Curiosity Theory

Space Is Bigger Than Your Brain Can Handle | Epic Spaceman

• Dr. Dakotah Tyler & Justin Shaifer • Season 1 • Episode 59

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Dr. Dakotah Tyler and Justin Shaifer sit down with Toby from Epic Spaceman, the YouTube creator known for using cinematic animations to make the scale of the universe easier to understand.

They talk about cosmic scale, visual storytelling, interstellar travel, whether future humans would still be human, what telescopes actually see when we look at stars, Betelgeuse going supernova, why UFOs are probably not alien spacecraft, and where microbial life might exist in our own solar system.

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Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler and Justin Shaifer

Stay curious.

SPEAKER_00

The galaxy is ridiculously huge and stars are incomprehensibly far apart.

SPEAKER_02

If you shrink down the sun to the size of a softball and you were in Los Angeles, where would the closest star be to the sun? It's gonna be a while away. The closest star would be in Chicago. And it just like gives you an idea of how vast and empty space is.

SPEAKER_00

I don't think humans will ever leave the solar system. By the time we would be able to do interstellar travel, I don't think you'd be able to call us humans anymore. We would be completely technological. We never actually see stars. When we look at the night sky, we're looking at points of light from those stars. We're gonna collide with Andromeda at some point in the distant future, and no star will crash into each other because the stars are so far apart.

SPEAKER_04

When you say you've been able to fully resolve 10 stars, what does that mean exactly? What's going on, everybody? Justin Schaefer, also known as Mr. Fascinate, one half of Curiosity Theory, joined here with Dr.

SPEAKER_02

Dakota Tyler, astrophysicist and science communicator. We have a super special guest today, a fellow content creator, Toby from Epic Spaceman, the YouTube channel, does all of these really cool animations of scale differences in the universe. You know, we hear about there being billions of planets or black holes that are millions of times the mass of the sun. And over at Epic Spaceman, Toby like visualizes these things so you can get a sense of just how immense and vast the universe is. So a pleasure to have you on, Toby.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, and we are gonna be talking about precisely those things today, in addition to arguments about uh whether or not there's gonna be sustainable life on the moon, uh, whether or not there's life in our solar system. Sustainable life on our moon? No, on moons. On the moons and satellites in general, uh and many, many, many more nerdy things. Uh, we're gonna enjoy this conversation. We're both huge fans of Toby's work. So make sure you tune in right now. So, Toby, we were talking before about some of the incredible projects that you've worked on. We were just having a conversation the other day about falling through the atmosphere of Jupiter and how basically just a super thick, dense atmosphere. I kind of understood that okay in conversation, but I feel like the best way that I was able to comprehend that was seeing some of your 3D animated concepts where you kind of simulate these what-if questions in such a spectacular way. Uh, I I think the work that you do is absolutely fake. But explain that. Explain it to the audience. Yeah. I mean, um, and you know, obviously, Toby, I'd love for you to chime in and clarify and correct me on some of these things, but uh, you know, you have this character, Epic Spaceman, and what Epic Spaceman does is uh simulates epic things in space. So you know, you go on all kinds of yeah, I know it's it's crazy, really counterintuitive. And so you go on all these cosmic adventures uh and you help people understand what it might be like to fall through the atmosphere of Jupiter or to be uh sucked in by a black hole, you know, like spaghettification, these kinds of uh concepts you use 3D computer technology, uh Blender, I believe, to help people understand. And it's a it's an incredible creative artistic process. I know it's gotta take a ton of time. Um, but where where did I where did I where did I get that wrong?

SPEAKER_02

Wait, what happens if you fall into Jupiter? Like that's what the I don't I don't know that one, actually.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, uh I haven't done one on Jupiter, actually. But I've I've done some back hole stuff. Um but yeah, all the sort of ideas uh that I kind of try and represent in 3D are just interesting questions I have about the world or interesting things that I've heard that I kind of want to understand a little bit better. And mainly I want to visualize something that I've sort of seen the numbers for. So, you know, I might I might have heard how many uh solar masses a black hole is, but for me, you know, millions or billions of solar masses, it doesn't like mean anything to me really. Um but if if I put millions of suns in New York and collapse them all into a black hole, then I can kind of get to grips with you know how many that actually is, if I can see them all, or I turn planets into marbles or galaxies into cereal and fill them in swimming pools. I can kind of start to grips, start to get to grips with some of the sort of crazy scale and and numbers and just stuff I've seen in science that is hard to visualize in our heads if you don't kind of bring it into our world. And so yeah, I usually start off with something sort of simple like a question or or a topic that you know lots of people know about and have heard about before, but I want to kind of see it and kind of hold it and feel it in my hands myself. And I came with it.

SPEAKER_02

So the example of uh the sun in New York is good, right? Because like people, a lot of people have been to New York, or in general, a lot of people have an idea of like how big a city is. Or you're um the the one where you filled up was it uh 40, it was a bit tens of billions, 40 billion planets um inside of a giant like Olympic swimming pool.

SPEAKER_00

Oh yeah, I yeah, I did um I did planets in the Coliseum in Rome. Um Planets in the Coliseum with marbles, and then I did uh cereal in swimming pools. I just like pouring small things into other things, I guess. Right.

SPEAKER_02

But that's a great way to to show it though, because people know how big a marble is, right? So you know if there's if there's 10 billion or a hundred billion or a trillion planets, it's like not really clear uh mentally what that looks like, right? It's just an uncountable number, you know. Like if you had you wouldn't know if you if you if you if you fit if you did that, if like if somebody watched the end of that and saw the full 40 billion and were to guess the number, there's like you would probably get guesses in the range from millions to trillions or quadrillions or something like that. We're just so bad at uh uh dealing with those numbers that are larger than what we experience on like a day-to-day basis. And so yeah, it's super cool how you make your videos and try to come up with ways where people can relate whatever it is that we're talking about in scale to something that we can actually attach to, like something that we have experience with. Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I I very much kind of resonate with with that myself. And quite often when I've I've read something in a in a science book, in a sort of popular science book um that's explaining something, it's usually the the visual metaphors are the things that give me those huge aha moments, you know. Um is it aha moments?

SPEAKER_04

I don't think that's you nailed it. Absolutely aha moments. We call it aha fever. We call it aha fever here in the States. Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_00

Is that what is that what he says um when he jumped out of the bath? Eureka type moments, that's it. Eureka.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I I I I kind of need to see something myself. I I'm not really interested in how far away the moon is in kilometers. Like that number is even though it's not a ridiculously huge number, it it doesn't really tell me anything. But if you hold like if you hold an orange in one hand and a grape in the other and just stretch out your arms, and so you can that's you know, that's roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon. And that means way more to me than knowing how many kilometers it is, you know. I feel like sometimes we we kind of teach science like you're trying to answer a quiz, you know, or like in the UK it'd be a pub quiz, like or you know, just trying to pass a test. Like it doesn't, you know, the in interesting stuff is being able to actually kind of comprehend it rather than know it, you know. Yeah. To actually sort of have uh deal with stuff.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I have another one of these sort of shrinking scale uh fact factoids?

SPEAKER_04

No, factoids are not facts.

