Can we engineer the sun?

00:00:07
Speaker 1: Are we at the mercy of our cosmic fates or are we masters of our domain. We've been lucky so far, living on this tiny spinning rock at just the right distance from an enormous ball of plasma. It keeps us warm but not too warm, and it's been stable enough to give us time to evolve, to develop technology in science and understand our fragile place in the universe. And is there also time for us to intervene in the Sun's eventual demise? Can we develop the technology and massive engineering capacity to keep the Sun from going red giant and frying the whole planet? That's the cosmic question we're tackling today. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily engineered Universe.

00:01:10
Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Kelly Windersmith. I study parasites and space, and I'm looking forward to putting on my skeptical face today.

00:01:18
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm going to be optimistic about our ability to preserve the future of humanity today.

00:01:27
Speaker 2: Ah, why are you going to make me sound like such a wet blanket?

00:01:30
Speaker 1: Because you love it, Kelly, you love it.

00:01:33
Speaker 2: It's the most comfortable feeling for me. I guess all right, So let's start with another amazing engineering project for our intro question here, So do you think we should terraform Mars?

00:01:47
Speaker 1: Wow, that feels like a trap to me.

00:01:53
Speaker 2: You brought up this amazing geo engineering.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: That's true. No, you're right. Compared to what we're talking about today, terraforming Mars is like just a warm up exercise.

00:02:02
Speaker 2: There you go.

00:02:03
Speaker 1: I think that we should first figure out if Mars has life on it before we go in and muck it up with our kind of life. Because wouldn't it be incredible to discover Martian life that evolved independently, that started from nothing independently, or if it weirdly has like something in common with Earth life, so we could have some sort of like mini pan spermia. I feel like the scientific consequences would be amazing and be ashamed to muck that all up by just dropping a million people on Mars too soon. But that's a pretty extensive project. Once we're done with that, though, then yeah, I think if we have the capacity and the resources and we've thought it through, then I do think it's a reasonable place to extend humanity. What do you think where am I wrong.

00:02:47
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't think you're wrong in any of the things that you just said. I guess I'm more thinking about how we would go about terraforming Mars. One of the things that surprised me when A City on Mars came out, which available in paperback now, was that the geology community felt like we hadn't spent enough time talking about how Mars is a like unique geological treasure and we shouldn't be going out there and mucking it.

00:03:12
Speaker 1: Up from a scientific perspective, like answering geological questions.

00:03:16
Speaker 2: I think that was part of it, but I think there was also a bit of a thread of a like, well, we've messed up a lot of stuff about our planet. We shouldn't let people go out and mess up another planet. And you know, I see their point, and I particularly see their point when you hear about terraforming arguments that go something along the lines of let's dump a bunch of nuclear weapons on the poles at Mars to release a bunch of water vapor, which will then create a greenhouse effect and will warm up the planet and will create an atmosphere that would be more hospitable to human life. Blah blah, blah. I think I'm not super excited about dropping nuclear weapons on Mars, is what I'm saying.

00:03:51
Speaker 1: Especially because to get n FCO two to warm with the planet, you'll create an atmosphere which is toxic to humans anyway, And so like, yeah, there's a lot of challenges there, And so I guess my answer is like assuming we can solve a lot of these really big engineering challenges, because in today's episode, we're going to think really big and really broad about like mega engineering, engineering that would impress visiting aliens. That's what we're talking about today. WHOA.

00:04:17
Speaker 2: Well, I guess if you're an alien civilization that made it all the way to Earth, you maybe wouldn't be impressed with what we've done. But I am personally impressed with the extent to which we have molded the planet to meet our needs.

00:04:28
Speaker 1: But anyway, there are lots of moments of awe. You know, every time I like drive across the Golden gate Bridge, I'm like, Wow, humans built this and it's still here like decades later. It's pretty impressive. Or every skyscraper, or frankly the COVID vaccine, I'm like, wow, we can do Yeah. So yeah, humanity has done a lot of impressive stuff, but it's just the beginning, you know. The kinds of things that we might do, the challenges we might take on, the solutions we might engineer, really are almost limitless.

00:04:57
Speaker 2: We are only getting started, which is why we need to make sure that our species persists for a very long time. So today we're gonna be talking about how we can engineer the Sun to keep our species going for much longer.

00:05:09
Speaker 1: That's right, because one of Mars terraforming proponents is always saying that Earth is going to get fried in a few billion years anyway, when the Sun expands and goes red giant, and so not only do we need to have outposts on Mars, but we got to get interstellar. And so today we're gonna talking about exactly that scenario. Is it possible to engineer the Sun using a technique called starlifting to prolong our time in the habitable zone? So, as usual, I went out there to ask our audience if they knew something about starlifting. Here's what they had to say.

00:05:42
Speaker 3: What is starlifting is that when you go to the gym and you see someone famous and you pick them up. No, that can't be it. Maybe it's something to do when a star's about to go supernova and the core is starting to burn carbon and getting into iron. Maybe the layers start to lift off and that's starlifting. I have no idea.

00:06:05
Speaker 4: Well, that is that new show that is airing on NBC at seven o'clock on Thursday nights where big movie stars compete in weightlifting competition, and it's intense and I'm ready. I'm really looking forward to seeing it.

00:06:21
Speaker 3: I have not heard of starlifting, but a star lift sounds like it could be a fun. Right at the amusement park.

