Somewhere in the Skies - Weird Science with The Debrief's Christopher Plain

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

On episode 256 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we are joined by The Debrief's head science writer, Christopher Plain. Plain runs us through his most recent articles, including a manta ray spacecraft heading to Venus, the discovery of both a new exoplanet and a new planet within Proxima Centauri, developments in the theory of the origins of life on Earth being extraterrestrial, and much more! Follow Christopher Plain's articles at: https://thedebrief.org/author/chris-plain/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Somewhere in the Skies Coffee: CLICK HERE  Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at: https://bit.ly/3rJpbd7 Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE Copyright © 2021 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey guys, Ryan here. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is a labor of love every week. And with that comes many different costs to keep the show running. That's where our Patreon campaign comes in. You give what you think the show is worth. There's different rewards available all the time, including shoutouts on the show, early editions of main episodes, bonus episodes and content, and very soon monthly patron hangouts, where we sit back and chat all things UFOs. So I hope you'll consider becoming a Patreon subscriber today. To learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you for your support and keep looking up. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome everyone to Somewhere in the Skies. As always, I am your host, Ryan Sprague. And today we have with us yet again, the head science writer at the debrief.org.

saying you know what that means. We're going to be talking all about space and tech and UFOs and aliens and everything in between. So let's not waste any time. We're going to break down a ton of his new exciting articles over at the debrief. So with us again is Christopher Plain of the debrief. Welcome back, my man. Brian, thanks for having me on, my good man. Hey, anytime you send me that message that says, I'm doing the hot guy show,

I need another hot guy to join me. I always tell you, I'm there for you. So we can give the fans what they always really want, which is just you and I sit here looking good together. Our mugs, I knew it. We could say anything. It doesn't matter. But no, we're going to say some,

we're going to talk about some really cool stuff. You know, we've got a ton of stuff going on in the world of emerging tech and space exploration. So I kind of would love to just hop in with one of your most. recent stories. And that was this one, exploring Venus in a Manta Ray inspired spacecraft. So I'm not going to even try to summarize this. You are the man of the hour. You're the one who wrote about this. So why don't you tell us about this first one, if you don't mind. What is this craft that they're hoping to get over to our neighbor Venus? So this is really, really cool piece of technology, Ryan. Basically what happened about a week ago?

is NASA, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, NIAC, announced a round of about 13 grants. So this is something they're actually putting money into. And some of these grants are for advanced radar systems. Some of them are for different mission proposals. This grant is to explore building and designing exactly what you said. It looks like a triangle, like a Manterey, and not only does it. does it look like it? It's actually what they call bio-inspired technology,

which means the design of it, the way it works, is inspired by a manta ray. So imagine this. You're inside the ocean, right? And you see a manta ray swimming. Now, it's not traveling the same way a bird

does through the sky, even though it has these big wings, essentially. The way it travels is its muscles and bones inside the wings kind of like ripple and like create a waving effect to create propulsion and move through the water. That's exactly what they're using this NASA grant for, this NIAC grant, is to try and develop and build exactly one of these things. I forget the exact research university. I didn't look it up. It's right there in the article. But that's what these grants do is they fund these really cutting edge advanced things. The reason this is so important

is because there have been a lot of proposals about sending, you know, a lighter than air balloon, if you will, to the clouds of Venus. And of course, we all know last year, there was this big announcement that they had found phosphine gas or the signs of phosphine gas at a certain altitude, I think it was about 50 kilometer, you know, like 30, 35 miles above the surface of the planet in this cloudy region. And the reason that was a big

deal is phosphine gas on earth and other, where we know it's created, is typically created in small volumes by some geological processes. But in the volumes they found it

and at the altitude they found it, there's typically, if we found it that way here on Earth, that would be from an anaerobic life, a type of extremophile, a microbiological organism that doesn't use oxygen and instead, and therefore creates this phosphine gas. And the other reason that's interesting, even before that signal was detected, there was this, there was this, Many models showed that that's the one area in Venus that you could have something living. Is this certain elevation where the atmospheric pressures and the solar radiation and all the things, temperature, all of that is just right that you could have life? And then boom, we see this gas there that seems to indicate at least there's a chance that that is what we've seen.

So we've come up with these different missions to go there. Like I said, like balloons that would float around. But those balloons are all pretty much dependent on the winds at those altitude, like a hot air balloon. You just got to ride where the wind takes you. These Manta ray craft are not that. They can maneuver through those clouds. And you see if they're in that artist rendering the same way a Manta ray maneuvers through the fluid of the ocean. And if they spot something interesting in the clouds, they can circle back to it.

They can hover over a specific spot. they can actually maneuver. And it's all done internally. All these, it's almost like an endoskeleton that moves all that. And because of that, none of the joints, nothing's exposed to the corrosive effects of the atmosphere. So as long as the outer surface is durable enough to take the effects of the atmosphere, that internal mechanisms are all protected. The one other really interesting piece of technology that they're testing under

this grant for that program is the idea that the thing could deflate itself to some degree, and that would let it sink. You know, think of a ball in the water, and as it slowly loses water, air at some point, it'll sink to the bottom, even with a little bit of air in it. So that's what's happening with this craft. They can manipulate it to go lower in the atmosphere, and then expand it back up to go up higher in the atmosphere. So it has this full maneuvering capability to really go up there and really scope around.

And they have a suite of instruments they want to put on it and sensors and stuff. Really a cutting edge concept that NASA feels interested enough to put some real money behind. Wow. So cool, man. Just think if there is some sort of intelligent life on Venus, we're now going to be the UFOs. They're going to be reporting these Manta ray-shaped craft to their local news. We saw a black triangle in the sky the other day, right? And it was biological, I swear. It was like moving like an actual creature.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, a very cool concept. And like I said, a real one. It's one that the NIAC, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, actually put a little bit of money into. So it may be something we see. I mentioned in that article that there are some other missions planned to Venus, and NASA has some for the end of this decade called Da Vinci Plus and Veritas they're working on.

