Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Mercury (planet)

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the planet Mercury is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Mercury, known for being a planet. Famous for being the little first hot planet. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Mercury is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of Podcasts all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden.

Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of the planet Mercury? Well, you know, I'm Scorpio. So what that definitely means is that with Mercury rising, waxing and waning, and gibbis, when Mercury is in alignment with the gibbon, I get superpowers I can levitate like a little bit you can't really so like the levitation is like very

it's like about it's like it's like a nanometer off the ground so you can't really see it that well but it is happening I'm an Ares and I just suddenly go under the earth sometimes then pop back out sure you clip a little bit no clip into the earth's crust yeah

I know very little about Mercury. I'm not really either an astronomer nor an astrologer. I like to think I'm not too mercurial, though. I feel like I'm a steady, stable, sort of like dependable. My whims, my whims are pretty predictable, I would say. Yeah, I can say as your co-host, dependable whims. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that a lot. Alex, what about you? How do you feel about Mercury? I feel like every solar system planet is very sift because you can just live your entire life never thinking about astronomy, even the planet's closest to us.

But everybody's heard of especially the first planet, right? Easy to remember the first one close to the sun. The only time I've thought about it deeply is one Kurt Vonnegut novel. Because in The Sirens of Titan, he writes like a beautiful passage about an alien species he made up that lives on Mercury called Harmoniums. Oh, yeah. It's like one of the best Vonnegut sections ever is that. Are those the ones that kind of look like stingrays sort of in the book? Yeah, yeah, they're just little flat beings that live on the cave walls and live on the like the harmony of the shifts and vibrations of Mercury in his fictional version.

That book's really good. A few vaguely problematic parts, but mostly extremely good. 100%. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I like I've seen a few people with like harmonium tattoos because it's such a beautiful. In his book, he writes that all they say to each other is here I am, here I am, here I am.

So glad you are. So glad you are. So glad you are. And that's all they think and do. And they never die or hunger or toil or anything. It's just like a magical part of a book about existence. It's great. Yeah.

Now I love it. I also love an alien being that is sort of designed after or at least somewhat. inspired by sea life. Yeah, totally. For me, I'm, I'm hardcore on the side of, like, designing aliens as sea life versus sort of, like, reptilian, uh, it's fine. It's fine if you want to do, like, reptilian aliens. But for me, the aquatic life, uh, aliens are, that's, like, peak.

My favorites are either the most sea lifey, weird little aliens or whatever Star Trek to decided they could knock out in under an hour in the makeup chair, like that little nose difference or something, you know? Right, right, right. Just like added extra nostril. And then it's like alien. This is the blingus from beta cuspid, the bicuspid sector. There's a ray that's actually pink in real life and kind of looks like a harmonium.

I'll send you a picture of it. It's not really. that's super mercury related, but we were talking about harmoniums. Oh, it's so pink. Yeah, because in the book, I think they're blue harmoniums, and then they like turn orange if they happen to die, but they never die really. They can just live forever.

Right, yeah. But it also speaks to how little I think about Mercury for real that one science fiction character is by far my biggest thought about it. Right. Yeah. Well, let's talk about it, though. Like it is, what is it, first rock from the sun? First rock from the sun, yeah.

Yeah, French Stewart had to keep going, you know, to get to us. Right. First Rock from the sun was a really short show because there is just a sort of white screen and a little bit of crispy noises as people are being instantly burned to a crisp. The best scream in John Lithgow's career. His many distinguished roles, his best scream. Would he have time? Would John Lithgow? Okay, look, I love the guy and I'm sorry, but would he have time to scream? Because like, if he was on Mercury, would that be pretty much just like, bam, you're done. No time for John Lithgow to really eat the scenery.

Like, or would it be, would it be something where you're like, uh-oh, I'm on fire? Because it's hot, right? It's hot or incredibly cold, and we'll talk about it. So maybe not even a scream situation. Could half of you be really hot and half of you be really cold? Link Bart Simpson with Australia and America. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Is there like a place on Mercury that's actually tepid? Well, it would move if there was.

So it'd be hard to... So you have to run around and find the tepid area? Like chase it around. The tepid beam. Yeah. There's like a one-foot radius tepid area that you run around. Tell me about Mercury, Alex. Yeah.

And thank you to Coup Bear for suggesting this and also suggesting Mercury the element. And you don't need to hear that episode to understand this. There's separate things. And we've done other sifts about Venus and about Saturn. So this is our third solar system planet one. There's also a ton of other space missions, a whole Apollo 17 episode. But, yeah, the first planet from the sun. On every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics.

This week, that's in a segment called SIFPod, pushing down all stats. Numbers count in stats. The fans ask for. SIFPOD, that puts a podcast out, and numbers one, two, puts podcasts on streets. Bebaboo, Bebibh. Bebibh, bam. Tom. We're going to have a runaway scan effect.

Beed-a-bo-bo-bo-bo-ba-bo-ba-beep. Okay. And it was submitted by Tom. Thank you, Tom. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them a silly and whack in best possible submit through Discord or to siftpot. At gmail.com. I wanted to make the first numbers basically about what it would be like to be on Mercury.

