Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What if the asteroid hadn't killed the dinosaurs?

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

Daniel and Jorge answer listener questions and give a special birthday shout out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. 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'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement 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 IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denials easier complex problem solving takes effort listen to the psychology 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's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No, thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host,

Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I-feel uses. Like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Jorge, what did you want for your birthday when you were nine? I'm pretty sure I wanted Legos, because I think throughout most of my childhood, that's all I wanted. What do I do? Yep, probably Legos. That or

having my own bedroom. Did you want Lego so you could build your own room? I wanted my own room so I didn't have to share my Legos. Oh. So are you saying that 9-year-old Jorge didn't want answers to some big science questions? I think Jorge in the third grade didn't know what

science was. So probably my biggest science question would be, what is science? So you weren't wondering about aliens and black holes? I did probably have a question about the universe. back then. What was that? What's the biggest thing you can build out of Legos?

All right, I'm going online after this to buy you a bunch of Legos. Done, I'll take it. It's on the record. You know my address. Did they make an entire universe set for Legos? I'm thinking of adding to our house, so I think we'll just make it out of Legos. Did you send me? Save on construction materials.

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'm not great at building real things out of Legos. Really? You never play with them as a kid? No, I play with Legos all the time, but I always end up making weird, abstract stuff rather than like ships or dinosaurs or, you know, cartoon characters. I would have thought as a future particle physicist, all you would do is build stuff and then smash it together. Is there another reason to make Legos of the knocking them down?

That is the joyful part. No, the joy is putting them together, right? Seeing how everything fits together. That's part of the wonder. Well, there is a wonderful connection between Legos and particle physics because it turns out that our universe follows the Lego principle. It's made of tiny little interlocking pieces. And everything that's unique about you is how those pieces are put together,

not the pieces themselves. Are quarks also painful when you step on them by accident? Absolutely, since Legos are made out of quarks, it's really the quarks that you're stepping on at 3 in the morning. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard radio. In which we knock down everything about the universe and break it up into tiny little Lego-sized pieces so that we can explain it to you. We tackle black holes and neutron stars and galaxies and the tiniest of little particles. We tear all of it apart and show you what it's made out of, the pieces. that we understand and the pieces that we are still puzzling over.

Yeah, because it is a pretty wonderful universe, very complex, very interesting, very fascinating to see how it all sort of fits together because it does seem like sometimes somebody put it together using some kind of an instruction manual. It does sometimes and it makes me wonder if we ever do figure out what the smallest thing is, what that will sort of mean, you know, what we will learn from that, philosophically how we will interpret that. If the universe is made out of strings or tiny little foaming bits of space or something else entirely, eventually we'll be faced with a question, hmm, what does that mean about the universe?

Yeah, because there might be a tiny little particle at the end of everything that everything is made out of. And Daniel, I think if you ever discovered it, I think you should call it with some sort of acronym that spells out Lego. Because that would be just so wonderfully ironic. Maybe like light, energetic, glue-on, observable. Oreo? Oreo? You can't call a particle an Oreo because Oreos have something inside them so it can't be fundamental. Oh boy, you can go in loops.

Like maybe Oreos are then made out of Legos and Legos are made out of Oreos. Wait, are Oreos an acronym? I just wonder, because I always see them capitalized. You're right, yeah. What does Oreo stand for? Another secret of the universe, uncovered here. Yeah, listeners out there educate us. What does Oreo mean? But it is a wonderful universe and, you know, as human beings, we sort of can't help as we We look at it, we can't help but wonder about it and ask questions about it.

You know, we see things that we don't understand or see things that are maybe seem unexplainable. And you have to ask, why is it the way that is or how does that work? Yeah, and we are surfing along on this incredible wave of scientific knowledge. People 100 years ago knew so much less about the universe than we do. And people in 100 years will know exponentially more about the universe than we do. So every year that goes by, we gain more and more insight into this crazy bonkers universe. And all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the wave, or you can come join us and pitch in to create that knowledge.

Yeah, there's a lot we know and a lot we don't know, and people have questions. And by the way, I should give a shout out again to our book, Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe, which is out now and people can get it. And we answer all kinds of amazing questions in it for you. That's right. And for those moments on our podcast when Jorge says, ooh, that's tricky to do on a podcast. I wish I could scribble on a piece of paper.

Well, the book is a bunch of pieces of paper. a lot of them have Jorge's hilarious scribbles on them. Because don't forget, he's not just a podcaster, he's also a cartoonist. Just a cartoonist, yes. But yeah, we asked her all kinds of awesome questions in it. So please support the podcast, get a book for yourself when you read over the holidays or for a friend or maybe a late gift to that special love one, you totally forgot about that. Or if you're building an extension to your house and you need some building materials,

order a bunch of copies. Yeah, they stack pretty well, right? They're rectangular. They're sort of brick-like. They're made out of dense matter as well. That's right. But yeah, people have questions, and we get so many questions on the podcast here through social media that we couldn't fit them all in one book. And so we like to answer those questions here on the podcast live. That's right. We encourage you when you are thinking about the universe and wondering how something works to write to us to questions at Daniel and Jorge.com.

I can usually answer people's emails in less than a day and give them a clear answer about their question. Sometimes the question is so good that I want to talk about it on the podcast. when we ask listeners to send in audio of themselves asking their question. Yeah, so to the end of the program, we'll be tackling. Listener questions, number 22. 22? Have we actually recorded 22 of these listener question episodes? We have in our more than 350 episodes that we've done so far.

