Stuff You Should Know - How Terraforming Will Work

Episode Date: November 27, 2014

A lot of great thinkers are warning that if humans are to survive as a species we are going to have to find another planet to live on. Terraforming, or engineering a planet to maintain all of the ingredients to sustain life, seems to be the answer. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention, Bachelor Nation, he's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever

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with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. Chandler's over Chuck's shoulder in the window.

Creepy. Things all weird. I'm hot and you're cold. Uh, yeah, I'm cold. One of us is Mars and one of us is Venus. Isn't that a book? Chuck is from Mars, Josh's from Venus. It is, it's a bestseller.

In the podcast co-host segment of Barnes and Noble. Are those still around? Yeah, they got like three books. In three stores. That one, Click and Clack, by the way, RIP. Yeah, RIP. Legend. Yeah.

Man, that was a sad one. Was he Click or Clack? You know, I always got that confused. It was Tom, right? I want to say Click, but... But it was Tom who died. Yeah. And his younger brother Ray's still around.

Yeah, very sad. Yeah, that was a great show, man. Yeah, my hat was off to NPR for like immediately, like lowering the flag and making a big deal out of it. I mean, like, it was cool. Yeah, he certainly taught us a thing or two. They did about just... Everything we know.

Kind of being natural goofs. Leaving it in everything. Exactly. So hats off to you, sir. So Chuck, moving along to terraforming. Yes. Did you know that a recent study found that even if we instituted

a global one-child policy, like China. Yeah. But global. Sure. By 2100, which is less than 100 years away now. Yeah. It's like 85 years away. That's not that far.

No. We'd be able to keep the population at about current levels. A lot of people would say the current level is too much as it is. Yeah. But if we didn't do anything and continued on this pace of growth,

we'd hit about 12 billion people by 2100. Yeah. That is a ton of people. It's a lot of folks. There's a lot of stretch on resources for agriculture. Yeah. Fuel, energy, all that kind of stuff.

And it's caused a lot of people, numbers like this, studies like this, it's caused a lot of people to say, how are we gonna support all of these people? Yeah. Did you know a lot of people poo-poo that notion? Oh yeah. Yeah.

You told me that. I had no idea when I did that little video on overpopulation. A lot of people are like, this is not a problem. This is a conspiracy. Right. There's a definite division between camps. There's the gloom and doom camp

who say like we're screwed. Sure. And then there's the other camp who says, we'll always technologically advance our way out of trouble like this. Right? Sure. Is that what you're saying?

I don't know what the point was. I think there's a camp that says overpopulation is not an issue like people say it is. Well, I think if you redistributed people, yeah, it's possible that that could alleviate overpopulation if it is a thing. Yeah. But I think most people, I can't even say that.

Some people would say that agriculture has what's called a carrying capacity. Yeah. We've talked about Malthus before and that we are possibly stretching it right now. Sure. So a lot of people, the ones who do believe in the overpopulation problem,

are starting to look to the stars and saying, hey man, let's figure out how to exploit other planets too. Yeah. So the human race can survive. Isn't that what Interstellar's about? That new movie? And it was totally, I didn't think like, oh, Interstellar, this'll be timely.

Like the two just happened to coincide. Is it about terraforming or is it just like, hey, go find a place that's hospitable? Well, according to what Michael Cain says in the preview, it's about just going to find a hospitable planet, which is a search that is currently underway and has been for a while through NASA's Kepler Observatory. Yeah.

They've been looking for exoplanets and supposedly, right now, they're 1,854 confirmed exoplanets, 4,173 unconfirmed, and all of them are between 10 light years and 25,000 light years from Earth. Pretty far. It is. Right now, it's prohibitively far. Yeah.

But there are planets out there that exist in what's called the Goldilocks zone, which is they orbit a star and they're just far enough away from the star that they're not gonna burn to a crisp. Right. But they're not so far away that you're gonna freeze to death, hence the Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold. Gotcha.

