Listener Questions #32

25:55And so, for example, when folks age, they produce less melatonin. And melatonin is a hormone that our body uses to control our circadian rhythms. So we make more melatonin when it's supposed to be dark outside at night. That's part of how our body tells ourselves, oh, it's time to go to sleep. and older people make less of it. Is that the one that people often take when they're on an airplane to help them with jet lag? Yes, exactly. Exactly. So one thing I'd like to note is that when I read a bunch of these papers, the first thing that most of these papers said was, look, if you're having trouble sleeping, the first thing you should try isn't a sleep aid.

26:31It's exercise, which Thomas is already doing. And then it's cognitive behavior therapy to improve sleep or other sleep hygiene things. And so there's a bunch of stuff you're supposed to try before you start trying to take medications because a lot of medications have side effects that are not ideal. So first, like, make sure you get exercise during the day. Make sure you're sleeping in a cool, dark, quiet place. You don't have, like, toddlers jumping up and down in your head, this kind of thing. Yes, right. Try to avoid looking at screens for the two hours before you go to sleep, stuff like that.

27:03So Thomas's question actually kind of has a couple different parts to it. First, you probably want to know, does the sleep aid actually help you sleep better? And there's a couple different ways you can measure that. So you can measure, does it help you fall asleep more quickly once you lay down in bed? Once you've fallen asleep, do you wake up less often? If you do wake up, how long does it take you to fall back asleep? And then when you're in bed, what is the total amount of time that you spend sleeping? And those are some ways of measuring your sleep. But another way of measuring sleep quality is things like how deep does your sleep get?

27:41So you can put like electrodes on people and you can measure things like rapid eye movement sleep, REM sleep. And this is where you should go and listen to Gina Poe's amazing episode. But basically when your brain is doing rapid eye movement sleep, this is when you're like consolidating memories and like doing all sorts of stuff that our brains and bodies need to do. I feel like this is the heart of his question because he's asking, is sleep as beneficial? But are we going to talk about aging and sleep and metrics and not talk about Brian Johnson's data? Go ahead, Daniel.

28:16Brian Johnson is this guy who wants to prevent himself from aging. And he takes blood from his 18-year-old son and injects it in himself. And I think a lot of that stuff is really weird. What I do think is fascinating is how much data he takes on himself, including what happens when he sleeps. And he posts all this data online. You love telling this story. You also told it to Dr. Vankyarama Krishna. We had a Nobel Prize winner on the show, Daniel, and you told him this story while we were looking at each other over the riverside recording. But go ahead. Tell everybody so that everybody knows what you said.

28:53It's just that, you know, one way to measure your sleep is the length and quality of the erections you have while asleep. Oh, my gosh. Yes. According to Brian Johnson and the data that he posts daily on his website. Yep. Okay. Okay. Well, I didn't find that measure in any of the papers that I was looking at. But apparently the sleep that Brian Johnson is having slays.

29:22all right so what are some ways that people can improve their sleep medically the kind of sleep aids that thomas is talking about okay so there's many different kinds of sleep aids that can be delivered in different ways this is not at all comprehensive as i've said one class of drugs that tends to be used often are benzodiazepines and what benzodiazepines do is they bind to GABA receptors. So these are receptors that are in our brain. They're on our like nerve cells, and they are important for making our nerves excitatory, which is essentially like making our nerves fire so that our brains are like active and doing stuff.

30:01You said GABA receptors. What's a GABA? GABA is just a neurotransmitter. Wasn't going to go into too much detail here, but it's a neurotransmitter. And when that neurotransmitter binds to these receptors in our brain, our nerves start firing and our brains start doing stuff. But you don't really want your brain to be doing too much stuff. You want your brain to be kind of calming down. And so when benzodiazepines bind to these receptors, your brain sort of gets less excited and it acts as like a muscle relaxant and a sedative. And you start getting sleepy. And the idea is you're supposed to fall asleep.

30:37And these drugs were established in the 1950s. They were first synthesized in the 1950s. And they were supposed to be a great replacement for barbiturates, which had some like negative side effects. And everyone was like, yay, benzodiazepines. So we started prescribing these for everybody. But it turns out that they're also highly addictive and they do a bunch of bad things. But they might. I found a 2016 review for sleep aids for folks who are older. and that review said that benzodiazepines do appear to help you fall asleep faster, help you reach REM sleep faster, so that sleep where you're doing a better job of consolidating memories, and it reduces the number of times that you wake up in the middle of the night.