SPEAKER_02

Factoids are technically not facts, yeah. So little fact, fun fact. Uh is if you shrink down the like the sun is so enormous, if you were to shrink down the sun to the size of like a softball, you know, basically something that could fit in your hand, yeah, and you were in Los Angeles, which is where I live, so southwestern corner of the United States, where would if you if you shrunk everything, you know, in scale proportionally in the universe, where would the closest star be to the sun? Do you have uh just like any guesses? You may maybe you know. Actually, it's hard to use because I'm using the United States, so maybe you would know uh like a different part of the world in Europe or something like that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so so pretty much like the location of Earth is almost irrelevant in that kind of like scale scenario. So uh because it's so close to the sun compared to how close the sun is to the next softball. So yeah, if it's a softball, yeah, it's gonna it's gonna be a while away.

SPEAKER_02

Um so the closest star would be basically in Chicago, so like clear across the United States, if stars were the size of uh softballs, which is crazy to think about because there's almost nothing else in between them. And it just like gives you an idea of how vast and empty space is. Like what are the what are the chances of those two softballs running into each other? It's basically zero, it's not exactly zero, but it's very, very close. Right.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and so like the yeah, the the the galaxy is is ridiculously huge, and stars are incomprehensibly sort of far apart.

SPEAKER_04

We we kind of it's it's it's interesting, just really quick note on that. Uh, one of the more fascinating things that we talked about with the distance of stars from each other, you know, the relative distance of the stars, is that closer to the core, like near the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxies, there's a lot higher like interstellar traffic, right? There's just like a higher concentration of stars in a certain area.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, there's a higher density towards the center of the galaxy, right?

SPEAKER_04

Like substantially so to the point where stars could be like travelable distances apart, like in our lifetime if we were theoretically in one of these.

SPEAKER_02

Definitely not in our lifetime.

SPEAKER_04

Not in our lifetime. No, no, no. With the light speed travel technology that we have today. We don't have light speed travel technology with the I'm saying the at the fraction of light speed that we can travel at today. That's what I meant.

SPEAKER_02

Uh the close, nah, because like the close distances, we still wouldn't be able to do it. Uh, like a close distance towards the center of the galaxy, um, I guess just for the for the audience, what the example that I just gave of these stars that the size of softballs are the distance essentially one side of the US to the other, um, is applicable at our distance from the center of the galaxy. So we're like, you know, if you were to think of a galaxy as a a busy city, the downtown is the center where there's a supermassive black hole. Then there's like stuff out in the sticks where people in the rural that are super rural, and then there's like an area in between that's kind of like the suburbs where a lot of people live there, but they're not stacked right on top of each other like a city, but they're also not spread apart like far in the country. And we kind of live in that like suburb area. And in the suburbs of the galaxy, um, you know, it may uh uh the average distance is like four light years to get to the next star. But if you get much closer, then that that goes down to like less than a light year, like maybe half a light year, or maybe even like 0.1 or 0.2 light years. So substantially closer, but still way farther than we could travel, like with our technology. Right. You know, it's still like thousands of years sort of thing. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah. My my I don't know if this is um a popular opinion or not, but I've kind of the more I sort of think about it, the more I feel like, and I I don't want this to sound like a sort of depressing thing to say, but um, I don't think humans will ever leave the solar system. Um I don't it like interstellar travel is by the time we would be able to do interstellar travel, I don't think you'd be able to call us humans anymore. I think you know, we'd be some sort of you know combination of you know brain and technology or something like that, or we we would be completely technological, we wouldn't I don't think you could call that a human anymore. We would call ourselves something else. And so I I don't think because it would take you know thousands of years to get to just the next planet, and um I don't know why we do that. We'd just send probes, you know?

SPEAKER_04

We'd just send like Voyager one or Voyager one or Voyager 2, you know. But Toby, I think that that begs an interesting question, and I'm curious of your take on this. You know, you think about this idea of a car, and it's like, okay, you take off the doors of a car, it's still a car. You take off the the trunk and the hood and all that, it's still a car, right? Maybe you take out the engine, you may it's debatable whether or not it's still a car. At what point are we no longer human? You know, like what parts of us could we take away and still consider ourselves human? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's a it's a good question. Yeah, I I I don't know. Uh I think we'd probably adjust the rules as we go along slightly. I think uh I think AI, to an extent, for me at least, is starting to make me kind of question what humanity is. And I feel like, you know, we used to have maybe we still do, we have the Turing test, which is supposed to tell us whether something is, you know, alive or not. But I I didn't know. It was supposed to, right? I don't think uh I I don't think we can kind of use that anymore because I'm there's probably models that can sort of pass it definitely quite easily now. Yeah, sure. I think they passed that a while ago, actually.

SPEAKER_04

I think it was maybe a don't quote me on this. I think it was a couple years ago that the model started passing the Turing test. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Uh there's I mean, there are some people that I talk to that I'm not sure of whether or not they're like bots. And so and I'm like, Chat GBT seems like more of a person than you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I'm with you on that as well. Yeah, it's it's it's uh it's a tricky one. It it's you know, obviously a sliding scale, and there's so many things that go into what makes us sort of human and conscious. And um Yeah. Yeah, I I think you could you could reproduce a human electronically in the in the future. And would that be a human? I don't know. If it if it recreated exactly what the neurons were doing, I don't see why not. I don't see why you couldn't call it, but you probably wouldn't call it human anymore. You'd call it the you know, there'd be some other name for it.

SPEAKER_04

Like a humanoid. That's kind of just another type of humanoid.

SPEAKER_02

But they wouldn't call themselves that though. Guarantee it.

SPEAKER_04

Humanoids wouldn't call themselves humanoids?

SPEAKER_02

Nah.

SPEAKER_04

Huh.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you're already in the name implied in the name is something that's not a human, right?

SPEAKER_04

So that's it feels kind of accurate. Like a humanoid.

SPEAKER_02

Why would they call but they wouldn't call themselves that though? You're calling them that. Maybe you think that would be like a which is probably like racist isn't the word, but it's something.

SPEAKER_04

Like that is that's like it's like calling me stupid. Like calling me like you think I'm like a human? Like that's like Oh, you think that they wouldn't want to be called humans? Like, yeah, because maybe it's like beneath them to be humanoid. To be related to humans.

