Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: So I want you to imagine standing outside on a
Speaker 2: clear night, right away from the city lights.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, best way to see the sky exactly.
Speaker 2: You look up and you just see thousands of stars.
Speaker 2: And for well the entirety of human history, those stars
Speaker 2: have been little more than untouchable points of light.
Speaker 3: To us, right, just distant data points.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean, we measure their luminosity, We watch them
Speaker 2: wobble to guess if their planets. We do all as
Speaker 2: crazy spectroscopic analysis on the light. But the idea of
Speaker 2: actually getting a visual you know, yeah, like a true
Speaker 2: ultra high definition, twenty meter resolution photograph of a planet
Speaker 2: orbiting an entirely different sun.
Speaker 3: It sounds like pure science fiction, right.
Speaker 2: It always felt like something fundamentally locked away behind centuries
Speaker 2: of future engineering. The distances are just they're too.
Speaker 3: Vast there, really are. I mean, space is big in
Speaker 3: a way the human brain isn't built to understand exactly.
Speaker 2: But and this is what we're getting into today on
Speaker 2: this deep dive. There is a meticulously detailed engineering roadmap
Speaker 2: out there now. T. Marshall Eubanks and the team at
Speaker 2: Space Initiatives, Inc. They've demonstrated that within our lifetime we
Speaker 2: could actually have those images.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of a planet orbiting our closest stellar neighbor. Right.
Speaker 2: We are moving from the realm of abstract telescopic data
Speaker 2: to tangible, close up visual evidence of another solar system,
Speaker 2: and not in five hundred years, but within the span
Speaker 2: of a normal human life, which is just wild to me.
Speaker 3: It forces a complete reassessment of our whole technological trajectory really,
Speaker 3: because we are looking at the in situ exploration of
Speaker 3: Proxima B.
Speaker 2: Approxima B is the exoplanet right in the habitable zone
Speaker 2: Approxima century right exactly.
Speaker 3: And that phrase in situ, that's the game changer here.
Speaker 3: It fundamentally alters the scientific return. We're no longer talking
Speaker 3: about just relying on a few photons that have traveled
Speaker 3: four light years to hit a mirror in Earth orbit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hoping we catch a glimmer.
Speaker 3: Right, we are talking about physical presence in that alien system,
Speaker 3: and doing it within a human timeframe means we have
Speaker 3: to completely abandon the incremental advancements we've been making in
Speaker 3: traditional propulsion, because.
Speaker 2: The Apollo air mechanics, right, lighting a controlled explosion under
Speaker 2: a giant metal cylinder, that won't get us there, not
Speaker 2: even close. I mean, if we look at the Voyager
Speaker 2: one spacecraft, it's currently moving at roughly what thirty eight
Speaker 2: thousand miles per hour around that Yeah, which sounds fast.
Speaker 3: Right by terrestrial standards, that's blistering, but by interstellar standards,
Speaker 3: it's basically a rounding error above zero.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at that velocity, reaching Proxima Centauri would take well
Speaker 2: over seventy.
Speaker 3: Thousand years seventy thousand, So to bridge a gap of
Speaker 3: over four light years, which is about twenty four trillion
Speaker 3: miles within a couple of decades, we have to defeat
Speaker 3: what they call the tyranny of the rocket equation.
Speaker 2: The Coosky rocket equation. Yeah, it is the absolute supreme
Speaker 2: bottleneck of spaceflight.
Speaker 3: Break that down for us a bit.
Speaker 2: So simply put every gram of payload you want to move,
Speaker 2: requires propellant to move.
Speaker 3: It makes sense. But that propellant has a mass, right,
Speaker 3: so now you need additional propellant to accelerate the initial propellant.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, it becomes this brutal exponential penalty. You end
Speaker 3: up with vehicles where ninety nine percent of the mass
Speaker 3: is just highly explosive liquid just to nudge a tiny,
Speaker 3: tiny fraction of functional payload up into a vacuum.
Speaker 2: So if you want to go really fast, if we
Speaker 2: want to.
Speaker 3: Travel at relativistic speeds, say twenty percent, the speed of
Speaker 3: light carrying fuel becomes a physical impossibility. The mass ratio
Speaker 3: just becomes infinite.
Speaker 2: So the solution they propose is conceptually simple, but from
Speaker 2: an engineering standpoint absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 3: Oh it's wild.
Speaker 2: We just leave the fuel behind exactly. Instead of putting
Speaker 2: the engine on the spacecraft, we heat the engine on Earth.
Speaker 2: We build an enormously powerful laser array and use it
Speaker 2: to push an incredibly lightweight spacecraft that's equipped with a
Speaker 2: photon sail.
Speaker 3: And people might wonder, how does light push anything? Light
Speaker 3: has no mass?
Speaker 2: Right, I was going to ask that, But.
