Protomolecule Biology and Precursor Civilizations

Astronomy Cast Episode seven hundred ninety five the Science of the Expanse . Welcome to Astronomy Cast, 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. I'm Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science In stitute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how you doing? I am experiencing sunlight streaming radically into my studio in a way I don't get to see on Mondays because I've usually fled at this point of the day. Right. Yeah, we're usually done recording, but here we are later on in the afternoon. You're getting uh that that afternoon sunlight coming through. It's true. Feels good. Yeah . This is the final episode of our series on Sci-Fi Universes, and this week we will tackle the expans. Now we've got fusion drives, protomatter, and G Forces. Listen up, Beltaloda. We'll talk about it in a second, but it's time for a break. Thinking about buying or leasing a car and not sure where to start? Meet FlexCar, the first and only month-to-month car lease with no large down payments or dealership hassles. One simple monthly payment covers your car , insurance, maintenance, roadside assistance, and more. Swap cars when your needs change or return at any time, giving you total flexibility. With Flexcar, you drive everything. Use code SFB to getAY $50 off for your first month at FlexCar.com . And we're back. Alright. Now last week I said that Stargate was objectively the best sci-fi series ever done. I was wrong. I was wrong, I take it back. The expanse is objectively without question the best sci-fi television series ever made. So say we all Okay, and where does Babylon 5 go? Oh, we're not gonna do the Science of Babylon 5, are we? Um We are not. We absolutely are not. But we're not gonna do Battlestar Galactica. I and I did hear you say so say we all is a fabulous phrase, by the way. That one just needs incorporated into life more often . Um Yeah, no, I I won't do I won't do a science of Battlestar Galactica, so then I'll just go off in rage. But I'm gonna re watch it. I will re once we finish Stargate. Just don't watch the last season. I just won't watch the last season, yeah. It only th it's too bad that they never were able to finish Battlestar Galactica. It's it would have been much better if they'd had a final season to that show, but they never did. Anyway, but we're not talking about Battlestar Galactica. We're talking about the Expanse. Um so Expanse is so good. It really is. Yeah. Now reading the books also just those of you who are like, meh , get through the first third of the first book, and it's also the first third of the first TV season. It starts slow because this is a space opera, people, and there are a lot of characters to introduce, there are a lot of concepts to introduce, and oh my goodness, the journey you you will be taken on. Yes. You just have to, you know, on a roller coaster, the part where you're going up and it's going chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk. And you're just like, why? Why did I wait in line five hours to go chunk chunk Yeah, it's it's gonna be worth it. It's going to be worth it. Yes. And this is not a thirty second ride. Yeah, and the T V show like what is it, six seasons? Uh it is just it is phenomenal. Yeah. Such a good show. And what's nice is in the previous episodes we've talked about the science of things, but but a lot of it's just hand waving nonsense. In this, we've only got a couple of hand wavy th ings, and the rest is just real science taken to the extremes, and that part makes it just beautiful. So we I guess let's start with as as we have been, let's start with transportation. Um let's start with the terrible so the terribly named Epstein Drive. Yeah. What an unfortunate name. Oh, if they only didn't know him. But the Rosinante . Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about Epstein Drives. What is it? I don't remember. Okay, it's a direct fusion drive. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So this is this is a real kind of system . And you know, we talk about this idea of like having fusion energy fusion plants and you've got IDER, the you know the giant tokam ak that's being built in in Europe right now. There's uh there are the laser ignition facilities that are happening in the U.S. , but there is another style of fusion that if if you're willing to sort of walk the fine line between a thermonuclear weapon. We do. It's a it's a fusion bomb. It just tends to be a a bit faster than we can control. Yeah, you just don't get the energy out in a nice controlled way. So direct fusion is this sort of halfway point where you are sort of detonating small amounts of fusion and you're using that as a um as a propulsion system. And in fact this is real. So uh NASA has been funding through some of its NIAC grants uh direct fusion drives and people are proposing you can make it out to the outer solar system in uh a couple of years as opposed to dec And and NASA has a a new uh rezon that I'm just gonna use that word a lot apparently during this part of the season, um uh that is to get a uh working fusion