Time Dilation, Airborne Rabies, and Whether Thunder Makes Sound

Añadido: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello. I want to talk about the moon.

[00:00:02]So, I'm going to go through some comments that I got on my video, the last video I made about the Aremis timeline and the photos from Artemis, like this one from Tallbison, who asks, "Did Hank just reinvent Apollo in real time from scratch?" I didn't know about Apollo in real time. What a delightful thing on the internet. It's so good.

[00:00:20]It's It's wild. That It's amazing. Good lord. I love people. We make so much cool stuff. You should check it out.

[00:00:26]I'll put a link in the description.

[00:00:27]Ivonne says, "What the heck? I just posted a video about the timeline in photography this morning. Hopefully I can ride your coattails. Please do. Your video was lovely. I will also put a link to that in the description. This comment is about the connections I played where I was like, "Don't tell me that these are noises that thunder makes because they are noises that lightning makes."

[00:00:44]And people got very confused by this.

[00:00:46]But let's just be clear, thunder does not make noise. Thunder is noise. When a goose honks, it isn't the honk that's honking. When I talk, it's not my words that are talking. I'm talking. When lightning makes thunder, the thunder doesn't make sound. The lightning makes sound. Thunder doesn't make sound. It is the sound. The thunder might be a rolling thunder or a clapping thunder, but the thunder does not clap. I'm going to die on this hill. I will. People will say that the thunder claps, but no, that is a thunder clap. It is a noise. The thunder doesn't clap. The lightning claps. Now I'm thinking about goose honks. Like, can a goose honk squeak?

[00:01:19]And then did the did the honk squeak?

[00:01:22]No, the goose squeaked. Wait, the honk did squeak. Oh no, maybe I'm wrong. And a sound can make a sound. I'm I'm terrified. I'm no longer dying on this hill. The goose has changed my entire perspective on this. Maybe the thunder can clap just like a honk can squeak.

[00:01:41]Can a honk squeak? This is not about the moon. This is so cool. Is it open source? Can we contribute? Yes, I have made it open source. I will put a link to the repo in the description. I've gotten people submitting things, which is fun. It's weird though. People sometimes are like, "Here, I fixed it.

[00:01:56]And I'm like, "No, you I I had it that way for a reason. You You broke it. I had to deal with my first conflict. That wasn't fun." Uh, but I did it. We We got through. As for expanding to other events, I figured out hosting. I just put all the heavy stuff on Cloudflare.

[00:02:12]But as for figuring out like expanding to other events, it is not designed for that. It is not even designed to import data into it. It is all very manual.

[00:02:19]>> I did not make something with uh utility in mind. I made something with speed in mind. Didn't you have cancer or something? What happened to that? I feel like this question both assumes that I'm not going to read it and that I am, which confuses me. Uh yeah, sometimes you have cancer and then you don't anymore. It's a thing that happens. In fact, more than half of people who are diagnosed with cancer will die of some other disease, which is remarkable.

[00:02:42]Nobody noticed when that happened, but it was it was a relatively recent thing.

[00:02:46]Like maybe in the last 20 years, we made that that switch over. still a lot still almost most you know people who are diagnosed with cancer will die of the cancer but but most won't and I'm one of those probably and in remission I'm about to hit year three since diagnosis and then then you know not too long after that I'll hit year three since remission. Good lord. Good lord. Is there a higher res raw uncompressed photo somewhere? They're gorgeous but they seem to max out at 2K with JPEG compression. Yeah, I I couldn't put the the full res images up. They're huge.

[00:03:20]Some of them are like double digit megabytes.

[00:03:21]>> But yeah, super available. I got these photos in a number of different places.

[00:03:25]So, some of them are Department of Defense photos, like the ones where the the they're being collected. Those are all from the DoD. The rest of them are NASA pictures. And the NASA pictures are all in the NASA images website, which you could go to and and is amazing and has an API and it's great. And all those pictures in in like their highest resolution will also have the metadata.

[00:03:45]Um, so I done it on all the highest resolution pictures because that that's how you can make sure that the metadata doesn't get scrubbed in the resizing process, but I didn't show off those pictures because the bandwidth and also you'd be waiting forever for them. But you can go and get them. So if they are NASA looking ones, you can either get them on the NASA like Houston Flickr or the NASA HQ Flickr or at images.nasa. I think it's images.nasa.a.a.a.a.a.a.a.a.a. Yeah, images.nasa.gov. A picture novice here.

