Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can we engineer the sun?

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Daniel and Kelly exercise their optimism and explore engineering solutions to the Sun's projected overheating and demise.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. On the podcast health stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. I'm Dr. Priyanko Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane de Bolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I Have Scurvy at 3 a.m? And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way, like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type two?

Extremely. Listen to Health Stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, The Texas Teen Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies. in the history of business. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline is.

The most Texas story ever. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcasters, it's time to get the recognition you deserve. The IHeart Podcast Awards

are coming back in 2026. Got a mic? Then you've got a shot. Every year, we celebrate the most creative, compelling, and game-changing voices in podcasting. Is that you?

Submit now at Iheartpodcastawards.com for a chance to be honored on the biggest stage in the industry. Deadline December 7th. This is your chance. Let's celebrate the power of podcasting and your place in it. Enter now at iHeartpodcastawards.com. so far, living on this tiny spinning rock at just the right distance from an enormous ball of plasma. It keeps us warm, but not too warm. And it's been stable enough to give us time to evolve to develop technology and science and understand our fragile place in the universe. And is there also time for us to intervene in the sun's eventual demise? Can we develop the technology

and massive engineering capacity to keep the sun from going red giant and frying the whole planet? That's the cosmic question we're tackling today. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily engineered universe. Hello, I'm Kelly. I study parasites and space, and I'm looking forward to putting on my skeptical face today. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm going to be optimistic about our ability to preserve the future of humanity today. Oh, why you got to make me sound like such a wet blanket? Because you love it, Kelly. You love it.

It's the most comfortable feeling for me, I guess. All right, so let's start with another amazing engineering project for our intro question here. So do you think we should terraform Mars? Wow. That feels like a trap to me. You brought up this amazing geoengineering stuff. That's true. No, you're right. Compared to what we're talking about today, terraforming Mars is like just a warm-up exercise. There you go. I think that we should first figure out if Mars has life on it before we go in and muck it up with our kind of life, because wouldn't it be incredible to discover Martian life that evolved independently, that started from nothing independently,

or if it weirdly has something in common with Earth life so we could have some sort of like mini-panspermia, I feel like the scientific consequences would be amazing and be ashamed to muck that all up by just dropping a million people on Mars too soon. But that's a pretty extensive project. Once we're done with that, though, then yeah, I think if we have the capacity and the resources and we've thought it through, then I do think it's a reasonable place to extend humanity. What do you think? Where am I wrong?

Oh, I don't think you're wrong in any of the things that you just said. I guess I'm more thinking about how we would go about terraforming Mars. One of the things that surprised me when a city on Mars came out, which, available in paperback now, was that the geology community felt like we hadn't spent enough time talking about how Mars is a like unique geological treasure and we shouldn't be going out there and mucking it up. From a scientific perspective, like answering geological questions? I think that was part of it. But I think there was also a bit of a thread of a like, well, we've messed up a lot of stuff about our planet.

We shouldn't let people go out and mess up another planet. And I, you know, I see their point. And I particularly see their point when you hear about terraforming arguments that go something along the lines of let's dump a bunch of nuclear weapons on the poles at Mars to release a bunch of water vapor, which will then create a greenhouse effect and will warm up the planet and will create an atmosphere that would be more hospitable to human life, blah, blah, blah. I think I'm not super excited about dropping nuclear weapons on Mars, is what I'm saying. Especially because to get an FCO2 to warm up the planet, you'll create an atmosphere

which is toxic to humans anyway. And so, like, yeah, there's a lot of challenges there. And so I guess my answer is like, assuming we can solve a lot of these really big engineering challenges because in today's episode we're going to think really big and really broad about like mega engineering engineering that would impress visiting aliens that's what we're talking about today well well i guess if you're an alien civilization that made it all the way to earth you maybe wouldn't be impressed with what we've done but i am personally impressed with the extent to which we have molded the planet to meet our needs but anyway there are lots of moments of awe you know

every time i like drive across the golden gate bridge i'm like wow yeah humans built this and it's still here, like decades later, it's pretty impressive. Or every skyscraper or, frankly, the COVID vaccine. I'm like, wow, look what we can do. So, yeah, humanity's done a lot of impressive stuff. But it's just the beginning, you know, the kinds of things that we might do, the challenges we might take on, the solutions we might engineer, really are almost limitless.

We are only getting started, which is why we need to make sure that our species persists for a very long time. So today we're going to be talking about how we can, engineer the sun to keep our species going for much longer. That's right, because one of Mars terraforming proponents is always saying that Earth is going to get fried in a few billion years anyway when the sun expands and goes red giant. And so not only do we need to have outposts on Mars, but we've got to get interstellar. And so today we're going to be talking about exactly that scenario.

Is it possible to engineer the sun using a technique called starlifting to prolong our time in the habitable zone? So, as usual, I went out there to ask our audience if they knew something about starlifting. Here's what they had to say. What is starlifting? Is that when you go to the gym and you see someone famous and you pick them up? No, that can't be it. Maybe it's something to do when a star is about to go supernova and the core is starting to burn carbon and getting into iron.

Maybe the layers start to lift off and that's starlifting? I have no idea. Well, that is that new show that is airing on NBC at 7 o'clock on Thursday nights, where big movie stars compete in weightlifting competition. And it's intense, and I'm ready. I'm really looking forward to seeing it. I have not heard of starlifting, but a star lift sounds like it could be a fun ride at an amusement park. Amazing answers, as always.