Speaker 3: Because energy and momentum are inextricably linked in physics. Photons
Speaker 3: do actually carry momentum, so when a laser photon strikes
Speaker 3: a highly reflective sail and bounces off, it transfers a
Speaker 3: minuscule physical push.
Speaker 2: So it's like windsurfing, but instead of the wind pushing
Speaker 2: your sail, you have a giant stationary fan on the beach,
Speaker 2: aimed perfectly at your back, just pushing you across the ocean.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect analogy, actually, and it is the relentless
Speaker 3: accumulation of that microscopic momentum that makes this viable. A
Speaker 3: single photon's momentum is negligible.
Speaker 2: Sure, don't feel flashlight beam hitting.
Speaker 3: In exactly, but a gigawat class laser array focused on
Speaker 3: a specialized sail in the vacuum of space that delivers
Speaker 3: trillions upon trillions of photons every single second.
Speaker 2: And there's no air resistance.
Speaker 3: Right without atmospheric drag to slow it down. That continuous
Speaker 3: bombardment accelerates the craft continuously. You apply that gigawat beam
Speaker 3: for just a few minutes or hours, and the craft
Speaker 3: reaches twenty percent the speed of light before it even
Speaker 3: leaves our solar system.
Speaker 2: Okay, but wait, the challenge with that frictionless ocean of space.
Speaker 2: Is that the laser itself isn't perfect, right. Look, if
Speaker 2: you're aiming massive, incredibly powerful lasers into space, are we
Speaker 2: sure we can actually hit something that small over such
Speaker 2: vast distances.
Speaker 3: That is a massive hurdle. You're talking about the diffraction limit, right.
Speaker 3: A beam of light naturally spreads out the further it travels.
Speaker 3: If we are firing from Earth or even Earth orbit,
Speaker 3: keeping that beam tight enough to hit a meter wide
Speaker 3: sail a million mile away requires an optical array of
Speaker 3: just staggering proportions.
Speaker 2: Because it'll just turn into a wide, weak flashlight beam.
Speaker 3: Otherwise, precisely to keep the spot size of the laser
Speaker 3: small enough to remain entirely on the sale at lunar
Speaker 3: distances and beyond, you essentially need a phased array of
Speaker 3: lasers spanning square kilometers.
Speaker 2: Square kilometers of lasers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if you build it on the Earth's surface,
Speaker 3: you introduce the absolute nightmare of atmospheric distortion. The atmosphere
Speaker 3: is always boiling and churning.
Speaker 2: Which makes stars twinkle, right.
Speaker 3: Exactly, But that twinkling would scatter a concentrated laser beam instantly,
Speaker 3: so you have to employ extreme adaptive optics. We're talking
Speaker 3: deformable mirrors that physically change shape thousands of times a
Speaker 3: second to perfectly counteract the atmospheric turculence.
Speaker 2: That's insane, it.
Speaker 3: Is It ensures the combined beam wavefront is perfectly flat
Speaker 3: as it exits the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: And we aren't pulling this concept out of thin air either.
Speaker 2: Like the Japanese Space Agency JAXA demonstrated the foundational physics
Speaker 2: with icrows back into using solar photons.
Speaker 3: YEAP sunlight pushing a sale.
Speaker 2: And the Planetary Society followed up with light Sale two.
Speaker 2: Plus you had the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which spent millions
Speaker 2: mathematically validating the transition from solar power to focused laser power.
Speaker 2: So the physics of a light driven sail are solid.
Speaker 3: The physics are extremely solid, but the propulsion system dictates
Speaker 3: the entire anatomy of the spacecraft.
Speaker 2: Right, because if the laser array is pushing, the payload
Speaker 2: has to be virtually massless. We can't attach a heavy
Speaker 2: mars er over to a photon sale.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely not.
Speaker 2: We are looking at a payload measured not in tons
Speaker 2: but in grams. And Ubank's team they call them coracles soracles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the microengineering required for a coracle is arguably
Speaker 3: as daunting as the laser array itself. To achieve a
Speaker 3: fifth of light speed without requiring a laser that consumes
Speaker 3: the energy output of a medium sized country, the entire spacecraft,
Speaker 3: including the sale, must weigh just a couple of grams.
Speaker 2: A couple of grams.
Speaker 3: You have to pack propulsion, navigation, powered generation, communication, and
Speaker 3: scientific instrumentation onto a platform the size and weight of
Speaker 3: a paper clip.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate exercise in miniaturization. Let's break down what's
Speaker 2: actually in that payload. Because you obviously can't fit a
Speaker 2: standard telescopic lens on something that flat, right.
Speaker 3: A long camera tube is out of the question.
Speaker 2: So they're proposing a two hundred millimeter annulus aperture folded optic.
Speaker 3: Camera, which is a brilliant piece of engineering.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Essentially they are etching microscopic mirrors into a flat wafer,
Speaker 2: bouncing the incoming light back and forth internally to mimic
Speaker 2: the focal length of a massive bulky camera. It gives
Speaker 2: you deep space telescopic resolution in a completely two dimensional
Speaker 2: form factor.
