Should You Be Scared Of A Black Hole? | Dr. Becky Smethurst

0:00 At the start of May last year, I found,

0:02 it was a slight dimple on my left breast, basically.

0:06 Hearing those words, your entire world just comes crashing down.

0:10 You know, it's one of those things where you think,

0:12 "What did I do?"- There are people who are like,

0:14 "Skip the treatment that your doctor's giving you and just live healthy,

0:19 live naturally." What do you wanna say to those people?

0:22 I wanna say that you're gambling, but the gamble might not pay off.

0:26 And the thing is, you only hear from the people that the gamble pays off for.

0:29 Welcome back to the "Checkup" podcast.

0:31 Today's guest is Dr.

0:33 Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist from Oxford University in the UK

0:38 who specializes in everyone's favorite astronomy topic, black holes.

0:43 Believe me, we go into all of that plus the inevitable death of the sun,

0:47 who owns the moon, debating flat Earthers, and of course aliens.

0:51 We also discuss Dr.

0:53 Becky's startling breast cancer diagnosis as an otherwise healthy and fit woman

0:58 in her thirties and her experience navigating the UK's National Health Service.

1:03 But she's not just an outer space expert.

1:05 Dr.

1:05 Becky is also an expert on YouTube where she educates her audience

1:09 of nearly 1 million subscribers about the wonders of the cosmos.

1:13 As a working scientist and YouTuber, it turns out Dr.

1:16 Becky and I actually have a lot in common.

1:19 Please help me in welcoming Dr.

1:21 Becky Smethurst to the "Checkup" podcast.

1:22 Huge thanks to Guardant Health for sponsoring this video.

1:25 We function in the same space, but we don't function in the same space.

1:30 And I use the term space purposefully.

1:34 I get really excited talking about health science,

1:37 you get excited talking about science, but on a different side of things.

1:41 What side is that?

1:43 My side is astrophysics.

1:44 Okay.

1:45 So black holes specifically, 'cause I'm obsessed with black holes,

1:47 but mostly it's, you know, the planets, stars, galaxies, alien life.

1:53 So like Zodiac signs?

1:54 No.

1:55 (laughs)- Not the same?

1:56 Not the same, no.

1:58 When I watched a Dr.

1:59 Oz show years ago, he said, your zodiac sign can actually impact your health.

2:04 Do you think that's not?

2:06 I don't think that's a thing.

2:07 No, I don't think that inanimate rocky objects that have been orbiting the sun

2:11 for four and a half billion years care about what we're all doing down here.

2:13 Ah, fair, fair, fair, fair.

2:15 Okay, so different world.

2:17 [Dr.

2:17 Becky] Yeah.

2:18 How does one get drawn to astrophysics?

2:23 When I was a kid, I was the kid that was obsessed with space.

2:27 Space and dolphins to be fair.

2:28 But you know, I was gonna end up in one of those fields.

2:30 Interesting vibes.

2:31 I was gonna be a marine biologist or an astrophysicist,

2:33 which weirdly I think is like a common thing for a lot of millennials.

2:36 Because those are unexplored, deep ocean location,

2:39 although dolphins don't necessarily live deep.

2:41 But yeah, the mystery of the oceans kind of thing.

2:43 [Doctor Mike] Right.

2:44 So I basically just never lost that spark of interest.

2:49 Like I was a why child.

2:51 I constantly asked why, why,

2:52 why all the time and-- Did people get annoyed by that?

2:56 Yes.

2:56 (laughs)- What would teachers say to you?

2:58 'Cause I'm curious if it matches with my experience.

3:00 The one thing that I remember from my, like

3:02 school reports was flibbertigibbet was written on my report.

3:05 From "The Sound of Music", a flibbertigibbet, a will-o'-the-wisp, a clown.

3:09 It's basically like she just bounces off the walls.

3:11 Okay.

3:11 And just asks crazy questions all the time.

3:12 She's just an annoying child.

3:14 My mom says if she had my sister first,

3:15 she would've had like four more, but she had me first.

3:19 You taught her a lesson?

3:20 Yeah.

3:21 But yeah, so I just never lost it.

3:23 And I think that's like the hallmark of like a scientist in research

3:27 today is like you have that innate curiosity to keep asking why.

3:31 And so yeah, when I was like picking subjects to take

3:34 at school or you know what to do at university,

3:36 it was, you know, astronomy, astrophysics were always at the top of that list.

3:40 And that was how I ended up just in a job that, you know,

3:44 now I'm researching black holes, which sounds crazy.

3:47 I didn't like go through school like intending to do that.

3:50 If you'd asked me what do you wanna do when you grow up?

3:52 I had no idea.

3:53 But by choosing all the things that I love to do,

3:55 you know, it just sort of naturally fell out of that.

3:58 Yeah, what created that spark for you?

4:00 How did you learn about the field in general existing, or space existing?

4:04 I mean like the, I don't even remember the first

4:06 time I probably learned about space was through some Hollywood movie,

4:09 you know, "Space Cowboys" or something.

4:11 Sure, yeah.

4:12 I remember having a book that was just called "Space" and it

4:15 was just like fact files about like here's a fact file.

4:18 Like a whole double page spread on like each planet.

4:20 And you know, here's the stars, galaxies.

4:22 And I remember devouring that as a kid, but I also remember thinking,

4:26 "Oh, we know everything about space, you know?" It was like, we're done.

4:29 We're done.

4:29 Yeah.

4:29 Yeah, we're done.

4:30 You know, nothing interesting else here.

4:32 You know, we know everything.

4:33 And so it wasn't until I was probably about 17

4:38 that like I had chosen physics to study as one

4:40 of my, A Levels as we call them in the UK

4:43 because it was like one of my favorite subjects.

4:45 Not because I was thinking I'd go in a career to do that.

4:48 But then I remember asking a question in one of the classes

4:52 that the teacher didn't know the answer to and was like,

4:55 "I don't actually think anybody knows the answer to that question."

4:57 I don't remember what the question was that I asked,

4:59 but I remember thinking-- Sure.

5:01 Wait, there is something we don't know the answer to?

5:04 Yeah.

5:04 What?

5:05 And then realizing that researcher like was a job,

5:08 whose job it was to answer those questions

5:11 that we don't know the answer to, right?

5:13 And the fact that there were still questions that we didn't know

5:15 that in terms of all of the side of astrophysics and space that I loved,

5:18 it was like a, it was just like my eyes were opened, you know?

5:22 And I was like, "Oh,

5:22 I actually will go and do astrophysics at university now and I will go study it.

5:25 And that will be a really fun thing to do as a career."- Did you

5:29 have any fear or hesitation because you

5:31 didn't know ultimately what job you would get,

5:34 but you were interested in the subject?

5:37 Any thoughts there?

5:38 No, weirdly not.

5:39 I think I spoke to like a careers advisor at school as you do at like 17.

5:43 And they were just like, "You can do anything with physics.

5:45 It's basically a problem solving degree."- Mm.

5:47 And I was like, "Oh, okay,

5:48 cool." And I'd looked at like lists of careers that people had

5:51 gone into and it was everything from like finance and you know, banking.

5:54 Oh really?

5:54 Yeah, well especially with things like, like insurance or anything like that.

5:58 It's all mathematics based.

5:59 Actuaries.

6:00 Exactly, right.

6:01 It's everything is like that.

6:02 So you need someone with a really strong like maths background at least.

6:06 And they kind of don't care if you've done

6:07 maths or physics at the end of the day.

6:08 Yeah, yeah.

6:09 'Cause it's just applied maths technically.

6:11 Yeah.

6:12 So like it was one of those things where you just

6:14 look at the list of careers and you know, teachers, yes.

6:16 But also finance and banking and then visual effects

6:19 is one thing that I looked at as well.

6:21 Ooh.

6:21 Because you know, if they're gonna blow up

6:22 a building they need to know like in a film,

6:24 not really, but like if they, you know, like I do that.

6:25 To make it look-- Real.

6:27 Legitimate, yeah.

6:27 Exactly, yeah.

6:28 So it was also-- It's a shame they

6:29 don't do that often with medical scenes in movies.

6:31 Right.

6:32 With some medical dramas they do, but medical scenes not so much.

6:34 [Dr.

6:35 Becky] Yeah, yeah, fair.

6:36 Okay, so you're going into the field,

6:38 you're really excited about the prospect of just learning,

6:41 perhaps answering some questions that were unknowns at the time.

6:45 Were you, because we touched on the subject,

6:47 watching any movies related to space?

6:49 Oh yes.

6:50 Yeah?

6:50 I remembered vividly watching like "Deep Impact".

6:53 Oh, okay.

6:53 And like "Armageddon".

6:54 Yeah.

6:54 When I was a kid.

6:55 I loved those films-- Yeah.

6:57 So, so much, like Elijah Wood in "Deep Impact", I'm like,

7:00 "Why is that such like a nostalgic hug for me

7:02 now?" Probably to do with "Lord of the Rings".

7:05 But like those films I remember and especially like

7:07 the sort of the discovering the comet that's gonna, you know?

7:10 Right.

7:10 Wipe out the planet, or whatever-- The hero who's gonna save them.

7:13 Yeah, like all of that.

7:14 I remember thinking like that was their, that was their job kind of thing.

7:18 Also, I do remember in "Top Gun".

7:22 Okay.

7:23 Kelly McGillis' character is an astrophysicist.

7:25 Wow.

7:26 I dunno what she was doing in "Top Gun".

7:28 Yeah, well clearly you can go into any field.

7:30 Right.

7:31 'Cause like, I don't dunno what she was like gonna do

7:33 with whatever knowledge she got during her PhD on, I don't know,

7:36 supernova or something to do with the "Top Gun" field.

7:39 Yeah, I didn't put that together actually.

7:41 No, I think it, well it is kind of bandied around

7:43 by Hollywood as just like a word for a smart person.

7:46 Rocket scientist?

7:47 Yeah.

7:47 Yeah.

7:48 Rocket scientist.

7:48 And what is the difference between you and a rocket scientist?

7:50 Very different actually.

7:51 So like a rocket scientist will be very much kind of like

7:54 the dynamics of how do you get something out of Earth's gravity,

7:58 like off the surface of the Earth into space.

8:00 And then how do you bring it back down again as well.

8:02 So it's the dynamics of like the gravity of like the Earth.

8:05 But then the moon, if you're sending something to the moon,

8:07 where is the moon, where is the Earth?

8:08 If we send it in this direction,

8:09 is it gonna end up there by the time the moon has moved into that spot?

8:13 Got it.

8:14 On its orbit, you know?

8:14 It's all those like moving parts.

8:16 For me as an astrophysicist, there's kind of two different types or three

8:20 different types of astrophysicists you can be.

8:22 The first type is like a theorist.

8:24 So literally stood at a board with chalk being like, "You know,

8:28 if we take these equations, you know,

8:30 that Einstein came up with about how we describe gravity,

8:32 what does it then mean for what like the inside of a star

8:35 would be like?" There's then people who run simulations who go,

8:38 "Okay, well if we plug all those equations into a computer, what do we get out?

8:43 What does it tell us that the inside

8:44 of the star is like?" And then there's people like me,

8:46 which is an observational astrophysicist where

8:48 you actually go and use telescopes,

8:50 take the data and then say what does that data tell us about the universe?

8:54 And it's a really interesting field

8:55 of science 'cause with most fields of science,

8:57 like if you have an experiment, you'll repeat it like loads,

9:00 and loads, and loads, and loads of times to see if you get

9:03 the same answer each time and see if it's repeatable.

9:05 And you know, that's sort of like the scientific method and process.

9:09 With astrophysics, you observe a star and it can tell you one thing.

9:12 So you have to then almost like repeat your experiment

9:15 by observing another star of the same type and things like that.

9:17 So it's almost like you're doing it population wide in a kind

9:21 of similar way to medicine in that respect, I guess.

9:23 Yeah, it is similar because we can't run like

9:26 one of these randomized control trials for every condition.

9:30 A, sometimes it's not feasible.

9:31 B, sometimes it's not ethical.

9:33 You don't wanna force people to start a bad

9:35 habit to see if it's gonna make their life shorter.

9:38 And at the flip side, you don't wanna withhold a treatment for something

9:42 that you know is already beneficial to their life.

9:45 So the ethics can get quite messy when

9:47 it comes to the healthcare side of things.

9:49 But what our side is from the observational

9:51 side of things is like a cohort trial where,

9:54 I don't know what your version of that would be.

9:57 Where we watch a group of people over time and we see

10:00 how certain things play out and see if any patterns can be elucidated,

10:04 with the understanding that this is not the highest level of evidence.

10:08 So I guess with you it would be observing it over and over and then do,

10:14 is there a higher level where you can then say,

10:16 now can we replicate it or attempt to replicate it?

10:19 Or because it's happening so far away, there's no shot that's happening.

10:22 That's the thing is replication is not really a thing.

10:23 I think with the cohort trial as you called it,

10:26 is basically what we do when we look back

10:28 in terms of, look back in time as we say.

10:30 So you say every telescope is a time

10:32 machine because light takes time to travel to us.

10:35 Mm.

10:36 So if we're seeing galaxies further away from us, so islands of stars, galaxies,

10:40 like hundreds of billions of stars,

10:42 then we are seeing them as they were when the universe was much younger.

10:46 So we almost see how they evolved.

10:48 You know, when you look back 13 billion years ago,

10:51 it's like you're seeing baby galaxies and now

10:53 after like 13 billion years of evolution,

10:55 we are seeing them as they were as like,

10:56 you know, sort of, I don't know whether they'd be middle aged

10:59 or old age 'cause we don't know how the universe is going,

11:01 how long the universe is gonna live.

11:02 But we've seen them evolve in that respect.

11:04 Yeah.

11:05 So that's kind of our sort of cohort trial.

11:08 But then repeatability, I guess, is what we get from simulations.

11:11 We say can we reproduce what we've seen in observations by plugging all

11:15 the laws of physics into a computer and seeing if the same thing pops out.

11:19 And if it doesn't, we know we've missed something.

11:23 And interesting you say we've missed

11:24 something as opposed to creating a conclusion.

11:26 Mm, yeah.

11:27 Which is where I think a lot of misinformation on the health

11:31 side starts coming out where when researchers that are trying to be honest,

11:35 they're trying to disprove their hypotheses

11:37 and find reasons why their research is imperfect.

11:41 Many people are just looking to confirm

11:42 their research and they have this ongoing confirmation bias.

11:46 But that is exact opposite of what you'd be doing in your work, right?

11:50 Yeah, exactly.

11:51 We're always trying to break physics.

11:53 And I think that's where a lot of miscommunication comes from.

11:55 Like you see headlines being like, "Oh, the big bang theory is wrong." And I

11:58 think most astrophysicists would go, "Yeah, probably.

12:01 You know, there's probably something wrong with it."- Sure.

12:02 There's probably something we've missed.

12:04 Yeah.

12:04 And we've not considered, and you know?

12:06 We know there's a whole chunk of the universe that, you know,

12:09 doesn't interact with light.

12:10 You know, the dark universe as it's called,

12:12 whether that's dark matter or you know, dark energy as it's called,

12:15 that's like 95% of the universe and we're like, we still don't really know.

12:19 Wow.

12:19 Well of course the big bang theory is probably wrong.

12:22 Right, that's the point of a theory, right?

12:24 It's always getting refined all the time as new evidence comes in and as we

12:28 make new observations of things that we haven't been able to before,

12:31 thanks to new telescopes that can see further.

12:34 You know, like more, you know,

12:35 fainter things that we haven't been able to see, or even,

12:37 you know, a new technique for observing something that, you know,

12:41 we'd never been able to see before.

12:42 That all changes things, you know?

12:45 In the same way that, you know, people say, "Oh,

12:46 the atom can't be split." Or you know, that kind of thing,

12:48 it's like, well, you know, we will never be able to observe a planet

12:51 in orbit around another star 'cause stars are too bright.

12:53 Oh, well actually if we put something in front

12:55 of the telescope to block the star's light,

12:57 oh actually we can see the very, very faint planet.