And if you want to contribute your amazing, amazing answers. Write us at questions at Daniel and Kelly.org and we'll add you to the list of folks who get these questions ahead of time. I love the, uh, when you go to the gym and see someone famous response. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I heard that Dwayne the Rock Johnson also lives in Charlottesville. And sometimes if you go to the gym, you will see the rock. How often is that happen to you, Kelly? Oh, zero times. Zero time. I don't think he goes to the YMCA. He probably goes to a better gym than I.

go-to. But, you know, another good reason to work out, I guess. Why doesn't he live in L.A.? I thought he would be an L.A. I think that he's probably part-time L.A., part-time, the better coast, you know, like you're in California when you have to be, but in Virginia when you have a choice, that sort of thing. Virginia is for lovers of Virginia. So there you go. Oh, Virginia is for everyone. All right. So Starlifting is an engineering technique to solve a very particular problem. So before we get into the solution, I thought it would be helpful to introduce what is the problem we're solving anyway. That's right. And fortunately for me, I won't get too mired in existential dread because the timeline here is way off in the future.

But let's go ahead. Tell us about the future of the sun. Why won't the sun last forever? The sun won't last forever because it's in frankly a delicate balance. It's amazing to me that stars last as long as they do. I mean, there's this incredible balancing act between gravity, which is pulling the star together and trying to collapse it down, and fusion, which is creating heat and energy and pushing the star out. And these two forces, which are fundamentally very,

very different, right? Fusion uses the quantum mechanical strong nuclear force. Gravity, of course, uses curvature of space. We don't even know how to unify these things. Conceptually, they're very different pillars of physics, but here they come together and they dance together nicely for billions and billions of years. right? In the heart of the star, you have incredible pressure and temperature. And so hydrogen gets squeezed together to form helium, which releases heat. When light elements fuse together, you release heat. And when heavy elements break apart, that's fission that also releases heat. So in the heart of a star, it's sort of like a constantly exploding nuclear bomb that's generating all of this energy to prevent the star from collapsing.

I think that's where your beautiful dance metaphor kind of falls apart. I don't usually think of beautiful dancing involving explosions of a nuclear type. Well, that's why it's so incredible. Imagine a constantly exploding nuclear bomb that you're keeping in a gravitational bubble, right? And if you compress it too much, it's going to go out. It's going to turn into a black hole. If you don't compress it enough, it's going to blow itself apart. And so it's really amazing.

And the outcome for these stars depends almost entirely on how much mass you have. Like, if you don't have a lot of mass, you end up with a red dwarf, a smaller star. and the heart of it is lower temperature and lower pressure, and so the rate of fusion is lower, and so these stars are dimmer and cooler, which is why they're called red dwarfs, or a much bigger star is like a blue giant, and these are hotter at their core, and they fuse a lot faster, and the peak of their glow is at a higher frequency, which is why they're called blue giants. But those stars, the bigger, more massive stars, fusion happens much more rapidly, and so they

burn through their fuel. So there's this really tight relationship between the mass of the star and how long it's expected to live. Smaller stars are cooler and they can burn for billions, maybe even trillions of years. Red dwarves are very, very long lasting. Whereas bigger stars don't burn for very long because they burn so hot and so fast. Like if you look at a population of stars, you can tell how old the population is by how many big blue stars there are. It's got a bunch of big blue stars, you know it's got to be pretty young. because they don't last very long.

As galaxies eight, they turn redder and redder because all the blue stars burn out. And where is our sun on the gradient from itty-bitty stars to big stars? Our star is not one of the biggest stars in the universe. The limit is around 300 times the mass of the sun. A star bigger than that will have fusion so terrifyingly powerful, it will tear itself apart and it'll become smaller.

But our star is bigger than the average star. So the most common star is a red dwarf. that's like the median star in the universe, our star is bigger than that. So it's a bigger, hotter star than it's typical. And its lifetime is expected to be about 10 billion years. And we're halfway through that. So we've got another 5 billion years. Oh, man.

What do you think a midlife crisis looks like for a sun? It's talking to all the other stars. It's wondering like, hey, do I have the right number of planets? Should I have accomplished more by this point? Have I dealt with that knacking and. on my third planet, you know, I really should snuff that out before it takes over. No, no, let us go. Let us go. We're going to save you in the long run. Baby, we'll see. Or at least we're going to tinker with you. Okay. So we're halfway through.

We're halfway through. And the future, the second half of the Sun's life is going to be quite different from the first half. What's going to happen is that as fusion progresses, it forms helium. And that helium is heavier than hydrogen. So it sinks to the core. So instead of just being like basically a huge ball of hydrogen, you're going to get helium core, like the ash from the fusion, sinks and goes to the core. But our star is not hot enough to fuse that helium. Like if it was hotter and denser, you could fuse helium together, three of them together to get carbon. But we can't do that. Our star is just not hot enough. So the helium is sort of inert. And it blocks fusion from happening. But before that, because it's denser, increases the temperature at the core of the star,

which makes the sun hotter. So our sun is gradually getting hotter and hotter. Whereas its core gets denser and denser because of the helium that sinks there. Roughly every 100 million years, the sun gets 1% brighter. So the gas that makes us sound like this is going to be one of the things that like ends our species. That's not funny. Helium's supposed to be funny. I know. If it makes you sound like a chipmug, it should be funny.

