Coming up on DTNS, what Qualcomm's new chips will mean for your smartphones next year, what Salesforce gets out of Slack, and why middle management has the most to fear from robots. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 2nd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And not yawning on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Do you want to know why he's saying that and get some great analysis of the new M1 silicon? Both why it works better and Sarah salivating over how much it works better. You got to get good day internet to become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple's MagSafe Duo Charger is now on sale for $129 online. It includes a magnetic wireless charging puck for the iPhone 12 and Apple Watch. But what you don't get is a charging brick. A 20 watt USB-C adapter will get you faster charging speeds, though not as fast as a 15 watt MagSafe charger itself. Spotify announced that its podcast creation maker, Anchor, powered 80% of new podcasts on Spotify this year, which is more than a million shows added to Spotify's catalog in 2020 alone. Spotify says Anchor shows account for more consumption spent listening than any other third-party podcast hosting or distribution platform on its platform. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal sources say Amazon is in talks to acquire the podcast network Wondery, which a lot of people thought Apple might buy. They produce true crime podcasts like Dr. Death, Dirty John, and Overmind Dead Body. True crime, big podcast genre. Discovery will launch its streaming service, Discovery Plus. Yep, that's what they're all calling their subscription services. On January 4th, 2021, it'll be $4.99 per month. That's for the ad-supported tier, $6.99 per month for an ad-free tier. Discovery is partnering with Verizon to give Verizon's 55-ish million customers up to 12 months of the ad-free Discovery Plus plan for free, depending on their wireless plan. So some people might be able to check it out without paying for a while. Discovery owns the Discovery Channel, HGTV, and Food Network, among others, and is also adding content from A&E, the History Channel, and Lifetime to offer 55,000 episodes from 2,500 shows. AWS announced the launch of industrial monitoring tools to help identify things like equipment failures, productivity bottlenecks, worker safety issues. One of the tools uses an algorithm to analyze video for anomalies, but does not use facial recognition. And another one called Panorama is an AWS hardware device that can add computer vision capability to your existing on-premises cameras. AWS also announced new algorithms to assist call center workers to gather information about the customer and answer questions faster. Well, we're getting a lot of best of the year lists is that time of year. And Apple has named Zoom the best iPad app. iPad app Wake Out, one best iPhone app, Disney Plus was named best Apple TV app, and productivity app Fantastical, one best Mac app. Over in the Google corner, Google named Luna Bedtime Common Relax, the best Android app, and Disney Plus was named the user choice for best Android app. All right. We promised we'd talk more about the Snapdragon 888. So that's what we're going to do right now. By the way, apparently they named it 888 instead of 875 or 885 because 8 are lucky and they think that'll help sales in China. So hey, there you go. Good job. Hope that works for you, Qualcomm. It's easy to remember anyway. Yeah. This is going to be the chip that powers most flagship Android phones in 2021. So it's important to know what it can do. It will feature Qualcomm's eight core cryo 680 CPU, one of the first chips to feature arms customized Cortex X1 core. That promises up to 30% higher peak performance with a maximum clock speed of 2.84 giga hertz on the main core. The X1 is essentially a supersized A78 that optimizes for performance. Even so, Qualcomm expects a power efficiency rise of 25%. So more powerful chip. I don't think there's a whole lot of surprises there. First one to use Cortex X1. So it's going to be super on performance, maybe not as great as battery life, but Qualcomm says it'll still be 25% better than the last version. The Adreno 660 GPU promises a 35% jump in graphics rendering and a 20% improvement in power efficiency. Games will also have access to variable rate shading on this processor. That's supported on Vulkan and Unreal Engine. And it's for the first time that you've had variable rate shading on a Qualcomm chip. So a little better mobile gaming. The 5nm X65G modem with sub six gigahertz and millimeter wave support will be integrated now. Everybody's been complaining about the fact that they didn't integrate it into the flagship Snapdragon. Well, now they will. That'll be 5G and 4G both in there. Download speeds are the same as it was when it wasn't integrated up to 7.5 gigabits per second. You'll never get 7.5 gigabits per second, but it's capable of it. It also supports voice calling over 5G and dynamic spectrum sharing that lets carriers run 5G calls over 4G spectrum. That's a little bit of future proofing there. The Snapdragon 888 also supports Bluetooth 5.2, Wi-Fi 6, and Wi-Fi 6E, which is good for crowded areas, helps Wi-Fi work in areas where a lot of people are using the spectrum. The Spectra 580 image signal processor is the first triple ISP in a Qualcomm chip, can capture three simultaneous 4K HDR streams if you need to do that for some reason. You could also take three 28 megapixel photos at once, which I mean, if they're all pointed the same way. Anyway, you can do it. That's the point. All right. Up to 2.7 gigabit pixels per second in its capture rate, 35% faster than the 865 can capture 120 photos per second at 10 megapixel resolution and shoot photos in 10-bit color in HEIF, which, yeah, iPhone users, we know you could already do that, but this will be able to do it now too. I was just thinking maybe you want to do a selfie and a front-facing camera at the same time, or have another camera. That's true. We could already do that. Right? I'm like the Nokia, I think, could do that. There was a whole social network for a while that was all about, you know, taking the photo front and back, but that doesn't really have anything to do with this. There will be cool uses for this that we can't possibly imagine. Well, that's why I kind of laugh, because I'm like three simultaneous 4K HDR streams. Why? But that's just me being like, I haven't learned yet why this is. There's the telephoto that you can then edit in, and yeah, all that. Yeah. Lastly, the AI processor, the six-gen Hexagon 780 can perform 26 trillion operations per second compared to 15 on the 865, three times better performance per watt. Also has the second-gen sensing hub. So that shifts some of the lower power AI onto it, which is things like, you know, knowing when you pick up your phone so you can light up the display. That way it doesn't use as much power by using the main Hexagon 780. There's also a Type 1 hypervisor, which can isolate data between apps and multiple operating systems on the same device. I don't know what that's going to be used for either, because you can already isolate with Android. So the operating system would be the only advantage here. And who knows what that's meant for, but intriguing, multi-boot phones coming? I don't know. Snapdragon 888 chips start showing up in devices Q1 from Asus, Black Shark, LG, Meizu, Motorola, Nubia, Realme, OnePlus, Oppo, Sharp, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE. But of course, the one you're going to pay attention to is the Samsung Galaxy S21 or whatever they decide to call it. I'm going to just throw out the argument that this is also, you're going to see mixed reality and VR headsets use this chip. Good point. Yeah. And that could be the multiple operating system. You could do that. Yeah. Sure. Well, speaking of mixed reality, Varjo, if you haven't heard of the company, well, they announced a new generation of VR and AR headsets. The PC tethered VR3 and XR3 headsets used two panels for each eye, a 1920 by 1920 display in the center of your vision, and then a 2880 by 2720 panel for the rest of the screen, both with 90 Hertz refresh rates. This produces a clear image straight ahead because of the greater pixel density. And the new models also have a 115 degree horizontal field of view, bigger than most consumer grade headsets. A lot. There is also hand-to-eye tracking, and the XR3 adds cameras and lidar to enable a pass-through video feed for augmented reality as well. The XR3 weighs 594 grams compared to the VR3, which is 558. They're both heavier than the Oculus Quest 2, which weighs 503 grams. However, they're different. They are business and organization products, at least right now. Think a pilot who needs to be trained, somebody in telemedicine, for example, and the prices reflect that. The XR3 costs $5,495 with a required one-year, $1,495 Varjo software subscription. The VR3 is $3,195 with a $795 required yearly subscription. They're both available now, shipping in early 2021. Yeah. I mean, it's good to look at this stuff, though, because a lot of times what happens in the enterprise areas, which is where VR is actually very successful, trickles down to what we use on the consumer side. And this idea of using two different displays that have different pixel densities so that you can make a high, because your peripheral vision doesn't need as high a resolution. You're not capable of seeing it as high a resolution, or high a pixel density. So yeah, that's an interesting way of doing it, and obviously great for training of all kinds. Yeah. What's interesting, I think, about this and just VR development in general, is those multiple screens are a sign that what we're getting better at is creating the complexity that our own eyes experience. So how are you going to do that? The optics for the human eye are crazy complicated. It all just works, and here we are seeing stuff, but really, really complicated. So to replicate that, or to replicate the sense that you're creating objects in worlds and virtual situations that to your eye are as real as you and me standing and talking, that's the big clam in the sky. That's what we want. And this feels like them going, yeah, well, to get that, we're going to have to get weird with displays. And then we're going to have to get weird with this other thing. And by get weird, I mean, innovate in ways that seem a little crazy to us now, but it makes perfect sense to me that they would start to focus on the way our eyes actually work more and more as these new headsets come out. And this thing sounds fantastic, but clearly it isn't for me in my living room. That's not where this is going to go. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, there's so much of precision training, for example, where you go, well, of course, you know, somebody's training to be a fighter pilot needs the absolute best VR training ever. But consumers also want that great experience as well. You might not need it in a life or death situation, but it will trickle down. Like you said, the light simulator, well, that would be very helpful.  