 Okay, well, we're a little bit after 10 o'clock. So maybe I should gavel us to order here. And we have a nice little crowd. Very nice. I appreciate that, especially people coming during the holidays. So, welcome everyone to the Science Circles continuing program of panel discussions. And we're doing a little bit of a different format today rather than sort of having a topic with a panel of experts to discuss the topic. I've assembled some of our favorite Science Circle panelists. And what we want to do this time is just take end of the year questions from our studio audience and use those as a trigger for hopefully some fun discussion and maybe we can even answer some questions. So I hope some of you have maybe come prepared with the question to ask, or maybe as the discussion goes on, you'll think of a question to ask. So I guess maybe the best way to do this is to simply type your question into the nearby chat. And I will exercise my executive authority to select questions. And of course, if any of the panelists, if any of the questions, you know, if any of the panelists want to answer a particular question that I didn't select or something, feel free to chime. What is the meaning of life? 42. You know, I do think the meaning of life question is a little bit interesting because I think one of the objections that people of faith have is that science doesn't provide any meaning. To life and that and that the spirituality does provide meaning. And so I think people who are who do not have faith, you know, have to find a different way to find meaning to find the meaning of life. All right. Looks like we have a question from cast star cast about the sun, she says, the sun's Corona heats up to 6 million degrees centigrade. There is no definitive explanation why it is getting so hot there. Is there any progress in understanding the the sun, the heat of the sun's Corona. Well, I guess I'll feel that one. Happy holidays, everyone. I've always loved panel discussions and as I've mentioned to some panel discussions can benefit from more discussion, specifically audience participation and today audience participation is required. As the cast is quite a question. I don't remember the name of the latest solar mission. There was a recent solar mission, whether I'm trying to understand better the magnetic field. The reason for having such a hot Corona, one thing to keep in mind is that even though the gas is very hot millions of degrees, it's extremely low density, just a tiny fraction of the density of the sun's photosphere. What seems to be happening is that there are a strong magnetic fields. The envelope of the sun is convective means that there's like a pot of boiling water. The Parker solar probe, it might be that one, but I think there's a slightly more recent one. Because it's like a pot of boiling water and it's filled with ionized hydrogen, basically a lot of charged particles, boiling and boiling and moving up and down. There's a magnetic field that threads these charged particles and the magnetic field lines are constantly twisted and it will even break and they have to reconnect because you can't have a disconnected field line. That's called magnetic reconnection, which releases a lot of energy, solar mass ejections, solar flares. This kind of energy will heat the Corona. I don't think that that necessarily explains entirely what causes the high temperatures in Corona, but this new mission has apparently found that the magnetic field is even more energetic above the photosphere. And that may explain the high temperatures. I seem to have heard recently there's some new data that suggests that the magnetic fields that are sort of binding this energy in the Corona actually sort of is emitted from the surface. The magnetic fields in a kind of a twisting braid that the magnetic fields kind of corkscrew away from the Corona. And apparently this sort of dynamic nature of these magnetic fields was a little bit of a surprise. Yes, that's right. The magnetic fields they thread probably quite deeply into the sun. And as the sun rotates, of course, it's going to twist the magnetic field and there are other other energetic phenomenon occurring because of the infection in the solar envelope above the solar core. The core is radiated, but the envelope is convective. I might add by general education is, as you may know, temperature is a measure of how energetic particles are. So you can have very rarefied particles like in the upper atmosphere and stuff that would be high temperature. They're bouncing around a lot. There's a lot of energy there and you can have then very dense obviously as you get to the sun itself and you get deeper. Very dense. So temperature there means a lot because you've got a lot of particles very close to each other. Whereas in the Corona or in the upper atmosphere, the particles are fairly rarefied. You can see through it. So temperature there may not mean when you say 6 million degrees, it wouldn't be the same. I mean, it's 6 million degrees because they're bouncing around a lot, but it's not the same as saying 10 a million degrees in the center of the sun or 10,000 at the surface. Yes, that's right. I mean, if you have such low densities, you have basically low pressure despite the extremely high temperatures. But the energy from the convection in the solar envelope will get into the Corona. And as Matthew has pointed out, these new data have suggested the energy from that magnetic field was even higher than previously thought. Okay, that's fantastic. If you don't mind, let me move along to our next question so we can get in as many questions as possible. And Steven Zudify asks, what is the latest news and prospects for propulsion systems in the next 50 years? He says, I thought I heard about a near light speed system that may be possible. What energy and technology would that take to work? So this is kind of a speculative question, maybe an opportunity to kind of speculate about what sorts of new technologies can we look forward to maybe in the next, in the near term? Well, I'm going to jump in with a quick thought. If we're going at light speed, then there will be or near light speed, then there will be a lot of particles