Speaker 1: Imagine looking up into the night sky, you know, past
the constellations, past the Milky Way, and just trying to
wrap your head around the idea that what you don't
see is far, far more abundant than what you do.
Speaker 2: It's a chilling thought, isn't it.
Speaker 1: It really is. We are talking about entire worlds, planets,
you know, ranging from smaller than Mars to way bigger
than Jupiter, just hurtling through the vacuum, dark, silent, completely
unbound by any star.
Speaker 2: And that's the real paradox here. The largest population of
planetary mass objects in our galaxy might just be the
one we can't actually see. These gravitational no bands, which
is a term Stragarian as team used, could number in
the millions, or even trillions, or even trillions. Yeah, just
sailing through our galactic neighborhood as we speak.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads, where we take your sources and
unpack the biggest, most mind bending ideas in the universe.
And today we are absolutely diving into the mystery of
these cosmic wanderers. Our listener was curious about this unseen fleet,
you know, how they exist, the danger they pose, and
this shocking potential for them to harbor life.
Speaker 2: So our mission today is to really get into the
hard science behind these nomads, and I think we need
to start with a really clear definition when we say
rogue planet or free floating planet FFP. For sure, what
are we talking about. We're talking about a planetary mass
object that is gravitationally unbound. Simply put, they are planets
floating completely alone in the dark.
Speaker 1: They've either been kicked out of their home system or
maybe they just formed that way exactly.
Speaker 2: And before we go any further, let's just touch on
the sheer scale of this. Oh, because the numbers they're dizzying.
They really are based on microlensing data, which we'll get into.
Strigari and his colleague suggests there could be up to
ten to the power of five, So one hundred thousand
compact objects for every single main sequence star, one hundred.
Speaker 1: Thousand planets for every sun. And these are objects bigger
than Pluto, right.
Speaker 2: Think about that first time, The Milky Way has what
two hundred billion stars. At least you multiply that by
one hundred thousand. The space between the stars isn't empty,
it's intensely populated by trillions of these silent, dark worlds,
a vast unseen fleet. That's the reality we have to
grapple with.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack that. That is an enormous plan. We're
talking about worlds that are essentially pitch black. How, I mean,
how on earth do you even begin to find a
dark object against the black backdrop of space? The challenge
seems almost impossible.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly difficult because there's no traditional light source. Road
planets are invisible to normal telescopes, they don't have a
star to reflect light, and they're too cold and small
to radiate much heat on their own, not like a
star or even a brown dwarf.
Speaker 1: So you need a completely different method.
Speaker 2: A completely non traditional method. Yeah, and thankfully Einstein give
is the tool.
Speaker 1: For it, and that brings us right to gravitational microlensing.
So this is the key, right, it's really the only
liable technique we have right now for finding these things.
Speaker 2: It is it all comes down to a core principle
of general relativity. Mass warps space time. So when a
massive object, in this case our rogue planet, which we
call the lens, passes almost perfectly in line between us
and a distant star, the source star right exactly. The
rogue planet's gravity acts like a temporary magnifying glass.
Speaker 1: So it actually bends the light from that background star,
focuses it and makes it look brighter from our perspective.
Speaker 2: Precisely, we see a temporary brightening, a little anomaly in
the star's light curve. And the beauty of this is
that the duration of that brightening and how bright it
gets that's directly linked to the mass of the unseen
planet the past in front.
Speaker 1: And the event has to be incredibly brief, I'd imagine.
I mean, this thing is just flying by. It's not
in a stable orbit.
Speaker 2: That's the catch. It's super brief, maybe a few hours,
a few days at most. You have to be looking
at the exact right place at the exact right time.
Speaker 1: Which means you need automated systems scan millions of stars
all the time looking for these tiny blips.
Speaker 2: Right, and this high cadence monitoring is what led to
some staggering initial results. Let's go back to that twenty
eleven study from the MOA and OGL collaborations, the one
led by Suomi.
