Ep.9: Quack Quack Sneeze

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Episode Agenda with Time Stamps:

• 00:30 - Banter
  • Josh: First vaccine dose
  • Ian: New heat pump
  • Patrick: Power outage
• 11:56 - “Break” - Thank you to our listeners.
• 13:07 - Gaming
  • Ian: Silver & Gold, Quacks of Quedlinburg
  • Patrick: BLIZZCONLINE, Diablo 4, Diablo 2 remaster 
  • Josh: Nintendo Direct, Skyward Sword rerelease
• 32:32 - Science
  • Josh: permafrost melting could release more carbon than all of human history combined https://www.sciencealert.com/study-reveals-thawing-permafrost-is-rusting-the-arctic-s-crucial-carbon-sink 
  • Patrick: Work With Einsteinium https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210206125326.htm
  • Ian: NASA’s Perseverance lands on Mars - https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/18/science/nasa-mars-landing

Credits:

• Cover Art Photo: Mosby Lake - follow this dog on instagram at regular_mo.
• Cover Art Font: Paper Cuts 2 by Empire of Dust (Daniel Werneck) is Public Domain.
• Intro Music: Shortened version of “Sweat Time” by Loyalty Freak Music is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License.
• Outro Music: Shortened version of “Alethia” by Nihilore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Transcript

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Ep. 9 - Quack Quack Sneeze

Ian: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Yondercast  my name is Ian Lake and I'm joined this week by, is that a Porsche? Is that a Bugatti? No, it's Patrick Leitch

Patrick: [00:00:15] hi guys.

Ian: [00:00:16] And over there. Is that a Yugo? it's Josh Baltzell.

Josh: [00:00:23] expected a bicycle or a skateboard or something.

Patrick: [00:00:26] A Roomba.

Josh: [00:00:27] A Roomba. Yes.

Ian: [00:00:30] Well, welcome back, everybody.  Josh? What's been going on in your life.

Josh: [00:00:34] I, you know, not a lot. I got my first dose for my vaccine. And I just have to say how incredible those medical professionals are, the nurses that run, that thing are absolutely amazing. I was in and out of there in like 20 minutes. And that includes like my 15 minute wait time. I was not expecting them to work that quickly.  Yeah. They, they are like a well-oiled machine. You walk in there, they take your name, there's all these people running around and then you're in line. They, I didn't even realize that I was getting my shot and then they were like, go stand over there. 

Ian: [00:01:10] Yeah, our medical professionals, man, they deserve all of the praise and thanks that they are receiving and the Yondercast cast. Thanks them as well.

Josh: [00:01:23] Yeah.

Ian: [00:01:24] That's awesome. I'm signed up for my first dose next week and I'm excited. I'm really excited. I've been the biggest thing that's happened to me in the last week is that we got a new heat pump. So a couple of months ago now our gas furnace, which is like this. It's a furnace, I think from 1994 or something like that, it was this super old beast down in the basement that heated our home.

And it just stopped working a couple of months ago, right in the middle of winter. And it just didn't work for about a week and we were super, super cold. And we were scrambling try and figure out how to fix it or replace it or something. And then it came on. And so we had a little bit of time to kind of.

Plan for what the best replacement would be. And we ended up getting an air source heat pump, which is if anybody's not familiar, it's a newer technology. Although it's not brand new heat pumps had been around for like at least a decade probably longer. But it's basically an AC machine and air conditioner, except that it can flip around and move the heat the opposite way.

So in the summertime it can move heat out of your house. To the outside and in the wintertime, it can flip around and move heat from the outside, into your house. And man, I love this thing. It's so cool.

Patrick: [00:02:41] that's awesome.

Ian: [00:02:42] really excited to have AC we've never had central AC before in the summer and the heat works great.

Patrick: [00:02:48] Wow.

Ian: [00:02:49] pretty amazing,

Patrick: [00:02:50] That's incredible.

Ian: [00:02:51] And it's like way more environmentally friendly. There's no combustion. And the like energy to heat ratio is a lot higher than a traditional furnace. So. Helping the environment too. That's the most important thing going on thing in my life

Patrick: [00:03:07] That's awesome.

Ian: [00:03:08] at my house for like 12 hours on Wednesday.

That was, that was a little exhausting. And that was a cold day. Cause he, he was off all day, but and it was snowy, but but it's

Patrick: [00:03:16] I imagined you going into your basement, like in home alone, where it has that big, like furnace monster that has like the chomping gate and everything else when your power is like going down, your furnace is going out and you're done. They're scared of the basement with that furnace thing going off.

That's how I envisioned it. 

Ian: [00:03:32] So the furnace is right next to my drum set is it's about like four feet away from my drum set. And it's the direction that I face when I'm playing my drums. And there's a grading on it on the side of it that faced. I guess, I shouldn't say, I should say in past tense, there was a grading on it that faced my drum set.

And every time that it kicked on, because it was a gas furnace, there was like this like explosion of flame that I could see behind the furnace. So it actually was kind of like that you, you saw the ignition of this, like, boom, and then, you know, and then it got a little bit lower and more controlled, but 

Patrick: [00:04:09] please tell me that happened while you were drumming. So you're

Josh: [00:04:11] I was going to

say. 

Patrick: [00:04:13] sort of like like techno rave concert person that as soon as the, the drop happens, the fire goes off and you just start going a little bit harder. Is that kind of like pyrotechnics in a concert sort of thing?

Ian: [00:04:27] Heck yeah. Yeah, it happened all the time. Cause our furnace was just like, it was one of these old things that would just like turn on and blast heat until it was like 10 degrees above what the thermostat said. And then it would just shut off let it cool down to like 10 degrees below the thermostat and then would just blast on.

So it was on and off all day. So yeah, it happened all the time.

Patrick: [00:04:44] All about the average, doesn't matter, keeping it at a constant temperature. It's all about the average.

Ian: [00:04:49] Patrick, what's been going on with you. You've had an eventful week.

Patrick: [00:04:52] Oh my God. That's to say the least. Well, my power went out Friday at about midnight. And then, so this is what Saturday now? So about a week 

Ian: [00:05:01] Saturday. So like eight days ago, your power went out.

Patrick: [00:05:04] It hasn't been out for eight days, so that's good. But so it went out about Friday at midnight and then came back on the next day at about 5:00 PM.

And we thought we had gotten really, really lucky. Cause at that time, my parents, their power had gone out. My wife's parents had power, had gone out and we have two little ones, so it was a little bit nerve wracking. But so it came back on and we were kind of like celebrating like, Oh my gosh, like we narrowly missed it.

