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This is the final episode of our series on sci-fi universes. And this week we will tackle “The Expanse”. Now we’ve got fusion drives, Proto-matter, g-forces! Listen up, belta lawda! Let's look at the science of our own possible (with a side of aliens) future. 

Show Notes

• Science and physics of The Expanse
• Fraser’s favorite sci-fi series
• Strong recommendation for the show and books
• Epstein Drive and fusion propulsion
• Artificial gravity through acceleration
• Metallic hydrogen and advanced spacecraft technology
• Newtonian space combat and high-G effects
• Ring gates and interstellar travel
• Realistic human adaptation to life in space
• Asteroids as weapons of mass destruction
• Earth, Mars, and Belter politics
• Belter culture and low-gravity living
• The protomolecule and precursor civilizations
• Themes of humanity’s future in space
• Future discussions: Battlestar Galactica and Dungeon Crawler Carl
• Upcoming episodes: Oceans and Organics on Mars, Big Rockets and the Moon Race, and summer reading recommendations.

Transcript

Fraser Cain:

AstronomyCast Episode 795 The Science of the Expanse. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Cain, I'm the publisher of Universe Today.

With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute, and the director of Cosmoguest. Hey Pamela, how you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay:

I am experiencing sunlight streaming radically into my studio in a way I don't get to see on Mondays because I've usually fled at this point of the day.

Fraser Cain:

Right. Yeah, we're usually done recording, but here we are later on in the afternoon and you're getting that afternoon sunlight coming through. It's true.

Feels good.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

This is the final episode of our series on sci-fi universes, and this week we will tackle the Expanse. Now, we've got fusion drives, protomatter, and G-forces. Listen up, Beltalota.

All right, now last week I said that Stargate was objectively the best sci-fi series ever done. I was wrong. I was wrong.

I take it back. The Expanse. The Expanse is objectively, without question, the best sci-fi television series ever made.

So say we all.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Okay. And where does Babylon 5 go?

Fraser Cain:

Oh, we're not going to do the Science of Babylon 5, are we?

Dr. Pamela Gay:

We are not. We absolutely are not. No.

Fraser Cain:

And we're not going to do Battlestar Galactica.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And I did hear you say, so say we all is a fabulous phrase, by the way. That one just needs incorporated into life more often.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah, no, I won't do a Science of Battlestar Galactica, because then I'll just go off in rage. But I'm going to re-watch it. Once we finish Stargate.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Just don't watch the last season.

Fraser Cain:

I won't watch the last season, yeah. It's too bad that they never were able to finish Battlestar Galactica.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Right, exactly.

Fraser Cain:

It would have been much better if they'd had a final season to that show, but they never did. Anyway, we're not talking about Battlestar Galactica. We're talking about The Expanse.

So The Expanse is so good.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

It really is. Now, reading the books also, just those of you who are like, nah, get through the first third of the first book. And it's also the first third of the first TV season.

It starts slow because this is a space opera, people. And there are a lot of characters to introduce. There are a lot of concepts to introduce.

And oh my goodness, the journey you you will be taken on. Yes, you just have to, you know, a roller coaster, the part where you're going up and it's going chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, and you're just like, why? Why did I wait in line five hours to go chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp?

Yeah, it's it's going to be worth it. It's going to be worth it.

Fraser Cain:

Yes.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And this is not a 30 second ride. Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

And the TV show, like, what is it? Six seasons? It is just it is phenomenal.

Yeah. Such a good show. And what's nice is in the previous episodes, we've talked about the science of things, but a lot of it's just hand waving nonsense.

In this, we've only got a couple of hand wavy things and the rest is just real science taken to the extremes. And that part makes it just beautiful. So, um, so we, I guess let's start with as, as we have been, let's start with transportation.

Um, and let's start with, let's start with the terrible, so the terribly named Epstein Drive.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

What an unfortunate name. Oh, if they only didn't know him.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

But the Rosanante.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about Epstein Drives.

What is it?

Dr. Pamela Gay:

I don't remember.

Fraser Cain:

Okay. It's a direct fusion drive.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Thank you.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is a real kind of system.

And you know, we talk about this idea of like having fusion energy, fusion plants, and you've got either the, you know, the giant tokamak that's being built in, in Europe right now. And, you know, there's, uh, there are the laser ignition facilities that are happening in the U S but there is another style of fusion that if, if you're willing to sort of walk the fine line between a thermonuclear weapon, because like we know how to do nuclear fusion.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

We do.