Because otherwise it's just a rock out in space. It doesn't really mean anything. Well, Alex, I got to tell you, it's hot. here in Torino, Italia. And elsewhere on the globe, a lot of people are sweating it out. So give us some perspective on that so we feel better. Yeah, temperatures right away. So the sunlit parts of mercury reach around 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 430

Celsius. And then when the part of mercury that's in darkness, you take the temperature, that's at negative 290 Fahrenheit, negative 180 Celsius. A little brisk. I know there was a lot of numbers in a row. In Fahrenheit, it gets up to 800 and down to negative 290. Okay. In Celsius, it gets up to 430, down to negative 180. Okay, a little bit muggy on one half and then a little brisk on the other. Yeah. And then the other odd thing is it would probably be more. more pleasant than being on Venus. Because the chemistry of Venus is extraordinarily hostile to life made of the chemistry we're made of.

But also Venus is a little bit hotter all of the time than Mercury. Okay. According to one source this week is Vahey Perumian, who's professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southern California, he says that due to the runaway greenhouse effect and extremely thick atmosphere on Venus, it's around 867 Fahrenheit. all of the time planet wide. So that's dozens of degrees hotter than Mercury and Fahrenheit. So this is sort of like inland San Diego. Am I right, folks?

No, I'm joking. I always want to joke about specific towns in that area, and I always forget all their names. It's like Chula Vista. Am I right, folks? I don't know. There we go. And, yeah, Venus is much further. from the sun, but basically Venus's atmosphere is constantly trapping that heat. And Mercury has no

atmosphere. It has an extremely thin, what's called an exosphere, just some basically loose particles of gas barely around it. So a lot of the heat just dissipates away. Crop dusting, a little crop dusting around. Yeah. So it gets extraordinarily hot, but it's not quite as hot as Venus because it just lets a lot of the heat go. And when it's nighttime on Mercury, it cools. way off immediately. So Mercury would basically dry freeze you or kind of saute you, whereas Venus would sort of slow cooker, well, actually very fast cooker you. Like steam you. It steam you.

Yeah, like hell's instant pot, if people know that brand of pressure cooker, you know? That sounds like a Gordon Ramsey collab. He just gets stuffed at an instant pot. Well, you could say he would sell an Instapot with Instapot as he does sell cookware these days. But yeah, sure, we could also go with just stuffing them in a giant Instapot. I jumped to murder at Gordon Ramsey, who I like. Yeah. I think he's cool.

I'm still raw. I'm practically mooing. And then the other weird reason, Mercury would be more pleasant. Venus is the pressure and the gravity. On the Venus show, so long ago, I'd talk about the probes that especially the Soviet Union sent to Venus just got like immediately crushed after delivering a little bit of data. Like a few minutes later they were destroyed.

Mercury only has 38% of Earth gravity on top of having basically no atmospheric pressure. So you could jump more than twice as high as you do here. You would like hop and bounce around in a fun. way. Right. That sounds fun, like, while you're burning alive. Yes. And the other weird thing is you might superficially think you were on Earth's moon or being like what you've seen of videos and pictures of astronauts on Earth's Moon because the upper upper, like, ground surface on Mercury, it's very dark gray. It's made of a lot of silicate rocks and dust. There's a lot of craters, like, in a totally superficial way. It feels like Earth's moon. There's just a little more gravity. The moon only

has one sixth of Earth gravity, around 16%. So Mercury 38. How big is Mercury relative to like the moon and the Earth? It's much smaller than the Earth. It's the smallest of the official eight planets, but it's bigger than the moon. Okay. Yeah. In exact size, Mercury's diameter, right, if you go straight through the middle of it. It's a little over 3,000 miles across or about 4,800 kilometers. And then the moon is only 2,150 miles across. So Mercury is bigger than the moon, but not wildly bigger than the moon. It's 3,000 mile diameter versus 2,150 mile diameter.

So I could take a golf cart around that bad boy, what, in like a couple days. If you just drive straight through fast, I guess. If you had like a good car, you could really road trip through in a few days. I mean, I did say golf cart. And with Mercury, I've seen a lot of just random models or artistic depictions where it looks reddish or yellow or something. But superficially, it almost looks like a slightly bigger Earth's moon that's just next to the sun, which is kind of a funny situation. Well, red is hot. Yellow is also warm. So, you know, gray is not hot. Yeah, it's just a hot gray thing, you know, despite that not making sense to us. We think gray is cold.

We think gray is cold. Red is hot. That's not really how it works. Yeah, yeah. Another really weird thing about Mercury is how it moves. When you're on Mercury, would have an extremely strange experience of days. The big number there is a 3-2-2 resonance. Number three, number two, resonance is the ratio. That's the ratio of rotations and orbits on Mercury. I know that sounds confusing. What it means is Mercury rotates three times

for every two times Mercury orbits the sun. So in our most typical concept of days and years, that's three days per two years. Right. So you've got like a basketball on your finger. That basketball is mercury. Awesome. So, okay, right? Yeah. No, that's pretty fun. Good for you. And you got to dunk that mercury into, yeah, you got to dunk the mercury. And nothing but net. But no, so it's going around three times. So it spins like three times on your finger. Yeah.

And then you, Alex, with Mercury on your finger, are running around the sun two times. And that's the ratio in what is happening. Yeah. And so that means the rotation, the days feel extremely slow, right? Like that's so few days per year. Right. And the amount of time that takes in an earth sense is the. rotation happens in 59 Earth days.

And then the orbit happens in about 88 Earth days. So, you know, its year is shorter than our year because it's so much closer to the sun. And then the day is so much longer than our days. Yeah, like our day is 24 hours to do a full rotation. And then 365 days in a year. I know things about time. Alex? Yeah.

