Episode 8 - Special Announcement & Interstellar

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hey everybody welcome to a special edition of the liturgist podcast my name is josh lujan loveless and uh and i'm here with uh the man you know as science mike hey everybody mccarth uh mike thanks for joining us we're uh we're missing uh mr mr michael gunger today wow he's he's out on the road i've been brought in um as i've been brought in from aaa i've been practicing rehearsing in the farm leagues we uh we here at the lyrius we've got a farm system set up for the podcast and uh i recently went two for three and uh was brought in uh once uh we lost mr gunger so thanks for giving me a shot here i don't even know what any of that means i know i know you're a science guy you're not baseball mike for a reason i get that i understand i thought it was probably baseball and that's as much as that it's all right i don't expect you uh to uh to run with any sort of sports analogies and hopefully that's the last sports analogy we'll roll with today um but michael's out on tour and uh is traveling go see uh gunger on the road um this month if you get a chance um and mike you've got a bunch of speaking stuff coming up so we're excited about making this podcast happen so thanks for making time today yeah thank you it was uh guys so you know i sat down and tried to record this episode by myself and it was the saddest loneliest thing you can imagine but michael is like non-stop on the road and this month i'm non-stop on the road and there was not a single day in all of november where neither of us were traveling in the whole month did you do voices like multiple personalities and it was just you i just i just monologued and like i was literally um just about to hit stop and say i'm not releasing anything and then um you texted me back and i i have it on the recording where i cheered when i got your text i think that's the deluxe edition of the podcast that gets released with deleted material at some point down the road um and uh and sold on ebay if that still exists so for me i know i know uh for those who are wondering about the schedule of the podcast um we're moving into more of a seasonal podcast rhythm uh where we record several at a time and uh and then release them kind of consistently um mike you uh you pulled some people online and found that uh people wanted quality over quantity isn't that what you discovered yeah by the way for all of you who got on twitter and got on facebook and talked to us about podcast scheduling number one really really encouraging thank you for uh your concern for uh michael and i's ongoing energy uh that's really refreshing and of the options we provided it seems like you guys overwhelmingly prefer that we do less frequent episodes at a quality equal to or greater than what we're already doing as opposed to doing lower quality regular releases anything like that so we're gonna start doing seasons of podcasts with off-season periods now when we we've skipped one week so far in the history of the show and we lost like an unbelievable amount of subscribers in a single week they've all come back in the last two episodes but if you guys are serious about seasons uh don't forget we exist when there's no podcasts coming out right but all this is part of of gearing up for uh 2015. we've got some huge plans you guys been asking for liturgies more are coming we can't wait to announce what we've got planned um josh uh is is part of what we're doing now he's helping us get some uh some other events off the ground that you're going to hear about in the near future and of course we're going to actually wrap up season one in december when we bring on my wife jenny mccarg and lisa gunger to talk about uh spouses of doubt that's like the most common question we got after we did faith lost and found one and two from you guys was well what's it like when you're married to someone what does the spouse do how how does the family deal with this what do you do with kids we're gonna address all those questions in december to wrap out season one uh that's so good that's great stuff really really great stuff um today um we uh we're gonna take a unique approach we're gonna dig in specifically to uh some conversations that have popped up online due to the release of the feature film interstellar it's so funny i saw the movie over the weekend and my first thought after it was over was i need i need to talk to science mike i have no idea what i just saw um i just spent three hours and uh a bunch of money and popcorn and tickets on seeing this movie and now all i have is questions so the fact that we're doing this today is pretty incredible so um there is a spoiler alert for those who have not seen the movie you may want to hit pause at this point and come back to this podcast once you see the film uh if you're not worried about it then you can roll with us but um there's gonna be a lot of great questions we've taken questions online uh that mike's gonna answer for us today and uh and really excited about kind of digging in here so um mike uh hopefully you saw the movie over the weekend as well i did i saw at 10 a.m on saturday uh because i'm old and i like matinees [Laughter] is it a matinee if it's in the morning is does that still work it was six bucks six dollars okay i mean i was i was like why does anyone go to movies later than 10 a.m this is this is the way it should be done that's great that's amazing well i think my my first question kind of coming out of the gate then is after seeing this movie and movies like it i think the big question is what is actually when you see a film like this um i think a lot of people come out of the theater and they're asking what is actually scientifically possible that we saw in that film versus what's what's complete fiction what's made up for the entertainment um of selling tickets and uh and getting people really excited about seeing matthew mcconaughey in space um can you walk us through just from like a 30 000 foot perspective on how do you even go about kind of deciphering clearly you have to have some sort of background and common understanding of science but how do you even filter through like what's fiction for the sake of film and and what's real science that's possible and happening right now well i thought uh first of all the movie was perfect for our listeners because if if we're talking about science art and faith this was a piece of art that was about science and faith um and so i actually thought first of all it was a good story and i thought that was the most important thing you know um some people in the science community um saw the film didn't like the film regardless of the science i act i liked it now i'm pretty sentimental i'll you know uh frozen is my jam so let's be honest like when it comes to film if you've got uh some family interaction you've