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 imagine you are standing on a shoreline. But this
Speaker 2: isn't anywhere on Earth. The atmospheric pressure pressing against your
Speaker 2: suit is noticeably heavier, right, It's about fifty percent thicker
Speaker 2: than what you're used to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it would feel a bit like being at the
Speaker 3: bottom of a shallow pool, just from the air pressure alone.
Speaker 2: Right, But at the exact same time, you feel almost weightless,
Speaker 2: And then a breeze brushes past you. It's barely a zephyr.
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe two or three miles per.
Speaker 3: Hour, which is nothing on a beach here on Earth.
Speaker 3: A wind bit light wouldn't even disrupt the surface tension
Speaker 3: of a tiny tide pool. You wouldn't even see.
Speaker 2: A ripple exactly. But as you look out at the
Speaker 2: liquid expanse in front of you, the physics just totally
Speaker 2: break down. You are watching these massive ten foot tall
Speaker 2: swells rolling toward the shore, and because of the gravitational
Speaker 2: mechanics at play, they're crashing in this like haunting, drawn
Speaker 2: out slow motions. Such an incredible visual, it really is,
Speaker 2: And you are standing on the shores of kraken Mare.
Speaker 2: It's the largest liquid body on Titan, which is Saturn's
Speaker 2: largest moon. And we're not just making up a sci
Speaker 2: fi scenario here. This specific visual is actually the mathematical
Speaker 2: key to solving one of the most perplexing planetary mysteries
Speaker 2: in our entire Solar system.
Speaker 3: It really is. It forces a complete recalibration of our
Speaker 3: intuitive understanding of fluid dynamics. I mean, we've had radar
Speaker 3: imagery of Titan from the Cassini mission for years now.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, mapping out all those crazy liquid networks exactly.
Speaker 3: We've mapped these vast, branching river networks that physically carved
Speaker 3: through the icy bedrock and they just empty out into
Speaker 3: these mats of lakes of liquid methane and ethane. But
Speaker 3: here's the thing. Geologically speaking, when you have mature river
Speaker 3: networks feeding into a standing body of liquid, you expect
Speaker 3: to see deltas right like.
Speaker 2: The Mississippi Delta of the Nile. You expect a bunch
Speaker 2: of mud and sand to just pile up exactly.
Speaker 3: You expect to find massive alluvial fans of sediment deposited
Speaker 3: right at the mouths of those rivers. Yeah, but on Titan,
Speaker 3: the deltas are virtually non existent. The rivers just hit
Speaker 3: the coastline and stop. It's a glaring anomaly, and that.
Speaker 2: Anomaly brings us to what we're going to deep dig
Speaker 2: into today. We're looking at a brand new framework developed
Speaker 2: by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specifically in
Speaker 2: their Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Lead author Unashneck and Taylor Puran, they really cracked this open.
Speaker 2: They did. They published this model called Planet Waves in
Speaker 2: the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets. And what's wild is
Speaker 2: they didn't set out to build some like sci fi
Speaker 2: Wina simulator for fun. They built a rigorous mathematical tool
Speaker 2: to solve this exact geological discrepancy on Titan and honestly,
Speaker 2: by extension, any planetary body with liquid.
Speaker 3: Because waves are the engines of coastal erosion. The MIT
Speaker 3: team basically hypothesized that if Titan's coastal environments were volatile enough,
Speaker 3: the wave action would essentially act as a giant planetary sander.
Speaker 3: It would relentlessly obliterate any sediment deposits before delta could
Speaker 3: ever even form.
Speaker 2: Wow, so just wiping the slate clean constantly, exactly.
Speaker 3: But to prove that, they had to understand exactly how
Speaker 3: waves are generated in an environment that shares almost none
Speaker 3: of Earth's baseline.
Speaker 2: Variables, right, because previous attempts to model alien oceans usually
Speaker 2: just stopped at the most obvious variable, which is gravity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, gravity is the simplest calculation, and.
Speaker 2: Titan has roughly one seventh the gravitational pull of Earth.
