Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Could we build a particle collider on the moon?

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Daniel and Katie talk about what such a huge collider could reveal, and whether it would be a good idea. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/lis...tener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System
Starting point is 00:00:33 On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.
Starting point is 00:01:01 Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From tips for healthy living to the latest medical breakthroughs, WebMD's Health Discovered podcast keeps you up to date on today's most important health issues. Through in-depth conversations with experts from across the health care community, WebMD reveals how today's health news will impact your life tomorrow. It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy. It's just that people don't know why it's healthy. And we're struggling to try to help people help themselves and each other.
Starting point is 00:01:39 Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, we're not going to choose an adaptive strategy, which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier, ignoring is easier, denial is easier, complex problem solving, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Daniel, how much did it cost to find the Higgs boson?
Starting point is 00:02:27 Hmm, well, do you want the answer in dollars, in euros, or in aircraft carriers? Is aircraft carriers a real unit of currency? Yeah, absolutely. The large Hajon Collider, for example, cost one aircraft carrier. Awesome. That sounds like a good deal. And so how much is that in dollars? It's about $13 billion per aircraft carrier.
Starting point is 00:02:51 Okay, now it's sounding a little bit out of my budget. And that's exactly why we quoted in aircraft carriers. Actually, maybe we should have made the collider cost like 0.99 aircraft carriers to make it sound cheaper. Sold. I'll take two. Did you want a plastic bag with that or did you bring you around? Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor. at UC Irvine. And I would love to go shopping for bigger colliders. And I'm Katie Golden. I'm the host of Creature Feature. And I'll always take my reusable bag when buying aircraft carriers' worth
Starting point is 00:03:40 of Hadron Colliders because I like to live sustainably. And welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe in which we aim to buy all of the knowledge in the universe. There's nothing out there we don't want to know. And we will encourage humanity to to spend, spend until we figure it out. We want to know what's on the inside of black holes. We want to know all about the soup that's in neutron stars. We want to understand the tiniest buzzing particles in the passage of time, the origins of the universe, and its final fate.
Starting point is 00:04:11 We dig into all of this on this podcast and explain all of it to you. My friend and co-host Jorge is not here today. So we are lucky to be joined by one of our favorite guest co-host, Katie. Katie, thanks very much for joining us today. Always a blast coming on here. sometimes literally. So Katie, what is the biggest thing you have put in a reusable bag? Ooh, that's a good question.
Starting point is 00:04:35 I mean, I want to go with like a huge supply of toilet paper is probably the most accurate answer. The heaviest thing probably be when I got like weights from the store and, you know, like exercise weights. And they're really heavy and I'm carrying them back to my apartment. And I'm thinking, this sucks. This is so heavy. But then when I just lift them voluntarily, it's like, this is great. This is exercise. But when I had to carry them back, that's when it sucked.
Starting point is 00:05:06 Well, I think that in our house, the thing that's most commonly put in bags are other bags. I don't know if you end up with this same scenario, but we have like bags stuffed with bags filled with other bags. And eventually we're like, why do we even have these bags if they're just to hold other bags? But you need bigger bags to hold the bags that are holding the small. smaller bags. It's like we're afraid will be caught out without the right size bag at some moment. So we end up just being like drowning in bags. I reorganized our garage the other weekend and I felt like it was about 50% just bags.
Starting point is 00:05:39 Maybe that's the true sort of gray goo that's going to overtake the earth is bags and bags and bags. Yes, I think so. When the aliens do come, they will find the remnants of our civilization buried in plastic bags. But I hope that we as a civilization can aim higher than just producing more plastic. bags or even sustainable bags, I hope that we can produce great works of science and technology. When I look at something like the Golden Gate Bridge, I think like, wow, go humans. Look what we have accomplished. Something that a single human could never build on their own.
Starting point is 00:06:12 But a bunch of people coming together and putting their brains to it and designing it and spending years and of course millions of dollars have accomplished something really incredible. And the same is true for some of our great science experiments. The International Space Station floating above the Earth, the large Hajon Collider underground. These are like enormous monuments to the human intellect, don't you think? Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking a sort of theme park on the moon where we have like a Golden Gate Bridge, maybe a statue of liberty. Would that be a good waste of our money? Or maybe we should do something a little more scientific?
Starting point is 00:06:47 Maybe we should take a bunch of bags and recycle them into a huge monument for humanity. I like that. What would you say are some of the great monuments to science in biology? Like what can you point to and say, look what we have built? I mean, when we're talking about biology, it's sort of on a very small scale, right? I feel like some of the greatest monuments to our knowledge in biology are the smallest things, like our ability to make vaccines and to have these really precise surgeries. So when it comes to biology, these really tiny little itty-bitty discoveries are the most incredible.
Starting point is 00:07:24 Things like a COVID vaccine, which can totally change the course of human history and save thousands or millions of lives, right? It is really incredible what biology has accomplished. Exactly, yeah. But with physics, sometimes you need to go big to even find the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest particle, right? Like, it seems like the smaller and more elusive the particle, the bigger the structure around it has to be to actually measure it. That's right. And that's the history of particle colliders. We started in the 50s with E.O. Lawrence in Berkeley building cyclotrons and these things, you know, like one or two meters around so the electrons could get up to what at the time felt like very high energies.
Starting point is 00:08:04 And then they just got bigger and bigger. And we had colliders all over the world. We had colliders in Chicago that were kilometers long. And now we have one in Geneva, which is tens of kilometers long. And people are talking about building even bigger colliders and bigger colliders. And so a fun question to consider is like, well, how big. can we go? Should we aim for like solar system size colliders, galaxy size colliders? Are there aliens out there that have already built galaxy size colliders? Are we part of an aliens collider? You know,
Starting point is 00:08:35 joking aside, there is a really fun mystery there because the earth is bombarded by very high energy particles from space, cosmic rays that nobody can explain. And one ridiculous but fun theory is that maybe it's pollution from alien particle physics experiments. Like somebody out there has built an ginormous collider and we're basically the beam dump. Is this an accident or maybe alien crimes? Or maybe it's messaging, right? They've built this collider to send these particles to us
Starting point is 00:09:08 to tell us the secrets of the universe and we just don't know how to decode it. Yeah, I mean, it would be something if we thought this was a message and then we just realized it's garbage from space that they've been shooting at us. But we don't just build these colliders bigger and bigger because we think it's fun and because we want to build larger and larger monuments to physics.
