How did gravity get so ridiculously weak? Could it be related to extra dimensions? What does string theory and the concept of the “bulk” have to do with it? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)

pulling up to Mickey D's just for drinks. Oh yeah, that's me. Nothing extra. Just perfection and a straw coming in hot for the coldest cups on the block because there are drinks. Then there are drinks from McDonald's. Get a creamy Oreo fr or mccaf smoothie for less with 20% off any purchase of $10 or more only on the APP. Limited time only at participating. McDonald's valid one time per day. Visit McDonald's app for details. I know that at the end of my eight episode series on string theory that I said I would never talk about string theory ever again. But listen, folks, we've got a problem. Gravity No, not the usual problem with gravity, which is that our theory of gravity is fundamentally incompatible with our theory of literally everything else. Hence string theory and loop quantum gravity and other solutions to that riddle. And no, it's not. The other problem with gravity, which is that it has solutions which contain singularity, is like the centers of black holes in the beginning of the universe, which is a big headache if you're trying to solve for situations like what happens at the center of a black hole or at the beginning of the universe?

No, it's neither of those. Today's problem with gravity is that it's weak, very weak, super weak. Imagine the weakest possible thing. Imagine the force of a gentle breeze that barely moves a single hair on your head. It's weaker than that. Imagine a butterfly brushing its wing against your skin. It's weaker than that. Imagine if someone says, Hey, check out my new super spicy hot wings and then you find that it's just chicken drumsticks dipped in water. It's weaker than that. Imagine meeting a new family, a couple, parents, four kids. Three of the kids are pretty much the same. Same eye and hair color. Maybe a little variation. Maybe Kid number three is a bit taller. Maybe Kid number two talks a bit much, but you can definitely tell that they're related. There's something in common, even though they're a little bit different. It's just variations on a theme. Three kids, all from the same family.

You can just tell they are related. Now imagine that you meet kid number four, and Kid number four is a 300 ft tall purple Giant kid number four is gravity. Kid number four is weird. Kid number four doesn't fit. Nobody likes Kid number four. Sorry, kid number four. Nothing against you personally, it's just a metaphor. There are different ways to represent this problem, depending on what you want to focus on. So let's start with the obvious, which is that gravity is way too weak. It's a little bit fuzzy to define exactly how strong a fundamental force is. And we got the four forces we got strong nuclear, weak nuclear electromagnetic and gravity and and so like to describe, like, how strong is electromagnetism? How strong is the strong nuclear force? How strong is gravity? Uh, these forces interact in different ways in different situations, and they they have different, uh, lengths, and they can be very, very complicated. The strong forces is wickedly complicated, so it's It's a little bit fuzzy to say the strength of a force, but one way is to look at what are called coupling constants.

These are, uh, numbers that describe how the force mediates some interaction. So, for example, we have for gravity Newton's gravitational constant, usually represented as capital G. If I have a mass over here and a mass over there, and they're a certain distance apart. I want to know how strong is their gravitational attraction to each other. Well, that gravitational attraction is proportional to a certain constant. That constant is called G. This is the coupling constant for gravity. It tells us all else being equal how strong gravity is. Another example is the fine structure constant, which we recently met. This tells us how strongly the electromagnetic force interacts with matter, which is a very, very important thing. If this number were smaller, the interaction would be weaker, and if the number were bigger, the interaction would be stronger. These are coupling constants. These are numbers that appear in our theories. And no, we have no explanation for where they come from.

But there are numbers that describe how powerful in certain situations or in certain scenarios these fundamental forces are. And so, if we look at these coupling constants for the strong nuclear, the weak nuclear, the electromagnetic and the gravitational forces, we have four competitors and their coupling constant tells us how strong they are. So they're I don't know. Let's go with an Olympics analogy. We got four forces, their competitors and their coupling. Constant tells us how strong they are. Well, as the name might suggest, the strong nuclear force wins is the strongest force as the strongest coupling to other things. It gets the gold. Electromagnetism gets the silver, the fine structure. Constant tells us that the electromagnetic forces is pretty powerful. Uh, but it's just a few percent of the strength of the strong nuclear force. That's right. Silver is is is like 1/10 or 1/100. As strong as the strong force. The weak nuclear force gets the bronze, but it's a million times weaker than the strong force.

