Moon/Mars VS Underwater | Q&A 473

Is it easier to put a base on the moon or under the ocean? What astronomy can you do from a light-polluted city? Can a Martian base realistically evolve into a Martian city? And in Q&A Plus, what do I think about the life mission? All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show. Your questions, my answers, as always, wherever you are across my channel. If a question pops in your brain, just write it down, I'll gather them up, and I will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions. Borg terraformers. What would be more difficult, practical, or beneficial to humans? Putting bases on the Earth's ocean floors versus the moon and planet of Luna and Mars. Are there lava tubes beneath the ocean floors? So I'll tackle the last question. Are there lava tubes under the ocean? Probably, but I don't know the answer to this question. I mean, we know that the... The height of the oceans, the sea level has risen and fallen over eons, depending on how much ice there is by a couple of hundred, like a hundred meters, I think a couple hundred meters. And so you could imagine there were lava tubes that were once on land and now they're under ocean or ones that were once under ocean and now they're on land, but does... Lava under the ocean cause lava tubes. I don't know because it cools so quickly with the ocean. And so that's something that I don't know. Like you look at lava expanding under the ocean and it's a totally different creature than what it is when it's out on land. So is it more difficult to put bases on the bottom of the ocean or on the moon or Mars? In many ways, it's more difficult to put them on the bottom of the ocean. The pressures are ludicrous. Um, While the pressures are perfectly reasonable, you know, they're vacuum, but they're, you know, you can do it. But the expense of launching people into space is quite a bit, while the expense of just having a person descend to the bottom of the ocean is cheaper. You don't have to pay the enormous propelling costs. So there's always this classic thing that people say that we understand, say, the surface of the moon or Mars better than we understand the bottom of the ocean. And that is because the ocean is very hard to explore. While the moon, once you put a spacecraft in orbit around the moon, it just keeps going around and around and around. There's no air. You're taking pictures of the ground. You're sending them home. Done. Easy, right? Trying to explore the bottom of the ocean is very difficult. The ocean is opaque once you have enough of it. The pressures are ludicrous. The difficulty of transmitting data back from the bottom of the ocean back up to the top is very difficult. There are technologies that you can do, sonar and things like that, to try and scan the ocean, but you just don't get to take pictures in the way that you do when you're out in space. So it's a lot easier to actually explore the surface of worlds out there around the solar system. But, you know, to put humans in these places, you know, they're all scientific questions. So the question you're really asking is, what gives us more scientific benefit? Is there more scientific for putting people at the bottom of the ocean. Or is there more scientific benefit for putting people on the surface of the moon or the surface of Mars? And I would say there's probably the most scientific benefit at putting people on the surface of Mars, only because the ocean is relatively close, and we already have learned quite a lot about the ocean. While with Mars, is there life on Mars? What effect does being on Mars do to the human body? But this is such a subjective question. So many people are going to have different opinions about this. I'm sure they're having them in the comments right now. David Fries, for the Dark Side Finder, you gave New York City as an example of an extreme light pollution, but it turns out that if you use the right filter, the Milky Way is visible. And the question goes on to talk about sort of what astronomy you can actually do from a big city. And this sort of made me want to talk about this. So first, let's just talk about dark skies, because there's this sort of scary thought that about a third of humanity can no longer see the And like people who are watching the video right now and the people who are watching the video after the fact, you know, if you're watching this video, can you see the Milky Way? Most of you probably can. Now I can, I live in a fairly dark part of Canada. And so I can go outside and look up and see the Milky Way when it's not raining, which is never. So I can't see the Milky Way anyway, but huge chunk of the population, people in Europe, people on the coasts of the United States People in Asia, they just can't see the Milky Way. And it's something to be experienced. You know, if you are excited about space, seeing truly dark skies with your own eyes is one of the most fulfilling things that you can do. And in most cases, dark skies are not as far away from you as you think. That if you use this website, the Dark Site Finder, and it's essentially takes a light pollution map and it puts it over top of a Google maps. And then you can see where there are relatively dark skies near your location. And if you're like right in the middle of New York city, then you might be looking at a two hour drive to get out of the city to a place where there's actually dark skies. But for a lot of people, it's not as far as you think that it's an hour hour drive that there is this really nice park, forest, lakeside. that you can get to with a couple of hours drive where you see truly dark skies. You see the Milky Way. But people can do astronomy in very light-polluted places like New York City. And the way they do that is with astrophotography. If you're just using your eyes, you're looking up into the sky, no, you can't see anything. In this question, you were talking about infrared. I have no experience with infrared instruments looking at the sky, but Plenty of experience with using light pollution filters for telescopes. So what happens is that various wavelengths of light. are emanated by civilization, by cities, by city lights. These lights go up into the sky and they bounce off of essentially just the atmosphere and they cause this haze. And if you do live in dark skies, then you know the difference between when the moon is out and you can't see a lot of stars and when the moon is down and the skies are very dark. And it's the same experience. It's this light pollution. But the light that is emitted by humanity is only emitted in certain wavelengths. And so there are other wavelengths that there is no light pollution. And so what