Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 158: Geomagnetic Storms

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

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Podcast. Podcasting, yes. Hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem podcast. A podcast about engineering disasters, with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are she and her. Na-Liam, unfortunately. We have no Liam. RILEY No Liam today. ALICE But we have a guest. RILEY We do have a... we have a guest to replace Liam.

RILEY Hello everyone. Yeah, Liam's been fired. It's me now. ALICE My... ALICE It's a soft coup, yeah. It's rude of us to do it while he's on vacation, but you know, sometimes you want to avoid confrontation. RILEY Yeah, this is a very passive aggressive coup. Yeah, my name is Kieran, I am the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he, him. ALICE Oh yeah. We're talking about, what are we talking about? I haven't even read the slides, I've been sick, I've had mega-COVID. Kieran Well, there was an event that occurred

recently that you can see here in this picture. I took this beautiful photo of the aurora borealis in Philly from my backyard. ALICE Localized entirely within certain northern hemispheres. JUSTIN Yeah. Can I see it? No. ALICE I didn't see the Aurora Borealis because I was at a party with a bunch of clouted up

trans women, and we were playing Mario Kart on an SNES, but it was a good time, but I did not see the Northern Lights, I regret to say. Honestly, that sounds so much better than actually seeing them, and I say that as someone whose job is to talk about things like this. ALICE I mean, yeah, possibly. RILEY You'll see them again. Mario Kart, you might not. JUSTIN Hmm.

Good point. Good point. ALICE Very ominous. You might never see Mario Kart again at any time. RILEY We'll get there. ALICE Oh god. JUSTIN Yeah, so I thought it would be topical to talk about serious geomagnetic storms. Like the Carrington event.

This would have been more topical if I hadn't derailed the schedules of three separate podcasts by getting hyper-COVID, the COVID that's worse than COVID. I'm fine now, as far as I know, but I was laid out for a week, so I apologize. We have many scheduling difficulties this month, we apologize to the listeners. This month, every month, I... yeah, I will get this podcast on a regular release schedule if it's the last thing I do. Unfortunately, when I had hyper-COVID it began to feel like it might be. Um. But, before we talk about geomagnetic storms, and carrying an event, and all that fun stuff,

we have to do the goddamn news. Do not get in a helicopter. Yeah, it's a bad idea to get in a helicopter. LIAM Yeah, it's a bad idea to get in a helicopter. ALICE Under any circumstances, whoever you are, whether you're like a tourist, whether you're a marine, whether you're like a billionaire owner of a football club, whether you're Kobe, whether you are the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ibrahim Raisi, do not get in a helicopter.

Unfortunately, the president of Iran, the late president of Iran, found this out the hard way, because he was flying in a convoy of helicopters in, I wanna say, the northeastern corner of Iran, very rural, very mountainous, in a very very thick fog, and in a great piece of euphemism, one of Iran's state news agencies said that his helicopter made a hard landing. And, it turns out that if that's hard enough... Yeah, well, the kind of hard landing in which a key component step is you are scattered across a mountainside, over a fairly wide area. They haven't left one up there yet. No, no they haven't.

And this one came down at, like, maybe too precipitous and too decisive a rate. So, this is... JUSTIN Isn't this actually fairly... didn't Kobe's helicopter also crash on account that they flew through some fog? ALICE Yeah, I mean, helicopters will crash for any reason or none, but like, they really don't like fog, and when they don't like something they tend to express that by scattering your body parts across a mountainside. Um, this guy, the geopolitical implications of this are actually pretty minor, is the thing, it's not like when Trump killed Soleimani or whatever, like, Reisi was... he's kind

of a nothing, like, the president doesn't really do anything in the Iranian political system cause, you know, the supreme leader does everything. the president doesn't really do anything in the Iranian political system, because the supreme leader does everything, and no one really cared about this guy, but nonetheless they did five days of mourning. Although they didn't actually know he was dead for a while, because of the fog. There was lots of footage of people trudging up 45 degree slopes in thick fog. And my favourite detail of this is, they asked for help from the Turks. And the Turkish Air Force, not sure if it was the Air Force, but the Turks sent a Byraktar drone of Ukraine fame to go and search for him. And I think this was the drone that actually found the

crash site. But if you watched it on like FlightTracker or whatever, what it did after finding the crash site was draw a Turkish crescent moon and star in its flight path over Iran to celebrate. Which is just so perfectly juvenile. This is exactly the kind of thing you want your search and rescue team to be doing. And I really applaud them for that, because I think it was... Take your fun way you can find it. This guy... The Turk lusts for Tehran.

Yeah, apparently. The irredentism never dies, I guess. This guy, not a good guy, as much as people want you to, you know, accept Iran as a kind of anti-imperialist force, that's true, but it's not like a leftist force, and this guy in the 80s, like, helped supervise the mass execution of communists. So like, you know, fuck him, he's dead. F. Or whatever. But crucially, the main lesson for this is, well, a couple of things.

First of all, never get in a helicopter. Second of all, never get in a helicopter if your country is under sanctions and doesn't have a kind of Soviet, like, supply chain, or post-Soviet supply chain for helicopter parts. Iran's in this weird position where, like, because of the Shah, they were, like, a US ally recently enough that, like, stuff that the Shah, they were like a US ally recently enough that like stuff that still flies was built in the US. That's why they still have F-14s, which is cool as fuck.

But it's also why the president was flying around in a Bell 212, which is old as shit, and they didn't have the parts to maintain it because of sanctions. And therefore, you know, it probably responded to the being in fog a bit more dramatically than it otherwise might have done, certainly more than a modern helicopter would have done, and uh, yeah, scattered this guy over a mountainside, so... don't fuck around with sanctions, either, is my takeaway from this. RILEY It's crazy to me you would risk this. Like if someone told me to get in a 50 year old helicopter there is no way. ALICE Yeah, I mean, it depends on what the, like,

maintenance is like. Also, really bizarre confidence to fly in that kind of weather as well. RILEY Right, yeah. JUSTIN People are very blase about helicopters, I mean, people spend a thousand dollars for Blade to take them from the heliport in New York City to the Hamptons, y'know, people don't understand the risks of these things. RILEY My anxiety wins again, I will never get in one.

ALICE Yeah, exactly. ALICE I guess also, being a kind of VIP or whatever habituates you to them, because you're presumably a helicopter a lot more often than a normal person, and you're like, well I haven't gotten killed doing this and I'm too important to get scattered over a mountainside. Not so... RILEY Yeah, when it happens to you. ALICE Yep.

As I was reading in a piece of World War I fiction the other day, the fact that you have done something in perfect safety three days in a row does not disclaim the possibility of you getting killed on the fourth. And so, yeah. STAN Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns. ALICE This is not financial advice. But yeah, he's up there with Soleimani now. STAN This is financial advice, don't buy a helicopter.

ALICE Well, there goes my plan A for reinvesting, like the podcast profits, y'know? Do you think you could gift them to people you didn't like, and just wait? Oh, that's beautiful. There's an idea. Technically a very slow burn assassination attempt. I sent Jeff Bezos a huge gift-wrapped helicopter. Just in a giant box.

I mean, you could put some polonium in it for good measure, but, y'know. Just inadvertently doing a kind of airborne dirty bomb there. I really like the idea that as well as the stuff that we do, like, sponsoring a racing car team, we can also do a crowdfund to buy Jeff Bezos an unreliable helicopter. Hahahaha. Um, well, in other news... Things can only get better? Uh, I write this one in, basically, there's very little to it, there's gonna be an election

in the UK, earlier than anyone expected, because it would be the act of an insane or very bored man to call an election 20 points behind in the polls. But Ritchie Sunek has done so, I think, because he wants to spend summer in California instead of like, here. As we saw, because when he announced it he got rained on, and we really, like, I said this on TF that we just recorded, we really got the grossest looking rain we could in special for this as well. It just-

Shouldn't they have a guy holding an umbrella for him or something? You would think so, but like, this isn't a thing that we do as standards, so maybe he just neglected to ask for it on the basis that he thought that getting rained on would make him look tough or something, I don't know. Yeah, I figured he was going for like a Wuthering Heights type. Is it Wuthering Heights? I'm just a boy standing in front of a nation of 60 million people, asking them to love him.

That's not even Wuthering Heights, it's just another rom-com thing. But, you know... ALICE I mean, you know, another politician had a very short term in office after giving a speech in the rain. ALICE Mmm, it's true. This is William Henry Harrison, right? ALICE William Henry Harrison, yes. ALICE I am amazed at myself that I remember this. Yeah, so I don't know, maybe Rishi's gonna get pleurisy and save us all the trouble. Yeah, he might get pneumonia and die. That would be extremely funny. Yeah, I mean, it's like a six week election campaign, which is gonna seem a bit foreign to Americans who like, your elections start like, six years ahead of time.

But yeah, and it's gonna be completely uninteresting in that the Labour Party is going to win with like a massive majority of a tiny turnout. Like all of the people who like the West Wing, like the thick of it, but don't get any of the jokes and like are enthusiastic about politics are going to like bright-eyed and bushy-tailed run to the polling stations at six in the morning, and vote Kir Stama into number ten, and they will be the only ones voting. And it's gonna be a sort of a triumph apathy, you know? From which the lesson the Labour party's gonna learn is gonna be, we can only get right-wing

and stay right wing forever. JUSTIN Aren't there some conservative MPs who are trying to make motions to call the election off? ALICE They've tried, so basically the Conservative Party is a primarily regicide-based organization, and so, if enough secretly-balloted MPs are like, we need a new leader of the Conservative Party, then they have to call one. I believe there was a kind of desperate, forlorn hope plan to cancel the election by deselecting Rishi as leader. I don't think that's likely to work, but it's an entertaining idea, at least.

And I do like the idea of the Conservatives doing their own leadership election and a general election at the same time. JUSTIN I like the idea that, you know, you can just tropical this and say the time is not right to hold elections. ALICE Basically, like, we have a fixed term parliament for five years that would have lasted a mountain till, like, I think down near the end of the year, and the only reason I can think of calling an election this early is just boredom. And just being like, I don't wanna do this shit anymore.

And so a bunch of the horrible shit that he was going to do in office, he just can't now, because you have to wind up parliament. So, deporting people to Rwanda, we're just not gonna do that, thank god. We're not gonna ban smoking, which was his other thing. And instead we're just... ALICE Oh god. ALICE Yeah, I know. Only dip. Only vapes. But...

Yeah, Liam is off to do some political consultancy for this. But yeah, instead we're just gonna kind of go straight into a very low like, low enthusiasm election, and it's gonna be fucking miserable, the whole time. ALICE Yeah. I think another country that'll have a low enthusiasm election. ALICE Uh huh. Yeah. JUSTIN It's kind of the same boat, right?

