Origins of Life, Mars Missions & Cosmic Measurements: #490 - Q&A Edition

Hi there, thanks for joining us. This is a Q and a edition of Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, so good to have your company. Coming up, we are going to answer a question from Christian about the origins of life. We talked about that sort of in the last episode. Well, there's a question on the table from the audience. Rennie wants to know about the pitfalls of traveling to Mars. Aside from being next to Elon Musk, there are other things to consider. Lawrence is asking how we judge distances in space, and Lee wants to know about whether or not there's a possibility in the future of James web Space Telescopes two and three. That's all coming up on this edition of Space Nuts fifteen, Channel ten nine Ignition Space Nuts or three two Space Nuts as can I reported Neil Goods and in the stead of Professor Fred Watson, we are again joined by Johnty Horner, Professor of Astrophysics. Hi, Johnny, Hey, how are you going? I am well, good to see you again. We have got plenty of questions to answer. They're all text questions today. I didn't get the audio questions in time, but we'll save them up for future episodes, and we might as well get straight into it, shall we. All Right, Happy New Year. I've been listening to your podcast regularly for over five years now. Well you know, some people go to prison. You did that, and it's been a source of inspiration for me. In fact, it partly motivated the work I currently do, which is why I wanted to share some exciting news with you. We've finally published our findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Our study explores the origins of life and argues for its significant implications not only for Earth, but for other planetary's across the universe. I'd be thrilled to hear your thoughts on it. Freds mentioned my colleague Juan Manuel Garcia Ruez's earlier work a few times on the podcast. Recently, we embarked on an exciting new project collaborating with the XOMRS science team at the European Space Agency. It's an incredibly stimulating area of research and I hope it piques your interest. And that comes from Christian And forgive me if I mispronounce your surname Christian Gene Wine or Gene Wayne. I hope you know I'm close, but I'm kind of gobsmacked that listening to us kind of partially inspired this work. That's I never thought I would see the day where something we did could lead to something like that. Not directly, but obviously you know a few things we've said has got somebody thinking, which is what we hope to would Well. Absolutely, it's fabulous, and yeah, congratulations to yourself and Fred by proxy for motivating him inspiring. I think that's fabulous and that's one of the real values of this kind of work before we dive into the awesome paper here. One of the important things with podcasts like this, with TV shows, with astronomy outreach in general or astrobiology outreach, is you don't know where it's going to end, but people get inspired. And I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Patrick Moore doing the Sky at Night back when I was a kid. Yeah, and it's fabulous to see that impact and that, you know, just yeah, genuinely huge Hudosa and Fred for having such fabulous podcasts and clearly going out and inspiring people. So that's fabulous and it's lovely to hear this story. Now. The article itself is on PNAS, which is, as it says, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The challenge with that, and certainly I quite happily recommend people have a look at the paper. But one of the challenges when you're publishing a journalist prestigious is that is that papers have to be very short and concise, which sometimes makes them harder to dive into. And I think the authors here have done a very good job of dealing with that. But it is a slightly challenging read if you're not banging the discipline. But I've had really through it and it's a fabulous piece of work and really really interesting. So what they've done is building on a really fabulous history called the Miliuri experiments. But this was the idea that people are fascinated with how life got started, and way back in time there was this experiment done which essentially attempted to bottle the atmosphere that the early Earth had and then pass electricity through it, essentially simulating lightning and UV exposure on that early atmosphere, and it showed that you could get some kind of pre bout chemicals forming from a very simple atmosphere in those kind of conditions, so it became very much a touchstone of early astrobiology. Went out of fashion for a while because people argued that the early Earth wasn't like like that, but recent study have shown that those kind of conditions probably were around were important. This work then kind of builds on that. They've done a similar experiment with a much more modern and much more new once set up and looked at the results in a lot more detail than could have been done all that time ago. And what's really interesting is, again with a really simple setup, they get quite a complex stew of different ingredients forming. You get this layer of stuff floating on top of the water essentially, but they've dug into that and what they've found that is that in that water relayer there is this what they almost describe as proto cells, these globules that are quite small, that are spheres with a membrane that are possibly hollow inside that could be you know, prebiotic chemical factories essentially, the places where chemistry can happen in really interesting ways. That's really interesting, and they're talking about these biomorphic proto cells. Now that's positive and negatives to this. So