So we were trying to coordinate with my parents, having them come over them, do laundry, them, take showers and all that sort of stuff. And then it went out again. And so it went out, I think, God, what was that? So it came on for like Saturday, for like six hours and then went off again Sunday morning and then we just didn't have it for four days, three days after that.

So along with the power outage came falling trees in our backyard. So we had like massive tree branches falling down in our backyard, in our front yard. And so not only are we like huddling for warmth, all four of our family members in one room, we're hearing just these tree branches crashing down all around us.

It was kind of like eerily scary, but also like very like. Surreal and almost like a euphoric calming sort of way. Like you, there was no ambient sound like we live pretty close to the highway, so you can kind of hear cars going back and forth. There wasn't any of that. There was no humming of the AC or the heating.

There was no humming of the fridge or anything else. It was just silent. And you could hear every tree cracking and breaking. And the, in the back of my head is like, great. That's probably just over another power line. And I remember looking, I mean, I was habitually, probably OCD checking the PGE app where there's like hundreds of thousands of power out and I can see how many lines are down and just like a couple streets.

There's like probably 10 to 15 lines in a. Probably four block radius, just down, just out. And they had a crew there. They were probably working around the clock, talking about thinking like the medical professionals and talk about talking about some of those trade people being there from out of state, out of everywhere to try and get this going, let alone.

Everything happening in Texas, too. It was just, it was amazing to see the response. But it was, yeah, it was nuts. So we had to pack up the family and move home to my parent's house for a little while because they got their power back on. And it was almost a surreal experience. I was actually telling some of my students about this and AP chemistry that I might've been teaching.

My high school chemistry class from the same bedroom, I took high school chemistry in, and I can honestly say I would've never, in a million years imagined that happening. And it was kind of funny, but kind of like poetic in some sense of like, it would be so weird to be like, Hey guys, guess what I'm doing?

I'm giving you homework, which I really don't give that much homework, but I'm giving you homework. In the same place I was doing my homework. Like that's, that's pretty surreal what an interesting experience to be in. But. We were lucky enough to have the power come back on and my parents got theirs.

Their internet was out for a little bit. So trying to teach with digital learning and no internet, it was, it was pretty stressful. So hopefully there's not a lot of people out there that are still without that, because trying to learn in that experience where you don't have your basic necessities met and trying to teach in that experience was.

Very, very stressful. So I'm very fortunate to have it back and hopefully people in the area or people in the other part of the U S who don't have it, get it back soon. So, yeah, it's, I'm, I'm here. I got a smile on my face, so that's good, but otherwise it's been very, very stressful, but I'm very happy to have it back.

Ian: [00:08:23] yeah, it man, the last week, especially last weekend for, for background, for anybody who is any listeners who are outside the Portland area we've just been having crazy power outages, not quite as crazy, or as unprecedented as what's happening in Texas, but there are people who have been out of power for, you know, Over a week and are still out of power.

And there was just like massive, like most of the city was out of power at one point. And

Josh: [00:08:48] of them didn't even have water.

Ian: [00:08:50] Yeah. And it's been, it's been wild and we had a lot of snow and the roads were terrible.  I had to take Kassidy or Kassidy had to get to work the next day and. I decided to drive with her and drive her there so that like we could kind of handle the, the process together. And man, it was a adventure, the normal way that she would go to work was blocked by a tree down.

So we turned around and kind of went the alternative way. And that road was closed as we had to go all the way into downtown Portland, which is a total like mush pit of slush. 

And And we had to go through there and then like go up the Hill to the, the hospital from the completely other side, it took like over an hour to, to get her to work.

What would normally take 15 minutes? And there were just people in cars snowed in and, you know, stuck all along the whole drive. All the lights were out. It just felt like a disaster. It was a disaster. Hopefully we're on the other side of it now.

Patrick: [00:09:48] Yeah, I know. It's been interesting to like being able to talk about that in my class as well. Talking about the impact of physics and chemistry and biology on what's going on right now. Like you talked about the power plants going down. There's a lot of good lessons to learn of why we winterize things and why we need to expect high and low temperatures all over the place now.

 So hopefully it's not just a situation, a disaster that we experienced and go through, but also learn from and how we can use our brains and our willpower and each other to make it better in the end and make sure this doesn't happen again, because it feels like some of this was avoidable and some of this wasn't avoidable. And I mean, we were keeping food outside. It was so cold outside that it was, it was colder sometimes in our house. So having it, not in the fridge was good. And then some days it was colder outside. So we'd like take our milk and take everything perishable and just bury it in the snow to keep it from going bad.

So it was one of those things that was just an interesting, like, Like balance between, like, what do we keep things here? Do we keep things there? Do we go to our parents? Do we go to this place? And I'm just fortunate enough to have those opportunities, because I know someplace some places, people don't have those luxuries.

And that's what I guess ate at me the most is like, sure. We were able to make it through it, but I was just so like nervous for other people that might not have some of those same luxuries and it just made me worry. Well, what can we do to make sure that doesn't happen again for those that are maybe less fortunate, but.

It seems like we're out on the other end in Portland. Hopefully it's soon for some of the people down in Texas and some of the East coast, Midwest places.

Ian: [00:11:21] I was just reading about. How all of this is, you know, totally linked to climate change as well. And so that's just something to really think about me. We are really between the crazy wildfires that we had this last year and that we have continued to have for the last several years. And that kind of just worsening like winter weather and the more, you know, these, these kind of wild weather patterns it's, it's evidence. it's real and it's affecting us now. And you know, there's, there's stuff that we can do about it. Well, I want to get onto talking about what you guys have been doing for fun, but, but first I want to just do a quick shout out to our listeners who we truly appreciate and who continue to give us positive reviews on Apple podcasts and positive ratings.

And I want to read one review from. One of our listeners named SidJB23, who says aside from being three amazing teachers, your skills as podcast producers are so amazing. The chemistry between you is amazing. And I enjoy listening. I started listening about a week ago and I'm enjoying each and every one of your episodes.

I appreciate all you do. You've kept such a positive attitude through the whole show and made life feel so close to normal. Please do not stop with this amazing content.

Josh: [00:12:38] Oh, that's really sweet.

I love the pun, the chemistry between us.

Patrick: [00:12:45] They got to stop with some of these reviews though. Cause I mean, they can't see our faces, but like we're like misting up and tearing up and they kind of, they're going to stop it. I mean, keep it coming. We love that stuff, but at the same time, it's like, Whoa, kind of tugs on the heartstrings a little bit.

