Episode 158: Geomagnetic Storms

Podcast.

Podcasting, yes.

Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem podcast, a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Nailiam, unfortunately.

We have no Liam.

No Liam today.

But we have a guest.

We do have a guest to replace Liam.

Hello, everyone.

Yeah, Liam's been fired.

It's me now.

It's a soft coup, yeah.

It's

rude of us to do it while he's on vacation, but you know, sometimes you want to avoid confrontation.

Yeah, this is a very, very like passive-aggressive coup.

Yeah, my name is Kieran.

I am the person he's talking right now.

My pronouns are he, him.

Oh, yeah.

We're talking about...

What are we talking about?

I haven't even read the slides.

I've been sick.

I've had mega COVID.

Well, there's, there, there, there was an event that occurred recently that you can see here in this picture.

Um, I took this beautiful photo of the Aurora Borealis in Philly from my backyard.

Um, localized entirely within certain northern hemispheres, yeah.

Yeah, I see it.

No,

I didn't see the Aurora Borealis because I was at a party with a bunch of clouted-up trans women, um, and we were playing Mario Kart on an SNES.

It was a good time, but I did not see the Northern Lights, I regret to say.

Honestly, that sounds so much better than actually seeing them.

And I say that as someone whose job is to talk about things like this.

I mean,

yeah, possibly.

You're going to see them again.

Mario Kart, you might not.

It's a good point.

It's a good point.

It's very ominous.

You might never see Mario Kart again at any time.

We'll get there.

Oh, God.

Yeah, so I thought it would be topical to talk about serious geomagnetic storms, like the Carrington event.

This would have been more topical if I hadn't derailed the schedules of three separate podcasts by getting hyper-COVID, the COVID that's worse than COVID.

I'm fine now, as far as I know, but like I was laid out for a week.

So I apologize.

Many, many scheduling difficulties this month.

We apologize to the listeners.

We don't really every month.

Yeah,

I will get this podcast on a regular release schedule if it's the last thing I do.

Unfortunately, when I had hyper COVID, it began to feel like it might be.

But

before we talk

about

geomagnetic storms and Carrington event and all that fun stuff, we have to do the goddamn news.

Do not get in a helicopter.

Yeah, it's a bad idea to get in a helicopter.

Under any circumstances, whoever you are, whether you're like a tourist, whether you're a marine,

whether you're like a billy owner of a football club, whether you're Kobe, whether you're the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ibrahim Raisi, do not get in a helicopter.

Unfortunately, the president of Iran, the late president of Iran,

found this out the hard way

because he was

like flying in a convoy of helicopters in, I want to say, the northeastern corner of Iran, very rural, very mountainous, in a very, very thick fog.

And

in a great piece of euphemism, one of Iran's state news agencies said that his helicopter made a hard landing.

Right.

And it turns out that if that's hard enough.

Yeah, well, the kind of hard landing in which a sort of key component step is you are scattered across a mountainside over a fairly like wide area.

They haven't left one up there yet.

No, no, they haven't.

And this one came down at like maybe too precipitous and too decisive a rate.

So this is.

Isn't this actually fairly didn't Kobe's helicopter also crash on account of they flew through some fog?

Yeah, I mean, helicopters will crash for any reason or none,

but like they really don't like fog.

And when they don't like something, they tend to like express that by scattering your body parts across a mountainside.

Yeah.

This guy, like, the geopolitical implications of this are.

actually pretty minor is the thing.

It's not like when Trump killed Soleimani or whatever, like Raisi was

he's kind of a nothing.

Like the president doesn't really do anything in the Iranian political system because, you know, the supreme leader does everything.

And no one really cared about this guy, but nonetheless, they did like five days of mourning.

Although they didn't actually know he was dead for a while because of the fog.

There were lots of like lots of footage of like people trudging up like, you know, 45 degree slopes and like thick fog.

And my favorite detail of this is they asked for help from the Turks.

And the Turkish Air Force, I'm not sure if it was the Air Force, but the Turks sent a Bayraktar drone of Ukraine fame to go and search for him.

And

I think this was the drone that actually found the crash site.

But if you watched it on like flight tracker or whatever, what it did after finding the crash site was draw a Turkish like crescent moon and star in its flight path over Iran to celebrate,

which is just

so perfectly juvenile.

This is exactly the kind of thing you want your search and rescue team to be doing.

And I really applaud them for that because I think it was, you know, you take your fun where you can find it.

The Turk lusts for Tehran.

Yeah, apparently.

Like,

the irredentism never dies, I guess.

And this guy, like, not a good guy, people, like, as much as people want you to, you know, accept Iran as a kind of anti-imperialist force.

That's true, but it's not like a leftist force.

And this guy in the 80s helped supervise the mass execution of communists.

So

fuck him.

He's dead.

F or whatever.

But crucially, the main lesson for this is, well, a couple of things.

First of all, never get in a helicopter.

Second of all,

never get in a helicopter if your country is under sanctions and doesn't have a kind of Soviet

supply chain or post-Soviet supply chain for helicopter parts.

Iran's in this weird position where like,

because of the Shah, they were like a US ally recently enough that like stuff that still flies was built in the U.S.

It's why they still have F-14s, which is cool as fuck.

But it's also why the president was flying around in a L-212,

which is old as shit.

And they didn't have the parts to maintain it because of sanctions.

And therefore, you know, it probably responded to the being in fog a bit more dramatically than it otherwise might have done, certainly more than a modern helicopter would have done.

and uh yeah, scattered the sky over a mountainside.

So I don't don't fuck around with sanctions either is my my takeaway from this.

It's crazy to me you would risk this.

Like if someone told me to get in a 50-year-old helicopter, there is no way.

Yeah, I mean it depends on what the like maintenance is like.

Also, I I really bizarre confidence to fly in that kind of weather as well.

Right, yeah.

People are very blasé about helicopters.

I mean, people, you know, spend a thousand dollars for Blade to take them from the heliport in New York City to the Hamptons.

You know, people don't understand the risks of these things.

My anxiety wins again.

I will never get in one.

Yeah,

I guess also like being a kind of being a VIP or whatever habituates you to them because like you're presumably helicopters a lot more often than a normal person.

And you're like, well, I haven't gotten killed doing this and I'm too important to get scattered over a mountainside.

Not so.

It happens to you.

Yep.

As As

I was reading in a piece of World War One fiction the other day, the fact that you have done something in perfect safety three days in a row does not disclaim the possibility of you getting killed on the fourth.

And so,

yeah.

Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns.

This is not financial advice.

But yeah, he's up there with Salamani now.

This is financial advice.

Don't buy a helicopter.

well there goes my plan a for reinvesting like the podcast profits you know

you think you could gift them to people you didn't like and just wait oh that's beautiful there's an idea technically a very slow burn assassination attempt i send jeff bezos like a huge gift wrapped helicopter

just in a giant box i i

you could like put some polonium in it in it for good measure but you know, yeah.

Just inadvertently doing a kind of like airborne, dirty bomb there.

I really like the idea that, like, as well as the stuff that we do, like sponsoring a racing car team, we can also like do a crowdfund to buy Jeff Bezos an unreliable helicopter.

Um, well, in other news,

yeah,

this can only get better.

I write this one in, basically,

there's very little to it.

There's going to be an election in the UK earlier than anyone expected because it would be the act of an insane or very bored man to call an election 20 points behind in the polls.

But Richie Sunak has done so, I think, because he wants to spend summer in California instead of like here.

As we saw, because when he announced it, he got rained on.

And

we really like, I said this on TF that we just recorded, we really got the the like grossest looking rain we could in special for this as well um it just

shouldn't they have like a guy holding an umbrella for him or something you would think so but like I this isn't I guess a thing that we do as standard so maybe he just neglected to ask for it on the basis that he thought that like getting rained on would make him look tough or something I don't know yeah I figured he was going for like a Wuthering Heights type is it Wuthering Heights?

I'm just I'm just a boy standing in front of a nation of 60 million people asking them to love him.

That's not even Wuthering Heights.

It's just another rom-com thing.

I mean, you know, another politician had a very short term in office after giving a speech in the rain.

It's true.

This is William Henry Harrison, right?

William Henry Harrison, yes.

I am amazed at myself that I remember this.

Yeah, so I don't know.

Maybe

Rishi's going to get pleurisy and save us all the trouble.

Yeah, he might get pneumonia and die.

That would be extremely funny.

Yeah, I mean,

it's like a six-week election campaign, which is going to seem a bit foreign to Americans who like your elections start like six years ahead of time.

But yeah, and it's going to be completely uninteresting in that the Labour Party is going to win with like a massive majority of a tiny turnout.

Like all of the people who like, like the West wing and like the thick of it, but don't get any of the jokes and like are enthusiastic about politics, are going to like bright-eyed and bushy-tailed run to the polling stations at six in the morning and vote Keir Starmer into number 10.

And they will be the only ones voting.

And it's going to be

a sort of a triumph for apathy, you know, from which the lesson the Labour Party is going to learn is going to be we can only get right wing and stay right wing forever.

Aren't there some conservative NPs who are like trying to make motions to call the election off?

They've tried.

So basically the Conservative Party is a primarily regicide-based organization.

And so if enough secretly balloted MPs are like, we need a new leader of the Conservative Party, then they have to call one.

And I believe there was a kind of desperate, forlorn hope plan to cancel the election by deselecting Rishi as leader.

I don't think that's likely to work, but it's an entertaining idea at least.

And I do like the idea of the Conservatives doing their own leadership election and a general election at the same time.

I like the idea that, you know, you can just tropico this and say the time is not right to hold elections.

Basically, like

we have a fixed term parliament for five years that would have lasted him out until like, I think damn near the end of the year.

And the only reason I can think for calling an election this early is just boredom and just being like, I don't want to do this shit anymore.

And so a bunch of the like horrible shit that he was going to do in office, he just can't now because like you have to wind up parliament.

So deporting people to Rwanda, we're just not going to do that.

Thank God.

We're not going to ban smoking, which was his other thing.

And instead, we're just,

yeah, I know.

Only dip, only vapes.

But

yeah, Liam is off to do some like political consultancy for this.

But yeah,

instead, we're we're just gonna kind of go straight into a very like low enthusiasm election um and it's it's gonna be miserable the whole time well i think another country that'll have a low enthusiasm election uh-huh yeah it's kind of the same boat right i think anyone who thinks things are gonna get significantly better is kidding themselves There was one person suggesting that things were going to get better, which was as Sunai was doing this very wet speech announcing the thing, no one could hear him because

one of the things that, you know, Stalma and Stalma's people are all like, as I say, politics enthusiasts, brackets derogatory, which means that they're also all dead-eyed psyops, like freak shows.