We've done 22 listener question episodes, which means we've answered like 66 questions on the air. Wow. And the questions keep on coming, right? They come into your inbox every day. Absolutely. We get dozens of questions every single day. And they're a joy to read because it shows me that people out there are thinking. They are using physics to try to understand the universe. They're taking the ideas we're giving them and trying to apply them elsewhere and saying, hey, how come this doesn't work? I don't get it. What happens when the ship turns around in the twin paradox? So if you're confused about something or you see something in physics you don't understand, please don't be shy. I write to us to questions at danielanhorpe.com. We love your emails. Do you ever get questions about Legos?

Which color should I use next? Have you seen my 4x1 piece? Have you seen my Lego model of the fundamental particle of the universe? No, but I think we should have a contest. We should have listeners send in pictures of their most physics-y Lego creations. Ooh, interesting. So email those to us to questions at danielanhorpe.com and we'll post our favorites online. And you can't just have like one little piece in the middle there and say it's like a model, the fundamental particle of nature.

That's cheap. That's right. Or just a black picture and say, hey, it's a black hole. Yeah, it's a dark matter. That's right. An empty picture. And just say it's dark matter Lego. That's right.

And this episode is airing just after Christmas. So I hope that all of you folks out there have been lucky and gotten some nice pile of new Legos for Christmas and can make something physicsy out of it and send us a nice snapshot. Yeah. So we'll be answering questions from listeners here today. and we have some awesome questions about asteroids and dinosaurs and black holes, the kane stars. And that's all just one question or maybe two questions. And also aliens, of course, what's happening in Proxima Centauri. So these are all awesome questions.

And we'll start for this first one from Spencer from Melbourne, who, by the way, is having a birthday right now. That's right. December 29th is Spencer's birthday. So happy birthday, Spencer. He's in Melbourne, Australia. But does that mean that if it's December 28th here, it's actually already December 29th in Australia? Yeah, but three years in the future. Because those Australians are ahead of their time.

That's right. Through the wormhole, we are also communicating with Spencer's 18th and 75th birthday hearties. Yeah, well, we should record his next like three birthdays here right now so he can just replay them. So happy 9th birthday, Spencer. And happy 10th birthday, Spencer. And happy 11th birthday. That's right. And happy 75th birthday.

I hope we're all still around. Yeah. I doubt it, though. Unless we move to Australia and they have that fancy technology. That's right. Australia is going to deflect the asteroid, but only from Australia. They're going to send it our way instead. Yeah, but happy birthday, Spencer, and thank you for listening to the podcast. We hear you're a big fan. And we have your question here. That's really awesome. And it's about asteroids and dinosaurs. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. My name is Spencer. I live in Australia and I'm eight years old. So I had this question for you. So what would happen if the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs missed Earth?

And I really love your podcast and I can't wait to hear your answer. Oh, so awesome. Thank you, Spencer. That's such a great question. I feel like that's the plot of a movie. The voice of a future scientist. I love it. Or a science fiction author.

Yeah, maybe. I think there's a job for you at Marvel. They have a whole show called What If? agents somebody get out there and get Spencer on contract well it's a great question and his question is what would happen if the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had actually missed the earth that's a pretty big one right like would we still be around even it's a wonderful idea to think about because it really shows you how our existence depends on a huge sequence of random events things that might have gone slightly differently and could have had very very different outcomes

it's really amazingly improbable that we are even here. Yeah, it's sort of a crazy coincidence that we're all here right now, the way we are right now. Like any sort of a small event in the past could have changed the course of history or even the course of your life. Exactly. And you might imagine that, you know, things would have roughly gone the same way.

But there are moments in evolution of life and in our cosmic history when very small changes would lead to very large differences in the outcome. And this is a great example because for that asteroid to hit the Earth, it had to be on exactly the right trajectory, a tiny little deviation earlier on, like 100 or a thousand years earlier in its history, and it would have missed the Earth and the Earth could have had a totally different history. So like some little rock bouncing against that asteroid a thousand years before it hit totally determined the future of life on Earth.

Yeah. All right. Well, let's get to answering Spencer's question. And I guess first of all, Daniel, an asteroid killed the dinosaurs? That's the prevailing theory these days. We think that a piece of rock from the outer part of the asteroid belt, something about the size of Mount Everest, hit the Earth around 65 million years ago, traveling around 30 kilometers per second. So that's an incredible amount of energy to deliver to the surface of the Earth.

30 kilometers per second. That's faster than the speed of sound, right? That's super fast. It's super fast, and it would have caused incredible shockwaves. And, you know, rocks are hitting the atmosphere all the time. every time you see a shooting star, that's a rock hitting the atmosphere. But the atmosphere slows them down and there's friction, and that's where they heat up and they burn and they turn into flames.

And a huge number of them never hit the ground because they melt, they vaporize before they hit the ground. But if you're big enough to survive that, only your outer edges vaporize and the core actually hits the surface of the earth. And this one was definitely plenty big to hit the surface and cause a huge amount of damage. Yeah, it came with a ton of energy. I mean, like much, much bigger than the Hiroshima bomb or any of those nuclear bombs we have. Yeah, it has the energy equivalent of 10 billion Hiroshima bombs.

So it was an enormous devastating impact and delivered an incredible amount of energy to the atmosphere and also to the surface of the earth itself. Yeah, and it hit somewhere in the Yucatan Peninsula, right? Which is in Mexico. Yeah, it hit in the Yucatan, which is really interesting and had a big role in its effect on life on Earth because the water there is fairly shallow. If it had hit a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, like if it had gone deep into the Atlantic or deep into the Pacific, it would have had a very different effect on life on Earth. So it hit fairly shallow, which means it didn't throw up like a huge amount of water, just like maybe a hundred meter high tsunami, which is pretty small for such a big impact.

