The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 486 - Andrew Lound

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Oct. 11, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:05:37

Edition 486 - Andrew Lound

A full space update and many questions answered by cosmos-watcher Andrew Lound in Birmingham...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is still Howard Hughes and this is still the unexplained.
	Well, thank you very much for staying in touch with me.
	Always nice to go into my email, old-fashioned style, open it up and see a new crop of emails from people all over the world, some of whom have never emailed before.
	So it's really nice to be hearing from you, especially as we get into autumn here and the weather is rainy and dull and you start getting a bit kind of depressed about things.
	So it's just nice to, it's almost like a delivery of mail used to be.
	Remember when you were a kid maybe and some far-off relative had sent you a letter?
	It's a little bit like that feeling.
	I open up the email inbox.
	Of course these days more and more people are messaging me and leaving comments on my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	But these days people are still sending emails and I'm grateful for them.
	The guest on this edition of the program is a man called Andrew Lound.
	He is somebody that I discovered only fairly recently.
	He's a space expert, I guess you could call him.
	He does a lot of presentations and he's got a very good way of explaining space topics.
	So this edition will basically be introducing you to Andrew and also just running some random topics at him and seeing what he thinks.
	He, as you will discover, is a bit of an encyclopedia of space.
	So Andrew Lound in the Midlands, in Birmingham, in fact, coming very soon here are The Unexplained.
	Thank you to Adam, my hard-working webmaster, for getting these shows out to you.
	Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
	And above all, thank you to you for being part of this.
	If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can send me an email from there.
	And if you sent a donation through the website recently, thank you very, very much from the bottom of my heart.
	Your donations, vital to see that we continue into 2021 and, as they say, beyond.
	Let's just do a couple of shout-outs here.
	Alex, thank you for your email about the Roberto Panotti interview about UFOs in Italy.
	Gratefully received.
	Thank you for that.
	David in Cambridgeshire says this.
	Dear Howard, just wanted to say an extra special thank you for your shows.
	I left my career job and started my own business just before lockdown and subsequently had to put it on hold and get a supermarket delivery job to pay the bills.
	Listening to your back catalogue of shows in the van has kept me going throughout what has been a very rough time.
	Well, I'm glad it's been able to help, David, and I hope that you get yourself back on track with your business as soon as this crazy, mad lunatic situation sorts itself out.
	And hopefully that's going to be really soon.
	Otherwise, I'm going to be climbing the walls.
	Okay, Jerry, thank you very much, Jerry, for your concern.
	Nice to hear from you.
	Hope you're okay.
	Jeff wants to know about Phobos.
	Listen to the rest of this show, Jeff, and I'm going to ask Andrew Lound about Phobos and what he thinks about it.
	Because as you rightly say, we talked about Phobos about a decade ago with Richard C. Hoagland here on the show, and then we didn't mention it again.
	So let's see what Andrew thinks about that.
	John, says this, on one of your recent shows around September the 11th, you discussed 9-11 and covered some of the ideas around the full picture not being known, etc.
	There was some sense of irony that in the same show you discussed conspiracy theories with an expert.
	I think it's a well-known fact that the FBI created the term conspiracy theory to label anybody who would question the government's official line.
	You questioned the official story of 9-11, but then went on to seem to agree with the expert that conspiracy theories are bogus.
	How can we know what is true and what isn't?
	Is what John is basically saying here.
	Well, that's something that bugs me all the time, John.
	I think there are conspiracy theories, and I think some of them rational people can easily dismiss because they're not based on anything rational or a solid, what do they call it, substratum of fact.
	But I agree with you.
	There are a lot of grey areas these days, and there are a lot of cases where questions have to be asked.
	So where you say that I appeared to agree with an expert about 9-11 and the conspiracy theories around that, I don't think you're right about that.
	I've done interviews with people like Dr. Judy Wood, two of them.
	In fact, two conversations on these podcasts about a decade or so ago.
	And her theories, as you will remember, Judy Wood is a physicist and expert on why things fail, why materials fail.
	And her take on 9-11 I found very compelling.
	In fact, the book that she wrote about it with photographs is very hard to obtain these days.
	I think it was fetching large sums of money on Amazon at one point and on eBay.
	So I can't sit here and say that I agree with conspiracy theories, but what I can say is where I think there are incidents and issues where further questions need to be asked, then I will flag that up.
	But it's not for me to agree with conspiracy theories or indeed to rubbish them.
	That's just simply not true.
	I mean, look, how many times have we discussed JFK on this show?
	Now, do you think that the official story of the killing of JFK was exactly how it played out?
	Maybe it was.
	Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was acting on his own.
	But, you know, for my five cents worth, I don't think so.
	Now, all of that was in the realm of conspiracy theory and still is, to an extent.
	So it's a gray area, okay?
	All I can say is that I will keep asking the questions.
	And I'm sorry that you thought that I agreed with the expert that all conspiracy theories were questionable.
	I don't even think the expert said that, just thinking back to the conversation.
	But I get what you say.
	How is it possible to know in this crazy era in which we live what is true and what isn't?
	Sometimes I have to tell you this, John, and my listener, that I despair for this world sometimes, the things that happen in it.
	And I just wish that people could get on together.
	And I wish that this damned coronavirus would just go away.
	Because I think that's been driving a wedge through people too.
	And I just think it's sad.
	I don't think that's controversial at all.
	That's Just a fact, isn't it?
	Okay, thank you for your email, John.
	And Rusty, finally, nice to hear from you, Rusty.
	Rusty says, I've been enjoying your back catalogue.
	Rusty's been going back 14 years, and thank you for your thoughts.
	And Rusty said something about he hopes I'm not going to retire.
	Well, I think that would be an awful long time.
	An awful long time ahead, I think, Rusty.
	In fact, the truth is, whatever age I might get up to, I don't think I'll ever be able to afford to retire.
	I think I'll have to be doing something when I'm 95.
	And maybe I'm the kind of person who needs to do that.
	But financially, I'll certainly have to.
	Now, let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained coming to you from London.
	Thank you so much for being my friend, by the way, for all of your support out there.
	Okay, out there.
	I haven't said that for a long time.
	Let's get to Andrew Lound in Birmingham.
	We're going to talk about space and see where the conversation takes us.
	Andrew, thank you for coming on my show.
	Thanks for having me.
	Now, listen, Andrew, we've spoken many times on the radio recently, and I think that you are very much a gift that keeps on giving, because if I throw a topic at you to do with space and science, you'll always know about it.
	And, you know, in radio, that makes you a very valuable person.
	You do know that.
	I do know, actually, I'm not sure.
	Let's see.
	Let's just very reassuring if there's a breaking story.
	But look, why don't you tell me your story?
	Because I've been on your website today, which is very good, by the way.
	And I recommend my listener checks it out, but not right now.
	We'll tell them at the end where it is.
	And you've been involved in all of this stuff.
	I'm talking about space and science.
	All of your life?
	Near enough, yes, yes.
	It started when I was five years old, and I can even tell you exactly where I was at Great Yarmouth on holiday with my dad and my mum and dad.
