Will A 25 Year Old Space Pen Still Write?

18:41Michael Stevens:Interestingly, this whole cell recycling disposal system is called UPS. It really is a kind of parcel delivery system, by the way. But is it united? No, UPS stands for ubiquitin proteosum system. Ubiquitin is the tag and the proteosum is the bin. So let's talk about rubbish. How can we hijack our body's internal rubbish disposal system to treat cancer? Well, Cancer Grand Challenges and their partners are supporting a team of international scientists to find ways to develop therapies for solid tumors in children, including degrader drugs, which hijack this bin system, this rubbish disposal system to go after proteins that scientists once thought were undruggable.

19:26Michael Stevens:They can attach trash tags, not trash bags, trash tags, okay, to cancer-causing proteins that tell the cells to chuck them out. So the teams are designing degrader drugs to target five faulty proteins, and they've already identified a few promising compounds that could put a protein that drives childhood neuroblastoma in the bin. A neuroblastoma is a cancer that develops in nerve cells, neuro, of children mostly younger than five years old. Right. You can see the potential for this and what an unimaginable difference it could make to really countless lives. This idea of cancer grand challenges, by the way, is an initiative that supports international interdisciplinary teams to try and solve these big unsolved mysteries in cancer research.

20:12I mean, you could imagine a giant scientific escape room. You've got puzzles on like nothing you've ever seen before and you get teams all together. But the prize at the end, if you manage to solve them, it could change really everything. But this idea, these degraders, they have this power to potentially cross the blood brain barrier to also treat brain tumours, which is a wall that most drugs really struggle to penetrate.

20:40Michael Stevens:Yeah, this trash tagging technique could help us treat children and young people with better drugs that aren't as harsh on their developing bodies. Yeah, this is the next step in a very long legacy. Over the last 50 years, around 35 ,600 children and young people with cancer in the UK have survived into adulthood, thanks in part to Cancer Research UK's work. And with continued breakthroughs like that, the number is only going to keep growing. So it turns out taking the bins out really can save lives. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science.

21:27This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?

21:38Michael Stevens:And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve, like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible. Indeed it did, by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. So after the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90 % lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK.

22:14This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with.

22:17Michael Stevens:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science. Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by WISE. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer and no surprises along the way.

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23:52orientation due to the lack of gravity and thus the lack of up and down and therefore experience

23:57Michael Stevens:something more akin to the world moving around them i mean the pens definitely feel it yeah the pens definitely feel the lack of gravity the pens have a built-in gravity though they have this built-in direction which is the direction that the pressurized gas is pushing but for a human our inner ear the little like stuff floating around in that fluid it doesn't have an up or Doesn't have an up or down. Well, there is a little bit of gravity going on in there, but generally you can tell rotation. That's essentially what it can test. So I think if you are spinning in space, you still know that you're spinning.

24:34But loads of astronauts, they talk about how if you don't, I mean, you're not getting like blood rushing to your head in the same way. That sort of same physical sensation.

24:43Michael Stevens:When you're upside down, it doesn't feel any different. Yeah. So instead, it doesn't feel like, oh, look, I flipped upside down relative to the spaceship. It's more like, oh, the spaceship has rotated around me. Interesting. So astronauts say that their frame of reference, as it were, is where their feet are. So up and down to them remains fixed and everything else changes around them. Oh, that makes so much sense. I never even thought about that, though. And when I first heard that question, I thought, oh, no, they're going to feel rotation because you can. But you're only going to really feel rotation if you rotate quickly.

25:17Michael Stevens:But if you're just doing stuff and you're incidentally, you've turned yourself 180 degrees in your process of work or slowly while you're sleeping or something. They're strapped down when you're sleeping. But you're going to, of course, you're going to say, hey, the whole ship's upside down. Yeah. It's not me. And of course, upside down is like a very arbitrary concept up there. Absolutely. Because there's no such way as up. I mean, there's like down towards Earth, but you certainly don't feel a force pulling you to Earth. There's definitely gravity. That's why I'm always careful to say weightless.

25:48I'm okay saying zero G because they don't feel a G. They don't feel a G because that's a force. They're not accelerating in a particular direction. I don't like saying zero gravity because there's definitely gravity.

