Astronomy Cast

We are powerless fans of space exploration. But what if some fool gave us the authority and funding to make our space dreams a reality? Someone asked us what we’d do with a billion dollars. What missions? Which telescopes? But what if we had more? 100 Billion! A trillion! All the monies! You keep asking, and this week we answer you! Come hear what Fraser and Pamela would do if they were given complete control over $1billion that had to be used for astronomy. 

Show Notes

• What if we had $100B or even $1 trillion to explore the cosmos?
• Ground-based observatories: big science at surprisingly low cost
• Pamela’s dream: VLT North or Vera Rubin North in the Canary Islands
• Funding the Breakthrough Starshot interstellar mission
• Fixing the grant system: fully funding 50–100 researchers for a decade
• A $100M lunar interferometer mission to study stellar surfaces
• Affordable rover missions and rideshares to the Moon and Mars
• Solar sails: low-cost missions for asteroids and deep space exploration
• The value of small missions as testbeds for future breakthroughs
• Investing in next-generation planet hunters: “super PLATO / mini Kepler”
• Follow-up to Gaia using infrared to map hidden stars and brown dwarfs
• Ultimate wish list:
  • Radio telescope on Moon’s far side
  • New orbital Great Observatories
  • Successor to Chandra for high-energy universe
  • Nulling interferometers to find Earth-like worlds
  • Solar gravitational lens telescope for megapixel exoplanet imaging
• Importance of Mars Sample Return for life detection
• Fleets of robotic telescopes for public education and research

Transcript

Fraser Cain: 

Astronomy Cast, Episode 773 What Would We Do With a Billion Dollars? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly, facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.

With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, so this is me talking from the past to us, because at the time that now everyone is listening to this, I am still traveling and we have no idea how I’m doing.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

You have gone to the land of UTC plus seven?

Fraser Cain: 

Yes, I am in the future.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Leaving me behind?

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I’m working on my tan, I am walking in the jungle. Who knows what’s happening?

I hope it went well. And you? Who knows how you’re doing?

So there’s no point asking how we’re doing, because we would just be projecting into the future to try and imagine. So we’ll move on. We are powerless fans of space exploration, but what if some fool gave us the authority and funding to make our space dreams a reality?

Someone asked us what we do with a billion dollars. What missions? Which telescopes?

But what if we had more? A hundred billion, a trillion, all the monies. Okay, so it’s funny, when you had originally pitched this episode, I, in my mind, was ten billion dollars.

I thought you’d said ten million dollars. I’m like, okay, yeah, ten million, you know, that’s something to sink my teeth into. And you’re like, okay, so remember, it’s like one billion dollars.

I’m like, what? Yeah, yeah. That’s not any money.

Right. I can’t, I could barely eat lunch on a billion dollars. So fine.

So let’s kind of give people a sense of what you can buy for a billion dollars. What are some missions that would cost roughly a billion dollars?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So I don’t know about missions, but the one that made me happy was the VLT is about nine hundred million to build. And I would love to replicate the VLT, the Very Large Telescope, in the Northern Hemisphere, have another one of these four massive mirrors with satellite mirrors that can do interferometry, that have all these amazing different instruments on board. And let’s just be prepared to do equal science at the highest resolutions possible.

Fraser Cain: 

So the construction of Vera Rubin was about five hundred and seventy million. So you could buy a North, a Vera Rubin North for that budget. The Extremely Large Telescope was a little over a billion euros.

So I don’t know what that is in U.S. dollars, maybe 1.3. So kind of in that. So you can build a second Extremely Large Telescope. So ground-based observatories are surprisingly affordable.

And it’s not surprising to me that that your instinct was to go after a ground-based observatory because I had the exact same instinct, which is that like Vera Rubin North, please, right? Or Extremely Large Telescope North. And this was in the works, right?

The 30 meter telescope was going to be built in Hawaii as a counter to the Southern Hemisphere’s telescope. And so the future of that is uncertain. Maybe it’ll end up in the Canary Islands.

So I would probably build either the Extremely Large Telescope North or the Vera Rubin North and put them on the Canary Islands.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And so that hopefully we can figure out how to do some savings. And I was like, so what could we do with like 100 million left over?

Fraser Cain: 

We could fully fund Breakthrough Starshot. That’s the amount of money that they were intending to spend on Breakthrough Starshot. Yeah, it was $100 million.

That’s how much Yuri Milner had set aside. And then in the end, they only actually gave a handful of million. And so never actually funded Breakthrough Starshot.

But that was the plan. Now, that wouldn’t get you to another star system, but it would allow a lot of people to do interesting work for a decade on interstellar spacecraft.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Speaking of people doing interesting work, one of the things I looked up is, again, we are not going to consider like endowments or anything like that. We are earmarking money to go to specific things. And so…

Fraser Cain: 

So not just general outreach, development of quantum, quantum, quantumness.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Well, one thing I considered is right now, researchers have, for every grant we get, in general, you are limited to two months of salary per grant, which means for someone like me, you need at least, if you’re super lucky, six grants to be full-time employed. Most of the time, you have to have even more than that, because you get two weeks here, you get two months there, and it works out to… You’re never really full-time employed is what it actually works out to.

But the dream for all of us is to be able to just focus on thinking, experimenting, doing research, and not having to spend all this time just constantly asking for money that you’re probably never going to get. So you could, for $100 million, fund 50 to 100 people, depending on what stage in their career they’re at, for 10 years. And by just saying, okay, we’re going to take a bunch of people at different stages in their career, doing completely different types of science, and we’re just going to say, go.

We are funding you.

Fraser Cain: 

So you gave a really wonderful and elaborate explanation of what you would do if you were going to break the rules of how we would set up this.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I said we’re not going to endow. So I’m saying we’re giving them 10 years- That sounds like an endowment. Endowment lasts forever and requires you to only spend 3% to 5% of the amount of money to do the process.

Fraser Cain: 

A 10-year endowment, okay. So what about space? Because it gets really hard to spend money in space.

So I’ll give you sort of the example that I want, which is that I would like an interferometer on the moon. And so when you look at the budget of, say, the Blue Ghost Lander, these NASA lunar COTS missions are in the $70 million-ish range. So for $100 million, I think you could do this mission that I did an interview about this, that you would land on the moon with an optical telescope, and then there would be a rover that would be attached to the telescope.

It would drive out about 100 meters away from the telescope, and then it would have a telescope on board. And it would point up in the sky, and then you would be able to resolve features on the surfaces of stars, because the interferometer allows you to see bright objects, but with a very large baseline. And so we could resolve the surface of Betelgeuse.

We could resolve the surface features of other stars. We could separate binary stars into their separate pieces. So I think that’s $100 million.

And so then that got me thinking, like, okay, so if you could have lunar landers that would do really interesting things, things that would really push things forward, at $100 million a pop, you could do a lot of really interesting missions, you know?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So to give some perspective, the Viper rover, which is extraordinarily complex, was developed across two different programs, actually, and over a decade. It’s estimated that its total cost will come in around $500 to $800 million, depending on what all you include in the costing. And that’s as complicated as it gets.

So yeah, we should totally be able to do, like… Do you remember the little, tiny first rover that they put on Mars that found the blueberries?

Fraser Cain: 

I’m trying to remember what it was called. Well, the blueberries were found by Spirit and Opportunity. I think it was Spirit.

I thought they were found…

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Are you thinking… The ones that had the yoga bear?

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, you’re thinking of the little rover that was attached to the Mars Pathfinder.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Oh, yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, I think the rover was actually called Pathfinder.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

No? No, it was…

Fraser Cain: 

No, the mission was Pathfinder.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Sojourner.

Fraser Cain: 

Sojourner, that’s it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And its job was just to test, can you drive around on Mars? It didn’t find anything but rocks.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, so Pathfinder and Sojourner, Pathfinder with Sojourner. That size Tonka truck version, RC robot version of a rover, that’s nowadays something that we can consider doing. And the chipsets are so powerful and so small.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, so there was a 10 kilogram rover on the Japanese Hakuto-R mission. And that’s the kind of scale that we’re talking about. And so it was designed to land on the moon and then and roam around under solar power and explore.

And so we could put… You could do a fancier version, maybe you’re at 120 million, 150 million for your lander on the moon, and you’ve got rovers and telescopes and all kinds of stuff.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And there’s other things that you can start doing, like ride shares of tiny things. One of the things we’d love to be able to do is really understand the weather across the surface of Mars. And there’s this absolutely giggle worthy program being worked on in the Netherlands called Tumbleweed Rover.

It’s just this giant ball of infrastructure with sails and it rolls all over the place. And according to wind tunnel tests, Martian gravity and wind, they should be able to go up like 30 degree inclines with this thing.

Fraser Cain: 

That’d be cool.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And so you can start imagining you can ride share tumbling rovers to Mars. You can use the lawn dart approach that was explored for Venus by the Russians about a decade ago, except start looking at Mars because there’s things to ride share with to Mars. And as you go over, you just deploy all these literally lawn dart type things with little tiny antennas.

So they keep their orientation thanks to center of mass, hit the ground, dive into the ground, leave the antenna sticking out and just monitor the weather.

Fraser Cain: 

So this idea of ride shares, I 100% agree with you. So one mission that I was really excited about was the NEA Scout, the Near Earth Asteroid Scout mission. And this was going to be a solar sail, was on the Artemis 1 mission.

It was in the ring, the docking ring between the upper and lower stages. And unfortunately, because that rocket didn’t launch, a lot of the batteries died on the missions that were inside of it. But the idea was great.

It was $25 million to build a solar sail mission that would have gone to an asteroid. Like people say, oh, like NASA wastes money. That was amazing for the budget.

And so imagine, like for me, the theme is really about that there are a bunch of really exciting and interesting technologies. Solar sails are probably at the very top of the list that we just do not have enough practice with. And so I would want to see a real emphasis on solar sail type missions because then they’ll have an application across many different spacecraft.

You could just put a solar sail on the deep space gateway to keep its orientation. You could put a solar sail as just a backup on other missions that might’ve been able to save missions. All right.

I’m going to give you sort of another sort of direction that I would want to go with my billion dollars. And that is, you know, that NASA’s test mission was actually relatively inexpensive. And this is a planet hunting mission that’s found hundreds, we’ll probably find thousands of planets by the time it’s done.

It was, its budget was like 400 million. And then the upcoming European Space Agency’s PLATO mission, which is going to be a much fancier version with like 24 separate cameras. It’s in the 500 million euro range.

So 600-ish million dollars, so there’s some room to spare. And I would love to see a fancier version of PLATO because we lost Kepler before we could get that discovery of an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star. But is there a kind of a mid-range, super PLATO, mini Kepler that would get us that detection of the Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. You and I, I love the fact that we looked in completely different directions because like that’s the kind of thing where I’d love to see a return of small PI-led missions. And one of the awesome things that we get to see the plans for is the NIAC stuff where they’re testing all sorts of like absolutely wild ideas.

And we’re at a point where solar panels are so powerful now, or they generate so much power nowadays, where chipsets are so small and so capable nowadays, where CCDs and CMOS chips, depending on which technology you’re going with, are so sensitive. We can do things that we never even dreamed of. And there are technologies waiting to be tested and combined.