00:06:30
Speaker 2: Amazing answers as always, and if you want to contribute your amazing answers, write us at questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org and we'll add you to the list of folks who get these questions ahead of time. I love the when you go to the gym and see someone famous response. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I heard that Dwayne the Rock Johnson also lives in Charlottesville. And sometimes if you go to the gym, what you will see the Rock.

00:06:55
Speaker 1: How often has that happened to you, Kelly, Oh.

00:06:57
Speaker 2: Zero times, zero times. I don't think you go to the YMCA. It probably goes to a better gym than I go to. But you know, another good reason to work out. I guess why.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: Doesn't he live in La. I thought he would be in La Dude.

00:07:08
Speaker 2: I think that he's probably part time La, part time the better coast, you know, like you're in You're in California when you have to be, but in Virginia when you have a choice, that sort of thing.

00:07:18
Speaker 1: Virginia is for lovers of Virginia. So there you go.

00:07:22
Speaker 2: Oh oh, Virginia is for everyone.

00:07:26
Speaker 1: All right. So starlifting is an engineering technique to solve a very particular problem. So before we get into the solution, I thought it'd be helpful to introduce what is the problem we're solving.

00:07:35
Speaker 2: Anyway, that's right, and fortunately for me, I won't get too mired in existential dread because the timeline here is way off in the future. But let's go ahead. Tell us about the future of the sun. Why won't the sun last forever?

00:07:48
Speaker 1: The sun won't last forever because it's in frankly, a delicate balance. It's amazing to me that stars last as long as they do. I mean, there's this incredible balancing act between gravity, which is pulling the star together and trying to collapse it down, and fusion, which is creating heat and energy and pushing the star out. And these two forces, which are fundamentally very very different, right, Fusion uses the quantum mechanical strong nuclear force. Gravity, of course, uses the curvature of space. We don't even know how to unify these things. Conceptionally they're very different pillars of physics. But here they come together and they dance together nicely for billions and billions of years. Right in the heart of the star, you have incredible pressure and temperature, and so hydrogen gets squeezed together to form helium, which releases heat. When light elements fuse together, you release heat, and when heavy elements break apart, that's fission that also releases heat. So in the heart of a star, it's sort of like a constantly exploding nuclear bomb that's generating all of this energy to prevent the star from collapsing.

00:08:54
Speaker 2: I think that's where your beautiful dance metaphor kind of falls apart, and I don't usually think of beautiful dance involving explosions of nuclear type.

00:09:03
Speaker 1: Well, that's why it's so incredible imagine a constantly exploding nuclear bomb that you're keeping in a gravitational bubble, right, and if you compress it too much, it's going to go out, it's going to turn into a black hole. If you don't compress it enough, it's going to blow itself apart. And so it's really amazing. And the outcome for these stars depends almost entirely on how much mass you have, Like if you don't have a lot of mass, you end up with a red dwarf, a smaller star, and the heart of it is lower temperature and lower pressure, and so the rate of fusion is lower, and so these stars are dimmer and cooler, which is why they're called red dwarfs. Or a much bigger stars like a blue giant, and these are hotter at their core, and they fuse a lot faster, and the peak of their glow is at a higher frequency, which is why they're called blue giants. But those stars, the bigger, more massive stars, fusion happens much more rapidly, and so they burn through their fuel. So this is this really tight relationship between the mass of the star and how long it's to expected to live. Smaller stars are cooler, and they can burn for billions, maybe even trillions of years. Red dwarfs are very very long lasting, whereas bigger stars don't burn for very long because they burn so hot and so fast. Like if you look at a population of stars, you can tell how old the population is by how many big blue stars there are. It's got a bunch of big blue stars, you know, it's got to be pretty young, because they don't last very long. As galaxies aid, they turn redder and redder because all the blue stars burn out.

00:10:31
Speaker 2: And where is our Sun on the gradient from any bitty stars to big stars.

00:10:36
Speaker 1: Our star is not one of the biggest stars in the universe. The limit is around three hundred times the mass of the Sun. A star bigger than that will have fusion so terrifyingly powerful it'll tear itself apart and it'll become smaller. But our star is bigger than the average star. So the most common star is a red dwarf that's like the median star in the universe. Our star is bigger than that, so it's a bigger, hotter star than it's typical, and its lifetime is expected to be about ten billion years, and we're halfway through that. So we've got another five billion years.

00:11:06
Speaker 2: Oh man, what do you think of midlife crisis looks like? For a Sun?

00:11:12
Speaker 1: It's talking to all the other stars. It's wondering, like, hey, do I have the right number of planets? It should I have accomplished more by this point. Have I dealt with that nacking infection on my third planet? You know? I really should snuff that out? Oh gosh before it takes over.

00:11:28
Speaker 2: No, no, let us go, Let us go. We're gonna save you in the long run, baby, we'll see, or at least we're gonna tinker with you. Okay, So we're halfway through.

00:11:36
Speaker 1: We're halfway through, and the future, the second half of the Sun's life is going to be quite different from the first half. What's going to happen is that as fusion progresses, it forms helium, and that helium is heavier than hydrogen, so it sinks to the core. So instead of just being like basically a huge ball of hydrogen, you're gonna get a helium core. Like the ash from the fusion sinks and goes to the core. But our star is not hot enough to fuse that helium, like if it was hotter and denser. You could fuse helium together, three them together to get carbon, but we can't do that. Our star is just not hot enough, so the helium is sort of inert and it blocks fusion from happening. But before that, because it's denser, it increases the temperature at the core of the star, which makes the Sun hotter. So our sun is gradually getting hotter and hotter as its core gets denser and denser because of the helium that sinks there. Roughly every one hundred million years, the Sun gets one percent brighter.

