Interstellar Propulsion, Uranus-Type Exoplanets, AGI Solving Space Mysteries | Q&A 255 

Your closing comments are why I give $5 a month to this channel now. Its real space news in a sea of garbage and embellishments. Youre worth it, a small gesture to ensure we always have this "keeping it real" resource. Keep doing it Fraser

Thanks for your clear stand on the issue of AI-generated gibberish clogging youtube with nonsensical clickbait.

Brian May's doctoral thesis was about to zodiacal dust. It would be amazing if you could get him on your channel!

If the sun loses (central) mass, then the planets' orbits would get farther away, not closer, right? And if the central mass sheds uniformly outward, wouldn't the aggregate gravitational force still be the same? (Edit: It would, until it spreads beyond the orbit in question.)

One way you can tell the "JWST saw city lights 7 trillion miles away" story is fake is that 7 trillion miles is just under 1.2 light years which is nearly 4 times closer than our closest star

Your points about AI featuring NDT or Dr. Brain Cox et al is spot on - no matter what I search for, be it astronomy/Archaeology/whatever, it is EVERYWHERE. I am honestly sick and tired of having to block all these channels.

Good little rant against the misinformation on this platform. Excellent video mate 👍

57 earths can fit inside Uranus. ^^ (Never gets old.)

Its not so much that the sun runs out of useable hydrogen, the helium products build up a lot and hydrogen meet up becomes less frequent. The core looses some of its heat over time causing the core to collapse a little, at least until hydrogen meetups happen more frequently. Eventually, there's so much helium in the core, it gets in the way of enough hydrogen meetups to keep the core from collapsing under its own weight. There's a switch over to helium fusion once the core collapses enough, but this gets really really hot.

Manned interstellar missions are 100% possible, we just have to copy and use the warp technology of the Star Trak Enterprise or Voyager. I saw many Star Trak episodes and warp technology works great for interstellar and intergalactic travel.

I always enjoy listening to your videos while working. I always pick up an interesting tidbit.

Re. the difference in density of Venus atmosphere vs Earth atmosphere (part of question Risa), is it possible that the collision with Theia resulted in Earth having less atmosphere. It seems probable. But, I don't recall ever hearing a discussion on it.

So, we are coming to the realization that there is a LOT MORE matter out there in the dark, around and way past the Oort cloud etc. I wonder what effect (if any) this will have on our models of gravitational dynamics, we hear people talk about the planet nine being out there in the dark based on the behavior of other gravitational bodies perhaps the discovery of all this extra mass out there will "fix" this ?..

"...the other part is that it's the word 'Uranus.'" I KNEW IT! These exoplanet folks just hate being the butt of the joke.

I'm so glad you got to see the eclipse in Texas, I was worried for you! We went to Sherbrooke Quebec because that was the only spot on the path that consistently had a clear weather prediction. It was an amazing event!

For question two: In January 2006, a conical capsule carrying the first samples of a comet and the first pristine traces of interstellar dust ever collected landed in the Utah desert. The capsule had been dropped from NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which continued its voyage through space and became the first mission to visit two comets.

Risa, that's an update that i hadn't heard till now, very interesting, thank you. This video is really helping me de-stress during an intense time dealing with family stuff. Thanks Fraser!

Well, the building blocks for life, the amino acids, don't necessarily have to arrive from space on a asteroid, there are plenty of energy sources down here to get these reactions going to make all kinds of organic compounds not just amino acids. The Urey -Miller experiment showed that it can be done with lightning, an electric arc inside a primordial concoction of ammonia, methane, hydrogen, water, hydrogen sulfide etc. But wait, there's more ! There is geological processes with geothermal energy supplying the kick starter catalyst, even radioactive elements can have a hand in this, with complex geology forming underground lakes with wildly differing conditions some being oxidative environments others reductive environments and even the surfaces of minerals and clays acting as catalysts for reactions, the possibilities are very complex so, maybe, life is just what happens to star dust when you mix it up and cook it in certain ways....we are, just one example of what can happen with star dust....

Thrilled to see you recommend Steve's channel!

I'm glad that you are recommending other small youtubers, as you said before, with those fake-autogenerated-lying YT channels, I've stop exploring and basically do not watch unknown people...

Im pretty sure plnets would move out if less mass is present to sustain their orbits

Oh my gosh! Been watching these videos for years and I finally got my question answered for real, and a good answer too! Thanks Fraser! If I had to vote for a question of the week... Aeturan, maybe. Not biased 😁

What's cool about finding all those complex organic compounds found all over the universe is, if you rewind the universe 's clock backwards, there was a few million years when the temp of universe sat between 32°-212°F. Could life have formed non terrestially under those conditions!?