Speaker 1: That was the one that really opened the flood gates,
wasn't it.
Speaker 2: It really was They monitored fifty million stars fifty million,
and they found about four hundred and seventy four microlensing
events in total. But the key was ten of those
were extremely brief and crucially they showed no sign of
a host star anywhere nearby ten events.
Speaker 1: And from those ten lonely events, what did they extrapolate
about the galactic population?
Speaker 2: This is what blew everyone away. Based on just those
ten events, they calculated that statistically there are nearly two
jupiter mass rogue planets for every single star in the Milky.
Speaker 1: Way, two jupiters for every sin.
Speaker 2: Yes, that figure is what first drove this whole narrative
of superabundance. It suggested that maybe the most common type
of planet in the galaxy isn't orbiting a starl ours,
but is just wandering free.
Speaker 1: And it's incredible that the technique is sensitive enough for
not just these huge gas giants, but for smaller rocky
worlds too well.
Speaker 2: The technology keeps getting better, and that brings us to
that amazing discovery in twenty twenty by the ogl E astronomers,
again led by Prisimech Morose, they found the smallest rogue
planet to date.
Speaker 1: How small are we talking.
Speaker 2: The microlensing event was so fast, the light curve was
so brief, they figured the object was likely less massive
than Earth, maybe closer to the mass of Mars.
Speaker 1: A Mars mass object just floating out there in the void.
I mean, there's no other way you would ever find that.
Speaker 2: Ever, absolutely not. And what made that detection so solid
was their follow up work. They could confidently rule out
any star orbiting that little planet within about eight astronomical units.
Speaker 1: So eight times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
That's a pretty big space to check.
Speaker 2: A very big space. So it proves two things that
these low mass free floaters exist and that our current
ground based tech can actually find and characterize them if
the alignment is absolutely perfect.
Speaker 1: Okay, but this is where we have to pump the
brakes a little, because the census isn't quite adding up,
is it. We have some studies like Merritt Roy in
twenty twenty one suggesting billions or even trillions of these things,
which supports that super abundance idea, right, But then you
have other more recent, very precise studies that seem to
be pushing back suggesting the numbers are lower.
Speaker 2: Exactly. This is a fierce debate in the scientific community.
Right now, you have to contrast that high estimate with
a twenty seventeen study, also from a Rose team. They
used six times the statistical power of that original twenty
eleven paper.
Speaker 1: And what did they find.
Speaker 2: They suggested an upper limit of only point two five
jupiter mass free floaters per main sequence star.
Speaker 1: Wait, so we went from two jupiter's per star down
to a quarter of a jupiter per star. That is
a massive discrepancy. What's going on there?
Speaker 2: The problem is really understanding the full spectrum of what
we call planetary mass objects or pmos, and just as importantly,
the limitations of our detection methods.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's clarify that spectrum. Where do you draw
the lines between a star, a brown dwarf, and a planet.
Speaker 2: It's all about how they generate energy. Stars fuse hydrogen.
Brown dwarfs are sort of failed stars. They're massive enough
between thirteen and eighty jupiter masses to fuse deterium but
not hydrogen.
Speaker 1: And below that thirteen jupiter mass threshold you're in planetary territory.
Speaker 2: Correct. Everything under that is in the planetary mass range.
Gas giants, rocky planets, all the way down to commets,
and that's the population of raid planets we're trying to count.
Speaker 1: So our current detection methods must have a bias, a
huge bias.
Speaker 2: As some have pointed out, current microlensing surveys are inherently
biased towards the higher end of that mass range, specifically
the four to thirteen Jupiter mass objects.
Speaker 1: Why is that Because.
Speaker 2: A more massive object creates a more pronounced and a
longer lasting lensing event. It's just easier to spot. So
if your survey is optimized to find these heavier objects
and it turns out those heavier objects are actually pretty rare, then.
Speaker 1: Your overall population cout is going to come out looking
really low exactly.