But also chipmunks can be quite deadly. You know, yeah, they could take over the whole planet. They carry the bubonic plague. Well, their fleas do. Yeah, in New Mexico, actually. Home with a flea land of the plague, we call it. all right there's some new mexico pride for you so yeah the sun is gradually getting brighter and in a few billion years the sun will be 40 percent brighter and this is why people say like the sun is going to boil

off the oceans because in a couple billion years the global average temperature is going to rise to a hundred degrees sea right where the oceans will boil and so this is just a natural progression of the sun it's going to get brighter and brighter and brighter the sun itself is not getting that much hotter, but it is getting brighter. And the outer layers are going to grow because as the core accumulates helium, then fusion moves further out, right? You can't have fusion at the ash helium core, so you start getting fusion in the outer layers. And that puffs up the sun, and that's what makes it become a red giant. And it doesn't just puff it up a little bit. We're talking about the radius of the sun growing from its current radius to 200 times its current

radius. Okay, so I'm starting to feel the existential dread bubble up. I didn't think this was going to happen. But we only have one to two billion years, even though Earth is middle age, before our oceans boil. But I'm betting that we all die long before the oceans boil, because it takes a lot of heat to get the oceans to boil. You mean me and you? Are you talking about, like, me and you and all of our descendants? It would be our descendants at that point. Yeah, so how long before Earth becomes uninhabitable? Yeah, that's a great question. That's just a few hundred million years, right, because the temperature on the surface of 100 C is intolerable, obviously, right? It's a pretty good approximation that every 100 million years you get 1% brighter, it's roughly

linear. And so, yeah, it's going to be a few hundred million years. It's going to be much hotter than it is now. Definitely, we're talking climate change for sure. So this is something we're going to have to adapt to well before the oceans boil or the outer layers of the sun consume the earth. All right. We've got time to figure this out, but I'm still not loving it. not cool sun and so the crucial things to understand there for our later conversation is what's driving the sun to get hotter and to get bigger and that's the mass of the sun right if the sun were smaller then it wouldn't do this as quickly it would burn a lot lot longer right because the core would be cooler and it wouldn't fuse as fast and it wouldn't accumulate as much helium and it

wouldn't push the layers out and it wouldn't get hotter and brighter and so that's the thing that's driving the sun to basically vanish our habitable zone. All right. So mostly I care about what happens to me, and I'm going to die before the Earth. Well, my ancestors will die before the Earth gets consumed by the Sun. But let's say I still care about the Earth even when there's no humans there anymore. Is it going to actually get engulfed by the Sun, like swallowed up? Yeah, this is something you hear in Pops Eye all the time.

And it's not clear because there's a lot of small effects here that could change the answer. So for example, as the sun in its last little bit is blowing out and its radius is really growing rapidly, it's also losing some mass because it's puffing out so much. It doesn't contain all of that. A lot of this plasma just shoots off into space. And because it loses mass, it loses gravity. And so the sun's pull on the earth gets weaker. So the Earth's orbit is going to drift further out. And so rather than just staying at the same place, it's going to drift out as the sun grows and lose. some of its mass. And so people have done modeling to answer the question, are we going to escape the outer layers of the sun? It's sort of a silly question because, like, it doesn't really matter if you're in the sun or right next to the sun. Like, in either way, can you survive?

But, you know, just from a sort of, like, academic question, it's fascinating. You don't want to be even, like, a little bit engulfed. But it looks like the Earth might just sort of, like, skip over the outer atmosphere of the sun, the radius of its orbit growing with, the radius of the sun. Could we keep ourselves in good shape by just sort of like nudging earth farther away and closer to stay at exactly the right temperature throughout this

whole process? You could try to do that to move further out. And you know, you want to stay far enough away for the sun for sure, not just because it's going to be hot, but because if you are anywhere near the atmosphere of the sun, then you're going to be losing kinetic energy because you're flying through the atmosphere. This is going to be friction. You're going to fall into the sun. bad. But anyway, if you wanted to engineer just the Earth, the simpler thing is to move the Earth's orbit. There are things you could do to build a huge planet rocket to move the Earth out, this kind of stuff. But it's a bit of a crapshot because the whole solar system is going

to be very chaotic. Like when you lose mass of the Sun, you're also weakening the Sun's grip on Jupiter. Jupiter's going to drift further out. It's going to interact with Saturn. That's going to be a chaotic mess. And the chances that we can like predict that and navigate through Jupiter and Saturn, like having a big argument and cluttering of the whole solar system, very unlikely. We think that that happened in the past that Jupiter and Saturn went into the inner solar system and then back out again and maybe ejected another gas giant from the solar system. So there could be like a lost sibling planet out there floating and frozen in space, feeling rejected, having been literally you rejected. And so the solar system is going to get very chaotic if we let the sun do this.

And I think it would be pretty hard not just to move the planet, but to figure out how to move it and how to protect it against Jupiter's craziness. I wish I had felt more optimistic during our episodes on interstellar travel. I think I'd like to just skip all of this. Just leave town when all of this problem starts. All right. So let's take a break. And when we get back, let's talk about how we can engineer the sun so we can avoid this situation altogether. Hey there, Dr. Jesse Mills here. I'm the director of the men's clinic at UCLA Health. And I want to tell you about my new podcast called The Mailroom.

And I'm Jordan, the show's producer. And like a lot of guys, I haven't been to the doctor in many years. I'll be asking the questions we probably should be asking, but aren't. Because guys usually don't go to the doctor unless a piece of their face is hanging off or they've broken a bone. Depends which bone. Well, that's true. Every week, we're breaking down the unique world of men's health, from testosterone and fitness to diets and fertility and things that happen in the bedroom. You mean sleep?

