Could we build a particle collider on the moon?

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Speaker 1: So, Daniel, how much did it cost to find the Higgs Boson? Well, do you want the answer in dollars, in euros or in aircraft carriers? His aircraft carriers a real unit of currency. Yeah. Absolutely, The large hage On collider, for example, cost one aircraft carrier. Awesome, that sounds like a good deal. And so how much is that in dollars? It's about thirteen billion dollars per aircraft carrier. Okay, now it's sounding a little bit out of my budget, and that's exactly why we quoted in aircraft carriers. Actually, maybe we should have made the collider cost like point nine nine aircraft carriers to make it sound cheaper. Sold, I'll take two. Did you want a plastic bag with that? Or did you bring you around? Hi? I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor UC Irvine, and I would love to go shopping for bigger colliders. And I'm Katie Golden. I'm the host of Creature Feature and I always take my reusable bag when buying aircraft carrier's worth of Hadron colliders because I like to live sustainably. And welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe in which we aim to buy all of the knowledge in the universe. There's nothing out there we don't want to know, and we will encourage humanity to spend, spend, spend until we figure it out. We want to know what's on the inside of black holes. We want to know all about the soup that's in neutron stars. We want to understand the tiniest buzzing particles in the passage of time, the origins of the universe and its final fate. We dig into all of this on this podcast, and it's playing all of it to you. My friend and co host Jorges not here today, so we are lucky to be joined by one of our favorite guest co host Katie. Katie thinks very much for joining us today. Always a blast coming on here, sometimes literally. So, Katie, what is the biggest thing you have put in a reusable bag? Oh, that's a good question. I mean I want to go with like a huge supply of toilet paper is probably the most accurate answer. The heaviest thing probably be when I got like weights from the store and you know, like exercise weights, and they're really heavy and I'm carrying them back to my apartment, and I'm thinking, this sucks. This is so heavy. But then when I just lift them voluntarily, it's like, this is great, this is exercise. But when I had to carry them back, that's when it sucks. Well, I think that in our house, the thing that's most commonly put in bags are other bags. I don't know if you end up with the same scenario, but we have like bags stuffed with bags filled with other bags, and eventually we're like, why do we even have these bags if they're just to hold other bags, But you need bigger bags to hold the bags that are holding the smaller bags. It's like we're afraid will be caught out without the right size bag at some moment, so we end up just being like drowning in bags. I reorganized our garage the other weekend, and I feel like it was about fifty just bags. Maybe that's the true sort of gray goo that's going to overtake the earth as bags and bags and bags. I think. So when the aliens do come, they will find the remnants of our civilization buried in plastic bags. But I hope that we as a civilization can aim higher than just producing more plastic bags or even sustainable bags. I hope that we can produce great works of science and technology. When I look at something like the Golden gate Bridge, I think like, wow, go humans, Look what we have accomplished, something that a single human could never build on their own. But a bunch of people coming together and putting their brains to it and designing it and spending years and of course millions of dollars have accomplished something really incredible. And the same is true for some of our great science experiments. The International Space Station floating above the Earth, large ha John Collider underground. These are like enormous monuments to the human intellect, don't you think? Yeah? I mean I'm thinking a sort of theme park on the moon where we have like a Golden gate Bridge, maybe a statue of liberty. Would that be a good waste of our money? Or maybe we should do something a little more scientific. Maybe we should take a bunch of bags and recycle them into a huge monument for humanity. Mm I like that. Yeah. What would you say are some of the great monuments to science in biology? Like what can you point to and say, look what we have built? I mean, when we're talking about biology, it's sort of on a very small scale, right. I feel like some of the greatest monuments to our knowledge and biology are the smallest things, like our ability to make vaccines and to have these really precise surgeries. So when it comes to biology, these really tiny, little, itty bitty discoveries are the most incredible things, like a COVID vaccine, which can totally change the course of human history and save thousands or millions of lives. Right, it is really incredible what biology has accomplished, exactly. Yeah, But with physics, sometimes you need to go big to even find the teeniest, tiniest particle, right, Like, it seems like the smaller and more elusive the particle, the bigger the structure around it has to be to actually measure it. That's right, And that's the history of particle colliders. We started in the fifties with EO. Lawrence in Berkeley building cyclotrons and these things, you know, like one or two mems around so the electrons could get up to what at the time felt like very high energies. And then they just got bigger and bigger, and we had colliders all over the world. We have colliders in Chicago that were kilometers long, and now we have one in Geneva which is tens of kilometers long, and people are talking about building even bigger colliders and bigger colliders, and so a fun question to consider is like, well, how big can we go? Should we aim for? Like Solar system sized colliders, galaxy size colliders? Are there aliens out there that have already built galaxy sized colliders? Are we part of an aliens collider? You know? Joking aside? There is it really fun mystery there because the Earth is bombarded by very high energy particles from space cosmic rays that nobody can explain. And one ridiculous but fun theory is that maybe it's pollution from alien particle physics experiments. Like somebody out there has built an ginormous collider and we're basically the beam dump. Is this an accident or maybe alien crimes? Maybe it's messaging, right, They've built this collider to send these particles to us to like tell us the secrets of the universe, and we just don't know how to decode it. Yeah, I mean it would be something if we thought this was a message and then we just realized it's garbage from space that they've been shooting at us. But we don't just build these colliders bigger and bigger because we think it's fun and because we want to build larger and larger monuments to physics. This isn't Ausimandias, right. We build these colliders larger and larger because the bigger the collider, the more I can tell us about the nature of the universe. You can think about these colliders sort of like microscopes. The bigger