Like if I were allowed to find engineers and play to my heart’s delight, one of the things I haven’t seen, and maybe you have because you see a lot more of these than I do. I would love to see something that is brought up to speed using solar sails on the inner solar system and then has an ion drive that continues to accelerate them as they hit the higher speeds. So you can imagine you’re sending outer solar system tiny things out there, just big enough to be able to send back a good signal, come up to speed with the solar sail, drop the solar sail, send the ion drive into activity, keep accelerating, keep going, and just do the thing that Don did with a kickstart to get you going.

Fraser Cain: 

Your recommendation about NASA NIAC, I am a gigantic fan of NIAC. I report on pretty much every single story that they, everything that they fund and their total budget. I mean, they give you just a couple of hundred thousand dollars per project for the phase one, more like 700,000 for phase two, maybe a million, a little bit over a million for phase three, that every year, NASA’s NIAC’s total budget is, I don’t know, $10 million?

Like almost nothing compared to the rest of the, of the NASA financing. And yet they are the ideas of the future that are being considered. I would, can you imagine if you just expanded and expanded it so that you were, they had a really great pipeline that you were essentially, so it’s this idea of, of removing the risk that you don’t want to take on a new technology if you think it’s going to add too much technical risk to your mission.

And so, um, we need a way to de-risk really great ideas in a practical way to demonstrate that they work in space and that then these missions can then be considered down the road and they won’t increase the budget. When you think about a lot of the risks that were included in James Webb, they ballooned its budget. If they knew ahead of time which technologies were safe to work in space, which ones would be easy to use and so on, probably would have brought their costs down.

So, so I would love to see some kind of fancy NIAC that does, does a sort of ideas of the future and de-risking great ideas to bring down or bring up their technological readiness level for future missions.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And one of the things that’s getting reflected in what both of us are suggesting is due to budget constraints, we’re seeing both NASA and the National Science Foundation quite often ask what major things need supported. So we see the National Science Foundation and I think it’s the Department of Energy funding Vera Rubin Observatory and a bunch of these big cameras. We see NASA funding James Webb Space Telescope and TESS and Europa Clipper and flagship projects that you can never imagine a small university doing, whereas ESCAPADE is one of the few smaller missions that has been funded.

It’s coming out of the University of California, Berkeley. It has blue and gold, two separate things that will be heading off to Mars. But there’s very few of these smaller missions still getting done because resources are scarce.

And if you can fund something huge like Rubin, it revolutionizes the entire field. These smaller projects are test beds. They’re ideas that their children will revolutionize the entire field.

They’re just saying, hey, this is possible.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

We’re currently killing the future by not investing in it. I’d like to have a future, please.

Fraser Cain: 

Yes. Yeah. All right.

So another of my favorite missions is the Gaia mission. Oh, my favorite.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And it came in at about 600 million, so a little less than a billion dollars. And we learned so much about the Milky Way, about the cosmos from Gaia. And there’s another mission on the books that people are proposing, essentially a follow on to Gaia.

It would be an infrared version of Gaia. And so it would have that same level of astrometry to to measure the positions of all of the stars. But it would be looking more into the infrared.

So we’d be looking for the cooler objects, the red dwarfs, the brown dwarfs, maybe large exoplanets and looking for the motion of them. Because we still don’t have a great census of where all of the red dwarfs, brown dwarfs are, even though they’re the most common stars in the universe. So we’re still learning about that.

And so, you know, for my billion dollars, I could buy Gaia, too.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And Gaia, it is my favorite space mission so far. What they did with its technology. Go find a video, humans.

It had a light train like nothing else that has ever existed. And I can only hope we learn from that technology and build more things, building on what was learned.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. Yeah. That’s always makes me so sad when engineers come up with this absolutely brilliant idea.

With Gaia, the spacecraft had this CCD array and it had a telescope and it would slowly turn at the rate that it was depositing light onto the pixels on its camera system. And reading out those pixels. And then reading all those pixels.

Yeah. And it was perfectly tuned to make these measurements. It was a it’s a beautiful telescope.

And it’s so sad that it’s no longer operating.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. And we could use something similar to that that also just worked brighter. One of the really stupid things in astronomy is we don’t actually know where Betelgeuse is.

It is, depending on the paper, between 410 light years and 640 light years. And we can measure the sucker’s angular size on the sky. And if we just knew where it was, we could like, there’s so much amazing physics we could do.

But it was too bright for Gaia. All right.

Fraser Cain: 

So I think, you know, you get a sense, I think, from both of us that that there are these that there’s these scrappy ideas that are, you know, that there could be more funding to them, new forms of propulsion system, new ideas and so on. So let’s go the other way now. Let’s let’s if we had all the monies in the world, what would what would you want to see out there?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

If we had all the monies in the world, we definitely need a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. That that is a must, please.

Fraser Cain: 

And, you know, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon gives us the ability to detect the hydrogen line from the dark ages of the universe. We essentially are able to scan this time when those first stars were forming and get that get a real sense of how the universe came together, which right now, you know, is outside the reach of James Webb.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And it would be amazing if we could just start doing things like, can we please have an on orbit eight meter optical? Can we please have a bigger, more sensitive.

Fraser Cain: 

Like LUVAR, we want 15, we want 20.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

OK, fine. But there was the great observatories that were built in the 80s and 90s. And Chandra’s still hanging out there doing its best.

And someday Chandra is going to stop. I want I want to have something on deck that is even better, more powerful, that takes us out into the high energy universe. I want a successor to Fermi out there ready to go.

I want to have the survey scope that has all the abilities that Swift has that it’s leveraging for gamma ray bursts to instead just be like, and now we are going to simultaneously observe this in optical infrared, gamma and X-ray, because why not?

Fraser Cain: 

Yep. Yeah, so if money was like for me, if money was no object, I mean, the thing you mentioned, the 80 meter telescope, like we want to know whether there are Earth-sized worlds orbiting around Sun-like stars within the habitable zone.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

We need that.

Fraser Cain: 

We want to find Earth 2.0. And you need a coronagraph, you need a whopping big telescope with a whopping big coronagraph or multiple spacecraft flying in formation to perform a nulling interferometer. So, you know, originally it was the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which I think we mourn once a year. Yeah, at least.

You know, we put flowers on its grave and feel sad about it. And the successor to that is the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets, which is being developed by the European Space Agency. It’s going to be expensive.

You know, maybe not web expensive, but in that kind of range. My other one is Mars Sample Return Mission, because Perseverance collected all of these samples that very likely the answer to, is there life on Mars, is in one of those samples waiting on the surface of Mars. We just have to bring them home.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And at a certain point, we have to improve education. And there’s this amazing opportunity coming with the Rumen Observatory. It’s going to be spotting so many transient objects, things that flicker, flare and move in the night, that they have four different data repositories to handle the output.

And this is where you start being like, OK, we are just going to build fleets of robotic telescopes. And there are here in the United States, 125,000 libraries between town libraries, university libraries and school libraries. And so 300 million people, 125,000 libraries, that’s basically one library per 3,000 people on the planet.

So let’s start assigning each of those libraries a telescope that school kids can use for science fair projects, that people with spare time can use to follow up objects and just increase public engagement in science in a way that is shared resources and scalable in a reasonable way.

Fraser Cain: 

I feel like you’re not really spending all the monies. That’s not very much monies.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And that’s the thing, we’re not even spending that much money right now.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, yeah. So the one that is like the most ridiculous, probably in the hundred billion dollar range or more, would be the solar gravitational lens telescope.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, this is Fraser’s thing that he brings up every year. And I just find it so remarkably ridiculous. Go ahead, explain this ridiculousness.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, well, it just is that you send the spacecraft out to 500 AU from the sun, where the gravity of the sun forms a natural gravitational lens, gives you a telescope, the natural multiplier to your telescope. Yeah. And so you would be able to see a megapixel image of an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star, like literally see the mountains, forests, oceans, clouds, etc.

With a relatively modest telescope, you just have to get out there. And so.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. And you have to get out there and stop.

Fraser Cain: 

No, you don’t have to stop.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Well, you need to enter orbit.

Fraser Cain: 

No, no, you’re going to keep moving. You just keep moving. As long as you stay in the cone, you can, as long as you head down the cone that’s created, lining up the planet with the star, you could be at 10,000 AU and it’s still fine.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Right. But the signal attenuation is a bit much.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, this is like the engineering challenges of getting a signal. But I mean, we’re getting signals from the Voyagers. So getting a signal, like it’s several, I think the Voyagers are like 100 AU.

So this is five times farther than the Voyagers.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

25 times less signal.

Fraser Cain: 

Yes, it’s harder. That’s why it’s a, did I not get to spend a hundred billion dollars or what? Fair.

A trillion dollars, whatever. But, but if we could, then we would, you know, and we had the targets, we had the candidates. So you’d need some other telescope, like the habitable planet finder first, then you would like, at night you would see their cities.

It’s crazy. What we could see. So we just need the solar gravitational lens telescope, please.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yes. For science.

Fraser Cain: 

Yep. All right. That’s so, so if you’re ready to fund our ideas, let us know.

We’re ready to take over. Would we be co NASA?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yes.

Fraser Cain: 

Chiefs?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Sure.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, we’d do that. That sounds good.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yes.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of our $10 and up patrons out there. You allow us to keep the humans that make this show go going.

So specifically from Avivah, Rich and Ali, I would like to thank the following humans. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomy cast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons.

Alex Cohen, Andrew Palestra, Arctic Fox, Bore Andro-Lovesville, Benjamin Davies, Boogie Nett, Brian Kilby, Kami Rassian, Cooper, David, Davias Rosetta, Don Mundus, Elliot Walker, Father Prax, Frank Stewart, Gerhard Schweitzer, Gordon Dewis, Hal McKinney, James Signovich, Jean-Baptiste Lemontier, Jim McGean, Joanne Mulvey, John M, J.P. Sullivan, Katie Byrne, Kimberly Rake, Larry Dzot, Lou Zeeland, Mark Phillips, Matt Rucker, Michael Prashada, Michelle Cullen, Name, Olga, Paul Jarman, Philip Grant, R.J. Basque, Ron Thorson, Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Bieber, Subhana, Stephen Coffey, The Big Squish Squash, Tiffany Rogers, Tricor, Wanderer M101, and Zach Kukindel. Thank you all so very much.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. Thanks, Pamela. We’ll see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Bye-bye.

Live Show

It’s time once again for our annual gift-giving guide. We’ve got recommendations for books, movies, TV shows, games, and of course astronomy gear to satisfy the space nerds in your family. The Christmas season is almost upon us, and with it comes excuses to inject science into the lives of those you love… or ask for them to give you that book, lens, or art print you already know you’ll love. In this episode, Fraser and Pamela share the things they think would make good gifts for nerds like us. 

Show Notes Astronomy & Science-Themed Gift Ideas

• Recommended starter gift: astronomy binoculars (10×70 or 15×75, anti-reflective).
• First telescope suggestion: 6-inch Dobsonian for ease of use.
• Affordable smart telescope: Seestar S50 for easy astrophotography.
• C-Star telescopes for imaging nebulae in light-polluted areas.
• Gift cards for remote observatories in cloudy regions.

Astronomy Tools & Gear

• Binoculars as foundational astronomy equipment.
• Smart telescopes for beginners wanting astrophotography.

Books & Magazines

• Book pick: “The Planets” by Andrew Cohen & Brian Cox (Folio Society).
• Value of physical books and media for inspiration.
• Magazine subscriptions: National Geographic, Scientific American, Sky & Telescope.