00:12:32
Speaker 2: So I guess it. It's the same with this is gonna be one of the things that like ends are species that's not funny. Helium's supposed to be funny.

00:12:41
Speaker 1: I know, if it makes you sound like a chipmugget should be funny. But also chipmunks can be quite deadly, you know. Yeah, they could take over the whole planet.

00:12:47
Speaker 2: They carry the bubonic platey.

00:12:49
Speaker 1: You go, well do yeah in New Mexico actually home with the flea land of the plague, we call it all right, there's some New Mexico pride for you. So, yeah, the sun is gradually getting brighter, and in a few billion years, the Sun will be forty percent brighter. This is why people say like the Sun is going to boil off the oceans, because in a couple of billion years, the global average temperature is going to rise to one hundred degrees sea, right where the oceans will boil. And so this is just a natural progression of the Sun. It's gonna get brighter and brighter and brighter. The Sun itself is not getting that much hotter, but it is getting brighter, and the outer layers are going to grow because as the core accumulates helium, then fusion moves further out right, you can't have fusion at the ash helium core, so you start getting fusion in the outer layers and that puffs up the Sun and that's what makes it become a red giant and does just puff it up a little bit. We're talking about the radius of the Sun growing from its current radius to two hundred times its current radius.

00:13:50
Speaker 2: Okay, so I'm starting to feel the existential dread bubble up. I didn't think this was going to happen. But we only have one to two billion years even though Earth is middle aged before our oceans boil. But I'm betting that we all die long before the oceans boil, because it takes a lot of hate to get the oceans to boil.

00:14:05
Speaker 1: You mean me and you? Are you talking about? Like me and you and all of.

00:14:08
Speaker 2: Our descendants, it would be our descendants at that point. Yeah, So how long before Earth becomes uninhabitable?

00:14:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question. That's just a few hundred million years, right, because the temperature on the surface of one hundred sea is intolerable obvious there, Right, It's a pretty good approximation that every hundred million years you get one percent brighter. It's roughly linear, and so yeah, it's going to be a few hundred million years. It's going to be much hotter than it is now. Definitely, we're talking climate change for sure. So this is something we're going to have to adapt to well before the oceans boil or the outer layers of the Sun consume the Earth.

00:14:44
Speaker 2: All right, we've got time to figure this out. But I'm still not loving it. Not cool sun.

00:14:50
Speaker 1: And so the crucial things to understand there for our later conversation is what's driving the Sun to get hotter and to get bigger, and that's the mass of the Sun. Right, If the sun were smaller, then it wouldn't do this as quickly. It would burn a lot lot longer, right, because the core would be cooler, and it wouldn't fuse as fast, and it wouldn't accumulate as much helium, and it wouldn't push the layers out, and it wouldn't get hotter and brighter. And so that's the thing that's driving the Sun to basically vanish our habitable zone.

00:15:18
Speaker 2: All right. So mostly I care about what happens to me, and I'm going to die before the Earth. Well, my ancestors will die before the Earth gets consumed by the Sun. But let's say I still care about the Earth even when there's no humans there anymore. Is it going to actually get engulfed by the Sun like swallowed up?

00:15:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something you hear in pops eye all the time, and it's not clear because there's a lot of small effects here that could change the answer. So, for example, as the Sun in its last little bit is blowing out and its redias is really growing rapidly, it's also losing some mass because it's puffing out so much, it doesn't contain all that A lot of this plasma just shoots off into space, and because it loses mass, it loses gravity, and so the Sun's pull on the Earth gets weaker. So the Earth's orbit is going to drift further out, and so rather than just staying at the same place, it's going to drift out as the Sun grows and loses some of its mass. And so people have done modeling to answer the question, are we going to escape the outer layers of the Sun. It's sort of a silly question because like it doesn't really matter if you're in the Sun or right next to the Sun, like neither way can you survive. But you know, just from a sort of like academic question, it's fascinating. You don't want to be even like a little bit engulfed. But it looks like the Earth might just sort of like skip over the outer atmosphere of the Sun, the radius of its orbit growing with the radius of the Sun.

00:16:42
Speaker 2: Could we keep ourselves in good shape by just sort of like nudging Earth farther away and closer to state exactly the right temperature throughout this whole process.

00:16:53
Speaker 1: You could try to do that to move further out, And you know, you want to stay far enough away from the Sun for sure, not just because it's going to be hot, but because if you are anywhere near the atmosphere of the Sun, then you're going to be losing kinetic energy because you're flying through the atmosphere, there's gonna be friction. You're gonna fall into the Sun. Bad bad. But anyway, if you've wanted to engineer just the Earth, the simpler thing is to move the Earth's orbit. There are things you could do to like build a huge planet rocket to move the Earth out this kind of stuff, but it's a bit of a crap shot because the whole Solar system is going to be very chaotic. Like when you lose mass of the Sun, you're also weakening the Sun's grip on Jupiter. Jubiter is going to drift further out, it's going to interact with Saturn. That's going to be a chaotic mess. And the chances that we can like predict that and navigate through Jupiter and Saturn like having a big argument and cluttering up the whole Solar system very unlikely. We think that that happened in the past, that Jupiter and Saturn went into the inner Solar System and then back out again and maybe ejected another gas giant from the Solar System, So there could be like a lost sibling planet out there and frozen in space, feeling rejected, having been literally rejected. And so the Solar System is going to get very chaotic if we let the Sun do this. And I think it'd be pretty hard not just to move the planet, but to figure out how to move it and how to protect it against Jupiter's craziness.

