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Feb. 12, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:39
Edition 701 - Guest Catchups
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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 Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Very good to have you there here in London.
It is grey, but it is fairly mild, and I think temperatures might improve over the next week or so.
That's enough of a weather report for now, I think.
Thank you for the emails that keep coming in.
I see them all and note them all.
If you have a guest suggestion or something to say, go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link there, and you can send me an email in that way.
And if your email specifically requires a reply or response, then please put in your email in the subject line, reply required, and then I will understand that that is what you need and get round to it.
Very busy on the email front lately.
Thank you very much.
It's nice to hear always from new listeners, wherever in the world you might be.
This edition of The Unexplained, three guests from my TV show talking about three hot topics, certainly two hot topics, and something that never fails to be a hot topic, that is science and understanding it.
Guest number one, from the debrief, Christopher Plain, great friend of this show.
We had him back on on Sunday last, February the 5th, to explain what we knew at that point about the Chinese balloon shot down over U.S. airspace, the surveillance balloon as it appears now to be, the wreckage now being examined, of course.
It was a huge story for about seven or ten days around the world.
Continues to be so, of course, with the shooting down of something else, as I record these words.
Now, we may well get more information on that by the time that you hear this.
But I thought Christopher's take on it anyway is very interesting, even though it is the situation as it stood last Sunday, the 5th of February.
So Christopher Plain from the debrief, giving us his time and expertise, number one.
Number two, giving his time and considerable expertise.
Seth Szostak from SETI talking about the discovery that signals from space can be decoded with AI and a bunch of people who are doing that and what that might mean for the future of trying to find that signal that may well be from somewhere that's inhabited.
So we'll talk about that.
Number three, Marcus Chown, British science writer and science broadcaster and author.
Great man.
Just a few comments from him around his new book, which is a book basically dealing with all of those ballpark questions that all of us who are not scientific like to ask, like what is gravity?
What's a black hole?
What's a quantum computer?
Those sorts of things.
So I'm just going to get a few words from his long conversation on last Sunday's show.
And you can hear that.
And of course, you can check out the book too.
It's Marcus Chown, C-H-O-W-N.
And the book literally, I think, has come out in the last 10 days or so.
So three things on this edition of The Unexplained.
Let's get to number one from the TV show, Christopher Plain, head writer at the debrief, talking about what the Americans shot down over their territory, the balloon.
There was a lot of faffing, as we say here in the United Kingdom.
Faffing means kind of, if you're in another country watching this now, faffing means kind of deliberating, you know, being dithery about the thing.
And finally, they've done it anyway.
The president gave the order and this thing has been shot down.
Now, we have to say a few things about it.
From the reports, this thing is bigger than a bus.
In fact, it's the size of a couple of buses.
What was it doing there?
And what about the reports of a second one?
I saw a report out of Canada that there might have been one there, but there was certainly one that was reported in South America, Central America.
So this is a strange story, okay?
BBC put it this way.
The U.S. has shot down a giant Chinese balloon that it says has been spying on key military sites across America.
The Department of Defense confirmed its fighter jets brought down the balloon over U.S. territorial waters.
China's foreign ministry later expressed strong dissatisfaction and protest against the U.S.'s use of force to attack civilian unmanned aircraft.
Well, aircraft in its broadest sense, I think you'll find.
So the thing's been brought down.
Bits of it are in the sea.
They are at some depth, we understand.
And moves are on to, you know, retrieve those and then try and find out what's in them.
Was it spy equipment?
Was it a weather balloon, as the Chinese claimed?
What was this all about?
This is a bizarre story.
Christopher Plain, head writer for the debrief, I knew he would be all over this.
He's online to us now.
And Christopher, thank you very much for doing this with us again.
Howard, happy to be on anytime you need me.
Listen, I don't know about you, but there are a few things to me and my sensibilities that don't add up about this story.
Am I just a suspicious old geezer, as we say here in the United Kingdom?
Or are there facets of this story that are weird?
There are at least three or four that are very weird.
Figuring out the origin, figuring out the nature of it, the fact that maybe it was maneuvering, which balloons usually don't do.
So there's a bunch of things about this story that are really odd.
Right.
And one of the things that, unless I have missed a lot of the coverage in America that has asked this question, I don't think anybody has asked.
Maybe you did for the piece that you've written for the deep.
And here's a photograph of that said very peculiar item.
And again, it would be nice to see it closer up, but that's the one that we've got in most of the media.
If this was a weather balloon and a weather monitoring device that had simply drifted off course, would the scientists, in terms of international scientific protocol, not have gone on the phone or whatever method of communication that they use, communicated with scientists in America and said, look, chaps, one of our balloons is missing.
We think it's coming your way.
Nothing to worry about and we'll try and retrieve it if we can.
That didn't happen, did it?
No, you know, when we're dealing with China, Howard, you know, I report on a lot of advancements in Chinese probes going to the moon, things of that nature.
It is kind of a weird area when it comes to that because everything ultimately runs through the government in China.
So you would like to think that the scientists would get on the phone with Each other and key in American scientists and American defense officials.
Hey, one of our balloons got away from us, and don't anybody panic.
But unfortunately, even if it really were, which I don't think anyone at this point thinks it was actually a weather balloon, but even if it really was, I don't think the nature of communication between scientists in the two countries is I don't think they have the liberty in China to jump on the phone independently and say, hey, don't shoot our weather balloon down.