in space that will be hitting the front of the spacecraft. So heat shielding and just making sure that the spacecraft is not abraded away by hitting small particles. That's going to be an important thing for us to develop. Well, that's the advantage of the space warp. We need a warp drive that warps space around the ship so that we don't encounter any particles. We sort of travel through space in a protective envelope. Yeah, that was one of the Arthur C. Clark stories. It's not a new idea that basically they have a large thick bow of ice. And as you travel through the interstellar medium, it'll slowly eat away at that ice from the high energy collisions with the ice bow and it'll slowly eat away over time. And then what you have to do is you have to replenish it, put another layer of ice on it. That's featured in Alastair Reynolds stories more recently too. One of the more interesting things I've heard of as far as propulsion, it wouldn't be for human vehicles, but the little myriad of very light vehicles that we could send out of Centauri. In other words, laser reflects on them and they accelerate up to a quarter of the speed of light and so we could actually get a vehicle with a small camera or sensors to up a Centauri within about 25 years. I think that's a pretty amazing thing. We couldn't get there ourselves, but we could get these tiny little feather light vehicles to the next stop. I think that's pretty amazing. So that's sort of cool. Yeah, that sounds a little bit like a solar sail, but enhanced by human laser energy, which you need to direct the laser from outer space. So you don't have to, you know, you don't have to shoot it through the Earth's atmosphere. Would it be something maybe done from the space station or something like that? Yeah, the idea, I think, is to have a whole bunch of tiny, these would be tiny spheres that are only a few centimeters in size. The lasers would shoot them into interstellar space towards whatever target you're aiming for. Oh, that's great. That's pretty cool. I don't think we quite answer Steven's questions. I do recall, I mean, full disclosure here, I am actually checking the web, which is, I suppose, kind of cheating a bit, but I do. I do that all the time. Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I do recall recently hearing about something called electrothermal, electrothermal type of drive, which is basically you have a superheated plasma and you fire it through some nozzle to generate thrust. And I think this is also for airplanes, but it could be used for rockets. But I think I did hear something about that. So what kind of timeframe would be, would be, would we be looking at to implement this kind of technology? Is this, if 50 years are reasonable timeframe or is that would it be, you know, is that something that's right around the corner or more distant in the future? The problem with predicting the future is that things are ever accelerating. So it could happen in the next, I don't know, 20 years. Maybe, maybe it would be longer than that. But I mean, things are constantly accelerating. So it's, it's difficult to predict. Well, now that we have a space force, maybe that will accelerate things wink wink. Speaking of accelerating, I found it kind of interesting that the, I'm trying to remember the names of the, whether it's the Voyager probes or the pioneers. Yeah, Voyager and pioneers, Voyager probes, even though they were launched long after the pioneer probes, is that they actually left the solar system before because the earlier probes didn't have the acceleration or technology at the time. So we could easily say launch something out into space and something decades later might surpass it because of enhanced technology. Yeah, they passed beyond the sun's influence. There's a boundary layer between the sun's influence where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium and the both Voyager spacecrafts crossed that boundary. Yeah, I saw some interesting news recently about the Voyager craft that apparently there the boundary crossings were different. I think the early one had kind of a dirty boundary crossing that seemed to take longer, whereas the more recent Voyager craft when it left seemed to have a cleaner, cleaner break from the solar system into deep space. Am I am I on the right track with that? Yes, you are. We're moving through the interstellar medium. The sun is moving through the interstellar medium and there's a boundary around the sun, which is not spherical. It's pulled down into a teardrop shape as we move through the interstellar medium. And so one Voyager spacecraft passed through, I think what we would call the front and one passed through the side. Oh, I see. Fascinating. The dynamics of that have got to be interesting because the sun is swirling around the center of the Milky Way at almost 900,000 kilometers per hour and is sort of dragging the solar system along with it. And that creates some very interesting mechanical dynamics. Yeah, well, I don't know if you call it dragging along. I mean, there is no, there's nothing, there's no kind of drag in space. And this is, you know, something about flat earthers. The flat earthers say that, oh, you know, we're moving at these incredible speeds through this universe and we don't feel it. Well, you wouldn't feel it. I mean, there's, when there's motion through space, there's, there's no drag force to give you the feeling of motion. And any accelerations are extremely tiny. So you're not going to notice the motion. Yes. Fantastic. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. That's a really good point. Let's see. Looks like we have another audience question. Again, Stephen asks mentioning Space Force reminds me that this idea preceded Trump's fascination with it really seems a reasonable way to create a focused chain of command for dealing with space based weaponry and information and information systems. What are your thoughts in that? I just, I guess I'll just editorially mentioned that I can see Stevens point with respect to a chain of command with respect to orbital weaponry, but I am a little bit concerned because we do have a space treaty that is supposed to, you know, outlaw the weaponization of space and I'm a little bit confused about some sort of the legality of in terms of international treaties about what exactly the Space Force is going to be doing. So I just want to throw that thought in all and do any of the panelists have any thoughts about that? I don't have any specific thoughts on Space Force or the military. I mean, if we want to understand the legality of that it's a lawyer up here somewhere. Well, I've looked into it a little bit myself, but the Outer Space Treaty is a little bit vague about what is allowed. I have to admit I haven't brushed up on it lately, but if you read up about the Outer Space Treaty it's not really that helpful. And I suspect that the Space Force, the creation of Space Force is in some sense sort of exploiting the ambiguity or the vagueness of the treaties, which does not, doesn't seem like a really good thing. I think I personally think maybe a better way to have gone about doing this would have been in fact to convene an international body to in fact maybe write a new Outer Space Treaty that would sort of clarify these issues before we in fact created the Space Force. Well, thanks. That's a good point. And it's usual that the science is leading and the law is lagging. No intended criticism there, but that's the way things are going. Well, I do have a general thing to say that Carl Sagan brought up in his book The Pale Blue Dot. Weapons that could be used against the Earth, which are extremely frightening is that we all talk about using technology, rocket technology to divert asteroids from hitting the Earth. Well, they can be used in the other sense where someone who has that technology can direct the asteroids towards Earth and aim the asteroids towards your enemies, and that would create an incredible level of destruction. You choose the asteroid of just the right size and you destroy the country that you want to destroy. It would have effects around the world, but if you can just destroy, you know, a few cities, major cities in a certain country, you can destroy your enemy. This is particularly frightening. Wow, that is intense. I have to say it reminds me a little bit of that scene in Dr. Strangelove where in the war room where the President goes, you know, or I think it's Dr. Strangelove actually who says, you know, you know, why did you create a doomsday bomb or doomsday machine and not tell anyone the whole point of a doomsday machine is to tell people so, you know, so it deters people, you know, deters, it's a deterrent. Well, I mean, yeah, you do need some kind of deterrent. I mean, there's legality there too. What do you do with someone has a technology to shift around asteroids? You have to have the proper legality and you have to have a way of enforcing those laws. Yeah, so that, yeah, that's a very interesting topic. Right. Yeah, and frightening. Let me move along with some other questions here. We have a couple of good ones. One, I think Vic was asking what is what might be the role of AI. I was just repeating one of the questions that were earlier that was missed. Oh, thank you. Okay. Yeah, I see. Actually, it was neuro wander who, who asked that. So, any thoughts about AI and I think what I think are we thinking about sort of a like an AI like these, the Starship Enterprise computer, or are we also thinking about, you know, robots that maybe autonomous robots. I'll jump in. I think that we have to make a distinction between systems that are primarily just tools and don't have consciousness or motives of their own versus more elaborate technologies that are actually going to be self aware. The self aware creatures as they're created creatures would be excellent explorers and excellent partners if they're treated well and oh now I see my conversation going towards Terminator. Now, basically, are we talking about developing partners and scientific exploration or simply just tools and I've seen discussions on both sides of this sort of divide. I mean, one advantage of an autonomous AI is that it could respond in real time a problem with tools that we send into space that have to be controlled from space. You know, if you have to send commands to them hours in advance, so then you don't get the data back hours. And so this I think this really limits what we can do with with Earth controlled robots in space. So I think the ability to have autonomous exploration unit would be more nimble and would be able to respond to their environment. Absolutely. But you also have to think about what their needs are hopefully they will be interested in doing their jobs and, you know, are not just kind of holding data hostage for, you know, the next episode of the Star Wars movies that come down because they like the Star Wars too. Okay, since we talked about the Space Force and about AI, I'm going to combine these. Anywhere remember the science fiction is a great science fiction from about 1950s where essentially there were two, let's say countries that were fighting each other and they were shooting missiles at each other and each of the AI systems would be able to avoid the missiles that had been doing it for hundreds of years. But humans in the nose cones of the rockets because they were unpredictable and then so one nation was able to win the war that way. I'm just combining. Well, that's a big yikes. But unfortunately, we've done such things before, you know, the kamikaze pilots in World War two and actually there were torpedo submarine versions of the same thing with human derived guidance systems. So while that's a very scary thought, it actually has precedence. Holy moly. Well. All right, I still want to get a few more questions in so and I shunt all has a kind of interesting question that I'm also curious about which is, what do we think about Elon Musk's internet satellites that he's putting up thousands of little satellites in low earth orbit to improve internet and I think also GPS. And this is already creating problems with Earth based astronomy. And it just, I am personally really nervous about having all of this clutter in low earth orbit. I mean, at some point, seems to me it's going to be difficult for us to launch rockets. Beyond low earth orbit because we're going