SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: Will We Find Evidence of Aliens by Their Engineering Projects?

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Let's be real. Eating is a huge part of our lives. It fuels us. It brings us together, and yes, it's one of life's great pleasures. But once a meal's over, we don't think much about what happens next, unless something starts to feel off. Introducing Eating Interrupted, a new podcast from I Heart Ruby Studio, hosted by longtime journalist and Crohn's patient, Cynthia McVadden. Listen in to unpack what it means when your body doesn't always respond to food the way you expect and what science is now revealing about why. Listen to Eating Interrupted on the I Heart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you're in Do It Yourself Mode, the last thing you want to do is drop everything to pick up that one-parter tool that you need. That's where my Lowe's Rewards and my Lowe's Pro Rewards come in. Place your order and Lowe's handles the rest. Lowe's will make the run for you, with free, same-day delivery. Lowe's get more at Lowe's, $25 minimum in loyalty membership required.

1:01Order eligible items by 2pm, subject to weight and size restrictions and availability. Terms at Lowe's.com slash shipping terms. I'm Martha Stewart from the Martha Stewart Podcast. When you want to make your best, it's got to be McCormick. From everyday meals to hosting dinner parties, turn to McCormick. Their convenient versatile flavors elevate every dish. McCormick has been and is an essential in the kitchen. Now they have a new line of signature seasonings crafted by flavor experts. With everyday favorites, like garlic and olive oil, globally inspired ones like chimichurri and more. McCormick's signature seasonings make it easier to add bold flavors that make each bite of your meal more delicious. Try the chimichurri blend to get elevate grilled meats. Explore the full array of blends and find your favorite at McCormick.com. Okay, I'm back with a neat and rollicking look at some sci-fi theories in the truest sense of the word sci-fi. About what lines of progress any intelligent civilization should follow.

2:03And this concept leads pretty much inevitably to things like building space probes and harnessing the energy of stars, all of which should lead some telltale trace of a civilization already far more advanced than ours. What happens after that is another story. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from How Stuff Works.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. Your foot on the button and that means this is Stuff You Should Know. The podcast. The foot on the button. Just waiting to cut us off. Yeah, that's what no one knows. But Jerry has a kill switch at her foot for all of our profane tie raids. Yeah, it would kill us if she ever pressed it. That's right. That's why they call it that. But she's not very good at it, I've noticed.

3:03I've noticed some stuff slips by. Yeah, it's older. She's like Keith Richards of podcast producers because he can't use guitar pedals. So he's known for that? Is that the thing? Well, I mean, I don't know how known he is. Maybe among guitar players, but he just plugs right into the amp. That's pretty great. Oh, I see. And he was on Mark Maren's podcast. It was a great interview in Marin. He was pure Keith Richards and he was just basically like, I have a hard time standing upright like I can't mess with trying to press foot pedals. That's Keith, man. Yep, very pure. Yeah. And by pure, I mean pure heroine. Pure China. No, he's clean now, but is he really? That's astounding. Well, I mean, no, I mean, he doesn't do like hard drugs anymore. I got you. I think he drinks and smokes weed. I got you. But it's cleanish. Cleanish. Come on.

4:04Yeah, he's still smoking pristine. Actually, Marin smoked his first cigarette in a decade in that show with him. Oh, that was smart. Perfect decision. He was like, I have to. How can I not? Yeah, he easily could not have done that. I'm disappointed. Did he really? Yeah. Keith Richards offered him a smoke and he's like, sure. Yeah, I mean, I see that, but at the same time, I also see not smoking. Listen to you. I know. I'm being judgy. Wagon your finger. So Chuck, yes. Have you ever used energy? Yes. Well, you know, when you're using energy, most likely you're using something like a fossil fuel, right? Yeah, right. Like gasoline or natural gas or something like that. Stuff that comes from decomposing dinosaurs. Yes. Okay. The problem with using decomposing dinosaurs, as most people know, is that it's essentially a non-renewable resource. There's no more dinosaurs decompose any longer.

5:04And even if there were, it would take tens of millions of years for them to decompose into fossil fuels for us, right? Right. Even if we could, even if we had dyno DNA, and we could make new dinosaurs, just to kill them and watch them decompose. Which is something we would do if we had the capability I guarantee it. Oh, sure. Right. But we don't have that capability. And as far as I know, like no one's working on that track right now, I don't think just Steven Spielberg. Right. Maybe someone at Rutgers. So we have to come up with energy sources that we won't eventually run out of. And obviously there's like wind and solar. And as far as solar power goes from what I understand, we're actually doing pretty well right now. We use something like 0.01% of the sunlight that reaches earth to power our world. So there's a lot of room for growth potential.

