Welcome to the question show your questions, my answers wherever you are across my channel, just go ahead, type them in. I'll gather them up and answer them here. I record the show every Monday at 5pm Pacific. So come join me live on my YouTube channel if you want to ask your question to me directly moochie to chat asks, Are there ways starship could tether with another starship and rotate on the way to Mars to get some spin gravity as it's currently envisioned? No, I sort of explained this. So, right now, of course, we don't have any kind of artificial gravity in space, we don't have the expanse where they just fire the thrusters at high speed and accelerate, accelerate, and that gives you one G, we don't have any rotating structures that could provide you with gravity. And so when the astronauts board starship and they make the flight, the colonists fly to Mars, they're going to be in zero gravity for six to six plus months than the time it's going to take to make the journey to Mars. Now we know from the International Space Station that astronauts can handle a year in space with not a lot of adverse effects. So I wouldn't be super worried about about needing to kind of keep people healthy for the six months, they're spending time in space, the radiation is a bigger issue than the lack of gravity. And then when they get to the surface of Mars, then they'll be in Gravity again, and they'll be able to recover. And in fact, it'll be easy because it'll be in 35%, gravity as opposed to going straight back to the earth. But theoretically, sure, you could take a couple of starships, you could, once they're in space, flying side by side with each other, you could reel out a tether connect them nose to nose, or maybe have them be like, you know, sideways, and then they're just sort of actually you probably want them nose to nose. And then you would have them rotating and over. And while they're on their way to Mars, and then when they have arrived at Mars, then you would stop the rotation, you would detach the starships, then they would both do their landing and, and everything would be fine. So then you would get a few months of artificial gravity while you're in that. And this idea of I mean, not specifically starships, but just having some long tether, having a counterweight, and then having your spaceship, that idea has been expressed for decades. And so and I've even seen some renderings of of people, seeing what it would look like with starship. So I don't think we're gonna see it happen. I think it's theoretically possible, but it's sort of just not practical. And for the, the short amount of time that we're going to be traveling to Mars, it doesn't really matter. It's not the real point. So yeah, I think though, that that coming with some kind of artificial gravity system, just testing out a technique we talked about this last week or a couple of weeks ago, it's just is really key, like it is the big unknown right now in space exploration is how do we keep human beings safe in space? And, and the radiation we know, you just have to put some kind of material in between you and the, and the the rate, you know, put like water or metal or whatever. But the lack of gravity is a real tricky one. And it needs to be solved, we just need to know, can you get by with a small centrifuge that makes you spin uncomfortably fast, but provides you with artificial gravity for a little while? Or do you need to go with something that is much larger and more slow, but it needs to be constant? We just don't know. And this is a big mystery. JOHN Minton. Would you rather have levar for the overwhelmingly large telescope, we talked about the overwhelmingly large telescope last week, the 100 meter telescope that was originally thought of by the European Southern Observatory, and then cancelled because it was going to be too expensive, by like, you know, it's gonna be like $4 billion dollars. And then LUVOIR is the upcoming replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, it's going to be a big telescope, it's probably going to launch 2035 it's going to be a nine to 15 meter telescope, maybe larger, that's still sort of being figured out by the decadal survey, which is a meeting that astrophysicists meet every 10 years and decide their priorities for the upcoming decades. And so which one would I rather have? I don't know. I would say, based on how well ground based telescopes are doing of recent years, if I had to choose, I'd probably take the overwhelmingly large telescope over lubar I mean, the Space Telescope would be great and Movavi amazing, but I sort of am imagining all of the issues that's happened with James Webb Even with Hubble, that to have a ground based telescope that would probably come in at budget that you could replace the instruments on board and you've got a telescope. That is just, it's ridiculous. It's 101 of the ridiculously large telescope that'll come after the overwhelming the large telescope. But But yeah, I would probably choose the overwhelmingly large telescope and it will be cheaper be billions of dollars cheaper than LUVOIR. So, but don't make me choose like, what kind of monster are you? Patrick West? Do you think that a nuclear powered rocket is feasible? Yeah, absolutely. We did a video about this, but nuclear powered rockets have been tested for decades. The the NASA did a lot of tests with nuclear power rockets back in the like the 60s. So this technology is, is as old as almost space exploration itself, like the the power of a nuclear fission reactors that you can heat up hydrogen to really high temperature and