Speaker 2: So less gravity means less downward force on the liquid,
Speaker 2: which means the liquid is easy to lift. But when
Speaker 2: I was looking at this, that single variable analysis completely
Speaker 2: falls apart when you actually look at momentum transfer. Right.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely yeah. If gravity was the only variable that mattered,
Speaker 3: a high pressure atmosphere moving across a low gravity liquid
Speaker 3: should theoretically just shear the surface right off.
Speaker 2: It would atomize it, like, just turn the whole lake
Speaker 2: into a miss.
Speaker 3: Right, So the model had to account for the liquid's
Speaker 3: actual composition, and that is.
Speaker 2: The huge critical advancement of the Planet Waves model. It
Speaker 2: isolates and calculates this intricate dance between gravitational acceleration, atmospheric pressure,
Speaker 2: and the specific the reology of the liquid.
Speaker 3: Its density, its kinematic viscosity, and its surface tension.
Speaker 2: Right and Andrew Ashton, a researcher at the Woodshole Oceanographic
Speaker 2: Institution who collaborated on this. He framed the core math
Speaker 2: challenge around predicting what he calls the first puff.
Speaker 3: I love that phrase, the first puff.
Speaker 2: It's so descriptive. You have a completely quiescent, glassy liquid surface.
Speaker 2: The model has to calculate the exact threshold of atmospheric
Speaker 2: kinetic energy required to overcome the liquid's internal cohesive forces
Speaker 2: and generate a capillary wave, just a tiny ripple, because.
Speaker 3: Once that boundary layer is broken, the physics change entirely.
Speaker 2: Tell me about that, because this transition is fascinating.
Speaker 3: Well, once you get that first ripple, you introduce aerodynamic drag.
Speaker 3: The wind starts catching the windward side of that ripple
Speaker 3: and then compounds the energy transfer, so it turns a
Speaker 3: tiny capillary wave into a full scale gravity wave.
Speaker 2: So the surface roughness increases, which basically allows the wind
Speaker 2: to get a grip on the liquid.
Speaker 3: Exactly the wind grips the water. But modeling that transition
Speaker 3: from a perfectly flat plane to a chaotic turbulent swell
Speaker 3: that requires a flawless understanding of energy transfer coefficients. You
Speaker 3: can't just plug in the density of liquid methane and
Speaker 3: hope for the best.
Speaker 2: No, you have to calibrate the math against a known,
Speaker 2: highly erratic system first.
Speaker 3: Right, which is why the MIT team didn't start with Titan.
Speaker 2: Started in our own backyard. They validated the planet waves
Speaker 2: model using twenty years of continuous meteorological and oceanographic data
Speaker 2: from Lake Superior, which.
Speaker 3: Is perfect because geologically speaking, Lake Superior operates as an
Speaker 3: inland ocean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's massive. It has these huge fetch lengths, violent squalls,
Speaker 2: and then prolonged periods of absolute dead calm.
Speaker 3: And the National Data Boyse Center maintains a rays all
Speaker 3: across Lake Superior. They provide high frequency sampling of wave period, amplitude,
Speaker 3: wind sheer, stress, all of.
Speaker 2: It, and having twenty years of that data allows researchers
Speaker 2: to filter out all the statistical noise, right like roague
Speaker 2: currents or localized thermal inversions.
Speaker 3: Exactly atmosphere canomalies, all the weird outliers. They fed the
Speaker 3: Planet Waves model the historical wind velocity and atmosphere of
Speaker 3: pressure for specific days. They locked in Earth's gravity and
Speaker 3: the density of fresh water, and then basically said, okay,
Speaker 3: model predict the wave height and frequency for this civic
Speaker 3: Tuesday in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 2: And it worked flawlessly. The model matched the buoy data perfectly.
Speaker 2: It accurately predicted the exact wind shear required to initiate
Speaker 2: those capillary waves and the subsequent growth into full scale
Speaker 2: gravity waves.
Speaker 3: It's an incredible proof of concept, it really is.
