AZ Tech Podcast
AZ Tech Podcast
Danny Jacobs, Researcher, ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration
Dr. Danny Jacobs is, in a way, a space explorer. As part of his research at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, he's trying to understand how the universe began. Danny's whole goal is to answer some of life's biggest and most basic questions, like where did we come from and how did we get here? Not only that, but he's also building satellites the size of cereal boxes to launch into space.
So where did we come from? In this episode, Danny and Hamid talk about that and more, like Elon Musk, the colonization of Mars and the future of space exploration.
Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/apGmxDUoPjE
Danny 0:00
Just because that there's the possibility that we might, you know, re Columbus, something that, you know, just because it's a possibility doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It just means we need to think about it.
Hamid 0:15
Welcome to today's tech podcast, I'm your host, Hamid Shojaee. I'm a tech enthusiast and entrepreneur. Recently, my wife and I sold our software companies. And we're investing $10 million in Arizona's tech ecosystem. As a way to know what's happening in Arizona, every week, I get to sit down with some exceptionally talented people who are doing some cool sh*t. Alright, let's go.
Hamid 0:37
I'm here with Dr. Daniel Jacobs, a researcher at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration. Hey, Danny.
Danny 0:43
How's it going?
Hamid 0:44
Good. How are you?
Danny 0:45
I'm good. I'm alright.
Hamid 0:46
Awesome. Alright, let's, let's jump right into it. You're doing some really cool research about the origins of the universe. And why don't we start there? And there's a bunch of other things I want to talk to you about, based on your background and physics and astrophysics and the type of research that you're doing and satellites. And it's going to be a fun topic.
Danny 1:09
Well, yeah, yeah. There's a lot to talk about. Yeah. And I like to talk. So yeah, so the cosmology stuff is, you know, there's, we've, me as a human, you know, humans have been learning a lot about our universe, you know, on the biggest scales in the past 40 years or so 50 years, to the point where we know, we have this origin story in the Big Bang, and we know, sort of rough time history period, you know, 14 billion years or so went by, and then we're here we are, right? We know that. But there are a lot of huge holes, actually, that are kind of conundrums. In fact, you know, so you might know some of them, like the fact that we think that most of the energy in the universe is in what we call dark energy, which basically just means we don't know what it is. And then the rest of it is mostly in dark matter, which again, we don't know what it is. And the main difference being how they interact with matter how they do with the kind of things that they do to the universe. But another big mystery that we still don't understand. And so that's, that's sort of mysteries that have been exposed by measurements. Okay, we've done a lot of measurements with satellites and ground based observatories, and everything from looking at galaxies and how they move, you know, we can see that there's invisible stuff there. That's the dark matter is we can, we can see galaxies flying away from each other faster than we'd expect. And that's what dark energy does. But there's other mysteries too. Like, for example, why are we here, right? The universe started off as this lumpy gas of hydrogen, basically, and collapsed under gravity. And eventually formed stars and galaxies and stuff and us. But if you if you try to make stars with just hydrogen, they don't, you can't make them. In fact, this was a big problem about 100 years ago, or so. It was solved by adding adding metals, which to an astronomer just means anything that's not hydrogen or helium, like carbon or oxygen, doesn't matter. If you add you salt, a little bit of that stuff into some hydrogen, you can make a star and it's it has to do it's basically acts like a catalyst. But the universe when it was born, didn't have metal. A little bit of helium. It's a mystery, how did stars even, even form?
Hamid 3:40
Alright.
Danny 3:41
And no one knows, really. And it happened not that, we know it happened not that long after the Big Bang, we know what happened pretty quick. Actually, the universe wants to make us, you know, the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. That's a good fraction of the age of the universe. Right. You know, people tend to think the universe's, you know, mind bogglingly huge and old. 14 billion years is a long time 13.8 whatever. But that's not that much longer than 4.6 or whatever their you know, billion years the earth is right. The Earth has been around most of the age in the universe.
Hamid 4:22
About a third of it. Right. So, how do we know like that hydrogen by itself can't form like just a gravitational pull doesn't form the necessary components of stars?
Danny 4:36
The basic quantum mechanics of how stars, few stars are powered by fusion. Okay, put enough molecules together movement of atoms together, they start to stick together and when they do, they release energy. That's what fusion is, right? So there's hydrogen, and the star and it gets pushed together. It fuses a whole bunch of energy comes out, right? Think of it like there's this deep hole, that's where two atoms are sort of smooshed together. So there's a little bump that you're gonna push them up and over in the following way down when they hit the bottom, that's sort of like the explosion, pushing them together. The thing is that the bump, they have to push two hydrogen atoms together is really big. You can really smoosh them together. And it's just not. It's not it doesn't work out. If you do the math, like you'd like the gravitational pull of, even if you have plenty of hydrogen is is not enough to create the initial we get a much bigger star, he would have to be a lot bigger than ours is, for example, if our star was just hydrogen, it would be enormous. To get it to burn.
Hamid 5:45
So could I mean like, okay, so, you know, the question is like, why couldn't it have started out with really big ones?
Danny 5:51
It did, and that's what we think happened, but they're really weird. We don't we there's no modern examples of them. Okay. They call them population, three stars, because astronomers give things names. So there's, there's theory, of course, there's theories. Okay. Of course, there's theory people think they know, but they don't know. What I want to do is find out by setting up experiments.
Hamid 6:14
And that's what your research is as well?
Danny 6:15
That's what it's about. Yeah. And turns out, if you can observe that, so we've come up with this observable that is actually looking at the hydrogen itself. Yeah, in the early times, it radiates radio waves. The hydrogen atom is the smallest atom that there is, right? One, one proton, one electron can't get any smaller than that. It radiates a radio wave. Because of radio emission, like so for example, you if you look at, you'll get the sun through a grading or through a prism or something, you see all these lines, right? These are right, atomic lines that radiate. There are lines all the way from radio up to, you know, above visible, like our eyes can see, they're all over the place. They're generally pretty small, like they're photons, right? They're really narrow wavelengths down there. nanometers, we talk about small. The hydrogen atom radiates a radio wave 21 centimeters and wavelength. That's literally, you know, macro size. It's this big,
Hamid 7:21
Right? Little more than a foot.
Danny 7:22
Yeah, about a foot. So that enormous wave...
Hamid 7:26
Actually less than a foot.
Danny 7:28
A little less than a foot. I'm a cosmologist, I think in orders of magnitude. It's a mile, it's between there.
Hamid 7:34
Gotcha.
Danny 7:36
It's just it boggles my mind to think about the tiniest atom and that, you know, this enormous wave comes wiggling out somehow, right?
Hamid 7:47
It's the tiniest little thing, right? I see what you're saying.
Danny 7:50
It's so weird. It's weird.
Hamid 7:51
So you can detect these, these wavelengths? And and, like, you're trying to detect the ones that were generated, right at the Big Bang?
Danny 7:59
Right, way back in the day. Yeah. So people look at this stuff in modern times, you know, other galaxies, our galaxy. And in fact, it's what's one of the main observables that's been used to show that dark matter exists. Because you can radio is a it's like a GPS, right? It lets you track the matter really precisely. And so you can see it's moving like that. There's some of the hidden stuff there anyway, so we can see it. In local galaxies. There's a little bit hydrogen down in every galaxy, okay, track it. But the stuff that's at the very dawn of time, it's far away, takes time to get to us. Right, the right back time, the light cone is such that, you know, if you tune it... Okay, so you're in the very early universe, right? You have 121 centimeter line, photon comes out. And then the universe does its thing, which is to expand, because it's sort of just coasting after the Big Bang.