00:18:16
Speaker 2: I wish I had felt more optimistic during our episodes on interstellar Travel. I think I'd like to just skip all of this, just leave town. What all of this problem starts? All right, So let's take a break, and when we get back, let's talk about how we can engineer the Sun so we can avoid this situation altogether. All Right, we're back. Daniel has scared the pants off of all of us. We're going to burn up where we're going to fall into the Sun, but we're probably not going to actually fall into the Sun. We're just going to be in its hot atmosphere layers. Anyway, we're dead. So Daniel, how do we avoid this whole we die in billions of years.

00:19:11
Speaker 1: Thing we turn to the engineers and we ask them, hey, can you solve this problem. We think we understand enough of the physics of the Sun to figure out when it's going to grow and get hotter, and so in principle we should be able to engineer a solution. And there was a paper in the eighties by a guy named David Criswell coined this phrase star lifting to imagine that maybe we could prevent the Sun from getting so big and so hot by making it more like longer lasting stars, by making it smaller. That's why it's called star lifting. It's like take stuff off of the Sun. Essentially, could we go in and take a big scoop off of the Sun. And this is a little bit delicate because you don't want to turn the Sun like into a red dwarf. A red dwarf is cooler, and then the Earth wouldn't be in the habitable zone anymore. I want to do is scoop off just enough to keep the Sun from getting too big and too hot, so it sort of like maintains the same temperature throughout its lifetime and lasts a lot longer. Removing some mass would lower the pressure at the center as the helium accumulates, and so that's the sort of basic idea. It was revived in twenty seventeen in a paper by Greg Mattloff, and then a couple of years ago a really interesting paper by Matt Scoggins and David Kipping dug into the details of exactly how you would do this, And so I thought it'd be fun to talk about this engineering task and whether it's possible at all.

00:20:34
Speaker 2: First of all, this is fascinating. I will note that when you started introducing the topic, you said a lot of we think and presumably, and I feel like before we start tinkering with the sun, we should be like we are sure about And it is absolutely the case that but presumably these papers had all the right qualifiers in them, and this is just getting the conversation started.

00:20:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is definitely let's have a first conversation about whether this is possible all and not let's have a policy discussion about whether we understand the risks and decide whether the balance of risk and reward is a good one, which we definitely should have before we do anything like this, the same way that we should before we do any geoengineering. But it's still reasonable to say, hey, what is possible? And these papers are just like the very first steps towards what is possible. As you'll hear, like, the solutions are so outrageously expensive and elaborate that they aren't anything we could hope to imagine doing in the next few centuries. But you know, scientists and engineers a few centuries from that will be glad that we thought through some of the details here to make their work easier. But you're right, the policy question is separate.

00:21:43
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, I don't know. That sounds like whimp talk to me. Let's just.

00:21:49
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, I'm not advocating for any of these things, right, I just I think it's fun to think so big and to imagine what's possible. And you know, the same way, I'm like awestruck by what humans have built. I'm obstruck to imagine what we might build. But of course, yes, we do have to do it carefully. Just because you want to drill a hole through the scent of the earth to drop a ball through and see what happens doesn't mean that you should.

00:22:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I really like your approach to engineering. Think it through first, all right, So let's talk about the first proposal for how you would do this.

00:22:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, there's a few ideas. One is called the thermal driven method, and the idea is to tap into something that's already happening, which is the solar wind. The Sun is already shedding mass. It's a huge ball of plasma in space and it's mostly confined by gravity, but the atmosphere is one of the hottest parts of the Sun, and so it's constantly shooting off particles. You know, yes, photons obviously, and we're absorbing those and we enjoy those on a sunny day, but also protons and electrons. That's what we call the solar wind. And if you're out there in space as an astronaut, this is the kind of thing you have to be wary of because for you, it's radiation, very high speed particles shooting out from the Sun of space. So don't imagine space as empty. One of our episodes about interstellar travel talks about the dangers of radiation in space and it's serious, and this is where it comes from. It comes from the Sun, and then of course other suns and black holes and all sorts of stuff out there in space generate wind. And by wind, we don't mean air molecules, we mean high speed particles. So one idea is, can we enhance that, Can we get the Sun to shed more of its mass to crank up the solar wind?

00:23:26
Speaker 2: Okay, wow, So the fact that we're proposing that we're going to heat up the Sun sounds incredible to me. How can we make a dent in the hottest thing that we know about? But go ahead, let's see how what are proposals for making the Sun even hotter?

00:23:41
Speaker 1: And it doesn't sound like the kind of thing you'd want to do, right. The whole problem we're trying to solve is that the Sun is going to get too hot. So something comes along and says, the solution making it too hot is to make it hotter. A a second am I in a solar engineering conference or an insane asylum or both.

00:23:58
Speaker 2: Could be some overlap in those communities.

