How were ancient people able to predict eclipses so well? How did they make predictions without modern science? What were they able to discover? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)

Come on, everyone. Let's hop in our time machine. By the way, I built a time machine. And we're going to spend the weekend showing off our fancy technology to our primitive ancestors and convince them that we're wizards or whatever. And because they're superstitious idiots, I'm assuming that they'll eventually want to murder us for our witchcraft.

But by the time that happens, we'll already be on our way back home, so it will work out great. For our first stop, we're going to set the clock back about, I don't know, let's say a 1000 years. And let's put ourselves I know I know, along a caravan route on the Silk Road, and let's not go to a major city like Constantinople or Beijing. Let's go somewhere in the middle of Nowheresville, like modern day Uzbekistan. So here we go.

Now we're here in the middle of Central Asia around the year 1,000. And, yes, it happened that quickly. If you think traveling through time involves flashing lights and complicated machines, then you've been watching too many movies. And to show off our technological prowess, we brought along our smartphones, and we're gonna show them to these wandering traders, to impress them, but we're a little bit limited, aren't we? We we can't call anyone.

We can't text anyone. We can't go on Snapchat. We can't access the Internet and its vast store of useless and occasionally useful information. Okay. Okay.

Okay. That's fine. What can we show up? I know. Maybe we could take some selfies.

Maybe let them play Mario Kart or something. We can pop out a little virtual keyboard and and type down what they're saying. And you know what? They may not be all that impressed. You know, writing things down, well, they got that already.

Taking pictures, they they got that too. It just takes a little slower. Maybe Mario Kart will really wow them, but that's assuming they even understand that. We need something else. We need something that will really impress a random trader in the middle of Central Asia.

Something they can connect to, something they understand and understand just how powerful we are now. I got it. We don't have GPS, but we can tell them that this little device can do astronomy, That this little rectangle that fits in a pocket has the magical ability to tell the time, to tell the date, to make a map of the stars above your head, to tell you the current phase of the moon, and to tell you exactly where you are on the surface of the earth. How is that for a killer feature something, you know, anyone can understand in history of just how cool and powerful that is. Any human who has ever had to get from point a to point b or worried about what time of year it was, which I'm pretty sure is everybody, will be wowed by the astronomical features of our smartphone.

But after we're finished explaining, our wandering trader just shrugs. Not that impressed, not that wowed, and they reach into their pocket and pull out a strange metallic device and shows it to us. They go on to explain that this device can tell you the time, tell you the date, make a map of the stars, the current phase of the moon, tells you where you are on the surface of the earth, and more. You see, this wandering trader already has a smartphone of their own, an advanced multifunction, multipurpose device, a device that everybody who can afford 1 has 1, and, yes, there are multiple additions and updates and stylized brands and regional variations, personal preferences, a whole marketing juggernaut behind it. Heck, some people even walk around wearing one around their neck just to show off that they have one even if they don't know how to use it.

You know, like most modern fashion accessories. Our wandering trader has an astrolabe, and that trader ain't gonna be impressed by our smartphone because our smartphone needs to be connected to the Internet and the GPS system to work, and that astrolabe can just do its thing. No battery, no incompatible apps, no walking around looking for good reception. It just works. The astrolabe, which is taken from the Greek words for star and taker, is this magnificent piece of engineering.

I wish I could show you a picture in podcast form. These things are beautiful. They're intricate. I I actually have one in my office. It is not a 1000 years old.

It's a replica made a few years ago in a factory, but it it still does the job. It's still accurate, and it's this wonderful wonderful disk of of bronze or other metals with with overlapping a series of of lines. Some are straight and some are curved and some are are circular. And and there are markings to map out the positions of stars and then little devices and angles you can use on the side of it. And then you flip it over the back, and it does even more.

An astrolabe is this wonderful device, an analog computer that can tell you what time of day it is, that can tell you the phase of the moon, that can position, help you identify stars on the sky. And then once you've oriented yourself, it can tell you where you are on the earth, can tell you when sunset and sunrise are gonna be, and it just fits in your pocket or around your neck. It's highly portable. The astrolabe was developed in Greece, ancient Greece 1000 of years ago in use all the way up until the early modern era. It is a sophisticated piece of human ingenuity and engineering and creativity and an understanding of the cosmos captured in this work of art.

