Listener Questions #45

Daniel and Kelly wonder how many Extraordinaries are planning on becoming supervillains as they discuss how to make Jupiter explode, the changing colors of children's hair, and whether or not aliens could discover electromagnetism without iron. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 3:26Speaker 00

  How would a supervillain get Jupiter to blow? Not that anyone wants to, but would it make a great show?

• 3:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Norwegian kids are often born blonde but end up brunette. Why? Did this help our Viking ancestors fend off some threat?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Imagine aliens on a planet without iron to find. Could they still discover magnets and send us messages from their alien minds?

• 3:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ooh, whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Welcome to listener questions number 45 on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 4:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I am getting a little bit concerned at all of the questions we get from our listeners that suggest they're researching how to become supervillains.

• 4:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who loves thinking about aliens, and I'm happy to grow the supervillain demographic in our audience.

• 4:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you are. And so, Daniel, give them something to work with. If you were going to be a supervillain, what would you do with your physics or cosmology knowledge to do the most supervillain-y thing you can think of?

• 4:52Daniel Whiteson?

  I think I've advertised this on the show already. I would gamble or trade away the entire Earth to superintelligent aliens if they could offer us some insight into the deepest questions of the universe.

• 5:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's supervillain-y for sure. And we all knew that you valued the aliens you've never met much more than every human on this planet. But I'm talking about, like, you know, would you push Jupiter into the Earth? Or you just, you have very tunnel vision on this alien thing?

• 5:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, you really want me to be a supervillain here, huh?

• 5:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I'm giving the people what they want.

• 5:27Daniel Whiteson?

  I would similarly encourage people to do experiments here on Earth that might even risk the planet.

• 5:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 5:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, when we turned on the Large Haidon Collider, there was a big brouhaha about, is it gonna make black holes that gobble up the Earth? And no, the answer is, it's not going to. There are higher energy collisions happening all the time in the atmosphere anyway that are not destroying the Earth. But in my view, actually, I didn't really care.

• 5:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 5:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Even if it was gonna risk the Earth and maybe create a black hole to gobble everything, I was like, let's do it, because that would be fascinating.

• 5:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  This, you know what? I shouldn't ask you these questions, because I'm always disappointed afterwards.

• 6:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I tried to squirrel away from it.

• 6:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  You did. Okay, let's move on. Let's go ahead and hear Kenny's question about Jupiter. Kenny is today's supervillain listener.

• 6:15Speaker 06

  Hi, Daniel. We were talking about Jupiter, and then we thought of something a bit scary. Jupiter is, it made mostly hydrogen, so could it explode? What if evil space aliens arrived with a plan to destroy the solar system? What if they dumped a huge, huge amount of oxygen onto you to make a giant explosion? Or what if they swallowed in loads of bananas and Jack chocolate, making Jupiter heavier and heavier until it turns into a star? What would happen to Earth? Would Earth get blasted apart? But what would happen instantly?

• 6:56Speaker 06

  Or would Jupiter come a terrifying new star in a sky that lasts data for a really long time?

• 7:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, Kenny, what are you planning, man?

• 7:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, Kenny does really seem like he's got big plans. Fortunately, we're not going to suggest anything that's of any practical use to him.

• 7:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's good, that's good.

• 7:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Essentially, there are two ways for Kenny's dreams to become reality, via physics or via chemistry. I don't see any biological way to destroy Jupiter, so we're limited to those two basic sciences.

• 7:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like this is one of the reasons why biology is great. But all right, go on.

• 7:41Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so let's talk about destroying Jupiter via physics. What that means essentially is fusion. This is what's already happening at the core of stars. You have a huge ball of gas, mostly hydrogen. It gets compressed due to gravity that increases the temperature and the pressure. And eventually, you have such high temperature and pressure that fusion goes from essentially impossible, never, never happens, to very rarely happens, but happens often enough to release enough heat to increase the chances of fusion, or to at least maintain it. So the thing to understand here is that fusion is very sensitive in a nonlinear way to pressure and temperature. You double the pressure and temperature, the rates of fusion don't go up by two, they go up by more than two. It's nonlinear.

• 8:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, really big stars, for example, have a lot of gravity, they get really hot, fusion goes really fast, and big stars burn themselves really quickly. Small stars have less pressure and temperature, fusion at their heart goes very slowly, they can last for billions and billions, maybe even trillions of years. So the amount of stuff you have determines the pressure and temperature, which determines how much fusion is happening.

• 8:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I feel like fizzling out is very different than exploding, which is what Kenny's, are we gonna get to the explosions, is what I'm wondering, Daniel? When do the explosions happen?

• 9:06Daniel Whiteson?

  You want some more kabooms? I mean, if the star is big enough and hot enough, then it will blow itself apart.

• 9:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 9:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, if you try to make a star that's more than 300 times the mass of the sun, you just can't do it, because it's so big, it gets so hot, the fusion is so powerful that it blows itself apart, and you end up with a star of mass around 300 times the mass of the sun.

• 9:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Now we're talking.