[00:04:11]What is flicker? Flickr is was one of like the first like second generation websites where people could like upload things and it was always meant to just be like a tool for people who have photos and then like all of the Google Photos and Apple photos happened and Flickr kind of went to the wayside. I wonder if I have a Flickr account that's still active. I used to have so much stuff on Flickr and I have no idea if it's still there. Nope. Nope. I thought I found it, but I didn't. I was excited there for a second. It sent me an email.

[00:04:39]This is why I'm glad I still have the same email address that I've had for the last billion years. It's sending me another verification code. Verify and we're going to find out if I got any pictures in Flickr still. Don't do Don't I do I got a bunch of pictures in my flicker? Is this the only place I have these? Look at me doing stuff.

[00:04:58]That's Z Frank. Look at me hanging out with cool people. I got all these pictures from Haiti when I went to Haiti with YouTube and water.org. Anyway, I found my flicker everybody. But if you want to know more about Flickr, Anneil Dash actually did like a remember Flickr? Why does NASA use Flickr? And there's like reasons why because it's a tool for photographers. That's what Flickr is. It was a It was like a early web 2.0 thing and it's still around and still doing it. Got acquired by Yahoo and then Yahoo got acquired by Verizon and then like a like an individual family came along like we have to preserve Flickr and they did. So that's very good. Scott Manley left a comment and said, "I was hoping somebody would do this, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see you did it. Have you considered trying to incorporate attitude information from Orion using the spice kernels?" I'm sorry, Scott, but I did have to look up what the spice kernels are. And no, Scott Manley, I did I h I have not even now that I know what the spice kernels are. I have not considered trying to incorporate attitude information where like the the how the spacecraft was pointed, which like you could imagine this would be very cool.

[00:05:59]You could like do a simulation where you actually can see all the data is there.

[00:06:03]Like you can see where it is, where it's pointed, what's the direction, what the solar system's like, and you could be on Artemis and see exactly exactly what they saw. But I'm not going to do that.

[00:06:14]That's not on the list of things that I am going to do. Can you do a video about if rabies hypothetically went airborne?

[00:06:21]I couldn't do a video real quick for you about why rabies is not going to go airborne. If rabies went airborne, it would be very bad because nobody's vaccinated against it. It's a very uh unpleasant vaccine to get and uh we'd have to very rapidly ramp up vaccine production. But we don't have to worry about this because rabies has found a direction that it has evolved in. And it's evolved very specifically to be good at that. Evolved to be good at being passed through bites through nervous tissue and saliva. So saliva to nervous tissue. And there's a bunch of changes that would have to happen for it to be good at aerosolizing in the spit, at encouraging coughing, at uh infecting lung tissue. There's all this stuff that would like tremendous changes. It's just like headed down one specific evolutionary path. And to jump to a totally different evolutionary path would be very hard. It'd be like a duck evolving into being a carnivore. Like they're just not good at that. That's not the direction they're going. They're going in the duck direction. But rabies can in very specific situations potentially infect through lung tissue.

[00:07:23]But you have to just have a ton of it around, which is not how rabies works.

[00:07:28]If you're like in an enclosed space with like a bunch of intentionally aerosolizing uh particles that like could hold on to rabies. They talk about like potentially you could get rabies from being in a batcave. I don't know if that's ever happened. It is a thing that they tell you to be concerned about. Not something that could pass from like a person to person. If it did, it would be very bad.

[00:07:47]But it's it's like, you know, it would also be very bad if, you know, your cat decided that it wanted to kill you and all cats all at the same time decided they wanted to kill us. That would be bad, but it's not going to happen. Hey, Hank from the future here. Super weird that I recorded this before the haunt virus thing, huh? But that's not that dissimilar from the rabies situation.

[00:08:07]So, hivirus also has a very specific evolutionary path as it is headed down.

[00:08:13]um and it is not evolved toward being transmissible through uh the upper resp respiratory tract. However, as we have seen, it can sometimes do that. Do we think that it would be a good pandemic candidate? We don't. Uh because the amount of evolution that would have to do like several things would have to happen at once for it to be uh upper respiratory. It is evolved primarily to infect through somewhat through spit but largely through urine and feces. And that's what it's optimized for. That's what that's what it's been selected for through natural selection. That's what it has given its success so far. And so it would be weird to see it uh making big changes that sort of head off into this other direction. Several things would have to happen at the same time.