the collider is, the smaller the thing it can see, the more it can peer into the nature of matter and tell us like, what's really going on down there, what's inside the particles that we think are fundamental are their new particles out there? And so it's not just Hubrius. It's not just because we want to have a bigger collider than the next guy. It's because we really want to answer these questions about the universe. And it's sort of like the pinnacle of modern particle physics to build these huge cathedrals to investigation. Now, it is a little counterintuitive that they're so big, because when I think about studying something small, I'm thinking of having to shrink down to the size of the small thing to be able to see the small thing. So why would you need such a big structure to study something so small? Because in our universe, as opposed to the marvel cinematic universe, where antman can just shrink himself down to the quantum scale, we can't do that. We have to stay at our size, and so we have to tear apart quantum objects, which requires huge energies. You want to pull apart the nucleus of the atom. That stuff is really tightly bound together. You want to peer inside the proton. The gluons inside the proton are really holding it together. So you need really really powerful hammers basically to smash these little bits so that you can see them. Sounds a little dangerous. I would recommend getting in the way of that hammer, no matter how many layers of plastic bags you have wrapped around you. But physicists are talking about this kind of thing seriously because these collider take decades to build. They take even more decades to plan and to fund and to organize the politics of getting the billions of dollars all lined up to build them. And right now particle physicists are engaged in a project to plan out the next ten twenty fifty years of particle physics, and so people are talking about what should we build next? And there are practical suggestions for what the next collider might be, and they're also fanciful ideas for what the next or next next collider might be. I bet there are a lot of not in my backyard types who don't want a h drawn collider in their backyard. But oh, sure in someone else's backyard. You joke, but that is part of it. And so on today's episode will be exploring one of these crazy ideas for a new particle collider, will be answering the question should we build a particle collider on the Moon? Well nineteen something something called and they want their Austin Ours movie building back. It does sound like something you would build while stroking your white cat and sitting under your volcano in your layer. So when I first sent you this idea, did you think it was totally ridiculous? What do you think? Wow? I would be amazed if humans could do that. I mean, we put Tartar grades those little tiny water bears on the Moon, So I don't see any reason why we shouldn't put a particle collider on the Moon and then let the tartar grades run it. That's the actual next step for you. You're like, if they're tartar grades there, we should put a collider there. Yeah, why not? There are tartar grades everywhere. They're tarte grades in the Pacific Ocean. She would put a huge particle collider in the Pacific. Well, as long as it doesn't get in the way of any like snapping shrimp mating strategies, then maybe. Well, as we're leading into on today's episode, you'll find that putting a particle collider on the Moon might answer some deep questions about physics and solve some problems about existing colliders, but it comes with its own unique set of challenges. And so, as usual, before we dug into the topic, I went out there to ask people what they thought about this question. Would it be practical to build a particle collider on the Moon. So thanks to everybody who volunteered to answer random questions in their inbox from a physicist without the opportunity to do any googling. If you'd like to participate and here yourself baselessly speculate on difficult topics on the podcast, please don't be shy right to me two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. So before you hear these answers, think to yourself, should we build a particle collider on the Moon. Here's what people had to say. Yes, we should definitely build a particle collider on the Moon, but we should use such financial resources to achieve fusion and I'm sure we can survive on this planet. First, I'm assuming this question is being asked because there's a lot of space up there, and you don't have to go around buildings, and it's quiet, there's no electromagnetic disturbances. I don't know if those benefits would outweigh the detriments of it being so far away and so hard to maintain and so hard to staff. It sounds like a fun idea, but probably not the best use of our resources. I don't know how much the effects of gravity impact our design of particle accelerators, but that and possible interference from ground traffic, earthquakes, all those sorts of things that can potentially disrupt experiments, UH could all improve the results from testing That would be seriously expensive. If we could conduct experiments up there that we just couldn't do down here, then yeah, I'd be all for it, and I think we should build it um, But if the experiments aren't going to be that different, then I think those resources could be better spent elsewhere. Of course, we should be the particle collider, even on Marth. Well, I think we should do this all these things because you never know whant to go, what you're gonna find. Let's create jobs. I think we should definitely build a particle collider on the Moon, maybe even around the entire Moon. I have no objections to that. I say why not. I'm gonna say now, because the Moon has a lot of different particles in there are Earth. Well, because there's a lot of the plants on Earth and there's basically no plants on the Moon, that that is quite true. I don't know. Maybe there's a maybe because it's in vacuum and cold, maybe we could do something with superconductors. Yeah, so maybe it would be easier to have more electricity there. We can actually make it go a bit faster or something. I think it would be interesting to build one of the Moon, at least not maybe not a very large HC or the Fermi lat form, but I think it would be possible to build quite uh, small particles collator in the moon, see some interesting stuff without the gravity. Go bigger, go home? Definitely, why not even bigger? Let's build one the size of our solar system so we can really measure some gigantic things. Where we get money for this? I have no idea. I really like the answer of we should do it, but maybe not a very large one, just a little one, you know, just like, yes, we should have one, but let's be reasonable people, Let's make it, you know, medium size. You know, it's so reasonable to build a little any medical eider very very far away when nobody can get to it. No. I like the one that says, let's go big, build one the size of the solar system. I mean, while we're spending a jillion dollars, why not spend a budget jillion dollars? Right? It all just feels like made up money at this point. Yeah, I mean, you know, if we turn our currency into