SIO445: The Science of 3 Body Problem with Paul Sutter

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 445. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. And we got another fun returning guest for you. You may recall from, I don't know, a month or two ago, Dr. Paul Sutter, theoretical cosmologist. Has the show Ask a Spaceman. Fantastic show. Last time we had him on to talk about his book. And since then, we've been looking for any excuse to get him on to talk about basically any space stuff.

I'm a huge fan of space stuff, and between then and now, I guess, the show Three-Body Problem came out. It's on Netflix. It is, of course, based on the book series, and we will do our best to avoid heavy spoilers, but there's going to be a little bit of, you talking about the plot to degree. It's not going to go through all the end or anything.

But if that's something that you had in queue, then, you knows, maybe give it a watch before listening to this. Great show, I watched it or if you're never going to watch it or if you don't care about spoilers, proceed on as there will be a few. We're going to talk to Paul about some the series, it gets right, things it get wrong. More importantly than critiquing it or anything, it's gaining a better understanding of the scientific issues And it's a really fun conversation.

Can't wait for you to hear it. And that will be after this break that you, of course, can't avoid if you go to patreon.com/seriouspod. the show. Science in science communication by pledging to the show and making it happen. We appreciate you so much, folks current patrons. We really couldn't do it without you, really. So patreon.com/seriouspod to skip the ads and support the show and we'll ask a spaceman about three body problem joined again by Paul Sutter, Spaceman himself. How you doing?

0:02:00 Paul: Am fantastic, how are you? Just...

0:02:02 Thomas: Good. I am so excited to talk to you. That was a lot of fun last time. And we thought it'd be a perfect time to get you back on to talk three body problem. Cause that series has some science.

0:02:14 Paul: Just a couple bits, just here and there, and then you, you blink and you miss it.

0:02:19 Thomas: Yeah. So new with you? I mean, last time it was really cool to hear about some of the things you've done. It seems like you're, you're often jet setting, you know, doing really cool stuff. Cool stuff. Any updates?

0:02:27 Paul: I I got to finally witness my first total solar eclipse, I was I was in Indianapolis at the Indy 500, joined by 70,000 of my closest friends, and uh, there are clips on YouTube, I was live with Weather Channel all day long, there are clicks on YouTube of me freaking out in front of a live national audience and losing my mind.

0:02:34 Thomas: Oh, that's right. Yeah. Okay. I grab some of those and play some for the audience, will you be offended? Okay. I might grab those.

0:02:55 Paul: Absolutely not. It was there. It was genuine. I

0:02:58 Thomas: That's awesome.

0:03:30 Paul: Was with Jim Cantore, and in the middle of totality, he turns to me and says, Dr. Sutter, could you put into words what we're experiencing? And I turned to him, And I remember I said, why just more like

0:03:44 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, I got some words. It's amazing. Yeah, Yeah.

0:03:49 Paul: Vocalizations, but not quite, not quite language.

0:03:53 Thomas: Some sort of throat singing, maybe. I don't know. That's awesome. I still haven't gotten to do that. It was absolutely pathetic where we were. It barely could be called an eclipse, that's okay. Well, you know, 20 years from now. No, we actually felt so left out. We're going to see if we can snag one in another part of the world in a couple of years. You know, we've

0:03:55 Paul: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Yes. In 2026, there's one that's going to come between Greenland and Iceland and then come down through Spain.

0:04:21 Thomas: Got our eyes on it. We're seeing about that. But if nothing else, what's funny is when they're like, oh, the next one is in 20 years. And I looked at that one. That one actually hits very close to us. So, you know. Listeners, check back in 20 Years or whatever.

0:04:22 Paul: Yeah that's right. Yeah exactly.

0:04:34 Thomas: I think it's Northern California. Maybe it's like Southern Oregon. I don't know. But somewhere close. Can't wait.

0:04:39 Paul: Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, put it on your calendar.

0:04:43 Thomas: Was it everything that you had hoped it would be? I'm kind of surprised that was your your first one.

0:04:47 Paul: I've tried multiple times. So I, in 2017, I was in Nashville, and we got clouded out at the last minute, and so didn't get to see totality. And then I had another invitation in 2021. I was invited to be the guest expert on an Antarctic cruise expedition that was going to catch it, uh, an eclipse over the southern ocean, and that one got canceled because of COVID, uh, and so this was attempt number three, and third time was the charm.

0:05:15 Thomas: Oh no. Well, that's excellent. All right. Well let's talk about some other celestial bodies. Uh, three body probably. Yeah. Roughly three of them. Um, this was really cool. We I, were chatting a little bit before recording, but I had read this first book of this series and I thought it was really, really fascinating, interesting, a little uneven in some ways, but like really interesting. And then I kind of, I didn't realize that there were two other books. I thought it was, I don't know if my mind, I just like combined it with, you know, George R .R. Martin or something. And we're like, oh, hopefully, hopefully more of those come out.

0:05:26 Paul: Of them Right. Yeah. Because Like, no one finishes series anymore, so

0:05:55 Thomas: Yeah. But I think it was now I look back and I'm like, Oh, I think It Was Already Out When I Read the First One. And I just didn't even check. Then this show kind of came out, hadn't really even realized they were making it, it comes out and, oh man, what an enjoyable show. I it. I loved the acting, the casting was phenomenal. And so I thought it'd be really fun to talk about it with an actual spaceman, because there's, as much as it's cool ideas, it does feel like potentially some stuff could be pretty, you know, weird science -wise, but I can't wait to hear an actual breakdown, how, what's your experience with the, uh, the series? Well,

0:06:01 Paul: Probably.

0:06:29 Paul: Overall enjoyable. I'm about three quarters of the way through the TV series right now. I'm trying to balance it, by the way, against Shogun and Fallout, and so, I, you know, I'm I'm spinning a lot of plates over here. I'm super busy. Um, it's an enjoyable show. Uh, when I watch, people often ask me, you know, to criticize TV shows or movies. I've consulted on TV shows, on some films. And my general response is that, uh, when I am watching a show, I am not interested in grading homework.

