Let's Find Out - New Astronomy / Space Books | Thunderstorm Soft-Spoken ASMR

Episode Date: August 2, 2020

Browsing through a few new astronomy books I found. Talking about the drake equation and SETI, physics, and scales of planet sizes and distances in the solar system.

I want you to give yourselves a big pat on the back because you enabled my hoarding habits. You guys made me go out and buy a few more astronomy books. Not as old as this guy. And by the way for those of you guys, cringing at the little flap here, falling off to be sitting back together. You guys, uh, you guys loved the astronomy book. That was really cool because I enjoy buying books. used, used books preferably, actually. And today I got my buddy's tomato leaf,

pumpkin spice here with me. I'm gonna pop up on the shot. It sounded, but I do like candles, so we're gonna like these real quick. Today's video is gonna be us, sort of unboxing. I already opened them up, actually. I just kept the packaging, put them back in.

We're gonna give you guys a rundown of my new astronomy books. and my dozen or so older, already purchased. Books I've had about astronomy and space. I won't say astronomy per se, because I have a book like this on rocketry and about space travel. All of these are books that I eventually want to kind of use

to make independent episodes about. I'd actually be ashamed to me. I didn't trim these wicks. It's really gonna be nice and poppy. Briefly, since I just realized I'm wearing a wedding ring, I might as well tell you guys, I got married. Most of you are gonna know Molly. I haven't had her on the video proper, I guess, in a while, but any of you guys who follow my IG know, I had a girlfriend, then I had a fiance, and now I have a wife, which is so...

interesting to say oh my god and now I got a dog dropping farts on me right under my desk oh my Ernie oh my god oh my you stay on the hallway you stay out you're dropping farts on me buddy you're dropping atomic farts you're blasting me away that's ridiculous so anyways now that Ernie's cinched my nose airs off with his volatile farts. He's got bad gas. I don't know what to do about that. I need to change his diet maybe.

But, yeah, I'm married, and I can say two weeks into it, and I'm happily so. I'm a lucky man. I'm very lucky. And if I didn't love her enough, if I didn't have a million reasons to love her already, she picked out

that date because July 20, is the day that Neil Armstrong and the Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, I think it is, landed on the moon. And it's the day he put his first human footprint in the moon's soil and said, it's one giant leaf for mankind. And I thought that was pretty symbolic too. That means a lot to me. And she knew that and that's why I'm the luckiest man in the world. So anyways, that's some very cool news that I've had recently in my life. Big steps.

Making big, big steps. For those of you who cared, who have, you know, been following my life changes throughout the channel in the past couple years. The first book that you guys, in my newly reignited, love of buying you, books that you guys kind of enable them. I'm gonna blame you guys for this advice of mine to just procrastinate and waste hours searching for used books online. I got this one off eBay. More again it's it's hard for me to make this is kind of an improvisational impromptu video because every topic I get into I find that there's so so much you know every especially with the internet nowadays we can go down so many

rabbit holes and there's a lot of deep rabbit holes even non-conspiratorial ones so as I'm getting into the Drake equation and which is essentially just a very educated guess by an astronomer of the likelihood of intelligent civilizations that are not only exist but are actively communicating, propagating some form of most likely radio wave communications. Although there's, I shouldn't say most likely, well, we'll talk about that when I do eventually make the video. But he comes up with eight or so variables that you can tweak, you can tune to get different results in the end probability, the final result, I guess.

And that lumps him with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And, yeah, I purchased all these books to learn more about the science of astronomy, me, what we know in general about, you know, about space in our place in it. I just realized I'm bumping this table. Looking through, you know, this old 1800s book just really piqued my interest as far as finding out what we know. It made me want to know more about this, you know, technological, scientific revolution. time that we're in and I fused today with the last 150, 200 years even actually, as a

remarkable novel era in human achievement and evolution in general and it's, you know, fundamentally it's me wanting to know more about our universe but about our place in the history of human kind. more I understand about astronomy, which I guess I'll just get to unpacking this, the more respect I have and awe I have, it fills me with in regards to just how much we're learning about space and our place, in space and time. So, kind of on an oddly parallel journey right in my self-education, which you guys, again, are a huge part of, just because you support me and I wouldn't have time to learn all this stuff

if it wasn't for you guys encouraging me and watching and giving me feedback and all the financial support on Patreon, by the way. Let me segue into that real quick. Because I don't say it enough, in all honesty. So all of you guys who support me, on there and just in general show love on the channel I just had to plug that real quick and then give you guys show you guys my gratitude honestly so the point of all these books I'm about to show you today today is they're purchased in

