Speaker 1: Are we at the mercy of our cosmic fates or
Speaker 1: are we masters of our domain. We've been lucky so far,
Speaker 1: living on this tiny spinning rock at just the right
Speaker 1: distance from an enormous ball of plasma. It keeps us
Speaker 1: warm but not too warm, and it's been stable enough
Speaker 1: to give us time to evolve, to develop technology in
Speaker 1: science and understand our fragile place in the universe. And
Speaker 1: is there also time for us to intervene in the
Speaker 1: Sun's eventual demise? Can we develop the technology and massive
Speaker 1: engineering capacity to keep the Sun from going red giant
Speaker 1: and frying the whole planet? That's the cosmic question we're
Speaker 1: tackling today. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily engineered Universe.
Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Kelly Windersmith. I study parasites and space, and
Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to putting on my skeptical face today.
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to be optimistic about our ability to preserve the future
Speaker 1: of humanity today.
Speaker 2: Ah, why are you going to make me sound like
Speaker 2: such a wet blanket?
Speaker 1: Because you love it, Kelly, you love it.
Speaker 2: It's the most comfortable feeling for me. I guess all right,
Speaker 2: So let's start with another amazing engineering project for our
Speaker 2: intro question here, So do you think we should terraform Mars?
Speaker 1: Wow, that feels like a trap to me.
Speaker 2: You brought up this amazing geo engineering.
Speaker 1: That's true. No, you're right. Compared to what we're talking
Speaker 1: about today, terraforming Mars is like just a warm up exercise.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: I think that we should first figure out if Mars
Speaker 1: has life on it before we go in and muck
Speaker 1: it up with our kind of life. Because wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be incredible to discover Martian life that evolved independently, that
Speaker 1: started from nothing independently, or if it weirdly has like
Speaker 1: something in common with Earth life, so we could have
Speaker 1: some sort of like mini pan spermia. I feel like
Speaker 1: the scientific consequences would be amazing and be ashamed to
Speaker 1: muck that all up by just dropping a million people
Speaker 1: on Mars too soon. But that's a pretty extensive project.
Speaker 1: Once we're done with that, though, then yeah, I think
Speaker 1: if we have the capacity and the resources and we've
Speaker 1: thought it through, then I do think it's a reasonable
Speaker 1: place to extend humanity. What do you think where am
Speaker 1: I wrong.
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't think you're wrong in any of the
Speaker 2: things that you just said. I guess I'm more thinking
Speaker 2: about how we would go about terraforming Mars. One of
Speaker 2: the things that surprised me when A City on Mars
Speaker 2: came out, which available in paperback now, was that the
Speaker 2: geology community felt like we hadn't spent enough time talking
Speaker 2: about how Mars is a like unique geological treasure and
Speaker 2: we shouldn't be going out there and mucking it.
Speaker 1: Up from a scientific perspective, like answering geological questions.
Speaker 2: I think that was part of it, but I think
Speaker 2: there was also a bit of a thread of a like, well,
Speaker 2: we've messed up a lot of stuff about our planet.
Speaker 2: We shouldn't let people go out and mess up another planet.
Speaker 2: And you know, I see their point, and I particularly
Speaker 2: see their point when you hear about terraforming arguments that
Speaker 2: go something along the lines of let's dump a bunch
Speaker 2: of nuclear weapons on the poles at Mars to release
Speaker 2: a bunch of water vapor, which will then create a
Speaker 2: greenhouse effect and will warm up the planet and will
Speaker 2: create an atmosphere that would be more hospitable to human life.
Speaker 2: Blah blah, blah. I think I'm not super excited about
Speaker 2: dropping nuclear weapons on Mars, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Especially because to get n FCO two to warm with
Speaker 1: the planet, you'll create an atmosphere which is toxic to
Speaker 1: humans anyway, And so like, yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: challenges there, And so I guess my answer is like
Speaker 1: assuming we can solve a lot of these really big
Speaker 1: engineering challenges, because in today's episode, we're going to think
Speaker 1: really big and really broad about like mega engineering, engineering
Speaker 1: that would impress visiting aliens. That's what we're talking about today. WHOA.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess if you're an alien civilization that made
Speaker 2: it all the way to Earth, you maybe wouldn't be
Speaker 2: impressed with what we've done. But I am personally impressed
Speaker 2: with the extent to which we have molded the planet
Speaker 2: to meet our needs.
Speaker 1: But anyway, there are lots of moments of awe. You know,
Speaker 1: every time I like drive across the Golden gate Bridge,
Speaker 1: I'm like, Wow, humans built this and it's still here
Speaker 1: like decades later. It's pretty impressive. Or every skyscraper, or
Speaker 1: frankly the COVID vaccine, I'm like, wow, we can do Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, humanity has done a lot of impressive stuff,
Speaker 1: but it's just the beginning, you know. The kinds of
Speaker 1: things that we might do, the challenges we might take on,
Speaker 1: the solutions we might engineer, really are almost limitless.
Speaker 2: We are only getting started, which is why we need
Speaker 2: to make sure that our species persists for a very
Speaker 2: long time. So today we're gonna be talking about how
Speaker 2: we can engineer the Sun to keep our species going
Speaker 2: for much longer.
Speaker 1: That's right, because one of Mars terraforming proponents is always
Speaker 1: saying that Earth is going to get fried in a
Speaker 1: few billion years anyway, when the Sun expands and goes
Speaker 1: red giant, and so not only do we need to
Speaker 1: have outposts on Mars, but we got to get interstellar.
Speaker 1: And so today we're gonna talking about exactly that scenario.
Speaker 1: Is it possible to engineer the Sun using a technique
Speaker 1: called starlifting to prolong our time in the habitable zone? So,
Speaker 1: as usual, I went out there to ask our audience
Speaker 1: if they knew something about starlifting. Here's what they had
Speaker 1: to say.
Speaker 3: What is starlifting is that when you go to the
Speaker 3: gym and you see someone famous and you pick them up. No,
Speaker 3: that can't be it. Maybe it's something to do when
Speaker 3: a star's about to go supernova and the core is
Speaker 3: starting to burn carbon and getting into iron. Maybe the
Speaker 3: layers start to lift off and that's starlifting. I have
Speaker 3: no idea.
Speaker 4: Well, that is that new show that is airing on
Speaker 4: NBC at seven o'clock on Thursday nights where big movie
Speaker 4: stars compete in weightlifting competition, and it's intense and I'm ready.
Speaker 4: I'm really looking forward to seeing it.
Speaker 3: I have not heard of starlifting, but a star lift
Speaker 3: sounds like it could be a fun. Right at the
Speaker 3: amusement park.
Speaker 2: Amazing answers as always, and if you want to contribute
Speaker 2: your amazing answers, write us at questions at Daniel and
Speaker 2: Kelly dot org and we'll add you to the list
Speaker 2: of folks who get these questions ahead of time. I
Speaker 2: love the when you go to the gym and see
Speaker 2: someone famous response. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I
Speaker 2: heard that Dwayne the Rock Johnson also lives in Charlottesville.
Speaker 2: And sometimes if you go to the gym, what you
Speaker 2: will see the Rock.
