Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The Science Fiction Universe of "Orbital Cloud"

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Daniel and Kelly talk to Tayio Fujii, author of "Orbital Cloud" See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Kelly, are you a lottery ticket purchaser? No, as a person who thinks a lot about statistics and probability, I am not a lottery ticket purchaser. Well, you just got to bet on the high variance events. But let's say that you win a billion dollars someday. What are you going to do with your windfall? Have you thought about that? Oh, my gosh.

Well, I'd like to think that I'd like work on the world hunger problem. So maybe I'd do something like that. But also, I would make a really awesome lab for myself, probably. Probably put it into science. What would you do? I might start my own university where students can go for free. and faculty don't have to apply for grants. Whoa.

And then I encourage them to hire me because this university you're talking about sounds fantastic, and I would like to work there. What I definitely wouldn't do is spend any of that money sending myself to space. Really? You don't want to go to space? I have zero inches in going to space.

How much money would you spend on a ticket to space, Kelly? I wouldn't. No, we're on the same page. But it still seems way too dangerous right now for my taste. Let's just stay here on Earth and spend our billion dollars on science. Yeah, that sounds great. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine,

and I am terrified of fast-moving vehicles. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith, and I'm a parasitologist with Rice University, and I am also sort of petrified of fast-moving vehicles, but also maybe in particular, fast-moving vehicles that have a high probability of exploding. I recently tested my faith in science and engineering because A took a helicopter flight for the first time last week. Whoa! How did you get that opportunity? My daughter and I went on a road trip around the West Coast, and we took a chopper ride through the Grand King. canyon, which was pretty spectacular. That does sound awesome. But are you saying you were scared or was it moving slow enough that it wasn't scary?

I was terrified. There's so much angular momentum in that thing. You know, some little thing goes wrong. It just pulls itself apart. And my daughter was scared. She thought, is this thing really safe? And I know the numbers. I know the statistics.

It's much safer to get in the helicopter than it was to drive to the helicopter. But still, it was terrifying. And so I had to reassure her, even though inside I was also terrified. Well, it's also, you know, the unknown things that could happen that maybe you're not expecting, which is sort of what makes the book that we are going to talk about today, you know, makes space travel sound even more petrifying. And so welcome to the podcast, Daniela Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio, in which we explore everything that can and does happen in our universe, how things come apart, how things come together, how everything works. We talk about black holes, we talk about white holes, we talk about galaxies, we talk about particles, we talk about everything that happens in the universe. And sometimes we talk about things that happen in fictional universes. My friend and co-host Jorge can't be with us today, but I'm very happy to have Kelly, our host on these science

fiction episodes, joining us today. Kelly, thanks very much. Thank you so much for having me. I love every time you email me and you're like, hey, how about we read a science fiction book for work? And I'm like, this is, my life is the best. Science fiction is so much fun to read. You know, as a scientist, you spend all of your days struggling against the boundaries of the laws of physics. It's so much fun to have creative people also contributing, you know, thinking about other ways universes could be what the laws of physics might be or setting stories in our universe

and figuring out like how to solve problems. I just love the connection between the creativity of writing science fiction and the creativity of actually exploring our universe. Yeah. And this book was particularly exciting because it's set almost essentially in our time exactly and the world is very similar to our world and so it's interesting to think about well it's just a few things we're different what might our world be like and so yeah it's a really fun book to think about yeah i love when science fiction tells us about how we could live how we might

live and also explores like you know the consequences of technology and how it can affect and change people's lives you know we can like lift up one nation to make it more powerful it can give access as to people who were excluded from the mainstream. Technology really can completely revolutionize our society. And I love seeing science fiction writers try to anticipate that and to explore that. And that's absolutely what this book does. And what book did we read for today's episode, Daniel? And so on today's episode, we're going to be talking about

