Astronomy Cast
#796: Oceans & Organics on Mars
Mars is cold & dry today, but the evidence is growing that it used to be warmer & wetter. with seas & oceans that covered large parts of its surface. With the additional findings of the chemicals for life, the search for life on Mars is getting pretty interesting! New results from Perseverance and Curiosity describe a past Mars with complex chemistry and water. But did it have life?
Show Notes- The search for life on Mars
- Viking mission and its lasting impact on Mars exploration
- Evidence that Mars was once warmer, wetter, and potentially habitable
- Discovery of ancient rivers, lakes, shorelines, and possible oceans
- Confirmation of water ice by the Phoenix mission
- Curiosity rover's detection of organic molecules
- Perseverance rover's search for biosignatures and ancient habitability
- Bright Angel Formation and promising organic discoveries
- InSight's contributions to understanding Mars' interior
- Growing evidence for long-lived liquid water on Mars
- Why Mars Sample Return is essential for confirming past life
- Perseverance's cached samples and retrieval plans
- The delayed Rosalind Franklin rover mission
- Tianwen discoveries of ancient Martian shorelines
- Sample return missions as the next revolution in planetary science
- Could Mars preserve evidence of ancient microbial life?
- Future prospects for robotic and human exploration of Mars
Fraser Cain:
It's the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, coming in 3, 2, 1. Astronomy Cast, Episode 796, Oceans and Organics 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, Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of Cosmic West. Hey Pamela, how you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I am experiencing levels of spring that are unlike your levels of spring, but my weeds are taller than I am in some of my flower beds. Oh my goodness, things are growing like never before. And you have them trying to breed in your nose, from what I understand.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, so I returned from a trip in Japan to a wall of histamines. You know, all of the plant matter had been waiting for me to return. And so it's literally the moment I got off the plane in our home city, the allergies came roaring in.
And I am a Claretonian, and still, I know you can probably hear a little gloopiness in my voice. So I will do the best that I can to minimize it, and you know, our editors will clean up the dad sounds. But yeah, man, it is gorgeous.
You leave your garden for two weeks, you come back, and it has been busy and it's surprising and it's wonderful to see all of the changes. And no deer got in, which is great. So I get to see what trees look like when they're actually allowed to grow as opposed to savaged by brutal, cruel deer.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I have one hilarious green bean plant. They're growing up strings. And I have cages around the bottom.
And then the cage only goes up so high. And there is this naked section on the vines that is the part the groundhog could reach over the cage. So leaf, leaf, leaf, naked, leaves.
It's glorious and excellent. And the groundhog survived getting picked up by my dog and carried off.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. If you don't garden, why not?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It's the best.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, you know, some people don't have a room to garden, but even if you have like a little balcony, get gardening.
All right. Mars is cold and dry today, but the evidence is growing that it used to be warmer and wetter with seas and oceans that covered large parts of its surface. With the additional findings of the chemicals for life, the search for life on Mars is getting pretty interesting.
All right. So I want to talk first about like setting the scene, which was the dead end that the Viking mission got us to in the search for life on Mars. Can you tell this story?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So the Viking mission had three different experiments on board that were designed to try and identify, is there life here? Both by looking to see what chemicals were getting metabolized, how the air in the container was getting metabolized, and by looking at the organics. And they realized that one of the experiments, they had not taken into consideration the reality of Mars, and it was utterly inconclusive.
Fraser Cain:
The worst kind of conclusive.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes. One of the experiments was like, there is life. And then everyone's like, no, no, no, no, this must have a different explanation.
And then the third one was like, I got nothing. So we have yes, no. And did we take into consideration everything we should have?
And this has led to squabbling that persists to this day, to this day, right now, as we are recording this, the National Academy of Science, there is a two day meeting going on, on astrobiology and signs of life, where they were discussing these experiments this morning. So literally to this day, on this day, this is getting discussed. And so the thinking was, some people were like, yes, there is present day microbial life on Mars, and they will go to their graves arguing even for lichens.
And then the majority of the field, which is honestly over it with all of the people claiming aliens is like, no, Viking did not prove anything, it did not prove anything. And so from the 1970s until the early 2000s, everyone was like, no, Mars is dry, Mars has never had water, we're going to explain the canyons, we're going to explain everything that looks like fluid flow, as aeolian processes, which means wind, it is the coolest word. And not fluvial processes, which means water, less cool of a word.
And then we started landing landers again.
Fraser Cain:
But I think the, I mean, more than just landing landers, there were orbiters, there were images from the, from orbit, that told a story that was really hard to explain by wind patterns alone, that you're seeing craters, where rivers are flowing into them, and rivers are flowing out of them, you are seeing features that can really only be explained by moving water. And, and, and that I think, so then, they sort of, you know, the way they described is they went back to the beginning, they ripped up the foundation, went back to first principles and said, okay, let's just start by telling the story of this, of Mars. Let's just like, was there ever liquid water on Mars?
And if we can get to there, then was there liquid water on Mars for a long time? And if we can get there, then were there organics on Mars? And then are there any indications that there is or was ever life on Mars?
Like it was like, we are going to no longer make this argument inconclusive.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this was the follow the water plan. And so in 2003, we had a new orbiter arrive that started delivering high res images. And we started getting neutron measurements indicative of frozen water.
And what was really interesting was the 2003 Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference, the headliners were all alien processes, it's wind. And at the end of the session, which is usually when people's brains are dead and they're no longer taking notes, was when you'd hear the, but Fluvial explains this better. Let me count the ways.
And then a couple of years later, we finally had Spirit and Opportunity get to the surface. And as Spirit and Opportunity climbed around, looking at the landscape, we were finding things like these cracked mud landscapes that I listened to the words I just used to describe it, cracked mud.
Fraser Cain:
Cracked mud, yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And suddenly, the language that was headlining changed to water processes.
Fraser Cain:
And so you're still sort of living in this, this seems to indicate cracked mud, this appears to indicate water, but then you're seeing things like the famous blueberries, concretions. So you talked about cracked mud. Yeah.
And that was just one. I mean, there were a lot of smoking gun evidence. And I think one of the ones that was most exciting people are probably very familiar with were these spherules or these Martian blueberries.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So these were actually discovered by the Opportunity rover. Again, part of that Spirit and Opportunity pair of rovers. And these were the kind of small minerals that we really only expect to be formed in water.
And it got people thinking, okay, so how do we need to rewrite the history of Mars to make sense of this? And the revolution started there. And Spirit and Opportunity had a lot of really good equipment.
They had their stereoscopic vision, they had arms, they could drill a bit. They had some spectral capacity, but they didn't have that dig deep and they didn't have the power necessary.
Fraser Cain:
All right. So Spirit Opportunity said, okay, yes, there appear to be geological traces that water was acting here on the surface of Mars. But it was you could have had a deluge and then it was over one rain four billion years ago and then it was over and then the world was dry forevermore.
And that is not conducive to life. So NASA said, okay, let's build up the picture. How long was water present on the surface of Mars?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this is where we saw a trio of missions that started with Mars Phoenix, which was launched in 2007, landed in 2008. And its sole raison d'etre was to identify water. Flat out, is there water ice?
It went to a polar region. It had a scoop. It had an amazing social media campaign and it landed on the surface.
It went scrapey scrapey. It revealed white stuff and the white stuff sublimated exactly the way water ice should sublimate. There it was.
Fraser Cain:
Right. And you look at Mars in a telescope, you see the polar ice caps like there is water ice. But it is hard as a rock ice at the poles.
Question is, is it mixing with the regolith at more southern latitudes?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It was 68 degrees north.
Fraser Cain:
Right. So you're seeing that water ice is blended in to the regolith just below the surface in the one spot that Phoenix landed. And so it must be in other places as well.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this was where we also saw discussions start to arise about the dark stripes that were getting seen. Is that water? Is there brine beneath the surface?
So all of that was coming out. And this led to funding of Curiosity rover and InSight lander. InSight went with a seismograph looking to see if Mars was still geologically active.
It went with equipment to drill that failed spectacularly and was the most amazing we're going to problem solve this ever. InSight is amazing. And then Curiosity was sent with a radiothermal generator, which is a lump of nuclear materials that as it decays, generates heat, generates power.
