Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is it possible to move the sun?

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

If we needed to move the sun, could we do it? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, if you could travel to another solar system, would you sign up to do it? Oh, I would so love to be in another solar system, but I'm not sure I'm up for actually taking the trip. Oh, really? Do you get space sick easily? Yeah, especially after 40 years of eating the same food. Well, what if you could just take the red eye, you know? Like, you go into hibernation and then you wake up when you get there.

That's kind of like teleporting, almost. I do like naps, but I'm not sure I'm up for a 40-year nap. I'd have to pay for economy plus in her to have enough room to really sleep comfortably. To sleep well for 40 years. Well, if you could visit another solar system without actually traveling there, how about that? Would you be up for that? Totally. If I could just sit on my couch and then, like, open the door to see another world, I'd be in.

Oh, man. Then I've got an idea for you. I just need $400 trillion. Do you have that in your pocket? Let's crowdsource it from our listeners. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I dream about traveling the universe from my couch. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio.

In which we take mental trips all over the universe, from the heart of neutron stars, to what's happening inside a black hole, to crazy stuff at the microscopic. level and try to explain all of it to you in a way that also maybe makes you laugh. Yeah, think of us as your audio guide in your tour of the universe as you travel from the farthest reaches to the smallest places in the universe. That's right, and we might not just be limited to a mental trip. It might be possible to actually take a trip somewhere else in the galaxy. Maybe someday, sometime in the future, humans will actually set foot on planets in other solar systems. Yeah, it's been a dream of humanity for a long time, I think, right? Hasn't it been to

travel to another star and discover new worlds and maybe discover different civilizations out there in space? But it's always been kind of a difficult thing to get out into space and to travel somewhere because the distances are so big and it's a pretty hostile environment out there in space. Yeah, do you think it's a dream of humanity as a species or like of all humans? Because I would love for... Your difference between humanity and all humans? Well, I would love for humanity to explore the galaxy and learn all these things and send us pictures back,

but I don't particularly want to be in a spaceship or be an astronaut, though I'm like a big proponent of humanity doing it. One small step for some other man. Oh, I see. You just want to sit back, but you don't want to be the one who actually discovers another world or to be the one who travels to another world. So even if we discovered another world,

you wouldn't want to go there unless i could do it from my couch you know i'm not up on i don't even like going skiing you know so i'm not that up on like physical danger oh i see but you just want to know that somebody else went there yes totally i will pay more taxes and encourage people to work on these projects and i want us as humans to do it but i don't necessarily want to be that one i wonder how common that i feeling is though i wonder if everybody else out there whose pro space travel also actually wants to do it themselves. Yeah, I can see what you mean. I mean, maybe not everyone can get over the fear of possibly dying while you're exploring.

But everyone probably thinks it would be cooled for someone else to discover a new place. Yeah, and I think for some people, that fear of death is living. You know, some people really want that thrill of living on the edge and doing something dangerous. And I want to hear all about it when they get back. You want to live in the centers, comfortably in the center of things. I do. I like my couch. Well, it is sort of an impediment for, you know, a big challenge for humans to travel to into space is that space is sort of big and there's really nothing out there and you could die at any moment because it's such a hostile. There's no oxygen, you know, the vacuum would kill you, the temperature would kill you.

It's a pretty big barrier to overcome if we want to discover other things out there. Yeah, and one classic solution is, you know, try to take what you need with you, make a little box and fill it with. air and food and all that stuff and sort of take the minimum human survival necessities and pack them with you but you know that's sort of like camping you know it's fun for a while but it can be a little uncomfortable and you know you don't want to do it for 40 years or 40,000 years and so people are wondering like is it possible to maybe explore the universe without ever leaving your home you mean teleporting can we teleport your couch you and your couch can we make a couch that teleports Daniel somewhere else.

You know, that's a good question. On Star Trek, how come they have to stand up when they're in their teleporter? Why can't there just be a chair there? Oh, man. We can't even get you to stand up to teleport. You're like, I have to stand up? Forget about it. Forget about it.

I forget about it. I'm turning into an old man. Every time I go somewhere, I'm always looking for a chair. You know, where can I sit down? Are you laying down as we're recording this, Daniel? On advice of counsel, I refuse to answer that question. Well, this is a pretty big topic in it, a pretty big question. And so one of our listeners had maybe a good idea or came upon a good idea for maybe how we could travel comfortably to other solar systems.