Fraser Cain:

It's a, it's a fusion bomb.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

It just tends to be a bit faster than we can control.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. You just don't get the energy out in a nice controlled way. So direct fusion is this sort of halfway point where you are sort of detonating small amounts of fusion and you're using that as a, um, as a propulsion system. And in fact, this is real.

So, uh, NASA has been funding through some of its NIAC grants, uh, direct fusion drives and people are proposing you could make it out to the outer solar system in, uh, a couple of years as opposed to decades.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And NASA has a, a new, uh, raison d'etre, I'm just going to use that word a lot, apparently during this part of the season, um, uh, that is to get a, uh, working fusion generator and we'll see. Fission though.

Fraser Cain:

Fission.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

You're right.

Fraser Cain:

They're planning on building a fission. Yeah. Yeah.

Totally different than fusion.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

I need to have a bulletin board that is fission on one side, fusion on the other, and just Right. Cause I'm, I'm going to swap them. Dyslexia is particularly cruel.

Fraser Cain:

Right. Um, the cool thing about the drives in the Expanse is that they give you gravity, that they fire so hard that you could accelerate your spacecraft so that you were then experiencing 1G inside.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And then you flip.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. And then, and then they flip. So they, they go for half the journey at 1G of acceleration, and then they've reached a halfway point and then they flip around and then they go at 1G of deceleration.

And so you experience gravity on both, in both legs of the journey.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And it also leads to interesting spacecraft designs cause there's some metric, uh, not all of them, but many of them.

Fraser Cain:

Some metric. What do you mean?

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Symmetric. They, they, they, when you flip them, they look, the, the, the way the spacecraft looks, you look at the silhouette, um, it's, it's, they have to be able to.

Fraser Cain:

Oh, I see. Symmetrical. Okay.

I got it. I got it. I understand what you're saying.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

Sorry. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like the, it's, it's sort of interesting that the, like the spacecraft, the way they're designed, they're kind of like living in a skyscraper.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah. You need it so that, that when you rotate it, not all hell breaks loose. Cause if I, weight matters.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Or mass.

Fraser Cain:

I don't know if they talk about what the fuel is, but I think it's, it's a metallic hydrogen, which is a real thing.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

That would make sense. Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. And so in the interior of Jupiter is thought to be hydrogen that is pressed together under thousands of gigapascals of force. And it gets turned into this lattice where you're essentially compressing the hydrogen atoms as close as they'll possibly go.

And they turn into this metallic form that actually generates Jupiter's magnetic field. And this is supposedly been, been generated in the lab, although some people are, are skeptical that it's actually happened, but, and so one possibility is if you can take regular hydrogen, squeeze it into this metallic form, it might remain in that form. It may not require the ongoing pressure to keep it in that form.

And so now you've got this, this form of fuel that you then are feeding into a fusion reactor and you've just got enormous amounts of, of energy storage that can then be used in a way that provides you with a huge amount of thrust.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And if you go to Epcot at Disney World and you ride the ride that theoretically takes you to Mars, that actually just rotates you super, super fast. And you watch the show that they have at the beginning, which stars the one badass woman from Firefly. I'm so bad with proper nouns.

They talk about the rocket you're about to take to go to Mars is powered by, by solid hydrogen, so metallic hydrogen. And if you yell at the TV that that's not a thing that they can do, everyone around you will stare at you. And if you proceed to yell out the number of space toilets, Annie Wilson, I'm looking at you, they will look at you even worse.

Fraser Cain:

Right. Yeah. So, and, and then what, one of the really cool implications for, for this, these high fusion drives is then the combat works in this very Newtonian way where, you know, they're calculating the, the motion of these spacecraft, they're moving, they can make various slight adjustments.

And so you're having to lead the target, you're trying to predict the target if you're going to be shooting it. We'll talk more about weapons in, in a bit, but, but that if you are inside the ship, you are then experiencing these high G maneuvers. The one G is, is purely for comfort.

These things can go much faster. They can do five Gs. They can put you into horrendous G forces while these things are in, in combat.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And they have couches for it.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. They have, they have a fluid that they pump into their veins, right?

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah. So, so there's two different things that go on. They have the high G couches, which conform and support your body so that like you don't have every bone in your body break.

But then the other issue that you run into is high G situations. And someone just pointed out in the YouTube chat that the high Gs on the Mars ride at Epcot made them very not happy with the world. There's certain medications that don't mix well with high Gs, statins is one of them.

