Astronomy Cast Ep. 53: Astronomy in Science Fiction

0:00It's the 365 days of Astronomy PodGa. Coming in 3, 2, 1. Astronomycast Episode 53 for Monday, September 10, 2007. Astronomy and science fiction. Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Kane, I'm the publisher of Universe Today. Pamela is not with me this week. She's actually on the road traveling still. She's at another convention. But this is going to be a very different episode of Astronomycast. As we mentioned last week, Pamela recently attended the Dragoncon Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. And while she was there, she participated in a special live edition of Astronomycast

1:03with special guest, Dr. Kevin Frazier. Sound strange to see that Frazier. Anyway, Kevin is a NASA scientist and the science consultant for the TV shows Battlestar Galactica and Eureka. So he and Pamela worked through the physics and astronomy in popular science fiction on television and in movies. So what they get right, what they get wrong, what they get really wrong. And Swoopy from Skepticality took my place and administrative the whole show. So I hope you enjoy this. What's Astronomycast? We've got 52 episodes of the regular show, plus a few special episodes. In fact, we didn't miss a single week the whole year. So since Pamela isn't here right now and she can't hear me, maybe you'll take a second and record a congratulation or email something in and we'll surprise her and maybe play a few on the next episode. So enjoy this special episode. It's a long one. It's just shy of an hour, so make sure you got some time. But I really enjoyed listening to it and I hope you will too.

2:09Astronomycast episode number 53 live from Dragoncon. This is Swoopy from Skepticality, seven in four Pam's usual co-host, The Very Canadian Frazier Cain of the universe today. And I'm here with Dr. Pamela Gay and her extremely special, very cool guest, Dr. Kevin Grazer from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. And as well as being a super genius, Kevin is the science advisor to Battlestar Galactica and Eureka. Hey guys, welcome to Dragoncon. Give them a big welcome. So how's it been so far? Oh, it's been outstanding. Yesterday I did a panel with a bunch of galactic actors along with Jonathan Friggs, Gates McFadden and Brent Spiner. I can die and go to Nerdvon or right now. Anyway, so yeah, it's been great so far. This is the first time I've gone to a con and had people who weren't astronomy professors

3:10come up to me and go, you're showing so cool because what a astronomy prof. Well, yeah, I do astronomy. They're going to hopefully think it's cool. Otherwise, why are they teaching astronomy? But normal people listen to and I met some face to face and it was very exciting. Are you sure they're normal? Okay. They're friends, family, freaks and geeks that works for me. Roger, got it. No, I actually witnessed somebody recognizing you by your voice and getting very, very excited and oh, I love you. And women who know science are hot, right? Yes, yes. That's the next. So what's the, we always have to ask, coolest costume you've seen yet? The coolest one? Costume? Costume. Or a person that you hope was a costume? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a good question. Oh, I know what the coolest one I've seen. There was a master chief. So that was just astounding from Halo. Oh my God, this is, there's a lot of work into that.

4:10I mean, you're a dragon con. A lot of skin. But then again, that's all kind of sainy. Master chief, that's cool. What about the costume related to galactic? Well, galactic doesn't have a lot of great costumes. You know, I mean, if I saw somebody like number six, that'd be pretty cool. But no, there's been a lot of people in galactic agarbe in this standard, you know, double twin tank top thing. That's pretty much everywhere. I didn't see one good bridge costume, but they're pretty ubiquitous. Yeah. So today we're going to talk about astronomy in film and television and what facts they do right, wrong, and just plain totally very wrong. And I think you know what you're talking about. So we can try and start on a, we'll end on a positive note. So we'll start with the concepts that just plain don't make sense. The wrongest of the very wrong. Well, I have to say the thing that most causes my brain to go, but we can't do that is artificial

5:15gravity. There are perfectly normal hanging out shuttlecraft that if you believe the mockups would fit in this room, which means they don't have that much gravitational attraction of their own. There's just not that much mass. And yet people experience gravity. Well, we have like two explanations for where gravity comes from. One is a particle physics explanation that would require them to have figured out how to not only detect, but harness and utilize gravitons in different type of boson. We can't detect them. If we can't detect them, how are we going to manipulate them? And I know it's the future and all of that. But the other explanation we have is relativity. And relativity explains gravity as mass physically warping space. And it's a shuttle. A shuttle again doesn't have enough mass to physically warp space and create gravity.

6:15So this is my personal pet peeve. Thank God we have Babylon five and other examples of things rotating and creating not artificial gravity, but a force that keeps your feet on the hull. That works for me. I'm good with that. I'm glad to go what I tell people. I get asked a lot about artificial gravity at FTL. And what I tell them is with the exception of artificial gravity at FTL, if you can make that leap, we do pretty much pretty well on the rest of it. Interestingly enough, we actually have explained in house how these work. I've always also said that in conventions, etc. That as long as it could potentially be a plot point, then I won't go into how we have explained it internally. But we see them both as an offshoot of the same effect. Now interestingly enough, I just worked on an anthology of essays called The Science of Dune. And it'll come out in January. And in that, I never really realized until recently that in Dune, if you look at the