Speaker 3: And alongside that folded optic system, you need a communication layer.
Speaker 3: A gram scale probe obviously cannot house a high gain
Speaker 3: radio dish like standard probes.
Speaker 2: So how does it phone home?
Speaker 3: It relies on the sale itself acting as an antenna, or,
Speaker 3: in some designs, highly specialized meta materials woven to directly
Speaker 3: into the sale fabric. But we have to face a
Speaker 3: harsh reality here. A single gram scale camera, no matter
Speaker 3: how brilliantly engineered, is scientifically weak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, i'd imagine.
Speaker 3: So if you send one single coracle to Proximu Sentaury,
Speaker 3: the signal to noise ratio of its transmission back to
Speaker 3: Earth would be atrocious, the imaging would be highly restricted.
Speaker 2: Basically, you send one, you get a blurry, noisy thumbnail
Speaker 2: after a twenty year weight exactly.
Speaker 3: So, the paradigm shift here is abandoning the monolithic spacecraft model.
Speaker 3: We aren't sending a flagship like Cassini or Voyager. We're
Speaker 3: sending an insects swarm.
Speaker 2: Thousands of these individual coracles launched in rapid succession. And
Speaker 2: the swarm isn't just for redundancy, right, like, it's not
Speaker 2: just backups. The swarm is the fundamental mechanism of how
Speaker 2: the science actually works.
Speaker 3: Yes, the swarm operates as a vast distributed interferometer.
Speaker 2: Okay, interferometer, explain that for us.
Speaker 3: So interferometry relies on the wave nature of light. If
Speaker 3: you have two small telescopes separated by say ten kilometers,
Speaker 3: and they observe the exact same target simultaneously, you can
Speaker 3: mathematically combine their light waves. Okay, when those waves interfere
Speaker 3: with each other, they synthesize an image with the resolution
Speaker 3: of a single mirror that is ten kilometers wide.
Speaker 2: Way, so it's like sending one highly trained, heavily armored
Speaker 2: knight versus sending an entire colony of ants. One ant
Speaker 2: can't do much, but the colony together can move mountains.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to look at it.
Speaker 2: And we did exactly this to capture the first image
Speaker 2: of a black hole with the event horizon telescope. Right,
Speaker 2: We networked observatories across the globe to turn the Earth
Speaker 2: into one giant lens.
Speaker 3: We did, But applying that to the coracles is just wild.
Speaker 3: You have this diffuse cloud of microscopic cameras spread out
Speaker 3: over thousands of kilometers, hurtling through the target solar system
Speaker 3: at sixty thousand kilometers a second. Mind blowing, and by
Speaker 3: time stamping and combining their individual observations, they synthesize an
Speaker 3: optical capability larger than our entire planet.
Speaker 2: It totally circumvents the mass limit brilliantly, you distribute the
Speaker 2: mass of a massive telescope across thousands of gram scale nodes.
Speaker 2: But I mean that astronomical capability requires a target worthy
Speaker 2: of the effort, oh definitely, And we are aiming this
Speaker 2: swarm at the Proximus Centauri system, which is the tertiary
Speaker 2: component of the Alpha Centaury group. And Proxima Centauri is
Speaker 2: an m dwarf. It's a red dwarf star. It's violently
Speaker 2: different from our yellow Sun.
Speaker 3: Very different. It's a fraction of the mass, significantly cooler,
Speaker 3: and it emits most of its light in the infrared spectrum.
Speaker 2: And the target proxima B orbits within the star's habitable zone.
Speaker 2: But because red dwarfs are so cool, that habitable zone
Speaker 2: practically scrapes the surface of the star, like Proxima B
Speaker 2: orbits closer to its star than Vircuy does.
Speaker 3: To our Sun, which introduces some extreme conditions that close
Speaker 3: proximity almost guarantees the planet is tidally.
Speaker 2: Locked, meaning one side always faces the star exactly.
Speaker 3: The gravitational gradients across the planet's diameter, over billions of years,
Speaker 3: dissipate its rotational energy. Eventually its orbital period matches its
Speaker 3: rotational period. So one hemisphere faces the eternal, glaring red
Speaker 3: Sun while the other faces the freezing absolute zero of
Speaker 3: deep space.
Speaker 2: So because Proximobe is tidally locked, we aren't just looking
Speaker 2: at a static terminator line like some peaceful twilight zone
Speaker 2: in the middle.
Speaker 3: Now, the atmospheric dynamics would be chaotic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, The atmospheric circulation models suggest ferocious supersonic winds constantly
Speaker 2: transferring heat from the boiling day side to the frozen
Speaker 2: night side.
Speaker 3: And that assumes the planet has managed to hold on
Speaker 3: to its atmosphere at all, because we have to factor
Speaker 3: in the tantrums. The tantrums m dwarfs are violently convective.