So if you think about it, if there are drugs that make it harder for you to tolerate high Gs, there's also going to be medications that make it easier for you to keep your blood even more hyper oxygenated because it's going to be harder for the blood to get to your brain that prevents strokes from occurring. All the things that are in extreme risk during high G events, um, these drugs are meant to assist with, although they still end up losing their pilots and seasons into the series due to a high G maneuver that they don't make it back from.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. And I've mentioned many times that like one of my favorite sequences in a sci-fi television show is where they're in a ship, this sort of really nimble little ship, but there's a bunch of tools out left out and they're making these high G maneuvers shifting back and forth. And now the tools are flying around inside the spacecraft like bullets because everything else is strapped down.

Like what you're supposed to do is strap everything down inside your ship. But in this, they, they leave some stuff out. I forget that like they were, they were working on something when something got attacked and they didn't have time.

And now it's very dangerous. Yeah. It's all weapons inside their ship, which is just terrifying.

So, so they don't have faster than light drives, but they do have stargates, the ring gates.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

They, they have eventually, um, so, so one spoilers just, just to warn you all, it's been out long enough. If I feel okay, spoilering everything. So one of the core premises is, is they encounter a alien life form in the form of this weird, like fungal kind of stuff that, uh, can infest humans and change their actions.

And while trying to understand what's happening, what's going on, uh, there's a bit of seeing visions because of course there is, um, they end up finding in the outer solar system, um, a, a ring that once set up, when they pass into it, it affects how they're moving. And when they try and pass back out of it, once they get things working again, um, they can use it to jump to other solar systems. It, one of the things that gets encountered during that particular season, and it's even better in the books, is this idea that without gravity, wounds don't work right.

And that, that's a really weird sentence to be stating, but.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. That you, your blood won't clot in zero gravity or something like that.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Not so much that it doesn't clot as it doesn't flow in a reasonable way. So we're used to this idea that when you cry in zero gravity, the tears just bubble up on top of your eyeballs. We got introduced to the idea of blobs of blood flying around in one of the Star Trek movies.

Um, but in Expanse, the idea that our body is designed to have blood drain away from wounds, um, in zero gravity, it just pools where it is and keeps expanding where it is. And you have to suck the blood out, yuck, and seal it up, right. Or spin up gravity.

So one of the ideas is you need gravity in order to heal. And that's a powerful idea.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Really cool. Uh, okay.

So we've talked about the, the transportation. Let's, let's talk about, um, sort of the, well, I guess we'll talk briefly about weapons, which we tend to sort of reach at this point.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Flinging asteroids.

Fraser Cain:

Yes. Well, right. So, so you've got the, the drones, the missiles on the various ships, which are like little mini fusion drives that are, they're tracking their target.

You got point defense kinetic weapons that are able to try to blow those things out of the, out of the sky when they're, when the missiles are coming at you. But as you said, uh, at one point someone uses asteroids as a, uh, as a weapon of mass destruction.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah. So this, this is really kind of a remarkably rich set of ideas where they have prisons, especially for the violent that are deep, deep, deep underground and they get harmed in the process of asteroid striking. And of course they still figure out how to escape.

Um, but it just makes for a really amazing set of concepts. But since you know, where the earth is going to be, I feel safe in saying, uh, and days from now and years from now, if you start asteroids, which can be really dark on an intercept path with the planet earth, once they're set flying, they're just going to hit and it's the ultimate terrorist weapon.

Fraser Cain:

Well, it's, it is, but, but there are these essentially stealth weapons that they have a version of mutually assured destruction like we have with nuclear weapons on, on earth. They have these, these mass accelerators that are stealth, they're stealthed pointing at each other's planets.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

And so if you detect the asteroids haven't been sent to your planet, you can fire your accelerators at your opponent and make sure that, that all life is wiped out on their planet as well. And so they've just taken the standard idea of, of nuclear weapons on ballistic trajectories and then just scale that up so that now you've got mutually assured destruction at a solar system level. And the idea is, is terrifying and, and used for great mayhem in the, in the books.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And this is in the true sense of a space opera, something with so many different plots going on because you have the aliens, you have Mars wanting independence, you have the earth system trying to just keep everyone in line, behave children. You have the belters, you have the people in the outer solar system, and you have this idea of who does and doesn't get resources, who does and doesn't get jobs, and it gets into the economics, it gets into the science. And one of the things that does really well is it gets into how does the human body change if it's able to reproduce in space?