	And the Apollo program was getting going.
	And I asked Dad where the moon came from.
	And he said, well, he said, a chunk of the Earth broke off.
	And that's why the Pacific is there.
	And it formed.
	And that was a theory at one point.
	It really was a theory.
	But I wasn't too keen on that idea.
	It just didn't seem to gel with me as a five-year-old.
	I don't know why.
	I just didn't.
	And I started then to read what I could.
	And it just sort of expanded from there out of all control, if you like.
	A five-year-old getting out of control, reading as much as he could, and then continuing through that.
	And at school, they didn't do astronomy, of course, and I wanted to do astronomy.
	So I did my own thing.
	And I did a slideshow for some school colleagues.
	I don't say chums, school colleagues.
	And one of the school kids' father was a caretaker at Newtown Community Centre.
	And he actually said, would you be interested in doing that at the community centre?
	He said, because it would be quite good.
	I mean, at the time I was seven, just over seven years old.
	And I said, yeah, that'd be fun, as you do.
	Hang on, it's seven years of age.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And what was interesting was my dad was working for a building company, famous building company in Birmingham at the time called J. Emlyn Williams, very famous firm.
	And he asked, well, we called him, he was known as Mr. John the boss, advice about this.
	And he said, well, introduce your son to as many subjects as you possibly can because he's likely to take one, maybe two of them up.
	That was a mistake.
	I took them all up in the end, but that's another story.
	And he said, oh, we could try and get him to see a couple of lectures at the university because he apparently had something to do with the local university.
	So I sat in a couple of lectures.
	Obviously, he didn't understand loads of it, but some of it I picked up.
	But the one thing I did pick up was the fact that I thought we've got a very exciting subject here, being crucified by a poor presenter.
	In fact, what they did was it was the old days where they had a tweed jacket with the leather arm patches hidden behind a lectern, almost as if it was defending them against the people, looking down at the notes and putting images up which weren't that great.
	And I thought they could do, because I was very used at the time on TV to watching people like James Burke, who were doing things, who himself wasn't a scientist, was a journalist, brilliant journalist.
	Have you met him?
	I haven't, sadly.
	No, he's a man I would like to meet.
	I did a show with him a couple of years ago.
	I went to his home.
	He's 80.
	I think he's 81 or 82 now.
	Wow, what a brilliant man.
	That man has got a brain like a razor.
	Now, if you're listening in America, you'll remember his original shows that weren't Discovery Channel shows, because when they were on, I don't think there was a Discovery Channel, but they were about science topics.
	But he had a way of making science and space interesting.
	In the UK, we know him best as being the man who shepherded us through all of the Apollo missions and the space coverage on TV.
	Brilliant man.
	Absolutely fantastic.
	So he's a big influence watching that because there was a man who made it quite interesting.
	He asked stupid questions, which was very important, because he knew the public wanted to ask the questions.
	And they were a pride into it.
	So he used to do it himself.
	And of course, he had this never-ending enthusiasm for getting involved in things.
	And I thought, well, that's what we could do live then, isn't it, really?
	So I got the old Hanny Mexic projectors, slide projectors.
	I got a cassette tape recorder to put music and sound effects on.
	So I got that working.
	And we got images.
	And I got my mother to make me a flight, NASA-style flight suit.
	Looking at it now, it wasn't that great, but at the time it worked to make it just different.
	And I did like the idea of looking down at notes, so I simply memorised it and then just went out and did it.
	And one or two people liked that.
	So it sort of cascaded on from there where I've always sort of done presentations in a way which was somewhat different at the time, which ran into, which has been an interesting history of that in itself.
	And now we're at the very latest level.
	People go on the website, they'll see how it's developed over the years because we're now in the digital age, which is very helpful for me, because that's made life a lot easier because I can use video, sound effects, visual effects now to more of a thing.
	So that's where it really began, really, then, if you like, what they now call public awareness of space science.
	So that's where it really started.
	But Andrew, you know so much about this.
	I know from having done so many conversations on radio with you.
	Are you a qualified astronomer?
	Did you go to university and do astronomy?
	I did what you might, what they tend to call correspondence courses, aren't they?
	I had bit of open university and things like that to get a degree in a science degree and I got my master's, which has emphasis on planetary science, which is astronomy and mainly on planetary science and geology of planets and atmospheres and such like.
	So that's what I did.
	But I did that in my own time to do that.
	So I didn't go anywhere to do anything with that because I tended to not fit in very well within the general structure of an education system.
	Basically, because if I saw something was wrong, I would raise the question.
	And I suddenly realised many school teachers didn't quite like that very much.
	And I remember learning something once.
	And I remember, oh, God, the trouble is I remember it so clearly.
	It actually makes me shudder to think about it.
	Anyway, excuse me, sir, it says here, and it was about the moons of Jupiter.
	And it says, I said, that's actually wrong.
	I said, that's not true at all.
	And I was trying to explain the details.
	He went, wait a minute, the book says this.
	You're going to be tested on what the book says.
	Just give the answer that the book wants.
	But I said, it's wrong.
	And he went, but that's what we're told to teach you.
	So you best learn it.
	God, well, that's no use, is it?
	You're never going to.
	I did a conversation with a man called Leonard Mlodinov, who worked with Professor Stephen Hawking and effectively did his biography.
	And, you know, that method would not have been enamored of Stephen Hawking.
	He wouldn't have gone for that at all.
	We don't learn things if you just parrot what is accepted from books.
	You know, we learn when mavericks want to take things beyond that.
	Yeah, I find myself coming up across a lot of very similar things.
	I just say doing the presentations, I started getting involved with a variety of organisations.
	We won't mention them, but they'll put it this way, the people who are into astronomy will know who they are based in London.
	And they said, oh, we watched you do a presentation, yes.
	That's not the way you do it.
	And then had a habit of actually telling me how to stand behind a lecter and read my notes.
	And I said, sorry, I don't do that.
	I'd like to put a bit of music in.
	I'd like to put a beer of effects in.
	Well, I think that's the way to get the message across.
	Can I ask you a question?
	Have you got a creaking armchair, a creaking desk or a cat in there with you?
	Sorry, that's just me.
	Okay, I've settled it now.
	You can't leave it like that.
	What is it?
	What's making that?
	It's my chair.
	It's all out.
	It's my desk by your computer chair.
	Oh, right.
	Well, I do all of my stuff, my broadcasting and my podcasting in my dad's old TV watching leather chair that we got from a shop called Broadbent's in Southport years and years ago.
	And I've kept this thing going.
	I've patched it and I do all of it.
	It's my lucky chair.
	I'm sitting in that.
	Oh, well done.
	Thankfully, unless I really try, it doesn't creak.
	Okay, I'm glad I know what that was.
	Okay, so what I think I should do, since you specialize in a lot of subjects, if it's okay with you, I'm just going to fire stuff at you and we'll talk about it, okay?
	Okay, yeah, it's great for me, yeah.
	All right.
	This year, 2020, space discoveries, like last year, seem to have been coming at us at an accelerating pace, more and more things.
