Tatooine Terraforming the moon is something that I think of whenever I see it in the sky.

Going back to the topic of colonizing Mars again. I think it is more likely that we will create large space habitats around moons or planets out in our solar system that are close to something that can be mined, and larger colony might be eventually built on a strategic moon with very little gravity...all in the name of science and mining. Perhaps some people will go to these places as tourists eventually. All visits to these places will be short term, because there's no place like home as they say.

Tatooine, I wanna see a green moon :) Incidentally, according to a PSYC course I took once, we best remember the first and last items on a list - can you see a bias in your votes?

Thanks Frazer :) [Tatooine] Can we terraform the Moon is my fave Q&A, I did not know it was possible for The Moon to hold an atmosphere...I learn something new everyday.

Tatooine gets my vote. Never even considered it before. Now it seems like a no-brainer!

Coruscant. Strong question, stronger answer! Some of the things the Ancients (like Eratosthenes) worked on (like the world being round), will always stand. Missing gravity in the standard model? Maybe or maybe not.

The Yavin question made me think of a 1979 Andy Griffith TV movie called Salvage. In the movie, Andy owns a junkyard and teams with a failed astronaut and a woman that developed an extremely powerful but extremely unstable explosive/rocket fuel. They build and launch their rocket on a trip to the Moon to recover all the abandoned "junk" left by the Apollo astronauts. I was 11 when it aired and really enjoyed it. It was turned into a series called Salvage 1 but was cancelled with only 16 of its 20 episodes having aired. Salvage 1 is yet another TV show from my childhood that I have tried to find a way to watch as as an adult. But the problem, as I understand it, is that while it wouldn't cost much to (physically) offer failed shows from the 70s or 80s to a streaming service, the effort to secure contract releases from all the credited actors and musicians is not deemed to be worth it. Nobody ever considered home video releases at the time these contracts were negotiated, much less video on demand/streaming. But it seems a waste to just leave them sitting in a vault somewhere. Eventually, those shows will move in to the public domain. But one, I doubt I will live that long and two, them being in the public domain will hardly incentivize studios to release them. Maybe the studios could negotiate a standard deal with SAG-AFTRA and the union representing TV musicians that would apply to any TV show or TV movie that aired prior to 1990 and didn't have existing streaming deals. That wouldn't disturb deals already negotiated for more popular shows while providing fair compensation for artists and their heirs. Studios could then release most of their back catalogs and generate revenue they wouldn't otherwise receive. The unions could hold payments for artists/heirs that can't be located. It might require a law from Congress to make that arrangement legal, but I am not sure if anyone would be against such a law. BTW, I think a low quality VHS recording of Salvage is available on KZfaq. I appreciate both the uploaders for making movies and shows like this available and the studios that own the rights not to issue strikes.

Another thing about all our probes and rovers and why we would want to recover them. They have been exposed to harsh/exotic environments, studying how they have degraded is valuable materials research.

19:31 fully agree. for me, a very amateur astro-fan, stars in very dark places are overwhelming in numbers - thus I believe constellations were created when people start noticing patterns during not that clear nights, when there are not many stars visible

So, follow-up question to the Mars colonization question: I agree with your assessment, but what is your thoughts on the prevalence of O'Neill Cylinder (or similar) as a proxy for terrestrial colonization? I've always assumed it will be far more likely given the engineering complexities are orders of magnitude less.

Bespin. Without any doubt. Thanks for your answers.

New follower and future amateur astronomer. You’re an inspiration

Have been a sub for a long time and I'm still occasionally surprised by how good your video looks and how good your audio sounds. Thanks for the quality! Happy New Year, Fraser

Ad Tatooine: Place Lunar colony at South Polar Aitken basin and you can have eternal sunlight for solar panels and green houses, and frozen water for water(!), oxygen for breathing and fuel (hydrogen and oxygen), close at hand! Build into the side if the crater and you are radiation shielded but can still have windows 🙂

Coruscant. Your answer is spot on. Thanks for all that you do.

