The Sahara Mystery: Unearthing the Origins of a Remarkable Meteorite | #362

Hi there, Andrew Dunkley here, and thanks for joining us on another edition of Space Nuts. Lots to come today, we'll be talking about a meteorite that was discovered, not recently, they've known about it for a few years, but they've made a discovery in regard to this one. It was found in the Sahara Desert, so we'll tell you all about that. It's got quite a fascinating backstory, and we talked about it recently a courtesy of an audience question that of whether or not dark dark matter stars might exist or now the James wed Space Telescope is suggesting that there is one out there, maybe more than one, but we'll be talking about that potentially three and we've got audience questions, a couple of left field questions from Scott, Mikey and Graham will tackle all of that today on this edition of Space Nuts nine Agnia think Space Nuts three two Space Nuts and actually bought it deals good and joining us to go on and on and on and on and on about all of that is a professor we know and love so well, Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer of Bar Hello, Fred, nice to talk to you again, Andrew, And yeah, I think we both can go on and we really respect if things. I've been doing it for a living for forty years. That's going on and on and on about little stuff. Yeah, um now we yeh by the way, yeah all well in your world, yes, thank you. Yes. We were down last week at Perula in West sorry in South Australia, which is right at the northern end of the Flinders Rangers, and we were there because they have just been declared a Dark Sky Sanctuary. A bit of a celebration that we were involved with, but it was very nice to visit. It's an extraordinary place geologically. It was widely prospected after the Second World War for uranium. There is uranium that there is indeed a uranium mind there, but there's but it's a natural environment that is highly unspoiled, apart from the road lead to the uranium prospecting sites which let you actually access some of the most extraordinary scene. Really, I think he's in Australia. Remarkable. It's really good that you and money can bring darkness to the world. So tell mission, that's right. Mardi styles herself because she is the princess of darkness. She styles herself a lady of the night. Well that might seem mean something else. Yeah, yeah, well but she's not that. She says that I'm by a lady of the night. She says it always goes down well into it. Yeah, I can imagine. Oh that's terrific. So that'll be making a lot of astronomers very happy. Yeah. All right, Well let's get on to our first topic. And this is as you've mentioned, well, as we mentioned at the start, about a meteorite. This first story, this is a meteorite that they found in the Sahara Desert well a little while back, but they've been able to study it. And what's fascinating fascinating about it is that it's an Earth rock. So how can it be a meteorite? Well, that therein lies the question, Fred, that looks like it is the case, and it's it's a first of its kind. Fine, by the sound of it, it's certainly the first that has had this idea that it might have come from Earth tanked onto it. And it's still I suspect it's still scientifically a debatable issue still whether it did come from Earth, but the evidence seems to point that way. So what we're talking about is a meteorite. All the meteorites have names. This one is called Northwest one three one eight eight, very glamorous name, and it's I think actually it might be in a private collection. I'm not sure, but it's been analyzed by geologists as you would because people, you know, people who think they've got a meteorite usually want to go to a geologist to check whether it really is a meteorite. Yeah, because some of them are just stones, you know, they're not people say, oh, I've got a meteorite here, but yeah, well it's just a rock. It's very hard actually to identify them. Anyway. This one has been identified. It meets all the all the characteristics of of the meteorite. It has been clearly been heated on its outer surface, assumably by its passage through the atmosphere. But it's m geophysicists in the French National Center for Scientific Research they are basically investigating this. And what has led to the idea that it might be the first known boomerang meteorite is it's it's composition is very very closely matching the composition of rocks in the Earth, and it's it's what we call isotopes, the sort of exact atomic structure of the atoms, that the isotope, that the isotopes match what we find on Earth, and there is there is some really interesting what you might call nwanswers to this, because yes, those isotopes are matching, but some of them are their ratios. The isotope ratios have changed a little bit, and so what the the citists are suggesting is that that change has been due to the fact that this rock has been in orbit around the Earth and has been bombarded by cosmic rays. Because cosmic rays are subatomic particles. They they're they're in space, hence the name. We actually don't know the origin of some cosmic rays. A lot of them probably come from star explosions, but there's a sort of high enage background that has still I think, as people are scratching their heads, some of them are from Russia. I'm very aware of a cosmonaut named Ray. Should save that for the dad jokes that we do on Tiktoey. Maybe I should. What do you call a Russia about? Yeah? Never mites. Anyway, there's a suggestion that the isotope ratios have changed