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Big O tires, the team you trust. We're

0:37

going to build a telescope. But

0:39

it's not going to be like any

0:41

telescope you've ever encountered in your life.

0:44

It's going to be different. It's going

0:46

to be strange. It

0:49

won't even come with a lens, but

0:51

it will be so powerful that you

0:53

could take a picture of an alien

0:55

city sitting on the surface of a

0:57

planet orbiting another star. Just

1:00

as a dramatic example, to be clear, I'm

1:02

not saying that there are any alien cities

1:04

nearby, but you get my drift. And

1:07

this telescope is going to use

1:09

the sun itself. But

1:12

before I get into the construction of

1:14

this strange, not a telescope, but still

1:16

a telescope, I want to build up

1:18

just how powerful it can be. In

1:21

general, in astronomy, when we go

1:24

to build a telescope, we care

1:26

about three things. One is the

1:28

resolution. How sharp our image

1:30

is. What minute detail can

1:33

we see in the image?

1:35

That's our resolution. The

1:37

second thing is the field of view.

1:39

How broad of a view do we

1:41

get? You know, you've you've all seen

1:43

that thing where like you you look

1:45

at something and your eyeball has this

1:47

fantastic field of view. And then you

1:49

hold up your phone camera and you're

1:51

like, wait a minute, that's not everything

1:53

I'm capturing with my eye. That's field

1:55

of view. And the third

1:57

is wavelength. What wavelength of light? are

2:00

we going to be observing at? And

2:03

when we call a telescope powerful,

2:05

it means it could be powerful

2:07

in any or all of these

2:09

capacities. And for our purposes

2:12

today, when I say we're we are

2:14

going to build the world's most powerful

2:16

telescope, for now we're going

2:18

to ignore the wavelength part because it's,

2:21

you know, just not a major point of the

2:23

story. So thank you, wavelength, you're important and

2:25

useful, but you can go take a break

2:28

and grab a sandwich or something because you're

2:30

not needed in this episode. Field of view,

2:32

just wait for a second outside, we'll bring

2:34

you in towards the end. But resolution, sharpness,

2:38

why don't you join us for a moment

2:40

and get comfortable? Because we need

2:42

to talk about you a lot. The

2:45

entire point of introducing telescopes

2:47

into astronomy is to make

2:49

distant things more visible. And

2:51

to do that, you need

2:53

high resolution. You've all

2:55

taken our phone cameras and started

2:57

pinching and zooming and very quickly

2:59

the results become rather lackluster. Images

3:02

start to get all blurry and

3:04

pixelated because when you zoom all

3:06

the way in, you reach the

3:08

resolution limit of your camera. If

3:10

you had a more powerful camera, you could

3:13

keep pinching and zooming and still get a

3:15

clear, not blurry, not pixelated image. Same thing

3:17

for a TV. If you have like an

3:19

older TV with low resolution and you go

3:21

up close to it, you can see the

3:24

individual pixels and then the image doesn't look

3:26

as great. But if you have a newer 4K

3:29

TV, whatever they're making now,

3:31

then you can still see

3:33

a sharp crystal clear picture

3:35

even nice and up close.

3:38

In astronomy, we usually measure resolution in

3:40

terms of things called arc minutes and

3:43

arc seconds. This is a very old,

3:45

even ancient method of dividing up the

3:47

sky. And for once we have the

3:50

case where an old ancient tradition in

3:52

astronomy still makes sense and describes exactly

3:54

what it's trying to accomplish. Check

3:57

out my episode on Bad Jargon if you want some

3:59

more. chunks

6:01

on this circle going all around you. Now

6:04

you divide each of those individual degrees,

6:06

just one 360th of that circle into

6:08

60 sections

6:13

of its own. So you take that

6:15

one little degree and now you, you

6:18

chop that up into 60

6:20

little sections. Those little sections are called

6:22

arc minutes or minutes of arc. And

6:25

then you can take each one

6:27

of those individual arc minutes, those

6:30

each of those 160th subdivisions of a degree and

6:32

each degree is just one 360th

6:36

of the entire circle surrounding you. You

6:41

can subdivide each arc minute into

6:43

60 arc seconds.

