Let's Find Out - History of Early Space Exploration | soft-spoken ASMR

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

Tonight we're reading some interesting history on early human exploration across the Pacific Ocean and how that's evolved into our space engineering and testing, and speculation about our astronomical future in the stars. Some main characters are Robert Goddard, Freeman Dyson, and our prehistoric ancestors. Youtube video version: https://youtu.be/iDDhHNYIgo0

thrilled to be channeling my inner Carl Sagan today. Guys, we're gonna be talking about exploration of space, keeping it fascinating, interesting. That's exploring it with the pioneers who invented rockets who predicted space travel and worked with actual, and in a lot of cases were actual scientists themselves. So we're gonna be joined today by Carl Sagan. Once again, gonna help us out. And I'm real pumped about this one, so let's get you guys relaxed. Just use this to tune out some noise or whatever while you're doing something hopefully more productive. But if not at least, you'll learn a thing or two. about where we're headed as a species.

It could see it like that. They, my excitement for this topic. Um, better with my eyes and hand motions this way, I guess. Let's get started. You guys have heard of the Goddard flight space, space flight center? Um, where is that? I think that's the one in Texas. But, um, it's named after this. This, no, I guess I was wrong.

Goddard is in the Goddard space flight center is in Maryland. Surfaces of three ring-shaped interstellar arcs, crossing the ocean of darkness between suns. As envisioned by an aerospace engineer, each vessel rotating Rotating enough to create the equivalent of Earth's gravity carries some 1600 space pioneers in four pairs of habitation towers spaced at intervals along the ships. The ship's 29 mile long perimeter hydrogen mounted on the ship. Spoke-like fuel lines convey hydrogen from the ship's mounted on the ship.

containers mounted on the ship's inner and outer rings to the central propulsion hub for annihilation with stories of anti-hydrogen ice traveling with stores of anti-hydrogen ice traveling at 2% of the speed of light or 3,720 miles per second the theoretical velocity of the ships, the fleet would take several generations to journey to another solar system. I get such an inspiration optimism for our species when I see that there's people imagining these things and then you got people like Elon Musk who are making them into a reality. So this book is broken into several parts. An image dominated by the 5006,000, which is a

60. Or Garabasin, the tenuous carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars is scarcely more than a wispy haze. We think of it as like a dead planet and an atmosphere like, you know, vacuum on the surface like the moon, but it actually does have a very light atmosphere in it. I think that the book in the movie The Martian did a really cool job of explaining that. I'm saying what the harsh reality of living on the surface. So one day in January, 1918, and that's why I love history, because you gotta remember, this is Goddard, the guy I was just talking about, but this is one year before the end of the Great War,

the First World War. Sadly enough, I feel like it takes, and hopefully we'll, if we're educated enough, as a species on our history and we assimilate our own history and our bloody history into ourselves. We don't need war things as destructive on a large scale like war, horrifying things to motivate us to to do grand things. But I feel like in the context this probably was a huge, driving force for Goddard at this time. No doubt it had an impact on everybody what they were doing, but it's amazing during this greatest war. Goddard could be being up into the stars and projecting his vision for the future. Only 10 years after the first, the Wright brothers invented an airplane. In 18, the young American physics instructor named Robert Goddard.

gave a friend a collection of unpublished papers. He had written on such subjects as solar energy, atomic power, and the avoidance of meteors by travelers in outer space. Goddard, 35 years old at the time, had long been fascinated by futuristic ideas, suburb of Roxbury, Massachusetts, he had devoured Jules Verne's novel from, uh, Julesverne's novel, from the earth to the moon. After his family had moved to nearby Worcester, Worcester,