While this thing was being monitored, and it was being monitored for, what, the thick end of 48 hours or so, wasn't it?
We first knew it.
72.
72.
All right.
72 hours they're monitoring this thing.
Were they, as far as you're aware, Chris, jamming whatever signals it may have been sending back to its base?
So nobody has gone on the record to say that, but Wolf Blitzer on CNN had multiple unnamed sources within the Defense Department saying that, that yes, they were, once they zeroed in on it and decided they were going to let the natural wind currents, which do run from west to east, they were going to let it carry it across the country and end up in the water, which is what they did.
That yes, they were theoretically actively jamming whatever sort of signal intelligence or electronic intelligence equipment might have been on that balloon and keeping it from gathering any more data until they could shoot it down.
In just a second, we've got some footage of this thing being shot down, but I just want to ask you this before we get to it.
If this thing was there to spy effectively on military sites or whatever it was there to spy upon, I thought in this day and age, but what do I know that's worth knowing?
That we were being surveilled constantly from space by satellites.
Why do they need balloons?
We are being constantly surveilled from space by satellites.
You are correct there.
Here's the key point to keep in mind.
Imagine you want to listen in on a conversation happening inside someone's house.
Would it be better to stand outside their house or would it be better to have a microphone inside the room?
So I think that's the way to look at a spy balloon is it's on the right side of the upper levers of the atmosphere.
It's in the stratosphere.
So it's just kind of the troposphere is from the ground up to about 45,000 feet.
That's where airplanes and pretty much everything else travels.
It was just in that next level up in the stratosphere.
So it's in a perfect position, yes, to monitor weather, although typically weather balloons kind of will bounce between those areas in the top of the troposphere and the mesosphere.
This thing was clearly operating at almost 60,000 feet, which is, you know, where you would put the U-2 spy plane back in the 20th century or the SR-71 Blackbird.
This is perfect spying area, if you will.
In the wake of 9-11, and we will get to that video, by the way, of this thing being shot down as the piece de resistance of this conversation.
But in the wake of 9-11, I stood on the streets of New York asking Americans at that time whether they felt safe in their country.
And the response that they got, I think, was a little different from the response you might get here.
And it was very heartwarming, I felt, as somebody who went through that awful time with those people and had American friends who suffered there.
And they said, almost unanimously, I feel safe everywhere I go.
I feel our government is looking after us.
Do you think the fact that this thing was able to get in, do whatever it was doing, and then they hung about before they did anything about it, would in some way dent people's feeling of security at this time?
That's a strange question to ask, but I think it's pertinent.
I do think it's a good question.
I don't know as a science writer if it's right up my alley, but I will tell you that I think the feeling is with, as you pointed out, satellites going overhead all the time that we're pretty much being watched.
Now, if they retrieve, you know, the FBI is digging this thing out of the ocean and they're expecting to take a few days to do it because they're treating it like a crime scene is the best way to put it.
They see where the debris is.
They've zeroed in on it.
So if they dig it up and they found some sort of nuclear agent or some sort of biological agent or something, yeah, the idea that that could just be floated over the ocean and dropped on Americans, I think would definitely have to impact that feeling of security.
So somebody needs to do some explaining pretty quick.
Let's, while we've got time to do it, run the video of this thing being shot down with the sound that went along with it, Chris.
Break one.
Last one.
I just got a flash.
That is a big kill.
The balloon is completely destroyed.
Okay.
Completely destroyed.
You talked a second ago about what's going to be done with the bits of this they may find.
That's going to be fascinating, is it?
What are they going to be looking for first?
So first of all, just the instrumentation.
So if it's a weather balloon, it will have the type of instruments that measure weather, right?
Barometers and thermometers and air pressure gauges and things like that.
If it's a spy balloon, it's going to have the type of equipment on it that measures electronic intelligence and signal intelligence and radio waves and that sort of stuff.
So even if it's shattered, I mean, it's going to hit the ocean, you know, somewhere between 150 and 500, 30, 400, 500 miles an hour, depending on the shape of it and the nature of it.
So it's going to be shattered.
But even if you shatter a barometer and you dig up all the pieces, you'll be able to put it back together and say this was a weather device.
So I think that's the biggest piece of information we'll get.
I did allude, Howard, to the fact that Scientific American put out a report yesterday in the States that there was observations of this thing maneuvering.
And that when you look at the pictures, this is a pretty typical balloon design with a balloon and then an instrumentation package hanging under it.
It's not a dirigible.
It's not a blimp-shaped balloon or a balloons float, they don't maneuver.
You know, something that should be able to maneuver.
So I think they will also look to see is there something unique going on with this ability to maneuver.
Do you think America's got, if it is a surveillance device that can maneuver and we're told this thing is bigger than a bus, it's huge, has America got stuff like this?
Is America doing this as well?
You know, I mean, if you think about the lore around Roswell and the crashed potential alien craft way back in 1947, and the ultimate answer by the Department of Defense was that it was a mogul balloon.
Mogul balloons were huge.
I mean, they were five, six times as big as this device.
So, yeah, we have balloons this big.
We don't have weather balloons are usually about 20 feet, you know, not even half a bus in size.
So this is much larger than a weather balloon.
It sure seems designed from an atmospheric effect to travel in an area of the atmosphere where you would do spying, to carry instrumentations that would be for spying.
