#404: Terraforming Trials & Titan's Tantalizing Truths: Venusian Visions and Microbial Mysteries

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By there, Andrew Dunkley here,
Thanks for joining us on Space Nuts Q

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and A. And on this episode, we've got a few things we need

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to talk about terraforming for starters,
we get questions about terraforming fairly regularly,

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but we've got a new one.
We've also got a question about a proto

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star. Fred loved the name of
this L one five seven. We'll see

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if we can answer that one.
We've got a question about the enjoyment of

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science fiction? Are there limits to
what you can do that will make or

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break it? And a couple of
our younger listeners have chimed in with questions

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as well. We'll deal with all
of that on this episode of Space Nuts

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fifteen. In Channel ten nine ignition
Sigunch Space Nuts ni Urn three two Space

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notes as when as we bought it, Neils good and with me again is

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Professor freed Wardson, Astronomer at Large. Hello, Fred, Hi Andrew,

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looking forward to a few Q and
a's. Yes, we've got quite a

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bit to get through us. A
couple of these will be pretty quick because

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one of the questions, which is
almost ironic, asks us exactly about something

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we spoke about last week in episode
four oh one, So we'll be able

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to make a reference to that.
But let's begin well, actually, let's

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deal with that straight away. A
young listener named Oliver, eleven years old

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from Queensland has sent in a question
and said, I was just wondering if

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there was any chance that Titan could
have micro organisms, and well, up

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until recently we might have said yes, and I think the chance still exists,

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but some recent data has been put
together suggests Titan probably not as life

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worthy as we once thought. Free
that's right. So the bottom line from

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our discussion last week was that the
calculations that have been made by some astrobiologists

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demonstrate that the water that filters down
through the icy surface of Titan won't contain

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enough of the carbon containing material that
we know is on the surface of Titan

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to make any difference to the ocean
underneath. In fact, it was one

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elephant mass per year, was it
that was filtering down seven seven point five

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tons? And that's a tiny amount
when you compare it with a water reservoir

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that towns. I believe we said
twelve times the amount of water as the

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assertions have so people are a bit
depressed about that. I don't think I

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mentioned in the program. I'm more
optimistic because there is a possibility that there

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might be microorganisms that don't use water, they're working fluid, but use and

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methane as they're working fluid, and
they will be very different from what we

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know on Earth, but micro organisms
nevertheless, so I think there's still a

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possibility. Andrew, I'm not as
pessimistic as maybe the authors of this article

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were. Yes, So there you
go, Oliver. The new data which

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is based on modeling, so they
don't have absolute proof, but it does

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suggest that if certain things happen the
way we think they did, Titan's less

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likely to have life as we know
it, but it might have other forms

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of life. But I wouldn't write
it off completely. But it also kind

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of puts a bit of tips water
on the other ice moons having life as

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well, because they're less likely than
Titan apparently to harbor life. So,

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Oliver, thanks for the question,
but if you go back to episode four

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oh one, there's a much broader
explanation of the situation you've asked us about.

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Next question comes from Dan Hi,
Andrew and Fred. I know a

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few listeners have touched on this before, but i'd like to go a little

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further on the terraforming thing, if
I may, what would happen if we

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were to place a huge megastructure at
Venus's l one point, something like a

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vast solar panel that blocked all the
light from the Sun. How long would

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it take Venus to cool down?
And would that eventually lead to the runaway

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greenhouse effect collapsing? It comes from
Dan in California. I've got a nickname

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for Dan in California. I'm going
to call him Cala Dan, which is

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one of the planets in a sci
fi show that I've watched recently. Couldn't

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help usself. There you go,
and yes, So this touch is on

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things we were talking about last week
as well, because we were talking about

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flotilla's of tiny spacecraft to reduce the
radiation from the Sun on Earth, and

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the idea was to do exactly as
Dan suggests, put these flotillas of spacecraft

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at the l one point between Earth
and the Sun. So if you did

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the same thing with Venus, it
turns out that a solid lump of something

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like a big sunshade, even if
you could build something which would have to

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be the diameter of Venus to work
at all, that will be unstable.

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It's not something that would probably stay
intact. The gravitational forces might well break

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it up. So you're better off
starting off with small things rather than big

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things. Dan's questions not about that
though. Really it's about if you did

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switch off the Sun, as far
as Venus is concerned, how long does

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it take to come back to something
that we might recognize as a planet like

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Earth? And I honestly don't know
the answer to that. But my guess

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is we are talking about geological timescales. We're talking about millions of years rather

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than a fortnite or something like that. Just because that sudden loss of energy

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would certainly transform the climate. It
would shock the climate into a change.

