Yup, I always wish I could live in the future to see what happens next.

Fraser Cain Me too!

Yes, but then you'd want to see what the "future" holds for that time and then the next time period. I was born at a time when jet engines were just barely being used on passenger jets. Now, we are talking seriously of sending people to Mars and it might even happen in my lifetime. I can only imagine what I would see if I could live one more lifetime after this one. Of course, I do believe in an afterlife and I believe that I will get to watch what happens here. Time will just pass a lot faster for us then.

Yes, many of us will always long to see what is beyond our days. Although it is interesting to look back at what some prior generations would have seen. Imagine living 100 years, from 1900 to 2000. You would have gone from horse and carriage to automobiles to airplanes to jets to rockets launched into space. You would have gone from slide rules to mechanical calculators, to pocket calculators, to PC's, to laptops, to cell phones. I often wonder if I live 100 years, or close, if there will be as much extreme innovation as there was in that period. A truly fascinating lifespan to have lived. I wish I had known my great grandfather, but he died when I was only 2. He was born in 1898, and died in 1979. A friend of mine's grandmother's second husband was born in 1885 and was an inventor. He was interested in technology at a young age and actually personally witnessed the first deadly airplane crash in history. He has old tapes of the guy talking about his life experiences. He said he knew something was wrong and the guy was going to crash. I just think that is an amazing story.

Personally, I am giving it 50/50 odds that we will still be alive. Live forever or die trying!

Thanks Larry!

Thanks for the suggestion of John Michael Godier, I'm really enjoying his channel.

Option #1 makes me sleepy and I have to drink two cups of coffee to get through his videos. But in addition to Sixty Symbols I would recommend another sister channel, Periodic Videos. Another good one Harran does is Objectify where he digs around the Royal Society's collection for artifacts like Newton's original telescope.

Great suggestions, thanks!

I really want to do an episode all about what it would take to get a base on the Moon. I'll count this as another vote.

Generally you need some kind of event to collapse the hydrogen cloud in on itself, just a supernova shockwave. We did an episode on quark stars. The next step is black holes: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/frJ7ltJo1amYoX0.html

Fraser Cain Yeah I know cause I watched this video when it just got uploaded(Btw you're doing some great videos tbh,keep it up).But what if this neutron star somehow can dig a way to the sun core will it remain living there since it's theoretically possible ?

What do you think would happen?

I've paused it at 1:43 and I'm seeing a still shot of Fraser talking. What am I looking for?

Awesome, let me know what you do with it. :-)

The Goat I want it too xD

Its great, but its been done, to farcical effect in futurama. LoL The ''space train'' used a prism as a switch to split the track & send carriages on different colours! It was awesome! But I agree with the concepts importance...cant wait!

Yup, the Orion Nebula would never look any better than it does right now. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/lZ9-gLuqlqyvgHU.html

Fraser Cain Hah! I missed that video of yours. That is perfect! Love the "meat camera" bit.

Did you see that I did a collaboration with Sarah? I'll probably be doing another soon: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/odSnZJOg1Lune2g.html

indeed. That was actually how I found her channel. I was just spreading the word for those that might not have seen the episode. Socratica delivers their content in a very similar style to sarah. They also cover many other subjects, including computer science and videos on how to prep for tests and exams.

Great suggestions. :-)

I have. They did a great job dealing with the threat of a AI.

Nope, they're totally random.

MarineIguana this is interesting; is there a handedness to the spin of galaxies? I would guess no, but what if there was some sort of preference for clockwise? And it would depend on our perspective, too.

Clockwise and Anticlockwise don't really exist in space. It's all about perspective. Which side of the galaxy are you looking at?

Of the perspective of the North and South pole, of course! And by extension, the ecliptic.

Do all Stars rotate a galexy in the same direction.

We talk about this idea here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ptB2h86WnauVmnU.html

It's actually pretty close. Check out this article from Brian Koberlein: briankoberlein.com/2015/12/15/is-earth-gaining-mass-or-losing-mass/

Cool. Thanks for the reply and keep up the good work!

Yeah, I should have addressed the idea of just sending robots with life seeding capabilities on board. Frozen lifeforms that could jumpstart future ecosystems.