6:04Sure. The thing is, as I also saw, that if we keep growing in our energy consumption keeps growing at something like 1% a year, within a thousand years, we'll be using more than the entire amount of sunlight that hits the earth can provide. So we really need to come up with something else. Yes. The problem is, even if we harnessed all of the energy here on earth, we would very quickly outgrow whatever energy it provided. So some people have said, well, why don't we just go straight to the source? If the sun's such a great source of energy, but it's shooting that energy out in directions other than the earth, the stuff that is starting toward the earth doesn't make it very frequently. Let's just go to the sun and basically strangle the life out of it to get energy from it. Great idea. And one of the first proposals of it, I don't want to say a serious proposal because

7:04although it's been taken seriously over the years and almost been interpreted like scripture, it was a thought experiment to begin with. It's something called a Dyson sphere. Yes. Well, I guess we should introduce the man, not that we have him here. That'd be awesome. He's still around. Yeah, I know. He's an old dude. But we're talking about Freeman Dyson, not to the maker of the vacuum cleaner or the bladeless fan or the bladeless hairdryer. Is that really a thing? They have a Dyson hairdryer? Yeah. I was so disappointed when I found out what the bladeless fan was. Why? Have you seen those? Yeah, you can stick your hand through it. It's amazing. Well, I know. And I was like, is it magic? Like how in the world isn't doing this? But it's got a stupid blade. It's just housed in a casing. Yeah, so there's a terrible name for it.

8:05And then it just channels it up and squirts it out the front. But the Dyson invention that always got me was the air blade hand dryer. I think we've talked about this before. Oh, yeah. Stick your hand down in there. I love those. Yeah, but they're so filled with germs that actually I was in a bathroom the other day and they have an air blade now that just blows downward onto your hands. And it's actually, I'm like, okay, now I'm satisfied with this invention. Well, you're not supposed to rub your hand on the air blade itself. No, but it's so close. It's like you're playing operation. Like I'm trying to remove a funny bone or something like that. It's almost impossible not to hit the sides of the thing, you know? Your big meat hooks are just rubbing all over every plate. That's gross. Yeah, it is gross. Believe me, because I walk out just crying with my hands held in the air every time I go to the bathroom. Well, you and I have a very big thing about airport bathrooms. And I think I had the worst one of my life at Boston Logan on our last tour. Oh, yeah, what happened?

9:06It was just not up to snuff. Like the, first of all, the door, and this might have been just this one bathroom, but the doors to the stalls, none of them secured. They've been ripped clean off. Well, they were there, but you couldn't, you know, the locks didn't work. It was just, yeah, basically I had to push my hand against it, which grossed me out. Yeah, then that's not okay. And then the gap when the door was shut was like two or three inches big. Like you could fully just look in and say, how you doing? How's your poop? Yeah. And the Mr. Peepers model stall. Well, it's just not acceptable, you know, in this day and age to not have complete privacy in there. I mean, I agree with you. I, again, I'm going to reiterate, I think there should be one stall for an entire bathroom so that no one could possibly sit down next to you, but barring that. One stall through a rule them all. Exactly. But barring that though, like the place, like what we have in our office is acceptable. It's a good second place. Oh, great. A complete wall in between you.

10:07There's a complete wall in front of you and a door that's securely shut. Yeah, it's a water closet. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess it is. Like your full little water flow in there. Oh, man. I knew we were going to get distracted by poop. Yeah, this isn't even the porta-pawdy episode. I know. All right. So sorry, back to Freeman Dyson, not the vacuum maker. He was born in England. He worked most of his career. He's retired now. He's got work most of his career as a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, not Rutgers. He was a civilian scientist with the RAF in World War II. Cool. Went to Cambridge then Cornell for grad school. This guy's got some bonafides. And then he's been in news recently by being a big, I mean, brilliant, brilliant man, but he's been in the news recently by being one of the more prominent scientists that on as a climate change skeptic.