26:00Michael Stevens:There's gravity. That's why the International Space Station doesn't just drift away. In fact, the gravity that they feel up there is still, it's not 100 % what you feel on the surface of Earth, but it's more than 50. It's somewhere in between. Is it? Yeah. If you built, I think we talked about this in a previous episode. The space elevator one. Yeah. I think it maybe was that one. We talked about if you built a skyscraper that was so tall, its roof was at the height of the International Space Station's orbit. I think it would have something like 70 % gravity up there. You would maybe feel different, but you certainly wouldn't be like, whoa, I'm on top of the building.

26:36Michael Stevens:You'd be like, I'm on top of the building. Well, wait, why is that not the same on the ISS then? Because they're falling. They are in free fall. If you imagine yourself in an elevator, that's cable has been snapped. You're going to be floating weightless in that elevator because there's nothing to resist your attraction to Earth. And so that's what they're doing. It's just that they're falling, but they're also moving to the side so quickly that as they fall, the curvature of the Earth falls with them. So they never get any closer to it. That's what an orbit is, a successful orbit, a stable orbit.

27:13Michael Stevens:So it is weird to think that you could stand on top of a building that was what? How high? 400 kilometers? you could stand on the top of such a building and you could see the ISS just fly by so quickly. It wouldn't feel like it was falling as you watched it because it would be traveling horizontally so quickly that you would just be like, it was there and now it's way past me. Absolutely. But it would be falling because if you imagine drawing a tangent out from where you are, as it follows the curvature of the earth, it will be below that line very quickly. And of course, it does fall over time because of friction.

27:52Michael Stevens:There's enough air up there that they do slow down and that means they fall closer to the earth. Or hold on, let me rephrase that. Because of the friction over time, like over the course of weeks and months, the ISS does drop in altitude and it needs periodic boosts to go back up a little bit higher. And so I actually did a short video about this where I was like, if all life on Earth was destroyed by some calamity and the only living things left were the astronauts in the ISS, how long would they have? Well, they would eventually spiral down into Earth, right? They would because they need periodic deliveries of propellant for the boosts to reboost them back up into the orbit they want to be in.

28:42Michael Stevens:they could certainly very easily have enough food, enough water. They generate oxygen. The ship is going to give them enough of all that stuff. The limiting factor is altitude. That's what they will run out of first. How long would it take? About like a year and a half, maybe 15 months. Wow. Yeah. Like that's how long they would have. And they'd be like, look, we've got it. You can easily have enough food. You can have enough water and air to last more than 15 months. You could have two, three years worth of those kind of supplies. But altitude, you will run out of first. Altitude is the thing.

29:17You know, some astronauts on the ISS in particular, they also say, just going back to the question, that if they close their eyes, they sort of lose perspective of direction altogether. It kind of feels like they're just a disembodied brain. And then they kind of open their eyes. It's like, surprise! You've got a body. the space in the ISS is in disorientation. Wow. Yeah. That would be trippy. Yeah, completely. But the spit trick doesn't work, basically. The spit trick that you can use in avalanche.

29:50Michael Stevens:Yeah, you can't spit and watch where it goes to figure out which way is up or down. No go. No go. Okay, this is a question from David. Could a building be damaged by resonance if everyone clapped in unison all at once? What if the entire world clapped at once what if they were all densely packed in the isle of white and clapped okay well okay here's the thing i looked this up and you can find like little short videos other people have made about this question of like how damaging would it be if we all clapped at the same time and a lot of them are just what you would expect it's like a whole bunch of like ai animations of the earth exploding great while they tell us that everyone clapping at once would be like maybe as loud as a jet engine for like a second if you were close and you're like give me a break it's a it's kind of anticlimactic um but the problem is first of all you got to get everyone together in one place because if we all just clapped where we were it would attenuate through the air and it would basically not even matter well also the speed of sound is extremely slow so if you clapped where you are when you're in can you know in kansas or denver whatever and I clap in London, effectively by the time those two claps would meet each other, they'd just be off.

31:07They're not, they're not, yeah. They're not synchronized.

31:09Michael Stevens:The clap is like compressing air and then that compression wave travels, but it gets weaker and weaker and weaker. So when I clap in Colorado, you don't hear it here. Anyway, if we got us all into one place, we could all clap together and sound adds up in a way that isn't quite like just normal arithmetic. But we could probably get 8 billion people to clap together and make a noise in the like 200 decibel range. So that's that's pretty loud. That's very loud. Yeah. But you're still limited by how close you can get everybody. The world record loudest clap was actually achieved just in 2021 by a guy named Stephen Wallace, who I could not find how far away they measured the loudness.