the science fiction universe of Orbital Cloud by Tayao, Fuji. This is a really fun book that takes place in the near future. Kelly and I both read this book and encourage you to pick it up. It's a lot of fun. And it's a really impressive display of like the technical mastery of the author. It's like very detailed, very specific. A lot of the plot points really rely on like understanding the science and how things actually work. But I feel like often when you get a book that's really good about the science, sometimes you don't get characters that are good also. There's like, you know, you can be good at the engineering, but maybe. you're not also good at describing people. And this book, I think, does a really nice job of having, like, an interesting plot, interesting characters, and solid science. I was personally very impressed with his breath. I was curious what your thoughts were about it, especially, like, the space international law and all the treaties and the intrigue and all that stuff.

But first, let's tell our listeners a little bit about what this book is about. It was published originally in Japanese and then translated a few years later. And in my mind, it's something like a space spy techno thriller. You know, you have countries, battle. against each other in space, but, you know, it's not like a shooting war. It's more like, you know, information and maneuvering. I got some sort of like hunt for Red October vibes. You know, it's like political and there's espionage and all sorts of stuff. How did you see the book? Well, so first of all, I should admit that I've never seen Hunt for Red October. And I regret

that like every couple months because I feel like it gets referenced all the time. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I got to watch that. But yeah, no, I got those vibes too, although I'll say that it's like, yes, there was the espionage web aspect of it. But, you know, there were also these very real weapons that were up in space, too. And so, yeah, had some of that also. But I'll watch Hunt for Red October. So the next time it gets brought up, I'm on the ball. I don't know how you can exist in the nerddom without having seen that movie.

When I've spent two years studying Russian and I'm interested in Soviet history. And so it comes up a lot because it's us versus the Soviets in that, right? Yeah, like every movie back then. So what is this book about? takes place over a few days in 2020, and it involves a lot of sort of amateur characters, people watching the sky. There's a guy who runs a meteor predicting website who's following something in space and notices something strange happening in the trajectory of an object that was launched by North Korea.

So if a lot of different characters all around the world sort of seeing things happening in space and trying to put together what's going on. Yeah, they all actually, for the most part, work together, which I hope is, what would happen, but I'm not always so optimistic. There's also a rich dude who is doing a stunt trip to his orbital hotel and he's bringing his daughter with him and like, you know, you read it for the first time or you start reading the book and you think to yourself, oh, is this supposed to be Elon Musk? And then it turns out he made his millions from a company that is very clearly meant to be PayPal and fiction or in this fictional universe and you're like, okay, I get it. This is

definitely supposed to be Elon Musk. So there's an Elon Musk character who is going to space in his orbital hotel for the first time and as a big stunt to like, I guess, show how safe it is. He takes his daughter with him. Exactly. But then it turns out maybe space isn't so safe because these amateurs watching the sky notice that this object that North Korea launched has a sort of strange trajectory. It's not really following like your typical gravitational trajectory. It's sort of maneuvering in space in a way that surprises everybody.

And suddenly people panic like, hold on, is this some sort of new weapon? had the North Koreans develop this thing called the Rod from God that can, you know, drop payloads from space, or maybe they're like targeting this orbital hotel that the Elon Musk character has built. So all of a sudden there's this sort of change in the power balance in space. People think, oh, this is new technology. Maybe now we are no longer safe, whereas a moment ago we thought of ourselves as safe. I think that's really interesting how the explores the sort of power dynamics and how very quickly things can change with new technology. And absolutely, if some country not only got the power

to knock out, you know, the international space station, the Chinese space station that's up there, any tourist stuff, but also all of our satellites that we use for GPS or communication or something, that would be an incredible power if they were willing to wield it, you know, for evil purposes. And it would, of course, break all sorts of international law. But yes, you could certainly cripple a country like the U.S. if you suddenly took out all of our satellites. We'd be in trouble. And so now that we've got you all petrified of the idea that your cell phone's not going to work anymore or your credit card, how plausible is the science here, Daniel? Could something like this happen? So this is a really fun book because wow did the author do their homework. Oh my gosh. It's so clear that it was really important to him that every element of this book be plausible. I think he wanted the characters to be really living within the confines of science. And, you know, his background is he is an engineer. And so I think he's trying to share sort of that joy. of solving puzzles within these rules.

