Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Is A Dyson Sphere?

Episode Date: May 23, 2019

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Hey, Jorge, what do you think is the most impressive thing humanity has ever built? That's a pretty good question. Let me think about it for a second. I think I would have to say probably the most impressive human achievement is the refrigerator, obviously. I mean, they use it every day. I couldn't live without it. It's pretty awesome. That's a cool answer.

I was sort of thinking things like, you know, the Great Wall or the Golden Gate Bridge or the Burge Caliphah, you know, stuff that would inspire awe, you know, things that, like, last for generations. Well, you know, there is still in my fridge that's been there four generations. I don't know. I look at these projects sometimes, and I think, you know, humanity can really accomplish great things when we work together. It's really sort of impressive what we can pull off when we all work together. Yeah? Well, I don't know. I mean, I once ate everything in my fridge all by myself.

I mean, I didn't eat the rest of humanity for that. Yeah, well, you can accomplish great things by yourself, but it makes me wonder sometimes, like, what future humans will build. Like, what are the great, what's the great wall of the 21st century? You know, what kind of achievements will we, what kind of monuments will we leave behind for future humans? The great refrigerator of China. That's right.

A huge refrigerator in space. That you can see from space. That you can see from space that it needs to be cleaned. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm the cartoonist behind the comic strip piled higher and deeper, or PhD comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I smash protons together with a large Hedron Collider to try to figure out what the universe is made out of. And together we wrote a book called We Have No Idea, which explores all the things we don't know about the universe. And right now you're listening to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. a production of iHeart radio

in which we try to mix accessible science with a huge quantity of low quality jokes what do you mean are you saying my jokes are low quality or no I'm saying we spray a huge number of jokes and our editor just picks out the ones that are best so that our listeners think we're funny yeah our awesome editor

exactly our producer who we should give a shout out to for sure Taylor thank you so much for making us funny thank you for making us sound funny and speaking of human achievements today's podcast is all about monumental constructions and accomplishments. What can civilizations do when they get together and build something enormous? Yeah. What are humans capable of making? Like what are the limits of our ingenuity and resources and our ability to work together? That's right. Because, you know, there are a lot of problems, right, in the world, like global energy consumption and

global warming and... That's right. And some of those are being tackled, right? Like we're developing solar power so that we can get energy just for the sun and not burn fossil fuels and to meet the global energy demands, right? But if you extrapolate forward and you think like, what is humanity going to need? Our global energy consumption is just increasing. And it seems unlikely unless we have some cataclysmic event in our civilization that that's ever going to turn around. So if you project forward, you might wonder like, how is humanity going to meet its energy needs in the future? If we don't invent some fantastic new form of fusion, What can we do to rapidly increase the amount of energy we have accessible?

And that's the question two of our listeners had. And so they sent us questions via Twitter and via email. That's right. So we owe a shout out to Everton Chin and to Steve Davis for requesting this topic. So today on the podcast, we'll be covering the topic. What is a Dyson sphere? That's right. Yeah, so the Dyson sphere, Daniel.

So this is the idea that we could maybe build something that can really take advantage of all that amazing power that's coming out of the sun, right? That's right. If you think about grabbing solar power and you think, well, we might need a huge amount of it. Your first instinct is like, let's just put a bunch of solar panels in the desert, right?

Let's just like build solar panel after solar panel. After all, nobody's really using that land. There's a lot of sun out there, right? But as humanity gets more and more greedy about energy, you might think, like, is there enough room on Earth to put enough solar panels? Right. Is that true? Like, what if we covered all of the Sahara Desert in solar panels?

Would that not be enough? I think that would be enough today. Like, actually, I think today all you'd need to do is cover, like, Delaware with solar panels, and you'd have enough energy to power the entire United States, or maybe even the Earth. What? Really? Yeah, exactly. Solar power is pretty.

You're just ready to give up on Delaware. wherever he needs Delaware. That's where all those fake companies are set up, aren't they? We probably have listeners in Delaware, so you might want to check with them before you're giving up their land. Well, they might appreciate the shade, you know. They might appreciate being relocated. Sorry, we have authority here from Jorge Cham, a podcast host,

and we're going to raise your house and put solar panels down. It's eminent podcast domain. That's right. Being moved out of Delaware. Well, I just check the numbers, and it turns out Delaware is actually a bit too small. I think you'd need to add Maryland, too. Hope that's okay with Maryland. No, but the point is that I think today, human civilization can survive using energy captured by a pretty small fraction of Earth's surface.