Supporting Creators & Small Businesses

• Gift Patreon subscriptions for ad-free content (e.g., Universe Today).
• Encourage buying from small retailers (Peak Design, B&H Photo, Seestar).
• Importance of supporting journalists and content creators.

Games & Hobbies

• Steam Deck gaming: recommended stand and 8-Bit Do controllers.
• Discussion of physical gaming and ergonomic setups.
• Lego sets (galaxies, Star Trek Enterprise) and preserving sets.
• Favorite board games: Sushi Go, Exploding Kittens.
• Magic: The Gathering deck themes (dinosaurs, meteors/lightning, space).
• MTG Arena as a digital way to play.

Media Recommendations

• TV series: Scavenger’s Reign.
• Movies: Mars Express (French animated sci-fi).
• Anime: Delicious in Dungeon, I May Be a Guild Receptionist…
• Book series: Dungeon Crawler Carl (isekai RPG sci-fi).

Additional Gift Suggestions

• Items from local game stores: squishables, Funko Pops, collectibles.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: 

Astronomy Cast, Episode 772 – Our 2025 Gift Guide. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly, facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.

With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I don’t know.

Fraser Cain: 

We don’t know.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, we’re recording this.

Fraser Cain: 

Who knows how we’re doing? Totally, yeah. So in the moment, I’ve been recording a lot today, and I can hear my voice starting to go.

So I’m a little raspy now, but…

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I can feel my brain starting to go, so…

Fraser Cain: 

Trade? Yeah. So I think this is…

I did finish off the Patrons question show that I do every month, so that was a couple of hours, and then we’ve already recorded another episode, and I’m going to do this one, and then I’m going to go… Anyway.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

A lot of using my voice in the last couple of days, and it’s definitely feeling like it’s had enough. But that’s okay, because I will be on vacation-ish, and let my voice rest.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

You just get to sit on an airplane tomorrow, and yeah, you just get to be quiet for, what, 28 hours?

Fraser Cain: 

Something like that. Yeah, it’s ridiculous.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I forget.

Fraser Cain: 

Carla was saying we’ve got like 24 hours of… 22 hours of flight time?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, something like that. It’s going to be bonkers. Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

It’s time once again for our annual gift-giving guide. We’ve got recommendations for books, movies, TV shows, games, and of course, astronomy gear to satisfy the space nerds in your family. All right, so let’s just start with the…

I mean, this is the advice that we give every year, but I think I’ve got some more nuanced take on it now, but let’s give that bedrock, it’s time to buy your family members some kind of sky-watching gear.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yes. So, bedrock is an update from last year. I’m going to recommend B&H Photo as the company that is my new go-to for optics.

Buy the biggest pair of binoculars you can hold steady with your hands, because yes, you can put them on a tripod, no, you aren’t going to want to. You’re going to want to grab them, mine are hanging on a strap off of a doorknob. You’re going to want to grab them, step outside and go, can I see that comet, or whatever it is that you’re trying to see.

So buy the biggest, I like 10 by 70s, I own a pair of Celestrons, there’s excellent by many different companies, get ones that have a coating on the front, an anti-reflective that causes more photons to go through the lens than to get reflected off the lens, binoculars.

Fraser Cain: 

And so it’s the one that I have, I have the 15 by 75 by Celestron, I was sort of checking the prices and they’re in the $100, $150, $200 range, and just bang for your buck. That if you want to get somebody just something that’s going to completely level up their astronomy experience, those binoculars. And I think both of us have owned our astronomy binoculars now for almost the entire time that we’ve been doing this show, and mine get used almost every day.

So I’m using them to look at birds, I’m using them to look at stuff in the sky, and you can see the moons of Jupiter, you can see the rings of Saturn, you can see the craters on the moon, you can see the individual stars in the Milky Way, you can see the galaxy in Andromeda. If you know where you’re looking, you know where to point them, then globular clusters, the Orion Nebula, it’s comets, it’s all available to you.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And then there’s also the, what is that bird in the tree? It’s much harder to do that with a telescope. So I…

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, they’re just fast and easy to use.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, exactly.

Fraser Cain: 

And so if you don’t have binoculars, that should be the foundation of your astronomy kit. So I’ve gone down the telescope journey quite a bit this year, and I think, yeah, I’ve got four of them behind me right now. But I think our original recommendation was the Dobsonian as your good first starter telescope for people.

And an eight inch is going to cost you quite a bit. It’s probably closing in on $1,000 or $800. But a six inch is…

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

It’s totally easy to pick up and easy to use.

Fraser Cain: 

Easy to pick up, easy to use.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And that’s still… Stick it on a table.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. A very big telescope. So if you want a first telescope, that’s the one that we recommend.

And then we used to recommend that you would then start to consider the more automated telescopes. Think about the Celestron, like an eight inch Schmidt-Cast grain or LX200 or something like that. And now my recommendation is to go the smart telescopes route.

And I highly recommend the Seastar S50, which is this great little… It’s the bigger one. It’s the bigger one, but it’s still relatively inexpensive.

They’re about $600. And take phenomenal pictures of the sky. And they’re super easy to use.

And there’s a lot of features in the telescope that I really like. Better than more expensive telescopes. And so that’s kind of affordable.

Like people are thinking about, oh, do I get my kid a PlayStation? Do I get a drone?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

No. You get one of these.

Fraser Cain: 

Get a telescope.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

It looks like an overhead projector that crossbred with a portal gun. And what amazes me is Aviva, the woman who does our website, our updates, all the behind the scenes stuff for AstronomyCast. She’s in Bandung, Indonesia, which is a suburb of Jakarta, which is a mega city.

And Bandung is what in the United States would be one of the largest cities. It’s a massive light polluted city. And she’s taking nebula images with her C-Star.

And it’s just sort of like you no longer have to be afraid of light pollution the way we grew up being afraid of light pollution. These C-Stars are just doing magic as near as I can tell.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Even if you live in light polluted area, there are light pollution filters. And so they’re great. So that’s it.

And then there are the accoutrement books like Nightwatch, which we always recommend. There are apps that you can use to help you find around the night sky, but you kind of don’t need them with the C-Star. You just find the list of the things you want to look at and you punch them on your phone and away you go.

So hopefully over the next several years, if you’ve got the budget, you will be building up your astronomy nerds tech.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

If you live someplace where you’re like, I’m not worried about light pollution. It’s simply always rains here. There’s Star Front Observatories and they are putting together a gift card system so that you can either buy a gift card to give to somebody or buy somebody a gift certificate to buy somebody.

I don’t make money from Star Front Observatories. I just think they are super cool and I use their telescopes now and then. So there’s now this way that you can get access to a C-Star in dark skies and just log into it on your computer.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. Yeah. And like monthly pay at a monthly rate.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. It’s they’re looking at a Netflix for telescopes kind of model.

Fraser Cain: 

Exactly. Okay. So we got the telescope recommendations out of the way.

So let’s move on to other stuff that we think is important. So pick a category that you think is relevant now.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So this part of the show is also me for anyone in my life who happens to also listen to this show and can like point my husband at things. I found a website, foliosociety.com, and they have a book called The Planets by Andrew Cohen and Brian Cox that is nothing but pretties, page after page after page of pretties. They have all sorts of other books as well.

And I really think that sometimes it just makes sense to say, I want to influence the people in my life by handing them something that is paper, that they’re going to feel encouraged to just randomly open to a different page and see what is there and be swept away by how amazing our universe is. So Folio Society, Megan Watsky and Kim Arcade, Kim Conwell Arcade have an entire collection of super pretty, pretty books. David Dickinson put together, along with you, I contributed randomness, put together a book a number of years ago on how to take your own pretty pictures.

Books are a way to change people’s lives in a way that doesn’t require them to poison their night vision the same way that a screen does. You can set one on your coffee table and people will flip through it. I mean, that’s why they’re called coffee table books.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. You know, I was sort of not a fan of physical media for a while then, and I’m coming back around now and kind of regret the ditching of the physical media that I did and am starting to rebuild my collection, my library. And, you know, physical books are great, as you said, you know, sometimes you just want to pick up a book and you want to look through it.

You want to read it. You want to look at the pictures. And astronomy is one of those fields where there are new missions, new telescopes, new images coming out all the time, and they capture well.

Astronaut photography, there’s memoirs from astronauts, you know, there’s a bunch of those kinds of books that you can get your hands on. And so, you know, you made some recommendations. So I would definitely suggest like some nice physical book that has nice imagery from space, something you can sit front and center and use it as a talking point when, you know, people come by or just like sit and read.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And I really think there’s a place for getting both older people who have spare time, so people who actually, I’ve heard of this mythological thing called retirement, I’m not quite sure what it is, and younger humans, so like high school, middle school, a subscription to a physical magazine, support publishing, National Geographic, Scientific American, Sky and Telescope is now part of the American Astronomical Society, but there I’d say Patreon with this guy, he’s over there, support the publishing industry and get physical subscriptions for people who have the time to just like sit and enjoy them. Because if you’re flipping through pages, you’re going to read articles you would never click on, on the landing page of a website. And Patreon now allows gift subscriptions.

So you can gift someone ad free forever on Universe Today, which has more media than any other astronomy site as near as I can tell.

Fraser Cain: 

Mm hmm. Yeah, you can gift a year’s Patreon subscription to any patron. And so whatever the recipient is into, you can probably find a Patreon to support them.

And this is sort of another direction that I think is really important. We’re going to see this grow, is this direct support of journalism, of media creators, of the content that you enjoy. And it’s a way to give back, a way to make sure they can keep doing their job under all of the different threats that people are currently facing.

So someone in the chat is recommending you can buy a membership in the Planetary Society. So there’s like a whole bunch of these, and you can sort of give a person membership in something that is meaningful to them. Awesome.

I like that.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And the Dungeons and Dragons community, it is not astronomy. I just need to say the Patreon Dungeons and Dragons community is without comparison.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, there are map makers. There’s 3D miniature creators that you can download their designs and run them through your 3D printer. There’s adventure people who run, who design adventures and give all kinds of other support information for D&D.

Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty amazing how well supported the community is for role playing games.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And so I think find these small companies or even, I mean, Scientific American, it’s not huge when you compare it to a tech company. We’re talking like dozens of people, not tens of thousands of people. Find the places you can support directly.

And so even for like accessories, I would say, don’t go to Amazon, go to like Peak Design. They’re the place I go to buy tripods. You could murder somebody with a Peak Design tripod or simply observe through a tornado.

Pick one. Probably observe through a tornado, but go inside, leave the camera outside. Peak Design, B&H Photo, it’s another smaller company, buy direct from Seastar.

Just go direct, remove the middleman, remove the loss of income to the companies, keep the creators, the companies you enjoy going through this weird future.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. All right. So let’s talk about games.

So I want to talk about physical games and video games. I have been playing a lot of physical games recently. So video games still, my Steam Deck continues to be in heavy use.

It is my primary game machine. And I think if you’ve been following our recommendations for the last couple of years, we’ve recommended the Steam Deck. So you can also accessorize your Steam Deck, which is kind of cool.

I bought for my kids, I bought them the Steam Deck sort of stand. And so you sit on this little stand, you plug into the back of it, and then it gives you a bunch of expansion ports. So now you can hook up a bunch of controllers to it.

You can hook it up to your television. And now it acts like a game console, just as if you had an Xbox or a PlayStation, but it’s got your entire Steam library and it’s played on your TV. And then you can play like co-op games with it.