And yeah, would be a size in nature that sure seems like a spy balloon.
You've written a piece about this for the debrief, which I, you know, heartily recommend.
Is there anything that I haven't asked you?
Is there a killer point here about this that I should be getting in here?
Yeah, well, I just, I've already mentioned, but I do think the maneuverability is something that has raised a lot of eyebrows.
It's something that the Department of Defense has commented on in a couple of different briefings about it seem to be able to maneuver.
And balloons just don't do that.
They either go up or they go down, and they ride with the wind.
Now, when you look at it, there's nothing extraordinary about the shape or design that would tell you it would maneuver.
But there are some advanced propulsion systems that people like the Horizon Drive or the EM Drive that are in development stages that the Department of Defense is supposedly putting money into.
So could this thing have some unique propulsion mechanism that lets it be both a balloon and a maneuverable balloon?
I think that's something people are really looking forward to.
And I think in the science community, that's the big question is the reports of the maneuverability sure raised a lot of eyebrows.
So this ain't over.
This story is not over by a country mile.
There's much more to say about this.
And I still think there's a lot of mileage, even though I know that the technology of it is your bailiwick, not the politics of it.
There's an awful lot of interest, I think, going to be in the notion that America's sacrosanct borders have been violated seemingly in this way.
People, I think, will be concerned because from Americans that I know and have known all my life, you like to believe, and it has been true for decade upon decade, I think, that your country, whereas Europe borders all kinds of hostile entities and actors, and it's a mix over here and in other parts of the world, people like to think that America is literally its own balloon.
It's safe.
It's sacrosanct.
And I think people are going to be believing differently now unless we discover something else.
I remember when a gentleman flew an ultra-white aircraft and landed on the White House lawn a couple of decades ago.
And we were all dumbfounded because as Americans, we felt like you couldn't even get that close to flying over the White House without getting shot down.
So I think the reality of security versus the illusion is something.
One other technological thing I'll point out, Howard, is a lot of people have emailed me or messaged me and asked me, why didn't we just grab it?
Why did we have to shoot this thing down and let it smash into the ocean and shatter into pieces?
And that would be just based on how high it was.
It's an area of the atmosphere you couldn't really send a proper helicopter drones up there because we do have anti-drone technology that has big nets that are used to capture other drones right out of the sky.
So we do have that type of technology, the DOD does.
But to operate at that high a level, the atmosphere is just too thin.
So you really options are send another balloon up or send what they did, an F-22 Raptor equipped with a missile that could go up there and shoot the thing down.
So that's why we didn't grab it en masse without damage.
Because it would have been two hit and miss.
And, you know, this operation had to go 110% right.
You know, our boys, in inverted commas, had to shoot that thing down, and the American public needed to see it falling to the earth or the sea, which they did.
Chris Plain, thank you very much indeed.
People can read about this in the debrief, can't they?
Yep.
We have an updated article coming out with a lot of the information we're hearing about the maneuverability and the science aspects of it.
And yeah, that's at thedebrief.org.
And I'm sure as the weeks go by, we will hear more information about this and, of course, the other developing story connected with it, it seems.
And of course, as I record these words, I don't have the full picture on that.
That will develop too.
So my thanks to Christopher Plain.
Seth Szostak from SETI, old friend of the show now, talking about the use of AI to decode signals coming in from space.
TheConversation.com and other portals reported this.
An international team of researchers looking for signs of intelligent life in space have used AI, artificial intelligence, to reveal eight promising radio signals in data collected at a U.S. observatory.
The results of their research, published in Nature Astronomy, are remarkable.
The team hasn't yet carried out an exhaustive analysis.
The paper suggests the signals have many of the characteristics we would expect if they were artificially generated.
Really?
Why hasn't this been more talked about by our media?
We're going to put that wrong right now with Seth Szostak, an old friend of this show, good friend of mine, senior astronomy at the SETI Institute, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
I think I got away with that.
Seth, how are you?
I'm just fine, Howard.
Seth, are you as excited as whoever wrote this in theconversation.com seems to be?
Well, you know what?
You're going to knock it down now, aren't you?
After seeing claims that we've got some signals here that might be it, after seeing that for three decades and more, you get a little bit, I wouldn't say skeptical, but you do you know restrain your enthusiasm put it that way well yes you have to curb your enthusiasm because quite often we can get overexcited and then we're only in for a letdown however this is different isn't it this is using artificial intelligence to perhaps do what people can't do is that so
That is so.
Artificial intelligence, really it's machine learning that we use, is a new technique for digging signals out of the radio noise that our big antennas pick up.
And this has been talked about for a while.
It's finally getting implemented, which is to say we're going to actually start using it.
Now, you might think, OK, well, that's an interesting technical discussion or maybe not even so interesting.
But what does it mean to me, the car buyer?
I mean, if you could find signals that are, say, only half as strong as the kind we can find now coming from the cosmos, that means, you know, you're you're examining eight times the volume of space as you were previously.
So, look, you're on a South Sea island looking for buried treasure.
If all you can find are chests of gold that that have, I don't know, aluminum fittings and hinges and so forth.
And now suddenly you can find any kind of hinges that might increase your chances of digging up something valuable.
OK, so where does this leave us?
Apparently, the person who was behind this, the mastermind of this is is a graduate student.
Do you know anything about the originators?
I think it's probably Peter Ma.
I'm not sure.