But imagine in the future, right, what if we want to build a huge civilization? We want to construct enormous things. We want to send ships across the stars. We're going to need incredible amounts of energy. and we're not going to be able to burn cold to do that and we're not going to be able to necessarily cover the earth and solar panels and so people started thinking big

people started thinking what's the limit what's the maximum number of solar panels you can make what's the biggest solar panel you can build yes exactly and where would you put it okay so this is where the question of what is the Dyson sphere comes from exactly this is a thought a thought experiment by Freeman Dyson a famous physicist

to think about what is the biggest solar panel is it possible? Could we build one? How would you do it? And could we see if other civilizations are doing it? Wow, that's amazing. All right. So we, as usual, we're wondering how many of you out there actually knew what a Dyson sphere was? Like if someone approached you on the street and asked you, hey, have you seen any Dyson spheres? Or, hey, do you know what it is? Or would you contribute $10 towards building a Dyson sphere? So as usual, Daniel went out into the streets and asked people randomly out there if they knew what a Dyson sphere was. Here's what people had to say.

Have you ever heard of a thing called a Dyson sphere? No, I haven't. Okay. I know it in the context of looking for other life on other planets because it's basically like a ring that you can build around a star to harness its light for energy. You look at the light patterns. If something interferes with the patterns and, like, in a certain way,

it can lead to the assumption that maybe there's a Dyson sphere around it or something like that. Awesome. No. Okay. No. Yeah, it's this gigantic thing that you put around, like, a solar system, and then you can harness all the energy. I heard of it.

I don't know what it is. No. No. I've never heard of it. All right. So pretty much no. Across the board. Well, I would say we got our typical set of binary responses, a bunch of knows.

I got a bunch of weird looks, too. People are like, is you making this up? Like, is that a thing, really? Is this like a test? I wonder how many people thought you were talking about. talking about the Dyson vacuum cleaner. That thing really sucks. No, I think it was like people thought maybe it was a control question.

Like I was making things up. Like, have you ever heard of the Smith Gabrikabooi or whatever? It was like a trick question to see if you try to make up some funny things. Yeah, which actually gives me the idea I should do that, right? We should have a trick question and see if people spout off, you know. Oh, yes, I told I saw a Nova episode about that, and it involves, you know, electrophons and whatever. What would it be about? Let's see, dark, she'd be like dark, a dark black hole. How about that? Oh, you know what, that's actually really cool. And people are written in asking whether you can have a black hole made of dark matter.

Oh. Which is a really awesome question, which we should talk about it in a different episode. How about an anti-dark matter black hole? A dark matter black hole, yeah. Isn't that a cool idea? An anti-dart matter black hole. Oh, well, we don't know if dark matter has anti-particles. We don't even know if dark matter is made of particles. So we don't know if there is such a thing as anti-dark matter.

But we know there is dark matter, and we know there are black holes. So people have this tendency to, like, ram them together. Anyway. But so nobody thought you meant the vacuum cleaner? Because, you know, the Dyson vacuum cleaners are known for having this, like, sphere out front that you use to pivot and to roll around and, like, it twists the head of the vacuum cleaner as you tilt and turn. Did you get some, like, check from Dyson Company? Because I didn't get one.

I don't understand why you're promoting the Dyson vacuum. Maybe. You're going heavy on this permission. If you used to link Dyson.com slash explain the universe. Jorge got a check. Slash and didn't share it with Daniel. Well, let's break it down for people then. What is the Dyson sphere?

So a Dyson sphere is basically the idea of max. maximal solar panels, right? You want to build solar panels, you cover the Earth. The Earth captures a tiny fraction of the energy from the sun, right? It's like a tiny, tiny fraction, right? Like, to the Sun, the Earth just looks like a little marble way out there in space. Exactly. And so it's barely catching any of its rays.

Exactly. So imagine a sphere, and the radius of the sphere is the distance from the Earth to the sun, right? So now imagine a sphere that's basically the size of the Earth's orbit. It's like a ball centered on the sun that really, teaches all the way to Earth. Exactly. And it's made out of what? Well, I mean, just imagine the sphere for now, geometically,

and think about what fraction of that sphere is covered by the Earth, right? This is the point you were making before. It's like a tiny dot. Most of the Sun's energy just gets radiated out into space, right? It maybe hits Jupiter or Saturn, but the vast majority, 99.9% of it just gets shot out into space, right? So the idea is if you really want to go big, if you want to build a huge project, you know,

then could you build solar panels that capture a significant fraction or even, dare I say, all of the sun's energy, right? All, wow. So it's like a giant solar panel that surrounds the sun completely. Yeah, I mean, like, let's do the thought experiment. Let's think as big as possible. How much energy would that be? You know, how would you do it?