It's like, OK, well, you know, my I was only half kidding this morning where I was like in three, two, what is Oculus by Varjo? But that's the sort of thing where a company goes, oh, OK, because right now as cool as I think VR is, I'm like, I mean, sometimes the visuals leave a little to be desired, but you just sort of deal with it because it's cool anyway. But when it gets to a point of a company that's doing something on this level, then we'll, you know, we'll all look back to right now and say, oh, remember that janky little thing we used to put on our heads? I mean, I thought for a long time that augmented reality would and virtual reality would become one device. And this is another step that direction by using LiDAR and external cameras to say when you want augmented reality, we'll just bring it into you. And because it's doing it that way, the augmented reality is more convincing. It's able to occlude things better. It may it's able to work it in to the image better than than the way say HoloLens does it, where you have to deal with natural light. So I don't know if this is the one that went out or not. But I think this is another indication that we're just going to have mixed reality headsets, which is why people use that term. Yeah. If I had six grand, I wonder if I could just plug this into men. It's like buying a high end Mac, right? Well, it is. But if I had it, would it just work? Like, can I play steam games on this thing? I don't know. I don't know if there's any kind of like interoperability. Well, because you got to pay for that software subscription and all that. Yeah, it's really not meant for that. Yeah. All right, well, check this out. Let's talk about a study that was meant for us. You worried about losing your job to robots? Well, you shouldn't worry so much. A study from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School finds that managerial jobs are more at risk of elimination due to automation than lower level employees. So think middle management, that sort of thing. The study looked at forms that purchase or excuse me, looked at forms at the purchased AI and robotic systems. Firms that is over the last 20 years in Canada. Overall, that study found that primary motivations to automate with AI and robotics was to improve product and service quality, not to save costs. Everyone assumes it means that you're going to try to save or, you know, have less jobs there for payout, less money. Well, the study found that say, sorry, managers, on the other hand, no longer spend as much time overseeing work hours and inspecting work and results because robotics and AI recorded these numbers faithfully and automatically and with automated assistance, lower level workers could supervise themselves more efficiently, at least in theory. That means you needed fewer managers to oversee the same number of employees due to automation. However, because there is less demand for supervisory roles, the ability to work your way up into a better paying position was reduced. So there used to be kind of a bridge there, right? Like a little bit of a curve and you get those new jobs and build up to the next one. Some of that in the middle gets removed. Now you got a bigger leap to get to the higher paying job, but you're not going to lose your job as quick as y'all feared you would. Well, unless you're a middle manager, right? That's the thing that stuck out to me is that, and I've been suspecting this for a while, is that companies that don't automate can't compete. So you're more likely to lose your job at a company that doesn't add AI and robotics because it costs more to employ humans and they fall behind and those companies don't do as well and they have to lay people off. And this study found that to be true, that if you want to keep your job, you want your company to be doing automation. But I did not expect that they would find that, you know what? While it doesn't eliminate the lower level employee jobs because we either have them do other things or there's things that humans can do that robots and AI just can't do yet, it's easier to supervise people when you got a lot of assistive technology with them. And that gets rid of that middle management layer.  And this kind of points out that they may be the least useful in the chain. Well, you know, as somebody who has technically been a middle manager in a couple different positions with different companies, it's not that I didn't think I did anything. I was very busy. But a lot of it was sort of busy meeting work that wasn't necessarily super enjoyable and not necessarily creative on any level.  And so I think there's a lot of that. You just kind of get lost in the fold of you're not really doing the stuff that the company does, but you're not really the boss boss. You're somewhere in the middle, you know? And so there's a lot of just kind of busy work that happens. Again, depending on where you work, this could be like a very integral job that a robot could not replicate. I think probably in a couple of instances that I'm talking about, a robot could do a lot of what I was doing all the time for 12 hours a day quite well. And yeah, it's not necessarily a thing that I'd be like, oh, I loved that job. It was sort of like, well, you know, that's a pretty good job. But I think the most important thing is people saying, okay, if robots take jobs that are, you know, low level as in, you know, maybe the lowest pain, but they're super important jobs, well, now, you know, those people are, they're S.O.L. and that's a bad thing. And sure, that may happen. But this, this is, you know, pointing to something entirely different. Sure, I totally agree with that. And having number of conversations with Tom over the years, I never forget the discussions we had about Lotus 123 and the fear that that struck in the hearts of the accounting world at the time. And everyone was sure that meant we're all losing our jobs. The accounting world is going to be destroyed. CPAs jump ship now and find another gig because this is going to be bad. And instead the reality was it created jobs like way more jobs. And that business never went away. And in fact, it's, you know, money management and what we're able to do with the hard math being done by computers has made it so much easier for us to focus on the services and the things around accounting. So this feels like that to me. Like we'll find a way, and oftentimes what we're afraid of is actually the thing that will spark a whole new industry and I worry about it not at all because of the conversation I have with Tom like four years ago. Well, and if you look at the actual study here of actual companies and what they did, it looks like the problem may be advancement that you might get stuck in lower level jobs because AI and automation eliminates the path to moving up. So keep an eye on that. Hey folks, if you want to join in the conversation in our Discord, do it right now. Link your Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Well, we mentioned yesterday that Salesforce had agreed to acquire Slack, which pits Salesforce more directly against Microsoft Teams. That is the big competitor at this point. Microsoft and Salesforce compete in a few other areas as well, but they also partner up a lot. Salesforce is slowly building a business software stack that replicates what Microsoft already offers. And Salesforce has a 20% market share in CRM. Back in 2018, it bought Mulesoft, which connects legacy IT systems to the cloud. In 2019, it bought Tableau, a data analytics platform which up until now was one of its most direct competitors to Microsoft. And now Salesforce also has Slack. Slack's big advantage is integrating with enterprise software, does it already? TechCrunch suspects that plus Slack's bots, which also integrate well, depending on what you're doing, make it the central place for Salesforce customers to work since all of Salesforce's various products can integrate into Slack already. For instance, Quip, that Salesforce's way of socially sharing documents, slots right into Slack. That integration is a risk for Salesforce if they can't pull it off. Probably think that they can. The other risk is Slack not being worth the money. It was a big acquisition. Slack has not benefited as much from work from home as, say, Zoom, Teams, and others. Slack reported a net loss of $147.6 million in the two quarters ending July 31st this year. Salesforce thinks it can rejuvenate Slack both with development resources and sell in the heck out of it, which if you're not familiar with Salesforce is what the company does quite well. Yeah, I'm kind of taken by this idea that Slack becomes your Salesforce hub. They haven't integrated everything in there, and it might not all integrate well, which would be the risk that you're talking about. But if they did, that's pretty compelling to be like, hey, we've got this and we've got Slack. You all know Slack, right? We've got Slack. You just use that and it integrates everything, all your CRM, all your backend stuff. It's just all right there. You can communicate with everybody. I get why this makes a lot of sense for Salesforce and I get why Microsoft passed on buying Slack. Microsoft could have bought Slack when it was much cheaper, but they looked at the tools they had and said, I think we can just build it ourselves and have it do what we want it to do. Because it does things a little differently than Slack. It's a little more video focused, a little more Office 365 focused than Slack would have been had they just bought it. So this, I guess that's the challenge for Salesforce is making sure that it's Salesforce focused, but this makes sense to me. Yeah, me too. What I hope, so this is a tiny little thing that only affects me and I use Slack a lot with a lot of people, including you guys. My biggest complaint about the service is some of its more basic things that we just sort of rely on it for, like sharing files, in particular image files, which I have to send to people all the time for approvals and like a book cover. I got to get 10 people to look at it and sign off on it. So we use Slack to do it. Their image compression has been getting worse and worse and worse. So this is a small technical quibble, but I see this acquisition as potentially, at least a chance for Salesforce to go, all right, well, let's evaluate everything as it's happening right now. Why is that happening? Is it because free tier people just aren't getting some of the better features like higher quality images? Or in other words, Salesforce could just afford to pour money into fixing stuff. Yeah, and to me, that would be a reason for me to stick around because lately, I've been like, I don't really want to use it. In fact, Discord is being used by most of the people I work with now, and they're not gamers. That's the thing was made for gamers. They don't use it for that anymore. They use it to communicate and to share messages. And while it doesn't have all the integrations maybe you would want from something like Slack or Teams does a decent job at a very basic level of all that. So that's where they go. And you don't have image compression issues. You don't have video compression issues. It's like, it's just some of that quality of life stuff. If they could sink some money into that, rejuvenate that stuff as part of the core Slack experience, then maybe my whole outlook on Slack changes and I'm back in their good graces because right now it just seems like kind of a bummer, some of that stuff. So I'm kind of excited about this, as I guess what I'm saying. I hope they do it.  Yeah, as you mentioned, Scott, we use Slack for DTNS. I use Slack even just for casual talking to friends and sharing gifts and just friend stuff. It's really sort of a big group text that looks a lot nicer and does other things. And there are some integrations, but this doesn't really scare me. I mean, sure. Lots of times when a big company buys a smaller company or a newer company anyway, both sides from each team say, don't worry, they'll run independently, nothing will change. It's going to be the product that you've always loved just better. That doesn't always happen. But if Slack gains a bunch of features that I may or may not use, but doesn't lose the features that I like now because it works really well for me, then I don't care that Salesforce spots Slack. Oh, I fully expect Salesforce to want you to use Salesforce to continue to use Slack. I'm not saying they'll get rid of the free tier, but expect that free tier to change and expect the focus of Slack to shift from where it is now. And probably more than just a jump off point, right? They're not going to want to just have it be, hey, come on in here and check out this free thing, but also here's all our stuff. It's going to be more integrated than that probably. Slack is going to be a thing when you buy Salesforce, you use this, not a thing where, hey, use Slack, and then we'll try to upgrade you to a paid version. That's my guess. Well, now I'm mad. I'm mad by anticipation. I should make this note here about Apple. Earlier this year, Apple patched an exploit discovered by Project Zero Researcher Ian Beer that would gain complete access to an iOS device over Wi-Fi with no user interaction required. Oof, that's a bad one. The memory corruption bug existed in Apple's mesh networking protocol, AWDL. The attacker would need a Raspberry Pi a laptop and off the shelf, off the shelf rather, Wi-Fi adapters as well as be within Wi-Fi range of the targeted computer for at least two minutes or so. Anyway, Apple patched the vulnerability in May. It was developed in the lab and was never in the wild. The computer you're talking about is the phone, right? Or the phone. Within range of the phone. And this is good news. This is very good news. Let me explain why. This is somebody whose job it is to find really bad vulnerabilities, spending six months and finding a really bad vulnerability and then reporting it to Apple, Apple fixing it before anyone else knew about it. And now it's not a vulnerability. That's what you want. That's what Project Zero exists for. That's why Google runs it. That's why you responsibly disclose so that Apple patches it. That's why you hope companies respond, which Apple did. This is everything working well. Yeah, makes me happy. I like to hear when somebody out there finds a thing, no matter who they are, and tells them before it can be a problem. Like, this is how we should be. There's always going to be bugs and vulnerabilities and things that companies don't catch.  