EP #26 Amber Straughn’s AMA: Are Wormholes Real? w/ NASA Astrophysicist

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Yeah, I think as far as human travel goes, I mean really, any space travel. I think that we really do need a revolution in propulsion if we are ever going to actually become an interplanetary species. Like thinking further in the future, but even in the near term we could accomplish so much more if we could revolutionize our propulsion system.

And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Now we have went out to Twitter to the community there to ask for questions. We have an incredible list of questions. Some of these are great and I want to just take a second and share them with you because I think they're worth answering. So. And feel free to say not my area or I'll answer it in a few years. But Dan asked. I would love Amber's thoughts on the hypothetical existence of wormholes. So yeah, do you want to go there?

It's again, it's theory, but it's. I mean it's good physics, right? I think theoretically, yeah.

I mean I've seen this on Star Trek. So it's got to be true.

Exactly, it's got to be true. Right? So yeah, I think hypothetically, theoretically, yes, it's possible from a physics standpoint. Can we use it as humans to travel across space? Right. That's the big question, the big underlying question. And not right now, maybe later. You know, I like to take an expansive view of what we're going to be able to accomplish in the future of humanity because we've been able to do so much already.

Yeah, I would never say, I would never say never if it's within the realm of physics.

Exactly. Yeah, I agree. So someday will we be able to use wormholes to travel? I would say I hope so.

Yeah. All right, I'll take that. Thinks Magic Cube 7 says how confident are you or your colleagues that will be boots on the moon by 2030?

By 2030? Well, I can't speak for my colleagues, but for me I think again, it's so hard to tell, but I think it's going to happen. Obviously we had a really good Artemis test last year, so that's exciting. You know, what Starship is doing I think is also super, super incredible and exciting. So I think the technology is there.

And by the way, it could be Chinese boots on the moon too.

It could, it absolutely could. You know, China's space program is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. So yeah, it could be. I think it's likely, actually.

Yeah, I would give it 90% chance. I mean, unless something catastrophic happens, I think a race to the moon's surface by 2030 is a very realistic target. So I'll take bets on that online. We'll get there. All right, Amber, so another question here is what item do you think would be the most interesting thing to send to space that would intrigue the world? Do you have anything in the back of your mind that.

Well, you know what? I think Carl Sagan had a pretty good idea with the Golden Record. Right. I mean, I think that looks great.

That was a stroke of genius.

Yeah.

Describe what that Golden Record was and where it flew, on which flight.

Yeah, yeah. So this is the. I mean, it's a golden Record. It's an object that contains data about the human species that was sent up a voyager. And it was a sort of, it was almost a last minute, kind of like, oh, there's this satellite going up to space. We should do something about humanity with it. And it contains, you know, you know, like images of what human. The human body looks like. It has, I think, songs of like whales, whale noises. It has music, it has greetings from.

Like every nation on the planet. Yeah.

So it's.

Yeah, it has that famous photo of a naked man and woman and the nine planets and. Yeah, and binary. Yeah, it's amazing.

It's beautiful and it's so hopeful. I mean, that's what I love about it. And again, getting to more of the, you know, the touchy feely aspects of space. Yeah, it's, it's hopeful. You know, that was a very hopeful thing to do to send that into, you know, to think there's someone out there that might see this.

Yeah. And it created an entire Star Trek movie episode. That's incredible. Feature. All right, so Surinder says, I am an Indian and want to enter the domain of planetary science. What are the recent research areas so I can get ahead of the domain? I'm doing my engineering undergraduate. So if someone wants to dive in, where would you direct them to focus?

So planetary Science is super interesting. Wow. There's so much going on at NASA, in particular with planetary science, so we are going to soon bring samples back from Mars. So that's very interesting. So I think there's. There's a lot of options in planetary science. Sending probes to Europa. All the. All the planetary missions that we have planned are super, absolutely incredible. I would say, in general, if you're. If this listener is interested in planets outside of our solar system, that the field of exoplanet science is really. It really is one of the sort of hottest fields in astronomy right now. And so, you know, If I was 20 years younger, I might go into exoplanet science myself.