aircraft carriers, maybe we're gonna get somewhere. Joking aside, I think there is an important point there. These things feel really expensive to us, like ten billion dollars. I mean, it's so much more than you and your entire family will earn your entire lifetime. I mean, I don't know what you've invested in, but I'm imagining not a billionaire. It just seems like an unimaginedly vast sum of money, doesn't it. But it's not that much money on the scale of societies, you know, collectively, the financial power of a country is enormous, So that like ten billion dollars is a tiny blip in the US budget. It really is just like one more or one fewer aircraft carrier. You know, the US Congress spends five billion dollars without even thinking about it too much. When you're talking about unlocking the secrets of the universe, we're like in the store where they sell the secrets of the universe, and we have enough money in our pocket to buy it, we're just deciding not to because we want to go down the street and go to the aircraft carrier store instead. So these things really are achievable, either by the US or by the global community. It's just a question of whether we want to do it. Yeah, And I feel the perhaps more important metric isn't necessarily money directly, but the idea of the carbon cost of things. So is it too much of a carbon cost to build something or is the knowledge that we get from it worth that kind of you know, exchange in terms of the amount of fuel we would need to get to the moon or something. But that's not really reasoning that we use often when we're building aircraft carriers. I don't think we think about, hey, the cost of the environment of this, But that would be my my only sort of concern in terms of the budget on uh, building a big thing. Yeah, that's interesting point. I wonder if Elon Musk is designing an all electric aircraft carrier, you know, Tesla's first aircraft carrier. Well, let's take into the question, and I think maybe the place to start is to try to understand why particle colliders have to be so big. I mean, it's not just that we like to build big things, but there's a reason why these things are massive, right, Yeah, So this is what I want to find out more about because I think of a really tiny thing. You know, what's with all of this extra space. Surely you don't need that much storage space for like a little cork, right, That's right. It's not about like having a big enough bag to hold a cork. It's about tearing that cork out of the bonds that it's held in. And there really are two different things that we want to do here, but both of them require a lot of energy. One is take the particles that we know and try to break them into pieces, like find out what's inside a cork. Is a cork made of smaller little bits, maybe strings or sub corks or quirkinos or whatever you would want to call them. I'm sure we should consult Jorge when the time time comes you know what are they made out of? And what we've discovered in the last few decades is that as you go deeper and deeper into the atom, the bonds get more and more powerful. Right Like, the bonds that hold an electron to the nucleus are very strong. They're much more powerful than gravity, for example, which is the force you deal with on everyday basis. And the bonds that hold the nucleus together are the strong force, which are even more powerful, which is why fission and fusion and nuclear power have so much capacity to release energy bound in the nucleus. So we suspect that as we go deeper and look inside the proton and then inside the cork, will need even more energy to tear that apart. The second reason we need a lot of energy in these collisions is that we want to make new stuff. We want to discover new particles we haven't seen yet. And sometimes those new particles are very, very heavy, Like the Higgs boson is a hundred and twenty five times as massive as a proton, So to make it, you can't just toss two protons together gently. You've got to give those roton is a lot of energy. That's the whole E equals mc squared thing. So the short answer is you want a lot of energy in your collider in order to answer the deep questions of the universe. So my understanding of atom smashing is somewhat limited to nuclear explosions. So when I think about smashing an atom, I think of mass destruction. How do you make a collider not explode? That's a great question, and that's not a question I've ever been asked before, Like, why don't we have a nuclear bomb every time two particles collide? That's a great question, But the answer is basically that we do. The thing is that we don't have a sustained reaction. So what happens is you smash two protons together for example, and the protons collide and they get broken apart, and the corks inside them interact, and you do get a massive release of energy, but the energy is like fairly small compared to a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb you have like killing rams of fuel and the nuclear reaction starts and then it goes off in the chain reactions. So you have like you know, ten to the twenty six protons all releasing their energy simultaneously in a very short amount of time. That's a bomb. You have a single proton releasing its energy. It's not actually that much energy. It's just one proton. So the reason we don't have like nuclear explosions all the time is that we had to do one proton at a time. Basically, I say, so, you're really only in danger if you stand on the target area, probably with a bunch of warning signs around for you not to stand there. Yes, nobody should stand in the beam or near the beam. There is radiation produced in these collisions. You smash two protons together and a bunch of particles fly out of very high energy. And that's why these collisions are usually done underground, like large hadron collider in Geneva is about a hundred meters underground, and that's enough ground to absorb all the radiations, so nobody on the surface should feel a thing, and people down operating the collider they protected by lead or or some kind of shield. Absolutely surround the whole thing with concrete and with layers of lead, and the people who are operating it are usually actually up on the surface, and so there's nobody down at the beam level when the thing is running. That's a clever way to tell me that there aren't a secret society of more people operating these colliders. Maybe there are, but it's a secret. But the key thing is that you want a lot of energy so you can peer inside the nature of matter or maybe make new weird particles, particles that haven't existed since the beginning of the universe. For example, the way that we discovered the top Cork was by smashing particles together at energies. Nobody's ever done it before, and because we created enough energy in one tiny little spot, we were able to turn all that energy into a new massive particle. The reason the top Cork took so long to discover, decades of searching, was because it was more massive than anybody expected, so we had to put more energy into it than anybody expected. So we have to build a whole series of larger and larger colliders to get to those high energies. So when you're building this larger collider, I'm