Ologies with Alie Ward - Selenology (THE MOON) with Raquel Nuno

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

Are we crazier during a full moon? What is the Moon made of? Can we move to the Moon? Was the Moon landing a hoax? What's up with all those craters? Planetary geologist and selenologist Raquel Nuno loves the Moon and sits down to answer approximately 1 million of Alie's shameless questions. Gaze into the sky with newfound understanding and appreciation for our glowing buddy in the sky. Also: a burst bladder and a drunk moose.Raquel Nuno's website and Instagram @thespacegeologistMore links at www.alieward.comBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris and Jarrett Sleeper Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hi, it's that friend from high school who calls shotgun and then leans over you to scream their order into the drive-thru alleyward. Back with another episode, apologies. Oh, man, this topic is one that is close to my heart and our planet. In full disclosure, I knew very little about any of this before this interview. So I may have asked the most stupidest questions of any episode to date, which is exciting. That's exciting. So get ready to get cozy with the moon, our little buddy floating out there.

What is its deal? But first, my buddies, thank you for supporting on Patreon, patreon.com. A dollar a month gets you in. Thank you for getting merch at oligysmerch.com and thank you for rating and subscribing and reviewing oligies on iTunes. Y'all know I creep your reviews. You know I do it. So this week, thank you, acelee04, who says that they wish I lived next door, quote, so

you could drink wine while baking lopsided chupacabra-shaped cookies while singing at the top of your lungs and looking through telescopes waiting for the sun to come up. So you could go explore the backyard with magnifiers and microscopes in between REM-filled maps in Brazilian hammocks. That life, it sounds like a good one, acelee, I would like to sign up. Thank you. Okay, onward and upward to the moon. Okay, so the word selenology, it comes from the Greek selen for moon.

And someone who studies the moon's movements or composition or formation is a selenologist. It's a real word. I mean, yes, sure, sure, they can be geologists and astrophysicists too. There are many different names, but selenology, it's a thing, it's cool. And while the term peaked in the late 1960s, probably due to all the Apollo hullabaloo, we're bringing it back right now, oligites. So this selenologist studies both Mars and the moon. She is a wonder.

I am very lucky to have this gaggle of friends known as the nerd brigade. And I was introduced to her at a barbecue through Derek Muller, aka Veritasium on YouTube. And upon meeting her, all of us were like, this person rules, we love her. She's permanent. Now she's currently getting her PhD while also doing science communications. So she's done research and production with Veritasium. She's written for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, aka LROC blog. And all around, she's just an earthling I'm very proud to know.

So she came over on a Sunday afternoon, she was wearing NASA sneakers, and we chatted on my couch. And I am now so much more informed about the moon. So get ready to marvel at the glow of selenologist Raquel Nuno. Any tips on microphone use just look, talk straight into it. Yep. Adjust your levels a little bit more. Okay, cool.

Raquel, Raquel, Raquel. Okay, good. So what exactly would you say when you introduce someone and say what you do? What do you tell them? I tell them that I'm a planetary geologist. That's just what I say. And people usually have no idea what that means. They're like, I know geology, I don't know planetary, what does that even mean?

So then I say, I'm a space geologist. I study rocks on other planets, and that's what I tell them. And then they lose their minds. And they're like, what does that, what, yes, yes, that's what I do. And so what does a space geologist necessarily do? So I say that I'm actually an armchair geologist. So I sit on a chair and do geology. You're a reclining geologist.

Reclining geologist. Yeah, so we have samples from rocks in other worlds, but most of the time we don't. So I essentially use spacecraft data to analyze either images. I also do a lot of programming. So a lot of computational modeling of what's happening, surface processes that are happening in other worlds. And so you are crunching numbers and data to try to figure out what is happening with the rocks on other planets.

That's right. That's what I do. That's crazy. That's crazy. Do all of the planets or just a few of the planets? Just a few of the planets. I, too, babies are the moon and Mars. So Raquel got her bachelor's in geophysics and space physics.

She got a master's in geology and she's now completing her PhD in geology and planetary science. This is all at UCLA. The first day that I met her, Raquel mentioned that she studies rocks and she's always like rocks. And I was like, Raquel, huh, Raquel, yeah, huh, how about that? And she said that she'd never really connected, that she has the word rock in her name. And this discovery, as you can imagine, thrilled your old dad ward here to the point of giddiness.

I was so much more excited about it than I think she was, but that's okay. Anyway, so she studies Mars rocks as well, but the moon is my passion project and I love the moon. It's just one of the coolest planetary bodies ever and it's so close. So you see it every day is just so tangible to me and to a lot of people. So we do a lot of staring up at it. Yes, we do. We do a lot of moon and toward the moon.

I remember someone was telling me once, like Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer was on a podcast and he was, he got caught up being like, wait, is the moon a planet? Is the moon a planet? And he had one of those moments where he just didn't remember. Okay. So I looked this up because if I don't share it, I will regret it to my grave. And this was actually live on QVC with host Sean Killinger. Now she is holding up like a blousy, amorphously patterned turquoise and key lime top is perfect

for like a ladies lunch in Boca Raton. And she's with fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who is not known for his humility. Now anyway, I'm playing you a portion of this because I applaud QVC for being a safe space to chat space science and also just a side note, folks, do not feel ashamed to not know things because nobody knows everything and you don't learn unless you ponder something openly while selling a blouse on QVC. I love that color. That's such a happy, beautiful, rich experience.

It almost kind of looks like what the earth looks like when you're a bazillion miles away from the planet moon. Yes. Yes, I just squinted at it. From the moon looking back at the earth. From the planet moon. From the planet moon. Isn't the moon a star?

No, the moon is a planet, darling. The sun is a star. Is the moon really a planet? The moon is a planet. Don't look at me like that. It's a planet. The sun is a star. It's a planet.

Is the sun not a star? I don't know what the sun is. The sun is a star, isn't it? We don't know what the sun is. The sun is a star. The sun is a star. The moon is a planet. The moon is a planet.

I knew it. I knew it. Excuse me. You were trying to take me down that road. The moon is not a planet. Excuse me, chunky. If you're listening to me, you have to Google the moon. Someone, I can guarantee you someone's Googling right now because I knew it was not a planet.

The moon is such a planet. I can't even stand it. The moon is not a planet. What else is it if it's not a planet? It's not. I believe it's a star or something. It's a moon. Do a lot of people tend to think that the moon is a planet?

Okay. That if you'd ask a planetary scientist, they would say, yeah, it's a planet because it acts like a planet. It behaves like a planet, but it's just orbiting the earth versus orbiting the sun. So it's not in the true definition of what a planet is. It's not a planet, but we have to say planetary body because it's not technically a planet. So it's a planet if it's orbiting the sun. That's right.

And I mean, I'm going to ask just stupid ask questions. I have no shame. How do you guys determine what's a planet? What's an exoplanet? What's a planetary body? I mean, a planetary body is not orbiting a sun, but it could be orbiting another planet. Well, a planetary body can be a planet as well. Oh, okay.

So the earth is a planetary body. But so are asteroids. Asteroids are planetary bodies because they're orbiting, they're in our solar system. So they're a planetary body. I feel like it's kind of like a not all cacti, not all succulents are cacti, but all cacti are succulents. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that.

Okay. Yeah. So if you have to be a planet, if you, so you have to be round. So you have to have enough gravity to have formed a round shaped object. So there's a lot of asteroids that are, they look like potatoes or like weird dumbbell things. And those are not, could never be planets because they're not shaped like a planet is. So you have to have enough mass that you create enough gravity to round up your shape. You also have to have cleared your orbit.