There’s a great set of controllers that come from a company called 8-Bit Do. And I’ve bought now two of their game controllers, and they’re just really nice, really great controllers. They’re not expensive and have much better gameplay than even like an Xbox controller or a PlayStation controller, and I highly recommend them.

So definitely check that out.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And those are a whole lot more ergonomic. I know one of the things I run into, and I have just like a cheapy controller to go with my Steam Deck, the Steam Deck, it’s kind of hefty to just like lay in bed and use it. And so having one of these stands, I have one in my living room where I have monitor arms, like you can’t move in my house without finding some place to dock your computer.

And so having it there, it’s now computer on an arm, I’m in my recliner, I’m playing games. Lightweight control in your hands. Yeah, it’s super pleasing.

Yeah. And don’t forget while you’re looking at games, so there are the old school board games galore out there, and then there’s also other toys that allow you to think creatively. Lego last year came out with a galaxy set, like it’s a picture of a galaxy that you can sit and build.

It’s pricey, but it’s gorgeous.

Fraser Cain: 

Did you see what they added this year? No. It’s the Enterprise from the next generation.

That’s amazing. It’s so cool. It’s like 3600 pieces, like I’m sure it’s going to cost a fortune, but it is the, what Enterprise D?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so cool. So, yeah, it’s super tempting to, you know, again, a thing that I got rid of when I was a kid, all my space Lego and regretted, although I didn’t make that mistake again with my kids.

So we’ve got all of their Lego in storage and then we’ll be able to hand that off to their kids and hand that off to their kids. Like that stays within the family, like an endowment.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Except for the brown Legos. I don’t know what it is about brown Legos, but they have a half life and then they just crumble to bits.

Fraser Cain: 

Oh, wow.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. Beware of the brown Legos. Yes.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. OK.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

All the others are fine, just not the brown ones.

Fraser Cain: 

So so what are you playing in board game land?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I’ve so not that much that space related. We’ve been playing Sushi Go. It’s this little tin that you get and and you’re grabbing different sushi bits trying to build up the best meal we’ve been playing.

Oh, man, I have a wall of games and trying to remember all the stuff on the wall. Sushi Go is one of our go to’s. We’ve also been playing Exploding Kittens.

It’s an old classic. It never goes away.

Fraser Cain: 

And you’ve been playing a lot of Magic the Gathering recently.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So much Magic the Gathering. And there’s actually a space related set that came out last month, Edge of Eternities. It has spacecraft.

It has space stations and it has lots of interesting, actually science related things. So one of the tasks on my to do list is I now have three different decks I need to build. One is dinosaurs.

The other is things like meteors, meteor crater, lightning, so I can kill the dinosaurs. Right. And now I also have the ability to build a space related deck and see if I can destroy goblins from space.

Fraser Cain: 

That’s awesome.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Go to your local gaming store.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, but but you wouldn’t you were like I’ve been out of the Magic the Gathering space for a little while. And you’re saying that now the Magic Arena, you can relatively inexpensively collect cards in the game, play against other people. It will sort your deck.

It will shuffle between games. You can play quickly and you can play for fun. You can play ranked games against other people.

And it’s sort of a nice way to stay on top of the hobby without actually physically buying the cards. Although there’s nothing like owning the physical deck and sitting down and playing with a person in an actual room. That’s the way the game was meant to be played.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And this is where you can go find out when are they doing draft nights, things like that, where it’s not what you’ve collected. It’s paying an entry fee to get cards you can walk away with that everyone builds their own decks in real time.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Things like that. And another reason to go to your local game store is to just find out what is out there. Get introduced to the latest squishables, squishmallows, Funko Pops, all these different things that you can just insert joy into somebody’s life.

Last year, I found on a Funko Pop discount, like some of my friends’ favorite characters, I just got lucky. And who doesn’t love having a plague doctor in their life?

Fraser Cain: 

So let’s talk about media.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And this is funny because, again, I’ve recently been recollecting media and I’ve got sort of a stack of Blu-rays behind me that I’ve picked up at garage sales and Value Village and various discount shops. And it’s kind of filling in all of the gaps. And I know that I’m going to get to a point where I’ve collected all of the common movies and the uncommon movies, kind of like collecting Pokemons.

But it is. And then for the rares, you got to buy them. You’re going to have to order them from the store.

So there’s a couple of shows that I’ve really enjoyed in the last year or so that I thought people should want to check out. And you can buy these on Amazon and other media places. So one is Scavenger’s Reign.

And have you seen this yet?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I would know if you’d had.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, you’d know if you had. So it’s it’s it’s animated. It’s about these people that are on this weird world.

And it’s the strange biology based.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I’ve seen a few episodes that they go through. Yeah, I keep one of my friends watches it and I keep catching fragments of episodes at her house.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, I think it’s it’s it’s in my top ten television shows ever. Oh, wow. And there’s a nice Blu-ray you can buy that just has the whole collection ready to go.

And they’re it’s highly worth watching. Another movie that came out that sort of surprised me how good it was, was a movie called Mars Express. And it’s and it’s a French animated movie and is sort of like Blade Runner meets.

Man, it’s kind of like Blade Runner, but but it’s about a private detective and her robot assistant and they chase bad guys to Mars and sort of really cool technology, very funny dialogue, very well written. I really enjoyed it. And it’s a movie.

But if you can get your hands on it, definitely check that out. And then I think sort of one of the more endearing shows that I watched in the last year is called Delicious in Dungeon, which is an anime about some it’s like a D&D anime where some adventurers are trying to go down into this dungeon and they are running out of food and they’re trying to rescue their friends. And they and so one of them wonders, well, could we just cook the monsters?

And and so they meet up with this dwarf who has been had the exact same question. And so now the main characters are all delving deeper and deeper into this dungeon, encountering all kinds of horrific monsters and cooking and eating them and and then sort of surviving as they make their way down into the dungeon. And I just love it.

It’s so cozy and so endearing. Yeah, I think you’ll really for people really enjoy it. I checked in and there is DVDs available of that.

I’m not sure sort of, you know, if they have the audio that you find on Netflix, but yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So an anime, I I can’t even justify why I like it as much as I do. It’s just ridiculous is I may be a guild receptionist, but I’ll solo any boss to clock out on time. And it is the typical that’s the name of the anime.

Uh huh. The entire name is I may be a guild receptionist, but I’ll solo any boss to clock out on time. And it is literally the story of a a timeline where dungeons have opened up all over the place and they have adventurers that have to get licenses before they go down to take on the different bosses.

And this this girl works at the Adventurers Guild and she’s going home one day lamenting all of the overtime she has to do. And as the result of the needful prayer she puts out, she gets superpowers and now she just solo kills bosses. And it’s it’s just silly and sweet.

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And it has a ridiculous name.

Fraser Cain: 

So one books, I want to just briefly mention some books. Yeah. And I haven’t been reading a ton of books that are kind of new and interesting.

But the one series that I read and really gobbled down was the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. So there’s like seven books and I just speed ran through all of them on the recommendation of my son. And they’re just terrific.

And so if you want to give somebody, you know, like if you enjoy light, entertaining reading, think about, you know, We Are Legion, We Are Bob. Think about The Martian. Think about Project Hail Mary in that sort of zone.

Then Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

It’s an isekai, just to be clear. It’s an isekai.

Fraser Cain: 

A role playing game fiction.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. But it’s not like the ones where it’s someone suddenly ends up only them in a different timeline. It’s the entire planet Earth becomes part of a game show.

And there are some lines in it that just stay with you. So the main character has a quote that is basically, they will not break me. They may hurt me.

They may kill me. They will not break me. And just that concept is especially in this timeline.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great it’s a great series.

You know, electronically, audiobooks, physical books, some of the best the narrator they heard.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Oh, my God. He’s the best. I thought it was a full cast recording.

It is not.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.

Do you have any more final gift recommendations? Or are we all out?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I think that’s it.

Fraser Cain: 

Get people’s physical media, buy things from the creators and support the support, the fandom of the person that you’re buying for, which is going to require a little investigative work on your part. So if there was like a patron that you wanted to join, who would it be?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Exactly. Son. Yeah, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

Dad. You know, who would you want to support? Yeah.

Awesome. All right. Well, I hope everybody has a great holiday.

Please let us know if you have any additional recommendations or if you’ve taken action on any of our recommendations. We are not funded. We’re not advertising.

We receive no sponsorship from any of the things we talked about here.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So go forth, be awesome. And thank you to our patrons. We thank the $10 and up patrons at the end of every episode.

And today we would like to thank, and this is where Rich inserts the audio. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomy cast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons.

Alan grass, Andrew Allen, and to soar Aster sets, Benjamin carrier, Bob Krell, Brian breed, buzz Parsec, Conrad Howling, Daniel Schecter, David green, Dr. Whoa. Ed Fairchild. Just as it sounds.

Frederick Salvo, Jeff McDonald gold, Gregory Singleton, Jay, Alex Anderson, Jason Kwong, Jeremy Kerwin, J O John Herman, Jordan Turner, Kate Sindretto, Kim Barron, Lab Rat Matt, Les Howard, Mark, Masa Herleu, MHW1961, Super Symmetrical, Michael Regan, Nyla, Noah Albertson, Paula Sposito, Peter, Red Bar Is Watching, Robert Plasma, Sachi Takeba, Scone, Sergey Manalov, Stephen Rutley, T.C. Starboy, Thomas Gazzetta, Travis C. Porco, Vitaly, William Andrews. Thank you all so very much.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. That’s great. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Thank you.

Fraser Cain: 

See you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Bye-bye.

Live Show

With the arrival of the comet 3I/Atlas (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System), the world is getting a crash course in comets, their behavior, and of course their tails. Today we’re going to talk about comets and their tails, why they exist, how they grow, why they can be different colors and how they can be sometimes point AT the Sun.

Comets are one of the most animated and ephemeral targets for astronomy. From night to night they can change in shape and color, and every nuance tells us something. In this episode, we decode blue tails, green cores, forward-facing plumes, and other weird and awesome details observed with these icy visitors. 

Show Notes

• What comet tails are and how they form
• Sublimation, dust release, and the creation of the coma
• Differences between ion tails and dust tails
• How solar radiation and magnetic fields shape comet tails
• Why comet tails always point away from the Sun
• Color changes in comets and what causes them
• Explaining the “anti-tail” and strange comet behavior
• Comet 3I/ATLAS and public misinformation
• Potential spacecraft interaction with comet tails
• What happens as a comet moves away from the Sun

Transcript

Fraser Cain: 

Astronomy Cast, Episode 771 Comet Tales. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the Publisher of Universe Today.

With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pam, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I’m doing well. I am very envious of the amazing adventure you’re about to go on. It sounds so cool.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, we’re going to do a month in Thailand. Not for any purpose, but to escape the Canadian winter.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And we are about to record a bevy of shows. And so there’s going to be very boring intros because we’re just going to sit and do them.

Fraser Cain: 

How are you doing? I don’t know how I’m doing because we recorded this in advance. I have to assume that I’m fine.

So yeah. I saw an elephant. I went to a temple.

I ate some really tasty Thai food. I don’t know. I don’t know.

With the arrival of Comet 3i Atlas, the world is getting a crash course on comets, their behavior, and of course, their tails. Today we’re going to talk about comets and their tails. Why they exist, how they grow, why they can be different colors, and how they can sometimes point at the sun.

So I’ve ranted quite a bit on my channel about how awesome Comet 3i Atlas is.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yes.