Hamid 8:59
Right. After the explosion, everything is moving apart from one another.
Danny 9:03
But it's because space is expanding. Okay, not because everything is moving. It looks like it is but it's just space that's expanding. Okay, take a look at the raisins in a raisin bread, right, the raisins aren't moving in the bread. But the bread bakes, they get further apart, or you take a balloon and put some dots on and blow it up. You know, they're not moving, the dots are still the same spots that you drew them, but they were getting further apart. Okay, this is the same idea. And if you get that balloon is a really good example because draw a wavelength on the draw like a sign, you know, like a line, right? Blow it up, the line gets longer and longer.
Hamid 9:41
Right, right.
Danny 9:42
So too does the wave, 21 centimeter wavelength gets longer. Okay? And this is true for all, you know, all radiation in the universe. As as the universe expands, it gets longer. So it's coming to us. For you know, 12 billion years it's been traveling to us and the universe has been growing and growing and growing. So by the time it gets to us It's grown from 21 centimeters to two, four meters, depending on how far back you're looking.
Hamid 10:07
Okay, so when you detect these, like, what's the hope? Like, what do you what are you hoping to be able to determine?
Danny 10:15
Well, I mean, if you think about what you might see what might you see, you might see hydrogen, you know, make a map. Okay, you can at different wavelengths or tuning to, you're looking at different time times. So you could you can make us 3D cube, like, a 3D map of where things are, where things were, like, 12 billion years ago.
Hamid 10:40
Yeah. And, and your hope is to detect the other metals or to detect like what?
Danny 10:46
So that there's, okay, so there's matter and energy out there doing whatever they're going to do, right? And so one thing people think is that one star start to exist, we know they do, because here we are, they're going to ionize, that hydrogen, they're going to burn it away. It's hydrogen is is a tiny little atom, it doesn't take much to ionize it, okay. In fact, if you look around our universe, like locally, there is no hydrogen between galaxies, it's all been burned away, basically get sunburn. Literally, suns burn you out UV light burns it. And by burning I mean, turns to plasma just gone. So we think if we look at some distance, we'll see hydrogen, and then later, it'll just kind of disappear. And in between, you'll see these holes, like Swiss cheese holes, where stars start to burn holes away. And there's other stuff too, like, before that even happens, you can actually you can you can see, like it get hotter, you know, you can see that you can actually measure a temperature of this signal. It's not just there or not there, it's like, more or less, you know, and see, you can you can actually measure a huge volume of the universe and start to do some, you know, you can do some really powerful statistical stuff.
Hamid 11:57
And where are you guys in the in this research?
Danny 12:00
Well, it was a new idea. I don't know, about 20 years ago, and there was about a decade of theorists sort of sorting that out and figuring out what might we see the questions you're asking? These are really like, hard questions to just predict, right? What, given a guess, what might have happened? What would an instrument like see? What's a good kind of instrument? What's a bad instrument? What's about a decade ago, we were building the very, very first instrument, these were talking about wavelengths that nobody really uses. The universe decides where we get to look what frequencies we get to look. And it turns out about two meters wavelength, which is look back time. Right around we think, at the end of this, this transition happened. That's FM radio. 100 megahertz 101.9.
Hamid 12:55
So we do use it.
Danny 12:56
Oh yeah, we use it all the time, just not for listening quietly to the universe. We use it for...
Hamid 13:02
So does that create a challenge? Trying to listen to this?
Danny 13:05
Yeah. It does, in fact, create a challenge. And we have, so that means we need to build these things far away from humans.
Hamid 13:12
In space?
Danny 13:13
Well, we started by going to Australia.
Hamid 13:17
Because they don't have FM over there.
Danny 13:19
They, in the deep, deep in the outback, they have one person per square Delaware.
Hamid 13:25
Oh, I gotcha.
Danny 13:26
It's not, not a lot of people.
Hamid 13:28
Just unpopulated areas.
Danny 13:30
Not a lot of customers for, you know, mattress advertisements and whatever else.
Hamid 13:35
FM radio has. Yeah.
Danny 13:37
And so there are places on the on the on the earth where it's quiet.
Hamid 13:42
See, podcasting is good for that. Right. We are not on the airwaves.
Danny 13:47
Except for sometimes when they are driving in my car, and there's a podcast on here. Anyway. Yeah. The there's, there's, there's a few places.
Hamid 14:00
So, continuing, like where the research is that you guys eventually came up with the instrumentation?
Danny 14:06
So we build a couple of different when I say we, I mean humans, okay. Generally, there's a bunch of different groups around the world trying to do this and everyone has their own, you know, approach to it on it. Yeah, there's about four or five or six, depending on how you count experiments and they're all different weird looking, and we're talking about, you know, kind of a lot of collecting area, a lot of, you know, a lot of metal on the ground, too, is not a small thing, right? Because your wavelengths are big, okay? You need a big dish, you need a big receiver of some sort. So we've, we're now building the second, second round of these things. The most the most, the one that a lot of us are working on right now is called the hydrogen epoch of reionization array. It's a, it's got 350 dishes. Each of them are about 40 feet across, and they're all packed together in a in a single clump. So they basically act as a single dish essentially, essentially. And that thing's actually in South Africa and Australia. There's a, there's quite a renaissance in, in both South Africa and Australia in radio astronomy.
Hamid 15:24
So they collect the data, and send it to researchers around the world?
Danny 15:27
More, it's more like, because it's a collaborative work. So we go there all the time. And help put it together. The local help. They, they, they manage the project locally, they build most of it. And then people from all over the world are building the bits, like the receiver bits, the electronics, and you know, that sort of stuff and go and plug it all in.
Hamid 15:58
What's the big question that you're hoping that this research is going to answer? Like, what what are you after personally?
Danny 16:03
I think it's fun. I don't know.
Hamid 16:07
But what's the question that like that, you know, like the answer to what question is, is your pursuit? Like, I know, it's fun to be researching these things, but like, what is the motivation factor? Like, where are we coming from? Or where did we come from?
Danny 16:18
Where did we come from? And what are we, why are we here? And not, you know, not nothing? Right? Why? Why is it that? Why is it that we get the kinds of galaxies? We do? They're, they're not what you might expect, if you just if you were to just sit down and try to imagine what would form from a bunch of hydrogen gas collapsing, you would not probably predict what we've gone. But, you know, it's kind of hard. Nobody, nobody can do that. Because we all know what we've got, right? But it's, it's it just all doesn't quite gel. So that's why so many telescopes are spending a lot so much effort and looking so far back. That's when it all happened. That that sort of very brief window and stars formed for the first time when galaxies formed for the first time. James Webb Space Telescope, this is one of the big questions, questions, it's almost hard to phrase as a question, right? Like, why? Why do we have what we have?
Hamid 17:27
Yeah. So I mean, there's sort of like the question of, you know, like, why are we here, which might not be answerable? versus, you know, how did things come to be the way that they are? And that's, which seems to be more answerable?