one of the negatives from this research is that when people look for evidence of the earliest life on Earth, or in future, when they're looking for evidence of the earliest life on Mars, what are the things they look for of these kind of pro to our cells, things that are a precursor to the cells of life we know. And the argument has always been that these are separate to the formation of the compounds, and therefore they could be seen as a discrete bit of evidence of the origin of life. And what this work is saying is that these can actually be something that forms concramically, that's the phrase is in the title, forms at the same time as those preboutic chemicals. So finding these globules is not necessarily evidence that life has begun, but rather that the conditions needed for life were there. So it's maybe saying when you look back at the historical record, this is not a definitive sign of life necessarily, but Mays said, be a sign that of the conditions for life to then develop in the future. So that's a little bit sad. But on the flip side, what it's showing is that these conditions where you can start to get the conditions needed for life to start could be quite widely distributed because this was fair as simple. These are the kind of conditions you could get on planets across the cosmos with similar conditions to the Earth. So the other outcome from this is that this thing that sets the scene for the emergence of life could be more common than people think. That places where you've got oceans and atmospheres like this could get these proto cells, these globules, the actors, accelerators, incubators for advanced chemistry that could be more common through the cosmos, and therefore the scope for finding life out there could be greater than we thought. So it's a really interesting piece of work, and I think the way that the balance of positive and the native outcomes is really quite cool. Now it is quite a complex paper to read because of the nature of having to be condensed for this very prestigious journal, but the results are fabulous and if you do get on Twitter and have a look at it, the entire presentation is available online and some of their figures are beautiful. Some of the images that they've got showing the globules and the microscopic structures, they've got a really beautiful and it's the kind of thing that you almost wish that back when Uri and Miller were doing their experiment originally, we could have had that same quality of imagery and results to go back and look at. So I think it's an absolutely fabulous piece of work, and I'm really interested to see where it goes next and how people react and interact with it. In other words, what research does expawn next. Are we actually going to get to the point where we get a distinct idea of where life began? And also what the difference between life and not life is? Is still not really a hard and fast definition of when something is life and when it isn't, which always makes my head hurt. I'm an astronomer, I'm not a biologist, and I remember one of the early astrobiology conferences I went to talking about life and somebody mentioned viruses and all the biologists said, oh, no, viruses aren't alive. And that's totally contrary to my understanding as a layperson, you know, as a generalist, as an astronomer. I was gobsmaked. But apparently my mass biological definitions, the virus is not alive. I don't understand how that works. Now it's again back to that old carrot about. You've actually got a spectrum from definitely not life to definitely is life, and we have to put the dividing line somewhere, but I don't know that there's a consensus on that yet, And that kind of feeds into this as well, and that this kind of work might help people figure out that process and therefore help them put a line on This is where we consider it to be a live versus not essentially. So. Yeah, fabulous work, and even better, I guess even more inspirational given the links to the podcast in the past. I think that's fabulous. Yeah, I'm chaffed. I'm really kind of in tread most of the talking idea. But I have always argued that the recipe for life exists everywhere. You've just got to have it all put together properly and have the right oven to make it happen. And I've always believed that when you look at how life flourishes on Earth, how a weed can find the slightest crack and grow, I mean, it stands to reason that life could flourish anywhere in the universe if the conditions are right. Because we have learned that the building blocks of life all the bits and bobs that we need to establish life exist. They're flying around the universe as we speak, so it's not. A giant leap to consider that. You know, if it hits something that's exactly right, boom, you've got life somewhere else. I don't doubt it exists. Now, it might not be life as we know it. And as you said, what is life anyway? That the same question that the great George Harrison asked, And yeah, there is no real definition of what constitutes life. How do you you know when I was. A kid, I had a pet rock it could have been alive. You don't. Yeah, where do you draw the line? Especially real es set out there as well, So it's not like you're limited in space. We've got incredible volume of space and incredible depth of time. And what's always shruck me as interesting is the division between those who believe that life won't be out there and those who will. And I saw this one. I'm one of the members of the Committee of the Astrobiologist side of Great Britain, even though I left the country fifteen years ago now, but there's an active astrobiology community there and I first sat and going to conferences with them more than twenty years ago now, and