Ian: [00:12:57] it's true. It is really meaningful to hear from our listeners, especially when, you know, in this case, we can tell that they're also students of ours. That's really. Wonderful to hear. Well, let's talk about games. I mean, a little bit. And uh, I'd like to kick off this conversation because I've been doing some, some tabletop gaming.

I'll be the tabletop representative for today. And playing a couple of games that I've been really excited about and that I want to recommend to anybody who, who might be interested as well. So, I've been playing two games with my wife recently, the first is this little game called silver and gold, which is super inexpensive.

I think it's like 12 bucks. You can get it on Amazon. I saw it in target the other day. So it's pretty wide distribution. It's it's well available. And it's, it's just a fantastic quick, but really fun. Game that would be fantastic for couples or families playing with, you know, people who don't do a lot of gaming.

Basically the premise is that it's a stack of cards and each of the cards is a little Island and the islands are made up of it's a shape made up of a bunch of squares. And so everybody takes a couple of these Island cards and you get a whiteboard marker. You get like a dry erase marker. And the cards must be waterproof or something because you can actually write on the cards and then just wipe it off.

And what you do is there's another little stack of cards and you draw a card and it's got a Tetris shape on it. So it could be, you know, like four boxes in an L shape or a box made of four squares or just three boxes in a row. And you just draw a card and everybody fills in that shape of boxes on one of their islands. And then once everybody's done, you just draw another card and you fill in more shapes. And the goal is to just fill up islands as quickly as you can. It usually takes like three or four turns to fill up an Island. And when you fill up an Island, you get another one. And there's a couple of little wrinkles in there.

There's like, it's, it's kind of like a pirate theme game. So there's gold coins and there's Xs and there's Palm trees on the islands. And when you fill those in, you get little bonus points for them, and it's just super simple, really fun. Really like engaging, just, you know, filling in boxes, checking things off.

And there's some really interesting decisions and it plays in like 15 or 20 minutes. So highly recommend that one. It's hard to go wrong, especially at that price point.

Patrick: [00:15:11] Quick hitter co-ops are like what we would probably look into for ours, because I know Kaylie and I really like to do co-op stuff. We're both fairly competitive people. So after we put the kids to bed, we don't want to go play a pretty competitive game against each other. We want to work together towards a goal.

And that seems like it would be a really great option for people that maybe are on the competitive side and want to work together towards a common goal versus work against each other in a way.

Ian: [00:15:38] it is technically a competitive game. You are trying to score more points than everybody else that, you know, by the way that you fill in your islands, but what's kinda cool about it is that it almost feels like. And this isn't a bad thing. It almost feels more like a solitaire game that you're playing with.

Other people who are also playing the game because you draw card and everybody fills in the same shape at the same time. So the other thing that's great about us, there's no turns everybody's playing all the time. 

Patrick: [00:16:04] Kind of like bingo in a way. 

Ian: [00:16:05] yeah, yeah. Kind of like that. So it's really cool.

And with regards to the competitive side of it, I have yet to win this game. My wife and I have played it like four times. 

Patrick: [00:16:15] I'm very proud of you for admitting that.

Ian: [00:16:18] And I don't care because I just like filling in boxes. I just have fun. Explore an islands.

Patrick: [00:16:24] That's awesome.

Ian: [00:16:26] the other game that I've played that I absolutely love.

I've only played at one time, but it's already one of my favorite games and I don't think I'll ever get rid of it. It's called the Quacks of Quedlinburg. you guys might like this game because it's almost a chemistry game. idea is that you are quack doctors who are making potions to sell to the 

the, population that doesn't know any better.  And basically what you're doing is you buy ingredients to put into your ingredient bag, and then every turn, you draw ingredients out of your bag and add them to your cauldron to make your potion.

And you can just keep drawing ingredients for as long as you want. But if you draw the wrong combination of ingredients, your potion explodes and you get nothing. So it's this kind of. Almost digs into the like gambling of aspect of, of what makes things engaging, where you're like, Oh, do I add another ingredient from this bag?

I don't know what it's going to be.

Josh: [00:17:29] it's black Jack.

Ian: [00:17:32] Exactly. But if I draw the wrong thing, my post is going to explode and I'm going to lose everything that I've done so far. And then, so you just, you do that. You buy new ingredients, you score points. It's just a super fun time.

And my wife absolutely loved it as well. She said it's one of her favorites of all time as well. So

Patrick: [00:17:48] that's

Josh: [00:17:48] Oh, that's 

Patrick: [00:17:49] risk, high reward. 

Ian: [00:17:50] yeah, exactly. It's a little hard to get right now. I think that it's won, like the game of the year in Europe I think last year. And so it's kind of suddenly had a, a big surge of popularity. So it's a little hard to get. It's a little expensive at the moment, but they should be reprinting it and it should come down in price.

So, put that one on the list for future

Josh: [00:18:10] That's usually the case with the really good board games. Cause I was on a waiting list for the game compounded for almost a year. It took me forever to get that game. It was totally worth it though.

Ian: [00:18:22] Yeah, that's a cool, that's a very chemistry game.

Josh: [00:18:25] Yeah. It's just straight up chemistry. It's not even that. It's like chemistry. That is you are a chemist making chemicals.

Ian: [00:18:32] Patrick. I see that you've been excited about some new developments from one of your favorite video game developers.

Patrick: [00:18:39] Yes. So recently as of like yesterday Blizzconline, usually it's BlizzCon, but they changed it to Blizzconline, which fortunately for them worked out really well has put out a bunch of new stuff about like Overwatch 2, and more specifically Yeah, the Diablo series. So I kind of grew up loving a RPGs, which is like action role-playing games where you, they call it like a hack and slash where you're basically running around and just feeling super overpowered and not at the beginning, but at the very end and just kind of picking up items, it's kind of like a blend between like role, true role playing games, like a Dungeons and dragons.

And then something more along the lines of like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Like, wow. World of Warcraft, but I grew up playing Diablo one, which is, I mean, I can remember sitting in my, at my dad's house, like on the oldest computer, you could ever imagine just playing this really horrible graphics.

Very fun game. And then I got into Diablo 2. So to give some insight into my high school experience, we were playing a lot of Diablo 2, like a lot, like we played Diablo two and we played Counter-Strike. Those were kind of our two big games at the time. And so we played so much Diablo 2, that we would actually I'm going to admit something, but I ran like a bot.

To do what they call Pindle runs for. I'm getting into some very nitty gritty. So if anyone's played Diablo two in that time period, you might remember that, but there was one boss that you would kill over and over and over and over and drop it the best loot in the game. Well, they had third-party programs that could run a bot that would do it for you.