because of their bombardment by cosmic rays and the amount of change leads these scientists to believe that they've been bombarded by cosmic rays for at least two thousand a year, two thousand years, and possibly more like ten thousand years. And so what that is suggesting that this rock somehow came from Earth ten thousand years ago. Now, the candidates for an event on the Earth surface that would send a rock into orbit, which would orbit for a while and then eventually come come back again. The candidates are, first of all, the volcanic iroction, and we've had a very big one quite recently, the Hunger Tong Hunger Pie volcano in Tonga. Was it two years ago? Now it's a while. Yeah, I was getting on. Yeah, that actually hurled rocks, but not into orbit. Apparently the debris that was emitted by that blast peaked at around fifty eight kilometers thirty six miles, and that's not high enough to get into orbit. You'd need to propel it higher and actually give it a sort of horizontal velocity of some sort of swell for it to stain in orbit. Yeah, so these rocks went high into the atmosphere, but weren't high enough to actually become an Earth an earth bound or an Earth rock that is suddenly in orbit. So the other catastrophic or high energy event that they postulate, and they think this is the likely one, is an asteroid impact. Excuse me, because an asteroid impact generates huge amounts of energy and can send rocks very high. In fact, it can put rocks into orbit. And we think that's why here on Earth we see meteorites from the planet Mars. There are some meteorites which are called Martian meteorites, which we know have come from Mars, and we know that because of the traces of gas that entrapped in them, which match Mars's atmosphere exactly. So I think that about three hundred Martian meteorites known now they classified into different different types. So it looks as though what we might have is a scenario where something hits the Earth ten thousand years ago or thereabouts, maybe a little bit before that propels debris into space, some of it stays in orbits that that orbit gradually decays as orbits do, and eventually this bit of rock comes back through the other atmosphere, gets heated again by its passes through the atmosphere, and turns up as a meteorite in Northwest Africa, in fact in the Sahara Sara Desert where it was found. So yeah, a really interesting story. I suspect that there still it's still you know, a likely candidate for debate this tale. But the the person, you know, the person who leading this study is clearly quite convinced that that's where it came from. And how long ago are we thinking? Roughly ten thousand years so um, it's it's it's you know, we don't actually know where the impact that that the crater was. I think one of the one of the things that this team in France have looked at is to try and find an impact crater that might actually fit the bill for that. But excuse me, these are these are you know, the ten thousand years ago is quite young and if it would that they reckon, it would form a crater probably something like you know, twenty kilometers wide or something of that sort. Yeah, we have to be a massive impact to cause that amount of volofty it would, that's right exactly. And you know, most most of the craters that fit the bill on that millions of years old rather than thousands. So there is a there is a problem here, I think. Yeah, it sounds like it. Yeah, but it's still a really interesting idea, and it's still you know, even if even if it doesn't come from Earth, it's remarkable that it's it's It's structure and composition match Earth's rocks very well. Either way, it's a fascinating story. And I believe if it is, though, an Earth's rock that's been added into space and then landed back on the Sahara Desert, that that's a first. I mean, it's probably not the first, but it's the first one we've found. Yeah, haven't they also found Earth rocks on the Moon? Did we cover that? They found moon rocks on Earth? Moon rocks? I found something on the Moon. They might that. Not sure about that? Not sure about that that there's certainly moon rocks on Earth, like like the ones we get from Mars. They're created by impact crass or impact events. Um yeah, now hang on there. It is nine seventy one the Apollo astronauts found a chunk of Earth that they dug up on the Moon. Anyway, all right, I saw I'd heard about that somewhere. That's that's well done. Yeah, thank you, that's a really interesting one. Maybe who knows, maybe you've made a link there, then these two things might come from the same event, that's it. Oh yeah, yeah, that could be interesting. Yeah, yes, probably follow up on that because I didn't. Yeah, I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten. Yeah wow, okay, So which apollo did I say it was? Well, it's just nute seventy one, it's probably it would be fifteen. Yeah, now that the fifty sixteen sixteen was sort of ten, that's to anyway, just mother. But now it's definitely something worth pursuing. And I'm sure they're doing more and more examination of this particular meter right to see if they can figure it all out. But fascinating story the Boomerang asteroid, and yeah, if you want to read up on it, it's on the space dot com website. Fred. We've got a live studio audience, Brookie viewing us today through various outlets Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble. One of them is one of our regular listeners, Misty West, who's sent us a terrible dad joke these Misty, I thought we were bad. This is plain