I think anyone who thinks things are gonna get significantly better is kidding themselves. ALICE There was one person suggesting that things were gonna get better, which was Az Sun as Sunak was doing this very wet speech announcing the thing, no one could hear him. Because one of the things that, you know, Stama and Stama's people are all, as I say, politics enthusiasts, brackets derogatory, which means that they're also all dead-eyed psyops like freak shows. And so, they had someone outside blasting Things Can Only Get Better, New Labor's election song from 1997, and drowning out Sunak.

And it just really added to the general air of misery. Which is great. Critical support for that. JUSTIN And things can only get better because of how bad they are. ALICE Yeah, exactly. We've hit rock bottom. JUSTIN Yeah, we've hit rock bottom. JUSTIN Yeah, we've hit rock bottom. The whole UK is

gonna have to check into rehab. ALICE You know, I'm not opposed to it, you know, I think maybe it would give us a chance to sort out some of our shit for a while, you know? ZACH Would we have to sit in a circle with Brazil and talk about... Just like, yeah, 60 million people in, like, a kind of group therapy circle would be like, yeah, might be healthy, might be catharsic, I don't know. People have to go around telling us that they love us and they, you know, feel bad for our troubles and in Bretton's case neither of those things is true.

Now, Bretton would accidentally wind up in like a synonym type situation. Yeah, yeah, uh huh. I mean, listen, maybe we should, maybe as a country we could, we get the shot in the arm we need, we get the kind of national renewal by just joining a cult and seeing what the vibes are. I'm willing for us to do that, you know? It can't be worse, right? Fuck it, why not?

No. Basically we have been in a cult this whole time, it's just the cult has been like free market neoliberalism, so maybe the next one will be more entertaining, you know? JUSTIN Yes. LIAM I hope we get rubes. That's my main hope. ALICE Ooooo. There you go.

JUSTIN Ooh, rubes, girl. You could get everyone to become druids. I mean... ALICE Yeah! We've made more harmful weirdos than that in this country. Alright. That's our plan to fix Britain. Make everyone druids.

We go back to the like, yew trees, and like, groves, sacred groves, like, all of this. All this stuff. Y'know? Yeah. That was, the goddamn news. I said go back to the yew trees as a druid thing, but I think Britain's been in the yew trees for a hot minute, to be honest. Alright, this is all Ciaran.

This is me. I don't remember any of this. No that's fine. Okay, so, the whole point of me, or the reason I'm here, is I'm a kind of druid. By that I mean, I, in a previous life, was an astrophysicist. And unfortunately, before we get to the astro part, we're gonna have to do the physics part. Sorry. ALICE I topped out at GCSE Double Award Science,

so... RILEY It's okay, we can get through this. ALICE Best of luck. RILEY So, okay, we can get through this. Best of luck. So, um... Okay, okay, there's a vector, and there's a vector, and there's a cross product, yeah, I don't really remember any of this. This may as well be written in Sanskrit to me, I don't... Yeah, like, you do not need to worry about this. Like, really, there's gonna be sort of three or four facts we need to take away from this. So the first one of those is, um, the guy who kind of, uh, what we're going to talk

about is magnets, and how do they work. And the guy who... Well, actually one guy does, who is James Clark Maxwell, as depicted on the right. Oh, the guy with the demon! Yeah! And he is my also most hated son of Edinburgh. All stiff competition. I know, Dolly the Sheep's up there, but...

I was gonna go with, like, I dunno, Hume, maybe? Or like, the guy who wrote all the Rebus books? Oh, fucking Rankin, yeah. Yeah, Ian Rankin, yeah yeah yeah. I dunno, I don't even think he's the worst author in Edinburgh at the moment. I mean, does Rowling count? She does live there. I mean, Edinburgh, like, it's one of those places, right, where you don't have to live

here for very long. Rowling would be a hated daughter. That's true. That's true, yeah. Although misgendering her would be a kind of a flex, I suppose. That would be funny, yeah. I mean, she misgendered herself, right? Didn't she write her book?

Oh, Robert Galbraith! Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah, that's true. Okay, this is my second most hated son of Edinburgh then, after Robert Galbraith. Okay, and yeah, the reason he got famous is, based on Maxwell, that is, is he put together the theory, or is credited with, of linking together electricity and magnetism. ALICE Why does he sit neurodivergently on this statue? RILEY I think Victorian guys just do this.

ALICE I see, I've only ever folded myself into that kind of shape when I'm having a serious neurodivergent moment. I keep thinking it's that meme, you know, like, about how bisexuals can't sit on chairs properly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, he's about to get into that... maybe? Who knows. James- James Clark Maxwell, bisexual.

Let's google this real quick. Uh, well, I mean, in a beautiful moment of AI overviews, I've just seen them described as a Glaswegian lesbian and Quaker, I don't think either of those things is true, but I'm willing to incorporate them into my belief system. RILEY I think you'll find it was on Google, and therefore it was true. ALICE Yeah, exactly. RILEY Okay, so... where was I?

Yeah. Usually in astronomy, magnets don't really matter, kind of to the point that they're a bit of a meme. So what will happen is you'll give a conference talk or something and the most unfunny person you've met in your life will ask you what about the magnetic fields. And the joke here is they're incredibly hard to model and fold into your stuff. And usually, they don't matter. The exception being what we are going to talk about, which is the sun, basically.

So we just need to dip our toes in here and get a couple of facts out about magnets. So number one, can we go to the next slide? Yes. So, first of all is basically if you have something that's electrically charged. So, in this case, it could be stuff in a wire or it could be like an electron or a proton or something. So, if it's zooming along, so in this case, it's moving left to right. So, if you can see the V arrow, that's the way it's moving. It makes a magnetic field around it. And that magnetic field sort of is doing these anti-clockwise, anti-clockwise, yeah, anti-clockwise like

circles around it. So basically, yeah, moving electric charge makes magnetic field. And then the second one, which is the diagram on the right, is if that electric charge enters an already existing magnetic field, so that little like boob symbol in the bottom right is... It's B for boob. Yeah. Fuck! Such a hack!

What that symbol means is that's a a magnetic field pointing out towards you. Like, out of your monitor. Okay, it's pointing directly. I'm staring down the barrel of guns. I don't approve it doing that to me. This is like the intro to James Bond. So, okay, so we have the same charged particle going left to right this time or like wire or whatever.

It enters into this field that's pointing straight at your face and that will deflect sort of perpendicular to both of those things. So it'll go, yeah, everything's at 90 degrees to each other basically. And then the third one we need is if you go next slide please, is kind of the reverse of this, which is if you have a magnet and you move the magnet around near some electric charges, those electric charges start moving. So you'll have probably seen this effect

if you've ever had one of these torches on the right that you kind of have to like jerk off. Pfft. Yeah. So yeah, the way this torch works is there's a magnet inside, you give it the shake weight treatment and then that induces charge going through the wire and gives you light. So this is a process called induction. So it's also like how those really fancy electric cobs work. Oh, right. And it's also, you know, you make the magnet circular, and then, you know, you can make

a generator. Boom. Yeah, so actually, this kind of, these processes are like, really fundamental to basically how we generate electricity. So like, every power plant has one of these in, to make electricity. What I'm expecting is that I should like, learn things, or have, like, engineering knowledge required on my engineering podcast. JUSTIN Yeah.

I did do, like, a lot of this in, like, physics too, in college, and, yeah, the magnetic stuff is just annoying to do. Especially when you get into things like the right hand rule, where it's like, I'm looking at myself doing the, or is it the right hand rule, where it's like, I'm looking at myself doing the, or is the left hand rule. I did the wrong hand either way. Yeah, this stuff is a real like, undergraduate physics like wall. Like a lot of people in America, I gather drop out. I muddled through it by having a creative writing class to drag my GPA up. That is a potent combination.

Yeah. Okay. So, they're the kind of three things we need. So, we need what happens when charges move and what happens when magnetic fields kind of move. And then the last thing we're just going to look at if you go to the next slide is what a magnetic field usually sort of looks like. So a really useful model for this. That's the gore of my comfort character, iron filings.

So yeah, a really useful model for magnetic fields is what we call field line diagrams. And the way you can see one in real life is a thing you probably did in school, which is where you drop a load of iron filings around a magnet and you get these cool patterns. And these just have a few rules that go with them. So we don't really need to worry about most of it, but basically the magnetic field lines always form like a loop. So you can't break them or sort of have them just stop. And then the other one is that they like, really hate touching each other, so they will spread out as much as they can.

Right. Okay. So, that is the physics over. I'm declaring it done. So if you go, head to the next slide for me please. How many, like, physics credits is that for me? Ha ha, Christ, I don't know. Let'sLEASE. HALF FOR ME PLEASE. Christ, I don't know.

Let's say ten. I don't know how many that is. Thank god, yeah. He's almost given me a higher national certificate in physics for sitting through like, three slides. Listen, I have the power to do that, it's fine. Honestly. Count as a continuing education credit, if you have a PE, reminding you how magnets work.

Yeah, you guys have like, continuous professional development for the podcast, right? Oh yeah, of course. I'm still working on my portfolio. You have to fill out a little thing about like, leadership skills... Alright, should we head to the next slide? Yeah, we need a worksheet that comes with the podcast, you know. that little thing about like leadership skills... Alright, should we head to the next slide? Yeah, I mean a worksheet that comes with a podcast, you know? I mean that is the next evolution, right?

Yeah. You're already doing slides. Yeah. Okay, so, slightly more fun part, what is a star? In this case, the Sun. But this kind of stuff kind of applies to all starts. So a star really is just a huge, huge, huge ball of gas. And when you get a ball of gas that's big enough, it becomes a giant gravity fed nuclear fusion reactor.

So all of this stuff's... Yeah, it's kind of nice. So all of this stuff just squashes together and then in the middle you start to get a fusion. So yeah, basically anytime you get gas together above about a tenth the mass of our sun, it just does this on its own. And then you've got like stars can vary in size a lot. So our sun is relatively small. So they go up to about a hundred times the size of our sun. But the bigger ones are rarer. So, I guess it's kinda like tall people, where like, you've got this really long tail of, like, most people

are around the average height, but then some people are giant. Yeah, and the tall ones are hotter. Yeah. Shout out to Mia Molder. Yeah, most of us are normal, and then you've got me and Molder. Okay, so, for our purposes... I worked her into the next episode I wrote as well, so this is getting, like, bordering on the obsessive now.

There's no shame in it. Can it still be a parasocial relationship if she's been on a podcast? I think so. Or maybe it's just a social relation, I'm not sure. RILEY I think this is straying into social, yeah. ALICE Yeah. RILEY Okay, so, if you jump to the next slide, so stars are made up of three delicious layers.

ALICE Ooh. They're like ogres. RILEY Yeah. ALICE Yeah. RILEY So the middle layer, or at least for our purposes, like there's obviously subdivisions in this because scientists love doing that. But for our purposes, the middle one is called the core and this is where the fusion happens. So the takeaway from this is, you have this huge, y'know, sort of ball of hydrogen, and through various complicated processes, it turns it into helium.