Although some of those were added for convenience and dealing with the limits of the game engine. Ion drives in SE are way more powerful than should be possible for the energy input and their fuel is abstracted. RL ions are throwing mass out the back of the ship even if they are sipping fuel compaired to conventional rockets. SE ones they dont bother with fuel just the electricity(although the hydrogen thrusters are more like traditional rockets). They were made that powerful for game balance because who would want to spend a week accelerating their mining ship to reach that asteroid orbiting 1km away from where you started. Artificial gravity in SE runs on magic space pixy dust, they just wanted a way for players to walk around on ships. The engine isnt optimized for handling spin gravity and originally there were no planets or magnetic boots. the fact that you can setup gravity drives with the things, literaly hauling yourself up by your bootstraps violates so many laws of physics it isnt funny :P The jumpdrives same reason as the OP ions. they are just a convenience thing for traveling long distances quickly. Agian this was mostly to get around game engine limitations. They had to have a speed cap to keep things from breaking too badly. Instead of allowing players to reach relative speeds of 100's of KM/s and breaking the physics engine they added jump drives. Coasting at the default speed cap its around half an hour to travel 200km. Most of the rest of SE tech is fairly reasonable if you accept that the nity gritty bits are abstracted. IRL your not going to assemble an LCD just by shoving the components in a pile and pointing a welder at it for a minute but it makes sense from a game play standpoint. You've got your reactors and solar panels for power, you've got refinery and assemblers (3d printer) for making components for what you want to build. You've got tanks for O2 and H2 to use as needed. Some of the stuff is more advanced than today's tech but not so much that we couldn't expect to have it in a century. Really only the jumpdrive, gravity gen, and the OP thrusters are improbable.

It can't collapse it completely, just deform it and change it. The next episode is all about the Van Allen Belts, so stay tuned.

You would see Earth as it was 4.3 years ago, then you'd return back home and see it as it is now.

correction: The Science Asylum is the name of the channel. i for the "the" part. : ]

No, they're made of gas and ices, so they wouldn't have a solid landmass.

I've been a space journalist for almost 20 years now, and I started doing the Astronomy Cast podcast about 10 years ago. Doing video has always fascinated me, and I knew it was the future of science communication so I just kind of forced myself to start figuring it out. If you go back to the beginning, you can see us learning how to make these videos. :-)

Well said.

Well, it will work on the same principle, but it won't be a generational ship. Just a ship.

Here's a video we did that explains this exactly: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/otCnjbCK3p-XYKc.html

Well, I knew that the Moon's orbit is at an angle, which is why we don't get an eclipse every month (in fact, I asked this same question in freshman science many many moons ago, and my teacher didn't know... this was before you could simply look things up online). But my question is about the periodicity of eclipses, or the seeming lack thereof. Is there ANY periodicity at all to solar eclipses?

Yup, they can provide transportation and communications.

I'm glad you enjoyed Vancouver. :-) Once the new asteroid surveys have been completed, we'll have a much more comprehensive understanding of what's out there. I'll bet we'll find many many more objects of "concern". 1.9 million miles is nothing. Way beyond the orbit of the Moon.

I don't think so. Then you just ask, where are all the alien robots?

That's fantastic, let me know when you're done, maybe we can do an episode on lunar colonies.

I think self-sufficiency is worth investigating, but I also think part of the magic of human society is that we can specialize, take advantage of trade, automation, etc. I just spent 4 days hiking in the Canadian wilderness, and spending an hour a day to collect and purify our own water got really old. :-)

Great point! And, I do agree. I dream of a world where we each work to improve society by playing the part we can given the skills, knowledge, and passions that we have. If every single one of us, every single day, had to do everything, we wouldn't get much of anywhere. My comment was meant specifically in the context of sudden, extreme change where the exchange of our specialized skills / products might be disrupted. :)

Thanks a lot! I typically do the QA episodes off the top of my head and in one take. I occasionally give an answer I don't like and redo it, but mostly you're just seeing my stream of consciousness. For the regular episodes, they're prewritten scripts and I'm reading from a teleprompter. I make a few mistakes on those but we go back and redo a few paragraphs for easier editing.

So a total pro then :D keep up the great work!

You'd still need 4 turns, even if you went billions of light-years away.

How can we be so confident that the Universe is flat. Even if the Entire visible Universr is flat it could be an enomoly. If you envision time as a spacial dimension as in a black hole T could equal distance from creation. (Big Bang, Bounce, budding off fatherverse, etc.) More likely it would be a White hole or something similar. This model would explain a lot of observations (Dark energy, Dark matter, and maybe the relationship between super massive black holes and the surrounding Galexies.) Of corse other questions would be even more numerous. Is time really progressing or does our consciousness travel a path. Would time travel be possible of you traveled fast enough. Time travels slower as you approach light speed

A capabilities-driven human space program, a lander for Europa, a space telescope capable of detecting extrasolar life, an asteroid redirection mission, and a rotating space station.