And so they had someone outside blasting things can only get better,

new labor's like election song from 1997 and drowning out Sunak.

And it just really added to the general air of misery,

which is great.

Critical support.

Things It can only get better because of how bad they are.

Yeah, exactly.

We've hit rock bottom.

Yeah, we've hit rock bottom.

The whole UK is going to have to check into rehab.

You know, I'm not opposed to it.

You know, I think maybe it would give us a chance to sort out some of our shit for a while, you know?

Would we have to sit in a circle with like Brazil and talk about it?

Just like, yeah, 60 million people in like a kind of group therapy circle would be like, yeah, might be healthy, might be catharsic.

I don't know.

People have to go around telling us that they love us and they, you know, feel bad for our troubles.

And in Britain's case, neither of those things is true.

Britain would accidentally wind up in like a synonym type situation.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, listen, maybe we should.

Maybe as a country, we could, we get the shot in the arm we need.

We get the kind of national renewal by just joining a cult and seeing what the vibes are.

I'm willing for us to do that.

It It can't be worse, right?

Fuck yeah, why not?

Basically, we have been in a cult this whole time.

It's just the cult has been like a free market neoliberalism.

So like maybe the next one will be more entertaining, you know?

Yes.

I hope we get robes.

That's my main hope.

There you go.

Robes girl.

You could get everyone, get everyone to become druids.

I mean...

Yeah,

we've made more harmful weirdos than that in this country.

All right.

That's our plan to fix Britain.

Make everyone druids.

We go back to the like yew trees and like groves, sacred groves, like all of this, all this stuff.

Yeah.

That was the goddamn news.

I said go back to the yew trees as a druid thing, but I think Britain's been in the yew trees for a hot minute, to be honest.

All right.

This is all Kieran.

This is me.

Okay.

I don't remember any of this.

No, that's fine.

Okay, so

the whole point of me, or the reason I'm here is I'm a kind of druid.

By that I mean I, in a previous life, was an astrophysicist.

And unfortunately, before we get to the astro part, we're going to have to do the physics part.

Sorry.

I topped out a GCSE double award science.

It's okay.

We can get through this.

Best of luck.

So,

there's a vector and there's a vector and there's a cross product.

Yeah, I don't know.

this may as well be written in sanskrit to me i don't yeah like you do not need to worry about this uh

like really

there's going to be sort of three or four facts we need to take away from this so the first one of those is um

the guy who kind of uh what we're going to talk about is magnets and how do they work and

the guy who

Well, actually, one guy does, who is James Clark Maxwell, as depicted on the right.

Oh, the guy with the demon.

Yeah.

And he is my also most hated son of Edinburgh.

Oh, stiff competition.

I know.

Dolly the sheep's up there, but

I was going to go with, like, I don't know, Hume, maybe, or, like, the guy who wrote all of the Rebus books.

Oh, fucking Rankin.

Yeah.

Yeah, Ian Rankin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know.

I don't even think he's the worst author in Edinburgh at the moment.

I mean, does Rowling count?

She does live there.

I mean, Edinburgh, like, it's one of those places, right, where you don't have to live here for very long.

Rowling would be a hated daughter.

That's true.

That's true, yeah.

Although, misgendering her would be a kind of a flex, I suppose.

That would be funny, yeah.

I mean, she misgendered herself, right?

Didn't she write her book?

Oh, Robert Galbraith.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

Okay, this is my second most hated son of Edinburgh, then, after Robert Galbraith.

Okay, and yeah, the reason the reason he got famous is base, uh, Maxwell, that is, is he put together the theory, or is credited with of linking together electricity and magnetism.

Why does he sit neurodivergently on this statue?

I think Victorian guys just do this.

I've only ever folded myself into that kind of shape when I'm having a serious

neurodivergent moment.

I keep thinking it's that meme, you know, like about how bisexuals can't sit sit on chairs properly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like he's about to get into that.

Maybe who knows?

James Clark Maxwell, bisexual.

Excuse me, this real quick.

Well, I mean,

in a beautiful moment of AI overviews, I've just seen him described as a Glaswegian lesbian and Quaker.

I don't think either of those things is true, but I'm willing to incorporate them into my belief system.

I think you'll find it was on Google, and therefore it was true.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so where was I?

Yeah.

Usually in astronomy, magnets don't really matter, kind of to the point that they're a bit of a meme.

So what will happen is you'll give a conference talk or something and the most unfunny person you've met in your life will ask you, what about the magnetic fields?

And the joke here is they're incredibly hard to like model and fold into your stuff, and usually they don't matter.

the exception being what we are going to talk about which is um the sun basically so we just need to kind of dip our toes in here and get a couple of facts out about magnets so

number one

uh can we go to the next slide yes so first of all is basically if you have

um

something that's electrically charged so in this case it could be stuff in a wire or it could be like an electron or a proton or something.

So, if it's zooming along, so in this case, it's moving left to right, so if you can see the V arrow, that's the way it's moving,

it makes a magnetic field around it.

And that magnetic field sort of is doing these

anti-clockwise, yeah, anti-clockwise like circles around it.

So, basically, yeah, moving electric charge makes magnetic field.

And then the second one, which is the diagram on the right, is if that electric charge enters an already existing magnetic field, so that little like boob symbol in the bottom right

is

what that symbol means is uh that's a magnetic field pointing like out towards you, um, like out of your out of your monitor.

Okay, it's pointing directly.

I'm staring down the parallel at the time for it doing this.

This is like the intro to James Bond.

So, okay, so we have the same charged particle going left to right this time, or like wire or whatever.

It enters into this field that's pointing straight at your face, and that will deflect sort of perpendicular to both of those things.

So it'll go, yeah, everything's at 90 degrees to each other, basically.

Uh-huh.

And then the third one we need is: if you go next slide, please, is kind of the reverse of this, which is if you have a magnet and you move the magnet around near some electric charges, those electric charges start moving.

So you'll have probably seen this effect if you've ever had one of these torches on the right that you kind of have to like jerk off.

So yeah, the way this torch works is there's a magnet inside, you give it the shake weight treatment, and then that induces charge going through the

through the wire and gives you light.

So this is a process called induction.

So it's also like how those really fancy electric hobs work.

Oh, right.

And it's also, you know, you make the magnet circular and then, you know, you can make a generator.

Boom.

Yeah.

So, actually, this, this kind of, these processes are like really fundamental to basically how we generate electricity.

So, like, every power plant has one of these in to make electricity.

I was expecting to actually like learn things or have like engineering knowledge required on my engineering podcast.

Like, yeah, do

like a lot of this in like physics too in college.

And yeah, the magnetic stuff is like just annoying to do, especially when you get into things like the right-hand rule, where it's like, I, I'm looking at myself doing the, or is the left-hand rule?

I did the wrong hand either way.

Yeah, this stuff is a real like

undergraduate physics like wall.

Like a lot of people in America, I gather, drop out.

Um, rather than muddling this, I muddled through it by having a

creative writing class to drag my GPA up.

That is a that is a potent combination.

Yeah.

Okay, so they're the kind of three things we need.

So we need what happens when charges move and what happens when magnetic fields kind of move.

And then the last thing we're just going to look at, if you go to the next slide, is what a magnetic field like usually sort of looks like.

So a really useful model for this.

Iron filings.

So yeah,

a really useful

model for magnetic fields is what we call field line diagrams.

And the way you can see one in real life is a thing you probably did in school, which is where you drop a load of iron filings around a magnet and you get these cool patterns.

And these just have a few little rules that go with them.

So we don't really need to worry about most of it.

But basically, the magnetic field lines always form like a loop, so you can't break them or sort of have them just stop.

And then the other one is that they like really hate touching each other, so they will spread out as much as they can.

Right.

Okay, so that is the physics over.

I'm declaring it done.

So if you go head to the next value for me, please.

How many like physics credits is that for me?

Ah, Christ.

I don't know.

Let's say 10.

I don't know how many that is.

Thank God.

Yeah.

He's almost given me like a sort of like a higher national certificate in physics for sitting through like

three slides.

Listen, it has the power to do that.

It's fine.

Honestly.

There's a continuing education credit if you have a PE

reminding you how magnets work.

Yeah, you guys have like continuous professional development for the podcast, right?

Oh, yeah, of course.

I'm still working on portfolio.

I have to fill fill out a little thing about like leadership skills.

All right, should we head to the next slide then?

Yeah, we need a worksheet that comes with the podcast, you know.

I mean, that is the next evolution, right?

Yeah.

You're already doing slides.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, slightly more fun part.

What is a star?

In this case, the sun.

But this kind of stuff kind of applies to all stars.

So a star really is just a huge, huge, huge ball of gas.

And when you get a ball of gas that's big enough, it becomes a giant gravity-fed nuclear fusion reactor.

So

all of this stuff's yeah, it's kind of nice.

So all of this stuff just squashes together, and then in the middle, you start to get fusion.

So,

yeah, basically, anytime you get gas together above about a tenth the mass of our sun, it just does this on its own.

And then you've got like stars can vary in size a lot.

So our sun is relatively small.

So they go up to about 100 times the size of our sun.

But the bigger ones are rarer.

So, because it's kind of like tall people, where like you've got this really long tail of like most people are around the average height, but then some people are giant.

Yeah,

and the tall ones are hotter.

Yeah.

Shout out to Mia Motor.

Yeah, most of us are normal, and then you've got Mia Motor.

Okay, so for our past.

I worked her into the next episode I wrote as well.

So this is getting like bordering on the obsessive.

Well, we're gonna be able to do that.

There's no shame in it.

Can it still be a parasocial relationship if she's been on a podcast?

I think so.

Or maybe it's just a social relationship.

I'm not sure.

I think this is straying into social, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so if you jump to the next slide, so stars are made up of three delicious layers.

Ooh.

So like ogres.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the middle, uh, middle, middle layer, um, or at least for our purposes, like, there's obviously subdivisions in this because scientists love doing that.

Um, but for our purposes, the middle one is called the core, and this is where the fusion happens.

So the takeaway from this is you have this huge, you know, sort of ball of hydrogen, and through various complicated processes, it turns it into helium.

So the one on the right is the most common.

It's called like the PP chain or something.

Yeah, PP.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fuck, briefly killed me.

I don't even have to say anything.

