122. Wait, We Can Mine Asteroids and 3D Print Hearts In Space?? Astrophysicists Dr. Martin Elvis

In this enlightening episode of the "College Knowledge" podcast, host Dave Kozak and co-host Joe Kerins engage in a riveting conversation with Dr. Martin Elvis, a renowned astrophysicist from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Dr. Elvis recounts his personal journey, starting as a high school student unfamiliar with the intricacies of higher education, to becoming a leading voice in astrophysics. The trio delves deep into the realm of space exploration, discussing the influence of private space initiatives by pioneers like Elon Musk and Richard Branson, the groundbreaking potential of asteroid mining, and the multifaceted economics of space ventures. Dr. Elvis also sheds light on the latest advancements in rocket technology, the challenges and prospects of space-based resource extraction, and the legal and economic facets of mining celestial entities. This episode offers a comprehensive insight into the future of space exploration and the myriad opportunities it heralds.

Watch Here:
Wait, We Can Mine Asteroids and 3D Print Hearts In Space??

Check Out Dr. Elvis Latest Book:
Asteroids: How Love, Fear, and Greed will Determine our Future in Space

Video Version of Podcast YouTube:
The College Knowledge Podcast

Follow us on social media:
Instagram
Facebook
LinkedIn

Visit us online:
The College Knowledge Podcast Website
Elite Collegiate Planning

Transcript

Hey, everybody, Welcome back to College Knowledge. And we host Dave Kozak alongside my co-host, Joe Kerins. Good morning, Joe.

00;00;56;05 - 00;00;57;06
Speaker 2
Good morning, Dave.

00;00;57;09 - 00;01;10;24
Speaker 1
And today we have the distinguished pleasure of interviewing Dr. Martin Elvis, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Astrophysics? Sorry. Welcome to the show, Dr. Elvis.

00;01;10;26 - 00;01;13;07
Speaker 3
Great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

00;01;13;10 - 00;01;49;28
Speaker 1
Yes, I'm excited about this conversation. I think Joe's a little trepidatious on where we're going to go here because I can get off into the into the black hole, pun intended. So obviously, this is college knowledge and we're sort of trying to peel back the layers of the onion on higher ed. And my interest in in this interview is understanding how you go from obviously, you know, your college educated Ph.D. you've got there's a direction and a pathway and it was it just a pursuit of passion or you just found your niche.

00;01;49;28 - 00;02;02;19
Speaker 1
Did you choose it? Did you? Did someone get you there? Was it mentorship? Was it just from the raw beginnings and if you could just give us as a start a little bit of your history and progression into where you are?

00;02;02;22 - 00;02;27;16
Speaker 3
So. Well, I had no understanding of higher education in my college university stuff at all. When when I was in high school, I was in England, of course, back in the day. And as you could guess from my accent. So I was the first in my family to actually go to a university. So it was all feeling it out.

00;02;27;16 - 00;02;57;22
Speaker 3
I had a pretty clueless basically okay. And there was a sort of in England that everybody wants to go to sort of Cambridge. And they were I was encouraged to applied. And but it turned out my school had no knowledge either about getting into those arcane places. And they said, Oh, a place to live is college. Very special place for people from your high school turned out to be a divinity only college, and that was not really me.

00;02;57;22 - 00;03;30;18
Speaker 3
So they threw me out. So I just found places that were doing physics because I wanted to do physics because I'm a good high school teacher in physics who managed to make it very exciting. And you could see how it explained all sorts of things very easily. And then I read a couple of popular books on one on relativity and quantum mechanics, which are like the basis for 20/20 21st century physics.

00;03;30;21 - 00;03;57;23
Speaker 3
And it blew my mind because of the sort of strange things happening, like time dilation or the uncertainty principle, where you're just amazing. I thought, Well, there's no way I'm going to understand that for myself. I'm going to have to go get taught it. So I decided to go to physics and I went to a highly respectable but not stellar university.

00;03;57;25 - 00;04;20;19
Speaker 3
And then I applied to do. I thought, This is great. Now I can do research. I wonder what research is. What I saw was, well, I want to find things out. I want to find new things and try to understand them. And I seem to be an awful lot less to understand. So I thought I'd do either astronomy or like accelerator physics.

00;04;20;22 - 00;04;42;13
Speaker 3
And then a professor at the university that showed me a published paper in astronomy, and it had like three names on it, and he showed me one in accelerator physics, had like 200 names. I thought, Well, there's no chance of standing out in front of people. I'll go be easier looking. So I did astronomy, but it has to be something like one of those because it was like big.

00;04;42;13 - 00;05;12;17
Speaker 3
It was seemed to have this implications on the basic physics. And so I applied again, I applied to these places and none of them that belong to me were very interesting somehow. This is one of the strange things that you apply, not really having enough knowledge. So there was a field of cosmic ray physics, and somehow I just knew that was boring.

00;05;12;19 - 00;05;42;26
Speaker 3
And I think I was completely correct. And I went there was I have no idea how I knew that. So instead I went and did a master's degree in astronomy, and that turned out to be a great movies are just a one year program. So I learned some actual astronomy there and then applied for Ph.Ds again. And by a stroke of luck, I was rejected by Cambridge and accepted by Leicester University, which at that point no one knew about.

00;05;42;28 - 00;06;07;13
Speaker 3
But it turned out they the radio astronomy group at Cambridge. So I was applying to repeating that very year because the US opened a much, much bigger telescope called a very large array that year and I think until August. Right. So it was, it was, it was a good moment not to go there instead of going to Leicester was great because they were they just launched.

00;06;07;13 - 00;06;46;23
Speaker 3
When I arrived the second ever satellite to survey the sky and X-rays and X-ray astronomy was completely new. Field was just started like ten years earlier and we had a there were a few dozen sources known in the sky that were emitting X-rays and no one knew what they were, more or less. And so we did. We surveyed the sky and finding all sorts of new and exciting things that no one had guests of the X-ray sources and including what I had my Ph.D. was on was finding out that what we now know at giant black holes of great sources of X-rays, which are the darkest things in the universe, are actually emitting enormously intensely.

00;06;46;25 - 00;07;19;02
Speaker 3
But it's not the black hole itself. It's the gas falling into the black hole where it gets really, really hot goes. It starts the strong gravity of the black hole, makes it move like material and very fast collides, gets enormously hot. And so that was that was a surprise and that was very lucky for me. But it's a general thing if you're going to get once you get to this point of choosing to do research, if you want to do it, I would recommend getting just some totally new field, something that's just beginning.

00;07;19;05 - 00;07;41;06
Speaker 3
It's that's been demonstrated enough to know that it's got a lot of long way to go but hasn't got so far. But you have to get into a very sophisticated kind of analysis thing before you can publish. And I mean, so you can be the world expert because nobody's the world expert because it's totally new. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's I think I was lucky in finding that real.

00;07;41;08 - 00;08;04;08
Speaker 1
Couple of cool things that I think are worth, you know, reflecting on in the story. And thank you for sharing that. The first is that, you know, there was a teacher that made a subject matter in high school for you, a very interesting subject matter, and that in its own right, that genuine curiosity and desire about that subject leads to additional exploration for you.