So the one on the right is the most common, it's called like the PP chain or something. Uh, PP. Yep. Yep. Fuck, that really got me. I don't even have to say anything. I hate this, I'm a doctor, I'm such a child. This is the thing, this is the thing, we invite you on and then we drag you down to our level

and then we beat you with experience. No, like, the reality is, I'm like this. I need to accept that. I mean, I'm assuming the other fusion chain is the doo doo chain. Yes. Yeah. If it's not called that, I'm going to petition. Okay. So what thepee chain produces is... god damnit. You end up with your helium. But the other thing that you end up with is energy. So the energy comes out in the form of light, and...

ALICE So I'm sort of missing the point a bit, to be like, the sun is an enormous fusion reactor, the end product of which can be used to fill balloons. It also does some light, or whatever. RILEY Yeah, it makes, it's so much good stuff comes from the sun. It makes lithium as well, shoutout to people who take that. ALICE Elon Musk about to invade and coup the sun.

JUSTIN This is like when, y'know, people point out that all the elements were created in stars, so we're all stardust, and then you say, shut up. I don't wanna hear that hippie bullshit. ALICE You said that to Carl Sagan. That time I saw you getting a fistfight with Carl Sagan. In a parking lot. Over the phrase, star stuff. JUSTIN Yeah.

Shut up. over the phrase, star stuff. Yeah. It's like, shut up. It's like, what the fuck did you just say to me? From dust you were made, and to dust you shall return. I mean, he must have got really pissed off at some people at some point. Or maybe, I'm more imagining the Buzz Aldrin thing. Have you guys seen that? I've seen that, yeah.

I specifically had that in mind, if you want a sense of how similar our thought processes are here. I think that's my favorite space-related video, anyway. Where was I? Yeah, so you've got all this fusion happening. And the most important thing for kind of our purposes on Earth is that energy comes out of this. And that energy does a few different things. It gives us heat and light and things like that.

But it also stops the star from just collapsing. So you've got gravity pulling in. And then eventually, you've got gravity pulling in, and then eventually you've got this radiation kind of pushing outwards. So this is like, just a fistfight between those two things, to kind of stop it from collapsing. And to be clear, this may sound a kind of, like, basic question, but the sun collapsing would be bad for us, right? I would rate it three out of ten. Okay. Yeah, not great. Kind of not an experience you're desperate to repeat, but like, it's okay.

Is ten the worst, or is one the worst? I'm gonna say, I was saying ten, I think. This would be bad. Ten is the worst, so... It would be bad, but not that bad. I'm sure worse things could happen to you. Well, that's a good point, yeah. Oh, my intrusive anxiety about gamma ray bursts, for instance.

Oh yeah. Ooh yeah. Have me back on to talk about those. Another time. Get a rogue planet just coast through the solar system. Mmm, yeah. This is one of the ones where, like, it's very like the kind of pre-ons thing, where that's the episode where I get a workplace injury because one of my fears just becomes embedded.

RILEY So, here's the thing, as I was writing this, I actually listened to that episode, just by chance, and I was like, oh shit, I'm doing the same thing. ALICE Yeah, yeah, you are. I think every so often about how we're in a terrifying, cosmic suspension in which we're in a room where the lights are out, it's a really big room, but also there's a guy firing a shotgun around, like at random, occasionally. Oh boy, we'll get there.

Alright, you got fun stuff, like all the exotic quantum physics things, like vacuum energy collapse or whatever the fuck it's called, you wouldn't know it had happened until it already happened. ALICE I've woken up with hangovers some mornings thinking it already has. So what you're telling me is I'm gonna be ripped apart at the subatomic level, yep, feels like it. JUSTIN Yeah, but you wouldn't be able to see it happening. ALICE Hey, I mean, gamma ray bursts are cool, cause

if you're on the other side of the Earth you you just get a millisecond of, hey, why is it daytime, suddenly? JUSTIN Yeah, there you go. You have a nearby supernova randomly? RILEY Those I think we'll be okay from. But again, story for another time. JUSTIN Okay. RILEY Right, let's move on to the next layer.

So if you jump me ahead one... So yeah, the first layer was the core. That's where all the heat and light gets produced. The second layer is called the radiative layer. This is basically just gas that isn't fusing. And it's really hot. And what happens in this layer is all that light that was produced in the first layer

kind of just bounces around in here for a long time, and heats everything up. So, I don't know if you've ever heard that statistic of like, light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach the Earth? Sure. Well, it doesn't, because it spends like 170,000 years bouncing around in this layer to escape. Wow. I call this the gender identity clinic waiting list lair. Hahahaha. I mean, kinda, yeah. It just kind of spins its wheels, doesn't always go forward...

Yeah. There's not much else to say about this lair. JUSTIN Gotta implement some congestion pricing here. Hahahaha. Wait, couldn't we get the fucking tunnels that Elon Musk built? Maybe they would help. Oh, there you go. You just get like an insane jet of light out of one side of the sun, directly from the

core. I, again, I really hope that's not pointed in our direction. Eh, we'll get there. So the third layer is called the convective zone. So this is the one you can see, if you look at the sun. I encourage you to look at the sun. That's a good idea. This is astrophysical advice.

Yes, I am an astrophysicist, and I'm telling you, the listener, look at the sun. Correctly. Stare at it for a while. Okay, so what this zone does is kind of like air in a room, so like the diagram on the right. So basically, stuff gets heated up and when it gets heated up, it becomes sort of less dense and so it rises up and then it heads over to somewhere cooler, cools down, kind of comes back in this loop. So...

ALICE This radiator should be positioned under the window. LIAM Listen, whatever Victorian cartoon I pulled this from... ALICE I know it's for illustrative purposes, but... ALICE Really old-fashioned radiators, huh. RILEY Yeah, I have no idea, like, I was thinking about when I saw this, when do you think this was drawn? I genuinely can't, the kind of Georgian sash window?

Like old, like, coil tube radiator? I mean, it could be anywhere from like, the fuckin' 1890s to the 1970s, like... Well, there's a big contrast here between the style of the arrows and the style of the illustrations. History of Radiators. That is true, oh god. Uh, 1855. So... Oh wow.

Yeah. Um. They had radiators before that, they had radiators in eastern state penitentiary. And how old was that? I mean, uh, like 18... Wait, Alice, are you just on the AI bit? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. Yeah, invented in 1855 by a kingdom of Prussia at the mall, born Russian businessman living

in St Petersburg. They had it but in 1829 in Eastern State. ALICE I dunno what to tell you. Like, uh... JUSTIN It didn't work! But... ALICE Well, this would be why, because they were waiting for this guy in, um, uh, a fucking king of fracture to invent them.

RILEY Wait, is this like one of those inventions, though, that like, you know the ancient Greeks had? Like that Turkish guy that had the steam engine to turn the kebab. Yep. Yeah, or like the... Well, you had the... Americans invented the radiator, but only to heat prisons? Yeah, you had the heated floors in the Roman baths.

I know a hyper-course is earlier than 1855, I'm aware of that, give me that much credit. But like, just because it is radiative doesn't mean that it's the same thing as a radiator in the sense of- As a radiator. Yes. Yes. The kind of, like, metal heat exchanger that you put in your fucking, like, on your wall is like 1855.

Okay. You're not supposed to put it on a wall, you're supposed to put it under the window. So you can combat the miasma. Jesus Christ. I'm gonna move us out. Please. Uh, yeah, can you jump to the next slide, sorry. Yes.

Oh, this is a radiator. Yes. Yeah, so- So really, the first radiator was invented several billion years ago. ALICE Yes. So yeah, this convection zone is our son the radiator, and what it does is it makes these big... ALICE Only used to heat kebab for billions of years. ALICE Honestly, what a use for it. I'm done with that. LIAM I kinda want a kebab for billions of years. Honestly, what are you used for it?

I'm done with that. I kinda want a kebab now. Oh yeah, you can have like a whole... you can have like a Dyson Sphere of like, rotating kebabs, you know? Yeah, grading a civilization based on how much of its energy of its star it uses to heat kebab. Like, type one civilization, y'know? S, I mean, it is a true sign of civilization.

L, yeah, absolutely, no question. A, this is what the Turkish guys were about to draw on the flight radar before the Iranians made them take the drone back. S, oh my god, drawing a Donna would have been fantastic. Okay, yeah, what was it? Yeah, so the Sun has these convection cycles. So what happens is, can you like John Madden a little bit for me? So at the bottom of the cycle, that's where all the heat is.

So you pick up heat at the bottom, and then you carry it up to the top, and that's where you radiate it off into space. So the bit that we actually see when you look at the sun is that bit at the top radiating off into space. And then that stuff comes back down again to pick up more heat. And that's kind of the process. And each of these, they're called cells, are about a thousand kilometres across. So they're like, big, but not astronomically big, if that makes sense. So like, on the right, you can

kind of see some, so that's a picture of the sun taken through a solar telescope. Huh. So like, that's not like, like an artistic impression, that's a photograph. Nope, real photo. That's fucking wild. Yeah, you get a telescope and then you basically put really really strong sunglasses on it. Close up of Garfield. Do it, doing macro shots of Garfield.

I was gonna say I thought it looked like a cell. Like a, you know, like an egg? Yeah, it has the kind of furry pattern to it. Yeah, but I prefer Garfield. Harpets, or Garfield, yeah. I'm just thinking now though, if you had the big vertical kebab spit in zero-g, wouldn't it cook differently, because the fat doesn't drip out? It would just stay in place. ALICE This is the kind of thing that NASA need to be working on right now.

JUSTIN Yeah, get onto the guys at the International Space Station, they're not doing anything. ALICE Oh, I'm not, they're not taking my calls lately. JUSTIN LAUGHS ALICE I can't figure this out, guys. How will space kebabs taste. First person to be shadow banned from the ISS ham radio set. Okay, so. You've got, yeah, you've got these convective cells, so these sort of thousand kilometre-ish

size bits of gas moving up and down. The other bit of movement that we care about is, if you jump to the next slide, the Sun spins around. ALICE The Sun goes spinny. RILEY Sun goes spinny. But, because the Sun isn't a solid object, like you or me or the Earth... ALICE Kind of custard. RILEY Yeah, right, exactly.

So... ALICE I was joking, but okay, I'm gonna go with it. No, like, pretty much. So if you've ever, yeah, stirred a cup of tea, or like, a custard, or whatever, it's kind of the same deal. But bird's eye microwave custard, similar viscosity, similar temperature. So yeah, your bird's custard takes 25 days to go around at the equator, but it takes almost...

Bird's eye? Like the fish? Jesus Christ. Did I say bird's eye? I was meaning birds. I said bird's eye! That's a cursed product. Frozen custard.

Mmm. Mmm. I did mean birds, but I definitely said bird's eye, so yeah, your frozen fish finger cusp... fuck, I've just demented Doctor Who again, independently. Oh, disgusting. I know. Okay, your fluid of choice spins differently at different latitudes, effectively. So what happens is, yeah, the equator spins the fastest, and then it spins slower at the

poles. And like, everything wants to do this, but you're only able to do this if you're not made of like, solid stuff. Right. So, this is just a product of like, how gravity works really, it's not anything special about the sun, the earth would do this if it could. If it was liquid. If we, like, if we custodized the earth.