You got it? That's so cute. So that's one thing we could do. We could go find a planet that's ready made for us to live on. Yeah, I doubt that exists, though. Yeah, and plus, even if we did find it, like I said, the closest exoplanet that we know of, I think, is about 10 light years away.

That means it would take a photon, which travels at the speed of light, 10 years to get there. We can't travel anywhere near the speed of light, so it might as well not exist. We're not photons. So, no, we're not. So, alternately, a lot of people are proposing

to take a planet or a moon or asteroid or something and turn it into something habitable for us, and that's terraforming. Yeah, find a nice little fixer-upper planet, go in there and flip it and move humanity there to ruin it. Maybe have a meltdown in front of the cameras. Yeah. Make a couple of stupid things.

Cliffhangers. Sure. Boom, you've got yourself a series. That's right. Terraforming, we did a short video about this once, about 100 years ago, where we explained it in 60 seconds. We should just try that again. No, not that.

Just press play and sit back. We also did one about building a lunar base. Yeah, sure. I almost said a lunar base on the moon, but that's redundant. Yeah. And that's another idea is, well, we could just build lunar bases and stuff like that.

I think Russia is doing that, right? They announced in May or June. They want to build a habitable base up there, right? They plan to spend several hundred million dollars and put it on the moon and just start mining the moon. They want to get a jump on the rest of humanity, and it's pretty smart. But building a lunar base or building a base anywhere,

a floating city on Venus or anything like that, it's not terraforming. That's building a base somewhere or a floating city somewhere. Yeah, we're talking about changing the atmosphere of a planet and more. Yeah, which requires a substantial amount of energy, a lot of foresight, and a tremendous amount of patience.

And money. Yeah, I am money. But I mean, if you take money and the amount of time, I would say the amount of time is more depressing than the amount of money you're gonna have to sink into it. Because what we're talking about is stuff that's not going to take place until millennia have passed. Yeah, there's all sorts of ranges

of how long it might take to terraform a planet. Right. From a thousand years to 20,000 years. Right, I saw 40,000. Yeah. For Mars, for us to be able to go to Mars and take off a helmet and be like, Michio Kaku has a very cheap idea.

Have you ever seen his little short videos? No. He explains in 60 seconds. What is he, what's his idea? He's like, you know, there's lots of CO2 under the surface and all we have to do is heat that up a little bit and jump start the process. Yeah.

And then it creates what he called a catalytic effect and it just sort of sustains itself. Well, let's talk about that. It just needs a jump start. Yeah, so that's called, what he's talking about is called the standard paradigm. Yeah. That Mars has enough CO2 on the planet

that if, like he says, you can just melt it, it will create an atmosphere that traps heat. Yeah. You know, we have a problem with CO2 on this planet. So it's another reason people say we need to go find another planet and create a greenhouse effect and that will trap heat which will melt more CO2

and more and more and it will just create this cycle. Do there what we don't want to do here. Exactly. Yeah. Jump start it. Let's talk about Mars, man. You got some time to rap about Mars and why Mars is frequently pointed to

as an ideal locale for terraforming. Yeah, if you listen to our April episode on Mars, then you know a lot about Mars. But we're gonna recap some of it. Mars is a very cold, dry, dusty place now, but it used to be wet and warm and a lot more like Earth than a lot of surrounding planets.

So they think if we can just get it back to that state, then we've got a good start. Probably the key to Mars more than anything else that makes it the likeliest candidate for terraforming is that the Martian day is 23.7 hours, I think. It's almost exactly like Earth's day, right? Oh, is it getting shorter? Or no, 24.7 hours, I'm sorry.

24 hours and 37 minutes? Something, yes. Yeah. 0.7 is 37 minutes, isn't it? Sure, I just wanted to give it a relatable angle. So it's close, it's very close to the Earth's day. And that indicates that it spins. So if Mars is already spinning,

it has a huge leg up over the competition in the terraforming contest. Yes. So many, many years ago, Mars was wet. There was volcanic activity and it was getting bombarded by asteroids. That's right. That did two things, Chuck, two huge things for Mars.