00:24:01
Speaker 1: Exactly choose your venue carefully. The idea is not to heat the core of the Sun, but to heat the atmosphere. This is where the solar wind happens. Right, It's the outer layers of the Sun that are super crazy hot, super high energy particle that rech escape velocity from the Sun. So instead of heating up the core, you want to heat up the atmosphere, which will help strip the Sun of some of these particles. So all you got to do in this case is basically reflect the Sun back at itself. So imagine building a bunch of mirrors which just reflect the Sun's light back to the Sun. Now, it will heat up the Sun's atmosphere. You know. It's sort of like putting a fire in an insulated box will help make the fire hotter, whereas if you don't, then the heat from the fire bleeds out into the atmosphere. And so if you have these mirrors, or you like have solar panels which gather the energy and then beam it back, you could heat up spots on the Sun's atmosphere.

00:24:56
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, And I think I'm just being too picky, because if you put a fire in an insulated box, it's going to run out of oxygen and burn out, right, No, you're right, yeah, but we understand what's happening with the sun better. We're not going to snuff out the sun accidentally.

00:25:13
Speaker 1: I'm not impressing you with my level of detail here, Daniel. Please don't put.

00:25:18
Speaker 2: Out the Come on, engineers, do better.

00:25:23
Speaker 1: You don't want to wake up one morning, get an email from Daniel bad news, I accidentally put out the sun last night.

00:25:29
Speaker 2: Well, as we discussed in a prior email, that would be a high information email.

00:25:33
Speaker 1: Yes, that would be surprising, that would be surprising. It would be a good lesson in Shannon entropy. So at least you gained something, right.

00:25:39
Speaker 2: That's right. I'm sure everybody would be through.

00:25:43
Speaker 1: No, you're right that analogy is not perfect for that reason. But in this case, you're either just having huge mirrors to reflect energy back from the Sun to heat up spots on its atmosphere, or you have some more complicated system where you're absorbing the energy using like footo wal take cells, and then you're beaming the energy back using like microwaves. Do you remember we once had a conversation about solar power in space. This is basically that same system. You have solar power. You generate energy and then you build a beam. Instead of beaming it to the Earth's surface where you're going to use it to charge your phone, you're just beaming it to the surface of the Sun to heat it up to make these hot spots.

00:26:18
Speaker 2: Okay, and this is going to buy us more time.

00:26:21
Speaker 1: This is going to buy us more time, because it's going to create more solar flares, like solar flares, or we call solar weather right our moments when the Sun has like a huge eruption of plasma which then floats out into space and sometimes it washes over the Earth and causes incredible damage. There was this Carrington event in the eighteen hundreds where huge solar flare flashed out and the Earth basically went through a plasma plume and it like fried all the electronics on the Earth, which at the time, fortunately were pretty simple. So we have some fires from like telegraph wires going haywire. But if it happened now, it would be very, very bad. But what we're talking about now is creating hotspots on the surface of the Sun which would generate solar flare, so like huge strands of plasma floating out into space, and obviously you don't want that happening in the direction of the Earth. Right, you might be thinking, Daniel again, Now you're creating like bad things, right, bad solar weather. It's bad for satellites, it's bad for the Earth, it's bad for all these things. Why would you risk this? So the idea is, yes, you create these hotspots, and those hotspots create solar flares and you get this plasma ejected. But then you try to guide it. So plasma is electrically charged, right, it's positive and negative. There are protons and there are electrons there. So you build a huge magnetic field around the Sun to guide all this stuff so it doesn't go along the ecliptic where the planets are like the Sun's equator, but it goes up to the poles.

00:27:45
Speaker 2: Okay, And so then are we going to be in any trouble if we're not getting that stuff, Like will we cool down or will we just not get hit with radiation?

00:27:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, that stuff would be bad, and so it will cool the Sun a little bit. But that's the goal, right, We want to keep the Sun from getting too hot. So if we pull this stuff out of the Sun by creating these hotspots, having it spew it, and then shepherd it up to the North and South poles, we're safe because we're not being blasted by these huge plasma strands, and we're slowly reducing the mass of the Sun, which is the whole goal, right. The goal is to take mass off of the Sun.

00:28:16
Speaker 2: All right, So it seems pretty important that you get all of this stuff heading in the right direction, because you don't want to accidentally spew a lot more radiation towards the Earth or a more settlement if we ever get one. How do we control where this stuff goes?

00:28:29
Speaker 1: So this is my favorite part because it involves building a particle accelerator that goes all the way around the Sun. So essentially you need to build a magnetic field that pushes stuff towards the Sun. And so to build a magnetic field, as we talked about in a recent episode, you need currents, you need moving electric charges, and so good to do this is to build a particle accelerator which shoots particles around the equator of the Sun. Or you have a few of these things stacked on top of each other, which basically shepherds this stuff up to the polls. And at the same time you can answer a bunch of really important fundamental physics questions because now you have a particle accelerator with an enormous radius and super high energy. And boy, wouldn't that be awesome.

00:29:11
Speaker 2: For other reasons, I wouldn't want to have to write that grant because I bet the money for the LHC was a tough sell. I mean, it's awesome, but I'm sure it was expensive. I can't imagine the price of this.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: I'm not even gonna try to put dollars on this. I mean, the price of the next collider on Earth is going to be something like fifty to one hundred billion dollars.

00:29:32
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:29:32
Speaker 1: They're also crazy out there proposals for a collider that runs along the equator of the Moon, which would be awesome for some reasons and not so awesome for other reasons, but fun to think about, and also absurdly expensive. So yeah, collider that runs along the equator of the Sun. I mean, I don't even know what the scientific prefix is for those dollars. It's beyond trillions and quadrillions and quintillions, I'm sure. But you know, we're talking about the future of humanity here. Finally particle physics will be useful.

