 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here, likable. Science is likable. This is likable science. I'm Jay Fidel, likable science at 2 p.m. on Friday, no surprise. And Ethan Allen's to my left, and we're going to do this thing together today. Hi, Ethan. Howdy, Jay. Nice to see you. Good to be here. Happy New Year. You know. Happy New Year. So what's interesting is that this week, the Chinese landed a spaceship and a lunar rover on the dark side of the moon, our moon, we thought we owned the moon, we don't own the moon. Oh, no. And at this point, I think they more likely own the moon, just like the South China China Sea. Let's hope we don't get that contentious about it. Well, OK. So can you tell us what the environment is? Give us an establishment shot of what's out there that needed to be challenged. Well, the sort of technological tour de force that they did was landing on the so-called dark side. But it's not really the dark side. The moon is caught in what's sometimes called tidal lock with the Earth. So we from Earth only ever see one side of the moon. We see one face of that sphere, and that face always faces Earth, and the other side always faces outer space, as it were. So the moon rotates on its axis with exactly the same frequency that circles the Earth. How does that work? Is it a mass and magnetism? Is it physics? And something must be physics. It probably has to do with how it got established initially and what happened to set it in place there and how it coalesced. Because obviously the Earth spins a lot faster on its axis. It spins every 24 hours and then takes 365 of those days to go around its parent body. So a very different pattern. The moon that is the moon's day and its year, if you will, around the Earth are the same length of time. But it's just not the only place in the solar system where moons keep looking at the planet. Some moons are tidally locked in other places too. Moon lock. Tidal lock, it's called. Tidal lock. Yeah, and how it's to do it, how the gravitational forces are set. It's like moon struck, but not the same thing. Anyway, okay. But the problem with that is when you come to land a probe on that backside, the moon is in the way then and you can't send radio signals back to Earth. So you can't either give instructions to your probe or receive any data from your probe. Now if that body were spinning faster and rotating around you could, you know, you get a few hours of data and you could upload instructions to the probe and download data and everything will be fine. But because it's tidally locked, once you dump something on the backside, it's there and you're not going to communicate with it directly, except unless you've done something very clever, which is what the Chinese did. So in any two body system, the Earth and Moon being two bodies, there are five points, so-called Lagrange points, where the gravitational forces between those two bodies are balanced out very neatly at five points in space. So you can drop a satellite and have it essentially sitting there doing a little orbit around nothing at one of these points and it will more or less stay there pretty much indefinitely. It's sort of held in place by competing gravities. Okay, I'm backing some of that. Right. Let's see. Now that was called- And so that's the Relay Satellite. The Relay Satellite, which was named by the Chinese, well, the Lunar probe was called Changi Four. Right. Changi is their Lunar goddess name. Okay. And the Relay Satellite was really a very clever part of it. Right. In fact, an essential part of this whole thing- Absolutely. Is- what was it- Chi Chao, Chi Chao. Something like that. The spelling- Right. I'll spell it Q-U-E-Q-I-A-O, Chi Chao. Right. Okay, so this is, you know, to change the truth though, it sounds obvious. I know that it shouldn't sound obvious, but it does sound obvious. You need to communicate with this thing on the far side of the moon. There's no way to communicate with it through the moon, so you have to find a way to communicate, so you make a satellite. Again, I think the value added here is that you're using this Lagrangian point calculation and finding the right spot so the communications satellite will do the right thing on a continuing basis. Exactly. So you have the satellite actually perform, yeah? Right, yeah. I mean, they put that satellite in place first and made sure it was sitting there stably because now it can just sort of sit there and it's not using that particularly much fuel at all. It doesn't have to go anywhere. It doesn't have to power itself. It just hangs there and then it can get direct line of sight with anything on the dark side of the moon, the back side of the moon, and at the same time it can communicate directly with Earth. Yeah. So, and, you know, with modern-day telecom and I assume they have that, you can communicate to land the vehicle on the moon. You can communicate to move the, what do you call it, the moon? Right. We actually have the probe around. Right. There are three parts to it. It's got relay satellite. There's the lander and then the lander opened up and spit out a little rover. The rover. So, all of that, you really need to communicate. So, somebody back, somebody is, it's like a drone, somebody back in China is moving it around. Yeah, because you can't, yeah, you can't just let it go randomly, right? Let it run into a rock. Because you don't know what's there. Right. Exactly. You know, you have to. And it can send pictures