12:59 So it's like, just as progress goes, you know,

13:01 there's so many things that end up cropping up that nobody expected.

13:05 Right.

13:07 Do you remember the first moment you looked through a telescope?

13:12 Telescope, no, weirdly not.

13:13 But look up at the sky and realize something different.

13:18 What did you realize?

13:20 So, do you know the constellation Orion?

13:22 Most people know-- I've heard it- Orion's Belt, there's the three stars.

13:25 So Orion is a, it's not just his belt, he's a whole hunter.

13:28 Right, he's like a man in the sky

13:29 with a bow and arrow and he has like two shoulders

13:32 and two feet and one of his feet is bright

13:34 blue and one of his shoulders is like a red star, like a slightly orangey star.

13:39 And you can see this with your eye, you can see the difference in color.

13:42 Like it's very slight, but it's there.

13:44 And I remember being like in a really,

13:46 really dark sky when I was about 10 years old and looking up and sort of going,

13:51 "Huh, why is that star, like, am I imagining that?" You know,

13:54 as a 10-year-old being like, "Do I, you know,

13:56 am I making things up almost?" But my dad goes, "No, no,

13:58 you can see that, that's right." And we went and find out why it was

14:01 and it's 'cause one of them is a giant blue star that's like the hot,

14:04 the kind of hottest star you can get.

14:07 And then the-- Like most popular or?

14:09 No?

14:10 Yeah, the coolest, no.

14:11 Viral star.

14:12 Yeah, no, no.

14:12 Like the, like, physically hottest star.

14:15 Sure.

14:16 The biggest star is like a hundred times more massive than the sun.

14:18 Wow.

14:19 It's huge.

14:20 It's called a blue giant star.

14:21 The other one is, that was called Rigel, is the one that's in Orion's foot.

14:26 And then the other star is Betelgeuse, which is a red giant star,

14:30 which is red because it's at the end of its life and it's much cooler,

14:34 but it's still a giant because what happens when

14:37 stars start to run out of fuel is they

14:39 try and like resist the fact that they're running

14:42 outta fuel and they expand to like cool down.

14:46 So that like only sort of the bits

14:48 in the center are sort of gonna be-- Interesting.

14:50 It's very human body esque.

14:52 Weirdly, yeah, yeah.

14:54 Like when we're cold we try and redirect blood flow to internal organs.

14:58 Yeah, so they're trying to like slow down the fusion inside so that they

15:01 can keep fusing hydrogen into helium for longer

15:04 by expanding to this red giant phase.

15:06 It's what the sun will do when it eventually runs out of fuel and dies,

15:08 it will swell to definitely beyond Earth's orbit.

15:11 This is like 5 billion years time.

15:13 There's like nothing to worry about but like definitely.

15:15 You promise?

15:15 Yeah.

15:16 Okay.

15:16 Beyond Earth's orbit.

15:17 I'm gonna hold it against you if it happens.

15:18 If it happens tomorrow you can come-- I'm

15:21 gonna leave you a nasty comment on Instagram.

15:23 Yeah, do it.

15:24 But yeah, it'll be huge.

15:25 So it's really cool to think of like the difference.

15:27 And the funny thing is, every time I tell this to kids, kids are like,

15:30 "Hang on a minute, why is a red star cooler than a blue star?

15:35 Why is a blue star hotter?" 'Cause you think about like.

15:37 [Doctor Mike] Color temperatures?

15:38 Yeah, like even like, you know when you turn on a tap,

15:40 when you start a faucet to use US lingo.

15:42 We have tap.

15:43 Taps.

15:43 When you turn on a tap, right, the hot tap is red and the cold tap is blue.

15:45 So like, shouldn't the blue giant star be

15:48 colder and the red giant star be hotter?

15:49 But it's like the opposite way round

15:51 'cause it's talking about like light temperature.

15:54 Like if you think about-- Like a light bulb.

15:56 Yeah, yeah, even like the spectrum of light, right?

15:58 A blue light is a much higher frequency, a higher energy, a higher temperature.

16:03 So I like to say like, think about the flame on like a Bunsen burner.

16:06 Yeah.

16:07 Or like on a gas stove, that's a blue flame.

16:09 So it's a really, really hot flame as opposed to like

16:11 a dying embers of a fire which is redder, is cooler.

16:14 Yeah, wow.

16:15 And you were 10 years old when that happened?

16:18 Yeah, I didn't quite have that level of knowledge at that time,

16:20 but I noticed it and thought,

16:22 "Wow."- Something unique is happening here that you wanna learn about.

16:25 Now, you've probably looked into a telescope and observed stars.

16:30 Yeah.

16:31 And planets thousands of times.

16:36 Mm.

16:37 Planets definitely.

16:38 Saturn is one of my favorite things to look through

16:39 a telescope at, especially with people who've never seen it before.

16:43 Early on in your career you're doing this, are you feeling anything?

16:48 Yeah.

16:48 Emotional or is it very physics calculated?

16:52 I'm looking at formulas and light patterns.

16:58 No, it's emotional.

17:00 I remember the very first time I used like a professional telescope.

17:05 It was like the first year of my PhD and it was in La Palma.

17:09 So the Canary Islands, near like Tenerife is one of the other islands there.

17:12 Very, very, very summit is like a big observatory

17:16 where there's loads of telescopes that are used professionally.

17:19 And we went to use one called the Isaac Newton Telescope.

17:21 And we were looking at galaxies with growing super massive black holes,

17:25 which we can get to.

17:27 Basically, I remember, you don't look through this telescope like it's so big

17:31 that there isn't an eyepiece because you're seeing like, it's so big.

17:35 So you can see really faint things.

17:36 So actually you wouldn't be able to see anything with your eye.

17:39 You need the camera on the back of the telescope to basically open the shutter.

17:43 Transfer the information.

17:45 And just absorb light over like, you know, minutes to hours, basically,

17:49 to collect enough light to be able to actually get something on an image.

17:53 And I remember like the first galaxy we looked at, it

17:56 was a 20 minute exposure and it was almost like really anticlimactic,

18:02 sort of just being like typing a command into the computer being like,

18:05 go and I being like.

18:06 Okay.

18:06 I guess I'll just wait 20 minutes.

18:07 Wait 20 minutes.

18:08 Yeah.

18:08 So what did everyone have for breakfast?

18:11 Yeah.

18:11 But there, oh no it was like, "What music are we gonna put,

18:13 are we gonna play?" You know what I mean,

18:15 my colleagues were like arguing over which musical we were gonna put on.

18:18 That's an important question.

18:19 Yeah.

18:20 But then after 20 minutes, my colleague Brook, she was like,

18:23 "Oh, the date is up." And I was like,

18:26 "Oh cool." And I looked at this screen and was like,

18:30 I just couldn't quite believe it.

18:33 Like this thing that had been this tiny fuzzy smudge

18:35 on like the finder screen where it was like, okay,

18:37 we know we have to be this much offset from this really bright star,

18:40 and there's maybe something there but we can see it.

18:42 And then all of a sudden it was resolved

18:43 into this amazing like spiral shaped thing and I was just like,

18:50 "What?" (laughs) Like, I think because it had been so anticlimactic

18:54 when we typed in the command to then

18:56 have this thing just be realized in something

18:59 that almost looked like a Hubble Space Telescope photo.

19:01 Which I think, you know,

19:03 I'd grown up seeing so many Hubble images that they'd become so iconic.

19:08 And so just like ingrained in your brain that this was something that, you know,

19:12 like incredibly insanely clever people did at NASA and ESA and you know?

19:16 And all of a sudden, yeah, we had a very pixelated,

19:18 you know, version of that 'cause the telescope we were using,

19:21 you know, was looking through the atmosphere and Hubble isn't,

19:24 so you get all like the blurring from the atmosphere.

19:26 But I was just that like, "We did that.

19:29 Like we took that."- Wow.

19:31 And it was a really emotional moment for me because it was

19:34 like the first like professional piece of observing I'd done as well.

19:37 And even though I'd been a year in academia

19:39 at that point during my PhD and then obviously, you know, all the time before,

19:42 it was that moment that I felt like I was like,

19:44 "Oh, I'm really like an astrophysicist now."- This is serious now.

19:49 Yeah.

19:50 If you were to show that image to your friends and loved ones

19:54 and show it with the level of excitement as you're describing it today,

19:58 would they just go, "What?"- Yeah.

20:01 Because first of all it'd be black and white and they'd be like, "Huh,

20:03 why is it black and white?"- I think about it when parents,

20:05 I mean, especially back in the day, maybe now the images are better,

20:08 when they're showing an ultrasound of their baby and they go,

20:11 "Look." And you're looking at static and you're like,

20:13 "Oh wow, that's a beautiful baby."- Yeah, where is the baby?

20:17 Yeah.

20:17 So especially like med student,

20:20 you're training them to take a look and there's nothing to be seen really.

20:23 Yeah, I know.

20:24 I think the image they could probably appreciate.

20:26 It would be black and white because the telescope is really just record,

20:30 is there light there, is there not light there?

20:32 So it's black and white.

20:33 When they make the beautiful like Hubble

20:35 Space Telescope images with all the color,

20:37 what they're doing is they take an image through filters.

20:40 So they've set say, only let in the wavelengths

20:43 of light that give us red colors,

20:45 that give us green colors, that give us blue colors.

20:47 And then you can add them together because you have

20:49 an RGB image and that's how you get something nice and colorful.

20:52 Wow.

20:52 So we just took a black and white image 'cause we didn't need color,

20:55 we just needed it through a single filter.

20:57 And I think they could appreciate that.

20:59 The bit they couldn't appreciate was what we also took,

21:01 which was called a spectrum.

21:03 Which was why you split the light through like a prism,

21:05 like into its rainbow of colors.

21:06 Okay.

21:07 And you record, "Okay, how much light of each color have you got?"

21:10 And you can make like a nice graph where it's like,

21:11 "Oh, look at all these like sharp peaks and whatever."- Sure.

21:13 But the raw data almost looks like TV static.

21:16 Really?

21:17 Like, it's literally just like a strip like this.

21:19 Okay.

21:19 And it's like there's a brighter patch where

21:21 there's a big spike from a certain color,

21:23 which is from hydrogen that's giving off a very specific color of light.

21:26 And basically you are looking for that really

21:29 bright like stripe in the image that you know,

21:31 "Oh, there's hydrogen kind of thing." And this, if

21:34 I showed that to my family, they'd be like.

21:36 What are we looking at?

21:37 What even is that?

21:38 Like, they'd just be like, "This is nothing." And I'd be like, "What,

21:41 but this is hydrogen around a black hole."- Do you get

21:43 to a level where someone can pass you one and you go,

21:47 "You got it?" Like there, it's like-- Yeah.

21:49 You know when a, God, I'm making the worst analogies.

21:52 Like someone gives you a rare Pokemon card.

21:54 You're like that's the Illustrator first edition.

21:57 Yeah, that's a Shiny Mewtwo.

21:58 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

21:59 No, I have that with, there's a, so they recently launched James Webb Telescope.

22:05 I say recently, it was Christmas 2021.

22:07 That feels recent.

22:07 Oh, that's recent.

22:08 It's recent for us.

22:08 Yeah.

22:09 In 13.8 billion years of the universe's lifetime.

22:11 That's astrophysically recent.

22:12 Exactly, yeah.

22:13 But yeah, so The James Webb Space Telescope launched and it basically

22:17 broke so many records of like the most distant thing ever seen.

22:22 And the way they do it is you're basically

22:24 looking for a really sharp drop off in light.

22:26 Because essentially there's been a lot of clouds of gas

22:28 that have absorbed all of that light in the interim.

22:31 So from the first time that absorption happened,

22:34 you can pinpoint how far away it is.

22:36 And so you're really looking for like brightness,

22:37 brightness, brightness, and then nothing.

22:40 And so it's really fun when you see these like

22:43 raw spectrum and people get it and it's like,

22:44 "Look at that, look at what wave length is

22:45 that."- Is there a Guinness World Record for how far?

22:48 Yeah, oh, what is, I think it's like 14 point- 14.1,

22:51 the redshift I think of the most.

22:54 I need a number.

22:54 I know, I'm trying to work out.

22:56 What does 14.1 mean?

22:57 It means like a stretch factor.

22:58 So it's like how much the light has

23:00 been stretched by the expansion of the universe.

23:03 And it translates-- Sure.

23:04 I think this is off the top of my head,

23:06 but I think it translates to about 13.5 billion years.

23:10 Wow.

23:11 Like in time in terms of that's how

23:12 long the light's been traveling through the universe.

23:14 So that's kinda like how far away it is, 13.5 billion light years.

23:17 And then you translate that to be like, "Okay,

23:19 well the universe is 13.8 billion years old." So we're seeing that galaxy

23:23 as it was when the universe was only 300 million years old.

23:27 Which seems like a massive number,

23:28 but in terms of astrophysics, like that's really young.

23:31 That's like, you know,

23:32 just as the first sort of like galaxies and stars were forming.

23:36 This is pretty heady.

23:37 You can lose yourself.

23:38 Oh yeah.

23:39 Brainstorming in this scenario.

23:42 Yeah.

23:43 Does it stay that feeling that you

23:45 described in looking through this Canary Islands telescope?

23:47 Or is it like, again, terrible analogy, so I'm gonna apologize for all of these.

23:53 When you move into an apartment with a nice view and you go,

23:56 "I love this view." And then two years into living there,

23:59 you haven't looked at the view once.

24:00 Is it like that?

24:03 I think you can get a bit complacent, especially with the numbers involved.

24:06 Like you can get very like oh billion, 10 million, whatever.

24:08 It means nothing, you know?

24:09 But it does.

24:11 I think in terms of telescopes,

24:13 I'm never tired of JWST images or there's a, there was a really cool

24:18 tool on one of the, what's called the Very Large Telescope in Chile that like

24:22 everybody in my field like drools over every time we see data from it

24:25 and like every time I'm in like a talk and someone shows up that data,

24:28 I'm still like, "Yeah, that's really cool and I wish I had that data," you know?

24:32 So I think there is some aspect of that to some extent.

24:37 But I still think- I think to be in academia and to be in like research,

24:43 you have to love it.

24:45 Otherwise you just.

24:46 You'll burn out.

24:47 Well, yeah.

24:47 Or you'll just be like, "I don't care," you know.

24:48 You'll be like the red star, not the blue star.

24:50 Yeah, exactly.

24:51 So.

24:53 Wow, that's so interesting because my head where I would be

24:57 so curious is to think about the human side of it all.

25:02 Do you ever consider that the areas that you're looking are looking back at you?

25:10 Ooh, no, I have never even thought about that.

25:12 Oh, okay.

25:12 That's so cool though.

25:14 Yeah, like, I think I think about it when,

25:17 so I don't work in the field of exoplanets,

25:19 which is the search for planets around other stars in our galaxy,

25:22 our milky way, of like a hundred billion stars.

25:26 But there are people that do this and like

25:28 their express sort of like research field is finding planets.

25:31 And it's cool how they do it.

25:32 Like they can look for like planets passing in front of stars

25:34 and there's star dips in brightness and it does it like repeatedly.

25:38 So you're like, "Oh, there's a planet there." Which is really fun.

25:40 And I feel like when I think about that side of things, I think, "Ooh,

25:45 but could there be life on those planets like looking back at us and going,

25:50 'Oh hey, there's a planet around that star over

25:52 there.'" And it's Jupiter that they've found, you know?

25:53 Yeah.

25:54 Like that's kind of cool.

25:55 So do you think there is life on other planets?

25:57 I think there kind of has to be somewhere.

25:59 There has to be.

25:59 Yeah.

25:59 I think there has to be, like,

26:01 if you think about the fact that there are, well, eight planets around the sun.

26:05 The sun is one-- We lost one, right?

26:08 We lost one, I'm so sorry, yeah.

26:10 Pluto is a dwarf planet.

26:12 He's the king of the dwarf planets though.

26:14 Oh, that's kind of cool.

