Listener Questions #32

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about the expanding universe, how sleep aids impact sleep quality, and what characteristics might make aliens better adapted for interstellar travel. 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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• 1:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Is the universe's expansion just entropy's show? No, it's the cosmic stretch that lets disorder grow.

• 1:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  I live in envy of Rip Van Winkle. I just can't stay asleep. But if I take a sleep aid, will I rest longer but less deep?

• 2:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Could aliens evolve epic nap skills for the long cosmic ride? Or yeet themselves across space on pure physics pride?

• 2:10Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 2:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. Listener questions number 32.

• 2:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Woo.

• 2:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weider-Smith, and it currently hurts to laugh. So this is one of the few instances in my life where I wish my friend and co-host Daniel was less funny.

• 2:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I never thought being funny was dangerous.

• 2:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, it's not, it's not usually. It really, really isn't usually.

• 2:57Daniel Whiteson?

  But it is fun to consider yourself dangerously funny.

• 3:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yes, yes. We all enjoy fiction from time to time.

• 3:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Ooh, I love the instant karma. Every time you throw a jab, you feel it.

• 3:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, you know, I think what I'm, what I'm learning about myself is that I laugh at myself a lot. And that's, I think I'm very funny, which is maybe not a great personal trait.

• 3:24Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a little dangerous, it turns out.

• 3:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I guess so. Ooh. Okay, so here's my question for you. So you used the word yeet in one of, in the poem in the intro. And yeet is a word that specifically reminds me that I am old, because it was one of the first words that I remember hearing where I was like, oh, I don't, I don't know what that means, but I don't want to tell someone I don't know what it means, because it's clearly one of the cool words that people are using now. And I just have to figure it out through context. And so yeet was like my initiation into being one of the not cool, older people. Do you have a moment where you were like, oh, I have reached the age where I don't get the things?

• 4:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I have a teenage daughter, so I hear a lot of words I have to interpret in context. For example, it took me a while to understand what slay really meant. Like what exactly is a good sleigh? And how do you start every day with a sleigh? And now, of course, that I've mastered it, it's like so embarrassing to use that word because nobody uses that word. So I love how language is flexible and how it evolves and how my teenager lets me put my thumb on the linguistic pulse of America.

• 4:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  How your teenager lets you sort of strangle America by like making it not fun anymore as soon as you understand it.

• 4:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. Spoiling fun, that's what parents do.

• 4:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, it's certainly what I do.

• 4:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And on this episode, we're hoping to not spoil your fun, but answer your questions, which we hope is a fun resolution to those mysteries. We are scratching your curiosity.

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, the good news is our listeners are a lot more fun than we are. And that kind of makes us fun by association. So let's start with Sonia's question and let's go ahead and listen to it.

• 5:14Speaker 06

  I have a question about time. So years ago, I read a book called Flatland, and I think it had a sequel called Sphere Land, which I read as well. And it was an incredible explanation of dimensions, including time as a dimension. It did also have some hilarious sexism in it that I think men are nice logical shapes and women are small, pointy lines. And if they bump into the men, the men explode and die. I mean Freudian or what. But aside from that, it made it possible to understand how time could be a dimension. But then I was thinking that time is the only dimension that you can really move in one direction, that you experience it only going forwards.

• 5:55Speaker 06

  And I often wondered, is that related to the fact that the universe is expanding? Is it like spacetime is growing and our consciousness sits on the growing edge of it? And as it grows, we experience it going forward? Or? Is it something to do with maybe just falling like gravity and time pulling us forward like, you know, what is pulling us in this direction? Why can we not slide backwards and forwards in time in the way that we could in space? That's it, really?

• 6:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so I am definitely interested in hilarious sexism. Are we talking about like, you know, watching a movie from the 80s where, you know, the women are like just blonde and need to be saved? Or like, what are we talking about here?

• 6:49Daniel Whiteson?

  No, Flatline goes even further back and it's sort of like a time capsule of casual sexism from the middle of last century.

• 6:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 6:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I mean, sometimes that can be hilarious, but also really frustrating.

• 7:03Daniel Whiteson?

  I wonder if it was even commented on at the time or if it's just like, hey, this is just how we talk about women. Anyway, it's fascinating.

• 7:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, the other day I got my gallbladder removed, which wasn't a ton of fun, but right as they were rolling me into the operating theater, I looked around and I said, wait a minute, you're all women. This is awesome. And they were like, yeah, that is pretty awesome. I guess they were kind of used to it. But anyway, I thought it was pretty great that everybody rolling me into that room was a woman. Anyway, we've made some progress, still some room for improvement. Let's talk about time as a dimension.

• 7:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so Sonia's question essentially is, why does time go forward? If time is a dimension, why can't we slide backwards and forwards? And how does it relate to the expansion of the universe and all this kind of stuff? So let's start at the beginning and remember what we know about time and space. Space is three dimensional. You can go backwards and forwards. If you define an arbitrary reference frame, you put yourself at zero, then you're always at the same place. If you define the center of the earth to be zero, then you can move all around, you can come back and revisit where you were born. There is no arbitrary reference frame, but if you pick one, you can go backwards and forwards in space. Time, we think of a little bit differently, but Albert Einstein showed us that time and space are deeply connected.

• 8:24Daniel Whiteson?

  In fact, he wraps them together into a four dimensional object called spacetime.

• 8:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  And one of the first episodes you and I recorded together was what is time? And what is space? And those are some really fun philosophical topics to, uh, to think about deeply. Well, looking at the stars, I think.

