Space Mirrors: Weapons, Energy & Propulsion

homage to David Bowie. We're recording this two days after he passed away, so we thought it would be fun to do a little space oddity routine since we're gonna be talking about space mirrors. So how how do these work? Why are we putting mirrors in outer space? It's not to look at ourselves, is not to look at planet Earth? Right,

There's many reasons behind this. Yeah, though I will say that I did run across at least one scenario in which they were talking about using mirrors and space as a means to to to better analyze conditions on the Earth. Is that right? Yeah? But for the most part, yeah, we're not putting them up there, but they're not putting haunted mirrors up in space, right, not like the mirror from Oculus. Not yet. That's the sequel. I just came up with it, right there, Oculus to space mirror. The

Oculus mirror, as you is used in a telescope. It gets put in the Hubble Yeah, Hubble space telescope or the James Webb Yeah, exactly. And it's worth mentioning the haunted mirrors because haunted mirrors, I feel, capture a lot of the mystique of the mirror itself. Even if you sort of know how a mirror works, uh, there's still something kind of magical and uncanny about it. And therefore the idea of putting them in space, putting them out there, uh in orbit, uh, is inherently kind of weird and

mystical feeling. Yeah, potential event horizons scenario. Ye. So before we dive into the mirror stuff, I just want to remind everybody you know, Stuff to Blow your Mind is a podcast, and most of you know us from listening to the show, and thank you for doing so. But we do a bunch of other stuff too, and we love if you check that out. So we've got videos that we produce uh and star in. We've got articles that we write, and the best way that you can find most of that stuff is by visiting us at

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We are blow the Mind on those platforms. We also do periscopes every Friday at noon Eastern Standard time, So if you want to hang out with us for twenty minutes or so and talk about what's going on with the show this week, what we're working on for articles or whatever. Uh, that's that's the best way to do that, to talk to us directly, throw us those hearts on periscope, all right, you know. But as we get going here, Uh,

this is not an episode that deals exclusively with telescope. Uh. That is a topic that deserves its own episode or a couple of episodes to explore some of this amazing terrestrial and orbital observatories that we've rolled out over the years. But in discussing the role of mirrors in space, we have to talk at least briefly about their role in

the telescope. Yeah. So, the basic gist of reflector telescopes, which is the kind of telescope that uses mirrors instead of lenses, is that the mirrors collect light within them from a distant object, bring that light to a point or to a focus, and then through an I P S lens, take that focus and magnify it for our human retina, right, so we can see through. Its ability to collect light is directly related to the diameter of

the mirror being used to gather the light. Okay, and Isaac Newton was the first one to develop this idea for the reflector telescope back in sixteen eighty. He used a curved metal mirror to collect the light and reflect it into focus. Then in seventy two, John Hadley developed a design using parabolic mirrors, and these are relatively still

in popular use today. The disadvantage of reflector telescopes, though, is that you have to clean and realign these mirrors, and that actually comes into play with the Hubble telescope. Oh yeah, because there's some some flaw to it. But reflectors are also subject to some light loss as well. So Hubble we mentioned it before. We thought we joked about putting the oculus mirror inside of it. Uh, it's

a cassa grain, that's the title of it. Reflector telescope where the light enters through a small opening and bounces off primary and secondary mirrors inside of it. It's sort of in like a w formation, is how the light is bouncing around in there, and there's other smaller mirrors inside to distribute the light to the eventual instruments that then broadcast them back to us. The mirrors are made, you know, different from how Newton made his with just

a sheet of metal. Uh. They are glass coated with layers of pure aluminum and magnesium fluoride. But the hubble has a couple of flaws. It had a flaw in in its mirrors UM, and so what they used to do is they had several small mirrors inside of it that were called co star UH. And the idea was that they would intercept the beam from the primary mirror that had a flaw, refocus it, and then make it so that you know, is able to be uh parsed out.

But today the instruments that are built into it have corrective optics that compensate for that flaw, so they don't need the co Star mirrors anymore. And then the big one that I'm sure a lot of you have heard about is James Webb Telescope, which is coming up. It is an even bigger mirror that is twenty ft in diameter.