00;08;04;08 - 00;08;32;14
Speaker 1
And, hey, this is, I think, where I want to go. And then continuing on to the college about some of it or sorry, I should say the post the postgraduate degree, but some of it was luck, right? Some of it was it didn't get into this one and this one took. Yeah. And so we share a lot with families about trying not to fall in love with a particular institution because you just don't know the outcome until they decide that you're either worthy or not.

00;08;32;14 - 00;09;01;18
Speaker 1
Right. And whether you were worthy or not is not the question. In retrospect, obviously, you were worthy of all of it, but you just sort of you sort of lucked out from the sounds of the story of getting into the other school that had a different opportunity. And then I think the other thing that that I the advice is so amazingly clear, if you're going to get into a subject matter and you want to be involved in research, don't be involved in something that's been around for hundreds of years and has been researched thoroughly.

00;09;01;18 - 00;09;25;22
Speaker 1
And then the nuance space you have to get into, you've got to catch up of 300 years of research. You get into something in research and it's brand new. A You are the expert by virtue of being in the field, right? So let me let me ask you another question. Research versus teaching versus application. Right. What what made you want the research side?

00;09;25;22 - 00;09;39;02
Speaker 1
Was it the curiosity versus doing something to teach others versus using it in an applied space? And is it was there even in applied space that you could have gone into?

00;09;39;04 - 00;10;08;04
Speaker 3
Let me think. So for me, it was absolutely curiosity and just wanting to know things when you find them out and somehow I don't know how I got back to passion, but that was real. I a lot of people went into teaching directly from go into teaching to get diplomas right out of high school. And I just didn't like that because it seemed like all I would do is recycle the knowledge already gained and I wasn't good enough.

00;10;08;06 - 00;10;27;07
Speaker 3
I wanted to expand that knowledge. So for me, it was it was not a good choice to go into teaching. I think I would have been very frustrated, not of all I did okay and applications, but my whole family are engineers. So the question when I was going to high school was what kind of engineer do you want to be?

00;10;27;07 - 00;10;52;27
Speaker 3
Martin Mm hmm. I was like, what else is it? And somehow I, I really didn't like that either, because, again, engineering was applying knowledge that already existed, and that's fine. And it's really good. Then you look at anything done and engineers, you can't really build anything but, but it wasn't to me. So yeah, yeah, that's, that's it.

00;10;52;29 - 00;11;09;03
Speaker 1
And at that point again, Joe, one of the subject matters that comes up to us all the time. It's as important in this journey of higher education to know what you don't want. And I think, I think there's a critical component there where you were like, I don't want to just recycle knowledge that I have currently. I want to expand my knowledge.

00;11;09;06 - 00;11;41;18
Speaker 1
Secondarily, the application of the engineering as an example is, yeah, they're, they're making new. Yeah, they're sort of expanding engineering, right? It's not like it's a, it's app, it's a finite thing, but it is your applying the same rules and the same things over and over again. And you're limiting the creativity and the explore to the exploratory nature of what you do today in the astrophysics and the black hole research And the subject that I really want to get into, which is the asteroid mining.

00;11;41;21 - 00;11;43;13
Speaker 3
Yes, okay.

00;11;43;15 - 00;12;05;05
Speaker 1
But, you know, this concept of having a little bit of self knowledge as you're going through your journey in higher education is a vitally important component of of having what I call luck. Right? Luck favors the prepared mind. So if you are not preparing and in some cases it's cutting things out, I'm not going to do that. I don't want to do that.

00;12;05;05 - 00;12;27;13
Speaker 1
I know I don't want to do that because a lot of people in your situation with a family of engineers being asked what type of engineer are you going to become your whole life, they just do it. They just go, Well, I'm I guess I'm going to be a mechanical or I'm going to be at the electrical, and they kind of just go through it and realize, you know, at age 35 or 40, I hate this.

00;12;27;13 - 00;12;47;13
Speaker 1
I don't want to do it. And, you know, lawyers are another one and I'm not going to get off off topic too much here. But the amount of people that have said to me and I never knew this was an expression, but they call themselves recovering attorneys. And I said, what to recover someone that did it? Because, hey, it was it was high paying, it was glamor job.

00;12;47;13 - 00;13;06;25
Speaker 1
It was you know, you could either be an engineer or a lawyer. And I was bad at math. And so it was what my parents said I had to do. And they they reversed course. And so that's a that's a thing that is a tough lesson to learn when you're in, you know, you've started a family. You've got a mortgage, you've got all this stuff, all this responsibility, and you chose poorly.

00;13;06;25 - 00;13;41;26
Speaker 1
So kudos to you for the self-knowledge and kind of pursuing the passion, which is the other side of that. Any advice that you have on the people sort of exploring this field? Is there like if I'm a prospective student and you're obviously now in your career, you are the expert, there's no question. And so is this a field that has so much more to go that, you know, you, you, you can it's almost infinite.

00;13;41;28 - 00;13;53;27
Speaker 1
There's as they say, the universe is right. The research can go. Or is this a field that people should lean into? If you have that passion, what's your kind of opinion on that?

00;13;53;29 - 00;14;21;20
Speaker 3
Oh, yeah. I think there's a whole it's the James Webb Space Telescope is demonstrating that there's an enormous amount to go for great new things that are happening. There's we we're looking at the earliest galaxies to form in the universe back to the time when the very first stars formed. That's and they should. And at some point we should finally look very different but we haven't quite found that point yet.

00;14;21;22 - 00;14;45;24
Speaker 3
At the same time, we can look at our planets, our own solar systems on our own, and our start to just find that they aren't there, which has been happening to like 20 years now, but to start to understand their atmospheres and maybe eventually with the next generation of being get big telescope, we could see whether there are traces of life in May in the atmosphere.

00;14;46;00 - 00;15;09;07
Speaker 3
And so there are even ideas and which may not be practical, but may be eventually practical to send a telescope out beyond well beyond Pluto and look back toward the sun. And the sun will act as a gravitational lens and we'll image planets around other stars. So you could see continents and oceans and even finer detail of matter.

00;15;09;07 - 00;15;14;13
Speaker 3
So we can start to really understand that That would be pretty darn amazing.

00;15;14;16 - 00;15;15;28
Speaker 1
Yeah, no doubt.

00;15;16;01 - 00;15;35;17
Speaker 3
So there's other fields too. Gravitational waves completely new neutrino astronomy, as it does, like a few of neutrinos have been found. But we're going to build a ten times bigger detector and nothing make all the difference. That will be like extra in astronomy was when I started. I think so. Local areas and there's still way to go.

00;15;35;20 - 00;15;57;03
Speaker 1
And in a again, I just want to relate it back to our most of our listening audience here, which is, you know, I used to talk about when and probably when you were growing up and they were talking about engineering, right? Engineering at the time there were very refined subject matters of engineering, right? You had your electrical, mechanical, your nuclear was a relatively new subject matter.