• 8:44Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's really important and subtle point here, which is like, why do you put things together? Is it more than just I'm tacking on another dimension? Is it meaningful in some way? And it really is, we only do this when it makes more sense to group things than it does to divide things. Like with electricity and magnetism, we noticed that these two things are really two parts of the same larger object. And we had drawn an artificial dotted line between them. And now we see that it makes much more sense to connect them and to think of them as one larger whole. Because for example, in special relativity, we know that what somebody sees is an electric field. Somebody else can see is electric and magnetic. It's observer dependent. So it really is one larger whole. And it's the same story with space and time.

• 9:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Things get simpler, they get more beautiful, more elegant. When you treat it as one larger whole rather than two separate things. Specifically in special relativity, when you think about what's happening in the universe and you want to translate from what one observer sees to what another observer sees, who's like somewhere else and maybe moving fast. It's just rotating a four dimensional vector. Because space and time is one 4D object and a frame is like a 4D vector. You just rotate that 4D vector and all the components mix. Just the same way like in linear algebra. If you have a 3D vector in space and you rotate it, all the components get mixed together. And that's just because time impacts where things happen and space impacts when you see them happen.

• 10:13Daniel Whiteson?

  They really are parts of a larger whole. And so it makes perfect sense to stick them together. In fact, the math becomes much simpler if you do so. That's why we stick things together. It's not just arbitrary.

• 10:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but, but where and when?

• 10:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are still different. So do you lose anything by lumping them?

• 10:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I love that question. No, you don't lose anything. In fact, you gain because all of your intuition for how space works and vectors rotate in space, you can now generalize that to four dimensions and operate on spacetime in the same way. So it's like you get to bring a whole set of tools along with you. You have to adapt them a little bit, but now you have like a more powerful toolkit to deal with these questions. But you're right that space and time are still different. Like special relativity sees them as very, very similar, right? And brings them closer together, but we know they are still different. And the theories of physics that we have actually all treats time differently. So we've been talking about relativity, which combines space and time. But in general relativity,

• 11:15Daniel Whiteson?

  it gets even weirder. And you have these more generalized coordinates, which you can say are like, kind of spacey, and some of them are kind of timey. And in general relativity, you can even have theories of the universe where time has a beginning. There's like a singularity, right? Before which there is no time. So time is very weird in general relativity. And then in quantum mechanics, it's completely different. Quantum mechanics treats time just as a parameter. It separates space and time. It says you have all these fields through space and they evolve over time. And actually, quantum mechanics, which insists that no information is lost, requires that time is infinite into the past and into the future. And quantum mechanics is almost symmetric in time. So we have very similar concepts and we use the same word,

• 12:00Daniel Whiteson?

  but time in quantum mechanics and time in relativity really are different concepts. And it's actually one of the obstacles to merging them together into a theory of quantum gravity. And we have even a third concept of time, which of course, we just use the same name for, which is thermodynamic time, right? In thermodynamics, there actually is an arrow. The universe evolves differently forwards in time and backwards in time because of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy increases with time. It goes up. So this is asymmetric. This is what we call the thermodynamic arrow of time. The universe goes Lower entropy to higher entropy. And check out our episode, A Deep Dive Into Entropy,

• 12:43Daniel Whiteson?

  which shows you that it's not just like disorder. It's an evolution from improbable states to more probable states. So that's another concept of time, which again, doesn't perfectly mesh with quantum mechanics or with relativity. So we have these three different ideas of time.

• 13:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so I think that I have lost where we are heading to. So now we have, we have a lot of different definitions of time. Initially, we were trying to lump space and time. The road that we are taking is eventually supposed to get us to where again?

• 13:16Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's our primer on space and time. Now, Sony's question was, are we moving forwards in time because the universe is expanding? Or does this have something to do with gravity? What's pulling us forwards in time essentially? And it's true that the expansion of the universe seems to have a direction in time also. Right? Like as time goes on, the universe gets bigger and its entropy is growing. So, ooh, that feels like maybe there's a connection there. But number one, it's not required for the universe to keep expanding. Like if the universe had had more mass in it and less dark energy, or if it had a different topology, like it was curved more, it could have contracted. Right? The universe, when it began expanding, that expansion was initially slowing down.

• 14:01Daniel Whiteson?

  It was always expanding, but that expansion was decelerating until dark energy ramped up and took over and accelerated it. But it could have been in other universes that it decelerated, stopped, and then contracted. So the universe is not required to expand as time goes forward. It's not like thermodynamics where entropy increases with time. The expansion of the universe could have various directions.

• 14:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 14:25Daniel Whiteson?

  So I don't think the expansion explains why time goes forwards. But it is true that as time goes forwards and the universe is expanding, the entropy grows. Right? And this is one of the greatest mysteries, actually, about time and entropy, which is that the early universe started out really, really low entropy. Right? Entropy is going to increase and eventually we're going to reach a maximum entropy where everything is like spread out and there's no useful energy. There's still like energy floating around, but there's no useful energy, no differences. Right? Like if everything is the same temperature, there's no way for energy to flow and for you to do anything. And so that's a pretty boring universe. And what's fascinating is that our universe started out really, really far from that. So it's going to take a long time to get to the heat death.

• 15:09Daniel Whiteson?

  It could have been that our universe started out like pretty close to the heat death. And like five seconds later, we were at the heat death. One of the deep mysteries of cosmology and thermodynamics and time is why we started out with such low entropy.

• 15:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I guess we might not be here if that hadn't been the case.

• 15:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So that's a great argument. It's the anthropic one. Only in universes that do start out with very low entropy, do you get people asking, hey, why is there such low entropy? Right? Because the other ones just have a bunch of photons flying around. Another comment on this thermodynamic arrow of time. Some people argue that the thermodynamic arrow of time is the arrow of time. The fact that entropy grows with time forces time to go forwards because the second law says entropy has to go up and therefore time has to go forwards. And I'm not sure I buy that as an argument.

