Why Elon Musk plans to put 1 million satellites in orbit; Should we be giving sleep drugs to kids?; Why global pesticide risk is not improving

0:00When you want your spring break to feel like and your kid's pool day to feel like and your hotel bed to feel like and room service to feel like because at Hilton, hospitality feels like Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton for this day. Elon Musk has announced plans to make Earth a Kardashev Type 2 civilisation, which is when a species is able to directly harness all the power of its star. Right, so he doesn't just want to make us multi-planetary as a species. We now have to harness the entire power of the sun. Just that small thing, yeah.

0:48It's about plans for SpaceX to put a million satellites into orbit. A million is such a stupid number that it's probably a bit of a joke. you might launch 50 ,000. A little bit of a land grab in that sense. Also this week, we hear that half of American parents have given their kids melatonin, a hormone, to get them to go to sleep. We're going to discuss what that means. In the US and Australia, poisons hotlines now are actually getting record numbers of calls about children overdosing on melatonin. It's horrifying. And also, 60 years after Rachel Carson alerted us to the dangers of pesticide use, we report that the toxic burden of pesticides is growing all over the world still.

1:30Welcome to the world, the universe and us from New Scientist. I'm Dr Penny Sarche. And I'm Dr Rowan Hooper. Now, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, announced earlier this week that he's going to merge SpaceX with another of his companies, XAI, and launch a million satellites into space. Just a million. So what does it mean? Jonathan O 'Callaghan has reported this for us and he joins us from Bangkok. Hi, Johnny. look SpaceX already has how many satellites up there and what's the plan now? Yes SpaceX has 9 ,500 satellites currently which is about 65 % of all the satellites in orbit but they want to launch another million in the next few years for this new plan for Elon Musk which is another kind of semi-crazy plan from Elon but you know there is a little bit of method behind it okay so obviously SpaceX at the moment are launching their Starlink constellation which you've probably heard is like the space internet that you can connect to with your phone from a wireless terminal.

2:28That's going to number in the tens of thousands of satellites. But a lot of companies now are looking at these orbital data centers to power AI, how we're using chat GPT, and so on. And Elon has got this number of a million to make kind of the best one possible with SpaceX that we can all connect to and generate all our AI through. So whether it's achievable, I'm not sure. Well, we'll get into whether it's achievable or not, perhaps. But there has been a demonstration of having a kind of data center in space already. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. So last year, there was this StarCloud One mission from this company, StarCloud.

3:05They launched an NVIDIA chip into orbit. One chip? Just one chip. So with ChatGVT and other AI models, obviously, you have to train them with copious chips. They are trying to show that you could do this in orbit. So you could put all the chips into space. So rather than having your big data centers on Earth that are consuming all your water and your electricity, you whack them up into space. They get abundant solar energy. It's technically cold, which we'll come to. And you can have loads of them without impacting cities on Earth. So, yeah, they demonstrated with this one chip they could train a new language model.

3:44And they're hoping to put more up into space soon. so when he talks about this um kardashev 2 thing and so what's that so so what that is there was a soviet astronomer in the 60s called nikolai kardashev and he came up with this classification for extraterrestrial civilizations and it became known as the kardashev scale and level one is when you harness all the power on your planet level two is when you harness all the power of your local star and level three is when you harness all the power of your galaxy and we are not quite at level one like quite far off being a level one civilization so for musk to say he this is the start of level two is it's going a bit far even for him but johnny you know what you've said about getting these really awful data centers energy hungry water hungry data centers off planet it that's a good thing isn't it yeah potentially i just to address the kardashev thing yeah that's like that's classic musk talk yeah he loves his science fiction he's a big nerd so like for him to bring up this topic you know it makes it sound attractive people love his you know approach to spacex bringing up science fiction whenever we can you know he named his barges for the falcon 9 rockets after science fiction books you know he's got science fiction throughout all of his all of his companies.