• 9:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Because most stars are a balance between gravity and the fusion pressure, the energy that's being released by that fusion. And so, when it gets too big, then gravity makes it too hot, and then the pressure and temperature get cranked up, and then fusion wins. So in order to make Jupiter really blow, you'd need it to be 300 times the mass of the sun. And currently, it's about one thousandth the mass of the sun.

• 9:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Really?

• 9:55Daniel Whiteson?

  And so you look confused.

• 9:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I'm not confused. I'm surprised. I guess I'd assumed Jupiter had a lot more mass, but the sun is that much more massy, huh?

• 10:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, the solar system is basically the sun. Everything else is a crumb. We have a totally distorted view of the solar system because we live on a planet, so we think it's really important. It's like if you live in a tiny town outside New York City, and you think that it should also appear on a map, when really, it's just New York City, you know? We're basically irrelevant.

• 10:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 10:24Daniel Whiteson?

  We're irrelevant compared to Jupiter. Jupiter is basically irrelevant compared to the sun. So we're irrelevant squared.

• 10:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 10:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So what this means is that Kenny has a lot of work to do. There's a few thresholds here. Like, what would it take to get fusion happen at all in Jupiter? People sometimes imagine this is like an on off switch. There is fusion happening within Jupiter. It's just very rarely and not enough to do anything interesting. For fusion to get like hot enough, so you start to increase the temperature of Jupiter for there to be ignition, it'd need to be about 80 times its current mass. It's like the minimum size for a star to really glow. They would become like a really dim red dwarf. So not a boom, not an explosion, just like a very, very gentle star. As you add mass, it gets brighter and brighter. You get up to the mass of the sun, which is a slightly above average star.

• 11:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And then you could keep going to get up to the most massive stars in the universe. But it would take an enormous amount of mass. Like, there isn't enough mass in the solar system, obviously, to make another star that's 300 times the mass of the sun. You'd need to like gather 300 neighboring solar systems and squeeze all of their mass into Jupiter. Then you'd get a really awesome explosion.

• 11:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  You better be a very motivated supervillain. That's a lot of work.

• 11:39Daniel Whiteson?

  More realistically, if he gets enough bananas and dark chocolate, like siphons off some mass from the sun and dumps it into Jupiter, he could get Jupiter to ignite into a star if he cranks up its mass by a factor of 80. So we're talking 80 Jupiters squeezed together, right? Then you're going to get a very dim red dwarf. That would warm Earth a little bit. Like Jupiter is kind of far away. It's much further from Earth than the sun is. And a red dwarf would be much, much dimmer. But it would have some impact on the Earth. It would also affect the Earth's orbit. Earth's orbit is not just determined by the sun. Jupiter does play a role. There's a reason we have like ice ages and all sorts of long-term cycles, because Earth is getting tweaked by the other planets. It's a little bit of a chaotic system.

• 12:23Daniel Whiteson?

  These are called Milankovich cycles. And so if Jupiter becomes 80 times its mass, that's going to get more dramatic.

• 12:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Do we have anything that's more boomy, though, that we could give him as an answer? Is there something else we could do?

• 12:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Chemistry is definitely more boomy than physics in this scenario. I mean, physics and fusion is behind like, you know, atomic bombs, fusion bombs. So that's pretty dramatic.

• 12:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's hard to get that kind of density. But you could also do it with chemistry, right? Like, you know, hydrogen famously burns. But what is burning? Burning is a chemical reaction. It's combustion. You take something like hydrogen and oxygen, and you add a spark, and then you get water and energy. Famously, the Hindenburg is hydrogen burning, right? This is why we don't fill in massive tanks with hydrogen anymore, because hydrogen and oxygen combust. Oh, the humanity.

• 13:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's a little surprising. We thought it was a good idea initially, but we don't do it anymore.

• 13:22Daniel Whiteson?

  And if you are on a massive hydrogen-filled balloon, don't go out onto the smoking deck. It's not a good idea.

• 13:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, actually, don't smoke.

• 13:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, don't smoke at all.

• 13:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Biologist's recommendation.

• 13:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And something I very rarely say is that this little bit of chemistry is actually kind of interesting, because you see oxygen a lot. It's around all the time. You see it in combustion. You see it in lots of reactions. It's also important in biochemistry, right? Oxygen is an electron acceptor. It's important for metabolism. We breathe in oxygen via our lungs because we need it. And it's all for the same reason, is that oxygen has openings for electrons in a fairly low energy state. And so what you're trying to do in all of these reactions is release energy. And so for that to happen, you need to take something at a high energy level and get it to a lower energy level. So when biochemists talk about electronic receptors, what they mean is basically, there's a valley here. So if you have rocks on the tops of hills,

• 14:21Daniel Whiteson?

  you can roll them down into this valley, and then you can gather that energy. If you have rocks on the top of hills, but it's just hills, and there's no valleys, there's nowhere for that energy to go. And so you need valleys. And oxygen is basically a valley, which is a way to release energy. All right, so let's say that Kenny wants to blow up Jupiter with chemistry. How much oxygen does he need? Well, a lot. Jupiter is about 10 to the 27 kilograms. About 75% of that is hydrogen. So call that like 1 times 10 to the 27 kilograms. Oxygen is much more massive than hydrogen. Remember that hydrogen is atomic element number one. It's just a proton.