Yeah, something like that, Jordan. We'll talk science without the jargon and get you real answers to the stuff you actually wonder about. It's going to be fun, whether you're 27, 97, or somewhere in between. Men's Health is about more than six packs and supplements. It's about energy, confidence, and connection. We don't just want you to live longer. We want you to live better. So check out the mailroom on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success. about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly.

The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head.

We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk, and they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast.

On the podcast health stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I have scurvy at 3 a.m.? On health stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health, but also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes.

In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are. Oh, it's hard to explain. to rest of the world that you, like, your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible, but, like, you don't even know. You don't know.

You don't know. It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in. Listen to health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas planes, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange acts.

and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Daniel has scared the pants off of all of us. We're going to burn up or we're going to fall into the sun,

but we're probably not going to actually fall into the sun. We're just going to be in its hot atmosphere layers. Anyway, we're dead. So, Daniel, how do we avoid this whole we die in billions of years thing? We turn to the engineers and we ask them, hey, can you solve this problem? We think we understand enough of the physics. of the sun to figure out when it's going to grow and get hotter.

And so in principle, we should be able to engineer a solution. And there was a paper in the 80s by a guy named David Criswell coined this phrase star lifting to imagine that maybe we could prevent the sun from getting so big and so hot by making it more like longer lasting stars by making it smaller. That's why it's called starlifting. It's like take stuff off of the sun. Essentially, could we go in and take a big scoop off of the sun? And this is a little bit delicate because you don't want to turn the sun like into a red dwarf.

A red dwarf is cooler and then the earth wouldn't be in the habitable zone anymore. What do you want to do is scoop off just enough to keep the sun from getting too big and too hot. So it sort of like maintains the same temperature throughout its lifetime and lasts a lot longer. Removing some mass would lower the pressure at the center as the helium accumulates. And so that's the sort of basic idea. It was revived in 2017 in a paper by Greg Matloff. And then a couple of years ago, a really interesting paper by Matt Skagins and David Kipping dug into the details of exactly how you would do this. And so I thought it would be fun to talk about this engineering task and whether it's possible at all.

First of all, this is fascinating. I will note that when you started introducing the topic, you said a lot of we think and presumably. And I feel like before we start tinkering with the sun, we should be like, we are sure about. and it is absolutely the case that. But presumably these papers had all the right qualifiers in them, and this is just getting the conversation started. Yeah, this is definitely, let's have a first conversation about whether this is possible at all,

not let's have a policy discussion about whether we understand the risks and decide whether the balance of risk and reward is a good one, which we definitely should have before we do anything like this, the same way that we should before we do any geoengineering. But it's still reasonable to say, say, hey, what is possible? And these papers are just like the very first steps towards what is possible.

As you'll hear, like, the solutions are so outrageously expensive and elaborate that they aren't anything we could hope to imagine doing in the next few centuries. But, you know, scientists and engineers a few centuries from now, we'll be glad that we thought through some of the details here to make their work easier. But you're right. The policy question is separate. Okay, yeah, I don't know. That sounds like wimp talk to me.

Let's just... And so, yeah, I'm not advocating for any of these things, right? I just, I think it's fun to think so big and to imagine what's possible. And, you know, the same way I'm, like, awestruck by what humans have built, I'm awestruck to imagine what we might build. But, of course, yes, we do have to do it carefully. Just because you want to drill a hole through the center of the earth and drop a ball through and see what happens, doesn't mean that you should. Yeah, that's right. I really like your approach to engineering.

Think it through first. All right, so let's talk about the first proposal for how you would do this. Yeah, so there's a few ideas. One is called the thermal-driven method. And the idea is to tap into something that's already happening, which is the solar wind. The sun is already shedding mass. It's a huge ball of plasma in space, and it's mostly confined by gravity. But the atmosphere is one of the hottest parts of the sun.

And so it's constantly shooting off particles. You know, yes, photons, obviously, we're absorbing those. and we enjoy those on a sunny day, but also protons and electrons. That's what we call the solar wind. And if you're out there in space as an astronaut, this is the kind of thing you have to be wary of because for you, it's radiation. Very high-speed particles shooting out from the sun, fill all of space. So don't imagine space as empty. One of our episodes about interstellar travel talks about the dangers of radiation in space, and it's serious. And this is where it comes from. It comes from the sun. And then, of course, other suns and black holes and all sorts of stuff out there in space.

generate wind, and by wind, we don't mean air molecules. We mean high-speed particles. So one idea is, can we enhance that? Can we get the sun to shed more of its mass to crank up the solar wind? Okay, wow. So the fact that we're proposing that we're going to heat up the sun sounds incredible to me. How can we make a dent in the hottest thing that we know about? But go ahead. Let's see. What are proposals for making the sun even hotter? And it doesn't sound like the kind of thing you'd want to do, right? The whole problem we're trying to solve is that the sun is going to get too hot. So somebody comes along and says, the solution to making it too hot is to make it hotter? Hold on a second. Am I in a solar engineering conference or

an insane asylum or both? Could be some overlap in those communities. Exactly. Choose your venue carefully. The idea is not to heat the core of the sun, but to heat the atmosphere. This is where the solar wind happens, right? It's the outer layers of the sun that are super crazy hot, super high energy particles that reach escape velocity from the sun. So instead of heating up the core, you want to heat up the atmosphere, which will help strip the sun of some of these particles. So all you're going to do in this case is basically reflect the sun back at itself. So imagine building a bunch of mirrors, which just reflect the sun's light back to the sun. Now it will heat up the sun's atmosphere. You know, it's sort of like

putting a fire in an insulated box will help make the fire hot. Whereas if you don't, then the heat from the fire bleeds out into the atmosphere. And so if you have these mirrors or you have solar panels which gather the energy and then beam it back, you could heat up spots on the sun's atmosphere. Okay. All right. And I think I'm just being too picky because if you put a fire in an insulated box, it's going to run out of oxygen and burn out, right? No, you're right. Yeah.

