Tell Me Something I Don't Know (Volume 2)

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Grownups, if there's a child in your life who is interested in, curious about, or fascinated by people in places from history, then my podcast, The Past and the Curious, might just be a hit in your home. From the invention of microscopes to world-traveling dogs to fashions of the 1890s,

Gold Rush Ghost Towns, and audiences going wild for walking competitions, we've got a little bit of it all. Hosted by Children's Author and Museum Educator, Mick Sullivan, that's me, The show is fun, funny, engaging, honest, and beloved by kids and parents alike. Find the past in the curious at all the usual podcast places.

It's taken a lot longer to put this episode together than I anticipated, so let's take a minute to get on sides. Around the beginning of the year I began soliciting stories from you and everyone Who else who listens to this show to be part of a special 200th episode and you more than delivered?

I bet you didn't know that if you took all of the H2O molecules in a liter of water and laid them out in a line end to end They would measure a distance of almost exactly one light here Apparently, Nikola Tesla didn't believe in electrons You were more likely to die by being crushed by a vending machine than a shark attack

Brandel Bronte, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece in order to prove it could be done. I also reached out to a few podcast-y pals of mine

to come on and share cool stuff with me, and they delivered too. My name is Chelsea Weber-Smith, and I am the host and writer

of the American Hysteria podcast. Sure, my name is Avery Truffleman, and I have a podcast called Articles of Interest. I do want to say congratulations on 200 episodes, man.

It is a real achievement. You know, the podcasting game ain't easy. I'm Nicky Walth. I am a podcaster.

One of them over delivered. And so now, yeah, so here we are. So I asked you to bring me a short little thing, just a little bit of trivia

that we could breeze through in the span that we've already been talking. And instead, you have done something, I know not what, aside from that it is substantially larger than my expectations.

I did maybe go a little bit ahead of the brief. Together, we put out a whole episode number 201 about the fastest thing ever created by humans. This is the constant. There is.

After that, two birds remained in want of stoning. One of them was that I had a few more listener stories left to tell, so I asked y'all to keep sending yours in so that we could put together a second listener story episode, which you did.

And one of those submissions gets us to the other problem, which I got Nikki on the line to talk about. Yeah, I mean this is essentially a mea culpa, right, like this is, demonstrating the show title in the most literal possible way.

I was thinking that if you're comfortable with it, I'm going to introduce you as the Mike Daisy to my Ira Glass. Oh, God. Yeah, go on, yeah.

I'll say, so this I think is going to be the opening to I've got a bunch more cool listener stories. And one of those cool listener stories came from a guy that sent me in one for the first time.

And he was like, hey, here's a cool story for you. That's not the fastest thing. Hello, Mark. This is Benjamin from the podcast,

The Nerd and the Scientist. I absolutely love, love, love the last episode about Operation Plumb Blom and the manhole cover that reached 150,000 miles an hour if it survived.

But I hate to be a stickler. It is not the fastest man-made thing yet. Yes, that's right. The fastest thing ever created by humans isn't.

The Parker Solar Probe, which is currently orbiting the sun, has so far clocked in speeds over 430,000 miles an hour. And it's ramping up every time it gets closer and closer

to the sun. So not only does it hold the current record, it's currently en route to keep on breaking that record. It's even, it's worse even than the,

So the nuclear power manhole cover, if we got to the end of the episode, 125,268 miles an hour, something was going more than three times that speed while we were fucking talking.

Yeah, yeah. At the time. Now, as you might expect, the process for getting a 430,000 mile per hour probe

built and into space is involved. It's been a 60 year general project since the idea was first put forward. And it predates NASA and apparently it emerged after a dinner party where physicist Lloyd Berkner, I'm reading straight from the astronomy.com article here,

proposed an international council of scientific unions host an international geophysical year. I think they were trying to get around the Cold War, trying to find a way of the US and Russian scientists working together. Eisenhower said the US couldn't use any of its classified rockets, so they designed the Vanguard rocket specifically for what would then become NASA.

But then Russia launched Sputnik after the Vanguard failed. And the mission of such a probe is fascinating. Yeah, it's the first thing that's going to test what's in the corona. We don't know why the sun's corona is hotter than its surface, apparently.

When I first brought this to your attention, you sent me the expected end of the Parker space probe because it is very good. It says that the final orbit is inside the orbit of Venus, and so no further encounters with that planet are planned.

It will continue in this orbit but requiring adjustment to maintain attitude so that its transmitters point at Earth. Eventually, its thrusters will run out of fuel and full functioning will not then be possible.

The plan is to then rotate the craft so that its instruments will be exposed to the full radiance of the sun for the first time. This is expected to ablate and destroy them. The heat shield will remain though and is expected to continue to orbit the sun for

millions of years. Millions of years. Millions, I mean, you know, knock wood. But ultimately, well, so here's where I'm at with this.

This thing is neat. It's good tech. some stuff and obviously it is by a long stretch the fastest thing.