SPEAKER_02

I would say that we're humanoids right now. Uh, the vast majority of processing uh of information, I think that we all do happens externally. It happens on computers, uh, you know, it happens on our phones. I navigate essentially solely using my phone, which is, you know, communicating with with these machines that are orbiting around the earth, right? Effectively, I am, you know, that thing is inside of my head, right? Like I'm I am leveraging this incredible technology that's like taking into account general relativity and special relativity because they are they're orbiting so fast that uh and they're telling and I'm just following the directions that it's giving me. And it's like that's that's not very human. You know, our ancestors would like navigate with the night sky, right? Using their own two eyes and their own little, you know, Medulla ablangata, I don't know what the I don't know what part of the brain helps navigate. But I would say that we're already kind of, and you you pointed this out uh earlier, Toby, it's like it's a spectrum, right? It's like there may not be like this discrete thing where it's like we use more and more and more technology, and then if one day we just start putting like the chips inside of our head, then it's like, well, what are you now? Yeah, and yeah, like where do you draw that line?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think as as like interfaces um gets you know better with our brains that we will start to become slightly Android, you know, we'll slight slightly fuse with technology. And you know, I mean we're s as you sort of point out, we're so close already with just a phone in your hand looking at it and and that being connected to everything. And it's just the interface between that machine and your brain is going through your eyes, but like at what and you know, we listen to things as well. So at what point I guess when it's directly interfacing with your brain, then it's then it's you're kind of more than human there, maybe, but I doubt we would put that label on when we create an interface where you can say move a mouse cursor with your brain. You know, I don't think people would start calling people androids. I think it will just be a slow change over time, and at some point we will just kind of accept that we are sort of connected to our technology. I I mean that would be kind of my guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you know, a cool you mentioned that by the time, if ever, we could do interstellar travel, we would not be, you know, that's how we kind of got on this conversation. We wouldn't necessarily be human. And it's like one of the other things, like one of the reasons why I think that makes sense is if it's if a consciousness was digitalized, or you you know, if you if you could create it like a digital human um or some electronic version, you could make it much smaller. You like uh you would like reduce the amount of it it like doesn't need to eat food, right? It needs to be powered somehow, but not by like corn and bread and cheese and these sorts of things. Yeah. So you could imagine, you know, having these like little microchips that were like versions of consciousness, which is interesting to think about, and putting that on a ship that's very low mass, like a ship that's not that heavy, and then you can get it going faster with less fuel.

SPEAKER_04

With like a light sail or something like that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, light sail, a bit a huge light sail that's super, super thin, that's like as thick as a layer of carbon or something, and then yeah, use photons from a star to propel you, and then you could like shrink that time, right? And that's something that you wouldn't be able to do with biological people that need to have um, you know, would have to live for like hundreds or thousands of years. I think that's kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_00

It makes it to me, it makes no sense to make kind of like generational ships that because the whole point of traveling fast, like as you're pointing out, is you know, the bigger the mass, the more energy you need to move it. And so you want to make things as small as possible that just have the ability to kind of understand their surroundings and you know, take readings, you know, probes, the smallest probe you can make, and you just fire as many of them out as you can and you just wait, you wait thousands of years probably for your for your answers.

SPEAKER_04

Um but yeah, I mean that's maybe start if you have embryos and a little bit of food.

SPEAKER_00

Like why would you be trying to keep people alive? And like when you actually think about what these ships would be, you know, if you make this sort of capsule that's as small as possible somehow, but you can have lots of people in there surviving many years, or somehow you've extended the human life so they can survive a hundred thousand years or something and not go completely insane and you know massacre everyone or you know whatever would happen with a human consciousness being able to like live for that long. Um and like what would you do when you got there to your destination? You'd go into orbit say around one of the planets. And then all of your information would be coming from cameras and you know probes anyway. So like what are you going to be doing looking out the window like it doesn't make any sense. And then you know looking out of a small window all of the useful information will be coming from you know robots effectively anyway robots and instruments and things like that. So you're not adding anything by being there. And I'm sure I'm sure there will be some like you know humanity will have some people going to extreme places in our solar system and things like that. I think it's cool to kind of push the boundaries and and kind of get people off the planet and in other places but going to the next star is just such a big difference there's such a big difference between that and going to Mars or something like that. It's it's and Mars itself is so ridiculously far away. I mean yeah it's it's so so crazy. I did a video where I made the galaxy the size of the continental US and on that scale the sun is I think half the size of a red blood cell roughly that's funny. And um the the orbits of the planets of the solar system are the swirls of your fingertip. So that's how big the sort of the solar system is out to Neptune. And the next star is I think something like a hundred meters away. So you know it's like fingertips a hundred meters away and we're just trying to get from I'm trying to think I I think Mars is probably on the same fingertip ridge as us as I recall. So we're just trying to get like a third of the way across one fingertip ridge and that is ridiculously hard. So the idea of going across a full like football pitch is so bonkers and just the time required to do it is yeah crazy. And just why would you do it?

SPEAKER_02

Like just why don't you do it just is one of the most for me like glaringly obvious explanations for why UFOs whether or not we can explain exactly what they are are almost certainly not aliens that came from the other side of the galaxy or from some other star system. It's just the reason that you said like you have to travel a distance that is incomprehensible right the you know the idea that if a galaxy was the size of a the US which is huge um the a star is the size of a blood cell like this is crazy. And the blood cells themselves are so far apart that they never come into contact with each other. They never will a hundred meters away that's um yeah yeah so it's like it just doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_00

I remember my uh physics teacher telling me this is you know 30 years ago but uh and I don't know if it's accurate but I I wouldn't be surprised if it is um that we are we're gonna collide with uh Andromeda at some point in the distant future and no star will crash into each other you know when you collide two galaxies together because the stars are so far apart that the odds of stars you know you know colliding with each other is is you know just not going to happen even with that huge number of stars. And we just we don't kind of think that because when we when we look at a galaxy we see all these points of light and it seems like they're all kind of next to each other but you know you're seeing light's kind of deceptive you're seeing pixels you're not seeing the sort of light source you know you're seeing a point light source and it just fills up a pixel of your you know image your JPEG or if you could stand outside the un stand outside the galaxy and look at the Milky Way you it would look like lots of stars but you'd never be able to see an actual star. Well we we never actually see stars is something I'll I'll do in another video but obviously apart from the sun you know when we look at the night sky we're not technically we're not looking at stars we're looking at points of light from those stars. And so we the the retina in our eyes the the sort of light cells effectively like the pixels in a camera um they're they're slightly hexagonal so we actually see stars as just like hexagons of light from a star you know and they might be double stars they quite often are and we just see this one hexagon and and we kind of think oh we're looking at these stars and that's why they kind of feel close and they feel close to each other but they're so far apart and they're so far away. And even with our most powerful telescopes we've only we've only kind of imaged I think maybe 10 stars something like that.

SPEAKER_02

There's a couple that we've been able to resolve but in general everything exactly what you said is we call it a point source. Yeah literally like an infinitesimal point. On a detector we would say that that's a pixel but that's just because the star is smaller than the pixel and the pixel is the smallest thing that we can resolve.

SPEAKER_04

So maybe this is something that I don't understand. When you say you've been able to fully resolve 10 stars what does that mean exactly?

