From the Vault: Jupiter the Destroyer, Part 1

Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we bring you ill omens from the planet Jupiter. Today is gonna be the first of a two part series where we're going to be looking at the planet Jupiter and how Jupiter interacts with some some specific mythology about the wars before the world we know, and how that also relates to some very interesting scientific theories concerning the fate of the planets in our Solar system and in star systems beyond throughout

the galaxy. But I start I wanted to start off today by talking about the belief that the motion of the planets can have dire effects on the fate of creatures here on Earth. Of course, this is a long time tenant of many of the world's different traditions of astrology.

But like if you read astrology today, Rob, I don't know if you've had this experience, there's little sense in in astrology today that like the planets are literally doing physical things to you, like they're reaching down with I don't know, with like gravity or winds or something to have physical effects on your life. Rather, the mechanism that is believed to to link the movement of the planets or the constellations or whatever uh to your fate is

is a more obscure one. It's a kind of like in visible almost kind of young ian um anti causal relationship. Would you would you agree, Yeah, yeah, I would think so. And I mean not that I spent a lot of time in the astrology section, but right, But sometimes people have believed that the movement of the planets or the constellations have more direct physical effects on the Earth that can absolutely influence the fate of people or the fate

of nations. So I wanted to talk about one example that we discussed way back when we did an episode on Miasthma theory, and I remember the miasma theory was a it was a theory of disease that predated modern germ theory. It was the idea that disease was often was spread by like bad vapors or foul smelling odors, winds that went from you know, that that might come up from the earth or down from heaven and would bring the plague, or would bring malaria or something like that.

And so the example I wanted to look at was how in the year thirteen, this was during the Second Plague pandemic, when the bubonic plague was sweeping through Europe. It was devastating towns and cities. Of course, people had no understanding of what was actually causing the disease. So King Philip the sixth of France called in scholars from the medical faculty of the University of Paris to see

if they could figure out what was going on. And the scholars discussed things, they researched the matter, and they eventually came back with an answer. And their answer was this. On March Mars, Jupiter and Saturn had all lined up in conjunction and it happened within the House of Aquarius. And this was bad because to these scholars, Uh, there

was a causative story to tell here. The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, to them was said to bring death and calamity, and the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars was said to bring pestilence on the breeze. And then this was both of the those things happening at the same time. So here I'm gonna quote from a historian named ole Jorgan Benedicto from his book The Black Death to thirteen

fifty three. Quote. In this astrological theory of epidemiology, Jupiter was assumed to be warm and humid and to draw malignant vapors both from the ground and from water, while Mars was assumed to be hot and dry and therefore had the capacity to kindle such malignant vapors into infective fire. So under this theory, the movement of the planets would

be directly responsible for calamity here on Earth. Now, obviously, scientists today do not put a lot of stock in the motions of Jupiter and Mars in determining our fates. But we did want to talk about some ways that in a very real and material sense, local gas giants and in our case, that would be Jupiter in particular. We can also talk something about saturn Um can indeed shape the face eat of creatures dwelling on inner rocky planets.

And so that's what we're going to focus on for the next couple of episodes, a number of scientific ideas about ways that the planet Jupiter could, like the Jupiter of myth that we're going to talk about in a few minutes, be a kind of cosmic destroyer or a cosmic creator deciding the fortunes of earth bound mortals like us. Without Jupiter, could we even exist? And how long could life go on? So this should be a fun one. If you know some of you out there, you might say, well,

I'm not as crazy about the space episodes. And some of you might say, well, you know, I'm not crazy. It's crazy about the mythology episodes. Well, we're gonna have a little bit of mythology and a little bit of of space just spread throughout here. Um, So if you hate both topics, I guess it's time to click off. But I think we've heard from anybody who said that, No, no, nob um. I just I know, uh, some people aren't maybe maybe it's my mom. I'm not gonna can't remember

my mom. THATTT might be less into the space episods. Uh. I guess one of the things about space, in talking about it is I always feel that it is nice to have some sort of human element there to to sort of attach us to it. Now, a lot of times that human element is just imagining if we are there, you know, or or talk about how we might get there one day, and just sort of put it in in in that kind of human context. And there's gonna,

I guess, be some of that here. But for the most part, uh, the mythology provides that there's like the mythological idea of who Jupiter is, and then there is the planetary idea of what Jupiter the planet is. And it's ultimately a lot of fun to compare the two, right though there might not be a lot of I don't know, human interest or drama and looking just at the icy ridges of Yapotus or something, right, but those

are some good icy ridges. But yeah, well, we'll try to give you some some narrative context here when when talking about the planets. So one of the first things I wanted to mention was I was recently reading about the etymology of the word Jupiter, and came across something that I did not know but I actually found really interesting. So, of course, the English word Jupiter comes to English through Latin, where it is a Jupiter spilt with an eye at

the beginning. A lot of Latin words that start with a J in English actually start with an eye. There was no j in Latin, and this, of course was the name of the sky god and the chief of the Roman pantheon, Jupiter or Jove or Jupiter or Yove. Yeah, that's why we refer to the moons of Jupiter as the Jovian moons, right, synonymous in the Latin context. But so, so I was reading about okay, well, what goes back before that? It seems that the Latin word Jupiter traces

back to a Proto Indo European root. And I I apologize, I don't know perfectly how to pronounce this, but it's something like deuce fatter. And remember, of course Proto Indo European in is a prehistoric lost language, so nobody speaks it today. In fact, nobody spoke it at any time that anybody was writing anything down. So this is a this is a prehistoric, pre written language that was the direct ancestor of a huge number of languages spoken throughout