But it did throw up a lot of sulfur into the atmosphere because the rocks right there, it's a carbon layer with a lot of sulfur. So it threw up a huge amount of sulfur into the atmosphere, which caused a lot of problems for life on Earth. I guess maybe a basic question is like, how do we know these things? I know that you can see the crater there and the Yucanacilinsula, but how do we know like that's the crater that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs landed in? You know, like how do we know that's the one and how do we know, you know, when it hit and how big it was? These are great questions. And it's been a while. It's been taken like decades to really put the story together.

It's always going to be a little bit circumstantial. But, you know, we know that there was a die-off around 65 million years ago. When you look at the fossil record, 75% of all species went extinct around 65 million years ago. So clearly, something happened. And then we also see evidence for this impact, which we can date to the same time using, you know, geological layers. We can see time pass as you dig down deeper into the earth. And we see this crater, and it's not just like a big hole in the ground. It looks like a crazy impact.

Like there are rocks that only form uncertain circumstances. like incredible high energy events. This thing called shocked quartz, for example, only happens when there's a huge impact. And so there's a layer there that is evidence of an enormous impact right around the same time. Oh, interesting. When the asteroid hit the Earth, it actually kind of transformed some of the rock that was there or part of the rock that came with the asteroid, like made new kinds of rock. Yeah, rocks that you only see under like devastating impacts. And so it's a pretty clear signature that there was a devastating impact right.

around the same time as a huge die-off. We can time these things pretty well, but it's 65 million years in the past. And so, you know, the uncertainty on these things is like a few thousand years by now, which seems small compared to, you know, millions of years, but it's still pretty big. So we're pretty sure that these two things are aligned, but, you know, we never know for sure in science. Right. 65 million years is a long time. And I guess the other question is, how do we know that it passed by the Earth once before?

That's the part of the theories that this asteroid actually sort of did a drive-by before it hit the Earth. Like it was checking us out maybe. Yeah, when we went to JPL to talk to the team there that watches asteroids constantly to make sure this is not about to happen to us, they told us that that's the theory that this asteroid didn't just like come straight out of the asteroid belt and hit the Earth. You know, it does a bunch of orbits before it actually hits the Earth. And in one of their reconstructions, they think that it made a really near miss one time when it ran around the sun and then it looped around again and came back and hit the earth, which means that if you had looked up in the sky as a dinosaur,

you might have seen it. And if you'd been like a dinosaur scientist, you might have had some like years warning, which means, you know, you could have done something. So this comes from, you know, it's a little bit speculative, but they have an idea for where it came from in the outer asteroid belt and how big it was and where it hit and its velocity. So they can sort of like backtrack its trajectory.

And this is one of those possible scenarios. Yeah, I bet they did see it. And I bet the conversation went something like, RRR, meaning like, I have these little hands in front of me. I can't do anything with them, said the T-Rex. Yeah, they didn't really have, like, dexterous fingers, which allowed them to develop technology and send emails to get stuff done.

Because we all know that's how you get stuff done in this world, is send an email. So that's why they didn't make any progress. Anyways, so Spencer's question, back to Spencer's question. His question was, what if that asteroid had not hit the earth? Like, what if it had missed us? What would have happened to Earth, to the history of Earth, I guess, first of all. Would that, Rock, do you think would still be flying around and would it sort of eventually hit us?

Oh, yeah, that's a fun question. What if it hit us later on, right? I think Spencer's question is like, what if it missed entirely? If that hadn't happened, what would be the future of Earth? But you can imagine all sorts of different scenarios where, you know, waits a few more years or a few more thousands of years and then hits us and probably has similar impacts. It's really fun to think about. And I like to think about not just whether it hit the Earth, but like, it. if it had hit the earth in a different place.

Because when it hit in the Yucatan, it threw up all this sulfur into the atmosphere, which caused incredible dust and acid rain. There were like shockwaves, magnitude 12 earthquakes and volcanoes triggered. And it would have been different if it had hit the Pacific, for example, because that would have absorbed a lot more energy

and you would have gotten more tsunamis and fewer earthquakes, for example. You've gotten like a five-kilometer high tsunami, which would have been pretty amazing. Yeah, like a five-kilometer tall, wave coming at you that would have probably taken out most vegetation and animals and most coast around the world. Yeah, so people speculate that maybe larger dinosaurs would have survived if it had hit in the Pacific or in the Atlantic, but because it hit in the Yucatan and threw

up all this like burning ejecta into the sky that started wildfires and everything all over the earth that it spelled immediate doom for those guys. But let's talk about what would have happened if it had missed entirely. And this is a really active area of discussion among evolutionary biologists because some of them think that the dinosaurs were sort of already on their way out, that the climate was cooling and the dinosaurs were not well adapted. And so some scientists argue that at the end of the Cretaceous, the dinosaurs had been declining already for 40 million years and that mammals were on the ascendance. Interesting.