Speaker 2: But if, as some of the ejection models suggest, the
vast majority of these rogue planets are actually small rocky
Mars or Earth mass objects.
Speaker 1: Then we're just missing them. Their lensing events are too brief,
too faint for our current ground based surveys to catch systematically.
Speaker 2: That's the heart of the debate. The people who model
the mass function all the way down to Pluto mass objects,
they get these huge numbers, the trillions, because they assume
it's a continuous distribution like grains of sand. The people
who rely only on the current detection stats for the
big guys, they get the smaller numbers.
Speaker 1: The truth is probably somewhere in between, almost certainly.
Speaker 2: But until we can actually detect those small ones reliably,
we're kind of stuck guessing.
Speaker 1: So we need a next generation tool, something specifically built
to overcome this bias and just count them accurately.
Speaker 2: And that is where the real excitement is right now.
The solution is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope RST.
It's scheduled for launch by May twenty twenty seven, and
it is an absolute game changer.
Speaker 1: How does Roman get around the problems that the ground
based telescopes have two huge advantages.
Speaker 2: First, it's in space, no atmosphere to blur the images,
so you get much sharper, more stable pictures, which is
critical for measuring these tiny distortions. And the second it's instruments.
They are designed to serve a massive, wide field of
view with very high cadence. And it's going to be
staring at the galactic bulge.
Speaker 1: Why the bulge just because it's dense with stars.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. The bulge is the densest part of
the Milky Way. It gives you millions and millions of
potential background source stars. You need that huge population to
maximize your chances of a rogue planet just happening to
pass in front of one.
Speaker 1: So what's the payoff? What kind of precision are we
hoping for?
Speaker 2: Roman is expected to give us a rogue planet count
that is at least ten times more precise than what
we have now. Wow, this will let us finally pin
down the mass function. We won't have to guess if
the galaxy is dominated by Jupiter sized rogues or Earth
sized rogues. We'll have hard data. It will for the
first time tell us if we live in a galaxy
with tens of billions of these things or truly trillions.
Speaker 1: So once Roman launches, will finally have a real answer. Okay,
so if we know they're out there, the next obvious
question is where did they come from. They're free floating,
so they either had to be borne that way or
they were violently exiled from home.
Speaker 2: And that violence is really the key. The main theory,
the most accepted one, is the ejected planet model. Most
of these free floaters probably formed in a totally normal way,
in a protoplanetary disc around a star, just like Earth.
Speaker 1: But then something went horribly wrong.
Speaker 2: Something went very wrong. The early years of a solar
system are incredibly chaotic and turbulent. They were thrown out
by gravitational interactions.
Speaker 1: It's hard to really picture that. You know, our system
seems so neat and orderly now, but you're saying it
started out is a complete mess.
Speaker 2: The total mess. The models show dozens, maybe hundreds, of
planetary embryos in clumps of gas, all circling the young star.
It's a gravitational binball game. You get eccentric orbits, collisions,
and inevitably ejections, and it.
Speaker 1: Seems like the smaller planets are the ones that are
most likely to get the boot. The simulations suggest for
stars like our Sun, the median mass of an injected
planet is around point eight.
Speaker 2: Earth masses, which is a really significant number because that
lines up perfectly with why they're so hard to detect.
The smaller the planet, the less tightly it's bound to
its stars gravity.
Speaker 1: So it's easier to kick out, much easier.
Speaker 2: All it takes is a close encounter with a Jupiter
or a Saturn, and that little rocky world achieves escape
velocity and gets flung out into interstellar space. The process
itself favors making small, rocky rogue planet, but.
Speaker 1: That can't be the whole story. That model doesn't really
explain the supermassive ones, does it, The ones that are
you know, ten twelve times of the mass of Jupiter right.
Speaker 2: For those, you need a different origin story. And that's
this fascinating theory of direct collapse that some of these
big planetary mass objects formed all by themselves.
Speaker 1: How does that even work?