back. Right. It needs a satellite for that too. Exactly. It can get that two-way flow of data. So, it can send its images up so you know what you're, what you're looking at and where to go. I mean, while it's also sending data back, you're sending commands up saying go right, go left, go ahead, slow down, dig here, whatever. Oh, yeah. And, you know, finally the most important thing is do some experiments. Right. Right. Evaluate the soil, evaluate the conditions. Right. They're doing temperature probes. They're doing visual analysis, spectral analysis. They're sampling the atmosphere such as these gases, the types of radiation. But the really interesting thing they're doing, they basically stuck a little terrarium on this thing. It's about a six and a half pound can, you know, foot and a half long. And it's got some soil. It's got some plant seeds of potatoes and tomatoes and I think a mustard plant. And it's got silkworm eggs in it. And the idea is basically it's all sealed so it, they keep warm enough basically. And they want to see if they can get a little ecosystem going where the plants will go and start growing. They'll produce oxygen that'll allow the silkworms to grow up. The silkworms will produce carbon dioxide that'll allow the plants to grow and everyone can be happy together. But it's a sealed system. Yes. A small sealed system. It's a little legitimate concern but it strikes me that one reason to have a sealed system is to protect the moon from any microbes that may be in that system that may cause trouble or go out of control somehow in the moon. Am I right about that? That's probably a sort of secondary level of concern, yes. Most of our things like to live on Earth aren't going to do well at all in the moon. The moon's just not a happy condition for them. To die. It has no air. It has very huge temperature extremes and high radiation and all three of those are sort of big strikes against what you probably want. So the primary reason for sealing the system is to have the system survive. It doesn't have, the essential elements would escape into the non-atmosphere or the very low atmosphere in the moon and then the whole terrarium wouldn't work. I should point out some things on Earth do pretty well. There are these little things called tardigrades, these little tiny bug-like creatures that are incredibly tough and some of them have gone on space flights and actually been outside of spacecraft for a very long time and they continue to live. For a surprisingly long time they have to go out. They're very tough for the animals. It's a negative side to that. We could go back a few years later and find the whole moon covered but maybe they'll thrive. Okay, it sounds very scientific. Incidentally, Ethan is our chief scientist here at ThinkTech, aside from being part of being the host of likable science. So it's interesting, so many points. One, let's just look at the reasons the Chinese went to the effort because this is not a time when a lot of probes are going to the moon. We have some stuff going to Mars, unmanned to Mars, but not to the moon. And maybe not as sophisticated as this sounds pretty sophisticated, although it's unmanned. In fact, what I read was that the Chinese did not intend to send a manned vehicle to the moon for another 10 years at least. So why did they do this? So these experiments, that important, are they into this kind of science? No, it's a showy thing to do that was sort of doable. I mean, I would say it's not rocket science, but obviously it is rocket science, but nobody had done it before. They crashed a couple of probes onto the dark side of the moon, the backside of the moon, but nobody had set something down there gently and stayed in communication with it. And yet, people had figured it out a long time ago. All it would take was, yes, first you dump your relay satellite into the right little lagrange point, and everything should be hunky-dory, and it should be easy enough to do. But nobody's done it. So it's cute. And they've done it in the very south pole of the moon in this very large crater called the Aitken crater, Aitken basin, which is a huge old impact crater that is about eight miles deep, that is the center of that blue there is about eight miles below the surface of the moon, basically below what will be the surface. The blue represents an artificial color and represents the distance from the camera. Well, the depth, yes. Right. The depth. Okay. And because it's so deep, it was a big impact crater, they expect there is deep lunar crust essentially on the surface there. And so they can find out more about the moon's history and what it used to be like, what its original crust looked like, rather than looking just at the new surface of the moon. So the device, what do you call it, the probe itself, is in that blue area. Yes. It's at the bottom of the blue area, and therefore it has a greater opportunity to do experiments there. And one of those little craters is inside that big crater, basically, yes. Did you know, do we know whether this is ever going to come back or just send signals? I do not believe this, they plan to get this back at all. I don't believe they have any technology put onto it to have it pop up. That's their next one. This is Chang Four, and Chang Five and Six are going to go to the moon, grab surface samples and come back to Earth, supposedly, and bring lunar materials back, which will be the first time since the Apollo flight. So this is part of a long-term series, a