pursuit of a deeper understanding and a broader understanding of our place and history and where we might be going. And I really, really think that there is a very high probability that within the next hundred or so years, our radio communications, let someone, let another intelligent civilization be cluing in another intelligent civilization within, you know, 20 to 100 light years from us on some distant, or I should say locally, um, cosmically a very local distance, you know, would be a couple tens of light years from our solar system. So anyways, I really think, you know, we're not only going through our own earthly, technological, moral, scientific and spiritual revivals and evolutions,

but also I think cosmically we're at a new precipice that we've never, never been at before. In a very quickening, accelerating, at a very accelerating pace too. So I just want to know what we know because I feel like even the most basic stuff. And I'm so glad that you guys enjoyed the, um, a lot of my astronomy-based videos, but the basics of astronomy in particular, that's kind of what I want to do. I actually bought, you can kind of make it out back there. I bought like a little kids-sized easel

with a chalkboard on one side and a dry race board on another to set up, and hopefully it's not too cheap. I got it at Walmart, but to kind of, you know, make it more interactive and write equations and get into the physics of astronomy. more often because I'd really like to. So as I educate myself, I'm purchasing books about history and general information about astronomy in particular. This one is called

the search cosmic discovery, the search scope and heritage of astronomy. You can see none of these books are really new. I bought one textbook that was from I think 2006 and even that is you know somewhat date. in certain areas. But this book is just a nice overview, you know, to kind of get my feet wet into it. So this is, this book's written by, it's written by Martin Harwit. This guy has passed away. This book is from 1981, so this guy wrote it when he was 50 years old. And he was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

He was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, so that was Carl Sagan's university. So a part of me jumps to the probability that he was encouraged by Carl Sagan to write his own book. Search, scope, and heritage of astronomy. I like this because it's not a dry textbook. It includes, I'd say, some elevated mathematics. and physics concepts in it. But overall, it's appeal to me is that it takes on a more conversational tone,

just a more poetic style, rather than dry prose of most textbooks. It says cosmic discovery in the first page here is an investigation into the complexity of the universe. addressed to a wide range of readers interested in astronomical discovery from the astronomers, historians, and policymakers points of view. I've tried to avoid the specialized jargon of each of these three fields and have appended a glossary to explain those techniques, technical and lesser known terms and abbreviations that had to be included. And yeah, really the overview of this book in

particular is that it contains, let you guys look at that, contains the first, contains five chapters, first one summarizes the most important findings and conclusions of the study of astronomy. It's mostly interested in ideas and results, rather than the substantiation and evidence in the process, may find themselves satisfied by this chapter length essay. others, particularly professionals, more interested in a thorough, in a thorough examination of the subject, we'll find full documentation in the remaining four chapters. Yeah, I just really enjoyed this book.

It popped out, you know, and again, these books are cheap, you know, because astronomy is a constantly evolving subject. A section of one chapter gets outdated, it's profitable, especially in the universities, with textbooks. Unfortunately, they sadly price gouge those textbooks. Put that burden, that financial

burden on the students acquiring debt, which is incredible that they do that. But these books are cheap. This book is 40 years old, but I would probably say 90% of it, 95% of it, the overwhelming

majority of it is still very relevant and accurate information. So he just goes into discoveries, major breakthroughs and discoveries. This is like a, I need to read this first chapter, which I haven't even done yet. It's a great overview of all the discoveries. He even has a graph. You know what? Maybe I should just, I think I was gonna do an introduction like I did with my introduction to astronomy video or basics of astronomy video.

basics of astronomy video, face the camera, and then just transition into looking down. So yeah, I think I'll do that right now. And we'll get into all these books. Because I want to show you there's a couple graphs and all that in this book. So it's transition. Oh, I just looked up Martin Harwood. He's still alive and kicking at 89 years old. Born March 9, 1931.

So good for that guy. This guy right here. I just wanted to show you guys this cool chapter. This is the graph in the first chapter, I mean. So it says, stars, planets novae, before, you know, 1600, which is roughly a good date to call the dawn of the modern era of science, modernism, technology. It didn't really get in a full swing, you know, didn't pick up steam, so to speak, until the 1800s. But polishing of lenses for Galileo to be able to look up and see the moons at the beginning of 1600s. You could see moons and rings of Saturn and Jupiter, moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn, I should say.

And, you know, basic mechanistic things like clocks, which is why we have a huge... Back in those texts of a clockwork universe. And then we have galactic clusters. Let's see, 7. A little bit after 1750. Yeah, I guess so rings weren't exactly made out. Saturn just looked like it kind of a sphere with two big years coming. off it, the gap between the rings and the planet of Saturn wasn't able to be we discerned

until, you know, about 60 or so years after Galileo had already been looking at it through his telescope. But then we go into the 1800s. That's when our old book, early 1800s, that's when it's That's when it started to be written. Was it from 1836? I think it was. So, right before that book, we had 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. Galactic Clusters, Clusters of galaxies, interplanetary matter, in asteroids.