Well, you know, the other conversation we have a lot on this podcast is around longevity. So you'll have your second, third, and fourth career coming up soon.

There we go.

And honestly, I agree with you. I mean, that's like one of the most exciting ideas I could think about is exoplanet conversation. Another question comes up. How fast, let's say speed of light being the fastest could we safely go? Is a question. And that brings us up into sort of propulsion systems and, you know, traditional propulsion systems, where we carry all the fuel from the surface of the Earth and we, you know, we burn it to get speed and we burn it to slow down, is kind of limiting right now. But there's a lot of conversation that I've seen on nuclear propulsion and solar cells. What are you hearing from your exoplanet friends or your propulsion friends out there about traveling to Mars or to the outer moons of Saturn and Jupiter?

Yeah, I think as far as human travel goes, I mean, really, any space travel, I think that we really do need a revolution in propulsion if we are ever going to actually become an interplanetary species, like, thinking further in the future. But even in the near term, we could accomplish so much more if we could revolutionize our propulsion system. So, yeah, I think nuclear propulsion, like you said, solar propulsion, solar sail kind of technology, still pretty early, I think, in technological development, but super interesting. So I think. I think we need all cards on the table in terms of figuring out the best ways to get our spacecraft and ourselves out into space in the future.

I'm still holding out for wormholes, though. We're going to get back to that.

Yep, that's the hopeful approach.

Nearer to Earth, space debris. I mean, I don't think people realize what a challenge that could potentially provide to humans getting off the planet. Any conversations that you're hearing on space debris, I mean, we're seeing more and more of it. Right. As more satellites get launched and those satellites bump into each other or spent fuel tanks explode. What's the buzz there?

Yeah, so I'm, I mean I'm not in a lot of the sort of NASA conversations about, about space debris other than when it does impact our satellites, which it does. Right. We have to maneuver the International Space Station to avoid big chunks of debris. We have to maneuver our satellites to avoid big debris. So it does, like it's not a future thing. Like it's happening now, it's impacting space now. And so I do think that we have to get, we have to figure out how to manage it. And I certainly don't, don't have those answers. But I know, I know very smart people are working on it.

Yeah. And I think, you know, we're working right now on a space debris X prize. I mean there will be a business in terms of that. And the solution there falls in different categories. One solution is can you in fact build spacecraft that go and gather the largest piece of space debris down? When I was a kid, there was a television show, I forget the name, where the basis was. It was a company that would go and salvage, I think it was like Salvage 1 was the name of it. You'd go and salvage debris from the, the, from orbit. The energy of that's crazy. Another idea is using space based lasers to sort of zap the space debris that, you know, slows them, slows them down. Let's talk about one of my favorite subjects, asteroids. And you know, asteroids are of incredible interest as a future resource base for, for liquid oxygen, principally hydrogen, potentially nickel, iron, platinum group metals. But the thing that's interesting more than that is the concern of near Earth asteroids that get too close. We just saw recently, I guess it was a school bus size asteroid that came within the geostationary orbit of Earth. Now it's pretty large. And the thing that was scary about it was it was discovered like four days earlier. I guess it was, it was approaching from the sun. Like we can see the asteroids that are coming from the outer solar system because they're illuminated from far away. But if they're coming directly from the sun, you can't see them. Is that a conversation going on inside the halls of NASA?

Oh, for sure, yeah. And I think, you know, it's, it's being taken, you know, even more seriously now than it was say 10 years ago. And of course we just had the DART mission. Successful mission.

Yeah. Describe the DART mission because that was.

A super cool mission. So we slammed a spacecraft into a little tiny asteroid and it was amazing. And you know, it's the first time I've.

It wasn't just for fun. Right, right.

So the, the acronyms basically stands for. Well, I'm going to be honest, I don't remember the first two words, but it was a redirect mission. So it was seeing if we could smash something into an asteroid to alter its trajectory enough that would be sufficient to protect us in the future from an asteroid impact. And it worked. I mean, it was incredible. And it's the first time I've ever seen a crowd full of scientists, a room full of scientists, you know, react with joy when their camera stopped working. Right. Because it smashed in and then it's.