Fraser Cain: 

And my frustration at the nonsense that is proliferating on YouTube. And there is a lot of nonsense. You know, on the best case, you have people who are writing scientific papers that go against the scientific mainstream and much to the eyebrow raising of their scientific colleagues, not naming any names, pointing any fingers.

And on the worst case, you’ve just got people making stuff up, just literally going, it broke into 17 pieces. And now we’ve got spaceships that are flying out of it and laser beams and people receiving communications. And, you know, it’s so, and a lot of it rests on the behavior of its tail.

I know. So I think today, let’s just, just hammer comet tails as until we really, really understand the whole process. And that will give us a lens from which to both understand this comet and every comet that will ever show up again in the future.

So I guess, what is a comet tail?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

It is material that has been removed by some form of physics from the nucleus of the comet. And the reason I phrased it that way is we have two different processes going on. One is your standard stuff melts, which actually in this case means sublimation.

So you have all the volatiles, all the frozen stuff that as it gets energy injected into it either from solar heating or because there’s been landslides or something like that, that inserted kinetic energy, some form of energy got inserted and that raised temperatures, caused phase transitions. And now you have stuff that has gone from solid to gas. Now the solid going to gas is a wild change in volume and this can eject dust at all sorts of different velocities in all sorts of different directions.

And so you also have dust getting ejected from the comet nucleus. So around your comet, you have expanding gas, you have dust, and all of this stuff can be slightly different colors depending on what’s going on.

Fraser Cain: 

And so dust, it’s very interesting. For a while there, we’ve always talked about dust as this thing and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. And so talked to a bunch of scientists and was like, okay, look, if I could hold some dust in my hand, what would it look like?

If I could throw dust up in the air, what would it look like? And the best example is essentially smoke coming from a fire that you’ve got these, what’s it, polyachromatic carbon compounds. Polycyclic aromatic compounds.

Hydrocarbons. Yeah, hydrocarbons. The soot coming from hydrocarbons that are then mixed in particles of this soot, and these are very small particles, you know, they are micrometers across, they are mixed in with the volatile elements, the frozen nitrogen, the frozen oxygen, frozen carbon dioxide on the surface of this comet.

And so then as this gas is sublimating off of the surface, you’ve also got these PACs. Is that right? Yeah.

The soot, this dust. PAHs. PAHs.

That’s it. Right. Yeah. You’ve got this soot being lofted into the environment around the comet as well. And this is going to be important when we sort of come back around to it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

All right. So the way I always think of it is they’re just really big molecules and sometimes they’re multiple molecules that have decided to gang up and join forces to build slightly bigger things. Right.

And this is where it’s important to remember they can have different sizes. And sometimes it’s not the kind of dust you’re talking about, which is like the stuff that lives between the stars, the interstellar space, the dust of why it’s really hard to see through clouds of material, the dust that makes the horse and the horsehead nebula. Sometimes dust is just grains of material because comets are made of rocks and ices.

And so we get all these different grain sizes and some of these grains are actually the stuff that’s eventually going to form meteor showers. Less exciting than polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, easier to spell, and cause really cool light shows.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. I love Nicole did her science experiment at one of the, I think at Dragon Con one year and had dry ice and bits of…

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Oh yeah. Made a comet.

Fraser Cain: 

And made a comet. Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And all of the raw material. A bit of dirt, a bit of regularized dry ice, cooking oil, all of this stuff, mixed it all together and made a ball. And then you watch as the carbon dioxide is sublimating off of the surface of it and bits and pieces of it are dropping off onto the ground.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. Add a little bit of ammonia in there. It’s really cool.

And so all of this stuff, when you take that dirty snowball that has been going through interplanetary space, interstellar space, it has been gathering on its surface all of the dust. And it’s also had very slow chemical reactions going on that form these larger molecules. So as it comes into the solar system, it experiences gravity from other objects, which can cause landslides and it experiences solar heating.

Both of these factors can cause activity, which is also why we see centaurs that get active sometimes out beyond Jupiter in the outer solar system. And this kind of activity is going to shed dust.

Fraser Cain: 

Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And that dust is going to reflect light and it’s going to reflect predominantly redder light because it’s really big stuff. So the reflection goes all the way into the reds. And so looking at a lot of comets when they first start to get active in the outer solar system and 3i Atlas is utterly unsurprising.

It’s remarkable, but also utterly unsurprising. And it started out by doing the, I’m going to be red right now thing. And yeah, it was awesome.

Fraser Cain: 

Right. And, and so this idea of the, I mean, what we’re talking about here is the coma and when you look at a comet and you see this diffuse blob in your telescope, that is the coma. The nucleus is down there inside.

Sometimes you can’t even resolve the nucleus. Sometimes you can, but then around that is the coma. And the coma can be hundreds of kilometers across while the nucleus may just be five kilometers or one kilometer and it can just produce enough material that makes this larger, brighter object that you can, that you can see.

So how does the coma become the tail?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So we have two different processes that, that we need to keep track of and a third that occasionally happens that we’ll get to. So the tails, there’s normally both an ion tail and a dust tail. And the ion tail is rogue molecules.

So like C2, I’m not talking the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons here, I’m talking like C2, sodium, methane, just the super simple little tiny stuff you can build with tinker toys and not hate yourself in the process. Right So, so that stuff can form ion tails and the ion tails, as the name implies, are charged. So because they are charged as the solar wind of high energy particles, as the sun’s magnetic field interacts with these charged particles, it, it forms a, a tail that is distinctly separate from the dust tail, which is the second tail. And the dust tail tends to be made of bigger stuff.

And that bigger stuff has its location influenced by the motion of the comet. So it’s leaving stuff behind as it goes. And it’s getting pushed by the not charged light of the sun, photons aren’t charged.

Fraser Cain: 

But I think it’s really important. Like, I think we have this terrestrial in atmosphere concept of, you even said it, leaving stuff behind. But this stuff is, is coming off of the comet and has the same momentum as the comet itself.

And if there was no sun, no solar wind, then this diffuse ball would just continue along with the comet, its gravity would pull it back down onto it and that would be that. But because the solar wind is interacting with it, it’s causing a force against its motion that is pushing it away from the comet. And so when you see this tail, it’s still moving at roughly the same speed as the comet, but a little bit slower and in a little bit different direction.

And that’s why the tail starts to grow out from the comet as it gets warmer, more activity on surface, more comas produced, more of this material gets separated into the ion tail and the regular dust tail. And that’s how we see that. And then just the size of the tail will depend on how much radiation this thing has received, how close it is to the sun, and then what its composition is depending on the sublimation temperature.

All right, so that’s how we get the tail. Now, what about the color of the tail? Because that changes from comet to comet.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, and it is a function and it can change over time as different stuff gets revealed. And it’s a function of composition. And one of the mistakes that is easy to make is, oh, are aurora colors and comet colors related?

Yes and no. It is the same physics, but because it’s working in different regimes with different energies involved, we’re seeing different reactions. So we see red in comets, we see red in aurora, different causes.

The red in comets comes from either scattering off of dust, less exciting, or sometimes, very rarely, we get super lucky and there is sodium in the tail that ends up being really cool, bright, if you have the right filters and you expose long enough, red. So you can get red in the comet tail and it’s not associated with the ion tail, it’s associated more with the dust tail towards the ion tail because it’s like its mass puts it in between. I just want to go back to this mass thing again.

The reason you get a different spreading out of the dust tail is different mass particles get pushed with different efficiency. A low mass particle is going to like totally get flung out by solar light pressure. Heavier mass stuff is like, I’m just going to hang back here, you’re not going to push me quite so hard.

So it spreads out as a function of mass and then the ion tail is just like, I am small and narrow. It’s the way it works.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of amazing that the magnetic field of the plasma coming from the sun in the solar wind is grabbing those ions, locking them into place and moving them directly while the dust tail, it’s more of a transfer of momentum from the particles in the solar wind that are bonking into them as opposed to just that really tight coupling of the electromagnetic field of the magnetism.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Students are so glad I’m not teaching physics one right now because this is entirely a case of an object in motion stays in motion until acted upon by another force. And we have two forces acting on all of these things. The electromagnetic force and then we also have impulse, which is easier to solve as a transfer of momentum problem from photons.

And so the dust, the electromagnetic force, just it’s like not as big a thing, even if the dust is charged because those molecules are so big. But the bigger they are, the more light is hitting them and pressing them. But the harder it is to move it, it all balances out.

It’s an amazing set of just balance the forces and remember the inertia.

Fraser Cain: 

Right. But you would you would require like for homework for your students, you would be requiring two different sets of calculations. One is all about the impulse, while the other one is about calculating the what the magnetic moment as the.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

No, it’s the sum of the forces. So you’re taking the electromagnetic force and you’re taking the it’s the impulse from getting hit by the photons. Right.

So, yeah, you just sum the forces and you do it as a function of these things have this much a charge and this much mass. This stuff has this much charge and this much mass. And so I’d have them run the calculations for some random dust grain I pulled out of a textbook and then for a charged, probably just charged carbon atom.

Fraser Cain: 

Right. Yeah. So let’s talk about some sort of strange behaviors that we might see from comets.

So one of the things that was very interesting with Comet 3i Atlas right at the very beginning, we were super lucky that we detected it early on on its way inbound. We didn’t get that with Borisov and with Oumuamua. Right.

Astronomers were able to watch this strange anti-tail, essentially material that was making its way towards the sun. What was going on there?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So two problems. One was human language and the other was lots of dust. So what it actually had was a forward facing plume.

But because they’re so used to talking about comet tails, people are like, it has a tail facing the sun. Right. That’s not a thing, people.

So what was happening is you have this chunk of dust covered ice. The front part facing the sun is heating up in the sunlight. Dust actually helps stuff heat up because it’s dark.

So it absorbs. And if you have a grain of dust with ice behind it, and that ice gets warm, gets warm, sublimates. When it sublimates and expands, it’s going to fire the dust straight out towards the sun in this case.

So the reason there was a plume facing towards the sun is that was dust getting fired off the surface of the comet as the comet warmed up and just flung that dust straight off.

Fraser Cain: 

Right. And that’s the kind of thing that you would expect to see early on before enough light pressure has built up to really start to push that tail back away from it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Well, more than that, it was just that much dust and heating at that point.

Fraser Cain: 

Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So once you get all the dust off of it, and that’s part of what’s happening is they’re literally cleaning the surface off.

Fraser Cain: 

But, right. But all I’m saying is that, you know, in the beginning, there’s not enough light pressure coming from the sun to really produce that long tail. So instead, you get this heating on the side that’s facing.

It ejects a bunch of dust towards the sun. That’s kind of, you know, it’s got that initial velocity off of the surface of the comet. And then over time, as it gets closer and closer and closer, then the light pressure of the solar wind starts to pick up and push that stuff away into that proper tail that you, you know, that we always expect.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. There’s a one over R squared relationship for those who like math. So basically, you’re far away.

There’s less sunlight, you get closer in, there’s more sunlight per square meter. And so it’s literally the closer in you get, the more sunlight is pushing against you. So it’s two different factors.

But yeah, yeah, totally.

Fraser Cain: 

So let’s talk about how the tail is facing away from the sun. And it’s, it makes the comet look like when it’s going towards the sun, it looks like a burning fireball that’s on its way towards the sun. Yeah.