There's a private group sending a probe up later next year called the Venus Lifefinder missions, and it's really designed to kind of drop a little parachute craft through those cloud layers and see what it can pick up as far as confirming those phosphine gas and signs of life. But yeah, this is the first concept of essentially like a drone that can fly around through those clouds. And it is a really, really neat and seemingly really viable concept. Love it. Absolutely love it. Well, hey, let's move from Venus to Mars. This was another story that went viral maybe a week or so ago as we're recording this.

And this was the story about Perseverance Rover. It spotted something on Mars, an artificial object. And this started going, got everyone's conspiracy theories going. And unfortunately, doing your due diligence as the head science writer at the debrief, you had to set us straight and tell us what it really was. So why don't you tell us a little about this story, if you don't mind, Chris? Yeah, sure. I can't think of his name, but there's a UFO researcher on Instagram that kind of broke this story

when it was first going around, Twitter and Instagram. And people are sharing this picture because we all know, like, dating back to the face on Mars and the pyramids on Mars and the Sidonia region, that there's this kind of history of the cameras from time to time picking up things on Mars that at least at first glance look like there's something other than a natural formation. So we've seen that a ton over the years. I know there are guys. I think it's Mike Barra. you know, they make a living, writing books about this stuff. So here we had a picture that when you look at that picture, there's no doubt. Like, that's a thing, right?

Like, that's definitely not a rock. And a little farther down in that article, yeah, you're zooming in it. I have a close-up on it a little farther down in the article. But, yeah, this created a stir on the internet. I know when I first saw it on Twitter, I was like, ooh, that's a thing. And then my first thought was it's probably one of our things. And that was the ultimate conclusion of this researcher, and that was what I found when I looked into it was there was a drill bit with a cover. And it was there to like protect another bit.

And it was something that it dumped back in like July. And so this is just a picture of, you know, unfortunately us going to another planet and doing what we do here, which is leaving garbage on the side of the road, right? Technosignatures, baby. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I'll tell you, Ryan, one thing I thought was cool as they mentioned in the article is, you know, maybe 100 years from now

or a thousand years from now, these could be like national parks on Mars or national parks on the moon, these areas where we leave these little bits of human technology. There may be a national park built around the whole perseverance area or around the spirit and opportunity areas or the curiosity, rover because there are these little spots on the planet.

We think of them in these big areas, but the rovers are only, you know, skirt in a couple of miles of area. There, yeah, there are these like historical zones with stuff there. And that drill bit will probably be studied by students long after you and I are gone. They'll be like, oh, here was the thing that, you know, was left behind and created a controversial photo. So it was a neat picture. And, yeah, my first thought was, okay, we really got something here.

This isn't a rock formation. Yep, yep. And the conspiracy theories flew. I love it. I love it. Well, I'm glad we have an answer. Yeah, yeah. We'll see what civilization builds up around it, you know, in terms of what it is, monolith style.

The Coke bottle and the gods must be crazy, right? That too, exactly. One piece of technology left behind. Yep. Well, hey, Mars is sort of dusty, terrain. It reminds me a lot of a planet from our mutual favorite, favorite universe, and that is the Star Wars universe. Oh, yeah. So you know what comes next. We have to talk about your next article here. Tatooine like exoplanet confirmed. We have an actual planet now where we could say Luke Skywalker is

from. So tell us about this one, if you don't mind. So I wrote about this first last year, and then this latest article is, like you said, it's confirming it's there. Keep in mind when we find exoplanets, whether it's the test, the transiting exoplanet survey satellite, or the Kepler missions, or even with Hubble, when we find them, it's typically just, we're going through light spectra data, and we're saying, okay, something moved in front of the planet, or we're going on gravitational data and something caused the planet to wobble. So this, even though we've confirmed maybe 5,000 of these exoplanet, there are thousands out there that we've detected that signal and said we think one's there, but we're not quite sure. And this was one of those. This was a planet that last year we found.

And like you said, the reason it's so cool is because it's part of a binary star system. So if you were on this planet and you were to look up into the sky, the right time, you would see what Luke Skywalker is saying in that picture right there. You're seeing two stars in the sky or two suns. However, from a search for life standpoint, this is actually even more exciting. And the reason why is when you go through the cosmos, binary star systems are the most common. They're about half of the star systems, maybe a herover, at least in the Milky Way galaxy. So these binary star systems are everywhere.

and finding planets in them, we found a few in other binary systems like this, and they're almost always in the habitable zone of the two planets. So every time we find a binary star system with a planet or multiple planet candidates like this one in it, that's a brand new, exciting, high-quality place to look for life. it may even be the case as we find signs of life, assuming we do, around other planets. Because of the prevalence of this type and because of their favoring having planets in the habitable zone,

it may be more common to look up in the sky on your home planet and see two suns than it is where we look up and see what. That just may be the more common scenario. That's so cool. I know. I dream of that. I can look over a mountain like Luke there and just see two suns or two moons. It's a iconic shot. I seem to remember reading or hearing that it was like a mistake and it was like an effect of the camera lens.

And it wasn't something that was originally intentional. And then when they looked at it, George Lucas was like, wow. I don't want to confirm that that's the case. You know, I've read a lot about Star Wars in the last. 40 plus years. So I don't want to, I'm pretty sure that's the origin story of this, the two sons in the,

on the sunset. And the reason it's so amazing of a shot in the movie, I mean, when I was writing this article, I showed the picture to my wife, and she's not a Star Wars nerd by any means, but she's like, oh yeah, I remember that shot from the movie. Because it's, it's epic and, you know,

romantic and potent, and it's just got all these, like, you know, and it's totally foreign. It's like no sunset we've ever seen on art. So you're like, this is in a galaxy far, far away. So yeah, finding that, confirming that. A little bit of extra news in that story is that they found it using the wobble method rather than the transit method, which is how we find most pilot exoplanets. So not only was it confirming it, but it was confirming it, using a different method.