generator. And we'll see if they 're fission. You're right, they're not. Yeah. Yeah. Totally different than fusion. I need to have a bulletin board that is fission on one side, fusion on the other, and just I'm I'm gonna swap 'em. Dyslexia is particularly cruel. Right. Um the cool thing about the drives in the expanse is that they give you gravity, that they fire so hard that you can accelerate your spacecraft so that you were then experiencing one G inside. And then you flip. Yeah, and then a little and then they flip. So they they go for half the journey at one G of acceleration, and then they've reached a halfway point , and then they flip around, and then they go at one G of deceleration. And so you experience gravity on both in both legs of the journey. And it also leads to interesting spacecraft designs because they're symmetric . Not all of them, but many of them. Symmetric? What do you mean? Symmetric. They they they when you flip them they look s the the the way the spacecraft looks, you look at the silhouette , um it's it's they have to I I see oh they're symmet metrical. Okay, I got it, I got it. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like the it's it's sort of interesting that the like the spacecraft, the way they're designed, they're kind of like living in a skyscraper. Yeah. You need it so that that when you rotate it, not all hell breaks loose, because if I weight matters. Yeah. Yeah. Or mass. I don't know if they talk about what the fuel is , but I think it's it's uh metallic hydrogen . Which is a real thing. That would make sense, yeah. Yeah. And so m in the interior of Jupiter is thought to be hydrogen that is pressed together under thousands of gigapascals of of force, and it gets turned into this lattice where you're essentially compressing the hydrogen atoms as close as they'll possi bly go, and they turn into this metallic form that actually generates Jupiter's magnetic field. And this has supposedly been been generated in the lab, although some people are are skeptical that it's actually happened. But and so one possibility is if you can take regular hydrogen, squeeze it into this metallic form, it might remain in that form. It may not require the ongoing pressure to keep it in that form. And so now you've got this this form of fuel that you then are feeding into a fusion reactor and you've just got enormous amounts of of energy storage that can then be used in a way that provides you with a huge amount of thrust. And if you go to Epcot at Disney World and you ride the uh ride that theoretically takes you to Mars that actually just rotates you super, super fast. And you watch the show that they have at the beginning, which stars the the one badass woman from Firefly. I'm so bad with proper nouns. Um they talk about the rocket you're about to take to go to Mars is powered by by solid hydrogen. So metallic hydrogen. Right. And if you yell at the TV that that's not a thing that they can do it the everyone around you will stare at you. And if you proceed to yell out the number of space toilets Right. Yeah. So and and then what one of the really cool implications for for this, these high fusion drives is then the combat works in this very Newtonian way . Um where you know they're calculating the motion of these They can make various slight adjustments, and so you're having to lead the target, you're having to try and predict the target if you're going to be shooting it. We'll talk more about weapons in a bit, but but that if you are inside the ship, you are then experiencing these high G maneuvers. The the one G is is purely for comfort. These things can go much faster. They can do five G's. They can put you into horrendous uh G forces while these things are in in combat. And they have couches for it. Yeah. They have they have a fluid that they pump into their veins, right? Yeah. So so there's two different things that go on. They have the high G couches which conform and support your body so that like you don't have every bone in your body break. But then the other issue that you run into is hygiene situations . Um and someone just pointed out in the YouTube chat that the hygienes on the Mars ride at Epcot made them very not happy with the world. Well um there's certain medications that don't mix well with high Gs. Statins is one of them. So if you think about it, if there are drugs that make it harder for you to tolerate hygienes, there's also going to be medic ations that make it easier for you to keep your blood even more hyper-oxygenated because it's going to be harder for the blood to get to your brain, that prevents strokes from occurring. All the things that are in extreme risk during high G events, these drugs are meant to assist with, although they still end up losing their pilot N seasons into the series due to a high G maneuver that they don't make it back from. Yeah. And I've mentioned many times that like one of my f favor ite sequences in a sci-fi television show is where they're in a ship, th this sort of really nimble little ship, but there's a bunch of tools out left out and they're making these high G maneuvers, shifting back and