Speaker 2: But this is where the concept of viscosity becomes the
Speaker 2: absolute lynchpin. To kind of visualize this for you listening,
Speaker 2: think about it like this. If I have a wind
Speaker 2: tunnel and I blow a ten knot wind over a
Speaker 2: basin of tap water, I get immediate ripples right instantly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But if I swap that water for something really thick,
Speaker 2: like a bowl of thick honey or heavy syrup, that
Speaker 2: exact same tennot wind does practically nothing right.
Speaker 3: The sheer stress isn't sufficient to overcome the syrup's resistance
Speaker 3: to being deformed exactly.
Speaker 2: The physical effort required is vastly different. The momentum from
Speaker 2: the air mass just kind of slips over the top layer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the kinetic energy dissipates as microscopic heat rather than
Speaker 3: translating into actual wave motion. So by proving that planet
Speaker 3: waves could account for this specific viscosity and density of
Speaker 3: water on Earth using the lake superior to the MIT
Speaker 3: team confirmed their math was rock.
Speaker 2: Solid, solid enough to handle the weird alien chemistry of
Speaker 2: liquid hydrocarbons precisely.
Speaker 3: So we take this perfectly validated model and we point
Speaker 3: it back at kracken Mare on Titan.
Speaker 2: Let's really look at those parameters, because it is wild.
Speaker 2: The liquid is a cryogenic mixture of methane and ethane.
Speaker 2: It is sitting at roughly minus two hundred and ninety
Speaker 2: degrees fahrenheit, so cold, unbelievably cold, and the density of
Speaker 2: liquid methane is about four hundred and twenty two kilograms
Speaker 2: per cubic meter. Compare that to Earth water, which is
Speaker 2: basically a thousand So this Titan liquid is less than
Speaker 2: half as dense as the water we drink.
Speaker 3: And then you have surface tension which is incredibly low
Speaker 3: on Titan. Methane molecules don't have the strong hydrogen bonds
Speaker 3: that water molecules do.
Speaker 2: Right, Water exist together exactly.
Speaker 3: Water is cohesive, but the force holding the surface of
Speaker 3: a methane lake together is incredibly weak.
Speaker 2: Okay, So then you factor in the gravity, he said earlier.
Speaker 2: It's zero point one four gramsificantly lower than Earth. So
Speaker 2: the restoring force, meaning the gravity that's trying to pull
Speaker 2: a wave crust back down to make the surface flat again,
Speaker 2: is minimal.
Speaker 3: But and this is the kicker, you still have the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, just like Earth's, but it's
Speaker 3: much colder and denser. It exerts about one point five
Speaker 3: bar of surface pressure.
Speaker 2: Okay, So this is where I struggle with the visualization,
Speaker 2: and maybe you can help break this down. If the
Speaker 2: liquid is that light, right, and the surface tension is
Speaker 2: weak and the gravity is super low, but you have
Speaker 2: a dense, heavy atmosphere pushing across it, why does it
Speaker 2: form a cohesive ten foot wave? That is the big question, right,
Speaker 2: Like why doesn't the atmospheric drag just rip the top
Speaker 2: layer of the methane off into a fine aerosol mist.
Speaker 2: I mean if I take a high pressure air hose
Speaker 2: and blast a puddle of gasoline, I don't get waves.
Speaker 2: I get a spray of vapor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a totally fair question. It comes down to
Speaker 3: a question of kinetic scale and atmospheric density. You aren't
Speaker 3: hitting the lake with a highly localized, high la velocity
Speaker 3: jet of air like from a hose.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 3: Okay, the low wind speeds on Titan. Remember that two
Speaker 3: to three mile prour breeze we talk about. That means
Speaker 3: the dynamic pressure exerted by the wind is actually quite low,
Speaker 3: even though the atmosphere itself is death.
Speaker 2: So what's spreading the force out exactly?
Speaker 3: The planet? Waves calculation show that the wind transfers its
Speaker 3: momentum across a vast surface area, and it does this
Speaker 3: without ever exceeding the threshold where aerodynamic sheer would rip
Speaker 3: the fluid apart.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, so it's almost gentle.