astrobiology conferences are wonderful things. Bex. They's so multidisciplinary, so you've got learning in areas that you wouldn't normally encounter where you learn something. You've also got kind of sociological learning of the way that different disciplines present. You know, different disciplines have different color schemes which I'd never thought of. You know, I've been to talks by geologists that were pink text on a pale blue background, which made my eyes bleed. But you know, you get theseferences there. But one of the things that struck me early on was that the people involved in astra biology from the biology side were nearly all very young researchers, really passionate and excited, but because the senior biologists were convinced that life was impossible, and they thought that the search f life elsewhere was a fool's errand that you just couldn't have life. Now, if you think that the Earth is the only place in the universe of life, which you know, we've got a sample of one, so that is still possible, then you have to assume that life is so incredibly impossible that wear a flick. If you make life even slightly more probable than that, even if it is not impossible but just vanishingly improbable, vict there is so much realistic bect There are so many planets around so many stars, in so many galaxies. Even if life is vanishingly improbable, it must be everywhere. It just might not be close enough for us to find. And that divide is really stark. And it's a philosophical one because we have no evidence either way, and it becomes almost a belief structure. People believe that we must be all on our people convinced that we're not, and the only way we'll find out is by looking and by doing this kind of work. And I would love to think that within our lifetimes we'll know the. Answer when one can only hope. Yes, if you would like to find that paper, it's at p NAS dot org PNS dot or that didn't sound good, and yeah, it's it's. It's a long title, but it is really a concomitant formation of proto cells and prebotic compounds on replausible early Earth atmosphere where you are. And yeah, it's not a long read, but it is. Yeah, it can make your brain hurt. But most scientific papers tend to do that. But yeah, and thanks Christian for letting us know and telling us that we had a tiny part to play in the development of your work. That that really excites me. And I'll make sure Fred's areware and he might want to talk about that when he gets back to our next question. This one comes from who is it? It's from Rennie, who is in southern sunny West Hills, California. Rennie tends to ask very short, sharp questions. On a mission to Mars. Would a spaceship. Traverse through the asteroid belt or would it travel above or below the belt? Yes, really good question. Now, the astro belt, as everybody imagines it, is between the obbits of Mars and Jupiter, So when we're going to Mars, we're still closer to the sunner than the astraid belt is, so you're not really going to be traversing the belt anyway. However, Mars is such a tiny, puny planet with fairly weeak gravity and sorry Mars, but it's true, but the inter readge of the astra belt basically almost of lapsed with Mars's orbit, and asteroids do cross Marser's orbit all the time. Mars therefore gets hit more often than we do. Fortunately, space is really, really, really big, and there's a experiment you can do that demonstrates this. So if you've watched great movies like Star Wars, you've got asteroid belts in there as a refuge for the brave, heroic enemies of society and being chased by the baddies. They're flying to the astroid belt and they have to dodge and we've to get through, and of course the baddies fail terribly, crash into things, and wee chair because at heart we're all horrible individuals. But that's what happens. So the kind of cultural tick from that is that we imagine asteroid belts has been incredibly densely packed with material. Now, if the Ashtoi Belt was like that, you could go out tonight or any night of the year and look up and the plane of the Soul system would have a band quite broad of the sky from horizon to horizon where you see no stars, where you cannot see due to when you cannot see Saturn because there's an asteroid in the way, because every line of sight would hit an asteroid and that would be glowing grayish because it'd be reflecting some light back to us. That'd be how the sky looks. The reality is that you don't see the asteroid belt. You need a telescope or binoculars to see individual asteroids. But to have an asteroid pass in front of a star and block its light to have an occultation is a sufficiently unusual event that astronomers will travel across the world to set up in the shadow of the asteroid to get data that tells you how big it is, what its shape is, by the shape of that shadow as it moves across the Earth. What that tells you is that space is mostly empty. The fact that it is so rare that one of these asteroids lines up with a star is telling you that essentially you're going to be fairly safe traveling through the asteroid belt. When you talk about there being more than a million objects bigger than a klometer across, you think space must be packed. But the actuality that belt is so sparsely populated these days that if you were ever to be stood on the surface of an asteroid and you weren't having to worry about how you get home or what you're going to breathe, if you're stood on the surf of that asteroid. Very few few other asteroids will be near enough to see with you an added eye. Space is that big. The way that you can evidence that, I guess is the fact we've sent all these missions to the outer planets and not one has come a cropper. But also when those