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But how long it might take for
the change to take place, I don't

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know. Just thinking slightly laterally though
the thinking, I believe, as far

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as you know, a kind of
quasi related event on Earth's history, which

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is the chick Slab impact sixty six
million years ago. I think scientists who

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look at that so yes, that
thing ejected huge amounts of dust in the

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atmosphere which blocked off the Sun.
And I think it wasn't a fortnite but

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I think the lengths of times for
things to recover were measured in you know,

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in decades rather than millions of years. But with Earth, what you're

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talking about is a temporary blanket of
the Sun, which is all the dust

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in the atmosphere that eventually falls out
and the Sun comes back to its original

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brilliance, the atmosphere regains its original
transparency, and so you're returning to the

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status quo, whereas with Venus you're
fundamentally changing everything. If you leave that

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shut some shade in place, or
equivalently, fill the atmosphere with dust,

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that might have other consequences that because
dust retains heat. So I think it's

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going to take a lot longer.
Yeah, Indeed, we've talked This was

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quite a whilid and go we talked
about that. I mean, Venus is

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an example of a planet that may
one at one time and it's past been

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earth like, as was Mars.
And so we've got three planets that at

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one stage during the life of the
Solar System were Earth like. I had

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more what we would consider normal terrain
and normal conditions, one of a better

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work. Yeah, and sometime in
its past the Earth was more tyson like

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because there was the snowball Earth era
when everything was frozen. So yes,

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it's gone through various climatic changes and
events. Fortunately it's landed up where it

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is at the moment. In terms
of the Earth, you know, ambient

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temperature fifteen degrees celsius on our ridge
and rising, yeah, rising, yes,

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right, all right, Kelly,
Dan, thank you so much for

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your question. I always like to
get those kinds of questions and dice them

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up. But yeah, probably not
feasible in terms of building the structure and

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time frames would be rather extensive,
and I'm probably understating that. From Dan

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in California to Dan in Brisbane who
wants to talk about a proto star for

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red Hello to stand from Brisbane.
If you do a Google search on proto

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star L one five two seven,
you'll see amazing James Webspace telescope image of

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a accretion disc with two cones of
material being ejected above and below the accretion

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disc. Now, I believe this
was the same situation is what happened to

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our soul system when it was forming. But this protostar is one hundred thousand

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years old, where our four point
six billion years. So I'm wondering did

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similar clouds of material form above and
below the accretion disc plane. If so,

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what happened to him after four point
six billion years. I believe that

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there's two forces of pressure coming from
our sun. One is the photonic pressure,

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which I think would be spherical,
and the other one is the solar

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wind, which probably varies over time, but I think bridge it would probably

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be spherical as well. So I'd
like to know how does the pressure,

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say on on clouds of gas compare
from the say, the solar wind and

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the photonic pressure. And also what
has happened to this cloud of material above

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and below the plane of our solar
system? Is there any remnant of it

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left? Okay, thank you,
Dan. A lot of information required to

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answer that one. I did look
up the website that he referred to,

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the NASA website with that image of
L one five two seven. I can

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see what he's saying. I think
we did talk about something like this recently

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with the hourglass image that is created
by that effect. Yeah, what,

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well, it's yours s bread passing
the ball. How do you answer this

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one? So Done's you know,
Done's conjectures are right, It's actually not

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really an accretion disc. It's a
protoplanetary disk that is in orbits around the

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star itself, although as the caption
that NASA provides for that Web telescope images

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suggests, the cloud of material is
actually feeding basically the nebulating nebula within which

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this star has been born is feeding
the growth of that protostar. So it's

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a process that probably you know,
includes various examples of stellar burps, if

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I can put it that way,
what you'd call, in a more formal

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sense, sporadic ejections, where material
is actually ejected from the star as it's

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forming, And indeed there's evidence for
several past stellar ejections in the web telescope

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image. It's really it's a really
extraordinary image, and thanks to Dan for

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drawing our attention to it. But
to bring it more up to date.

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So I so long time as I've
looked at these, But my understanding,

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if I remember correctly from my time
when he used to study cellar evolution,

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is that all sunlight stars go through
what's called a t Tory phase. Now

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t Tory is basically another type of
star. I'm just going to google that

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as well, just to get my
bearings correct with what I'm talking about.