But yeah, well, anybody in science knows that it's the graduate students who do all the work, whereas the faculty gets all the pay and that kind of thing.
But in fact, yes, it's a graduate student because, you know, taking courses in artificial intelligence and more specifically machine learning, you know, you really couldn't do that 20 years ago.
So that's that's a new technique that just sort of allows you to find things that you hadn't anticipated.
Because if you look at what SETI is really doing when it collects all these data, how does it decide if there's really a signal from ET in those data?
Well, it looks for a specific type of signal, a signal that's called narrow band.
It's a, you know, one spot on the radio dial, just as this broadcast would be at one spot on the radio dial.
It looks for things that are narrow band.
Well, that's just a convenience.
That's only because it's the only kind of thing we can look for.
But if you put machine learning on the case, you can find a wider range of possible signals.
I mean, that's one thing that you told me in one of our very first conversations, I think probably 20 years ago, maybe maybe more, that you can't be looking everywhere all the time.
You can be looking in the most likely places.
So if you've got a computer doing it for you, then you can look in more places.
Well, yes, that's certainly true.
I mean, you know, you're only looking at one place at a time and for a very limited amount of time, actually.
Typically, you know, you point the antennas at some spot on the sky where you happen to know there's a star system with planets.
Maybe you even know if any of those planets could be somewhat like the Earth, you know, with liquid solutions and nice breathable atmospheres and all the things that any extraterrestrial would love to have for their planet, right?
And you can only look at that for a while.
Then you have to look somewhere else, presumably.
So, yeah, it's a search that's limited by the number of antennas you have to do it, the number of people involved, and lamentably, the most important thing, how much money you have to run the project.
Okay.
If, in future, the big discovery is made and we finally find the ultimate wow signal that is as close to being verifiably created by somebody trying to communicate with us, or not as the case may be, is it now likely that it's going to be a machine that finds it and not a person?
Well, I think that's been the case for a long time, Howard, actually, because this isn't the first application of computers to the problem, right?
In the movies, the way SETI's done is somebody puts on a set of earphones like these, right?
Maybe like yours, I don't know, like somebody's, right?
And they're just sort of listening, tuning the dial, hoping to hear something that sounds like an alien signal.
But it hasn't been done that way for a very long time, something like 60 or 70 years.
What happens is that the computers are already looking through the signal space because, honestly, you wouldn't have enough earphones to monitor all the channels that are being monitored.
No, exactly that.
And, you know, we've had a question sent in.
It may well be from Mark, my producer.
I'm not sure who it's from.
But how many frequencies, I think we have talked about this before, can you monitor at any one time?
Yeah, it's tens of millions.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
And that's soon to increase, too.
Look, that also just depends on computer technology.
If you have more compute power, you can listen to more channels at one time.
Now, I'm talking to you here from the Silicon Valley in Northern California.
And, you know, the guys who are working in the next block over, all these high-tech types building faster and faster computers at basically the same price point.
So that's the sort of technology that really speeds up the search.
Speeding up the search is a good idea.
If you can speed it up, then you might be alive when we find a signal.
Are you confident that we're going to find something that might excite the world in your lifetime, in my lifetime?
Well, I'm trying to be careful about what I eat and when I cross the street, Howard.
So I'm hoping to be alive when we find this signal.
And somewhat infamous week, many years ago, I was giving a talk in Europe, but I bet everybody in the audience a cup of Starbucks that we would find E.T. within two dozen years.
You did.
Now, that's been about, you know, 17 or 18 years ago now.
So I'm beginning to get a little worried.
I'm going to have to buy a lot of coffee.
But, in fact, I do think that not only is the experiment a good experiment, but also that it has a good chance of succeeding within our lifetimes.
And it's probably a flexible deadline anyway.
In the words of Carly Simon, it'll probably be coming around again.
Thank you very much, Seth.
It's very kind of you to help me on a Sunday like this.
Seth Shostak.
is senior astronomer at seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence who is excited but not over excited at The prospect of artificial intelligence, checking out signals that emanate from space.
If there's any development on that front, you can be sure we'll talk about it here first.
The marvelous Seth Szostak from SETI.
Remember listening to him on the old Art Bell shows.
He never fails to interest.
And now at the end of this, just a few words from science writer and broadcaster Marcus Chown.
He's got a new book out about the questions that we commonly ask, those of us who are not scientists and don't understand as much as we should, about basic science things like what is gravity, what's electricity, and those sorts of things.
So it's just nice to hear from Marcus Chown.
The whole interview was on the TV show.
I'm not going to give you that here.
I'm going to give you a portion of it.
So here's Marcus Chown.
He's an award-winning writer and broadcaster, formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brunel University.
And his books include Deep Breath, The Ascent of Gravity, which was the Sunday Times Science Book of the Year, The Magicians, Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand, What a Wonderful World, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, Felicity Frobisher, and The Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil.
And that's not all of them.
Aldebaran?
Aldebaran.
Dust Devil, I think is the way to pronounce that.
He's got a new book out, though, that I think has been waiting to be done for youngs.
Do people still say youngs?
Mark, do people still say younks?
They do.
It's been waiting.
I know, my sister taught me that one, and, you know, it goes back, like most things with me, to the 70s.
But this book has been waiting to be done for youngs.
It is called The One Thing You Need to Know.
