The most impressive science fiction stories emphasize “science” over spectacle. The Star Trek franchise has featured plenty of examples since the original series premiered 60 years ago this month, but one of its most famous sci-fi moments may prove even more fascinating than fans realized. At Brazil’s Federal University of ABC, physicist Níckolas de Aguiar Alves determined that an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation demonstrates an aspect to the theory of relativity even better than its creators likely anticipated.
Season One’s ninth episode, “The Battle,” introduces a bit of backstory to Jean-Luc Picard’s illustrious career in the Federation. Years before he became captain of the USS Enterprise, Picard oversaw a ship called the Stargazer when it came under fire from an unknown assailant. Picard needed to navigate closer to the mystery attacker before responding, but the Enterprise’s shields were down.
The captain then quickly improvised what later became known as the “Picard Maneuver.” He ordered his crew to rush their foe at warp speed (faster than the speed of light) then quickly halt and begin firing. Relativistic physics dictated that if Stargazer traveled faster than visible light, it would technically generate two images of the ship from their attacker’s point of view—one Stargazer at the location just prior to warp speed, then a Stargazer where it halted. The operation was risky, but it gave Picard and his crew a 50/50 chance that the enemy would continue firing on an afterimage of Stargazer.
Traveling faster than lightspeed is widely considered impossible, but the underlying principles of Picard’s Maneuver don’t only hold up to expert scrutiny—its depiction in Star Trek is hypothetically less accurate than it should be. According to de Aguiar Alves, Picard’s odds technically would be even higher in such a scenario. But while a fan of the series, the physicist wasn’t intentionally trying to stress test the episode’s logic. Instead, de Aguiar Alves was working on an actual particle physics problem that involved a slower light speed. At one point, he began sketching out the scenario to double check his work.
“And after I drew one or two diagrams, I started noticing, ‘Hey, I think I’ve thought about something like this before,’” de Aguiar Alves said in a recent interview with Ars Technica.
In actuality, Picard’s Maneuver wouldn’t result in two Stargazer ships; it would make three of them. This is because Picard’s crew didn’t travel at a constant speed during the gambit–they first sped up, then stopped closer to their opponent. That means Stargazer technically accelerated not once, but twice. This makes all the difference.
The physicist doesn’t hold it against the episode’s writers. If anything, the overall conceit is an excellent scenario to ponder while studying theoretical physics.
“The main thing they got perfectly, and I think it is a great illustration,” he said.
Conversely, the researchers calculated that smaller settlements with fewer than 10,000 human colonists could have enough accessiblewater to survive for centuries. They also suggested that other technological advances inwater harvesting or advances in scanning techniques that explore below the top few meters of surface regolith may reveal significant amounts ofhidden lunar water.
Water Ice Stored in Moon’s Pits of Eternal Darkness
The Moon’s surface is covered with visible evidence ofasteroid collisions. Along with its textured appearance, some of these massiveimpact craters contain areas that are permanently shaded from direct sunlight.
The Harvard-Smithsonian research team behind the new study said some of the earliest “pits of eternal darkness” could be over one million years old. More critically, they can maintain a temperature of 110K, or just above absolute zero. At this low temperature, frozen water ice trapped in the sunless craters won’t lose more than a millimeter of thickness to space every billion years.
When announcing the new study, the researchers noted that “a succession of Moon-orbiting missions” has mapped out possible locations of stored water ice since 2013. The results suggested that the Moon’s pits of eternal darkness may contain as much as a billion tons, with the largest concentrated around the Moon’s northern and southern poles.
Since those missions, scientists and industrialists have begun to speculate about the viability of long-term human lunar habitation. Unlike astronauts trapped in capsules or space stations, lunar colonists could theoretically possess enough on-site water to support farming, full-service bathroom facilities, and production of hydrogen-based fuels.
Still, researchers wondered if one billion tons of stored water ice is enough to support the types of cities that billionaire industrialists and science fiction authors have proposed.