So we would run this while we were sleeping. So we would literally run this while we were asleep. Yeah. I told you I was going to admit some stuff, but at that point we had already played the game to its max. We had literally leveled 99 characters, which you would have to play for weeks at a time without dying to get there.

Right. Do you have to do what they call ball runs over and over and over and over and over and over and over. So to do this, either you sat at your computer for days upon days, or you did some not very integrity based things like a bot. But so what we would do is we'd run this Pendle by it and I can remember me and a couple of my buddies would get to class in the morning.

We had the same first period together and we'd just hash out what we got from the night. I'd be like, Oh, what did you get? What did you get? I'll trade you that for a trade you this. And so I'm sure my first period teacher loved it as were. Strategizing and theory crafting our video games on our English papers.

But I just, it has so many good memories for me. And, and one of the things that came out from BlizzCon line is a remastered version of that game. And so like, it's always hard. You, you want to go back and play remastered game. Like for me, final fantasy seven remastered was awesome because it, it took a lot of the same elements of the original final fantasy, which.

Again, I'm going to admit something here. I printed off the entire walkthrough for that game. In my middle school library, it was like 500 pages long as a teacher right now. If I saw one of my students printing off a 500 page walkthrough in the library first, I'd give them a high five because that's awesome.

I did the same thing in secondary. You better not do that again because paper's really expensive. But. It was, it was one of those things that like once I had that remaster of final fantasy seven, it brought back a lot of those same memories. And I think sometimes we play these games for nostalgic reason where we're feeling like, Oh my gosh, I remember doing this same exact thing a while ago.

And you kind of hope that they change a little bit about it. So it becomes something slightly new. So it doesn't feel like, Oh, this isn't as good as I remember it. Like sometimes we play games that we used to play all the time. Like. Oh, I only liked this because maybe I didn't know any better. And now that I've played a game that's different and slightly better, it's not the same, but I'm really, really pumped for that Diablo to remaster.

And I think it's going to come sometime later this year. So it might bring back some of the nostalgia of playing with some, some buddies and then hashing out what we got the next morning from. Yes, I understand cheating. But Hey, when you need to get the best.

Josh: [00:22:27] people like you are the reason why I'm scared of playing PVP online. I can't play anything that's online or PVP because there's always going to be someone that set up a bot or played for 16 hours every day. And then I'm just going to get destroyed as soon as I log in.

Patrick: [00:22:43] I will play with you and I will teach you the ways of this new Diablo coming out soon, which I know, I know some of you guys love the Diablo series, but Diablo four, they brought out a bunch of announcements, which is the newest version. So Diablo two is probably from. My high school days. And then Diablo three came out probably when I was in the college class, past days.

And now that I'm well past that they're coming out with Diablo four, which honestly they didn't give a date, which probably means it's like five years from now, which is how blizzard usually runs in the Diablo series. But it's got a lot of cool aspects that was, they released a lot on their PVP, those player versus player aspects that Josh was so afraid of, but Hey, we could be a team.

We can work together 

Josh: [00:23:24] I'm just going to follow you around and pick up gear.

Patrick: [00:23:27] Yeah, which I would love, like, I would love that. 

Ian: [00:23:29] that's what I'm

Excited about

because I've never played a Diablo game. I, of course I had friends like in high school and stuff who were super into it, but if I'm getting the theme, correct, you can correct me, but you're just kind of. Sorry, not to, not to like minimize it or anything, but you're a character running around through hell, I believe fighting demons and monsters and collecting gear and stuff.

Right.

Patrick: [00:23:52] Pretty much, yeah. Different levels of it. And you're fighting different demons and that sort of thing.

Ian: [00:23:56] Yeah. And so like, it looked cool, but it was never something that I was like super interested in doing by myself. But you sent a really excited text in like all caps yesterday

Patrick: [00:24:07] probably 17 of them in all caps and lots of exclamation points.

Ian: [00:24:12] about the fact that the Diablo to remaster is coming too. Like all platforms like console's PC.

I think it's even coming to the Nintendo switch and you can cross platform play with anybody on any console. And that's super exciting. Like, I will definitely get that game. If I can be sitting on my couch with my switch and playing with you guys on your PCs or wherever you want to play. That's super exciting.

Patrick: [00:24:39] I just, it blows my mind that this technology just hasn't come out with other things. And I don't know if there's limitations, I'm obviously not a software programmer on any of those platforms, but it just seems like this would be the way to do it. Right? Like if, and then I can switch to switch to this switch using that word twice.

But if I needed to, like, we could go and we could play together mobile. Right. Like, we can totally bring both of our switches to a place in play where I don't have to have the traditional high school LAN party where I'd take my entire tower and my laptop and my computer and my monitors, literally everything.

So a bunch of us could play together. This could be a straight up mobile experience. Like we could be moving around and pick it up and put it down whenever we want, because. We're all busy. We have tons of lives and this is just another aspect to easing the playing field of different styles of gaming and different styles of individuals where they're at to meet them.

And so I know it's for Diablo two, I believe, but if they could have that for Diablo four as well, I mean, that would just be. Just awesome. Because as I think we talked about last time, the, the ease of play on the switch is honestly just, it seems flawless. Like there's very few issues with how it plays.

And I think that's one of the biggest issues with Diablo on the computers. I'm constantly clicking or holding the mouse button to go somewhere. So I like to feel like I'm gonna get arthritis and my index finger, just trying to like pick up everything and anything else, whereas on a switch, it just feels.

A little bit more natural. At least I get to workout different fingers slash digits, whatever we're going to call them. So, I mean, I would love, I mean, it makes me so happy that I play with you guys. Like we get even have a live Twitch stream of us playing Diablo two remastered. We'll having our podcasts.

Like I've, I'm not gonna lie. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, which is why you guys got 17,000 texts in all caps and lots of exclamation points.

Ian: [00:26:18] I'm actually shocked that at this point in our lives, we all don't have Extremely huge buff, like thumbs and index fingers and all the rest of our fingers are these weird, like little worms, because like, like we spend so much time just like, you know, using those muscles in those fingers so much more than the other ones.

Josh: [00:26:40] I could crush your skull with these three fingers.

Patrick: [00:26:44] especially in like first person shooters and movement games, w a S D like those keys, moving those around, like, I swear that movement itself is going to like destroy our fingers later on in life. Or we're going to have the most like pronounced joints from arthritis, like later on, it's only going to be specific ones.

