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Fall In's Space Hackathon Winners: Team Lima's Asteroid Collision Education Project
29 Plays11 months ago
In this podcast, we sit down with Team Lima, the winners of Fall In's space-themed hackathon. Led by Dan "The Man," the team discusses their innovative asteroid collision education project, which aims to raise public awareness about the dangers of potential asteroid impacts.
Discover the fascinating journey behind their award-winning solution, from ideation to execution, and learn about the technologies they used to bring their project to life. The team also shares their hackathon experience and offers advice for future participants.
Don't miss this opportunity to hear from the brilliant minds behind Team Lima's project. Tune in now and learn how they're making a difference in educating the public about the importance of asteroid collision awareness.
GitHub repo: https://github.com/Team-Deep-Impact/Deep-Impact
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Transcript
Introduction and Dan's Journey into Tech
00:00:02
Speaker
All right, welcome everyone to the second time we're meeting with the team leader for Team Lima, who won the hackathon for our May 17th to the 19th event that we just had. And yeah, why don't we kick things off? Dan, do you want to go over your background and maybe talk a little bit about your journey and how you got into tech?
00:00:30
Speaker
Sure. So I'm not a veteran, but I was invited by my friend Ty to come take part in this hackathon. So I went to college for computer engineering and I have spent three years just about professionally doing embedded software development. Very cool.
00:00:57
Speaker
And then yeah, why don't we go over each other's background here? Michael, you want to go next? Yeah, sure.
Military Backgrounds and Transition to Tech
00:01:05
Speaker
So yeah, my name's Michael, of course, and my background in tech was basically, you know, probably a little over 10 years ago, I
00:01:15
Speaker
deployed didn't know what i wanted to do and deployed individually that is that it was crazy enough to raise my hands and say hey i want to deploy his military police i don't know with whom i don't know exactly where we'll be going and i don't know what we'll do but uh... the time i was like sure let's do it so you know while i was deploying i ran into some guys who were uh... ex-special forces one guy kind of
00:01:43
Speaker
was telling me about, you know, it's a really good field to get into. They were all doing cybersecurity stuff for a contracting company, and they each kind of had a little bit of different background, but they were telling me, one fellow said, hey, you know, I'm teaching my 10-year-old daughter how to build computers, you should get into it. It's definitely the way the future is gonna be a lot, so you should get into it. So one thing, one day or the other, I had free time. I started picking up PC mags, learning about the hardware aspects, how to build computers.
00:02:12
Speaker
Started thinking to myself, you know, I could definitely do this. This is pretty cool. Like I'm a pretty technical person. And so I came back, finished up my contract, swapped over to 25 Bravo IT specialists, and started working on a networking team. Ended up just being by myself, got a couple of awards. And then I went to college and I got a degree in IT as well. And beginning I wanted to do law enforcement. And then as time went on, I just decided, you know,
00:02:42
Speaker
Yeah, it seems like a pretty good gig. You get paid pretty much the same money, if not more, depending on what you do. And, you know, that kind of led to me being in IT. And after a number of years, it was a love-hate relationship, right? Hate being the troubleshooting of being the people you get surrounded with and people you end up networking and building friendships. So a couple years ago, I was looking at software stuff. And within like the last year, I got back into it and just graduated from Coventune recently.
00:03:11
Speaker
very happy. It's a very awesome group of instructors and I would definitely say, especially if you're a veteran, highly recommend it. Highly, highly recommend it. Can't tell you anything more, but that's pretty much my journey to how I got here. Very cool. Yeah, I know a lot of my buddies that were in the military think law enforcement's forefront of career options, but end up switching to something totally different.
00:03:42
Speaker
But yeah, glad to have you on board. Ty, you want to go next? Yeah, sure. So we started from the army, I guess, the military. So after college, I went to the US Army. I enlisted as a crypto linguist, a signals intelligence collector linguist for six years. So I did six years active duty time, deployed combat zones.
00:04:12
Speaker
Did some work in the rear as well, mostly on the cyber and intel side. I don't want to get too into the weeds here on that, but yeah, and I got out. I went straight to a three-letter agency work. So I moved to Virginia from North Carolina, and that's what I've been doing since I got out in 2017. Around 2020, during the pandemic, I was in more of a program manager role down range. I was pretty much overseeing, at the time,
00:04:41
Speaker
the plans for the pullout for Afghanistan, which were like a whole year prior than when they happened during President Trump's, you know, last year there. And yeah, during that time, I was kind of deciding to go back to school. And so I started exploring different options, including coding bootcamps, which are kind of like, you know, kind of taken off, I guess you could say back then. There's a program called Vet Tech. And so I ended up applying to
00:05:07
Speaker
of that tech for 2021. So it's spring, January, 2021. I enrolled in CS50 at Harvard through the Extension School online. Did that course, really got into computer science kind of, I'd coded beforehand for work things, but it wasn't like a day-to-day task, not even close. Mostly just for systems engineering things, making sure things work and connections to SATCOM systems, but nothing crazy.
00:05:33
Speaker
Um, so I did CS50 and thoroughly enjoyed it. Um, and then I, I did a small, I guess you can call it a bootcamp. You're familiar with them, Jamil, that's in tech. It was a four week web development bootcamp. So I did that like, you know, March, 2021 while the Harvard semester was going on. And, and then I started applying to, uh, looking at different schools, ended up rolling in community college. I did the warrior scholar project program, um, in June following that.