You know, you can't just break the rules and say, I'm gonna magic away this problem. And so in the book, the characters can't magic away stuff. So there's a lot of really interesting science in this book includes like computer science and space technology and physics. One of the espionage bits in the story involves changing how automatic translation engines

will translate like Korean into English so that it changes what people hear when they're watching a speech. So you're watching a speech. speech by the dictator of North Korea, for example, and you're relying on this automatic translation, and you can manipulate what people hear if you manipulate also these translation engines. And I thought that was really fascinating, a very clever and troubling idea. I agree. It was both petrifying and clever and troubling. And has anything like this ever happened before? Or did he come up with this?

It's a totally plausible idea because the way a lot of these translation engines work is they just sort of like scrape the web for information. You want to know how to translate between English and in Korean. You don't like sit down with a bunch of experts who teach your computer how to do it. You just get a bunch of examples and you just learn the mapping. So you need pages that are written in one language and in the other language and the computer learns between them. And so just as chat GPT is learning from the web, they just like scrape text from the internet. So they rely on the fact that it's written by humans and it's correct. And then they learn that mapping. And so if you pollute that sample, if you insert a bunch of new stuff into the web that has

incorrect translations that you want to insert into like English-Korean translators, then that's totally possible. You would absolutely do that because the assumption they're making when they're doing this training is that all the human text out there is basically correct. None of it's like maliciously incorrectly written. And there actually is a sort of hilarious and tragic example of incorrect text being pumped into, you know, the sort of textosphere, which is a few years ago, they discovered that there was one guy writing a bunch of articles in the Scots language. So, you know, Scottish people, part of the UK, you know, speak English, obviously, but they also have their local dialect Scots, which is related to English, but not identical.

And there was some American teenager. Probably this kid watched too many Austin Powers movies in which there's, you know, some Scottish characters, et cetera. And he just thought, oh, I'm going to write a bunch of articles in Wikipedia in the Scots language. But he didn't know Scots. And so he just wrote them sort of as like English written in a Scottish accent. But he wrote like gibberish and nonsense

and just like made up a bunch of stuff. Oh my gosh. But and so like how many how many articles did he write? Like how committed was heat to this endeavor? For being something that was not malicious, it was really impressively deep. He wrote 23,000 articles about a third of the entire Scott's Wikipedia at the time was created by

by this one guy who didn't speak Scots. You're just like writing in a joking accent. This is why teenagers should not be allowed to have free time. Like, they don't do good things with it. There was an interview with a professor who's like an expert in the Scots language. And he said, quote, this is going to sound incredibly hyperbolic and hysterical. But I think this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history. Oh my gosh.

Worse than Mel, what was it, Mel Gibson? And didn't he do a? Worse than all those English kings that's killed all those Scottish people and suppressed Scottish culture. Anyway, the point is that you can actually pollute what's out there. If you now go and write a translator that goes from English to Scots, you're probably picking up a lot of this baloney that this American teenager created. And so now it's a lot harder to learn that translation. So this is totally plausible. It's really happened in our world that you can pollute the sort of ocean of information from which AI is learning to connect

languages. So what you're saying is that North Korea is going to hire this teenager and we're all going to be in a lot of trouble. And I think after the break, we should talk about the weapon that the North Koreans were wielding in this book. So let's take a quick break. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grasias 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.

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of love that flows through this place and it's sincere now it's a personal mission don't want to have to go to any more funerals you know i got blown up on a react mission i ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and the traumatic brain injury because i landed on my head welcome to season two of the good stuff listen to the good stuff podcast on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast All right, so that there's a corruption of information. There's also actually these weapons that are going into space. So Daniel, tell us about these weapons.