• 15:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Oxygen is eight protons, right? So it's eight times more mass. So if you want to do the chemical reaction of like H2 plus O2, then four grams of hydrogen means 32 grams of oxygen. So eight times as much. So you want to blow up all of Jupiter? You're going to need like six times the mass of Jupiter in oxygen to make that combustion happen. We're talking 1,800 times the mass of the Earth, all in oxygen, which you got to find somewhere, Kenny.

• 15:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so this is a very common misconception about supervillains. They're not just lazy misanthropes. You got to work hard to be a supervillain.

• 15:45Daniel Whiteson?

  And you got to have connects. Do you have an oxygen guy, Kenny?

• 15:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 15:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Because you're going to need one.

• 15:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Networking is critical, Kenny. Get on LinkedIn.

• 15:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And you can't just mix hydrogen and oxygen, right? Because though this reaction is energetically favorable, like it does release energy, there's an activation barrier here. So you're not just like at the top of a hill, rolling down the rock. You're in a little valley at the top of the hill, and you got to get over the edge of the volcano and then down into the valley. So that's why you need a spark. You just mix hydrogen, oxygen, you don't get the reaction. You need to light a match, and that initial energy gets it going. And then the heat released by the combustion gets it going. That's what we call ignition. Now, that's not a problem in Jupiter. You don't need a match, Kenny, because the core of Jupiter is already very, very hot. The challenge here is mixing.

• 16:37Daniel Whiteson?

  You need enough oxygen mixing with hydrogen in an even way. And oxygen is heavier than helium. So if you just dump it into Jupiter from your spaceship, it's going to all sink to the core. You're not going to get like a smooth combustion. So probably what you're going to get is like a series of planet-wide explosions, rather than like a single boom. There's going to be turbulence in the combination. You're going to get like atmospheric detonation fronts.

• 17:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa.

• 17:05Daniel Whiteson?

  A lot of the heat is going to get reabsorbed, just heating up the gas and expanding it. So you're going to get huge plasma shells. We actually got to see in history a bunch of cool explosions in the atmosphere of Jupiter when a comet struck Jupiter in 1994. And we saw massive fireballs, like bigger than the Earth, which was really awesome.

• 17:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you got to watch. I remember this story.

• 17:29Daniel Whiteson?

  I did get to watch it. Yeah, it was a cool summer for me.

• 17:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Daniel Whiteson?

  And this would release a huge amount of energy. You know, it would release probably like 10 to the eight joules per kilogram. That's a lot of energy. Probably two times 10 to the 35 joules in total. That's like 10 to the 18. It's like a quintillion SARS bombas.

• 17:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 17:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? Or like 16 times the annual solar output, all in one explosion.

• 17:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Holy cow.

• 17:58Daniel Whiteson?

  So it would be dramatic. We would definitely see it here on Earth. We would probably get sunburns. It might fry us. But I think there's some technical challenges there that I doubt Kenny's going to overcome, so I'm not shy to give him all this advice.

• 18:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  You don't know, Kenny, man. Kenny might be a real go-getter.

• 18:17Daniel Whiteson?

  This could be the beginning of Kenny's story. Let's find out.

• 18:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And Kenny, if you have any follow-up questions for Daniel, let us know.

• 18:25Speaker 06

  Thank you for answering my question on your podcast. I look at the atmospheric destination foot on the X weather forecast.

• 18:43Speaker 00

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• 21:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back. We're transitioning from answering questions from potential supervillains to helping people understand their children's hair.

• 21:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which is a tough question. And so, all right, we are going to hear two questions from listeners because I got a very similar question from two different folks. And so let's hear Mark and Ephraim's questions about what the heck is going on with their kids' heads. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Ephraim from Arlington, Massachusetts. I just listened to the discussion of gray hair in listener questions number 29, which totally overturned what I previously read about how gray hair works. Kelly's mention of hair follicles lasting four to six years made me wonder if the same turnover in the follicle population

• 22:20Daniel Whiteson?

  relates to how some children's hair color changes. I was blonde as a very young child up to about age five and brown haired ever since. Well, except for the red in my beard, which has now gone gray. My number one son did roughly the same thing, though his blonde hair lasted perhaps a year longer than mine had.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Hello, Kelly and Dan. In my little Norwegian town in southern Wisconsin, we have all these little children who start out with whitish blonde hair, including my kids, who by the time they are in high school are brown haired. Does this have to do with the six-year cycle of a hair follicle? What evolutionary advantage would changing hair color have had in hunter-gatherer Scandinavia? Thank you. Mark.

• 23:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can I start with a funny story about my son's hair color?

• 23:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yes. Tell us. What is your son's hair color and why is it hilarious?