Speaker 1: How often has that happened to you, Kelly, Oh.
Speaker 2: Zero times, zero times. I don't think you go to
Speaker 2: the YMCA. It probably goes to a better gym than
Speaker 2: I go to. But you know, another good reason to
Speaker 2: work out. I guess why.
Speaker 1: Doesn't he live in La. I thought he would be
Speaker 1: in La Dude.
Speaker 2: I think that he's probably part time La, part time
Speaker 2: the better coast, you know, like you're in You're in
Speaker 2: California when you have to be, but in Virginia when
Speaker 2: you have a choice, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Virginia is for lovers of Virginia. So there you go.
Speaker 2: Oh oh, Virginia is for everyone.
Speaker 1: All right. So starlifting is an engineering technique to solve
Speaker 1: a very particular problem. So before we get into the solution,
Speaker 1: I thought it'd be helpful to introduce what is the
Speaker 1: problem we're solving.
Speaker 2: Anyway, that's right, and fortunately for me, I won't get
Speaker 2: too mired in existential dread because the timeline here is
Speaker 2: way off in the future. But let's go ahead. Tell
Speaker 2: us about the future of the sun. Why won't the
Speaker 2: sun last forever?
Speaker 1: The sun won't last forever because it's in frankly, a
Speaker 1: delicate balance. It's amazing to me that stars last as
Speaker 1: long as they do. I mean, there's this incredible balancing
Speaker 1: act between gravity, which is pulling the star together and
Speaker 1: trying to collapse it down, and fusion, which is creating
Speaker 1: heat and energy and pushing the star out. And these
Speaker 1: two forces, which are fundamentally very very different, right, Fusion
Speaker 1: uses the quantum mechanical strong nuclear force. Gravity, of course,
Speaker 1: uses the curvature of space. We don't even know how
Speaker 1: to unify these things. Conceptionally they're very different pillars of physics.
Speaker 1: But here they come together and they dance together nicely
Speaker 1: for billions and billions of years. Right in the heart
Speaker 1: of the star, you have incredible pressure and temperature, and
Speaker 1: so hydrogen gets squeezed together to form helium, which releases heat.
Speaker 1: When light elements fuse together, you release heat, and when
Speaker 1: heavy elements break apart, that's fission that also releases heat.
Speaker 1: So in the heart of a star, it's sort of
Speaker 1: like a constantly exploding nuclear bomb that's generating all of
Speaker 1: this energy to prevent the star from collapsing.
Speaker 2: I think that's where your beautiful dance metaphor kind of
Speaker 2: falls apart, and I don't usually think of beautiful dance involving
Speaker 2: explosions of nuclear type.
Speaker 1: Well, that's why it's so incredible imagine a constantly exploding
Speaker 1: nuclear bomb that you're keeping in a gravitational bubble, right,
Speaker 1: and if you compress it too much, it's going to
Speaker 1: go out, it's going to turn into a black hole.
Speaker 1: If you don't compress it enough, it's going to blow
Speaker 1: itself apart. And so it's really amazing. And the outcome
Speaker 1: for these stars depends almost entirely on how much mass
Speaker 1: you have, Like if you don't have a lot of mass,
Speaker 1: you end up with a red dwarf, a smaller star,
Speaker 1: and the heart of it is lower temperature and lower pressure,
Speaker 1: and so the rate of fusion is lower, and so
Speaker 1: these stars are dimmer and cooler, which is why they're
Speaker 1: called red dwarfs. Or a much bigger stars like a
Speaker 1: blue giant, and these are hotter at their core, and
Speaker 1: they fuse a lot faster, and the peak of their
Speaker 1: glow is at a higher frequency, which is why they're
Speaker 1: called blue giants. But those stars, the bigger, more massive stars,
Speaker 1: fusion happens much more rapidly, and so they burn through
Speaker 1: their fuel. So this is this really tight relationship between
Speaker 1: the mass of the star and how long it's to
Speaker 1: expected to live. Smaller stars are cooler, and they can
Speaker 1: burn for billions, maybe even trillions of years. Red dwarfs
Speaker 1: are very very long lasting, whereas bigger stars don't burn
Speaker 1: for very long because they burn so hot and so fast.
Speaker 1: Like if you look at a population of stars, you
Speaker 1: can tell how old the population is by how many
Speaker 1: big blue stars there are. It's got a bunch of
Speaker 1: big blue stars, you know, it's got to be pretty young,
Speaker 1: because they don't last very long. As galaxies aid, they
Speaker 1: turn redder and redder because all the blue stars burn out.
Speaker 2: And where is our Sun on the gradient from any
Speaker 2: bitty stars to big stars.
Speaker 1: Our star is not one of the biggest stars in
Speaker 1: the universe. The limit is around three hundred times the
Speaker 1: mass of the Sun. A star bigger than that will
Speaker 1: have fusion so terrifyingly powerful it'll tear itself apart and
Speaker 1: it'll become smaller. But our star is bigger than the
Speaker 1: average star. So the most common star is a red
Speaker 1: dwarf that's like the median star in the universe. Our
Speaker 1: star is bigger than that, so it's a bigger, hotter
Speaker 1: star than it's typical, and its lifetime is expected to
Speaker 1: be about ten billion years, and we're halfway through that.
Speaker 1: So we've got another five billion years.
Speaker 2: Oh man, what do you think of midlife crisis looks like?
Speaker 2: For a Sun?
Speaker 1: It's talking to all the other stars. It's wondering, like, hey,
Speaker 1: do I have the right number of planets? It should
Speaker 1: I have accomplished more by this point. Have I dealt
Speaker 1: with that nacking infection on my third planet? You know?
Speaker 1: I really should snuff that out? Oh gosh before it
Speaker 1: takes over.
Speaker 2: No, no, let us go, Let us go. We're gonna
Speaker 2: save you in the long run, baby, we'll see, or
Speaker 2: at least we're gonna tinker with you. Okay, So we're
Speaker 2: halfway through.
Speaker 1: We're halfway through, and the future, the second half of
Speaker 1: the Sun's life is going to be quite different from
Speaker 1: the first half. What's going to happen is that as
Speaker 1: fusion progresses, it forms helium, and that helium is heavier
Speaker 1: than hydrogen, so it sinks to the core. So instead
Speaker 1: of just being like basically a huge ball of hydrogen,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get a helium core. Like the ash from
Speaker 1: the fusion sinks and goes to the core. But our
Speaker 1: star is not hot enough to fuse that helium, like
Speaker 1: if it was hotter and denser. You could fuse helium together,
Speaker 1: three them together to get carbon, but we can't do that.
Speaker 1: Our star is just not hot enough, so the helium
Speaker 1: is sort of inert and it blocks fusion from happening.
Speaker 1: But before that, because it's denser, it increases the temperature
Speaker 1: at the core of the star, which makes the Sun hotter.
Speaker 1: So our sun is gradually getting hotter and hotter as
Speaker 1: its core gets denser and denser because of the helium
Speaker 1: that sinks there. Roughly every one hundred million years, the
Speaker 1: Sun gets one percent brighter.