One, these asteroids were bringing in gases or compounds that Mars needed to have an atmosphere, right? It was supplying the planet with it. And then the volcanic activity was taking these compounds and elements that were locked into rock and stuff like that and recycling them back into the atmosphere, which was sustaining the atmosphere, right? Yeah, which was great as long as that was going on,

but once those volcanoes stopped, and it was lousy with volcanoes, once they stopped doing their recycling gig, it basically absorbed all that stuff and locked it in the planet. Yeah, the same thing would happen here, apparently. Like if we didn't have volcanic activity, what volcanoes do, one of the things they perform

is atmospheric recycling, which is taking this stuff that you normally have in the atmosphere that's been absorbed by the soil or by rock and boiling it, melting the rock and spewing it out as a gas back in the atmosphere. And like you said, when Mars stopped doing that, the recycling process stopped, and all of a sudden you just had a static atmosphere

that slowly was stripped away. That's right. Another part of the problem was Mars cooled at the core, and that means it lost its magnetic field, so the upper atmosphere was not being held in place any longer by the magnetosphere. So the solar winds were just stripping it away, and all of a sudden, Mars had this very thin atmosphere

that couldn't trap heat any longer, and the whole planet, like you said, got really dry and really cold like we know it today. That's right, and completely uninhabitable. A couple of other things Mars doesn't have going for it is it's not very close. It's what, like six months away to get there? Yeah, I guess.

Yeah, I think it's like a six-month trip to get to Mars, and that's a long way to go if you wanna make regular trips. Just it's cost-prohibitive. Yes, but compared to the moon, which you can get to like lickety-split. Yeah, that's like a weekender. Six months is, that's pretty distant.

Sure. But the fact, again, the fact that Mars has this history of being able to hold an atmosphere and surface water to huge factors in a habitable planet, Yeah. And the fact that there's stuff that's necessary for life, like CO2 and things like that, trapped on the planet already in a frozen form, really just kind of is a bright,

flashing neon sign to people saying, hey man, come terraform me. That's right. And we'll talk about some of the steps that you have to take to terraform a planet like Mars right after this. On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going

to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams,

canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so Mars is a good, it's a good nice old house that has good bones. Oh yeah, it's a great analogy. And we want to restore it to its former moist wet glory. Which sounds really gross.

Some people can't even hear the word moist, you know. Yeah, yeah. There's a whole, there's like a, yeah. I don't mind it. So Michio Kaku has the right idea. There are polar ice caps on Mars, which have a lot of CO2. And if you jump start those and start to melt them, let's say with solar reflective mirrors,

bounce that sun over there that way, that might be a good way to get things started. Right, and it's not going to take too terribly much energy to melt those that sequestered CO2. Because carbon dioxide, basically what those polar ice caps are is dry ice. Like Mars has dry ice all over it. That's from the atmosphere that was frozen, right?

That's right. And dry ice sublimates it, negative 109 degrees Fahrenheit, right? So if you can just direct some mirrors at it and just raise it to that temperature, that CO2 is going to go from ice and vaporize into gas and it's going to float up and hang in that thin atmosphere. And like we said, once you have that CO2 in that thin

atmosphere, you've just started this chain reaction that's going to create a cycle where the planet gets warmer and warmer and the more and more CO2 sublimates and joins the atmosphere and you have a runaway greenhouse effect. Apparently, at the peak, the calculations of the amount of CO2 on Mars says

that you would have a surface temperature of about 158 degrees Fahrenheit. That's great. Yeah. It's a little hot. But that means water can be sustained. That means that with that atmosphere, the air pressure will be increased.

Because right now, the air pressure on Mars is pretty low too. I think it's about 1% of sea level here on Earth, which is another challenge. Yeah, well, maybe once it's that hot, we can introduce hyperthermophiles. Because I know we'll get to Venus, but that's one of the ideas for Venus.