6:45

And if you need even finer divisions than

6:48

that, which we will, we'll switch to decimals

6:50

because we quickly get tired of all that

6:52

divide by 60 nonsense. And

6:55

if you're wondering why 360, why

6:57

60 arc minutes in a

7:00

degree, why 60 arc seconds in a

7:02

minute, you can thank the ancient Babylonians

7:04

who also gave us 24 hours

7:06

in a day, 60 minutes in an

7:08

hour, 60 seconds in a minute coincidence.

7:10

Absolutely not, but that's a different episode.

7:13

This is angular resolution. This is

7:15

measuring how finally you can chop

7:17

up a circle surrounding

7:19

you and

7:22

it's angular resolution that we use

7:24

to judge telescopes because the angular

7:27

resolution is independent of what you're

7:29

looking at. It's just something you

7:32

know, how finally you can divide

7:34

a circle surrounding you. And

7:36

then from here you can look at

7:39

objects at different distances with the same

7:41

angular resolution and you end up with

7:43

different linear resolution. So if you have

7:45

very, very fine angular resolution and you

7:48

look at something up close, you

7:50

can see tiny, tiny little details. And

7:52

then if you look at something far

7:54

away, you can't see those tiny details,

7:56

but the angular resolution tells you how

7:58

well you're going to. you

8:01

when looking at all these different

8:03

objects. For example, to give you

8:05

some perspective, and in a second you'll realize that for

8:07

the clever pun that it is, the

8:09

human eye has an angular

8:11

resolution of about one arc

8:13

minute. That's pretty

8:16

impressive that if you take a

8:18

circle surrounding you on the horizon, divide

8:20

it into 360 little bits, we'll call

8:22

those bits degrees, and then you divide

8:24

each of that degree into 60 arc

8:27

minutes, one of those little

8:29

slices is the angular resolution of

8:31

the human eye. We

8:34

can translate this into linear resolution

8:36

based on the distance of the

8:39

thing we're observing. So if

8:41

you're looking at something about one kilometer away, you

8:44

can distinguish two points if they're

8:46

separated by at least about a third

8:48

of a meter, which is pretty impressive.

8:51

But if you hold your finger

8:53

up nice and close to your

8:55

eye, you can see the tiny,

8:57

tiny like millimeter level differences in

8:59

the markings of your fingerprint, which

9:01

is also pretty impressive. You

9:04

cannot make out a fingerprint sitting a

9:06

kilometer away, and you

9:08

can very easily distinguish something that

9:11

is separated by a third of a meter if it's

9:13

in the same room as you. Angular

9:15

resolution allows us to translate

9:19

and calculate our linear resolution for

9:21

whatever distant object we are studying,

9:23

which is why it's so handy

9:25

in astronomy. And we

9:28

need to take a quick break, folks, to

9:30

mention that this show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

9:32

You know, it's the season of Halloween

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first month. That's better help H

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e l p.com slash

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space man. So let's

10:39

kick things up a notch and jump right

10:41

to the James Webb Space Telescope. That

10:44

instrument's primary mirror is 6.5 meters

10:47

across which is so big it couldn't even fit

10:49

inside of the rocket and we had to fold

10:51

it up and devise all these clever origami

10:54

like schemes to get it up

10:56

in space that

10:58

gives the telescope an angular resolution

11:01

around a tenth of an arc

11:03

second. So you take

11:05

the human eye resolution which is already

11:07

pretty impressive you divided that

11:09

by 60 to go from

11:11

arc minutes dark seconds and then you divide

11:14

by 10 to get a tenth

11:16

of an arc second. So right

11:18

there the resolution of the James

11:21

Webb Space Telescope is 600 times

11:23

better. Than

11:25

the human eye to give some

11:28

fun examples the James Webb could see the

11:30

details of a coin placed 40 kilometers

11:33

away from it or

11:35

it could pick up the pattern of a regulation

11:37

soccer ball sitting 550 kilometers

11:40

away from the telescope. It's that's an

11:42

impressive telescope. We want to go bigger.