missions want to visit an asteroid for a bit of added value, they've got to be very careful in picking their trajectory to get near enough to see something. Big. Space is pretty big. So in terms of this question, for a mission to Mars, there is debris in the inner Solar System that you'd want to be aware of, but you can basically just pick your path and go. The odds of you intersecting an asteroid are pretty much non existent, very very small smaller debris maybe, but the big you get, the less stuff there is. Even going to the outer Solar System, you just go through. You don't need to go above or below, which is fortunate. See obits of the asteroids are quite puffed up. You'll get up to thirty or even forty five degree tilts before the asteroid belt starts to when, and so that means you'd have to go very very high to get up and then get back down again. A lot easier to go straight through. Yeah, yeah, And as you said, nothing's hit one yet that we've sent out there, so yeah, there's plenty of room to move through. And as you said, space is big. You might think it's a long way down the street to the chemist to quote a famous book, but. Yes, space is huge. Thanks Rennie. Great to hear from you. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley. And John D. Horner. Time to take a short break to tell you about our sponsor, Nord VPN and they've got a great new year deal for you, which I'll get too soon. Now, if you're someone who uses public Wi Fi, then you could be exposed to hackers. And I'm talking about places like cafes, airports, hotels, shopping malls, anywhere that Wi Fi exists for open use basically, and let's be realistic, there aren't many places that don't offer it these days. Now you might not be aware of this, but there are two ways hackers work. They can hack into your device directly, or they can intercept your Wi Fi data, which could include your passwords and usernames. And once they get that all bets are off, So what can you do to ensure your safety? Simple put up a wall known as a virtual private network or VPN. 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You won't be disappointed. Now back to the show. Space nuts. Well, it's not Professor Fred Watson at the moment, it's Professor Johnty Hornefred's away and that means the mice can play Johnty. Let's go to our next question. Hi you chaps, Lawrence from London, England. Here, I have a question about how we map the night sky and judge distances accurately. Specifically, how can we make any kind of objective claim regarding the distance and positions of particular stars or planets when we know effects like gravitational lensing can actively disconnect what we see with what is actually out there. It seems that without any sort of unaffected control against which we make these judgments, it's not all some giant, if not educated, guessing game. Apologies if I've missed something incredibly obvious here. Love the pod, listen to it every day and to and from work, and congratulations Thread on the big step in your career. You're an inspiration to all. Jeez, chaps, all the best. That's another one I'll have to send a Fred, But yes, yeah, measuring. Things in space, how do we get it right? How do we. Compensate for gravitational lensing. I think we've had similar questions in the past. It's always good to revisit these things. Absolutely, and it's a good question, and we actually cover a lot of this when we teach asterronomy. So I've taught this, I've gone through it, and it is true that the distances you get are not perfectly precise. Yes, so we can't say that an object four million light years away is exactly four million. There'll be an uncertainty with that. But the way that we've got the distances worked out is a series of different runs on a ladder. That's the why it's often described the distance ladder. And there are different techniques we can use that find objects that are more easy to spot but are rarer so within our solar system, it took a long time, but people got the distances worked out. There were clever experiments that went on all the way back to the sixteen hundreds and even earlier trying to estimate the scale of the solar system. Famously ol Aroma back in the sixteen seventies, I believe it was did some cool experiments trying to measure the speed of light looking at the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, and in order to measure the speed of light, he had to have an understanding of the scale of the universe, or at least a scale locally in the Solar System in order to make that happen. And that scale the distance of the planets from the Sun had got relatively well established by then, fans to clever observations using trigonometry and using little bits of things like trigonometric paddle acts. Now pedalas is going to become quite important. So within the Solar System, once you've got your ruler worked out, if you know the orbital period of an object, you know it's semi major axis, which is the scale of its orbit. We also, by observing from different locations, can get quite a good immediate measurement of the distance, even to things we've only just discovered. If you observe from two different sides of the planet, you'll see the thing move a little bit against the background thousand that gives you a distance. Now that technique, that idea of paddle ants comes in really important to measure the distance to the nearest stars, and this is what people were doing by the early eighteen hundreds. You've got people like you have three diric vessel were doing this way before the days of optical observe of photographic observing. Should I say this is all optical with the eye, but they were taking very precise measurements of stars against the background