	And of course, culminating, as you know, because we spoke about this on the radio, with the discovery of phosphine, this gas in the atmosphere of Venus that is a possible indicator of life.
	Now, that was, what, four weeks ago or so now?
	It was, yes, yes.
	It seems to have gone all quiet.
	This was, I thought at the time when we did it, we did it first on air, that this was probably the most exciting story to do with space that I'd ever known, including landing man on the moon.
	You know, it was up there with man on the moon.
	Let's put it that way.
	But it's all gone quiet.
	Why do you think that is?
	Well, it's gone quiet because one, it was picked up by the media because it was a paper that was published in a scientific journal.
	And the media always go to look through scientific journals, see if there's any interesting.
	If you put anything there that suggests the possibility of life on another world, they're going to jump on it like there's no tomorrow.
	What they'll tend to do is they'll read the general synopsis of it and probably dive down to the conclusions and miss out all the middle bits.
	And therefore, they've got themselves an exciting story, which is quite common in the things.
	And the reason why it started off a bit is because the paper talks about the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.
	The paper discusses how the phosphine could be there, because that's the big question.
	Why is the phosphine there?
	And one of the many suggestions was a possibility that it suggests life on the planet, because phosphine on Earth in its natural form is found as part of the process of the decay of microorganisms.
	And this is very important, the decay of microorganisms.
	So it suggests that in the environment where it's been found, which is in part of the Venetian atmosphere where the atmosphere is much more Earth-like, but it's high up in the atmosphere.
	You've got to get that right.
	It's high in the atmosphere, so we're not looking at the ground at all.
	The temperatures are a little bit more like on part of the Earth.
	Because we have to say that down on the surface of Venus, it's like an incinerator.
	Nothing much that we know of could exist there.
	No, 475 degrees centigrade, and the pressure is 90 times that of sea level pressure on Earth.
	So it's a nightmare.
	Parts of the atmosphere of Venus, it's all carbon dioxide.
	Parts of the atmosphere of Venus also contains a great deal of sulfuric acid.
	So it's a very violent place.
	With this one band, which isn't a good place, they found phosphine.
	So obviously it got very exciting.
	But there is a real problem with this.
	And the problem is, why is there phosphine in that particular part?
	That doesn't make sense.
	To produce phosphine, and most phosphine on the Earth is produced industrially because it's used as a rat poison.
	So there's no rats on Venus.
	That can be certain, I think.
	The problem is, is we produce it commercially and it's difficult to produce in a laboratory.
	And you produce it using pressure, temperature, and acid.
	Temperature, pressure, and acid, although admittedly not the same type of acid, still is there on Venus, but normally not the right level of pressure.
	There's a lot of phosphine on Jupiter, for instance, but the pressures there are absolutely phenomenal.
	So therefore, you would expect to see the production of phosphine, but you don't Get it normally on the Earth where there's lots of life, and yet they found it on Venus.
	So the jump to say, oh, this seems the possibility of life on Venus, is actually one of a long line of reasons why phosphine could be there, and it is the one that everyone jumps on.
	And of course, when they suddenly point out, well, we can't prove that, we've got to go to Venus again and examine where the phosphine comes from, the story dies because there's nothing, no further way you can go until a spacecraft actually gets there.
	So suddenly it all gets very exciting and then it suddenly dies.
	And unfortunately, that's the way a lot of science stories happen because there is no follow-up until we can get to Venus and there is plans being made at the moment, but it'll still be a few years yet.
	So it's not as if, you see, those of us who are not scientists, and I'm not, of course, some of us might think, well, they'll simply say, right, quickly, let's send international rescue or whatever.
	Let's get us, you know, let's get a spacecraft we've got ready over there to go and we'll just program in Venus and send it there now because this is important.
	It doesn't work that way.
	No, it doesn't.
	You have to have a bespoke mission.
	There was a plan several years ago to have spacecraft built on a production line that you could put certain instruments on, but the thing never got off the ground.
	That's unintended.
	Yeah, it literally didn't get off the ground.
	And that was a shame because there was an opportunity there where you could actually do that.
	But even so, you've still got to time it right depending on the positions of the planets.
	For instance, going to Mars, every two years you can send a mission to Mars to make it the most efficient flight you can do.
	So it does take a while to get these things going.
	So the only thing we can do is look from a distance and then tell the people who are planning to go to Venus at some point in the future.
	Well, we need you to investigate this really because we found this now.
	And if the mission's already been planned, they say, wait a minute, we haven't put any instruments on to actually do that.
	So now we're going to have to redesign the spacecraft.
	And to do that takes another long period of time.
	So yeah, these things unfortunately take a lot longer than I'd like it to be.
	But having worked in engineering at one point, I do understand the reasons why.
	And it does take a lot of time to get these things done.
	But the problem is it comes back to that thing that you do so well.
	That's the presentation.
	The public hear this story.
	And, you know, I'm a journalist first and foremost.
	And they think, well, I mean, this is fantastic.
	Here we are on a road.
	In a year or two, we're going to hear something really fantastic or not from Venus.
	And that's not the way it's going to be.
	No, it's not the way it's going to be.
	And that's really unfortunate.
	Something has changed a lot.
	In the days of James Burke, we had so many brilliant things.
	We used to have The Great Tomorrow's World, of course, with Baxter.
	We had Burke doing his programs.
	We had Patrick Moore doing The Sky at Night, which was a lot more prominent in those days.
	And mainstream channels, terrestrial channels, covered it at sometimes even in prime time.
	We don't get that now.
	They're all being pushed away to, you know, BBC Fours, Fives and things like that out of the way, or they're going online channels only.
	And they've sort of been pushed away.
	So the general public who would come across science by accident would go, oh, that's interesting.
	We'll watch this for a bit.
	And then get very interested in it.
	And it was very exciting.
	They don't get that opportunity now because now everything's targeted.
	They'll go, they won't particularly go and look for a science program.
	I can tell you that now.
	The general public do not go and look for a science program.
	This is what makes the things like yourself do extremely well when there have been people like me on because it's a radio station that isn't scheduling the fact we're doing science today, but we've got someone on to talk about science.
	And the people who are listening wouldn't probably have listened, but they're going to pick it up because they're listening and then to go, oh gosh, that's interesting.
	I think that's such a great point.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	That's such a great point that you're making.
	I've never thought of that.
	And you're right.
	People get to hear the headlines now through social media, through online versions of newspapers, or maybe even these days, some still buy the physical copies of paper newspapers.
	But we don't get the regular background.
	And that's something that when we were kids, television programs used to come on, and they were run because they were thought to be good for us.
	These days, everything has to be entertainment.
	But those programs actually in themselves were entertaining.
	And if you put programs on like that today, they would still educate, entertain, and inform.
	But we don't get to see them.
	So these days you have to seek them out.
	And a lot of people, they're busy people, they're tired, they turn on TV, what's the first thing that's on there?
	Dancing with the stars, as they call it in America, Strictly Come Dancing, as we call it in the UK, whatever it might be, not knocking those programs, but they are pure entertainment.