But you weren't expecting, I bet you weren't expecting me to know that. How many days there are in a year? I'm like, how old is baby golden? And you're like getting out a globe? Like, ah, gee, you really sprung one on me. Uh, okay, okay. I guess I got to get my astrolabe. Right, because you're in Italy, I'm imagining like Galileo's observatory,

like a bunch of old papers and weird telescopes. I also did that. I saw Galileo's fingee. I saw his skeletal fingee. It's so cool, man. Yeah. That's fun. So, like, oddly because we are, you know, earth-centric people, we're only used to days on Earth. It's extremely hard to understand the experience of a day on Mercury because what I just described is only one of two senses in which we can understand a day on Mercury. There's two different ways to define day. Right? One way to define a day is the planet rotates once, but the other way to define a day is there's a complete sunrise and sunset cycle. And on Mercury, those things are not aligned in the way we're used to on Earth. Hmm. Okay.

So with the planet rotates version, you know, 59 day rotation, 88 day orbit, that means three days per two years. And I know that was a lot of numbers in a row. I'm sorry. But the other way to think of it is only one day per two years. Because since that rotation is so slow and the planet is moving around the sun at the same time, you would only see one cycle of sunrise and sunset in two. Mercury years. But the planet would rotate three times. Okay. It's so confusing and weird. Right.

Well, no, I understand it because, like, there are two movements going on. One is rotation and one is movement around the sun. And so because you're like, you're turning but also rotating that those both in conjunction will mean that, you know, it's not like if you're just turning, you'd have a stable sunrise sunset. And doesn't that, I mean, that kind of like impacts stuff on Earth as well. It's just less noticeable because the 24-hour cycle is really fast and the 365 days cycle around the sun is really slow. Exactly. Yeah. Our sunrise and sunset actually varies a lot. We just have so many of them in a year. We don't really notice. And then because Mercury has so few of them in a year to the point

that there's only one sunrise and sunset for two years. Apparently, the movement of the sun would also be extremely spooky. Here's the European Southern Observatory's description. Quote, at some moment, an astronaut on Mercury would watch the sun come to a complete halt. Then the sun would appear to move backwards

for some time before returning to its original position, performing a loop in the sky. When you're saying the sun would do this, We're talking over like a long period of time. Like would the astronaut be standing there for days watching this happen? It would feel like multiple Earth months for that to occur. I see. Okay.

So it'd be more like an astronaut who is also, well, hopefully they're an astronomer as well. So it'd be sort of like tracking the movement of the sun over time. Not necessarily that the sun's like doing, hello, my baby. be hello my darling, hello my springtime gal in the sky over the course of minutes. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that would be, that would be concerning. Do you ever have, okay, do you ever have this recurring dream? Because like how big would the sun look in the sky from Mercury, like pretty big?

Huge, yeah. I don't have numbers, but yeah. Huge. Okay, I have this recurring dream where either the sun or the moon or a random planet is really, really big in the sky. And I want to know if like this is a common thing among people because

I feel like this is because we have alien DNA. Oh, here we go. Okay. Now Alex, hear the context and you'll definitely agree. Alien DNA from a memory

when we were Mercurians. And, And it only comes to us in our dreams. I like how you saved your relationship to Mercury until the really prime part of the episode, you know? Well, I had to know you were cool. I wasn't sure you were cool yet. Long game on that.

Yeah, yeah. I am being genuine about the recurring dream about like a too large sun or moon or planet in the sky. And that's like, I don't know. It's like almost like a megalophobia kind of thing. But I would have a, I would be freaking out on Mercury seeing that big sun. That sounds terrifying. Here's the thing I do have numbers on. The other thing that would worry you is that the sun's size would seem to change a lot across the year.

Because also, Mercury has the most lopsided orbit of any solar system planet. The more technical adjective is eccentric. but it gets much closer and further from the sun. That's the technical... It actually is, yeah. Wait, wait, wait, because eccentric, because, like, centric is... That is a geometric term, right?

In Latin? Yeah, yeah, it's actually a real... When we call somebody eccentric, that's sort of slang, this is actually like the really scientific term. Right. That's like the OG sort of meaning of it. Oh. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes all it because like centric, like, concentric and eccentric. Yes. And these millions of miles don't mean anything, but like the difference is interesting. Mercury gets as far as 43 million miles away from the sun, but it gets as close as 29 million miles from the sun. So its sun distance varies by 14 million miles and by a giant percentage, right? Like, like day-to-day life and your experience of what you're looking. at in the sky, you'd be like, oh, no, the sun's bigger after a few months. It'd be terrible.

Yeah. Man, that would be disconcerting. I mean, the thing is, like, it's hard for me to imagine any kind of life existing on that, on Mercury to be able to witness it. But yeah, that would be, that would be alarming. So the other other thing is, we suspect that it was quite possible for Mercury to have life at one point. Really? Like with like extremophile type bacteria stuff? Probably yeah. What we're more confident about is that Mercury probably contained a lot of, the technical name is volatile compounds, which makes me think of like beakers of stuff that's on fire. But that really means things like water.

Makes me think about mattresses you buy and then like they come in like a plastic package and then you unfurl it and they're like Let it air out so the VOCs can air out. I'm like, excuse you, VOCs in my mattress? Don't worry. Put an incredibly thin bedsheet over that. You know, I'm like, oh, okay, well. When I pop open one of those mattresses that come in the mail because it's like vacuum packed, I huff them.

Get that good new mattress smell in me. It activates your mercurion DNA. With those sleepy particles. Yeah, exactly. This is why. Yeah, so this is a very new idea, but in 2020, a team at the Planetary Science Institute, which is a really major nonprofit for astronomy research, they published a new theory about Mercury's landscape.

