Listener Questions #26

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about tornadoes, water purification, and massive moons in the sky. 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.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 1:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Tornadoes always touch down on the plains. Is that because hills block all the rains?

• 1:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  When we treat water, we rotate, filtrate, and aerate. Tell me more, but be careful how you pronounce "floculate."

• 1:24Daniel Whiteson?

  How large can a moon appear in our sky without being shredded by gravity's tides?

• 1:30Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 1:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 1:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I am afraid of tornadoes.

• 1:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'm afraid of Zach's comments on our poetic introductions.

• 2:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, are we going to let the listeners know that Zach skips the introductions for the listener question episodes because he is actually really good at poetry and finds our poetry sort of nauseating?

• 2:17Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not what we're famous for. Let's just put it that way.

• 2:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're having fun.

• 2:20Daniel Whiteson?

  But let me put it this way, at least your spouse listens to our podcast.

• 2:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Katrina doesn't?

• 2:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no.

• 2:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I'm mortified. Do we really want to keep having her on our show? The answer is yes, we absolutely do.

• 2:36Daniel Whiteson?

  This is my secret plan to pull her in, to hook her on the podcast.

• 2:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, fantastic. Since we're talking about tornadoes today, let's share our scariest tornado story. Do you have any tornado stories?

• 2:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Ooh, I do have a tornado story, though I wasn't very scared. I was in my dorm room at Rice in Houston and studying really hard for a test and I heard a bunch of shouting in hallways and I ignored it because I was busy. And then later I discovered there was a tornado that went right through Houston and within about a mile of the campus and I didn't know anything about it. Yeah. And that's not very typical for tornadoes to pass through cities. So it was something of an event. How about you? What's the closest you've been to a tornado?

• 3:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  So Zach and I moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, right after like the big tornado that like knocked out a bunch of the city. And we were in a hotel before we got our keys to our place and there was a tornado warning in the area. And I was like, oh my gosh, another tornado is going to take out half the city. And Zach was not worried at all. And I was panicking and Zach's like, all right, well, you're obviously not going to sleep. So while you're panicking, I'm going to take a shower. And I was looking up, what do you do if there's a tornado and you're supposed to like get in a tub?

• 3:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 3:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so Zach finishes the shower, he comes out and I'm panicking and I was like, I think we should get in the tub. And Zach is like almost asleep already. And I go into the tub and like, the tub is filled with water, like something had happened with the drain. And I was like, now we're going to drown. And I was more worried about like Zach hampering our ability to survive the tornado. And anyway, we were totally fine and I am kind of nuts, is the point.

• 4:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Sounds like a swirling panic attack.

• 4:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm known for those.

• 4:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, today you don't have to panic because you are not going to experience a tornado. Instead, you're going to experience an explanation of how tornadoes work and where they form. Because we are answering questions from listeners like you, people just like you who listen to the podcast and want to know how things work out there in the universe. They can't find answers online. They ask JETGPT, they're not satisfied, so they write to us. And we are very happy to provide some answers.

• 4:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, how can you know for sure they're not going to be experiencing a tornado? They could be listening to this at any time. There could be a tornado when they're listening.

• 4:52Daniel Whiteson?

  No, this is a tornado free podcast. I'm providing my guarantee.

• 4:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think you are violating the rules of physics and I, I'm going to write the physicist board and they're gonna, you're gonna lose your job, man.

• 5:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm going to hedge because everything is statistical in particle physics. So I'm going to give you my 95% guarantee and that's my highest guarantee.

• 5:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, that, that's a pretty high guarantee. It sounds to me like you just pulled that number out of swirling thin air.

• 5:17Daniel Whiteson?

  All of statistics sounds like that, but really there's a lot of rigorous calculations behind it. Trust me.

• 5:25Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, let's move on to more solid ground and answer some questions from listeners. Here's a question from Patrick about tornadoes.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. We had some tornadoes touchdown outside of Cincinnati recently. And I've noticed tornadoes seem to hit the flatter, more open areas outside the city more often than the city itself. I was thinking about why this might be and wondering if I'm on the right track. So the weather system builds up enough power to form a tornado over the unobstructed flat land, but in hilly areas and populated areas, the power is attenuated by the hills and buildings, or alternately the tornado's oscillation is damp by the obstacles. So thanks for taking my question and let me know if I'm on the right track.

• 6:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, tornadoes in Cincinnati. I grew up in Ohio and I don't feel like tornadoes should be allowed in Ohio. I'm sorry you had to go through that, Patrick.

• 6:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, Cincinnati is like kinda on the border, isn't it? It's like partly in Ohio, partly in Kentucky, right?

• 6:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, it's in Ohio.

• 6:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Isn't there a river that runs through it?

• 6:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, maybe, maybe I'm wrong. It might be a little bit in Kentucky. What?

• 6:39Daniel Whiteson?

  I think technically you're right because the part of the city that's north of the Ohio River is Cincinnati, but there's definitely lots of city on the other side, whether or not you officially call it Cincinnati.

• 6:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, I am gonna have to actually, I'm giving this point to you. I'm sorry. I did not carefully study Ohio geography because I was trying real hard to get out of there. Sorry, Ohio.

• 7:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Let me tell you about your home state.

• 7:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. All right. Kelly's batting 0 for 1 so far. All right. What is a tornado, Daniel? What am I so afraid of?