So when the planet was originally found a year ago, it was spotted because of the transits in front of those two stars. Now it was spotted because the gravitational effects the planet as on the stars. So we're pretty darn sure that planet is there. That's amazing, man. I love it. Absolutely love it. Doing incredible work.

Well, let's piggyback off of that to some more work that NASA is doing. And that's the story you did on. There's a rocket that's ready to chase pulsating Aurora. This is so cool. So explain to me if you don't mind. What is this Aurora that they want to chase? And why? What purpose do they see in doing this?

If you've been, I've never seen it in person, but you've been lucky enough to be at a real northern latitude at the right time, you can see the northern lights, right? That those streaks of ribbon like colorful lights, blues and greens, and sometimes other components of the rainbow that happen up at these northern latitudes. and it's an effect of solar radiation in the atmosphere and other chemical effects. Really beautiful, brilliant light show. But what they found is every once in a while,

and these things seem to pulsate, right? There's like a pulsating component to it that they really couldn't quite understand. And the first clue they had as to the origin, if I remember this story, right, was during World War I, radio operators in Europe and northern latitudes were picking up these pulsating frequencies on their microphone, on like radio receivers. And they couldn't figure out what it was. But it gave a clue that there was a sound wave component to this electromagnetic phenomenon. So what they did was the research team that's looking into this, oh, wow, look, That's a great picture.

So the research team that's looking into this, what they did was they took a little rocket and they put a package of instruments on it based around that idea that there is this sonic component to the sound wave component to creating these brilliant light shows and this pulsating effect in it. And they hold it up there to where it's most commonly seen somewhere up, I think in Alaska possibly. I don't remember exactly where because I write 10 to 15 stories a week. But yeah, they hold this rocket up there and that was last week

and they positioned it so that the minute they picked up on this pulsating thing, they can launch that thing, have it fly right over the aurora and gather all kinds of information on it and really get to the bottom, like, what is making this thing pulsating?

So it's just kind of a neat science story. You know, it's not a, it's not a search for life. There's no aliens behind the pulsation. But as far as like, like what is causing it? And the fact that, again, like radio operators of World War II, we're picking this, or World War I, we're picking this up a hundred years ago. Right? And now we finally have an answer. So I believe, if I remember that story right, that rocket was poised to launch as early as February 24th. That was kind of when the window opened. And so my guess would be sitting here on this, what, second day of March or third day of March, somewhere in the March here, that it's probably already launched.

And they've already gathered the information. But as is typical in the science where there would probably be six months to 18 months before we get a paper on what exactly they found. But, yeah, I believe that rocket is already shot up there. And they've already got those readings. So, man, it's just a beautiful... Every once in a while when I'm writing a science story, I have more fun digging through the pictures. You know, like every once in a kid,

it's just like, yeah, like that Star Wars picture from the one before. I think MJ Benayas, our editor, picked that out for that, for another article I wrote about the binary stars like a year ago. So I was digging through pictures for this one. And I mean, these Northern Lights images are so beautiful. So, yeah, this was just a fun one to dig into and write about. Cool, cool. You know, and it reminds me, actually, this whole concept of, like, flying something in, gathering data.

Remember Twister when they put the door at the end of the tornado to try to gather what's inside of a tornado, what's going on? It's another tornado. So maybe within this Aurora, we're going to find another Aurora. Or maybe we are going to find some signs of intelligence. in there. Who knows, man. Who knows? It's definitely that's the thing about unexplained things in science, Ryan.

They have an idea of what caused it because of those World War I radio pickups and the fact that it's been picked up using radio technology since. But yeah, as of now, it's an unknown cause, the pulsating phenomenon. Well, hey,

I'm looking forward to the results and I can't wait, man. If anything, this is a beautiful, image that I just want to keep up here for the rest of the show. I'll admit I picked that one out. I had about 10 of them and this one with the two people sitting there staring at I with that is just beauty. That's it.

That's the one. I love it. Well, hey, speaking of unexplained, let's move to this really cool story that you did that really comforted me. I know a lot of people out there, you know, they fear what comes after, after, you know, we cease to be here on this planet. And, um, this story. kind of gave me some comfort and hope, you know, of like what happens and what could possibly

happen. And we might be getting closer to answering some of those questions. You have people like Robert Bigelow looking into the science of consciousness and the afterlife. And now you have these scientists looking into what actually flashes before your eyes. We know that old cliche of your life flashes before your eyes. And we're coming to realize that might actually be true. So yeah, would you mind telling us a little about does your brain replay your best life when you die? Yep. First of all, yeah, this is a really interesting story to look into. And basically what happened here is researchers had this patient. He was 87 years old. He was having regular seizures and they knew he was in ill health and near the end of his life. And so they had him

hooked up to MRI brain scan imaging type equipment to basically monitor these seizures to try and get an insight into what was causing the frequency and maybe even help him with some treatment as he was aging. And what happened was is in the middle of one of these sessions, he had a heart attack and passed away. As I point out in the story, that's the sad part of the story. The interesting part is having a guy whose brain is hooked up to all this equipment at the moment he passes away provided this treasure trove of information that you can't

plan for. You know, you can't have this expensive of equipment and this level of monitoring going on on a brain anytime you think somebody might be close to dying. They just happen to be studying for another reason. And what they was really incredible. So there's all kinds of brainwave and brainwave activity that comes out of your brain.

And by brain waves, that's just the electromagnetic description of the shape the electricity is taking in your brain. I mean, it's a complex term for a simple process. But the different brain waves we often see in there, like beta waves,

alpha waves, gamma, delta, theta waves, all of these sort of things. And What they found was when this guy passed at the moment of death, and for some period of minutes afterwards, they were seeing activity in his brain in the areas of the brain associated with memory and in all of these different brainwave patterns representing like thought and analysis and, you know, emotion and all these other things were all.

mixed up, but happening in a very normal way that one would associate with almost like a dream recall state, where you're having a pleasant dream, where you're remembering a great memory as a childhood or something like that. And that was the most, most apt description of the wave pattern and the brain regions they were seeing in this guy. Is it sure as heck looked like he was reliving his best life, that as he was reliving his best life, that as he was was on the way out the door. And even after his body had stopped functioning, his brain was still playing out the end of that show.