And could you tell if other people had done it? So this is the origin of it. Freeman Dyson thought about this and he wrote a paper about it and he thought, could you build one of these things? And if another civilization around another star had done this, could we tell? And could we use that to find alien civilizations? This is like a legit physics paper? This is a legit physics paper.

It's published in science, one of the top journals. Really? Yeah. And the thing I love about it is that it's visionary. It's like, what would we do in a thousand years? What would we do in a million years? And could we use those ideas, if we could predict them, could we use those ideas to discover super advanced alien civilizations?

Like, let's not look for other civilizations at the same level as us. Let's look for civilizations that are like a million years or a billion years ahead of us and try to anticipate what they would do and how we would spot them. So I love that kind of visionary thinking. Oh, like if you use your imagination wildly, where could humans go and then that we could maybe see or get evidence of from other civilizations out in the universe.

Yes, exactly, right, exactly. Trying to think of what the grown-ups are doing because we're basically kids. You know, we are pretty new to this whole universe. We've been intelligent for, you know, maybe tens of thousands of years. We've been technological for decades, right? We've been communicating for, you know, less than that. And so we are brand new on the universe stage.

And there may be... We're grateful of pimples, good voices cracking. We're not even there, man. We're not in puberty. We're getting kids. Growing hair and funny places. No, we are still pooping our pants. From the civilization point of view, like, you know, literally.

I mean, literally, we're pooping our pants on Earth here. Filling it with poop. We are pooping the bed. That's true. And so, you know, might ask, like, what are the grownups doing? And the same way it's hard for kids to anticipate, like, what is an adult life like and how would you tell what's going on, it might be hard for us to what super advanced civilizations would do and how they would live and how they would get energy.

So that was the idea of Freeman Dyson. He thought, can we spot other stars being wrapped by these spheres? Wow. So what kind of physicists was he? Oh, he's famous for being really broad. He's done all sorts of physics. I think he even did some chemistry. He did quantum mechanics.

He's thought about consciousness. He's one of these modern-day Renaissance men who've like thought and dabbled in all sorts of different kinds of physics. wonder if your name affects that, you know? Like, if you go around with the name Freeman Dyson, is it just the expectation that you were this amazing personality? Well, you only have that expectation because there's a guy named that who has an amazing... Well, that's what I mean. It's like he's got the perfect name to be a Renaissance man.

No, it's the other direction, man. He was a Renaissance man, and now, therefore, his name is connected with being a Renaissance man. It doesn't work the other way. It's not like you're born. Oh, I see. He's like the original cool guy. And they're like, Galileo, that sounds like you'll be a great scientist, yeah. No, I think it's the other direction.

But he does have sort of a mystical name. I always thought his name, you know, I always connected his name with like the Freemasons, you know, Freeman Dyson. It sounds like he's probably the member of a secret society somewhere. Yeah, like cool people. Who are trying to build, trying to build mega structures. Even that word is fun to say, right, mega structures. So he had this idea. He thought, hey, what could we possibly, what could have?

alien civilization much more advanced than us, what could they possibly be doing that we could maybe detect? Exactly. And he had the idea that maybe they figured out a way to capture all of a sun's energy by building something basically like wrapping up a sun.

Yeah, exactly. And that's pretty hard to do. I mean, imagine, as you were saying before, that you had to build something, that size, right? Like the radius of it is millions of miles, right? So you're going to construct something that wraps the whole sun at like the distance from the earth to the sun and grabs

all that energy. I mean, the size of it is boggling. Like, the inside of that sphere, I did a few calculations, the inside of that sphere would have the surface area of 550 million Earths. Wow. Which sounds doable, maybe. I don't know. It's hard to build something that big.

I mean, in order to build something that big, you need stuff, right? You need materials. You need, like, you know, matter. And if you were going to build it, you'd need to basically use all of the matter in Jupiter and Saturn and the asteroid belt. You'd use up like all the stuff in the solar system just to build that shell. Like it's just barely enough stuff to build a shell all the way around the sun. But why does it need to be the radius of where the Earth is? Couldn't you just make it smaller and it be more convenient to make?

Yeah. Like to make it the radius of, what's the mercury, the closest one? you know a small sphere around the sun and then just have like a cable running to us to Earth yeah you have to balance right like an extension cord really long extension cord

the closer you get to the sun the hotter things get and things melt and it's harder to work you know so you want to balance there you don't want to be like immediately surrounding the sun you don't want to be really far away because it has to be bigger it would be too intense

to build something that close to the sun yeah the other advantage if you built it the radius of the earth is then you'd have an awesome livable surface, right? People could live on the inside of that sphere. Like you could put dirt down and plant crops and you'd be in the habitable zone, right? You'd be at the right distance for the sun to have the right temperature. Oh, you build it at the radius of this earth and where the earth is, then really it could be like sunny Florida all year round.