We've always known that it's an extremely chaotic looking surface, not just that there's a lot of craters, but also that a lot of the land looks like it's sinking or collapsing or doing big tectonic stuff. And the old theory is because a giant asteroid hit Mercury. And we know a giant asteroid hit Mercury, but the new theory is that for probably about two billion years after that asteroid hit, Mercury continued to shift a whole lot. And it's partly because of volcanoes, but it's also because a lot of volatile gases and liquids, including potentially water, were under the surface.

And so for a few billion years, Mercury's basically been bursting like a balloon where blasts of those gases and liquids come out and then the land under that falls in and collapses. Whoa. And so if there were all those compounds, there could have been extremophile small life all over Mercury. Right, right. Yeah, because like even if the water is really hot, you could potentially have something

that withstands that because we do on Earth near our thermal vents down deep, deep in the ocean. Right. And also Mercury is more alive than we think, which also is one of many reasons it's not like Earth's Moon at all. It has a molten iron core and more iron in its core than most other planets. And so there's volcanic activity. It's a very lively planet that would apparently have minor seismic tremors often. Between that and the life-forming materials, it makes me kind of shock that Kurt Vonnegut's idea is a decent theory for life on Mercury.

Like he was writing before we knew much and it was kind of kind of on the ball Because if I remember correctly his idea was there there were like these deep like sort of a big cavern that went into the earth of mercury and that's how like these things survive not on the surface but sort of in these like chasms Yeah yeah and he was writing before we had better data to show that mercury is covered in chasms the geological and geographer term is a grobben. Grabben is the German for a ditch. He would have loved that word. He would have, yeah.

Kurt Vonnegut Graben, yeah, my fellow German-American. But yeah, like huge stretches of Mercury have just collapsed in. We think that the planet's diameter has shrunk by four miles since it forms because it keeps collapsing and collapsing and collapsing and collapsing in on itself. Wow. Is it shrinking or is it just shifting? It's like cooling and shrinking in a minor way, but it's not like it's going to suddenly be half its size or something. I see.

Okay. And then the other thing is the crater theory about the crazy landscape is because it does have a gigantic single crater on top of lots of little craters. The number there is 1,550 kilometers. That is the width of this crater. it's called the coloris basin. It's about as wide as the central time zone of the U.S. and Canada. It's literally bigger than Texas. Yeah.

And it's also on a planet much smaller than Earth. Based on Mercury's circumference, that crater is wide as about 10% of the surface of the planet. So it's like if there was a crater on Earth as big as the continuous 48 states. Quick, Alex. How many Texases could you fit in the crater? Oh, like less than two. Okay. Well, I'm not impressed. Approaching to, but yeah, you know.

Right. 1.8 techsi. Scientists theorized Houston's and Dallas is on Mercury. Yeah. But yeah, so one massive asteroid hit Mercury about 3.5 billion years ago and contributed to the bonkers landscape on it. and also might have led to its orbit being so eccentric, too. Like, it might have pushed the orbit out of alignment a little bit. Smacked it. Yeah.

Wow. So it's really weird. I'm glad we don't have to ever worry about asteroids because we're special. Yeah, most of our listeners are dinosaurs. They're still here. Yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're fine.

We'll be cool. Mercury, in my mind, has always been the, this just tiny, completely sunblasted rock. And one amazing number is the year 2012. That is when a NASA probe called Messenger reported that there's a polar ice cap on the northern pole of Mercury. There's frozen water on Mercury. Mercurial Santa! Yay!

Yes, it has water on it now. It used to maybe have a lot more life-creating, life-giving compounds on it. It has an active molten iron. Iron core, unlike Mars, which has a dead core. Like, it's a much more lively planet than I ever imagined. It's weird to think about that way. So, like, my theory of alien life. Right.

Also, listen, Alex, if an asteroid, look, I'm just trying to get us Joe Rogan numbers here, so be cool. If an asteroid hit mercury and blasted off a chunk, wouldn't that help distribute shards of it around the solar system? And then we could have had mercurial bacteria here on Earth. I just cut you off so we could throw to an ad for brain pills. Like, yeah, yeah, you know. Anyways, here's some mercury. Pills. Listen to our Mercury episode. That's not historically an exaggeration. Yeah, the old Calamel business. And in case folks write to us, there are theories about when asteroids strike

planets that deposits minerals or even chemicals and life on the planets. That is a theory out there. Right, right. That there's like some sort of, you know, tardigrade like little organism that can go into stasis and be stable on an asteroid. and then it blasts into Earth and then somehow revitalizes. Not proven even a little bit, but it's a theory. Another weird, weird thing that we don't even really have time for, but apparently it's hard to find any pieces of mercury on Earth, the planet Mercury. We've found other meteorites and chunks related to other planets on Earth,

and it's somewhat mysterious why no pieces of Mercury are here. The big theory is that the sun sucked anything up, but it's kind of hard to find. Yeah. Hey, you know, that's a, the sun is kind of like that sometimes just sucking things up. Because of gravity, not a big sun vacuum. Yeah. And speaking of probes to Mercury, how do we know anything about Mercury, right?

Like how have humans learned anything about it without going there? Yeah. How do you know? Yeah. Alex. Sound all confident over here. You've never been. We mentioned on last week's show about the element Mercury,

five planets in the solar system can be seen with the unaided human eye. So Mercury, along with Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There's no, like, first person who cited the planet Mercury. It's just kind of everybody around the world. However, Mercury is extremely tiny and close to the sun compared to other planets. minutes. So it's hard to see it in general, and it's even hard to see when it transits the sun. We call it a transit, especially referring to Venus, when Venus goes between the sun and the earth, and we just get to see it like a little thing going past. It's not a huge eclipse or something.