And there's an idea encountered where people want to travel to places with gravity to give birth. And that if you've spent too much of your life in space, you can take all the drugs in the world to try and survive. You can exercise all you want, and you're still going to get deathly sick if, if you're trying to be somewhere with gravity.

You're still going to struggle if you're a Martian going to the planet Earth.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. There's the, one of the main characters is a Martian Marine who has trained in heavier gravity for years of her life and still has a rough time going to Earth.

She's super tough in every other situation, but on Earth, she's definitely feeling the increased gravity. And then the belters, the people who live in the asteroid belts, who've been living in one-tenth gravity, they're almost a totally different species of human beings at this point.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And they also do something that I really love, which is because the belters spend so much of their life in spacesuits, spend so much of their life where you can't see hand gestures and facial expressions the same way, they have large gesture sign language that gets incorporated into how they speak. And then there's other things that come into it that we've seen other places like Battlestar Galactica, which we're not going to discuss. There's an episode where Naomi has to jump from one spacecraft to another.

And she pre-breathes to hyperoxygenate her blood. She exhales so that she doesn't explode. That's always a problem.

She has the bursting of the blood vessels, the massive bruising. All of this is legit and it's just kudos to them. They did an amazing job.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people always wonder what would happen if you went outside without your spacesuit.

Watch The Expanse. They cover it.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah. Naomi goes through some stuff.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Totally. All right. So let's talk about the part that is like the most science fiction, which is the protomolecule and the weird biology of this.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

So protomolecule, they don't really talk about is this a virus? Is this a, what is it? Is it a parasite?

How does it communicate? So they are oblivious to all these details, which is part of what allows them to do awesome sauce with it. Yeah.

The idea is once you're exposed to this, it starts taking over your body, repurposing it. It changes your physical structure. You get really gross, really, really gross, kind of turn into a lump, begin to merge with everything around you.

So it's really gross. I'm just going to repeat that a few more times. Yeah, really gross.

But the protomolecule also allows communications between different life forms. And it's this idea that we had from the last episode with Stargate of the parasites can make you do stuff. And so the protomolecules are trying to essentially take over humanity.

They end up on Ganymede. One thing that you see across the Expanse universe is this idea that they have spun things up enough that the inside walls are like you're walking on the bottom of the surface of Ganymede. There have actually been some fast rotating asteroids recently announced from the Vera Rubin Observatory.

These things do exist. They are actually rotating without falling apart fast enough to have nearly lunar gravity, which is wild to think about. So they get that idea of how to get artificial gravity correct.

But like they lose Ganymede to the protomolecule because it takes over the life forms on board it. And they also end up having to give a couple of the characters extreme radiation poisoning. They talk about the consequences of that throughout the series.

It's a show where what you see in season one crops up years later.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. That essentially the protomolecule, and we don't want to spoil it too deeply, especially because they haven't finished the books yet.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah, they have.

Fraser Cain:

No, no, they haven't finished, sorry, they haven't finished turning the books into shows yet.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Okay. So there's going to be years before they can do the last book.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. There's apparently going to be like a movie to wrap it up or something like that. I don't know if they're going to do more seasons.

It's bananas to me that they didn't just keep going. How could they not just keep going?

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Well, there was a gap in time between those books of like 20 years. The human beings needed to age.

Fraser Cain:

I guess so, or they need new actors. But yeah, but the gist being that it's this, I mean, there's a lot of flavors and ideas that we've talked about quite a lot in the show about panspermia, directed panspermia, right? Like what if you wanted to clear out a solar system, get it prepared for you to move in and take over?

I've classically always said that the best thing to do is send the inhabitants a bad idea.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

Right? You send a message like contact that says, build an enormous machine and people can't help themselves. They'll build the enormous machine.

It's true. And then the machine destroys your civilization. And then you didn't have to send a weapon, you have to send anything.

So the protomolecule is kind of like this idea that you're clearing the ground, you are resetting a site so that you can now build what you need in that solar system. And that there's this other sort of precursor race, similar to the ancient, similar to the precursors in Star Trek. Like this theme comes up quite a bit.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

They're finding relics on the solar systems they're able to get to, and the relics are weird and scary and- Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

And point to some precursor civilization that had plans for the galaxy.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah. Yeah.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. And is not your friend.

Like, you're always hoping, like, come on, there's gotta be a good reason. The protomolecule can't be all bad, right? No, it's all bad.