Speaker 2: So I guess it. It's the same with this is
Speaker 2: gonna be one of the things that like ends are
Speaker 2: species that's not funny. Helium's supposed to be funny.
Speaker 1: I know, if it makes you sound like a chipmugget
Speaker 1: should be funny. But also chipmunks can be quite deadly,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, they could take over the whole planet.
Speaker 2: They carry the bubonic platey.
Speaker 1: You go, well do yeah in New Mexico actually home
Speaker 1: with the flea land of the plague, we call it
Speaker 1: all right, there's some New Mexico pride for you. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the sun is gradually getting brighter, and in a few
Speaker 1: billion years, the Sun will be forty percent brighter. This
Speaker 1: is why people say like the Sun is going to
Speaker 1: boil off the oceans, because in a couple of billion years,
Speaker 1: the global average temperature is going to rise to one
Speaker 1: hundred degrees sea, right where the oceans will boil. And
Speaker 1: so this is just a natural progression of the Sun.
Speaker 1: It's gonna get brighter and brighter and brighter. The Sun
Speaker 1: itself is not getting that much hotter, but it is
Speaker 1: getting brighter, and the outer layers are going to grow
Speaker 1: because as the core accumulates helium, then fusion moves further
Speaker 1: out right, you can't have fusion at the ash helium core,
Speaker 1: so you start getting fusion in the outer layers and
Speaker 1: that puffs up the Sun and that's what makes it
Speaker 1: become a red giant and does just puff it up
Speaker 1: a little bit. We're talking about the radius of the
Speaker 1: Sun growing from its current radius to two hundred times
Speaker 1: its current radius.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I'm starting to feel the existential dread bubble up.
Speaker 2: I didn't think this was going to happen. But we
Speaker 2: only have one to two billion years even though Earth
Speaker 2: is middle aged before our oceans boil. But I'm betting
Speaker 2: that we all die long before the oceans boil, because
Speaker 2: it takes a lot of hate to get the oceans
Speaker 2: to boil.
Speaker 1: You mean me and you? Are you talking about? Like
Speaker 1: me and you and all of.
Speaker 2: Our descendants, it would be our descendants at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So how long before Earth becomes uninhabitable?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question. That's just a few hundred
Speaker 1: million years, right, because the temperature on the surface of
Speaker 1: one hundred sea is intolerable obvious there, Right, It's a
Speaker 1: pretty good approximation that every hundred million years you get
Speaker 1: one percent brighter. It's roughly linear, and so yeah, it's
Speaker 1: going to be a few hundred million years. It's going
Speaker 1: to be much hotter than it is now. Definitely, we're
Speaker 1: talking climate change for sure. So this is something we're
Speaker 1: going to have to adapt to well before the oceans
Speaker 1: boil or the outer layers of the Sun consume the Earth.
Speaker 2: All right, we've got time to figure this out. But
Speaker 2: I'm still not loving it. Not cool sun.
Speaker 1: And so the crucial things to understand there for our
Speaker 1: later conversation is what's driving the Sun to get hotter
Speaker 1: and to get bigger, and that's the mass of the Sun. Right,
Speaker 1: If the sun were smaller, then it wouldn't do this
Speaker 1: as quickly. It would burn a lot lot longer, right,
Speaker 1: because the core would be cooler, and it wouldn't fuse
Speaker 1: as fast, and it wouldn't accumulate as much helium, and
Speaker 1: it wouldn't push the layers out, and it wouldn't get
Speaker 1: hotter and brighter. And so that's the thing that's driving
Speaker 1: the Sun to basically vanish our habitable zone.
Speaker 2: All right. So mostly I care about what happens to me,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to die before the Earth. Well, my
Speaker 2: ancestors will die before the Earth gets consumed by the Sun.
Speaker 2: But let's say I still care about the Earth even
Speaker 2: when there's no humans there anymore. Is it going to
Speaker 2: actually get engulfed by the Sun like swallowed up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something you hear in pops eye all
Speaker 1: the time, and it's not clear because there's a lot
Speaker 1: of small effects here that could change the answer. So,
Speaker 1: for example, as the Sun in its last little bit
Speaker 1: is blowing out and its redias is really growing rapidly,
Speaker 1: it's also losing some mass because it's puffing out so much,
Speaker 1: it doesn't contain all that A lot of this plasma
Speaker 1: just shoots off into space, and because it loses mass,
Speaker 1: it loses gravity, and so the Sun's pull on the
Speaker 1: Earth gets weaker. So the Earth's orbit is going to
Speaker 1: drift further out, and so rather than just staying at
Speaker 1: the same place, it's going to drift out as the
Speaker 1: Sun grows and loses some of its mass. And so
Speaker 1: people have done modeling to answer the question, are we
Speaker 1: going to escape the outer layers of the Sun. It's
Speaker 1: sort of a silly question because like it doesn't really
Speaker 1: matter if you're in the Sun or right next to
Speaker 1: the Sun, like neither way can you survive. But you know,
Speaker 1: just from a sort of like academic question, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: You don't want to be even like a little bit engulfed.
Speaker 1: But it looks like the Earth might just sort of
Speaker 1: like skip over the outer atmosphere of the Sun, the
Speaker 1: radius of its orbit growing with the radius of the Sun.
Speaker 2: Could we keep ourselves in good shape by just sort
Speaker 2: of like nudging Earth farther away and closer to state
Speaker 2: exactly the right temperature throughout this whole process.
Speaker 1: You could try to do that to move further out,
Speaker 1: And you know, you want to stay far enough away
Speaker 1: from the Sun for sure, not just because it's going
Speaker 1: to be hot, but because if you are anywhere near
Speaker 1: the atmosphere of the Sun, then you're going to be
Speaker 1: losing kinetic energy because you're flying through the atmosphere, there's
Speaker 1: gonna be friction. You're gonna fall into the Sun. Bad bad.
Speaker 1: But anyway, if you've wanted to engineer just the Earth,
Speaker 1: the simpler thing is to move the Earth's orbit. There
Speaker 1: are things you could do to like build a huge
Speaker 1: planet rocket to move the Earth out this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: but it's a bit of a crap shot because the
Speaker 1: whole Solar system is going to be very chaotic. Like
Speaker 1: when you lose mass of the Sun, you're also weakening
Speaker 1: the Sun's grip on Jupiter. Jubiter is going to drift
Speaker 1: further out, it's going to interact with Saturn. That's going
Speaker 1: to be a chaotic mess. And the chances that we
Speaker 1: can like predict that and navigate through Jupiter and Saturn
Speaker 1: like having a big argument and cluttering up the whole
Speaker 1: Solar system very unlikely. We think that that happened in
Speaker 1: the past, that Jupiter and Saturn went into the inner
Speaker 1: Solar System and then back out again and maybe ejected
Speaker 1: another gas giant from the Solar System, So there could
Speaker 1: be like a lost sibling planet out there and frozen
Speaker 1: in space, feeling rejected, having been literally rejected. And so
Speaker 1: the Solar System is going to get very chaotic if
Speaker 1: we let the Sun do this. And I think it'd
Speaker 1: be pretty hard not just to move the planet, but
Speaker 1: to figure out how to move it and how to
Speaker 1: protect it against Jupiter's craziness.