Yay! Fraser got the right shoulder. :)

I think the best definition of "down" is just the direction towards the center of gravity of whatever the dominant object you're orbiting is. So it's subjective depending on where you are, but it's still down. Like orbiting is falling "down" but just moving so fast laterally that you never hit the ground, but gravity is still pulling you towards it. It's more that for humans in space, there might as well be no up or down because either one is the same as the other, so that's the main reason behind saying there's no up or down in space.

Fraser's Canadarm jokes never fail to get a good laugh out of me, I love 'em hahaha

Since the Oort Cloud theoretically extends all the way to the "edge" of our solar system, is it possible that objects from _our_ Oort Cloud could possibly be drawn towards, or even impact, exoplanets in _neighboring_ star systems (like Alpha Centari)? Also, do our neighboring star systems have their _own_ "Oort" Clouds that interact with ours at the dividing line between our two systems?

Great show! Thanks for breaking it down for the rest of us.

5:29 Sure, Fraser! I'm sure when I look down below, the referenced link will definitely, _actually_ be listed in the show notes... right?? I've been watching this channel for far too many years to be fooled by you again! You're not getting me this time! 🤣🤣🤣

Allright, a new Fraser Cain video! 😃🥳

absolutely love these videos, nice to have a place for reliable information =P

Is there a way i can vote for all the questions? Great video

Coruscant - More for the answer than the question. Great channel, keep up the good work

Always a good watch. Bespin

Happy holidays fellow Canadian brother!!! ❤

hoth the universe is so vast it really is inconceivable.

I love these!

Your putting out a ton of great content!

Tatooine! Now regarding settling on Mars, I think VR/AR tech is evolving fast enough that if you miss trees and wind on Mars, you'll be able to experience it. Say you're bored of the baren landscape by day 90, then you tell you built in assistant to augment the scenery through your visor with whatever you want while leaving reality intact enough for carrying out the work. You'll also be able to enjoy experiences of anything on Earth with a VR suit inside the habitat that will be real enough to fool your senses. You may need to get a Neuralink implant, but that also likely won't be a big deal by then. 🤷

I already think a lot of current science is provably mumbo jumbo but we've already had this discussion. Carry on sir.

You're question shows are my favourite. One of the only videos on KZfaq that I always watch till the end

Thanks!

Question about the twin paradox: If Alice remains on Earth, always experiencing the same acceleration (10 m/s²), and Bob goes on a trip, but his ship always maintain the same acceleration (10 m/s²) for the entire trip, holding a speed close to the speed of light for the majority of the time, when Bobs meets Alice again, will be any time dilation between the two?

Hey Fraser. I just wanted to say your videos are spectacular. If you're looking for an idea for a new video, I'm not sure but I would imagine that a lot of people would very much enjoy watching a video about building a substantial moon from asteroid material for mars to help warm the core.

Hoth. Thks for the great content

Tatooine, was the best!

Wow, if I take the ideas I found so far on your channel, giving the moon a permanent atmosphere is not quite that difficult with technologies we soon have: * Build a magnetosphere generator on the moon (might be something like a big cable around the moon or something similar) * Build ships to sail on the solar wind to the comets (difficulty: braking at the orbit of the comet)... * ... and bring them with water, nitrogen and oxygen to the moon to rain them down there (the difficulty of again braking at the moon's orbit)

Tatooine - amazing.

Tatooine! I would love to look up and see a green and blue marble in the sky.

Yavin. I seriously want your quote on a t-shirt: "Mars sucks!" It's fn awesome. From Rory in Toronto

I had a book from the 60's about the future that showed underwater cities, because living underwater is what we will want to do in the future.

Yay! Fraser, could we destabilize orbits in our attempts to terraform celestial bodies?

How long would JWST still be useful if it drifted away from its Lagrange point?

Awesome show Fraser! My question is regarding stellar motion and momentum. When we see stars in a galaxy rotating around the (possible) central SMBH, they largely appear to rotate in the same direction. Where did their momentum come from? Assuming all the gas to form the stars started out largely randomly moving - where are the 'balancing' reverse motion stars?

