Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What would happen if the sun became a black hole?

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

Listen to Daniel and Jorge answer a hypothetical question in today's episode Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. 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. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, can I ask you a hypothetical question? I'm not a big fan of speculation. What do you mean? Well, my question is, what if you liked hypothetical questions? Isn't that a hypothetical question in itself? That's right. Exactly.

It's a hypo-hypothetical question. In that case, I guess I would be very happy right now if I like hypothetical questions. Well, in that universe, in which you do like hypothetical questions, I've got one for you. All right. I am hypothetically excited. So do you worry about dramatic ways that the world might hypothetically end? I think I worry about any kind of way that the world might end, both the dramatic and the documentary categories of the...

You mean in the actually hurtling down the road to us from the future, sort of imminent disasters that we're ignoring mostly because of their inconvenient? Well, what do you mean by dramatic? Like a, like if the world turn into a giant banana or something, something? That would be dramatic, but I had in mind things like, you know, getting zapped by an alien ray or maybe the whole planet falling into a wormhole or maybe getting smashed into some rogue asteroid or comet oh man well i i wasn't worried before but i am now well be sure these are just hypothetical questions and so all your worries are also

hypothetical i am hypothetically terrified well let me hypothetically reassure you you probably should worry about all that stuff Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And I'm Jorge. I'm a physical cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. And this is our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. Which we try to take you on a trip out into the universe to explain.

all of the amazing and incredible and potentially universe and earth-ending things that can happen. That's right. We explore the real. We explore the conceptual. We explore the hypothetical. The universe in which Daniel starts the podcast instead of Jorge. I wonder if people are a little bit freaked out by that. Listeners, you are in that universe. This is a hypothetical podcast right now. No, we love to talk about things that happen in the universe, things we understand, things we don't understand. but we've noticed in our emails that we've been getting a lot of hypothetical questions like what would happen if

and so today on the podcast we'll be talking about one very dramatic question that people have been writing in about today's topic is what would happen if the sun became a black hole we need some dramatic music there That's right. Not a white hole, not a rose hole, not something else entirely, but the sun became a black hole. And I think this is a fascinating question because I think people are intrigued by the concept of black holes, but they also find them mysterious and dangerous. And dangerous, yeah. I think the blackness of it and, you know, the mystery of it makes it a little scary. Yeah, and the idea that, you know, we're comfortable here on Earth, but we live in a tiny little shell of it. gas on the crust, you know, on this cool crust floating above magla in a crazy, dramatic, powerful universe that could snuff us out in a moment without even noticing or caring.

And so I think maybe this question reflects people's like feeling that our life on this planet is precarious, right? That there's things out there that are incredibly powerful and dangerous and, you know, and they wonder, like, could these things happen to us? Are most of the questions we get hypothetically about, uh, the end of the world and things like this? No, no, most of them are, hey, can you explain this? Or you said this on the podcast and I didn't understand.

And I'm happy to answer those questions. But sometimes they are a bit more dramatic. And hey, maybe these are just questions from script writers working out their ideas, you know? And if so, awesome. Send us your ideas. We love to dig into them. Well, this one is not a crazy question, right? Because I think maybe a lot of people know about black holes and maybe a lot of people have

heard that black holes come from stars, right? From suns. That's right. Yeah. I mean, in the end, a black hole is just a really dense clump of mass, dense enough so that even light cannot escape. And, you know, stars are also dense clumps of mass. And you're right. End point of a life of some stars is a black hole. And so I wouldn't say it's not a crazy question, but it's not a super crazy question. Yeah, absolutely. There is some reason to that. we'll dig into that. But before we do, I thought, let's see if this is something people wonder about, if people worry about. What do people think would happen if the sun became a black hole? And so I walked around on the streets. And these questions, I did not ask of people at UC Irvine because I was out of town for the summer, but it's a rather international crowd, folks in Heathrow Airport, folks on the streets in Portugal, folks anywhere I found them speaking English, and were willing to answer your questions. Are you serious? Really? Yes, absolutely. You were, this is our, this is our international podcast. That's right. I'm probably breaking all sorts of