31:23But I also found a more recent study that suggested that if you use benzodiazepines long-term, you're going to spend less time in REM sleep. And so in that case, quality would be lower. So long-term use would be giving you less good sleep. This all sounds good, but the way that older bodies metabolize or like break down drugs is different than the way that younger bodies do. And in some ways, it's less efficient. And so these drugs spend more time in your body. They do different things in your body. So the American Geriatric Society recommends not using benzodiazepines because in elderly patients, these drugs are associated with cognitive impairment, delirium.

32:06You're more likely to fall. You're more likely to get fractures and you're more likely to get into car crashes. And so these drugs, even though they might help with sleep, they are in general not recommended for elderly patients because the downsides are just too high. So your 100-year-old co-host here should not be taking these things. Ow! No. So I always wonder about how we discover these side effects. It seems like we put these things out and then we discover, oh my gosh, they're addictive, or oh my gosh, they're bad for this population. So I guess we do some preliminary tests to see if they're safe before we put them out there.

32:41But basically we're testing them on the population without really knowing the side effects. Well, so this drug first became available in like the 1950s. And I think we had much less testing before drugs went public back then. And so, yes, I think that this is a drug that was released to the public before we understood some of the more negative side effects. And so some of them were sort of observed along the way, which is less good. The next drug I'm going to talk about, which is Zolpidum, is an example of a Z drug, a non - Zolpidum, really? Did I pronounce it wrong? I don't know, but it's a terrible name.

33:20Did they come up with that name? Is that like some marketing scheme? A lot of the drugs that are marketed have a Z in their name. And I think that's why they're called the Z drugs. And so I think someone came up with that. Z I get because it's associated with sleep, but Zolpidem. It just sounds like a letdown. Oh, I'm sorry. You got a Zolpidem. Maybe it's Zolpidem. Z-O-L-P-I-D-E-M. I mean, we know not to trust me for pronunciation. That's true. Yeah. All right. So if we take this Z drug, what happens? Okay, well, so it's a non-benzodiazepine drug is what it's called. And these started getting synthesized in the 1980s.

33:55It binds to like the same kind of receptor as benzodiazepines, but there's actually like a bunch of different kinds of GABA receptors. And these drugs bind to like a smaller subset of the receptors. And so the bad effects are minimized. And so these have fewer bad effects. They've got a lot of the good stuff going on. And so it does seem to be associated with like you fall asleep faster, you wake up less often, you sleep for longer, you're less likely to be tired during the day, you're less likely to have memory issues, you're less likely to like fall and stuff like that. But I found this review paper that was the one that was saying that like, oh, you're, you know, it's not associated with a lot of memory issues, blah, blah, blah.

34:41But they also said, you know, when we were reviewing all of these papers, we should note that the quality of most of the papers we were reviewing was pretty bad. And so it doesn't look like there's a lot of papers where, you know, like good use of placebos or large sample sizes and blah, blah, blah. And so although things look like they're pointing in a good direction, we haven't really collected loads of exactly the kind of data that we would want to feel super confident about it. So there could still be like dangerous side effects lurking out there, like makes you more likely to hurt yourself laughing on a podcast.

35:17Could be. Could be. Yes. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you get gallstones just like Kelly. That's not funny. Weird sense of humor, Daniel. Daniel. So but but for this drug, you are specifically supposed to take low doses for short periods of time. And so there shouldn't be people out there who are taking high doses for long periods of time. And so if it is the case that, you know, high doses for long periods of time do have negative impacts, you know, that shouldn't matter because people probably shouldn't be taking it in that way. Or at least it's not recommended. All right. So we've done benzodiazepine.

35:54We've done the Z drugs. What about the old standby melatonin that feels like kind of natural and simple in comparison? Yeah, yeah. And so I started looking into this because, you know, for a while I was having disrupted sleep. And I was like, well, maybe I'll try melatonin. And so I dug into the literature and I dug into the literature, you know, specifically like trying to answer Thomas's questions for, you know, people who are older than me. And it looks like the answer is it depends. Like the results are super inconsistent. Really? The most consistent result is that it helps you fall asleep a little faster.

36:28But the studies that find that the effect size is often something like five minutes. You know, like you fall asleep five minutes faster, which is not a big difference. I don't know. Five minutes of lying there with your eyes closed trying to fall asleep can feel like a thousand years. Okay. All right. But you might be a good candidate for melatonin. You're not supposed to use it like long term. You're supposed to just kind of use it sort of short term, not stay on it like forever. It doesn't seem to help too much with things like reducing the number of times that you wake up or influencing how long you sleep overall.

