Episode Idea Research

Now seems like as good a time as any to get a little research done! Especially since I'm in a spacey kind of mood...

I'm not sure if I mentioned it before but the whole point to the Deep Space Explorers series idea, is that it be educational. With this in mind, I'm either going to have to stick completely to things that astrologists and possibly theoretical physicists know or think should exist somewhere. Or I can take that a little further and let my mind wander a little...

Now then, while letting my mind wander immediately summons hundreds of amazing ideas for episodes, it also makes the whole series completely fictional rather than based on fact and theory. While some would say that anybody can theorize I think for the sake of young minds, it would be best to leave it to the qualified physicists... Although that does narrow the boundaries of what can be in the series, you'd be surprised how little it narrows it...

...The universe is a big big place, and a lot of stuff happens in it!

Even some of the stuff happening right in our backyard (so-to-speak) is truly amazing! So much diversity in our immediate surroundings, in our solar system and even on Earth... Just imagine the things you could find if you broaden your search even a little. Our solar system is but a speck, on a larger speck, in a truly huge... HUGE universe.

I think a good start for this research could be to attempt to get even a vague sense of scale of the universe... A video that I saw quite a while ago now comes immediately to mind, just showing the scale of some of the largest stars we know:

When you start to notice the huge stars that dwarf our sun being dwarfed by even bigger stars, you can see how big the big stuff can really get! VY Canis Majoris is truly a MONSTER star... It basically has to be in the series... It's one of the first space videos that I ever saw that got me super excited about what is out there, and I'd love for it to get other people just as excited as me!

Here is a much shorter but narrated video also of VY Canis Majoris, it only features Earth and 3 stars, which is why it wasn't the video I chose to open with:

An important thing to keep in mind... We're trying to get a sense of scale for the universe, every star in these videos are all from our own galaxy! 

Now keep the videos you just saw in mind when watching this:

Absolutely amazing isn't it? I got goosebumps watching that one... It's so enormously big that your mind (or mine at least) struggles to remember that each of the tiny tiny TINY specks at the end of the film are entire galaxies, each containing literally millions of stars, each of which possibly (and most likely) with planets orbiting them! 

Let's think about that for a moment... Now then, I'm a conservative person so let's be conservative. Even if each star has on average only one planet orbiting it (Keep in mind our relatively small sun has 9), that means in each galaxy there are millions and millions of planets, each as diverse as the planets in our own solar system. And each of the millions of billions of galaxies are but a tiny part of the whole universe, each of them holding millions of their own solar systems!

Here's one more video of the universe:

Millions of billions of galaxies x millions and millions of solar systems x at least one planet = a whole lot of planets.

And a whole, whole lot of possibilities for physics to get really... Really awesome!

Your mind has now been blown!

So in summary... I'm really not worried about a lack of inspiration for episode ideas... Not even a little bit worried! My biggest problem is I have only 8-14 episodes to play with...

Matty out!