Starting point is 00:09:29 This isn't Ozymandias, right? We build these colliders larger and larger because the bigger the collider, the more it can tell us about the nature of the universe. You can think about these colliders, sort of like microscopes. The bigger the collider is, the smaller the thing it can see.
Starting point is 00:09:43 The more it can peer into the nature of matter and tell us like, what's really going on down there? What's inside the particles that we think are fundamental? Are there new particles out there? And so it's not just hubris. It's not just because we want to have a bigger collider than the next guy. It's because we really want to answer these questions about the universe.
Starting point is 00:10:05 And it's sort of like the pinnacle of modern particle physics to build these huge cathedrals to investigation. Now, it is a little counterintuitive that they're so big because when I think about studying something small, I'm thinking of having to shrink down to the size of the small thing to be able to see the small thing. So why would you need such a big structure to study something so small? Because in our universe, as opposed to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where Ant Man can just shrink himself down to the quantum scale, we can't do that. We have to stay at our size. And so we have to tear apart quantum objects, which requires huge energies. You want to pull apart the nucleus of the atom, that stuff is really tightly bound together.
Starting point is 00:10:50 You want to peer inside the proton, the gluons inside the proton are really holding it together. So you need really, really powerful hammers, basically, to smash these little bits so that you can see them. Sounds a little dangerous. I wouldn't recommend getting in the way of that hammer, no matter how many layers of plastic bags you have wrapped around you. But physicists are talking about this kind of thing seriously. Because these colliders take decades to build, they take even more decades to plan and to fund and to organize the politics of getting the billions of dollars all lined up to build them. And right now, particle physicists are engaged in a project to plan out the next 10, 20, 50 years of particle physics. And so people are talking about what should we build next.
Starting point is 00:11:33 And there are practical suggestions for what the next collider might be. And there are also fanciful ideas for what the next or next next next collider might be. I bet there are a lot of not in my backyard types who don't want a Hadron Collider in their backyard, but oh, sure, in someone else's backyard. You joke, but that is part of it. And so on today's episode, we'll be exploring one of these crazy ideas for a new particle collider. We'll be answering the question. Should we build a particle collider on the moon? Wow. 19 something, something called and they want their Austin Powers movie villain back.
Starting point is 00:12:16 It does sound like something you would build while stroking your white cat and sitting under your volcano in your layer. So when I first sent you this idea, did you think it was totally ridiculous? Or did you think, wow, I would be amazed if humans could do that? I mean, we put tardigrades, those little tiny water bears on the moon. So I don't see any reason why we shouldn't put a particle collider on the moon. And then let the tardigrades run it. That's the natural next step for you. You're like, if there are tardigrades there, we should put a collider there.
Starting point is 00:12:44 Yeah, why not? There are tardigrades everywhere. They're tardigrades in the Pacific Ocean. Should we put a huge particle collider in the Pacific? Well, as long as it doesn't get in the way of any like snapping shrimp mating strategies, then maybe. Well, as we'll dig into on today's episode, you'll find that putting a particle collider on the moon might answer some deep questions about physics and solve some problems about existing colliders, but it comes with its own unique set of chat.
Starting point is 00:13:09 And so as usual, before we dug into the topic, I went out there to ask people what they thought about this question. Would it be practical to build a particle collider on the moon? So thanks to everybody who volunteered to answer random questions in their inbox from a physicist without the opportunity to do any Googling. If you'd like to participate and hear yourself baselessly speculate on difficult topics on the podcast, please don't be shy. Write to me to questions at danielandhorpe.com. So before you hear these answers, think to yourself, should we build a particle collider on the moon? Here's what people had to say. Yes, we should definitely build a particle collider on the moon, but we should use such financial resources to achieve fusion and ensure we can survive on this planet first.
Starting point is 00:13:56 I'm assuming this question is being asked because there's a lot of space up there and you don't have to go around buildings and it's quiet. There's no electromagnetic disturbances. I don't know if those benefits would outweigh the detriments of it being so far away and so hard to maintain and so hard to staff. Sounds like a fun idea, but probably not the best use of our resources. I don't know how much the effects of gravity impact our design of particle accelerators. But that and possible interference from ground traffic, earthquakes, all those sorts of things that can potentially disrupt experiments, could all improve the results from testing. That would be seriously expensive.
Starting point is 00:14:57 If we could conduct experiments up there that we just couldn't do down here, then yeah, I'd be all for it. and I think we should build it. But if the experiments aren't going to be that different, then I think those resources could be better spent elsewhere. Of course. We should beat a particle collider even on Mars. I think we should do this, all these things, because you never know what you're going to find.
Starting point is 00:15:23 Let's create jobs. I think we should definitely build a particle collider on the moon, maybe even around the entire moon. I have no objections to that. I say why not? I'm going to say no, because the moon has a lot different particles than there are on Earth. Well, because there's a lot of plants on Earth and there's basically no plants on the Moon. That is quite true.
Starting point is 00:15:48 I don't know. Maybe there's a, maybe because it's in vacuum and cold, maybe we could do something with superconductors. Yeah, so maybe it would be easier to have more electricity there. We could actually make it go a bit faster or something. I think it would be interesting to build one on the moon at least, maybe not a very large, like the LHC or the Fermilab one. But I think it would be possible to build quite a small particle collider on the moon and see some interesting stuff without the gravity. Go bigger, go home, definitely. Why not even bigger? Let's build one the size of our solar system so we can really measure some gigantic things where we get money for this.