Danny 17:42
Why is a bad question. How is it better as a better question, because I mean, who knows why, but how is definitely an answerable question.
Hamid 17:51
Yeah. So to answer the how, the big sort of hole that's missing in the origin story of the universe is how did other molecules form? Or other metal, elements?
Danny 18:06
Yeah, how do the elements get here? But I honestly am most interested in the cosmology questions like what is dark energy? Right? Is it really an energy? What is dark matter? These are, these are these, these just touch everything? And they're just big question marks. And they've been question marks since I was in college and they drove me crazy then. And it's such a big question that you have to bite off a little thing and try to answer smaller questions of just, you know, smaller questions like how did how did all the stars and galaxies form?
Hamid 18:45
Just a really tiny, little question.
Danny 18:46
Yeah, and there's so many different options, for example, for dark matter, there's so many different options of what it could be, right? Everything, almost none of them have been suitably eliminated in my view. And the each one of them requires different kind of way of tackling the detection or, you know, some set some kind of direct detection. People are looking, you might write, you can write down, I think maybe it's this kind of particle, and then you can devise an experiment to look for it. But if you write down a different particle that could equally solve the problem, you would have a completely different experiment, or maybe not even one that would work on Earth, it might have to be done astrophysically somehow, by looking make a prediction about what you might see up there.
Hamid 19:33
By like, sending satellites to, to do the observations?
Danny 19:37
Or just you know, astronomical observation.
Hamid 19:40
Like of other stars.
Danny 19:41
Yeah. So for example, people have shown that there's, there's a little bit of evidence that maybe there's an excess of energy in the local galaxy. That could be evidence for annihilating dark matter, maybe, of a specific flavor. It's, you know, more than 31 flavors of dark matter,
Hamid 20:05
Baskin Robbins of dark matter. So as part of this research, you've also had dabbled a little bit with cube SATs, cube, or what are they small satellite, small satellites that are roughly the size of cereal boxes, apparently. Right? And so like, how did your research lead there? And, you know, what can you tell us about that research?
Danny 20:26
I mean, personally, it's been more of a just my checkered history of just doing things that are kind of attractively cool and interesting and a little bit out there now. So in grad school, to pay the bills, I worked at a at a satellite lab that was in the physics department, at the university I was at and that's just, it's just kind of fun to help him. And mostly it's an educational, it was an educational thing, the origin of being able to make a small, very small satellite and get it to space means that students, people, or anybody, anybody, anybody can make a satellite. Right? And that really opens up a lot of possibilities. It's no longer NASA, it's just or, you know, the military industrial complex, putting things in space, you could do it right on your kitchen table. It would be your obsession for about a, you know, I don't know, two or three years, but you could do it.
Hamid 21:25
What's the cost of putting a small CubeSat?
Danny 21:28
You can get it to space for free.
Hamid 21:31
Oh, really?
Danny 21:32
Yeah. There's a NASA program that you can apply to. And if your satellite isn't, like dangerous, usually they go to the space station, so you know, the astronauts kick it out the door for you.
Hamid 21:45
But I imagine it's got to be extremely competitive to get into one of those. No? Oh, I see a side project coming.
Danny 21:55
You got a maker space, go for it, man. No, anybody can do it. And that's, I think, what's the cool thing. But just, you asked about, you know how it's related to my research right now. And I think the answer is that the earth is a noisy, and, you know, kind of annoying place to build precision instruments, like the kinds of things we're trying to do for cosmology. Space, it's quiet, stable, it's far from us, it's further than, further further away than Australia, which is about as far as you can get. So we kind of see this as a long term development project getting good at putting instruments in space. And we're involved in projects to develop all the way up to film small instruments to go you know, near space, just to test how they do, you know, kind of thing, all the way up to trying to build a big array on the far side of the Moon, which is the sort of it's been the dream of, of the the science fiction nerds for 50, 60 years.
Hamid 23:08
Ever since we landed on the moon. But a big array of what?
Danny 23:12
Well, the current, the current plans are mostly to try to build like a low, low, low frequency array, because on Earth, you're under the ionosphere.
Hamid 23:24
Okay, yeah. Oh, I gotcha. It's related to your research to be able to detect those two meter waves.
Danny 23:30
Or yeah, beyond. And so we're talking tonic 10, 20 meters. That's, that's so there's a lot of other cool stuff you can do, you can observe at 20 meters, which is like, that's a long wave, right? You could potentially see, for example, the ionosphere of exoplanets.
Hamid 23:49
Oh, interesting.
Danny 23:50
Those things snap, crackle and pop and make all kinds of noise, but really low frequency. And on earth, you're under our own stuff, the same thing. And there's plasma between you and space and plasma reflects radio waves. So it's like looking at a big mirror that's going, right? Going to the moon, you don't have any of that. It's nice, quiet, stable, you have to go to the far side, right? You can only observe it because it's when the sun isn't going right. You could potentially see a lot of interesting things about stars and exoplanets. And who knows what else nobody's ever looked at these wavelengths before. It's just not possible on Earth.
Hamid 24:30
That is amazing. So obviously, in order to enable that, you have to be all in on space exploration. So what are you what are your thoughts about? Like, what's happening in space exploration right now? Because there seems to be a flurry of activity.
Danny 24:49
Yeah, yeah. It's been a really interesting time. I mean, it's almost impossible to keep up at this point, really, because there's so much action, commercial action, you know, so many different companies doing things. For every, for every sort of splashy, you know, SpaceX landing or whatever, there's a dozen other things that are just as commercially impactful, but sort of less, showy? And there's so there's been a fairly interesting sign, I'm not a business guy, I went into academia because of that. So I don't always understand what's going on. And kind of glad of that, but at the same time, anyway, there's, there's been a lot of, there was this sort of wave of first there were, we had these, this sort of, maybe about a decade ago, we had really sharp uprise in people building these small cube SATs, and people trying to make commercial space happen. And those are kind of orbiting each other, you know, one's obviously a much bigger thing than the other. But there were a lot of companies that were selling regular people, meaning like, you know, universities and other each other, you know, other companies, components, small pointing systems, little tiny rockets, radios, I don't know stuff like that ready for space. And now, a decade later, there's huge inflation and the number of small SATs up there. Everything from the Planet Labs, you know, Earth Observing cube SATs, which image the earth once every day, and there's hundreds of them, they think some of the single largest number by fraction, that they basically are all cube SATs. Right.
Hamid 26:50
That's amazing.
Danny 26:52
And then, and then things like starlink, and these other things, just floods of stuff in low Earth orbit.
Hamid 27:00
What are your thoughts about starlink, by the way?
Danny 27:03
It's great, I guess, I mean, I...
Hamid 27:09
Does it affect that, like astronomical sort of observations that we're trying to make in a negative way? Or, you know, you feel like the long term positive definitely outweighs the short term negative?
Danny 27:22
It's a commons issue.
Hamid 27:24
What does that mean?