Europe and Asia today. It was probably originally spoken by people living somewhere around modern day Ukraine or southern Russia. But it is a language that has to be reconstructed by linguists by looking at all these different languages around the world and sort of tracing back their common roots. In this Proto Indo European language, do you spotter would have meant something like daylight sky father, and this would have been the sky god of the reconstructed Proto Indo

European religion. Now, if you hear in that they're deuice Potter, you can hear where we get Jupiter from that. But you can also probably hear where the word zoo can be derived from that, right juice, And so again there is a reconstructed form of this religion. We don't have

any written records of this religion. It existed before writing, but scholars can conclude some things about it with pretty high confidence by looking at what common elements appear in very geographically separated religions that have a Proto Indo European linguistic rout and this deity, this deuced potter one uh, seems to be very common to religions that are spread

out all over the place. For example, this name formulation also appears in the Sanskrit rig Veda, where you get a god named like Diaus or something roughly equivalent to that. But in Roman religion, in particular, this ancient sky god tradition that of course had been channeled through the Greek stories of Zeus. Remember the the Roman mythology and the Roman gods are extremely close copies of the of the Greek gods, and there might be there are some appreciable differences,

but there is enormous overlap between them. So for all practical purposes, Jupiter is Zeus. But in the Roman tradition, this god, this sky god, this chief of the pantheon, came to be associated with the planet Jupiter, which had been known since ancient times since it could be seen with the naked eye. And of course Jupiter, the planet,

has mythological significance beyond the Roman connection. One example is that in the ancient Babylonian religion, the planet Jupiter is associated with another chief god, mar Duke, the chief god

of the city of Babylon. Uh he's the slayer hero of the epic poem the Enuma a Leash, where there is a primeval chaos monster named Tiamat, a sort of saltwater dragon that arises from a previous generation of divine beings, and then Tiamat threatens to destroy the younger generation of gods, and mar Duke becomes sort of president of the God Club by going out to slate Yamat and the monsters

at her command. And there are some interesting parallels here because a mar Duke, like Zeus and like Jupiter, is sort of a sky god. Now, I think it's interesting that the broad contours of this story in the Inuma a Leash have a very strong echo in Greco Roman mythology, where Zeus, who would later become Jupiter to the Romans, also has to overthrow and destroy a pre existent class of divine beings to sort of pay the way for

the younger generation of gods to take power. And in the Greek case, this earlier generation of divine beings were the Titans. This conflict in Greek religion that pits Zeus and the gods of Olympus versus the older beings of the previous divine generation is sometimes called the Titanomicy. The War of the Titans is what that means, Yeah, that the Titanomicy is an example of what is sometimes referred to as um a theomicy like THEO and then uh at the beginning of it, you know, a war of

the gods. So the Titanomicy is just one in the Greek tradition, in the Trojan war is also essentially a Theo macky. There's also the Gigantomachi, which occurred after the war against the gods. This is the war between the Olympian gods and the giants who are the offspring of Gaya and the blood of Chronos Um. Now, of course, there are plenty of other religions that feature of THEO makis. Of course, there's the Norse uh god between the Aser and the van Air. There's the Vedic wars of the

Devas and the Ostras. There's the Water War of Chinese mythology that that pitted the destructive water god U Gong Gong against Zoo wrong, the fire god. And then of course in Christian tradition we have this idea of a war in heaven uh and and I'm sure there're there

are numerous other examples we could point to. Yeah, it seems to be very common throughout the myths of the world to imagine that it's some ancient time there was a conflict between a pre existent class of of divine beings and then some like newer or younger class of divine beings. It doesn't always break down along generational lines like that, but it certainly does in the Greek example. Yeah, we kind of get into this in our I had this idea of like, Okay, we have the King of

the gods, and he shall reign forever and ever. But I feel like things feel a bit more tenuous with these earlier models, because it's like, well, this have been He's been ruling for a good three or four years now. There were some there's some other guys that came before him. I don't know what will come next. He has he

doesn't get along with everybody heavy lies the crown. Yeah, I mean it makes sense too, if you're basing your ideas of of divine rule, uh in a mythological sense on the on the examples of rule that you see in the world around you. I mean, that's just the nature of things. Yes. Uh. So, now I want to move to reading a section from an ancient text known as Hessia's the Ogany. This is the the Genealogy of the Gods by the ancient Greek writer Hesiod, to give

some color to this story we're telling. But first I need to set the stage before I get to the part that we're going to read. So I'm necessarily doing a bunch of condensing here, because there are a whole bunch of stories about like which divine beings emanated and gave birth to what. But the short version is there have already been a couple of generations of divine beings by the time we get the Olympian gods. Uh. The earth deity Gaya and the sky deity Uranas or Uranus