I think somebody contacted me via Twitter and was like, well, isn't this a bit reductive and doesn't make consciousness a local phenomenon? I thought actually, if anything, it lended great credence to a non-local conscious phenomenon. Because after the body is not really perfectly working anymore, and you are essentially dead, this antenna that in a non-local consciousness theory, that your brain is more like an antenna picking up on consciousness and conveying it,

then yeah, that would be what you might see is the body stop working, but the brain's still picking up a little bit of signal while it's viable. And what it's, it's almost like a transition. So it's not, yes, it could be the fact that in a material world, what they caught was an image of somebody, dying and having pleasant memories on the way out the door. But in a life after death or a continuation of consciousness or a more particularly like

a quantum non-local consciousness argument, which is relatively new in science, but a pretty popular area of study, this lends just as much credence to that area, if not more. So it was a really, like you said, Bigelow and these other ones that are kind of looking into it at this time for them to have this chunk information. like this where you could look at and go, here was a guy while he was passing away, and we have this information. And this information looks like, yeah, he was channeling his best life. I love it.

I absolutely love that. Like, you couldn't plan these things any better, you know? And that's kind of the beauty of science. Like, a lot of it is happenstance, and we just happened to trip upon something, you know, unbeknownst to us at the time. And there you go. Scientific, you know, discovery made. It happens all the time, Ryan.

You know, we will joke about like propitia to keep you from losing your hair was like a blood pressure medicine, right? Like this happens all the time that you find something. You're looking for one thing and you find something else. I have one of the stories on the list you gave me is where they were looking to confirm one planet, they found a whole other one, right? So like, there are definitely circumstances like that. And yeah, in this case, they're studying epilepsy, they're studying seizures, and all of a sudden, they're able to publish an entire paper about what happens in the brain at the moment of death,

something they were not working on at all, but all of a sudden here they are publishing a paper on it, because it's that significant of a recording, you know, the right place at the right time. Crazy, crazy. Well, let's move to that, that story you were talking about, about finding another planet. This is the new planet found orbiting Proxima Centauri. Now, you know, we hear about these ideas of exoplanets and things like that. But this is a little bit closer to us, you know, our stellar neighbor, as it were. So, yeah, would you mind telling us a little bit about this story?

Do you like stories of the strange, the weird, and the unexplained? Then we want you to check out Jim Harold's campfire. The concept is pretty simple. Jim talks to regular people about strange stuff that happens to them. And yes, that includes UFOs, along with cryptids, ghosts, and head scratchers. He doesn't exaggerate or play a lot of spooky music, kind of like I'm doing right now. The stories speak for themselves. One's like a ghost story involving serial killer Ted Bundy, or the young man who encountered an eight-legged demon.

Then there's the story of an alien abduction by what could be considered a reptilian. Now, not all the stories are horrifying. Some are actually pretty heartwarming, like a visit from a past loved one or a peaceful near-death experience. Regardless, these are just. true and fascinating stories told by ordinary people who've had extraordinary experiences. Tune in to Jim Harold's Campfire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to somewhere in the skies. And remember, stay spooky.

This is really exciting to me. So if it's some day in time, our technology is advanced enough that we, that we, we're going to go to other star systems, and we're going to go to other planets that aren't in our solar system, and we're going to study planets, hopefully rocky planets that are in the habitable zone, that have a chance at life, what better place to start than, you know,

the closest one, which is proxmus and start. And at one point, I believe, is 2016, they found the telltale wobble, again using the wobble method, but that teltyle shimmy of the star that indicated there was a planet there. And not only is there a planet there that they found,

they dubbed that one Proxima B, but that Proxima B is indeed the right orbit, the right orbital distance from its star, to have water, the habitable zone, to have liquid water on the surface. So it's an Earth-like planet. It's size-wise, mass, and habitable zone. So we already knew, like, hey, if we're going to ever go to the stars,

let's see if there's a planet around the closest one. They found it. So this latest study is exactly what you and I just talked about. So here we are 2021 last year, and researchers that they, I believe, it was the let me double check here yes so there's the thing called the european southern observatory in chile and they have a telescope there it's my favorite telescope name it's the vl t which stands for very large telescope so it's by far the best i mean Hubble all these other are great but that's a

great thing come on yeah how literal can you get yeah the ESOVLT is about as cool as it gets right the very large telescope. So researchers use this very large telescope to again look at Proxima and to measure the light coming from the host star and see if they could confirm that that Proxima B, that planet exists. And they found two things. One, yes, Proxima B is there. And two, by the way, there's a whole another planet there too, Proxima D. And yes, now Proxima D is not in the

habitable zone. It's smaller than Earth. It's also rocky. But it's much closer to the horse star. So think of like a mercury and how close it is to our sun. And therefore on the surface it's like a molten lava hell, you know, right?

Like nothing would probably live there. And so that's what they found. So So they did confirm the planet they were hoping to confirm, and while we're here, there's another planet here. Now, the reason that's encouraging is because we're hoping Proxima B is habitable, but multi-planet systems have various astronomical advantages in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So ideally you would have like a big gas giant, like a Jupiter that does end Saturn in our solar system that kind of like keep a lot of the big rocks from coming. coming in and slamming into us and killing life over and over. So signs of more planets in a star system that has a habitable zone is already really

encouraging. So I wrote another story not that long ago about a mission being developed using directed energy propulsion. So basically you put like a satellite space that has a laser and you put like a solar sail that uses that you propel with that laser. You know, imagine like you have a like a little parachute, you're shooting it with your hose, right? It's pushing

it forward. So this laser would hit that solar sail, and this is using current technology. So this is something that's within our viable range. And if you could shoot, and the mission they're designing is to go to Proxima Centauri. So if you shoot

that thing with the laser and you keep the laser pointed on it. You keep pushing that probe faster and faster. There is a point around 20 to 30 percent the speed of light where other aspects of physics get involved that prevent it from really probably traveling much faster. But imagine you could get to 20 percent of speed of light, which seems something we will be able to do. May not be in my lifetime, maybe in yours, but we're not that far from doing this sort of directed energy propulsion. If you could go 20% the speed of light and Proxima is a little over four light years away, my simple math tells me that's about 20 years.