All of which, we didn't know all the characteristics of, but we knew that we were at least able to spot them for further future observation. We have variable stars. velocity, which I guess means indications of gaseousness around them. Maybe like a planetary nebulae, which, I don't know what we thought it was a star

and it looked like it had a ring. It looked like it was sitting within a nebula. Globular clusters, which we now know our sense. satellite galaxies, clusters of, you know, tens of thousands of stars that themselves were kind of created independent of our own galaxy, but perhaps were young proto-galaxies that got absorbed into our galaxies and now kind of orbit. Anyways, it's cool how you see a central curve, I guess, is where I was getting at, of discoveries here. Very massive discoveries. These aren't, you know, x-rays, x-ray background,

microwave background. That's the indication that of the universe's characteristics, that it's infant, you know, at the earliest stages that we can determine, I guess, 14, 15 billion years ago. We'll last into galaxies and stars, but they were kind of this hot soup of very elementary particles, you know, bubbling over with heat and energy, just hundreds of, for the first, you know, a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, as far as we know, they happened before that, but everything we know about the Big Bang, we kind of extrapolate based on that infrared stars. So, you know, these are major, major discoveries that are cluing us into the nature of stars and we can detect all the

pills us once we discovered the electromagnetic spectrum which discovered and that light was just one part of this dynamic interaction this this interweaving of electromagnetism electric energy and magnetic energy and oscillate of two separate fields that are perpendicular to one another. So electricity is undulating like that, in magnetisms, undulating like that, traveling in conjunction with each other,

but exactly at a 90 degree angle to each other, which I really don't know what that means. Honestly, I've done math describing that and I've learned the equations in school, but the actual nature, what that actually means is so elusive, it's so interesting. But we know so much more about the nature of the universe now that we're able to probe it across all these.

We got radiation, cosmic rays, solid bodies. You know, I enjoy, as long as it's not annotated. I enjoy looking at other people's notes, the information that we know. Because as kids, astronomy is one of the more glamorous sciences, because it's so easy to, you know, point the camera in the sky. You had these grand pictures from the Hubble telescope. And so it's easy to... You know, we're so flooded and saturated with those images.

It's easy to just kind of take them for granted, I think, but there's so much intensive thought and labor, mental labor and logical, that goes into understanding, you know, so much mathematics, so much, so many bright ideas that go into understanding and unveiling the nature of the universe. Fundamentally, a lot of sciences, are discussions of information like DNA is such a breakthrough in the field of biology because it's a transmitter of genetic information or it contains in a very simple way information that creates it incredibly unrealistically almost unfathomably a fathomably complex organism out of these four simple molecules and just different patterns and

different organizations of these molecules and the same goes are this physics and chemistry and astronomy and we have five known types of carrier that transport information across the universe one is electromagnetic radiation That's all these right here. Atmospheric is a good filter of a lot of these types, a lot of these frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. So you see here it's all open on the ground. So microwaves and radio waves,

the two longest, largest, lowest frequency, types of electromagnetic waves actually penetrate the atmosphere. the atmosphere but these as do some area of gamma waves gamma rays this is right here this is about our invisible wavelength here oh sorry right here yeah this is in nanometers right here I think they got the scale kind of off visible should be oh no that's right because it's more like micrometer I guess. Yeah. Interestingly, this very narrow band of the EM spectrum right here penetrates the atmosphere. And when we go outside our thick, very thick atmosphere, relative to the moon and Mars and Mercury, not as thick relative to Venus, and all the other cast giants, of course.

but we you know we're adapted to navigate in the visible spectrum the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum EM spectrum we're spared the exposure of the to all the radiation much much smaller wavelength higher frequency range of the EM spectrum radio waves right there as far as, you know, transmitting information. We think that Drake, Drake and a lot of these other people, Carl Sagan included, being one of them, and I got his book, Cosmos here we're going to look at. They propose for a very interesting reason,

a very thoughtful reason of, just very logical reasons. that we would most likely intercept, receive transmissions from extraterrestrial, intelligent, technological civilizations, radio wave area of the EM spectrum. Because without going into too much of the science, even though I don't know much of it, Hydrogen is the simplest molecule, simplest atom, the atom with the fewest number of protons in its nucleus has one proton in its nucleus. I'm sure there's a periodic table back here. Temperatures in the universe. But because it's the simplest, it's also the most abundant because it takes the fewest number of, the fewest number of, the fewest

energy, the smallest energy in the fewest number of, uh, it's the most stable, I think. I want to say it's the most stable. Complexity, it's the least complex atom, one of the most stable and the most abundant in the universe. And it, like all atoms, give off a photon of energy in the certain, which is a, uh, essentially a unit of energy. A particular wavelength. Let's see. Yeah, I guess they don't have it. I guess continue my train and thought. They give off absorb or emit energy. They do so at a particular wavelength that corresponds to their size

and their own kind of intrinsic relationship between their nucleus and their electrons. Electrons kind of, I guess you say occupy, you don't really say hover. You don't really use words of conveying, motion because they it's kind of like this static field that just surrounds a nucleus. Here's a good example. And they shift the electrons, here we go, large atoms with energy, the electrons absorb some of that energy in specific amounts, kind of like finite units that can't be halved or fractionated in any way. So So they do it in multiples of units of energy called quanta.