5:04So yeah, for him to bring this up, not that outlandish for Elon. Yeah, putting data centers in space, you know, it's not the craziest idea. So yeah, you get abundant solar energy. So here you can have your big satellites maybe merged together or connected through optical link. That's what SpaceX wants to do. And you've basically got, you know, endless energy from the sun coming in. You could just harness that. You don't need to connect into a national grid on Earth. You don't need to take up power from cities. yeah that in itself makes sense in terms of getting rid of the heat on earth you know you need to cool these systems use huge amounts of water in space in theory it's cold but in reality it's a vacuum and getting rid of the heat is very difficult because you can't just expel it into the vacuum you have these massive radiators you're right you might have seen on the ISS international space station they're big soda panels and these big white things that are about as big as the solar panels which are the radiators and those expel all the heat into space no i never actually appreciated that i just thought oh it's cold in space don't need to worry about expelling it but it is a problem as as you say okay it can't come back to there's no air yeah there's a vacuum the heat it doesn't go anywhere yeah stays right there yeah fair enough so uh i'm surprised to actually start thinking you know seeing the point to this idea yeah however you know ai is having a boom at the moment.

6:24Some might call it a bubble. I've seen people express concerns that in the rush to build data centers here on Earth, we could be building vast amounts of infrastructure that we don't really know we're actually going to need long term. Isn't that massively compounded if we're putting a million satellites up into orbit? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of factors at play here. One is that SpaceX is rumored to be doing an IPO later this year. This is probably an attempt by Musk to boost the value of SpaceX to say, hey, we're going to be building this massive AI, like this super AI space center better than anyone else, a million satellites.

7:00We are worth trillions of dollars or whatever. Also, a million is such a stupid number that it's probably a bit of a joke. He's not going to launch a million satellites, but he might launch 50 ,000. But by saying a million, he can kind of reserve space a little bit because he's filed this with the FCC in America, this big government agency. And by applying for this many satellites, they kind of have to say, right, we kind of have to preserve a bit of space for them, a bit of bandwidth in case they do do it, which they probably won't. But he's kind of a little bit of a land grab in that sense. And then it also just sounds cool.

7:37I think Elon launched his car to space. He's done countless other things. When we call these things mega constellations, mega means a million. No one's launched a million satellites. Mega doesn't, you know, none of these things are mega constellations until now. Now Elon can say he's got the only mega constellation, really, which I imagine to him is quite attractive. I mean, and the idea is to do this on Starship, which I guess the ultimate aim of that has always been to go to the moon and then to Mars with people on board as well as cargo. But is the idea that this is a sort of interim step of that and a way to actually start making money out of Starship if you can get and you need thousands of launches to get this many satellites, even 50 ,000 satellites.

8:20I'm talking about a huge upstep in launches when the thing isn't even working properly yet. I think if they can actually make Starship work, before we get on to Starship, Starlink for SpaceX is like a cash cow. It's already making them tons of money. I think the estimate was$10 to$15 billion a year. And that's with seven, eight million customers. Elon tweeted out the other day that NASA only made up 5 % of the revenue, something like that. Wow. Whereas it used to be their biggest customer. Starlink is now their biggest moneymaker. It's going to make them hundreds of billions probably in the next few years.

8:54Elon's realized that, okay, we've got space internet and with that comes money and geopolitical power. Now we can maybe get orbital data centers. That could be another way to generate tens, hundreds of millions of dollars you know if these things come to fruition SpaceX could be a you know multi hundred billion dollar generating company quite peaceably in you know five ten years uh so yeah it's not it's not crazy and it's him like a way to make a ton of money that he can then use to fund these moon and mars ambitions which which i think he still does want to do like why would he not that's been his goal all along everything at SpaceX is designed towards going to Mars i think that is still his ultimate goal and this is just a way he's always talked about Starlink being the way to make additional make money that would fund the missions to Mars and I think he's just spotted this other gap where he's thinking okay we can make a bit more here and make the Mars missions even more likely.

