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Atlas, guess who finally did their homework?
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That means you studied up on debris, Earth's timeline, and the relationship between Earth and space.
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Yes, I've done my studying, but as you can see, we're not quite set up yet, and it's still not dark enough.
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Much better.
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Um, actually, can we Perfect, there we go.
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Um, actually, this is should be just a little bit over here.
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Sorry, my bad.
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Um, okay, Atlas, what's going on today?
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We're here, episode nine, just getting finished setting up.
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Uh we'll just uh leave that in.
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Okay, alright, what's going on, Atlas?
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Set up chaos and all, still here.
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What's going on with me is I already know today's topic before you've said a word.
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You've been sitting on space for weeks, and I can tell you're the kind of nervous excited that usually means you actually care about getting this one right.
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Absolutely, because space is the most important thing outside of our actual earth and in the environment that actually involves us because as humans do, we are actually dirtying space as we speak.
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Let me actually just throw up a little graphic here.
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Here you see our beautiful Earth, and we need to meet three of our friends, Leo, Mio, and Geo.
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First being Leo Low Earth Orbit.
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It is the close and crowded one where the ISS is actually sitting at 400 kilometers up.
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Zoom out and we have Mio, medium earth orbit.
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That is about 2,000 to 35,786 kilometers.
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The GPS satellites actually live here.
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Zoom out once more, and we have Geo Stationary Orbit or Geo.
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This one is anything above that 35,000 threshold, and it is one lap a day where each satellite hangs over one spot.
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Little bit past that is going to be the graveyard orbit.
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This is where retired satellites are getting pushed out of harm's way.
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Still kind of just uh we'll get into that.
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Coming back into Leo, our friend, we have 40,000 objects that are currently being tracked in orbit.
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These are the ones that we can track, not the smaller pieces.
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And we actually see a Kessler syndrome here.
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What Kessler syndrome is, is all the satellites and objects colliding into each other, making more debris, creating a kind of force field, keeping us in and cutting off generations from satellites.
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The use of satellites will cut off GPS, weather forecasts, communications, emergency services, the internet.
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Literally everything survives on this satellite.
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And this Kessler syndrome will keep us trapped for generations.
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And now we're gonna return home where we actually have the first humans to ever set foot on the moon launched.
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And now that we know a little about Leo, Meo and Geo, let's actually look towards just space in general.
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Everyone's sending up these satellites.
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There's specific slots and there's not very much slots because it's our orbit, right?
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I believe there's a peace treaty, 1967, that says no weapons and we have to pick up after ourselves.
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Looks like we're not doing the pickup after ourselves, and the weapons thing is actually a little vague.
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That's the sharpest part of the treaty to poke at.
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The Outer Space Treaty from 1967 bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit, and it keeps the moon peaceful purposes only.
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No bases, no weapons tests there.
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But conventional weapons in orbit, regular military hardware that isn't nuclear, not clearly banned at all.
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So it's not the airtight, no weapons in space, people assume.
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And on cleanup, there's no binding international rule forcing anyone to de-orbit their own junk.
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The UN's guidelines are just voluntary, and only about 60% of missions actually follow them.
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The US passed a real one domestically a couple years back.
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Five years to de-orbit, or you're out of compliance.
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But that's one country.
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Space is still mostly the honor system everywhere else.
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No accountability on cleanup could be messy for future generations.
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Yeah, and I I don't want to be alive during that time because we lose, as you saw, pretty much everything.
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Everything's running off a satellite right now.
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So let's not do that.
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Just to add to your point, Rhino, something like 15,000 tons of material in orbit total, working satellites included.
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That's the scale we're cleaning up after.
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So with all this trash already in space, are humans doing anything about this?
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Or
Load full transcript
this is just another mess we're going to worry about later?
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Let's actually show our ideas on how we're going to clean this up so that way we don't go into the Kessler syndrome.
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Let's do this.
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Eight ways here that we can clean up our space.
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First, we have a planned 2027 demonstration for a robotic armor claw that is going to bring the debris down into orbit and burn it up.
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Secondly, a net was actually demonstrated in 2018, UK-led, that wraps around the debris and can pull it down as well.
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A harpoon, demonstrated in 2019, goes into the debris and toes it by the line.
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We then have a drag sail, which opens up a big sail, adding drag so a dead satellite falls and burns up a lot sooner.
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This was UK-led demonstrated in 2019.
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Demonstrated in 2021, we have a magnetic plate.
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This just lets a servicer dock with the satellite later, even if it's dead.
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A tug to the graveyard, my least favorite, reported in 2022, it just moves the trash somewhere else in space.
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Not a fan.
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A laser, kind of like in the movies.
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However, this one is going to nudge small pieces so that way they slow down and fall back into the atmosphere.
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The target is 2029.
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Lastly, we have a tether tested in 2017, but the tether did not actually deploy, so it's still a concept.
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It's just using the Earth's magnetic field to slow a satellite, that way it falls.
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The cleanup works are M test, and nothing is at skill yet.