Ian: [00:27:01] we'll see. We'll see. It's worth it. Josh. I want to know what you've been up to.

Josh: [00:27:07] So I watched Nintendo direct instead of BlizzCon live. Cause I I've been just really excited for new switch games. I don't know. The switch is my favorite console in the world. I would, you guys restart started like talking about how you're gonna play on the switch for Diablo four. I was like, great. So we're all going to start bringing our switches to work. And after school we're going to finish grading. I know

students are going to start busting into our classrooms. Like, what are you playing? Like go away.

Patrick: [00:27:36] Well, we've had smashed tournaments before at the end of finals. Like I would have people in my room, we'd hook up a switch to my projector. And after finals we just sit and have smash tournaments.

Josh: [00:27:44] Oh yeah, absolutely. I love that. I got really excited because I've never played Skyward sword before and they're coming out with a rerelease of that and everybody talks. Yeah. And everybody talks about how it's one of their favorite legend of Zelda games. I I've never had the opportunity to play it before.

So I'm really excited about that because. It's been a while since they've released any switch games. I don't know. I've been kind of frustrated

Ian: [00:28:11] yeah, that I loved Skyward sword. It's one of my favorites. I'm a weirdo. My favorite Zelda of all time was the wind Waker,

Patrick: [00:28:19] I liked that a lot though. That's that's not weird. I, the different style of it, I actually enjoyed it. And I'm kind of an Ocarina of time sort of person, like that's my bread and butter in terms of Zelda games. But yeah, I liked that one.

Ian: [00:28:33] yeah, I, I just the visual style and it also came out at like a really important time in my life. You were talking about nostalgia, Patrick. I have so many memories of like coming home from school and just like booting up the old game cube and play in the wind, Waker and dislike completely discovering every single secret in that game.

I know a lot of people didn't love it as much as the others, but it was my favorite and Skyward sword is I think a really  under appreciated one because it brought back that sort of whimsical visual style from the wind Waker kind of combined that  with the slightly more realistic kind of ocarina of time thing, and really paved the way for, you know, what came for the future, which was Oh my God, what's the most recent one wild breath 

Josh: [00:29:16] breath of the wild. Yeah.

Ian: [00:29:17] And it was just so cool, like that game, the fact that you're like in a city in the sky and you just like jump off the side of the city to go to all of the, like other places on the world. It's just, yeah. I'm excited for you to play it. I'm

Josh: [00:29:31] that's why I'm so excited. I've never, I don't even know what you're talking about right now. Like jumping off a city. That sounds awesome.

Patrick: [00:29:38] Oh, you're going to find out when you get it.

Josh: [00:29:40] Yeah, no, I breath of the wild, one of my favorite games ever. My students know this, I, I wore a hat for an entire term, cause I couldn't get a haircut because of quarantine, but like I wore my breath of the wild hat every single day and I have the same exact hat, but it's Majora's mask instead.

I love the legend of Zelda. So the fact that they're coming out with another game that I've never played. Even though it's a rerelease. I'm super excited. We need more. Rereleases

Ian: [00:30:08] I agree when they started doing like all of these re it was a few years ago that they started just like, Hey, we're just going to rerelease all our old games. And I was kinda like, Oh, so you're too lazy to make new games, but it gives everybody. We've kind of reached this point. I feel like in video game history where like there are games that are 10, 15 years old that are still wonderful and just kind of like bringing those back, making them available on the current platform, maybe updating the graphics a little bit, just makes it so that people can revisit them and new people can experience them.

I'm all for it.

Patrick: [00:30:42] Especially with some of the limitations that those games had at the time, like, especially in final fantasy seven, you always wondered like what it would be like if this was like more three dimensional, like you could actually see the world in a very different way, or you could, you could go to different levels of the environment in a more seamless fashion, or you had more environmental effects, right?

Like things crumbling and things falling down around you for that more immersive experience. And so. Finding a way to make it time lists is, is okay in terms of like it lasting over the ages. But I mean, updating it is, that's not a bad option that just makes it so much more appealing. And the, I mean, they're gonna make money off of it too, because the nostalgia factor is just so high.

Josh: [00:31:21] It's been like four years and I'm already ready for the Subnautica rerelease.

Patrick: [00:31:27] my favorite thing is just reading so many people being so scared of Subnautica that's like one of my, literally my favorite things to do is read on some social media platforms. How people play Subnautica and literally just want to stop because it's so scary, but they can't because it's so amazing.

Josh: [00:31:41] Okay. 

Ian: [00:31:42] That's the one caveat to the rereleases is that if you're going to come out with. A rerelease of a ten-year-old game, please don't charge $60 for that game. 

Like make it affordable. Since, you know, the development cost of that was probably a lot less than like coming up with a completely new title. Just, just lower that barrier of entry so that, you know, the most people can experience and enjoy it as possible.

Josh: [00:32:05] I got tricked by a game and I'm not going to out the game makers, but Oh, I'm still mad at them because I thought that I was purchasing a sequel because it was $60. It was, it was just a remake. It was the exact same game. And the graphics weren't even that well improved. And so like, I was like, I own this game.

Why, why did I spend $60 on this? I'm still mad about it.

Ian: [00:32:32] Well, I think it's time for us to talk a little bit about science. And I see that we've all chosen some pretty diverse and interesting things that have been going on in the world of science lately. And I want to hear from Josh first, because I want to get the bad news out of it.

Josh: [00:32:47] I know, right. I felt really bad. You guys are all like optimistic and happy mind brings us right back to climate change and it's like ha, doom and gloom.

Patrick: [00:32:59] we've been over this in previous episodes. Josh just loves the villainous aspect of bringing things to light.

Josh: [00:33:05] I do I, I am one lab accident away from trying to take over the world with chemistry. Like it's going to happen. Everyone's going to be like, have you heard that our world? Emperor was my old chemistry teacher?

Patrick: [00:33:20] Hey, I was three floors above that guy.

Ian: [00:33:23] Josh is the real quack of quedlinburg

Josh: [00:33:25] it's true. I wear that title with honor. Yeah, Nope. My article was actually really cool because it's something that you don't really think about when we think about carbon emissions. And we think about climate change and greenhouse gases, I don't know about everybody else, but my brain always goes straight to human impact.

This article was really terrifying because it was talking about permafrost. For those of you that don't know permafrost is frozen soil. It's usually in the Northern hemisphere, but. Permafrost is notorious for trapping decomposing organic matter. We can actually study permafrost and see basically world history.