11:10Oh, is that right? Yeah, and not like a complete skeptic. Like he does believe that it's, I believe what it stands is that he does believe that it's man-made, but he doesn't think we have enough detail about all the variables for these computer-generated models to be accurate. I see. So he's basically saying like this is not the end of the world. And in fact, he thinks that increasing levels of CO2 can be a good thing for humanity ultimately. How so? I don't know. I didn't get that far. He's like, it gives you a pretty good buzz. Maybe. I don't know. It's pretty interesting, though. I think starting about six to ten years ago really started making the news with his somewhat controversial, because he's a brilliant man. And all these other scientists are like, wow, he's such a smart guy, but he's so wrong on this. Yeah. But then other people are like, no, he's totally right. That's pretty interesting. Anyway. So that's who he is. And he in 1937, well, not in 1937, he in the 1960s was reading a book from 1937 called

12:16Starmaker from science fiction author Olaf Stapleton. And he saw this thing called a light trap from this book. And this book also had predicted things like virtual reality. And it's kind of a pretty much a landmark sci-fi science book. And he said, hey, this light trap sounds like a good idea. I'm going to rip it off. Yeah, he did. And he actually, it was, I think, a paper that was published in science and the journal science in 1960. And it's really short. Did you read it? Yeah. Yeah, it's like, I think it took up two pages in science out of like a thousand or something like that and that volume. But he basically said, this would be a great thing, as you say, to rip off for a thought experiment I'm working on, right? Because just very recently, something called project Osma had been created. And that was, they started to search the sky for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was the first setty.

13:16And they were looking for radio signals. Still are. But Dyson was saying, well, hold on a second. If you're going to start looking for extraterrestrial beings, like signs of intelligence, civil civilizations, you should maybe start looking for these. And they came to be called Dyson spheres because he was the first one to popularize it, even though he got the idea from Olaf. Yeah, he actually said he thought a stapled in sphere was a better name, but I guess not good enough to actually use it. Right, right. Yeah, he said it once. Right, very quietly. Yeah. But so this Dyson spirit, he, it was originally created as a, again, a thought experiment. He wasn't, he didn't talk about how to construct it necessarily or anything like that. Although there were some follow up correspondence after the letter first came out. But almost immediately people started thinking about how you would create one of these things, this, this Dyson sphere. And the whole point we should say basically at its basis, a Dyson sphere is an engineering

14:22project, a megastructure that initially was thought to be basically a hollow sphere that you built around a star. For example, we would build it around our sun. Right. And the whole point of this thing is on the inside of this sphere are solar arrays so that all of that sunlight, like we were talking about earlier, that gets wasted as far as we're concerned, is captured and converted into usable energy for us. And, and, and, and Freeman Dyson's point was, if you build one of these things, you're going to capture light, light won't get out, but infrared radiation heat, thermal heat, will escape. And so if you're looking around the skies for aliens, look for something that has a tremendous amount of, like the infrared radiation of a star, but isn't putting any light out and maybe you just found an alien civilization. That's how it began, but people started trying to figure out how to make one of these things almost as soon as he, he published that letter.

15:24So the one thing I don't get was he saying that look for this because other civilizations out there are using a Dyson sphere. He said that it would be likely that they, that this would be an invention they came up with. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. All right. So, you, this, Nikolai Cartichef, I think we can't put it off any longer. It's pretty interesting. In the 1960s, there was an astrophysicist named Nikolai Cartichef and he was a Bond villain and actually he wasn't, but he should have been. He had this idea that there were three classifications of civilization, type one, which is basically we have learned how to harness all the energy on the home planet. Like everything you can possibly harness here on Earth and you would think, well, that's probably us. We're not quite there yet. A really smart dude named Michio Kaku, not a Bond villain either.

16:27He said, in the next 100 years or so, maybe 200 years, we might actually be a type one civilization. Yeah. And like you said, this were every bit of geothermal energy, every drop of sunlight, every, every bit of hydroelectric power, all that stuff, every potential bit of energy is being harnessed by us. That's right. Yeah. We're nowhere near that right now. I think Kaku's assessment's a little rosy. Oh, wow. And I can say that because he was on our TV show. Sort of. Well, he was. Yes, he appeared on, but we didn't interact with us in any real way. Exactly. He has no idea who we are. No, none. So type two is the next, of course. And they, that kind of civilization would understand how to harness all of the energy, not only on your own home planet, but the energy of a star in its own solar system. Right. That's where the, that's where the Dyson sphere comes in.

17:27Yeah. You know, that's what we aspire to do one day. Right. Maybe a million or so years from now. And then type three is just kind of like following this logical progression. Right. And that's harnessing all the energy of all the galaxies or of entire galaxies, not necessarily all of them. Yeah. I think that the second, the second stage, the type two civilization would be the, either the hardest to get to or take the longest to get to. Right. And that's because when you build that first Dyson sphere, your technology and your energy efficiency and your productivity is going to just shoot forward exponentially from that point on. Oh, yes. So once you build that first one, you can start building more and more and more much more quickly. So you jump from a type two to a type three civilization pretty, pretty fast compared to how long it took you to go from a type one to a type two civilization.