26:14 So I kind of feel like-- Does that mean something also like the?

26:18 The dwarf planet?

26:19 Star colors?

26:19 Does king mean something?

26:22 In star colors, no, I don't think there's a king of the stars.

26:24 I guess-- Well, no, no, is there a king of the dwarf planet?

26:26 Like what makes him the king?

26:28 Well, he's the biggest.

26:29 Ah.

26:29 So he is the king of the dwarfs, is the joke, yeah.

26:31 Got it, okay.

26:32 So yeah.

26:32 And what's a dwarf planet?

26:34 Basically anything that's not, so there's three definitions for a planet.

26:37 It has to be orbiting the sun, it has to be round and not like a potato shape.

26:42 Why, why is that important?

26:44 So when things get big enough so that gravity

26:47 essentially can take over to like shape things,

26:49 it will naturally make a round shape.

26:51 Because we think about like if you

26:52 had a cube-- And gravity is important because,

26:56 hard to start life without gravity?

26:58 Yeah, I mean, planet definition doesn't really take into account life.

27:02 You can have a planet without life.

27:03 Got it.

27:04 It's more so kind of things like how do

27:06 we classify what is a planet versus like an asteroid?

27:09 Because asteroids are kind of like lumpy potatoes.

27:11 Got it.

27:12 In shape, right?

27:13 So why are they lumpy potatoes?

27:14 Well, they're not big enough for gravity to have

27:16 taken a hold to be like, oh, you know,

27:19 it's weird that there's a skinnier bit here where there's less gravity between

27:23 the surface and the center versus like it's a cigar shape and there's,

27:26 you know, like a less of a pull into the center.

27:29 Got it.

27:29 So basically gravity will naturally round stuff over time.

27:32 So that's like a second criteria.

27:34 And the third criteria, which is the thing that killed Pluto,

27:36 is that it has to have cleared its orbit.

27:38 Like it has to be the like only thing in its orbit,

27:43 which for Pluto, Pluto actually-- Feels pretty egotistical.

27:45 Well yeah.

27:46 Maybe Pluto's just really down to Earth.

27:48 Maybe.

27:49 Literally.

27:50 Literally.

27:51 But Pluto crosses Neptune's orbit.

27:53 It actually gets closer to the sun than Neptune,

27:56 like average distance from the sun occasionally.

27:58 And also there's a lot of other stuff around Pluto.

28:00 It's also technically a binary planet, Pluto.

28:03 So it's like moon, which is called,

28:06 I don't know how you pronounce it, Charon, Chiron.

28:09 I'm not entirely sure.

28:11 But it's like, there's many ways to pronounce it.

28:12 Like Beetlejuz can be pronounce Betelgeuse.

28:14 It's kinda like-- Can it?

28:15 Whatever you-- Can it, can, it?

28:16 Can it, can it?

28:17 Yeah it can.

28:17 If you wanna pronounce it that way, pronounce it that way, it's fine.

28:20 I mean you can, but you'd be wrong, it's okay.

28:21 No, I think it's like, it's totally fine.

28:23 I think both are allowed.

28:24 Okay, can it, okay.

28:25 But yeah, but Pluto is a binary planet

28:26 because like Charon's not that much smaller than Pluto.

28:29 So what happens is, instead of like,

28:33 because when something orbits another thing,

28:36 it's not like the thing in the middle is static, right?

28:38 The sun is not static as the planets orbit it,

28:40 the planets pull on the sun slightly as well.

28:43 So the same is true for the moon on Earth.

28:44 It pulls on the on Earth, that's why we have like-- Tides.

28:47 The tides.

28:48 And so for Pluto and Charon, Charon is so, you know,

28:51 not just like small compared to its planet in the way that the moon is to Earth.

28:55 It's a very comparable size, which means that they orbit a position between them

29:00 rather than something that's like in the center of Pluto.

29:03 And so the two of them are sort of going round each other.

29:06 So it's not-- How do we make that mistake,

29:08 initially when we did call it a planet?

29:10 I think because-- Because people like me

29:12 in the seventh grade were quite disappointed- I know.

29:14 To lose the planet.

29:15 I was disappointed too.

29:16 It's like we're losing a piece of the solar system.

29:18 Yeah, I know, it was sad.

29:19 I love how Mike Brown, who's like a astrophysicist,

29:22 his handle is Pluto killer because he was like one of the main people that like.

29:27 That should be his license plate on his car, for sure.

29:29 I love that he just took ownership of it.

29:30 He's like, people are gonna hate me for it, I might as well.

29:33 So yeah, I think the reason, was just 'cause,

29:35 I mean, it was discovered in the thirties, Pluto.

29:38 It was predicted that there was something out past

29:41 the orbit of Neptune because Neptune's orbit was a bit weird.

29:44 So people were actively looking for a planet anyway beyond Neptune.

29:48 And then Pluto was found and it was a really fun story how Pluto was found.

29:51 'Cause we actually observed Pluto like 10 years before.

29:54 Like there's what's called pre-discovery images where

29:57 people had actually like taken observations with telescopes.

30:01 And once Pluto's position and orbit were known,

30:03 people were able to go back and go, "Oh, look there it was in that image and we

30:06 just missed it the whole time."- Wow, okay.

30:07 You know, but it's 'cause it was so tiny and so faint for telescopes back then.

30:11 So when it was first found,

30:12 it was actually thought to be a lot bigger because Pluto is not enough

30:17 to pull on Neptune's orbit to make it weird in the way Neptune's orbit is.

30:20 It's not really very, no planet orbit is circular,

30:23 but at Neptune's orbit is a, is very like elliptical compared to the others.

30:27 And so it was like, "Okay, there must be something pulling on Neptune,

30:30 something else big like Neptune." So we discovered Pluto and people were like,

30:33 "Oh, here's a thing that we found." It's

30:35 just a faint dot of light in images, right?

30:38 So it's like, okay from its brightness,

30:40 you estimate a rough size, a rough mass as we say.

30:45 And people are like, "Oh,

30:45 it must be the thing that's pulling on Neptune's orbit.

30:47 So it must be this big, it must be as big as Neptune at least."

30:49 And so it was overestimated already from the beginning.

30:53 And then as more observations were taken of how bright it was.

30:56 And I'm not entirely sure how they ended up getting it.

30:58 Like is it the actual size from brightness,

31:00 I think from other telescopes, they whittled it down.

31:03 They're like, "Oh, it's actually much smaller."- Wow.

31:05 Poor Pluto.

31:06 [Dr.

31:06 Becky] Yeah, poor Pluto, yeah.

31:07 It's always the Mikes that are killing the planets.

31:09 I blame them all.

31:11 So we got off the topic of life.

31:14 Oh yeah.

31:15 Yeah so, people are looking at trying to discover new planets.

31:20 Dumb question.

31:21 Why can life only be on a planet versus on a star?

31:26 I mean on a star?

31:28 I guess it would just be the temperature.

31:31 [Doctor Mike] Mm.

31:32 A star also doesn't really have a surface.

31:34 It's, you know, it's a plasma as well that stars are made of.

31:37 We talk about balls of gas when we talk about stars,

31:38 but it's actually like the fourth state of matter, which is like ionized gas.

31:43 Ionized gas.

31:44 So you know, you've taken the electrons from the orbits

31:47 around atoms and separated them from the centers of atoms.

31:51 So the center of atoms and electrons are just roaming freely.

31:55 We have plasma on Earth, like neon signs are plasma, essentially, that glow.

31:58 Okay.

31:59 That you get as a plasma.

31:59 So it's a weird state of matter.

32:01 So I feel like in terms of what we, at least what we know about life.

32:05 Life, yeah.

32:07 Like a plasma of extremely hot matter is not the place that you will find it.

32:11 However, never say never.

32:13 Yeah.

32:14 You know?

32:15 Because that would be a cool.

32:17 It would, yeah.

32:18 Discovery.

32:18 It would, yeah.

32:19 Like a little amoeba esque thing flying around the plasma.

32:22 That like the plot of "Project Hail Mary".

32:24 So if you like that idea, read the book or watch the film.

32:27 There you go.

32:28 But yeah, so in terms of like, but you could have life on a moon.

32:30 So we are actively looking for life in places like.

32:33 Oh, what makes a moon a moon versus

32:35 a planet because it kind of looks like a planet.

32:37 Yeah, so a moon is just orbiting a planet rather than orbiting a star.

32:40 And you get fuzzy potatoy shaped moons like Mars' moons,

32:44 Deimos and Phobos are basically captured

32:46 asteroids that just are like lumpy potatoes.

32:48 Whereas like Jupiter's moons,

32:51 like some of them are bigger than like our moon, you know?

32:54 And almost the same size as Pluto.

32:56 So you know, they kind of a fuzzy

32:59 boundary except it's just they're orbiting a planet.

33:01 Got it.

33:01 But we're actively looking for life in places like Enceladus,

33:05 which is a moon of Saturn.

33:06 How do you do that?

33:09 So.

33:11 There's a couple of different ways.

33:12 A lot of the time we're sending probes to those planets, sorry, to those moons.

33:16 The Cassini probe for example, that was in orbit around Saturn for a very

33:20 long time and gave like those incredible images of Saturn.

33:22 And also, you know, the pale blue dot image,

33:24 which I dunno if you've seen it, but it's like,

33:26 it's a picture of Saturn looking back towards the sun and the Earth

33:29 is just this tiny blue dot-- I think I've seen it, yeah.

33:32 It's beautiful.

33:33 So Cassini was in orbit for a long time

33:35 and it flew through these plumes of sort of like,

33:39 almost like an ice volcano that's coming from Enceladus,

33:42 like from in like this like crust.

33:44 So there's an icy crust on the outside and we think there's liquid

33:46 water underneath it because there's this sort

33:48 of like plume coming out from Enceladus.

33:51 And so it flew through the plumes and was like, "Oh yeah,

33:54 there's water in there." That's really exciting for life as we know it at least.

33:57 'Cause we know that all life pretty much needs water.

34:00 And also looked for things like, you know, organic molecules that make up life,

34:05 you know, like proteins and things like this, that we need for life.

34:07 And we can also do similar things with telescopes

34:11 from the ground or from space as well.

34:12 We can actually look at those kind of plumes

34:14 if we can resolve them with our telescopes and we

34:16 can say what is the light that's reflecting off

34:19 those plumes giving us in terms of like the fingerprint,

34:23 like what's been, so if you have

34:24 a molecule in something that's reflecting light,

34:27 it can leave like a fingerprint on a light.

34:29 Oh, okay.

34:29 So we know that it's there.

34:30 So there's a couple of different ways you can do

34:31 it in terms of like stuff in our own solar system.

34:34 One of the missions I'm really excited for actually

34:36 is a, like a drone mission to Titan,

34:39 which is one of the moons of Saturn, which will be really, really cool.

34:42 It's literally gonna like,

34:43 it's called Dragonfly and it's gonna like hop around Titan.

34:45 And that's kinda looking for life is we don't know it.

34:48 Okay.

34:49 So like life that, instead of needing water might

34:51 need like ammonia or something to live-- Oh, interesting.

34:54 Instead.

34:54 Or methane.

34:56 Okay.

34:56 So that'd be fun.

34:57 In terms of on like exoplanets, so like planets orbiting other stars.

35:02 Yeah, that's probably harder.

35:03 It's a lot harder, a lot harder.

35:05 But it's one of the things that the James Web Space

35:08 Telescope got built for and it's really cool what they can do.

35:11 They basically wait for the planet to pass in front of the star

35:14 and then a tiny amount of starlight will pass through the atmosphere.

35:18 And again, the molecules in the atmosphere

35:19 will leave like a fingerprint on the light.

35:21 They will like absorb a tiny little color

35:23 of light away that then we can isolate and go,

35:27 "Is that molecule present in that atmosphere?"- Mm.

35:30 Obviously that's a lot easier when you've got a really thick atmosphere,

35:32 something like Jupiter.

35:34 Like you can be like, "Yeah, what a really strong signal." Something like Earth,

35:38 which has, you know, this tiny thin atmosphere, right?

35:41 That we're all just, you know,

35:42 cocooned by, but it's just this tiny thing, right?

35:45 It's not really very thick.

35:46 Like it's a very weak signal.

35:49 And so there's been a lot of like efforts

35:51 for trying to, for like rocky planets that we

35:53 know of, like Earth-like planets that we know

35:55 of, trying to figure out what's in the atmosphere.

35:58 But the data is just so-- Weak.

36:01 Noisy and weak.

36:02 And yeah, it just- I mean,

36:04 it's amazing what techniques can do, but at the same time,

36:07 like there's a massive argument at the minute,

36:08 for example, going on about a planet called K2-18b.

36:12 Fun name, I know, but named after stars.

36:14 Stars are named after catalog names.

36:16 So yeah.

36:17 Okay.

36:17 Which is like, is it like a water world

36:19 and does it have this molecule called dimethyl sulfide,

36:23 which is only produced by bacteria here on Earth or industry.

36:26 Like does it have that in its atmosphere?

36:28 A lot of people are claiming yes it does, the data says it does.

36:30 And other people are like, "No.

36:31 You can describe the same data with a flat line.

36:34 There's nothing there." So it's like

36:35 a really interesting debate that's going on.

36:37 Interesting.

36:37 But it also, it raises this question of like,

36:39 even if we did believe we'd made that detection of like,

36:41 here is this thing in a planet's atmosphere that points to life,

36:46 doesn't necessarily mean that there's life there.

36:48 Because-- There could have been.

36:49 There could have been.

36:50 Or even there could be some chemistry that's going on that we don't know about.

36:53 The early stages of life?

36:55 Or yeah, exactly.

36:56 And I think this is one thing that people don't think about is the timing.

37:00 'Cause like if you think about,

37:00 Earth's been around four and a half billion years,

37:03 we've been around a few hundred thousand of that, maybe.

37:08 Life has been around for a long time obviously-- I struggled to even like,

37:10 what do you do with these numbers, right, like?

37:12 I can think of 50 years.

37:15 Yeah.

37:16 Maybe 200.

37:17 Yeah.

37:17 But like what does it mean when you say these numbers?

37:19 Yeah.

37:19 Okay, the best way I always think about it is actually in time, right?

37:22 Is if you think about like, I think it's like a million seconds.

37:25 Yeah, okay-- Is around week.

37:26 That's a good one, that's a good one.

37:27 But 30 like a million seconds is around a week.

37:29 But a billion seconds is around 30 years.

37:31 Yes.

37:31 Right?

37:32 Now it's even longer than that.

37:33 It's even, I don't know?

37:33 Yeah, I think it brings you back to like the 17 or 18 hundreds.

37:36 Okay, yeah.

37:37 Yeah, so like if you rewind a million, God, is it seconds or minutes?

37:42 Maybe that's why, maybe you're doing seconds.

37:44 Maybe we do seconds and you do minutes, yeah.

37:46 But that's insane.

37:46 But yeah, okay, so how do you, what's your trick?

37:48 So you, that's how you measure the time?

37:50 That's how I measure it, yeah.

37:51 And like that's why, you know, when they talk about like,

37:54 you know, if you put like the Earth's history on a clock, right?

37:57 We've literally been here for like the last

37:59 two minutes or something of the 24 hour day.

38:01 When you say put on a clock?

38:03 Oh, so like if you put the 4.5 billion years of like the Earth's history.

38:06 Okay.

38:07 Into a 24 hour day.

38:08 Like I think humans have been around for like the last like minute if that.

38:13 Wow.

38:13 Like we've barely been around.

38:15 And if you think about how long we've been either sending stuff to space

38:18 or looking at the stars and actually able to make sense of them.

38:21 Yeah, it's even worse.

38:21 Like it's even, it's only in the last a hundred years

38:23 we thought we knew that like other galaxies existed beyond our own.

38:27 We thought the entire universe was just our Milky

38:29 Way Galaxy of a few hundred billion stars.

38:32 So when you think of it like that, in terms of how long we've been

38:35 around for like the likelihood of not

38:37 just there being life elsewhere in our galaxy,

38:41 but also that it would be at the same stage of evolution as us.