So this is a very lopsided competition. Strong is way up there. We electromagnetism is pretty far down and the weak is way down. And then gravity. 00, no. It doesn't even get to be on the podium. It gets fourth place. It doesn't even get to hear its national anthem and feel free to vote on what gravity's national anthem should be. On social media, gravity is 1000 billion billion billion times weaker than the strong nuclear force. I will say that again, the gravitational force that coupling constant G has expressed through these coupling constants to give us a measure of a strength of a force. It's 1000 billion billion billion times weaker than the strong force. That's insane. Even if gravity were a billion times stronger than it is, it would still be the lamest force in the universe. If it was a billion billion times stronger than it is, it would still be the lamest force in the universe. Gravity is weak. As an example, Pick something up, literally pick anything up in front of you right now.

Congratulations. Your arms, your arms, your your arms and hands. Your own body strength has successfully counteracted the combined gravitational might of the entire planet Earth. How did your arm do it so easily? Because gravity is lame. It takes the entire planet Earth to hold something down. And then you could just reach over and pick it up with your muscles. What is going on? I even put periods in between the words and my notes to make sure I said that right. One explanation is that it just is what it is. Gravity is. We get over it, move on with your lives. That's well OK, I guess it's a little unsatisfying, but just saying it is what it is hasn't exactly propelled any of the insights in science over the past few centuries. So it could be gravity is weak because gravity is weak. OK, but like that's not exactly how science proceeds. So let's explore some other options before we give up.

Besides, there's an even bigger problem sitting inside of this. I know. I know what could even be even bigger than the incredible weakness of gravity. So let's reframe the problem. We're for now. And actually, for the rest of the episode, we're gonna ignore the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. We're gonna, uh we're gonna focus just on gravity and the weak nuclear force. We're gonna compare and contrast them. Why? Because it's easier than focusing on all four at the same time. And the other three forces strong nuclear, weak nuclear electromagnetic. They're kind of in the same league, like, yeah, one is a million times weaker than the other. But that's that's OK compared to this giant discrepancy from gravity. A million times weaker is peanuts. It's nothing. So let's just compare weak nuclear and gravity because gravity is is trying to get on the podium and to get on the podium. It has to unseat the weak nuclear force in order to claim that bronze medal.

So let's just look at the two of those it. It makes our problem a little simpler, and maybe we'll gain some insights. Maybe we'll we'll get some clues as to why gravity is so weak when we just do this head to head comparison. Another way to describe the strength of gravity is to imagine the smallest possible black hole, you know, make a black hole. You take a bunch of matter and you squeeze it down into an incredibly tiny volume. And at a certain point, as you squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, the densities go up and up and up, and the gravitational force gets strong enough that it finally can overwhelm all the other forces. And then it's just gravity, and then you make a black hole. So, for example, if I take something, say, uh 10 solar masses 10 times the mass of the sun and cram it down into a volume just a few miles across, then the gravity becomes strong enough because the densities are high enough that the gravitational force finally gets to overwhelm everything else.

And it makes a black hole. If you were to take me or you, let's go with you and squeeze you down to say the size of I don't know, an atomic nucleus. You'd have a little atomic nucleus size black hole so we can ask about the strength of gravity. If gravity were stronger, you could more easily fashion black holes. You wouldn't have to cram as much stuff into a small volume in order to make a black hole. And if gravity were weaker, you'd have to work harder to make black holes because you'd have to cram and cram and cram and cram into a tiny and tinier volumes until the gravitational force could finally overwhelm everything else. The reason we're switching here is it's a way to express the the the mass of gravity. I know that phrase doesn't make a lot of sense, but listen, we're just playing with numbers here to get a sense of what gravity is like. So stick with me. The smallest possible black hole you can build in our universe has a specific mass. It's the plank Mass. You know, plank units. Uh, plank length plank time.

This is plank mass. It's the smallest possible black hole you can possibly build in our universe. It's around 10 to the minus 8 kg. If you're curious. So that gives us some number like, uh, the the building block of gravity, if you will. The mass of the gravitational force. We can express it as 10 to the minus 8 kg. The smallest possible black hole. You can build the black hole. The smallest possible thing you can have where gravity is able to overwhelm the other forces. OK, that's one number. Let's compare that to to anything else in the weak nuclear force that has a mass. Well, the new weak nuclear force has force carriers. There are these fundamental particles that carry the weak nuclear force from place to place. We call them the W and Z bosons and those bosons those particles have a mass uh-huh. So this gives us just another way to compare the weak nuclear force to gravity. Before, we were looking at coupling constants. Now we're looking at a mass is associated with these with these forces gravity, the mass we get is the smallest black hole of 10 to the minus 8 kg.