"Aeturen" was the topic that first drew my attention to Sabine Hossenfelder's blog before she came to RU-vid. I was very relieved to hear you give the same answer she did.

Thanku cane for the propulsion segment

Veritas is an awesome name for a Venus mission. In Venus Veritas as they say! 😄

Vulcan. This was a really good Q & A episode. Every time I had a question while you were answering, you connected the dots during the answer. That's excellent communication skill! Being able to anticipate follow up questions of your audience is really nice to experience.

I so appreciate your reporting.

about those fake news. I also saw a recommendation of a video about the thing james web saw. Was waiting on your videos to see if that actually was true or not. Am happy that I can watch this channel without worrying about fake news.

Thanks Fraser for another wonderful show. PEACE AND LOVE TO EVERYONE ❤❤.

Cheers for these vids 👍👍👍

Fraser, serious question for the question show: why are you so great?

Interesting, as usual!

Very interesting video. But l do have a question about the first segment. Why would the planets spiral in closer to the Sun once it has shed significant mass? Wouldn't that make its gravity weaker and encourage the planets to migrate outward?

Remus: Wild idea. Create an antimatter generator on Mercury. Using a large solar collection there to drive the generator. Although, the ideal place might be somewhere further back where solar panels won't melt.

Like usual Fraser…. Your insight is amazing and incredible… for a journalist .

16:10 My favorite approach for interstellar travel is some sort of intelligent beamed propulsion. Eg a constant stream of tiny "starshot" like sails that can minutely adjust their trajectory over massive distances, to vaporise and push against a magnetic or electric sail on your human-scale vehicle. Of course the laser array would be in space instead of on earth. The magsail could also be used for braking at the destination. I have heard estimates of 0.2c for starshot sails.. in any case improving on that would probably be a lot easier than solving the hurdles for antimatter IMO.

02:04 _They'll move, I guess, closer in ..._ No. They'll move further out.

Thank you for many great explanations and answers - the issue with YT algorithms makes your work even more important.

Risa. Related to that, how do we know that the Earth was formed in the inner solar system? Perhaps the reason that venus and mars have so little water is that the protoplanetary disk was very dry inside of the orbit of mars. What if the collision that formed the Moon took place in the outer solar system and the Earth then spiralled in to the position it occupies now? Maybe the asteroid belt is also debris from this collision?

1. Are the gas giants just heavy 'rocky' planets with really thick atmosphere? 2. If not, what is the planet mass threshhold (or any other way) to tell if a planet is a gas or ice giant or rocky/ocean world with really thick atmosphere? Can there theoretically be a planet that is difficult to classify?

The way you said "UR-Anus" lol and I admit I laughed. Even harder after you said "see you laughed". Good stuff sir

Question, Fraser. When it comes to interstellar travel, what are the risks of a space ship encountering and colliding with space "dust?" Something like the scenario from the movie, Passengers. The space is mostly empty but even James Webb got a little battering already. At interstellar travel speeds generated by the antimatter propulsion, how small can an impacting object be and still cause catastrophic damage to the ship? What could be done to counter it? Thanks for all your great work!

If there is all this undetected dust just in the small space of the inner solar system, how does that account for the unaccounted matter? What of matter is much more common? How does that affect the “dark matter” problem?

It would seem that all these ever increasing complex molecules found out there like amino acids and the no doubt even more complex molecules are hinting that life is nothing more than an emergent property of matter and energy itself, all these molecules come together and with the energy supplied by stars react in very distinct and well known ways, organic chemistry and then biochemistry. I understand the nature of elements and how they react and make other compounds and so on, but it does seem very odd that this all happens in a universe that is apparently entropy driven, with everything supposedly tending toward disorder, life, it seems, is the exception to this..we are the ultimate expression of order, it's weird...

15:45 I'm always glad that in polish language we are saying 'ooran, same for the planet and element. and also fortunately that, this sounds threateningly and nobody will laugh ;)

So it looks like we have a second Oort cloud. It's going to take us an extremely long time to get to interstellar speeds because acceleration is going to be very difficult going through the pebble fields. We may already be stuck in Kessler syndrome and we just don't know it

Cheleb. I am very lucky and very thankful that I discovered the RU-vid astronomy community through high quality channels like Event Horizon, Issac Arthur, and eventually Frasier Cain. I had a solid base of good channels to subscribe to before the sea of crap flooded in. Consequently, I don't really have to deal with the garbage at all. My subscription and recommendation feeds are full of the good stuff, and I know how to spot the bad.

15:53 alright you got me 😅

Cheleb You and Kyle need to hire a lobbyists. God bless Amurica

Thanks

Cheleb: You can also help a bit by mouse over the thumbnail, click the three dots that show up and selecting "Don't Recommend Channel" Its easy and YT seems to get the idea that you do not wish to be misinformed pretty quick. That said, making money on misinformation is a crime and we all are the victims.