37:02And some studies have found that you have what they call a residual daytime sedation. So like you take it the night before and then the next day it's still making you a little bit tired. And so you might wonder, were those additional five minutes worth it if the next day you're still feeling kind of sleepy? Yeah. You know, you'd have to make that decision up for yourself. And then there are some studies that find no effect at all. Like you take the melatonin. It didn't make the people in the study fall asleep any faster. And so, you know, it seems to have done nothing. So there's no perfect bullet out there.

37:34It doesn't seem like there's any perfect bullet out there that has no, you know, no risks associated with it. And I think, you know, that's just kind of life. I think just about. That's kind of biology. That's kind of biology, you know. I think anytime you take a medication, you get a pamphlet with potential side effects that you need to discuss with your doctor or your pharmacist and understand the risks of. There are plenty of people who are on sleep aids and they feel like it's worth it that the benefits outweigh the risks. But I think that you, if you're having trouble sleeping, you should go to your doctor and talk about why you're having trouble sleeping.

38:10because, you know, if the problem is pain, then maybe like Tylenol or Tylenol PM would be worth it and it would solve the problem. But, you know, I think it's important to talk to your doctor about the specific problems you're having and the, you know, costs and benefits of taking drugs and, you know, work through it with them. It amazes me that in this day and age when we can do so much, we still don't understand sleep very well. And so we don't understand how to manipulate it and correct it and adjust it. It's such a basic part of life and still such a huge challenge and a mystery. But, you know, with how complicated our bodies are, I don't know that we should expect that there would be a perfect solution.

38:50You know, like our bodies don't necessarily have like a little switch where you should just be able to like push up the knob for more sleep with nothing else getting messed up. Like we're just an interconnected mess of things. Maybe you can't tinker with one thing without messing up something else. I don't know. I think what we've managed to do is pretty amazing. And hopefully we just keep getting better. That's a fascinating and kind of depressing theory. I imagine our bodies as these really complex machines with all these knobs on it. And it's, of course, hard to predict what happens if you pull this lever or press that button.

39:25But I always assume that there's some place in that phase space of operations where things go the way you want. But it sounds like you're suggesting that there may be no way to to tweak these knobs to get you where you want to be. Yeah. I'm not sure that there is always going to be a way to tweak the knobs to get you exactly where you want to be. Wow. Fascinating. That's a depressing thought, Kelly. I mean, I don't know that evolution is always going to be like, oh, I need to make sure there's some way for Kelly to get to her optimum level of sleep. You know, evolution is just, you get what you get.

39:56And you don't get upset. And you don't get upset. Exactly.

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43:39Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners, which span an amazing and delicious array of topics. We've also been getting notes from listeners that they're really appreciating the huge variety of topics that we cover. I assume that means that they're enjoying all the biological and chemical questions we're tackling. So I'm very glad to have such a range. I think that means that they're enjoying the questions that they're submitting, which have been wonderful. And we should give them the credit for the great diversity. All right. And so we're going to zoom out from sleep questions to think about the cosmic context and, of course, talk about aliens.

44:14Here's a question from Ralph, which sets me up to give a little rant. Yay! So I've seen some sensationalist headlines recently based on Harvard physicist Davy Loeb's claim that an interstellar object moving through our solar system might be an alien spacecraft with malicious intent. And I'm probably not going to lose any sleep worrying about this, but it reminds me of a recent podcast you guys did where you discussed the effects of interstellar space travel on humans. And I'm thinking, what if you shifted the perspective to aliens? You know, specifically, what kinds of evolutionary characteristics might make them more adapted to survive interstellar travel?

44:53And assuming they have superior understanding of physics, what kinds of propulsion systems might they employ? This might be an opportunity for you guys to put on your sci-fi hats and have a little fun. Thank you. Well, I'm glad to hear that Ralph isn't planning on losing any sleep, but I am looking forward to hearing Daniel's rant. Apparently, not worrying about aliens is the way to get a good night's sleep. Oh, then you don't sleep much, do you, Daniel? Because you spend a lot of time worrying about aliens. That's true. So Ralph mentions this interstellar object, 3i Atlas, which recently entered our solar system.

45:33And this was a lot of fun because we haven't seen very many interstellar objects. We've only been looking for a few years, and we've seen three of them now. That's why it's called 3I Atlas. And each one is new because each one is like one of the first few samples we've ever gotten from other solar systems out there. We think these things are probably chunks of rock from like the equivalent of the Oort cloud around some other star, which got gravitationally dislodged. And instead of falling into that star and becoming a long period comet, just floated through the galaxy until it ran into our solar system.