• 15:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're not sure you buy the second law of thermodynamics? Bold statement, Daniel.

• 16:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no, I'm deeply invested in the second law. But the second law says time and entropy are connected. Doesn't say time has to go forwards. You know, if time went the other way, it would just mean that we are in a universe that entropy is decreasing. So it couples time and entropy, but I don't see how it forces time to go this way instead of the other way. Maybe in some other universe where entropy is constantly decreasing, they're wondering why time goes in their direction, right? Which we would call backwards. Anyway, so nobody knows the answer to this question, Sonia. Unfortunately, we don't know why time is different from space because it seems so similar. We don't know how to unify time from a thermodynamic point of view and a quantum mechanical point of view and a relativity point of view. We hope to one day figure that out.

• 16:47Daniel Whiteson?

  We don't know why time just goes forwards. It does seem somehow connected to entropy, but I don't think it's connected to the expansion of the universe.

• 16:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, let's yeet this answer over to Sonia and see what she has to say. Does it? Wait, what was the word that Hazel used? Slay! All right, let's see if it slays.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Hey, Daniel and Kelly. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question. I have been banned officially by my family from trying to use words like "slay", so I shall just say that was a fantastic unpacking of all the reasons we don't know the answer. I do think, though, over the last 20, 30 years, we've made so many advances in understanding. I wonder whether maybe in my lifetime, we might work it out. And if we do, maybe you can explain it to me then. Thanks again. Love the show.

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• 19:44Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we took a little break and we're ready to answer more questions from listeners. So those of you who are gently falling asleep, don't, because this question is very important for you. Get up and stretch, do a jumping jack and pay close attention.

• 19:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's go ahead and listen to Thomas's amazing question about sleeping.

• 20:04Speaker 07

  Hey, this is Matt the Sound Guy. Thomas was not available to read his question, so I'll do it in his stead.

• 20:14Speaker 07

  Hi, I just finished and enjoyed your episode about aging. As a 77-year-old who exercises daily, I still find my sleep is very disrupted. My question is, if one takes sleep aids, i.e. Advil PM or melatonin, is sleep as beneficial?

• 20:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I love this question. I want to know the answer to this question also. Thank you, Tom, for asking it.

• 20:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, okay, so maybe this, the answer is going to be relevant to you because you indicated that when you turned 50, you started rounding your age up to 100. But I specifically set up an answer for this question for the impact of sleep aids on older folks. Because it turns out that the answers depend a lot on why you aren't sleeping well, which I'll get into. But first, I'd like to note that Thomas is referring to the Why Do We Age? episode where we interviewed Dr. Venky Ramakrishnan, and that was from October 9th, 2025.

• 21:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Super fun conversation.

• 21:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Super fun. He's so good at explaining concepts. And Gina Poe, Dr. Gina Poe, is also great at explaining ideas. And we had her on to talk about why we sleep and dream. So another great episode to check out. That was August 21st, 2025.

• 21:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And so this is going to be like a crossover between our two episodes?

• 21:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, kind of a crossover. And I, you know, of course I have to remind everybody, I am not a medical doctor. And if you are suffering from disrupted sleep, you should talk to a medical professional. And this discussion is in no way comprehensive.

• 21:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 21:44Daniel Whiteson?

  And by medical professional, do you mean ChatGPT? Or do you mean like an actually human person?

• 21:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, an actual human person.

• 21:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And yet you use ChatGPT for medical advice.

• 21:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are you talking about my decision to go to the ER recently? Yes, no, it's true. I did. So I guess I'll tell that story now. So I was crawling around on the bathroom floor in incredible pain. And I had been in pain all day and I just started throwing up. And Zach was like, you should go to the ER. And I was like, I don't want to go to the ER because I'm gonna have to sit in an ER for hours and be uncomfortable in their horrible chairs. And I just want to find a position where I'm comfortable and I'll stay home all day. And Zach looked on ChatGPT and ChatGPT immediately said, your wife has gallstones. She needs to go to the ER.

• 22:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And it was right.

• 22:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it was right. I went to the ER and they immediately brought me to the back. And they were like, you have gallstones.

• 22:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And they didn't use ChatGPT, did they?

• 22:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I hope not. Well, I mean, they did. They eventually gave me an ultrasound. And they were like, look, you have gallstones. And turns out I had four gallstones, each about two centimeters wide. And then I looked at my post operative notes and they had to cut a bigger hole where my belly button was because the gallstones were making it so hard to get the gallbladder out because they were so big. Anyway, more than anyone needed to know. ChatGPT is sometimes a helpful tool.

• 23:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 23:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  But in general, if you're having disrupted sleep, which is very common in the elderly population. And if it's bothering you, you should talk to a medical professional. All right, so there are lots of reasons why people have disrupted sleep at various different ages. And those problems can impact the kinds of sleep aids that you might want to take.

• 23:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 23:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  So some, some people have trouble sleeping because of anxiety or because of depression or because of pain. But I, I decided that I was going to look at just problems related to sleep when you're aging. And so, for example, when folks age, they produce less melatonin. And melatonin is a hormone that our body uses to control our circadian rhythms. So we make more melatonin when it's supposed to be dark outside at night. That's what a part of how our body Tells ourselves, oh, it's time to go to sleep and older people make less of it.

• 23:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that the one that people often take when they're on an airplane to help them with jet lag?

• 24:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly, exactly. So one thing I'd like to note is that when I read a bunch of these papers, the first thing that most of these papers said was, look, if you're having trouble sleeping, the first thing you should try isn't a sleep aid. It's exercise, which Thomas is already doing. And then it's cognitive behavior therapy to improve sleep or other sleep hygiene things. And so there's a bunch of stuff you're supposed to try before you start trying to take medications. Cause a lot of medications have side effects that are not ideal.