the telescopes do is you point your telescope at the sky, you put light pollution filters in front of your camera, and they only let in a very specific wavelength of light, the kind of wavelength that lights aren't producing. that gives you a view of the sky. And there's some incredible photographs that have been taken by people who are just like in downtown Manhattan. And yet they're pointing their telescope at the sky. They're using these light pollution filters. It's a false color image. So they might pick, say, a hydrogen alpha filter, and they call that their red, and then they use a sulfur filter, they'll call that their green, and then they'll do, say, an oxygen filter, and that's their blue. And they will then take those three colors. And then they'll turn that into an image and they use what's called a Hubble palette. And they can make telescope images that kind of look like the Hubble Space Telescope, but you know, like low resolution from the middle of these cities. And so because you're blocking most of the wavelengths of light out, you're letting in just some of the light. So you have to do longer exposures, but you can do really good images, even if you live in a light polluted city. And it only adds a couple of hundred dollars to the cost of your telescope. So if you've already invested in a smart telescope or some other... Astrophotography rig for a couple hundred bucks more than that, you can be taking great pictures even from the center of London or New York City. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above. Peter Kirk, Voe Maziaras, Joseph Gier, Stephen Tucker, Seth Levine, Vladi, Tom Micheline, James Holden, and James Porter. Join the club at patreon.com slash universe today. Coin Patrol. Fraser, do you think Japan's rover will work or is Phobos' gravity just too low? I mean, I'm not the expert here. I'm assuming that the engineers that worked on this mission are the experts and they have developed a rover that is capable of driving around on the surface of Phobos. So it's called E-Defx. So the surface gravity of Phobos is 0.0057 meters per second Second squared, which is one two-thousandth of Earth gravity. And so if you could run on Phobos, you could theoretically escape the gravity of Phobos. So that is very low, but it's not nothing. And so a rover with wheels will go very slowly, very carefully, and try not to throw itself off the surface of Phobos and flip itself upside down. But it is definitely a dangerous process. And we saw something kind of similar with the, remember the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission? Where they had this lander that went down to the surface of the comet. And they knew that it was going to be a really tricky, very low gravity maneuver. And so the thing had harpoons on it and it was designed to go down to the surface. And then as it got really close, it would harpoon the surface and then stick itself to the surface and then send pictures home. And it hit the surface and bounced and then kind of rotated and then bounced and then came to rest. And they later were able to kind of puzzle and piece together what happened. And I think they were able to make a little bit of communication with it. But, but. It's a very tricky maneuver. So I'm sure that the engineers behind this have been really thinking about it. But in fact, this sounds like the kind of people that I should reach out and do an interview with. So stay tuned. I'll see if I can get them. Roderick Beck, can a Martian city evolve out of a research base? The only way to keep costs down for a research base is partial self-sufficiency and that leads to trade bars, barbers, et cetera. If there's any way that a city on Mars is going This is the way it's going to happen. Whenever you hear about Elon Musk and other proponents of there being a city on Mars, and they sort of talk about it from this sort of central planning. It sounds borderline communist, actually, when you think about it, where they're like, we're going to build this city on Mars. I'm going to send all the infrastructure and everyone's going to work and they're going to do their part. Comrade, when the reality is that the successful places on Earth. have happened just organically. And, you know, in some places there's some feature, there's some money to be made, it's close to a river, it's close to the ocean, it's close to gold. There's something that humans have realized that there's money to be made and it's self-sustaining and they're willing to pay the expense to live in that place. The only place that I just don't understand is a place like Phoenix. You've got this city in the middle of one of the most scorching deserts on earth with millions of people. Why are they there? What resource are they extracting? I think they're just extracting good weather for the wintertime, for Canadians maybe. And so, you know, there have been people. Permanently at Antarctica since the 1960s, 50s, you've got McMurdo Station and you've got just like permanent inhabitants. And yet it has never become a city, right? Like if you wanted to get to Antarctica and live off the land, you could try. And, you know, theoretically, maybe people who have a lot of experience in the North, maybe some of the Inuit people from Canada, could be able to pull it off. But, I mean, they have flights that are coming in, they have trucks that come in to bring them additional resources. Like, it's really hard to be cut off from civilization in that way. And so, Antarctica has never gone beyond research stations. And yet, you can breathe the air, water falls from the sky, there is theoretically food around you, but I mean, they're too adorable to eat, and yet it hasn't turned into a city. People don't want to live there and move there. Now, obviously, there are international regulations about this, but if you go and find some little hidden cove in Antarctica... And you build a little house. Nobody's going to notice. No one's going to stop you. No one's going to catch you. And the reason nobody does it is because you would not be able to survive without an enormous amount of technology and regular resupply. And so it's the places that make sense where humans tend to be. And right now, Mars is so much worse than Antarctica. But if we discover that Mars makes sense for some reason, trade, there's some resource on Mars that we really need, then there's a possibility that it could extend and you'll eventually have more people there. Tourism, whatever. But you can't just expect and assume that it's going to turn into a city because reasons, right? Because we need another place for human beings to live. That is not a good enough reason to support an entire economy of