38:46 Same point of time.

38:46 You know, it might have already, you know,

38:47 like it might still be evolving, it might still, it might be amoeba,

38:51 it might have evolved and like peaked and already crashed again and you know,

38:54 wiped out its planet or something like that, right?

38:56 So when I think about sort of like,

38:58 do I think life exists out there in the universe?

39:00 I'm like, "Yes, I think it kind of has to in terms of like the statistics

39:04 of there are hundreds of billions of stars

39:06 in the Milky Way."- And the timeframe.

39:08 The sun is just one star.

39:09 Yeah.

39:09 And you're not saying that there is life outside this planet right now.

39:13 No, that's the thing.

39:14 Yeah.

39:14 Exactly, it's like it doesn't have to be.

39:15 So you're hedging in a way that really gives you a lot of flexibility.

39:19 Exactly.

39:19 And also if you think about how many

39:21 galaxies of stars there are beyond our galaxy.

39:23 Right.

39:23 You know, the latest count puts it around 2 trillion.

39:26 Yeah, and that's-- In the observable universe.

39:28 And they all have a hundred billion stars with planets.

39:31 Something's going on.

39:32 Like something is going on.

39:33 We cannot be the only ones.

39:34 I think it would be just like arrogant of us to assume

39:35 that we're the only place that like the right conditions for life were there.

39:40 But also like it might be life not as we know it.

39:41 You know, it might need some other solvent instead of water to evolve.

39:46 You know, it might be sulfuric acid or something, you know?

39:49 It could be anything.

39:50 Maybe they're like alcohol and they live off alcohol.

39:52 Yeah.

39:52 You know?

39:53 So.

39:53 Oh, we have this thing in exoplanet science,

39:56 which is called the habitable zone, which is like the Goldilocks zone,

39:58 you know, where it's like it's not too hot and it's not too cold for life.

40:02 Right.

40:02 If you had a planet there around a star.

40:05 My PhD supervisor has a thing called the really habitable zone,

40:09 which is the zone in a galaxy where you would

40:12 have the molecules to make alcohol and quinine and citric acid.

40:17 Okay.

40:17 So that you could make a gin and tonic.

40:19 (laughs)- Nice, and protect yourself from malaria.

40:22 There you go.

40:22 It's like a win, win, win.

40:23 In case some mosquitoes hang out.

40:25 And also scurvy.

40:26 (both laughing)- It's true.

40:28 What is, since you're an evidence-based person.

40:32 Yeah.

40:33 What is the strongest level of evidence that there is life outside of-- Oh yeah,

40:37 I don't-- Is there any?

40:38 I don't think we have any at the moment.

40:39 None, so like not light somewhere, not a Goldilocks zone.

40:43 No.

40:43 Nothing?

40:44 Nothing.

40:44 And this is the thing,

40:45 the burden of evidence for proving that there's life elsewhere is huge.

40:48 Do you think maybe not just the US,

40:51 the UK, et cetera, are hiding evidence of aliens?

40:55 No.

40:55 No, not at all.

40:57 Why?

40:58 Because I don't think you'd be able to keep that secret.

40:59 'Cause I think scientists, if we ever discovered that there was life that had

41:02 visitors here would absolutely shout about it from the rooftops.

41:05 Mm.

41:05 And I think there is,

41:06 I think what happens with misinformation around this topic is really getting

41:11 across the difference between actual alien life versus what is a UFO.

41:18 A UFO is just unidentified flying object.

41:20 It could quite literally be anything.

41:23 And there are so many phenomena that we don't

41:25 understand and we haven't explained yet that it, you know?

41:29 You know, you see these things.

41:30 Oh, it's a video of like a ball of light and it's moving.

41:32 Yeah.

41:32 Yeah, have you ever heard of ball lightning

41:34 or like plasma balls and things like this?

41:36 What?

41:37 They just, yeah.

41:37 They're a thing, tight?

41:39 Hit me.

41:39 Yeah.

41:40 Plasma balls?

41:40 Plasma balls are a thing, yeah.

41:41 What's a plasma ball?

41:43 So a plasma is, we talked about it, right, it's a gas that's been charged.

41:46 So you're taking the electrons away from the-- They're kind of free floating?

41:50 Atoms and they're free floating.

41:51 Yeah, and so when that happens, you can,

41:54 they travel through the atmosphere very fast,

41:56 you can actually get light from it.

41:57 You can actually make this, I wouldn't recommend doing it.

41:59 It's one of these things like, "Don't try this at home,

42:01 kids." Maybe look up a YouTube video of where

42:03 you can make plasma balls like in a microwave

42:05 with like two grapes next to each other because

42:07 they have like ions between them that create this.

42:10 And it's the most bizarre thing you will ever see.

42:13 Why are grapes doing this?

42:14 I actually don't know why grapes.

42:15 I don't know if it's just because they're small

42:17 enough to fit into a microwave or if it's

42:19 like the specific nature of the skins perhaps gives

42:21 it like a, like an ionization potential between it.

42:24 But it's grapes.

42:25 But it looks bizarre, right?

42:27 It's like it moves in the most like alien, for want of a better word way.

42:32 Like some way that is completely foreign to us.

42:33 'Cause we don't experience plasma day to day.

42:36 We have solids, we have liquids, we have gases.

42:38 We don't have the kind of like temperatures

42:41 that you need or like pressures or whatever, for plasma.

42:45 And so it's one of these things where it's

42:47 like if you have the right atmospheric conditions though, then this can happen.

42:51 So that could be one explanation for UFO's.

42:53 So you're saying it's the noise that you hear late at night at your house.

42:58 The odds are that it's an intruder is very low.

43:01 It's probably the wind.

43:03 The creaking wood.

43:04 Exactly.

43:05 The plasma ball.

43:06 Yeah.

43:06 Something else.

43:07 Exactly, and that's why I think just like the burden of evidence is so high.

43:10 It's this like the, if you say this all the time, right?

43:13 It's like the, if you hear hooves, it's horses not zebras, right?

43:18 Yeah.

43:18 Which is imperfect by the way.

43:20 Sure, 'cause sometimes it's zebras.

43:21 Yeah, and you have to-- Yeah.

43:23 Not write off and keep the zebras in mind.

43:25 And it's based on your prior of, you know, where are you in the world?

43:28 'Cause if you're in Africa, it probably is gonna be Zebras.

43:31 Yeah, for sure, easily.

43:32 Some parts, anyway.

43:33 Yeah.

43:33 So if you're in Serengeti National Park, it's probably Zebras.

43:35 So you gotta think about it.

43:37 Sure.

43:37 Yeah.

43:38 But yeah, the burden of evidence for finding life in the universe is very high.

43:41 But also it's just kinda like if something like

43:44 this, we did have evidence of a, something that was crashed,

43:46 I don't think you'd be able to ever keep it a secret.

43:49 Especially not for as long as it's been claimed

43:53 to be and things like this, you know, so.

43:54 And then one to 10, how fake is the moon landing?

44:00 What's my scale here?

44:01 What's one and what's 10?

44:02 Because I know basically the moon landing is not fake.

44:05 One is plasma ball and 10 is dwarf planet.

44:09 Still doesn't make any sense, Mike.

44:11 (laughs)- Well, that's exactly right.

44:14 Given the fact that this conspiracy theory doesn't make sense.

44:17 I know, this conspiracy theory doesn't make sense at all, exactly.

44:20 And I think it's one of those things that it's just,

44:22 again, a massive misunderstanding of like, yeah, people are like,

44:25 "But we sent astronauts in a tin can to the moon." It's like,

44:28 "Yeah, 'cause that's all you needed." Like proportion is a solved problem.

44:32 You literally just need to throw something that way to go that way, right?

44:35 And you didn't need like computers to do this.

44:38 The maths is something we've known for a very long time,

44:42 and yet it was a lot of effort by a lot of people.

44:45 But it was doable.

44:47 And again, this is just, if it had have been fake,

44:50 you don't think Russia would've been like,

44:52 "Actually it was fake, they didn't beat us."- Yeah, yeah.

44:54 You know what I mean?

44:54 Like, it's just, it's one of those crazy things, right?

44:57 And I know that it is bizarre that we did this before a lot of the modern tech,

45:02 like technology that we've become to be so reliant on.

45:05 But it just was really that simple,

45:08 as just fire something up on a load of fuel and you'll go that way.

45:10 Do you have to answer that question sometimes

45:13 on your social media, do you get it?

45:15 I see it.

45:16 Or you passed it already?

45:17 I feel like I get a lot more flat Earth than I do moon conspiracy.

45:23 In what sense?

45:25 I get a lot of space is fake.

45:27 The Earth is flat.

45:28 Like NASA and all scientists are lying to you.

45:32 Oh.

45:32 And I'm like, okay,- Where do you think that's coming from?

45:36 I don't, I think it's a mistrust of government.

45:38 I think it possibly stems from, because a lot of space

45:40 research is funded through government agencies like NASA and ESA.

45:43 Obviously a lot of-- And is that because there's not much profit to be made?

45:46 So like capitalistic companies are not gonna

45:48 go invest in something they can't monetize?

45:51 Probably, yeah.

45:51 Something like that.

45:52 But it's just, I think what's strange about it

45:55 is you see people like doing experiments that they design,

45:59 like we're gonna show that the Earth is flat and you know,

46:01 they design it in this specific way and they send it up,

46:04 but then they're almost ignoring the evidence

46:06 that's then in front of them, you know?

46:09 Like what?

46:09 Give me an example.

46:11 I mean, I don't really engage with a lot of this content, so.

46:13 That's impressive.

46:14 I can't think about it for-- See,

46:16 I don't have a choice these days with all the vaccine stuff that's happening.

46:18 Yeah, that is true.

46:19 You have to do it.

46:19 That is my flat Earth.

46:20 This is the thing, yeah.

46:20 Like I think the vaccine thing has become so like mainstream and widespread

46:26 that so many people are talking about it that you almost have to.

46:29 Yeah, like I try to think about the one

46:31 difference between the two subjects in that, those who disbelief

46:36 that the Earth or those who believe that the Earth

46:39 is flat don't have any negative repercussions to their daily lives.

46:44 Right.

46:44 From that belief.

46:45 Yes.

46:45 So they can believe it.

46:46 Yeah.

46:47 They can feel happy about it no one's gonna really challenge them on it.

46:50 No.

46:50 But when you disbelieve in vaccines, in germ theory.

46:54 Yeah.

46:54 You start creating negative impact not just for yourself,

46:58 but for your own children.

46:59 And then for society as a whole, because outbreaks start happening,

47:03 then viruses mutating and start impacting other geography.

47:07 And because we're so interconnected as a world these days.

47:10 Yeah.

47:11 What happens here happens there.

47:12 What happens there happens here.

47:14 Yeah, so it's so important.

47:15 And I like tap, I just hit my hat to you for that respect because I mean,

47:19 we have the luxury of just kind of being

47:22 able to ignore it a little bit, you know?

47:24 It is funny 'cause like for example,

47:25 in the UK we have the BBC, they have to be impartial.

47:28 The amount of times that me or my colleagues have been like,

47:31 rang up being like, "Oh, have you seen this?

47:33 This like flat Earth news thing?

47:34 You know, we're gonna get them on and then obviously 'cause of impartiality,

47:37 we wanna get someone to debate." And I'm like, "No, it's not a debate.

47:40 Like it, you know, this is something that the Greeks proved.

47:43 Do you think that it's not a good idea to debate flat Earthers?

47:46 Yeah.

47:46 Because it's like, don't engage in a kind of a way.

47:48 You know, it's just kind of like there are

47:50 better uses of our time to not engage, you know?

47:55 When it is simple enough as to prove that the Earth is round, to say, Hey,

48:01 I have a well in Alexandria and you have a well in Athens,

48:05 at what time does the sun directly shine down your well?

48:09 Oh, our time is different because we're around the Earth.

48:13 The Earth is round.

48:15 Right?

48:15 Like, it's not something that's worth time.

48:17 It's not a debate, therefore we don't debate.

48:20 If that makes sense.

48:21 And this is the funny thing about flat Earthers, if you,

48:22 if I've seen some stuff where you talk to them and they're like,

48:25 "Well what do you think about like, Mars?

48:26 Is Mars flat?" And they're like, "Oh no, Mars is round.

48:28 We can see that." And I'm like, so why don't you think the Earth?

48:32 The consistency isn't there.

48:33 Exactly, right.

48:34 Okay.

48:34 Yeah, and so this is one of these things.

48:37 Have you ever heard a really good conspiracy theory about space?

48:40 Oh.

48:42 No.

48:43 (Doctor Mike laughs) I'm trying to think, no.

48:46 You just went full on, no.

48:47 I'm like, no.

48:48 I did enjoy the, do you remember when they launched a Tesla into space?

48:53 Yes.

48:53 Yeah.

48:53 There's a scientific hypothesis called panspermia,

48:57 which is that all life in the universe has

48:59 a common origin and it's travel between star systems on things

49:04 like asteroids and like life on Earth was seeded

49:06 when say an asteroid impacted with Earth and-- Interesting, okay.

49:09 You know, like life was born that way.

49:10 So like little bacteria came to Earth on an asteroid, for example.

49:13 It's not a proven idea, it is just an idea.

49:16 Okay.

49:17 But when the Tesla was launched into space, we were like, "Ah,

49:19 did we just accidentally start panspermia?" Did we

49:23 just send bacteria on a Tesla into space?

49:26 But wait, there's also bacteria on rocket ships, no?

49:28 Well, yeah, exactly.

49:29 Yeah.

49:30 But it was just kinda like most of those things

49:31 that are launched into space go through really,

49:33 really strict like decontamination protocols, for example.

49:36 Oh they do?

49:37 Yeah, yeah.

49:38 Like if you send rover-- So if you send

49:39 a rocket into space and you didn't wash it, that's like bad form.

49:43 Yeah, well think about it.

49:44 Like if you send a rover to Mars, right?

49:47 You send like the Curiosity rover up to Mars

49:48 and it's gonna explore Mars for like a decade.

49:51 Right.

49:51 You know?

49:52 And it has like a little tardigrade, you know,

49:54 a little like tiny life form that we know can survive the vacuum

49:57 of space 'cause we've tested it on the International Space Station and stuff,

50:00 and you send it to Mars and then

50:03 a decade later you are trying to prove is there, or was there life on Mars?

50:07 And you find evidence of that.

50:09 You are like, "Well-"- Did I create it?

50:11 Did that come from the rovers we've sent?

50:14 This is why I actually don't think sending humans to Mars is a good idea.

50:17 Because I think we then, like if we-- Ruin it.

50:20 We're ever gonna answer that question,

50:22 that'd always be the question of, well was it

50:24 because we sent humans and it was like, you know?

50:26 Because humans ruin everything.

50:27 Well yeah, we carry a lot of bacteria in our bodies, so, you know.

50:31 There's a whole galaxy of that in there too.

50:33 Yeah, exactly.

50:33 So that's one of the big issues I think.

50:36 And so I don't think the Tesla went through the same strict

50:39 decontamination protocols that perhaps other agencies

50:42 that would've launched stuff would've gone through.

50:43 That's so scary.

50:45 So I like that sort of like fun.

50:47 It's not really a conspiracy, but I think it's a fun musing of like,

50:50 did we accidentally spoil the universe with life by sending a Tesla into space?

50:54 Yeah, 'cause we sent animals into space, right?

50:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah- There was a dog.

50:58 There was a dog, yeah.

50:58 Monkey or something.

50:59 There was a dog and a monkey that both went up

51:00 in the early space race just to prove that you could survive the g-forces.

51:04 They were sadly never brought back to Earth.

51:06 They died in space.

51:07 Oh.

51:07 Why didn't we bring them back?

51:10 Because we didn't know how at the time.

51:11 Oh, we didn't know how to bring them.

51:12 It was like a, well possibly we did,

51:14 but it was kind of like a, we didn't know if they could even survive

51:16 being brought back in terms of like

51:18 reentry into the atmosphere and things like that.

