Can we engineer the sun?

Daniel and Kelly exercise their optimism and explore engineering solutions to the Sun's projected overheating and demise. 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.

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• 1:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Are we at the mercy of our cosmic fates? Or are we masters of our domain? We've been lucky so far, living on this tiny spinning rock at just the right distance from an enormous ball of plasma. It keeps us warm, but not too warm. And it's been stable enough to give us time to evolve, to develop technology and science, and understand our fragile place in the universe. And is there also time for us to intervene in the sun's eventual demise? Can we develop the technology and massive engineering capacity to keep the sun from going red giant and frying the whole planet?

• 1:54Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the cosmic question we're tackling today. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily engineered universe.

• 2:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I'm looking forward to putting on my skeptical face today.

• 2:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm gonna be optimistic about our ability to preserve the future of humanity today.

• 2:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Aw, why you gotta make me sound like such a wet blanket?

• 2:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Because you love it, Kelly. You love it.

• 2:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's the most comfortable feeling for me, I guess. Alright, so let's start with another amazing engineering project for our intro question here. So do you think we should terraform Mars?

• 2:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, that feels like a trap to me.

• 2:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  You brought up this amazing geoengineering stuff.

• 3:01Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true. No, you're right. Compared to what we're talking about today, terraforming Mars is like just a warm-up exercise.

• 3:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  There you go.

• 3:08Daniel Whiteson?

  I think that we should first figure out if Mars has life on it before we go in and muck it up with our kind of life, because wouldn't it be incredible to discover Martian life that evolved independently, that started from nothing independently, or if it weirdly has like something in common with Earth life, so we could have some sort of like mini panspermia? I feel like the scientific consequences would be amazing and be ashamed to muck that all up by just dropping a million people on Mars too soon. But that's a pretty extensive project. Once we're done with that, though, then yeah, I think if we have the capacity and the resources and we've thought it through, then I do think it's a reasonable place to extend humanity. What do you think? Where am I wrong?

• 3:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I don't think you're wrong in any of the things that you just said. I guess I'm more thinking about how we would go about terraforming Mars. One of the things that surprised me when A City on Mars came out, which, available in paperback now. Was that the geology community felt like we hadn't spent enough time talking about how Mars is a like, unique geological treasure and we shouldn't be going out there and mucking it up.

• 4:17Daniel Whiteson?

  From a scientific perspective, like answering geological questions?

• 4:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that was part of it, but I think there was also a bit of a thread of a like, well, we've messed up a lot of stuff about our planet. We shouldn't let people go out and mess up another planet. And I, you know, I see their point. And I particularly see their point when you hear about terraforming arguments that go something along the lines of, let's dump a bunch of nuclear weapons on the poles at Mars to release a bunch of water vapor, which will then create a greenhouse effect and will warm up the planet and will create an atmosphere that would be more hospitable to human life, blah, blah, blah. I think I'm not super excited about dropping nuclear weapons on Mars is what I'm saying.

• 4:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Especially because to get enough CO2 to warm up the planet, you'll create an atmosphere which is toxic to humans anyway. And so like, yeah, there's a lot of challenges there. And so I guess my answer is like, assuming we can solve a lot of these really big engineering challenges, because in today's episode, we're going to think really big and really broad about like mega engineering, engineering that would impress visiting aliens. That's what we're talking about today.

• 5:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa. Well, I guess if you're an alien civilization that made it all the way to Earth, you maybe wouldn't be impressed with what we've done. But I am personally impressed with the extent to which we have molded the planet to meet our needs. But anyway.

• 5:34Daniel Whiteson?

  There are lots of moments of awe. You know, every time I like drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, I'm like, wow, humans built this and it's still here like decades later. It's pretty impressive. Or every skyscraper, or frankly, the COVID vaccine. I'm like, wow, what we can do. So yeah, humanity's done a lot of impressive stuff, but it's just the beginning, you know, the kinds of things that we might do, the challenges we might take on, the solutions we might engineer really are almost limitless.

• 6:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  We are only getting started, which is why we need to make sure that our species persists for a very long time. So today we're going to be talking about how we can engineer the sun to keep our species going for much longer.

• 6:14Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right, because one of Mars- Mars terraforming proponents is always saying that Earth is going to get fried in a few billion years anyway, when the sun expands and goes red giant. And so not only do we need to have outpost on Mars, but we got to get interstellar. And so today, we're going to be talking about exactly that scenario. Is it possible to engineer the sun using a technique called star lifting to prolong our time in the habitable zone? So as usual, I went out there to ask our audience if they knew something about star lifting. Here's what they had to say.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  What is star lifting? Is that when you go to the gym and you see someone famous and you pick them up? No, that can't be it. Maybe it's something to do when a star is about to go supernova and the core is starting to burn carbon and getting into iron. Maybe the layers start to lift off and that's star lifting? I have no idea.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  Well, that is that new show that is airing on NBC at seven o'clock on Thursday nights, um, where big movie stars compete in weightlifting competition. And it's intense and I'm ready. I'm really looking forward to seeing it.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  I have not heard of star lifting, but a star lift sounds like it could be a fun ride at an amusement park.

• 7:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing answers as always. And if you want to contribute your amazing answers, write us at questions at danielandkelly.org and we'll add you to the list of folks who get these questions ahead of time. I love the, uh, when you go to the gym and see someone famous response. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I heard that Dwayne The Rock Johnson also lives in Charlottesville. And sometimes if you go to the gym, you will see The Rock.