international laws about recording people, but you know, for you listening. Do they sign a release forms? You'll hear a variety of accents and a variety of ideas. Awesome. So think about it for a second. Well, what do you think would happen if the sun, if our son, our lovely, bright, beautiful sun became a black hole. What do you think would happen? Here's what people had to say. Well, I guess we would be sucked in. If you were used, it will be really dark outside and after that we can't improve our light systems and we can solve the problem. However, heat is going to be the bigger problem. The Earth will vanish in the black hole.

But this is not an option, I think, because, no, I have no idea. A lot would happen. Although we probably wouldn't know about it for eight minutes. We're far too close to be in a stable or with a black hole, even if the, of one solar mass. We would disappear into the sun. Well, that would be very difficult for farmers. I think the sun would go through various phases before that of its core helium expanding or something changing gravitational forces. I think by the time the sun became a black hole,

we would be either well-fried or well-suffocated or something. All right. Not a lot of sunny answers or optimistic. A lot of bad things happen here in people's mind. Nobody thought it would be good news, right? Nobody said, yes. That sounds awesome. Finally, my plan has come to fruition.

No, no evil villains out there planning to make this happen. there's sort of two categories of answers I thought like one is people thought well that's just the end because if there's a black hole nearby we're getting sucked in right and the other one is yeah because that's what black holes do they suck stuff in that's what they do

black holes suck and the other category is you know well if the black if the sun becomes a black hole then it's no longer a sun and we sort of rely on the sun being a sun providing light and heat and so now it also kind of suck in a different way.

I like the person who said it would be bad news for farmers. Exactly. Like just farmers, everyone else would be cool with it. But farmers, they won't get that, you know, farmers' tan. Yeah, well, you know, that answer came from a guy who runs a farm in Portugal. And so maybe that was in the forefront of his mind. Is that possible? Could our son become a black hole?

And, you know, there we can give a pretty definitive answer, right? There is almost no universe in which our son. sun becomes a black hole. And that might be surprising. Farmers everywhere are relieved. You can hear Jorge stopping to pack his emergency go bag. No, it's not something. I'll power down my spaceship. Hold on. Hey, I didn't get an invite to your emergency spaceship. Why is that? You powered the thing up. You were packing it. I thought you had your own. I thought, oh, man, awkward. I thought you had your own. We should have talked about this. It's kind of embarrassing. some stars become a black hole

and the basic idea is you got to have enough mass, right? You don't have enough mass to create enough gravity to pull the thing together to make a black hole then you just get sort of a dense blob of stuff. Anything above like six or eight, maybe ten masses

of our sun, solar masses, can become a black hole. Stars that are smaller than that don't have enough gravity to squeeze things together to become a black hole. That doesn't sound like a very safe margin of error. You know what I mean?

Like if our sun was just, you know, a couple of times bigger, it would totally be possible. I don't know. The sun is pretty big, dude. So we're talking about a huge amount of stuff you'd need to add. Like 10 solar masses

is not just like the change in your pockets, right? It's a huge amount of stuff. I guess I mean, how confident are you on that math? You know, is it like it would never be able to turn into a black hole? Or is it like, not likely to turn into a black hole?

Jorge starts to power. up his spaceship again, I can hear it. No, we're fairly certain that the sun is not going to become a black hole. But that doesn't mean that like it's all cool, right? The sun, we did talk about this on a whole other podcast. The sun is going to end its life when it's done with its fusion cycle. And before that happens, it's going to expand and get huge. And the radius of the sun will be larger than the orbit of the Earth, meaning that the

earth will be inside the sun, right? And so even though the sun is not going to end its life as a black hole, that doesn't mean that when the sun ends its life, we'll all still be happily here on Earth farming in Portugal. We won't even see this black hole. Yeah, exactly. If it could turn into a black hole, we wouldn't even survive, see it. Yeah, so it doesn't actually even really matter if the sun becomes a black hole or a white dwarf,

which is much more likely because we'll be toast either way. Unless, of course, we all cram onto Jorge's special spaceship, and we can just watch the party from the safety of Pluto. How big is this spaceship anyway? Now you went ahead and told everyone, Daniel. Thanks a lot. No, only our listeners, which of course are the most intelligent, best-looking privileged people on Earth. That's right. If you had to self-select, you had to select the population of people to save from humanity.