18:32Yeah. I think it's like any, any product even that that first one is tough. And then you can scale it in. But well, we'll get to the robots here. Okay. In fact, let's take a break. I'm getting a little psyched, Chuck. And we'll talk a little bit more about the sun, boo, right after this. I'm hosting a barbecue tomorrow and nothing's party ready. The grill's in the box. The patio's a mess and I haven't even bought snacks. That's when I post on airtasker. Local taskers handle the errands, set up, cooking and more. Go to airtasker.com or download the app. Get any things done. You know what? The smallest things when they're done really well can completely change your mood. Did you know that? That's right. They sure do like sitting down the end of the day with something actually taste incredible.

19:32And of course, we're talking about Girodelli premium dark chocolate because it's a real standout. It's a kind of dark chocolate that's all about great taste. I love this stuff. Exactly. Good dark chocolate really hits differently when it's done right. It's rich and it's smooth without being overpowering. So every bite delivers that satisfying dark chocolate flavor that keeps you coming back for more. That's right. And that's because it's made with high quality cocoa beans and premium ingredients. And the first thing you're going to notice is how great it tastes. Whether it's part of an evening wind down or just a small everyday treat, it's an easy way to make an ordinary moment feel a little more special. And sometimes that's all you need. Chocolate is good. Pick up a Girodelli premium dark chocolate today. Our mission is 24-7 access to fresh food for all. Hey guys, it's Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know. And that was Jaleia Hemmings. She and her husband created nourish and blue market. When we decided to open this 24-7 AI grocery store, people thought we were crazy, but our first store was completely community-funded.

20:34And when your family and your friends bet on you, it hits a little differently. And the city of Atlanta took notice and decided to be a part of the change. But the city actually put dollars behind that change and said that the big box stores won't come will build our own. One community-funded store became several, but eradicating food deserts across the country takes more than a village. We won the AT&T Small Business Contest ramp. And that was what we needed to open the first AI-powered shipping container grocery store in the country. Having a powerhouse like AT&T stand behind you takes it to a whole new level. Connecting changes everything. AT&T. Alright, so I went, when I said the word, sun. Yeah, I thought that was odd. No, it's not. You know. I honestly had no idea where you're going with this. Well, you do.

21:35You're being coy. Most people out there, most long-time listeners know that our sun podcast was one of our biggest struggles and would have been our biggest achievements had we done it right. It's the biggest pity applause we get for the sun. No, no, it was fine. How do you guys think we get? You try and get free for trying. But let's talk a little bit about the sun. This stuff I can deal with at least. As far as it's immense power and energy. And I love our own article, has some of these comparisons. The sun can generate five times one zero two three horsepower. I think that that is a typo. I think that it's supposed to be five times ten to the twenty third power. Oh, you think that's the only explanation I have. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. That's a really small number actually. Yeah, I agree. It would be like about 5,100, 5,200 horsepower.

22:40Yeah, that's five times ten to the twenty three. It's gotta be. Someone just got lazy there. Seriously. I don't know how to do the little twenty three thing. Right. I don't know how to use superscript. What am I like a great editor? Super script. That's what it is, right? Super script and subscript. Right. So let's put it this way. And this one is the one that cracks me up. The sun has enough energy to melt an ice bridge two miles wide and a mile thick from earth to the sun in a single second in a single second. That's pretty good. This is the only article I think I've ever seen an ellipse in like like the author was like wait for it. Yeah. In a single second. Yeah. I don't even think they did the ellipse right in the ellipse supposed to be right after the letters. They're space. I think there's supposed to be a space on either side. Oh, really? Technically, yeah. I've been doing these wrong men. Well, don't feel bad. This thing says five times one thousand twenty three horsepower. Is it? It's all good. All right. What else?

23:41One trillion one megaton bombs going off every second. If you were like. And then finally one single second of sun action. Whatever that is. Is enough to power our earth for a half a million years. That drives it home. It does, but it also gives you an idea of just how primitive we are energy consumption wise. Yeah. Like it's it's it's crazy because you know we're we're really worried about running out of our non renewable resources. But we use such a minute amount of energy that that the sun could power the energy use we use currently for a half a million years in one second. Yeah, that's nuts. Right. It also kind of takes your mind though too. And this is I think one of the things one of the buttons that Freeman Dyson pushed. It makes you realize like holy cow.