00:06:01
Speaker
I was actually visiting my uncle in the summer of 2021. So I met Dan actually, because Dan is a tenant uncle back then. So now that's where I met Dan, um, played a bunch of Fortite, got me into Valorant, unfortunately a year later. Um, yeah, I've been in community college since and, um, looking at transfers for good four year program, kind of stuck between like computer engineering, electrical engineering, just computer science, not really sure which route to go. Um, yeah, just school and work in,
00:06:28
Speaker
for the government as a contractor. That's pretty much what I've been doing. So occasional projects here and there. Came across your hackathon, what was like September, October, 2022. The theme was veteran homelessness. So that was really important. So I just went with it. I signed up like Jamil, and that was like the week up or something. And was like, whatever this is, I'll figure out how to do it. I've never done a hack on before. I kind of did one for like, it's called Hack-A-Sat through the Air Force.
00:06:57
Speaker
but I wasn't really that involved. I was down range where you hack satellites and stuff. And I just did that because I got to understand how like SOCOM connections work and stuff, but I wasn't like one of the main team members. So it's like first real coding hackathon. And, you know, we didn't even have like a working product. We had a good idea and, you know, I guess it was enough to win based on the parameters given to us and the judging criteria. So that was really cool. And I decided to go out on top, you know, and just join to help out Jamil run the hackathons from then on out.
00:07:27
Speaker
So that's what I've been doing. Here I am. Very cool, man. Yeah, I've got a bunch of people in my network that have graduated with electrical engineering and computer science degrees. So if you want to connect with anyone, they're already seasoned in the field. Some of them are even working in defense type companies as well. So happy to make that connection.
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, I want to go back to Dan.
Hackathon Experiences and Team Dynamics
00:07:55
Speaker
I mean, have you done a hackathon before? And what were your kind of expectations coming into a veteran's hackathon? You're not a vet yourself? What were some of the things that you were kind of thinking about before joining? Yeah, so this was the first hackathon I've ever done. And I had no expectations.
00:08:19
Speaker
It wasn't until the hackathon actually went underway that I found out that it was going to be 48 hours when we were done. For some reason, I thought we were going to have like a couple of weeks to get the project done. And then while we were brainstorming, figuring stuff out, like the schedule and stuff, it's like, oh, it's actually this amount of time. It's like, uh-oh. All right. It's like finding out, I got a term paper due in a couple of days. I got to sit down and start crunching.
00:08:47
Speaker
But it was, uh, it was a lot of fun staying up late, getting to do some, some cool coding. I had a good time, but yeah. Sweet. And like, as you found out that the hackathon is only three days or whatever, what, what was like the, uh, what was like the light bulb moment that sparked the idea for your asteroid collision?
00:09:14
Speaker
Education project was it before you found out it was three days or was it after you found out? So it was before So when our team first came together we were sort of brainstorming ideas somebody mentioned the That NASA had a that NASA has an API called century Where they have
00:09:41
Speaker
catalog of asteroids that are marked as potentially dangerous, where they have the highest risk of coming into contact with Earth. So all of them are on that list with as much information that NASA can gather on them. And so we were flipping between that idea and a couple of other ones. And I guess when I brought that up,
00:10:11
Speaker
people started asking more and more questions about it. I guess we sort of fell into the, just naturally fell into the idea that, okay, yeah, this is what we're going with. Cool. And I know, Michael, you had a switch teams. Yeah. How did you feel about coming into a new team with this new idea? Um, did you already have an idea, um, before joining this team? How was that experience? I know that must've added a little bit of friction on your end. Yeah, absolutely. So.
00:10:42
Speaker
You know, it kind of was like at times that feeling I talked about earlier about moping by myself where I was like, I have no idea what's going to happen. This is my first time. What exactly is the idea here? What are we going to do? I kind of just, you know, we throw ideas out there. I had one, but.
00:11:02
Speaker
With the timeline in mind, I, of course, went along with them whenever Dan was talking about the ideas. I was trying to remember who it was that threw out the API idea from NASA for the Century API, but I think part of it, obviously, was once we realized, hey, we only have less than two days to get this done. Obviously, the majority of the time, it's just to have something with good functionality and an actual use case.
00:11:32
Speaker
I was nervous it being the first time and wanting to be able to just make sure that we can create something pretty decent. And I would definitely give a huge shout out to Dan for that because he was, it worked out really well that some of us had come from a background of like frameworks and using React and some Django and him having the CS kind of background in the raw kind of logic and functionality. It worked out really well together. So I'm really happy with the team that I was,
00:12:02
Speaker
that I was with, but that's pretty much it. I'm not sure what else to add on to it. Cool. And then, yeah, Ty, I know you were kind of helping moderating things. What was your experience like working with this team? Did you notice them struggling in the beginning or how did you see them come together? So, yeah, like I was kind of bouncing around, going room to room, checking in different chats, see if they need anything.
00:12:30
Speaker
I know Dan, Mike, you said you joined from a different team. Oscar kind of got disbanded. Lima was kind of this conglomerate of different teams. Initially it seemed like there was much activity from her from the stock chat. You know, there's people missing, people in the beginning were, you know, pinging each other and then people disappeared. So yeah, I noticed that, you know, that's pretty normal happens every hackathon, you know that. So I just try to stay,
00:12:59
Speaker
make myself available, whoever needs help, ideas. I was dropping some ideas, links, whatever, for APIs, doing what I can for all the teams. So yeah, with Lima, I mean, honestly, I knew like, damn, it was pretty squared away, so they were pretty fine going in. Didn't know anyone else on the team, obviously, but from observing them, they made their own Discord. Two teams had Discord made. They just found that to be more convenient, and I believe that's also
00:13:25
Speaker
You know, pretty smart to do. I personally, I mean, I don't like Slack. It's just not conducive for like collaboration. Discord's way more relaxed and just more conducive for a team environment. So they were in Discord, November as well was in Discord. So spent a lot of time there between those two teams. And yeah, just a typical, you know, it's easy to share screen. Everyone can be on the same page quickly. So I'm a big advocate of Discord, man.