It's fantastic. Now, Dan Gooden, whom I respect quite a bit at Ars Technica, points out, he's like, well, if Ian Beer could spend six months figuring this out, imagine, you know, what a highly motivated state-backed team could do. And that's true. That's something to keep in mind, especially if you're likely to be a target of a state-backed actor. But this is mostly a good news story. Well, this might be a good news story, depending on how hungry you are right now. Singapore has given the first world's first regulatory approval for the sale of cultured meat. U.S. company Eat Just will sell nuggets made out of lab-grown chicken meat under its good brand. The meat is grown from actual chicken, mussels, cells. So it's meat, but it's obtained without killing those animals. The first sales will be at premium prices at a restaurant in Singapore in the very near terms as the company. Several other companies are developing cultured meat as well, including Singapore's Shiok meats, making culture shrimp, and U.S.-based Memphis meats. I would eat all this meat, no problem. Me too. Bring it on. We talked about it on TMS a little bit with Tom, and I just want to reiterate, if it tastes like chicken and it looks like chicken, and I don't mean it needs to be like a full chicken with the legs on it and all that. I don't mean that. But you know, looks like I've got some chicken on my plate, nugget or otherwise, and it tastes like chicken. This is great. All for this. Let's do it with cows next. Let's cut down on methane. Let's get less chickens being slaughtered by the billions. Let's just have a couple of cells and grow it from there. I've been in for this for years. Finally, it might happen. Yeah, it's minimally invasive too. It's like a biopsy to get the cells out. Some people say like, yeah, but it still encourages meat eating. And since we don't have most of our meat grown in the lab, that might be bad. But really, this is a good move for being able to more sustainably create our meat. We'll find out if there are any other downsides to it. But the reason Singapore is first on this is Singapore only makes 10% of its food, and they want to increase that. They want to make more of their meat in the country, and they don't have room to grow a bunch of chickens. So this would allow them to get there. Let's see what's in the mailbag. Well, we wanted to have a little bit of an anniversary party. Mike McLaughlin wrote us and said, it just so happened today, December 2nd, to be the 22nd anniversary of my 25th birthday. Yeah. So I was like, 22nd anniversary. I see what you're doing, Mike. Got it. Happy 25th birthday again. And yeah, you're one of our master grandmasters. I know your name well. Mike McLaughlin, turning 25 for the 22nd time. Wow, jeez.  Right. By the way, this was Mike's request for a recorded announcement that you get at a certain level on our Patreon, which is why we're able to do this for you. And thank you, Mike, for supporting us for so long. Appreciate that. Happy birthday, my friend. Yeah, Feliz Coopalianios. If you have feedback of any kind, you want to tell us when your birth is, we'll take it. Or if you have questions or comments about anything that we talk about on the show, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send those emails. We also want to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Philip Less, Dan Colbeck, and Chris Benito. Also thanks to Scott Johnson. Scott, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and what's been going on? Well, I did. I had a really nice Thanksgiving and we had an amazing turkey. I recommend smoking your turkey next time you do it. And as a result, it gave me ideas for my comic strip that I do every week called Fred and Ken. Yeah, that's right, a guy who lives with a can of expired cream corn in an apartment and their adventures together. And the latest one deals with a Warcraft hangover. Some of you may be familiar with that. I can't imagine that was ripped from your own experience. It feels like it might be. You'll have to decide for yourselves. Go check it out. It's over at fredandcan.com and for everything else you need for me, you can find it at frogpants.com. Now, listen, folks, I'm just talking to you right now. OK, nobody else. Just you. So play it cool. You got your headphones in. I want to send you a holiday card. Now, if you don't want me to, that's fine. But if you do, I need your address. So go to patreon.com slash pledges. Find DTNS if you back more than one patron and just make sure that address is there and it's correct. If it's not, you can click Update. You can add it. If it's not correct, you can click Edit. And if you do that by December 10th, I will send you a holiday card. Now, if you're not a patron and you're like, wait, I want a holiday card, well go sign up and make sure you put in your correct address at dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon. Folks, we are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Primeman Club hopes you will enjoy this moment.


Okay, I'm going to start the I'm going to click the go live. Yeah, we got a battle here and then we'll get started. Yeah, the classic automatic except you have to push this button setting, which you can actually adjust that setting so it is just pure automatic but always where I'm going to accidentally stream the wrong stream to the wrong YouTube channel if I do that. And Dave, I don't know whether you meant to put the live stream link just for the just for us because because some of my click it and accidentally get a weird echo. Yeah, we don't want that. No, I'm not. Yeah. Well, they don't need to see the live stream. So, exactly. Yeah, we wanted to send something to Colby's family so they could check him out too. Well, let's go ahead and get started here and so hello everyone and welcome to the April NASA night sky network member webinar we're hosting tonight's webinar from the astronomical society at the Pacific in San Francisco, California. We're very excited to present this webinar with our guest speaker Colby Osberg from the University of California at Riverside. Welcome to everyone joining us on the live stream on YouTube we're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are monthly events for members of the night sky network. And for more information about the night sky network and the astronomical society the Pacific and just a moment we'll put a couple of links in the chat. But before we introduce Colby here's Dave prosper with just a couple of announcements. Okay, hi folks. Right off, I just want to thank you all for joining us today. And my apologies if you're watching this on a recording that you did not get my reminder email spent most of today trying to get our system to send everyone a reminder and obviously it didn't work in time. But thankfully it's a bug that only affects super users like myself and coordinators you're fine club members you're fine. And my apologies again, let me fix. And more fun news, we're going to be at the ncrl vision 2022 the convention for the north central regional astronomical leagues convention convention, this May 13 and 14. So if you knew the port Washington, Wisconsin area, and for those of you not near that area it's also near the greater Milwaukee area. So stop on by and say hi. There's going to be a ton of great speakers and great company there and I'm going to put the link in the chat. And I've been calling it ncrl. I don't know if that's correct. I'll find out soon enough. It's also global astronomy month organized by the good folks at us at astronomers without borders. They have tons of different events that have gone on already and there's even a few more going on as April's astronomy month comes to a close. So if you want to find events on their site at astronomers without borders.org and the link will also of course be in the chat. Now, this is related the globe at night's light pollution measurement campaign is on this week. So take a look at Leo and use their charts to determine the quality of skies where you're at, and report back to globe at night if you have their pop and details around their website which is globe at night.org and that link is in the chat and also extremely related to the previous two it's also dark international dark sky week from the International Dark Sky Association, and you can find out more about light pollution in ways we can mitigate or eliminate it all together on their site and for their events are also having this week. If you've never seen a sky from a dark site, especially the Milky Way from a dark sky park, it's worth it if you get there. And for more info, go to ID SW dot dark sky dot org and where is that link and also be the chat. And that's pretty much it but I just have to add, if you wake up early tomorrow, you got a clear view of the eastern skies and there's that line of planets going on. Looks great. It's going to be a special guest the crescent moon. It's hanging low below Venus tonight's subject. So, yeah. So I'm Saturn somewhere off to the side there, a little ways away from Mars, and that is courtesy Earth Sky and John Goss so I just thought of Venus, check it out. That's it for me. Thanks, Dave. I also want to mention that it's never too early to start planning for total solar eclipses we are under two years from the 2024 total eclipse and about a year and a half from the annual eclipse and I hope Vivian might give a little mention about the program that we're doing and hopefully she can find the link for you can sign up to get more information at some point. So Vivian, do you got anything to say? Oh, a little teaser. We're really excited. We just got funded to lead a project called Eclipse Ambassadors off the path. So if you are from somewhere that's not on the path of totality or annularity coming up, or even if you are and might not be there for the eclipses we encourage you will you'll get plenty of information from us soon to sign up to become an eclipse ambassador I'll stick that in the chat in just a minute. We'll partner amateur astronomers and undergraduate students to prepare their communities in advance of the eclipses. We're really really excited to have you participate and we'll get you plenty of information in no time flat. Thank you Vivian. So for those of you on zoom you can find the chat window and the Q&A window, generally at the bottom edge of the zoom window on your desktop, please feel free to greet each other in the chat window or to let us know if you're having any technical difficulties please send us an email at night sky info at astro society.org. If you have a question you would like our guest speaker to answer, please type it into the Q&A window, and we'll keep the chat for just chatting, and also speaking of the chat, make sure that you select everyone, and because of defaults to just host and panelists. I'm going to hit the record here for the welcome to the April webinar of the NASA night sky network this month we welcome Kobe Osberg to our webinar. Kobe is currently a fourth year PhD student at the University of California Riverside. He received his BS in physics at San Francisco State University before joining Dr. Stephen Cain at UCR. Since his arrival there he's been immersed in studying all things Venus. They published a paper in 2019 which predicted the number of potential exovenuses that the trust your exoplanet survey satellite, otherwise known as tests would discover. Since then he's focused his attention on the transmission spectra of exovenuses which will allow the opportunity to estimate the atmospheric composition of these planets. Please welcome Kobe Osberg. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. I guess I can go ahead and share my screen. Cool. Looks great. Awesome. And let me just get set up with the presenter of you. Okay. So, again, thank you for having me here to preach the Venus gospel. I'm very excited. I have been studying Venus for quite a while now. And I love being able to, you know, tell people how cool it is because it is typically portrayed as not being cool at all. So, let's just go ahead and get into it. Of course, before I start a little bit about me, you already mentioned some of this, but I'm a fourth year PhD student at Riverside. And I did my undergrad at SF State, which is pretty close to where your community is based. So that is awesome. I'm in San Francisco and I miss it there. It's definitely not as cool down here in Riverside. Not really much going on just a lot of deserts and sweltering heat, which is soon coming as we are near the summer. But yeah, so I did my undergrad in physics and I definitely enjoyed it. But I just came to the understanding that the amount of math that you had to do to actually have a career in physics was just too much for me. I was talking to a lot of graduate students who were doing like their masters at SF State while I was there and just seeing the things that they had to do for their masters in physics. It just sounded awful. And Stephen Cain, which is my current advisor, was actually a professor at SF State and I took an exoplanets course with him. After taking that course, I realized that exoplanets are amazing and I decided to pursue it. That's why I'm here now. So I'm very lucky that he was there at SF State. And so since I've gotten here, I've pretty much been doing all things Venus. As Brian mentioned, I published a paper with Stephen Cain and it was either 2020 or 2019. I honestly do not remember. But that paper just focused on predicting the amount of exovenus exovenuses that the test mission would be discovering throughout its lifetime. And I did a little stint with Sue Smirkar at JPL and she is amazing. She is the, I think the deputy PI on the Mars insight mission and I think the lead PI on one of the new Venus missions, Veritas. And so when I was with her at JPL, we were doing a lot of Venus geology. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So I've been doing, you know, exovenuses and also Venus here and the geology aspect of it. So I've been really just trying to round out my skill set and the things that I know about Venus. Since the paper that I put out, I've been focusing mainly on transmission spectrum, which is basically the main tool that we will have for determining the composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets. And I'll go into more detail about that as well. For those that are not aware, let me just go over some of the cool facts about Venus. So Venus is extremely hot. And this is one of the reasons that people tend to ignore it's just because, you know, oh, it's way too hot for life to exist on the surface, therefore, we should not care about it for that is wrong. We should definitely care about it. And so one cool fact about the surface temperature is that if you were to take a frozen pizza out while you were on the surface of Venus, the pizza would cook in 10 seconds, because it is that hot. So if you ever need to quickly cook a pizza because of an emergency, then the best thing to do is to take your pizza to Venus. Besides the extremely hot temperatures, it only gets worse. There's also an extremely high amount of surface pressure, which is mainly due to the extremely thick atmosphere. And so just to. So the surface pressure is 92 bars and just to put that into perspective, you know, here on earth, we are at one bar at the surface. So 92 bars would be the equivalent of going almost a kilometer deep into the ocean. So the weight of the ocean and the atmosphere on top of you, when you're 900 meters deep is the same as being on the surface of Venus. So that doesn't sound like a good time. Venus is completely covered in clouds. So you know here on earth clouds are variable and you know they're never covering the entire planet at once on a Venus that is not the case. And so this is why Venus is able to stay so hot because of the greenhouse effect that occurs. And so those clouds are composed of mainly sulfuric acid and water. And so not only would you be crushed by the atmosphere and pretty much melted by the high temperatures you would also be dissolved by the acid that consists or that is in the atmosphere. So it's just not not a good time on the surface of Venus. Venus is also kind of weird just because it is rotating in the opposite direction of all the other planets other than Uranus, of course, which is on its axis, and it rotates very very slowly. The rotation is almost the same as its orbital period, so it is almost will be called tidally locked. And yeah, so this is weird and there's some speculation as to this speculation that this rotation rate is responsible for the environments that we see today. So weird thing is that, or I guess not weird, but in the past when we couldn't see through the atmosphere or know what's going on in the surface of Venus, we believed that it was actually a swamp planet. And there is a bunch of old science fiction movies that are pretty terrible, but cool nonetheless, that depicts going to Venus and seeing like dinosaurs walking on its surface and things like that. But once we were able to actually, you know, see the temperature of the atmosphere and down to the surface then we realized that okay well it's not a troubled planet. And so why should you care about Venus as I explained it is pretty terrible, not for us, but it is a very very interesting planets. One of the reasons that it is particularly interesting is that work has been done recently that showed that Venus could have had a extended period of having temperate surface temperatures. And if anyone's interested the paper is by Michael way and 2020 and basically with the with the right starting conditions when the planet forms. It could have, you know, sustained a livable climate for up to a billion years ago. And of course there's factors, a bunch of factors that, you know, could affect whether it would have had water in the beginning to help sustain that temperature or not, but the model that Michael way ran show that it is possible. Not know for sure and it'll be very difficult to actually determine that it was habitable but the possibility of it is very very intriguing. Another thing that people tend to forget is that Venus is the most physically similar planets are Mars is the one that gets all the attention by NASA and other agencies it gets all rovers all latest technology and Venus doesn't get squat. But it shouldn't just get squat because it is extremely similar to Earth. It has 90% radius that is 90% that of the Earth's radius, and its mass is about 85% that of Earth, whereas Mars is very very small. And so the fact they're so similar makes it even more intriguing as to why are they so different now. This is why Venus is very important in the search for life in the universe and understanding how planets become habitable is because you know what what happened to it. If it was similar or since it is similar to Earth. You know what exactly was the tipping point that caused it to diverge from Earth's evolution so drastically. And these are things that are currently being looked into and things that the new missions, which I mentioned down below will really help us investigate. And so the new missions that have are being planted or they have been accepted by NASA are the Da Vinci and Veritas missions. And there's also a sequel to the venera spacecrafts that were sent to Venus a long time ago by the Russians and that is called venera D. And there's also a ESA, which is the European Space Agency. They are also sending a mission to Venus. And so Venus is becoming pretty popular, which is fantastic. And these new missions will be, you know, extremely helpful for understanding what happened to it. And of course there's a lot that we still don't know. And I'll get into that, of course. So just a little breakdown of, you know, what we have sent to Venus from Earth. Probably the most famous missions have been the venera missions. And that is primarily because they were able to take pictures of the surface. But there is also, you know, mariner, pioneer Venus, Magellan, which is, which I'm going to decent amounts. And the latest ones were Venus Express and Akatsuki, which is a Japanese Space Agency mission. But since Akatsuki, Venus has received nothing except for loneliness and neglect.  But with these new missions, we will definitely be spoiling it. And hopefully it'll make up for all the last time that we were not investigating it. So just to go a little bit more in depth about some of the missions that I mentioned. So the venera missions were, I think there was like 12 or 13 of them were spacecraft that were sent to Venus by the Russians. And the venera three was actually the first human object to reach another planet's surface, which was awesome. And it was actually the first to take a picture of another planet's surface from the surface. So a pretty, you know, benchmark mission and honest descent was able to take measurements of the pressure and temperature on Venus, as well as things like wind speeds. There's a funny little anecdote. So I don't remember which of the 12 or 13 venera missions it was. But on one of these spacecrafts, they had a device that was designed to measure the compressibility of Venus' surface. And from those measurements, I think they can determine like the composition of the surface and how dense it is, things like that. And they also had a camera to take pictures. And so the camera needs to be protected as it is descending. And so they have a cap that goes over the camera. And so the cap needs to be ejected and with force because the atmosphere is so thick that it, you know, it takes a lot of force to actually move things. And so it ejected properly, but it happened to land directly under the spot where the device was going to measure the compressibility. And so the device sent back data and it returned the compressibility of the lens cap instead of Venus' surface.  This was a pioneer which was able to measure the composition and temperature of the upper atmosphere, as well as the plasma environment and the ionosphere of Venus. And it consisted of a orbiter and four probes that were able to, again, measure important things like the composition of the clouds and the pressure and temperature deeper into the atmosphere. And it's really cool. I don't know if it was from the same era or not, but it's really cool like poster for pioneer and I really, really love this photo. Now for Magellan, and so I used basically only Magellan data when I was working with Sue Smirkar. And so Magellan was an orbiter that did a fantastic job of taking images of the surface, as well as measuring the topography or just like the height of different geological features on Venus. And to this day, I guess, you may wonder, you know, why am I using this 30 plus year old data to study Venus' surface? Well, it's because that's all we have. There has not been any updates to this data that we got from Magellan. And so, you know, it was a 30 or the mission was 30 plus years ago. And so therefore the devices used to get the data were also 30 plus years old. And so that means the resolution of the measurements that it took was not very good in comparison to today's standards. And so just to put it in perspective, if you were to map Earth's surface with the Magellan orbiter, you would not be able to resolve the San Andreas fault because the resolution is that bad. And that is a important detail to miss because the San Andreas fault is a clear indicator that there are tectonic plates on Earth. And so with the new missions, I believe Veritas is going to be redoing this thing that Magellan did. With the new data, you know, there could be a lot of stuff that we discovered that we just missed out on because of how bad the resolution was. But I know I was hating on it a lot, but we still learned a lot from this mission. There is possible evidence of subduction on Venus's surface. So in that top right figure, we're looking at the topography of a feature called a corona on Venus. So red is indicating higher topography and green is lower topography.  