The Astroholic Explains S02E12 – The Quickfire Round

The Astroholic Explains S02E12 – The Quickfire Round
13 October 2020

For the final factual episode of season 2, we have crowdsourced many questions about space. Tune in to discover how many atoms are in the universe, how we can tell that galaxies rotate, how we measure the speed of stars, what would happen if we blew up the Moon, and many more questions!

Listen on Apple Podcast or on your favourite podcast player through Anchor.

Chris

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Astroholic Explains

Alfredo

Welcome! So this is going to be the penultimate episode but it’s going to be our final episode

that is focused on the science. We have another episode, that is a fictional episode

after this and then there’s going to be a little bit of a break and then as it’s tradition we’re going to have our Christmas special! and then that’s it for 2020 both for the year and for… from us 

Chris

it’s gonna be a good couple of fictional episodes as well!

Alfredo

Yes, we’re really excited about that can’t wait but I am excited about this special episode because it’s going to be

Chris 

it’s going to be a quickfire round episode!

Alfredo

Very very exciting! 

Chris

So yeah we have crowdsourced some questions and I’m just going to throw them at Alf with well hopefully the answers won’t be too long so it’ll be a very fast-paced episode

Alfredo

depends on the questions and depends on the answers! shall we start?

Chris

Yes, let’s begin 

Alfredo

let’s begin!

Chris

right the first question is going to be one from me because i just wanted to get a question

as well and it’s not just everyone else…

Alfredo

Awesome, get the ball rolling!

Chris

the ball rolling, the first question: you become the first person on Mars. What are your first words?

Alfredo

My first words are going to be “Oh god, oh god no, oh god no!” and then I cut off the feed

Chris

oh, that’s terrifying! I like that!

Alfredo

No, I’m not sure, I’m probably going to ask this… I’m going to crowdsource this question mostly because first of all, I think it’s there’s already been enough white men getting firsts in the

solar system, so I just feel like it’s somebody else’s turn to have an epochal, life-changing, humanity-changing phrase. If I were to be a first somewhere in space, I think I would pick like a comet or an asteroid. 

Chris

would you have any different words for there?

Alfredo

not sure, I think it would be something… nothing as a giant leap for… it should be humankind.

nothing… I don’t think it’s going to be that big. I think it would be maybe a reflection on

my experience, I don’t know or maybe it’s a small step for a gay.

Chris

A small step for a gay?

Alfredo 

yeah giant leap for queerkind… i don’t know. No but if you have any idea of what’s your first

sentence on a different planet or an asteroid, a comet, a moon, please do let us know in the comments or just tweet us!

Chris

Right i’m going to carry on! This question comes from Karl, or @kjcbyrne who asks what is your favorite galaxy other than the milky way and why?

Alfredo

Okay, first of all, Karl a bit presumptuous that the milky way is my favorite galaxy.

I know, I know is the only galaxy with chocolate, but I am not too super keen on earth at the

moment so…

Anyway, I think the answer will have to be M51 also known as the whirlpool galaxy

because it is the quintessential spiral galaxy. if you’re picturing in your head a spiral galaxy, 90 percent chance you’re picturing the whirlpool galaxy. It is textbook. Also, it is merging. it’s doing a minor merger with a spheroidal companion, which is much tinier, so it’s a case of galactic cannibalism. And I don’t know how many of these have you listened to or if you follow me on

social media but, you might know, that galaxy mergers is my Ph.D. topic. So i can show a perfect spiral with a merger that is like “uuh you see” And people have heard of the whirlpool galaxy. 

Chris

I think every time there’s a depiction of a galaxy anywhere, the picture that is going to be shown more than likely is the whirlpool galaxy and i think that’s probably why people are going to have seen it. 

Alfredo

Yeah! Also, you can see it with a good pair of binocular. It is “only” 23 million light years away

and quite exciting but it’s still in peer review so we can discuss it because it was on

the arXiv but we can’t really be super excited, we might have discovered a planet in M51… 

Chris

That’s exciting!

Alfredo 

super exciting, if it’s confirmed. And it would be the furthest planet ever discovered at 23 million light-years away!

Chris

My favorite galaxy it’s the little Penguin and the egg (NGC 2936 & NGC2937)! that is adorable! 

Alfredo

that is very very very cute 

Chris

So next question comes from Ben Jack or @sparksofben who asks: “galaxies look stationary, so why do scientists say that they rotate?”