got some emotion on display i'm a pretty easy sell now when you when you decide decipher science the first thing you have to realize is hollywood does an overwhelmingly horrible job with science even sci-fi franchises you look at star wars and star trek and the physics is bad there are sounds in space just really fundamental problems with science in those films now there's been a few standouts in hollywood's history apollo 13 obviously went through painstaking work to get the basics right because it was an account of a true story but i thought interstellar did a better job than the vast majority of hollywood cinema now that's great to hear you say mike because i feel like i approach movies just assuming it's all fiction even the based on a true story stuff i i approach it like i remember seeing um mission impossible tom cruise is there's an explosion and he's blown onto the front of a helicopter in the middle of exploding and it's on fire and it's just like it's the very picture of something that's so ludicrous that you just i don't know i approach film from that place that there isn't any good science involved so to hear you even begin kind of saying that there is some good science happening in the story related to this i think is i think interesting for our conversation today well it's all about suspension of disbelief and for me as someone who's at least science literate really bad science breaks my ability to be in the story so you know you look at a film and lois lane is is falling very fast towards the surface of the earth that you assume eight meters per second per second acceleration and uh and here comes superman like hypersonic he's gonna catch lois lyon and then he doesn't slow down he just catches her right and she's saved well superman is going faster than lois and what hurts human bodies is acceleration and deceleration and what would actually happen in that situation is superman would act as a giant artillery round and vaporize lois she'd turn into a red mist right and so for me when i watch films if the science is bad enough i can't stay in the story and for most of interstellar i could stay in the story a couple of times when i got out of the story i did more research over the weekend and it turns out my intuition was wrong and their science was better than i thought oh wow okay all right well let's let's take let's take it from like kind of the the arc of the story um is that the the there is something changing related to the climate um on planet earth and that basically the world is coming to an end but not everybody knows it yet they see signs of the climate changing there's all these you know crazy dust storms and other things happening and and people are putting together that things are not right and things are not well on planet earth um and there's this climate change thing do you what's your take on on how they approach the environmental issue and either explaining it or not explaining it to um the audience they were very clever in that they didn't give you a fixed this is happening in number of years in the future right if you take a long-term view a few century view um everything that interstellar displayed on earth is plausible uh so as sort of uh our climate's getting warmer uh our deserts are growing um it's affecting precipitation look at california uh you can imagine that that drought could spread dramatically further and further across the us as as the climate continues to change and because of climate change and human activity we're actually already uh in the sixth major mass extinction event in earth's history what is that what is the sixth extension event when you look at the fossil record there's these there's these periods where suddenly uh biodiversity drops dramatically because of some event uh super volcanoes meteors some of them we don't know why but species suddenly die off very very very very very quickly and whenever that happens it's always bad news for the top of the food chain most of all microbes they don't care they they adapt they their their their generations are so short microbial diversity is hardly ever affected um but the bigger the animal the longer the the food chains or the supply chain it takes to to keep your existence viable uh the worse extinction events tend to turn out you know uh if you think of apex animals um you know from the dinosaur era none of them survived only the small dinosaurs had a chance to evolve into birds um so the idea that climate change could ultimately affect the viability of earth for humanity is sadly plausible and viable scientifically when you think when you talk about the sixth extinction uh are there five other extinctions that are we've been leading up to we've already gone through that we should be aware of and know about there's there's five documented ones basically um and uh you know the most recent i believe was caused when a meteor struck mexico and wiped out most of the life on the planet had a nuclear winter the whole whole thing had a mass die off and that's actually what it's great for us that's when mammals got to take over the planet uh in the the the extended lack of food the food scarcity wiped out all the large animals and that gave mammals the space to sort of evolve and and diversify and ultimately produce humans on this planet so i'm sure you know bees or whoever ends up as the next major life form on this planet if it gets to that we'll be very happy for our climate change it's just not a good story for people sure sure real fad pittman uh his question for the liturgist was what was the cause of the dust on the earth there in the film was it gravity related great question uh it was not gravity related other than dust stays on the earth because of gravity um what actually happens with climate change again is you get those drought conditions soil gets fatigued there was something in the movie called blight we can assume that is some form of disease or infection that is affecting their crops that fed on nitrogen started wiping out the different kinds of food crops humanity uses so you they just start using corn over and over and over and over which fatigues the soil and if you look back in the 1930s we had the great dust bowl right when soil gets fatigued and and things start dying off and there's no roots to hold it together you combine that with drought and more severe wind storms and you would in fact get horrible dust storms uh across the american continent and across the world really that was awfully plausible but the driving engine there is climate not gravity okay all right tundravol uh asks he says why did the combine there's this moment where all the combine tractors returned to the farmhouse kind of on their own i i had the same question did we miss something how did how did these tractors end up in front of this farmhouse like at random and yet all in sync that confused me too uh so these