Astronaut Chris Hadfield Debunks Space Myths | WIRED — Transcript

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1. 0:0054321 mark
2. 0:02hi i'm commander chris hadfield
3. 0:04astronaut spaceship commander
4. 0:06spacewalker part-time musician i'm here
5. 0:08today to hopefully debunk some common
6. 0:11space myths here's this common
7. 0:13perception that you will immediately fry
8. 0:16to a crisp by the
9. 0:18unfiltered unadulterated solar radiation
10. 0:21if you get sucked out of the airlock in
11. 0:23truth it's way worse than that in the
12. 0:25shade in space it's like minus 250
13. 0:28degrees but the part of you that's in
14. 0:29the sun it's plus 250 degrees at least
15. 0:32so it's going to start boiling and
16. 0:34burning so it's like lying on a red hot
17. 0:37stove with a piece of dry ice on your
18. 0:38back and your lungs are going to be
19. 0:40sucked flat instantaneously but even
20. 0:43worse than that is your blood is going
21. 0:45to boil like opening a can of pop where
22. 0:48suddenly the all the little bubbles come
23. 0:49out because there's no air pressure
24. 0:51around you so simultaneously you are
25. 0:53going to freeze boil
26. 0:56burn
27. 0:57get the bends and no longer be able to
28. 0:59breathe not a good way to go i've done
29. 1:00two space walks and i was very thankful
30. 1:03to have a spacesuit around my body so
31. 1:05that none of those things happen to me
32. 1:08[Music]
33. 1:10sometimes you hear that you have to work
34. 1:11out constantly or you will pass out and
35. 1:14possibly die in space not true living on
36. 1:17a spaceship is the most lazy existence
37. 1:20you can imagine you're weightless you do
38. 1:22not have to lift a finger you don't have
39. 1:25to hold your head up your heart doesn't
40. 1:27have to lift your blood against gravity
41. 1:29you can be the laziest person in the
42. 1:31universe in space but eventually you
43. 1:33need to come back to earth and if you
44. 1:34don't exercise for your whole six months
45. 1:36in space you'll sort of turn into a
46. 1:37jellyfish so we do exercise two hours a
47. 1:40day on a spaceship we have a resistive
48. 1:42machine we have a unicycle and we have a
49. 1:45treadmill where elastics hold us down
50. 1:46just to keep our bodies strong enough
51. 1:48and our bones dense enough so when we
52. 1:50get home we don't just fall over like a
53. 1:52puddle but you don't need to work out
54. 1:54all the time
55. 1:57you've probably heard that space has a
56. 1:59smell maybe like burnt steak or some
57. 2:02type of barbecue that's true when you
58. 2:04come in from a spacewalk you're
59. 2:05surrounded by the emptiness of space
60. 2:08it's sort of like the opposite of air
61. 2:10there's nothing there at all when you
62. 2:12quickly repressurize the hatch and you
63. 2:14open up the hatch and you smell what is
64. 2:16that lingering smell from a place that
65. 2:18used to be exposed to space the smell in
66. 2:20there is is a little bit like that trace
67. 2:22of a smell of gunpowder or burnt steak
68. 2:25or to me it's sort of like brimstone
69. 2:27like a witch has just been there it's a
70. 2:29cool lingering trace of a smell i think
71. 2:32what it really is is the emptiness of
72. 2:35space the vacuum of space is actually
73. 2:37pulling trace chemicals out of the metal
74. 2:40of the walls of the ship little bits of
75. 2:42stuff you never smell because normally
76. 2:44there's air pressure holding them into
77. 2:45the metal they're slowly off gassing
78. 2:47those tiny little trace gases and trace
79. 2:50particles that otherwise they never get
80. 2:51into your nose and those are released
81. 2:53sort of that metallic gunpowder fired
82. 2:56smell that's where the smell is coming
83. 2:57from maybe it's not even coming from
84. 2:59space it's just sort of coming from
85. 3:00space's effect on our ship yeah in truth
86. 3:04it smells a little bit like a burnt
87. 3:05steak
88. 3:07so there's a lot of word out there that
89. 3:09if you go incredibly fast like the speed
90. 3:11of light if you could travel at the
91. 3:12speed of light that you won't age and
92. 3:15despite thousands of years going by
93. 3:17you'll stay the same but everybody that
94. 3:19you know will die that's not really true
95. 3:22einstein called it relativity because
96. 3:24what he meant was your aging will be
97. 3:27different relative to people's aging on
98. 3:29earth you'll still age time will still
99. 3:31pass for you but people on earth will
100. 3:34age at a different rate so that if you
101. 3:36came back after going incredibly fast
102. 3:38you would have gotten older by the
103. 3:40amount of time that it took for you to
104. 3:42travel but people on earth would have
105. 3:44aged much much faster they would have
106. 3:46had a longer period of time because if
107. 3:48you get going fast enough your speed is
108. 3:49sort of proportional to the time passing
109. 3:51so you'll still age but you just age at
110. 3:54a different rate than people back on
111. 3:55earth einstein did this cool thought
112. 3:57experiment imagine if you were looking