Starting point is 00:16:37 I have no idea. I really like the answer of we should do it, but maybe not a very large one, just a little one. You know, just like, yes, we should have one, but let's be reasonable people. Let's make it, you know, medium size. I know. It's so reasonable to build a little itty-bitty collider very, very far away where nobody can get to it. No, I like the one that says, let's go big, build one the size of the solar system. I mean, while we're spending a kajillion dollars, why not spend a bajikadillion dollars, right?
Starting point is 00:17:10 It all just feels like made up money at this point. Yeah, I mean, you know, if we turn our currency into aircraft carriers, maybe we're going to get somewhere. Joking aside, I think there is an important point there. These things feel really expensive to us, like $10 billion. I mean, it's so much more than you and your entire family. will earn your entire lifetime. I mean, I don't know what you've invested in, but I'm imagining you're not a billionaire.
Starting point is 00:17:35 It just seems like an unimaginably vast sum of money, doesn't it? But it's not that much money on the scale of societies. You know, collectively, the financial power of a country is enormous. So that like $10 billion is a tiny blip in the U.S. budget. It really is just like one more or one fewer aircraft carrier. You know, the U.S. Congress spends $5 billion without even thinking about it too much. When you're talking about unlocking the secrets of the universe, we're like in the store where they sell the secrets of the universe
Starting point is 00:18:07 and we have enough money in our pocket to buy it. We're just deciding not to because we want to go down the street and go to the aircraft carrier store instead. So these things really are achievable either by the U.S. or by the global community. It's just a question of whether we want to do it. Yeah, and I feel the perhaps more important metric isn't necessarily money directly but the idea of the carbon cost of things. So is it too much of a carbon cost to build something or is the knowledge that we get from it worth that kind of exchange in terms of the amount
Starting point is 00:18:45 of fuel we would need to get to the moon or something? But that's not really reasoning that we use often when we're building aircraft carriers. I don't think we think about, hey, the cost of the environment of this, but that would be my, my only sort of concern in terms of the budget on building a big thing. Yeah, that's an interesting point. I wonder if Elon Musk is designing an all-electric aircraft carrier, you know, Tesla's first aircraft carrier. Well, let's speaking to the question. And I think maybe the place to start is to try to understand why particle colliders have to be so big. I mean, it's not just that we like to build big things, but there's a reason why these things are massive. Right.
Starting point is 00:19:28 Yeah, so this is what I want to find out more about because I think of a really tiny thing. You know, what's with all of this extra space? Surely you don't need that much storage space for like a little quark, right? That's right. It's not about like having a big enough bag to hold a cork. It's about tearing that cork out of the bonds that it's held in. And there really are two different things that we want to do here. but both of them require a lot of energy.
Starting point is 00:19:58 One is take the particles that we know and try to break them into pieces, like find out what's inside a cork. Is a cork made of smaller little bits, maybe strings or subcorks or corkinos or whatever you would want to call them? I'm sure we should consult Jorge when the time comes. You know, what are they made out of? And what we've discovered in the last few decades is that as you go deeper and deeper into the atom, the bonds get more and more powerful, right?
Starting point is 00:20:24 Like the bonds that hold an electron to the nucleus are very strong. They're much more powerful than gravity, for example, which is the force you deal with on an everyday basis. And the bonds that hold the nucleus together are the strong force, which are even more powerful, which is why fission and fusion and nuclear power have so much capacity to release energy bound in the nucleus. So we suspect that as we go deeper and look inside the proton and then inside the quark, we'll need even more energy to tear that apart.
Starting point is 00:20:52 The second reason we need a lot of energy in these collisions is that we want to make new stuff. We want to discover new particles we haven't seen yet. And sometimes those new particles are very, very heavy. Like the Higgs boson is 125 times as massive as a proton. So to make it, you can't just toss two protons together gently. You're going to give those protons a lot of energy. It's the whole E equals MC squared thing. So the short answer is you want a lot of energy in your collider in order to answer the
Starting point is 00:21:22 questions of the universe. So my understanding of atom smashing is somewhat limited to nuclear explosions. So when I think about smashing an atom, I think of mass destruction. How do you make a collider not explode? That's a great question. And that's not a question I've ever been asked before. Like, why don't we have a nuclear bomb every time two particles collide? That's a great But the answer is basically that we do. The thing is that we don't have a sustained reaction. So what happens is you smash two protons together, for example, and the protons collide and they get broken apart, and the corks inside them interact, and you do get a massive release
Starting point is 00:22:08 of energy, but the energy is like fairly small compared to a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb, you have like kilograms of fuel, and the nuclear reaction starts, and then it goes off in a chain reaction, so you have like, you know, 10 to the 26 protons all all releasing their energy simultaneously in a very short amount of time, that's a bomb. If you have a single proton releasing its energy, it's not actually that much energy. It's just one proton. So the reason we don't have like nuclear explosions all the time is that we have to do one proton at a time, basically.
Starting point is 00:22:39 I see. So you're really only in danger if you stand on the target area, probably with a bunch of warning signs around for you not to stand there. Yes, nobody should stand in the beam or near the beam. There is radiation produced in these collisions. You smash two protons together and a bunch of particles fly out of very high energy. And that's why these collisions are usually done underground. Like the Large Hajorn Collider in Geneva is about 100 meters underground.
Starting point is 00:23:04 And that's enough ground to absorb all the radiation so nobody on the surface should feel a thing. And people down operating the collider, are they protected by lead or some kind of shield? Absolutely. We surround the whole thing with concrete and with layers of lead. And the people who are operating it are usually actually up on the surface. And so there's nobody down at the beam level when the thing is running. That's a clever way to tell me that there aren't a secret society of mole people operating these colliders. Maybe there are, but it's a secret.
Starting point is 00:23:36 But the key thing is that you want a lot of energy so you can peer inside the nature of matter or maybe make new weird particles, particles that haven't existed since the beginning of the universe. For example, the way that we discovered the top quark in 1995 was by smashing particles. together at energies nobody's ever done it before. And because we created enough energy in one tiny little spot, we were able to turn all that energy into a new massive particle. The reason the Top Quark took so long to discover decades of searching was because it was more massive than anybody expected.