That's right. Obviously, our listeners. Now boarding zone A for Jorge Spaceship are premium listeners. Daniel Jorge explained the universe. Oh, sorry, you haven't listened to all of our podcast episodes? Oh, you go to the back of the line. But, you know, some people might be wondering about what I said there because on another podcast, we said that you could take anything

and make it a black hole, right? Like, you take a baseball and you make it small enough, you can make it a black hole. And that's true, right? All you need is a certain density of stuff. But for stars, you do need a certain density, but to get to that density, you need a minimum mass because there are things that are preventing stars

from just falling in, right? The reason everything, like your pillow and your hamster, don't become black holes, is because there are other forces preventing them from becoming super dense. And so for stars to have enough gravity to overcome the barriers to that density, they have to have a certain mass.

I think what you're saying is that technically the sun could become a black hole, right? Like if the hand of God reached out and grabbed the sun and squished it, it could become a black hole. But naturally, left to its own devices, our sun won't ever turn into a black hole. That's right, exactly.

If the hand of God reached out and squeezed all the mass in the sun down to a ball about three kilometers wide or smaller, then it would be dense enough to be a black hole. But there's physics that prevent that from happening, right? Squeezing that stuff down would take a force that gravity can't do. And so gravity not being the hand of God

can't turn this mass into a black hole. But wait, so into a ball three kilometers wide? But then how big would the hole be? Would the hole be three kilometers wide? You mean like, I mean like the event horizon? Yeah, the event horizon. If you got all the mass of the sun into a sphere three kilometers wide or less, then the black hole, the event horizon would be three kilometers, right?

And again, we don't know what's going on inside the event horizon of a black hole. We don't know if all that stuff is squeezed in at a little point to the center or a singularity or sort of quantum fuzzed out, or if it's distributed in some sort of weird pattern, we don't know. And actually it doesn't even really matter from a gravitational point of view. And that's a point we're going to talk about later.

If you're on the outside of a sphere, then the only thing that matters to affect how much gravity there is is just how much stuff there is on the inside of that sphere. Like you're standing on the surface of the Earth, the force of gravity from the Earth depends only on your distance from the surface,

center of the earth and how much mass there is in the earth if you rearrange stuff inside the earth it doesn't change how much you weigh it doesn't change the force of gravity right which which is cool to think that if you go down to your basement you literally weigh a little bit less right a little bit more sorry a bit more you get an airplane you weigh less because you're further from the center of the earth and so you have a smaller force but if you go down into your basement then there's less earth pulling you down No, you're right. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, if you drill into the earth, right? Yeah. Then there is less earth inside that sphere whose radius is your distance from the center of the earth. Yes, you're absolutely right. So as you drill into the earth, your weight drops because eventually it goes down to zero as you get to the center of the earth. If you're exactly at the center of the earth, then the gravity from all the bits cancels and you feel no force of gravity.

So if you're trying to lose weight, just go down to your basement. and weigh yourself there. Or get an airplane. Interestingly, the force of gravity, force of gravity is strongest on the surface, right? Because as you leave the surface, you increase the radius from the center. The mass stays the same,

but the radius increases. And if you drill down to the earth, the mass decreases faster than the radius squared term. So the surface of the earth is where you are the heaviest. Well, we were talking about black holes, though. That's right. But the point is, if you took all, all the mass of the sun and you squeezed it into a ball three kilometers of radius or less,

it would be a black hole. But physics can't accomplish that. On its own, naturally. So, you know, hey, if aliens came by and they did something weird to the sun, they could turn the sun into a black hole. So let's explore that scenario where the hand of God or aliens turn the sun into a black hole, what would happen. Right.