They get stimulated to a higher energy state when they get hit with energy. And then I think hydrogen after like something like 12 million years or something like that, eventually they, I think they, what's the word, suddenly only one day, 12 million years later, release that energy and they move back down to their ground state. the electrons do, a little bit closer, if you will, I guess. Orbiting the proton. And that's all the hydrogen atom is, one proton, one electron. And when it does drop back down to that energy state, it gives off.

Essentially satisfies that equation. It absorbs some energy to it for 12 million years. And then recognize the spectral lines. lines. It does that at a, it gives off that energy at a specific wavelength and we can detect that using specialized instruments called a spectroscope or we can separate light into all the different wavelengths it's made up of. And anyways, Drake and these guys called Coconian Morrison figured that because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe the pioneers the one of the first it would be one of the first targets of telescopes spectroscopes instruments looking into the universe

for more information and so they think that civilizations that are advanced and trying to reach out and communicate to other upcoming civilizations would communicate in this wavelength that they know the original civilizations, the emerging intelligent civilizations would be probing the universe for. They know that they're basing all this off of human history. So they have evidence that that's what we did. we probed, you know, for hundreds of years, we probed around and discovered that hydrogen found at a certain wavelength, we could see that and we could see that it was the most abundant

everywhere, that essentially we'd be looking because we'd, I'm trying to say, essentially because young civilizations wouldn't already be most likely to be looking in that area of the wavelength spectrum. they think that that would be a good frequency to communicate at cosmic ray particles is number two so we have so as I've been searching this researching this Drake equation in SETI's general findings and what they're exploring it's definitely piqued my interest that the reasoning has impressed me quite a bit and it's helped you know inform my

take and I hope it will yours once I get this video piece together. Understanding of the probabilities and likelihoods of civilizations there are out there and I think there are, I think the data that we have, currently at least, shows that there are quite a few, at least 10 distributed, roughly, you know, some within a thousand light years of us, given that the Milky Way is 200,000 light years ago. cross and yeah the restrictions that we logically put on which wavelengths we

probe the universe for communications with that we think it might be too be too expensive to be shooting off a spherical set of high intensity energy waves they'd have to be too narrow. They're angular... What's the phrase there? Anyways, their angle that they're dispersed off, their angular arc or whatever, is way too narrow.

It would have to be directed at exactly at our sun. And they might have that, you know. but one of the rationale for searching in the hydrogen wavelength was its ability to probe life-giving atmospheres such as ours so they want something that would fit within these ranges so it could be visible it could be optical you know they think most likely it would be in the microwave or radial wave wavelength because these travel the furthest for the fewest units of input energy and then it could be way up here in the gamma ray scale where it would be able to penetrate atmospheres but it would be very energy costly very very costly so for a cardishief

you know anything registering registering more than one on the cardishaph scale being able to harness one being able to being a civilization able to harness able to being a civilization able to harness their full power of the planet that they're on. I think two being the entire sun that they orbit, and then three would be either galactic or at least interstellar, meaning they'd be able to live across multiple stars and proportionately be able to harness, or maybe not. I mean, every door opens up two more doors.

it's like in a way I guess I won't dwell too much further on this because I do want to discuss it on the video proper but it's just really interesting that like maybe civilizations are casting just a wide net and using the least

you know the most energy efficient and just crude through which to transmit energy and messages and information fundamentally could be the radio waves but then that's also a one-way communication which leaves them vulnerable to being essentially voyered voyered they could their awareness their existence is without any reciprocation so in a way that's kind of a foolish thing I think Stephen Hawking or someone, one of the popular astrophysicists, astronomers, said that it's kind of like yelling out in the jungle at night, giving away your location to predators.

