Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. I
Speaker 1: find it interesting, Julie, that that we can as humans
Speaker 1: can take solace and find some sort of spiritual almost
Speaker 1: spiritual comfort in the idea of a supernova, which is
Speaker 1: something that's worth discussing this podcast that is, on one level,
Speaker 1: is so far removed from us. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a it's a Titanic event, one of the most
Speaker 1: powerful events that that regularly occurs in the universe, and
Speaker 1: it takes place vast distances of both time and space,
Speaker 1: and yet we can find something in there to connect
Speaker 1: with and to to to take solace in and and
Speaker 1: leave it feeling better about our place in this vast
Speaker 1: sea of cosmos. What's the life stile goal in Macro Right,
Speaker 1: it's a dying star and it's absolutely brilliant. Right, it's
Speaker 1: visual fireworks. It's a star that suddenly increases greatly in
Speaker 1: brightness because of a catastrophic explosion that ejects most of
Speaker 1: its mass. So it's a dramatic storyline. So because you
Speaker 1: know how could you not be caught by this, this
Speaker 1: thing that is imploding and ejecting most of its mass. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's the death of a star. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like the death of a guy. Like we're totally
Speaker 1: into that idea as well. Yeah yeah, um. And it's
Speaker 1: really powerful and the core of a massive star runs
Speaker 1: out of nuclear fuel, right, this is this is the
Speaker 1: sad part. I guess you could sit sad. It's not
Speaker 1: so much sad and collapses under its own gravity to
Speaker 1: form an ultra dense object known as a neutron star.
Speaker 1: But only so much material can compress into the neutron stars,
Speaker 1: so some of the original stars collapsing gaseous outer layers
Speaker 1: can't fit, so instead they sort of bounce off the
Speaker 1: neutron star, and then this triggers a shock wave that
Speaker 1: bulldozes back were the outer layers and blows the star
Speaker 1: to smithereens. Yeah. The way, the way I really like
Speaker 1: to think about it is basically, you have a situation
Speaker 1: where a working star, a functional living star, is having
Speaker 1: to burn massive amounts of energy to expand against the
Speaker 1: force of its own crushing gravity. So I like to
Speaker 1: think of it like a poorly run but well financed business,
Speaker 1: you know, where there's a lot of moneys, a lot
Speaker 1: of money is being spent to keep keep up these offices.
Speaker 1: It's like, uh, the company that Tom have havever heard
Speaker 1: a season sorry his character in Parks and Rector. It's
Speaker 1: just spen in all this just mad money and they're
Speaker 1: not actually bringing money in, but all this money is
Speaker 1: being spent to keep it out. And then what happens
Speaker 1: was it Tommy Fresh Industries or something like it was
Speaker 1: something along those lines, and they were hiring NBA stars
Speaker 1: just hang out at the off the hands from cocktails
Speaker 1: to people, um and uh. And then of course they
Speaker 1: run out of money and it just collapses. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of what happens with with the Star. Um. It
Speaker 1: reaches the point where there's nothing else to burn to
Speaker 1: sustain it, to to to keep it fight against its
Speaker 1: own massive gravity. And when that happens, it collapses. In
Speaker 1: some cases you end up with a singularity, you end
Speaker 1: up with a black hole. But in other cases you
Speaker 1: end up with this enormous explosion that Jettison's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: all the shrimp cocktail and NBA stars elsewhere it happened
Speaker 1: to the universe. Yeah, and it's really helpful to use
Speaker 1: these supernova nova plural to actually study the universe, right,
Speaker 1: because it's something that we can see, something that we
Speaker 1: know about. UM. It used to be that we thought
Speaker 1: this was terribly uncommon, but it turns out that it is. Uh,
Speaker 1: these stars exploding, this very violent catastrophic events are more
Speaker 1: common than we thought. UM. And again just so you
Speaker 1: guys understand, um, how immense this is. They emit in
Speaker 1: a few seconds and energy equivalent to what they've emitted
Speaker 1: for their entire lifetime. UM. Our galaxy is about twelve
Speaker 1: billion years old, so we have seen well not you
Speaker 1: and I when you guys out there personally, but two
Speaker 1: hundred million stars exploded during its lifetime. Right. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was looking at a at a study where from April
Speaker 1: two thousand three to August two thousand and six, the Canada, France,
Speaker 1: Hawaii telescope watch four parts of the sky. Each section
Speaker 1: that it looked at was about sixteen times the area
Speaker 1: of a full moon, and which is roughly one of
Speaker 1: the entire sky. And during that time period they observed
Speaker 1: two hundred forty one Type one A supernova. So just
Speaker 1: to give you an idea of like how often these
Speaker 1: things are happening. Um. And actually I did a blog post.