Exactly. I mean, let's think big, right? The solar system. Yes. Let's think big. Let's think like, you know, we're going to do this. What would be the best thing to do? Like, humanity is going to be huge and have huge amounts of energy. Then let's like, let's prepare for the future of humanity and build 550 million times the land of the earth. The amount of energy that this thing would capture is just ridiculous. Like, if you captured all of the energy of the sun every year, there's this number, which is pretty hard to understand. It's 384 yacht watts, right? Watts being a unit of energy, and Yata being like a pretext. I think you mean a lot of watts. Whole lot of watts. Exactly.

No, it's 3.8 times 10 to the 26 watts, right? Like, it's just a ridiculous number. So I thought, well, let's explain it in terms of how much energy humanity currently uses, right? So currently, the power use of humanity is one 33 trillionth the energy put out by the sun. Wow. So 33,000 billion times how much we use right now. Yeah, so we don't really need this thing today or tomorrow or next year, right? This is the kind of thing that would support a civilization with enormous energy consumption.

You know, the kind of thing where you're like building huge spaces and you're pushing them to other star systems with like lasers, you know, like light sails that capture laser beams. Like you would have an incredible amount of energy if you could really capture all of the energy output of the sun. Okay, I have a lot of questions, but first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

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all right so that's a dyson sphere it's this idea that you can maybe build a shell around the sun and capture all of the energy that's coming out of it and you would want to build it kind of far away from the sun because otherwise it would just melt but it would be humongas. It would be

bazillion times the surface of the earth. It would take a lot of stuff to build that shell. It would take a lot of stuff. It would be enormous and there's a lot of other problems. Problem number one is you'd have to be really strong. I mean this thing is going to have a huge amount of weight on it, right? Yeah, like a, and just like it would get

tousled around, right? Because it would have to hold together. Yeah, and it doesn't you wouldn't also have any gravity. right like the gravity we experienced from walking around on earth comes from earth but if you're if you build a huge shell the size of the earth's radius and build it around the sun then it's balanced gravitationally right you don't feel it doesn't feel the sun's gravity there's no net gravitational force on it from the sun so it'd be sort of like floating around the sun nothing to keep it in place which means it could like drift you know and like one side of it could get too close and maybe bump into the sun or something it'd be pretty hard to maintain. You need like jets on it to like keep it in the right place. I think an interesting idea is just the idea that you can envelop a sun, right? Like it, you know, your intuition, my intuition tells me that if you cover it up the sun, it would snuff out, but not so, right? Like you could.

Yeah, the sun doesn't need any feedback, right? It's just pumping that energy out. It doesn't need, or care, doesn't need to know or care about what happens to the photons and protons that it's flying out, yeah. Right, that's what I mean. Like, you could capture a sun, literally. Yeah, exactly. And it would burn happily inside your dicing in. You're pumping out energy.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, that's basically what we want to do here on Earth on a much smaller scale. I mean, that's fusion, right? Fusion says, build a little plasma, make it really hot, have it burn, have it pump out radiation, which we then capture. That's energy. So we want to do that. And, you know, we want to do that in a miniature way on Earth, in a controlled way. But we basically have a huge fusion furnace already, and it's going pretty well, and it's not too far away.

So some people say, let's just capture that energy, right? Why have fusion here on Earth when it's already going in the center of the solar system? Let's just build a whole lot of Yotawatts. Exactly. Giant trillion size shell. Yeah. That sounds much easier. Yeah.

And so you might be thinking also like, all right, well, a huge shell sounds like too much. Like, you don't need to complete the shell, right? If you don't need 33 trillion times our energy, what if you just build a partial shell, right? I mean, that's basically every solar panel, right? The one you have on your roof right now is a tiny little bit of a Dyson sphere, right? It's a tiny little Dyson sphere element.

So you might think we don't have to go all the way. It's not like a, you have just a few little solar panels or you have the whole thing. You might just build, you know, part of a shell. Like half a shell or just a ring of the shell or a patch of the shell. Yeah, yeah, like a good middle ground. like a ring and you can imagine putting them like in earth orbit right so they're all in the same orbit so they don't bump around each other you got a bunch of like really big solar panels

in earth orbit gathering all this energy and and sending it back to earth but you know you were you were saying earlier like and then you just put out a big cable that's actually kind of a tricky problem like how do you get this energy and bring it back to earth I don't know you can't you can't just run an extension cord yeah yeah you need a whole a whole lot of yada extension cords. A yada. A yada mile. A yada mile.