Bespin!

hi fraser, many years ago i questioned how you used further and farther interchangeably and to be honest i was just being a silly pedant, but virtually every episode after that i've noticed you almost make a point of using them in their intended sense, so much so its almost like they are emphasised each time. My question is, is this coincidence or did i have an impact on you all those years ago?

Hoth segment, how does the minimum size of the universe compare to where we might expect the event horizon for the universe?

Tatooine was my favorite answer. I didn't know that the gas would generally stick around the lower-gravity moon, but now I'm confused by the whole "Jean's Escape Velocity" thing. I interpreted it as "If the gas molecule is moving faster than the escape velocity of the gravitational body it's on, then it will tend to escape". This would imply that solar heating would likely strip the moon's atmosphere, if it were within the limits of an unprotected human.

When we go back to the moon should the astronauts visit the equipment left behind by the Apollo missions? Would the buggy still work?

"..click on the notification button, and then also agree to have this posted into your dreams.." Yeah, nah...Haha, ok. Good one Fraser! I apreciated that.

Tatooine We can't even seem to terraform the earth back into something less dangerous, like prior to the industrial revolution levels of pollution and greenhouse gases. Not having to travel off world should save at least a few billion on the project.

28:13 canada - we put arms on everything

I think the point is that no matter what insane things we discover in the future, revolutionary things, or even if we become able to control all of physics' laws as we want to, our current science doesn't stop being science. Our current models, despite how imperfect they are, are still the ones that fit best with our observations, and are researched to the best of our current abilities. That's science. Dalton's model for the atom didn't stop being scientific, it just became outdated as new facts were learned.

Tatooine! (am I doing this right?) Why can we give a planet (or moon) an atmosphere but not a magnetosphere? Can't we just build a really big magnetic field?

Basically Terra forming, interstellar travel and other big problems in space need much bigger power supplies than we have. I think that is a doable problem over time. Not a short time but who knows? All of a sudden, someone figures out a great source of anti matter...find it, produce it, whatever, the main thing is you have access to it. As long as you don't blow up Earth you would then have a much larger source of power than we have ever had. Possibilities of what we can do go to a new level. Other choice is we never go out of the solar system and just become good at using everything we have access to.

4:05 - While using genetic engineering to create plants that can cope with extended periods of darkness is an option, why not just borrow a page from Isaac Arthur's playbook and make solar shade / reflector satellites? In that way, we introduce less questions into the scenario, and we can control the light cycle to whatever we desire.

Hoth Here's an interesting question : Based on the current understanding of the universe, could we, in theory, see past iterations of our Galaxy or even see the beginning of the Milky Way? If so, how would we be able to determine that is indeed our Galaxy and some other Galaxy. Consider the time light is observable. For example, a star is 10 light-years away, and we are observing the star as it was 10 years ago, not as it is today.

Hey Fraser! Love your contents as always. My question is, is it possible for a star to have rings??

Tatooine!!!!

Wow, that is awesome about terraforming the Moon. Would power stations in a line making a powered ring around the Moon give it a magnetosphere? And the plant cycles could be taken care of by charging batteries on sunny days and running lights with them on sunless days. We already have solar-powered grow lights.

Large space mirrors could probably mitigate that 30 day/night cycle somewhat.

Yavin! I want a total recall vacation!

Dagobah: the idea that we will one day be able to build structures around these artefacts, to celebrate and protect them is simultaneously so ostentatious and humbling. It's actually quite emotional too, to think that one day, somebody will get to put their hand on the surface of these landers, to physically connect with that history and the hopes and trials and successes that accompanied them; that one day some martian colonist will get to have a Picard-meets-Phoenix moment with Pathfinder or Insight or Opportunity, even if they have to wear a full EV suit to do it.

Tatooine !