then expel it out the back of your rocket. And that gives you a lot of thrust. And that has been tested very, very well here on earth. And there's no reason to think that it wouldn't I mean, nuclear reactors have been sent to space, the Russians sent like 31 of them Americans have sent one fusion reactors, not just the the battery rtgs. But But fusion reactors. So we know that this technology would work. And it looks like most in the last couple of years, NASA was given authorization by the White House to pursue nuclear powered rockets. That said, I mean, it would be incredibly effective, very efficient, they would cut down travel times to Mars. Of course, the downside is launching fusion reactor into space. Because you don't want to launch it from Earth, you want to get it into space. And then you want to fire the reactor because it's gonna let out radioactive particles. And even like when I say, perseverance, or curiosity, or New Horizons launches, there are people who are very concerned by the fact that, that these missions have a pile of nuclear material on board and what if they explode? And what if they scattered in the atmosphere? So? I, I don't, I think that we will see nuclear reactor spacecraft. And there's no technical reason why they won't work fantastic. But there are political reasons. And it's not urgent. Like, if you're going to launch your rocket to Mars, and it's going to take you say, nine months on a chemical rocket, and you could shorten that time to six months, but then you get all the political grief of the fact that you launched a nuclear rocket. That's not worth it. Now, if you're going to go all the way out to Pluto, then that's starting to make sense. But there's even some other ideas as well. There's some pretty cool fusion rockets that have been or three fusion rockets that have been proposed. There's a new technology that we're probably going to do an article on, maybe we already did, I forget about this idea of like magnetic recombination, similar to how the sun works. So there are some pretty interesting ideas for exotic propulsion systems. But at the end of the day, chemical rockets work, they get the job done. If we can refuel these rockets in space, like when one starships are refueling starships, then you can reach any part of the solar system that you want at fairly high speeds. So I don't think that there's really a great demand today. For a faster form of travel. What we want is a more powerful form of travel something that can that can loft larger payloads into space that can push larger payloads onto trajectories to different parts of the Solar System, to be able to allow people to land safely with a powered landing. And the more important technology to do that is probably space refueling over more exotic forms of propulsion. 211212112 What do you think about Abraham Loeb saying that it might be aliens? It's funny, I was talking to Paul Sutter a couple of days ago, because he did a response video to Avi lobes book tour of talking about his his Oumuamua theory that Momo is a spacecraft. And I want to talk to him personally. And so maybe, you know, you're gonna see a much better answer from me to that question in about a week and a half, two weeks, I think he's coming on the 14th. And we're gonna talk for an hour so we'll be we'll get into it. And the thing is that with this audience, we're not gonna have to talk about like, What's Oumuamua and what's the Fermi Paradox and so on and so forth. We can get right down to it. And, and the the The question that I think is important, and i and i disagree with Paul a bit. But I but I definitely get what Paul Paul says. Dr. Paul Sutter asks cheese man, I'll link to his his latest episode. But Paul really feels like the when you invoke aliens, then you're not because the hypothesis isn't well tested, you're not really able to know whether you're right or not. And the problem is that it's aliens when there are other natural possibilities, Oumuamua could be lots have been suggested. It doesn't really get you anywhere, scientifically speaking. And I think a deeper issue that that Paul didn't really get into is that it erodes confidence in scientists by the public because they get really excited. Or So scientists believe. And I don't think that's entirely true. I think that, you know, we thought about the phosphine discovery on Venus, we thought about the discovery of Mars, Martian rocks life on Mars rocks, and the Viking experiments, we've been plenty of times where it's been inconclusive, and people have been super concerned about it. And I think they, you know, I come somewhere down in the middle, which is that the question of whether or not we're alone in the universe is the most important question scientifically, like one of the most important scientific questions we could possibly ask. So it seems bizarre to me that this isn't a huge question that a lot of resources should be getting applied to, in terms of SETI in terms of searching for bio signatures in terms of just archaeology here, as well as planetary science on other places in the solar system. And yet, it's very much considered fringe by, by mainstream science. And Jason Wright had this great quote, he was like, why, you know, why are we okay, looking for dumb aliens? Why shouldn't we look for smart aliens? And I mean, smart aliens would change everything, we change everything about what it means to be human to live in this universe. So we should know the answer. So I think that, like, on the one hand, you probably shouldn't suggest that it's aliens if you don't have any evidence for it. But on