The masses of the W and Z bosons are 10 quadrillion times smaller than the plank mass, 10 quadrillion times smaller, lighter than the smallest possible black hole you can make. So when we examine the weak nuclear force in terms of mass, it's 10 quadrillion times stronger than the gravitational force. Remember, if gravity were stronger, you could make smaller and smaller black holes. It'd be easier to make black holes. You would need less stuff to make a black hole because gravity would do a much better job at pulling things down to make a black hole. But gravity is so weak that the smallest possible thing that you can build out of gravity is 10 quadrillion times bigger than the force carriers of the weak nuclear force. I'm basically repeating myself and saying that gravity is super weak, but now we're looking at it through a different lens.

Why? Because we're going to reverse the question if we're going to leave aside strong nuclear and electromagnetic, and we are because we can. And we're just comparing gravity to the weak nuclear force. On one hand, you can ask why is gravity so dang weak? And on the other hand, you can ask, Why is the weak nuclear force so strong? Now this gets interesting. Why? Because we have no idea why gravity has the strength that does. We have no explanation for the value of Newton's gravitational constant. No idea. It's just a number. It appears we have to experimentally measure it, and then that's it. We don't know where it comes from. We don't know why gravity has the strength that does. But we do know why the weak force has the strength that it does. So when we just stay here asking, why is gravity so weak? We don't know, because we don't know why Gravity has the strength that does. So let's flip it around and say, Why is the weak nuclear force so strong? Well, the weak nuclear force is strong. That's determined by the mass of the WZ and W and Z bosons, because there's those particles that are running around doing the work of the weak nuclear force, and their mass determines how effectively the weak nuclear force can do its job.

So if you want to know why the weak nuclear force has a strength that does. You need to know why the WNZ bosons have the masses that they do, and we know why they have those masses. So by changing our perspective from a question about gravity to a question about the weak nuclear force, we can investigate the same problem, which is called the hierarchy problem for you physics aficionados out there from a different angle. In this case, the angle is known physics. We don't know why gravity has the strength that does, but we do know why the weak nuclear force has the strength that does. We know this. We know the physics here. So instead of just throwing up our hands in the air and or shrugging our shoulders, possibly at the same time, we can poke at this a little bit more because now we're in the realm of known physics, and it gets very weird very quickly. Before I continue, I want to take a quick break and let you know that this podcast is sponsored by better help online therapy. And today I want to talk about burnout. Burnout happens all the time when it's just too overwhelming to keep going.

It happens to me when I work too much or get stressed out. I just want to stare at a wall for a while or a tree or something, and I can't get motivated to to do anything useful. And, yeah, podcasts like this are great to alleviate burnout. You can get lost in the wonders and mysteries of the universe, just like I do. And it's fantastic. But But just like me, maybe you should also talk to a professional. Try better health. It's customized online therapy. They do video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist. It's It's real, it's real and it's affordable, and you can be batched with a therapist in under 48 hours. Give it a shot. Ask if spaceman listeners get 10% off their first month at better help dot com slash spaceman. That's BE TT ER HE LP dot com slash spaceman Go ahead, give it a shot. We know why the weak nuclear force has the strength that does, because we know why the WNZ bosons have the masses that they do.

And the reason is the Higgs boson and yeah, here we go. Nobody expects the Higgs boson. Here we are. I did a two-parter back in the day about the Higgs boson and how it works, so I won't dig into it super deep here. So here's the short version. The Higgs boson exists. It's just a particle or a field. However you want to think about it, it doesn't matter right now. The Higgs boson exists. It bosses around almost every particle in the universe, and it forces them to have mass, including the W and Z bosons. The masses of those particles depend on the mass of the Higgs boson itself. You change the Higgs Mass, you change the mass of all the other particles in the universe. And if you don't understand how this works, don't sweat it. Because for our purposes here, we only need to know that it works. So let's take a breath. Grab a glass of water or the beverage of your choice. I won't judge. We started this episode by asking why gravity is so weak. And somehow we ended up at the Higgs boson mass.