to be, you know, we'll have to, it'll be hard to get through all this junk. So I'd be very interested in the girls take about. Yeah, I was going to say basically the two things that you said one is that there's going to be a lot more debris up there. But this will be in well defined orbits so you can avoid them by knowing the schedules. The problem I have is that it's as mentioned before observational astronomy, which mentioned that they're going to be a little bit too bright. So you have to schedule your observations. You have to, you have to basically cut out. If you're doing long integrations over the night, you're going to have to cut out those times when the satellite is too near your field of view. So I'm a little bit wary of this. I mean, apparently Elon Musk has said something about this and he's going to try to make satellites dim, but I wonder how that's going to work. This seems like an area that could really take advantage of materials. Science. I'm wondering if there's a way they can create these little satellites from, I don't know, transparent materials or like you say dim materials, non reflective materials. I don't know, but I think it could really maybe take advantage of advances in material science. Alright, well, pigments and dyes are a active field of research. There's always the search for the new blackest dye or new pinkest dye. I suppose if the satellites were small enough so that they could radiate heat out, having a totally black exterior would, you know, the only problem for observational astronomy at that point would be them eclipsing objects of interest if they didn't reflect any light. I did want to make a point. Socially, there have been some countries like Russia and China and Iran who have been experimenting with disconnecting from the global internet. And having a global internet that people could not disconnect from would make it much more difficult to control the flow of information. I heard a news report that Russia is looking at that too and it's isolating its internet. Yes, I was on PBS. Making things black is also going to cause other problems is that you absorb too much sunlight, the sunlight's overheat, so you have to have some way of reflecting away the light. They might have to have some kind of coolant system which would make them more complicated. Yeah, I guess if they are absorbing visible light and re-radiating in the infrared, then infrared observations just get messed up too. So it's a bit of a no-win there. So let's kind of delve into this internet issue a little bit. How are countries able to cut their internet off from the global internet? Is this just a matter of creating, do they have to create sort of their own internal wiring or a radio feeds or something in terms of the connectivity? Is it just a matter of banning Google from their web browsers or something? Do you all know anything about sort of how that's actually achieved? Well, let me take this one since I headed the computer information cybersecurity program at our university. Essentially, there's way more networks than just the internet. In fact, the internet is simply kind of the one that's public that people can get to. In other words, most a lot of corporations, things like government agencies and stuff, military all have their own private networks that are just not connected. And you're right with the IP addresses. There are agencies that control what blocks of IP addresses you have and stuff. And the easiest way to do it is that we're all connected through basically internet service providers and as far as the public internet goes. But as far as anything else, anyone who has a can secure a block of IP addresses and then have their own routers and servers and switches and stuff can create their own network. All you have to do is have enough money and be able to keep it secure. So the other thing is that in countries, it happens all the time. So for example, all you have to do is control the routers. I mean, the internet is simply a network of routers. So if you can control them and the companies that can control them, then you can control the network. That's the simplest explanation. It happens all the times in countries that want to control the information. It seems to me that this has great risk for social unrest because I would imagine that Iranians and Russians and countries that have already had access to the internet and then find their access shut off. I mean, they're going to be cut off from a lot of global popular culture. I mean, what if they won't know what Cutie Pie is doing on YouTube or what the latest memes are or I don't know what. And I would imagine that this is going to, once you've had a taste of that and it gets taken away, it just seems like that is politically quite risky. You know, I contrast this with say North Korea, the North Koreans have never had any access to that. So they don't really know what they're missing. But in some of the more developed countries, I guess it seems to me that even if you can technically isolate your own internet, you're just asking for trouble in the long run. Well, that's a very good thing. Let me just throw in one more thing. Is that in the Jurassic Park movies, there's the thing about life will find a way. So and that's essentially what happens in these cases is people always find some way around this to get information to each other. It's almost impossible to block all conversation because there's so many different types of technologies and sizes and networks. With the internet, you're just talking about one large network. But if you use technologies that only go a certain distance and basically just connect people to people rather than to routers and such, you can bypass a lot of this stuff. It happened during the Arab Spring. It happened during, I mean, there's people are very resourceful as Chantel mentioned. So once you let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, it's impossible to keep people from communicating. Well, it's sort of an opposite example that some people have been mentioning where China would be actually risky to let them see certain things. Because, for example, Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Most young