WEBVTT - From the Vault: The Lost Daughters of Aten, Part 2 0:00:05.720 --> 0:00:07.640 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name 0:00:07.680 --> 0:00:10.560 is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday. 0:00:10.640 --> 0:00:12.680 Time to go into the vault. This time it's going 0:00:12.720 --> 0:00:15.880 to be part two of the episode we ran last Saturday. 0:00:16.000 --> 0:00:18.040 This is the second part of the Lost Daughters of 0:00:18.040 --> 0:00:23.880 Oton series. This originally published March nineteen. And uh, you know, 0:00:23.920 --> 0:00:25.760 if you were here last Saturday, you know what you're 0:00:25.800 --> 0:00:31.600 in for. All right, let's jump right in. Welcome to 0:00:31.920 --> 0:00:41.159 Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, 0:00:41.240 --> 0:00:43.159 you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name 0:00:43.200 --> 0:00:45.720 is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Can we're back 0:00:45.960 --> 0:00:48.479 for part two? Or is this part two? Or does 0:00:48.520 --> 0:00:50.640 it kind of stand alone to a large time? I 0:00:50.640 --> 0:00:53.840 think this one stands alone. Yeah, okay, so well last time, 0:00:54.000 --> 0:00:56.160 if you were with us in the last episode, we 0:00:56.160 --> 0:00:58.560 were exploring what we were sort of calling the Lost 0:00:58.640 --> 0:01:02.240 Daughters of Aton, the the planets that once were thought 0:01:02.280 --> 0:01:05.600 to exist somewhere in the Solar System, whether in ancient 0:01:05.680 --> 0:01:08.640 times or in recent centuries, but we later found out 0:01:08.680 --> 0:01:12.440 probably never existed or definitely never existed in some cases. 0:01:12.800 --> 0:01:17.199 So examples we talked about included Antikathon and the Central Fire. 0:01:17.319 --> 0:01:19.760 What was the deal with that? Oh, well, you just 0:01:19.800 --> 0:01:21.600 have to go back and listen to the episode. But yeah, 0:01:21.640 --> 0:01:25.480 this complex notion where, um, the Sun is not the 0:01:25.520 --> 0:01:27.600 center of the universe, the Earth is not the center 0:01:27.600 --> 0:01:30.600 of the universe, but something called the Central Fire is 0:01:30.640 --> 0:01:33.399 at the center, and Earth is actually closer to the 0:01:33.440 --> 0:01:36.560 Central Fire than the Sun. So it's you know, this 0:01:36.640 --> 0:01:41.880 sort of complex uh model of the cosmos based on uh, 0:01:42.720 --> 0:01:46.440 you know, the best observational data of the day of 0:01:46.560 --> 0:01:51.840 like ancient times, ancient Greece. Yeah, combined with certain religious 0:01:51.920 --> 0:01:56.920 mythological ideas. Yeah, Pythagorean cosmology sort of. But then also 0:01:57.000 --> 0:02:01.360 we talked about the scientific thinking that to the belief 0:02:01.400 --> 0:02:04.080 in such a thing as the planet vulcan, a planet 0:02:04.080 --> 0:02:07.320 believed to be inside the orbit of Mercury super close 0:02:07.400 --> 0:02:11.000 to the Sun, as was proposed by Urban la Verier. 0:02:11.480 --> 0:02:14.880 And of course we also talked about Phaeton, the the 0:02:14.880 --> 0:02:18.960 Phaeton or Phaeton the the best subject of a Renaissance 0:02:19.000 --> 0:02:21.959 painting of all time. Yes, but for the purposes of 0:02:22.040 --> 0:02:25.119 main purposes of our discussion, the the idea that that 0:02:25.160 --> 0:02:28.000 they thought, well, the asteroid belt maybe used to be 0:02:28.040 --> 0:02:29.920 a planet and maybe this is this is what we 0:02:29.960 --> 0:02:31.960 would call that planet if it were still a whole 0:02:32.240 --> 0:02:35.240 exactly right. So today we wanted to carry this discussion 0:02:35.320 --> 0:02:38.639 forward to talk about other ideas about planets that are 0:02:38.720 --> 0:02:42.240 thought to maybe exist somewhere in the Solar System but 0:02:42.360 --> 0:02:45.400 haven't yet been confirmed. In the last episode, all the 0:02:45.440 --> 0:02:48.320 planets that we talked about, we're pretty sure now have 0:02:48.520 --> 0:02:50.919 never existed at any time. I mean, with two of them, 0:02:50.960 --> 0:02:55.440 were quite sure, but there are still questions. For example, 0:02:55.480 --> 