Starting point is 00:24:10 So we had to put more energy into it than anybody expected. So we had to build a whole series of larger and larger colliders to get to those high energies. So when you're building this larger collider, I'm imagining sort of an area where some kind of beam is focused. But to put it in very simple terms, because I'm going to need that to understand it, what is the shooty part? Like, how does the shooty part work?
Starting point is 00:24:38 And what is it doing when it is sort of shooting this energy into these particles? It's a great question. Colliders come in two varieties. There are linear colliders that are like a straight line where they accelerate the particles and smash them together. or particles come in the circular variety, right? Like the Large Hadron Collider, where the particles go around a lot of times
Starting point is 00:24:59 before they collide. And the advantage of the circular one is that you can push the particles many, many times to get them up to even higher speeds before they collide. So in a circular collider, what you have are little sections that push the particles. And these are just sections
Starting point is 00:25:13 that have like electromagnetic waves that push the particles. The particles like surf on these electromagnetic waves. There are RF cavities. They have a lot of energy in them. And any part of the particles, that goes in there that has a charge like an electron or a proton is going to get pulled out the other side. So that's sort of the shooty part. It pushes the particles.
Starting point is 00:25:31 We only really know how to do that in a straight line. Like we can't really make a bendy accelerator. We can make a little straight line accelerator. So to make an accelerator that goes in a circle, what you need are a bunch of these RF cavities, the shooty parts that give the particles a kick, and then you need something to bend it. So we have magnets.
Starting point is 00:25:49 So these really powerful electromagnets will bend the power. the path of a particle. So when a particle hits a magnetic field, it curves. That's why, for example, the magnetic field of the Earth protects us from particles from space because it bends them and deflects them away from hitting the surface. So a big collider, like the Large Hadron Collider, has parts that push the particles and then bend and then bend and then push and then bend, and then push and then bend. And there's like 1,200 magnets all the way around this 33-kilometer ring. Wow. Don't get your computer near that thing. I've learned that. It'll wipe your credit cards in just a moment.
Starting point is 00:26:23 But yeah, that's essentially the shooty part. And that's also why these things have to get bigger and bigger. Because if you want the particle to get higher and higher energy, you need more of those bits that push on it that make it go faster. You know, imagine particles are going around the ring and each one is giving it a little kick. So sort of like you're running through a room of your friends and everybody gives you a little push as you go by. By the time you get out the other side of the room, you're going really fast. And so you want to go faster and faster.
Starting point is 00:26:49 you need more of those things that push it. At the same time, the faster you're going, the stronger the magnets you need or the more magnets you need to keep it going in a circle. So you can either have like really strong magnets or you can have a really, really big ring. So it's like the world's biggest
Starting point is 00:27:08 and most expensive game of curling. Shout out to all the Canadians who are listening. Exactly. So you want higher energy so you can explore the universe more deeply and answer some of the big open questions, but the more energy you have, the bigger the collider has to be. So you have more of those pushy bits that make it go faster and also so you can effectively bend it in a circle because you can go around many, many times that you can get your particles up to even higher and higher energy because you can reuse those pushy bits.
Starting point is 00:27:36 And at a large Hedron Collider, before the particles smash into each other, they go around the ring billions and billions of times. It's lots of laps before the end of the race for them. Wow. So how long does it take for a particle to go around the loop a billion times? That's a great question. So, you know, these particles are basically going at the speed of light. It's like 0.999C. And they're going 33 kilometers. So it takes about one microsecond for a proton to go all the way around the ring. That's fast. It's pretty fast, right? 33 kilometers in a microsecond. That's the speed of light for you.
Starting point is 00:28:11 But it goes around lots and lots of times. And actually, we inject the beam, which is like this little cloud of protons that whizzes around the collider. And the beam lasts for, you know, tens of hours before eventually enough protons have collided and the beam has gotten sort of diffuse that they dump it and they start again with a fresh beam. So an individual proton can be in the large Hedron Collider for like a day, day and a half sometimes. which means it makes a lot of trips around.
Starting point is 00:28:36 It's a lot of laps. Wow. Do you get to take home the stale protons after work or is that not advisable? Stale proton. That's a great question. I've never seen what they do with the used up protons. I think they just smash them into a beam dump and nobody uses them. They should sell them in the gift store, though.
Starting point is 00:28:57 This proton was in the large Hedron Collider. As long as it's not radioactive. So I want to talk some more about why we want to build bigger and bigger collider. the secrets of the universe that we might unlock and then why people are talking seriously or semi-seriously about building one on the moon. But first, let's take a quick break. And I'm going to look up those used protons
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Starting point is 00:30:30 Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now
Starting point is 00:31:04 wants them both to meet. So do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.
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Starting point is 00:32:02 the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season 2 of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-holing. hosting a podcast with her fiance Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more.
Starting point is 00:32:37 Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk.
Starting point is 00:32:55 We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar A.Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously. you all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. selling used protons from the large Hageron Collider.
Starting point is 00:33:34 How much should we sell them for? Look, I'm feeling generous today. So maybe half of an aircraft carrier. That's right. But bring your own bag, right? This is definitely a B-Y-O-B kind of story. Y-O-B, yes. Reus-reus, recycle.