7:17suspensors, the essentially Inagrave units and the FTL, they're both off-shoots of the Holtzman effect. So even way back when, even Frank Herbert. Why is the Holtzman effect? It's ill-defined. Frank Herbert did a very good job of triberting the technology to one non-defined effect and then having everything be an offshoot of that so it never grows old. It's a classic forever because he doesn't go into technical detail. And I think that's brilliant. By the same time, in his world or universe, the Dune universe, it is the Holtzman effect is both antigravity and FTL. It does both. It's just like we do. So he can even see him effect, you know, what, 40 years earlier. So when we don't have a proper effect, we make up nouns. Yes. Well, also you have to look at the, actually, the Hollywood details. Do we want to have people floating everywhere and would running to your viper be better than just pulling yourself along on a cable? But it would be so cool if you rotated the galactica and people had to try and figure

8:17out how to launch the viper out of something that was spinning. That would just be so cool. That would be cool also, but I also, it would cost more money to. It would cost a lot more money. We also, I worked on a chapter on a book about Halo, the physics of Halo, and talked about spinning something for gravity. And there are non-intuitive effects with that as well. I did computer simulations. Yes, I am in touch with my inner nerd of how a trajectory of a projectile would work in a Halo. And it's not, it's, if you go a long track or anti-long track, it's asymmetric. We talk about spinning something for gravity and if you're on the hall, you're fine. It's like gravity. But once you start projecting things, it gets really weird. And so the spinning thing is also, there are catch-gatsives with that as well. It's physics makes things fun. Spinning physics makes things mathematically hard, but gets you almost artificial gravity.

9:20It's a secondary force. Now you mentioned quite, quite vaguely that you have explained faster than light in artificial gravity and battle star Galatica, but you're not going to explain how, because it's not a plot point yet, if you had to make hints at how faster than light travel could be done without breaking the laws of physics, what hints can you give us? If you look in sci-fi, there are several ways that it essentially boils down to. You could compress space ahead of you. That's implied in like Star Trek, the warping space, which is also an offshoot of general activity. You also could argue that that's implied in Galatica, maybe. There's also the, we were talking earlier about the Millennium Falcon. There's a line from Star Wars, a famous line where Han Solo says, of the Millennium Falcon is a ship that made the castle run less than 12 parsecs. Then there's a debate, is he just full of it? Or is he saying his ship can compress space so efficiently that it's only 12 parsecs

10:24to the castle? And so there's a whole space compression. There's also literally leaving this physical universe, going to some dimensional, higher dimensional plane like hyperspace. And like Batwatt V goes hyperspace, or was it ultra quantum space? Or if you've seen the latest video, the newest TV quantum space. Some other plane where space is denser and then coming back into our point realm of existence, I would say it's probably not what we're going to do with Galatica. And probably. That's the best you can tell me, probably, maybe not. That's what I'm going to say right now. Like I said, if it could be a plot point and we still have, in my world, we still have half a season to go. And who knows? So I out next year, ask away. So remember that. One of the problems with faster than light is, again, relativity. It's always out there trying to just take all the fun out of science fiction.

11:27It says we can't move faster than the speed of light relative to space around us. What it doesn't say is that space can contract or expand, allowing us to move through this differently sized space that when it unstreshes is now it appears that we've moved faster than the speed of light. Now, it was a very confusing statement. But back when the universe first was starting, it was expanding so rapidly that Kevin and I might have started off this far apart, but a fraction of a second later, he's often in drama. Very small fraction. Very small. But it wasn't that he moved away faster than the speed of light. It was that space carried him. So we can explain faster than light, just by saying that space time itself adjusts to take us where we want to go. And this is where in things like Dune, you have the guild masters going out, grabbing space, bringing it to them, and then letting go and you get zonked back out to where you needed

12:29to get to. And that's just a cool concept that we can't carry out. What about in the straights away from Galactica, but something else that is probably extremely questionable in television sci-fi on the show, Farscape, the concept of the wormhole was a huge plot point. Right. Actually, that was another one of the, I mentioned there are several ways it's been done. And a wormhole is actually an offshoot of general relativity. The wormholes can be shown mathematically to exist. They are a allowed solution for other general relativity equations, but the wormholes, as we understand them, until recently, have been microscopic. In the past few years, they've actually found solutions that allow macroscopic wormholes. This through a wormhole, the title stresses are like a black hole and you get torn apart, and that would ruin your whole day. But there's also speculation that there are applications that something called the Casimir effect or application of vacuum energy. And that's something we can go away off and do. But vacuum energy, that would allow you to stabilize a wormhole.

13:32Now, one of the problems with wormholes is, while you can go in from either side, you can't get out from either side. There are one way passages to the center, which makes using them to get somewhere rather difficult, unless we figure out how to not only overcome the fact that they're unstable, but that you only go in. So there's a lot of different problems with the mathematics behind wormholes. Like a cosmic roach motel. Yes, the roach motel. You check in, you don't check out. Well then, so the plot point about being able to predict where the wormhole would appear so that they could use it to get from point A out to point B is completely wrong in so many ways. It's wrong, but at some level, there's this suspension of disbelief thing. And if we're working from both of the science and sci-fi aspect, you realize that if you don't have some kind of password in my travel, I can go out to it. We see one star system in our lifetimes. How exciting is that? So you do have to do something about it.