And the idea is you can't just plop humans down immediately. What you're going to have to start with is some basic form of life, some kind of bacteria perhaps that just starts doing its thing and chowing down on CO2 and making oxygen. And pretty soon, like many thousands of years later, humans might be able to live there. That's almost like the intermediate steps.

So the first step is to get an atmosphere back on Mars. And to get an atmosphere back on Mars, you take Michio Kaku's mirrors and melt the polarized caps. I don't think they were his mirrors, but yeah. Right. It's just nice to say his name sometimes. And you melt the polarized caps of dry ice, and you create this atmosphere, and you

allow water to melt onto the surface. And then you add something like, I think, the likeliest candidate is cyanobacteria, which is incorrectly referred to as blue-green algae. Who says that? Who says what? Blue-green algae. That's the other term for it.

Oh, really? But it's not an algae. It's like a protozoan, I think, or something. Or it's a prokaryote, not a eukaryote, like algae. Gotcha. Man, I feel nerdy right now. It's the oldest fossil on Earth. I mean, that's kind of where it all began.

Right. That's what gave Earth its oxygen. So we're saying, hey, why not try the same thing on Mars? Yeah. Got a bunch of CO2 on Mars, a runaway greenhouse effect? Well, it just so happens that cyanobacteria eats CO2. And not only does it eat CO2, it converts that stuff into oxygen as a waste product.

So all of a sudden, you have something, a living organism, on Mars that's converting the atmosphere into something breathable for us humans here on Earth. The problem is, you have to have water present for cyanobacteria to live. But you're going to have that water because you've melted the ice caps. You've melted the ice caps to get the CO2 released,

which is negative 109. You need to raise the temperature to at least 32 degrees to start melting the water, which requires even more energy. Where are you going to get that? Well, you're not going to introduce any cyanobacteria until you have that water. Like, that's the first goal. You can't have life without water.

Exactly. But once you do get the water going, which, again, you could use orbital mirrors, but you just have to concentrate them a little more to reflect more energy into a tighter spot. Sure. You've got the cyanobacteria. It's chomping away at the CO2.

It's producing oxygen. Some conservative estimates that I've seen are once you have the oceans or the surface water on Mars, which, staggeringly to me, we could do in a couple hundred years, supposedly. Yeah. That's nuts, man. Think about that.

Mars could be turned from a desert into a place with surface water in a couple hundred years. Yeah. That's not that far away. It's not. But after that, it would take about 40,000 years for enough oxygen to be introduced in the atmosphere for a human to possibly walk around on Mars.

Yeah, this is why it's so farfetched to me. Well, it's science fiction. It is farfetched. But if you take a long view of humanity and say, yeah, I mean, there's no reason. What was it made in the extinction episode? How long does the average species last? Wasn't it like 10 million years?

I don't know. Well, say it is even 1 million years. That means humans will be around, supposedly. I'd be surprised. Well, beyond 40,000 years. So we need to be thinking like in these terms, because there's no way Earth's going to last another 40,000 years for us unless we just radically re-engineer ourselves.

Yeah, I never thought of myself as a doom and glimmer, but I must be, because I don't know if humans will be around in 40,000 years. I guess we'll see. Yeah. All right, we won't see that. But I mean, technically, it should only take an existential catastrophe to get rid of humans.

Like we shouldn't just necessarily die off as a species. It should take something like a physics experiment gone awry, or a nuclear war, or a biochemical attack, something like that. Yeah, man will do it. Yes, it would be a self-injury, probably. Yeah, suicide. I guess.

Well, not suicide, murder. Murder humanity. So then there's two other things. And there's a guy named Martin Fogg who wrote a book called Terraforming, Engineering Planetary Environments. And he basically laid out what you have to do to get Mars going. And again, Mars is the easiest one to do, because it has that planetary rotation already.

But additionally, there's two other things you have to handle. One is the atmospheric pressure. So apparently, even at best, Mars would it be a lot like existing on a mountaintop here on Earth. Like the air would be thin. You'd be like living on the top of Mount Everest. You'd have to bring your own oxygen. You would, but maybe Tibetans and Ethiopian Highlanders

would make great early inhabitants of Terraformed Mars, because they're already used to that kind of thing. Sherpa. Exactly. The other thing is you need nitrogen. Nitrogen is vital to life and the atmosphere. Yeah, and there's not much nitrogen on Mars. No.