Mercury is so tiny, it often gets mistaken for a sunspot or people see a sunspot and say, that's mercury, and it's an easy mistake to make. Also, if folks want to try to see the next transit of Mercury that is in November of 2032. Hey. Either November 12th or 13th, depending on where you live on Earth, you can see Mercury go across the face of the sun. So that's cool, you know.

Ah, it's going to miss Brett's birthday. Oh, well, maybe you could bring up along? No, no, I can't. He's distracting. I can't. And yeah, Mercury Transits the Sun approximately 13 times per century. So it's also not a once in a lifetime thing. You have

chances, you know, but it's also rare. It's cool. Sweet. Fun. So like a lot of people have observed Mercury from Earth, but not in much detail at all because it's so tiny and so almost blotted out by the sun. Apparently also our major space telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, we don't aim that toward Mercury because the bright light of the sun could blow everything out and like damage the telescope. And cook your eye like a sausage. Yeah. And so basically everything we know about Mercury in any detail,

besides just the basic movements, comes from three probes. We have only ever sent three probes to Mercury in all of space exploration history. The first one, 1974, it was a NASA probe named Mariner 10. It made the first flyby of Mercury in human history, followed by two more flybys. And until that probe got there, we could not confirm that Mercury lacked an atmosphere or what its surface really looked like.

We just had kind of vague telescope pictures from Earth. Before that, all we really know is its orbit and its approximate size. Everything else was guesses. How close did it get to Mercury? I don't really have numbers that mean anything, but it was able to take pictures. Like, it got close enough. Okay. Yeah.

And then in 2008, another NASA probe called Messenger began making flybys of Mercury. And in 2011, entered Mercury orbit. So that was able to find out it has a polar ice cap. Like, nothing had orbited Mercury until a few decades ago. Wow. Yeah. Really one decade ago, actually. Yeah.

What happens to these poor little probes? Do they just get sucked into the sun eventually? Perfect question. And that gets us into takeaway number one. All of our detailed information about Mercury comes from the ideas of one Italian college professor. Hey. Yeah. And his name is Giuseppe Colombo.

His nickname was Beppe. Perfect name. Perfect nickname. It's so cool. And the third probe that is currently doing flybys of Mercury and attempting to enter orbit is named Beppe Colombo. in his honor. It's supposed to orbit Mercury in November, 26, and begin unprecedented science in 27. Oh, no, no, I'm not. Love it. Probo di Beppe. Yeah, he, I wish he was famous to me before I started learning about Mercury, especially because his mission is ongoing and really cool. It's called

Beppe Colombo. Yeah. But also because he helped revolutionize how we send spaceships through the solar system with gravity assists and changing the trajectories. So if not for him, we would basically know nothing about Mercury today. Right. Because of like slingshotting things rather than just, you know, having it use a bunch of fuel to try to plow through space. Exactly. Yeah.

And then the additional useful thing for that with Mercury is to do a slingshot that prevents your spacecraft from just getting sucked into the sun. Mm-hmm. Ooh. Because when you're launching something from Earth toward Mercury, you're basically shooting it at the sun and hoping Mercury catches it. And that's very hard to do unless you do a lot of complicated maneuvers. Right, right.

Because Mercury is small. It's small. It's small. It only has like a third of Earth's gravity a little more. And so the sun has more gravity and can just grab your stuff. Yes. Well, the sun is large. Yeah. So, yeah, this guy is amazing, and he's from the 1900s.

He lived from 1920 to 1984. He should be a global hero of astronomy and space exploration. I mean, his name is Colombo Giuseppe, or Giuseppe Colombo. Giuseppe Colombo, yeah. Giuseppe Colombo, and his nickname is Beppie. That's just so Italian and so wonderful. It's quite good, yeah. And I got curious, he's almost definitely not related to Christopher O'Colombo, Christopher Columbus.

Because apparently it's a super common name and they also gave the last name to orphans. So across history, there's just a ton of unrelated Columbuses. Yeah. They should, like, and this is a great opportunity to just replace one Colombo with the other Colombo because, like, Italians are kind of precious about Christopher Columbus. Like, oh, he wasn't that bad. And it's like, no, guys, he was. Just like changed him to Giuseppe Colombo.

We've got, you don't even have to switch out the nameplate except for a little bit. 100%. What I learned about this guy, I wanted to do that this coming October. Just be like, happy Giuseppe Columbus Day, everybody. And, you know. Exactly. Just scoge it a little bit towards Giuseppe Colombo. Yeah, yeah.

It's so easy. Because this is very cool. Because it's such a cool concept because you are taking something that is typically like a huge impediment to, say, space travel, right? Just gigantic poles of gravity. And then using that to actually factor into the trajectory of your projectile and get it to where you want to go, that's got to be like nutso math. It is. I also like that he's a much more skilled navigator than Christopher Columbus, you know?