And so the trench on the outside is potentially where a part of the crust went underneath a different part of the crust, which is essentially what subduction is. And so that is really, really, or if that is actually subduction, then that can help us understand a lot about Venus's history because on Earth, subduction is vital for recycling carbon from the atmosphere back into the interior. So subduction allows us to keep our carbon levels, you know, relatively low. And that's why, you know, global warming is or climate change is the thing because we are speeding up that process of putting that CO2 back into the atmosphere. And so the subduction is not quick enough to account for how much we're putting out. I guess, lastly, another thing that Magellan discovered is that there are very few craters on the surface of Venus. And so we use craters or the number of craters on the surface of a planet or moon to date the age of its surface. And so when we dated the age of Venus's surface, the crater showed that the surface is around a billion years old, which doesn't really make too much sense. There isn't really any erosion going on of Venus's surface. And so the hypothesis that was used to account for this is that there was a catastrophic resurfacing event where a billion years ago the entire surface was covered in lava, which then, you know, covered up the craters that we should be seeing to because the crater should, you know, reflect that the planet is four billion years old or whatever. And so the theory is really dramatic. And it is only a, or I guess it would be a hypothesis. It is only a hypothesis. And there are other, you know, different things that have been brought up that could answer the same question, but the catastrophic resurfacing is accepted by some of the community. But it sounds really crazy. It would have been crazy to witness. And lastly, let's talk a little bit about Akatsuki. So this was a Japanese Space Agency mission. And honestly, I don't know too much about the science that they have done. I know that it has a strong emphasis on setting the clouds on Venus. And so this is one of the cooler features that they have found. And so you can see this like bulge in the middle of Venus here. And so that is essentially a gravity wave that is traveling through the atmosphere and creating this crazy bulge that we see here. And the scale of this is crazy. It's like, it's like 6000 miles wide or something. I guess that would be vertically. And so yeah, so it was like really crazy things going on in the atmosphere on Venus that we would not be used to here on Earth. And another thing that Akatsuki has become famous for is it's really amazing photos of Venus. So these aren't in the visible spectrum. So if you were in space looking at Venus, it wouldn't look quite like this. They are using filters to look at different structures of the cloud. So it's either in like the ultraviolet or in infrared that you're seeing this. But these are really, really awesome photos that they have of Venus. So despite all these missions, there are still a ton of things that we just do not know about Venus. So just a list of few. We don't really know what the structure of the interior is, you know, here on Earth. We have, you know, the core mantle and the crust, but we don't know if that's the same on Venus as well as what it is composed of. And the interior is very important because the interior of planets is what generates a magnetic field. On Earth, the magnetic field is very important for deflecting solar wind and protecting our atmosphere. And Venus does not have a magnetic field. So we would like to know if it did in the past. And so learning more about the interior would help with that. Plate tectonics, as I mentioned, super, super important for recycling carbon. In the moment, we say that Venus has a stagnant lid. And so that is basically the crust is one thick or one complete plate. Whereas on Earth, you know, we have plates that are moving tectonic plates. And so the thing the possible signs of subduction kind of hint to, you know, there might be some form of tectonics on Venus, but we really do not know. And also the water loss history, we would like to know whether Venus have water or not. And the D to H so that is D for deuterium and H for hydrogen so it's the deuterium to hydrogen ratio. And basically the ratio of the those two elements in the atmosphere can help us understand how much water did Venus have in the past. We don't really have any good measurements on that because all the measurements of that were taken by the older missions, and the uncertainties are very high so we can't really learn too much from them in the moment. Was Venus habitable in the past, if it was how long was the habitable and what caused it to be completely uninhabitable to life as we know it today. So the ways that we are going about trying to solve these mysteries is either through in situ missions so missions that go to Venus and take data from the planet itself, or which I will be talking mostly about today the study of exoplanets. And so the in situ missions, as I mentioned before there's four new missions that are coming out. And that will ask, they'll help answer you know some of the direct questions about Venus that we have. Whereas the study of exoplanets is kind of like a indirect pathway to to learning about Venus. So we are interested in planets and this is primarily what I have been working on is planets that are in the Venus zone, which I will be defining in a couple slides. And so when we discover a planets that might be Venus like the way we can learn about those planets is by observing their atmospheres through different techniques that again I will define later. So these planets are really important for understanding Venus, even though they may not be exactly like Venus because we want to try and whittle down what were the main causes that made Venus the latest today. And so Venus receives a lot more energy from the sun than we do. So that is one potential factor. And so what we could do is find a rocky planets that receives a similar amount of energy from its star that Venus does, which I think is around two times amount that Earth receives. So we find a planet that's two times amount of flux in the earth. And if we find that, you know, that planet may be able to sustain a habitable atmosphere if we find that it has, you know, water, then, you know, it helps it bodes well for the theory that Venus could have been habitable in the past. And so we can use exoplanets to basically confirm things that we are wondering about Venus here. Alright, so let's get into how exactly we discover exoplanets. So the main method that is used today to discover exoplanets is called the transit method or transit detection. And so with this method, basically what we are doing is looking at a star. And we are basically this have if you don't know that there's a planet there, they'll just point a telescope at a star. And if, while it is looking at the star we see the brightness of that star drop that we know that something is passing in front of it. And based on how much that brightness drops the amount that it drops, we can then determine what the size of the planet is in comparison to the star. And since, you know, there is like a limit on how small of things that we can detect. There is this method is more sensitive towards larger planets, but it also helps with the star is a lot smaller. And so a lot of the missions recently like tests and Kepler, which I hope some of you all have heard about. They have been using this technique and they've been looking at a lot of really small stars and they've been finding a lot of rocky planets, rocky planets, transiting in front of their stars. This method is also more sensitive to planets with shorter orbital periods. So our solar system is very weird because it is very spread out. But when we are looking at a lot of cooler stars, the systems around those stars tend to be a lot more compact and have a lot shorter orbital periods. And the reason that it is more sensitive to these shorter orbital periods is mainly because the chances of actually detecting or seeing the thing the planet pass in front of the stars a lot higher because it passes in front of the star more often.  If we were looking at a completely analogous system to ours, we would only see the earth transit once every 365 days. And so the chances of actually seeing it transits when you are looking at the star is very, very low. So as I mentioned, this method is used primarily by the test mission. And so test stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellites. And this mission was launched in 2018. And it has basically been surveying the entire sky and seeing if planets are transiting in front of stars. And it has been doing a very, very good job. In particular, it has been finding a lot of planets that are in the Venus zone, which I will explain in the next slide. And one thing that is great about tests is that it is observing stars that are nearby and therefore a lot more are very bright. And the mission that tests was the predecessor, I don't know if predecessor is the right word, the mission that came before tests was called Kepler. And it did a similar thing. It stared at a single point of the sky looking for transiting planets, but the stars it was looking at were very far away and therefore very faint. And it is easier to learn about exoplanets when they are around a brighter star. So it is very good that tests is looking at nearby stars. And yeah, so let me explain the Venus zone. So the Venus zone is basically a first order S or we use it as a first order estimates to determine whether a planet is Venus like. And so this is a very busy plot. So let me just try and explain it. On the y axis is the effective temperature of the star. I believe the sun is around like 57, 5700 degrees Kelvin. So it would be, you know, in the middle and you see Venus Earth and Mars here. And on the x axis is the percentage of star lights that the planet is receiving relative to earth. And this is a log scale on the bottom. And so you can see earth here is at 100% on the x axis and the y axis is the temperature for the for the sun. But these shaded regions here the red is the Venus zone and in the blue is the habitable zone. Essentially the habitable zone is the region around the star where the amount of energy that the planet receives could allow it to sustain liquid water on the surface, given that the planet has sufficient atmosphere pressure. So that's a very vague description. But it is really it's not saying for sure that, you know, if a planet is in the habitable zone that it is for sure habitable. It is pretty much just a selection tool to help us locate planets of interest. And so the Venus zone is similar. The outer boundary saw the blue boundary that is shared with the habitable zone, that is the runaway greenhouse boundary. And at that boundary basically the amount of flux that a planet would receive at the boundary would be enough to prevent it from having liquid surface water on its surface. And so, because just because the energy would receive would make it too hot to sustain liquid water. And the inner boundaries of the boundary on the left the dotted line, that is essentially how hot a Venus like planet could