the other hand, you should get the public really excited about the search for aliens about getting involved. And, and, and, like, encouraging budget to be spent to search and get an answer to this question. And, and I think, and this is, I mean, hopefully, I'll get a chance to talk to you about this, but it's like, I feel like science is way over there. Science is way over, like, we're not interested, we don't want to sort of have this embarrassing conversation about looking for it. And the public is way over here. They're like, Star Wars Star Trek. Stargate. We love aliens. And, and the reality is somewhere in between, and, and it's like, we need to bring scientists over where they can have, they can have this conversation more readily. And we need to bring the public over. And that's kind of my job is to bring the public over to to be okay, with a more nuanced conversation about this. Not I saw UFOs aliens are real, you're a science denying lizard person? Or why can't it be like Star Wars and Star Trek, bring them into the far more nuanced conversation about the sort of deep philosophical issues with the Fermi Paradox and the great filter, but also just the actual tangible hunt for planets and biosignatures out there in the universe. So that's conversation I want to get into without you just heard a free view of the conversation we're probably going to have, and hopefully, we'll all come out the other side of it a lot more knowledgeable about, about where science should go, because I don't think there's ever been a scientist who is better positioned was has more authority and respect by the science community, but also the public to take this conversation forward. So so I'm pretty excited. And and I'm looking forward to the conversation. I I like to have conversations that are nuanced that are in deterring gray areas that are complicated that there are no simple answers that you can have it out and, and be cordial about it. And I'm looking forward to it. So I think that's where we're gonna that's where it's probably going to probably gonna go but we'll see what happens. Ryan Schmitz and Arjun asks, Can you tell us about the issue between the FAA and SpaceX regarding the starship launches, this story is kind of breaking today. So I don't really know all the details all no more later on in the week. But what happened was apparently when SpaceX launched the starship as an eight and it exploded on the landing pad. It was done without the FAA exact requirements that SpaceX had done, some had skipped a few steps. And so this time around, the FAA has been a lot more. You know, they're the regulating body that controls rocket launches within the United States. And they were a lot more concerned and had a lot more issues and boxes to check. And I guess it had snarled up the head snarled up the launch of SN9 and or SN10. So I you know, we're gonna find out exactly the back and forth. I mean, what I assume is going to happen is that, you know, because at the end of the day, the FAA is the law, and they can decide whether or not starship is, is allowed to launch whether SpaceX can can have a business. And they can put as much pressure as is required to get SpaceX to step through and follow every step. And so, SpaceX will so so we're gonna see whatever regulatory requirements are fulfilled. And then the the launch, Larry Beckham is asking, did you talk to Matt Williams about the magnetic reconnection process to harvest energy from an Ergo sphere? Will he be on the weekly space hangout soon? I'm not sure if I understand ergo spheres yet. So Matt Williams is one of the writers at Universe Today. And he covers a lot of the sort of futurist concepts. He's actually a science fiction writer, but also a journalist working with us. So yeah, I will, I will probably have him here on maybe on the weekly space Hangout, I'm not sure. It's, it's funny, we've got a lot of really great writers and team members on the weekly space Hangout, as well as, as just the team at Universe Today. You know, this point is probably 12-15. writers, and you don't know many of them. So I want to fill that gap. And that's probably going to be me interviewing them here on the channel. And we're just gonna chat. We did a bit of an experiment. I mentioned this, I think I mentioned this last week. But one of the writers, Matthew Simone, is he recorded an audio version of one of his articles, and it was great. And so I want to sort of steal the Daily's concept. So if you listen to the New York Times, they do a show called The Daily every day. And there's a there's a journalist who interviews other journalists working at the New York Times about stories that they're working on that are big. And so I would love like me, or Matthew Simone to interview the other writers at Universe Today about the stories they're working on. So you could have Matthew or me talk to Matt Williams, about the Ergo sphere, talk about what's happening with regulations of sn nine or things like that. So that's, that's pretty high on my list of priorities at this point, it's, it's, you know, I want a way that we can fulfill the I want to be able to fulfill the let me sort of describe this, I want to be able to have our team, I want to make them better known. I want to improve the reputation, so I'll help them build their portfolios and give people a better connection. Because Because I mean, when you think Universe Today, you think me and, and, and I'm just one piece of the puzzle. I mean, there's at this point, a huge team that works on Universe Today. Some you have been around for a long time. Do you know Nancy