And what that means is that there's no debris in front of your behind you. You have collected all of the matter that's in your path to form yourself, to form the planetary body. I don't think I've ever realized that we're kind of like a Swiffer. Like that's part of where we get all of our stuff to make things is just by picking it up as we go. Yeah. So it's actually interesting.

We, Earth acquires a lot of mass just by traveling through space. And when you see like meteor showers, that's us traveling through a trail of rocks of stuff that then encounters our atmosphere or that we encounter it. And then they come crashing in a beautiful light shows in the sky. That's so exciting. Yeah. What voice was that? I'm sorry.

I just, I could not contain myself here thinking about meteor showers and I sound like I've just found a kitten in my pocket for like most of this episode anyway. And have we always had the moon? So the moon, essentially, so the moon formed very, very soon after the Earth did. So essentially when you're thinking about geologic time, yes, the moon has always been here with us. And why did you grow up loving the moon so much? Because you see it.

You see it. It's some, and it changes every day. It's either a little bit brighter or a little bit darker. It's like a kid that you would hear songs about the moon or, or read like the little prince. I love the little prince that, you know, who, who hasn't been impacted by the little prince. I mean, I was for sure.

No pun on the impact crater. So the little prince is a novella and it was written by this French writer, poet and aviator whose name I can't pronounce in French. So I'm going to sabotage it and try pronouncing it with a Texas accent. Antoine de Saint-Oxbury. Now the book was published in 1943. It's about a prince who lived on a tiny asteroid. Anyway, it's this pensive, moody, wonderful French tale about exploration and also love

and it contains gems like all the stars are a riot of flowers and it involves a rose and a fox and a prince and the geological composition in orbit of small planetary bodies. So yes, this book about an asteroid made an impact. Let's talk a little bit about where you grew up. Where you grew up, was there a lot of light pollution? Were you able to see stars and moons and planets when you grew up? So I grew up in Portugal in Lisbon. So I did live in the city.

But my birthday is August 11 and around that time there's a meteor shower that peaks on the 12th. So for my birthday every night we would go, me and my family and my friends, we would go out to the beach to watch the meteor showers. That was like a thing every year we would go and do. So yes, there was pollution but at the same time there was this event around my birthday that we would go and see. So it's just always, being, looking at space was always something that was like special

and fascinating. Oh my god, it was like free fireworks. It was free fireworks, just for me. And when did you decide to start studying the moon and studying planetary geology? Oh man, it's been a very, very windy road. It's, it's, that wasn't always the plan. I actually had an internship at JPL when I was a community college student. But I was studying electrical engineering.

I was not going to do planetary science. I wasn't going to be doing science at all because I wasn't sure that that was a practical thing. I actually didn't even know really what a scientist, I had no idea. My parents were artists, like they were not scientists, I hadn't really been exposed to what a scientist does. So I'm like, okay, I like science, I like math. What can, what's a practical thing that I can do?

So an engineer, of course, I'm going to go be an engineer. So I got an internship at JPL to do engineering type things. But my advisor there, the project wasn't set up yet. So he's like, well, I have this data for you to analyze. Would you rather do that instead? So I said yes. So I started, I was actually using magnetometer data looking at the magnetic fields of Jupiter. That's what I started doing.

That's what it does. So this was your busy work with magnetometer data from Jupiter? Yes, yes. That's what he was like. Okay. While we figure out the project, you do this. Oh my God. But it really opened up this whole field that I didn't know existed.

I had no idea that planetary science existed. I knew about astronomy. I knew that there was the people that would study the stars and the planets. And I always just thought those were astronomers. But working at JPL, this is where they, it's a jet propulsion laboratory here in California in Pasadena, where they build a lot of these rovers and spacecraft that go study other planets. That's how I discovered, whoa, there's this whole field out there that is just dedicated

to study our solar system, our world, and the worlds near us. It just opened up this whole world that I didn't even know existed about science. So then when I, I had transferred to UCLA for my undergrad as an electrical engineering major and I ended up switching. So I switched to geophysics and space physics because now I knew that there was, that was something I could study. I could study the planets and I could help send spacecraft to other worlds and I wanted to be part of that.

I wanted to be part of that world. Take me back a little bit too because I understand you were in the military. I was, yes. And so before you got to community college even, what was your, what was your process? Yeah, so I was 17 when I graduated high school and I joined the U.S. Air Force right after graduation. When did you move from Lisbon to the U.S.? I was 11 years old.

So I moved to United States when I was 11. And my, so the reason I joined the military was my, my father had terminal cancer. He was, he was dying. And because we weren't U.S. citizens at that time, you couldn't get, he couldn't work. So he couldn't, he didn't have healthcare. And so you couldn't get Medicaid or Medicare because we weren't citizens. So he was without healthcare. And the, just the supporting, just so he could be comfortable, pain medicine and anti-anxiety

medicine that you, you need when you're going through the dying process was costing. I think it was like $1,100 every 10 days. And we couldn't afford it. That was just, there was nothing we could do. And I'm an only child. I had to do something and I was 17. What could I do? I figured the military would be a good way to be able to provide for my family.

And that's why I joined the military. Oh, I'm going to cry. Oh, don't cry. That's amazing. No, it's, and honestly, I think that that's the thing that I'm the most proud of in my life is to be able to, no, no, no, you're going to make me cry too. But it's, it's a thing that I'm the most proud of that I think I've ever done because I was able to, to be there for him both financially and emotionally.

The Air Force was great about helping us. So I would, I would, they, I worked the night shift so that I could, during the day I could take him to the hospital, that I could take him to his appointments. And I made him a dependent of mine, which meant that they could, the military would pay for his medical care. So of course it was terminal, he was going to die, but that I could, he could get the medicine that would make him more comfortable going through that process. So it was, it was great for that.

Sorry, I was fully red faced, wet cheeks, ugly crying, recording this. Can you clone yourself? No. Can we just repopulate Mars with just you? Just all. So when, when, how long did you serve in the Air Force? Four years. I did four years.

So I was in a US citizen when I went in. I got my citizenship through the military, which was great. But I couldn't get any of the cool jobs in the military because I couldn't get secret clearance. So I couldn't, I couldn't work with satellites or, or like the space side of, of the military, which I'd, I'd, I'd always liked space. They don't tell you about what really happened in Roswell unless you don't, they don't tell me.

No, I was kidding. No. Just kidding. Mulder. Don't. Don't even start with me. So I picked, so how I ended up picking that job that I got, so I worked in the medical field.

I was the person who draws your blood and tests it. Ooh. That's what I did for four years, testing people's urine and, and poop and growing bacteria. You were just on like the bodily fluids committee. Yes. Yes. That's what I did for four years. But I didn't know what I wanted to do when I got out.

I didn't really like, it wasn't crazy about the medical field. I didn't want to stay in there. I knew I liked science and math, but I hadn't taken a math or science class in like four years and I was really afraid to, to fail. So I like, I bartended for many years just trying to find myself and figure out what I wanted to do. I started going to community college, just take a class here and there. And then I started doing well and I'm like, okay, maybe I can do this.

This is a path I can take. And then slowly just taking more and more classes and I was doing well. And I said, okay, well, I'm going to go get a science degree, an engineering degree until you got, until I got that internship at JPL that opened the world of planetary science to me. I talked to a lot of people and when I tell them what I do, oh, you're an astronomer. I'm like, no, I'm not, I don't, I'm not an astronomer. I'm a planetary scientist.

I study rocks. And, and it's funny to think that a lot of the rovers, like all of the rovers that have gone to Mars, they're all robotic geologists. That's what they, they are. They're not astronomers. They're geologists. Yeah, they're not, they're looking down. They're not looking up, right?