9:47You mentioned as well that it's a bit of a land grab so do you think he's also driven by trying to push out his competitors in AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic? Yeah that could be a case that could be a case obviously he had a bit of a tussle with Sam Waltman, ChatGPT. And yeah, maybe he's looking at ways to make SpaceX the number one AI company. You know, OpenAI isn't going to launch a million satellites. If SpaceX can, they can have a potentially train a better AI model. They could potentially have better access to power and cooling that other companies can't match. But, you know, I wouldn't know if someone on earth could match that or not.

10:23It could be a way for them to get ahead in that field, but I wouldn't never certain there. And you mentioned Starlink as well. And I've seen them when I've been stargazing and crisscrossing the sky. This is going up at several orders of magnitude. Does this kill off astronomy as a pursuit? And you probably, Johnny, as a kid, gazed at the stars and it affected your future career. Even if it doesn't, it's a beautiful thing to do, a timeless thing. But is it the end if this goes ahead? Yeah, astronomy is already massively impacted by satellites. I think astronomers say that Starlink right now is causing huge issues for them.

11:01But for like our natural view of the sky, it's not too bad at the moment. So if you look up at the sky, you'll see a few satellites going across. But, you know, there are nearly 10 ,000 Starlinks up there and you can't see them all. because most of them are too dim to be seen. They're below magnitude, I think it's six or seven, which means that they're below naked eye visible. So you can't actually see them once they're in their operational orbits. And that will be the same for these orbital data centers, probably. They will orbit a bit higher than Starlink. They might be brighter because of the radiators, but in theory, they should be dimmer as dim.

11:34So we won't see them, I think. You might see them at launch when they're being deployed, like you do with Starlink sometimes, the kind of string of pearls in the sky, but they shouldn't impact us. But for astronomy, it's a nightmare. I mean, a study came out last year that said, if we put half a million satellites in orbit, every single image taken by any telescope on earth or in space would contain satellites. And that means, you know, if you're looking at a distant supernova or a galaxy, you're trying to spot a new event, you're trying to see an asteroid flying past, there's always going to be a satellite street going across that could mask a new planet discovery it could mask a new star it could mask part of a supernova that has i don't know carbon dioxide or water emitting it hampers all scientific scientific discovery and launching telescopes to space doesn't solve it hubble at the moment all of its image images are being contaminated by starlink satellites and other satellites so if you put a million satellites in space it makes astronomy extremely extremely difficult how astronomy copes I don't know, clever algorithms to remove the streaks, launch the telescopes even higher.

12:39But yeah, it would be a nightmare. OK. And just to go back to Mars, because you said that you think this doesn't undermine his ultimate aim. And as you say, he has always been clear about wanting to go to Mars. But it's just that Peter Thiel said last year he thought Musk had cooled on the idea of going to Mars. so what we we still think it is gonna happen yeah musk tweeted back to theo and said that mars was still his ultimate goal yeah i think that is still his plan for multiple reasons one because he is a big nerd and he wants to do things that he thinks are interesting and scientifically valuable two for the prestige he wants to be i think the first person to send people to mars uh and three it gives spacex clouts like if they are getting these government contracts obviously with the moon missions through nasa uh to launch humans and land them on the moon yeah that makes spacex already one of the most important companies in the world if it's landing humans on the moon if they can then do the same for mars and they're the only company that can launch people to mars and land them on mars i mean that raises it to stratospheric levels and he's never wavered in his desire to make mars the end goal and i think that's still that's still the case for him the other the other aspect is why not i mean if starship works as they intend it to you know he's spoken about launching it every hour yeah and if it you know i don't think it will never launch that often that i think that's too high but if it can launch even every day and you can refuel starships in orbit they cost i don't know a million dollars to launch something like that why not go to Mars like you could launch 20 of these things in a month refuel one starship fly it to Mars land humans come back like if the rocket works as intended like why not go out into the solar system it could it could do that time for a quick word from our sponsor lego education what if the most high octane workout for the human brain is just play that's the takeaway from the latest new scientist collab feature exploring how active play is a powerful brain sculpting force that operates at every level, from genes to cell biology to behaviour.