51:19 So it was kind of a proof of concept that you

51:21 could go up at all and anything could survive being sent up.

51:25 So yeah, like space isn't exempt from the horrors of animal testing either.

51:31 Yeah.

51:31 So.

51:32 Speaking of conspiracy theories, tell me about ATLAS.

51:35 3I/ATLAS?

51:36 3I/ATLAS.

51:36 Yeah, oh my god.

51:37 So this is one of the coolest things that's

51:39 happening I think in astronomy at the moment is,

51:41 it's only in the past couple of years

51:43 that we found what we call interstellar objects.

51:46 So basically like an asteroid or a comet, but not from our own solar system.

51:51 So it's like from another solar system, it's like formed around another star.

51:55 It's been like ejected out of that solar system because you know,

51:58 as things are forming, you've got lumps of rock all clumping together and they

52:01 like interact and they get thrown off, some of them.

52:04 Kinda like, you know, like when you play pool and like they can

52:07 collide together and like one ball goes flying off, one ball stays kinda thing.

52:10 So it'd gone flying off and now we've

52:11 spotted them coming through our own solar system.

52:13 Like we've observed them and we've gone, "Okay,

52:15 we've seen it there that day, there that next day,

52:17 and then there." So we'll work out it's orbit from that and we're like,

52:20 "Oh hang on, this is not orbiting the sun."

52:22 And we realize it's coming from somewhere else.

52:24 And we've seen only three of these things so far.

52:27 And the third thing literally has only been spotted a few months ago.

52:30 And it's 3I, the third interstellar object

52:33 and it was spotted by the Atlas Telescope.

52:35 Okay.

52:36 And it's very, very cool.

52:37 And it has obviously been latched onto by a lot

52:43 of conspiracy theorists and misinformation online and things like this.

52:46 I think because of well-meaning

52:48 scientists publishing things, where they're like,

52:50 "Well, there is a possibility that it could be an alien spacecraft.

52:54 Let's figure out whether it is, you know?"- Right, yeah.

52:57 And all the information we have about this is

52:59 it's brightness and how it's moving and things like that.

53:01 And that's what we're having to go off and they're saying,

53:03 "Oh well you know, it could be,

53:05 you know, because of this specific property."- Sure.

53:08 Could that be, you know,

53:09 a different material to like an asteroid that we've necessarily considered.

53:13 But of course when you publish things like that, they get latched onto,

53:16 they get completely-- The headline gets twisted, yeah.

53:18 Exactly, yeah.

53:19 And then, you know, it's like a game of, you know, so like the whispers game,

53:22 or you know the whispers where you pass

53:23 on like information and it gets complete-- Telephone, yeah.

53:25 Telephone, thank you.

53:26 Yeah.

53:27 Like it just gets completely warped, right?

53:29 Sure.

53:29 So there's a huge amount of misinformation there, but these things are so,

53:32 so cool because they allow us to ask so many questions that we

53:36 can't just ask by studying like asteroids and comets in the solar system.

53:40 'Cause we talk about asteroids as being like rubble,

53:42 like left over from the formation of the solar

53:44 system that didn't make it into becoming a planet.

53:46 So they're kind of like fossil records of like what

53:49 happened like 4 billion years ago and things like this.

53:52 And so we have that fossil record and then when you

53:56 have another object come in from another star system, you think,

53:59 well that's a different fossil record we can

54:01 then compare to and say like have things evolved

54:05 differently in different star systems to give you

54:07 different like properties and different features of the rock.

54:11 There is a big question about whether they get completely, like,

54:14 annihilated by radiation passing between star

54:16 systems and does that completely like,

54:18 you know, invalidate everything that you look at?

54:20 We don't know.

54:21 And it'll only be by finding more of these things that we figure out, you know,

54:25 what do other star systems look like and can we

54:27 even pinpoint it to a different star system and stuff?

54:29 Would we ever go out and capture it?

54:32 Good question.

54:33 There have been, maybe not capture it,

54:34 but send a mission to one maybe like impact with it.

54:38 'Cause by impacting with it you can like throw up a load of, sort

54:41 of like the dust on the surface and maybe you can try and like capture that.

54:45 So there was a mission that did do that sort of like,

54:47 almost like what can I say,

54:48 like high fived an asteroid to throw up a load of stuff-- Nice.

54:50 And then brought it back to Earth.

54:52 So maybe we could try and do that at some

54:54 point and that would be very, very cool.

54:56 The problem is we don't get much

54:57 warning for them because they're interstellar travelers,

55:00 they're moving really quite fast and they're sort of-- Sure.

55:02 Coming directly at us and so they sort of loop round the sun very quickly.

55:06 So mobilizing for something like that.

55:08 Got it.

55:08 You know, usually if you plan a space mission,

55:10 it's gonna take 10 years before launch kind of thing

55:12 and then how long it takes to get there.

55:13 But there is plans in place to sort of have

55:16 one ready for the next one that we spot.

55:19 Ooh, cool, okay.

55:19 But it is very, very fun.

55:20 Like, I was in the office the day that, the day after it was discovered,

55:24 or it was like overnight in the UK.

55:26 So someone literally came in at like nine o'clock in the morning,

55:29 got to their desk and realized this had been spotted overnight.

55:32 And they like ran to my colleague's office next door,

55:36 literally just shouting like, "3I.

55:38 3I, we've got 3I," you know?

55:40 And it's just like, it's so much fun seeing the joy in people's

55:44 faces when a whole new field of science is created by spotting these things.

55:48 Yeah.

55:49 You know?

55:49 Wow.

55:50 What's an emergency in an astrophysicist office?

55:54 It depends what field you're in.

55:55 An emergency can be like,

55:56 usually like if a supernova goes off, if you're a supernova person,

55:58 it can be like, "Quick, quick, quick,

56:00 mobilize." Gotta get another telescope to point at this thing," you know?

56:02 Okay.

56:03 And it's like, who's on what telescope in Hawaii right now?

56:05 You know, can we call in a favor?

56:06 You know, all that kind of stuff.

56:07 That can be a bit of an emergency if

56:10 you're in that kind of what's called a transient field.

56:12 So something that changes in the sky.

56:14 Mm.

56:14 But obviously the classic one would be asteroid.

56:18 Yeah.

56:18 Impacting with Earth kind of emergency.

56:20 Typical movie.

56:21 Yeah.

56:21 Script.

56:22 Yeah, yeah.

56:22 Cool.

56:23 Back to the interview in just a second.

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57:44 All right, let's get back to the interview.

57:45 On your social media, since you're not engaging with flat Earthers,

57:48 are you engaging with misinformation at all?

57:50 Yeah.

57:51 Or are you doing primarily education?

57:52 Like what is your goal with the social media?

57:54 Yeah, I mean, I think it's mostly just sort of like educational.

57:58 So if there are like comments where people have like misunderstood something,

58:02 I'll try and like follow up on that, either in a reply or a comment

58:05 or even like a short form or something like that, you know, when you reply.

58:10 But I think it's not my job to prove to flat Earthers that the Earth is round.

58:15 I think that, like I said, it's like a waste of time that you could

58:18 be talking to someone about a valid scientific theory.

58:20 Right.

58:21 That's really, you know, exciting.

58:23 And I think my job, what I like to think of it as is like,

58:26 you know, most of the time when people have,

58:29 when they engage with space content, it's usually because there's been some

58:32 new discovery or a new telescope launched, or a new image from telescope.

58:36 And then, you know, a journalist will cover it for some news site

58:40 or news channel and do a great job of the sort of like overarching coverage.

58:45 But people might be like, "Yeah, but how did they, you know,

58:47 get that or whatever?" And so I'm sort of cutting out the middleman.

58:51 I'm like, come to me to find out how we did this.

58:53 Right.

58:54 You know, the why we are even doing this.

58:57 And it's sort of like a connection between people who, you know,

59:00 perhaps were like interested in science,

59:02 maybe did science at university-- Like astro-curious.

59:04 Yeah, exactly.

59:05 I think there's a lot of people that love space.

59:07 There's a lot of people that love space.

59:09 And never lose that curiosity as they get older.

59:11 But you know, they didn't do what I

59:13 did and keep following the physics path or whatever.

59:15 And they did, you know,

59:16 go out and do something else but still wanna keep that connection.

59:19 Like what I feel like I do is kind of like,

59:21 we have things called journal clubs in academia where we're like,

59:24 "Oh, this new paper came out,

59:25 should we all talk about it and just chat and what do we think

59:27 of the idea?" It's kind of that, but between me and like-- The audience.

59:32 Someone, the audience.

59:32 Yeah, the public.

59:34 And so I think that's kind of my role is

59:36 to be that like in for people into the field.

59:38 I mean, basically, I mean, I'm been doing what you're doing,

59:40 but for astro instead of medicine, right?

59:42 Yeah.

59:43 So.

59:44 And what questions are people asking you?

59:45 Are they asking you questions that are hypothetical or more

59:48 so things that they've seen happen in the news?

59:50 What's the breakdown there?

59:51 A bit of a mix.

59:52 Yeah, I've got, I get some crazy like, hypothetical questions.

59:54 Yeah, like what?

59:56 You know, like, "Oh, if we crush the Earth down into a black hole,

1:00:00 how big would it be?

1:00:01 Like if we made a black hole in a lab,

1:00:03 would we all get sucked in, you know?" But then also things like,

1:00:08 "You know, why doesn't dark matter," Which is matter we

1:00:11 can't see 'cause it doesn't interact with light in any way.

1:00:15 Like, "Why doesn't that make like dark stars and dark black holes

1:00:18 and things like this?" It just kind of stays in fuzzy balls.

1:00:22 You know, why is that?

1:00:23 And it's like, well we think because of this.

1:00:25 You know, we don't know.

1:00:26 Right.

1:00:27 We don't know what exactly what dark matter is,

1:00:28 but what we do know of it, we think it's this reason.

1:00:30 So it gets like as in depth as that to like fun sort of like,

1:00:35 you know, if I flied a potato into space, how long would it take to come down?

1:00:39 You know, like silly things like this, you know,

1:00:41 it could be-- Yeah, the what if questions of the world.

1:00:42 Exactly, yeah.

1:00:42 Exactly like that.

1:00:44 What is your actual job?

1:00:46 Like?

1:00:48 Yeah.

1:00:48 How would you sum?

1:00:48 If you were writing a one to two sentence resume summary?

1:00:53 Yes, so I like to say that I answer the questions that we

1:00:57 don't know the answer to, specifically on how super massive black holes grow.

1:01:03 So we think there's a super massive black hole at the center of every galaxy.

1:01:06 How did they get that big?

1:01:08 Why are they at the centers of galaxies and what process grew them?

1:01:16 What's a black hole?

1:01:17 Yeah.

1:01:18 That's the million dollar question.

1:01:21 Is that, I feel like you're discounting it.

1:01:23 I feel like it should be a billion or a trillion dollar question.

1:01:25 Yeah, well, yeah, exactly.

1:01:26 So a black hole is, I like to think that we probably misnamed black holes.

1:01:31 Hmm.

1:01:32 I think that actually contributed to a lot

1:01:34 of people's misunderstanding of what they are.

1:01:35 Oh.

1:01:35 how would you name them if you had to rename them?

1:01:37 I'd name it a dark star, I think.

1:01:40 Because black hole gives people a sense of it is a-- Emptiness?

1:01:44 A hole, there is nothing.

1:01:45 Exactly, it's an emptiness, but it's the exact opposite.

1:01:47 It's literally a mountain of matter, is a black hole.

1:01:50 So black mountain.

1:01:51 A black mountain, yes.

1:01:52 But then also they're not really black either.

1:01:54 We can see them kind of.

1:01:55 So they're white mountain.

1:01:58 But yeah.

1:01:59 So a black hole, the off thing is that it's

1:02:02 a region of space so dense that light can't escape.

1:02:06 A region of space.

1:02:08 With so much stuff there.

1:02:09 With so much stuff that light can't penetrate, leave?

1:02:13 Leave, yeah.

1:02:14 Leave.

1:02:15 So if we think about leaving Earth, right?

1:02:17 The reason we can't leave Earth, like if we jump now,

1:02:20 we would not leave the Earth's pull of gravity,

1:02:24 is because we can't jump at a high enough speed to escape it.

1:02:28 Only rockets can, rockets have to be traveling at 11.

1:02:31 And Michael Jordan.

1:02:32 Well, if only.

1:02:33 Sorry, okay.

1:02:34 Yeah, in "Space Jam" maybe.

1:02:36 So yeah, rockets, you know, have to be traveling at the right speed to be

1:02:40 able to actually escape the Earth's pull of gravity.

1:02:43 Right.

1:02:43 And so they have enough speed to do that, fine.

1:02:46 So something heavier like Jupiter, you would have to be traveling even

1:02:52 faster to escape from because it's much heavier.

1:02:55 It's a bigger planet.

1:02:57 Stronger gravitational?

1:02:58 Stronger gravity, exactly.

1:02:59 So imagine just like keep piling matter onto a planet, you know,

1:03:04 until it gets-- Is it a speed that you have to surpass

1:03:07 or an acceleration that you have to, or is there no difference?

1:03:11 Usually you have to accelerate until you hit a certain speed,

1:03:16 but you don't accelerate fast enough.

1:03:18 When you're escaping from a pull,

1:03:19 if you're not, or if you're starting stationary,

1:03:21 then yes, you have to reach a certain acceleration,

1:03:24 otherwise the gravity will still overtake you.

1:03:26 But at the end of the day, it's speed.

1:03:28 It's about a speed that you're looking for.

1:03:29 Yeah, yeah.

1:03:30 Okay, got it.

1:03:30 So it's not a continuous acceleration that you need to get out.

1:03:34 It can, for the Earth, yes.

1:03:37 Because gravity is an acceleration at the end of the day.

1:03:39 Yeah.

1:03:40 But in terms of like, in terms of a black hole,

1:03:44 really you would be thinking in terms of speed, not acceleration.

1:03:46 Okay, got it.

1:03:47 Yeah.

1:03:48 I'm just thinking for my future escape.

1:03:49 Sure, got it, yeah, just so you know.

1:03:50 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:03:52 So yeah, with a black hole,

1:03:53 what's happened is you have so much matter in that place that the speed that you

1:03:58 would need to be going to escape the pull

1:04:00 of gravity backwards is 300,000 kilometers a second.

1:04:04 That's about 186,000 miles a second.

1:04:08 And there's nothing in the universe can go faster than light.

1:04:10 That was what Einstein showed us is

1:04:13 that it's like a speed limit in the universe.

1:04:15 And as you approach that limit, physics starts to go really weird.

1:04:19 Like as you put, you know,

1:04:20 to go faster when you're like running to get faster and faster,

1:04:23 you have to put more energy in, right?

1:04:24 Or like a lazy jog is not as energetic as like a really full on sprint, right?

1:04:29 When you get up close to speed of light,

1:04:30 you can put more energy in, but you won't go faster.

1:04:33 Instead you'll get heavier, which is bizarre.

1:04:37 Because of?

1:04:38 Relativity.

1:04:39 Yeah, I was gonna, I'm starting to think of Earth

1:04:42 situation because you're thinking of, you're running against air molecules.

1:04:45 Right?

1:04:46 But in space, that's not an issue.

1:04:48 No.

1:04:49 What is creating you to become heavier?

1:04:52 It's, that's essentially what Einstein's theory of relativity tells us.

1:04:55 And it's one of those things that-- Clearly,

1:04:57 I studied this extensively that-- It's fine,

1:04:58 I wouldn't have expected, this is the thing.

1:05:00 I like thinking about relativity every day and it's like no one else does.

1:05:02 Yeah.

1:05:03 But it's one of those things that I

1:05:04 don't think we really understand fully why necessarily,

1:05:08 like I could show you an equation that's like,

1:05:10 this is why it makes sense and this is pulled out

1:05:12 of all the things we know about like time and space.

1:05:15 But in terms of the why, just because-- It happens-- Because it happens.