• 8:00Daniel Whiteson?

  How often does that happen to you, Kelly?

• 8:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, zero times, zero times. I don't think he goes to the YMCA. He probably goes to a better gym than I go to. But, you know, another good reason to work out, I guess.

• 8:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Why doesn't he live in LA? I thought he would be an LA dude.

• 8:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that he's probably part-time LA, part-time, the better coast, you know, like you're in, you're in California when you have to be, but in Virginia, when you have a choice, that sort of thing.

• 8:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Virginia is for lovers of Virginia. So there you go.

• 8:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, oh, Virginia is for everyone.

• 8:31Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So star lifting is an engineering technique to solve a very particular problem. So before we get into the solution, I thought it'd be helpful to introduce what is the problem we're solving anyway?

• 8:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And fortunately for me, I won't get too mired in existential dread because the timeline here is way off in the future. But let's go ahead. Tell us about the future of the sun. Why won't the sun last forever?

• 8:53Daniel Whiteson?

  The sun won't last forever because it's in frankly, a delicate balance. It's amazing to me that stars last as long as they do. I mean, there's this incredible balancing act between gravity, which is pulling the star together and trying to collapse it down, and fusion, which is creating heat and energy and pushing the star out. And these two forces, which are fundamentally very, very different, right? Fusion uses the quantum mechanical strong nuclear force. Gravity, of course, uses curvature of space. We don't even know how to unify these things. Conceptually, they're very different pillars of physics, but here they come together and they dance together nicely for billions and billions of years. All right. In the heart of the star, you have incredible pressure and temperature.

• 9:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And so hydrogen gets squeezed together to form helium, which releases heat. When light elements fuse together, you release heat. And when heavy elements break apart, that's fission that also releases heat. So in the heart of a star is sort of like a constantly exploding nuclear bomb that's generating all of this energy to prevent the star from collapsing.

• 9:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that's where your beautiful dance metaphor kind of falls apart. I don't usually think of beautiful dancing involving explosions of a nuclear type.

• 10:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that's why it's so incredible. Imagine a constantly exploding nuclear bomb that you're keeping in a gravitational bubble, right? And if you compress it too much, it's going to go out. It's going to turn into a black hole. If you don't compress it enough, it's going to blow itself apart. And so it's really amazing. And the outcome for these stars depends almost entirely on how much mass you have. Like, if you don't have a lot of mass, you end up with a red dwarf, a smaller star. And the heart of it is lower temperature and lower pressure. And so the rate of fusion is lower. And so these stars are dimmer and cooler. Why they're called red dwarfs or a much bigger stars like a blue giant. And these are hotter at their core and they fuse a lot faster. And the peak of their glow is at a higher frequency, which is why they're called blue giants.

• 10:53Daniel Whiteson?

  But those stars, the bigger, more massive stars, fusion happens much more rapidly. And so they burn through their fuel. So there's this really tight relationship between the mass of the star and how long it's expected to live. Smaller stars are cooler and they can burn for billions, maybe even trillions of years. Red dwarfs are very, very long lasting. Whereas bigger stars don't burn for very long because they burn so hot and so fast. Like if you look at a population of stars, you can tell how old the population is by how many big blue stars there are. If it's got a bunch of big blue stars, you know, it's got to be pretty young because they don't last very long. As galaxies age, they turn redder and redder because all the blue stars burn out.

• 11:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  And where is our sun on the gradient from itty bitty stars to big stars?

• 11:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Our star is not one of the biggest stars in the universe. The limit is around 300 times the mass of the sun. A star bigger than that will have fusion so terrifyingly powerful, it will tear itself apart. It'll become smaller. But our star is bigger than the average star. So the most common star is a red dwarf. That's like the median star in the universe. Our star is bigger than that, so it's a bigger, hotter star than is typical. And its lifetime is expected to be about 10 billion years. And we're halfway through that, so we've got another 5 billion years.

• 12:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man, what do you think a midlife crisis looks like for a sun?

• 12:17Daniel Whiteson?

  It's talking to all the other stars. It's wondering like, hey, do I have the right number of planets? Should I have accomplished more by this point?

• 12:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Have I dealt with that nacking infection on my third planet? You know, I really should snuff that out.

• 12:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, gosh.

• 12:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Before it takes over.

• 12:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, let us go, let us go. We're going to save you in the long run. Baby, we'll see, or at least we're gonna tinker with you. Okay, so we're halfway through.

• 12:41Daniel Whiteson?

  We're halfway through and the future, the second half of the sun's life is gonna be quite different from the first half. What's gonna happen is that as fusion progresses, it forms helium and that helium is heavier than hydrogen, so it sinks to the core. So instead of just being like basically a huge ball of hydrogen, you're gonna get helium core like the ash from the fusion sinks and goes to the core. But our star is not hot enough to fuse that helium. Like if it was hotter and denser, you could fuse helium together, three of them together to get carbon, but we can't do that. Our star is just not hot enough. So the helium is sort of inert and it blocks fusion from happening. But before that, because it's denser, increases the temperature at the core of the star, which makes the sun hotter.

• 13:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So our sun is gradually getting hotter and hotter as its core gets denser and denser because of the helium that sinks there. Roughly every hundred million years, the sun gets 1% brighter.

• 13:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the gas that makes us sound like this is gonna be one of the things that like ends our species? That's not funny. Helium's supposed to be funny.

• 13:46Daniel Whiteson?