In fact, we just sent a team here uh from How Stuff Works up to the NASA Observatory there where they're working on the James Web telescope, and a couple of videos were produced by our team, primarily led by all Fry from the History podcast. But I'm looking forward to seeing that stuff because they've they apparently got real up close and personal with the James Webb telescope and the production and maybe even the Haunted mirror. That's you gotta ask Hollie if that Oculus mirror made its way

in there. Um. There's also some considerations for something that's called a liquid mirror telescope that could potentially be mounted on the Moon. It would be between sixties six and three hundred and twenty eight feet long, which would collect a thousand and seven hundred and thirty six times more light than the Hubble telescope does. Now, so that's just

my brief primer here on telescopes and their role. And yes, we have space we have mirrors in space four telescopes, but we're going to talk a little bit beyond using them to see far and look into other ways that you could use them potentially as weapons or just to

make people happier. Apparently. Yeah, and you know it's also worth noting that, um, you know, especially with terrestrial observatories, you have mirrors that are solid one piece, and then you also have mirrors that are composed of of of of various segments that all come together. Um, you mentioned the liquid mirror, and I have to to throw in about a new proposition. This just came out. This made a made the rounds from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, good

old JPL. Yeah, two thousand fifteen orbiting rainbows. So and you already know it's gonna be good at the title like that. But this would be a reflective cloud. This is theoretical. This would be a reflective cloud of glitter light grains that are just floating there in space, and they're trapped and manipulated by multiple laser beans. So you don't have to worry about structure or backing material. You have to worry about, you know, unfurling the sails, et cetera.

The pressure of the laser light coming in from different directions ship would shape the cloud and push the small grains to a line in the same direction. So kind of a nano mirror cloud. Yeah, that sounds interesting, curious. I mean, it sounds like it would be a long way off, given given how long the work on James Webb has been going on. Yeah, but it's there's certainly an innovation that is worth thinking about in terms of these various applications that we're going to discuss here, some

of which you know, are a little more feasible than others. Um, we should also mention solar sales because that that's an important aspect of the use of mirrors in space as well, or at least mirrord surfaces. So the concept itself goes back to the sixteenth century UH astronomer mathematician Johannes Kepler UH noticed that comet tails always point away from the sun, implying that sunlight itself was pushing them around like they were little wind solar breeze. Yeah, and there is there

is a solar win We know that now. Um. We we know now that sunlight is a little more than a stream of photons, tiny particles of light, and they don't possess mass, but they do boast a linear momentum, and when they bounce off a reflective surface, they push against that surface. And UH, and then this has been demonstrated because of the solar sales. UH. The Mariner Tin probe successfully demonstrated the technology in seventy four when Nassy

used the probe solar arrays UH as an impromptu solar sale. UH. Subsequent American, Russian, Indian, and Japanese missions have also uh further proven the technology's feasibility. But we really haven't taken the solar sale concept and uh and and fleshed it out in a more uh you know, remarkable way. We haven't created like full full on solar sale vessels. Yeah. The idea is that like, eventually, the continuous force of all those sunlight particles would propel a spacecraft potentially five

times faster than traditional rockets. Yeah, and then if you could also throw in varying uh theoretical means of boosting them with lasers, so you point the laser beams at the sale and add a little bit of artificial win to those solar sales. So this sounds good, right. We're using mirrors in space as a as a as a real means and as a and as a near future means to gaze at the cosmos, and propulsion as a

means to move through it. But what else can we do? Well, apparently we can hurt each other, which is one of our favorite ways to examine space. Right. We love talking about space weapons here and stuff to blow your mind. Yeah, and we've seen time and time again that if you want, you want any kind of a science program funded. If it has a weapon aspect to it, then all the better. That's that's how human civilization gets excited about science. And

that's exactly the case with something called the sun gun. Uh. And this comes from a Life magazine article. Basically, there were U. S. Army technical experts that were in Germany and they came across notes for the sun gun. And the concept was by a German rocket scientists named Herman O Berth, and he pitched this idea in ninete. Now, his idea for this was totally peaceful, right. He wanted to use it to do things like illuminate ports or

thaw out frozen rivers. Uh. He also thought that you could potentially use this as a I mean he was thinking way ahead as a refueling station for spaceships. So there were some sort of sci fi ash ideas here. Yeah. Oh, Berth is one of those names you see thrown around at times with Verna von Braun. He was very much involved with the German rocket program in the creation of

the V two. Yeah exactly. But you know, in this situation, ober comes up with this idea and the nazis going, you know, what, what if we could use that to take the rays and burn our enemy cities and boil

the ocean. Yeah. I mean it comes down again to this case where you have you have scientists who who have this in their areas of expertise, they have their research they cared dearly about, but you're ultimately you're you're you're ultimately having to deal with a warlike and dogmatic force at the top of the chain, and you have to appeal to those masters. And it's like that nowadays.