So in the book, they have this weapon. They call it the rod from God, which is a really fun name for a weapon, but it's terrifying. The idea is to take a big, heavy object, launch it into space, and then drop it on someone. And this is essentially just taking advantage of the kinetic energy. You have something really high up in the gravitational well and it falls to Earth. And as it falls down, it speeds up. It gains a lot of kinetic energy. And when it impacts, it's like a meteor.

You know, it's the reason why the dinosaurs were wiped out. There wasn't a nuclear weapon. Nobody blew up a fusion bomb. It's just a massive amount of energy delivered to the Earth's surface, which doesn't take high technology. As long as you can get something heavy up really far above the Earth and then drop it into the gravitational well, By the time it hits the planet, it can be devastating. Yeah, I did a little bit of research on these Rod from God proposals when we were working on our spacebook. And there are some pretty good arguments against not using them.

Like, one, you know, the fact that it's heavy is super important, which is also going to make it super expensive because every pound you send into space is still pretty pricey these days. Also, it's sort of hard to direct this kind of weapon relative to, like, you know, a missile that you can, in some cases, maybe turn or point. it needs to be almost always over a potential target at all times. And then finally, this weapon, so as you mentioned, like, asteroids were pretty bad for the dinosaurs. They were also bad for everyone because they created this, like, cloud that impacted the climate. And so this is a kind of weapon that can cause problems for people who aren't necessarily the target. But still a very scary weapon.

And I guess the final argument that usually goes against these things is that you can do all of these things with weapons we already have from Earth. So I spend the money to send it up into space and then you have to worry about maintaining this weapon. But still, yes, Rod from God comes up in sci-fi. I actually think the idea came from a sci-fi novel first and then got explored by the U.S. Air Force. And to be honest, I didn't know that the Air Force's project Thor had gotten as much attention as it did. I ended up doing a little research after reading your outline. Yeah, this is something the Air Force has actually thought about. They read about it in science fiction.

Is that possible? And so they explored the idea of dropping basically a tungsten telephone pole from space. And, you know, this thing would reach like Mach 10 and it would have the yield of a nuclear weapon without any fallout. So from that perspective, it's like less dangerous. You know, you worry about like nuking other countries and then the fallout drifting across the ocean or whatever. In this case, there is no radioactive fallout. But as you say, it's super expensive. They calculated it would cost like $230 million per shot.

Oh my gosh. Because, you know, tungsten is expensive. The thing that makes it powerful is also the thing that makes it heavy. And so that's pretty tricky. I think you'd have to, like, mine the tungsten in space to make this thing more effective. But hey, I'm not here giving the Air Force, you know, good ideas for futuristic weapons. Well, I'm not too worried. That's pretty far off in the future, I think.

Being able to mine that much tungsten and use it for weapons. But then they also have this other interesting technology in the book, which are anti-satellite weapons. So if you have now things in space that can attack you, you want to have a way. ways to defend yourselves. And so in the book, there's a long thread at NORAD where they're talking about like, what could we do to attack a satellite to help defend ourselves and refers to this technology, this ASM-140 is anti-satellite missile, essentially, shooting a missile from Earth into space to attack a satellite.

So what do you know about anti-satellite technology in our universe in reality, Kelly? Well, so I guess this is one of the ways that the rod from God actually is a good weapon. like if you, it's pretty hard to mess up a giant slug of tungsten. And so like if you are sending it towards Earth and someone shoots it, probably that giant slug of tungsten is still coming towards you. But in terms of actually shooting at like, you know, like a GPS satellite or something, this is something that a number of countries have done already from the ground. China, the U.S., Russia, and India have all shot their own satellites out of the sky

just to show that they can so that other people know that they have that power. I think that in all of those cases, it was from the ground shooting to space as opposed to the method that's used in this book where you climb on an airplane and then the airplane shoots at the weapon. I could be wrong about that. But anyway, so anti-satellite weapons are a thing that exists right now. In the time between when his book was published and when it came out, Russia shot down one of their satellites and it got some news because the ISS folks had to jump to their return vehicle because there was some concern that the debris caused. by the satellite getting blown up was going to hit the ISS and puncture it and expose everyone to the vacuum of space. Russia, of course, claimed that everybody was making a big deal over nothing and it was nowhere near the ISS. But anyway, so these sorts of weapons are real.

