Paul M. Sutter talks about the science behind movies and TV shows set in space.
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00:00When Cooper first falls through the black hole, then he goes,
00:08oh, everything's black.
00:10No, like, you're not the only thing
00:13falling into a black hole.
00:14There's light from the entire rest of the universe
00:17that's falling in with you.
00:19I'm Dr. Paul Sutter.
00:21I'm a cosmologist, author, and NASA advisor.
00:25I also host my own YouTube channel and podcast.
00:29Today, we'll be looking at the science of outer space
00:32in movies and TV and judging how real it is.
00:40Only the line, a syzygy.
00:43Did he say syzygy? Oh, good for him.
00:46I'd cry if I saw a syzygy.
00:48Syzygy is one of my favorite words in all of astronomy,
00:52and it's simply when more than two objects
00:56line up in a straight line.
00:57That's it. Anytime you have more than two objects
01:01in the same system, you have a three-body problem
01:05or four-body problem or on and on.
01:07And in this case for this show,
01:11they have three suns that are all orbiting around each other
01:15in a very complicated way,
01:16and predicting how those stars are going to orbit
01:20is very challenging.
01:22A real three-body problem that we encounter
01:25all the time in the solar system
01:28is trying to predict the orbits of near-Earth asteroids.
01:32So if we see a little asteroid out there,
01:34we're like, oh my gosh, is this going to hit us or not?
01:36We have to calculate its trajectory through the solar system
01:39with all the gravitational influence of the sun,
01:43of the Earth, of Jupiter over there.
01:45And that gets really, really complicated really quickly,
01:48which is why we're always revising
01:50and updating our predictions
01:52of orbital trajectories of asteroids.
01:56The planet's under the gravitational force
02:00of all three suns.
02:01Syzygies do create slightly stronger gravitational pulls,
02:06but this is a very extreme example
02:10that would not be realistic.
02:11When the moon and the sun are on the same side,
02:15we get extra tides, we get extra gravitational pull,
02:19but the oceans don't go flying out,
02:22buildings don't disintegrate,
02:24and helicopters get pulled out into space.
02:27That's not a thing,
02:28because if the gravity was that strong,
02:31then everything on this planet
02:32would have been destroyed eons ago already.
02:36When we unfold its higher dimensions,
02:39even a tiny proton becomes something very large indeed.
02:45We have particle colliders all around the world
02:48that are accelerating protons and other particles
02:51to nearly the speed of light every single day.
02:54This is something we're good at.
02:56And the goal of this facility
02:58is to trigger nuclear fusion in that target.
03:00Unfolding a dimension is not a real thing.
03:03Yes, they say they can do that,
03:05but that's not how it works.
03:07The dimensions are the dimensions.
03:09It's just what space is.
03:11You can't take one of these compact dimensions
03:14and make it bigger.
03:15I would rate this a three out of 10 for realism.
03:19It started off okay
03:20with discussions of compact dimensions,
03:23but then lost some points
03:25because everything else after that was nonsense.
03:27What I'm proposing is
03:33we start accelerating immediately.
03:35His mannerisms of physicists and engineers
03:37explaining stuff to other people is dead on.
03:40We like grab random stuff and just say,
03:42okay, imagine this is the particle,
03:44and then it's going over here,
03:44and it's like exactly what we do.
03:47We don't intercept with Earth at all,
03:48but we come close enough
03:50to get a gravity assist and adjust course.
03:52The problem here that they were trying to face
03:55was that getting to Mars
03:56takes a really, really long time.
03:59It's really far away,
04:00and it's on its own orbit.
04:01And the idea here used in the movie,
04:03which is all mathematically sound,
04:05it's all solid orbital mechanics,
04:08was that if you are able to slingshot off the Earth,
04:11you get a speed boost,
04:12and you can return back to Mars
04:14faster than you would have initially thought
04:16as if you had launched it
04:17from the surface of the Earth.
04:20You're Mars.
04:21Now, we're going too fast at this point
04:22to fall into orbit,
04:23but we can do a flyby.
04:25Yes, when you're sending an object
04:28to another planet,
04:30you have a few choices.
04:32You can do a close flyby,
04:34or if you do it just right,
04:36it will come in,
04:37in what we say is fall into orbit,
04:39where it'll end up making a permanent loop
04:42around that planet.
04:44And so if you're coming in too fast,
04:46you simply have too much energy.
04:48The gravity of the planet
04:50isn't strong enough to hold onto.
