What Actually Happens If You Try To Land On Jupiter — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00You are a few hundred kilometers above
2. 0:02the cloud tops, and Jupiter has stopped
3. 0:04looking like a planet. It fills
4. 0:06everything. There is no curve left in
5. 0:08your window, no horizon, no edge, just
6. 0:11bands of cream and rust and brown
7. 0:13sliding past each other in opposite
8. 0:14directions. Storms wrapped around
9. 0:16storms, a weather system that has been
10. 0:18running since before your species
11. 0:20existed.
12. 0:21You are here to land on it. That is the
13. 0:24plan. Somewhere under all of that, there
14. 0:26has to be something to stand on. Hold on
15. 0:29to that assumption for a moment. It is
16. 0:31about to become the most expensive
17. 0:32mistake anyone has ever made.
18. 0:35Your problems start before you even
19. 0:37touch the atmosphere. Jupiter is
20. 0:39surrounded by a magnetic field so
21. 0:40enormous that if you could see it from
22. 0:42Earth, it would look bigger than the
23. 0:43full moon.
24. 0:45That field traps particles and
25. 0:47accelerates them into belts of radiation
26. 0:49that make Earth's radiation environment
27. 0:51look like a warm bath. You cross into
28. 0:53them while you are still coasting in,
29. 0:55still hours from the clouds. You feel
30. 0:57nothing. That is the unnerving part.
31. 1:00There is no sound, no heat, no warning
32. 1:03light that says something is passing
33. 1:05through you, but it is. Every second you
34. 1:07spend in the inner part of that field,
35. 1:09high-energy particles are moving through
36. 1:11your body and your electronics without
37. 1:13asking permission. Depending on how deep
38. 1:15in you fly and how long you linger, the
39. 1:17dose here is the kind that stops being
40. 1:19survivable within hours or days. So
41. 1:22before your descent even begins, the
42. 1:24honest version of the mission is this:
43. 1:26You are already dying. You are just
44. 1:28still on schedule.
45. 1:30Your electronics start to agree with
46. 1:31you. Detectors fire off phantom
47. 1:33readings. Memory registers flip bits
48. 1:36that nobody asked them to flip. Your
49. 1:37navigation computer briefly reports that
50. 1:40you are somewhere you are not. You keep
51. 1:42going because there is now nothing else
52. 1:44to do with the momentum you are
53. 1:46carrying.
54. 1:47And you are carrying a lot of it.
55. 1:49Jupiter's gravity has been pulling on
56. 1:51you for weeks, and it does not stop
57. 1:53being polite at the end. By By time you
58. 1:55meet the top of the atmosphere, you are
59. 1:57moving at roughly 47 km every second.
60. 2:00Not per minute, per second. At that
61. 2:03speed, you could cross an average
62. 2:04country in the time it takes to read
63. 2:06this sentence. Then the atmosphere
64. 2:07arrives. At first, it is nothing. A
65. 2:10whisper of hydrogen so thin that on
66. 2:12Earth it would count as vacuum.
67. 2:14But you are moving so fast that thin is
68. 2:16irrelevant. The gas cannot get out of
69. 2:18your way. It piles up in front of your
70. 2:20heat shield, compresses, and ignites.
71. 2:23The layer of shocked gas in front of you
72. 2:25reaches temperatures of 16,000°.
73. 2:28That is not a typo, and it is not
74. 2:30hyperbolic. It is roughly three times
75. 2:32hotter than the surface of the Sun.
76. 2:34You are now the brightest object in the
77. 2:35Jovian sky. Your heat shield does the
78. 2:38only thing it can do, which is to
79. 2:40destroy itself on purpose.
80. 2:42It burns, boils, and peels away in
81. 2:44layers, carrying the heat off with it.
82. 2:46This is the design working perfectly. It
83. 2:48is also the reason you are shedding mass
84. 2:50by the kilogram every second, and why
85. 2:52there is a very specific amount of
86. 2:54shield between you and becoming a
87. 2:55short-lived streak of light.
88. 2:58At the same time, the deceleration hits.
89. 3:00You go from 47 km per second to
90. 3:03something survivable in a couple of
91. 3:04minutes, and the price of that is force.
92. 3:07At the peak, you are pulling well over
93. 3:08200 times your own body weight. A
94. 3:11fighter pilot blacks out at nine. 200 is
95. 3:13not a thing you experience. It is a
96. 3:15thing that happens to your remains.