I hate this.

I'm a doctor.

I'm such a child.

This is the thing.

This is the thing.

We invite you on and then we drag you down to our level and then we beat you with experience.

No, like the reality is I'm like this.

I need to accept that.

I mean,

I am assuming the other the other fusion chain is the doo-doo chain.

Yes.

Yeah.

If it's not called that, I'm going to petition.

Okay.

So what the PP chain produces is, God damn it.

You end up with your helium, but the other thing that you end up with is energy.

So the energy comes out in the form of light.

Sort of missing the point a bit to be like the sun is an enormous fusion reactor,

the end product of which can be used to fill balloons.

It also does some like light or whatever.

Yeah, it makes so much good stuff comes from the sun.

It makes lithium as well.

Shout out to people who take that.

Elon Musk about to invade and coo the sun.

This is like when

people point out that all the elements were created in stars, so we're all stardust.

And then you say, Shut up.

I don't want to hear that hippie bullshit.

I wonder if you said that to Carl Sagan.

That time I saw you

get in a fist fight with Carl Sagan in a parking lot

over the phrase star stuff.

Yeah.

Shut up.

It's like, what the fuck did you just say to me?

From dust you were made into dust you shall return.

I mean, he must have got really pissed off at some people at some point.

Or maybe just like I'm more imagining the Buzz Aldrin thing.

Did you have you guys seen that?

I've seen that.

I specifically had that in mind.

If you want a sense of like how similar our thought processes are here,

I think that's my favorite space-related video.

Anyway,

where was I?

Yeah, so you've got all this fusion happening, and

the most important thing for kind of our purposes on Earth is that energy comes out of this.

And that energy does a few different things.

It gives us heat and light and things like that, but it also stops the star from just collapsing.

So you've got gravity pulling in.

And then eventually you've got this radiation kind of pushing outwards.

So this is like just a fistfight between those two things to kind of stop it from collapsing.

And to be clear, this may sound a kind of

like basic question, but the sun collapsing would be bad for us, right?

I would rate it three out of ten.

Okay.

Yeah, not great.

Kind of not an experience you're like desperate to repeat, but like it's okay.

Is 10 the worst or is one the worst?

I'm going to say,

I was saying 10, I think.

10 is

so.

It would be bad, but

not that bad.

I'm sure worse things could happen to you.

Well, that's a good point, yeah.

Oh, my intrusive, my intrusive anxiety about gamma-ray bursts, for instance.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Have me back on to talk about those another time.

Get a rogue planet, just coast through the solar system.

Yeah, this is this is one of the ones where, like, it's, it's very like the kind of prions thing where it's like, that's the episode where I, we, like, I get a workplace injury because one of my fears just becomes embedded.

So, the thing

as I was writing this, I actually listened to that episode just by chance, and I was like, oh shit, I'm doing the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, you are.

Like,

I think every so often about how, like, we are in a kind of terrifying cosmic suspension in which you know we're in a room where the lights are out.

It's a really big room, but also there's a guy firing a shotgun around, like, at random occasionally.

Uh, oh boy, we'll get there.

Oh, you got fun stuff like all the exotic, like, uh, quantum physics things like you know vacuum energy collapse or whatever the fuck it's called.

You wouldn't know it had happened until it already happened.

I've woken up with hangovers some mornings thinking it already has.

What you're telling me is I'm going to be like ripped apart at the subatomic level.

Yep, feels like it.

Yeah, but you wouldn't be able to see it happening.

Hey, I mean, gamma ray bursts are cool because if you're on the other side of the earth, you just get a kind of millisecond of, hey, why is it daytime suddenly?

Yeah, Yeah, there you go.

We have a nearby supernova randomly.

Those I think will be okay from, but again, story for another time.

Okay.

Right.

Let's

move on to the next layer.

So if you jump me ahead, one.

So yeah, the first layer was the core.

That's where all the heat and light gets produced.

The second layer is called the radiative layer.

This is basically just

gas that

isn't fusing and it's really hot.

And what happens in this layer is all that light that was produced in the first layer kind of just bounces around in here for a long time and heats everything up.

So I don't know if you've ever heard that statistic of like

light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach the earth.

Sure.

Well, it doesn't because it spends like 170,000 years bouncing around in this layer to escape.

Wow.

I call this the gender identity clinic waiting list layer.

i mean kinda yeah it just kind of spins its wheels doesn't always go forward uh yeah there's not much else to say about this layer gotta gotta implement some uh congestion pricing here um

wait couldn't we get the um the fucking tunnels that elon musk built maybe they would help oh there you go send the ball just get like a like a like an insane jet of light out of one side of the sun directly from the core i i again i really hope that's not pointed in our direction.

We'll get there.

So the third layer is called the convective zone.

So this is the one you can see if you look at the sun.

I encourage you to look at the sun.

This is astrophysical advice.

Yes, I am an astrophysicist, and I'm telling you, the listener, look at the sun.

Directly.

Stare at it for a while.

Okay, so what this zone does is kind of like air in a room.

So, like the diagram on the right.

So, basically,

stuff gets heated up, and when it gets heated up, it becomes sort of less dense.

And so it rises up, and then it heads over to somewhere cooler, cools down, kind of comes back in this loop.

So, this radiator should be positioned under the window.

Listen, whatever Victorian cartoon I pulled this from,

I know it's for illustrative purposes, but

really old-fashioned radiator as well.

Yeah, I have no idea.

Like, I was thinking about when I saw this, when do you think this was drawn?

I genuinely can't tell.

The kind of Georgian sash window, the like, yeah, old, like, coil tube radiator.

I mean, it could be anywhere from like the fucking 1890s to the 1970s.

Like,

well, there's a big contrast here between the style of the arrows and the style of the illustration.

History of radiators.

That is true.

Oh, God.

1855.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

They had radiators before that.

They had radiators in Eastern State Penitentiary.

And how old was that?

Like 18.

Wait, Alice, are you just on the sorry, Nova?

Are you just on the AI bit?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am.

Yeah, invented 1855 by a kingdom of Prussia at the mall.

Born Russian businessman living in St.

Petersburg.

They had a button in 1829 in Eastern State.

I don't know what to tell you.

They didn't work, but...

Well, this would be why, because they were waiting for this guy in

a fucking king of Prussia to invent them.

Wait, is this like one of those inventions, though, that the ancient Greeks had?

Like that Turkish guy that

invention to turn the kebab.

Yeah, like the American people.

Well, you had the

radiator only to heat prisons.

Yeah, you had the heated floors in

the Roman baths.

I know a hypercaust is earlier than 1855.

I'm aware of that.

Give me that much credit.

But like,

just because it is radiative doesn't mean that it's the same thing as a radiator.

Radiator.

Yes, yes.

The kind of like metal heat exchanger that you put in your fucking, like, on your wall is, is like 1855.

Okay.

But you're not supposed to put it on a wall.

You're supposed to put it under the window so you can combat the miasma.

I'm going to move us up.

Please.

Yeah, can you jump to the next slide?

Sorry.

Yes.

Oh, this is a radiator.

Yes.

Yeah.

So, really, the first radiator was invented several billion years ago.

Yes.

So, yeah, this convection zone is our sun, the radiator.

And

what it does is it makes these big only use to heat kebab for billions of years.

Honestly, what a use for it.

I'm done with that.

Kind of want a kebab now.

Oh, yeah.

You can have like a whole...

You can have like a Dyson sphere of like rotating kebabs, you know?

Yeah,

grading a civilization based on how much of its energy of its its star it uses to heat kebab

like type one civilization you know

i mean it is a true sign of civilization yeah yeah absolutely no question This is what the Turkish guys were about to draw on the flight radar before the Iranians.

Oh my god,

drawing a donor would have been fantastic.

Okay, yeah, what was it?

Yeah, so the sun has these like convection cycles.

So what happens is when you, can you like John Madden a little bit for me?

So like at the bottom of the cycle, that's where all the heat is.

So you pick up heat at the bottom, yep.

And then you carry it up to the top, and that's where you radiate it off into space.

So the bit that we actually see when you look at the sun is that bit at the top radiating off into space.

And then that stuff comes back down again to pick up more heat.

And that's kind of the process.

And each of these, they're called cells, they're about a thousand kilometers across.

So they're like big, but not astronomically big, if that makes sense.

So like on the right, you can kind of see some.

So that's a picture of the sun taken through a solar telescope.

Huh.

So like

an artistic impression, that's a photograph.

Nope, real photo.

That's

fucking wild.

Yeah, you get a telescope and then you basically put really, really strong sunglasses on it.

close-up of garfield

doing doing macro shots of garfield

i was gonna say i thought it looked like a cell like a you know like an egg

yeah it has the kind of furry pattern to it yeah but i prefer garfield carpets or garfield yeah

i'm just thinking now though if you had the the big vertical kebab spit in zero-g,

wouldn't it cook differently?

Because the fat doesn't drip out, it would just save the place.

This is the kind of thing that NASA needs to be working on right now.

Yeah, get on to the guys at the International Space Station, they're not doing anything.

Oh, I'm not, they're not taking my calls lately.

Figure this out, guys.

How will space kebabs taste?

First person to be shadow banned from the ISS ham radio set,

Okay, so

you've got, yeah, you've got these convective cells, so these sort of thousand-kilometer-ish

size

bits of gas moving up and down.

The other bit of movement that we care about is if you jump to the next slide, the sun spins around.

Sun goes spinny.

Sun go spinny.

But

because the sun isn't a solid object, like you or me or the earth.

custard.

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

So

I was joking, but okay.

No, like pretty much.

Like, so if you've ever, yeah, stirred a cup of tea or like a custard or whatever, it's kind of the same deal.

But bird's eye microwave custard, similar viscosity, similar temperature.

So yeah, your bird's custard takes 25 days to go around at the equator, but it takes

like the the fish?

Jesus Christ.

Did I say bird's eye?

I was meaning birds.

I said bird's eye.

That's a cursed product.

Frozen custard.

I did mean birds, but I definitely said bird's eye.

So yeah, your frozen fish finger cuss.

Fuck, I've just imagined Doctor Who again independently.

Oh, disgusting.

I know.

Okay, your fluid of choice spins differently at different latitudes, effectively.

so what happens is yeah the equator spins the fastest and then it spins slower at the poles and like

everything wants to do this um but you're only able to do this if you're not made of like solid stuff right so this is just a product of like how gravity works really it's not anything special about the sun the earth would do this if it could if it was liquid if we if we like if we custodized the earth and yeah we could just give it a shave go down to the mantle

there you go.