Like you see static and snow. Yeah, no, I mean, it was. But what was amazing was the precision.

Exactly.

You know, a bullet hitting a bullet type of velocities and smack into the center, as predicted. I didn't see the final results of it because of course, the world just tuned in for that, you know, that moment of impact. But statistically deviated the asteroid in a predictable way. That would be enough. With enough advanced notice to get it out of the path of Earth. Is that correct?

In general, yes, of course. Again, with these kind of things, it's all about orbital mechanics and math. Right. Because it all depends on how close it is, how soon you detect it, how fast it's moving, you know, and how big it is. You know, those things come all, come into play. This was just a very sort of initial first proving we can do it. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's incredibly, it's incredibly important, important work. And again, I try to stay hopeful. So I would think that if we did discover something, we would have the tools and the know how to be able to deflect a planet destroying asteroid.

Yeah, we got to figure it out before Bruce Willis, you know, departs.

Exactly.

So, all right, let's go back to space telescopes here. What's on the drawing board next? I mean, we have, I think they're called the great telescopes, Right. These telescopes that we've been producing. And so James Webb telescopes, conceived of in 96, 25 years later it gets launched after you said congressional cancellation and lots of budget overruns and time overruns and such, but it makes it. Thank you to you and your fellow scientists and those who support it. Because it's like once it's there, it's like, oh my God, this is a human treasure. Where are we going next? What's the vision for next generation?

So right now we are building and are very far along on our next quote unquote flagship, our next big astronomy telescope at NASA. And that's the Nancy Grace Roman telescope that's going to be launched in 2027. So not too far away. It is smaller in terms of like, scale. It's about a Hubble sized telescope, but the primary.

Just a Hubble sized telescope.

Just a Hubble, you know, but the big deal about the Roman telescope is that it has a huge field of view. So whereas Hubble again and JWST sort of stare at one teeny tiny piece of sky, sort of like looking through a straw very deeply, the Roman will be able to see large swaths of the sky. And that just allows you to do different science. So we'll have to do another podcast on the science of the Roman telescope. But it's awesome. So it's going to focus on also on exoplanets, but also on dark energy, this big, you know, space mystery that we have of what is most of the universe made of. So Roman is again, it's doing great. Technology is there, it's being built, it's being tested, launches in 2027. As far as the next big, big thing after the Roman telescope, bigger is better. Bigger is better. And let me tell you what, the next big one is going to be. Awesome.

Okay?

So, and just to give a little background context, every 10 years astronomers get together and say, what are our biggest astronomy questions? What do we need to build to answer them? And those are the decadal surveys. So your listeners have probably heard of these. So for the last 2020 decadal survey, we decided that we need to build basically a fleet. So we need three new observatories, new big, bold, awesome observatories. And the first of these is going to be called the Habitable Worlds Observatory. So that's exactly what it sounds like. We are going to build a telescope to find life. So that is the next big goal in astronomy of NASA. So. So it's essentially going to search 100 nearby star system to search for Earth like planets. That's the goal. And to find evidence of life on those planets. So that's a big goal, but I think we can do it.

So going back to Serendir's question of what should he study? It's going to be perfect for you, just, you know, looking for exoplanets with life.

With life, yeah.

And it's interesting, right? Hopefully, fingers crossed, we will Expand the envelope of what we can deliver to space. With the advent of starship, which is huge.

Absolutely, yeah. And having these big, reliable, and in this case reusable rockets I think is going to be a complete game changer for astronomy. And also the prospect of in space servicing super important. We've done that with Hubble, but all of our other telescopes have not been built to be serviceable, including jwst. But our next fleet of observatories that we're thinking about, those have to be serviceable. And so that's something that we're actively planning for. I think we again, jwst, it's awesome. It's so worth it, but it was so hard. This next fleet of observatories we're thinking about is it's not a whole new, it's not a revolution. It's going to be building on the technologies and the lessons learned we have from JWST to be able to build these again. This habitable worlds observatory is the first one we're prioritizing. Then we also want to build a huge X ray telescope and a huge far infrared telescope, which basically help us to get at all of those fundamental questions that we have in a certain spectrum.

Right?