these tractors are being driven by gps gps is the only project in human engineering right now that uses both general and special relativity what does that mean it means time is moving at a different rate for gps satellites than it is down here on earth right and gps clocks are designed to accommodate for that right that is an electromagnetic phenomenon that gps uses to communicate gravity is responsible for that warping of time uh now gps alone isn't enough to navigate something your phone to give you good directions also has a compass now compass is just a magnet it reads electromagnetic fields what was purported to be happening in the bedroom this anomaly was gravitational so if it was gravity severe enough to warp clocks it would probably be gravity severe enough to destroy that home completely and possibly the neighboring areas i was really confused i just had to assume that perhaps the manipulation of gravity whatever unknown mechanism in physics that took also manipulated either magnetism or some other electromagnetic activity otherwise that's a huge gaping hole in the plot now they have some license here in physics today gravity is pretty much a mystery we know a lot about the other fundamental forces of physics but we don't know what the force carrier the particle for gravity is we don't know how to integrate it into quantum mechanics so you know a physicist like you know uh the one who was involved in the production of this film could certainly wave his hand and just say the mystery of gravity and kind of write a free pass there but that that seems uh unsatisfying one of the present kind of characters that's that's surrounding this story is obviously the role of nasa um nasa is this program that everyone thought had kind of disappeared and was irrelevant um and the government you know come to find out through the story of the film the government is secretly funding uh nasa work even though they know public opinion uh wouldn't make that a popular thing to to you know send a press release out about because people wanted money spent on things that you know would allow the earth to continue to thrive and they felt like nasa you know was something that is all about other worlds and other planets and other places that's a little bit of what kind of popular opinion is about nasa today right i mean that's you and i both live in florida and cape canaveral is kind of a big part of the story here in florida um do you think there's a role that that nasa can play in what's happening with climate change and what's happening here on earth versus other places or do you think nasa even as we think about it in 2014 um has a different role so nasa doesn't just do space exploration they do basic aeronautics research that's a a really important function that people don't realize they do they help us make more efficient airplanes they help us they're working on basic viability for hypersonic flight for commercial aviation uh they also do a lot of planetary exploration on earth nasa has a ton of satellites who are focused not outward but inward back down towards our planet and nasa is actually instrumental in documenting and forecasting what's happening with our climate um so that's that's pretty plausible uh what is not as plausible is the government amidst financial crisis suddenly funding nasa more right nasa's got pretty good pr today it's pretty well loved by the public people just assume when asked that nasa is getting about a quarter of the federal budget when they realize that in fact nasa gets half of one percent of the federal budget they think nasa is great right uh so the idea that under calamity and collapsing budgets nasa would get more funding i thought was the least realistic part of the film that's political science not hard science but it was really i don't know how you would get from where we are today to a place where humanity put its hope and trust in space exploration i think it's the right call i just don't think we're there as a public and certainly not there as a government and not only that this secret nasa uh from an engineering perspective was building this massive structure this station that was going to be lifted off the earth by an as yet unidentified gravity drive right i don't know how they could have been engineering that and building a structure with no idea on what the ultimate promotion propulsion system was going to be that left me scratching my head big time sure well the overall strategy seemed to be that this this nasa campaign this underground nasa campaign was to to see what kind of life could be set up um somewhere else not on planet earth and to send people to senate a small group of people to go and search and find the best place for life a new life and a new world to be set up the way they had to get there though was through what's called a wormhole explain to us is this wormhole thing something put together by hollywood or does it actually exist and is it plausible to travel through a wormhole wormholes are totally plausible in modern physics in fact some physicists believe that quantum entanglement this characteristic that you can take two quantum particles and link them and they'll mirror each other's state even when separated by distance is done via a quantum wormhole so we're kind of on the threshold of validating wormholes is not just theoretical but an existing thing but the important word there is quantum [Music] right wormholes uh if they exist um on a more macro scale would require um a particular model of the universe which is currently called brain theory not brain is in your head but as in part of the word membrane you can imagine that uh the universe exists as a as a four-dimensional sheet and to do a wormhole you effectively fold that sheet back on itself and then you create a tunnel between those folded universe sheet now you're folding four dimensional space which isn't as crazy as it sounds because the sun and anything with mass curves four dimensional space that's how orbits work that's how gravity work that's what einstein's relativity tells us and this is that scene in the in the film where they are folding the piece of paper yes and i thought that man you know i've read so many physics books to understand wormholes yeah was that a good explanation and and kind of prop for that it was the best explanation i've seen especially for why this wormhole was a sphere and not a circle right because you would expect people usually when you talk about portals cartoons and video games have trained us that you'll have an oval that you step through yeah but that's not a hole in three-dimensional space that's a hole in two-dimensional space so a spherical opening oh man i totally geeked out and not only that one of my favorite parts about this film is that they um the way you make computer graphics is a technique called ray tracing where you where you basically have