So like maybe dinosaurs were about to be extinct anyways, or at least the large ones, right? Is that what you mean by dinosaurs or do you mean like all dinosaurs? No, I mean just the large ones because, you know, dinosaurs technically not extinct. Birds are descendants of dinosaurs. So all the birds out there are dinosaurs. So we're really just talking about the large non-avian dinosaurs. Right, right. The cool ones, the big ones, with big teeth and horns. This is sort of like, you know, your TV show quits before it gets canceled, you know, by the network or something. So it might be that the dinosaurs were sort of on the way out, that the T-Rexes and the bronchisorses and all those guys were not going to last

until present day. Right. But is there something about dinosaurs that wouldn't have survived the change in climate? Like, is it just not sustainable to be that big? Is that what you mean? I think it's more a question of competition. You know, are the dinosaurs or were the mammals better adapted to the climate as it was cooling? Then there's one scientist, Mike Benton, a paleontologist at Bristol University, who argues that there's evidence that mammals were really rapidly diversifying just before this happened. And so they were sort of poised to fill a lot more niches than the dinosaurs. So it's really all about competition. But most evolutionary biologists, I think, disagree and argue that dinosaurs are very, very adaptable, and that no matter what would have

happened to the climate, they would have found a way to survive. I mean, one piece of evidence for that is that there are still twice as many species of birds as there are mammals today. So dinosaurs, including birds and their ancestors, are very, very adaptable. And then those survived the asteroid, right? Like something about that asteroid killed those big dinosaurs was maybe like a sped up version of what was going to happen anyways over millions of years. It could be. But if it happened more slowly, then those bigger dinosaurs could have potentially survived, though they would be changed. So if the asteroid hadn't hit the Earth and T-Rexes and all those guys had survived, we wouldn't see T-Rexes walking around today looking the way the fossil reconstruction does. The same way there's lots of animals from the past that we don't see walking around today because they're extinct or because they have adapted.

You know, horses don't look anything like they used to, for example. Right. Yeah. Maybe like there would be small T-Rexes running around or small, you know, turdactyl is flying around. like small versions of him. Yeah, and so people have gone back and looked at like the history of Earth's climate and thought about how that might have affected the dinosaurs if the asteroid hadn't hit. So 55 million years ago, for example, things got really, really hot. You got 8 degrees Celsius hotter than it was today, and there were rainforest spanning much of the planet.

So dinosaurs would have had to adapted to that. And then 35 million years ago, things got colder and drier. And instead of rainforest, you had grasslands covering most of the earth. And that's why we have things like elk and deer and all sorts of fast, four-footed mammals evolved. So, you know, dinosaurs would have had to adapt it to all of those. And we might have had very different, very interesting new kinds of dinosaurs evolve in response to these climate changes. Interesting.

So they would have stuck around and they would have adapted and evolved. And I think it sort of inevitably maybe had a showdown with mammals, right? Like that's sort of like maybe more of a direct competition with mammals. Maybe a big dinosaur mammal war. Now you're writing your screenplay. I can hear it. Something that's really interesting that I didn't realize is that dinosaurs weren't around to see flowers. Like flowering plants evolved after dinosaurs.

And flowering plants are easier to survive on because there's like a dense packet of nutrition there, either in the fruits or in the seeds or whatever. So dinosaurs might have evolved in response to that. They could have been smaller. For example, they wouldn't have to be so big. And that's one reason that our answer. ancestors survived. You know, they were like swinging in the trees, eating fruits.

And so it's interesting to wonder, like, would a dinosaur have evolved to fill that niche? You know, like the dinosaur version of a monkey. What would that have looked like? Would they have been competition with, you know, our ancestors? It's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's talk about a little bit about what that might mean for humans.

And let's answer other questions from listeners. But first, let's take a quick break. A foot washed up. A shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

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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. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair.

right, that this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all.

Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino.

Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. the final, and the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all.

The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the I IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. The OGs of Uncensored Motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica.

And I'm Mila. And we're the host of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribes. With guests like Corinne Steffens.

I'd never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was going. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class.

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All right, we are answering listener questions, and our first one was about dinosaurs and what would have happened if the asteroid that killed them had actually missed the earth. And we talked about how they would have adapted maybe and lived with mammals. But do you think, Daniel, that that would have meant no humans, or do you think humans might have still evolved with dinosaurs? It's really hard to say because there are no evidence of dinosaurs living in the evolutionary niche that humans take, you know, or that our ancestors took. They're sort of like living in trees, eating fruits, swinging around. There really aren't any dinosaurs, but then again, they weren't around when fruits and flowering plants evolved. So who knows how they would have responded or if they would have figured that out.

Are you saying the humans evolved intelligence? because they could eat bananas? Despite eating bananas. Oh, despite. Well, that's a competing theory. I have my own theory about human evolution here. But yeah, it takes like a lot of dexterity to climb trees and to swing around them. And that gives you dexterous fingers, which allows you to manipulate your environment and develop

tools and do all sorts of crazy things. Dot, dot, dot, dot intelligence, right? So I'm not saying bananas are responsible for physics. Bananas are tricky to peel. I mean, not everyone can peel. them easily. Yeah, but do all animals actually peel them? Or do they just chop it down the skin also? Well, only the intelligent ones peel them, which is what I'm saying. I see. That's the intelligence test right there. But I guess another cool scenario is that dinosaurs could

have evolved intelligence and maybe they would have been like the primary species on Earth and developed spaceships and internet and phones. It's one of those deep questions. What forms can intelligence take and what makes it evolve? Something we see about life on Earth is that Life on Earth started fairly shortly after it was possible. Like life has been around a long, long time. Once the Earth cooled and the chemistry was around, it didn't take that long for life to kick off. But it did take billions of years for intelligence to evolve, which might suggest that it's rare or difficult or unlikely. But, you know, we're extrapolating from one example.