00:13:54
Speaker
And like, I know Dan does that. Like I made a joke too. I think it was, I forgot who it was. I told Jeff as well and Brandon that, uh, you know, Dan was sitting on his own server. Like I have my own server for gaming. He has his own server, whatever. He'll be sitting there just like coding for like absolutely nobody dude. It's like, just like sharing the screen, you know?
00:14:13
Speaker
And that's why I know he's like a good coder, you know, that's why he does, you know, so, um, and you're doing the same thing with his team, just like coding, coding away. And I felt like a real, like amongst out of all the teams, I feel like that was the team that felt like it was like a real hackathon because it's like, they're just grinding like into the night, early morning, like, all right, we gotta do this next. Like I'm gonna wake up to do this at this time. These are the hit times. We gotta be at this blah, blah, blah. You know, someone's sitting in for the talk while the rest of the team's coding. Like that was like, I just felt like it was a little square away team.
00:14:42
Speaker
I don't want to say square away. They're all square away teams. But I just felt like that was the most exciting thing to watch because they were really grinding and taking everything into account while just 24-7 still coding. There was no like, all right, we're just going to go to sleep for a night, the whole team. Someone was coding the entire time. So that was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. And it paid off. So it's awesome. Yeah. I'm not sure if we're going to talk about judging criteria, but that was a whole thing.
Asteroid Project's Scientific Challenges and Educational Goals
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, we definitely can touch upon it. It's based on how valuable is this project, how polished is this, how technically difficult. And I think one other thing, I forget. But yeah, it was a combination of four different value points. And yeah, I think you were part of the judging portion of it and noticed that there was a tie between, I think, Lima and Kela at one point, and then Lima and then Juliet.
00:15:42
Speaker
So, yeah, it was definitely like, it was a tough decision to figure out who would be the winner, since I think a lot of the projects were really great. Going back to, you know, y'all's hackathon project, Dan, what do you think was the most mind-blowing fact about asteroid collisions that everyone should know? So the most mind-blowing fact
00:16:10
Speaker
that I learned was the amount of time that, like a worst case scenario type deal, where if like something is coming from out of the solar system and just happens to manage to be like on the perfect course to snipe earth, that we, A, have like a really difficult time even like detecting satellites, not satellites, asteroids,
00:16:40
Speaker
and then be being able to mobilize something with enough time to send it out far enough to interact with the asteroid to divert its course enough to have a meaningful impact and like obviously deflect it. Yeah, I mean, just like the movie Deep Impact, like why do you think it is so difficult to kind of track and trace these big objects? Is it because they're
00:17:06
Speaker
is because there's a huge volume of them and it's because it's a combination of the volume and the speed that they're traversing in. Yeah, why do you think it's so difficult? Well, yeah, so those are definitely things that impact how difficult it is. But another problem is that asteroids don't emit their own light.
00:17:31
Speaker
And so in order to record something about anything in space, we need to receive information from them. And so I think there's a limited number of ways that you can actually tell that there's an asteroid in space. And one of the methods I saw is that you're just photographing a section of the sky
00:17:57
Speaker
you just keep taking pictures and pictures and eventually you'll see something cover like a star in the background or that sort of thing. So you can sort of infer that something's there by the light going away. And so I think that's one of the methods that we use to detect things within our own solar system that don't emit their own light.
00:18:25
Speaker
I'm sure that there's other methods, but that was the most impressive one that I learned about. Yeah, that is pretty crazy. Michael or Todd, do you guys have anything to add as far as anything mind-blowing that you learned about asteroid collisions that you think people should know about? Go ahead, Michael. Fiona. Oh, you're good.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's just insane how much we miss out and we take for granted this out there in space. And so like there's even things like you don't even consider how there's so much out there already. Like you look at Leah Labs website and you can see all the satellites and stuff in our different spheres surrounding us. That's pretty insane. It almost looks like kind of quoting somebody. They said almost looks like a big virus when you start turning on everything.
00:19:15
Speaker
see the track satellites and the track trash things like that up in the orbit. Also the fact that like you know there's this irregular orbit so like you have something coming at us but people don't even think about it's not just like hey you have all this time in the world it's one being able to identify it like Dan was kind of talking about with the light aspect but
00:19:38
Speaker
There's also irregular orbiting. Think about it. You have something flying towards you, but then it can have an elliptical orbit where things kind of change the path a little bit. It gets sucked in, or it manually starts to move, or something can collide. Different variations, different confounding variables, just a way to see anything, everything we can account for.
00:19:57
Speaker
And so all this comes into effect, and this is why it's just mind-blowing to think about. And so how we can even come up with different ways to deflect or deter these kind of things is, I just think it's quite amazing. We were used to seeing impacts in Russia or something. I've seen a couple there, and there was something recently, I think I mentioned it last time, about what was it? Spain, I think is where it was. They had a bunch of feeds on Twitter and such.
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's just a lot of crazy things out there. Yeah, it was a Saturday night. I forgot it was Friday night and Saturday night, but there was a huge comet that came across Spain and Portugal. It landed somewhere in Portugal, but it was just crazy, bro. It was just teal. This whole sky was lit up.