0:02:59.480 there has long been a question about what lies at 0:02:59.480 --> 0:03:01.760 the further stretches we we talked about. You know, what 0:03:01.800 --> 0:03:03.959 happens when you go down as far as you can 0:03:04.040 --> 0:03:06.280 into the Solar System, like the Sun, is this pit 0:03:06.480 --> 0:03:08.639 this well where you go all the way down? Are 0:03:08.680 --> 0:03:10.560 there are things that are hard to see because they're 0:03:10.560 --> 0:03:12.840 so close to the Sun. When you think about the 0:03:12.840 --> 0:03:14.840 opposite end, could there be things that are hard for 0:03:14.919 --> 0:03:18.120 us to see because they're so far And of course 0:03:18.360 --> 0:03:22.520 we have to realize how how confusing this may seem 0:03:22.520 --> 0:03:26.000 at first, because it's easy to think that we have 0:03:26.200 --> 0:03:29.480 our Solar system pretty much figured out at this point, right, 0:03:29.720 --> 0:03:31.680 I mean, mostly if you're listening to this, you probably 0:03:31.720 --> 0:03:38.120 grew up memorizing the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Urinous, Neptune. 0:03:38.240 --> 0:03:40.120 And then there's the whole issue of Pluto, and some 0:03:40.160 --> 0:03:41.800 of us get a little bit out of shape, right 0:03:41.840 --> 0:03:45.360 when when someone tells us, actually, Pluto isn't a full 0:03:45.360 --> 0:03:50.040 fledged planet, it's more of a dwarf planet, etcetera. And uh, 0:03:50.200 --> 0:03:52.480 you know when when maybe don't roll with change all that. Well, 0:03:52.480 --> 0:03:54.760 but it's easy to think, Okay, but that's it, right, 0:03:54.920 --> 0:03:58.880 there's nothing new to discover in the Solar System, because meanwhile, 0:03:59.240 --> 0:04:02.200 we are continue really spotting new exo planets that are 0:04:02.320 --> 0:04:06.040 light years upon light years away, like far distant reaches 0:04:06.400 --> 0:04:09.920 of the observable universe. So if we're figuring that out, 0:04:09.960 --> 0:04:14.040 then surely we've got everything squared away in our immediate neighborhood. Yeah, 0:04:14.080 --> 0:04:16.400 it only makes sense that that's the way it should go. Right, 0:04:16.440 --> 0:04:19.680 Why are we seeing exo planets when there's still a 0:04:19.800 --> 0:04:22.120 question of whether there could be a planet in our 0:04:22.160 --> 0:04:26.000 own Solar system we don't know about. And unfortunately that's 0:04:26.040 --> 0:04:28.400 just a side effect of the different ways we have 0:04:28.560 --> 0:04:31.880 of detecting things. It actually may be much easier to 0:04:32.000 --> 0:04:35.240 detect the presence of a planet orbiting a distant star 0:04:35.320 --> 0:04:38.719 because you can definitely see that star, and you can 0:04:38.720 --> 0:04:41.159 tell by certain things. You can tell by if the 0:04:41.200 --> 0:04:44.800 star wobbles, if there are other gravitational influences on that star. 0:04:45.200 --> 0:04:47.800 You can tell by the what's known as the transit method, 0:04:47.839 --> 0:04:50.400 if something is passing in front of the star from 0:04:50.440 --> 0:04:54.039 our perspective and causing it too dim. Yeah, I think 0:04:54.080 --> 0:04:55.960 I was thinking about it this way. Um, I was 0:04:56.000 --> 0:04:59.400 thinking of beach houses. Imagine you're staying in one beach house, 0:04:59.440 --> 0:05:01.480 you know size a ble beach house, and they tend 0:05:01.480 --> 0:05:03.240 to be you know, with lots of lots of beds 0:05:03.279 --> 0:05:07.120 for multiple families or groups to stay and at the 0:05:07.160 --> 0:05:09.159 same time, so you're in one beach house, and then 0:05:09.320 --> 0:05:13.400 you're adjacent to another beach house and you you you 0:05:13.440 --> 0:05:15.080 gaze out at the other beach house. You see some 0:05:15.160 --> 0:05:17.720 lights on and you ask yourself, I wonder if anyone 0:05:17.880 --> 0:05:20.800 is staying there, and you observe it until you find 0:05:20.920 --> 0:05:24.080 definite signs that there is an individual in that house, 0:05:24.200 --> 0:05:26.480 and then then maybe you can count how many individuals 0:05:26.520 --> 0:05:28.240 are in that house. But then if you ask the 0:05:28.240 --> 0:05:32.200 same question about your own beach house, well then you can. 0:05:32.279 --> 0:05:35.560 There are ways to try and figure that out, but 0:05:35.720 --> 0:05:37.800 not the same, not the same ways. Right. You might 0:05:37.839 --> 0:05:40.360 do a bit of listening. You might do a bit 0:05:40.400 --> 0:05:44.960 of roaming around, of of rattling the curiously locked doors 0:05:45.360 --> 0:05:48.120 that go who knows where. That's a really good analogy. 