46:06So it's super fascinating to get to see these chunks. Welcome to our solar system. I think I finally remembered how to pronounce the first one. Oumuamua, right? Oumuamua, that's right. Yeah, nice. I think I've messed it up on the show something like six or seven times, but eighth time's a charm. There you go. All right, congratulations. Thanks. And so at first, of course, we didn't know exactly what to expect because every single one of these is weird. They're drawn from a huge population that's very diverse. And so they're all going to be different from anything we've seen before. And this one was no different from that.

46:42As it got closer, we saw that it was unusual. It had a lot more carbon dioxide in the cometary coma. It seems to have unusual amounts of nickel and cyanide. Is the coma, that's just the tail, right? The coma is the fuzz around the comet. Okay. So a comet is like a frozen chunk. And then as it gets closer to the sun, there's more radiation on it. And as it heats up, various parts of it sublimate and turn into gas. And that makes the coma. And then if there's more pressure from the solar wind or from the radiation, that can make a tail. And when it first arrived, of course, we didn't have a lot of great data and we didn't have a lot of data.

47:17And so there was a lot of speculation about what it might be. By now, we've pointed all of our best telescopes at it. We think we understand it. It looks like a frozen rock from another solar system. its velocity, its trajectory, all the emissions, it all makes sense. The prosaic explanation of it being a frozen blob from another solar system is a great description of this thing. But before we had all of this data, there was one famous astrophysicist from Harvard, Avi Loeb, who made a lot of hype about how it could be aliens. And so, you know, on the podcast, I try to generally only be positive and only talk about people if I have something nice to say, But this guy's made such a negative impact on science and science communication that I think it deserves a little bit of a comment.

48:01I love that you jumping up on your soapbox and getting angry is, and I think it deserves a little bit of a comment. Like, this is angry Daniel is. I'm going to make a little bit of a comment. Let's hear it. Well, the issue is that Avi Loeb claims to be, like, more open-minded to new ideas than mainstream astronomy. And he likes to paint everybody in mainstream astronomy as like closed-minded and rejecting the idea that it could be aliens out of hand, just dismissing it. It's part of this whole shtick that academics are closed-minded or march to the beat of some drummer. And you're an academic.

48:38You know, you can't get two academics to agree on anything. And it's like everybody's dream to disprove somebody else or to upset the narrative or to make a big paper discovering something mind-blowing. And for a guy from Harvard to be like complaining about mainstream astronomy, like what's more mainstream astronomy than astronomy at Harvard? But the real issue is that he makes a bunch of arguments and these arguments are weak and they're flawed. And then when experts criticize these things fairly, he portrays that as them trying to shut him down unfairly. When that's just how the marketplace of ideas work.

49:14And if your ideas can't survive in the marketplace, maybe they're wrong. But instead, he plays victim and he says, look, they're attacking me. Oh, come on, man. And, you know, he's made basic mistakes. Like he misunderstood the difference between solar radiation pressure from photons and solar wind from particles. He assumed that the fuzz around the comet, which is just due to the coma, was because of smearing. It was because it was moving so fast. He didn't understand the telescopes were tracking the comet and to show there should be no smearing effect. He assumed that because this thing came in close to the ecliptic, it was therefore very, very unlikely to be a natural object, which is silly.

49:49It's just like shooting a gun in a random direction and then drawing a bullseye around it later and saying, how unlikely that the bullet landed on the bullseye. You can always find something unusual if you look through enough examples. And there's some great work by Steve Desch and Jason Wright very carefully and very fairly taking his arguments apart, which he then turned around into like, look, I'm being attacked. So, you know, I just think it's not a good faith analysis, which is a shame because we should be open to any good faith commentary. And I think that we are. But these bad faith attacks on mainstream astronomy, I don't think they're productive at all.

50:28Yeah. Well, that's and that's also really frustrating because as a Harvard professor, he probably could have access to like all the experts and he could be working with them on these questions and like checking to make sure like, is that a smudge or are we tracking it, you know, through time? And anyway, these mistakes don't need to be made. Yeah, and I don't know what's in his heart, so I can't say for sure, but he's not acting the way somebody who's interested in evidence-based reasoning acts. He's acting more like somebody who's out for attention and spreading misinformation to benefit himself and sell his books.