11:44

We want even bigger telescopes than the

11:46

James Webb. We want to do this.

11:48

We'd like them to be in space

11:51

because observing in space is super easy.

11:53

We don't have to deal with nasty

11:55

atmosphere stuff, but we can all

11:57

agree that the James Webb was kind of a

11:59

pain to make it was like. a decade late,

12:01

it was billions of dollars over budget. It

12:04

was expense. It was just a mess to

12:06

get it up there. We like that it's

12:08

there now, but it wasn't fun in the

12:10

lead up to it. So in

12:12

astronomy, the only way to get higher resolution

12:14

is to have a bigger dish. But

12:17

bigger dishes are hard to do. Thankfully,

12:20

there are some ways to cheat. One way is with

12:23

a technique called interferometry, where you don't

12:25

have a single large dish. Instead,

12:27

you have lots of small independent

12:29

dishes, and then you cleverly connect

12:31

them together, you correlate them together,

12:33

you take their independent measurements and

12:35

stitch together a larger image of

12:37

that. One of the

12:40

best examples of this technique is

12:42

called the Event Horizon Telescope. This

12:44

is what we've used to observe

12:46

the ring of material around distant

12:48

black holes. The resolution

12:50

of the Event Horizon Telescope,

12:53

which is made of instruments

12:55

scattered all across the globe.

12:58

So it effectively turns the

13:00

earth into a single astronomical

13:03

collecting instrument. There are some

13:05

downsides because you can only

13:07

pick up signals where your

13:09

instrument is if light

13:11

just hits dirt like ground next to your

13:13

telescope, you don't get to fold that into

13:16

the image. So there's this whole complicated business

13:18

of turning these into images. But

13:20

at the end of the day,

13:22

it gives you insanely high resolution.

13:24

Remember, the James Webb was a

13:27

10th of an arc second resolution, the

13:29

resolution of the Event Horizon Telescope is

13:31

20 micro arc

13:33

seconds, or two times

13:35

10 to the minus five arc seconds. A

13:38

delightful example given by the Event

13:40

Horizon Telescope folks is that they

13:42

could spot an orange sitting

13:44

on the surface of the moon. That's how high

13:47

of a resolution they have. Using

13:49

tricks like this, astronomers have unlocked the wonders

13:51

of the universe, explore the mysteries of the

13:53

cosmos, etc, etc. It's not good enough. It's

13:56

not good enough, especially when

13:58

it comes to searches. of

14:00

exoplanets, of planets outside the solar

14:02

system. Why? Because

14:05

if I gave you the

14:08

opportunity to take a picture,

14:11

a detailed picture of another

14:13

world outside the solar

14:15

system, where you could hang a

14:17

poster in your room or

14:20

your office, or wherever you

14:22

like posters, a detailed

14:24

picture of another world with the same

14:26

level of detail or fidelity that we

14:29

have of the planets in our own

14:31

solar system, would you pass that up?

14:34

What could we learn? What

14:36

are the limits to what we could learn if

14:38

we had a detailed portrait of a planet outside

14:40

our solar system? Leave alone

14:42

the rest of astronomy, exploding stars,

14:45

black holes, distant galaxies, etc., etc.,

14:47

etc. An ultra

14:49

high resolution telescope would unlock wonders

14:52

across the universe. But let's just

14:54

focus now on exoplanets and

14:56

the hunt for life, the hunt for

14:58

Earth-like planets. We've developed

15:01

and are developing a lot of very

15:03

clever techniques to look at thin slices

15:05

of data. We're

15:08

not even talking images, we're just talking spectra,

15:10

like we're dealing with literal dots of light

15:13

from exoplanets and using that to try

15:15

to understand what's in their atmosphere, whether

15:18

they might host life. We're

15:21

doing all of this with literal dots

15:23

of life. Imagine if we could take

15:25

a picture of a planet, especially a

15:27

planet that we suspect might host life.

