 That's a good question, yeah. Nobody has ever asked me to help before. Wow. One of the good things about having this astro blog is that it forces me professionally to talk to people. In order to make content, I have to go talk to people and it forces me to meet new people and, you know, to drink more coffee. Hey, yeah, let's do it. Cheers. So my guest today for coffee time is Michael Wong. You have a far cooler mug than I do. I mean, the Pluto mug is great. Thank you, Lowell. I had a great visit there a few months ago. But you got the camera lens mug. Nice camera lens mug that my friend Henry Noe gave to me for my birthday. So thank you, Henry. It's a Canon. So, you know, this is being shot on a Nikon. And I also do some photography as well, and I have a Nikon. So I'd like to say that the only thing that Canon lenses are good for is to hold hot beverages. Nikon, Nikon rocks. Yeah, we are very happy for this to be sponsored by Nikon. Nikon, reach out. I need you a camera or send us a coffee mug or something. Coffee time could be sponsored by Nikon, I'm just saying. You are also repping a bunch of really spectacular fashion. Ty that I recently got at DPS meeting, the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting. Curiosity rover and the sky crane that landed Curiosity on the surface of Mars from StarTorialist. I don't know if you've heard about them. I saw this and I fell in love. I was like, I need this because I love planets. Can you please show us your jacket? Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. This is probably my single most commented on piece of clothing that I own. This is a Starfleet Academy. What do you call these types of jackets again? Letterman's jackets. Yeah, that's right. Starfleet Academy. This one is from ThinkGeek. Okay, so that's a perfectly smooth transition into what I want. The first thing I want to talk to you about was you run a Star Trek podcast. Yep. Tell us how you ended up podcasting. Mostly that I'm a big Star Trek fan and I don't know if you're aware, but there's a new Star Trek series that came out last year. Discovery. Star Trek Discovery, yeah. Season two coming soon. Yes. And so when the season one trailer hit, it was a big thing in the Star Trek podcasting world. Everybody was like, new Star Trek footage. Let's analyze it from every possible angle except for science. Which I thought was really funny because the first thing that I noticed in that trailer, this beautiful depiction of binary stars in formation. Right. And it was like one of the most beautiful things that I've ever seen in the Star Trek. These two protoplanetary disks spiraling and they're both going around each other and I'm like, nobody's talking about that. So I started a science and Star Trek podcast called Strange New Worlds and it just launched off from there into talking about science, technology and even culture through the lens of Star Trek. I need to go listen to this podcast. Absolutely, link below. Why Star Trek? Where does the Star Trek love come from? It started when I was four or five. My dad was on the couch watching Star Trek. He had grown up watching the original series and Next Generation was on. And I was so struck by what I was seeing on screen, especially Mr. Data. It was Data, really, who hooked me at first and I was like, Dad, what is this? And he said, this is Star Trek. And I was like, what's Star Trek? And he said, it's a TV show about a bunch of people exploring outer space. And the more I watched, the more I realized that that's kind of what I want to do, too. I want to go out there and explore outer space. I have this really strong memory. This pop-up shop opened with Star Trek sci-fi gear at our little mall. My dad came home with a communicator badge pin, which I wore the crap out of as a kid. And he gave it to me early because Star Trek Voyager was about to premiere. I was old enough to watch it and sit down and watch it. I remember sitting there and just being so excited about that intro, the solar flare, the injector of the coronal mass ejection. And that's the kind of thing that you study. And that's exactly what I work on. I work on active stars and solar flares. Because I've been so influenced in my life by people who are out there trying to spread science through outreach, I try to give back wherever possible. And so the podcast is one big way that I do that. Your podcast is about science of Star Trek. Science things or aspects of Trek. So top three science things in Star Trek. That's a good question. Nobody has ever asked me that before. Wow. Okay. It's hard to just narrow it down to three. But I'm going to... Okay. Definitely the Heisenberg condensate. So important. So important. So brilliant. It's a component of the transporter and the writers of Star Trek. In particular, it