00;15;57;03 - 00;16;18;13
Speaker 1
Chemical was a relatively new chemical engineering. We had chemistry. We've always had chemistry. But that chemical engineering component, all that. And so you had these, you know, I don't know the big five or the big six, but now, I mean, you have there's 30, 30 different engineers there. It is just expanding and expanding, expanding what you're sort of saying or how I'm interpreting it.

00;16;18;13 - 00;16;40;12
Speaker 1
And I want to make sure I'm not missed most. Taking your words as we're discovering new studies and new almost new levels of degree that that need to be attained in some of these areas of research. Right. It's no longer just astrophysics. You're you're that's your base. And then there is a subset in there that is specific to the things that you're talking about.

00;16;40;12 - 00;16;46;05
Speaker 1
So we're expanding the almost professional designations you can get, correct?

00;16;46;07 - 00;17;11;25
Speaker 3
Yeah. Astronomy, several hundred years ago used to be like a piece of mathematics they would do we got a degree in mathematics and do astronomy because all you're doing is studying the positions of planets. Some of our planets in the solar system, on the sky and things like that. And then when it was the invention of spectroscopy in the 1850s, it was possible to know what stars were made of.

00;17;11;25 - 00;17;31;19
Speaker 3
And so it became astrophysics because suddenly astronomy was able to do physics. Some of the things that we're looking at and now we get to see it moving to a large fraction of a field is moving to astrobiology, right? So then and that means in astrobiology actually life on other planets, it's not just biology. You need that geology.

00;17;31;19 - 00;17;44;29
Speaker 3
You need atmospheric physics to understand the cycle of the different elements and chemicals in the atmosphere. So it's getting to be very rich as it is.

00;17;44;29 - 00;18;10;22
Speaker 1
I love I love that you said astrobiology because it's that idea that, okay, the subset of knowledge base you needed to be an astro physicist is one thing, and now all of a sudden you're studying and you've got to bring biology background to it and you got to bring geology background to it. So that now creates a course work or or a body of study that requires a different subset to get to that level of thought.

00;18;10;22 - 00;18;26;04
Speaker 1
And so it's while it is completely new and separate in its own right, it is pulling some some of the other pieces into it. And you're and it's it's the expansive nature of different majors, right. I mean it's it's how it works.

00;18;26;06 - 00;18;27;17
Speaker 3
Yeah.

00;18;27;19 - 00;18;51;15
Speaker 2
So I guess, you know, one of the things we talk a lot about and we've heard different things about is, you know, planning with the end in mind and then creating a roadmap essentially backwards to where you're currently at. And so, you know, your roadmap was it was an essentially I don't think you said there was a lot of luck and we talk about luck being prepared, but it seemed like it was just every step of the way, Oh, this is this is what I want.

00;18;51;15 - 00;19;14;01
Speaker 2
I know I don't want that. Oh, this is what I want. Was there anybody that helped you kind of create that? And for students that may be interested in this and are thinking about potentially being a research or where should they be starting QBR, where should they be looking at as far as their type of roadmap? What's kind of the some of the steps that they would take or what are some of the steps that you took that they can also learn now?

00;19;14;01 - 00;19;38;09
Speaker 3
Gosh, I think it was I think I had very little information. I don't think I got a little bit of guidance from my physics teachers, but not much. Mm hmm. There was a focus of a pretty simple back then. There were like 50 universities in the UK and you can look up on a page there. They had a little syllabus that we do physics, and this is what we cover.

00;19;38;11 - 00;20;06;14
Speaker 3
You know, you could look at. But I actually chose a while because I wanted to do a minor in philosophy, and it turned out I was very ill suited to that. So I didn't actually do more than a couple of classes. So that's that was that cut it down to like three different places to apply. And I really reformed back in the day in the UK you applied to six places and that's a total you're allowed to apply to and then they allow between them.

00;20;06;16 - 00;20;38;16
Speaker 3
And so I got into my number two choice because Oxford sent you both doing theology. So no, you can't write to do this college. So I got into that next term. So did I have advice? I had a little bit of advice from a mentor and who is an old geezer about my age now at Bristol University, which is where I went, and to make a telescope, small telescope mirror and use a optics stage.

00;20;38;18 - 00;21;07;00
Speaker 3
And I'm astronomer, but okay, you talked to a professor and retired professor at Oxford. I want you to tell me a bit, understand what you do then. Let's see. I my master's was one year and I think I didn't have a clue really, where to apply to expand the list of universities and find various Canadian universities that really had nothing to do with astronomy that I found the.

00;21;07;05 - 00;21;58;21
Speaker 3
So it was all pretty useless. I did. But there were talks like the master's level. You go to the seminar the week where some astronomer comes in and talks about what they were doing and most I vaguely knew what they were talking about, but at the end one of them was £10, who was at Leicester University and he was talking about X-ray astronomy and that was he's a very good speaker and he made it very exciting and clear that this was totally new and full of puzzles, that we didn't understand this or that, but so that's why I played Leicester University, the first actually that I applied immediately to Leicester after my BBC and I

00;21;58;24 - 00;22;16;10
Speaker 3
got turned down because a guy with a slightly better degree had applied and they had rules where he got to it because of the levels of grades. You get strong first, second and second, row second and so on and the UK system, but basically a grade on how good your degree was this guy got at first, I can remember a second.

00;22;16;16 - 00;22;43;04
Speaker 3
So he and I would be the rule was they had to take him at the stroke of luck because he'd spent years building a rocket payload, which would have been wonderful, which had it worked, but it spat out of control and so he got nothing essentially for his data. You have to really make straight soup around of bits on the floor and use items.

00;22;43;07 - 00;22;58;17
Speaker 3
And I again, I would have been very ill suited to building a piece of hardware with electronics because when I demonstrated in lab classes for undergraduates, when I got to Leicester, I would make smoke come out of the back of the apartment.

00;22;58;21 - 00;23;01;23
Speaker 1
It was not your thing.

00;23;01;25 - 00;23;23;23
Speaker 3
No, no. And you had to be much more disciplined and and careful than I ever been. And probably since. Yeah, but, but I, but we just thought everything was starting to work on computers and they could make mistakes. So you just change the code and run it again. That was okay. I could do that.

00;23;23;25 - 00;23;45;06
Speaker 2
And I think I mean, a big takeaway I have from that story is as much as, you know, you keep saying, Oh, I got lucky this was luck. And again, there's some fortuitous events in your life, but I'm also hearing, well, I looked into this many schools and I knew that these were not a fit. And I research this type of program and realized that was not for me.

00;23;45;06 - 00;24;04;16
Speaker 2
So wasn't as much. I got into a school and there I and this is I just it all worked out. No, you put work in to figure out what was a fit and what was not. And that, I think, is extremely important. Like there is work, especially in the world today and how much knowledge you can get. That was different back then.

00;24;04;16 - 00;24;25;18
Speaker 2
You know, as far as just the the amount of knowledge we can get with the Internet and college planning that work. Like you can really start to roll schools out. And that is extremely important. And it may not be that you should be always looking at the name of a school, you know, for kids. What are they offering, What programs do they have, How many people are in that program?