32:00Michael Stevens:Because, of course, loudness goes down by what do they call it? A square inverse square law. Inverse square law. So if you're twice as far away, it's four times quieter. Anyway, Guinness World Records did not tell me what the rules were for how far away they measured, but there's a video of it. And he clapped and he hit 117 decibels. And that broke a record that had been around for 15 years. Before him, the loudest clap was 113 decibels. Now, I've watched the video. Right. Was it something special? Did he have like ginormous hands? Was he doing a special technique? Like, was it cupped hands, flat hands?

32:40Michael Stevens:I don't want to be catty on this podcast very often, but it seemed like... One in five episodes is okay. Because Guinness World Records made such a point to mention the audio company that did all of the recording and measurements, it sounded a little bit like they themselves pushed for Guinness to do this. Like, hey, we should do a loudest clap thing. Hasn't been broken in 15 years. And they just got like their intern to go in. And the guy's just, I mean, they're loud claps. Like I'm not putting, his technique is solid. But he didn't wake up, you know, one day as a child and be like, you know what?

33:15I need my life's mission to be. I've worked it out. It's going to be clapping.

33:20Michael Stevens:Yeah. No, it wasn't that. Can I look at it? Look it up. Yeah. Look up Stephen Wallace clap and you'll find there's like a video on Facebook of it. It's during the pandemic also. So everyone's wearing masks in the video, which is, it's always such a like, oh gosh, yeah there was that period yeah that's nothing that does look like an intern you're right right i mean again i don't want to put anyone down i do that's rubbish but just listening to that clip i'm like that's applause that's regular i think i've done a lot of claps than that i want to see someone who trained since childhood yeah and they only trained because when they were a kid people made fun of how like big and cuppy their hands were.

34:04Michael Stevens:And they were like, I'm going to triumph over this. And they like that turned out to make their claps really loud. And then like they even spent time in jail for clapping once. And it was so loud it hurt children's eardrums nearby. That's what I want to see. I want someone who has dinner plates for hands, right? Yes. And maybe webbing between each of their fingers in order to really focus those sound waves. Exactly. Yeah. Or I want someone who's got like a technique and it almost feels illegal. you're like well yeah i can clap loudly and they're like oh yeah watch this i invented this and they do this like weird clapping backwards upside down and physicists get involved and go wow it actually is like twice as efficient to clap that way and where there's like a whole new way of clapping invented don't give me this like oh hey guys what's up here to set a world record yeah nice um i wholeheartedly and there are there are new styles of clapping i'm discovering every day.

34:58Michael Stevens:And by every day, I mean like maybe 15 years ago, I found the fastest clapper. That is a record that I very, very much respect. Wait, can I guess? Can I guess? Instead of doing the normal way, do they do something where they like... Kind of, kind of like that. Fold their hand into and clap forwards and backwards. Kind of. They do it like this. Not regular clapping, but clapping like this. Oh, I've seen it.

35:29Michael Stevens:yeah so i'll slow it down for the purposes of people who are listening yes please you just saw michael do what was a really amazing impression of a circus seal yeah i'm basically sliding my palms across each other long ways but then allowing enough of a gap oh you've practiced this i gotta work out more but the point is that that is currently the way you can set the most claps per minute record. Yeah. Which I love because it's a different way of clapping. And it reminds me of things like the high jump and how people used to jump over it with like a scissor kick. And then someone invented the flop.

36:12Michael Stevens:Yeah. The Fosbury flop. And it was like, oh my gosh, yes, that allows them to raise their center of mass higher than before. It allows them to clear a higher bar at least. I forget the physics behind it. But that stuff, really, I love it. Yeah, we need more competition on this. Record your claps. See how loud they come out. Let's get a community going. Let's get an annual conference. Let's get ClapperCon. Yes, we should do that. And I think it's important because guess what? You, all of us, are always clapping. Go on. This is not my joke. But the joke is that you never stop clapping. The distance between your claps just gets really long.

37:00Nice.

