Extended Classic: StarTalk Live! Satisfying Our Curiosity about Mars (Part 1)

In honor of the 4th anniversary of Curiosity landing on Mars, we’re revisiting our StarTalk Live! show where we descended on The Bell House to celebrate the momentous event, with Neil Tyson, Sarah Silverman, Jim Gaffigan, Eugene Mirman and astrobiologist David Grinspoon. NEW: Extended with David and Chuck Nice discussing the Anthropocene epoch.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:22Eugene Mirman?

  Hello.

• 0:26Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome to an amazing evening of StarTalk Live.

• 0:33Eugene Mirman?

  It is my very great pleasure to bring to the stage Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This evening, the topic will be the exploration of the solar system.

• 0:56Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I reached into my Rolodex, found one of my colleagues. He is actually a curator of astrobiology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He's an expert on the solar system and he's worked on the Mars Curiosity rover.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me a warm welcome for Dr. David Grin spoon, David.

• 1:30Eugene Mirman?

  David, welcome. Thanks. Good to be here, I think. Get ready to do science party.

• 1:37Eugene Mirman?

  And now I'd like to bring out the wonderful Sarah Silverman.

• 1:47Eugene Mirman?

  She brought her backpack in case there is studying to be done.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  It's my transitional object.

• 1:55Eugene Mirman?

  And ladies and gentlemen, Jim Gaffigan.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Alright.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, before we begin, Jim, you came out with an album called Mr. Universe.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  That's right, I did.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm gonna hold you to that.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so you know.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  I'm an expert on everything in the universe.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  Probably the smartest person here right now.

• 2:24Eugene Mirman?

  I'm not intimidated.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying. Before we begin, I consulted with your bartenders in the back bar, and there is a special drink tonight called the Martian Sunrise.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I confess, the sunrise is just a little lemon that's hanging over the edge of the cup. It looks like a little sunrise, but the drink is certainly red, so...

• 2:45Eugene Mirman?

  And a tiny bit of bacteria from Mars that will kill you within 10 seconds.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  And you'll wake up with someone that looks like a Martian.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  And you'll be able to jump really high?

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. It was good, it was good, it was good, hey!

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get to John Carter in a moment.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, David, it was page one story. An SUV-sized rover was plunked down on Mars. Like, what's up with that?

• 3:17Eugene Mirman?

  Well, we're really glad it made it.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I was scared. I said, "This is not gonna work."

• 3:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you go nine months, and then it wasn't just the airbags, like the old ones did, right? That was scary, but I got accustomed to the airbag landing. This one, it had like, heat shields, and then a hypersonic drogue chute, and then retro-rockets, and then a hoist crane. It was something Rube Goldberg would have designed, and I'm thinking, "I don't want Rube Goldberg on Mars," so...

• 3:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, with his OK videos.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Why don't you just say what you mean, "No Jews on Mars"?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Let's make that t-shirt. I would wear it.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Why does it have to be an SUV? I mean, I wish they would do something a little better for the environment.

• 4:05Eugene Mirman?

  Well, the last one was a Mini Cooper.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Electric?

• 4:09David Grinspoon?

  Well, the last one was solar. This one's got nukes.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, those suck.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, first of all, how confident were you that this whole sequence of landing devices would have worked?

• 4:18David Grinspoon?

  I wasn't confident at all. I was shitting bricks. The thing is, I'm on the science side of this thing, so we've got our instruments. We want to get them onto the surface of Mars and go to interesting places so we can learn things. And the engineering side of it, those guys tell us, "Don't worry, this'll work." And then we say, "So how are you gonna do it?" And they describe this thing, you know, "It's gonna come in at hypersonic velocity and make these S-turns and then drop off the heat shield. And there's a parachute and it's gonna fire these rockets. And then it's gonna stop 50 meters up and hover and drop things down on this."

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On a hoist!

• 4:49David Grinspoon?

  And we're like, "You gotta be kidding me. That's not gonna work." And it was scary. We were scared. I was not confident at all. And...

• 4:56Eugene Mirman?

  This sounds literally more complicated than making Avatar.

• 5:01Eugene Mirman?

  Just to put it in perspective.

• 5:02David Grinspoon?

  And even, and even more expensive, if you can believe that.

• 5:06Eugene Mirman?