• 24:32Daniel Whiteson?

  So first, like, make sure you get exercise during the day. Make sure you're sleeping in a cool, dark, quiet place. You don't have like toddlers jumping up and down in your head, this kind of thing.

• 24:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. Try to avoid looking at screens for the two hours before you go to sleep, stuff like that. So Thomas's question actually kind of has a couple of different parts to it. First, you probably want to know, does the sleep aid actually help you sleep better? And there's a couple of different ways you can measure that. So you can measure, does it help you fall asleep more quickly once you lay down in bed?

• 25:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 25:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Once you've fallen asleep, do you wake up less often? If you do wake up, how long does it take you to fall back asleep? And then when you're in bed, what is the total amount of time that you spend sleeping? And those are some ways of measuring your sleep. But another way of measuring sleep quality is things like, how deep does your sleep get? So you can put like electrodes on people and you can measure things like rapid eye movement sleep, REM sleep. And this is where you should go and listen to Gina Poe's amazing episode. But basically when your brain is doing rapid eye movement sleep, this is when you're like consolidating memories and like doing all sorts of stuff that our brains and bodies need to do.

• 25:45Daniel Whiteson?

  I feel like this is the heart of his question because he's asking, is sleep as beneficial? But are we going to talk about aging and sleep and metrics and not talk about Brian Johnson's data?

• 25:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Go ahead, Daniel.

• 26:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Brian Johnson is this guy who wants to prevent himself from aging and he like takes blood from his 18 year old son, injects it himself. And I think a lot of that stuff is really weird. What I do think is fascinating is how much data he takes on himself, including what happens when he sleeps. And he posts all this data online.

• 26:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  You love telling this story. You also told it to Dr. Venkyramakrishna. He was at the, we had a Nobel Prize winner on the show, Daniel, and you told him this story while we were looking at each other over the riverside recording it. But go ahead, tell everybody so that everybody knows what you said.

• 26:37Daniel Whiteson?

  It's just that, you know, one way to measure your sleep is the length and quality of the erections you have while asleep. Yes. According to Brian Johnson and the data that he posts daily on his website.

• 26:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. Okay. Okay. Well, that's, I didn't find that measure in any of the papers that I was looking at. But apparently the sleep that Brian Johnson is having slays.

• 27:06Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So what are some ways that people can improve their sleep medically? The kind of sleep aids that Thomas is talking about?

• 27:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So there's many different kinds of sleep aids that can be delivered in different ways. This is not at all comprehensive, as I've said. One class of drugs that tends to be used often are benzodiazepines. And what benzodiazepines do is they bind to GABA receptors. So these are receptors that are in our brain, they're on our like nerve cells. And they are important for making our nerves excitatory, which is essentially like making our nerves fire so that our brains are like active and doing stuff.

• 27:44Daniel Whiteson?

  You said GABA receptors? What's a GABA?

• 27:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  GABA is just a neurotransmitter. Wasn't going to go into too much detail here, but it's a neurotransmitter. And when that neurotransmitter binds to these receptors in our brain, our nerves start firing and our brains start doing stuff.

• 28:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 28:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you don't really want your brain to be doing too much stuff. You want your brain to be kind of calming down. And so when a, when benzodiazepines bind to these receptors, your brain sort of gets less excited and it acts as like a muscle relaxant and a sedative. And you start getting sleepy and the idea is you're supposed to fall asleep. And these drugs were established in the 1950s. They were first synthesized in the 1950s and they were supposed to be a great replacement for barbiturates, which had some like negative side effects. And everyone was like, yay, benzodiazepine. So we started prescribing these for everybody. But it turns out that they're also highly addictive and they do a bunch of bad things.

• 28:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  But they might, I found a 2016 review for sleep aids for folks who are older. And that review said that benzodiazepines do appear to help you fall asleep faster, help you reach REM sleep faster. So that's sleep where you're doing a better job of consolidating memories. And it reduces the number of times that you wake up in the middle of the night. But I also found a more recent study that suggested that if you use benzodiazepines long-term, you're going to spend less time in REM sleep. And so in that case, quality would be lower. So long-term use would be giving you less good sleep.

• 29:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  This all sounds good, but the way that older bodies metabolize or like break down drugs is different than the way that younger bodies do. And in some ways it's less efficient. And so these drugs spend more time in your body. They do different things in your body. So the American Geriatric Society recommends not using benzodiazepines because in elderly patients, these drugs are associated with cognitive impairment, delirium, you're more likely to fall, you're more likely to get fractures and you're more likely to get into car crashes. And so these drugs, even though they might help with sleep, they are in general not recommended for elderly patients because the, the downsides are just too high.

• 30:04Daniel Whiteson?

  So your 100-year-old co-host here should not be taking these things.

• 30:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  No.

• 30:11Daniel Whiteson?

  So I always wonder about how we discover these side effects. It seems like we put these things out and then we discover, oh, my gosh, they're addictive, or, oh, my gosh, they're bad for this population. So I guess we do some preliminary tests to see if they're safe before we put them out there. But basically, we're testing them on the population without really knowing the side effects.

• 30:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so this drug first became available in like the 1950s.

• 30:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I think we had much less testing before drugs went public back then. And so, yes, I think that this is a drug that was released to the public before we understood some of the more negative side effects. And so some of them were sort of observed along the way.

• 30:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 30:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which is less good. The next drug I'm going to talk about, which is Zolpidem, is an example of a Z drug, a non-

• 30:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Zolpidem, really?

• 31:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did I pronounce it wrong?

• 31:01Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know, but it's a terrible name. Did they come up with that name? Is that like some marketing scheme?

• 31:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  A lot of the drugs that are marketed have a Z in their name. And I think that's why they're called the Z drugs. And so I think someone came up with that.