• 7:14Daniel Whiteson?

  So we've all seen tornadoes in movies, et cetera. They're essentially rotating columns of air in contact with the cloud and the ground. So you see this tube and it's like twisting and flailing around and they can be very, very powerful. The winds can be like up to 480 kilometers per hour. Super incredible.

• 7:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  What is that in freedom units?

• 7:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Fast. It's fast in freedom units.

• 7:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it.

• 7:43Daniel Whiteson?

  It's destructive, yeah. And they can be quite narrow or they can be really wide, like big monster tornadoes, up to three kilometers wide. And for it to be classified as a tornado, it has to come from the cloud and make contact with the ground. And that's where the destruction happens. These powerful winds, the funnel touching the ground, and the funnel travels across the ground and tears stuff up. And it can go for like up to 100 kilometers, tearing a path of destruction across Kansas or Ohio or wherever.

• 8:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Alabama? Man, do tornadoes always go from the clouds to the ground? They never go from the ground to the clouds?

• 8:20Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. They always start in the cloud and then descend to the ground. There are other similar patterns like dust devils you might have seen, which looks similar to tornadoes but aren't officially tornadoes. Those just are whirling patterns of wind on the ground that touch only the ground and there's no cloud above them. So they're not officially tornadoes. And if it's over water, they can be called a waterspout. So there's a few variants of them.

• 8:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. And are those things ever as damaging as tornadoes? Or are they like tornado's baby sisters and baby brothers?

• 8:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, they can be as powerful because the storms can be powerful. But unless you're living on the water, they're not damaging houses. Right. So the most damaging ones are the ones that touch the ground because that's where the houses are.

• 8:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Okay. All right. And where, so we've, we've noted that they do sort of tend to be like aggregated in certain geographic regions. Why is that?

• 9:09Daniel Whiteson?

  This is something that really America is best at. Like, American exceptionalism has data to back it up. In the case of tornadoes, most of the tornadoes in the world are in the United States. We have like 800 per year. And most of them are in a slice of the US, in central and southeast corners of the country, which we affectionately call tornado alley. So there's like four times as many tornadoes in the US as there are in all of Europe. You have a few in like South Africa, some in Europe, Australia, Eastern India. But primarily, it's a thing the US is best at.

• 9:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  The wind really likes us. All right. So why, why are we cursed with these tornadoes?

• 9:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So to understand why tornadoes happen here and less often elsewhere, you have to understand how they form. And this is not something where the science is totally settled. People are still working on this. It's a great example of complexity. You're studying a system which has lots of components, which interact very strongly. Pulling a simple story out of that is not always possible. But people are working on it. We think that the ingredients are, number one, a huge thunderstorm. But not just like a normal thunderstorm, one with like really powerful, strong winds, hailstones, et cetera. And in particular, a thunderstorm called a supercell, which is a set of towering clouds up to 15 kilometers tall. So like a really massive cloud.

• 10:33Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's ingredient number one. It's like a really powerful thunderstorm, a very tall one. And then below that, you need warm, moist air on the ground. And we'll talk about how these come together into a tornado in a minute. And the third ingredient is shear. You need strong changes in the wind speed as you go up or down in altitude. And so these things, how they come together to make a tornado, again, it's not fully understood. There's a bunch of different theories out there. One is that it starts in the storm. You have these pockets of rotation in the storm and then they somehow intensify and touch the ground. And one way this might happen is that the warm, moist air on the ground is rising up. There's already like pockets of rotation in the storm and the rising air connects with

• 11:18Daniel Whiteson?

  those and creates like a horizontal rotation. Right, so you have this rising pattern, sort of like in a hurricane, you have like rising air in the center, which then moves out to the edges. So you get these horizontal rotation, which then gets tilted into a vertical column somehow. So that's sort of one cartoon explanation.

• 11:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  But that kind of sounds like it's starting from the bottom and like meeting the hurricane halfway, like it's coming from the top and the bottom. So what am I, what am I missing there?

• 11:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you're right. And again, simple stories are never going to describe the complexity. What's happening there is that you have this rising air, which is coming up and contributing and helping pull the cloud down. But still, the cloud is moving down towards the ground. It's not like there's a tornado forming on the ground and reaching up to the cloud. It's really the cloud coming down to meet the ground. Yes, being pulled down and contributing by stuff on the ground.

• 12:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 12:06Daniel Whiteson?

  There's another idea that maybe there's a sudden downdraft, a special kind of downdraft in the cloud that reaches down and squeezes a column of air, which happens to be spinning. And now because you've squeezed it, it's spinning faster and that instigates a tornado. And there's a third theory that maybe there are a lot of small vortices on the ground, like a bunch of little random ones, which merge together and then start spinning and pull the cloud down. And so there's lots of different explanations. And one reason that we don't have an answer is that it is a complex situation. Even if you have all the data, even if you take lots of measurements, answering the question of like, well, why did this happen is complicated. We touched on this in our episode on causality.

• 12:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, is there a single reason why it happens? What are the necessary ingredients? Even thinking about like what an explanation would look like is a little bit fuzzy because it's a really complicated environment. It's not like a single Rube Goldberg machine where you say like A causes B, which causes C, which causes D, right? You have to have a A lot of ingredients in place and maybe there's ranges of requirements. A lot of people are doing simulation studies where they try to create tornadoes in simulations to see like what ingredients are necessary and how often does it happen? It's very expensive simulations because you have to simulate like all the raindrops and all the different areas of wind here and there. So it's something people are definitely working on, but not something we fully understand.