I liked Vulcan best. Thanks.

Mind officially blown! This video is like a cosmic buffet of mind-bending topics. Who knew we'd be discussing interstellar propulsion and AGI cracking space mysteries all in one place?

Giggle avoidance for using Neptune as the classifier is definitely valid. I also think that Uranus is also too non-standard. If a "Uranus" like exoplanet was discovered I would assume in my head it is on it's side as well as a few other observations specific to Uranus. While Neptune seems more like the "typical" ice-giant.

I’m not sure if they would be considered but the American Space Museum does great work with their RU-vid channel. I really feel like they’re under watched. Daily videos, most often they’re interviews with space workers

35:19 [Cheleb] I think it is cool that you take the time to introduce us to other inspiring thrustworthy science youtubers. The state of RU-vid right now make it almost impossible to search for interesting people because if by mistake I click on a video that end-up being just an IA gibberish youtube will think I was interested and will propose even more ai gibberish. I have to constantly designate "not interested" the video youtube try to propose me.

A really good channel I have stumbled upon that I think you should recommend is Over The Horizon. Only have 1500 subs and have really good content with interviews discussing cool space topics. Crazy the level of content that is on that channel with nearly no viewers.

great video, I have a question if we never are able to develop warp drive could a interstellar space ship have a multi power system? such as solar sail, conventional rockets and nuclear power rockets all in one

I don't know which question to vote for, but the best answer is definitely the Uranus one.

You are out there and about Uranus :) Greetings from Denmark! I like how we all talk...Canadians are cute ;)

Cheleb You already know the answer 💰

Fraser, if all we see in the universe is the distant past, is there anybody working on a map of the universe as it is "right now"? Thanks for your consideration! Love your channel!

Brian May's PhD thesis was zodiacal dust! Queen ftw😊

REMUS! The other problem with antimatter is that it produces energy in an unusuable form: gamma rays. Even electron-positron (the lightest ordinary matter) annihilations produce gamma rays and gamma rays, even more than x-rays, go through everything and no one knows how to focus them.

13:00 Yes, we want to [learn more about Hawking radiation]

Vendikar - that was my reaction, too. The phrase 'exo-Uranus' is just intrinsically hilarious and nobody wants to use it.

Risa - Is this encouraging news for the eventual habitation of Mars then? Perhaps it would be easier to keep an atmosphere there than we previously thought?

Hi Fraser, can you address the question why Ingenuity did not cover the top of the rotor blades with solar panels, and instead using a smaller fixed solar panel? NASA et al must have considered it, but which factors decided it? Structural integritiy? Transferring power through the axis efficiency? KISS?

Question: have we actually measured Hawking Radiation?

16:08 I would think the similarities of N and U, the big oddity being U's reclining axis, make U a subclass of N.

Cait. So many orientation issues on both ends. Conditions would be so rare or a miraculous chance. I gotta talk to someone about it now😂

First manned interstellar mission ?!? What ?!? We cannot even send people to the Moon...

Hi Fraser, assuming we make that antimatter engine work. Do we have a material that makes a spaceship going at 50% of light speed withstand a piece of grain in space, what kind of materials would that be?

I have a question. I very much enjoy your show. This is more of a physics question, but perhaps you will answer it. I have heard that there is a way to write Maxwell's equations such that the the two physical constants that appear in them both equal 1 and so disappear. In other words, the constants are only present as a way of scaling the equations to the size of the units that we typically use. If that is correct, is it correct in general? Is there a way to write the fundamental laws of physics such that all the fundamental constants equal 1?

QUESTION for the Question Show: is it possible that a large fraction of Earth’s water came from Theia, the impactor from the MFI? What if it somehow formed beyond the water line but then migrated inward, & even if the water vaporized during the impact, a bunch of it fell back to Earth? It might explain dry Venus & Mars (assuming he recent work shows the water depths we know of on Mars could’ve been removed by the Sun). Best question this week: Risa.