Uranas together have a bunch of offspring. And these offspring include these beings called the Hecaton Curries or the hundred handers. H there were there were three of them, these three brothers, and they had some amazing body plans, you might say, yeah, fifty heads, a hundred arms. It's great. I really enjoyed looking up mostly modern illustrations of what this could have looked like, because there's a there's a temptation to want

to kind of draw a turbo goro. You know. Um, it's been it's just too many heads and too many arms. It just becomes this mass of limbs and heads. But I've seen some people, some artists push this more in the direction of kind of like an amorphous being, you know, like it's the thing or some sort of a show god or something. You know. Yeah, just a kind of rat king god. Yeah. Now, Guya and Uranas also gave birth to the Cyclopes, who you know, we know about those.

And then finally they gave birth to a bunch of gods that were called the Titans, and two of these titans, Chronus and Rhea. They together then sire a new generation of gods with names that might be more familiar Poseidon, Hades, demiter Hera, Zeus. Yeah, the members of the proper Greek pantheon of gods. Right, But as we mentioned, heavy lies the crown and Chronus. At this point, Cronus has assumed the throne of the of the heavens after castrating his

father Uranas, so Chronus is in charge now. But Chronus is jealous and paranoid like like many kings of Greek myth are like a Chrysius. You know, in the Perseus narrative, he fears his own offspring um and be because he's been given an omen that one day he would be dethroned by his own offspring. So every time Reya gives birth to one of his offspring, Chronus would eat the newborn child. But then Zeus is born, and I guess Zeus is the youngest of the brood of the Olympian gods.

And here Ya plays a trick on Chronus. She feeds him a rock. It's a very good trick. Instead, she she sends the real Zeus off to hide away in a cave and swaps out Zeus for a stone in a blanket and hands it over to Chronus, and Chronus just eats it up. And then Zeus is just training in a cave like a big training montage, getting ready for the rebellion against his father. Right, it's like Rocky four when he's out in the snow, you know, lifting the logs and everything getting ready. And so you have

to imagine Chronus. Here is Ivan Draco and Zeus is Rocky and what's going to happen? Well, when Zeus has grown up. He somehow tricks Chronus into vomiting up all of Zeus's siblings, who are then able to join Zeus in making war on Chronus and the Order of the Titans. And they also enlist some of their allies, like some of the other primordial beings come to fight on the side of Zeus and the Olympians. The Cyclopes and the

hecaton Kerries. They had previously those last two classes of beings had previously been imprisoned in the underworld of Tartarus, and they're sort of set free, and they joined in the fight. Zeus says to them, put down your chainsaw and listen to me. It's time for you to join in the fight, and they do. Now Here, we're gearing up for battle. And Robert, are you ready for us to read some from the theogony? That wasn't from the

theogony that you just quoted about the chain's house. No, no, no, that that was from a weird al dared stupid Well, then then carry on. This translation appears in Thomas G. Palma's Anthology of Classical myth Primary Sources in translation from Hackett Publishing, two thousand four. So the Olympian gods take their position. Quote they stood against the Titans on the line of battle, holding chunks of cliff in their rugged hands.

Opposite them, the Titans tightened their ranks expectantly. Then both sides hands flashed with power, and the unfathomable sea shrieked eerily.

The earth crashed and rumbled, the vast sky groaned and quavered, and massive Olympus shook from its roots under the immortals onslaught a deep trimmor of feet reached misty tartarus, and a high whistling noise of insuppressible tumult with heavy missiles that groaned and wind in flight, and the sound of each side shouting rose to starry heaven as they collided with a magnificent battle cry. And now Zeus no longer held back his strength. His lung seethed with anger, and

he revealed all his power. He charged from the sky, hurtling down from Olympos in a fury of lightning, hurling thunderbolts one after another, right on target from his massive hand, a whirlwind of holy flame, and the earth that bears life roared as it burned, and the endless forest crackled in fire, and the continents melted, and the ocean streams boiled,

and the barren sea. The blast of heat enveloped the Thornian Titans, and the flame reached the bright stratosphere, and the incandescent rays of the thunderbolts and lightning flashes blinded their eyes mighty as they were, heat so terrible and engulfed deep chaos. The sight of it all and its sound to the ears, was just as if broad Heaven had fallen on Earth. The noise of it crashing and of Earth being crushed would be like the noise that

arose from the strife of the clashing gods. Winds hissed through the earth, starting off tremors and swept dust and thunder and flashing bolts of lightning, the weapons of Zeus, along with the shouting and din into both sides, reverberation from the terrible strife hung in the air, and sheer power shown through it. I love it. One can imagine like led Zeppelin or rage against the machine ring in the background. Yeah, or Chronus is like the witch king