So with its radiothermal generator, it had more power to be able to do more science. And it also carried with it a sample analysis ability that we had never had before. So the sample analysis at Mars SAM, located in Curiosity's belly, had the ability to take samples and twice, which is not a lot, but it had to carry chemicals with it to drop on the samples it scooped up.
So the samples that it scooped up, the chemical it dropped on allowed it to break apart organics to see what are these complex molecules made of. The first paper to come from this just came out. They did a sample at Mary Anning.
This is the name of the rock. It's named after the woman in Dover that the seashells, seashells, seashells. Yeah.
That tongue twister that I am incapable of saying is actually because of her. She collected fossils and sold them to take care of her family.
Fraser Cain:
She sold seashells by the seashore.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And she was also like the first citizen science, but also became a leading paleontologist. Awesome story. Go read it.
They named this rock after her. That's awesome. And they found 20 organics that had never previously been seen on Mars in the broken up much bigger molecules.
And so this is one of the amazing wet chemistry labs that they're able to do with Curiosity. And Curiosity's early successes led to the launch of Perseverance rover, which is in Jezero crater. So Gale crater is clearly a former lake.
It has Mount Sharp, which is the central peak of the crater. It has been climbing Mount Sharp, looking at organics at different places as it goes. Jezero crater is another previously filled with water crater, but its wall collapsed, creating this amazing river delta.
And while crossing the river, it came across, it's called Sapphire Canyon where this river about Perseverance. So Percy over in Jezero crater had been going through Sapphire Canyon where this river used to flow and came across what they've named the Bright Angel Formation. And this was about a year ago.
And with all the capabilities that this little rover has, they poked and prodded this rock and the organics they're finding are completely consistent with a biosignature. Now they can't say for certain that there was life on Mars. They don't have the capacity.
Percy did its best. It could only get us so far. We need to do a sample return.
We have canceled our sample return. We hate everything right now.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. All right. So just to sort of recap the story so far, right?
The purpose of Curiosity was to say, was there water acting on the surface of Mars for a long period of time? And in the crater that it landed in, climbing the flanks of Mount Sharp, it found ample evidence that this place was not only wet once, but it was wet for a long time that the rains fell, the crater filled, that this was a lake. Yeah.
And that water was doing water stuff for a very long time. Curiosity kind of nailed that. So then you move on to that next step and you say, okay, then were the conditions habitable for life for a long period of time?
And this was the purpose of Perseverance. And so in addition to it confirming that Jezero crater had water acting on it for long periods of time, it also found that the conditions were... The stuff of life.
It found the stuff of life, that the conditions were reasonable, that if we dropped Earth life down, it would stand a good chance of surviving in this environment. And then, as you said, found some really exciting, and this is fairly fresh stuff. I mean, we're talking within the last year here from an exploration mission that has been in this new phase since Spirit and Opportunity.
I mean, we are 20 years into Let's Find Life on Mars V2. And we are now getting to the point where there is a rock. There are chemicals in that rock, which we'll talk about in a little more detail here, that the scientists have said, we've tried to explain it in every non-life way that we can.
And we have come out, we've run out of ideas. Someone, please explain this rock.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right.
Fraser Cain:
Now, obviously, other astrobiologists are saying, hold my beer.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Right? I got plenty of explanations.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
But that's the thing is they said, hold my beer. And they said, give me my beer back. I got nothing.
Fraser Cain:
Hold my beer. No, I'm getting my beer back. Okay, one more time.
No, wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think you're exactly right, which is that we are now, we have gone as far as...
I mean, obviously, we can get farther. I mean, if we saw a fossil, right? If we saw a stromatolite, if we saw something really exciting.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
But they've seen things that look exactly like stromatolites.
Fraser Cain:
I know, I know, I know, I know. But if we did see a Mars bunny run by, then that would be more evidence, right? But now we need that sample returned because there is only so much lab equipment you can pile into these rovers.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
We need to bring these things home.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And Rosalind Franklin just doesn't have it. It's... Rosalind Franklin rover is several-year-old technology because this poor rover got cursed by the Russian-Ukrainian war and losing its launch vehicle and a bunch of other stuff.
The US has canceled all NASA-funded missions to Mars in lieu of commercial missions to the moon. And we have these samples scattered all over Mars that just need someone...
Fraser Cain:
No, not sampled. In Perseverance's sample collection...
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So it's left caches as it goes.
Fraser Cain:
It has done both.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
So it has taken samples, put them inside its special sample collection apparatus, and then it has taken backups and dropped them on the landscape behind it. And so you could either meet up with Perseverance, hand over the samples, put them on your return vehicle, bring them home to Earth, or you could chase down the pathway that Perseverance has traveled and pick up samples that are lying there on the surface of Mars. Both are options.
Yeah. And that you get 20 or whatever of the finest, most interesting samples that the scientists on Earth were able to direct Perseverance towards into the hands of the biggest labs on Earth, you are going to make some magic.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
But this is not... We're not going to trauma dump. This is not a grieving session here where we are just going to whine about a lack of a Mars sample return mission.
We want to...
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Celebrate what's been discovered.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, we want to bring you right up to speed with what is the cutting edge of the search for the story of life on Mars.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And it's really amazing. And the details are still coming out. It takes time to analyze results.
We're going to continue to see new results about Bright Angel Rock. I'm having to be so careful during this episode because I read a paper that is not yet published that I'm working on putting together press stuff for. And it's so cool, people.
And so here we have a river delta that has essentially been fossilized in place. And there's so much other cool stuff on Mars. There was work done a few years ago where by looking at how the landscape was altered in response to water, they were able to identify where tsunamis have historically taken place.
So you can imagine one of these crater lakes that gets thwomped by either a landslide or an incoming meteor, both. And as a result, a tsunami moved across the crater lake. And there's some evidence, this is still being discussed, how long it would have lasted, that the reason that one side of Mars is at a radically different altitude than the other is there used to be an ocean.
And so what we're seeing is the ocean floor and the continental landmasses, sands, ocean. I just love that idea. Kevin Gill has amazing graphics related to that.
We used one of them for the slide cover for this video. Go look at Kevin Gill's work. It's science-based.
Fraser Cain:
And this is like a multi-country exploration. So we got a really interesting discovery from the Chinese rover, Tianwen, which found, it was able to map the ancient shoreline. They've targeted the landing site for Tianwen to be at what was thought to be the ancient shoreline.
And it was able to map out and see that, yes, indeed, this was the place where water was probably lapping at the side of an ancient sea for a very long period of time. Very exciting. So again, the evidence is building.
Now, the Chinese are going to be sending a sample return mission. Tianwen 3. And yeah, and it's going 28?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It launches in 28. It lands in 2031. And they're not going to have a multi-year rover ahead of it collecting samples, but they are going to carefully target where it lands.
It's too early to know where it will land at this point.
Fraser Cain:
Grab something interesting nearby, put it on a rocket, send it home. So we will, by the middle of next decade, well, early next decade, get our hands on a fresh piece of Mars, which is pretty exciting. Not as good as the best samples Perseverance could find, but it is still a good first step towards getting some samples from Mars.
So do you think, like, are we now in the endgame of the V2 search for life on Mars?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I don't know if we're endgame yet, just because time scales are so wibbly wobbly. I mean, that's the thing is our exploration of Mars is limited by the technology we've been able to land, which is where Percy did the best it could and said, I think biosignatures, but we can't prove it without a full laboratory of equipment that has a whole lot more power than that little robot has. The helicopters we're planning to send aren't going to be able to do chemistry.
Fraser Cain:
Right. The skyfall.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. And so the endgame question is, when are we going to bring back the right samples to incontrovertibly say, yes.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. And I think, like, I'm sure people who are listening to this right now, their thought is, well, aren't humans going to go to Mars? And so can't they do this in the same way that humans went to the moon and the tech stack for sending humans to Mars and bringing them safely home to Earth is the same thing, but vastly more complicated than sending a robot, picking up a bunch of samples and bringing them back home to Earth.
The robots are hardier. They can handle a lot more. So if you can't do the first thing, then you can't do the second thing.
Right. And your other option is we'll send the humans and then send good lab equipment. But again, good lab, like we're talking devices that are the size of a small building.
Right. You cannot take one of those and put them on the surface of Mars. You really want to bring that stuff back home to Earth.