terrible. I thought about putting it observatory in my house, but the cost was astronomical. Oh, with that, we'll take a breath. You're listening to the space and Nuts whether Andrew Duntley and Professor Fred Watson space puts now once again. The James Webb Space Telescope is in the news. It's been sort of looking around going oh, what's that and that's how it sounds, by the way, and it has found something that we did discuss recently thanks to an audience question about whether or not there could be dark matter stars, and we kind of debated it and thought, well, you know, how could it be a star if it's dark matter. Well, the James Webb Space Telescope might have discovered not one, not two, but three of these weird things. Yes, that's right, And we'd have to preface this by noticing that this is entirely hypothetical. Yes, but the idea is that if you have particularly this might occur in the early universe where the density of dark matter it's probably higher than it is now. If you if you have a star, that he's formed by the collapse of a cloud of gas and dark matter, And that's how we know that stars are formed that way. Normally, it's the dark matter that that sort of concentrates the gas itself. That's how galaxies start. So you've got this web of dark matter that there's left over from the Big Bang itself that has gravitational pool which attracts the hydrogen. Hydrogen comes together, clumps together. I'm doing all this with my hands. Yeah, I can say that little listeners clumps together. People with very good hearing would be able to hear you doing that. Yeah, they would have to have very good hearing indeed. Anyways, So and that clumps together and eventually collapses into a cloud, a highly dense cloud under its own gravity. The pressure goes up, temperature goes up, it goes up high enough that you can trigger nuclear fusion, and then you've got a start. So, but what the hypothesis for dark stars is is something that's a bit different. If you imagine a mixture of the hydrogen and the dark matter and it's being it's collapsing to form a star, your hope. But what happens is that as the dark matter is compressed, there is a hypothesis that dark matter particles can self annihilate, so that they come together and they just disappear and produce you know, electromagnetic radiation. But like you get antimatter and matter. Yeah, and so what they're saying is if that happens, if you've got this mixture of gas and dark matter that collapses and it sort of wants to be a star, but the dark matter itself, just by it self annihilation, is creating energy, so it's producing light and heat, and that stops the hydrogen itself becoming a normal star. So what you've got is this star that's that's in a way kind of frothy. It's it's being prevented from collapsing into a normal start by the amount of energy that the annihilating dark matter is producing, and so it doesn't become a normal star. So the suggestion is that it does become a start, but it's gigantic. And one of the numbers that's being banded around is that a dark star could be ten times the diameter of the earth sorbit around the Sun. So that's what's that. That's three three hundred, three hundred million kilometers is the diameter of the Earth orbit around the Sun. So if you multiply that by ten, you've got three billion kilometers, which is a very very big star in the end. Well, that's right, and in fact, that is the that's why these scientists who have been using that are looking at a survey produced by the JIBS web space telescope. Why they're excited by it because they they are they're going to be big, and they're going to be bright. They actually could be a lot brighter just because of the size of them, and you know the fact that there's still energy being being created. So what the scientists in question have done, and I haven't said where they are, but I think I'm right in saying this is at the University of Texas at Austin in the US. So these are scientists who have looked through James Webb space telescope data something called the Advanced Deep Extra Galactic Survey, which is I think publicly available probably, and what they've looked for is objects that are very compact but have the signature, the spectral signature of being a long way away. In other words, they're highly red shifted. And so they found three candidates for that. It's really really interesting. What you've got to do here, I think, is is work out a way that you can differentiate between one of these dark scar that dark scar dark stars which are very large, and a compact galaxy. Because a compact galaxy might also look like this at the distance that the James Webb telescope is looking at. But they think they're seeing in the spectrum of these things evidence that they're not galaxies that they seeing, that they're looking at dark stars, and they would be the first candidates for such an object if it can be proven. And this clearly is going to generate much more research. What you've got is something that might give us a few more hints as to what dark matter is. Yes, and you know that's always a good thing at the moment, and the idea is a good one, and your ideas on the postcard, please, Yeah, it's it's it's the dark matter is an elusive material. It would be fantastic to be able to shine some light on it, if I can put it that way, by means of these dark stars. I think the only thing that bothers me about this is that dark matter doesn't interact directly with matter as we know it. And yet if there are dark stars that are in existence, you've