Yeah, we could just give it a shave. Go down to the mantle. There you go. I really don't want us to shave the earth. Gotta build a whole bunch more of those, like, German bucket wheel excavators. Yeah, well, I was about to say, German lignite mining is an early attempt, it's like, kind of plucking the hair that we want to shave.

Do you know what, I think the Germans should have the literal translation of mining to be like earth shaving. Mm. I'm not actually sure what the German for mining is off the top of my head. Belg-Bow! What the f- Yeah, no, I don't- Does that have like a literal translation? In this case it would be like, like, mountain, uh, like, building.

I mean, it... It's not wrong. I guess. Uh, you are making some big spoil tips. Mmm. I'm like, too literal. Anyway, sorry. About this spinning costume.

No, we're all good. Right, and you might think, like, I've witted on now for like 25 minutes and I've talked about magnets and I've talked about how the sun moves. Like how are these two things connected? So if you jump to the next slide, the way these things are connected... Oh wow, it's Garfield and his whiskers. The way these things are connected is all of that, what we sort of colloquially call gas is actually plasma. The only difference between the two is basically a plasma is a gas that has an electric charge.

So if you remember from your physics course you took not too long ago, whenever you have electric charge moving, you get magnetic field, or whiskers. So what you're seeing here is a picture of the sun, and then overlaid is a model of the magnetic field. And they're all... They're all fuck of a lot of iron filings. I assume since it's all gas, these electric fields are constantly spazzing out. Yes.

So, yeah, if you could use one adjective to describe these, it would be fucked. Because they just kind of go everywhere. The reason for that is, yeah, you've got these convective cells that are constantly moving, and you also have this, what's called a winding effect. So, if you jump to the next slide. So, our lovely, what's called differential rotation, which is our bits of custard spinning at different speeds, mean that slowly what happens is the magnetic field, like, winds up.

ALICE All of radioactive custard covered in yarn. RILEY Yeah, it's lovely. ALICE I had a lot of feelings about the sun before, but I wasn't expecting gross to be on the list. Just really unsatisfying. This is the thing, right, whenever people do, like, intelligent design or whatever, and they're like, everything about this is so perfectly elegant and stuff, and then you talk to scientists and it's like, yeah, it's fucked.

It's like, completely, like, fucking weird. ZACH Yeah, absolutely. And like, I mean, that's part of the fun, right? Like, if it was really simple, we'd have solved it all by now. So like, I think the fuckness is, yeah. Part of the attraction. It's created a kind of like, inner London one-way system, in the last picture there. It's like, I don't...

Yeah, it really is. So I guess that's actually quite a good analogy. So like, what happens is this horrible one-way system gets more and more and more complicated, and this produces, if you remember one of our magnates... God is real, and does intelligent design, he's just a traffic engineer. Left to their own devices, traffic engineers will eventually produce Earth's sun. I worry I've killed Justin. Oh, I'm back, I just hit the fridge real quick, sorry.

Oh, no worries. It's legal, I was just stealing your joke about traffic engineers. Oh, yeah, I mean, this is the ULAZ zone, but in stellar sense. I mean, you're kind of not wrong. Again, like these analogies are really good because what happens here is it gets wound and wound and wound up like this. If you remember me talking about magnets, I said the closer these magnetic field lines are, the stronger the magnetic field is at that point.

So basically what's happening here is you're storing energy in the magnetic field, and more and more and more of it. And then eventually what happens is, this produces weird effects on the sun. So if you jump to the next slide... ALICE Look at this beautiful creme brulee up here. JUSTIN Wow. It's Garfield's butthole. And then this horrible Garfield butthole.

Also Garfield on the right one, Garfield has developed a couple of melanomas or something. Yeah. Not far off, they are called sunspots. So what these are, is sometimes in certain areas of this totally fucked magnetic field, it can switch off the convection sort of locally. So what this convection does remember is it carries hot stuff up to the surface and then it's radiating off heat. So if you turn off the convection, the stuff that's radiating off gets kind of stuck at the top and radiates off more heat than you'd expect. So the areas in like yellow and orange say, are 5,500 degrees C and the black bit is quite a bit cooler. It's at like 3,400 degrees C.

Bomb me. Yeah, you know, as far as the sun goes, it is anyway. No, you still die, nevermind. Oh yeah. I'm trying to think of something that happens at like 3400C, not even like, cement manufacturing gets that hot. Yeah, you are melting everything. Yeah. Cause it's also like, it's 3400C on the surface, in the atmosphere of the sun it's much hotter,

you are fucked. Um, yeah. Why does that make me anxious? It requires a pretty big, long chain of events for me to be on the surface of the sun. Most of the intervening ones which kill me anyway. Why am I suddenly a bit nervous now? ZACH I think this just does that to people, to be honest. Like, yeah, you get used to it.

The cosmic horror, you mean? Yeah, it's very born in that way, where you just kind of are okay with it after a while. This is only a little bit warmer than the conditions that Salvadorians have to work in right now. Salvadorians are agriculture workers. Stan Oh, Jesus, that's dark. Marshall Yeah. Stan Okay, yeah. So, you get these sunspots and what these are is the magnetic field at that point

has gotten so fucked and so strong and close together that it's switched off this convection. Marshall The other thing you you gotta think of is like Phoenix, this is a dry heat. I've been in Phoenix in summer, and admittedly this was a good ten years ago before the global warming really got global warming, but like, even still, I never wanna feel that kind of heat again, which is bad news considering, given that it's coming to us as a near-year. RILEY I'm sure if you stay in Scotland it'll be fine. That's my strategy anyway. I'm trying to move to London.

Oh, that's a mistake. I know, I know, everyone tells me this, including me, fairly often, and yet. Yeah, you gotta keep going north, you gotta move to Shetlands. If you don't want me to move to London, cancel your Patreon, because that's the only way I can afford to move down there. No, no, the rest of us have to eat as well. The alter areas of the UK all canceling the Patreons out of spite. Oh, god.

Yeah. You could move to beautiful Blackpool! I've never been! You know what, I like Blackpool, I grew up not far from there. It's okay. It has a horrible drug problem, but other than that. I've never been. Uh, I... You know what? I like Blackpool. I grew up not far from there. It's okay. It has a horrible drug problem, but other than that. I wanna see all the old trams.

The trams rule. I took my nephew on them a few months back. They're so good. Boom. I just love that we picked somewhere as a punchline and just, honestly, ended up being like quite enthusiastic about it within like a minute. Yeah, exactly. They sent us one of their boat trams, they sent us one to Philly, and then we used it

for a while, then we gave it to San Francisco, cause we're idiots. Did you get anything in exchange? I don't know what we got in exchange. I think we got something, but I'm not sure what it was. That's fair. Could we tell you about this? By way of New Orleans or something. Alright, tell me more about this furry crème brûlée though.

Sorry, yeah, furry crème brûlée. So yeah, what's happened here is, these convection cells have switched off so this bit gets to cool down, but the reason that's happened is the magnetic field is like, especially fucked in this locale. So what then happens is, I mean, you get these sunspots all the time, but what then happens is all of these magnetic field lines, what people call in the literature reorganize, but I'm gonna call snap back into place. And when they snap back into place, they bring some of this electrically charged material

with them. So if you jump to the next slide. So... Wow, a GIF has finally worked on this podcast. Amazing. It's this kind of technical wizardry that you get me in for. So yeah, on the right is the results of this snapping back, and this is called, well, they're both called...

Wait, let me get my names right. Yeah, sorry. The ones on the left, I think are called solar prominences, if I remember right. So what's happened here is the materials escaped, but then like been dragged back immediately to the surface. So it forms these like cool loops and flares and things like that. Neat. The one on the right, however, is so sort of violent that the stuff escapes off into space. So this is called a coronal mass ejection, which is basically a huge burp. JUSTIN Yeah.

Not to be confused with a corneal mass ejection, which is when your eyes- ALICE Yeah, don't do that. Ooh. Yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE That is gross. JUSTIN Yeah. Eye popping.

Hmm. Okay, yeah, so, what you're looking at here, this coronal mass ejection, that's about a billion tons of material coming out. And I actually did the math on this, because I love homework, and this is kind of the equivalent, if you did a burp, of like, a red blood cell. A single red blood cell. So like, this isn't gonna evaporate the sun off or anything like that. But, it's a lot of stuff.

Differing scales, right. Not a lot to the sun, but a lot to you. Yeah. And I mean, it's spread over an absolutely huge area, so there's nothing to worry about directly. Like, it's not gonna fall on your head. You gotta think like, a billion tons, I mean, you know, that does sound like a lot, but I'm also wondering, okay, what does like, a mountain weigh, you know?

Probably about the same, yeah. On that sort of scale. There's probably spoil tips from like, German lignite mines that are about that much. ALICE Just a German man just like, jumps an entire mountain on you, killing you. RILEY Okay, I just Googled it, this is a Mount Everest, more or less. JUSTIN Oh, okay, okay. RILEY It's a lot, but like...

ALICE So it ejects like about a million tons of debris and a bunch of like, dentists and stuff, on top of you. RILEY Yeah. Yeah, you get that dentists and stuff, on top of you. Yeah. Yeah, you get that guy with the bright green pants. The green boots, yeah. Listen to our Mount Everest pod, yes? Yeah, the really fucked up thing about The Sun is that it mostly coronally mass ejects like Sherpas, but like, no one really gives a fuck about them.

Again, watch the movie Sherpa, it's really good. Sherpain explicitly survives, he's like smoking a cigarette the whole time. I'd actually argue if anything the Sun's anti-white based on what it does to me. Mmm. Yeah. That is definitely true. Sun finally doing anti-white racism. I really don't know why the evil scientist Yakub invented white people in defiance of the sun.

Because he was evil. Yeah, but it seems ultimately self-sabotaging, given that we all get infinity melanomas and stuff. This is true, yeah. Okay, if you jump to the next slide for me. So, something I forgot to mention is the sun gets more and less active every about 11 years. So, it goes in this kind of cycle of being very, very active for sort of four or five years and then it goes away again and kind of comes back. So, back in 2012, this picture was taken. So

this is one of the biggest coronal mass ejections that we've taken a picture of. So this was taken by a satellite called SOHO, which has a thing called a coronagraph, which basically means you stick your thumb over the star to look at everything else. So that- Extremely low tech. Yeah. Like if you're doing this from the ground, you would literally just like, you know, put Yup. To look at everything else. So that... Extremely low tech. Yeah, like, if you're doing this from the ground, you would literally just like, you know, put one of those like little sticky dots on the telescope. Nice.