113. 3:59at a clock the the light from the clock
114. 4:01is coming and hitting your eyeballs and
115. 4:02telling you it's 12 o'clock well imagine
116. 4:04if you could move away from that clock
117. 4:07at the speed of light it would only say
118. 4:0912 o'clock because that light and you
119. 4:12would be moving away from the clock at
120. 4:13the same speed so for you it would look
121. 4:15like it was always 12 o'clock forever
122. 4:17you'd still be getting older but that
123. 4:19clock would always look like it was the
124. 4:21same time the people on earth were
125. 4:22continuing to live they're not aware of
126. 4:24you going the speed of light so you can
127. 4:26see that the time for you because of
128. 4:28your speed is relatively different than
129. 4:30the time for the people on earth it's a
130. 4:32really unusual thing to try and grasp in
131. 4:34your head
132. 4:35[Music]
133. 4:37what happens when something blows up in
134. 4:39space if something explodes in space
135. 4:41will it make a sound and could a human
136. 4:43hear it it's a pretty easy question to
137. 4:45answer the sun is just an explosion the
138. 4:49sun is the biggest explosion any of us
139. 4:50can imagine it's a huge continuous
140. 4:53thermonuclear explosion it's every atom
141. 4:55bomb we've ever built way more than that
142. 4:58continuously exploding it would be the
143. 5:00loudest thing imaginable it's constantly
144. 5:02happening but we don't hear a whisper of
145. 5:04it and that's because there's nothing to
146. 5:07carry the sound from the sun to us even
147. 5:10though it's incredibly violent there's
148. 5:12nowhere for the pressure of all of that
149. 5:14sound all of that noise to be carried
150. 5:17across the emptiness of space to shake
151. 5:19my eardrum in here and let me hear the
152. 5:20sound of the sun it's a good thing it'd
153. 5:22be deafening so if something explodes in
154. 5:24space it makes sound but there's no way
155. 5:27for that sound to be carried across
156. 5:29space so that i could hear it
157. 5:32there is this idea out there that maybe
158. 5:35the only way that we could really create
159. 5:37gravity is to spin the spaceship so that
160. 5:39everybody is stuck to the sides like one
161. 5:41of those rides at the fair where you're
162. 5:43pinned against the wall and for now
163. 5:45that's actually true we don't know how
164. 5:47to control gravity we have no way to
165. 5:49control gravity we can sort of pretend
166. 5:52there's gravity by spinning a ship and
167. 5:54everything stick to the sides like a
168. 5:56ball on the end of a string maybe
169. 5:58someday we'll figure out how to control
170. 5:59gravity but for now we have to spin the
171. 6:01whole ship only in the middle would they
172. 6:03be weightless
173. 6:06i've seen that people think that nasa is
174. 6:08working on warp speed so that we can
175. 6:10travel at the speed of light to
176. 6:12interstellar planets warp speed is an
177. 6:15invention of science fiction if we knew
178. 6:17how to work on warp speed we would we
179. 6:19don't know how to go anywhere near the
180. 6:21speed of light it takes an unlimited
181. 6:24amount of energy the faster you go the
182. 6:26more energy it takes e equals m c
183. 6:29squared it goes up with the square of
184. 6:30the speed in fact so how can you
185. 6:32generate that much electricity and what
186. 6:34does it do to your mass we don't know we
187. 6:36think maybe it's possible that you could
188. 6:38go faster than the speed of light but we
189. 6:40sure don't understand how right now so
190. 6:42we're not really working on it so
191. 6:44it's not really true we're hoping for it
192. 6:49in so many movies you see that the only
193. 6:51way that they survive interstellar
194. 6:53travel from one star to another is to
195. 6:55freeze yourself into cryosleep we don't
196. 6:58know how to do that right now when you
197. 7:00freeze water which is what we're mostly
198. 7:02made of our blood and everything it goes
199. 7:04into crystals it turns into ice crystals
200. 7:06and if you allow the beautiful delicate
201. 7:08nature of your human body to expand into
202. 7:11ice crystals it'll destroy the structure
203. 7:13of you it'll kill you you know frost
204. 7:15bite destroys it so that you get
205. 7:17gangrene in your hand you'd end up with
206. 7:19entirely destroyed bodies so right now
207. 7:21we do not know how to successfully
208. 7:23freeze a human body so that it is not
209. 7:25going to be permanently destroyed maybe
210. 7:27we'll figure it out someday but all of
211. 7:29those movies that rely on freezing the
212. 7:31crew we don't know how to do that it's
213. 7:33not real
214. 7:37you see on the internet all the time
215. 7:38someone has built a balloon and they've
216. 7:40launched some little figurine with a
217. 7:42camera attached to it where they take a
218. 7:43picture way up high in the atmosphere
219. 7:45you can see the curvature of the earth
220. 7:47it's pretty cool but there's some people
221. 7:49thinking you could fly yourself all the
222. 7:51way up to the stratosphere with some