04:53You're just going to be deflected in your path.
04:56They just had too much energy.
04:58They had too much speed.
04:59So there was a trade-off.
05:00They can get to Mars faster,
05:02but that means they can't stay there.
05:12He has to get to as high an altitude as possible
05:15so that he can intercept the oncoming spacecraft.
05:19But in order to do that,
05:21he has to get rid of mass.
05:22The less stuff he has,
05:24then for the same amount of fuel,
05:25the same amount of thrust,
05:26the higher up he can get.
05:36So that's true.
05:37This is Newton's third law in action.
05:39If I punch a hole and the gas escapes,
05:42the gas goes this way,
05:43I go this way.
05:44But if it's on the palm of my hand,
05:47it's away from my center,
05:49which means it won't just push me,
05:51it will twist me.
05:53And so if you actually tried that,
05:55you would end up tumbling uncontrollably.
05:58This is going to sound crude,
05:59but if he had punctured his crotch,
06:01that would be on a line to his center of mass,
06:03and that would have propelled him straight up.
06:12I got him!
06:12In space, everything is complicated.
06:16You can't move around as nimbly as you can
06:19without a spacesuit,
06:20and you're trying to operate in three dimensions,
06:23so it's not like a relay race
06:25where you're guaranteed to have the ground
06:27underneath you the whole time.
06:29And so you're trying to match this precise speed
06:33in this alien environment in three dimensions,
06:36not something our monkey brains
06:37are really capable of handling,
06:39and it's just all hard,
06:40and it makes for a great movie.
06:42I would rate these clips a 10,
06:44full 10, 100%.
06:46I love this,
06:47but it's just such a wonderful movie,
06:49and it's all about science,
06:50and science saving the day.
07:02So much good science in the black hole image.
07:05Light follows the curves,
07:07the hills and valleys of space-time,
07:10and these curves are set by massive objects.
07:14This was one of the earliest tests
07:15of Einstein's theory of relativity,
07:17and black holes bend space a lot,
07:20and so what we're seeing is there's a thin disk
07:23called an accretion disk surrounding the black hole,
07:26but if you're standing on one side of the black hole,
07:29light from the back end,
07:31which normally you wouldn't see
07:32because, you know, black hole in the way,
07:34there's light that's going up this way,
07:36but then gets bent and curves right to you.
07:40Goodbye, TARS.
07:42Goodbye, Dr. Brent.
07:43Newton's third law is for every action,
07:46there is an equal and opposite reaction,
07:48and this is the fundamental basis for space travel.
07:52We push against the air to get our airplanes to go,
07:55but in space, there's no ground, there's no air,
07:58so we can only push against ourselves.
08:01If we throw something away from us,
08:03that propels us in the equal and opposite direction,
08:07and so what I think is really important
08:09And so what I think he's going for here, old Cooper,
08:13to get him away from that orbit
08:14if he pushes something towards the black hole
08:17that will nudge the spacecraft away from that orbit
08:20and give it a safe escape.
08:22Pushing you to the horizon.
08:26What side?
08:27Dipping down beneath it.
08:28The event horizon is the one-way barrier.
08:33This is the edge of the black hole.
08:35This is the point of no return,
08:37that if you cross the event horizon,
08:39then gravity is so strong, it's so overwhelming,
08:42that nothing, not even light, can escape.
08:45All black.
08:49TARS, do you read me?
08:57When Cooper first falls through the black hole,
08:59then he goes, oh, everything's black.
09:01No, like, you're not the only thing
09:03falling into a black hole.
09:05There's light from the entire rest of the universe
09:08that's falling in with you.
09:10For a supermassive black hole like this,
09:12like Gargantua in the movie,
09:14you've got a handful of seconds
09:16from the moment you cross the event horizon
09:19to the time you hit the singularity.
09:21That was an incredibly accurate depiction.
09:24In fact, it's one of the most accurate depictions
09:26of the environment around a black hole ever made.
09:29I would give it a nine.
09:31Okay, a point off because, you know,
09:33it's not actually dark in there,
09:34but honestly, we don't know what actually happens
09:36inside of a black hole, so that's fair game.
09:40So how do we make it?
09:42Awaken the heart of a dying star.
09:46Thor needs the energy from a dying star
09:48to create his new weapon, which is called Stormbreaker.
09:52Stars die when they run out of fuel.
09:55So every star in the universe fuses elements
09:59into heavier ones, which releases some energy.