Atkinson? Paul Sutter writes with us, Brian Koberlein writes with us, but then there's a bunch that you don't know. And I've been working on them for years. Evan Goff, Matt Williams. So, yeah, so I want to do that I want to be able to sort of bring them in and get them connected to the to you as an audience so that you can get to meet them and also just hear different perspectives. Because it's not all me. I'm, I'm just the ringmaster. But, but, but in fact, and Alan Boyle is writing with us today, there's a lot of people feel to shame. I've been trying to memorize the right ascension and declination of the 30 brightest stars because any value in this, the goal is to look up and know what I'm seeing. On the one hand, I'm the kind of person who likes to gather little pieces of information. You know, I'm learning Chinese. I know about 2000 Chinese characters about 3000 Chinese words, I use Anki. I don't know if you're using Anki. But by use Anki to memorize as much material as I can for space and astronomy, which I use for writing because a way to sort of have facts. What are these q A's use let me rattle off facts and it's not because I have done this for a long time. I was part of it but also because I I actually force memorize stuff so that I can have access to it. But that sounds not useful. To know the right ascension and declination of stars, I would not do that at all. I would learn your constellations. There are 88 constellations in the sky, of which you can probably I'm not sure where you live, but we can all see some fraction of them 50-60 depending on where we are. And once you learn them, they stay with you forever for your whole life. I, every night I go outside, look at the sky, when it's clear, because it's almost never clear. And I know where I am. I know what time of the year it is. I know the constellations. Right now I go outside and look up and there's Orion and I can see Sirius and I can see Pleiades and then in a couple of months, I start to see Leo come up and Gemini. And it's great. And then you use those constellations as your way of finding the objects to see with a telescope or a pair of binoculars, so so I would take a pair of binoculars, I would use, you know, learn your constellation just one at a time. And you you build, you find one that's really easy to find like Orion, or the Big Dipper or the big difference and constellation. It's an asterism. But still, you know what I'm talking about. And then you just start to find the ones that are connected to it. And you're like, oh, there's Draco Oh, there's booties, and oh, there's Summer Triangle, which is composed of Vega, and Deneb, and Altair and you learn them bit by bit by bit night after night after night. And then you use them. You know where Vega is. And that helps you find the Ring Nebula or you know where Hercules the constellation Hercules is. And that helps you find m 31, which is a globular cluster in Hercules. So I don't think knowing the right ascension and declination of the stars is very helpful, because they're changing every night and they're changing around the year. But if you learned your constellations, and then you use your constellations, to just be able to find objects in them with a with a pair of binoculars, or even a small telescope, then then that like, like, I learned my constellations when I was 14 years old, I haven't spent any time since I just reinforced them when I go outside. And I look and I forget a couple, you know, but it's wonderful. It's great. It's like looking at a map for the first like, once you finally see it, you see a map of the sky, and, and all of the objects and you know that that you may look at Hercules and you know that m 31 is inside that constellation in a beautiful globular cluster. And it's just a matter of, of learning so, so definitely don't remember the right ascension and declination learning constellations, get a pair of binoculars or small telescope, and just spend time studying each one, learning all the objects that are inside of them, just visually. So Vince corto asks, What are the odds that any spacecraft traveling in only a few percentage points at the speed of light won't collide with even a grain of dust in the interstellar space? I looked this up a while ago, I'm trying to remember the exact stats. But there is like one grain of Nova is 1000 grains of interstellar dust in 1000 cubic kilometers of space. So that sounds like not very much like space is big. But each one of those grains of sand hitting a spacecraft that is going say 10%, the speed of light is going to be hitting with 1000s of times more energy than a bullet. If you're lucky, then it's just going to borehole right through and it's not going to take out any electronics, it's not going to be a big problem. But if you're unlucky, it's going to like detonate when it hits the spacecraft blowing off big chunks of the spacecraft. So what is the solution? One solution is you put some kind of ablative screen in the front of your spacecraft. So you have like ice maybe, or something like that, that can handle getting hit by chunks, grains of dust, I mean, interstellar dust, as the spacecraft is flying towards its destination, or carbon fiber or something that have blades, right that you that you get hit by grains or dust, it takes out the chunkier armor, but it doesn't destroy the spacecraft. Either way to go is make your spacecraft really small and send a lot of them and just hope. And that's the idea with the breakthrough starshot is they're going to send these tiny little spacecraft by the 1000s. So yeah, some of them get hit by a