And our ancestors a 1000 years ago are not gonna be very impressed by the astronomical functions of our smartphone. They can do it all already. But surely, if we go further back in time, we can find someone who would be impressed by the astronomical functions of our smartphone. Right? Well, let's push back a little bit further.

What do we got? We got, 964 AD. We've got this book called the book of the fixed stars written by Al Sufi, who I could do an entire episode just on him. Just ask. And that book itself is a work of art.

Seriously, words can't do it justice. It's it's an improved and updated and corrected version of Ptolemy's algamist. And and there's this book is the reason why many star names are in Arabic. Like Beetlejuice, which is actually the result of a transcription error of. I am butchering that pronunciation.

I apologize. We can just say Betelgeuse from now on if we want. 964 AD, we had a catalog of highly accurate star positions, names, constellations, identifying markers, what you'll see, tables of sunrise, sunset times, solstices, you know, everything you needed to know about the sky was in this one book, which was widely copied and distributed. When you were going to build your astrolabe, you would refer to this book for all the tables and information you needed. No.

It's not a smartphone. No. It's not electronic, but it's accurate. Okay. Let's go further back.

Surely, surely, you know, someone's gonna be impressed. Let's go 2000 years ago. Say 100 to 200 BC. Well, people then aren't gonna be super impressed by that, And we have an artifact of that, of their sophistication, of their knowledge of the night sky in the Antigythera mechanism. This is a device that was found in a shipwreck in 1901.

For a century, we had no idea what it was other than that it was complex and really, really cool. Over the years with with high resolution scanning and mapping, we've been able to guess at some of the functions, but not all of them, of this incredibly complicated device at 37 meshing gears. And by identifying some of the words written on the gears and the labels, almost like a use there's like a user manual on the back, This mechanism, this device, whoever it was built for, we don't know who made it. We don't know who owned it, who commissioned it, what whose hands it passed through until it ended up in that shipwreck. But this device made 2000 years ago could track the movements of the sun and the moon.

It could predict lunar eclipses. It was aware of the fact that lunar months are not perfectly the same length and could account for that, could account and measure and map and predict the motion of all the visible planets, upcoming moon phases years in advance, told you when certain Olympic style games were to be held every few years could predict it all. You could look at this device and see the future. You would know, you know, 5 years from now what the position of the sun, the moon, and the planets would be when sunrise and sunset would be on that day years from now. No.

People 2000 years ago were not gonna be impressed by our smartphone, at least the astronomical functions. Mario Kart, I'm I'm I'll give them that. But the astronomical functions of our smartphone, they could already do that. European cultures and tradition are not alone in this. They're incredibly precise Hindu and Chinese calendars stretching back millennia.

The first accurate calendars appear in those cultures around 500 BC, 25 100 years ago, and people are writing down accurate calendars saying, yep, this is what the moon phase is gonna be. This is when sunrises yell all the things we take for granted. 25 100 years old. Some of our best records of supernovae and comets come from Chinese sources who really, really cared about that kind of stuff. Polynesian sailors are able to spread throughout the Pacific Ocean, out of sight of land using star compasses.

Could do an entire episode just on that. We start to see the beginning of the rise of star catalogs around the 4th century BC. We see here with the Shishen catalog, this Chinese catalog developed 25 100 years ago, the application of mathematics to explain and predict the motions of heavenly bodies, where it's not just recording. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, Saturn was visible today. Moving on. But telling you where Saturn is going to be, what constellation it will begin years from now, what star it will be near years from now, where we're seeing ancient people not just record what's happening in the night sky, but begin to predict what will happen in the night sky. When will the next eclipse be?

The next solstice? The next equinox? How long until the next equinox? They could tell you. Perhaps the first application of mathematics to understanding the natural world was in our ability to develop mathematical models to predict the motions of objects in the sky.

One of the first such cycles we identify in the first mathematical models humanity ever developed is something called the metonic cycle. The metonic cycle arises because there are lunar months. So, you know, the moon cycles from new to full to new to full, and it cycles one entire round. We call that a month. And then there's a solar cycle, like from Equinox to Equinox takes a certain amount of time.

And a solar cycle is almost the same length as 12 lunar cycles. In other words, there are almost 12 lunar months in 1 solar year, but not quite, it's a little bit off. And so this gap, this discrepancy is one of the first things our ancestors noticed. And it's also one of the first things that our ancestors were able to develop a mathematical for to explain and to predict. It turns out every roughly every 19 years, things line up again.