On-Site Solar Power Could Support One-Million-Person Lunar City
To start, the team modeled how long large human settlements ranging from 100,000 to one million people could survive on the water stored in lunar pits of eternal darkness. This included water-recycling rates up to 98%, as achieved on the International Space Station (ISS).
After running the numbers, the team found mixed results.
First, even colonies up to one million humans wouldn’t run out of power. The team said that number is based on solar power generation and excludes nuclear reactors.
Instead, the Harvard-Smithsonian team proposed constructing one-kilometer-tall solar energy towers near the rims of the craters. Their models suggest that an array of towers covered in photovoltaic arrays could generate three gigawatts of usable electricity.
The team noted that the materials needed to build solar panels, including the primary ingredient, silicon, are plentiful on the Moon, meaning future lunar colonists could manufacture new solar power-generating towers on-site. Such lunar colonists could theoretically maintain enormous AI data centers near these towers capable of servicing paying customers back on Earth.
“That would be the start of a true lunar economy,” the research team explained.
Even Generous Water Ice Estimates Limit Large Lunar Colonies
When the researchers crunched the water numbers, long-term lunar habitability became significantly more dubious. In fact, most estimates had future lunar colonists exhausting the most generous one-billion-ton projected supply of water ice within “a few years.”
When researchers modeled an ISS-level water recycling efficiency level using those same water estimates, a colony of one million humans would run out of water “in just over a century.”
“And today’s best estimates of the amount of water on the Moon are about 30 times less than a billion tons, shortening the time to water exhaustion by the same factor,” they add.
For example, if more conservative ‘pits of eternal darkness’ water ice estimates are closer to reality, the researchers said that “even a small city” likely wouldn’t make it past a decade before they had tapped the Moon dry.
Untapped Sources Could Improve Long-Term Habitation Prospects
Fortunately, the news was not all bad. When the team assumed a smaller “Moon village” of over one thousand people, up to a larger settlement of 10,000, the researchers found that the water ice stored in the Moon’s pits of eternal darkness “would instead be sustainable for several centuries or more.”
The team also suggested alternate solutions for supporting a larger, long-term lunar settlement. These included potential improvements in water recycling, improved farming efficiency, or mining nearby asteroids for water.
The team also noted that additional pockets of stored lunar water ice may be awaiting discovery, suggesting that finding such lunar water may be easier than achieving sufficient farming and recycling efficiency improvements.
“Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps,” they explained.
Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.
A new virus emerges in rural China. Although those who contract it initially display moderate, flu-like symptoms, their health quickly declines. The mortality rate is unclear, but one aspect is immediately obvious—it’s very contagious. Within three months, nations around the world are planning lockdown protocols and quarantine measures. Politicians seem completely out of their league and ill-equipped.
The world eventually recovers from the ordeal, but consequences of the virus linger for decades.While society pushes forward, there’s no promise that an even deadlier virus isn’t already lurking out of sight.
This isn’t about COVID-19, by the way. It’s the plot to the novel World War Z—arguably the most realistic depiction of a zombie apocalypse ever created. Released 20 years ago this week, the horror novel by Max Brooks quickly became one of the undisputed cornerstones of walking dead canon. Readers and critics devoured the book (no pun intended), but their responses often worry Brooks. Much like the reception to his first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, many fans seem to misunderstand his intentions. These projects weren’t simply intended to entertain. Max Brooks was trying to warn everyone about the looming threats we would prefer to ignore.
While the 54-year-old writer ostensibly writes books about zombies, Sasquatch, and (soon) an alien invasion, his attention to disaster details and hyperrealism has earned him a parallel career as a security and threat analyst for some of the world’s most respected geopolitical think tanks.
To celebrate World War Z’s 20th anniversary, Popular Science recently spoke with Brooks about the book’s massive impact.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Andrew Paul: Did you anticipate World War Z attaining the legacy it now has in popular culture?
Max Brooks: Oh, God no. Of course not. Especially because I’m never tapped into pop culture. I don’t know what anybody else is doing—even when it was my job writing for Saturday Night Live! I’m good at thinking about what I think about.