0:06:42 Thomas: We can talk about the science of Shogun, and then that'll be an excuse to, right?

0:07:08 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:09 Paul: I already do enough of that. And so I sit back, relax, and I enjoy the show. And what I assume, my default assumption when I enter into a science fiction show or any show that touches on science or involves science, I assume – and this is just to help my mental state – that I am watching a show that takes place in a universe that is very similar to but not not identical to our own. That way, I'm just like, oh, that's not how it works in my universe. But I'm watching this universe over here, and things operate differently. And so I'm okay with that. And so they

0:07:33 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. That Is okay, that is incredibly enlightened, and that is, uh, not something that I do, uh, and I'm not even a scientists. I'm like, they got that crap wrong, and you know, sure.

0:07:51 Paul: Go, yeah. Because that's so easy. And I'm just, and it's exhausting to do it for me, because there's something wrong with every every single depiction of science in every single piece of media. So I just actually want to enjoy and take a little break and let my mind go to some interesting place. But that said, we can still talk about the science that's presented in Three-Body Problem and the real-life inspirations for those science, and it might go, in fact, of course, it's science fiction, it's like a source from science, but it's not real, and but, my, as I've been watching Three-Body Problem, the thing I can't turn my brain off about is not the science, the science I just let it wash over me, and the technobabble and the Sauvons and made up stuff, it's actually the depiction of the scientists themselves. Hey,

0:08:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah First off, they're way too hot. I'm sorry, they just are, it needs to be said. This is not, this is non-insult to scientists, this is just truly an observation of how hot these scientists are, they're too, they're two hot.

0:08:56 Paul: Wait a minute, I, they're

0:09:05 Thomas: It's it's not, yeah, exactly, exactly.

0:09:05 Paul: They're too hot for human beings things. Uh, Yeah,

0:09:09 Thomas: You know what? That's a better way to put it.

0:09:09 Paul: Because they are actually alien plants, and the aliens only watched like, high you know, Hollywood movies and think this is what an average human looks like and they were way off. Um,

0:09:19 Thomas: Yeah, I bet that the Sofons made it, or no, what's the name? Oh, the Santee, that's their name. Yeah, the alien's name is Santee.

0:09:22 Paul: You go, the Santee yes and

0:09:26 Thomas: Yeah, you

0:09:26 Paul: Actually is in how they are reacting. I remember the first episode when they're like, oh my gosh, you know, all of our particle collider experiments are going haywire.

0:09:37 Thomas: Know, that I should have done my job better, and maybe I'll set up, I think we, you can avoid spoilers, right? I think for the most part, I mean, we'll probably have to talk about some stuff, obviously, but watch the series. You should check it out, at least the first couple episodes. We won't go too deep of it's on netflix. Check it out. Again, great cast. Really enjoyable. I liked it. One thing I think early on, it's very quickly established, so it's not much of a spoiler, is science experiments are no longer working. For reasons that will become clear, it's like every particle accelerator, you know, the Large Hadron Collider, all those things, they are just yielding what seems to me, the non -scientists, they depict it as garbage results. Like this is just can't be right. And it's not like a one time thing. It's like it seems that systematically all over the world, something something's wrong. Like it's just wrong. Like science. And they're grappling with is science wrong? Were we wrong about science? And it'S a really interesting setup. I love that way of kind of beginning our story.

0:09:43 Paul: So, yes.

0:10:01 Paul: Yeah.

0:10:32 Paul: It's a very interesting setup. And I think, and this is my own opinion, this has happened before in actual history, so I'm guessing, that if we woke up and over the course of a month, all of our experimental data was starting to spit spit out nonsense, and also in the story, uh, many senior scientists are starting to commit suicide, and reaction of the scientists that we follow in the series, to me, is way off, because they, like, they mention it and they're like, "Oh, darn, all of our experiments are going haywire, and my adored, beloved mentor of many years just committed suicide."

Uh, anyway, you want to go out for drinks? Um, scientists are human beings, and it always bugs me, in general, in movies, when there's like a major death, and no, and people mourn for like five minutes, and would be deeply damaging to me personally. If, my if I found out my mentor committed suicide, that would that would really disturb me. It would affect me. It would affect everything of my community. And then, and also, if all of our experiments were going haywire, I know scientists, I am a scientist, yes, we lead normal lives, we have hobbies, we have families sometimes, we have pursuits, we have passions.

0:10:53 Thomas: Right.

0:11:12 Thomas: I know.

0:11:23 Thomas: I never understand that. It's so weird. Yeah,

0:11:54 Paul: Also, we are like a dog with a bone when there's an interesting problem. You cannot get us away from that problem because this is part of our training, part of our own approach and psychology. Psychology. If there was a major worldwide problem in science, in like physics, all those scientists in the show, they would be wearing the same clothes for a week. They would be on nonstop virtual calls in conferences, flying around, debating, arguing, trying to figure out what's going on. And in the show, it, to almost brush it off, like, "Oh, there's this worldwide, worldwide catastrophe happening in science," um, let's go play this video game and uh around with people and and have a good time, and yes, they address it, but not in the level of seriousness Exit

0:12:17 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:12:42 Thomas: Like existential crisis that it would probably. Yeah that

0:12:44 Paul: Yes. Exactly. Like, we would be busy, my family would not see me for a month, because I'd be heavily involved in trying to figure out what's going on, just that human aspect of science.

0:12:48 Thomas: Sounds right to me as well. I did. Yeah. And they did the other thing. And not scientists. Correct me if I'm wrong, but something I think has come up a lot. You know, it's movies. So whatever. But it seemed like they had a lot of the lone scientist expert ish stuff. I mean, I know there was some amount of collaboration, but it also seemed like a lot lot of the characters are like, this is the scientist that does these particles. And you're like, all right, there's one.

0:12:57 Paul: Right.

0:13:17 Paul: No. No.

0:13:19 Thomas: Okay, sure. Fine.