51:00But again, I don't know what's in his heart. Yeah. Anyway, this was not an alien ship. Unfortunately, I wanted it to be an alien ship. Lots of people wanted it to be an alien ship. If it was, we would be very excited. Astronomers are not like anti-alien in any way. Probably no one wanted it to be an alien ship more than you. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Come on, man. Come and laser half the planet, but tell us the secrets of the universe. That's right. But that was just the prologue to Ralph's question. Ralph is really wondering about, well, how would aliens get here? Like, if this was an alien ship, how would aliens survive that interstellar journey?

51:34Could they develop new techniques? Could they evolve in some way that makes it better? And so this was a lot of fun to think about, like, what kind of critter could survive a thousand or 10 ,000 year sublight journey from another solar system? So I thought about the biology of space travel a little bit. So Kelly, tell me if I get anything wrong. Oh, yeah. You know, one issue is our metabolism, right? To stay alive, we need oxygen. We need the right temperature. We need regular food. The whole thing is a huge ordeal, right? Right. So perhaps instead of doing that, we could somehow enter like a or aliens could evolve to enter like a low metabolic state, you know, essentially where you just don't need as much oxygen.

52:17You don't need as much food. And we have examples of this like here on Earth, like tardigrades can curl up and essentially not be dead and not be frozen, but just be like in a very low metabolic state. The ton state. I think that's what we, because we had a whole episode on tardigrades and I think it was called the ton state. And rotifers also have like, you know, states where they can essentially like, you know, freeze their existence and then come back at a later time. But I think of those as sort of simple creatures, not the kind of creatures that could create spaceships capable of interstellar travel.

52:51But we have examples on Earth of more complex creatures, not with as dramatic an effect, but like, you know, mammals hibernate, their metabolism drops. So it's certainly possible for complex creatures to change their metabolism, right? Yeah. I mean, nowhere near the timescales that you would need for interstellar travel. And they would still need their waste removed, and they would still need some energy put into the system, depending on the timescales. Wait, do bears poop in hibernation, Kelly? I don't know if they poop in hibernation, but like that's because hibernation is weeks or months, not generations.

53:28They got to poop eventually. I can tell you that as an expert. They got to poop eventually. Okay. Thank you. That's what your PhD in biology is getting you right now. That's right. That's right. And of course, these are just examples here on Earth. But, you know, it suggests that maybe it might be possible in some corner of evolutionary space for aliens to evolve in such a way that allows them to change their metabolism maybe more dramatically. Do you think that's impossible? You know, I don't think it's impossible. I think that we are very far away from being able to figure stuff like that out for like humans for interstellar travel.

54:08Well, we can't even put humans to sleep here on Earth reliably. So, yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I don't know. I guess I'm 50-50 on whether or not that's going to be impossible. For humans. But, you know, imagine aliens and for some reason they've gone out into space. And so there's evolutionary advantages to being able to survive, you know, to the difference between being alive and being dead requiring very, very small requirements, small amount of food, small amount of oxygen, et cetera, maybe lower temperatures. It seems like perhaps evolution could cook up some way to survive that situation.

54:39No? uh well so you know wood frogs in like michigan can freeze and then thaw out and so you know i think there you can like freeze organisms but i i also think that it is the case that there's some percent that die when the thought happens i hate to reference science fiction as though it's science fact but i think in andy weir's book hail mary some of the crew did not survive the thaw out this is kind of a spoiler but not really it happens pretty early on but like you know i it i imagine that a lot of the procedures that we would come up with would have a like less than 100 success rate but but yeah we might be able to come up with some situation but you know i don't know if referencing natural selection is going to help us much because we are a species that has not been exposed to extreme temperatures for a long time uh you know and exposed to natural selection associated with that so you know we don't survive freezing that's not a thing we do usually All right.

55:40So the next kind of adaptation that aliens might potentially evolve would have to do with radiation, right? Out in space, it's not just empty space. There's lots of particles out there. They're moving at very high speeds. Even if you're just on the moon, which is not very far away, you're going to be exposed to high energy particles. This is radiation. They're going to zip through your body. They're going to tear up your DNA. They're going to do lots of damage. And this is why we like being here on Earth under our magnetic shield and our atmosphere, which protects us from a lot of that radiation.

56:11And anytime we go into space, we need to worry about it. So if aliens are traveling here from another star, they're going to have to worry about radiation. The best way to protect yourself from radiation is mass. Have like huge water tanks or huge amounts of lead or something. Some high Z material between you and the radiation is going to absorb a lot of that. But mass is tough, right? because the more massive your ship, the harder it is to accelerate up to some reasonable speed. You can imagine finding an asteroid and hollowing it out and living on the inside while you travel from one star to the other, but asteroids are massive and it takes a lot of energy to get an asteroid up to near the speed of light.

