Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Earlier this month
I travelled to Kourou in French Guiana with euronews
to watch the launch of Vega Rocket,
if it happened
while I was there. Waiting at the observation point with only minutes to go,
the launch was postponed because of weather.
Even though the rocket scientists were
using Comic Sans, the rocket it didn't take off
until the day after I had to be back in London.
But it made me think. We can send satellites into orbit
and people to the moon and predicts solar eclipses
thousands of years into the future but yet
we cannot reliably predict which way the wind will be blowing
in the next our or so. How can such monumental cosmic movements
light minutes or light years away from us be understood,
whereas the weather, which happens in the very same layer of the atmosphere we
live in every day,
remains such a mystery? Well,
it has to do with the limits of what we know
and what we can know. Planetary positions
and terrestrial weather in the future are determined by their
initial conditions.
But over a short time scale predicting the future position of a planet
involves fewer variables than the weather.
In order to accurately predict the weather, you need to know the complete
and exact conditions
of every molecule of air on Earth. How those molecules will interact with each
other
and the earth and how they will feedback and influence themselves by changing
other molecules. This makes it incredibly difficult to predict the weather more
than a week
in advance. And this problem isn't going to go away.
It is fundamental to our relationship with the universe.
Given enough time small, unnoticeable,
unmeasurable, unknowable factors get magnified
again and again slowly
until eventually their impact is vastly significant
and our predictions today are hopeless.
Neil deGrasse Tyson mentions this in his brilliant "Death by Black Hole,"
where he points out that the recoil from the launch of a single
space probe can influence our future in such a way
that in about 200 million years
the position of Earth and its orbit around the Sun will be shifted
by nearly sixty degrees.
Edward Lorenz gave this phenomenon its popular name.
"Predictability; Does the Flap of a Butterfly's wings
in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"
The butterfly effect. A small change,
like a butterfly deciding to flap its wings,
can lead to a whole chain of events were bigger
and bigger processes change just enough to leave the even more significant
changes until finally an entire storm
occurs somewhere different or not
at all. The discipline that such thinking
kick-started is known as chaos theory.
When the present determines the future, but the approximate
present does not approximately determine the future.
To us the universe is full
of "if". But all things considered, we are pretty good at predicting the future
and preparing for it, but some things
are or were prepared for a future that hasn't occurred yet
or never did. And knowing more about those things
sheds amazing perspective on the limits of our knowledge.
Speaking of limits, let's begin with your life,
carpe diem. An online tool that when given your birth date
uses the latest life expectancy data to give you back
a grid of squares. One square represents
one week - seven days. The lighter ones are the weeks that you have already
been alive, the darker ones are what you have left.
Check "sleep" to see how many of your previous
and future weeks will be spent
sleeping. Of course, it's just an approximation,
it's difficult to know if you will have more
or fewer weeks to come. It's hard to know when it will all end.
It's even more difficult to document, unless you are
Reynaldo Dagsa, a councilman from the Philippines,
who took this photo of his family on New Year's Day
at the very same second that he was
assassinated. The photo was later used
to catch the killer. We can't predict everything,
but in the event of an anticipated catastrophic
event - severe weather, an incoming nuclear attack or
asteroid - how would we all know what was going on?
Well, many countries have systems in place to allow them to speak to as many
people as quickly as possible.
The United States has the Emergency Alert
System. When triggered, the system
interrupts all programming on radio and television
with messages generated using text-to-speech
automated voices. The warning tones are known,
so what's kind of scary is that today
we can take a peek
and see what it would look like and what it would sound like
if a catastrophic event occurred. In this example
a nuclear attack that threatened life across the entire country.
First of all, you would likely here sirens
and then, as you went tune into, say TV,
this is what you would hear and see.
We interrupt our programming.
This is a national emergency. The following message is transmitted at the
request of the United States government.
This is not a test. A nuclear attack is occurring against the United States.
Four nuclear missiles have been launched from unknown locations
and are expected to strike the United States within the next 15 minutes.