• 13:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I love that you've been covering the weather lately. And so now I feel like I can ask you any weather related question. So this is great for me. So

• 13:39Daniel Whiteson?

  And I'll give you a 95% confident answer on anything.

• 13:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't feel great about that. But so, so do we understand why you get very strong thunderstorms in some area? Since that's like ingredient number one that you need, do we understand that?

• 13:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Not fully. Weather is of course chaotic, but we can model storms reasonably well. The formation of storms, like we can predict when it's going to rain and when it's going to hail. Check back to our episode about predicting the weather we did recently to hear all about that. So those ingredients are reasonably well understood. But why they come together to make a tornado sometimes and not others? It's a bit of a mystery. You have like storm watchers on the ground and they'll be watching a storm like, oh, it feels like it's going to come together and then it just like fizzles out and no tornado happens. And we don't have a clear understanding of why that is sometimes. But these rough ideas that you need a combination of thunderstorms and then warm air on the ground and wind shear, they can help us answer Patrick's question about why tornadoes tend to form in the plains?

• 14:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And your question about why tornado alley exists?

• 14:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, those, those things that you said, those seem like they're things that happen just about anywhere. Right? Severe storms, warm, moist air and shear. Like you should be able to get that anywhere, right?

• 14:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you can. And there are tornadoes all over the place. But in lots of places, there are mountains which block warm, moist air from coming in from the ocean. Whereas in the United States, for example, you got the Gulf of Mexico, which is a lot of warm water. And there's a lot of warm, moist air that comes in from the Gulf of Mexico. And there's no major mountain range there to block it like Louisiana, no mountains there. That whole state is totally flat, right? So that warm, moist air just rolls up into the center of the United States and Lines with midwestern thunderstorms to give you tornadoes. And the reason it doesn't extend like further west is we have the Rocky Mountains like running through New Mexico and Colorado and Wyoming and Idaho. The Rockies block a lot of that warm, moist air.

• 15:33Daniel Whiteson?

  And so you don't get tornadoes in Utah, for example, as often as you do in Missouri, because they're blocked from the warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico.

• 15:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  I guess California's got something going for it.

• 15:46Daniel Whiteson?

  We've got two lines of defense, the Rockies and then the Sierras. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, we got earthquakes over here, but yeah, we don't have very often tornadoes.

• 15:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I just realized we are maybe taking a political stance by calling it the Gulf of Mexico and I support it 100%.

• 16:03Daniel Whiteson?

  We're taking a stance on facts. Yeah.

• 16:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Well, I just looked up Google Maps and it says Gulf of America now.

• 16:09Daniel Whiteson?

  What? Oh, my gosh. So the answer to Patrick's question is that we have tornadoes on flatland because you need that warm, moist air and mountains block it. And so you need flatland and you need like an open corridor to a warm body of water that's going to provide that warm, moist air. So that's why we have tornado alley and that's why you have tornadoes in the city of Cincinnati in Kentucky.

• 16:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I hope this, and I hope this is the last tornado that hits Cincinnati, Ohio or Cincinnati, Kentucky.

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• 18:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back. We're transitioning from tornadoes to biology. Yay, biology. And I get to talk about parasites a little bit, so that's exciting.

• 18:45Daniel Whiteson?

  But we have a connection also. This is all about flowing water, isn't it? Warmth and moist are going to be relevant also for your question.

• 18:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, you're right. But also there's some chemistry and I feel like this was kind of a trick chemistry question, but I'm going to forgive John because parasites were tied in and so that's okay.

• 19:02Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so let's hear the question from John.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  This is John from New Mexico. A topic for biology and a smattering of physics is how do you make water safe to drink without OD and chlorine? You could compare Los Angeles, rural Virginia, background through methods. And a word of the day in water treatment, I understand, is flocculation. And I bet Kelly can't state it fast enough without making the show's rating an R instead of a G.

• 19:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so I have practiced saying flocculation so that this show can remain G instead of R or PG 13. So when you're trying to clean water, you've got a couple of goals. So one, you want to remove debris like sticks and rocks and rags and stuff like that because you don't want to be drinking that, of course. You want to kill parasites, viruses and bacteria, and you want to re- Move toxic stuff like pesticides.

• 19:57Daniel Whiteson?

  So where is this water coming from? We're drawing it from like random rivers or we're recycling water that's been used? Or we're gathering rainwater or what?

• 20:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So John wanted to know how you get water for, for example, a big city, a rural area, and if you're a back country hiking. And so, but I did do a deep dive into like how we treat our sewage. So if Daniel wants to know about treating sewage, I'm happy to tell you because I found that fascinating when I got to that.

• 20:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I happen to know that Orange County leads the world with their toilet to tap system.

• 20:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, whoa, that's exciting.

• 20:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Katrina's a big fan. She's always visiting the Orange County sewage treatment plant to get samples.

• 20:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, that's because she wants the phages that are in there, right?

• 20:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 20:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, everyone should check out our episode with Katrina on phage therapy. That was amazing. All right, well, let's start with, let's imagine that you are pulling water from a lake or a river or something like that.