long-term plan. Yes. This is the fourth in a series of six, as far as I know. And they've already been there. Right. The Chinese have been to the light side of the moon, I guess. Chang Three hit the light side, yeah. So it really sounds like, in terms of the science, they want to own the science of going to the moon. They want to be there. Okay, so that makes them look good, for sure. And it makes us look maybe like we abandoned our interests in the moon, which we did, I think. It's really too bad. The administration, after the administration, didn't seem to care about it. And they didn't fund NASA as well as they might have. But aside from that, aside from looking good, certainly they do, could there be other reasons for that? I guess there's pure science, learning stuff that humanity did not know. And they're learning stuff maybe we didn't know either, and I know they'll share that with us or not. But the question is, what else? Is there a geopolitical reason? Is there a South China Sea reason here? They want a sort of assert jurisdiction, sovereignty, a claim over the moon, do you think? I believe, as far as I understand it, many of the nations on Earth, all ones capable of doing spaceflight, agreed some while ago that the moon was sort of not to be claimed to sovereign ground by anyone, which basically joined me by the Earth. So a binding global agreement. We know how binding those are. Yeah, right, exactly. And so yes, by putting, by showing they can go to the dark side, the back side of the moon, you put in theory, put stuff there that's going to be harder to see, certainly. It won't be totally hidden, but it makes it much more difficult for people to see it. They really have to send a satellite out to look for it. But what might you want to put on the dark side of the moon where people can't see it? For example, they have telecommunications satellite out there. We can't access those signals. We have no idea. We can get those signals. I assume everything is coded. Yeah, right, it's coded, it's encrypted, and it's probably in Chinese on top of that. Right, so if we broke that code, we're all fine. And there's no big mirror back there. And we have no way, right now, we have no way of seeing what's back there. It's a hidden place in the sky, that's what it is. I mean, for example, you could amass equipment. You could amass other lunar probes to do other things and leave them quietly there, and we, in the US, we wouldn't even know what was there. Well, I think our intelligence agencies track pretty closely when you knock something up out of our atmosphere, send any significant chunk of matter up out of our atmosphere on this planet pretty much leaves a heat trail. Oh, we know something went there. Yeah, and we'll track it and know what went there. Well, they could track it and figure out, you know, why do you dump six payloads of something? Yeah, there, and we'd get pretty suspicious after a while. Absolutely not. Not talking about it. We should, actually. But it is interesting. They didn't make a big deal in China about that. It's interesting enough that they ran, like, fourth or fifth level news story of the day when there's land where they had lines here in the US. Remarkable. You know, the day that it happened would be what? Wednesday, our Wednesday, their Thursday. We had big press, only yesterday, no, two days ago. We had big press about that, and it was all over the place because it's a sexy thing, it's a clever thing, and we got upstaged, sorry, we got upstaged. They on the other, and then there was an article in the paper, I think this morning, as to what you say, that the Chinese papers didn't make much of it. Right, some of the citizens didn't know about it, they didn't know about it, they didn't seem to care about it. So why? What is it that the Chinese public don't care about? What is it that the Chinese government doesn't want to really make a big deal about? Yeah, I mean, that's interesting why what they choose to prioritize, not prioritize, what they choose to talk about, what they choose not to talk about is clearly sort of centrally determined on people, their governmental leaders have their priorities and they know what news they want to feature, what news they don't want to feature. I don't really claim to have any understanding of it. I think they're increasing in a sort of untenable position with more and more information channels opening up all the time, flowing around the world. They're trying to muscle it this way. I think, yeah, trying to muscle all these voices, it's going to be harder and harder in the future, but that's something. Really it seems kind of strange to me, and maybe the lesson here is this is what happens when you have the government controlling the press. The government has decided that it's going to put political stories on pages 1234 and a science story on page five or whatever it was. And it's not important, the science is not important to people, it's the political. They want to influence their thinking, they put it on a political story at the top of the stack. That could be what it is. It could be they were worried about the public reaction, because China is a little bit, I guess, of a downturn economically recently and maybe they're worried that people in China would say, why are we spending all this money? Well, that was in the story too. They were concerned and maybe some people expressed concern that why is the government spending this money when in fact we're having a bit