So we don't know if another species might have developed intelligence or if it would have taken another billion years for dinosaurs to become intelligent or, you know, maybe something else would have happened. another asteroid would have come and killed everybody and then the slugs would have become intelligent, who knows? And everything would have been a lot slower. That sounds great, actually. I bet slugs don't send too many emails. I bet they just sit in the couch all day and do physics. All right, well, thank you, Spencer, for that awesome question,

that big what-if question. And again, happy birthday. So we'll get to our next question here. And this one is from Corinne, who is 11 years old. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. My name is Julian. I love the show. Thank you so much for making it.

My son, Corrin, recently asked me a question that I did not know how to answer, so I was really hoping you could help. How do we know that black holes come from decaying stars? Awesome. Question. Thank you, Corrin and dad. That's so great. Did you guys listen to the podcast together? That is wonderful.

I really enjoy hearing people out there supporting the next generation of curious sciences. So thank you, all you parents and teachers, of course, for encouraging thinkers of the next generation. Yeah. So this one is a pretty tricky question, and it's a little bit technical, but Corrin wants to know, how do we know that black holes come from decaying stars? Like, you know, black holes are so mysterious. We barely have a picture of them. They were mostly theoretical for a long time. Like, how do we know their origin and how do we know where they come from? It's a great question. And it's important to think about what we do know and how we've drawn these conclusions.

Because sometimes we're led astray. Sometimes we don't actually have evidence for something. We assume it's true. Then we discover, oh, that was a big mistake. It turns out that the universe works in a totally different way. So it's a really good idea to go back and examine what we do know and how we know it. And it's especially tricky to understand how things in the universe turn into other things because it usually takes a long time. It might take a million years or a billion years for a star to burn out. So how do you learn about how this thing happens when you don't have a billion years to watch something, right?

You can't just watch a star for a billion years until it turns into a black hole. it's pretty tricky to figure this stuff out. That would be a long PhD. I mean, that would take you a billion years just to get that degree. But we do have another tool, which is that we can look out into the universe and we can look further and further out, which means we're looking further and further back in time. Because remember, light travels at a finite, though dizzingly fast speed. And that means that as we look further out into the universe, we're looking further back in time.

So we can sort of like rewind and fast forward movies of the universe to see what happened. You can never look at one object at different slices in time, but you can look at different populations and you can see how things on average evolve. Right. It's like you can see a whole group of people or a little town of people and you can see, oh, there are babies and then there are also a little slightly bigger humans and then slightly bigger humans and then there's humans who get wrinkles and seem to get old. And so you sort of piece it together and you say, okay, I think these humans go from babies,

to old people. Exactly. And we can't follow one individual person in that analogy through their whole life, but we can sort of piece that story together by seeing different slices from sort of different villages. And that story tells us that there is this evolution of stars, that stars are formed, we see that happen, that they burn for a long time, that they expand, and that they collapse and sometimes make supernova. And all those things we see, again, not from an individual star, but we can see different stars at various points in their evolution. And sometimes we look at what happens after a supernova and we see this incredible cloud of stuff, this remnants of the supernova blowing out most of its contents.

But at the heart, you can see something dark and something massive right there where the star used to be. Right. And I think we've actually seen sort of seen supernovas, right? Like throughout our history, we've sort of seen a few of them and also at least see them just as after they happen. Yes, we can see supernova happen. It's incredible because they're very short-lived, right?

They burn, like, brighter than the entire galaxy that they're in. And sometimes they last a few days, sometimes a few weeks, but they are these very brief moments in time. Then, of course, we can't wait around for the black hole to form or to show us its evidence, but we can look somewhere else in the universe, somewhere where we think a supernova happened recently. And we can tell a supernova happened because we see, for example,

these clouds of gas and dust shooting out from the center at very high speeds, which is the kind of thing that only happens in a supernova. So we see, oh, here's a supernova that happened a thousand years ago or a million years ago. And we can look at the heart of that and ask, is there a black hole right there at the heart of this cloud that came from a dying star? Yeah, and sometimes you can see it, right? I mean, you don't see it directly. You don't see the black hole in like a picture of it, but you see it kind of tugging on the

things around it, but without any sort of bright light coming from it. Exactly. And we did actually once recently see a black hole. that had just been born. There's this supernova called AT 2018 COW, which is known to astronomers as the cow. Is that like the goat, but a different accomplishment level? That's right. There's a different acronym there for cow. And this was very dark at the center and then suddenly it became very, very bright. So this is like a supernova remnant and at the heart of it was dark and then all of a sudden it turned on and was very, very bright. And that's actually counterintuitably evidence

for a black hole because what happens in a black hole is that while it itself doesn't give off light, the gas and the dust swirling around it and the accretion disk get very, very hot. And they can emit a lot of radiation, very, very bright sources of x-rays, for example. And so what they saw, they think, is this black hole sort of turning on and giving off these beams of x-rays from its accretion disc. So that's a pretty good evidence of seeing a black hole form after the death of a star. So you can actually, we've actually seen this baby black hole and saw that it came from a star that imploded. Yeah, and it makes sense because if you keep looking around long enough, you should capture a star at basically every stage of its life cycle.

And so if you look at enough stars, you'll see these things forming, you'll see black holes forming, you'll see supernovas at all different stages. It's really pretty fun. And on top of that experimental evidence, you know, seeing all these things at different stages, we also have a model. We have a theory for how stars form. and we can do this in simulation. We can say we know what the laws of physics are. We think we understand the starting point for stars. What should happen according to the laws of physics?