0:05:48.200 --> 0:05:50.839 I like that a lot. And so by running around 0:05:50.880 --> 0:05:54.920 within our own house, we have discovered by say the 0:05:55.240 --> 0:05:58.680 early nineteen hundred, late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, we 0:05:58.720 --> 0:06:02.000 had discovered a lot stuff. We discovered eight planets at 0:06:02.440 --> 0:06:08.039 that point. The first six planets Mercury, Venus, of course, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, 0:06:08.160 --> 0:06:10.880 and Saturn have been known about since ancient times. The 0:06:11.120 --> 0:06:13.480 ancient astronomers with the naked eye could see them in 0:06:13.520 --> 0:06:15.680 the night sky and charted their movements and all that. 0:06:16.120 --> 0:06:19.680 Then in seventeen eighty one you had Uranus or Uranus. 0:06:20.400 --> 0:06:22.520 We still have to decide which one we truly prefer. 0:06:23.320 --> 0:06:25.880 Uranus was found by Sir William Herschel with a telescope. 0:06:25.920 --> 0:06:28.480 He wanted to name it after King George, and fortunately 0:06:28.520 --> 0:06:33.599 that didn't happen. Uh. Then Laveryer, the French astronomer, predicted 0:06:33.640 --> 0:06:37.520 the placement of Neptune by the wobble in Uranus um 0:06:37.720 --> 0:06:41.200 and he said, I predict there's another planet here and 0:06:41.320 --> 0:06:42.920 you can find it. And then they went and looked 0:06:42.960 --> 0:06:44.440 for it and they did find it. And that was 0:06:44.480 --> 0:06:47.480 in the eighteen forties. So we're up to seven planets 0:06:47.480 --> 0:06:49.839 at this point by the eighteen forties. By the way, 0:06:49.880 --> 0:06:54.600 as long as we're snickering at at the planetary name Uranus, 0:06:55.400 --> 0:06:57.120 I do want to throw in to call back to 0:06:57.120 --> 0:06:59.640 an older episode that I hope that one day someone 0:06:59.680 --> 0:07:02.440 writes a science fiction tale in which a starship is 0:07:02.480 --> 0:07:06.400 headed towards Uranus and it's called the Guy a Bolga. 0:07:06.640 --> 0:07:09.760 That would be a great ship title there. That is brilliant. 0:07:09.800 --> 0:07:12.480 That is absolutely brilliant. Wait a minute, I think I said. 0:07:12.840 --> 0:07:14.840 Did I say a minute ago that Neptune was the 0:07:14.840 --> 0:07:17.480 seventh planet. I feel like I've got that ringing in 0:07:17.480 --> 0:07:19.320 my head for some reason. If I said that, that's 0:07:19.440 --> 0:07:22.600 entirely wrong. Neptune is the eighth planet. Obviously. Uh So, 0:07:22.680 --> 0:07:25.120 I apologies if I misspoke. If not, this is just 0:07:25.600 --> 0:07:27.440 maybe something we can edit out. Sorry I had to 0:07:27.440 --> 0:07:29.400 say that before I forgot, But yes, the Guy Bolga, 0:07:29.600 --> 0:07:32.840 that that should be the ship to Uranus. Absolutely much 0:07:32.920 --> 0:07:37.240 more evocative and resonant than Voyager two or whatever they've 0:07:37.280 --> 0:07:40.080 previously used. But let's pull it back and meet a guy. 0:07:40.120 --> 0:07:43.679 You ready to meet a guy A mustachio gentleman. Yes, okay, 0:07:43.720 --> 0:07:45.600 so it is time to meet a fellow by the 0:07:45.680 --> 0:07:48.880 name of Perceval Lowell. I think we visited this guy 0:07:48.960 --> 0:07:52.920 on the podcast before. That mustache does look familiar. So 0:07:53.160 --> 0:07:57.480 Perceval Lowell was born to a wealthy, prominent family in 0:07:57.560 --> 0:08:01.280 Boston in eighteen fifty five, the Lowell family. So he 0:08:01.360 --> 0:08:04.040 was brother of a Lawrence Lowell, who was a lawyer 0:08:04.080 --> 0:08:06.960 who ended up becoming president of Harvard University. He was 0:08:07.000 --> 0:08:09.720 also the brother I didn't realize this until