00:20:44
Speaker
I thought it was pretty crazy. Cause you guys, I put it, you guys are on the discord channel. Cause I was like, you guys are working on an asteroid defense. There's this freaking comment. It's like a crash on earth. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I so badly wanted to put that in the slides, but I wasn't like sure how to like, within the timeline, we had the five minutes and everything. I'm like, I don't know. We'll have enough time, you know, but yeah, that that's right. I threw that in the discord and I was like, Oh my goodness, this is insane. So people were blowing up social media. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't have anything to add for like the,
00:21:14
Speaker
defense stuff. I just remember like during the hackathon, I was kind of looking up stuff that had to do with the topic to help you guys out. But, you know, some of the stuff is too technical for me as far as tracking goes. You know, it's like ground based. I went to visit an observatory in Arizona and I went to observatory at Yale University in Connecticut. It was not too far from where I grew up. I've had some conversations with like the astrophysicists there that work there, mostly just like PhD students making money on the side. They've explained things to me because I'm like a big astronaut.
00:21:44
Speaker
Um, but yeah, I couldn't tell you off top of my head, like any techniques used, like this is not my domain, narrative expertise. You know, I think it's fascinating. Um, cause I mean, what are we really going to do? Like, you know, dinosaurs, they got wiped out by one. You know, we have Jupiter, I guess, like Jupiter's gravity is kind of keeping a lot of them at bay from us, saving us, I guess. That's the whole thing too. Um, not all of them get swung out, you know, so who knows? Um,
00:22:13
Speaker
Maybe one comes in a year, one comes in 100 years, 100 million years, who knows? So that's definitely an important field. So it's a pretty cool project you guys did on that. I liked it a lot. Yeah. Nice. And so Dan, what would you say would be the top or the highlighted features of your app? And if you had more time, what do you think you would want to see in that app? Yeah, sure.
00:22:40
Speaker
I'm guessing that the highlighted feature would be like the 2D physics simulation that we kind of cobbled together in React.
00:22:53
Speaker
And it's basically, it's kind of like a game where you're just taking like the information collected from NASA, we're taking that, putting it in this simulation and then letting the user kind of aim the asteroid at different angles towards the Earth and kind of seeing like how like a rocket stratagem flies out to Earth to intercept the asteroid and then deflect it and like we have some
00:23:23
Speaker
like UI features like a orbital trajectory, like a forecast to like show you where it would have gone if the rocket hadn't collided with it. So you can see sort of like the history of where everything has been has been through space. So yeah. And how are you accurately
00:23:46
Speaker
Or how are you making sure that the information was accurate, scientifically correct? Were you just relying on that NASA API? Or was there any underlying math behind any of the calculations? Yeah. So for the asteroid, we calculate the gravitational attraction forces. And so somebody way smarter than me figured out some constants related to gravity.
00:24:13
Speaker
And basically using these constants and some equations, you can calculate how much the gravity of one object affects another. And so for the scenario that we put on the website, we just have Earth and the asteroid. And so you can see that as you change the asteroid's trajectory, the closer it gets to Earth, the more and more it gets pulled in.
00:24:43
Speaker
And there are some of the asteroids on the website where you can purposefully make it miss and have just like an elliptical orbit that it will fly around indefinitely. Yeah, those are like simulation apps that are out there, I think is what you're referring to. I've seen a lot online, like what if the Earth was a little bit closer or further away from the sun or what if the sun was bigger? I'm not sure if you've seen these videos online, but simulation videos are really fun.
00:25:14
Speaker
Yeah, as far as Michael, what would you say was the most technically challenging part for yourself? I think the whole time, Dan was going through the logic for the simulation. I think that was probably the most difficult part of everything. The APIs, it's the typical, it may not do exactly what you want it to do, but I know for the most part,
00:25:44
Speaker
would be great if Yams was here because he did a lot of troubleshooting with that, but I think that was the hardest part for all of us, just because mainly the timeline, because once like Dan said, we realized we only have like less than two days to do this and not like a week or a couple of weeks to do it, you know, it starts to become a lot more real and you start to have to throw things away, you know, kind of that whole, you have user stories for all your features to explain each part,
00:26:13
Speaker
And then as we go on, we're like, all right, well, we got to get rid of like five of these things and we're only going to be able to focus on like two. So I think, I think that was the hardest part at least, um, was just getting that down. Cause I know, uh, a future thing games was talking about was really cool as the AI parts, like make quizzes and stuff for the educational aspect of the application. But that's more set for the future at this point. So as we get time, um,
00:26:41
Speaker
to elaborate more on that would be pretty cool. And also to see what's out there, but I would say that's about it for me. Cool. And then Ty, what was like the, um, for you, it was like the aha moment where you were like, yeah, this team is like, it, they picked a good, good idea here and that their solution is actually viable.
Judging Criteria and Team's Focus
00:27:01
Speaker
Was there a moment for you when you were checking out this room or this team actually? It's really just,
00:27:10
Speaker
Again, I was constantly observing all the teams out of the rooms. Um, I just felt that this project was like the hardest as far as coding. Cause it was physics. They're doing like real physics. Um, and it, it was also just like, they weren't focused on, you know, you see this a lot and it's fine. People are trying to sell a product that could sometimes you treat like a shark tank, you know, how can we make a sale out of this? Who's going to buy this? This is purely educational, just pure physics.
00:27:39
Speaker
How do you stop Earth from getting obliterated? And they just spent the entire time just figuring it out. They didn't put a minute into design. Look, we all know it was mostly ugliest, but it was no CSS thought. Now, there's basically cement colored site. And they were just focused on functionality. So I knew they were going to place in the beginning. They had a clear head on that. So I don't know.
00:28:09
Speaker
The topic is way above my head. Dan's doing orbital mechanics. I haven't taken that class yet. I haven't done Diff EQ and all that stuff. I'm sure it's not as hard as I say it is to do this, but it's still harder than I can do. So I don't know, man. I just figured it would probably get in place based on how difficult of a problem set this is to solve. And that's what hackathons are about. It's a problem that society has in some kind of theme for the hackathon.