So that like, dark red circle is the sticky dot, the white circle is the sun. So you're getting a feeling for like how big this thing is. Jesus. That's quite a lot, that's a lot of stuff. Yeah, so this happened in 2012. And you said an 11 year cycle. Yes. This now being 12 years ago. So we are, yeah, effectively at the next peak after this. So like, during the mid 2010s

the sun was pretty quiet, there was enough other stuff going on, and it's back. ALICE Is this a... I've vaguely heard the terms before, solar maximum, is that what this is? ZEKE Right, yeah. This is a solar maximum. ALICE So that's a cool turn of phrase. ZEKE Yeah, it really is.

It'd be a good band name, I think. So yeah, this is one of the biggest ones that ever came out. Luckily, as you can probably tell by the picture, this wasn't pointed at us. So this is kind of going up and down, away from us. And that's a bit of a saving grace. So if you jump to the next slide for me... ALICE LAUGHS. ALICE This is what I'm fucking afraid of, thank you for exemplifying!

Now, the problem is that it's not just our sun, there's like, fucking, there's billions of these fuckers and they all have plasma rifles! RIght? Like, this is a lot of things in astrophysics, unfortunately, that like, you live next door to a psychopath with two plasma rifles, and it's only by, sort of, two graces, I suppose. So number one, everything in astronomy happens over really long periods of time, so, like, things don't happen that often on a human scale. And number two, space is really big, so when they do happen they don't always hit you. But other than that, space is horrible.

I appreciate Earth being a very small, very fast moving target, so you're trying to, like, you know... Your VATS percentage is low. Yeah. You're in a huge shooting gallery, but uh, you know. You're one of many tasty targets. You are the world's fastest, like, blue bottle in a shooting gallery. Of billions of psychopaths? Yeah, and I mean, most of these psychopaths are too far away to really do anything to

us. The sun less so, however. ALICE It is right there. RILEY Yeah. It's... ALICE We tried to get away from it, we probably had a problem. ALICE You have like a, you're like, what, eight minute

warning or whatever? RILEY You wouldn't even get that. ALICE Right! Cool! RILEY Sorry. ALICE Uh, okay, cool. Um, I guess we might start drinking more. No, I do want to reassure you though, we're not completely defenseless against this.

So, coronal mass ejections do hit us from time to time. We can kill the sun! In self-defense! Like the fucking, the sun has a cowboy hat and two plasma rifles, earth we can Photoshop in later maybe, just has like a big high point sticking out of it. This is what we go back to. We could go back to our geoengineering episode, where I, uh, bonus episode, subscribe to the

Patreon for that one. And I suggested we could move the Earth, you know, that's always an option. Just tow it a bit, yeah, for sure. We could put thrusters on and do like evasive maneuvers. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But before that, the earth has some natural defenses. So number one, if you go to the next slide, atmosphere.

Ooh, I like this. Atmosphere, good. Not only do we breathe it, it does so much for us. One of my favorite objects, if I'm honest. So it modulates our temperature. So for example, the moon is the same distance away from us, from the sun basically. And daytime on the moon is plus 100, and nighttime is minus 180 at sea. I can have some issues with thermal expansion on structures on the moon, I would imagine then.

Yeah, it's horrible and it's one of the many reasons that building there is going to be really hard, probably impossible. Unless people are really clever about it. It also protects us. It's a jigger hole. I mean, yeah, that's probably one most... one of the most viable things, in my opinion. It's time to Mondberg-bowl. Y'know?

You would have to send one of the bucket wheel excavators up there. German space program, we finally let em play with rockets again. Uh, huge, HUGE insult to Sigmund Yane out of nowhere. But, uh, yeah. No, we just... Just mine the whole moon. Excavate the moon. Yeah, like, people have been talking about asteroid mining, fuck that, why don't we instead mine the moon that has, as far as we know, very little value in it?

Yeah, just fuck all that. Really? Never understood. very little value in it. Yeah, it does fuck all that, really. Never understood. It's some of the housing crisis, you know? Okay, maybe you can't afford to rent a flat in London unless you have a bizarrely successful comedy podcast, but you can afford social housing in zone 27000, The Moon. Never understood. This is like when I have to move to East Lothian when Edinburgh becomes too expensive.

ALICE LAUGHS. Yeah, and then of course the moon gets sequentially gentrified, and you're like, for fuck's sake, why a podcast is moving to the moon, and the answer is that London's too expensive. Yeah. Never understood asteroid mining, cause I feel like, y'know, maybe it'd be easier to reopen a mine in Minnesota or something. I'd see much work, with the permits and everything, plus you have to go to Minnesota, which is less hospitable than some asteroids.

I think it's mostly asteroid mining as a thing, because it sounds like a cool future job, that's like, working class, and we don't have enough blue collar jobs in sci-fi, so you're like, yeah, I'm an asteroid miner. An asteroid miner. Or whatever. Yeah, if you ever run out of episode ideas, I'll get drunk and rant about this. But... Please, yeah. It's like, come on, the Upper Peninsula exists.

I've never seen proof of that. Alright, I'm gonna move back to on topic, I'm gonna make a controversial move. Yeah, so the atmosphere, it regulates our temperature. It protects us from stuff that comes out of the sun all the time. So the sun has a thing called the solar wind, which is like the coronal mass ejections, but just like happening continuously. It just streams off. So that stuff is unpleasant. It also blocks most of the UV radiation that comes from the sun, which would cook you. Yeah, it does lots of good things.

I like that it's pitched at the level that it likes. It blocks most of this kind of cosmic scale of radiation, however you might also want to top up with a bit of sunscreen. Yeah. Yeah, like, I actually think it's pretty amazing that those two things in combination is what it takes. Yeah, for real I actually think it's pretty amazing that those two things in combination is what it takes. Yeah, for real. Like, yeah.

It takes the might of the Earth's atmosphere and like, a cream. Yes. Maybe a spray if you're lazy. Yeah. Yeah, okay, so, the atmosphere is something we should protect. Thank you very much, atmosphere, I love you. But, it can't- Give you very much atmosphere, I love you. But, it can't-

ALICE You're giving me a big hug right now. RILEY Yeah. It can't do it on its own. So, for example, Mars used to have a lovely, luscious atmosphere like ours, and basically doesn't anymore. And the reason for that is, this solar wind and these coronal mass ejections basically strip off bits of the atmosphere when they collide with it. So it's like, ablative sort of shielding.

Right. What are we at with the atmosphere status? We gotta like, uh... I actually had to look this up, because I got, very rarely do I get existential crisis about this stuff, but I did go and look up, like, are we losing atmosphere? The answer is no. The reason for that, like, we're producing more atmosphere than is disappearing into space. That's one good thing.

JUSTIN That's one excellent... Leave it up, guys. RILEY Yeah. So, the reason that we're not losing so much atmosphere compared to like Mars, which is virtually gone, is if you go next slide please, the Earth has its own magnetic field. So, I the source source I have for this would be if you've ever used a compass. Oh, right. Yes, those do work. So basically where this comes from is the Earth has a delicious gooey center. So if you want your planet to have an atmosphere, you need to have like a liquid center, preferably

made of like iron or nickel or something nice and magnetic, and as that moves around it produces a magnetic field. And what this does is deflects away all of that solar wind, because it's made up of charged, electrically charged bullshit. So it deflects that away... For whatever reason, it gets more pixelated as you get towards the surface. RILEY Yeah, sorry, it deflected... The one thing they never warn you about in podcasting is like, how to keep your train

of thought. ALICE Oh, trust me, we don't bother. RILEY Yeah, so, magnetic field deflects away charge bullshit, and that stuff just kind of is deflected off into space and just kind of disappears. Harmlessly off into space, and then we smash cut to like, some other planet where the first like, piece of life develops and is immediately like, one-shotted by like, by like, shit that's been deflected off of Earth. Fuck you, should've evolved on a real planet.

Or maybe... We're just the kind... We're like, so lucky, because we're effectively the coin in an Annie Oakley trick shot, and everything that could kill us just bounces off to kill something else. Or it could be like the Great Pacific trash patch, where it's actually just floating out somewhere. Just all this disgusting hydrogen. ALICE Ugh. Gross.

Never see that in Star Trek, do you? Just fuckin... Yeah, Star Date 26606, we ran into a big cloud of gross hydrogen. And it needed to like, really scrape off the outside of the ship, it's horrible. Captain's log. Ugh. So this is, yeah, this is why like, Mars, the Moon, Mercury, they don't have atmospheres is because they're a little bit smaller than the Earth and so they cool down quicker. So their cores are solid rather than liquid, so they don't have a magnetic field, so the solar wind blasts off their atmosphere so they become more hellscapes than Earth.

You really don't want to fuck around with cooking time then? Yeah, exactly. ALICE When you're making a planet. JUSTIN Yes. JUSTIN Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right, the deal is, you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode

once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalogue of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't, it's your

decision and we respect that. Back to the show. Another nice feature of this magnetic field and what it does for the earth is, if you go to the next slide please, it produces lovely light. Ooh! Steamed hams! Just had that on deck, waiting for the next Aurora Borealis thing. I mean, you couldn't not, right? Yeah.

So, this is a photo a pal of mine took in Edinburgh, and this was pretty much how it looked to the naked eye, so it was pretty cool. So what's happening here is all of that stuff that's come off of the sun, when it reaches Earth it smashes into the upper atmosphere and basically works like a neon lamp that you get in a takeaway. So it excites the electrons of the atoms, and when those- Oh, it's a shitload of bugs. Yeah. Yeah, it excites the electrons of the atoms, and when those... ALICE It's a shitload of bugs.

RILEY Yeah. Yeah, so... ALICE Sorry, I'm sorry I'm like this. RILEY No, it's good. It's good, I just feel... ALICE The pitch that we offer to guests, would you like to deliver a lecture of your own choice of subject and length and style, but you also have at least one hooting moron in your ear at all times. Well, so my day job is as a science communicator, so I'm usually doing this to the good eight-year-olds

of Edinburgh. And... Yeah, so what's it like to step down in intellect, you know? No, honestly, this is preferable, this is chill. Yeah, okay, the takeaway of this is, charged bullshit smashes into earth, excites atoms in the atmosphere and they give out light when that happens. They give out light of like, yeah, very specific pretty colors as well. So, aurora are always that green and always that pink, exactly.

Right. So the green comes from oxygen, there's a red which you, I don't think you see in this one, but like if you google them, that also comes from oxygen, and then the blue, violet and pink, which I think you're just getting the pink here, they come from nitrogen, and sometimes you get some other stuff too. So, if you jump to the- NITROGEN IS THE TRANS RIGHTS? Yeah! Well, if you jump to the next slide.

Whole planet looks like bisexual lighting. So, to be fair, knowledge and belief, this is the only planet that generates bisexuals. I mean, look at the other planets, they look pretty... Do you see trans rights on Jupiter? Do you see trans rights on Saturn? Well, you can see it's blue for boys, cause boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider. So yeah, this is the same effect. This is the exact same thing that's happening, it's just happening on other planets.

ALICE Unfortunately, theirs look whack, ours looks cool. RILEY I actually agree! ALICE Once again, undefeated, number one baby, greatest earth in the multiverse. RILEY Greatest place in the universe. N-n-n-n-number of living beings. More than zero.