stars using the biggest telescopes of the day. And they use this technique culture inometric parallaxs. Now, if you're driving while listening to the podcast, don't do this, But if you' sat somewhere safe, you can do this as an experiment. Actually, see how it works. So if you put your finger up in front of your face and close your right eye and look where your finger is against the background. Then open your right eye and close the left, you'll see your finger move against the background. Yeah, close your fingers to your face, the bigger the movement. So that's trigarometric paddle acts. And it's part of how our brains help us do things like catchable that's surroun to us. We get a sense of depth perception. Now, what I want you to imagine is that without killing you or causing you pain, I'm able to separate your eyes and instead of them being a couple of inches apart, make them three hundred million kilometers apart, so I'm putting them on one side of the s of it rather sudden then the other. That gives you a much bigger baseline. And that baseline is enough that by stars, when you look at them through a telescope, will appay to move against the background stars in just the same way that your finger does when you look from the left either right eye. So that gives us a way to measure the distance to those stars. So long as we know the distance that the Earth has moved, that's a distance of the Earth from the Sun. So if we know the size of the baseline, we know the angle that the stars moving through. Fairly simple trigonometry allows you to calculate the distance, and that gives us a distance to the nearest stars. And the better your telescope, the better your facility, the more accurately you can measure that, which is why the GEY emission at the minute is so incredible. The Gey emission is this spacecraft floating around out there in space with an incredibly precise camera that is, among many other things, measuring the parallats and the proper motion of about two billion with a b two billion stars. That's depending on the number us a half a percent to one percent of all stars in our galaxy will be able to have their distance measured by this spacecraft. But eventually things get so far away that you can't use padallax anymore. They just moved too little for you to measure it. How then do you get the distance to the next subject. Well, you go back to the early nineteen hundreds, and you had a great astronomer, I think it was Henrietta Levitt who did this fabulous, fabulous work as one of the calculators, one of the astronomers at a great American observatory, and she was looking at photographic plates of the large Magelanic Cloud, which is one of our satellite galaxies, and studying them. And what she realized was that there was a group of variable stars which we call the Seafeed variables after Delta Cephi, which is the brightest one in the sky, that were all varying periodically. They were getting brighter and fainter. But the stars that were the same brightness that were varying this way also varied with the same period. Now, because all these stars were in the same galaxy a long way away, they were essentially at the same distance. The size of that galaxy compared to its distance is quite small. Stars she's studying in that field of view in that galaxy were effectively the same distance. The stars that looked fainter actually were fainter, and the stars that looked brighter actually were intrinsically brighter. And what she found was that there was a relationship between the period of these oscillations and the brightness, which is brilliant. What that means is if you see a star oscillating in this way and you measure its period, you know intrinsically how bright it is, and you know how bright it is in the sky, So that allows you to work out its distance as an equation we can use which allows you to compare the true brightness and the observed brightness. So that gives you an independent measure of distance that tells you which of these stars are closer or further away across the sky. But you need to calibrate that. You can say that one star is closer than another, but until you know the distance of one of the stars, that's not really useful. But fortunately, the very closest of these sephored variable stars are close enough to also measure the distance with paddle aps, so that gives you a way to quantify a scale. Now, these are quite bright steles, so you can even see them in nearby galaxies, So that gives you another wrung on the distance ladder. And you can see these seals, you can spot them. You can measure their variability, which tells you how luminous are, how intrinsically bright they are, And you can measure how bright they appear and use that to get the distance, and that gets you out a bit further. But then again they get too fent you can't see them. But there are some types of super and over explosion that it turns out, are very very regular in their peak luminosity, how much light they give off. So if you see a super and over behave in a certain way can identify it's one of these kind of supernovay. Then that tells you you know exactly how luminous it got. And once again you can measure the brightness as we see it. Put the two together to get the distance. With those, we can use the see fed variables to set the standard. These standard candles, you can get the distance of us super and ova and that gives you a distance scale. So there are other ladders, other rungs on this ladder, but that's the essential way it works. Now, it's not perfect. There are uncertainties that accumulate as you go further and further away. So the more distant something is from us, the larger the uncertainty on its distance will be. So for objects in the