of Angmar and uh. But anyway, as Zeus and the Olympians are, of course the victors in this war, the titanomic he breaks in their favor. The Titans are defeated, and they are chained up in tartar Us, so they're could sort of thrown down into this hell like underworld and and imprisoned there. And and there are a few other disparate fates, like some of these primordial being side with the Olympians. Uh Atlas is one of the Titans. In particular, he's punished by being made to hold up

the heavens forever. But it'll be interesting to keep this in mind later on when we talk about some of the astrophysics today, is that this idea that Zeus or his Roman counterpart Jupiter would have been these prolific destroyers that paved the way for the status quo of today, the you know, the way things have been ordained today by defeating this ancient class of gods that had existed since the beginning or shortly after it. And of course, and another funny thing about Zeus and Jupiter is that

the slaying doesn't stop there. I mean, they are these these gods are prolific destroyers throughout all time of myth Yeah, because you know, they they won the crown through war and then wars are required to maintain the order. And then also you just have individuals who step out of line. Uh. And you know, maybe in a way that is meaningful, but also sometimes the idea is just in a way where mortals are not are not allowed to question the

gods or or or in any ways like them. So I thought we might run through some of the the murders or I don't know, executions I guess attributed to Jupiter and Zeus. Um. So first of all ones that seemed to be more specifically aligned with the Roman Jupiter. There's the story of Tillis Hostilius, who was killed by lightning bolt for botching the reading of a sacred right. Um. So you know it makes sense. Rights are important to religion. All this is it's it's it's part of the framework

that's holding up the cosmic order of the universe. This guy is getting it wrong, so Zeus sends a lightning bolt down on him. Could you imagine if Seth could throw lightning at us every time we screwed up reading something? Oh, it would it would be it would be a blood bath. Uh. Now we mentioned in um the Titano macky. Sorry. Now, during the Titanomicy the war against the Titans. It's also said, uh that Jupiter killed his father the titan Saturn right.

And Saturn is basically the equivalent of the Greek titan Chronus. Right. You get into different versions of it, particularly, I think some of the Greek variations of it, it's it's less a clear picture of him having killed. Sometimes it's the dividing up. I mean, it's it's kind of like when you do them with a titan or a god. Uh. You know, sometimes that kind of marvel uh universe system comes into play where nobody really dies. There's always a

way they could come back. Now, murders attributed more properly to Zeus. Um, boy, there there are a number of them here. First there's Asclepius, and uh, this one's interesting because he was essentially killed by Zeus for practicing necromancy, for raising the dead. Asclepius was some kind of healer figure, wasn't he. Yeah, But you're not supposed to heal too much because when you're miss you're interfering with the divine

order of things. That's over the line. Now there's salmon As, who is executed for us actually pretending to be Zus, that's a no no. Then there's another Titan here, the Titan Minnotius, who is also killed during the war against the Titans. And then when you get into the myth of like Hayn, the like Haan was this individual. There's a whole cool story to this. I think we've we've touched on it before on the show. But essentially, uh,

he was punished by being turned into a wolf. But he had a number of sons, and a lot of those. If you look at lists of people that were killed by Zeus, his sons make up a whole subsection of that list. And then there's a faith on the son of Helios, who is essentially executed for bad driving. Uh, but bad driving with the sun chariot. So you know, that's that's one thing. If if if you're just you know, misusing a normal chariot, but if it's the chariot of

the Sun itself, well that's dangerous. And now you're toying with the gods. But of course, beyond specific murders or executions or killings however you want to establish them, Jupiter or Zeus, you know, he tended to punish gods, mortals, and Titans with various imprisonments transformation in his tortures. He is the King of the gods, after all, and then he has to dish out this punishment to maintain cosmic balance. But but also due to sort of the outside nature

of his own powers and his otherwise humanoid demeanor. You know, he is still essentially a king. And while a human king with human cravings and imperfections, it certainly has an outsized ability to create chaos. Uh, it's even more so with the God of gods. So he's a being of intense gravity and mass, and those who involve themselves with

him risk just being crushed by that mass. Right, And this brings us back, of course to the planet, which, as we mentioned earlier, you know, as you can tell from the from the English word for the planet, the Romans came to associate this chief of their pantheon with the bright light in the sky that actually is the planet Jupiter. Yeah, so obviously Jupiter is big. I don't think that's gonna come as a as a surprise to

anyone out there. And some of the facts that we're gonna lay out for you here are kind of sort of the typical songs of Jupiter that we must sing just to remind you how big Jupiter is in relation to Earth. Uh So, let's refresh. First of all, Jupiter is eleven times larger than Earth. That's in terms of diameter, right, Yeah, if you line them up, Jupiter is more massive than all the other planets of the Solar System combined. That is incredible, because there's some there's some other big ones.

