Today’s lightning round questions deal with hot topics like what we’re going to do with trash on Mars, what direction dogs stand when they do their business, what kind of king Charles will be, and why it rains diamonds on Uranus.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, before I get into this month’s lightning round video, I just want to say I just got back from doing some traveling, I was in New York for Educon and San Diego for Fully Charged Live and I think I got to meet and shake hands with more followers of this channel than I’ve ever had a chance to at any one single amount of time.

Hey, before I get into this month’s lightning round video, I just want to say I just got back from doing some traveling, I was in New York for Educon and San Diego for Fully Charged Live and I think I got to meet and shake hands with more followers of this channel than I’ve ever had a chance to at any one single amount of time.
For all of you that I got to meet, I want to say it was great to meet you, thanks for coming up and for all the kind words, but there was one sentiment that was reflected the most that really kinda put me on my heels a little bit.
I had so many people say that what they like about my channel is that I cover a wide range of random topics and let me tell you something, that’s my favorite thing about doing this channel.
It can get really easy to be pigeonholed on YouTube, the algorithm tends to put people in silos and say, “you can talk about this, and if you talk about anything else, we’re just not going to show it.” And I  can tell you right now, if I went by that alone, I would not enjoy doing this.

In fact the channel might grow a bit faster if I did focus on one thing… But it would be a lot less interesting wouldn’t it?
But I can only cover all the weird and wonderful things I do because you guys let me and keep coming back and trust that whatever it is I cover, you’ll dig it, or at least dig my take on it. So I want to thank you for having that trust in me and for coming along with me on this ride. It’s really only because of you that I get to do this.
Besides, I get a lot of my video ideas from you guys in your comments and social media posts… and Patreon supporters with lightning round questions like these.

Thomas Lovse – Patreon – September

What do you think the future of the British monarchy will be now that the Queen died? Will Charles be a good king?

I am wholly unqualified to speak on this.

What is the value of the monarchy? What is a “good king” in 2022?
Whenever I say that we don’t have anything like the monarchy in America, people always say the Kardashians. That reference is apt in a way, and I know a lot of Brits feel the same about the royal family, that they’re just freeloaders and famous for being famous. But I think there’s something about that link to 1000 years of history that people find comforting. That’s what I mean when I say we don’t have anything like that here. I feel like Charles is a fairly uninspiring figure but has garnered some sympathy. Whether he retains it is another thing.

I always kinda had a little bit of empathy for the guy, the fact that he was kinda forced to marry Diana even though he was in love with Camilla, kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The Dr. Becky story

Meghan Betts – Patreon – September

Ok I have one more – I could have googled it but I’d rather hear it from you. Why are most celestial bodies/atomic structures round(ish)?

The short answer is gravity. When an object in space gets big enough, its gravity pulls everything in at a roughly equal force in all directions, lending it to a spherical shape. But gravity is actually a very weak force so objects that are smaller don’t form into these perfect spheres.

Then you have to factor in rotation because most objects are spinning, so planets in general aren’t perfectly spherical, they’re oblate spheroids. Saturn being very low density has a difference of 20,000km around the equator vs polar Then there’s asteroid Bennu, which has become kind-of diamond shaped (or shaped like a top) because it’s small enough that its gravity can’t overcome the centripetal force of its rotation that wants to fling the mass at the equator outward.

As for why atoms are spherical… The short answer is that they aren’t. Not technically. They have electrons in various orbitals with no solid boundaries so it’s not exactly a sphere. We mostly just visualize them that way. But they do have a vague spherical shape for the same reason planets do, the nucleus asserts the same force on electrons in all directions.

Fishtail – Discord – September

Please provide us your ponderances of the gamification of popular prominent pastimes.

For instance TopGolf https://topgolf.com/us/locations/
Go to TopGolf and get footage of hitting some balls

Brian Beswick – Discord – September

I don’t even have a question on this one, I just thought this was cool. Diamond Rain in Uranus… insert joke here.

I don’t want to insert anything into Uranus.
Read and riff on the article. Highlights: It’s done by firing lasers into cheap PET plastics – produces pressure that creates nanodiamonds It’s the pressure on gas giants that causes the chemicals to form into diamonds, but on gas giants the nanodiamonds can grow to “millions of carats” Ultimately those fall to the center and create a “bling ring” around the planet. Nanodiamonds have a very wide array of applications in drug delivery, medical sensors, noninvasive surgery, sustainable manufacturing, and quantum electronics. Joke about all the acronyms and “I don’t know why people find science so unapproachable”

Claudio f souza – Discord – September

Hey Joe , will you upload your mind to ~the machine~ once it’s possible: y/n? And why?

The old teleportation problem I struggle with this. It’s not as simple as uploading your consciousness to a computer because then you’re just creating a replica of yourself. I have two problems with that. One, I don’t actually get to experience it – my replica does. And two, I’m not sure having two of me in the world is a good idea. I did a video that tried to hypothesize a way to kind of turn the brain into hardware so that you could kind-of become a part of the “machine” and not have to rely on “uploading” or “replication”.

Meghan Betts

Meghan here! Do you think we’re living in a white hole? If so does that mean we’re not living in a simulation? Or does that mean that the black hole is the main processor for our simulation?

Hoo boy…
So if my understanding is right – and that’s a big if – there is the idea that the big bang and expansion of the universe was caused by a white hole, which itself might be like the outgassing of a black hole in another universe. It’s kind-of just another way to try to explain where all of this came from. It does kinda collide with the holographic theory, which says that information that falls into a black hole gets encoded on the event horizon and then radiated back out slowly over trillions of years through Hawking radiation.

