The Supermassive Podcast - 6: Looking for Alien Life

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

The search for alien life continues. Dr Becky Smethurst and Izzie Clarke explore the world of astrobiology and astronomer Robert Massey joins them to take on your extraterrestrial questions. Plus, they discuss the "broken pipeline" for black and minority ethnic physicists with Dr Sheila Kanani, and what to look for in the night sky this month.  With special thanks to Professor Jane Greaves from Cardiff University.  The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media Production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham

You look at the numbers and you think it's got to exist. When can I live out my Dr Louise Banks arrival fantasy? There is an earth or carbon or anthropic bias, whatever you want to call it here. Pod racers would be pretty great. But it would have to be environmentally friendly. If that's how we end up communicating with them, I'll be very happy. I'll be like, this is not intelligent life. intelligent life. Hello, welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and award-winning astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst.

Congratulations. Thank you. So share your news with the team. I have been awarded the Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship for 2020, which I'm very excited about. It's a prize from the William Herschel Society, and it means I'll be giving a lecture in November at the University of Bath and one at the Royal Astronomical Society as well. You know, COVID permitting anyway. We'll see what happens, but hopefully they'll be in person. I'm just absolutely thrilled because Caroline Hchel was just an incredible astronomer so

to win something with her name attached is a real honor yeah that's amazing am i allowed to turn up with just like one of those foam fingers in the background like yeah if you don't i'll be disappointed so shall we get to it for this month yeah probably should um so I can't believe we've actually pulled this off so we've got a full report into area 51 um it's been a lot of hard work we've had an astrophysicist who works there and they've been secretly recording things and and sending us updates and so we've got so much information for you not really you tried to make that so serious i couldn't i couldn't but we are we are exploring extraterrestrial life this month yeah and that might sound like we've left science behind for

some sci-fi but this is actually an active area of science research at institutions around the globe that of astrobiology this covers everything from you know what evidence we'd need to declare life had been found on a planet to how we'd even get that evidence and to what life might even look like with different conditions such as like the strength of gravity changing or the distance from a star changing as well science writer writer Arthur C. Clarke once said, two possibilities exist, either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. So we'll be getting to grips with astrobiology, taking on your questions,

and astronomer Robert Massey will be telling us what to keep an eye out for in the night sky this month. And astronomer Robert Massey will be telling us what to keep an eye out for in the night sky this month. Hi, Robert. So what do we think? Extraterrestrial life, does it exist? I'd really love to think so, wouldn't you? I mean, look, it's a really, really big universe. It seems inconceivable that something doesn't exist. But I think an even bigger question is whether there's intelligent life out there. You know, the stuff of Star Trek and star wars and space operas and science fiction stories galore so who knows it's a it's a really open question becky yeah it definitely is i mean i'm convinced like i'm not convinced we'll ever make contact with any civilizations or life that

might exist out there but you look at the numbers of the number of stars and galaxies and planets around the stars and you think it's got to exist right and that's I think what this podcast is going to be about we're not talking about you know UFO videos released by the pentagon or anything like that we're not talking about little green aliens in spaceships we're talking about you know is it feasible that life could exist somewhere in our universe and what would that look like well we'll be catching up with Robert later in the show to take on our listener questions. We're going to start with the simpler signs of life. So where are scientists looking and what are they looking for?

I spoke with astrobiologist Professor Jane Greaves from the University of Cardiff. I guess as a working person on this subject, I don't spend much of my daily life thinking about ET. So the simplest form of life is probably single-celled creatures something like microbes so they have like a cell wall that divides themselves from their surroundings their water puddle or their rock or whatever and then inside the cell wall there's some DNA basically just enough genetic information to allow them to reproduce themselves so we're talking about really simple forms of life? Yes, because when you think about it, life that's existed on the Earth has only been complex really for quite a long time,

but maybe like 10% of the lifetime of the Earth itself. So I think scientists are trying to do something more basic and see if there's any signs of life out there at all. So, for example, a molecule in the atmosphere of a planet that might suggest it could only be there in the presence of life. So an example is oxygen, which could all be absorbed by rocks on the Earth if it wasn't continually made by life. How do you actually go about searching for this because space is pretty big? That's the trouble with life well life in space is space is really big and a lot of space is really far away so the bit that's founded in traditional astronomy is looking at spectra so people have done this for 150 years maybe use a telescope spread out the light like a rainbow and study the