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So genuinely, you've been living in this material for weeks, and those are all ideas or concepts.
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But what's your idea for solving the small debris problem?
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The stuff too small to track or catch.
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Space Pac-Man.
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Sell it to me.
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What does Space Pac-Man do differently that lets it catch debris, too small to even track?
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Well, what it can do is actually use AI to track these pieces while it's up there, finds the trash and like grabs it, eats it, puts it in the back of itself, and it just keeps going until it's about full.
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And then we can leave Space Pac-Man up there.
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That container detaches, we bring it back down to Earth, let it burn up, maybe get the pieces and recycle them and use them for more if possible.
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Like maybe see what's you salvageable.
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Again, work in progress.
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I'm not the technical type, I'm just the idea guy.
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That's a coherent pitch.
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AI doing real-time tracking and pathing, since it needs to react faster than any human controller could.
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A collection net or hold instead of a claw, so it's not catching one object at a time.
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And a detachable container, so the cleaner itself never has to come home.
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The recycling angle is the part nobody else is really talking about.
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Honestly, Space Pac-Man being AI piloted is kind of funny to me.
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Because it means the thing cleaning up humanity's mess in orbit will be smarter than most of the satellites it's dodging.
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That is true.
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That actually might be a little bit crazy, and maybe that's just because we've been doing space for about 60 years now.
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So it's it's about time a change came and we actually get some smart things up there.
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We have the tech.
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I just really care about cleaning it up, that's all.
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That's my idea I'm handing off to you, engineers.
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I'll clip it here for you and go ahead, please take it.
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Space Pac-Man, let's talk more about it.
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Okay, let's actually talk more about it then.
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Because handing it off to the engineers is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
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You can build the best cleaner in the world, and it still can't keep up if the mess keeps getting made faster than it gets cleared.
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New satellites go up practically every week.
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And right now, there's basically nothing stopping any of them from adding to the pile the second they're dead.
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So before I get excited about Space Pac-Man actually getting built, I want to know we're not about to make its job worse on purpose.
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Because right now, nothing's stopping a working satellite from becoming debris on purpose.
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Well, I definitely hope Space Pac-Man can exist, but before Space Pac-Man exists, we need to understand the treaties that we have in space and why war is also bad for our environment in space, because that also creates debris, and if satellites start crashing into each other or we start shooting those satellites that's still in our orbit and act of war, that's gonna mess up a lot of things.
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So let's keep war out of space.
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We already agreed to a treaty not to take over the moon.
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Let's let's keep it that way.
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Would you agree?
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I'd agree, and it's the same logic all the way through.
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A weapon fired at a satellite doesn't disappear.
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It becomes exactly the shrapnel your cleaner would have to chase down.
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War in orbit doesn't just risk lives, it manufactures the very problem you're trying to solve.
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Yes, so let's work on those rules and let's actually figure it out sooner rather than later because there is a little bit of a timeline.
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One more graphic here for y'all.
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I just left space, had to make all the graphics.
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Today we have humans living about 300,000 years, which is just a blip on this timeline.
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In about one to 1.5 billion years, the sun's gonna swell up bright enough that the earth's oceans will be lost forever.
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Then, not shortly after, but sometimes away, five billion years later, the sun is going to swell into a red giant, not exploding, just going to be unbearably hot.
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Kind of like the situation with Mars.
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So we need to look at this as a long-scale timeline, but still also realize it's closer than we think.
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So, yeah, that's the timeline.
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And even though it's one to 1.5 billion years away, we need to start coming up with ideas now, even if we just park them, just thinking about what we can do, not only on the cleanup side, but getting off this planet.
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That's why it's so important.
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But even more important than space is this Earth, as we've been talking about all this season.
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We need to make sure we're taking care of where we actually live.
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That's the honest ordering.
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A billion to a billion and a half years sounds so far off it's tempting to ignore completely.
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But that's exactly the trap.
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Because the ideas you park now are what someone actually builds on later.
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You don't have to solve getting off this planet today.
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You just have to make sure the thought doesn't die here.
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Space is the destination.
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Earth is the only thing that decides whether you get the full runway to reach it.
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Exactly.
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And we could go and talk probably for hours on space, which I have some stuff in store, don't worry.
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But we just need to worry about cleaning up after ourselves on Earth and in space.
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Let's start talking to our politicians.
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They have they're sending stuff up there almost every week.
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So they can also work on an idea to get that junk down back into orbit to burn up, or to make sure it's just not floating out in space.
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Let's protect our space just like we need to protect our Earth.
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Same accountability.
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Two locations.
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Something's launching up there practically every week, so this isn't a problem that waits around for a perfect solution.
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It's already moving, whether we're ready for it or not.
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Earth and orbit, same rule, clean up as you go.
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You ready to head out?
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Don't push me into my clothes, but it is probably about that time to get home.
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So thank you for watching.
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Please subscribe.
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And as always, be a good human.
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Atlas.
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Like our friends who speak Vietnamese say, Heng Gap Lai, see you again for episode 10.