Jupiter is three hundred and seventeen point eight times as massive as Earth, and you could fit almost thirteen hundred earths inside of Jupiter. So basically, if Jupiter was a gumball machine and you were putting Earth's inside it, that's about how many you could fit. Uh So these are

pretty standard facts. I got these from NASA and from Universe Today, and yeah, you've probably heard them before, but I think it it just bears reminding just how big Jupiter, and therefore how massive, how just gravitationally potent and powerful. You know, I bet you could fit more earths inside Jupiter Earth was cube shaped rather than round. You ever look at that like the packing efficiency of ball shapes

versus other shapes. Yeah, I guess, I guess so. Uh. But it also it makes you wonder how many humans could fit inside Zeus or Jupiter the god, how many gods can fit inside Chronus? It seems like a lot. You know, well the baby gods, that's true, they're smaller than Yeah. How big was that rock? You think that Cronus had to eat like to trick him into thinking it was Zeus? I mean, are we are we talking just like a you know, hand sized rock or is

this like a mountain that he ate? I think it's like, well, I mean it's it's size the size of a baby god. So then I guess the question is how big is a baby god? I don't know. Uh. There, so the difference between Earth and Jupiter is so great that it can even play into our sci fi models and uh and I think this is great because it's also I think helps make our point here. I was reading reading about this. This is some work from David Boulderstone from

the University of Leicester. He asked a couple of questions regarding Jupiter and planet sizes and energy. Back in twenty eleven, this would have been an article title That's No Moon by Boulderstone at All, published in the Journal of Special Topics, University of Leicester. Department of Physics and Astronomy. Yeah, this is this journal is fun. It's an undergraduate journal, but it's for papers by physics students, like working out the

math of weird problems involving superpowers and destroying planets. I think I recall one paper on there that was about whether you could drive a boat in Jupiter's atmosphere. That was really funny. Uh, it's it's stuff like that, So you can find a lot of really fun topics. The topics are quite special in fact. Yeah, and as you can guess from the title, that's no moon. This paper

concerns the Death Star. So the main questions asked by this paper and you should look it up if you can find it for free online if you if you're if you really want to geek out on your your star wars and uh science. Here first of all, asked, is it possible for something the size of the Death Star so uh physical construction more or less the size of of Earth's moon uh, to generate enough power to

destroy a rocky planet like Earth. And then the secondary question, if so, would it be possible to generate enough power to destroy a gas giant the size of Jupiter? So a lot of this paper is about you know, doing the math, making a number of necessary assumptions. Uh, and without you know, geeking out too hard on questions about well, what does a khyber crystal really do to energy and

so forth. But ultimately they decided that the Earth is well within the star, the Death Star's energy budget, so it could totally blow up our planet, no questions asked. Cool but good. But Jupiter, Jupiter, this would be a challenge. Quote, Jupiter requires much greater energy demands and would put considerable strain on the Death Star. To destroy a planet like Jupiter, it would probably have to divert all remaining power from

all essential systems and life support, which is not necessarily possible. Okay, So granted this is not like this is not firm and set side. Is this a speculation on the power of the Death Star. But think about that. That is how massive and tough the planet Jupiter is. If it was Jupiter versus the Death Star, the Death Star would not completely win. Uh. The Death Star is not powerful enough to destroy Jupiter. No, Jupiter absolutely is a local bully.

Jupiter has a mass and a gravitational influence that is unrivaled in the solar system, of course, apart from the Sun itself. This does make me think of Percy Shelley's verse play Prometheus Unbound, where the god Jupiter is the villain. He's this cruel, tyrant god who has to be destroyed

in order to free the world from his grip. And he he's destroyed with the help of this being of the void called the Demogorgon, which we explored in a was it was it last October that we did that episode or maybe two octobers ago, But yeah, there's one part where the spirit of the Earth itself is speaking of Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound, and it says, I dare not speak like life lest heavens fell king should hear and link me to some wheel of pain more torturing

than the one whereon I roll. So Earth is already on a wheel of pain? What what if it gets worse? Could could Jupiter put Earth on a worse wheel of pain? The answer is yes, thank Okay. So here I wanted to shift to talking about some astrophysics, and specifically I want to get to a hypothesis put forward in in one interesting paper that came out a few years ago that has some parallel else to the titanomicy. So first, I think we should look at some exo planets, because

you know, it's weird. I can still remember a time when the idea of planets orbiting other stars was mostly a matter of speculation, you know, with a few stray bits of evidence here and there. But within the past decade or so, exo planet research has just exploded, and I think this is largely due to a number of new telescopes coming online and new detection techniques. But I remember one of the big moments here in the history of exoplanet research was this dump of data on hundreds

of new exo planets from the Kepler Space Telescope. I think this was Do you remember when this happened, Rob, Yeah, yeah, yes, it was hugely illuminating. But it also raises these questions about what kinds of planets are out there, and what kind of differences do we see when we compare our Solar system to the types of stellar systems that are common throughout the galaxy. And so here I wanted to

turn to something interesting I was reading. It was a blog post by the astrophysicist and science writer Ethan Seagull called this is why you must never try and colonize a super Earth planet. You've probably heard this term super Earth so but that term can actually be fairly misleading, and this post gets into why that is. And I wanted to kind of follow his logic here. So first of all, you can observe that here in our Solar System,

we've got two kinds of planets pretty much. You have small, rocky planets with a thin atmosphere or no atmosphere, and those are those are closer into the Sun. So you've got Mercury, Venus, Earth Mars rocky core, very little atmosphere relative to gas giants. And then further out you have these larger gas planets with some kind of solid or metal core surrounded by dense gases extending out for thousands

of kilometers in radius. How do these different types of planets form Well, the leading theory on the formation of the planets is that our Solar System began as a huge cloud of interstellar gas and dust floating in space.