97. 3:18Let us be generous and assume you have
98. 3:19been engineered for this, because
99. 3:21otherwise the video ends here and the
100. 3:23title promised more.
101. 3:25The fire fades.
102. 3:26The glow drops away behind you. A
103. 3:28parachute snaps open above your head,
104. 3:30and suddenly there is something almost
105. 3:32peaceful happening.
106. 3:33You are descending through the top of
107. 3:35Jupiter, and for the first time, you
108. 3:37look around. The light is wrong.
109. 3:39It is dim, cold, and orange, because the
110. 3:42Sun out here is a small bright dot
111. 3:44delivering a tiny fraction of the light
112. 3:46Earth gets.
113. 3:47Around you are clouds made of ammonia
114. 3:49ice, white and thin and endless,
115. 3:52stretching in every direction with no
116. 3:54interruption anywhere.
117. 3:55You are also moving sideways.
118. 3:58Fast.
119. 3:59Jupiter's winds are not gusts. They are
120. 4:01permanent rivers of air that run around
121. 4:03the planet in belts, and in places they
122. 4:05move at hundreds of kilometers per hour,
123. 4:08with some jets reaching several hundred
124. 4:10more than anything Earth can produce.
125. 4:12You are not being blown off course.
126. 4:14There is no course. You have simply
127. 4:16joined the weather, and the weather is
128. 4:17going somewhere at highway speed
129. 4:19multiplied by five.
130. 4:20There is no turbulence in the way you
131. 4:22expect, either. You are not bouncing.
132. 4:24You are being carried, smoothly,
133. 4:27enormously, like a leaf in a river that
134. 4:29has no banks.
135. 4:31You look down for the ground. This is
136. 4:33the moment where the plan begins to
137. 4:34quietly dissolve, because there is
138. 4:36nothing down there. Not dark ground, not
139. 4:39ocean, not even a suggestion of a
140. 4:41surface.
141. 4:42Just more cloud fading into a deeper and
142. 4:44darker version of itself, and then into
143. 4:46a haze that your eyes cannot resolve.
144. 4:49You tell yourself it is just far away.
145. 4:51You keep falling. The first cloud deck
146. 4:54passes above you and closes over your
147. 4:55head like a lid.
148. 4:57The light dims. The color shifts from
149. 4:59pale white to a dirty orange-brown as
150. 5:01you enter the second layer, where the
151. 5:03clouds are made of ammonium
152. 5:04hydrosulfide. If you could smell it, it
153. 5:07would be rotten eggs mixed with cleaning
154. 5:08fluid, which is a fair summary of what
155. 5:10this planet thinks of visitors.
156. 5:13The temperature outside, which started
157. 5:14far below freezing, has stopped being
158. 5:16cold.
159. 5:17That is the first genuinely bad sign.
160. 5:20Everything you have descended through so
161. 5:21far has been getting warmer. Not because
162. 5:23you are approaching a sun, but because
163. 5:25you are approaching pressure.
164. 5:27Jupiter has no internal furnace in the
165. 5:29way a star does, but it is still slowly
166. 5:31releasing heat left over from its own
167. 5:33formation. And the deeper you go, the
168. 5:35more the atmosphere above you squeezes
169. 5:37what is below. Around this depth, water
170. 5:40clouds appear.
171. 5:41Real water in a place where you cannot
172. 5:43use a single drop of it. And with water
173. 5:46comes lightning. Jupiter's storms
174. 5:48produce lightning bolts that make the
175. 5:49worst thunderstorm on Earth look like a
176. 5:51static shock from a doorknob. You see
177. 5:53them ignite whole regions of cloud from
178. 5:55the inside, silent for a moment, then
179. 5:58arriving as a pressure wave that hits
180. 5:59your hull like a fist.
181. 6:01If you are enjoying this video, please
182. 6:03hit the subscribe button. It genuinely
183. 6:05helps keep the channel alive. Now the
184. 6:07descent turns.
185. 6:09Up to this point you have had a working
186. 6:10spacecraft in a bad situation. From
187. 6:13here, the situation starts eating the
188. 6:15spacecraft. The pressure outside has
189. 6:17been climbing the entire time, quietly,
190. 6:20without any drama. At the cloud tops it
191. 6:23was comparable to Earth's. Now it is 10
192. 6:25times that, then 20. Your hull begins to
193. 6:28make noises that hulls should not make.
194. 6:30A low structural groaning as the
195. 6:33atmosphere leans on every square
196. 6:34centimeter of you at once.
