178 - Underwater Spacesuits

Hey, buddy. How honest do you want to be about what we're doing right now? All the way always honest. Okay.

Okay. Well, okay. Well honest doesn't mean you have to say everything about what's happening in life and all of that But all right. Well, how do you read it?

What do you make of this moment that we're having right now? All right, so here's the deal. So Matt and I recorded days ago maybe a couple weeks ago I don't know what it was. When was it?

Do you remember? Yeah, it's like three days ago. Okay, it felt like weeks ago Okay, and we did it and we did in the middle of you doing a lot of things in your personal life and me doing the final approach on a Video and when we got set up with our Bluetooth stuff, we had a huge delay like yes huge delay my energy Yeah, it was awesome. Yeah, and so we recorded this episode about Italy which is something we want to talk about forever And we sent it to Tina mm-hmm and the problem with polishing a turd I can just see where it's going.

I can see it in your expression. Isn't that a turd? Yeah, it's still a turd. Yeah We we've done a turd episode before I'm gonna let people just guess which one it is But we have a turd episode on this podcast you and I both know which one it is.

Yeah We it's the bar that we inspired to never stoop below and we both listened to the episode We were gonna publish it today and we were both kind of beating around the bush a little bit But ultimately I think we agreed dude. This is a turd. It's a turd which is nice to the third chair No, we should not publish this. Yeah, so we're not um we're not gonna so here we are we like to get two episodes out every month and we're on the last day of the month and The Sun is down and we're gonna do this in a very short amount of time Yeah, and I think it's okay because the conversation I wanted to have for this episode It didn't make sense when we recorded it because you weren't done with your thing But you've been telling me about this neutral buoyancy lab thing that you're doing you've been teasing me with details I remember when you traveled to do it and I've been really curious about it I hadn't seen the video.

I hadn't seen any footage I just knew it was a massive endeavor a huge investment of time and the massive edit as well It's gonna be like an hour an hour like a feature film Yeah, the length of the total runtime that you're putting into it And so we weren't able to do the episode we wanted to do which was this one because you weren't done with the thing Well now as luck or providence depending on how you see things would have it the video is out I've had a chance to watch the first little bit of it And now we can do the episode that I want to do all along which is ask you about your neutral buoyancy lab thing And what the heck you're doing in scuba suits writing on little like wax boards with NASA astronauts and stuff in a fake underwater moon I mean, did I see that right? That's right. Yeah, it was awesome So years ago, there was a decision made that if you were going to prepare astronauts for a zero-gravity environment You have to figure out a way to take their weight away from them So their bodies have mass but you want to take away the way, right? Sure, so how would you do that?

Like if you wanted to do that somebody's like Whitman get in here and then you're all wearing the little white shirts Little black tie women we've got a train the astronauts right now and they're gonna be in a weightless environment We don't know what to do. This is your job. Whitten. Go do it.

What we really asking me. Yeah, what would you do? Okay, this is embarrassing But this I would not have gone straight to go underwater I would have gone to some elaborate gyroscope with a bunch of bungee cords attached to some kind of belt thing Like the unit that I used to suspend my microphone that I usually use it's all It's got like shocks in every direction so that if you bump anything it doesn't go all the way through to the microphone Except I would put that around the astronaut and trainings waist on like a belt But then all the weight would be distributed right from there waist and that wouldn't feel natural So I put on some kind of suit with like suspenders and stuff that comes off their shoulders and their arms It would be this whole elaborate ready player one style rig This sort of bounces and then I would get the tension of all of the goofy rigs stuff to be such that it would match the gravity of Wherever I'm training the astronaut to go so yeah, if you go into the moon I guess you got to figure out however many G's the moon is and you get the tension just right and you tune it for their weight And then you put him in the giant ridiculous basically baby hopper toddler jumper machine Yeah, and you have him do moves and stuff. That's how I would do it.

That's how I would engineer that go ahead and mock me No, that would work actually I don't think it would work out under with that work It does work and NASA has built one and I've seen it. Yeah a baby hopper for astronauts. Yes, absolutely So you've described two things you described back in the day There was a thing called pogo which was a partial gravity simulator. It's very similar to what you're talking about and so they've It's exactly what you just said.

It's kind of it's not like a bungee thing You would do you've seen these amusement parts you got you hook the kid up to the bungee cord at their waist And they can jump a little bit. It's not unlike that It's very similar to that and then there's another one a more modern version that's better It's called Argos and here's an acronym active response gravity offload system now The difference in pogo and Argos if I understand it correctly, so what would be the problems with Emulating this 5G offset you understand why I say 5 6th offset do you understand that? Yeah low orbit It looks one G is earth one G is earth. Yes, so low orbit isn't the same as like just full-on space Right low orbit.

You still got a little bit more gravity than just out there or it's low orbit Just not gravity. Well once you get into once you get into low earth orbit Which is what you're talking about basically the simplest way to think of orbit is like we were to fire a rifle Parallel with the ground off the top of the Empire State Building that thing is going to fall towards the earth if we neglect drag Just for the math that thing is going to fall to the earth at 9.8 meters per second square Yeah, it's gonna be a parabolic arc now once in drag It's a little more than a parabola, but you get the idea Yeah, so if you ever shoot that bullet faster and faster and faster so that the fall of that bullet happens to match up with the curvature of the earth That's orbit. Oh, that's that's all orbit is So if you go up really really high, so you're still trying to fall you just can't cuz of the shape of the earth Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what orbit is well, huh?

That's pretty cool, right? Yeah, yeah So if you're in low earth orbit you feel weightless because your spaceship is falling and you're falling You just never hit anything that is that that's orbit So in low earth orbit your weightless if you're on the moon you there is gravity There's about one sixth as much gravity as there is here on earth So if you wanted to simulate the moon which is what we did in the video you have to offset five six of your weight So that you're left with only one sixth of your weight So one sixth is what feels like orbit gravity in the lived experience of a person who is in that environment? No Orbit is zero gravity and I'm just now realizing I confused you because when I brought you in the office and said Whitman I said they're gonna be weightless and now. Yes.

I'm talking about five six off set. So I'm sorry about that I'm jumping ahead. So okay, all right all right So what what you're saying will work and they have a little ride that when people come to space camp here in Huntsville, Alabama They rig them up and they get to climb on the outside of the international space station and do a quote spacewalk And it just takes their way to way. Yeah, the thing about Argos which is the active It's this whole rig you just invented in your mind, but it's active now What does active mean to you like it means that it is receiving feedback from what I'm doing with my body And it is compensating for that blazing fast in real time It's running calculations as opposed to letting the rig just do it physically or analog There's a digital calculation and feedback that's occurring exactly instead of like a spring or a bungee cord that would be reactive an active Response gravity off-loop system predicts what it's going to need to do based on what's happening right now It has a control loop and so that control loop you imagine under a crane and not like a crane like a talk-it-shape crane But like an overhead crane in a warehouse you've seen one of these sure okay, so imagine that so the crane trolley can move up XYZ exactly and X and Y are on the ceiling Z would be represented by dipping down to grab whatever it needs to grab from the floor Exactly and so X and Y are are pretty pretty You know possible But the problem is you have to move that whole trolley overhead and it has mass and so you have lag because you've got to accelerate that whole trolley system over Your head so that's the hard part of that anyway My point is what you said will work and in fact NASA uses that to train astronauts for for redistributing environments What I described is the Pogo system the old version is the Pogo the new one is called Argos a R.

G. O. S And Pogo stands for something. It's just one of those really fun acronyms where you make it match what it reminds you of in your brain It's like a Pogo stick.