imagining sort of a an area where some kind of beam is focused. But to put it in very simple terms, because I'm going to need that to understand it, what is the shooty part, Like, how does the shooty part work? And what is it doing when it is sort of shooting this energy into into these particles. It's a great question. Colliders come in two varieties. There are linear colliders that are like a straight line where they accelerate the particles and smash them together. Or particles come in the circular variety, right like the large Hadron collider, where the particles go around a lot of times before they collide. And the advantage of the circular one is that you can push the particles many many times to get them up to even higher speeds before they collide. So in a circular collider, which you have our little sections that push the particles, and these are just sections that have like electromagnetic waves that push the particles of particles like surf on these electromagnetic waves there. RF cavities have a lot of energy in them, and any particle that goes in there that has a charge like an electron or a proton, is going to get pulled out the other side. So that's sort of the shooty part. It pushes the particles. We only really know how to do that in a straight line, like we can't really make a bendy accelerator. We can make a little straight line accelerator. So to make an accelerator that goes in a circle, which you need are a bunch of these RF cavities, the shooty parts that give the particles a kick, and then you need something to bend it. So we have magnets. So these really powerful electromagnets will bend the path of a particle. So when a particle hits a magnetic field, it curves. That's why, for example, the magnetic field of the Earth protects us from particles from space because it bends them and deflects them away from hitting the surface. So a big collider like large hadron collider, has parts that push the particles and then bend and then push them bend and then push them bend and there's like twelve magnets all the way around this thirty three kilometer ring. Wow, don't get your computer near that thing. I've learned that it'll wipe your credit cards in just a moment. But yeah, that's essentially the shooting part. And that's also why these things have to get bigger and bigger, because if you want the particle to get higher and higher energy, you need more of those bits that push on it that make it go faster. You know, imagine particles are going around the ring and each one is giving it a little kick, so sort of like you're running through a room with your friends and everybody gives you a little push as you go by. By the time you get out the other side of the room, you're going really fast, and so you want to go faster and faster, you need more of those things that push it. At the same time, the faster you're going, the stronger the magnets you need, or the more magnets you need to keep it going in a circle. So you can either have like really strong magnets or you can have a really really big ring. So it's like the world's biggest and most expensive game of curling. Shout out to all the Canadians. You're listening exactly. So you want higher energy so you can explore the universe more deeply and answer some of the big open questions. But the more energy you have, the bigger the collider has to be, so you have more of those pushy bits that make it go faster, and also so you can effectively bend it in a circle because you can go around many, many times that you can get your particles up to even higher and higher energies because you can reuse those pushy bits and at a large change on collider before the particles smash into each other. They go around the ring billions and billions of times. It's lots of laps before the end of the race for them. Well, so how long does it take for a particle to go around the loop? A billion times? That's a great question. So you know, these particles are basically going at the speed of light. It's like point C and they're going thirty three kilometers, So it takes about one micro second for a proton to go all the way around the ring fast. It's pretty fast, right, thirty three kilometers in a microsecond. That's the speed of light for you. But it goes around lots and lots of times, and actually we inject the beam, which is like this little cloud of protons that whizzes around the collider, and the beam lasts for you know, tens of hours before eventually enough protons have collided and the beam has gotten sort of diffuse that they dump it and they start again with a fresh beam. So an individual proton can be in the large Hadron collider for like a day, day and a half sometimes, which means it makes a lot of trips around. It's a lot of laps. Wow, you get to take home the stale protons after after work or is that not advisable. That's a great question. I've never seen what they do with the used up protons um. I think they just smashed them into a beam dump and nobody uses them. You know, they should sell them in the gift store. Though this proton was in the large haye On collider, it's not a radioactive So I want to talk some more about why we want to build bigger and bigger colliders, the secrets of the universe that we might unlock, and then why people are talking seriously or semi seriously about building one on the moon. But first let's take a quick break and I'm going to look up those used protons on the black market. All right, we're back and we are starting our Etsy store selling used protons from the Large Hadron Collider. How much food be sell them for? Look, I'm feeling generous today, so maybe half of an aircraft carrier, that's right, and but bring your own bag. Right, this is definitely a B Y O B kind of Styes, re usable, reuse, recycle. We're sustainable here. So people out there might be wondering, like, why do you want to build a bigger collider? What's left to figure out? After all, didn't we discover the Higgs boson, which is called the last piece of the standard model? What mysteries are there left to unlock? Are you guys just wanting to build bigger colliders because you like building big stuff or they're real scientific questions left to be answered in a real as killed But you know, while the Large Hadron Collider was amazingly successful in discovering the Higgs boson, which is a triumph for modern physics, and blah blah blah. Regular listeners to the podcast will definitely be familiar with the open questions of particle physics. There's so many things that we don't know about the universe. For example, we've discovered the nature of the matter that makes us up, but we still don't know what most of the universe is actually made out of. Right, five of the universe is made out of the familiar particles quarks and electrons. That accounts for things like stars and gas and dust and the visible galaxies and hamsters and lava and plastic bags and aircraft carriers. But this twenty five percent of the universe is made of something else, dark matter, which is not made out of quarks and electrons. And so that's a pretty big open question. Is dark matter of particle? Could we make it the large Hadron collider? What is it made out of? Just one example of the kind of questions