That guy couldn't really sail good. Yeah, Christopher Columbus, he was. not very smart. I'm sorry. I'm going to get kicked out of Italy, but no, he was kind of, he was kind of a ding-dong. You're Mercury and you can just go home, you know? Yeah, exactly. But yeah, and key sources for this are digital resources from the European Space Agency, a feature for astronomy magazine by writer Ben Evans, and an amazing episode of the BBC radio show in Our Time, all about Mercury. Their experts are Emma Bunce of the University of Lester, Carolyn Crawford of the University of Cambridge, and David Rothery of the Open

University. Giuseppe Colombo, he was born in Italy in 1920. He trained at the university in Padua, and then in Pisa and then became a professor in Padua. And for decades, he's just a physics and astrophysics professor working out theories. And then NASA very smartly brings him in in 1970. NASA says, please come to the jet propulsion laboratory in California. We're doing a conference about the last probe in our Mariner missions, the Mariner 10 probe. And we hope it can maybe just kind of fly past Mercury one time before it's destroyed. So we'll just take a look at it. It would be the first time anything's gone by Mercury.

That's probably the best you can do. But Beppe Colombo said, hey, if you use the paths of Venus and the path of Mercury, you don't just have to like give up and get brief flybys of each one. You can get three flybys of Mercury instead of just one before the probe is no longer usable. Wow. That's really cool. And because like each time it does a flyby you could collect more data, right? Exactly. And if you're only doing one flyby and something happens, there was no point, you know, like something bad happens. I mean. And so this was a major idea that.

NASA checked out and agreed on, and then they changed the whole Mariner 10 plan and were able to successfully execute three flybys of Mercury. I'm going to link like diagrams of the path that Mariner 10 traveled. It's still very hard to understand, but the point is by using the gravity of Venus to not only change the trajectory of the probe, but also change its speed so it doesn't end up in the sun and can catch Mercury's gravity better. they were able to get three flybys instead of one, which probably helped make sure the mission happened at all. Because in the 1970s, NASA had put people on the moon,

and Mariner 10, according to Astronomy magazine, was the first NASA mission ever to have a strict budget limit. It was the first of what became many times when the government said, you do it for this price or we cancel. That's it. And so they did get it slightly under. budget because they did an amazing job. But if they needed a lobby for more money,

their first argument would have been, we found two more mercury flybys. Right? Like, this is worth more money now. Please make it happen. Wow. Yeah. I'm looking at a picture of Giuseppe Columbo.

He's on a chalkboard. He's drawing orbitals around the sun. The sun is cute because it's got little lines on it, like little sunlines. He looks very unamused because I think maybe someone's like, no, pose with the chalk. And he's kind of like, okay. But he's very, he's very,

Poirot looking. He's got a little mustache. He is. Yeah. Yeah. He's got the poor. He's a Poirot type. Like I categorize people based on Agatha Christie,

uh, tropes. And he's poro type person. Yeah, he's a cuddly mustache continental European kind of guy. I like it. Yeah. It's good stuff. Yeah. Good stuff.

And yeah, his calculations worked. The Mariner probe worked. We got our first ever views of Mercury from close up at all. And other people had executed small versions of a gravity assist before with other spacecraft. But this was by far the most complicated ever and made all further probe missions to Mercury possible, not only the math, but also the proof with Mariner 10 that we could do it. So if not for him, we would be many decades further behind on understanding this planet at all. Like we might still be like setting up a first mission to go there. Amazing.

Man, that's so cool. Math is incredible. It is. And he also came up with a like long tether for an orbiting platform that was part of space shuttle missions. He helped plan a European Space Agency probe to Haley's Comet that got the first images of a comet's core. Wow. He should be so famous, and I hope, especially next year as the Beppe Colombo probes to Mercury return information, like science will begin in 2027. That's going to be amazing, and I hope everybody finds out who he is.

But you listening find out now, you know? Yeah. I'm going to see if like, because maybe he's more famous in Italy, I'm going to start asking Italians just like, do you know, Beppi? Do you know Beppe? Do you know Beppe? Do you know Beppe Colombo? Are you aware of Beppe? I would think, right? Like, as famous as anybody doing space stuff. Yeah, and that probe, by the way, it's a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency.

The most revolutionary part of the Beppe Colombo probe might be that it's actually two probes. It's sort of one ship and then it's going to release two probes that will be different angles at different distances from Mercury. And I almost wonder if we'll need to redo this whole episode with the huge amount of new information that we'll get. Not that the episode's wrong. It'll just be like further amazing stuff, you know. We'll do an update. We might want to do a Mercury the Planet update for sure. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And folks, that's so much numbers and giant takeaway about everything about Mercury.

We have one further astounding takeaway for you about the entire history of science. Ah! Too much. My brain. We're back and we're wrapping. up the main show with one further Mercury takeaway. Takeaway number two, Nicholas Copernicus and Albert Einstein both built their reputations and revolutionized science by answering one question about the planet Mercury.

What's his favorite color? Dark gray, but hot. Yeah. Wickman, nothing wrong with a nice charcoal gray. Yeah, again, that's Copernicus and Einstein, who are, you know, hopefully famous enough, but we'll describe who they are too. They both did a lot more work on Mercury than I ever knew or expected before getting into researching this planet. Hmm. And Copernicus, it makes a little more sense because he's famous for the heliocentric model of the solar system, where the planets are going around the sun and not Earth.

And he and his immediate supporters and followers did a lot with Mercury. to confirm that work. But Copernicus lived from the late 1400s to 1543, and then 400 years later, Albert Einstein lived from 1879 to 1955. So this also speaks to how little we've known about Mercury until recent probes. Like guys 400 years apart still had questions to answer. Right, right. Well, because, you know, it is a little scampy little planet that does little weirdness, weird movements. Yes. Yeah, they were both dealing specifically with how the whole planet orbits.