223. 7:53sort of high altitude balloon you can
224. 7:55actually but it's really complicated
225. 7:57felix baumgartner when he did his his
226. 8:00leap out of a balloon and actually go
227. 8:02through the speed of sound falling down
228. 8:03towards the earth and landing with a
229. 8:05parachute he was way up into the
230. 8:07stratosphere the stratosphere starts at
231. 8:09about six or seven miles up it's not all
232. 8:11that high and then it goes on for a long
233. 8:13way there's not enough air to breathe
234. 8:15you kind of need to have an airliner
235. 8:16with the pressure inside to keep your
236. 8:18body healthy if you're that high but if
237. 8:20you take the right equipment with you
238. 8:21yes we can use a balloon to lift us high
239. 8:24enough to get all the way up into the
240. 8:25stratosphere so if you have the right
241. 8:27equipment it's true
242. 8:31you've probably read somewhere on the
243. 8:32internet that if you go to the space
244. 8:34station your body will get taller sort
245. 8:37of expand and it'll be painful and
246. 8:40you're going to be taller forever an
247. 8:41irreversible experience
248. 8:43it's not really true as i'm standing
249. 8:44here talking right now gravity is
250. 8:47pushing me down towards the floor every
251. 8:49single bone in my body and the little
252. 8:51bit of bristle that's in between the
253. 8:53bones like each of the vertebrae of my
254. 8:55back everyone has a little disc in
255. 8:57between each of the bones and even my
256. 8:59hip bones and my knee bones there's a
257. 9:01little bit of a gap well if there's no
258. 9:02gravity pushing me down then those gaps
259. 9:05can all get a tiny bit bigger if you
260. 9:07stay in weightlessness for a few weeks
261. 9:09in fact your body just sort of stretches
262. 9:12because the gap between each of the
263. 9:13bones gets a little bigger and in my
264. 9:15case i got about that much taller but
265. 9:17you aren't really taller you're just
266. 9:18sort of temporarily longer but it's not
267. 9:21permanent as soon as you get home and
268. 9:23gravity starts doing its its work on you
269. 9:25and grinding you down everything
270. 9:27squishes back down to its launch so you
271. 9:29may be for a little while a little bit
272. 9:31taller in space and it may hurt your
273. 9:33back a little because everything's sort
274. 9:34of getting pulled tight some people have
275. 9:36back pain in space as a result but it's
276. 9:38not really growing it's just sort of
277. 9:40stretching to your natural maximum that
278. 9:42you're going to get squished back again
279. 9:44as soon as you get home if you do get
280. 9:46maybe that much longer after you've been
281. 9:47in space for a few weeks think what your
282. 9:49pants would be like you know they're
283. 9:51gonna they're gonna be high above your
284. 9:52ankle and if you put on a spacesuit who
285. 9:55custom fit the spacesuit to the size of
286. 9:57your body but we know it's gonna happen
287. 9:59so we actually plan in advance we fit
288. 10:01our spacesuits knowing that the
289. 10:03astronauts are going to be a little bit
290. 10:04taller when they're in space or at least
291. 10:06their bodies are going to be a little
292. 10:07bit stretched and even the seat that
293. 10:09protects us when we come back to earth
294. 10:11the crash seat so that when we hit the
295. 10:13ground it protects us properly we allow
296. 10:15for the fact that our backbones are
297. 10:16going to be slightly longer when we're
298. 10:18up there but your clothes you don't
299. 10:20really know how they fit because you're
300. 10:21floating around weightless your shirt is
301. 10:24always floating around your body so you
302. 10:26never really have a sense up there how
303. 10:28well your clothes fit just because
304. 10:29there's no gravity to pull them down and
305. 10:31look and see how well they're fitting on
306. 10:33your body it's more like they're just
307. 10:34floating next to you
308. 10:37i've read somewhere that on board the
309. 10:39international space station bacteria
310. 10:41multiplies 10 times faster in space so
311. 10:44if you get sick your body's going to be
312. 10:46like torn apart by this ravenous strain
313. 10:48of mutant salmonella nah
314. 10:50it is a different place than earth the
315. 10:52space station we run around with little
316. 10:54swabs all the time to measure what
317. 10:57microbes and what viruses and what
318. 10:59little uh tiny bits of life might be
319. 11:01growing on the spaceship we also go
320. 11:03around with little cleaners and wet
321. 11:05wipes and wipe down the whole space
322. 11:06station all the time like in a hospital
323. 11:08to try and keep the whole thing clean
324. 11:10and hygienic and we are finding that
325. 11:13some of those primitive forms of life do
326. 11:15mutate slightly differently in the high
327. 11:17radiation weightless environment of the
328. 11:19spaceship but no one has died yet
329. 11:21because of the mutant salmonella i'm
330. 11:23chris hadfield hopefully this has helped
331. 11:26answer some of those common space myths