• 20:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 20:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so you've, you've got this water. It might have dirt. It might have sticks. It might have parasites. And so the first thing you're going to do is just like filter out the big stuff. So if there's like a stick in there, you just, you get that stuff out. And so now what you've got is water that has a bunch of little tiny particles in there that you don't really want in there anymore. And because they're so small, they're going to take a really long time to settle out. And so what you want to do is figure out a way to get them to settle out faster. And so the first step is called coagulation because you're trying to get all of these tiny particles to stick together. So they'll settle to the bottom. And so these tiny little particles often have charges.

• 21:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  And because they're charged, when they get close to one another, they don't tend to stick together because they might repel each other. And so what they do, and this is where the chemistry comes in. And so, I know, gosh.

• 21:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Bracing myself.

• 21:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. Well, I mean, we're not going to get that detailed. Don't worry. So anyway, so they tend to dump stuff in there like salts or kinds of aluminum or kinds of iron. And essentially the goal is to bind to these charged particles and make them neutral. So that when these tiny little particles bump into one Another, they're more likely to stick together and form bigger chunks.

• 22:09Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. All right. So neutralize their charges, let them happily clump up together so they're easier to filter out.

• 22:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly. Okay, so now you've got these clumps, but you want to make those clumps even bigger, actually, because that would make it easier for them to fall down to the bottom so that you can get them all out of there. And so the next step is the step that John mentioned, which is flocculation.

• 22:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 22:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And essentially what you're doing is

• 22:33Daniel Whiteson?

  It sounds like a punishment.

• 22:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  It does. Flagulation or something like that. But, uh, but, but no, focus on flock. So flock is like a group of things. And the goal here is that you are very gently mixing the water so that the tiny clumps that you've made start bumping into other clumps. And now they start making much bigger clumps, you know, it's like a flock of birds, you know, as they merge in the sky together and all head to their migration site. But here it's junk that you don't want to be drinking. And so they bump into each other, form big chunks. And then you bring them to another area, like another big pool. And this is the sedimentation step. So you basically just let the heavy stuff fall out by letting the water sit for a while. And you draw the water off the top.

• 23:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And so we've added salts and aluminum and iron in order to help the stuff clump together. And what is the stuff that we're gathering up? What is the stuff that's clumping? Where does it come from? Why is it there anyway?

• 23:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I mean, we're collecting from a natural system and so it could be little bits of poop or little bits of sand or, you know, it could, it could be just about anything. There's a lot of things in, in the river.

• 23:40Daniel Whiteson?

  The technical term, I think, is dirt.

• 23:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm. Oh, does dirt also cover poop? Because that's news to me.

• 23:46Daniel Whiteson?

  I think a big fraction of dirt is poop, isn't it?

• 23:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know.

• 23:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  You should ask your wife.

• 23:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I think I will.

• 23:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And then we'll ask your husband to write a poem about it.

• 23:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, fantastic. Oh, this is a family affair. I love it. All right. So. So you let the heavy stuff settle to the bottom. You draw the water from the top because all the heavy stuff is now down at the bottom. And now you start running it through different kinds of filters. So what you've done is you've removed like, you know, the, the poop, the dirt, whatever the like heavy stuff, but now you want to make sure that there's no bacteria, parasites or viruses in there anymore. These things are kind of tiny. And so now you need to start passing the water through different kinds of filters that are going to catch these tiny things.

• 24:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. So even for the super tiny stuff, you're still using physical filters, like super tiny meshes to block like viruses. That's insane.

• 24:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, we're also going to get to a disinfection step. And so they get a little bit more serious eventually, but, but here we're still trying to remove like the bigger stuff. Like for example, parasites probably get stuck if you make it go through like a big thing of sand and the water has to sort of like filter through the sand. So you get some of that stuff out that way.

• 24:52Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's basically still the pasta strainer strategy.

• 24:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  With a very, very fine hole in the pasta strainer. Yeah. So, I mean, think about like passing water over sand or gravel, and in some cases charcoal. And charcoal is using like Vanderwall's forces to capture stuff. And then, you know, it, whatever trickles out the bottom is probably pretty clean, but viruses are really tiny. And so the viruses and stuff probably got through there. And so the next step is disinfection where they usually add like chlorine, chloramine, chlorine dioxide, chlorine stuff to try to kill whatever is left in there that might be alive. They can also pass it through like some UV light to try to like break up the DNA in these organisms to kill them.

• 25:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  But most places, as far as I can tell, use some version of like, you know, bleach, some version of like chlorine. And the other benefit of using chlorine is that it continues to kill things as the water is passing through your local like municipal pipes to get to your house.

• 25:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, at the Orange County Water Treatment Plant, they walk you through the whole process. And at the end they have a tap and they like pour you a glass of water and they're like, here you go. And you've seen it come from like raw sewage.

• 26:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man.

• 26:05Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's crystal clear, beautiful water.

• 26:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And did you, and you drank it?

• 26:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh yeah, a lot of our water comes from toilets, which is actually the connection with our first question because you know, how does that water get to the sewage treatment plant? Well, flush it down the toilet. We create a little toilet tornado.

• 26:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, I didn't see where that was going until you got there. But amazing.

• 26:27Daniel Whiteson?