Yeah, I got a wonderfully hilarious email from one of our listeners who heard our podcast about terraforming and found that it came in handy in a random conversation he had. So here's what Daniel Saunders from London. wrote to us. He says, Hi, I just want to say thanks for the terraforming episode. It came in surprisingly handy when I was loading my groceries onto the checkout at the supermarket. Two checkout assistants were talking across to each other about whether or not we could ever move to another planet, maybe Mars. They didn't seem to have much idea on the subject. So after a minute or two, I couldn't help myself and I began explaining all the things I learned from your podcast, making a magnetic feel,

the giant mirror for heating, dumping microbes, et cetera. They were pretty amazed that some random guy happened to know these things. I gave credit where credit is due and pointed them to your podcast. But then they asked me if it would ever be possible to physically move our planet or our solar system somewhere else in space. So I'm writing to you to ask. Wow, what an awesome email. And where is this supermarket where people talk about science at the checkout line? Nowhere here.

I've never overheard somebody asking such a complicated physics question in public where I feel like chiming in your history. I know. That's what I got a PhD in physics for. So somebody would be like, what is the branching ratio of the top cork to the bottom quark? I wonder if anybody knows. At the checkout line, you're like, oh, my God, this is the moment I've been preparing for for 30 years. Or you're on an airplane.

They're like, excuse me, is someone have a PhD in particle physics on the plane? We have an emergency calculation we need to do. That never happened to me. We have an emergency particle collision. We need to analyze. What are these cores? We don't know what to do with them. But he does raise a fascinating question.

So I'm really glad that Daniel in London had this interaction and generated this wonderful, fascinating question. Yeah, it's awesome to think that our listeners are having these conversations with other people and even more awesome that they're telling them about our podcast. That's right. So if you are one of those checkout assistants from that supermarket, welcome to the podcast.

and thank you for listening. This one is for you. But it's an interesting idea. And so the idea is that Daniel wrote in about is that, you know, it is sort of hard to pack everything with you to go on a trip into outer space to another solar system

because, you know, you have to build your house, your spaceship, and you have to bring in a food and air and be able to recycle everything. And so I guess the idea here is that instead of building a spaceship, think of it as us already being in a spaceship called Earth.

that's right yeah just make earth our spaceship like earth is now a mobile home or a camper van right take your house with you as you travel or not even just the earth the entire solar system could be our you know our camper yeah well i think you'd need to bring the sun otherwise you'd end up in the rogue planets episode that we just did and that would be pretty cold that's a whole different episode there is a movie actually in netflix i don't know you've seen it where they something like, I think either a meteor is coming or the Earth gets knocked out of orbit until they build these giant engines to push the Earth to another solar system. Wow, and would you rate the physics in it as excellent?

I would rate the special effects as not bad. Okay. Not bad. By not answering the question, you've answered the question. And so the question we'll be tackling today is, Is it possible to move our solar system somewhere else? I think that sounds like a wonderful way to explore the galaxy. I stay on my couch and you just let me know when we're getting near another solar system, you know?

But then what would you do? You wouldn't even want to visit the neighbors because you'd be like, I have to stand up. What? Well, you could just train the telescopes. You know, we could like turn Hubble on those now nearby planets. I see. I see. You just want to look at pictures while sitting on your couch.

And if we get aliens. If we get close enough to some alien solar system and there are aliens, I'm sure they'll come meet us and we can send our, you know, strapping young representatives, young women and men of our species to go and meet them. It doesn't need to be some 45-year-old grumpy physicist podcaster, right? I'm not the prime candidate to meet aliens. What if everyone refuses? Everybody refuses. Everyone's like, he's staying in his couch. Why should I get up and risk my life?

We're all five years old now. All right. If nobody else will do it, I will sign up. I will go. Oh, yeah, really? Yes. I'll take one for the team, absolutely. Let's write up the petition.

Okay. Who wants to go into space? No one? Daniel, you're up. I'm pretty sure this is not a situation I'm ever going to actually encounter, so I'm comfortable volunteering in that scenario. You're comfortable in the craziness of other human beings to do more reckless things. Yeah, people want to do that stuff.