14:33And there are ways of at least doing it both speculatively and kind of sort of believable. There are also ways of doing it in Apple evil. Actually, a great example of doing it horribly is the original Galactica. There's an episode where they just ignore, relatively ignore everything. They just say, you push your fuel, you push out enough fuel out your tailpipe and you're going to go to the speed of light. How do you remember that? But there was a line that says, you don't mind me using a half-my-fuel all, push her up to light speed. And even back then, I said, oh, come on. And what was particularly amusing about that is how did they get there if they hadn't previously been going at light speed? This greatly disturbed me at a small age with the original battle star Galactica because they were like, going to carol on and stuff. And then all of a sudden, they get to the pseudo-not-quite-earth and engage their light speed drives for the first time. How did they get there? OK, I just had a bigger problem with the fact that our whole 12 counties have been destroyed so let's go to the party planet. So that's that.

15:34If your world has ended, you might as well go celebrate. That's the Prince 1999 version. Why not? OK. What else? We have suspension of disbelief to help do some of these things that are sort of wrong and sort of not wrong. But what about stuff that's just based on a factual mistake? All that happens all the time. I mean, like, sound in space. Oh, yeah, not going to happen. I actually had someone send me this really well-thought-out question that made me think for a moment and go, yeah, that still doesn't work. And all of these sci-fi fighter things blowing up movies, you always hear the explosion. Not while not always, but most of the time you hear the explosion. And the problem is that you have to have gas. You have to have air or at least a rock. If you yell in one side of rock, sound will go through it and come out the other side.

16:35You have to have some sort of a medium to carry sound waves. Well, occasionally, you have spacecraft fighting it out in really cool looking nebula. So you have pretty background and death and destruction all at once. What more could you ask for? And the question was, if you blow something up in a nebula that's filled with gas, can you then hear the explosion? And the problem is, these really pretty nebula that we're looking at that look so rich and dense and colorful and gorgeous would have one particle in this room. So yes, there's gas compared to the vacuum of everywhere else. But not that much. And the sound waves really, the particles aren't interacting with each other. So the sound doesn't get from particle A to particle B. So no, now if they explode while duking it out in the outer shell of a star, they can't do that. But if they did, the gas in the star could conduct the sound waves. So really the only time you're going to hear an explosion is when you're inside of a star

17:37and let's avoid that. Even the corona would be a good vacuum. So you have to be in the plasma. Which would kind of ruin your whole day and the battle of the older ones. And then there's other things that are factual. As you must see this all the time, what are some of the things that cut your attention? Well, actually, let's go back to the sound in space. There is one place in your firefight. Did that right? Firefly actually didn't have sound in space. And on Galactica, we had planned on not having sound in space that we were over. I didn't mention that. No, I know. I knew it. But I knew you were thinking that I could hear it. There were waves. Oh crap, that's not right. There was body language. Okay, there was that. And we initially were, say, weren't going to have sound in space, but if you get my chest. So anyway, so yeah, but the whole sound in space, it's something that it's assumed that people have tried it. And with the stuff in the firefight, who didn't get overruled, usually something somewhere

18:39somewhere, somebody comes from down from on high and says that's a so counterintuitive. It's like just out of the way the sound. And this is why teaching physics is so much harder. It is. And yeah, people come into, especially astronomy, I think with more misapprehensions or misconceptions than any other topic maybe in academia. And one of my favorites that was abused horribly this summer by every science specialist could think of it was a pothos. This happy little meteor that's going to get a bit too close for comfort to the earth, but not going to hit us. It started with deep impact. They took one image of one object and figured out it was going to destroy the entire planet. And you see this in other sci-fi. They get a single radar return off of some ship and they realize that it's trajectories on ahead on collision. It takes lots of images. Now Kevin is a planetary scientist. He actually works hard to send things at other planets.

19:41And how many images do you usually think are needed to get orbits? Depends of how you're doing the orbit determination, but we do orbit permission several different ways. From our spacecraft, we actually take images of moons, compare them to the background stars, and we can do fairly well at figuring out where we are with just a couple. But as far as something like an orbit determination for an asteroid, an asteroid, an impact, or sorry, coming inbound, it takes several. It takes numerous and you need them over a period of time as well. You don't just go shuttered and image and go holy frack. Can I say that? And then run off, down the hill and get yourself killed and then like deep impact. But anyway, you need to vote load. And also with the spacecraft, we have the benefits of Doppler, which they don't. So with a spacecraft, it's a lot easier than with an asteroid because you don't get much of a return signal from them. They don't broadcast much. And the other thing that, especially with the apothec type this summer, was orbits once they've been calculated, tend to stay the same.

20:44So we know, tend to stay the same. Erakowski effect. It's throwing a monkey wrench into all of the people doing an asteroid work. There's an effect that happens with an asteroid, that makes it so unpredictable that as you heat one's high of an asteroid, it warms up. And if it's rotating, which they all are, it tends to radiate that heat away and generate a thrust. Yes, photons generate thrust, believe it or not. And that makes them very chaotic and hard to project over long time periods. So that's one of the increasing issues we have with the ability to predict long term asteroid orbits. And that also is, that has come into play in sci-fi, whereas people can say in however many years we're going to hit well, maybe. Sorry, go ahead. It's all right. No, it's one of these things where we're watching what's going on and they say either single image, we're all going to die or they say, well, we don't think it's going to happen,

21:44but we think, and the vagaries of no, you either know the orbit or you don't within short periods of time. We can predict a few years out quite successfully. There's no vagueness at the few year time scale. And then there's other random things that get randomly done wrong, like the whole blowing up an asteroid is a good idea. I'm going to let you go on that. I can go off way on that. There were two movies came out in the same summer, Armageddon and Deep Impact. One is blowing up an asteroid, one they blow up a comet. And the two are very different, very different paradigms. Red, rock. Metal, rock and metal, okay, and dirty snowball. Now, it turns out that if you blow up a rock, impacts, tend to saturate. Let me back up.