Yeah, that's right. Let's hot goss about the moon. Okay. So I didn't learn until way too late that I was like, the moon is made of a bunch of junk from earth that just maybe chunked off. Explain to me, where does this goddamn moon come from? Yeah. So the cool thing is actually we're not a hundred percent sure.

What? Which is really, really cool. It's just how many science questions are still left answering. We don't know that much about the moon. There's still so much more to learn. But the idea is the prevailing one of the, the one that most people think is the real thing that happened was that a Mars sized object, which we call Thea, was just floating around space and crashed into the, the early earth.

And they collided and stuff kind of was flung out into space and coalesced to form the moon. When you look at what the moon and the earth are made of, they're, they're very similar. They look like they're made of the same stuff. So, so we think that that's what happened. These things collided, they mixed together and then a big chunk of it got, or several chunks of it got flown into space and then eventually coalesced into

what our moon is today. And it's gravity that's keeping it all together and into a ball. Yeah. That's how planets get bigger. It's you, you start out with like little dust particles that are electrically attracted to each other and they start getting sticking together and everything has mass. Even a tiny dust particle has mass and so it starts attracting the next dust

particle and then now, now you have little pebbles and now the pebbles start getting stuck together and then eventually you form a planet that's gravitationally bound to, to itself. Do you think there's any place on earth where it's like we got in a collision, we still have a little bit of a dent? Yes, there's actually lots of craters that we see on, on earth. Well, not lots compared to them. And when you look at the moon, all those dots that you see on it, that's, those

are craters and there's still some here on, on earth. The thing about earth is we have plate tectonics, which is always recycling our crust. We have the atmosphere and the wind and water, which erases a lot of the evidence that we have of impacts that have happened here on earth. But there's a really beautiful one in Arizona. I don't know if you've ever been to Meteor Crater. So side note, I haven't been, but the nerd brigade organized a trip in a motor home

a few years ago and at the last minute I couldn't attend. But this meteor that bitch slapped Northern Arizona is estimated to have weighed 300,000 tons and it hit the earth with the force 150 times that of the atom bomb in Hiroshima and left what looks like a geological chickenpox scar one mile across 55 stories deep near a town called Winslow, which was side note made famous partly because it's 18 miles from a giant crater, but also Winslow was memorialized in the song. Take it easy.

After a member of the Eagles had his car break down there once. The guy in the Eagles doesn't even mention the crater in the song, though, which is a disappointment. But this nearby Meteor Crater is sometimes known as the Behringer Crater after mining engineer Daniel Moreau Behringer, who first postulated, Hey, y'all, I think this huge crater was caused by a meteor. Let me dig into it and become rich. So he got the right to mine it thinking there must be like a huge chunk of iron

under the surface worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But after 25 years and almost all of his savings, he got a report that the meteor wasn't buried under the earth. It just would have vaporized. So there was nothing to mine for. And days after getting this report, Behringer died of a massive heart attack. But the Behringer family still owns the crater and scientists refer to it as Behringer Crater as kind of a tip of the hat to be like, Hey, thanks, dude, for

knowing that this huge bowl in the earth was formed by a space projectile. What a sincere bummer that the stress of it killed you. So why on earth aren't there more of these craters to which we can take road trips? We have here on earth, but our atmosphere protects us from a lot of them. If the rock is small enough, it'll just break up in the atmosphere. Whereas on on the moon, there is no atmosphere. It'll just slam into the ground and it'll be left and there'll be a hole there. And that's actually one of the cool things about studying the moon.

The moon has experienced pretty much everything that the earth has experienced. So and because it doesn't have plate tectonics and it doesn't have an atmosphere, it acts as a witness plate to everything that the earth has experienced. So the moon is kind of like a responsible sober friend who recalls details that haven't been blurred by atmosphere or shifting plates. Also, what's in the moon's core? Is it like a jawbreaker? Raquel says it has a core.

It's just much smaller than the earth's. Then she told me something truly crazy. I lost my damn mind. What's one of the cool things that I think when I think about the moon and the impact that that caused it was there was so much energy that collected from that original impact that formed the moon, that the entire moon was just a magma ocean. So that's what?

Yeah, just imagine the whole moon. No, just magma. Yeah, so that's what that's the prevailing theory. And we have evidence for that. So so it's just lava. The whole thing is just. Oh, my God. And and so then what happens as you start cooling down,

your crystals start forming and the heavier crystals sort of sink to the bottom and the lighter stuff floats to the top. And so when you look at the moon, you see that there's different shades. There's the light stuff and then there's the dark stuff. And we've brought rocks back from from the moon during the Apollo missions. We know that that light stuff is an orthocyte, which is a very not dense rock. It's a very light type of rock. Again, a lava ocean.

The moon was a lava ocean was a lava ocean. Here we are thinking it's cheese, but at one point it was habanero queso. What is life? It's here on Earth, we have different types of rocks. We have igneous rocks, sedimentary rocks, whereas the moon, it's essentially all that light stuff is just one one thing. And the only way that you can form something like that is if it all just pretty much formed at the same time from the same stuff.

And so we think it's just a big anorthocyte crust, except for the dark regions that you see on the moon and those are ancient volcanic planes. Wait, so there were volcanoes also on the moon? Yes. OK. Yes. OK. Yes. What a backstory. So we so something hits Earth. Shit flies into the atmosphere. At what point does it become lava?

Well, from all the heat, from all the heat of it, like, you know, when you hit something, you generate energy and the energy is probably heat. And it makes out in it and whatnot. But yeah, it's heat. And so just from accretion, which is stuff coming together, it just melted the whole because it's not that big, right? The moon, I mean, it is big, but not that big. So it's it's easier to melt the whole thing.

How big around is the moon comparatively? What's the size difference between the moon? So if you were so if the Earth were to be a basketball. Then the moon is a tennis ball. Oh, yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Done. Yeah. Amazing. That's how I like to think. Oh, yeah. And then what about these volcanoes?

Yeah. So they were a long time ago, like three billion years ago. So very ancient volcanoes that flooded tour. So there's not a lot of them on the far side of the moon. So it's not the dark side. It's the far side because it's it's not dark. We've been saying it wrong this entire time. Thanks, Pink Floyd.

There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look like is the sun. How dare you? So the the side near to us is actually the crust is thinner. So it's easier for Lavas to bubble up. And so what you see when you look up, those dark regions were just ancient lava plains that flowed and found a low place on the moon and just settle there.

OK, so now this is very stupid. But where is the moon in relation? It goes around like, where is the moon at any given time? How do moon phases work? Just like pretend I'm someone you met at the car wash. She doesn't know jack shit about the moon because that's pretty much what's happening, but we're not at a car wash. So the faces of the moon are caused by

what we're seeing is where the sun is lighting the moon. So during a full moon, the the sun is directly behind. If you were to if you were to be staring at the moon and it's a full moon, the sun would be directly behind you. But the reason that there's if you see the full moon and it's not an eclipse, it's because that it if there's a slight tilt to the moon's orbit. So it's not perfectly in line with the with the sun. And so you see the sun lighting up the full face of the moon.

Now, when the sun, if you're again staring at the moon and you see only half of it lit, that means that the sun is to your either to your left or to your right. And when it's a new moon, when you don't see any light of the moon is because the sun is lighting the dark side of the moon, the the far side, what we call the far side. So it's always a full moon somewhere. It just depends on where you're hanging out, where you're hanging out. That's right.