  Barely. Wow. So, what'd you say, like, twice the cost of Avatar?

• 5:13David Grinspoon?

  Actually, it was about 10 times the cost of Avatar. Now...

• 5:16Eugene Mirman?

  But it played in Times Square.

• 5:18David Grinspoon?

  You tell me if it's worth 10 times as much as Avatar.

• 5:20Eugene Mirman?

  I'm going to say yes.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  I think we should measure everything in terms of the cost of Avatar.

• 5:27Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Yeah, this drink is just like a fifth of Avatar.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like...

• 5:32David Grinspoon?

  Call that the AU, the Avatar unit.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Avatar unit, yeah. So...

• 5:39Eugene Mirman?

  So it landed on the Mars place.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it landed.

• 5:43Eugene Mirman?

  Back to where we were.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, did you know that I had a private Twitter conversation with the rover, just before it landed?

• 5:50Eugene Mirman?

  What do you mean?

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean? Who said what?

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, I had a relationship.

• 5:58Eugene Mirman?

  Meaning you tweeted the rover and the rover was like, "Hi, Neil."

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The rover tweeted that.

• 6:03David Grinspoon?

  You know what? It was probably just some old guy pretending to be the rover. It was like, "Can't talk now. I'm about to go through seven minutes of terror."

• 6:11Eugene Mirman?

  76 rockets have to fire in weird directions.

• 6:14David Grinspoon?

  There was a Van Halen video all about that.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you were mentioning this tension between the scientists and engineers. One of my last two questions was, "Who do you like better? Scientists or engineers?"

• 6:24David Grinspoon?

  You asked the rover this?

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I asked this of the rover.

• 6:26David Grinspoon?

  Oh, and what did she say?

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's a she. It's a she, actually.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Sure it is.

• 6:34Eugene Mirman?

  Scientists have to build a lady and send it to Mars.

• 6:39Eugene Mirman?

  That's how they fall in love.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She said she would not pick between the two, that they are both important to her life.

• 6:47David Grinspoon?

  She loves us both.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She loves us both, yes. So it worked, it landed, nothing went wrong?

• 6:53David Grinspoon?

  Almost nothing went wrong.

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What went wrong?

• 6:55David Grinspoon?

  Well...

• 6:56Eugene Mirman?

  Helicopter crashed into the wall?

• 6:58David Grinspoon?

  No, actually it was...

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Martian.

• 7:01David Grinspoon?

  It was remarkably free of glitches.

• 7:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, I did my very last question to Curiosity, which is her name, was...

• 7:07Speaker 02

  That's such a stripper name.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  She sounds very curious.

• 7:14Eugene Mirman?

  What's your favorite?

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I asked her.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Curiosity.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said...

• 7:20Speaker 03

  You typed to her, you didn't ask her.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  I have an eight-year-old son named Josh, he's my world. Wanna have a party?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Do I say that?

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I said, "Suppose a Martian crawls out from under a rock, climbs on your back, and rides you like a rodeo bull."

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She said, "That was not in my briefings."

• 7:38David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's funny, we wouldn't actually know if there was life on Mars if it was just hiding out behind the camera right there on top of the rover.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would have to be completely moving behind the camera.

• 7:47Eugene Mirman?

  So there might be a practical joker Martian riding around, being like, "Humans don't, no, I'm here, humans don't..."

• 7:55David Grinspoon?

  Could be.

• 7:56Eugene Mirman?

  That's adorable.

• 7:57David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so you got, I last counted, it was like 10 experiments on this thing. What's your favorite among them?

• 8:23David Grinspoon?

  Well... I'm a little bit partial because I'm part of one of the instrument teams. I help propose and design and...

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So by "partial" you mean you're biased?

• 8:31David Grinspoon?

  I'm biased.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so which one is...

• 8:32David Grinspoon?

  I mean, the obvious thing to say is the cameras, because the cameras are so cool, because we all want to see, and it's beautiful and it's amazing, and part of it's just sightseeing. But our instrument is called RAD, and it is RAD. It's the Radiation Assessment Detector, and we are measuring for the first time.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that what RAD stands for?

• 8:47David Grinspoon?

  It is what it stands for.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  I invented that 10 years ago, sorry to tell you.

• 8:51David Grinspoon?