AP: Before World War Z, you wrote an actual preparedness handbook called The Zombie Survival Guide. What prompted you to take a hyperreal approach to such a seemingly outlandish subject?
MB: The reason I wrote [them] was because all the zombie stories, even to this day, tend to focus around small groups. To me, it’s like trying to understand World War II from watching Saving Private Ryan. I had big picture questions nobody was answering.
I think the best zombie movie ever made was Dawn of the Dead. To me, the most interesting part was when they’re holed up in the mall watching the news. That window into the wider world was so fascinating, and I wanted more.
AP: But there was a time when World War Z almost never happened, right?
MB: [The publisher] didn’t know what to do with The Zombie Survival Guide. Their marketing strategy almost killed my career before it even launched. They thought, “Well, no one is clearly that much of a loser that he’s actually spent this much time thinking about [zombies]. Clearly, he’s a cool guy making fun of those losers. And because he’s Mel Brooks’ son and he’s coming off SNL, we’re gonna position him as Mel Brooks, Jr. writing Younger Frankenstein.”
But The Zombie Survival Guide really is a disaster preparedness manual. It’s why [soldiers] took it to Afghanistan; people told me it saved their lives when they were lost in the woods. I didn’t make anything up. It’s not Hollywood stuff—it’s all about dehydration and dry socks and shelter.
But [these books were] legitimately the product of years of thinking, “If I was in a zombie world, how would I survive?”It really set me on this path of asking, “What happens when the grown-ups drop the ball?”
AP: And now it’s your job to worry professionally.
MB: I’ve now been part of three military and national security think tanks—the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Modern War Institute at West Point. I’m a non-resident senior fellow at all three of them, and it’s my job to study real threats.
For some reason, I was not blessed with the wall of denial. Like, I can’t just say, “That would never happen and I’m just going to go about my merry way.” I’m already terrified! And the way to reduce my anxiety is to study the threat so that it’s not nebulous.
AP: What was the most difficult part in preparing to write World War Z?
MB: You don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t know what you’re missing. There’s always a fear of groping around in the dark; of not even knowing who to talk to. That was a real struggle, because I’m an insular guy. I’m not a social guy. Part of it was talking to experts, but part of it was reading books—and I’m fully dyslexic. So that was a real slog.
It was also about never trusting the internet. I used it once or twice, like, to research laser weaponry. I literally went to a company’s website, saw their demonstration video, and was like, “Yeah, okay. That is not a practical weapon for hunting zombies. I see how long it takes to burn through something.”
AP: Obviously humanity’s most terrifying challenge in the last 20 years was the COVID-19 pandemic. How do you view that real-world horror in the context of World War Z?
MB: COVID was scary because I knew it was coming thanks to my friends in the military and biodefense community. I was part of what was called the Blue Ribbon Biodefense Panel for germ attacks way before COVID. So I already had at my fingertips the ability to tell the difference between panic porn in the media and the real deal. I also had to study diseases enough to write about a zombie plague. But also, it came from being on the receiving end of a bioterror attack. When I worked at SNL [from 2001 to 2003], we had the anthrax letters delivered to our building [in October 2001].
So, I knew this was coming, but the question was how to warn people. I had people laughing at me. Ironically, the people who are the worst minds to reach are the smarty-smarts because they think they know everything.
AP: Were you expecting COVID to be much worse than it was?
MB: Oh, much worse. It got me into trouble, because I was prepping for, like, tanks on the street, you know? I was ready for that. I stocked my home with food that would last the longest as opposed to food that my wife would actually eat.
But the irony is, had it been worse, we might have actually done better. Studying diseases over the years—it’s sort of like the slow zombie versus the fast zombie. The fast zombie is so scary you have to react. The slow zombie gives you the false sense of security. Like, “Oh, I can take ‘em out.” COVID was the slow zombie. It allowed us to be arrogant and dismiss it: “Oh, it’s no worse than the flu.”
AP: How did you see that play out during the quarantine?