of a downturn here? Right. Why aren't we doing better things for our citizens here on the planet? Right. And you mentioned one other thing when we spoke before about this. And that is that, I forgot the point, but it was something about, oh yeah, the point you made and I think it's a really valid point is that this is a risky business. We don't want to look bad if we fail. So let's put a lid on it. We won't really talk that much about it. If we fail, nobody will be all that concerned and we won't be subject to as much criticism if we fail. If we put it on the front page story, then if we fail, we're going to look terrible. And that's the way you manage your image. And while they apparently have succeeded and you think they might trump it a little more, they may be worried too. It might break down after two days, right, and the whole thing is sort of a workplace. I think we're still in that pocket of risk. Right. Right. Not like some of our probes that are going 13, 14 years later, right, and they continue to run around and do good things. I don't know. Yeah, I feel we're in a pocket too, you and me, actually. That's Ethan Allen. He's our chief scientist. And we're going to take a pocket of break. We're going to see about the risks and then we'll come back. You'll see. We'll be right back with likable science. Welcome to Sister Power. 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This is so important we study these things, even at great distance, even on the far side, the dark side of the moon, okay? And Ethan Allen is our chief scientist, he's here to tell us about that stuff. So I guess let's look at the slides you have, we're released by the Chinese news agency to the world and see what they mean. Here's one. This was, I think maybe their first shot they released, it shows again a pretty sort of grim looking landscape out there on the floor of this crater. Nothing of course very fancy, just barren rock. People who study this kind of thing can tell all kinds of stuff from the color of that and the granularity of it and the little pock marks in it and there are a thousand clues to all kinds of information just from the shot but it doesn't look like a hospitable place. Here's the probe on the floor. I believe it's taken after, yeah, I believe it's maybe... So it's pretty smooth. Yeah and then, now here is the probe when the lander drops some little ramps down and the rover has gone off now and is leaving tracks. Just a perspective, that lander is what about four by four by four? The rover is roughly four or five feet long, three feet high, three feet wide roughly. There's little wings on it there. Those are solar panels. It's not the dark side of the moon, right? Ah, right. It's eventually going to get into the sun and then it will pick up. It has basically an enhanced, what do they call it, enhanced? Photo. Well, a small nuclear power reactor to give it a little power. So it can get through the dark time when the sun isn't shining. But then when the sun is out it wants to gather its power from the sun to keep it going. Can you clarify one thing though? If it's the dark side, why is there sun on it? Calling it the dark side is really a misnomer. It should be called the back side or the far side. Sometimes the dark side has sun. Right, exactly. It's just a dark side, far from us. Yes, exactly. It's the side we never see, so it's sort of dark to us. But when it's pointing to the sun, it's blazing hot there. It's just like the other side. Right. Indeed, it arguably gets more sun because it's never shadowed by the Earth. Right, right, right. I need to close it to the sun too. Okay, what else we got? Is that it? Yeah, those are the two shots I was able to find on the map again of the big crater where it landed. Okay, so I think this is really an upstage for us. We haven't done this in a long time. Right. And somehow, it is a competition. It's a science competition. And what they're saying in a neon sign way is that we're right up there with you. In fact, we're further than you are. We have done things you haven't done. Right, exactly. So all the world to see. I think that's got to be a big thing for the Chinese sense of excellence and supremacy. Right, right. It really says, yes, we're certainly up and coming power. And here's, you know, we're making our statement in the space race as a border. And saying that we can do the same stuff that you've done and do it better, maybe. Now, despite that agreement you mentioned, where everybody agreed that, you know, it would be sort of common property up there. If I wanted to sort of take control of space, and if I could make my, if I could own the moon, so it would be both sides, then I suppose I could shoot down communications and military satellites all around the Earth. Because it passes around the Earth, and it could be, you know, some sensors, telescopes up there to see where the satellites are and shoot them down. But you could do that from the surface, much closer to the satellites, much shorter distance than satellites to the moon. Much, much, much shorter. Flush that one. Is there a practical purpose for all this aside from crowing about it? I don't know. I mean, yes. There have been, you know, the conspiracy theorists will tell you the U.S. has, you know, military bases on the dark side of the moon and all. But, you know, I think that's utter nonsense, quite frankly. And yeah, if so, why? What have we done with them? Why? Yeah, and I don't really see, you know, if there's any