Danny 27:32
So, when I say Commons, I'm referring to, you know, in the sort of Old English sense, you know, common, you know, the common land, right, you know, held in the common good used by the people, sort of communally, right. You know, the, the, the space between us and the stars is similarly common, commonly held by all of us. The use of that space then needs to be we need to cooperate. And we have been, like, there's, there's, there's all kinds of treaties and other things in place, and the bad actors tend to, you know, get quite a lot of opprobrium. So you know, a few years ago, there were anti satellite tests, and there was a lot of hubbub about that. And, you know, the China booster landing in, you know, whoeversville a couple of weeks ago, is another example. The one that I'm most familiar with is radio coordination, not just start radio astronomy, but, you know, if you want to talk to your satellite, you need an FCC license in this country and, internationally, there's a coordination process to make sure we're all on different frequencies and stuff like that. And we do we coordinate and we talk to each other. I don't know how that's going for, you know, starlink.
Hamid 28:59
Is it a voluntary thing is like they have to be coordinating with others?
Danny 29:05
I mean, anything international is voluntary, man.
Hamid 29:09
Okay, gotcha. But aren't they coordinating with like NASA for some of this stuff?
Danny 29:15
So, they must they must be coordinating with the FCC. The FCC regulates, you know, like telecommunications for any U.S.-based company, or person or anybody. They also regulate, because they do and you have to talk to your satellite over radio, they also effectively regulate, you know, space. They, for example, evaluate your satellite.
Hamid 29:46
The FCC regulates space for that reason.
Danny 29:49
Effectively, yeah. Which is kind of weird, and maybe not what you might have picked.
Hamid 29:57
As the organization.
Danny 30:00
You know, it's it, so they must, they must have coordinated their, you know, there's going to be some tricks. So for example, I know that SpaceX is sponsoring a, some research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to figure out how to coexist starlink, with, with radio telescopes, which are incredibly sensitive, and if you transmit, you know, in the beam, you could literally fry the receiver. I mean, these, these receivers can detect the, you know, the Big Bang, the dawn of time, very sensitive. They're very, very sensitive. So, you know, if you, it's possible to blow them up. And so, you know, you do that you figure out how to how to work around it. And the optical astronomers also have a have a beef, you know, about occlusion and reflection and stuff like that. I, I'm pretty confident that we, you know, LEO is not a great place for this I think.
Hamid 31:08
LEO being Lower Earth Orbit.
Danny 31:10
Yeah, I don't know, I have a, I have a suspicion that it's, we're not going to be you know, you're not going to go outside, you know, 100 years from now and just see a billion like speeding lights across the sky. I don't think that is where we're headed. But I could be wrong. And that could be one outcome. And I think people will, kind of alert to that.
Hamid 31:35
Interesting. Why do you think that satellite communication is not the future?
Danny 31:42
No, I think it is, I just don't know that.
Hamid 31:49
The higher you go, the higher the latency and latency is what sort of like because of speed of light, right, like, so that's what kills the high orbit ones.
Danny 31:57
Yes and no, I, you know, so the doubling, so, for example, the distance between us and, you know, Low Earth Orbit is much, much, much, much, much less than the distance from here to New York, for example. So, as long as you're talking about relative delays that are smaller than the size of the Earth, you're probably not worrying about it too much. That's, that's my cosmology, you know, so it is a foot or a mile.
Hamid 32:35
You're thinking like, maybe not hundreds of miles, but 1000s of miles, would be the right sort of, okay. So I mean, it's still would mean that we're going to have 1000s of satellites out there, or maybe...
Danny 32:47
But they may be farther away and less reflective, and they may be are in those optical orbits so that they spend more hang time above specific locations. So, I don't know. There's a lot of stuff up there already, a lot of stuff.
Hamid 33:04
So this is a problem we need to solve. Irrespective now.
Danny 33:08
I was, when I was an undergrad, I did some I did a lot of, you know, observing at the local observatory. And the first thing that I saw, when I, when I took a picture with the camera on the telescope, with this line, going across it getting bigger and smaller, and some sort of booster and, you know, slowly through my image.
Hamid 33:29
The other night, my wife and I were walking in our backyard, we looked up and there was like, literally dozens of lights going across the sky. And I realized that it has to be the starlink satellites, because they had just sent a group of 60 of them the day before. So as they sort of start to like, move into their orbital positions over the Phoenix sky, you could see like, basically, all 60 of them. But you know, you could see like, 30 or so at a time that like, we're moving across the skies, super bright. It was just one of the most amazing sights I'd seen.
Danny 34:07
But but not unlike, you know, the the lineup to land at Sky Harbor, right.
Hamid 34:11
Yeah, a lot, a lot of them, a lot more of them. So what are your sort of overall thoughts about humans in space and like, space exploration? Do you think we should be trying to colonize Mars, for example? Is that a direction that is useful in your opinion?
Danny 34:33
Well, you use an interesting word colonize...
Hamid 34:37
Right, versus going there for like research purposes?
Danny 34:40
No, you know, historically, colonies, yeah, have been efforts to extract resources from someplace, right? Whether it's people or, you know, sugar or whatever. They're more they're sort of like out posts that are designed to, you know, run a mine or you know, whatever, service ships going someplace. They're assets for some country.
Hamid 35:12
So for the purposes of this discussion, let's define it as like a self sustaining civilization.
Danny 35:18
I know what you're getting at what you're getting at is, should people live on Mars? And, you know, should we live on Mars like, you know, and the moon and, you know, in trying to do it in a sustainable way. So that, like, if something were to happen to the sort of the thing that the point that I'm getting at is that there's, there's always an economic basis to everything we do. And, and it kind of has to be right, like, people, people do things because they make sense, not because of a dream. And they're there are, when things are motivated in that way. There are upsides and downsides. And I think the thing to consider is, so that's why I think the thing to consider is why, not will we or can we? Why are we doing it?
Hamid 36:16
Yeah, I would definitely ask you why, if you thought we should do it, but I was asking you if we should do it in first place?
Danny 36:22
Well, I so so given that framing, you know, they have to consider what are the pluses and minuses, right. And some of the pluses are challenging humans and that sort of thing. You know, the kinds of things we'd learn how to do would be beneficial to us. Sort of like, you know, any kind of growth experience that you know, growing up, learning how to manage your biosphere really, really carefully. Well, we should all learn how to do that here on Earth, right? But we don't we're not really pushed in that direction. Although we're starting to be. So going someplace hard would be good for us. The solutions, though, might, you might, you know, be a little bit taken aback by them. So for example, Mars, to live sustainably on anywhere you need, what you need energy, you need water. And, you know, trace resources have some sort of other you know, you need like lithium and stuff like that to make batteries and what have you. Okay, so, suppose. So how do you get those things? You mine them. Yeah. So we're going to go to Mars. And how do you get water? Well, so here on Earth, water falls, from the sky, although, you know, some places more than others.
Hamid 37:48
And two thirds is covered.
Danny 37:50
And two thirds of it is covered by some sort of yucky water, which has things living in it. So you can just go scoop it up off the ground here, but there, it's probably, it's probably not in underground lakes, or in sheets of like crystalline, it's probably dirty, you know, watery dirt? Right, somehow. So it's going to look a lot like mining. Yeah, where you have like iron ore and you want to extract or gold or you know, where you have? It's embedded in a matrix, and it requires energy and mechanical extraction to do it to pull it out. So suppose you know, water, for example, you might basically, you know, imagine something like a hot iron that you run across the surface, and then you, you know, suck out the water, and then you scrape the dirt off. And you do that again, and again, and again, and again, and again, until you have something that looks kind of like morency. You know, strip mine of some sort.