Speaker 1: The guy did a neat thing where he he set
Speaker 1: this to music, like he sped it up. And then
Speaker 1: every time there's a supernova and one of these quadrants
Speaker 1: that lights up and there's a note and it's really cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's a great event. I believe in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven they were actually able to uh witnessed an
Speaker 1: explosion of the nineteen seven nine seven a supernova which
Speaker 1: they had had their telescopes trained on. Uh. But you know,
Speaker 1: I'm vniched down. They actually blew up and they were
Speaker 1: able to study it quite carefully. Um. But again it
Speaker 1: brings back to this this whole idea that you put forth,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, we can't help but look up
Speaker 1: in the night sky and feel connected. And now that
Speaker 1: we know a lot more about a supernova, we can
Speaker 1: better understand that these raw materials hurling out in the
Speaker 1: universe are actually very deeply connected to our existence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is I mean you look back at like just
Speaker 1: sort of religious and spiritual ideas. I mean everybody, it's
Speaker 1: probably not everybody, but but you see a lot of
Speaker 1: people into the idea of being, say, a child of
Speaker 1: God or being or having some sort of a connection
Speaker 1: to a spiritual or heavenly realm. So strip away religious
Speaker 1: and spirituality and uh and just look at science. And
Speaker 1: that's what what we're looking at here, the idea that
Speaker 1: there is a connection between these titanic and timeless events,
Speaker 1: uh playing out in the cosmos and our own small,
Speaker 1: uh little lives. Yeah, and let's talk just a little
Speaker 1: bit about sort of the nuts and bolts of the
Speaker 1: supernervo so that we can all sort of get a
Speaker 1: firm understanding of what's happening at the center of a supernova.
Speaker 1: So a star can go supernova in one of two waves.
Speaker 1: There's type one supernova, in which a star accumulates matter
Speaker 1: from a nearby neighbor until runaway nuclear reaction nick nites.
Speaker 1: And then there's the type two supernova. And this is
Speaker 1: sort of the more spectacular version, in which a star
Speaker 1: runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravity, right,
Speaker 1: which is the kind of the the collapsing business analogy
Speaker 1: I used earlier. Yes, Yes, what happens is that as
Speaker 1: it begins to die, it eventually runs out of hydrogen
Speaker 1: and then helium fuel at its core. So gradually heavier
Speaker 1: elements build up at the center, and then it becomes
Speaker 1: layered like an onion, with elements becoming lighter towards the
Speaker 1: outside of the star. And this is where we start
Speaker 1: to see the spiraling effect of those materials um throwing
Speaker 1: off of the star. Basically, so that shock wave that
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier, that actually shoots out the whole
Speaker 1: outer part of the star, and the shock waves compressed
Speaker 1: the gas and space, which triggers new star formations. Okay,
Speaker 1: which is really key to us into the universe. Right,
Speaker 1: you have situations, um where just imagine just some empty
Speaker 1: space in the universe where you just have a bunch
Speaker 1: of dust molecules just floating out there doing nothing. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like a quiet town. I can think
Speaker 1: of it as like a quiet Midwestern town. Everything's just
Speaker 1: going about its business, tumbleweeds. But then what happens, right,
Speaker 1: the hot young rebel on its bike rolls through town,
Speaker 1: right and stirs everybody up. Well, that's kind of what
Speaker 1: happens when a shock wave from a supernova moves through
Speaker 1: these particles. It's it mixes things up a little. Suddenly
Speaker 1: you have pieces colliding into one another you have in
Speaker 1: these little bits of dust begin a process called acretion,
Speaker 1: where the gravity of minute little pieces of matter begin
Speaker 1: drawing in other many pieces of matter until and in
Speaker 1: this snowball effect takes off where it gets grows bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger, eventually becoming uh, planets, stars, new systems, new galaxies.
Speaker 1: And this you know this, this gun slinger, this rebel
Speaker 1: riding into town. This is happening super fast because the
Speaker 1: core of a supernova supernova is larger than the Earth,
Speaker 1: containing about a million times the mass of the Earth.
