- Huh?
(laughs)
You wanna see something weird?
Yeah.
I found,
I found this video online,
uploaded by Reddit user wowdu,
and it shows an octopus named Noodle
at the Odyssey Aquarium,
and as you can see,
throughout her tentacles,
blue blood pulsing through the tentacles
like some sort of alien creature.
And octopi, or octopodes,
if you want to be really
annoying about it,
they are very fascinating.
And one of those fascinating facts
is that they have blue copper-based blood.
So your blood is more red,
because in the hemoglobin
molecule and hem, you have iron,
and this iron protein, this structure,
just happens to reflect red light,
so your blood looks red.
In the copper-based blood of Noodle here,
it reflects bluish-greenish light,
and so they have bluish-greenish blood.
And this is being pumped
through one of her arms
by one of her three hearts.
Looks pretty weird, huh?
I've seen enough anime to
know where this is going.
Back into the aquarium.
(electronic music)
Hello, and welcome to
another edition of Footnotes,
the companion show to Because Science,
where I take all of your comments,
questions, and corrections,
and I pump the lifeblood of
science and answers into them,
and then I tell you what's
coming up next on this channel.
Hint, it's what turns Chris
Evans into Chris Heavens.
(angelic choir)
But getting right down to it,
in the last episode of Because Science
I ventured outside of the
void to crispy old Toronto,
where it's very cold,
and I visited the set of my favorite
science-fiction show on
television right now,
The Expanse on Amazon Studios.
I toured the sets, I
talked with the writers,
the actors, the people
who design all the sets,
to give you an inside look at what I think
is the most accurate
show of our generation,
at least in terms of
science fiction and science.
I absolutely love it.
They did not pay me to be
this enthusiastic about it.
It is just,
it's just so good.
You should watch it.
And I promise I will stop
talking about it so much now.
But we have to finish this episode first.
Oh, so I want to know
what did you have to say?
Because you couldn't all
agree with me about this.
It's the internet.
Our first comment comes from
Eduard Liriano, who says,
"Hey, Kyle."
He didn't say that.
"How fast does a spaceship have to travel
"to make a person into red sauce
"like that scene in The Expanse
you were talking about?"
Yeah, so, in The Expanse,
I've never seen any other show do this,
they show the consequences
of rapid deceleration,
and they turn a Belta
into basically Prego.
Inside of a spaceship hull.
How fast would you have
to go to make that happen?
Well, I need to redirect your question
and thrust in another direction,
because it's not actually the raw velocity
that would turn you into something
like pasta sauce inside of a spaceship.
It is the acceleration
or the deceleration,
more specifically your change in velocity.
And if we had to consider how much
it would take to pastafy you,
the figure you'll commonly see
for acceleration or deceleration
that would be fatal to people
is around a hundred Gs.
But that is to, like,
just make you not alive.
I don't know if that would
rip you limb from limb
into pieces, into saucy sauce-sauce,
so I'm guessing it would be
much more than a hundred Gs,
probably thousands or
tens of thousands of Gs,
and then you're talking about
just a rapid change in velocity,
either going from a very high
speed to a very low speed
in a decent amount of time,
or just some speed to zero in
like a fraction of a second.
That's kinda what happens in The Expanse.
Elliot Grey says, "If Kyle dies in space,"
phew,
"will he do his signature pose
"so his body will freeze like that
"to be discovered by
future space explorers?"
Oh, you can be absolutely certain
that if I, me,
me,
if I die in space, you
will find me like this.
(chair rolling)
No one's died in space yet.
People have died in space missions
and as they're getting off
the ground and returning
and on the launch pad and stuff,
but no one's died in space,
so we don't know what to
do with space bodies yet.
So if I die on a space mission,
you can legally eject me,
but first position my body like that.
Our next comment comes
from James Hatfield,
the lead singer of Metallica, who says,
"One of my favorite scenes in the show
"is during the battle over Ganymede,
"when the Martian Marines lose
their communication systems
"and they have to push
their helmets together
"to be able to communicate
with the air in their helmets.
"As a viewer, you take that
communication for granted,
"and it really adds to
the tension in the scene
"when they all of a sudden
can't talk to each other."
That is one of my favorite scenes too,
because I even asked
the writers of the show
if they did this intentionally.