Yeah. So it's super exciting. And if we can do it, I say if we can do it, we just need the will to do it and we need people to get behind it to decide to do it. It's going to be hard, but I think the faster we can get these observatories in space, the better it's going to be. Overall.

I can't imagine what could be more exciting. And luckily a few of the wealthiest people on the planet are space cadets, along with you and me. And so if the government has difficulty, maybe we'll get some privately funded mega space telescopes out there as well. I mean, what's $10 billion between friends? That's not too bad. I'm going to close us out with a question I asked my guests. So, Amber, you know about the xprize, you know that we run these large scale global competitions and I'm always looking for great moonshots, great X Prize ideas. So if I were to say to you, Amber, we're going to fund the Amber Strong X Prize. It's fully funded. I just need you to tell me what do you want scientists and engineers around the world focusing on? Is there a grand challenge that you think would be a great X Prize? I know I'm putting you on the spot here, but I know you're brilliant too, as well, so we've covered a lot of different subjects. What are your thoughts? What do you think unleashing global creativity on might give us some interesting breakthroughs?

When I think about problems facing us humans, my mind goes to climate change. Of course. I think that's a huge one and I know XPRIZE is funding things to address that. Yeah. So I think climate change is the thing that comes to mind. I think it is not only in the future but now it's a big problem now it's affecting people now in.

The climate change and the space area. An idea I've kicked back and forth and I'm curious of your view on this is the idea of a sunshade. Can we put up a large scale structure that would titrate, would maybe block, you know, a fraction of 1% of the sun in a way that would fail safe and allow you to put like a thermostat on the solar flux hitting the Earth?

That's super interesting. Yeah, I don't know, I need to think about that a little bit. That's interesting. I, well you've heard me say a couple of times now I try to take a hopeful outlook on things and I really do. I, I, a lot of times when I think about these big problems, I feel like a lot of our problems are to, to address the problems. It's social or political problems rather than technological. So, so that's, that's, that's a tough side of, of of these sorts of things.

X prizes work more when you're building a technology. You know I've, I've thought about just to enter this sort of conversation with you. Would there would an X prize to look for Earth approaching asteroids from within the orbit of Venus potentially, You know, could we create small telescopes that would be launched and funded to look for those asteroids and give us a little more advanced warning maybe something like that. I wonder if data prizes looking at all of the James Webb telescope like competitions to discover the most interesting breakthrough by citizen scientists.

Does something like that exist as far as prizes? I'm not sure. But yeah, there are huge platforms for citizen science and they're fairly active. But competition always spurs on human being. So having a competition for diving into that data does sound, sound really interesting. So, and we have tons of data, it's great. But once we do bring on the Roman telescope and also a ground based telescope called the Rubin telescope. These two.

Where's that one going to be?

That one? Oh no, I'm forgetting off the top of my head where it's being built. I should know that. So but it's a huge and it's the same idea as Roman in terms of science wide field. And what that means is so much data that we actually don't really know how to handle it yet in terms of, in terms of analysis. That's one of the reasons there's a lot of effort on machine learning algorithms in astronomy right now. So once we get in the era of Roman and Rubin data, we are definitely going to need help from humans, from competitions, from machines to be able to analyze this massive amount of data.

Amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Amber Strong. This was probably one of my favorite conversations. You sort of tickled the young nine year old in me who got, you know, sort of turned on with Star Trek and Apollo and it just, it's extraordinary that the human race using these tools can discover the everything that's going on this in this universe. It's literally awe striking to our souls. Amber, I thank you. You're going to be joining us at Abundance 360 this year on stage. I hope you'll bring with you some of your favorite images and tell some of your favorite stories because this very much is a visual story. And anyway, thank you for painting the pictures with your words and taking the time. Today folks who want to dive in deeper, see some of these images, learn about more. Where would you direct them, what website?

So to learn more about JRST and find all the images and all the great stuff, it would be jwst.NASA.gov Nice.

Well thank you to NASA, to Congress for putting the money back up to all the astronomers who have been working around the clock for this and thank you to you Amber. It's just amazing to call you a.

Friend and thanks, thank you so much for having me, Sam.