00:30:01
Speaker 2: Oh oh, well, we talked the other day about how particle physics gave us a new treatment for cancer, so it will be useful for a second time. Only those two though, So this.

00:30:13
Speaker 1: Is one scheme to try to slurp some stuff off the Sun, and then at the North and South poles you have these like magnetic nozzles which focus the stuff and gather it and then you could actually like use it for something. This is raw material or if your goal is to like build megastructures, a dice in sphere or other crazy engineering projects in your solar system, elimiting factors having enough stuff. Like you might say, I want to take Jupiter apart and use it to build a Dyson sphere, it might not be enough. And so just having raw material is important. And the Sun is the biggest source of raw material in the Solar system. I mean, the Solar system is basically the Sun plus right, and we're like those little extra bits. So gathering that stuff off the Sun gives you an enormous amount of mass to play with to build other stuff.

00:30:58
Speaker 2: But it's in the form of gas when you right.

00:31:00
Speaker 1: It's in the form of plasma mostly, And you might think it's mostly hydrogen. Who really cares, well, hydrogen's good for building stuff, and the Sun has lots of other stuff in it that's not just hydrogen. Like it's mostly hydrogen, it's two percent metals or something, but it still has Most of the iron in the Solar system is in the Sun. Most of the oxygen, most of the nickel, most of the basic building blocks of silicon are in the Sun. Like the Sun has twenty times as much of all those basic elements as Jupiter does, and it's distributed all through the Sun because of convection, you know, the plasma currents, and so if you are funneling mass off of the Sun, then yeah, you could slurp off an enormous amount of pretty useful basic ingredients for your other insanely expensive engineering projects.

00:31:47
Speaker 2: Yay, it's crazy all the way down.

00:31:51
Speaker 1: Crazy enables crazy.

00:31:52
Speaker 2: Thank goodness. So iron is getting ejected in the solar flares, in the solar wind.

00:31:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's mostly hydrogen, but it's a good mixture. I mean, iron is not being made in our sun, right, so it's not like it's only at the core. And if there is iron there from previous rounds of stellar nucleosynthesis, and a lot of it does sink to the core because it's heavier. But also the Sun is a big churning ball of plasma, and this convection that brings stuff up right also the way that you know, like diamonds are made inside the Earth, but then convection brings stuff up to the mantle and to the surface. So yeah, we could definitely get iron out of the sun. I mean definitely. You can't say definitely about anything about this project. It's ridiculous upon ridiculous upon ridiculous. In theory, one could get iron out of the sun to build your other absurd projects.

00:32:41
Speaker 2: All right, So we're gonna talk about at least one other proposal. Is this proposal that you just explained to us more or less crazy than the next one we're going to talk about.

00:32:52
Speaker 1: Oh boy, that's a tough question. I think it's differently crazy. I mean, none of these are very realistic and all require all sorts of engineering problems that we don't know how to solve. But they are also fun to think about because you know, they just make you think big.

00:33:08
Speaker 2: That's right, And when we get back, we will think big in a different way. All right, we're back and we're thinking big about engineering projects. We are engineering the sun today. On Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, we talked about one kind of Nutsoe method. What method are we going to talk about next? Daniel?

00:33:44
Speaker 1: So the next method is called the huff and puff method. So that everybody takes it very very seriously, no doubt, and they do hear similar to what we talked about a minute ago. But earlier we were heating of specific spots on the Sun to get it to eject mass. We're going to basically try to pump the whole sun like bellows. And so you still build your particle accelerator around the equator. I mean you gotta have that, right, that's non negotiable.

00:34:11
Speaker 2: What is science without a particle accelerator? That's have you heard of this? This this concept called the Overton window, where like someone does something super extreme. Yeah, to make what you're proposing seem less crazy, you're probably having some people pitch these ideas to the funder so that when you just have something that's like one hundred trillion dollars or something, they'll be like, oh, the particle physicists are being less crazy today.

00:34:32
Speaker 1: You have revealed my secret scheme here, Kelly, I am shifting the Overton window.

00:34:38
Speaker 2: Well, I study animal behavior.

00:34:41
Speaker 1: This is a This is basically the Combin and Hobbs method, you know, where he asks his mom if you can have a flamethrower. She says no, and he says, can have a cookie. She's like sure, yeah, that's right, that's right, all right. So here you build a particle accelerator around the core, and you know, this thing is kept in place by the magnetic field that it generates, which floats over the Sun. But in this case, you can turn it on and off. So you turn it off, and all the components of the particle accelerator, which you're not connected, it's a big ring. It's just components which shoot particles between them. All these components then fall towards the Sun because of its gravity. Then you turn it back on and it rises back up again and pushes against the star. And so essentially this is like massaging the star. You like drop a magnetic ring around the star and then turn it back on and it pushes itself back out, squeezing the star. So you do this over and over again, and it like pumps the star's atmosphere, moving mass up to the pole. So it's sort of like squeezing it, like massaging it, kind of like bellows on the sun.

00:35:43
Speaker 2: And for anyone who didn't grow up in the Victorian era using bellows on their fireplace, what would you like to explain what a bellow is?

00:35:53
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah, it's basically like a big fan, right, you squeeze it and it shoots a stream of air towards a useful spot on your fire to help blow. It's sort of like leaning over the campfire and going you know, but mechanically, how is that for an explanation of bellows?

00:36:09
Speaker 2: I think people are following us. You're good. I wish people could could watch the video because you are particularly animated in this episode, like you've hit your microphone at least once as you gesticulate in enjoy at this engineering idea.