Chinese know nothing about that because they can't access that information outside of China and the Chinese government doesn't want them to know. Somebody even mentioned carrier pigeons and you're a wonder. You can always go analog if you can't go if you can't go digital. But China probably is an interesting case study because they actually have been able to pretty effectively isolate their population. Although you can sign into Alibaba from the West and shop on Alibaba. Smoked signals. So just to kind of at the risk of turning this into kind of a bull session, this idea that people are resourceful and will find a way. I'm also, it kind of makes me think that I know there's in American politics, there's in on the progressive politics. There's a lot of interest in really weakening the power of billionaires and plutocrats and the ultra the ultra wealthy the point the point zero one percent of the world. Try to really diminish their influence in politics. I sort of think that like life. I think power and money finds a way I just don't. I kind of feel like power and money will not let itself be shut out of politics no matter how much democracy might demand it. I so I'm a little bit skeptical of this kind of impulse. My personal view is that, you know, a more practical approach is to is to bend that power and that money to your will. And but I don't know that's just my idea, but I just like shutting off countries from the Internet. I think it's also going to be difficult to shut, you know, power and money out of politics. I'm with what you're saying. I mean, you're basically quite right. I mean, we have a way of uniting the population against power, but the same time the power can fight back very effectively. And one very good example of that is the climate crisis. Why we're still many people debating about whether climate change is actually occurring. Well, the reason they do is because there's so much money there are literally trillions of dollars in the hands of big oil and they're fighting back and they have very subtle and clever ways of fighting back. The subtle and clever ways are really fascinating. The psychology of how people can get manipulated through social media is just fascinating. Very small groups of people who happen to be well funded can get messages amplified through technology, a thing that we've been talking about a little bit. And this, this ends up being a problem that we're only just beginning to scratch the surface of. There's going to be pretty much, you know, an arms race, perhaps, a tit for tat for stopping certain behaviors and then circumventing them. What do you guys think? Yeah, that's correct. There's, let's see, I heard this on quirks and quirks. As a matter of fact, there are groups, or at least one group that I know which group it was. But the point is they were studying the effects of misinformation. Can you harden people to misinformation so that they pick out misinformation better? And the truth is, you can you give them certain surveys or questionnaires and ask them to figure out which things are true and which things are false. And over time, they get better. They can tell which things are true and which are false. And that's, that's something that the population needs to learn more about. That's quite interesting and it reminds me of a kind of a humorous situation that's occurring in Canada. Canada issued a PSA to educate its population about the emergence of deep fakes in deep fake videos. And the PSA to illustrate this uses a little tiny virtual hippopotamus that sort of wanders around in your house and causes trouble, kind of like a little gremlin. And but the PSA backfired because people thought that there really were little virtual hippos like that was a real thing. And so instead of instead of educating people about deep fakes, it just illustrated how easy it is for people to fall for deep fakes. And what's weird is that the CGI little hippo is not even the CGI isn't even that good. So I'm just giving some dirty looks at my cats who do wander around like little hippos getting into the way you think they would be graceful, but they're kind of clumsy. I'll try to find a, I'll find a link to the PSA video and post that before we're finished here. Now we're in the pocket of big hippo. Okay, so we have a new question from neuro wonder. How can knowledge gained through space exploration help us survive on our own planet with climate change? Yeah, that's an excellent question. There are probably a number of answers that one I can pick up off the top of my head is the space exploration. We understand much better what the surface of Venus is like as Venus is not that far. It's not that much further, much that much closer to the sun than the Earth is, but yet it's a living hell. It's almost like the Earth is going to become a Venus in the future. Venus Earth in the future will become what Venus is currently. And that's of course very frightening. And if we can understand what's happening on Venus, we might understand a little bit better what's happening on the Earth. The advantage to studying other planets in general is if you can understand what's happening with their atmospheres, for example, Jupiter, you can understand what's happening with our atmosphere. It strikes me one of the things, Venus sort of got into a feedback loop where it just kept getting hotter and hotter. And of course those processes also occurred on Earth, but Earth has life. And life kind of acts as kind of a homeostasis agent that can help moderate the Earth from slipping into these feedback loops. And also the Earth has volcanism and plate tectonics, which can also sort of help moderate perpetual feedback loops. But nevertheless, it is not comforting because certainly the Earth has experienced really close calls where life was almost wiped out. And so I don't think we can ever be cavalier about the risks that that could happen. You're talking about the Gaia hypothesis where life will change the environment in which it lives and there may be some truth to that. But as you said, there have been close calls and I don't know when this happened exactly. Chantel prefers it if we answer without the internet, but I will still use it now and