So they're saying, well, then all you have to do is start directing comets. Ammonia-based ice droids, I think is what they call them. Yeah, because I don't know if everyone knows this. Comets are, I think, one of the articles likened it to giant snowballs. And if you sent a comet and exploded it before it hit the planet, in theory,

it would send ice everywhere, which would be pretty cool. But you need a lot of comets. You would. It's not just like one comet and you're done. No, one and done doesn't apply to Terraforming. And we have to figure out how to steer these comets that way. Which apparently is not, I mean, using astrophysics, I guess, it's not all the realm of possibility

to steer a comet and then hit it with a nuclear device to blow it up so that it explodes into shards and then rains down on Mars. A lot of things could go wrong, though. Yeah, it's fraught with complications. Steering comets. But it is a viable way to introduce nitrogen to Mars. And it should ideally stick around, especially

once you have an atmosphere. So that's Mars. It's probably the way we're going to go. Keep an eye out, because in a couple of centuries, there'll probably be some seas on Mars. Yeah, and I think that guy that you mentioned, too, says, even if we do manage to do this, it's going to be a constant process of reintroducing

these elements, these volatile elements, to keep that atmosphere going. I don't know if Michio Kaku is right, if it would ever self-sustain. Well, it could, if you do that standard paradigm of creating a runaway greenhouse effect, what Martin Fogg is saying is, why would you want to do that? Because then you have a greenhouse effect

that you have to deal with. Well, that's what I was wondering. Yeah, then you have to rein that in. Exactly. He takes a longer view of just slowly introducing stuff again and again to create this Martian atmosphere over a longer period, but in a more granular way, like more directed than just creating

a runaway greenhouse effect. That makes more sense. A little more focused. Yeah. So we'll talk about some of Mars' rivals for the terraforming game right after this. Stuff is shouldn't matter. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s

called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back

to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends, and we dove in. And let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I guess I'm Venus, since I'm always hot, because Venus is a very hot place. It's very unlike Mars. But some people say Venus has a few things going for it.

Namely, it's super close, the closest planet to us. We have similar, almost, well, not identical, but very similar size and mass, and a very thick atmosphere, just like Earth does. So there's a lot of similarities there, but you're sort of working in the opposite direction of Mars, as you've got to cool Venus down a lot. And there's lots of wacky ideas on how to do that,

one of which is, what would you do if you were hot? Put up a big shade. Yeah, like one of those little umbrellas in a tiki drink. Yeah, just a giant one. Yes, basically, the idea is to block all sunlight from Venus and cool it. And apparently, in about 100 years, Venus's atmosphere, which is pretty substantial,

like you said, and almost all CO2, would freeze and fall to the surface. Well, there's also a lot of sulfuric acid. There is. But this atmosphere would freeze and create a surface layer, just like on Mars, like how the CO2 is locked in the polar ice caps, it'd be doing the same thing with Venus.

Then you'd have to go in and deal with this frozen atmosphere, which is kind of a thing. But you could use it to your advantage, Chuck, because the leg up, like I said, that Mars has over Venus, is that the Martian day is about 24 hours long, right? Well, the Venusian day is about 160 days long, which means it rotates way too slowly for us to be habitable for us.

So if you take this atmosphere and you freeze it and you create this frozen hulk of a planet, you can actually make it spin faster if you can blow the atmosphere off into space in a directed manner. Yeah, and actually, in show correction, that's 116 days is the length of their day. Gotcha, 116 Earth days, right?

Yeah, there you go. Not 160, but I think anything over 100, you just call it a big problem. Yeah, it's too long. So if you can figure out how to blow the atmosphere, the now frozen atmosphere off of Venus in the direction that it's already rotating, you could conceivably speed up the rotation of Venus.