We could see all kinds of different animals, all kinds of different plants. Even microbes that we didn't even know existed are trapped in permafrost. But what's really scary. That's going on right now is that the permafrost is melting because of climate change. And we had some predictions about how much methane and CO2 was trapped in the permafrost turns out we underestimated the amount of greenhouse gases that were trapped in it by half.

Patrick: [00:34:35] Classic humans.

Josh: [00:34:36] I know, it really terrified me reading this article. I was like, Oh, this is interesting permafrost. Then I read it and was like, Oh great. That's terrifying. Turns out that the amount of greenhouse gases that are trapped in this permafrost is twice as much methane and CO2 as is currently in Earth's atmosphere. And so when it melts, it's, it's going to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere by more than we ever thought possible. And that's saying a lot because the, our, our Earth's atmosphere's composition is super fragile. Like we have 21% oxygen and we need to stay within that realm.

Otherwise our lungs can't handle respiration. 

Patrick: [00:35:25] Was it like only need like a two or 3% difference in oxygen levels to have a pretty. The negative impact on our bodies, something like that.

Josh: [00:35:33] absolutely. Yeah. If we fluctuate outside of that 21% window, by just a couple percentage points, it's, it's pretty detrimental on our bodies. So this would be a really big deal because it would offset that percent of oxygen not to mention their greenhouse gases. So it's going to throw off our climate. What really freaked me out about the article is that, that wasn't the part that scared scientists, the most, the part that's scared. I know right here comes the park. It really scared the scientists was that there are microbes that we don't even know what they do that are trapped in this permafrost.

And as it melts viruses and bacteria get released that are disease causing pathogens.

And the most recent one was in Siberia. There was an outbreak of a different species of anthrax because the permafrost melted and it uncovered the 70 year old reindeer that had been frozen after they died. And they had this species of anthrax in them.

And so when the permafrost melted it spread among the humans. And a lot of people got really, really sick, but that's actually, what's scaring scientists is that when they study the permafrost, they're finding all of these different viruses and bacteria. Even something like smallpox could be frozen in this permafrost and as it's melting because the climate is changing in those areas, we don't know what's about to get released and we've only done a tiny bit of research.

On the different kinds of pathogens that are frozen in that permafrost.

Patrick: [00:37:18] That's what scares me the most is like I was reading another article too, about people that were digging up preserved animals and then extracting like their tissues to try and find this stuff. Like, okay. Stuff's already happening where it's just naturally releasing. Please don't dig it out. This is an Encino man with Brendan Frasier, where things come out of ice and they skateboard around in high school.

Like that's, that's not what's happening here. This is going to be,

Josh: [00:37:41] I mean, that could happen too,

Patrick: [00:37:43] I mean, I'm all for it. Like that was a wonderful movie. Okay.

Ian: [00:37:47] Well, that is terrifying. I don't want to think about that, Patrick. It looks like somebody has been doing some work with a rare element. I'm assuming that you're gonna give us the solution to these permafrost frost problems with your science news.

Patrick: [00:38:01] Probably not. I'm just going to admit this is not related at all. The article I chose is actually working with, Einsteinian a pretty, what I'll call rare synthesized element, which isn't always synthesized.

I'm going to the factory was first seen from the debris of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, which is likely why Einsteinian was chosen as he helped make some of these very massive weapons of destruction. One thing they noticed that is troublesome when working with Einsteinian is the fact that it's just really hard to work with because it's hard to create and it's very radioactive.

 They can only do it in a few nuclear reactors and they yield about one milligram per year, one milligram.

Per year, so you don't make a lot of it. So they get about one milligram per year. It decays basically breaks down  and that happens at a rate of about 3% per day. So not only can they only make about one milligram per year, every day, 3% of it's gone.

And it would probably get a little too long to get into the details of it. But we might be wondering, okay, well, Why, why do we need this? Like, why is it important that we study this? 

And those elements, especially Einsteinian is in a very specific row of the periodic table called the actinides series. So they're very large, heavy metals, and these actinide series themselves are. Are pretty important in some aspects, but very hard to obtain they're usually used in nuclear power production or radiopharmaceuticals, which is essentially like imaging.

So looking at different ways to view inside of our bodies our cancer therapeutics or even analyzing organ function. So they're, they're pretty important in terms of the medical field, but Very hard to produce. So what they're able to do is basically take Curium named after Marie Curie, a famous scientist that worked a lot with radiation, chemistry, physics, Nobel peace prize.

Hopefully you've heard of her. If you haven't look her up, please. And they basically take care of him and just shoot neutrons at it. So for. Those that maybe haven't taken chemistry, know what that is. It's one of the major subatomic particles. We cover very small thing. They shoot at a pretty large Adam.

They just bombard it over and over are just shooting BBS at a bowling ball essentially, but not to scale. And then it triggers just lungs triggers this long chain of nuclear reactions that eventually. Ends up with Einsteinian so smallest side here. One of the reasons why I chose this is because I was reading through it and it really reminded me of a book that I think a lot of us have either read.

And I gave to my AP students called the disappearing spoon. And I'm, as I'm reading this, that kind of made me think of this story. They tell about. The scientists in the U S that were kind of battling in the cold war, the same time period as the cold war was going on, the space, race, that sort of stuff.

But they're battling to discover new elements. And so these Berkeley scientists started making these new elements, but what they did is they, when they made a new one, it made it radiation and set off a little buzzer. And so they were excited that they created this new element.  So they hooked up that buzzer to the fire alarm in the building.

And so then what they would do is every time they synthesize that new element to celebrate the fire alarm would go off and they would celebrate and cheer and everything else. Well, I think they celebrate it a little bit too. 

Ian: [00:41:07] I thought these were like the most brilliant minds in the world.

Patrick: [00:41:10] I mean, I've never. Hooked up a buzzer to a fire alarm to get it, to set off, to make a new element.

But then they forgot to take it down cause they probably celebrated a little bit too hard. So they went back to work the next day, made it again to show the other people and then the fire alarm goes off and they have to evacuate. And that might not seem like a big deal, but I'll talk about why that might be a big deal a little bit later, but 

so back to the original story to do all of this, they needed about 250 nanograms of the sample. Now, remember they only, they only really make like what one milligram per year, a nanogram like 250 nanograms is 2.5E-70000 grams. Like you can't even see that. And that's what they're working with to create these things like something so incredibly small, like if you were to put it on a little bit of a way paper, you would sneeze and it's gone.

Like, it's just, you can't even see it. In fact, your sneeze probably has more mass than that amount of sample or whatever 

Josh: [00:42:03] gross. That's true.

Patrick: [00:42:06] Sorry. 