15:30

What would we see? Would we see jungles,

15:33

arid deserts, cities?

15:35

We're not going to see cities, but like, you know,

15:38

let's let our imaginations not

15:40

run wild, but run, you

15:42

know, free. What would we

15:44

gain? Also, that sounds

15:46

pretty cool. How could we do that?

15:48

There are plans for

15:50

telescopes in the post-James Webb

15:52

era to go even bigger,

15:54

even better, larger mirror. Let's

15:56

let's fold them up. Let's

15:59

do it. One

16:01

of them is called the Habitable

16:03

Worlds Observatory. It will be designed

16:05

to target a few

16:07

dozen planets orbiting

16:09

nearby stars and get pictures

16:12

of them. These pictures

16:14

of the planets will

16:16

occupy maybe a

16:18

couple pixels at best. So

16:21

the blurriest image possible, like it's not a

16:23

dot of light, but we're talking a telescope

16:25

that isn't going to launch for at least

16:27

another decade. It's still in the design phase,

16:30

so more likely two or three decades out.

16:32

It will fly, it will study a few

16:34

dozen exoplanets, and it's going to give us

16:36

the next best thing from a dot of

16:39

light. It's going to be a picture of

16:41

a planet that is a couple, maybe three

16:43

pixels across. As blurry

16:45

as blurry can be. As low resolution

16:47

as low resolution can be. This

16:49

isn't going to work. I mean, we're going

16:52

to build the thing, it's going to operate, and

16:54

we'll get the images, we'll get some cool data

16:56

out of it, but it's not enough. I want

16:58

a portrait. We need to go bigger. How can

17:00

we get a bigger telescope? Without

17:03

turning all of Mars into glass or

17:05

something, we're kind of running into the

17:07

limits of our technology. Like we've cleverly

17:09

figured out how to fold up mirrors

17:11

and then unfold them in space. That's

17:13

great and that's going to enable a

17:15

lot of science in the future. But

17:17

what if a couple

17:20

pixel picture of a nearby planet

17:22

isn't good enough? What

17:24

if we want more? Does it

17:26

mean we just have to wait a thousand

17:28

years before we're sophisticated enough to build a

17:30

large enough telescope to take a portrait

17:33

of a planet? I mean,

17:35

maybe with enough Patreon support we

17:37

can go faster. That's patreon.com/pmstutter where

17:40

you can go to support this show. And

17:43

I can't thank you enough. patreon.com/pmstutter. I don't

17:45

know if we can build a super telescope

17:47

faster with Patreon contributions, but it's worth a

17:50

shot. No, I don't want to wait

17:52

a thousand years for technology to

17:54

catch up. I want to do it now. I

17:57

want to cheat. Let's use the

17:59

sun. But Paul. We

20:00

already use gravitational lenses in

20:02

the distant universe to leapfrog

20:06

vast distances in sea into the early

20:08

universe where some of the first

20:10

galaxies to appear in the universe are simply

20:12

too far away, too small and too dim

20:14

for us to see. But

20:16

when they happen to coincidentally

20:18

just randomly sit behind a

20:21

giant massive cluster of galaxies,

20:23

the gravity of that cluster

20:25

of galaxies will bend that

20:28

light, focus that light, amplify

20:30

that light, increase the resolution,

20:32

and we can use an

20:34

entire cluster of galaxies as

20:36

a giant lens to

20:38

see what's behind it and magnify what's

20:40

behind it and allow us to see

20:42

some of the most distant galaxies in

20:44

the universe. Okay, in

20:46

the solar system, the most massive object by

20:48

far is the sun. It's like contains like

20:51

99% of all the mass in the solar

20:53

system. It's in the sun. We

20:55

know that the gravity of the

20:57

sun bends the path of light

20:59

around it as if it were

21:02

a giant lens, it sends light

21:04

any light that grazes the surface

21:06

of the sun gets

21:08

bent and gets sent to a focal

21:10

point, just like light,

21:14

just like a lens will bend any light

21:16

that passes through the lens and send it

21:18

towards a focal point. It's

21:20

like we have a giant telescope just sitting there

21:22

in the center of the solar system. And

21:25

it is by far the most

21:27

powerful telescope we can

21:29

conceive of, you know, with

21:31

reasonable extensions of our current technological limits.