got a correlation between dark matter and real matter and ones disturbing the other. So how can that be Because the only way that dark matter does interact with normal matter is gravitationally. Yeah, it's the one thing nothing else, you know, it doesn't sort of talk to normal atoms, can't shake hands. They can't shake hands, they can't the dark matter can't block the light of brighter things behind it because it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation. But the only thing it does do is generates gravity, and gravity, of course, is common to both both dark matter and normal matter. And so that's that's the idea that you've got a gravitational collapse of a mixture of these two things, real matter and dark matter at a very high density. And that's that's the critical thing about this. They collapse to a high density so that you get some shining of the stars, but also shining of the dark matter itself because of the annihilation. It's a really interesting story and one that I think could have ramifications. I think we should follow this one as it evolves. Oh, I suppose the fact that they've found more than one makes it even more fascinating because a lot of the time we can say, all right, we've found one thing that is a planet called Earth that has life, but we've never found another one, so we can't say definitively that life exists beyond that one example. But here we've got three actual candidates. Yeah, that's right, So so really quite remarkable. I mean they you know, again, there's still the possibility they might turn out to be highly compact galaxies. But nevertheless, nevertheless, I think it's a very intriguing story. It sure is. We'll keep an eye on that one, and I dare say it's going to spawn a whole bunch of audience questions. But it just seems to be the topic at the moment. Dark matter, black holes, dogs and cats living together. People really want to know about that stuff. We've got that too, No, Yeah, revenue. They're nearly talking to each other as well, I like dark Muster and real latter. Yeah, but they're not touching each other. Well, they did accidentally this morning. The cut. The cut still takes a very dim view of the dog, but us that's usually how it goes, Fred, Yeah, that's just that's just normal Earth life. Yeah, and so maybe dark Utter takes a dim view of real Nutter who knows it? Yeah, highly likely, finally likely. All right, this is Space Nuts Andrew Dunkle here with Professor Fred Watson. Space puts as would you we're shuffling along rather quickly today. We've got to slow down. But we've got a few questions. I'm going to hit you with the first one because it does dovetail with that dark star theory. This comes from Scott. You're a frid and Andrew. Scott couldn't here from christ Church in ZID. I have so many questions, but I'll start these two. Could the reason dark matter doesn't interact with light or build structures is that it hasn't gone through the Higgs field. Maybe there wasn't enough Higgs to go around. Thoughts on that, mate, Also, what do you think about afterlife time? It took fourteen billion years for this life, but felt like just now, when we're gone, it could take trillions of years, but we wouldn't notice it until the next life. Even then we could end up in a fourteen billion year structure. I could go on and on, but just your quick thoughts on an afterlife or time when we don't exist? How fast it travels? Thanks friend and injury. Wow, that's deep. It's very deep, very tide. Thanks got I hope you're well now. Guess first up the dark matter of Higgs field scenario. Yeah, It's a really interesting question, and I guess we would assume that dark matter is affected or influenced by the Higgs field. So the Higgs field is it's like all things in you know, this sort of sub atomic physics. You can imagine it as a particle or a field, like a force field. And the Higgs field is the elements, which is represented by the Higgs boson, which as we know, was fouled in twenty twelve by at the Large hundred collider called god particle. Yeah, it was not a good name, but it was probably. So the Higgs field basically is what gives other particles their mass. And we do know that dark matter particles have mass because they have gravitational attraction, and so one would assume that they interact with the Higgs field in the same way that normal matter particles do. But it, like so many things about that master, this is something that may still prove to be wrong. It might, you know, might not be a certainty. But my assumption will be that, yes, start matter is bound by the effect of the Higgs boson, the Higgs field in just the same way as normal matter is, just because it basically has grovitational attraction. It has mats. Okay, that was simple, well easier than the next bit though, yes, after lifetime. Now I've got to confess, Scott, I'm not quite sure where you're coming from here, but i's Alfred nodding, well, so I must. Yes, I'm kind of reading between the lads here as well from Scott. But I wonder if so. Scott's point is that it's taken us thy point eight for the billion years for us to evolve, if you include the period when you know the element elements were being made by nuclear synthesis within within stars and all of that stuff. So us he is saying, Okay, we've got a planet full of sentient beings, conscious beings who can understand what time is, and we can look back fourteen thirty point eight billion years and sort of see the history of the universe and understand how we got here. So I think what he's saying is, if we disappear as a species and there's no other sentient beings in the universe, which is possible and a bit spooky, the next time you know, organisms like us evolve, will they notice that the universe you know that might be trillions of years down the track, will they notice that. And I think the way I'm understanding this question is it goes to some other issues which are about some people. People have argued that unless you've got consciousness, the universe isn't real, you know, so that it's it's like that argument about the trees fall down in forests when nobody's looking, that sort of thing. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around, can you still hear it and kind of thing, Yes, yeah, that's right, so you know it's it's them, And it goes into it goes back to quantum theory, where particles can exist in superposition. You know, we know that things can be in many places at the same time and different states altogether until you look at them, and it's the act of looking at them or basically making them interact with the outside world, which is really what he's saying. But it's that that that causes that quantum superposition to be broken and you can you can see things in one place rather than many places at once. So I think part of this idea is, Okay, if there's nobody here to see the universe, does it really exist? So there's the clock still ticking? Or do we you know there's the next sentient. Sentient beings that emerge still only see thirty point eight billion years in the past because they don't know about the trillion years that's elapsed since we were there. Yeah, a really really interesting crush, fascinating and deep discussion, and you could go on for hours, and it sort of reminds me of a discussion we had some time ago about a theory that was put forward that our existence is basically because of our consciousness. Yes, that is, you know, we only exist because we've created this scenario, if we can call it that, And that's just too mind blood weird. But it's years sound, isn't it. Yeah. But the other thing I thought was, Okay, you know, we know the universe is thirteen point eight billion years old, and if we've vani and you know, it all happens again, will they who become whatever they become and twinkle of time ahead of us know anything about the fact that we existed or has it happened before? Yeah, that's right. They might not know that. They wouldn't know that the universe was older though, that just by I suppose, because you can you can looking at the red shift and things like that. You can get the age of the univer Yeah. So it did prompt another question in my mind. When the Big Bang happened, did we in some form already exist, whether it was molecular or whatever, we had to be around at the beginning. Didn't we to be created or did we get created by a consequence of the reactions that occurred thereafter? Yeah, so all the all the bits that well, yeah, in fact, no, you you're rice in the sense that Okay, so we are mostly H two. So two thirds of what we're made of is hydrogen, and most of that came from the Big Bang. So your points is well laid that we are big bangers. We we've we've basically got to atoms in our bodies that were created a gazillion of the second after the Big Bank, because you know, the Big Bang itself, the energies were too high for for protons and things to fall, but soon afterwards they did. Yeah, um, well most of it. It's H two. A couple of my mate of coh that down, you know, helpit the all right, take your Scott, you've I think you've opened up a can of worms. We're going to get a lot of people on this, probably on social media having a bit of a chat about it, because I've noticed with social media that the element that the theory of time is often debated. Some people say, look, we only made it up. Humans created time. There is this such thing, so it just goes on and on and on. Thanks Scott. Let's move on to the next question from Mikey, who's been a semi regular ass. Hey friend and Andrew. It's Mikey from Illinois with another asteroid question for you guys. Last time we had talked about you, guys, had answered a question about I would love to talk to you guys, but we did not talk in person. A question about nuclear bombs and asteroids, and it got me thinking, if we did send a bomb to redirect an asteroid on Earth, Ellie, the shockwave, I assume be what would redirect or you know, cause damage to something here or in space. There's no air, so what I guess I'm asking what is before that pushes the asteroid and send it in an other direction if not air being pushed. I hope that makes sense, guys, and thanks for everything now. Worries Mikey. I think with the Dark Test it was kinetic energy, wasn't it. That Yes, that's right, Yeah, it was absolutely But Mike is right actually because when we talked about asteroid that the idea from observations that something like half of asteroids might be rubble piles. Don't really remember that conversation. Yeah, And it turns out the Emirates, Yeah, it turns out that they are more robust than solid asteroids. And so the the thinking was, and I think we talked about the idea that if you let detonated a nuclear bomb next to one of those, there might be more resistant to being blown apart by the shock wave. But Mike is absolutely right. There's a vacuum in space. It's it's it's not quite a vacuum. It's an it it could be. Yeah, I think today we're on a road, but I think dysons are rather more than a vacuum there. You can mop them with pops and all sorts of