Alfredo

Oh, this subtly excellent question! I’m not sure if he’s a little bit trolling with the “how do they say they are rotating” but Ben Jack is right galaxies look stationary and take such a long time to rotate how can we tell that they are actually rotating?

And it is due to a very common effect that you must certainly have the experience you might not

know the name but you definitely experience it and it’s called the doppler effect.

Chris

Oh like when an ambulance goes past..

Alfredo

excellent so taking my example away please, describe what happens when the ambulance goes past

Chris

No.

Alfredo

I thought you were going this is The Astroholic Explains

Chris

It is the Astroholic explains it’s not Chris Explains

Alfredo

Okay, fair enough. So what happens? You have an ambulance coming towards you. so it’s

moving at a certain speed which is comparable to the speed of sound. as the ambulance approaches the pitch of the siren is higher than its normal regular pitch if the ambulance

was stationary. once it passed after you, beyond you, the pitch becomes lower than if the ambulance was stationary. and this is because of how the sound waves propagate from a moving object. 

Chris is nodding so I would assume that it’s been a clear explanation. how does this relate to

galaxies? So the same effect, the same doppler effect also happens to light so a light source

that is moving. if it’s moving towards you, it will be blue-shifted. if it’s moving away from you it will be redshifted. So if you’re looking at galaxies and you’re combining the entire light from a galaxy and you measure the sort of spectrum of light, that the sort of fingerprint of how light is emitted by this galaxy, you’ll see that in a rotating galaxy half of the galaxy will look a little

bit bluer and half will look a little bit redder.

Obviously, something that you cannot see with the naked eye you need specialized equipment and techniques but you can absolutely totally see this rotation. And you can do even more you can measure how the rotation changes at different point of the galaxies and it’s super exciting because that is wha suggested the presence of dark matter. Because spiral galaxies tend to rotate in a very peculiar way that suggests there is a lot more matter than what we can see

with our telescopes. 

Chri

the more you know! next question! @wanfungyeung who asks  “How do we measure the speed of stars/galaxies (ie travelling from A to B in C direction)?! Surely they’re relative to something else that’s also moving…

Alfredo 

Absolutely. This is a case of “It’s all relative!” and measuring it’s quite subtle. so, let’s start with galaxies. Again doppler effect that we’ve just been discussing you can use the same approach

to measure galaxies. there is the one extra bit. It is important, when you’re doing that kind of measuring that you measure galaxies and its neighbors, the galaxies that are around there.

why Chris? 

Chris

Because everything is moving away from everything else.

Alfredo

Close, very close. So that is exactly where we’re going but… you’re very close!

So the universe is expanding and everything is moving away from everything else unless they’re really close to each other. So usually because there is this expansion there is something that we call the redshift. So galaxies just by the fact that they are so far away from us they appear that they are moving away. It’s not a proper motion, they’re not actually speeding up themselves, the space between galaxies is expanding. okay so far? So if you want to work out a proper motion it’s quite difficult because you have this cosmological redshift plus the velocity that could be towards us, away from us, perpendicular to us… so what we do is look at galaxy they are like in groups or in clusters: they’re all more or less at the same distance. So we can work out using the cosmological redshift the distance and then using the slight variation trying to create simulations of how the geometry of these galaxies is working in space, we can work out

how they’re moving how fast they’re going etc

Chris

Okay. 

Alfredo

So far so good, so how do we measure the speed of the stars? Obviously, we’re talking about stars in the milky way and there is the speed that the stars have going around our galaxy.

If they are moving at a certain speed towards or away from us we can work it out with redshift or blueshift, so doppler effect but also we can do something even more detailed, even more subtle

and is through the concept of parallax. So maths!

[Long sigh from Chris]

Chris is not impressed about maths. So you heard the trigonometry right?

Chris

Yep

Alfredo

Awesome! So let’s assume that.. let’s take one star in the sky and let’s assume that is fixed it

doesn’t move! If you start looking at the star at a precise time in the sky so… Sorry, the star is not fixed in the sky, it’s fixed somewhere in space away far far away from Earth, you are

here on earth and every night for a year you measure the position of that star in the sky. Because the earth rotates around the sun and it describes an ellipse, the star although is fixed in space it will look like it does a little ellipse in the sky on earth. what you can do by

measuring the size of that ellipse? 

You can work out something called the parallax angle and so you can measure the distance to

that star. what we call parsec is a measurement that this is implying that you have a parallax of one arcsecond which is one-sixtieth of one-sixtieth a degree of an angle.