Yeah, and that's really the downside of it is that if we have like a war, we're shooting each other satellites, we could fill the near space environment with garbage and we could make it impossible for anybody to get off planet. We have an episode about space junk in this concern that as soon as you have enough space junk, it becomes exponential and banging into itself and destroying all the satellites. And then space is just filled with junk and you can't launch anything safely, which would be terrible in lots of ways. Yeah, Kessler syndrome. We want to avoid that for sure. Exactly. I think there was actually a program in the Air Force. It's called ASM 135, where they were going to launch a missile from an F-15 doing this crazy supersonic climb. I was reading

about how they did test it in 1985 and destroyed a solar observation satellite. And the junk still was floating around for 20 years. They track each piece of junk after this explosion. And the last piece deorbited in 2004. So it's not like space cleans itself up very quickly either. Like you make a mistake. It could be decades before we could launch something into space again. So that I was wrong. There has been, they have tested this from a plane shooting the satellite thing before. So that's super interesting. And I think the country that got the most flack for this test was, China because they shot a satellite that was still at a sort of higher orbit. And so all the junk, it created, stayed up there for much longer.

Most people, when they shoot down their satellites, it's much lower. So the junk is going to deorbit sooner. And I think the international community went after China, whereas they usually don't make a huge fuss about this stuff because they had sort of polluted the space environment so much. But anyway, okay, so that's been tested. Cool. Cool, scary. I'm not sure.

Yeah. One of the key technologies in this book, the thing that allows the North Koreans to sort of like steal the satellite and manipulate this rocket in orbit without having propulsion on it is this idea of a space tether. The sort of central plot device in the book is that they're watching this North Korean satellite and they're expecting it to just be tumbling, but then it's maneuvering and they're wondering like, how did they do that? And so this space tether technology is what allows the North Koreans in the book, having stolen it from the Iranians to sort of maneuver this object in orbit and, you know, maybe target areas with their rod from God. So how do these tethers work? So these space tethers are super fascinating. Again, the author has been very diligent because there is real physics here.

Like you can't actually use these things to manipulate the path of things in orbit. Especially space tether is just a long wire. You have an object in space and you have a very, very long wire attached to it. If you're moving through a magnetic field, then you can take advantage of the Lorentz force And you can either turn your motion into electrical energy. You can, like, become a generator by turning the motion of your wire through a magnetic field into current in the wire. So you can, like, generate power. Or if you can dump a power into the wire, if you can create current on the wire, then you get a force between the wire and the magnetic field.

And you can use that essentially to steer. So you get something like an electronic rudder where you can control your motion through the magnetic field and basically position your satellite anywhere you want it, at least steer it somewhat. So could we actually have this and why don't we? Or should we let the author explain that later in the interview? This is totally plausible. The physics is solid.

You know, it's all just the Lorentz force. You either turning kinetic energy into electrical energy or electrical energy into kinetic energy. Both of those actually work. And people have explored this. NASA had a mission in 2002 called the ProSEDs mission, which was going to have a 15-kilometer tether attached to an object. That was going to explore like electromagnetic propulsion.

The advantage again here is that you don't need propellant. You know, most of the time when you're maneuvering in space, you have to throw some mass off your ship. You want to change direction. You've got to push away by throwing something in the other direction to conserve momentum. And so this would allow you essentially to swim through the magnetic field indefinitely because you will never run out of propellant. So this is a very cool idea, totally plausible.