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I spent that. In fact,
I think I have a paper back in

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my long ago history where I was
talking about T. Tory stars because so

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I worked on them with a colleague
on an instrument I just built. So

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T Tory stars are a class of
variable stars that are less than about ten

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million years old. They're named after
the prototype T. Tory, a young

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star in the Tourist star formation region. They're found near molecular clouds and identified

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by the optical variability and chromospheric lines. So they are basically sun like stars

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that have not yet become sunlight,
typically less than three times the mass of

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the Sun. And what they do
is they basically emit winds. The sorts

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of winds that they blow are like
the solar wind, much much stronger and

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with much more energy you know,
associated with them. So Tee Tourist stars

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are effectively how a newborn star in
a nevula blows away the residual gas,

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gets rid of all this stuff that
has formed its cocoon for a few,

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perhaps tens or hundreds of millions of
years. So they are, you know,

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they're basically embedded in these gas clouds, but they blow out the wind,

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which I think has down surmises are
probably isotropic. I mean in all

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directions, it's very clear symmetrical.
So check out t Tourist Stars, Dan,

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and you'll find that that might be
the mechanism by which the residual gas

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and dust is blown away. And
so that an object like the Sun who's

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lost already lost its siblings. The
son would have been born with other stars

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in the same dust cloud. And
we know we can't identify what those stars

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are. They won't be far away, and I'm sure it will happen one

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day that stars with identical chemic called
composition to the Sun will be discovered.

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But you know that that means that
because of the te Tory phenomenon, we've

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lost all those remnants of the cloud, which is so obvious in the picture

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of L one five two seven.
Okay, there you Dan, if you

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do it, so it for TEA
Tory. It's tea single letter and Tory

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t A U R I T Tory
Star if you want to read up on

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it. And thanks for the question. Is a really good one. This

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is space Nuts Andrew Dunkley here with
Professor Fred Watson. Okay, we check

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your space nuts. Let's go to
another question, and this one comes from

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Star. That's so we're talking about
a proto Star. Now we've got a

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question from Star. I just wanted
to start off by saying, thank you

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so much for this amazing weekly podcast
twice a week now. I always look

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forward to it every Thursday, and
your episodes helped me get through my astrochemistry

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homework. Oh okay, good.
I hope you didn't get your answers wrong

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based on what we've said, I
was wondering, when it comes to sci

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fi, does your enjoyment of it
depend upon how scientifically accurate it is,

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where applicable or does it not matter? Also, if you have a favorite

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sci fi series, book, movie, et cetera, I would love to

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hear about it from Star. My
enjoyment of sci fi is not limited to

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anything. I will take every story
on its merits, whether it's feasible or

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not. I suppose one of my
favorite sci fi movies would have to in

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recent times be The Martian, which
did actually base a lot of its storylines

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on feasibility. They did stretch the
envelope a bit, though, didn't They

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fread a couple of times there with
certain things, But they basically went with

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a this could be possible scenario.
But then I look at a movie like

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Passengers, which is absolutely and utterly
not feasible because you're basically cryogenically freezing people

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and stopping their lives so that they
can travel ninety years to another world and

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then suddenly start their lives again,
so they're ninety years older without getting any

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older. And a lot of things
in that film were just, you know,

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they were stretching it beyond reasonable possibility
in terms of the story. But

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a great story nonetheless, and I
really enjoyed it. And as far as

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my favorite, my favorite sci fi
story of all time, I'd have to

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say it's Dune. I think Dune
is probably one of the best sci fis

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ever written, but there are so
many it's probably unfair just to name one.

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I mean, Isaac Asimov's Nemesis is
brilliant, Kitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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probably one of the greatest of all
time. The list goes on. There's

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three that I can think of,
Parallax, the Trannian Enigma, the Hitler

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Paradox. They're all really good too. They're familiar sounding time a bit of

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an unknown author. They're black great
idea is just not a great execution,

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Fred would you're not so much into
sci fi as I am? Are here?

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No, I'm not, definitely,
and that comes from you know the

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real thing. Well, I don't
know that. It's that I used to

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read the huge amounts of sci fi
when I was just a lad, but

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these days there seems to be far
more to do, and so it's not

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so not so much. But just
picking up on what you said about passengers,

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was it with that idea of suspended
animation that in my experience goes back

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to nineteen fifty five when Frank Hampson, who was the author of Dan Dayre

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in the Eagle comic in Britain,
actually put his put the whole crew into

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suspended animation for about ten years so
they could get to the solar system of

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Loss with its two warring and it's
cryptos and fantos. That's, for me,

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was the stuff of why I became
a scientist actually because I was totally

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immersed in all that stuff back in
the day, I have to say though,

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And in fact, actually Frank Hampson, who was a genius artist as

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well as a great educator and a
great feminist as well, back in the

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day, he had a character called
Professor Jocelyn Peabody, and she was the

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one who explained all the science,
and so he put, you know,

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the scientific explanations for what was going
on in the in the mouth of a

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woman, which was very unusual back
at that time, but fantastic stuff,

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way ahead of his time. But
maybe it was that, maybe it was

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the effect of my old time favorite
movie two thousand and one, A Space

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Odyssey, where you're where, you're
where, you are actually keeping within the

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bounds of scientific reality. That to
me, he's an added if a science

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fiction story keeps the physics right and
the biology right, then it strikes a