00;24;25;18 - 00;24;44;27
Speaker 2
And we talk about competitiveness. You know, sometimes if you're going to a school and you want to study a certain subject matter and they're known for that, or was that where you have a place to shine? Or do you go somewhere that's now just trying to start their program and you can be the top student and potentially just grow and help build that program?

00;24;44;29 - 00;24;52;18
Speaker 2
There's a lot of work that can go into to finding the right fit, and it's not always about luck. But as Dave said, I always love that luck favors the prepared, right?

00;24;52;18 - 00;24;59;00
Speaker 3
So yeah, yeah, that's right. That's very nicely put.

00;24;59;02 - 00;25;01;01
Speaker 1
Yeah, I agree. Oh that's nice.

00;25;01;01 - 00;25;02;19
Speaker 2
So I try sometimes, you know.

00;25;02;21 - 00;25;34;26
Speaker 1
To now what I've been waiting for and here we go. Two questions. Well, I guess I'll start with the first one. So everybody's watching. Elon Musk's the Richard Branson's the the guys are now investing personal wealth of an extraordinary nature into space travel, into space exploration, into knowledge. How much has that impacted your profession and having now? Not for a long time space?

00;25;34;26 - 00;25;56;08
Speaker 1
Was government managed really everything. Every dollar that went up in the space was via governments across the globe. Now we're starting to see these massive stockpiles of wealth invest in that game. Has that has that propelled your industry, has that propelled your research? Is it helping or is it hurting?

00;25;56;11 - 00;26;24;14
Speaker 3
So far it's had a minor impact. I would say that was in a stay that way because now several small satellites have been launched on the Falcon nine rocket of Space X, So we and that's good because it's saving money and making them more capable. I think the test satellite was one of the an example about imagine your special venture.

00;26;24;14 - 00;26;52;25
Speaker 3
You could do that because you had a Falcon nine, which is more powerful than the original plan, I think if I remember correctly. And that's a satellite that's been finding many, many more exoplanets, planets outside a ground of a stars. The sun is very available. And so it was a few cases like that. But I think it's going to be a bigger impact as time goes on in a couple of ways.

00;26;52;28 - 00;27;23;02
Speaker 3
One is this starship huge rocket that Elon Musk is is getting is trying out. He studies all set to go against all odds. It gets permission to launch. And eventually I'm betting, given the track record, that will work fine and it will be you can launch enormous masses to orbit a wait, wait, wait of a spacecraft can be 100 times instead of seven times.

00;27;23;04 - 00;27;25;28
Speaker 3
The space telescope weighs only like seven times.

00;27;26;00 - 00;27;26;21
Speaker 1
Okay.

00;27;26;23 - 00;27;54;17
Speaker 3
And to get to that like that, to make it so special in mirrors, which may think they was very hard to maneuver them and to get it big enough, they had to fold everything up. So the big unfold in mirrors is much bigger than the rocket that went up in and a lot of that and Musk's new rocket will be inside of they saw it done in metric five meter diameter.

00;27;54;17 - 00;28;15;09
Speaker 3
It's going to be eight meter diameter. And so you could plot the James Webb Space Telescope mirror in without any folding and it would be sick because the masses there's plenty of mass budget to deal with it. And so we could usher in an era when we suddenly can make really powerful telescopes much cheaper than we're used to.

00;28;15;11 - 00;28;56;03
Speaker 3
Right. Okay. I'm hoping we I've written a paper about this and I hope it has some impact. And I think people are going to start looking at that. But that's actually a short term difference. The long term difference is going to be that, though, because by 2030 there will be at least two very plausible commercial space stations that is pretty flying independent of NASA's leased by NASA, parts of it for research work, but also lease a lot of space for any country that can afford about $100 million a year.

00;28;56;03 - 00;29;22;21
Speaker 3
They could get an astronaut in orbit most of the time, or even a rich corporation and some biotech companies might well find that it's worth their while sending their scientists, research scientists to do really research in zero-G. Hmm. So I think there's going to be beginnings of a research economy. We already have tourism in space thanks to the billionaires.

00;29;22;23 - 00;29;47;29
Speaker 3
They're going to tourism. We're going to have research, and eventually the research will lead to new products. Amazing things like maybe can grow a human heart in orbit, basically by 3D printing it and in cells are squishy things. So if you 3D print on Earth, they kind of go like that, maybe 3D printing, albeit in microgravity, they keep that shape.

00;29;48;03 - 00;30;03;05
Speaker 3
And so it's a possibility. There is a company looking at this, who knows? Eventually it might work, so you could order a new part from a space station. We've got some and that will be nice. Yeah. Yeah.

00;30;03;09 - 00;30;05;11
Speaker 1
And Bezos will take care of the shipping.

00;30;05;13 - 00;30;08;07
Speaker 3
Well, yeah, right.

00;30;08;10 - 00;30;30;20
Speaker 1
No, I mean, it's fascinating. And you know that that leads to the kind of further conversation, which is where you are the world expert. From all my research in the idea of the asteroid mining and potential is there. So, you know, I look at this and and again, you have to excuse my ignorance, but I look at the movie Armageddon.

00;30;30;21 - 00;30;57;27
Speaker 1
Right? And Armageddon, they're flying up. They're landing on this asteroid. They're blowing it apart so it doesn't hit Earth. But the idea behind it is essentially, can you land on it? And mine it for the precious metals or the valuables that are there? And can we bring that back to Earth for and in the introduction to this, it was what is on an asteroid like, what are we going to mine on the asteroid?

00;30;57;27 - 00;31;18;22
Speaker 1
So that's question number one. And how is this conceived? And is there a timetable where this is a reality? Like will I be alive? Will you be alive? Is this something that is is really just not that if the asteroids close enough, the technology is close, this could be something that that happens. Can you elaborate a little bit on the subject matter of asteroid mining?

00;31;18;22 - 00;31;37;15
Speaker 1
And then your research obviously has been extensive on it. Thanks, everyone, for being a part of college knowledge powered by illegally. Are you planning just as an employee? We are guaranteeing that you will save money on college by working with ECP. This is a guarantee that you will pay less. Book a free consultation at elite collegiate planning dot com.

00;31;37;17 - 00;32;12;25
Speaker 3
Yeah sure. So the point of these space stations and the growing industry in orbit is that they will soon need more supplies. But it's sensible to get from Earth they might want because I am for construction there's some people's thinking you could it's now sensible to rethink the idea of space based solar power so you could bring you could have big solar panels, no square miles even in orbit and permanent sunshine and then beam down using microwaves.

00;32;12;27 - 00;32;36;08
Speaker 3
The power to be received. I don't know if that's practical, but I know the people are looking at it. It used to be completely absurd. So vast. You need enormous amounts of construction material like I am in orbit and it's a low space space. X will be able to launch 100 or 150 tons at a time. That's not still not that much.