Speaker 2: They form directly from the collapse of a cold, dense
molecular cloud. It's the same way as star or a
brown dwarf forms, but they just fail. They bypass the
whole protoplanetary disks.
Speaker 1: Stage entirely, so they just condense out of the primordial
gas and dust, but they don't quite gather enough mass
to ignite fusion. They're basically failed stars.
Speaker 2: That's one way to think of it. It's often called
the halted decretion scenario. You have a stellar embryo forming
in a crowded star nursery, but before it can pack
on enough weight to start burning deuterium, it has a close,
violent encounter with a bigger newborn star nearby and gets ejected.
Speaker 1: So it gets kicked out of the nursery before it
can grow up into.
Speaker 2: A star, and it's doomed to wander the galaxy forever
as a planetary mass object. That's how you can get
a twelve jupiter mass object that has never ever had
a parent star.
Speaker 1: To really get them, machare anx of that ejection. We
have to talk about the engine behind all this chaos,
which is orbital resonance. It's how a tiny, repeated push
can just completely destroy a stable orbit.
Speaker 2: Resonance is such a powerful concept in physics. It's when
some external push lines up perfectly with an object's natural rhythm.
That matching just amplifies the effect way beyond what you'd expect.
Speaker 1: I love the guitar analogy that Paul Sutter uses. You
pluck a string and that tiny bit of energy gets
magnified because the whole wooden body of the guitar is
designed to resonate at those frequencies. A small force creates
a huge.
Speaker 2: Sound, and a planet's orbit is its natural rhythm. If
another big planet's gravity gives it a little nudge in
sync over and over again, then nudge adds up.
Speaker 1: So let's use that dramatic scenarios. Sutter describes a hypothetical
two to one resonance between Earth and Jupiter. Earth goes
around twice for every one Jupiter orbit.
Speaker 2: In that situation, every two years, Earth and Jupiter line
up in the same part of space, and every two
years Jupiter gives Earth a tiny, tiny gravitational boost. But
because it happens regularly, like clockwork.
Speaker 1: It reinforces itself. The effect compounds over.
Speaker 2: Time, Yes, over hundreds of thousands of years. That tiny
cumulative boost adds a little bit more energy to Earth's orbit,
a tiny gain in speed with every pass, and eventually,
eventually those tiny gains would push Earth to a velocity
greater than the Sun's escape velocity, which is about forty
two kilometers per second from our position. Once you cross
that line, you're gone ejected from the Solar System for good.
Speaker 1: It's just astonishing to think that our entire system stability
hangs on the fact that our big planets aren't in
these clean, simple resonances right now.
Speaker 2: The difference between a stable home and a mass ejection
event can be just a tiny fraction of a percent.
In an orbital period, the early Solar System was cleared
out by this exact mechanism.
Speaker 1: And that process stocked the galaxy with all these wanderers,
which brings us to cosmic interlopers, the idea that interstellar
space is just full of graffic and that's some of
it is constantly passing through our own Solar system, and.
Speaker 2: This was all just theory until quite recently. The idea
that our Solar system was this isolated island was completely
shattered in twenty seventeen with a discovery of Umuomo.
Speaker 1: The first confirmed interstellar object.
Speaker 2: The first one, and its trajectory was the smoking Gun.
It followed a hyperbolic orbit.
Speaker 1: Which means it came in with too much speed to
get captured right. It swung around the Sun and was
on its way out, never to return.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it was not gravitationally bound to our Sun at all,
and that confirmed that, yes, objects from other star systems
are regular visitors. And we've seen a whole variety since then.
Asteroids comments.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that weird interstellar comet three I eight
lists the one that passed near Mars orbit in twenty
twenty five. It had some really strange behavior.
Speaker 2: Three I at lists was a fascinating look at alien chemistry. Normally,
a comet gets near the Sun and the solar wind
pushes the dust and gas away from the Sun, forming
a tail.
Speaker 1: But this one had a tail that was pointing towards.