	You won't learn anything from them.
	And programs like the ones that we saw that were on mainstream channels involving people like James Burke.
	That's how he made his name.
	He was a teacher.
	I think he did drama or something like that.
	That was his background.
	He was a journalist, but he wasn't a scientist.
	No, he wasn't.
	But what he was, was a fantastic entertainer.
	And we don't get that today.
	So basically, that answers my question, really.
	The fact is that it's going to be a while before we get the answers to the questions about Venus.
	And the public are going to get disillusioned, perhaps, because they're not going to get the answers in the short order they think they're going to get them.
	Yeah, and it's a 15-minute hit these days, the way things have gone, and the internet hasn't helped with that strategy.
	The internet has been good and bad on these things.
	One, you can actually go and find information.
	But most people who go on things like YouTube don't want anything longer than 15 minutes.
	And therefore, they can only do 15-minute hits.
	And it's a very strange thing.
	Whereas when we were growing up, programmes were 30 minutes to an hour giving us information.
	And we could absorb it.
	And we were quite comfortable.
	And they didn't repeat themselves.
	One thing that really, really, really gets up my crawl these days on science programmes, when they do go out, they'll do a piece and they'll take a break.
	And then when they come back off the break, they spend about four minutes repeating the main points of what they've just told you in the previous 15 minutes.
	I don't need to do that.
	I'm not a goldfish.
	I can remember, you know?
	And you end up with a programme which was scheduled for about 55 minutes, 30 minutes of which actually had information.
	And the rest of the time was repeating that information.
	And I think the production values are very much higher now than they were.
	But I think sometimes the quality isn't there in the general presentation sense.
	Certainly, not the quality of people like Burke and not the quality of Raymond Baxter.
	We're not getting, and that's not going against the people doing it.
	I'm not, because this is the way media organizations want things.
	And maybe we're just getting older and maybe that's how things are now.
	I don't know.
	It's a big debate, and I don't think we've got time to get into it, but it's a fascinating one.
	And I think you're right in the way stuff is presented.
	News in the last, well, as we record this at the beginning of the week, in the last 48 hours or so.
	Actually, no, it was probably five days or so ago from when we're recording this.
	The discovery of three more buried lakes on Mars.
	This is possibly briny water.
	So water that it would be very difficult for anything that we understand to live in.
	But to me, again, as a layman, as somebody who's not a scientist, that sounds exciting.
	It is very exciting.
	The reason why it's exciting is because the speculation of lakes underneath the surface of Mars have been there for an awful long time, all the way back to Carl Sagan speaking in the 1960s when the first Mars missions went there and they found no water on the surface.
	And he said, well, there could be water underneath it, which they laughed at at the time.
	But now the Mars, the European spacecraft, Mars Express, has actually penetrated with its equipment, which is remote equipment, the surface, and has actually found lakes about one and a half kilometers underneath the surface.
	This is quite important.
	It's briny because the temperature is still very cold there.
	And if it wasn't briny, it would have frozen.
	So therefore, it's a briny solution underneath.
	These seem to be the, because the layout of the lakes, if you like, it's like the lake district here, except underground on Mars.
	And the layout of it shows us that, in fact, it's the remains of an ocean that used to be on the surface.
	And this is where the ocean has ended up.
	The surface, of course, is far too cold now.
	It's covered over by dust.
	But water has seeped into these areas underground.
	And therefore, we're seeing the remains of an ocean that used to be there about 3 billion years ago on the surface.
	This is very exciting because we've found on Earth that where you have liquid water, carbon chemistry seems to happen.
	Admittedly, you do need the right temperatures and you need processes, but nonetheless, where we find liquid water on Earth, we always seem to find organisms.
	And if life had got started on Mars when it was a much, much more warmer planet with a denser atmosphere and had an ocean on the surface, then when the ocean started to leave the surface and when the temperature fell, these organisms would have migrated with the water underground and could therefore, their descendants could still actually be there.
	That's why this is very exciting.
	So those who keep telling us that the answers to the mystery, the enigma of Mars will be found beneath its surface on so many levels, they do have a point.
	Oh, gosh, absolutely.
	The surface itself we found with the Viking landers and subsequent landers is bombarded heavily by ultraviolet radiation because there's no ozone layer on Mars to protect it from UV.
	Therefore, essentially, that would sterilize the surface of the planet.
	So you can't have organisms on the surface that we know of which would survive happily.
	But the upside of this is that the surface then acts as a surrogate ozone layer protecting what's underneath it.
	So it acts as a barrier and that makes it very good.
	So that means, of course, anything deep underground probably could survive and be very happy.
	So that's a very exciting discovery indeed for that.
	Okay, looking at it from the other perspective, the exploration perspective, we have been given various versions over the last, say, three, four years or so of when mankind might go to Mars, men and women might go there.
	And I am confused for one about two things.
	When we're going to go and which nation will be getting there first.
	I'm just in a complete, I'm in a Martian fog about that.
	What do you understand to be the answer to those questions?
	Timelines are very difficult to go through here, basically because America will put humans back on the moon in four years' time.
	And that's the starting point, to be honest, because we're testing out technologies which would eventually take people to Mars, which means that probably within probably the 2030s, people will probably be going to Mars.
	But we have upshots of this.
	The Chinese have shown an interest in going to Mars.
	They've got a probe on the way there at the moment, but they've already shown they want to send people to the moon.
	I think everyone's going to have to go to the moon first because this is your training ground for landing humans on another world.
	But we've got the extra spin-off now, the fact that we've got people like Elon Musk, a private individual, a private company, who are building spacecraft now, which could actually go to Mars, which is quite staggering.
	So I would say, to be quite honest, that by the end of this decade and the beginning of the 2030s, I think it's going to be serious possibility that humans are going to be going on their way to Mars.
	That all depends on a number of other factors, which we can't predict.
	One of them is economic factors, which we've got at the moment, a real problem.
	That has a major role in doing this kind of thing.
	Political factors will overrol, because we might have a sudden change in political situation where you might see more than one nation joining together to go, which would be the ideal.
	At the moment, it's looking like it would be the Americans or private industry or the Chinese going to race out there, which would be quite fascinating.
	The Japanese partnered with the Americans on something to do with the moon recently.
	Yes, yes.
	There's a lot of partnerships going on.
	The United Arab Emirates have partnered with the Americans as well on a mission to Mars.
	There's a lot of partnerships going on.
	That goes on all the time, but you'll notice it's often Westernized partners which actually tend to work together.
	We would like to see China and the United States working together better because I think it would be beneficial to the planet and beneficial for exploration.
	But there is no way you're going to get those two nations working together.
	Purely political reasons, not scientific.
	It's because of technology.
	I mean, if you look at the International Space Station, if People look at illustrations of it, you'll see the Japanese model is on the far side with the American module, and that's so they're not bolted onto the Russian module because the Japanese don't want the Russians stealing their technology.
	So, even there, you've got issues going on, and the Chinese are not allowed at all on the International Space Station for political reasons.