And so I think you're going to see that gate be, can we get good samples back from Mars that allow the scientists to conclusively search? And I think a great analogy of this is what's happening with the samples of Ryugu and...
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And Bennu.
Fraser Cain:
Bennu.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And we're seeing these just little whiffs of asteroids... Amazing science. ...turning into some of the most incredible discoveries that science has made about our understanding of the history of the solar system. I mean, they are finding amino acids. They are finding ratios of water to deuterium. Yeah.
They are putting together the history of the solar system in a way that you just have never been able to do with the meteorites that the solar system has deigned to drop on our planet up until this point. So yeah. Endgame is sample return.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I'm hoping that we can do fossil hunting while we're both still alive. That is my dream, is fossil hunting on Mars.
Fraser Cain:
Fossil hunting on Mars. Yeah. Walking around, chipping open a rock, looking inside.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I mean, it can be a robot. It can be a super powerful robot.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. But why not...
I like to go with a little hammer and chip away at rocks and look for fossils inside. So let's let an astronaut do that too. That might be a good use of astronauts.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It's true. It's something that I've always said I hope to be a little lady fossil hunting on Mars. I think I'm just a little bit scarred by the double boom of Starship's booster and Blue Origin's New Glenn.
So last week was a really bad day. And currently we have Starship, New Glenn, and Vulcan all grounded.
Fraser Cain:
Yes. Yeah. We are not go for launch.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We are not go for launch.
Fraser Cain:
Right. All right. Well, Pamela, that was awesome.
Thank you.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It was my pleasure. And thank you to all our patrons. Some of you have realized you can get me to say truly ridiculous things by having truly ridiculous usernames.
To those of you who make me laugh, I salute you. To those of you whose names I'm about to mispronounce, I'm just really sorry. This week, we would like to thank Adam Anise Brown, Alexis, Andy Moore, Astro Bob, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Mueller, Bresnik, Bruce Amazine, Christian Bergholt, Cooper, David Fines, David Green, Dr. Whoa, Ed, Evil Melky, Frank Stewart, Jeff McDonald, Gordon Duis, Hal McKinney, Jacob Huell, Jason Kwong, Jeremy Quarrel, Joanne Mulvey, John Drake, Jonathan H. Staver, Justin Proctor, Katie B., Kim Barron, Lab Rat Matt, Les Howard, Mark, Mark Thompson, Matthew Horstman, Michael Purcell, Mike Dog, Nate Detweiler, Papa Hot Dog, Paul L. Hayden, Philip Walker, Rhythm Chameleon, Robby the Dog with the Dot, Ruben McCarthy, Sage Sinfen, Scone, Sean Matz, Seggy Kemmler, Taz Talley, Tim Garrish, Van Ruckman, and William Andrews. Thank you all so very much.
Fraser Cain:
All right, thanks, everyone, and we will see you next week.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Bye-bye.
Live Shows#795: Expanse Science
This is the final episode of our series on sci-fi universes. And this week we will tackle “The Expanse”. Now we’ve got fusion drives, Proto-matter, g-forces! Listen up, belta lawda! Let's look at the science of our own possible (with a side of aliens) future.
Show Notes- Science and physics of The Expanse
- Fraser’s favorite sci-fi series
- Strong recommendation for the show and books
- Epstein Drive and fusion propulsion
- Artificial gravity through acceleration
- Metallic hydrogen and advanced spacecraft technology
- Newtonian space combat and high-G effects
- Ring gates and interstellar travel
- Realistic human adaptation to life in space
- Asteroids as weapons of mass destruction
- Earth, Mars, and Belter politics
- Belter culture and low-gravity living
- The protomolecule and precursor civilizations
- Themes of humanity’s future in space
- Future discussions: Battlestar Galactica and Dungeon Crawler Carl
- Upcoming episodes: Oceans and Organics on Mars, Big Rockets and the Moon Race, and summer reading recommendations.
Fraser Cain:
AstronomyCast Episode 795 The Science of the Expanse. Welcome to AstronomyCast, 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 Cosmoguest. Hey Pamela, how you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I am experiencing sunlight streaming radically into my studio in a way I don't get to see on Mondays because I've usually fled at this point of the day.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Yeah, we're usually done recording, but here we are later on in the afternoon and you're getting that afternoon sunlight coming through. It's true.
Feels good.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
This is the final episode of our series on sci-fi universes, and this week we will tackle the Expanse. Now, we've got fusion drives, protomatter, and G-forces. Listen up, Beltalota.
All right, now last week I said that Stargate was objectively the best sci-fi series ever done. I was wrong. I was wrong.
I take it back. The Expanse. The Expanse is objectively, without question, the best sci-fi television series ever made.
So say we all.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Okay. And where does Babylon 5 go?
Fraser Cain:
Oh, we're not going to do the Science of Babylon 5, are we?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We are not. We absolutely are not. No.
Fraser Cain:
And we're not going to do Battlestar Galactica.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And I did hear you say, so say we all is a fabulous phrase, by the way. That one just needs incorporated into life more often.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, no, I won't do a Science of Battlestar Galactica, because then I'll just go off in rage. But I'm going to re-watch it. Once we finish Stargate.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Just don't watch the last season.
Fraser Cain:
I won't watch the last season, yeah. It's too bad that they never were able to finish Battlestar Galactica.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right, exactly.
Fraser Cain:
It would have been much better if they'd had a final season to that show, but they never did. Anyway, we're not talking about Battlestar Galactica. We're talking about The Expanse.
So The Expanse is so good.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It really is. Now, reading the books also, just those of you who are like, nah, get through the first third of the first book. And it's also the first third of the first TV season.
It starts slow because this is a space opera, people. And there are a lot of characters to introduce. There are a lot of concepts to introduce.
And oh my goodness, the journey you you will be taken on. Yes, you just have to, you know, a roller coaster, the part where you're going up and it's going chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, and you're just like, why? Why did I wait in line five hours to go chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp?
Yeah, it's it's going to be worth it. It's going to be worth it.
Fraser Cain:
Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this is not a 30 second ride. Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And the TV show, like, what is it? Six seasons? It is just it is phenomenal.
Yeah. Such a good show. And what's nice is in the previous episodes, we've talked about the science of things, but a lot of it's just hand waving nonsense.
In this, we've only got a couple of hand wavy things and the rest is just real science taken to the extremes. And that part makes it just beautiful. So, um, so we, I guess let's start with as, as we have been, let's start with transportation.
Um, and let's start with, let's start with the terrible, so the terribly named Epstein Drive.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
What an unfortunate name. Oh, if they only didn't know him.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
But the Rosanante.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about Epstein Drives.
What is it?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I don't remember.
Fraser Cain:
Okay. It's a direct fusion drive.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Thank you.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is a real kind of system.
And you know, we talk about this idea of like having fusion energy, fusion plants, and you've got either the, you know, the giant tokamak that's being built in, in Europe right now. And, you know, there's, uh, there are the laser ignition facilities that are happening in the U S but there is another style of fusion that if, if you're willing to sort of walk the fine line between a thermonuclear weapon, because like we know how to do nuclear fusion.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We do.
Fraser Cain:
It's a, it's a fusion bomb.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It just tends to be a bit faster than we can control.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. You just don't get the energy out in a nice controlled way. So direct fusion is this sort of halfway point where you are sort of detonating small amounts of fusion and you're using that as a, um, as a propulsion system. And in fact, this is real.
So, uh, NASA has been funding through some of its NIAC grants, uh, direct fusion drives and people are proposing you could make it out to the outer solar system in, uh, a couple of years as opposed to decades.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And NASA has a, a new, uh, raison d'etre, I'm just going to use that word a lot, apparently during this part of the season, um, uh, that is to get a, uh, working fusion generator and we'll see. Fission though.
Fraser Cain:
Fission.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
You're right.
Fraser Cain:
They're planning on building a fission. Yeah. Yeah.
Totally different than fusion.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I need to have a bulletin board that is fission on one side, fusion on the other, and just Right. Cause I'm, I'm going to swap them. Dyslexia is particularly cruel.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Um, the cool thing about the drives in the Expanse is that they give you gravity, that they fire so hard that you could accelerate your spacecraft so that you were then experiencing 1G inside.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And then you flip.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. And then, and then they flip. So they, they go for half the journey at 1G of acceleration, and then they've reached a halfway point and then they flip around and then they go at 1G of deceleration.