So how do you measure the speed? Things are not fixed in space. So when you start measuring this you’re expecting this nice ellipse, the star has moved from the year

before so it’s actually creating a weird sort of curly shape. And by measuring that you can work out both the distance and a value for its speed.

That’s how you measure both the speed of galaxies and the speed of stars. 

Chris

Wonderful, so the next question actually comes from an anonymous person who does not wish to be named: what’s one thing in astronomy you wish wasn’t true?

Alfredo

That wormholes are not stable!

Chris

Why? Are you thinking of travelling?

Alfredo

I want to see the stars. I want to travel through the universe and as far as we can tell based on relativity, wormholes are not stable so we cannot travel across intergalactic, interstellar distances, traveling to the past. 

But even if they were stable on a short distance… Imagine! Just like “Okay now I’m going to pop to Tokyo for a bit of tempura udon, or soaking an onsen! Oh I’m gonna pop home and see my family for lunch, i’ll be back in the afternoon… 

Chris

It’s no living out your star trek fantasies, then?

Alfredo

It’s not just star trek. Seriously every single major sci-fi franchise uses wormholes or something akin to warp space and stuff like that so no, I am very upset about that!

Chris

Okay, next question from

Alfredo

Not super quick fire! We need to do a little bit of calculations. What do we have? The visible

Universe… First of all the universe might be infinite..

Chris

So is the answer infinite?

Alfredo

Eeeeh… but that is not a fun answer. what’s the point? “Nathan the answer is infinite; maybe; we

don’t know; we’re not certain. no. We can do better than that okay 

Chris

Okay

Alfredo

So let’s focus on the visible universe. The visible universe due to the expansion is 93 billion light-years across which makes it

Chris

unfathomably big i can’t even begin to picture that

Alfredo

unfathomably big but also which makes it 10^27 meters across so that is slightly less than a billion billion billion meters across 

Chris

10 to the 27 meters sounds so much smaller.

Alfredo

i know and it gets it gets worse, so we’re talking about volume. We need to talk about volume… sorry in my head that it’s already clear what the calculation i need to do but you’re not in my head!

So we need to talk about volume because humans have been able to measure the density of matter in the universe. So bear with that thought. Let’s make it super simple for us because

we don’t know the geometry of the universe, we assume that the universe is three-dimensionally flat. Alfredo what the fu…. what does it mean it’s three dimensionally flat

Chris

That would be another question…

Alfredo

but yes let’s go with it, let’s just make our life easy and just cube our 10^27 meters so you get to 10^81 cubic meter. So it’s a lot of billion billions. We don’t care. big big number. so you might think okay how many particles are there? 

There is this paper that came out just a couple of weeks ago put the amount of matter in the universe to be about six protons per cubic meter.

Chris

Sure 

Alfredo

You can imagine like a cubic meter and like that six protons, because there is a lot of empty space. But that’s not all matter. That is our average base on the fact there is also dark matter!

And regular matter is about one-sixth of the total matter density of the universe. Which makes ti quite easy. It means that there is one proton per cubic meter. So we have an upper limit. 

The upper limit is: How many atoms? One proton is the nucleus of one hydrogen so our

upper limit is about 10 to the 81 atoms in the universe.

We can make it slightly more precise but it’s not gonna change much. The composition of the universe.. Uuhh. The composition of the milky way that is something that is in my head. 74 percent of the matter of the Milky Way is hydrogen. 24 percent is helium which takes us to 98.

Then the rest is all the other elements. The third most abundant is oxygen which is about 1.4 %

of the milky way is oxygen. So we can divide things like this. Every 100 atoms you have 74 hydrogen, 24 helium, and 2 oxygen. That means that based on the amount of protons how many would you have?

You usually would get something around for 800 protons you would get something around

641 atoms, that’s what you have. I would put a more reasonable answer to between 10^79 to 10^80 atoms in the universe.

I know this wasn’t really fast! 

Chris

no it’s not really a quick fire question after all was it?

Alfredo

Sorry, but thank you Nathan for the question! It was brilliant 

Chris

Okay, another question from carl @kjcbyrne: where in the solar system should we send

a probe next?

Alfredo

In the words of Lady Gaga to the planet: Venus! Come on!! Okay, enceladus and europa are a lot more likely to have life and they’re probably going to have a lot more exciting things. Titan is going to be so much more exciting. It is the only other world in the solar system with liquid something on its first surface; it’s methane but it’s still liquid and exciting!

But venus is really close and i really really really want to know about the phosphine!!