The laser relay could work for communications too. It would do double duty. :-)

Maybe, we talked a bit about this idea of marsiforming ourselves. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e5txmLuema-UnGw.html

Yeah, we can't get very far yet. Literally 1 generation. :-)

the reason they can go 30 years is the entire core is weapons grade uranium. IE U-235 98%. 300 tons in CVN-78.

Владимир Кузнецов Yes! I love that channel.

If we get to the point that we've got a visible ring, then we've got a problem. Scientists already track tens of thousands of pieces of space junk on various orbits. It's not all on a perfectly equatorial location.

We talked about this a little bit in our episode about Fast Radio Bursts, about what it would take. The problem would be slowing it down once you got to Tau Ceti. I think we'll need to start with traditional trajectories to get the laser relays out to other stars before we can use the lasers themselves to accelerate and decelerate spacecraft between worlds.

Fraser Cain I just like to think that there's a way to slow down something from a very high velocity using gravity assist. Even if it takes 10 years and hundreds of dollars flybys, it would be worth it to have it there. I should write a book about the first time we do it... 😀

I just imagine that AI will eventually be good enough to work out how to use gravity assist and hundreds of orbits to slow down from 0.1c. Even if it takes a decade just to slow down, it'll be worth it to have it there. We could speed up later probes even faster as long as we had sufficient power to slow them down. I should write a short story about that...😀🤔

The limit is the speed of light, you can't hit it, but you can get to 99.9999999999...% of it. In fact, we can accelerate particles to that speed in places like CERN. If you could actually go that fast, the time dilation does some really crazy things. Check this out: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/atqahJugndCRf2w.html

if that's true I'd love to hear Fraser explain it ;)

Lifespan is the factor that maybe most yielding given the revolution in genetic modification. A person that can live for 10 000 years can take a 100 or even a 1000 years for a trip into the blackness.

Harambe's Ghost I completely agree!

Have you seen this episode? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rt-be9h60qi1YKM.html

Fraser Cain - Ahhh I missed this one somehow. Right now in Kerbal Space Program, i'm using a mod called realism overhaul that supposedly turns the game into something that is supposed to match reality. Engines, fuels, materials all that jazz. And with this I've been working on a single staged vehicle. And like in your video that you just linked to me, it is quite a challenge. So keep doing what you're doing and stay awesome.

I think there have been a few vehicles built that could theoretically get to orbit in one stage if they were carrying no payload. So, not that useful. In order to make a useful SSTO we need to either have engines with greater ISP but still high thrust or improve mass fraction with lighter structural materials. Problem is we're pretty close to the limits of current technologies in both areas today. Maybe with nuclear thermal rockets or nanotech materials we could.

We just wouldn't see any stars. We'd see a black sky.

That's known as "the Control Problem". How do you give an AI a goal without suffering unintended consequences. Some of the smartest people in computers are trying to think through this problem.

I hadn't heard of it, but I checked it out. James Oberg investigated it, and didn't find anything - I trust him as a journalist.

I think you'll still need a rocket, although there are some alternatives to rockets. Check out this video we did: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/g81hm6ln0dOpnGQ.html

I'm sorry but for everything that you say gives me so many more questions. I'm not trying to be super knowledgeable or anything but I find so many more things to ask. I am grateful that you take the time to answer even if sometimes you may think that my questions are dumb.

I guess you can think of the Earth as a generational ship.

+Fraser Cain - yep. The whole solar system is already traveling to another part of the galaxy - we just aren't steering it (yet). Smaller versions are also possible - a space colony with a small asteroid worry of resources can be completely self-sufficient for millions of years whether it stays in the solar system or not.

It's just the distances and timeframes involved. Our best technology would still take tens of thousands of years to get to another star system.

Fraser Cain with are current technology I agree. But if solar sails or something works out it could change to a couple hundred. And if we can make the ship a nice enough place I think people would want to go

Also just thought I'd thank you for doing this show I've learned a lot from you

The biggest problem is having children in space. Have you ever tried to child proof your house? Imagine a daycare on a 747 flying for 8 hours from New York to London and having nobody with any living experience as to what might happen if you open a door midflight. Imagine child proofing a structure where if anybody opens the wrong door you all die.

Great suggestion on Ridddle, thanks!

i hope the nazis from the dark side of the moon kidnap you for forcing me to read a notification :,( oh and they have the same channel in russian with the same name but with even more videos