human beings on another planet. It's just not. So, uh, yeah, that is, um, why I just like, I just, I just don't buy a city on Mars. And it's funny, I, I've sort of, you know, I will go into this rant and I feel one coming on, but maybe not. I'll go into this rant about just how a city on Mars just doesn't make sense. There's just no economic reason to do it. And then people will go like, you can't say something's impossible. You know, like as soon as you say that something's impossible, then someone's going to figure out how to do it. And the thing that I'm saying is not that it's impossible, it's that it is not practical, that it just doesn't make sense. That there is a million ways you could live your life today that are not practical, right? You could drop everything and join the Cirque du Soleil, but chances are your knees are just not able to handle you being in the Cirque du Soleil. And so you have now dropped everything for this career in the circus and the circus doesn't want you. And now you don't have money and now you don't have a job and you lose your apartment and your partner leaves you and someone has to take your dog and your kids are wondering where you are and it is impractical. And so you don't do it. So you, instead you do the thing that's practical thing that makes sense. That is self contained and, and, and, and sort of logically And that is the same thing about a city on Mars. It is just, it is not practical. It is certainly possible that if all of humanity decided that the thing that was most important was for us to build a permanent inhabited station on Mars, we could do that. Absolutely. We're like, okay, tell you what, everybody, no more wars. All expenses on military, the $2 trillion per year that's spent across the entire planet is now spent on building this self-sustaining city on Mars, $2 trillion a year would make a good down payment on a city on Mars. Actually, a very small down payment when you consider like a human mission to Mars was estimated back in the 1990s, 2000s in the sort of $500 billion range. So spending $2 trillion a year would start to build a interesting research station on Mars. And we get the side benefit of no more wars, right? No military. That'd be great. Well, is that practical? Is that what's going to happen? Or is the whole world going to say, no, I think we want to hang on to our weapons. Thanks. I think we are more concerned. We are more practically concerned with an invasion from one of our neighbors than we are about how cool it would be to have a city on Mars. And so, you know, I think whenever I say that something is not going to happen. It's mostly just because no one has demonstrated a practical reason why it will happen. The only way that we will get some kind of permanent inhabitant on Mars, some kind of city on Mars is if it just evolves naturally, that there's some reason why it is self-sustaining and grows from there. And it will just be self-evident like, oh, there's more people moving to Mars. Isn't that crazy? And now Mars is a place, it's a thing and it's self-sustaining and it makes money and the people there are healthy and thriving and they're beginning their terraforming process because It just made sense. And right now, there is just like no version of this that makes sense. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? We call it Q&A Plus. And this week's bonus question, what do I think about the life mission? I'll put a link down in the show notes. you. All right. Those were all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you everyone who asked your questions into the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show, everybody who asked your questions over on Patreon. I'm going to talk about two of the best videos about explaining the current search for Dark Matter. But first, I'd like to thank our Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, Boldazorg, I Hate This Place, It's the Smell, Brian Bodie, Kerwin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bailick, David Giltonen, David Matz, Evan.Pro, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Marcel, Spencer McPurcell, NASA Ocean Guy, Nord Space, Onestepforanimals.org, Ryan Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Team 49, Telescope Scanner, Vlad Shiblin, Wolfgang Klotz, Zelda, Boldazorg, your silence is fooling no one who supports us at the Master of the Universe level and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. We cover the topic of dark matter on this channel quite a bit, and you know, it's a tricky subject to cover because you've got essentially this unfolding mystery, this collection of observations, but the explanation for the observations has not been figured out yet. And so we can see this thing that is happening out there in the cosmos on many different ways affecting the cosmos, some way that the observations do not match the theories. And this gap is dark matter. But that is like a really unsatisfying explanation for a lot of people, that they feel that this is just something that astronomers are making up for some reason. And that is not true. But, you know, it's my job and the job of many science communicators to kind of explain what this is. And the analogy that I always liken it to is, there's a sound coming from your car. A new sound, a bad sound. You don't know what the sound is. You're not making this up. It's making a sound. You just don't know what it is yet. That's it. That's the analogy. That's dark matter. Dark mechanical problem. But there was a new video from MinutePhysics that gave just one of the best, most concise, beautifully articulated explanations for dark matter that I think I've seen so far on YouTube. So I'm going to put a link down in the show notes, but it is just terrific. Explains the mystery, the lines of evidence, the possible explanations, where we stand in each one of these and sort of where the scientific consensus is to explain it and sort of what comes next. It's perfect. Just perfect. So I'm going to put a link down in the show notes. Go and check out this episode of MinutePhysics. And then the other video that I always recommend is from Angela Collier, which is titled Dark Matter is Not a Theory, which is great because it's such a brilliant title because it's sort of clickbait. People think, oh, wait, finally, a scientist doesn't think that dark matter is real. And she's like, nope, it's a series of observations, not a theory. It's a collection of observations, terrific video. So I'll put links to both of those in the show notes. Go and check them out. And hopefully that will fill some slots in your brain about how dark matter works right now. All right, we'll see you next time.