21:33

Like, yes, you can imagine some super

21:36

advanced civilization turning an entire galaxy into

21:38

a giant mirror and it uses it

21:40

to peer across the universe, etc. Say,

21:42

okay, we can do that. We can

21:45

talk about that. But with

21:47

our actual technological capabilities or like

21:49

reasonable extensions of our technological capabilities

21:51

like, you know, if we spent

21:53

a couple trillion dollars, I bet

21:55

we could do this kind of

21:57

stuff. If we limit ourselves to

21:59

that. And we talk about

22:01

the kind of telescopes we can build, where

22:04

we could go with them, what materials would we

22:06

use, how big they could be. This

22:08

blows it out of the

22:10

water. The sun has a

22:12

gravitational lens is the most

22:14

powerful accessible telescope in

22:17

history. We can do the math. We

22:21

use Einstein's relativity to calculate

22:23

what the magnifying power of

22:25

the solar gravitational lens could

22:28

be and its

22:30

magnification, its angular resolution

22:33

goes all the way down to 10 to the

22:36

minus 10 arc seconds. That is

22:38

a million times better than the

22:40

event horizon telescope. And

22:42

because of the effects of gravitational lensing,

22:45

you don't just get higher resolution. You

22:47

also get amplification of brightness because it

22:49

combines a bunch of light rays and

22:51

focuses them. Witness amplification

22:53

up to a factor of 100 billion

22:56

to say this is

22:58

better than any known telescope is an

23:00

understatement. This is better than any possible

23:02

telescope that we could possibly build in

23:05

any possible future for the next few

23:07

hundred years. And

23:09

it's just sitting there. What

23:11

do you get with 10 to

23:13

the minus 10? That's

23:15

a tenth of a billionth of

23:17

an arc second resolution. A

23:20

million times better than our most highest

23:23

resolution telescope we have right now, the

23:25

event horizon telescope. What do

23:27

we get with that? Let me give you an

23:29

example. We know there is a planet orbiting our

23:32

nearest neighbor star Proxima Centauri. We call the planet

23:34

Proxima B. We know this planet.

23:36

We know it's rocky. We know it's Earth

23:38

like we know it's sitting in the habitable

23:40

zone of Proxima Centauri. But Proxima Centauri is

23:42

a red dwarf star like other. That's

23:45

another episode. This telescope, called

23:48

the solar gravitational lens, would be

23:50

able to map the surface of

23:52

Proxima B to a resolution of

23:54

one kilometer. That's not one pixel

23:56

containing the entire planet. That's

23:59

creating a detailed. times

26:00

further than the distance from the Sun

26:02

to the Earth. Okay, that's 13 times

26:06

the distance to Pluto, and

26:08

that's over three times the

26:10

distance to Voyager 1, the most distant current

26:12

spacecraft, which was launched in 1977. Huh.

26:18

I guess it might be a small, tiny

26:20

challenge to deploy an instrument to that extreme distance,

26:22

get it to work, collect the data, build an

26:24

image, and send the results back to Earth, maybe.