Speaker 3: They undergo magnetic reconnection events that utterly dwarfs anything our
Speaker 3: Sun produces. The stellar flares from proximusentaury are catastrophic. They
Speaker 3: periodically bathe the habitable zone and lethal doses of ultraviolet
Speaker 3: radiation and high energy X rays.
Speaker 2: So an unshielded atmosphere subjected to that relentless stellar wind
Speaker 2: and flaring activity instantly at risk of being stripped away completely,
Speaker 2: leaving just a sterile, irradiated rock.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It's a harsh.
Speaker 2: Neighborhood, which raises the immediate question for me, why go
Speaker 2: Like if astrobiologists snow proximusentry regularly sceralizes its inner system
Speaker 2: with X ray flares, why dedicate the first interstellar mission
Speaker 2: to looking for biology there? Doesn't that make it a
Speaker 2: terrible place for biology. It feels like pointing our most
Speaker 2: advanced technology at a cosmic blast furnace.
Speaker 3: That is a very common objection, but it is the
Speaker 3: ultimate test of biological resilience. You have to remember M.
Speaker 3: Dwarf's account for roughly seventy to eighty percent of the
Speaker 3: stellar population in our galaxy.
Speaker 2: Wow that many.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they are the standard, not the exception. Our Sun
Speaker 3: is actually kind of the odd ball. So if life
Speaker 3: requires the quiet, stable environment of a G type star
Speaker 3: like our Sun, then life is exceptionally ruer in the universe.
Speaker 2: I see.
Speaker 3: However, if we survey Proxima B and find that a
Speaker 3: thick atmosphere has survived, or that biology has somehow adapted,
Speaker 3: perhaps retreating to subsers. We're thriving under the ice of
Speaker 3: the dark side. It implies that life is aggressively tenacious.
Speaker 2: Well, that makes sense. Proximabe is the crucible that will
Speaker 2: tell us that the galaxy is teeming with life or
Speaker 2: mostly just dead space.
Speaker 3: Exactly if life can survive there, it can probably survive anywhere.
Speaker 2: So we have a target that could redefine biology, and
Speaker 2: we have a propulsion system to get us there in
Speaker 2: twenty years. But bridging those two points introduces the most
Speaker 2: severe navigational challenge ever conceived.
Speaker 3: It's an absolute nightmare.
Speaker 2: Because you have thousands of disconnected paper clips flying at
Speaker 2: twenty percent of light speed. They are over four light
Speaker 2: years away. If a coracle detects a trajectory error and
Speaker 2: radios Earth for a course correction, that radio wave takes
Speaker 2: over four years to reach.
Speaker 3: Us, right, and our reply takes another four years.
Speaker 2: That is an eight year ping for a single instruction. Like,
Speaker 2: they cannot be remote controlled. You can't have a guy
Speaker 2: with a joystick on Earth.
Speaker 3: No. Complete autonomy is absolute mandatory, and you can't use
Speaker 3: standard inertial navigation systems either. Yeah, gyroscopes and accelerometers, they
Speaker 3: naturally drift over a twenty year cruise. They just aren't
Speaker 3: precise enough over that time span, so they have to
Speaker 3: navigate by the cosmos itself. They'll be utilizing pulsar navigation.
Speaker 2: Using stars as lighthouses.
Speaker 3: Specifically millisecond pulsars. These are rapidly rotating neutron stars emitting
Speaker 3: beams of electromagnetic radiation with literal atomic clock precision.
Speaker 2: So the probes measure the arrival times of these X
Speaker 2: ray pulses. But it's not as simple timing exercise, as it.
Speaker 3: Not at all. At twenty percent the speed of light,
Speaker 3: the probe experiences significant relativistic time dilation.
Speaker 2: Okay, Einstein's relativity kicks out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the onboard clock actually ticks slower relative to the
Speaker 3: rest of the universe. Furthermore, as the probe races toward
Speaker 3: a pulsar or away from it, the incoming X ray
Speaker 3: pulses are severely Doppler shifted.
Speaker 2: Like the siren of an ambulance changing pitch as it
Speaker 2: drives past you.
Speaker 3: Exactly the same principle, but with light and X rays.
Speaker 3: So the autonomous software has to calculate complex Lorenz transfers
Speaker 3: just to figure out where it is in the three
Speaker 3: D space.
Speaker 2: Wait, so the computational density required to process relativistic pulsar
Speaker 2: navigation on a gram scale chip. Yep, that is immense.
Speaker 3: It is a phenomenal software and hardware challenge. But knowing
Speaker 3: your location is only the first step. You also have
Speaker 3: to coordinate with the rest of the.
Speaker 2: Swarm, right because of the interferometry we talked about exactly now.
Speaker 3: The researchers model three operational modes for this. The first
Speaker 3: is sending them as entirely independent agents. They drift, they
Speaker 3: don't talk to each other, They just fly by and
Speaker 3: snap photos.