Starting point is 00:33:50 We're sustainable here. So people out there might be wondering, like, why do you want to build a bigger collider? What's left to figure out? After all, didn't we discover the Higgs boson, which is called the last piece of the state? standard model. What mysteries are there left to unlock? Are you guys just wanting to build bigger colliders because you like building big stuff or are there real scientific questions left
Starting point is 00:34:12 to be answered? You know, real buzz kills. But you know, while the large Hedron collider was amazingly successful in discovering the Higgs boson, which is a triumph for modern physics, blah, blah, blah. Regular listeners to the podcast will definitely be familiar with the open questions of particle physics. There are so many. things that we don't know about the universe. For example, we've discovered the nature of the matter that makes us up, but we still don't know what most of the universe is actually made out of, right? 5% of the universe is made out of the familiar particles, quarks and electrons that accounts for things like stars and gas and dust and the visible galaxies and hamsters and
Starting point is 00:34:55 lava and plastic bags and aircraft carriers. But this 25% of the universe is made of something else dark matter which is not made out of quarks and electrons and so that's a pretty big open question is dark matter or particle could we make it at the large hadron collider what is it made out of just one example of the kind of questions about the universe that remain open so if we can make colliders here on earth underground that are safe why would we even need it on the moon in the first place well it's a great question we can build colliders here on earth that are safe but they're getting sort of awkwardly big like the collider that we have now is 33 kilometers in circumference and it's so big that it crosses two countries it's partially under switzerland and partially under france and has the energy of
Starting point is 00:35:45 13 trillion electron volts which sounds like a lot and we're upgrading it this year actually to 13.6 trillion electron volts and people are talking about bigger and bigger colliders but as you get bigger, it's harder to figure out, like, where are you going to put this thing? People don't like having colliders like right underneath their house. And to find enough space to put something that's like 100 kilometers in circumference is a little awkward. So we got to go to the moon. We got to go to the moon. There are plans for like 100 kilometers circumference colliders maybe in China. People are talking about maybe putting one in Europe. There's an idea for a collider called Collider in the Sea, a floating collider in the Gulf of Mexico. But these things get a
Starting point is 00:36:29 little awkward, right? You have to invent all this new technology to have this thing floating. It's a little crazy. So people thought, hmm, the moon is right there. There's a lot of land there that nobody's using. Maybe we could put one on the moon. Yeah, that's free real estate. So, all right, we want to put a collider on the moon because that solves the land issue. But the moon, is really different from Earth. I mean, it's a moon. It's not a planet. So would the physics even work
Starting point is 00:36:58 to put a collider somewhere where gravity is different and we don't have an atmosphere and, you know, where the ground is all sharp and powdery? Yeah, you don't need gravity for a collider. Like the fact that we have gravity on Earth basically is irrelevant for these protons.
Starting point is 00:37:14 They're traveling at basically the speed of light so we can ignore the effect of gravity. And also remember, protons are super duper tiny. They have almost no mask compared to like an apple. And so the effect of gravity on them is very, very small. And so we can basically ignore it. And building a collider on the moon
Starting point is 00:37:31 with there's less gravity, that's not a problem. Also, colliders operate in near vacuum. Like inside the collider, the beam pipe itself, where the protons go around, we try to get that down to basically a vacuum so the protons don't bang into other stuff along the way. So operating without an atmosphere, also not a problem. With one exception, we build our collider here
Starting point is 00:37:52 on the surface of the earth and the atmosphere is actually a protectant as rocks hit the earth for example meteors and all sorts of other stuff the atmosphere protects us from their collision so you build your experiment on the surface of the earth you don't expect to come back and have it be like a crater because some rock from space has killed it but the moon has basically no atmosphere which is why its surface is pockmarked with craters from all these rocks that slam into it all the time so if you build your collider basically on the surface of the moon then it's destined to to be smashed into by these rocks. And so you need some other way to protect it.
Starting point is 00:38:27 Giant space umbrella. Pat and pending. My idea. All right. So we have already an issue. We would have to, in addition to building the collider, build some kind of protection. Is the moon too small to be able to build a subterranean collider? Or is it too difficult to excavate the moon?
Starting point is 00:38:49 No, that would actually be a great idea. because another problem with putting a collider on the surface of the moon is that the temperatures on the surface are bonkers. Because it has no atmosphere because of its weird tidal locking, the surface of the moon gets like super heated during its day and then super cold during its night. So during the day it's like 127C and during the night it's like minus 176C. And those kind of temperature variations are not great for like high precision scientific equipment. Right. And so we could bury it, but would we basically look up at a moon that we see this giant, just like giant excavators and cranes on? And would that change the surface of the moon? That would be cool, though, if you could see it from Earth. The idea is to build a collider just like a few meters underground on the moon.
Starting point is 00:39:43 Because if you dig down like a few meters, the temperature variations are much smaller. It's basically pretty stable temperature-wise, except for the surface. And so you bury this thing like a meter or two, and then you build it all the way around the moon, like a belt around the moon. And yeah, you might be able to see it from Earth. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. And people would feel like, hmm, you kind of spoiled this incredible natural view. But yeah, it would be like a line across the moon. I mean, I feel like we just got to sort of take a pull of everyone on Earth and see if they're
Starting point is 00:40:17 cool with it. Shouldn't be too hard. You know, it sounds like you're making a joke, but I think that there's something serious there. You know, when we take steps that affect all of humanity, we really should think about how to make these decisions. It's a similar question when we think about like, should we try to message aliens? or if we get a message from aliens, how should we respond?
Starting point is 00:40:37 We had Jill Tartar, head of the SETI program on the podcast recently, and she was talking about, like, how to include all different kinds of cultures in this decision about how to write back to aliens. And in a similar way, I think it would be important to think about, like, how people look at the moon and how important it is to them. You know, science can't just be like, we're going to come and take this land and do what we want with it for science. Yeah, we can't colonize the moon.
Starting point is 00:41:02 I mean, we can, but we shouldn't. Because the moon doesn't really belong to anyone, which is, I mean, we may like to think it does sometimes, but I think that is something that's kind of charming about the moon and the planets is that nobody can really claim them. So to build a collider on the moon, to build this moon belt as incredible and amazing it would be for unlocking these mysteries, it would also require some astroids. astronomical, pun intended levels of cooperation between countries and peoples. You're right. And not just people who would benefit from it and who would pay for it,
Starting point is 00:41:42 but basically everybody for whom the moon is important, which is basically everybody on Earth. You can't just like scribble on the night sky and say, hey, I did it. And that's an issue with, for example, Elon Musk, right? He's launching these Starlink satellites, which are in low Earth orbit, which are changing our view of the cosmos. And he basically just got permission from one U.S. regulatory authority, you know, but like, are they in charge of the sky? It's crazy to imagine one U.S. government agency is making decisions for all of humanity. So I agree. It's a really important question.