24:41We could do some really amazing stuff if we could capture a significant amount of that power that the sun puts out. Even an insignificant amount. Yeah, really? Yeah. You keep Iggy Pop going for like another hundred years. So like you said, the idea behind the Dyson Sphere is this structure. He originally proposed a hollow sphere and kind of referred to it as a shell. But I think now or I think he went on to make it a solid sphere. So he actually said he was really what's the opposite of clear convoluted? Take. Yeah, I guess a little convoluted. He didn't really go to the trouble of spelling out because again, remember, this is a thought experiment that had to do with finding aliens, not an engineering schematic. So he used some very, it was vague. That was what I was looking for. He was using some vague words. Yeah.

25:41We're like, what are you talking about? What is this sphere? Is it cohesive? Is it like a solid body? Is it hollow in the middle? What's going on? And he came back and said in a letter, a follow up. He said, no, no, no, like there's no way you could build something that would go around our sun. That would be a solid body that was hollow in the middle. Like it couldn't be a cohesive hole because the rotational forces, the sheer forces and the gravitational forces acting on it would just obliterate it immediately. Like it's just being mechanically impossible to make it like that. So he said, so maybe you would make something like a bubble or a swarm or something like that. He said in the letter, I've enclosed some blotter acid. Put it on your tongue. You're going to love this is dynamite. And call me in an hour. Might make a little more sense. Yeah, our own article points out that one of the first downsides, obviously, if you surround the sun completely, is that sunlight has, I mean, I know we'd be harnessing that energy,

26:47but sunlight provides a lot more than just energy. Oh, yeah. Like it makes us happy. Yeah, people write entire songs about how sunshine makes you happy like John Denver. You know, we just on the shoulders. It would be a global bummer if somebody enclosed the sun. That's like supervillain kind of stuff, right? Yeah. Okay. So that's a problem. Another problem though is that if you're going to build something like this and Dyson even suggested the size of it, he was saying it would need to have a radius. So a radius, not even a diameter, half of the diameter, a radius that was two times the distance of the earth to the sun. Yeah. So this thing would be massive, which means that it would also enclose the earth to, right? Yeah. Like he wasn't proposing you just go up and create this tight ball around the sun. Like it would be much further spread out and it would actually encompass the earth's orbit within it. Oh, so it would be like this, this is mine.

27:49It belongs to the earth and no one else can get any sun. Yeah. It would block off the stuff outside of two times the distance of the earth's orbit. So there's a couple planets out there that would get the old screw job. But the ones inside twice the distance of earth's orbit would really benefit from it. It's very selfish. But the other problem is two chuck is I imagine it would, things would get pretty hot. Yeah. So the earth would be destroyed. Yes. And to get around this and a lot of people I don't think got it immediately, he said, well, you just live inside the Dyson sphere like in the outer shell of it. Oh, sure. Make it habitable. Yeah. Right. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. But what you were saying about just the sheer size of it, they're literally aren't enough raw materials on our entire planet to make something this big.

28:50In fact, in our entire solar system, there probably aren't enough raw materials to make a structure like this. No. And not still try to inhabit it. There's just no way. Yeah. Some people say though, in Freeman himself, I keep on calling Freeman like that's his last name. But I just end up sounding like I know him on a first name. He was saying you might be able to build something like this by disassembling Jupiter. Well, that was his suggestion. Oh, really? Yeah. He said disassembled Jupiter and put it back together and you could build a Dyson sphere that had the radius twice the distance from the earth to the sun and make a solar array of it. Must have been some good acid. Yeah. All right. So I think we're both in agreement. And most people are in agreement that this sphere idea is not at all tangible.

29:54Not as like a cohesive whole, no. Like it just remains in the realm of thought experiment. So why bother? Oh, well, that's the interesting thing to me. It basically is kind of like he meant it as a thought experiment. It's been brought out of the realm of thought experiments. And yeah, we're in no way shape or form capable of doing this. But a lot of people have tried to figure out how to do it. And I think it's one of those things that's like, yeah, it's theoretically possible. But we're just, it's not at our, we're nowhere near that level of capability right now. Well, I think his other ideas that he came up with though are decent. Oh, like the swarm and stuff? Well, yeah. Let's get to that. And he himself even said this sphere is probably not very realistic at all. So why don't we do this? Why don't we think of different machines maybe that are independent of one another that actually circle the sun, collect this energy, and then beam it back to earth?