And essentially, it's for those of us who go into situations when we need to be able to discourse about something like black holes or gravity or electricity.
And you think to yourself, especially if you don't have a scientific background, and I don't, I was crap at science at school, to be quite frank with you.
You know, I didn't exactly have the best teachers of science in the world back in those days, so they did not help.
But I came out failing most of the exams when it comes to science.
So if you wonder, one of the reasons why I do science on this show is because I'm actually learning stuff that might be useful.
Such is the theme of this book of The One Thing You Need to Know.
Marcus Chowm is online to us now.
Marcus, how are you keeping?
I'm very well, thank you.
How are you?
Very good, Marcus.
It's nice to see you again.
Everything's about AI these days, isn't it, Marcus, though?
AI?
I'm a bit worried that, you know, even authors will be made redundant by artificial intelligence.
Well, I think so.
I read a newspaper report just a week or 10 days ago that kids are getting chatbot GPT to do their homework.
Some workers are getting their work done by chatbot GPT.
I don't think people realize, and this is not what we were going to talk about tonight, but it's interesting to reflect on.
I don't think ordinary people realize the pace at which this is going.
No, I don't think they do.
It could completely transform the world.
We never expected this because AI, there was a lot of hype about AI about 20 years ago when it was thought we could have expert systems that could replicate a doctor.
But then that proved to be a dead end.
But now, this tremendous amount of data that's available that can be crunched allows a different type of intelligence, not our kind of intelligence, but an intelligence that can mine data and behave or certainly see connections and things in the world that we don't see.
So mathematicians are already using AI to supplement their search for new theorems.
So yeah, I think it's, who knows?
I mean, it could be worrying, really.
Do you think it's going to make us lazy?
I don't think so.
I think that it'll supplement us.
We've used computers to enhance our capabilities.
I mean, really, we've got a brain which is like three pounds of jelly and water.
We evolved on an African plane three million years ago.
But we found, we enhance ourselves, you know, with telescopes that can see to the edge of the universe, microscopes that can see the invisible world.
And this is just another enhancement, I hope, of our abilities.
And I'm hoping that it doesn't supplant us.
But of course, there's always the chance that we will be supplanted.
And one of the reasons we may not be seeing any sights of intelligent life in the universe may be because it's, I don't know, machine life or something like that.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, that's in itself fascinating.
There are those, and again, it's not a topic for us, but we do talk about this, who say that some of the aliens that people describe experiencing are actually programmed robots.
They're not, you know, sentient, you know, blood coursing through the veins creatures.
They're robots.
Well, certainly.
I mean, I think when you think about interstellar travel, I mean, the fastest thing that we've ever created is, you know, the Voyager space probe.
It takes something like 80,000 years to get to the nearest star.
And the real deal breaker is, you know, if you accelerate very fast through space, or you travel very fast through space, the gas, the protons that are in interstellar space effectively come at you like that they're being shot at you by a particle accelerator.
So biological life would be subject to tremendous radiation for interstellar travel.
And it certainly seems that we could be too fragile and it might require machine or metallic life to suffer the depredations of interstellar flight.
That's interesting, isn't it?
And we've discussed on this here before.
We had a guy who's a well, he was an astronaut and is now a medic who talks about space matters and about the fragility of the human frame, the human constitution to be able to make these journeys.
What isn't discussed enough, I don't think, is that the likes of NASA, the European Space Agency and others are working at the moment frantically and furiously to make sure that the techniques and the materials and the technology that they need to be able to protect us from exactly what you've just talked about keeps pace with the development of spacecraft and propulsion systems.
we might be able to go there, but it's no use being able to go there if you get radiated to the extent that it gives you cancer.
Absolutely right.
And that is the deal breaker on traveling to Mars.
You know, if there should be a flare on the Sun and you were flying on a six-month journey to Mars, you'd probably die.
You know, I mean, the Apollo astronauts, you probably know, I think it was one of the Apollo, Apollo 12, I can't remember.
They just missed a solar flare by about a day, something like that.
And so that is the real problem.
That is the real problem.
If you take a lot of shielding with you, that's a lot of mass.
And the problem is you need fuel to shift that mass and you need fuel to shift the mass of the fuel.
So yeah, that is a problem which isn't pointed out.
We can't actually predict when there are solar flares.
Do you remember, I think I mentioned in my book the solar flare of 18, I think it was 1851, I can't remember, the Carrington event, which was the most powerful solar flare in recorded history.
And at the time, there was a growing technology, the technology of the telegraph.
And telegraph operators were electrocuted across the world.
Because as the magnet, you know, when we actually, we generate electrical power by changing a magnetic field through a conductor and that induces a current.
So this magnetic field was carried by this plasma, this material from the sun.
When it cut through the wires that connected the telegraph over thousands of kilometers, it induced currents and telegraph operators were electrocuted.
In fact, it was such an amazing flare that it created aurora that you could read a newspaper by at the equator at midnight.
When was this again?
This was in about 1851.
It was called the Carrington event.
There was a guy called Richard Carrington, and he had an observatory in Reigate, I think it was, in Surrey, just south of London.
And he was looking at the sun, and he noticed that there was a flare on the sun, so a brightening of the sun, at the very same time that a magnetometer at Q, so this is an instrument that detects the magnetic field, went off scale.
And so he made this connection that these two events were connected.
And before that, people thought the sun only affected us through its heat and through its gravity.