My one question when I was reading about this was whether the magnetic field of the Earth really was strong enough to give the effects in the book. But we asked the author about it and he gave us a very fun answer about it when we talk to him. All right. And so enough of me and Kelly talking about this book that we didn't write. We were very excited to talk to the author about how he wrote such a fun book with so many interesting characters and so much cool space technology and space dynamics and space law and space politics. And we're very happy that the author was willing to join us. So here's our interview with Tayao Fuji. So it's my great pleasure to welcome to the podcast, Mr. Tayao Fuji, author of Orbital Cloud. Taya, thank you very much for joining us

on the podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me to the podcast. I'm very glad to talking about Optial Cloud. We're glad to have you here. We loved it. And we'd love to hear about how you got into writing science fiction, what was your path to becoming a successful science fiction author? I was a computer software engineer and especially developing the computer graphics software for the commercial usage. Then in the 2011, May, 1911, we caused the huge earthquake in Japan. On that time, then 10,000 people have gone away by tsunami. We know that. But the two days after the Fukushima nuclear power plant got the boom, exploded.

All the news source and the media is changed to the mentioning about the tsunami disaster, but also they turned to reporting the radioactive, dangerousness. On this timing, safely, safety. But the news media kept claiming that the radioactive is dangerous and we cannot live there.

I got anger. Then I was thinking about how to show that we can stand in front of the technology or disaster or the natural disaster or the climate change or the many things. Then, but I was only one engineer, I'm not scientist.

I was not famous for the talking about a disaster, nuclear disaster. Then I started to write science fiction. The fiction is the most low-cost way to sending the message to somebody. Then I wrote the first science fiction story about the demagogue killing people. I sold 10,000 copies of e-book on the two months or so. I became the many, right, the editor and my publisher editor know my work. Then I, then the publisher Hayakawa, the Japanese science fiction dedicated publisher, they offer me to the publishing, the dreamapper, to be commercial publishing.

Then I agree it and rewriting it and changing my job to the engineer-employee to their independent writer. That is such an interesting path. And so I'm wondering you were inspired by an event that happened in modern times. Is that what motivated you to write a book that could be happening in the very near future, as opposed to like thousands of years in the future? Were you a science fiction fan before that? Yes, I was science fiction. big science fiction fan. I already have 800 books on my shelf and I kept James P. Hogan

and Ashimov and the writers. And especially I love the work of the Paolo Bachi Barzigalpi, the wind-up girl. Well, tell us about how you came up with this story. There's so many fascinating interconnected pieces to it. Did you come up with sort of the story first? And then figure out how the technology worked, or are you more fascinated by the technological elements and then figured out a story you could tell with them? I start a story from there. I started to write a novel science fiction from the story. Who do what is my story starting point?

And about Orbital Cloud, speaking about Obitac Cloud, the web engineer saves the world. a story story is called the core. Then how I think and when I think was home. Then when the food, that's what was. I was impressed by how much different knowledge you had of things like international law, different space agencies in different countries and how they work. And the knowledge was expansive and beyond just what you would expect from your experience as an engineer. So how long did it take you to get all of that.

additional information and how did you go about learning all of those additional pieces? I researched through the three or four months, but that's the internet, the method, is joining onto the Hakka Song, the Hakka Marathon. NASA started the Hakkhasom of the space-up data, disclosed all the data by the Obama governance. Then NASA started to let the engineers to make something, develop something from using NASA data, space data. Then I'm joining it. Then there, I spent two days at the Tokyo University and making a friend. And I joined and with my friend.

Then my friend is the more the protagonist's model of the orbital cloud. I met many people, some people is appearing in this book. Do you have a friend like Kazumi who could like, and I'm sorry, sure I pronounce the name wrong, but who could like imagine orbital trajectories in his head? During the Hakkason, I tried to make the positioning of the ISS. Then we agreed that if we track the two weeks, the ISS orbital element, we can pressure this of the positioning

in the one-hour accuracy in the brain calculation. Wow, that's some real research. And the story about Isana is very interesting. He is my friend from the university, a very long friend, and he made the unique program. Then he displayed the position of the ISS on the Google Map. Then everybody can see the where is ISS on the square. Then I love that program, very small program.

