Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #26 Amber Straughn’s AMA: Are Wormholes Real? w/ NASA Astrophysicist

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

In this episode, Amber Straughn answers questions regarding getting back to the Moon, wormholes for space travel, how to protect ourselves from space asteroids, and more. You will learn about: 00:57 | Wormholes Could Be Used For Space Travel... One Day. 05:20 | What Is The Best Way To Get Involved With Space Exploration? 10:41 | How Do We Protect Ourselves From Stray Asteroids? Dr. Amber Straughn is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. Her research explores how black holes and stars form in distant galaxies. _____________ Resources Check out the latest discoveries of the  James Webb Space Telescope Learn more about Abundance360. Read the Tech Blog. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets.  _____________ This episode is brought to you by: My executive summit, Abundance360 Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Yeah, I think as far as human travel goes, I mean, really any space travel, I think that we really do need a revolution in propulsion. If we are ever going to actually become an interplanetary species, like thinking further in the future, but even in the near term, we could accomplish so much more if we could revolutionize a propulsion system.

And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am am this is what i'm going to do this is the dent i'm going to make in the universe now we have uh went out to twitter uh to the community there to ask for questions we have an incredible uh list of questions uh some of these are are great and I want to just take a second and share them with you because I think they're worth answering. So, and feel free to say, not my area, or I'll answer it in a few years. But Dan asks, I would love Amber's thoughts on the hypothetical existence of wormholes. So, do you want to go there?

It's, again, it's theory, but it's, I mean, it's good physics, right? I think, I think theoretically, yeah. I've seen this on Star Trek, so it's got to be true. Yeah, exactly, it's got to be true, right? So, yeah, I think, I think think um hypothetically theoretically yes um it's possible from a physics standpoint can we use it as humans to travel across space right that's the that's the big question the big underlying question and not right now um maybe later you know i like to take

an expansive view of what we're going to be able to accomplish in the future of humanity because we've been able to do so much already yeah i would never say i would never say never if it's within the realm of physics exactly yeah i agree so someday we'll be we'll be able to use wormholes to travel i would would say I hope so. Yeah. All right. I'll take that. ThinksMagicCube7 says, how confident are you or your colleagues that there'll be boots on the moon by 2030? By 2030. Well, I can't speak for my colleagues. But for me, I think it's, again, it's so hard to tell. But I think it's again it's so hard to tell um but i i think it's i think it's gonna happen um

obviously we had a really good uh artemis test uh last year so that's exciting um you know what starship is doing i think is also super super incredible and exciting so i think the technology is there and by the way it could be. And by the way, it could be Chinese boots on the moon too. It could, it absolutely could. You know, China's space program is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. So yeah, it could be. I think, I think it's, I think it's likely actually. Yeah. I'd probably give it it i would give it 90 chance i mean unless something catastrophic catastrophic happens i think a a race to the moon surface by 2030 um is a very realistic uh target so i'll i'll take bets on that online we'll go there all right amber so um

All right, Amber. So another question here is, what item do you think would be the most interesting thing to send to space that would intrigue the world had a pretty good idea with the golden record, right? I mean, that was great. That was that was a stroke of genius. Yeah. Describe what that golden record was and where it flew on which flight. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the the the. I mean, it's a golden record. It's a it's a it's an object that contains data about the human species that was sent up a Voyager. And it was a sort of, it was almost a last minute kind of like, oh, there's this satellite going up to space. We should do something about humanity with it. And it contains, you know, like images of what the human body looks like.

It has, I think, songs of whales, whale noises. It has music. It has greetings from every nation on the planet. It has that famous photo of a naked man and woman and the nine planets and binary. Yeah, it's amazing. It's beautiful, and it's so hopeful. I mean, that's what I love about it.

And again, getting to more of the, you know, the touchy-feely aspects of space. Yeah, the human connection. It's hopeful, you know. That was a very hopeful thing to do, to send that and to, you know, to think there's someone out there that might see this. Yeah, and it created an entire Star Trek movie episode. That's incredible. All right, so Surrender says, I am an Indian and want to enter the domain of planetary science.