recently of 0:08:09.760 --> 0:08:12.320 the poet Amy Lowell, who I guess is considered a 0:08:12.360 --> 0:08:15.840 modernist poet. She sometimes called an imagist. Um. But I 0:08:16.080 --> 0:08:18.000 picked out one of her poems because it had an 0:08:18.040 --> 0:08:21.520 image that seemed maybe a bit relevant to today. Um. 0:08:21.560 --> 0:08:24.360 The poem is called Balls. I'm not gonna quote the 0:08:24.360 --> 0:08:27.600 whole thing, but she writes, throw the blue ball above 0:08:27.680 --> 0:08:30.480 the little twigs of the tree tops, and cast the 0:08:30.560 --> 0:08:34.000 yellow ball straight at the buzzing stars. All our life 0:08:34.040 --> 0:08:38.600 is a flinging of colored balls to impossible distances. I 0:08:38.600 --> 0:08:40.880 think the image there is that all our life is 0:08:40.880 --> 0:08:43.280 a flinging of colored balls, like we're doing the flinging. 0:08:43.280 --> 0:08:45.760 But you could also think of it is that everything 0:08:45.800 --> 0:08:48.720 that human life is is being flung around on a 0:08:48.760 --> 0:08:51.240 colored ball in the void of space. Yeah, that's that's 0:08:51.280 --> 0:08:53.800 the whole human experience, just right there on the surface 0:08:53.800 --> 0:08:57.680 of this weird ball among other weird balls. It's always 0:08:57.679 --> 0:08:59.160 a weird thing to consider. I mean, I know a 0:08:59.280 --> 0:09:02.079 Sagan point that out about like the picture of the Earth. 0:09:02.400 --> 0:09:05.680 When you take a picture of the Earth, everything human 0:09:05.800 --> 0:09:09.120 there has ever been is in that picture. Yeah, that 0:09:09.160 --> 0:09:13.600 pale blue dot that contains our beginning and may well 0:09:13.679 --> 0:09:16.520 contain our end. But anyway, back to Amy's brother, Perceval, 0:09:16.600 --> 0:09:19.120 so Perceval loll. I think in his early days, I guess, 0:09:19.120 --> 0:09:21.439 since he was sort of a man about town, except 0:09:21.559 --> 0:09:24.200 town was like the whole world, and especially like the 0:09:24.240 --> 0:09:27.599 eastern part of Asia. Like, he traveled a lot of 0:09:27.800 --> 0:09:31.720 international fleneur maybe um and he he traveled through the 0:09:31.760 --> 0:09:34.320 eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties, and at one point 0:09:34.400 --> 0:09:38.160 became foreign Secretary to the Korean Special Mission to the 0:09:38.240 --> 0:09:41.400 United States. But then later in the eighteen nineties, Perceval 0:09:41.520 --> 0:09:45.960 Lowell became more and more fascinated with astronomy, particularly with 0:09:46.040 --> 0:09:49.080 the planet Mars. And there was something interesting going on 0:09:49.120 --> 0:09:51.320 in the late eighteen hundreds with the planet Mars. There 0:09:51.440 --> 0:09:56.680 was this Italian astronomer named Giovanni Chaparelli who had been 0:09:56.720 --> 0:09:59.840 studying the planet Mars through a telescope and he perceived 0:10:00.120 --> 0:10:03.400 what looked to him like a series of lines on 0:10:03.480 --> 0:10:06.280 the surface of the planet that he in eighteen seventy 0:10:06.320 --> 0:10:12.240 seven called canally, an Italian word meaning channels. But apparently 0:10:12.280 --> 0:10:15.839 these canally were taken by some English speaking audiences to 0:10:16.120 --> 0:10:19.600 be canals, kind of a false cognate inference, as in 0:10:19.720 --> 0:10:24.959 canals like in Venice, artificial structures made by intelligent tool 0:10:25.120 --> 0:10:28.400 using creatures like us, And this idea kind of became 0:10:28.440 --> 0:10:31.800 a sensation, right, Yeah, this this had a tremendous effect 0:10:31.840 --> 0:10:34.400 on on the way we perceived the planet Mars. I mean, 0:10:34.400 --> 0:10:37.080 its effects are still felt today in the way we 0:10:37.120 --> 0:10:40.560 think about Mars, despite everything that we've learned since then. Yeah, Like, 0:10:40.640 --> 0:10:43.520 why how come when we talk about aliens the go 0:10:43.640 --> 0:10:46.320 to is to talk about Martians. Especially in the early 0:10:46.320 --> 0:10:50.160 twentieth centuries, it was always Martians, and when Venusians or 0:10:50.160 --> 0:10:52.760 anything like that, I mean, occasionally Venusians would pop up, 0:10:52.800 --> 0:10:55.120 but it's not Santa Claus versus the Venusians. It's Santa 0:10:55.160 --> 0:10:58.360 Claus versus the Martians. Yeah, or in War of the World. 