Yeah. Nothing. That's nothing, right? Like the two Mars rover Spirit and Opportunity launched to the Mars in the mid-90s. Like, that's almost 30 years ago. So the late 90s, the fact that, like, we could send a probe. Now, granted, it's not going to land on those. planets. It's not going to do anything other than whip by them and take pictures and readings

and stuff. But it will do that. So the idea that we have a first place to look that's within technological spitting distance, at least within the next 20, 30 years. And the fact that there's a habitable planet there and the fact that we found this other planet, I mean, that is, Because imagine the We went, oh, the closest star has no planets. The second closest, you know, the only place we found planets are 40, 50, 60, 1,000 light years away, 10,000 light years away. No, the very closest one has a habitable planet.

Now we found another planet there too. Crazy, man. To think that, like, maybe it's a lot closer than we ever thought it could be. And just think of, like, how that would shatter the skeptics and the debunkers who refuse to say that nothing could travel here in terms of light speed, and it's impossible mathematically. And now, like, there are a lot of scientists are turning, you know, turning face and saying, huh, we could have been wrong on this the whole time.

So it's exciting. If you were building a case in the courtroom in 1969 at the end of Blue Book for aliens already being here visiting us, you would have to build the case that humans could survive long-term or anything could survive long-term in space. You would have to build the case that there are planets around other stars. You would then have to build the case that some of those planets would be rocky like Earth. Then you would have to build the case that some of them would have water. They'd have to build the case that some of those rocky water ones would be in the habitable zone. And then you would have to build the case that, yes, traversing the interstellar distances for that life to get here.

In my lifetime, I was born in 1969, the year that men first, humans first walked on the moon, and the year that Blue Book finished up. And I can tell you that in my lifetime, everything but the last one on that list has been covered, right? Like, there are planets everywhere. Humans, we can send things up into space for a year or two-year journey. they're in the habitable zone, they're rocky planets, and not only are they common, they're extremely common.

Avi Lowe at Harvard said in an interview the other day that data seems to indicate that as much as half of the planets that are sun-like, that have a star like our sun, have rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone. I mean, think about that. Like, everyone talks about the billions of galaxies and billions of star systems, think about the idea that like half of them would have a planet around it.

And then all these binary ones that we talked about, half of those or more would have these habitable zone exoplanets. So what happens to the discussion about life already visiting Earth, whether it's happening or not? But what happens about that theoretical discussion? if we start finding signs of life in the atmosphere in these planets we're finding is common. What happens if you say, all right, we've spotted 25,000 planets, and 10,000 of them are rocky, and 5,000 of those are in the habitable zone. And of those 5,000 habitable ones, a couple of thousand of them have gases in their atmosphere that seem to indicate they have living things there.

Now you have a ton of origin points of life that could be coming here. And again, you just get down to, like you said, that interstellar distance, which is legit. It's a legitimate issue. But again, in the last 120 years ago, we didn't have an airplane, right? Like, we didn't have an airplane. And here we are in virtually one, the oldest person on the planet, I think, is 118. And I think it's a Japanese woman. So she was alive before airplanes flew.

and in her lifetime, we're sending missions across the solar system. We have spacecraft that left in the 70s that have already left our solar system. Voyager 1 and 2 have already left the solar system. Think of that in that short period of time, the technological advancement, and then tell me that in 50 years or 500 years or 5,000 years that the human species won't be able to go across those interstellar distances, even with the probe, I find it a ridiculous proposition. Absolutely.

I couldn't agree more, man. I think we're building that case. And it's like you said, we're so close. Within within the span of a few decades, we've been able to accomplish that. So I can't even imagine. If that last one, that last challenge is the only thing keeping us back, like just think of when we will be able to do that. And who knows, man, could still be within.

in the lifetime of that Japanese woman. Who knows? Who knows? I mean, really, right? We're really, things are moving so fast, Ryan. That's, you know, me. I report on exotic propulsion. So I talk to these people that are building, working on work drives and solar sales and

directed energy and plasma rockets and fusion energy propelled rockets that can go 10%, 20% the speed of light. I mean, a bunch of technologies that, again, if you look 50 or 100 years, ago, the technologies that were in development, not only have they all been developed, the ones

from 100 years ago, but we've gone way past that. So these are things we're planning now. Where are we going to be in 50 years or 100 years? I think when you're doing the Ryan Sprague, somewhere in the sky's a 3D hologram podcast in the meta-verse like 30 years from now, you may be talking about a probe zeroing in on Proxima and that habitable planet, get ready to take photos. I just don't think it's that far away. Let's hope so, man. Let's hope so. Well, hey, it's so cool. I know, I know. That's why I love the stories you bring forward. This isn't like dry, you know, data-driven, you know, mathematical stuff. Like, you're showing us the ambitions of the scientists out there, the ones who are willing to ask those tougher questions and not conform to the, you know,

the status quo of science. And that's what the debrief is all about, you know, disruptive science. And what's that next step? And who's willing to take those risks to ask those questions? And I know those are kind of the people that you have spoken to and the stories you're bringing forward. And this last one that I kind of wanted to talk to you about,

at least the stories I wanted to share. I know there's a couple more that are going to be coming out that you're going to tease for us here. But this idea, this I love this theory. I've been all about it for years. The idea that we are the aliens to our own planet. Earthling is but a subjective term when it comes to who we are as a species. So, yeah, apparently this theory is a lot more plausible than we think,

and scientists are looking further into it. So would you mind telling us a little about this story of the origins of our species? Possibly. Possibly. This is as fundamental as science question as there is, Ryan. And I mentioned that right at the beginning of this article. I'll keep going to fix this right here. This is as fundamental as questions get.