fantastic. Anyway, notwithstanding all that, we do get shock waves in space because we see them all the time in gravitational waves, no real shock waves through the interstellar medium. In fact, you know, in a way we think that's why what trigger star formation is density waves, which should kind of shock wave they're a wave passing through this rarefied gas in galaxies, But when it comes to an nuclear detonation, I suspect the medium might still be the very low density residual gas that there is in the Solar system. But I really should look more at this because it could just be the blast of material that is being expelled by the nuclear weapon itself, the fact that it's you know, there's there's a blast of material, and the radiation itself, because the radiation has a pressure, and the radiation that comes from and by that I mean electromagnetic radiation as well as subatomic particles, that's all gonna effectively impact the asteroid. I would like to follow up a bit more on that, Mikey, because you've raised an interesting question there. So I'm going to put an asterisk next to my nose and find out about just what the mechanism would be when a nuclear bomb is detonated next to an asteroid. Why is going to shift its orbit? Yeah, it's a good it's a good question. Um. I wonder if it would be the same as setting off a bomb underwater? Is it a similar concept, except you know, you've got you do have a very dense medium there that you contract with. So yeah, the water is pretty dumb. Um. Yeah, okay, good thing. That's definitely speaking of pressure. And this is a sort of a side note, but I've been on the radio the last few mornings and I've been keeping an eye on the barometric pressure. Yeah. When when I was a kid, they used to refer to very high barometric pressure as an anti cyclone. But that you don't hear them say that anymore. But this morning, while I was on air, I looked at the barometer and it was a thousand and forty one, and that's really high. I've never seen it that high. So we did some searching around and one of my audience members sent me a link to the Bureaus some bureau data which indicated that the highest barometric pressure ever recorded in Australia was a thousand and forty two. The highest ever recorded in the world was in Russia in nineteen sixty eight, which was one thousand and eighty two, which is extraordinarily high. Yet I thought, I don't remember never seeing the barometer hit a thousand and forty in Dubbo where I am in all the time I've been reading weather, and that's you know, twenty thousand years, twenty something years. But the thousand and floyty wanted is what it hit this morning? That just blew me away. We are certainly sitting in a high pressure region. I'm going to be very rude and go and see what my barometer says. Really No, okay, well that's not rude. Let's let's find out because but the interesting difference I noticed was that because I was looking at the weather station information on the roof of the radio station, we've got a weather station right on top, and we're on top of a hill as well, so where we're a little bit higher up than the airport, and the airport reading even though it was high at Dubo Regional Airport was a thousand and thirty six point six, So there was wide a difference between the two, which is hard to explain because the lower down the lower the pressure, I think, or is it the opposite, I don't know. Sorry, what did we do that? One thousand and thirty seven? So that's high. Yeah, it is very high, and mine's sort of corrected for sea level. I don't know whether yours is trul don't if it's not that it's even higher because you're sixty seven meetings. Yeah, yeah, well the radio station would be a bit higher than that. Yeah. The airport reading was what I was telling people when you stepped out. It was a thousand and thirty six point six this morning, and I mean it fluctuates. It's never constant, end, it's always no, that's right. Yeah, who was going up down? Yeah, but I thought a thousand and forty one was yeah, way out of there, quite quite amazing. I just wanted to mention that, by the bye, because we're talking about pressure and all that kind of Yes, great stuff, I love. All right, Yeah, yeah, we've got one more question. This comes from Graham. This one's a little bit out of left field for it. Hell, it's Graham from London. I like your podcast a lot, listen to him all the time. It's fair to say I'm a fan. I've got a quick question. Do you think it's possible for a planet that evolves life and there's a watery surface on a significant amount of it to evolve into a giant planetary? Eyeball? I think you though, you know, mushrooms linking plants together over enough billions of times? Well, U in the water, you'd in and everything like that own city, and it sounds clearer in my head and thatsbody come out of my mouth. But there could be giant planetary eyeballs in space stirring across the vast m I think. I think it's clear. I love the show. Keep going and hello everybody out there, think you, thank you very much. Grahams is a fascinating theory as to whether or not a life form could grow to a point where it became an eye the size for planet, or something to that effect. We do have massive life forms living on Earth, and I'm not talking about blue whales, but there is a particular forest, the name of which escapes my mind at the moment, that covers thousands of square kilometers and its technically one plant. Let's just spread itself out so it does. You know, He's not He's not being silly. This This can