then, sorry Chantel. In the past, like I was like two billion years ago, three billion years ago, there was an ice ball Earth. The Earth had become completely covered in snow and ice and you'd think that it's a feedback loop. What happens is the snow and ice reflect away the sunlight and it doesn't stay trapped in the atmosphere so the Earth cools. And that just causes more snow to fall and more ice to form. And you end up with a tremendous global cooling so the Earth should never have warmed up again. But we were saved by volcanoes. Volcanoes produced a lot of ash on the surface which allowed the sunlight to be absorbed and that helped to break out of that snowball Earth. And it's important to keep perspective about those events because there were cycles of snowball Earth and so forth, stayed by volcanism, but those processes occurred over geological time periods over millions of years. And what we're confronting with climate change is not happening over geological time periods, it's happening within human lifespan. And this is introducing kind of, it seems to me, kind of a novel, sort of a novel event on Earth. And maybe something akin to the extinction of the dinosaurs, sort of a cataclysmic event that happens very quickly. And it took life a long time to recover from various extinction events and really reshapes the biosphere of the Earth and so forth. So I think perhaps some people who think that global warming won't be that bad sort of are not considering the, if you're citing the history of the Earth as evidence that global warming won't be that bad or that we can recover from it, I'm not sure they're really fully keeping the context of the history of the Earth in mind. Well, the good news is the Earth will still be here and all that, but the animals that we know and perhaps us won't. Maybe that's better for the Earth, but it's not so good for us. Yeah, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the Earth purged itself of humans. Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point that these events occurred over a long time scale. So Vic provided the, I didn't know exactly when the snowball Earth occurred. Apparently, I have more than once 715. That's, it lasted a long time. It didn't clear up overnight. So these things happen on very long time scales, but global warming or climate change humans is happening over a period of just a couple hundred years. And that's, again, I like the word frightening because it's frightening. The good news about, I always like to, you know, throw in some good news. The good news about the snowball Earth and about mass extinctions, which of course we've had many of them, is that they tend to, I'm trying to think of the word, but they basically tend to begat a proliferation of new species in life to take up the niche in the ecology. So some of our worst ones have brought about fantastic new creatures and such. So of course, why we're here, once everything over five kilograms died in the 70 million years ago, it begat all of what is today. So that's the good news. All right. Thank you for that nugget, for that read of hope. And of course, one of the disasters that to us, I mean, mammals weren't particularly dominant creatures in the in the Cretaceous period. Thanks to the pose that was an asteroid that blighted with the earth. And it may also have been volcanoes that went off about the same time to the dinosaurs were no longer dominant after that mammals could become dominant. You know, I'm a little bit confused about the nature of the dinosaur extinction event, because especially I think just in this last year or so, like new data seems to, you know, new fossil discoveries seems to suggest that that the die off was very specific that the the the asteroid that hit the earth. You know, sort of the way the theory goes is that it sent, you know, the ejecta from the explosion sent charge into outer space, which became glass like when they went into outer space. And so forth just crystallized into glass, and then all this glass rained back down on the earth. And this all happened within a matter of hours or days or something like that. And that the as the as the dejective fell back down on the earth, it ignited in the atmosphere, burning the atmosphere. I mean, there's a whole scenario that's been worked out from this new data. And it sounds absolutely apocalyptic that it just would have destroyed all life on earth. I'm not really, I'm a little bit confused about how anything survived that. So this whole new sort of model for the dinosaur extinction is absolutely horrifying to me and also confusing. Go ahead. Yeah, thanks. Destroy all life is something like 70% of life, which is, you know, pretty major. The Great Permian extinction like 250 million years. That was like 90% of life. Yeah, and it only destroyed everything that's above about five kilograms. In other words, mammals at the time were very small birds are still around their dinosaurs. So anything that basically was smaller than that was able to eat what was left go underground, eat seeds. That sort of thing scavenge. But that was my understanding is, and then of course there's critters in the seas that are still around crocodiles are still around. I mean, it didn't destroy everything. I like what Scissor G is saying that there were mass extinctions that destroyed far more. In fact, even the snowball earth one destroyed. Yes, that's true. Far more percentage. You know, in view of that history, it is wild to me that that the genetic code that life's genetic code just maintained maintained a through line through all of that. You know, it's not like DNA was like recreated over and over again. You know, there was sort of a single origin of life moment and then that and the Senate and sort of with bacteria and so forth and that genetic code has maintained a through line through all of those extinction events. So that, you know, we can find, you know, we can think there are rare instances where we're able to extract, you know, DNA from fossils and so forth. I think something like that, you know, it is still just like our DNA now. And so this, that just blows my mind actually that that this this continuity of life has been able to maintain