Hamid 38:53
Yeah, so these are the hard challenges that you're talking about that will teach us a bunch of stuff, right?
Danny 38:59
That's right, but what would it teach us about ourselves? You know, we're awesome. We're humans, we're expanding, we're spreading and we're strip mining. This, this planet that has not seen, you know, a human footprint.
Hamid 39:12
So is that bad?
Danny 39:15
What do you think?
Hamid 39:16
Well, I mean, like, you're definitely implying that it's bad.
Danny 39:19
No, I'm just I think, I think people tend to think about things like, can we do it? And not should we? Okay, so I like to raise the question that I think people aren't talking about as much just because I'm a contrarian.
Hamid 39:35
But should we not do it because we would have to do mining? I mean, like is, is that? I mean, it seems like mining is essential to survival.
Danny 39:46
It's just one little thing, right? Like, you know, there's probably boring parts of Mars that nobody would care if you mined it, scraped the dry stuff back in.
Hamid 39:58
You're suggesting that because Mars has been like pristine for billions of years without human influence, like us going over there and like messing shit up again, just like we've done on Earth is probably not the best idea.
Danny 40:11
Well, I think it just, you know, what I'm... humans do this. We spend, we consume, we use the commons for our own personal gain, you know, we, we get an idea of what's good for everyone, and then we do it, despite, you know, maybe it not being I don't know. So I think I think there, there are other ways, though, other ways to do what to do. If we know this about ourselves, you know, we're really thinking about it. How might we, but it's still necessary, like, we still need to go to places we still need to explore, we still need to become better. Yeah. Then, you know, just because that there's the possibility that we might, you know, re-Columbus something that, you know, just because it's a possibility doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, it just means we need to think about it. Right?
Hamid 41:13
So, I'm not sure where you fall on the on this spectrum of like, should we be going? Or like, should we be trying as a as a civilization to become a multi planetary civilization? Like, I mean, if you would do?
Danny 41:26
Of course we should.
Hamid 41:27
Okay, we should. So to become a multiplanetary civilization, if we were to sort of choose Mars as this first planet to go to, we would have to do the mining there. Like, you can't, not mine?
Danny 41:40
I don't know. So there are, there is a lot of stuff floating around in this solar system. And there's, there's watery objects, for example. So
Hamid 41:54
Maybe potentially utilize, like asteroids and things to get the resources that we need?
Danny 42:00
And maybe that's a better place to live, honestly, you know, the Mars is, like, you know, has an atmosphere can fly helicopters in it, but it's not very thick. You know, what's the cosmic rays situation? Like, actually, that's probably well known, but I don't know. But it's, it's, you know, you're down a well, which means you need to spend energy to get out of it. Gravity, well, the, the benefits of being on a planet might not be as good as you think they are. On the other hand, it might be that people just can't humans are going to, for looking at a million years of evolution before we can live in space productively, that, I mean, you know, without gravity. And gravity is pretty essential to everything we do. You can a really great, really terrible way to kill the person is to hang them upside down, and leave them there. So we need to be pointed up in the gravitational field. That's what we need. On the other hand, just go to space, you know, get enough mass and spin it up. And then you have gravity. And then you you're not in a well, and you can go wherever you want.
Hamid 43:14
So actually, Jeff Bezos has the Africa, what they're what they're called his dream of the future, in contrast to multiplanetary is that we will live in space and what it brings. I don't think they were ring shaped the structures that he had sort of shown off, but I, and I don't know if they necessarily had gravity, but he, you know, let's call him rings. So your view is that, you know, if in order for human survival long term, we should be exploring space, but not necessarily colonizing planets, we could colonize these rings that we make out of asteroids and resources. Inside of asteroids, potentially, yeah.
Danny 44:02
Yeah, there's, there's a lot of material that the value of matter that's not on a planet is nearly 1000s and 1000s of times higher than matter that is on a planet, because it's the cost so much to get it out of well.
Hamid 44:21
Right. Right.
Danny 44:22
Even after you account for reusable rockets. Yeah.
Hamid 44:28
Super interesting. So who do you like in terms of, you know, who's doing a great job of this space exploration aspect of what humanity is doing right now? Is it the European Space Agency, is that NASA? Is it private companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin? Or like what are you excited about in that in that realm?
Danny 44:53
Geez, I mean, I'm, uh, I'm not, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna pick any. You know, I think it changes so quickly. And once you start, you know, the grass is always greener. You know, so I think they're all doing a good job. I think, you know, the, Elon definitely has the kind of Steve Jobs kind of making it happen kind of thing going on, which is good. It it doesn't last beyond one person. So but there's a lot that can be done in one person's lifetime, which is, which is good, right? It can, you know, we're still as a species, you know, every 400 years between no average of couple 100 years between Newton's.
Hamid 45:52
Yeah, but like, if you will, between famous ones, right? Like, if you take humanity in 19, like 50, when was the first satellite 59, 58? When Sputnik went up, right? Anyway, like us didn't even have the ability to send satellites into space in 1960. But by 1969, in less than a decade, we went from not being able to send anything to space to like landing people, humans on the moon, which is is a feat we haven't been able to replicate ever since, which is kind of mind blowing. In this 60 or 50 plus years since. So, you know, there is a lot to be said for someone who is hell bent on doing a lot of stuff in a short period of time, like, Elon is right, like the amount that he might be able to push things forward, could be actually pretty significant. To the point where we might actually be able to colonize Mars during his lifetime. And, and if he wasn't hell bent on doing that, it's quite possible, it might not happen for hundreds of years. And by then, who knows, we might lose the technology to be able to do it, and it might never happen.
Danny 47:11
Yeah, that's true.
Hamid 47:13
So, like, what's your viewpoint? There's, there's someone like Elon Musk, I guess, like excite you, or does he present a risk factor?
Danny 47:23
No, he doesn't present a risk. I just think it's, it's, you know, we went to the moon, because of the Cold War, right? Going to Mars because of an interesting confluence of economic factors, which allow a few people to accumulate an insane amount of wealth. Right? Neither of those two things are good. Right? You would agree the Cold War is bad.
Hamid 47:52
I agree. And I mean, it definitely had some good elements that came out of it. Right.
Danny 47:57
There's always a silver lining, but we probably...
Hamid 47:59
A cold war is definitely better than a hot war.
Danny 48:03
You're right. You're right about that.
Hamid 48:06
I mean, there was a lot of hot wars before the Cold War, which, which is the reason that like, maybe Cold War is not all that bad. Right, like, I mean, I don't know, I'm sort of like, throwing stuff out there just to sort of challenge this sort of assumption that anything with the word war is bad. I think the, like, actual war where people are dying is bad. Cold wars are like a competition, in a sense of ideas.
Danny 48:37
If it were just that, I would agree with you.
Hamid 48:40
Yeah, I mean, but the side wars that they were fighting against...
Danny 48:43
Vietnam was a bad thing.
Hamid 48:45
Couldn't agree more there. But so the but that was a real war. I mean, like, you could have a cold war without those wars, though, technically speaking.