Best question: Hoth. It was about the size & shape of the universe.

can the oumuamua be really a intersteller spacecraft, and what if every object is just the peaks and valleys of a 4d hypersphere just like taking a 2d slice of earths surface, is the orbit of planets slowly increasing due to the solar radiation

Isaac Asimov's book The Relativity Of Wrong makes the case that modern science has the correct major theories about how the universe works. These theories can be refined but not overthrown.

Regarding the 'size' of the universe, I am surprised that no one has considered that the universe is in fact a Klein bottle set within a tesseract. This would take care of a lot of issues regarding both macro and micro (quantum) physics.

kamino We got to see a magnitude lower event when comet Shoemaker fell into Jupiter in '94, can't believe it's been 30 years now, wow.

Naboo, because it's a major plot point in 'Godzilla vs Guiron'.

Up is away from gravity, Down is towards gravity. Up and down are only directions that make sense in a strong gravity well.

@ Fraser Hi mate. This is in relation to engineering an atmosphere on the Moon and all questions assume that we're also able to create a magnetic field for the Moon - Would we need to deliver MORE gas to deal with the lower gravity of the Moon? I mean, a lower gravity would lead to a gas of 'x' volume having a lower density and taking up a greater volume on the moon. Lower density would equate to a lower atmospheric pressure, yes? To achieve a desired pressure, we'd need to have more gas for a given volume, than we would on Earth, right? How much more? If we were doing this on Earth, 1 cubic meter of space contains 44.64 mol. of gas and since each mol. is 22.4 litres, we'd need 1,000 moles of gas for 1 cubic meter. 1 cubic meter = 1,000 litres, so we could just say that on Earth, 1 litre of volume contains 1 mole of gas. What would this be on the Moon? I'm certain it would be different, I just can't work out how different... Also, is there a practical limit to how much gas can be accommodated/ accumulated on the Moon? At some point, the volume a given gas occupies will be so great/ so far from the surface, that the Moon's gravity will have difficulty holding on to it. But then again, Venus doesn't have a particularly high gravity and yet it holds on to over 90 atmospheres of pressure worth of gases. Does that mean that we could "overfill" the moon? Could we accidentally end up with an atmospheric pressure of 10 atm on the moon? Or 20? Or 100, even? Or do you think the pressure would max out at around 10 atmospheres, with excess gases being swept off into the ether?

At sea and in the air, you have green and red navigation lights on starboard and port sides of the vessel. This makes sense, as there is also up and down on Earth. But why do you have the same navigation lights on spacecraft? Shouldn't you have something extra, to let the lights give your heading to others seeing your craft?

I believe that colonzing Mars wouldn't necessarily suck but it would suck for most people. This is a question about finding the kind of people that would like to live like that. There are people that have adapted to live in extreme environments even here in Earth, even with primitive technologies so I believe it can be done.

Don’t forget about the vibrations that the moon produces that wouldn’t be pleasant for the human ear if something crashes into the moon or even trying to mine there it will ring for weeks since the moon is hollow. So turning that into growing plants is just not possible unless you mobilized your own farm above ground.

Any space body we terraform, will simply become a pirate magnet.

Why not orbit mirros for lighting, lagrange radiation shield, and mineral already there? It can actually be done toady or within the next 10 or so if your creative enough.

How much faster would voyager be going if it had an ionic drive firing this whole time? Have either of them traveled a light day yet?

Tatooine - That part about the moon was a fascinating thought experiment - I never even considered terra-formation. If we could add several artificial magnetos (spinning metallic asteroids?) at the Earth-Moon LaGrange points such that one would always be on the sunlit side - probably requiring constant correction of some sort, we could create an analogue for a magnetosphere. Then (very gently :) ) direct comets and icy asteroids into the moon over hundreds or thousands of years - creating a ~habitable place faster than we could terraform Mars. Without the sun stripping away gasses, a proto-atmosphere could be created as more material would sublimate from the existing regolith to add to the atmospheric composition. Question is, would the deflected solar particles expose the earth to significantly higher radiation while the moon was in front of the earth in relation to the sun, or simply be deflected by the earths own magnetosphere as usual?