Yeah, one of the other problems with Venus is there's no water, and as everyone knows, like we said, you need water for life, but then we come back to our comet idea of driving these comets and exploding them and creating water that way. And then the hyperthermiles, which I mentioned thermophiles, sorry that I mentioned earlier,

are these organisms that can thrive in really hot temperatures. And we're talking really hot. I think that the surface temperature of Venus is something like 800 degrees Fahrenheit, 872, which is 467 degrees Celsius. Yeah, the problem is we haven't found anything on Earth, any hyperthermophiles that can handle

that kind of temperature and pressure yet, but they think they exist. Yeah, did you mention the pressure of the atmosphere on Venus? It's 200 times the pressure at sea level here on Earth. It's a problem as well. But if you could find a hyperthermophile that could sustain that and a sulfur.

Yeah, which they do though. Yeah, and then yeah, because I think some of them are by thermal vents under water. Yeah, we know they serve sulfur, we just haven't found any that can sustain that kind of heat and pressure yet. It's only one way to find out,

and that's to launch them toward Venus and see what happens. Basically infect the planet is what you're talking about. Yeah. So the problem with all of this is to freeze Venus, it's gonna require a lot of energy to reflect all the light from the surface. To spit the frozen atmosphere out and the space is gonna require even more.

Basically it would require the amount of energy that the sun puts out in an entire year. That's crazy. It is crazy, it is crazy now, but have you ever heard of the Kardashev scale? Sure. So then you know there's type one, type two, and type three civilizations,

and a type one civilization uses all of the available energy from the star. So all of this energy that hits the earth normally from the sun, if you could harness all that, you'd be a type one civilization. We're not even there yet. Type two civilization could harness all of the energy that's created at the star,

not just the stuff that makes it to your planet. And if you could harness that, if you're a type two civilization, you could be doing this kind of terraforming, no problem. No sweat. No sweat, man. But I mean, if you think about it, if you have a couple of leaps forward in understanding,

a couple of geniuses are born and live in advanced human understanding over the course of a few generations, you could conceivably hit something like that in a hundred years. So I mean, it's not out of the realm of possibility that we could be doing stuff like this a hundred, 200 years from now.

Yeah, Venus, another idea they have instead of these huge giant shade sails would be to have a big floating pressurized geodesic sphere city that people basically would use the atmosphere because the atmosphere is okay, above the sulfuric acid that is. But that would provide shade. And then eventually it would cool the planet down enough.

Right. Just by creating a shadow. They'd be simultaneously sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere and breaking it down into carbon and oxygen as well, supposedly. So it'd be doing like two things at once. Not a bad idea. Yeah, no.

Sounds efficient, a little more efficient. And apparently if you pressurized like a indoor city or something like that, a floating city and put it into Venus's atmosphere, it would naturally float in the atmosphere. It would stay put. Yeah, I think that was the same for the solar mirror wouldn't have to be attached to anything either off of Mars.

I think it would just be held in place by, I think gravity and what? Solar bubble gum. Bubble gum. Yeah. And then of course, Chuck, there is the moon. Boo. Seems pretty unlikely.

The one thing that the moon has going for it is its proximity, basically. Yeah, basically it's like the moon is close, it's small. So you're not gonna have to spend a lot of money getting there and it's because it's small, you're not gonna have to spend a ton of money fixing it up. It's the budget terraforming idea. I guess the Russians are already be living there

at this point. I don't know if the moon is very viable though. Well, you'd have to again bombard it with something to get it to spin faster because right now it's days, 28 Earth days, right? Yeah, they said like a hundred comets at least. About the size of Haley's comet. Yeah, to get it just spinning faster

and perhaps knock it off its axis a bit and give it seasons, which would be nice. Yeah. Like we have here on Earth. My money's on Mars. It's got everything you need except for nitrogen and that you can just deliver however you like. I kinda like the shell idea that you sent along.

Ken Roy, he's an engineer who basically says why don't we just encase a small planet in a huge shell made of Kevlar and steel and dirt. Yeah. And just create like a huge geodesic dome around a planet. I guess the question is, is where are you gonna get all that dirt? I don't know.

