- 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)