And so you experience gravity on both, in both legs of the journey.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And it also leads to interesting spacecraft designs cause there's some metric, uh, not all of them, but many of them.
Fraser Cain:
Some metric. What do you mean?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Symmetric. They, they, they, when you flip them, they look, the, the, the way the spacecraft looks, you look at the silhouette, um, it's, it's, they have to be able to.
Fraser Cain:
Oh, I see. Symmetrical. Okay.
I got it. I got it. I understand what you're saying.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Sorry. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Like the, it's, it's sort of interesting that the, like the spacecraft, the way they're designed, they're kind of like living in a skyscraper.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. You need it so that, that when you rotate it, not all hell breaks loose. Cause if I, weight matters.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Or mass.
Fraser Cain:
I don't know if they talk about what the fuel is, but I think it's, it's a metallic hydrogen, which is a real thing.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
That would make sense. Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. And so in the interior of Jupiter is thought to be hydrogen that is pressed together under thousands of gigapascals of force. And it gets turned into this lattice where you're essentially compressing the hydrogen atoms as close as they'll possibly go.
And they turn into this metallic form that actually generates Jupiter's magnetic field. And this is supposedly been, been generated in the lab, although some people are, are skeptical that it's actually happened, but, and so one possibility is if you can take regular hydrogen, squeeze it into this metallic form, it might remain in that form. It may not require the ongoing pressure to keep it in that form.
And so now you've got this, this form of fuel that you then are feeding into a fusion reactor and you've just got enormous amounts of, of energy storage that can then be used in a way that provides you with a huge amount of thrust.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And if you go to Epcot at Disney World and you ride the ride that theoretically takes you to Mars, that actually just rotates you super, super fast. And you watch the show that they have at the beginning, which stars the one badass woman from Firefly. I'm so bad with proper nouns.
They talk about the rocket you're about to take to go to Mars is powered by, by solid hydrogen, so metallic hydrogen. And if you yell at the TV that that's not a thing that they can do, everyone around you will stare at you. And if you proceed to yell out the number of space toilets, Annie Wilson, I'm looking at you, they will look at you even worse.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Yeah. So, and, and then what, one of the really cool implications for, for this, these high fusion drives is then the combat works in this very Newtonian way where, you know, they're calculating the, the motion of these spacecraft, they're moving, they can make various slight adjustments.
And so you're having to lead the target, you're trying to predict the target if you're going to be shooting it. We'll talk more about weapons in, in a bit, but, but that if you are inside the ship, you are then experiencing these high G maneuvers. The one G is, is purely for comfort.
These things can go much faster. They can do five Gs. They can put you into horrendous G forces while these things are in, in combat.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And they have couches for it.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. They have, they have a fluid that they pump into their veins, right?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. So, so there's two different things that go on. They have the high G couches, which conform and support your body so that like you don't have every bone in your body break.
But then the other issue that you run into is high G situations. And someone just pointed out in the YouTube chat that the high Gs on the Mars ride at Epcot made them very not happy with the world. There's certain medications that don't mix well with high Gs, statins is one of them.
So if you think about it, if there are drugs that make it harder for you to tolerate high Gs, there's also going to be medications that make it easier for you to keep your blood even more hyper oxygenated because it's going to be harder for the blood to get to your brain that prevents strokes from occurring. All the things that are in extreme risk during high G events, um, these drugs are meant to assist with, although they still end up losing their pilots and seasons into the series due to a high G maneuver that they don't make it back from.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. And I've mentioned many times that like one of my favorite sequences in a sci-fi television show is where they're in a ship, this sort of really nimble little ship, but there's a bunch of tools out left out and they're making these high G maneuvers shifting back and forth. And now the tools are flying around inside the spacecraft like bullets because everything else is strapped down.
Like what you're supposed to do is strap everything down inside your ship. But in this, they, they leave some stuff out. I forget that like they were, they were working on something when something got attacked and they didn't have time.
And now it's very dangerous. Yeah. It's all weapons inside their ship, which is just terrifying.
So, so they don't have faster than light drives, but they do have stargates, the ring gates.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
They, they have eventually, um, so, so one spoilers just, just to warn you all, it's been out long enough. If I feel okay, spoilering everything. So one of the core premises is, is they encounter a alien life form in the form of this weird, like fungal kind of stuff that, uh, can infest humans and change their actions.
And while trying to understand what's happening, what's going on, uh, there's a bit of seeing visions because of course there is, um, they end up finding in the outer solar system, um, a, a ring that once set up, when they pass into it, it affects how they're moving. And when they try and pass back out of it, once they get things working again, um, they can use it to jump to other solar systems. It, one of the things that gets encountered during that particular season, and it's even better in the books, is this idea that without gravity, wounds don't work right.
And that, that's a really weird sentence to be stating, but.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. That you, your blood won't clot in zero gravity or something like that.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Not so much that it doesn't clot as it doesn't flow in a reasonable way. So we're used to this idea that when you cry in zero gravity, the tears just bubble up on top of your eyeballs. We got introduced to the idea of blobs of blood flying around in one of the Star Trek movies.
Um, but in Expanse, the idea that our body is designed to have blood drain away from wounds, um, in zero gravity, it just pools where it is and keeps expanding where it is. And you have to suck the blood out, yuck, and seal it up, right. Or spin up gravity.
So one of the ideas is you need gravity in order to heal. And that's a powerful idea.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Really cool. Uh, okay.
So we've talked about the, the transportation. Let's, let's talk about, um, sort of the, well, I guess we'll talk briefly about weapons, which we tend to sort of reach at this point.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Flinging asteroids.
Fraser Cain:
Yes. Well, right. So, so you've got the, the drones, the missiles on the various ships, which are like little mini fusion drives that are, they're tracking their target.
You got point defense kinetic weapons that are able to try to blow those things out of the, out of the sky when they're, when the missiles are coming at you. But as you said, uh, at one point someone uses asteroids as a, uh, as a weapon of mass destruction.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. So this, this is really kind of a remarkably rich set of ideas where they have prisons, especially for the violent that are deep, deep, deep underground and they get harmed in the process of asteroid striking. And of course they still figure out how to escape.
Um, but it just makes for a really amazing set of concepts. But since you know, where the earth is going to be, I feel safe in saying, uh, and days from now and years from now, if you start asteroids, which can be really dark on an intercept path with the planet earth, once they're set flying, they're just going to hit and it's the ultimate terrorist weapon.
Fraser Cain:
Well, it's, it is, but, but there are these essentially stealth weapons that they have a version of mutually assured destruction like we have with nuclear weapons on, on earth. They have these, these mass accelerators that are stealth, they're stealthed pointing at each other's planets.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And so if you detect the asteroids haven't been sent to your planet, you can fire your accelerators at your opponent and make sure that, that all life is wiped out on their planet as well. And so they've just taken the standard idea of, of nuclear weapons on ballistic trajectories and then just scale that up so that now you've got mutually assured destruction at a solar system level. And the idea is, is terrifying and, and used for great mayhem in the, in the books.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this is in the true sense of a space opera, something with so many different plots going on because you have the aliens, you have Mars wanting independence, you have the earth system trying to just keep everyone in line, behave children. You have the belters, you have the people in the outer solar system, and you have this idea of who does and doesn't get resources, who does and doesn't get jobs, and it gets into the economics, it gets into the science. And one of the things that does really well is it gets into how does the human body change if it's able to reproduce in space?
And there's an idea encountered where people want to travel to places with gravity to give birth. And that if you've spent too much of your life in space, you can take all the drugs in the world to try and survive. You can exercise all you want, and you're still going to get deathly sick if, if you're trying to be somewhere with gravity.
You're still going to struggle if you're a Martian going to the planet Earth.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. There's the, one of the main characters is a Martian Marine who has trained in heavier gravity for years of her life and still has a rough time going to Earth.
She's super tough in every other situation, but on Earth, she's definitely feeling the increased gravity. And then the belters, the people who live in the asteroid belts, who've been living in one-tenth gravity, they're almost a totally different species of human beings at this point.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And they also do something that I really love, which is because the belters spend so much of their life in spacesuits, spend so much of their life where you can't see hand gestures and facial expressions the same way, they have large gesture sign language that gets incorporated into how they speak. And then there's other things that come into it that we've seen other places like Battlestar Galactica, which we're not going to discuss. There's an episode where Naomi has to jump from one spacecraft to another.