Speaker 2: Which I guess drastically lowers the engineering threshold, but it
Speaker 2: kind of ruins the science.
Speaker 3: Doesn't it It does. Without coordination, you can't synthesize the interferometer,
Speaker 3: you just get thousands of redundant, blurry images of the
Speaker 3: same hemisphere.
Speaker 2: Okay, So what's the second option?
Speaker 3: The ideal, and by far the most challenging, is what
Speaker 3: they call the time coherent swarm. In this architecture, the
Speaker 3: probes actively monitor their relative positions when the flyby occurs.
Speaker 3: They don't just bro podcast randomly. They calculate the exact
Speaker 3: distance to Earth and synchronize their radio transmissions down to
Speaker 3: the picosecond.
Speaker 2: Down to the piico second.
Speaker 3: Yes, the goal is for the individual weak radio waves
Speaker 3: from thousands of pobes to physically align their phases in
Speaker 3: the interstellar medium so they arrive at Earth as a single, unified,
Speaker 3: coherent wavefront.
Speaker 2: Wow. I picture it like a stadium full of people
Speaker 2: holding up flashlights. If everyone turns their flashlight on and
Speaker 2: waves it around randomly, this statium just looks like a
Speaker 2: chaotic blur from a distance exactly. But if you network
Speaker 2: them all and every single person flashes their light at
Speaker 2: the exact same nanosecond, it creates a blinding focused beacon
Speaker 2: that could be seen from low Earth orbit.
Speaker 3: That is the exact principle.
Speaker 2: Yes, But getting thousands of independent probes to execute that
Speaker 2: nanosecond synchronization while dodging interstellar dust that sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 3: And you brought up a great point. Dodging interstellar dust.
Speaker 3: The interstellar medium is not completely empty. It is filled
Speaker 3: with microscopic dust, grain, and stray hydrogen atoms. When you
Speaker 3: collide with a speck of dust at sixty thousand kilometers
Speaker 3: per second, the kinetic energy exchange.
Speaker 2: Is explosive because of the speed right, it.
Speaker 3: Will physically pit the optics, it'll shred the ultra thin sale,
Speaker 3: and it will completely fry the microscopic circuitry.
Speaker 2: So we are effectively firing a cosmic shotgun blast and
Speaker 2: just hoping a few of the pellets hit the exact
Speaker 2: right spot to take a picture.
Speaker 3: Yes, you essentially have to accept a brutal attrition rate.
Speaker 3: Maybe you launch ten thousand coracles and the dust claims
Speaker 3: half of them. The relativistic impacts simply vaporize them en route.
Speaker 2: That sounds disastrous.
Speaker 3: Actually that's the beauty of the swarm architecture. It completely
Speaker 3: inverts traditional mission risks. Oh how so, think about a
Speaker 3: billion dollar monolithic probe. If it hits a dust grain
Speaker 3: and loses its main bus, the mission is entirely dead,
Speaker 3: twenty years of planning gone. But if the swarm loses
Speaker 3: five thousand units, the remaining five thousand just recalibrate the
Speaker 3: in frometry baseline. They just adapt, They absorb the casualties
Speaker 3: and keep flying. Statistical resilience is their armor.
Speaker 2: That makes total sense. So by the time this surviving
Speaker 2: vanguard reaches the Proximus Andry system, the swarm has likely
Speaker 2: drifted into a sprawling cloud roughly one hundred thousand kilometers across.
Speaker 3: A massive diffuse cloud.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that sprawling formation brings us to the climax
Speaker 2: of the mission, which is violently brief. Yeah, because they
Speaker 2: cannot decelerate right. The close approach flyaby approximate b lasts
Speaker 2: less than sixty seconds, less than a minute. You travel
Speaker 2: silently for twenty years dodging microscopic bombs in the void,
Speaker 2: all for a sixty second window. The velocity is sixty
Speaker 2: thousand kilometers every second. The cameras have to run at
Speaker 2: absurd speeds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, The payload specifications demand high dynamic range cameras firing
Speaker 3: up to one million frames per second.
Speaker 2: A million frames a second, because the logic there is
Speaker 2: that at those speeds, a standard exposure time would just
Speaker 2: capture a blurred streak right.
Speaker 3: Now, exactly, You need microsecond exposures just to freeze the terrain,
Speaker 3: which means you need millions of them to successfully map
Speaker 3: the surface as you scream past.
Speaker 2: But the data generation during that minute must be catastrophic,
Speaker 2: like a single probe. Firing a megapixel camera at a
Speaker 2: million frames per second generates terabytes of raw data almost instantly.
Speaker 3: It does multiply that across a swarm of thousands of
Speaker 3: surviving probes, and you have petabytes of deep space imagery
Speaker 3: sitting in their memory banks.
Speaker 2: And here hits the brutal physics of the communication bottleneck.