Speaker 3: It is. In fact, the thick atmosphere actually acts as
Speaker 3: a stabilizing blanket. It presses down uniformly, maintaining the fluid
Speaker 3: phase of the methane, while the wind slowly steadily piles
Speaker 3: that light liquid up into a crest.
Speaker 2: And because there's almost no gravity fighting that upward lift,
Speaker 2: the crest just keeps building and building.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and that lack of gravitational restoring force is what
Speaker 3: dictates the whole kinematics of the wave. Think about Earth.
Speaker 3: On Earth, a ten foot wave crest is incredibly heavy.
Speaker 3: Gravity pulls it down violently. That's what creates the rapid
Speaker 3: crashing turbulence we see when we go surfing.
Speaker 2: Right, that classic crashing sound and foam.
Speaker 3: But on Titan, the mass of that methane crest is
Speaker 3: very low and the gravity pulling it down is very weak,
Speaker 3: so the acceleration of the falling fluid is drastically reduced.
Speaker 3: It literally takes longer for the methane to succumb.
Speaker 2: To gravity, which creates that cinematic suspended slow motion effect
Speaker 2: as it breaks against the shoreline. It's just so mine bending.
Speaker 3: It really is. And returning to the MIT team's original objective,
Speaker 3: this completely solves the mystery of the missing deltas right.
Speaker 2: Because a two mile per hour breeze on Earth does
Speaker 2: absolutely nothing to a shoreline, but a two mile per
Speaker 2: hour breeze on Titan generates a ten foot slow motion
Speaker 2: wall of liquid methane that is carrying a massive amount
Speaker 2: of kinetic energy.
Speaker 3: Exactly. The river networks on Titan are undoubtedly carrying sediment
Speaker 3: down to the coasts. It's likely crushed water, ice and
Speaker 3: hydrocarbon particulates. But the moment those rivers meet the lags,
Speaker 3: they just get they get pulverized. The relentless, easily generated
Speaker 3: wave action just destroys the deposits. The coastal erosion vastly
Speaker 3: outpaces the sediment deposition, so the deltas are being destroyed
Speaker 3: way faster than they can ever form.
Speaker 2: It's just a perfect synthesis of fluid dynamics answering a
Speaker 2: planetary anomaly. It's so satisfying, it really is.
Speaker 3: But Titan represents the system that's in relative equilibrium today.
Speaker 3: The planet waves model becomes even more revealing when we
Speaker 3: apply it chronologically to planetary bodies that have undergone massive
Speaker 3: changes over time.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to a really fascinating part of this
Speaker 2: deep dive Ancient Mars.
Speaker 3: Yes, the Noatian period of Mars.
Speaker 2: Right, because Mars is effectively the ultimate control group for
Speaker 2: atmospheric degradation. If you look at orbital telemetry of Mars today,
Speaker 2: you see this dry, irradiated dead desert, but the topography
Speaker 2: tells a completely different story.
Speaker 3: We have undeniable geomorphological evidence of a hydrological cycle on
Speaker 3: ancient Mars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the most famous example right now, the one
Speaker 2: everyone's is jezuro Crater. NASA's Perseverance rover is literally driving
Speaker 2: around in there right now, precisely because it is an
Speaker 2: ancient paleo lake basin, and unlike Titan, jesuro Crater has
Speaker 2: a magnificent, beautifully preserved delta.
Speaker 3: Which mathematically confirms something huge. It confirms that the wave
Speaker 3: action in jezro Crater billions of years ago was not
Speaker 3: powerful enough to erode the sediment being deposited by the
Speaker 3: inflowing river.
Speaker 2: Right so the water was relatively calm, or at least
Speaker 2: the waves weren't titaned sized monsters.
Speaker 3: Exactly, But the conditions of that wave action were not static.
Speaker 3: They changed dramatically during the no action period, which was
Speaker 3: roughly four billion years ago. Mars possessed a global magnetic field.