  I know if it makes you sound like a chipmunk, it should be funny, but also chipmunks can be quite deadly, you know? Yeah, they could take over the whole planet.

• 13:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  They carry the bubonic plague. Well, their fleas do.

• 13:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, in New Mexico, actually, home of the flea land of the plague, we call it.

• 14:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 14:02Daniel Whiteson?

  There's some New Mexico pride for you. So yeah, the sun is gradually getting brighter and in a few billion years, the sun will be 40% brighter. And this is why people say like the sun is gonna boil off the oceans because in a couple billion years, the global average temperature is gonna rise to 100 degrees C, right? Where the oceans will boil. And so this is just a natural progression of the sun. It's gonna get brighter and brighter and brighter. The sun itself is not getting that much hotter, but it is getting brighter and the outer layers are gonna grow because as the core accumulates helium, then fusion moves further out, right? You can't have fusion at the ash helium core. So you start getting fusion in the outer layers and that puffs up the sun and that's what makes it become a red giant.

• 14:47Daniel Whiteson?

  And just puff it up a little bit. We're talking about the radius of the sun growing from its current radius to 200 times its current radius.

• 14:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so I'm starting to feel the existential dread bubble up. I didn't think this was gonna happen, but we only have one to two billion years, even though Earth is middle aged, before our oceans boil. But I'm betting that we all die long before the oceans boil, because it takes a lot of heat to get the oceans to boil.

• 15:10Daniel Whiteson?

  You mean me and you? Or are you talking about like me and you and all of our descendants?

• 15:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  It would be our descendants at that point. Yeah, so how long before Earth becomes uninhabitable?

• 15:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's a great question. That's just a few hundred million years, right? Because the temperature on the surface of 100 C is intolerable, obviously, right? It's a pretty good approximation that every 100 million years, you get 1% brighter, it's roughly linear. And so, yeah, it's gonna be a few hundred million years. It's gonna be much hotter than it is now. Definitely, we're talking climate change for sure. So this is something we're gonna have to adapt to, well before the oceans boil or the outer layers of the sun consume the Earth.

• 15:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we've got time to figure this out, but I'm still not loving it. Not cool, son.

• 15:55Daniel Whiteson?

  And so the crucial things to understand there for our later conversation is what's driving the sun to get hotter and to get bigger. And that's the mass of the sun, right? If the sun were smaller, then it wouldn't do this as quickly. It would burn a lot, lot longer, right? Because the core would be cooler and it wouldn't fuse as fast and it wouldn't accumulate as much helium and it wouldn't push the layers out and it wouldn't get hotter and brighter. And so that's the thing that's driving the sun to basically vanish our habitable zone.

• 16:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so mostly I care about what happens to me and I'm gonna die before the Earth, well, my ancestors will die before the Earth gets consumed by the sun. But let's say I still care about the Earth even when there's no humans there anymore. Is it going to actually get engulfed by the sun, like swallowed up?

• 16:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, this is something you hear in Popeye all the time. And it's not clear, because there's a lot of small effects here that could change the answer. So for example, as the sun in its last little bit is blowing out and its radius is really growing rapidly, it's also losing some mass because it's puffing out so much. It doesn't contain all of that. A lot of this plasma just shoots off into space. And because it loses mass, it loses gravity. And so the sun's pull on the Earth gets weaker. So the Earth's orbit is gonna drift further out. And so rather than just staying at the same place, it's going to drift out as the sun grows and loses some of its mass. And so people have done modeling to answer the question, are we going to escape the outer layers of the sun? It's sort of a silly question because like,

• 17:24Daniel Whiteson?

  it doesn't really matter if you're in the sun or right next to the sun. Like in either way, can you survive? But you know, just from a sort of like academic question, it's fascinating. You don't want to be even like a little bit engulfed, but it looks like the earth might just sort of like skip over the outer atmosphere of the sun. The radius of its orbit growing with the radius of the sun.

• 17:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could we keep ourselves in good shape by just sort of like nudging earth farther away and closer to stay at exactly the right temperature throughout this whole process?

• 17:58Daniel Whiteson?

  You could try to do that, to move further out. And you know, you want to stay far enough away from the sun for sure. Not just because it's going to be hot, but because if you are anywhere near the atmosphere of the sun, then you're going to be losing kinetic energy because you're flying through the atmosphere. There's going to be friction. You're going to fall into the sun. Bad.

• 18:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bad.

• 18:17Daniel Whiteson?

  But anyway, if you wanted to engineer just the earth, the simpler thing is to move the earth's orbit. There are things you could do to like, build a huge planet rocket to move the earth out, this kind of stuff. But it's a bit of a crap shot because the whole solar system is going to be very chaotic. Like when you lose mass of the sun, you're also weakening the sun's grip on Jupiter. Jupiter is going to drift further out. It's going to interact with Saturn. That's going to be a chaotic mess. And the chances that we can like predict that and navigate through Jupiter and Saturn, like having a big argument and cluttering of the whole solar system, very unlikely. We think that that happened in the past, that Jupiter and Saturn went into the inner solar system and then back out again and maybe ejected another gas giant from the solar system.

• 19:02Daniel Whiteson?

  So there could be like a lost sibling planet out there, floating and frozen in space, feeling rejected, having been literally rejected. And so the solar system is going to get very chaotic if we let the sun do this. And I think it'd be pretty hard, not just to move the planet, but to figure out how to move it and how to protect it against Jupiter's

• 19:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  I wish I had felt more optimistic during our episodes on interstellar travel. I think I'd like to just skip all of this, just leave town when all of this problem starts. All right, so let's take a break and when we get back, let's talk about how we can engineer the sun so we can avoid this situation all together.