And this would have been made up of atoms and molecules that were partially left over from previous generations of stars that may have exploded in a supernova or been torn apart in other events, you know, neutron star collisions and things like that billions of years ago, or just hydrogen that's been floating around out there in space since the Big Bang. But so you've got all this gas and dust just floating around, and at some point this huge cloud of gas and dust collapsed, meaning it started

to fold in upon itself and become much denser. And there are certain they're there are different things that could have caused this. Could have been caused by gravitational or magnetic disturbances, maybe another star exploding nearby, sending material and

a shock wave through the cloud. Um But when the cloud collapsed, all of that dense matter pull together by gravity at the center of the cloud started to become a star, which would be our sun, but in this kind of larval stage, it would be known as a solar nebula. It's a cloud on the way toward becoming a sun. So you can picture a kind of huge wheel of spinning gas and dust orbiting around a dense hot center and getting more thinned out as you move

out from the center. Now, eventually gravity pulls things together so much that the material at the center of this spinning disk under under all this heat and pressure. As it gets denser and denser, starts to cause hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium atoms, and this is the beginning of the nuclear fusion reaction that powers our sun. And of course this releases tremendous amounts of energy in the process.

You get radiation, heat, and sunshine. Meanwhile, the outer parts of this spinning wheel, they keep spinning around the newborn star at the center, and eventually clumps of gas and dust in side this spinning disk start to be attracted to each other and to attract more gas and dust to themselves because of gravity, and they form these larger and larger clumps of matter still in orbit around the star.

And of course these accumulating clumps would eventually turn out to be solid stuff like planets, moons, comets, and asteroids, and one of the biggest of these early forming clumps would become Jupiter. Now, this is a normal way for

for star systems to form. But coming back to that that blog post by Seagull that I was talking about, sometimes we would just assume that other stellar systems should be like ours, with small, rocky planets towards the you know, in smaller orbits or closer orbits around the Sun, and then bigger gas giants farther out. But actually it looks like our Solar System is rather unusual in this regard.

To read from Seagull quote. When we look at our most successful exoplanet hunting missions, Kepler and tests, the most abundant class of world that a found is an in between type commonly known as super Earth's. Despite the allure of a planet that might be Earth like, only larger and with more room for life forms on it, super Earths are nothing like our science fiction imaginings. Here's why

you must never try and call an ice one. So in our Solar System, smaller rocky planets are close to the star within what's known as the frost line, as a certain distance out from from the host star, and the outer planets beyond the frost line are these gas giants. But actually we know now from exoplanet surveys that this is somewhat arbitrary. Planets of any mask and any size

can orbit in very close to the host star. You can have a planet as big as Jupiter orbiting really close to our Sun, making a full circuit within days.

You've probably heard about these types of planets that referred to as hot jupiters, So it doesn't have to be the way it is here and uh and as see said, the most common type of planet we've actually found out there are these super Earth So these would be planets of two to ten Earth masses, So once you get to about double the mass of Earth, you're in super

Earth territory. Now, an important thing to point out here is that to some extent, by necessity, our picture of what kind of planets are out there is going to be influenced by our detection methods, like what types of planets we are particularly good at spotting using the methods available to us. So it's possible that these types of planets may be overrepresented in surveys. But still it does appear that there are lots and lots of super Earths

around stars throughout the rest of the galaxy. And despite the name, these super Earth planets are not necessarily much like Earth at all. One factor is how much gas these planets retain around them as they form. Because when you think about a planet, you know whether it's a rocky plant it like Earth, or a gas giant like Jupiter. There are going to be a couple of things working against each other that helped determine what types of volatiles

you can keep stuck to you. One is going to be your mass and thus your gravity that really helps keep the atmosphere stuck to you. But then another thing is going to be is going to be solar radiation, because the Sun is always going to be blasting you with solar winds and solar radiation that want to strip away volatiles from the planet and blow them out into space. And this is something we can see happening to other planets,

like I think you know. One of the theories of how Mars ended up with such a thin atmosphere today is that it once may have had a thicker atmosphere, but the Sun kind of blasted that atmosphere further out into space over time. Now it's nice for us that Earth is able to maintain an atmosphere because we need it in order to breathe, but actually having too much mass and thus too much gravity and thus too much atmosphere can really make it impossi sable for creatures like

us to survive on a planet. To read from seagull quote, as long as the mass remains below a certain threshold, the radiation from the nearby star will hit these easily boiled gases and hit them with enough energy that they'll escape from the planet in question. But it rise above that threshold, and even the ultraviolet radiation and solar wind particles emitted from the star within the Solar system won't

