E110 - Black Holes, Ancient Civilisations & The Search For Alien Life | David Kipping

51:23So it's, I think most, when you do polls, most people in America estimate it would be of order of seven, 10%, something like this. And it's, it's way, way smaller. So I think it just goes to show you how cost effective NASA is. It has such a huge impact, but yeah, you're coming to this point, like people don't think about it too much about the future. And so there are some projects like the seed vault, uh, where's that in Scandinavia somewhere where they've like stuck all the seeds of the earth into this vault just in case things go wrong. So we've got a backup supply. And there are preppers, there are some people which worry a lot about doomsday scenarios and think about that a lot.

51:59But as a society, we tend not to. And you think about the national debt in every country, pretty much in the world has the same problem where we're all running huge debts because it's all about presentism. It's just about getting now, now, now, now, now. I want everything right now and I don't want to have to wait 20, 30 years, 40 years to bite the bullet, to sacrifice my current state of living to make the world and the future a better place. We seem to be so focused on our current state of affairs. And I do wonder whether this is somewhat inevitable for anyone who gets to our point, right? Because we live in a capitalist society and it has, you know, both with technology and science, it has always been massively bolstered by brilliant individuals.

52:47I don't want to downplay the impact of having large collaborations and teams, but individuals have certainly had a huge impact. I mean, Elon Musk is having a massive impact as an individual in space travel right now. Think about the impact of Einstein or Newton, these giants of the field, which just moved the needle forward so far. And I think humanity has always been advantaged by that. And so as a society, we have a very individualized, individualistic focused society it's all about my own rights my you know thinking about what's best for me and that's not necessarily the best thing for society to optimize for yourself isn't necessarily the best thing to optimize for the planet but maybe if we always optimized if we're always so focused on on the ensemble you would kind of water out you dilute those sparks of genius right maybe maybe you wouldn't be able to have that um those brilliant entrepreneurs who can push through and use that individualism to advance society in profound ways and it's a similar kind of thing with with tribalism and competition we're very competitive people we love to compete with each other or even against ourselves um we love to compete with other nations in sports teams and scientists compete with each other we like to you know prove that we've got more publications that have bigger impact, Nobel Prize, whatever it is.

54:08We like to, you know, show off about our achievements. And that competition drives us to become better. It drives us to innovate more and more and more. That's where, you know, during wars is when huge amounts of technological innovation occur. We developed radar in England during the Second World War, purely as a product really of that tension of competition with the Germans. and so i kind of wonder whether if you took that away if you took away the competition maybe you just wouldn't have a technological species to begin with so maybe competition is always part and parcel of any technological species and if that's true it's also the seed of our own annihilation right because if that competition goes on uncontrolled it leads to hostility tribalism polarization conflict and that could be our you know that could be our death knell so it's curious to wonder is there such a thing as a totally benevolent society out there where it's utopian or would they just still be farming and that's as far as they go yeah i think elon musk i think he was asked the question and he he doesn't believe in a society where there is peace there will always be conflict yeah it's part of human nature to some degree yeah we'll get back to the podcast in a second but first of all i want to say a massive shout out to bionic i have been using their supplements for the past four years i never knew what supplements i needed to take i'd always go into the pharmacy and buy a load of random bottles and end up popping pills all day every day not having a clue if i was consuming the vitamins which i should be consuming at all.

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56:23sign up to bionic and ensure that you remove those deficiencies and build up your immune system. what do you think if if let's say for example nasa's spending is one trillion they have a budget of one trillion what does that look like like what would they do well yeah that i mean even doubling the budget which would be an extra 25 billion would be game-changing you know we could having boots on the ground on mars within probably the next 10 20 years but if you're talking about throwing a trillion dollars at it i mean that's just beyond anyone's wildest expectations in the field of science and technology so it's hard to imagine but i think you could easily be building giant structures in space at this point you could be doing space mining we know that you know there are some uh asteroids out there near earth objects that contain more rare earth elements than the entire planet earth it's like platinum for instance i think there's this uh asteroid that contains more platinum than the entire earth so if we mind that um that could be and i mean obviously that's people mostly think of that for jewelry but there's a huge number of rare earth elements which are critical for battery technology and for um the solar technologies that we're developing as well so i think the ability to space mine would advance it would be that kind of dream of a um a limitless unbounded society where we just have everything we want and i think investing in science has always been the key to unlocking that world of uh of of opportunity of new resources the earth only has so many resources and we're tapping it pretty hard right now and clearly we're running into conflict with other nations that they want to hold on to their rare earth elements and they don't want to share them anymore so that's going to have economic impacts on the US and I'm sure elsewhere.

58:20So I think - It seems so silly when you think about it like that. Yeah. It's just tribalism though, isn't it? It's that same thing of individualism of, well, I want to look after myself first and look after you second. And that's just, unfortunately, human nature. We don't think of each other as brother and sister. We think of each other as competitors. A lot of people say if we ever detect an alien civilization, it would shift that mindset completely. And then we'd be like, okay, they're the other now. Now we can all work together to focus on the other but somehow we always need the other and then we then within that group we can collaborate but we can't just be one unified group for the sake of it i think arrival that was a great film where it depicted that we're all competing against each other because we didn't want to share information and then eventually all nations got together they shared the information and they unlocked this code and formula which was like the key to progressing life even further yeah it i mean how society would change some people say like society would would just get on like you'd still get up the next day and go to your job and in a day-to-day sense maybe nothing would really change but i think it would proliferate into our into our philosophies and outlook of life that the universe is not the same anymore when when you discover someone else you now know that the there's more than this just pale blue dot of light there is a whole universe of potential civilizations out there who are waiting to interact with us and engage with us.