get before it starts losing all of its atmosphere. So with that in mind with those boundaries in mind, planets in the Venus zone should not have any liquid surface water, but should still have sufficient or a prominent atmosphere. And so with this, we basically can determine whether a planet could potentially be an exo Venus. The other thing that is important of course is that the planet is rocky. And so the the limits kind of it's kind of fuzzy but the limits for how big a planet can get before it turns gaseous is around two times the radius of Earth. So we are interested in planets that are in the Venus zone and less than two times the size of Earth. And so, this is a sorry again for another plot, but this is basically the same plot, we have the flux which is just the amount of energy that a planet receives on the x axis here. And on the y axis again is the temperature of the star. The dotted lines are for the inner and the outer Venus own boundaries. And this is showing discovered known planets. And they're just color coded based on their, their radius. And so if you just focus on the red, so those are all planets with radii less than 1.5 times the radius of Earth. There is a lot. There is a lot of planets that are in this Venus zone. And so that is great. You know, we, it is nice that we have a large sample size so that we can, you know, have observations of their atmospheres open into to determine essentially your composition. But in general, there is a lot of planets that potentially be like Venus. And how do we determine, you know, the actual climates or surface conditions of these planets? Well, that's where the James Webb Space Telescope comes into play. You know, this telescope was recently launched. And thank God it launched safely and got to its location or its destination safely because you know it was a long time coming. But the JWC will be able to do a lot of things for a lot of different fields, but in particular for exoplanets, its primary use will be for conducting transmission and emission spectroscopy. And essentially with these techniques, we are determining the composition of the atmosphere of planets. And the, for anyone that's interested, the wavelength range is in the near infrared, which is around one to 25 microns. And so just a little visual on what transmission spectroscopy is. I include this little figure. So this requires a planet to transit, which again is when the planet passes in front of us and the star. And so when the light from the star goes through the atmosphere of the planet, it interacts with the molecules in the atmosphere. And molecules kind of have like a fingerprint where they will absorb light, but at different frequency or different wavelengths for each molecule. And so when that star light passes through the atmosphere and gets to us, we can basically look at all the different wavelengths of light that we are receiving. And if some of that light is missing, then we know that, you know, a molecule, a species in the atmosphere of the planet absorbed or scattered that molecule. And again, based on the wavelength that it was absorbed at, we can determine what kind of molecules are in the atmosphere. And you can also do this when the planet is behind the star, but it's just a little bit different because it is reflecting light instead of the light passing through the atmosphere. But this will be the primary method of us determining the composition of planets. But unfortunately, it will not be easy to actually learn things about exovenuses in particular. We have actually done this before this trans spectroscopy of planets, but primarily with giant planets in other systems. And that is because the planet is bigger, there is more light that is being absorbed because it has a much thicker atmosphere. And when I say giant, I'm talking about like Jupiter like planets just completely gaseous. And so there's a lot more absorption going on there. And so that kind of stuff was actually done with Hubble, but Hubble didn't have the sensitivity needed to do it with terrestrial rocky planets. And James Webb will have the capability, but with menaces that can actually get a little complicated. And so I apologize, this is an extremely busy plot. But this is an example of what's transmission a transmission spectra of a Venus like planet would look like. So the y axis is basically the the opaqueness of the atmosphere. And on the x axis is the wavelength that the atmosphere is opaque. And so as I mentioned before, you know, each molecule has a specific absorption fingerprint. And so CO2, which is the primary molecule in Venus's atmosphere absorbs at these wavelengths here, which is two microns to 174.3. And so with a Venus like planet, we would expect there to be a ton of absorption at these wavelengths because there would be a lot of CO2 and the CO2 would be absorbing the light. And so that's what we're seeing here. So these peaks are all absorption from CO2. But what I also did, and probably did 20 times because it looks more complicated, but I adjusted the height of the clouds in the atmosphere.  And so clouds are terrible for doing transmission spectra.  And so they prevent us from learning a lot about planets. And so let's only just for now focus on this yellow line. So this is the transmission spectrum of the clouds at the highest point of this planet or in the atmosphere of this planet. This is based off of. And so when the clouds are this high, you are basically missing out on all the information that is in the other lines below it. So basically, it shrinks the size of the CO2 features and then any smaller features that the clouds are blocking we also don't get to see at all. And so in general, clouds will prevent us from learning things about exoplanets. And so another thing that's a problem is that Earth has a pretty similar transmission spectrum to Venus. So this is kind of the same thing we're just looking at, but now I threw in Earth's transmission spectrum in the red. And it's pretty puzzling because, you know, Venus has like 100 times as much or more than that. The atmosphere is extremely thick and has 96% CO2. Earth has, I think, like 0.004% CO2, and it's much thinner. So you would expect Venus to have a lot more CO2 absorption. But since the clouds are there, it negates a lot of that absorption, and it actually makes it seem like Earth has more CO2. And so this is another problem that we might encounter when looking at exoplanets that we might not be able to differentiate a Earth from a Venus. I'm going to try and speed through here, because I'm a little behind. And so the next question is, you know, can James Webb actually detect an exo-Venus? And so the simple answer is probably not. This plot here is showing the same spectra in black that we're just looking at, but in red is simulated James Webb data. And pretty much it just doesn't matter how many times we observe a Venus-like plant, just because the features are so small, that we would just never be able to differentiate it from a planet just not having an atmosphere at all.  But, you know, the thing is we don't really know what we will encounter when we are observing exoplanets. This is for an exact Venus analog, but in reality, you know, the atmospheres of planets in the Venus zone could be a lot different than what we see on Venus today. So it is yet to be seen how well we'll be able to determine the atmosphere composition of exoplanets. Okay, so after we get the spectra, the main thing will be determining the climates of the planets from just looking at their atmosphere. And so as we saw, you know, the clouds can prevent us from seeing the molecules in majority of the atmosphere. And so one of the challenges is determining the surface conditions on a planet just from observing the very top of this atmosphere. And that's where in situ missions come into play because we need to determine the climate of an exoplanet we model it using a climate model. And so the information that we put into those climate models will just be the information that we learned from their atmospheres. And so the more that we understand the connection between the surface conditions and what's going on the top of the atmosphere, the better we'd be able to model the climates of exoplanets from our observations. And one of the missions I'll be helping us improve these models is DaVinci was recently accepted, and it's awesome. Its main goals will be to determine whether there was water ever on Venus. And as well as just improving the general data that we have because the data that we currently have for Venus, again, is very old because it's all from those older emissions. And so the uncertainties are a lot higher and with the new data will be able to get a more firm understanding of the structure of this atmosphere. And I'm going to show a quick video just because this video will probably do a better job at explaining it than I will. So enjoy it's only a minute long. On the hottest planet in the solar system, a probe descends through a thick poisonous atmosphere. It is both a time capsule and time machine, unlocking secrets of the ancient past while revealing how a world can turn from possibly habitable to horrible. The location, Venus. Our sister planet has much to tell us about our own and exoplanets helping ignite a scientific renaissance for our universe. The mission brought to you by NASA Goddard and its partners is aptly named DaVinci Plus, the first US probe mission to Venus in over 40 years. With the probe acting as chemistry lab and photographer, other cameras will map and gather additional views of the planet from above, providing a new study of Venus that has scientific implications well beyond our own solar system. DaVinci Plus will give us a new understanding of planetary evolution. Launching in 2029, three years will be spent exploring our celestial neighbor, DaVinci Plus, coming soon to a planet near you. So yeah, I think the video is so cool. So yeah, that is a general idea of DaVinci.  Unfortunately, I don't have too much time since I spent a little bit too much time in the background stuff that is all good. But the main questions it will answer is, did the interplanets form the same materials? Did Venus have water ever? Did Venus have continents in the past, which is kind of a sign of plate tectonics and things like that? Let me see what else I can fit in here. So yeah, as I mentioned, it will have a probe that will just fall down onto the surface. It will most likely not survive the landing and then does not plan to. But on its way down, it will be taking in measurements of the atmosphere. And just to get an idea of what it will be doing. Missions in the past. Pretty much we're only able to measure the or investigate the top of the atmosphere and a little bit of the middle of the atmosphere you see there with the Vega balloons and pioneer. But DaVinci will be a complete measurement from about 70 kilometers down to the surface and the surface. The atmosphere near the surface we really do not know that much about. So DaVinci will be unveiling what is going on down there. And so, yeah, so help us understand, you know, there could have been two have a little planets in the solar system, which is a game changer, because we all have been, you know, living our lives with understanding that Earth is special and the only one. And I'm just going to wrap it up there. Sorry, I rushed a little bit at the end there. But in summary, Venus is more important than it is given credit for exoplanets will be a, you know, alternative path to understanding Venus and looking into the possibility of it being habitable in the past. And in situ measurements will be complimentary to that of the exoplanet studies, and will help improve our models that we use to model the climates on Venus like planets. And yeah, thank you. I appreciate all for having me and thank you all for listening. All right, thank you, Colby. That's really, really fascinating. And, you know, gosh, it sounds like an exciting mission. And I love the fact that at that, you know, looking beyond can help understand what's here. But, you know, then there's a synergy between the near and the far with this mission and it's great. And what acid question wouldn't Venus's