Solar System, we know the distances with incredible accuracy nowadays, particularly for the objects we've studied really well. The nearest stars. Again, we know that very very accurately, but not as precisely as we know the distance to the objects in the Solar System. And the further you go, the bigger the uncertainty, the bigger the error gets on the measurement compared to the measurement itself. Now, all of these things like gravitational lensing and stuff like that interfere for some objects in some locations, but they're not the end of the world because they're a small subset of the objects and they are a small effect on the total of it. So if you've got and this is getting a bit further from my personal area of expertise, but if you've got a distant galaxy is lensed by fall ground object. The distance along the different light paths is still going to be very similar to it coming direct. You're only deviating by a couple of degrees off that line and then getting bent back. So even if that lights had to travel a little bit further, the uncertainty is still within all the other uncertainties there. So that's a part of the story as well, and we can observe these things now. One of the nice things is for some of the really extremely distant things that are lensed, that lensing gives us a brighter image than we will get if the thing in the foreground wasn't there, which has allowed people to observe this sup and ova in them to help give an independent confirmation of their extreme distances. You've also had a couple of quirkycasions, I believe, where you've got these fragmented lensed images, these beautiful things you see in some of the astra photos from things like Hubble, where you've got a distant galaxy with a lens in the foreground and you've got multiple images of the same galaxy. And I believe that san to be corrected on this that there has been a case at least once where AVA has been seen in the different fragments of the lens coming at slightly different times because of light paths of different lens. So we can even see the differences in the distance for the different images because of the asymmetry and the lens fact that it's not perfectly then to essentially, so there's a lot we can dig into there, and if you want to know more about it, it's searching, you know, the kind of galactic distance scale, the you know, the distance ladder, looking at the seafeed variables, and the story of the incredible scientists in the early nineteen hundred, the women who worked there and in this remarkable science is well worth looking into. Us while you've got people like Henriette to Leavitt, Annie John Cammon who did similar work at the same institute at the time, these kind of overlooked heroes of astronomy that did absolutely astonishing work and led to this knowledge that we have now. Wow, theger Lawrence, I bet you didn't expect any answer, But you've got plenty to work with. So if you go do your homework and get back to us when you've got when you've got another follow up question. But yeah, yeah, I mean it's a great explanation, and there's a lot more to it than meets the eye bombob. Murder Your Love through Space Nets. One final question, and this one comes from Lee. I'm listening to the episode discussing the nine to one subscription rate for the James Web Space Telescope's time. I understand that JWST costs a few dollars, but surely most of the cost was in tooling, contracting, et cetera. Wouldn't NASA have contract options to build additional systems, such as in the event of a launch failure. Since the tooling and such is already made and the science value is so high, would they ever consider consider building James Web Space Telescopes two and three. Just seems logical to buy in box. Keep up the good work, sheees Lee. I think when Fred and I were first talking about James Webb, we talked about the fact that they had to get this absolutely right first go, because there was no going back if they made a mistake. So that may well help answer the question from Lee. But your thoughts, Johnny, there aren't any plans. At the minute for j WSC mark two, mark three. It's interesting when you go back to Hubble that the US military has spare hubbles lying around, so there's great, great observatory coming online in a few years time when it gets launched. Nancy gresh Roman Telescope, I think it is that has its origin in the fact that hubble space telescopes in our old technology for the military, So that'sn't gone approached apparently, And told by the way, we've got three four spare hubbles lying around, could you use them? And the ones that the military were using obviously point in a different direction because they look down rather than looking up. I don't think that's the same story with JEDUST. And part of the issue here as well is the development time. JWSC famously launched about twenty years after it was initially scheduled to and the first discussions of first planning for JEDSC was actually in the nineteen eighties and it took until twenty twenty one for it to get launched. That's really challenging, and there is nothing in the pipeline to do it now. The idea of having the production line is something that has become relevant for smaller telescopes. We at UNISQ have this fabulous observatory amount Kin observatory where we've got a dedicated facility for finding and characterising planets around other starts, and we're able to do that on a university scale budget with our collaborators because for smaller telescopes, there are now companies who produce these things on a production line, and we're having essentially the muddel t forward revolution in telescopes, where for small telescopes people and by small telescopes here i'm talking telescopes