So this is the first time we realized that we would be affected by actually, you know, kind of an event as serious as the 18, I think, 1851, 1854.
I'd have to check my book.
We haven't had an event as serious as that since.
But it would be, I think it is a risk, you know, there's a risk register.
I think you've, oh, is it my book?
Look at my.
I'm just looking in the index here.
Keep talking.
Catch on the sun.
Yeah, on the sun.
Yeah.
Oh, here it is.
Carrington event, page 52 to 53.
If you'll hold on for a moment, I can find it for you.
You can test me on it now.
1859, apparently.
One of the things I should tell you about books is that by the time the book has come out, the author has read it so many times that they can no longer remember it or even remember whether it's interesting or not.
I think that, I mean, look, we're going to have to get into the contents of the book any second.
But I think when you're close to something, that's what happens.
I actually have been reminded by listeners and other people who know, I've done 720 hours of podcasts, right?
I started in 2006.
I was one of the first people to do podcasts.
I'm not expecting a medal for that, but people tell me every so often, we think you should have so-and-so on.
And I'll say, that's a good idea.
And then either they will come back to me or I will check and I will discover that I have talked to them.
I just simply forgot.
Now, that could well be my advancing age, but it might be something else.
You get so close to your work.
Sorry, the interesting thing about this book is, again, by the time it comes out, you cannot tell whether it's interesting or not.
But fortunately, there was somebody who edited it who had done a physics A-level and they got really excited by things and kept telling their friends at parties.
So it kind of reassured me that maybe there are some things in there that are interesting.
Well, we're going to work our way through it.
I think it's great.
And I think it's written clearly so that a Dumbo like me who was not good at science can understand this.
And, you know, sometimes some of the things you talk about here are discussed even on this show.
And I don't know as much about them as I should.
So I get loads of books in for reviews and stuff.
And I can only afford to keep a percentage of them and the rest go to the charity shop.
However, this one I'm going to keep by me for all of those occasions when we're maybe talking about black holes or whatever it might be.
Okay, why, I think we probably explained it anyway, but you tell me because you're the author.
Why did you write the one thing you need to know?
In February, only a year ago, I got invited to give a talk at a law firm in Cheltenham.
It was called Wiggin Law Firm.
I don't think we should be naming them, but anyway.
Well, anyway, they asked me to give a talk about quantum computers because they were interested in would it affect their, you know, their firm?
They just needed to be knowledgeable on the subject.
And they said, by the way, nobody here knows anything at all about science.
So I thought, oh, my God, you know, what's the problem?
Yes, exactly.
So I thought, well, what's the one thing I need to tell them about quantum computers from which everything else, you know, logically is a consequence.
So really, that was it.
And then I thought to myself afterwards, oh, why don't I do this for other subjects?
You know, why don't I, why don't I do, I mean, my publisher, I approached, said, why don't you do it for 21 topics?
So I do topics like quantum theory, quantum computers, evolution, black holes, as you mentioned, the Big Bang, you know, these kind of things.
So that was really the idea to just take, just, you know, point out one thing and try and deduce everything else from that one thing.
You can't do it in every single case.
I've got a chapter about the brain.
And obviously the brain is something, you know, the last frontier, really.
We don't really understand the brain.
Two minutes before I've got to take commercials, I wasn't going to start with the brain, but I was fascinated that you included the brain because the brain is such a complex thing and we don't understand all there is to know about it anyway.
So if somebody asked you to explain what the brain is and what it's for, what would you say?
I mean, the brain is the only organ that exists to make changes in itself, really.
That's what it does.
I mean, nothing else.
I mean, you know, a liver just stays a liver.
You know, your heart stays your heart.
But the thing that the brain does is it makes changes in itself.
And absolutely everything that you do, our conversation now, the people who are listening to our conversation, the connections between the neurons, which are like the atoms of the brains, are changing, the strength of the connections because of the words that you're actually hearing.
You might think they're boring.
You might think they're interesting.
I don't know.
But basically, I've made a physical change in your brain and everything.
I mean, I'm looking around in my kitchen here.
I'm looking at a clock.
The fact that it's 20 past 11 has just registered and that has made a change in my brain.
Isn't that interesting?
So the other organs that we have, of course, they do change, but that change is mostly aging.
Yeah.
That's what that is.
But the brain is actually adapting to the circumstances around it.
I think we have something like 100 billion neurons, which by coincidence is equivalent to the number of stars there are in our galaxy.
And they can make something like 10,000 connections with other neurons.
So that means something like, I mean, one followed by 14, zero possible connections.
And all those connections can change their strength depending on what you're learning.
And what we learn, our memory, all that is stored in the strength of these connections.
If anybody asked me ever to explain what is electricity, I couldn't tell them.
And in the book, you are brave enough to tackle that.
Yeah, and the reason is that I thought to myself, you know, I was puzzled myself, you know, how is it that we can, you know, electricity can light my light bulbs in my house.
It can run my toaster, my washing machine, and not just mine, but it can light the homes and run the appliances of billions of people.
I mean, how is that actually possible?
And I began to, when I thought about it, I realized it's down to the phenomenal strength of the electric force.
Okay, so you probably think that the gravitational force, gravity is strong.
I mean, if you try and jump, you know, a meter in the air, it pulls you back down again, doesn't it?
So, you know, if you fall from, I don't know, from a ladder, you can break your leg.