• 19:48Speaker 01

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• 22:34Speaker 04

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• 22:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're back. Daniel has scared the pants off of all of us. We're going to burn up or we're going to fall into the sun, but we're probably not going to actually fall into the sun. We're just going to be in its hot atmosphere layers. Anyway, we're dead. So, Daniel, how do we avoid this whole we die in billions of years thing?

• 23:08Daniel Whiteson?

  We turn to the engineers and we ask them, hey, can you solve this problem? We think we understand enough of the physics of the sun to figure out when it's going to grow and get hotter. And so in principle, we should be able to engineer a solution. And there was a paper in the 80s by a guy named David Criswell coined this phrase star lifting to imagine that maybe we could prevent the sun from getting so big and so hot by making it more like longer lasting stars by making it smaller. That's why it's called star lifting. It's like, take stuff off of the sun. Essentially, could we go in and take a big scoop off of the sun? And this is a little bit delicate because you don't want to turn the sun like into a red dwarf. A red dwarf is cooler and then the earth

• 23:52Daniel Whiteson?

  wouldn't be inhabitable zone anymore. What do you want to do is scoop off just enough to keep the sun from getting too Big and too hot, so it sort of like maintains the same temperature throughout its lifetime and lasts a lot longer. Removing some mass would lower the pressure at the center as the helium accumulates. And so that's the sort of basic idea. It was revived in 2017 in a paper by Greg Matloff. And then a couple of years ago, a really interesting paper by Matt Scoggins and David Kipping dug into the details of exactly how you would do this. And so I thought it'd be fun to talk about this engineering task and whether it's possible at all.

• 24:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  First of all, this is fascinating. I will note that when you started introducing the topic, you said a lot of we think and presumably, and I feel like before we start tinkering with the sun, we should be like, we are sure about, and it is absolutely the case that. But presumably, these papers had all the right qualifiers in them, and this is just getting the conversation started.

• 24:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, this is definitely, let's have a first conversation about whether this is possible at all. Not, let's have a policy discussion about whether we understand the risks and decide whether the balance of risk and reward is a good one, which we definitely should have before we do anything like this, the same way that we should before we do any geoengineering. But it's still reasonable to say, hey, what is possible? And these papers are just like the very first steps towards what is possible. As you'll hear, like, the solutions are so outrageously expensive and elaborate that they aren't anything we could hope to imagine doing in the next few centuries. But, you know, scientists and engineers a few centuries from now will be glad that we thought through some of the details here to make their work easier.

• 25:36Daniel Whiteson?

  But you're right, the policy question is separate.

• 25:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, yeah, I don't know. That sounds like wimp talk to me. Let's just...

• 25:45Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, yeah, I'm not advocating for any of these things, right? I just, I think it's fun to think so big and to imagine what's possible. And, you know, the same way I'm like awestruck by what humans have built, I'm awestruck to imagine what we might build. But of course, yes, we do have to do it carefully. Just because you want to drill a hole through the center of the earth to drop a ball through and see what happens doesn't mean that you should.

• 26:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. I really like your approach to, uh, to engineering. Think it through first. All right, so let's talk about the first proposal for how you would do this.

• 26:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so there's a few ideas. One is called the thermal driven method. And the idea is to tap into something that's already happening, which is the solar wind. The sun is already shedding mass. It's a huge ball of plasma in space and it's mostly confined by gravity. But the atmosphere is one of the hottest parts of the sun. And so it's constantly shooting off particles. You know, yes, photons, obviously, we're absorbing those and we enjoy those on a sunny day. But also protons and electrons. That's what we call the solar wind. And if you're out there in space as an astronaut, this is the kind of thing you have to be wary of. Because for you, it's radiation, very high speed particles shooting out from the sun fill all of space. So don't imagine space as empty.

• 26:58Daniel Whiteson?

  One of our episodes about interstellar travel talks about the dangers of radiation in space. And it's serious. And this is where it comes from. It comes from the sun. And then, of course, other suns and black holes and all sorts of stuff out there in space. Generate wind and by wind, we don't mean air molecules. We mean high speed particles. So one idea is can we enhance that? Can we get the sun to shed more of its mass to crank up the solar wind?

• 27:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, wow. So the fact that we're proposing that we're going to heat up the sun. Sounds incredible to me. How can we make a dent in the hottest thing that we know about? But go ahead, let's see, how do, how, what are proposals for making the sun even hotter?

• 27:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And it doesn't sound like the kind of thing you'd want to do, right? The whole problem we're trying to solve is that the sun is going to get too hot. So somebody comes along and says, the solution to making it too hot is to make it hotter.

• 27:47Daniel Whiteson?

  A second, am I in a solar engineering conference or an insane asylum or both?

• 27:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could be some overlap in those communities.

• 27:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Choose your venue carefully. The idea is not to heat the core of the sun, but to heat the atmosphere. This is where the solar wind happens, right? It's the outer layers of the sun that are super crazy hot, super high energy particles that reach escape velocity from the sun. So instead of heating up the core, you want to heat up the atmosphere, which will help strip the sun of some of these particles. So all you got to do in this case is basically reflect the sun back at itself. So imagine building a bunch of mirrors which just reflect the sun's light back to the sun. That will heat up the sun's atmosphere. You know, it's sort of like putting a fire in an insulated box will help make the fire hotter. Whereas if you don't, then the heat

• 28:39Daniel Whiteson?

  from the fire bleeds out into the atmosphere. And so if you have these mirrors, or you like have solar panels which gather the energy and then beam it back, you could heat up spots on the sun's atmosphere.