Speaker 2: The Sun, a sun facing tail, which just seemed to
defy physics.
Speaker 1: So what was the explanation.
Speaker 2: The thinking is that the dust particles coming off of
it were just really big and heavy, hundreds of microns across,
think more like coarse sand than fine powder. They were
just too heavy for the Sun's radiation pressure to effectively
blow them away.
Speaker 1: So the momentum of the particles coming off the comet
was stronger than the push from the sunlight exactly.
Speaker 2: And what that tells us is that the protoplanetary disk
where three Ilists was born must have been very different
from ours. It must have been rich in whatever material
allows these big, heavy dust grains to form. It's a
tiny chemical window into another star system light years away.
Speaker 1: And we're not just watching these things fly by. Earth
itself is kind of a passive collector for the smaller bits.
The twenty fourteen Manis Island meteor is a perfect case study.
Speaker 2: That was the incredible work from the Saraje and Load paper.
They figured out that meteor had to be intertellar because
of its insane velocity. It was traveling at over forty
three kilometers per second before it even entered our Solar system.
Speaker 1: That speed, that trajectory, there's no other explanation. It had
to come from outside.
Speaker 2: It did, and it just highlights this idea that Earth's
atmosphere is like a giant fishing net. We are constantly
sampling tiny bits of interstellar debris. We might literally have
fragments of an exoplanet sitting at the bottom of the
Pacific Ocean right now.
Speaker 1: Which is an amazing scientific opportunity, but it also raises
the stakes for potential hazards. We have to talk about
the rare but pretty chilling scenario of a major disruption.
Speaker 2: The danger from a wandering star over geologic time is real.
A close pass from a star wandering in from the
depths of the galaxy could seriously disrupt the delicate balance
of our system.
Speaker 1: And the worst case scenario, however unlikely, is a gravitational
tug strong enough to just fling Earth out of the
Solar System entirely.
Speaker 2: It's not impossible, but even a much more distant pass
can cause problems. It stirs up the Oort cloud.
Speaker 1: Which is our Solar System's huge, vast outermost shell of
icy bodies.
Speaker 2: Right of them, and these passing stars act like a
giant gravitational spoons. During that pod, they tweak the orbits
of all those icy bodies, and some of them get
sent tumbling towards the inner Solar System.
Speaker 1: And there's a huge timelag on that isn't.
Speaker 2: There a massive one. A star could pass by today,
but it might take two million years for the wave
of comets it disturbed to actually reach us. So a
stellar passage that happened when our early ancestors were walking
the Earth could be causing a small increase in impacts today.
Speaker 1: But it's not all destructive. The Sun can also be
a collector. This idea from the Belbruno study that our
Sun can actually capture rogue planets that seems to defy
celestial mechanics.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly hard to do. To get captured, an object
needs to lose a lot of speed. Normally, that would
require a perfect slingshot maneuver around a planet like Jupiter
on its very first.
Speaker 1: Pass, which seems wildly improbable.
Speaker 2: It is, but Belbruno's models suggest it's possible over millions
of years, even without that perfect slingshot.
Speaker 1: How does that work?
Speaker 2: Factored in the galactic tide, the subtle but constant gravitational
pull of the entire Milky Way on our Solar System
over millions of years, that tide acts like a tiny
gentle break on an incoming robe planet.
Speaker 1: The galaxy itself slows it down just enough, just.
Speaker 2: Enough for the Sun's gravity to grappled. These captures aren't quick.
The planet would go into a long, unstable orbit and
then slowly spiral in over millions of years until it's
permanently trapped.
Speaker 1: So we could have captured rogue planets in our Solar
System right now, hiding out in the far reaches.
Speaker 2: We could, and we might even be able to find
them by looking for their tiny gravitational tugs in the
orbits of Neptune or Uranus. We might find proof that
our Sun is actively hoarding worlds from other star systems.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pivot from mechanics to astrobiology, because this is
where it gets really wild. The idea that life could
exist on a world with no Sun It just completely
upends our definition of a habitable zone.