Starting point is 00:42:15 Yeah, it's something I feel like could go two ways. Like it could be this incredible cooperation amongst nations and people, or it could be something where it's seen as kind of a foisting our desires from, like a few rich nations on to the rest of the world. And so I'd like to think it would end up in the more cooperative sort of building a more connections between people on Earth. But you never know. It seems often that we just kind of strong arm other people into accepting like, yep, now we've got Elon Musk's name and brand on the moon.
Starting point is 00:42:51 You know, deal with it. No, you're right. It is a really fun show called For All Mankind, which explores this issue in some depth, imagine some alternative history with the space where, didn't peter out and the US and the Russians landed on the moon and built elaborate moon presence and basically started, you know, wars on the moon because they're valuable resources there and everybody was afraid of getting cut out. And we might be looking at that in our future. I mean, NASA has plans to build a moon base to make a quote sustainable presence by 2028. It's part
Starting point is 00:43:23 of the new Artemis program. They want to like explore the entire surface of the moon with humans and robots and have plans to place like large scale lunar infrastructure. And so a lot of these other questions arise. Like, can we just put a base on the moon and not get anybody else's okay? Would we be okay with other countries just like grabbing a chunk of the moon and saying, hey, we're building here. This is our spot. Get off our lawn.
Starting point is 00:43:46 Seems like we need a globally elected moon president and I'll do it. All right. Fine. I'll do it. Well, that was quite a campaign. Would you like to? to be president of the moon, really? What did that job come with? What are the benefits there? Seems like it would come with a really cool hat and outfit, though. So that's my main motivation.
Starting point is 00:44:09 But ethics aside, which I love to say all the time, ethics aside and politics aside, if you have a collider on the moon, let's say we could even get it up there, which seems difficult given it seems pretty heavy. How does it get power? Because you can't run like a plug for from the U.S. all the way to the moon. That's right. That thing would get so tangled up. Oh, my gosh. It would be a nightmare.
Starting point is 00:44:36 You notice how every rope always gets knotted up. Like if you have headphones in your pocket, they come out, they're always knotted up. It's some like property of a string. This most relaxed state seems to always be in a knot. Is this due to small particle behavior or is it pocket gremlins? I think pocket gremlins are definitely a part of it. Also, there's something in there about statistical mechanics,
Starting point is 00:44:57 about just having like the number of ways that a string can be configured. The configurations without a knot are like a small fraction of that. So if you just like randomly rearrange a string and lower we end up in a knot. But you raise a great question, which is powering this thing. And as you get up to higher and higher energies in your collider, you need exponentially more power. The amount of power we use the Large H-Jon Collider is not that much. But as you get your particles up to higher energies and then you curve them around this collider,
Starting point is 00:45:26 then they radiate away more energy. Every time you bend a particle, you're curving it. That's acceleration. And acceleration happens through radiation. Like when a particle wants to turn left, it can't just turn to conserve momentum. It's got to like throw something off in the other direction. It radiates a particle.
Starting point is 00:45:44 So they lose energy. You need a lot of energy in those little bits that push it just to keep the particles at that energy. And for the moon collider, we're talking about energies a thousand times higher than our current collider, which is like terribly exciting from a particle physics point of view, like the kinds of things we could discover,
Starting point is 00:46:01 but really tricky from a power point of view. So this thing would need about 10 terawatts of energy. That's similar to hearing the number like $100 billion. It essentially becomes meaningless to me because I can't conceive of 10 terawatts of energy. 10 terawatts is a lot. You know, for scale, the entire human population uses about 18 terawatts. Over a year or over a day, like, or in total.
Starting point is 00:46:29 Terawatts is energy per second. And so it's like the rate of energy use. And so this thing would have a constant use of about 50% of the entire budget of the Earth, all the energy we produce. So even if you could run a line from the Earth to the Moon, it would not be advisable because you'd need to increase the Earth's energy budget by a huge amount. It'd probably blow a fuse, right? Exactly. That'd be a very thick cable. You'd just need one person trying to run their hair dryer and the fuse would blow out on all of Earth.
Starting point is 00:46:59 Exactly. And so people have thought about like, well, how could we power such a collider? Definitely you'd need a power source on the moon. And one attractive thing to think about is like fission. You know, could you build nuclear power plants on the moon in order to power this thing? And, you know, getting into like the ethical issues of producing nuclear waste and storing it on the moon is a whole other rabbit hole we could even dig into because fission plants are not even. practical. Like all the fission plants we have currently produce about 400 gigawatts of energy. So you'd need like 50 times the amount of fission power plants we have operating now on Earth suddenly running on the moon. I mean, it just seems impossible, right? But there's got to be other types of plants that you could have on the moon, right? Absolutely. And one thing that the moon does have is a lot of sunlight.
Starting point is 00:47:48 Like there's lots of land out there and plenty of places to build solar panels. And you know, you don't have clouds on the moon. It's no weather on the moon. So solar power on the moon is actually much more stable and reliable than it is even here on Earth. The biggest problem people have with solar power on the earth is what do you do in a cloudy day or what do you do during winter or when it's raining? But on the moon, there's nothing between you and the sun. So you could actually power this thing with like 0.1% of all the solar power that hits the moon. So it's like a set of solar panels about the size of Delaware power this thing. Okay. So, so. So as long as we're okay with seeing Delaware on the moon all the time, we could probably power a collider.
Starting point is 00:48:32 Exactly. And you wouldn't want to build it in just one spot because then part of the time it would be in darkness. The idea is to build the collider in a big ring around the moon and then to cover it with solar panels. So you have like a big ring of solar panels around the moon. So part of it is always in the sunshine. Could we make it like a smiley face? Because I think that might sell it better to the people of Earth. I'll put that front of the committee.