I think it's just some I think you've just Complicated partial gravity simulator and people just call it Pogo because it it kind of I don't know Yeah, it's it's basically a it looks like an engine hoist kind of thing from the pictures I've seen I've never seen the Pogo system, but I have seen Argos and yeah So yeah, what what you describe would work that would that would get some of it done, but there's some problems with what you've described There's another thing you can do okay. Can I guess what the problems are yeah? I don't know about Argos and Pogo. I mean that's not something great So I would think the Pogo system would work pretty well as long as the astronaut in training is basically upright But as I learned in enders game, there isn't really down in space and so I would think inversion would require require a series of gyroscopic rings That could move inside but then you have actual gravity working against you in different ways that would feel unnatural and would not simulate zero gravity And there's really nothing you can do to simulate the inversion without an active system So I would think the Argos system would do better at getting you oriented to being an environment where there is no up or down in reality but Yeah, I don't know that's the only problem I can think of that's the only limitation that immediately springs to mind for me I think it would be difficult to design it like I'm imagining trapeze artists these aerial acrobats and they have the bar Yeah, or in gymnastics when they do that you know that what is it the split bar thing?

You don't talk about I think you could flip over that stuff So I can imagine them mounting an astronaut spacesuit in a yoke and you can just flip over front or back But I think it'd be very hard to move in the cartwheel axis. I think that would be difficult. Yeah, I can see that I think it'd be difficult. I'm sure the engineers are smart and they figure that out.

So yeah, you're right That's one way to do it. There's another way that's really really cool that I got to do one time a long time ago I think I told you about it Do you remember what the other way is if you're gonna simulate reduced gravity? Upside down and inside out we're gonna fail it Okay, go song. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, they did a video with your your zero G plane drop thing, right?

Yeah, I think that's the song even that goes with the video upside something like that. It's really fantastic video vomit comment Yeah, there we go That's basically what they do is they take an airplane and they just start pointing up and then they just kind of go over the hump And so basically you're pointing up at the sky at 45 degree angle or something like that And then you just nose over the airplane and then you start going over and then down and the cool thing is because you're Decent you like you're pushing the nose of the plane forward You're weightless or you can fly any parabola you want you can get a one six G or one third G You can do whatever your weightless as you're still going up in the airplane So you think to yourself. Oh, you're just gonna go really high and your nose dive it down towards the ground And you'll be weightless the whole time you're falling and you pull up for your Ground that's not how it works at all you're pointing up and then you're pointing up point up and then nose over and then you're weightless from there All the way over the hump until until you start pulling the nose up again halfway through the like if you were to graph Why equal sign X it would be at all where that curve crosses zero Those are the points where you're in either zero G or 2G your pushing over a little bit 2G is So you're starting your correction. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I can see all of that I've never really understood how that worked or when you would get the experience So it's like 30 seconds that you get on the upper part of the parabola exactly. That's the limitation So if you got if you got something you want to I don't know test how do you do that?

So let's say you want to test which is what I get to observe you want to test at next generation Astronaut spacesuit walking in lunar soil at one sixth G. How would you do that? Okay, I'm still struggling with the five six one six thing. I'm sorry madam.

I depth here one sixth G Is moon gravity it's just 16.7% of what I would be used to here. Correct Yeah, does that mean that if I have a four inch vertical leap which might be what it's down to at this point that I would then have like a 20 inch vertical leap is it just is it all just linear like that in terms of how you modify everything out? I have things will respond. That's a great question.

I don't know how muscles work And so I would 16 yards now I can throw at a hundred. I don't know the answer that that's great. That's a great question But okay, I do know that that it's different than you think and so Surprise me it's different than I thought as well. I thought oh you're in one six G Everything everything is easier to jump easier to throw, but there's another component I didn't think about and that's inertia and we'll talk about that in a minute The first one set the stage for what I got to do which was amazing if that's cool.

I'm sorry. I've got one more question for you Okay, so one six G is the moon But you were simulating zero in the vomit comet, right? Correct. Okay, but the pogo system or our gust system You could simulate zero or you could simulate One six depending on the pogo system tension of the the physical feedback the springs or whatever with the Argos system You would just dial in the active feedback to simulate the gravity you want to simulate vomit comet You kind of get 2g or zero correct because you're oscillating on either side of one you can you can fly a different parabola And so oh, okay.

Yeah, so instead of taking away instead of decelerating it 9.8 meters per second squared You can decelerate it, you know 85% of that and then you can create a one-sixth g Parabola and so you can have you know You take away most of the gravity but not all of them in fact when I got to do this as an undergraduate We flew our 20 parabolas for our experiment and then at the end they flew a lunar parabola And then they flew a Martian parabola, which I think the way they do that. Yeah, it was awesome. What is Martian gravity? It's I pulled it up here.

It's about 38% of the gravity on earth is 3.7 1 meters per second squared I knew that when I was watching the expanse, but I don't remember it anymore. So okay, all right, okay Okay, now I'm tracking with all of that final question for the setup run here So I understand what I'm learning about you're talking about old generation of Space suit you're talking about next generation. What was wrong with the old stuff? Why are we updating it?

What does the new one do that's better? Well, the Apollo system, you know, that's a really old space suit And then we had a newer one and a newer space suit that's being used right now up on the ISS Think about it. They're not made to walk because if you're doing a an EVA and extra particular activity on this the ISS You're just using your hands and you're like moving around all over It's not like your spider-man You don't have to like grapple to it because you're weightless You can just hold yourself and move yourself with your pinky, right? And so there's no like if you look at the boots on the ones with the ISS, they're like hard plastic They're not made for walking and so they don't have to worry about space dust They don't have to worry about like regolith the lunar soil is called regolith.

They don't have to worry about that getting up in the sleeves And all that kind of stuff. So anyway, it's a completely different thing Also, they've learned some lessons over the years and it's pretty hard to put that thing on But the cool thing about this episode is years ago I was allowed to put on a space suit at NASA Johnson Space Center So what we did is I was there. This is back when I was making some videos with smarter every day And they said hey, we've got time I might be able to get you into this astronaut like Anthropomorphic study where we're we're measuring people's bodies and then we put them in the space suit like to get more data Like you're this big you wait this much your forearm is this long and they took all these measurements They're like okay You need this this and this part of the space suits and then they let go you a space suit together and then you get in it And it was cool I got to do that and so that was super super awesome And I did it years ago And so I got to finally use that footage because I didn't want to release it prior to now because back in the day I was like really excited about one to be an astronaut And so I didn't think it made sense to release that video because it felt too self-centered Does that make sense you got a video you know you won't you know you know you are you mean? I mean it seems normal enough that I mean that's a really cool experience I don't understand how that would be self-centered.

I guess I don't know man There's you know you know that you and I at one point in time We decided to turn a camera on and pointed at our face and then upload that to the internet Yes, I remember that what like at some level like you thought that was a good idea At some level I did Yeah, I think there was There's a degree of humility in that exercise. There's also a degree of pride in that exercise, right? There's a white wolf and there's a black wolf in my soul and Whichever one I feed more That one more informs why I'm turning on the camera. Hold on.

We should do that again Like I'm sorry to say this but this is something me and Steve have been talking about like the thought of the black wolf being the bad one Actually ends up you don't have to do that, but I don't care you can roll it if you want I just marked it it's if you're cool as light it's light and darkness this goes back to ancient Persia Let's go then in terms of this distinction. I'm not willing to change it. Okay. I will I will caveat this and Obviously light and dark in that scenario is a reference to you know The ideas of where the light shines and where the light does not shine with you ancient ideas of yin and yang and balance and all of that stuff In this case, I don't know.

I'm overthinking it I'm over communicating it just simply put yes cameras do weird things to your soul And if you're the one in charge of what you film and what you say and what you edit and what you show people and what you don't There's a temptation to try to make yourself look cool and have it be all about you right get that make yourself look cool thing So there was a shot that I had in there of and keep in mind one of you an astronaut kind of thing There's a shot of him putting an astronaut helmet on your head and latching it and you start breathing and I'm not filming that somebody else is Filming that and I was like man. There's no way I'm putting this on the internet. This is just too It's too much. You know, I don't know it felt like too much so serving Yeah, like it would flip the point of the video from being about the person watching to being about you Yeah, yeah, I don't know it was weird.