Speaker 3: It was generated by an active core, just like.
Speaker 2: Earth's, and that magnetic dynamo protected the atmosphere from the
Speaker 2: solar wind, which meant it could hold on to a
Speaker 2: thick atmosphere, which in turn allowed for liquid water to
Speaker 2: just sit on the surface.
Speaker 3: Right. But then the Martian core cooled, the magnetic dynamo failed,
Speaker 3: and the planet was suddenly exposed to continuous atmosphere expedtering.
Speaker 2: The solar wind just started sand blasting the planet exactly.
Speaker 3: It began stripping the upper atmosphere away molecule by.
Speaker 2: Molecule, and as that atmospheric envelope bled away into space,
Speaker 2: the pressure at the surface dropped. So the MIT team
Speaker 2: took the planet Waves model, locked in the gravity of
Speaker 2: Mars and the composition of liquid water, and they effectively
Speaker 2: ran the model backwards through time.
Speaker 3: Tracking the wave dynamics is the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Thinned out, Yes, and the dynamic pressure of wind is
Speaker 2: governed by a specific equation right where pressure equals one
Speaker 2: half the fluid density times the velocity squared. So if
Speaker 2: the atmosphere density drops, the wind velocity has to increase
Speaker 2: exponentially just to transfer the exact same amount of kinetic
Speaker 2: energy to the water.
Speaker 3: Think about it like, this wind is just moving air.
Speaker 3: It's molecules in motion. The mass of the air on
Speaker 3: Mars physically decreased over time a forty mile per hour
Speaker 3: wind in a thick atmosphere carries billions of tons of
Speaker 3: kinetic energy because of the sheer density of molecules impacting
Speaker 3: the water.
Speaker 2: Right, there's just more physical stuff hitting the water.
Speaker 3: Exactly, But a forty mile per hour wind in a
Speaker 3: really thin atmosphere, it's mostly empty space. It exerts barely
Speaker 3: any physical sheer stress.
Speaker 2: So if you imagine setting up a time lapse camera
Speaker 2: on the shores of Jezero Crater millions of years ago,
Speaker 2: the model basically illustrates a dying ocean. In the early days,
Speaker 2: regular seasonal weather patterns could weep up totally normal surface waves.
Speaker 2: But as the air literally thinned out over tens of
Speaker 2: millions of years, the exact same storms rolling in century after.
Speaker 3: Century, the same wind velocity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the exact same speeds became increasingly impotent. The water
Speaker 2: was still there, the wind was still moving at forty
Speaker 2: miles per hour, but the waves just started getting smaller
Speaker 2: and smaller.
Speaker 3: It would require increasingly extreme massive gales just to make
Speaker 3: a splash, let alone generate the baseline wave heights of
Speaker 3: previous eras.
Speaker 2: Wow, you are literally watching the mechanical transfer of play
Speaker 2: planetary energy just grind to a halt. The geological engine
Speaker 2: that powered coastal erosion on Mars slowly suffocated as the
Speaker 2: atmosphere vanished. By the time the lakes ultimately froze or
Speaker 2: evaporated away, their surfaces were likely completely stagnant, no matter
Speaker 2: how fast the wind was blowing.
Speaker 3: It's a pretty chilling visualization of planetary mortality on it.
Speaker 2: It really is. So we've looked at Earth as the baseline,
Speaker 2: We've looked at Titan as the low gravity alien chemistry extreme,
Speaker 2: and we've looked at Mars as the decaying atmosphere variable.
Speaker 2: But what I love about this research is that they
Speaker 2: didn't stop there.
Speaker 3: Oh No, they pushed it way further.
Speaker 2: To stress test the math to make sure it wasn't
Speaker 2: just biased toward our local Solar system physics. They pushed
Speaker 2: the parameters to the absolute, terrifying extremes by applying planet
Speaker 2: waves to exoplanets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, testing against extreme parameter spaces is vital if you
Speaker 3: want to confirm the integrity of physico model, Yeah, you
Speaker 3: have to try and break it right.