SPEAKER_02

So uh resolution is like when we think when we talk this is actually a really good point because we use this term like high resolution and people think of oh it's clear right like a video that has higher resolution um like 4K is higher resolution than 1080. Well what does that actually mean if you think about it right if you were to zoom in all the way on something that was 1080 and something that was um let's just say 2K like twice right if you were to zoom in as as small as you could go you would basically see that there was kind of like two pixels for every one to the 1080. It's not a perfect conversion but and then 4K is more right and so what it means is that you're able to kind of get more information um on a smaller and smaller thing and that and that is a resolution like your resolution element. It's like how many of these pieces of small space can we actually resolve see so something that's really high resolution is able to resolve a bunch of points on the thing. So a point source star, no matter how much you zoom in you there's nothing you haven't resolved anything beyond like this this single pixel. But if you can resolve a star then maybe it's like you zoom way in and you actually have like 10 pixels that are showing the star and you can see that there's a difference between the left side of the star and the right side like you can actually like resolve the surface of it. So you can tell a lot more of some about something like that, right? Because there's more information whereas just that point source everything about the star is on that one pixel. It's like it's a mishmash of what the star is doing at the top and the bottom and the left and the right and if it's spinning you just kind of see like the net effect.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah and I I think I think that that makes so much sense to me having messed around with these 3D space animator tools that you you might have messed around with too Toby I know you use Blender for a lot of your stuff um we actually when we first started working together we used uh not we used our universe sandbox to simulate a lot of things and then space engine also yeah and uh in space engine uh one of the things that I feel like helps me conceptualize this point source idea was looking at what most systems are in our galaxy these uh binary star systems you zoom out far and like you see the two stars when you're up close and you zoom out far enough and then it just looks like one source.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah yeah it's a great example and it's like to your point Toby the reason that we look up and you may see a bright star and it may actually be two uh I guess there's a couple reasons. One is that a lot of stars are in these binary systems. And two, you're getting twice as much light. So that little pixel basically or this small like hexagon as you're talking about that our eyes perceive is going to be kind of like twice as bright. But from our vantage we're so far away that they're basically right on top of each other. Like our eyes can't resolve them. And then even the best telescopes can only resolve ones that are very very very close to us and very very very large. And yeah it's maybe 10 or something like that.

SPEAKER_00

Very interesting yeah I think um I remember looking into it a while ago and I think it's right I'm not 100% sure but I think Beetlejuice was the first one or Betelgeys or however you want to put it Beetle juice that was the first one that was resolved because it's so big.

SPEAKER_04

Because it's so close and relatively close.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah exactly close enormously close and and really big and I think it was Hubble that first I think it was Hubble that first imaged it. And so that was the first time we could confirm that other stars are also spheres. I mean we always didn't know right maybe we were in a yeah we'd had no idea that it could be hexagon could be all hexagons yeah we didn't know gravitationally bound hexagons I I don't know when that was that's I don't know 2010 or something like that when we first imaged um beetle juice but yeah that was a before then for all we knew all stars could have been the shape of bananas you know we wouldn't have known they would look well we could have proved in a court of law yeah yeah okay yeah like technically we we didn't uh officially know until we took a picture of another one other than the sun which it's just so wild to me you know that how many people know that we've only imaged like 10 stars or something yeah you know how how many people in the world have seen a picture of a star that wasn't the sun like I'd like the percentages but I mean have you seen have you seen a picture of Betelgeuse like a an image of it like I don't know if I've seen that picture. I've only seen the ones in simulations where Beetlejuice looks like this huge red giant end up I mean it's it's just a fuzzy circle you know basically that's not our best image but Hubble was the first telescope that had the resolution to be able to see it see it as more than one effectively.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah part of the reason that it's so large is because it's about to blow up soon. Stars as they age they expand they get larger and larger and they get brighter and for super for massive stars extremely massive stars which Beetlejuice is uh they get even larger and then they go supernova and so you know part of the reason we're able to see this is because it's extremely large because it's about to die soon. And I say soon could be literally tonight. One of the first things I do when I go outside at night every night I go outside is I find Betelgeuse and I just check to make sure it's not about to go supernova like right then. Because I feel like it's it's bound to happen right and I feel like I deserve to see it when it happens like that would be cool.

SPEAKER_00

I love the idea that uh that it it actually exploded a hundred years ago and it's still the other thing right is that it's uh still just looking the same I want to say 400 light years away maybe we could look that up for check that I got you right and so yeah 600 and something no maybe that's we get 640 to 725 light years ago okay 600 so technically it could have it could tonight when I look up it might explode and we won't see it on earth for another 600 700 years.

SPEAKER_02

But if it exploded like 650 years ago to this day then we might see it tonight because there's that time delay.

SPEAKER_00

I remember looking into it and um it would be about as bright as um half the moon's brightness something like that. It would be kind of moon style brightness and it would be very clear in the day as as well as at night.

SPEAKER_04

Roughly how long would the because that would be a supernova right like roughly how long would that core collab supernova yeah right like how long would we be able to see this bright object in the sky a few days a few weeks maybe something like that.

SPEAKER_02

It would just tail off fade out over the course of some weeks yeah but you would be able to see it in the day time for yeah at least a few days and at night it would probably be visible for a bit longer.

SPEAKER_04

It'd be crazy it'd be casting shadows and stuff it would just be so wild to see you know would that be like one of the highest resolution supernova events that we've ever captured because I know we have a few that we've we've captured we've imaged right yeah so basically how it happens now it's rare for stars to go supernova um even as rare as it is you know basically happens every day probably like in somewhere in the universe probably every couple seconds um but you you know it's random where that happens and when we study them now there because there are people who study supernovas.

SPEAKER_02

I study exoplanets but there's people who specifically study these supernovas and what they do is they have to apply for um what's called takeover time. So you know there are these hundred million dollar telescopes that can do like the you know top notch research in any given field. But you can't plan to observe a supernova because you know you don't know when it's going to happen. When they do happen however you can like use your takeover time. And that happened to me when I was observing once some planets that I was looking at in my research there happened to be a supernova um that was like you know a couple hundred million light years away or something and it it exploded you know it blew up a couple hundred million years ago I guess and then the light arrived when I was on the telescope uh but it was cool though because I got to see this supernova and um yeah most of the time they're extremely far away I think that there was a nearby supernova that created the Crab Nebula and you can look we can show a picture of the Crab Nebula is pretty cool. And we know that there are Chinese astronomers in I want to say the 1300s that observed and recorded a bright new star that was like visible during the day for a couple weeks and we think that that was the supernova that created the Crab Nebula. So the last time that this happened nearby Earth was in the 1300s right so they didn't get to you know collect much data on it um and yeah it would be for people who study supernova you know I this would be like I want to say once in a lifetime but apparently this is like once in a millennia like a once in a millennia type of thing.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. But like what are the odds that because you you were on the telescope while you know you were the first person to see this supernova or no?

SPEAKER_02

Well I guess me and the well the people knew about it.

SPEAKER_04

Right.