I couldn't I don't know it was just strange anyway, but okay That was a heavy what was a suit like super heavy just wait it's super yeah, absolutely backpack called a place portable life support system that thing was crazy heavy and so I had to walk that You know, they they mount the hard-opper torso They mount you that and then you climb up through it It's very difficult and then you put the pants on and then they put the helmet on and the glove It's just a very difficult thing to get into by yourself They got some kind of tube on your thingy so you can pee while you're in there You have to go in for a bathroom break. How's that work? So Apollo did Apollo did have the urine system It was it's like a little rubbery condomy type thing and it would it would you would pee into that and then that would go into a Little bag and they came in three sizes. Do you want to guess what the sizes were?

I'm gonna go with large extra large and extra extra large. It was actually humongous is the word You're trying to you're depending on these people to operate very sophisticated expensive machinery in space other people's lives depend on it You can't have a second guessing themselves or their competency level. Yeah, yeah Yeah, I'm sorry extra large in humongous. Well done NASA Yeah, Michael Collins in his book he was talking about that and I believe I'm not mistaken instead of small medium large It was large gigantic and humongous So funny no that in that space that they're using now on station they use what's called a mag a maximum absorbent garment It's basically a diaper and I was offered the diaper to you know Hey, you want to astronauts where mag you want to do that?

And I was like no thank you and I really wish I had done it but I did you should have taken it and peed in it I know right exactly why not that's the astronaut experience I know exactly so so the thing I was invited to do was go to the NBL the neutral buoyancy lab Which is this other way to do weightlessness? Which is basically you get in water and they trim you out with weights and because you're in a space suit has air in it You float and so you have you ever been scuba diving I have so but now we're to new suits Yeah, we're in new suits smaller and lighter than what you tried on I assume because we were things tend to be smaller and lighter Or still huge they're just better in several ways. They have they have shoes made for walking they have what's called a rear entry So they have a hatch on the back and you can climb in it's something you can actually get into by yourself It's you really need people to help you I guess it's getting into a mech. Yeah, yeah kind of like the the orline Which I believe is the Russian suit it was rear entry the Russians designed a rear entry suit years ago And you're supposedly can get in there and like throw this lever and you latch yourself in like the problem is sealing yourself in there Right that's the problem don't get that wrong.

No, I don't think so I don't think you want to so the new one the XEM you which is the name of the new government suit So there's a contract recently that that went out and so there's two companies that they're making new spacesuits They have the contract to do that But in the meantime NASA made a government suit This is the XEM you and the purpose of the XEM you is to gather data Like we're going to just come up with all this data on how all these suits work What pressures are best and all these things and then we're gonna give that data to the contractors making these suits Which I'm interesting so that brings us to the big picture the neutral buoyancy lab and you're getting to try this out And you're wearing one of the XEM you suits in there? No, sorry I didn't wear the suit I was allowed to scuba dive with the astronauts that were wearing the suits because the astronauts were testing a Very interesting thing. They were testing the pressure of the suits But before we get to that you said you've been scuba diving I have yeah, not a ton I mean it's snorkeled a ton I love that activity But a little bit of scuba diving I had a buddy who was into it and he taught me how it worked and I learned and I made some mistakes And I did okay, and it was really neat Did you learn how to control your ability to float in the water like do you know what a BCD is a buoyancy control device? Do you remember that I remember that?

Yeah, it's been a while walk me through it bring me up a like a floaty vest Do you remember wearing a floaty vest and you hit a button and go You can pump air into it. I do remember that okay So the the deeper you go in water the more pressure there is on you right sure and if you have an air bubble with you And you take it down it's going to shrink and when you shrink your volume gets smaller And so your density goes up and so what can happen is this really weird thing when you're descending With a scuba diving rig as you go down further your vest can start to shrink and you start to sink faster So it's this really strange thing that happens and so it's kind of counterintuitive and so when you're coming up The other way I think you and I have spoken about this before there's this I'll say you're at the bottom of the pool and you take a big breath And you hold your breath if you were to swim towards the surface with your breath you're holding your breath What would happen? Hmm? I think I feel like it pressures down with that if I swim toward the surface with a full breath Yes Yeah, I feel like that pressure is down it would blow you up you would explode well not from like six feet underwater Not from six feet underwater.

No, but like if you go to the bottom of 40 to 100 feet or something like that You take a breath. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, so when I take a breath, okay, sorry I'm tracking the scenario now, so let's say we're in the 12 foot range, okay, and I take a breath and I go down I feel that compression. Yes, I feel my shoulders wanting to roll in and the the relationship between my body and my lung capacity feels cramped It feels different. So you were asking me to imagine getting the breath somehow magically 12 feet below water and then going up with it in my understanding Yes with a scuba regulator.

I'm sorry. I wasn't here. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've never experienced that I didn't go very deep in my little bit of training and goofing around that I did but yeah Yeah, that would hurt as I came up I would expect yeah Have you ever seen a fish you've probably seen this deep-seafish and if you've seen a fish with their swim bladder like all puffed up You ever seen that yeah, I had to try to end koi recently to euthanize it what swim bladder became damaged It's a tough deal man.

We had a fish named blubber looking back yard in the koi pond. We inherited him I didn't it's not even my fish. I got him from the previous owners They've had this fish since the 80s when I was a very old fish get all the cancers all the fish diseases You can have he had all of them but somehow he just didn't die right well I go out there last season and it's over you can't you just can't control it's like getting food I was down there like trying to push the little food pellets into his mouth like come on blubber my kids love you Come on blubber pull through but I mean he's 80% cancer at this point There's a little bit of fish left But it's mostly just as ease and he's just flipping over rolling over I'm in the water with him trying to prop him up their tricks when the swim bladder gets deflated from pressure or stress with a trout Where you can you can get them righted by moving water along the gills and holding them at a certain angle You can get that bladder functioning right again. You can start to get back.

Is it normally too big or is it too small the swim bladder? Well, I don't know how efficient I would think it's too small I would think it would be too small in my experience because usually if I see a swim bladder that's too low I'm fishing with a new fisherman and they're freaked out by the fish and they overclench it. Oh fish goes I'm like oh good. You're doing a good job.

That's great Why don't I put that one back for you and so to me it looks like they squeeze the air out of the poor thing And I imagine that as I work it against the current in the most oxygenated part of the flow I'm getting air back into the swim bladder But I don't know the anatomy of a fish dude I just know that it works and then eventually when they feel right You can feel the tents up in their flanks and their musculature and that means I'm right again I can swim and off the trout goes blubber There was no such tensing I think the way the muscles were it was just cancer and bloat and I worked that fish over and over and over You know I fired up some air bubblers and I got the little like aquarium. Oh really bubbler right underneath them You did you try you attempted fish CPR basically take all that air buddy. What about all this air? Are you hungry?

Here's some more fish pellet fish in these water. Yeah, well I had there was he was getting water too because he was in water Oh, I seem like he had plenty of all it Just wasn't working. He's a bobber. He's dead.

It was over So I tried that for a couple days without telling the kids and finally I was like a it's over for blubber They do dead He can't like he's maybe the tiniest bit alive, but it's over how big how big is blubber blubber is a big toy maybe? Eight inches did you get a minute pretty big coin? No, although I did get a trout map might come in like I made the biggest trout I ever caught just yesterday. We got we got it's on the wall.