You know, I mean, gravity, you think, is strong.
But the electric force, right, which glues together the atoms in your body, isn't just 10 times stronger than gravity or 100 times or even a million times.
It's actually 10,000 billion, billion, billion, billion times stronger.
Okay, so that's one followed by 40 zeros stronger.
Okay, you may think to yourself, well, okay, I'm walking down the street, I pass someone in the street, how come I'm not forward towards them with this incredible force?
It's because matter comes in two types.
It has what we call a negative charge and a positive charge.
So the unlike charges, you probably learned from score attract and like charges repel.
So in all normal matter, because there's an equal amount of negative and positive charge, this repulsion and attraction is perfectly balanced.
So you have no sense whatsoever that there's this phenomenal force.
But if you were to actually create a charge in balance, you could unleash it.
So I was thinking about this and I thought, say you had a mosquito.
This maybe gives you some idea of the power.
Say you have a mosquito and it's made of atoms like you and me.
And say you removed all, so the atoms are like, you know, they have a little nucleus like the Sun around which electrons orbit like planets.
And the nucleus has a positive charge and the electrons have a negative charge.
Say you removed all the electrons from a mosquito.
You only have the positive charge, the positive nuclei, and they would repel each other.
Okay, so how much, I'll ask you, how much energy do you think that they would repel each other with?
With the energy of a sparkler, the energy of a stick of dynamite, the energy of a hydrogen bomb, or a global mass extinction?
What do you think?
Well, they're only little, I presume just a kind of prick on the finger.
Basically, the mosquito would explode with the energy of a global mass extinction.
So equivalent to the energy of the city-sized asteroid that slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
So all from a tiny mosquito.
If you unleashed the power of the electric force, so you see immediately, if you can create even a small charge imbalance, you can unleash this phenomenal force.
And we see it when you get a charge imbalance in the sky during a thunderstorm, and we get a lightning bolt.
But that's exactly what we do.
So I mean, and we are totally puzzled why there could be one force, the electric force, that is one followed by 40 zero stronger than another.
So one of the fundamental questions, because we're trying to, we're pretty certain that the four forces which glue the universe together, there are four fundamental forces, there's a gravitational force, there's the electric force, and there are two nuclear forces that operate inside, deep inside atoms.
We're pretty certain they're all facets of the same force.
And in the Big Bang, there was only one force, and these forces have split apart.
But how can you possibly have a description of those three forces when, you know, a formula when one of them is followed by 40 zeros bigger than the rest?
So that is a huge mystery in science.
You may have heard of, so I'm going off on a tangent here.
Tell you what I'm just wondering, and I'm sorry I'm jumping right in here.
There's you going off on a tangent and here's me jumping in.
That's two transgressions In one.
If it's so complicated and these forces are so elemental, which literally they are, how did we ever unlock them?
You know, it's been done for us, as you said, in lightning, thunderstorm.
But how were we able to harness this?
Well, I mean, again, it's a number of inventions that made this possible.
I mean, you know, the Greeks knew about static electricity.
You know, they knew about lightning.
They knew that if you rubbed amber against fur or whatever, you could get them to stick.
You know, we can do this now with a balloon.
You rub a balloon up your sweater or whatever.
They knew about static electricity.
The problem is you couldn't probe this and try and understand it unless you could generate some steady flow.
And of course, the invention of the battery in about the late 18th century, that was the beginning.
And if you go, I'm actually in Maryland in central London here.
I'm only a mile away from the lab where Michael Faraday did all of his, you know, he did his experiments and basically created the modern world.
He created the modern world of the electrically powered world.
And if you walk in off the street, it's just off Piccadilly.
If you walk in there, you can just walk into his basement lab.
You'll see a battery that he brought back from the man who invented batteries because Faraday worked with, well, he was the kind of assistant of Humphry Davy.
Humphry Davy was the Brian Cox of his day.
The DNA land.
Yeah, he discovered chemical, exactly, discovered chemical elements.
And he took Faraday, the young Faraday, on a tour around Europe.
And they met Volta, who invented the battery.
And he sent a battery to Faraday.
And you can see the battery he sent.
So once you had that source of electricity, then you could start experimenting, which of course Faraday did.
Faraday, completely uneducated person, no academic qualifications whatsoever, entirely self-taught, and in later life, humiliated by the Oxford and Cambridge educated physicists of his day, you know, until the greatest physicists probably between Newton and Einstein wrote to him.
And that was James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist.
So if you're down the pub, and you need the answer.
If you're down the pub and you need the answer to the question, what is electricity?
What you've explained to me at the beginning of this, I think, is brilliant.
It is an imbalance of forces.
It's an imbalance of huge and there is this tremendous electrical force and we don't know why.
But it is such a phenomenal force, isn't it?
As I say, no one can imagine one followed by 40 zeros, but if you realize that you create a charge imbalance, you can unleash some of that tremendous force.
You can see how we can power the well.
It is just a phenomenal thing.
And if we ever work out how to produce it for free.
Faraday realized we're electrically powered.
I mean, basically, we create batteries, basically charge differences across cell membranes.
And that's how we drive every process in our body.
That's how we create the chemicals, the proteins, and all the things that we need in our body.
We are electrical powered, electrically powered.
When you have a bowl of pasta and you can run a marathon, that is actually the electrical power from that pasta that is.