59:46And we'd probably take a lot more responsibility and try and mature as a civilization, I think, at that point, right? You don't want to be embarrassed by their looking and saying, wait, you're still burning all those fossils from the ground? Like, you do realize you're poisoning your atmosphere? But, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, actually, we'll stop that now. We'll stop that now. It would probably help us to figure things out a little bit. um but i'm not i have to be candid and say i'm not optimistic i'm gonna see that i'm not i'm optimistic i'll see the day of a advanced civilization being announced in my lifetime you are i'm not i'm not optimistic i think i a simple life maybe i i mean i hope i think there's stuff under the pyramids and under the sphinx that's being hidden that we're you know Zawi Hawass there's a lot of gatekeepers in Egypt who are preventing archaeologists just doing their thing and great YouTube channel Uncharted X the guy goes into the the description of what might be underneath the not the pyramids one of the pyramids there's this huge labyrinth yeah which is this underground structure which is said to be greater than the pyramids themselves but we just can't like access it so i think there's i think there will be i'm hoping and this is the thing i'm probably hoping more than than anything else that there will be some sort of discovery made which will prove that there was an existence of a previous civilization that was technologically advanced that had the capability of doing things would they be alien in your mind or would they be another earth-based civilization yeah okay yeah so that idea is i mean there's scientific ground for that for sure there's an idea called the silurian hypothesis that suggests that yeah there could have been a past civilization that was pretty advanced and we wouldn't know about it over geological time scales hundreds of you know tens of millions everything breaks down eventually after if you're looking at like hundreds of thousands of years yeah things decompose apart from the metals yes i mean you could have another ancient rome ancient greece from that was 10 million years ago, and we'd have no trace of it now, it'd just be lost and eroded away completely at this point.

1:02:04I think it's harder to imagine a civilization that had as much plastic and as concrete as we've made, right? So those are, if you talk to anthropologists and geologists, they are currently trying to encourage us to classify the current geological era as the Anthropocene. Anthropo means like humanity. So there's, you know, like the Paleocene, um there's the holocene and we want to create a new category which is the anthropocene which is essentially the effective technology of humanity and that's if you if you went a billion years into the future and you know these like a layer yeah exactly look in the rock layer you would see plastic pure pollution you'd see radioactive elements plastic you'd see concrete you'd see um even chicken like they were pointing out like chicken carcasses would you'd see sites with just like a billion dead chicken carcasses in one place, which would make no sense.

1:03:00Why is there so many chickens that died in this one place? So it would be really profound impact in the geological record. So I think we're fairly confident there was never a civilization which got as far as we are. There's nothing on the moon, right? The moon is totally pristine. There's no weather or erosion on the moon really of any kind. Neil Armstrong's footprints will be there for another million years and the apollo landers will be there probably forever i don't think there's any way those would erode unless you go into like trillions and trillions of years into the future so no there's no other apollo landers on the moon right we've imaged every damn centimeter square of the moon with uh unless there's a conspiracy why is there so many conspiracy theories about the moon yeah like if you just type in conspiracy theory on youtube there's so many videos i would people claim that the moon is hollow yeah or made of cheese or whatever it is yeah uh and there's i mean a while back there was this um uh lunar hut that was that i remember reading about so it was this there was this chinese lander that a rover that was driving around and there was this photo of this thing that looked like a little hut in the back there's like perfectly square lunar hut and the chinese um media called it that in their press release they They called it like Mystery Hut.

1:04:22And so when the Western media got hold of it, they were like, what the hell? The Chinese have discovered like an artificial structure on the moon. And so they redirected the rover to drive over and get a closer look. And when it got a closer look, it was just like a normal rock. They're just in the blurriness because it was so far away when it took the photo, you couldn't really figure out what it was. And that's true so often that things that look really compelling are just on that, we sometimes call it the low information zone. like the things which are just blurry enough that they're intriguing but you don't have high quality high resolution images of and so often these whatever it is be it you know things under the pyramids or lunar hut or face on mars or ufos often this stuff is at that ambiguity regime where you can inject your own hope imagination that could be the real thing and those hopes have often in the past taken us down down the wrong path unfortunately um guess the views yeah yeah right i mean if you go back a century and a half ago there was this dude percival lowell an astronomer who was arguing that there was canal systems on mars right and so he was seeing these lines on mars with the early telescopes and he he was he was on the front of the new york times with this article saying there's a canal civilization on mars and it was all in that low information zone of it just being blurry enough that you couldn't quite tell what it was.