00:28:35
Speaker
And you try to, you set out to try to solve that problem for either group or a company or a government or whatever it is, you know, society. So yeah, people might not think it's like a big deal, you know, it's cause asteroids don't really hit us. Um, but I still think it's pretty serious, you know, cause I mean, if you can't, if this, if there is a real threat and you can't solve it, then then what, you know, so, um, again, this is just an educational site. They made that very clear. So yeah, I don't know. I just felt like they were,
00:29:05
Speaker
pretty squared away on what they wanted to do, what they knew they could do, limitations, adjusting as they went along. Some teams don't adjust well, you know. They have initial plan and they just try to knock everything out. So they maybe like they put in half the effort they should have on one thing and then try to focus on one other thing. But they followed the rubric. They were able to kind of dial down on what's important. And design wasn't important. It wasn't on the rubric.
00:29:34
Speaker
You know, we talked about that in judging. I had to bring that up a couple of times. You know, we can't punish someone for not having great aesthetics, you know, when that wasn't a judging criteria. This could have been a completed text. It's even worse looking, you know, not saying it's bad looking, guys. I'm just saying, like, you know, it's not, like, flashy and, like, appealing and aesthetic. So it could have been less colored than this. It could have just been black and white, just text, you know, many little things in the corner, not even centered.
00:30:02
Speaker
None of that would have mattered because the judging didn't say it mattered. So they were super dialed in on the judging criteria. I noticed all that throughout the weekend. So it's pretty cool. Yeah. Nice. And then, Dan, what would you say made you the team leader versus anyone else in the team? Was it because you're more experienced technically? Or was it because of your vision, combination, curious how that came about?
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of funny. When the team first joined, there was a person who was kind of taking the lead at the time. And then he kind of disappeared off the face of the planet and then didn't show up for the rest of the hackathon. But basically, when he really, well, he did us a really good service of getting us organized and getting us underway.
00:31:02
Speaker
And so when I brought up the idea of this asteroid thing and like everybody's just kind of agreed that like, this is what we wanted to do, he was like, all right, well, I vote you to do it. It's your idea. So you get to take charge for it. And I was just kind of like, okay, all right, sure. So yeah. Nice. And then Michael, what technologies did you use to work on this app?
00:31:34
Speaker
So I mainly did most of the like front end stuff along with Jordan. We did a little bit of troubleshooting, but it was mostly Dan had a lot of the logic kind of applied. And as he mentioned about the century API, it was a lot of, you know, other people that I had a lot of the physics and stuff implied within it, but there's still the limitations to deal with. So myself, it was more.
00:31:58
Speaker
It was more of the front end and discussing what yams about hosting it, which was really nice because we used, we ended up using render instead of something like AWS, which we're, we're learning. I'm currently learning as well. I've hosted lamb sites and some other stuff before, but to do it in such a small timeframe with a full stack app.
00:32:19
Speaker
I hadn't been familiar with render. So that was kind of a nice thing to see utilized and something I'm kind of looking into now with other applications. And Dan, this is a question that's kind of out there, but if you could have one celebrity promote your app to raise awareness about asteroid collisions, who would it be and why? Celebrity to kind of promote this webpage. Well,
00:32:50
Speaker
I guess it would be one of two people.
Promotion Suggestions and Broader Impact Discussion
00:32:55
Speaker
I guess Hank Green is like a science educator. He does a lot of stuff on YouTube and TikTok and somebody that I really look up to in terms of just being able to condense a complicated educational topic into a short, sweet,
00:33:15
Speaker
like condensed video. Yeah, probably pick either Hank Green or I mean, the obvious go-to would be like Neil deGrasse Tyson, someone like that. Nice. Do you have any that comes to mind, Michael? Yeah, I would have just said Tyson. That's the only one that really came to my mind. I'd like to think of somebody more, you know, I guess you could say like Musk, maybe Elon Musk or something, you know, another known name, but that's all I really have.
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, no, definitely. We actually reached out to Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson's team. Got a response back saying, hey, if he's available, he'll try to make it. I share the communication, the email comms in the Crewmates channel. Ty, you might have seen it. And then we do have a, you know, I've got a campaign that I want to, like a social campaign that I want to,
00:34:13
Speaker
run to try to get Elon on. I've got a couple different ideas on how to approach that, but yeah, pretty gung-ho about getting really well-known speakers. We've had the co-founder Twitch on for one of our earlier hackathons. We've had a Metal Bonner recipient. This year, we obviously had a retired general, and yeah, I think
00:34:42
Speaker
We're shaping up to have more, you know, future really like high esteem keynotes to join. Are you, Dan, are you, are you like a space nerd? Have you seen any shuttle launches? Are you into like space movies, that sort of stuff? So as far as space goes, I don't know if you've heard of a game called Kerbal Space Program.
00:35:07
Speaker
It basically, it's like a creative science game where you can fabricate your own planes and spacecrafts to launch from carbon, quote unquote, Earth. And you can send up scientific equipment. You can do all sorts of kinds of stuff with it. I think I got 300 hours in that game. But basically, it's just
00:35:38
Speaker
goofing off with space equipment. It's a lot of fun. So I mean, obviously, yeah, that stuff does kind of intrigue me. And I definitely think that space as a frontier is definitely the way to go in terms of trying to continue to advance and collect more resources for our planet and for environmental reasons as well.
00:36:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I had no idea that you were into that game. Yeah, there was definitely a lot of activity coming early, you know, commercial space and even like, you know, ideas of like one day having humans on Mars. What do you guys think of that idea? Like, do you guys think that's plausible? What do you hear? What do you guys like theories around that? I know there's a really great show on HBO.