  No, we're measuring how much radiation there is on the surface of Mars, which has never been measured before, and it's one of the things that would possibly kill you and possibly kill Martian bugs. So we want to characterize it and see what it's doing in the soil and in the atmosphere and so forth.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's not measuring anything about Mars itself? It's just stuff that's coming to Mars?

• 9:09David Grinspoon?

  Well, but it's doing stuff to Mars.

• 9:10Eugene Mirman?

  When you say Martian bugs...

• 9:13David Grinspoon?

  Oh, you don't know about that?

• 9:15Eugene Mirman?

  I'm not saying there aren't Martian bugs, I'm just saying, are there Martian bugs?

• 9:19David Grinspoon?

  Well...

• 9:20Eugene Mirman?

  And then also, are they attacking us?

• 9:23David Grinspoon?

  Well, that was a slip. There are no Martian bugs.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  No, aren't there like, isn't there like microscopic life of some kind?

• 9:30David Grinspoon?

  Well, that's what we're trying to figure out.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the RAD detector would tell you whether the radiation flux would sterilize the surface and kill all bugs?

• 9:40David Grinspoon?

  Exactly. Probably if there's bugs, microbes, whatever, on Mars, they're underground, because on the surface, there's no water, there's ultraviolet, it's freezing, it's nasty.

• 9:49Eugene Mirman?

  That's terrible.

• 9:49David Grinspoon?

  But underground, there might be water, it's a little more reasonable temperature, and you're shielded from the radiation. But what we're trying to figure out is how deep do you have to be if you're a Martian bug? What's happening to the radiation? And the thing to do is to measure it at the surface, and then you can...

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so if it's very heavy on the surface, you gotta go a little deeper to get the bugs?

• 10:07Eugene Mirman?

  And did you guys already have...

• 10:08Speaker 02

  How deep is your bug? Sorry.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How deep is...

• 10:11David Grinspoon?

  How deep is your bug?

• 10:13Speaker 03

  You know what, this is really awkward. I just realized now that we weren't talking about the Mars candy bar.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll send them memo earlier next time.

• 10:24Eugene Mirman?

  Have you already figured out the radiation? Do you have the answer? And you're just not telling us, is you're a big jerk?

• 10:30David Grinspoon?

  Essentially, yes. We have data, but we haven't released it yet. But it's not just because we're jerks. It's because we're trying to figure out if it's right. And there's some tricky things. Like, we mentioned this nuclear power source that puts out a lot of radiation. So we have to make sure we're not just measuring that.

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so you have a nuclear power plant on the rover?

• 10:46David Grinspoon?

  It's not a power plant. It's a power source.

• 10:49Eugene Mirman?

  Whoa.

• 10:53Eugene Mirman?

  You know, my favorite moment in any day is when Neil is wrong about something scientific.

• 10:59Eugene Mirman?

  It's just literally a joy to see his mustache get angry.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 11:04David Grinspoon?

  No, we're touchy about this. Because when you use the nuclear word, people get sometimes upset. I wouldn't have any idea why.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one of the two rebutting N-words out there.

• 11:13David Grinspoon?

  That's right. So when we use that N-word, we try to speak carefully. And it's not like a nuclear power plant with the cooling towers and the turbines and all that. It's a bunch of plutonium that's giving off heat, and we use that to generate electricity.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you found another thing to call it to not spook people when it's launched?

• 11:28David Grinspoon?

  We call it the not-scary big power thing.

• 11:30Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, it's one of those good, safe nuclear power plants.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  A clean power source.

• 11:35David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Eugene Mirman?

  But you wouldn't put it in the drinking water of humans.

• 11:40David Grinspoon?

  Well, no.

• 11:40Eugene Mirman?

  But Martians would.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do you need nukes? Did other landers have nukes? I don't think so.

• 11:46David Grinspoon?

  No. Well, the thing is, this lander has more than 10 times as much scientific instrumentation than anything we've...

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it needs more power?

• 11:54David Grinspoon?

  Needs more power. As Kirk would say to Scotty, "I need more power." And it can run at night. It can run in any season, and it should be able to run...

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the other ones had solar panels. They can only run in the daytime. You have solar panels. Couldn't you charge a battery and keep working at night?

• 12:08David Grinspoon?