Speaker 2: You have an antenna the size of a postage stamp,
Speaker 2: backed by a microwatt power source, trying to push data
Speaker 2: through four light years of interference.
Speaker 3: The bandwidth is agonizingly thin.
Speaker 2: Even if the probe survive the flyby and spend the
Speaker 2: next fifty years doing nothing to transmitting, they can only
Speaker 2: physically send a tiny fraction of the data they collected.
Speaker 3: Right. This creates an acute triagen crisis. The probes have
Speaker 3: terabytes of data, but they can only send megabytes. They
Speaker 3: have to aggressively filter, and they have to do it autonomously.
Speaker 2: Because Earth can't help them decide. No.
Speaker 3: Earth is four years away by radio. So this requires
Speaker 3: edge computing driven by a highly specialized on board neural network, and.
Speaker 2: They use what's called a look ahead strategy.
Speaker 3: Right now, Yes, because the swarm is a deep cloud, right,
Speaker 3: it's spread out along the axis of travel. So the
Speaker 3: vanguard probes, the ones at the very front they arrive
Speaker 3: hours or even a day before the main cluster. Okay,
Speaker 3: As they approach, they take preliminary low resolution optical and
Speaker 3: thermal readings of the system. Their onboard AI processes those
Speaker 3: approach vectors. It is specifically trained to ignore the mundane.
Speaker 2: Like vast stretches of empty ocean or barren rock.
Speaker 3: Exactly, it looks for anomalies. The AI is hunting for
Speaker 3: high albedo reflections that might indicate ice caps or specific
Speaker 3: thermal gradients that suggest active cry volcanism. Or maybe it
Speaker 3: spots an unusual shadow profile that might be an uncataloged
Speaker 3: exa moon. Once the vanguard AI flags an anomaly, it
Speaker 3: broadcasts the coordinates backward to the trailing main fleet.
Speaker 2: It effectively acts as a spotter. It's like trying to
Speaker 2: photograph a specific license plate on a highway while you
Speaker 2: are blasting past at mock ten and you only have
Speaker 2: enough memory card space to save three pictures. The AI
Speaker 2: is the passenger screaming look left, take the shot.
Speaker 3: That's a brilliant way to put it. It tells the
Speaker 3: thousands of trailing cameras ignore the northern hemisphere, focus all
Speaker 3: folded optics on this specific coordinate cluster near the terminator line.
Speaker 2: That is so smart.
Speaker 3: And more importantly, once the main fleet executes the flyby
Speaker 3: and fills its memory banks, the AI dictates exactly which
Speaker 3: packets of data represent the highest scientific value. It ruthlessly
Speaker 3: deletes petabytes of dark sky and redundant terrain to ensure
Speaker 3: the exact frames containing a potential coastline or strange atmospheric
Speaker 3: cloud are prioritized for the transmission back to Earth.
Speaker 2: It is localized light speed decision making, So assuming the
Speaker 2: eye performs perfectly, the data is compressed, the phase alignment
Speaker 2: is locked, and the time coherence WARM broadcasts its wall
Speaker 2: of light back home, and then.
Speaker 3: Four point two years later, that highly refined data stream
Speaker 3: washes over our radio observatories here on Earth.
Speaker 2: Okay, so if this wall of light reaches us, what
Speaker 2: are we actually going to see? What secrets will proximate field?
Speaker 2: The primary return is the optical data. Right through the
Speaker 2: synthesized aperture of the swarm, we achieve twenty meters surface
Speaker 2: resolution of proxima.
Speaker 3: B twenty meters, which is.
Speaker 2: That isn't just a pixelated blob of color. At twenty meters,
Speaker 2: you are resolving major geological formations. You are seeing the
Speaker 2: jagged edges of mountain ranges, the distinct boundaries of continent
Speaker 2: sized land masses, and potentially the swirling fourtexes of extreme
Speaker 2: weather systems. Driven by those tidally locked temperature extremes.
Speaker 3: We might even see weather patterns. And because the vanguard
Speaker 3: captures approach and departure angles, we even get thermal mapping
Speaker 3: of the dark side.
Speaker 2: The visual data is visceral just thinking about it, but
Speaker 2: the most profound discoveries will likely come from transmission spectroscopy,
Speaker 2: won't they.
Speaker 3: Yes, almost certainly. As the swarm flies through the system,
Speaker 3: it will position itself so that the light from proximusentry
Speaker 3: passes through the atmosphere of Proxima B before hitting the cameras.
Speaker 2: Right, And we do that now with the games Web
Speaker 2: Space telescope exactly when an exoplanet transits its star. We
Speaker 2: analyze the starlight that silters through the planet's atmospheric rim
Speaker 2: different molecules like water, methane, carbon dioxide. They absorb very
Speaker 2: specific wavelengths of light. By looking at the spectrum that
Speaker 2: makes it to our telescope and seeing which colors are
Speaker 2: quote unquote missing, we can determine exactly what the atmosphere
Speaker 2: is made of.