Speaker 2: So they modeled three entirely distinct classes of exoplanets. Let's
Speaker 2: start with LHS one forty B.
Speaker 3: This one has been heavily studied by the James Webb
Speaker 3: Space Telescope. It classifies as a super Earth, and it
Speaker 3: orbits in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star.
Speaker 2: It's a rocky world roughly one point seven times the
Speaker 2: radius of Earth, and its mass suggests it could easily
Speaker 2: host vast oceans of liquid water. But the gravity on
Speaker 2: LHS eleven forty b is.
Speaker 3: Immense, which creates an incredibly extreme environment for that restoring
Speaker 3: force we talked about earlier. When wind sheer attempts to
Speaker 3: deform the surface of the water on this super Earth,
Speaker 3: it is fighting a massive gravitational anchor.
Speaker 2: The gravity is just pulling it down so hard exactly.
Speaker 3: The kinetic energy required to lift a volume of water
Speaker 3: is drastically higher than on Earth. So the planet waves
Speaker 3: calculations indicate that a windstorm that would generate say a
Speaker 3: six foot swell on.
Speaker 2: Earth like a really decent surfing one right.
Speaker 3: That exact same windstorm might only manage a turbulent chop
Speaker 3: of a few inches on this super Earth. The water
Speaker 3: is effectively pinned to the ocean floor by gravity.
Speaker 2: That is wild, and that introduces some really fascinating implications
Speaker 2: for oceanic circulation, doesn't it like thermal distribution on a
Speaker 2: planet like that. If you lack deep water wave propagation,
Speaker 2: the mixing of nutrients and heat might be severely stunted.
Speaker 2: The oceans might just be these heavily stratified, stagnant layers.
Speaker 3: It completely changes how we think about habitability. But then
Speaker 3: they shifted from manipulating gravity to manipulating the fluid itself.
Speaker 3: The team analyzed Kepler sixteen forty nine b.
Speaker 2: Okay, so this one is terrestrial, roughly Earth sized, so
Speaker 2: the gravity is familiar, but astrobiologists theorize it operates as
Speaker 2: an exovenus, which means it likely possesses surface liquids composed
Speaker 2: not of water but of sulfuric acid, and.
Speaker 3: The reality of sulfuric acid is a completely different beast entirely.
Speaker 3: We know it's highly corrosive, obviously, but mechanically speaking, it
Speaker 3: is incredibly dense. It has a density of roughly eighteen
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty kilograms per.
Speaker 2: Cubic meter, which is nearly double that of liquid water.
Speaker 3: Exactly so, even with Earth normal gravity, the sheer mass
Speaker 3: of the fluid requires intense aerodynamic drag just to initiate
Speaker 3: that very first capillary wave.
Speaker 2: You're dealing with extreme fluid inertia. A standard earth breeze
Speaker 2: simply lacks the physical momentum to overcome the density of
Speaker 2: the acid lakes. The wind would just flow right over
Speaker 2: the boundary layer with almost zero energy transfer.
Speaker 3: It requires extreme violent atmospheric velocities to generate any meaningful
Speaker 3: wave action on that planet.
Speaker 2: Okay, but even that pales in comparison to the ultimate
Speaker 2: stress test. They applied the model to fifty five Cankori.
Speaker 3: This is the lava world.
Speaker 2: Yes, the lava world. It's a tidally locked super Earth
Speaker 2: orbiting so close to its host star that the day
Speaker 2: side temperature exceeds four thousand degrees fahrenheit. The planet is
Speaker 2: literally covered in a global ocean of silicate magma liquid rock.
Speaker 3: This pushes the planet waves model to the absolute boundary
Speaker 3: of fluid mechanics because magma doesn't behave like a simple
Speaker 3: Newtonian fluid like water or even methane. How So, depending
Speaker 3: on the silica content and the temperature, magma often acts
Speaker 3: as a Bingham plastic.
Speaker 2: A Bingham plastic what does that mean? In this context?