about the universe that remain open. So, if we can make colliders here on Earth underground that are safe, why would we even need it on the Moon in the first place. Well, it's a great question. We can build colliders here on Earth that are safe, but they're getting sort of awkwardly big, Like the collider that we have now is thirty three kilometers in circumference, and it's so big that it crosses two countries. It's partially under Switzerland and partially under France, and has the energy of thirteen trillion electron volts, which sounds like a lot, and we're upgrading it this year actually to thirteen point six trillion electron volts. And people are talking about bigger and bigger colliders. But as you get bigger, it's harder to figure out, like where are you going to put this thing. People don't like having colliders, like right underneath their house, and to find enough space to put something that's like a hundred kilometers in circumference is a little awkward. So we got to go to the moon. We gotta go to the moon. There are plans for like a hundred kilometer circumference colliders, maybe in China. People are talking about maybe putting one in Europe. There's an idea for a collider called collider in the sea, a floating collider in the Gulf of Mexico. But these things get a little awkward, right, you have to invent all this new technology to have this thing floating. It's a little crazy. So people thought the moon is right there. There's a lot of land there that nobody's using. Maybe we could put one on the moon. Yeah, that's pretty real estate. So all right, we want to put a collider on the Moon because that solves the land issue. But the Moon is really different from Earth. I mean, it's a moon, it's not a planet. So would the physics even work to put a collider somewhere where gravity is different and we don't have an atmosphere and you know where the ground is all sharpened powdery, Yeah, you don't need gravity for a collider. Like the fact that we have gravity on Earth basically is a relevant for these protons. They're traveling at basically the speed of light, so we can ignore the effected gravity. And also remember protons are super duper tiny. They have almost no mask compared to like an apple, and so the effect of gravity on them is very very small, and so we can basically ignore it. And you know, building a collider on the Moon where there's less gravity, that's not a problem. Also, colliders operate in near vacuum, like inside the collider the bean pipe itself where the protons go around. We try to get that down to basically a vacuum so the protons don't bang into other stuff along the way. So operating without an atmosphere also not a problem. With one exception. We build our collider here on the surface of the Earth, and the atmosphere is actually a protectant. As rocks hit the Earth, for example, meteors and all sorts of other stuff, the atmosphere protects us from their collision. So you build your experiment on the surface of the Earth, you don't expect to come back and have it be like a crater because some rock from space has killed it. But the Moon has basically no atmosphere, which is why its surfaces pop marked with craters from all these rocks that slam into it all the time. So if you build your collider basically on the surface of the Moon, then it's destined to be smashed into by these rocks, and so you need some other way to protect it. Giant Space umbrella patent pending my idea. All right, so we have already an issue we would have to, in addition to building the collider, build some kind of protection. Is the Moon too small to be able to build a subterranean collider or is it too difficult to excavate the Moon. No, that would actually be a great idea because another problem with putting a collider on the surface of the Moon is that the temperatures on the surface are bonkers because it has no atmosphere. Because if it's weird tidal locking, the surface of the Moon gets like superheated during its day and then super cold during its night. So during the day it's like a hundred and twenty seven C and during the night it's like minus a hundred and seven the six s and those kind of temperature variations are not great for like high precision scientific equipment, right, And so we could bury it, but would we basically look up at a moon that we see this giant just like giant excavators and cranes on and would that change the surface of the Moon. That would be cool though if you could see it from Earth. The idea is to build a collider just like a few meters underground on the Moon, because if you dig down like a few meters, the temperature variations are much smaller. It's basically pretty stable temperature wise, except for the surface. And so you bury this thing like a meter or two, and then you build it all the way around the Moon like a belt around the moon, and yeah, you might be able to see it firm earth. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, And people would feel like, hm, you kind of spoiled this incredible natural view, but you would be like a line across the moon. I mean, I feel like we just gotta a sort of take a poll of everyone on Earth and see if they're cool with it. Shouldn't be too hard. You know, it sounds like you're making a joke, but I think that there's something serious there. You know, when we take steps that affect all of humanity, we really should think about how to make these decisions. It's a similar question when we think about like should we try to message aliens or if we get a message from aliens, how should we respond. We had Jill Tartar, head of the Study Program, on the podcast recently and she was talking about like how to include all different kinds of cultures in this decision about how to write back to aliens. And in a similar way, I think it would be important to think about like how people look at the moon and how it important it is to them. You know, science can't just be like we're going to come and take this land and do what we want with it. For science. Yeah, we can't colonize the Moon. I mean we can, but we shouldn't because the Moon doesn't really belong to anyone, which is I mean, we may like to think it does sometimes, but I think that is something that's kind of charming about the Moon and the planets is that nobody can really claim them. So to build a collider on the Moon, to build this this moon belt, as incredible and amazing it would be for unlocking these mysteries, it would also require some astronomical pun intended levels of cooperation between countries and people's you're right, and not just the people who would benefit from it and who would pay for it, but basically everybody for whom the Moon is important, which is basically everybody on Earth. You can't just like scribble on the night sky and say hey, I did it. And that's an issue you know, with for example, Elon Musk, Right, he's launching these Startlink satellites which are in low Earth orbit, which are changing our view of the cosmos, and he basically just got permission from one US regulatory authority, you know, But like, are they in charge of the sky. It's crazy to imagine one US government agency is making decisions for all of humanity. So I create it's a really important