I'll show you a picture It's awesome great big fatty rainbow. Yeah, it's on the wall It's just the thing now where you'll actually have to keep the fish you just take the pictures from a certain angle and then they can do it Yes, dude, I maybe we should do a whole conversation about this, but I'm cool telling you real quick There is a guy in the hot spring south Dakota. It's about an hour south of here Camilla looked him up online dude is amazing. I went to his workshop yesterday I saw how he does everything it is amazing But we went in there he's like well show me the fish that you want to do and I took a ton of pictures because I knew this Service existed and I might want to do it someday.

I showed him all my pictures He's like oh, yeah, it's more than enough no problem He pulls out this big digital catalog and he's like alright you measured it And yeah, I showed him me measuring the fish He's like I had a 23 inch trout really good girth on it. It's all footballed up He's like alright right here. This is the model and they're like ten different fiberglass plastic models of exactly the dimensions of the fish I caught and he just had me pick the pose. I wanted I was like yeah I bet it struck that pose right there at one point in its life and I put it back it's still alive It's out there in nature somewhere and he's like alright Well, just you know give me the highest resolution of the photos possible And I'll paint it to look exactly like this fish the spots the speckles what the depth of the gill cuts the color around the gills The life in the eyeballs everything and then I'll make a little rock base for it I got the thing back It's a spitting image in my hands it sits in my hands just like the picture of me holding this fish up out of the water It's a two-hander and it's the most amazing thing ever the guy's an absolute artistic genius and now that fish lives on my wall And I haven't decided what the fish's name shall be yet But it shall have a name someday my children and grandchildren shall inherit it and be like that is what our eccentric grandpa did And now we have his fish for some reason why I think we should work shot names real quick I think we should do what do you have in mind is it a is it a boy or a girl?

I think it's a boy, but I would I'm gonna verify but yeah, let's assume boy. How do you make you feel? How do you make me feel what a thoughtful question? You laded oh I was just okay.

This is what happened with this fish I walked up to a clear stretch of water and I had a whole gallery with me There were a bunch of people on the trail my my three kids my wife were there and her parents were there My father-in-law is a spin fisherman who likes to catch trout, but that's not like fly fishing and He performs very well often outperforms me with his lures and spinners and all of this and so I walked up to this particular pool He didn't have a rod out. I did have mine and I've got this teeny tiny little fly on there and we walked up and both of us We're like well dang. That's the one you'd want to get right there It sounds like alright, let me see if I can show you how this is supposed to work with a fly rod We got a weight and we got a watch at this low angle so he can't see us But we can we can see him we need to see how he's feeding snowing eating Yeah, and where the food is coming to him from yeah, yeah, exactly that the angle of refraction that would defeat the fish's ability to see you So we watched we looked at what bugs were floating on the water. We evaluated exactly how the fish was feeding I decided I have more or less what I would want already on tied onto my line So I don't need to change flies I just need to drop it upstream here and nurse it so that it follows the current here because he seems to like things that are coming down Exactly that way, but I have to manage my rod so he doesn't see it, but there's no slack That's too old a fish You're not gonna get a fish that old if you got a bunch of line in the water the fly needs to be the only thing on the water Coming downstream and so my cast was good.

I liked where it hit everybody's all crouched down my whole family including my in-laws who are not super young and I cruise it right into his strike zone. I saw him snap his tail one time which means oh, I'm in hunting mode watching I'm like he's gonna hit he's gonna hit he's gonna hit sure enough boom came up and rolled on it Just the way you would hope I set the hook it was a long long fight and I won I got him in the net I got him to shore and then I he's so big you can't I mean he's exhausted when you defeat a fish that big So you got to keep him in the net in the current so I was kind of in the water with him making sure that I wouldn't kill this beautiful animal And so the couple of shots where I lifted him up out of the water for pictures I was elated because I picked the fish I wanted I wanted to try to show my father-in-law that this kind of fishing is legitimate and actual and You know it's credible and it worked on the first cast we got a fish we wanted my kids were excited Yeah, my wife kind of had that take me take me now look in her eyes. She did yeah, absolutely That didn't happen at all I completely made that part up She was you know only moderately impressed, but I was elated it was exactly the fish I wanted that's how I felt so what does that mean the name should be I mean I've got a few suggestions Okay, most of them start with Darth No, is he is he a good fish or a bad fish? Like is he more evil or more good like you see great fish, so he's more of a Jedi less of a Sith Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I'd like to say we're friends. Okay, so Goliath is out Glide yeah, yes negative so you said he snapped the water. What about snappy? Well, I mean that would describe the action he took What are we doing?

Dr. Snapples. Oh, that's good lieutenant Snappleton. Oh, that's good.

Yeah Snapples that's great. What if we keep work shopping that at another time? I just it doesn't feel doesn't feel like work Quite there yet. Okay.

Okay. So Such a long story short now blubber he was done I decided like he's deceased the fish is dead. Goodbye to this beautiful koi You've been a good friend to the family I will now bury you in the garden and you will become part of the food we will later eat. Oh, thank you.

You're good continues Yes, the giving fish so I dug a little hole I took his body out and I set it in the little hole and he starts going Well, dang it you bury me. He's not dead. Yeah, I'm not gonna bury him alive. Okay, so I'm like well I need to run him through with something.

I gotta put him out of it He's done the fishes don't man I know what a fish is done But I don't want to club my fish to death and I was like well buddy How do you kill a fish with and I'm gonna kill a fish with a trident? Yeah, there's no try wait There is a trident because we had a thing that you stick in the garden for a sprinkler that had a trident on the Yeah, so just out there in my backyard. I just took the three prong to try it and I stood over him I thought some kind thoughts I just sort of pressed the middle time of the trident and do his cancer Was it like the night fighting scene and saving private Ryan? Oh, it was a good one.

Actually, it was exactly like that And he was like Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then I buried a blubber and now he is part of the food we grow in our garden and he missed It's a wonderful fish. That's great story. Thank you for that, man. You bet This episode of notum questions is brought to you by the patrons those are the people who took a look at this situation We're like hey, I like that podcast and it's free and I don't have to pay for it at all What if I did anyway?

I really appreciate that equation that you ran. Thank you absolutely and I mean let's let's go truth again, right? So we are motivated to get an episode done right now because yes, yeah the patron like the patrons not only Pay for this they told us to do it. They slapped us on the hand like hey do it No kidding.

It is 8 47 p.m. Where you live? It is 7 47 p.m. Where I live and I had a Wonderful Easter Sunday with my family.

We got up early. We did church stuff. We had a great dinner We played games wonderful day and I came down to publish the podcast and you and I touch base and we were like well It's hot crap. We should publish that at all Why would we put that milky sludge on the internet and forever besmirch our name and bore our listeners?

They're nice to us We shouldn't do that so we had two options before us a fork in the road if you will fork option number one was I would just don't do anything Punt it didn't work out. We missed on that one didn't get to where we wanted it and we're out of time whatever option number two was The out of the the patron thinks quite the motivation and this is the last day of the month Yeah, we should do that this this is actually really helps our families Which tells you how bad that other episode was so we climbed Mount Mordor and we cast it into the volcano The point is thank you very much patrons for supporting the podcast We are severely grateful and if you want to check it out go to patreon.com slash no dumb questions And I think we're to start doing the conversation over there, right? We are yeah I'm gonna figure that out in the upcoming month and we'll let people know how to do it But more or less we're gonna make it so that anybody you don't even have to like pay your contribute But anybody can be a free member or a paid member of patreon and we're just gonna move the conversation over there because I like the culture on patreon better There's a bunch of bunch of you who are awesome who are on reddit and on reddit frequently, but I Don't want to force people who want to talk about the program to have to spend time on reddit when I think that could have positive or Maybe negative impacts on a person's life So we'll just move it over to patreon and let everybody participate whether they're a patron or not Yeah, I think so patreon.com slash no dumb questions. Thank you so much for encouraging our conversations as friends I think it's great.

