WEBVTT

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Hello there, friends.

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I'm your host, Captain Sergio, though most people just call me Sergio.

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I'm a sloth, an astronaut sloth to be specific.

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And welcome to Hangtime.

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I know what you're thinking.

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Sergio, shouldn't astronauts be, you know, fast, alert, ready to respond to emergencies in milliseconds

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And sure, that's what they taught me at NASA orientation, but then I asked them a question.

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Have you ever actually looked at space?

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Space is really big and really slow.

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Planets take centuries to orbit.

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Light from distant stars takes millions of years to reach us.

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A photon traveling at the speed of light still has to wait around for billions of years before anything interesting happens.

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So actually I think sloths are perfectly suited for space exploration.

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Took me 45 minutes to say that sentence, by the way.

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Sorry, so here's what this podcast is about.

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Every episode, I'm going to tell you about something amazing happening out there in the cosmos.

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We'll talk about black holes, supernovas, exoplanets, the Big Bang, all the heavy stuff.

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And we'll do it at a pace that actually lets us appreciate how absolutely mind-bending it all is.

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No rushing, no stressing, just me, you and the infinite universe hanging out together.

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Get it?

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Hanging?

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Out?

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I'll be here all season.

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Now I should probably tell you how I became an astronaut, since that's probably the question you're wondering about while listening to a sloth talk about space

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I grew up in the rainforests of Costa Rica.

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Very peaceful, very green, very slow-paced.

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My family had a nice tree, a sacropia tree, if you want to get specific.

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And I spent my days doing what sloths do, eating leaves, napping, existing.

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Life was good, simple.

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But then one night I looked up and I saw the stars.

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Now I'd seen stars before, obviously, I'm not that slow.

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But this particular night I really saw them.

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Not just dots of light, but actual burning balls of plasma, light years away, possibly with their own planets and their own strange creatures.

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And I thought, I want to understand that.

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It took me six months to climb down from the tree to tell my mother about my dream.

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But she understood.

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Mothers do.

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Turns out, there's a whole application process for astronauts.

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Medical exams, psychological evaluations, IQ tests.

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The NASA people looked at my slow metabolism and my incredible body density, which makes me more fuel efficient in zero gravity by the way.

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And they decided to take a chance on me.

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The training was interesting.

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A lot of centrifuges, a lot of people yelling, faster Sergio.

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A lot of me moving at my own pace and eventually getting the same results as the other trainees, just in a different time frame.

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But here's the thing: when you're trying to memorize spacecraft systems or understand orbital mechanics,

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Moving slowly is actually an advantage.

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You don't make as many careless mistakes.

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Last year I went to space for the first time.

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I spent three months on the International Space Station.

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And you want to know the most amazing thing about it?

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The view.

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Of course.

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But also, and this might sound strange, the quiet.

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You're in a machine hurtling around the earth at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour, and inside there's just this gentle hum, this permanent, constant reminder that you're alive, suspended above a world so beautiful it makes you want to cry.

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I floated near a window for hours.

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Days maybe.

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Time moves differently up there, and I realized that this, all of this, is worth the slow journey, worth every moment it takes to get here

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So that's what we're going to explore together on this podcast: the things that make the universe worth taking our time to understand.

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Next episode, we're talking about the sun.

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Specifically, why it's about 4.

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6 billion years old, and what happens when you try to explain that number while your brain is also processing that 99.

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86% of the mass in our entire solar system is literally just.

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The sun.

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It's a lot to hang with.

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Sorry.

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Hang with.

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More of those jokes coming, I'm afraid.

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I've got time.

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Until then, this is Captain Sergio, reminding you to look up.

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The stars aren't going anywhere, and neither am I