0:10:58.520 --> 0:11:01.959 You know why, why the Martians? The Martian threat? Exactly. So, 0:11:02.280 --> 0:11:05.720 the the idea of alien canals on Mars really got 0:11:05.760 --> 0:11:09.560 Perceval Lowell's gears cranking, and he decided to turn his 0:11:09.600 --> 0:11:13.160 attention and his wealth and his resources to astronomy in 0:11:13.200 --> 0:11:16.360 the eighteen nineties, and in doing this he founded the 0:11:16.480 --> 0:11:21.800 Lowell Observatory and Flagstaff, Arizona, still there today. Yeah, and 0:11:21.840 --> 0:11:24.319 Flagstaff is certainly a great place to gaze at the 0:11:24.360 --> 0:11:26.720 stars and just a cool place in general. I like 0:11:26.760 --> 0:11:31.000 Flagstaff so personal. Lowell became a passionate defender of the 0:11:31.040 --> 0:11:35.280 idea that there was or had been, intelligent civilization on Mars, 0:11:35.600 --> 0:11:37.800 and he put this theory forward in a bunch of 0:11:37.840 --> 0:11:42.480 published writings, using observations from the Lowell Observatory to back 0:11:42.559 --> 0:11:45.080 up his argument. And so I want to quote from 0:11:45.360 --> 0:11:49.520 his nineteen sixteen New York Times obituary with a few abridgements. 0:11:50.040 --> 0:11:53.400 The author rights quote the great controversy among astronomers, in 0:11:53.440 --> 0:11:56.360 which he played a leading part, began in nineteen oh 0:11:56.520 --> 0:11:59.520 seven after his announcement that the observations made by his 0:11:59.559 --> 0:12:04.199 astro comical station proved that Mars was inhabited. Professor Lowell 0:12:04.240 --> 0:12:07.040 had put the theory forward tentatively as early as eighteen. 0:12:08.160 --> 0:12:11.240 Many imminent astronomers in this country in Europe accepted his 0:12:11.320 --> 0:12:15.520 conclusions of nineteen o seven as unassailable. Others were skeptical. 0:12:15.800 --> 0:12:19.400 Professor Lowell's theory begins with the demonstration that the primary 0:12:19.480 --> 0:12:23.520 requisites for human life exists on the planet water, heat, 0:12:23.600 --> 0:12:27.000 and atmosphere. His positive proof of the existence of human 0:12:27.040 --> 0:12:30.240 life on Mars is the network of lines which marks 0:12:30.280 --> 0:12:33.800 certain areas of the planet's face, indicating the digging of 0:12:33.920 --> 0:12:37.960 artificial canals, which would require an intelligence and engineering skill 0:12:38.120 --> 0:12:41.600 as great or greater than possessed by the inhabitants of 0:12:41.640 --> 0:12:45.280 this Earth. So I think he's making a few jumps here, Yes, yeah, 0:12:45.800 --> 0:12:48.400 I mean the main jump, of course, is that is 0:12:48.440 --> 0:12:51.560 that there are no such canals, and uh. And the 0:12:51.600 --> 0:12:54.120 more we looked at Mars, and then ultimately as we 0:12:54.360 --> 0:12:58.160 began to to send probes to the Red planet, it 0:12:58.240 --> 0:13:02.040 became increasingly clear that there are absolutely no canals. Yeah, 0:13:02.040 --> 0:13:04.760 when we we got photos of Mars from a probe 0:13:04.760 --> 0:13:08.800 in the nineteen seventies which showed yeah, definitely not nothing there, 0:13:09.000 --> 0:13:11.920 right and and uh and you know we talked about 0:13:11.920 --> 0:13:13.440 this before in the show, and you know, dealing with 0:13:13.480 --> 0:13:17.559 early observations, there is a there's more room to see 0:13:17.600 --> 0:13:20.600 things that are not there, especially if you don't have 0:13:20.760 --> 0:13:23.400 the ability to really kept being a do any photography 0:13:23.440 --> 0:13:27.240 at all. It's so it's very observational and then very 0:13:27.559 --> 0:13:30.600 and then you're very easy to maybe think you see 0:13:30.640 --> 0:13:34.360 something or misremember something you've seen, or or in fact, 0:13:35.080 --> 0:13:37.280 the more you look at it see faint signs of 0:13:37.360 --> 0:13:39.600 the thing you want to see. Yeah, there's so much 0:13:39.640 --> 0:13:43.760 interesting stuff in the history of astronomy about things people 0:13:43.880 --> 0:13:47.439 said they saw during the days of earlier optical telescopes 0:13:47.520 --> 0:13:53.360 without modern instruments and modern uh telephotography, where like the 0:13:53.400 --> 0:13:57.079 ash and Light remember that episode, and the planet Vulcan itself. 