1:05:19 Yeah.

1:05:20 Yeah.

1:05:20 And it's a bizarre thing.

1:05:23 And so it means that once you've hit a certain like density,

1:05:27 the gravity's so strong that you physically cannot go faster to escape it.

1:05:32 So matter gets trapped there, light gets trapped there.

1:05:35 And we don't really know what a black hole looks like because of this.

1:05:38 Because all of that information comes from light.

1:05:42 And where are we finding these black holes

1:05:43 that we even are aware of their existence?

1:05:45 Yeah, so we find them in a few different places.

1:05:47 So stars when they die, some stars, some very, very massive stars,

1:05:52 the cores of the star will collapse into black holes.

1:05:55 And so we've seen them, if you have say two stars,

1:05:59 what's called a binary star system,

1:06:00 where you have two stars that formed and they're orbiting each other and one

1:06:03 of them has already gone supernova and died and made a black hole.

1:06:05 You can see the pull of it on the other star.

1:06:08 And so we know that it's there.

1:06:10 But then we also know that there are

1:06:11 super massive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

1:06:14 So instead of something similar in mass to a star,

1:06:18 so I'll say like three times heavier than the sun,

1:06:19 10 times heavier than the sun.

1:06:21 A super massive black hole is anywhere from like a million to tens,

1:06:25 you know, 50 billion times heavier than the sun.

1:06:30 So they are quite literally super massive.

1:06:32 And if we can't see them, we're just watching their impact on other?

1:06:37 Yes- Structures.

1:06:38 We can do this, for example, with the Milky Way Galaxy.

1:06:41 Our galaxy has a black hole at its center,

1:06:43 which is 4 million times heavier than the sun,

1:06:46 which we've worked out is there because we've watched

1:06:49 the stars in the middle of the Milky Way,

1:06:51 like right at the very center, not get pulled in, orbit the black hole.

1:06:55 So like how, you know, the sun is pulling on Earth,

1:06:58 but Earth is in a stable orbit, so it's not going anywhere.

1:07:01 Right, the stars-- But what keeps it in that stable

1:07:03 orbit if the black hole is actively exerting some force?

1:07:06 But the black hole is like the sun, in that scenario,

1:07:09 the sun is exhorting some force on Earth, right?

1:07:11 But we are not being sucked towards the sun,

1:07:13 even though the sun is massive, it is huge.

1:07:16 The Earth is not being pulled towards the sun, okay?

1:07:19 Why is it not?

1:07:20 Well it is, but it's being pulled in a certain

1:07:22 way that it keeps it on a circle orbit, right?

1:07:24 And so unless something like took energy away from the Earth

1:07:28 or like nudged it slightly to give it extra energy,

1:07:30 we wouldn't change that orbit.

1:07:31 And the same is true for stars.

1:07:33 So the sun is technically orbiting the center of the Milky Way,

1:07:36 the black hole at the center, but it's not, even though there's some pull there,

1:07:40 it's far enough away that it wouldn't get like sucked in.

1:07:44 And the same is true for the stars in the center.

1:07:46 So the closest one orbits are about 12 light years away.

1:07:49 So it'd take light 12 years to go from the black hole to the star.

1:07:52 And that's far enough away that even though

1:07:55 it is being pulled towards the black hole, which is keeping it in orbit,

1:07:58 it's not getting sucked towards the black hole so that it would fall in.

1:08:01 So because we see it's like full orbit around the center

1:08:06 and we plot that orbit out, we can then go,

1:08:08 "Okay, so the thing in the middle has to be

1:08:10 this big to make it go that fast in its orbit.

1:08:13 I see why you wanna call it a dark star or a black star.

1:08:17 Because it's functioning as the sun.

1:08:21 Yeah.

1:08:21 Just without the sun.

1:08:23 Exactly, yeah.

1:08:24 Interesting.

1:08:25 And this is the thing,

1:08:25 I think that's what comes with the misconception is people

1:08:28 think of them as these massive vacuum cleaners just like-- Sucking.

1:08:32 You know, sucking everything up.

1:08:33 But it's the same thing,

1:08:35 it's like- This is why I say if you could make a black hole in a lab,

1:08:39 do it because it would, you know,

1:08:42 how much mass are you gonna be able to squish down in the lab?

1:08:45 10 grams?

1:08:46 You are gonna feel the same pull from a black hole

1:08:48 of 10 grams as you would anything 10 grams or a few ounces.

1:08:52 So the thing that makes a black hole giving- The thing that gives

1:08:56 a black hole its potential energy exertion is based on its mass.

1:09:02 Yes, yes.

1:09:03 And because it has so much mass.

1:09:05 [Dr.

1:09:05 Becky] Yes.

1:09:05 And is that because these stars are huge

1:09:07 or because it's a confluence of all these stars?

1:09:09 So it's because of how dense the, well

1:09:12 it's 'cause of how dense the black hole is.

1:09:14 But in terms of the stars that make them, the core that's left behind in a star.

1:09:19 So where all the fusion that turns the hydrogen

1:09:21 into helium that gives out light that power stars is happening,

1:09:25 all of the hydrogen's been used up,

1:09:26 you've just been left with helium at the end.

1:09:29 And then what does it do next?

1:09:31 It's kinda like, "Okay, well it can maybe fuse helium into heavier things,

1:09:34 but eventually it sort of reaches the end of the line

1:09:36 when it comes to you have enough energy to keep

1:09:39 fusing things together and then there's no process making energy

1:09:44 to push outwards against gravity." So like a star for example is,

1:09:48 you know, the sun is very, very big.

1:09:50 Yeah.

1:09:51 Right, it's 10 to 30 kilograms or something crazy, right?

1:09:55 I have no idea how to conceptualize this.

1:09:57 No, a one with 30 zeros after it and then kilograms, right?

1:10:00 And people are like, "Can you translate that into imperial?" And I'm like,

1:10:02 it would still be a lot of zeros.

1:10:03 It doesn't matter.

1:10:04 Yeah.

1:10:05 How many elephants is that?

1:10:08 Yeah.

1:10:08 So if you have like that big of a thing

1:10:11 thing that gravity is pulling in on that all the time.

1:10:14 But it's got fusion in the center pushing outwards.

1:10:16 And so to make a black hole, you basically have to get rid

1:10:18 of the thing that's pushing outwards against gravity.

1:10:20 So that gravity sort of starts to win and will collapse everything down

1:10:24 to make it so dense that all of a sudden whatever's happened to that material,

1:10:29 it's become so dense that light can't escape.

1:10:31 But we just don't know what then that looks like anymore.

1:10:34 You know?

1:10:35 Because we've never visualized it.

1:10:37 No, because we can't because no light can get to us

1:10:40 beyond what's we call it the event horizon, which is like a.

1:10:44 The ending event of the star burning out?

1:10:45 Yeah, exactly.

1:10:46 It's the diameter of the black hole, basically.

1:10:48 It's like the radius of what you class as inside here is the black hole.

1:10:54 And if something crosses that line,

1:10:55 it's never coming back and we can't see what's inside it.

1:10:58 But we know all the material that was

1:11:00 in the center of the star is trapped in there now.

1:11:03 So if you shot a drone into the black hole, what would happen to the drone?

1:11:10 Well, if it could survive the gravity,

1:11:14 because the thing is the gravity gets so strong that you get like

1:11:19 a, like the difference in the gravity between one side of the drone,

1:11:24 like closest to the black hole and the other

1:11:26 side would be so great that it would-- Split it?

1:11:28 Get stretched out, it's called spaghettification.

1:11:30 It is perhaps my favorite word ever.

1:11:31 Spaghettification.

1:11:32 Spaghettification.

1:11:33 Mm.

1:11:34 It is a real physical like terminology that is used,

1:11:37 that is one of my favorite things.

1:11:38 I'm gonna use that in a reaction video when we watch someone get pulled apart.

1:11:42 Oh it's a spaghettification of the human body.

1:11:43 Yeah, they got spaghettified.

1:11:45 Yeah.

1:11:46 It's just so much fun to say.

1:11:48 So it would get spaghettified as it got close to the black hole.

1:11:51 It would just like be just this like trail of atoms,

1:11:53 you know, sort of slowly falling in.

1:11:55 But essentially if it could survive that, it wouldn't notice anything.

1:11:59 It would cross the event horizon, wouldn't know it crossed it,

1:12:03 but it wouldn't be able to get out again.

1:12:07 So this is the thing.

1:12:10 Interesting.

1:12:10 And it would be able to see what was beyond the event horizon all of a sudden.

1:12:13 All the light and material that had been trapped in there,

1:12:15 it would then be like,

1:12:17 "Oh, I can see it now." But like it wouldn't be able to tell us,

1:12:20 it wouldn't be able to send a signal back to be like,

1:12:22 "This is what I'm recording." Because any signal

1:12:24 it sent out would never make it to us.

1:12:27 Because it gets pulled back.

1:12:28 Yeah.

1:12:28 It's the thing that says that like it's a really weird thing.

1:12:31 So we talk about spacetime in astrophysics.

1:12:33 So like there's three dimensions of space and then another dimension of time.

1:12:37 And in the same way that like you can move through space,

1:12:40 do you move through time?

1:12:41 They're all intrinsically linked.

1:12:42 [Doctor Mike] Yeah.

1:12:43 In a black hole, it's like if you move in a direction,

1:12:46 you are actually moving in time because the only path that you have is

1:12:51 that your future will end up at the very center of the black hole.

1:12:56 Yeah.

1:12:57 Kind of like human life.

1:12:58 We all end up in a black hole in some ways.

1:13:01 (Becky laughs)- Sure.

1:13:04 Usually buried but.

1:13:05 Yeah, oh, okay, I see where you're going.

1:13:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair.

1:13:08 There is an absence of light.

1:13:09 I can say that as well, from a medical standpoint.

1:13:12 But okay, so you have that and there is

1:13:15 no black hole that ever develops in, on the Earth?

1:13:23 Not that we know of, no.

1:13:24 There was a, one of the big things that in our field that was

1:13:26 the sort of big miscommunication thing that we had to be like, "No,

1:13:29 no, no it's gonna be fine." Was when the, what's called the Large

1:13:33 Hadron Collider in Switzerland in CERN turned on back in like-- What is that?

1:13:38 The two thousands.

1:13:38 So it's a huge particle accelerator.

1:13:40 It's a big tunnel that's underground that goes,

1:13:44 it's like kilometer, like miles, miles long.

1:13:46 This like huge, huge circle that goes all the way like under

1:13:49 the city of Geneva and out into France and back around again.

1:13:52 And basically it's so big 'cause they accelerate particles up

1:13:55 to, near to the speed of light in the tunnel.

1:13:58 And why do they do this?

1:13:59 They collide them together and see what pops out

1:14:01 again so that they can understand particles better, basically.

1:14:04 Cool.

1:14:05 Sounds safe.

1:14:06 Yeah.

1:14:07 It is very safe, when it switched on, people were like,

1:14:10 "They're gonna make a black hole."- People question vaccines

1:14:12 and there's a giant particle accelerator underneath France and Switzerland.

1:14:16 Yeah, exactly.

1:14:17 You have way bigger things to worry about than 5G cell towers, folks.

1:14:20 (Becky laughs)- I love that.

1:14:24 Well this was the thing that when it switched on, people were like,

1:14:27 "The energy's so high,

1:14:28 you're gonna make a black hole and the whole Earth's gonna get

1:14:31 sucked into a black hole." And people had to come out and go,

1:14:34 "First of all, the energies are not high enough to make

1:14:36 a black hole because you'd have to have something like

1:14:38 a billion times higher than the energy that you create

1:14:41 in the particle collisions in the particle accelerator to make a black hole.

1:14:43 So not gonna do it.

1:14:45 And B, be kind of cool if we made a black

1:14:47 hole because nothing would happen if we did, you know?

1:14:50 It's too small.

1:14:51 It's too small.

1:14:52 Yeah.

1:14:52 So if you did, it would be like particle sized.

1:14:54 So if you take a single like, you know,

1:14:56 a few particles and collapse it down, it'd be tiny.

1:14:59 So like a, something like a, what is it

1:15:02 a a kilogram black hole would be smaller than a proton,

1:15:06 which is like smaller than a hydrogen atom,

1:15:08 basically, like the center of a hydrogen atom.

1:15:10 What happens if you shine light on a black hole?

1:15:13 Gets trapped there and you never see it again.

1:15:16 Yeah.

1:15:18 So.

1:15:19 Wow.

1:15:19 Yeah, this is the thing.

1:15:21 So it's just crazy how much-- It gets trapped there.

1:15:23 Like miscommunication there is around it.

1:15:25 Even if it's really small?

1:15:26 Yeah, even if it's small.

1:15:27 It would just get trapped.

1:15:29 Still captures.

1:15:29 So it would be, it would just, a tiny bit would go, so.

1:15:32 And the thing is like, like I said, even if it was a kilogram,

1:15:35 it would have the same pull as anything, you know, that was a kilogram.

1:15:38 Like a bag of sugar, right, it would have the same pull as a bag of sugar.

1:15:40 You're not getting sucked towards a bag of sugar.

1:15:41 You won't get sucked towards the black hole.

1:15:42 It would only be if you got like too close and too

1:15:45 close for a black hole of something smaller than a proton,

1:15:48 right, is that you'd have to be on a quantum level to get close enough to it.

1:15:52 Wow, so for people that are listening that are

1:15:55 probably experiencing a black hole in their mind right now.

1:15:58 Yeah, I have that effect on people.

1:16:01 What?

1:16:02 I give people a few pillars of things that they

1:16:05 need to know about and take seriously about their health.

1:16:07 And usually it's not mind blowing, it's what grandma told us.

1:16:11 It's accurate.

1:16:11 Sure.

1:16:12 Over generations which is we need to sleep well.

1:16:14 Yeah.

1:16:15 Eat moderation, you know, that kind of stuff.

1:16:17 What should be three things that everyone knows about a black hole?

1:16:22 Mm, that we're not gonna get sucked towards a black hole.

1:16:25 We're not in danger from a black hole.

1:16:27 Black holes don't suck things towards them.

1:16:28 They just act like any other object in space.

1:16:31 It's only if you get too close.

1:16:33 The second thing.

1:16:33 So if you see a black hole, run?

1:16:35 Yeah.

1:16:35 Or it doesn't even matter.

1:16:35 It doesn't even matter.

1:16:36 Doesn't even matter.

1:16:37 So you're gonna either succumb or it's not gonna do anything.

1:16:39 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:16:40 If you're that close to see a black hole, you probably to close anyway so.

1:16:42 Okay.

1:16:42 Yeah, and there's nothing close enough that's gonna be a danger to us either.

1:16:45 Okay good, so we're safe from black holes.

1:16:47 We're all good, nothing to worry about.

1:16:48 That's the title of the podcast.

1:16:49 Do not lose sleep.

1:16:49 You are safe from black holes.

1:16:51 Yeah.

1:16:51 Do not lose sleep over a black hole.

1:16:53 The second thing I think I wanna get

1:16:54 across people is that we weirdly can see them,

1:16:57 we can't see the black hole itself but the-- But from the absence of them.

1:17:02 Yes, but also material around a black hole is

1:17:07 accelerated to such huge speeds by the black horse gravity.

1:17:11 Like if it is sort of like going to eventually

1:17:13 fall in, it kind of falls in on such a slow,

1:17:17 slow so spiral that on its way down it's accelerated

1:17:21 up to such a huge speed that it starts to glow.

1:17:24 And then we can see it with like ultraviolet ray, x-rays, even invisible light.

1:17:29 And so this is how we tend to study a lot of black holes is because we can

1:17:32 see what's going on around them and from how

1:17:36 hot something is and how much light it's giving off,

1:17:39 we can tell a lot about the black hole.

1:17:40 We can work out how heavy it is.

1:17:42 We can work out how fast it's growing.

1:17:44 So how quickly it's taking in more material of the stuff

1:17:47 that's actually gotten close enough to it in the first place.