  To some degree, you can. But in the Martian winter, the amount of power goes down if your solar panels get covered with dust.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Martian winter, the sun is very low in the sky?

• 12:16David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. Well, one of them did die because of the winter, because it got...

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the two rovers?

• 12:20David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. If the power goes down enough so that you can't run the heaters at night, then you die. That already happened to one of our previous rovers. So if you want to do a lot of science, you want a lot of power, a lot of instrumentation. You want to last a long time and be able to rover anywhere on Mars.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Send nukes.

• 12:33David Grinspoon?

  Exactly.

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly what happened there. Okay. Now, here's one of the experiments. I happen to like the name of the Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer. You gotta love the sound of that. That sounds like something, you know, in Batman's utility belt.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:47Eugene Mirman?

  It sounds like something to get you pregnant.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  It sounds like 70's version of the future speak.

• 12:54David Grinspoon?

  Yes, not the Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Why, yes.

• 13:00David Grinspoon?

  Batman.

• 13:03David Grinspoon?

  So, what does that do for us? With the Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer...

• 13:08Speaker 02

  You must get so much pu-

• 13:10David Grinspoon?

  We have a little-

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Oh my god, last night Eugene told me not to swear and then I was joking and I was like, "Can I say, mm?"

• 13:19David Grinspoon?

  You get so much pudding from-

• 13:20Speaker 02

  And then I completely just forgot and did it.

• 13:23David Grinspoon?

  No, you get a lot of pudding because you can go up to any rock and go, "Hey babe." You zap it with X-rays and you look at the pattern of what comes back and it tells you what the minerals are made out of, what's in that rock, how much iron it is. It's a way of basically probing the- Rocks. Not to get too scientific with you, but it sounds like it's a way of probing rocks for the minerals inside them. Wait, we want to know what the rocks are made out of because we want to know what the story is about the- How to have sex with them. The history of that place. Well, that's a way to break the ice, yeah. Okay. Alright, and it landed where on Mars? Because there's a lot of places to go. You pre-picked a spot. Yeah, we landed in a place called Gale Crater.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  I've been there.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  It's nice. He does tour a lot. It's nice. I actually named it after a friend of mine, Gale.

• 14:14David Grinspoon?

  Gale.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  It's not funny, she's dead.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Killed by a Martian, I might add.

• 14:26David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. It's by far the coolest place we've ever landed on Mars because-

• 14:33David Grinspoon?

  Because Mr. Universe has been there.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  I've been to some cooler places.

• 14:37David Grinspoon?

  So, back me up here. It's a cool place, right? Because- It's an ancient crater that used to be a lake. And it has all these sediments in it that tell us about the ancient past on Mars. And it's got a five-kilometer, that's three miles for you Americans, three-mile-high mountain in the middle of it that we're gonna climb up. And it's like going up the Grand Canyon on Mars. Every layer is from a different time in Martian history. It's gonna tell us the whole story.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not just a mountain that lifted up surface material. It has laid bare its layers?

• 15:07David Grinspoon?

  Well, it looks that way. It looked that way from orbit, and now we're seeing it in the distance as we start to approach it. And it's like Utah, it's just all these layers and canyons and juicy stuff.

• 15:16Eugene Mirman?

  Lot of Mormons on Mars. Vote for whoever you want.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Five of my way, next summer there's gonna be a Hilton in that crater.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so you've got this crater, what's the diameter of the crater?

• 15:35David Grinspoon?

  It's about a couple hundred kilometers across. It's a big crater.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So like a huge stadium-sized?

• 15:42David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but it's big for a rover, but...

• 15:45David Grinspoon?

  Very huge, very huge stadium.

• 15:46Eugene Mirman?

  Are you comparing something that's hundreds of kilometers to a stadium for some reason?

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, no, sorry, I was thinking hundreds of meters, sorry. You said hundreds of kilometers.

• 15:53David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry.

• 15:54Eugene Mirman?

  Is it as nice as the Meadowlands? So it's the size of like nine million Keystone arenas?

• 16:00David Grinspoon?

  It's a, it's a big crater.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was off by a thousand, alright?

• 16:04Eugene Mirman?

  Who isn't?

• 16:04David Grinspoon?

  Happens all the time.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Happens all the time. Alright, so you go hundred million miles to Mars and land in a crater that's, you know, a hundred miles across. That's a really good hole-in-one.