There's always like thousands of things. thousands of people applying to be astronauts. So there's no need for me to try to elbow my way in there. Well, I'm surprised that this idea is out there, you know, that people have been thinking about this. And it sounds like you did some research and you found some stuff in it. Yeah, there definitely people have been developing concepts or how this could be possible. And it's kind of important. There are reasons why we might want to move our sun, not just out of curiosity, not just out of the desire to explore the universe and be lazy on our couch, but also, you know, for the survival of our solar system, there could be times we need to move it.

So I thought it was a fascinating question. But as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had even heard of this idea, much less think that it's possible. And so as usual, Daniel went out there and asked people on the street if they thought it's possible to build a machine that could move a star. So here's what people had to say. Yes, but maybe in the far future, not with the materials we have right now. How would you do it?

maybe some concepts involving stretching the space behind the star and condensing it in front. Okay, like a warp drive? Like a warp drive, yeah. Awesome. No? I don't think so. I don't think the technology is there yet right now, but I think it might be possible. I think it would be hard with the resources on the planet here, just because we have such finite resources, you know, and we have to think, well, how much are we taking away from Earth to try and move something that's even bigger than Earth?

earth, and it's kind of hard. But I think it's a maybe for me. I know, I wouldn't say no, I wouldn't say yes. You might not fund it, but you think it's possible? Yeah, probably. All right, wouldn't it? Yeah. I believe it would be possible because photons do carry momentum, so if you were able to harness the energy from photons, you would

potentially, like, with also like being able to put that force into the sun, you would be able to move the sun. To use the sun's own energy to turn into like an engine. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's impossible. Impossible. All right, cool. No, but I think we could get away with lying about it. That's awesome.

All right. You have to be a very strong machine. Expensive, yes. Yeah. Is it possible? I don't know. I feel like it caused a lot of havoc with the whole circulating around it systems. That would make it a bad idea, but not impossible.

Not impossible, yes. All right. All right. Not a lot of confidence in the concept. People were shocked. Sometimes I had to repeat myself because people thought they must have misheard the question because it was so ridiculous to move a star not necessarily our sun but just like a star is there and you're moving it yeah it's a crazy concept in fact it's the central feature of one of my favorite science

fiction series by alister reynolds where they try to tackle this problem of having an interstellar empire you know where the distances are so vast it takes forever to travel or even communicate and they solve the problem by dragging a bunch of stars close to each other so they can have an interstellar empire that's not actually that big. And so, you know, it appears in science fiction. It's in the realm of people's thought, but not most people. Most people thought this was a crazy idea. Oh, I see. You've read about this in a science fiction novel. Yeah. Yeah. It's a cool idea. And, you know, all best ideas start in science fiction novels. All right, but it's a crazy concept. Everyone out there thought it was kind of crazy. Just the idea of moving a star, much less our star.

So there's all kinds of questions here. Why would you want to do it? How would you do it? What would it mean to do it? So let's dig into all of these crazy questions. But first, let's take a quick break. 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. 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. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. 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 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 app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. I feel like this is my destiny. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network

on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so moving a start. How do we move a star? Why would we want to move a star? And how could it even be practical or plausible to move an entire star like our sun to somewhere else in the galaxy? It's a crazy idea, mostly because stars are really, really big. I mean, the mass of our sun is 10 to the 30 kilograms. That's a lot of kilograms.

It's a lot of kilograms, you know? It's like a million Earth. It's more than a million Earths. and the Earth already pretty big. Of course, the sun is already moving. It's orbiting the center of the galaxy. And what we're interested in is changing its motion, right? And because F equals M-A tells you that you need a force

in order to move something with mass, you want to accelerate the sun, move it somewhere else. You've got to apply a force. And the M in there... The bigger something is, the harder it is to move it. Yeah. So it's hard to get Daniel off the couch. Imagine getting the Earth off the couch.

And now imagine moving 1.3 million Earth. out of the couch. You know, since you're suggesting I'm so massive, maybe we should be measuring the sun in the units of Daniel, right? There he go. Isn't it about to say, 1.3 million Daniels? That's right. I am the Earth.

I have eaten everything. It's big, so you need a really big force. Like, we're talking cosmic scale engineering, which is awesome to think about and to read about in science fiction novels, but very difficult to actually pull off. Well, the basic idea is that you would build like an engine, or how would you even approach this problem of moving a whole star?