22:44Armageddon is a great example of science done wrong, gone amok. While I'm a scientist, I'm also a huge sci-fi nerd. I love sci-fi. Okay, I'm all over it. So, I'm all about suspension of disbelief. I understand that. Armageddon lost me literally in the first 30 seconds. You see an impact into Earth, the dinosaur killing asteroid, and you see this explosion propagate over the entire plant, not going to happen. What happens is, and this is pertinent to the question, Nesbli, I'm going to come around about back to that. What happens is, impacts tend to saturate, meaning that you get an impact of a certain size. And once you get beyond that, for a large range of sizes, the explosion doesn't get a whole lot worse. So, what happens is, the explosion blows out hemispherically, and then it hits the scale height of the atmosphere and tends to blow up not out. Okay, in English? Sorry. The explosions tend to go in a hemisphere. And then when it hits the atmosphere of much less dense up here than down here, it's harder to push against this than it is to blow up.

23:46So, it is blow up. And so, what that means is, once you're going to ask for this big, and ask for this big, the explosive impact is about the same, so to speak. It's not a whole lot better. So, if you are going to nuke, well, firstly, that means that the dinosaur forming, your dinosaur killing impact, you've seen the beginning of Armageddon wouldn't blow over the whole planet. Secondly, if you nuke an asteroid, split it into pieces, you risk the chance of doubling the explosive yield or tripling if you break into more pieces. So, not a good idea. Okay, nuke, if you nuke next to it, try to maybe vaporize some of it. Some of the metal on rock, you might generate a thrust. You know, they say, this is how the world ends, not with a whimper, but a bang. Well, instead of bang, stick a small iron engine on it and push it for months, and you actually, you've much more subtly saved your sorry butts. Then with a big nuke, comment to different thing, though. A comment is a collection of, it's a dirty snowball. It's ice, like methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, mostly water, and some rock.

24:52And you nuke one of those, hit it with a nuke, and you might vaporize a good chunk of it, and you might very well save it. Instead of splitting it half, like wolf, beater, and they actually might have vaporized the whole darn thing with a nuke. It's very volatile stuff. It's vaporized very easily. That was more reasonable. Armageddon, they're, well, I could go off in the Armageddon engine. We could be here an hour with me just ranting about Armageddon, but nuke an asteroid, not a good call. Actually, here's a great analogy. Talking about astronomy is great by analogy. We're talking about things that are the size of the universe. But you have a football field. You remember on Armageddon, we have a 900 mile asteroid, the size of Texas, that's what they said. Firstly, we know all the Texas size objects in the solar system. We've known that for a fairly long time. They're not coming. And remember they said it has to be what, 900 feet deep, the whole? Take a football field. Drilled the depth of a bottom blade of grass. That's how deep it has to be to nuke the blow up the asteroid. No. Yeah. So, I mean, they just, and for a movie that, like,

25:54SNS, SNS, SNS, SNS, then they said, okay, we're going to take oil drillers and make them in the astronauts like without training. And this kind of a SNS up. So you didn't hear, and then who were hearing this, didn't see the gesture, but you get the idea. It, it, yeah. So astronauts are really smart people. They're, and oil drillers, some of them are, not all of them. So now, on top of that, our universe is good at providing us experimental evidence for whether the movies are right or wrong. And when the universe fails NASA sometimes kicks in. And after the movie Deep Impact, there was the mission Deep Impact, which basically threw a refrigerator at a comet. How fun is that? And when they did, it sent dust, ice dust, snow dust out from the impact site. There was so much dust, they couldn't see the crater, the refrigerator-sized chunk of

26:54metal made when it hit the comet. We know that when you go thwank on a comet, you get little stuff. Now, when we look at some of the other planets and moons in the solar system, we find chains of craters that were all made at about the same time. And we think what happened was you take an asteroid. You hit the asteroid with another asteroid, you know how a bunch of small asteroid lets. You then let them hit a planet. The planet is rotating day to night, day to night, day to night while it's getting clocked. So these incoming asteroid fragments, instead of making one big crater, make a whole bunch of little craters. So say there's an asteroid headed toward California, because the universe has a sense of humor. And since there's been so many movies about destroying California, the universe opts to actually play along. Well, if we blow up that asteroid as the earth is rotating, depending on the direction of all the motions, you can end up with a whole string of destruction all the way around

27:57the globe in a nice, polite line. So rather than just blowing up Hollywood, you've no blown up the whole planet, which is not as fun. I don't think blowing up California is particularly fun, but I'm an East coaster. It shows. So what other are your favorite things to pick on in movies and TV? Oh, there's a good one. Anyone here see Outland? Oh, boy. Remember Outland? I mean, it doesn't really stick in the forefront of your brings. It's a long time ago when you go, oh, yes. Outland. Sean Connery at a low point in his career. Anyway, what am I going to mention? Excuse me. Hello? Already get that? I teach a class at UCLA and we have a standard rule. If your cell phone was off, I get to answer it. It's always fun when the boyfriend calls. Hello, who's this? Who's this? I have been responsible for more breakups.