• 28:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. All right. I think, and I think I'm just being too picky because if you put a fire in an insulated box, it's going to run out of oxygen and burn out, right?

• 28:59Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you're right. Yeah.

• 29:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  But we understand what's happening with the sun better. We're not going to snuff out the sun accidentally.

• 29:08Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not impressing you with my level of detail here, am I?

• 29:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Daniel, please don't put out the sun.

• 29:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Come on, engineers. Do better.

• 29:18Daniel Whiteson?

  You don't want to wake up one morning, get an email from Daniel, "Bad news. I accidentally put out the sun last night."

• 29:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  As we discussed in a prior email, that would be a high information email.

• 29:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, that would be surprising.

• 29:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  That would be surprising, yeah.

• 29:31Daniel Whiteson?

  It'd be a good lesson in Shannon entropy. So at least you gained something, right?

• 29:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. I'm sure everybody would be thrilled.

• 29:38Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you're right. That analogy is not perfect for that reason. But in this case, you're either just having huge mirrors to reflect energy back from the sun to heat up spots on its atmosphere, or you have some more complicated system where you're absorbing the energy using like photovoltaic cells, and then you're beaming the energy back using like microwaves. Do you remember we once had a conversation about solar power in space? This is basically that same system. You have solar power, you generate energy, and then you build a beam. Instead of beaming it to the earth's surface where you're going to use it to charge your phone, you're just beaming it to the surface of the sun to heat it up to make these hot spots.

• 30:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. And this is going to buy us more time.

• 30:16Daniel Whiteson?

  This is going to buy us more time because it's going to create more solar flares. Like, solar flares, or what we call solar weather, right, are moments when the sun has like a huge eruption of plasma, which then floats out into space. And sometimes it like washes over the earth and causes incredible damage. There was this Carrington event. In the 1800s, where a huge solar flare lashed out and the earth basically went through a plasma plume and like fried all the electronics on the earth, which at the time fortunately were pretty simple. So we had some fires from like telegraph wires going haywire. But if it happened now, it would be very, very bad. But what we're talking about now is creating hotspots on the surface of the sun, which would generate solar flare. So like huge strands of plasma floating out into space.

• 31:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And obviously you don't want that happening in the direction of the earth, right? You might be thinking, Daniel, again, now you're creating like bad things, right? Solar weather is bad for satellites. It's bad for the earth. It's bad for all these things. Why would you risk this? So the idea is, yes, you create these hotspots and those hotspots create solar flares. And you get this plasma ejected, but then you try to guide it. So plasma is electrically charged, right? It's positive and negative. There are protons and there are electrons there. So you build a huge magnetic field around the sun to guide all this stuff. So it doesn't go along the ecliptic where the planets are, like the sun's equator, but it goes up to the poles.

• 31:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. And so then are we going to be in any trouble if we're not getting that stuff? Like, will we cool down or will we just not get hit with radiation?

• 31:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that stuff would be bad. And so it will cool the sun a little bit, but that's the goal, right? We want to keep the sun from getting too hot. So if we pull this stuff out of the sun by creating these hotspots, having it spew it, and then shepherd it up to the north and south poles, we're safe because we're not being blasted by these huge plasma strands and we're slowly reducing the mass of the sun, which is the whole goal, right? The goal is to take mass off of the sun.

• 32:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So it seems pretty important that you get all of this stuff heading in the right direction because you don't want to accidentally spew a lot more radiation towards the earth or a Mars settlement if we ever get one. How do we control where this stuff goes?

• 32:24Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is my favorite part because it involves building a particle accelerator. Yay. That goes all the way around the sun. So essentially you need to build a magnetic field that pushes stuff towards the sun. And so to build a magnetic field, as we talked about in a recent episode, you need currents. You need moving electric charges. And so Good to do this is to build a particle accelerator, which shoots particles around the equator of the sun. Or you have a few of these things stacked on top of each other, which basically shepherds this stuff up to the poles. And at the same time, you can answer a bunch of really important fundamental physics questions because now you have a particle accelerator with an enormous radius and super high energy. And boy, wouldn't that be awesome for other reasons?

• 33:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  I wouldn't want to have to write that grant because I I bet the money for the LHC was a tough sell. I mean, it's awesome, but I'm sure it was expensive. I can't imagine the price of this.

• 33:18Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not even going to try to put dollars on this. I mean, the the price of the next collider on Earth is going to be something like 50 to 100 billion dollars.

• 33:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 33:27Daniel Whiteson?

  There are also crazy out there proposals for a collider that runs along the equator of the moon, which would be awesome for some reasons and not so awesome for other reasons, but fun to think about and also absurdly expensive. So yeah, collider that runs along the equator of the sun. I mean, I don't even know what the scientific prefix is for those dollars. It's beyond trillions and quadrillions and quintillions, I'm sure. But, you know, we're talking about the future of humanity here. Finally, particle physics will be useful.

• 33:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, well, we talked the other day about how particle physics gave us a new treatment for cancer. So it will be useful for a second time. Only those two, though.