with mirrors at seventy centimeters or amet cross so they're still a lot bigger than they typical backyard scale, but they're small compared to jws or compared to the Vera Rubin observatory, things like that. And there is sufficient demand from the military, from commercial interests, from astronomers, and from amateur astronomers that it's now sufficiently profitable for companies to do these things on a production line. And what that's led to is a drop in the cost of these telescopes of an order of magnitude, which lets us build these bespoke observatories that are tasked with a single task to do a single thing. The problem is that that production line thing is okay if telescopes that are seventy centimeters or a meter across. It's not telescopes at the cutting edge of the biggest in the world, the most complex in the world. These are relatively simple telescopes. There is no motivation as far as I can tell. It's not a good financial thing to say we're going to build a production line for jwsts because there's just not the market for them. The cost is so high the use case. I'd love there to be nine out there, but I would lay if there were nine j wsds, they would still be over subscribed by nine to one. Because there's just so much science that we want to get done. The focus is on the next generation of telescopes. There's a Vera Rubin Observatory coming online in the next year or two that'll see fest light that will revolutionize astronomy. I'm really excited about that. And that's ground based, but that's an eight point three meter diameter primary mirror, but an incredibly incredibly fast photographic lens, so it'll have it's like having a really fast lens on your camera, but it'd been eight point three meters across. That will let people serve there the entire sky once a week down to magnitude twenty, which is about a billion times fenter than the human eye can see every single week, and that's predicted to increase the number of objects we know in the Solar system my factor of ten to one hundred times within a year to do similar things for the rest of astronomy and things like that. Things like the games Web, which are really at the cutting edge of what we can do, tend to be one off because they are incredibly expensive if they require huge amounts of technology innovation to make happen, But they are also such an incredibly long lead time that by the time it's up there, people planning the next big things. And we're joking for space observatories about telescopes that want launch and silver late twenty thirty is early twenty forties. Now, nothing that I'm aware of is a direct analog for gems Web. It's probably worth having an a side here, and I like to talk about this. Do you sometimes get people saying, why do we spend so much money on this? Why do the US governments continue to give billions to NASSA and Shrudn't we spend that money on things like curing cancer? You know, yes, really the question semi regularly for me. What we as scientists always overlook is the fact that the motivations of governments to fund these things are not really the science. We always want to get asked that question. So, but it's awesome and we want to learn stuff and we're so passionate. And that's a really valid answer if you share that passion, But if you don't, it'sless. What's actually going on with NASA and with other governments around the world that are pumping huge amounts of money into this is that they're aware of the return that they'll get on their investment. To build James Web was ridiculous expensive. I think it's approaching ten billion US dollars. That's billion with a B. Again, that's a lot for government to invest, especially when you think, yeah, should we be investing in cure in cancer. But to do that, you're looking at solving technology problems that have never been solved, building cameras to make measurements with a precision that's never been achieved, and that drives a huge amount of technological innovation for the government funding NASA. The great majority of the people aren't at all interested in the science, but what they're aware of is that historically, since it formed without fail year on year, NASA has had return on investment of at least ten to one. So for every dollar that is invested, the return to the economy is more than ten dollars. And there is no other business that I'm aware of that has that return on investments. So commercially it may it's a lot of sense, but also for things like curing cancer. If you're a doctor who wants to cure cancer and you want to be able to study the human body, you're going to need better cameras, better detection tools, better software. But you're a doctor, you're saving lives. You can't say I'm going to let my patients die because I'm going to go spend five years developing a new tool that's not going to happen. But the tools that are developed for these astronomical things, for instruments, for facilities, for space observatories then find use in other areas. You know, I've got, you know, my pocket based fruit based device, my phone or other brands are obviously available, has a camera in it that when you take photos, they're awesome, and all the phone brands likely but the camera itself is terrible. You know, you look at the phone side on and you've got a tiny little light path to a sensor with mass produced lenses. The images that these phones make are actually absolutely god awful. They're terrible images because the optics is terrible, because it's cheap, reproducibile, very small, But they're god awful in a very predictable way. All the optics have the same flows from one f one to the next, which means in the camera software all of those flaws can be reverse managed out, so you go