So it's a really interesting concept, which is, when you sort of deal with the more philosophical ideas of this show, what happens when you are a incredibly powerful race, you are transcending dimensions, you are spreading out across everywhere you can reach. How do you make this job as easy as possible for yourself? Both to get around, both to not have to have rivals to deal with.

It's a great concept. And just the levels that this goes as you climb up, because finding the ring gates gives humanity access to the galaxy, but also then puts you closer and closer into contact with the other things that are out there.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Well, and it also just gets into all of the issues of humans being humans and doing stupid things. And what what do you do for love? What do you do for social justice?

What do you do for power and how the rich are able to live completely different lifestyles than the poor? So it has the science dimensions. It has the human dimensions.

It has characters that have so many layers to them that you think they're just like a big, dumb thug. And then you realize this is someone who's just trying to figure out how to human when they had no example as a child. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah.

Fraser Cain:

And, you know, man, I mean, it just it just goes on. There's the Mormons, I think, build interstellar spacecraft because they're planning on going to another star system, which gets stolen from them. Yeah, there's there's just so many bits and pieces, large and small in this in this show.

And and I loved every part of it.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Read the books, too, people. Read the books.

Fraser Cain:

So I will admit I have not read the book. They're so good.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

I read the books first.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah, my wife has, but I haven't.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

And and like I was like, I can't watch this TV show because I love these books too much. And then I didn't I didn't have I didn't have a regret. So, yeah, well, the first few episodes of the first season.

But other than that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get through this first few episodes and then.

Fraser Cain:

No, it was gripping from moment one. But OK, fine. Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Well, I hope people enjoyed this this four part series.

And I did. We can. Yeah, me too.

Come on. We get to talk about science fiction here. So let us know if you want us to continue.

You know, there are a bunch of other shared universes that we could talk about. Dungeon Crawler, Carl, because there's a ton of science in that. But, you know, you've both got an interstellar civilization.

We could talk about Battlestar Galactica because there is a lot of stuff in Battlestar Galactica.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

So currently we are going to take the Monday of Memorial Day weekend off.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

I currently have slated for June. Oceans and Organics on Mars. Big Rockets, Moon Race.

And then a recommended summer reading. We can turn all of those into TV shows. Sure.

If we need to. Just let us know what you want.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Let us know if that's what you want or is it like or some portion of the audience is going to be like, oh, I don't want to do this. So let us know.

Yeah, I mean, we could definitely talk about Babylon 5.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah. Dungeon Crawler, Carl has a new book coming out.

Fraser Cain:

I know. Two days.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Three days.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to be I'm going to be probably listening to it while I'm in Japan.

So.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

So many Kickstarters.

Fraser Cain:

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

I have spent so much money on Kickstarter.

Fraser Cain:

All right. Thanks, Bubba.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Thank you. And thank you to everyone out there. Some of you have figured out you can get me to say truly ridiculous things by having truly ridiculous usernames.

To those of you who make me laugh, I salute you. To those of you whose names I'm about to mispronounce, I'm just really sorry. This week, we would like to thank Alan Gross, Andrew Allen, Antosaur, Astro Sets, Bebop, Apocalypse, Bob Zatzky, Brian Bede, Burry Gowan, Claudia Mastroianni, Dale Alexander, David, David Rustiera, John Mundus, Elliot Walker, Fairchild, Just as it sounds, Frodo Tannenbaum, Gerhard Schweitzer, Greg Davis, Hannah Tankery, James Signorovich, John Baptiste Lamartine, Jim McGeehan, John Holstein, John Herman, Jonathan Poe, Justin S., Katie and Ulyssa, Kimberly Reek, Larry Zotz, Lou Zeeland, Mark Share, Masa Herleu, Matthias Hayden, Michael Wichman, Mike Huzzy, Nick Boyd, Patricia Hope, Paul Lowell, Rajiv Akari, Richard Drumm, Robert Cordova, Ryan Amari, Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Bieber, Semyon Torfason, Steve Rutley, TC Starboy, Travis C.

Porco, Rutley, and wiped only three times because I like the itch. Thank you all so very much.

Fraser Cain:

Thanks, everyone. And we will see you when we're back. I think we're off one day, one week, right?

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Yeah, we're off one week for Memorial Day.

Fraser Cain:

Okay, we'll see you then.

Dr. Pamela Gay:

Okay. Bye, everyone.

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