And on that years, Google Maps API was freely. It's a very important thing. Then we love that program. And many the amateur uses a program. and yeah and one day the is a phone that

NASA use it on the Space Shuttle mission he watched the NASA TV and the Space Shut emission on the bigger

largest console the NASA displayed his app on the biggest screen and sharing the position

wow and the iPhone I know that after that thing, he was invited the Space Chattel launching mission to NASA. Then he watched the launching from the fast prize seat. Then this story is the basis of the, and one of the big base of the Optial Cloud. All right, we have lots more questions for Tai-O, but first we have to take a quick break.

Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union. shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand.

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and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, 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. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories.

I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests

for this new season of family secrets. Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman,

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 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. 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. Okay, we're back and we're talking to Tayao Fuji, the author of Orbital Cloud, about how he wrote such a fast. fascinating and complicated, but compelling novel. I really liked how in your story a lot of the contributions to solving the puzzle come from people who are amateurs and they don't work for NASA or the space agency. You know, maybe they're amateurs but wealthy or they're professionals, but they're underfunded. Is it important to you in our real world that everybody can contribute to cutting edge science and space exploration with whatever skills they have? My writing year was 2012 or 2013, that those years, the SpaceX had not succeeded yet. Then I think the amateur can help the world better.

So you mentioned that you were researching and writing in 2012. So in the decade since you wrote the book, what about the trajectory of the space industry has surprised you or disappointed you? Are we about where you expected we would be? by now, or are we falling short? I, they're limiting on the space development. The commercial and non-governmental space development is kept going to succeed, rather than I imagine writing of the orbital cloud.

Of course, the Ronnie Smock, the space developer on the story models, But the mask followed very closely to imagination. His space X and the studying system is very similar for my story. My imagination was touched by the evil mask. And another challenge is keeping. Then the space development is better than my expectation. But the batting was the world tension of the geopolitical situation. situation is harder than I thought than I project.

And if given the opportunity, would you like to travel to space personally, if Elon Musk offered you a seat on one of his flights? Yeah. I think that Musk showed that it is possible than there are many follower walks and better, I think. Yeah, I'm excited by companies like Rocket Lab, too. I know they're not bringing people to space, but they're doing a good job of lowering the costs and stuff. So your book was translated into English. Did you work with the translator or have you read the translated version? What was that process like?

The translation was a very standard process. The publisher, the publisher Haikasol, the San Francisco publisher, the selected translator. The translator is a payer translation. And then this is the Timosie Silver is the group name of the. the two translators. Then they are living in Japan. Then after translation was almost finished, the two of them

asked me to the accuracy or a question about accuracy with the, but if the communication was via the publisher Haikaso, not the direction to me. Then I only review the translation

in English, but I was so excited. it. During the Optial Cloud in Japanese edition, I imagine that, of course, the many characters speaks English in Japanese edition, of course, then, but I write in Japanese. But I imagine that how they say it in real, in English, then I was so excited to read in the English edition. And with the real English ones, I was so excited. And the translation is very accurate, very similar to my Japanese one. Every paragraph is not removed.

No one is added. Wonderful. Well, I'm glad that it's so accurate. Kelly and I have both written books that have been translated into languages. We can't read. And I wonder sometimes if my bad jokes work in Turkish, you know, or in Hungarian. but I'll never know. Speaking of accuracy,

something about the book really impressed me is that you have all these characters sort of fighting against the rules of science, sort of struggling against nature. You know, how do we solve this problem? And every time they find a solution, it falls within science. You're never inventing new kinds of science.