Danny 48:54
We could try again, and see how it goes. But I think, you know, it's, it's, it was competition. And, and whether it's, you know, trillionaires competing, or whether it's, you know, economic ideas competing. That's the kind of thing that seems to be the most effective driver of things with and what's not effective is sort of businesses usual military industrial complex, for example, you know, had its fingers all over the shuttle and that's, that just went nowhere. It was it went somewhere. It was but it was way too expensive, was too expensive and sustainable. And just had too many, too many silly things going on basically. So that so are we going to have every 50 years some outlier economic event that leads to a spurt of interesting activity, and then 40 years of the bureaucrats sort of cleaning up the mess. And, you know, try and do business as usual, like, you know, Apple is right now, marking time until the next big inflection point, or can we do something different? And you know, that's, that's kind of the thing that I'm interested in. And I don't have an answer for you.
Hamid 50:32
Yeah. But so okay, let me argue the point of like, can we do something different aspect of it, is that maybe this is a good system, because it encourages the next Steve Jobs to challenge the Apples of the world who are complacent, right. And we have a system in place, you know, granted, there's plenty of problems with the system. But we have a system in place that encourages that competition, and encourages the sort of next Steve Jobs is and it rewards them, probably too well financially, especially in terms of like power and such, but there is incentives in place with the ability for those challenges to come about. Whereas if you don't have an alternative to this system, that has resulted in so much progress in such short periods of time, then, you know, like, how can we say that this is bad, necessarily? And this is an honest question. I mean, I'm like, there's lots of things I love about capitalism, but you know, there's lots of things that, you know, like, truly are a concern, right.
Danny 51:44
Yeah, I think we're close, I think we're close. I, you know, I think, I think, well managed capitalism is probably, you know, the, the most successful we've ever been in this country anyway. We've had times when, you know, in the 50s, if you got to a certain level of income, effectively, you were, you were taxed, and they have all the rest went to the government, and I guess you got a trophy or something, you know, and that is how we got to the moon, right, that's what paid for all that stuff was really, really high taxes on rich people. There's still a huge margin there to do to do your own stuff, right, you just don't get to become your own little country. And I think, you know, could could under, you know, the sort of progressive taxes of the 50s, where we have managed capitalism, basically a top end, could you, you could still get the kind of innovation, that, in fact, you get more of it, because you have more people getting free college or, you know, more people with more opportunities, so they aren't loaded down with student debt, or, you know, whatever, so that they can actually do things you can get, you know, Steve Jobs is the number of opportunities he had, you know, people talk about, you know, privileges a lot, right. I think, you know, just the past had more privileges than the present, right. And that's messed up. Like, that's not better. So I think that there's that there's the just slight adjustments. There can be a lot more people coming up with ways to do things without strip mining Mars, and you know, doing things in a cool way.
Hamid 53:47
Okay, very cool. So, let me change subjects on you for a moment because ASU is doing lots of cool stuff. First of all, what brought you to ASU?
Danny 53:56
Oh, well, I came as a postdoc, which is journeymen scientists kind of thing. You know, after you get your PhD, you still don't know what you're doing. So you could you take these little jobs that last a few years, and I ended up staying here for six years doing that on a first on working for ASU and then as an NSF fellow and and then after a while, the opportunity came to join the department where I already was as a professor, and with the focus on the cosmology stuff that we talked about at the beginning, but also helping to make the make the school you know, grow its space program, basically, do more instrumentation, more of our own missions in space, and particularly in small, small satellites, because that was kind of the thing I was into and knew about already.
Hamid 54:54
Right, right. And like did you end up loving Arizona as well, you know, like as a result of that? You're smiling because, what is that smile about? It's a it's a little like, No, I don't know about that.
Danny 55:13
I like my job very much, so I am here.
Hamid 55:16
Okay, you fell in love with the work that you were doing as opposed to...
Danny 55:20
I love the job. I love the people. University is is great. Yeah.
Hamid 55:25
So talk about some of the stuff that ASU is doing that is most exciting to you.
Danny 55:30
Well, ASU is huge.
Hamid 55:34
Yeah. What is there now, like, 100,000 students or something like that?
Danny 55:38
It's something like that. I mean, it depends on how you count. I think there's roughly 60,000 on the Tempe campus, which is where I'm at now. And that's students. And there's, there are a lot of things, faculty, research departments, all kinds of things. I just, you know, whenever somebody says, you know, that's happening, I didn't know about that, I think, well, there's actually probably another one of those somewhere else that you don't know. But there's, so that's, it's, it's so big as to be overwhelming, anything that you'd have to sort of start ignoring cool things, which is, you know, a good problem to have. Or, you know, just saying no to things is, you know, the, that's the limiting factor is your time to sort of do cool things. So, some of the things that are that I'm involved in that I know about that are cool. Well, first of all, I must say that the the way that the university handled the Coronavirus was very impressive. You know, universities are not always known for management. Yeah, you know, doing things that people, you know, appreciate or like, or doing things well, efficiently. You know, faculty are, you know, we're the sort of scatterbrained intellectuals, you know, losing our papers walking across campus, but the university stood up with testing, and sequencing and had, you know, fairly sensible plans in place, despite nobody knowing what was going on, I was impressed with the degree to which, you know, I can, I signed up for it, you know, and very quickly, I could sign up for a test and go get it right right away when nobody else could get tested, for example. That was really, really impressive. I, so I'm in the School of Earth and Space exploration, which is sort of like a mixture of geology and astronomy. And the reason is, because there are a lot of people interested in planetary science, which is rocks in space, basically. And also life in space, you know, astrobiology, you know, where everything from the atmospheres of potential planets to, you know, asteroids, we have one of the premiere asteroid centers, meteorite centers in the country here. I'm also involved in the Interplanetary Initiative, which is this sort of pan-university effort. So across all of the campuses, and to ask the questions, that a lot of the questions that we were asking today about how, how humans become an interplanetary species, like, everything from political questions, both science to psychology, and sociology, and art, and law, and all the other, you know, more arcane things that, you know, kind of need to be asked, and every time humans expand, they change a little bit. So what does that change, like for us. And that's a big interdisciplinary project with all kinds of different things going on from a new major, made just for that. But the two little pilot projects, which are meant to grow into new areas of research, to events and things like that, you know, we also have a lab and that's the thing that, that I've been focusing on, okay. It's kind of like a maker space for space. Space maker space. It's a place that students or outside partners, anybody really can come to collaborate with us on building satellites, instruments. Basically, anything like I'm expecting weird art projects and all kinds of them. And so, we have basically everything you need to make a satellite. We have, you know, electronics stuff, we have people that specialize in mechanical things and orbital dynamics and you know, stuff like that. We also have test facilities so you can come and put your if you want to build a CubeSat in your garage, you can bring it down onto our lab and put it on, we have a vibe table, which is basically a big speaker that shakes like it went on a rocket, which is to test it out to make sure that it doesn't fall apart. Yeah, I does usually the first time. And then we have a vacuum chamber. So you can, you know, put it in there and suck out all the air. And pretty soon we'll have a cold maker in there. So it'll get down to about 70 Kelvin, which is cold. That's as cold as you know, you can go on a reasonable budget. It's pretty dang cold. And, you know, other stuff like that. It's, you know, ASU is very creative in its use of space. The lab is in a gymnasium from the 50s. Okay, so the middle of campus...
Hamid 1:00:51
Is that the one next to the MU? So it's been repurposed. I used to play basketball there.
Danny 1:00:56
A lot of people are saying that to me. So when you played basketball there, did you use a locker room? No, it was probably gross.