Chris

So speaking about the phosphine, like would it be possible if we did send a probe to venus

with like a sort of, i don’t know, a space scoop or something that can just…

Alfredo

a little hoover

Chris

yeah, a little hoover that can just sort of suck up a little bit of that venusian atmosphere and bring it home for us to analyze. Is that possible?

Alfredo

There are certainly missions looking into that. There is a russian mission that wants to do everything. It wants to get on the surface, get a sample, then fly into the atmosphere, get a sample, and then just shoot itself back to Earth. So there are a lot of very exciting ideas but you have made several assumptions with that question. 

you wanted to grab a little bit of venusian atmosphere to find the origin of the phosphine. What are your assumptions?

Chris

My assumptions:

  1. that we could scoop it up 

  2. That it’s dense enough to be scooped up 

  3. That in doing that it would survive the trip home 

  4. that we would even be able to discover the origin of this phosphine

  5. that it would survive the journey

Alfredo

You already said that but four is key. i think your underlying assumption there which it’s only natural and sometimes I think in these terms (but we shouldn’t) is that the origin of that phosphine is something in the atmosphere that is constantly producing it, just by being in the atmosphere. 

That is a sort of underlying assumption that it is a living organism. 

Chris

So you suggesting that if we were to scoop it up and bring it home it would just diebecause it’s not in it’s natural habitat.

Alfredo

No, it’s not that it’d just die because ideally you take a lot of the atmosphere. The issue is what if it’s not a living organism. If you haven’t heard the news about the phosphine on Venus, i did a really good explainer on The Astroholic youtube channel and it’s also on the website etc but in very simple terms: researchers discovered this molecule called phosphine in the atmosphere of venus. it’s super exciting because it’s a molecule that should be destroyed pretty quickly by

the extremely acidic environment of the atmosphere of venus but it isn’t. So there’s something producing it.

Researchers look at, i think, 74 ways to produce phosphine on earth or at least the ways that we are familiar that don’t involve a living organism. And none of those ways could work on venus so there’s either a geochemical (so something happening on the surface of venus or underground because we believe that venus is volcanically active) or there’s something in the atmosphere

happening with uv light from the sun or, potentially, a living organism that somehow is surviving the extreme conditions of the acidic atmosphere of venus. 

So if it’s not a living organism, just taking a sample of the atmosphere and bringing it back home

is unlikely to give us any answer. We might we might find out something really exciting about venus…

Chris

I was going to say it’d still be worth sending a probe there and finding stuff..

Alfredo

Now, here are a lot of missions thinking of how can we get as close as possible to Venus and study it as well as possible. This is why i answered Karl saying let’s go to venus!

Chris

Right, another question from me: do nebulae look as colorful and pretty

in real life with your naked eye as they do in photos?

Alfredo

Since you’re an artist you probably would say.. i will probably have to say no.. I would

say this still look pretty but obviously the colors are a lot more muted and this is often the case

also for a lot of planetary pictures. Not all of them. Astronomer tend to enhance photos…

Okay first of all most of images have different filters, so it’s not like seeing it with our proper naked eye. it’s like a camera. It’s looking at filters that collect light in a slightly different way

and so often have more… they can see more light than the human eye. Sometimes it’s even combined with infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, so a lot more than what the human eye can see. So different colors needs to be assigned. 

But even the things that are just visible, the colors are enhanced because they allow us to see

details better so in real life the colors will appear a lot more muted but this will look very pretty. 

I would say if you were inside a nebula you would only see the fuzziness at the edges. You wouldn’t be like inside a cloud. Bebulae are very very very big. They’re huge and the density is so very very low. 

Chris

Right i’m gonna throw another question at you. Another one from Ben Jack (@sparksofben). Are there any other planets you would downgrade to a dwarf planet or any natural satellite you would upgrade? 

And i would like to make an addendum to this question, because obviously it’s not just a case

of if you would like to downgrade a planet. So i’m going to say if you could download [sic] a planet out of spite, which one would you do?

Alfredo

If I were to downgrade a planet out of spite… Okay i think i’m going to be extremely spiteful… actually not spiteful just chaotic. I would upgrade or actually reclassify Titan because it as i said

the only other world with liquid on its surface, thick atmosphere etc.  And then i will downgrade Saturn. we’re gonna have a dwarf planet binary.

Chris

What?? But it’s so big!!

Alfredo

Yes, okay but you see? I think there is an issue here with, and i blame the americans for this,

that we consider the fact that pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet a downgrade. And i don’t think is correct to say that.

Obviously, it was the only planet discovered by an american and at the time of the reclassification, the New Horizons mission had been launched for i think a few years

so there was a lot of riding on this idea that Pluto is so important.