• 23:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, okay. Well, so he was originally born with really dark hair, like the color of mine before I started going gray. And then he started losing it from the top of his head first. And so he had like a bald patch on the top of his head and he was the chunkiest baby ever. He had like more rolls on his thighs than I've ever seen a baby have, which was absolutely adorable. But anyway, he had a definite Danny DeVito stage,

• 23:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  which I thought was so cute. But every time I looked at him, I would chuckle and think about Danny DeVito and.

• 23:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Is Danny DeVito like the epitome of cute though?

• 23:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, no, but my son was. And so sometimes as a mom, you hold very, you know, discordant ideas in your head and it's fine.

• 24:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Because you know, I will admit that when I see babies, some of them are very cute. Not every baby is cute. And I feel like people think it's weird to say that, but it's true. Like some babies look like Richard Nixon, you know, or Churchill. And that's not cute.

• 24:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  I 100% agree. Some babies are not cute. I'll go on the record with you there. This is going to be the last episode people listen to of our podcast.

• 24:22Daniel Whiteson?

  But I'm sure your little Danny DeVito was very cute.

• 24:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  He was so cute. And anyway, he ended up being a, you know, blonde haired, blue eyed cutie. And he would have been cute if he had still had dark hair too. But anyway, how does our hair end up one color or another? So maybe that's a good place to start.

• 24:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the answer is it's complicated. And, and I feel like when we were in elementary school, we were told that like, this was something that was pretty easy to figure out. Like if you have two brown headed parents, you're probably going to have a brown headed kid. And I guess I got the sense when I was younger that this was like a dominant, recessive, easy trait to figure out. Researching it, that absolutely does not seem to be the case. There's like 100 genes or something that contribute to the color of your hair. One of the more important ones is a receptor, whose name I won't say so that I don't have to hear it from Daniel, but it's, it's a receptor.

• 25:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Look at that. I've trained you. I don't even need to be here anymore. You've learned.

• 25:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Arf, arf. Anyway, so.

• 25:21Daniel Whiteson?

  But I have to say, I've done this experiment myself.

• 25:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 25:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Because I have dark hair and dark eyes and my wife with her Danish Irish heritage has blonde hair and light colored eyes and light skin. And both of my kids have light colored hair and light colored eyes. And you know, the simple understanding of biology is like my traits are dominant and hers are recessive and yet hers won out.

• 25:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well.

• 25:45Daniel Whiteson?

  So it must be more complicated. Or she cloned herself in the lab.

• 25:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I wouldn't put it past her. She's a very smart biologist. But yes, these things are complicated. And so the thing that gives your hair color is a pigment that we have two versions of. We have a version that gives you like black and brown colors and a version that gives you sort of blonde reddish sorts of colors. And we have receptors in our like hair follicles and the cells that are important for making hair color. And those receptors essentially they'll get bound by a hormone. And if they get bound by a hormone, they're like bam, I'm making more, you know, black, for example.

• 26:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 26:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so it's all about like what receptors you have and the hormone messages that are being sent to those receptors.

• 26:31Daniel Whiteson?

  So I think this is fascinating because it's more complex than people usually imagine where like you have things encoded in your genes that your body does. Instead, you have things encoded in your genes that your body can do. Whether it does them depends on whether it gets messages like, okay, now do this.

• 26:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 26:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Like you have this library of capacities and only some things actually get turned on. That's fascinating.

• 26:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. And so my understanding is that part of the story about why hair color can change when kiddos are very young, is that when you are in your mom, you're getting bathed in her hormones. So the receptors in your body are getting messages that your body's not producing, but your mom's body is. And so that can influence your hair color.

• 27:13Daniel Whiteson?

  And I wish you all had just seen Kelly's little dance she did when she said, you're in your mom.

• 27:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, it's probably a great place to be.

• 27:22Daniel Whiteson?

  When you're like getting all koozie there, you're like, hmm.

• 27:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I personally was a baby who stayed in the womb for an extra couple of weeks until they eventually had to kick me out. And so, you know, I imagine it's a lovely place in there.

• 27:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Much easier than real life. But anyway. So, so partly when you're very young, you're getting exposed to the hormones that your mom makes. But then as you get older, you start making your own hormones and you start making more of your own hormones or different kinds of hormones. And so the messages that your hair receptors are getting change over time.

• 27:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 28:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that explains why your hair can go from being one color when you're young to another color when you're older. And it's apparently very common for light haired kids to end up having darker hair. And part of that has to do with like hormones during puberty. You start, you know, making more hormones. Those hormones are also talking to your hair receptors. But your hair doesn't change color overnight because of something that we talked about in listener questions, episode number 25. And this is the episode that was being referred to by the listeners where they were, we were talking about why you sometimes go gray after a very stressful event.

• 28:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see.

• 28:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so this is the hair cycle. And the idea here is that each follicle on your head has a cycle where for something like four to six years, your hair is growing continuously.

• 28:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And

• 28:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Did you just say where for, as in, you know, like colonial times transition sentences?

• 28:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did I? I don't know. I'm trying to think about what I'm going to say next. And so I've already forgotten what I said.

• 29:02Daniel Whiteson?