Like you know, a lot of the scientists that I know who get funding for their work get it from the d O D. I mean, one of my closest friends used to do work out of M I T. And he always reminds me that the GPS was first developed with do O D money. And I'm talking about the Department of Defense in the United States for international listeners. Yeah,

So the scenario more or less remains the same. It's easier to uh to cast a nefarious I obviously on on a scientific experiments going on in scientific endeavors going on during the Third Reich and under the Third Reich. But it has always been the case. And if you have a big project, war is the way it gets green. Well, there don't seem to be any surviving schematics to actually show how they're going to build this mirror sun gun.

But the Life magazine article has like drawings and illustrations in it, which I'm assuming that they came with the notes that were uncovered by these technical experts unless they were drawn for the article. And those illustrations are are available, you can find them, i think, on on Google and and they're wonderful. They're just fabulous retro futurist visions of

what life space could consist of. Um, they didn't really have a plan either on how they were going to have a rocket actually get the get the sun gun up into space, but the idea here was that it

would be pre assembled before it even got up there. Uh. And in the same article that hypothesized that at the distance that the Germans were planning to set up the mirror, which was five thousand, one hundred miles up, the image it would cast on Earth once they actually crunched the math would be forty miles in diameter and it would not be hot enough to do any damage, so there would be like a forty mile uh sunburst that I don't know, maybe it would give you a bit of

a tan. Yeah, that's uh, And that's one of the um the cool things about that Life article is they just immediately tear down the idea. Um. Of course, it's also worth noting that that the German scientists themselves, they were saying that this thing, this would be like years anyway,

so they weren't saying we can do this next year, guys. Um. But yeah, it seems like if you try to extrapolate over it's work into a weapon, as as some of the Nazi individuals may have seemed to have done, it's not gonna work, but as a means to slightly heat areas, right, Yeah, yeah, And I'm curious, like, especially given what we're going to talk about Russian applications for this as well. But you know, maybe they could thaw or ever, but at the very

least they could literally shed some light on the situation. So, Okay, here's the basic breakdown of ober'st thing. Even if we don't have access to as sschematics. The idea is that the mirror would be a concave disk that's one mile in diameter. So we keep coming back to this, the importance of how big the diameter is mirror. The crew would live inside the mirror and they would breathe air

produced by thousands of pumpkin plants. I loved that. And even in some of the drawings they sort of show where these pumpkin plants would be placed that they would be generating oxygen for the car. Wonder why, I guess because of the buyer, if they feel like that would be a good support structure for us. Yeah, it wasn't clear. It wasn't clear, and you know, unfortunately, oh Birth's actual

reasoning for it was kind of lost to time. There was also some weird stuff because they the design was pitched to have centrifugial rotation and mimic gravity, kind of like we're familiar with now from two thousand one of Space that classic scene. Yeah. Um, but they also would wear magnet shoes that would allow them to stick to the floors and walls at the same time to compensate

for the gravity loss. So maybe it's sort of like I'm I'm thinking of that scene in Star Trek the Next Generation where they put on those like magnet boots and walk along in the hull of the Star Trek Enterprise to the star Reck enterprise, the spaceship enterprise. Uh. And so the idea here is that there would be tiny little rocket motors that are attached to the mirror and they would fire those off to control where it was turned, so they could aim the light at Earth.