particular sort of geopolitical advantage, other than basically it's sort of a nice piece of one-upmanship, basically. That's what it is, yeah. The other thing, I think it tells us things. I mean, it sort of identifies sea changes. And one sea change that seems to me is that manned space travel is really, although we have a lot of tourist possibilities going on, you know, manned space travel to go to distant places is really not happening right now. Right. Maybe later, but not now. Right. And I think it's less fatal for one reason. And why take the risk? Why take the embarrassment of having people, you know, die in space? Well, Ann, it's much, much harder. I mean, you know, again, that rover there is not big enough to have a person in it. And it has a lot of capabilities of doing a lot of stuff. If you want to get a person there, suddenly you have to have a much bigger vehicle to get there, you know, all kinds of life support systems, redundancies built in. It takes a lot of space. Yeah, huge amounts of material and it's more pounds to lift when you need a bigger rocket to move it. I mean, it's got a thousand sort of drawbacks to it. Yeah, yeah. And we have systems now, robotic systems that, you know, a small 4x4x4 kind of container, we can pack a lot of science. Oh, yeah. And have it automated and have it controllable like a robot from Earth. Right. So exactly why would you need a human being? It's like having an autonomous car drives better than it would be driven if a human being were driving it. Yeah, I think so. I mean, people do have unique capabilities, of course. We can still do things that machines can't do. We can think about using our imagination. We can make decisions perhaps that machines will be flummoxed by or will make wrong. But in this particular case, it seems to me the cost-benefit makes a lot of sense to go with the automated, non-human systems. Yeah, so not only were the Chinese avoiding the risk of having somebody die in space, I think they were also demonstrating that they had robotic technology that would allow them to do this. And I think it sets a standard for a while. Right. If anybody goes up there, it's going to do this. Right. Again, this is not just a, we're communicating directly with the lander in the rover. We're communicating with a satellite that's communicating directly with the lander in the rover. There's a whole extra link on there that, again, said that we're technologically pretty sophisticated if we can do this kind of stuff. The Grangean point, yeah. The satellite track there. Right. The orbit. That's really unprecedented, isn't it? Well, we've done that before. Those Lagrange points were known about actually a century ago or more. But they've, and they've been visited a few times and we've put probes into them. But this is the first time I think maybe one's really been used well. Like, I'm a... Practical benefit, yeah. Certainly one of the nicest examples of how very neatly they're using that to solve a problem that's basically otherwise unsolvable, basically. Right. Very clever. And actually, as you said, that if they hadn't done this with the Lagrangean orbit, they might not have been able to do a trip. Right. And all. It was a key. The last point to discuss is what does this mean to the American space program? I mean, NASA does get a certain amount of money, but it doesn't get money for this kind of thing. And I'm not sure that our technology is as good as what the Chinese... I mean, the question is raised as to whether our technology is as good. Is this going to sort of motivate the United States to do more space initiatives, more space programs, more exploration of space, or is it going to have no effect? I don't know. It's an interesting one to speculate on. I mean, Sputnik, if you recall, back in 57 was a galvanizing force for the U.S. Basically, you got everyone up and like, hey, we've got to go to space. It's the next frontier. We've got to be there. We've got to beat our potential enemies. It's certainly, given the isolationist, nationalistic focus of our current government, it's hard to see that they'll treat it that way. They'll much more likely just to downplay it, poo-poo it, ignore it. Yeah. I mean, the powers that be want to shrink government. Right. And they want to shrink science for that matter. Yeah, exactly. And this kind of science is inherently very expensive to do, even the non-man probes. I'll tell you what it might stimulate, though. Let me see if you agree. So you have Elon Musk and his friends doing these tourist trips up there. I think this will stimulate some people to want to be tourists and to get up there and see what it's like up there and pay big bucks to go there and take big risks to go there. But we may find that although the government isn't doing anything, although NASA isn't funded and the government is not inclined to fund them, maybe guys like Elon Musk will find more takers on the tourist trips. Maybe, maybe. And maybe they'll use their burgeoning little sort of space hop industry and send things out when they're up there at their edge of space anyhow, because then it'll be much easier to send other probes off. So yeah, this might stimulate some private investment and all. Yeah. Well, how much space exploration can a $5.6 billion buy, actually? That's a rhetorical question. And if we find aliens up there on the dark side of the moon, what kind of immigration policies would? To the wall. To the wall. Thank you. It's great to talk to you. Aloha.