But we understand what's happening with the sun better. We're not going to snuff out the sun accidentally. I'm not impressing you with my level of detail here. I'm like, Daniel, please don't put out the sun. Come on, engineers. Do better. You don't want to wake up one morning and get an email from Daniel. Bad news, I accidentally put out the sun last night.

Well, and as we discussed in a prior email, that would be a high information email. Yes, that would be surprising. That would be a good lesson in shin and entropy. So at least you gain something, right? That's right. I'm sure everybody would be thrilled. No, you're right. That analogy is not perfect for that reason.

But in this case, you're either just having huge mirrors to reflect energy back from the sun to heat up spots on its atmosphere, or you have some more complicated system where you're absorbing the energy using like photovoltaic cells, and then you're beaming the energy back using like microwaves. Do you remember we once had a conversation about solar power in space? This is basically that same system. You have solar power, you generate energy, and then you build a beam. instead of beaming it to the earth surface where you're going to use it to charge your phone,

you're just beaming it to the surface of the sun to heat it up to make these hot spots. Okay. And this is going to buy us more time. This is going to buy us more time because it's going to create more solar flares. Like solar flares, or what we call solar weather, right, are moments when the sun has like a huge eruption of plasma, which then floats out into space and sometimes it like washes over the earth and causes incredible damage. There was this Carrington event in the 1800s where a huge solar flare lashed out and the earth basically went through a plasma plume and it like fried all the electronics

on the earth, which at the time, fortunately, we're pretty simple. So we had some fires from like telegraph wires going haywire. But if it happened now, it would be very, very bad. But what we're talking about now is creating hotspots on the surface of the sun, which would generate solar flare. So like huge strands of plasma floating out into space. And obviously, you don't want that happening in the direction of the Earth, right? You might be thinking, Daniel, again, now you're creating, like, bad things, right? Bad solar weather. It's bad for satellites.

It's bad for the Earth. It's bad for all these things. Why would you risk this? So the idea is, yes, you create these hotspots, and those hotspots create solar flares, and you get this plasma ejected, but then you try to guide it. So plasma is electrically charged, right? It's positive and negative. There are protons and there are electrons there.

So you build a huge magnetic field around the same. sun to guide all this stuff so it doesn't go along the ecliptic where the planets are like the sun's equator but it goes up to the poles okay and so then are we going to be in any trouble if we're not getting that stuff like will we cool down or will we just not get hit with radiation yeah that stuff would be bad and so it will cool the sun a little bit but that's the goal right we want to keep the sun from getting too hot so if we pull the stuff out of the sun by creating these hot spots having it spew it and then shepherd it up to the north and south poles we're safe because because we're not being blasted by these huge plasma strands,

and we're slowly reducing the mass of the sun, which is the whole goal. The goal is to take mass off of the sun. All right. So it seems pretty important that you get all of this stuff heading in the right direction because you don't want to accidentally spew a lot more radiation towards the Earth or a Mars settlement, if we ever get one. How do we control where this stuff goes? So this is my favorite part because it involves building a particle accelerator,

that goes all the way around the sun. So essentially, you need to build a magnetic field that pushes stuff towards the sun. And so to build a magnetic field, as we talked about in a recent episode, you need currents. You need moving electric charges. And so good to do this is to build a particle accelerator, which shoots particles around the equator of the sun. Or you have a few of these things stacked on top of each other, which basically shepherds this stuff up to the poles. And at the same time, you can enter a bunch of really important. fundamental physics questions because now you have a particle accelerator with an enormous radius

and super high energy. And boy, wouldn't that be awesome for other reasons? I wouldn't want to have to write that grant because I bet the money for the LHC was a tough sell. I mean, it's awesome, but I'm sure it was expensive. I can't imagine the price of this. I'm not even going to try to put dollars on this. I mean, the price of the next collider on Earth is going to be something like $50 to $100 billion. Wow. They're also crazy out there. proposals for a collider that runs along the equator of the moon, which would be awesome for some reasons and not so awesome for other reasons, but fun to think about, and also absurdly expensive. So yeah, collider that runs along the equator of the sun. I mean, I don't even know

what the scientific prefix is for those dollars. It's beyond trillions and quadrillions and quintillions, I'm sure. But, you know, we're talking about the future of humanity here. Finally, particle physics will be useful. Oh, well, we talked the other day about how particle physics gave us a new treatment for cancer. So it will be useful for a second time. Only those two, though. So this is one scheme to try to slurp some stuff off the sun. And then at the North and South Poles, you have these like magnetic nozzles which focus the stuff and gather it. And then you could actually like use it for something. This is raw material. Or if your goal is to like build

megastructures, a dice in sphere or other crazy engineering projects in your solar system, eliminating factors having enough stuff. Like you might say, I want to take Jupiter apart and use it to build a Dyson sphere. It might not be enough. And so just having raw material is important. And the sun is the biggest source of raw material in the solar system. I mean, the solar system is basically the sun plus, right? And we're like those little extra bits.