26:28

Don't even get me started on pointing

26:30

the dang thing. We can

26:32

target one planet, but

26:34

to even shift where this telescope points

26:36

by one degree, it's not like a

26:38

telescope that's sitting on a mount and

26:40

you want to change to a different

26:42

position, you just point it. Here

26:46

instead, at the solar gravitational lens, at this

26:48

distance of over 500 AU, if you want

26:52

to point in a different direction, you

26:54

have to move the entire array here

26:56

so that you're in a different position

26:58

in your orbit around the Sun. If

27:01

you want to move, if you want to shift

27:03

and look one degree to the right, it means

27:06

you have to change your position by 10 AU,

27:09

which is the distance between

27:11

the Earth and Jupiter. So

27:14

that means pointing this thing

27:17

is essentially impossible. This

27:19

difficulty in repositioning also means that we

27:21

may not ever get a full portrait

27:23

of a planet because this

27:26

super high resolution image that's coming in,

27:28

that's bent, the light is bent around

27:30

the Sun and sent to the focal

27:32

point, well the focal point here is

27:35

more like the focal area because

27:37

this image is so high resolution,

27:40

the actual image is gigantic, it's

27:42

like a giant, a mosaic image,

27:44

it's like a giant mural at

27:46

high resolution. And so instead of

27:48

a tiny focal point that you

27:50

can just, you know, look at

27:52

with your eye, the

27:54

image of a distant exoplanet

27:56

is spread out

27:59

over tens of kilometers.

28:02

So if you have a spacecraft just parked

28:04

in one position, yeah, it will get that

28:06

one little bit of light and it will

28:09

see that little patch of the planet and

28:11

that'll be great, but if it wants to

28:13

build a portrait it has to scan over

28:15

tens of kilometers. What

28:18

this means is that if

28:20

we want to get anything more than

28:22

snapshots, we need a mobile spacecraft at

28:24

that distance where we can't just fling

28:27

it out and let it stay there.

28:29

It has to move around so it

28:31

can scan the image and

28:33

we have to be really really good at predicting

28:36

the target. That by the

28:39

time the spacecraft reaches this position

28:41

we're looking at Proxima B. We

28:44

have to know where Proxima B is in

28:46

its orbit around the star so that all

28:48

the timing works out so when this when

28:50

our when our spacecraft carrying all these instruments

28:52

to collect the image when it's pointing at

28:55

Proxima B it's not just looking at an

28:57

empty patch of the Proxima system it's actually

28:59

looking at where the planet will be so

29:01

we have to do all this intricate math

29:03

like that's just a bunch of math we're

29:05

nerds we're good at that. And

29:08

there are proposals floating around starting as early

29:10

as the 1970s to make this work. It's

29:14

not outright impossible that's the craziest

29:16

thing about all this. It's an

29:18

advanced past Voyager for sure but

29:21

it's not crazy outlandish past

29:24

it. It's not like we have to

29:26

create brand new schemes for generating energy

29:28

or we need super large spacecraft it's

29:30

a crazy idea but it's it's a

29:32

grounded crazy idea which is why it's

29:34

so alluring to me. One method is

29:37

to just a chock a probe out

29:39

there like a super Voyager and hope

29:41

for the best. Let it fly through

29:43

this focal point and collect whatever data

29:45

it can and then send it back

29:47

to Earth and then maybe we might

29:49

get a small portion of a snapshot

29:51

of one region of a nearby exoplanet.