But when it’s going away from the sun, it appears as if it’s going in reverse.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So, so in general, if you look at a comet, from a top down view of its orbit relative to the sun, you can draw a line from the sun towards the comet, and its tail will arc away from the sun and towards where it came from. And what’s happening is, as it moves, sunlight, literally the pressure from the light, is pushing the material away. And as it moves, this part has now been pushed for a longer period of time, this part has been pushed for a longer period of time.

So that bit of curvature is reflecting the fact that where it was has now been pushed out. With Comet 3i Atlas, there’s actually this really neat case where over time, the tail is going to get pushed out to where Hera and Europa Clipper are now. So potentially, it’s not that the missions are going to fly through the comet tail, it’s they’re continuing their journey and the sun is pushing the comet tail past them.

Fraser Cain: 

Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And that’s awesome.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if we’re unlucky, it’ll be about 8 million kilometers away from Europa Clipper. But if we’re lucky, it might actually go right through that tail.

And Europa Clipper is equipped with the kinds of tools on board to be able to study the particles, if it can get close enough to be able to analyze them. And that is the, I mean, this is a comet that formed in another star system. This is a gift that the universe has sent to us to say, hey, study this.

And we happen to have a spacecraft that is perfectly positioned that it might actually be able to study it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And so yeah, the sun is pushy, light is pushy, magnetic fields like to move things around. All of these factors are working at different ways to move things.

Fraser Cain: 

So one of the things that’s happened, and this happened in 3i Atlas, although this happens regularly, is that the color of the comet has shifted. So you mentioned early on that it started out red and then has recently, or I guess has been brightening and also shifting more into the blue. Right.

And I think people are misunderstanding this because they’re saying, so it was a red comet in the beginning and now it’s a blue comet?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

This is just normal. So it started out shedding dust, all the dust, dust beyond to you. And then as it continued to heat up, we began to see a, I always have to look at how to say this, diatomic carbon reaction.

So what’s happening is you have C2 molecules, you hit them with one photon and they go, oh, wait, what’s going on here? You hit them with a second photon, they lose an electron. That electron wants to come back.

And when it does, it releases a green photon. So this is a really weird reaction because it requires two photons before the molecule decides, oh, green is going to happen now. So carbon molecules in the coma of the comet are getting excited.

They shine green, tail is reflecting sunlight. There’s still that ion tail, not a sodium tail that I’ve seen reported. Now, as the comet was getting close into the sun, temperature profile is changing, new things are getting revealed.

They’re reporting as it comes out from behind the sun and from spacecraft that have been able to continue seeing it. It’s above the plane of the solar system. So it is behind and above the sun and then coming back around as it continues in towards the disk of the solar system.

And it has begun to have significant green light. And that’s actually coming from copper in the comet. And copper is, again, something perfectly normal.

This is just atoms getting happy, exciting their electrons. Those electrons come back down, they release light. And in this case, the light they’re releasing is blue.

Fraser Cain: 

Right. But my understanding as well is that the, you know, when you see it from a spectroscopy perspective, you’re looking at the color that’s coming from the comet. And is the light predominantly moving into the reddish end of the spectrum and the bluish end of the spectrum?

And, you know, astronomers will do spectroscopy on an asteroid and they’ll say, this is a bluer asteroid, that is a redder asteroid. And if you look at the two asteroids, like, I can’t tell the difference. But to astronomers, it’s more about like, what colors of reflected light are coming off of this object?

And it is going to be subtly towards the blue or subtly towards the red. This is not subtle. Well, but part of this is coming from the composition of the coma.

If it’s more dust dominated, then you’re getting things that are pushing a little bit more into the red. And if it’s more gas dominated, you know, sublimated volatiles, then it’s going to be a little bit more blue.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So this is one of those topics where nothing is clean. Literally, it’s covered in dust. Nothing is clean.

So you have the black body radiation, which is a continuum of color at all the different colors. That was a stupid statement. And that will shift slightly back and forth depending on how light is getting scattered, how it’s getting reflected.

And temperatures. Then on top of it, you have emission lines. And the emission lines are like, and right here, we are now going to inject, pick something.

Sodium is something that sometimes gets picked by these, like I mentioned before, in which case you’re adding a spike of red.

Fraser Cain: 

Cyanide?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, yeah. And so these are suddenly emission lines. And in cities, we can see how like flying over a city, a city will appear super yellow because of all of the compressed sodium lights.

That is just one specific color that’s getting injected on top of all the other colors from everything else going on in the city. Well, comets have this black body, the scattered light and emission lines all adding up together to produce their colors.

Fraser Cain: 

And what does the future hold for the tail of the comet? What makes it go away in the end?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So it depends on the comet. The short term answer is as that sucker moves further and further out away from the sun, it was closest to the sun on October 30th, as it moves further and further away from the sun, it is going to cool off. All of the awesome sublimation that’s currently taking place is going to stop.

It’s going to become a smaller solid object. Now, one of the things that is interesting is the perspective we’re going to have on this. Our perspective as it moves away, it’s going to be heading almost directly out of our solar system when it’s at opposition with the Earth.

So it’s going to be moving out of the solar system. Its tail is going to be getting pushed faster than it is moving. So the nucleus is going to be flying into the tail.

And we’re going to be watching it from behind. And we’re just going to see something that’s, coma is getting smaller and smaller over time, which is a sad perspective. But also just like, this is the comet that was determined.

It was not going to give people on the Earth a really clear view of what was going on. Someone has to be at the tail end of the pretty view or terrible view end of the Gaussian distribution. We landed on the tail end, giving us the worst view possible of this particular object.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. Well, I think hopefully everyone now understands comet tails and we’re ready for that wonderful future, incredible comet that will grace the skies any day now. Right, Universe?

Thanks, Pamela

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all of our $10 and up patrons out at patreon.com slash astronomycast. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com. slash astronomycast.

This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons. Adam Anise Brown, Alexis, Andy Moore, Astro Bob, Bebop Apocalypse, Bob Zatsky, Brett Moorman, Bury Gowman, Cody Rose, Daniel Loosley, David Gates, Dizastrina, Dwight Elk, Evil Melky, Flower Guy, Galactic President Scooper Star McScoopsalot, Glenn McDavid, Greg Vylde, Helge Bjorkhag, Jarvis Earl, Jeff Wilson, Jim of Everett, John Drake, Jonathan H. Staver, Justin S., Kenneth Ryan, Kinsella Panflinco, Lee Harbourn, Marco Iorassi, Mark Steven Raznak, Matthias Hayden, Michael Wichman, Mike Hizzi, Nick Boyd, Paul D. Disney, Pauline Middleink, Randall, Robert Cordova, Sergio Sanchevier, Sergio Sansevero, Shersom, Semyon Torfason, Slug, Taz Tully, The Lonely Sandperson, Time Lord Iroh, Van Ruckman, Will Hamilton. Thank you all so very much.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. Thanks, Pamela. And we will see you next week.

Live Show

It is arguable that humanity now has the technological ability to live on Mars. It would be done at enormous expense and sacrifice, and there are some tricky problems that we haven’t solved yet. Although we could live on Mars, should we? There is a famous quote from Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” This concept is played out across the sciences, and in planetary exploration, it requires us to ask, all because we can launch humans toward Mars, should we?

Show Notes

• Framing
• Practical & environmental costs (Earth-side)
• Mission risks & human health
• Life on Mars: daily reality
• Reproduction & generational ethics
• Planetary protection & science first
• Timeframe & infrastructure argument

Transcript

[Fraser Cain]
Astronomy Cast, Episode 770, The Ethics of Living on Mars. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.

With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how you doing?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It is the most amazing fall day outside. It looks like a Hallmark special with cloudless blue skies, orange and red trees. I just want to go take photos during the golden hour, which is far too early because stupid daylight, time shifted.

[Fraser Cain]
Winter might have been cancelled here. Really? All of my fruit trees still have all of their leaves, still putting on new growth.

It is into November now. Yeah, they have not gotten the message. It has been surprisingly warm, but eventually I’m sure it’ll cool down.

Now I got a new piece of kit, new piece of gear, which I just want to talk about.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
You did? What did you get?

[Fraser Cain]
I got a eight-inch Dobsonian telescope.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Those are the bestest.

[Fraser Cain]
I know, they are the bestest. So I was talking to a patron actually. They were telling me how they were on Facebook Marketplace and they bought a telescope for reasonably inexpensive.

I was like, oh, I should see what prices are like for Facebook Marketplace for telescopes. Just get a sense of the lay of the land out there. Boom, there’s a Skywatcher eight-inch Dobsonian telescope, which is like the perfect telescope.

It is not too small and it’s also not too big. The price was really reasonable, about less than half, maybe a third price of what you pay if you bought it new and shipping and taxes and all that kind of stuff. I was like, yeah, okay, I got to do this.

So I reached out to the seller and bought the telescope and brought it home. And of course we’ve had clouds. I got one quick look at the moon and where you go blind in one eye because it’s so bright.

And I was able to look at Andromeda and I was able to look at the double cluster in Perseus. And so a few things quickly before the clouds have set in, but what a great telescope. So just a reminder, every now and then if you’ve got sort of a telescope on your mind, just check and see what’s going on at Facebook Marketplace and see if someone is selling your dream telescope.

And so now I feel like with the Seastar and the Dobsonian, I have the perfect pair. I can look at Saturn and it’ll look glorious and I can see the bands across Jupiter and the moons, or I can take long exposure images of various nebulae and so on and so forth. So I think that’s the perfect pair now, Dobsonian with one of these new automated telescopes.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
That is excellent.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. So it is arguable that humanity now has the technological ability to live on Mars. It would be done at enormous expense and sacrifice. And there are some tricky problems that we haven’t solved yet, although we could live on Mars.

Should we? All right, Pamela. So this is interesting because I think if there was one aspect of space exploration, of astronomy, of just like my entire career journey, my entire existence as a human being, something that I have evolved my thinking on more than almost any other aspect is human space exploration.

And my guess is that you have as well.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
So let’s kind of like go back historically and think about sort of where we were, maybe even before we started AstronomyCast, like where were you with your sort of like becoming interested and excited in human space exploration and humanity living off planet?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So the X-Prizes that it was the Ansari X-Prize back when we were starting the show was looking to start the commercial space race with we’re going to accomplish multiple launches in a very short period of time. And this is going to start proving that it doesn’t have to be governments taking me to space. And my take was NASA has so few resources that we need to leverage NASA and governmental funds to do science, to send out the probes, to send out the rovers and the explorers and to not keep doing human exploration, but to leverage human beings as thumbs that can build things and fix things in space.

And I was like, we’ll just leave it to the commercial space agencies to go and take humans on the next step. Like the West Indian Trading Company took merchants on the next step once the government funded voyage of Columbus had found the new world. What I failed to think through in my ignorance was the trading companies led to all sorts of terrible working conditions, led to lots of pillaging of the ecosystem.

And I didn’t necessarily advance civilization. And I fear I was naive in what I thought. I foresaw commercial spaces like ecotourism, and it is absolutely not going to be that.

[Fraser Cain]
So for me, I was, you know, like, I think I grew up on a diet of science fiction. And so just a mainstay of science fiction is that humans are going to live on other planets, that this is just what we’re going to do. When you read the Pine Lines, you read all of the original science fiction books, they talk about humanity being across the solar system.

And it really kind of solidified for me, I read Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, not necessarily in that order. And that, you know, this was like the practical nitty gritty reality of living on Mars and humanity setting up its existence on Mars. And then that coincided with The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin.