Boom. Yep. Population greater than zero. Lest we find tiny microbes on Mars, I don't know. Oh fuck a tiny microbe, I don't give a shit about them, but I'm really gonna take it poorly if we do, like do first contact with intelligent space fairing life. Because I really have been dining out on whatever hypothesis you choose to deploy, it doesn't

matter as to why, I really like the idea that it is us. We are the only ones doing it, nobody is on our level. You know. We're the part of globetrotters of this shit. No! We're like, flexing on, like, all that has ever possibly existed. But also like... Sorry, go on.

Well, we make first contact and it turns out they have a better football team than we do. Motherfuckers. Alright, well, the Galactic War begins right then, obviously. Yeah. We go back to my original thing of that, the Pioneer plaque, depicting humans as being twenty feet tall, standing at Thwart a throne of skulls. You know? We've discovered an entire race of Tom Brady's. the 80s. ALICE LAUGHS ALICE LAUGHS

ALICE LAUGHS I just, I think what we do, once we like, become like, properly, like, routinely, like on a solar system level spacefaring, right, is what we do is we stake out the kind of boundary zone, we fence off the outside of like, the orbit of Pluto, and we put a bunch of signs saying like, multiverse is best football played here, and we brook no argument about that. JUSTIN I imagine the first NFL exhibition game played on Mars. LIAM Do you know what, like, you know people talk about those Olympics where you take all the drugs, is Peter Thiel doing that if I remember right?

What I can't wait for is the low gravity games. That's gonna rule. Oh, hell yeah. Mmhm. Yeah. Yeah. Goddamn. Okay.

Well. Yeah. The key takeaway from this... You could do a tackle, but, you know, instead of falling on the ground, you go up. Are we tethering them, or are they just like, lost? ZAC Yeah, I don't know, maybe they got like, yeah, they got some like, they got some like magnetic cleats or something. RILEY I think on Mars they'd be fine, but we could

find a small enough asteroid to do this on. ZAC Yeah, yeah, where you just sort of float. RILEY And we could tackle somebody into space. ZAC Yeah, tackle them into space. ALICE We'd have to get a couple of like, astronauts with the like, jetpack thing, just to kind of catch them, just in case. And if you fumble a guy who's going to-

Oh my god, this is how they do the fucking, you know those people who do the Quidditch bullshit? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is how you do that. Low gravity Quidditch, I could get behind. First of all we have to deport everyone who wants to play Quidditch from Asteroid. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there's so many problems.

Snitch is floating there hopelessly because there's no atmosphere, you know? Aw, yes. I'm just also thinking about, like, relative acceleration and stuff on something with no atmosphere. For some reason my mind went to cricket, and I just thought about perfectly spin bowling through someone's sternum. Like, just because... There's no air to impede a cricket ball. Yeah, like, the home runs on the first interstellar baseball game are just gonna be constant.

ALICE We need to do low to zero gravity sports as soon as possible. RILEY See, it would be so good, right? ALICE Civilizational priority. RILEY Everyone's dunking on zero gravity basketball. ALICE Well, plus also, if they'd been running basketball in zero gravity, Kobe wouldn't have died. Good point. Wouldn't have needed a helicopter.

That's right. If you'd gotten in a helicopter, it would just, you know, have been fine. Wouldn't have crashed. Alright, so all of these auroras are bitch made apart from ours. Yeah, pretty much. That's the main takeaway from this. The other smaller takeaway from this, if you go to the next slide please, is when these particles come to Earth, they are charged. So if you remember back to when I was talking about magnets, when you've got these charged particles moving, they bring along their own magnetic fields.

And basically what happens is they fuck with our magnetic field by this process called induction. So, you have a moving magnet, it fucks around with our magnetic field, it fucks around with more importantly, any wires that are around. So yeah, if like normally this doesn't really do anything, so like this isn't even noticeable even with the aurora from the other night, like you'd need pretty advanced scientific equipment to even notice. However, if you had a really big geomagnetic storm, it would induce big currents into our long conductors.

ALICE Yes. And this is where I've put together some slides about three times that happened. ALICE I didn't know it was gonna be three. I thought this would be like a one-time thing. JUSTIN I didn't know it was gonna be three either. ALICE And I was gonna be less worried about it. I was aware that the sun can fuck with my gaming computer on the level of, like, it can flip bits occasionally because it feels like it, right, and really fuck with your

speedrunning thing. I was not aware that it could really fuck with your speedrunning thing by making it so that you don't have a computer anymore. And that drives me, because I like having a computer. It can speedrun your computer's temperature increases. That's helpful. Mmm... once again, between this and UV radiation we're coming back to cooling gels being spread on things.

Maybe they just cure everything. More gels. Maybe just everything needs to be in a kind of a gel form. I mean, my oestrogen is, and that's done wonders for me, so I'm pro-gel on almost any basis. So we've had several large geomagnetic storms, but to explain them first we have to explain the telegraph. I've heard of these, you know, the... Yes.

...kind of thing. That was just gibberish. Yes, I know. I don't know Morse, I don't remember it. Alright, so, the telegraph. This is the way you do long distance communication without physically schlepping a message from point A to point B. You do still have to schlep a wire from point A to point B.

This is true, but you only gotta- You gotta do it once though, right? Only gotta do it once, yeah. That's true, yeah. So there's some of the very early telegraph systems, because telegraph systems predate electricity, because they're not necessarily electrical, you have optical telegraphs, they were very popular in France, some Native American tribes used them, civilizations used them for a while in the form of smoke signals, for instance.

You could also have semaphore signals, you could do... You know, some place with drums... Big semaphore towers, yeah. It's a really cool alternative to the telegraph, proliferated for a while. Yeah, I think the semaphore towers, they built a big system in France in 1790 or so. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the most progressive version of this is just, it's just signal fires, right? Like, you use it as a kind of alarm system for like, I don't know, the fucking, the Mongols are coming over the border, the first guard tower to see them lights a big brazier, then

you see another brazier light thing, goes all the way over, and you're like, okay, cool. But the Minas Tarith has to signal Gondor. Yeah, exactly. So they just send one big dash. Just, f***. Yeah, you just yell a slur into the machine and it keeps going. Just like, listening to a Morse transmission, just like, I didn't know anything I could say that many slurs that quickly. First electrical telegraph experiments were back in like 1816, there's a lot of weird

systems that crop up initially, they have things like needles that indicate letters or like dials, and they have multiple wires or different characters. These are largely superseded by the very simple one-wire Morse system by the 1840s. Yeah, things got weird in the sense that like, you could transmit a picture by telegraph pretty quickly after this. And that led to some interesting systems. Oh yeah, the fax machine was developed very early on, actually. Yep.

Did we have documents of who the first person was to send a nude for this? You know, I'm guessing that was like five minutes after its invention. The song, Send Me a Kiss by Wire, the one that begins with like, hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime girl, that is a song about sexting over a telegraph, and it was topical because the telegraph was new. That rule. Send Me a Kiss by Wire is like, essentially, send me the nudes and, you know. Nudes please.

Yeah, exactly. I thought that was, I thought that was invented for the cartoon with the talking frog. I know the Michigan Rag was. The Michigan Rag was definitely invented for that cartoon. Alright. Yeah, Tin Pan Alley song written in 1899. Damn. It subjects as a man who has a girlfriend who he knows only through the telephone.

Wow. On the telephone, no one knows you're a dog. So these networks expand very rapidly, since they were cheap and simple to construct by 1859, work had commenced on a transcontinental telegraph net cable in America, Europe had been thoroughly knitted together by the electoral telegraph at this point, except for France, who had invested heavily in the optical system, you know, the semaphores, and they had a sunk cost fallacy sort of state of denial about it. Oh, these'll be good someday.

ALICE I think in some ways they were kind of aesthetically cooler. JUSTIN It is aesthetically cooler. ALICE And, less fuckwothable by the sun, so now who's laughing? JUSTIN That's a good point, that's a good point. So how does this work? They have this old timey battery, cause they haven't invented the generator yet.

That's something that has, like, I don't know, a bunch of copper plates and zinc plates and then there's some bullshit that goes on there, I don't understand it. ALICE Some like, some acid or some like, I don't know, a bunch of copper plates and zinc plates and then there's some bullshit that goes on there, I don't understand. ALICE Like some acid or some shit, I don't know. JUSTIN Yeah. When you tap on a telegraph it completes the circuit, at another telegraph office, you know, 100 miles away, that circuit powers an electromagnet, the telegraph receiver taps there too, thus you can send messages in Morse code, right? ALICE Sure. taps there too, thus you can send messages in Morse code, right? But this gives you your very very long wire, which is susceptible to geomagnetic storms, such as those from the sun.

So... Did you draw this? Long time ago, yes. I remember this, motherfucker, yes! Oh, is this vintage? Well, there's your profile... Is this vintage John Maddening? Yes.

Yeah. So this all worked great until September of 1859. So there's these two English guys named Richard Christopher Carrington and Richard Hodson. Both these guys independently observed and documented solar flares for the first time, and they were observable on account of they were extremely big. I mean, in that case I kind of like, naming shit after them is a bit, like... They don't name, like, if a truck runs into a building full of air horns outside, and

I notice it, out the window, and go, damn. They don't call it the November Kelly traffic collision. Right? Like...... Yeah. We'd have to see what happens. Depends how, like, civilizational impactful a collision it would be, y'know? Well, speaking of impactful, two days later, on the 3rd of September, the coronal mass ejection hit the earth head on.

I mean, you get a decent amount of warning, I guess. Yeah. The mass ejection, I believe, goes a lot slower than the visuals of it. Yeah, it does, but the question is, what do you do in that time? The plus of the movie Melancholia, which is another thing that strikes me. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, Aurora was seen as far south as Columbia. In New York City you could read a newspaper by the Aurora. And this was

at the time, by and large, a curiosity. Except for telegraph operators. Because all those long telegraph cables... ALICE We have almost no conductors in society apart from a shitload of telegraph lines. JUSTIN Yeah. All those long telegraph cables now had significant induced currents, these telegraph operators were shocked by induced currents, these telegraph operators were shocked by the machines, you know, you just get a nice electrical shock. Telegraph operator shocked by coronal mass ejection! Speaking perfect Morse!

I guess a coronal mass ejection just, if it's a constant current it just encodes one really long dash. Which is a- It's the big beep. The beacon's alert. A T? We'll get to that in a second. Just like, who the fuck is sending me a T, and why has it electrocuted me?

Um, wires started throwing up sparks in like random locations, equipment like relays failed due to the high induced current. In some cases, the only feasible way to keep the network going was to disconnect the battery power entirely, because you could use the induced current to send messages. I'm not 100% certain how that worked. It's free current. It's free energy.