computers simulate rays of light and and that's how they build the model all those models are made make an assumption that light travels in a straight line and so they rewrote a renderer just for this film for the wormhole and the black hole that allowed for curved light uh that's never been done before and so you could make an argument that these visuals are the most accurate representations of wormholes and supermassive black holes that have ever been produced by humanity for a hollywood film oh my gosh wonderful sure okay so so you brought up the black hole so so what's the relationship with the black hole to the to the wormhole then the none they just happened to create a wormhole near a black hole who whoever later in the plot does that uh that that was just uh the wormhole was the mechanism by which we arrived at the black hole now there are ideas in physics that black holes are wormholes inside the singularity uh but that that wasn't the case in this film okay and and explain explain then the role of a black hole in general like as we know it through science okay matter is mostly empty space we know that protons electrons protons themselves are mostly empty space you got three quarks which are tiny they glue together and they make a proton so when gravity gets intense enough it can actually force matter to collapse in upon itself and as that density increases you can reach a point where there's so much gravity that nothing that gets to that black hole can get away that boundary is called an event horizon and you can take any amount of matter and if you compress it enough it will turn into a black hole so the earth could be turned into a black hole if you compressed it down enough i don't remember the exact threshold i think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of like a softball or maybe a p it's very very small but you take the same amount of matter in the whole planet and you make it tiny you get you get a black hole it wouldn't last very long because black holes evaporate but that's that's a tangent but so uh black holes are any time gravity has gotten so intense that there's no exit anymore once you're there you're there now that's weird in physics but is it like is it like a a cosmic version of quicksand and then it pulls you in and you you kind of get sucked in and you can't it's it's cur it's curved space time and this is basically your curving space time so much that there's a pit at the bottom instead of a it's a bottomless pit of gravity so yes absolutely you start getting close to a black hole you're going to accelerate toward it and if you get too close to the if you get to the event horizon no amount of energy can get you back out okay which is whoa right now there's there's black holes and then there's super massive black holes uh so a lot of black holes are like stellar mass they're like 10 or 12 a stellar mass is the weight of our sun by the way um so but supermassive black holes are millions of black holes and gargantuan the black hole and interstellar is a supermassive black hole who's rotating near the speed of light it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists um and those are crazy wacky things what we do know about black holes is obviously the planets around them are pretty cold and dark do is there anything else we need to know about the aesthetic or the environment around these black holes i was really confused by the film at this point because they landed on a planet covered in water near a black hole um and that doesn't make any sense um if a planet's close enough to a black hole to experience the kind of relativistic effects that you saw in the movie where one hour equals seven years back on earth yeah i would expect that planet to exhibit some specific characteristics one of those is i'd expect it to break apart jupiter's moons the close ones are in a constant state of flux they're they're oblong and they're being torn apart by jupiter's gravity and that's just jupiter so here you have something with millions of times the mass of our sun and a planet in a stable orbit so but it's a weird it's a weird black hole again it's rotating near light speed so that's going to kind of uh that's going to amplify the effects of relativity so let's assume there is some orbit and they did the math that's stable you'd still be getting bombarded with matter that's being sucked toward this black hole one your orbital velocity would be unfathomable it'd be incredibly fast and i'm not sure how you would accelerate a spaceship to that speed to land on the planet to the fir in the first place right but number two um there'd be stuff flying through space near light speed now if you think about like when meteors strike the earth think about recently we had a meteor strike over russia and there was footage of it and it it exploded with a force of nuclear bombs and there were injuries that knocked out all these windows well that was moving you know 100 000 miles an hour 150 000 miles an hour you'd have meteors traveling near light speed bombarding this planet right so uh it wouldn't take very many of those to turn a planet into rubble uh and plus black holes are called black holes for a reason now they're they're surrounded by something called an accretion disk this is the matter that's being sucked in and that matter does get heated to millions of degrees like star-like temperatures but compared to the amount of illumination and heat that comes from the entire surface of a star there's not that much from an accretion disk so i was surprised by the relative amount of light and warmth on all these black hole planets and the film i'm hoping i've ordered the book the science of interstellar that there'll be answers in there because that was a really big head scratcher and the other thing that bugged me and this was like the most confusing thing in the movie uh was that they could take off from these planets at all but i think we've got some questions that'll address that so you're saying that when once you land on one of these planets who that have the kind of you know planetary environment that they do um you know you being able to walk around out there and you being able to kind of even though it's cold that there wasn't you still have some questions about whether you could actually function and walk well no you could function and walk what i'm talking about is basic rocket science how did they make the ship take off again right 130 percent of earth's gravity is is is that's pretty tolerable really compared to some other even places in our solar system right um but well so i'll just get into it like uh so this first planet you have these uh tidal waves massive tidal waves that they're trying to avoid yeah and uh i would think a planet close enough to a black hole to have tidal waves like that would be tidally locked so the same part of that planet would always face