1:05:44And he injected his own hopes. Like he really hoped there was a civilization there. So I think that's where you have to be so cautious, not just in science, but in a guide for life is really ask yourself, what do I want to be true? Maybe it's like a news story you're reading about a political person you don't like or a celebrity you don't like, whatever it is. What do I hope to be true in this case? And then just kind of like really be cautious about it and think well whatever i want to be true i need to almost act the opposite direction consciously and fight against it because my brain is is very tempted to trick me here and we've seen that so many times i've i've seen that personally as a scientist i've had cases where i thought i detected something that would change my life and you know i was imagining all these prizes and accolades if this was true and then uh whenever you hit that moment of like this could be it this could be my big break you know obviously keep pushing keep trying to to get to that next step but also just take a sober beat and think you know am i deluding myself here because i want this to be true and uh you know sometimes you need that i would imagine there's a lot of scientists and astrophysicists out there who they're just so stubborn in thinking that their theory is right or hoping that what they believe is to be right that they refuse to listen to other points of views you're absolutely right i mean sometimes the physics advances one funeral at a time yeah so it's only when the old guys die that ideas can move forward and i mean that was true that's been true throughout science but you know it's often the young people who are coming into the field who are uninitiated and unstained by paradigm, right?

1:07:25So they can think outside the box because they don't have any bounds on them. Whereas someone who spent 50 years pushing a particular theory, they're locked in. And it's really sad. One of the first ever planets that was announced, an exoplanet, was all the way back in 1969 by a Dutch astronomer called Peter van der Kamp. And he claimed this star, Barnard's star nearby had the first ever exoplanet. And he stuck to his guns, even when people started to say, I'm not sure about this, the dynamics don't work out, there's some problems here. But he just kept sticking to it, sticking to it, sticking to it.

1:08:02And then he kept changing the mass of the planet. So he said, actually, you know, I know initially I said it was six Jupiter masses, now it's two Jupiter masses, now it's half a Jupiter mass. So he kept, you know, dialing it down. So it's always just below what we could see. And then eventually, the Hubble Space Telescope pointed at it like 30 years after he made this prediction and he didn't see anything and he'd like to totally ruled out this planet being there and even on his deathbed he still insisted that everyone else was wrong the whole world was wrong and that planet was there he could not let it go and i think that's really sad when a scientist gets so married to their theory to their ideology they can't move and we all do it we're all humans where you know everyone gets married especially imagine if you dedicate your whole life to this one particular point of view right when you find out yeah you might actually be wrong yeah it's always weird when someone says i'm a proud um labor voter my whole life or something i'd never vote another party or republican or whatever it is and you just think well so no matter what happens you're never going to change your mind that just seems like the opposite of activating your brain.

1:09:14Like, just think about what's happening and make a judgment. And so it is sad when scientists, of all people, fall on that. And it is, you know, it's sometimes said that science is supposed to be a place where anyone with a single piece of evidence can prove someone else is wrong. In practice, it's harder than it seems. If you're a young person and you have a great idea and you want to prove that Einstein is wrong or whatever, you... you have to overcome the entire institution of academia, right? There's going to be hundreds of thousands of scientists that just think you're an idiot for even saying that and won't even entertain what you're coming up with.

1:09:54So we have to be careful about groupthink, of being so locked into paradigms that we're no longer willing to listen to innovative new ideas. But then on the other side of it, my inbox is full of crazy ideas all the time. I get so many emails from people saying um i've proven that god exists here's a you know here's my formula it's simply yeah some i get hundreds and hundreds of emails like this and i don't have time frankly to review them all it's just too much coming into my inbox and lots of scientists it's the same thing so there's we do we all have to prioritize our time a little bit and you're always making that judgment of do i investigate every single thread of crazy or what appears because there probably will be quite but one of them's probably right out of these hundreds thousands of lottery tickets someone's probably gonna have a genuinely really good idea and i'm probably gonna miss it because there's just so much noise flying my way and it's true of so many of us well i guess the good thing about today's day and age is if no one's going to listen to you then at least you can just get a camera and just start filming videos and then maybe someone somewhere will eventually catch on and be like oh this guy's onto something yeah yeah certainly the democratization of science is improving with social media um if you got ridiculed for anything you came up with the concept of the halo drive yeah the halo drive as you do yeah i didn't get ridiculed for that well you know i did get ridiculed maybe we can talk about that in a moment but i just i did get ridiculed early on my career for looking one of my things i'm most well known for is looking for moons around planets and so i remember when i first arrived at Harvard University when I was probably like 22 years old or something, 23.

1:11:36I was so excited to be there. And I was terrified by all the names on the doors, walking down the corridor, these like giants of the field, Dave Charbonneau, Dimitar Sasla, people who in my mind were like the heroes, you know, in my field. And I remember walking down this corridor and there was a coffee hour around the corner every morning. And they, I guess there was some gossip that I was the new guy who'd arrived and they knew that i worked on moons and to them it was ridiculous because we'd only recently started finding planets so the idea of looking for moons was like pie in the sky stuff to them and so i remember hearing them joke about it saying oh that is the moon guy gonna turn up and talk about this these crazy ideas for finding exomeans and i remember walking you know walked around the corner and they all just kind of went quiet and yeah it's like a really awkward first coffee um and yeah so i was kind of not ridiculed to my face but i know there was people who thought what i was doing was like was crazy but i i knew it was reason to me it just didn't make any sense what they were saying like we know planets in the solar system have moons so there's hundreds of moons in the solar system of course exoplanets must have moons it's and why would we assume they're all as small as the moons in our own solar system some of them could be quite big and thus detectable right now if we're lucky we should try we should do the experiment we should look so that was always my opinion nobody was really doing this no i mean at the time it was just like wild west stuff to be looking it sounds crazy like now because it's actually become quite mainstream to look for moons but the time it was wild west stuff and so is you know back then like the giggle factor as we sometimes call it was applied to to looking for life in the universe as well people thought that was just like oh you put your tinfoil hat on or you've been watching too much ancient aliens or whatever like it was it was even that has a still today has a bit of a an edge to it and yeah i think it's a shame when we start ridiculing colleagues like this um i think it does a disservice to open scientific debate because then it kind of shuts down conversation right it's whenever you kind of bully someone through emotional means rather than just trying to address the scientific validity of their argument that's when you've you've lost whenever someone starts invoking ad hominems like um that you know like anyone who doesn't agree with me is an arrogant prick or something like that i immediately think okay well you've you've lost the argument right because you're you're you're now having to fall back to this kind of graham's pyramid of argumentation and at the lowest level is ad hominem and the next level is like what about ism like you just deflect to something completely different which politicians do all the time yeah um and so yeah i'm always very conscious of that and i just like i just want to talk about the argument like if with 3i atlas where we talked about this interstellar object uh avi lobe has come to a lot of heat for saying this could be an alien spacecraft and um i think the evidence is is pretty clear at this point this is not an alien spacecraft but i think we shouldn't ridicule him for suggesting this as a hypothesis to explore it's an interesting hypothesis we could think of experiments to test it and yeah there might well be stuff flying to with the solar system, which is alien.