And when you do those calculations, you get a supernova and then you get a collapse and you get a black hole. And the black holes that are formed are about the size of black holes that we see out there in the universe. So the story sort of all hangs together. There's, you know, little bits of it that are circumstantial. You can't actually see the whole life cycle of a star. but we try to tell a complete scientific story and probe it from lots of different angles and it mostly hangs together.

Yeah, you mean like we can sort of think about how a star works and predict what's going to happen and sometimes a black hole will form and you can also sort of see these evidence of them out there and so it matches what you predict and it also matches what you see right now. Yeah, and we can also see when a black hole doesn't form because if there's not enough mass to make a black hole

then instead it will make a neutron star as other very, very dense object but not quite a black hole. It's part of a gray hole. Yeah. And we see those also, and that helps us validate, like, in general, our understanding of stars and how they die and how they collapse. So we can predict not just when it makes a black hole, but when it fails to make a black hole.

And our models also describe that pretty well. All right. Well, I think that answer is a question. We can predict that they come from decay and collapsing stars. And you can also see them out there to have the black holes that have come from collapsing stars and some that came a long time ago from decaying stars. King stars. All right, let's get into our last question. But first, we'll do the side question here, Daniel. And this one is sort of about your emotional state. Does this one come from

a reader or your parents? This one came from a listener. Here it is. Hey, guys, it's Daniel from the UK here. I've been thinking a lot about this recently. And I thought, who better to ask it to then you guys? I mean, you've done a lot of podcasts. You've thought about the universe on a vast scale, all the various questions that no one knows the answers to. And I'm just thinking, do you ever get a bit sad and depressed that you probably won't be alive long enough to find out some of these big answers, are there aliens? What are they like? What's dark matter? What's the meaning of your life? You know, what's inside a black hole? Does the universe ever end? I don't know. I'm excited for the future and to see what we discover, but also occasionally, you know, true in the existential crisis, I'll be a bit bummed out about the fact. I'll probably won't be alive so to find out a lot of these things. Cheers.

All right, great question. Thank you. And yeah, Daniel, it's sort of an interesting question. I guess, are they concerned about you, do you think? Or are they worried that you're leading an unhappy life? I think they're just sort of capturing the feeling of living in primitive times. You know, we know that we know so little about the universe and we hope that our great grandchildren and their great grandchildren will know more.

And that's exciting, but it's also sort of frustrating. because we know the information is out there. We know humans eventually will probably figure this stuff out. Somebody will know the answers to these questions that keep us up at night. And yet, we probably will not or we may not, depending on how smart the next generation is. And that is sort of frustrating but exciting. Well, the question is sort of like, are you sad that you might in your lifetime

because you devoted your life to answering some of these big questions. Like, are you a little bit sad that you may not know the answers by the end of your life? Like, you may never know the answers. Well, I'm planning to invest in cryogenics so that a year before I die, I can just freeze my body and then thaw it every hundred years or so instead of get an update on the physics. But if you did it right before you die, you would just be dying 50 years into the future. That's right. I'll spend my last year sort of like surfing through the future, learning about what happens in physics. You want to spend the last year of your life in school, is what you're saying. I've spent all of my life in school so far. I'm in like 500th grade right now.

And I guess you haven't had enough. Sounds like a premise for a show called Futurama. Exactly. So it's really fun. But, you know, even if we get the answers to those questions, then our descendants who know those things about the universe, they're going to have new questions. Because we know the answers to questions that people puzzled over 500 years ago.

We know those things definitively. But we're still tortured with new questions about the universe. So it's not like there's ever going to be a moment where we're like, okay, yeah, we got it. We have it figured out. Because we are curious. because we wonder and because we explore, there are always going to be more things to wonder about. And I also kind of get the sense that what's fun for you, for scientists, for all of us

who sort of think about these things, is sort of the asking of the question, you know? It's like it's the journey, not the destination. Like, it's fun just to be part of this moment and time where we're asking these questions and learning more about it. It's almost like if you actually found out the answer, it would be not as fun anymore. Depends on what the answer is. But yeah, often the joy isn't asking the questions because we certainly ask a lot more questions than we get answers. So the sign that you're a scientist, it might be that you like asking questions and puzzling over them, not necessarily just getting the answers. All right.

Well, we'll get to our last question, and it's an interesting one about maybe sending your in-laws to another planet. So we'll get into that. But first, let's take another quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum,

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. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin-Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief.

But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety.

Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino.

Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate. You can't get back. Going up to locker room every morning just to shi-talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd.

I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. The OGs of Uncensored Motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila.

And we're the host of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribes. With guests like Corinne Steffens. I'd never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened.

And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter. Her first day in ninth grade And I called to ask how I was going She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class I ruined my baby's first day of high school

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On the Black Effect Podcast Network The I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast Or wherever you go to find your podcast All right, we're answering listener questions today here on the podcast and we've gotten some awesome questions and we talked about some awesome answers here about dinosaurs, asteroids, and black holes and collapsing stars. And our last question comes from Nick. Hello, Daniel and Jorge and all the guests' hosts. I really appreciate the podcast. My question today is, if we could put someone on a planet near another star, for example,

Proxima Centauri, and have them try to detect the civilization on Earth with current Earth technology, would they be able to? Thank you very much. Hmm, asking for a friend, I guess. If you could banish someone to another planet, like at Proxima Centauri, Nick wants to know, could they find this with current Earth technology? Like, do you think he's asking if they'd be out there for a planet? or lost or is there sort of an easy way to get back to Earth?