gargantuan and its tides would always stay in the same spot so totally feasible to have these massive walls of water less feasible that they would be moving now if there's some unknown force causing this plant to rotate you would have those giant tidal waves but so you you have eight meters per second per second of gravitational acceleration on the earth now if this planet has a hundred thirty percent of earth's gravity it's going to have a higher rate of gravitational acceleration we can't calculate it precisely because we don't know either the planet's density or its circumference so we can't run the normal equations right to get the exact escape velocity but you can guess that you're looking at between 10 or 11 meters per second of acceleration towards the center of mass of that planet now to get off the earth like the apollo astronauts did you have to accelerate a rocket to 25 000 miles per hour to get into earth orbit low earth orbit like the space shuttle did you've still got to get between 17 and 18 000 miles per hour so on this unknown planet this water world you're going to need to beat 32 000 miles per hour to get off the planet they visited um this is an issue because when you look at the saturn rocket or you look at excuse me the space shuttle they're giant multi-story structures and they're only so big because they have to hold a ton of fuel right rocket equations tell us that not only do you have have to have enough fuel to accelerate what you're getting out of orbit you also have to have enough fuel to accelerate the fuel you could imagine if you took your car and you were going to drive to from the east coast to the west coast the united states but you had to carry all the gas with you in the car right right you have to as you add more gas in a big gas trailer you have to keep adding more gas to cover the weight of the gas and when they had these little landers in interstellar there were no fuel tanks and they were very clearly conventional rockets which means what creates thrust is exhaust velocity and they had no fuel to create that exhaust velocity that really really confused me not to mention uh you know you could say well they made a they made a tremendous burn they took you know the maximum acceleration well humans can only accelerate so fast without dying right that's a big point and number two in an atmosphere if you accelerate too quickly you burn up and explode so um that was like phenomenally confusing for me to have modeled so accurately to have worked on relativistic orbits to have compensated for some problems and really advanced physics but avoid like commonly known scientific knowledge today about rocket science really confused me okay so it feels like they may have taken some creative liberties on travel yeah but that means for me every single time a spaceship took off i rolled my eyes and left the story every i couldn't let it go so you wanted to see so from a scientific standpoint you wanted to see them trapped on that first planet or you wanted to see what did you what did you want to see what would have made more sense from a scientific you know either they're harvesting fuel locally which is something we talked about theoretically in science or this giant space station that they've got that they're traveling around with it could drop a vehicle full of fuel you know just something some nod to the fact that the most fundamental understandings of physics and rocket equations means our primary difficulty is dealing with fuel it's just a really fundamental part of space exploration now you know if you've got a gravity drive layer in the film great but at this point there's no gravity drive that's a chemical rocket where's your gas it's so great looking at this film through your eyes because how they're traveling around in spaceships was the least of all of my concerns [Laughter] it that makes because of all the movies that i've grown up with where people in space fly around in spaceships it just makes sense that they can fly a spaceship around and now as you're breaking it down for us um yeah clearly there's way so even star trek or star wars they give us something to chew on there's warp drive there's hyperdrive there's a non-propellant-based system and no such technology was introduced in interstellar right nothing new is what you're saying right okay all right um can we talk about this this relativity situation with the uh as it relates to to one one hour equals seven years yeah that's totally plausible is it i mean how does that fundamentally work where on earth it would be seven years and and you can travel somewhere else and in real time it feels like an hour to you based on where you've traveled in the universe so our intuition tells us that time is a universal constant because it's all our experience prepares us for that but time and space are the same thing that's what einstein taught us and that's been proven in a myriad ways if it wasn't true gps wouldn't work the way it's built uh according to newtonian physics mercury's orbit around the sun is wrong because it's a relativistic orbit gravity and velocity distort space time so the speed of light exists not because you can't go any faster it's not some cosmic speed limit but because of time dilation if you somehow traveled faster than the speed of light from your own reference frame you would arrive before you left and that's not possible right that's where the speed of light comes from right so um if we could build a spaceship that traveled at a significant fraction of light speed which we have no idea how to do by the way that's a phenomenal amount of energy we can accelerate some things near light speed like protons and subatomic particles that's what the large hadron collider does but anything with more mass than that the amount of energy required is ridiculous right so um and i really appreciate most films that that that work on time dilation uh they make you go really fast and that's way less realistic than dropping someone in a gravity well okay i love this but so so again gravity bends the fabric of space which is space time it bends not only physical space but it bends time um so if you get too close to some severe source of gravity like a black hole time starts to stretch out and it actually almost when you get to the very edge of a singularity that time dilation gets more severe so we're you know it almost gets infinite um it's crazy do you see a moment in the future in which plastic surgeons are gonna harvest this kind of science to slow down the growth and development of people on the earth so they can look younger i i can i can see people going wait a second i want to be 100 years old and look like matthew mcconaughey you would be 100 years old from earth's perspective from your own perspective no time would have passed or very little time would have passed so the only way you could do that would be to