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15:32Whether you get those few hours to sort your entire life out while they're asleep or not before you go to bed is very important. and something I hadn't heard about was giving the sleep hormone melatonin to kids to help them sleep. Our Australia reporter Alice Klein has filed an amazing piece on it and she's here to tell us about it. Hi Alice. Hi Penny. Alice tell us how you first heard that parents are dosing their kids with melatonin. Yeah so I first heard about this a few years ago actually when I was at my kids gym class and one of the mums there was saying that her daughter had been this terrible sleeper, She took ages to go to sleep.

16:10She woke up a lot overnight. And then she'd heard of these melatonin gummies. And when she'd given them to her daughter, it was kind of like this magic cure. You know, she was suddenly going to bed really easily, not waking up overnight. And then it just seemed like after that, the word spread like wildfire between tired parents. Everyone was sharing stories about these melatonin gummies and how well they worked. But quite a few paediatricians have actually been raising concerns about the fact that these products, even though they seem to work really well, are really unregulated and we don't really know much about their long-term effects.

16:44So let's start with melatonin then. I described it as a sleep hormone. Is that accurate? Can you tell us a bit more about it? Yeah, so it is a hormone. It's produced by the pineal gland in the brain, and it naturally rises over the first half of the night, and then it falls during the second half of the night. And this seems to help regulate our sleep-wake cycles. Is it synthetic melatonin, or do they get it from the pineal gland of dead cows or something? No, it's a synthetic form. They're not milking it from our brains. In the UK, it's a prescription only melatonin. It's only supposed to be used on children for real quite bad sleep disorders.

17:26But what's it like in other countries? What's it like in Australia? Well, actually, the situation is the same here in Australia. So to get melatonin tablets from a pharmacy, you need to have a prescription. But what's happening is that parents in Australia, and I've heard in the UK, are ordering melatonin gummies online from places like the US where you don't need a prescription. You can actually just buy melatonin gummies down at your local Walmart. Of course. Yeah. Just freely available, probably in a vending machine. Even intended for children, so not just adult gummies. Well, they're marketed, aren't they?

18:02They look like gummies. There's not just gummies in the US. There's all sorts of things like chewable tablets and I think liquid, like melatonin drinks, all sorts of things. So if you're in the UK or Australia, there's more of a dealer network of mums coming up to you going, do you want to score some gummies for your kid? Get them to sleep. But what about the, you know, prescriptions are regulated and you know exactly the dose you're getting. And what about with gummies? You might not know what you're getting. Yeah, if you're getting them off the internet or off a friend rather than via prescription.

18:39Yeah. So, you know, melatonin tablets are obviously very strictly regulated because they're pharmaceutical medicines. But melatonin gummies have no regulation. and in fact when the FDA in the US recently tested 110 melatonin gummy brands and other children's melatonin products they found that many of them had really really high doses of melatonin you know some had up to 667 percent of the dose that was actually listed on the label. Wow. What's it six times the dose that it was supposed to be? Well that's huge so I just looked So it's often about 10, it's advertised 10 milligrams, which is also already quite high.

19:19Then it could be much more than that. And so why are the doses so high in these unregulated products? I don't know the answer to that. But there is research showing that if you have higher doses, it does get you to sleep faster. So one possibility is maybe manufacturers are putting a bit extra in because then it kind of knocks the kids out even faster. So it works really well. And then, you know, maybe parents think, oh, that works really well. They go out and buy more. I mean, if you gave a kid heroin, it would knock it out quickly. But at least melatonin is a natural hormone. But are there risks of giving these high doses of even though it's natural?