Let's get into that. So assuming that it does happen, let's find out what it means for us. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 Authrum, 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 get your podcasts. All right, so the hand of God, Daniel, came down and, or went up, and squished the sun down into a black hole, or aliens went out there and used some special machine to turn our sun into a black hole. What does that mean for us?

Yeah, what does that mean for us? And I think a lot of people think, well, black hole sucks. stuff in. And so if there's a black hole that nearby, it would just suck us in, right? And that would be the end. And a lot of people we interviewed said that. But remember, the gravity is not all powerful, right? There is already a very strong gravitational force towards the center of our solar system from the mass of the sun. But the earth is not getting sucked into the sun right now, right? Why not? Because the Earth is in orbit. It has too much velocity. You can think of an orbit is sort of like constantly

falling towards the center and missing because you have too much forward velocity and that's what the earth is doing now. It's like you're falling but you miss so you come back around and you miss again and you come back around and you miss again. That's what being an orbit really means. Yeah, sort of like forever falling down the stairs

right and if the sun became a black hole it wouldn't change the mass of the sun. We're talking about just squeezing the sun down to a smaller radius so it becomes a black hole. It doesn't change the mass. And the gravitational force, as we were saying a minute ago, depends just on two things. The total mass inside that sphere, right?

The sphere that's the radius, that's your radius from the center of the mass. You mean like all the math that's closer to you to the center of the sun or the black hole? Yes, exactly. And so if you're just squeezing the sun smaller, that doesn't change that number. So it depends on the mass and it depends on your distance from the center of the mass, right? And that number is not going to change either. So you could take the sun and squeeze into a black hole. It wouldn't change the Earth's orbital dynamics at all. Just because it's a black hole doesn't mean it magically has a greater gravitational pull. It's the same

gravitational force. Nothing magic happens when it becomes a black hole. That's right. The only thing that changes is the gravitational effect on things that are super close to the black hole. Before the sun became a black hole in this hypothetical example, the closest you could get to it is the surface of the sun. That's where the strongest gravitational force was, right? Now, because you've squeezed the sun down, you can get closer. And so there is a stronger gravitational force, right? Because you can get closer to this mass than just the surface of the sun, then the radius to the sun, because now you shrunk the radius down. So there is a region, a new region, where the gravitational force,

is stronger than anything used to be, but the Earth is not in that region, and the gravitational force at the radius of the Earth doesn't change at all. So the Earth would just orbit this black hole the way the Earth orbited the sun. I think it might maybe help people to think about, like, maybe not like a dramatic collapse into a black hole,

but just like imagine the sun, you know, shrinks a little bit, you know, like gets a little bit more dense or compact. Or if it like fluffs up a little bit and gets a little bit bigger and fluffier, it's still the same amount of mass. And so our orbit wouldn't be affected if the sun got a little bit fluffier

or a little bit denser, right? That's exactly right. So if the sun shrank by 1%, right, and the mass stayed the same, it wouldn't change our orbit. And so if it shrank by 2%, or 3%, or 30%, we still be going around the exact same orbit.

Yeah, exactly. And things do orbit black holes, right? The most direct way that we've seen black holes is from stuff orbiting them. There's a black hole at the center of our galaxy, and we see stars moving around it, and we can calculate the mass of that black hole based on the orbit of the stars. We see gas orbiting black holes and being squeezed and massaged by the tidal forces and emitting crazy radiation. And so we see stuff orbiting black holes. Stuff does orbit it.