No, you need some sort of wireless energy transfer, which is pretty tricky. I mean, we know how to do this, but it's not that easy. Basically, it's lasers, right? For long-distance energy transfer, the only way we know how to do it is lasers. So you're saying, let's build a giant laser out in space. And point it at the earth. And shoot and point it at the earth. Exactly.

It's like, or you could think of it more like a magnifying glass, like. Basically, it's like take the sun's rays and focus them on the earth, right? You know, so we're basically like, you know how you take a magnifying glass when you're a kid in like fried little bugs? We're basically doing that to ourselves. So that's pretty dangerous, right? You need some sort of way to absorb that energy here on Earth in a safe way. And, you know, there's a lot of things to figure out. But as usual, we could just leave that to the engineers.

Okay, so let's see. You're saying it's kind of an alternative to, what if you just cover like the Sahara Desert? Wouldn't that set us up for the next billion years or something? That would set us up for a while. Yeah, I think there are people who own the Sahara Desert, though, so they might have something to say about that. They can move to Delaware if they want.

You are just solving problems all over the place, man. Global Solutions by Jorge Champ. No, we definitely do not need this any time in the near future. Like, if we invested in solar power, We would be set up for a while. Oh, I see. You're saying we don't need it, but maybe aliens needed. Well, I'm saying we don't need it now.

But, like, let's think big, right? Let's think about, like, what does humanity need in a thousand years? In a million years. If you're going to build this thing, you've got to start thinking about it now, so you can figure this stuff out. And it's always fun to think aspiration. Like, could we build this? You know, is it possible?

What technology would you need? Because often that spurs ideas, right? People are like, hmm, I wonder if you could transfer a laser from an orbiting ring of solar panels. to the earth. How would you do that? And then they get interested. Then they come up with some invention, which makes, you know, for better hamburgers or something. But a lot of cool stuff comes out of just like thinking aspirationally. I see. You're saying like, what if in a thousand years there are 33 trillion yada people

on earth and we need all that energy? Maybe we should think about these kind of crazy ideas. In advance. Yeah, exactly. Before we have 33. We covered Delaware. We covered Sahara. It's not enough. Yeah. So you could do the whole sphere. which seems a little crazy because you need all this material. You could do a ring, right, of orbiting solar panels. That's sort of, you know, intermediate.

But there's also a lot of other approaches. Like, you could have a few rings, right? You could have, like, different rings at different radius or, you know, orbiting in different directions or something. They have to think about, you know, collisions and shadows and stuff like that. But that kind of stuff is pretty practical.

Isn't that a famous science fiction novel, like the ring idea? Or was it a ring around the earth? No, Ringworld. Yeah, Larry Niven had this idea of a ringworld. I don't know if he had a sun in the middle of it or not, but yeah, definitely you could build a ring and it could be spinning, you know, so you could live on it, that kind of thing. Okay, so that's one idea of a ring. You can also do like a patch, right? Or like small patches. Yeah, exactly. You got these small patches. And some people are thinking about the idea of they're not satellites. They're called statites because they don't move, but they're basically just big floating patches of solar panel. And they avoid falling into the sun because they partially absorb the sun's energy.

That's where you get the energy for the solar panel. But they also partially reflect it. Think about what happens when you reflect energy. Basically, you're getting a push, right? If a photon comes and bounces off of you, then you're getting a little push from that photon. So if a big solar panel is half reflective and half absorbent, then half the energy goes into, you know, electricity or whatever, and half of it keeps the solar panel from falling into the sun. So these things could basically, like, float on the solar wind, which I think is pretty cool.

There's something beautiful about all these, like, huge, super thin solar panels out there floating on the solar wind, half the energy keeping them a light and half of them the energy keeping our televisions on. They're not floating around the Earth, they're just floating out in space, and we would kind of swing by them every year. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And they would be stationary with respect to the sun, right? They wouldn't be orbiting the way we are.