And she pre-breathes to hyperoxygenate her blood. She exhales so that she doesn't explode. That's always a problem.
She has the bursting of the blood vessels, the massive bruising. All of this is legit and it's just kudos to them. They did an amazing job.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people always wonder what would happen if you went outside without your spacesuit.
Watch The Expanse. They cover it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Naomi goes through some stuff.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Totally. All right. So let's talk about the part that is like the most science fiction, which is the protomolecule and the weird biology of this.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So protomolecule, they don't really talk about is this a virus? Is this a, what is it? Is it a parasite?
How does it communicate? So they are oblivious to all these details, which is part of what allows them to do awesome sauce with it. Yeah.
The idea is once you're exposed to this, it starts taking over your body, repurposing it. It changes your physical structure. You get really gross, really, really gross, kind of turn into a lump, begin to merge with everything around you.
So it's really gross. I'm just going to repeat that a few more times. Yeah, really gross.
But the protomolecule also allows communications between different life forms. And it's this idea that we had from the last episode with Stargate of the parasites can make you do stuff. And so the protomolecules are trying to essentially take over humanity.
They end up on Ganymede. One thing that you see across the Expanse universe is this idea that they have spun things up enough that the inside walls are like you're walking on the bottom of the surface of Ganymede. There have actually been some fast rotating asteroids recently announced from the Vera Rubin Observatory.
These things do exist. They are actually rotating without falling apart fast enough to have nearly lunar gravity, which is wild to think about. So they get that idea of how to get artificial gravity correct.
But like they lose Ganymede to the protomolecule because it takes over the life forms on board it. And they also end up having to give a couple of the characters extreme radiation poisoning. They talk about the consequences of that throughout the series.
It's a show where what you see in season one crops up years later.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. That essentially the protomolecule, and we don't want to spoil it too deeply, especially because they haven't finished the books yet.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, they have.
Fraser Cain:
No, no, they haven't finished, sorry, they haven't finished turning the books into shows yet.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Okay. So there's going to be years before they can do the last book.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. There's apparently going to be like a movie to wrap it up or something like that. I don't know if they're going to do more seasons.
It's bananas to me that they didn't just keep going. How could they not just keep going?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, there was a gap in time between those books of like 20 years. The human beings needed to age.
Fraser Cain:
I guess so, or they need new actors. But yeah, but the gist being that it's this, I mean, there's a lot of flavors and ideas that we've talked about quite a lot in the show about panspermia, directed panspermia, right? Like what if you wanted to clear out a solar system, get it prepared for you to move in and take over?
I've classically always said that the best thing to do is send the inhabitants a bad idea.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Right? You send a message like contact that says, build an enormous machine and people can't help themselves. They'll build the enormous machine.
It's true. And then the machine destroys your civilization. And then you didn't have to send a weapon, you have to send anything.
So the protomolecule is kind of like this idea that you're clearing the ground, you are resetting a site so that you can now build what you need in that solar system. And that there's this other sort of precursor race, similar to the ancient, similar to the precursors in Star Trek. Like this theme comes up quite a bit.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
They're finding relics on the solar systems they're able to get to, and the relics are weird and scary and- Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And point to some precursor civilization that had plans for the galaxy.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. And is not your friend.
Like, you're always hoping, like, come on, there's gotta be a good reason. The protomolecule can't be all bad, right? No, it's all bad.
So it's a really interesting concept, which is, when you sort of deal with the more philosophical ideas of this show, what happens when you are a incredibly powerful race, you are transcending dimensions, you are spreading out across everywhere you can reach. How do you make this job as easy as possible for yourself? Both to get around, both to not have to have rivals to deal with.
It's a great concept. And just the levels that this goes as you climb up, because finding the ring gates gives humanity access to the galaxy, but also then puts you closer and closer into contact with the other things that are out there.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, and it also just gets into all of the issues of humans being humans and doing stupid things. And what what do you do for love? What do you do for social justice?
What do you do for power and how the rich are able to live completely different lifestyles than the poor? So it has the science dimensions. It has the human dimensions.
It has characters that have so many layers to them that you think they're just like a big, dumb thug. And then you realize this is someone who's just trying to figure out how to human when they had no example as a child. Yeah.
Yeah. So, yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And, you know, man, I mean, it just it just goes on. There's the Mormons, I think, build interstellar spacecraft because they're planning on going to another star system, which gets stolen from them. Yeah, there's there's just so many bits and pieces, large and small in this in this show.
And and I loved every part of it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Read the books, too, people. Read the books.
Fraser Cain:
So I will admit I have not read the book. They're so good.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I read the books first.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, my wife has, but I haven't.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And and like I was like, I can't watch this TV show because I love these books too much. And then I didn't I didn't have I didn't have a regret. So, yeah, well, the first few episodes of the first season.
But other than that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get through this first few episodes and then.
Fraser Cain:
No, it was gripping from moment one. But OK, fine. Yeah.
Yeah. Cool. Well, I hope people enjoyed this this four part series.
And I did. We can. Yeah, me too.
Come on. We get to talk about science fiction here. So let us know if you want us to continue.
You know, there are a bunch of other shared universes that we could talk about. Dungeon Crawler, Carl, because there's a ton of science in that. But, you know, you've both got an interstellar civilization.
We could talk about Battlestar Galactica because there is a lot of stuff in Battlestar Galactica.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So currently we are going to take the Monday of Memorial Day weekend off.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I currently have slated for June. Oceans and Organics on Mars. Big Rockets, Moon Race.
And then a recommended summer reading. We can turn all of those into TV shows. Sure.
If we need to. Just let us know what you want.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Let us know if that's what you want or is it like or some portion of the audience is going to be like, oh, I don't want to do this. So let us know.
Yeah, I mean, we could definitely talk about Babylon 5.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Dungeon Crawler, Carl has a new book coming out.
Fraser Cain:
I know. Two days.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Three days.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to be I'm going to be probably listening to it while I'm in Japan.
So.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So many Kickstarters.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I have spent so much money on Kickstarter.
Fraser Cain:
All right. Thanks, Bubba.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Thank you. And thank you to everyone out there. Some of you have figured out you can get me to say truly ridiculous things by having truly ridiculous usernames.
To those of you who make me laugh, I salute you. To those of you whose names I'm about to mispronounce, I'm just really sorry. This week, we would like to thank Alan Gross, Andrew Allen, Antosaur, Astro Sets, Bebop, Apocalypse, Bob Zatzky, Brian Bede, Burry Gowan, Claudia Mastroianni, Dale Alexander, David, David Rustiera, John Mundus, Elliot Walker, Fairchild, Just as it sounds, Frodo Tannenbaum, Gerhard Schweitzer, Greg Davis, Hannah Tankery, James Signorovich, John Baptiste Lamartine, Jim McGeehan, John Holstein, John Herman, Jonathan Poe, Justin S., Katie and Ulyssa, Kimberly Reek, Larry Zotz, Lou Zeeland, Mark Share, Masa Herleu, Matthias Hayden, Michael Wichman, Mike Huzzy, Nick Boyd, Patricia Hope, Paul Lowell, Rajiv Akari, Richard Drumm, Robert Cordova, Ryan Amari, Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Bieber, Semyon Torfason, Steve Rutley, TC Starboy, Travis C.
Porco, Rutley, and wiped only three times because I like the itch. Thank you all so very much.
Fraser Cain:
Thanks, everyone. And we will see you when we're back. I think we're off one day, one week, right?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, we're off one week for Memorial Day.
Fraser Cain:
Okay, we'll see you then.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Okay. Bye, everyone.
Live Shows#794: Stargate Science
We continue our ad-hoc miniseries through sci-fi franchises. This week we’ll talk about Stargate, worm holes, mind parasites and self-replicating bots. There’s a lot to talk about!