• 31:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Z, I get, because it's associated with sleep, but Zolpidem. It just sounds like a letdown. Oh, I'm sorry, you got a Zolpidem.

• 31:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe it's Zolpidem? Z O L P I D E M? I mean, we know not to trust me for pronunciation.

• 31:27Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true.

• 31:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so if we take this Z drug, what happens?

• 31:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, well, so it's a non-benzodiazepine drug is what it's called. And these started getting synthesized in the 1980s. It binds to like the same kind of receptor as benzodiazepines. But there's actually like a bunch of different kinds of GABA receptors. And these drugs bind to like a smaller subset of the receptors. And so the bad effects are minimized. And so these have fewer bad effects. They've got a lot of the good stuff going on. And so it does seem to be associated with like you fall asleep faster, you wake up less often, you sleep for longer, you're less likely to be tired during the day, you're less likely to have memory issues, you're less likely to like fall and stuff like that.

• 32:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I found this review paper that was the one that was saying that like, oh, you're, you know, it's not associated with a lot of memory issues, blah, blah, blah. But they also said, you know, when we were reviewing all of these papers, we should note that the quality of most of the papers we were reviewing was pretty bad. Like- And so it doesn't look like there's a lot of papers where, you know, like good use of placebos or large sample sizes and blah, blah, blah. And so although things look like they're pointing in a good direction, we haven't really collected loads of exactly the kind of data that we would want to feel super confident about it.

• 32:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So there could still be like dangerous side effects lurking out there like makes you more likely to hurt yourself laughing on a podcast.

• 33:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could be, could be. Yes, maybe.

• 33:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, maybe you get gallstones, just like Kelly.

• 33:07Daniel Whiteson?

  That's not funny.

• 33:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Weird sense of humor, Daniel. So, but, but for this drug, you are specifically supposed to take low doses for short periods of time.

• 33:18Daniel Whiteson?

  I see.

• 33:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so there shouldn't be people out there who are taking high doses for long periods of time. And so if it is the case that, you know, high doses for long periods of time do have negative impacts, you know, that shouldn't matter because people probably shouldn't be taking it in that way, or at least it's not recommended.

• 33:34Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So we've done benzodiazepine, we've done the Z drugs. What about the old standby melatonin? That feels like kind of natural and simple in comparison.

• 33:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. And so I started looking into this because, uh, you know, for a while I was having disrupted sleep and I was like, well, maybe I'll try melatonin. And so I dug into the literature and I dug into the literature, you know, specifically like trying to answer Thomas's questions for, you know, people who are older than me. And it looks like the answer is it depends. Like the results are super inconsistent.

• 34:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Really?

• 34:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  The most consistent result is that it helps you fall asleep a little faster. But the studies that find that the effect size is often something like five minutes. You know, like you fall asleep five minutes faster, which is not a big difference.

• 34:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know. Five minutes of lying there with your eyes closed, trying to fall asleep can feel like a thousand years.

• 34:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. All right. But you might be a good candidate for melatonin. You're not supposed to use it like long term. You're supposed to just kind of use it sort of short term, not stay on it like forever. It doesn't seem to help too much with things like reducing the number of times that you wake up or influencing how long you sleep overall. And some studies have found that you have what they call a residual daytime sedation. So like you take it the night before and then the next day it's still making you a little bit tired. And so you might wonder was were those additional five minutes worth it if the next day you're still feeling kind of sleepy.

• 35:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, you'd have to make that decision up for yourself. And then there are some studies that find no effect at all. Like you take the melatonin, it didn't make the people in the study fall asleep any faster. And so, you know, it's, it seems to have done nothing.

• 35:15Daniel Whiteson?

  So there's no perfect bullet out there?

• 35:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  It doesn't seem like there's any perfect bullet out there that has no, you know, no risks associated with it.

• 35:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I think, you know, that's just kind of life. I think just about.

• 35:28Daniel Whiteson?

  That's kind of biology.

• 35:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's kind of biology, you know? I think anytime you take a medication, you get a pamphlet with potential side effects that you need to discuss with your doctor or your pharmacist and understand the risks of. There are plenty of people who are on sleep aids and they feel like it's worth it, that the benefits outweigh the risks. But I think that you, if you're having trouble sleeping, you should go to your doctor and talk about why you're having trouble sleeping. Cause you know, if the problem is pain, then maybe like Tylenol or Tylenol PM would be worth it and it would solve the problem. But you know, I think it's important to talk to your doctor about the specific problems you're having and the, you know, costs and benefits of taking drugs and thus, you know, work through it with them.

• 36:12Daniel Whiteson?

  It amazes me that in this day and age when we can do so much, we still don't understand sleep very well. And so we don't understand how to manipulate it and correct it and adjust it. It's such a basic part of life and still such a huge challenge and a mystery.

• 36:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you know, with how complicated our bodies are, I don't know that we should expect that there would be a perfect solution, you know? Like our bodies don't necessarily have like a little switch where you should just be able to like push up the knob for more sleep with nothing else getting messed up. Like we're just an interconnected mess of things. And maybe you can't tinker with one thing without messing up something else. I don't know. I think, I think what we've managed to do is pretty amazing and. Hopefully, we just keep getting better.

• 36:56Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a fascinating and kind of depressing theory. I imagine our bodies as these really complex machines with all these knobs on it. And it's, of course, hard to predict what happens if you pull this lever or press that button. But I always assume that there's some place in that phase space of operations where things go the way you want. But it sounds like you're suggesting that like, there may be no way to tweak these knobs to get you where you want to be.

• 37:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I know. I'm not sure that there is always going to be a way to tweak the knobs to get you exactly where you want to be.

• 37:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, fascinating. That's a depressing thought, Kelly.