How do we get here? Well, gravity is weak, is only a relative phrase we need to compare it to something so we can compare it to the next weakest force, which is the weak nuclear force. Gravity came in fourth, so we'll compare it to the bronze medallist. And the weak nuclear force is only on the podium because of the Higgs. So maybe that makes the Higgs the the coach of the weak nuclear force. I don't know. I realize I'm stretching this analogy of FR, which is pretty standard for this show. I suppose so. Here we are. The weak nuclear force has the strength it does because the WNZ bosons have the mass that they do. The WNZ bosons have the mass that they do because the Higgs boson has the mass that it does. Why did I take you to the Higgs boson? Because the Higgs boson shouldn't have the mass that it does. Yeah, you heard that, right? As far as we currently understand, high energy quantum physics would take that. For what it's worth, the Higgs boson should have literally any other mass.

The mass it has is unstable and exceptionally fine tuned. It's relatively lightweight. We know the mass. We measure that that that's why we had the Large Hadron Collider. So we can measure the mass of the Higgs boson. It's around 250 giga Electron volts, and if you don't know what those units are, don't sweat it. It doesn't matter. But quantum interactions, because the the Higgs particle or the Higgs field interacts with so many other fields all the time, and it's tangled up with them. All those complex quantum interactions to drive this mass to be either zero or somewhere around 70 billion. You see, quantum interactions are crazy complex. The Higgs boson is constantly interacting with all other particles in the universe. Constantly, it's being bombarded. It's talking over. It's like someone at a party. Oh yeah, yeah, and the really, really popular person finally shows up at the party, and everyone want wants to talk to them. You say, Hey, how is it going?

OK, The Higgs boson is busy, and when nature does something like interact with the Higgs boson in a very busy way, it does it all the way, either. The Higgs boson is so busy talking to so many other particles that he can't get anything done, and its mass just goes to zero, and it doesn't talk to anyone. It's like like uh, like everyone's bothering the Higgs boson Higgs, Higgs, Bo. Hey, Higgs. It just shuts down. It has zero mass or the Higgs boson talks to everybody and does respond. Hey, how's it going? How you get we saw? Hey, yeah, you're going to the concert and it and it's interacting with so many people that it it's mass explodes. But instead it has neither of those. The Higgs boson Mass is not zero, and it's not super huge. It's 250 Giga Electron volts. It's like the Higgs boson walks into the party. Everyone wants to talk to it, but it's only choosing very selectively how to respond and doing so in a very measured, calm, almost robotic way.

It seems unnatural. We have no way to explain why the Higgs Mass is this precise value and not something not something that's more natural, the meaning of natural changes, depending on our theory of physics. So this is a clue that we need a new theory of physics so we can get a new definition of natural. The Higgs boson Mass appears artificial. It appears unnatural. Our intuitions of quantum physics of quantum field theory tell us that the Higgs boson should have some other mass. That there's a lot of fine tuning happening here. Uh, and I can dig into this in a whole separate episode. If you want me to just go ahead and ask why is the Higgs boson have the mass? It does, and what are some ways around it. But ultimately, we don't know. We don't know why it has this precise value instead of something else that it should have. So this is a clue that we need a new theory of physics so that hopefully in that new theory of physics, the Higgs boson mass will be more natural. This is what motivated supersymmetry theories. Again, I can talk about this more if you want. So there it is.

Why is gravity so weak? Because the Higgs boson has a weird, unnatural, finely tuned mask. If I wore glasses, this would be the point where I dramatically took my glasses off to clean them while staring off into space. Instead, I'm I'm just staring off into space. Gravity didn't win the bronze medal. It came in fourth. The weak nuclear force got on the podium and got the bronze medal, but the weak nuclear force was cheating. If the Higgs boson had a more natural value, the weak nuclear force should be as weak as gravity. But the Higgs boson has an unnatural value. Has a weird, finely tuned value which makes the weak nuclear force stronger than it should be. The weak nuclear force is cheating. It got juiced. It got boosted. The Higgs boson as a coach isn't playing fair. So we've transformed the question instead of asking why is gravity weak? We now are asking, Why does the Higgs boson have the mass that it does? And the answer is we don't know. Sorry if you thought we were building up to something here, but we're kind of stuck. I mean, we've got some ideas, and you you you want to hear them.