0:13:57.120 --> 0:13:59.520 You know that wasn't just predicted like people said they 0:13:59.559 --> 0:14:02.160 saw the planet Vulcan up there by the sun during 0:14:02.160 --> 0:14:05.199 an eclipse. Who knows what they actually saw, but clearly 0:14:05.240 --> 0:14:10.480 the process of astronomical observation was was much cruder back then, 0:14:10.840 --> 0:14:13.440 but Little's Little's argument is kind of funny. So he 0:14:13.440 --> 0:14:17.240 says astronomers can see white surfaces on the poles of Mars, right, 0:14:17.559 --> 0:14:19.400 and he says that these are ice caps, and in 0:14:19.400 --> 0:14:21.640 a way that he's correct about that there are ice 0:14:21.720 --> 0:14:24.080 caps on Mars. But he said they would melt and 0:14:24.120 --> 0:14:27.080 shrink in summer and then freeze and grow larger again 0:14:27.120 --> 0:14:30.680 in winter. And so he observed that the Martian spring 0:14:30.800 --> 0:14:33.240 came and the ice melted, and at that point the 0:14:33.360 --> 0:14:36.960 dark lines or the canals would grow darker quote even 0:14:37.000 --> 0:14:40.240 showing straight black lines criss crossed over the surface and 0:14:40.320 --> 0:14:43.920 over the surface of the orange ochre areas. Uh and 0:14:43.960 --> 0:14:46.320 that he said, these dark lines would disappear again in 0:14:46.360 --> 0:14:48.960 the Martian autumn. And he concluded from this that the 0:14:49.080 --> 0:14:53.160 darkened areas around the canals were flourishing with plant life 0:14:53.240 --> 0:14:56.560 bearing leaves and grasses during the summer, which had died 0:14:56.600 --> 0:14:59.000 away again in the winter when the water froze up 0:14:59.040 --> 0:15:02.120 and became scarce. And from this he argued that Mars 0:15:02.200 --> 0:15:05.040 must have been a very parched planet where water is 0:15:05.040 --> 0:15:08.120 in high demand, which meant that the people who lived 0:15:08.160 --> 0:15:10.320 there would have had to make very careful use of 0:15:10.320 --> 0:15:13.520 a highly limited water supply, or else quote would find 0:15:13.560 --> 0:15:16.800 themselves at last face to face with the relentlessness of 0:15:16.800 --> 0:15:20.280 a scarcity of water, constantly growing greater, until at last 0:15:20.280 --> 0:15:23.280 they would all die of thirst, either directly or indirectly, 0:15:23.560 --> 0:15:26.520 for either they themselves would not have water enough to drink, 0:15:26.760 --> 0:15:29.640 or the plants or animals which constituted their diet would 0:15:29.640 --> 0:15:32.640 perish for lack of it. An alternative of small choice 0:15:32.640 --> 0:15:35.720 to them, unless they were conventionally particular as to their 0:15:35.720 --> 0:15:40.000 mode of death. So Lowell concluded that they had to 0:15:40.040 --> 0:15:43.440 build canals on Mars, that only irrigation on a vast 0:15:43.480 --> 0:15:46.560 scale could prevent the Martians from dying from a lack 0:15:46.600 --> 0:15:49.800 of water, and thus the proof of the existence of 0:15:49.840 --> 0:15:52.840 civilization on the surface of Mars. Well, it's a fun argument, 0:15:52.840 --> 0:15:55.040 and I love the world building off but if you know, 0:15:55.080 --> 0:15:57.200 if they were just purely science fiction, that that would 0:15:57.200 --> 0:16:01.640 be marvelous. But as we've already touched on, uh, evidence 0:16:01.680 --> 0:16:04.760 did not support this theory. Yeah, and there were skeptics 0:16:04.800 --> 0:16:06.520 at the time. We should say, it wasn't like everybody 0:16:06.560 --> 0:16:09.560 believed this until we had a Mars probe, Like take 0:16:09.560 --> 0:16:12.360 photos of the surface from up close. Right, though, certainly 0:16:12.480 --> 0:16:15.560 one of these possibilities is far more exciting than the other, 0:16:16.520 --> 0:16:18.680 so you can understand why that one would be the 0:16:18.680 --> 0:16:21.080 one that the idea of canals on Mars would be