0:13:21 Paul: The, the major accelerators, the major collaborations, the giant ones, they have over a thousand co-authors on a paper.

0:13:27 Thomas: Yeah. They may, the show kind of makes it think there's a graveyard shift on the large Hadron. That's like two people and janitor. And it's one person on a, on an Atari computer. That'S like, THIS DOESN'T LOOK RIGHT. And then they're like, well, better kill yourself. No, sorry. Well, better.

0:13:28 Paul: Um, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like, yes.

0:13:45 Thomas: It is that part, you know, and it, and it was a shame because I didn't really get that impression in the book though. It's been a few years. I Um, can't remember if that that Was just a show. Show thing, or if the book did that, um, know, it's a limitation of, of You budgets and stuff to not have 50 ,000 actors.

0:13:59 Paul: And I understand. And And I get it, and I always give of Hollywood to pass. I've worked with many writers and directors and producers, and at the end of the day, you're trying to tell a story, and you're time to pull out certain themes. People in a story do not always behave like people in real life, because, um, the point of telling the story is to tell the story, not to be an accurate reflection of everyday people, so

0:14:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:26 Thomas: One hand, I feel like I'm way less forgiving than you, especially around, like, tropes. I get tired of, if it's the same lazy science trope over and over, it's like, all right, I forgive it if you're the first one to ever do it. But it's, like, come on, everybody does this. The lone genius trope, I'm so tired of it. But I will say, maybe a counterargument against me, though, I will say, in terms of the behavior, It think a lot of times in real life we expect people to behave like in movies. And it's almost can be the opposite.

I mean, they talk a lot about that when it comes to trauma, or when it comes to sometimes people who are victimized, like we have expectations that they'll act a certain way, and then, you know, experts will be like, "Well, you know, people are weird," like, to be honest with you, like People, people will act very weird. Now, would they all not be losing their shit because all the experiments are wrong? I don't know about that. I'm not sure I'll go that far. But when it comes to the grief part, like, you know, I'll, who knows, people are, people are kind of odd. Yeah.

0:14:59 Paul: Yeah. People are weird. Yeah, yeah. And Then the whole video game helmet thing, most scientists, I imagine, in that situation, one would not root around their dead mentor's stuff, and all this is in the first episode, just spoiler alert, um, and then they put on like a shiny helmet, get sucked into this hyper virtual reality thing, the first thing they would do is smash it with a hammer to see what's inside, and they would be curious about how this works out, this is such a radical leap in technology, um, be like, what is going on, yeah.

0:15:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:46 Thomas: Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Instead, they just like let it suck their brain forever. And like talk about how, wow, this is impossible technology. That's probably scanning your entire brain. Like, want to do it some more? Yep.

0:15:59 Paul: Yeah, Yep. Um, and so that aside, like the sociology of science, I feel like the show missed the mark, and which is always sad, because I'm always trying to show people what the humanity of science and our passion and our curiosity, what drives us, what gets us up in the morning, how we come to conclusions and decisions, how we debate with each other. There's so many interesting aspects of the scientific enterprise that people don't usually get to see, and you don't get to see it in Three-Body Problem.

0:16:40 Thomas: Right. Well, that point aside, let's ought to at least get to the three body problem is the name of the thing. That's part of it.

0:16:46 Paul: It's the name of the thing. Yeah.

0:16:47 Thomas: So, and, and maybe going in order so that we can, you know, reveal the least about the plot. I sort of the next thing is that this virtual game, you'll set all that aside. Fine. I don't, you know, and actually, you You know, I don't, I'm meant to say I'm not quite like where I'll just pretend it's another universe.

And again, I mean, I'll pretend I'm an expert, but honestly, sometimes there are things that touch on my expertise in movies and my random like audio or music related expertise. And it's just always completely terrible. Like it's almost never right. Hockey, my other expertise, that's often terrible. But my thing is always like, I will go with people to, to whatever premise, as long as they put in the effort to be like, ah, yes, this, and they write it well and they make it, they justify it.

I don't care if it's like, yeah, well, in reality, you couldn't really do it. It's like now if you justify it, if you work for it, that's fine. But like the there's, there are better and worse ways to do that. And what I do like about Three Body Problem is I feel like as much as I don't know, you're going to tell us, like, I'm sure a bunch of this science is crazy. I do feel like it really, really the author really tried to to build this world and justify it and I love that like I I

0:17:55 Thomas: Love going with that. Well,

0:17:55 Paul: Yes, absolutely. That an excellent point. And the the author, and then the the people who wrote the series based on the book, did try to flesh out this world. And what I do appreciate in movies is when, yeah, they can pick physics that doesn't exist in this universe, uh, but what I like to see is when they stick to it and stick to their guns and really explore the consequences of these ideas. And that's real powerful science fiction to me. That's why I still love reading science fiction books, uh, because when you get to see, you know, it's like asking, what if this were true, or that were true, uh, or we had this technology, or we had this idea or revelation, what would that mean? And that's a very fun and interesting exploration, and

0:18:39 Thomas: To To build built on that, maybe bring into the topic, it, the truth is, this may be controversial, you may hate me for saying this, the truth, if our science fiction had to be purely scientific, like, honestly, it might be pretty boring. I mean, there is some great stuff, don't get me wrong, but like in terms of aliens, which, which, spoilers, it's aliens, everybody. That's the point of the show.

0:18:55 Paul: Yep.

0:18:56 Thomas: That, I feel like we need to really fiction it up, our science. Because, correct me if I'm wrong, it just feels like the constraints of the universe that we actually live in kind of suck if you're a fan of aliens. Like, how would we get to them? It's so far away. Space travel is so hard. You know, it juste feels like that's kind of difficult, difficult, uh, if you could comment on that, and then also maybe we could talk about our aliens, uh, in this, uh, show. Well,

0:19:24 Paul: Yeah, absolutely. So the phrase I like to say is, or, one, let's lay the the evidence that we have, which is, we have absolutely no evidence for any life outside of the Earth whatsoever. We're working on it in multiple different directions. We're trying to find evidence of microbes, either past or present, within the solar system. We're developing the tools and techniques to look for what are called biosignatures on other worlds outside the solar system. We have the whole SETI enterprise looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

So if they create, say, radio waves, or they rearrange a bunch of stars to say hello, we're looking for that. We have found nothing so far. So when we look out at the universe, we do see a largely empty universe. So what we do know for sure right now, based on our current observations, is that life is at best rare in the universe. And intelligent life is almost certainly even more rare than that.