37:01Michael Stevens:That's a lovely idea. It's a little bit of a like, you know, paradigm shift. Lovely idea. You're welcome. Yeah. It's a bit like when I was about 13 years old, I deliberately opened a bracket and I've actually just been writing inside that bracket ever since. Oh, yeah. I think I saw a tweet once where a guy was like, oh, my gosh. in ninth grade, I said, quote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I forgot to ever say end quote. So most of my life has been something I've attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Yeah. Okay. I'll answer your question then, David. We're not damaging any buildings. No, no, no, no, no.

37:43It would be loud.

37:45Michael Stevens:It would be uncomfortable, but the building would be more in danger of just all those people, like trying to physically pack it full of that, like as many people as you could, that would be much more damaging than the combined volume of a clap. Unless the new clapping technique really elevates things. Unless and until ClapperCon generates a whole new style of human clapping, which it will. Okay. All right. Last question. This is from Jordan. What are your thoughts on the Kardashev scale. Had there been further developments on this theory since its inception over 60 years ago, where do you think we, Earth civilization, land on it currently?

38:23And do you think we'll get it in your lifetimes? Okay, we should probably start with what it is. So this is an idea from the 1960s, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, and he was trying to categorize how hypothetical physical, alien civilizations might distinguish themselves from one another based on the amount of energy that they can harness, right? So type one, this is a civilization that is totally able to use all of the energy resources that are available on their planet, right? So, you know, all of the energy that's floating around on Earth, by the way, we're about 0.7 at the moment, maybe 0.73, I think.

39:03Michael Stevens:Okay, because what are we missing? I mean, loads. We're still like digging up dead dinosaurs and using that to power most stuff but so so this scale doesn't actually mean all energy like we find a way to break the laws of thermodynamics sure and get waste heat energy back into right no it's more like there's loads of wind power that we're missing there's loads of solar power that we're missing i'm not sure about nuclear power actually i think that that does that still count i think it does still yeah so i guess i'm wondering um i'm only vaguely familiar with the scale but like i'll be honest with you me too to reach one to use all the energy of your planet does that mean that you're literally creating nuclear explosions out of all the matter in your planet obviously not i think it must mean that it's within your technological ability to harness energy of all kinds but no you or you are harnessing it no i think it's beyond your technical ability i think it's i think it's that you have the ability to harness all available energy that your planet has apart from destroying matter.

40:09Michael Stevens:Okay. Okay. All right. I think it's that. I mean, honestly, can I be honest with you? I think the whole thing's nonsense. Yeah. I find it really annoying because they get so into it and they're like, oh, when are we, it emotionally matters to them that we become a type three civilization. And I'm like, why are you? Why? Okay. So let's, let's, to finish off. So type one is like you use everything up in your, you can use all the energy in your own planet. Type two is that you can use the entire energy output of your star. So the idea to be able to do that is maybe you have something like a Dyson sphere, or maybe like an entire cluster of mirrors that surround the sun, these satellites that go out and surround the sun, and take all of the sunlight and then transport this single beam into a way to harness all of that energy.

40:56And then that can be used to do whatever you want. And then type three is that you have a civilization that is capable of using the entire energy resource of a galaxy. Right. Right. Which is crazy.

41:07Michael Stevens:And so then this one thing that this leads to is the idea that, OK, well, if there are highly intelligent life forms out there that have reached level two. Sure. Then we should be able to see their stars, you know, flickering because of the spheres of energy collectors put around this. Because they've got loads of mirrors around them. Right. And there was a situation a few years ago, Tabby's star, where astronomers got really excited. Amateur astronomer found it first. This is Tabitha Boyajan, who found this star about 1500 light years away from Earth. And it was like dimming and brightening in an unusual way.

41:45Now, normally when you get an exoplanet that passes in front of a star, it does dim the light, but it does so in actually a really tiny way. Even if you get a planet like the size of Jupiter, it does it in a really small way. But this particular style was like the dimming was really significant and everyone got very excited about it and were like, we found one. We found an alien civilization that is using a Dyson sphere to harness energy from their own sun and there you go. And it turned out it's just actually interplanetary dust. So probably not. But people were really excited. They were like, there's a genuine possibility.

42:18Michael Stevens:And that's the thing. This scale gets people very excited. There are so many videos on YouTube about the scale, about Dyson spheres, Dyson rings. And it's exciting because it's like sci-fi technology. And because I think it's not just a cool futuristic idea, but it's like a hierarchy of like, okay, that means that you're at two. It feels quantitative, right? It feels quantitative. Even though it's actually very hand wavy. Yes, yes. So Carl Sagan calculated that we're at 0.7. The current estimates are that we are at 0.73, you know, around about now. I mean, if you project forwards and we continue with the increase in global energy consumption of 3 % per year, then we'll become a type one civilization.