  It was a bit of a reach. A bit of a reach. All right. So does that mean that the water that's coming out of our tap has chlorine in these chemicals in it? And also like destroyed carcasses of bacteria and viruses? Because they can't actually remove it, right? It's still in there.

• 26:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. And according to the Center for Disease Control or the CDC, low levels of disinfectants like chlorine in your water don't make people sick, but some people are more sensitive to this kind of stuff than other people. If you're worried, you should talk to your physician. But we have been treating water like this for about 100 years. And for most people, it's not a problem.

• 27:02Daniel Whiteson?

  And are these strategies different from what you might do in a rural region? Or if you're like in the back country?

• 27:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Super different.

• 27:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Really?

• 27:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. So for example, I live in a very rural region. I say that I live in Charlottesville, but I actually live on a farm, you know, a bit away from Charlottesville. And what we use is groundwater. So we talked about how in a city, you'd go through a bunch of different kinds of filtration methods. But here, the filtration method that we use is nature. You know, rainwater falls on the ground and it has to trickle through loads of dirt and sand and stuff. And a bunch of the stuff that you don't want to be drinking sort of gets stopped by the sand on the way down to become part of the groundwater. So the groundwater is like, you know, there's like a hard rock underneath. Groundwater accumulates on top of it. And then you can dig a well that goes into the area where water is stored underground

• 27:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  and you can pump that up into your house. Does that make sense?

• 27:58Daniel Whiteson?

  It's sort of amazing. I mean, you're talking about using nature to filter out nature.

• 28:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, but it doesn't always work fantastically. So if you live in a city, then your water has to pass a bunch of tests before it gets to you. Or like the facility needs to regularly do monitoring to make sure that like the levels that it has to hit are being achieved. Whereas me, I have to collect water samples every year and pay somebody to test our water to make sure that, for example, our septic system isn't leaking bacteria into the groundwater. Or, you know, I live around a lot of farms. If they were using a bunch of pesticides, maybe some of them could seep down into the groundwater and end up in our drinking water.

• 28:39Daniel Whiteson?

  So your groundwater has no filters other than this natural system? Like you just pump it up and drink it?

• 28:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 28:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. It does, it goes through like a sedimentation step just to make sure that any dirt has fallen out of it, but we don't do anything after that.

• 28:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And when people visit your farm, you don't ask them to like sign a waiver or anything? I mean, I've drunk this water.

• 28:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was gonna say, I didn't ask you to sign a waiver or Katrina.

• 29:00Daniel Whiteson?

  I wish I'd heard this podcast episode before I visited.

• 29:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  But, but, but like I said, we get our water tested and our water always has pristine levels of everything. So country living.

• 29:11Daniel Whiteson?

  It was delicious.

• 29:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 29:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Country.

• 29:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Country living at its best.

• 29:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Wow. All right. Button up your overalls and have a glass. Sounds good.

• 29:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know why I had to go to the overalls, but anyway, all right.

• 29:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Country living, no? You don't wear overalls around the farm?

• 29:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not yet, not yet. I'll get there, I'll get there. But so maybe next year when I start with my dairy goats.

• 29:33Daniel Whiteson?

  And don't misinterpret me, overalls was a positive comment. I'm not anti-overalls.

• 29:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  They do look very comfy.

• 29:40Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So what about if you're hiking in the back country and you don't have access to any of these things? What do you do?

• 29:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Well, first I'll note that not everybody is as lucky as I am. They don't always live in an area where the groundwater is clean, in which case they do have to use extra filters or disinfectants and stuff like that. So we're lucky we don't have to add extra steps, but depending on where you are, you might have to. If you are in the back country, maybe what you're doing is you pull up to a river and you pull some water out and that is the only water you have to drink. So what are you gonna do? The first thing you're gonna do for all the methods we're gonna talk about is strain the big junk out of it.

• 30:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Take out the rocks, take out the leaves, maybe pass it through a handkerchief or something. And then I checked the CDC website and they actually have pretty good, pretty detailed instructions for what you're supposed to do. And the best thing to do, if you're able, is to boil it.

• 30:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Boiling will kill the bacteria, it'll kill the viruses, it'll kill the parasites. And if you bring it up to boiling for just one minute, that's usually all it takes. But if you're at high elevation, like above 6,500 feet, you need to boil it for three times as long, and that is because of chemistry, so you can blame chemistry.

• 30:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Because water boils at lower temperatures at high altitude.

• 30:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly. So you need to do it for longer.

• 30:51Daniel Whiteson?

  And I love how thorough they are in their warnings. They say, "To avoid burns, allow the water to cool before using it." "Don't drink boiling water, people."

• 31:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right, that's right. Remember to breathe while you're doing this process and yeah.

• 31:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Do not take a shower in boiling water. Hmm, thank you, CDC.

• 31:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, don't stick knives in your eye. Yeah.

• 31:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you know, they're covering their tails.

• 31:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Anytime you read one of these, I imagine that there was some instance where somebody needed that warning, you know, and they're responding to that. And they're like, "All right, we didn't think we had to say this, but apparently..."

• 31:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  But here we are.