MB: It goes back to when COVID hit New York City. I had written a book called The Harlem Hellfighters, which was a true story of African American soldiers in World War I. They’re still an active unit in the National Guard, and I’m friends with their chief medical officer. Their job was to pick up the dead bodies around New York.
He said to me, “If those bodies had been stacked up on the street for everyone to see them, there would have been no argument about masking or distancing or taking the vaccine.” The hiding of it is what allowed naysayers to get way more people killed.
AP: Where did the grown-ups “drop the ball,” as you say?
MB: I think the greatest failure on the part of leadership at every level was not publicizing the dead. Maybe they were afraid of angry letters and backlash and didn’t want to cause a panic, but that’s exactly what they should have done.
A doctor in Los Angeles told me they converted hospital rooms into morgues. He said, “You don’t believe the amount of bodies. We’ve got pyramids of body bags.” And I’m like, “Well, then why is this not on the news every night?”
AP: After experiencing an actual global plague, how do you feel about World War Z’s overall accuracy?
MB: I think it was accurate for the time. I would still have the plague coming from China, 100 percent. I would love to say that was my genius futuristic prediction, but no. I based it on SARS. And this is why it’s unforgivable that it happened again. If I wrote it today, I would really highlight why it was allowed to be [downplayed]—and the reason is our greed. All of our stuff is made in China.
I would also really change the politicization of information. We’re living in a time where all facts have become tribalized. We’ve had 20 years of such dumbing down that I think it would be a central tenant of the book.
AP: Would you change how the United States responded to a zombie outbreak?
MB: I still firmly believe we are a moderate country, but I don’t know how brave we are. In order for a crime to be committed, you don’t need 100 bullies. You just need one bully and 99 cowards.
The psycho fanatics have a microphone now, which was inconceivable 20 years ago. They are hate merchants, and the erosion of our education system has created a demand that the merchants supply.
AP: So you think we would have handled COVID differently in 2006?
MB: If COVID happened 20 years earlier, we would all have gotten vaccinated, because of all the grandmas and grandpas who grew up before the polio vaccine.
AP: What else has changed?
MB: When I talk to people in power, I try to educate them about what I call “uphill influence” versus “downhill influence.” Downhill influence is when there’s a pre-existing bias that you just need to hijack and ride downhill. There’s gravity already there, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It was an established fact 20 or 30 years ago that vaccines kept you safe. So, if you were rolling out a vaccine, you could already just ride that existence acceptance downhill. The gravity was with you.
Uphill is when you have to educate before you can even start to persuade. You first have to educate people about just the world that you’re trying to explain. Vaccines have gone from downhill to uphill. The [subjects] we all had to try to stay awake through in seventh grade science class aren’t even there anymore.
I understand [MAHA supporters] want a clean planet, food, and water, and all of that will make you healthier. However, in 1491, the people who lived on this continent had all that, right? The moment the first Javier Bardem-looking Spaniard coughed on them, whole civilizations died.
Max Brooks and Mel Brooks at the Los Angeles premiere of HBO Documentary Films’ Mel Brooks: 99 Year Old Man! on January 20, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. Credit: Chad Salvador/Variety via Getty Images Chad Salvador
AP: Both of your zombie books hinge on public education, and that’s now a major aspect of your threat analysis work. Do you know why you keep returning to this theme?
MB: I think one of the reasons I’m so obsessed with education is because I was not a good student. I have such ferocious learning disabilities. I never felt instantly comfortable learning, and I’ve always had to find workarounds. My mother had to help me find workarounds so I could learn. So when I research, it takes so much time and effort and [there’s] so much insecurity. I understand how hard it is to teach something to someone who doesn’t naturally pick it up.
I’m very lucky that I come from two parents who had no formal education, but were both very smart. Most importantly, they were very curious. I became very comfortable with the idea of approaching something as an absolute beginner.
AP: It took 14 years between World War Z and your follow-up sci-fi novel, Devolution. Your next book, The First Hundred Hours: A Story of Alien Invasion, comes out in 2027. Is there a reason for such long pauses between these projects?