grain of dust doesn't matter. You send a pile of them. And so both solutions would work. I mean, if you put a thick enough sheet of just ice in front of your spacecraft that would protect you from all of the interstellar dust that you're going to encounter. Now wouldn't protect you if you hit Like a rock, but the chances of you hitting a rock are so remote. It's that dust that you have to be worried about. It's gonna be like sandpaper just grinding down the front of your shield. But if you didn't have a shield, yeah, that would be a problem. Sarah Cameron, my six year old had a great question. He asked what would happen to the earth? If it had no moon, I understand we would have no tides would this affect the climate? It's believed that having a moon is one of the reasons why Earth has life. And it's not about the climate. The the thing that seems to be really important is that the moon causes tides, where the water goes in water goes out, can't explain it. But they believe that the tidal force causes this intertidal zone where you've got life forms that were in the water. Now they're in dry air, now they're back in the water, now they're in the air. And they were able to evolve to adapt to these two conditions. And then eventually, someone spend more time higher up where they spend their dryer for longer, and other ones would spend more time lower, where they were wetter for longer. And eventually, some of these creatures or plants or whatever, we're able to just remain dry for days, weeks, months forever. And so it's believed that one of the primary advantages you get for having a large Moon is to create an intertidal zone that allows life to take that jump from water to land. The other thing is that it provides stability to the planets rotation, the planets axial tilt. So we know that Mars in the ancient past rolled over, you can actually see that what used to be the Martian North Pole, South Pole are in different locations, that it at some point, just like, like just wobbled over onto its side. And it's thought that having the Moon provides a level of just stability, like a, like an anchor to keep the earth rotating at roughly the same kind of axial tilt that it does would take a lot of force to push the earth out of its current axial tilt. Because you have to drag the Moon along with it. Now the Moon does wobble a little bit, but the Moon seems to help with that as well. So so it's it's really believed, like, if you were going to rewrite the Drake equation, which is this list of all the requirements that you need to have the count the number of advanced civilizations that are in the, in the universe in the galaxy, that having planets have large moons nearby is probably indicative is probably one of the contributing factors, as well as having a magnetosphere having a crust that's made of certain kinds of components, etc. So, so yeah, the Moon is critical probably to life on Earth. Colby s asks, Why aren't there any elongated craters in the moon only circle craters, if knees are coming from all directions, up, down and sideways? That's a great question. When you look at the moon, or when you look at just craters in general, they are always circles, they're not dashes, or whatever you would expect. If they're coming in at different angles, then you would get a, you would get a smear on the moon at whatever angle the the asteroid hit at. And the reason is that when it doesn't matter what angle an asteroid hits the moon, or you know, the earth, mercury, whatever, the moment it hits, it immediately essentially detonates like a bomb and transfers its material directly into the crust directly down. So no matter what angle that Meteor came in, if it's just like skimming in the second it hits and transfers, it just kind of goes kaboom. Now there are a couple of examples are very rare examples where you actually do get the swipe, that if it comes in at low enough angle, that it will sort of create this smear. And there's also some interesting chains where it looks like maybe like a meteor broke apart. And like as it was coming in, and then sort of dropped a bunch of chunks, you know, in a line and you see these Meteor chains on the moon. But just in general, whenever the an asteroid hits the moon, it just immediately creates a a circular detonation. And in fact, when you see the animations of it, right, you see the mushroom cloud as it's sort of expanding up from the impact site. That's what you get, you get to just this, this it's like someone led off a bomb at the at that place and you get the the circular detonation zone, you get this, you get this splash that comes up in the middle of of debris that actually can freeze in place and that's why you get these mountains in the middle of these things like a like a splash, and then you get this ejecta blanket that falls over and sort of creates this giant shape around. So yeah, it's kind of amazing. It's a good, cool thing to notice that. Dominic little Do you think humans will be able to live generations in the Solar System like the expanse without magic mess in like in the show? So do I think the humans will be able to live in the solar system? Yes. Yeah, I think at a certain point, our technology will trivialize living in space, we will understand how to have a completely closed ecosystem, we will understand how to deal with space radiation will understand how to provide artificial gravity, and we will have energy to spare in space thanks to perfect solar panels, that we will be able to create a very comfortable environment in space. Yes, I think that'll be possible. Do I think it's going to