Because that is an essential ingredient. Is it mostly dirt? If you place it in dirt, then you create an atmosphere between the shell and the dirt. Yeah. Where's all that dirt coming from? Adobe. I guess so.

Adobe sphere. I don't know. I think that's a pretty neat idea. It'd be, you know. I do too. It'd be all artificial. You'd have to have artificial light because you're inside a dome.

Right. And apparently you would have like airlocks and stuff to account for like the vacuum. Yeah. I don't know about that though. That sounds like sanction. He was saying the atmosphere would be just thin enough for gravity would be just light enough

so that humans could fly around. I swear to God he added that. No, no, no. I saw that. He's like just to sweeten the pod a little more. Yeah, to make it that much more cool. You'll be able to fly. So anyway, we'll eventually ruin this planet

and need something. Hopefully we'll have had the foresight to started terraforming in time. Yeah. Well, they're already working on it. Are they? No, I mean, people are talking about it. Proposing ideas, theoretical ideas.

I don't think they're like building. They should be. The asteroid slinger. They should have started in the 19th century. They're building a comet sling in Texas as we speak. Yeah. If you want to know more about terraforming, you can type that word in the search bar

howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for Chuck a very special edition, Thanksgiving edition of Administrative Eternity. That's right. We are here to say thanks because it's around Thanksgiving because my friend, it is Thanksgiving.

Oh, is it Thanksgiving Day? Yes. Well, of course it is Thursday. Unless you're in Canada and in which case, happy late belated Thanksgiving. Yes. Because they do theirs in like October. Weirdos.

I think so too. So who do we have to thank? Yeah, I mean, we have, for those of you who have never heard this segment, we have listeners that send us gifts from time to time and it is always very much appreciated and very nice. And so here they are. Yeah.

I'm going to start with the second page if you want to start with the first page. Sure, you go ahead Chuck. Anthony Savino sent us from his Etsy shop, Swiss chisel, a laptop and business card holders made out of old wine barrel staves. Yeah, those are nice. And he makes all kinds of stuff out of these things.

So check out a store, which is Swiss chisel. Yes, I'm Anthony. And Matt Perkey from EvolveWorkforce.com sent us some mugs. Matt's aim is to refine drug testing for states where marijuana is legal. So we can get an idea of what your intoxication is immediately after something like an accident or whatever.

Yeah, I was wondering about that. Well, states legalizing, like if your job, you know, if you have to get drug tested. This guy's on it. Interesting. EvolveWorkforce.com. Is that where the mug came from? Yes.

Okay. I thought that was a hint. New York, New York, the band sent us a promo CD, which is terrific. So we always like getting music from our musician friends. So thanks for that. Yep.

Mike Dudek from theklickypost.com. C-L-I-C-K-Y-P-O-S-T sent us cube pen holders of his own making. He also sent us some awesome pilot metropolitan fountain pens and rodea dot pads. Mike is a pen person. He wanted to share his passion with us. So thank you very much, Mike.

All right. We have an anonymous gift. Someone sent us a postcard from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glencoe, Georgia, along with the junior federal agent badges for all three of us. And have mine in my wallet.

Yep. You really do, don't you? I do. Huge thank you to Chloe, the candy maker, who is also a ghost tour guide, who sent us tons of amazing candy from Mackinac Island, Michigan, where I used to go sometimes as a child.

So I was very happy to get this. Oh yeah? Yeah. And we want to say good luck and safe travels to you and your sister on your world tour, Chloe. Be safe. Big thanks to Annie from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Nice. Sent us a mega care package for real of Australian treats. Tim Tams, I think you love those things, right? Man, I went crazy for this. And Carmelo Kids were pretty good as well. Violet Crumbles, Picnic Boost, Hero. There was some weird stuff in there,

but it was all good. Burger Rings. Man, Ozzy's got some crazy candies. Thanks to Andrew Parr for an entire puzzle dedicated to stuff you should know in the world of puzzles, winter 2014 issue. It was awesome. Oh boy, this is one of my favorites.