  How to for here with?

• 29:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Much ado about hair today. Anyway.

• 29:08Daniel Whiteson?

  So it takes some time for these things to register.

• 29:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, yeah. So, so your hair will grow for four to six years, but then your hair will take a break and it will rest. And during that resting stage, the cells that produce pigments that go into your hair die. And then you have stem cells that will produce more of the pigment making cells and those new, fresh baby like pigment making cells will go down into your hair follicle to start the cycle again.

• 29:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Got it.

• 29:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so you need one set of cells to die and a new set of cells to come in with their new instructions reflecting the new hormone milieu in your teenage body before you start getting that change in hair color.

• 29:51Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. So it's not just that we shouldn't think of ourselves as having one hair color, but instead we should think of ourselves as capable of producing a spectrum. And the color that's actually on your head somehow reflects the history of the hormones that your hair cells have received, but also in a time delayed way because cells have to die and be replaced. So in some sense, like a person who has brown hair is telling me that like, over the last few years, their hair cells have received the hormones to produce brown.

• 30:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Ish. But just to clarify, like you said that we've got a gradient of hair colors. I don't think I have anything in me that could make me make red hair. Like, I don't really nothing.

• 30:38Daniel Whiteson?

  There's nothing that could happen.

• 30:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  I will not.

• 30:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Asteroid impact.

• 30:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't think that I have the genes for like the right kind of receptors or something like that. So I'm not capable of producing red hair, but I am capable of producing, you know, like a range of brownie black colors or something like that.

• 30:58Daniel Whiteson?

  So our genomes can control the sort of spectrum that hormones can influence. That makes a lot of sense.

• 31:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Or at least that is how I understood it when I was doing the reading. So hopefully that's totally correct. If not, write to me and tell me I'm wrong. I always want to know.

• 31:12Daniel Whiteson?

  And is it like an on off thing? You know, if I get no hormones, am I producing blonde? And then you have to get hormones to produce brown? Or is that I need to get the blonde hormones or get the brown hormones?

• 31:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think it's a little more complicated. So it can depend on like, how many copies of the genes you have for certain receptors. And so if you have like, both copies of the genes for a certain receptor, you're like, more likely to produce brown and you're more receptive to the amounts of hormones that are in your body. But we have now slammed into the wall of Kelly's knowledge.

• 31:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  At 100 miles an hour.

• 31:49Daniel Whiteson?

  So summary is it's complicated.

• 31:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. It is complicated. Over 100 genes involved, it sounds like. And it changes over the course of your life as your hormones change over the course of your life. So the listeners also wanted to know if it was evolutionarily advantageous that their babies were going from blonde headed babies to darker haired babies.

• 32:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 32:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  And at the end of the day, I think the answer is probably not. We don't like, we probably don't know. I can't see a benefit of like, you know, does a blonde haired baby hide better in the snow? And like, if you, you know, worried about predators around, I can't come up with a good explanation.

• 32:27Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's not about like blonde haired babies are cuter because we know that moms will find their own babies cute, even if they do look like Richard Nixon.

• 32:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or Danny DeVito.

• 32:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  He was the cutest. Anyway, but so, so I looked for hypotheses that people came up with.

• 32:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the closest I could come up with is that blonde and red hair might just be a side effect of needing to have a lighter colored skin when you live in areas that get less sunlight. So UV light is important for us for the production of vitamin D. And so if you live in areas that get less sunlight or darker for more times of the year, having lighter skin allows you to absorb more of that UV light and helps you with problems related to vitamin D. And so as our skin lightened, we might have ended up with lighter hair as sort of a side effect of the lighter skin, because a lot of the same pigments that go in your hair are also found in your skin.

• 33:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So this doesn't tell us why it's beneficial for your hair color to change from when you're a baby to when you're an adult. But I think the point is that hair color in general, like having a variety of hair colors, isn't really something that selection has probably acted on. It's probably just something that got pulled along because of something that was happening to our skin. And so you wouldn't necessarily expect there to be an evolutionary advantage to your hair going from blonde to darker colored, when hair color is just sort of like pulled along because of selection on something else. Anyway.

• 34:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. And so this is sort of a subtle point in evolution, at least for a physicist, that it's not necessary for every trait you have, even ones that have survived selection, to be individually advantageous. They can just be linked to something else, which is an advantage. So for example, of being a physicist is an advantage, but it also means you have a terrible sense of humor. Then you might ask like, how do all these people with terrible sense of humor find mates and have children and whatever? And the answer is because of their amazing physics knowledge. And that's the reason it survives. Just as an example to illustrate the point.

• 34:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  That seems like two hurdles to get over, but instead of just one. But, but I think I understand what you were trying to get at there. But, but I want to be really clear that like, the stuff that I just said was pretty hand wavy. I was trying to find some answer other than, I don't know, but I wanted to give at least a guess. Anyway, I don't think we really know the answer, but that might be what's going on.

• 34:59Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, cool.