• 31:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  I do feel like anytime there's a sentence like that, there's a story that you probably would want to hear. But anyway, all right. So what if, for whatever reason, you can't boil? You are hiking and it's raining and you can't start a fire or something. In that case, you can hope that you thought ahead to bring a couple different kinds of filters with you. And the problem with filters, or the difficulty with filters, is something we talked about earlier, which is that viruses are really, really small. So getting a filter that can filter out viruses is really difficult. Very teeny tiny little holes that stuff needs to pass through. You can use a reverse osmosis system, where essentially they're like pushing

• 32:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  water through a very, very, very, very, very fine mesh, and just about anything that isn't water doesn't make it through to the other side. And so you end up with like one side that has all the gross stuff mixed with some water and one side that has clean water. I feel like I got mixed answers on whether or not this will remove parasites. This might work if you're like really in a pinch. But you know, I think you pretty much always want to boil it or maybe use one of these filters, followed by a disinfectant that's more likely to kill you. Kill the viruses. And so disinfectants is another option. This doesn't work as well against parasites. Parasites are like bigger and a little bit harder to kill. So like chlorine or iodine is maybe less likely to kill them, although it might kill some of them. But you can add chlorine or iodine. But if you're pregnant or have some other issues with iodine,

• 32:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  you might want to skip iodine. Check the CDC website. But basically you can add some chemicals to also kill parasites. Finally, if you're really in a pinch and all you have is a plastic bottle with no filters, no disinfectants, you can still try to filter it to get the big stuff out. And you want that water to be as clear as possible because you're going to be trying to use the sun's UV radiation to kill stuff that's in there.

• 33:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Particle physics is our last line of defense.

• 33:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, does it? This counts as particle physics?

• 33:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, I'll give it to you.

• 33:25Daniel Whiteson?

  These are high energy photons exactly zapping those viruses.

• 33:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was wondering why you looked like you were getting excited about something. And I realized now you were getting excited because we were about to get to particle physics. But I'm learning to read you. I should have known particle physics was coming.

• 33:43Daniel Whiteson?

  That's how you know.

• 33:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's how you know. All right, so anything that makes the water cloudy, you want to get out because any suspended particle in there is going to stop UV radiation from hitting the bacteria and viruses that you're trying to kill. If it's a super sunny day and your water is super clear, then you can leave a plastic bottle filled with water under the sun for about six hours and that will probably kill everything, hopefully.

• 34:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 34:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, amazing, totally. And if it's cloudy, you might want to wait like as much as two days. I think I'd still feel better if I did some other additional treatments to it.

• 34:12Daniel Whiteson?

  What if you launched your water into space? So it's exposed to radiation in space. Would that make it safer?

• 34:20Daniel Whiteson?

  How did you not prepare for that question? You're an expert on space.

• 34:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  So what I'm wondering is, so, okay. So we talked about how space can even kill tardigrades, which are like supposedly indestructible. But what I'm wondering is if you launched it to space, would that like if there were pesticides in the water, would that solve the problem of the chemicals? And so I do think that would kill bacteria and viruses. And parasites, but I don't know if it would remove pesticides the same way as like a charcoal filter would. And so I think for any of these things, it's important to keep in mind, like, what are my goals? You know, if you're drinking from a waterway and there's a bunch of farms upriver, you might want to worry about pesticides and maybe you want something like a charcoal filter. But if you're just worried about you don't want to get Giardia, Beaver Fever, then maybe disinfecting is the way to go.

• 35:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Beaver Fever? I've never heard of that.

• 35:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no. I think Giardia became famous when some people were camping downstream of a beaver dam and the beavers gave them Giardia, which gives them massive diarrhea. I had a friend who got Giardia once. She called it muddy butthole disease.

• 35:29Daniel Whiteson?

  The good news is if you're an astronaut and you're in space, your water is probably not going to give you beaver disease.

• 35:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's probably true, but you are probably drinking yesterday's coffee. You're drinking recycled urine and sweat.

• 35:42Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, let's hear if we have muddied the waters or clarified everything for John.

• 35:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that was bravo, Daniel. Bravo.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Thank you, Kelly, for the insightful answer. You floculated all the little bits and pieces into a really understandable podcast. Thank you again.

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• 37:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we've established that you can probably get clean water in space by just exposing it to how horrible space is. Another horrible thing that could happen in space would be if your moon broke into many pieces.

• 38:03Daniel Whiteson?

  But one of the amazing things about space is that it exposes us to other kinds of environments and other kinds of vistas. And we've all seen movies where you have like two stars in the sky or huge moons. And one of our favorite listeners, Joe, has a question about what extremes are possible.

• 38:22Speaker 05

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Joe from Florida, loving the show, but even more, really appreciate your willingness to answer random questions from any one of us. To that point, I'm playing games and other imagery of sci-fi planets and worlds. It's really common to see a massive planetary body taking much of the sky, kind of like a moon of a gas giant, where it's just the whole thing. Creates a very alien appearance. So I got to thinking, after the Parker Solar Probe, quote, "touched the sun," I ran those numbers. And even at closest approach, I think it was only about a 12-degree of the sky field of view. So it'd be big, but not completely taking up your vision big.

• 39:06Speaker 05

  So my question is, is based on Roche limits and...

• 39:09Speaker 06

  Assumptions of standard planetary compositions. What's the largest a body can appear in the sky while your own world is still kind of in a stable orbit and you're not being torn apart or coming into any of those major as mass kind of situations. Thanks a lot, guys. Love the show.

• 39:26Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So this is a super fun hypothetical question. He's essentially asking, how close can we get to science fiction? How big in the sky can something appear and still obey the laws of physics?