I really don't want us to shave the earth.

We've just got to build a whole bunch more of those like German bucket wheel excavators.

Yeah, well, this I was about to say, German like lignite mining is an early attempt.

It's like kind of plucking the hair that we want to shave.

Do you know what?

I think the Germans should have the literal translation of mining to be like earth shaving.

I'm not actually sure what the German for mining is off the top of my head.

Baugbau.

Yeah, no.

Does that have like a literal translation?

In this case, it would be like

mountain

like building.

I mean,

it's not wrong.

I guess.

You are making some big spoil tips.

Something too literal.

Anyway, sorry.

About the spinning custom.

No, we're all good.

Right.

And you might think, like, I've wittered on now for like 25 minutes and I've talked about magnets and I've talked about how the sun moves.

Like, how are these two things connected?

So, if you jump to the next slide, the way these things are connected.

Garfield and his whiskers.

The way these things are connected is

all of that, what we sort of colloquially call gas, is actually plasma.

The only difference between the two is basically a plasma is a gas that has an electric charge.

So if you remember from your physics course you took not too long ago,

whenever you have electric charge moving, you get magnetic field or whiskers.

So what you're seeing here is a picture of the sun and then overlaid is a like a model of the magnetic field.

And they're all fuck of a lot of ion filings.

I assume since it's all gas, these electric fields are constantly spazzing out magnetic fields.

So yeah, if you could use one adjective adjective to describe these, it would be fucked

because they just kind of go everywhere.

The reason for that is, yeah, you've got these convective cells that are constantly moving and you also have this, what's called a winding effect.

So if you jump to the next slide, so our lovely, what's called differential rotation, which is our bits of custard spinning at different speeds, mean that slowly what happens is the magnetic field like winds up.

All of radioactive custard covered in yarn.

Yeah, it's lovely

i i i i i had a lot of feelings about the sun before but i wasn't expecting gross to be on the list

just really unsatisfying when this is the thing right whenever people do like intelligent design or whatever and they're like everything about this is so perfectly elegant and stuff and then you talk to to scientists it's like yeah it's fucked it's like completely like fucking weird

yeah absolutely and like i mean that's part of the fun right like if it was really simple we'd have solved it all by now

So, like, I think the fuckness is, yeah, part of the attraction.

It's created a kind of like inner London one-way system in the last picture there.

It's like, I don't.

Yeah, it really is.

So, I guess that's actually quite a good analogy.

So, like, what happens is this, like, horrible one-way system gets more and more and more complicated.

And this produces, if you remember, one of our marketing.

God is real and does intelligent design.

He's just a traffic engineer.

left left to their own devices traffic engineers will eventually produce earth's sun

i worry i've i worry i've killed justin back oh i'm back i just

hit the fridge real quick sorry oh no worries it's legal i was i was just stealing your joke about traffic engineers oh yeah i mean you know this is uh this is the uless zone but uh in stellar sense uh

i mean you're kind of not wrong but again like these analogies are really good because what happens here is it gets wound and wound and wound up like this.

And if you remember me talking about magnets, I said the closer these magnetic field lines are, the stronger the magnetic field is at that point.

So basically what's happening here is you're storing energy in the magnetic field and more and more and more of it.

And then eventually what happens is

this produces weird effects on the sun.

So if you jump to the next slide,

You look at this beautiful creme brulee up here.

Wow.

Garfield's butthole.

And then this horrible Garfield butthole.

Also, Garfield and the right one, Garfield has developed a couple of like melanomas or something.

Yeah.

Not far off the cold sunspots.

So what these are is

Sometimes in certain areas of this like totally fucked magnetic field, it can switch off the convection sort of locally.

So, what this convection does, remember, is it carries hot stuff up to the surface and then it's radiating off heat.

So, if you turn off the convection, the stuff that's radiating off gets kind of stuck at the top and radiates off more heat than you'd expect.

So, the areas in like

yellow and orange, say, are 5,500 degrees C, and the black bit is quite a bit cooler.

It's at like 3,400 degrees C.

Balmy.

Yeah, you know, as far as the sun goes, it is anyway.

Say, and I probably.

No, you still die.

Never mind.

Oh, you're trying to think of like something that happens at like 3,400 C.

Not even like cement manufacturing gets that hot.

Yeah, you are melting everything.

Yeah.

Because it's also like it's 3,400 C on the surface.

In the atmosphere of the sun, it's much hotter.

You are fucked.

Why does that make me anxious?

It requires a pretty pretty big, like, long chain of events for me to be, like, on the surface of the sun.

Most of the intervening ones, which kill me anyway.

Why am I suddenly like a bit nervous now?

I think this just does that to people, to be honest.

Like, yeah, you get used to it.

The cosmic horror, you mean?

Yeah.

It's very boring that way, where you just kind of are okay with it after a while.

Only a little bit warmer than the conditions that Salvadorians have to work in right now.

Salvadorians are agriculture workers.

Oh, Jesus, that's dark.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah.

So you get these sunspots.

And what these are is the magnetic field at that point has gotten so fucked and so strong and close together that it's switched off this convection.

The other thing you got to think of is it's like Phoenix.

This is a dry heat.

I've been in Phoenix in summer, and admittedly, this was a good 10 years ago before the global warming really got global warming.

But like, even still,

I never want to feel that kind of heat again, which is bad news considering, given that it's, you know, Cummingsworth isn't near you.

I'm sure if you stay in Scotland, it'll be fine.

That's my strategy.

I'm trying to move to London.

Oh, that's a mistake.

I know.

I know.

Everyone tells me this, including me, fairly often, and yet.

Yeah, you gotta

go north, you gotta move.

If you don't want me to move to London, cancel your Patreon because it's the only way I can afford to move.

Yeah, no, no, the rest of us have to eat as well.

The outer areas of the UK all cancelling the Patreons out of Spy.

Of course, yeah.

You could move to beautiful Blackpool.

I've never been.

I like Blackpool.

I grew up not far from there.

It's okay.

It has a horrible drug problem, but other than that, I want to see all the old trams.

The trams rule.

I took my nephew on them a few months back.

That's so good.

I just love that we picked somewhere as a punchline and just earnestly ended up being like quite enthusiastic about it within like a minute.

Exactly.

They sent us one of their boat trams.

They sent us one to Philly, and then we used it for a while, and then we gave it to San Francisco because we're idiots.

Did you get anything in exchange?

I don't know what we got in exchange.

I think we got something, but I'm not sure what it was.

That's fair.

I thought it was by way of New Orleans or something.

Tell me more about this furry creme brulee, though.

Sorry, yeah, furry creme brulee.

So, yeah, what's happened here is these convection cells have switched off, so this bit gets to cool down.

But the reason that's happened is the magnetic field is like especially fucked in this locale.

So what then happens is, I mean, you get these sunspots all the time, but what then happens is all of these magnetic field lines, and what people call in the literature reorganize, but I'm going to call snap back into place.

And when they snap back into place, they bring some of this electrically charged material with them.

So if you jump to the next slide.

So wow, a GIF has finally worked on this podcast.

Amazing.

It's this kind of technical wizardry that you get me in for.

So yeah, on the right is the results of this snapping back.

And this is called, well, they're both called,

wait, let me get the names right.

Yeah, sorry.

The ones on the left, I think, are called solar prominences, if I remember right.

So what's happened here is the material has escaped, but then like been dragged back immediately to the surface.

So it forms these like cool loops and flares and things like that.

Neat.

The one on the right, however, is so sort of violent that the stuff escapes off into space.

So this is called a coronal mass ejection, which is basically a huge burp.

Not to be

confused with a corneal mass ejection, which is when your eyes don't do that.

Yeah.

That is gross.

Yeah.

Eye popping.

Okay, yeah.

So

what you're looking at here, this coronal mass ejection, that's about a billion tons of material coming out.

And I actually did the math on this because I love homework.

And this is kind of the equivalent, if you did a burp, of like a red blood cell, a single red blood cell.

So like this isn't going to evaporate the sun off or anything like that.

Right.

But it's a lot of stuff.

Differing scales, right?

Not a lot to the sun, but a lot to you.

Yeah.

And I mean, it's spread over an absolutely huge area.

So there's nothing to worry about directly.

Like it's not going to fall on your head.

You got to think like a billion tons.

I mean, you know, that does sound like a lot, but I'm also wondering, okay, what does like a mountain weigh?

You know,

probably about the same, yeah.

On that sort of scale.

There's probably spoil tips from like German lignite mines that are about that much.

Just a German man just like dumps an entire mountain on you, killing you.

Okay, I just googled it.

This is a Mount Everest, more or less.

Oh, okay, okay.

It's a lot, but like.

So it ejects like about a million tons of uh a billion tons of debris and a bunch of like dentists and stuff on top of you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You get that guy with the like bright green pants.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Listen to our Mount Everest podcast.

Yeah, the really fucked up thing about the the sun is that it mostly coronally mass ejects like Sherpas

that like

no one really gives a fuck about them.

Yeah.

I don't know if you should watch it watch the movie Sherpa.

That's really good.

The Sherpa inexplicably survives.

He's like smoking a cigarette the whole time.

I'd actually argue, if anything, the sun's anti-white based on what it does to me.

Yeah, that is definitely true.

Sun finally doing anti-white racism.

I really don't know why the evil scientist Jakub invented white people in defiance of the sun.

Well, yeah, but like it seems ultimately like self-sabotaging, given that we all get like infinity melanomas and stuff.

This is true.

Yeah.

Okay.

If you jump to the next slide for me.

So something I forgot to mention is the sun gets more and less active every about 11 years.

So

it goes in this kind of cycle of, yeah, being very, very active for sort of four or five years, and then it goes away again and kind of comes back.

So back in 2012, this picture was taken.

So this is one of the biggest coronal mass ejections that we've taken a picture of.

So, this was taken by a satellite called Soho, which has a thing called a coronagraph, which basically means you stick your thumb over the star

to look at everything else.

So, that

extremely low tech.

Yeah, like if you're doing this from the ground, you would literally just put one of those like little sticky dots on the telescope.

Nice.

So, that like black or dark red circle is the sticky dot.

The white circle is the sun so you're getting a feeling for like how big this thing is jesus it's quite a lot that's a lot of stuff yeah this happened in 2012

and you said an 11-year cycle yes this now being 12 years ago so we are yeah effectively at the next peak after this so like during the mid 2010s the sun was pretty quiet there was enough other stuff going on and it's back

is this a uh i've I've vaguely heard the terms before solar maximum.