1:14:42How do we know? Why are we assuming that's crazy? We haven't done the experiment. We don't know. So I don't like it when we ridicule anyone in my field for making legitimate scientific arguments. And the A3 Atlas, is that what it's called? 3I Atlas. 3I Atlas. Why is he thinking that it's potentially alien? Just because of the speed that it's traveling at? Yeah, the argument seems to be evolving a little bit, which is one reason to maybe be skeptical about it but the initial argument was the speed of it was very fast um the trajectory was was unusual it kind of flies very close to the plane of the solar system and it makes it's making a pretty close flyby to mars um in october i think next month okay it's on the way in still it won't come anywhere near the earth so this is for me one reason why i'm like if it's an alien spaceship that's making a close approach to mars it seems much more interested in Mars than it does in Earth, right?

1:15:41So that's already kind of strange. And he calculated the probability of it going so close to, what was it, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. And the probability of it going past each of them is something like 1 % probability. And so if you multiply 1 % by 1 % by 1%, you get this very small number. So he was like, okay, this is incredibly unlikely to happen by chance. This is a spacecraft. But I pointed back when I made a counter rebuttal to this, that what if you chose Saturn, the Earth, and Mercury instead? Then the probability is like 50%. It's a bit arbitrary which ones you pick as to how you engineer these probabilities.

1:16:13So the trajectory. And then the third thing was the size of it. So early images of it, it was unclear whether it was a rock or a comet. If it's a rock, it's an asteroid. If it's a ball of ice, like a snowball, basically, it's a comet. And we couldn't really tell from the early images which one it was um if it was a rock though it would have been huge because you could tell by the physical size of it like it would have been like the size of 40 kilometers across or something would have been absolutely gigantic and avilo made the argument that it's so big there's no way it could be natural like if you do the calculation of how often something that big should be randomly flying around it's just tiny tiny tiny chance that's another reason why we should think this is a spacecraft of some kind um however if it's a comet then the actual what you're seeing isn't all surface.

1:17:02The actual physical nucleus of the comet is buried right in the middle and then it's got all this dust and like an envelope of atmosphere almost around it. So what you see is like the shroud of dust and the true size is much, much smaller than what you think it is. So as the object has got closer and closer to the sun, we now see a cometary tail come off it. there's been these beautiful images by gemini a telescope and the hubble space telescope has captured it as well uh james webb has observed it so we now know with great confidence it has a cometary tail there are still weird things about it um it has a lot of nickel for instance coming off it that's unusual um i think abby's been suggesting well that could be part of some kind of factory or something some industrial process happening on board but he didn't know that when he first made the you know the alien argument to be clear um and it also has some some weird uh amount of carbon dioxide versus water coming off it so there was definitely like some weird things about it i don't want to dismiss it as a totally ordinary comet because that's not correct but it is also um only the second ever comet we have ever seen come from another star system yeah so we don't really have we've only seen three objects yeah maybe that's what they all look like yeah as far as we know we don't know that it could be that they all have nickel coming off them as far as we know we've only seen two of them the other one we didn't really study very closely so um i think it's perfectly possible that this is just a new type of comet why should it be that all solar systems have comets that are exactly the same as our comets they have different chemistry they're born in different environments um some be closer to the galactic core some can be in you know dense stellar nurseries there's all sorts of weird stuff that could be going on out there the weird thing about that amur amur was that it didn't follow the predicted trajectory that it was supposed to follow once it went past the sun it went off at different angles something not quite it had a slight amount of excess speed it was accelerating so yeah it didn't like change direction but it did move faster along that trajectory than it really should have done and the mystery of me actually comets do this often so as a comet goes past the sun it it warms up and so stuff comes off it and it actually acts like a jet so it's like if you spit stuff out the back like a water jet you're going to propel yourself forward so you accelerate a little bit forward so at first a lot of people just assumed it was that a lot of astronomers thought well it must be just outgassing something the weird thing was that then when we looked for those chemicals that were being outgassed we couldn't see anything so we went through a list we had a list of i can't remember the exact list it was things like carbon dioxide dioxide, ammonia, water, stuff like this.