spectrum and that's been done for the star but what we can now do is for a planet and that gives us a kind of almost like a barcode imprint of any molecules or atoms that might be there in the planet's atmosphere and then within our own solar system we can do that but we can do a bit more because the distances are much smaller so we can send spacecraft to places like Mars or moons of Jupiter and we can actually chemically sample the ingredients that are there. And by chemically sampling is that essentially a fancy term for digging? Amazingly the digging itself is sometimes the hardest bit to do so if you send a drill bit to Mars and it gets stuck or it breaks you've kind of wasted a lot of money but yeah it might be more scraping a sample off the topsoil and putting it in like an internal instrument on the lander and then breaking it

down with heat and then seeing what kind of molecules are detected kind of the stuff you might almost have done in a chemistry lab back in school um you know something that samples the atmosphere yeah and so how are we getting on like what have we found if anything so far so the work on extrasolar planets hasn't quite got to the point of planets like the earth so we can sample the atmospheres of larger planets something like about the size of nept Neptune but we're probably not really seriously looking for these biosignature molecules there because that's a very deep high pressure atmosphere we're not really expecting that's conditions suitable for any kind of recognizable life but we're getting on pretty well with the solar system so for example the

landers there have found there's quite a lot of water in the form of ice at least on the surface things like clays that suggest there was running water there so mars is in a way a bit a little bit sad because maybe we're not quite at the right time so the atmosphere today is very thin it doesn't shield the surface of the planet from energetic radiation from the sun for example so the surface of mars is not great today we might be a bit too late in time there's chances that there might still be some kind of microbes below the surface where they don't really care about the surface conditions maybe living on from days when Mars was a bit more habitable you know proper running

water on the surface that kind of thing the other things we're doing is sampling things coming out from um this is a real surprise over the last 20 years or so that there's water jetting out from some of the ice-covered moons of jupiter and saturn and you can like chemically sample some of that almost as though you were standing like a like a geyser on the surface of the earth but the hope is that it might be some kind of life um on essentially the seafloor under the icy surface of the moon that's very much an open question because it may be that the conditions there on a small moon have never allowed enough sort of chemical richness enough energy for life to get started but it's

a possibility okay so we've got Mars as one candidate, potential moons within our solar system. Are there any other candidates that scientists like yourself are looking at or is this essentially it for now? We're trying to keep our minds open so the basis of life could be a fluid other than water in some of the really cold environments. So for example, the moon Titan, which has methane lakes, liquid methane running around, you could potentially have a methane-based chemistry because that's a carbon-bearing molecule and it's reactive and so on. And then looking really exotic, there's the very high clouds in Venus' atmosphere, which I'm quite enthused about. So they're incredibly acidic,

but there is this theory that when Venus was more temperate, maybe hundreds of millions of years ago, or even billions of years ago, then there was this dramatic runaway greenhouse effect, which made the surface really unpleasant, hot, arid, incredibly hot, in fact. But maybe some of this simple life could have just let grow the ground and floated up into the clouds. So that's something scientists are pursuing. Oh, wow. OK. And so obviously we've been talking about simpler forms of life. But you have to admit that people are really interested as well at the idea of finding advanced life.

Do you think that could be possible? What are your thoughts on that area i think it's possible and people have been essentially listening out with radio telescopes for probably about 60 years now so it is possible that we could get a signal from another civilization interested in communicating with us the problem again may be recognizability because we've been transmitting radio programs and TV programs through radio waves for decades. At the moment optical fibers came along that was a lot more efficient than squirting radio waves in all direction. We started using those so if somebody was randomly listening for us now we'd be a pretty radio quiet planet. So the search I

think has got more sophisticated experiments can actually detect small enough radio waves you could essentially hear a plane being landed through radar on a planet say 100 light years away even is probably about our horizon for that and that's not communication aimed at us it's just strong communication so their alien plane can land so they could hear us we could hear them in the radio that kind of thing and you know maybe the hope is out there that people are deliberately signaling as it turns out actually the earth is not deliberately signaling not a lot of effort has gone into that but we're certainly listening I guess it's a bit like being the quiet one on a WhatsApp group. That's Jane Greaves from the