So over Ganymede, Martian
communication goes out,
and so to communicate with each other,
the Martian Marines, they
push their helmets together,
and they use the vibration of
their helmets to communicate
the sound waves through
the air of their helmets,
so going from someone's mouth
through the air of their helmet,
vibrating the helmet, vibrating
the other person's helmet,
and then going through the
air to that person's ears,
kind of like a tin-can telephone,
and physics says this could kind of work
if you were really screaming
and you were in space
with no comms and you pressed your face
up against someone else's face.
So that's one thing to
do if you ever find me
floating around in space like this.
Press your face against mine and scream.
But the nerdiest comment
at the time I'm filming this episode
I'm giving to James Greene, who says,
"Thanks, Kyle, for getting
me to watch The Expanse.
"It's one of my favorite sci-fi stories,
"precisely because of how
they treat the physics
"and the realness of space.
"One of the things that stands out for me
"is how they treat interstellar travel
"as some Herculean feat, which it is.
"In the first season
the Mormons are building
"a generation ship on Tycho.
"It's portrayed as this massive,
"long journey with no hope of return.
"But as you mention in a recent video,
"accelerating at even
1G for a little while,
"you get going really fast.
"At 1G, the trip to Alpha Centauri,
"4.4 light years away,
would only take six years.
"And six years isn't all that bad.
"I mean, there are tons of
other issues that would come up,
"fuel, supplies, air, morale,
"but when you can
comfortably accelerate at 1G,
"the local systems are
still not that far away."
That's one of the caveats of The Expanse.
So in a lot of great sci-fi stories,
they're very internally consistent,
but they may bend or
break one or two rules.
In The Expanse, that's the Epstein Drive,
which is a hyperefficient
nuclear fusion engine
which can allow you to accelerate at 1G
for extended periods of time.
That's why all these travel times shrink
to a couple of days and not
months or years or more.
So you're exactly right.
Although, when I do my math,
I only get three years and not six.
I think you missed and
multiplied by two in there.
But your point is well taken.
When you can accelerate with comfortable,
real artificial gravity,
you can get around the solar
system like it's nothin'.
And for that, you are
indeed, James, a super nerd.
Ah!
We were in an atmosphere, so
I had to make a lot of sound.
But of course I'm not always right.
Although I will point out that
in a recent charity stream
for St. Jude where we
raised $1.3 million, wow,
and did a fantastic job for
millions of people watching,
I did win a trivia contest
against none other than
MatPat and Vsauce3.
So, you know, I'm not always right,
but sometimes I'm right a lot.
So what was I wrong about last week?
Oh, and if you want to correct
me, as I'm sure you do,
make sure you go down on
this page and subscribe
and hit the notification
bell and like this video
just to make sure that these videos
end up in your selection,
your algorithm, more often.
You can get notified
whenever we do anything,
'cause I'm sure you want to
know everything I'm up to.
Everything.
There's nothing left of
me that isn't contentized.
Isn't it great?
I'm good.
Our first correction comes
from Ferdi van der Woerd,
who says, "Hey, Kyle, amazing episode.
"Just one question, though.
"In the beginning you talked about
"having a hole in a spaceship
"and how they put a plastic binder
"in front of it and they're fine.
"How would that impact the ship
"when entering an atmosphere?"
Yes, so what I liked about
in one scene in The Expanse
is that when they had what would have been
an explosive decompression
in any other sci-fi,
they just patched it very
calmly and collectedly
like they knew what they
were doing, because they did,
and that's what would
have actually happened.
But what would happen to that hole
if you were entering an atmosphere?
Well, you definitely wouldn't
want that hole unplugged.
I'm assuming that they would repair it
before entering an atmosphere.
You wouldn't want a hull breach
as you were entering an atmosphere,
but I bet a cup-sized hole
or something like that
while you're entering the
atmosphere in a spaceship,
it might not totally destroy it.
You gotta plug it.
Plug it up.
Our next correction comes from Rowan Hill.
How dare you have one of my names?
Who says, "For the record, in Star Trek,
"the warp drives bend
space around the ship,
"and it's not an actual
propulsion system."
Rowan, I'm familiar with warp drive,
which is the idea that you
bend space around a ship
so that you don't have to
move the ship through space
so then you can travel faster
than the speed of light
and get to places really, really quickly
because you're not covering too much space
in too little time to
break the speed limit.