Is it important to you that the science in your book be plausible, essentially that your story take place in our universe? You never, like, make up new laws of physics. Yeah. There are only one thing that I had told a lie about this book, Physics. And one thing is the strongness of the magnetic field of the Earth. Then I calculated it is a thousand times stronger than the actual one

in order to the moving the things quickly. because the electrodynamics power is very small. One thing of the physics lie is the magnet strength of the magnet fuel. The second one is the clock, computer clock. I set the atomic clock on the cellarphone-based circuit, but the atomic clock is not the one my friend's science fiction writer say that. You should set the solar cell on the tether.

Then even if it cannot be there, making enough power, but also the fictional accuracy was held. Everybody cannot claim you that you're making, you're talking, you're writing the eternal machine. This you can correct in the second edition. There you go.

Yeah, sure. And when the movie. That's right. That's right. They'll have solar sales in the movie. Yeah. When somebody says the movie. Yeah. So one of the themes in the book is how space technology and, you know, the satellites that we have in orbit are really helpful for the developed countries that have them and that this contributes to power and balances. What do you see as the current state of things and do you see any hope that the developing countries will be able to catch up and better? from space technologies as much as we do in developed countries without like something catastrophic happening. Yeah. The catastrophic might not be happened because too much players is launching things to the orbit.

Then there are many, the thousand eyes is watching the spaces every time, every second. And already the 4,000 satellites by one company. one company starting system is covering us, and the starting system guys watching the orbit every second, of course. And China already launched two space stations, two space stations. And they often launching the projects to their Tengu Second. And the North Korea already launching the many things to the there. And another country is starting to the launching the many things.

Then the increasing of the player makes to the watching by each, watching each other's. And that makes the collapsing or the big project for the big Thailand country may not be appeared because there are too many. players is working on the space, basically. And the challenge of the SpaceX, let our past sea to the sky, at least, then that makes the interesting is kept on our orbit. Then I think the collapsing thing may not occur

from the space, but also from the ground, I think. Wonderful. Thank you again. very much for joining us on the podcast today and talking to us about your book and congratulations on it. So I forgot to tell you that when the Orbiter Cloud, then Orbiter Cloud sets the date of the 2020. Then why I said this year is because the moon is not shown in Christmas. It's a new moon date. then I was very nervous about when the people were looking about the sky,

if there was a moon, I should describe the position of the moon every time. Then I searched the when the new moon. I searched there, I should set the date of the story, this seven days' story during the new moon, terms. Then I found that 2020 is the best just after the president was changed. Great. Then I set here to the object at this one. I love that you used a moon phase to figure out when the book was going to be set. That's awesome.

So there many science fiction found that where is the moon? On that time the moon is on that time the moon is on the in front of you, then everybody cannot see the meteor or other, another thing, then I want to remove the moon. Then I found the new moon terms. Main literature writers can remove the moon easily, but science fiction cannot do it. When you read science fiction, do you check the science yourself? Do you think, hmm, is that accurate? Would the moon be in the sky? Are you that detailed when you're reading as well? Yes, exactly.

We cannot escape from the science. Awesome, awesome. All right, well, again, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. All right, so that was super fun interview. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. And thank you, Kelly, for reading this book with me and chatting with us about it today. Thanks for having me and thanks again for doing another one of these sci-fi episodes where I have an excuse to read a super fun book. I had a blast.

All right, thanks very much. and we encourage everybody to check out this book. It's a lot of fun. Thanks for listening. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Death World Records.

From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music. music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture Raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis, and we host Bananas, the podcast where we share the weirdest, funniest, real news stories from all around the world. And sometimes from our guest personal lives, too.

Like when Whitney Cummings recently revealed her origin story on the show. There's no way I don't already have rabies. This is probably just why my personality is like this. I've been surviving rabies for the past 20 years. New episodes of bananas drop every Tuesday in the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you.

I'll take it off. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me.

I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No such thing. This is an IHeart podcast.