Yeah, it's only our perspective that makes the the phases of the moon happen. Well, how does the moon affect the oceans and maybe us? So the moon has a couple of effects on us. So it creates our tides. So high tide, low tide, that's from the it's the moon and the sun. A lot of people think it's just the moon, but it's a combination of both. But the moon is stronger because it's it's closer. So it pulls on our oceans, depending on where it is on the on the planet,

which area where on the planet's closest to it's going to tug on that part of the planet. So it's actually tugs the rocks as well. It's not just the water, just the water, just easier to deform. Oh, my gosh. So it's totally. Yeah. So actually, our earth is. Yeah, our earth is slightly oblate because we have the moon tugging at it, the moon and the sun, of course. But then we tug at it, we tug at the moon as well.

Oh, man, I'm going to have a galaxy brain right down right now. And the other way it affects us is we it slows down our days. So the earth used to be spinning a lot faster than it used to be. But because of conservation of momentum, angular momentum, it has slowed down the earth's spin. So about every 100 years, we get 2.5 milliseconds slower. And in 2012, we had to add a second to the world clock just to make up for it.

Moons like I did that. Likewise, Earth's gravity pulls on the moon. The moon slows down a little. And then the moon becomes what's called tidally locked. So its orbit around us takes 28 days. And its own rotation takes about 28 days, which means that it's daylight for over 13 Earth days straight. Raquel explains.

And as you will hear, this was news to me right now. It's it is rotating. So the moon does rotate. So it spins around itself at the same period that it goes around the earth. So that's the reason why we always see the same face. I never knew that. Yeah, so I never knew that. It's not stationary.

If it were stationary, you would see all the faces. So it's rotating with the earth. So it is spinning. And that's the reason why we see the same face always. Oh, my God, I I didn't know for the longest time that we don't see the other side of the moon. Like I just didn't know it didn't even occur to me. I was like, the moon changes so much.

Sometimes it just looks like like big old God just left a toenail clipping right up in the sky. And you're like, it's like, come on, man. Another times it's just it's just like full beach ball. OK, listen, I am your QVC host right now. OK, let me be your QVC host. I will throw my pride into a dumpster and ask the questions. We're all too embarrassed to ask, but it's OK.

I'm living in active inquiry. I'm not ashamed. How does the moon work? So the far side of the moon, what exactly is there? What's happening on the far side of the moon? More craters. OK. Less lava, much less lava. Most of the lava that the ancient lava fields are here on the near side.

Like I said, the crust is thinner, so it's easier for lava to bubble up on this side. So the the far side, it just like a much lighter color to the moon, because it's mostly the anorthosite that I was talking about earlier and lots of impact craters. Side note. So yes, the light side is on the dark side, which is really the far side. So the far side has tons of craters and it's lighter in color. And so far, no alien communes. Now, the near side is smoother and has darker splotches of basalt.

Those are called Marais because way back in the day, folks thought they were oceans. Now, the Marais are flatter and they have fewer craters because it's younger terrain. So lighter parts, a north side rock called the Highlands. The darker parts are basalt called the Marais. Boom, the Highlands and the Marais. So Apollo 16 landed on in the Highlands at the lighter regions. But again, they tried to look for a place that was nice and flat,

not a lot of craters because it's safer for the astronauts and for the lander to land in. And then Apollo 17 landed right on the edge between Highlands and the Marais because they were trying to sample the rocks from the two different places. How many times have we been to the moon? Six. We've been to the moon six times. Yeah. The first time was everyone. Everyone cared. It is July 20th, 1969, and man is about to land on the moon. That's one small step for man.

One giant leap for mankind. It's pretty cool. And when you go back, there's still so many questions to answer. And the moon is so interesting and it's so close. And it's just the perfect place to to go before we go to Mars. There there's water there. Do you know that there's wait, there's water on the moon? Ice, water, ice on the moon. Yes. Yes. Where is it?

In these at the poles, there's these craters that never see sunlight. They're so deep that sunlight never actually enters the crater. So they have not seen sunlight for billions of years. Oh, my God. And it's actually one of the coldest places that we've ever measured. The solar system are inside these craters, colder than the surface of Pluto. No. Yeah. Yeah. So there's trapped ice there.

That we we've thrown a something into one of these and then detected the plume that it that it spewed. And there's water. So there, you know, we know, we know that there's ice in these things. How much we're not sure, you know, we have guesses, but we think it's plenty to to provide water, to generate fuel, to shield us from radiation, because water is a great shielding material for radiation that that might be coming in from the solar wind. OK, yes. Of course, I had to look up solar wind.

And it's a stream of plasma from the sun, charged particles, mostly electrons and protons. Also, I found an article showing data that the Apollo astronauts have significantly higher mortality rates from heart disease than their colleagues who did not visit the old moon. So they did some studies with mice, too. And they found that, yes, deep space radiation can affect vascular health. Also, 12 people have walked on the moon, which is weird,

because you can probably name the two, maybe three. So if you're ever stressed out about an embarrassing thing that like you said at a party, just know that there are 10 people who have walked on the frickin moon and most of us don't even recall their names. Life is long. Memories fade. Just do what you want to do. Just be nice to each other. Oh, and what did we toss into the moon? Was it a firecracker? No. So in 2009, we strategically dropped a spent rocket stage

into a South Pole crater. And then it was like and then we followed it with a spacecraft covered in sensors to go with up the dust. So it's like a very well calculated. Oops, a daisy. Did I drop that? Followed by a robot bloodhound. And another reason the moon is cool is like there's lava caves. Have you know about the caves? No, there's caves.

Do I look like I know about lava caves? Yeah, there's caves where we can set up human bases because they'll be shielded from radiation and from the cold and in the heat because the sun, the sun heats up the surface a lot. So there's it's either very, very hot or very, very cold, depending on if you're in the shade or in the sun. How cold? How hot we talking? Oh, man.

In these permanently shadowed craters, you can get down to 15 degrees Kelvin. So that's so zero Kelvin is absolute zero. And you can I mean, this is just 15 degrees higher than that. It is very, very, very cold. So to put that in context with the thermometer on your porch or like your car's dashboard, daylight on the moon can get up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit. And at night, it's a brisk negative 280 Fahrenheit. That's 127 Celsius at its hottest and minus 173 Celsius when it's cold, which means

if we do end up cramming ourselves into caves on the moon, we're going to need a lot of extra space just for scarves and parkas for the 13 Earth days of nighttime. Also, perhaps some flip flops and a Hibachi for those long ass days and some sunscreen made out of magic. It's funny because you think of the moon. I think of the images we see of the moon look relatively flat and everything looks so dark that it just seems there's something like it just seems very inert.

Oh, yeah. Like it must just be like tepid room temperature and everything very flat. And that's just not what's happening. No, no, it's it just wanders from hot, cold, hot, cold. And so then we need to if we do set up bases there, we need to shield our astronauts from from that. And I think caves are a good place to do it or maybe inside some of these craters. I mean, we started in caves here. Yeah, pretty much. That's a good point, right?

Yeah, we should continue. This is like the way to continue human exploration. Just find caves and go live and would you ever go to the moon if given the chance? I feel like that. My opinion changes often before I had kids like, yeah, of course. And then I had kids and I'm like, they need me. They need me here until they are they self sustaining. So like 30.

OK, I'm just saying, you know what? Humans live longer than they used to. So maybe it's part of the natural order that it's getting later for us to make a blanket nest on the couch in the den and eat our parents' cheese until we're 34. Raquel's children, I'm sure will move out when it's time. Bring him to the moon. I would I would be so happy if my kids became astronauts. I don't know why.

Like it's it's super weird that because it's probably not the safest thing for them to do. But to explore, I don't know, to become exposed. There's something so poetic and and beautiful about, you know, pushing the boundaries of what humanity has done and can do. Do you read them the little prints? I have the little prints in Portuguese and I've read it to them, but they don't I don't think they speak. Just a little secret.