happen at least in that form, but could it go to another level? It's um, it's the Great Barrier reef a single It is classified as the biggest organism on Earth, I believe, but I don't. But it's made up of lots and lots and lots of little creatures. Yeah yeah, Whereas the forest is just one. Yes, it's one plant. Yeah. And I think there was another story I read where I think it was a fungus that was also quite massive that was found somewhere in Europe, I think, and covers quite a huge amount of ground. That might be the one I'm talking about. That's thousands of kilometers. The the aspen tree, I think is the one, because um that's got it's about eight kilometers long. Yeah, that's um. That's that's probably an example of what he's alluding to. Um. So the Earth. So, a planet like the Earth, even if it's covered with water, it's got to have a it's going to have a rocky core. And so in the sense that you know, imagining a physical representation of an eyeball, it's never going to happen that you've got something that's hollow or at least filled with a fluid that's like transmitting. So so you're always going to have a rocky ball with something on top of it. And in the Earth case, it's water. In the case of many other objects, it's water with a layer of ice on top. So they are common. Yeah, And whether you could have an organism that arranges itself in such a way that it actually becomes light sensitive. And I suppose maybe a better analog might be a fly's eye. It's a fly's eye is lots of little lenses that are coated on a very clish surface, each twel with its old reset. There'd be something like that could evolve on the surface of the Earth. That would be interesting. Yeah, very interesting. It's it's a great question, mate. It would make an awesome science fiction. Yeah, there you go, there's an idea for you. I woke up last night trying to think of a new angle on a science fiction story. But I've got other projects going on. Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. It's not ready to write a new one yet. Got to tell you a funny story though. I got an email the other day from Amazon. Now, two years ago I released The Hitler Paradox, and when I did, they wrote to me and said, look, we're not happy with the cover. It's um you know, it's got a SWAS sticker on it, and we don't publish hate symbols. Can you provide us with another cover? So it did. They published it with the original cover anyway, so oh really yeah they did, And so I thought, okay, that was your call. Yeah. Well, last week they emailed me again and said, we've quality control systems have picked up that you've got a swasticker on the cover. We will not be offering this book for sale in Germany as it contravenes German law. And I said, well, fair enough. And I wrote back and said, you know you are the reason this has happened, because I did offer you an alternative cover and you didn't use it. The reply was, our quality control people have noted that there is a swasticker on the cover of your book. And I wrote back and said, well, can I upload the alternative cover again? And their reply was our quality controlled me, I've noted there's a swasticker on the cover. I tried one more time and said, can I change the carver? Our quality controlled people have noted there's a swasticker on the cover and will not be for sale. And jerk, I thought, they are they using AI to deal with people, because it can't be human and if it is not worried about the terminator ever happening, because it's a pretty dumber AI that answers the separate inquiries with exactly the same phrase over and over again. Dumb as a box of hammers. Anyway, I'm going to keep trying. It's been fun. Thank you Graham, lovely lovely to hear from you in a really interesting angle on that theory. And if you do have questions for us, please pipe them through to us. Use some PVC and just roll it up in a piece of paper and send it our way, or use a vacuum tube you need a really big one, but it'll get here eventually. Or you can go to our website and send us a message that way pretty easy. Space Nuts podcast dot com or space nuts dot Io. There's a couple of ways you can send us messages. And yeah, we look forward to hearing from you. I'm sure you'll get plenty more. And while you're there, have a look around. Don't forget about maybe looking into becoming a patron. And we send a big shout out and thank you to all our patrons. We have many, and it is greatly appreciated. It keeps the lights on. In fact, I blew a light the other day and I'd like to get a new one. Just about to go to the shop and get one, So thanks for thanks for covering that for us. Fred. We're at the end of the show. It's been a really fascinating journey today. We've had some great questions and some great topics somewhere. So it's always good to explore the limits of well, first of all, the limits of what I know, which are relatively narrow of maybe the limits of what science knows as well. Yes, indeed, all right, good to catch up and we'll see on the next episode, I hope. So yeah, okay, thanks, I'll be miffed if you have somebody else or instead. Not a problem there. Thank you Fred, professor Fred what's an astronomer at large? And thanks to Hugh in the studio who got up early for us today but we were five hours late. And from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. We'll see you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye, Spacenuts. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bites dot com. 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