The Christmas Present--Man Playing God

Daily Chariot Ride 12/25/24

Today’s chariot ride is an interesting one, because I think just last night there was another chariot spotted around the world—and instead of being pulled by fiery stallions it seemed like some other quadrupeds were pulling it. Very curious. I’ll have to investigate more.

Jokes aside, since I started writing these sorta-daily news updates six months ago, I think there are about twice as many of you today who are reading every morning, and it's the best Christmas gift you all could have given to me to let me be a small part of your daily quest for knowledge.

So if you know anyone else who deserves to be a Flight of Phaethon subscriber, let them know. I’d love to have them.

Today’s chariot ride is particularly in the spirit of Flight of Phaethon. I make sure to tell you all, in every news recap that I do, about one amazing thing that people are doing in the world—some great achievement that exists. It’s very Phaethon because almost all of the achievements I gravitate towards are instances of man playing God. We’re eradicating diseases, sending rockets to the stars, reviving dinosaurs, building superintelligent AI. For today’s chariot ride, we’ve got 3 great stories of man playing God—and succeeding (hopefully) :)

The Sun Chariot

In the Greek tradition of overwhelming hubris, I think humanity may become greater than the gods. NASA, in 2018, launched the Parker Space Probe directly at the sun. In a manner of speaking, we’ve recreated Apollo’s chariot!

Part of the reason for having this probe is that the sun is extremely mysterious. For instance, the sun's surface is actually rather cool relative to its “corona” which extends millions of miles from its surface. In fact, (see footnotes on the details of how this is measured, it’s rather cool [1]) we can tell that the corona is over 1000 times hotter than the surface of the sun! That’s crazy! I always thought that the heat of the sun came from the extreme energy from the nuclear fusion being crammed by gravity into an insanely small space, buuuuuut this fact challenges that belief of mine pretty substantially.

From my cursory checking of the state of thought on this question, there are a ton of speculative theories on how this “coronal heating” effect could maybe occur, but the problem is that the sun’s surface possesses such extreme conditions that there could be emergent effects that totally thwart our intuition. So hopefully the Parker Probe can inject some more data for us to work with. They’re looking at things like ionic winds and magnetohydrodynamics to see if any of those readings have any impact on the theories. We’ll have to see!

But beyond the scientific outcomes, this probe is doing something that is, just on a sheer physical level, super cool. Because it’s falling into the sun, whose gravitational force is, famously, very large, the probe will be going really freaking fast. Like, faster than any man-made object. Like, so fast that it’s almost convenient to measure how fast it’s going in units of the speed of light. If my math is right, at peak speed, it will be going at ~.1c, so astronomers are going to have to take into account special relativistic effects (due to the probe’s speed) and general relativistic effects (due to the mass of the sun) in deciphering their data.

The Eradication

The United States Department of Agriculture has officially declared that, in the United States, “murder hornets” have been eradicated. Basically, in 2021, some people in Washington state saw these murder hornets, which are an invasive species and could pose a serious threat to honeybee populations, and ecological engineers lept into action. They used thermal imaging and radio tagging to pull off a search-and-destroy operation on every single beehive in the state.

It’s just magnificent, isn’t it? It felt like every day in public school biology I was learning about how invasive species are just this impossible pest to control, and once an invasive species is present, the entire ecosystem is doomed. Well, guess what? We just un-doomed it: P(doom)=0! This is just confirmation to me that if we wanted to, we could successfully do some serious geoengineering and get away with it. It’s Christmas Day, and man is playing god—just as God intended.

P.S. Let’s do mosquitos next.

The Hype

I’ve given so much space to SpaceX’s amazing rocketry achievements, that it’s about time that I show some love to its competitors. Blue Origin’s massive rocket, New Glenn, is slated to launch before the end of the year. Currently, it is standing upright on the launch pad in Cape Canaveral—just waiting for regulatory approval to launch!

If the bureaucrats ever let it get up in the air, the mission has a bunch of objectives, so I’m just going to tell you about the coolest ones. First, they’re going to try to land the booster and prove to the world that it’s not only SpaceX who can figure out how to make a rocket reusable. Second, they’re going to put into orbit a “Blue Ring Pathfinder” which will gather a ton of data relevant to Amazon’s Blue Ring project, which is so cool that it deserves a post on its own, but in essence, if Starlink is putting cell towers into space, then Blue Ring is putting AWS into space.

I don’t know if this will happen, and Blue Origin is really running out of time to get it done this year, but even if they don’t I can’t think of a better New Year's present than some good old-fashioned rocketry. It beats fireworks any day.

• [1] Ok, you stuck around for the explanation of how we managed to measure that the corona is a million times hotter than the surface of the sun. Sweet. Basically, when you get to super high temperatures, crazy things can happen to atoms. For instance, at millions of Kelvin (which is what the temperatures in the corona are like), there’s enough energy to rip 13 electrons off of an iron atom. These extremely exotic atoms emit light in characteristic ways that you would never find in any normal atom, and we can detect those light signatures from Earth. But then we get to the neat part: how do we know that those light emissions come from the corona and not just the surface of the sun? Well, we measure during an eclipse. And when we do, we find that all of the other normal sun emissions go away, but all of these crazy emissions that can only be present at millions of Kelvin don’t get blocked by the moon. Hence, it’s not the surface of the sun, but rather the corona, which is responsible for the extreme temperatures.