You know, you could be, you could find another human that might help you cooperate to survive in the jungle and flourish. Or you could be inviting predators to know your location. at a minimal risk to them, you know. So, and even beyond the predator prey, we might think that a part of me thinks from the little bit that I understand about this, maybe there is a litmus test, a kind of chivaleth that the advanced civilization might want to,

you know use in order to vet the potential civilizations onboarding into the galactic you know community so in other words maybe they might choose the more radio high energy more intensive route and then someone sufficiently advanced again we've come a long way in just like 200 years imagine 2,000 years or God, you know, God willing, a million years of further technological

innovation for us and we can discoveries that we might make might make forms of information carrying either obsolete or just very superficial in terms of how we understand. how an advanced civilization might understand how the universe works. So magnetic radiation is, you know, if we analogize it to like a caveman to us, it might be sharpening a stone, you know. Spear flints. More advanced civilizations, you know, like as we invented the wheel and the lever and the pulley and then lenses and then like we discovered electricity and then we were eventually able to probe the atom for nuclear power. Maybe that is a more sophisticated area in which that they might communicate using gravitational

waves, neutrinos, antinitrinos, particles that we are, you know, just beginning to discover in the last 50, 60 years. using particle colliders. Everything we know really exists on the visible wavelengths, solid bodies. So it was really just massive particles. We have matter, visible wavelengths. There is fundamental particles, cosmic ray particles, highly energetic electrons, protons, protons, heavier nuclei, antimatter.

And again, this book is 40 years old, so I think a lot of this is going to be dated technologically as far as what we've detected. Gravitational waves, theoretically predicted radiation from rapidly accelerating mass of bodies, such as exploding stars or binary black holes orbiting each other with so much mass and output of energy that they actually propagate undulations in the fabric of gravity that he detected detected those but anyways it's one book and i have like over a dozen books so i'll probably edit this one down a bit the last little bit of this chapter is interesting that he is speculating on not what we know but what we can in a way is like metaphysical.

So he's speculating on based on discoveries to date in this one section he just pulls out, points out 1960 to 1979 noting that there's been nine massive major revolutionary discoveries of phenomena, new phenomena

in the universe. X-ray stars, a background, quasars, x-ray galaxies. So being able to look at galaxies through a filtered lens of not just visible light, but different types of light. And x-rays being some of the higher energy, I guess soft and hard, there's different within the spectrum, within the levels of the spectrum. X-ray is second only to gamma rays as far as how intense its wavelength, how

camera ray bursts, radio sources. When he says, it's called SS 43, assigned to the observed source, appeared. Let's see what that is. SS says, one of the most exotic star systems observed. Hmm, in the frame here,

star systems observed, it's an eclipsing x-ray binary system, most likely a black hole, and possibly a neutron star spectrum of the secondary companion star suggests that it's likely a type star the w50 and SS 433 are related objects remnants from a supernova which occurred about 20,000 years ago interesting a thousand light years away so that would mean we saw it in the sky about 2,000 years ago it lines up with Christ isn't that interesting

If I were speculated about those types of things, which part of me is, I might really run with that. This guy thinks that, yeah, I guess that's what we'd say. By the year 2200, 280 years from now, he thinks we will have discovered, by the year 2200, we should become aware of some 90% of all multimodal phenomena characterizing the universe. the universe and I'm not sure what he means by that but I know it's also in another section the declining funding for cosmic exploration so obviously he's a fan of funding departments and areas of research discoveries at the end here in outlook before we approach the most exhilarating era the epic of cosmic discovery. That's Martin Hewitt's

Harwood's book. You know, I like it because this is kind of like, almost like he's the Will Durant of astronomy here. He's putting everything that we know so far. You know, obviously he's an astronomer himself. Part of the member of the Max Planck Institute, Cornell, who wrote another book, plenty of articles. holds a number of patents for technical innovations. This guy's a polymath. And it's men like this, men and women like this, that I think further inspire new generations

of people to continue exploring. Because they aren't afraid to creatively speculate where we're going. And they're not just trapped in maintaining the dogma of currently accepted information about the world. You know, they're on the edge of probing the periphery, the boundaries of what we know. And that's awesome. That's fundamentally what makes us human.

Very cool. Very inspiring. So I want to learn more about astronomy through that. Next up, these next two books, useful, an artistic book, 1,000 years of the art and science of astronomy. They got this one because of its pictures. Another line of inquiry that I'm navigating is the divergence of alchemy, you know, essentially spirituality and the condensation of a factual scientific. worldview out of kind of a filtering of the facts from the pre-scientific, spiritually, religiously charged, infused, saturated worldview that all our ancestors came out of.

I, for instance, was writing in 1638, 400 years ago. He was speculating about life. moon, other places. Riley noted that all philosophy is based on two things only. Curiosity and poor eyesight. So it's really cool to, I think it's encouraging. It gives, literally gives me courage to discuss and pursue these ventures, the things I do. Like the Drakey equation, you know, it can be dismissed as too radical and too unrealistic, but I really don't think it is. If we think about just how much is out there, how many worlds, how many stars, and just how likely it is that there might be so many inhabited, inhabitable at least, stars. planets around stars that are during lifespan of you know billions of years very stable

you know middle of the road average sized average energy output stars that would encourage life to form around them i think there's so much information indicating that there is probably a lot of life teeming the universe teeming with life out there and it's cool it's uh cool it's it really makes you feel a part it's meaningful it makes you feel a part of a part of a bigger story much bigger than your own life and in a way that's we can all hope for in life is to partake and participate and be a part of Not only our family, but our community, voyages and adventures. We go on independently, individually, and as a community, and ultimately as a species.