grow clones inside of spaceships put them in orbit around a black hole and keep them there stably so it you could do it but it would be like a 20 trillion dollar facelift um the amount of resources required to pull that off i can't believe i'm examining the plausibility of that so seriously no i can imagine i want matthew mcconaughey looks good for 124 years old i uh i want to figure out what a secret was but he had to pay a price he didn't actually live the 124 years yes good point thank you for bringing that up bringing that back into perspective for those who are trying to stay young and that's how relativity works uh it's totally real totally measurable right now like when you get it's as simple as this is true every time you fly every time you get on an airplane you experience time dilation right because of the speed of the aircraft and it's greater distance from the center of earth's gravity well now it's very very small but it's measurable so if you take very accurate clocks and you put you know one on the top of a mountain and the other at sea level in time they drift from each other because time's not flowing at the same rate uh and people trip out with that if you've never studied relativity that seems unbelievable and fantastic but uh it's it's good science and proven sure sure let's get back to some of the questions um from uh some of our friends online um let's see we've got joe stroup uh asked the question if the wormhole the wormhole was placed by fifth dimensional humans of the future but they need a wormhole to survive to that point how like his point is like how does how does that work yes first of all uh fifth dimensional humans of the future would no longer be humans um that would be like uh you know a lung fish saying uh large-brained lung fish of the future talking about humans right right so a lot of evolution in there yeah um and by the way for those listeners i know we have some more uh um theologically conservative folks that are along for the ride we appreciate you i'm making tons of scientific assumptions here that you don't hold uh and i just want to acknowledge that um and just feel free to think i'm a lunatic i'm cool and here in a few minutes we'll get into some theology and and kind of some of the god aspects of all this but let's let's get into the fifth dimensional humans in the future what what are your thoughts on that so that's you know could theoretically some distant descendant of ours transcend space-time yeah probably i mean i don't it's so we're talking about so far in the future and so far beyond our ability to model um i think the question though is is that something that scientifically if if a plus b equals c and you kind of follow that you know some sort of formula you're saying that is plausible versus some sort of fictional thing that was made up yeah i mean more likely than we turn into middle earth or whatever there's at least some basis there but where this question really makes a great point is fifth dimensional humans were only able to do so because they went back in time and protected themselves before they were ready to transcend earth sure there's a real causality issue there um that i think was just like a they either needed to address that in the story or or they just missed it and i have a hard time believing that maybe there's something on the cutting room floor that is going to fix this and the expanded developer edition but right now that was just some basic like you guys messed the story up right right right right um td row 87 he asked why did they have to ruin the movie by going into the black hole do you want to explain that yes um so i was really nervous when i realized he was going to the black hole first of all because he shouldn't be able to right the accretion dish should have vaporized him now if we assume distant descendants of ours trans humans are sort of paving the way into the black hole for him okay great but then i thought how in the world are you gonna put on screen what happens inside of a black hole it's a singularity the laws of physics don't work anymore right like how on earth are you going to portray that and at first i was deeply disappointed when he woke up in this tesseract and it was all these lines and i was like that's not a singularity but then is the scene unfolded and it turns out that this is a three-dimensional construct in the singularity designed for a four-dimensional being like a human who's locked on the fourth dimension by the way who can't move freely in time only in in the three dimensions of space for him to interact with his own past okay i didn't hate it um i thought the way gravity was used to manipulate the past was strange and i think for example the morse code on the watch like the watch kept moving the morse code kept happening that was strange it's also really convenient that they put a walking super computer in the singularity with him to not only do the measurements of the singularity but rapidly derive the mathematical implications right a more feasible thing would be a team of scientists fell into the singularity and spent a few decades in there puzzling things out before transmitting their results back so yeah there were a lot of graphs there now the thing is a singularity in physics you're talking about like the ultimate deus ex makina um like that is god from the machine that is going to get you out of any writing trap because you just say well singularity um but yeah just all kind of things like if you're manipulating gravity knocking books down and moving the hands on a clock are really strange limitations to how you can manifest gravity right um yeah i mean if you can manifest gravity that precisely just like make marks on a desk you know what i mean just write the thing out uh i get from a storytelling perspective that's less interesting but again this this this part did strain uh my ability to keep my belief uh my my suspension of belief but but it was kind of the way they were trying to tie it all together to pull the story together and to bring it to an end so you're saying it may have been more of a storytelling device than good science well there is no good science on a singularity that's the great thing for them nobody has any idea if you go back to the beginning of the universe of the singularity or in a black hole nobody has any idea because our math completely breaks down right so they got to lean into mystery there it's just that i get to use infinite mystery i don't know i don't know if that's the way i would have gone but uh i also have never released a major film so i'm a little hesitant to criticize their storytelling because as someone who does write it is quite difficult yeah it is a challenge and and i think that's what's so compelling about this film is um is knowing that they have the daunting challenge of selling tickets and trying to to get pop popular culture to