But after World War Two, you know, the Nazis were done for in terms of the weapon building business, and oh Berth went to other nations to see if they would pick up his idea for the peacetime applications. He originally came up with him for he thought the US could build a mirror that's three hundred miles in diameter. That's huge, uh, to terraform the Earth. So he had

some big ideas, o Berth did. He even suggested, well, you know it would be expensive, Yes, but why don't we just mind all the materials from the Moon to keep the costs down. I keep in mind, we hadn't even been to the moon. He doesn't know what's on the moon. But sure enough, we're gonna he pitches, Yeah, don't worry about it. We'll just we'll make this mirror from moonbits. See he's very much thinking a few steps

ahead of hurrent science. Yeah, I mean this concept is, as far as I can tell, more sci fi than science. But it was, you know, initially pitched to be developed. You know. It's it's interesting that he was already at this point talking about it's use for terraforming, because in recent decades you've you've see space mirrors occasionally pop up

as a means to terraform Mars. The red planets too cold, so you know, you just deploy fleets of orbiting reflective balloons to collect sunlight and reflect it down on the chili surfaces. Um that that in particular was it was a scheme that was proposed by University of Arizona's rogol Waida, who theorizes that such a scheme could raise the Martian temperature in a one fifty acre patch to Earth like

levels of interesting. And likewise, you you see various theories about how you could you could use space mirrors as a geo engineering or plan at hacking measure here on Earth to counteract global warming. Yeah, I've heard that as well. But Overth already had all that uh teaming around in that brain age. Yeah, back in the twenties, he had the whole thing figured out. He just didn't have the means to achieve it. I'm gonna go back to the

sun gun one more time though. Um that edition of Life magazine in busting It, these are some of the particulars that they laid out. They said that the German plan for building may be proved physically impossible by a simple axiom of optics. Uh. This is that light cannot be brought to a sharp pointed focus with lenses or

mirrors unless it comes from a sharp pointed source. Uh. It goes on to say that since the Sun appears in the sky as a disk and not as a point, the best any optical system could do would be to produce an image of that disc. So at very short focal length, the image is small and hot, but the focus length is increased the image becomes progressively bigger and cooler. So at the distances that the Germans what we're dealing with, as you mentioned, they wouldn't be able to cast that

laser like beam of heated intensity on anything. They would just be able to warm things up like ha ha. Enemies enjoy slightly warmer temperatures in this general vicinity, which actually would work out pretty well for the next next space mirror. We're gonna talk about projects, Zin Maya. That's right. When we come back, we're gonna discuss Soviet attempts to cast a little light on the on the world using

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is mind blown, the product is square Space. Go try it out and build that website you've been dreaming off. All right, we're back and we're talking about Project Znamia. Znamia is Russian for banner, because essentially we're talking about a big reflective banner in space. And this is that this was the brainchild of the Space Regathera Consortium or s r C, a partnership of seven Russian aerospace management and engineering companies who proposed and ultimately got off the ground. Uh,

two different variations of this space mirror technology. And the interesting and maybe confusing thing about this too was the first one that went up was the Jennaia too, not Jean Maya one. So I wonder whatever happened to the first one, or maybe they just jumped right to two after a prototype. Yeah, And then the second one is Namia two point five, right, and the third proposed one that never actually happened was going to be Namia three. Yeah.

It's sort of like an iOS operating systems that they just kind of jumped around with the numbers there. So the idea here is that it's a spinning space reflector, apparently sort of similar to the sun gun. I guess in the idea was that it would reflect a three mile wide patch or a five kilometer wide patch of light across a swath of pre dawn Europe. Uh. And now, unfortunately when they tested it, the clouds obscured much of this.

But there were some observers who reported seeing a one second flash that was as bright as a full moon, and they were able to see this on top of the Alps. Apparently there were astronomers knew that it was being tested, so they were looking for it. Yeah, full moon shows up a lot as a descriptor for how bright this thing actually was. Yeah, which is you know, granted, full moon level of luminosity is pretty significantly sent right, especially for the purposes that they came up with. At

least so the scientists at the Space Regatican Sortium. Their hope was that Zimaya two would lead to a constellation of space mirrors that would be an orbit around Earth and they would use these to light up cities with up to a hundred times the full moon's brightness. So you have multiple mirrors operating at the same time, um combining their efforts to illuminate an area. Yeah, and they thought that this would improve morale during the winter, and they would they would use it just after sun set

or just before sunrise. And my first thought was that is so Russian like that is the coming from New England, which is is nowhere year as harshest a Russian winter. I can understand wanting to dispel the grayness of winter. Uh So, And I also thought about this, I wonder what they would do to human circadian rhythms, given how light interacts with the human eye and brain. Well, that was I think one of the the criticisms that that you saw is that people were saying, well, what was it?