Speaker 3: It means it has a yield stress, so it actually
Speaker 3: behaves like a solid until a specific threshold of sheer
Speaker 3: stress is applied to it. Only when that threshold is
Speaker 3: met does it actually begin to flow like a liquid.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, So it's fighting the wind not just with weight,
Speaker 2: but with its fundamental state.
Speaker 3: Of matter exactly. And the viscosity is just staggering. The
Speaker 3: internal friction resisting deformation is astronomically high. We are talking
Speaker 3: about a fluid that is incredibly dense under higher than
Speaker 3: Earth gravity, with a viscosity millions of times thicker than water.
Speaker 2: So the output of the MIT model for fifty five
Speaker 2: kankrete is just profound in its darkness. To use an
Speaker 2: analogy here, it's like taking an industrial leaf blower right
Speaker 2: hurricane force wind and pointing it directly at a swimming
Speaker 2: pool filled with wet, heavy, fast drawing cement. You're gonna
Speaker 2: make a lot of noise, but you're barely gonna move
Speaker 2: the surface.
Speaker 3: As the perfect way to visualize it, if you took
Speaker 3: a category five hurricane sustained winds of over one hundred
Speaker 3: fifty miles per hour, which on Earth is capable of
Speaker 3: generating forty foot rogue waves, and you unleash that exact
Speaker 3: same aerodynamic force across the Magna ocean of fifty five kankerteth.
Speaker 2: The result is almost nothing.
Speaker 3: Almost nothing. The model predicts waves of maybe a few
Speaker 3: centimeters in height. The immense kinetic energy of a hurricane
Speaker 3: is utterly neutralized by the rheological resistance of the liquid rock.
Speaker 3: The atmospheric drag is entirely insufficient to overcome the yield
Speaker 3: stress and the viscosity of the magma.
Speaker 2: It's just incredible. It's a mathematical proof that aerodynamic force
Speaker 2: is highly conditional. It's the ultimate demonstration of boundary layer friction.
Speaker 2: The atmospheric molecules are colliding with the Magna surface at
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty miles per hour, but the energy
Speaker 2: just dissipates his heat. The surface remains practically undisturbed.
Speaker 3: Which is exactly why they ran this test. It validates
Speaker 3: that the MIT model isn't just calculating wind speed, it's
Speaker 3: calculating the total mechanical profile of the entire planetary environment.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we've talked about the mind bending physics, We've
Speaker 2: visited lava oceans and acid lakes, but practically speaking, why
Speaker 2: does this level of precision matter right now? Beyond solving
Speaker 2: geological curiosities like Titans missing Delta's, how are scientists actually
Speaker 2: using this knowledge today?
Speaker 3: Well, it is fundamental to the engineering of future exploratory missions,
Speaker 3: right because.
Speaker 2: We are actively planning to send actual hardware to these environments.
Speaker 2: The proposed missions to Titan, for example, they don't just
Speaker 2: involve orbiters taking pictures from space. The goal is to
Speaker 2: deploy landers, specifically autonomous robotic vessels space boats, essentially directly
Speaker 2: into kraken Mare or Legea Maire.
Speaker 3: We are literally conceptualizing extraterrestrial naval engineering.
Speaker 2: Which is just the coolest phrase ever.
Speaker 3: It really is. But if you are designing an aquatic
Speaker 3: probe for an alien ocean, the wave dynamics are the
Speaker 3: absolute most critical parameter for structural integrity. As Engishnek pointed
Speaker 3: out in the research, the probe has to actually survive
Speaker 3: the physical and environment.
Speaker 2: They can't just sink or get batter to pieces, right.
Speaker 3: And if the engineers assumed Titan's lakes behaved exactly like
Speaker 3: Earth's lakes simply because the wind speeds are low, they
Speaker 3: would severely underdesign the kinematic shock absorption of.
Speaker 2: The hull ah because even though the liquid methane is
Speaker 2: less dense than water. A ten foot wave is still
Speaker 2: a ten foot wave, and having that crash into an
Speaker 2: aluminum or titanium hull at minus two hundred ninety degrees
Speaker 2: fahrenheit introduces terrifying mechanical stress.