I mean, yeah, sure, they're they're pretty happy. Just just sketches. Not really worthy of prime time. But, uh OK, OK, I'll tell you. But it's it's gonna cost you. You're gonna have to go to patreon dot com slash PM Sutter. That's P MS U TT ER to continue supporting this show. I'm just kidding. I'm I'm going to tell you, no matter what, because I appreciate the fact that you're just listening. But if you do want to support the show, please go to patreon dot com slash PM Sutter, I truly do appreciate it. Here's one idea. Maybe we're calculating this all wrong. You know, we started this journey talking about coupling constants. We started talking about the plank mass. The smallest possible black hole. Maybe, and and And from there we got some numbers that were really, really out of whack. And it led us down this path of of comparing and contrasting gravity to the weak nuclear force. And we found that the weak nuclear force is way stronger than it should be because the Higgs boson is is mucking around with it. It's playing dirty. OK, maybe we're missing something important in that story. Maybe the Higgs boson does have a natural value.

Maybe this 250 Giga Electron volts is its natural value. But we're just missing something about the universe. Maybe the Higgs mechanism, which is what gives the W and Z bosons their masses, you know, isn't doing what we think it's doing. Maybe the universe is more complicated than that. What if there's more to the universe than meets the eye? And this is where string theory comes in? One of the big ideas behind string theory was that the only way to get the math to work is to add extra dimensions to the universe. These dimensions are tiny and curled up on each other, but they're completely invisible to everyday motion. They're way down there, yet you add extra dimensions to the universe, but they're crammed down into these tiny little spaces no bigger than the plank scale, so they're essentially invisible. Unless they're not. There's no reason that one or a few of these dimensions could be bigger. And it could be that the different forces of nature work differently in these different dimensions. Maybe three forces of nature operate on the normal dimensions, you know, left right up, down, forward, backward.

But gravity works through all the dimensions, making it appear weaker. You know, if in three dimensions we have this this very famous, uh, R squared dependency with it, R is just radius or distance. So if if I have, uh, a source of light or a source of gravity, it gets weaker the farther away it goes like if I get farther away from a star, the light gets dimmer and dimmer, and the gravity gets weaker and weaker, and they both go fall off as as the distance squared. So if I am twice as far as away, the gravity is one quarter. If I'm four times away, the gravity is 1/16 and et cetera, et cetera. If you add dimensions if, say, gravity wasn't propagating in three dimensions, it it was propagating in four or five. And then it would get really, really weak really, really quickly, because it has to spread itself out over all these extra dimensions.

And it gets thinned out too quickly so that maybe if gravity is propagating through more than three dimensions, maybe it's as strong as the other forces. But in our three dimensional experience of the universe, it just looks we because some of the gravity is leaking out into other dimensions. And, yes, you would be forced to explain why this happens. Why there are extra dimensions, why gravity propagates through those and the other forces don't. But that's a problem for another day. If there are more dimensions to the universe, then the real plank mass. The actual smallest black hole is now now much smaller because gravity is actually much stronger than we thought in This whole discussion is not needed because we can. With more dimensions in the universe, we can totally reframe the strength of gravity. We can totally reframe the Higgs mechanism. Uh, the Higgs boson mass. We get to reframe all of this. We have a lot more freedom now because we've been calculating it wrong this whole time.

So, yeah, maybe the weak nuclear force is cheating because of the Higgs boson. But maybe gravity has a cheat of its own. Maybe it has a shot at the metal saying, Hey, if weak nuclear force is gonna do gonna cheat, then so can gravity in a different way. Now, these extra dimensions that could explain why gravity is so weak are sometimes called large extra dimensions. They're sometimes also called the bulk, which gives you the impression correction gave gave me the impression that our 3D universe three dimensional universe is floating around in some giant vat of hyper dimensional goo that makes a ball of reality like we're our universe is a three dimensional blob. And then there's this hyper dimensional of of ocean that we are embedded in, Uh, no. But when we say large extra dimensions, we mean the extra dimensions are like a a millimeter. So that's very large compared to the playing scale, but not large at all compared to us. What would this mean? It would mean that once you get down to scales of, say, a millimeter or so the three other forces strong nuclear, weak nuclear and electromagnetism they just operate on our normal three dimensional reality.