56:50So instead of building some technology, you might imagine aliens evolving some biological mechanisms, like more active repair systems or redundant genetic coding or something like that, or maybe even some sort of non-DNA based way to store genetic information that's more robust to radiation. I mean, do you think that 3I Atlas is big enough that something could be living inside there and be shielded from radiation? I think I read that post by Avi already speculating about that. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's like, I think a few kilometers across. So that's definitely big enough to be a nice ship for sure.

57:35Okay. Yeah. I still doubt it though. All right. Yeah. But I'd love to go inside and take a look. Yeah. Beam me up. These are maybe ways you could evolve biological techniques to survive the high radiation in space. But again, this is just science fiction speculation. And then another issue, which Kelly has mentioned many times about living in space, is the question of like, how do you reproduce? It's not like I'm fixated on that, Daniel. You make it sound like it's all I ever talk about. Is it possible for your species to reproduce and to have gestation and development and all that stuff in space?

58:10I think it's certainly possible for another species to evolve the capacity or to already have a system which by chance is not sensitive to gravity. And I think we don't know whether ours is or how sensitive ours is. But if you wanted to avoid that entirely, you can imagine another way to spread your aliens around the galaxy is not to send adults, but to send some sort of like precursor, you know, basically gametes and then have them be created when they arrive and maybe raised by robots, you know, chat GPT raised. I've read that story for sure. It's a common theme in science fiction. And in this sense, if you do that, then like maybe travel is sort of part of your reproductive system.

58:52You know, you have your cozy evening, you create your gametes, you put them on a ship, you send them off and you never meet your kids. And then they'd never jump on your head at two in the morning. Maybe you sleep better. Oh, yeah. And then you don't get all the diseases they bring home from kindergarten. And all right, I'm in. No, I'm just kidding. That would really bum me out. But that would be really weird as the visit tease, right? If visitors arrived and they're basically alien babies and we just watch them grow up and they've never experienced their home planet either. I don't know. Sounds like a fun science fiction story.

59:24It does, but presumably the robots that are bringing them up would, you know, have a bunch of knowledge about the home planet and it would be able to teach you a bunch of stuff. In which case the robots are the real visitors, right? Those are the ones we'd want to talk to. Yeah, yeah. Forget the kids. And then from a technological point of view, let's assume that aliens don't have warp drives. They don't have wormholes. Otherwise, they could just get here in a moment. There are ways to get from star to star in a reasonable amount of time. If you use things like light sails, this helps you avoid having to carry your fuel with you because you just have like a huge reflective sheet and you shine a laser on it.

1:00:00It zooms it up to near the speed of light much more quickly because it's not so massive. This doesn't work for an asteroid very well, but it works for a small payload and then you can cruise between the stars and try to use the arriving star as a brake when you arrive. And you can maybe even have like a magnetic tail that you can use to steer. So this is technologically totally feasible. I can imagine us doing this. I mean, we're still talking huge time periods to visit the star, but technologically not impossible. I'm staying here. More exotically, aliens might show up with their whole solar system.

1:00:37You know, Elon Musk talks about building a Dyson sphere to capture all the energy of the sun. But if instead you build half a Dyson sphere, like a mirror that wraps around half of the sun, and then you make it gravitationally captured by the sun, then in effect, it's an engine because half the light gets reflected back and half of it doesn't. And so there's a net momentum there. And basically it just drags the whole solar system. So you never have to leave your planet. Kelly can stay under the covers and we can go visit aliens or aliens could do that and come visit us. Yay, that sounds wonderful.

1:01:11All right, so those are some of the ideas I have for how aliens might come and visit us. I hope that it happens one day. And when it does, I'm sure that the astronomy community is going to be very interested and totally open-minded to the possibilities. All right. Well, let's see what Ralph had to say about Daniel's rant and your answer. Guys, thanks for answering my question. Some very interesting thoughts and ideas there. I'm happy that I gave Daniel a chance to rant. And I'm pretty impressed about how quickly Kelly was able to work on the alien poop reference.

1:01:47All right. Thank you very much, everybody, for sending us your questions. It's really my favorite thing to see your questions in my inbox, and I love answering them here on the pod. If you have questions, please don't be shy. We love, love, love to hear from you. Yes. Send your questions to questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org. We answer them as soon as we can, and we answer all the questions. Some of the questions also end up on the show. Have a great day, everyone. Hope you sleep well.

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