00:36:32
Speaker
called fired on Mars. I highly recommend that show. It's really funny. It's an animation about this like UI UX designer who gets to Mars and then ultimately gets fired. But I don't want to give up too much, but it's a great show. But yeah, what's your guys's thoughts on like, you know, one day going to Mars? Michael, I can start with you and then ask everyone else. Yeah, sure. That's fine.
00:37:01
Speaker
Well, I will admit, I think it's an interesting idea. I definitely wouldn't be one of the ones that first volunteer. I'll just be honest. I'm sure that would be the one contract that actually employs somebody to research for me to say, what does this actually mean? What's going to happen if something bad happens and I'm gone? I'm no more. I don't exist.
00:37:23
Speaker
But I like Elon. I like a lot of his ideas. You know, we all have our opinions and there are things you disagree with. I'm sure everybody does. But I think the Mars thing is cool. I'm actually looking more forward to his
00:37:37
Speaker
goals was like the whole human AI kind of thing where he's wanting to incorporate more of like a, not a singularity, I'm not sure what you'd phrase it, but just like, I love the idea of seeing how we can use AI and other things as tools, you know, it's going to change everything, kind of like the industrial revolution changed things, where everybody was like, oh my goodness, now they're just going to factories and replace all the manual labor, but
00:38:03
Speaker
I think it's just gonna become more niche jobs in the future and I actually listened to a clip from Tyson the other day and he said that he thinks in the next 200 years or something, I think he said there's gonna be driverless cars, there's gonna be a natural thing.
00:38:20
Speaker
certain aspects of space will no longer be paid, but I think he said like tax dollars, but it's going to be mainly tourism and things like that. I mean, I don't know if I quite agree with all of that, but I think it's cool. I think the space thing is cool. The Mars thing will be awesome.
00:38:38
Speaker
I'm not a huge space guy myself, I like a lot more stuff with languages, but I definitely like the sci-fi stuff, you know, not gonna lie. Aliens, things like that, awesome. And I like listening to, you know, I love science class when I was younger, but I'm definitely not, you know, anything in comparison to Tyson or Musk or any of these guys, but I do think there are a lot of things that are really cool that they have, you know.
00:39:05
Speaker
They're making up for the future. I look forward to seeing the stuff that succeeds and where it goes. So we're seeing a lot of cool things here and there. And it's going to be a point where they start combining some of that stuff in the future, I think. But that's just my two cents. Some random guy out in Northwest PA, right?
00:39:29
Speaker
I don't know, Elon seemed like he was like a normal average guy until he either started either getting lucky or just really taking action on his ideas. Like when he threw his convertible car into outer space, I was like, I've never even dreamt of doing anything or dreamt of anyone doing anything like that.
00:39:55
Speaker
This guy really loves startups and it's really one of the biggest, bigger inspirations for me to get into startups as well. But yeah, Ty, any thoughts on this whole endeavor towards Mars? How do you see that impacting society? Do you even think that's real? If it's feasible, would love to hear your thoughts on it as well. Yeah, I'm all for it.
00:40:24
Speaker
people that know me, I joke, I'm only halfway joking. If anybody's all go, we want a better way to die, man. Better death than combat or anything else, man. We're all going to go one day, right? Might as well go as far as possible. The farthest humanity's ever gone. If anybody's going to go do it, let's do it, man. Whatever, man. We're all going to die. I think it's real. It's going to take a lot of work. Going back to like, is it possible? I know
00:40:52
Speaker
at some point I learned about like habitable zones and I'm not sure where that starts and stops. I have to look it up, you know, don't quote me, but Mars is like still within that habitable zone. Whereas Venus is not, you know, you have different pressure systems, gravity, Venus has an atmosphere, pressure is too crazy. You can't survive on the surface there. You'll just be crushed to death. It's like what? 90, 100 bar on the surface. That's crazy.
00:41:19
Speaker
Mars doesn't really have an atmosphere. I think it's like very, very faint. So there's a lot of work that has to be done to, you can't just go there and just not have a space suit on, you know? So it's just like being on the moon. It's not safe, right? Which means like all the stuff that our atmosphere usually takes care of, like burning up a comet before it hits you. It's not going to happen. You're going to die, you know? So how feasible is it? Part of the conversation that kind of doesn't make
00:41:48
Speaker
the rounds for Elon and Mars is that conversation about the atmosphere. And if you do follow him, I follow stuff. I've read the book on him by Ashley Vance. I really recommend that book if you guys are into space stuff. It's called Elon Musk by Ashley Vance. Ashley is a really well-known tech reporter, and he's one of the only people that he's allowed to live alongside him, work alongside him day in, day out, and report on him and his life, people around him, his company, et cetera. Really good book.
00:42:18
Speaker
But the atmosphere problem is serious. And there's actually a t-shirt. Someone stole it from me in Afghanistan. I bought a bunch of SpaceX t-shirts. But it was like the Nuke Mars one. It was really popular when it came out back in 2019, 2020. It's not nuking Mars for fun. The real thing there is that you need to create an atmosphere. And so his engineer's idea is just we're just going to nuke the crap out of Mars until an atmosphere forms. And these are the smartest people, much smarter than me.
00:42:48
Speaker
I'm not going to question Elon Musk, who might do that? So if they think that's viable, then that'll probably work. Or at least that's the most viable solution so far. But that's the first thing. No one's trying to say, you've got to go set up a colony right now. My background in RF engineering and my interest in space come from the RF engineering side. Comms are impossible. So you first need to set up some space stations in low Earth orbit, high Earth orbit.
00:43:17
Speaker
Um, and then a lunar station, probably on both sides, dark side as we never see. And then our side, um, and then, and that's like the basics, right? And then you can like, because that's like nine months to get there at best, right? For like Apogee, right? Like that's like, that's crazy. So like you just lose comms. There's no more, there's no one, you can't talk to anybody, you know, something goes wrong. You find out like months and months later, now what, you know, everyone's just going to die. So.