I don't think he's thinking at all about sending one of his friends or your in-laws to Proxima Centauri. I think he's wondering about if there are aliens on Proxima Centauri would they have discovered that we exist if they had sort of like Earth-like technology. Oh, I see, I see.

All right, yeah. So like if there is already somebody there, maybe your future in-laws, you never know, right? I mean, life takes interesting turns sometimes. They could be future in-law. How would they find this, I guess? Yeah, it's a fun question because we don't know where the aliens might be. And so it's worth asking, should we have heard from them or should they have discovered us?

So it's an important sort of thought experiment. If there were aliens there, shouldn't we have heard from them? Because, you know, they're only four light years away, which means if they knew that we are here, it wouldn't take very long for them to send us a message back, right? It's actually the kind of conversation we might be able to have. Much better than discovering aliens across the galaxy where it takes feet. 50,000 years to send a message. These are basically our neighbors.

And so it's important to wonder whether or not they would even know that we are here. I see. Well, let's maybe break it down a little bit. What is Proxima Centauri? It's a nearby star or a nearby planet? It's a nearby star. It's a red dwarf. And it's got two planets that we've discovered around it.

And it's only 3.7 light years away. It's the closest star to our sun. So if there's any place we'd like to discover friendly aliens, then it's. It's Proxima Centauri because it's very close by. And then there are other stars almost as close by, but this one edges out the other ones and is the closest. I see. And these planets are sort of habitable, you think?

All right, yes. So there are two planets out there, Proxima Centauri B and Proxima Centauri C. One of them, Proxima B, is orbiting within Proxima's habitable zone, meaning that like the temperatures are right for liquid water to exist on its surface. But, you know, Proxima Centauri is actually a flare star. It's like brighter and darker. And so it's not really clear whether any aliens could survive there. Interesting.

And so it's the closest basically outposts or like non-empty space that is the closest to us in our galaxy, right? That's right. Well, the question is if there are aliens, if you put a scientist there with Earth technology or if there are aliens there are living there, could they find us? Would they know we're here?

And 3.7 light years away is not that far, right? Like if I shine a flashlight in their direction right now tonight, it would get there in four years. It would get there in four years. And some of those photons from your flashlight would actually hit Proxima B. And so that's pretty exciting because your flashlight sends out light in a cone

and that cone expands. So when you get really, really far out, that cone is really, really wide. So your flashlight would cover like the entire solar system out there in Proxima B. Every point in that solar system could potentially see your flashlight.

But of course, it wouldn't be very bright anymore because it would have spread out so much. Right. Well, you could use maybe a laser. You could use a laser. And so that's exactly the issue, is that we could send signals to Proxima Centauri using Earth technology. And they could discover it if it was sent intentionally, right? So if we, on purpose, send a message to Proxima Centauri that was focused, saying, like, we want to beam a whole bunch of light right at this one place, then yes, we could send a message that they could discover.

But if we're just sort of like sending signals out into space generally, then it'd be much harder to discover it because those signals would die off very, very rapidly. You mean the way we're like broadcasting TV signals and radio signals out there into the atmosphere and out into space? Like that's not focused, right? Like that's just going everywhere. And so that would get diluted pretty quickly. Exactly. And if they have technology and proxima centauri, like we do, you know, a dish like Erecebo or something,

they don't really see those kinds of signals if you were within about a light year of the source. So to detect signals from Earth, using a dish like Erecebo, you'd have to be within about a light year of Earth. So if you had a dish like that on Proxima Centauri, we'd have to send signals that were like 16 times stronger in order for an Erocebo on Proxima Centari to pick them up. Interesting. Or I guess maybe the hope that they have a bigger receiving dish, right? Yeah. Maybe they have a 16 times bigger dish than they could see us.

But next question was sort of like with current Earth technology. And so if we sent a directed message there, then they could definitely pick it up. If we have no idea that they're there and we're not sending them any messages, we're just sort of like blathering out into the universe, then it's unlikely with current Earth technology. They would even know that we are here. Oh, I see. So they can't eavesdrop on us.

Is that what you're saying? They can't which of our Netflix subscription. That's right. And the latency from there is terrible. Yeah, they're barely just watching season one of Stranger Things. That's right. Buffering, buffering, buffering. For four years.

All right, well, I guess that's sort of talking to them, but could they see us? Like we can see, we can sort of see them, right? We can see these planets out there and you can actually sort of almost take pictures of it, right? It's not just being detected by the gravity there. Could they see us and could they sort of take a picture of us? Almost. Like these are the closest planets.

And so if we use Earth-like technology, we can tell that those planets are there. And now we can make some measurements of what's in the atmosphere of those planets. Like we don't yet have telescopes that are powerful enough to directly take pictures of them, that we will in about 10 or 15 years. but currently what we can do is like see how the light changes as it passes through the atmosphere of those planets and use that to get estimates for what's in the atmosphere and like is there methane is there oxygen are there signs of life in that atmosphere what's the weather like on those planets interesting yeah they could tell that we are polluting our atmosphere and not doing a great job and maybe decide not to come visit us yeah but it's not easy to just look at the atmosphere and conclude that life exists people used to think Well, all you need to do is see oxygen because oxygen is evidence of life. But now we have lots of ideas for how you could make a lot of oxygen on the surface of a planet without life. And we recently discovered, for example, phosphine on Venus or people thought we did.

