Dying In Space, Trapped Water, and What's Hidden In Pi?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Rest of Science.
I'm Hannah Fry.
And I'm Michael Stevens. And every single human ever has been born and died on Earth. Yeah.
Short episode today.
Or is it?
What?
Except for three people. I want to start today by talking about the only three humans to have not died on planet Earth.
Oh, Lord. Okay. We're talking astronauts. No.
What? We're talking cosmonauts. Oh, okay. A cosmonaut is what the Soviets called someone who went to space. And I like that name so much more because what is an astronaut? There's someone who knots, who travels the astros, the stars. But we don't. We travel around one star, the sun.
Right.
What does a cosmonaut travel around? The universe. In a way, we're all cosmonauts, though. So actually, they're both kind of bad names.
But it would have
been better to be like an outer space knot.
Yeah, or like a solar system nought. I mean, to be honest, I'm sorry, but if you're at the ISS, yes, you're in space, technically, well done. But you're only
just. I know, I don't want to be the guy, but you started it. The ISS astronauts are basically still on Earth. Right. I mean, if the Earth was the size of an apple, where are they? You can't even get your fingernail close enough to the apple. I mean, you can, you can dig your fingernail into it, but you put your finger on it, your fingernail is further away from the apple than the ISS astronauts.
It's pathetic, really. You're still within the magnetic protection of the planet. You're not getting radiation in the same way. Look, I'll accept the people who've gone to the moon, right? Artemis, that crew, I accept that they are something noughts. But really, they're moon-Earth noughts. Moon-Earth system noughts.
Yeah, they are cis-lunar noughts.
Mm-hmm.
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So,
I
mean, we're getting ahead of ourselves, but you're right. The Artemis II crew holds the record for the farthest a human has ever gone from Earth. And they recently broke that record by going 1.6% further than the previous record holders, which was the crew of Apollo 13. So the record stands at 406,711 kilometers. It's about 250,000 miles away from Earth.
Yeah.
That's the furthest we've gone. Robots that we've made have gone a lot further. Agree. The robot record is currently 25.6 billion kilometers.
Oh, wow.
Billion.
What's that? Voyager?
Voyager 1. But not only have humans, you know, gone not that far from Earth, really. Even our robots have gone far but like barely left the solar systems.
They're not even up to another star yet.
Voyager 1 is 0.006% of the way to another star. I could find you seven experts today that would tell you that technically it's still in the solar system. It's left the heliopause, but is that really the edge of the solar system? If it slowed down to a stop, it's going back to the sun. Give me a break. Right. Yeah. Okay.
Well, then, no.
But every human who's left, even the ones who have gone record-breakingly far, have come back, except for three. Well, they did come back, though, but they didn't come back alive.
Right.
But I'm spoiling the end, kind of. I mean, I already said that they died there.
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