I just Amazon her one in English, like a sketchy little holiday elf. But then the gift wrap option wasn't working. So it's just arriving unceremoniously with no card, just like here, which is embarrassing. Also, do her kids like the moon? My little I mean, my he's two and a half now. But I think ever since he was like a year and a half, he'll point to the moon and be like, moon, moon.

Because I think like every night I set up the telescope just to look at the moon. Like almost every night. It's I love looking at it and it doesn't get old. Every time I look through that eyepiece or through my camera, it's it's just beautiful and I don't know, breathtaking to me. Every time it doesn't get old. Do you have favorite craters or mares or highlands? I know the lingo now.

Yeah, you're you're in it. Oh, man. She definitely has the patience of someone capable of raising a toddler. Bless her. I really like Copernicus crater and Eratosthenes. And the reason why is they I think they pretty much set off the entire field of lunar science. So and how we study how things age and impact craters.

So Copernicus crater is is a bright, bright crater. So this is something we could talk about space weather. So if something is fresh, it's bright. And as it's exposed to space weather, it darkens. So if you see something that's a crater that's very bright on the moon, it's a younger crater than something else. Yeah. That's cool.

And the reason we knew this is because this. So this crater, Copernicus crater has these crater rays and crater rays are material that were ejected during the impact. You punch the ground and a lot of stuff comes up and then gets flown all over the place and creating these beautiful crater rays. And some of those crater rays went into another crater. So that's how we knew that stuff that was bright must be younger than the stuff that is darker,

because we have these rays that are going into these craters. So and that's that's how we call the superposition. And a lot of dating on on planetary bodies, because we don't have samples from it get done through these crater counting and superposition principles of what is on top of something else. So is it kind of like a paint drippings? You can tell what's on top because of the splatter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that.

Yeah. And then we use samples brought back from the Apollo missions to sort of ground truth, what we think the age of something is. So now you can create a curve of how many craters. What does that mean for age? So you kind of test it out on the moon and then those theories hold up for other places. It's people have fights about this. Actually, at conferences, people will break out into. Well, I had a professor told me that he saw somebody punch somebody else over

at a conference over crater counting statistics. Like this is people fight about this. Because there's a lot of uncertainties. And, you know, if you tweak something, there's different models. And if you tweak something and something small in one, a completely different answer. And so people are always battling like, no, you did that wrong. No, this is right. This is wrong. Anyways, it's drama.

It's so much drama. Yeah, crater counting is so much drama and planetary science. Maybe there's a full moon that day. Probably knows. Probably. I want to ask about a particular crater. OK, I like to call it the moon's butthole. Oh, yeah. Tycho crater. Yeah. I mean, it's just it's just like a cat walking away from you.

You know what I mean? What? Why did he? Why is it named after Tycho Brahe? Right? Tycho Brahe. And do you know anything about him? I do know that his nose was cut off. And apparently he died because he felt like his bladder exploded. Oh, yeah.

Because it was impolite to leave dinner or something. He was like at a dinner party. That's this is a story I've heard. I don't know if it's true or not. This man. Oh, Lord. OK, so he was a Danish astronomer and a nobleman who had a long mustache that looked kind of like two drooping hairy lip slugs. And he made a ton of very precise astronomical observations in his time,

which is all very exciting. But yes, hello. He did also lose part of his nose in a duel with his third cousin. What was it over? Good question. Who was a better mathematician? But he also married a commoner for love, and he was eventually exiled for pissing off the king's doctor. So this man lived life.

So this is what I know about him. So we actually thought about naming one of our children, Tycho. But I knew the history of Tycho and I'm like, I cannot name my child. He also had a pet moose that lived in his mansion. They would get drunk off of fermented fruit. No, I didn't know he was a real character. The fact that there hasn't been like a John Malkovich movie about Tycho Brahe is criminal.

Does anyone listen to this? I'd like to pitch it. But why did why is the biggest crater on the moon that we see named after him? Do we know? All of the craters are named after scientists. They are. Yeah. All the craters on the moon are named after scientists. Who gets to name these things?

There's a committee. There's so many craters on the moon. A lot of them are not named because they're not either big enough or maybe we ran out of science because I think they have to be dead. I think I have to be. I think so. I wonder if anyone's like, can you sue me for it? Can you push me?

I want a crater after me. Somebody poisoned my drink. I did a little follow up fact checking and the Tycho moose situation is even weirder. He would send his moose out to parties without him. And at one, the moose just straight up drank too many beers and fell down some stairs and died. Also, the name of the moon is different for different areas. So scholars are in one quadrant, Greek names are toward the north. And I found a NASA document from 1981 that read, quote,

newcomers to lunar studies often expressed dismay at the apparently haphazard and illogical disposition of names and letters on lunar maps. Their dismay is not without some foundation. Also, the Tycho crater is sometimes referred to as the umbilica. So now it's even more confusing. Belly button, lunar butthole, so many names moving on movies about the moon. Are there any that you love, hate, paper, moon, moonstruck? The moon is a little like love.

Will you marry me? I will marry you. I will be your wife. You love them, Loretta. No, good. When you love them, they drive you crazy. Anything moon related in pop culture that either really gets your goat or that you love? Oh, my gosh, there's a book about the moon.

OK, I really like. What is it? It's called Seven Eves. I don't remember the author. I'm really bad with the names. Neil Stevenson, copyright 2015. But it's called Seven Eves. And the first thing that happens in the first page, so I'm not giving anything away, is the moon explodes.

Kaboom. Ouch. And then it's the story of the next 5,000 years of what happens. Oh, it's it's a beautiful story and it's it's a good book. We highly recommend it. Does it explode because some pesky human went and threw something in one of its lava caves? I am. I'm not going to give anything away. It's like, ouch, dude, what are you doing? And then again, stupid question.

I don't care when the moon is really, really huge in the sky. And it's very impressive or when it's really orange at the horizon. What is happening when sometimes we look out and we're like, oh, my God, is a witch going to fly past that? What's happening, Moon? Why are you so big? So so that actually happens to be a perspective thing. It just looks big because it's near things in the horizon. So it's actually not that big.

It is a perspective thing. It's the same size as when you later on you look up and it just looks small. But it just because there's nothing else around it, it just looks boring. It's kind of like in photography when you're trying to get like the scale. If you're trying to take a picture of a landscape and you really want to convey the the scale of something. If you just take a picture of the thing that's really far away, it's like meh. But if you put something in the foreground,

you can it becomes a lot more majestic because now you have this perspective of like, OK, well, the human looks this big against it. Oh, wow, that must be huge. So it's the same idea. It's the same. Oh, my God. It's an optical illusion. Yeah, exactly. Why is it when you see the moon, you're like, oh, the moon's so pretty.

I'm going to take a picture and send it to my boyfriend and be like, look at the moon. And then you take a picture. It looks like shit because it's an optical illusion because the camera is actually capturing what it truly is. But your brain is interpreting it to be a lot more epic than it actually is. Oh, yes. Oh, my God. I did not know that. I know. I know it's so sad.

But we can still marvel at it. Oh, yeah, I do. Every time I do it every time. And the redness is our atmosphere, our atmosphere more easily scatters blue light. And so the red what reaches us is usually more the red lights. If it's traveled for a long time, that's why sunsets are beautiful because it has more atmosphere to travel through. So a lot of the blue light has been scattered away,

leaving us with just the the red tones and the orange tones. How do you feel when people get amped for super moons? I mean, I love when people get amped about the moon because I get amped about the moon. It's cool because it actually does look bigger during the super moon. So that's and it looks it's bigger because it's closer. So the the orbit of the moon is not perfectly circular. So there's sometimes when it's closer to Earth and other times it's further away.