It's not like everything near a black hole just automatically get sucked in, right? And so the same thing would happen here. Well, I guess the part that is tripping me up is that, you know, I can imagine the sun collapsing 10%, 30%, and still the Earth goes around on the same orbit. But, you know, at some point the sun, you know, something sort of magical happens, right? Like suddenly it becomes a black hole and you have an event horizon and you see the black dot. And so you're telling me that really nothing sort of magical happens, right? Like nothing, from our point of view, nothing changes. Like the fact that it suddenly became a black hole doesn't suddenly make it like a bigger sucker of stuff.

That's right. It doesn't make it a bigger sucker of stuff at our radius, right? So, you know, one AU, 93 million miles from the earth, the force of gravity doesn't change. Also, at where the surface of the sun used to be, the force of gravity hasn't changed. Because again, you're at the same distance, right, and the same amount of stuff. But now, say you were like at half the radius of. the old sun, right? This is a place that's now empty space that used to be the center of the sun, so you couldn't get there. But now there's a spot there where there's incredibly strong

gravity. You can get closer and closer to the surface. So remember, as we said before, the strongest gravity of any objects is at its surface. And now that surface is much, much closer to the center of all the mass. And so on the surface, the gravity is much, much stronger. So it is sort of magical in that way. So it's sort of like you open up new real estate in our solar system, but you sort of don't want to be in the real estate because the gravitational forces are

going to be crazy. Yes, exactly. You've opened up new crazy and tense real estate, but it's on a crazy hill and you don't want to buy there, exactly, because you're just going to roll right down into the ocean. And so, you know, people might feel like, oh, well, how can it not change anything to create a black

hole? It does change something, right? It just doesn't change anything outside. the radius of the old sun because there the gravity is the same it wouldn't affect our orbit right like the earth would still take a year to go around it and we would probably still spin one once a day um but it would probably have other pretty bad effects right uh yeah absolutely all right let's get into that but first let's take another quick break Ninth, 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 2, 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 professional. and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper, into the world of music and into the world.

With raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters,

sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me.

Yeah. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so if the sun became a black hole suddenly, it wouldn't affect our orbit, right? We would still go around it once a year, and we would still spin around once a day. But it would have other kind of bad effects, right? That's right.

If you have solar panels on your roof and you're using them to power your Tesla, for example, then you're going to need to figure something. else out. Because if the sun becomes a black hole, it's no longer fusing and no longer giving off light. And that light is the source of all energy and, you know, animation of life on earth. And so, yeah, it'd get pretty dark eight minutes later and sort of never lighten up again. It'd be basically nighttime forever. Wait, so the black hole is totally cold, right? It's not emitting any radiation or light? It might be emitting some very, very low level of radiation called hawking radiation, but that's never been experimentally confirmed. And even if it is,

it's a tiny amount of radiation. And I mean, the amount of radiation the sun currently gives out is incredible. I mean, it's almost 100 million miles away, and yet it can burn you, right? It can fry your eyeballs if you stare at it for a few seconds. So the amount of radiation coming off, that thing is huge. Now you suddenly just delete all that radiation, right? And so the solar system becomes a very dark place very quickly. Wait, what happens to all that radiation? It just stays inside of the black hole now?

Well, the radiation comes from fusion, right? Like, where does that radiation come from? The sun is a huge ball of plasma. It's fusing and releasing energy, right? And a black hole is not doing that. A black hole, usually black holes form when a star can no longer do, fusion, right? Because the fusion is preventing a star from collapsing. Gravity is pulling the star in, trying to squeeze it down. And a fusion is this explosion that's constantly happening,

blowing the star up to keep it from getting squeezed down. And so if the aliens come and they squeeze the sun into a tiny little black hole, then, you know, who knows what's going on inside there, but nothing is coming out. Yeah. Wow. So it would be super weird, right? Because, like, if it happened right now, we wouldn't feel the difference right away, you know, like we would still be able to walk around, the Earth would still be spinning, we'd still be going in an orbit, but it'd just be like complete night all the time. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we'd have great, we'd do a great astronomy for a while, right, until we ran in a power and food and society crumbled. Before we freeze to death. Exactly. Yeah, be no light, no heat, right? That would be pretty bad. We rely on the sun for a