Show Notes- Stargates, wormholes, and hyperspace travel
- Travel between galaxies including Pegasus Galaxy and Atlantis
- Wormhole stability and Einstein-Rosen bridges
- Faster-than-light travel and teleportation rings
- Naquadah and unstable Quadria as power sources
- Superheavy elements and island of stability discussion
- Matter-antimatter energy concepts
- Energy weapons, plasma, and shield technology
- Human migration across the galaxy
- Ancient alien civilizations and ascension
- Goa’uld parasites and Tok’ra coexistence
- Real-world parasite comparisons like cordyceps
- Asgard cloning and genetic degradation
- Replicators as self-replicating machines
- Praise for Stargate Universe
- Stargate compared to the Isekai genre
- Appreciation for Stargate’s humor and relatable characters
- Humanity’s technological rise across the series
Fraser Cain:
Astronomy Cast, Episode 794, The Science of Stargate. 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 am particularly well, because I've been brought a 44-ounce cranberry slushie, so I'm going to be getting progressively more sugar high throughout the piece.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, so you won't hear all of the breaks that we take as Pamela goes to the bathroom, but just assume they will have happened. 44 ounces, I don't even know what that is in milliliters, that's a lot. We continue our ad-hoc mini-series through sci-fi franchises.
This week, we'll talk about Stargate, wormholes, mind parasites, and self-replicating bots. There's a lot to talk about. Alright, Stargate.
Now this is objectively the best sci-fi series. So I just, you know, I need to put my, and I'm not just saying it's my favorite, I'm saying that it's objectively the best, that in a court of law, it would stand up, people would make their case, and in the end, Stargate would win. I brook no argument from anyone, that is just the truth, the reality, this is the universe that we live in.
The Stargate universe. Obviously, you know, people will give me grief to that, they'll send emails, send your emails to Pamela at, no, Starstrider, no. So well, so let's just start with the big one, with the Stargate universe, and that of course is the Stargates themselves.
What is the science of what they're doing in Stargate?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So in theory, there are a series of rings that if you put in the correct number of locked-in runes, will allow you to travel to a matching gate in our galaxy, or, or... Into another galaxy. If you figure out how to enter even more runes, you can travel, with added energy, to another universe, thus, Atlantis.
Fraser Cain:
Other galaxy.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Other galaxy, that's what I meant to say.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, they're not another universe, they're another galaxy, I think they're in Andromeda? So we're re-watching Stargate right now, my wife and I, and so we're into season seven right now, so we're pretty deep in the re-watch. And again, I'm like, I'm really enjoying going back and re-watching shows that I know that I love, but it's been so long that I actually don't remember the details.
It is literally a new show to me. Every episode, I'm like, I don't remember this, I don't remember that, I don't remember this episode. We just watched Dark City, and that I mostly remembered, the movie, and we just watched the Iron Giant, and I mostly remember that movie, but with the Stargate episodes, each one, like I know the high-level stuff, who the people are, who the factions are, who some of the main characters are, but the episodes, I am as shocked and surprised when the twist is revealed as I was when I first watched the show, which is such a wonderful feeling. It is. When you realize that you can now just go back and re-watch your entire media library, everything you've ever loved is all there waiting for you to be watched again.
Okay, so what is the physics principle that is connecting these Stargates together?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So the idea is that you can, and this breaks the physics, you can connect two points together using a wormhole through basically an extra dimension.
Fraser Cain:
Right, the Einstein-Rosen bridge.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Now, the problem is that mathematically, those suckers become super unstable the moment any mass enters them, which makes it really hard to travel from one point to another through them. So yeah, that's slightly problematic. Right.
Fraser Cain:
And we've mentioned this in a previous episode, like a long, long time ago, when you would sort of allow us to talk about this subject. I believe it was nonsense that needs to be debunked. But in that Einstein-Rosen, they came up with the math for how this would work, but the downsides are, as you said, that if any actual matter or energy is in there, then the thing immediately collapses.
But we've seen the classic examples in interstellar and all that, where you take a piece of paper, you draw the two locations, and then you fold it over and you punch right through, boom, these places are connected. And so theoretically, there's some factory, some wormhole factory that the ancients are building and then they're putting them on spaceships, and then they're taking these wormholes to various locations around the galaxy. And so then you can activate them in the wormhole network and be able to communicate.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
But it's even wilder than that, because each point is connected to all the other coordinates. So it feels much more like they're able to generate wormholes that go from one point to the other.
Fraser Cain:
Right. As opposed to having the kind of wormholes. This is a really cool idea, that if you could make a stable wormhole, you could take one half of the wormhole, put it on a spacecraft, go close to the speed of light, and you have made a time machine.
Because the different sides of the wormhole have experienced different amounts of time. And so you will go through one at the local time, and then you will pop out of the other at the local time for the wormhole. And so theoretically, you can have a time machine.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
But the light hasn't made it between those two places.
Fraser Cain:
Right. The light hasn't. You're being transmitted instantly through these, through a distortion in space-time.
So the idea was around, of course, these are in Star Trek as well. I mean, we didn't even bring this up in, think about Deep Space Nine. I'm sure they're in Star Wars.
I mean, that's kind of what the hyperlanes are.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So in the last season of Ahsoka, they have the ability with extra power to get.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Spacewhales go with the space whales to another galaxy.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right. And this is where I will die on the hill. The night sisters are actually Bene Gesserit.
But yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Did you just cross the streams? I did.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I did. Yeah, but.
Fraser Cain:
As opposed to them just stealing a cool idea.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I'm just going to cross the streams.
Fraser Cain:
Yep.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
OK. OK.
Fraser Cain:
So so then if you don't have a wormhole, if you don't have a Stargate and a DHD, a dial home device at the planet that you're attempting to reach, you can use a spacecraft.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this this is a two part system where you have the Stargate. Then you have the control thing that causes the different ringy bits to move and lock in the different runes. Now, the wormhole is generated by the ring thing.
And so you can replace the control system. So the control system is just like your remote, basically. Yeah.
So so just to be clear, I don't know why I'm being so pragmatic. True. And and yes, they do have in the Stargate universe the ability to move through space on spaceships that are also capable of going fast.
And and this is how you get the the spacecraft that land on top of the pyramids, which is really cool CGI in the Stargate movie. But but the aliens in the Stargate universe are just creepy.
Fraser Cain:
We'll get we'll get we'll get to the to the life forms in a second. But OK, but the yeah, so so they have faster than light travel as well. And it's their version of hyperspace.
And so you have a hyperspace drive on your spacecraft and that allows you to travel at faster than the speed of light and you generate a hyperspace tunnel in front of you and then you enter that and and go. And there's like one episode where they have where they're about to crash into the earth and realize that they can hyperspace through the earth, which is very cool.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So but it's not infinite speed. So they have the same problem as Star Trek Voyager of if you end up through some fate too far away, you're not getting home.
Fraser Cain:
No, but they they talk about, say, the the the Asgards. Yes. Living outside of the Milky Way.
And then whenever there's a problem, they request the Asgards and the Asgards show up almost instantaneously. So so there is very fast movement, different technology and different civilizations. Yeah, there is very fast move through it.
OK, so then they've got a teleportation system, which are the rings.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes. And this is one of those things where you have to wonder, is this like a mini wormhole? Is this like it's not clear how those work.
But again, they like to have things work through rings and those are vertical rings versus they go up and down versus standing. Right.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. So you go into this this room.
It's very much like the transporter of Star Trek that you go into this room, you stand in the middle, these rings pop up, then the rings pop up in the destination. And there you are. Yeah. And you need the rings to move between locations, which is kind of cool. So you don't just randomly transport yourself to some random location. You have to go to a place where.
So you're exactly right that it feels like it's like a mini version of a of a wormhole, however, that works. All right. So let's talk about some of the the technologies that are involved in this.
And I think one of the main things, one of the essentially the main resource that everybody's fighting over in the Stargate universe is Nakuta, which is the equivalent of dilithium. Well, it's not exactly the same as dilithium crystals, but it is it is the same pinch point of a resource that everybody is looking for Nakuta.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I have to admit, I never fixated on that and have no memory of anything other than it exists. So you, sir, who are currently rewatching, please continue.
Fraser Cain:
So theoretically, the Nakuta is in a stable island of resources farther up the periodic table of elements. And so this is something we've debunked in the past. But in theory, this is just like another element that you can mine, I guess, in the same way you combine dilithium crystals and that it produces an enormous amount of energy like a fission reactor.
And that that and that that is what is needed to power hyperspace drives, to power the Stargates and so on. And then there is this unstable version of a called the Quadria, which has been found on this one planet. And that is used, but it is is unstable.