But it's you know, it doesn't get that much bigger in the sky, but it's perceivable to our to our eye because we're so used to seeing it every day that, you know, any small change like, oh, yeah, that actually looks pretty majestic, pretty epic because it might be like 17 percent bigger. But to us, I get apparently that's a big change for our eyes. Do you think that and there's always been a certain number of super moons, but we maybe make the news more. Absolutely. Yeah. OK.

Yeah, I feel like we need something good to talk about. And we're like the moon. What do we got guys? The moon's bigger. Well, run that story. Yeah. OK, I have questions from Patriots. OK. It's a lightning round. Oh, my goodness. OK. I got a lot of questions. I was like, oh, damn, because we all love the moon.

The other thing about the moon. What has the moon ever done to you? It's true. The moon. I feel like the moon is that friend that you can you can rely on. Yeah, sometimes they're close, sometimes they're far. But no one's the moon's ever pissed anyone off. Not yet. Although it's getting further away, though.

So every year, about 3.8 centimeters every year, it's moving. Where is it going away? Just a little orbit. The orbit is getting bigger. Did you find another planet that likes better? We're going to go love on Mars or something. No, more of us like, oh, these people suck. Actually, before I get to Patreon questions,

how do you feel about the moon just being called the moon? All the other moons have freaking names. Yeah, but this is the moon with capital M. Good point. So this is something that actually I get upset about when people talk about the moon and it's in lower case. I'm like, no, it's a brick, it's the moon. If you talk about Earth's moon, then you can it can be lower case.

But if it's the moon, it's capital. It's like the edge, the guitarist for you, too. Who else is going to put a capital T, capital E? You know what I mean? That's baller. That is baller. So the fact that it doesn't need it, a little cute little nickname based on a Latin or based on a Greek God.

That's right. It's its own thing. Just call it the moon. Do you feel weird? Same about that our solar system is just called the solar system. Well, it's the best one because we're here. It formed us. Like I'm I'm not upset about those things

because these are things that we are here. That's our perspective. Like if we weren't here, the solar system would be boring because there'd be nothing to appreciate it or to study it or to. So I think a lot of when it comes to to astronomy, planetary science is like we are able to appreciate that. So yes, it's the moon because it's our moon and we are the ones who are studying it.

So this can be our our thing. Right. Like it can rain diamonds on Titan, but like this is our moon. This is our moon. Yeah, exactly. Screw Titan. It's got lava craters. It's our moon.

It's our moon. So the moon is like mom. If it's anyone's mom, that's a lower case. But your mom, well, that's like the mom, capital T, capital M, because it's special. It's ours and super quick before the lightning rapid fire round. I want to do a very quick promo swap with another podcast. They are listeners of allergies.

They have their very own show in which they freak each other out with ghost stories. Is it science? Not so much. Is it fun? Heck yes. So I'll let them tell you about them. Two Girls, One Ghost is a new podcast hosted by us, Corinne and Sabrina. It's not what you think or is it?

It's not. It's a paranormal comedy podcast. Who doesn't love a good ghost story? We sure do. And we bring you new hunting tales each week. Are you planning a hike? Not anymore. What about a trip abroad?

You might want to rethink that. Pack your stage sticks and prepare to find out your favorite pizza place is anything but family friendly. We cover topics like black eyed kids, shadow people, haunted prisons, exorcisms, visits from family members and pets and everything in between. So join us every Sunday as we scare ourselves, each other and you. Two Girls, One Ghost is available wherever you listen to podcasts. See you on the other side.

OK, we're back with Raquel. Are you ready for a lightning round? Yes. OK, water, sip of water. The answer is yes. Yes. You got this. I'm going to just fire off as many as I can and total transparency. I didn't look through them at a time because I just put this up last night. So we're going to go for it.

Got it. OK. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where allergies gives our money, you can go to alleyword.com and look for the tab, Allergies Gives Back.

There's like 150 different charities that we've given to already with more every single week. So if you need a place to go, donate a little bit of money, but you're not sure where to go, those are all picked byologists who work in those fields. And this ad break allows us to give a ton of money to them. So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. OK, your questions.

Julie wants to know, will we ever know what's on the dark side? Also, Janu Slickjahus Petit, Taylor Munich, Mark Larson, Laura Harder, Bonnie Joyce, Anthony Stoll, Emily Manderkeef all requested some hot gossip about the far side of the moon. We know, we do. Yeah, there's been so there's a space graph right now that's orbiting the moon called LRO, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. And it has taken spectacular, high definition,

beautiful pictures of the entire moon. And you can go to their website and find pictures of the of the dark side, far side, it's not the dark side, the far side of the moon. And it's one of the coolest things that I think those cameras have done. They've actually imaged the the Apollo landing sites. So you can see the footprints and the rover prints that the astronauts left at the surface and like the lunar module and the rover. It's still and you can see it.

It's it's in the images that were taken by LRO, the cameras on board LRO. Recently on Raquel's Instagram, the space geologist, she did a live stream of her looking at lunar dust under a microscope because some other folks in her lab were studying the optical properties of it. So how light or dark does it look in certain lights? So we have moon dust lying around. And sometimes my advisor takes it out to show classes or and every time I'm like, oh, my God, I saw someone asked if you were afraid to sneeze around it.

Yes, yes, I've been so afraid of sneezing around it. But and so I try to cover if I'm so we've used these samples for outreach events where it'll be like tons of people coming through. And I will always cover it with glass because I'm petrified of people just bumping into it or I don't want to lose moon dust. Like NASA would be so mad at us because it's on loan. It's on loan to us by NASA. It's very precious stuff.

Can you own anything from the moon? Not legally the stuff that was acquired by the Apollo mission. So I think that there's been some Russian selling of samples that I think there have been missions by the Russians that brought back samples, not manned missions, but robotic missions that have brought back samples from the moon. And so I think I've seen some of that on sale and like eBay or something, but it won't be an Apollo mission dust that those are not allowed to be sold. I mean, if I put a pumice stone in the Vitamix, I could make a killing on eBay.

Yeah, there's just so many to bronies. So excited. Remind me to make some extra cash that way. Maria Kimbrough wants to know, have you ever yelled at the moon like Buzz Aldrin on 30 Rock? Did he did he do that? I see you. I see what you're doing.

Return to the night. You've no business here. Never saw that one. No idea. But the answer is going to be no, I guess. Yeah, no, I've never yelled at the moon. Jason Kahn wants to know, is there a man in the moon because I see a woman's face. Oh, I loved asking people this.

Do you see anything when you look at the moon? No. Oh, what? I never see. I got a face. OK, no. OK, but there's other things you can see. I've seen all kinds of things. I just see the butthole. What does that say about me?

So we pulled up a photo together and Raquel showed me that she sees a frog jumping onto a lily pad or a bunny with two ears. Also, weirdly, if you're in the southern hemisphere, the moon is upside down to how us northerners see it. How bananas. So Raquel pointed out the face of the man in the moon, which I had literally never seen before.

Eyes, nose, mouth, maybe? Do you see like those two? Maybe. Wow, this is like magic eye. And I feel like you have to squint to be able to see these things sometimes. I feel like you might have to just get pharmaceutical grade LSD to see it,

which is not going to happen for me any time soon. OK, so a face. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never seen that before my whole life. OK. I swear, whenever they talked about the man in the moon, I always was like, OK, that's something I don't get. This person, Jason Scott, says that he sees a woman's face. You I I always see the the frog frog.

Yeah, that's the first thing that pops out to me, the frog jumping onto a lily pad. It's such an ink blot test to see, like, what are you? I guess everyone go look at a picture of the moon and see what you see and report back. Let us know, please. Christina, she only wants to know which theory on the origin of the moon is your favorite?