buy into this film you know and and see it as accessible from an entertainment value standpoint but also um to not be discredited from a scientific standpoint too so i mean the the balance they were trying to run with this is uh you know daunting to say the least um all right we have another question here from uh let's see we've got td row uh 87 has one other question i want to get to um wouldn't cooper know that by sending a stay message he'd simply be creating another universe if that cooper stayed i'm gonna cut the writer's slack here okay cooper is the first human being to fall into a black hole and he's seeing a daughter he thought he would never see again right his uh his limbic system took over he wasn't doing advanced uh reasoning in his prefrontal cortex he was in a panic state and why wouldn't he be what do you mean his limb dicks took over what does that mean so the the our frequent listeners already know but the the brain is uh layered the outer layers are more advanced more evolutionarily recent more arguably human the inner layers are more primitive when you are in a disaster situation your limbic system your rat brain takes over the show it pushes your higher brain functions aside it does fight or flight it manipulates you with emotions anger fear in some cases even affection uh and love so i fully believe cooper having just had this incredible physical fear lots of adrenaline ejected from a a spaceship inside a black hole presumably to his immediate death instead finds himself in a completely unfathomable set of circumstances uh of course of course you write the message stay because you don't care if it creates a paradox right you want to be with your daughter and not in the middle of a black hole sure oh yeah that seems obvious um austin mcnair asks any science behind the possibilities of hyper sleep um now clearly this was a fascinating device they used um you know to allow the body to to be in some sort of recovery mode um explain hypersleep and whether there's any good science behind that uh this was one of my favorite parts of the film uh even to go to mars when we face real issues you're talking about a six-month trip best case six months in space carrying not only all your fuel but all your food and your water that's a that's an issue humans are pretty expensive when it comes to food and water we need a lot of it to continue to survive now you can recycle water to some degree but food's an issue uh not only that on earth in our cosmic cradle uh we're protected from the harshness of space the sun is constantly spewing radiation that's very bad for us and our atmosphere blocks it right yeah uh i think most of our listeners would probably view that as the loving hand of god some of our listeners view that as a necessity for evolution to happen and some both uh but whatever reason when we send people outer space you can only go to space so many times as an astronaut i don't know if you know that the amount of time you spend outside the earth's atmosphere is measured because your risk of cancer starts to skyrocket from genetic damage from cosmic rays so if you could put people into hypersleep you fix the food and water problem if they go into a reduced metabolic state they don't consume as many resources well it's actually possible today to induce a particular type of safe hypothermia and put people in a hibernation state effectively for about a week but nasa's funding that research to see if we can extend that period much much much farther the same way frogs and bears and other animals hibernate you can induce hibernation in humans by manipulating their respiratory passage with a carefully controlled low temperature mist so is it is there any similarities to like being in a coma probably probably coma yeah probably in the neighborhood sure like a medically induced coma i'm not as severe um you probably could dream in a hibernated hibernation state which you're not really going to do in a medicated coma right but what was great is not only did um and i i haven't seen this in real science so this this could be one of those situations where real science emulates science fiction as these guys went into hypersleep they were immersed in water and water is an incredibly effective radiation shield so you can imagine if we really did put astronauts in uh some state of hibernation or suspended animation and then dip them in water you're mitigating the harmful effects of space travel you're solving the food and water issue and you're solving the radiation issue all at the same time i thought that was brilliant wouldn't you need to be hooked up to some sort of iv or something yeah you totally need an iv and you would actually and i didn't see this in the film you'd probably need a breathing tube right they did they didn't show breathing tube iv or um or some there were a few elements that seemed to they just kind of slipped into this tube that was underwater and didn't really explain how how they were staying alive i mean it was it was a subtle device but if you almost halted metabolism right you could do that i don't know what that mechanism would be but also uh although i am a lover of science uh this is definitely not the areas of science i've spent the most time studying um and you know medicine in general uh you know i like doctors um so yeah i don't know but i think i think on a fundamental level the idea of we're going to sleep in a very deep sleep or surrounded by water was was was quite clever and less of a stretch than many of the other things we saw in the film sure sure well we talked a lot about the science here we talked a little bit about some of the evolutionary process um a little bit about what was fictionalized there are some people that approach science as when we talk about science they understand that we're talking about um kind of the nature of how god has set some things in motion there are other people when we talk about science feel as though we are not talking about god being at work um where is where is god at work in a movie like this where is his hand where is his what is what is his role in the universe for those that that think about him being involved in science and for those that even separate god from science i thought interstellar worked with a basic assumption that there's no such thing as god i thought interstellar worked if you have sort of a pantheistic assumption that the universe itself is god i think uh interstellar works well if you make an assumption that god is indeed some higher force or higher reality and they alluded to that in the dialogue whenever they spoke about the transcendent reality of love so in my own particular theology i am a guy who both believes in god and experiences god in a personal way but also believes that the universe formed in an ancient big bang and that uh life emerged on this planet through a relatively brutal and competitive