Yeah, it's free current, yeah. Yeah, it's exactly the same as how a battery works, just provided from wirelessly effectively. Yeah, and ultimately this largely proved to be a trivial problem. These telegraph networks were down for, you know, days at most. There was no lasting damage. But there was another major geomagnetic storm that caused significantly more damage. The New York Railroad Storm. This is on May 12th, 1921, it was the most intense geomagnetic storm in the 20th century. RIley The real theme of this podcast is, I'm amazed how much happens to the northeast's

railroad system. RIley Well, one of the reasons this is called the New York Railroad Storm... It's a great cognitive bias in terms of that's what one of us, who is extremely informed about it, keeps talking about. I was gonna suggest is it built on like a ley line or something. Oh, probably that too. Nah, a big aspect on why this is reported on as the New York Railroad Storm is that that's where the press was. Mmhm. was. Yeah.

So you have a more developed... If you wanted to pick a through line for stuff to talk about, in terms of influence, you could do a lot worse than trains, you know? Yeah. You have a lot more telegraph wires at this point, you have electrical grids, but they're not interconnected in the way they are now. I mean, you have, like, in New York City alone you have like, 20 electricity companies with 25 different standards. From proprietary wires, all like messing each other up, and, yep.

Exactly. Different proprietary appliances, if you have any appliances at all. You know, proprietary light bulbs. The electrical grid at this point was a mess, because it wasn't a grid, it was, you know, 25 competing grids. ALICE Thank God, apparently. JUSTIN Yeah. You have sort of similar symptoms like strong auroras, you have induced currents in the

large interconnected telegraph systems that resulted in a rash of fires, which wound up largely targeting railroad infrastructure, particularly, and this is also an artifact of reporting, the New York Central Railroad. The voltages in the telegraph wires approached one kilovolt. So one of the first things that happened is that the Telegraph tower in Grand Central Terminal burst into flames. Just instantly. ALICE I was gonna ask, is that a lot?

And apparently... JUSTIN Yes. One... GARETH It kinda depends, right? Because, like, in a modern power line that's not that much. It's not nothing. JUSTIN That's not that much, but... In a Telegraph system.

Yeah. Train station at Brewster, New York... I think Brewster's in New York, it might be in Massachusetts, I forget. It burned down, signal systems stopped working, the whole railroad came to a halt, further north in Canada the telegraph system was like, burned out entirely, essentially every fuse north of Mexico had to be replaced. It was a huge manufacturer. ALICE This was a huge... ALICE Exactly, yeah.

This was a huge storm, but it still... ALICE In a gold rush cell picks and shovels, in a solar storm, cell fuses. JUSTIN Now we got circuit breakers, though. You just flip them... Yeah. Yep. Another thing which has been ruined by woke. This was a huge storm.

Some reports say it was like even possibly the same size as the Carrington event, but I think it was a lot smaller. A lot of the stuff is like scales in like scales logarithmically as opposed to linearly. Society was back up and running fairly quickly. And then our most modern one that caused serious issues was in March of 1989. So in Northern Quebec they have something called the James Bay Project, which is a series of massive fuck-off hydroelectric dams, right? ALICE I'm generally in favor of those, sort of, sometimes.

JUSTIN Oh, these are so fucking big, it's insane. The height from the top of this thing to the bottom of the thing is like Niagara Falls and a half. This is the Robert Orasa generating station. It's good for five gigawatts of clean electricity, most of which is sent to Montreal, some is sent to New England. They built like half a dozen of these things. The Cree First Nations tribe has not been happy about the project, because it flooded all their land.

RILEY I was not bad as, or something? ALICE Yeah, a perennial downside of hydroelectric dams. But I was going back and forth between kind of being regime-pilled, being like, the clean energy is so cool on the mass engineering project, and then it's also like, oh, energy is so cool and the mass engineering project and then it's also like, oh it also displaces a bunch of people. I mean, I feel like there's a middle ground, right? You don't have to do it exactly where all the First Nations people are. Well, the one thing I like is this huge fuckin' spillway here, which I think they call the

Stereo-Case of the Giants, except it's in French, because it's Quebec. That's cool. ALICE Le Scalier du Géant... Des Géants? Yeah. I'm amazed that I had staircase just on deck, though. JUSTIN So, another big coronal mass ejection slams into the earth March 13th, 1989. This one was big, but nowhere near as big as Carrington or the Railroad storm.

The auroras were seen as far south as Florida though. But this time, there was finally some substantial electrical infrastructure, even where the storm was the mightiest, near the poles, right? So the result of this was massive induced currents in Hydro-Québec's long transmission lines, right? So we finally got some like, Roland Emmerich shit. Yeah. Cool.

These were then protected by various circuit breakers, which isolated the hydro system, which resulted in massive loss of capacity, which overloaded the few power plants still connected to the grid, resulting in the total failure of the entire Quebec Quoie electrical grid in something like 90 seconds. ALICE I mean, if ever there was a population more able to withstand sudden electrical loss, by immediately going out and riding a kind of diesel-powered ski-doo directly into a tree...

RILEY They know how to live, okay? ALICE Yeah. ALICE Absolutely. Survive, well, those maple syrup pipelines, they don't need electricity to function. I mean, they're made of metal, they are long conductors. That's a good point. Inducing current in maple syrup. That's apparently a potential problem, is induced currents in oil pipelines. That long enough, sure, why not. potential problem is induced currents in oil pipelines. Oh.

That long enough? Sure, why not. Yeah. Of all the potential problems we could be giving oil pipelines, we're relying on the sun to bail us out in this one? Yeah, this is the real problem with oil. Sending a bunch of Andreas Malm books to the sun, just so I can get the right ideas. So, these are hydro plants though, which means they avoid one of the hardest problems in large scale electrical engineering, which is something called black start, right, which

is when you're trying to start your huge electrical generating station with no electricity. Yeah, it's one of these weird life hacks where it turns out it's way easier to do if you already have a generator, like a small one or whatever. Yeah, in this case, like the generator probably didn't even stop spinning, you know, just because the water is there. If you had something like a coal power plant or a nuclear power plant and those went offline, the turbines went down, you're gonna look at a long long time to try and get those things back online, even for the sake of just helping to get other plants back online.

That's the real Roland Emmerich stuff. I mean, like, a nuclear power plant running out of electricity is like, serious emergency. Yeah. Which is really funny when you think about it. Yeah, even if you got something that, like, sort of, you know, can safely shut down, you know, without causing, like, a sort of three mile island or Fukushima or Chernobyl type event, even the plant is just safely shut down, and you wanna restart it, that's a long long process, and that takes a lot of electricity to do so to start it back up.

ALICE Key factor in making Chernobyl happen, by the way. It's a bunch of Soviet bureaucrats being like, I don't wanna fuckin' do that. We're getting in so much trouble. Well, that's lucky you mentioned, because it's gonna be our next one. JUSTIN Yes, obviously. But yeah, these are hydroelectric plants, so it's sort of like, they managed to get the electricity, the entire grid back online in about nine hours. That's not too bad.

That's pretty good, actually. Yeah, all things considered, probably the stuff in your freezer didn't even spoil. I mean, granted the entire population of Quebec has died of ski-do injuries, but like, other than that, you know. They had fun doing it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, that's one of the worst geomagnetic storms in terms of like actual, you know, damage to electrical systems. And there have been some improvements to electrical systems as a result of this, but you know,

we do have to consider, alright, what if we actually did get a proper Carrington event right now? Number one, this podcast would stop recording. Yeah. This would be a huge problem. So, obviously that hasn't happened to us. And so, I read a Royal Academy of Engineering study from 2013, they sort of indicated some of the problems you would probably have, you know, you'd have significant damage to electrical grids, requiring replacing transformers, which has long lead times, like, they don't keep a stock of transformers on hand.

ALICE Yeah, and a lot of this stuff is weirdly precarious. Weirdly, a good example of, like, the... simultaneously, like, vulnerability and, like, persistence of electrical grids is Ukraine. Because the Russians keep trying to fucking bomb power stations and transformers and stuff. And yeah, it turns out that you can maintain this stuff at great effort and cost, but a lot of this stuff is not made quickly, and like you say, they don't keep it in stock. And so if the transformers get blown up, there's no replacements for them. You're waiting without electricity from that thing for months.

Yeah, you gotta... I mean, luckily there's a lot of electrical lines that you can try and route things around stuff. You know, this is, if everything goes up, that's going to be a serious issue. Yeah, that's the fundamental problem is like you're hitting everything at the same time. The sun in this case being kind of mega Russia. Yes. Instead of reading Andreas Malm, he's actually been reading Dugan. And Edward Limanov.

You're looking at, like, uncertain amount of damage to satellites, including possible total failure of the global positioning system. I weren't using it anyway. That's a good point, yeah. I note with interest our Addison Devon's position of Kessler syndrome as soon as possible, if not now. ALICE Oh, thanks Elon Musk. Rounding aircraft, you'd have communication blackouts on high frequency radio, which did

happen in 1989. A lot of people thought it was Russian interference with Radio Free Europe that caused... Nah, it was actually the sun. ALICE The sun is Russian. There's a really interesting sort of coda to that that I didn't put in the slides, but like kind of as I was reading about this, which is it makes ham radio is really good because all that large stuff sticks around in the atmosphere. So for the last couple of weeks, all the ham radio enthusiasts have

been able to like, communicate much, much further because they bounce their signals off this charged stuff. So, if you manage to have one survive, yeah, you could. It's like the sun is just the product of two Russian guys five billion years ago. Yuvgeny, I make fusion with hydrogen! Yeah, so what you're gonna want to do is, you're gonna want to hit up November Alpha One Sierra Sierra for the International Space Station. Tell them I sent you! What? yell at them for like, making the sun too strong, and make them turn it down. So, you know, with these various layers of protection and electrical grids today, I don't think you see a situation where like, your toasters start shooting out lightning bolts,

but you know, if you're like a kid in like, 1999 and you hang out by the green electrical box in the subdivision... Oh sure. Uh, it might catch fire. Or a transformer on a pole at the end of your block, you would probably expect a lot of fires simultaneously, combined with interrupted communications, the fire department has difficulty learning just how overwhelmed they are, stuff's gonna be disrupted for weeks. Oh, and they can't navigate to stuff with no GPS either. Yeah, exactly.

So what you're getting here is the kind of, like, season finale of your Firefighter show. Yeah, exactly. And this is why it's also fantastic that now we're, y'know, building large apartment buildings out of light timber. Um. Y'know. I wouldn't worry about it, y'know? Yeah, don't worry about that, though.