So if you start off with, you know, you call this month number 1, and it starts off at the beginning of your solar year 1, things are gonna be a little bit off between your 12 lunar months in your 1 solar year, and these will accumulate, but then it resets naturally 19 years later, and then month 1 is gonna start at the beginning of the year again. Identifying that cycle, correcting for that cycle. One of the biggest things that our ancestors like to do, was to insert extra time at the end of the year, so that their calendars could be synced up again. So that month 1 was at the beginning of the year, and then you'd run through and you'd run through your 12 lunar months, and then you'd have to wait a few days before the new lunar cycle would start again. And so you'd insert a gap, and usually there's feasting and and holidaying and partying.

There still is even though we keep our calendars on sync by having all these weird number of days in a month, and our lunar calendar doesn't line up with our calendar month anymore, and we're kind of okay with that. But if you just keep a lunar month, you and your month is defined by the amount of time it takes for the moon to cycle in one of its rounds from new to full and back to new, then then you get a chance to party. And keeping track of that was really important. And there is another cycle that we very quickly developed, us ancient humans, something called the Saros cycle, where there are 223 lunar months between eclipses. So if you see an eclipse, well, let's say it's a lunar eclipse, the moon turns blood red.

It's super cool. Everyone's freaking out. You gotta you gotta sacrifice a little bit more today. You know, if you're an ancient astronomer, 1000 of years ago, you know this. You know that 223 lunar months from now, you're likely to see another eclipse.

If you see a solar eclipse and the moon blocks the sun and it's super scary and also kind of fun, You know, 223 lunar months from that date, you're likely to see another eclipse. Now maybe partial, maybe full, you don't have that precision. That would have to wait for our understanding of the gravitational force to make those kinds of predictions, but you know you had a really, really good chance 223 months. That's 66,600 days later. You're going to see another eclipse.

And mechanisms like the Antikythera mechanism could predict that. It would tell you where you are in a metonic cycle. It would tell you where you are in a Saro cycle. Oh, it's been, 120 months since the last eclipse. Well, then you've got, 103 months to go until your next eclipse.

It would tell you that. And this practice, what was baked into the Antikythera mechanism, was baked in already common knowledge amongst astronomers for 100 and maybe even 1000 of years. Ancient people were able to develop mathematical models to predict what would happen in the sky. And especially that's crazy things like the Saros Cycle, That's a long time. 223 months.

That's a long time. This is almost intergenerational. This requires people to record positions, preserve it, pass it on to the next generation so that future people, their descendants could see these patterns and pick them out, and then you could say, hey, by the way, emperor, next week there's gonna be an eclipse. That's kind of important knowledge to know. In from in fact, one of our oldest oldest written stories comes from China.

It's a story of he and ho that these two court astronomers slash astrologers who failed to predict a solar eclipse because apparently as the story goes they were out drinking. They later got beheaded. We don't do that with modern astronomers. Also, we're much better at making predictions. And, again, it's cultures around the world.

We've got the Maya over in Mesoamerica who beginning in the 5th century BC develop a extremely sophisticated calendar, a complex series of overlapping cycles of different lengths that combine together to give, the most accurate calendar known up up until modern times. It was really quite ingenious. They didn't develop mathematical models the same way Europeans, in Arabic cultures and Chinese cultures and Indian cultures, did, but they still were able to make incredibly accurate predictions. They were able to tell you where you were within this series of nested cycles. When the next eclipse was, they were also fascinated with Venus.

They cared a lot about Venus. They could predict with incredible accuracy the rising and setting of Venus years in advance. Cultures around the world are paying attention to the night sky. They're writing things down and they're finding patterns and they're developing predictions, mathematical models, the beginnings of modern science. Modern science is a mathematical description of nature.

It finds its beginnings here in ancient astronomy. It goes back further. There's this, artifact called the Berlin Gold Hat. It's a tall cone shaped hat made of gold leaf, probably worn over a more functional hat, probably worn for ceremonial or religious purposes or both, comes from modern day Germany, dated to 1,000 to 800 BC, and the thing itself is a work of art. One of my favorite things about ancient astronomy is how how rich the symbolism was and how much this was integrated into religious activities, political activities, daily activities, and how much thought and care and attention we humans put into creating not just works of functional engineering, but works of art.