And I feel a kinship with these guys speculating in 1638. The first two printed works on the possibility of travel to other worlds in life on those planets, were both published in England in 1638. First of these, although given less credit as an early work on extraterrestrial life and travel, had a number of progressive ideas. So we got Francis Godwin, 1552, born in 1552, student at Oxford in 83. He had been influenced by ideas propounded by Giordano, Giadano Bruno, fantasy entitled, man in the moon, moon with an e there. Discourse of a voyage thither in Bruno's works included a book

entitled on the infinite universe and worlds, which proposed that all the planets of the solar system were like the earth inhabited. The idea that travel to other worlds and the possibilities of life there wasn't entirely new. Galileo, Descartes, and Kepler, had all cautiously recognized the possibility of extraterrestrial. His ideas were extraordinarily progressive for a 17th century literary figure who was not technically or scientifically trained. Clear power, reverse thrust, in non-human, meaning robotic, human, non-human payloads.

Ideas that have evolved in the modern phase, very very much. of aeronautics it's it's cool it's like who can't be who isn't inspired by that that's it's it's amazing that's amazing it's and it's so positive too it's it's it's it's a phrase that the you know first inklings of great scientific achievements in in discoveries and advancements in leaps are first found in poetry and fiction It's true. It, uh, know how many people are this in a real way? How many engineers that invented cell phones or helped internally design their look, especially with the flip phone, were influenced by Star Trek and they're flipped. What do you call it? Star Trek, the next generation. They had their panels look like touchscreen iPads. No doubt, Steve Jobs. was inspired to create the iPhone and the iPad. I watched an interview of him in a couple years, you know, maybe 2010 or something after the iPhone had come out.

And he actually said that the iPhone was originally second to the iPad. He had originally invented the iPad or came up with the idea, conceived. his first touchscreen device at Apple being an iPad. Only later they had to minimize it and with the idea of making a cell phone. I even heard the other day someone talking about pre-iPhone. It really is one of those great technological inventions. We all take touchscreen technology for granted nowadays but it was revolutionary when he invented it for sure.

So anyways, this book, very visually interesting. 1, 1950, Thomas Wright, titled An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, Wright's vision of the infinite number of universes that may exist, which he called of infinity. The stars were imprinted. He actually was there. Again, another 1750. This is Wright's view.

of nearby star systems. A is ours. B is the star system around Sirius. C is a star system around Rajal. It's a picture written by drawn by Isaac Newton in 1687. This is a diagram showing locations and appearances of the comet of 1680, later known as Halley's comet, in its parabolic orbit around the Sun. and you see the tail of the comet is changing. Its angular location is deflected perfectly. So the sun's wind, solar wind, the particles, it emits. It's blowing the exposed, you know, elements and chemicals and dust of the comet's surface,

blowing it behind the comet. So this whole book is, you know, we'll probably go in much more detail. But, you know, on top of it being just interesting visually, I mean, who didn't like looking at those pictures? Star Systems. I think it's also very informative historically. You know, it's very educational about where even the most speculative thinkers were. in respect to the truth that we currently hold at least.

You know here is a great example of the monumental efforts that went into observing the stars. You know we take for granted now we got machines to just follow and track stars and we have images and they didn't even have photographic plates until the 1800s. So they had to draw what they were looking at. They couldn't take a picture and then go back and analyze it. Or nowadays, record, you know, terabytes of data and then have, you know, thousands of lines of code,

post-process it, and decipher, you know, filter out elements that we're looking for in particular. They had to track it, keep numbers, use these instruments like the one we just saw. all these uh sextants this is one of tycho brahis right here measuring the distance between celestial objects you have massive angular sextence to measure recognizing that how it enters the high lens and how it hits the back so we must be seeing the world upside down and apparently that's true we uh somehow I wonder if babies view the world upside down and then just by sheer necessity we all have to Psychologically I guess mentally unconsciously though flip the image right side up out