10:03But no matter what star you have,
10:04iron is always the end of the limit
10:06that's the most you can get,
10:08because after that, the fusion process
10:10doesn't release energy, it takes it.
10:12So once a star fuses iron, it's done.
10:23There is a lot of good Newtonian mechanics there
10:26with the spinning of the rocket and then letting it go
10:30and then grabbing it and using that,
10:33its own propulsion to move this massive ring thing.
10:37A Dyson sphere is this concept developed
10:40by a famed physicist and mathematician, Freeman Dyson,
10:45where the idea is like, hey,
10:47if you're a civilization on the move,
10:50you know, you got your wind power, your nuclear power,
10:53you got your solar power,
10:55eventually you're going to tap out
10:58all of the energy sources available on a planet.
11:02So, hey, if you need a lot of energy,
11:04what if you pulverize your planet
11:07and turn it into a whole bunch of solar panels
11:09facing inwards on your star?
11:12And that way you can capture as much light as possible.
11:15Most of the light emitted by the sun
11:17just goes off into empty space, misses us completely.
11:20So if you capture that, then you can use it
11:23and, you know, make a new hammer.
11:29Once a star is dead, it's just dead.
11:31Just let it go, man.
11:33But neutron stars can release enormous amounts of energy.
11:40And that's because you have an object
11:43that's one step away from a black hole.
11:45You've got this incredibly dense ball of material.
11:48Fastest rotating neutron stars rotate at over 10,000 RPM.
11:54That's faster than a kitchen blender.
11:56That's faster than a kitchen blender.
11:58There are enormous energies involved
12:01with this compression of matter rotating at that speed.
12:04And so, yeah, they can power up
12:07some seriously incredible energetic outbursts.
12:12♪♪
12:19Yeah, that's what struck out to me the most, actually,
12:22is, like, they awaken this dying star,
12:24you know, whatever that is,
12:25and it sends this, like, energy beam out.
12:27And then the characters are all like,
12:29oh, that's cool.
12:30Like, these are energies that can rip apart planets,
12:37that can vaporize anything.
12:39To be close to a source of energy like that,
12:44you wouldn't get to look at it.
12:45You would just be destroyed.
12:48We're gonna have to scrape the bottom of the barrel here
12:50for accuracy.
12:51I would rate this clip a four.
12:54Neutron stars are a real thing.
12:55Neutron stars actually have a lot of energy,
12:58and Newton's law is still valid in the comic book universe.
13:02♪♪
13:05Six, five, four.
13:11When this device switched on,
13:13and we had, like, the battleship out front,
13:16you know, full of all the observers,
13:17and the battleship started tilting towards it,
13:20and I was thinking, like, if this thing
13:22has immense gravitational pull,
13:24why is there just a tilt instead of the whole ship
13:26being pulled along with all the water?
13:29I mean, it looked amazing.
13:30It was very cool to look at.
13:32♪♪
13:39So, this machine consists of a passenger pod,
13:43a little vessel,
13:45surrounded by some protective shielding and metal,
13:48and then a series of rings.
13:50♪♪
13:53Through various alien magic,
13:56the rings open up a wormhole
13:58and then drop that passenger sphere in,
14:01and then the passenger sphere travels through the wormhole
14:03to the distant destination.
14:06A wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel
14:10or bridge through space and time
14:13that can connect two very,
14:15very distant regions in space and time
14:18and bring them closer together
14:20so that you don't have to go the long way,
14:22which might involve a whole lot of light years.
14:24There's nothing scientific about using spinning rings
14:27to create a wormhole, but they sure do look cool.
14:30The only way we know to create a wormhole
14:34is to start off with a blob of what's called exotic matter.
14:40What makes it exotic is that it has negative mass.
14:44If you've got some exotic matter that weighs negative mass,
14:47then you can potentially reconfigure space-time
14:51in just the right way to create a stable wormhole.
14:54And we don't think it exists
14:56because it would kind of violate everything we know
14:58about, like, momentum and energy
15:00and all of our experience in physics.
15:03Like, if you had a ball that weighed negative 5 pounds
15:07and you kicked it,
15:09it would go flying in the opposite direction.
15:10And if you dropped it, it would go flying upwards.
15:12And that seems kind of wrong.
15:16Ah! Ah! I made another wormhole now!
15:20It's a triple...
15:22No, quadruple system.
15:24One thing that struck me, though, actually,
15:26that seemed very accurate was her attempt
15:29to narrate what she was seeing as she was going.