Speaker 2: I wish I had felt more optimistic during our episodes
Speaker 2: on interstellar Travel. I think I'd like to just skip
Speaker 2: all of this, just leave town. What all of this
Speaker 2: problem starts? All right, So let's take a break, and
Speaker 2: when we get back, let's talk about how we can
Speaker 2: engineer the Sun so we can avoid this situation altogether.
Speaker 2: All Right, we're back. Daniel has scared the pants off
Speaker 2: of all of us. We're going to burn up where
Speaker 2: we're going to fall into the Sun, but we're probably
Speaker 2: not going to actually fall into the Sun. We're just
Speaker 2: going to be in its hot atmosphere layers. Anyway, we're dead.
Speaker 2: So Daniel, how do we avoid this whole we die
Speaker 2: in billions of years.
Speaker 1: Thing we turn to the engineers and we ask them, hey,
Speaker 1: can you solve this problem. We think we understand enough
Speaker 1: of the physics of the Sun to figure out when
Speaker 1: it's going to grow and get hotter, and so in
Speaker 1: principle we should be able to engineer a solution. And
Speaker 1: there was a paper in the eighties by a guy
Speaker 1: named David Criswell coined this phrase star lifting to imagine
Speaker 1: that maybe we could prevent the Sun from getting so
Speaker 1: big and so hot by making it more like longer
Speaker 1: lasting stars, by making it smaller. That's why it's called
Speaker 1: star lifting. It's like take stuff off of the Sun. Essentially,
Speaker 1: could we go in and take a big scoop off
Speaker 1: of the Sun. And this is a little bit delicate
Speaker 1: because you don't want to turn the Sun like into
Speaker 1: a red dwarf. A red dwarf is cooler, and then
Speaker 1: the Earth wouldn't be in the habitable zone anymore. I
Speaker 1: want to do is scoop off just enough to keep
Speaker 1: the Sun from getting too big and too hot, so
Speaker 1: it sort of like maintains the same temperature throughout its
Speaker 1: lifetime and lasts a lot longer. Removing some mass would
Speaker 1: lower the pressure at the center as the helium accumulates,
Speaker 1: and so that's the sort of basic idea. It was
Speaker 1: revived in twenty seventeen in a paper by Greg Mattloff,
Speaker 1: and then a couple of years ago a really interesting
Speaker 1: paper by Matt Scoggins and David Kipping dug into the
Speaker 1: details of exactly how you would do this, And so
Speaker 1: I thought it'd be fun to talk about this engineering
Speaker 1: task and whether it's possible at all.
Speaker 2: First of all, this is fascinating. I will note that
Speaker 2: when you started introducing the topic, you said a lot
Speaker 2: of we think and presumably, and I feel like before
Speaker 2: we start tinkering with the sun, we should be like
Speaker 2: we are sure about And it is absolutely the case
Speaker 2: that but presumably these papers had all the right qualifiers
Speaker 2: in them, and this is just getting the conversation started.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is definitely let's have a first conversation about
Speaker 1: whether this is possible all and not let's have a
Speaker 1: policy discussion about whether we understand the risks and decide
Speaker 1: whether the balance of risk and reward is a good one,
Speaker 1: which we definitely should have before we do anything like this,
Speaker 1: the same way that we should before we do any geoengineering.
Speaker 1: But it's still reasonable to say, hey, what is possible?
Speaker 1: And these papers are just like the very first steps
Speaker 1: towards what is possible. As you'll hear, like, the solutions
Speaker 1: are so outrageously expensive and elaborate that they aren't anything
Speaker 1: we could hope to imagine doing in the next few centuries.
Speaker 1: But you know, scientists and engineers a few centuries from
Speaker 1: that will be glad that we thought through some of
Speaker 1: the details here to make their work easier. But you're right,
Speaker 1: the policy question is separate.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, I don't know. That sounds like whimp talk
Speaker 2: to me. Let's just.
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, I'm not advocating for any of these things, right,
Speaker 1: I just I think it's fun to think so big
Speaker 1: and to imagine what's possible. And you know, the same way,
Speaker 1: I'm like awestruck by what humans have built. I'm obstruck
Speaker 1: to imagine what we might build. But of course, yes,
Speaker 1: we do have to do it carefully. Just because you
Speaker 1: want to drill a hole through the scent of the
Speaker 1: earth to drop a ball through and see what happens
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that you should.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I really like your approach to engineering.
Speaker 2: Think it through first, all right, So let's talk about
Speaker 2: the first proposal for how you would do this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, there's a few ideas. One is called the
Speaker 1: thermal driven method, and the idea is to tap into
Speaker 1: something that's already happening, which is the solar wind. The
Speaker 1: Sun is already shedding mass. It's a huge ball of
Speaker 1: plasma in space and it's mostly confined by gravity, but
Speaker 1: the atmosphere is one of the hottest parts of the Sun,
Speaker 1: and so it's constantly shooting off particles. You know, yes,
Speaker 1: photons obviously, and we're absorbing those and we enjoy those
Speaker 1: on a sunny day, but also protons and electrons. That's
Speaker 1: what we call the solar wind. And if you're out
Speaker 1: there in space as an astronaut, this is the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you have to be wary of because for you,
Speaker 1: it's radiation, very high speed particles shooting out from the
Speaker 1: Sun of space. So don't imagine space as empty. One
Speaker 1: of our episodes about interstellar travel talks about the dangers
Speaker 1: of radiation in space and it's serious, and this is
Speaker 1: where it comes from. It comes from the Sun, and
Speaker 1: then of course other suns and black holes and all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff out there in space generate wind. And
Speaker 1: by wind, we don't mean air molecules, we mean high
Speaker 1: speed particles. So one idea is, can we enhance that,
Speaker 1: Can we get the Sun to shed more of its
Speaker 1: mass to crank up the solar wind?
Speaker 2: Okay, wow, So the fact that we're proposing that we're
Speaker 2: going to heat up the Sun sounds incredible to me.
Speaker 2: How can we make a dent in the hottest thing
Speaker 2: that we know about? But go ahead, let's see how
Speaker 2: what are proposals for making the Sun even hotter?
Speaker 1: And it doesn't sound like the kind of thing you'd
Speaker 1: want to do, right. The whole problem we're trying to
Speaker 1: solve is that the Sun is going to get too hot.
Speaker 1: So something comes along and says, the solution making it
Speaker 1: too hot is to make it hotter. A a second
Speaker 1: am I in a solar engineering conference or an insane
Speaker 1: asylum or both.
Speaker 2: Could be some overlap in those communities.
Speaker 1: Exactly choose your venue carefully. The idea is not to
Speaker 1: heat the core of the Sun, but to heat the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: This is where the solar wind happens. Right, It's the
Speaker 1: outer layers of the Sun that are super crazy hot,
Speaker 1: super high energy particle that rech escape velocity from the Sun.