Hamid 1:01:05
Yeah, I don't remember ever going into the locker room.
Danny 1:01:08
The locker room was very gross. So that's what the lab is now. We, we took we took the, we took it down to the dirt. Okay, and out to this studs, and maybe in some cases past and cleaned off 60 years of funk.
Hamid 1:01:24
So is the gym still there?
Danny 1:01:25
The gym is still there for now. In fact, it's an COVID testing facility right now. But the locker rooms, or the locker rooms are now a Space Lab.
Hamid 1:01:35
Very cool. That's, you run that essentially?
Danny 1:01:40
That's right. We have a whole class. You should, it's pretty cool. We're having a growth period. Right now we're taking on new projects and sort of partnering with, you know, companies and that sort of thing. And basically anybody that you know, if you're running a company, and there's a lot of like I said before, a lot of companies that are building new gadgets and gizmos and things for space, because it's becoming this commercial enterprise, and there's a lot of little mom and pop.
Hamid 1:02:11
Is there any kind of like competition for like, encouraging this type of work? That well?
Danny 1:02:16
Well yeah. So through NASA and a few other things you can apply for these grants. If you have as little company you can apply for grants. We don't have any competitions where we are equal opportunity, come...
Hamid 1:02:34
Would you want to put on your own competition? If you had the like, I don't know, like, would like a $10,000 competition be a thing like that would encourage people?
Danny 1:02:43
Yeah, that's that. Yeah, sure. If that's if that seems like the kind of thing that would motivate people to do cool stuff. Yes. Yeah.
Hamid 1:02:49
I mean, like, I'd be willing to support something like that for building some cool space, CubeSat that that would actually make it to space. Should we put on a competition?
Danny 1:03:02
I don't see why not. Yeah. I have to talk to my, our High Council, budgetary things. But yeah, I don't see why not. That seems like a good idea. I think it's something fun to do, what we're trying to do right now is really just get the word out. And, and sort of build up our, our network of people that might be interested in such things. That way, we kind of have a you know, we've got our got a sense which way the winds going. So for example, we're gonna have a competition, I would want to say, make it be a little bit more specific, instead of say, bring, you know, competition to do cool space stuff. I'd say something like, make a you know, a lunar rover that can fit inside a shoe box or something.
Hamid 1:03:43
That's what I'm talking about.
Danny 1:03:44
It couldn't last more than a day.
Hamid 1:03:45
Or a much better version of the Mars helicopter.
Danny 1:03:52
I mean, like, I don't think you could do better than...
Hamid 1:03:56
The atmosphere is a problem. On the moon, you have no atmosphere. So maybe...
Danny 1:04:00
Yeah, helicopters aren't going to fly on the moon.
Hamid 1:04:03
you know, maybe a fast RC.
Danny 1:04:05
I, you know, there are actually other competitions that are going on right. We had a student team in over this last summer who were working on a probe into the, the on the moon there are these regions that never see sunlight. Yeah, permanently shadowed regions. And they might collect water, they're like a cold trap. They just sort of like the the, the, the element in your, in your fridge that gets covered in ice, right? And so they're building probes to go in there and those things get down to like a few Kelvin, they're long cold.
Hamid 1:04:40
Now how would you like power something like that?
Danny 1:04:43
That's a good question. They were they were talking to the sun. They were talking about just charging up a battery and just shooting it in there like a bullet and learning whatever they could until it died. You know, other people were like, you know, talking about I don't know. Nuclear power is basically the best as far as I can tell the best way to do that, but yeah, the way that's, you know, we're kind of running out of plutonium in this country. Yeah, you set up all the solar panels on the edge of other people talk about that, you know, just a long extension cord wireless power, you know, our, you know, laser laser, you can power things. So one of my other projects is, as a drone based radio calibrator. Just because we find that it's necessary to put an antenna with the transmitter above our radio telescopes. And I have just been doing this for about a decade. And so just watching drones, sort of go through their the entire cycle of, you know, from, from a decade ago to now, all kinds of nutty things, including a lot of wireless power. Drones, powered by fiber, long laser power, going to a, you know, light sensor, light absorber just like a solar panel. All kinds of stuff like that. There's a lot of weird stuff out there. Wireless RF power transmission combustor combustibles. Just use something you know, like hydrogen, right? Burn, burn it, just burn it. You know, who cares about where the products are like water? Yeah. So maybe you don't want to do that.
Hamid 1:06:29
You might have a false positive that. But no, I'm serious about the competition thing. But we can talk about the details.
Danny 1:06:35
Yeah, let's talk about it.
Hamid 1:06:36
I think that's a great idea. That would be fun.
Danny 1:06:38
We talked about things like that. Yeah, there's definitely stuff like that on the table. So I think the question is, who? And what? And I think we can we can pick things that are exciting to people, we will get people and they will be things. Yeah, I think that'd be fun.
Hamid 1:06:54
Or is there any plans to like put small, what's it called? Telescopes while like, you know, the equivalent of like, the eight inch, you know, like hobbyist telescope into space?
Danny 1:07:07
Yep. So another project we've been working on for a few years now is to make a basically a astronomical telescope out of a CubeSat, so like a CubeSat is, like I said before, it's like about the size, this one would be about the size of a box of Cheerios, the families, the family size box. You can fit about an eight centimeter aperture mirror in there. Now that's not that big. Like you could that you could get that at Walmart. But if that's that's true in the optical, the ultraviolet is basically invisible to us here on the ground, it's absorbed by the atmosphere. Except, except a little bit for New Zealand where I once I've had the worst sunburn in my life, but mostly, it's absorbed by the atmosphere, right. And so you just can't do that from the ground. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the ultraviolet, including like, a galaxies, ionizing, you know, hydrogen, but lots and lots of other stuff, including, like flares from stars. So the nearest planet to us that we know of 1000 outside our solar system, do you know what it is?
Hamid 1:08:21
It's like six light years away if I'm not mistaken, right?
Danny 1:08:24
Three or four, yeah. And it's right next door. I mean, they're talking. So there's the breakthrough starshot, which wants to shoot a probe at it and have it get there in our lifetimes. It's that close.
Hamid 1:08:37
How would it...?