I really enjoy it and we always say stuff like hey This exists because of you but no look me in the eye right now, please I'm looking at that if you are a patron This actually does exist entirely because of you so if you hated this episode blame the patrons But if this was fun for you, and it's been very fun for me. Thank a patron So what we're gonna talk today about tridentine fish right my household pets tridentine household pets now to tile that together There's some divers at the neutral buoyancy lab and they all have tattoos and most of them have tridentine So really yeah, they do so without work out better than expect to think you asked me about swim bladders right yeah So so basically when you go really deep in water There's this cool thing that happens the air gets smaller And so there's this really cool thing that I think you and I talked about before called a CISA controlled emergency swimming ascent So yes, yeah, I didn't know that was the term Yeah, you know the bottom take a breath out of your you know your regulator and it's a pressurized breath because you're under so much Pressure at the bottom that's why you have those big tanks on your back as a scuba diver you take this pressurized breath And then you can just open your mouth and go And you can swim up in your breath will never run out what yes, no, I didn't know that's how it worked I've heard you talk about that before I had no idea that's how it works That's how it works. So basically and that's that's an emergency maneuver It's an emergency maneuver because you've heard of the bins like you can yeah, it's a nitrogen poisoning basically Yeah, rapid ascent inappropriately rapid descent Yes If you go to the bottom of the pool and you start breathing air then what can happen is the nitrogen can absorb in your tissue and your Blood and your like everything you can just absorb nitrogen in your synovial fluid I think it's how you say it like in your joints and stuff like that And so if you swim up too fast if you ascend too quickly then you'll end up like blubber you'll get Or maybe I did it yeah, you'll end up with your you know basically the nitrogen will boil out of your blood But it's not quite as violent as it sounds but anyway, that's the same effect bad things happen I call it the bins because you're bending over in pain. Okay.

Yeah, and so anyway You want to avoid that and so at the neutral buoyancy lab they said hey, we're gonna do these new spacesuit tests and we're going to do a blind test where they run the spacesuit itself at a certain pressure and so they said hey We're gonna run the space the spacesuit is 4.3 psi or whatever it was But it might be running at 6.2 psi we don't know And I'm like well Why would you want to run it at a higher pressure because when I tried on the spacesuit years ago and I put my hand in the glove as Soon as they pressurized the spacesuit, it's like being inside of a balloon And so imagine a balloon the shape of your hand Now imagine it's pressurized and I imagine trying to close your hand You can see that you'd be fighting the balloon, right? How much real estate is there between your flesh and your balloon hand? In fact, they put a foam block on the back of your wrist to push your hand into the palm of the glove That's a very good question that you just asked because they have to think about it They also put a metal bar over the front of your palm So so you're kind of in there You've got a foam block on the back of your wrist and you've got a metal bar on the palm and it's pushing you so that your fingers are engaged With the glove makes sense Yes, yeah, good description. Okay, I get it So how much pressure would you want in your suit?

Like what you know? I just told you see the four or six, but like do you think you'd want more pressure or less pressure? What four or six of what unit did you say psi psi psi at pounds per square inch? So would you would you want dude?

I couldn't even would you want more or less pressure in your suit because of this balloon hand? What would be easier to say? Well, I would think I would want more because all my movements would translate clumsily I'll be it they would translate to the outside with more pressure But I could get more precision movement with a smaller suit and a smaller bubble at a lower pressure where there's just a little bit more ability to engage With the material I could see an advantage to both yeah, yeah If you have the tighter the pressure, you know, basically the more pressure in the suit the more the suit will fight against you on your hands So your hands can get really tired. So they really have to design those hands or excuse me the gloves So that they can close easily because you're fighting that pressure It's called a every joint the goal for the joints are to be a zero work joint meaning the the physics equation for work is Pressure times delta volume and so you want to make it so that when you extend your elbow or or close your elbow You're not changing the volume of the suit at all Does that make sense?

Wow, I had not even thought of that, but it makes infinite sense exactly Yeah, I mean humans articulate in what's the number a hundred different ways with all the little things that we can bend every one of those is A change in pressure in part of the suit. Oh, wow. I'd never thought about that complication At all so you're okay So you're suggesting that what they're trying to do is make it so that no matter what you articulate the pressure remains uniform throughout the suit in the envelope the air envelope is that am I hearing that yeah a constant volume joint is the goal like in the Building a CT control variable transmission. Oh, you know joint C J.

Okay. I got it. I got it Yeah, a constant volume joint not a constant velocity joint, which is a thing in the car Oh, yeah, great, but but I basically imagine building a suit of armor so that all the elbows and knees and stuff bend without It'd be a hard thing to do right now. You have to vary and O ring and every one of those joints and it would just be challenging So I didn't understand why they were test they said hey, we're gonna do this test and it's possible that we're gonna run it at a higher Pressure or a lower pressure.

We're not gonna tell the astronauts what they're testing We're just gonna put it in the suit and say hey, you're on the moon go walk around on the moon And we're gonna we're gonna trim out your buoyancy with weight strapped to your legs and stuff and foam blocks strapped to your back And very specific locations and that's kind of what the video that I made is about how they get those locations right not an interesting topic Right now though. So basically they get these astronauts perfected perfectly trimmed out Put them in the water and they say okay go do all these tasks and then they say how tired are you and It's a blind test. They don't tell the astronaut what pressure they're at and it's like I don't know I'm a four out of ten tired at the end. I don't know how easy was that task it was a Three out of ten and so there's these there's these you know subjective type is that the correct way of I always get that confused subjective Yeah, so you're having to give a guess of how hard something is and the problem is when you're doing it You've got another astronaut sitting right beside you if you and I pick up a block and somebody says hey Hey, man, how hard was it to pick up that block?

Yeah for me? It's gonna be like a super easy and for you It's gonna be really taxing exactly right so there's a little bit of competition going on So if I say like well this block was about a four and then like okay Astronaut women what was that for you one? Yeah like a negative one? I don't know just because of all my mind Exactly, so it's a hard test to run But but they do it But what I didn't understand is like why why the heck would you want the suit to have more pressure if the human body is happy to operate at Or psi by the way the atmosphere you're in right now.

I'm in 14.7 psi or a little bit less You are what's your altitude where you're at? I'm at about 700 feet here. Where are you at? We're on the we're kind of going up the hill here in Rapid City.

So 3,000 ish Wow, well not like Wyoming where I mean in Lander. We were solidly at a mile. Oh wow You probably have way more hemoglobin than I do. Yeah, I was gonna say that and I was afraid of hobgoblins growing up But you know the hemoglobin.

Yep. What is that white blood cells? Hema is the red ones. How do you say it?

Hemoglobin hemoglobin I think yeah, that's the oxygen saturated cells. Yeah. Yeah, you have more red blood cells to transport oxygen Oh the white ones are the ones that they fight the bad stuff. Yeah, they seriously eighth grade health I haven't covered this as a child so I don't remember so okay the whole purpose of the test was fascinating to me because How do you know you just know your PSI off the top of your head for some reason that's well one atmosphere for some reason I remember all these numbers.

It's 1760 tour I think it's 101.325 kilopascals it's 14.7 PSI and was it was the other ones? I don't know there's more but for some reason I got really excited about one atmosphere a pressure and just memorize much of it 29.92 inches of mercury I think that's right. There may be a dude. It's not how many kilopascals.

I didn't know there was a kilopascal I that's pretty good. You get the things that you memorize you could tell me when did When did Israel fall to Nebuchadnezzar when was that? 586 BC. Okay.

Yeah, so you know this stuff when did areas take over? Approximately yeah, 520 gibberty. Yeah, you know these things. I don't know that stuff.