And that would be pretty cool. Something really cool about that. Right. And I think the thing that got Freeman Dyson thinking about this is, if aliens were doing this, how could we spot it? How could we tell if somebody was doing this? And initially you think, well, if they build a whole sphere, then they're blocking out their sun. We wouldn't even know their sun exists, right? So how do we even know anybody is there?

there could be out there tons of stars covered up in these Dyson spheres I mean I'm sure they call it something different unless Freeman Dyson is an alien which would explain his coolness but

yeah right like there could be stars out that there are covered up by alien civilizations we just don't know it because we can't see them yeah so he actually had a cool idea he said all right if you build these things it will block out the light of the sun but if it's made of matter and it's absorbing the energy of their sun

then it's going to glow. It's going to get hot and it's going to give off infrared radiation. So you won't see the stars the way you normally would, you know, in the visible spectrum and all that stuff,

but you would see sort of a black patch of sky plus a bunch of infrared radiation which shows you that there's something hot there. No. Really? You would attribute that to an alien civilization

building a shell the size a giant shell around the sun and not just some like hot rock well how do you get a hot rock how do you get something out in the middle of space not next to a star that's warm right aren't there stars that are like basically like cinders kind of yeah there are some yeah well this is the point of his paper he's like how could you see this and he had the idea like let's look for infrared radiation and i'm sure you know reviewer number two had your reaction

no come on um but and he talks in the paper about like other things that might mimic the signal and how you could tell, et cetera. Wow. But it's a good idea, right? Like, how else could you spot these things? Unless you saw them building it, right? Unless you watch them build it. You could see the star like winking out year by year as they're constructing this thing.

That would be super awesome. But wouldn't it take them like hundreds of years to build it, right? I mean, even an advanced... Well, we're talking about hypothetical super advanced aliens. I could say it is anything, right? Maybe they spend like a million years building it and then it just like unfolds in one year. thing, right? Who knows?

Just as we're looking at their star. Yes, you'd have to be super lucky, right? So I think either you're super lucky because you're seeing them build it or you see these things radiated. And people have done this. People have looked out in the night sky and said, are there places where all we see is infrared emission, right? Mm-hmm.

And so people did this survey and they found 17 candidates, 17 candidates and most of them they were able to explain due to other astronomical things you know it's a dead star or it's this or is that but there were four candidates I looked at the paper and they described it in this way and I have to quote it directly because I've never seen this in a scientific paper but they say

that four of these candidates have been named quote amusing but still questionable. Wow. Which means like they gave up what people call me. I feel so connected to the universe now. Yeah, I mean it tells you what scientists find funny

But there is something hilarious about finding things out there and not really understanding them and like, what is going on out there in space? And the thing I love about looking out in space is that every time you do it, you find something weird. It's always surprised. There's always something weird out there. What do you think they meant by amusing but still questionable?

I think they meant we can't rule out alien megastructure. And that's what's amusing about it, right? Like, it makes you seriously consider that. And if you're an astronomer, we don't know what's out there. Oh, it's amusing in the sense of, like, it makes you think. Yeah. It makes you muse about it. Or it makes you hope, you know?

Astronomers always have to keep in mind that they might, that today might be the day. They discover alien civilizations, right? It's a low on the list, right? They've got to rule out a thousand other things first. But one day, I think we will discover alien civilizations, right? And somebody will be today for somebody. It'll be right now for somebody. And so you always got to keep that in mind.

right? Wow. All right, let's get into it, but let's take a quick break first. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage,

kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism.

Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict. and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK story. right time podcast on the iHeart radio app album podcast or wherever you get your podcast i'm dr scott barry coughman host of the psychology podcast here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about

exploring human potential i was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and i get eye rolling from teachers or i get students who would be like it's easier to punch someone in the face when you think about emotion regulation like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving

meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so Dyson's fears are this idea that you can surround a whole sun with some kind of structure to capture all of its energy. And Dyson proposed this as a way to... maybe detect alien civilizations. That's right.

And he said, let's look for stars that might be blocked by alien megastructures. And so you're saying that we actually may be found one of these stars? Yes, a couple of years ago, there were astronomers that were looking at stars, and they saw this one, and they were watching it, and the light from it did this weird thing.

It wasn't constant, right? Most stars, the light from them is constant. I mean, you see a little bit of twinkling from the dust between us and them, but mostly the light's pretty constant and astronomers look at these stars sometimes to see if they can spot planets in those solar systems

and the way they do it is they look to see if the planet goes in front of the star and if that happens you see a little dip in how bright the star is because it's basically a little mini eclipse but that dip is like you know one percent maximum like if you were watching our sun from really far away and Jupiter

went in front of the sun the sun's brightness would dip like 1%. So this is the kind of thing people are doing they're watching stars looking to see if they dip. And then they found this star, and they saw a dip not 1%, not 2%, but like 20%, like a huge fraction of

the star's brightness just went away. But then it came back, and then it went away again, and then it came back. Really? How often? It's not regular, right? It's not like, you know, if a planet is orbiting a star and blocking it, then it's regular. And you can use that to figure out

like how quickly does the planet orbit the star, right? What is the period of it? And they watch it for many periods and they figure these things out. You can measure the mass of the planets. It's really awesome. But there was no pattern here, right? There was like dips and then days that would go by when it would be bright again, and then more dips would come. And then it was like two years when there were no dips. And then another huge dip came. And so people were like, what is going on with the brightness of this star? What is this? And so immediately, that little voice in everybody's head was like, Could this be aliens? Aliens.