University of Cardiff. So Becky, when can I live out my Dr. Louise Banks arrival fantasy, like talking to aliens? It's not quite happening, is it? Yeah, it is the microbes. That's the thing. I think that is, you know, if we think about in terms of how long life has existed on Earth for, you know, the Earth has been around for we think about four and a half billion years. And if we think about the time that humanity as we know it has been around, it's like a blink of an eye in comparison to the length of time that Earth has been around for and the length of times that microbes have been on earth for as well so if we think in terms of how long those signatures of microbial life will actually be around for on a planet in the universe they're going to be around much longer than say any signatures of human life like these radio communication signals or something that we could pick up so it's just ever so slightly more likely that we're going to be able to detect microbes and that's going to be the first thing any signs of microbes on a planet then we ever are going to be able to detect maybe more advanced civilizations but I guess that doesn't stop us from thinking

about it well there are people out there who are working on whether more intelligent or advanced life is out there in space there's's this thing called the Drake equation. So what exactly is that, Becky? Yeah, so the Drake equation, I mean, it's a weird one to call it an equation. I think maybe sort of the Drake factors might be a better thing because it's not necessarily something like E equals MC squared that we'd solve. It's more of a probabilistic look at the things that would influence how many advanced civilizations are out there. So there's sort of seven different factors, right? It's how many stars a galaxy is forming. It's how many of those stars will have planets around them. And then how many of those will

support life, but specifically intelligent life. And then specifically life that will actually be able to communicate with us as well. And then also how long they have been sending signals out into space for like radio comms as well. So there's lots of things that come into it. And a lot of those things are, can be scientifically motivated, like, you know, how many stars is a galaxy forming per year, for example, we have a pretty good idea of that. It's sort of maybe like one to three stars per year for the milky way for example then you've got you know the number of stars with with planets and when this equation was first proposed back in the 60s that was thought to be quite low maybe like a fifth of all stars might

have planets but from our exoplanet studies of the past couple of decades we think that's actually more likely that a hundred percent of stars actually have planets. So you can see how some of them can be scientifically motivated. It's just, you know, the fraction that support life, the fraction of those that support intelligent life, the fraction of those that then go on to do, you know, communicable civilization kind of life. It's, it's, those are a little bit more woolly, let's say. And we can sort of get estimates, but those estimates can range from anywhere from sort of like one planet per galaxy to like 15 million per galaxy right so it's so woolly based on what your assumptions are but recently there were new calculations published

in the astrophysical journal and they've revealed that there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy today so this is what i'm talking about yeah so so this work was really interesting because they they took what was sort of they dubbed the astrobiological copernican viewpoint of it all which is essentially that like all we know is earth right and if we and if we key in the fact that you know we assume that one of nine planets i should say one of eight i'm still hanging on to pluto one of eight planets can uh you know host life and will go on to develop intelligent life because earth did and has been sending out signals into space for about 100 years or so sort of the event of sort of radio technology then that's what

numbers they arrived at that's 30 civilizations in the galaxy that could be hosting life which is a sort of a really interesting way of of approaching it i think especially because it's sort of that very much you can specify that that's what you've done in terms of the commit the copernican principle as such but what i like is that okay if there are 30 civilizations in the galaxy that could communicate with each other you then have to think well if they were distributed you know perfectly randomly across the galaxy and nicely spread out evenly then our nearest one is probably 17 000 light years away so near exactly so a conversation is going to be a very long time so unless you're willing to live

to 34 000 years old izzy i think your arrival fantasy is gonna have to wait for now i mean that is the biggest disappointment i've had all week turning away from extraterrestrial life for a moment to the importance of life here on earth since our last episode we have watched as the world has come together to protest police brutality and the inherent systemic racism in our society. All of us here at the Supermassive Podcast are behind me when I state Black Lives Matter. There is no genetic evidence for race, and yet historically science has a lot to answer for and now the changes needed can only come from those in the ivory tower. According to a 2012 study from the

Institute of Physics, of all physics academics in the UK, 0.1% are black. We have a lot of work to do. The Royal Astronomical Society is taking time to get educated on our own history and work out how we can open up sciences and make everyone feel welcome in astronomy and geophysics. With us now to explore this further is Dr Sheila Kanani, the Education Outreach and Diversity Officer at the Royal Astronomical Society. So let's take a look at the history. What was the Royal Astronomical Society like at the very beginning? We're talking 200 years ago. The Royal Astronomical Society was probably very similar to other learned societies that long ago. It was very sort of middle to upper class, male dominated. There were some women that were involved, but they were not allowed to be fellows.