Starting point is 00:48:57 I think that's a great idea. But I think we should have a competition, you know, for like what designs we'd like to put on the moon. You know, maybe a spiral would be good. We should have all the artists of the earth contribute. All right. So let's dig into a little bit more about the practicalities of how to actually build this thing on the moon, what we would build it out of how we get the materials there. And then let's talk about what we might learn from it and whether we think it's a good idea.
Starting point is 00:49:20 But first, let's take another quick break. I'm going to draw up some plans for the shapes I want to see on the moon. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
Starting point is 00:50:03 In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.
Starting point is 00:50:42 Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't try. trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio Out. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.
Starting point is 00:51:36 These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum,
Starting point is 00:52:11 the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple, podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her
Starting point is 00:52:42 fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? the final, the final, and the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back, showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker
Starting point is 00:53:07 and college superstar A.Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all, the guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah. Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, we're back and we're talking about scribbling on the face of the moon.
Starting point is 00:53:41 Is that a good idea? I did draw a kitty cat that I think people will like universally. Would that require building little ears that stick off the top of the moon? That doesn't sound expensive at all. Yeah, I'm sure we can do that. It'll be worth it. So, you know, we do have realistic plans to build the next collider, the 100 T.EV collider. That's 100 kilometers long.
Starting point is 00:54:03 And thoughts about how much it might cost, cost about $100 billion using current technology, current magnets and current RF technology and the detectors and all of that stuff, which sounds like a huge amount of money. And it's definitely a good political question to ask, like, is that worth spending our money? on, which we can dig into. But when you're talking about building a collider on the moon, something that's thousands of times bigger than even a large Hajon collider or that next collider, you have to wonder, like, how much is this thing going to cost? And where could you even get the materials? Like, how do you actually go about building this thing on the moon?
Starting point is 00:54:39 Do we even have enough fuel to transport that amount of materials to the moon? So people have gone through this exercise and wondered about that very question. And And just like with the question of power, I think the best idea is not to find the stuff on Earth and lift it to the moon because that would be incredibly expensive. Every launch is, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. But instead, to try to build it with materials that are already on the moon. So, for example, one of the most difficult elements of a particle collider are these magnets. Magnets are hard to build and hard to make powerful.
Starting point is 00:55:16 And so we tend to use superconducting magnets, magnets that have very, very, very low resistance, so they have very, very high magnetic fields when you power them with electricity. But a lot of these use rare earth elements, things like gadolinium or uterium or other elements I don't even know how to pronounce. And because they're rare earth elements, they are rare and there's not a lot of them. And there are other industries that want these things like battery industries, which are going gangbusters here on Earth. And so it'd be hard to like divert a huge amount of Earth's rare Earth.
Starting point is 00:55:50 elements and launch it up to the moon. Current estimates are that you'd need like 6,600 tons of rare earth elements to make the superconducting magnet you'd need for this collider on the moon. So that sounds like a no-go for sure. So let me guess there's got to be a planet out there somewhere with like giant blue really attractive aliens where they have all these rare metals and abundance that we can plunder. That's right, but they are charging an arm and a leg literally. Yeah, you know there might be asteroids out there filled with these rare earth elements and there's a whole fun question about like mining those asteroids and what you could do with them and eventually if we do build heavy space industry we will have to tap into those resources because it's ridiculous to launch these things from
Starting point is 00:56:34 the gravity well of the earth you definitely want to find them already out there but then there's that whole other question who owns these asteroids and how you regulate that complicated question but people think that the moon might have other materials which would make for good magnets like Probably there is a lot of iron on the moon because, you know, there's iron all over the solar system. Most of the rocky stuff that's out there in the solar system has huge quantities of iron and nickel. And people are working on technology where you can combine iron with arsenic and with phosphorus to make iron-based superconductors. And so it might be possible eventually when we're ready to build this thing to find a way to build it using materials that are already on the moon. So we would need moon miners to be up there. And so would we send humans up to go work on the moon? Or would that be the job of robots? And then should the robots have labor rights?
Starting point is 00:57:25 They should definitely get royalties for the songs they write while working on the moon collider. Like the classic 1-0-0-0-1, which is covered by 1-0-0-0-0-1. Exactly. That has got quite a beat. No, it's a real question. You know, we're talking. about building lunar infrastructure anyway. Like a moon collider aside, NASA wants to have effectively a permanent presence on the moon by later this decade. And so we're talking about having people up there. But I think that a lot of this work would be pretty dangerous. And so you'd want robotic miners and robotic construction. And this is not something we know how to do today or tomorrow or even really project about when we'll be able to figure it out. But a project of this size
Starting point is 00:58:08 would require either an enormous labor force or robotic mining and construction. So I think you definitely want to go to the robotic side. Have you seen that movie Moon? I have seen that movie. Is that where the guy like gets in a time lapse or like kills various copies of himself or something? Yeah. Yeah. Spoilers alert if you ever want to see it. But yeah. So there's this guy who is on the moon doing basically moon mining work like we're talking about. And Spoiler alert, in case you haven't seen it yet, he turns out he is just one clone and an endless line of clones.