SPEAKER_02

Oh okay okay just how they knew to look gotcha okay I was gonna say what are the odds that you would catch too in one lifetime yeah oh well it's not it wasn't in our our galaxy right this is like in a distant galaxy is also crazy so the odds that you'll catch you still a long time ago in a galaxy far far away exactly precisely precisely that seeing multiple nearby with your naked eye I would say is something that would be extremely unlikely. Yeah but seeing other galaxies is pretty easy.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah Beetlejuice is kind of overdue to explode but still might not be for another 50,000 years or something. So uh it's kind of we're kind of in the window and hopefully it'll go off soon but uh yeah we're not really sure. We I think we're still sort of understanding you know the sort of telltale signs of when they're about to pop. Yeah yeah yeah so it's a great case case study for this there's really good uh there's a there's a cool fact um that if you can detect the neutrinos from the supernova um then you can potentially get a head start and know where to point your telescope before it kind of fully goes off because neutrinos despite having mass you travel at like 99.99% of the speed of light or something and they race out of the suit supernova or or perhaps some supernova supernovae um they race out you know straight away as it's going off but the light from the explosion is kind of trapped a bit more and so it doesn't travel at the speed of light as in it doesn't travel at sea um and so you can get like if you can detect the neutrinos from a supernova you can point your telescope at exactly where they came from and see the sort of supernova before it kind of goes off um yeah which it's wild you know yeah and we'll have the opportunity to put that to the test I mean like you said astronomers may need to be uh monitoring neutrinos from the direction of Betelgeuse for the next 5000 years nonstop but uh I feel like that'd be that'd be worth it eventually seems like a good use of our tax dollars maybe so yeah so Toby uh is there anything that you're working on right now that you're particularly excited about I mean I feel like the when we talked before you described this process of having lots of stuff that you know you want to make videos about but the videos themselves taking a long time to make so just a bunch of stuff that you have like kind of in the library of potential the potential videos. I'm I've just said I've just started working on one um it's it's actually more to do with the oceans um I kind of wanted to do like a a slightly different one and um and then I'm gonna do one I think that's kind of to do with the night sky and and the the why why it moves the way it moves why the stars move the way they do by kind of kind of visualizing the planet and uh I just uh I don't want to annoy the flat earthers but uh it's very difficult to talk about the planet without annoying flat earthers um but yeah and so I've got a couple of kind of slightly slightly why don't you want to annoy the flat earthers?

SPEAKER_02

What's wrong with annoying them?

SPEAKER_00

I just I don't have the energy actually you know to be fair I I don't in terms of like my YouTube comments my I'm you know I'm very lucky that my YouTube comments are like super supportive and and and really nice in general but um the only time there are a little sometimes they can be a bit wacky when when they're flat earthers but I I tend to actually I tend not to mind the flat earthers too much because it's like you can't have an argument with someone that's that's so sort of that's not coming from a position of any logic whatsoever type thing. It's not it's it doesn't really make sense to kind of have that argument. The people that annoy me are people that say I've got things wrong when I haven't got things wrong. Those the those the ones that I'm like replying to in the comments saying no actually I got it right. But I don't I I just don't I don't reply to to the the really wacky stuff. I sort of I picture them as you know when you when you go to a busy part of a city and there's you know people holding signs saying the end of the world or you know some you know megaphone shouting some craziness. You know I've never stopped to have a conversation with them for good reason. You know you're not going to change their minds. That's kind of generally been my take on it. I don't have enough energy to try and to try and change people's minds. I've I've tried a lot of that in the past just on having Facebook arguments with people about politics and stuff like that. And you know I've never I've never changed anyone's mind on anything you know you can't reason someone into a position they didn't reason themselves into reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into and I just lost too much of my life doing that and my channel I sort of I just tried to focus on putting out good information that's helpful and not in not getting into the weeds about arguing with people.

SPEAKER_02

But yeah that's kind of my take on sort of flat earthers I mean flat earthers that's uh I don't know where you go with that really yeah yeah it's we you know it it's it's weird because it's like yeah like some nights I literally am looking at I'm like with my own eyes looking at something happening in another galaxy. Uh and there are people who think who genuinely think that space is fake that it's a satanic lie from the government to like get people not to believe in the Bible or something.

SPEAKER_04

And all the stars are just coin shaped. I guess every everything's flat right no they don't believe in stars they don't believe

SPEAKER_02

In they don't believe in space. They don't believe in space. So it's all a flat earther thinks that there's a dome over the earth and that like everything else is like that these aren't like that. Wouldn't make it flat though. There's a dome over it. The dome is a half circle. But the the thing is the plane is flat.

SPEAKER_04

So it's a flat plane with a dome on top of it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, it's like a semisphere. They believe in a hemisphere. Yeah, actually. So the hemisphere.

SPEAKER_02

The earth part itself they believe is flat, though.

SPEAKER_04

Right. But the atmosphere is dome-shaped.

SPEAKER_02

I guess the atmosphere would have to be dome-shaped if it filled in the underneath the glass.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, but yeah, I I guess, yeah, we I guess we're trying to make a glass, by the way, was which didn't like always exist, right?

SPEAKER_02

Like we figured out how to make glass. I guess if you actually, I guess glass does exist, you know. Like if lightning strikes sand and heats it up enough, it'll kind of like melt into glass and form in glass. Um but that's some pristine glass. Because when we looked with our telescopes, it doesn't appear that we're looking through anything. So, you know, in space now we have this like pristine glass that's like the the most pristine glass that you could possibly imagine. It's basically like it's not even there.

SPEAKER_00

Look at look at you trying to bring logic of the mechanical properties of glass to a conversation about a hemisphere over a flat earth.

SPEAKER_04

Like yeah, but maybe maybe we'll we'll look forward to an epic spaceman video where you just zoom out and then you just see a flat earth. And that's like the video. It's like a two, it's like a one, like a 30-second video. You're like, all right, guys, we're gonna zoom out today and just see how big Earth is, and then you just zoom out and it's just flat.

SPEAKER_00

I I mean, yeah, uh I I have a a kind of a weird, it's not really a theory, but just like I feel like we've always put pictures of of the earth as you know, our map of the earth is a flat map, and we stick it on walls in schools, and we shouldn't be so we shouldn't be so surprised that some people can't get past the fact that that's not actually what it looks like, you know, that you can't it's not a flattened earth. We just do that because it's helpful for maps and navigation and stuff, but um we shouldn't be so surprised that some people can't get over the fact that from a child from you know from when they were children, they've seen the earth as a flat map on a wall and nothing else on it.

SPEAKER_04

There's no blatantly ignore the other thing in the classroom, the globe. Globe, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Well, maybe if we printed all of our books classrooms didn't have globes, maybe.

SPEAKER_02

And uh maybe if we printed all of our books on spheres and you're like the library just had a bunch of spheres and that's how you read books, then the natural projection of a globe would be fine, right? But it's like, yeah, to get it in a book, it needs to be a like a rectangle, right? That's that's a flat plane, and the way that you it is pretty interesting. Um, if you've ever seen uh I I saw a photo that somebody took of themselves, and then they did the I think it's called the Mercator projection. I'm not sure uh which is like the map projection, yeah, which obviously you're like projecting this thing that's 3D, it's a physical 3D object onto a flat plane, and it warps everything at the top and the bottom, yeah, as well as like the edges, because you're seeing the backside of it as well, right? Like when you look at um a globe, you can kind of like see North and South America, or you can see like Asia, but you can't see both of them at this, you have to turn it to see both of them. And on the map, you see everything. So you're looking at this 3D object, and you're seeing the backside as well. So if you take a picture of you and we did that, on the at top and bottom and the edges, we would see like the back of your head.

SPEAKER_03

Hmm.

SPEAKER_02

Interesting. Yeah, and you just get a chan idea of how weird it is when you see it with a face done. Because it's not totally obvious how weird it actually is for the earth itself.

SPEAKER_00

People, um, I think it's the Makeda one that has um that has Greenland as a similar size to Africa. And um not to get into politics too much, but but I I'm a bit worried that someone might have looked at that map and thought, yeah, we should take we should take Greenland. It's it's um like the size of the bigger.