question. Yeah, it's something I feel like could go two ways, Like it could be this incredible cooperations amongst nations and people, or it could be something where it's seen as kind of a foisting our our desires from like a few rich nations onto the rest of the world. And so I'd like to think it would end up in the more cooperative sort of building a more connections between people on Earth. But you never know. It seems often that we just kind of strong arm other people into accepting like, yep, now we've got Elon Musk's name and brand on the moon, deal with it. No, you're right. It is a really fun show called for All Mankind, which explores this issue in some depth. Imagine some alternative history with the space race didn't peter out, and the US and the Russians landed on the Moon and built elaborate Moon presence and basically started, you know, a wars on the Moon because they're valuable resources there and everybody was afraid of getting cut out. And we might be looking at that in our future. I mean, NASA has plans to build a Moon base to make a quote sustainable presence by t It's part of the new Artemis program. They want to explore the entire service of the Moon with humans and robots and have plans to place like large scale lunar infrastructure, and so a lot of these other questions arise, like can we just put a base on the Moon and not get anybody else's okay? Would we be okay with other countries just like grabbing a chunk of the Moon and saying, hey, we're building here, this is our spot, Get off our lawn. Seems like we need a globally elected Moon president and I'll do it. All right, Fine, I'll do it. That was quite a campaign. Would you like to be president of the Moon? Really? Where did that job come with? Where are the benefits there? Seems like it would come with a really cool hat and outfit though, So that's my main motivation. But ethics acide, which I love to say all the time, ethics acide and politics aside. If you have a collider on the Moon, let's say we could even get it up there, which seems difficult given it seems pretty heavy, and how does it get power because you can't run like a plug from the US all the way to the moon. That's right, That thing would get so tangled up. Oh my gosh, it would be a nightmare. I mean, notice how every rope always get knotted up. Like if you have headphones in your pocket they come out, they're always knotted up. It's some like property of a string. It's most relaxed state seems to always be in a knock. Does this dude to small particle behavior or is it pocket gremlins? I think pocket gremlins are definitely a part of it. Also, there's something in there about statistical mechanics, about just having like the number of ways that a string can be configured, the configurations without a knot, or like a small fraction of that. So if you just like randomly rearrange a string and will away end up in a knock. But you raise a great question which is powering this thing? And as you get up too high and higher energies in your collider, you need exponentially more power. The amount of power we use the large dron collider is not that much, but as you get your particles up to higher energies and then you curve them around this collider, then they radiate away more energy. Every time you bend a particle, you're curving it. That's acceleration, and acceleration happens through radiation. Like when a particle wants to turn left, it can't just turn to conserve momentum. It's got to like throw something off in the other direction. It radiates a particle, so they lose energy. You need a lot of energy in those little bits that push it just to keep the particles at that energy. And for the Moon collider, we're talking about energies a thousand times higher than our current collider, which is like terribly exciting from a particle physics point of view, like the kinds of things we could discover, but really tricky from a power point of view. So this thing would need about ten terra lots of energy. That's similar to hearing the number like a hundred billion dollars, since only becomes meaningless to me because I can't conceive of tin tara wats of energy. Tin tara watz is a lot, you know, for scale, the entire human population uses about eighteen tara wats over a year or over a day, like or in total tara watts is energy per second, and so it's like the rate of energy use. And so this thing would have a constant use of about fifty percent of the entire budget of the Earth, all the energy we produce. So even if you could run a line from the Earth to the Moon, it would not be advisable because you need to increase the Earth's energy budget by a huge amount. Probably a fuse, right exactly, That'd be a very thick cable. You just need one person trying to run their hair dryer and the fuse to blow out on all of Earth exactly. And so people have thought about like, well, how could we power such a collider? Definitely you need a power source on the Moon. And one attractive thing to think about is like vision, you know, could you build nuclear power plants on the moon in order to power the thing? And you know, getting into like the ethical issues of producing nuclear waste and staring it on the moon is a whole other rabbit hole we could even dig into, because fish and plants are not even practical. Like all the fishing plants we have currently produced about four hundred giga watts of energy, so you need like fifty times the amount of fission power plants we have operating now on Earth suddenly running on the Moon. I mean, it just seems impossible, right, But there's gotta be other types of plants that you could have on the Moon, right absolutely. And one thing that the Moon does have is a lot of sunlight, Like there's lots of land out there and planning of places to build solar panels. And you know, you don't have clouds on the Moon. There's no weather on the Moon. So solar power on the Moon is actually much more stable and reliable than it is even here on Earth. The biggest problem people have with solar power on the Earth is what do you do on a cloudy day or what do you do during winter or when it's raining. But on the Moon, there's nothing between you and the sun. So you could actually power this thing with point one percent of all the solar power that hits the Moon. So it's like a set of solar panels about the size of Delaware power this thing. Okay, So as long as we're okay with seeing Delaware on the Moon all the time, we could probably power a collider exactly, and you wouldn't want to build it in just one spot, because then part of the time it would be in darkness. The idea is to build the collider in a big ring around the Moon, and then to cover it with solar panels, so you have like a big ring of solar panels around the Moon, so part of it is always in the sunshine. Could we make it like a smiley face, because I think that might sell it better to you, the people of Earth. I'll put that front of the committee. I think that's a great idea. But I think we should have a competition, you know, for like what designs we'd like to put on the Moon. You know, maybe a spiral would be good. We should have all the artists of the Earth contribute. All right, So let's dig into a little bit more about the