Speaker 1: So instead of heating up the core, you want to
Speaker 1: heat up the atmosphere, which will help strip the Sun
Speaker 1: of some of these particles. So all you got to
Speaker 1: do in this case is basically reflect the Sun back
Speaker 1: at itself. So imagine building a bunch of mirrors which
Speaker 1: just reflect the Sun's light back to the Sun. Now,
Speaker 1: it will heat up the Sun's atmosphere. You know. It's
Speaker 1: sort of like putting a fire in an insulated box
Speaker 1: will help make the fire hotter, whereas if you don't,
Speaker 1: then the heat from the fire bleeds out into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And so if you have these mirrors, or you like
Speaker 1: have solar panels which gather the energy and then beam
Speaker 1: it back, you could heat up spots on the Sun's atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, And I think I'm just being too picky,
Speaker 2: because if you put a fire in an insulated box,
Speaker 2: it's going to run out of oxygen and burn out, right, No,
Speaker 2: you're right, yeah, but we understand what's happening with the
Speaker 2: sun better. We're not going to snuff out the sun accidentally.
Speaker 1: I'm not impressing you with my level of detail here, Daniel.
Speaker 1: Please don't put.
Speaker 2: Out the Come on, engineers, do better.
Speaker 1: You don't want to wake up one morning, get an
Speaker 1: email from Daniel bad news, I accidentally put out the
Speaker 1: sun last night.
Speaker 2: Well, as we discussed in a prior email, that would
Speaker 2: be a high information email.
Speaker 1: Yes, that would be surprising, that would be surprising. It
Speaker 1: would be a good lesson in Shannon entropy. So at
Speaker 1: least you gained something, right.
Speaker 2: That's right. I'm sure everybody would be through.
Speaker 1: No, you're right that analogy is not perfect for that reason.
Speaker 1: But in this case, you're either just having huge mirrors
Speaker 1: to reflect energy back from the Sun to heat up
Speaker 1: spots on its atmosphere, or you have some more complicated
Speaker 1: system where you're absorbing the energy using like footo wal
Speaker 1: take cells, and then you're beaming the energy back using
Speaker 1: like microwaves. Do you remember we once had a conversation
Speaker 1: about solar power in space. This is basically that same system.
Speaker 1: You have solar power. You generate energy and then you
Speaker 1: build a beam. Instead of beaming it to the Earth's
Speaker 1: surface where you're going to use it to charge your phone,
Speaker 1: you're just beaming it to the surface of the Sun
Speaker 1: to heat it up to make these hot spots.
Speaker 2: Okay, and this is going to buy us more time.
Speaker 1: This is going to buy us more time, because it's
Speaker 1: going to create more solar flares, like solar flares, or
Speaker 1: we call solar weather right our moments when the Sun
Speaker 1: has like a huge eruption of plasma which then floats
Speaker 1: out into space and sometimes it washes over the Earth
Speaker 1: and causes incredible damage. There was this Carrington event in
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds where huge solar flare flashed out and
Speaker 1: the Earth basically went through a plasma plume and it
Speaker 1: like fried all the electronics on the Earth, which at
Speaker 1: the time, fortunately were pretty simple. So we have some
Speaker 1: fires from like telegraph wires going haywire. But if it
Speaker 1: happened now, it would be very, very bad. But what
Speaker 1: we're talking about now is creating hotspots on the surface
Speaker 1: of the Sun which would generate solar flare, so like
Speaker 1: huge strands of plasma floating out into space, and obviously
Speaker 1: you don't want that happening in the direction of the Earth. Right,
Speaker 1: you might be thinking, Daniel again, Now you're creating like
Speaker 1: bad things, right, bad solar weather. It's bad for satellites,
Speaker 1: it's bad for the Earth, it's bad for all these things.
Speaker 1: Why would you risk this? So the idea is, yes,
Speaker 1: you create these hotspots, and those hotspots create solar flares
Speaker 1: and you get this plasma ejected. But then you try
Speaker 1: to guide it. So plasma is electrically charged, right, it's
Speaker 1: positive and negative. There are protons and there are electrons there.
Speaker 1: So you build a huge magnetic field around the Sun
Speaker 1: to guide all this stuff so it doesn't go along
Speaker 1: the ecliptic where the planets are like the Sun's equator,
Speaker 1: but it goes up to the poles.
Speaker 2: Okay, And so then are we going to be in
Speaker 2: any trouble if we're not getting that stuff, Like will
Speaker 2: we cool down or will we just not get hit
Speaker 2: with radiation?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that stuff would be bad, and so it will
Speaker 1: cool the Sun a little bit. But that's the goal, right,
Speaker 1: We want to keep the Sun from getting too hot.
Speaker 1: So if we pull this stuff out of the Sun
Speaker 1: by creating these hotspots, having it spew it, and then
Speaker 1: shepherd it up to the North and South poles, we're
Speaker 1: safe because we're not being blasted by these huge plasma strands,
Speaker 1: and we're slowly reducing the mass of the Sun, which
Speaker 1: is the whole goal, right. The goal is to take
Speaker 1: mass off of the Sun.
Speaker 2: All right, So it seems pretty important that you get
Speaker 2: all of this stuff heading in the right direction, because
Speaker 2: you don't want to accidentally spew a lot more radiation
Speaker 2: towards the Earth or a more settlement if we ever
Speaker 2: get one. How do we control where this stuff goes?
Speaker 1: So this is my favorite part because it involves building
Speaker 1: a particle accelerator that goes all the way around the Sun.
Speaker 1: So essentially you need to build a magnetic field that
Speaker 1: pushes stuff towards the Sun. And so to build a
Speaker 1: magnetic field, as we talked about in a recent episode,
Speaker 1: you need currents, you need moving electric charges, and so
Speaker 1: good to do this is to build a particle accelerator
Speaker 1: which shoots particles around the equator of the Sun. Or
Speaker 1: you have a few of these things stacked on top
Speaker 1: of each other, which basically shepherds this stuff up to
Speaker 1: the polls. And at the same time you can answer
Speaker 1: a bunch of really important fundamental physics questions because now
Speaker 1: you have a particle accelerator with an enormous radius and
Speaker 1: super high energy. And boy, wouldn't that be awesome.
Speaker 2: For other reasons, I wouldn't want to have to write
Speaker 2: that grant because I bet the money for the LHC
Speaker 2: was a tough sell. I mean, it's awesome, but I'm
Speaker 2: sure it was expensive. I can't imagine the price of this.
Speaker 1: I'm not even gonna try to put dollars on this.
Speaker 1: I mean, the price of the next collider on Earth
Speaker 1: is going to be something like fifty to one hundred
Speaker 1: billion dollars.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: They're also crazy out there proposals for a collider that
Speaker 1: runs along the equator of the Moon, which would be
Speaker 1: awesome for some reasons and not so awesome for other reasons,
Speaker 1: but fun to think about, and also absurdly expensive. So yeah,
Speaker 1: collider that runs along the equator of the Sun. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't even know what the scientific prefix is for
Speaker 1: those dollars. It's beyond trillions and quadrillions and quintillions, I'm sure.
Speaker 1: But you know, we're talking about the future of humanity here.
Speaker 1: Finally particle physics will be useful.