1:19:45Went through this list. Do we see this? No. Do we see this? No. Do we see this? No. The typical stuff that comets emit. And it didn't seem to emit any of that stuff. But there were still a few molecules we didn't check. So the back door here of escape is to say it's just outgassing something we didn't check for. We didn't have time because it was moving out of the solar system before we had a chance to do those observations. I think still that's the most likely explanation. Otherwise, you have to say, yeah it's a spaceship which is just a big move to make because that's you know that's a pretty if that's the only solid ground you have for your evidence that it's moving slightly and we're talking like millimeters per second squared it's not like moving fast you know this is not like going close to the speed of light out the solar system it's a it's like a 0.01 percent excess speed that it has so to me that's not enough i would want to see it personally i'd want really compelling evidence i want to see it like change direction yeah i want to see it um zigzag around i want to see it stop and and do something you know just stuff that like there's no way there's possibly an explanation as to how how it could do this but for omu mua there's definitely still a back door to explain it naturally and as long as you have a plausible back door for me that's not enough you have to rule out everything once everything's ruled out then i'd be happy to say okay the only thing left is aliens at this point but if we if we had enough warning would we have the capability to put something out there to fly alongside it or is that not possible yeah that'd be really cool um omel was moving quite slowly so it's actually quite easy to intercept that one in principle um 3a atlas is moving really fast about three times faster so it's harder to catch up with that guy um but it is possible so especially if you use existing spacecraft which are already in the solar system so we have a few probes that are already in orbit of mars for instance and during the mars flyby three atlas is coming pretty close to mars you could turn on the jet you know turn on the the thrusters of one of those spacecraft and try and catch up with it and it should just about be possible i think for one of those but then you'd basically sacrifice the mars mission that you've got so the question is whether i don't think that the science teams who they have their own science questions they're interested in about mars they're probably not willing to shred up their mission to do years of work probably millions and billions yeah realistically you need to think ahead um and so there's a mission there's a european mission called the comet interceptor which is being planned i think it's 2030 roughly they plan to launch that thing and the idea is you basically park it in the solar system waiting for the next thing so just kind of it's just lurking there waiting and as soon as you see it turns on the thrusters catches up with that thing get some beautiful images maybe land on it maybe get a sample as well so that would be the most obvious way to do that that's good um let's say worst case scenario one of those was heading for earth do we have the ability to deflect it or blow it up depends on how much warning we get um you know comets are always and interstellar objects as well i suppose are always the a very serious threat in this regard um there's basically two types of objects which could annihilate the earth of course or cause mayhem on the earth one is what we call a near-earth object so this is something which is basically orbiting the sun at the same distance that the earth orbits the sun more or less and there's thousands of objects like that um very small rocks and they're not stable.

1:23:18Over millions of years, they get pushed into different orbits. They don't stay in the same place. But because of that instability, there's always a chance that they could move and strike the earth. So there was a directive from Congress in the United States to track down over 90 % of those. So we know where they all are. We know what the threats are. And we're more or less going to get to that point, thanks to this new observatory that's just come online called Rubin, that should be able to find pretty much all of those things which would be great um however a comet is a completely different story because the comets are not nearby the earth they're coming from the distant depths of the solar system and they're really far out and so we don't know about them until they're basically heading right at you and then it's that last moment when you're like oh shit so you actually see the thing it's kind of like a truck you know when you're sleeping at the wheel and the truck just suddenly puts the lights on that's what that's the moment you have to catch when those headlights come on and the horn starts beeping.

1:24:15So there is a bit of a panic for a comet. So again, Ruben is going to extend the warning for that. So I think before the warning was just like maybe a couple of days that we'd have for a killer comet. A couple of days, really? Yeah, and now it's more like a couple of months, maybe a year if we're lucky. So it's still not very long, but it's maybe plausible that we could get something off the ground. and we would like if it was that desperate we'd figure out a way to do it and then the question is how do you deflect it if it's a comet heading straight at us again you don't have much time so normally with um with an object if you have month if you have years or even decades to deflect it there's lots of stuff you can do you can just basically park a small spacecraft on the surface turn on its thrusters and it will just nudge it very slightly out of the way and even a small nudge if you're far enough away is enough to save you but if it's heading straight at you and it's big and you only have a couple of weeks to play with it's basically the nuclear option is all you've got you're just gonna have to try and blow that thing up um but realistically the best strategy is not to detonate the entire comet but to detonate just to the side of the comet and then again nudge it off because if you detonate the whole comet itself you just get all these fragments which are still pretty much heading in the same direction so you kind of want to like bang push it off to the side and and save yourself that way but again the more notice you have the easy that is because then the less nukes you have to use to to do that so how big does it have to be for it to be like a substantial threat uh i think a board of like 100 meters across will destroy a city um and but then it has to actually hit the city itself um about a kilometer would have global impacts wherever it hits um and 10 kilometers would be sort of the size that would be an extinction level event for for some species on the earth whether that would annihilate humanity is a is a open question because humanity is i think a very resilient species we're you know covering the planet pole to pole we even have humans in space we have seed vaults we have um you know preppers we have people you know there are a lot of people who are resilient and i think humanity is a very resilient species so i i think we would be very difficult to completely knock off the off the earth i'm sure there's a lot we don't know about uh the plans which the elites have yeah yeah some of these buildings they have these like basements that go down like you know 30 levels right and they're just it's a complete uh biosphere almost underground that they can survive the rest of their lives down there so um i mean that i mean the interesting thought about that is that maybe humans are actually very difficult to get rid of on this planet think of ourselves as fragile if that's true maybe society's easy to collapse i think you know capitalism the economy modern society is probably fragile but the actual biological species of humanity is probably more resilient than we give it credit to and i think i could imagine one of these impacts or some disease or something you know collapsing society down back to sort of caveman times essentially but humans would bounce back it would maybe take another you know 100 ,000 years for us to climb back up that ladder again.