And when they did publish any work, they published under the names of their brothers or their husbands. And even though some prominent female scientists were given awards, they were still not allowed to be fellows. And the situation in terms of black, Asian and minority ethnic astronomers was even worse and hasn't really improved a huge amount in the last 200 years unfortunately. Yeah I guess that was going to be my next question was sort of taking a look at the field of you know astronomy now how are we actually doing? So we have some stats from

our last demographic survey which was done in 2016 in terms of the UK population, about 87% of the population described themselves as white, compared with 95% of permanent staff and 97% of fixed term researchers. And at the postgraduate level, it was a similar sort of percentage. Although the samples are too small to really draw firm conclusions, but we had, I think, of over 900 people who filled the survey in, we had one person specifically respond as a black British astronomer. And that was in 2016. And I suppose historically we have had fellows who are black astronomers, sort of, you know, one here and there in the 1950s and 60s. It has increased a little bit but it's still not significant numbers even today. Yeah because ideally what we'd want is to to see when we walk into the Royal Astronomical Society you know what we see in everyday life as we walk

down the street represented inside as well. Yeah that's definitely what we're striving to do and I know that the percentages in the general population, depending on where you live in the UK, etc, you know, vary, but we do want it to reflect the general population. And it certainly isn't doing that at the moment. So do we know why we're not seeing enough black and minority ethnic students or academics in physics and astronomy? So we talk about a leaky pipeline when we talk about STEM careers and women and other minority groups but for the black astronomers and geophysicists

it's not a leaky pipeline unfortunately it's completely broken and there are various reasons for that from the RAS's point of view we haven't pinpointed them exactly but we have started doing some investigation as to why that is and some of those issues surrounding black asian and minority ethnic astronomers and geophysicists are their sort of heritage and their background and where they come from so i know from a personal perspective being a british indian person wanting to be in the space industry, my family just didn't really understand my career choices. I was surrounded by people who were doing very vocational studies. And even when I got my PhD, there were people in my family saying, so what are you going to do with that now? What's the point of a PhD in space science? And I think that is one of the factors behind these issues is that the careers

that are available with a degree in physics or a degree in astrophysics aren't often that obvious and so people sort of shy away from it and it also comes down to things like science capital and perpetuation of people in families not going to university or not being encouraged to do those sorts of subjects at a higher level. So there's lots of different things. That means at the moment, there aren't many people from ethnic minorities in higher positions. And so it's harder for younger people to look at those higher positions and think, oh, that's a job for someone like me. You know, if you don't see someone doing that job that you can relate to then you're less likely to want to go into it yeah and i'm sure a lot of our

listeners will be thinking you know how can how can they help make a positive change i mean we're obviously raising awareness right now and speaking out and i think a lot of us who have been doing that over the past couple of weeks have found a lot of backlash within the community saying you know keep the politics out you know stick to. And you know, you can't do science without the humans. And this is a human rights issue. So it's one of those things that it's almost once you're inside, it's difficult to know how to help. So have you got some advice for both astronomers and our listeners as well about what they can do? Yeah, and it's really interesting, because we've run

various different things including we put out a call quite recently for black astronomers and geophysicists who are fellows to come forward and help us with our work not because we want to put the burden of change on them but because we're genuinely interested in their opinion and because there are so few particularly British black astronomers and geophysicists it would be great to have more in our committees and things like that and when I put that call to fellows out we did have some people questioning why diversity is important why we're looking for people of different colour skin to to come forward or why should we care what the colour of someone's skin is as to how good an astronomer they are yes I do understand that fear but the more diverse a workplace the better it works and

the more diverse experiences and people that are part of your team the better outputs you're going to have and science is especially astronomy is is a completely international collaboration. You know, we all live under the same sky, so we all should be able to share it together. So, you know, we want to understand why these challenges and these barriers exist. We don't want to put the burden of change on the black astronomers and geophysicists. We want to educate ourselves and we want to ensure that no future astronomers feel unwelcome in our field. So it's definitely a marathon, not a sprint. But I think it's going to, you know, I really hope anyway, that it is going to make our society and the space industry a better place.