Wurstor, God, I'm terrible at pronouncing these names. He had listened to, he had listened rapt as the astronomer Percival Lowell lectured to a local audience on his theory. that Mars was populated by highly intelligent beings. But Goddard was more than just imaginative. He possessed practical genius. Before he was out of college, he began experimenting with rockets. In 1914, he was issued two patents, one for a multi-stage rocket design fuel systems,

baseline technology that even Elon Musk and NASA, of course, he used. NASA, of course, uses multi-stage designs and solid propellants. During the decades ahead, he would prove himself as a peerless inventor in the field of rocket dream. The American rocket pioneer, Yankee inventor, dreamer, they called him the moon man and laughed. But on his own, he went ahead designing, inventing, and testing. His first proving grounds were on his Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. During the decades, he would prove himself a fearless, I was sorry, a peerless, probably fearless, inventor in the field of rocketry, earning more than 80 patents during his lifetime. 131 were granted posthumously, so a total of 211 patents, not bad.

Now has he prepared to go to California on a wartime assignment. for the government, he handed his papers to his friends for safekeeping. Goddard put the manuscript in an ordinary envelope, which he then placed inside another one that he labeled special formulae for silvering mirrors. On the inner envelope he wrote, the notes should be read thoroughly. Be like that's the fundamental character trait that you have to have, if you're going to go into the field of astronomy and anything that looks to the heavens. The injunction seemed especially apt for the musings had, for the musings he had titled,

The Last Migration. What he would later refer to as most extreme, his most extreme speculations were suggestions for how human beings could make the seemingly impossible journey to vastly distant stars. He described as a state of granular protoplasm that would allow their bodies to withstand low temperatures for long, just as seeds hibernate. Deep sleep could be awakened every 10,000 to a million years by a radium alarm clock, activated by an increase in gas pressure as the radium decayed. Alternatively, generation upon generation of travelers might simply live and die aboard a spaceship or a starship.

The characteristics in natures of the passengers might change. I've heard people say that the first tenuous, well actually I did an episode on Kant's theories in Laplace's and Laplace's and the garages or no was Laplace theories of galaxies and spiral clumps and cluster. back 300 years ago. It was first thought of, in philosophical terms, in very abstract, speculative term, terminologies, and then scientists as our technology and our availability, as our telescope technology is increased,

we're able to actually identify the Andromeda Nebula as a galaxy itself. two million light years outside of our own galaxy. There's just a general phrase that the first intimations of a scientific, objective reality, are often outlined and felt out in speculative art and philosophy. This is definitely no exception to that rule, you know. I feel like the people, you know, Elon Musk, I guarantee. T.U. Elon Musk read a lot of science fiction as a kid. Because you have to have the imaginative framework to be able to conceive all the possibilities,

and then out of that pick out the most practical one to be able to implement. I love the fusion between imaginative science fiction, futurism, optimism, and hard scientific knowledge actually makes something like inspiring, I guess. So Goddard did not hazard a guess. He didn't hazard a guess as to when this extraordinary vision of interstellar travel might become a real. But his paper implied a time far in the future. Today in part because of the sturdy foundation that he built for the science, the notion of journeying out along a series of stepping stones to the stars is a matter of serious scientific discussion. We'll speak of it as version of the manifest destiny, which was the phrase applied to America's settlers in their

westward expansion. A very religious phrase, century in the 1800s. Others cite the eloquent words of Constantine Sulkowski. Sjokovsky, a Russian school teacher and mathematician who envisioned orbiting space colonies and inspired a generation of scientists with his book Beyond the Planet. He says, says, Shilkofsky, Zyokovsky. Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not live in the cradle forever. Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, an eminent theoretical physicist and dreamer about the cosmos, has written of the spreading out of life in all its multifarious forms, from its confinement on the surface of our small planets,

to the freedom of a boundless universe. It's funny, you'll find little really compact phrases like that. Earth is the cradle, Zilkovsky. I need to practice that so I can get better at it. Zyolkowski. Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not live in the cradle forever. It's definitely childhood's end.

And it was probably, I don't know if you guys can see, but... So all those books, I started the channel three years ago. And I've never actually opened these up. open these up. It's a whole series I got from some thrift store for like two bucks each. I think doing the O, the interstellar comet video the other day made me, there's like eight different volumes. Space exploration, so I think there's a theme developing in my thought, in my interests, at least. I wouldn't call it, I wouldn't call it thought yet. Absorption of a other people's thought, maybe.