And again I got this book for cheap. This was like four bucks or something five bucks I don't know Maybe this one was a little more because these with the high quality images are usually a little more expensive, but it was worth it, maybe ten bucks, you know. So the last book I recently got, and, uh, you know, maybe I'll make this, it's on self-contained video, and we'll go into the older, the books I've had, longer at least, um, in another video, but it's a textbook. Explorations in Introduction to Astronomy by Thomas Arney, fourth edition,

sure probably like a hundred dollars who knows maybe two hundred which um you know I understand a lot of work goes into this but I just think it's a sin against our younger against the youth make them pay so much for books but this one was written in 2006 in the 96 in this version fourth edition I guess was made in 2006 I got this because again it's useful to it's an introduction I don't need to know everything about every nook and cranny and I don't even have the intelligence to do that so more time all the first you know 20 pages is an essay about the history it actually is a

very cool fold out I'll look at it real quick so this is another thing I really really want to make a video on so I won't take too much time on this we'll flip through this whole book so that'll take enough time as it is but um again this is uh for me this is something that we don't teach enough of we always show the planets and stuff and oftentimes you'll oh where's that thing I have a box, but anyways, I have a puzzle box with the pictures of the planets on it that I also want to make a video doing, just, you know, gradually doing a puzzle. I think that would be nice and relaxing. But the scale, so they always convey, you know, roughly, accurately,

the relative sizes of the planets. But they rarely convey the scale. I guess this side's the best. They rarely convey the scale of distance between the planets. And here we have the sun with Earth to scale. And the moon's orbit, and you can see, let's zoom in here. So we got the Earth right there. But, um, yes, because that gives us an accurate idea of just how far

astronauts have to travel to get to the moon. This little pale blue dot right there is our entire planet. And we usually like, we get images that depict the moon here, or here maybe. Not way out there. Not way 220,000 miles away.

That's such a long... It was like a three, three day journey going, what, I don't even know how fast, 30,000 miles an hour. Or no, I guess that's not right. I think maybe they were doing 20, 20,000. But no, that's not even right of it. But, again, it's showing the reality of the situation we're all in, how small we actually are. To me, that it helps us unify. and recognize the similar position we're all in.

You know, we're all mortal beings, but we're also on this same planet, you know? And we share a kinship that really oozes out of these pictures. When you recognize that, this huge thing is right there. These are the actual distances that we, our planets, exist at. You can't even see it on the scale if the sun is this tiny dot, Earth and the other planets for that matter Aren't even register don't even register is a more Galactic and intergalactic scale using a football field an American football field

United States size of a grapefruit sitting right on the goal line right on that white line touchdown line And then we have Mercury who's Venus, Venus the size of a poppy seed. Mercury and Venus are, you know, within the first seven yards, we'll say meters, just a case, just to make everything, you know, universal. A quarter, the quarter represents the moon's orbit. Earth is sitting at, you know, about 12 meters out. And Mars is just, just over 15 meters. away from the sun. To convey the accurate distance, 66 yards from the grapefruit. We have Jupiter. We have a, like a, basically a 50-yard gap between Mars and Jupiter. And Jupiter is the, a raisin.

That's a raisin. 66 yards from a grapefruit, if you can imagine that. So that's just incredible. And then we have about the 30 to 40-40-yard mark. We have cinnamon powder sprinkled representing the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And then if that's not far enough for you, let's zoom out a little bit. Two football fields back to back. Saturn is way out there. Saturn is 120 yards away from the grapefruit. So double the distance that Jupiter is.

Roughly, roughly double. Almost, you know, relatively exactly double. That's so, that's such a massive difference in distance. It, uh, that's because it accurately portrays just how far out, how separated, how far apart, rather. And far out from the sun, really. So then yeah, so the entire football field after that after Saturn is blank before we get to Uranus. And Neptune, I don't even think Neptune registers. Yeah, look at it.

So Uranus is, again, it's very cool. Mathematically, there's a resonance with the planets. There's a resonance with the units of distance from the sun. Jupiter is, I think it's, forget the exact ratio, but you can see Saturn. The distance from the Sun of Saturn to Jupiter is a 2-1 ratio. From Uranus to Jupiter, it's roughly a 4-1 ratio, or 2-1 for Uranus to Saturn. And then Neptune is way, way out there. there, um, it says Pluto up here. There are two football fields beyond Uranus is where Pluto is.

I guess that's roughly where Neptune is as well. Anyways, uh, and then down here, maybe it's, you can see at the 50 yard line. So if we took our field and made, shrunk it down even further, So the sun would now be, you know, maybe the size of a grape instead of a grapefruit. Or maybe even smaller than that. But if instead of Pluto being a quarter mile out, you know, five football fields or something, Pluto was 50 yards. So that's our entire solar system. A poppy seed on a pin-headed at the 50-yard line equals the orbit of Pluto.