00:43:47
Speaker
There's a lot of steps. It's going to take decades and decades and decades. And that's decades and decades based on if that was the pry for the US government, for world governments, which we don't have a world government. I don't think that's really their pry. We don't get too distracted here with different topics, but yeah, I don't think it's like everyone's on the same page for that. I think Musk is. There's other people that are. I think they gravitate towards companies.
00:44:15
Speaker
Like his, if they have the same visions and same goals and same priorities, but I just don't think it's become, it's just not a pressing issue for enough of the right people for it to become like feasible anytime like soon. Maybe when I'm like, you know, my seventies, it's like a thing, you know, lunar station's done. People are going to Mars, one way tickets for sure. You know, I'll do it, you know, but we gotta wait and see how they progress
00:44:46
Speaker
all the things required in between. So yeah, it's going to be a while. Yeah, I'm noticing they're not rushing into it. Hopefully, it's a clean operation. We've all heard of that submersible that wasn't as clean, right? But then we see SpaceX spaceships, like the Starship, which Dan, you're going to get that Starship torch. That seems like they're doing it in a very clean, methodical way.
00:45:17
Speaker
I hear stories that they're actually going to launch their fourth Starship. The third one reached, you know, low earth orbit and then came back down and hit the ocean. But I think this time around they want to do like a more of a controlled crash in the ocean. So it's really cool to see them, you know, taking their time and not kind of rushing into it and trying to keep things clean here.
00:45:45
Speaker
But yeah, that that Starship, man, it's like a gnarly spaceship, which is what they're kind of selling. It's going to take us to Mars. But yeah, Dan, we even heard your thoughts around Mars. Do you have any? Yeah. I think I accidentally unmuted you, my dad. Sorry. Yeah, so the challenges that deal with, like,
00:46:15
Speaker
putting souls on Mars comes down to like a sequence of sort of like milestones I think that we need to make before that becomes something that's feasible so obviously getting practice on the moon with an outpost another one is
00:46:37
Speaker
like breakthroughs in rocket technology and propulsion technology, because as it is right now, it takes so much energy to send things anywhere in space that is extremely expensive. And so in order for the economics, I really think that once the economics for rocket travel improve,
00:47:02
Speaker
then I think that will become a much more feasible project to send humans further away from Earth. Part of the problem with Mars not having an atmosphere is that Mars' gravity is not as close to Earth's, meaning that no matter how much atmosphere that we put on it, it'll just keep leaking away unless we put more mass on the planet itself. So I think
00:47:32
Speaker
The way that we want to do it is go to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and just keep grabbing things from there and dumping them on the planet to increase the acceleration of gravity. And then once it's to a high enough point where it's stable to generate, to create an atmosphere, I think that that's the point that we can start terraforming and planning for long-term humans to live there. Nice.
00:48:03
Speaker
Yeah, as we wrap things up here, I wanted to see if you guys had any like space movies or shows that you really enjoy and you want to put that out there. Do you have a favorite space movie, Michael? No, I'm actually trying to think of one that is not sci-fi related. I know I've seen one, but it's been a while. Yeah, what about Utah?
00:48:31
Speaker
I mean Interstellar was fantastic. Definitely as far as I think the physics go for what they think is supposed to happen that far out. I think it's just a really fantastic movie. I really enjoyed a show called For All Mankind. I tried to get Dan into it. Basically it's like a flip scenario from when, I guess back when the Apollo program was going on and Russia beats us to the moon. And so it's like an alternate history.
00:49:00
Speaker
But we also just stay focused on the space program and never just move away from it for oil wars in the Middle East. Space is the pry for everybody. Highly recommend that show. There's a book series called The Expanse. I never read the books. A buddy of mine, he's also in my career field, he recommended the books to me several years ago. It's about 2018, 2019. When I Googled it, I found out there was a show. I was like, I'm not wasting time. I'm just going to watch the show.
00:49:30
Speaker
And he watched shows well. So the Expanse is cool. It's done now. It's based on the books, but there's some slight differences. I learned some things from that show as well. I mean, in the books they have... So the premise of that story is you have earthers, you have earth, you have Mars, the Martian colony, and it's like a full blown civilization like hundreds of years from now. And then you have belters that live out like way out in the Ashford Belt. And they're like,
00:49:59
Speaker
kind of seen as like piracy, kind of pirate confederacy, just out there, no real laws. And asteroid mining is like the thing. So it makes it real money. That's what the fights are about. That's what wars are about. So Mars is like this known actual marshal. They mess with Mars. Earth has their world leadership. That's kind of like trying to outdo Mars for resources in space. So it's a good look and look at what war in space is going to look like.
00:50:29
Speaker
as much as I like to believe that, you know, going to space and finally monetizing space resources, which are endless, even just here on the moon, 250,000 miles away. Um, you know, there's the fights will break out over that as well. You know, later on a thousand years from now out in the belts, whatever it won't ever stop. Um, but yeah, it's a really good look at that. Then the storyline is pretty cool. Um, the science is pretty cool. It's sort of science fiction because it's futuristic stuff, but I think it's pretty good, man.
00:50:59
Speaker
For all mankind's more grounded reality Really great show. Please check it out. Great actors and actresses there, too But yeah any space movie comes out. I'll watch it interstellar for sure You know, it's probably my favorite. I think I'm just an Hathaway fan. So I'll watch anything she's in. So yeah Yeah for all mankind, I thought that was really funny they had like the space space Marines in there React with the first initial contact The guy classic Marines
00:51:30
Speaker
Cool. Dan, do you have any space movies you want to plug? Yeah, so there was the big one, The Martian. Very good. Heavily based on science reality. The author of The Martian also came out with a book called Artemis. And that's another
00:51:56
Speaker
I guess sci-fi, but talking about the realistic things that would go on about what's it like to have a colony on the moon. It follows a protagonist and her dad is a professional welder on the moon. It turns out that welders are the most important people there because they're the ones who are keeping the colony together and that sort of thing.