• 37:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I don't know that evolution is always going to be like, oh, I need to make sure there's some way for Kelly to get to her optimum level of sleep. You know, evolution is just, you get what you get.

• 37:39Daniel Whiteson?

  And you don't get upset.

• 37:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you don't get upset.

• 37:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

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• 38:22Speaker 07

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• 38:39Speaker 07

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• 39:11Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 39:29Speaker 07

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners with span an amazing and delicious array of topics. We've also been getting notes from listeners that they're really appreciating the huge variety of topics that we cover. I assume that means that they're enjoying all the biological and chemical questions we're tackling. So I'm very glad to have such a range.

• 40:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that means that they're enjoying the questions that they're submitting, which have been wonderful and we should give them the credit for the great diversity.

• 40:20Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, and so we're gonna zoom out from sleep questions to think about the cosmic context and of course, talk about aliens. Here's a question from Ralph, which sets me up to give a little rant.

• 40:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yay.

• 40:32Speaker 07

  So I've seen some sensationalist headlines recently based on Harvard physicist Dabi Loeb's claim that an interstellar object moving through our solar system might be an alien spacecraft with malicious intent. And I'm probably not gonna lose any sleep worrying about this, but it reminds me of a recent podcast you guys did where you discussed the effects of interstellar space travel on humans. And I'm thinking, what if you shifted the perspective to aliens? You know, specifically what kinds of evolutionary characteristics might make them more adapted to survive interstellar travel? And assuming they have superior understanding of physics, what kinds of propulsion systems might they employ? This might be an opportunity for you

• 41:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Guys to put on your sci fi hats and have a little fun. Thank you. Well, I'm glad to hear that Ralph isn't planning on losing any sleep, but I am looking forward to hearing Daniel's rant.

• 41:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Apparently not worrying about aliens is the way to get a good night's sleep.

• 41:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that then you don't sleep much, do you, Daniel? Because you spend a lot of time worrying about aliens.

• 41:39Daniel Whiteson?

  So Ralph mentions this interstellar object, Three Eye Atlas, which recently entered our solar system. And this was a lot of fun because we haven't seen very many interstellar objects. We've only been looking for a few years and we've seen three of them now. That's why it's called Three Eye Atlas. And each one is new because each one is like one of the first few samples we've ever gotten from other solar systems out there. We think these things are probably chunks of rock from like the equivalent of the Oort Cloud around some other star, which got gravitationally dislodged. Instead of falling into that star and becoming a long period comet, just floated through the galaxy until it ran into our solar system. So it's super fascinating to get to see these chunks.

• 42:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to our solar system. I think I finally remembered how to pronounce the first one. Omuamua, right?

• 42:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Omuamua, that's right. Yeah, nice.

• 42:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think I've messed it up on the show, something like six or seven times, but eighth time's a charm.

• 42:38Daniel Whiteson?

  There you go. All right, congratulations.

• 42:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks.

• 42:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And so at first, of course, we didn't know exactly what to expect because every single one of these is weird. They're drawn from a huge population that's very diverse. And so they're all going to be different from anything we've seen before. And this one was no different from that. As it got closer, we saw that it was unusual. It had a lot more carbon dioxide in the cometary coma. It seems to have unusual amounts of nickel and cyanide.

• 43:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is the coma, that's just the tail, right?

• 43:07Daniel Whiteson?

  The coma is the fuzz around the comet.

• 43:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 43:09Daniel Whiteson?

  So a comet is like a frozen chunk. And then as it gets closer to the sun, there's more radiation on it. And as it heats up, various parts of it sublimate and turn into gas and that makes the coma.

• 43:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks.

• 43:19Daniel Whiteson?

  And then if there's more pressure from the solar wind or from the radiation, that can make a And when it first arrived, of course, we didn't have a lot of great data and we didn't have a lot of data. And so there was a lot of speculation about what it might be. By now, we've pointed all of our best telescopes at it. We think we understand it. It looks like a frozen rock from another solar system. Its velocity, its trajectory, all of the emissions, it all makes sense. The prosaic explanation of it being a frozen blob from another solar system is a great description of this thing. But before we had all of this data, there was one famous astrophysicist from Harvard, Avi Loeb, who made a lot of hype about how it could

• 43:59Daniel Whiteson?

  be aliens. And so, you know, on the podcast, I try to generally only be positive and only talk about people if I have something nice to say. But this guy's made such a negative impact on science and science communication that I think it deserves a little bit of a comment.

• 44:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love that you jumping up on your soapbox and getting angry is, and I think it deserves a little bit of a comment. Like this is, this is angry Daniel is, I'm going to make a little bit of a comment. Let's hear it.

• 44:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, the issue is that Avi Loeb claims to be like more open minded to new ideas than mainstream astronomy. And he likes to paint everybody in mainstream astronomy is like closed minded and rejecting the idea that it could be aliens, you know, out of hand, just dismissing it. It's part of this whole shtick that like academics are closed minded or march to the beat of some drummer. And you're an academic, you know, you can't get two academics to agree on anything. And it's like everybody's dream to disprove somebody else, or to upset the narrative, or to make a big paper discovering something mind blowing. And for a guy from Harvard to be like complaining about mainstream astronomy, like, what's more mainstream astronomy than astronomy at Harvard? But the real issue

• 45:12Daniel Whiteson?

  is that he makes a bunch of arguments, and these arguments are weak and they're flawed. And then when experts criticize these things fairly, he portrays that as them trying to shut him down unfairly. When that's just how the marketplace of ideas work. And if your ideas can't survive in the marketplace, maybe they're wrong. But instead, he plays victim and he says, look, they're attacking me.

• 45:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, come on, man.