process called evolution via natural selection and a lot of those things uh really push back and wrestle with our assumptions and dogmas and beliefs about god for someone like me who sees god as present somehow and involved in the way that nature has unfolded so far i don't see that stopping so if this for me this was not a challenging movie faith-wise this is very much how i see the unfolding story of of god and man continuing that we can do so you see you see the the science in this film um as a a compliment to the existence of god and his work on the earth not as a separate conversation however god actually is and we don't know in my opinion we experience god you know i belong to a faith tradition that believes god was specially manifest in a particular person named jesus many of my friends think that's lunacy i get that but for whatever reason god seems very content to allow creation to continue to unfold things are not static they have never been static things are constantly changing things are constantly in flux and emits uh best case um now humans have only been around for a couple hundred thousand years that's an unimaginably long amount of time but if our kids keep having kids and their kids keep having kids eventually you can cross time frames like that life has so far god seems content to let us continue to grow and to change and to experience new things and i thought and this will sound weak sauce to some people but whatever could it be there's a nod to a higher power in this movie already and that somehow humanity was allowed to go back and save itself is is that plot whole as people have described it perhaps a nod to some degree of theism in this film could that have been one of these moments that we don't understand how or why but god intervenes and helps us help ourselves that's such a good point i i think the other side of the faith conversation for me that i think stuck out was whenever i think about people involved in in putting together a life and career based on good side and science i feel like the idea that they there isn't a faith element to what they do is is a big part of the pr plan i think what i saw in this film is there are people putting together good science and making decisions based on you know everything they can put together in a formula but at the end of the day they're still making decisions based on faith and hope right you don't know what is going to happen you you have as many of the formulas and theories put together that you can but even good science leads scientists to have to roll the dice and gamble and and hope that things are going to not have been a waste of time and be effective right is is is there a faith element to science that scientists don't often talk about that comes across in this film i think so uh you know there are certainly scientists um who have no belief in god whatsoever but there are many scientists and i know many scientists who are good scientists doing good research who believe in god heisenberg said one of my favorite quotes the first gulp of the natural sciences will make you an atheist but god is waiting for you at the bottom of the glass you know i've got some friends who roll their eyes at that i think that's incredibly beautiful here's the thing haven't had a gulp of natural science that made me an atheist as i've continued to drink and i've found god again that god the bottom of the glass is not the same god i lost at the first gulp right yeah um yes so i think scientifically enlightened people probably have different conceptions and understandings about their faith than people who are are not really into science or non-science folk yeah um but you know do i believe in god because i've experienced god as a transcendent reality or do i believe in god because evolution has shaped my brain to believe i've experienced god as a transcendent reality i don't really care yeah that's true and i think i think a lot of people just lean into that mystery um you know i tell people theologically i'm probably closer to a deist but pragmatically i know god is a being and i don't try to balance that equation because doing so collapses it um it it i don't try to master it uh i just try to enjoy it and that doesn't mean i reject science i think anyone who listens could could understand i take science very seriously and i don't i don't shape science with my faith sure but at some level like you said there's a hope i hold on to that is beyond any reason and i think that hope is useful and beautiful and the essence of what it means to believe that's great and i also feel like i think what i'm getting at too is it feels like even in this the the scientists are going i hope this works like there isn't any guarantee that all of their data adds up to what they want it to add up to right i mean there's a oh oh yeah yeah we never know this stuff's going to work that's science science is failing over and over and over right i think i think that's that's the hope and faith side even from a non-spiritual faith you know standpoint where you know scientists kind of stand on these these you know bedrock facts as far as many of them are concerned but i think what was fascinating to me about this movie is is this kind of roll of the dice i hope i hope this works you know rather than uh facts or facts and this is all gonna work out just like it you know does in my laboratory you know what i'm saying i do i mean so that's how we got to the moon right that shouldn't have worked right right right but we because we thought we could make it work we did the impossible right uh you know and you re i've alright you heard it here a lot reasonable people don't start businesses right because businesses statistically don't work it makes no sense to start your own business it's such a gamble i mean you're it's better than playing the lottery but not a lot better than playing the lottery uh but when people transcend and refuse to accept those facts sometimes you win and those moments of winning are what shapes our culture and shapes our history uh yeah totally i'm with you that's that's that's a good thought well this has been super insightful mike thanks so much for taking the time to to think through this for us do you have additional resources or places people can go um to to learn more about some of the things that you've talked about here today in the show notes on the liturgists.com podcast i'll have some links uh i'll have a link to the book the science of interstellar which is from one of the film's producers uh that i can't wait to read i know a lot of you will want to too i'll have articles by astronomers and astrophysicists with their take on the film of course we also want you to subscribe to the podcast on itunes that's not only makes it easier on you it also helps this program continue to grow and if you have thoughts or questions or comments we'd love for you to do you