1:27:28But I think it would be hard to totally scrub off the surface. I think we're almost like an infection of the planet. It's hard to completely scrub us away. And that gives me hope that, yeah, even if this experiment, this iteration of humanity ends, there will probably be other iterations down the future, which is interesting for your speculation about the pyramids and stuff. Yeah, it's not unreasonable that civilizations could collapse, they do collapse, and then go through a reset and then eventually come back again in the future. Do you think Mars can be colonized? And another question about that is, is it better to colonize a planet or a moon?

1:28:10I think Mars makes the most sense for a settlement or a colony at this point, because it has many of the resources that you would need. The moon is the next obvious place to consider. The moon is very dry. There's not a lot of water there. There is some at the poles and water is critical for our survival, not just for hydration, but also you can split H2O to make oxygen and you can use the hydrogen then for rocket fuel. So it's sort of the basis of a Mars base or a moon base. Mars is much wetter. It has a stronger gravity. So it's unclear what the effects on the human body would be living in such a low-gravity environment as the moon for a long time.

1:28:53We know that astronauts who are in microgravity, an International Space Station, have huge physiological problems. They lose a lot of their muscles. They lose their muscles. Their eyesight gets hugely impacted. They get kidney stones, right? Because your muscles are not only degrading, but your bones are degrading. That calcium then gets processed into your blood, into your kidneys and forms stones. um so yeah everything and of course you're being exposed to high radiation which is um probably going to shorten your ultimate lifespan due to cancer so there's there's many many health detriments of being certainly in orbit of the earth and if you were on mars there's some benefit by having a stronger gravity i think the gravity is about um uh was it like about 20 percent the the earth's gravity whereas on mars it's about a sixth so it'd be i think having a stronger gravity maybe a stronger there's a very weak magnetic field around mars as well we can think of ways to maybe strengthen that so there are certainly advantages to mars but the thing with mars is it you know who wants to live in antarctica right antarctica is a brutal hellish environment to live in and even the most um adventurous humans rarely spend their entire lives there they might live there for six months and they're like a cat had enough of Antarctica that's enough for me but if you went to Mars it'd be worse than Antarctica and it'd be for the rest of your life right it's pretty much a one-way trip so it's a pretty brutal environment and it's it's unclear to me whether we have the technology to live there today but I certainly think it's it's within the realms of possibility we can think that all the problems we can think of we can think of solutions to we maybe don't have the solutions fully developed and fleshed out yet but there's no showstopper to live to us living on mars so i think eventually it probably will happen and it probably should happen it'll be a benefit because it will protect us to some degree i just wouldn't want to be the first person to do it no i have i i wouldn't i don't think i even want to visit mars to be honest it's because it's also a really long way it would take you about nine months to fly there and you're exposing your body i mean you'd lose all your muscle mass you'd you your your eyesight would go downhill.

1:31:07You'd basically take like maybe five, 10 years off your lifespan, your health span. So there's no, to me, this is not obvious to look at a desert when you get there at the other end. It's going to be that worth it. The moon I'd be interested in going, because that's only like a two or three day ride. It'd be kind of fun to play golf on the moon or something. I reckon they'll probably turn that into a Taurus hotspot eventually. Yeah. I would love to go and see, you know, where Neil Armstrong's footprints were, right? And see the Apollo landers. that would be that should be like a national heritage site almost or a lunar heritage site it'd be really fun to visit there is there any films that have come out that you feel as though have actually got it like right yeah i mean you know what the expanse does a pretty good job that tv show um the book series is really good i think a lot of astronomers point to that as one of the closest to science hard science fiction in recent years um because they think really you know they have warp drives they don't have uh at least they do kind of eventually have something goes faster than light but that's an alien technology which does that but all the human technology is kind of within the bounds of what we're imagining they have this kind of cool concept where they hollow out asteroids and they live on the inside and they spin them so if you spin an asteroid then you get the centrifugal force like when you bank a corner in your car you get pushed to the side and so that can create artificial gravity so that's an idea that astronomers and physicists have been talking about for decades and so it was really fully fleshed out in the show and in the books um and that would be like a really obvious way to sort of overcome some of these problems of low gravity for instance um so i think that does a pretty good job this film's like you know i personally love interstellar it's always been one of my absolute favorite films of all time yeah but there's some of the science goes a little bit wonky especially towards the end of the film but i get going in the black hole yeah but well you could probably survive going into the black hole how the hell he gets out of the black hole is a but i thought if you were going into a black hole you just get so stretched that you would this is actually where the film does a good job so you know yeah normally you would for any normal size black hole but weirdly for a super massive black hole you can actually survive so the the event horizon is this kind of critical distance where once you pass the event horizon even light itself can't escape from a black hole and so the question is how how strong are the what we call the tidal forces that's the stretching forces at that point and it turns out that the tidal forces around a small black around a small black hole at the event horizon are brutal they would savagely rip you apart whereas the bigger and bigger you make the black hole the event horizon rapidly moves out and so it moves out far enough that actually uh as you pass the event horizon for the black holes in the center of our own galaxy it probably wouldn't kill you you probably wouldn't even actually notice anything to be honest as you pass the event horizon so we could a human could enter past the event horizon which is what obviously happens in the film you would never get out of course as far as we know that's impossible to get out but um it'd be yeah i've always wondered like if that was a possible option like if you knew you were going to die and you you had like you were terminally ill or something and you were given the option hey if you want you can just throw yourself into this black hole would you want to see what's on the other side i'd do that right it'd be kind of fun like you know that's it this is a question that it's it's a weird question because only you could ever know the answer you go in and you can never tell anybody what you saw but you would scratch that itch of knowing is there is is what's at the bottom of the black hole but eventually parallel universe or another universe or nothing at all yeah yeah i mean eventually though you would probably get tightly ripped so even though you survive passing the event horizon you're still falling and so you still will eventually um get closer and closer towards the singularity and be ripped apart at some point so there's no way of escaping spaghettification it's just whether it happens at the threshold or not yeah are you friends with brian cox i wish he's a cool guy yeah no i don't have a point where you can share thoughts i wish yeah i've never interacted with the dude i love his work though um i've interacted a lot with neil because obviously i'm in america so i'm in new york so um neil is in the same city as me and so we we chat a lot i've been on star talk a few times so i guess as a product of being in the u.s i'm a bit more plugged into the u.s uh psycom network than i am in the uk but hey i'm here for a year now apart from my sabbatical so So I'd really love if, yeah, if Brian listens to this, let's chat because I would love to sit down.