28:59Speaking of breakups, let's go back to Outland. In Outland, we had the first thing that took place on IO. IO is a moon of Jupiter spelled like it sounds. And the moon is so close to Jupiter that if you were standing on the surface, a brief minute dose of that radiation you'd be toast. OK, let's suspend this belief and go with the fact that you might be able to mine IO for anything other than sulfur. And we had people who would, if they'd just brought a leak in their space suit or somehow were exposed to space, they would blow up and pop. You ever see that? And it was such a cool effect. They did it several times. No, sorry. Simple logic, even if you're not a rocket scientist, you have, inhale, or you have any air in your lungs. OK, where's going to go? Is it going to blow out your body or take the pathways resistance out your mouth? So yeah, that was one that's just a crying out loud.

30:02Even that came out when I was a lot younger than now too. And even then I wasn't a, I was a baby rocket scientist and I still just shook my head and said, OK, we can do better than that. It was kind of cool and kind of disgustingly gross, but still. And you sort of had the opportunity to get that one correct? Yeah, we did actually. And last season, a battle saw Galactic. And let me point out with something we caught flat four too. In the last season of Galactic, we had a story where we had two people locked in an airlock and they were losing air gradually and they were going to die. And it was actually, it was a married couple. So it's like, it was the chief in Cali. It was, it was, it was a tense episode. It was good. Oh, I'm glad you liked it. And so it's a married couple. We're in this airlock and it's slowly bleeding air and married couple with new little child. And he assigned her to do this, this job with them just because they're so busy they don't get to spend time together. I just want to spend what time with my wife and now we're both going to die and leave an orphan. So anyway, it was very, very sad. But they figured out the way to save them. Let's blow them out the airlock into a waiting raptor.

31:04Cool. We caught grief for that because they didn't pop and they didn't freeze. You know, in space, it's cold, right? It's not absolute zero, but it's cold. What in space would make you freeze? It's cold, but you've never noticed that room temperature air feels okay from temperature bathwater kind of cold, right? Bathwater carries away your heat faster. The air doesn't carry away heat best. Vacuum doesn't carry away at all. You have to radiate away your heat which takes a while. So you wouldn't freeze. You wouldn't pop. You would get the bends, which they did. Notice that when the next day, if you saw the episode, the chief's getting out of bed and he's not moving too quickly. What are the bends? The bends are when you inhale the gas in the air, the nitrogen and oxygen is obviously dissolved in your blood. And when you are the pressure that holds you in is alleviated very rapidly, nitrogen bubbles form in your blood. This is not good. This is what scuba divers will get if they rise too quickly. And they end up sticking you in a hyperbaric chamber.

32:06Okay. So the chief got the bends. You see him slowly getting up and he's hurting because he had the bends. And then he goes to see his wife who is in a hyperbaric chamber, which is what they listened to me. And that's one of the things they actually listened. I said, hey, they'd be putting them in his chamber. I sent him a picture of a chamber. They found one. And look almost exactly like the picture I sent him. They don't look radically different. That's probably why. But anyway, they see her in a chamber. And I also told him, okay, what would happen? Your eardrums might pop. You made me nosebleed. Blood vessels in your eyes might pop. You notice the caliocsover atom. You see she's got blood vessels popped in her eyes. So they did everything correctly. And we got crap from people who've seen 50 years of sci-fi doing it wrong. And said, they'd explode. They'd freeze. No, they wouldn't. And shortly after that on an episode of House, they actually, they were up flying. And there was a person on the airplane that got extremely ill and they all thought they

33:07were going to die of this terrible virus or bacteria or something. And it turned out it was just a guy who had the bends, who the difference between scuba diving and flying in the airplane was enough to cause the joint pain, the all the other symptoms. Same situation. He got it right and House got it right. People criticized him but not House because we're familiar with the concept, but only within a lit. The science doesn't change. This is the exact same thing in space as an Earth. It's just a matter of scale. And space just happens to be a bigger vacuum than the altitude that airplanes fly at. Well so we talked about the bad, bad, bad stuff. And how often I might ask you in your fun, cool job as a science advisor, are there times when you advise something and they tell you they can't do it for... We, if you don't think are good enough maybe?

34:09Well there's actually the biggest mistake I've ever made in Galactica was an omission. Actually let me back up a second. Often when I'm a science advisor I've most often done my job when they don't say something that's originally in the script. So a lot of times my job is something you don't ever see. So that's not intuitive initially. But the biggest mistake I ever made was something that didn't include it because I had a, I don't know, brain fart. Can I say that? Absolutely. You can edit that out. You can brain bleep right? Anyway, whatever. In the second episode, I was a baby science advisor then. In the second episode of Galactica we see Galactica under way replenishing another vessel, the Burgannis breast. And they're pumping water over there. They're underway under rubbing water. And there are explosions in several Galactica's water tanks blows out water which would impart a delta V, it's a delta velocity, a change velocity and it would snap the lines and push Galactica away. And I didn't see that the first time I read this script and later on, how could I miss this

