Space Hazards with Dr. Ryan French

So what is the idea behind "Space Hazards"? 'Cause you cover a lot.

We're gonna look at two or three things from the book today, but-

Yep.

Yeah

... what was the idea of putting the book together with the, um, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, which is also on the cover?

Yeah, yeah.

Great question.

So it all started with the sun.

So I talk about the sun a lot in my research, of course, and I, I do public talks and things, and I quite often tell people about the influence that the sun can have on our society.

So w- we'll talk about some of these in a little bit, but the sun and activity on the sun can influence our power grids, our sort of aviation sector, uh, satellite networks, all of these things.

And so I thought it would be a good idea to sort of write a book about this, not from, like, a strictly scientific perspective, but almost from, like, a society perspective.

Yeah.

Like, why does it matter? Why do we care? Let's pretend for a moment that we don't care about astronomy, which we, we all should, right? But even if we don't-

100%

... like, why does it matter? So it started off with the sun, and then as I began to put the book together, I thought, "Wow, there are definitely other things in space that are very relevant to this topic." So near-Earth objects, so comets, asteroids, meteors, these are something as well that we are researching, not just from an academic perspective, but also from a sort of a planetary safety perspective.

Space junk too.

And then I think those are the ones we'll talk about today.

But later on in the book, I also talk about really wacky things that are very low probabilities of happening, but could theoretically happen.

So what would the impact be of, you know, a rogue black hole passing through the solar system? Or what will happen when the sun eventually dies, right? So all of these things are covered from the sort of the, the now and relevant to the maybe one day, but maybe not sort of categories of space hazards.

It, it's a lot of fun and just, you know, you don't wanna judge a book by its pictures, but the pictures are gorgeous.

You've got a really lovely selection of, of imagery in the book.

Yep.

Yep.

You definitely have my permission to judge this book by the cover, 'cause I think it's, uh...

So it's a nice cover.