So you need a lot of energy and you need something that produces a lot of energy. And the only thing nearby that sort of produces enough energy to move a star is a star. I mean, a star is a huge fusion engine and it's pumping out an enormous amount of energy. And the simplest idea is to think about all the fusion energy that it's pumping out, mostly in terms of photons and protons and stuff like that. And that's not creating a force on the star because it's pointing in every direction. Like the sun pushes out and it pushes down. It pushes left.

It pushes right. Every time it shoots out a photon to the left, that gives it a little bit of force to the right. But on the other side, it's shooting out photons to the right, which gives it a force to the left. So it's balanced. It's like a rocket, but it's shooting in all directions at the same time. Yeah, exactly. What would happen if you attached eight rocket engines to yourself and set them all off at once? Well, you wouldn't go anywhere.

In like in all different directions. It perfectly balanced. Perfectly balanced in all different directions. I guess they would just squish you. But that's essentially what the sun is right now. So the idea is instead of having the sun pushing in all directions to somehow get it to only push in one direction. So it uses its own energy to fly through the galaxy. Wait, this is one idea.

So one idea for moving the sun is to somehow coax it or fool it into only shooting in one direction. So it naturally moves. and you can't really change the way the sun operates, what you've got to do is sort of like reflected. So you remember once we talked about solar sails, we talked about like sailing through space by capturing the momentum of photons. And the idea there was basically have a huge mirror,

and when a photon hits the mirror, it bounces off, and that pushes the mirror. Well, if you built a really big solar sail, like the size of the sun, okay, and you put it next to the sun, what it would do is, bounce some of those photons, the ones that hit the solar sail, they would bounce it back the other direction.

So wouldn't the sail get blown away? The sail would definitely get blown away because it's a huge solar sail, and that's the idea. But if you could somehow attach it to the sun, right, attach it to the sun. I see. It's a small problem of building a sail the size of the sun and then the small problem of attaching it to the sun. Well, actually, that problem is not that tricky because the sun has a huge amount of gravity. And so if you just put it in the right place, then the amount of pressure you're

getting on the solar sail is balanced by the gravity of the sun pulling on it, and it would sort of stay in the same place. It would become, in a sense, part of this larger gravitational system of the sun plus the sail. So the sun would hold it in the right place. Give it like a gravitational chain there to attach it to. Yeah. So actually attaching a solar sail to the sun, not physically like strapping it to the core of the sun, which is sort of the way it works in your brain. But you can do effectively the same thing gravitationally. Did you actually run the numbers? Like wouldn't it need to be super heavy for it to have a gravitational effect on the sun? Yes, but anything you're building that's going to be the size of the sun is going to be

heavy. If you build this thing and it's like a micron, a very thin aluminum or something, A micron of thin aluminum that's, you know, one AU wide, that's 90 million miles wide. That's still a lot of aluminum. That's a lot of microns. But is there even that much aluminum in our solar system? That's such an engineering question, man. I see. If we could magically create matter, is what you're saying.

And make it a size of the sun, then no problem. No, we probably do have enough materials if we liquidate. you know, a planet or two or, you know, some asteroids. There's probably enough stuff out there. Oh, I see. Actually, fabricating that thing. I mean, we'll talk about that later. It would cost a lot of money.

The physics of it sort of does make sense, yeah. And the reason is that, you know, the sun puts out a lot of energy. It makes like 10 to the 45 photons per second. And so it's pumping a lot of energy. So you're saying capture some of it and have it pull the sun along with it, gravitationally. Yeah, so you'd imagine having a huge mirror, for example, and then you'd position this mirror next to the sun, and half of the photons that come out of the sun would get reversed in their direction and go the other way. And so the net force would be, it'd be like if the sun

just had a huge flashlight and it was shining it off into space, that would push the sun. It would get pushed in the direction away from this beam, so in the direction of the solar sail. And so that would move the sun. It would accelerate the sun. Now, there's some little, limitations there, like you can't have this solar sail in the plane of the planets. You know, like if you have it in the plane of the planets, then it's shooting a huge beam of photons, you know, into the solar system. It could like fry a planet. We don't want to do that. So you're sort of limited also in the direction you can aim this thing. You don't want to strap a huge rocket to the sun and point it at the Earth, for example. I don't know. It sort of sounds to me like if you're in a boat and you put up a sail and then you blow in it with your mouth and expecting that to move you.

across the sea like you know you're blowing on it and somehow it feels like it kind of feels like a closed system you're exactly right if you were only blowing on the sail you'd go nowhere but if you're blowing on the sail and your friend is blowing the other direction right your friend's blows will actually push you somewhere so if we could just turn off half of the sun that'd be great this is effectively like turning off half of the sun and having it only blow in one direction Oh, I see. And then the sail would also pull the sun.