19:59Are there risks? It doesn't seem great to give a toddler. I mean, it sounds like laudanum in Victorian times, right? Just knocking a kid out with drugs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the trouble is that no research has looked at the long-term effects of taking these big doses of melatonin on a regular basis. And this is a big problem because in the US, for example, almost half of parents now say that they have given melatonin products to their children. Some children, yeah, 45%. So almost quite a few children are taking them every day now for a very long time. And we just don't know. I mean, there might not be any risks, but we just don't know.

20:40There was one study that did find an association between long-term melatonin use in children and delayed puberty, but it was quite a small study. So we really need more research to investigate this. Often as parents, I mean, it depends on the kind of parent you are, but there's a you know you want everything to be pure and clean and do the right thing and not contaminate your kids and that's one of the sort of stresses of being a parent in the modern world this seems completely the opposite it's essentially getting black market drugs for your kid do you think that the form in which they are like as a gummy and the way in which they're sort of packaged makes it seem a lot more benign than it really is yes I mean they come in these really bright cheery colours.

21:28The containers I've seen often have lots of pictures of fruit on them. They have labels saying that they're natural or drug-free. So I think it's quite easy just to see them as another vitamin or a dietary supplement when actually melatonin is quite a potent hormone. And the other issue with having this gummy form is that they look like sweets, they taste like sweets. So children are sometimes, you know, secretly getting into the stash and eating them, you know, by the fistful. And in the US and Australia, poisons hotlines now are actually getting record numbers of calls about children overdosing on melatonin.

22:08It's horrifying. What does an overdose involve? What happens? They basically get very, very sleepy and drowsy. They might get dizzy, confused, headaches, yeah, all sorts of things. So this seems like a real phenomenon then. Are authorities cracking down on this? What's the plan? Well, in Australia, our national medicines regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, they have recently started to try to crack down on this. And they're urging people not to import them. And they've asked border control if they do find these products coming in to seize and destroy them. But I have found, you know, on Reddit and all sorts of places, parents are sharing all these tips on how to circumvent this, you know, how to secretly get them in, get past border control.

22:57So I don't know if these measures are actually working. Wow, parents are just desperate to find ways of circumventing any sort of control on this. If they found something that works and they want to keep it. Yeah, I mean, It speaks to just how desperate we all are for an evening. Exactly, exactly. And I mean, they do seem to work so well, so you can see the temptation. I think one of the other issues that's coming up is that some parents are finding that once their children get used to taking melatonin to sleep, they then actually have a lot of trouble sleeping without them. And no one really wants to go back to the old bedtime wranglings.

23:37and so a lot of parents just are desperate to keep using them. You can understand why. But I think at least until we have more research on the long-term safety of this, I think you can understand why regulators are wanting to take a cautious approach. Maybe one day we'll find out it's all fun, we'll all be using it, but for now I think it's probably best just to wait for that research. My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym. Pre-K pickup, back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius, gotta keep the lights on. When the three alarm hits, I'm ready.

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24:26Now, I think everyone pretty much knows that pesticides used on farms to grow our food can have a lot of undesirable effects. they can harm the health of farm workers kill off beneficial animals like bees they also get into our rivers and seas where they kill fish and other animals so in 2022 at a un biodiversity meeting countries agreed to reduce the overall risk from pesticides by at least half by 2030 and michael a page has been reporting on this for us this week michael how are we doing with that goal yeah so it sounds great doesn't it we're gonna halve the risks of the pesticides so the trouble with this is that um there's no actual measure of the risks of pesticides no one actually said you know how are we actually going to achieve this how do we actually measure it and of course it's very difficult so you think about pesticides well you can look at the quantity of pesticides but then of course the toxicity can vary enormously from one pesticide to another so you've got to take the toxicity into account as well and that also varies from species to species so how do we do that.