And so it has unpredictable results. And that is the power source that the that humans use in their spaceships is the quadrics. They have a source for this stuff.
But a lot of the conflict between the the empires in Stargate are over planets that have Nakuta that they're then trying to mine and subjugate the the people who live there and and so on. They have a lot of other technologies that are kind of related. They have this zero point energy as another kind of reactor, like antimatter reactors, which and they have a lot of stuff that the that the Asgards use.
So they're they're able to be able to power all of these.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So let's back up and unpack some of these ideas. So so backing first up to the island of stability, there is when you look at our periodic table, there's the main chunk at the top that those are fairly stable. Then there's all the stuff down at the bottom.
Those those are not stable. Those.
Fraser Cain:
Americium.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes. Thank you. Is is very unstable, which has a lot of ironies in twenty twenty six.
And and so as we're going through figuring out how to bombard the cores of atoms with protons or neutrons and get them to move up to heavier and heavier things that don't tend to hang around. There is this idea that you can get back to some place where you've added enough to the core that it's able to hold itself together because of the geometry. Now, so far, we haven't been able to get close enough to prove or disprove this idea.
But the fact that we never find any of this in the universe and supernovae are a thing has a lot of people thinking it doesn't actually exist or we would have found it by now.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Nature has provided a particle accelerator capable of fashioning elements with an enormous number of protons and neutrons, and we have not found them. But that a colliding neutron stars is so much more energetic than anything humanity can possibly offer.
And yet and we know that the Earth has many of the elements that came from colliding neutron stars. And yet we don't find anything beyond the the table of elements as we see it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Okay. So that was concept one that you just kind of rolled over. Yes.
Zero point. Zero point energy is this idea that our universe hasn't actually like gotten to the lowest allowable energy. So if you think of that model you got for an atom when you were in high school, where electrons can jump up to a variety of different energy levels and then they decay down to lower energies until they get back down to that base energy.
Well, we're up. The idea is that we're not at the base, we're up at like two or maybe higher, and it is collapses to lower energies that perhaps are responsible for the epoch of inflation. It could also like do very violent things to all the rules of physics in our universe as we know it, if we actually undergo a zero point collapse.
So hopefully that's not a thing. But the idea is our universe isn't at the lowest stable energy point and has further can collapse to it.
Fraser Cain:
And then antimatter reactors, I think it's relatively cheap.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, that's matter, antimatter, they annihilate when mixed correctly.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. So let's talk about the weapons. You know, Teal'c has this energy weapon, the staff weapon, it feels like it's relatively straightforward, you know, shoots a bolt out of the end of the weapon.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It's a bolt of energy. It's just a pulse. It's the same annoyance you get in pretty much every other series of, wait, how are we able to watch something that should be traveling at the speed of light move across the room?
But there we are.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe it's not moving the speed of light. It's a blob of energized plasma or something.
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I mean, it will have massif it's electricity. So maybe it's a blob of slow moving electrons.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. And then the other weapon that they have is it's called the Zat gun or the Zat Nikta. And it is the it's the little one that kind of pops open and then they it's their it's their version of the phaser.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And so one hit stuns, two hits kills and three hits disintegrates. Is the is the rules of the universe. And so instead of setting your thing at stun or kill, you can just hit them once with it and they pass out.
But if you hit them twice, then you kill them.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Don't do that. And I don't know what the time frame is, but you can hide the body easily enough.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, I don't know what that. Well, yeah. So if you do need to, then you just vaporize them with a third hit and they just disappear.
So they go through they go through through that. And again, I mean, however, these things work, they are clearly somehow messing with your nervous system, electricity, you know, your nervous system runs on electricity. So there's some kind of squishy biology explanation for how this all comes together.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
But it doesn't leave the same wild scarring that that getting struck by lightning does. So at least there's that positive.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, the question I always have is like, what's the time frame that if you used to hit a person once, like because all the main characters have been hit by these at guns multiple times. So is it just like once in your life?
No, obviously not. Is it once in a day? I it's probably like getting a sunburn.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. I mean, like you can be out in the sun for whatever, half an hour and then you'll start to burn or 10 minutes or whatever is the number. But then how long of a break do you need before you can then go back under the sun for 10 minutes?
Is it the next day? Is it the same day? Do you have to wait an hour?
What is the what is the what is the delay for being out in the indirect sunlight for you to get a burn again?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
The rate at which the energy dissipates, I guess.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So it doesn't depend on if you're surrounded by an insulating material or on something conductive.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So but they're very handy weapons. And then, of course, you have shields both on the spacecraft and personal shields for the for the ghouls, which we're going to get to.
And again, I think we've you know, we kind of covered shields in Star Trek, both Star Trek and probably Star Wars. So, you know, same same thing, some kind of electromagnetic shield that you are putting around yourself that is redirecting harmful energy away from you.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And I have to just put out a congratulations to the folks over in the YouTube chat who can spell the things in the Stargate universe correctly.
Fraser Cain:
This is just confirmation of what I of what I said. All right. So one thing I don't think you were sort of expecting this, but one thing that I really like is that almost all of the entities that they interact with are human beings.
They all speak English, which, you know, is obviously a problem. But they all are transported from Earth. Yes.
To different locations, which is such a it's such a cool idea that all this mythology, that all of these, you know, are the ghouls and that you have this migration across the galaxy because these people have been taken to these worlds and set up essentially as slaves.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And that that idea is in Star Trek. Just to be clear, there was the elder race that it transported human beings and plopped them down in different places.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Right. And that's why Vulcans and Romulans and everybody kind of looks the same.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
No, it's there's actual humans on other worlds that were put there by this race. I've forgotten the name of that. I think it's the same race that holds the.
There's this place that they're absolutely not allowed to fight. It's the glowing light organisms. I think their name begins with the letter O and that's not useful.
Fraser Cain:
In in Stargate, Star Trek, Star Trek, both Star Trek and Stargate, because there's there is a white glowing thing in Stargate. All right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. So so both of them have that idea that there were ancient humans that were used to seed life on other worlds. This is why in the original Star Trek you end up with the planet that has the Native American population.
But Stargate does it in in a much cooler way where the origin of so many different myths that involve human like gods. So the Egyptian gods, the Viking gods, or I guess Norse is the correct phrase. The Norse gods, the Greek gods, they go through them all like Chinese mythology, Japanese mythology.
Yeah, it's really cool.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, they pull all of this mythology and then each one of these is actually a system lord, one of the the big bad, the gold, which we're going to get to in a second, that are running portions of the galaxy and fighting with each other. And essentially they use the humans as their slave shock troops and put them to work and brainwash them and make them think that these are their gods. But in fact, Earth is the is the heart is the original place because, you know, people always ask me this question.
How how do we know that we're that humans didn't come from another planet? Well, we can trace our ancestors back to the to the very first life form on Earth. We know we evolved on Earth.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I read too much science fiction. Let's talk about the Goulds.
Fraser Cain:
So so the Gula, the word you just said correctly, the Goulds, the Goulds as as General Hammond would call them, the Goulds.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
The the idea is they are a parasitic life form that goes through multiple phases. They are largely aquatic. They go from being in basically the ponds that they're reproduced in pools, whatever, to taking over human hosts where they live in the gut.
And when they're juvenile, they they support their life form, but they don't take over its brain. Now, the problem is these are life forms that are fully capable of joining forces with the human nervous system. And so very much like the Trill in Star Trek, you end up with life forms that are a joining between the parasite and its ego and the human being.
The Trill do not generally go read books, take over and control the human. The Gould, the word you can say, the Gould, that word, yeah, they I their raison d'etre is apparently to take over. Yes.
The the human being and make it their own. And these are life forms that also have extra energy so they can like cause glowing eyes, um, rapid healing. Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. And strength, intelligence, things like that.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So it's one of these things where it's good to live forever, but a whole lot not if you're the host.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, the idea of a parasite, I mean, this is this has its place in in science. I mean, we see the cordyceps, which is a kind of fungi that will take an ant, take an ant's brain, have it force it to climb to the top of the tallest plant that it can find and then and then die and extend the fruiting bodies of the cordyceps to then allow, you know, it to be able to replicate itself.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Or in theory, there's a lot of parasites that do things that get the host body consumed or take it to life forces.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Or isn't the one like the one in in cat litter that makes mice be more brave?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And so easier to get.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And that causes them to get eaten. Yeah. And and so the idea that there are life forms out there capable of taking over hosts by affecting their neurochemistry is a known thing.