Yeah, well, the sun would actually be pushing itself, right? It would be pushing itself because the photons that are going away from the sail would be pushing the sun effectively. And then the sun would have this sail sort of captured in its gravitational system. And so hopefully it would be stable.

But that's one of the problems is that it might not be that stable a situation. You know, if this thing like gets twisted it a tiny bit, then all of a sudden it's unstable and it's falling into the sun and your $400 trillion engineering project is literally toast. And the whole reason that you melted down Mars could have been for nothing. And the Martians are pissed. All right, but that's just one idea.

One idea is to use like a giant solar sail and focus the sun in one direction. What's another way that we can maybe move the sun? Another way is to sort of use the fuel of the sun to pass. an enormous rocket. So, you know, if you were like a five-year-old and you thought, how would I do this, you say, okay, well, I'm just going to build a huge rocket and attach it to the sun. And that's basically this idea. But, you know, a rocket like that is going to take a lot of energy. And fortunately, the sun is, you know, it's a huge ball of fuel, basically. It's helium, it's hydrogen. So if you could build a big enough rocket, then you could just use the fuel from

the sun itself to power that engine and push the sun. And how would you push it again, gravitationally? That's a great question. Like, you know, if you build an engine and you want to move something, you imagine like strapping it to something, but you don't want to strap this thing to the sun, and nobody can build a leather strap the size of the sun. So you'd actually have to build a two-directional rocket.

So one that sort of pushes the rocket, another one that pushes the sun. So it keeps the sun sort of in front of it. Imagine it's sort of like a tugboat pushing a really big ship. You can't touch the ship, So it has like a little, like a particle accelerator or a rocket to sort of keep the sun in front of it. Does that pause mean that made perfect sense or no sense at all? It made no sense at all to me.

So maybe step me through. So you build a rocket. You build like a little spaceship, right? And then you put it out in front of the sun, in front of the direction you want to go or behind the sun in the direction you want to go? You put it behind the sun. So the sun is in the direction you want to go and the rocket is behind it. and the rocket is burning away from the sun. Uh-huh.

Okay, so the rocket is pushing towards the sun, but then so that the rocket doesn't fall into the sun, it shoots out a beam in front of it that pushes the sun. Oh, you're saying shoot a beam of what? Of whatever, you know, hydrogen, helium, whatever comes out of your reaction. You can push anything, sort of. Blow on the sun to get it to move.

Blow on the sun. Yeah, so you're, imagine you're pushing some enormous, is ball, right? You have some like 20 meters high basketball and you have trying to push it. You're running and you're pushing, you're blowing on this thing to keep it in front of you. Yeah. Oh, boy. All right. It's complicated. My rocket is getting energy from the sun.

Yeah, you're stealing matter from the sun to fuel it. So you have to like slurp stuff off of the sun, you know, the sun's plasma and the, the winds and all that stuff in order to fuel this thing. Oh, what? Like with a straw? How would you scoop things out from the sun? That's how it would it sound like. Well, you could use magnetic fields to sort of channel large areas of the sun's radiation into this thing to sort of grab it. Or you might have to build like a Dyson sphere to capture more of the sun's emissions and focus that into your rocket.

So it would be pretty complicated. Built like a giant catcher's mid. Use that to power your rocket. and whatever it is you're throwing at the sun to push it. It's like you grab some of the stuff it's shooting out and you use it to push it back out. That's right.

And if you're worried that this would like eat up the sun pretty quickly, the sun is pretty big. And even this ridiculous contraption would take a pretty small fraction of the energy of the sun. So we don't have to worry about that. All right.

So those are, I think, two pretty solid ideas. I don't know. They seem pretty, both pretty crazy. but they're out there those ideas are out there and they're not I guess what you're saying is they're not impossible

they're physically possible but maybe they might be engineeringly impossible I just coined that term but at least they're technically possible to do these things yeah there's sort of like what you would come up with

if you had a chalkboard and 10 minutes to solve this crazy problem and we haven't really gotten that much further than those first ideas because it's a crazy problem That's the total amount of time. I think we're talking about these ideas more than anyone has actually taught them through.