be able to kick those light atoms and molecules away. So, in other words, if you are too low in mass and too close to the star, the star will blast away your atmosphere. But if you raise a planet's mass beyond a certain threshold, it's gravity is going to get so strong, strong enough to withstand that solar assault and hold onto its volatiles like gases and water. And you get enough mass together in one place, and it will start suctioning up material from all around it. It will

become this great accumulator. And of course, if it gets enough mass that atoms that its course are undergoing fusion, then you've just created a new star. But if you if you're not, if you don't have quite that much mass, what you end up creating is a gas giant, a gas planet even even smaller than Jupiter and Saturn planets. More on the on the scale of Neptune are going to have these thick, accumulated atmospheres that will make the

surface uninhabitable. So Seagull calls attention to a really important paper from published in the Astrophysical Journal by Jinging Chin and David Kipping called Probabilistic Forecasting of the Masses and Radii of Other Worlds. And this is basically a survey that says there are pretty much four types of planets that you expect to find in our in our galaxy, you get rocky worlds like Earth, and then you get gas planets with with big what was called volatile envelopes,

like Neptune. And then you get very big gas giants like Jupiter, and then you get basically fully fledged stars. Just a planet gets so big that it's a star in its own And one of the important things for us here is that category of the Neptune like planets. Seagull points out that if you're talking about a planet with a density roughly equal to Earth's, which is about six grams per cubic centimeter, you can really only get about thirty percent larger in radius than Earth is and

still be a rocky planet. You start getting bigger than that, and your mass means that you will be less like Earth and more like Neptune, a minor gas planet clinging to a deep blanket of hydrogen and other gases with maybe thousands of times the atmospheric pressure of Earth at

the surface. So I feel like we don't appreciate this enough when we think about this idea of you know, super Earth's orbiting other stars, that you don't have to go much bigger than Earth before you're starting to turn into an uninhabitable gas planet, or at least uninhabitable for

the kinds of life that we understand. And these kinds of planets litter the galaxy, planets that are a little bit bigger than Earth, probably enveloped in a gas cloud that would make the surface fully uninhabitable for us uh

seagull rites quote. Once you get to about twice as massive as Earth, or just about twenty five to thirty larger and radius than our planet, you're no longer rocky with only a thin atmosphere, but are overwhelmingly likely to be Neptune like with a full fledged, large envelope of hydrogen, helium,

and other light gases. And so for this reason, if you hear references to the abundant super Earth's in the Milky Way, these are not good places for humans to colonize, probably not at least, and probably not great places to look for life that is a close analog to Earth life. Some people have seen calling them many Neptunes rather than super Earth's. But this brings us back to an interesting question about our own solar system. Why does our Solar

system look like it does? Why does it have a planet like Earth rather than a bunch of these in vernal super earths like so many other stars in our galaxy? And there was a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in that offers one hypothesis to answer this, So why does our Solar system look the way it does? This paper is called Jupiter's Decisive Role in the Inner Solar System's Early Evolutions is by Constantine

Batigen and Greg Laughlin. Now, in addition to this paper, I was looking at a couple of write ups on it that quoted the authors, one in NAT Geo by Andrew Physicis and one in Scientific American by Lee Billings.

And so the short version here is that the authors of the study in argue that in the newly forming Solar System, Jupiter briefly migrated inwards from the place where it first formed, and as it moved inward into the inner Solar System, it caused a series of cascading effects that would have smashed other early forming super Earth's in its wake, and that the current inner planets like Earth are actually formed from the debris left over after this

catastrophic series of collisions caused by Jupiter's inward migration. And this broader hypothesis about the ancient inner migration of Jupiter is sometimes called the Grand Tach hypothesis. Basically, it goes that lots of astronomers used to think that planetary orbits were as a rule, highly stable and nearly circular, unlikely to change. But when we look at other stars again, that's just not what we find. Sometimes we see weird

kind of changes or eccentricities in planetary orbits. And so to explain the Grand Tach hy hypothesis, I'm going to quote from this article in Scientific American by Lee Billings called Jupiter, Destroyer of Worlds, may have paved the way for Earth, where Billings describes the Grand Tach hypothesis by

saying that it posits quote. In the first few million years of our Solar systems existence, Jupiter migrated into and then back out of the inner Solar System, following a course similar to a sailboats when it tacks around a buoy. Back then, Jupiter would have still been embedded in a

gas rich disc. Much of that gas was spiraling down towards the Sun, so much that the action would have sapped some of Jupiter's angular momentum too, causing the giant planet itself to spiral into the vicinity of where Mars is today. Jupiter would have kept falling in towards the Sun if not for being caught by the subsequent formation of Saturn, which began drifting in as well. As the two giant planets came closer together, they were caught in

an orbital resonance. This resonance expelled all the gas between them, gradually reversing their death spirals and causing them to tack back out to the outer Solar System. So this grand Tach hypothesis, if true, would explain several things. It would explain why Mars is so all when we might expect it to be larger. In the words of Billings. It would also explain the distribution of icy and rocky bodies in the asteroid belt and other strange features of the