Speaker 1: So when a star like say the supernova seven A, dies,
Speaker 1: it collapses to the size of the Earth, which then
Speaker 1: collapses to the size of London and approximately one second,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is that's amazing, right, So this, this
Speaker 1: h gunslinger shows up and you know this, this ball
Speaker 1: of fire. And you know, if that's not dramatic enough,
Speaker 1: consider that the materials that spiral off the supernova into
Speaker 1: the universe during its final seconds have been billions of
Speaker 1: the years in the making, right millions. For instance, we
Speaker 1: know that all the hydrogen burns to helium in ten
Speaker 1: million years. So this is what's happening when a star dies, right,
Speaker 1: it starts to take its own material and burn off.
Speaker 1: So all that hydrogen burns to helium in ten million
Speaker 1: years um, and then gravity starts to contract the star,
Speaker 1: making it hotter and hotter, and then helium burns to
Speaker 1: carbon in one million years, and then all the carbon
Speaker 1: burns to form nitrogen in one hundred thousand years. Oxygen
Speaker 1: burns to silicon in ten thousand years, and then during
Speaker 1: the last day, this is the coolest part, the last
Speaker 1: day in the life of the star, all the silicon
Speaker 1: burns to form iron in one day, and this really
Speaker 1: is the death now, since iron is tightly bound um
Speaker 1: in terms of its nucleus and it has nothing to
Speaker 1: give in the form of fuel to the star. The
Speaker 1: really cool thing about this is that these are all
Speaker 1: the elements that the universe is made of, that the
Speaker 1: Earth is made of, and pretty much what we are
Speaker 1: made of. Right, So every atom in your body, according
Speaker 1: according to Lawrence Cross, and he's a theoretical physicist, was
Speaker 1: once in a star that exploded. Two hundred million stars
Speaker 1: have created the elements to make up your body. Hydrogen, carbon,
Speaker 1: and lithium were part of the Big Bang. So this
Speaker 1: is where the beautiful quasi spiritual idea enters the picture.
Speaker 1: The idea that are humble, little fragile body that are
Speaker 1: in the process of growing old and dying. Uh contain uh,
Speaker 1: the elements that were once a part of the of
Speaker 1: one of the most colossal, powerful events that regularly happens
Speaker 1: in the universe, And they were once the part part
Speaker 1: of stars. We're we're made out of these stars were
Speaker 1: made out of the celestial gods. We are kind of
Speaker 1: like the trickle down from that. Yeah. So if you
Speaker 1: look at in the night sky and you fill an
Speaker 1: affinity with it, then it's because we you know, it's
Speaker 1: the building blocks of us. Right, And Lawrence Cross says,
Speaker 1: you know, the atoms in your left hand probably came
Speaker 1: from a different star than your right hand. He says,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a great quote. It really is
Speaker 1: the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are
Speaker 1: all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded,
Speaker 1: because the elements carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things
Speaker 1: that matter for evolution and for life weren't created at
Speaker 1: the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear
Speaker 1: furnaces of stars. And the only way for them to
Speaker 1: get in your body is if those stars were kind
Speaker 1: enough to explode. He says, so forget Jesus, the stars
Speaker 1: died so that you could be here today. Well, we'll see.
Speaker 1: That's nice. And now I've also read estimates that of
Speaker 1: the mass in our bodies has actually started us. So
Speaker 1: it's a good chunk. It's a good chunk. And it
Speaker 1: just sounds better to say all of it though, because
Speaker 1: no one wants to be like, like we are divine.
Speaker 1: You know, that's that's a weird percentage. Why I just
Speaker 1: go for a hundreds, right, yeah, exactly, why not? Uh,
Speaker 1: let's not split hairs. But um, you know, it's an
Speaker 1: interesting perspective when you think about that your existence in
Speaker 1: a in a the universe. And we actually just did
Speaker 1: a podcast concerning black swans. Black swans being these events
Speaker 1: that out liars that seem like, you know, you couldn't
Speaker 1: predict them. Um, and this idea that black swans are
Speaker 1: everywhere all the time, and in fact our existence is
Speaker 1: a black swan, right um. And Lawrence Cross would actually
Speaker 1: say that there's there's many black swans in this universe.
Speaker 1: We just have to look for them. And we have
Speaker 1: a lot many more connections to the universe than just
Speaker 1: being you know, part of Stardust. Ruminate on that for
Speaker 1: just a moment, and we will be back with more
Speaker 1: on the cosmic origins of your atoms. All right, we're back,
Speaker 1: and we're actually going to discuss a few other um
Speaker 1: kind of trippy cosmic connections that you can make to
Speaker 1: the outer dark without having to really as much on
Speaker 1: the whole star dust supernova situation. Okay, here's here's one.
