wow. There are also crazy out there proposals for a collider that runs along the equator of the moon. What? Which would be awesome for some reasons and not so awesome for other reasons, but fun to think about and also absurdly expensive.

35:36So, yeah, a collider that runs along the equator of the sun. I mean, I don't even know what the scientific prefix is for those dollars. It's beyond trillions and quadrillions and quintillions, I'm sure. But, you know, we're talking about the future of humanity here. Finally, particle physics will be useful. Oh, well, we talked the other day about how particle physics gave us a new treatment for cancer. so it will be useful for a second time. Only those two, though. So this is one scheme to try to slurp some stuff off the sun. And then at the North and South Poles, you have these magnetic nozzles which focus the stuff and gather it.

36:12And then you could actually use it for something. This is raw material. Or if your goal is to build megastructures, a Dyson sphere, or other crazy engineering projects in your solar system, a limiting factor is having enough stuff. Like you might say, I want to take Jupiter apart and use it to build a Dyson sphere. It might not be enough. And so just having raw material is important. And the sun is the biggest source of raw material in the solar system. I mean, the solar system is basically the sun plus, right? And we're like those little extra bits. So gathering that stuff off the sun gives you an enormous amount of mass to play with to build other stuff.

36:48But it's in the form of gas when you collect it, right? It's in the form of plasma mostly. And you might think it's mostly hydrogen. Who really cares? Well, hydrogen's good for building stuff. And the sun has lots of other stuff in it that's not just hydrogen. Like it's mostly hydrogen. It's 2 % metals or something. But it still has most of the iron in the solar system is in the sun. Most of the oxygen, most of the nickel, most of the basic building blocks, the silicon, are in the sun. Like the sun has 20 times as much of all those basic elements as Jupiter does. And it's distributed all through the sun because of convection, the plasma currents.

37:24And so if you are funneling mass off of the sun, then yeah, you could slurp off an enormous amount of pretty useful basic ingredients for your other insanely expensive engineering projects. Yay! It's crazy all the way down. Crazy enables crazy. Thank goodness. So iron is getting ejected in the solar flares in the solar wind? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's mostly hydrogen, but it's a good mixture. I mean, iron is not being made in our sun, right? So it's not like it's only at the core. And if there is iron there, it's from previous rounds of stellar nucleosynthesis. And a lot of it does sink to the core because it's heavier.

38:04But also the sun is a big churning ball of plasma and this convection that brings stuff up, right? Also, the way that, you know, like diamonds are made inside the earth, but then convection brings stuff up to the mantle and to the surface. So yeah, we could definitely get iron out of the sun. I mean, definitely. You can't say definitely about anything about this project. It's like ridiculous upon ridiculous upon ridiculous. In theory, one could get iron out of the sun to build your other absurd projects. All right. So we're going to talk about at least one other proposal. Is this proposal that you just explained to us more or less crazy than the next one we're going to talk about?

38:42Ooh, boy. That's a tough question. I think it's differently crazy. I mean, none of these are very realistic and all require all sorts of engineering problems that we don't know how to solve. But they're also fun to think about because, you know, they just make you think big. That's right. And when we get back, we will think big in a different way.

39:10For business owners and entrepreneurs, there's a constant challenge, getting things done fast and done well. Why not have both? That's why Wix Harmony stands out. It's an AI website builder that helps create a website quickly without compromising your vision. A fully functional site can be built for any business just by describing the idea. Then you can choose to chat with AI or edit everything manually to get it exactly right. There's also Aria, an AI agent available to answer questions or help complete tasks. And here's what makes it even better. Aria doesn't just live in a chat box. You can click anywhere on your site and ask her to make changes instantly.

39:55It's these details that make creating with Wix Harmony feel seamless. Join millions of businesses already using Wix and try Wix Harmony for free at wix.com slash harmony. That's wix.com slash harmony. For years, everyone thought Verizon had the best network. Want to know why? Because they did. But guess what? Those days are over. The data says it all. Based on hundreds of millions of real world tests, the experts at Ookla speed tests have spoken. T-Mobile is the best mobile network in America. T-Mobile's network has the most advanced 5G, the most towers, and their signal reaches farther than ever.

40:39And don't forget the largest satellite to mobile network. Basically, with T-Mobile's network, you're connected, well, pretty much wherever. T-Mobile is way ahead today and they will be for years to come. So if you're ready to stay connected wherever life takes you, head over to your local store or t-mobile.com to switch to the best network. T-Mobile has the best mobile network in the U.S. based on analysis by Ookla of Speed Test Intelligence Data 2H2025. T-satellite available with compatible device in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Included with Experience Beyond or$10 per month.