Solar System. But if the Grand Tack is correct, Jupiter's orbit would have strayed into the inner regions of the Solar System, and its gravitational influence would have caused the realignment of the orbits of existing early forming super Earth's, sometimes causing their orbits to overlap one another, and sometimes

they would actually have major collisions. You would really only need one such catastrophic collision in order to have a chain reaction that could annihilate these early forming inner planets. One one crash could lead to what the authors here

called a collisional cascade. The studies author Greg Laughlin is quoted in the in these news articles by saying, quote, it's the same thing we worry about if satellites were to be destroyed in Low Earth or it, their fragments would start smashing into other satellites, and you'd risk a chain reaction of collisions. Our work indicates that Jupiter would have created just such a collisional cascade in the inner

Solar System. And to quote here from Billings quote, the simulation suggested that Jupiter's inward spiral would send swarms of one hundred kilometer wide planetary building blocks cascading into the inner Solar System. The giant planet's gravity would also sling those building blocks and the inner planets themselves into overlapping elliptical orbits, creating an interplanetary demolition derby of whirling, colliding, fragmenting worlds. Now this, I mean, this sounds like a

titanomic e Yeah to me. I mean this is a war of the gods in which maybe the gods themselves are not destroyed, but there's a lot of destruction um going on between them. Yeah, exactly right. I mean that's

why I was making this connection. And I do want to be very clear we are suggesting a connection based on like metaphorical similarities, because there are actually people in the more Velakovsky vein who think that you could draw literal parallels between things described in myth and ancient movements of the planets, which I think is not probably not true.

Like Emmanuel Velakowski, one of the things he wrote was that you know, like miracles described in the Bible, about like pillars of fire and stuff like that would have been caused by ancient planets moving around in their orbits and and uh, you know stuff like that. I mean, there's no evidence for this in the modern world, but fantastically weird hypotheses that some people still believe for some reason,

not not actual scientists. All of this stuff we're talking about would have been before we even had the Earth as it exists today, So this would not have been things that people could have witnessed. But the metaphorical similarity to these uh you know, uh, theomicy myths is is fantastically cool. Yeah, and you can you can easily get into comparisons of like what does it mean to have

terrific power? You know, whether you're that that power is coming via the mass of some sort of a planet, or if it's coming through the you know, the power of a of a single warrior king in in history.

And I like that it's it's creating this metaphorical residence that it's not just Jupiter destroying this early generation of of primordial beings like the Titans, but it's also creating the new divine order because, according to the author's here, a second generation of planets after this you know, destruction cascade within the inner Solar System caused by Jupiter. If this hypothesis is correct, a second generation of planets would inform out of the whirling field of debris that's left over.

So the pulverized remnants of these ancient super earths would have a couple of fates, Like some of the debris would get dragged down into the Sun, and then some of the leftover chunks would become the bodies of planets like Earth and Venus after Jupiter migrates back out away from the Sun again. Yeah, it's like in the aftermath of the war. Um, you know, Zeus has to say, well, um, looks okay, Poseidon Hades, Um, we gotta divvy this up. Uh,

somebody's gotta make the ocean's work. Somebody's got to keep the underworld running clean. Um, so let's let's get to it. These are jobs now, now, the the aftermath of the

war defines our roles. Now. One thing that doesn't perfectly match up with the story in Greek myth but does seem just generally mythologically interesting is that if the Grand Tach hypothesis is correct, that Saturn would have been responsible for pulling Jupiter out of the fray right, pulling Jupiter back out away from the Sun. Now, Saturn again is associated with Chronus, the father of Jupiter, who was actually the main enemy here. So that part doesn't really line up,

but but I like it anyway. Well, you know, don't discount the bond between father and son. Who knows, even after you fought one another in battle, right, And I just imagine like the six hours Snider cut of this myth, Like, I can imagine this scene where yeah, they've been battling each other, but then, uh, you know, the Saturn reaches out to him and and and and saves him from from destruction or something. My son, I am sorry, I tried to eat you while digesting that stone, I realized.

I'm not sure what he realized. I don't. I don't think Chronus learns lessons. Chronus does not seem like a lesson learner. Well, I don't know if any of the gods do, particularly, I mean not really. It's not really a role for them. It's for mortals are the ones who learn the lessons. Uh, the gods are the ones

who teach the lessons. Yeah, so I think that's maybe gonna have to do it for this episode, but in the next episode we wanted to come back and look at more interesting ways that the tyrant Jupiter could indeed be the decider of the fates of Earth, acting as protector, creator and destroyer all in one. So so come back next time for more Jupiter myths and Jupiter science. That's right,

should be a good time. In the meantime, if you want to check out other that's the Stuff to Blow Your Mind, including past episodes that have dealt with with Saturn and Jupiter uh, mainly with the moons of of Saturn and then also the Jovian moons UH, then you can find those in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed, and you can find that podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts, wherever that happens to be. We

used to ask that you rate, review and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio with the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

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