It's not even that different of questions 400 years apart. Right, right. And with Copernicus, he approached Mercury from the basic set of questions about how the whole solar system moves. And he reminds me of Charles Darwin as I read about him, where both Darwin and Copernicus figured out their big idea and then spent decades working up the courage and the readiness for arguments to publish it, you know, that the people were going to get mad about evolution or about the sun being central. Man, that reminds me of me. I have such, like, great huge world-changing ideas.

I'm just shy about it, man. You know, I'm just a little shy. I got them, I got them cooking, you know, but I'm a little shy to talk about it. But believe me. Yeah. The K.D. Mercurian Codex is ready to print. It's just... I got some really world-changing ideas on, you know, science and also how to make, like, a good brownie and stuff.

But, like, it's, I'm not ready yet. Yeah, Copernicus, one book was where he put his big idea. He published it when he was 70 years old and shortly before his death. And then the intro he wrote, quote, the scorn which I had to fear on account of the newness and absurdity of opinion almost drove me to abandon a work already undertaken. Like he was almost just too afraid to put this out. And for good reason, because the Catholic Church got mad at everyone who supported his ideas after he died. Yeah.

Whoops. Specifically Catholicism? Or did all of Christianity have like a more earth-centric model of the universe? It's a good question. It's basically that Europe and places associated with it, were really into especially Greek ideas that the earth was in the middle. And then the Catholic Church was setting up inquisitions in the 1500s. Apparently one year before Copernicus died, Catholic Pope Paul III established an

inquisition in Rome. It's not as famous as the Spanish one or the Portuguese one, but that was the exact organization that punished Galileo later on. Right. Nobody expects the Portuguese inquisition. Yeah, also that one's not famous. Only the Spanish one. Truly. Yeah.

But yeah, and Copernicus was so nervous about his idea. He basically mentions it in the book's intro and then spends many hundreds of pages just laying out how he thinks the planets move. And then the key follower of Copernicus besides Galileo was a guy named Johannes Kepler, who was born a couple decades later in Germany. One of Kepler's ideas was to argue that heliocentrism does not conflict with the Bible. Because sure. Like, I don't know. Sure. Yeah. I'm not really a biblical scholar. Is there like a line in there that's like and everything rotates around the earth? As I understand it, not really. And it's sort of like how there's not a line that says evolution is fake or something. There's just lines that say God created all life and people take issue with evolution. Right. Well, it's interesting because like actually the, it's more the Greek, um, Greek,

sort of myth does have that built in a bit more because there's like the sun is being pulled by Apollo's chariot across the sky. So that's like much more of the geocentric kind of model baked into it. So it's not really, it seems like it's more of a, you know, polytheist notion. Right, right. Yeah, it can all just work either. way. And the other thing Kepler pushed was Mercury, right? Like, of all of Copernicus's calculations, Copernicus spent a lot of time on Mercury. Mercury pills. Oh, not the pills, no. You got to have a

side hustle. No. Pushed mercury on our streets. Yeah, like, Copernicus spent a lot of time on mercury because it's hard to see and interesting to calculate. The orbit is eccentric and weird. And Kepler ran with that and said, if we can predict, transits of Mercury based on Copernicus's work and other guys' astronomical observations. That helps prove Copernicus's thesis that the sun's in the center of the solar system. And then after a lot of effort, he was able to very successfully predict one in 1631. Apparently, most of Europe was cloudy, but a guy in Paris named Pierre Gassendi had a break in the clouds and saw the transit of mercury. And so that building on Copernicus's work did a whole lot to establish his entire idea and established like all of modern astronomy basically.

Wow. Whoa. Mustache and beard. Sorry, I was looking at a picture of Kepler and then got sort of smacked with that mustache beard combo. I like to look these guys up so I can visualize them doing. their little calculations with their astrolabes and so on. Wait, that's the wrong Kepler. Hang on.

Both of the, that's so funny because I looked at a different Kepler, which was the wrong Kepler. But they both have wild mustache beard combinations. Yeah, late 1500s. That was really going on. Yeah. Right. And because specifically transits of Mercury did so much to, prove Copernicus's theory.

Europeans then generated a myth that Copernicus was obsessed with Mercury instead of just observing it a lot like he did with the rest of the solar system. There was this big urban legend that on his deathbed, Copernicus lamented never getting to observe Mercury with a telescope or with his eye. And apparently his notes and the way the skies would have been suggests, he probably saw it in life actually. But like... Right, right.

And he dropped the snow globe and he's like, Mercury. they thought it was the planet, but it was the name of his childhood sled. It was the name of his childhood toy liquid metal that killed him. He meant to say I'm dying of mercury poisoning. Please help. Right. But yeah, so I had always heard the Copernicus story as just he kind of swapped the earth position for the sun position. But a lot more had to do with tracking mercury specifically. It's amazing. And then the the other discovery is Einstein surprisingly advancing his entire reputation and the theory of relativity with Mercury calculation specifically.

Because you hear of Einstein for like other stuff or you hear of relativity as more of a general thing. Also super hard to explain. So I'm just kind of kind of skim through it. The gist is that when Albert Einstein was theorizing relativity, that was sort of a step beyond Isaac Newton's theories about gravity. And apparently Newton's theories of gravity explain the orbits of all the planets in the solar system except Mercury.

Mercury has such eccentricity. Newton's theories on its own didn't quite explain it. Hmm. Okay. So there was a lasting into the 1900s Mercury orbit question of why do our ideas about gravity not explain this? Right. And so he needed a new,

theory of something. Yeah, and the extreme gist of relativity is that it's not just the mass of things that affect each other, it's also that masses of things bend spacetime. And so then matter interacts with space time. And what I'm describing, I don't even totally understand, but that's the gist. Get bent, space time. Yeah. And so Einstein said, this is my theory about space time also mattering.