SPEAKER_02

It's possible that Donald Trump was like, oh, wait a second, who's who has the big one?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I I would not put it past it's 15, you know, Africa's like 15 times bigger or something like that, just because it's been stretched by by the map. You know, Greenland's a lot I mean it's Greenland's still big, but you know, it's not quite that big. It's not a continent big.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Not at all.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. But uh Toby, I wanted to revisit what you said about the ocean video. So I know sometimes some of the the more recent videos, like we we talked before about the video did with uh Marquez Brown Lee, where you you shrunk down to the size of uh the silicon chips that are being made in a lot of these uh you know semiconductor manufacturing companies, right? So you're kind of doing other things in epic proportions. I'm curious about where you're planning on taking this with the ocean, if if you're okay, Sharon.

SPEAKER_00

I yeah, I don't want to talk too much about it, but it will be, you know, I think most of my videos, or maybe even all of my videos, have kind of been about scale in some way. So I'll be sort of talking about sort of scale and the oceans. You know, it'd be nice for me because you know, these videos quite often are for myself just as much as other people. I want to understand these things better and I want to be able to visualize them and and see see them. All of my videos I've kind of gone in gone into them from a point of view of uh, you know, I haven't seen this before and I I'd really like to see it. I'd I'd find it really helpful myself. And so yeah, I I want to understand the earth better, you know, the the biggest stuff in it, and and in the future I'll get into, you know, life and DNA and animals and and bacteria and viruses more and things like that. I think, you know, I want my channel to be about everything in the universe and and there's so much wonder on our planet. Um but you know, I I will always be be drawn sort of beyond the planet as well. You know, most of the scale of our universe is is, you know, beyond our planet. There's there's a lot below us as well, down to the you know, down to the quantum world, which is so crazy, I can't even begin to get into that yet. But um, so I'll I'll do more down to the sort of small scale, down to the atomic scale. Uh one of my videos, I went down to the size of an atom, and I will be going uh, you know, further in the future. I've got lots of sort of half scripts and sort of ideas for sort of videos there. And then I'll also be doing, you know, stuff on stars and galaxies and the and the sort of wider universe and kind of understanding it. And I kind of wanted to do a lot of the scale stuff first before I kind of delved into things a bit more because I feel like it's hard to uh hard to talk about a galaxy if you can't sort of put it in a box in your head. And so I'm kind of addressing the sort of scale stuff first so I can then, you know, talk about the distances between stars or you know, talk about uh, I don't know, black holes a bit more or something like that.

SPEAKER_04

So uh one of the the most inspiring things to me about your creative journey is um it almost feels like the practice of the craft that you're committed to with your YouTube channel is somewhat of a lost art by many other people's standards of the type of content that they put out, right? Like the videos that you make take so long, you use Blender, which I, you know, I thought that you might have used Unreal Engine and had a little bit more help to set certain things up, but you know, from my understanding, uh although you can still download 3D models and other things on Blender, a lot of that stuff is done so manually and by hand. Uh I'm I'm imagining you encounter an immense amount of technical hurdles and difficulties and persist. You know, you kind of have this desire to make things not short, make things long and great. Um, which is, you know, and and not do it with a huge team of people, right? Which is um, again, like an art form that I certainly respect because I think it's combined with your approach to curiosity. And I I just think it's uh uh it's an interesting mentality to cultivate in in a time like this.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I don't know if I'd necessarily recommend it to other people, by the way. Um, but yeah, I I do um I do spend a few months on each one, and um I do kind of I really get into them and once I've done the script, um, you know, I actually I spend ages on the script, probably about as long as on the script as I do on the video, which is um which isn't great, but I rewrite it, I usually rewrite each script about like 10 times before I I kind of commit to it and sort of start forming myself. And yeah, I love that creative process of of writing something and it being like your thing and then and then kind of bringing it to life. I love I love the sort of art of filmmaking and cinematography, and you know, I I definitely I I wouldn't say that I'm a great filmmaker or a great f great cinematographer or a great writer, but I enjoy all of them, and so I can get hooked enough making them that I can, you know, lose hours of my day, you know, creating stuff. There's you know something so unique about creating a scene where you can do anything and and you can put the camera anywhere and you can put the the lighting anywhere and do anything that you want with it. Like Blender is so um such an incredible product and it's it's free. It's an amazing company. I think I think they're amazing. Uh and I just I I I I tend to use well, I not tend to, I've only used Blender rather than Unreal. Unreal is is getting better and better, and I might look to it a bit in the future. And if I wanted to do like a game or something like that, I I would obviously do it in something like Unreal. But um, Blender still has the edge for kind of a more cinematic look. And so it deals with reflections and refractions a bit better, sort of proper ray tracing. Uh, and it's been getting faster and faster as well. So it's I'm now at a speed where my hardware doesn't really slow me down. It's more kind of my imagination and and how I build each scene, which is probably the sort of slowest, slowest part of it. And yeah, you can, it's just so wonderful to know you can do anything. It it's it's a problem sometimes because uh when you can do anything, you've got too many options and you're overwhelmed with things that you might do and directions you might go, and you've kind of got to make these decisions. And yeah, like I'm like I say, I'm still, you know, not that not that great at VFX. Uh I wouldn't rate myself very highly there. I'm perhaps better at cinematography, and I still wouldn't rate myself that highly there either. Um, but when I sort of combine all the things that I'm good at, I I can make stuff that I'm sort of eventually happy with. But I have to redo scenes a lot, and there's a lot of a lot of me thinking, I just I hate this, I hate what this looks like right now, and I have to just keep chipping away at it. And then magically I'll I'll tweak one thing and think, oh, actually that looks really good. And and I'll I'll then be able to move on to the next scene, which I should have started like five days earlier. Um, and then at the end of it, I still, you know, I struggle to watch them back a little bit because I see all the flaws and the problems with it, but that's just that's just normal, I think, for you know yeah, that's everybody, no matter that's anybody who's ever done anything on camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's tough. It's tough. You have you have to that there's a skill to learning to let go of things, and you know, it's important for people to to know when they need to stop and move on and uh to learn still.