MB: I’m not a natural scientist. The amount I’ve had to study for this new book has been excruciating. But it’s very humbling having to talk to the experts and say things like, “Please talk to me like I’m a third grader—and not a smart third grader.”
AP: Would you end World War Z the same if it was set in 2026?
MB: I would still end it on a positive note, and I think that has to do with being an American. We don’t have the luxury of abandoning our ideals, because that’s all we are. We’re not a nation-state—the ideals in America are all that hold this mutt [of a] nation together. We all come from different places and tribes, and we all agree to live under a certain set of guidelines. It’s really critical that we fight for those guidelines.
If there is one takeaway, it’s the central reason I wrote the book in the first place. We’re all stuck on the same planet together, and that planet is not that big anymore. What affects some of us could potentially affect all of us. I think America has some amazing cultural strengths, but one of our weaknesses is our isolationism. That’s built on an outdated notion that we are somehow protected by two oceans and our geography. That’s not true anymore.
Sixty years after television audiences first tuned in to see the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, an astronaut on board the International Space Station has paid tribute to Star Trek by flying the badge of the franchise's latest fictional captain.
Expedition 75 flight engineer Sophie Adenot with European Space Agency (ESA) donned the Delta badge originally worn by actor Anson Mount for a video recorded from aboard the space station. Mount portrays Christoper Pike in the Paramount+ streaming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Paramount and ESA both released the clip on their Instagram feeds.
"For 60 years, Star Trek has brought us stories of friendship and exploration. I'm wearing Captain Pike's badge aboard the ISS in celebration of continuing the real world work of science and exploration," said Adenot. "For me, exploration and science are about curiosity and cooperation daring to go a little farther together, learning from what we discover and build, and turning that knowledge into a better future for everyone."
Sixty years after television audiences first tuned in to see the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, an astronaut on board the International Space Station has paid tribute to Star Trek by flying the badge of the franchise's latest fictional captain.
Expedition 75 flight engineer Sophie Adenot with European Space Agency (ESA) donned the Delta badge originally worn by actor Anson Mount for a video recorded from aboard the space station. Mount portrays Christoper Pike in the Paramount+ streaming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Paramount and ESA both released the clip on their Instagram feeds.
"For 60 years, Star Trek has brought us stories of friendship and exploration. I'm wearing Captain Pike's badge aboard the ISS in celebration of continuing the real world work of science and exploration," said Adenot. "For me, exploration and science are about curiosity and cooperation daring to go a little farther together, learning from what we discover and build, and turning that knowledge into a better future for everyone."
Imagine this: A giant sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) has just swallowed you whole.
It might seem like a bizarre scenario to envision, but you’d hardly be the first. In the Bible’s Book of Jonah, the belly of a whale is the setting for the prophet Jonah’s three days of repentance and prayer. In the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio, Geppetto manages to rig up a cozy living space inside the stomach of Monstro the sperm whale, complete with amenities including a small fire and a fishing setup for seafood that drifts in. Even his pet goldfish, Cleo, is swimming inside the microcosm of her highly ironic fishbowl.
Surviving inside of a giant sea creature has become a classic “fish tale” of human resilience and redemption. In the latest reimagining of this theme, the upcoming movie Whalefall, a scuba diver is swallowed by a sperm whale and has exactly one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.
But for all our fascination with extended whale-squatting, one fact remains: it has never actually happened. The few close calls with whale ingestion have involved humpback whales, a species physically incapable of swallowing a person. In all cases, the whale spat the person up as quickly as you might cough up a bug that flew into your mouth.
“I wouldn’t call that swallowed,” Shane Gero, a whale biologist and Lead Biologist at Project CETI, tells Popular Science. “I would call that a mistake by both the mammals involved.”
So, if it’s never actually happened, is it even possible?