And I think that explains Mercury's extra weird orbit, that it's the mass of the sun in particular, but also the way that truly bends space time is impacting how Mercury moves. And other scientists had a different theory. They said, Newton explains it on its own, and there must be another planet we cannot see between Mercury and the Sun, a secret other planet in the solar system. And people got really into this hypothetical planet theory. The widely agreed on name for it was Vulcan. Yes. And Vulcan is the Roman god who's the god of the forge. It's Hephaestus in Greek.

And that fits the idea that if it's so close to the sun, it's super hot like a blacksmith forge. That was why they picked the name. Right. Vulcanized rubber. Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah. We think of him as burning stuff. And we were like, a planet closer than Mercury, yikes, no way.

It was too hot. Right, right, right. And also scientists said, surely Vulcan is so close to the sun. It's sort of like Mercury where it's hard to see with the sunspots and the heat and so on. So for many decades, people claim to observe Vulcan or claim that like, oh, we need to do this next thing and then we'll see Vulcan. Vulcan's definitely out there. Yeah, I saw it once. Yeah.

I was out there hanging with the... I'm Best Bud, Bigfoot, and Bigfoot was like, hey, what's that? And we looked up and there was. Yeah, yeah. And you're Mercurian, so you would know, you know. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so anyway, Einstein, apparently in sort of a series of papers in the 1910s, puts out his idea

of relativity. And one of the later papers in November 1915, he says, here's how relativity plugs into Mercury's orbit. It explains it perfectly. And that was hailed as a landmark in proving. his entire idea and also, you know, building his entire reputation. 1915 is early in his career. Wow. So that helped him be the guy in science kind of through World War II, you know?

Just dropping mad bars about theory of relativity. Yeah, and it was important to make sure there's not a secret extra planet. So that's good. Right. Yeah, because, you know, what would they be doing? Like we would need to know like what they're doing over there in this secret planet. Yeah. And like our very last tidbit here is that the hypothetical concept of a planet Vulcan seems to have at least indirectly influenced most science fiction since then because both Star Trek and Doctor Who have a planet Vulcan.

And both of them depict that as an extremely harsh and dry and hot planet, which fits what we assumed about the fake planet Vulcan. Yeah, that would be pretty tough. I mean, I don't know if Leonard Nimoy would fare any better than John Lithgow. How many more distinguished actors must be lose to the inner planets of the solar system? They're very distinguished, and I like them both. They would boil alive. There's just one really sad part of Comic-Con where they live. list new actors who got devoured on Mercury by the heat.

It's casting call. Anyone who can survive the extreme temperatures of Mercury. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. I feel like this one, it's really two mega takeaways. I didn't call them mega takeaways in the run of it. So mega takeaway number one,

all of our detailed information about Mercury comes from just a couple probes, made possible and effective by one Italian college professor named Giuseppe Bepi Colombo. Mega takeaway number two, Nicholas Copernicus and Albert Einstein both built their reputations and revolutionized science by each answering a question about the movements of the planet Mercury, more than 400 years apart. And then a ton of stats of numbers this week really entire stats and number experience of the practical experience of living on Mercury or existing on Mercury if you even tried to do that. Also, the formation of Mercury, the more than Texas-sized crater dominating the surface of Mercury, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said

that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the date the sun will devour mercury and new arguments and theories about whether the sun will devour the earth. Obviously, it's a long way away, and the specifics are amazing. Visit sifpod. dot fun for that bonus show. For a library of more than 25

dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows, it's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at

maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include as many expert voices as I could bring in through the research as possible. One of them is Dr. Vahe Perumian, a physicist and astronomer at the University of Southern California. Also leaned on an In Our Time episode. That's a BBC4 radio show. It featured experts Emma Bunce, Carolyn Crawford, and David Ruthery from the University of Leicester, the University of Cambridge,

and the Open University, respectively. Also used the University of Leicester's digital resources for timelines of Mercury exploration, a lot of stuff from Caltech about how life on Mercury would be. There is also a wealth of digital material about Mercury from NASA and from the ESA, the European Space Agency. NASA sent the first two probes. Europe, along with Japan, is sending the current third one that's amazing. Those programs are doing such incredible work, essentially discovering this planet that we've always been looking at. And then the Smithsonian, both their magazine and their Air and Space Museum, are very handy for material about Copernicus and about Einstein.

I'm also linking to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory for a quick rundown of the procession of Mercury, which Einstein was able to really break down thanks to his theory of relativity. And I also want to shout out sciencenews.org, which is a wonderful publication, both covering the early work by Einstein on how Mercury moves, and a study in 2018 that further built on Einstein's theory of general relativity and additional quirks of Mercury's orbit that we are still continuing to understand. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape-Hoking,

the traditional land of the Muncie-Lanape people, and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord

where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord and hey, would you like a tip on another episode because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating

by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. I do sort of wish it a generation, rated last week's show about Mercury the Element because we touch on how the planet got named after Mercury the Roman god, whose Hermes the Greek god. But no, it gave us episode 169 about grass. Won't find grass on Mercury as far as we know, but it turns out most of the foods we eat are grassy crops, and in a sense, the Earth is a grassy planet as its dominant feature on its land. So I recommend that grass episode for more about that.

I also recommend Katie Golden's podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists' own shows. Supported. Directly. By you.