But an expansion of the species. If the testing of these dreams lies out in the far future, impulse that drives them can be traced into the deep to a time when humanness, or at least the first glimmerings of humanness, revealed itself in the long entangled drama of life's evolution on Earth. Sometime between four and five million years ago, a new creature appeared on the open savannas of Africa.

This hominid, which would be given the name Australopithecus or Southern ape, was destined to be the forbearer of the most extraordinary and expansionary. It was expansionary, I just added that, expansionary of all earthly species. descended from a tree-dwelling line of primates, Australopithecines were small-brained but resourceful enough to use elementary tools of stone, insects, and scavenge on their grassy habitat. 6 million years ago had given rise to a species called Homo.

Members of this more advanced, they made sharp-edged tools, resource of food, was big games such as bison. As they traveled in small groups across the savanna, and the tree dotted grasslands in search of their prey, they steadily expanded the range hospitably across southern Asia and into southern Europe as well. The roving bands penetrated into radically different environments

also by about 100,000 years of the river. 100,000 years ago, humans had begun to move not only into dense rainforests of Central Africa, but also in the regions where water was actually scarce. And into the treeless tundras of Europe in Russia where big game abounded. The great herds of bison, reindeer, horses, mammoths, mastodons, and other grazing animals. The hominid's great adaptive advantages were intelligence and their descendants in a very systematic way. No way any previous species had actually ever been able to do. We're conquered by a series of inventions of fire.

The fashioning of protective, the building of shelter from wood, hides, and animal bones. At the same time, the tribes were gaining new territorial opportunities. With the coming of the last ice age, 79,000 years ago, great quantities of water were locked up in vast ice sheets, causing the level of the oceans to drop by some 300 feet. So all of you living near a coastline like me right now, Florida, I think we're a coastline I think would be widened. It was three or four times the width. Because our

metal shelf in the ocean recedes at such a shallow gradient. 300 feet of ocean floor being exposed. I heard that connected. Pretty much connected. Really cool to think about that.

Like that's not science fiction. That's verifiable, reproducible, science discoveries I don't know what you'd call them I guess these are from ice core samples in glaciers

a cell phone that can record video and stream my image and sound live over the internet to thousands of you so I'm trying to believe scientists so you gotta make sure it's verifiable and reproducible right

but still nonetheless it's fascinating to think about that like philosopher 100 years ago, people speculating about the human species were doing so under the impression that the Earth was maybe 6,000 to 10,000 years old. Maybe more speculative people in the 1800s would think it was maybe a couple million years old. Now we know that it's 3.5 billion years old. So we have to orient our perspectives on our psychology and our innate nature, you know, accordingly to a species that came about, you and I, the current of three and a half of evolution.

But nonetheless, perhaps 50,000 years ago, humans dwelling on the coasts of this reclaimed region of Indonesia, actually, I should skip over it. Indonesia once an unreachable scattering of islands became with this 300-foot sea level drop an extension of Asia. Perhaps 50,000 years ago, humans dwelling along the coasts of this reclaimed region built simple vessels, rafts most likely, and made their way from island to island, across the sea. across the Timor Straits of the continent Australia, which was then a landmass of more than 3 million square miles. Here's a picture of some scientists.

You know, as one of today's visionaries of the subject of interstellar travel, astrophysicist Freeman Dyson, so he's... ...goins the ranks of Russian mathematician Konstantin Zjokovsky, no doubt, that's him. the beard scientist, conceived of a... At the turn of the centuries, Jokovsky conceived of a liquid fuel multi-stage space rocket. Two decades later, Jokovsky conceived of a liquid fuel

multi-stage space rocket. Two decades later, Goddard, refined the theory of staging, and began testing a series of experimental liquid fuel rockets. One of a one of a very, which reached an altitude of 9,000 feet. And then Dyson over here was a futurist maverick, they call a maverick futurist. As proposed several schemes using nuclear bombs as to power