Speaker 3: Exactly, materials become incredibly brittle at cryogenic temperatures. The cyclical
Speaker 3: loading of those massive slow motion waves repeatedly slamming against
Speaker 3: the probe over and over, that could induce fatigue failure
Speaker 3: very very quickly.
Speaker 2: The boat would literally just crack apart.
Speaker 3: It would. But now because of the Planet Waves model,
Speaker 3: it provides the exact wave height, the frequency, and the
Speaker 3: kinetic energy distribution that the probe will encounter based on
Speaker 3: the local meteorology.
Speaker 2: So the engineers can use those specific parameters to design
Speaker 2: the buoyancy control, figure out the center of mass, and
Speaker 2: reinforce the structural resilience of the vessel. They can actually
Speaker 2: simulate the pitch and roll frequencies to ensure the communication
Speaker 2: antennas can maintain a lock on Earth or on the
Speaker 2: orbital relay despite the high amplitude swells.
Speaker 3: It's incredible foresight. We're using a mathematical equation validated by
Speaker 3: booys bobbing up and down in Lake Superior to dictate
Speaker 3: the exact thickness of a titanium hull that will float
Speaker 3: in a sea of liquid methane a billion miles away.
Speaker 2: It's the sheer audacity of human engineering. It requires a
Speaker 2: flawless grasp of universal physics. It proves that the mechanics
Speaker 2: governing the universe aren't localized just to our planet. The
Speaker 2: Navier Stokes equations that dictate fluid motion apply just as
Speaker 2: rigidly to a lake of sulfuric acid on an exovenus
Speaker 2: as they do to a glass of tap water sitting
Speaker 2: on your kitchen counter. The only thing that changes are
Speaker 2: the inputs, which is really.
Speaker 3: The core takeaway here. It strips away are anthropic bias?
Speaker 2: Say more about that?
Speaker 3: Well, we inherently view planetary mechanics through the lens of
Speaker 3: our own environment. We assume water, we assume one atmosphere
Speaker 3: of pressure. We assume nine point eight meters per second
Speaker 3: squared of gravitational acceleration. That's all we know.
Speaker 2: Firsthand, right, It's our default setting.
Speaker 3: But this research forces us to view Earth not as
Speaker 3: the baseline for reality, but simply as one specific coordinate
Speaker 3: on an infinite spectrum of physical.
Speaker 2: Variables, and when you adjust those coordinates, when you tweak
Speaker 2: the density, or dial down the gravity, or strip away
Speaker 2: the atmosphere, the reality of the environment transforms radically. The
Speaker 2: next time you look at a puddle trembling in the wind,
Speaker 2: or watch waves crash on a beach, realize you are
Speaker 2: watching a miraculous invisible equation balancing Earth's exact gravity, air pressure,
Speaker 2: and water density. Just tweaking one of those numbers turns
Speaker 2: our familiar world into a completely alien landscape.
Speaker 3: It completely changes how you look at the natural world.
Speaker 2: It really does. The interaction between moving gas and standing
Speaker 2: liquid is the primary geological sculptor of coastlines across the cosmos,
Speaker 2: and knowing that the mechanics of erosion operate at completely
Speaker 2: different extreme depending on the rehology of the local fluids
Speaker 2: leaves us with a pretty profound final thought. If the
Speaker 2: slow motion methane waves of Titan can erase vast river
Speaker 2: deltas and the dense, viscous oceans of other worlds remain
Speaker 2: completely undisturbed by hurricane force winds, we really have to
Speaker 2: consider the unimaginable geomorphologies waiting out there in the deep universe.
Speaker 2: What intricate bizarre coastal architectures, cliffs carved from exotic ices,
Speaker 2: or abyssal trenches hollowed out by heavy acidic tides have
Speaker 2: been sculpted over billions of years. They are out there
Speaker 2: right now, operating under a set of physical rules we
Speaker 2: are only just beginning to mathematically comprehend, just waiting to
Speaker 2: be discovered,