30:55Right. So to him, his initial idea was that sphere. And then what it came to be was that the sphere was like this umbrella term for these different slightly more realistic ideas like this swarm or the bubble. Right. So like, what's the swarm? Well the swarm, maybe they, they're in different orbits. And they like the swarm. He likens it to bees. Like instead of gathering pollen, they're just around the sun moving around gathering energy and power. Right. And so those might be habitable too. Right. And they're like, they're solar arrays that are satellites that are moving around on independent orbits of one another. That's right. And the way that they would make a distance fear is, yeah, there's a lot of space in between them. But if you step back a few orders of magnitude further back into the other parts of the galaxy or the universe, it would appear as basically a whole sphere around the sun. Yeah. So it still falls under that category, right?

31:57Yeah, he had to keep that sphere thing because of branding. He didn't want to lose that. He's like, the genie's out of the bottle. They're like, you really don't need it to be a sphere. It's like, it's got to be a sphere. So those satellites are actually they would be called statites. Well, no, if they were the bubble, they would be statites. This guy's got it wrong. Oh, really? I thought the solar sales could be the statites now. So what I saw the difference between the swarm and the bubble was that the swarm has the satellites in orbit around the star. They're in their own orbits, not interacting with each other. Oh, I got you. A bubble is where the satellites are in a fixed position relative to the star. So those are the statites. You're right. So they're just kind of hovering outside of the star, not in orbit. Just kind of hovering instead. And then those are the two and then the third are the solar sales, correct?

32:59Well, you can make a solar sale or you can make any of them with solar sales. And I don't know where that guy got that. Yeah, do we do a whole episode on solar sales? Yeah. So I mean, it makes sense. If you get a bunch of these solar sales orbiting the sun, you might think that you could harness the power and send it back to Earth some way. Right. Exactly. And like you could use that with with with any of these like a whether it's a bubble, whether it's a swarm, whatever you're doing. And if you like you said a second ago made them habitable, then all of a sudden you have a recipe for survival for the human race if Earth ever becomes untenable, right? Right. We can't tear four Mars. We can go live on these things. And when we think about living out in space, my brain immediately goes to like the cramped, tiny tin can conditions of the ISS. These things don't need to be like that. I mean, if we're creating Dyson spheres, we're going to be advanced enough that we could build some really looks satellites and statites as solar arrays to go hover or orbit around

34:06the sun, right? Yeah. So they could be huge. So so big. In fact, that that Dyson was saying this doesn't have to be an engineering project that's carried out by a central global government that's directing the whole thing. That as our energy consumption and energy needs continue, nations could take it upon themselves individually to create these solar sales that are habitable, put them into orbit independently. And just through the desire to preserve one's own life would make sure that their orbit wasn't going to intersect with somebody else's orbit who was already up there and just organically a Dyson sphere in the form of a swarm or a bubble could form on its own just by self-interested nations developing this technology basically independent of one another. I know. I know. I was, he had some far, far thinking thoughts. Far thinking. All right. Don't have those.

35:06Should we take another break? I think so. All right. We'll do that and we'll wrap it up a little bit with how to get this energy back to the home planet. If it wasn't for AirTasker, I wouldn't even be having this barbecue tomorrow. Grills still in the box. TV's not mounted for the game and apparently half my friends are vegan now. So I hopped on AirTasker, posted my tasks, set my budget, and bam! My tasker assembled the grill, mounted the TV, and even potty trained my dog before guests arrive. It looks like a plan this week's ago. Go to AirTasker.com or download the app. AirTasker. Get anything done. This message comes from Apple Business. Now you can control how your business shows up across Apple apps and with ads on maps.

36:08You now have a new way to show up to an even wider audience of potential customers available in the US and Canada. What if your soda actually did something for you? Introducing Skypop Protein Soda. Skypop Protein Soda has 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and real delicious soda taste. Protein Soda, reach for the sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target, Ralph's, or Go Puff. Alright, so earlier you talked about dismantling Jupiter with a socket set, a couple of screwdrivers. Mercury is another planet that people have talked about as potentially harvesting. The good thing about Mercury, a couple of things. One is that it is near the sun. Yeah, so who needs it already? Yeah, so it would make it proximity wise. It makes a little bit of sense. And I think this Oxford University physicist Stuart Armstrong is who proposed this.