Starting point is 00:58:44 Oh, that's right. And a mistake happens where there are two clones at once. And so, you know, plot ensues. But it is an interesting idea of, like, the ethics of, you know, his original body signed away his rights to these clones. And now this endless line of clones who don't know their clones are laboring on the moon. But the, I guess in terms of,
Starting point is 00:59:07 of our conversation, the question of, is it ethical to have a labor force on the moon? Because what kind of quality of life would people lead and would people feel pressured into doing it due to, you know, the need for money? And is that right? It's a great question. And you definitely have to have enough protections for those folks. The moon is a pretty inhospitable place. And the cancer rates would be a lot higher because you don't have atmospheric protections or magnetic fields. So you'd need a lot of shielding and definitely be very dangerous. You need people to be fully informed for sure before they went up there to work on this project. Something that reams and reams of lawyers, I'm sure, will be arguing about for a decade if we
Starting point is 00:59:45 ever decide to build this thing. And, you know, it's hard to even figure out, like, what would a price tag be for a project like this? You know, the large H-on-collider cost $10 billion. If you just scale that up, like, per meter, you know, per kilometer, then you get a number for the moon collider like almost two trillion dollars which even in units of aircraft carriers is a very very big number and what that tells you is not this is something we should never do it's we can't do this today like our current technology it would just be insane but humans don't just sit around
Starting point is 01:00:20 we're a clever species we come up with innovations and so that number comes from like needing all those magnets well maybe we can come up with cheaper magnets and needing all that power well maybe we can come up with a way to make accelerators that don't require so much power more effective ways to accelerate particles. And so I think between us and crazy big astronomical colliders, we need a lot of layers of innovation, a lot of clever new ideas for how to make this technology more feasible. Maybe colliders will go the way of phones
Starting point is 01:00:49 and go from being a big giant brick to being a little pocket collider. I guess that kind of goes against our whole earlier premise, though, if it needs to be big and moon-sized, but maybe a more efficient collider. No, you're absolutely right. If you could develop incredibly powerful magnets, then you could have small colliders, even if they're high energy. The only reason a collider has to be big is because our magnets are not powerful enough to curve particles in smaller loops. You could have particles moving in a one meter loop at the energies of the large Hadron Collider if you had powerful enough magnets. We just don't. If you had powerful enough acceleration technology that we just don't have. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. And so the dream, of course, is to come up some new technology that makes a moon collider ridiculous. So you can have your own tabletop, large Hajon Collider, or you build one the size of a tennis court that has the power that we're talking about for a moon collider.
Starting point is 01:01:44 That would be fantastic. And I think, you know, a moon collider is a pretty ridiculous project. And the real way forward is to push hard on these technologies and try to innovate there and to make the next layer of energy accessible with better technology rather than just bigger. I like that. And I'm looking forward to all of us being able to get our own. own pocket collider, which is very convenient, but also completely obliterates your phone and also probably your body with the radiation. But, you know, the convenience. That's right. Man, my
Starting point is 01:02:16 collider is running so slow. I guess I need to upgrade my phone. But I do think that these projects are important, even though they are currently expensive, even with our current technology. You know, there are questions out there that we just don't have answers to, but that we could. could get. And to me, this is a kind of exploration. You know, the same reason that we want to land on alien planets and walk around and see what's there is the same reason that we want to make collisions at higher energy. Every time you build a collider with more energy than anybody's ever done before, it's like exploring another planet. You don't know what's going to come out of it. When you smash those particles together, you could see nothing like the way you could land on
Starting point is 01:02:58 a planet and just see rocks and dust. Or you could see crazy new particles. super symmetry or mini black holes or all sorts of secrets of the universe could just pour out of it. And we just don't know. And it's exploration because we have no idea if those secrets are around the corner. Like if we build a collider twice as powerful as LHC, would we discover these things? Or if they're really, really far away and we need a really, really big collider to find them. We don't yet know how far away these answers are. So we don't know how much money we have to spend, which is what makes us want to go big.
Starting point is 01:03:31 I mean, it seems like instead of having this opposition between, well, we can't spend resources on colliders or this kind of really expensive science because we need those resources for people now, it really is more the joy of life is things like new discovery. And so we need to make sure that humanity is healthy and living good lives. so we can someday just make these discoveries and enhance the human experience more. I think it can all go hand in hand rather than being in opposition to each other. Absolutely. And just the same way looking at the bridge inspires people and makes children wonder like, wow, what can we build in the future? I think that as a species, we should be trying to do things at the edge of our capability,
Starting point is 01:04:22 things that 20 years ago seemed impossible. We should be striving for that. That's really progress. and I think that it serves all of humanity. You know, the same way like we wonder why would you spend money on art? It's because it improves the human experience. Well, why do you try to answer deep questions about the universe? Not just because one day it might give you some technological spin-off,
Starting point is 01:04:43 but because understanding the nature of the universe improves the human experience. It's part of who we are to try to understand the world around us and unravel its mysteries. So I totally agree with you. And it's not a question of like, should we spend our money on this or that, in my view, we should spend our money on all of these things. You know, these things are cheap compared to all the things we do spend money on and they pay off so much economically, educationally, inspirationally, it's definitely worth the investment.
Starting point is 01:05:12 So if you are out there and you have rivers of money you could divert somewhere, please send some money to science. It pays for itself. Less fewer giant hammers for war, more giant hammers for smashing atoms and studying them. Wow, that sounds like a good kid. campaign slogan for running for president of the moon. Yeah, would you endorse me as for president of the moon? I'll wear a really fancy hat. Well, you put me on the spot, but yes, absolutely. I will back your candidacy for presidency of the moon, and I'm looking forward to the first debate among
Starting point is 01:05:41 the candidates. Going to be between me and super intelligent tardigrades on the moon. They ask a lot of good questions. All right, so thanks very much for joining us for this fun exploration of a crazy idea of building a particle collider on the moon. I think all in all it's something which we could do, though it would be massively expensive without innovations. But it's not clear that it's something we should do. There are lots of ethical questions and questions about how do best spend our resources. But what is clear is that there are a lot of big mysteries out there in the universe. And with just a little more ingenuity and a little bit of effort and a little bit more resources devoted to science, we could actually get answers.
Starting point is 01:06:22 to some of them. Thanks very much, Katie, for joining us. Let us know how your campaign for President of the Moon goes. Thank you so much, and I will let you know. I'll probably need about $100 billion in donations before I get there, but I'm sure it's achievable. All right, we'll let you all know when Katie's website is up so you can send her some donations.
Starting point is 01:06:41 Thanks again for joining us. Tune in next time. Thank you for having me. Bye, guys. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed.
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Starting point is 01:08:12 Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK story. Time podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities.
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