• 16:15David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, not only that, we actually landed in a landing ellipse, which is the area that you shoot for, that was only about fifteen miles across. And that's a first, that we've been able to control our landing to that extent with that crazy cockamamie landing system.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's what the engineers did for you?

• 16:30David Grinspoon?

  Exactly.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, an airbag would just bounce its way out of the crater and it would be no good to you.

• 16:34David Grinspoon?

  But that's why we're able to land in a much more interesting place than we've ever landed before, because before you needed a landing ellipse. So we've actually picked the most boring places on Mars to land before, because you wanna be safe. So you pick somewhere really flat. But you wanna go to the mountains, the canyons, the craters, but we haven't dared to do that before.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you gotta go to that little flat area between the mountain and the valley.

• 16:52David Grinspoon?

  And this is the first time we've ever do that. And so now we can see these mountains in the distance, and we're gonna get to them. We've never been to a place like that on Mars before.

• 16:57Eugene Mirman?

  How many times have we landed on Mars before?

• 16:59David Grinspoon?

  Oh, let's see, successfully, or we've tried?

• 17:03Eugene Mirman?

  I believe in my, the, yes.

• 17:04David Grinspoon?

  Let's see.

• 17:06Eugene Mirman?

  No, how many times have we set the thing and it just hit the sun?

• 17:11David Grinspoon?

  I guess we've had, what, five successful landings before? Two Vikings, two Mers.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, no wait.

• 17:16David Grinspoon?

  Two Vikings, Sojourner, Phoenix, two Mers.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two Mers, seven.

• 17:20Eugene Mirman?

  So far you're just naming comic book characters.

• 17:23David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. So, this is number seven, but we've had as many attempts, and the Russians had dozens of attempts that went, "Pshh."

• 17:29Eugene Mirman?

  They have a failed government.

• 17:31David Grinspoon?

  Well, but they... They did better at Venus.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all Putin's fault.

• 17:34Eugene Mirman?

  They did better at Venus.

• 17:35David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. Russians are from Venus, Americans from Mars. Don't go getting all venereal on me now.

• 17:39Eugene Mirman?

  That's the technical, scientific name.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:42David Grinspoon?

  Perfs.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the warranty on Curiosity Rover?

• 17:47David Grinspoon?

  Well, you know, we've been pretty unreliable with our warranties before, but this one's supposed to last two years.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two years.

• 17:52David Grinspoon?

  I mean, we've been unreliable in that they usually last longer.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if the engineers really did it on purpose, so you genuflect in front of them?

• 17:58David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, the Mers, the last rovers were supposed to last ninety days. Mars Exploration Rovers. The last two rovers were supposed to last ninety days, one of them still going eight years later. Now, these are supposed to last two years, but the power source will last more than ten, and so, we don't want to get overconfident, but potentially we could be there a long time.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's go down the list of the cool things that Mars has in common with Earth. What's the top of your list? I have my list too, we'll compare. What's the top of your list?

• 18:43Eugene Mirman?

  Shouldn't we start with Jim?

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Jim!

• 18:47Speaker 03

  They just, uh, one of my favorite parts of Mars is they just put a Shake Shack in there.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  The line, there's no line!

• 18:57Speaker 03

  It's like you just, whenever you want to go, you're like, "All right, I'm gonna go now."

• 19:00Speaker 02

  It takes two and a half years to get there, but there are no lines.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  There's no line, and they have like a camera setup, you could check it online, see if there's gonna be no line.

• 19:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We order it, yeah.

• 19:11David Grinspoon?

  I would have to say the coolest thing is the riverbeds. They're dried up, but they speak to us of flowing water, which is cool.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They meander.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  So there was water on Mars?

• 19:20David Grinspoon?

  Yes.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, how do you know it's water and not, like, liquid ammonia?

• 19:23David Grinspoon?

  Well, at one point, when we just had pictures from orbit, people said, "Well, they look a lot like rivers, but could it be ammonia? Could it be liquid CO2?"

• 19:31Eugene Mirman?

  You sure it's not died, Dr. Pepper? You sure?

• 19:34David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, it could have been.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Wait, could this be like a post-apocalyptic state? Where there was life?

• 19:39David Grinspoon?