Fine.
What about at impulse power?
Even if you were going impulse power
and hundreds of thousands
of kilometers per hour
and then you stop around
a planet or something,
you're still gonna be
a pizza sauce in there.
A prego.
Our next correction comes
from werdwerdus, who says,
"I wish he takes about
Eros and how the station
"was actually on the inside of an asteroid
"and gravity was increased
by spinning Eros."
Okay, I'll take about it.
One thing that The Expanse thought about,
which surprised me when
I first encountered
the books and the television show,
was that for humanity to live
on smaller objects than planets
like people in Da Belt
and things like that,
those objects naturally have very small
surface gravities in relation to Earth.
Like Ceres, the largest
body in the asteroid belt,
that has, like, 2 or 3% Earth's gravity.
And so James S.A. Corey, Ty
Franck, and Daniel Abraham,
what they wanted to do was
think about how to give
an asteroid or another large
planetoid artificial gravity,
and they thought about
putting engines on it
and spinning it up like a top
to give it artificial
gravity on the inside
like you were inside of one
of those carnival attractions
that flung you out to the outside edges
and you feel that as increased weight.
But the nerdiest correction
at the time I'm filming this video,
it's something that I want
to point out about how people
discuss books and shows
like this in our community.
It's from Nusszucker, who says,
"While I like The Expanse
"probably as much as anyone else here,
"I also enjoy hard SF books,"
hard science fiction books,
"but I don't really get
why it bothers people
"when science is not 100%
accurate in science fiction."
And they go on to talk about,
well, why can't we like both?
It would be hard for you
to say that Star Trek
isn't a good show even though
they have a lot of
technobabble and handwaving.
And I want to add to that.
Just because something
isn't a hundred percent
scientifically accurate
doesn't mean it's a bad show.
I mean, some of the
episodes of Star Trek TNG
are still some of the best
science fiction episodes of all time,
like Darmok and Measure of a Man
I can think of off the top of my head.
Star Trek has a lot of weird stuff in it.
It's not a hundred percent accurate.
But you can still absolutely enjoy it
even if it's not scientifically accurate.
I appreciate The Expanse
not only for its accuracy,
but because it uses that accuracy
in service of the narrative.
These still have to be
good, interesting stories
for them to be good shows or movies
or books or what have you,
or else it doesn't matter
how accurate they're being.
If it's hyperaccurate with no narrative,
then it's just a textbook.
And if it's hypernarrative
with no accuracy,
then it's just,
I don't know,
a romance novel?
'Cause no one hooks up
that much that quickly,
you know what I mean?
But what I'm trying to say is that
if you're going to make
something accurate,
or you want to try to
make your story accurate,
it should be in service of the story
and the characters
you're trying to develop,
or else it's just gonna
come off like this,
where you want people to feel smarter,
or you're trying to challenge
the reader in a weird way.
You can enjoy Star Trek, you
can enjoy hard science fiction,
you can enjoy things like The Witcher,
which is like hard
science fantasy, kind of.
You can like all of these things.
Don't gatekeep other nerds
for really enjoying the
stuff that they enjoy.
That's not really an accurate way to be.
And for highlighting this little division
and helping bring us together, Nusszucker,
I don't like saying that,
you're indeed a supernerd.
Ah, together.
You and me.
But not, don't touch me.
Now, moving right along
to this week's episode.
This week's episode of Because Science is,
ooh, how to make that
Chris Heavens, am I right?
No?
What's inside superhero serum?
Don't you dare get on camera!
Don't say anything!
Don't!
That's right, in this week's
episode of Because Science,
we are looking into superhero serum.
How could you take some
chemicals and inject them
into some skinny guy that's
willing to jump on a grenade
and take him or her from zero to hero
through chemistry and
metabolism and genetics alone?
Oh, we get into it.
So go watch the latest
episode of Because Science
if you haven't yet, all about The 'Spanse.
Leave me your best comments,
questions, and corrections
at YouTube.com/BecauseScience,
Facebook.com/BecauseScience,
and @BecauseScience on,
I don't know, type it in.
See what comes up.
It's probably me.
And don't forget you've
been watching this video
for about 20 minutes,
and now it is time to
look away from your screen
and maybe into the woods to, you know,
sleep them peepers a little bit,
and then walk into the
woods and never come back.
(light flourish)