And of course, that was recognized very early on because in the 1790s, Luigi Galvani accidentally, he noticed that dead frog's legs twitched when you actually attached them to a battery, you know.
And it was realized that, and of course, that then inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, you know, 19-year-old Mary Shelley.
One thing leads to another.
They used to, you know, yeah, you could animate dead flesh and she wrote Frankenstein, This is going back a long way.
But one of them was about a thing called Evoluan, which was a great exhibition, may still be there in Eindhoven, Holland.
And there's a frog there.
And I've never forgotten the thing that the frog said.
And for a whole generation watching this right now, people of my kind of age and a little bit younger perhaps, who used to, in Liverpool, as we say, sag off school and watch these films, this film about Evoli on this wonderful science exhibition that I always wanted to go to.
There was a frog and the frog said the words, I am the frog.
But for me, Galvani would be nowhere.
And you've just brought that to life for me.
Thank you very much.
Now, here's one for you from the book.
Got one from the book for you.
If you have to describe to somebody in the pub, what is a black hole, where do you begin?
Well, a black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.
And the only real description of a black hole came from Einstein's theory of gravity in 1915, where he realized, unlike Newton, Newton thought there was actually a force of gravity between the Sun and the Earth, you know, like a piece of elastic that connects the Sun and the Earth and keeps the Earth going around the Sun.
And Einstein realized that was wrong.
You know, he realized that there is no force of gravity.
What actually happens is a body like the Sun warps the space-time around it.
We can't see it because it's a four-dimensional thing and we're three-dimensional creatures, but it actually creates a valley in the space-time.
So the Earth goes around the Sun, around this valley, rather like a ball in a roulette wheel, round and round.
And in 1916, a man who had volunteered to fight for the German army in the First World War, his name was Karl Schwarzschild.
He got a copy of Einstein's paper, which he, Einstein was actually presenting his theory in November 1915 in four lectures, in four weeks.
And Schwarzschild got a copy.
I think he actually may have attended one of the lectures on his leave from the front.
He was actually in the German front in Belgium and he realized, well, first of all, he found a solution to Einstein's theory, right?
So Einstein had replaced Newton's one formula, which described gravity, with 10.
So this made the theory incredibly difficult to deal with.
What you needed to do is you needed to find how space was warped by a particular mass.
But Einstein thought it was impossible.
This guy on the Western Front realized, he found a way, he found a solution.
He found a curvature of space around a point mass like the sun.
And he wrote to Einstein and Einstein was shocked to receive this letter from the Western Front.
But he hadn't finished.
He realized that if the mass became more and more concentrated, the valley of space-time around it would become steeper and steeper until it became a bottomless pit out of which nothing could escape.
Something like a giant whirlpool.
Yeah, and he had no word for it, but there isn't a single person on Earth today who doesn't know the word for it, I'm pretty certain, because the word is black hole.
But that was not coined until 1967.
So nobody actually had a word to describe this object.
Einstein didn't believe that they existed.
And throughout really the first half of the 20th century, physicists tried like mad to prove that these things could not exist because they just thought they were just too mad, too ridiculous.
But then in 1971, two astronomers working at Hurstman Sioux Castle, which is this 16th, 15th century castle in Sussex, discovered the first black hole, which was called Cygnus X1.
And that was Paul Murdin and Louise Webster.
Now, Louise Webster is a woman physicist, a woman astronomer, and nobody knows her name.
She's been entirely forgotten.
Nobel Prizes have gone for black holes, but no one remembers Louise Webster.
She was an Australian, unfortunately.
She had the first liver transplant in Australia, and she died quite young.
She was in her 40s.
What a story.
This person needs to be recognized for that because a lot of other people have had recognition.
Yeah.
So anyway, so they found that, so now, to cut a long story short, far from being ridiculous and objects of science fiction, we've now discovered that there's a giant one in the center of every galaxy.
We don't actually know what it's doing, what they're doing there.
So we've got a relatively small one in our galaxy, but some of these galaxies, some galaxies have massive black holes of maybe 30 or 40 billion times the mass of the Sun.
So we now realize that these things that Einstein thought couldn't be possible are now central to the life of the universe.
But we don't actually know why.
We don't know what they're doing there.
We don't know if they came before galaxies and they built a seat around which galaxies were coalesced or whether they formed in galaxies that, you know, the galaxies came first.
We don't actually know.
And there's this weird connection between these supermassive black holes and their parent galaxies.
Now, when I tell you that a black hole, even a supermassive black hole, compared to its galaxy, is like a bacterium compared to London.
Now, you wouldn't expect that the street plan of London would be controlled by something as small as a bacterium.
But the actual motion of the stars in a galaxy is controlled by its supermassive black hole.
Isn't that an incredible thing?
Marcus Chown, always a friend of the show, man with tremendous scientific knowledge, I think you will find.
And before that, you heard Seth Szostak from SETI on using AI to decode signals from space.
And before that, the ongoing worry about what other nations may be sending over the United States, and indeed probably my nation too, to perform surveillance missions, balloons and drones and those sorts of things.
How much of this is going on?
I think we're going to learn much more about this.
Very, very quickly, I would say.
And maybe everything that we've said here will be out of date by the time that you hear it.
I don't know, but it's still interesting to hear.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained online.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
And if you have made a donation to The Unexplained for the website and all the other stuff that we do, thank you very, very much for doing that.
Thank you.
Take care.
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