So anyway, um the test they were running was fascinating They said ideally when astronauts go to the moon with Artemis we could run them at a higher pressure And I said why would you want to do that because that that makes it harder for the glove thing? You know, I remember this from years ago and they said oh well it it will decrease the pre-breed time I said what what does that term mean? Yeah, basically right now on the International Space Station people don't realize this If they go do a space walk you think oh they're gonna put on a space suit and then they're gonna go out the airlock and they're gonna Go you know like move around on the outside of the space station. Yeah, sure Except that's not exactly how it works.

You you start by putting a mask on your face It looks like an oxygen mask in the hospital. Okay, and you breathe 100% pure oxygen for like two and a half hours or two hours or something like that You have to do what's called pre-breeding because you have to get all that nitrogen out of your blood because on the space station They're at 14.7 psi. They have more pressure inside the space station than you do where you're at right now Yeah, it's interesting and so but they're picking that yeah, they get to select that they pick that number And so I are they picking that number it makes sense because if the goal of the International Space Station is to be a lab And we're trying to test microgravity Then you would want the only different variable to be gravity, right? And so you'd want to pretend oh like we're at you know, we're at one atmosphere You would want to pretend that and so basically they said we're going to do that at 14.7 psi and then after that We'll see what happens the interesting thing is Apollo when Neil and Buzz went to the moon They were at five psi, but it was way more oxygen like right now Do you happen to know the percentage of oxygen in one atmosphere?

If you have a guess 0 to 100 percent how much of the area breathing would you say is probably oxygen of just like oxygen like O2 not like correct Including co2 yes co2 is very very minimal nitrogen argon let's say oxygen is 82% Backwards you're thinking about nitrogen so oxygen is like 21% Oh nitrogen is a big contributor nitrogen is the big one again eighth grade science I don't remember that the thing that I thought was interesting is when the Apollo guys go into the into the thing They have like a hundred percent oxygen and so you've got five psi in the Apollo like lunar lander But it's almost all oxygen which is scary because oxygen helps things burn right without a no Yep, yeah, and so imagine being in like a spacecraft with 100% oxygen if you were in that environment at 14.7 psi at one atmosphere like everything around you is dangerous everything is fuel It's like all rocket fuel and like holy cow this this thing wants to kill me But once you decrease the the pressure everything changes. I mean it's it's like a balance And so what they're trying to do is they say okay right now these astronauts they're in a spacecraft If they would need to go do a spacewalk they have to pre-breed oxygen for like two hours And then we put them in the spacesuit and then they have to do like exercise in the spacesuit and get ready It takes like three and a half hours Why for them to like if you say hey, we're on the moon The FedEx moon guy just rang the doorbell to bring us our moon package Let's go open the door and greet the FedEx moon guy It would take you three and a half hours to be able to do that because if you depressurized really really quickly And you just go from like a high-pressure environment to boom to like something like four psi then you would get the bins like It's like it's just like blubber Well, not really blubber because he was in the backyard But like if you're at the bottom of a pool and you go up really really fast You get the bins if you've if you've been like saturated with nitrogen because you've been down in the bottom of the pool So long and so doing a spacewalk is like being at the bottom of a pool and swimming up And so you have to constantly think about how much nitrogen saturation is in your body. Does that make sense? Yes, okay three things very quickly One now I really am an idiot because I make fires burn things and I understand what oxygen does to things and that oxygen And high concentrations is like that that's ideal for soaking fire flammable even So for me to guess that the world we live in is 82 oxygen and we don't constantly explode Bad form with them.

It's what it's basically live radio. I'm not starting to go up the questions in an easy to understand way No, no, no, I My bad should I have that too? Okay, so that's a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere and we are taking that out of I mean they're breathing basically just oxygen right they're trying to supersaturate the blood with oxygen is that we're Preparatory yeah when they're pre-breathing. That's right.

Yeah, do you need I mean what would happen if we just breathe all oxygen forever? Do you need the other stuff that is in earth's atmosphere? Are our bodies adjusted to it? Or do we really only need the oxygen part?

I don't know the answer to your question and it's a great question because There may be some long-term physiological effects of breathing too much oxygen And the reason I say that is because when I was doing my little lessons to get ready to go in the neutral buoyancy lab I said okay, look normal scuba divers they use air compressed air We dive with nitrox here at the NBL which is basically air that has more oxygen in it than normal Now normal nitrox is like 32 percent. Did you see the on the zoom call? Did you see the balloons just go up? Yes, I'm a hundred percent sure that just happened.

I think you waved your hand what just happened make a peace sign I don't know what happened. They were balloons and they came from nowhere I thought I understood I was talking about the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere and now I don't think I know anything I'm trying to do the thing like the ooma thermon dance in okay. That was crazy. That's not doing it So so anyway the oxygen In the gas that you breathe at the NBL it's called nitrox 46.

You can't like it's not normal nitrox So basically what is 46? That's a concentration of oxygen So so if you put more oxygen in your air and you compress it and you go down you breathe it you can stay down longer Okay, depending on the double ish the oxygen of what you normally get. Yeah, I guess it is Yeah, so anyway, we breathe nitrox at the NBL and so you don't have to worry about doing. Oh neutral buoyancy lab Yes, I'm sorry.

I'm forgiving so what do you do if you're a if you're a scuba diver? You're gonna go to the bottom of the pool and like the deepest dive I've ever done was about 100 feet And that was a long time ago. It was okay And I was looking at my pressure gauge on my tank and man my air was going fast because as I was breathing it It was compressed more and I was taking more of the air out of my tank It's a very interesting thing So anyway, I was I was diving and once you do that if you go that deep and you and you're breathing under such high pressure You can't go to the surface because you'll get the bin so you have to go up Just a little bit and then you look at your watch and you just you just sit there and you float at a certain depth And you start exhaling the nitrogen and then you go up to another one you do it's called safety stop You go to a you know a 10 feet or something you just start breathing breathing breathing try to get rid of all that And sometimes you'll say hey, we're gonna do a two-minute safety stop And we're just breathing the nitrogen down and you go to the top and then you still have nitrogen saturated in your joints and your blood and stuff You can't yell it afterwards even if you do it, right? I never have but one of the things you can't do and this is interesting is you can't fly after you scuba dive for 24 hours Huh because if you were to go up to your elevation Like that's less pressure, right?

Right and so anyway the thing that I learned in this trip that was the most eye-opening to me is you want the pressure of the spacecraft to be as close to the pressure of the space suit as possible because Neil and Buzz okay, that's my third question. I think you're speaking to it right now Remember second ago, I was like I got three things and I got the third thing yeah, the third thing was everything you're describing is so slow What if something happens exactly and you're like well, I got a breathe oxygen for three hours I mean there's a there's a space gremlin out there destroying our No, I'm looking at a Micro-media right let's say we got like a oxygen tanks outside and a micro-media right strikes one of the tanks and they're all connected together But there's a valve over there. I can go shut the valve. Oh, there's always a manual switch right someone's gonna have to sacrifice themselves I know the spot.

Yeah, so basically you can't just be like oh Sanchez. He's gonna do it He's gonna save us, you know, you know, it just seems I think Sanchez was the guy actually I do yeah So it's gonna be great. So that's the thing the idea here is we could speed up the time That you could get out and address things and this would I mean this is vital for the long-term prospect of doing space stuff or Colonizing something with little or no atmosphere you have to be able to get out there quicker than three plus hours in order to Just maintain your existence because you're you're exposed you have no shield you have no armor out there and so the suit the design of the suit the pressure of the suit the pressure of the Space colony or space station All of those things might need to be reconsidered to see if we could shrink the necessary time to respond to things happening outside Absolutely, and you nailed it. That's the deal And so I didn't know this was a thing And so I was able to observe a government test They let me scuba dive and watch these astronauts in these suits at the bottom of the pool And I was able to be like, oh wow, this makes so if we can increase the pressure of the suit or decrease the pressure of the lander The closer we can get them together for example right now if you needed to go get band-aids right now at the store How long would it take you to get ready?