197. 6:36The temperature outside passes the
198. 6:38boiling point of water and keeps going.
199. 6:40This is the exact point where the only
200. 6:42probe humanity has ever dropped into
201. 6:43Jupiter stopped talking. It survived the
202. 6:46fire, survived the crushing
203. 6:47deceleration, floated down under its
204. 6:49parachute, sent back everything it saw,
205. 6:52and then somewhere around 20 times
206. 6:54Earth's pressure and well past the
207. 6:56temperature of an oven, it went silent.
208. 6:59It had descended roughly 150 km into an
209. 7:02atmosphere that is tens of thousands of
210. 7:04kilometers deep.
211. 7:06It had, in other words, barely scratched
212. 7:08the paint.
213. 7:09Your hull follows the same path. Seals
214. 7:11deform. Instruments stop reporting.
215. 7:14Somewhere above you, your parachute has
216. 7:16become irrelevant because the air is now
217. 7:18so thick that it is slowing you down all
218. 7:21on its own.
219. 7:22And here is the thing nobody plans for.
220. 7:24You start to slow down not because you
221. 7:26are arriving somewhere, but because you
222. 7:28are being absorbed. Deeper still, the
223. 7:30hydrogen around you stops behaving like
224. 7:32a gas. It does not condense into an
225. 7:35ocean with a surface you can splash
226. 7:36into.
227. 7:37At these pressures and temperatures
228. 7:39there is no boundary between gas and
229. 7:41liquid at all. The atmosphere simply
230. 7:43becomes thicker and thicker until it is
231. 7:45behaving like a fluid, and you pass
232. 7:47through that transition without ever
233. 7:48crossing a line.
234. 7:50There is no splash. There is no
235. 7:52shoreline. There is no moment of impact.
236. 7:55You have been looking for the ground
237. 7:56this entire time, and what you actually
238. 7:58get is the slow realization that the air
239. 8:01just keeps getting heavier until it is
240. 8:03no longer air.
241. 8:04Now you are sinking, not falling.
242. 8:07The light is gone, completely.
243. 8:09Whatever is left of your craft is
244. 8:10descending through a hot, dark fluid at
245. 8:12pressures that would flatten a submarine
246. 8:14like an empty can.
247. 8:16Thousands of kilometers below, the
248. 8:18hydrogen is squeezed so hard that it
249. 8:20starts conducting electricity like a
250. 8:22metal. A vast, churning shell of liquid
251. 8:24metal hydrogen that generates the same
252. 8:27magnetic field that was cooking you
253. 8:28before you ever arrived. Below that, in
254. 8:32the deep interior, temperatures climb
255. 8:34into the tens of thousands of degrees
256. 8:36and pressures reach millions of times
257. 8:37what you feel at sea level. You will
258. 8:39never see it. And here is the final,
259. 8:42quietly devastating part. You do not
260. 8:44reach the bottom.
261. 8:46As you sink, the fluid around you gets
262. 8:48denser and denser. Your spacecraft,
263. 8:50crushed and compressed as it is,
264. 8:52eventually reaches a depth where the
265. 8:54stuff around it is simply heavier than
266. 8:55what remains of you. And at that point
267. 8:57you stop. You do not crash. You do not
268. 9:00land.
269. 9:01You do not leave a crater or a wreck or
270. 9:03a marker that anyone could ever find.
271. 9:05You float, thousands of kilometers down
272. 9:08in permanent darkness at a temperature
273. 9:10that will take whatever metal you were
274. 9:11made of and turn it into vapor, and then
275. 9:14into part of the general chemistry of
276. 9:15the planet.
277. 9:17Jupiter does not swallow you.
278. 9:19It dissolves you and keeps stirring.
279. 9:21And somewhere above all of this, the
280. 9:23cloud bands are still sliding past each
281. 9:25other in their opposite directions. The
282. 9:27storms are still turning. The lightning
283. 9:29is still flashing through water clouds
284. 9:31that have never touched a shore, and the
285. 9:33whole system carries on exactly as it
286. 9:35did before you arrived.
287. 9:37There was never going to be a landing.
288. 9:39That was the mistake, right at the
289. 9:41beginning, back when the planet still
290. 9:43looked like a place.
291. 9:44You did not fail to land on Jupiter. You
292. 9:46found out that Jupiter is not something
293. 9:48you land on. It is something you become
294. 9:50part of, briefly, and then stop being
295. 9:53anything at all.