Speaker 2: It forces you to rethink the entire energy chain of
an ecosystem. Here on Earth, almost everything traces back to
the Sun. On a rogue planet, the entire system has
to be one hundred percent powered from the inside, no
photons involved at all.
Speaker 1: So what's the power source? What keeps these worlds warm
enough for liquid water if there's no star?
Speaker 2: Two main things. First, you have primordial heat, just the
leftover heat from when the planet first formed. But more
importantly for the long haul, you have radiogenic.
Speaker 1: Heat from the decay of radioactive elements in the core.
Speaker 2: Exactly things like uranium, thorium, potassium. Their decay generates a
steady stream of heat from the inside out.
Speaker 1: And how long can that last?
Speaker 2: For billions of years, a rocky Earth sized planet could
have a warm core and mantle for GigE years, which
is plenty of time for simple life to potentially evolve.
Speaker 1: And as a third option, right if the planet got
ejected with a moon.
Speaker 2: Yes, tidal forces. If a rogue planet has a moon
in a slightly eccentric orbit, the constant gravitational stretching and
squeezing of the moon generates a tremendous amount of internal
friction and heat the Io effect.
Speaker 1: Jupiter's gravity makes its moon io the most volcanically active
body in our Solar System.
Speaker 2: The exact same principle, a rogue planet Moon system could
create a geologically active environment with subsurface water even in
the absolute cold of deep space.
Speaker 1: All of which supports this water world's hypothesis, the idea
of a vast dark subsurface biosphere.
Speaker 2: The hypothesis is that these Earth sized rogue planets can
maintain liquid oceans for billions of years, but they're hidden
beneath a thick crust of ice. The ice acts as
a perfect insulator.
Speaker 1: So the surface is hundreds of degrees below zero, frozen
solid from miles, but deep underneath you have a warm,
liquid pressurized ocean, a perfect habitat for extremophiles.
Speaker 2: It could be. And what's really interesting is how an
atmosphere could help. If a rogue planet held onto a thick,
heavy atmosphere, maybe helium from its berth cloud, that atmosphere
would act like a blanket.
Speaker 1: Trapping the internal heat that's trying to escape.
Speaker 2: Right. It would act as a powerful dark greenhouse gas
keeping that subsurface ocean liquid for even longer. It just
completely expands the possibilities for where life could exist.
Speaker 1: And the ultimate biological implication here is pans bumia, the
idea of rogue planets as cosmic seed pods spreading life
across the galaxy.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful idea. If these worlds can sustain life
for billions of years, they become transport vehicles. Imagine a
rogue planet carrying dormant microbes in its icy shell, passes
very close to a nice, warm, habitable planet in another system.
Speaker 1: The gravity of that system could rip the rogue planet apart.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it could tear off the outer layers, scattering debris,
ice and rock seeded with life into the new system.
Some of that debris could then land on the habitable.
Speaker 1: World, seeding it with life from another part of the galaxy.
Speaker 2: It suggests that life on different worlds might not be
entirely unique. We might all share sort of much traveled
chemical history. It's an incredible thought.
Speaker 1: The idea of them as transport vehicles naturally leads to
this final section interstellar travel. Could these rogue planets be
a pathway for US, US or some other civilization to
migrate between the stars.
Speaker 2: This is that fundamental shift in perspective. They stop being
hazards and they become infrastructure. They're stepping stones.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to this concept of island hopping, like
how Polynesian cultures spread across the Pacific, not in one
giant leap, but from island to island.
Speaker 2: The thinking is that interstellar migration might not be some
huge government funded project to build a giant starship. It
might be a much slower, more organic economic expansion that
takes millennia, and it starts in our own ort cloud.
Speaker 1: So for a future civilization living in space, the trillions
of icy objects in the ork cloud are just resources.
Speaker 2: Raw materials ice for water and fuel, rock for building materials.