Speaker 2: Oh oh, well, we talked the other day about how
Speaker 2: particle physics gave us a new treatment for cancer, so
Speaker 2: it will be useful for a second time. Only those
Speaker 2: two though, So this.
Speaker 1: Is one scheme to try to slurp some stuff off
Speaker 1: the Sun, and then at the North and South poles
Speaker 1: you have these like magnetic nozzles which focus the stuff
Speaker 1: and gather it and then you could actually like use
Speaker 1: it for something. This is raw material or if your
Speaker 1: goal is to like build megastructures, a dice in sphere
Speaker 1: or other crazy engineering projects in your solar system, elimiting
Speaker 1: factors having enough stuff. Like you might say, I want
Speaker 1: to take Jupiter apart and use it to build a
Speaker 1: Dyson sphere, it might not be enough. And so just
Speaker 1: having raw material is important. And the Sun is the
Speaker 1: biggest source of raw material in the Solar system. I mean,
Speaker 1: the Solar system is basically the Sun plus right, and
Speaker 1: we're like those little extra bits. So gathering that stuff
Speaker 1: off the Sun gives you an enormous amount of mass
Speaker 1: to play with to build other stuff.
Speaker 2: But it's in the form of gas when you right.
Speaker 1: It's in the form of plasma mostly, And you might
Speaker 1: think it's mostly hydrogen. Who really cares, well, hydrogen's good
Speaker 1: for building stuff, and the Sun has lots of other
Speaker 1: stuff in it that's not just hydrogen. Like it's mostly hydrogen,
Speaker 1: it's two percent metals or something, but it still has
Speaker 1: Most of the iron in the Solar system is in
Speaker 1: the Sun. Most of the oxygen, most of the nickel,
Speaker 1: most of the basic building blocks of silicon are in
Speaker 1: the Sun. Like the Sun has twenty times as much
Speaker 1: of all those basic elements as Jupiter does, and it's
Speaker 1: distributed all through the Sun because of convection, you know,
Speaker 1: the plasma currents, and so if you are funneling mass
Speaker 1: off of the Sun, then yeah, you could slurp off
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of pretty useful basic ingredients for your
Speaker 1: other insanely expensive engineering projects.
Speaker 2: Yay, it's crazy all the way down.
Speaker 1: Crazy enables crazy.
Speaker 2: Thank goodness. So iron is getting ejected in the solar flares,
Speaker 2: in the solar wind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's mostly hydrogen, but it's a
Speaker 1: good mixture. I mean, iron is not being made in
Speaker 1: our sun, right, so it's not like it's only at
Speaker 1: the core. And if there is iron there from previous
Speaker 1: rounds of stellar nucleosynthesis, and a lot of it does
Speaker 1: sink to the core because it's heavier. But also the
Speaker 1: Sun is a big churning ball of plasma, and this
Speaker 1: convection that brings stuff up right also the way that
Speaker 1: you know, like diamonds are made inside the Earth, but
Speaker 1: then convection brings stuff up to the mantle and to
Speaker 1: the surface. So yeah, we could definitely get iron out
Speaker 1: of the sun. I mean definitely. You can't say definitely
Speaker 1: about anything about this project. It's ridiculous upon ridiculous upon ridiculous.
Speaker 1: In theory, one could get iron out of the sun
Speaker 1: to build your other absurd projects.
Speaker 2: All right, So we're gonna talk about at least one
Speaker 2: other proposal. Is this proposal that you just explained to
Speaker 2: us more or less crazy than the next one we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, that's a tough question. I think it's differently crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, none of these are very realistic and all
Speaker 1: require all sorts of engineering problems that we don't know
Speaker 1: how to solve. But they are also fun to think
Speaker 1: about because you know, they just make you think big.
Speaker 2: That's right, And when we get back, we will think
Speaker 2: big in a different way. All right, we're back and
Speaker 2: we're thinking big about engineering projects. We are engineering the
Speaker 2: sun today. On Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, we talked
Speaker 2: about one kind of Nutsoe method. What method are we
Speaker 2: going to talk about next? Daniel?
Speaker 1: So the next method is called the huff and puff method.
Speaker 1: So that everybody takes it very very seriously, no doubt,
Speaker 1: and they do hear similar to what we talked about
Speaker 1: a minute ago. But earlier we were heating of specific
Speaker 1: spots on the Sun to get it to eject mass.
Speaker 1: We're going to basically try to pump the whole sun
Speaker 1: like bellows. And so you still build your particle accelerator
Speaker 1: around the equator. I mean you gotta have that, right,
Speaker 1: that's non negotiable.
Speaker 2: What is science without a particle accelerator? That's have you
Speaker 2: heard of this? This this concept called the Overton window,
Speaker 2: where like someone does something super extreme. Yeah, to make
Speaker 2: what you're proposing seem less crazy, you're probably having some
Speaker 2: people pitch these ideas to the funder so that when
Speaker 2: you just have something that's like one hundred trillion dollars
Speaker 2: or something, they'll be like, oh, the particle physicists are
Speaker 2: being less crazy today.
Speaker 1: You have revealed my secret scheme here, Kelly, I am
Speaker 1: shifting the Overton window.
Speaker 2: Well, I study animal behavior.
Speaker 1: This is a This is basically the Combin and Hobbs method,
Speaker 1: you know, where he asks his mom if you can
Speaker 1: have a flamethrower. She says no, and he says, can
Speaker 1: have a cookie. She's like sure, yeah, that's right, that's right,
Speaker 1: all right. So here you build a particle accelerator around
Speaker 1: the core, and you know, this thing is kept in
Speaker 1: place by the magnetic field that it generates, which floats
Speaker 1: over the Sun. But in this case, you can turn
Speaker 1: it on and off. So you turn it off, and
Speaker 1: all the components of the particle accelerator, which you're not connected,
Speaker 1: it's a big ring. It's just components which shoot particles
Speaker 1: between them. All these components then fall towards the Sun
Speaker 1: because of its gravity. Then you turn it back on
Speaker 1: and it rises back up again and pushes against the star.
Speaker 1: And so essentially this is like massaging the star. You
Speaker 1: like drop a magnetic ring around the star and then
Speaker 1: turn it back on and it pushes itself back out,
Speaker 1: squeezing the star. So you do this over and over again,
Speaker 1: and it like pumps the star's atmosphere, moving mass up
Speaker 1: to the pole. So it's sort of like squeezing it,
Speaker 1: like massaging it, kind of like bellows on the sun.
Speaker 2: And for anyone who didn't grow up in the Victorian
Speaker 2: era using bellows on their fireplace, what would you like
Speaker 2: to explain what a bellow is?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah, it's basically like a big fan, right, you
Speaker 1: squeeze it and it shoots a stream of air towards
Speaker 1: a useful spot on your fire to help blow. It's
Speaker 1: sort of like leaning over the campfire and going you know,
Speaker 1: but mechanically, how is that for an explanation of bellows?