SPEAKER_04

Toby, like this is interesting to me because I think of this also as like a mindset thing. There's a certain patience you have to have to just keep coming back to this stuff over and over again before you release the video, right? Yeah um, and it almost feels difficult, uh, you know, at least with like the fast-moving hustler mentality that we like to cultivate here in the States, it seems difficult for a person to arrive at that mentality uh with a lot of the value systems that we have here. Why is which is why, in fact, like a lot of my favorite channels like yours, or uh Kurzgesat, you know, the in a nutshell guys, like they do a lot of really cool 2D animations. Uh their videos take an extremely long amount of time and do the research to animate all the graphics. Um, and it's just like in America, it doesn't seem like that happens as much unless it's like a Netflix film or you know, something that's less indie, like a YouTube, YouTube video.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's I think it's very difficult for a creator to kind of produce content that's uh at a comparable standard to something that a team might do for a TV show or something like that. That that like that's a hard ask for you know, some 15-year-old or something, or someone slightly older like me, um, you know, approaching a like a video to put on the internet. And and the sort of the monetization of it, I'm I'm just kind of getting to now where I'm yeah, I'm still not doing very well, but like I it I'm a bit available uh you know, I can survive just about at the moment. And it's taken a long time to get there. And you know, people people can't just put their lives on hold and spend years working on things in the hope that it takes off and they make all the right decisions. And so it's it's very difficult for you know creator to compete with something like that. And so I I get the idea of of people needing to automate everything or people making short form stuff or making this sort of hustler mentality and and stuff like that. Um I I I get all of that, it it all makes sense to me. I was just just being fortunate enough to be in a position where when I sort of first started it, um, I was still working on the side, you know. I I don't give up your day job while you're sort of working on your passion projects, you know, until you get to a point where you feel like it's it's financially reasonable to be able to kind of go all in. And when I when I started the channel, my intent was not I want to be a millionaire making these videos, you know, there was no like mon I think no yeah, monetary kind of reason for making them. I I was hoping I would get to a point where I could survive, like like I am now. Um but the reason I I wanted to make them was I I wanted to just make the best video I could ever imagine making. That was like my my stipulation. That was, you know, I wanted to pick the topic I was most interested in that other people are also interested in as well. But um something that I would be proud of if I just make five videos, two videos, I would be super proud of them. And that was me, you know, doing the best thing that I could possibly do. So for me, making something that that I only put 10% of the effort in, which is still like still a lot of work, um, you know, still a week of work or something like that, it it doesn't interest me. It wouldn't keep me going. I wouldn't be able to make something easy and short now, I don't think, because I'm kind of sucked into this world where I'm I'm making something that I think is is special, you know? And each one is like I sort of forget about all my last videos and I just go into the next project trying to make the most special video that I can about that topic. And I just don't put like a ceiling on that. I currently don't have sort of um I don't have deadlines so much. I mean when a sponsor comes in that changes slightly, but um yeah, I have I'm I'm doing something weird and I don't necessarily recommend it, but there's sort of the creators that I love as well, they they just are really passionate about what they do and they make something that they think is special and they're sort of lucky enough to find people that uh agree with them, I guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, that's powerful, man. And um, no man, I think uh yeah, I'm I'm I'm just I'm I'm super inspired by that that notion. Oh thank you that um you know, because yeah, I mean it I feel like in in a way, like it makes other people feel like maybe something that they also think is a crazy idea that's not worth their time is something that they can invest their energy into, and and you know, there will be there it will find an audience with the way that the algorithms work these days.

SPEAKER_02

Maybe but I definitely agree with you that um there is like this fulfillment. What what I what I hear from you is like a deep fulfillment from doing this thing that's very aligned with uh like your interests and your values of creating something that's very cool that is impactful for you as well. You says like this is the way that you think about things, you know. You hear about you know, supermassive black holes that have millions of times the mass of the sun. Or you hear about these micro nanochips uh y'all were talking about earlier that are that we that are being manufactured that are smaller than wavelength of light, meaning that you can't see it. Like we're creating things that are so small that literally the human eye can't see it. It doesn't make sense to think of being able to see it because a light wave is too small to interact with it in a way that you know is like obvious to us. And one way that you could uh, you know, visualize that is exactly what you do, and to be able to go in and like manually like hack uh you know this code or hack probably isn't the right word, but uh manually like recreate this thing is very, very cool. And I yeah, I like the idea hearing you talk about it and how much it means to you and how this is like something that was very important for you to start working on like on the side. Uh one of the premises behind our podcast, Curiosity Theory, is that we all that this like curiosity, the same one that you have about the universe that like led you into figuring out how could you create the you know these this pro this product that could help teach other people um you know about scale in the universe from the nanoscale to like you know the cosmological scale is something it's like a curiosity that we all have. Um it's like an instinct that lies within us all, probably stemming from our ancestors who you know were trying to figure out how to survive in the wild, literally, uh, while there were big big animals trying to eat them, and you know, there was like a scarcity of food and that sort of thing. And, you know, curiosity just paid off so much. But for a lot of people today, you know, you don't really need to be that curious about the world to survive, to like live until tomorrow, but you're not using something. You're like you have this thing inside of you that's not being activated that your DNA wants you to get curious about something. And it's very cool to see how um, you know, for you, your curiosity has like led to this very, very, very cool thing in leveraging these tools that, like you said, Blender's free. So, you know, this is a this is like a skill set that you can develop that won't, you know, cost you an arm and a leg. I mean, you need to have like, I'm sure you have a decent computer that you're working on.

SPEAKER_04

What is your setup, actually, Toby? We actually both have P well, we both have PCs, so we kind of know about that stuff too.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I've yeah, I've got PCs. Um my I've both got I've got uh fifty nineties. On two different PCs now.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, you have two separate PCs with RTX 5090s.

SPEAKER_00

I basically work on one PC which has a 5090 in. And so I mean, over the last few years, basically I've just been upgrading and upgrading. And you know what it's like when you upgrade like a graphics card and now you've got an extra graphics card and you probably should sell it. Or you've now got pieces of loads of other computers lying around and you could just make another PC. So I'm always like moving stuff from one PC to another and kind of building them. But I do now have basically two identical computers, so that uh with both with 5090s in. And so I I work on one and when I get to the point where I'm like rendering stuff and building scenes and rendering building scenes, I I can run a I I can just copy the files over like on a NAS. Um I have the the files go over there and then they kind of copy to the other one, and then I can like run a script and on the other machine and it and it renders all the files I want on that other machine so that I can kind of move on to the next scene or I can just remove it. Yeah, yeah. And actually I've I've now I've now got a third computer which has got a 4090 in. Uh wow. Because that was from that was from an old computer, and I just had enough parts to be able to assemble a third computer. Uh hardly ever use it, but when I'm really like trying to do as much rendering as possible, I can fire that one up and and just set that one going. Because some of my rendering um, you know, uh quite often I mean I I sort of render overnight basically. I I do the scene and render overnight, and so it's not slowing me down anymore, but there are times where I have had all three with my with my video because I was I was making a video with uh Marquez and I was making my own video as well. I was kind of making two videos at the same time and and I had about I think his is about 10 minutes long, mine's about 17 minutes long. So I was doing 27 minutes of full CGI. Um I don't know if it's 4K, I think I I rendered some of it in 4K, some of it in 2.7k. And yeah, that's a lot of rendering. And so uh at times I did have all three computers going. And you know, I might run one for like two days or something like that while I'm working on on the others, and yeah, it's pretty pretty hardcore. And then you find out you've made a mistake and you have to run it for another two days. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um it's called the character building experience. Makes you a better, it makes you a better person.

SPEAKER_00

Oh my god, yeah. I lost so many hours uh rendering before I learned how to do a script. I got I got AI to write the script for me, to be fair. Um and before that, I I would I would do a render that should take 12 hours or something like that, but I would leave it running and go to sleep, and I'd find out it it crashed after like an hour or something. So I'd then have to do that.

SPEAKER_02

That's a that's our research problem. That's what we do in in research. We have like have these long uh projects that we run, and then you come back and you realize that the code like choked out midway through.

SPEAKER_00

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04

So I spent respect a couple of times too. Yeah, rendering, walk away, come back, it crashed. Yeah, you got to.