What are the recent research areas so I can get ahead of the domain? I'm doing my engineering undergraduate. So if someone wants to dive in, where would you direct them to focus? So planetary science is super interesting. There's, wow, there's so much going on at NASA in particular with planetary science. So we are going to soon bring samples back from Mars. So that's very interesting. So I think there's a lot of options in planetary science.

Sending probes to Europa, all the planetary missions that we have planned are super, are absolutely incredible. I would say in general, if this listener is interested in planets outside of our solar system, that the field of exoplanet science is really, it really is one of the sort of hottest fields in astronomy right now. And so, you know, if I was 20 years younger, I might go into exoplanet science myself. Well, you know, the other conversation we have a lot on this podcast is around longevity. So you'll have your second third and fourth career coming up soon there we go and honestly uh i agree with you i mean that's like one of the most

exciting ideas i could think about is exoplanet conversation um another question comes up um how fast, let's say speed of light being the fastest, could we safely go is a question. And that brings us up into sort of propulsion systems and, you know, traditional propulsion systems where we carry all the fuel from the surface of the earth and we, you know, we burn it to get speed and we burn it to slow down is Kind of limiting right now But there's a lot of conversation that I've seen on nuclear propulsion And solar cell solar cells. What are you hearing from your exoplanet friends or your propulsion friends out there? About traveling to Mars or you know to the outer moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Yeah, I think as far as human travel goes, I mean, really any space travel, I think that we really do need a revolution in propulsion.

If we are ever going to actually become an interplanetary species, like thinking further in the future. But even in the near term, we could accomplish so much more if we could revolutionize our propulsion system. So yeah, I think nuclear propulsion, like you said, solar propulsion, solar sail kind of technology, still pretty early, I think, in technological development, but super interesting.

So I think we need all cards on the table in terms of figuring out the best ways to get our spacecraft and ourselves out into space in the future. I'm still holding out for wormholes, though, if we can get back to that. Yep. That's the hopeful approach. Nearer to Earth, space debris. I mean, I don't think people realize what a challenge that could potentially provide to humans getting off the planet. Any conversations that you're hearing on space debris?

I mean, we're seeing more and more of it, right, as more satellites get launched and those satellites bump into each other or spent fuel tanks explode. What's the buzz there? the conversations about space debris, other than when it does impact our satellites, which it does, right? We have to maneuver the International Space Station to avoid big chunks of debris. We have to maneuver our satellites to avoid debris. So it does, like, it's not a future thing. Like, it's happening now.

It's impacting space now. It's not a future thing. Like it's happening now. It's impacting space now. And so I do think that we have to get, we have to figure out how to manage it. And I certainly don't have those answers, but I know very smart people are working on it. Yeah. And I think, you know, we're working right now on a space debris XPRIZE.

I mean, there will be a business in terms of that. And, you know, the solution there falls in different categories. One solution is, can you, in fact, build spacecraft that go and gather the largest piece of space debris down? When I was a kid, there was a television show. I forget the name. The basis was a company that would go and salvage. I think it was like Salvage One. You go and salvage debris from orbit. The energy of that's crazy. Another idea is using space-based lasers to sort of zap the space debris that slows them down. Let's talk about one of my favorite subjects, asteroids. interest as a future resource base for liquid oxygen principally, hydrogen potentially, nickel, iron, platinum group metals. But the thing that's interesting more than that is the concern of near-Earth asteroids that get too close. We just saw recently, I guess it was a school bus size asteroid that came within the geostationary orbit of Earth. It's pretty large. And the thing that was scary about it was it was discovered like four days earlier.

I guess it was approaching from the sun. Like we can see the asteroids that are coming from the outer solar system because they're illuminated from far away. But if they're coming directly from the sun you can't see them uh is that a conversation going on inside the halls of oh for sure yeah um and i think you know it's it's being taken you know even more seriously now than it was say 10 years ago um and of course we just had the dart mission um successful mission yeah i described the dark mission because that was a super mission so we slammed a spacecraft into a little tiny asteroid and it was amazing and you know it's the first time i've ever it wasn't just for fun right so um the the acronyms basically stands for well i'm going to be honest i don't remember the first