35:11and I called them and said, well, we just have kind of already filmed that stuff and would you ship us sail down that one? So it was just an omission and I didn't do it again. But what's the question, originally? In the job. I'm answering that part. Well, do they ever, if you advise them towards something that you see, do they ever choose not to take your advice for whatever reason and sometimes do you wish they maybe take your advice a little bit more? They really don't ever callously ignore me very often. There was one thing I was a little upset about and that was an episode at Home Part 2, the constellations that they saw from what racetrack called the Half-Ass Planetarium show, eventually. I wish would have been done a little differently. But there was also an episode in Exodus Part 2, The Jump. You know what I'm talking about? Galactica jumps into the atmosphere and plummet launches vipers and jumps out at before

36:13impact. And that's a case of willfully me telling them essentially I wrote my note was essentially I would be remiss my job as science advisor to point out that this couldn't happen because Galactica would break up in the atmosphere that Columbia just did recently, but only to the high coolest factor go for it. Well, what I did at was I said, though, I did add to that as I said, but that much mass disappearing would suddenly leave a big suck and you see him going, ah, grab that and then because the vacuum came in behind it. So that was the one part where I added to that. But there was a place where I, as that my inner sci-fi nerd come out and I said, this is just too cool to not do. And the fact of the matter is, is it something that Ron Moore had added to the episode after the people had written it and it wasn't going to not fly anyway. So that was really cool. If you're going to have artificial gravity, you can hold the ship together and have greater integrity of the ship as well. But the fact that you had that vacuum, that was one of the things that was just so cool

37:14because one of the things that perpetually annoyed me about the Star Trek universe is all these times these people are transporting and this stuff is transporting. Where's the air coming from that fills in where the human being used to be? The more you transport people off of the enterprise, the more atmosphere you need to put in. So yeah, there's a space that needs air. And when they get the bends by inner by materializing around the air that exists there before and I never thought about that and I don't think about it again. Well, maybe so heading in a more positive direction, what are the things that get done correctly? What are some really shining examples of good science and television movies? I was a... Especially astronomy. Well, in Kevin go to movies, I guess with movies, I love the Wii 2010. I'm probably... I see people who agree with me. I will go out and o' limb here and probably subject myself to ridicule, but I like 2010

38:17better than 2001. You know, I didn't worship the model of 2001, quite like some fans did, but I love 2010. And 2010, it's so many things right, it was so cool. They did the arrow capture at Jupiter. They like, we do that with spacecraft now. We do arrow breaking at Mars all the time. When they got to Jupiter, they got... They found discovery in orbit, tumbling in orbit over I.O. Coded and sulfur. I.O. is the most volcanic active body in the solar system. It spews out sulfur from its volcanoes. They had discovery. They had to brush off the sulfur. There was so many small details. They had the lexia Leonov. The spacecraft, the Russians, had gone... They're mission to spinning for gravity. And it was just... It was so well done. There was so many small details. I thought it was just so great. I'm tickled pink on that one. Of course, they do have sound in space, but, you know, hey, we'll give them that one because everything else was done so well. And you see some of the things that they did well, getting stolen by other shows. Babylon 5, you have the rotating crafts again. He didn't bring it up, but on an episode of Balistar Galactica, they go flying through

39:19a nebula. And afterwards, you see the chief scraping goop off of a viper, also very accurate. And... That was actually my fault. So the really good shows not only get the science right, which doesn't lead to misconceptions in the general public, but they also can lead to future goodness. So if we can just get one really good series, one really good movie like 2010, it can impact how everyone else is doing their science because it educates them on how to do it right. And I could also add that we did something on Galactica that was almost right, but it's closer than before. And if you look at it kind of doing iteratively, you can do it better than it's done before. You can at least move towards doing it right. We had a supernova in an episode. And actually that whole episode came from... A lot of the ideas that episode came from a little presentation I gave in the writers

40:19room over at Universal. I was talking to the writers about roadblocks or signs, portents, astronomical things. We can find on the way to Earth that will lead us there. And we're still kind of using some of those from that talk. But afterwards I was talking to one of the writers and I said, you know, 800 million years after Earth was formed, the first life forms began Earth as algae, cyanobacteria, blue green algae, whatever you want to call it, stromatolites, very all kind of the same stuff. And this life form, the first algae formed on Earth was about a billion years after... A hundred million years after the Earth was formed. The way stars are... It doesn't take a star much larger than ours. Our star has a much shorter lifetime. Our star has a 10 billion year lifetime. You get a little bit larger and you're only down to a billion year lifetime. Yes, bigger stars actually die much more rapidly. It's kind of counterintuitive. It's like a race car. They blow through their fuel much faster even though they're smaller than say a fuel-efficient minivan.

41:19Right. I said, I was wondering how many times in the history of our galaxy you had a planet where life first pops up, boom, this heart blows up and wipes it out. And guess what? You had a planet with algae that they find, it was because they need food. Any other... We say that any other life or any other planet on that planet were a result of the 13th colony, the 13th tribe. We left that there and they're not indigenous. That's kind of the going idea. But we had that supernova actually occur in the other word. It blows up the planet that life had first formed. And they talk about a helium flash. And helium flashes something that happens a lifetime of a star. It happens in the star's nearest end of its life. It doesn't happen when it's going supernova. But we're able to get a little things like that into the show. And maybe somebody will look up helium flash and learn about stars. I mean, I realize that was done wrong. No one's ever called me on it yet. But now they will. We get things like that out there and maybe somebody will learn a little bit more about astronomy in so doing because it was a cool out-of-the-hole.