• 45:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Made basic mistakes like he misunderstood the difference between solar radiation pressure from photons and solar wind from particles. He assumed the fuzz around the comet, which is just due to the coma, was because of smearing, it was because it was moving so fast. He didn't understand the telescopes were tracking the comet and to show there should be no smearing effect. He assumed that because this thing came in close to the ecliptic, it was therefore very, very unlikely to be a natural object. Which is silly, it's just like, you know, shooting a gun in a random direction and then drawing a bullseye around it later and saying, how unlikely that the bullet landed on the bullseye? You know, you can always find something unusual if you look through enough examples. And there was some great work by Steve Desch and Jason Wright,

• 46:19Daniel Whiteson?

  very carefully and very fairly taking his arguments apart, which he then turned around into like, look, I'm being attacked. So, you know, I just think it's not a good faith analysis, which is a shame. Because we should be open to any good faith commentary. And I think that we are. But these bad faith attacks on mainstream astronomy, I don't think they're productive at all.

• 46:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, that's and this was also really frustrating because as a Harvard professor, he probably could have access to like all the experts. And he could be working with them on these questions and like checking to make sure like, is that a smudge or are we tracking it, you know, through time? And anyway, these mistakes don't need to be made.

• 46:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and I don't know what's in his heart, so I can't say for sure. But he's not acting the way somebody who's interested in evidence based reasoning acts. He's acting more like somebody who's out for attention and spreading misinformation to benefit himself and sell his books. But again, I don't know what's in his heart.

• 47:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Anyway, this was not an alien ship. Unfortunately, I wanted it to be an alien ship. Lots of people wanted it to be an alien ship. If it was, we would be very excited. Astronomers are not like anti-alien in any way.

• 47:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Probably no one wanted it to be an alien ship more than you.

• 47:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, exactly. Yeah, come on, man. Come and laser half the planet, but tell us the secrets of the universe.

• 47:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 47:36Daniel Whiteson?

  But that was just the prologue to Ralph's question. Ralph is really wondering about, well, how would aliens get here? Like, if this was an alien ship, how would aliens? And survive that interstellar journey. Could they develop new techniques? Could they evolve in some way that makes it better? And so this was a lot of fun to think about like, what kind of critter could survive a thousand or 10,000 year sublight journey from another solar system? So I thought about the biology of space travel a little bit. So Kelly, tell me if I get anything wrong.

• 48:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, one issue is our metabolism, right? To stay alive, we need oxygen. We need the right temperature. We need regular food. The whole thing is a huge ordeal, right? So perhaps instead of doing that, we could somehow enter like a, or aliens could evolve to enter like a low metabolic state. You know, essentially where you just don't need as much oxygen. You don't need as much food. And we have examples of this, like here on Earth, like tardigrades can like curl up and essentially not be dead and not be frozen, but just be like in a very low metabolic state.

• 48:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  The Tuns state. I think that's what, uh, we, we, cause we, we had a whole episode on tardigrades. And I think it was called the Tuns state.

• 48:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 48:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  And Rodifers also have like, you know, states where they can essentially like, you know, freeze their existence and then come back at a later time. But I think of those as sort of simple creatures, not the kind of creatures that could create spaceships capable of interstellar travel.

• 49:05Daniel Whiteson?

  But we have examples on Earth of more complex creatures, not with this dramatic an effect, but like, you know, mammals hibernate, their metabolism drops. So it's certainly possible for complex creatures to change their metabolism, right?

• 49:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, not, I mean, nowhere near the time scales that you would need for interstellar travel. And they still need, they would still need their waste removed and they would still need some energy put into the system, depending on the time scales.

• 49:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, do bears poop in hibernation, Kelly?

• 49:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know if they poop in hibernation, but like, that's because hibernation is weeks or months, not generations. They gotta poop eventually.

• 49:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  I, I can tell you that as an expert, they gotta poop eventually.

• 49:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you.

• 49:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  On the record.

• 49:50Daniel Whiteson?

  PhD in biology is getting you right now.

• 49:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right.

• 49:56Daniel Whiteson?

  And of course, these are just examples here on Earth, but you know, it suggests that maybe it might be possible in some corner of evolutionary space for aliens to evolve in such a way that allows them to change their metabolism, maybe more dramatically. Do you think that's impossible?

• 50:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  I, you know, I, I don't think it's impossible. I think that we are very far away from being able to figure stuff like that out for like humans for interstellar travel.

• 50:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we can't even put humans to sleep here on Earth reliably. So, yeah.

• 50:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. I don't know, I guess I'm 50 50 on whether or not that's going to be impossible.

• 50:28Daniel Whiteson?

  For humans, but you know, imagine aliens and for some reason they've gone out into space and so there's evolutionary advantages to being able to survive, you know, to the difference between being alive and being dead, requiring very, very small requirements, small amount of food, small amount of oxygen, et cetera, maybe lower temperatures. It seems like perhaps evolution could cook up some way to survive that situation, no?

• 50:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Uh, well, so you know, wood frogs in like Michigan can freeze and then thaw out. And so, you know, I think there you can like freeze organisms, but I also think that it is the case that there's some percent that die when the thaw out happens. I hate to reference science fiction as though it's science fact, but I think in Andy Weir's book, Hail Mary, some of the crew did not survive the thaw out. This is kind of a spoiler, but not really. It happens pretty early on, but like, you know, I, it, I imagine that a lot of the procedures that we would come up with would have a like less than 100% success rate. But, but yeah, we might be able to come up with some situation, but you know, I don't

• 51:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  know if referencing natural selection is going to help us much because we are a species that has not been exposed to extreme temperatures for a long time, uh, you know, and exposed to natural selection associated with that. So, you know, we don't survive freezing. That's not a thing we do usually.