atmosphere cause extensive erosion with all that acid and other things. Yeah, so that's a good question. So there is weathering. I think it's, you know, specifically chemical weathering when the atmosphere interacts with the surface. It is not to the same effect as, you know, erosion from water. Like the, you know, the chemical weathering won't be making a Grand Canyon on Venus. You know, water has a much more potent erosion effects than that. And so that is why we we the chemical weathering wouldn't be responsible for the lack of prayers that we saw. That's why they use that catastrophic resurfacing to explain it. But good question. Okay, and you might go ahead and stop screen share since you just have the last slide. They're great. So Mary asked, will the DaVinci probe and I think you alluded to this and will the DaVinci probe be able to take any images once it lands on the surface if it survives the trip to the surface. So what are the imaging capabilities of the probe all the way down. Yeah, so again, great question. So it will be taking images, but not from the surface. What it will be doing instead is taking images of the surface below as it is descending towards the surface. And the reason that they wanted to do that is because they wanted to see if there are any ties between the surface features or the geology below the atmosphere that they're taking the measurements in. So it will be taking hundreds of images as it falls. But I think once it hits the surface, they aren't planning on doing anything there. Okay, Bill asked or will either inside to or exoplanet investigations look at the effects of magnetospheres, especially on the existence or absence of atmosphere so I guess what's the relationship between atmospheres and magnetic surfaces. So hopefully I got that right Bill so you can correct us if we didn't so. So that is actually a pretty deep rabbit hole, especially as of recently. You know, it is predominantly thought of that magnetic fields are essential for a planet, you know, maintaining an atmosphere, and it does, you know, protect us from the charge stellar winds, which when interacting with our atmosphere can send molecules in our atmosphere flying to space, and over time, you know, we would lose our atmosphere. But Venus does not have an atmosphere does not have a magnetic field. And so the thought of a magnetic field being necessary, kind of doesn't work when it comes to Venus, because Venus has the thickest atmosphere out of all this racial planets. So it is actually unknown, whether magnetic fields help or hurt planets, because at the poles, it actually the magnetic fields actually like funnel stellar wind at the poles and that's why we see your aurora. And so that's in the solar system with exoplanets. Also I know it will be extremely difficult. And at least in the near future it'll probably won't be able to determine the presence of magnetic field on an exoplanet. There are ways hypothesized with viewing aurora on giant planets. But with our current sensitivity is it would be very, very hard. So it makes me think a little bit because I know that that that's was one of the areas of investigation on Mars and that was one of the things that Maven went was to investigate the, the, you know, lack of atmosphere on Mars and a lot of it had to do with the magnetic field but also there were there were some other implications which I don't know whether that would have anything to do with, with Venus, you know, I think it was the solar wind stripping the, the atmosphere away in any, you know, synergy with any findings there does that inform anything. Maven Maven is a great mission. It's hard to directly connect the two just because one of the primary factors of a planet sustaining an atmosphere is its mass. And, you know, more the mass the stronger the gravity, and therefore the stronger its ability, or the stronger it can hold on to the molecules in this atmosphere. So Mars is not very massive at all. And so it loses its atmosphere pretty easily. Whereas Venus is near the mass of earth and so it has an easier time. But another thing is basically when it when molecules escape a planet's atmosphere in the space. The reason they are doing so is because they are energized to where they're fast enough to exceed the escape velocity, which is basically how fast you need to go to leave a planet's gravity, a gravitational pull. And it is easier to accelerate lighter molecules. And so one thing that is a factor for why Venus has been able to keep its atmosphere is it's primarily composed of CO2 which is a heavy molecule in comparison to, you know, hydrogen or nitrogen. And so, since it is composed of mainly heavy molecules it is much harder to speed those up so that I can leave. So hopefully they answer your question. Okay, so, you know, Cliff has a good question.  Yeah, good question. So no parachutes. I believe there's no parachute, but saying that there isn't. They use a technique called arrow breaking, which is where they basically use the friction of the atmosphere to help decelerate the spacecraft. And so this is used in a bunch of missions whether it's an orbiter sometimes they have like the satellite that's orbiting a planet dip into its atmosphere for a minute just to slow it down, just because of the friction that it has. And with Venus is probably actually a lot easier to arrow break just because the atmosphere is so thick. So the terminal velocity on earth is, you know, basically where the the as fast as you can go in and the terminal velocity on Venus would be a lot slower, mainly because it has a thicker atmosphere and less gravity. So no they won't be slowing it down, but it won't be going too fast or they won't be able to take measurements, essentially. So something you just said that was interesting this kind of leads into a question that Stewart asked and it's about, you know, the interior of Venus, which, you know, Da Vinci isn't going to be able to say anything but maybe you might say he says how solid is the surface to the core is consistent in the sense we understand Earth's tectonics, but then I want to come back to something you just said you said that the even that the gravity on Venus is a little bit less. However, it's approximately the same size as earth and so that would seem to indicate that we do know something about the interior of Venus. Yeah. So we do know it's average density, for sure, just using its mass and its radius. But something so the earth produces a magnetic field because it has a liquid outer core and the convection in that liquid outer outer core which is basically just the the the soup of metals in the core moving. So that movement creates a magnetic fields, but over time that liquid outer force solidifies and so when it is no longer a liquid and it can't convict that's when the magnetic field stops being produced and so there's things like that that's just using the average density to learn. And specifically to magnetic fields. There are ways to like check metals or rocks on the surface for like, kind of like a signature of past magnetic fields. Basically like the metals in a rock might be like polarized and the only way they may be polarized is from the presence of a past magnetic field so there are things like that that we can use to determine things like a magnetic field but on. Yeah, we just don't really know too much just from average density. Yeah, we could get down there with some handheld magnetometers or something and determine the polarity just like they use that for the spreading regions in the ocean floor back in the 60s. Okay, we're going to go for one last question here we are a little bit past time and so Jim K kind of brings up one of the more popular things from a couple of years ago is that there was the discovery of something in the atmosphere and and some, you know, implications for the potential of life as a source and so anything about that that you could, you know, comment on. Yeah. Just to be clear, you know, it is not currently a, it is a heavy super heavily debated topic. When that paper first came out about the detection of boss mean. I got a lot of publicity. And it's awesome that means was getting publicity because of it but since then, there's been like, I think like four or five rebuttal papers in response to their their work to try and show why it's not the case. And obviously this is why science works is because you know there is people that like to make sure that people's analysis is correct. But it's, it's something that we really won't know until we go there and this detection was. This detection occurred a good while after the missions were already conceptualized and all the different instruments were created. So I'm not positive as to whether they added instrumentation last minute to these missions to look for a solution. But I guess like personally, I wouldn't. I'm not too confident in it. It is definitely, you know, a little far fetched. I'm not saying it is impossible. I think the best thing about that the whole philosophy is just the added excitement about Venus and the potential that there could be life in the atmosphere and there is life in the atmosphere on earth. So it is definitely not a impossibility, but I just wouldn't bang on it too much. All the more reason to go there and more than once to so that you know let's make it a mission for us. Exactly. Yeah. Well that's all for tonight thank you so much for Colby for joining us this evening this is wonderful and thank you everyone for tuning in. So you can join us for our next webinar on Thursday may 19th, when we welcome back Dr Kelly lepo from the space telescope science Institute, who will share with us what we might expect from the release of the first images and the science return from the web telescope. So you can find an archive of these webinars and the next guy network website and the outreach resources section, each webinars page also features some additional resources and activities and I'll link to Colby's paper. You can also find these webinars on the next guy network YouTube channel. And so keep looking up and we will see you next month and we'll kind of hang here for just a few more minutes though.


I took about four roles at the march. People kept gathering in increasing numbers towards the middle of the day, and apparently a lot of them were coming directly by bus from wherever, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Virginia. A group of people marching with pickets. And a couple of them are holding large signs indicating that they were such and such an organization, church, union, whatever it was, from Danville, Virginia. First of all, there was no unified march. There were lots of individual marches. People who probably had consolidation either due to their membership in a church, their membership in some group, including SNCC, unions, Philip Randolph, I believe, was a union leader, I don't remember exactly. And this is leading up to, obviously their target was the space, the reflecting pool essentially in front of the Lincoln Memorial. That's where they had the platform where the speakers and singers and other people spoke from. They had separate tents for giving out pickets, separate tents for the news media, and maybe other things. And the march more or less kept on schedule. There was a lot of speakers. A Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., some big ones they also had. Lots of other, John Lewis, who was just mentioned in the New York Times today. The news media were very good. They had taken a lot of care, a lot of preparation. They had booms to put TV cameras, still cameras, camera men on top to get into a large view. And in the lead-up to the formal schedule, there were a lot of informal things, including a little, actually, platform, some of which were the back of a U-Haul trainer, the people singing. There was civil rights songs. There was singing in one of these venues by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. There were police all over the place, and people were not intending to be violent. There were no incidents. Sometimes people say, what could I do as one person? And there's a lot of people thinking that. If you get them all together, you've got a force.