two words but it was a redirect mission so it was seeing if we could smash um something into an asteroid to alter its trajectory enough um that would be you know sufficient to uh to protect us um in the future from from an asteroid impact and it worked i mean it was incredible and it's the first time i've ever seen you know a crowd full of scientists, a room full of scientists, like, you know, react with joy when their camera of velocities and smack into the center as predicted. I didn't see the final results of it because, of course, the world just tuned in for that, you know, that moment of impact. But statistically, it deviated the asteroid in a predictable way that would be enough with enough advance notice to get it out of the path of earth is that correct in general yes um of course again with these kind of things it's all about orbital mechanics and math right uh because it all depends on how close it is how soon you

detect it um how fast it's moving you know and how and how big it is. You know, those things all come into play. This was just a very sort of initial first proving we can do it. But yeah, it's incredibly important, important work. And again, I try to stay hopeful. So I would think that if we did discover something, we would have the tools and the know-how to be able to deflect a planet-destroying asteroid. Yeah, we got to figure it out before Bruce Willis, you know, departs. Exactly. So, all right, let's go back to space telescopes here. What's on the drawing board next? I mean, we have, I think they're called the great telescopes, right? These telescopes that we've been producing. And so James Webb telescopes conceived of in 96, 25 years later, it gets launched after you said congressional cancellation and lots of, you know, budget overruns and time overruns and such.

But it makes it. Thank you to you and your fellow scientists and those who support it, because it's I mean, it's like once it's there, it's like, oh, my God, this is a human treasure. Where are we going? Where are we going next? What's the vision for next generation? So right now we are building and are very far along on our next quote unquote flagship, our next big astronomy telescope at NASA. And that's the Nancy Grace Roman telescope. That's going to be launched in 2027. So not too far away. It is smaller in terms of scale. It's about a Hubble-sized telescope,

but the primary... Just a Hubble-sized telescope. Just a Hubble, you know. But the big deal about the Roman telescope is that it has a huge field of view. So whereas Hubble, again, and JWST sort of stare at one teeny tiny piece of sky, sort of like looking through a straw very deeply, the Roman will be able to see large swaths of the sky. And that just allows you to do different science.

So, we'll have to do another podcast on the science of the Roman telescope. But it's awesome. So, it's going to focus on also on exoplanets, but also on dark energy, this big, you know, space mystery that we have of what is most of the universe made of. So Roman is, again, it's doing great. Technology is there. It's being built. It's being tested. Launches in 2027. As far as the next big, big thing after the Roman telescope. Bigger is better. Bigger is better. And let me tell you what, the next big one is going to be awesome. Okay.

So, and just to give a little background context, every 10 years, astronomers get together and say, what are our biggest astronomy questions? What do we need to build to answer them? And those are the decadal surveys. So your listeners have probably heard of these. surveys. So your listeners have probably heard of these. So for the last, you know, 2020 decadal survey, we decided that we need to build basically a fleet. So we need three new observatories, new big, bold, awesome observatories. And the first of these is going to be called the Habitable Worlds Observatory. So that's exactly what it sounds like. We are going to build a telescope to find life.

So that is the next big goal in astronomy of NASA. So it's essentially going to search 100 nearby star system to search for Earth-like planets. That's the goal. And to find evidence of life on those planets. So that's a big goal, but I think we can do it. So going back to Sir and Dear's question of what should he study, it's going to be perfect for you. Just, you know, looking for exoplanets with life. With life. Yeah. And what's interesting, right? Hopefully, fingers crossed, we will expand the envelope of what we can deliver to space with the advent of Starship, which is huge. usable rockets, I think is going to be a complete game changer for astronomy. And also the prospect of in-space servicing, super important. You know, we've done that with Hubble, but all of our other telescopes have not been built to be serviceable, including JWST.

But our next fleet of observatories that we're thinking about, those have to be serviceable. And so that's something that we're thinking about, those have to be serviceable. And so that's something that we're sort of actively planning for. And, you know, I think we, again, JRST is awesome. It's so worth it. But it was so hard. And, you know, this next fleet of observatories we're thinking about is, it's not a whole new, you know, it's not a revolution, you know, it's going to be building on the technologies and the lessons learned we have from JWST to be able to build these. So this, again, this Habitable Worlds Observatory is the first one we're prioritizing.