happen soon? No, no, I think that we are 100 years, 200 years away from from a time when we will have trivialized living in space to the point that we have a powerful rocket you get on spaceship, you fly to space, you live in space, it's great. And I know that Jeff Bezos thought that in the Far far future, there will be a trillion people living in space. And so you know, I was talking about this idea that the gravity worlds are for suckers, that the earth is the best place in the solar system. So if you're going to leave the earth, don't go into another gravity, well, don't go to the moon, don't go to Mars live in space. But the reality, of course, is if you're going to try and live in space, you need to provide everything that human beings require to survive from the oxygen from the water from the food, energy temperature, keeping out the horrible, horrible space vacuum, the space madness, you got all the stuff that you got to do. So we don't understand a fraction of those. And so we have to understand that we have to learn. And here on Earth, we actually have a ton of benefits that are provided to us for free by our planet, we have gravity, we have a magnetosphere that protects us from space radiation, we have an atmosphere that allows us to breathe, the water that we need to drink just falls from the sky, the food that we eat grows in the ground runs around. So so we will have to mimic, we will have to completely artificially recreate every single one of those things. And that's not easy. We're gonna have to take them one at a time. So yeah, I think at some point, we will, but it's not gonna happen soon. It's gonna happen a long time, it's not gonna happen in our lifetimes. I think. in our lifetimes, we will see a base on the moon base on Mars. Better space station's in my lifetime, but I'm old, your lifetime, maybe you'll see more. But it's going to be that way for a long time. And then we'll see bigger and bigger space stations. And then eventually people will just live in space. Once someone's cracked that rotating artificial gravity problem and the space radiation problem manifests 11. If we ever have the option of having a fuel depot in low Earth orbit, do you think there will be a limit to the amount of fuel in the depot? I did a video on this a couple years back, but but one of the biggest ideas that's waiting to happen, one of the things that really unlock exploration of the Solar System is the ability to refuel your rockets in space. Right now when you launch from the earth, you need like eight and a half kilometers per second of velocity just to get off the planet. And then once you're in orbit around Planet Earth, you then need more to go somewhere else you need many more. I mean, if you want to leave the Solar System itself, you need like another eight kilometers per second. If you want to go to Mars, you need a couple of kilometers a second yonago the Moon needed a couple of kilometers a second and you've used all your fuel by launching or just getting off the gravity Well, again, gravity rolls are for suckers, the the Earth's gravity well is awful. So the idea is that you have fuel depots in space that are refilled. So you have say a starship launches flies to a fuel depot refills it with methane or hydrogen, oxygen or whatever you need for different kinds of rocket types. And then, so then say when starship launches, it launches, it docks, the fuel depot refills itself completely. And now it's already broken free of Earth's gravity. It's already in orbit, it's now can use all that propellant to go to some other destination. You can then get by with smaller spacecraft. With tankers, you can have spacecraft that never have been built on the earth. like think about the enterprise from Star Trek, right? It can't land on planet Earth, it has to fly in space. So imagine a rocket that's only designed to live in space. What does it mean? What would a rocket look like? What would a spaceship look like if it only lived in space and refueled? So there's a ton of advantages, lots of great ideas. And in fact, I'm United Launch Alliance. put a lot of energy into thinking about this idea for refueling depots in space. NASA has put a lot of work into this as well, again, you know, these are ideas that have been thought of for decades, probably 50 years, NASA has been thinking about refueling rockets in space. And so one really interesting thing recently was they did a partnership with SpaceX, where they provided SpaceX with all of their technology for free for SpaceX to try to implement it. And in fact, there's a refueling depot on the International Space Station, they've been testing out this technology on the space station. One of the big problems is that when you're in space, it's really hard to keep volatiles together in the in the low pressure environment, the radiation, the heat changes, you can lose a lot of your material just bleeding off into space, it's really hard to prevent that. And so there are a bunch of technological challenges. Being able to keep fuel under pressure in space, despite the adverse conditions, being able to dock remotely, robotically being able to transfer the fuel in and out reusing these for a long time. So it's a great idea. I would put it like almost as important maybe more important than artificial gravity Actually, yeah, refueling spacecraft. Now of course, the the the starship, the plan to send starships to Mars depends on orbital refueling. So the plan is, of course, a starship launch. Filled with fuel another searchable launch, it'll transfer all the fuel and then the one starship will land fill