Is that what this is?

Right, yeah, this is a solar maximum.

That was a cool turn of phrase.

Yeah, it really is.

It'd be a good band name, I think.

So, yeah, this is one of the biggest ones that ever came out.

Luckily, as you can probably tell by the picture, this wasn't pointed at us.

So, this is kind of going, you know, up and down away from us.

Yes.

And that's a bit of a saving grace.

So, if you jump to the next slide for me,

This is what I'm fucking afraid of.

Thank you for exemplifying.

Now, the problem is that

it's not just our sun.

There's like fucking, there's billions of these fuckers and they all have plasma rifles.

Like

this is a lot of things in astrophysics, unfortunately, that like you live next door to a psychopath with two plasma rifles and it's only by sort of

two graces I suppose so number one everything in astronomy happens over really long periods of time so like things don't happen that often on a human scale and number two space is really big so when they do happen they don't always hit you yeah but other than that space is horrible I appreciate earth being a very small very fast moving target so you're you're trying to like you know your vast percentage is low yeah you're in a you're in a huge shooting gallery, but

you're one of many tasty targets.

You are the world's fastest

blue bottle in a shooting gallery

of billions of psychopaths.

Yeah, and I mean,

most of these psychopaths are too far away to really do anything to us.

The sun, less so, however.

It is right there.

Yeah.

If we try to get away from it, we probably have a problem.

You have like a your like, what, eight-minute warning or whatever.

You wouldn't even get that.

Right.

Cool.

Sorry.

Okay, cool.

I might start drinking more, no.

I do want to reassure you, though.

We're not.

completely defenseless against this.

So coronal mass ejections do hit us from time to time.

You can kill the sun

in self-defense.

Just like the fucking The sun has a cowboy hat and two plasma rifles.

Earth, we can Photoshop in later maybe just has like a big high point sticking out of it.

This is Earth.

This is what we go back to.

We could go back to our geoengineering episode where I

bonus episode, subscribe to the Patreon for that one.

And I suggested we could move the Earth.

That's always an option.

We could put thrusters on and do like evasive maneuvers.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, before that, the Earth has some natural defenses.

So number one, if you go to the next slide, atmosphere.

Oh, I like this.

Atmosphere, good.

Not only do we breathe it, it does so much for us.

One of my favorite objects, if I'm honest.

So it modulates like our temperature.

For example, the moon is like the same distance away from us, from the sun, basically.

And daytime on the moon is plus 100, and nighttime is minus 180 uh see

i'm gonna have some uh gonna have some uh issues with thermal expansion on structures on the moon i would imagine then yeah it's it's horrible and it's one of the many reasons that like building there is gonna be really hard probably impossible um unless people are yeah really clever about it um it also protects dig a hole I mean, yeah, that's probably

one of the most viable things, in my opinion.

It's time to mund the bergbao.

you know?

You would have to send one of the bucket wheel excavators up there.

German space program.

We finally let him play with rockets again.

Huge, huge insult to Sigmund Yan out of nowhere.

But yeah, no, we just

mine the whole moon.

Excavate the moon.

Yeah, like people have been talking about like asteroid mining.

Fuck that.

Why don't we instead mine the moon that has, as far as we know very little value in it yeah it does fuck all that really

housing crisis you know okay you maybe you can't afford to buy uh like maybe you can't afford to like rent a flat in london unless you have a like bizarrely successful comedy podcast but you can afford social housing in like zone 27 000 the moon

this is like when i have to move to east loathie and when edinburgh becomes too expensive

yeah and then of course the moon gets sequentially gentrified and you're like, for fuck's sake, why are podcasters moving to the moon?

And the answer is that like London's too expensive.

Yeah.

Never understood asteroid mining because I feel like, you know, maybe it'd be easier to like reopen a mine in Minnesota or something.

It's too much work with the permits and everything.

Plus, you have to go to Minnesota, which is less hospitable than some asteroids.

I think it's mostly asteroid mining as a thing because it sounds like a cool future job that's like working class and we don't have have enough like like blue collar jobs in sci-fi so you're like yeah i'm an asteroid miner

yeah if you ever uh run out of episode ideas i'll get drunk and rant about this but please yeah it's like come on the upper peninsula exists

i i've never seen proof of that all right i'm gonna move back to on topic i'm gonna make a controversial move um

Yeah, so the atmosphere, like, it regulates our temperature.

It protects us from stuff that comes out of the sun all the time.

So, the Sun has a thing called the solar wind, which is like the coronal mass ejections, but just like happening continuously.

It just streams off.

So, that stuff is unpleasant.

It also blocks most of the UV radiation that comes from the Sun, which would cook you.

Yeah, it does that.

I like that it's pitched at the level that it like it blocks most of this kind of like sort of cosmic scale of radiation.

However, you might also want to top up with a bit of sunscreen.

Yeah, yeah, like I actually think it's pretty amazing that those two things in combination is what it takes.

Yeah, for real.

Like, yeah, it takes the might of the Earth's atmosphere and, like, a cream.

Yes.

Maybe a spray if you're lazy.

Yeah, okay.

So, um, the atmosphere is something we should protect.

Thank you very much, atmosphere.

I love you.

But it can't.

It's a big hug right now.

Yeah.

It can't do it on its own.

So, for example, Mars used to have a lovely, luscious atmosphere like ours, and basically doesn't anymore.

And the reason for that is

this solar wind and these coronal mass ejections basically strip off bits of the atmosphere when they collide with it.

So it's like ablative sort of shielding.

Right.

What are we at with the like atmosphere status?

We gotta like.

I actually had to look this up because I got very rarely do I get existential crisis about this stuff, but I did go and look up like, are we losing atmosphere?

The answer is no.

The reason for that, like, we're producing more atmosphere than

is disappearing into space.

That's one good thing.

Keep it up, guys.

Yeah.

So, the reason that we're not losing so much atmosphere compared to like Mars, which is virtually gone, is if you go next slide, please.

The Earth has its own magnetic field.

So,

I guess the source I have for this would be if you've ever used a compass.

Oh, right.

Yes.

Those do work.

So basically where this comes from is the Earth has a delicious gooey center.

So if you want your planet to have an atmosphere, you need to have like a liquid center, preferably made of like iron or nickel or something nice and magnetic.

And as that moves around, it produces a magnetic field.

And what this does is deflects away all of that solar wind.

because it's made up of like charged electrically charged bullshit um So it deflects that away.

For whatever reason, it gets more pixelated as you get towards the surface.

Yeah, sorry.

The one thing they never warn you about in podcasting is like how to keep your train of thought.

Oh, trust me, we don't bother.

Yeah, so magnetic field deflects away charged bullshit

and that stuff just kind of is deflected off into space and just kind of disappears harmlessly off into space and then we we smash cut to like some other planet where the first like piece of life develops and is immediately like one-shotted by like

by like shit that's been deflected off of earth

fuck you should have evolved on a real planet Well maybe we're just, we're just the kind, we're like so lucky because we're effectively the coin in an Annie Oakley trick shot and everything that that could kill us just bounces off to kill something else.

Or it could be like the

Great Pacific trash patch where it's actually just floating out somewhere.

Just all this disgusting hydrogen.

Gross.

Never see that in Star Trek, do you?

Just fucking, yeah, star date 26, 606.

We ran into a big cloud of gross hydrogen.

You need to like really scrape off the outside of the ship.

It's horrible.

Captain's log.

So this is, yeah, this is why like Mars, the moon, Mercury, they don't have atmospheres is because they're a little bit smaller than the Earth and so they cool down quicker.

So their cores are solid rather than liquid.

So they don't have a magnetic field.

So the solar wind blasts off their atmospheres.

So they become more hellscapes than earth

you really don't want to fuck around with cooking time then yeah exactly when you're making a planet yes yes

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Back to the show.

Another nice feature of this magnetic field and what it does for the Earth is if you go to the next slide, please, it produces lovely lights.

Steam Hims.

Just had that on deck waiting for the next Aurora Borealis.

You couldn't not, right?

So, yeah, this is a photo a pal of mine took in Edinburgh.

And this was pretty much how it looked to the naked eye.

So it was pretty cool.

So what's happening here is all of that stuff that's come off of the sun, when it reaches Earth, it smashes into the upper atmosphere and basically works like

a neon lamp that you're getting a a takeaway so it excites the electrons of the atoms and when there's a shitload of bugs yeah

yeah so

sorry i'm sorry i'm like this no it's good it's good just for the the pitch that we offer to to to guests would you like to deliver a a lecture of your own choice of subject and length and style but you also have at least one cooting moron in your ear at all times.

Well,

so my day job is as a like science communicator.

So like I'm usually doing this to the good eight-year-olds of Edinburgh.

Yeah, so like what's it like a step down in intellect, you know?

No, honestly, this is preferable.

This is chill.

Yeah, okay.

The takeaway of this is

charged bullshit smashes into earth, excites atoms in the atmosphere, and they give out light when that happens.

And they give out light of like, yeah, very specific pretty colors as well.

So, aurora are always that green and always that pink, exactly.

Right.

Um, so the green comes from oxygen.

There's a red, which you, I don't think you see in this one, but like, if you google them, um,

that also comes from oxygen.

And then the blue, the blue, violet, and pink, which I think you're just getting the pink here, um, they come from nitrogen, and sometimes you get um, some other stuff too.

So, if you jump to the next rights question mark.

Yeah, well, if you jump to the next slide.

Whole planet looks like bisexual lighting.

So to be fair, like knowledge and belief, this is the only planet that generates bisexuals.

I mean, look at the other planets.

They look pretty.

You see trans rights on Jupiter?

Do you see trans rights on Saturn?

Well, you can see it's blue for boys because boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.

so.

Yeah, this is this is the same effect.

This is the exact same thing that's happening.

It's just happening on other planets.

Unfortunately,

theirs look whack.

Ours looks cool.

I actually agree.

Once again, undefeated.

Number one, baby, greatest, greatest Earth in the multiverse.

Greatest place in the universe.

Number of living beings more than zero.

Yeah, population greater than zero.

Unless we find tiny microbes on Mars.

Fuck a tiny microbe.

I don't give a shit about them, but I'm really going to take it poorly if we do like first contact with like intelligent like spacefaring life.

Because I really have been like dining out on like whatever hypothesis you choose to deploy.

It doesn't matter as to why.

I really like the idea that like it is us.

We are the only ones doing it.