• 35:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So I think that that answers our listeners' questions. And so let's go ahead and see what they had to say. Hello again, Daniel and Kelly. Thanks for returning to the subject, taking some time to answer further questions about hair color. I think I understand a little more now. I understand how both genes and hormones play into the variability of hair color across

• 35:25Speaker 00

  people and across time. And more than that, I think I understand something about how these questions and answers work, because I knew that Kelly was going to say, it's complicated. About three seconds before Kelly said, it's complicated. Thanks again. Kelly, your answer on hair color was very informative and I actually learned something. Thank you.

• 35:59Speaker 00

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• 36:19Daniel Whiteson?

  To this day, Ordinary would not have done anything and I would have not been able to put it out if Book Talk didn't back it up. And if my wife and her friend didn't back it up. So pretty crazy how like, just one thing.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:31Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you, I bet you, we could point to nine different things in our careers where it's just one thing, all of a sudden, if that one thing didn't happen, then I wouldn't be here.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  What you're talking about right now is what I've been talking about since the beginning of my career. There's these things outside of you that make everything happen. These other forces somehow came into contact with each other and helped propel you to this place.

• 36:56Daniel Whiteson?

  It's just insane.

• 36:57Speaker 00

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• 38:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back. And now we've got a question from Don in Palm Springs, California. This is Don Veleen in Palm Springs, California. Daniel and Kelly, thank you for your podcast. There's always something new for me to learn. Suppose there's no iron in the surface layer of a planet. How would an intelligent being who has evolved on that planet discover magnetism? Are other elements sufficiently magnetic or likely sufficiently plentiful to take the place of iron in discovering magnetism? Is understanding magnetism

• 39:21Daniel Whiteson?

  And likely electricity as well, a necessary condition for a civilization to advance to a scientific level where they could receive and send signals through space, other than whatever visible light they could see. And of course, so far, all planets with any intelligent life have had iron on or near their surface. I wonder how delayed their scientific progress would have been without iron. All right, Don, thank you for thinking so deeply about the experience of intelligent aliens living on a planet without iron. Really fascinating thought experiment.

• 39:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel already wants to be your BFF.

• 40:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I think before we answer Don's question about an alternative planet, we have to remind everybody how we discovered magnets and how it fed into our ability to send radio signals to potential aliens.

• 40:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Give it to me, Daniel.

• 40:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Magnets have been known almost forever. I mean, basically before we have any recorded history. So historians refer to this as in antiquity, which basically means we've known about this forever, and we can't tell when it was discovered. And that's because we have a lot of iron on our planet, and there's a lot of magnets just sort of lying around. And historically, they called these things lodestones. So you have iron, and it gets oxidized with oxygen, again, our friend, because oxygen likes to bind with everything, and it makes something called magnetite. And it'll just like sit on the surface and be magnetic. And so we have writings from like ancient Greece and China and India, people writing about these rocks they found that will attract iron. And so this has been known forever.

• 41:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  And did they use that iron for anything, like to forge swords and stuff?

• 41:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so once we got to the Iron Age and people were like smelting iron and making iron and stuff, then people noticed this. And then using magnets for practical purposes like navigation, that's actually much more recent. It's like maybe a thousand years ago. In China and in Europe, the people figured out this whole connection between magnets and directions on the earth. So people like been using magnets in technology for about a thousand years. But it was only a couple of hundred years ago that people connected electricity, obviously also known in antiquity, you know, lightning and static electricity, to magnetism. And these were really important experiments by Orsted.

• 41:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Essentially, he connected electricity and magnetism because he accidentally ran a bunch of currents through wires near a compass and saw the compass twitch. And he was like, wait a second, why is it when I have electricity, it affects the magnets? And that was the first observed connection between electricity and magnetism. And that led to a whole avalanche, you know, Ampere's law, the Beussovart law, eventually unification by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s of electricity and magnetism into a single coherent theory of a combined phenomenon. That's when we realized, these two things are just the front and back of a single elephant. They're not completely separate phenomena. We've just noticed them differently and never connected them.

• 42:32Daniel Whiteson?

  And Maxwell showed us how they're intimately connected. They're really just one phenomenon.

• 42:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  This tangent's not going to go too far, I promise. But like 1854 is when Jon Snow figured out the cholera pump stuff, all right? Like, so check out our cholera episodes. What an amazing time it must have been to be alive, when we're figuring all of this stuff out. We're like, oh, it's, you know, you don't get cholera because you were breathing stuff in, it's in the water. Of course, you live in a time where the water could give you cholera, that's less good. But like, you know, we're figuring out all of this stuff is about electricity and magnetism. Like, it must have been really exciting.

• 43:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and I hope that in 150 years, podcasters wax philosophical about how amazing it was to be alive now, when we're figuring all this stuff out. Because there's still a huge amount of stuff to figure out about the universe and biology and even chemistry.

• 43:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, whoa, even chemistry.