practicalities of how actually build this thing on the Moon. What we would build it's out of how we get the materials there, and then let's talk about what we might learn from it and whether we think it's a good idea. But first, let's take another quick break. I'm going to drop some plans for the shapes I want to see on the moon. All right, we're back, and we're talking about scribbling on the face of the Moon. Is that a good idea? I did draw a kittyicap that I think people will like universally. So would that require building little ears let's stick off the top of the moon. That doesn't sound expensive at all. I'm sure we do that it'll be worth it. So, you know, we do have realistic plans to build the next collider, the hundred TV collider, it's a hundred kilometers long, and thoughts about how much it might cost cost about a hundred billion dollars using current technology, current magnets and current RF technology and the detectors and all that stuff, which sounds like a huge amount of money, And it's definitely a good political question to ask, like is that worth spending our money on? Which we can dig into. But when you're talking about building a collider on the Moon, something that's thousands of times bigger than even the large Hadron collider or that next collider, you have to wonder like how much is this thing gotta caused? And where can you even get the materials? Like how do you actually go about building this thing on the moon? Do we even have enough fuel to transport that amount of materials to the Moon. So people have gone through this exercise and wondered about that very question, and just like that with the question of power, I think the best idea is not to find the stuff on Earth and lifted to the Moon, because that would be incredibly expensive every launch is, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, but instead to try to build it with the materials that are already on the Moon. So, for example, one of the most difficult elements of a particle collider are these magnets. Magnet are hard to build and hard to make powerful, and so we tend to use super conducting magnets, magnets that have very very low resistance, so they have very very high magnetic fields when you power them with electricity. But a lot of these use rare Earth elements, things like gatolinium or euterium or other elements I don't even know how to pronounce. And because they're rare Earth elements, they are rare and there's not a lot of them, and there are other industries that want these things, like battery industries, which are going gangbusters here on Earth, and so it'd be hard to like divert a huge amount of Earth's rare earth elements and launch it up to the Moon. Current estimates are that you'd need like sixties six hundred tons of rare Earth elements to make the super conducting magnets you'd need for this collider on the Moon, So that sounds like a no go for sure. So le mean, guess there's got to be a planet out there somewhere with like giant blue, really attractive aliens where they have all these rare metals abundance that we can plunder. That's right, but they are charging an arm and a leg literally. Yeah, you know, there might be asteroids out there filled with these rare Earth elements, and there's a whole fun question about like mining those asteroids and what you can do with them. And eventually, if we do build heavy space industry, we will have to tap into those resources because it's ridiculous to launch these things from the gravity well of the Earth. You definitely want to find them already out there. But then there's that whole other question who owns these asteroids and how you regulate that complicated question. But people think that the Moon might have other materials which would make for good magnets, like probably there is a lot of iron on the Moon, because you know, there's iron all over the Solar system. Most of the rocky stuff that's out there in the Solar system has huge quantities of iron and nickel, And people are working on technology where you can combine iron with arsenic and with phosphorus to make iron based superconductors. And so it might be possible eventually, when we're ready to build this thing, to find a way to build it using materials that are already on the Moon. So we would need moon miners to be up there, and so would we send humans up to go work on the Moon or would that be the job of robots? And then should the robots have labor rights? They should definitely get royalties, you know, for the songs they write while working on the moon collider, like the classic one zero zero zero one zero one, which is covered by one zero one zero zero zero one exactly. That has got quite a beat. No, it's a real question, you know, we're talking about building lunar infrastructure anyway, like a smoon collider. Aside, NASA wants to have effectively a permanent presence on the Moon by later this decade, and so we're talking about having people up there. But I think that a lot of this work would be pretty dangerous, and so you'd want robotic miners and robotic construction. And this is not something we know how to do today or tomorrow or even really project about when we'll be able to figure it out. But a project of this size would require either an enormous labor force or rob audit mining and construction. So I think you definitely want to go to the robotic side. Have you seen that movie Moon? I have seen that movie that with a guy like gets in a time lapse or like kills various copies of himself or something. Yeah, yeah, spoilers alert if you ever want to see it. But yeah, so there's this guy who is on the moon doing basically moon mining work like we're talking about, and spoiler alert in case you haven't seen it yet. He turns out he is just one clone in an endless line of clones. The mistake happens where there are two clones at once, and so you know, plot ensues. But it is an interesting idea of like the ethics of you know, his original bodies signed away his rights to these clones, and now this endless line of clones who don't know their clones are laboring on the Moon. But the I guess, in terms of our conversation, the question of is it ethical to have a labor force on the moon because what kind of quality of life would people lead and would people feel pressured into doing it due to, you know, the need for money, and is that right? It's a great question. And you definitely have to have enough protections for those folks who the Moon is a pretty inhospitable place and the cancer rates would be a lot higher because you don't have atmospheric protections or magnetic fields, so you need a lot of shielding and definitely be very dangerous. You need people to be fully informed for sure before they went up there to work on this project, something that reams and reams of lawyers. I'm sure we'll be arguing about for a decade if we ever decided to build this thing. And you know, it's hard to even figure out, like what would a price tag be for a project like this. You know, the large HHN collider cost ten billion dollars. If you just scale that up like per meter per kilometer, then you get a number for the Moon collider like almost two trillion dollars, which even in units of aircraft carriers is a very very