our expeditions to the fall of the fallen sea level also created a thousand mile long land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. I love how this is turning into a really broad. The date, you know, isn't certain, and now they think that there were waves in a thousand-year cyclical Ice Age, but the bands they think book was written, but definitely this was one of the second waves, I think, after the original 30,000 years ago. Siberia into a lot of Siberian, hunters following of grazing animals across the Tundra Bridge and eventually found a route south. In the past 10 BC, the migrants to the New World had reached the tip of South America. And those who had stopped at intermediate points en route swiftly mastered the demands of life

in the mountains, deserts, forests, and grasslands of the Americas. but the epic of human expansion was far from over. Got underway about 5,000 years ago, peoples of southeastern Asia, the ancestors of today's Filipinos, or sorry, Polynesians, began pressing of the range in sea-going craft. From the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos,

they traveled along the north shore of New Guinea and settled some small offshore islands. Around 1500 BC, 1,500, and within just a few generations, they spread 1,800 miles across the Pacific to inhabit the uninhabited islands of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. For their blue water journeys, they developed extraordinary navigational skills, determining the latitude by stars overhead, memorizing other stars in four-haft bearings, detecting the presence of laying stationary in the sky or patterns of bird flight or the refractive

effect islands had on the regular Pacific swell. Their vessels of migration were now huge wooden can more fit in with, I guess, can act as counterbalances, stretch fishing line out either off the left or right so that they don't get tangled on, but they were laden with food, plants that would be cultivated, pigs, chickens, and top. Most of the island hopping required Pacific pilgrims. Cross no more than it or so miles of water, but sometimes they ventured thousands of miles into the unknown before encountering land, like Hawaii. It's so cool, this is kind of weird. It's kind of oddly, that's the word serendipitous, that's talked about, oh muamu.

I've specifically picked this book. Captain Cook, and you guys, a few of you had mentioned what it would be like, maybe to do a video, I should, if I felt so inclined on the actual migration that we're talking about right now. So that's, it's just weird out. The oceanic realm of the Polynesians encompassed a huge triangular area. Corners marked by Hawaii, Easter Island, in New Zealand. It was almost the size of Europe and Asia combined. That's the entire Pacific Ocean. Virtually all of it was ocean, 995 parts in a thousand,

according to one estimate. The daring, the, just seriously, the undaunted courage that it would have taken to undertake a voyage like that and just keep going. like that and just keep going to get to Easter Island and to imagine going from Asia all the way to Easter Island 50,000 years, 40, maybe 30,000 years removed from your descendants, your your cousins who who had by another route, by the Siberian route. This next section called the Ocean of Space. I'm reading way slower and adding

way more formation into it. It's making a lot slower progress than I thought I would. So this is the ocean of space. However daunting, however daunting the ratio of land to water, it pales in comparison with the to what the human species faces in the vast ocean of space. All the solid bodies of the solar system together account from no more than an estimated 14 zeros and 1-3 at the end of that, so 3 to the negative 10 to the 5th percent of the spherical volume by the solar family. Yet these are crowded conditions compared to the general galactic neighborhood. The nearest stellar landfall, the three-star system known as Alpha Centauri, lies 4.3 light years away.

$25 trillion. Sorry, Carl. It kind of beats you. Next closest sun, Bernard Star. So the next closest sun, Bernard Star, is 5.9 light years away, so close to 50, 50 trillion light years away. To cross the cosmic ocean, even to a body as near as the moon, is an enterprise fraught with difficulties. The continents and islands on planet Earth, however vast may be the expanses of water between them, at least Jay stay in one place for the duration of the journey. Moon stars, by contrast, move and interact in a ceaseless gravitational dance that requires spacecraft to follow curving, looping trajectories painstakingly worked out, according to Newton's laws of motion. The hazards go beyond the navigational. Travelers are vulnerable to lethal high-energy particles in radiation that flood space when magnetic storms rage on the