• 39:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Love it. And so did this require you to do some actual math or was this answer available somewhere?

• 39:44Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I had to do a little bit of calculations here. This is very cool. I like thinking about this because it's super awesome to have big features in the sky. There's something really powerful about that because you're connected to them. You're like seeing the scale of the solar system and the universe in the sky. And, you know, we're lucky that our moon is so big and so close. And a lot of people aren't aware, but there are bigger things in the sky than the moon. For example, Andromeda, the galaxy is bigger in the night sky than the moon. We think of it as super distant, and it is, but it's also incredibly big. The reason that's a surprise is that most of the time you can't see it because it's dim. But if you train a camera on it and

• 40:26Daniel Whiteson?

  follow it and accumulate light, you can see Andromeda in the sky. So not with your eyes, unfortunately, but it's there dominating the night sky.

• 40:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  So kind of feels like cheating to compare an entire galaxy to a moon.

• 40:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I mean, we're just talking about angular sizes, right? Just for reference.

• 40:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, all right.

• 40:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Obviously, the moon is much smaller than Andromeda, but so much closer. And that's really the trade off here. What we're talking about is the size in the sky, which is what we call angular distance. And the way you calculate this is there's a formula, but essentially depends on the radius of the object and on the distance from the object. So the bigger the object, the bigger it is in the night sky, the further away it is, the smaller it is in the night sky. So to be big in the night sky, you can be pretty small, but very, very close, or you can be far away, but absolutely enormous. And so that's how you calculate it.

• 41:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so I haven't stared at the sun for Very long because I've been told not to.

• 41:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 41:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  But if I were to stare at the sun, would the sun and the moon, would they be about the same size? How different in size would they be if I stared?

• 41:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we know this because we have eclipses, right? The moon is almost exactly the same size as the sun in the sky. They're both about half a degree, which is the unit we use. And that's just an incredible coincidence. Often in science, when we see coincidences, we're like, hmm, what does that mean? Is that a clue? Why is that? But sometimes they're just coincidences. Like, there's no reason that the moon and the sun have to take up almost exactly the same amount of sky, but it does lead to very spectacular eclipses. So we're very grateful for this coincidence.

• 42:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe the aliens knew we would really enjoy eclipses. So they, you know, they worked some stuff out for us.

• 42:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that or the programmers of the simulation. I don't know, but it works out pretty well.

• 42:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Thanks, whoever.

• 42:12Daniel Whiteson?

  So the biggest, easily visible thing in our night sky are the sun and the moon. They're about half a degree. And Joe is wondering about how big things can get. And the physics we have to understand here are the physics of tidal forces. That is, the earth pulls on the moon with its gravity. And we tend to think about the earth as a point and the moon as a point and forces between those two points, but they're not really points. The moon has a side that's closer and a side that's further away. It has an extent to it. And the side of the moon that's closer feels the earth's gravity more powerfully than the side of the moon that's further away, because gravity depends on distance. And so because there's a difference in those forces, effectively, it's like the earth is trying to pull the moon apart. It is, and actually squeezes the moon and makes it a little bit like a football.

• 42:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  And this reminds me of the, uh, the book Seven Eves.

• 43:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. Neal Stephenson's really fun novel about what would happen if the moon was destroyed. And in that novel, it's not really much of a spoiler to say, it's destroyed by some like alien impactor. But in reality, the moon would be destroyed if it got too close to the earth. Because the closer you get to the earth, the greater the difference between the forces on your edges. And so effectively, the greater the force trying to pull you apart. And eventually you approach what we call the Roche limit, which is the closest you can get without being pulled into. Little bits and essentially form a ring. And for two objects of equal density of a planet and a moon, that radius is about two and a half times the radius of the planet, which is actually quite close. That would be like 18,000 kilometers from the center of our planet.

• 43:45Daniel Whiteson?

  But the moon currently is like 380,000 kilometers away.

• 43:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Phew.

• 43:50Daniel Whiteson?

  So the moon can get a lot closer and be a lot bigger in our sky without being torn into rings.

• 43:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am feeling like I'll sleep better tonight, knowing that it's not close to the Roche limit. That's good.

• 44:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Not at all. And so if you somehow engineered the moon, you put a rocket on it and you brought it in closer to the earth and all the way to the Roche limit, it would be about 20 times bigger in the sky than it is currently.

• 44:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 44:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? About 10 angular degrees, about the size of one or two outstretched hands. It would be pretty big. It would be awesome.

• 44:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Would that really mess up astronomy? Because it would be, all right, so Daniel and I both have our hands outstretched right now. And we're looking at, yeah, so how bad would that be for astronomy?

• 44:30Daniel Whiteson?

  They would be pretty bad because it would make moonlit nights much brighter.

• 44:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? You'd have much more powerful moon shadows. And already, moonlit nights are bad for astronomy because that's light pollution. Right? It's like having a big light in the sky. It's like a second sun. You are reflecting the sun, a mini version of it. So this would be 20 times as powerful. So it would be bad for astronomy.

• 44:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought you were gonna say moonlit nights are bad for astronomers because they're not very romantic or something like that. Because the rest of us love moonlit nights.

• 45:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, a moonlit night is romantic because the light is dim, right? It's like why you turn down the lights to make them romantic. And so at some point, cranking that thing up by a factor 20 is no longer as romantic.