Nobody is on our level.

You know, it just

are the globetrotters of this shit.

No,

we're like flexing on like all that has ever possibly existed.

But also, like, what?

Sorry, go on.

Well, what if we make first contact and it turns out they have a better football team than we do?

Motherfuckers.

All right, well, the galactic war begins right then, obviously.

Yeah.

I think that's my original thing about the pioneer plaque depicting humans as being 20 feet tall, standing athwart a throne of skulls.

We've discovered an entire race of Tom Brady's.

I just, I think we, what we do once we like become like properly, like routinely

like on a solar system level spacefaring, right, is what we do is we stake out a kind of boundary zone.

We fence off the outside of like the orbit of Pluto, and we put a bunch of signs saying, like, multiverse's best football played here.

And we broke no argument about that.

Are you mentioning the first NFL exhibition game played on Mars?

Do you know?

Do you know what?

Like, you know, people talk about those Olympics where like you take all the drugs.

Is Peter Thiel doing that, if you remember right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Like,

what I can't wait for is the low-gravity games.

That's gonna rule.

Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

God damn.

Okay.

Well, yeah.

The key takeaway is.

You could do a tackle, but instead of falling on the ground, you go up.

Are we tethering them or are they just like lost?

Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe they got like, yeah, they got some like they got some like magnetic cleats or something.

We think on Mars, they'd be fine, but we could find a small enough asteroid to do this on.

Oh, yeah, we just

indoor.

Yeah, tackle.

We have to get a couple of like

astronauts with the like jetpack thing just to kind of catch them just in case.

And if you fumble a guy who's gone to.

Oh my god,

this is how they do the fucking.

You know, those people who do the like Quidditch bullshit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is how you do that.

Low-gravity Quidditch.

I could get behind.

First of all, we have to dip this to everyone who wants to play.

Yeah, that's

just floating their hopelessly because there's no atmosphere, you know?

Oh, I guess.

I'm just also thinking about like relative acceleration and stuff on something with no atmosphere.

For some reason, my mind went to cricket, and I just thought about perfectly spin bowling through someone's sternum.

Like,

there's no air to like impede a cricket ball.

Yeah, like the home runs on

the first interstellar baseball game are, you know, they're just going to be constant.

We need to

do low to zero gravity sports as soon as possible.

See, it would be so good, right?

A civilizational priority.

Everyone's

doing on zero gravity basketball.

Well, plus also,

if they'd been running basketball on zero gravity, Kope wouldn't have died.

That's a good point.

Wouldn't have needed a helicopter.

That's right.

If you'd gotten in a helicopter, it would just, you know,

have been fine, wouldn't have crashed.

All right, so all of these auroras are bitch-made apart from ours.

Yeah, pretty much.

That's the main takeaway from this.

The other smaller takeaway from this, if you go to the next slide, please, is

when these particles come to Earth, they are charged.

So if you remember back to when I was talking about magnets, when you've got

these charged particles moving, they bring along their own magnetic fields.

And basically, what happens is they

fuck with our magnetic field by this process called induction.

So you have a moving magnet, it fucks around with our magnetic field, it fucks around with

more importantly, any wires that are around.

So, yeah,

if like normally this doesn't really do anything.

So, like, this isn't even noticeable, even with the Aurora from the other night.

Like, you'd need pretty advanced scientific equipment to even notice.

However, if you had a really big geomagnetic storm, it would induce big currents into our

long conductors.

Yes.

And this is where I've put together some slides about three times that happened.

I didn't know it was going to be three.

I thought this would be like a one-third was going to be three either.

And I was going to be less worried about it.

I was aware that the Sun can fuck with my like gaming computer on the level of like it can flip bits occasionally because it feels like it, right?

And like, really fuck with your speedrunning thing.

I was not aware that it could really fuck with your speedrunning thing by making it so that you don't have a computer anymore.

And that frightens me because I like having a computer.

It can speedrun your computer's like temperature increases.

Yeah, that's helpful.

Once again, between this and

UV radiation, we're coming back to like cooling gels being spread on things.

Maybe they just cure everything.

More gels.

Maybe just everything needs to be in a kind of a gel form.

I mean, my estrogen is, and that's done wonders for me.

So I'm pro-gel in almost any basis.

So

we've had several large geomagnetic storms, but to explain it first, we have to explain the telegraph.

I've heard of these.

Yes.

Kind of thing.

That was just gibberish.

Yes, I know.

I don't know Morse.

I don't remember it.

All right.

So the telegraph.

This is the way you do long-distance communication without physically schlepping a message from point A to point B.

You do still have to schlep a wire from point A to point B.

This is true, but you only got to...

Only got to do it once, though, right?

Only got to do it once, yeah.

That's true.

So there's

some of the very early telegraph systems, because telegraph systems predate electricity because they're not necessarily electrical.

You have optical telegraphs.

They were very popular in France.

Some Native American tribes used them.

The civilizations used them for a while in the form of smoke signals, for instance.

You can also have semaphore signals.

You could do, you know,

something like semaphore drums.

Yeah, it's really, really cool, like alternatives to the telegraph proliferated for a while.

Yeah,

I think the semaphore towers,

they built a big system in France in 1790 or so.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the most important thing is that they got stuck stuck with is just

signal fires, right?

Like, you use it as a kind of like alarm system for, like, oh no, the fucking Mongols are coming over the border.

The first guard tower to see them lights a big brazier, then you see another brazier lighting.

It goes, okay,

it's cool.

Minas Terith has to signal Gondor.

Yeah, exactly.

So they just send one big dash.

Just

yeah,

you just yell a slur into the machine and it makes it fun.

Just our first electrical television.

Listening to a Morse transmission, you're just like, I didn't know Signing on could say that many slurs that quickly.

First electrical telegraph experiments were back in like 1816.

There's a lot of weird systems that crop up initially.

They have things like needles that indicate letters or like dials.

They have multiple wires or different characters.

These are largely superseded by the very simple one-wire Morse system by the 1840s.

Things got weird in the sense that you could transmit a picture by telegraph pretty quickly after this.

And that led to

sex systems.

The fax machine was developed very early on, actually.

Yeah.

Do we have documents of who the first person was to send a nude for this?

You know, I'm guessing that's like five minutes after its invention.

The song Send Me a Kiss by Wire, the one that begins with like, hello, my baby, hello, my honey, hello, my ragtime girl.

That is a song about sexting sexting over a telegraph, and it was top-level.

The telegraph was new.

That was

send me a kiss by wire is like essentially send me the nudes in nudes, please.

Yeah,

I thought that was, I thought that was invented for the cartoon with the talking frog.

Yeah, who do you think?

You know what the Michigan rag was?

The Michigan rag was definitely invented for that cartoon.

All right.

Yeah, Tinpan Alley song written in 1899.

Damn.

Its subjects is a man who has a girlfriend who he knows only through the telephone.

Wow.

On the telephone, no one knows you're a dog.

So these networks expand very rapidly since they were cheap and simple to construct.

By 1859, work had commenced on a transcontinental telegraph net cable in America.

Europe had been thoroughly knitted together by the electrical telegraph at this point, except for France, who had invested heavily in the optical system, you know, the semaphores,

and they had a sunk cost policy sort of stated denial about it.

Oh, these will be good someday.

I think in some ways they were kind of aesthetically cooler.

It is aesthetically cooler.

And less fuckwithable by the sun.

So now who's laughing?

That's a good point.

That's a good point.

So how does this work?

They have this old-timey battery because they haven't invented the generator yet.

Um, that's something that has, like, I don't know, a bunch of copper plates and zinc plates, and then there's some bullshit that goes on there.

I don't understand some like some acid or some shit.

I don't know.

Yeah.

When you tap on a telegraph, it completes the circuit.

At another telegraph office, you know, 100 miles away, that circuit powers an electromagnet.

The telegraph receiver taps there too.

Thus, you can send messages in Morse code, right?

Sure.

Um, but this gives you your very, very long wire, which is susceptible to uh geomagnetic storms, such as those from the sun.

Did you draw this?

Long time ago.

Yes.

I remember this, motherfucker.

Yes.

Oh, is this vintage?

Well, there's your...

Vintage John Maddening.

Yes.

Yeah.

So this all worked great until September of 1859.

So there's these two English guys named Richard Christopher Carrington and Richard Hodson.

Both these guys independently observed and documented solar flares for the first time.

And they were observable on account of they were extremely big.

I mean, in that case, I kind of think that like naming shit after them is a bit like

they don't name like

if a truck runs into a like, you know, a building full of air horns outside and I notice it out the window and go, damn, they don't call it the November Kelly like traffic collision.

Right.

Like, yeah.

Yeah, I suppose not.

We'd have to see what happens.

Depends how like civilizationally impactful a collision it would be, you know?

Well, speaking of impactful, two days later, on the 3rd of September, the coronal mass ejection hit the earth head-on.

I mean,

you get a decent amount of warning, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah, the mass ejection, I believe, goes a lot slower than the visuals of it.

Yeah, it does.

But the question is, what do you do in that time?

The plot of the movie Melancholia, which is another thing.

Pretty much, yeah.

The Aurora was seen as far south as Columbia.

New York City, you could read a newspaper by the Aurora.

This was at the time, by and large, a curiosity, except for telegraph operators.

Because all those long telegraph cables.

There was no conductors in society apart from a shitload of telegraph lines.

Yeah.

All those long telegraph cables now had significant induced currents.

These telegraph operators were shocked by the machines.

You know, you just get a new one.

These telegraph operators shocked by coronal mass ejection speaking perfect morse

um i guess i guess a coronal mass ejection just if it's like constant current it just encodes one really long dash which is the big beep the beacons are lit

just just like what what the who the fuck is sending me a t and why has it electrocuted me

um the wires started throwing off sparks in like random locations.

Equipment like relays failed due to the high induced current.

In some cases, the only feasible way to keep the network going was to disconnect the battery power entirely because you could use the induced current to send messages.

I'm not 100% certain how that worked.

But it was just current.

It's free energy.

Yeah, it's free current.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's exactly the same as how a battery works, just

provided from wirelessly, effectively.

Yeah, and ultimately this largely proved to be a trivial problem.

These telegraph networks were down for days at most.

There was no lasting damage.

But there was another major geomagnetic storm that caused significantly more damage.

The New York Railroad storm.

This is on May 12th, 1921.

It was the most intense geomagnetic storm in the 20th century.

A real theme of this podcast is I'm amazed how much happens to the Northeast's railroad system.