That was thought to be like clear evidence of life. But now it turns out that that wasn't such a strong discovery. So it's a really vibrant and fast-moving field of study right now. What can you learn about potential life on the surface just from understanding the atmosphere? year. But in about 10 or 15 years, some of these other devices like the 30 meter telescope or the giant Magellan telescope will turn on. And those will give us much better resolving power and they might be able to take direct pictures and give us a sense for what's going on on those planets. Right. Yeah, that would be cool. I wonder if it could also send a probe, right? Like four

light years away, you know, maybe in 50 years we could send something there that it reaches there, right? Yeah, it's possible. It would take a long time because a probe like that would have to accelerate to a good fraction of the speed of light to get there in 50 years, but it would be pretty awesome. The most distant probe we have ever sent only recently left the solar system. So it takes a long time, though our technology has improved a little bit. Yeah, just make them faster, I guess. So this is kind of us sort of talking and seeing each other, but it turns out that maybe

we've actually heard from Proxima Centaurians, right? There's a story of a famous signal that came from there recently. Yeah, it said, help. We're Jorge's in-laws and he trapped us here on Proxima Centauri. No, no, it's more like, hey, we want to meet this, Jorge. We have some good prospects for him here. This was a fun story, though it was a brief excitement. Last year, they collected some signals at the Parks Telescope in Australia.

And as part of the Breakthrough Listen Project, which is looking for evidence of life in the universe by listening for potential signals. They were scanning lots of frequencies and looking for potential technological signals. And people got really excited for a few weeks that maybe we had heard something. It's a really difficult problem to know how to scan radio signals for signs of life because we don't know what that life would be like. We don't know whether it would be a technological civilization. We don't even know if they would use radio, how they would structure a message.

It's a hard thing to do. But there are some basic things to look for if you want a message that comes not from Earth. And one of those, for example, is to see that there are shifting frequencies. You know, if you send a message from something that's in motion that has a velocity, then the waves from that object get shifted by the Doppler shift. Because like if it's coming from Proxima Centauri, that planet is going around its star. And so it's moving away from us and then towards us and away from us and then towards us. So a message from there should have that kind of Doppler shift as that planet goes around the star.

Or maybe even a different kind of Doppler shift as the planet is spinning if the message actually comes from the surface. So they look through all the information to get from the telescope and they actually found one that seemed to have the right Doppler shift. Interesting. I see because you want to make sure that it's not a signal that's coming from the star, right, which is shining brightly. If you see something that looks like it's coming from something that's moving around the star, then you're like, hey, that came from the planet. And planets don't usually have bright sources, so it might be technology from these aliens. That's right. And then the second thing they do is they make sure that it really is coming from that direction. So they take the telescope and they point it in another direction, sort of like, off. of the target and they hope that the signal disappears and then they turned it back towards a target

and the hope that the signal reappears. And so this one also survived that test. So it had the right Doppler shift and it seemed to be coming from that direction. You know, it only appeared when we were pointing towards Proxima Centauri. So people got kind of excited and they started digging into the details like, what is this message? Is there information in it? Can we decode it? There was a moment we thought maybe we had heard a signal from the aliens. And it must be really exciting but also difficult to work in this field where every day could be the day that you like change the history of humanity by hearing from aliens or not. You know, it must be hard to maintain your excitement every time.

It's either a big discovery or a big disappointment. But, you know, everyone's at work, right? Every day you go to work, it could be the day you come up with the brilliant idea that changes the world. It could be. And so what they found when they dug deeper, into the signal is they actually discovered a bunch of other signals in their data, which looked almost exactly the same and were clearly not coming from Proxima Centauri because they picked up these other signals and pointing in other directions. So what they discovered is that it's

some weird kind of interference. I think it's still not totally understood, but it might be some weird kind of connection between some other kind of signal. It's the aliens here on Earth that are giving a signal, not the ones in Proxima Centauri. But for a moment we thought, maybe we had heard something from intelligent technological civilizations on our neighboring star that would have been awesome. Yeah and I guess my question is Proxima Centauri is everyone there

a centaur? Like that would be pretty cool a whole planet of half horse people. It's Proxima Centaur so they're centaur adjacent. Oh I see. They're approximately centaur. There you go. Like 60% horse, a 40% person. Not the perfect balance. Yeah, you got to go

to like asymptotic centauri to get to almost get a full Centaurs. That's right. Or O.G. Centauri for the true stuff. Maximus Centauri. That's where you got to go. Ultimate Centauri. There you go. Best Centauri. All right. Well, I think that answers Nick's question. And the answer is, could someone in Proxima Centauri find us? And the answer is yes. But you need to be pretty focused on listening for us. And you need to be pretty focused on sending a signal here. Like it can't

just sort of happen by accident, at least with current Earth technology. That's right. And with technology that we'll have in a dozen or so years, we might be able to see the surface of those planets and see what's going on and learn something about the surface of another planet. Would you go there, Daniel? Would you pack up and, you know, right before you died, I guess, so that you wouldn't have to waste your time here. Would you go there? No, I really don't like travel. I don't even really like being on an airplane. So spaceships, no thank you. But you'll be asleep and you'd be almost dead anyways. I would say why not, right? I guess it depends on the snacks.

I see. Did you eat while you're sleeping? And they stuff up your nose while you're taking your nap and the peanuts. They feed me bananas without even peeling them. Oh, boy. Well, let's move on here and thank everyone for sending their questions. We love answering these questions. We love tapping into your curiosity and getting us to think about these crazy scenarios

and wonderful mysteries about the universe. That's right. So please continue to send us your wonderings and your questions and your puzzles to questions at Daniel and Jorge.com. We can't get enough. Yeah, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

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.

It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life. Twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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. talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bibras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again

on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. 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's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.