The Burlingold hat, it's very tall. It's made of rows and rows of symbols and shapes that at first glance look totally decorative until you realize that there's a pattern. In fact, it's a calendar made of gold foil on this hat. And in fact, it's 2 calendars, 1 based on the moon, 1 based on the sun. There's a lunar calendar that's keeping track of of lunar months, and then there's a solar calendar which keeps track of the position of the sun in its annual cycle.

And then there's the appropriate machinery built into the hat itself that allows you to translate between the two systems. The reason it's tall is because it captures an entire 19 year metonic cycle. So you know when feast days are. You know the offset between your 12 lunar months in your one calendar year. You know what that gap is.

That Burlingold had would tell you, would calculate this was the smartphone for the this culture 3000 years ago. It could tell you when which month you were in, what part of the solar year you were in, when your 12 lunar months would end, and when you'd need to insert a gap to sync everything back up with your solar calendar, they could do it. We have the Venus tablet of Amasaduka, which recorded the rise and setting of Venus over a 21 year period recorded on a clay tablet from Babylon dated to around 1500 BC. We can even go back before the time of writing, before recorded history, And you're still going to find people who are not all that impressed by your smartphone, by its astronomical functions. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Stonehenge.

Right? Dated to somewhere between 3,015,100 BC. This arrangement of stone arches seems like a big deal, seems like those people spent a lot of time caring about this, building it. Not an easy thing to build. They did it anyway.

There's a special keystone that if you stand at the keystone and look at the arches during the summer solstice, the sun rises in a very particular spot to illuminate the keystone. Very important. Mark to the positions of solstices, kept track of the solar year. Those people would not be all that impressed by your smartphone. Oh, you know when the next equinox is?

Yes. So do we. Yeah. Our smartphone's like giant and made a stone. Okay.

We haven't figured out electronics. Don't hold it against us, but we can still do that. There's this wonderful artifact called the Nebra Sky Disc dated to 1800 to 1600 BC. Little metal disc has images of the Sun, a crescent moon, and some stars including a cluster of stars that is, like, obviously the Pleiades. There are arcs on the side that can measure the angle between solstices.

You know, the summer solstice is here. The winter solstice is there. They appear in different positions on the sky. This measures the angle between them. We don't fully understand the function of the nebrous sky disc.

We don't think it's just ornamental. It seems a little too functional for that. We think it might have been a way to help synchronize the lunar and solar calendars. As you can see this was a pretty big deal for ancient people, which, duh, you have 2 giant things in the sky, the Sun and the Moon, whose movements are very closely synchronized, but not quite, just a little bit off, people are gonna care about that a lot, because the moon is regular in its pattern. The sun is regular.

It's in in its pattern, and they don't quite overlap, and so you wanna measure that a lot. Seems pretty important. There's this artifact called the Goseck circle, 49100 BC, simple wooden structures, just series of concentric wooden circles with openings that mark the winter solstice. There's the Warren Field, 8,000 BC in modern day Scotland created by hunter gatherers, and there are pits in this field associated with phases of the moon all lining on the winter solstice. Obviously, the farther back in time we go, the less sophisticated these devices become, the larger they become.

You know, prior to the advent of writing, we don't have mathematical models of predicting positions of heavenly objects, but we're still marking it. We're still knowing it. We're still noticing the patterns. We're still building giant monuments to signify it. Perhaps the oldest astronomical record ever, and this is disputed.

That's another thing. The further back we go in time, the harder it is to to figure out exactly what the purpose of these objects was, but there's this ivory mammoth tusk dated to 30,000 BC. On one side, there's a carving of a person, and this person has I'm not joking here. It's, like, funny. It's it's, like, the exact same pose as Orion.

By the way, many many cultures around the world identify the constellation Orion as a person, because it it pretty much looks like a person with, like, arms out here, and then one leg's a little shorter, and then you've got it, like, you know, a sword or a dagger or something else, you know, hanging between, and the carving is, like, exactly that. It's hard to see that and not immediately think of Orion. On the back is an ad for patreon.patreon.com/pmsutter. Very sophisticated people wanting to keep this show going. That's patreon.com/pmsetter.

I truly appreciate any of your contributions. Now on the back are 86 notches. 86 notches. 86 notches. Now the this caution, I'm going to caution what I'm about to say, this may be a little bit of numerology where we just see 86 and we're trying to work out what could 86 possibly be and we might be creating meaning where there's is none.