No, there's a whole field and people have published papers thinking about the details of these things in more depth. But in sort of big idea concepts, how could you attack this problem, not like the gritty details of how you would actually build this, how could you attack this problem in general? There haven't been that many more great ideas for directions to attack other than the solar sail and the massive. engine. Is there a natural journal where people discuss these things? Is it the International Journal of physics fanfiction? International Journal of absurd concepts. Physics ideas.

Yeah, the Journal of engineeringly impossible concepts. Engineeringly. All right. Well, they're plausible at least. At least in the chalkboard, they work. But I guess maybe a bigger question is, why would we want to do this? And is it even practical or feasible? And so let's get into those questions.

But first, let's take a quick break. 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.

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 plainly. site 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 oh 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. And 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 app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah.

We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content. and creators and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. I feel like this is my destiny. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement,

a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day,

you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel. So also on the table on our chalkboard is this idea of moving the sun, our sun, to another solar system. as a way to, you know, see the sites out there in the universe.

And so we talked about ways in which we could do it, possibly. They sound kind of crazy, but it sounds possible. Now the question is, why would we want to do it? Why would we, you know, we're pretty good here in this part of the galaxy. Things are pretty stable. Why would we want to get off of our solar system couch? I don't know. You sound kind of skeptical.

When we started out, you were sort of excited by the possibility of doing something crazy that I told you what the plans were. And now you seem like, me, you're not. I'm so sure this is going to happen. Well, engineering, Lee, he's kind of ridiculous, to be honest. It sounds like a galactic BS. As an engineer, I'm just like, you know what? Just stay on the couch.

This is not anywhere near plausible. But, you know, it's fun to think about. And so, or maybe the reason the need isn't great enough, you know, maybe if there was a need, I would, you know, get off my couch here. All right, let's talk motivation. Let's motivate this galactic BS. Why would we tackle this crazy problem? Well, one reason, of course, is just exploration. Like, if we wanted to explore other parts of the galaxy, this is one way to do it.

And you could effectively move all of humanity and all of our resources. You wouldn't have to build spaceships and send people out there into space. And, you know, space travel is annoying. And who wants to, like, be born on a colony ship and die in a colony ship and never set foot on a planet? That sounds kind of depressing. And so you could sort of just gradually explore the whole galaxy. You know, imagine, like, taking our star, instead of just sort of floating along, and the galactic swirl going the other direction.

Then we could be like every few years or so visiting a new solar system. It would be like being on a cruise, maybe without the coronavirus. Yeah. So the idea is that we would then get close to other stars so we can look at them better or actually like, you know, send probes out to visit other solar systems. Both. I mean, you wouldn't want to get too close because you don't want the gravity of that star to interfere with the gravity of our solar system and perturb some orbits and,

cause, you know, cataclysmic events, but close enough that you could send probes in a reasonable amount of time. Yeah. And, hey, it's like a cruise. You know, you can either get off and go explore the local scenery or you could stay on the boat. You're saying it's more practical to build a giant engine around the sun than it is to just go a little bit further with a probe. I think it's sort of a longer term plan. You could build a ship to go visit one's solar system, but this is a plan to like visit all of them. This is your, retired and you bought an RV and you want to see the country. And so you decide instead of taking a lot of little trips, you just drive all around in

your house. All right. So the exploration is one reason to get off the couch. What are some other possible needs that we might have to do this? Well, we might see a danger to our solar system and we might have a lot of warning. Like we track all the other stars in the galaxy and it might be that, you know, one swirl around the galaxy, we see something coming. Another star is headed for a near collision with ours

or close enough that it could steal some of the planets and we might want to change the trajectory of the sun in order to sort of get out of the way. Oh, I see. If there's something that might destroy our solar system, then we might want to move it somewhere else. Yeah, or move our solar system out of the way, precisely. Like a rogue planet or like a rogue star?

Well, a rogue planet would be really hard to see far in advance because they're not bright. So it would have to be a star that's on a near collision course with ours. You know, earlier in the history of the galaxy, I think more of this kind of stuff happened. Things are sort of calmer now because all the bumps that have happened have mostly happened, but there could still be more. And, you know, in the very far future, when we collide with Andromeda, then there's going to be a lot of chaos. And so, you know, long-term planning, we might want to be able to sort of shift where our house is, you know. You might want to jump ship.