big number. And what that tells you is not this is something we should never do. It's we can't do this today like our current technology. It would just be insane. But humans don't just sit around where clever species. We come up with innovations, and so that number comes from like needing all those magnets, well, maybe we can come up with cheaper magnets and needing all that power, well, maybe we can come up with a way to make accelerators that don't require so much power, more effective ways to accelerate particles. And so I think between us and crazy big astronomical colliders, we need a lot of layers of innovation, a lot of clever new ideas for how to make this technology more feasible. Maybe colliders will go the way of phones and go from being a big giant brick to being a little little pocket collider that you can I guess that kind of goes against our whole earlier premise though, if it needs to be big and moon sized, but maybe more a more efficient collider. No, you're absolutely right. If you could develop incredibly powerful magnets, then you could have small colliders, even if they're high energy. The only reason that collider has to be big is because our magnets are not powerful enough to curve particles in smaller loops, like you could have particles moving in a one meter loop at the energies of the large hadron collider if you had powerful enough magnets we just don't. If you had powerful enough acceleration technology that we just don't have. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. And so the dream, of course is to come up with some new technology that makes a moon collider ridiculous, so you can have your own table top large hadron collider where you build one the size of a tennis court that has the power that we're talking about for a moon collider, that would be fantastic. And I think you know, a moon collider is a pretty ridiculous project, and the real way forward is to push hard on these technologies and try to innovate there and to make the next layer of energy accessible with better technology rather than just bigger. I like that, and I'm looking forward to all of us being able to get our own pocket collider, which is very convenient but also completely obliterates your phone and also probably your body with the radiation but you know the convenience. That's right, man, My collider is running so slow. I guess I need to upgrade my phone. But I do think that these projects are important, even though they are currently expensive, even with our current technology. You know, there are questions out there that we just don't have answers to, but that we could get And to me, this is a kind of exploration. You know, the same reason that we want to land on alien planets and walk around and see what's there is the same reason that we want to make collisions at higher energy. Every time you build a collider with more energy than anybody's ever done before, it's like exploring another planet. You don't know what's going to come out of it. When you smash those particles together. You could see nothing like the way you could land on a planet and just see rocks and dust, or you could see crazy new particles, supersymmetry or many black holes are all sorts of secrets of the universe could just pour out of it and we just don't know. And it's exploration because we have no idea if those secrets are around the corner, Like if we build a collider twice as powerful as the LHC. Would we discover these things or if they're really really far away and we need a really really big collider to find them. We don't yet know how far away these answers are, so we don't know how much money we have to spend, which is what makes us want to go big. I mean, it seems like instead of having this opposition between well, we can't spend resources on colliders or this kind of really expensive science because we need those resources for people now, it really is more the joy of life is things like new discovery, and so we need to make sure that humanity is healthy and living good lives so we can someday just make these discoveries and enhance the human experience more. I think it can all go hand in hand rather than being an opposition to each other. Absolutely, and just the same way looking at the bridge inspires people and makes children wonder like, Wow, what can we build in the future. I think that as a species, we should be trying to do things at the edge of our capability, things that twenty years ago seemed impossible. We should be striving for that. That's really progress, and I think that it serves all of humanity. You know, the same way. Like we wonder why would you spend money on art, it's because it improves the human experience. Well, why do you try to answer deep questions about the universe? Not just because one day it might give you some technological spinoff, but because understanding the nature of the universe improves the human experience. It's part of who we are to try to understand the world around us and unravel its mysteries. So I totally agree with you, And it's not a question of like, should we spend our money on this or that? In my view, we should spend our money on all of these things. You know, these things are cheap compared to all the things we do spend money on, and they pay off so much economically, educationally, inspirationally, it's definitely worth the investment. So if you are out there and you have rivers of money you could divert somewhere, please send some money to science. It pays for itself. Less, fewer giant hammers for war, more giant hammers for smashing atoms and studying them. Wow, that sounds like a good campaign slogan for running for president of the Moon. Yeah, would you endorse me? Is for President of the Moon. I'll wear a really fancy hat. Well, you put me on the spot, but yes, absolutely I will back your candidacy for presidency of the Moon. And I'm looking forward to the first debate among the candidates going to be between me and super intelligent Tarte grades on the Moon. They ask a lot of good questions, all right, So thanks very much for joining us for this fun exploration of a crazy idea of building a particle collider on the Moon. I think all in all it's something which we could do that we would be massively expensive without innovations, but it's not clear that it's something we should do. There are lots of ethical questions and questions about how to best spend our resources. But what is clear is that there are a lot of big stories out there in the universe, and with just a little more ingenuity and a little bit of effort and a little bit more resources devoted to science, we could actually get answers to some of them. Thanks very much, Katy for joining us. Let us know how your campaign for President of the Moon goes. Thank you so much, and I will let you know I'll probably need about a hundred billion dollars in donations before I get there, but I'm sure it's achievable. All right. We'll let you all know when Katie's website is up so you can send your some donations. Thanks again for joining us. Tune in next time. Thank you for having me. Bye, guys, Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio or more podcast. For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.