43:05Sort of less than one at the moment in like 100 years or so. Yeah.

43:10Michael Stevens:So it gives you like a like a personal goals, right? Like I'm going to help us get to a type one civilization sooner. and that means that we need to get fusion or whatever we need to better harness this other form of energy the the energy in the tides and the waves right i mean sure sure then there's also this whole like philosophical thing about oh the most difficult part is the transition from 0.7 to one because that's the bit when you've got enough power to exterminate your own planet Ah, so you can fold it into the great filter and all those kinds of things. The great filter being the answer to the idea of why haven't we heard this cacophony of sounds when we turned on SETI, when we turned on the ability to look for other alien life forms and we didn't find any.

43:57Is it because they all wipe themselves out? Is it because there's this filter that essentially you get powerful enough, intelligent enough, capable enough that you knock out your own civilization? Yep. I think maybe the reason why I feel a bit dismissive of it, maybe dismissive is a bit too far because I think it's a fun idea. But I think it's that. I think it's a fun idea. I think it's like a false quantification of things. And I think that it is just taken a bit too seriously.

44:28Michael Stevens:Yeah, perhaps. I think it's fun. I think it's too focused on just energy and specifically certain ways of getting certain kinds of energy where I think you could also build a scale about how broadly a species has has pioneered or what level of consciousness do they have. That could be a whole other thing where maybe like harnessing more energy just actually becomes completely uninteresting. And what is more important is, you know, your lives inside the digital world or something. There's just a certain group of people who are like really obsessed with growth, you know. True. More and more and more, expansion, expansion, expansion.

45:11And I don't know whether this is just because I'm a bit older or more female. But I'm more interested in there just being a point where it's like, you know, this is actually enough. Like this actually is enough. Like I'm really, I think there's an endless bound to my curiosity. I will constantly want to know more. That I want more of. I'd like cleaner forms of energy, but I don't think we need more.

45:40Michael Stevens:Well, yeah, more for the sake of more. More for the sake of more. so that energy prices can basically hit zero and we have access to everything and everyone has access to what they need. Sure, that would be nice. But you're right. I think there is this feeling of, well, but yeah, but there could be more. And then we could move up the scale and score more points. And you're like, for what reason? And they're like, well, because it's kind of a cool story. Like when a lot of people ask me about the scale, I can tell that what they really want is to just listen to really cool speculative science fiction, which is awesome, but it's not what I'm good at.

46:11Michael Stevens:It's not my job. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's exactly it. That's it. Speculative science fiction is really fun. Yeah. But it's fiction. It's a different thing. It's a different thing. It's not like, ah, yes, guys. Well, you know, next year, the European Space Agency is going to be doing this thing that's going to move us up to a 0.8 on the scale. And everyone's like, yes, of course, this is a real thing. Maybe we're being too harsh about this. Maybe everyone's going to get really angry with us. We spent about 20 minutes just kind of moaning about it. It is quite fun. It is fun. I don't have anything else to add about it, though.

46:45Michael Stevens:Like, oh, but here's what no one talks about. What if you're a negative one on the scale? Right. So this is the idea that it's like you go down smaller rather than bigger. So you manage to harvest all of the energy from like atoms. Yeah. Why can't you just cease needing energy? That could be a goal, a goalpost where you're like, actually, once you get to like one, you start to realize and become a species that needs to be at zero and you exist statically just suspended in how's that for speculative science fiction just we we we really find that the most intelligent life forms in the universe are all just statues because they've realized that that just existing just to be without change is the ultimate is the ultimate i mean that's what the buddhist thing isn't it they're way ahead of intelligence and if you listen to this podcast you are way ahead of intelligence the compliments are in abundance here um maybe energy isn't but but there's uh there's no shortage no scarcity of compliments thank you as ever for watching and listening to us uh you can send us emails the rest is science at goldhanger.com ask us questions either in an email or in the comments maybe we will uh be whining and moaning about your question we weren't whining and moaning about the the scale okay we were we were just reacting to what i think is people who have spent the last 20 years constantly being told about it and asked about it yeah what he said so you're seeing us raw this is real this is real life guys see you later Bye.

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