Yeah, or just take your ship with you, you know. Like, if you saw a huge rock about to fall in your house, it'd be nice if you could wheel your house over to the next block. Right. Oh, I see. Instead of getting off the couch, you'd be like, move my couch, please. Call the movers, move the couch with you in it to or move the whole house. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be just that a star is going to collide with us.

We might, for example, spot a star and be able to predict that it's going to go supernova. And that could be really dangerous. If it's a star go supernova close enough, you know, within 50 or 100 light years, you could fry the earth. The x-rays and the gamma rays, it's a huge amount of radiation. So if we get to a point where the science of supernovas is better, because right now it's really hard to predict exactly when they blow, and we see one coming, then we might want to get out of the way before we all get sterilized. Wow. We'd have to move the entire solar system to be safe, right, to sort of continue Earth as it is.

Yeah. Or we all have to get on ships and hope to live. land in another solar system, but it seems to me like we have one we like. Let's just move it out of the way rather than abandoning it. It's starting to seem more and more practical now, huh? Yeah, yeah. I guess if it's that or getting fried by a supernova, let's do it. Let's build this giant crazy rocket slash solar sail. And there's just one more idea I wanted to put out there, which is we're sort of far from the galactic center. We're like 30,000 light years from the center of the galaxy, which is a comfortable distance right now.

You wouldn't want to be any closer because the center of the galaxy is filled with crazy radiation from all the stuff that's happening at the center. You've got the black hole, all the gas and dust is getting squeezed and radiating. So it's like a death zone. And we don't know sort of the future of that death zone. Like as the black hole in the center of the galaxy grows and eats more stuff, that radiation from the center of the galaxy might get larger and larger as you get out to sort of the suburbs. And so we might need to sort of like escape that radiation by pushing ourselves further out.

and having a larger radius. Oh, I see. So get away from the dangerous part of the galaxy. Move to the suburbs. Move to the exurbs, right? Move our house to the suburbs. Not just move to the suburbs. You know, put your house and wheels and move it to the suburbs.

Yeah, we're already in the suburbs. So this would be like moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere. Might be safer. Yeah. All right. But then we wouldn't be able to explore anything. We wouldn't be. But, you know, and thinking really, really long term,

like we could use this strategy to go visit other galaxies. We could, like, leave the Milky Way behind. We could float our sun and, like, go to Andromeda or go to another galaxy entirely. Yeah. Because we have our own little battery pack, which is the sun. Yeah, we don't need anything else in the galaxy. It's not doing anything for us. So our star and planets together could survive out there in intergalactic space for a long, long time as we float towards another galaxy.

All right. Well, let's get into the final part of this, which is, is it even practical? Let's say we did have a big need to do it to move our solar system. Is it even practical or feasible? I will say it's definitely not in the near future. You basically have to be a civilization that's capable of building a Dyson sphere already in order to make this possible. And we are far, far from that. Right, because we don't even, you need, where do you get all these materials and the energy to build it?

Yeah, you need a lot of raw materials. And so you need a very vigorous, like, space mining operation. There are asteroids out there that are just like, you know, a trillion. tons of platinum or whatever, you probably can find those materials, but that means you have a heavy industry in space that can go search these things and tow these asteroids and fabricate these things and put them together. I mean, you're talking about a thousand years of technology we haven't even started on. Wow, a thousand years. I don't know. I mean, these things accelerate rapidly, so it's hard to make very far future predictions. But I can't imagine we're going to have

heavy space industry in the next 20, 30, 40 years. So we're just not there in terms of the industry required to do it. But let's say even if we are, is it still possible? Like, it wouldn't, you know, I feel like if you move the sun, wouldn't that leave all the planets behind or disturb their orbits or, you know, just kind of you're risking throwing the whole solar system out of whack? I was really worried about that also. And all of my reading, I didn't find anybody addressing that.

you know if this if you give a push to the sun you're not giving a push to the planets and so the planets are going to fall behind a little bit yeah exactly so this has to be going to different orbit yeah or you could just lose them entirely and that would not be a good outcome so yeah definitely what if you blow on them too daniel what if we attach rockets and everything we want to keep well the problem is you can't build a solar sail on the earth because it's not solar right It doesn't produce photons, and you don't want to build a rocket on the Earth and then have it push on the Earth because that would be really destructive. So you'd have to just get tugged along by the gravity of the sun, which means you'd have to be pretty gentle. Like, you'd have to start out really slowly to not perturb all these other orbits.