But Pluto is important even if you call it a dwarf planet and i think we should we should expand the classification. I think dwarf planets counts as planets. We just need to start putting labels in a better way: like mercury, venus, mars, and earth – rocky planets. then we have saturn and jupiter – gas giants. Neptune and uranus – ice giants. Ceres, Pluto, Eris – dwarf planets.

We create the classification because it simplify the way we try to understand the world.  But even for example gas giant planets, it’s a complicated classification. Because we’re starting to discover so many that are roughly the size of brown dwarfs which are objects that are stellar-like but are much smaller. And it’s very difficult for a lot of  these objects to understand if they are brown dwarf or just something really big, only a little bit bigger than jupiter. So it’s complex. Our astronomical taxonomy is far from perfect and we are walking towards a moment in which we will have to reckon with this classification.

Chris 

It seems to be an ongoing argument! constantly!

Alfredo 

It is a constant argument, but what i would say is I never learned of the existence of Ceres which is the largest body in the asteroid belt, until I got to university. And i would say that

Ceres was discovered by an italian so even in italy i should have had in school: “oh this is something that we can be proud of et cetera et cetera” because Ceres was for a while consider a planet, until they realized that it was just too small etcetera. What i think it’s important now,

a lot of schools teach that there are eight planets and five dwarf planets and a lot of other minor worlds. 

And suddenly you are putting these minor worlds on the map and I think it’s so important that that is happening. So i think it is a positive thing! But i’m happy to hear a counter-argument about why everything should be a planet 

Chris

we have two questions next from two separate anonymous people

Alfredo

Uhh, okay. 

Chris

First based on its name alone, do you have a favorite place in our solar system?

Alfredo

yes, the mordor macula!

Chris

Oh wow is that.. on wait hang on…

Alfredo

okay, where is it?

Chris 

So obviously named for j.r.r tolkien’s range of mountains that surround mordor.

Alfredo

Just mordor

Chris

Or just moderate in general. if i’m not mistaken there are…

Alfredo

Do you want me to translate the latin macula?

Chris

Only if you think it will help.

Alfredo

i have no idea! Macula means spot.

Chris

it does not help, well i mean it would suggest to me.. spot would suggest to me Jupiter but i don’t think it’s on jupiter

Alfredo

No, it is a geological feature

Chris,

yeah, so there are another geological features named after tolkien’s work which i think are the iron mountains and i think if i’m not mistaken they’re on titan. 

Alfredo

The iron mountains are on Titan. Gold start to chris!

Chris

At last, yes!

Alfredo

the murder macula is not on titan.

Chris

Mars?

Alfredo

Nope

Chris

pluto?

Alfredo

closer 

Chris

Ceres?

Alfredo

closer in a geographical sense rather than…

Chris

Neptune.

Alfredo

No,no around pluto but not on pluto. So around pluto but not on pluto, around pluto

but not on pluto

Chris

One of pluto’s moons 

Alfredo

yes! which one?

Chris

Charon?

Alfredo

yes! north pole of charon has this red zone that is called the Mordor Macula and we believe it is because some photochemical reaction is happening in the very tenuous atmosphere of pluto and it’s been blown onto its mon Charon. 

Chris

I like that. 

The next question what would happen to earth if we blew up the moon? Everyone wants to blow planets up…

Alfredo

I was about to ask… this is another anonymous, right?

Chris

It wasn’t Steve…

Alfredo

Okay, it wasn’t Steve. So we had in episode 15 lovely Steve who asked about blowing up Earth and we realized that it takes so much energy to completely destroy our planet and we had to invoke stars and rogue planets and black holes and supernova just to make sure that we could destroy it. 

Chris

If someone blew up the moon what i think would happen

Alfredo

tell me 

Chris

it would mess up all of the tides

Alfredo

correct 

Chris

but I don’t know in what way so it’s either going to stop waves full stop…

Alfredo

not exactly

Chris

or it’s going to do the complete opposite and there’s just going to be constant global tsunamis because there’s no moon to keep it in check.

Alfredo

okay first of all we need to start with a much earlier question. how are we destroying the moon?

Chris

Blow up

Alfredo

okay it’s gonna be blown up… so you’re extinguishing all life on earth because where do you think those bits of moon are going? haven’t you watch umbrella academy? like they are coming down on earth!

Chris

Spoilers!

Alfredo

spoilers? that’s season one!

Chris

more spoilers! i would personally i would have a shield. If i was to then i would have a big shield in front of earth so that none of those bits…

Alfredo

made of what??