42:23And there's other things like flying through atmospheres that you guys have been working to get right. How atmospheres change in thickness as you go from the tops down. Do you want to know the biggest serendipitous things happen in Galactica? Go for it. Laura had drawn the mandala, the pattern, the interblue circle, the red and the yellow circle. And then it was decided to do the episode, Malfstrom, about a storm on a gas plant. And actually literally last year at Dragoncon, I just quick-and-a-dote. I left a panel discussion, turned on my phone, like a minute after I left this panel, and the phone rings. And it was when the writer from Galactica, I pick it up. I said, hello, how was your panel? Good. Now, in episode 316, we were working with a storm. How did you know I was in a panel? How did you know where I was? Don't worry, if we need you, we will find you. Anyway, so it turns out that we'd had this pattern of the blue, red, yellow.

43:28For a while, that had been done. And then we wanted to have Kara die in a storm on a gas plant. It turns out gas planets have different levels of clouds. They have Jupiter, Saturn have three cloud decks. They have an upper level of ammonia crystals. So our white with a kind of yellowish tinge, a little layer of ammonium hydrosulfide. And lower level is water clouds, but so deep that your light has extinguished by then. You end up getting essentially, if you had a big storm, you can get a yellow, red, blue sequence. No way. Way. Total. It was totally serendipitous. They told me what they wanted. You're going to love this guy. Anyway, so that was something that just kind of worked and was really kind of serendipitous. Anyway. Unbelievably so. Sorry. I said almost unbelievably so because I really, I thought it was, I thought that was a stretch actually. And so it's so much cooler to know how right that was. On Eureka, we had another serendipitous thing happen recently where we were working on

44:29the season finale for season one as we were airing the first episode of the season. And something happened in which since I, since this is still ongoing, I'm not going to tell you much of the way details. But I saw something in the first episode of the season. I went, oh, I jumped around and said, look, I'm going to talk to you. And I emailed Jimmy Polly, the executive producer like that night. So we have to talk. He's going to Vancouver to Mar or film. We have to talk. And I saw something in the opening episode that actually will impact like the finale and beyond. So we, serendipitous moments happen. And then it's scientifically, it's something that's very, very scientifically accurate, valid. And if I'm here next year, I'll glad to spill it. Did you mean season two? Yeah, we were working on season two. Okay, you said season one. It can be for me. Sorry, season two. So there is a lot of good science out there. And what's cool is our universe offers so many crazy, fracked up things for us to study that with there's so many cool things that you can do right.

45:32They need to be hiring more people to say, look, you get this real color pattern when you look at gas giants. Look, you get these neat helium flashes and stars as they're evolving. Look, you get these neat bursts of neutrinos, of gamma rays, of all sorts of little energetic things flying out of stars just as they're starting to explode. The real science, in some cases, is so much cooler than the made up science. So maybe we need to force all of our science writers to take an astrophysics class that helps pair salaries. Because the more you know about the real universe, the more cool things you can do in the science fiction universe. I guess this is where we ask you what cool things have you noticed that you want to know? Are these right, wrong, or just plain, stupid? So your name first? My name is Kinsey. And one thing I've been curious about for a long time is it would seem to me that when

46:33science fiction, especially Star Trek, but in a lot of programs, they show the outside of the ship. Sometimes people go out of the ship. And it's always very well lit. But I would think if they're not nearest our system, that it would be extremely dark out. And I was wondering if that's true. Say, doing it wrong, Star Trek, doing it right, alien, and the strong one looked pretty dark. And yeah, it would be. But then again, if you can't see the ship that you're, you know, the audience is trying to find that very unsatisfying, if you can't see it. So, you know, Galatica is darker. And that's that whole thing is darker. But yeah, there's still, there's a lot more light than perhaps would be in space. You're absolutely right. And that bothered me from the original Star Trek on. They kind of address it a little bit. And then the movies you see when Enterprise 01, the upgraded version, and even Star Trek, the motion sickness picture. I heard a gap. Sorry, it's Star Trek motion picture, which actually I liked. We see they turn on the lights to light up the running lights or light up the hull

47:36number and things like that. But so they kind of address that a little bit. But yeah, I've always had a problem. The original Battlestar Galatica where you see the ship in deep space and it flies by with a beautiful zoom in of the name. No, that won't, putting the name written on a ship that should never enter an atmosphere. Only works if you put flood lights on the vipers. Now if you add flood lights to the vipers, that would go so far in making all of these trying to find these islands and the asteroid belts much more interesting. But there are flood lights in the raptors. Well, add them to the vipers. That's wait, it's a combat festival. Come on. And they have greatest, okay? You don't need the visual and you can see them in the infrared. I'm on top of that, okay? Look, we've had a one time, had a 45 minute discussion on the difference between injecting from a Vipermark 2 versus a Vipermark 7. So we're on top of that, too.

48:37Okay. Speaking of nerds. Anyway, go on. Next question. Hello, my name's Marty. I'm Marty. In Galactica, they have what look like artillery so that they even call it a flack barrier. You know, the bad guys are coming in and they're shooting things out. What would happen to the ship when you did that? Wouldn't you go the opposite way of where you're firing? Conservation of mass. If I throw my watch at you, which I'm not going to do because you seem like a nice person. You don't know that. I said C. Okay. There is an action, an equal and opposite action for every reaction or reverse the nouns how you will. This doesn't weigh that much compared to me. The bullets that they're firing, admittedly they're firing them at very large velocities which creates a kick. If you throw them at a small velocity, smaller kick, the higher the velocity of the artillery, the larger the kick.