Speaker 2: I think people are following us. You're good. I wish
Speaker 2: people could could watch the video because you are particularly
Speaker 2: animated in this episode, like you've hit your microphone at
Speaker 2: least once as you gesticulate in enjoy at this engineering idea.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, sometimes we dig deep into like real
Speaker 1: physics and what we're learning about the universe, and sometimes
Speaker 1: we just have fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well I think we always just have fun. But
Speaker 2: we're having a lot of fun today. Okay, So the
Speaker 2: idea is that you squeeze, and when you squeeze, how
Speaker 2: do you control when you squeeze where the stuff goes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so if you're squeezing at the equator, there's only
Speaker 1: one way it can go towards the poles. So then
Speaker 1: you've got to build another acceleratory of like a stack
Speaker 1: of these things. That's sort of like massage the mass
Speaker 1: as it goes up. So you squeeze the equator and
Speaker 1: then you squeeze just above it, and you squeeze just
Speaker 1: above it. You know, like a coordinated action here to
Speaker 1: sort of push the Sun's atmosphere towards the poles. I mean,
Speaker 1: the whole thing sounds like, boy, how would you know
Speaker 1: that that works before you build it and try it?
Speaker 1: And what if it goes wrong? You know, that's the
Speaker 1: joy of like being the first person to think about
Speaker 1: something is you just get to think about the big
Speaker 1: picture and don't worry about details like is this going
Speaker 1: to destroy everything in this solar system?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, that's a pretty important detail. But so how
Speaker 2: do you know you're not just moving around stuff the
Speaker 2: sun was going to make anyway, and you're actually increasing
Speaker 2: the amount of stuff that gets ejected or heating up
Speaker 2: the sun or whatever. How do you know you're accomplishing
Speaker 2: your goal instead of just moving stuff around?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Great question. And you know they've done some simple
Speaker 1: modeling and it really does suggest that either of these
Speaker 1: methods could eject more mass than you normally would, that
Speaker 1: a sun left to its own devices would burn hotter
Speaker 1: and more briefly than a sun that's engineered in this way.
Speaker 1: And they did some calculations also to wonder like, well,
Speaker 1: how much could you do, Like are we talking about
Speaker 1: ejecting ten protons or really a significant amount of stuff?
Speaker 1: And according to these calculations, you can reject about an
Speaker 1: earth's worth of mass every hundred years. So that's not
Speaker 1: a tiny amount of stuff, like the Earth is a
Speaker 1: tiny fraction of the Sun. But you know, a century
Speaker 1: is a long time, and we're talking about timelines of
Speaker 1: millions or tens of millions of years. So that's a
Speaker 1: significant amount of stuff. And if you just did it
Speaker 1: naively and extrapolated linearly, it could take apart the Sun
Speaker 1: in you know, fifty to one hundred million years, like
Speaker 1: the whole mass of the Sun eventually could be extracted.
Speaker 1: Of course, once you get to like ten percent of
Speaker 1: the mass of the Sun being ejected, the whole system
Speaker 1: is going to change and everything is going to be cooler,
Speaker 1: and so you can't extrapolate linearly. But just to give
Speaker 1: you a sense of scale of how effective this is,
Speaker 1: it's not a tiny amount of mass that you're rejecting
Speaker 1: relative to the mass of the Sun.
Speaker 2: All right, So this is the amount of time it
Speaker 2: would take to take the Sun apart. But I didn't
Speaker 2: know that that was our goal. I thought our goal
Speaker 2: was slowing down the destruction of the Earth. So how
Speaker 2: much time this by humans?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we do not want to take apart the Sun,
Speaker 1: absolutely not. What we want to do is gradually cool
Speaker 1: the Sun so that it stays at the same temperature,
Speaker 1: because remember, its natural progression is going to be to
Speaker 1: get hotter and hotter as the core gets denser, and
Speaker 1: then fusion moves to the outer layers. So that's where
Speaker 1: this paper from twenty twenty came in by Mas Goggins
Speaker 1: and David Kipping. They calculated how much mass would you
Speaker 1: have to remove from the Sun every year in order
Speaker 1: to maintain that temperature to essentially move the Sun from
Speaker 1: its natural arc at this mass down gradually to the
Speaker 1: arc you would expect for lower mass stars. You can
Speaker 1: imagine like the temperature progressions for individual stars which started
Speaker 1: a certain mass and red dwarfs last a long time
Speaker 1: and stay at a lower temperature. Essentially you want to
Speaker 1: step down from one progression to another. So they did
Speaker 1: this cool calculation which suggested that what you want to
Speaker 1: do is remove about two to three percent of the
Speaker 1: mass of series series is a dwarf planet in our
Speaker 1: solar system. It's the largest thing in the asteroid belt.
Speaker 1: It's like a big chunk of stuff. It's much smaller
Speaker 1: than the Earth. So like two to three percent of
Speaker 1: the massive series every century would accomplish this, So you
Speaker 1: don't have to take the Sun apart. You don't want
Speaker 1: to take the Sun apart. The point of this calculation is,
Speaker 1: in principle, this technique has the capacity to remove plenty
Speaker 1: of mass, much more than we would need if we
Speaker 1: wanted to engineer the star for our safety, and to
Speaker 1: engineer the Star for our safety, we only need to
Speaker 1: skim off a little bit of mass every hundred years
Speaker 1: or so to avoid the Sun going red giant and
Speaker 1: frying us.
Speaker 2: So this paper wasn't necessarily advocating for either of the
Speaker 2: two methods we talked about. It's just saying, whatever method
Speaker 2: you use, you got to get two and a half
Speaker 2: percent the massive series every one hundred years off the Sun.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Okay, yeah exactly, And if you do that successfully,
Speaker 1: and there's lots of problems to solve between here and there,
Speaker 1: but in principle, you can have our Sun last a
Speaker 1: lot longer. So instead of having a ten billion in
Speaker 1: your life cycle. It could have a twenty billion year
Speaker 1: life cycle. Oh wow, so you're adding ten billion years
Speaker 1: to civilization, giving us a lot more time to find
Speaker 1: an alternative home for the Earth.
Speaker 2: Wow. Can we can we adjust this method so that
Speaker 2: we can get humans to live twice as long? This
Speaker 2: is pretty exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I need to build a big particle accelerator to
Speaker 1: remove mass from Daniel. That's what I need to do.
Speaker 2: Always asking for money, Daniel, always asking for money.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's interesting to think about the alternatives, like
Speaker 1: if we lived around a red dwarf, then already the
Speaker 1: star would be lasting a long long time, you know,
Speaker 1: much longer than us. Hundreds of billions of years, maybe trillions.
Speaker 1: It's not really certain because the universe isn't old enough
Speaker 1: to have like a red dwarf cool and become a
Speaker 1: black dwarf. We've never seen that happen. But you can
Speaker 1: imagine having an even longer lived star. If you started,
Speaker 1: for example, from like an orange dwarf, which is something
Speaker 1: that has the mass of half of the Sun, then
Speaker 1: there's enough mass there to play with because it can
Speaker 1: be hot enough to create a nice environment and have
Speaker 1: enough mass to lose so it'll keep burning. Like if
Speaker 1: you try to starlift a red dwarf, there's not really
Speaker 1: a whole lot of extra masks there. It'll just like
Speaker 1: go out. It's just above the threshold for fusion. But
Speaker 1: if you start with like a nice toasty orange dwarf
Speaker 1: and then star lift it, the calculations in this paper
Speaker 1: suggest it might go for like a trillion years.