25:29So the new thing is a researcher in Germany called Rolf Schultz. He's come up with a way of doing this. So basically, he started by taking data from regulators who've looked at how pesticides affect eight broad groups of animals. So these are things like aquatic plants or terrestrial vertebrates, or things like this. And then he's combined that with data on more than 600 pesticides from 200 countries, and how much on sort of the quantities they've used. And so by combining that quantity and toxicity data he's come up with what he calls total applied toxicity but before we get into that can i just put in here that so you mentioned more than 600 pesticides and i mean many people have heard of of course rachel carson's work 1962 in silent spring she wrote about all the dangers that pesticides were doing then and at that time there were 37 kinds of pesticide on the market.

26:27Today, there's 900 licensed in the US and 500 in the EU. So, you know, Silent Spring was not the end by any means. It's gotten far worse. It's a booming industry. First off, the UN came up with this very nice sounding goal, but they didn't know even how to measure the thing that they wanted to have. No. So I think for us, we're coming from a scientific point of view, it's how do you achieve a goal that you can't measure? I suspect for politicians, it's, oh, if you can't measure it, you can't say we haven't done it. Right. So there may be some of that going on. So what's happening here is we do have a scientist now trying to make sure that we can measure it and track off the risk of it.

27:08Yes. I mean, it would depend on people accepting this, obviously, but he's come up with something that you could regard as a measure of the risks of pesticides. And so he calls this the total applied toxicity. Is that how much harm these pesticides are doing then? It's not quite how much harm they're doing, it's how much harm they might be doing. So we don't know this is the amount of harm they could do if animals are actually being exposed to them, as plants are being exposed, but we don't know that exposure are part. But there are lots of other studies not part of this that have shown that actually the level of exposure to pesticides is very high and that actually when regulators sort of assess these pesticides and say, oh, only this amount will get into the environment, actually find much higher amounts usually than the regulators thought they would be.

27:55Okay, so then how are we doing in terms of reducing this total applied toxicity? Is it going down? Please tell me it's going down. No, it's really abysmal, I'm afraid. Oh, no. So in this study, they could only get really good data from 2013 to 2019. But during that time, they saw really substantial rises for most measures of the total applied toxicity. So I think, for instance, for the pesticides that affect fish, it was a 30 percent increase in applied toxicity when it comes to fish. And it was similar for a lot of others. And so we don't have data since 2022, but I think it's very likely that it's continued to rise.

28:35And if you think about the bigger picture, so we've got a population that's rising, more people who need feeding. We've also got more livestock, more animals that need feeding. At the same time, we know that people are using a lot of food to make biofuels. So in calorie terms, 5 % of our calories are now going into biofuels. And then we've also got lots of pests that are evolving resistance. things so if you think of all of that to keep on producing more food and counter these resistant pests at the same time and to do that with reducing pesticide usage how on earth do we achieve that it's a really tough thing to do i guess climate change is always part of this too right and as plants crops are more stressed you often have to give them more of a helping hand to fight off disease yeah no there have been studies showing that there are a lot of pests that are limited in where they can survive at the moment because they can't survive cold winters say And so as the world warms, if winters get warmer, they'll be able to sort of spread further and affect crops.

29:31Another thing that happens is if summers get longer, a pest can go through several generations. And so that's sort of an exponential rise in the damage they can do. Can we move on to some solutions? Just losing my mind. Now, Michael, we agree on a lot of things, but I'm not sure we agree on organic farming. But nevertheless, I'm going to ask you, isn't that the answer to this? Okay, so the first thing to say about organic farming is that organic farmers do use pesticides. They don't, but they do use pesticides. So they use things like various sulfur and copper compounds, BT bacteria. There's some sort of pesticides called pyrethrins, lots of things like this.

30:12The idea that moving to organic farming gets rid of pesticides isn't true, although I'd say it's probably fair to say that these are less harmful than some of the other sort of pesticides that farmers use. But then there's a question of, you know, what happens if we try to go organic? So there's a really interesting study a couple of years back where they found that conventional farms that were neighbor by organic farms are having to use high levels of pesticides in other farms. So I look at that and that suggests to me that if the sort of organic farmers on some way, they piggybacking on conventional farming, they're relying on them for their pest control to some extent.