What is this due to the human circadian rhythm, essentially rolling out light pollution, more light pollution than uh the urban areas are already produced producing. So how's that gonna mess with the surrounding wildlife? Yeah. In fact, astronomers, other astronomers, not the ones that we're working on this, we're a little bit upset about it because they thought that it

was going to obscure their view of the universe. But if they're looking up with the telescopes we're talking about earlier, they're gonna be getting all kinds of reflections and problems from the constellation of space mirrors. Um. But the other idea that they had, and this seems like a good one to me, is is that they could provide emergency

lighting during disasters. So if a city loses its power, they you know, rotate the mirror is in boom, you've got light for an evening if you have to clear out. You know, probably given during a natural disaster. And I guess you could imagine it being used to in a scenario where all right, this area doesn't have power now, or for some reason there's an energy shortage. Instead of lighting up all the streets, you just cast the mirror and you down and then you can provide the at

least the level of illumination necessary for driving around town. Yeah. Yeah, uh so this was fairly successful. They thought, okay, the one second of full moon light, that's enough for us to call this a success. So let's try it again with Zemmaya two point five in. Yeah, this is six years later that set out to try it again. This one was U and they were hoping to cast a seven kilometer diameter bright spot. Uh that was expected to

have five to ten moon luminosity. So it's gonna be bigger, better, And this was gonna gonna be again a first step in establishing that constellation that we're talking about earlier constellation of reflectors that would allow us to really dose south the illumination. Um. The problem is that when they began to deploy this thing, um, the the the Z two's membrane caught on one of space station mirrors antenna and

ripped it up. So that was not a success. And they didn't even get there their one second of full moon brightness apparently. Yeah, and eventually they just have to jettison in and it burns up on reentry. So that's so despite that, they still had you know, I guess it was already on the books, but they had proposed in MAYA three and the idea for this was that it would have been even larger, and its goal was to test a new reflector concept using something called film photovoltaics.

And it was proposed to go up somewhere around two thousand or two thousand one. As far as I can tell, that never happened. Uh, but there's very little formation on it actually when you go to look it up. Uh. There is a BBC article that came out right after two point five failed that's basically like Nan and Nan, You're never gonna get three up. It's kind of fascinating little piece. It read a lot more like an editorial

than it did like a science article. They're basically, uh, speculating that you know, this thing was way too expensive, it was beyond the resources that Russia had at the time, and that it was a leftover from when the Soviets had really big space aspirations. So they said, it's probably gonna stop, and as far as I can tell, it

seems like it did. Um. But there's an interesting article that's out there after the antenna problem happened with I'm gonna call it Z two point five by a guy named n. Chapawkowski, and he comes up with five different proposals that they could have used to fix two point five, so that three would have been more operational. And I'll just go over these real quick. I mean, his papers

very long and academic in nature. But he talks about using something called rational membrane unfolding technology that would leave some of the folds free, so peripherals like the antennas would stretch together with the rest of the mirrors to make it so that it is less likely to rip apart upon first deployment. Yep. Uh. The other idea he had was to increase the spin so that the membrane needed would have to be heavy enough to withstand the

centrifugeal forces, but light enough to unfold quickly. And his idea was they use compressed air to rapidly unfold the memorane. They have little bursts of compressed air cheot out uh. And then building off of that, he adds the idea, well, why don't we put pipes into the membrane and run the compressed air through those. So three is really just kind of a two point five if we're sticking with the right of the note numbering uh. And then this fourth idea was you would have a compact packing of

the membrane. It would unpack like an accordion in outer space, So it would go up all folded together, and then it would come out like an accordion. And this this led to his fifth idea, which is another similar thing, but the bands of the membrane would unfold in a concertina fashion. Okay, so I'm imagining essentially a big, vaguely

accordion shaped reflective space balloon. Yeah, I mean, I think you know the conclusion of his article is basically like, maybe we could combine a little bit of idea number three with idea number one and idea number five and we can make this thing work out. But and never and never never went up. So with this and uh and some of these other applications of space mirrors, I mean, ultimately,

what you're getting down to is the manipulation of light. Uh, not only in terms of illumination, but also as as far as energy is concerned. And so really the applications apply to any situation in which you would want to redirect solar energy for propulsion, as we've mentioned, for observation, as we've mentioned also just for the energy usage. You could potentially use these mirrors to to refocus solar energy onto some sort of a solar up into onto a

