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