00:36:24
Speaker 1: Well, you know, sometimes we dig deep into like real physics and what we're learning about the universe, and sometimes we just have fun.

00:36:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well I think we always just have fun. But we're having a lot of fun today. Okay, So the idea is that you squeeze, and when you squeeze, how do you control when you squeeze where the stuff goes.

00:36:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, so if you're squeezing at the equator, there's only one way it can go towards the poles. So then you've got to build another acceleratory of like a stack of these things. That's sort of like massage the mass as it goes up. So you squeeze the equator and then you squeeze just above it, and you squeeze just above it. You know, like a coordinated action here to sort of push the Sun's atmosphere towards the poles. I mean, the whole thing sounds like, boy, how would you know that that works before you build it and try it? And what if it goes wrong? You know, that's the joy of like being the first person to think about something is you just get to think about the big picture and don't worry about details like is this going to destroy everything in this solar system?

00:37:21
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, that's a pretty important detail. But so how do you know you're not just moving around stuff the sun was going to make anyway, and you're actually increasing the amount of stuff that gets ejected or heating up the sun or whatever. How do you know you're accomplishing your goal instead of just moving stuff around?

00:37:36
Speaker 1: Yeah? Great question. And you know they've done some simple modeling and it really does suggest that either of these methods could eject more mass than you normally would, that a sun left to its own devices would burn hotter and more briefly than a sun that's engineered in this way. And they did some calculations also to wonder like, well, how much could you do, Like are we talking about ejecting ten protons or really a significant amount of stuff? And according to these calculations, you can reject about an earth's worth of mass every hundred years. So that's not a tiny amount of stuff, like the Earth is a tiny fraction of the Sun. But you know, a century is a long time, and we're talking about timelines of millions or tens of millions of years. So that's a significant amount of stuff. And if you just did it naively and extrapolated linearly, it could take apart the Sun in you know, fifty to one hundred million years, like the whole mass of the Sun eventually could be extracted. Of course, once you get to like ten percent of the mass of the Sun being ejected, the whole system is going to change and everything is going to be cooler, and so you can't extrapolate linearly. But just to give you a sense of scale of how effective this is, it's not a tiny amount of mass that you're rejecting relative to the mass of the Sun.

00:38:47
Speaker 2: All right, So this is the amount of time it would take to take the Sun apart. But I didn't know that that was our goal. I thought our goal was slowing down the destruction of the Earth. So how much time this by humans?

00:39:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, we do not want to take apart the Sun, absolutely not. What we want to do is gradually cool the Sun so that it stays at the same temperature, because remember, its natural progression is going to be to get hotter and hotter as the core gets denser, and then fusion moves to the outer layers. So that's where this paper from twenty twenty came in by Mas Goggins and David Kipping. They calculated how much mass would you have to remove from the Sun every year in order to maintain that temperature to essentially move the Sun from its natural arc at this mass down gradually to the arc you would expect for lower mass stars. You can imagine like the temperature progressions for individual stars which started a certain mass and red dwarfs last a long time and stay at a lower temperature. Essentially you want to step down from one progression to another. So they did this cool calculation which suggested that what you want to do is remove about two to three percent of the mass of series series is a dwarf planet in our solar system. It's the largest thing in the asteroid belt. It's like a big chunk of stuff. It's much smaller than the Earth. So like two to three percent of the massive series every century would accomplish this, So you don't have to take the Sun apart. You don't want to take the Sun apart. The point of this calculation is, in principle, this technique has the capacity to remove plenty of mass, much more than we would need if we wanted to engineer the star for our safety, and to engineer the Star for our safety, we only need to skim off a little bit of mass every hundred years or so to avoid the Sun going red giant and frying us.

00:40:34
Speaker 2: So this paper wasn't necessarily advocating for either of the two methods we talked about. It's just saying, whatever method you use, you got to get two and a half percent the massive series every one hundred years off the Sun. Is that right?

00:40:48
Speaker 1: Yeah? Okay, yeah exactly, And if you do that successfully, and there's lots of problems to solve between here and there, but in principle, you can have our Sun last a lot longer. So instead of having a ten billion in your life cycle. It could have a twenty billion year life cycle. Oh wow, so you're adding ten billion years to civilization, giving us a lot more time to find an alternative home for the Earth.

00:41:11
Speaker 2: Wow. Can we can we adjust this method so that we can get humans to live twice as long? This is pretty exciting.

00:41:19
Speaker 1: Yeah. I need to build a big particle accelerator to remove mass from Daniel. That's what I need to do.

00:41:24
Speaker 2: Always asking for money, Daniel, always asking for money.

00:41:29
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's interesting to think about the alternatives, like if we lived around a red dwarf, then already the star would be lasting a long long time, you know, much longer than us. Hundreds of billions of years, maybe trillions. It's not really certain because the universe isn't old enough to have like a red dwarf cool and become a black dwarf. We've never seen that happen. But you can imagine having an even longer lived star. If you started, for example, from like an orange dwarf, which is something that has the mass of half of the Sun, then there's enough mass there to play with because it can be hot enough to create a nice environment and have enough mass to lose so it'll keep burning. Like if you try to starlift a red dwarf, there's not really a whole lot of extra masks there. It'll just like go out. It's just above the threshold for fusion. But if you start with like a nice toasty orange dwarf and then star lift it, the calculations in this paper suggest it might go for like a trillion years.