00;32;36;11 - 00;33;11;07
Speaker 3
And maybe there are some pure iron asteroids out there. We see. And there's a mission called Spikey that's going to investigate the best candidate. It's launching fairly soon. And maybe we could bring we could mine those, cut out a piece of iron and bring it back to where we want to use it and energetically, it's it's easier that way than bringing it from Earth, whether economically it is, we don't know yet, but it sort of changes depending on the technology and the economics as things go along.

00;33;11;07 - 00;33;34;20
Speaker 3
So it could be for use in space and it's iron. There's also water on asteroids. There's a lot of water in the universe, hydrogen locked in a very common element. So that's the simplest thing. They make them. So there are asteroids that are a good fraction of water, 10% water or something like that. If oil the water off at the asteroid and on top of water back to orbit.

00;33;34;20 - 00;33;59;05
Speaker 3
So maybe the the millionaire tourists would prefer a toilet that really works in orbit rather than the one they have now. And a bigger water supply would really help with that. And having a shower and stuff like that going to have means that that may be able to fill. So the only thing that could bring back to Earth actually land on earth.

00;33;59;05 - 00;34;28;27
Speaker 3
I'm settle but is worth bothering with what are called platinum group metals palladium rhodium and so on. Platinum and palladium are the most expensive things they're worth millions upon tens of millions of tons and very because they're very rare on earth. And they're very rare because when the earth was molten, they sank down to a core along with the iron.

00;34;28;28 - 00;34;51;29
Speaker 3
They melted dangerous over time. So plenty of platinum in the earth, but it's thousands of miles. Maybe it's easier to get there, but you can buy The same thing happened to the predecessors of the asteroids. They melted like that. They had a core of iron full of platinum and palladium or what have, and then it got broken up by collisions.

00;34;52;02 - 00;35;05;27
Speaker 3
So you get a pure blob of the interior of this early body. And some of those are rich and platinum. So maybe you could get that out and sell it. But it's so.

00;35;05;29 - 00;35;28;10
Speaker 1
So and I didn't mean to interrupt, but is this so again, how many asteroids are flying within a range where we could get to them? And what what is the actual reality of of landing on it or a structure on it? And being able to do this?

00;35;28;12 - 00;36;00;27
Speaker 3
Okay. One of my first papers in this field was to say, actually, there really aren't very many that we can get to that we know of right now that are worth some nominal number, like $1,000,000,000. Because you know what venture capitalists wake up with. It was less than $1,000,000,000. I got to I worked out how many get the right kind of asteroid although it was how many do are rich platinum say or water and how many of those do we actually get to given the rockets we have today?

00;36;01;00 - 00;36;06;24
Speaker 3
And when you must buy all those things together, I ended up with ten.

00;36;06;27 - 00;36;07;19
Speaker 1
Okay.

00;36;07;21 - 00;36;30;04
Speaker 3
So that wasn't a very encouraging answer for the miners. But what it meant of the ones we knew that they and now there are two or three times as many and we're going to find another few times as many soon because a new survey said are going to start in the next couple years. And then so I guess up to 60 or something like that.

00;36;30;06 - 00;36;54;21
Speaker 3
But the when you rockets in particular stocks, it can have much for a much more capable. So instead of only being able to access about 3% of the asteroid population nearby, we could access half of them and that would multiply it up by another ten times three. So it could be several hundred accessible by 2030 or thereabouts.

00;36;54;23 - 00;37;20;08
Speaker 1
And is this is this the type of thing where, let's say all all things are real moving forward and we're able to do all this? Is this something where you get to the asteroid and you change its trajectory towards a specific direction. You're trying to get it to orbit so that you're you know, or is that is that an impossible feat in its own right, or are we just getting to it, mining it and leaving it?

00;37;20;11 - 00;37;44;22
Speaker 3
Doing that mining to leave it in is and by far the best thing to do, but it means much more advanced robotics. Right, right. People not moving the whole thing. And by having people minus in an earth orbit. Okay. I think you're going to get a lot of pushback if you say, I'm just going to get this football stadium sized rock, I'm going to push it towards us.

00;37;44;28 - 00;37;47;06
Speaker 3
Don't worry, nothing will go wrong and.

00;37;47;08 - 00;37;48;07
Speaker 1
Nothing bad could happen.

00;37;48;08 - 00;38;12;13
Speaker 3
Nothing could ever go wrong. So that's going to be undesirable? I think so. It's going to be a while before anyone lets you do that. You have to demonstrate a lot of capability. So extracting water is quite easy. I said, You boil it all distractingly the platinum is is going to be much harder because it's like one ounce of platinum per ton of rock.

00;38;12;15 - 00;38;45;20
Speaker 3
Okay. Yeah, it's tricky. Also, by now you don't really land on an asteroid. The recent Osiris-rex mission with just had its sample return to Earth and Utah Utah desert in Utah. It tried to land on the asteroid and then grabbed some rocks. But you had this arm, which is like a yard long and instead of stopping on the surface when it reach the surface, it just went straight on the surface of the asteroid, slowed around it like the liquid.

00;38;45;22 - 00;38;59;04
Speaker 3
It's a strange property of what I called grinding, limiting drills in zero-G that they become like liquid like that. So they were lucky to escape. But yeah.

00;38;59;06 - 00;39;00;28
Speaker 1
So they knew that was going to happen.

00;39;01;05 - 00;39;24;17
Speaker 3
They were not really content. No, but they preplanned preprogramed that it would fire the little rockets to push back after a certain time. Okay, that's what I understand. Yeah. I think they were like, surprise. So it's it's dealing with an object. It has almost no gravity. A long way from home. We're going to do a lot of learning to before we can do that.

00;39;24;22 - 00;39;32;21
Speaker 1
Well, and had those rockets not deployed, would it have just absorbed it? Would it have just kind of stuck into the house?

00;39;32;21 - 00;39;42;26
Speaker 3
I would have gone I don't know, because that was a long day like that big spacecraft above it, such that might have been enough to stop it. We don't know. Okay.

00;39;42;29 - 00;39;44;29
Speaker 1
So we're.

00;39;45;02 - 00;40;05;14
Speaker 3
Good. I'm sorry. Other ideas. I wrap the entire asteroid in, like a plastic bag or like Kevlar. So since you've done and then you could process evaluations at a time like that, but you help you hold it together with tension instead of gravity.

00;40;05;17 - 00;40;11;04
Speaker 1
So as a as a very ignorant person on the subject, let me.

00;40;11;10 - 00;40;12;03
Speaker 3
Know.

00;40;12;06 - 00;40;36;06
Speaker 1
If we get to an asteroid, let's say, and we're able to bag it up or do any of these how long of a period of time do we have on an asteroid before there is either, you know, it's too far away where we can get back to it? Is it what direction does it is there a specific like direction or vector?

00;40;36;06 - 00;40;47;29
Speaker 1
This thing has to be traveling to actually make this viable for us to get off of it and back to either a space station, as you say, or, you know, even to earth if it's if it's the rare mass.