A highly unlikely accident
Whalefall is the film adaptation of a 2023 novel of the same name by Pulitzer Prize winning author Daniel Kraus, and arrives in theaters on October 16.Protagonist Jay Gardiner is on a diving expedition to find the remains of his late father, a mariner who died at sea. Suddenly, Jay is swallowed by a giant sperm whale, with only an hour of oxygen remaining in his scuba tank. To try and survive, Jay deploys a series of highly resourceful, increasingly MacGyver-esque maneuvers, including using the beak of a squid to cut through the whale’s stomach lining, and navigating his climb up into the whale’s throat using the glow of a jellyfish.
The ordeal is an adrenaline-fueled adventure for Jay, but could any of it ever happen? Gero, who has studied sperm whales for over 20 years, thinks it’s highly improbable, starting with the swallowing part.
“To my knowledge, no one has ever been eaten by a sperm whale,” he says.
Gero hypothesizes that after some generous suspension of disbelief about sperm whales’ feeding habits and anatomy, there could be a situation where “the largest sperm whale ever” could accidentally ingest a human.
“I think anatomically, maybe you could shove a slender human down the throat of a very large, male sperm whale,” he says. “Would it happen? Very unlikely. Certainly not with scuba gear and a scuba tank making the human that much bigger.”
Yet Gero, who has read the novel, praised the book’s meticulous efforts to make the science line up, including its explanation for why a sperm whale would be anywhere near a scuba diver. Sperm whales usually feed at about 3,000-feet-deep at the bottom of the ocean, an area not typically occupied by scuba divers. The book reconciles this by having a giant squid (Architeuthis dux) struggling at the surface to escape being eaten by the sperm whale. When the whale comes to the surface to eat the squid, the squid latches onto Jay, who is then pulled into the whale’s mouth. But even after accepting this explanation, Gero notes that sperm whales use echolocation, which would likely distinguish a human as unusual prey, not a potentially tasty morsel.
“Eating a human by accident seems very unlikely, but it makes for a really exciting story,” Gero says.
The odds of surviving inside a whale
If a person somehow managed to survive entering the mouth of a sperm whale without drowning from the propulsive rush of water, Gero says that their luck would worsen almost immediately.
“More than likely, the human drowns the second they get smashed into the mouth of the whale, whether they were drawn in by a squid or accidentally brought into the mouth of a whale,” he says. “My guess is the person dies the second they enter the mouth.”
Gero raises another interesting possibility. Sperm whales usually prey on boneless squid, so consuming a scuba-outfitted human could be a choking hazard, and could choke to death.
Male sperm whale swimming at the surface, Pelagos Sanctuary, Mediterranean Sea, Italy. Image: by wildestanimal via Getty Images.
This would certainly make for a shorter movie, but Gero notes that the whale’s body could also have a more lively response to an unwanted foreign object in its mouth.
“When I swallow something that I shouldn’t have, it’s like a non-controllable response — your body just starts moving its mouth and coughing,” Gero says. “In that sort of movement, or freakout, it probably is going to do a lot of physical damage to the human.”
Although Gero acknowledges that he is not a whale anatomist, he still believes that it would be highly unlikely for any living creature to make it into the stomach of a sperm whale, let alone set up camp there.
“There are acids and gases,” he says. “The digestive tract of any mammal is not meant to be a livable place for any prey that ends up there.”
Dr. Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City who consulted on the anatomy for both the Whalefall book and film, explains that a sperm whale’s stomach is divided into four chambers. These chambers are a vestige from their early days as a land-based, plant-eating mammal about 50 million years ago. The first chamber is lined with thick, muscular tissue. It’s responsible for mashing up food, since sperm whales’ teeth, found only on the lower jaw, are too pointed to chew.
If Jay needed something solid to grab onto and pull himself toward the whale’s throat, Reidenberg tells Popular Science he wouldn’t find much. It would mostly be “wet, slimy, squishy walls,” with “no hooks, no handles.” The one exception is the whale’s voice box, or larynx, which sticks up like a rigid pipe.
“If he gets his arm around that, he can pull himself out,” she explains.
Even in that situation, Reidenberg says, few people would live to tell this phenomenal tale.