Danny 1:08:38
Sorry, another thing. So the CubeSat wants, we want to, there's a lot of planets, okay, that are potentially close to us. But they're mostly orbiting basically. red dwarf stars, right? Anything about stars and like the, the dimmer they are, the more pop popular the more common they are. Like, the dimmer they are, the smaller they are. So there's more small ones. There are big ones, but are like cookie crumbles -- really common. They're everywhere. And they probably have planets. So if you're going to pick a random planet, from you know, in our galaxy, it's probably going to be orbiting this red road our red dwarf but but like four light years away is not within our lifetime time. So of getting their plane that is like, okay, but before you even get there, is it worth going? Is it worth going and it might not be because these these red, red dwarf stars flare, like our stars, like as a 10 year cycle starting up again. What does the 10 year flare cycle where every five years there's a peak every 10 years there's a peak cycle must be five years. Anyway, there's a peak. And at that during when it's most active, you get a flare like a big flare that we you know, might cause power outage or something here on Earth. They have an impact on us. We way out here. Eight minutes away, eight light minutes away from our star. They happen once a year, once a year, once every two years around red dwarfs all for us. It happens once a year. They happen every day. Okay, wow, all the time. And where is the habitable zone for a red dwarf star? Way too close. It's, you know, it's a different coalfire if you got to get really close to the habitable, and you're probably going to be tidally locked at that distance. So you're close to this thing. And it's just poppin, it's just popping with a UV and charged particles are just, we don't know why this happens. We don't, we just, is observed to it's observed to be true. Right? But also, that's about like, what I just told you, it happens a lot is kind of all we know. It we don't know a lot. I was how I read telescopes would be able to tell me the UV tell us, they got a flare in the in the optical looks like a loop. You know, it's like a bright little spot in UV. It's like it's super bright, right? So, but we don't know a whole lot because there aren't that many UV telescopes in space, and they have to be in space. You can't see it from down here. So the idea is, why don't we just put a UV telescope inside a cube set, they're really cheap. And you can throw a bunch of them up there and monitor all of these stars that have planets around them and see how often they pump and see, you know, is it is it going? Is it like really so bad that it's just going to dissolve the atmosphere of the planet or something like that. So okay, so this planet, so this planet that's, you know, the few light years away three light years away, I think it's, it's, if you were able to go at the speed of light, you could get there in three, three years. If you could go at 25% speed of light. 20% is smaller than 100%. Then you could get there in 20 years. Or 40 years or something like that. So it's not totally unfeasible. Yeah, to take a very small probe. Make it be 99.999% reflective, like a mirror, like a really, really good mirror. Okay, like the best mirror that has ever existed better than any mirror that has ever existed. very reflective light, like make it weigh a grape. Okay, two grapes maybe. And then shoot it with a terawatt laser. It's gonna accelerate it about 1000 G's. And in about seconds, two minutes would be at 20% speed of light. So basically shooting like a grape at a star. That's, you know, in that direct way.
Hamid 1:12:48
But it wouldn't have any sort of ability to, like, a communicate back with us because it is not enough.
Danny 1:12:59
No, that's not true. People have made little prototype chipsets that are, you know, the size of a postage stamp.
Hamid 1:13:07
Don't you need, like, instrumentation to like antennas and things?
Danny 1:13:12
That thing on your wrist? You have something that is literally, you know, weighs a few grapes.
Hamid 1:13:18
But it barely can communicate 20 feet away?
Danny 1:13:20
How is it that you bought that? You know, at a store? If we spent, I bet if we spent a half a billion dollars, we could make one that works a little better than that, right? Yeah, Apple spent a couple billion dollars to make this thing they did. But they were gonna make a couple billion of them. So they made and they don't want them to last forever. They don't want it to work very well. They want it to sort of they want you to know technology's there to be able to make something that's super lightweight. It's definitely possible. That could communicate worth trying. And so the people are trying there's a project called Breakthrough Starshot which is, which is so this is one of the breakthrough initiatives, you may have heard of the other one Breakthrough Listen, which is about which is looking for, which is a SETI products or extraterrestrial intelligence, okay. It's mainly sponsored by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. So this sort of whole foundation now around these ideas of like, large, large capitalization for really, you know, it, you know, 20, 40 year projects that take out, you know, human lifetime to do really, yeah. And so this is starshot is one of those, it's going to take 100 years to figure out how to do this to make a terawatt laser and probe the size of a grape that you can hear from from four light years away and you know, all that sort of stuff.
Hamid 1:14:47
If you were as hell bent as Elon Musk, want to do it, right. Like, somebody is gonna come around and be like, we need to do this in like, in my lifetime.
Danny 1:14:56
That's right. And so that's what these breakthrough guys have started. They have said they are putting their money where their mouth is, and their people are working on it, people are being paid to work on this, which is a low weight. And there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff to come out of it. It's gonna who knows where it's gonna go. But they're going to they're trying to do weird things that nobody's ever tried to do before because it was silly. So I'm a big fan of silly things.
Hamid 1:15:18
And the hope is that, like, we could get it there and back and have it sort of like, survey the...
Danny 1:15:25
No, you would you would do this going pretty fast. And so it's never coming back. It's never coming. But you would you might be able to get the like data. Yeah, you would hear from it somehow. And actually, ASU is part of this, where we're handling the communications question for the initiative in a way that has been mostly just trying to get more other people to work on it. So there's, there's been a process for call for proposals to investigate different ways of doing it, and people are now in the process of starting those projects. And, you know, there's, there's gonna be a lot of interesting stuff to come out of it, I'm sure.
Hamid 1:16:05
Well, that is really cool. Yeah. I can only imagine the challenges, you know, communicating with somebody that's going at third of the speed of light, would be a fun challenge in itself. You know?
Danny 1:16:17
I mean, yeah, but I mean, think about it, we have these telescopes that are that are going to that are going to blow up when starlink what goes through them, and we, we've gotten some of the way there. And and I think, you know, there's a lot of others interesting questions that have nothing to do with this sort of thing. Like, for example, how to transmit quantum information that end up being kind of relevant, you know, like, you need to be able to, to, you know, interrogate a photon, you know, and, and stuff like that. And so, you know, when you're trying to talk to a grape, that's, that's that far away, you're going to be looking at like, I photon, that's Tuesday. I'll write that down, you know, so it's, it's gonna be, it's, I think it's going to be stuff like that, that ends up being the kind of ending who knows what kind of interesting stuff is gonna come out of it? I mean, development of this of a lot, you know, these questions have produced things like GPS, and MRIs, and stuff like that. I mean, that this is the really interesting stuff comes from, that's awesome.
Hamid 1:17:24
Yeah. Then if you weren't doing research on this stuff, what would you be doing?
Danny 1:17:29
Oh, gosh, I don't know.
Hamid 1:17:31
Did you like almost become a doctor? lawyer?
Danny 1:17:32
So I was, when I was 10 years old, I thought I wanted to go into special effects. I wanted, I would build little miniatures and blow them up. Okay, that that I would think I am the, the probably the youngest person that could possibly have gone into that career and still made a career out of it. Probably not even I would probably be, you know, begrudgingly learning animation or something or retiring early right now.
Hamid 1:18:06
But that's funny. That's, it made me think of, you'd be like working on the Mission Impossible set, and then they'd still be a space connection, because that's where Tom Cruise is going. And somehow you'd be ended, you know, like your destiny would, would be space connected in some way.
Danny 1:18:23
Yeah, I think, you know, when if you if you think big, it's pretty, it doesn't take long to get bigger than the Earth. I don't know the the there's a lot of, there's a lot of people that don't, that don't realize that they're more connected to not just a space, but to bigger things than they really are. So no, I just just keep trying to do cool things. And you never know. You asked me who knows where I'll be a decade from now doing whatever. I have no idea, but I just keep liking. Keep trying to do cool things.
Hamid 1:19:01
That's awesome. Thanks for sharing the cool things that you're working on with us.
Danny 1:19:06
Yeah. It's been a fun.
Hamid 1:19:10
Yeah. Likewise. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Hamid 1:19:13
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Danny 1:19:31
I don't have hobbies. I'm a generalist. Like I on my desk right now. I have pickety, Viktor Frankl, and Harry Anderson's book on how to cheat people.
Hamid 1:19:46
I love the best book to be like on your desk is like somebody cuz it's right there. People are checking...
Danny 1:19:49
10 bucks I can make this toothpick disappear.