was Mike Akuta, I believe, who invented this. And realized that there's this quantum mechanical principle where you can't know the exact position and momentum of a particle at the same time. So how do you get around to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? It's with a Heisenberg compensator. I once asked Mike Akuta over Twitter, of course, how does the Heisenberg compensator work? And he said, it works very well. Thank you. I would put that on my CV. Okay. Here's one. Do you remember the very last episode of Man's Generation? So in that episode, Q takes Picard, back in time, to 3.5 billion year olds, showing Picard what should be the origin of life on Earth. Yeah, the moment that life has begun. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Primordial ooze. Primordial ooze. That just really sparks my imagination because I'm so interested in that question. Okay, that's two. That's two. Okay, so the Heisenberg compensator, the moment the life on Earth is created. Yeah. How about the voyage home? Star Trek IV, the voyage home. Again, time travel. I do love time travel. It's the whales. It's all about the whales. The whales are the star of that movie. Bringing the whales forward in time to repopulate the species and save Earth from this calamity where, oh my gosh, it sounds so stupid when you try to explain the plot line on the voyage home. It's definitely bonkers. Yeah, it's crazy. But I love it. I love it so much. So I love that message from the voyage home, which is a message about environmentalism and taking care of our planet. We are part of this great dance that our planet is playing as it twirls around the sun, as it goes around the Milky Way. So Heisenberg compensator, the primordial ooze, and environmentalism, like saving the world. That's a good top three. Okay. What are your top three? So I'll play up your top three a little bit. I'll say, number one, the deflectors. The transporter is certainly a magical device, but also just the idea that we can travel at these velocities. A tiny micrometeorite would just go right through any spaceship, and so the Enterprise carries the deflector shield, and it just pushes ostensibly crap out of the way. So that's, I would say, deflector shield. I don't know if that's the number one most important thing, but it comes to mind. Number two, one of my favorite episodes, first contact, or is it just called contact? First contact. First contact. In this episode, the members of the Enterprise are the aliens that end up visiting this planet. It's just not quite ready. And I love that there is a character in that episode who is a scientist. She ends up discovering that they're there, and I love that idea. A lot of what I've been thinking about lately in science is about SETI, is about what are the things that we can be doing to be looking to see if we're alone. Contact with alien civilizations from a primitive species like our own, you know, my number two science thing. Maybe I'll say my number three. I mean, like, the wormhole is cool. There's so many things to choose from. Like, why did I pick this as a question? Because it's too hard. Oh, I forgot the episode name. Also, next gen. They end up discovering how the galaxy is populated. Yeah. What is that episode called? The Chase. The Chase. That's right. They're on this chase to find an artifact, literally a cosmic puzzle. And it turns out that all the aliens, the Klingons, and the Romulans, and the Earthlings, the humans, they are the pieces of the puzzle, not these artifacts. They are the puzzle. That when they come together, they discover, like, progenitor race that came before everybody, seeded the galaxy, and all the species, all the life throughout the galaxy, that all came from one place, the species that traveled the galaxy and found no one else out there. I think that, to me, that's the third thing that I would list as my top three. Yeah. I actually did an episode about the chase and talked about the scientific concept of panspermaia. So this was an episode that I was a guest on somebody else's podcast for. It was a Trek FM podcast called Earl Grey, the next generation podcast. And yeah, they invited me on to talk about the real science behind panspermaia and talk about the episode of the chase, some actual theories that some scientists have come up with for why Mars was a better place for the origin of life than Earth, and how it's conceivable that Martian life hitched a ride on an asteroid that then landed on Earth and seeded Earth. Human explorers, maybe we're just returning to the place that we came from. Well, I love that. Hey, cheers. Thank you so much for joining me for Coffee Time. I wish you'd check out this podcast. I can't wait to listen to Strange in Worlds. Live long and prosper. Live long and prosper.