	So, unfortunately, we've still got these rather nonsensical political situations going on at the moment.
	But the private sector is the big development here.
	That has changed.
	People like Musk have changed the game plan altogether now, because suddenly they're seeing there could be private individuals here who have the money, have the wearable, and they're just going to go and do it, whether anyone else likes it or not.
	And he's actually overtaken the American program at one point, which is quite staggering.
	And at the moment, SpaceX can seem to do very little wrong.
	They're doing very well indeed.
	They're doing it the right way, which is good.
	And their testing facilities are very good.
	It's all about testing at the end of the day of this, and they're exceptionally good.
	They learn from mistakes that they make on the ground, and things are going very well.
	And SpaceX are exceptional.
	They've got some exceptional technology working well there.
	And Elon Musk is one of those remarkable characters.
	You either love him or hate him, I think, to a certain degree.
	But what he's achieving is absolutely breathtaking, I think.
	And he's got this giant rocket which he's building now, which eventually could take 100 people to the moon, which is quite astounding.
	And the same technology could be used to take 100 people for expedition to Mars.
	It's quite fantastic.
	Now, technology-wise, it's okay, but there are other issues which will delay us getting to Mars.
	And these are the issues of surviving in the environment.
	And the biggest issue is radiation.
	I'm glad you came to that because certainly in the case of the moon, there was a report from a scientist, I think, about two weeks ago, that suggested that actually those who go to the moon would be affected by very large levels of radiation, and that would be a problem.
	And this has just literally dropped into my inbox on my computer that I'm looking at now.
	This is from the Voice of America.
	Remember VOA, The Voice of America?
	Well, they're still working, still communicating with the world.
	And a news story from them that I'm just literally reading this minute says, and I quote, new measurements show that radiation levels on the moon are two or three times higher than on the International Space Station.
	The measurements were taken by an instrument on China's Chang'e-4 lunar lander.
	The spacecraft touched down on the far side of the moon in January 2019, which we know.
	German and Chinese scientists involved in the experiment say the Chinese lander provided the first active measurements of radiation levels on the surface of the moon.
	The findings recently reported in Science Advances, that's a journal.
	Space Radiation says this piece, we know this, presents major health risks to future astronauts.
	Cancer is the main health concern, but radiation exposure can also lead to other diseases.
	Could this be something, and I'm literally just reading this off the screen right now, that impedes our progress in space?
	Yes, it is.
	It's well known.
	The International Space Station orbits the Earth underneath the Van Allen belts, and the Van Allen belts around the Earth actually help protect the Earth from radiation from space.
	So it's actually in low Earth orbit.
	So the radiation levels the astronauts get on board the space station is actually relatively low.
	They are told, however, that astronauts who work on the space station will probably lose 10 years of their lifespan because working in space.
	The Apollo astronauts, of course, were given much higher doses of radiation than most astronauts on Earth, but they had short missions on the surface of the moon.
	And of course, one of the reasons they had such bulky spacesuits was to actually protect them from radiation.
	They had layer after layer after layer to try and actually protect them from it.
	They landed on the moon in a period where the solar radiation levels were lower because the sun goes through an 11-year cycle.
	So they had to time it so that it wasn't at the highest level because that could have been dangerous.
	A major solar flare, solar outburst from the sun, could have possibly doused the astronauts with enough radiation to kill them.
	So you have to be careful.
	If you're traveling to Mars, then you're going to take, you know, between six and nine months to get to Mars.
	That means you're flying through space exposed to radiation from the sun for that period of time.
	So you're going to have to have methods to protect the astronauts.
	And of course, you have issues on the surface of the planet itself, on Mars, where you'd have the situation where radiation, obviously you're right with the cancer problem, but you also have the problems with your eyes, things like that.
	So you could have problems with eyes, problems with equipment.
	There's a whole host of the radiation is the biggest issue here.
	And a lot of people have sort of forgotten about it almost.
	And it's very harsh because it is the most serious issue.
	Keeping astronauts healthy and alive on the voyage to the planet.
	On the planet, I suppose you can have shelters, so it's not too bad, but the voyage there is going to be difficult.
	And although you could protect them in an area where it would be protected from radiation, would make sections of the vehicle extremely heavy.
	And then you've got to work out how do you get them into orbit, how do you build it, and so on.
	So radiation is the biggest issue to deal with.
	And so medical issues also regarding lunar soils and Martian soils also could be possibly a health risk regarding breathing them into the lungs, which could cause problems as well.
	And what about the problem we are planning to bring back eventually?
	It's a long and complicated mission, as you know.
	I think it's a two-stage thing, or maybe a three-stage thing.
	We're going to bring back soil samples from Mars.
	Could we be bringing back radiation with them?
	No, the radiation isn't a problem there.
	The problem with bringing samples back to the Earth could be if there's any microorganisms existing in them.
	That could be the difficult part there.
	Radiation isn't the issue in that particular case, fortunately.
	What you have when you're in space, it's the duration of exposure to radiation.
	Like if you go to get an x-ray, if you have your chest x-rayed, and then they make a note of it, and you can have about, what, three or four x-rays a year to be on the safe side.
	Well, if you're flying through space generally, you've got the equivalent of about 15, 20 years exposure.
	That's potentially dangerous, of course.
	You wouldn't want to do that in quick succession.
	So that's the issues.
	It's this duration and constant radiation, which is the real problem that you actually get out there.
	So bringing the soil samples back isn't likely to be a real problem at all from a radiation point of view.
	But there are other issues and considerations with that.
	Microorganisms, Perhaps reactions between the soil in an oxygen environment might have a catalyst in there which might do something really strange that we weren't expecting.
	So they're all the precautions that have to be looked at first before we bring the samples back.
	Okay.
	So that is something that we need to be thinking about now.
	Did I not hear somebody suggest a couple of years ago that one way of protecting astronauts traveling to places like Mars, long distances, would be to somehow circulate water around the inside of the craft as a protection?
	Water is an excellent protection.
	It's why organisms on the Earth probably started on this planet deep down in our oceans, was because in the early days of the Earth, the sun probably was more violent.
	And before our atmosphere was fully stabilised, radiation was bombarding our planet.
	But anything deep down on the surface of the planet would have been protected through the layers of ocean, which was actually there, which was quite important.
	So that would be good.
	Water is very heavy, although you can actually produce water if you use fuel cell technology.
	The byproduct of fuel cell technology is water, which is good, because what you do is you mix oxygen and hydrogen together and it generates electricity, and the byproduct of that is water.
	So you end up getting free water, which then you can pump around the spacecraft to act as a radiation barrier.
	So it could be done that way.
	Yes, water is very good itself.
	And that is a good possibility.
	But again, this is all part of the engineering issues that you have to deal with at the time.
	I read a piece online somewhere, I can't remember the website, just before we did this.
	And it was to do with Mars.
	And again, something I'd never thought of.
	The valleys, those carved and scooped valleys on Mars, which are quite dramatic and amazing to look at.
	But they tell us a story according to this.