00;40;48;05 - 00;41;09;11
Speaker 3
That's why there were so such a small fraction we could get to. Is that to the with the rockets we have now, we can really only get to a few percent because they have to be in orbit, sort of almost the same as the Earth's. But just to make it be a little incline, a little further out, a little farther in, but pretty much in an orbit.

00;41;09;14 - 00;41;32;01
Speaker 3
Also, the rocket, you can you can change the orbit. Your spacecraft orbit a lot more and so they can get to them. Typical journey times for these. So about six months there in back there and six months back. Okay. You have to stay there until it reaches until the asteroid comes back into the right location. And that may be a couple of years.

00;41;32;04 - 00;42;12;02
Speaker 1
Got it. So so in the again, trying to understand and again, you've spent your life and career studying this. So I don't expect to understand it in in short order in a 45 minute interview. But if the asteroid is first of all, is there a distance from the earth where we lose our orbit? Obviously, you get outside of it and you you know, you're you can't be in orbit anymore because the mass of the whatever the spacecraft is, the thing orbiting is no longer the gravitational pulls, no longer strong enough.

00;42;12;04 - 00;42;33;03
Speaker 1
Does it just fly into space? Is as the movies would show you, or does it find another object and does it stay in the sun's orbit or does it go to another planet's orbit? And how would we? I guess it's pure mathematics at that point. I mean, I don't know what math does that I'm sure it's very high level physics, calculus and all that.

00;42;33;03 - 00;42;52;26
Speaker 1
But it seems to me that, you know, we get our satellites in orbit, so they stay circling the earth, but there's other larger objects out there that have gravitational pull at the same time. How far away from earth can you get before? You're sucked to a larger object if that's even if that makes sense. Just simple, right?

00;42;52;29 - 00;43;12;03
Speaker 3
I don't know if you've seen these diagrams which show these sort of wells this gravitational well, also in the sun is huge like this. And then the earth's a little different. The moon is tiny, different than Jupiter's over the bigger do. So what did you what you're talking about is getting out to where it's kind of flat. You've got to get out of the Earth's potential.

00;43;12;03 - 00;43;35;15
Speaker 3
Well, then you go into a flat area and then that means that the pool from the earth is bouncing. They pull from the sun and other bodies. And so the first thing that happens, you get escape velocity from the earth and you so you will never come back to the earth. But now you're in a solar orbit and you have to go much faster to escape the solar system altogether.

00;43;35;17 - 00;43;47;11
Speaker 3
And not just accidentally going to say Jupiter is tiny, but if you aim for it, you can aim for get all of it around you. That's of course nice approach. Have done.

00;43;47;13 - 00;44;17;05
Speaker 1
Okay. Fascinating. I go all day to it. Give me ideas of you've watched technological progression over your career. We're obviously significantly more advanced today than we ever have been. We've got artificial intelligence, we've got robotics that are making advancements. How far are we from being able to do any of the types of things you're talking about in the asteroid mining?

00;44;17;07 - 00;44;47;14
Speaker 3
I think the technology of doing it is is relatively advanced in most areas. What we're waiting for is the in-space economy that I was talking about, the manufacturing of optical fibers, for instance. So that can be super good if made in zero-G collected to develop. So these would create a demand in space for some of the materials we can get from the asteroids.

00;44;47;16 - 00;45;19;27
Speaker 3
So we'll see how fast that goes. I'm kind of optimistic, bullish, I'll say, because I suspect once once you start having serious scientists working in orbit and I'm already promising projects, one or two or three of them are going to turn into products within a decade of doing that. So by 2030 or something, I think that could well be the beginning of enough demand in space that you would start saying, you know, those asteroids are looking pretty temporary.

00;45;19;29 - 00;45;30;07
Speaker 3
We learned a lot by going to the moon and doing exploration on the moon. And meantime, because that's happening now in the next decade, and I hope that'll teach us a lot.

00;45;30;10 - 00;45;50;10
Speaker 1
So that's an interesting concept here. I want to chat for a minute. So the the moon itself, it was and I'm not going to get controversial here, but we've we've landed on it, so we say, right.

00;45;50;12 - 00;45;54;12
Speaker 3
Yeah, Buzz Aldrin will fight you if you say anything else.

00;45;54;14 - 00;46;15;07
Speaker 1
I will. I'm not, but I. Why haven't we gone back to it until now? Why is it been something that we haven't explained more? Why? Why? So we've spent a lot of time on satellites. We've spent a lot of time in orbit. We've spent we've had people in orbit for a year. You know, we've seen all that. Why not the moon sooner than now?

00;46;15;09 - 00;46;40;24
Speaker 3
I think because the first because it looks like a great ball of dust and craters. And it's not very interesting to look that way. But it turns out that the first impression that you got from the Apollo astronauts bouncing around on the surface is misleading, right and left been it took a long time for anyone to go back to the moon, like 25 years.

00;46;40;24 - 00;47;08;26
Speaker 3
And then and finally one or two experiments that started photographing the moon in different colors and could pick out geological features and there are other techniques where people discovered that there's probably a lot of water in dark craters, permanently dark craters at the poles, the north and south poles of the moon, which never see sunlight for the past billion or more years.

00;47;08;28 - 00;47;34;16
Speaker 3
And so all that makes means that, oh, there's actually some interesting places to go here. And particularly water is great for if we want to take human base, it provides life support not only for, you know, oxygen in the water, but also water for hygiene and drinking and but also growing food because, you know, you can have actually you can actually have a fresh salad instead of trying to bring one from Earth.

00;47;34;16 - 00;47;45;28
Speaker 3
So just how expensive. And it would be kind of like the other term. So it's the whole look to the moon, to humans to go that got it.

00;47;45;28 - 00;48;00;25
Speaker 1
So it's more the check the box, move on let's let's get capabilities up elsewhere. Now all of a sudden we're we we have more information than we did previously and it makes it a more a more interesting kind of subject matter.

00;48;00;25 - 00;48;22;16
Speaker 3
It's a lot more interesting. People talk about mining helium three from there, and there are some places which are particularly good for mining helium three. And I laughed about that because it's to put the fuel into fusion reactors and we don't want fusion reactors to use that particular kind of element in a reaction with reactors even further off.

00;48;22;19 - 00;48;46;21
Speaker 3
But it turns out helium three is actually very useful in cryogenics making these very, very bold turns out to be kind of a vitals to get. And that's that's that's important now for quantum computing. And so that's a world that's big money. And if that works and so if that works, then there could be huge demand to actually mine is helium three.

00;48;46;24 - 00;49;01;20
Speaker 1
And I'm assuming that the advancement in rockets and the private sector is helping that type of exploration again, because we can send bigger, we can go further, we have that that power that maybe was a stretch to do regularly.

00;49;01;23 - 00;49;32;07
Speaker 3
Historically, certainly the astronauts from the Apollo could bring back, you know, a £10, £20, even £50 of rocks. But the lander, the massive the planning to use for the Artemis program to return to the moon with humans is is a variant of the space station. And that's going to be able to carry more like multiple times tens of thousands back to Earth.

00;49;32;10 - 00;49;43;02
Speaker 3
So I'll do it that way. It will be transferred to something. It's a complicated. All right. So yeah, you're talking multiple times instead of multiple pounds.