If you ramp up slow enough, then the planets would follow because I guess the orbits are sort of stable and they would sort of stabilize. Yeah, but I don't think we know that very well, and you'd have to do a lot of calculations. You know, it's like somebody is spinning plates on their fingers, and now you want them to also start running. Jog, yeah. Probably they could do it, but you'd want to start really, really gradually. All right, well, we'll make those calculations, Daniel, and submit it to the journal of physics fan fiction. But the good news is that none of these engines are that powerful. I mean, even if you built this solar sale, it would take, like,

200 million years to go just 100 light years. And that's because the sun is just really massive and moving. It takes a huge amount of energy. So this engine would just sort of like very, very gently push the sun. It would take 230 million years before we even see the next star. Well, the next star is only a few light years away. But, yeah, 100 light years, it's not that far on galactic distances. You know, the galaxy is 100,000 light years across.

So you're not visiting the entire galaxy very quickly using that solar sail. And that's one reason why people are thinking about the rocket engine approach because even though it's ridiculous to build a rocket engine that could push the sun, it is more powerful and has more potential to push the sun. Oh, I see. That would do it in a less amount of time. Yeah, you could do it like, you could go 100 light years and only like 2 million years. But still, that's a huge long-term project.

Like, Humanian has been around for 30,000 years. You're saying, let's have a project that lasts two million years. Yeah, let's take a trip that lasts two million years. Yeah, it's like you've been dating somebody for a month, and you propose going on a 50-year cruise, right? What could go wrong? The coronavirus. Maybe those folks are going to be on that cruise ship for 50 years.

You never know. Yeah, I'd never let them out. All right, so it's, well, but, But again, it all depends on the knee. Like, if we have to move the sun, then we have to move the sun, even if it takes a few million years. That's right. You know, sometimes you just got to call Bruce Willis, whether you have the budget for it or not, because you just got to solve the problem. And, you know, freeze him so he lasts a million years.

And only bring him out at critical moments. I think my favorite aspect of this, though, is not thinking about how humanity might do it as awesome as that is, but thinking about aliens doing it. Because if aliens pull this off, we might see them doing it. And that could prove they exist. The same way, like spotting an alien civilization, building a Dyson sphere, could prove that there are aliens. If we see a sun, like, doing weird things, moving non-gravitationalally, that's a clue that there's something interesting happening. I see. That's like option C.

Like, you know, option A, Daniel does it. Daniel doesn't want to do it. Option B, somebody else does it. Some other human does it. No other human wants to do it. often see, hey, look, somebody else is doing it. I'm done. That's all I needed to know. And that's the ultimate stay on your couch because then the aliens do all the work and they take

the trip, right? You're like, why don't you come visit us at our house? We'll just make dinner. Just put a big sign out saying, open for dinner. Yeah, free banana smoothies for any aliens who come to visit. And it's not just spotting aliens who are doing this so we can see that they exist, but maybe they would come and visit. You know, they could drag their star on their tour around the gallery. And they could stop over here and tell us all about the mysteries of the universe.

All right. Well, it's super fun to sort of think about these crazy ideas and giant engineeringly complex projects. Because, you know, it kind of forces you to think about what is possible and how physics works out there in the universe. Yeah. And a lot of things that are very normal, very banal every day in our society seemed impossible and crazy just a couple of hundred years ago. And so what seems crazy to us now could be ho-hum in the future. You know, and maybe this is a thing that our children's, children's, children's children will enjoy getting to pick the next solar system that humanity visits. You know, you don't even need to get off the couch to make more children, so that all works out. This plan is perfect. All right.

Well, I guess until then, couch potatoes, keep on dreaming. There's a lot that humanity can do just thinking about these things from the comfort of your couch. I prefer to refer to this community as kautstrannauts. Couchstrand. I see. Fearless non-explorers. Exactly. Explorers of the mind.

All right. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook. Twitter and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at feedback at danielandhorpe.com.

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. 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. 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 her gone. Now, 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. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grasias, 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. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah.

We'll talk about all that's viral and trending With a little bit of chisement And a whole lot of laughs And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast Or wherever you get your podcast This is an IHeart podcast

This is an IHeart podcast.