Speaker 2: So we're already making plans for what happens when we
Speaker 2: go to different like solar systems and start tickering with
Speaker 2: their stars. We are a very self confidence species.
Speaker 1: Yeah this really is Project Icarus, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. Okay, so we've talked about how
Speaker 2: you're going to be like channeling all of this stuff
Speaker 2: to the poles. But does making it go to the
Speaker 2: poles instead of shooting directly at us solve all of
Speaker 2: the problems we might experience from all of this extra
Speaker 2: like sun mask getting shot out into space.
Speaker 1: Not necessarily, because number one, we can't guarantee that all
Speaker 1: of it's going to go to the poles, right and
Speaker 1: on the whole. What you're going to do is increase
Speaker 1: the solar wind everywhere, right, Like if you have hot
Speaker 1: spots on the surface of the Sun. You can channel
Speaker 1: a lot of it up, but magnetic fields are not perfect,
Speaker 1: and some of it's going to escape, and so you're
Speaker 1: risking more radiation in space for our burgeoning solar system industry. Right,
Speaker 1: this whole context assumes we have like a lot of
Speaker 1: space based economy and people moving through space, and so
Speaker 1: increased stellar wind for that is going to be bad.
Speaker 1: And unless, of course, we develop some awesome radiation shielding technology,
Speaker 1: which maybe we could. Maybe that's a small problem compared
Speaker 1: to like lifting mass off of the Sun, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's not easy. And remember, we don't really understand the Sun.
Speaker 1: Like there's a lot we do know about the Sun,
Speaker 1: but also a lot we don't. We don't even understand
Speaker 1: why it's magnetic field flips every eleven years. So there
Speaker 1: can be a lot of surprises here, a lot of
Speaker 1: things that don't go the way that we expect. And
Speaker 1: when things don't go the way we expect on the
Speaker 1: scale of a star, then it can be very bad.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, high cost to human hubris in this case, I.
Speaker 1: Think, and even getting it a little bit wrong could
Speaker 1: increase bad solar weather in the Solar system. We could
Speaker 1: basically make it impossible to move around the Solar system.
Speaker 1: We just like get the star grumpy and it like
Speaker 1: takes a billion years to calm down, you know, like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, that's you know, maybe unrecoverable.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I def first of all, I absolutely want
Speaker 2: to read the sci fi novel written about this idea.
Speaker 2: But second, so it really seems to me that if
Speaker 2: you're going to take this task on, like first you
Speaker 2: send out the interstellar ships and then then you start
Speaker 2: tickering like we might kill everyone. So let's make sure
Speaker 2: that we send some human seed out into the universe.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, make a backup copy before you start playing
Speaker 1: with things at work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yes, it's a good spaceic tenet of computer programming,
Speaker 2: I'm guessing exactly.
Speaker 1: And you know, the energy required to do this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff is vast, not just to build the particle
Speaker 1: accelerator or these solar powered stations and beam energy back
Speaker 1: of the Sun, but you know, just like the energy
Speaker 1: involved in lifting material out of the Sun's gravitational well
Speaker 1: is huge because the gravity of the Sun is huge,
Speaker 1: and the Earth is already almost too massive to launch
Speaker 1: off of using chemical rockets, And so we're talking about
Speaker 1: incredible scales of energy here. The good news is the
Speaker 1: Sun has incredible scales of energy. So yes, you need
Speaker 1: enormous amounts of energy to beam back to the Sun
Speaker 1: to heat it up and to run this particle accelerator.
Speaker 1: But we're talking about the Sun, so it outputs a
Speaker 1: lot of energy you can just grab. But you know,
Speaker 1: we're playing with enormous quantities here, and so again, like
Speaker 1: mistakes and miscalculations, the consequences of getting things wrong are
Speaker 1: just much bigger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's probably not enough material on Earth to build
Speaker 2: these things that you're talking about. Would we have to
Speaker 2: collect the material for these devices from other planets or
Speaker 2: from the asteroid belt or is there enough stuff on Earth?
Speaker 2: Am I totally wrong about this?
Speaker 1: You definitely need a lot of material to solve this
Speaker 1: problem because you're, for example, and gathering all this energy
Speaker 1: to shoot the back of the Sun. Then you're building
Speaker 1: huge solar power collectors, not as massive as a dice
Speaker 1: in sphere or even like a sphere people would want
Speaker 1: to live on, but still it's a huge engineering project.
Speaker 1: I don't think you'd want to take chunks off the Earth.
Speaker 1: But like, you know, what is mercury good? For anyway.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. I'm sure every culture on Earth
Speaker 2: would be fine if you just disassembled Mercury, although maybe
Speaker 2: if they were facing their own demise, they would be fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So you know, we just launched like an AI
Speaker 1: probe to Mercury. We tell it to build a factory
Speaker 1: to make more of itself, to make solar power plants,
Speaker 1: which then power itself, and like hope that it continues
Speaker 1: following our instructions to build the sunlift or rather than launching,
Speaker 1: you know, an armada against Earth to take over.
Speaker 2: That is the start to the sci fi novel that
Speaker 2: I want to read about this, because I can absolutely
Speaker 2: imagine that going wrong.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think the bigger picture here is
Speaker 1: that we often think about the cosmos as fixed. You know.
Speaker 1: Number one, we think about the Solar system as always
Speaker 1: being the way that it is because it has been
Speaker 1: this way for a long time according to human timelines.
Speaker 1: You know, humans have always looked up at the stars
Speaker 1: and seen the same thing over the last tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of years. But on cosmic timelines, the story is different.
Speaker 1: The Solar system has looked different, and the Sun will
Speaker 1: not last forever, and we don't have to think about
Speaker 1: it as fixed. It is possible for us to intervene
Speaker 1: to change our fate. We don't just have to lay
Speaker 1: down and take it. We can blow ourselves up instead.
Speaker 2: Oh great, I mean at least you've got a little
Speaker 2: bit more control over the situation. And that feels good.
Speaker 2: That feels good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Would that make you feel better if we off
Speaker 1: fry up due to an engineering mistake rather than just
Speaker 1: like getting crisped naturally, No, No, it.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't, especially if it's sped the process up. But the
Speaker 2: good news is we have a lot of time, and
Speaker 2: if you invest in science, we can increase our certainty
Speaker 2: in these technologies. And I'd better understand how the sun
Speaker 2: works so that we can all save ourselves.
Speaker 1: One day exactly. So thank you for coming along on
Speaker 1: this ride where we stretch the window for science funding
Speaker 1: out to trillions of dollars.
Speaker 2: I'm sure this is going to change everything for science funding. Bravo,
Speaker 2: Daniel and Kelly.
Speaker 1: I'm probably my best to be optimistic today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, I like that. All right, let's take
Speaker 2: that optimism with us outside the podcast. Hope everybody has
Speaker 2: a fantastic day. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced
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