Speaker 3: But the limitation of web is distance and noise. We
Speaker 3: are looking across light years. The coracles are doing it
Speaker 3: in situ, right there in the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Oh, the clarity must be unbelievable.
Speaker 3: It is. And because they are moving at relativistic speeds,
Speaker 3: the onboard spectrometers must account for massive Doppler shifting.
Speaker 2: Again right, Because they are flying toward.
Speaker 3: The light, the starlight hitting the probe is heavily blue
Speaker 3: shifted as the probe races toward the star, and the
Speaker 3: absorption lines of the atmosphere areviolently skewed by the relative velocity.
Speaker 3: But once the AI corrects for that, the sensitivity of
Speaker 3: the data allows us to hunt for specific complex molecular chains.
Speaker 2: We are hunting for biomarkers exactly. Finding methane is interesting,
Speaker 2: but methane can be geological.
Speaker 3: Right right. Volcanoes make methane.
Speaker 2: But finding methane alongside high concentrations of oxygen is a
Speaker 2: massive red flag because those gases react and deplete each
Speaker 2: other quickly. If they are both present in a stable atmosphere,
Speaker 2: something is actively and continuously replenishing them, and.
Speaker 3: In our experience on Earth. That's something is a global
Speaker 3: biological mechanism life life.
Speaker 2: But the search extends beyond biology to techno signatures too,
Speaker 2: doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Yes, the spectrometers will be tuned to look for molecules
Speaker 3: that do not occur through natural, thermodynamic or geological processes,
Speaker 3: like what complex chlorofluorocarbons, nitrogen dioxide and unnatural concentrations or
Speaker 3: specific isotopic ratios of heavy metals in the atmosphere. Finding
Speaker 3: those would strongly indicate active industrial scale artificial chemistry.
Speaker 2: Finding alien industrial smog on the closest star to Earth.
Speaker 3: It would change everything.
Speaker 2: It would be the most chilling and paradigm shattering discovery
Speaker 2: in human history. But and this is where the mission
Speaker 2: profile gets crazy. There is a secondary method of chemical
Speaker 2: analysis proposed that is far more aggressive. Ah. Yes, the
Speaker 2: impactors the swarm relies on density and near the center
Speaker 2: of the formation. The probes are tightly clustered. Statistically, it
Speaker 2: is a near certainty that several coracles will not execute
Speaker 2: a clean flyby their trajectory will intersect the planet itself.
Speaker 3: They essentially become kinetic impactors kamacaze probes right.
Speaker 2: And a gram of mass might sound insignificant, but kinetic
Speaker 2: energy scales with the square velocity right, so it's sixty
Speaker 2: thousand kilometers per second. The kinetic energy of a single
Speaker 2: gram is roughly equivalent to forty tons of TNT.
Speaker 3: It's a massive explosion.
Speaker 2: If it hits the atmosphere, it doesn't gracefully burn up
Speaker 2: like a shooting star. It undergoes near instantaneous vaporization. It
Speaker 2: creates a highly energetic plasma flash in the upper atmosphere.
Speaker 2: And if the planet has no atmosphere, the probe slams
Speaker 2: into the bedrock, creating a hypervelocity crater and an explosive
Speaker 2: plume of ejected mantle material.
Speaker 3: And the incredible thing is this isn't viewed as a failure.
Speaker 3: It is leveraged as impact spectroscopy.
Speaker 2: Oh, they use the explosion.
Speaker 3: Yes, the trailing members of the swarm, positioned just off
Speaker 3: the impact vector, will train their million frame per second
Speaker 3: cameras directly on the explosive flash.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: By running a spectroscopic analysis on the light emitted from
Speaker 3: that vaporized plasma, they gather an exact elemental breakdown of
Speaker 3: the planetary surface or deep atmospheric layers. That standard transmission
Speaker 3: spectroscopy could never penetrate.
Speaker 2: Well wait, you're glossing over the planetary protection aspect. Like
Speaker 2: astrobiologists are hyper cautious about contaminating Christine environments. We bake
Speaker 2: our Mars rovers and industrial events for weeks just to
Speaker 2: kill terrestrial microbes. Very sure, here we are talking about
Speaker 2: intentionally or accidentally firing a man made object at relativistic
Speaker 2: speeds into a potentially habitable biosphere. Doesn't creating a hypervelocity
Speaker 2: explosion on an alien world raise some ethical questions. We
Speaker 2: are introducing artificial isotopes, heavy metals, and earth manufactured silicon
Speaker 2: directly into an alien ecosystem.
Speaker 3: It's a valid concern, but the planetary protection protocols focus
Speaker 3: primarily on biological contamination. At twenty percent the speed of light,
Speaker 3: the kinetic heat of impact is so absolute that the
Speaker 3: molecular bonds of any terrestrial biological hitchhiker are violently ripped.