This is the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and with science journalist Izzy Clark. This month we're exploring extraterrestrial life but if you want to send in questions to us for a future episode then email podcast at ras.ac.uk or tweet at royalastrosoc. Now I know this is a science podcast but researching for this episode I have ended up in such a sci-fi hole so it's got me thinking about like really weird or amazing tech that you've seen in sci-fi films so Becky if you had to have one thing from any sci-fi film what would it be oh it's got to

be beam me up Scotty like everybody wants to just you know like think like you finish the end of your holiday like this is what we say every time we go on holiday right and we're like getting to the airport and thinking oh you're like so many hours of travel ahead of us and some of us one of us in the family will always just go beam me up scotty eh and like you just really want you just really want like teleportation to just exist so you don't have to travel oh my gosh i so feel that like especially when you see like your train's being delayed or something as well you're like oh my god can i just go home straight away that would be amazing i think thinking about that i'm now jealous that you've come up with that because i was originally thinking maybe pod

racers would be pretty great but i feel like you've trumped me there so I need to now go away and get into a further sci-fi hole think about the options podracer would be cool though yeah I was like well it would have to be environmentally friendly and then how do they actually work and then it's as I say sci-fi hole another one though that I would very strongly consider is a sonic screwdriver yeah that would be really cool that That would be very, very useful, actually. Anything breaks, I just point it like, please work. It's basically a wand. Robert, have you got anything that you would really wish to be true? I really could use a teleport, I'll be honest.

I mean, that would be so useful, wouldn't it? All those endless commutes, all those kind of shopping trips. Just imagine pressing a button and getting home. But that, yeah, I don't know, eternal life, all those kind of things, sort of Star Trek style medicine where you just wave a thing over your arm and it's all healed up. I mean, what's not to like really? Time travel would be quite fun as well, paradoxes aside. I think as long as we're careful and responsible. Don't go changing history, all those kind of things. We've got to be very responsible with anything that we now invent exactly if anyone feels like they can trump anything that we've put forward then definitely tweet us in a sense i hope so i was gonna say the only thing i think would trump it was just

you know the ability to communicate with aliens by pianos like in the third cat ghost encounters of the third kind that would be that's that's on the dream right if that's how we end up communicating with them i'll be very happy just a little tune of chopsticks and just see you're like this is my offering for you all i can do is play the rugrats theme tune i'll be like this is your intelligent life um but every month we always ask people to send in their questions and obviously when we said we're going to be doing extraterrestrial life we got quite a lot so we've got a few to cover here and Robert's also going to help out with these so Terry Moulton asks when looking for ET how would you know that you found it if you don't know what you're looking for Becky

do you want to take that one? Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult one, Terry, because you're right in that we don't exactly know what we're looking for. And we do have to look for what we know. So the signatures on Earth, in Earth's atmosphere that we know that are there because of human activity. So advanced levels of methane, for example, from cattle farming or CFCs that might be in the atmosphere. from cattle farming or for CFCs that might be in the atmosphere. Those kind of signatures, if they turn up in exoplanet atmospheres, then we might think, well, that could be because of the presence of life on that planet too. But also, you know, methane can come from volcanoes and CFCs might come from some geological processes. So it's an interesting one to think about. I think

it falls under that remit of like the known knowns and the unknown unknowns and all that kind of stuff is what we search for there could even be a spectrum that we have right now with signatures of life in it but we wouldn't know that that's what they were if we didn't know to look for them I think it kind of fascinates me actually that idea that we could already know about it but we don't and Robert Wolfie asks how long would it take to have a two-way conversation if intelligent life was found? Well, it really depends how far away it is, but it's a really good, I mean, you know, we could definitely say, or almost certainly say there's nothing like that in our own solar system. So you're looking at a minimum of years and years because it's really unlikely there's intelligent life on planets around the very nearest stars. So then you're probably looking a lot further afield. And even one of the more promising ones that was found by Kepler called the Kepler space mission called TRAPPIST-1, which has possibly multiple places that might be habitable.

And, you know, that's loose. I mean, you've got to be quite careful about that definition. But even that's 40 light years away. So if you sent a message, you're looking at an 80 year trip, a round trip for them to reply. So, you know, our message goes out, they receive it 40 years later, then we wait 40 years for the reply. So essentially what it means is that someone sending the message is very unlikely ever to hear the reply. So it's not really a great conversation. No. OK, fair enough. Well, I hope that clears that up, Wolfie.