up with fuel again, launch again, refill the starship again, and now it's got enough fuel. It's, you know, it's tanks are full, and it's in space, and then it can make the flight to Mars and back and, and be able to, to deliver humans to the red planet. So yeah, I think that's a super important deck Perry, what do you think about the idea that the sun had a binary that captured Planet Nine, I mean, there's been ideas that the sun has a binary companion, some kind of like maybe brown dwarf, or even like a red dwarf star that is on a very, very long trajectory, very long orbit that maybe takes 10s of 1000s, maybe even millions of years to orbit the sun, and then it comes in, makes a close a close ish flyby of the sun and then flies back out into deep space again. And that each time it does his passes through the Oort cloud, and jiggles the Oort cloud gravitationally speaking. And that causes a bunch of, of objects to fall to the, you know, into the inner solar system. And that might be the cause of certain some number of long period content, it might even explain some of the mass extinctions that have happened in the past that, you know, mass extinctions seem to go in in cycles. And so maybe there's some object that's orbiting really far away, and it as it passes through your cloud, it's juggling it up, and then all of these comets hit the Earth, and then the other passes out again, and then it doesn't happen again for another long period of time. But that said, Nothing is actually directly been observed. If you did have an object like that, then you would have a much better chance of capturing other objects by using like a three body interaction. So in other words, like, if you want to add a moon to Jupiter, you can't just have a asteroid get really close to Jupiter and get caught by Jupiter's gravity has to have an interaction with one of Jupiter's moons as well. So it's sort of slingshots around Jupiter and then slingshots around one of Jupiter's moons, and that gets it caught into an orbit. And so to have we did have another object that was orbiting the, the sun, some big planet or, or star, whatever, then that would encourage being able to capture other types of interstellar objects coming from other places. So there's no evidence of it, except for like, we seem to get extinction events every some number of years. So all this asks appraisers since m type stars have so many problems like tidal locking and radiation, what do you think about life on k type stars? For the longest time, astronomers have been thinking about life on stars like the Sun, main sequence stars, they live about 10 billion years, we're about halfway through the lifetime of a star. They're good. But 10 billion years is not a long time, geologically life forming Lee speaking. What you want is you want a longer period of time. Now the other option you go with the red dwarf stars, the red dwarf stars they left forever. A red dwarf star just slips away. It's fuel for hundreds of billions, maybe even 10s of trillions of years. You can imagine life gets settled in on a red horse around a red dwarf star and continues to evolve and live there for effectively forever. Right 10 trillion years. Compared to 10 billion years here on on Earth, with sun. But the problem is that red dwarf stars are nasty. When they, when they start up, they have these awful killer flares that could just scour the life of the planet. So what you want is you want a star that's going to last a long time, but isn't going to be really, you know, deadly to any planets orbit around it. And it looks like these k type stars are the best places, they live 60 80 billion years, so they they're smaller than the sun less fuel than the sun. So they'll last a lot longer. But they also don't have the same kinds of flares that the sun does. So it seems like the perfect spot. And in fact, there's sort of this idea that, that the earth is fine, but you could do better, that, that you could have a planet with, say different kinds of oceans, or different kinds of a different kind of star, different lengths of time, different climate. And you could have a planet that is super habitable, that's more habitable than Earth. And, and one of the keys to this would be definitely being around a star like a type star. So I think it's a it's a great idea. And in fact, we should definitely be looking at K type stars out there. Because remember, you know, the earth has been here where the sun has been here for four and a half billion years, but the universe has been here for 13 point 8 billion years. So there's been plenty of time. And so if you had a K type star that's been around for say 10 billion years, 12 billion years, life could have had a long time to really figure things out. So it's they're interesting prospects, and I'll bet you a lot of work is going to be spent studying these key type stars. All right, well, that brings us to the end of this week's live question show. I would like to thank our patrons, thanks to Harold barn Hagen, Thomas Smith, Martine Nolan, Chris McNeil, George Sani Tom and the rest of our 860 patrons for their generous support. When our videos early with no ads, join our community@patreon.com slash Universe Today. And if you want a single comprehensive resource for Space News, you'll want to subscribe to my weekly email newsletter every Friday I send out a magazine of Space News with dozens of stories pictures, brief highlights about the story and links you can find out more so go to Universe today.com slash newsletter to sign up totally free. 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