And then we also want to build a huge X-ray telescope and a huge far infrared telescope which sort of um you know basically help us to get at all of those fundamental questions that we have in astronomy right um yeah so it's uh it's super exciting and if we can do it i say if we can do it we just need the will to do it um and we you know we need we need people to get to get behind it to decide to do it it's going to be hard um but i think the faster we can get these observatories in space uh the better it's going to be overall so i i can't i can't imagine what could be more exciting and you know luckily you, a few of the wealthiest people on the planet are space cadets, along with you and me. And so if, you know, if government has difficulty, maybe we'll get some privately funded, you know, mega space telescopes out there as well. I mean, you know, what's 10 billion dollars between friends?

That's not not too bad. I'm going to close us out with a question I asked my guests. So Amber, you know about the XPRIZE. You know that we run these large-scale global competitions and I'm always looking for great moonshots, great XPRIZE ideas. So if I were to say to you, Amber, we're going to fund the Amber Strong XPRIZE. It's fully funded. I just need you to tell me, what do you want scientists and engineers around the world focusing on? Is there a grand challenge that you think would be a great XPRIZE? I know I'm putting you on the spot here, but you're brilliant too as well. So we've to climate change, of course. I think that's a huge one. And I know XPRIZE is funding things to address that.

Yeah, so I think climate change is the thing that comes to mind. I think it is not only in the future, but now. It's a big problem now. It's affecting people now. In the climate change and the space area, an idea I've kicked back and forth, and I'm curious of your view on this, is the idea of a sunshade. Can we put up a large scale structure that would titrate, would maybe block, you know, a fraction of 1% of the sun in a way that would fail safe and allow you to put like a thermostat on the solar flux hitting the earth. That's super interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I need to think about that a little bit. That's interesting. I, well, you've heard me say a couple of times now, I try to take a hopeful outlook on things and I really do. I, I, a lot of times when I think about these big problems, I feel like a lot of our problems are to address the problems. It's social or political problems rather than technological.

So so that's that's that's a tough side of these sorts of things. It's surprised to work more when you're building a technology. If XPRIZE did work more when you're building a technology, you know, I've thought about just to enter this sort of conversation with you. Would an XPRIZE to look for Earth approaching asteroids from within the orbit of Venus, potentially, you know, could we create small telescopes that would be launched and funded to look for those asteroids and give us a little more advanced warning? Maybe something like that. I wonder if data prizes, looking at all of the James Webb telescope-like competitions to discover the most interesting breakthrough by citizen scientists? Does something like that exist? As far as prizes, I'm not sure. But yeah, there are huge platforms for citizen science and they're fairly active.

But competition always spurs on human beings. So having a competition for diving into that data does sound, sound really interesting. So, um, and, and we have tons of data. It's great. But once we do bring on the Roman telescope, um, and also a ground-based telescope called the Rubin telescope, uh, these two, um, that, uh, that uh that one oh no i'm forgetting off the top of my head where it's being built i should know that so uh but it's um a huge and it's the same idea as roman um in terms of science wide field and what that means is so much data that we actually

don't really know how to handle it yet in terms of in terms of analysis that's one of the reasons there's a lot of effort on machine learning algorithms and astronomy right now so once we get in the era of roman and rubin data we are definitely going to need help from humans from competitions from machines to be able to analyze this massive amount of data. Amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Amber Strong, this was probably one of my favorite conversations. You sort of tickled the young nine-year-old in me who got, you know, sort of turned on with Star Trek and Apolloollo and uh god it just it's extraordinary that the human race using these tools can discover the everything that's going on this

in this universe it's literally uh awe striking is to our souls um amber, I thank you. You're going to be joining us at Abundance 360 this year on stage. I hope you'll bring with you some of your favorite images and tell some of your favorite stories because this very much is a visual story. And anyway, thank you for painting the pictures with your words and taking the time today. Folks who want to dive in deeper, see some of these images, learn about more, where would you direct them? What website? To learn more about JWST and find all the images and all the great stuff, it would be jwst.nasa.gov. Nice. Thank you to NASA, to Congress for putting the money back up, to all the astronomers who have been working around the clock for this. And thank you to you, Amber. It's just amazing to call you a friend. And thanks.

Thank you so much for having me.