I would slip on my slip-on shoes and be out the door and if it was I mean if that was the thing I needed most in life I could be out the door in 15 seconds. Exactly right and so like we need to be able to respond to that But if it's the whole church, not church, excuse me If it's the whole family getting ready to go to church for Easter right and you all want to like I don't know Let's say for some reason you all have to dress like penguins or something. I know you don't dress up I don't want to go to that kind of church. Yeah, I know you don't but let's say let's say it's a I don't know It's a daddy daughter dance or something and everybody has to get ready Like how long is it gonna take you guys to get ready?

Forever, I know right so I think there's a middle ground I think there's a middle ground that you can do I think like an hour Like if you think about a spacesuit over in the corner, how long is it gonna take you to throw on that spaces? It's not taking you I don't know 30 minutes. I gotta put on the magic underwear that cools me off I gotta put on you know my diaper. I gotta put on my little snoopy headsuit I gotta like you know all 30 minutes, you know, maybe I don't know You're seeing my skeptical face here.

I mean that's nice progress But you're gonna have to figure out something quicker because here's the thing man My brain goes right to military strategy if you put people in space Eventually the people will fight each other right now the relationships in space are highly cultivated curated controlled I'm not worried about people on the space station get into a fist fight right now. I think they do great I don't think that's gonna happen But if you start putting multiple people with multiple interests in in different stations in space And let me just put it this way eventually people will fight people off of this planet It's going to happen really it's going to happen I wish it wouldn't happen but it's going to happen because of human nature and we have fought each other Everywhere else we've ever been ever Why are we not gonna fight each other there? We get to a place where combat happens in space based on what you're telling me about spacesuits Fastest suit wins the end that'll be the deciding technology of who wins at combat in space Holy crap, man. I've never even thought about that.

Also don't want to think about that, but you're right Have you heard of the uh, I've heard about this recently. It's called the the side of these trap This I don't know how to say it. I've only read it. It's a trap that was popularized by this american dude Graham Allison i'm reading from the wiki page now Basically, he says that if there's an emerging power that threatens to displace a great power Then they kind of always get into a fight.

There's always a war And this guy, uh, allison he uses this to describe the relationship between china and america However However, there's a lot of I saw this and I was like what? No, he's almost speaking as if war is inevitable and I went back and said no And so there's a lot of counter arguments to this that say well actually if you go back to history and this is your This is your bailiwick if you go back to history every time you see a new power and emerging power coming up Oftentimes war happens, but not all the time And so it's a really interesting thing to study Um, and uh, maybe we maybe we table that and learn about that at a different time I mean one pot. Yes, it depends on the time frame that depends entirely on the parameters if you say the Phoenicians under all kinds of pressure in the lavant from the the coming and going of the Assyrians the Babylonians and then the Persians If you say, all right, well, the phoenicians decide we're just moving west We don't want to be a part of this anymore. The lavant is not a good place to live There's a nice chunk of ground in modern day to nija north africa.

We're just gonna go set up It's just a colony for now. We're just colonizing what was space to them back then We're just gonna go colonize that and they quickly figure out this is way more hospitable to our lifestyle than old phoenicia north of modern day israel Let's just move the whole thing over there. Okay. Well, if you look at a very narrow time frame there They overwhelmingly the Carthaginians who are the phoenicians moved west overwhelmingly they got along with rome eventually they had a series of really ugly wars with rome but It kind of defeats the thesis when you zoom out a little bit and you're like, yeah But for the most part that worked out it ended very badly But did the hundreds of years where it worked out not count for anything?

I mean those are good times. I think it counts so I my my question on all of that in terms of a big grand historical theory would be what counts as a rising power and How long do they have to be rising before we count them? I'm I'm not sure I'm convinced but I'm convinceable and that would be a fun conversation for another time godly dude It's so interesting that your brain just instantly solved that problem like The space force is a thing and isn't there like a space movie now where people fight on the moon? I don't know the name of for all mankind.

I haven't seen it but people is It's some kind of show and I don't know I know there is a there's a scene that I've seen like floating around on social media of like astronauts with rifles or something Don't like to think about that. But the fact that there is a space force implies that eventually yeah waste Just you're seeing what you went through to almost become an astronaut You're baiting right now thinking about what it would look like for somebody to go through all that and just be like there Go to space now. Here's a gun shoot somebody else who went through all of that. I mean Yes, what a squandering of a mind of a life of the dream of the energy All of that work to go and fight in such an inhospitable space where the slightest wound is basically death There you go.

I mean it's just It never would there have been such an expense of soul and of treasure to get one dude in a place where he could point a gun at another dude We should not fight in space. This is very very bad and that idea sickens me Even just from a human resources perspective. It's a horrible idea Like human resources like you know Like You know the Russians put a gun in space There's there's a gun on the international space station right now What do you use it for? The idea is for bears If you land on Soyuz and you land in Europe or excuse me in Asia like you land in on the land Soyuz is interesting.

It's designed to land like on earth and so they have these they call them soft landing rockets But it's anything but like right when it comes down. There's a radar altimeter right before Soyuz the Russian you know reentry capsule before it hits the ground It fires these rockets to decelerate you and so you don't just basically hit really really hard your underappears you anyway What's the name of their reentry thing? I haven't heard that term before Soyuz s o y Uzi the Soyuz capsule. Oh, okay, and so anyway, it's like a little gumdrop kind of thing But anyway, they have a gun on board as I understand it in case they land in the wilderness and there's bears Huh, the US has decided no, we're not gonna put a gun on the space station We don't need to do that But if they're spray the Russians feel like they need to do that then they can do that so there is a gun on the international space station Which I thought was interesting do they say which Russian did it was an Anton check off?

Because I would have so many layers of sand Okay, so you get I mean what was your experience at the lab? I mean are you getting suited up alongside the astronauts or their other scuba divers in there watching this? I saw just a the tiniest little intro to the video and it looks like they made a moon But put it underwater and all I can see is you down there riding on a wax clipboard I saw the first few seconds. Yeah, it was amazing dude.

So I got to go down I got to see him do the test they were picking up rocks and then I learned about this last thing I'd like to explain So we mentioned earlier that on the moon you have one that's sixth of your weight, right? Yeah, okay, but how much of your mass do you have? All of it exactly all of it. So In football when you run or basketball, you're running straight and you try to change directions real quick.

Yeah, what happens to your feet? Well, that's where a lot of the energy transfer happens you're pushing off of a stable surface to redirect that energy you got however many Jewels of force moving in one direction And you're trying to redirect all of that force you can't do that without something about work against So what are your toes feel like when you make that pivot? I'll say you're juking somebody What what are your toes feel like in your shoe? You feel kind of pushed it's a poorly fit shoe you feel I'm kind of match up against the front and you'll pay for that later Exactly, right?

So now let's so what enables you to put that much force into the ground. I would argue it's your weight Uh And your momentum. I mean, that's what's producing force. No, no your momentum doesn't let you put that into the ground Like you're really you're having no you're having to do a pivot force, right?

So you need traction on the ground. So if you're playing basketball, you got rubber shoes and a hardwood floor Okay. Yeah, and so your side to side forces like that's friction, right? You need friction on the ground.

You need another word is traction you need traction with the ground Yes, and the reason you can get traction is because of how much you weigh Do you see that? Yes, it's called your normal force, but does Okay, but you don't float when you run there's downward force pushing your body into the ground as well I mean, that's that's that's momentum force. That's angular momentum. It's pushing you into that pivot I mean, it's why you get the what do they call it when they when you do drawing classes You learn how to draw comic book style art you do all of these exaggerated impossible poses Yeah And the one everybody learns in those elementary drawing classes is the impossible pose and it's the one that is usually depicting the god mercury Where he's leaning forward in a way that no one could possibly ever stand up, right?