• 34:07Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is one scheme to try to slurp some stuff off the sun. And then at the north and south poles, you have these like magnetic nozzles, which focus the stuff and gather it. And then you could actually like use it for something. This is raw material. Or if your goal is to like build mega structures, a Dyson sphere or other crazy engineering projects in your solar system, eliminating factors having enough stuff. Like you might say, I want to take Jupiter apart and use it to build a Dyson sphere. It might not be enough. And so just having raw material is important. And the sun is the biggest source of raw material in the solar system. I mean, the solar system is basically the sun plus, right? And we're like those little extra bits.

• 34:48Daniel Whiteson?

  So gathering that stuff off the sun gives you enormous amount of mass to play with to build other stuff.

• 34:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  But it's in the form of. Gas when you collect it, right?

• 34:56Daniel Whiteson?

  It's in the form of plasma mostly, and you might think it's mostly hydrogen. Who really cares? Well, hydrogen's good for building stuff and the sun has lots of other stuff in it that's not just hydrogen. Like it's mostly hydrogen. It's 2% metals or something, but it still has most of the iron in the solar system is in the sun. Most of the oxygen, most of the nickel, most of the basic building blocks, the silicon are in the sun. Like the sun has 20 times as much of all those basic elements as Jupiter does. And it's distributed all through the sun because of convection, you know, the plasma currents. And so if you are funneling mass off of the sun, then yeah, you could slurp off an enormous amount of pretty useful

• 35:37Daniel Whiteson?

  basic ingredients for your other insanely expensive engineering projects.

• 35:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yay. It's crazy all the way down.

• 35:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Crazy enables crazy.

• 35:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank goodness. So iron is getting ejected in the solar flares in the solar wind?

• 35:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's mostly hydrogen, but it's a good mixture. I mean, iron is not being made in our sun, right? So it's not like it's only at the core. And if there is iron there, it's from previous rounds of stellar nucleosynthesis. And a lot of it does sink to the core because it's heavier. But also the sun is a big churning ball of plasma and this convection that brings stuff up, right? Also, the way that, you know, like diamonds are made inside the earth, but then convection brings stuff up to the mantle and to the surface. So yeah, we could definitely get iron out of the sun. I mean, definitely. You can't say definitely about anything about this project. Ridiculous upon ridiculous upon ridiculous. In theory, one could get iron out of the sun to build your other absurd projects.

• 36:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So we're going to talk about at least one other proposal. Is this proposal that you just explained to us more or less crazy than the next one we're going to talk about?

• 36:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, boy. That's a tough question. I think it's differently crazy. I mean, none of these are very realistic and all require all sorts of engineering problems that we don't know how to solve. But they're also fun to think about because, you know, they just make you think big.

• 37:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And when we get back, we will think big in a different way.

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• 37:44Daniel Whiteson?

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• 38:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 38:13Speaker 06

  So, pretty crazy how like, just one thing.

• 38:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 38:16Speaker 06

  I mean, I bet 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.

• 38:23Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 38:41Speaker 06

  It's just insane.

• 38:42Daniel Whiteson?

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• 39:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're back and we're thinking big about engineering projects. We are engineering the sun today on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. We talked about one kind of nutso method. What method are we going to talk about next, Daniel?

• 39:45Daniel Whiteson?

  So the next method is called the huff and puff method, so that everybody takes it very, very seriously.

• 39:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  No doubt.

• 39:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And the idea here is similar to what we talked about a minute ago, but earlier we were heating up specific spots on the sun to get it to eject mass. Here, we're going to basically try to pump the whole sun like bellows. And so you still build your particle accelerator around the equator. I mean, you gotta have that, right? That's non-negotiable.

• 40:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  What is science without a particle accelerator? Have you heard of this concept called the Overton window? Where like someone does something super extreme, yeah, to make what you're proposing seem less crazy? You're probably having some people pitch these ideas to the funder so that when you just have something that's like $100 trillion or something, they'll be like, oh, the particle physicists are being less crazy today.

• 40:33Daniel Whiteson?

  You have revealed my secret scheme here, Kelly, today. I am shifting the Overton window.

• 40:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I study animal behavior.

• 40:42Daniel Whiteson?

  This is basically the Calvin and Hobbes method, you know, where he asks his mom if he can have a flamethrower, and she says, no, and he says, can I have a cookie? She's like, sure.

• 40:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right, that's right.

• 40:51Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so here you build a particle accelerator around the core. And you know, this thing is kept in place by the magnetic field that it generates, which floats over the sun. But in this case, you can turn it on and off. So you turn it off, and all the components of the particle accelerator, which are not connected, it's not a big ring, it's just components which shoot particles between them. All these components then fall towards the sun because of its gravity. Then you turn it back on, and it rises back up again and pushes against the star. And so essentially, this is like massaging the star. You like drop a magnetic ring around the star and then turn it back on, and it pushes itself back out, squeezing the star. So you do this over and over again. And then like...

• 41:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Like pumps the star's atmosphere, moving mass up to the poles. So it's sort of like squeezing it, like massaging it, kind of like bellows on the sun.

• 41:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  And for anyone who didn't grow up in the Victorian era, using bellows on their fireplace, would you like to explain what a bellow is?

• 41:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. Yeah, it's basically like a big fan, right? You squeeze it and it shoots a stream of air towards a useful spot on your fire to help blow it. It's sort of like leaning over the campfire and going,

• 42:06Daniel Whiteson?

  you know, but mechanically, how is that for an explanation of bellows?

• 42:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think people are following us. You're good. I wish people could, could watch the video because you are particularly animated in this episode. Like you've, you've hit your microphone at least once as you gesticulate and enjoy at this engineering idea.

