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S2E13 TRANSCRIPT:

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Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca. And today we are talking about astronomy, and space, science and the wow of all of it. So the reason that we chose today, Is this episode comes out on April 12th, which is Yuri's Night.

Mark: Exactly. And that is the anniversary, and as it happens, it is the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbiting of the Earth, the first entry of humanity into space. And this was a remarkable achievement in many ways, not least of which was that he actually orbited.

Later missions of the United States for example, tried to get capsules into orbit, but until John Glenn, they didn't succeed. So this was really a remarkable thing. And he had the first extra terrestrial view of space.

Yucca: Yeah, and helped us gave us that view as well. And since then, there have been many, many humans who have gotten to see our planet from outside of it. Which is just amazing. And of course the space age has unfolded since then. And now we have the satellite images continuously watching our world and looking out far into the distant past.

And it just amazing, amazingly beautiful and mysterious objects and giving us a completely different understanding of the context that we exist in.

Mark: Yes. And to be fair, I think a different understanding of ourselves as exploratory creatures, we have invested, and it may not seem much relative to how much we invest in ways to kill one another. And other

Yucca: weight loss pills.

Mark: Yes. things that we invest, but we have invested a tremendous amount of money and effort, expertise, and knowledge and genius into flinging our machines into space so that we can learn extraordinary things. Extraordinary things.

Yucca: And going back to the April 12th 61. we hadn't even flown past Mars yet.

Mark: No.

Yucca: That comes later. Now. Amazingly, we did that very, very quickly. But. We hadn't even glimpsed at are our neighbors that are sibling planets are telling us so much, or our studying of them is teaching us so much about ourselves, right?

The studying Venus, studying Mars, that comparative planetology has really given us a leg up in understanding climate change and the history and the different possibilities of where our planet goes, depending on human management and all kinds of things.

Mark: Yes. Yes. I am old enough to have lived through almost the entire space era. And I remember that when I was a kid, this misshapen smear was the highest resolution image we had of Mercury. For example, it was the very best we could do. And. That remained the best we could do until the Mariner missions. When suddenly we had these beautiful crystal clear Moon like shots of Mercury, it wasn't like we advanced in little steps. We went from essentially nothing, a completely undifferentiated smear to these beautiful high resolution images in a very short period of years. We've just learned so much.

Yucca: And we did something very similar with Hubble, the Hubble space, telescope and excitingly, lots of fingers crossed, but the James Webb telescope, which is scheduled to launch on Halloween this year is one of those that we hope is this going to be another one of those, amazing transformations of the imagery and data that we can get back just to completely new level,

Mark: An order of magnitude jump.

Yucca: literally.

Yes.

Mark: A literal order of magnitude. And when you consider the extraordinary imagery that has come back to us from Hubble the miraculous the deep field images, the nebulae the galaxies. The extraordinary quality of these images in the way that they've helped to inform us about the nature of the universe,