a lot of stuff. You know, fascinating to me, though, I didn't realize until recently that life on Earth didn't start in a way that was taking advantage of the Sun, right? Photosynthesis took a while to develop, like, you know, hundreds of millions of years. So very, very early life on Earth didn't rely directly on the Sun the way all life on Earth or almost all life on Earth currently does. It relied on like geothermal energy, right? Energy from the heat of the Earth. Yeah, exactly. And so there might be other sources of energy you could tap into. You'd have to drill down into the earth and find some warmth there.

But it would be pretty dismal. Your Tesla certainly wouldn't be running very long. You could get energy maybe from the center of the earth, right? And power up lamps to grow your vegetables. Would that be possible? That would be possible, yeah. But not for feeding billions of people. I mean, we have a huge fusion reactor out there in the center of the soul system,

just pumping out energy. And we're just siphying off a tiny little fraction of it to grow all of our. plants to feed all of our people. And so we lose that. We do not have something that we can just like slot into place. We don't have a backup star, you know, a backup source of energy that can replace the sun. Not yet. In fact, we're getting more and more reliant on solar energy because we treat it as a renewable source of energy. And so I read recently that like now in the US at least, or in Texas even, wind and solar power are providing more energy than coal, right? coal is stored energy we're digging up from the earth.

Well, which is good news, right? It is good news. Unless, of course, the hand of God comes down and snows out the sun. That's right. Which the people in Texas, you know, I don't know where I'm going with the people. I don't know either, but I don't know where this podcast is going because it sounds like we're sort of promoting coal as backup for alien invasion or something. I'm not sure. Yeah, just to be clear, we don't expect the hand of God or aliens to turn our sun.

sun into a black hole. Anytime soon, install those solar panels. That is probably the best thing for us right now, please. Yes, exactly. We are just exploring crazy hypotheticals in today's podcast. We are not giving you survivalist advice. We're going to be on the cover of Cole magazine now. Scientists come out in favor of coal. There you go. You're the 1% Daniel. And you know, there's other interesting things. Like you get no more light from the sun. You get no more heat from the sun. You get no more heat from the sun. Also, there'd be no more solar radiation, which means like no solar wind. And the solar wind is these charged particles that come off of the sun, you know, also a product of fusion that give you things like, you know, the northern lights. And so not only would we have night all the time,

but we wouldn't even have, you know, cool, fancy glowing lights in the north and south pole. Although I feel like that would be the least of our worries, you know, if the sun went out. If the sun went out. Yeah, but, you know, I figure at least you'd be a, able to have great night camping but you know all right well it sounds like uh it wouldn't if the sun turned into a black hole you know it wouldn't be a total collapse of humanity right away right things would sort of still keep going but eventually um having no sun would be bad news for other reasons other than physics that's right if the sun went black hole you wouldn't die in the way you might have expected but you almost certainly will and on that sunny note that's right

we don't expect the sun to become a black hole. And though we do expect the sun to expend its fuel and end its life as a cozy white dwarf, that also won't happen for billions of years. And so none of this is a reason to forget the very real ways in which we humans might extinguish ourselves or destroy our planet by worrying about crazy hypothetical astronomical problems that are very unlikely to bother us. But I think it sort of tells you a little bit about how physics works, you know. It's sort of interesting to think that even if something like this happened, a lot of physics would just still keep going. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Physics never quits, right? It just keeps chugging along. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that discussion.

Didn't get too alarmed. And please remember to still get those solar panels and that wind energy, please. That's right. And if you are the aliens listening to this podcast, please don't turn the sun into a black hole. We need it. All right. Well, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoy And if you have questions about weird things that might be out there in the universe, weird things that might happen to our planet, please send us an email to questions at danielanhorpe.com. We love your questions, crazy or not, hypothetical or conceptual. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. we'd love to hear from you.

You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com.

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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 okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.