1:17:50 Are there many black holes that you're

1:17:52 aware of that you already have identified?

1:17:54 Well yeah, so we think, so pretty much like 10% of all galaxies have

1:17:58 a super massive black hole at the center that's growing.

1:18:01 So we think all galaxies have a super massive black hole in the center,

1:18:03 but 10% of them have growing ones that we can see.

1:18:07 And this is the thing, the kind of thing that I study.

1:18:09 Are they like tumors of the solar system?

1:18:11 They're, no, they're more like volcanoes.

1:18:14 Like they're active or they dormant, you know what I mean?

1:18:18 Trying to find-- No, they're more like, oh like a medical analogy.

1:18:21 Yeah.

1:18:22 Yeah.

1:18:22 I see what you're saying,

1:18:23 like some people have them and some people don't but it's more like-- Yeah,

1:18:25 and some tumors are benign and some are more-- Yeah, yeah, okay fair.

1:18:28 Yeah, some of them.

1:18:29 So we think all black holes will grow at some

1:18:31 point in their life and will take in material.

1:18:32 It's just 10% of them at any one time seem to be lighting up of them.

1:18:35 Got it.

1:18:36 Yeah.

1:18:36 And do you have a favorite?

1:18:38 Ooh, TON 618.

1:18:39 Again, great name.

1:18:41 TO 1-- TON 618.

1:18:43 It's the heaviest, that's why it's the coolest.

1:18:46 Mm.

1:18:46 It's 50 billion times heavier than the sun.

1:18:48 Is it also the oldest?

1:18:50 Could be, yeah, for it to be that big.

1:18:51 Yeah.

1:18:51 Could be one of the old, it's not like the oldest in terms of like

1:18:55 the most distant that we've seen or anything like that.

1:18:58 Oh, I see I see what you mean.

1:18:59 I think maybe technically the oldest would be like- The furthest one.

1:19:01 Out in the Milky Way.

1:19:02 No, the Milky Way's black hole,

1:19:03 and the fact that we are seeing it like after 13.8 billion years of evolution,

1:19:07 whereas other super massive black hole galaxies, we're seeing,

1:19:10 even if it's a hundred thousand years ago versus a million years,

1:19:13 a billion years ago kind of thing.

1:19:15 We're always seeing them a while ago because light takes time to travel to us.

1:19:18 That messes with the mind so quickly.

1:19:20 Mm.

1:19:20 Okay, so third thing you must know about a black hole?

1:19:22 Third thing.

1:19:22 Wait, let's recap.

1:19:23 First is you're not gonna die.

1:19:24 No.

1:19:25 You're safe from black holes.

1:19:27 Two, that-- We can see them.

1:19:29 We can see them.

1:19:30 Yeah.

1:19:31 That that was misinformation.

1:19:32 And three?

1:19:33 It's really difficult to grow them.

1:19:36 Like people think of them, again, as like vacuum cleaners and you know,

1:19:40 you talk about like getting material close enough to them so

1:19:44 that they can use that to grow heavier and you know,

1:19:46 take in more mass and trap more mass inside the black hole,

1:19:50 the mountain, the star, you know, the dark star.

1:19:53 But actually getting material close to them

1:19:55 is really difficult because first of all,

1:19:58 just how mindbogglingly big space is, is one thing,

1:20:01 but also like the process to actually get material falling in.

1:20:05 Think about like how we said before,

1:20:07 the sun is orbiting the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

1:20:10 We're not falling into the center of the galaxy.

1:20:12 We're in a nice stable orbit.

1:20:14 It's the same is true for hydrogen gas,

1:20:16 the stuff that will make new stars but also

1:20:19 feed the black hole that's just hanging around the galaxy.

1:20:21 Which you can see when you look up on a night sky.

1:20:24 You see the Milky Way that sort of like

1:20:26 glow of like someone spilt milk across the sky.

1:20:28 That's kind of like the glow of our galaxy.

1:20:31 The gas in it or the dust that's in our galaxy.

1:20:34 That kind of stuff is also on a nice stable orbit around the center.

1:20:37 So if they're stable, why are 10% of them growing?

1:20:39 Well here's the thing, there has to be a process that sort of nudges the gas,

1:20:43 either takes some energy away so that it can lose energy

1:20:46 to get off its stable orbit and slowly fall to the center.

1:20:50 And so one idea we think is when two

1:20:53 galaxies merge together or collide or even just like

1:20:55 fly by each other and like really like pull

1:20:57 on each other with their gravity that can send,

1:21:00 sort of scramble things up and send stuff tumbling towards the center.

1:21:03 But a lot of my research is proving that that's not the only way this happens.

1:21:07 It also happens like in a galaxy like the Milky Way

1:21:09 that is kind of just being left to its own devices.

1:21:13 It can naturally also flow material towards the center

1:21:16 along these pretty spiral arms that we see in galaxies.

1:21:19 This like spiral shape, they can act as like a funnel towards the center

1:21:23 and that kind of like slow and steady sort of like growth,

1:21:26 like tortoise growth is what I call it as opposed to like a hair.

1:21:29 Like, you know, like with the mergers of the galaxies,

1:21:31 which is like a big firework of a growth.

1:21:33 The slow and steady growth is what

1:21:34 can actually grow them over billions of years.

1:21:35 Wow.

1:21:36 To be that big.

1:21:38 Overwhelming.

1:21:39 Very, yes.

1:21:40 It's so cool.

1:21:42 And it's why I love black holes 'cause my little fact

1:21:44 file of a book I had as a kid was just like,

1:21:46 every other page had an image, you know?

1:21:47 And I got the black hole one and it was

1:21:49 like artist impression and it was just this like black circle.

1:21:52 And I was like, "Oh, that's boring," you know?

1:21:53 And now we actually have an image of a black hole.

1:21:54 Right.

1:21:55 We have two were taken because of the Event Horizon Telescope,

1:21:58 which basically combined telescopes all around

1:22:00 the world to make an Earth-sized telescope.

1:22:03 Wow.

1:22:03 And we managed to take the image of like

1:22:05 the disc of material spiraling around the black hole.

1:22:08 And it looks like an orange donut,

1:22:10 but it's still a really cool picture of a black hole.

1:22:13 Can you be my doctor for a second?

1:22:15 Why when I-- Yeah.

1:22:17 Here, I'm feeling it a little bit now,

1:22:19 but mostly when I feel it the most is when on a night where it's dark,

1:22:24 I look up into the sky, I see stars, I freak out.

1:22:29 Oh, okay, so you have the existential crisis reaction.

1:22:30 Yes.

1:22:31 Okay.

1:22:31 So there's two reactions you can have when looking at the sky.

1:22:33 Thank God- There's the, "Oh my God, I'm insignificant.

1:22:36 Nothing I do is, you know, worth anything.

1:22:39 I'm tiny.

1:22:41 What's the point?"- Right?

1:22:42 Yeah, then there's the other thing that's like, "Oh,

1:22:45 nothing I do is significant, so it's totally fine."- Well.

1:22:49 You know?

1:22:49 I don't think about my significance.

1:22:51 I think about how easy I can float away.

1:22:53 Oh, right, okay.

1:22:54 The floating away thing.

1:22:55 You're freaking out because you're like, this rock isn't enough to hold me here.

1:22:58 Yes, like how long until the black hole starts.

1:23:02 Okay.

1:23:03 Impacting the Milky Way and its trajectory with another galaxy.

1:23:06 I think isn't this why people lay on like

1:23:08 the floor in the middle of a forest to feel grounded?

1:23:09 Yeah, but they're happy.

1:23:10 They feel positive, but why do I feel naked?

1:23:12 Am I a bad person?

1:23:13 No, I think it's a completely normal

1:23:16 reaction because it's so overwhelmingly big, right?

1:23:18 And it's so not, it's so removed from the mundane around us, right?

1:23:24 And I think that's, you either have that, the two reactions, right?

1:23:27 You either get so freaked out by it or you realize that, you know,

1:23:30 everything is fine and there's nothing

1:23:32 to worry about almost because you were worried.

1:23:35 Like, I have that reaction 'cause I'm like, "Oh,

1:23:36 that thing that I've been stressed about because I thought

1:23:39 it was important." I look up at the sky and go,

1:23:41 "That's not, that's not important," you know?

1:23:43 But I get the freak out aspect of it as well, I get that.

1:23:46 But then also the Earth's a lot bigger than you, you know?

1:23:49 So it's, it will, you're not gonna float away, you know?

1:23:53 Yeah, I hope so.

1:23:54 You'll be fine.

1:23:54 I really don't wanna float away.

1:23:56 Yeah.

1:23:56 That sounds like a really weird bad way to go.

1:23:59 It does, doesn't it?

1:23:59 Yeah, I just don't wanna float away.

1:24:01 Just like an-- I'll take anything else.

1:24:03 Shark attack, I'll take it- Rather than a very, very slow-- Slow floating away.

1:24:08 But there's nothing you can do.

1:24:09 Oh my god, yeah.

1:24:09 No.

1:24:10 And you're just, "Oh no." And you don't even know how long.

1:24:13 No.

1:24:14 Well I'm sure you'll know.

1:24:15 Yeah, well you would know.

1:24:16 If you could survive the vacuum of space.

1:24:17 If you were in a space suit, how long would you have?

1:24:19 Like what, three days before you die of like dehydration?

1:24:23 Well, how long, how much oxygen do you have in the spacesuit?

1:24:26 Oh, true, yeah.

1:24:27 That's probably the bigger thing.

1:24:28 But then, oh, then you would, yeah, just like a carbon dioxide-- Yeah,

1:24:31 it's like oxygen and then water, food is the least important.

1:24:35 So if you had a spacesuit,

1:24:36 with a limited supply of oxygen, you'd eventually just go from dehydration?

1:24:39 Yeah, yeah, for sure.

1:24:40 Yeah.

1:24:41 That's a pretty quick one too.

1:24:42 Just 'cause without water or in other areas, methane or whatever.

1:24:48 Yeah.

1:24:49 Life as we don't know it, yeah.

1:24:50 Ammonia that people are using.

1:24:52 And I say people very loosely there.

1:24:54 Yeah.

1:24:55 I just, I felt those moments and I struggled to relate

1:24:59 to people who look at it with such awe and enthusiasm.

1:25:02 Yeah.

1:25:02 Like even I went to El Salvador on a medical mission

1:25:05 and I went to a volcano and it's an inactive volcano,

1:25:09 but you're in the middle of it, you hike to get in there and then you look

1:25:13 around and there's just so much open space, it's uncomfortable.

1:25:18 And growing up in the city where I feel like I can take anything and like I box,

1:25:22 I get punched in the face.

1:25:24 Like these are scary things.

1:25:26 Yeah.

1:25:27 Racing cars.

1:25:27 No fear.

1:25:29 Weird.

1:25:29 And then I stand in a volcano and it's open and I'm just like,

1:25:32 what is this pressure?

1:25:34 Yeah, we are exact opposites.

1:25:35 'Cause I come into a city and I'm like, "Why am I so enclosed?

1:25:38 Why can't I see the sky?" Like, I'm like,

1:25:40 "Get me out of these like tall buildings." And you know,

1:25:42 if you put me in a fast car, I'm like, "No, no, no,

1:25:44 no, no, no, no." Like we're the exact opposites in that regard, right?

1:25:47 If you put me in the middle of the volcano,

1:25:49 I'd be like, "Ah, wide open space, surrounded by nature.

1:25:53 Yeah.

1:25:53 Like I always say like, do you think things that humans build are more beautiful

1:25:58 or do you think what nature can make is more beautiful?

1:26:03 I'm a human guy.

1:26:04 Yeah, I'm a nature girl.

1:26:05 Yeah.

1:26:06 So, yeah.

1:26:07 So I would venture to say that you are

1:26:15 more interested in things happening by chance that are special.

1:26:19 Yes.

1:26:23 So would the analogy here be for me to value earning a million dollars

1:26:32 and for you it would be way more exciting to win a million dollars?

1:26:35 Ooh, but then no.

1:26:36 Because that's by chance.

1:26:36 Because I would still wanna earn it though, right?

1:26:38 Yeah, but that's by chance, you could say like,

1:26:41 "Oh."- Yeah, but that's a random thing though, right?

1:26:43 Rather than like a million.

1:26:44 Well, everything is random.

1:26:45 True, but like a million year process that's made some really cool rock,

1:26:48 I think is way better than like, "Oh we-"- But isn't that random?

1:26:51 Steel thing.

1:26:52 It wasn't?

1:26:52 It does have an element of randomness,-

1:26:54 But we're getting into intelligent design and.

1:26:55 Yeah, yeah, so.

1:26:56 I don't wanna offend anyone.

1:26:57 True.

1:26:58 (laughs)- It's just the idea of the big

1:27:01 bang and everything that-- Sure, yeah, yeah.

1:27:03 Has come forth.

1:27:04 But it's that aspect of-- It's pretty random.

1:27:05 Yeah, it could be and it could be the fact that that, you know, that if you,

1:27:08 this is now getting into like the quantum aspect of things,

1:27:10 which-- Well, that's a good question.

1:27:12 You know?

1:27:12 Let me ask you that directly.

1:27:14 Would you rather win a million dollars or earn a million dollars?

1:27:17 Earn.

1:27:18 Really?

1:27:18 Yeah.

1:27:19 So you do like the human side of things?

1:27:20 I do, I do, yeah.

1:27:21 That's true, that's true.

1:27:24 So you were saying that the quantum side of things?

1:27:25 Yeah, the quantum side of things, like in quantum,

1:27:26 it's just a word that, again, gets thrown around by Hollywood.

1:27:28 Yeah.

1:27:29 I don't know what it means.

1:27:29 We don't explain at this point, but the quantum bit,

1:27:31 you know, the Marvel movies are the worst for that.

1:27:33 Yeah, tell me what that means.

1:27:33 The quantum means it's talking about like

1:27:35 the things that happen on the tiniest scale imaginable.

1:27:37 Like-- Okay.

1:27:39 Smaller than atoms, you know?

1:27:40 And so on that kind of scale you get into randomness.

1:27:44 And so it's like a weird thing where in quantum physics,

1:27:47 I can't actually define where the edge of this chair is.

1:27:49 Like-- Because it's constantly?

1:27:51 Yeah, exactly.

1:27:51 Like it could be here, but there is actually a very small vanishingly small

1:27:54 but still present chance that it could be like,

1:27:57 you know, a kilometer down the road, the edge of the chair because things can.

1:28:01 It can go that far?

1:28:04 Yeah, why not?

1:28:05 Like, it's a very small chance, but it could do.

1:28:08 Mm.

1:28:08 You see what I'm saying?

1:28:09 So it's all based on probabilities?

1:28:11 Yes, and so this is why like,

1:28:12 no one ever claims to actually understand quantum physics because

1:28:15 there's just so much of this that could be weird.

1:28:17 But there is this like thought that, you know,

1:28:19 the reason we're all here is because we just ended

1:28:21 up with the one random chance that did produce the universe.

1:28:25 Which makes it more special.

1:28:26 But then can't you use,

1:28:29 and I've seen a specific bad actor weaponize this before on stage.

1:28:33 Okay.

1:28:35 Say that quantum can be used to explain frivolous inaccurate concepts.

1:28:42 'Cause they say, "Well why?

1:28:43 We don't know, it could be."- Yeah exactly, you can take it too far.

1:28:47 So how do we control quantum in that way?

1:28:50 True yeah, I know what you mean.

1:28:51 Like how do you draw the line?

1:28:52 I think there's a, I mean,

1:28:53 this-- Like how do we say that this chair isn't a block away?

1:28:56 But that's the thing, like, in terms of our real experience,

1:28:58 right, we know that it, we know that it's here.

1:29:00 We're talking about like, you know, the one atom in the edge of the chair.

1:29:03 And you know it because your eyes see it.

1:29:06 Your hands can sense it.

1:29:07 Yes.

1:29:08 But are your senses perfect?

1:29:09 Well, exactly.

1:29:10 Can play that game all day long, right?