And so what I take from that, the the evidence, this is my own personal belief, you by the evidence, but also just my own personal believe, there are many other ways to look at the evidence and reach conclusions, is that we are likely not alone in the universe. There, there is probably other life in the universe. There are probably other intelligent civilizations in the universe that are just as bright and curious as we are, but they are incredibly far away, both in space and time.

And so for all intents and purposes, we are effectively alone in the universe. There isn't another intelligence out there, but the chances of us interacting with that that intelligence is very, very low. Not zero, not impossible,

0:21:21 Paul: But very low,

0:21:21 Thomas: Even And even if it, life was pretty ubiquitous, uh, it's not in our literal solar system, like even the next house over, you know, like that's that's even hard to get to, like that, right? I mean, Even if it was, like, we we know they live, I mean, I guess it's remind me, what is it, like a light year or two, it's close enough that, like, we could communicate slowly over time via, you know, radio or something, right? But that would be in the best possible scenario where, like, the first next planet to us, that's not in our solar system as life, right?

0:21:35 Paul: Absolutely, exactly. The nearest known exoplanet actually orbits our nearest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri, which is about four light years away.

0:22:03 Thomas: Four?

0:22:04 Paul: And yeah, and that planet is a rocky world within the habitable zone of its star, which is super cool. So our nearest exoplanet neighbor is a planet that is not unlike the Earth. Now, we don't know if there's water on this planet. We don't Know if it has an atmosphere, but we do know it is an Earth -sized rocky planet. And that's pretty cool. And in fact, we estimate that there are somewhere around a trillion planets within the Milky Way galaxy.

0:22:04 Thomas: Oh, man. I, I undershot it. Yeah, jeez, Did

0:22:38 Paul: And we estimate, this is based on very rough statistics, we only have confirmed of around 5,000 to 6,000 exoplanets. And from there, we estimate that there are about a trillion more. And we estimate that there is about, in the Milky Way galaxy alone, counting Earth-sized planets in the right orbit around sun-like stars, so the best conditions that we know of to host life, there are around, we estimated, 5 billion such worlds, in this, in the Milky Way galaxy. So in billion,

0:23:12 Thomas: You say billion or million, I couldn't, billion?

0:23:15 Paul: Five billion Earth-like planets around sun-like stars with just the right orbit, uh, which is pretty cool, uh, that's that's a, that's a delightfully large number, and that's fun number to play with, uh, but that, what, what this is, what sucks the air out of the room, you know, is distance, uh, and energy and time. And things are just really, really far away in a way that we can't really grasp with our mammalian evolutionary earth -browned brains. When I say four light years away, that's because we devised a system of units to make this stuff sound nice and small.

0:23:15 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the real buzz kill the alien buzz kill, yeah, no, kidding yeah, yeah, yeah,

0:24:00 Paul: But in terms of actual travel and movement, it is beyond impossible. Well, let me sketch something out for you to through. Kind of energy, the kind of scales we're talking about when we're talking about not interstellar communication, that is sending radio waves, sending focused laser beams or whatever, although on that front, let me say our most powerful radio broadcasts cannot be heard at Proxima B. They are too weak. They, they sink into the background

0:24:01 Thomas: Really? Oh, crap.

0:24:35 Paul: Uh, because there's there's all sorts of radio emission in the galaxy, and that's

0:24:35 Thomas: I didn't know that. When were you gonna tell us this? Damn it, I thought that when Jodie Foster gets on the headphones, we're, well, I guess that's more listening for stuff, but I thought we could beam whatever wherever. Crap.

0:24:41 Paul: Our, like, like, yeah, we can beam that, like, we can do a focused transmission, uh, Proximate B, if we wanted to, but our our most powerful broadcasts, um, there, aliens on Proxima B, they may not know we're here.

0:24:52 Thomas: Oh, okay, like the, like, our 70s TV shows Wow, so, if we focus something you're saying because we can do a bunch of, you know, trigonometry advanced math and, like, really get it, like, focused on some planet somewhere, okay, yeah,

0:25:08 Paul: Don't make it. And so that, yeah, right. Yeah. But then we have to, but then that means they have to be listening when we send the signal. And we've had radio technology for all of what, a hundred years, which is nothing. Thing. To give you some sense of actual movement from star to star, there is this initiative funded by various billionaires called the Starshot Initiative, which is largely defunct now, but that's a different story. Idea is create a design, not an actual spacecraft, craft, but the design, what would we need to accomplish? What would we need to do to send a probe to Proxima Centauri? And the reference design uses something called a solar sail, a large reflective membrane, and you shoot a laser at it, and the laser bounces off the membrane and accelerates the spacecraft.

The advantage is you can accelerate the spacecraft pretty quickly, as long as you keep shooting a laser are at it, uh, and then it coasts and it makes its way to Proxima Centauri, and then it does something, we'll leave that for another chapter, and this craft, uh, it's pretty straightforward to write down, uh, mass requirements, the energy requirements, how long it would take, you know, etc, etc, and all of it involves technology we don't have, uh, like, like you need a membrane that, in space, that's roughly a kilometer on a side. That's your sail. You need to, it needs to reflect 99.99999% of the light that hits it. Otherwise it just melts. Um,

0:25:29 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Oh, wow.

0:26:56 Paul: Then the laser needs to be, have an energy of around a hundred gigawatts, which is the

0:27:02 Thomas: It's a lot more than the 1.21 gigawatts that I'm used to, you

0:27:07 Paul: This is the entire nuclear power plant capacity of the United States is

0:27:13 Thomas: Well, that might not be much because we don't do enough nuclear. So that's achievable.