[00:08:57]But once it does start to transmit through the air, there is a selective pressure there. What we have seen with this haunt virus strain is it appears to not have evolved uh at all uh from the previous versions of havirus that we've seen in that region of the world. I'm not super worried about it, but I'm also not an expert so I shouldn't talk on it too much. It's just weird that I was talking like somebody asked this question about rabies aerosolizing and now I feel like I had to say this. Okay, got to go back to editing now. Never noticed that strange damage on the back side of the ship. Anybody know what that is? This is not actually part of the ship. So what you're seeing in this picture is um part of the service module, the European service module that the European Space Agency made. And then that connects through an adapter to Orion, which is the crew capsule. And that is what you're seeing there, that like wibbly stuff. That is the back of the adapter. And like look, I don't know how to build a spaceship, but however they were building the spaceship, they used that material there to save on weight or something. I don't know. I really have no idea. If anyone worked on the crew module adapter, let me know in the comments what that stuff is. When putting this together, is time dilation a problem? This was probably the most commonly asked question. What about time dilation? If they're going super fast away from the Earth, then are there cameras getting out of sync with the clocks here on Earth? And the answer to that question is is of course yes, very slightly, but in the opposite of the direction you would think, and also not enough that it matters. So this is wild.

[00:10:28]If you're moving faster than we are, you're gonna your time is going to pass slower. Like no matter, you know, slower, even if you're like at a jog, you're gonna your time's going to pass slower than me. But they're of course going much faster, faster enough to matter. No. Turns out no. Also, time will pass more slowly if you are inside of a gravity well. And they're outside and for a portion of this outside of the influence of Earth's gravity completely and are under the influence of the moon's gravity. And so that actually probably I haven't done the math or anything, but I think would have a bigger effect than the speed because they're not going that fast. They're going very fast, but they're not going very fast. Like relativistic time effects are like way past, you know, what are they like 40 times the speed of sound. That's nothing, you guys. That's that's nothing. So, one, time dilation is not a problem. We're talking on the order of like maybe hundreds of microsconds.

[00:11:25]And two, uh, it would actually there's two effects that are somewhat canceling each other out. So if they're going fast, that would make time pass more slowly for them. But if but because they're not inside of a gravity, well, that makes time pass more quickly for them. And I think that that would actually be the bigger effect. So to some extent, those two things cancel each other out. But I think that on on the whole, the relativistic time is actually overwhelmed by the effects of of being of like not being at the bottom of a gravity well and us being at the bottom of a gravity well, which is wild.

[00:11:54]Will a 13-month calendar have 28 days per month and one purge day?

[00:11:57]Unfortunately, Wedge, no. This is a reference to the fact that it would objectively be better to have a 13-month calendar in which every month would have 28 days. Exactly four weeks per month.

[00:12:07]Every month would start on the same day and end on the same day. It would just be so much better. And then at the end of the year, like the 28* 13 is 364 at the end of the year. You just have an extra day. one extra day for anybody for people to like do whatever they want.

[00:12:21]Apparently per the purge, which is not what I want. I want that to be something else, but something weird, but not murder. I something more fun than murder, karaoke day, no light bulbs day, something like that. But no, the calendar is you get an extra January so you have some time to replace your calendar. It's just good to have that that that overlap. That's why you put a 13 months in a calendar and also you get an extra photo in there. And that calendar, as I speak to you right now, is available for three more days. It's all my favorite photos from the Artemis mission. And you get to relive and have that joy in your life for all of 2027.

[00:12:53]And I bet there will be times when you'll be glad to have it. So check it out. There's a link to that in the description. It's a lot of links in the description of this video. Hello. The Milky Way image. You said uh ISO 12,800.

[00:13:04]What was the exposure time? I looked. It was 10 seconds, which is I don't know how. That seems like a long time. I I assume they have some kind of tripod rig. Otherwise, that would be really hard to do. Hank, how do you just go go?

[00:13:16]You think of something and you just do it. It's inspiring. I get stuck in the thoughts in my head and I don't make progress. How do you shut that off? It's been years of practice. I watched this video from ZFrank in 2006 or seven that was about uh how your mind gets addicted to ideas and that's not doing you any good. And I really took that to heart, maybe too much. So, there's really two components to this. The first thing is uh get is starting starting like having it not be in your head anymore and be in the world and you're actually writing or you're coding or you're drawing or you're painting or you're doing whatever it is you're doing like whatever your medium is and you're at it. You're you're trying to solve the problem.