What this has to do with simulation theory, I’m not quite sure…
There’s an idea that has been rattling around in my head lately, and this might be more science fiction than science science but here goes.
So there’s the whole question of where is all the antimatter, right? They say that when the universe was created in the big bang, it should have produced equal parts matter and antimatter. Which, in theory would have cancelled each other out in a massive explosion and left nothing behind.

Kinda gets to the whole question of why is there something instead of nothing.
But there is something. There is possibly an infinite universe of something, but we don’t see hardly any antimatter, that’s the mystery.
So one of the explanations for that is that there was by some fluke just barely more matter than antimatter when the universe was created, like one billion and one parts matter to one billion antimatter and what was left over was the universe we know of today.

Meaning the infinite universe we currently have is only a billionth of what should have been created.
But another way of looking at antimatter is that it’s regular matter traveling backwards in time.

So when you see a timeline of the universe like this, it maybe should be shown like this.

With our universe traveling in one direction on the arrow of time and an antimatter universe traveling in the opposite direction.Of course, the problem with this visualization is that time doesn’t move physically in one linear direction, it travels out in all directions so it might be more accurate to imagine a second, parallel universe (rotate the negative universe so that it lines up with the original one – maybe slightly askew so you can see both of them) exactly like ours, expanding right alongside ours, made of antimatter in a separate dimension of sorts, a dimension reversed in time.

So in this scenario, the idea of a black hole punching through to the parallel universe would mean that it wouldn’t appear to them as a white hole spewing that matter out into their universe, because they’re reversed in time, it would just be a black hole from their reference frame.
Also I think that would mean that the universe is deterministic because in this reversed time universe from our reference frame the future has already happened.

Earthbound Martian

As a creator, what do you think is the biggest thing you can bring to others lives? What do you feel it means to “create” in today’s world?

Judging by that last segment, it’s breaking people’s brains.
The simplest answer – the best thing we can do is help others feel less alone.
There’s a reason why you can find pretty much everything in the world on YouTube, because no matter how weird or unique you might think you and your interests may be, I promise you there are millions of other people out there that have the same interest.

Like we’re all living very unique and specific lives and have unique and specific perspectives, but we’re a lot more alike than we think.
And maybe you lived your whole life thinking you were different or alone because of this, maybe it made you feel ostracized or disconnected, and then you hear some random person from somewhere else in the world nerding out over the same thing and it’s like a magic trick, “holy crap, that guy’s into it too!”
In the earliest days of this channel, all my videos were more like this, where I would take questions from the comments and answer them, hence, Answers With Joe.

But after a while, I began to just kinda trust that if I was interested in something, you guys would be interested in it too. And that’s kinda proven to be true.
Not all of you like every video obviously, but that’s been a really interesting side effect of this whole thing.
The lesson I’ve learned is that if you just put yourself out there and be true to yourself as much as possible, you’re putting ripples into the universe. And you never know where those ripples will land and how they will affect others. And I think that’s true in life as well.

Cole Parker

One could say that Elon’s companies cover critical needs on Mars, But what about waste management. Humans produce tons of trash, literally. Will the second permanent structure on Mars be the first ex-terrestrial garbage dump or does Musk or others have some high tech solution to burning, reusing or reprocessing waste?

Cole, come on, it’s an entire planet, what could we possibly do to an entire planet?
I did a bit in a video a while back where I imagined how much waste would be created on a trip to Mars and joked that the way to Mars would become a giant skidmark. It was a joke worth repeating.

So, one of the things we’ve been learning on the ISS over the last 20 years is how to do exactly this kind of thing, learning how to build and live in an enclosed system. Of course there are some things that we still haven’t quite gotten down.
Astronauts famously recycle their urine on the ISS, hence the phrase, “Today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee”
But solid waste and a lot of other consumables don’t get recycled, they just get put on cargo ships that burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Earth, the ultimate landfill.

But this is not going to be an option on Mars, or on the Moon for that matter.
Now landfills are obviously an option, and it may come down to that but NASA’s working on some ideas to deal with waste in a more useful way.
In fact, earlier this year they launched a few challenges for the public to submit ideas along these lines.
Waste to Base Materials Challenge: Sustainable Reprocessing in Space seeks ideas to convert waste into useful resources, like propellant or raw materials for 3D printing. Participants are asked to share their ideas for managing, converting or processing a few specific categories of waste, including trash, fecal waste, foam packaging, and carbon dioxide. Trash-to-Gas Ash Management Challenge  seeks design concepts for an effective method of removing the ash from a full-scale Trash-to-Gas reactor in microgravity for later use or disposal.

Waste Jettison Mechanism Challenge, seeks concepts from the public for ways to safely eject materials from a crewed spacecraft. Jettisoned objects would safely orbit the Sun so as not to contaminate celestial bodies or interfere with future space missions.
The challenges have closed, and I tried to find the winners and what their ideas were but… I couldn’t. So NASA’s working on it.
As for Elon and SpaceX, I couldn’t find anything when I looked – I saw a lot of articles that were critical of their plans because of the waste issue – but if there’s something out there that I missed, feel free to share in the comments.

I imagine the most likely options would be plasma gassification to get energy out of it, or purposefully using consumable goods that break down organically or can be recycled for 3D printing or construction. And as for human waste, well… potatoes.

Robin Tennant Colburn

 A certain PBS You Tube broadcast mentioned a study found that dogs poop on a north-south alignment. All I can find on the internet seems to trace back to a study of 70 dogs.  How does YOUR dog do what she doo doos so well, ;-)?

Okay, I’m just gonna say that I don’t think this is a thing.
I will say though after reading this question I started paying attention to what direction my dogs poop and of the four times I saw them do it in our backyard… each time they were facing south.