49:38But Galactica is fracking huge. I love being able to use this word with people who get it. It's huge, which means that even though you're hurling this artillery at large velocities, the Galactica is just hanging out going, okay, I need to adjust myself a centimeter or whatever the battle star Galactica units are in their current universe. It was very confusing in the original battle star Galactica universe. Our members and undergrad nerd working with a friend very hard to try and figure out sectons and all of that other stuff and we gave up. We never figured out what was time and what was distance. You ever decide to share that information? There are a bunch of fan fiction writers who want to know the answer. But anyway, smaller artillery at a large velocity is still a huge mass and it really is just going to hang out. Going back to my water analogy earlier, that was an awful lot of water coming from the side of the ship to impart that velocity.

50:39You know, I said earlier about the water coming out spewing out, that was on the awful big mass of water. That's why I claimed that would create a kick, whereas in certain that the shells probably wouldn't. Not much. Hi, my name is Jeremiah. I'm actually from a town called Oak Ridge and they work with a lot of nuclear material. Yeah. I've always found it a little weird that science fiction in particular has straight away from nuclear power is explaining it as a source of energy or perhaps a source of propulsion. I was wondering what you guys thought why that was. You will actually in Galactica, you noticed that what's the big map bad weapon is our nukes because you can go to any matter, but that's kind of trite in some respects. Nukes are something that we all relate to and can deal with. And, you know, I don't know why people have generally tried to wait for nuclear power. I don't know. It's hard to build small nuclear reactors.

51:40And if you have a nuclear reactor, it's hard to get it to help you to go fast. So the ion drives that we have in some spacecraft, you basically have something that's releasing an ion, flinging it out the back. It's been accelerated with magnetic fields. So it's basically the equivalent of me sitting in a desk chair with wheels with my legs crossed so I have no feet touching the ground and a box full of lead balls in my lap. If I sit there and hurl the balls long enough with enough force, I will start moving backwards in the chair. That's how an ion drive works. You can eventually get going really, really fast, but it's going to take you a long, long time, which isn't exciting to watch. We want to watch those ships go from zero to mock, not mock to, and all. An old town in space. You want to go from zero to war factor and gazillion in a three seconds or something.

52:44You're not going to do that with an ion drive and nuclear, any nuclear drive is going to need huge amount of casing around it, casings way a lot. If they're not going to put flood lights in the vipers, they're certainly not going to put safety protection and cooling and everything else you need for a nuclear drive. It's a matter of they don't get you there fast and they get you there with a lot of weight. We have time for one more question. I know this is the astronomy cast, but my question is actually about Eureka. I was wondering if there was anything that you were particularly proud of, science wise, in Eureka, and then conversely, if there was anything where the writers brought you an idea and you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That you can admit too. Yes to both. But that actually did kind of a small thing is one small thing I was kind of proud of and

53:46then I was almost sorry I did it immediately after was I work on the Cassini spacecraft as my day job and notice what powers Sarah, a conspiracy or a TG. I got that in there and then instantly the writer took it and we agreed in this very narrow thing because it's very sensitive at NASA, the whole RTEG politics of the Radio Institute. Then they took a ram with it and saying it's created this and do that and like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, please, I don't want to get fired. Please don't do this. I had a beg, I should go to the person, please, please don't let them say that and then they scaled it back and end up with what you ended up with. I got this reference in the show. I was kind of glad about that. The other question was what? Was there anything the writers put in that I said was ridiculous that I will admit to? Not while I'm employed. Not being employed by anyone working in Hollywood, I'm in a safer position than Kevin S, although

54:47I do envy your position in some ways. I periodically had people come up to me with TV ideas and some of them are really great. The people who I respond to more than three or four times have really great ideas. But I have gotten single emails over the years of I'm working on a script and there is some sort of an idea in the script that they want me to validate for them. And I have heard some of the most insane things and no, I will not help you use quantum mechanics to explain telepathy or helmets that could be used to produce telepathy. Quantum mechanics does not work that way and action at a distance really can't be used in a meaningful way to direct things. So I believe in action of the distance. Electrons do do funky things, but we can't make telepathy. No quantum entanglement.

55:48No. Sorry. Yeah. Sadly, we are out of time. Well you guys have been a great audience and thank you so much for joining us in this special episode. Again, fun. And that's the end of this episode of Astronomy Cast and we'll be hanging out up here if you have any questions after the show. Let's give round of applause to our panelists, Dr. Pamela Gay and Dr. Kevin Grazier. You are listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Cool. The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute.

56:58Audio post production is by me Richard Drum. Project management is by Aviva Yamani and hosting is donated by libson.com. This content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. Please share what you love, but don't sell what's free. This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you. Please consider supporting our show on patreon.com, forward slash CosmoQuestX and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won't be able to share the stories that inspire the world. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with listeners worldwide. As we wrap up today's episode, we're looking forward to unraveling more stories from the universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories and each milestone and space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within

58:02it. Until next time, let the stars guide your curiosity.