If you look at the history of life on our planet and you start with the earliest forms of life, maybe three, 400 million years after the planet first form, so we're going back maybe four billion years in time. those first microscopic organisms over time evolved into different things and those evolved into things and if you skip ahead of today all of the forms of life you see on earth from plants to microscopic eukoroids or whatever they call them to animals to you and me this is all relatively traceable from a scientific perspective.

If you give me that first organisms, you give me those first microscopic organisms, and you give me enough time, and you give me just the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest, that over time you will get this vast array of organisms. And it's something we can trace through the fossil record. It's something we see happen every day today. So you can look at the coronavirus and see how it's evolving across general.

generations as it continually replicates. So that evolutionary process seems to indicate that the complex life we see today came from that simple life. But the question has always been, where did that simple life come from? How do we go from zero to one? We know how we go from one to where we are here. It's evolution. And there you could argue the science and some of the aspects of the,

evolution that people get more frustrated about. But the bottom line is there's a nice fossil record showing billions of years of evolution to get to where we are. But that beginning, that idea of here you have a planet, it's got water, it's got rock, it's got all these minerals and things, but nothing is alive on it. There's nothing alive. And then something is suddenly alive. suddenly we have one.

We have microscopic organisms. And once you light that fire, it's just a matter of time and pressures to end up with complex life forms. That just seems to be the pattern. How do we get to one? How do we go from zero to one? So when I was growing up taking science classes, there was this term that scientists liked to use. It was a prebiotic soup. And it was this the idea that like on Earth you had these like thermal vents and it was gurgling and there's volcanic activity and lightning and all these things kind of magically combine and boom.

You have the first like amino acids turning into peptide chains and you have those peptide chains turning into, voila, those very first microscopic organisms. and you go from no life to life, some sort of Frankenstein combination of electricity and heat and chemistry and boom, we have life. And then from there it's just a runaway train to get to where we are now. Interestingly, that may very well be wrong. And that's what this new study and this new research.

And there's been some research kind of building here. So that old idea of the prebiotic soup, the magic formula on earth that takes just raw material and turns it into life, that belief has been under fire for a long time now. And this may be the nail in that coffee, because here's what they found. We know that the building blocks of life, things that are called amino acids, are everywhere. They're in space and they're constantly raining down on us.

They're constantly raining down on Earth. We find them in meteorites all the time. We find him in Martian meteorites. We find him in interstellar rock fragments. We find them in everything, right? So we know, like, the stuff you make life out of comes here all the time. But it really did seem like you needed that, that, again, that prebiotic soup with the electricity and all the magic stuff to turn it into life. However, what they did in a lab is they recreated the environment of space.

and they showed how they could take these glycine amino acids that are common in what I think they say in the interstellar dust cloud, in the vacuum of space, in an interstellar dust cloud, you'll find these. And in a simulated space-like environment, they were able to in one step turn that single glycine into a pepsychine chain, a polyglycline. chain. And again, without getting too much into like biology class and how this all works, the step from not life to life has this transition you have to go through, from individual amino acids to these chains that make like muscle tissue and bone and all this other stuff. But there was always this energy problem. And how do you make that happen? Well, they did it in a lab. And they simulated space. They were able to make peptide chains that were multiple amino acids long. Like, I think one of the chains was over a dozen long. And again, this is like a first try experiment.

And they were able to do it without the electricity or without the water. And that's critical because we always say, oh, you need water for life to form. Well, what may be the case is you need water for life to thrive. So that's what we have on Earth. We have the, basically, like imagine the seeds that are blown through the air. I live in a suburban neighborhood. And all of a sudden, like a plant will crop up in the middle of my lawn that is nothing I planted.

But maybe a bird was nice enough to plant it for me. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. This really lends an idea to an argument that life is common in the universe.

The planet Earth formed and once it kind of cool, and settled down. I mean, it's getting hit with these amino acids from day one. And once it cooled down and settled down, meaning tectonic activity, enough that life could take hold, that peptide chains and the building blocks and the actual early life structures were being made in space all on their own and we're raining down on us. And we just had to be a garden capable of fertilizing that life, of support. that life, of giving that, be the womb for that life. And maybe that's all Earth is. Maybe we don't create life here. We're just a nice batch of soil, and life essentially is planted here. At first, I didn't think it was real.

I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is our city. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials.

No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Interesting. We are the fertilizer to our own planet. I love that. I absolutely love that, man. It makes you think, you know, well, then what's the next chapter in the evolution? Well, you know, if you watch the movie Prometheus, right?

I think that was Prometheus, where this idea that, like, the guy seated his DNA into the water to build life, well, you know, that idea of panspermia, that idea of life across the cosmos being spread, maybe even intentionally, if you were going to intentionally spread life to another planet as an advanced species of some sort, that was your goal. rather than spreading something specific, if you could spread the basics, if you could spread these peptides and they take hold on the planet and given the materials that are on that planet, the minerals that are on the planet, the temperatures, all that things,

it creates life that is more or less unique to that planet. So rather than sending down engineered organism, go, we'll give them a cow and we'll give them a duck and we'll give them a woolly mammoth and a couple of people, and whatever, like a Noah's Ark, it's like, no, no, no. Let's just send down the seeds and what grows grows. See what happens. So it lends an argument, A, that life could just be everywhere, which is what those of us

who are in this field, and I say it all the time, people that work at NASA, the European Space Agency, place like that, if you ask them in 2022, they will tell you their primary mission is now the search for life. They were astronomy organizations in the 20th century. In the 21st century, NASA employs astrobiologists, exobiologists,

jobs that didn't exist 15 years ago, 20 years ago, even some of them 10 years ago. So in that search for life, the idea that not only may Earth not be that unique, but life may have not even started here.