• 45:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, yeah, I can see that. You're gonna need much better curtains.

• 45:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. But let's do a little bit more engineering to try to make this bigger. What if we didn't just use our moon? What if we took a bigger object? Like, what if we somehow pulled Mars into our orbit? And we used it as a second moon? And we brought it in just outside Mars's Roche limit? Well, that would be about twice as big in the sky as the moon at the Roche limit, because Mars is bigger than the moon. So it'd be about 40 times the size our moon currently is in the sky, an angular distance of about 20 degrees.

• 45:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe it's just that I grew up with the moon being so far away, but I'd feel like a little crowded, you know, like you need to give me some space, Mars. You're getting too close. You're kind of freaking me out.

• 45:54Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, then you're not going to like the next scenario.

• 45:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, boy.

• 45:57Daniel Whiteson?

  I did a calculation to try to think about how close you could bring any object. Forget the moon, forget Mars. What if we're engineering something that we want to fill our sky?

• 46:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Go ahead.

• 46:07Daniel Whiteson?

  And you could make it out of some natural material. Well, the Rosh limit depends on density because something that's denser holds itself together better. So if you make it, for example, out of iron, you can get it closer. But then iron is also denser, so the object becomes smaller, so it doesn't take up as much in the sky. So I imagined, what if we had a object, the mass of the Earth? And my calculation suggests that if you make it about three times as dense as the Earth, so you use like pure iron, then its Roche limit would be about one and a half times the Earth's radius. And this new moon we build, because it's denser than the Earth, but it still has the same mass, would have a radius of about one half of the Earth's radius. So this thing would be orbiting just above the ground.

• 46:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  What? Just above the ground on Earth?

• 46:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Just above the ground on Earth. You'd have to like duck as this thing goes by.

• 46:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, yeah, that's no way to live.

• 47:03Daniel Whiteson?

  But, you know, and these are simplified calculations that we're really pushing to the extreme. We're assuming that the Roche limit formula applies here, and I'm not sure it really does. And of course, you know, you got any mountains, those are going to get rubbed right off.

• 47:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you're 95% sure about your answers.

• 47:20Daniel Whiteson?

  95% sure. So if you're out there and you have an Earth mass worth of iron and you're thinking about building this moon and having it orbit just above the surface, you should know that I only give you my 95% guarantee, which is my highest guarantee, by the way. But if you did this, it would fill half the sky.

• 47:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Please don't listen to Daniel, everyone.

• 47:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Look, he would sell us all out to the aliens if it would explain gravity.

• 47:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like, we can't depend on Daniel for our safety, everyone.

• 47:50Daniel Whiteson?

  95%, you can't.

• 47:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Now, you can also imagine the opposite scenario. What if you're on the moon, right? And you're not on the planet? So in our solar system, if you were to land on Io and look up at Jupiter in the sky, it already feels 20 angular degrees.

• 48:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 48:07Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the size we're talking about of having like Mars in our sky. So that's already the case. Jupiter is huge in the sky above Io. And in comparison, like if you're on Titus, Saturn is only like five and a half degrees, which is still big, right? A lot bigger than the moon is in our sky, but not as dramatic. But I calculated what would happen if you brought Io close to its Roche limit with Jupiter? And then it would be like 60 degrees in the sky. So that would be like, wow, what a view of Jupiter, right? And then if you made Io out of like something incredibly tough like diamond, it could get much closer without being torn apart. So the Roche limit depends on what the object is made out of. And then you could get Jupiter to be 95 degrees across in the sky before it's going

• 48:52Daniel Whiteson?

  to tear apart your diamond moon.

• 48:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Holy cow. I mean, you'd be dead long before that, but wow.

• 49:00Daniel Whiteson?

  What a way to go, right?

• 49:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  What a way to go.

• 49:01Daniel Whiteson?

  What a way to go. You'd be sitting on your diamond moon, sipping super clean water from your wastewater treatment facility, watching tornadoes play out on the surface of Jupiter.

• 49:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know what? That sounds, if you've got to go, that's high up there on my list of ways to go.

• 49:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And this episode will have prepared you to understand the science of each of those elements.

• 49:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. You're welcome.

• 49:23Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, let's hear if Joe is satisfied with our answer to his science fiction inspired question.

• 49:29Speaker 05

  Thank you so much, Daniel and Kelly, for that answer. It will please you and other listeners to know that I do not have an Earth's massive iron ready to put in dangerously close orbit. While giant objects in the sky may look pretty epic, it sounds like for all our survival, it's better they remain comfortably distant. Guess the first human on Io will have quite the view. But for those of us remaining earthbound, I'm still eager for that binary sunset portrait. So alien engineers, when you have a moment, that'd be great. Thank you again and keep looking up.

• 50:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, thank you, everyone who submitted questions. If you'd like to ask us a question, you can write us at [email protected], or you can join us on our Discord channel. You can find an invitation to our Discord channel at danielandkelly.org, or you could send us a message to our social media pages, although answers there are slightly less reliable. So I suggest email or Discord.

• 50:29Daniel Whiteson?

  We really do reply to every email. People continue to be shocked when we actually reply, but we will. We will write back to you with an answer to your question. Try it.

• 50:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, we love hearing from you all.

• 50:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everyone. Have a great day and stay curious.

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• 51:48Speaker 01

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