sun and rocky debris from asteroids or comets. Oh you know what I could use my Jamaican wand right now to see if I can see if my transporter works. All I got to do is ask I guess. Alright, let's pretend we're in the future. And let's pretend I have a transporter and a replicator. And this is what would happen. Computer place my Jamaican wand in my hand right now. Especially from solar coronal mass ejections, from the storms that rage on the sun,

and rocky debris from asteroids and comets zipping along at tens of thousands of miles an hour. of miles an hour, which can inflict serious, if not fatal, damage to the hull of a spacecraft. You know, even mundane concerns can become highly problematic in space, difficulties of communicating across the void, for instance, and the deliberating, debilitating effects of living for long periods without the normal tug of Earth's gravity. Yet the urge and the need to reach out,

for new territory are as strong as they have ever been in the genus homo. Space, with all its inherent risks, is the last frontier. Or maybe our minds are, but a physicist wouldn't say that. You can see here we have different celestial chronometers. They're saying ways to keep track of time using celestial objects like stars and planets in the sun and moon. So here's a, uh, since prehistoric times, prehistoric times,

humans looked into the heavens to mark the natural rhythm. The events, the ceaseless turn of day and night, the march of the seasons, attempts at calendar keeping May Day Back some 37,000 years ago. When evidence suggests, Ice Age hunter-gatherers first recorded,

the phases of the moon through aeons, efforts to chronicle celestial motions grew increasingly complex as various cultures erected structures whose form and function were patterned on the stars themselves. 6,500 BC of not just carved in this ice age antler correspond to may correspond to lunar phases. The broad end has been fashioned to resemble the head of an animal. So that was 6,500 BC, so almost 9,000 years ago. And then 2,800 BC, so almost 5,000 years ago, we got Stonehenge. The newly risen midsummer sun gleams above the heelstone, the center boulder. New England's Stonehenge, whose many lunar and solar alignments are subject to various scientific interpretations.

Just a little bit later than Stonehenge, 2,500 to 1400 BC. The Egyptians, an Egyptian tablet depicts the Pharaoh and left, and the goddess Seshat, laying out a temple by the big and the seven-pointed star, Seshat. And lastly, just about 300 BC, this is a chronicle, so 2,500 years ago almost, of the motions of Mars. Appears in Coneoform script. Clay Babylonian Astronomical Diary, one of thousands that recorded planetary and lunar events. Actually has a brief aside the astrological symbols based on the 12 constellations is transitioned based on the procession of the equinoxes.

You should look that up if you don't know what it is, but the Earth wobbles and creates one full wobble, like a top wobbling every 26,000 years. I think roughly two full rotations within the zodiac signs complete during that cycle. And I think 2000 BC to the year zero was the age of Ares. And then from zero to roughly our age right now, we're about to transition. It was the age of Pisces or the fish. And right around now, actually, we're during a transition time,

which is pretty interesting that the Internet was just discovered. Flight, the combustible engine. Obviously, electricity. A lot of things have been discovered right now. And so anyways, that's one of the big, if not the most significant factors in the reason that you see the fish symbol, symbolizing Christianity. On the back of cars, you see it a lot. It's because Jesus was the fish bearer. He was the fisher of men. and he ended the age of Ares, which was the lamb. That's why he's the lamb of God, and began the age of the fish.

That's why he was a fisherman. He were made friends with fishermen. And he ushered in the age of the fish. Pisces. I thought that was pretty interesting. The original baptism, I guess. I'm reading all this in Carl Young's book. Original baptism was meant to be baptized in a fish pot.