Life just may be in the cosmos, just may be something and it just, it rains down everywhere. And when it finds a nice patch of soil, I mean, drive down the street, I see little, like, little twig growing up in the crack and the concrete. Earth just may be the crack in the concrete, man.

And that's where life came up. I love it. I love it. Hey, purple rain, right? Right, yep. That's all I got to say about that. Or chubby rain, as my wife would say. Hey, man.

Hey, we're all unique in our own ways. I think Chubby Rain is a reference from the Eddie Murphy movie. We're at the end of the movie. It's the Chubby Rain. It's Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin. Oh, I remembered it. Look at that. Bowfinger.

Yes. Chubby Rain is the big line at the end of the movie. Product of the early 2000s, I think. Yes. Yeah, it's about 20 years old. It's a great film. One of my fingers. Eddie Murphy performances because he plays two characters in the movie,

and the nerdy brother character is one of his best performances. I love it. I love it. He's the master at playing, you know, those sorts of things. I love it. I love it. Well, hey, man, that's all the stories that I have from what I saw over at the debrief, but I know you're going to be coming out with some other ones in the coming days. This will probably, they'll probably be out by the time this airs, but are there any other articles you're really excited about teasing to us. year. Sure. So, they're going to be coming out soon.

I just put a video up that should go up in the next couple of days here. So about the time this podcast comes out, you can probably go ahead and look at it. And basically, there's a company in San Diego in Carlsbad, California, which is part of San Diego County, just south of me here in Southern California. And I wrote them about them last year. They've created a three-wheeled electric vehicle. It looks like an electric car, but it's got two wheels in the front, one in the back. Helps it qualify as a motorcycle, so it made it easier to get road legal, but it's enclosed, so you don't have to wear a helmet like a motorcycle.

They're called Aptera Motors. And the reason this car they created is really cool is a couple of things. And then the reason the video that just came out is really cool is a whole other thing. So what's great about this car is it's solar power. It's a purely electric vehicle. You can park it in your driveway. And it's covered in solar panels. And depending on where you live and how much sun you get, they say in a typical about 80% of the neighborhoods in North America, you would generate, excuse me, around 46 to 50 miles a day of driving energy in this car.

Right. So if you don't drive for two or three days in a row, you've got enough, you got like 150 miles driving. in really high sun areas, if you're like in Arizona or some parts of the southwestern U.S., some people calculate you'll get as many as 70 miles a day driving. But either way, so you've got this car, right? It's solar power. If you want to plug it in and charge it,

you can plug it in on a 110 AC outlet. So it'll, like, off your regular old plug, it'll get about 130 miles a day charge from that. And you can charge it when the thing is fully charged, it can go a thousand miles on one charge. And that's always the big anxiety with electric vehicles is what they call range anxiety. Anything over about three, four hundred miles is pretty rare for electric vehicles. So this new video that just came out is a drag race that the company put up. And they took their newer model, their Aptera Motors beta model, and they took their original, their Alpha model.

And they put them in a drag race against an Audi R8, which is an electric car, and a Tesla Model 3, which of course, we know Tesla is the gold standard of electric cars. And since Aptera Motors is the one to put the drag race up on their YouTube channel, I think you can guess who won the drag race. It was really neat to watch, because here you have a car that if, like, if you plug a Toyota Prius into an electrical outlet at your house and charge it up, all day, you get about like eight miles of driving. If you plug this thing and you get 130 miles. So it's this amazing car for that reason and the solar power

and then it's faster than the Tesla and the draggers. It'll go zero to 16 to about three and a half seconds. I mean, when I was a kid in the 80s, that was like Corvette times. Like you almost couldn't get cars. That was like Ferrari type times. Like there weren't cars that even did that.

So the thing's fast as heck. It's completely road legal. when I wrote about them last year, they were shooting for the end of 2020, 2021 to get their first models out. They're not quite out yet, but they're still expecting delivery sometime this year.

They're taking deposits. I don't get a commission, so I'm not selling them to you. But if you want to go watch the video and see this really killer electric vehicle, within that story, I have a couple other videos from the company showing things.

It's just a really neat vehicle. And yeah, And if a guy in a Tesla model 3 cut you off, you could dust him too. With this thing. Yeah, especially if you live in Arizona. I love it, man. Well, yeah, that's for the extra storage. But the speed is good anywhere you live.

But yeah, you can get extra miles of driving if you have good sun. No, the sun doesn't affect the acceleration on it. Okay. The one other story I was going to jump into here, and this is really cool, by the way. So if you cruise around the internet ever and you put in ionic wind or lifters or ionic lifters, and I think a lot of people kind of the UFO and science communities have done this. You go to YouTube, you'll see these videos of these things, and they usually like balsa wood triangle or a square with some foil wrapped around.

it and it has wires running to it and they flick the switch on and these things will hover and it'll like go up in the air with like no moving parts and as a matter of fact the scientists that first discovered it like a hundred years ago thought he had an anti-gravity

effect and it was known as the Befield Brown effect back in the day but it's basically an ionic wind so like you know like the air filter in your house those ionic air filters where you turn it on, and there's a little breeze going through there, right? Like it actually pushes air through.

But there's no fan moving. It's just the thick and thin electronic substrates on either side using an electric charge to create a wind by moving air through there. So in water, it's like an electro-hydrodynamic effect. So in air, the term they're using is an electro-aero-dynamic propulsion. If you could theoretically build this into a vehicle. Now, here's always been the problem. When you build one of these hobby lifters, the power plant and the battery or whatever's powering it has to be down on the ground. You've got a tether to it because it's just the weight doesn't work.

The thing doesn't create enough lift for the batteries to be on. board. So even though people have been building these lifters for generations, you can't build one and go out jumping it and fly around because it just, just the battery alone, just there's too much weight, the power plant alone. No matter how you power it, it can't create enough lift. Well, in 2018, some researchers at MIT built this model airplane. And I have that in the video, as well as the new update, which is, again, they're one of these groups from NASA. They got funding to take the plane to the next level.