  Well, this guy Percival Lowell, that's basically what he said 100 years ago. So, you should talk to him.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  So, basically, we're equal.

• 19:45David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Eugene Mirman?

  You know, Sarah really reminds me of this guy Percival Lowell.

• 19:49David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, no, I mean, that was a theory, that Mars was sort of a dying civilization. And that's where the rivers came from. But, people thought, "Well, how do you know it's water?" But now that we've been there with these other rovers, that was the main finding, the exciting thing. We found rocks on the surface, minerals that are only made by flowing water. So, we've kind of nailed that one with the last rovers.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it was only made by standing water?

• 20:11David Grinspoon?

  Yes, well, we found signs of standing and flowing, because there's ripple marks.

• 20:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you can make minerals out of flowing water?

• 20:16David Grinspoon?

  Standing water.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, standing water, okay.

• 20:18Eugene Mirman?

  Watching you two talk makes me feel so dumb.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No!

• 20:24David Grinspoon?

  No, but, but the...

• 20:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, I thought you were gonna say that it makes you feel...

• 20:28Eugene Mirman?

  Alive.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alive, yeah, sure, okay.

• 20:31David Grinspoon?

  No, we found this stuff called jarosite. These sulfur minerals. There's no way to make them. We don't know of any way to make them, other than sort of precipitating out of water.

• 20:38Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I actually teach like a Delta class on how to make minerals out of... In a different ways, but whatever, it's not a big deal.

• 20:44David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, he knows.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I like the polar ice caps. You gotta love the ice cap. We got ice caps, they got ice caps. Mars rotates in 24 hours. We rotate in 24 hours, right? Actually, not quite 24 hours. What's the exact rotation?

• 20:57David Grinspoon?

  Well, Mars is slightly slower. It's like a half an hour longer in the day, which is strange.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the people studying Mars, are they on Earth time or on Mars time?

• 21:06David Grinspoon?

  They're on Mars time. I actually was out there last week.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out where?

• 21:09David Grinspoon?

  At JPL. On Mars. While I was...

• 21:12Eugene Mirman?

  Half hour more for partying in Mars.

• 21:14David Grinspoon?

  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where we're running the rover from. And the day is on Mars time, which changes compared to California time. And it's really an odd experience.

• 21:24Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, Mars time isn't the same as California time?

• 21:26David Grinspoon?

  Well, sometimes it is. But it sweeps past.

• 21:30Eugene Mirman?

  24 hours out of the day.

• 21:31David Grinspoon?

  It slows down by half an hour a day, which is convenient if you're stuck in traffic. But actually, it's very weird, because it gets to the point where it's completely the opposite. And it's fine if you're, you know, a grad student or whatever, and you're just doing that. But if you have a family, or whatever, it leads to like divorces and psychosis and, you know, bad things.

• 21:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, how many Mars divorces has there been?

• 21:52David Grinspoon?

  I can't give you a precise number on Mars. But I can tell you it's not zero.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's about a 24-hour day. And Mars is tipped on its axis about the same degrees that we're tipped on our axis. So Mars has seasons. That is the cause of the seasons, by the way. It's not because we get closer to the sun or farther. I'm just saying.

• 22:12Eugene Mirman?

  Wow.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Someone's got pee.

• 22:16Eugene Mirman?

  But I didn't know how much he thought they didn't know it.

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So you can think this through because you knew that the southern hemisphere has opposite seasons to us. And if Earth were closer to the sun one time of year than another, if that's what made summer, then all of Earth would have summer at the same time and we don't. So our distance to the sun can have nothing to do with the origin.

• 22:38Eugene Mirman?

  It's all about the axis.

• 22:39David Grinspoon?

  But on Mars, distance to the sun changes the season because Mars has a non-circular orbit and southern summer on Mars is a lot hotter than northern summer because Mars is weird in that way. So it's a combination of the two on Mars.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Why don't you guys just, oh.

• 22:55David Grinspoon?

  Do you mind?

• 22:58David Grinspoon?

  Do you mind we're talking?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So one thing, Sarah, you had mentioned your resonance with Percival Lowell.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he thought he saw canals on Mars, the famous Martian canals.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  But let me ask what will probably be, well, no, there's no, but, oh, let's not judge it before it happens. Needs more setup and go.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  You said there's polar caps.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, ice caps.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  With no water?