a through line. Yeah, it is amazing. I think the real expert here would be, I think, Steven, Steven, the suit flies more of an expert on this than we are. I don't know if life just formed in just in one place on the earth that might have happened in a number of places on the earth. The conditions were right for it. Well, I think the most, you know, the most Darwinian approach would be to say that if there were multiple origins of life, then the systems that develop that reproduce the best have taken over and dominated. So certainly our DNA that, you know, we share our DNA with almost with we're just about every other living thing on the planet that came from the most successful group of organisms. Yes, and that's actually that's a really good point. So thanks for sort of jogging me about that. And, you know, sort of evidence of that are the, you know, the deep sea thermal vent creatures that metabolize sulfur. I mean, in some ways that might be like a different model or an example of a different more primitive origin of life. So it is possible that there were maybe there were competing ways for life to metabolize and we're simply the the ancestors of the one successful model. Well, it is amazing what life will do to find the energy sources to find food sources. I saw a article about a year ago, I think it was maybe it was two years ago. Where some bacteria had been bred, not engineered, but essentially bred over, there was only three generations I think and they're able to use silanes as their food source I think they started off using sulfur compound so things with H attached to s these things had been actually bred to use silicon attached to H. Very good energy source if you can find it. I think we actually had a science circle presentation about that. In the past. That sort of talked a little bit about some of these interesting metabolic systems that we can either engineer or. Yeah, there's life forms that use things called chemo synthesis photosynthesis. Our lives depend on photosynthesis plants. Right. The chemo synthesis of course is what you have during these for these open vents, the middle and bridge. Yes, they don't need. Yeah, they can they live without sunlight, which is remarkable. Well, the fascinating thing about this we could bring it back to the space thing is that the more we understand those types of life. The more we'll understand life that we might find under the oceans of Europa or Titan or places cold cold areas that. And as you know under Europa or the ones that with liquid water oceans that could very well be that if there is life it's around fumaroles black. What do they call it? You know, the the blacks. Humorals that are on the bottom of the ocean that we have here on earth that do metabolize sulfur rather than oxygen black smokers. Perfect. Thanks. Yeah, that leads to another interesting discussion. What about life? Other life in the universe. Well, what about in our solar system? Is there other life beyond the earth? And what would Vic or Phil mentions is the is Europa, which has an ocean beneath its icy crust, which could be a source of life, but maybe Mars as well. Maybe there are bacteria beneath the surface of Mars, maybe on Titan, there's life. But I think Europa is a little more interesting because it has water just ordinary water and you can have life in living in the water. Yeah, Titan used to be the darling prospect for life, but it's but Europa has surpassed it. And I'm curious about Europa because it's so cold. I would predict that if there is life there it metabolizes slowly and and you know might it might be hard for us to recognize that it's alive. Because it's the transformations or that maybe the chemistry, the chemical reactions maybe are happening so slowly that we might not appreciate it at first. And and I think we talked about this a little bit too. Yeah, Mike brings up an interesting point. The ice is kind of thick. I don't know exactly how thick the crust is like a kilometer thick or so. There are plans to actually go to Europa and drill through that ice and put little submarines into the water to see what they can find. So there are plans on the board, even if it will be difficult. Now I don't remember if Europa is big enough to do this. If you look at phase diagram of ice or of water there's several solid forms of water and if you have a like a body of water and ice moon that's large enough. You could have a icy crust of the ice that we're used to underneath that would be an ocean. But at the bottom of that would be another layer of ice, ice for something like that. And it seems to me that if you don't actually have other stuff like rocks and minerals and, you know, other trace elements easily available that life that could possibly live in the liquid. And the liquid part would have a hard time scavenging enough materials to actually be alive. Yeah, and of course it's so cold there how can you have liquid water and I think as you've mentioned there are minerals dissolved in the water which helps water stay in liquid form. And it's tidal friction. It's like with IO that has volcanoes and such like that obviously it would be too cold to have any water. Liquid water but because of the tidal friction it's able to have the liquid water oceans under that very thick ice crust. And that's why you could have black smokers and such and life around. Because the water is only liquid water. We could have a little submersible in there and go checking it out ourselves. Yeah, that's an interesting point because I did mention when I gave my talk on the moon about how the moon underwent some tidal friction in its interior which is why one faces locked towards us. Well there's a similar thing going on with the moons of Jupiter. They're in elliptical orbits. It's a slightly different mechanism but because they're in elliptical orbits they go closer to Europe a little to Jupiter and then further away from Jupiter. So the tidal forces change and that causes it to basically stretch and then unstretch so it's going through these motions where it's being stretched and then stretched less than stretched more and then that heats up the interior. Over time this would circularize the orbit of the moons but