• 42:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you know, sometimes we dig deep into like real physics and what we're learning about the universe. And sometimes we just have fun.

• 42:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Well, I think we always just have fun, but we're having a lot of fun today. Okay. So the idea is that you squeeze and when you squeeze, how do you control when you squeeze where the stuff goes?

• 42:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So if you're squeezing at the equator, there's only one way it can go. It can go towards the poles. So then you've got to build another accelerator. So you have like a stack of these things that sort of like massage the mass as it goes up. You're right. So you squeeze the equator, then you squeeze just above it and you squeeze just above it. You know, like a coordinated action here to sort of push the sun's atmosphere towards the poles. I mean, the whole thing sounds like, boy, how would you know that that works before you build it and try it? And what if it goes wrong?

• 43:12Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the joy of like being the first person to think about something is you just get to think about the big picture and don't worry about details like, is this going to destroy everything in the solar system?

• 43:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty important detail. But so how do you know you're not just moving around stuff the sun was going to make anyway? And you're actually increasing the amount of stuff that gets ejected or heating up the sun or whatever? How do you know you're accomplishing your goal instead of just moving stuff around?

• 43:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. And you know, they've done some simple modeling and it really does suggest that either of these methods could eject more mass than you normally would, that a sun left to its own devices would burn hotter and more briefly than a sun that's engineered in this way. And they did some calculations also to wonder like, well, how much could you do? Like, are we talking about ejecting 10 protons or really a significant amount of stuff? And according to these calculations, you can eject about an Earth's worth of mass every 100 years. So that's not a tiny amount of stuff. Like, the Earth is a tiny fraction of the sun. But you know, a century is a long time. And we're talking about timelines

• 44:17Daniel Whiteson?

  of millions or tens of millions of years. So that's a significant amount of stuff. And if you just did it naively and extrapolate linearly, it could take apart the sun in, you know, 50 to 100 million years, like, the whole mass of the sun eventually could be extracted. Of course, once you get to like, 10% of the mass of the sun being ejected, the whole system is going to change and everything is going to be cooler. And so you can't extrapolate linearly. But just to give you a sense of scale of how effective this is, it's not a tiny amount of mass that you're rejecting relative to the mass of the sun.

• 44:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So this is the amount of time it would take to take the sun apart. But I didn't know that that was our goal. I thought our goal was slowing down the destruction of the Earth. So how much time does this buy humans?

• 45:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, we do not want to take apart the sun, absolutely not.

• 45:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Daniel Whiteson?

  What we want to do is gradually cool the sun so that it stays at the same temperature. Because remember, its natural progression is going to be to get hotter and hotter as the core gets denser and then fusion moves to the outer layers. So that's where this paper from 2020 came in by Matt Scoggins and David Kipping. They calculated how much mass would you have to remove from the sun every year in order to maintain that temperature, to essentially move the sun from its natural arc at this mass down gradually to the arc you would expect for lower mass stars. You can imagine like the temperature progressions for individual stars, which started at a certain mass and red dwarfs last a long time and stay at a lower temperature. You want to step down from one progression to another.

• 45:50Daniel Whiteson?

  So they did this cool calculation, which suggested that what you want to do is remove about two to three percent of the mass of Ceres. Ceres is a dwarf planet in our solar system. It's the largest thing in the asteroid belt. It's like a big chunk of stuff. It's much smaller than the Earth. So like two to three percent of the mass of Ceres every century would accomplish this. So you don't have to take the sun apart. You don't want to take the sun apart. The point of this calculation is, in principle, this technique has the capacity to remove plenty of mass, much more than we would need if we wanted to engineer the star for our safety. And to engineer the star for our safety, we only need to skim off a little bit of mass every hundred years or so to avoid the sun going red giant and frying us.

• 46:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  So this paper wasn't necessarily advocating for either of the two methods we talked about. It's just saying, whatever method you use, you got to get two and a half percent of the mass of Ceres every 100 years off the sun. Is that right?

• 46:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 46:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And if you do that successfully, and there's lots of problems to solve between here and there.

• 46:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Daniel Whiteson?

  But in principle, you can have our sun last a lot longer. So instead of having a 10 billion year life cycle, it could have a 20 billion year life cycle.

• 47:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, wow.

• 47:04Daniel Whiteson?

  So you're adding 10 billion years to civilization, giving us a lot more time to find an alternative home for the Earth.

• 47:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. Can we, can we adjust this method so that we can get humans to live twice as long? This, this is pretty exciting.

• 47:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I need to build a big particle accelerator to remove mass from Daniel. That's what I need to do.

• 47:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Always asking for money, Daniel. Always asking for money.

• 47:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and it's interesting to think about the alternatives. Like, if we lived around a red dwarf, then already the star would be lasting a long, long time, you know, much longer than us, hundreds of billions of years, maybe trillions. It's not really certain because the universe isn't old enough to have like a red dwarf cool and become a black dwarf. We've never seen that happen. But you could imagine having an even longer lived star. If you started, for example, from like an orange dwarf, which is something that has the mass of half of the sun. Then there's enough mass there to play with because it can be hot enough to create a nice environment and have enough mass to lose. So it'll keep burning. Like if you tried to star lift a red dwarf, there's not really a whole lot of extra mass there.

• 48:12Daniel Whiteson?

  It'll just like go out. It's just above the threshold for fusion. But if you start with like a nice toasty orange dwarf and then star lift it, the calculations in this paper suggest it might go for like a trillion years.