Nothing special is happening there, but there are these extra dimensions to the cosmos, and the only thing that operates in those extra dimensions is gravity. So when there's a gravitational source, there's a star. There's a black hole. There's you and me anything that's gravity. We, we're we're imagine we're leaking out gravity. We're spewing out gravity and all that gravity propagates in our normal three dimensions. It spreads out from us, but it also we lose some of it. It it spills out into the extra dimensions and and effectively becomes lost to our three dimensional universe. Wouldn't we have noticed this by now? Actually, no And that's because all the rest of physics is restricted to the normal three dimensions. It's only gravity that would act weird, and it would only start to act weird on scales smaller than a millimeter. And we haven't very precisely studied gravity at such small scales. If there are extra large dimensions, if the bulk exists, then the only thing that would notice would be gravity and would only do so on very, very tiny scales.

And we haven't tested gravity very well at those tiny scales. What would happen at those small scales? Well, gravity would get weird, you know, at at scales above a millimeter, we would just have normal gravity. We're totally familiar with this. Below a millimeter, gravity would start to get weird. Maybe this R squared dependence that we're so familiar with would start to change. Maybe the normal Newtonian interaction that we're so used to at scale smaller than a millimeter. You you take a little like a little proton over here, or or a little and a or a little virus over here and a virus over there and you put them close to within a millimeter of each other. You, uh measure the gravitational interaction between those two viruses. And and maybe it doesn't follow Newtonian mechanics anymore. Maybe you can make some black holes because the real plank mass is now much, much bigger. Or it's much easier to make black holes than it was before. And so, you know, because now, gravity, maybe it is as strong as the weak nuclear force in reality. So maybe you can turn on a particle accelerator and make some black holes.

Not a big problem. Don't worry, it won't destroy the Earth. Uh, I know that when the Large Hadron Collider turned on long ago, there were tons of news reports saying they're gonna make black holes and destroy the Earth. No, these black holes would instantly evaporate the the the size of subatomic particles and nothing to worry about. And we were wondering if the Large Hadron Collider might produce black holes because of exactly this reason, because if gravity is actually stronger than we think it is, but some of it leaks into the extra dimensions when we turn on our particle accelerators and we start to probe physics at those tiny scales, we might pop up some black holes we found no black holes. In fact, we found no experimental evidence whatsoever for these extra dimensions, which is a bummer, because it's pretty awesome idea. And we're still kind of stuck, so we don't know. We don't know why gravity is so weak. We don't know if it's actually stronger, and we're just miscalculating it because we're not thinking higher dimensionally enough, it seems like the weak nuclear force is cheating the other forces we're not gonna talk about.

We're not gonna talk about strong nuclear and electromagnetism. That's a different problem. Focusing just on weak nuclear looks like weak nuclear is cheating because it looks like the Higgs boson is cheating. Has a mass that it shouldn't have, at least as far as we understand. Quantum physics, which honestly is, is not incredibly far, but it's something it seems weird. Our spite senses are tingling. When we look at the Higgs boson mass, it seems finely tuned, so if you were to give the Higgs boss on a more natural value, the the weak nuclear force would would collapse. It'd be just as weak as gravity. It'd be a toe to toe competition, so we don't know what's going on. We don't know why gravity is weak. We don't know why the weak nuclear force is as strong as it is. We don't know if there are extra dimensions. There are no experimental evidence whatsoever. Our best guess is for trying to explain why the Higgs has this finely tuned mass that it does have fallen apart. And now, Now I'm never talking about string theory again, because this is This is what happens when you do. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you, too, at Edit Room on Twitter and Lewis M on Patreon for asking the questions that led to today's episode.

Speaking of Patreon, go to patreon dot com slash PM Sutter. It's the easiest, simplest way to support the show. Just a few bucks a month. That's that's where it starts. That's it. I really do appreciate it. Shout out to my top patreon contributors this month. Just this is just a few of many. Justin G, Chris Barbara K Duncan M Corey D, Justin Z, Nate H and F NAIA Aaron Scott M Rob H Loyalty. Justin Lewis and Paul G, John W, Alexis Aaron J Jennifer M, Gilbert M, Tom B, Joshua, Kurt M and Bob H. If you want to join their illustrious ranks, you need to go to patreon dot com slash PM Sutter Keep those questions coming hashtag ask us Spaceman. Ask us spaceman at gmail dot com. The website Ask us spaceman dot com a treasure trove of previously asked questions, and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

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