Well, one of the reasons this is probably the New York Railroad storm.

It's a very positive bias in terms of that's what one of us who is extremely informed about it keeps talking about.

I was going to suggest, is it built on like a ley line or something?

Oh, probably that too.

No, a big, big aspect on why this is very, this is reported on as the New York Railroad storm is that that's where the press was.

Yeah.

So you have more

pick a through line for like stuff to talk about, like in terms of influence.

You could do a lot worse than trains, you know?

Yeah.

You have a

you have a lot more telegraph wires at this point.

You have

electrical grids, but they're not interconnected in the way they are now.

I mean, you have like in New York City alone, you have like 20 electricity companies with 25 different standards.

Different proprietary wires all like messing each other up.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Different proprietary appliances, if you have any appliances at all,

you know, proprietary light bulbs.

The electrical grid at this point was a mess because it wasn't a grid.

It was, you know, 25 competing grids.

Thank God.

So apparently.

Yeah.

You have sort of similar symptoms like strong auroras.

You have induced currents in the large interconnected telegraph systems that resulted in a rash of fires,

which wound up largely targeting railroad infrastructure, particularly, and this is also an artifact of reporting, the New York Central Railroad.

The voltages in the telegraph wires approached one kilovolt.

So one of the first things that happened is that the telegraph tower in Grand Central Terminal burst into flames.

I was going to say, is that a lot?

And apparently.

Yes.

It kind of depends, right?

Because like in a modern power line, that's not that much.

It's not that much, but it's enough.

It's It's a telegraph system.

Yeah.

The train station at Brewster,

New York.

I think Brewster's in New York.

It might be in Massachusetts.

I forget.

It burned down.

Signal systems stopped working.

The whole railroad came to a halt.

Further north in Canada, the telegraph system was like burned out entirely.

Essentially, every fuse north of Mexico had to be replaced.

Incredible time to be a fuse manufacturer.

Exactly.

Yeah.

This is a huge standard.

Goldrush, sell picks and shovels in a solar storm self-users.

Oh, now we got circuit breakers, though.

You just flip them.

Yeah.

Another thing which has been ruined by woke.

This is a huge storm.

Some reports say it was like even possibly the same size as the Carrington event, but I think it was a lot smaller.

A lot of the stuff is like scales and like scales logarithmically as opposed to linearly.

Society was back up and running fairly quickly.

And then our most modern one that caused serious issues was in March of 1989.

So in northern Quebec, they have something called the James Bay Project, which is a series of massive fuck-off hydroelectric dams, right?

I'm generally in favor of those, sort of, sometimes.

Oh, these are so fucking big.

It's insane.

The height from the top of this thing to the bottom of the thing is like Niagara Falls and a half.

Jeez.

This is the the Robert Orasa generating station.

It's good for five gigawatts of clean electricity, most of which is sent to Montreal.

Some is sent to New England.

They built like half a dozen of these things.

The Cree First Nations tribe has not been happy about the project because it flooded all their land.

Are we

something?

Perennial downside of hydroelectric dams, but

I'm always going back and forth between kind of being regime-pilled and being like, but the clean energy is so cool and the mass engineering project.

And then it's also like, oh, it also displaces a bunch of people.

I mean, I feel like there's a middle ground, right?

You don't have to

ideally

exactly where all the First Nations people are.

Well,

the one thing I like is this huge fucking spillway here, which I think they call the staircase of the giants, except it's in French because it's Quebec.

It's L'escalier du Géon.

Des Géon.

Yeah.

I'm amazed that I had staircase just on deck, though.

So another big coronal mass ejection slams into the earth March 13th, 1989.

This one was big, but nowhere near as big as Carringdon or the railroad storm.

The auroras were seen as far south as Florida, though.

But this time, there was finally some substantial electrical infrastructure, even where the storm was the mightiest near the poles, right?

So the result of this was massive induced currents in hydro-Quebec's long transmission lines right um

like rolling damaric shit yeah cool um these were then protected by various circuit breakers um which isolated the hydro system which resulted in massive loss of capacity which overloaded the few power plants still connected to the grid resulting in the total failure of the entire Quebecois electrical grid in something like 90 seconds.

I mean if ever there was a population more able to withstand sudden electrical loss by immediately going out and riding a kind of diesel-powered ski-doo directly into a tree,

they know how to live, okay?

Yeah, absolutely.

Survive.

Well, those maple syrup

pipelines, they don't need electricity to function.

I mean, they're made of metal.

They are long conductors.

That's a good point.

Inducing current in maple syrup.

Apparently, a a potential problem is induced currents in oil pipelines.

Not long enough.

Sure, I know.

Of all the potential problems we could be giving oil pipelines, we're relying on the sun to bail us out.

Yeah, this is the real problem with oil.

Sending a bunch of Andreas Malm books to the sun just so it can get the right ideas.

So

these are hydro plants, though, which means they avoid one of the hardest problems in like large-scale electrical engineering, which is something called black start,

right?

Which is when you're trying to start your huge electrical generating station with no electricity.

Yeah, it's one of these weird life hacks where it turns out it's way easier to do if you already have a generator, like a small one or whatever.

Yeah, in this case, like the generator probably didn't even stop spinning.

You know, just because the water is there.

If you had something like a coal power plant or a nuclear power plant and those went offline, the turbines went down,

you're going to look at a long, long time to try and get those things back online,

even for the sake of just helping to get other plants back online.

Yeah, that's the real like Roland Emmerich stuff.

I mean, like a nuclear power plant running out of electricity is like serious emergency,

which is really

about it.

Yeah, even if you got something that like sort of, you know, can safely shut down,

you know, without causing like sort of Three Mile Island or Fukushima or Chernobyl type event.

Even the plant is just safely shut down and you want to restart it, that's a long, long process.

And that takes a lot of electricity to do so to start it back up.

Key factor in making Chernobyl happen, by the way.

The bunch of Soviet bureaucrats being like, I don't want to fucking do that.

Maybe you should get it.

Get in so much trouble.

Well, that's lucky you mentioned because it's going to be our next one.

Yes, obviously.

But yeah, these are hydroelectric plants.

So it's sort of like they managed to get the electricity, the entire grid back online in about nine hours.

That's not too bad.

That's pretty good.

Yeah, all things considered.

Yeah, probably the stuff in your freezer didn't even spoil it.

I mean, granted, the entire population of Quebec has died of skidoo injuries, but like

other than that, you know.

They had fun doing it.

Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, that's one of

the worst geomagnetic storms in terms of like actual, you know damage to electrical systems and there have been some improvements to electrical systems as a result of this but you know we do have to consider all right what if we actually did get a proper carrington event right now number one this podcast would stop recording yeah this was obviously that hasn't happened to us and so i i read a royal academy of engineering study from 2013

They sort of indicated some of the problems you would probably have.

You know, you'd have significant damage to electrical grids requiring replacing transformers uh which has long lead times like they don't keep a stock of transformers on hand yeah and a lot of this stuff is

weirdly precarious weirdly that a good example of like the uh

simultaneously like vulnerability and uh like persistence of electrical grids is ukraine because the russians keep trying to fucking bomb power stations and transformers and stuff um

and

yeah it turns out that like you can maintain this stuff at great effort and cost, but like a lot of this stuff is not made quickly.

And like you say, they don't keep it in stock.

And so if

the transformers get blown up, there's no replacements for them.

You're waiting without electricity from that thing for months.

Yeah, you got to, I mean, luckily there's a lot of electrical lines that you can try and route things around stuff.

But, you know, this is, if everything goes up, that's going to be a serious issue.

Yeah, that's the fundamental problem is like you're hitting everything at the same time.

The sun, in this case, being kind of mega

Yes.

Instead of reading Andreas Malm, he's actually been reading Dugan and Edward Limanoff.

You're looking at like uncertain amount of damage to satellites, including possible total failure of the global positioning system.

I weren't using it anyway.

It's a good point.

Yeah.

I note with interest our editor Devon's position of Kessler syndrome as soon as possible, if not now.

Oh, thanks, Elon Musk.

Grounding aircraft, you'd have communication blackouts on high-frequency radio, which did happen in 1989.

A lot of people thought it was Russian interference with radio-free Europe that caused no, it was actually the sun.

The sun is Russian.

There's a really interesting sort of coder to that that I didn't put in the slides, but like kind of as I was reading about this, which is it makes ham radios really good because all that uncharge stuff sticks around in in the atmosphere.

So, for the last couple of weeks, all the ham radio enthusiasts have been able to

communicate much, much further because they bounce their signals off this charged stuff.

So, if you manage to have one survive, yeah, you could

like the sun is just the product of two Russian guys five billion years ago.

You've Guinea, I make fusion with hydrogen.

Yeah, so what you're going to want to do is

you're going to want to hit up November Alpha 1 Sierra Sierra for the International Space Station.

Tell them I sent you.

Yevgeny, I may use fusion to make kebab.

You can also call them in Russian on Romeo Sierra Zero,

India Sierra Sierra, if you want to, and yell at them for like making the sun too strong and make them turn it down.

So, you know, with

these various layers of protection and electrical grids today, I don't think you see a situation where like your toasters start shooting out lightning bolts.

But, you know,

if you're like a kid in like 1999 and you hang out by the green electrical box in the subdivision.

Oh, sure.

It might catch fire.

Cool.

You know, or a transformer on a pole at the end of your block.

You, you know, you would probably expect a lot of fires simultaneously combined with interrupted communications.

The fire department has difficulty learning just how overwhelmed they are.

Oh, and that's going to be disrupted for stuff with no GPS either.

So

what you're getting here is the kind of like season finale of your like firefighter show.

Yeah, exactly.

And then this is, you know, this is why it's also fantastic that now we're, you know, building large apartment buildings out of light timber.

um

you know i wouldn't worry about it you know yeah don't worry about that though

i've heard the prior proofing is very good for two hours um

once again remind you able to put out all the fires in those that amount of time once again reminding you that uh this is why in particular the london fire brigade changed their advice to uh as a result of grandfell to uh like if you're in an apartment building that catches fire get out of the building and stay out of the building out of the building yeah Yeah.

Yeah.

How the fuck was that naughty advice originally?

Well, I mean, we did a Grand File episode.

I'd like us to do another and revisit it in the three years' time when the inquiry finishes, you know?

People are stubborn.

People went back in the trade centers in 9-11 to finish up the day's work.

That didn't work out for them.

I mean, those trades aren't going to do themselves.

Right.

Exactly.