00;49;43;04 - 00;49;48;14
Speaker 1
And are we sophisticated enough to land where we want to land on the moon at this point?

00;49;48;16 - 00;50;12;18
Speaker 3
Well, we're getting better because of that, because the moon has been photographed so in detail at such fine levels. Now, you can you can store all of those images in your umbilical computer and it can match the terrain in its memory with the terrain it sees right below it and say, oh, I'm I'm here. I can get down.

00;50;12;20 - 00;50;29;07
Speaker 3
It's certainly than a half a mile or something like that. But you really need to get better than that. It's being worked on. I'm pretty confident that's going to work. The problem is at the South Pole, places you want to land or about the width of a football field is long.

00;50;29;10 - 00;50;30;26
Speaker 1
Gone and they're very dark.

00;50;30;26 - 00;50;34;08
Speaker 3
Right. You know, that's got to be pretty good.

00;50;34;10 - 00;50;52;27
Speaker 1
Okay. In is there a case for any and do we know what the make up of the moon is is there any of the mining types that you're talking about, asteroids? Is any of that are bound to do that stuff on the moon?

00;50;53;00 - 00;51;15;01
Speaker 3
Certainly we go to the extraction of water is the first thing, right. That's the most enabling resource there is. After that, there are places that are iron rich, which are the debris fields of late rebels related to asteroid impacts in the past. And we need to make those out more carefully to see find the richest places to go.

00;51;15;01 - 00;51;42;19
Speaker 3
But just very likely rich iron deposits, some radioactive elements. Thorium is possibly available, is available, and maybe we can find rich deposits again as we go to when I say we know the moon has a little stuff like this, it's been mapped at the sort of one mile level and you to actually go there and get something useful, you've got to get down to the hundred yards or less, ten yards.

00;51;42;23 - 00;51;50;18
Speaker 3
So can like this is the place to go. So much work to be done surveying worst to be done.

00;51;50;20 - 00;52;07;18
Speaker 1
Now, again, in my ignorance here, I've been taught and I know this to be true, that the moon has a lot to do with the tides on earth and the gravitational pull and all that. If we go up there and disrupt anything, does that disrupt not that type of feature on earth? Nothing. We're not going to mess anything up there.

00;52;07;21 - 00;52;35;03
Speaker 3
No, we would have to remove a big fraction of the of the moon's mass to to affect the tides and it would reduce the tides and the moon is only half the tide anyway. But realistically, no, I don't think we're not going to lose so much as those big changing mass. So it won't affect that.

00;52;35;06 - 00;52;36;18
Speaker 2
If it turns out that.

00;52;36;20 - 00;52;43;07
Speaker 3
Whatever we to do to taking anything amount of mass doesn't change the orbit at all. Yeah.

00;52;43;09 - 00;53;18;16
Speaker 2
If it turns out that there are valuable resources that can be mined on the moon, it's obviously not owned by a country. Yes. You know. So is there a I don't want to say a war, but is there a battle on who now? Higher space? Next is China. Does Russia, you know, do they essentially now say, hey, we're going to pay you this and now we get to go where we want and what's what's going to be the you know, I'll say, where's the where's law going to come in to that?

00;53;18;16 - 00;53;27;03
Speaker 2
We put a flag on there. So we own it like the United States is. Is it because that's our flag? You know, how are we going to get around that, that aspect of things?

00;53;27;03 - 00;53;55;25
Speaker 3
This is this is something that I've been talking about a lot that needs raising because a lot of the enthusiasts for going back to the moon or for mining asteroids are not sympathetic to lawyers or government government. They just like the idea going out and do it themselves. Useful. Yeah, it wasn't really like that in the West. If you go into the history of it.

00;53;55;27 - 00;54;29;29
Speaker 3
So sure, there's going to be a problem planting a flag that does nothing. There is one piece of international treaty that everybody signed up to. It is called the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and it clearly states that to this none, no celestial body, including the moon, be subject to national appropriation by any means to own the land. Now, the difference is you can actually pick up a rock like the Apollo astronauts did.

00;54;30;01 - 00;54;54;06
Speaker 3
Then it becomes property. And that's yours, right? And the precedent from the Apollo, from the Lunokhod, from the Japanese missions to the asteroid asteroids, and now from Osiris-rex to that, that's kind of settled law. And it was a little controversial, but it is raised again by the asteroid mining companies. But a whole bunch of countries have signed that into explicitly into law.

00;54;54;09 - 00;55;15;03
Speaker 3
But there's nothing to say who gets to pick up that rock from that place. So if there's one place on the moon, which is super rich in a valuable thing, right? And we suppose Company A does a lot of work and went from this one mile map down to a one yard and said, I sound it, this is it.

00;55;15;03 - 00;55;34;15
Speaker 3
Yeah. Then the fact that they another company B could say oh company has found that really the best place to go. We didn't need to do that research anything because we see where they are. So we're just saying we spend our money instead on a much bigger mining machine. So we'll land that right next to the moon, crunching away and we'll get away from it.

00;55;34;23 - 00;55;42;16
Speaker 3
So nothing regulates that right now. So that's sort of play clean jumping, something just so that.

00;55;42;18 - 00;55;52;29
Speaker 1
If I heard it correctly, it's finders keepers pretty much. And if you can if you can take it it is yours essentially, right? Yeah.

00;55;53;01 - 00;55;53;15
Speaker 3
Yeah.

00;55;53;20 - 00;55;56;14
Speaker 2
Possession is more than 9/10 of the law in this case.

00;55;56;16 - 00;56;00;02
Speaker 3
So. That's right. Yeah. Once you picked it up.

00;56;00;04 - 00;56;22;17
Speaker 1
One other thing that I want to just touch on because I think it is a subject that you've mentioned over and over again in your kind of answer to us, which is economics and the financial component of this and the real the reality of and I mean, it's obviously always been there. It's always but historically it was always governments that were involved.

00;56;22;17 - 00;56;43;13
Speaker 1
And so taxpayer dollars funding a lot, right? In this instance, you have an economy that has to you've got to figure out, you know, you've already talked about the expense of getting and actually doing these things. And is there a market for it essentially? Right. If you you're not going to go mine, something you can't sell, bring back or use.

00;56;43;14 - 00;57;08;18
Speaker 1
Right. And that someone willing to buy. But then you also have this the economy is and this is where I was leading with the private sector money right where there is, you're not going to be able to mine. The first thing you find that is worth dollars, Right? There's a lot that gets to going there. How much is the economics of this?

00;57;08;21 - 00;57;24;22
Speaker 1
How has it been exercised and where do those cross disciplines come in where someone's got I mean, you're an astrophysicist, obviously, you understand this. Have you studied the economics of it and the actual finances? And is anybody doing that work?

00;57;24;25 - 00;57;41;10
Speaker 3
Yeah, there are a few people doing that who are still still a couple of mining asteroid mining companies started about ten years ago and they both went out of business out of the asteroid mining business. Anyway, they got bought for that technology.