forth, and now the tools are s flying around inside the spacecraft like bullets because everything else is strapped down. Like what you're supposed to do is strap everything down inside your ship. But in this they they leave some stuff out. I forget the like they were they were working on something when something got attacked and they didn't have time and now it's very dangerous. Yeah, it's all weapons inside their ship, which is just terrifying. So so they don't have faster than light drives, but they do have stargates, the ring gates. They they have eventually. Um so so one spoil ers just just to warn you all, it's been out long enough, I feel okay spoilering everything. Yep. Uh so one of the core premises is they encounter a alien life form in the form of this weird like fungal kind of stuff that uh can infest humans and change their actions . And while trying to understand what's happening, what's going on, uh there's a bit of seeing visions because of course there is . Um they end up finding in the outer solar system um a a ring that once set up when they pass into it it affects how they're moving and when they try and pass back out of it once they get things working again, um , they can use it to jump to other solar systems. Yep. It one of the things that gets encountered during that particular season , and it's even better in the books, is this idea that without gravity wounds don't work right. And that that's a really weird sentence to be stating. But Yeah, yeah, that you your blood won't clod in zero gravity or or something like that. Well it's not so much that it it doesn't clod as it doesn't flow in a reasonable way. So we're used to this idea that when you cry in zero gravity the tears just bubble up on top of your eyeballs. We got introduced to the idea of blobs of blood f flying around in one of the Star Trek movies. Um but in expanse the idea that our body is designed to have blood drain away from wounds um in zero gravity it just pools where it is and keeps expanding where it is. And you have to suck the blood out yuck. And seal it up. Right. Um, or spin up gravity. So one of the ideas is you need gravity in order to heal. And that's a powerful idea. Yeah, really cool. Um all right, we're gonna talk about this some more, but it's time for another break. When your car needs repair, quality matters. At caliber collision, every repair is done with care and backed by a limited lifetime warranty. With free estimates and flexible payment options, you can get back on the road with confidence. Caliber Collision. And we're back. Uh okay, so we've talked about the the transportation. Uh let's let's talk about um sort of the well because we'll talk briefly about weapons, which we tend to sort of reach at this point. Flinging asteroids. Yes, well right. So so you've got the the drones, the missiles on the various ships which are like little mini fusion drives that are they're tracking their target. You got point defense kinetic weapons that are able to try to blow those things out of the out of the sky when they're when the missiles are coming at you. But as you said, uh at one point someone uses asteroids as a uh as a weapon of mass destruction. Yeah. So this this is really kind of a remarkably rich set of ideas where they have prisons especially for the violent that are deep, deep, deep undergro und . And they get harmed in the process of asteroids striking, and of course they still figure out how to escape. Um, but it just makes for a really amazing set of concepts. But since you know where the earth is going to be, I feel safe in saying, uh N days from now, N years from now , if you start asteroids, which can be really dark , on an intercept path with the planet Earth, once they're set flying They're just gonna hit. Yeah. And it's the ultimate terrorist weapon. Well, it's it is, but but there are these essentially stealth weapons that they have a version of mutually assured destruction like we have with nuclear weapons on on Earth. They have these these m mass accelerators that are stealth they're stealthed pointing at each other's planets. Yeah. And so if you detect the asteroids having been sent to your planet, you can fire your accelerators at that your opponent and make sure that that all life is wiped out on their planet as as well. And so they've just taken the standard idea of of nuclear weapons on ballistic trajectories and then just scaled that up so that now you've got mutually sure destruction any solar system level. And the idea is is terrifying and and uh used for great mayhem in the in the books. And this is in the true sense of a space opera, something with so many different plots going on because you have the aliens, you have Mars winning independence, you have the Earth system trying to just keep everyone in line behave children. Um, you have the belters, you have the people in the outer solar system, and you have this ide a of who does and doesn't get resources, who does and doesn't get jobs, and it gets into the economics, it gets into the science. And one of the things it does really well is it gets into how does the human body change if it's able to