	And the question of whether there is life on Mars or has been could be answered by the way that those valleys were formed.
	If they were formed by water, then it suggests there was once life there because there have been the equivalent of rivers.
	If things were too cold there and they were carved out, bashed out, hewn out by ice, then we're not going to find a life story there.
	It varies.
	It's interesting because even if they are bashed out by the movement of ice, the ice itself needs something to move on top of and that would mean water, generally speaking.
	So there would have to be flow somewhere in order for the ice itself to move.
	Otherwise it's going to sit there frozen on the surface.
	So therefore if the ice actually was moving, it has to have something to move on.
	Otherwise they'd have to reduce the friction between the ice and the ground.
	And the only way you can do that is if there's some sort of flow underneath it.
	So it still points to the possibility that there could be the formation of life, but it reduces it because it suggests the planet perhaps never reached a much warmer stage.
	One of the reasons we think it did was because of the valleys that we see.
	Although I have to say that although the movement of ice does work in many areas looking on the planet, in some areas it does not bear out because the river, they are certainly water or what we call fluid flow barkings on the planet itself.
	But whether these were long duration rivers or whether these were caused by flash floods caused by impacts, we simply don't know.
	But you're right, if these big areas were caused by the movement of huge glaciers moving across the planet, then it does suggest the world had stayed a lot colder than we'd actually anticipated.
	And again, the possibility of life springing up is much more less likely.
	Because we assume it started on the Earth, because Earth was a lot hotter, a lot warmer, and we've assumed that it was hot springs were absolutely vital for the Earth, for life, for carbon chemistry.
	Essentially, what you're trying to do is get carbon chemistry going.
	And for that, you actually need a lot of energy, including heat, energy, we thought, from lightning and things like that, which has been tested in the Uri Miller experiment, where they did actually find organic compounds actually being formed, which is quite a fantastic experiment.
	And we think that's how it's happened on the Earth.
	And if Mars never really reached the temperatures that you actually need to kickstart carbon chemistry, then you're right.
	It's not going to happen.
	And if it is ice flows that cause it, it does point us towards the less likelihood of something happening, which is very sad in some respects, but very exciting indeed.
	But again, just as with Venus, we assume that life will take a form that we can understand.
	And what we may be about to discover is that life may take forms that we do not understand.
	Well, we still have to work within the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are quite fixed on this.
	You can change the laws of physics.
	You can, yeah, you can.
	And what's remarkable about it is the fact that you have carbon chemistry.
	Now, carbon chemistry we fully understand because life on Earth is all carbon-based, and it has that.
	And this is because, of course, you can have all these connections with carbon, which means you can build complicated molecules.
	Only silicon is the only other way that could be done, but we can't actually understand if silicon life could actually form.
	Silicon life form is unlikely to be running around and jumping about and having a great time.
	It's got to be a much more static sort of life, but something we probably wouldn't really understand.
	But some people have said, oh, well, it could be based on something else.
	And the answer is no, it can't.
	And the reason why it can't is because in order for organisms to function and all the cells to operate correctly, you need to have multicellular organisms.
	You need to have something where long chains of molecules can form.
	And that points to just either silicon or carbon.
	It doesn't point anywhere else.
	And that's why we're biased towards that.
	And we're very biased towards carbon because we understand carbon to a great degree.
	And therefore, we can actually do some sort of testing for that.
	We can't rule out the possibility of silicon life forms out there somewhere in space.
	It's quite possible.
	How on earth we test for it, we have absolutely no idea whatsoever.
	And we probably will be staring at it and wouldn't even recognize it.
	That is always a possibility.
	The environments we're looking at within the solar system, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, they are the right sort of environments where you would have carbon chemistry taking place if you had enough heat and energy.
	Right.
	Question tangential to what we've just been discussing.
	And this is on behalf of myself and my listener, Jeff.
	Now, a while ago, I did a show with a friend of mine, Richard Hoagland, about Phobos, the moon of Mars.
	And it was suggested at the time, and he wasn't the only one to suggest it, that there might be something that doesn't add up about Phobos.
	As far as you know, what is the latest thing, because it all gone, it seems to have all gone quiet on Phobos.
	What is the latest thinking about Phobos?
	Is anybody interested in it?
	Well, a lot of people are interested in Phobos.
	The reason why Phobos is an interesting object is because it's one of the moons of Mars.
	I mean, we're not sure how it even got there.
	It's in a peculiar orbit.
	It's possibly a captured asteroid or an object that was certainly in the vicinity of Mars when Mars was forming and therefore stayed there.
	It seems to be a much lighter object than we thought it should be, which suggests it's probably quite a porous object.
	And many people have actually suggested because of that, it's actually an extraterrestrial vehicle of some kind.
	And that's caused a great deal of excitement.
	The data that certainly has come back from spacecraft, and we've got a lot of good spacecraft have been staring at it quite happily, doesn't suggest that at all.
	It could be very much a porous object.
	And we have seen porous objects already.
	We've sent spacecraft to look at different types of comets and asteroids.
	And you do get them in various flavours.
	Some are very dense, very solid objects.
	And some aren't.
	Some are almost like bundles of rubble just about stuck together.
	So this object seems to be a relatively porous object.
	It probably contains a great deal of ice.
	Some of the markings on the world are quite bizarre as well.
	Some of the geological markings are quite fascinating.
	And again, it's suggesting that there's a great deal of ice and water bound up with this, obviously frozen, bound up with minerals.
	In fact, in some respects, it resembles almost like a cometary core rather than your typical asteroid or moon that's been actually put together.
	And it is described as a rubble pile with a thin crust, which is probably why people get very excited about it.
	It's actually going to break up, I think it's about 30 to 50 billion years.
	Someone will correct me on that.
	And when it breaks up, it won't crash onto the planet.
	It'll form a ring, a planetary ring around Mars because it's spiralling in its position, which will eventually break up.
	So it'll almost be like a Saturnian ring?
	Yes, it will.
	There'll be a temporary ring around in about 30 to 50 million years' time because it will break up due to the tidal forces.
	And in fact, the markings on the planet, on the object itself, seem to suggest tidal forces are already affecting the object as it is.
	So it is an interesting object, but because its orbit is unusual, because it seems to be lighter than you'd expect for its size, it's got a lot of people excited, immediately jumping to the conclusion that it's some sort of extraterrestrial outpost.
	But unfortunately, that would be wonderful.
	But science, I'm afraid, has to jump in here and say no.
	So the likelihood is you think that maybe it is something that's been hooked into the orbit of Mars that has come from somewhere else?
	Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of debris out there.
	And in the early days of the solar system, moons were being captured by planetary bodies.
	And I think this is what's actually happened.
	And it has been caught there.
	I mean, you've also got Deimos, another small moon as well.
	There are two interesting small bodies caught there.
	Something dramatic has happened at some point where these two moons have ended up there going around Mars.
	But yeah, I mean, it's well worth visiting because if it is quite a rubble pile and a lot of water there, it could be a good fueling station to extract the water to be used for interplanetary spacecraft.
	So it has good opportunities there for us.