So it's important because our ancestors, way before we had modern technology, even Galileo's telescopes, 1,500,000 years before Galileo, we had people paying very, very close attention. to the stars. Obviously, I'm not suggesting there was some... Suggesting there was some voodoo,

some mysterious magic happening astrologically. But definitely you can imagine that whatever's going on in our psychology that's, again, evolved over three billion years, we project it into the closest version of a higher order being, that we could easily access, which was the infinite infinitude of the stars. It's so interesting that like, once you think about it like that,

it seems like a natural progression to look up and imagine that that, wherever a higher being might exist, or whatever it might look like, might be symbolized somehow in the stars. Whatever, whatever our ancestors' conception of God or a God or whatever, multiple gods might have been, it's kind of a logical progression to think that they would have projected those ideas onto different patterns in the sky, in the night sky, where they see the holes, where they see the holes to heaven. I think there's some stuff there worth considering, even if you don't believe in a God,

or at least you say you don't, maybe. Nonetheless, we still want to reach out to the stars. I think over and definitely not assume. I definitely don't assume I have any answers. I just think if you're going to ask some professional, found questions about your life. Our history in the stars are two pretty useful places to begin, I think. Back to the book. So the urge and need to reach out to the stars for new territory or as strong as they've ever been with our genus, which is Homo. Space dangers is the last

frontier. In 1961, while the world held its collective breath below, Eureka Garon of the Soviet Union became the first human being to brave that airless realm, to brave that airless realm. When he completed a single orbit of Earth in a craft scarcely large enough for one person, he did after that. In three decades, American astronauts had repeatedly visited the moon. And Soviet cosmonauts had spent as much as a year at a time living in relatively spacious quarters aboard orbiting space stations. Today, the scientists and engineers of several nations are plotting next steps, examining their options for establishing bases on the moon and, of course, For Ceylon Musk now says that within a couple years we'll be on Mars. Actually, hold on, let me.

Gives us any dates here. Making life multi-planetary. One Ma says, you want to wake up in the morning and think the future will be great. And that's what being a space-faring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out. than going out there and being among the stars. Elon Musk.

The guy, Jesus Christ. On September 17, 2018, SpaceX announced fashion innovator and globally recognized curator Usaka Mazawa will be the company's first private passenger to fly around the moon in 2023.

To date, only 24 people have visited the moon, the last of them flying in 19, The first private lunar passenger flight featuring a flyby of the moon as part of a week-long mission. The development of SpaceX's Starship in super heavy rocket, formerly known as the BFR. An important step in enabling access for everyday people, I mean, let's be honest, not everyday people, who dream of flying to space and also have about 10, and zero's in their big count less. I mean, damn, that is cool. So there's Elon trajectory around the moon right there. Very precisely time. I've been orbited for a few weeks. No, I guess it's a pass. Anyways, yeah, I think fantastic. I think large-scale endeavors like that are gonna really orient us

back to reality. There's probably gonna be something bad that happens. These missions, hopefully not. I really, really hope not. But if ever you, human being is as optimistic as Elon. I think we'll be all right. All right. Yeah, so we didn't say anything about Mars, but, oh, sorry, okay, our aspirational goal on SpaceX.com forward slash Mars is to send our first cargo mission to Mars in 2022. So a year before sending that fashion designer to the moon. Very cool. So considering prospects for piloted journeys to asteroids and or satellites of our outer planets in studying the feasibility, converting the solar system all together, and sailing out across the cosmos. Deliberations range from detailed engineering studies involving known technologies, such as the construction of space, a space station in the Earth,

that will serve as a staging ground for subsequent journeys, all the way to projects far more speculative, such as life support systems for interstellar trips lasting thousands of years. That's usually a good indicator originally intended. Hopefully it helped you get our future as a human species in a very optimistic bent, I hope, you thought. And yeah, I don't know, I just love talking about this stuff. So if you guys enjoyed too, let me know in the comments. Let's start a discussion. I really, really do rely on you guys a lot of times to help me, let me to direct me towards interesting information like Scoop. You tell me about Omoa, which I think I might have swiped past or something, but I didn't know about it. So it's super cool. I love that you guys are interested in the same things as me.

So, yeah, with that, just, yeah, shoot me a comment if you like this and we'll continue it. This book doesn't seem that thick, but it's... We only made it through like three pages, so... You know what's up, and if you liked it, and I'll see you next time, hopefully. All right, guys, take care, sleep well, be good to yourself, and happy holidays.

I'm just going to say that this whole month of December. But, all right, bye. I'll see you next time.