And then also, I was reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. And together, those sort of books made this really compelling case that humanity actually has the technological capability now to live on Mars, we could do it, it’ll only cost about $10 billion. But with a live off the land approach, let’s get cracking.

And I was so inspired that I actually started Universe Today, that I wanted to play a part in sort of cataloging humanities, sort of moving out into space and participating in this dream. And it felt inevitable, and it felt right, and it felt like the right thing to do. And there was a lot of people who would argue with me and go like, it’s crazy, let’s just send robots to Mars.

That’s ridiculous. We don’t need to send humans. I’m like, yeah, but that’s not the point.

The point is not about the science. The point is about us living on another world, that this is our future, that we can explore out into the cosmos. And it starts with us living on Mars.

Once we lived on Mars, then we’ll be living on the cloud tops of Venus and the moon base and asteroids. And we will do asteroid mining, and we will eventually begin to move out to other star systems and so on and so forth, right? And then reality, just day after day after day of reporting, of sort of cataloging what has happened just in our reality compared to what the fantasy was, has brought me deeply back down to Earth, literally.

And now I kind of have this totally different perspective on sort of Mars exploration, both sort of the practical reasons why we may or may not want to do it. And then I think the core of what you’re saying is there’s a lot of ethical issues here that we haven’t even resolved and may never be able to resolve if this is the thing that we are set on doing. So, you know, I mean, obviously there are technical issues that need to be overcome in terms of the gravity, the radiation, the lack of atmosphere, the poison in the soil.

You know, the list goes on and on and on. The distance communication, the lack of resources available to the people living there, so on and so forth. So, you know, we’re approaching this now from a not can we, because I think, you know, I think we can both make the case that we can.

If we really want to have humans be on Mars and we’re willing to expend a lot of resources, we could pull this off.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And they’re willing to accept the high doses of radiation that they’re going to be. Oh, yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
Well, this comes to the ethical issue, right? So we’ll get into that. I mean, I think, you know, if we’re willing to spend hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars a year from the Earth’s economy, we could make some existence on Mars happen.

If the people who go will be experiencing high degrees of radiation, maybe that’s a personal choice. And then there are issues with future generations who might be born and try to live on Mars. So let’s kind of break down the ethical issues bit by bit by bit.

And I’m going to start with Earth, because I think that’s where this all starts, is that I think most people vastly underestimate what this is going to cost and what sacrifice planet Earth is going to need to make to have even just a handful of people live on Mars.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And I have to admit that last week I had a, oh, oh, no moment of doing back of the envelope calculations that turned into spreadsheet calculations. I noticed in the past couple of Starship launches that they talked about wanting to do up to 10 launches a day, that they were planning to produce a Starship every eight hours. And I was like, that is all ludicrous.

But I didn’t pay any real attention to it because SpaceX has lots of things and you wait for them to actually do it.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And sometimes things actually happen.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Right. And then what got me was I saw someone post a picture of that jellyfish light pattern that appears in the sky when Starship is firing its engines. And underneath it was a clearly happy and cheerful and excited post along the lines of, just imagine when the sky is full of this happening every few minutes during the Mars windows.

And I was like, wait, what?

[Fraser Cain]
Wait, no, thank you.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And so I took a step back and I went to the SpaceX website and I was like, what are they planning here? And their plan is to launch literally thousands of Starships across multiple two month long launch windows to Mars. And if you do the back of the envelope math on 1,000 launches per two month window, for each of those windows, you have to do 25 launches per day to cover the, and the assumption I’m making is for each one Starship that goes to Mars, there is 19 Starships that’s needed to refuel it.

That is actually a completely middle of the estimation. There are people who have much higher estimations, a few people have lower estimations. So that’s just middle of the road.

So if you assume just to refuel each of the 1,000 that is departing, it’s 25 launches per day.

[Fraser Cain]
That’s 25,000 launches.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So you have 25 launches a day. This gets the eight Starships produced per day is what’s actually needed. The steel needed for only the 1,000 that go to Mars is a 10th of a percent of all US steel production, which doesn’t sound like a lot.

It’s a lot. But you’re taking what is a completely recyclable material and just sending it all to Mars. Sure.

Sure. And then on top of that, you have to have the cargo launches and you have to have the crew launches. So those are still in addition to the 25 per day, eight per hour that are getting produced.

And that is a number of launches that current research says our atmosphere cannot sustain.

[Fraser Cain]
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think like you’re taking them at their word and saying, yeah, what would it be if they did launch 1,000 per Mars window that they were planning on setting up a city of a million people on Mars. But even if you don’t take them at that point, like if you go the other end of the spectrum and say, what is the minimum viable resources required to have a colony on Mars that is permanently inhabited? Like maybe it’s a few hundred people.

Like maybe you’re looking at something like a McMurdo station in Antarctica, maybe 1,000 people. I mean, that costs hundreds of millions of dollars to sustain. And that’s here on planet earth.

You’re looking at tens of billions, if not trillions of dollars a year to sustain this. And that is money that could be spent on the economy in other ways. So as you said, you’re sending steel, you’re sending material, and those are relatively low.

Now, people are going to make the argument, well, the price is going to come down. Well, prove it. Right now, the cost to land a payload on the surface of the moon and not even bring it back is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which is significantly cheaper than it used to be.

And then the Chinese are bringing missions back and they’re in the whatever low billions, hundreds of millions to bring stuff back from the moon. But to go to Mars is sort of next level. Right now, we’re looking at tens of millions of dollars per kilogram to land payloads onto the surface of Mars.

So we do not have the technology currently to deploy that stuff to the surface of Mars. And so right now, if you actually want to live up to that dream, you’re going to have to contribute a huge chunk of Earth’s resources to this process.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So while also being destructive to the environment, it’s both sides. Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
While being destructive to the planet. Yes. Yeah.

And a bunch of those starships are going to burn up when they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. They’re going to contribute. It’s like a new worry that we actually didn’t even talk about or we didn’t even know about.

Now, it looks like there’s a high degree of catalytic metals that are being deposited in the Earth’s atmosphere that contribute to atmospheric chemistry and might actually, and that although, you know, we’re getting 100 tons of material from space, we’re producing, we’re putting a lot more of a very specific kind of metal into the atmosphere that is potentially harmful to the ozone layer. So exactly. So we are going to, if we try to live up to the dream, we are going to do, we’re going to have to sort of lose our economy to a certain extent and do damage to our natural environment to make this possible.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
Right. And, and, and, and what we get from it is nothing. Right.

Except for some science and knowing that there are people now living on Mars, right? There’s no economy. There’s no value that has returned to Earth for this expense.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And it’s like data centers. It’s something that takes up a whole lot of resources without producing a whole lot of jobs. And the, the trade off between allowing people to improve their own state of life versus the notch down, it takes the entire world there.

There’s no way I’ve been able to find to balance those two, especially when you start factoring in, we’re talking about using methane fuels.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. So let’s now talk about the journey. And, you know, you brought this up a bit that, that you’re going to spend nine months just getting to Mars and you’re going to be in a radiation environment that is hundreds of times more damaging than what you experience just on a normal day, living down here on the surface of the earth, protected by the atmosphere and the magnetosphere.

You know, what are the implications of that?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The most concerning one is we know that being in outer space affects vision. It’s a combination of zero G does bad things to eyeballs. And just like taking a high energy ray to a CCD can blow out a pixel, constant radiation exposure to your eyeballs will ruin your eyeballs.

[Fraser Cain]
But that, I mean, just, I mean, radiation, the eyeballs is one thing, but you’re getting radiation over your whole body.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Right. But, but at a certain level, having a bunch of blind people on Mars trying to set up a colony, it seems like a really bad idea. So I’m just going to baseline it at let’s not disable people and then ask them to do the hardest thing possible.

[Fraser Cain]
Sure, sure. But I, I mean, yeah, if there’s a catastrophic, like if this is a really bad solar storm, they’re dead.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
They’re all dead. Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. You’ve got a crew, you got a hundred people on board, bad solar storm. And it would, you know, if it moved in the direction of Mars, it would take out all thousands of starships.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The flare that went off, I think it was either yesterday or the day before would have been catastrophic. And the issue is these are vehicles that I, we’re not real great at, at protecting all of our electronics. And, and so we do have to harden things, but how are you going to harden that many electronics without something going wrong at some point?

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The human body, you can’t just encase it in a Faraday cage.

[Fraser Cain]
Right.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And, and so it’s, it’s just layer upon layer of ways that things can go wrong and then factor in that we don’t have a clear understanding of what happens to Mars environment in high radiation.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. We’re going to get, we’ll get to that in a second, like just the journey there. I mean, the very worst case scenario is there’s a catastrophic solar storm.

Like we’ve seen these happen every couple of years and it takes out the entire fleet that everybody, like literally everybody dies.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yes.

[Fraser Cain]
Right. Because, because everybody experiences a high radiation load.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
That is not the worst case. The worst case is everyone, but one person dies.

[Fraser Cain]
Maybe. So, so, but, but so now then there is the kind of the inevitable stuff. As you said, there’s issues with the vision.

There’s just an increased radiation load. Like everybody is going to be getting a lifetime’s worth of radiation in a few months and that’s going to increase their chances of getting cancer. Cancer is going to be a very common.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Leukemia.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Leukemia. These are going to be thyroid cancer.

These can be very common events on Mars that a much higher percentage of the population on Mars is going to come down with all these different diseases. And then there, and then whatever are the long term downsides of being in microgravity, you know, I think we, we know mostly and know how to deal with many of them. Like they’re going to be working out all the time to prepare themselves.

They’re going to probably have vision problems. Some percentage of people have vision problems downstream. They’ll wear glasses.

They’ll, you know, they’ll, they’ll, you know, so like these, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that we kind of know issues with your brain issues with some of your internal organs, liver, kidney. These are, these are changes in deep space memory. You know, we’ve never put people in deep space for longer than one week.

Right. Right. All of the longterm space exploration by humans so far has been under the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Only the Apollo missions have sent humans out beyond the magnetosphere and watch what happened to them. We just, we have not performed this experiment. We’ve not gathered enough data. Okay. So now people are landing on Mars and obviously some percentage of these starships are going to fail and they’re going to crash onto Mars. So that would be bad. A hundred people per starship that is fails its landing.

But then let’s, you know, let’s talk about the people that survive. You’ve got, you’ve got a Mars and this is their home. Now this is where they live.

Yes. What are the ethical issues for this now?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So, so you, you have three big things you have to worry about. One is people tend to be greedy and lazy. And how do you select a crew that is made up of people who won’t at some point decide, yeah, I’m just done.

[Fraser Cain]
And well, I mean, in theory, like basically it says there’s going to be return flights possible. So if you say you’re done, you hop in your return spaceship and you come home.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Okay.

[Fraser Cain]
And if you’re a bad person, they, they vote you off the Island. They put you in a starship and they send you home.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Like, I think that feels like, you know, I, I, I keep thinking back to the rules of the high seas, where if you didn’t do what was necessary, you were sent down the gangplank.