“Most people, unless they have protection and air, couldn’t survive this situation. Also, a sperm whale would probably never swallow a person.”
Meet your actual nightmare
While the fictitious scenario of a massive sperm whale swallowing a human relies as much on poetic license as it does grounded science, could any other land or sea animal engulf an entire human being?
Horrifyingly, yes. The reticulated python (Malayopython reticulatus), which is the world’s longest snake species and can measure as much as 26-feet-long, has been known to take in an entire human. According to a 2025 study tracking python-related deaths in Indonesia, 17 people were preyed upon by reticulated pythons between 1927 and 2025. Astonishingly, four of these people survived, although it’s unlikely they spent any quality time inside the snake. In several of the fatal cases, the humans were swallowed whole.
Gero notes that a green anaconda (Eunectes murinus) might also be up to the task, since they can swallow animals as large as deer. Even then, this prey is already dead when it’s consumed.
“Anacondas famously wrap around and crush their prey,” Gero says. “The body is limp by the time it goes down.”
Gero also makes one key distinction about sperm whales: they have absolutely no interest in preying on humans, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, humans have spent centuries slaughtering whales for oil, an uneasy relationship that may be part of why they loom so large in our storytelling.
“If those stories exist from the whaling days, they’re more a lesson to future whalers than they are based in reality,” he says. “I’ve never seen any kind of aggression from a sperm whale. These are gentle giants of the deep.”
Gero hopes movies like Whalefall will spark genuine curiosity about the intelligent, peaceful animals behind the myth. He and the team at Project CETI are working to decipher how sperm whales communicate with each other. In the meantime, you can visit listen.projectceti.org to record what you’d say to a sperm whale, if you ever had a chance.
This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.
Silo season 4 will premiere globally on July 9, 2027, giving the Apple TV science-fiction drama a firm date for its final descent into the mysteries surrounding Juliette Nichols and the underground society that shaped her life.
The announcement arrived immediately after the third-season finale, with Apple TV also releasing a two-minute sneak peek at the last chapter. Rebecca Ferguson returns as Juliette and remains an executive producer, while Graham Yost continues to oversee the adaptation of Hugh Howey’s bestselling trilogy.
Three complete seasons are already available to stream. Season four is designed to finish the story rather than leave the series waiting for another renewal, a rare advantage for a mystery built around questions that have been accumulating since its opening episode.
Silo Season 4 Has a Confirmed Release Date
Friday, July 9, 2027, is now the official premiere date for Silo season 4. Apple TV has not announced an episode count, a complete release schedule, or whether more than one episode will arrive on opening day.
The previous seasons used weekly releases, but that history should not be mistaken for confirmation of the final plan. The service can still decide how it wants to introduce the premiere and pace the remaining episodes closer to launch.
The timing creates a wait of a little more than 10 months after the third-season finale on September 4, 2026. That is long enough to build anticipation without sending the production into an indefinite gap.
It also gives new viewers a comfortable opportunity to catch up. The series began in May 2023 with an apparently contained mystery involving a community of 10,000 people living deep underground, protected from a world believed to be toxic. Each season has widened that mystery while keeping its emotional center with Juliette, the engineer whose refusal to accept convenient answers made her dangerous to the silo’s leadership.
Season three expanded the narrative across two periods. In the present, Juliette survived her forced cleaning and returned as the underground community faced the consequences of rebellion. The other story followed journalist Helen Drew, played by Jessica Henwick, and Congressman Daniel Keene, played by Ashley Zukerman, centuries earlier.
The fourth season must now bring those timelines into their final relationship without losing the human tension beneath the history.
The Ending Has Been Planned for Years
Silo season 4 being the final season is not a cancellation revealed after production had already moved in another direction.
Apple TV renewed the drama for seasons three and four in December 2024, while its second season was still being released. The service said at the time that the fourth chapter would complete the story contained in Howey’s trilogy.
That early commitment gave Yost and the writing team something mystery dramas rarely receive: a known destination and enough screen time to prepare the route toward it.