Could this be it? Could we be watching an alien megastructure be constructed? Really? That was the first thing that came to people's mind? Of course it was. Of course it was. Anytime you see anything strange, you're like aliens. That's right.

You're like, where are my keys? Oh, aliens. I've never seen a car like that before. Aliens. What is this fruit called? Aliens. How do you do that magic trick? A card trick.

Aliens. Exactly. How can one man eat so many bananas? Aliens. Yes, it's always on our minds, right? And, of course, first thing they did was like, all right, let's kind of try to come up with other explanations. What else could explain this?

And so they went through a long list of reasons to explain it. But it's really unusual. We have not seen another star like this. It's not like you see this all the time, and so you have a bunch of ready explanations, right? People had to really stretch their minds to imagine how you could block like 20% of the light of a star and not be an alien megastructure.

How do you know it was one star and not like two stars? Oh, I think they know the star pretty well. I mean, you can tell the difference between one star and two stars. I mean, two stars would orbit each other. I think you could resolve them. But I don't know. Does it matter? I don't know. But what they saw was, you know.

Hey, maybe let's consider other alternatives besides aliens. Then what they did is they looked, they did something really interesting as they went back through historical measurements. They said, you know, people. have been taking pictures of the night sky for decades and decades and not all of it's digital and not all of it's as good as recent data but we have pictures of lots of the night sky going back like a century so what they did is they went back and they looked for pictures of this star over the last hundred years and what they found is that over the last hundred years this star has been gradually fading like getting less bright yeah less bright like it's 20 percent less

bright than it was a hundred years ago but it's steadily yeah well we don't have have really constant data over the last 100 years, right? We have like a snapshot and then a snapshot and a snapshot and a snapshot and the snapshot. Recently, because we've noticed the star is weird, people have been watching the star a lot more. And so they've been seeing a lot more of these dips and trying to understand them. But the dips can be very dramatic and they're not regular. And it's kind of hard to explain. All right.

So you're thinking it could be aliens. It could be aliens, right? How would aliens, what would aliens be doing? You're like flipping the switch on and off, kind of like my kids do. no they would be building a dysent sphere right maybe but why would it go on and off maybe they're partially maybe they're part way done with constructing their dyson sphere right and what we're seeing is this dyson sphere like orbiting the sun and blocking it

right it's irregular so over the last hundred years they've been building it up and now you're saying it might be operational and it's rotating and that causes these dips yeah exactly and when the dyson spheres between us and their star is when the light from that sun gets dimmer. It's hard to come up with other explanations for irregular dips in the light. And so let's go through them, though, because in the end, people think it's probably not aliens,

which is, you know, the story of every scientific discovery ever. But there's not really one convincing explanation. Okay, so what are the possibilities here? The leading possibilities are that it's like a lot of dust, like a huge cloud of dust but it's not regular it's not like our asteroid belt where like the asteroids are sprinkled

all the way around the sun it's some like asymmetrical cloud of dust I mean like a patchy like a patchy clumpy cloud of dust yeah it's like spread out partially you know what you need in that case then you need a Dyson vacuum cleaner

not a Dyson sphere somebody clean up that star system it's a mess got the best suction maybe that's what they're building for 9999 if you use the code Dyson.com slash Daniel and Jorge

Exactly, yeah It's like Mega Made from Spaceballs Somebody's cleaning up that system Yeah, so maybe like a huge patch of dust And what they did

is they looked at the light from the star And they noticed That the light from the star is not dimmed equally across all wavelengths Right?

Remember light has different wavelengths from the reddish to the bluish And there's invisible wavelengths as well It doesn't dip The same in all

frequencies of light Yeah And, you know, one, the basic idea that Dyson had was let's look for light, let's look for stars that are basically only emitting in the infrared because that's what a huge megastructure would emit. But the direction of the spectrum, which light is absorbed and which light is coming out, suggests that it's dust. It looks like the kind of thing you would get if there was a big dust cloud.