the moons are perturbing each other so the orbits don't become circular so quickly either. So this heats up the interior of the moons and you have for example on the moon Io you have volcanism as it's being constantly heated by friction. I thought the water in Europe was due to just the pressure of the ice that it was sort of like supercooled water that stayed liquid just because it was under pressure. That's a contributing factor along with the chemicals right? Yeah the phase diagram of water itself you know the state is going to depend on just how much pressure there is and what the temperature is. So if you have a higher pressure on ice then you can cause it to liquefy. I mean there'll be a certain point beyond which you won't liquefy but you and of course if you have dissolved salts and other materials that'll affect the freezing point of the water. And you can get the water to freeze at very very low temperatures. But if you continue to apply more and more and more pressure it's going to become a solid at some point. All right. Can I ask something real quick? Sure we're kind of at the top of the hour so I was just about to say we kind of had a little stopping point there but I did want to invite any final comments I guess or final questions. Okay well my I'm just fighting in here but I want to last year I started kind of a probe probing class to see what people are interested in. But this next year I'd like to have a more regular class but I need to know from people what they want to learn. In other words what should we talk about. I'm not really bringing in deaths and such and facilitate this thing but what do you want in a class what would you like to hear about science news or particular topics or whatever I can kind of judge it by what sorts of questions are here but I just wondering if you guys would you don't even have to answer right now but think about it and start throwing out some of these stuff and that'll give me some things to think about. I would say that input from everybody is important and specify what you want from the science circle. I don't speak for Chantal but I'm guessing that Chantal would well. So Stephen Zudify has maybe a good question to maybe help us close out. I got to know what theory of possible point and isn't it like a balloon empty in the middle. So I guess at this late hour I'm a little reluctant to get into a new topic about the shape of the universe but maybe one of you can integrate that into your question here. I kind of like Stephen's question that what what for the for each of the panelists. What are you most excited about for 2020. So Mike maybe why don't you start and we'll go down the go down the row from there. What are you most excited about for 20 maybe 2020 or the immediate future. I'm always excited about renewable energy. So we live in a time right now where there's a lot of interest in taking solar power and turning it into stored power that we can use to live. And we have huge amounts of energy just coming at us from the sky and capturing that energy and being able to store it for our use with high efficiency will go a long way to alleviating some of the problems that are caused by our use of fossil fuels. While we may not ever be able to get away from fossil fuels completely if we can use the free energy that's coming at us that will certainly go a long way. Yes that's an excellent point renewables and energy storage also batteries and so forth I think are going to be crucial to our future. And and so did you what are so did you what are what are you looking forward to. Yeah that's an excellent question so many things going on if I'm going to talk about astronomy let's say Excel planet research that that's particularly exciting we've already found Earth like planets out there. Will we be able to see something in the atmosphere and we can actually look at the spectrum of absorption spectra through through the atmospheres of these these planets to see if we can find evidence biomarkers as they're called. See if there's enough evidence for possibly life on. Yeah that's a great answer I love that one that is going to be a lot of fun to see how that how exoplanet our exoplanet knowledge evolves that's going to be really exciting. And finally Vic what are you looking forward to. Yeah that's I mean anything about life other than us I mean we can't be the only life in the universe. I think that would be so I'm looking to find any kind of life no matter what somewhere else or telltale signs of something other than just us and this planet with with so many billions and billions and billions of possibilities it would be very sad indeed life where that rare. So anything in my lifetime where where somebody can confirm that there was another source or even the same I mean you know they could have the same type of DNA whatever we could be from another. In other words we could have been seated from somewhere else but it'd be fun to see if there were some other type of way to create life that wasn't exactly like ours and that that would be absolutely make my life. Yep those are all great answers and I do feel like you know the prospects for for the discovery of life either through the study of exoplanets or through the exploration of our own solar system just seems tantalizingly close now closer than it's ever felt before. That's a really exciting prospect. So with that I think we're just about at our hour now which I think is a good a good time period I don't want to you know anyway why don't we go ahead and wrap up this session and this was really enjoyable I think I think this is a format will want to experiment with again sometime. It's really fun to just take a variety of questions and see a see where the conversation takes us. So I want to thank my panelists Mike Shaw and a scissor G and Vic for chipping in and helping me with this and I want to help all of I want to thank all of our students here for their questions and their participation in the text chat. And have a happy new year. And thanks for your wonderful job at moderating us. Yeah thanks everybody who came. My panel members thanks to everybody in the audience. My pleasure thank you again so much and have a happy new year everyone.