37:15And one of the other great things about Mercury is it has a lot of great raw materials, namely iron that we could use. Right. And he actually suggested that we could disassemble Mercury fully in basically what amounted to a 40-year stretch. I thought you could say 30 days, I could do it. Right, exactly. If a contractor tells you you can take Mercury apart in 30 days, don't trust him. Agreed. No, this was in basically four, ten-year stretches combined equals 40 years, obviously. But I think his point, Armstrong's point was that you don't have to disassemble Mercury as a whole and wait until it's fully disassembled to put it together into a disc, to start creating a disc, you can disassemble and then start reassembling as you go. And once you start getting one bit of it online, it's going to help power and create better efficiency to harvest and reassemble the rest of Mercury.

38:17You know, like we were talking about earlier. Yeah, and not only that, but you could use that energy. All of a sudden, you could, there would be super computing, like you've never seen space travel would get faster. Like all these technologies that we can't even like think about yet would be growing at exponential rates. Right. And I mean, that's the point. Like when you're like, well, what would we do with, you know, all of this energy every second coming off of the sun? Who knows? We cannot conceive of the stuff we could do with that amount of energy yet. But I guarantee it's not going to be, you know, using fuel, like charging our smartphones. It should be for some pretty neat stuff, I guess. So the other cool idea is that, holy cow, how many people would have to take part in this kind of a project? Just literally the labor force you would need. And I think Armstrong, it's the one who said, well, you could use robots, actually.

39:20And with the same idea that once you get some of these robots going, if they could self-replicate and build themselves, then you can just kind of sit back and watch the paint try on Earth. And all these robots are up there just building themselves and working and working and doing everything for you. Exactly. And that's why that was his, I don't know if it was his point, someone's point along the way is that when you start that, when you build that first Dyson sphere, all of a sudden it's just going to keep going and going and going and going faster. It's going to spread at an exponential rate. So you would go from a type two civilization to a type three civilization pretty quickly. And as a matter of fact, you would also, if this project was carried up by a centralized government, it would spread so quickly and so far in such a relatively short amount of time, something like going from that first Dyson sphere to colonizing an entire galaxy in something like a million years, that even if it was a centralized government involved

40:23at the beginning, they would very quickly lose control of the colonies because they'd be so spread out and there'd be so many of them that they would just basically become self-sufficient and spread over the galaxy. So the reason this is noteworthy is that if you found one Dyson sphere, you would probably find millions or billions or trillions of them in just one section of the universe, right? You probably are not going to find just one Dyson sphere. You're going to find a Dyson galaxy, a type three civilization. And that's what they're looking for by sifting through some of these old sky surveys. And they found a couple of candidates actually in the last year or so, I think. Oh yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of surveys that have found stars and they have like typical star names. One is KIC 8462852, which is a sexy name.

41:24Yeah. One of the other is EPIC, which I'm pretty sure they call Epic 204 278916, right? And Epic was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft in 2014. And the reason these things are noteworthy is because there is some sort of weird transit pattern where the light dims, I guess randomly, or not necessarily on some sort of sets schedule around these stars. And you would say, well, that's probably just a planet or something coming in between it. Well, yes, they thought about that already. And normally a star will dim by about 1% when a planet sized object comes in between you, the observer and that planet. These things are dipping in the case of KIC star 22%. And in the case of the Epic star 65%, right?

42:29Good. They have no idea what could be massive enough to dim those two stars that much. They haven't encountered it before. There's a couple of theories. One of them said a swarm of comets. Somebody else said, well, you could very easily go from a swarm of comets to a swarm of solar arrays. So maybe these are evidence of Dyson spheres. Yeah. I mean, it's possible. Well, you know, it's kind of fun to talk about robots building themselves and them doing all this work up there. One of the big problems is we're not nearly, I mean, we have robot technology now, but nothing close to that at the present. And as this article points out that you would need like, it would have to be so advanced, these robots would have to be operating without fail up there because they would be by themselves or be able to fix themselves and fix problems like the intelligence would need to be so

43:31far advanced. Like we can't even imagine what that would be like. No, but I mean, even if Michio Kaku's off by 100 or 200 or 500 years, that's not that far off. Yeah. Like if we can harness all the energy on Earth, we should very quickly. And improve as far as our technology is concerned. So who knows, maybe those robots aren't that far off, you know? Yeah. One other thing that I saw from this though was when Freeman Dyson was talking about disassembling Jupiter Chuck. He said that it should take roughly 800 years worth of the Sun's energy output to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. Yeah, well, that's not bad. But do you remember how much comes out of the Sun in a second? We're like, whoa, you know, that's so much. We would need 800 years worth of that to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. So we like not only do we not have the capability of building a Dyson sphere, we don't even have

44:34the capability of disassembling Jupiter. We just don't have any way to harness that energy, which creates this kind of chicken or egg dilemma. But we almost need a Dyson sphere to create a Dyson sphere at this point. Yeah. Somewhere Freeman Dyson is laughing. Is it? Somewhere in New Jersey. One of the other big issues is, okay, let's say that you could even do something like this and harness this energy to get it to Earth is another big problem. If we want to make it actually usable, some people said we could laser it over. But the problems with laser beams is after about a mile, you're going to lose a lot of efficiency with it. So good luck with that. Microwaves have been floated out there, but microwaves, even though they're more effective farther out than lasers, you're still limited to about 100 miles, which will do us no good. Right. So what's the answer?