15:34And what that reminded me of is,
15:36if you listen to the Apollo 11 tapes,
15:40and the astronauts were trained
15:42to narrate what they were seeing,
15:45our view from the Earth was just little cameras,
15:48you know, little static-y images.
15:50The astronauts themselves could see in so much more detail.
15:54And so they were trained, like, don't just look,
15:56but keep describing what you see.
15:59Although the surface appears to be very,
16:04very fine-grained as you get close to it.
16:06We don't know what a wormhole looks like.
16:08We've never traveled down one.
16:10We don't even think they exist.
16:11You can visualize it however you want.
16:14I would rate this clip a seven.
16:17Jodie Foster maintained her composure
16:19while traveling through a wormhole.
16:20I'm pretty sure I'd be barfing
16:22and freaking out the whole time, so good for her.
16:31When they're approaching the moon to do that lunar roll,
16:36as they called it, you know,
16:37they turned their spacecraft towards the moon
16:41as if they were fighter jets banking into a turn.
16:45But this is space.
16:47There's no air.
16:48There's nothing to bank against.
16:50You can just go with it.
16:52You're fine.
16:53You're gonna go around the moon.
16:54It's all good.
16:56Nine and a half Gs for 11 minutes.
16:58I'd start praying about right now.
17:01So 9.5 Gs means that the pressure you'll feel,
17:07the weight you'll get pushed up against your chair
17:10is nine and a half times stronger
17:13than our normal experience of gravity.
17:16This is generally going to be miserable.
17:199.5 strikes me as a very unrealistic number,
17:23especially for that length of time.
17:26They're just going to pass out
17:28and be starved of oxygen for 10 minutes, which is dead.
17:34The astronauts are getting a gravity assist from the moon
17:42so that they can get a speed boost to land on an asteroid.
17:46The idea is you need to catch up to it.
17:48You need to match speeds with it.
17:50Otherwise you're just going to crash into it.
17:53So launching from the surface of the earth, we can do this.
17:57We've done rendezvous missions with moving asteroids and comets.
18:01I did it!
18:02Ah!
18:07There's no reason for them to experience G-forces
18:10during a slingshot maneuver.
18:12The whole time you're doing a slingshot maneuver,
18:15you're in space.
18:16There's hardly any gravity.
18:18You don't feel any gravity when you're in space.
18:22And when you're doing this slingshot maneuver
18:24around the moon or any object, the moon is big.
18:28Yes, you're accelerating,
18:29but that boost is taking place over the course of hours
18:34as you orbit around the moon.
18:36So it's a very slow and gentle process.
18:39So you don't feel anything extra.
18:42And I saw them in that clip,
18:43they're like burning their rockets.
18:45And I was like, man, that takes a lot of fuel.
18:47And I was like, if you have enough fuel
18:50to be already in space
18:51and then do this accelerated boost maneuver,
18:54like then just skip the moon
18:57and you can just go right to the asteroid.
19:00That's why they don't put me in charge of writing movies.
19:02I would rate this clip a three.
19:05We're being pulled off course.
19:07How?
19:07I'm not certain.
19:09It appears to be some kind of graviton surge.
19:13Graviton is a real word.
19:16If you were approaching a void,
19:17it'd actually be the opposite of a surge
19:19because there's less stuff.
19:21There's less matter in a void.
19:23There's less gravity in a void.
19:25What happened to the stars?
19:29I happen to be one of the top five experts
19:32on cosmic voids in the world.
19:33And that's because there are about five people
19:35working on voids in the whole world.
19:38And they're simply places where there ain't much going on.
19:41They have almost no matter within them.
19:44If you were to transport our solar system
19:47into the middle of a void,
19:49not only would that be a good thing,
19:52but if you were to put a telescope
19:54in the middle of a void,
19:56not only would there be no stars on the sky,
19:59because there'd be no stars around us,
20:01you could take almost any telescope
20:05and you wouldn't see a single thing.
20:07Because all the nearest galaxies
20:10would be so far away from you
20:13that you would need an incredibly advanced instrument
20:16to detect them.
20:17But they only pull matter in one direction,
20:21we've calculated the outer circumference
20:22at approximately nine light years.
20:25Oh, circumference is nine light years.
20:27That means the radius is even smaller.
20:28This is a tiny thing.
20:30This is nothing.
20:32Voids are huge.
20:34They're amongst the largest things in the universe.
20:37The smallest voids, the smallest voids
20:40are like 20 million light years across on a side.
20:43Voids aren't in galaxies.