[Fraser Cain]
Sure. Yeah. If you’re a very bad person, they’d throw you overboard.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So, so you’re looking to put together a society of people who are in many cases, not going to fully comprehend how shockingly difficult it’s going to be, how shockingly unhealthy everyone is going to end up being. And the amount of never ending work is something we saw playing Oregon Trail growing up. If you are of the right age and you witnessed the dying of dysentery, but even the people on, on the Oregon Trail got to pause on Sunday and there’s no resting when you’re in an environment that’s trying to kill you constantly.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. I have a couple of kind of anecdotes on this. One is talking with astronauts about their life on the International Space Station and how much they have to work.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
That, that they have to spend many hours every day just maintaining their strength and their, their cardiovascular system. They, they run nonstop and they lift weights. And I think they do two to three hours of exercise every single day.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. And it’s a lot of elastic more than weights just because elastic is, is easier.

[Fraser Cain]
I mean, they have a weight machine. They literally have this sort of cool Smith, Smith machine they can, they can lift with. And then they spend hours maintaining the, the equipment that’s keeping them alive.

And then they perform a bunch of science experiments. And then if they’re lucky, they have a few minutes of personal time before they collapse and they begin the whole process all over again. And they know they’ve got a nine month, six month trip in space that, you know, they’re there for a reason.

They get it done. They come back home, but the people going to Mars, this is their whole life forever. Yeah.

Yeah. And then the other thing is this TV show called Alone, which is often filmed here on Vancouver Island where I live, which, you know, was recently voted as one of the best islands in the world. And, and they’re there in November when it’s kind of hard to, to find food and they’re alone by themselves trying to take care of themselves.

And they all go crazy. They all get sad, lonely, and they want nothing more than to return home. But when you’re on Mars, even if that starship is waiting, you’re looking at six months or so, whatever, before you can actually make that return journey.

So I think all the comforts of home, it’s exciting. They’re all excited in the beginning and then the reality sets in and they’re all really sad and wish they could, they could come home. And so there’s like this, just this cognitive load.

But I think, you know, one of the bigger issues that we’re not even dealing with is, yet, is what if they want to have kids?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. And, and so there’s two sides to that. One is we don’t know what additional biological issues there’s going to be because there is increasing evidence that once upon a time, long, long ago, Mars might’ve had microbial life.

We don’t know what it’s chemistry. We don’t know what it’s former biology. We don’t know what any of that will do in terms of influencing things like plant growth, anything like that.

This, this is an entirely new environment where for all we know, the specific chemistry that exists on Mars causes new kinds of birth defects that we don’t know about because that specific chemistry isn’t something that even in the most industrially polluted places people get attached to. Then add onto that, we already know that things don’t form right in lower gravity, in microgravity, in orbit on the international space station. They’ve had issues with embryos not forming skin and that will live rent-free in my brain with me forever.

That was an episode we did years ago, still lives rent-free in my brain.

[Fraser Cain]
Yes. And still nobody has done the next experiments.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Because it’s too scary and ethically wrong.

[Fraser Cain]
I know, but nobody’s done like, let’s set up a centrifuge and let’s see what happens in one sixth gravity. And let’s see what happens in simulated Mars gravity. Like we have literally no idea, none about what’s going to happen to human gestation in Mars gravity.

Might be fine, might be no skin.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And the problem with saying, oh, we’ll just mandate they don’t have children is human beings don’t work like that generally. And life finds a way. I mean, a lot of this goes back to a different Jurassic Park quote.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should is another Ian, the Jeff Goldblum character.

[Fraser Cain]
The chaos mathematician. I mean, I think if you knew that there was a 100% chance that any child born on Mars would have such serious health issues that they would be non-viable or would live in pain and torment for their life, for their short lives, you would make it impossible. Everyone would have to be sterilized, I guess, going to Mars.

Like that’s crazy. Um, and if it was perfectly safe, then you would be like, okay, well, this is a problem, but the, but the problem is that we don’t know the answer to this question. Nobody has performed these experiments.

Nobody has, has taken mammals through gestation in various simulated versions of gravity. These are tests that need to be done. And we don’t know the answer to these questions.

And then the next issue is sort of like what life would be like. Now, we’re sort of giving this Mark Watney-esque from The Martian constant striving for basic survival. You’re probably living underground because you can’t be out on the surface to get more of that dose of the radiation.

You’ve already had a lifetime’s worth of radiation, so you’re going to spend every moment thinking about the time you spend outside. Probably you can’t grow food out in the open, even under a greenhouse.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It’s going to be moon is a harsh mistress style life where you’re underground in tubes. Your only source of light is artificial. Your only plants are grown in some sort of inside growing system.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. That’s your life. And so you sort of go back to that alone idea like you’re living underground.

You can’t go outside.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
If you’re someone with seasonal affective disorder, not for you. Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
You feed the algae bioreactor and you eat the slop that comes out. Yeah. So that is very tough.

Now, maybe people are going to think that this sounds like a great idea and maybe they’re going to want to do it. I don’t know. People have been able to weather hardships in exploration on Earth before, but often there’s another side to that.

It’s a tunnel and you get to come out the other side where now you’re living on a tropical paradise and you’re able to survive.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And this is where there’s so many post-apocalyptic sci-fi shows. Silo is one that I believe is on Apple TV that is the world has self-destroyed itself and everyone is living in underground silos where they have to completely match birth and death. And you see similar things in Fallout and all these different post-apocalyptic.

This would be that future without needing the apocalypse. You have chosen this future.

[Fraser Cain]
Yes. Self-inflicted sort of apocalypse.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And there’s another ethical side. Do we do this before the scientists have figured out all the things that we need to figure out before we pollute it with our own biology? Is there life on Mars?

Is there a fossil record we need to explore? I’m reminded of all the places that require a paleontologist and or an archaeologist to be on site during big digs to make sure that history isn’t destroyed. And do you see any of the commercial agencies planning that kind of, let’s make sure no fossil is destroyed?

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a situation where finding life on Mars would be one of the most dramatic discoveries in human history.

And it would tell us a tremendous amount about how common life is in the universe, how it evolved separately, or if they’re related. And yet if we go without really thinking about our impact on the environment there, then we’re just going to release various kinds of bacteria into the environment that is going to attempt to colonize those places. Like, what do you know?

You dig down and you find water bears, right? Thanks for the trip. Thanks for the new environment.

So that is another issue that we may lose track of the life, the life that was there before humanity arrived. And that is a, you know, it feels like it’s kind of an inevitability. But it would be nice to have a chance to do lots of science before we bring the earth life.

And then, of course, people are thinking about if we can terraform it, right? That takes it to the next level. You’re turning this planet that was, you know, if it does have life, has this sort of set environment and you’re turning it into something completely different for us.

Yeah. And then a lot of people are like, I don’t care, whatever.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I want to be able to answer all the questions before I destroy the data.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. At the very least, let’s get the science done before we destroy the data. So I think, you know, there’s like a certain percentage of people who are going to go like, I never want to listen to Astronomy Cast again.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It’s true. It’s true.

[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Which is fine, you know? And so for those of you who are like on the fence and they’re like, oh, I really hate what Fraser and Pamela are saying, I want to throw you a bone, which is that for me, and I don’t know about you, Pamela, but for me, this is not about whether or not we will or should colonize other worlds.

I think we should. And I think that we will. The issue is the timeframe.

The issue is where we are today on the technological curve towards this being a thing that we can do ethically and safely. And, you know, the analogy that I always use is, you look at a place like Phoenix, there’s whatever, 5, 3 million, 5 million people living in Phoenix in an environment that was never meant to support that many human beings. But we have infrastructure.

We have technology. We have highways. We have electrical grids.

We have air conditioning systems. We have transportation networks. Like we have, we have made it so that living in a place like Phoenix is eminently doable with our, with our level of technology.

We need that infrastructure. We need a way to safe. We need a way to safely transport people into space.

We need a way to safely transfer people through space to another world. We need to be able to make sure we can land on that other world. We need to be able to know the answer to the question of low gravity.

We need to be able to combat and stop radiation from space. We need to be able to manufacture resources that are required locally at scale. We need to be able to have new technologies that handle the temperature, the lack of atmosphere, the perchlorates in the soil, all of this kind of stuff.

It is infrastructure that we’ve not built yet. And that, that it, and so it’s not about whether or not this is going to happen for me. This is about when this is going to happen.

And I think a lot of people are getting very frustrated and angry that this isn’t happening tomorrow. And yet this humanity, as we continue to progress, we will inevitably reach this place where these are things that we do easily. We’re like, oh yeah, of course.

Hey, let’s just set up a city on Mars because that’s easy for us to do. We’ve got the, all the infrastructure. Let’s just do it.

And maybe we’re like, yeah, it sounds like a great idea. No problem. Right.

But we’re not there yet. And we get there by building infrastructure, developing our technology, understanding biology, understanding how, how, how close ecosystems work here on earth and in space as we live longer, close to earth, live on the moon, practice our techniques. Near earth asteroids.

Near earth asteroids, develop all of that infrastructure that then living on a place like Mars will be just the natural outcome of that. So I still believe that we will eventually live on Mars. I just think it’s going to happen in a few hundred years later than, than, you know, others who are a lot more enthusiastic to.

And that’s where I think my position has changed from the guy who was so excited about the case for Mars has now sort of tuned my enthusiasm to a more realistic timeframe.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I really want to see fossil hunting on Mars with high mass laboratories being possible, but I don’t care if there’s a human settlement tied to it. I just want to know if there’s actually fossils there. That’s what I want to know.

[Fraser Cain]
Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Like we have all these scientific questions we’d love to know the answer to. And you know, people say, oh, should we live on Mars? I always have to distinguish like, should we have a research station on Mars?

Absolutely. Right away. Tomorrow.

Let’s get going on that. Should we have people living on the moon? A research station on the moon?

Yes, absolutely. Tomorrow. Let’s get going.

Should we have people like live and grow and, and, and live their whole lives on Mars only when it’s feasible and we won’t know until it’s feasible.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]
All right. So hopefully that, yeah. So, so now we just, you may disagree with me, not you, Pamela, but you, the audience.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yes.

[Fraser Cain]
You, the audience may disagree with me and that’s fine. But I, I hope that we can have an argument about timeframe and not about, you know, we’re not having an argument about whether or not it’ll happen and should happen. It’s about when it’s going to happen.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. Thanks Pamela. Thank you, Fraser.

And thank you so much to all of the folks out there on Patreon. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomy cast. This week.

We’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons, Abraham Cattrell, Alex Rain, Andrew Stevenson, Arno DeGroot, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Mueller, Bresnik, Bruce Amazine, Claudia Mastriani, Dale Alexander, David Bogarty, Diane Philippon, Dr. Jeff Collins, Iran Zegev, Felix Gut, Frodo Tanenbaugh, Glenn Phelps, Greg Davis, Hannah Tackery, Janelle, Jeanette Wink, Jim Schooler, Joe Holstein, John Thays, Justin Proctor, Katie and Ulyssa, Christian Golding, Laura Kettleson, Lana Spencer, Mark Schneidler, Matthew Horstman, Michael Purcell, Mike Dog, Nate Detweiler, Papa Hot Dog, Paul L. Hayden, Philip Walker, Robby the Dog with the Dot, Reuben McCarthy, Sandra Stanz, Scott Briggs, Zege Kemmler, Stephen Miller, The Brain, Tim Girish, Tushar Nakini, Will Feld, and Zero Chill. Thank you all so very much.

And we have, as of tomorrow, I think, for AstronomyCast, access to quips and all the new Patreon features. So check it out. You have to install Patreon on your mobile device, though.

[Fraser Cain]
All right. Thanks, everyone. And we will see you next week.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Bye-bye, everyone.

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