0:27:17 Paul: Yeah. So if you take all of our... That the thing. None of this is outside, say, projections of technology over the next one or 200 years.

0:27:27 Thomas: This This might be a really dumb question, Paul, but what is the constraint on lasers? Can you just make a laser be as strong as possible? Like, I don't know how that works. Wow.

0:27:28 Paul: No.

0:27:37 Paul: Like, Like, you can, but the difficulty is, uh, they tend to melt the machines that they're in, um, as you're firing, powering up the laser, um, you're building the laser in a cavity and then it just melts. So, a 100 gigawatt laser, uh, in the reference for Starshot, this thing needs to run for 10 minutes, uh, at the solar sail. Um, you take the entire nuclear output of the United States, put it in one place, run one laser for 10 minutes and 10 minutes and that will get a spacecraft up to about a tenth the speed of light, which means it will make it to a tenth, which means they will make into Proxima Centauri in about 40 years.

0:27:44 Thomas: Only 10 minutes though, a tenth well This is very interesting because, I mean, it's a little skipping ahead, but in our series that we've watched, they bust their butts to try to get to one percent of light speed. Oh, okay.

0:28:16 Paul: Exactly.

0:28:26 Paul: Exactly, so, it's not so like 10 percent, um, is running a laser, 100 gigawatt laser, um, be roughly, roughly, um, a thousand to a hundred thousand times more powerful than our most powerful lasers. And those most powerful lasers run for around a femtosecond, which is 10 to the minus 15 seconds, um, And so we need to get that up to 10 minutes. So, okay, let's say we advance all that, we do all that, uh, shoot this laser, the spacecraft that actually makes it to Proxima Centauri using a kilometer wide sail, 10 gigawatt laser, 10 minutes long, this mass of a paperclip.

0:28:27 Thomas: Oh, that's not great. Wait, Really? Well,

0:29:09 Paul: Might over the next 100 to 200 years, we could send a paper clip to Proxima Centauri. So

0:29:19 Thomas: I guess if they have a book report, they need to turn in it, might help them, but

0:29:21 Paul: Exactly. You know what? What, this can be our gift to the galaxy is like, paperclips everywhere, you're welcome.

0:29:23 Thomas: Yeah, I'm paperclip thing surprises me because I don't know why you would even bother with the rest of the thought experiment if that was the thing. Like, when you just adjust, okay, well, that's dumb, we need to be able to send something more than that, so let's adjust some other parameters. I guess we need a 200 gigawatt thing at that, a paperclip, that's nothing. Yeah. Yeah, no,

0:29:42 Paul: Then we can send two paperclaps. And so the thing is, none of this is like impossible. And I never, ever want to get trapped by saying like, interstellar travel is impossible. That's not true. Just really, really hard. Andso my question for the aliens in Three -Body Problem problem is you are spending so much resources. You are so obviously sophisticated, uh, you're traveling across the light years to come to earth and, um, our spleens or whatever.

0:30:16 Thomas: They just want our precious, precious planet.

0:30:18 Paul: Uh, here's the other thing about that. Um. Earth is boring. Is nothing special about the earth. I mean, except for you and me.

0:30:27 Thomas: We, can okay, we pause on that to talk about three body problem then? Because that's the reason that they need to leave. The reason they're coming for us is they live, and we learn this through the video game that for some reason is a simulation of their existence. I thought that was one thing, and then it turned out to be like kind of a nothing. I don't know. That part was weird. But anyway, they live on a system that is three stars, and it is unpredictable, and sometimes it's ice cold, and sometimes it is just instant flaming fire, whatever, and no one can solve the titular three -body problem because it is an unsolved problem in physics. Tell us about that.

0:30:29 Paul: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. So the three body problem, and this is the motivation for the aliens to get out of their system, is a long standing problem in physics. And this is, it's, it's one of these things that is one of my favorite things I say to my students is that many problems are simple, but that does not make them easy. And this is a perfect example of that, which is if I have two objects, like I make a pretend universe where I just have two objects and they have mass and they're moving, they're doing stuff, like it's a planet orbiting a star. I can use Newton's laws of gravity to predict with absolute precision and total perfection the future orbit of this planet. I can even do this by simply writing down equations on a piece of paper.

0:31:41 Thomas: Okay.

0:31:55 Thomas: Newton? You don't have to? There is no relativity? Nothing?

0:31:58 Paul: Can include relativity if you want, but the three -body problem first appeared with Newtonian physics. Yeah, so we'll make it easy. We'll pretend relativity doesn't exist. Just have Newtonianysics. Can write down with a piece piece of paper, exactly when, you know, and how this system will evolve, how it will behave in the future with absolute precision. It's one of the most beautiful things about physics is we get to tell the future. You say, okay, that's great. Good job, Newton. Thank you. Let's add a third object to that problem. And can you tell me how these three objects will behave? Then you You can't. You cannot write down a solution with pen and paper of how these three objects will behave. Prominent physicists and mathematicians throughout the 1700s and 1800s threw themselves at this problem. There was even one time in the mid to late 1800s when the king of Sweden on his 60th birthday, announced a prize competition for anyone who could solve the three -body problem. There was a mathematician and physicist named Laplace who worked on this problem.

0:32:04 Thomas: Gotcha, okay, I'm Familiar with this demon, huh?

0:33:20 Paul: Yes, exactly. Same guy who on this problem and wanted to win the prize, wrote a whole book on it, won the prize and then said, I don't think I deserve the prize because all I did was write a book about it and I actually didn't solve it. And so there is no solution because it turns out the three -body problem was our first encounter with something that we now call chaos theory. And chaos theory wasn't really named and discovered until the mid-1950s, which is, you write down the physics of three objects interacting through gravity, and still can't predict with perfect precision far into the future how these three bodies will act. And that's because if you take one little measurement error in every measurement, like if you write down the starting positions and velocities of these three planets, if you're off off by just one little digit. And it doesn't matter how small that is. It's like, if you're one, one millionth off or one, 1

0:33:37 Thomas: Really? Hmm. Hmm. So

0:34:34 Paul: Trillionth off, or, or you know, one part in 10 to the 50 off, it doesn't matter in chaotic systems, that little change will blow up. And in a very short amount of time, you will be unable to predict far into the future, how this system will evolve. So if you're familiar with the butterfly effect, this is it in gravity.