You could haul them out build habitats inside. A civilization
starts by colonizing the inner org cloud. When that gets crowded,
the next generation just moves out to the next object.
Speaker 1: So it's a slow, steady expansion driven by population growth
and resource needs, until eventually you get to the edge
of our ork cloud where it starts to blur with
the ork cloud of the next star over like Alpha centaury.
Speaker 2: And that's the key insight. The energy cost to hop
from an object barely bound to our Sun to one
barely bound to Alpha Centauri is incredibly low. You've eliminated
the giant political and technical barrier of a dedicated interstellar mission.
It's just a settlement.
Speaker 1: And this feeds right into that cosmic hitchhiker's idea, which.
Speaker 2: Takes it a step further, and advanced civilization might not
just hop between little icy bodies. They might actively seek
out and colonize an entire free floating planet to use
as a transport vehicle.
Speaker 1: But why ride a planet instead of building a ship?
What's the real advantage scale and time?
Speaker 2: A rogue planet is already a massive radiation shielded habitat.
It has its own internal geothermal energy, it has geological stability.
You don't have to build a generation ship from scratch.
You just move into a pre built one that's the
size of Earth.
Speaker 1: So you're hitching a ride on a world ship that's
already migrating through the galaxy on its own natural course.
Speaker 2: It bypasses so many of the engineering challenges. Plus you
have a planet's worth of resources at your disposal.
Speaker 1: But there is a massive energy problem here. Once you're
out past the Kuiper Belt, solar power is useless. You
need a massive, reliable power source.
Speaker 2: This is the critical debate. The resources in the Ord
cloud are a problem. These icy bodies are undifferentiated. They're
just a mix of ice and dust. They are not
like Earth, where geological processes have concentrated heavy elements like
uranium into minable ores.
Speaker 1: So you can't just go out there and mine for
uranium to fuel fission reactors.
Speaker 2: Not effectively. The calculation by joy On this is just stark.
It really puts the problem into perspective.
Speaker 1: Lay it out for us.
Speaker 2: He calculated that if you took one ton of typical
Oort cloud material, the amount of fission energy you could
get from the uranium scattered within it would be enough
to melt just ten kilograms of ice a.
Speaker 1: Ton of rock to heat ten liters of water.
Speaker 2: It's an unbelievably low energy yield. You cannot run an
industrial civilization on that.
Speaker 1: So what's the conclusion. Fission is a dead end for
an outer system civilization.
Speaker 2: It is the only way to support a thriving, expanding
civilization out there. The only way to make this interstellar
island hopping work is one technology.
Speaker 1: It has to be fusion.
Speaker 2: It has to be fusion, fusion, and more fusion. The
raw materials deuterium from the ice are abundant, but you
absolutely must have mastered contained fusion power. Without it, the
outer Solar System is and always will be a resource desert.
Speaker 1: So we've woven together these incredible threads, the trillions of
unseen worlds, the tech we're building to finally see them,
the sheer violence of their creation, and this profound potential
for them to harbor life or even become our own
dark road to the stars.
Speaker 2: And it's just so important to remember that these objects,
the Wanderers, they used to be pure science fiction. Now
they're hard science. They might be the single largest population
of planetary mass objects in the whole galaxy.
Speaker 1: And the image that sticks with me is the one
we started with that right now tonight, there are worlds
than Pluto born in star systems light years away, with
our own unique chemistry, passing silently through the outer edges
of our own Solar system, and we would never even
know they were there. The universe is just so much
more crowded, so much more chaotic than our eyes can see.
Our Solar System isn't an island, it's an active participant
in the traffic of the galaxy.
Speaker 2: So we want to leave you with a question to
think about. If you had the choice to live on
a planet like ours, bound to the warmth and light
of the Sun, or to take up residence on a slow,
self contained worldship perpetually migrating through the galaxy's darkness, sustained
only by its own internal power, which would you choose?
And why let us know what you think.