from a blurry kind of you know, a whole of mirrors type experience to a beautiful image because it's reproducibly bad. The detector in that phone, the software that's used for that image processing, all of that stuff that we text self and granted in our pocket has come from astronomy research, from the image processing and the imaging that's done by astronomers. And that's really why governments invest in this. For you and I am for the bulk of the audience. We just we're just in it for the research and the excitement of the discoveries. But for the people in powers, they see the benefits that this brings that are clearly very different to the scientific outcomes, and that's why it gets funded. And when you're passionate about something, when you care, you don't think about that narrative. You just talk about the excitement and the wonder, which is preaching to the converted, but the skeptical person down the pub who wants to know where the tax dollars are going in a time when we've got across the living crisis, telling them about the wonder of science isn't going to win them over. No, telling them about the other benefits they'll under sun And I think it's really impot to have those discussions, even if they're not the wonder that we all want to espowels, and it's good to have the reality of the other benefits as well. Indeed, yeah, well said the go lee. Probably not a James Webb space telescope two and three, but I can tell you for sure, And Johnny hinted at this over the next Gosh will between now and twenty fifty one and beyond, there are plans to launch twenty two twenty three space telescopes, so there won't be James Webb. I'll all have different tasks. One of them will be studying gravitational waves. Others will be looking at gamma rays that the lips on, but they're. Sorry, other's exo planets as well in their result yet, and it's games. Webbits are very multi use tool, so it's good for everything, but you quite often get more mileage by making a cheaper tool that's good for one thing. Yeah, and a lot of the facilities are designed for a specific task. Yeah. So in the coming few decades here twenty two to twenty three at least, space telescopes are going to be launched, So it's it's not something that's stopped at James web By any means. What I might quickly on that topic is actually hop off one soapbox and climb up on another one, Okay, which is the challenge involved in this. So you say, you know, next twenty years we're talking about maybe another twenty or thirty space telescopes to be on, so we might get a bit more than that. In actuality, one of the things that salent proponents will often argue to astronomers when a Sean must say, oh no, this sky's getting ruined and it's going to be damaging for grand best optical observatories all well, grand based observatories are absolutely anyway. Elon Musk can just launch all your telescopes to space and that's problem solved. And it just doesn't work that way. I mean, I did some reading around when this debate kicked up again. There are more than ten thousand professional ground based astronomical telescopes on Earth that are doing research that rollover subscribed. The smallest of them are things like up at our observatory at Mount Kent. At Mount Kent, we've got more than a dozen telescopes all actively on sky every night doing really good research. And the smallest of them are our seventy centimeter telescopes. We're involved in a space mission called Twinkle. Twinkle is looking at putting a seventy centimeter telescope in orbit to do in for red observing, and it's kind of crowdsourcing it and building it off the shelf. It's a new model of telescopes, which makes it hugely cheaper. That will cost seventy million dollars. Our seventy centimeter telescope on the ground cost us a quarter of a million dollars. There is just not the money to rep what we've got on the ground. In the space there is also not the capacity to launch a really top end stuff. You know, the very Rubin Observatory is going to be an eight point three meter mirror with a five point three meter secondary, crazy huge thing. The biggest telescope is a building at the minute have nearly forty meter diameter mirrors. There's just no way you could launch them though. Unfortunately it's a bit specious to come back and say we don't need to protect the nightscab because you can just launch all the big telescopes space we can't afford to. Unfortunately, No, we eat the ground best stuff as well, and the grand best stuff does amazing work. Indeed, it does this very well. Said again and Lee, thanks for the question. It's certainly sparked Johnty into action. But yeah, thanks for getting in touch with this, Lee, Lawrence, Rennie and Christian who made up our panel today with our text questions, thanks as always to you. And if you've got questions for us, don't forget to send them in via our web site because that's the best way to get them through to us. Whether they're text or audio, we take them all. If you want to put a question on a paper aeroplane and just throw it. It might get to us, you never know. And Johnty as always, thanks so much. We'll catch up with you again. Next time, looking forward to it. Thanks for having me, and you know, Cleose Goings to everyone. John ty Horner, Professor of astrophysics, sitting in for Fred on Space Nuts at the moment. And thanks to Hu in the studio, although he couldn't be with us today because he's actually waiting in line for his turn to use the James Webspace telescope. And from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks to your company. We'll catch you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye Nuts to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from no It's dot com.