Chris

diamond! something impenetrable!

Alfredo

there is no such thing as something impenetrable

So let’s assume that you are not going to destroy it by blowing it up and then killing everyone on this planet in the process. you’re gonna somehow throw it into the sun.

Chris

Okay yeah!

Alfredo

Somehow you’re gonna throw it into the sun. what happens then? as you said the tides. what causes the tides on earth?

Chris 

the moon,  the wind, I don’t know…

Alfredo

It’s the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun okay? so, without the moon, there’s still going

to be tides but are going to be much lower. The tides are very important because they help circulate water on earth, in the earth’s oceans. So even if you just push the moon away

you’re gonna have that crucial effect. And the fact that there’s gonna lead to maybe…

definitely thousands, if not tens of thousands, hundred thousand, millions species going extinct

in the oceans, and the consequences is that species are gonna go extinct everywhere.

And we’re not finished. The moon also helps stabilize the tilt of the earth which is the reason why we have seasons. Because the earth is at an angle in its orbit, so without the moon, the tilt is going to start varying again quite significantly. And that will probably end up changing season maybe we’re going to get to a point in which there are no seasons. Again more extinction etc

so even if you can push the moon away in the most gentle but firm approach 

Chris

Just say “No, moon”

Alfredo

No more Moon. Goodnight moon. …it’s still going to cause huge harm to life on earth.

Chris

so not a good idea. 

Alfredo

not a good idea 

Chris

Let’s keep the moon

Alfredo

we keep the moon, we like the moon!

Chris

The final question is from me: if you were able to harness the energy of the sun through the use of a dyson sphere, which if you’re not familiar with the term it’s basically a hypothetical

machine/construct that you would use to surround the sun and use its energy and you would get

masses of energy from it, what would you do with all that energy?

Alfredo

Destroy the moon.

Chris

You just made such a good argument for not destroying the moon! 

Alfredo

what do you want me to do with all that much energy?

Chris

you could do so much! you could basically do everything! To tie it back to an earlier question 

you could use that energy to make a wormhole stable!

Alfredo

we don’t know if we can make a wormhole stable even with that amount of energy. I don’t know don’t think it’s clear just how much energy the sun emits in terms of luminosity. 

Tell me how many, i don’t know, millions or billion times or whatever big number you can think of

in terms of how much energy from the sun which reaches the earth or the total amount…

Chris

I have no idea about energy quantities from the Sun.

Alfredo

I remember the power produced by the sun (which is energy per second) simply because how we calculate luminosity so it’s about 10^26 watts. 1 & 26 zeros 

Chris

Okay

Alfredo 

The energy consumed by humanity, not the energy sorry, the power is about 10^13. 

Chris

Okay. So it’s much much more..

Alfredo

The power that we get from the sun to earth is 10^17 watts, which means that if we could harness all of the power that just gets down to earth we could power 10,000 more civilizations like ours. 

If we have a Dyson sphere, 10 to the 26, is another 10 trillion. 10 trillion civilization like ours in terms of power consumption. That is an enormous amount!

Chris

i can’t even picture 

Alfredo

Exactly! So I really don’t know what you would do with that amount of energy. First of all, I know that there is all this idea that civilizations get more and more and more power-hungry… but it’s just like… it’s an enormous amount.

With what I know, I cannot picture what you do. the only thing that sort of springs to mind, there was an idea to sort of… if you wanted to shift the entire solar system 

Chris

would that kind of turn the sun into like an engine?

Alfredo

yeah and there was this idea that you would use the sun and you will need a huge amount of

energy to use the sun as an engine and literally just shift the sun and drag the planets with it. but even that I don’t think, it would use a full Dyson sphere. 

Chris

move it there and back again

Alfredo

i have no idea but if any of you has any suggestions

Chris

What would you do?

Alfredo

Yeah, what would you do with a dyson sphere covering the sun? Please do let me know! 

And i think this is it.

Chris

Alfredo

Fantastic so as I mentioned earlier, we have two more episodes for you in 2020 and they’re gonna be two fictional episodes. We really hope you enjoy them. One is going to be again in two weeks standard for our episodes and then the next one is going to be just before Christmas.

Chris

Thank you so much to everyone who sent in questions

Alfredo

yeah, thank you so much this was very good fun. if you have more questions between now and when the podcast starts again feel free to tweet me either on my personal one or @theastroholic, or email me or comment on any of the social media. I will get back to you!

And until then have a good time!

Chris

See you!