Okay, so briefly I'd like to talk about highlighting there in Nehemiah chapter 8, the last verse that we read verse 8. I wanted to get the context as are the priests that bring in the Bible in front of all the people and they're reading the Bible for the first time as a congregation in quite some time and the verse 8 there that I want to highlight it says, so they read in the book in the law of God distinctly and gave the sense and cause them to understand the reading. Sometimes when we read the Bible, if we're doing it on our own time or even if we're hearing it at church or listening to it on an audio Bible or something like that, oftentimes there's words or phrases specifically like numbers and measurements and things that we don't use in 2024 America that maybe we're not familiar with. I'll read for you Leviticus 19 verse 36. It says, just balances, just waits, adjust ifa, adjust hen shall ye have.  So these an ifa or a hen, these are volumetric measurements that we don't necessarily know exactly what they mean, right? If you've ever met somebody from a different country or somebody that uses the metric system, sometimes we have this, you know, somebody might say, oh, I was driving 100 kilometers an hour and we don't really know how fast that is until they say, oh, 62 miles an hour. Oh, okay, I can relate to that, right? Or if you're talking about pesos or euros or the dollar or the yen, different currencies kind of translate differently to us. If somebody were to say, hey, I weigh 100 kilograms, we don't really know exactly off the top of our head, at least in America what that signifies, oh, that's 220 pounds, right? Somebody that's, you say somebody's six foot one, you know how tall they are, but if they say, well, I'm 185 centimeters, sometimes that goes over our heads, right? And so when we're reading the Bible, like it says there in Nehemiah 8 and verse 8, it says they read in the book in the law of God distinctly and gave the sense and cause them to understand the reading. We should also make sure that we take time to understand what those words mean, especially if they're a word that's not familiar to us or a word that is in a measurement that we don't use. So I kind of wanted to go over a few of those. Pastor was going over John chapter 12 on Wednesday night and that's the story where the costly bottle of ointment was poured on Jesus' feet and it says it was sold, it should have been, Judas says, why was this not sold for 300 pence? We don't really, we're not familiar with the pence, but we'll look at that and kind of get an idea and kind of show, make it more relatable to us, right? If you would, please turn to Ezekiel chapter 45. Ezekiel chapter 45. There's a couple of different types of measurements that I'd like to just go over. One would be the volumetric measurements, how a volume, you know, we would use gallons or quartz or pints. In the Bible it uses a different metric. Ezekiel chapter 45 and verse 11, verse 11 says, the ephah and the bath shall be of one measure, that the bath may contain the tenth part of an Homer and the ephah, the tenth part of an Homer. The measure thereof shall be after the Homer. So a Homer, if you look it up, a Homer is 50 gallons. So when it's talking about a Homer, we don't really recognize what that means, but if you say 50 gallons, you can imagine 5 or 10 5-gallon buckets or a 55-gallon drum of oil. The ephah and the bath, it says in the first part, shall be of one measure, meaning they're the same, and it says that the bath may contain the tenth part of an Homer. So a Homer, 50 gallons, a tenth of that is 5 gallons. So we can kind of get a feel for the metrics that the Bible is using here. There's another one that's talked about, I read it in the Leviticus, a hymn, that's just means simply a gallon. And it's important also that we pay attention here in Ezekiel 45 where you're at, it says Homer, H-O-M-E-R. I'll read for you in Exodus 16. It says a very similar word.  This was the pot of manna that was to be stored in the Ark of the Covenant. And if you're just listening to it, Homer and Homer, they sound very similar. It wasn't a 55-gallon jar that they had that they stored in the thing. An Homer, O-M-E-R is a half gallon, two quarts. That makes sense when you're reading the context, but sometimes it helps to put it into measurements that we understand. Turn to Genesis chapter six. Please, Genesis chapter number six at the beginning of the Bible. This is the story of Noah and the Ark, Noah making the Ark of wood. And now we'll get into length measurements. A qubit is what the Bible talks about. And a qubit isn't something, it's typically from the elbow to the point of the finger, standardized at 18 inches or a foot and a half. And that's an metric that we can kind of comprehend, a foot and a half.  It says in Genesis 6 and verse 14, make thee an ark of gopher wood. Room shall they'll make in the ark and shall pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make of it. The length of the ark shall be 300 qubits. The breadth of it 50 qubits and the height of it 30 qubits. So if we just go those 350 and 30 qubits, sometimes that can go over our head. But if we, okay, that's 450 feet, that's 75 foot wide, and that's 45 feet tall. Okay, we can kind of understand that in metrics that we use on a daily basis. There's also a metric that the Bible uses called a rod. That's talked about in Ezekiel and also in Revelation kind of describing the temple. A rod is typically 10 and a half feet. So that's kind of gives you measurements when you're reading through those. Another one in the book of Acts, when Paul's on his journey on the boat and they're about to be shipwrecked. Some of the people that are familiar with boating and it may be familiar with this term, but I wasn't. Acts 27 verse 28, it says, and sounded and found it 20 fathoms. And when they had gone a little farther, they sounded again and found it 15 fathoms. They're coming up to an island or to a piece of land and they wanna make sure that they're not getting too shallow, so that they're gonna strike ground on the boat that they're on. Well, a fathom, I don't really understand what that is. If you look it up, a fathom is six feet. So, okay, 20 fathoms, it's 120 foot deep of water. 15 fathoms, they're 90 foot deep water, it's getting shallower and shallower. So, we can kinda get the sense of it from the context, but oftentimes it helps to look it up and really put it into terms that we can understand. Another one that's interesting in John chapter 6 is a furlong. A furlong is a word we don't use much anymore, but that means an eighth of a mile. So, an eighth of a mile, the Bible says in John 6 and verse 19, it says, when they had rode about five and 20 or 30 furlongs, they say Jesus walking on the sea and drawing nigh unto the ship, and they were afraid. So, 25 to 30 furlongs, that's a little over three miles to almost four miles. Furlongs, we don't quite comprehend, but when we put it in miles, we can understand what a mile is, how long three miles is. Turn to Matthew chapter 20, please, Matthew chapter number 20. The last type of metric I wanna look at, one that we're not familiar with in the Bible terms, but we can put it into terms that we are familiar with, is in Matthew chapter 20, one example of it. So in the Bible, weight measurements is another measurement that the Bible talks about, the shekel, talent is a weight measurement. A piece of silver is equated to a shekel of silver, and that's a weight measurement, how much something weighs. So this is how people trade, in this example, currency, and it was a weighed out amount of silver, typically. So in Matthew 20 and verse one, it says, for the kingdom of heaven is likened to a man that is a householder, which went out early in the morning to hire laborers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the laborers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. Now when we see, when we read a penny a day, we're thinking of the one cent coin with a Blinken's face on it, right? Well, a penny in the Bible is here just described as a day's wage. So in the United States, average annual income is about 60,000 plus or minus. If you break that down into a daily wage, 52 weeks in the year and a five day work week, a penny would be about 230 bucks. So $230 is about what they had agreed to as their daily wage here, putting it into 2024 US dollars. That example I talked about earlier when it says in John chapter 12, Judas Iscariot after this ointment was poured on Jesus' feet, he asked why was not this ointment sold for 300 pence and given to the poor. A pence, in the same way that when we talk about our penny, our one cent penny, we say, well, instead of saying I have seven pennies, we say we have seven cents, right? In Britain, when they use the pound as the measurement, they also have pennies, but they don't say they have seven pennies, they say they have seven pence. So pence is just multiple pennies in the Bible. So a penny again at $230, if you do the math on that 300 pence, this ointment that he estimated its value, that's $69,000. That really kind of sits a little different when you read the story, right? And the Bible does say it was a very costly ointment and so on, but it kind of puts into perspective in numbers that we can understand and comprehend what these mean. Another one, again, the shekel. So a shekel is also equated in the Bible, shekel or piece of silver, they're used interchangeably. A shekel is a little less than half an ounce. So US ounce, 16 ounces in a pound, 0.4 ounces is the exact measurement for a shekel. So if you take silver just as a metric of worth, and that whole pence was done in weight as well. But this silver, $25 an ounce is what it's currently trading for today in America, that equates to a shekel of silver being worth $10 in today's standards. So in Matthew 26, I'll just read for you here in verse 15, it says, and said unto them, this is Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Christ. What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenant it with him for 30 pieces of silver, 30 pieces at $10 a piece. That's $300 is what he sold out Jesus Christ for, $300. So when you talk about these numbers in the Bible and we can obviously kind of get the context gives us some clues as to how much or how little these values are worth. But it does help translating it into terms that we're familiar with, right? The whole idea between centimeters and inches or centimeters and feet, we can comprehend typically in America, we can comprehend feet easier than centimeters or millimeters. It's not a metric we're familiar with. And like the Bible said, like we read earlier in Nehemiah chapter 8, when we're reading in the Bible, we ought to make sure that we fully understand and that we fully understand what we're reading. That we can get the full sense of what we're reading so that we have the best chance at understanding clearly what the Bible is trying to say, not interjecting our own understanding into it. Matthew 13, we'll close here Matthew 13 and verse 19. This is the parable of the sower. And Jesus is explaining the parable to the sower, specifically one part of this parable to his disciples afterwards. He's excited to hear you the parable, hear you therefore, excuse me, the parable of the sower. When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom and understandeth it not, then comeeth the wicked one and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the wayside. And specifically this is talking about when somebody's getting the gospel and they understand it not. That's akin, that allows the wicked one, the devil, to come and take that seed out of their heart, take that word of God out of their heart. And when we're reading the Bible for ourselves or when we're listening to it, if there's words that we don't understand or there's sayings or phrases that maybe we don't understand, we should. It would help us to get the sense of the passage to look up those words and fully understand what those words are meaning in terms that we understand. I've always kind of read through the Bible and not always understood what a pence was and what a pound was and a talent and so on. A talent, by the way, I didn't say that. A talent is 75 pounds, 75 pounds. So that kind of gives that metric there as well. But yeah, so make sure when we're reading our Bible we look up the words that maybe we don't understand so that we can get the full meaning and understand it more completely. Let's go ahead and close in prayer.