00:42:22
Speaker 2: So we're already making plans for what happens when we go to different like solar systems and start tickering with their stars. We are a very self confidence species.

00:42:34
Speaker 1: Yeah this really is Project Icarus, right, Yeah.

00:42:37
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. Okay, so we've talked about how you're going to be like channeling all of this stuff to the poles. But does making it go to the poles instead of shooting directly at us solve all of the problems we might experience from all of this extra like sun mask getting shot out into space.

00:42:54
Speaker 1: Not necessarily, because number one, we can't guarantee that all of it's going to go to the poles, right and on the whole. What you're going to do is increase the solar wind everywhere, right, Like if you have hot spots on the surface of the Sun. You can channel a lot of it up, but magnetic fields are not perfect, and some of it's going to escape, and so you're risking more radiation in space for our burgeoning solar system industry. Right, this whole context assumes we have like a lot of space based economy and people moving through space, and so increased stellar wind for that is going to be bad. And unless, of course, we develop some awesome radiation shielding technology, which maybe we could. Maybe that's a small problem compared to like lifting mass off of the Sun, but you know, it's not easy. And remember, we don't really understand the Sun. Like there's a lot we do know about the Sun, but also a lot we don't. We don't even understand why it's magnetic field flips every eleven years. So there can be a lot of surprises here, a lot of things that don't go the way that we expect. And when things don't go the way we expect on the scale of a star, then it can be very bad.

00:43:54
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, high cost to human hubris in this case, I.

00:43:57
Speaker 1: Think, and even getting it a little bit wrong could increase bad solar weather in the Solar system. We could basically make it impossible to move around the Solar system. We just like get the star grumpy and it like takes a billion years to calm down, you know, like, oh my gosh, that's you know, maybe unrecoverable.

00:44:16
Speaker 2: Okay, so I def first of all, I absolutely want to read the sci fi novel written about this idea. But second, so it really seems to me that if you're going to take this task on, like first you send out the interstellar ships and then then you start tickering like we might kill everyone. So let's make sure that we send some human seed out into the universe.

00:44:37
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, make a backup copy before you start playing with things at work.

00:44:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yes, it's a good spaceic tenet of computer programming, I'm guessing exactly.

00:44:47
Speaker 1: And you know, the energy required to do this kind of stuff is vast, not just to build the particle accelerator or these solar powered stations and beam energy back of the Sun, but you know, just like the energy involved in lifting material out of the Sun's gravitational well is huge because the gravity of the Sun is huge, and the Earth is already almost too massive to launch off of using chemical rockets, And so we're talking about incredible scales of energy here. The good news is the Sun has incredible scales of energy. So yes, you need enormous amounts of energy to beam back to the Sun to heat it up and to run this particle accelerator. But we're talking about the Sun, so it outputs a lot of energy you can just grab. But you know, we're playing with enormous quantities here, and so again, like mistakes and miscalculations, the consequences of getting things wrong are just much bigger.

00:45:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's probably not enough material on Earth to build these things that you're talking about. Would we have to collect the material for these devices from other planets or from the asteroid belt or is there enough stuff on Earth? Am I totally wrong about this?

00:45:57
Speaker 1: You definitely need a lot of material to solve this problem because you're, for example, and gathering all this energy to shoot the back of the Sun. Then you're building huge solar power collectors, not as massive as a dice in sphere or even like a sphere people would want to live on, but still it's a huge engineering project. I don't think you'd want to take chunks off the Earth. But like, you know, what is mercury good? For anyway.

00:46:20
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. I'm sure every culture on Earth would be fine if you just disassembled Mercury, although maybe if they were facing their own demise, they would be fine.

00:46:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. So you know, we just launched like an AI probe to Mercury. We tell it to build a factory to make more of itself, to make solar power plants, which then power itself, and like hope that it continues following our instructions to build the sunlift or rather than launching, you know, an armada against Earth to take over.

00:46:44
Speaker 2: That is the start to the sci fi novel that I want to read about this, because I can absolutely imagine that going wrong.

00:46:52
Speaker 1: But you know, I think the bigger picture here is that we often think about the cosmos as fixed. You know. Number one, we think about the Solar system as always being the way that it is because it has been this way for a long time according to human timelines. You know, humans have always looked up at the stars and seen the same thing over the last tens of thousands of years. But on cosmic timelines, the story is different. The Solar system has looked different, and the Sun will not last forever, and we don't have to think about it as fixed. It is possible for us to intervene to change our fate. We don't just have to lay down and take it. We can blow ourselves up instead.

00:47:28
Speaker 2: Oh great, I mean at least you've got a little bit more control over the situation. And that feels good. That feels good.

00:47:35
Speaker 1: Yeah. Would that make you feel better if we off fry up due to an engineering mistake rather than just like getting crisped naturally, No, No, it.

00:47:42
Speaker 2: Wouldn't, especially if it's sped the process up. But the good news is we have a lot of time, and if you invest in science, we can increase our certainty in these technologies. And I'd better understand how the sun works so that we can all save ourselves.

00:47:55
Speaker 1: One day exactly. So thank you for coming along on this ride where we stretch the window for science funding out to trillions of dollars.

00:48:05
Speaker 2: I'm sure this is going to change everything for science funding. Bravo, Daniel and Kelly.

00:48:09
Speaker 1: I'm probably my best to be optimistic today.

00:48:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, I like that. All right, let's take that optimism with us outside the podcast. Hope everybody has a fantastic day. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

00:48:31
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