1:35:43He's someone I would love to speak to as well because I think what the world needs more of is people like you guys who are incredibly knowledgeable, but you have this ability to communicate very well and break down complex topics. It's just easy to listen to, you know, because there's certain people who are just so smart, but they're impossible to listen to. either they're just bad at communicating or they're speaking in a different language as in like it's too complex like the average person cannot fathom or digest what it is they're saying but you guys do a great job of breaking it down for the slower people like me that's very kind i i mean i think i'm i think those people are actually too smart for their own good it's like i think the advantage of maybe why i think i'm a good science communicator is because i'm i'm not so smart i'm not a genius so for me to get my head around stuff i have to break it down into simple steps in my own head yeah and then once i've got a simple step formula as to how i understand it i more or less just share that online that's that's my recipe and i think the people who are just these super brilliant geniuses it just it's all so natural to them they don't even think it's like how what the recipe was to get not to understand yeah it's just it's just too it's too inherent to them so i think some somehow being a little bit below that level is useful as a science communicator yeah we do a good job with the the youtube channel it's yeah it's very good i know it's amazing i i started that channel with no intentions of it becoming a big thing uh i did this i think when i started was about 10 years ago and there was there was not a lot of scientists doing science communication at the time it was you know you can find science videos for a long time one of my favorite channels of all time is vsource love vsources videos i've always loved those um but you know that's a individual who is not a practicing research scientist and so when i created the channel i was like hey what if we actually have someone who's in the trenches telling you what it's like rather than someone who's seeing it from the outside someone who's actually in the game it's got some skin in the game and so that was my motivation it was pretty unusual at the time but now there's a whole bunch of us doing this kind of stuff and it's quite refreshing and i think it gives a whole level of authenticity yeah to it and that's i think that's a new generation that's a youtube thing that's not maybe of the same ilk of like brian cox and neil degrasse tyson who grew up more like you know they're very focused on a total science communication model um whereas i spend much more of my time doing research than i do um doing science communication so this is always like the side project stuff for me and it's it's weird because it's very lucrative doing science communication once you get to this level and so it'd be i would certainly make more money if i just did this but i my passion and my love has always been research and i don't think i could um i could be you know science communication is a bit like being in love you you just want to tell the world about it when you're in love you can't help talking about this how wonderful your partner is or you know how great yesterday was hanging out with them whatever it is but at the same time you don't want to stop hanging out with them you want your whole time just talking about being in love you actually want to spend a lot of your time with that person and so for me yeah those are the two the two aspects the two sides of the coin and so i can never imagine going full gung-ho in science communication but um yeah because if you're speaking or doing a podcast or making a video you kind of like man i just want to get back into the paperwork and doing the research well yeah you get ideas as you're doing it you're thinking oh that's a good question actually i don't know the answer to that we should we should we should look into that we should start a paper about that so but that's another great side of doing psychom if you if you don't do any science communication at all if you're just a pure scientist you get you do get very stuck in that lane and very niche right you kind of like what's the next ultra niche question about this thing that i'm working on and so for me it was exomoons right and so if i just if i hadn't done science communication i'd probably just be doing more and more exomoon moons and rings of moon, like very, very subtle, distinct stuff.