Ian: [00:42:07] Josh 

has massive sneezes.

Patrick: [00:42:10] yeah, 

Josh: [00:42:10] I can't control them either.

Patrick: [00:42:12] Technically, we all have massive sneezes just as it's more massive.

Ian: [00:42:16] It's like a superpower. It's like a shockwave puts you.

 Patrick: [00:42:21] So then since they're working with such a small sample, they have to actually work with another kind of set of researchers to develop a way to study it. Because usually we use x-ray crystallography to kind of study metals and pure metals, but need a pretty large sample. And since they're working with a sample so small they had to develop basically a new technique to study it.

So it's kind of a double function thing. So as we're studying new elements, we're also developing new techniques to study those elements. So it was kind of cool when I was reading through that. But really all of this was to discover one specific isotope. Einsteinian two 54, and what they're trying to study was there, the bond distance of it.

And we might be wondering, okay, well, why does that a big deal? Just because it bonds with something, what does that even mean to us? But in chemistry, bonding and reactivity is essentially how you play nicely with others. And do you form relationships? Some elements really love to be close to others, right?

They like to get nice and nestled in up next to others. And they form these really strong bonds over a long period of time. Some elements like to be alone, right. They like to be by themselves. And don't really like to be around others, but every once in a while, if the conditions, okay. Okay. I'll be with that person for a little while.

What they found with Einsteinium is that they actually behave slightly different than what they expected. So it's in its actinide series. They have some. Predictable properties of those. And they found that it's not really acting how it should, right. It's not really playing with others the way that they thought it would be playing with others  now I have this very bad habit of, and I'm not probably going to butcher this word. Anthropomorphization. Giving human characteristics to things that are not humans.

So me kind of explaining this to understand Einsteinium is, is probably not exactly. They don't have feelings. They don't want to play nicely with others, that sort of thing, but it kind of helps us understand why, because. Things on the periodic table, help us with prediction, right? Understanding that when this is in a certain row, and this is in a certain group, they tend to have the same properties.

So if you're listening to this podcast and you hear my mannerisms and you hear my sense of humor and you hear whatever that is, and you hear these other things, you probably have an idea of what my sister's like, believe it or not, we're different. Like we aren't the same person, but you can generally make this characteristic connection between me and my other family members.

So it's, it's exciting for scientists because if I can find out something about one person in the family, I can find out something about other people in the family. They might be a little bit different. Like I probably have more mass than my sister. But we behave in very similar ways. We have different physical properties.

We look different, we speak different, but we have very different, very similar chemical properties. Like I would assume that you guys would get along with my sister. Very, very well, same thing. Yes. 

Ian: [00:44:51] I have a question. Do you have more mass than one of Josh's sneezes?

Patrick: [00:44:55] That is 

Josh: [00:44:56] He better. 

Patrick: [00:44:59] I know exactly what test I'm running when we get back to school.

Ian: [00:45:03] I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Patrick: [00:45:06] Okay. No, that's a perfect interruption. Cause we can go somewhere with that. We can actually, that's a testable set up that we can actually do. 

Josh: [00:45:13] I don't want to. 

Patrick: [00:45:15] I do, like I'm into it now. Um, So it really kind of the goal of this all is then to, what can we do with it then?

And so this is the exciting part to me is we filled up our periodic table, right? If you look at the periodic table, we had these blank spots in our classrooms and in the past 10 years they filled it up. Are we done? Is that the end of the periodic table? Have we completed it? Are we done with the game and need to move on to the next one?

Well, this could possibly lead us to discoveries of new elements beyond that because one of our newest elements, Tennessee from Tennessee probably number one, 17, was created using berkelium, which is number 97, which is technically what I'll call two elements lower. Then Einsteinian and what they do is they used berkelium as a target.

So that was the bowling ball that they're shooting these neutrons, these babies at, and that can get that created again, not to scale. And then they created something new, something bigger. So what if we had a bigger target to start with? Right. If I had a bigger Josh, would I get a bigger sneeze? Right.

But I'd be able to use a bigger target in the beginning to have a more massive object in the end. So if I had something like Tennessee in, which is number one 17, and our periodic table ends just after that, am I able to use a bigger target at the beginning to get something well above that? What if I got element number one 30?

Whoa. That's way bigger than where our periodic table ends. What does that mean for us? Is that a stable element? So there's this theory, this theory around the something they call the Island of stability. And I'm not going to get into this because I've already run over plenty and this would get into eight, a lot of deep physics and chemistry, but essentially the Island of stability is this possible place.

Or these very, very, very massive elements can be. And they're very, very stable. Like I talked about earlier. Einsteinian doesn't really last that long. So Einsteinian. Which is the most stable isotope, which is Einstein M two 54 has a half-life of 276 days. That's fairly stable in terms of how long it's can last.

So when I say half-life, I basically mean if I had, like, let's say one pound of a sample, if it's half-life was 10 days. One pound after 10 days would turn into a half a pound. Then after 10 more days, it turned into a quarter of a pound and a half that mass over that period of time. And usually these super unstable isotopes, these massive metals, if you will have halflives on the order of microseconds.

Like 0.000, zero, zero one seconds. So by the time you thought you created a new element, it's already something different, like even before your brain can process the time that something new is created, it's already something else. 

Ian: [00:47:48] But the fire alarm went off, so it's okay. 

Patrick: [00:47:53] we did it and that's how I knew.

Right. Because if you created something new, it would emit radiation and then the buzzer would go off. And so. You never know if these things are actually being created in real time because Ray radioactive decay is going on on all of us. It's happening in our bodies right now. You are giving off radiation with some of the stuff that's in your body and it's an in the air and it's everywhere.

So if they can find a way to get these more stabilized elements they can last maybe on the order of minutes or days, maybe we have some new therapeutics because we can't use something that only lasts for 10 nanoseconds. That's that's not going to work in terms of imaging.

Josh: [00:48:28] Tell the patient stand in front of this bowling ball.

Patrick: [00:48:31] we're going to shoot some babies at it. So I guess the saddest part of this is really that they, they did a lot of this research before the pandemic and they had to stop their work due to lockdowns and everything else. So referring back to the half-life of element Einsteinian two 54. It has a half-life of about two 76 days one.

Fortunately, we've been in the pandemic for about a year now. So as soon as they took that, 250 nanogram sample. By the time they got back to work, you could probably guess a lot of it's gone, right? Because the sample that you work with deteriorates over time. So the longer you're out of the office, the more your sample goes away, you're most out of work.