• 48:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we're already making plans for what happens when we go to different like solar systems and start tinkering with their stars. We are a very self-confident species.

• 48:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, this really is Project Icarus, right?

• 48:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay, so we talked about how you're going to be like channeling all of this stuff to the poles. But does making it go to the poles instead of shooting directly at us solve all of the problems we might experience from all of this extra like sun mass getting shot out into space?

• 48:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Not necessarily, because number one, we can't guarantee that all of it's going to go to the poles, right? And on the whole, what you're going to do is increase the solar wind everywhere. Right? Like if you have hotspots on the surface of the sun, you can channel a lot of it up, but magnetic fields are not perfect and some of it's going to escape. And so you're risking more radiation in space for our burgeoning solar system industry, right? This whole context assumes we have a lot of space based economy and people moving through space. And so increased stellar wind for that is going to be bad. And unless, of course, we develop some, you know, awesome radiation shielding technology, which maybe we could, maybe that's a small problem compared to like lifting mass off of the sun. But you know, it's not easy. And remember, we don't really understand the sun. Like there's a

• 49:39Daniel Whiteson?

  lot we do know about the sun, but also a lot we don't. We don't even understand why its magnetic field flips every 11 years. So there could be a lot of surprises here, a lot of things that don't go the way that we expect. And when things don't go the way we expect on the scale of a star, then it can be very bad.

• 49:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, yes. High cost to human hubris in this case, I think.

• 50:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And even getting it a little bit wrong could increase bad solar weather in the solar system. We could basically make it impossible to move around the solar system. We just like get the star grumpy and it like takes a billion years to calm down, you know, like

• 50:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 50:14Daniel Whiteson?

  That's, you know, maybe unrecoverable.

• 50:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So I def- first of all, I absolutely want to read the sci fi novel written about this idea. But, uh, but second, so it really seems to me that if you're going to take this task on, like first you send out the interstellar ships and then, then you start tinkering like, we might kill everyone. So let's make sure that we send some human seed out into the universe.

• 50:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. Yeah. Make a backup copy before you start playing with things at work. Yeah.

• 50:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Exactly. Yes.

• 50:42Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a good strategy.

• 50:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Basic tenet of computer programming, I'm guessing.

• 50:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And, you know, the energy required to do this kind of stuff is vast, not just to build the particle accelerator or these solar powered stations and beam energy back of the sun. But, you know, just like the energy involved in lifting material out of the sun's gravitational well is huge because the gravity of the sun is huge and the earth is already almost too massive to launch off of using chemical rockets. And so we're talking about incredible scales of energy here. The good news is the sun has incredible scales of energy. So yes, you need enormous amounts of energy to beam back to the sun to heat it up and to run this particle accelerator, but we're talking

• 51:28Daniel Whiteson?

  about the sun. So it outputs a lot of energy we you can just grab. But, you know, we're playing with enormous quantities here. And so again, like mistakes and miscalculations, the consequences of getting things wrong are just much bigger.

• 51:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. There's probably not enough material on earth to build these things that you're talking about. Would we have to collect the material for these devices from other planets or from the asteroid belt? Or is there enough stuff on earth? Am I totally wrong about this?

• 51:57Daniel Whiteson?

  You would definitely need a lot of material to solve this problem because if you're, for example, gathering all this energy to shoot it back at the sun, then you're building huge solar power collectors, not as massive as a Dyson sphere, or even like a sphere people would want to live on. But still, it's a huge engineering project. I don't think you'd want to take chunks off the earth, but like, you know, what is mercury good for anyway?

• 52:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. I'm sure every culture on earth would be fine if you just disassembled Mercury. Although, maybe if they were facing their own demise, they would be fine.

• 52:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So, you know, we just launched like an AI probe to Mercury. We tell it to build a factory to make more of itself, to make solar power plants, which then power itself and like, hope that it continues following our instructions to build the Sun Lifter, rather than launching, you know, an armada against Earth to take over.

• 52:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is the start to the sci-fi novel that I want to read about this, because I can absolutely imagine that going wrong.

• 52:53Daniel Whiteson?

  But, you know, I think the bigger picture here is that we often think about the cosmos as fixed. You know, number one, we think about the solar system as always being the way that it is, because it has been this way for a long time, according to human timelines. You know, humans have always looked up at the stars and seen the same thing over the last tens of thousands of years. But on cosmic timelines, the story is different. The solar system has looked different and the sun will not last forever. And we don't have to think about it as fixed. It is possible for us to intervene, to change our fate. We don't just have to lay down and take it. We can blow ourselves up instead.

• 53:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, great. I mean, at least you've got a little bit more control over the situation. And that feels good. That feels good.

• 53:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Would that make you feel better if we all fry up due to an engineering mistake, rather than just like getting crisped naturally?

• 53:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, it wouldn't, especially if it sped the process up. But the good news is, we have a lot of time. And if you invest in science, we can increase our certainty in these technologies and better understand how the sun works so that we can all save ourselves one day.

• 53:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. So, thank you for coming along in this ride, where we stretch the Overton window for science funding out to trillions of dollars.

• 54:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm sure this is going to change everything for science funding. Bravo, Daniel and Kelly.

• 54:10Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm doing my best to be optimistic today.

• 54:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. All right. I like that. All right. Let's take that optimism with us outside the podcast. Hope everybody has a fantastic day.

• 54:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 54:32Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 54:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 54:44Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 54:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 55:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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• 56:17Speaker 01

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