Could you come up with a stable multiple planet configuration where every planet is in the L4 and L5 on the next and last planet, but all share the same orbital distance from the star.

Regarding adding an atmosphere to the moon, could it be more efficient to use something like a Nicoll Dyson Beam to bake the oxygen out of the moon rocks? I'm not seeing the codes you're referring to at 4:32. Technically, there is a down in space, but it's relative to the dominant source of gravity. For example, down in our solar system would be toward the sun. Down in the galaxy would be the central black hole, Sagitearious A.

You mentioned that the moon has no magnetosphere in the answer to your first question - could make one? Enough to cover a dome where people live and work?

Fraser, would you like to tell us more about JUICE mission that is expected to be launched in 2023? Do you think it will happen this year and what discoveries we may get? thanks

Yavin - I love it when Fraser busts people's Mars colonization fantasy balloons. I don't mind the Star Wars planet names at all, but maybe in the new year we can get some new planets? Star Trek has a bunch too! Andoria, Bajor, Betazed, Cardassia, Denobula, Ferenginar, Gothos, Iconia, Khitomer, Kronos/Qo'nos, Medusa, Nepenthe, Organia, Orion, Risa, Romulus, Tellar, Trill, Vulcan, Zetar

I see a lot of things written about terraforming moons, planets, even about Dyson spheres on how we would be able in the future to do this and that, and how theoretically is possible, probable, or even very close. Thing is, I think people have spent too much time reading sci-fi books and watching movies, and too little time walking outside in the "real world". We're not even able to take away 0.1% of CO2 out of the earth's atmosphere and we want to get a whole planet a whole new atmosphere and perfectly manipulate and fine tune it? 🤦🏻‍♂

Question: Tiny Measurements in Infinite Space. In one of the Q and As you mentioned that the moon is moving away from earth at 4cm per year and Titan is moving away from Saturn at 11 cm per year. I wish to know scientists are able to make such tiny measurements in the vast space? 4cm Seems nothing compared to the distance of moon from earth! Also, how other accurate space measurements are made to such incredible precision? Thanks. Vote: Coruscant

Hey Fraser. There will be a time when we see bio-signatures on a planet and know for certain there is life on that planet. How close do you think we are we to that moment?

Is there a meaningful difference between something going beyond the event horizon of a blackhole and going beyond the edge of the observable universe?

So, with adding water, and the components of air to the surface of the moon we could create an atmosphere there. What about atmospheric pressure? Yes there might be an atmosphere there but could it get up to the right pressure? Would the gravity on the moon play a part in creating or maintaining pressure? What about temperature? Temperature and Pressure are directly related right? Temperature would vary drastically on each side of the moon right? I wonder if that difference could create a lot of wind in that atmosphere? If so, that dusty moon regolith might be blowing everywhere?

5:50 a small amount of naivety 😌

What's this Solenoid Loop project proposed for Mars to give it an artificial magnetic field? Would that be applicable on Luna?

If we are traveling at a velocity close to the speed of light relative to the rest of the universe (say traveling to Alpha Centauri) would the microwave background radiation be redshifted behind us and blue-shifted ahead of us? And does this mean that there actually is a preferred inertial reference frame in our universe?

It's impossible for the Universe to be infinite but it is impossible for the Universe not to be infinite

In the far future when fusion based energy is no longer 20 years away what space based things could we do with it and is there a next type of energy source to look for after fusion?

Tatooine - With terraforming any celestial body; the next big technological issue that we will have to figure out is how to create an artificial magnetosphere.

Hoth!😍

Sorta philosophical here: Is a black hole, particularly a supermassive black hole like Sagittarius A* properly still part of the universe? There's no communication possible through the event horizon that I know of; only gravitational effects.

Tatooine , how would one create a magnetosphere, how much energy would a planet sized one require? And isn't the tidal forces of having a unusually large Moon that allows the Earth to keep a liquid enough core to have magnetic field? Isn't this almost a requirement for life and should be considered when looking at exoplanets?