I've heard the prior proofing is very good for two hours. So they are able to put out all the fires in that amount of time. ALICE Once again, reminding you that this is why, in particular, the London Fire Brigade changed their advice to, as a result of Grenfell, to, like, if you're in an apartment building, how'd you decide to get out of the building and stay out of the building? Just get out of the building, yeah. How the fuck was that not the advice originally? Well, I mean, we did a Grenfell episode, I'd like us to do another and revisit it in like,

three years time when the inquiry finishes, you know? People are stubborn, people went back in the trade centers in 9-11 to finish up the day's work, that didn't work out for them. I mean, those trades aren't gonna do themselves. Right. Exactly. Worse when it's your home. That's a problem for the 99th floor, I'm on 52. Yeah, all of a sudden you find yourself on the 99th floor along with the like, interposing

floors. Yeah, exactly. Or I guess on the 99th floor finds itself on you. This is an exciting thing because, you know, it could happen at any time, and we're in a solar maximum right now, so this would be the time when it would happen. At any time? At any time? And, you know, maybe we have an electrical grid that's hardened enough to withstand it,

or maybe we get, y'know, a type of event that we don't even know what it's like, because there have been very very strong electrical storms, or, uh, geomagnetic storms, in the historical record in like like, the 700s AD? ALICE If we go back to slide 16, you can see a comparison of the sunspots drawn during the Carrington event, and the one that's kicking around right now, which is bigger. AR-3664. ZACH Yeah, and I mean, it seems like, I mean, if you go a couple of slides down, where we had

the really big coronal mass ejection, that was from 2012, that was from literally, y'know, the previous solar maximum. So like, it seems like you get something pretty big every time, the question is, which way is the plasma rifle pointing? Yeah. I think the key takeaway from this is, you wanna, like, if things happen, make sure that the first thing that you fix is your Patreon subscription. Because, whatever society survives, I will need money to navigate, and this is, my podcasting is my only source of income, so please... This is actually the part of the podcast where you announce a new Patreon tier, where you

pay us in gold bars, ammunition, and medication. Yeah, in advance as well, like... Just send any of those to the PO box. Yes. Shit, that's actually legal. If you guys get gold bullion I'm gonna be so mad. Yeah, send us gold bullion. Yeah.

Well, you know, on that note, a disaster that we probably cannot practically protect ourselves from, or at least economically, we could protect ourselves from this, I think relatively. The electrical infrastructure could be hardened to withstand this. I think relatively, the electrical infrastructure could be hardened to withstand this. I just don't think we're going to do it. We have sort of partially done it, but like, you know, for like a really, we also don't know how big the big one can get, you know, is the other thing. So. Yeah. The thing is these things don't really leave like a fossil record. So like there was various ideas about like, could you extract stuff from like, you know, ice cores and things like that, and look way back

into historical ones? Doesn't look like that's really possible. At least from the reading I did. I thought there was evidence of like a super huge one that made Carrington look like, I don't know, a, you know, a tiny little- Yeah, there was a paper that came out about it, but it's pretty disputed from what I understand, because it doesn't match with other bits of evidence. There was a video game called Assassin's Creed 3. Oh, that'll do it.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. STEAMED HAMS! Shake hands with nature. I had a 50-50 chance there. Yeah. That's not the first time that's happened. With the same drop as well! With the same drop!

It's a sort of steamed hams maximum. Very much you putting your gun next to your car keys in your pocket. Greetings to Devin and the current lineup of talking heads you have to edit. This was not something I was made to do by an employer, but from those carefree years in college. Today's story is what happens when you have a bunch of engineering students with just enough knowledge of chemistry to be dangerous. I'm a little fuzzy on the details.

Ureacic acid and toilet bowl cleaner, were you cooking meth? Making a delicious soup. on the details. Ureacic acid and toilet bowl cleaner. Were you cooking meth? Making a delicious soup. Yeah, I'm a little fuzzy on the details and you can attribute it to the incident if you want, but it's been over 10 years now, so that may have something to do with it. By the third year of going to school for electrical engineering, I had a decent group of friends and we all like to work on our own projects. We weren't the sort to simply attend class to get good grades. We intended to squeeze all the benefit out of being in a publicly funded institution, using their facilities

to build cool stuff. We had access to a room on campus that was unique, in that it was entirely student run. The department would occasionally bring prospective students through to show off how cool it was, you could have that much freedom at our university. But we were mostly left... Check this out, there's a lot of flies in here. Yeah. But we were mostly left to our own devices.

This is not a small dingy closet, but I will note it had no windows or other means of easy ventilation. This is a technique known as foreshadowing. Oh, why are nerds like this? I say this self-depreciatingly like I hate this already. On the first day of class a bunch of us were gathered in the lab and one of the guys decided to start etching a circuit board he had been designing. These were the days where making your own circuit boards by etching them was not only faster but much

more cost-effective than sending the designs off to have them professionally manufactured, as shown in image one. The old school chemistry for etching circuit boards used something called ferric chloride to eat away the copper. That costs money and is not available at the minimart walking distance from this room. It's also an old fashioned way of weathering tin shacks for model railroads. HM You can also use it to etch meteoroids, fun fact. If you want those, like, cool patterns.

ALICE I don't know the fucking thing about what to do with ferric chloride, so I guess I'll just go fuck myself then. JUSTIN You can drink it. ALICE I don't want to do that. JUSTIN I don't do that. HM I am an astrophysicist, and I am telling you, the listener, you can drink it. Waiter, please take that, this drink, it tastes fucking terrible.

The formula being used that day was hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, that's image two. Here. Yes. Although these are available in various household chemicals found almost anywhere, previous attempts to perform this reaction had gone well, but today there was a substitution due to one of the ingredients. Instead of the big plastic bottle of muriatic acid from the hardware store, image 3, hydrochloric acid component was being supplied by a liquid toilet bowl cleaner, image 4.

I don't recall any real measurements being done and I suspect this was more of a shoot from the hip process. Yeah, man, why would you? Yeah. If your mix is not reacting fast enough, add more hydrogen peroxide and if it stops reacting at all, add more acid. When the copper is finished etching, remove it and neutralize what's left with baking soda.

We did have those little pH tester strips to be able to roughly see what acidity the mixture was, but that's about all the safety equipment involved here. Do you know what? These people deserve to die. I ate way stupider stuff than this in college. Also, it was less educational. As soon as the etch-it was mixed, we noticed something odd. It smelled like bleach. As soon as the etch-it was mixed, we noticed something odd, it smelled like bleach. The reaction causing this had us all thinking, uh-oh, and we very quickly decided to hit the bricks. You have now enlisted in Western Front World War One.

Our room had two doors to the hallway on that floor, so we propped both open, rolled in the seven foot tall industrial fan, image five, in front of one to promote air circulation, we flipped it on and we left. ALICE Now why not extend the gas attack out to like, battalion level, sure. RILEY Wait, so they committed chemical warfare against the rest of the uni? I reiterate my previous statement. Remember, folks, the solution to pollution is dilution. Something my dad liked to say.

To put it in a sort of Fritz Harbor context, you know, the solution to having too much chlorine gas is to start chlorine gassing enemy infantry. Yes. On the way out of the building we ran into someone heading up to our room, grabbed them by the arm and said, nope, we're going to lunch. I assume this is in, like, the same fashion as, like, in the Blues Brothers, when they bring the tax guy and sit him on the desk. Returning later, everything... When we returned later, everything had dissipated and we continued doing normal college things. desk. When we returned later, everything had dissipated and we continued doing normal college things,

acting with incredible amounts of unearned confidence. ALICE At least you didn't find, like, the fire department outside in hazmat gear. JUSTIN The prevailing theory of what went wrong was that the toilet bowl cleaner had some other compounds in it that released more chlorine atoms than expected and resulted in chlorine gas being produced. Quantity was not enough to cause problems when dispersed through an 8-floor building and no one was harmed. It just made for an exciting start to the year.

I have since heard that this room was repurposed for graduate student work, not because anyone was discovered doing dangerous things, but because the administration changed over and they no longer saw the value in our sort of independent study. ALICE I gotta be honest, I thought I would never hand it to a college administration after the Gaza stuff, but in this one... RILEY What strange allies you make. ALICE Yeah. RILEY Based on previous safety thirds, I assume it got much less safe with that transition.

ALICE Ent. entirely possible. yeah. now it's professors ordering you to do dangerous things rather than doing dangerous things on your own. now, what did we learn? the moral of the story is to always have an exit plan and it's good to have friends that will look out for you enough to keep you from inadvertently walking into a gas attack. Thank you all for keeping me entertained and informed as I email spreadsheets around and

call on engineering at my day job. I think everyone that was there that day now listens to this podcast as well, so if I got something wrong, don't worry about it, the gist of the narrative is close enough. That's right. Fuck you, other guys." I do worry about it. I worry about this one a great deal. Please, please do not do chemical warfare on your university.

You know, here's the thing. If anywhere deserves it, it's Drexel University. I'm not gonna gas the university. You just wouldn't be sad if it happened. I wouldn't be sad if it happened. I wouldn't be sad if it happened. I think the thing that gets me is that they just, like, pointed this at other people and left. Like, I feel like they should have done some sort of sepuku thing of shutting the room

with them inside. Like, maybe like, courting it off and be like, don't open chlorine gas inside. Yeah! You know? At least that way. No, no, they did, they did. They and be like, don't open chlorine gas. Yeah! You know? At least at that point. No, no, they did, they did close... Didn't they close the door? They opened the door, right? They opened the door and they had a fan.

Maybe they pointed the fan at... I don't know. I mean, at least chlorine's like, relatively like, kind of, you know, readily physically detectable by you, rather... At least they didn't make fucking phosgene, y'know? And just, like, half an hour later half the student body just drops dead. But like... Well, it's also a very small quantity is the other thing.

Just for etching? I think maybe per... My consideration of what a small quantity of chlorine gas in my environment is, is I think lower than these people's. When I think, like, small quantity of chlorine gas, I think CSX just ruptured a chlorine gas tank, you know, in like a neighborhood, and like, everyone's gotta leave for an hour and they come back and it's fine. I don't...

We are not the same. No, clearly. Clearly. not the same. No, clearly, clearly. I'm weaker. Just built of stent of stuff. Okay, yeah, official stance of me on the podcast, chlorine gas is not that bad. Use a fan. Use a fan, leave for an hour, come back. Take your pets with you.

ALICE If only at Passchendaele they had the seven foot tall industrial fan. JUSTIN Yes. Well, that was Safety Third. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? Send us bullion. Yeah, gold bullion ammunition? Lawyers, guns and money. Yes, absolutely.

I guess I should do some plugs. I don't know. Kieran, if they want more Kieran, where do they get more Kieran? Don't. I've got some social media, but like, it's my personal stuff. If you see me around Edinburgh doing royal observatory stuff, more than happy to chat. If you see me not doing royal observatory stuff, no you didn't. And join an anti-raids WhatsApp. ALICE Hell yes.

DEV That's pretty much all the plugs I have. ALICE I know you're getting the hell yes from Devon as well, in the edit. Yeah, actually, Dev, thanks a lot, you actually inspired me to join one, and, yeah, it's even, like, though I haven't directly been to one, it's made me feel a lot better about the world, knowing there's a bunch of people willing to do that. So, recommend it, even if it's selfishly for your own mental health. I think it counts as self- Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on, this has been fun.

I'm glad we finally have someone who can make us depressed about space almost as much as Kevin can make us depressed about the forest. Oh boy. I'm sorry. All right, we just need to like, if there's gamma ray blasts we just need to see them coming and like, perfectly dodge.