45:34I don't know. Yeah, I don't have one either. I mean, I guess one of the easy ones is, well, just inhabit the solar arrays, go inhabit the Dyson sphere, stop being so precious about living on Earth. Yeah, that's true. Which makes sense, but I like living on Earth. Yeah, but would an Earth 800 years from now be worth living on? It depends, Chuck. Will it be skipping to school and skin and knees and spelling bees and all that still? As if so, then yes. I don't know what you're talking about. It's another Simpson's reference. Oh, okay. He's it's a one where principal Skinner came back, the real principal Skinner. Oh, yeah, great. He was like, he goes, if if you think Skin and knees and spelling bees are corny, will him Mr. corny up. That's right. That's when they introduced, they'd like to introduce their principal Skinner, principal ski more Skinner.

46:34Yeah, Armit Tains area. Yep, that's a great one. There's one other thing you got anything else? I got nothing else. I got one more thing. So there's that whole idea that Dyson came up with to search the skies for this imprint where there's a lot of infrared radiation, but no visible light. There's a problem with that because this guy came along. His name was Robert Bradbury's a futurist. I think maybe a science fiction writer. No, Robert. His little brother. Robert Bradbury said, well, you know what, if you really wanted to make these Dyson spheres efficient, you'd make them in like the same manner that those Russian nesting dolls are made. Ah, Matroshka, right? Yeah, yeah. So you'd have the internal sphere and then outer spheres going around it, catching all that lost heat energy and turning it into usable power, which is awesome because you'd have basically 100% efficiency as far as the Dyson sphere was concerned.

47:35But if you're looking at the stars, you would see nothing because not only whether they're not visible light, there also wouldn't be any infrared radiation. And Freeman Dyson just hung his head, went into his room, shut the door and lay down on this bed for a while. The end. Yep. Well, if you want to know more about Dyson spheres, you can start with this article on how stuffworks.com by typing Dyson sphere into the search bar How Stuff Works, as I said. And since I said How Stuff Works twice, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, we helped a lady out. Hey guys, hope this email finds you well, been listening for only a short time. But it becomes so addicted, I've already been about half of your episodes offered on Spotify. I think she meant things. I'm kidding. We're on Spotify, by the way, and you can be us all you want from that platform.

48:35Like many others, I absolutely adore your show. I came across a podcast after a very upsetting event in my life. Saved the sob story, and just say I was going through intense grief. There was something about your kind voices, strong intellect, and a raunchy humor that gave me a thirst for learning and a new purpose in life. Wait a minute. Do we have raunchy humor? Sure. I didn't realize that. Oh, I think she picks up on the... That's like Cheach and Chong. The sideways comments. We're like the new Cheach and Chong. I thank you a billion times over for just being who you are. The podcast was a large factor in saving my life. Don't ever underestimate or doubt what you do and know that there are people like me out there soaking up every word. Sincerely, cherry bee. Thanks a lot, Cheery. That's nice. I like hearing that we help people with tea. Makes me feel good in my belly. Yeah, we appreciate the compliment. It's very nice of you to take the time to write in to let us know.

49:36And you can let us know that you think we're the tops by tweeting to us. I'm at Josh Umb Clark, and there's also an official S.Y.S.K. podcast one. You can hang out with Chuck at Facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.housestopworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. StuffYouShouldNo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HouseStopWorks.com.

50:43And back to juggling my kids. Go to airtasker.com or download the app. AirTasker, get anything done. Wait, this is a soda? Yeah. And it has protein? 10 grams. No sugar? Zero. And it actually tastes good? It's Skypop. Skypop protein soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda. Chris and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and just 45 calories. So you're not choosing between great taste and real benefits. You're getting both in every sip. Skypop protein soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop protein soda now at Target. Warning. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grownups. E-F-G-A-T-E-R-E-L-F-N-Don't be late.

51:45Lingo Kids. Only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Mingo Kids. Everything Kids love. Download now for free. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.