1:39:51But as a product of being a science communicator, I've been pushed more and more into the mainstream questions that people really care about. I'm very in touch, I think, with the things that people really are interested in, because I speak to folks like you and other folks who ask me these great questions. And then that affects me. I'm like, yeah, these are the things people really care about. Like, I should probably balance my portfolio to get to the nitty gritty of the big questions rather than just going too deep into these subtle issues so yeah i think it makes you try to balance it between what you're really interested in but also what the public is interested a little bit yeah and also i mean like the halo drive we talked about earlier to come back to that this is this interstellar propulsion system idea that i came up with so if you had a black hole um you could do a gravitational slingshot around it right you could swing around it and you could actually steal speed from the black hole to go really really fast close to the speed of light potentially and so the danger of that as we talked about earlier is a spaghettification if it's a small black hole which most of them are you're going to get ripped apart by doing this maneuver so my insight was hey maybe we could use a laser beam you could actually shine a laser it will boomerang around because light bends around black holes it'll boomerang around come back to your spaceship and light carries momentum so it'll actually push your spaceship forward so it's kind of a way of doing these slingshots remotely like you don't even have to fly that particularly close to the black hole you can steal energy from them from a great distance um and avoid that hazardous environment now that is a wild idea and what on earth is someone who studies exo-moons got any right thinking about that and it's because i'm doing science communication that folks are asking me and engaged and i can see there's a huge appetite for interstellar propulsion so i'm making videos about it and as i'm making videos about it i'm thinking hey actually what about this how come no one's done this before i should write a paper about this so well if we unlock that then that opens up the entire milky way if we can find a way of actually transporting quickly right i mean i will say the beauty of the halo drive it has obviously a big disadvantage that you have to have a black hole first you have to get to that we have to figure out how to get to it or make your own or you could make your own potentially yeah um but the great advantage of it uh certainly with natural black holes is that there's really no mass limit you could you could accelerate entire jupiter sized planets to close to the speed of light using them because the black hole is so massive it doesn't really matter so unlike most propulsion systems we think of uh we're always concerned about the weight like make it as light as possible as fast as possible the halo drive doesn't give a crap about that you can make this thing as heavy as you like so if you wanted to move an entire civilization this would be the way to do it and there's probably a order of a million black holes in the milky way that's a lot and they're you know they're spread about fairly evenly across the the disk of the milky way and so to me the they form like a nodal highway system right so if you you would you would accelerate between these points and you can use them to both accelerate and decelerate you can slow down as well you can break so to me this is kind of your highway system and then once you get to your destination you off ramp and then you use your more conventional methods to go to the star that you actually care about so um that would be my vision and i think you know an inspiration from that is hey maybe we should pay more attention to black holes as a place where aliens might be hanging out because they have so many advantages in that respect amazing what do you want to be known for for like all the work that you're doing yeah i don't think about legacy too much maybe i should i'm 40 years old now so i probably should start thinking more about legacy um i imagine you're hoping to get more people interested in the topic yeah i mean when i do science communication like i said it's not there isn't a super clear objective goal besides from like that analogy of being in love of just wanting to talk about it because it's in my it's ingrained within me that i just love this topic so much i want to share it um and you know i get frustrated sometimes because when i'm at home my wife's heard all about space so much she's not she's someone talking to me about space anymore let's talk about something else on to the kids but sometimes it's really fun yeah when like uh visitors come over and they're like oh you're an astronomer and i'll just like i'll just sit down i'll just read i'll just like okay it's fresh meat and i just love like sharing this passion i have with people who are engaged with it so it's always like a great pleasure for me it's like an outlet rather than something with a strong, here's the objective function that I'm trying to optimize for.

1:44:35And I'm just honestly inspired by so many other great scientists and science communicators that have come before me and are still active that it's just wonderful to be part of this world. And I know I get so many kind letters and people in the comments saying lovely things about the impact it's had on them. I remember the other day I was at a meeting in italy and um this girl came up to me and she said um oh i'm really inspired by your youtube work and she's a scientist she was a graduate student and she said i actually became a scientist because of your youtube videos that's i was like wow that's i can't i never thought that would that would happen but the fact that if i've made even one new scientist that is like i've done my job yeah so that that's that's huge when you hear things like that what's a discovery that you would love to make in your career i think life yeah i think if we i think i think the most realistic thing i could hope for is the detection of microbial life on another planet obviously if we detected an advanced civilization that would be the absolute pinnacle dream if we got like a mathematical sequence of prime numbers coming down a laser beam directed at the earth and it within that was embedded the you know the encyclopedia of the galaxy i mean that would be like the absolute dream dream dream dream dream thing to hope for if you found a planet with life on it do you get to name it you get to name a planet in principle whether it has life in it or not if you find it um usually astronomers are very conservative and we just name the planets after the star that they're around so um the stars usually have names it's just like a catalog name so if it's the 1000th star that james webb has observed then it might be called like james webb 1000 or something so you just normally call the planet like okay it's james webb 1000 slash b or something so we're not very imaginative but there has been a movement to try to get the public more engaged um with naming um i think the iau has a project if you google it iu name name exoplanets where the public have submitted suggested names, I think for the first 100 exoplanets that were ever found.

1:46:50And those are now canonical. So the first 100 now have proper names. I think like HD 209458b, for instance, is now called OSIRUS. You know, so it has like a much more easy name to remember. So yeah, I think there's a movement to do that. And it's a nice piece of outreach as well to get the public feel like they're involved. Because these planets, I mean, why should the scientists get to name it? yes they discovered it but the telescope is not their telescope like you paid for the telescope with your tax money so if it's if it's funded by the public i think the public should have the right to call these plants whatever they want even if it's boaty mcboat faced whatever they want to call it i'm okay with that because it's their world yeah awesome i've enjoyed this conversation you can go on and on about all the different areas of space but we'll call it a day there where can people find you yeah you can head to my youtube channel that's cool world's lab so at coolwards lab i also have a podcast called the coolwards podcast and you can find me on twitter and x david underscore kipping amazing thank you yeah pleasure