You know, caveat aside, it just so happens that a typical human pregnancy is equal to 1 year minus 86 notches. 1 year minus 86 days is the length of, human pregnancy. It's also by sheer cosmic coincidence the number of days that Betelgeuse, the major the shoulder of Orion is visible in the sky at that latitude where the Ivory Coast was found. Perhaps these people found a connection between the rising and setting of Orion with with something about pregnancy. I don't know if they kept track of lunar months and solar years and the discrepancies between them.

Fairly certain that they did not develop sophisticated mathematical models to predict it, but they noticed something important and they were trying to tie that to something relevant in their daily lives. No matter how far back you go, you're going to find people who aren't all that impressed with your smartphone. The farther back you go, the larger and less sophisticated our astronomical devices become. The less sophisticated our astronomical knowledge becomes. You know from just simple markings to megalithic structures to handheld astrolabes, but they were real and they were relevant and they were useful to the cultures that use them.

They recorded and tracked and predicted the motions of the heavens with surprising accuracy. Ancient astronomers were highly sophisticated. And how did they do it? How were they able to make all these predictions? Well, by paying attention.

The sky is the most regular thing about the natural universe. You look out in the world how chaotic it is, how messy it is, how unpredictable it is. You don't know when that river's gonna flood. You don't know when the next rain is gonna come. You don't know what the weather is gonna be like tomorrow.

You don't know if that relationship will work out. You don't know if your kid is gonna survive the winter. But dang it. You know that the sun is gonna rise every morning. It's gonna set every evening.

That the equinox will come every single year. That the moon may be gone for now, but it's gonna come back. You just pay attention. The cycles of objects in the heavens are so regular that you can't help but notice all you have to do is pay attention. It is the most regular thing in the entire natural world.

And then things like the metonic cycle, as long as you pay attention long enough from one generation to another, even oral records, you know, memories will suffice, just stories. You'll make some markings on a tree. You'll get it. You'll figure out the metonic cycle. You'll realize that that 12 lunar months almost equals 1 solar year, but not quite.

And that 19 years later, it will repeat itself. That the gap between 12 lunar months and 1 solar year will get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and then it will reset. Doesn't take much. That's like the first cycle. The first complex cycle you can identify in nature is the relationship between the lunar and solar cycles.

And then once you've unlocked that, you've you've unlocked the rest. Once you've developed the sophistication to realize or the knowledge or recording to realize that, oh, the sun and the moon are on close to but not exactly the same cycles, then instantly you develop a mathematical model to describe it and predict it. And you can say, I guarantee. Don't worry. Just wait 27 more lunar months and everything's gonna be fine.

Or hey trust me, we're gonna have 5 days coming up where we're just gonna party and where it's not gonna be a part of any official calendar, and everything's gonna line up again. Just trust me. And our solar year and lunar year are gonna line up. We just need to party a little bit. Who's not gonna listen to that?

Once you develop that sophistication, the the universe unlocks itself for you. You just build ever more complicated models to encapsulate Mars, Jupiter, all the equinoxes and solstices, the phases of the moon. You you and then you start to notice the eclipses, and you find the patterns in the eclipses. Ancient people were able to do this because the sky is always there. You know, that that river may change course.

There may be a dry season or drought, but the sky is right there, so it's easy to observe. You just have to look up. And ancient people were smart. They were just as smart and witty and intelligent and clever as we are. They were just working with less.

They had to get it started. You know, now we take calendars for granted, but it took us 1000 of years to figure out these kinds of accurate calendars. It started with giant monuments to mark the solstices, and it went from there. It started with careful record keeping to note the metonic and the Saros cycles, and it goes from there. They pass their knowledge on, spread their knowledge to other cultures, who would assimilate it, bring it into their own, add to it, modify it, pass it on.

There's a reason modern English star names are mostly Arabic, while the constellations are Greek because it's not just one line of thinking that brought us to our current understanding. Why'd they do it? Why would you care? Man, the world's a messy place, isn't it? It's it's hard to live in the world, especially without Mario Kart.

It's tough. The sky is different. It's regular. It's orderly. Once you reach a certain level of understanding, even eclipses aren't scary anymore.

We got it. We got it. We know what's happening. It'll happen again. Let's just mark it down.