41:25Auto renews monthly. Cancel anytime. This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances by major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Fourth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Join this landmark celebration and get your America's Block Party tickets now for$17.76 at America250.org. Change comes fast. So wouldn't it be nice if one thing stayed the same?

42:03Like the price of your Wi-Fi. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, you're guaranteed five years of the most reliable fiber-powered Wi-Fi with no annual contracts and our best equipment. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi and stream your favorite podcast on iHeartRadio. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply. Select plans only. Not available in all areas. Use a fiber coaxial cable.

42:40All right, we're back and we're thinking big about engineering projects. We are engineering the sun today on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. We talked about one kind of nutso method. What method are we going to talk about next, Daniel? So the next method is called the Huff and Puff method so that everybody takes it very, very seriously. No doubt. And the idea here is similar to what we talked about a minute ago, but earlier we were heating up specific spots on the sun to get it to eject mass. Here we're going to basically try to pump the whole sun like bellows. And so you still build your particle accelerator around the equator.

43:17I mean, you've got to have that, right? That's non-negotiable. What is science without a particle accelerator? Have you heard of this concept called the Overton window where someone does something super extreme? Yeah, to make what you're proposing seem less crazy. You're probably having some people pitch these ideas to the funders so that when you just have something that's like$100 trillion or something, they'll be like, oh, the particle physicists are being less crazy today. You have revealed my secret scheme here, Kelly, today. I am shifting the Overton window. Well, I study animal behavior.

43:50This is basically the Calvin and Hobbes method, you know, where he asks his mom if he can have a flamethrower. And she says no. And he says, can I have a cookie? She's like, sure. Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right. So here you build a particle accelerator around the core. And this thing is kept in place by the magnetic field that it generates, which floats over the sun. But in this case, you can turn it on and off. So you turn it off and all the components of the particle accelerator, which are not connected, it's not a big ring. It's just components which shoot particles between them.

44:20All these components then fall towards the sun because of its gravity. Then you turn it back on and it rises back up again and pushes against the star. And so essentially this is like massaging the star. You like drop a magnetic ring around the star and then turn it back on and it pushes itself back out, squeezing the star. So you do this over and over again and it like pumps the star's atmosphere, moving mass up to the pole. So it's sort of like squeezing it, like massaging it, kind of like bellows on the sun. And for anyone who didn't grow up in the Victorian era, using bellows on their fireplace, would you like to explain what a bellow is?

45:02Right. Yeah, it's basically like a big fan, right? You squeeze it and it shoots a stream of air towards a useful spot on your fire to help blow it. It's sort of like leaning over the campfire and going, you know, but mechanically. How is that for an explanation of Bellows? I think people are following us. You're good. I wish people could watch the video because you are particularly animated in this episode. Like you've hit your microphone at least once as you gesticulate in joy at this engineering idea. Well, you know, sometimes we dig deep into like real physics and what we're learning about the universe.

45:37And sometimes we just have fun. Yeah. Well, I think we always just have fun. But we're having a lot of fun today. Okay. So the idea is that you squeeze. And when you squeeze, how do you control when you squeeze where the stuff goes? Yeah. So if you're squeezing at the equator, there's only one way it can go. It can go towards the poles. So then you've got to build another accelerator. So you have like a stack of these things that sort of like massage the mass as it goes up. So you squeeze at the equator, then you squeeze just above it, and you squeeze just above it. You know, like a coordinated action here to sort of push the sun's atmosphere towards the poles.

46:11I mean, the whole thing sounds like, boy, how would you know that that works before you build it and try it? And what if it goes wrong? Yeah. You know, that's the joy of, like, being the first person to think about something is you just get to think about the big picture and don't worry about details. Like, is this going to destroy everything in the solar system? Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty important detail. But so how do you know you're not just moving around stuff the sun was going to make anyway, and you're actually increasing the amount of stuff that gets ejected or heating up the sun or whatever?

46:41How do you know you're accomplishing your goal instead of just moving stuff around? Yeah, great question. And, you know, they've done some simple modeling, and it really does suggest that either of these methods could eject more mass than you normally would, that a sun left to its own devices would burn hotter and more briefly than a sun that's engineered in this way. And they did some calculations also to wonder like, well, how much could you do? Like, are we talking about ejecting 10 protons or really a significant amount of stuff? And according to these calculations, you can eject about an Earth's worth of mass every hundred years.

47:17So that's not a tiny amount of stuff. Like the Earth is a tiny fraction of the sun, but, you know, a century is a long time. And we're talking about timelines of millions or tens of millions of years. So that's a significant amount of stuff. And if you just did it naively and extrapolated linearly, it could take apart the sun in, you know, 50 to 100 million years. Like the whole mass of the sun eventually could be extracted. Of course, once you get to like 10 % of the mass of the sun being ejected, the whole system is going to change and everything is going to be cooler. And so you can't extrapolate linearly.