• 51:53Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So the next kind of adaptation that aliens might potentially evolve would have to do with radiation, right? Out in space, it's not just empty spaces. Lots of particles out there. They're moving at very high speeds. Even if you're just on the moon, which is not very far away, you're going to be exposed to high energy particles. This is radiation. They're going to zip through your body. They're going to tear up your DNA. They're going to do lots of damage. And this is why we like being here on Earth, under our magnetic shield and our atmosphere, which protects us from a lot of that radiation. And anytime we go into space, we need to worry about it. So if aliens are traveling here from another star, they're going to have to worry about radiation. The best way to protect yourself from radiation is mass.

• 52:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Have like huge water tanks or huge amounts of lead or something, some high Z material between you and the radiation is going to absorb a lot of that. But mass is tough, right? Because the more massive your ship, the harder it is to accelerate up to some reasonable speed. You can imagine like finding an asteroid and hollowing it out and living on the inside while you travel from one star to the other. But asteroids are massive and it takes a lot of energy to get an asteroid up to near the speed of light. So instead of building some technology, you might imagine aliens evolving some biological mechanisms, you know, like more active repair systems or redundant genetic coding or something like that, or maybe even

• 53:17Daniel Whiteson?

  some sort of non DNA based way to store genetic information that's more robust to radiation.

• 53:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, do you think that 3I Atlas is big enough that something could be living inside there and be shielded from radiation?

• 53:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I think I read that post by Avi already. I'm speculating about that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's like, I think a few kilometers across. So that's definitely big enough to be a nice ship for sure.

• 53:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 53:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  I still doubt it though. All right.

• 53:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. But I'd love to go inside and take a look.

• 53:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Beam me up.

• 53:54Daniel Whiteson?

  These are maybe ways you could evolve biological techniques to survive the high radiation in space. But again, this is just science fiction speculation. And then another issue, which Kelly's mentioned many times about living in space, is the question of like, how do you reproduce? You know?

• 54:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's not like I'm fixated on that, Daniel. You make it sound like it's all I ever talk about.

• 54:15Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, is it possible for your species to reproduce and to have gestation and development and all that stuff in space? I think it's certainly possible for another species to evolve the capacity or to already have a system which by chance is not sensitive to gravity. And I think we don't know whether ours is or how sensitive ours is. But if you wanted to avoid that entirely, you can imagine another way to spread your aliens around the galaxy is not to send adults, but to send some sort of like precursor, you know, basically gametes and then have them be created when they arrive and maybe raised by robots, you know, chat GPT raised. I've read that story for sure. It's a common theme in science fiction.

• 55:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And in this sense, if you do that, then like maybe travel is sort of part of your reproductive system. You know, you have your cozy evening, you create your gametes, you put them on a ship, you send them off and you never meet your kids. And then they'd never jump on your head at two in the morning and maybe you sleep better.

• 55:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah. And then you don't get all the diseases they bring home from kindergarten and all right, I'm, I'm, I'm in. No, I'm just kidding. That would really bum me out.

• 55:24Daniel Whiteson?

  But that would be really weird as the visitees, right? If visitors arrived and they're basically alien babies and we just watched them grow up and they've never experienced their home planet either. I don't know. Sounds like a fun science fiction story.

• 55:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  It does, but presumably the robots that are bringing them up would, you know, have a bunch of knowledge about the home planet and it would be able to teach you a bunch of stuff.

• 55:45Daniel Whiteson?

  In which case the robots are the real visitors, right? Those are the ones we'd want to talk to.

• 55:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. Forget the kids.

• 55:51Daniel Whiteson?

  And then from a technological point of view, let's assume that aliens don't have warp drives, they don't have wormholes, otherwise they could just get here in a moment. There are ways to get from star to star in a reasonable amount of time. If you use things like light sails, this helps you avoid having to carry your fuel with you because you just have like a huge reflective sheet and you shine a laser on it, it zooms it up to near the speed of light much more quickly because it's not so massive. This doesn't work for an asteroid very well, but it works for a small payload and you can cruise between the stars and try to use the arriving star as a brake when you arrive. And you can maybe even have like a magnetic tail that you can use to steer. So this is technologically totally feasible. I can imagine us doing this.

• 56:36Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, we're still talking huge time periods to visit the star, but technologically not impossible.

• 56:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm staying here.

• 56:45Daniel Whiteson?

  More exotically, aliens might show up with their whole solar system. You know, Elon Musk talks about building a Dyson sphere to capture all the energy of the sun. But if instead you build half a Dyson sphere, like a mirror that wraps around half of the sun, and then you make it gravitationally captured by the sun, then in effect, it's an engine because half the light gets reflected back and half of it doesn't. And so there's a net momentum there. And basically, it just drags the whole solar system. So you never have to leave your planet. Kelly can stay under the covers and we can go visit aliens, or aliens could do that and come visit us.

• 57:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yay, that sounds wonderful.

• 57:24Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so those are some of the ideas I have for how aliens might come and visit us. I hope that happens one day. And when it does, I'm sure that the astronomy community is going to be very interested and totally open minded to the possibilities.

• 57:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, let's see what Ralph had to say about Daniel's rant and your answer.

• 57:41Speaker 07

  Guys, thanks for answering my question. Some very interesting thoughts and ideas there. I'm happy that I gave Daniel a chance to rant, and I'm pretty impressed about how quickly Kelly was able to work on the alien poop reference.

• 58:00Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, thank you very much, everybody, for sending us your questions. It's really my favorite thing to see your questions in my inbox, and I love answering them here on the pod. If you have questions, please don't be shy. We'd love, love, love to hear from you.

• 58:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, send your questions to [email protected]. We answer them as soon as we can, and we answer all the questions. And some of the questions also end up on the show.

• 58:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Have a great day, everyone.

• 58:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hope you sleep well.

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