Speaker 2: Apart, so nothing could survive the crash.
Speaker 3: The probe is sterilized on a subtomic level upon impact.
Speaker 3: And as for the material itself, you are introducing artificial isotopes, yes,
Speaker 3: but you must weigh that against the natural background mechanics
Speaker 3: of the system. We Proxima B is constantly bombarded by
Speaker 3: high velocity interstellar dust and natural micrometeorites. The addition of
Speaker 3: a gram of carbon, fiber and silicon, while unnatural, is
Speaker 3: a localized kinetic event that is practically indistinguishable from the
Speaker 3: background oars of cosmic bombardment.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the scientific return of knowing the bedrock composition
Speaker 2: of an alien world is deemed worth the localized kinetic
Speaker 2: disruption exactly, and the mission continues even after the impactors
Speaker 2: are vaporized and the main fleet screams pass Proxima B
Speaker 2: because they can't stop. They are still moving at a
Speaker 2: fifth of light speed, heading out into the deeper black
Speaker 2: of the Alphacentury system.
Speaker 3: Yeah, their journey isn't over. Roughly a year after the
Speaker 3: PROXIMY encounter, the surviving swarm will pass by the Alpha
Speaker 3: centaury Ab binary.
Speaker 2: Pair, the two larger stars in that system.
Speaker 3: Right, Alpha centaury A and B are much larger sun
Speaker 3: like stars. Now, the flyby will be distant, roughly ten
Speaker 3: thousand astronomical units away, but the swarm will reorient its folded.
Speaker 2: Optics to look back at them.
Speaker 3: Yes, they will use the vast baseline of their spread
Speaker 3: out formation to conduct deep field interfrometry on the binary stars.
Speaker 3: They'll be searching for planetary bodies in the orbits, mapping
Speaker 3: the stellar winds, and broadcasting that data back to Earth
Speaker 3: until their RADIOI stop batteries finally fail or the interstellar
Speaker 3: medium just degrades their sales completely.
Speaker 2: It is an almost unbelievable architectural vision. We started by
Speaker 2: looking at those untouchable points of light in the night sky,
Speaker 2: and the profound realization here is that the physics to
Speaker 2: touch them it already exists.
Speaker 3: Yes, the Zielkowski equation limits our rockets, but it doesn't
Speaker 3: limit our light.
Speaker 2: Building a gigawatt adaptive optic laser array on Earth and
Speaker 2: microengineering folded optic cameras onto a few grams of graphine.
Speaker 2: It's a monumental engineering mountain to climb, but it requires
Speaker 2: no new physics. It requires no warp drives or a
Speaker 2: theoretical wormhole.
Speaker 3: No, it just demands a total revision of what exploration means.
Speaker 3: The vanguard of humanity won't be heavy steel hulls occupied
Speaker 3: by astronauts. It will be a diffuse, artificially intelligent cloud
Speaker 3: of microscopic mirrors. Riding a silent beam of light, so
Speaker 3: beautifully put, they will absorb casualties. Autonomous networks will make
Speaker 3: split second triosh decisions, and they will synthesize an eye
Speaker 3: larger than our world to stare down the dark of
Speaker 3: a red dwarf star.
Speaker 2: It completely reframes our place in the technological timeline. We
Speaker 2: were the generation that possesses the theoretical capability to look
Speaker 2: back at the stars up close. But I want to
Speaker 2: leave you with a thought that flips this entire architecture
Speaker 2: on its head. We've discussed the colossal engineering required to
Speaker 2: build a gigawatt laser array here on Earth. That beam,
Speaker 2: focused tightly enough to push a swarm of sales across
Speaker 2: four light years would be incredibly.
Speaker 3: Bright, Oh incredible.
Speaker 2: It would punch right through the interstellar medium. If you
Speaker 2: stood on a planet fifty light years away and looked
Speaker 2: in our direction while the beamer was firing, you would
Speaker 2: see a distinct, artificial and blindingly powerful flash of light.
Speaker 3: The laser itself becomes an unmistakable techno signature, visible across
Speaker 3: galactic distances.
Speaker 2: Exactly so, if we can do it and the physics
Speaker 2: are universal, the timeline s as someone else out there
Speaker 2: could have already done it. Astronomers regularly catalog transient luminous events,
Speaker 2: these strange, unexplained, incredibly powerful flashes of light in the
Speaker 2: deep night sky that don't perfectly match the profile of
Speaker 2: supernovas or pulsars.
Speaker 3: That is a fascinating point.
Speaker 2: It really makes you wonder the next time you look
Speaker 2: up at a clear night sky and see a sudden,
Speaker 2: brief flare of light from a distant star system, you
Speaker 2: have to ask, are we watching a natural stellar phenomenon,
Speaker 2: or are we seeing the exhaust beam of another civilization
Speaker 2: firing up their own gigwatt lea's or array and launching
Speaker 2: their own swarm of corgels out into the dark