Due to the uncertain facts of these missiles, all residents of the United
States should seek out
and prepare to take shelter immediately.
Stand by for a message from the President of the United States.
If a catastrophic event occurred of global proportions,
what would humanity do next? Well,
there might be survivors. People hidden away in fortresses that we have built,
like
the North American Aerospace Defense Command,
NORAD. Built into solid
granite, shielded by steel plating to protect computer systems from
electromagnetic pulses
and supported on springs, so as to
safely sway in the event of an earthquake, NORAD can protect
humans and equipment from a 30
megaton nuclear blast just a mile away.
After the event, it's places like this
that would literally be humanity's last, best chance of continuing life.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is on the Norwegian island
of Spitsbergen. Buried 390 feet
inside a mountain, it safely stores and protects
250 million individual seeds
for growing plants and crops, if their vulnerable
living relatives on the surface are all destroyed.
Soviet technology existed to put people on the Moon,
of course, they never did. If
Russia had sent men to the Moon, they would have walked around on it
looking like this. The Krechet-94 was designed in 1967 but
never used for Soviet manned lunar excursion.
Russia did, however, sent the first man into space
and the first woman into outer space.
They also sent the first dog into orbit around the Earth.
Unfortunately, the dog died too soon after launch due to overheating.
But later they sent Belka and Strelka,
dogs on a rocket full of living organisms that became
the very first to orbit the Earth and return to
Earth alive. You can still see them
today. The Moscow Cosmonautics Memorial Museum has the two dogs
preserved. Stuffed and on display as
physical relics of earthlings growing up
and leaving their planet. I was also lucky enough to visit a restaurant
in Moscow with menus - yep - that used Comic Sans.
Oh, and I ate a star dog, which in the cyrillic
alphabet looks like it's called crap dosis.
The United States of course did send people to the Moon,
but recently we have learned that NASA at the time didn't know
with the same certainty as other variables
whether the first man on the Moon would be able
to leave. Just two days before humanity's historic moon landing
William Safire was asked to prepare a speech
for President Nixon to read on television to the world
if Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong
became stranded on the Moon. Thirty years later
William Safire explained that Aldrin and Armstrong were supposed to reunite with
the command module
orbiting the moon, but if they couldn't and there was a
good risk that they couldn't, then they would have to be
abandoned on the Moon, left to die there
and
mission control would then have to use their euphemism
"close down communication" and the men would have to either
starve to death or commit suicide.
And, so, we prepared for that with the
the speech that I wrote and
the President was ready to to give that. Luckily,
Nixon never had to deliver the Moon disaster speech,
but to read it today, thinking of those two guys
still alive on the surface of the Moon
knowing that they will never get back to Earth
is chiling. Included in that speech
were these lines: "fate has ordained
that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace
will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin,
know that there is no hope for their recovery but they also know that their
is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
In ancient days men looked at the stars and saw their heroes
in the constellations. In modern times we do much the same,
but our heroes are epic men of flesh
and blood. For every human being who looks up at the moon
in the nights to come will know that there is some corner
of another world that is forever mankind." And that's what I took away most from my
trip to Kourou.
Space isn't just a place for zero-g tricks or imagining sci-fi technology,
space is ever-expanding
and full of corners of other worlds that could one day become mankind's,
if we choose to. And that doesn't minimize Earth.
The Vega rocket I went to see sent up satellites designed to
test electric solar wind sails for interplanetary travel,
as well as satellites built to analyze the health of Earth's
vegetation or to predict natural disasters.
Just as our bodies benefit from having doctors and instruments beyond them that
can
probe, investigate and diagnose, so does the earth.
Launch pads, like the one in Kourou I got to visit,
are really just hospital waiting rooms for
earth. A place where our planet can wait for researchers and scientists
to put their tools, their instruments into use,
into orbit. We may never know
if something will or will not happen, but by
pursuing space, corners of other worlds,
we gain a perspective that can help us shrink
the size of that mysterious and often frightening
if.and as always
And as always,
thanks for watching.