	So it could be a sort of leaping off point.
	Yes, it could be.
	And as the gravity of the surface is quite low, it would be very practical to get there, mine the water, and then it wouldn't take much energy to get back off again to carry on.
	So yes, it would be an ideal place to put a small, even a robotic base there would be quite an interesting thing to observe Mars on a regular basis by putting a survey station to point down towards Mars itself.
	These would be great things for the future and that's what makes it useful.
	Now, apart from UFO and ET reports, the newspapers in this country are very preoccupied.
	Every single week now, I notice there is a story that usually goes, I mean, you could almost write them on a template.
	You just change the dates and the names.
	And the story is, such and such an object, let's call it Andrew, is hurtling, is usually the word that is used, hurtling towards Earth.
	And that'll be close to the top line.
	And then you read a little further down and you see the towards Earth bit is actually sort of in our backyard, but a long, long, long way away from us.
	You know, it's rare for things to even pass within the distance between ourselves and the moon, but sometimes that happens, as we know.
	And I think that happened quite recently.
	But every week we get these reports, there was one just a couple of days ago, and the end of it all is, but don't worry, it's going to get close to us, but it is not going to hit.
	Is all of this reporting about these things, and we're now more aware of them, is it useful?
	Yes, it is.
	The idea of all the, at one time, if you went to the 1950s, and Chesley Bonstall did a fantastic painting, very well-known space artist.
	He worked on a number of films like Destination Moon and things like that, Conquest of Space.
	He did an illustration of an asteroid colliding with New York, flattening New York, and he was criticized very heavily in the scientific newspaper journals.
	Andrew, you're slightly off your microphone now.
	Sorry, is that better?
	That's much better.
	Sorry.
	You were saying.
	Sorry.
	Yes, and he was criticised for doing that because they said asteroids aren't going to hit the Earth.
	But as time has moved on, we found that the likelihood of an object colliding with the Earth, a large object, is very likely.
	It's going to happen.
	Within the next 60 million years, this planet is going to receive an asteroid, which is a planet.
	We call them planet killers or something like that, because potentially they'll change the environment and change the course of life on the planet.
	And what we've got now is we've got lots of stations looking out for these objects, which could pose a threat to our planet.
	And that's why we're getting lots of reports, because now we actually have lots of data coming.
	And it's important to make the public aware of this, because this is going to happen.
	I mean, I think it's something like 2,000 tons of material hit the Earth a day.
	Mostly very tiny objects, so it's a lot of tiny objects come down.
	Some of it's in dust form, which is very strange, but it does happen that way.
	So it's not a big deal.
	The problem will be if a large object hits us.
	In Tunguska in 1908, an object exploded over a forest, flattening a huge area of land.
	Had that object, for instance, been on a slightly different trajectory and hit Europe, it would have destroyed Belgium.
	That's in 1908, not that far long ago, really.
	In 1973, I think it was, an object was filmed bouncing off the atmosphere, and it was a huge fireball in broad daylight, but fortunately it bounced off the atmosphere.
	So it is important to report these and to tell the public aware how close these objects are coming.
	One object which came past the Earth actually bounced off our atmosphere a few weeks ago.
	And in fact, NASA didn't spot it till it had already bounced off the atmosphere.
	And that would have made an interesting hole, no planet killer, but it would have been interesting.
	But it is a warning to people that this is the kind of thing that is going to happen sooner or later.
	And we have to make preparations for it.
	But you say it's a warning, but in terms of ordinary people, it's interesting to be told about these things.
	But if something was really coming our way, then, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, we'd only just have time to, you know, kiss goodbye to our relatives and kiss our, as they say, kiss our derier goodbye.
	There'd be nothing we could do.
	It depends how far in advance we have it.
	If it's a big enough object and we have several years' notice, then yes, there's things we could probably do about it.
	It's not like the film Armageddon, where in Armageddon they've got 18 days' notice and they do something about it with Bruce Willis.
	That cannot happen.
	That is not going to happen.
	If we have 15, 18 days' notice, there is nothing we can do about it.
	We need years and years of notice because then there's something we possibly can do.
	And one of the reasons people perhaps are asking the question is, why aren't we sending these probes to asteroids and things like that?
	This is the reason so we can study asteroids to see what the technology we would need to actually get to an object that's coming towards us to divert it away from us.
	And is that why the Japanese landed on one last year, wasn't it, or the year before?
	Absolutely right.
	And the idea is to try and study these objects.
	What are they made out of?
	One of them, which the Japanese were studying, Itikawa, for instance, was in fact a pile of rubble, which is what we think Phobos is.
	Which means, of course, that Phobos would be a good example of a world to visit, to have a look at, to see a world about that size if it was coming towards us, that kind of constituency.
	How would we deal with such a world?
	So yes, that's why we're doing all these studies.
	They're not just for the sake of it.
	There's a serious earth protection program on here that we need to try and understand and protect our planet.
	We're the only species that can actually protect our planet.
	Just remember, the only reason we're here is because the dinosaurs died out.
	If the dinosaurs had not died out and lived, mammals would not have risen.
	The dinosaurs would have continued to evolve, maybe to the intelligent species, we don't know, but they would probably still be here had they not died out.
	We think they may have died out after an asteroid impact.
	Right, so they weren't smart enough to do something about it.
	Potentially, if we don't destroy ourselves in some other way first, we are.
	Yes, that's right.
	I mean, something, I mean, we haven't been here that long, that three million years as a species.
	So we haven't been here that long, really.
	Yet we've done remarkable things.
	We are the only species that can actually leave our home world and go out there.
	We're the only species who can actually change our own planet globally at a phenomenal rate, both ecologically problems with our industry and things like that, and also, of course, with problems with weapons and of that kind of nature.
	So those are the kind of things we've really got to be careful about.
	Oh, hang on.
	I'm getting a bit of scrambling noise there.
	I don't know whether you touched your microphone there, but I got a little bit of noise.
	Are you all right now?
	Yes, it's all fine.
	All that's to the excitement, Andy.
	Don't worry about it.
	So look, we need to be aware of these things, and we need to be studying these things.
	That's why we're going there.
	Is one of the things maybe that we might discover when we land that the rock on these things is put together, is composed in a certain way, and there might be weaknesses and flaws within the rock on an asteroid that might allow us to break it apart if we needed to?
	Yes, there is.
	There's always danger of breaking an asteroid apart if it's coming towards us.
	Instead of one large problem, you end up with a million littler problems.
	So instead of a planet killer, you end up with 20 city killers.
	So the trick is to try and deflect it.
	That's the best way to try and do it if you can.
	And the techniques for deflecting are wide and massive by putting iron engines physically fitted to the spacecraft, to the asteroid.
	Because if it's years away, then you only need to deflect it by a fraction of a degree for it to miss us.
	But if it's quite close to us, then we'd need to deflect it by kilometres.
	And we just don't have the technology to do that.
	Detonating nuclear explosions, perhaps in front of it, but there'd have to be huge explosions to do that.
	Breaking it up would be probably the most dangerous thing we could do and could risk, of course, a bigger problem.