So gathering that stuff off the sun gives you an enormous amount of mass to play with to build other stuff. But it's in the form of gas when you collect it, right? It's in the form of plasma mostly. and you might think it's mostly hydrogen who really cares. Well, hydrogen's good for building stuff. And the sun has lots of other stuff in it that's not just hydrogen. Like, it's mostly hydrogen. It's 2% metals or something.

But it still has most of the iron in the solar system is in the sun. Most of the oxygen, most of the nickel, most of the basic building blocks, the silicon, are in the sun. Like the sun has 20 times as much of all those basic elements as Jupiter does. And it's distributed all through the sun because of, convection, you know, the plasma currents. And so if you are funneling mass off of the sun, then, yeah, you could slurp off an enormous amount of pretty useful basic ingredients for your other insanely expensive engineering projects. Yay. It's crazy all the way down. Crazy enables crazy. Thank goodness. So iron is getting ejected in the solar flares in the solar wind?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's mostly hydrogen, but it's a good mixture. I mean, iron is not being made in our sun, right? So it's not like it's only at the core. And if there is iron there, it's from previous rounds of stellar nucleosynthesis. And a lot of it does sink to the core because it's heavier. But also the sun is a big churning ball of plasma and this convection that brings stuff up, right? Also, the way that, you know, like diamonds are made inside the earth, but then convection brings stuff up to the mantle and to the surface. So, yeah, we could definitely get iron out of the sun.

I mean, definitely. You can't see definitely about anything about this project. It's like ridiculous upon ridiculous upon ridiculous. In theory, one could get iron out of the sun to build your other absurd projects. All right. So we're going to talk about at least one other proposal. Is this proposal that you just explained to us more or less crazy than the next one we're going to talk about? Ooh, boy.

That's a tough question. I think it's differently crazy. I mean, none of these are very realistic and all requirements. require all sorts of engineering problems that we don't know how to solve. But they're also fun to think about because, you know, they just make you think big. That's right. And when we get back, we will think big in a different way. Hey there, Dr. Jesse Mills here.

I'm the director of the men's clinic at UCLA Health. And I want to tell you about my new podcast called The Mailroom. And I'm Jordan, the show's producer. And like a lot of guys, I haven't been to the doctor in many years. I'll be asking the questions we probably should be asking, but aren't. Because guys usually don't go to the doctor unless a piece of their face is hanging off or they've broken a bone. Depends which bone. Well, that's true.

Every week, we're breaking down the unique world of men's health, from testosterone and fitness to diets and fertility and things that happen in the bedroom. You mean sleep? Yeah, something like that, Jordan. We'll talk science without the jargon and get you really. real answers to the stuff you actually wonder about. It's going to be fun, whether you're 27, 97, or somewhere in between. Men's Health is about more than six packs and supplements. It's about energy, confidence, and connection.

We don't just want you to live longer. We want you to live better. So check out the mailroom on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month. where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures.

What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding.

But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. we're embarrassed, we failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through.

So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk, and they were just like, so what do you got? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out Not My Best Moment with me, Kevin on stage, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, YouTube,

or wherever you get your podcast. On the podcast health stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka. Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m. On health stuff, we're talking about health in a different way.

It's not only about what we can do to improve our health, but also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are. Oh, it's hard to explain to the rest of the world that, like,

your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible, but, like, you don't even know. You don't know. You don't know. It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in. Listen to health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying, suicides that don't make sense, strange accidents, and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of breaking bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to paper ghosts, the Texas teen murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you. you get your podcasts. All right, we're back and we're thinking big about engineering projects.

We are engineering the sun today on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. We talked about one kind of nutso method. What method are we going to talk about next, Daniel? So the next method is called the Huff and Puff method, so that everybody takes it very, very seriously. No doubt. And the idea here is similar to what we talked about a minute ago, but earlier we were heating up specific spots on the sun to get it to eject mass.

Here we're going to basically try to pump the whole sun like bellows. And so you still build your particle accelerator around the equator. I mean, you got to have that, right? That's non-negotiable. What is science without a particle accelerator? Have you heard of this concept called the Overton window where like someone does something super extreme, yeah, to make what you're proposing seem less crazy. You're probably having some people pitch these ideas to the funders so that when you just

have something that's like $100 trillion or something, they'll be like, oh, the particle physicists are being less crazy today. You have revealed my secret scheme here, Kelly, today. I am shifting the Overton window. Well, I study animal behavior. This is basically the Calvin and Hobbs method, you know, where he asks his mom if you can have a flamethrower and she says no, and he says, can I have a cookie? She's like, sure.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right. So here you build a particle accelerator around the core, and, you know, this thing is kept in place by the magnetic field that it generates, which floats over the sun. But in this case, you can turn it on and off. So you turn it off, and all the components of the particle accelerator, which are not connected, it's not a big ring.

It's just components which shoot particles between them. All these components then fall towards the sun because of its gravity. Then you turn it back on, and it rise. rises back up again and pushes against the star. And so essentially this is like massaging the star. You like drop a magnetic ring around the star and then turn it back on and it pushes itself back out squeezing the star. So you do this over and over again and it like pumps the star's atmosphere moving mass up to the pole. So it's sort of like squeezing it, like massing it, kind of like bellows on the sun. And for anyone who didn't grow up in the Victorian era,

using bellows on their fireplace. Would you like to explain what a bellow is? Yeah, it's basically like a big fan, right? You squeeze it and it shoots a stream of air towards a useful spot on your fire to help blow it. It's sort of like leaning over the campfire and going, you know, but mechanically, how is that for an explanation of bellows? I think people are following us.