The impact theory that, say, a hit early Earth and it formed the moon. And now here we are. And here we are. Howard, your wish wants to know what would happen to the Earth if the moon got either closer or farther away? So, well, depending on what caused it to go further away, so it is getting further away.

So, so the tides would be less. And I think that our days are slowing down and it would slow down even more. So that would happen to the Earth. So you see how like an ice skater, when they stick out their arms, they slow down and then when they bring it in, it they go faster.

So it's the same thing that's happening. It's just the distribution of mass of the Earth-moon system. So if the moon were farther away, like of the whole thing would just like slow down more. So we could get more done in a day. This is cool. This is cool. Yeah, I guess you're like, the Earth is like moon, give me a little space.

It's working. OK. Letty McGinnis has a question that I'm sure so many people do, which is, do the phases of the moon affect people's moods? You also worked a little bit in health care. I did. During the airports. No, it doesn't because the phase, the moon is still there.

It's it's not any closer or any further. I mean, even if it does, like it wouldn't have an effect on us. It's the just the sunlight. It's what we see. The sunlight hitting one side or the other side. So I don't see how it could affect us. But and now the tides are affected more on a day to day basis,

not around the month, right? Right. OK. Yeah. I do have a friend who gets her period on a full moon every time, no matter what kind of birth control she's on, no matter what happened, no matter how every time the moon is is very regular. It it's it rotates on itself. What is the effect of like a 28 day cycle, 28 day menstrual cycle in the moon?

What's up with that? I think it's just coincidence. OK. It's coincidence. But it your friend must be that is her timing. That is her her cycle is like 28 point something days. And it just happens to coincide with the moon. That's pretty cool. I'm sure there's there's got to be other people.

I mean, if you have enough women, enough people, one of them will eventually have that one in 28. Chance. Yeah. OK, so like 3 percent, 3 and a half percent. P.S. Look this up. And in the age of apps, we have a bunch of data to play with for good and for bad. So there's a period tracker called Clue that analyzed seven and a half million user cycles and found

no correlation between lunar phases. None. So Natalie Mastic, Julie Platten and Michael Balaz also asked this. And sorry, science is saying it's just rando. Folks, talk to your crotch. I got no answers. Ryan Carter wants to know, given that the prominent theory for the moon's creation, early impact with thea, isn't matching up exactly with what we're seeing in the moon's composition.

Is there any competing theories that are coming to the fore? A combination that explains the inconsistencies? Not that explains everything that we see. The fea hitting the earth is still the one that answers the questions. Yeah. OK. So nothing new, like it was aliens. So for funsies, feel free to look up the hollow moon or the spaceship moon hypothesis. That is what it's called.

So essentially, some folks think that the moon is a Death Star. No biggie. And before you go just like spitting up your folders, laughing at this, do know that our beloved Carl Sagan for a while thought that one of Mars moons was just a cavernous storage shed installed by clutter bogged Martians. So the universe, it's a mystery. One Pedro Martinez wants to know, why don't we go back to the moon? I know. That's what I'm saying.

We should. The moon is the next logical step, I think. It's right there. It's right there. We can set up bases. We can we can make things there. We can make fuel there. It's much less gravity, so it's easier to launch from there. It just makes so much sense to go to the moon and not Mars. Like it's harder to leave the earth's gravity well,

whereas it'd be so much easier to do that from from the moon. It reminds me of living in LA. It's like, why would I go vacation in Florida when there's like a beach right here? Jay Owens wants to know, does it really ring when impacted? Does it ring like a bell? I've I've heard that before. There's definitely moonquakes. I look this up and according to an article by NASA,

because the moon is dry and rigid, moonquakes continue to rumble. It's like vibrations hitting a metal tuning fork, something to consider if you move into one of its space caves. And I wonder what they would charge for rent. Renee Coley wants to know who owns the moon. Nobody. OK. It's so there is a space treaty that was signed. I don't remember the year 1967. But it says that no one nation owns anything in space.

OK, so if you go and pee on it, it's not yours. It's not. Dang it. Well, there goes my plan. There was a company a few years back selling moon plots because they were like, well, it's not it's I'm not a nation. I'm a company. So I'm just going to claim that it's mine. And I think some people actually bought stuff.

I don't know. I don't know what happened to that. What are you going to do? Go retire there? Yeah, like congrats. Maybe one day. Oh, that'd be so cool. Imagine going on vacation to the moon. To the moon. Bring a parka. Yeah, it's a little chilly.

Mads Clement wants to know if there were two guys on the moon and one of them killed the other, would that be fucked up or what? That's the only question. OK, I think it's a yes. Yes, definitely. Oh, yeah. Marley Scheib wants to know, how do you feel about the moon impacting the way humans feel like if it impacts water and the tide were made of water? Is that a thing? Not a thing?

I don't think it's a thing. I think there have been studies that show that it's it doesn't there's I remember a few years ago, people were saying that there's higher hospital admissions during a full moon. But I think that's been debunked. I think that there's been studies that show that that's not true. OK, that might be flimflam. Yeah. I'll investigate. Yeah.

Everyone wanted to know this. This question was also asked by Heather Shaver, Anna M. Castro, Renoso, Kelly Rand, Ray Kasha, Kimberley, Thomas Maher, Meredith Ostro, Micah Eckhard and Elizabeth Gabel. So I did a little digging and according to data, no real correlation. The hypothesis that the moon is tugging on our sloshy brainwaters doesn't make a ton of sense because its effect on the tides happens even when it's not fully illuminated.

So it may just be that when the moon is bright, people stay out at night longer and just clinically speaking are out wild and or it's bright and people get less sleep. So they're a little bit cranky and clumsy. Or maybe we're all distracted by the moon and we crash our cars into trees or trip on things. Sonia Karpolevic says, why is the moon seen as feminine? As in it's often associated with Artemis and other women.

Because it looks delicate, maybe, I don't know. It's because it's pretty. It's pretty. It's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's what I think. That's what I think. And for example, like in Portuguese, it's female, a lua. So it's it's a female. And I think in Spanish, the same thing, la luna. Yeah. So it's, I think, in a lot of languages.

So I think it's like very. Yeah, I think it's because it's beautiful. I'm going to go with that. Yeah, because we see it as an object for us to look at and probe. No, because it's a beautiful thing. Maybe because this is sinister, but maybe because it accompanies us. Maybe we put women in helper roles. Exactly. We put in a stay in my orbit.

I'm the big thing. And almost like an Eve was made of Adam's rib and the moon is made of earth chunks. Yeah. So maybe that's something to the mythology of it. Maybe. But I think in reality, it's a complex and has taken some shit from the meteor and is still up there doing its thing.

OK, so maybe it's in built misogyny of treating women like accessories or maybe it's because of the 28 day thing. I don't know, whatever. Anna Thompson wants to know, what is the biggest unknown about the moon still or the coolest thing we've learned about the moon? Well, I think the biggest unknown is just how did it form? You know, it's it's so similar to our earth

and made like made of the same stuff. And but you think it's a lot more, it'd be a lot more different, but it's not and the coolest thing. I think there's water there. There's yeah, that's nuts. That's pretty cool. Brie Johnson wants to know, do you think there will ever be a time where humans can live on the moon?

And Lindsey K Trotter also asked, can we colonize this thing or what? Yeah, for sure. But I think that it'll be more of a jumping ground. You might go to the moon first to acclimate or, you know, not acclimate in the sense of acclimate to the weather, but acclimate to living in a space environment or in not earth and lighter gravity and how's the gravity on the moon versus Mars? A sixth.