20:45Galaxies are on the edge of voids.
20:50They're huge.
20:51And if you were to end up in a void,
20:52you're not coming out anytime soon.
20:5750,000 kilometers to normal space.
21:04So the easiest way to leave a void
21:08is to point yourself to the nearest galaxy
21:11and pack a sandwich and bring a book
21:14because it's gonna take you a while.
21:16There are no shortcuts, there are no cheat codes,
21:18you just gotta take the slow way.
21:20I would rate this clip a two.
21:23The only accurate part of this clip
21:28is that the word void is a real science term
21:32in astrophysics and cosmology.
21:35That's it, that's it.
21:43What really struck me, which was so beautiful
21:46and very, very accurate,
21:48was the actual surface of the sun.
21:52As the spacecraft is plunging into the sun,
21:54we get these great images of these giant arcs
21:58and flares and prominences.
22:00And the sun really does look like that.
22:04We have high-resolution imagery of the surface of the sun
22:09that shows just how dynamic and volatile
22:12and active and gorgeous it is.
22:15In real life, you wouldn't even get as close
22:19as that spacecraft got to the sun.
22:22You, with our current technologies,
22:25within a few million miles, you get caught.
22:30You could observe 3.1% for a period
22:33of not longer than 30 seconds.
22:40The amount of solar energy that we receive on the Earth
22:45is 0.0000000045% of the total solar output.
22:57The character is told that he can safely observe the sun
23:00for a limited amount of time
23:02at 3.1% of its total brightness.
23:06I wouldn't necessarily trust the computer.
23:08Maybe the math all works out, but I'm not playing games.
23:12I would give it a six because the images of the sun
23:16were gorgeous, accurate, spot-on,
23:19and most people don't get to realize
23:20just how gorgeous and dynamic the sun is.
23:24The law of relativity prohibits faster-than-light travel.
23:28Relativity, yes.
23:28We can't break the law of relativity.
23:32We can go around it.
23:33I've seen this movie, like, maybe a million times.
23:35We know in our universe that causes always precede effects,
23:39and the fastest that a cause can lead to an effect
23:44is the speed of light.
23:46Going faster than light allows you to have effects
23:51that come before their own causes.
23:53It breaks down the entire causal structure of the universe,
23:57which is why we're pretty sure you can't do it.
24:01Shift doesn't really go faster than light.
24:02What it does is it creates a dimensional gateway.
24:05It folds space so that point A and point B
24:10coexist in the same space and time.
24:13It's a little fuzzy because we don't know
24:15how Wormholes actually work,
24:17but we do know mathematically that they do act like tunnels
24:20where you can have as short a distance as you want
24:23between any two points.
24:24Now, whether this means the actual space-time
24:28is getting folded up in a higher-dimensional way,
24:33that's more of an analogy and a metaphor
24:37than what actually happens,
24:39which is kind of impossible to describe in words,
24:42but that's why we have mathematics
24:43so that we can do stuff that words can't let us do.
24:52That is the core of the Event Horizon's gravity drive.
24:57They use this to, in the movie, fold space and time
25:01so that your starting point and ending point
25:03are the exact same place.
25:05My best guess as to why this guy's getting sucked
25:09into the gravity drive is that when this thing is turning on
25:13and generating a singularity,
25:15you're taking a whole bunch of matter
25:17and compressing it down into a very tiny volume,
25:20which generates enormous gravitational forces
25:25that should have ripped the ship apart.
25:27You get these enormous things called tidal forces
25:30that can stretch and deform matter around it.
25:33And so it's like, if it's strong enough to act on a person,
25:37it's strong enough to act on
25:38everything surrounding the person.
25:48No, this was very inaccurate
25:50because it made it look like
25:53the black hole was two-dimensional.
25:55The surface of a black hole is three-dimensional.
25:57They're spheres.
25:59They're not funnels like this.
26:00They're spheres, almost like a planet sitting there
26:04that you could orbit around from any direction.
26:07I'm going to give a four.
26:09It gets a four because that's not really how wormholes work,
26:13so lots of points off,
26:14but Sam Neill nailing the attitudes of a tired professor,
26:21all for it.
26:21My favorite space movie slash TV show
26:26is actually The Expanse.
26:29It's a wonderful story, complex, intricate story,
26:32and yeah, there are some non-realistic magical elements,
26:37but they work really hard
26:39to not just set up the physics correctly,
26:42but what society would look like in space,
26:45and I really appreciate that.