You're good. I wish people could watch the video because you are particularly animated in this episode. Like you've hit your microphone at least once as you gesticulate and enjoy at this engineering idea. Well, you know, sometimes we dig deep into like real physics and what we're learning about the universe. And sometimes we just have fun. Yeah. Well, I think we always just have fun.

But we're having a lot of fun today. Okay. So the idea is that you squeeze and when you squeeze, how do you control when you squeeze where the stuff goes? Yeah. So if you're squeezing at the equator, there's only one way you can go. It can go towards the poles. So then you've got to build another accelerator. So you have like a stack of these things that sort of like massage the mass as it goes up.

So you squeeze the equator, then you squeeze just above it and you squeeze just above it. You know, like a coordinated action here to sort of push the sun's atmosphere towards the poles. I mean, the whole thing sounds like, boy, how would you know that that works before you build it and try it? And what if it goes wrong? Yes. You know, that's the joy of like being the first person to think about something is you just get to think. about the big picture, and don't worry about details, like, is this going to destroy everything in the solar system?

Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty important detail. But so, how do you know you're not just moving around stuff the sun was going to make anyway, and you're actually increasing the amount of stuff that gets ejected or heating up the sun or whatever? How do you know you're accomplishing your goal instead of just moving stuff around? Yeah, great question. And, you know, they've done some simple modeling, and it really does suggest that either of these methods could eject more mass than you normally would, that a sun left.

to its own devices, would burn hotter and more briefly than a sun that's engineered in this way. And they did some calculations also to wonder, like, well, how much could you do? Like, are we talking about ejecting 10 protons or really a significant amount of stuff? And according to these calculations, you can eject about an Earth's worth of mass every 100 years. So that's not a tiny amount of stuff. Like, the Earth is a tiny fraction of the sun, but, you know, a century is a long time. and we're talking about timelines of millions or tens of millions of years. So that's a significant amount of stuff.

And if you just did it naively and extrapolated linearly, it could take apart the sun in, you know, 50 to 100 million years. Like the whole mass of the sun eventually could be extracted. Of course, once you get to like 10% of the mass of the sun being ejected, the whole system is going to change and everything is going to be cooler. And so you can't extrapolate linearly. But just to give you a sense of scale of how effective this is, it's not a tiny amount of mass that you're rejecting relative to the mass of the sun.

All right. So this is the amount of time it would take to take the sun apart, but I didn't know that that was our goal. I thought our goal was slowing down the destruction of the Earth. So how much time does this buy humans? Yeah, we do not want to take apart the sun. Absolutely not. Yeah.

What we want to do is gradually cool the sun so that it stays at the same temperature. Because remember, its natural progression is going to be to get hotter and hot. water as the core gets denser and then fusion moves to the outer layers. So that's where this paper from 2020 came in by Matt Skagins and David Kipping. They calculated how much mass would you have to remove from the sun every year in order to maintain that temperature to essentially move the sun from its natural arc at this mass down gradually to the arc you would expect for lower mass stars. You can imagine like the temperature progressions for individual stars, which started a certain

mass and red dwarves last a long time and stay at a lower temperature. Essentially, you want to step down from one progression to another. So they did this cool calculation, which suggested that what you want to do is remove about two to three percent of the mass of series. Series is a dwarf planet in our solar system. It's the largest thing in the asteroid built. It's like a big chunk of stuff. It's much smaller than the Earth. So like two to three percent of the mass of series, every century would accomplish this. So you don't have to take the sun apart. You don't want to take the sun apart.

The point of this calculation is, in principle, this technique has the capacity to remove plenty of mass, much more than we would need if we wanted to engineer the star for our safety. And to engineer the star for our safety, we only need to skim off a little bit of mass every hundred years or so

to avoid the sun-going red giant and frying us. So this paper wasn't necessarily advocating for either of the two methods. we talked about. It's just saying whatever method you use, you got to get two and a half percent the massive series every 100 years off the sun. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, exactly. And if you do that successfully, and there's lots of problems to solve between here and there. But in principle, you can have our son last a lot longer. So instead of having a 10 billion year life cycle, it could have a 20 billion year lifecycle. Oh, wow. So you're adding 10 billion years to civilization,

giving us a lot more time to find an alternative home for the Earth. Wow. Can we adjust this method so that we can get humans to live twice as long? This is pretty exciting. Yeah, I need to build a big particle accelerator to remove mass from Daniel. That's what I need to do. Always asking for money, Daniel. Always asking for money.

Yeah, and it's interesting to think about the alternatives. Like, if we lived around a red dwarf, then already the star would be last, a long, long time, you know, much longer than ours, hundreds of billions of years, maybe trillions, it's not really certain because the universe isn't old enough to have like a red dwarf cool and become a black dwarf. We've never seen that happen. But you can imagine having an even longer lived star. If you started, for example, from like an orange dwarf, which is something that has the mass of half of the sun, then there's enough mass there to play with because it can be hot enough to create a nice environment and have enough mass to lose

so it'll keep burning. Like, if you try to starlift a red dwarf, there's not really a whole lot of extra mass there. It'll just, like, go out. It's just above the threshold for fusion. But if you start with, like, a nice, toasty orange dwarf and then starlift it, the calculations in this paper suggest it might go for, like, a trillion years.