0:34:59 Thomas: Interesting, I remember when I first read this, uh, I actually was like checking out, like, oh, that's interesting, and it, and I remember seeing a quick critique of, like, yeah, it's not really, it is solvable if you know everything, and it's kind of like, that was the, that was the, the gotcha that I saw was like, yeah, they just, you, you have this, the information, information, then it's solvable. But if, but yeah, well,

0:35:18 Paul: You can solve it for short periods of time. And the more you know about this system, the farther in the future you can predict. Yep.

0:35:28 Thomas: I think I didn't quite understand that back then, which is, I, it makes so much more sense to me now, which Is, yeah, but that's the whole point. Like if, if is it that there's so many little interactions happening that like, it's one thing if, okay, we're measuring our classic high school physics experiment. We got like a, I don't know, a little box car rolling down a hill, you know? And it's It's like, all right, you got your position, you take your measurements, you get your time, you get, you know, basic stuff. And I remember, you do those in high school physics, you're going to have a margin of error. What's the margin of error? You try to figure that out and It's reasonable. But it, that when you're adding these, in the three-body problem in particular, if you're just that one added thing, by the nature of the physics you're trying to calculate, there are so many interactions at all times that just very quickly multiplies out, so any error becomes significant. Is that kind of what's going on? Wow.

0:36:02 Paul: Yep.

0:36:23 Paul: That's exactly it. It's amplification of uncertainty. And so this prevents us from writing down an exact solution to the problem. We can only make approximate solutions to the three -body problem. Them. We can use computer simulations to predict the motions of three objects, and then we are limited by the precision. And then any little, uncertainty, which will always be there, prevents you from knowing the future to as precise as you would like.

0:36:27 Thomas: That's So interesting, because I, I just had this was one of those unsolved problems that's like a math proof or whatever, you know, where it's like, "Ah, we can't," they can't, that you, kind math gets so complicated, even I, as a lover of math, cannot understand any, but like, like, you know, that type of problem where it's like, if someone figures out the correct orientation of the, you Know, these variables and this, whatever they've cracked the problem, it's, it's not that I didn't realize that. So it's Not.

0:37:19 Paul: It could be. It could be like, you never know. There might be some, some understanding of mathematics that we we have yet to discover or invent that could say, oh, yeah, it looks approximate because you're stupid. And now that you're not stupid and you learn this, you can predict it with perfect precision Into eternity. That's always a possibility. That has happened before. Right now, it appears to us that this is an unsolvable problem, the same way we cannot predict the weather, infinite precision into the future, we cannot predict animal populations. Uh, you can set up what's called a double pendulum, which is a pendulum hanging off of the pendulum, this is a chaotic system, uh, You Like you, like, pull it back, measure as precisely as you want, let it go, and it starts doing its thing. Then you reset it and pull it to exactly where it was the last time, and it will come do something completely different because you were off just a tiny tiny bit, and then it amplifies.

0:37:21 Thomas: Oh, okay. Hmm. Hmm. Oh yeah.

0:38:19 Thomas: That's crazy. That makes a lot of sense though. Like it, well, again, okay, unrelated, but it's a good argument for why the universe isn't a simulation, you know, or at least if it is, holy crap, it is a really powerful one because the computer of the universe, I don't know, because the computer of universe can figure all that out. You know, the physics is somehow this instantaneous thing, you know, there's no buffering that we know of. It can do it, but we can't. It's really interesting. Like, we can't do that level of precision. And it's like it's it's so multiplicative, you know, because everything is interacting at light speed with each other constantly. Right. I mean, so it's, like, just going to compound so quickly. This Is mind blowing. I really didn't have this understanding of it. But assuming I'm understanding it right, that's so cool. And it makes actually a ton of sense to me. But okay, if you're our aliens and

0:38:29 Paul: Bad Yeah Yeah Or A really Bad One, like Yeah Um Yeah

0:39:07 Thomas: You've got quite a bit of technological know-how, couldn't you just keep resetting the parameters consistently?

0:39:14 Paul: Yeah It's like the three body problem is real, and even humanity can send probes to the edge of the solar system with, uh, great precision because we combine powerful computers, a lot of knowledge, and then constantly updating and correcting as we go. Um, and so it's like, it's not that hard to do this, um, to with like a reliable enough, like if you just need to know to within, say, a week, of in the show they have these chaotic eras where their orbit gets all wonky, um, you juste need to note like with, like, weeks warning, that's something we could have done in the 1800s. Uh, we would have had, like, Laplace with his book, we have had the sophistication to predict these. Can predict the timing of eclipses. We're able to do that in the 1700s. We were able to solve many of these three body problems to a good enough level.

0:39:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:13 Thomas: So Actually raises a question, and I'm sure it's really stupid, but is the key to the three body problem, is is it the relationship of their orbits, or because, like, our, our solar system's got, you know, as you say, quite a bit more than three bodies. It's got, you count all Jupiter's moons, it's got, that's, that's gerrymandered. They, you know, they got, okay.

0:40:29 Paul: Yes. So what Saves us in our solar system is that the planets are incredibly small compared to the sun. And then the moons are incredibly small compared to the planets, and this, um, minimizes the three -body problem to such an extent that, uh, you can, when you're looking at say the orbit of the Earth, most of it is just due to the gravity of the Earth and the sun, and then you add in some corrections because of Jupiter and you're, you're good enough to calculate it for, you know, like two billion years, you know, it's it's not It's not perfect for eternity.

0:41:08 Thomas: Oh, that's good for me. I mean, I, I could use three, but yeah. Okay. 2 billion ought to fit my schedule.