47:49But just to give you a sense of scale of how effective this is, it's not a tiny amount of mass that you're ejecting relative to the mass of the sun. All right. So this is the amount of time it would take to take the sun apart. But I didn't know that that was our goal. I thought our goal was slowing down the destruction of the Earth. So how much time does this buy humans? Yeah, we do not want to take apart the sun. Absolutely not. Yeah. What we want to do is gradually cool the sun so that it stays at the same temperature. Because remember, its natural progression is going to be to get hotter and hotter as the core gets denser and then fusion moves to the outer layers.

48:27So that's where this paper from 2020 came in by Matt Scoggins and David Kipping. They calculated how much mass would you have to remove from the sun every year in order to maintain that temperature, to essentially move the sun from its natural arc at this mass down gradually to the arc you would expect for lower mass stars. You can imagine like the temperature progressions for individual stars, which started a certain mass, and red dwarves last a long time and stay at a lower temperature. Essentially, you want to step down from one progression to another. So they did this cool calculation, which suggested that what you want to do is remove about 2 % to 3 % of the mass of Ceres.

49:06Ceres is a dwarf planet in our solar system. It's the largest thing in the asteroid belt. It's like a big chunk of stuff. It's much smaller than the Earth. So like 2 % to 3 % of the mass of Ceres every century would accomplish this. So you don't have to take the sun apart. You don't want to take the sun apart. The point of this calculation is, in principle, this technique has the capacity to remove plenty of mass, much more than we would need if we wanted to engineer the star for our safety. And to engineer the star for our safety, we only need to skim off a little bit of mass every hundred years or so to avoid the sun going red giant and frying us.

49:43So this paper wasn't necessarily advocating for either of the two methods we talked about. It's just saying whatever method you use, you got to get two and a half percent the massive series every 100 years off the sun. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, exactly. And if you do that successfully, and there's lots of problems to solve between here and there. But in principle, you can have our sun last a lot longer. So instead of having a 10 billion year life cycle, it could have a 20 billion year life cycle. Oh, wow. So you're adding 10 billion years to civilization, giving us a lot more time to find an alternative home for the Earth.

50:20Wow. Can we adjust this method so that we can get humans to live twice as long? This is pretty exciting. Yeah, I need to build a big particle accelerator to remove mass from Daniel. That's what I need to do. Always asking for money, Daniel. Always asking for money. Yeah, and it's interesting to think about the alternatives. Like if we lived around a red dwarf, then already the star would be lasting a long, long time, you know, much longer than it was hundreds of billions of years, maybe trillions. It's not really certain because the universe isn't old enough to have like a red dwarf cool and become a black dwarf.

50:55We've never seen that happen. But you can imagine having an even longer lived star. If you started, for example, from like an orange dwarf, which is something that has the mass of half of the sun, then there's enough mass there to play with because it It can be hot enough to create a nice environment and have enough mass to lose so it'll keep burning. Like if you try to starlift a red dwarf, there's not really a whole lot of extra mass there. It'll just like go out. It's just above the threshold for fusion. But if you start with like a nice toasty orange dwarf and then starlift it, the calculations in this paper suggest it might go for like a trillion years.

51:32So we're already making plans for what happens when we go to different like solar systems and start tinkering with their stars. We are a very self-confident species. Yeah, this really is Project Icarus, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay, so we talked about how you're going to be like channeling all of this stuff to the poles. But does making it go to the poles instead of shooting directly at us solve all of the problems we might experience from all of this extra like sun mass getting shot out into space? Not necessarily, because number one, we can't guarantee that all of it's going to go to the poles, right?

52:08And on the whole, what you're going to do is increase the solar wind everywhere. If you have hotspots on the surface of the sun, you can channel a lot of it up, but magnetic fields are not perfect and some of it's going to escape. And so you're risking more radiation in space for our burgeoning solar system industry. This whole context assumes we have a lot of space-based economy and people moving through space. And so increased stellar wind for that is going to be bad. And unless, of course, we develop some, you know, awesome radiation shielding technology, which maybe we could. Maybe that's a small problem compared to like lifting mass off of the sun.

52:42But, you know, it's not easy. And remember, we don't really understand the sun. Like there's a lot we do know about the sun, but also a lot we don't. We don't even understand why its magnetic field flips every 11 years. So there could be a lot of surprises here, a lot of things that don't go the way that we expect. And when things don't go the way we expect on the scale of a star, then it can be very bad. Yes, yes. High cost to human hubris in this case, I think. And even getting a little bit wrong could increase bad solar weather in the solar system. We could basically make it impossible to move around the solar system.