• 43:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And it is chemistry that tells us basically why iron is so amazing. Iron is a great way to discover magnetism because, number one, there's a lot of it. The earth is like 32% iron. So there's just a whole bunch of iron on earth. And that's not unusual for rocky planets, because stars make iron. Stars member are doing fusion, they're squeezing protons together to make helium, and that helium gets squeezed together, you get carbon and oxygen and neon and heavier stuff. And if the star is hot enough to squeeze together these heavier elements, you can keep doing that all the way up to iron. Above iron, it costs energy to fuse heavy elements together.

• 44:01Daniel Whiteson?

  So stars don't make a whole lot of stuff above iron. So iron is sort of the natural endpoint for stars' fusion process of manufacturing heavy elements. So there's a ton of it in the universe. And that's why it dominates our planet's core. And that's very helpful, because it's really, really good at making magnets. Remember where magnetism comes from? Electricity comes from electric charges. You can have like an electron, it makes an electric field. We don't have magnetic charges in the same way, but there's this connection between electricity and magnetism, that a moving electric charge will make a magnetic field. So you take your electron, you move it in a circle, you get a magnetic field. That's how an electromagnet works.

• 44:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Or if you have an electron and it has a spin to it, that kind of quantum mechanical motion will also give it a tiny little magnetic field. So electrons are little magnets, essentially. And iron has a partially filled outer shell, it's called the 3D subshell, is there's room in there for a bunch of electrons. And remember, electrons fill empty slots individually before pairing up, which means that because there's four unpaired electrons, they're all spinning in the same direction. There's not like one up and one down. They all like to fill the up before they fill the down. So iron has a bunch of these unpaired electrons, all spinning in the same direction, making a little magnetic field.

• 45:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And the atomic spacing of iron is perfect to allow these electrons to like lock their spins and neighboring atoms into parallel alignments. So you get all these electrons from all these iron atoms, all pointing in the same direction, and those tiny little magnets add up to a big magnet that sticks to your refrigerator.

• 45:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  So ICP was wrong. We know how magnets work. We got this. There's no magic, no mystery there.

• 45:48Daniel Whiteson?

  ICP is right about a lot of stuff, but yeah, not about magnets.

• 45:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, back that up, back that up. All right, let's, let's move on, magnets.

• 45:57Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so what if you didn't have iron, right? Iron is great. We used iron in our discovery of magnets. Don is like, well, what if you didn't have it? Could you still discover magnetism? So iron is involved in essentially all naturally occurring, very powerful magnets. But it is possible to have magnetic materials without any iron. So for example, pure nickel is a ferromagnet. Ferromagnets are just like iron, they're easy to align up and they can make permanent magnets. Most of the magnets out there that are nickel magnets are mostly iron, but if you have a very pure deposit of nickel, that will be a ferromagnet. On earth, these things are very, very rare, because nickel mixes with stuff, it's hard to find pure nickel.

• 46:42Daniel Whiteson?

  But it is possible. So if you have aliens on a planet with like lots of pure nickel deposits, they can use those the way we used lodestones.

• 46:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did we talk about what ferro means? What is a ferromagnet as opposed to a magnet magnet?

• 46:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so a ferromagnet is a material where all of these electrons can be lined up in the same direction, and it can stay a magnet. So a ferromagnet, like, if you put it near another strong magnet, and all of its magnetic regions will get lined up, and it'll stay a magnet. A paramagnetic material is one that's only a magnet when it's near another magnet, like they don't stay locked in place. And so ferromagnets are what you want.

• 47:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, good. Can we have more jargon, Daniel?

• 47:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, we can, yes. We could bring in all sorts of biological jargon.

• 47:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right, all right, all right. What else will make a ferromagnet?

• 47:30Daniel Whiteson?

  So you can use cobalt. Cobaltite is naturally ferromagnetic, and it has no iron in it. There's cobalt and arsenic and sulfur in that. It's much less abundant than iron on earth, but it's possible. There are also like neodymium and gadolinium and dysprosium. These have a really strong magnetic behavior, but mostly with iron. So people are thinking like, what about rare earth materials? Those are magnetic. Mostly those are powerful magnets with iron, combined with iron. Without iron, they're mostly paramagnets, so they're not useful in the same way. So there are some alternative ways to discover magnets. But if you don't have any iron, you probably don't have any pure nickel or cobalt or either,

• 48:14Daniel Whiteson?

  something went wrong, or you're in a weird kind of solar system. And so let's imagine you have no magnets on your planet. You're an alien civilization, you just have no lodestones, no compasses. Could you still discover electromagnetism and send messages through space? That's what Don is asking. And the answer is yes, because magnetism is connected to electricity. And so if you figure out electricity, you can figure out magnetism without any naturally occurring magnets. Remember how we discovered the connection between electricity and magnetism is through electrical currents? Orsted had these currents, he had electricity, and he discovered, oh, that's magnetic.

• 48:56Daniel Whiteson?