And this model plane flies with no moving parts. And on the video, you see it fly through the MIT gym. And it kind of looks like a Wright Brothers, like bywing, like Kitty Hawk, sort of like really simple design. But the main thing is it's not tethered to anything. it's carrying its own I forget what type of

their lithium polymer batteries I believe not lithium I am but they're a type of battery that they were able to conserve enough of the weight and they were able to get enough lift off of this airplane in 2018 that the thing does fly

on its own. Now the reason this is really interesting is if you think about the reports of drones or or UAPs harassing the U.S. military off the coast, and you think of the descriptions of some of them and their performance capabilities, it sure sounds like something you would think of as anti-gravity. But what these guys are designing is something that has no moving parts,

is completely silent, but flies just using the power of electricity. In my story, I even show a design of one that was built in the early 2000s, that looks like a flying saucer. And that one actually took off the ground and hovered for about three minutes before it late set back down. And we have heard nothing about that design. And that's, I don't know if it's, you know, something's going on behind the scenes or whatever, but that one kind of came and went 2006. But it's on Wikipedia.

I put a link to it. You can look at the flying saucer one. The video of this airplane is real. And so because of that success at MIT of flying, of a vehicle powered just with the power of electricity and no moving parts. NASA said, all right, here's a chunk of money.

You guys go to phase two as opposed to phase one. We want to try and build one of these that would be like a drone that can fly over an area where sound is an issue. So imagine like packaged drones, right, that we want

flying in neighborhoods or airplanes you want flying over or even delivering medicine at 2 a.m. to a critical patient, but it's where people don't want stuff flying overhead because of noise. Imagine these perfectly silent vehicles

that have no moving parts that fly just using electricity. So that's what the grant is for, is to try and develop that technology further, to create these new ducted type of

I'm trying to think of what they call them, like these electrodynamic ducts that would funnel the air in a better way and you would put them stack them. It's a really interesting article. It's not that complex. I make it more complex than it is. But basically it's silent.

No propellant, no moving now no propellant. It is pushing ionic wind through it, but you don't have to put any on board propellant. You don't have to put like rocket view or something off it to fly around. It can just fly around using electricity. So if

they're already building a little plane out of, of it that they can fly around. The idea of one of these get to the point of a drone, which is what they're talking about, that may be able to carry sensors on it or carry a package on it or whatever, and then you scale up to the idea of maybe you could solar power

it, so it doesn't have to carry the batteries on board. There's a lot of interesting technological applications that this group is going to be looking for that. But yeah, it's called electro-erodynamic propulsion, and it is something being funded by NASA, and they

got a real little airplane at MIT that flies. So it's pretty cool. Phase two, here we come. Oh, so cool. So cool. Well, hey, Chris, this has been incredible, man. I knew that all I had to do is pick some headlines and we would have enough to talk about for over an hour, man. So I'm going to wrap things up here with you. But I want to thank you. Every time you come on here, I can just hear the passion and the excitement in your voice. And it should, shows by the voluminous amounts of articles you put out over there at the debrief. And, you know, man, it gives me hope for the future. And what they can accomplish?

My pleasure, man. So, I can tell you the one thing I wanted to bring up before we got on, because it's really happening right now is that because of what's going on in Ukraine, I thought Tim McMillan, who I worked with at the debrief and who you work with, put an interesting tweet out this morning. And he said, well, I guess we know now that the UAPs that have hovering around our military are not Russian. Because if they had that technology, they'd be using it, right? They're in a live combat situation that's not going that well for that.

You know, Tim's been writing these updates on the debris with some pretty neat inside information about what's going on behind the scenes and what the situation on the ground really is. and the areas that maybe Russia made a lot of miscalculations. But I thought it was just an interesting point that we've had this list of are UAP's American secret project, Russian, Chinese, or other, right? The other was always the interesting one because we always seemed to be able to eliminate the first three. Well, now I feel like we can fully eliminate Russia. Tim put that out. I don't have like a thousand likes, but I read that this morning, and I said he's exactly right. We're in a live combat situation over there. If Russia had these things, they'd be used.

So I just thought it was an interesting piece of information he noted this morning. And yeah, I wanted to use as an opportunity to promote the fact that he's just doing amazing coverage over at the debris. So you want to hear about like the story inside the story of Ukraine and what he's hearing from intelligence people, what he's hearing from military people. and kind of like the stuff he's sharing with us. It's really cool. So, yeah, one thing for sure, it seems those, what Ryan Graves and these other Navy pilots were seeing, harassing their carrier groups are not Russian. Yeah. Let's hope so, man.

And let's hope for the best, honestly. Yeah, well, that too, of course. But I just thought it was interesting that you could kick them off the list of whoever's behind the UAP. So I thought that was an interesting revelopment, as we would say. Yep. The mystery remains. I love it. Well, hey, man, of course, before we go, I have to ask, you know, besides your Twitter handle there on the screen, where can we find everything you're up to?

So the best place, obviously, just keep going to the debrief.org. I do anywhere from eight to 15 stories a week, just depending on what I'm covering, what we're covering. I know people have been private messaging me about some stories I've teased in the past, and yes, nothing has disappeared. Things are still coming. We're working on some really neat stuff. I can tell people that 2022, I just feel like the balance of this year has some pretty interesting revelations on tap. And if you want to read my writing about science, technology, any of these cutting-edge things every day at the debrief, You can follow me there on Twitter. I do have my own website, but I don't do much on it. If you're somebody who reads fantasy novels or if you want to read my science fiction novel and it comes out later this year, that website is plainfiction.com. Just like you're seeing my Twitter is plain underscore fiction.

My website is just plainfiction.com. And I think my first book is up there for 99 cents right now. So knock yourself. What a steal? You are a Renaissance man through and through. So Chris, of course, my man, thank you so much again for joining me on Somewhere in the Skies. Thanks for having me, Ryan. It was a blast. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One podcast network.