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chord with me compared with the ones
that don't, and they're just annoying to

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a scientist. Gravity comes to mind. Gravity was just way beyond the realms

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of Yeah, it was was good
in the sense that the the the basic

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premise of a kind of Keshler syndrome
thing was was good. But the idea

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of being able to walk from one
space space station to another with your pressure

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suit on, that's just not on. And I mean the other one,

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Interstellar, was lump it a bit
over the top in that regard in stretching

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the relativistic ideas. The one I
liked, I've forgotten. We've talked about

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it recently. What was the one
called that had an interpreter working out how

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to communicate with arrival. Yeah,
magical movie. I like that one because

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because there was so much that could
be real in it, rather than you

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know, being scientifically fictitious. That
is, assuming that giant squid like creatures

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did come to you've got to have
that to start with. But that's the

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point is you can't eliminate that scientifically
because they might well be there, which

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is very I don't know. That's
the thing about aliens. You're never going

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to be able to prove that they're
not there. That's right. You can

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prove they're there if you find well, but you can't ever prove they're not.

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So you started something there start so. But the truth for me is

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it doesn't matter whether there's a reality
potential in it or it's just gone way

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to the extreme. Yeah. I
love the ones that are based on real

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science. But Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, which is based on nothing but

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a man's incredible imagination, just who
nails it for me? It just does.

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Thanks for the question. That was
really good. Quick one for Fred

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to finish from nine year old Ted, whose father has sent the question in

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on his behalf Joe, why can
I sometimes see the moon during the day

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in the UK and does that mean
there isn't a moon in the sky on

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the other side of the Earth?
Thanks Joe and Ted. The reason you

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can sometimes see the UK in the
sky is because the pollution is buying a

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way briefly, the moon in the
UK sky, Yeah, that's right,

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or the cloud or the cloud.
Well, it's true, that's absolutely true.

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The fact is you can see the
moon during the day anywhere it's not

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you know, because the moon as
it goes around the Earth is very often

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above the horizon at the same time
as the Sun is, and its phases

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are different. What you tend not
to see is a full moon during the

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day because that tends to be all
night long. You might see it at

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dusk and dawn, but you won't
see it in the full moon in the

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middle of the day, whereas you
can easily see half moons in the middle

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of the day and all that doesn't
matter where you are UK, North Pole,

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South Pool, Australia, anywhere.
But you're right, if you see

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the moon in the day during the
UK's daytime, you won't see the moon

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in the sky in Australia because we're
basically on the other side of the planet,

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almost exact opposites. Yeah, that's
right, we're almost the exact opposite,

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so that's why. Yeah, there
are times though, because of the

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positioning and the distance, you can
see the Moon from a great many places

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around the world at the same time. I've sometimes been watching live golf from

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the United States and they'll have an
image of the Moon and I'll be going

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in. I can't see that too, and you know, I'm thousands and

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thousands of kilometers away. But it's
all a matter of the angular perspective,

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isn't it. Yeah, it's pretty
easy. Actually, anywhere on the same

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hemisphere that's facing the Moon, we'll
see the moon. So that's half the

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Earth, yes, you know,
so it does include. Yeah, the

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Pacific Ocean's big, separating Australia in
the United States, but they can be

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simultaneously in the same hemisphere pointing towards
the Moon, so you see them there

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you go ted. Hopefully that answers
your question, and keep on gazing at

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the sky you just never see.
It's always fun up there. Fred.

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That brings us to the end.
And if you do have a question for

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us, please go to our website
and send it to us on the AMA

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00:24:27.359 --> 00:24:30.559
tab or the little button on the
right that says send us your questions.

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We'd love to hear from you,
whether it's in text form or audio form.

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00:24:36.000 --> 00:24:37.559
And don't forget to tell us who
you are and where you're from,

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00:24:37.599 --> 00:24:41.920
and don't forget to subscribe you for
your YouTube follower and have a look around

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00:24:41.960 --> 00:24:45.759
on the website. Some great sci
fi books on there, and some great

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00:24:45.839 --> 00:24:52.240
science books as well, more credibility. Thank you, Fred, a pleasure

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as always, and for me too, Andrew, thank you for putting up

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with my rumblings. And we'll speak
again soon. We will, indeed,

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and they're not ramblings by any means. Fred Watson, astronomer at large part

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of the team here at Space Nuts. And thanks to you in the studio

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for being just a nice guy.
Oh I said something nice And from me

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Andrew Dunfrey, thanks for your company. Looking forward to catching up with you

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again later this week on the next
episode of Space Nuts. Bye Byepnuts.

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You'll be listening to the Space Nuts
podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

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00:25:30.160 --> 00:25:34.160
iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at

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bites dot com. This has been
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