So a lot of the research stopped and then kind of ended. And then I have to wait maybe another year to make another gram or whatever it was. So. Just kinda interesting all around. I know, sorry. I went a little overboard on that. I just got really excited when I was reading it, but just kind of a fun article there.

Ian: [00:49:24] So the thing that was most exciting to me, Is that you said we completed our periodic table. We filled in all of those empty spaces on the periodic table because I am a kid from the Pokemon generation. So what I heard you say is that we can caught them all.

Josh: [00:49:42] professor Oaks going to show up and say, here's your certificate?

Patrick: [00:49:45] Until the next generation comes.

Ian: [00:49:47] Yeah. Until they release the next 1200 Pokemon next year. 

Josh: [00:49:51] God. 

Ian: [00:49:54] That's super cool, Patrick thank you for explaining that. Well based on Joshua's news, it sounds like we might be in need of a new planet 

humans are. 

Working on getting us to a new planet, specifically Mars. So there's some news, I guess I'm on a space kick because my, my article from last week, or the last episode was also a space related article talking about a possible alien artifact flying through our solar system.

Well, humans have created a new artifact flying through our solar system. And it has successfully landed on Mars as of just a couple of days ago. So we're recording this on February 20th and just a couple of days ago, NASA perseverance landed on Mars successfully, fully successful landing. And what this is, is it's really exciting.

It's the first kind of step forward in exploring Mars in a little while. It's a Rover kind of similar to previous rovers that have landed on Mars, but with more advanced instrumentation and some new experimental things that are super exciting. So to give you a couple of stats, this was a $2.7 billion project.  Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. It's a couple of Bitcoin. And the goal, all of this whole project is to further explore whether or not there was life on Mars previously, both to just kind of get that perspective. But also I think to understand what it might take to get life on Mars again. Because you know, years ago there was this whole thing, like, follow the water.

If we can, if we can discover water on Mars, we've discovered that there was probably life on Mars. Well, yeah. Long ago, we discovered that there's, there's pretty good evidence that there was rivers and like, you know, large bodies of water. Like there was water on Mars before. And

Josh: [00:51:41] All of the doctor who fans listening are freaking out right now because of the waters of Mars.

Ian: [00:51:48] in fact this Rover landed near the. Jezero crater with them. The goal of going into that greater and exploring what looks to be the Delta of an ancient river. And they're going to try and like dig into the sediment of this ancient river and see what they find. They're hoping to find fossils or possibly other evidence of like ancient microbial life on Mars.

So so they are looking for Conclusive evidence that life existed on Mars before previous to now. But also this thing is just super cool. Like this Rover, I was looking at the stats of everything that's on it and it's, it's wild. It weighs 2200 pounds. So it's quite large. 

Patrick: [00:52:30] One Joshua sneeze, 

Ian: [00:52:31] roughly three Josh sneezes.

Patrick: [00:52:35] new unit of measurement is going to be my favorite unit of measurement.

Ian: [00:52:40] So it has this really cool, like advanced suspension system to help it, you know, go over uneven ground made out of aluminum. It's got an arm with a drill on it. It's got chemical analysis tools. It's got lasers and cameras and microphones to provide power. It has two different power sources. It has solar panels and speaking of elements and chemistry, it has a plutonium power source, which is basically. I'm going to be a power source from the heat and the decay of a plutonium sample. That's kinda like stuck on the back of this Rover, which is super cool. And the, the, the most kind of experimental thing that it has is it has a helicopter

Patrick: [00:53:21] dude, it looks so cool. It looks 

so sweet. 

Ian: [00:53:24] It has a four pound little helicopter with solar panels on it that I don't think that the helicopter has any instrumentation.

They're not trying to like, get any data with the helicopter, but they are going to attempt the first ever controlled flight on a planet other than earth by humans, at least. Because you know, obviously we've like landed, you know, Rockets and things like that on the moon and on Mars, but we've never had like an, a vehicle take off and land on the planet, a controlled flight.

And so this thing's going to try it. This little tiny, like four pound kind of drone looking thing. It's a really tough job though, because remember that gravity and the atmosphere on Mars for different Mars has like one, 1/100th. Of the atmosphere that the earth has. So like 1% and it has a third of the gravity.

So the fact that it has less gravity works in the favor of this flight, but the fact that it has way less atmosphere means that it's got less stuff for the helicopter to actually push and to fly around him. So it'd be kind of like trying to fly this thing at a hundred thousand feet above the surface of the earth.

 That's how sparse the atmosphere is. So.

Patrick: [00:54:37] It's like trying to swim in a swimming pool where it's just water vapor, but not water itself. Liquid water. Ain't gonna move it.

Ian: [00:54:45] But you know, the NASA scientists they've done their calculations, they've crunched the numbers and they think that they're going to be able to, you know, fly this thing and land it which would be, which would be crazy. And it would lead to the potential for possibly airborne research vessels on other planets in the future.

You know, we started with like basically pods that we would just land on a surface and then it could like take samples from there. And then we got a huge step forward with rovers that are the exact same thing, but they can move, they can drive around on wheels. And we think we might, if this is successful, be able to introduce a new generation of flying rovers that can fly and take observations and images and things like that on other planets that that rovers would not places that rovers would not be able to access.

So pretty exciting.

Patrick: [00:55:35] those aliens from last week really missed out by about what a couple of weeks, if they would have flown by. Okay. I'm just I'm assuming they were aliens. It's not an asteroid. They would have flown by and see that thing. That would have been pretty interesting to them. They're like, wait, what is that?

And then they have a podcast on that ship where they're talking about unidentified flying object on Mars that they saw. Man. They just really missed out.

Ian: [00:55:58] you know, if aliens did create a light sail that was able to fly through our. Our solar system. I don't know how impressed they would be by our little RC cars that we land on.

Patrick: [00:56:10] Oh, that's cute.

Ian: [00:56:12] Yeah. It'd be like, awe,

awe. It's it's so fun to see these humans grow up.

Josh: [00:56:17] look at that. They're using plutonium.

Patrick: [00:56:21] I was there eating it for a snack.

Ian: [00:56:24] All right. Well, That is it for this episode of Yondercast. Thank you all so much for listening. If you haven't yet, please subscribe to the show. And if you have about 30 seconds to spare, I would really appreciate it. If you would rate and review us on Apple podcasts, we can't tell you how much those reviews help us to grow and improve and know how we're doing when it comes to this content. If you have any suggestions for what to discuss on the show, please fill out the form that is in the show notes. And if you'd ever like to contact us, just send us an email to yondercast@gmail.com. Take care, everybody. 

Josh: [00:56:58] bye.