00;57;41;13 - 00;57;42;27
Speaker 1
Okay.

00;57;42;29 - 00;58;03;08
Speaker 3
But there's still some companies starting again to do this as thing just ten years later. Everything's different. A lot of the things that we know a lot more asteroid is the rocket technology is much better and so on. They they are doing it, but they keep that to themselves because that's their business plan. And they have a secret source.

00;58;03;11 - 00;58;42;02
Speaker 3
They will tell me very wisely. They won't tell me where economic analysis is. There isn't a lot going on just across the river here. Harvard Business School, there's a couple of people who are working on space as a business proposition. Okay. So mine's always the one person I know best. So in that. So I think it's starting to come into MBA programs a little bit with him is maybe one of the leaders, people at the Colorado school mines who look at the economics more than I do.

00;58;42;04 - 00;59;08;22
Speaker 3
So it's the beginning, but it's pretty minor. I think activity at the moment is high here with its infrastructure. It really shows its potential to bring costs down dramatically because another sometimes cheaper rockets that will change the economics utterly. Yeah, that's a long ways in the favor of asteroid mining, because immediately bringing stuff from Earth will be cheaper.

00;59;08;25 - 00;59;19;28
Speaker 3
So do asteroid mining more easily. But you can also just start firmly from the ground up. So it's not a simple equation.

00;59;20;00 - 00;59;30;16
Speaker 1
No, absolutely not. And it's that's the fascinating part to me, having an economics background and going, hey, what's the reality of doing this? You know, can we make it happen?

00;59;30;18 - 00;59;38;29
Speaker 3
That is going to be a whole lot of different professions needed to sustain. This economy gets off the ground without question.

00;59;38;29 - 00;59;46;12
Speaker 1
Well, this has been tremendous. I love Hold on, not nails. Got a question burning in his brain here. Let's see what he's going to bring to the table.

00;59;46;17 - 01;00;01;24
Speaker 2
So, Doctor Elvis, I know you've studied a lot about black holes. Has there any has there been research of what happens when you know, an object enters a black hole, or have you guys been in any sort of spacecraft.

01;00;01;24 - 01;00;02;09
Speaker 1
Or.

01;00;02;12 - 01;00;03;05
Speaker 3
Observational.

01;00;03;05 - 01;00;04;05
Speaker 1
Tools into.

01;00;04;05 - 01;00;04;23
Speaker 2
A black hole?

01;00;04;23 - 01;00;28;08
Speaker 3
And where does it look? You in the nearest black hole we know about is a very, very long way away. Thousands of light years without like some pretty sight on it. The theory is that once you drop something into the black hole past the event horizon, nothing escapes. The light doesn't have any concern, no signal back to us.

01;00;28;15 - 01;00;54;05
Speaker 3
And the event horizon telescope images of this black circle with a bright, bright orange rings around it kind of confirms that pretty solidly. That's a shadow of the black hole that we're looking at and nothing is getting out from inside. And so it's very hard to know what's actually on the inside. And it's a basic physics puzzle, fundamental physics puzzle that Stephen Hawking and many others have been trying to solve.

01;00;54;07 - 01;00;57;22
Speaker 3
But I don't think they really have a solution yet.

01;00;57;24 - 01;00;58;24
Speaker 1
Okay. And yeah.

01;00;58;25 - 01;01;03;15
Speaker 2
So when we had our interview with the gentleman from Penn State, he had.

01;01;03;20 - 01;01;05;26
Speaker 3
Said.

01;01;05;29 - 01;01;07;05
Speaker 1
We might possibly.

01;01;07;05 - 01;01;08;22
Speaker 2
Be living in a black hole.

01;01;08;24 - 01;01;09;19
Speaker 3
You know, can I just.

01;01;09;19 - 01;01;12;03
Speaker 1
Get your take on that real quick? Just my curiosity.

01;01;12;04 - 01;01;15;28
Speaker 2
Is going to need I need to ask that.

01;01;16;00 - 01;01;38;08
Speaker 3
I think he might be referring to the whole universe, which is part of Stephen Hawking's thesis that the whole universe could be like a black hole. Hmm. Another way to look inside, because we can see that maybe our view is terribly distorted and it isn't as if we were inside. So we're safe on that.

01;01;38;11 - 01;01;39;10
Speaker 2
Thank you.

01;01;39;12 - 01;02;03;25
Speaker 3
There is an idea that there's a ninth planet, meaning Pluto, but yes, another one a few times. The mass of the earth orbiting and ticking. Now many planets in the solar Coker Belt in strange orbits. And one proposal is that that is, in fact, a baseball sized black hole. So it's pretty unlikely, but it would be a great sign if it were.

01;02;03;28 - 01;02;07;21
Speaker 3
And it's still a safe distance away.

01;02;07;24 - 01;02;28;03
Speaker 1
Amazing. And so any questions now? Thanks for that. But we're about out of time. I can't thank you enough for spending this time with us and educating us and kind of I really appreciate the beginning. Part three shared your story and kind of the the mentorships and the options and the way it kind of worked out for you.

01;02;28;05 - 01;02;32;01
Speaker 1
I'm fascinated by the subject. I think this has been an incredible interview.

01;02;32;03 - 01;02;35;02
Speaker 3
Oh, great. Happy to help.

01;02;35;05 - 01;02;59;26
Speaker 2
This has been great. Very enlightening for me. I think, you know, I've always as Dave may have alluded to, I'm always a little it's not my passion. The stars and the study of them in. But hearing, you know, the one they stick out about potentially, you know 3D printing a heart and the fact that if you do it in space, it's different than if it's 3-D.

01;02;59;26 - 01;03;06;28
Speaker 2
Like that is is pretty mind blowing. And, you know, things that I would never even imagine. So it's yeah.

01;03;07;00 - 01;03;10;22
Speaker 3
I love it's amazing. Yeah.

01;03;10;25 - 01;03;11;13
Speaker 1
Yes.

01;03;11;16 - 01;03;15;18
Speaker 2
But this this really was very enjoyable. And thank you for your time.

01;03;15;21 - 01;03;16;14
Speaker 1
All right.

01;03;16;17 - 01;03;18;05
Speaker 3
Absolutely. A pleasure.

01;03;18;08 - 01;03;26;18
Speaker 1
All right, everybody. That's Dr. Martin Elvis, astrophysicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Thank you for being on the show.

01;03;26;20 - 01;03;27;16
Speaker 3
Bye bye.

01;03;27;19 - 01;03;52;15
Speaker 1
Thank you, guys, for being a part of college knowledge powered by elite collegiate planning. If you didn't know we have a free crash course on college funding and elite collegiate planning dot com, This will explain different types of loans, types of financial aid, savings vehicles and much more. And remember plan early and pay less. Thanks for listening to the College Knowledge podcast with your hosts, Dave Kozak and Joe Kearns.

01;03;52;17 - 01;04;01;11
Speaker 1
We hope you enjoyed this week's exploration of higher education sponsored by the College Planning Network and Paradigm Financial Group. That's all for this episode. See you next time.