[00:13:56]You're trying to make the thing exist. I don't know what it is. And then the second thing that's actually even harder is finishing. And this is what I've really trained myself to do is that I end projects. I say, "Okay, like this Artemis thing, I could have kept working on it forever. I could keep working on it forever." You know, open sourcing it kind of obliges me to keep working on it for a while because I have to at least maintain the repository, which I'm sure I will be terrible at and it's already been very distracting, but also fun and I'm learning a lot. But I don't actually honestly know which thing is harder. But you really do like you have to recognize that being you become addicted to the idea in your head and then when you expose it to the real world it becomes different and it changes and it's less perfect and it has to like live inside of the constraints of your abilities and your toolkit and and people's reception and all of that. But the frame of the ZFrank video was like like pathized that it said you're addicted to your brain crack is the metaphor. And so if it's in there, it's taking up space and making it so that you can't have other ideas, you can't do other things. You have to get it out. And that really stuck for me. And and because I, you know, Is a mentor in a way where like I didn't know him and then eventually a mentor in like the real world way. He was right, you know, he was a right in a way that was not like questioned to me. And so I just believed that and I've never stopped believing it. And it is it has served me very well. I've been served well by just believing it. And at this point, it's an unquestioned belief in me. You know, ideas are better out than in. It's always better out than in. And then the finishing is harder sometimes for me. Like that that I never know quite when I'm done. Um but that also I I I think that I instinctually think things are done much more quickly than other people because I don't care that much about perfection. I don't think that ex like perfection exists. I think that getting like 90% of the way there basically is this is often the same as getting 100% of the way there because other people's version of the idea isn't exactly the same as mine. Doesn't have exactly the same aesthetic as mine. So if I get 100% of the way there for me, I might be 85% of the way to perfect for somebody else's version of the idea for somebody else's aesthetic. And that might actually also be true of 90%. Like if I get 90% of the way there, I'll still be 80% there or 85% of the way there for somebody else's aesthetic. And I'm not creating for me. I'm not a person who creates for myself. I just that's never been the way that I am. I want to make for other people. What is this shining thing in the Artemis 2 solar eclipse video on the left hand side? Uh that is a smudge. That's a that's a glare. Um, I'm almost certain objects of that size and shape appear in a lot of the photos. And I'm like 90% plus sure that that's not a a thing in space. That is some kind of artifact of the image. All right, and that is all the questions that I took screenshots of. Thank you for everybody for hanging out and listening to me ramble. I hope that you enjoyed my little ramble video.

[00:17:00]I can't believe Scott Manley liked my thing. I also got a tweet from him that was very sweet or a post on blue sky and I got a I got a post on threads from the creative director of NASA who said they liked it and we're sharing it internally which is awesome. And now I'm going to go and check see if any things going on in the GitHub repo. You know, it's crazy the extent to which I'm like ooh 80 stars on GitHub. I've got four issues right now everybody. I've got some mclassification, some photo duplication, a feature. Oh, I already did that one. I did that. That's done. I can resolve that. Nice. And then discovering and parsing images dynamically. What a That would be awesome. I would love that.

[00:17:37]That's I feel as if this is outside of my capability. It's totally doable. And and also would be like super cool and could be reapplied to other missions in the future. The creative director at NASA actually said on threads like, "Wouldn't this be cool if it stretched back like there was a way to have it be like here's the mission, but then you can expand the timeline out and have it stretch all the way back to assembly."

[00:17:58]Because of course, you know, if you work at NASA, this mission wasn't just like the piece that we saw. It's like all of the work that went up to it, the years of of work in, you know, training and construction and design and etc. That would be cool. That would require a redesign of the timeline functionality of how the timeline actually works. this just being able to like pop a new photo in or connect to the NASA images API um would probably be the right way to do it because then you you could get you could get everything all at once. You get the metadata, you could get the image descriptions, you could get the like even link to a high quality image uh on on NASA images.nasa NASA like it could do all the things like that's the thing that's like the actual next big project to do if we did a next big project would be to have it uh dynamically update images. I don't know. I kind of want to hand it off honestly like uh like there's plenty of comments on this video who are like, "Hey, how did you have time to do this?" And the answer to that question is I did not. Like I did it entirely uh on nights and weekends. And Katherine is like, "Why are you eyes always on your computer typing?