So you could jump pretty high. There's actually this really cool compilation video of the Apollo astronauts hopping and falling and they've somebody speed it up. So it just looks like they're just like with some silly music in the background. Look this up. And I found a video of Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan fully suited up in his moon ensemble, just lightly bounding along the lunar landscape, singing as he went. So there's your little frog and bunny on the moon.

Also, astronauts will train in zero gravity flights. They fly in these parabolic curves and it gives a few seconds of the sensation of weightlessness, each curve. Now, for a civilian to experience zero Gs, it costs about five Gs. But warning, it got the name Vomit Comet for a reason. I was on a Vomit Comet ones and they one of the thing, it's not just zero gravity. They also do diminish like less gravity, so that Mars gravity and moon gravity. And so for the moon gravity, you can hop pretty high.

It's really cool because you get to experience what it would be like to jump. You can jump so high. Oh, my God. So there's much less gravity on the moon than Mars, because it's a smaller planetary body. So on Mars, it's a third of the Earth and the moon is a sixth of the Earth. Yeah. So it's hippity hoppity. Like one of those places where you can go on the trampolines. Yes. Just all the time. Sign me up.

I'm looking for a couple more questions. Kirstie Chippendale says, can a moon have its own moon? Is that possible? I'm sure it's possible. It's probably just not very stable because the bigger object would end up grabbing it. And then it would just orbit the bigger object instead of the. Okay. You know what I mean? E. Brown asked, I didn't even think of this question,

how come you can sometimes see the moon during the day? So the moon is always orbiting us. So sometimes it's orbiting us when it's nighttime. And sometimes it's during, it's daytime. So it's, it's always either on our side during the day or on the other side. So it just depends on where it is on its orbit. So it's just cruising? It's just hanging out. Yep.

Oh, it makes me sad to think of a moon as like a kid with divorced parents where it's like at one house to the other. It's like sometimes it's like, it's going to be on the this side or our side. Okay. Let me see. Maggie Schwenker said, so the moon is tidally locked. Has it always been this orientation to the earth? No. No. Or did the first little footy fish hauling themselves out of the primordial ooze

see a different part of the moon? They might have seen a different part of the moon. Yeah. Although we think that it, it got tidally locked pretty early in its, because it's so small that it's, it's easier for it to become tidally locked. Yeah. I never knew that was a term. Justin Weisterfield wants to know casually what would happen if Elon Musk blew up the moon. It's like a never ending explosion.

Is he going to do that? I hope not. Well, we, we wouldn't have as much, the tides wouldn't be as pronounced. We didn't have the moon anymore. I mean, if it just, if you blew it up and then it disappeared, right? We wouldn't have, and our plan of my wobble a lot more. So the, the moon makes our planet stable. So kind of like a spinning top, you know, how sometimes like it moves.

Yeah. Yeah. So the moon actually keeps us from, from doing that. So our seasons are a lot more stable because we have our moon to stabilize our orbit. So if we didn't have a moon, we would be, we might like the, go through like ice ages and then crazy warm periods, a lot more than, than what we do now. Once again, moons like a woman. Thank you.

Stabilizes shit. That's right. Okay. So two questions I always ask. Okay. Shittiest thing about your job or the worst thing about the moon? Feel free to vent about the moon right now. I can't think of a thing the moon's done to anyone, but I don't know.

So shittiest thing about my job? It's hard. Do you have to answer a lot of conspiracy theories about not landing on the moon? Oh, yeah. I get that sometimes, mostly on social media, because I tried, I do a little psychom through my Instagram and I inevitably always, somebody's like, well, we never went there. So I don't know how you can say that that's actual moon desk. Like I actually had somebody DM me that.

That's cute. People have their mind set up because they will always say, well, those images are doctored. Those aren't really the footprints or footprints that that's photoshop or something. It's, and it's hard to, to argue with, with that. Yeah. What about anything about computer crashes? Just code not working. And sometimes it's just because you forgot to put a semicolon somewhere and you spend

hours trying to figure out like, what did I do wrong? And it's just like something stupid, like you put the semicolon in the wrong place or it's stupid shit like that. But that's, but that's the nature of the job. I don't know, problem solving is kind of fun. It's cool. So I know, how much do you love someone who loves to solve programming errors? What's the best thing about what you do or the best thing about the moon?

The best thing is getting to think about these things that are so much bigger than myself. It just takes, it takes me out of, of whatever is going on in my personal life or whatever is going on in the world, just focusing on something that is just out there. And it's so much bigger than us and bigger than whatever is happening in our world is, is kind of like a vacation in a way of everyday problems. And I think that that's what I love the most about it, to be able to think about these things that are, you know, might not impact me. They probably don't impact me at all directly, but

there's relief in that and not having to worry about me or anything directly related to me. I guess it's all about perspective, the moon once again. But, you know, it's, I think that especially in LA where we don't get a lot of weather, getting to be able to track the moon and see where it's at and check in with it, it does feel like a little buddy. You know, like, how, where are you in the sky right now? Hey, what's going on? Yeah.

What would your dream job be as a planetary geologist? I would love to be involved in missions, mission design and, and just thinking about, like, what are the big questions that we still have to answer and how can we design missions to answer those science questions? Get us back on the moon, man. Yeah, right. Come on. What are we going to do?

Let's get us back. It's right there. It's there. Although, you know, for all that we can say about this, this administration, they love the moon. So NASA is actually part of the executive branch. I don't know if you knew that. It's, it's, it's probably the executive. So whatever the president says is like, what happens?

It's, it's an executive branch department of the government. And so, and NASA actually ends up being on at the whims of whatever administration is, is running it, which is kind of crazy. So you end up losing a lot of money because, you know, you start designing a mission and most of the time it will go to completion. But there's, you might lose funding at some point because this administration doesn't like this project or, but right now this administration really likes the moon. I wonder why.

Because it's close. And I think, I think what it is, is that you can, there's a lot of commercial partners, the possibility where if you do something really far away, like Mars, there's so much, so much more can go wrong that commercial partners don't want to be involved. Like private companies don't want to be involved. So, but the moon, I think there's a lot of interest and- Are we going to mine the moon?

We could. Whoa. I wonder what I got up there. Well, I think- Jeez. Jeez. And where can you find Raquel on social media? The one that I spend the most time on is Instagram and you can find me at the space geologist.

That's where I talk about. There's also some baby stuff in there, but mostly science things that are happening. I love your Instagram. I always learn things. Oh, that's so nice. I love it so much. I, whenever you have a new story pop up, I'm like, ooh, what's she got? I get very excited about it.

That's really nice. Thank you. Cool moon photos. And I'm like, ah, she's killing it. Thank you so much for doing- Thank you for having me. So keep asking smart people stupid questions because look how nice they are. And you can follow Raquel again at the space geologist on Instagram.

You can find ologies at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Allie Ward with one L on both. And if you like ologies, tell a friend. If you want merch, go to ologiesmerch.com. Thank you Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas for managing that. Thank you patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for making the show possible. Thank you Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lipo for managing the ologies podcast Facebook group. The theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands.

And editing was done by the luminous Stephen Ray Morris, host of The Percast and C Jurassic Right podcasts about cats and dinos respectively. And also this week, we got some editing help from the disturbingly handsome Jared Sleeper. It's unsettling really. He hosts the wonderfully candid and really funny mental health podcast called My Good Bad Brain. Just check that out. We all have brains. And if you listen to the end of the show, I tell you secrets.

And this week, my secret is that I slept 12 hours last night. And then I took a two hour nap today and I'm making myself go to the doctor about it tomorrow. This is weird. I feel like a hefty bag filled with wet cement. Maybe I'm just tired. I'm not sure. Okay, I'm going to sleep now. Bye bye.