0:41:10 Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not perfect for eternity, but also because these masses are so small, you can get good enough numbers for billions of years.

0:41:14 Thomas: Yeah. That's interesting. So really it's like a series of I guess we'll, we'll call it eight. Cause then even though, I I mean, I guess, you know, Pluto is still orbiting the sun. I don't know. It's a series of two body problems that are a little bit affected by other stuff rather than like a trinary, if that's the word, system where they're like equally kind of comparable mass and they're actually orbiting all together as a system or orbiting each other. I see.

0:41:36 Paul: Exactly, exactly. It's when the masses become, and this is why if you've ever heard of Lagrange points, like where we park satellites, this is a solution that Lagrange figured out to the three body problem. Is like, oh, if one of the objects is really, really small in mass, you can write down some solutions. You can find, uh, write down Some stable points. Um, so you can make these approximations in the math that allow you to make some headway. And so I look at the Santee and their crisis. I'm like, like, you,

0:41:50 Thomas: Yep. Love them. Big fan. Hey, dummies. Yeah, sorry. Yeah.

0:42:21 Paul: You, you can, you invent interstellar travel, but you can't figure out the weather next week, um, like we can do that, um, and then

0:42:29 Thomas: Yeah, that'd be maybe that's the ultimate, I haven't read the rest of the books, maybe the ultimate solution is like, wait, has anyone just given them weather.com and then they're like hey, we got this website for you, like, oh, oh, I'm sorry, oh, okay, well, we were gonna kill you, but I, I'm really, I feel dumb now, we shouldn't have done that apologies

0:42:31 Paul: Um yeah exactly like which which to be fair, to be faire, you and technology are cultural products, we all have cultural blind spots, we have species blind spots, there are inquiries and ways of knowings and in things we care about that an alien species may not care about or think, they may have never thought about, let's predict the weather and may have never introduced like chaos theory.

0:42:46 Thomas: Yeah counterpoint that seems to be be the entire focus of their civilization is just trying to predict. Yeah.

0:43:15 Paul: Okay. Well then you're really failing. Yeah.

0:43:19 Thomas: I think that's kind of, all right, that's a science miss for this series. Uh, not going to lie. That's a bit of a miss

0:43:22 Paul: Yeah. I, it is. And then if you have the technology like travel and send vehicles, emissaries, whatever, ever um interstellar distances, you could just, you know, what kick one of your stars out of your solar system.

0:43:37 Thomas: In fairness, in fairness. Okay. So here's what I like about it because it does sound like they got that, that bit wrong, but let's, okay. We'll grant them that we'll say three body problem, or we'll says, Hey, maybe it's a climate change thing. I don't know. It's something that's really really hard. The they travel isn't very fancy, it seems to me. Based on what you're saying, especially earlier about the 10%, now I get that that seems pretty impossible, but they are traveling at 1 % light speed, right? And so that isn't like super crazy, is it? I mean, it's at least within science fiction. That might be within science, let alone science fiction, so I do like this combination of they have this super advanced, which we could touch on, physics quantum stuff that allows them to instantaneously communicate. But in terms of getting their asses over here, I actually did really like that about the story that's like, well, that's still going to take 80 years or whatever it was, you know, something like that. It's like that's good. Or no,

0:43:38 Paul: Right. Right, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. 400

0:44:34 Thomas: It's even more. It was 400 years. That's right. Because coincidentally, they are four.

0:44:36 Paul: Years. It was like a realistic number. Yeah.

0:44:38 Thomas: Yeah, they are for light years away. I'm just remembering. So maybe it was based on that, I don't think the book says the same system you said, but maybe it's a fictionalized version because

0:44:46 Paul: It's different. It's an imagine it's a fictionalized version because Proxima Centauri is actually part, part of a triple star system. There's Alpha, Beta, and Proxima. But Alpha and Beta, the two stars of the Proxima system, they orbit close together in a nice tight orbit, and then Proxima is like way far away, like half a light year away or something huge. I forget the exact number.

0:44:50 Thomas: Of the three bodies. Oh, that's so fascinating. I'm so mad that we don't get to go look at all this stuff out of the window. I wish that the travel did work better, even though those distances are so insane that it would just look like three things of light, I'm sure. But

0:45:24 Paul: Yeah. Through little dots, but you can look at Proxima through a telescope, and you can resolve all the, two stars, Alpha and Beta. Um, then this system, even though it's a three-body system, uh, Alpha and Theta, in a nice tight orbit right around each other, so if you're outside of that, from your point of view, it just looks like one big star, gravitationally.

0:45:25 Thomas: Yeah, that is so cool. Love it. Mm -hmm. Oh, wow.

0:45:43 Paul: And then Proxima is so far away from that that it just orbits around one star, and then its planet is so small, it's like you said, it's this series of two body problems, and it actually doesn't experience any of this chaos, but

0:45:49 Thomas: Gotcha. It's like if we found out our son was actually two sons in a trench coat. We're like, all right, we'll let you into the R -rated movie. You can, You pulled it off. Okay. So going back to what you said, I do like that that 400 year, you know, that seems like kind of reasonable-ish. And so we'll get back to maybe the point that you started with that kind of interrupted, was if we grant them that, even though it's wrong, we grant them that, okay, they've got to get out of their system. It's uninhabitable. They can't fix it. And, you know, that seems reasonable to me that if the reason, let's say the reason your your planet is uninhabitable is not this kind of thing that is bullshit and didn't really work, but like let's say you've got a star that's about to explode, it's not like technology will allow you to fix that easily, will it, or am I wrong, is there some way that we could tech our way into fixing that?

0:46:02 Paul: Exactly. Physics wise. Yeah. Yeah yeah.