SPEAKER_02

Start over something you have to um yeah. So switch up the switch up the topic a little bit. You I'm curious, you know, you talked about, you know, uh having some of the ide some ideas for different videos in the future, um, and you, you know, getting more so into into life. And I wonder if you have, is there like I I suspect that you've thought about this before, maybe you haven't. Do you have like an idea in your head of a of a potential like alien life form that you think of, maybe that you get like as an idea from sci uh some sort of sci-fi or something, but like uh an alien life form that you yourself want to like show or like have you thought about that at all? Uh yeah, I mean a direction to go there.

SPEAKER_00

Uh I did I did a video on basically the search for alien life, and I've that's the one where I filled up the the Colosseum with um planets that are in the habitable zone. Um I turned them into marbles and then basically filled the entire Colosseum with planets that Kepler sort of determined were in the habitable zone. And and I talked for a while about um alien life there and and kind of why that could because because I think you know when you I'm not a scientist and so so I'm not in a way tied to being to being really careful with stuff. I I mean I I do try and I am very careful, but I I can be a little bit looser. And so if you if you ask a a scientist, you know, how many plants out there might have alien life, they'll be really wishy-washy with you and they won't want to kind of commit to anything. And in my video, you know, I don't present any numbers as this is what's out there, but the aim of it is to really show the sort of overwhelming opportunity for life and how a lot of people will try and perhaps play down the numbers for you know planets in the habitable zone and and why those won't be feasible, you know, they're too close to red dwarfs and things like that. But but I I try to present reasons why they could also be underestimations, because a lot of life could be on moons, for instance. It's actually, you know, it's it's a reasonable, I think, um hypothesis to say that life could could be more prevalent on moons than they are on planets, because they can be they they could be, you know, that the the life like ours can perhaps be more possible on moons because they're heated in you know by tidal forces in in ways that you know planets.

SPEAKER_02

If there was absolutely, but if the if like the reason if like the red dwarf thing, right? Being close to a red dwarf, uh, you know, the moon would also be close to a red dwarf if we were talking about a planet that had a moon that was too close to a red dwarf, which they like tend to flare a lot. But I also agree with you. It's like a moon, and we see the moons in our solar system are extremely varied, so you're gonna get like this super wide distribution of possibilities.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so that that's the thing, you know, it's like it's it's all about you know how many opportunities there are. And in in my opinion, you know, life sprung up very quickly on Earth when the sort of conditions, conditions were right, which which you know when you've only got a sample size of one, you can't make any proper predictions from it. But when so much evidence is is pushing towards something else, it's reasonable to talk about it.

SPEAKER_02

And so I you know that there are so many moons, and so yeah, all the planets that are that are the moons are distinctly it there's nothing physically limiting the size of a moon, like a moon could in theory get much larger, but all the moons that we know about are actually quite small, and so none of them, with a couple exceptions, one major exception of Titan, uh Saturn's largest moon, none of them have atmospheres, right? And so you already sort of, while yeah, they have this like extremely diverse chemical composition, they lack one thing that we know for a fact, at least life on Earth needed, which was an kind of an atmosphere, not just to like, you know, animals, you know, use oxygen and um a lot of plants we use things like CO2, but you also need like a um a bit of a blanket to protect you from like the harshness of a vacuum of space. And so there's not a lot of moons that have that, especially ones that are close to the um that are like in the habitable zone, because you know you could imagine you could imagine that we we could artificially, let's just pretend that we artificially put a perfect Earth replica atmosphere uh on the moon, it would actually get baked away by the sun because the moon's gravity is not high enough to like hold it. And so I do think that that's that's I guess like a slight pushback, because I'm with you. It's like if if we're just going off of pure numbers, some of these planets have like dozens, hundreds of moons. So there may be like thousands of times more moons than planets, but there's still like some I think some challenges uh from a like a biological perspective of finding a habitable moon.

SPEAKER_00

I think um like ice moons, you know, like uh I think where the ice can protect an underground um ocean, you know, there's more water on Europa than there is on Earth.

SPEAKER_02

Which is crazy to think about.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah. Uh and so I think, you know, when you've got sort of tidally heated uh ice moons and you have just this vast variety of them in in all these different sort of I wouldn't say shapes and sizes, but you know, not actual shapes, but uh just the sort of the variety of of positions of planets and moons in all these different um ranges of stars and just the sheer numbers of them. I think yeah, I I think there's a reasonable if I had to put, you know, if you someone put a gun to my head and said, Is there life um outside of Earth in our solar system? My guess would be yes, there is my guess in our solar system, gun to your head, you're saying yes. Yeah, I would say yes.

SPEAKER_02

That there's aliens inside of our solar system right now, like microbes probably or something.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, my my yeah, I'm sure I mean all of it.

SPEAKER_02

Gun to your head, that's uh so it's over 50% for you.

SPEAKER_00

For for me, it's over 50. I think um my the of it all of this conversation is about microbial. This is not about advanced civilization. Um, you know, something similar to microbial. Um I think you know, something like Europa Enceladus. I think getting inside that, I mean, there's there's even when I was you know making the video, I was, you know, I found out crazy stuff. I I it's it's possible there's fossils on on Mars. I think that's a sort of reasonable guess. Uh it's possible there's life in Venus's atmosphere. Um the sort of evidence on that isn't isn't that great, but the the chemical composition and the temperatures in some parts of Venus's atmosphere are like one atmosphere and like 40 degrees Celsius or something like that. It's it's kind of that's I mean, I would have thought Venus is like the last place that you the that that life would be.

SPEAKER_02

And yet, even there, there's a kind of a I think it is the last place. I think you're I think that's a good guess, though, that it is uh like one of the last places that you find life. Yeah, because that the place that you're talking about in Venus also is like cut has a lot of um sulfuric acid clouds.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so it would it would probably need to be um so sulfur-based, is it sulfur-based uh life or it would need to be, it would need to kind of thrive on sulfuric acid rather than water as like a base.

SPEAKER_04

But we we talked before about uh Project Havoc, which is like the proposed project by NASA that could potentially have like uh basically like that you could create a hot air balloon, or not even a hot air balloon, but like a floating habitat on Venus that would be buoyant because if you had Earth's atmospheric composition in that dome bubble, you put I think you put like oxygen in it or something, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So that it floated.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, yeah. Um fascinating stuff. Um, but Toby, I we're we're actually we're we gotta have you back on, man. We're actually getting close to our time. Um, but we really, really appreciate you coming out here, man. Um yeah, lovely to be here. Thank you guys. Great to chat. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. We're definitely gonna have you back on, man. Where can people find more about you, more about Epic Spaceman and all the cool stuff that you're working on?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, just put Epic Spaceman into YouTube and uh you'll find my videos.

SPEAKER_02

Um definitely go check those videos out. Definitely.

SPEAKER_04

We are Dakota and I are both individually huge fans of your work, man. We are so excited when you agreed to come on with us, and uh, it's been an absolute riveting pleasure having you over here.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, I love your videos, and uh yeah, I've been watching you guys for a while, so uh I got in touch and uh yeah, wanted to have a chat. So yeah, it's been great. I want to talk more about exoplanets and stuff, so yeah, you gotta get me back on.

SPEAKER_04

For sure, man. Definitely gotta continue that debate. And as always, everybody, like we like to say, stay curious. Peace. Peace.