Speaker 1: Are we possibly the extraterrestrials that we've been talking about? Ah,
Speaker 1: you are, of course talking about exogenesis. I am talking
Speaker 1: about the idea that life immer originates not on Earth
Speaker 1: but somewhere else, the raw materials for it at least, right,
Speaker 1: that the raw materials at least or you know, you
Speaker 1: could go crazy and say, get into some ancient alien stuff,
Speaker 1: but that's uh, that's for another podcast for this though.
Speaker 1: You're talking about, um, the idea that the raw materials
Speaker 1: end up arriving here um via asteroids meteor rides. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And it turns out of Antarctica is really helpful in
Speaker 1: trying to study this because it's just this vast white
Speaker 1: landscape right, really easy to spot meteorites, particularly Martian meteorites.
Speaker 1: And since we have looked at the soil composition on Mars,
Speaker 1: we already know that when we find a meteorite that
Speaker 1: it could have come from Mars when we slice it
Speaker 1: and dish it and look at the composition. So what
Speaker 1: has become apparent is that we are polluted regularly from
Speaker 1: material from Mars and vice versa. So materialist from Earth
Speaker 1: getting knocked out from the surface, and they also make
Speaker 1: their way to Mars. Um. Now sometimes we send things
Speaker 1: to Mars too. It's true we did have little care
Speaker 1: packages um cookies, but we also known Again, this was
Speaker 1: Laurence Cruss talking about that microbes in this Siberian desert
Speaker 1: can exist without water under harsh conditions for months or
Speaker 1: even years uh and in door mis state, and he
Speaker 1: says no doubt that if microbes existed in a rock
Speaker 1: on Mars, it could make a six month trip to
Speaker 1: Earth once they were knocked out from this service with
Speaker 1: no problem. So the big question is did life on
Speaker 1: Earth arise here or somewhere else? Maybe we are all
Speaker 1: the extraterrestrials right, And the process of life traveling from
Speaker 1: one planet to another is called pan spermium. And we
Speaker 1: have an article on how stuff Works about space collisions.
Speaker 1: If you look, if you just go to a house
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com, type in space collisions and you'll
Speaker 1: find a cool little article talking about various cosmic heavy
Speaker 1: hitters smacking together. And also um the idea of pants spermia,
Speaker 1: the idea of life spreading from one world to another. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he also uh mourns across us people to think
Speaker 1: about taking a breath, think about oxygen for just one moment. Okay,
Speaker 1: now I can say this. Consider that life evolved on
Speaker 1: Earth for two billion years before it began to produce
Speaker 1: and use oxygen. Organisms use photosynthesis, which use carbon carbon dioxide,
Speaker 1: and all those little dudes produce little puffs of oxygen,
Speaker 1: and over millions of years, created more and more oxygen
Speaker 1: in our atmosphere until boom here we are taking it
Speaker 1: for granted. Um, he says. Lawrence Croft says that in
Speaker 1: every breath you take, they're an average of at least
Speaker 1: ten oxygen atoms from the dying breath of Caesar. When
Speaker 1: he said at brute wow, he's waxing poetic hardcore on this.
Speaker 1: He totally he's pulling out all the stops because he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not just as as I think he
Speaker 1: referred to it before, just a bunch of dead people's
Speaker 1: breath that we're taking in. Yeah, because because I mean,
Speaker 1: we're also you could also say, oh, I'm also drawing
Speaker 1: in the breath of every inane thing that has ever
Speaker 1: been said by a politician, Hollywood starlets, the dark side
Speaker 1: of that. But it's true. Every time you breathe, you're
Speaker 1: breathing in atoms of everyone who has ever lived. So
Speaker 1: you know, if there's someone sitting next to you that
Speaker 1: you just might be annoyed with, you just feel like,
Speaker 1: oh man, I can't I can't muster any sort of
Speaker 1: empathy for this person. Uh. You know, you just have
Speaker 1: to realize that we actually are all eat out of
Speaker 1: the same material um, and we're all breathing the same
Speaker 1: funky breath of the earth. But it reminds me of
Speaker 1: the I did a block pist a while back about
Speaker 1: the the idea that all drinking water was poo at
Speaker 1: one point, which again Lawrence Cross will say he has
Speaker 1: some interesting things to say about that. Um. He says
Speaker 1: that it's just really interesting. He says, every time you
Speaker 1: drink in water, you're drinking in the sweat from your parents,
Speaker 1: coupling that created you. I know, I know, even this,
Speaker 1: this fancy lacroix in my hand, it seems so pure,
Speaker 1: so wide spread our materials. We just and and he
Speaker 1: says also, like any sort of exprement from any sort
Speaker 1: of sludge that ever existed on this earth, you're also
Speaker 1: taking it. But this is really cool too. If you
Speaker 1: prick your finger and drop a drop of your blood
Speaker 1: in the Thames, for instance, Um, a year later, you
Speaker 1: could take a tablespoon of water from the ocean and
Speaker 1: there would be some of the atoms of your blood
Speaker 1: in that water. According to Lawrence Cross, Yeah, it does
Speaker 1: drive home the interconnectedness of it all, and that there
Speaker 1: is um. I mean, we don't stand outside the cycle
Speaker 1: of mass and matter and energy. That we are a
Speaker 1: part of this. Uh, we are part of cosmos. Really,
Speaker 1: you know that's true. So often we think of science
Speaker 1: is something separate from us rather than within us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just that's just the where our minds work,
Speaker 1: and it's one of the reasons we end up, you know,
Speaker 1: having all these blinders to figuring out how consciousness works
Speaker 1: and how can we end up creating all these uh
Speaker 1: uh these ideas of spirituality and religion. She sort of
Speaker 1: peep beyond those blinders that you're forced to recognize that
Speaker 1: we are a part of the universe. It's it's the
Speaker 1: hippie dippi as that may sound, you know, it's we are.