Okay, but the idea is that that angle you can kind of picture it used to be like a male or FedEx or yeah, somebody had that is their logo And you're leaning so far forward that the mind sees that and says you can't achieve that posture standing still Only with great speed can you do that because my cg is forward of your feet Yeah, okay So when I picture that and I really break it down to my brain. I am I am sensing downward force Like speed that is driving into the ground and also forward force and speed that is pushing you forward But you are telling me and I'm fully inclined to defer to the engineer on this one that that pivot is a function of weight not a function of Angular momentum. Yeah, that's what I'm saying And so that that downward force that you feel that there's this thing in physics called the normal force And so you take the the mass of the object times the the acceleration due to gravity of the object and that's your normal force Okay, okay, sure. Yeah, and so you can you can increase that normal force if you were running on a hot wheels ramp You were running up a curve then yeah, you would have some of that you'd be slinging out into the ground more and so you'd have more Acceleration that that didn't hit pretend.

I didn't say that. No, no, no. No, yeah. I like the hedgehog.

I can picture that Yep, no, that was a great example. I can make sure okay So so your ability to put your foot on the ground and push forward is a function of your normal force or how much weight you have On the moon you don't have that but you're 16.7 percent of that correct, but you still have the mass So you still have the same amount of mass you have to accelerate forward But you have one sixth of the traction on the ground. This is the first time I've ever understood this I've never thought about this in my entire life. I didn't understand it's really hard right now I didn't understand this till I went and saw what they were doing and so what they were doing is they were trying to walk in the zero Grab, excuse me the one sixth gravity environment and granted the neutral buoyancy lab is not a perfect simulator because there's a water drag all over your body But you're still if I were to walk in a straight line towards you right now when I were decided I want to pivot and I want to move to the side On earth, that's not a problem at all But arthur c clark the author of 2001 a space odyssey.

He wrote it like this He said that you're very sluggish up there. He said that how did he say it? He said that you're oh? Gosh, I have to get it right.

It's like one sixth. Oh, I wrote it down in the other room. Basically he said You are one six excuse me. You are six times more sluggish than your weight would suggest That's what he said.

You're six times more sluggish than your weight would suggest. So you work deal the other way Yeah, right. I think in my brain if you cut 83.3 percent of my weight I would be blazing fast my ability to cut and dart and move I mean, you'd lose a lot of musculatures. So I guess that's there too But I just imagine well you lose weight you get quicker than I think space like well You have lost weight so you must be quicker But I hadn't thought about the component that was not intuitive to me that you were just explaining your ability to use my layman's term cut Is relative to your weight which gives you that oh wow now So if you were to just run in a straight line You've seen the astronauts bunny hop in the Apollo footage if you were to go straight line Then you could you could slowly accelerate and you could go in and you could start bunny hopping across the surface You could probably go faster if I had to guess You could probably go faster But the moment you're not going to have races in tracks on the moon At least not in tight tracks like in a circle because the ability to turn is compromised because you have all of the inertia that you have right here on earth If you could run as fast as you could here on earth on the moon and then I say okay stop It would start a long A very long event of you plowing a ditch on the moon because the soil is not very compacted in certain places You know it's like moon dust and you would try to put traction into the ground But you would just drag your toes and it's it's a really odd thing to think about that I had never understood But anyway, that was the big there two takeaways for me from this whole experience number one I just did the balloons again.

Did you see that the thumbs up? What I don't have an activator, but you do you did a thumbs up and a thumbs up just appeared But how did the balloons happen? That's a thumbs up? I don't know just have maybe okay There's two things that I learned uh if this experience that were amazing The first one is you want the pressure of your spacecraft to be as close to the operating pressure of your spacesuits Possible that's the number one now you asked a great question earlier about can you just go 100% oxygen forever?

I don't know I do know they monitored me for oxygen toxicity I don't know what that means and like the guy goes hey, that was a great guy just stay right here I gotta monitor you for 10 minutes for oxygen toxicity and I said what what does what would that look like? He goes, I just I want to shake it and stuff. You're you look fine. That was like what hold on What does this anyway?

So the first thing I learned you want your spacecraft in your space suit to be as close and pressure as possible And the second thing I learned is that walking around on the moon is is it wasn't difficult It was just different I actually called a guy from he retired from nasa and I said hey, you know i'm doing this video and i'm just doing a little research here I want to ask you about word on the street as you're the expert on the falls on the moon that the Apollo astronauts have I just want to talk to you about that a little bit and uh, you know, I hear it's difficult that they're you know the way they They did it was just pretty difficult. He goes you do not propagate that bull crap about it being all they had phone on the moon I was like wait what i've just he goes they enjoyed it they were skipping they were singing while they were walking they it was not difficult It was different Okay, that was a yes sir yes sir But it was the second thing is that you are more sluggish because you have the same amount of momentum But you don't have the ability to cut or transfer any of that to the soil You don't have to feel that a little bit underwater when I fight with my kids and we do underwater karate and street fighter and stuff Some of that some of that is the resistance of the water But i'm compensating for that Some of that is the fact that I simply don't have the weight to drive into the bottom of the pool surface If i'm understanding you correctly that I do when we do fake street fighter karate ninja stuff in real life I just simply don't have the ability to drive off of that and change directions I attributed that entirely to the resistance of the water I think i'm now understanding that there are two functions working against me here One is the resistance of the water too is I don't weigh that much in the water and it's harder to push off I don't have as much to work with my mouth is a gape because I can't believe I didn't see that but you're absolutely right Man that would have been a great illustration to talk about but I didn't see it that's that's a great illustration good job Yeah, cool. Thank you for teaching me that yeah, that's great. So yeah, that was it Those are the two big things I learned and I loved it the opportunity was incredible The people at the neutral points he'll have that there's a guy there named domic del rasso that he actually was part of the reduced gravity Bombic comments thing I did when I was under that he was running it at the time and now he's doing other things that the man's done Everything and there's another guy named pat Keller.

He's a scuba diver and he's the guy that basically he babysat me the whole time And he kept me safe and they did great and so it was it was wonderful But there's some things about that video that I can't I don't think I'd do a good job of explaining it like Neil Armstrong's actually in the video And he explains something about the angle of attack of a spacecraft on the moon And it made me realize that landing so hls the human lander system of the nassus working on the ability to land that on the moon It's like a cartoon way to land a rocket like it's the the starship or spacex you land it on the tail We're kind of like upright on the moon. Okay, one thing I realized making this video is that when we come in to land that thing We're gonna have to spend a lot of fuel just stopping it stopping its lateral motion because you have to tilt over rockets a lot more On the moon to stop them. It's hard to explain but it makes sense with graphics on the video So I realized that in order to land on the moon we're gonna basically have to be coming straight down like a needle You know like a pencil when you were jumping in the swimming pool, you know when you were going to get the pencil So yeah, it was a wonderful experience and I think I think that's the the main deal those two things the traction was amazing I got to see an astronaut fall on his back On like on the bottom of the pool and I understood why because it was he mismanaged his CG He didn't miss manage it was just different. He was having fun.

He was swinging. There you go. Don't propagate that bull crap Yeah, that's it. It was great to uh, it was great to experience it.

So thanks for uh, thanks for having that conversation. I will never See the physical world the way I did before this conversation I understand my relationship with the world around me better than I did before we talked and what an amazing way to spend whatever it's been An hour and a half. I can't say that after most conversations. I really understand The physical world better.

Thank you. Well, thank you for teaching me that when I'm wrestling in the shallow end of a swimming pool That yes, I'm fighting the drag, but I'm also not getting traction on the ground Which is why it's so hard to run in a swimming pool. That's interesting. That's weird that That's what you took with you the real important thing that I taught you in this conversation is that the only Honorable death for a fish that is your friend is what to try to them in the swim bladder.

That is correct All right people. That's it. That's it. I'm cut seed