16:19 Sticking to the laws of physics, I thought Fraser would have said Fusion, not antimatter. We are a hell of a lot closer to making fusion a reality than antimatter production . Storage of antimatter is obviously dodgy, unless you make it and use it immediately, but again, tech. that we have, or nearly have. Fusion (eg. Tokamaks) are not susceptible to nuclear meltdown or some runaway explosion, if it go's wrong the process just stops so it's inherently safer. As for Delta V, functional plasma temperatures are in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius , made possible only by very powerful magnetic fields achieved with new gen. superconductors, so just speculating a bit a magnetic nozzle could be used to bleed off some of that high energy for thrust. Journey time is still going to be at least decades to the nearest stars, I can't imagine anyone would want to commit their entire lifespan to being inside a tin can to reach a "maybe". So that means stars like ours, main sequence yellow dwarfs or similar, with known planets in the habitable zone ( big big telescopes). Some form of "suspended animation" will be essential, and I personally don't think that will be all that hard to work out. Many mammals already have evolved survival tactics that mirror this goal, hibernation, torpor, antifreeze proteins in sub zero arctic fish etc. The benefits for doing this are huge, a large reduction on many resources, if the reduction in respiration is significant, like say over fifty percent, other physiological problems like microgravity's burden on the body could almost be completely mitigated. Musk would have been better off attempting this rather than sticking electrodes into monkey brains, we simply know very little about the brains architecture and functions etc. to be attempting such a lofty goal, that organ is well and truly beyond our ability to interface with, like sharing dreams and thoughts in a shared conscious network, that sort of thing, is a long way off.

For small RU-vidrs, I recommend Jason Kendall. He has a fantastic channel where he gives in depth lectures from simple to complex astronomical topics. Would be a great channel to shoutout.

Question: What stops others for sending unauthorised commands to satellites or other things in space like telescopes etc? Are they encrypted that well?

Cheleb was my favorite

Collide 2 neutron stars and ride the shockwave - you're golden.

Pentastic show is always. I'm kind of divided on what I think youtube should do about the massive amounts of crap. Obviously, there could be some kind of certification process. That will also create opportunities for gaming that system. But it could help

if everything emit Hawking radiation, might this tiny amount may be responsible for proton decay? An even electron decay, setting the stage for a Conformal reset as in Penrose CCC theory?

What would be the mechanism in what a liter star would hold on more to it's planets than a heavier one ? How the sun loosing mass would make orbis decay

8:05 water going deep undergtound was for a long time a suspicion of mine, especually for Mars, if very deep recoerability via technology is higly questionable though.

15:53 And because of that: Vendikar. But Cheleb is quite a pressing matter too. RU-vid earns more on those automated channels because they squeeze content onto a plate a lot faster than real content creators.

Beside anti-matter, black hole are the other kind of ultimate energy storage. Except that we can't make them until now. But I think IF we were able to produce them, they would be easier to "store" than anti-matter. And probably as dangerous or more.

Can you talk about the Concord 70 minute solar eclipse flight?

Brian May from Queen did his thesis on the Zodiacal light.

Vulcan!!!

What video did you explain hawkin radiation? Trying to find it ? RU-vid search comes up “do black holes evaporate? “video from you?

I think the 'city lights 7 trillion miles away' comes from a statement, before JWST was launched, that stated it could be possible to see light reflected from the planet Proxima b near Alpha Centauri which is just over 4 light years away. Or it could be observations of TRAPPIST-1 b.

My vote is for JANUS ! In Reply to Cheleb - I think it may be that misinformation is hard to qualify, especially with what you are saying about LLM not having the bandwidth for fact checking on a large scale. Its unfortunate, generally makes it hard to answer questions one may have about specific topics, because the search engines are cluttered with trash.

hmm.. if i check now under this video for the videos that youtube suggests next, i find videos from you, The Royal Institution, Sabine Hossenfelder, Terra X Lesch & Co (that's german), World Science Festival, ARTEde (also german, sometimes not REALLY scientific), Marcus House, and only after that some videos by 'strangers' whom i don't remember watching. Some of that i am subscribed to, but not to The Royal Institution, World Science Festival, Marcus House or ARTE. But: I prohibited Google from storing my Video history and practically all other personal data, maybe that's the reason. Seems to work well, though i don't understand why :)

i believe the first interstellar propulsion will be particle accelerator, via the Enzmann Echolance type ship. photons just don't have the mass that atomic particles have.

Risa. How do they measure day lenght or rotational speed on gas planets since they don't have a solid surface?

Question. With regards general relativity - is the volume inside a gravity well different to the expected volume from outside the well. Space is curved...

@seionne85 may i recommend doctor Kipling's video about this from the "cool worlds" cannel? I beleive mr. Fraiser an him are freinds. He talks about creating a spacecraft with constant acceleration which would provide the astronauts with 1g. Or gravity resembling what we experiance on earth and how a manned mission to our closest star might play out is such technolagy existed? Sounds like time dilation is the bigger problem. Ion drives and solar sails might be heading in the right direction to make that happen but our grandchildren would have passed away by the time we returned unfortunately.

Question: So objects that enter a black hole never quite reach the event horizon from an outsider's perspective, they simply fade away over time. I've recently heard that this is also true of the stars that form stellar black holes themselves. With the right tools, would it be possible to "age" a recently-formed stellar black hole by measuring the photons from that original star thar are still being emitted?

Fraser, huge fan of your channel. Thank you! However, censorship is never the answer.--Al Newby