	Yeah, because instead of having one missile heading your way, you've got a thousand smaller ones.
	Exactly.
	So it's a real problem.
	But it may be interesting because we have developed quite strong nuclear arsenals, which is quite interesting.
	And that we've developed technologies that divert it to more useful means could probably help us, which would be a great irony of the world.
	Well, that indeed would be.
	Now, listen, I'd like you to just readjust your microphone because you've gone slightly off it again.
	And while you do, I'm going to ask you this question.
	And I know you would have seen this story.
	It was fascinating.
	It was the least likely news story I think that I've seen this year.
	And it was, and I think it was in the Daily Express, as many of these stories are, Andy.
	Astronomy and the Titanic.
	Now, I know you're interested in the Titanic because you give talks about it.
	There was the suggestion a few weeks ago, you will have seen this story, the solar flare may have thrown the Titanic off course, may have disrupted its compass, thereby making it more likely to hit the iceberg.
	A fascinating theory.
	What did you make of that?
	I thought it was a very good one, actually.
	I thought it was an interesting one because, of course, its position was not where they thought it was.
	And it took a while for Ballard to actually find the wreck of the ship.
	So they were off their position, which was interesting.
	Which could suggest that the compass was actually off, which is quite an interesting possibility.
	Although it has to be said That their navigation isn't simply done by the compass, they also do stellar navigation, they use the stars to guide them.
	And the conditions were absolutely perfect for astronomy for that kind of work.
	And they were carrying out their solar sight, their sun sightings, and doing star sightings as well.
	So they actually knew fairly well where they were going.
	They are slightly off position, but not staggeringly to think that they were so far off position, they were drifting completely into ice fields.
	The ice that actually hit them was actually drifted further south than would normally be done, which itself appears to be an astronomical reason for that, which is interesting.
	Because the whole astronomy of the Titanic is fascinating.
	It was a perfect night, a starry night sky, no moon.
	The fact there's no moon is the problem, because the moon would have illuminated the way ahead a little bit more easier otherwise.
	And they'd have actually seen moonlight shining on icebergs.
	So they've actually seen the iceberg ahead of schedule.
	Dead flat calm on a perfectly dark scarry night.
	The ocean reflects the sky, so it looks as if you're sailing through space, which is really a difficult situation because you can't really be certain unless you're doing stellar navigation exactly the direction you're heading in, which they were.
	The lookouts actually themselves knew the stars, so they would have been able to report anything really weird going on there.
	But also, the icebergs were drifting into the shipping lanes because in that Jan, the previous January, just four months before, we'd actually had the fantastic alignment that only happens every few thousand years of the moon, the sun and the earth.
	It's such a position where the gravity is such that the ocean rises slightly and actually release more ice into the ocean than is normal.
	And one of the great ironies of the whole thing was the iceberg that hit the Titanic was probably formed from snow that was laid down the last time that happened, which was quite ironic.
	So it took thousands of years for that piece of ice to actually get to the position it was.
	So the whole thing is surrounded by astronomy, but this idea of solar flare causing some magnetic disruption to the compass is quite possible.
	It really is.
	And it'd be quite interesting if it threw them off slightly.
	But it would only be a slight putting off.
	People would therefore assume, oh my goodness, they must have been hundreds of miles away.
	No, they weren't.
	They're only a few miles off the course they're expecting.
	Having said that, the position they gave at the time of the collision with the iceberg when they sent out the radio signal would be very different from the position where it sank because it would have been drifting in the current of the ocean at the time and that was never compensated for in any transmission messages which is quite interesting and that causes of course causes you a big problem because it's going to be out of position then and of course the other issue was of course that when the ship broke into two the bow section planed away under the ocean taking her
	and further away from her reported position.
	Yes, that part slid away, didn't it?
	Yes, I think they generally say where the stern is is more or less the position where it was, so they can get a rough guide to that.
	But it's still some miles off position where they actually thought, where they were the Captain Smith and the people thought it was, but they would have severely drifted, which wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in the Dead Cloud Calm, but they certainly would have drifted anyway.
	But I did like it because it's yet another story for the Titanic for us to get our teeth into.
	Yes, it will remain a mystery, a sad one, for all of our lives and beyond, I think.
	Okay, last question.
	A week or two back, we were told, I believe, that we are going into, or we are in, a new solar cycle.
	For ordinary people like you and me, what does that mean?
	The sun goes through an 11-year cycle where it goes through a series where it slowly builds up to more and more and more and more solar flares and solar radiation being pumped out into space.
	And it's an 11-year cycle.
	It also means there are more sunspots slowly appear.
	Amateurs do a lot of observations of the sun.
	And everyone can do it themselves.
	Don't look at the sun directly yourselves.
	Project the sun using a telescope onto a piece of card or something like that.
	And you can actually see sunspots.
	And if you chart sunspots over the 11-year cycle, they actually create a butterfly pattern on the disk of the sun itself.
	It's quite bizarre where they arise and fall.
	And this cycle is quite important because this solar cycle, we think, affects our climate quite substantially.
	And the oceans over an 11-year period absorb solar radiation.
	And this actually gets distributed around our planet for the heat for our planet itself.
	There has been disruptions to the solar cycle, however, in the last couple of cycles, which has caused a great deal of confusion and I would say upset, but certainly has made people raise their eyebrows as to what the sun is actually doing.
	We've only been observing the solar cycle since about 1610, when Galileo first observed it.
	So we haven't been observing it for a great period of time.
	And what was interesting, from 1610, for about 60 years, the sunspot cycle seems to have been completely disrupted and nobody knows why.
	And then it picked up again.
	And again, it seems to be disrupted.
	The trouble is, the sun's been there for four and a half billion years and humans have only been observing it since 1610, which is a real problem.
	We don't have enough data.
	And one of the reasons we've sent things like the Parker probe to the sun is to observe the sun going through its entire solar cycle so we can try and get an understanding of the mechanisms on the sun.
	And that's important.
	One, it's important for what's called space weather, which affects our planet, affects our atmosphere, and also affects satellites in orbit, astronauts in orbit, of course, because radiation levels.
	And of course, it's going to affect us sending astronauts to the moon and to Mars or to Mars
	to the asteroids if we've got a big solar cycle we want to know what the radiation levels are going to be like so that's the reason this cycle is now quite important for us to study right we will talk again about that and many other things andy you're so easy to talk with i'm sure my listeners are going to love you and this will not be our uh this will not be our last conversation online if you enjoyed doing this then we're going to do this again thank you so much thank you and andrew um i said that we would uh mention your website because people have to see it yes it's www.andrewlound.com
	and that's a n-d-r-e-w-l-o-u-n-d andrew lound thank you very much andy for that um and give my love to birmingham i shall i shall take care okay Andrew Lound, please check out his website and please read all about him.
	I think he's a great guest.
	We'll hear more from Andrew Lound, both on the radio show and here online at The Unexplained.
	More great guests in the pipeline as we cruise towards the middle of October, towards the end of October and the end of this year here on The Unexplained.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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