Speaker 1: I mean, there you go. Okay, so now you've all
Speaker 1: put us in a mood for a little Carl. Second,
Speaker 1: why don't you hit us with a little well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that imagine A number of people were like, how are
Speaker 1: they going to mention that Carl Sagan quote or not?
Speaker 1: What's a matter with these people there? In fact, they're
Speaker 1: already writing the emails. How could you leave out the
Speaker 1: Carl Sagon quote? Well, I have the Car sagend quote
Speaker 1: here for you. And interesting fact, we considered, um, trying
Speaker 1: to get somebody to do a Car Sagan voice for
Speaker 1: us for this, but there was a lot of discussion about, well,
Speaker 1: he doesn't really do a Carl Sagan voice. He does
Speaker 1: a Kermit the Frog voice that kind of sounds like,
Speaker 1: kind of sounds like Carl Sagan. Do do we do
Speaker 1: we get him to do this in his current voice?
Speaker 1: Do we ask him to tweak it into a Sagan?
Speaker 1: Is that cool? Is that because we love Sagan, we
Speaker 1: don't want to and we love Kermit, you know, right,
Speaker 1: And then there's an other dude in the office that
Speaker 1: always wears a turtleneck. But then that doesn't quite come across. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that only works if you're in the studio with us.
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna read it in my serious voice.
Speaker 1: I guess matter is much older than life. Billions of
Speaker 1: years before the Sun and Earth even formed, Adams were
Speaker 1: being synthesized in the insides of hot stars and then
Speaker 1: returned to space when the stars blew themselves up. Newly
Speaker 1: formed planets were made out of the stellar debris, and
Speaker 1: Earth and every living thing are made of star stuff
Speaker 1: like that, like yeah, yeah, yeah, this the star stuff
Speaker 1: is is um Yeah, that's it's just a great quote
Speaker 1: and it really and he drives some some much of
Speaker 1: what Sagan did so well that he was able to
Speaker 1: convey this uh, this passion for uh, for for cosmos,
Speaker 1: for for the universe, for for space, for sciences, for
Speaker 1: you know, neuroscience, and another related to areas as well,
Speaker 1: was able to relay that passion for it and make
Speaker 1: it feel like a part of us and not something
Speaker 1: that we stood apart from indeed, incidentally, there is also
Speaker 1: around the same time about the late sixties of when
Speaker 1: when Sagan was thinking about this stuff and formulating these,
Speaker 1: uh these ideas, you also had a young Joni Mitchell
Speaker 1: wrote wrote a song called Woodstock, which features the lyrics
Speaker 1: were start us we're golden, We're billion year old carbon
Speaker 1: And as we close out the podcast, you were actually
Speaker 1: gonna play a portion of a cover by the by
Speaker 1: the band Austra all of that song wood Stock that
Speaker 1: I find particularly snazzy. So but before we get to
Speaker 1: that real quick, if you need to contact us and
Speaker 1: you want to reach out to us about anything we've
Speaker 1: talked about in this podcast or other podcasts, you can
Speaker 1: find us on Facebook as stuff to Blow the Mind,
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Speaker 1: And you can always drop us a line at blow
Speaker 1: the Mind. At how stuff Works dot com, we are
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