No, okay, fair enough. Well, I hope that clears that up, Wolfie. Becky, another one for you. Kat asks, do you think the search for ET might be earth slash it's actually a term that we call um anthropic bias right literally the bias that you know we have evolved here on earth so everything else must be the same in some way and you know every other piece of evidence we have is that we're not we're not anything special right and we could also be sort of like a carbon bias as well we are carbon-based life forms but silicon is also capable of making similar sort of bonds and connections so you could have silicon-based life forms and and again it's one of those things where we we wouldn't know what necessarily those life form signatures would be because we haven't seen it before so yeah definitely I agree there is there is an earth or carbon or anthropic bias whatever you want to call it here

um but I don't necessarily know what the way around that is. Are there people out there that are looking for, say, other signatures like that? Yeah, there probably are. But I think, again, you're not entirely sure how to extract what you found. So you could hypothesize that, well, if there was a silicon-based life form, they would be reliant on some other gas apart from oxygen, for example. I don't know what it might be. Let's say it's nitrogen. That's off the top of my head. Probably know what it might be let's say it's nitrogen that's off the top of my head probably not scientifically correct but let's say it is

and if it is nitrogen okay well you look for this specific signature and therefore that's your hypothesis right if we find nitrogen it could that it means that there are silicon-based life forms but you could have like many other hypotheses for why nitrogen could be in that atmosphere as well you know it could be a gas giant with significant amount of nitrogen or it could be some other sort of geological process that could cause it so you could always conjecture that there could that could mean that there is life there but confirming that unless we could communicate with them I think it's going to be really difficult. Okay so that's that one covered and Genghis Galahad great name wants to know is a Dyson sphere the best mark of a solar system like

civilization? So we've had quite a lot of questions on Dyson spheres. So Robert, can you start us off by explaining what they are? I mean, wouldn't it be great if this was just the end result of so many civilizations? A Dyson sphere is this wacky idea proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson back in the early 1960s. And he had the idea that super advanced civilizations might literally dismantle a planet in their solar system, take it to bits and construct this sort of structure around a star. And it wouldn't be a solid sphere. It would be a lot of sort of orbiting bits and pieces

all jumbled around in this huge sphere. Now, it's fantastic stuff. I mean, really probably incredibly hard to do. You've got to worry about the way they move around each other and so on. But if you were to build something like that, it would block a bit of the light from the star. And those panels, those things that you assembled from your dismantled planet would,

although they block some of the light, they would probably re-radiate a bit of heat. So we might see this bit of infrared light coming from them. And that would be a sign if everything else stacked up, that you maybe were looking at a Dyson sphere. Now, the thing is, we haven't, we've never seen anything like this. So there was a star which astronomers looked at in around 2015, Tabitha Boydian in the US.

She studied this and she thought, well, she didn't really necessarily publish saying she was looking at something like that, but it had some of the characteristics of a Dyson sphere. But more recent work suggests it's probably a dust disk. So it probably isn't a Dyson sphere just yet, but it would be incredibly intriguing. And I mean, you know, credit to Genghis, it would be a fabulous signature of a civilization if we did find one. And I promise you that as as soon as we do you know we'll let you know on this podcast i don't understand people's obsession with dyson spheres because i don't understand how it's it seems to have become sort of the marker for advanced

civilization and i'm kind of like well do you class us as an advanced civilization because we don't have a dyson sphere you know we haven't managed to either dismantle our planet or build some huge solar panel array around the sun so that we can like completely sort of account for the whole world's electricity needs. So it's an odd one that people are so focused on them because I mean, it's so beyond human capability of engineering, right? We just don't have the ability to do this at all.

So it just, i think it's fascinating that people think that that is the ultimate goal of any sort of civilization i think it's i think it's i mean it's intriguing the idea as well the science fiction mean for this tends to be a solid sphere and people living on the inside of it and that is even more a ludicrously hard to do so you know i mean it's i suppose it's just about the idea of it. And that is even more a ludicrously hard to do. So, you know, I mean, it's, I suppose it's just about the idea of constructing this vast living space. But, you know, the concepts, the things you think about

as soon as you imagine building something on that scale make it seem very, very far-fetched. Well, I just need to finalise a few more plans and then I'll just get started on it. Yeah, you get ahead of you. We're waiting, we're waiting. And as always, Robert, what are just some of the things

that we can look out for in the night sky this month? Well, this month it's midsummer in the Northern Hemisphere. So we have the shortest nights and the longest days. So astronomy at night is a little bit restricted in terms of time. But on the plus side, I guess, and I have to say I've been enjoying this myself, it is really nice and warm when you go outside right now, which is a big contrast to say January or February.