With maybe like pockets where the sun shines through. Yeah, exactly. And that's what the dips are. And so maybe what we're seeing is basically the profile of this dust cloud. But that's not really a satisfying explanation because, like, where does this dust cloud come from? You know, most stars don't have dust clouds around them for several reasons, like, especially old stars. Like young stars, if it's, like, just been formed, then it's being formed inside a huge cloud of gas and dust. Then, yeah, you expect a lot of gas and dust.

So, like, stellar nurseries. Wait, let me guess. Let me guess, Daniel. You think it could be aliens. I always think it could be. I'm just going to throw a random guess to what physicists might think it is. Aliens. Well, you're both right and wrong. Like, one possibility is...

So the point is, you don't get dust around old stars usually, right? Because that dust gathers together and forms planets or even just gets blown away by the solar radiation, right? Like, solar radiation pushes dust out of these systems. So maybe a planet blew up, right? Maybe it's aliens and they had a huge war, and like one of them blew up the other one's planet. And what we're looking at is, like, planetary debris or something. What? That would be super awesome, right?

from this fully operational battle station. You're seeing the remnants of the Death Star. Yeah, but before people get too excited about that one, that one doesn't really hold together because in that case, you would see, it would be like warm, right? Because like a planet blows up, you got this big blobs of glowing matter

and it would glow in the infrared, but we don't see that. So it's consistent with cold dust, which is kind of hard to explain. We don't understand how you could get this weird, irregular blob, of cold dust around a star. What if it was a planet destroyed by like a cold freeze ray?

You know? Aliens. What is that superhero that shoots freeze rays? Yeah. Ice man. Yeah, exactly. The Ice man came and froze their planet and it shattered into a bunch of frozen crystals. Yeah, I mean, might as well offer that as an explanation.

I see. So you're scoffing in my explanation of aliens, but instead, as a more likely explanation, you're suggesting the Iceman. Superhero. That's what I always go to first. Superheroes, yeah. That's true. I guess the cartoonist would go to superheroes first, as an explanation.

I'm just saying, I think I should get a physics degree, you know? I bestow upon you from Daniel and Jorge University, an honorary PhD in superhero physics. Oh, man, that should be a great product for a store. And you know how much value I put in honorary PhDs. Right. That's why you have three of them. That's why I have exactly zero of them. And so another explanation, another idea, is that maybe it's just a really weird star.

Maybe there's no dust there. Maybe the star is just like doing something weird inside of it. Like it's not glowing constantly. It has something weird going on inside. It's like flickering. You know, it's not burning consistently, but there's something inside that's like absorbing it the energy or it's sputtering a little bit. It's like an unstable star. Yeah, yeah.

Some kind of weird process that gives very. But the problem with all these explanations is that it's a big universe and we've looked at a lot of stars and we've never seen anything like this before. And so any process you propose to explain this has to also explain why it's only happening to this star and not to any of the other zillions and gazillions of yadas of stars that we've seen, right? Right. Like if it's a cluster of comets or a planet that blew up, like you would expect if it's not totally impossible, that it'd be happening to dozens or hundreds. hundreds or thousands or millions of times, we've seen other ones. So that's the real puzzle. That's what makes this star interesting, is that it really does seem unique, right? So maybe we're seeing something really, really unusual, right? That could happen. Or maybe it's aliens.

Right, because we're seeing, we can see like billions and trillions of stars, right? It's just one of them that's doing something weird. Yeah, well, our galaxy has, you know, hundreds of billions of stars. That's a lot. And so we can't see all of them, of course. but yeah, we've observed a lot of them and we've never seen anything like this. So it's pretty weird for one star to stand out in the galaxy.

Wow. So it could be a giant alien Dyson sphere. Yeah, or could be the villain's lair for Ice Man. Yeah. Well, you know, ice alien. Exactly. Yeah. All right, so that answers the question.

What is the Dyson sphere? And hopefully people out there found it amusing, but not questionable. That's right. And maybe someday we will build a Dyson sphere and aliens far, far away, will be having a podcast talking about, could we see if they had built a Dyson sphere around their sun? You know, maybe humanity will be able to accomplish these great enormous infrastructure projects and work together and not destroy ourselves.

It makes me hopeful to think that one day we could build such vast projects and have that much energy at our fingertips. Yeah, that would be cool. And it would spare Delaware. Like a refrigerator. So everybody in Delaware, no need to pack up your bags anytime soon. We're not taken over. That's right.

Rest easy, Delaware. Sleep well tonight. Another day when we didn't find aliens. All right. Thanks for joining us. I hope you guys enjoyed that. We'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in.

If you still have a question, After listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy. Emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.