uh, 0:16:21.160 --> 0:16:23.000 the idea that would show up in more headlines and 0:16:23.040 --> 0:16:26.880 would and would capture the collective imagination, right uh. And 0:16:26.880 --> 0:16:31.479 and Lowell's career of influential, controversial, and sometimes incorrect observations 0:16:31.480 --> 0:16:34.520 and hypotheses did not in there there was an interesting 0:16:34.520 --> 0:16:37.200 thing I came across where Lowell also believed that once, 0:16:37.440 --> 0:16:41.680 while observing the planet Venus, he saw quote spokes radiating 0:16:41.800 --> 0:16:44.840 from a hub within the planet Venus. But in a 0:16:44.880 --> 0:16:47.920 two thousand three paper by Sheehann and Dobbins Uh, the 0:16:47.960 --> 0:16:51.000 authors argued that what actually probably happened here is that 0:16:51.040 --> 0:16:53.720 because of the way he manipulated the telescope to look 0:16:53.720 --> 0:16:58.480 at Venus, he had accidentally converted it into a crude opthalmoscope, 0:16:58.520 --> 0:17:01.040 which would have been showing him images of the blood 0:17:01.120 --> 0:17:04.359 vessels within his own eyeball. Oh my goodness, and you 0:17:04.480 --> 0:17:07.159 included an image and in our notes here for me 0:17:07.240 --> 0:17:09.040 to look at here, and it does line up rather 0:17:09.080 --> 0:17:12.040 well with the arteries of the eye. Yeah, but it 0:17:12.119 --> 0:17:15.280 doesn't stop there either. So Lowell was also in the 0:17:15.320 --> 0:17:18.920 planet predicting business. And we'll discuss his planet predictions when 0:17:18.960 --> 0:17:23.560 we get back from a break. Thank alright, we're back. 0:17:23.600 --> 0:17:27.840 So thus far we've talked about Lowell's thoughts concerning um Mars, 0:17:28.160 --> 0:17:30.600 a known planet, but now we're gonna get into the unknown. 0:17:30.640 --> 0:17:34.600 We get into into the study and the prediction of 0:17:34.600 --> 0:17:38.639 of of hypothetical planets. Yeah, and remember how the eighth 0:17:38.640 --> 0:17:43.040 planet Neptune had been discovered. Again, uh Laveryer looked at 0:17:43.040 --> 0:17:46.120 the orbit of Uranus and said, Okay, by the way 0:17:46.160 --> 0:17:48.920 it's moving, we can tell something is influencing it. It's 0:17:48.960 --> 0:17:52.040 not moving based on what our predictions should be. So 0:17:52.160 --> 0:17:56.440 what if we pause it another another object out there 0:17:56.440 --> 0:17:59.080 of a certain mass and a certain position, Then we 0:17:59.119 --> 0:18:02.360 could explain why Uranis moves the way it does. And 0:18:02.440 --> 0:18:05.440 so he posited Neptune, and it turned out Neptune was there. 0:18:05.480 --> 0:18:09.680 He was correct, and so this is a fantastically useful 0:18:09.720 --> 0:18:13.320 and successful prediction based on the laws of physics. So, 0:18:13.400 --> 0:18:15.800 in the early years of the twentieth century, after studying 0:18:15.840 --> 0:18:19.120 the orbits of the outer gas, giants like Uranus and Neptune, 0:18:19.440 --> 0:18:22.600 Lowell tried to do the same thing. He concluded that 0:18:22.640 --> 0:18:25.720 there was another planet yet to be found based on 0:18:25.840 --> 0:18:29.040 those orbits. Something out there is messing with Uranus and Neptune. 0:18:29.400 --> 0:18:32.399 And yet again, like with the correct prediction of Neptune 0:18:32.440 --> 0:18:35.840 and the incorrect prediction of Vulcan by la Verier, this 0:18:35.960 --> 0:18:39.000 was on that basis, on the basis of inferred gravitational 0:18:39.080 --> 0:18:42.159 influences on the orbits of these known objects. So in 0:18:42.240 --> 0:18:46.360 nineteen o five or nineteen o six, Percival Lowell initiated 0:18:46.400 --> 0:18:50.040 a massive hunt for this ghost planet. The project was 0:18:50.080 --> 0:18:54.080 initially called the Invariable Plane Search, and the ghost planet 0:18:54.160 --> 0:18:57.600 was called Planet X. And this project went on for 0:18:57.680 --> 0:19:01.240 many years. It proceeded in stops and star throughout several phases, 0:19:01.520 --> 0:19:05.280 even after Perceval Lowell himself actually passed away in nineteen sixteen. 