  And it was helpful, he discovered it because it was a magnet nearby, but you don't need any magnets for that. You just have like a couple of wires, you run currents with them, they will attract each other, or they will repel each other, they turn into magnets. And so you could start just by discovering like static electricity like we did through amber. You know, you rub amber on cloth, it will accumulate a charge. You observe lightning, you do experiments, you can definitely discover electricity without any magnetic materials on the surface of your planet. You can develop like natural batteries, all sorts of stuff. And then you start building currents and you see this deflection, you will discover, just like Orsted did, that electric currents produce these magnetic

• 49:39Daniel Whiteson?

  effects. You wouldn't call it magnetism. You would think it's part of electricity. And in that sense, it might even be an advantage. We had the disadvantage of thinking magnets and lightning are totally different things. The front and the back of the elephant are completely separate. But if you only start from the back of the elephant and then you work your way to the front, then you know already that they're connected. So if you discover magnetism as a part of electricity, that could be even an advantage.

• 50:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  What is the link here with communication?

• 50:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. The link is that radio waves, the way we like to send messages into space and, you know, from person to person and the way your cellphone works, these are electromagnetic radiation. So you're sending ripples in the electromagnetic field. An antenna has a bunch of electrons in it that you're wiggling. And so you're wiggling the electric field that it makes. And that's what electromagnetic radiation is, our wiggles in the electromagnetic field. So if you are going to send messages through space, you have to understand electromagnetism at some level in order to do that. And so that's why Don is interested in this question of like, could you discover electromagnetism without magnets? And I think the answer is yes, you could discover it purely through electricity. However, you don't have to,

• 50:53Daniel Whiteson?

  right? Like you could imagine communicating via electromagnetism without really understanding what it is, because light is electromagnetism. And you could be sending messages from planet to planet, or even star to star, using essentially just optics. Like if you develop very powerful sources of light, even if you don't have a theory of electromagnetism, you could send those pulses through space, you know, essentially visible light signaling.

• 51:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like Morse code or something like with a laser?

• 51:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, essentially with a laser. Yeah. Morse code, or, you know, the same way that you have signals encoded into radio waves, you can encode a signal into laser pulses through amplitude or through frequency modulation or whatever. So, you know, the bottom line is, I think, you don't need iron to discover magnetism, but it's an enormous advantage. It's possible to discover it otherwise if you have some natural sources of magnets. But the other route is just through pure electricity, which will eventually lead you to understanding magnets anyway, and then theory of electromagnetism. And then you'll be broadcasting I Love Lucy out into space. But you also don't have to. And you could imagine other ways to send messages. Maybe there'd be advanced particle physicists and

• 52:05Daniel Whiteson?

  they send us neutrino bursts or something. And most likely, the history of science on that alien planet is even more alien than we could ever imagine.

• 52:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  And Daniel's out there transmitting the message, we'll trade humanity for physics facts.

• 52:21Daniel Whiteson?

  And Kelly is out there sending them all sorts of biology jargon.

• 52:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, come on.

• 52:27Daniel Whiteson?

  When we meet aliens, is that what you want to talk to them about? You're like, here's the name of that receptor, by the way.

• 52:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I want to say, what kind of parasites do you have? Here's a baggie for the stool sample.

• 52:39Daniel Whiteson?

  I think I saw that show. It's called Alien Earth.

• 52:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, okay.

• 52:44Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, let's send this message over to Palm Springs and see if we have answered Don's question about aliens.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Daniel and Kelly, thanks for the thorough and thoughtful discussion. It's interesting to learn about magnetic elements and minerals that are not iron. I've always wanted a magnet that attracted other metals like gold or copper. Some being somewhere has likely already created a magnetic prism that refracts a magnetic field to attract or repel whatever elements they specify. I suppose that's similar to what the Large Hadron Collider at CERN does for fundamental particles. Just shrink CERN to fit in your hand, install the app, choose your element, and go asteroid mining. I do have a biology question for Kelly. If

• 53:31Speaker 00

  iron were very rare at Earth's surface, what color would our blood be? Thank you again. I really enjoy your podcast.

• 53:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, that's a great follow-up question, Don. Okay, so our bodies use a protein called hemoglobin, and iron is used in hemoglobin, and that binds oxygen and brings it to different places in the body. Okay, so you're asking, if we don't have iron, what would we do instead? I have no idea what evolution would come up with, but I need to have an answer. So the answer I'm going to give you is that mollusks, so like clams and stuff, they have hemocyanin, which is a copper binding protein. So instead of iron, it uses copper. So if we lived on

• 54:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  a planet with no iron, maybe we would use this to bind oxygen instead. And so if you were using this, the protein turns blue when oxygen is bound to it. So I guess our blood would be blue, which would be kind of epic. Thanks for the question, Don. Thank you for sharing your curiosity with us. We love getting questions from you all. And you can send us those questions through email at [email protected], or you can connect with us at our Discord channel. And you can get an invite to our Discord channel by going to danielandkelly.org. We hope to hear from you. We answer every question. Daniel usually

• 55:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  within 30 seconds, me usually within about a week. But we answer them all, and a subset of them end up on the show.

• 55:07Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. And thank you for lending us your curiosity.

• 55:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 55:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 55:30Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 55:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 55:45Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 55:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  This is Jason Tipp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Tipp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 56:37Speaker 07

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  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems, to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic

• 58:23Speaker 03

  to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney

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  problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 59:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.