53:17We just like get the star grumpy and it like takes a billion years to calm down, you know, like. Oh, my gosh. That's, you know, maybe unrecoverable. Okay. So I def, first of all, I absolutely want to read the sci-fi novel written about this idea. Yeah. But second, so it really seems to me that if you're going to take this task on, like first you send out the interstellar ships and then you start tinkering like, we might kill everyone. So let's make sure that we send some human seed out into the universe. Right. Yeah. Make a backup copy before you start playing with things at work. Yeah. Exactly.

53:50Yes. That's a good strategy. Basic tenet of computer programming, I'm guessing. Exactly. And the energy required to do this kind of stuff is vast, not just to build the particle accelerator or these solar-powered stations that beam energy back of the sun, but just like the energy involved in lifting material out of the sun's gravitational well is huge because the gravity of the sun is huge and the earth is already almost too massive to launch off of using chemical rockets. And so we're talking about incredible scales of energy here. The good news is the sun has incredible scales of energy. So yes, you need enormous amounts of energy to beam back to the sun, to heat it up, and to run this particle accelerator.

54:36But we're talking about the sun. So it outputs a lot of energy which you can just grab. But we're playing with enormous quantities here. And so again, mistakes and miscalculations, the consequences of getting things wrong are just much bigger. Yeah. There's probably not enough material on Earth to build these things that you're talking about. Would we have to collect the material for these devices from other planets or from the asteroid belt? Or is there enough stuff on Earth? Am I totally wrong about this? You would definitely need a lot of material to solve this problem because if you're, for example, gathering all this energy to shoot the back of the sun, then you're building huge solar power collectors.

55:15Not as massive as a Dyson sphere or even like a sphere people would want to live on. But still, it's a huge engineering project. I don't think you'd want to take chunks off the Earth. But like, you know, what is Mercury good for anyway? That's right. That's right. I'm sure every culture on Earth would be fine if you just disassembled Mercury. Although maybe if they were facing their own demise, they would be fine. Yeah. So, you know, we just launched like an AI probe to Mercury. We tell it to build a factory to make more of itself, to make solar power plants, which then power itself. and hope that it continues following our instructions to build the sunlifter rather than launching an armada against Earth to take over.

55:54That is the start to the sci-fi novel that I want to read about this because I can absolutely imagine that going wrong. But I think the bigger picture here is that we often think about the cosmos as fixed. Number one, we think about the solar system as always being the way that it is because it has been this way for a long time according to human timelines. You know, humans have always looked up at the stars and seen the same thing over the last tens of thousands of years. But on cosmic timelines, the story is different. The solar system has looked different and the sun will not last forever. And we don't have to think about it as fixed.

56:30It is possible for us to intervene, to change our fate. We don't just have to lay down and take it. We can blow ourselves up instead. Oh, great. I mean, at least you've got a little bit more control over the situation. And that feels good. That feels good. Yeah. Would that make you feel better if we all fry up due to an engineering mistake rather than just like getting crisped naturally? No, no, it wouldn't, especially if it sped the process up. But the good news is we have a lot of time. And if you invest in science, we can increase our certainty in these technologies and better understand how the sun works so that we can all save ourselves one day.

57:05Exactly. So thank you for coming along on this ride where we stretch the Overton window for science funding out to trillions of dollars. I'm sure this is going to change everything for science funding. Bravo, Daniel and Kelly. I'm doing my best to be optimistic today. Yeah. All right. I like that. All right. Let's take that optimism with us outside the podcast. Hope everybody has a fantastic day.

57:34Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250.

58:16America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances by major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Fourth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Join this landmark celebration and get your America's Block Party tickets now for$17.76 at America250.org. Change comes fast. So wouldn't it be nice if one thing stayed the same? Like the price of your Wi-Fi. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, you're guaranteed five years of the most reliable, fiber-powered Wi-Fi with no annual contracts and our best equipment.

58:58Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi and stream your favorite podcast on iHeartRadio. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply. Select plans only. Not available in all areas. Use a fiber coaxial cable. Introducing the all-new Mazda CX-5. Featuring more connection. Hey, Google, where's the nearest Pilates class? Safety that has your back. More discovery on the scenic routes. more passion in the details and more control in changing weather the all-new Mazda CX-5 more to move every side of you see it in five films at mazdausa.com slash five sides google is a trademark of google llc sequences shortened and simulated looking for something new try fencing the olympic and paralympic sport that mixes speed strategy and fun it's like chess meets cardio Quick feet, quick decisions, and a satisfying beep when you score a point.

59:57Kids, teens, and adults can start anytime. No experience needed. And many clubs have loaner gear. Coaches teach fundamentals and safety from day one. Find a beginner class for your kids near you at trifencing.org. That's trifencing.org. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.