29:54

There have been proposals going

29:56

back decades to do just

29:58

that like take Voyager but more so

30:01

make it faster so it can get

30:03

to this extreme distance and something less

30:05

than four or five decades. But

30:07

that's not going to be super satisfying. The

30:10

most recent proposals is

30:12

instead of a single large

30:14

spacecraft that just buzzes

30:16

its way outside the solar system and

30:18

then when it hits this market 540

30:22

whatever AU, it collects its

30:24

data, sends it back to Earth, and we get that

30:26

one snapshot. We want

30:28

to have a spacecraft that can hang

30:31

out there. We want a spacecraft that

30:33

can spend some time there. We want

30:35

a spacecraft that has enough fuel and

30:38

energy to move around out there so

30:40

it can scan this giant focal plane

30:42

and build up an image of

30:45

an entire planet. The most

30:47

recent proposals don't involve

30:49

a single spacecraft but many

30:51

very, very small spacecraft. But

30:54

then you run into challenges of, OK, let's

30:56

say I have a small spacecraft,

30:58

it's just a simple sensor, and

31:01

then it works together in a

31:03

swarm and spirals around the focal

31:05

plane. It

31:07

looks at the image, builds this

31:09

map of a distant exoplanet. The

31:12

problem with small spacecraft is how do you get

31:14

them out there because you need to load them

31:17

down with fuel. But then when you add fuel

31:19

to them, they become heavier. So you need a

31:21

bigger rocket and then you need more fuel and

31:23

it spirals out of control. So the proposals use

31:25

solar sails. And I know I've poo-pooed solar sails

31:28

before, but that was for interstellar missions. This

31:30

is much more reasonable. The

31:33

idea here is to send a swarm

31:35

of spacecraft, launch them from the Earth,

31:38

let them spiral in towards the sun,

31:41

then unfurl their solar sails, let the

31:43

radiation pressure from the sun push them

31:45

out into the solar system, accelerate them

31:47

very quickly, get them to this point

31:49

at 545 AU, get

31:53

them to this point at 542 AU in the matter

31:56

of a couple decades,

31:59

still a long time. time, but not

32:01

insane, then somehow slow them down so

32:04

that they can stop because once they move past it, it's

32:06

going to be a little bit more difficult. Have

32:09

them start dancing around each other

32:11

in a pattern where they can all individually

32:13

start to collect data and then send that

32:15

data back to Earth. Yeah, the idea isn't

32:17

fully fleshed out. There's been a lot of

32:20

work in this direction, but there

32:22

are still a lot of unknowns. And you know

32:24

what? It would still require

32:26

a tremendous amount of technological advancement.

32:29

We don't have like super effective solar

32:31

sails right now. We don't we

32:33

don't have like swarms of

32:36

spacecraft that can work together super

32:38

efficiently. We yes, all of these

32:40

proposals are on the edge of

32:43

the possible, but they're crazy enough,

32:45

they just might work. It's right

32:47

there just beyond our current technological

32:49

capabilities, but not so far out

32:51

that it's just science fiction and

32:54

not worth thinking about in a serious,

32:56

like technological way. It's

32:58

entirely possible. And if we dedicated

33:00

enough resources to this, we could

33:02

capture an image, a portrait of

33:05

an alien planet. We could get to know

33:07

an alien world the way we know the

33:09

planets of our own solar system, and we

33:11

could do it in our lifetime. We just

33:13

have to cheat a little. Thanks

33:15

to Jimmy Kay for the question that

33:18

led to today's episode. And thank you

33:20

to all my Patreon supporters. That's

33:22

patreon.com/pmsutter. Special thanks to the top

33:24

contributors this month. Justin G. Chris

33:27

L. Alberto M. Duncan M. Corey

33:29

D. Stargazer Robert B. Nyla Sam

33:31

R. John S. Joshua Scott M.

33:34

Rob H. Scott M. Lewis M.

33:36

John W. Alexis Gilbert M. Rob

33:38

W. Dennis A. Jules

33:40

R. Mike G. Jim L. Scott J.

33:43

David S. William W. Scott R. Heather

33:45

Mike S. Michelle R. Pete H. Steve

33:47

S. Watt Watt Bird. Lisa R. Coosie

33:49

and Kevin B. Keep those

33:51

questions coming. That's Ask a Spaceman@gmail.com

33:53

or the website ask a spaceman.com.

33:57

Keep the reviews coming on your

33:59

favorite podcast. platform, those really help and

34:01

please keep sending questions. These episodes are

34:04

so much fun to do. And

34:06

I will see you next time for more complete

34:09

knowledge of time and

34:12

space. Okay,

34:35

it's official. We

34:38

are very much

34:40

in the final

34:42

sprint to election

34:44

day. And face

34:46

it, between debates,

34:48

polling releases, even

34:51

court appearances, it

34:53

can feel exhausting,

34:55

even impossible to

34:58

keep up with. I'm Brad Milkey.

35:00

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podcast from ABC News. And every morning, my

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