reproduce in space. And there's an idea encountered where people want to travel to places with gravity to give birth. And that if you spent too much of your life in space , you can take all the drugs in the world to try and survive. You can exercise all you want, and you're still going to get deathly sick if if you're trying to be somewhere with gravity, you're still going to struggle if you're a Martian going to the planet Earth. Yeah. Um Yeah, there's the one of the main characters is a Martian Marine who has trained in heavier g ravity for years of her life and still has a rough time going to Earth? Yeah. She's super tough in every other situation, but on Earth, she's she's definitely feeling the the increased gravity. And then the belters, but the people who live in the asteroid belts who've been living in one tenth gravity, they're a t almost a totally different species of human beings at this point. And they also uh do something that I really love which is because the belters spend so much of their life in spacesuits, spend so much of their life where you can't see hand gestures and facial expressions the same way . They have large gesture sign language that gets incorporated into how they speak . Um and then there's other things that come into it that we've seen other places like Battlestar Galactica, which we're not going to discuss. There 's an episode where Naomi has to jump from one spacecraft to another and she pre-breathes to hyperox ygenate her blood. She exhales so that she doesn't explode. That's always a problem. She has the bursting of the blood vessels, the massive bruising. All of this is legit and it it's just kudos to them. They they did an amazing job. Yeah, yeah. I mean people always wonder what would happen if you went outside without your spacesuit. Watch the expanse. They cover it. Yeah. Naomi goes through some stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Uh all right, it's time for another break. With the all new Audi Q3, the answer is always yes . Yes to adventure. Yes to escape. Yes to right now. The all-new Audi Q3. Made for the Yes Life . And we're back. All right. So let's talk about the part that is like the most science fiction, which is the proto-molecule and the weird biology of this. So protomolecule, they they don't really talk about is is this a virus, is this a a what what is it? Is it a parasite? How does it communicate? So they they are oblivious to all these details, which is part of what allows them to do awesome sauce with it. The idea is once you're exposed to this it starts taking over your body, repurposing it, it changes your physical structure. Um you get really gross, really, really gross, kind of turn into a lump, begin to merge with everything around you. It's really gross . I'm just gonna repeat that a few more times . Yeah, really gr oss . But the proto molecule also allows communications between different life forms. And it's this idea that we had from the last episode with Stargate of the parasites can make you do stuff. And so the protomolecules are trying to essentially take over humanity. They end up on Ganymede. One thing that you see across the expanse universe is this idea that they have spun things up enough that the inside walls uh are are like you're walking on the bottom of the surface of Ganymede. There have actually been uh some fast rotating asteroids recently announced uh from the Vera Rubin Observatory. These things do exist, they are actually rotating without falling apart fast enough to have uh nearly lunar gravity, which is wild to think about . Um so they get that idea of how to get artificial gravity correct . But like they lose Ganymede to the proto-molecule because it takes over the life forms on board it. And um they also uh end up having to give a couple of the characters extreme radiation poisoning. They talk about the consequences of that throughout the series. It's it's a show where what you see in season one crops up years later. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. No, they're not. But it is No no they haven't finished sorry, they haven't finished turning the book Okay, so there's gonna be years before they can do the last book though. Yeah, there's apparently gonna be um like a movie to wrap it up or something like that. I don't know if they're gonna do more seasons. It's bananas to me that they didn't just keep going. How could they not just keep going? Well there was a gap in time between those books of like twenty years. The human beings needed to age. So they or th or they need I guess so or they need new uh new actors. But but um but yeah, like but the gist being that th it's this I mean there's a lot of of flavors and ideas that we've talked about quite a lot in the show about about panspermia, directed panspermia, right? Like what if you what if you wanted to clear out a solar system, get it prepared for you to move in and and take over? Um the I've classically you know always said that the the best thing to do is send the inhabitants a bad idea. Yeah. Right? You just you send a message like contact that says build an enormous machine and and people can't help