So some of the things to look for, well, I would recommend something called noctilucent clouds. And if you haven't heard of these, these are clouds that are very high up in the Earth's atmosphere, way above most those you normally see. And they're called noctilucent because they look as though they're shining at night. and they're called noctilucent because they look as though they're shining at night. They're still lit by the sun, but when the sun isn't very far below the northern horizon, as it is in the UK and a bit further north, then the clouds catch the light. And they're actually 50, 70 kilometers up, way, way above the stratosphere, right up in the region of the Earth's atmosphere called the mesosphere. So although it's a struggle to see fainter stars in the summer months,

I do know a lot of amateur astronomers astronomers are very interested in seeing these displays. And there are right now is a good season for looking out for those things. If you want to look further afield, then there are a couple of other things I should mention. One is if the sun wakes up a little bit more, the sunspot activity might start to pick up now. We're at the beginning of the new sunspot cycle. And so hopefully over the next few months and certainly over the next couple of years, you should see a steady increase in those numbers. Obviously, the usual safety advice, if you're looking at the sun, then project an image. Don't ever look through a telescope at

the sun because basically it's very, very bad for your eyes. You can do yourself permanent damage. But if you know what you're doing, and there are plenty of online guides for that, then now is the time to start looking. And finally, it's a good time to look at Jupiter and Saturn as well. So they're coming to what's called opposition in July. Jupiter is at opposition around the 14th of July and Saturn about six days later. And so at opposition, the planets will be opposite the sun in the sky, which means they're visible all night and they'll be at their best around local midnight. Now, because we're on summertime, that means about 1am. But as the next few weeks pass,

they should become a bit more obvious. And if you're looking south, you will see them as bright objects. Unlike stars, they won't be twinkling. And of course, if you have a small telescope, it's a great chance to look at either, say, Saturn's rings or the weather on Jupiter or the big bright satellites that go around it as well so i strongly recommend those and if there are any advanced astrophotographers out there then please send us your pictures of

these planets because they're wonderful things to see well my big news is that i've just bought a brand new telescope so i'm taking notes here of things that i can look out for so you we're expecting great things then for next month's podcast, Izzy. That would be great. That would be fantastic. I've bought myself some actual solar filter paper so I can make solar filters that are literally fit exactly to the telescope itself. So I will keep an eye out for those sunspots.

Good idea. I mentioned to someone the other day, and they were really surprised at it. and i think it's one of those things that i've known for so long i almost like take for granted that like everybody knows it but you know that right now in sort of summertime in the uk we never actually go into the official definition of night time we're actually only ever in twilight so this is why the the sort of sky is so bright at the minute and it never really gets dark enough for some sort of really dark sky stargazing so you've got what people called civil twilight which is you know sort of like when the sun just sets then you've got nautical twilight and you've got something called astronomical twilight as well and basically

it's sort of what angle the sun is below the horizon so civil twilight goes to six degrees nautical twilight 12 degrees below the horizon then astronomical twilight to 18 degrees below the horizon and because the sun never drops below 18 degrees below the horizon in the summer for us in the uk we never officially enter nighttime that's amazing yeah that's going to be my new fact that i just share with people just be like you didn't ask for this but here's something i learned it's such a cool fact though isn't it i can't yeah i'm literally just gonna be pondering about that for days days to come if you if you go up to the uh shetland isles they have what is it a simmer dim they call it because it's it's it at midnight in the shetlands it's still pretty bright no it's a

the effect is more extreme the further north you go you know as you'd expect because you get the midnight sun and so on if you go really far north. But it does make for warm and beautiful evenings, but sadly, fainter stars are a bit harder to see. Alright, that's it for this month. We will be back next month with a look at planet Earth. We're actually going to be talking about earthquakes and volcanoes.

Finally! Something for the geophysicists! I can hear them cheering already i know we always forget don't we that it's the royal astronomical society to advance the pursuit of astronomy and geophysics so don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and thank you to everyone that has left a rating and review it really helps people find the podcast and as always tweet as if you try some astronomy at home it's at royal astro sock on twitter or you can email your questions to podcast at ras.ac.uk and we'll

try and cover them in the next episode till then though happy stargazing