1:29:11 Exactly, exactly.

1:29:12 So like how do we?

1:29:14 But the thing is, I don't think the, even

1:29:16 the maths of quantum physics tells you for sure either, right?

1:29:19 It would still just give you a probability back.

1:29:21 So you have to be just comfortable with like-- The unknown?

1:29:24 Like the, it's like 99.99999% likely or sure that the edge

1:29:28 of this chair is here because of what I'm being told.

1:29:30 But even the maths will probably tell you the same thing,

1:29:32 is like it can't be a hundred percent sure that that's where it is.

1:29:35 And so when you do study quantum physics, you have to be like willing to accept.

1:29:38 A margin of error of some kind.

1:29:40 Well a margin of error is true for any science, right?

1:29:42 But it's more like a margin of like likelihood and probability.

1:29:48 Honestly, this translates really nicely back to healthcare.

1:29:51 Mm.

1:29:52 And I'll explain why.

1:29:54 I believe my new job as a family medicine doctor in the age of AI,

1:30:01 biohacking, social media, dare I say,

1:30:06 is getting people to accept the fact that we cannot

1:30:11 control our health with a hundred percent predictive ability prevention,

1:30:18 cures, even a diagnosis is not a hundred percent.

1:30:22 True, yeah.

1:30:23 Yet, when people make content on health, they make it seem quite the opposite.

1:30:27 Yeah.

1:30:27 That they can sell you a product that will catch every condition.

1:30:31 They will sell you potion that will relieve all symptoms.

1:30:35 Like it doesn't even matter what symptom you have.

1:30:37 And what I try and instill in my patients, which is almost dangerous to instill,

1:30:42 is that I can't prevent and predict

1:30:45 a bad outcome in them with reason, within reason.

1:30:50 Yeah.

1:30:50 And I actually saw some negative criticism towards me about

1:30:54 this just before we started filming this podcast, I think applies.

1:30:58 There is someone on social media that is

1:31:02 very pro getting people screened for colon cancer.

1:31:06 Right.

1:31:06 Very important.

1:31:07 As a primary care doctor,

1:31:08 we talk about it and we've set this line of 45 as the age to start.

1:31:13 We lowered that from 50, I don't know how it is in the UK, by the way.

1:31:16 I'm not sure.

1:31:16 I'm sure it's quite similar.

1:31:17 Very similar, yeah.

1:31:18 And we also throw in if your family member

1:31:22 was diagnosed 10 years before their age of diagnosis.

1:31:27 So if they were diagnosed at age 35, we would start screening you at age 25.

1:31:30 So that's our general screening philosophy.

1:31:33 That's when we would give a colonoscopy recommendation

1:31:36 to someone who is healthy, has no symptoms.

1:31:40 Yeah.

1:31:40 Feels great.

1:31:41 But we would still check them for colon cancer if they fit that criteria.

1:31:44 Yeah.

1:31:45 Is that the perfect criteria to catch all cancers?

1:31:49 No.

1:31:49 No.

1:31:50 Because if we try to be perfect in healthcare,

1:31:54 what we end up doing is potentially catching some cancers.

1:31:59 Mm.

1:31:59 But also now getting a bunch of people hurt by the colonoscopy,

1:32:04 because a colonoscopy, while it's safe, still has side effects,

1:32:07 there's dangers from putting a scope inside your body, putting air, et cetera.

1:32:12 Even the procedure of taking a biopsy can.

1:32:14 Yeah.

1:32:15 Can have some risk.

1:32:16 And when you're doing these at scale,

1:32:18 because that's how we judge these public health programs,

1:32:20 we have to balance that.

1:32:21 Mm.

1:32:22 And sometimes we create arbitrary balances like this, 45.

1:32:26 Mm.

1:32:26 Does that mean if someone who's 44 might not be a good fit?

1:32:29 They totally could be.

1:32:30 Yeah.

1:32:31 But we set this arbitrary thing because we can't be a hundred percent certain.

1:32:35 And at times when people have certain symptoms,

1:32:38 we recommend getting a colonoscopy that is no

1:32:40 longer a screening colonoscopy that is now a diagnostic

1:32:43 because they have a symptom that we suspect

1:32:45 is pointing us to the fear of colon cancer.

1:32:47 And we're getting a scan or a camera,

1:32:50 I don't know what we would call it, imaging.

1:32:52 Yeah.

1:32:53 Internal imaging.

1:32:54 And in one of the conversations that I had on this podcast,

1:32:57 I pointed out that there are some patients that come

1:33:01 in wanting to get a colonoscopy and they clearly don't need one.

1:33:05 Mm.

1:33:05 And someone saw that, who's very pro colon cancer awareness, said,

1:33:09 "How in the world would you deny someone a colonoscopy?" And I

1:33:13 think it's a very nuanced point because it's not about denying.

1:33:18 Mm.

1:33:18 It's ultimately about trying to do the best thing for that patient.

1:33:22 So now if someone comes in and says something like,

1:33:24 "My buddy just had colon cancer and I'm 28 years old."- Mm.

1:33:28 "And I have no family history,

1:33:29 I have no GI symptoms." That person doesn't need a colonoscopy.

1:33:34 And it's not because I'm withholding

1:33:35 the colonoscopy 'cause I wanna like guard it.

1:33:38 But it's because ultimately that risk benefit ratio

1:33:41 is no longer in that person's best interest.

1:33:43 So that's an example of someone who might want a colonoscopy,

1:33:46 but clearly isn't in the good risk benefit portfolio.

1:33:50 And I think what happens in our poor healthcare communication,

1:33:54 in our shitty healthcare system, I don't know how much you love or hate the NHS.

1:33:57 I love it, but.

1:33:59 Okay, good.

1:33:59 I've seen both sides of people.

1:34:00 There are things, there are things wrong with it, sure.

1:34:02 It's nowhere near perfect.

1:34:03 But we're definitely?

1:34:04 But I'm like pro NHS.

1:34:05 Pro NHS.

1:34:07 So in our healthcare system, people come in saying,

1:34:11 "I've lost weight without trying, I have bloody stools,

1:34:15 I have this upset GI system and want

1:34:18 a colonoscopy." And then they get shut down.

1:34:19 Either insurance doesn't cover it.

1:34:21 The doctor-- Yeah.

1:34:22 Belittles them and says, "You're fine." And then they extrapolate that.

1:34:28 Yeah.

1:34:29 And that's why.

1:34:30 Yeah, that's frustrating.

1:34:31 I think it's like quantum.

1:34:32 Yeah, I can see- (Doctor Mike laughs)- That was the worst.

1:34:35 We got there.

1:34:36 Longest analogy that I spaghettified that.

1:34:39 You really did, yeah.

1:34:40 But I appreciated it.

1:34:42 Yeah.

1:34:42 And I agree that it was a good analogy, so.

1:34:45 Fair.

1:34:45 But now that we're talking about healthcare.

1:34:48 Yeah.

1:34:48 And I think that was the worst possible segue.

1:34:50 But it got us here.

1:34:51 Fair, it got us here.

1:34:52 So I'm happy.

1:34:52 Yeah, exactly.

1:34:53 Yeah, just like, perhaps the big bang wasn't the most

1:34:55 effective way to create life, but it got us here.

1:34:58 Yeah.

1:34:59 That's very true.

1:35:00 Tell me why you love the NHS.

1:35:03 Well, I just think it's amazing because

1:35:05 you don't-- And for folks who are listening, the NHS is the National Health.

1:35:08 It's the National Health Service in the UK.

1:35:09 System or service?

1:35:10 Service in the UK, yeah.

1:35:12 And basically it means that you could never make,

1:35:15 I show this, you could never make "Breaking Bad" in the UK.

1:35:17 You know, he would, the whole premise of "Breaking Bad", right?

1:35:20 He gets diagnosed with cancer and he can't

1:35:21 afford his treatment so he starts cooking meth, right?

1:35:23 Yeah.

1:35:24 No, in the NHS, he'd get diagnosed and they'd go,

1:35:26 "Let's get you treated." And then you leave

1:35:28 at the end of the day and there is no bill.

1:35:30 You know, you give-- So then what are you guys watching on TV?

1:35:31 There is no bill.

1:35:32 You, you know?

1:35:33 You need any sort of drug, that's fine.

1:35:36 There's no, obviously you have to get prescribed it.

1:35:38 Right.

1:35:38 But at the same time like there is no charge for it.

1:35:41 And I cannot even express to you how bizarre it is to hear some tales

1:35:47 from people in the US as someone who

1:35:50 lives in a country with a National Health Service.

1:35:52 When you hear people being like, you know,

1:35:54 "I had to go in for this lifesaving treatment

1:35:56 and it's bankrupting me." And now their entire life is derailed,

1:35:58 or whatever it might be.

1:36:00 Right.

1:36:00 It's just something I think you grow up

1:36:02 taking for granted that it will be there.

1:36:03 So the idea that if it ever did disappear

1:36:05 in the UK is absolutely horrifying to me because of like,

1:36:07 I just don't, I don't think we realize what we have.

1:36:11 You know, yes, there are things wrong with it.

1:36:12 And yes, there are things that could be improved, but it just, it's fantastic.

1:36:17 Yeah.

1:36:17 You know?

1:36:18 What can be improved, what don't you like about it?

1:36:20 I think the waiting times for things that are like elective,

1:36:24 not necessarily elective, but like things that aren't life threatening.

1:36:28 Right.

1:36:29 Are way too long.

1:36:30 They can be, you know, over a year to get like, say, you know,

1:36:33 like a hip replacement or something,

1:36:34 or a knee replacement, whatever it might be.

1:36:35 Something for quality of life, perhaps.

1:36:37 Exactly yes, people can be waiting a long time

1:36:39 for something that would massively improve their quality of life.

1:36:42 Right.

1:36:42 And that is hanging over them.

1:36:44 And that is very stressful, and I can get that.

1:36:46 And people who can afford to go private in the UK,

1:36:48 you know, people can still pay for healthcare if they want.

1:36:50 They can skip that line.

1:36:51 So there is still a definite like,

1:36:53 wealth imbalance in that healthcare side of things.

1:36:56 But if you have a life-threatening condition,

1:36:58 or if you are going through something like a pregnancy and wanting

1:37:01 to give birth and stuff like that, the NHS runs like clockwork for that.

1:37:05 And it is just fantastic.

1:37:08 You've had some experience?

1:37:09 I have, yes.

1:37:10 I have firsthand experience the past year.

1:37:12 Yeah, what's that been like?

1:37:15 Horrible.

1:37:16 But the NHS side of things, everything has been lovely.

1:37:18 So yeah.

1:37:19 I was, I guess timeline wise,

1:37:21 just to give you an idea of like how quickly I was seen in terms of the NHS.

1:37:26 At the start of May last year, I found,

1:37:30 it was a slight dimple on my left breast basically.

1:37:34 And I knew that that was a sign of breast cancer.

1:37:36 And I went, "Oh, I should probably go check that out." It was so slight,

1:37:39 it was barely even there.

1:37:40 It was like in certain lights in a mirror.

1:37:42 I was like, "Huh."- Unusual.

1:37:44 "What is that?"- Well, it's important that you knew what normal was for you.

1:37:47 True, yeah.

1:37:47 Because that's a good starting point for people.

1:37:49 Yeah, and I went to my GP, the family healthcare doctor.

1:37:53 And they sort of looked at it and went,

1:37:54 "Hmm, I don't really think it is anything.

1:37:57 Maybe keep an eye on it or I can just refer you if you

1:38:00 wanna get it checked out for just like peace of mind." And I went,

1:38:03 "Yes, let's do that, please."- And refer you

1:38:05 means refer you towards imaging or a specialist?

1:38:07 Yes, yeah.

1:38:07 Refer you to essentially a breast clinic

1:38:10 to have a mammogram and-- Ultrasound, yeah.

1:38:12 An ultrasound, and if they'd seen anything, a biopsy.

1:38:15 Right.

1:38:15 So I found that like start of May,

1:38:18 I waited a week, rang my family healthcare doctor.

1:38:20 They got me in the same day, which was like the Wednesday.

1:38:23 The next Friday I was at the clinic getting it checked.

1:38:27 They did an ultrasound and went, "Hmm,

1:38:29 there's something there." And they took a biopsy.

1:38:32 And then two weeks later.

1:38:33 That quickly?

1:38:33 Yeah.

1:38:34 Wow.

1:38:34 The same day, two weeks later,

1:38:35 I found out the results and that, so that was all in the space

1:38:39 of about three and a half to four weeks from me finding.

1:38:42 So very quickly.

1:38:43 To diagnosis.

1:38:44 And the diagnosis was sadly breast cancer, it was hormone positive,

1:38:49 which I was told at the time was the best

1:38:51 news I could have received in terms of like,

1:38:53 if you were gonna have breast cancer, it was the best kind to have.

1:38:56 'Cause they could throw everything at it if it's hormone responsive.

1:39:00 Which was I guess a good news.

1:39:02 But I didn't really appreciate it for what it was at the time.

1:39:04 'Cause it was just like hearing those words,

1:39:06 you entire world just comes crashing down.

1:39:09 You know, it's one of those things where you think,

1:39:11 "What did I do?" There isn't anything you did, you know?

1:39:14 Why me, you know, because random chance, you know?

1:39:18 By all the metrics of like, you know,

1:39:20 eating well and staying healthy and maintaining a nice weight,

1:39:23 not nice, like a good weight.

1:39:25 And then, you know, not drinking too much.

1:39:27 Like I wasn't in any of those categories.

1:39:30 I didn't smoke anything like that.

1:39:31 So you just think this is just bad luck, you know?

1:39:36 And to have it, like the age that I was as well, I was 35.

1:39:40 Like it's very young for breast cancer.

1:39:42 It's not unheard of, but it's very young.

1:39:45 So it was just really bad luck.

1:39:47 But coming to terms with that was really difficult.

1:39:54 We found out on like the Tuesday and then on the Friday we went on holiday.

1:40:00 We had a vacation planned with my mom, dad, my sister, me and my fiance.

1:40:03 And it was possibly the best thing that could have happened.

1:40:06 Like it was already booked and we were already

1:40:10 going and we just went away for the week.

1:40:11 And all of us were just like processed that information together.

1:40:16 And I, we went to Austria, massively recommended the Alps, they are amazing.

1:40:21 Wow.

1:40:22 Hiked a mountain and was like, "Oh, I can still hike a mountain.

1:40:26 I'm still fine, when I get to the top.

1:40:27 I still feel like me.

1:40:29 This doesn't define me,

1:40:30 it doesn't label me." And it was like I had this weird like,

1:40:33 mental clarity at the top of this mountain.

1:40:35 Like, "I'm gonna be fine." Like even if everything's not fine,

1:40:38 like I'm still me and I can still do things despite this thing, you know?

1:40:44 Which I think was a very good thing

1:40:46 to have happened so soon after getting the diagnosis, so.

1:40:49 Yeah, when you at that moment were getting the diagnosis,

1:40:55 were you processing what they were presenting to you or?

1:40:59 No, it was very overwhelming.

1:41:00 Very, very overwhelming.

1:41:01 'Cause they told me basically the whole treatment plan.

1:41:04 And they were like-- Right off the outside.

1:41:06 It's gonna be a year.

1:41:07 And I was like, "I'm getting married in a year.

1:41:09 I don't like this, I don't want this to be my year.

1:41:12 You know, I want- We need to finish this in like six months," you know?

1:41:16 And we, I think we did finish it in nine in the end.

1:41:18 But like, it was touch and go there for a long time.

1:41:21 But they were basically like, "We'll have to do surgery.

1:41:23 You might need a second surgery if we don't quite get like all of it,

1:41:26 or the margins we want.

1:41:28 You might need chemo and you will definitely have radiotherapy.

1:41:32 And if your genetic test comes back for BRCA,

1:41:35 then you might have to have a full-"- Surgery, yeah.

1:41:37 A a full, I can't remember the name.

1:41:40 Mastectomy?

1:41:40 Mastectomy, thank you.