When the two-season renewal was announced, Yost said the adaptation would tell the complete story over four seasons. Ferguson also spoke about her desire to bring the full journey from the books to the screen.
Planning does not guarantee that every question will receive an individual explanation. It does mean the writers were able to build seasons three and four as connected parts of an ending, rather than producing a temporary finale that might need to serve as the last episode if another renewal failed to arrive.
That distinction suits Silo particularly well. The drama depends on controlled information. Residents learn only what their society permits, viewers encounter evidence in fragments, and even discoveries can create new uncertainty. A rushed ending could turn years of tension into a sequence of explanations. Too much hesitation could leave the central conflict unfinished.
The third season’s expansion into the “Before Times” gave the series another way to deliver answers. Instead of relying entirely on present-day characters finding records or explaining old events, the story could place viewers closer to the decisions that created the underground world.
Silo season 4 can use that groundwork to connect institutional history with Juliette’s personal fight. The mystery is no longer simply how the silos work. It is also about who designed their rules, what those rules were meant to prevent, and whether survival built on control can remain defensible after its foundations are exposed.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Rebecca Ferguson Carries Juliette’s Last Journey
Ferguson has been the physical and emotional anchor of the series since its first season. Juliette is an engineer before she is a conventional hero, approaching danger as a system that can be studied, opened, repaired, or challenged.
That temperament helped Silo avoid turning its central mystery into an abstract puzzle. Every hidden mechanism affects people who must live within it. Discovering the truth carries a personal cost because the society depends on limiting who may possess it.
Ferguson’s executive producer role also gives her involvement beyond the performance itself. The fourth season will close a character journey she has helped shape across several years of production.
The current Silo cast page also includes Common, Harriet Walter, Chinaza Uche, Avi Nash, Alexandria Riley, Shane McRae, Remmie Milner, Rick Gomez, Billy Postlethwaite, Clare Perkins, Jessica Henwick, Ashley Zukerman and Steve Zahn. The final-season announcement does not provide a definitive list of every returning performer, so presence on the wider series page should not be treated as confirmation that each character appears in Silo season 4.
Behind the camera, the announced executive producers include Yost, Ferguson, Howey, Michael Dinner, Nina Jack, Joanna Thapa, Morten Tyldum, Amber Templemore, Fred Golan, Rémi Aubuchon and AMC Studios. Apple Studios produces the series.
Howey’s continuing involvement is especially valuable as the adaptation reaches material that must connect the mythology created across the novels. A screen version can reorganize characters, timing and revelations, but the ending still needs to feel consistent with the world’s original logic.
Why a Complete Four-Season Story Helps Apple TV
A defined ending gives Silo lasting value beyond the attention surrounding its final premiere.
Viewers who hesitate to begin a serialized mystery often want to know whether it reaches an intentional destination. Once Silo season 4 is complete, the service will have a finished science-fiction drama spanning four seasons, with no uncertainty about whether its central narrative stops midway.
That makes the show easier to recommend years after the finale. It can be watched as one long story rather than as a promising series whose survival depends on another corporate decision.
The release date also allows Apple TV to keep one of its recognizable genre dramas active through 2027. Silo occupies a particular place within the catalog: visually ambitious science fiction built around social control, mechanical detail and a mystery that rewards attention.
Its appeal does not depend on constant spectacle. Long stairways, restricted spaces, aging machinery and controlled screens make the environment feel oppressive before a character says a word. The production turns architecture into part of the power structure, reinforcing the distance between the people making decisions and those living far below them.
A planned final season can spend its resources on the places and events necessary to complete that world instead of extending the premise simply to preserve a successful title.
Anyone starting from the beginning has roughly 10 months to watch the first three seasons before July 9. That works out to about three episodes per month, leaving enough time to absorb the clues without turning the entire story into a rushed marathon.
The season-four sneak peek is already available as bonus content on the show’s Apple TV page. Because it follows the third-season finale, viewers who have not caught up may prefer to leave that two-minute preview untouched until they reach the end of “Troy.”
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