So we're already making plans for what happens when we go to different, like, solar systems and start tinkering with their stars. We are a very self-confident species. Yeah, this really is Project Icarus, right? Yeah, that's right, that's right. Okay, so we talked about how you're going to be, like, channeling all of this stuff to the poles, but does making it go to the poles instead of shooting directly at us

solve all of the problems we might experience from all of this extra, like, sun mass getting shot out into space? Not necessarily, because, number one, we can't guarantee that all of it's going to go to the poles, right? And on the whole, what you're going to do is increase the solar wind everywhere. If you have hotspots on the surface of the sun, you can channel a lot of it up, but magnetic fields are not perfect and some of it's going to escape. And so you're risking more radiation in space for our burgeoning solar system industry, right?

This whole context assumes we have a lot of space-based economy and people moving through space. And so increased stellar wind for that is going to be bad. And unless, of course, we develop some, you know, awesome radiation shielding technology, which maybe we could. Maybe that's a small problem compared to like lifting mass off of the sun. But, you know, it's not easy. And remember, we don't really understand the sun. Like, there's a lot we do know about the sun, but also a lot we don't. We don't even understand why its magnetic field flips every 11 years.

So there could be a lot of surprises here, a lot of things that don't go the way that we expect. And when things don't go the way we expect on the scale of a star, then it can be very bad. Yes, yes. High cost to human hubris in this case, I think. And even getting it a little bit wrong could increase bad solar weather in the solar system. We could basically make it impossible to move around the solar system. We'd just like get the star grumpy and it like takes a billion years to calm down. You know, like, oh my gosh. That's, you know, maybe unrecoverable. Okay. So I definitely want to read the sci-fi

novel written about this idea. But second, so it really seems to me that if you're going to take this task on, like first you send out the interstellar ships. And then you start tinkering. Like, We might kill everyone, so let's make sure that we send some human seed out into the universe. Right, right. Yeah, make a backup copy before you start playing with things at work. Exactly. Yes. That's a good strategy.

Basic tenet of computer programming, I'm guessing. Exactly. And, you know, the energy required to do this kind of stuff is vast, not just to build the particle accelerator or these solar-powered stations and beam energy back of the sun. But, you know, just like the energy involved in lifting. material out of the sun's gravitational well is huge because the gravity of the sun is huge and the earth is already almost too massive to launch off of using chemical rockets. And so we're talking about incredible scales of energy here. The good news is the sun has incredible scales of energy. So yes, you need enormous amounts of energy to beam back to the sun to heat it up and to

run this particle accelerator. But we're talking about the sun. So it outputs a lot of energy. You can just grab. But, you know, we're playing with enormous quantities here. And so again, like mistakes and miscalculations, the consequences of getting things wrong are just much bigger. Yeah. There's probably not enough material on Earth to build these things that you're talking about. Would we have to collect the material for these devices from other planets or from the asteroid belt? Or is there enough stuff on Earth? Am I totally wrong about this? You would definitely need a lot of material to solve this problem because you're, for example, gathering all this energy to shoot a back of the sun, then you're building huge solar power

collectors, not as massive as a dinosaur sphere or even like a sphere of people would want to live on, but still, it's a huge engineering project. I don't think you'd want to take chunks off the Earth, but like, you know, what is Mercury good for anyway? That's right. That's right. I'm sure every culture on Earth would be fine if you just disassembled Mercury. Although maybe if they were facing their own demise, they would be fine. Yeah. So, you know, we just launched like an AI probe to Mercury. We tell it to build a factory to make more of itself, to make solar power plants, which then power itself, and, like, hope that it continues following our instructions to build the sunlifter rather than launching, you know, an armada against Earth to take over.

That is the start to the sci-fi novel that I want to read about this, because I can absolutely imagine that going wrong. But, you know, I think the bigger picture here is that we often think about the cosmos as fixed. You know, number one, we think about the solar system. as always being the way that it is because it has been this way for a long time according to human timelines, you know, humans have always looked up at the stars and seen the same thing over the last tens of thousands of years. But on cosmic timelines, the story is different. The solar system has looked different and the sun will not last forever. And we don't have to think about it as fixed. It is possible for us to intervene, to change our fate. We don't just

have to lay down and take it. We can blow ourselves up instead. Oh, great. I mean, at At least you've got a little bit more control over the situation, and that feels good. That feels good. Yeah. Would that make you feel better if we all fry up due to an engineering mistake rather than just, like, getting crisp naturally? No. No, it wouldn't, especially if it sped the process up. But the good news is we have a lot of time, and if you invest in science, we can increase our certainty in these technologies and better understand how the sun works so that we can all save ourselves one day.

Exactly. So thank you for coming along in this ride, where we stretch the overall. and window for science funding out to trillions of dollars. I'm sure this is going to change everything for science funding. Bravo, Daniel and Kelly. I'm doing my best to be optimistic today. Yeah, all right. I like that.

All right, let's take that optimism with us outside the podcast. Hope everybody has a fantastic day. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K. Don't be shy. Write to us. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.

I'm Dr. Priyankawali, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dabolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m. And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way, like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type two? Listen to Health Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying.

Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history. History of Business. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline is. The most Texas story ever. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood, a Cuban musician with a dream, and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time? You get Desi Arness. On the podcast star in Desi Arness and Wilmer Valderrama, I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life, how he redefined American television, and what that meant for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and

Wilmer Valderrama on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.