00:52:25
Speaker
It's a good book. I highly recommend it. Nice. Yeah, I had no idea that the original author wrote a book called Artemis. We'll have to check that out. I'm going to check it out right now. Nice. I also want to plug First Man. She hasn't seen that movie. I watched that, well, a year ago, two years ago, it came out. Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong. It's not like it's a dark movie. It really details
00:52:55
Speaker
all the stuff that Armstrong was going through during that process, the struggles, like loss of his daughter. It's like not like a good, it's like really sad, but it's a great movie. Yeah. I love space movies in general, like I said, but that was a really, really good movie. You should watch that one for sure. Noted. Yeah. Same way, Ty. I'm a big fan of space movies. I think there's another one coming out fairly soon.
00:53:26
Speaker
And it looks like it's a romance, but, um, I can't think of the name, but if I do, I'll plug it in the chat. But, um, yeah, as we wrap up here, I'll start with Dan, but do you guys have any advice for future hackathon participants, um, attending to fall in hackathons, anything that I guess, um, you wish you hadn't known before joining? Yeah, that'd be great to hear.
00:53:52
Speaker
So advice for other people getting started is definitely make sure that you have clear and effective communication with your team members. Try and get a gauge of what sort of things that everybody's comfortable doing. And then number three would be start as soon as you can, basically.
00:54:20
Speaker
Because there really is not a lot of time to get much done. And a lot of the times it comes down to using up all the time you have, right? So we had people staying up all night working on our project. At some point or another, somebody was always picking away at it. So yeah, definitely try to make sure you use your time wisely. Yeah. Anything on your end, Michael?
00:54:47
Speaker
Yeah, I would just say to keep it super simple, collaborate early and often and research as much as you can until you're permitted to start coding during the hackathon. I think that's the hardest thing and something I've always thought is the hardest and especially hackathons. And now once you guys, I think it was Jamil and Ty and some judges mentioned another good site to go to to look at them.
00:55:17
Speaker
Um, and I've had a couple of people actually reach out to me, which was nice, but I would say that collaborate early and often and research a lot. So, um, yeah, that's all I'd have to say. If you can, if you can find at least even one or two other people that you know of and say, Hey, you agree upon the hackathon research and then kind of get an idea of where you guys are. I like Dan said it's great. So that's all I have to say. And also there was, there was a book, I can't remember. Cause when I was younger, I used to read a lot more.
00:55:47
Speaker
I don't know if it's HG Wells or whatever, but they're more like sci fi space books. But that was kind of part of what got me interested was they made all these like other alternate realities and space and cultures and all this. It was really cool. But I can't remember if I do off to like chattel you guys know, but yeah, that's all I have to say. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I've read space, like fantasy books about like crime in space, you know, how
00:56:15
Speaker
your body gets kind of used to being up there in space. And I think the scenario was like you're in a different planet with like no gravity. And then you take that criminal or whoever you want to punish back into a planet with gravity and you just hang them and let gravity punish them. I was just like such a weird thought to have on how to like punish somebody. That's brutal. So brutal. Does that work? Because that's actually that's the first scene in Expanse. So really the first actual like
00:56:46
Speaker
show They tried to stick to so the Belters who are so far out there in space in the asteroid belt They're like depicted as like much longer limbs like way taller because it's all gravity And so the opening scene is like You know, they have like one of these Belters like in prison on earth and are like torturing him and he's like visibly like longer stuff after that they just like I guess it's just too much work to like make every belter look at us all the Belters just like
00:57:14
Speaker
look normal but they just had these weird like creole accents like seem like I don't even know what they were going for but but he was you know chained up and something bothered him something about like the air or whatever it was but I'm not sure if it was just like gravity itself maybe I have to watch the episode again it's the first episode in expanse but that is pretty crazy because I think it would be I mean
00:57:42
Speaker
your build is your build, your bones are fused. How is that? Would it crush you? That's like I was going to Venus. There's just too much pressure there for us to exist, because what we're made of is just too crazy. So if the asteroid bell, which is, I think, within the habitable zone, I think, maybe not. I guess if you grew up there and your body's developed based on the physics of the asteroid bell, yeah, maybe you would get crushed
00:58:12
Speaker
from our pressure system here because we do have pressure, right? So I don't know how that works. It's pretty fascinating though. You brought that up. I want to kind of look into this. That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah, that would suck. Imagine. Yeah, I guess your wheels turning though. Cool. Yeah, we just hit the hour mark here. Does anyone have anything else to mention before we sign off here? No.
00:58:41
Speaker
I saw this funny, uh, Dan, uh, when they found out they were in first place, he was like, man, I want to read skiff cards on third place. Yeah. So there's the rocket, the little torch first place. Well, second place is prize. I have no idea. It's a Bluetooth speaker. Yeah. Okay. And it was like, it just a card or like the team gets gift cards. Yeah. The team leader gets gift cards. Um,
00:59:11
Speaker
Yeah, we've done different prizes for different hackathons. And so in the future, I do want to make sure like everyone in the team gets a prize, not just the team leader. But yeah, Dan, for for you having to come on twice, I'll definitely throw you another Uber card for your flexibility here. Yeah, that's all right. No worries. Cool.
00:59:37
Speaker
Well, cool, guys. Yeah, that's the part.