Rob Hinyan from, sent us those awesome stuff you should know bookends made from industrial fasteners. And they are super cool. They're really heavy and they're awesome. And you can get information at moremetalwelding at gmail.com or moremetal.etsy.com.

It's like quality, quality stuff. Yeah, it is. Kevin Palokwin from kevinpalokwin.com that's K-E-V-I-N-P-E-L-O-Q-U-I-N. And Raddad Tease. I think those are both of his sites. He gave us an amazing illustration of Steve's issue from the Life Aquatic

looking pensively toward the horizon, which I have up in my cubicle. Oh, I wonder where that was from. That's from Kevin Palokwin. Lauren and Megan from Chopsticks for Salamanders. They've got a pretty cool cause. They sent a stainless steel reusable chopsticks. And this is a big deal because chopsticks are,

honestly, they're kind of a problem. They sell these to help prevent destruction of forest from those little cheapy wooden ones. And they're the same forest where they get these, the wood for these things where salamanders live. And so every year 60 billion pairs of chopsticks are thrown away and a lot of salamanders are having their forests and habitats destroyed.

And because of your sushi addictions, I have as well. So get some of these. You can learn more at ChopsticksforSalamanders.org. Nice. We got a postcard. It's been a while since we did this. We got a postcard from announcing the birth

of one of our newer fans, Clyde Avery Thomas, who was born at 1.58 a.m. on January 16th, 2014 in Trevor City, Michigan. I thought you'd say it was like six. By now he probably is, but he most likely came out a little frostbitten because it's cold up there, but congratulations to Andrew and Janelle Thomas on the birth of your son.

Yeah, and happy first birthday pretty soon. Pretty soon. Mike and Cassidy Lord from Athens, Georgia. Woo-hoo! Sent us a postcard from Cambodia while in Borneo. I know, wrap your mind around that. Interesting. Sarah Austin gave us a very chic

and rugged handmade leather card holder wallet, which are pretty awesome. Thank you. Very nice. Rachel Crandall for the line drawing of stuff you should know, written in Gallifran. It's the language, apparently, that Time Lords and Doctor Who of the Time Lords. Right.

So I'm not a Doctor Who fan, but I appreciated the gift. Yeah, it was pretty cool. Julie from Austin, Texas, sent us a postcard from the Shed Aquarium in beautiful Chicago, Illinois. Thank you, Julie. Oh boy, Lois Olson. This is my favorite gift I've gotten.

Very simple, but awesome. The mini quilts. Yeah. They are, it's basically a little tiny, not a tiny, it's a small place mat that you use in place of a coaster. Right, it's mug rugs. Bigger than a coaster smaller than a place mat.

Yeah, a little rectangular thing. And I often at dinner will have like, maybe a beer, maybe a glass of water, maybe a cup of coffee. Shot of whiskey. And I put everything down on my little mug rug. And if anything spills, it soaks it up. It's better than a coaster.

It doesn't stick like a coaster. It's like, it's gonna revolutionize the coaster industry. I love them. Thank you, Lois Olson, for that. Thank you to Brett Arnold, who won our horror fiction contest, if you'll remember. He sent us a copy of his book, Avalon, and you can get Avalon on amazon.com.

And then lastly, for this one, we wanna thank Joe and Linda Hecht for sending us tons of stuff, including customized stuff you should know mugs with hints to podcast topics that they'd like to hear stuff about. They put them on a mug and have them made and send them to us.

Yeah, cool mugs. They sent us a copy of the DVD, American Amazon. They gave us 10 bucks to watch it. Oh man. They're the best. They are very great people. So thank you to everybody. And we still have more people to thank left, eventually.

Yeah, this is part one. Right, but we are grateful for each and every one of you. And to all of you listeners out there, whether you send us stuff or not, we're thankful to all of you. And we hope you're having a wonderful holiday, no matter where you are in the world. Agreed.

Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.