0:19:05.320 --> 0:19:08.400 So Perceval Lowell never got to see how this project 0:19:08.440 --> 0:19:11.040 turned out, though he wrote books about He wrote a 0:19:11.040 --> 0:19:13.679 book called I Think Like a Memoir of the trans 0:19:13.720 --> 0:19:18.840 Neptunian Planet. But on February eighteenth, nineteen thirty fourteen years 0:19:18.840 --> 0:19:22.600 after Lowell's death, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory named Clyde 0:19:22.640 --> 0:19:26.960 Tombo actually did discover a massive object beyond Neptune with 0:19:27.080 --> 0:19:29.560 the help of the with the help of a loaned 0:19:30.119 --> 0:19:31.800 sum of money that I think they used to buy 0:19:31.840 --> 0:19:34.760 new instruments from personal Lowell's brother who had been the 0:19:34.760 --> 0:19:37.760 head of Harvard, and this object was Pluto. Though Pluto 0:19:37.880 --> 0:19:40.359 was not nearly as massive as the planet that Lowell 0:19:40.400 --> 0:19:43.439 had predicted out there and later actually turned out more 0:19:43.480 --> 0:19:46.600 accurate measurements of the orbit and massive Neptunes, such as 0:19:46.600 --> 0:19:49.840 by the Voyager two mission, basically obviated the need for 0:19:49.960 --> 0:19:53.200 a planet X to explain our observation. So you actually 0:19:53.240 --> 0:19:56.280 looking at Uranus and Neptune, there was no need to 0:19:56.280 --> 0:19:59.040 to to infer a planet X. So it seems there's 0:19:59.080 --> 0:20:01.000 just no planet out there, right, and now we can 0:20:01.040 --> 0:20:03.720 conclude there's no need to explain anything. It is probably 0:20:03.720 --> 0:20:06.480 there's probably nothing. I mean, we have Pluto to be sure, 0:20:06.880 --> 0:20:09.159 and uh and and again, like we discussed earlier, you 0:20:09.160 --> 0:20:11.159 can go back and forth on exactly how we should 0:20:11.160 --> 0:20:14.719 classify Pluto. But here's the thing. There's no question that 0:20:14.760 --> 0:20:19.000 there are other objects in our Solar system beyond Pluto. 0:20:19.240 --> 0:20:23.720 Pluto is not the stop sign for our Solar system. There, 0:20:23.760 --> 0:20:27.200 there's plenty of other objects out there. Yeah. The Solar 0:20:27.240 --> 0:20:30.320 system kind of has a shell of icy debris floating 0:20:30.320 --> 0:20:33.480 around it. Yeah. And so it's not like you you 0:20:33.480 --> 0:20:35.280 would get to Pluto and there would essentially be a 0:20:35.280 --> 0:20:38.399 sign saying like last stop tell Alpha Centauri. Uh No. 0:20:38.600 --> 0:20:40.800 There there's the possibility for other other things, and we 0:20:40.840 --> 0:20:43.200 know for a fact that there are other things. First, 0:20:43.320 --> 0:20:48.040 there's the general category of trans Neptunean objects, such as 0:20:48.280 --> 0:20:53.280 the dwarf planet Eiris Uh between thirty seven point nine 0:20:53.320 --> 0:20:56.920 and ninety seven point six astronomical units away from the Sun. 0:20:57.320 --> 0:21:00.280 Is actually larger than Pluto by mass, the a little 0:21:00.320 --> 0:21:04.680 smaller by volume. Oh and just quickly, an astronomical unit 0:21:04.800 --> 0:21:07.600 is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Correct, Yeah, 0:21:07.640 --> 0:21:11.480 so Earth is one a U from the Sun, ETCETERA 0:21:12.600 --> 0:21:15.080 U is is way up. It's way out there. Yeah. 0:21:15.440 --> 0:21:21.440 Other dwarf planets include uh series, um Hamiya, and Makamaki. 0:21:21.800 --> 0:21:24.600 And then consider the said noise. This is where it 0:21:24.640 --> 0:21:28.280 really can to get weird. These are trans Neptunian objects 0:21:28.600 --> 0:21:32.320 with a parahelion. Again, this is a point of least 0:21:32.320 --> 0:21:35.480 distance from the Sun of at least fifty a U. 0:21:36.119 --> 0:21:38.679 So if they're closest to the Sun, they're still beyond 0:21:39.080 --> 0:21:41.760 the Kuiper Belt, which lies thirty to fifty AU from 0:21:41.760 --> 0:21:44.240 the Sun. This is an asteroid belt like scattering of 0:21:44.359 --> 0:21:49.520 leftover debris. And all three known you know, verified said 0:21:49.600 --> 0:21:53.320 noise have really cool names. First of all, there's Sedna, 0:21:53.440 --> 0:21:57.120 discovered in two thousand three, named for an Inuit sea goddess, 0:21:57.359 --> 0:21:59.159