I mean, worst one is your heart.

That's a problem for the 99th floor.

I'm on 52.

Yeah, all of a sudden you find yourself on the 99th floor along with the interposing floors.

Yeah,

exactly.

Or I guess in this case, the 99th floor finds itself on you.

This is an exciting thing because,

you know, it could happen at any time.

And we're in a solar maximum right now.

So this would be the time when it would happen.

At any time.

At any time.

And, you know, maybe

we have an electrical grid that's hardened enough to withstand it.

Or maybe we get, you know, a type of event that we don't even know what it's like because there have been very, very strong electrical storms or geomagnetic storms in the historical record in like

700s AD.

If we go back to slide 16, you can see a comparison of the sunspot

like drawn during the

Carrington event.

and the one that's that's kicking around right now, which is bigger.

AR3664.

Yeah, and I mean, it seems like, I mean, if you go a couple of slides down where we had the really big coronal mass ejection, that was from 2012.

That was from literally, you know, the previous solar maximum.

So like, it seems like you get something pretty big every time.

The question is,

which way is the plasma rifle pointing?

Yeah.

I think the key takeaway from this is you want to like,

if things happen, make sure that the first thing that you fix is your Patreon subscription.

Because

whatever society survives, I will need money to navigate.

And

this is

my podcasting is my only source of income.

So please.

Yeah, this is actually the part of the podcast where you announce a new Patreon tier where you pay us in gold bars, ammunition, and medication.

Yeah, in advance as well.

Like,

just send any of those to the P.O.

box.

Yes.

If you guys get gold bullion, I'm going to be so mad.

Yeah,

send us gold bullion.

Yeah.

Well, you know, on that note, uh, disaster that we probably cannot practically protect ourselves from, or at least economically, we could protect ourselves from this, I think, relatively.

The electrical infrastructure could be hardened to withstand this.

I just don't think we're going to do it.

We have sort of partially done it, but like, you know, for like a really, we also don't know how big the big one can get, you know, is the other thing.

So yeah, the thing is these things don't really leave like a fossil record.

So like there was various ideas about like, could you extract stuff from like, you know, ice cores and things like that and look way back into historical ones.

Doesn't look like that's really possible, at least from the reading I did.

I thought there was evidence of like a super huge one that made Carrington look like, I don't know,

a tiny little,

but it's pretty disputed from what I understand.

Because it doesn't matter with other bits of evidence.

There was a video game called Assassin's Creed 3.

Oh, that'll do it.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Steamed Hams.

Shake hands with danger.

I had a 50-50 chance there.

That's not the first time that's happened.

With the same drop as well.

With the same drop.

It's a sort of steamed hams maximum.

It's very much you putting your gun next to your car keys in your pocket.

Greetings to Devin and the current lineup of talking heads you have to edit.

This was not something I was made to do by an employer, but from those carefree years in college.

Today's story is what happens when you have a bunch of engineering students with just enough knowledge of chemistry to be dangerous.

See, hydrogen for a little fuzzy the details.

Uric acid and toilet bowl cleaner.

Were you cooking meth?

I'm a little fuzzy on the details and you can attribute it to the incident if you want, but it's been over 10 years now, so that may have something to do with it.

By the third year of going to school for electrical engineering, I had a decent group of friends and we all liked to work on our own projects.

We weren't the sort to simply attend class to get good grades.

We intended to squeeze all the benefit out of being at a publicly funded institution, using their facilities to build cool cool stuff.

We had access to a room on campus that was unique in that it was entirely student-run.

The department would occasionally bring prospective students through to show off how cool it was you could have that much freedom at our university.

Check this out mostly.

But we were mostly left to our own devices.

This is not a small, dingy closet, but I will note it had no windows or other means of easy ventilation.

This is a technique known as foreshadowing.

Oh, why are nerds like this?

I say this self-depreciatingly, like, I hate this already.

On the first day of class, a bunch of us were gathered in the lab, and one of the guys decided to start etching a circuit board he had been designing.

These were the days where making your own circuit boards by etching them was not only faster, but much more cost-effective than sending the designs off to have them professionally manufactured, as shown in image one.

The old school chemistry for etching circuit boards used something called ferric chloride to eat away the copper.

That costs money and is not available at the mini-mart walking distance from this room.

It's also an old-fashioned way of

weathering tin shacks for model railroads.

You can also use it to etch meteorites.

Fun fact.

And I don't know.

So I guess I'll just go fuck myself.

No, no, all of us.

I don't want to.

Don't do that.

I am an astrophysicist, and I'm telling the leader listener, you can drink it.

Waiter, please take this drink.

It tastes fucking terrible.

The formula being used that day was hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide.

That's image two here.

Yes.

Both of these are available in various household chemicals found almost anywhere.

Previous attempts to perform this reaction had gone well, but today there was a substitution due to one of the ingredients.

Instead of the big plastic bottle of muriatic acid from the hardware store, image three, hydrochloric acid component was being supplied by a liquid toilet bowl cleaner, image four.

I don't recall any real measurements being done, and I suspect this was more of a shoot-from-the-hip process.

Yeah, Monolio.

Why would you?

Yeah.

If your mix is not reacting fast enough, add more hydrogen peroxide, and if it stops reacting at all, add more acid.

When the copper is finished etching, remove it and neutralize what's left with baking soda.

We did have those little pH tester strips to be able to roughly see what acidity of the mixture was, but that's about all the safety equipment involved here.

Do you know what?

These people deserve to die.

I ate way stupider stuff than this in college.

Also, it was less educational.

As soon as the etch it was mixed, we noticed something odd.

It smelled like bleach.

The reaction causing this had us all thinking, uh-oh.

And we very quickly decided to hit the bricks.

You have now enlisted in Western Front World War I.

Our room had two doors to the hallway on that floor, so we propped both open, rolled the seven-foot and rolled in the seven-foot-tall industrial fan, image five, in front of one to promote air circulation.

We flipped it on and we left.

Why not extend the gas attack out to like battalion level, shall we?

Wait, so they committed chemical warfare against the rest of the uni.

I reiterate my previous statement.

Remember, folks, the solution to pollution is dilution.

Or my dad liked to say.

To put it in a sort of Fritz Harbour context, you know, the solution to having too much chlorine gas is to start chlorine gassing enemy infantry.

Yes.

On the way out of the building, we ran into someone heading up to our room, grabbed them by the arm and said, nope, we're going to lunch.

I assume this is in like the same fashion as like in the Blues brothers when they bring the tax guy and sit him on the desk.

Returning later,

when we returned later, everything had dissipated and we continued doing normal college things, acting with incredible amounts of unearned confidence.

At least you didn't find like the fire department outside in hazmat gear.

No.

The prevailing theory theory of what went wrong was that the toilet bowl cleaner had some other compounds in it that released more chlorine atoms than expected and resulted in chlorine gas being produced.

The quantity was not enough to cause problems when dispersed through an eight-floor building, and no one was harmed.

It just made for an exciting start to the year.

I have since heard that this room was repurposed for graduate student work, not because anyone was discovered doing dangerous things, but because the administration changed over and they no longer saw the value in our sort of independent study.

I gotta be honest, I thought I would never hand it to a college administration after the Gaza stuff, but in this one,

what strange allies you make.

Yeah.

Based on previous safety thirds, I assume it got much less safe with that transition.

Entirely possible.

Yeah.

No,

now it's professors ordering you to do dangerous things rather than doing dangerous things on your own.

Now, what did we learn?

The moral of the story is to always have an exit plan, and it's good to have friends that will look out for you enough to keep you from inadvertently walking into a gas attack.

Thank you all for keeping me entertained and informed as I email spreadsheets around and call on engineering at my day job.

I think everyone that was there that day now listens to this podcast as well.

So, if I got something wrong, don't worry about it.

The gist of the narrative is close enough.

That's right.

Fuck you, other guys.

I do worry about it.

I worry about this one a great deal.

Please, please do not do chemical warfare on your university you know here's the thing if anywhere deserves a dystrexal universe

i'm not i'm not gonna gas the university you just wouldn't be sad if it happened i wouldn't be sad if it happened

i think the thing that gets me is that they just like pointed this at other people and left like i feel like they should have done some sort of separate thing of shutting the room with them inside Like, maybe, like, cordon it off and be like, don't open chlorine gas.

Yeah.

You know, at least.

No, no, they did.

They did.

They did close.

Didn't they close the door?

They opened the door, right?

They opened the door and they had a fan.

Maybe they pointed the fan at...

I don't know.

I mean, at least chlorine's like relatively,

you know, readily physically detectable by you.

At least they didn't make fucking phosgene, you know?

And just like half an hour later, half the student body just like drops dead.

But like.

Well, it's also a very small quantity is the other thing, just for etching.

I think maybe

my consideration of what a small quantity of chlorine gas in my environment is is, I think, lower than these people's.

When I think like small quantity of chlorine gas, I think CSX just ruptured a chlorine gas tank.

you know, in like a neighborhood and like everyone's got to leave for an hour and they come back and it's fine

i don't we are not the same no clearly clearly i'm i'm weaker just build a stenist off

look okay yeah uh official uh stance of me on the podcast chlorine gas is not that bad

use a fan yeah

use a fan leave for an hour come back take take your pets with you um

if only at Passchendale they had had the seven-foot-tall industrial fan.

Yes.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Send us bullion.

Yeah.

Gold bullion.

Ammunition.

Lawyers, guns, and money.

Yes, absolutely.

I guess I should do some plugs.

Karen, if they want more Karen, where do they get more Karen?

Don't.

I've got some social media, but like, it's my personal stuff.

If you see me around Edinburgh doing Royal Observatory stuff, more than happy to chat.

If you see me not doing Royal Observatory stuff, no, you didn't.

And join an anti-Raids WhatsApp.

Hell yes.

That's pretty much all the plugs I have.

I know you're getting the hell yes from Devon as well in the edit.

Yeah, actually, Dev, thanks a lot.

You actually inspired me to join one.

And

yeah, it's even like though I haven't directly been to one, it's made me feel a lot better about the world knowing there's a bunch of people willing to do that.

So

recommend it, even if it's selfishly for your own mental health.

I think it counts as self.

Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.

It's been nice.

Thank you for coming on.

This has been fun.

I'm glad, glad we finally have someone who can

make us depressed about space almost as much as Kevin can make us depressed about the forest.

Oh boy.

I'm sorry.

All right, we just need to like, if there's gamma ray blasts, we just need to see him coming and like perfectly dodge.