solar energy collector. And that's what I was thinking about, is it if you wanted to get really serious about solar panels. Again, the State of the Union was last night and President Obama was talking a lot about solar energy. Build something like this and have it just beamed down the energy right at it. But I don't know that if that's practical or not. Yeah, that's always the challenge with with solar energy, whether you're talking something with space

meters or just say passive solar home design. How do you best design the system so that you maximize uh, the benefits of the solar energy harvesting? Uh, and that it's not just some sort of you know, expensive plus one right exactly. Yeah, I would assume that given the costs involved. We've talked about how much it costs to fly things up and out or space before, especially we talked about space weapons and our rods from God episode. Uh that I don't know if would if the cost

benefit analysis works out. Yeah, indeed. And now when you start getting into that far future area, yeah, you know, kind of like over it was discussing, you know, where we already have the Moon base in place, and then you can dream outward from that you get into a lot of really far fetched and and and really remarkable

ideas about how you could use a space mirror. So, what if you had a space mirror large enough to reflect the Sun's rays back on itself in a in a meaningful amount, say you know, a giant space mirror position on the other side of the Sun perhaps uh, from Earth. Could you essentially make the Sun into its own solar sale and then you utilize this effect to propel the solar system in the direction of your choice. Wait, so the Solar system itself becomes a spaceship. Yeah, yeah,

that's kind of the idea here. And now it's definitely a type to Cardassian civilization, uh concept. But yeah, the idea is that if you had a basically a megastructure in space, this big reflective megastructure, you would have what is referred to as a class A stellar engine that would use the impulse of the radiation emitted by a star to produce thrust. And this is also called a

Shakadov thruster. I imagine navigating spaceship Milky Way or sorry, not Milky Way, but spaceship Solar System would be extremely difficult. The calculations involved, uh, would be mind blowing. Yeah. It would definitely be the domain of a of a type too, sumplation as opposed to us um And I think I've

seen this rolled out occasionally in sci fi. There's any n Ebanks book where the the the Earth becomes threatened by an orc cloud that is going to block out most of the Sun's rays and so therefore it becomes necessary to move the Solar system to to a different location um or perhaps they merely move the Earth in that in that's in that particular novel. I'm having trouble

remembering off the top of my head. But yeah, when you start talking about capturing all of the energy in the solar system and the utilizing that, you're in this uh, this type two level of far future technology, and I'm just it's only just now dawning on me. I didn't even write down a note about this. And I don't want to spoil the spoil the movie for anybody who hasn't seen it yet. But there is something like this in the new Star Wars movie. Okay, yeah, you haven't

seen I have not seen it yet. Plans keep falling apart. I don't know that it's mirrors necessarily, but they harness the power of the sun. Okay, some sort of some sort of solar super weapon. Then yeah, I'm the last person on Earth too that that has not seen I don't know about that. I'm sure that some of you out there haven't seen it yet either. That's why I don't want to go too far into it. But yeah, but hey, that's one more thing I have to look forward to when I see the new Star Wars film.

So there you have it. We've We've rolled through just a number of the key key points in the history of space mirrors and some of their their actual and theoretical uses. But we're curious, you know, what else is out there, what's popping around your your head when it comes to either sci fi visions of space mirrors or just sort of possible UH uses for them, Like, for instance, what about the possibility of using solar UH mirrors in

space to illuminate a particular growing area for crops. Yeah, yeah, right, that seems like it would be a natural one. And I didn't get the impression from either the German or Russian designs that they were thinking along those lines. Yeah, but you could essentially have your own It's like having your own hydroponic growing area, except you could have just an enormous field somewhere. All you need isn't is the oribital mite of a It's like you just gotta have

this multi billion dollar steaking up there. So yeah, if you if you have ideas about this or or more resources for us to follow up on, please let us know. And you know, like I said at the top, we are always of llable on social media Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. We don't just post our own stuff on there either. We like to uh curate a lot of the weird science, the information that we find or across the web that

we don't have time to put into our episodes. Yeah, so follow us on those accounts, uh if you use them, and you can keep up keep up with us that way. And hey, if you want to reach out to us directly, you can always hit us up on email. That blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this and thousands of other topics How stuff works dot com. Bla bla fine nine nine nine nine