Nearest star. I guess if the whole solar system itself was shrunk down to a pinhead, then the nearest star would be about the 40-yard line. So that would be, you know, about 10 yards away, which is incredible. So if we shrunk five football fields down to the size of a pinhead, the nearest star, Alpha Sinai. to our eye would still be 30 feet away and then to continue onto the galaxies the Milky Way would be roughly about 50 miles in diameter which would be you know the size of a so our entire solar system is the size is the size of a pinhead in our galaxy our Milky Way galaxy is about the size of a city. Really let that sink in. The, just the magnitude, the size of a 50,

man, that's a large city too. So, you know, that'd be, it'd be like five times, maybe 10 times as large as my city. And you just think a pinhead is our entire galaxy. Maybe this, just how many other civilizations there might be evolved in the last 15 billion years. Yeah, so again, it's almost like orders of 10. The next galaxy, M31 is the Andromeda. That's 1,1,100 miles away from St. Louis to Salt Lake City. That's amazing. That distance entire solar system is the same.

size compared to 1,1100 miles. That intergalactic journey would take some revolutionary technology for us to reach. So anyways, we, uh, yeah, we got through this book, we got 20 pages into this book. I mean, we really didn't even do that. I just jumped right to that. That, uh, I guess there's really not much. I can go through without, you know, giving you a whole rundown on the cosmic landscape. But yeah, this book in general for me is just a very, you know, useful source of information. A quick look up.

And it got a little wet towards the end, you can see. It's crinkled up. But it being a little worse for wear, it's still, for me, really useful. And it's really cool just to browse through, you know, so it's... Maybe I'll put some links to... to Amazon or something like that. Because these books, if they're a little bit out of date and again, I'm sure 95, 99% of the book is still very usefully accurate information. So I just realized I didn't reset the camera. So we, you know, for very cheap, for very cheap, or you can go to your library, but I like writing in my books. So I'm

I just started reading the first couple pages of this book. I like highlighting and underlying. It doesn't, if that means I have to get a book that looks a little used, I'm okay with that. And I think this book was maybe $4, maybe $6 with shipping or something. I actually paid $8 to get the original $1950, nine article by those guys I mentioned earlier. I think it was Giovanni Coconi and Philip Morrison.

They wrote a paper called Searching for Interstellar Communications in the journal nature, a very prestigious journal that, again, makes you pay like $9 per article. I had to do that, so I couldn't access it in article 60 years old. I still had to pay ten bucks to access, but it was worth it. It was a neat little article. Breaking down why they think hydrogen is the best range of the electromagnetic spectrum to probe the universe for extra interest. So we got, yeah, the first... I mean, this book is useful just for the background of what we know in the little history of astro-astronomastronomy.

me advice like geography of the heaven's book did for for looking at you know stars in your backyard concepts of gravity here's a good little excerpt for the EM spectrum but yeah anyways i i'm particularly wanted to spend so much time on that one little pull out because because of just how how useful it is for our perspective it seems to us yet how small in the cosmos it actually is, how fast the distances are between the planets, let alone the stars and let alone the galaxies. We have a lot left to explore. Here's electric and magnetic energy fluctuating their separate axes.

So yeah, this will be like a really useful little reference to look up. hear like how they know the age of the earth. I gotta look at this one because my dad's always very adamant that you can't really know that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. So that's funny. No doubt a reason why I worshipped science as a young kid just to spite my parents as many teenagers.

I'm like, you know, this is just laid out like a general textbook as you guys can see. So I'm happy to show you guys this because who knows how long it is before when you get done with this Drake equation Script that I'm working on but I've been learning a lot about astronomy and I've just been excited to show you guys We'll make a separate video showing you guys their books I have surprisingly Carl Sagan's Cosmos the actual book called Cosmos is a really useful book for my Drake equation as a whole chapter on SETI. And I didn't realize Carl Sagan was actually an integral part

in forming the search. SETI being the search for extraterrestrial intelligence community. So even this book I didn't get a chance to get to. But we'll be doing a whole video, I'll be doing, probably working out some rocket equations soon. This one's very cool. He was a rocket engineer, you know? Perhaps a Nazi. He kind of looks like a Nazi.

He was a German scientist in World War II. He came over and got very famous, working for NASA and being integral in our Apollo space program. And this book is him explaining Space Frontier. Essentially, the engineering. science that goes into NASA's Apollo space program. So this book is very cool. And it'll be a good groundwork for when I eventually get to doing a video about Elon Musk and SpaceX

because that is a whole story in itself. I feel like we're... Elon Musk is... He's just such a boon to humanity. The things he's achieving are inspired. inspiring so many people to take control of their lives and do something great and positive great and positive so I'll leave it there guys thanks for watching and again seriously thank you I'm gonna have to edit that intro out it was way

way longer than I wanted it to be but thank you all my patrons patrons and everybody else that shows me love It means a lot and I don't say it enough. So I just want you to know how grateful I really am Hope you guys enjoy this. Get some sleep and relax and I'll see you soon. I'll try to be a little more consistent with the output of videos Till then though take care and get some sleep. Bye