0:46:48 Paul: My intuition. And again, this is purely a guess, is that if you have the technology and more importantly, the access to energy that would allow you to transport a civilization from one star to another, other, then you have more than enough technology and access to energy to simply stay at home and solve your problems there. Star exploding, yeah, there are ways to do it because you can siphon off mass from the star so you can slow down Its rate of reactions. You could spread a bunch of debris and dust around a star to reduce its illumination. You can send a bunch of objects, like a heavy object, in orbit around the star to act as what's called a gravity tractor, to pull it into a different orbit and eventually just eject it from the solar system altogether. You could dig a hole with,

0:47:12 Thomas: Even It's a star exploding? Oh, Okay, I Love this Dig A hole, what?

0:47:43 Paul: Yeah, you just go underground.

0:47:45 Thomas: What, what about, about like our sun eventually is going to engulf our planet, isn't it, like Yeah, but let's say we happen to have come into existence five billion years later

0:47:50 Paul: Five billion years. So yeah, right now at our present level of technological development, we'd be hosed. Used, uh, if we're if we are as

0:48:02 Thomas: I Like the Good physics Terms, okay, everybody write that down for the quiz. Host, oh,

0:48:09 Paul: Advanced, if we were as advanced as the Santi aliens and Three Body Problem, uh, would have more options. We could migrate the earth to a more distant orbit, we could just colonize one of the outer moons in the solar system, which are now ice covered, about five billion years from now there'll be water worlds. We could siphon material off of the sun to slow, slow down its rate of expansion, uh, we could build gigantic sun shades so that as the sun expands we nudge the earth out a little bit further orbit we put up a giant umbrella, like we got options and all those options involve staying at home, and what I suspect is that all of those options are cheaper and easier to do than traveling to another star. Yeah.

0:48:19 Thomas: Love it. Oh, I like that Okay, Yeah, Yeah, Depending on how many people you're taking, I guess, you know, like if It was like, all right, we built one craft, okay, I feel like that Well, Yeah, one large craft, you know, we got an aircraft carrier, no, no, but like we got a big one that's gonna take a hundred of a thousand of us or something, I feel like maybe then you don't, that doesn't necessarily mean you have the resources to change your star, but I do take your point, that does sound really fascinating if you, if you are talking, like, yep, we got everyone on the Earth almost up in these space vehicles, that we are also able to have the the energy to accelerate to 1% of the speed of light, which is, you know, that's a lot. It's not, you know, it's not 10%, but that's still got to take a lot of energy, right?

0:48:57 Paul: Which one of you is going. Yeah, and presumably it's larger than a paperclip.

0:49:37 Thomas: That's another really great point. Yeah. When we were talking 10%, we were taking a paperclip. So geez. Yeah, that is a lot energy. Um, I take your point. That means, yeah, take all that crap and just attach it to your planet and move your planet a little bit or something.

0:49:50 Paul: Yeah. On the other hand, if they are intelligent, they are probably as irrational as we are. And maybe like politically, socially, they latched onto this one idea, even if it's the worst idea.

0:49:51 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Maybe, maybe. I don't know. That's pretty bad. I think maybe they're just wrong on their science.

0:50:07 Paul: There's that too.

0:50:10 Thomas: Oh, that's so interesting though. Now, did I, was that the point you were making earlier that I interrupted? I want to make sure that I, that we go back to it.

0:50:15 Paul: Absolutely. That was it that you can you have a lot more easier options than, uh, trying to transport literally anything outside of your solar system. It

0:50:16 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, and it just sucks because like all good sci -fi with aliens usually involves this very thing, And it's like, wow, it's really hard to justify that decision.

0:50:34 Paul: Is, but it's okay. I want an interesting story, and I want to travel around the galaxy and have a little fun and meet strange new things. Yeah, uh,

0:50:35 Thomas: Yeah, I know. But in my ideal, you've done both. You've found a more plausible. Is there any plausible way you can think of? And I know you actually have to leave. So is there any possible thing you think of in the waning seconds here that would be a good premise for that? Is there anything that would make more sense as to why you would have to Leave Your Planet in ways that you wouldn't necessarily be able to fix the problem?

0:51:02 Paul: Like, eventually... oh, actually, no, wait.

0:51:06 Thomas: No.

0:51:06 Paul: Let me think about that, because even after our son dies, there is, it will leave behind a white dwarf. There will be, uh, still light and heat coming off of that white dwarf for billions of years to come. So I guess we'd have to wait for an incredibly long period of time where there isn't even enough energy left in your solar system, where your star has died, the neutron star, white dwarf has cooled off. We're talking in billions and like tens of billions of years in the future. And you, you really are out of energy in your solar system, and then you really do have to go somewhere else.

0:51:43 Thomas: And you're wondering how you even got to that point, though, I guess, but you you had ample warning that you needed to clear out the neighborhood.

0:51:43 Paul: Yeah. Once you understand physics, you, you, you can map out a timeline of your your system.

0:51:51 Thomas: Yeah, well, I appreciate the effort, but I don't think that worked. Okay, point taken.

0:51:55 Paul: Okay. I tried.

0:51:57 Thomas: Well, maybe that's good. Well, no, that's a good point. It makes your approach make sense where it's like, all right, it's going to be hard to think of something that actually fits all the boxes because of actual science. So, you know, make make an effort as this author did. And we'll go with you. It's really fascinating.

0:51:58 Paul: Yeah.

0:52:10 Paul: And have fun. All right, let's enjoy, let's enjoy the ride. Sure.

0:52:15 Thomas: Yeah, really fascinating book. Really fascinating series. I can't believe we're already out of time. That That's flew by because it was so fun. Thanks so much, Paul. Do you want to throw out your plugs where people can find you?

0:52:25 Paul: You can find my podcast called Ask a Spaceman, where people ask me questions exactly like this, and I answer them on my podcast. It's AskASpaceman.com. You can find me on all social channels. And my latest book is out in bookstores and on Amazon nationwide. It's called Rescuing Science, Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt.

0:52:45 Thomas: The focus of your last appearance. Everyone check that out if you didn't catch it. This was so much fun. Seriously, a pleasure. Thank you so much. Paul.

0:52:47 Paul: Exactly. Yes. Appreciate you having me on. I enjoyed it.