Make sure our descendants know that this one happened as we predicted. Prehistoric cultures? Why were they building these giant monuments? Well, I can't I can't tell you. They didn't write down their thoughts for us.

But I can tell you, why would you wanna mark the solstice? Why would you wanna know when solstices and equinoxes happen? I mean, have you ever just been caught up in, like, the middle of winter and all the days just kinda blend together? They're all kinda the same. It's all kinda cold.

Can't really tell. You know? Yeah. The days are maybe getting a little longer, but it's hard to tell day to day you're just stuck. You can't depend on the weather.

Maybe it's getting warmer, but, you know, maybe not. Snowed yesterday. Is that normal? Is it not? I don't know.

Man, I'm really hungry. We should probably plant some food, but when's a good time to plan? When when are the rains gonna come? When are the days going to be reliably longer? And, hey, if you're not even up to agriculture, that's fine.

When when are the seasonal migrations gonna start? You know, when when are those animals gonna make their way? The big game animals, when are they gonna make their way back to this valley? You know, I know they come every year, but is it is it this week? Is it next week?

Leo, when is it? I know. Let's build a giant monument that marks the solstice. Because then we know for sure when regardless of what the weather is doing, regardless of, you know, what it feels like, you don't have to rely on your guts anymore. You can simply measure it.

Yeah. See, when the light passes through this little gap, that's when we know things are gonna get warmer, things are gonna get better. The animals are gonna come back, we can start planting, the rains are gonna come. Almost every human culture, if not, and and this may be a stretch, every human culture has found some way to record solstices and equinoxes because it's the only thing you can count on. The solstice has never not happened.

And ancient people being smart and clever and observant noticed that and wanted to record that and wanted to count on it. Of course, religious rituals centered around this and developed from it. Of course. Because if you're seeking like comfort and explanation in a world that you don't understand, those solstices, those equinoxes, the movement of Venus, You know, these become really important, making sure that the metonic cycle, that your lunar and solar calendars line up. This becomes really, really important.

And so you get feast days, holidays, holy days, holy times, special times. It's also important on a personal level. For millennia, astronomy and astrology were the same thing. It was only in the 1800s when they started to diverge, and astronomy became a scientific discipline solely. Why?

The the sky is the only thing you can count on. It's the only thing that's regular and predictable. It's the only thing in the universe that you can say you can write a book on and say, I guarantee generations from now, this is what's gonna happen. You can't say that about anything else. So of course, you want to draw information from that.

Like that seems different. That seems important. That seems useful. Maybe it can tell me about my personal life. Maybe the arrangement of stars and planets right now can inform my daily life.

It's worth a shot. I don't blame any ancient culture for developing astrology. Heck, you know what? I don't blame any modern people for turning to astrology. It's a messy, confusing, painful world out there.

And sometimes, you you you wanna search for meaning. I'm never going to fault someone for searching for meaning. It's important for storytelling. You look at the stars. Oh, oh, can you tell us the story about Orion, the hunter?

Well, nope. That's a winter story. I've got I've got another one. I've got a summer story for you. The night sky brought comfort and safety and regularity and dependability in an unpredictable, chaotic, dangerous world.

We have this ancient prehistoric tradition of astronomy for a reason. And when you pull out your smartphone and you pull up the map of the sky or you even just glance at the time, you are resting on thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge about the cosmos. This is why astronomy still resonates today. The sky still hangs above us. The same moon, the same stars, the same sun that our ancestors knew still wheel about night after night and season after season.

It's still here. It's still relevant. It's so important. So go out tonight if you can. Look at the stars as we humans always have with curiosity, with wonder, with patience, with eagerness bring your questions to the stars sometimes you might actually get an answer And what patterns do you find?

What comfort do you find in that nightly embrace? Thank you to Brian d and Tony h for the questions that led to today's episode. And thank you to my top Patreon contributors, all of them actually patreon.com/pmcenter, but actually but especially Justin g, Chris l, Barbara k, Alberto m, Duncan m, Corey d, Nyla, John s, Joshua, Scott m, Rob h, Lewis m, John w, Alexis, Aaron j, Gilbert m, and Valerie h. And thank you so much for asking questions. I sincerely I love all the questions I get.

I really do. It is a joy to create this podcast. Please send more questions to askaspaceman@gmail.comorthewebsiteaskaspaceman.com. Leave a review for the show if you can. I appreciate it.

Helps get the show become even more visible, and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

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