There are zombie funguses.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Parasites that will replace a fish's tongue.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
That. Yeah, that's a real thing. People, there is a parasite that eats the tongue and then becomes the tongue and gets a first bite so that it can aid in eating.
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. It's crazy. It's so gross.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It's so awful. Okay. Yeah.
My stomach has literally just gone.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So the but but it's a great idea that you by having the young gestating inside the bodies of the warriors and priestesses. Yeah. You're you're supplying their immune system.
And so they are completely reliant on this. They cannot escape if they wanted to. They have to you.
They have to use this.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Once their immune system has changed, there's no going back. So yeah.
So you can replace the parasite inside someone, which happens to Teal'c, of course. But you can't turn them back normal. Now, there is a cast of the word you can say and I can't that.
Right. The Tok'ra.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
The good ones. Right.
Fraser Cain:
The good guys.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
They believe that they can coexist more like the Trill do and shared the body in a mutually supportive way. Yeah. There's lots of really cool stuff that goes on.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, totally. Totally. So and then the other thing is the ancients, which were the people that made the Stargate network.
Yeah. And and sort of one of the things that you you learn is that the ancients left technology strewn around kind of like a roadside picnic. And so then it's up to humanity to sort of go through the Stargate to find these little bits and pieces of ancient technology and then try to use this to defend against the the gold.
And then, you know, in Atlantis, they realize there's a whole ancient city in another galaxy and and and so on. But the the sort of thing that does show up quite a bit is that there are these transcended, oh, I forget what they call them, but essentially have ascended. They write these ascended beings.
And this is something that happens to Daniel Jackson for half the season. Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
When I think the actor wanted to take some time off of the show. And so they replaced him with Cornemic. And then he he came back at the end of the season.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
There's also an interesting Easter egg. It's not an Easter egg. There's an interesting side thing to note where the actor who plays Daniel Jackson starts out looking very much like you would expect a classroom and laboratory archaeologist to look just a little bit like clearly not working out all the time.
And then at one point he comes back super buff and he's like, you know, well, so he went off and he films an action adventure movie. So that's what happened. It's the actor who filmed an action adventure movie and ended up with a completely different physique as a result.
So. Right.
Fraser Cain:
That's fun to watch. And and so the there's one race in this, the Asgard.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Who are the little gray guys. The little gray guys. Yeah.
Which is so great, right, that they are the the perfect gray aliens. They really have been messing with humanity for forever. But they're essentially the protectors of humanity.
But but the science that I find really interesting about them is that they're all clones.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes. And that's actually also a problem for them.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Right. They suffer this problem that that they're getting this genetic degradation over time because of their reliance on cloning.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. And and it's one of these things where they didn't have to clone. They just like you see in other science fiction stories, somewhere along the line, it was just like, this is a better way to do things.
And the idea of having sex is yicky. And so they're trying to figure out how to change their ways to save their species. And and then there's also the replicants, the replicators.
Yeah, they're kind of like the perfect evildoer. They're like if Minecraft used nano bricks to attack just like they have the ability to use everything around them to convert it into machinery. And and it's wild the way they just like take over everything.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. They're kind of like the Borg.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. But the Borg, I don't consume matter and recycle it into robots the same way.
Fraser Cain:
Right. So they keep them looking people like as opposed to they just consume everything down to the atomic level and put it back together in a form. Yeah.
I really dislike the replicators, the whole storyline, the whole implementation of it. I really every time the replicators are on the show, my wife and I, we just groan and roll our eyes and tough through it because I just I really don't like it. They're they're not an interesting enemy to me.
And and the storylines aren't that aren't that interesting, although this kind of and they knew that the CGI was good, though. Yeah. I don't want to sort of spoil where they go with the storyline, but but in the end, it's actually quite a very emotional, brutal ending to the replicators.
Cool. So there's a lot of other stuff. Life is short.
I made a list beforehand. They've got communication systems. They've got sensors.
But yeah, I think that's all the big.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
They got Jason Momoa.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, right. Jason Momoa, the little baby Jason Momoa early on in Stargate Atlantis and then Stargate Universe. I mean, using a lot of the same technology.
And it's an ancient ship that's moving from star system to star system. They only had two seasons of it. I loved Stargate Universe.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, I loved it, too.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. It's really too bad.
So I think hopefully, apparently they're working on a new new versions of Stargate. So hopefully we'll see something show up in our lives.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It's it is amazing. And yeah, it also just like the social stuff they get, like the way human beings, human, really, really good.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
In the series.
Fraser Cain:
So yeah, I mean, I think like there is a level of humor and yes, and and people not taking themselves as seriously in Stargate that I just like there's a charm to it. Yes, that they just don't have in Star Wars and Star Trek. Yeah.
And I just don't think that like I've never seen anything in either one of those shows that except for maybe Andor, but the band was grim and dark. Again, it's not right. But I've not seen anything that runs this, I don't know, this light and just feels very, very, very relatable.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
I mean, the thing that I really love about Stargate is how much the pieces of the puzzle come back together later on to form a larger picture that they they find a little piece of technology over here and they find a little piece of technology over there. And then you meet with the three years later, they call on those people because now they're an ally and they can help them out. But they can't help them out in this situation, but they can't help them right now.
And then and now the humans have have figured out this technology. Now they have a ship and now they have control over and now they know how to power the wormholes. And it just you get this technological progression.
That goes on through the 10 seasons of Stargate from zero from zero to humanity is on its way to becoming a Milky Way spanning civilization. And it makes sense in a way that I haven't seen any other show tackle.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
There's an element of Isekai to Stargate because you have the humans suddenly got dropped into this completely new situation where they have to figure out how to level up.
Fraser Cain:
Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And Star Trek and Star Wars don't have that.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And and so I think part of us are part of our heart is there to cheer on.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
The Richard Dean Anderson's character who's like, what is this science? I just have a gun and I want to shoot.
Fraser Cain:
Just tell me how it works.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right. So I think that bit of Isekai for before that word was even something I knew existed.
Fraser Cain:
It just adds a completely different what's the word?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Isekai is the the kind of Japanese storytelling. Am I mispronouncing it? Where where you get dropped into either you're given a new magical ability.
Fraser Cain:
You're OK. OK, I see. I see.
Yeah. Like like the kind of thing you read in light novels and stuff.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right. Right.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Lit RPG. Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
There's the lit RPG of the Roomba that gets brought into an alternate universe. Yeah. And become sentient.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Very cool. All right.
So again, best series, sci fi series ever. Watch it. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And we are about to record our next episode. They will go out two weeks in a row, though. So if you're listening to the podcast, this is the part where I say thank you for amusing me with your usernames, because there are some amazing ones right now.
And I'm sorry for how I'm about to mispronounce them. Some of you have realized you can get me to say truly ridiculous things by having a truly ridiculous username. To those of you who make me laugh, I salute you.
To those of you whose names I'm about to mispronounce, I'm just really sorry. This week, we would like to thank Abraham Cottrell, Alex Raine, Andrew Stevenson, Arnaud de Groot, Balki, Benjamin Davies, Boogie Nett, Brian Kilby, Cammy Rassian, Conrad Haling, Daniel Schechter, David Gates, Dizastrina, Dwight Ilk, Eric Lee, Flower Guy, Galactic President, Scooper Star McScoopsalot, Gold, Gregory Singleton, J. Alex Anderson, Jarvis Earl, Jeff Wilson, Jim of Everett, John Esseth, John Vays, J.P. Sullivan, Kate Sindretto, Kenneth Ryan, Kinsaia Panflanko, Lee Harbourn, Marco Ierassi, Mark Steven Razanek, Matthew Crampton, Michael Prashada, Michelle Cullen, Olga, Paul Jarman, Peter, Red Bar is watching, R.J. Basque, Ron Thorson, Satche Takaba, Shersom, Sean Marion, Shobhana, Stephen Miller, the Lonely Sandperson, Tushar Nakini, Will Hamilton. Thank you all so very much.
Fraser Cain:
All right, thanks, everyone, and we will see you next week.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Bye bye.
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