themselves. They'll build the enormous machine. And then the machine destroys your civilization. And then you didn't you didn't have to send a weapon, you have to send anything. So the total molecule is kind of like this idea that you're just you are you are clearing the ground, you are s you are resetting us a site so that you can now build what you need in that in that solar system. And that there is this this other sort of precursor race similar to the ancient, similar to the the precursors in in Star Like this theme They're finding relics on on the solar systems they're able to get to and the relics are weird and scary and point to some precursor civilization that had plans for the galaxy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And is not your friend. Like I like you know, you're like you're always hoping like, come on, there's gotta be a good reason. Like Pro Balls can't be all bad, No, it's all bad. Um so uh it's a it's a really interesting concept, which is w w you know, when you sort of deal with a more philosophical ideas of this of this show, what happens when you are a incredibly powerful race, you are transcending dimensions, you are spreading out across everywhere you can reach , how do you make this job as easy as possible for yourself? Both to get around, both to not have to have rivals to deal with. It's a it's a great it's a great concept. So it and the like just the levels that this goes as you climb up. Because finding the ring gates gives humanity access to the the the galaxy, but also then puts you closer and closer into contact with the other things that are out there. Well and it also just gets into all of the issues of humans being humans and doing stupid things and what what do you do for love? What do you do for social justice? What do you do for power, and how the rich are able to live completely different lifestyles than the poor. So it has the science dimensions, it has the human dimensions, it has characters that have so many layers to them that you think they're just like a big dumb thug and then you realize this is someone who's just trying to figure out how to human when they had no example as a child. Yeah. Yeah. So man, I mean it just it just goes on. There's a the Mormons, I think, build uh interstellar spacecraft because they're planning on going to And and I I loved every part of it. Read the books too, people. Read the books. So I will admit I have not read the books yet. Yeah, my wife has, but I haven't. And and like I was like I can't watch this TV show 'cause I love these books too much. And then I didn't I didn't have I didn't have a regret. So Yeah. Well the first few episodes of the first season. But other than that , um yeah. Yes. Yeah. Get through those first few episodes and then No, it was gripping from moment one, but fine. Yeah. Yeah. Um cool. Well I I hope people enjoyed this this four-part series. And I did. Yeah, me too. I mean, come on, we can talk about science fiction here. So let us know if you want us to continue. You know, there are a bunch of other shared universes. We could talk about Dungeon Crawler Carl, 'cause there's a ton of science in that. We could talk about Battlesar Galactica because there is a lot of stuff in Battlestar Galactica. So currently we we are going to take the Monday of Memorial Day weekend off. I currently have slated for June Oceans and Organics on Mars, big rockets, moon race Yeah. Um and then a recommended summer reading. We can turn all of those into TV shows. Sure, if we need to. Just let us know what you want. Yeah, yeah. Let us know if that's what you want. Or is it like or some portion of the audience is gonna be like, ugh, I don't want to hear this. Um so let us know. Um yeah, I mean we could definitely talk about Babylon five. Yeah, Dungeon Crawler Carl has a new book coming out. I know. Two days? Three days? Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna be I'm gonna be probably listening to it while I'm in Japan. So many Kickstarters. Yeah. I have spent so much money on Kickstarter. All right, thanks, Pablo. Thank you. And thank you to everyone out there. Some of you have figured out you can get me to say truly ridiculous things by having truly ridiculous usernames. To those of you who make me laugh, I salute you. To those of you whose names I'm about to mispronounce, I'm just really sorry. This week we would like to thank Allen Gross, Andrew Allen, Antisor, Astro Setz, Beebcku Apocalypse, Bob Zatsky, Brian Bede, Bury Gowan, Claudia Mastriani Dale, Alexander David, David Rosti era, John Mundus, Elliot Walker, Fairchild Just As It Sounds, Frodo T annenbao, Gerhard Schweitzer, Greg Davis, Hannah Tankery, James Signorovich, John Baptiste Lamatene , Jim McGeon, John Holstein, John Herman, Jonathan Michael Witchman, Mike Hussey, Nick Boyd, Patricia Hope, Paul Lowell, Rajev Akari, Richard Drum, Robert Cordova, Ryan Amari, Sam Brooks, and his mom, Scott Bieber, Semyon Very much thanks everyone. And uh we will see you when we're back. I think we're off one day. One week, right? Yeah, we're off one week for Memorial Day. Okay. We'll see you then. Okay. Bye-bye, everyone.