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, where's the water?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Just frozen land or dry?

• 23:29David Grinspoon?

  We used to think, back in the days of your buddy Percival, we used to think the polar caps were water, which is, kind of makes sense because that's what polar caps are made out of. But turns out Mars is really cold and they're dry ice. It's frozen CO2. There's a little bit of water there, but it's mostly dry ice.

• 23:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dry ice.

• 23:45Eugene Mirman?

  You could have like a political party.

• 23:47David Grinspoon?

  Exactly, you could.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the Phoenix lander went to the ice caps, right?

• 23:54David Grinspoon?

  It went pretty close. So we had one lander that we actually sent right up to the edge and found ice in the soil, which was really cool.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Water ice in the soil.

• 24:02David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, so there is water ice.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't go to the ice cap and say, oh, we found ice cap.

• 24:07David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:07Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, is there still water on Mars?

• 24:09David Grinspoon?

  There's frozen water just underneath the soil in the high latitude places.

• 24:13Eugene Mirman?

  But no regular water?

• 24:15David Grinspoon?

  There may be-

• 24:16Eugene Mirman?

  Watery water, wetty water.

• 24:17David Grinspoon?

  There may be-

• 24:18Eugene Mirman?

  To be scientific.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Liquid water.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Can I get a club soda there?

• 24:21Eugene Mirman?

  Ooh!

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want a club soda! Larry, Jim, if you have the water and you have the CO2, you can make club soda.

• 24:28David Grinspoon?

  You could.

• 24:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jim is right!

• 24:30David Grinspoon?

  Great. Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Now can I be on NPR?

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so why do they go with the boundary? I mean, the Mars caps shrink and grow, depending on winter or summer.

• 25:00David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, they shrink and grow, and there's a whole history there of climate change on Mars in the layers and the caps. So by trying to investigate that stratigraphy, we can learn about the long-term climate history. And just getting to that water ice was a big deal.

• 25:12Eugene Mirman?

  Hey, when you say stratigraphy...

• 25:15David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Eugene Mirman?

  What do you mean?

• 25:18David Grinspoon?

  Layers. I mean, layers. But it sounds more sciency if I say stratigraphy.

• 25:22Eugene Mirman?

  No one is denying that.

• 25:24David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Can I ask you something? Uh, Mars is red. How do we know that's not all blood?

• 25:35David Grinspoon?

  Well, it is.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, let me take this one.

• 25:39David Grinspoon?

  Go for it.

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jim?

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars is red. For the same reason your blood is.

• 25:48David Grinspoon?

  Right.

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's iron.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Cause it's American!

• 25:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's American!

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's rust, essentially. Your blood is red because it's, like, oxidized iron.

• 26:02David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, hemoglobin, hem group is iron oxide.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna be tested on this later, man.

• 26:06David Grinspoon?

  Same thing as on Mars, yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Can I ask you about another root? Like, why is cosmology and cosmetology... What do they share?

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the same thing.

• 26:21David Grinspoon?

  It's basically the same thing.

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, the only difference is one uses makeup and the other concerns itself with the origin of the universe.

• 26:27David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But otherwise, it's the same.

• 26:29Eugene Mirman?

  And witch is witch again?

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, how come they always couch the mission statement in ways that where they're not actually saying, "We're looking for life." "We're gonna look for water that could be life." "We're looking for minerals that could tell you if there's water." Why all the subterfuge?

• 26:50David Grinspoon?

  Because we don't know how to look for life. We tried that once and we realized we didn't know what we were doing.

• 26:54Eugene Mirman?

  What do you mean? How did we try it?

• 26:56David Grinspoon?

  Well, we had a mission called Viking, our first ever lander on Mars.

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1976?

• 27:00David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, and did all these experiments.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's America's...

• 27:02Eugene Mirman?

  There were all like emails and like, "Why is no one responding?"

• 27:06David Grinspoon?

  The experiments worked and then afterwards we said, "Well, we still don't really know if we found life because we didn't even know what questions to ask." And then we realized decades later, "Well, we gotta go back and do this a little more slowly and try to understand the history of Mars and what kind of life there might even..."

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could it be that you cannot ask what something is if you only have one example of it?

• 27:29David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, that's a big problem with astrobiology.

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You cannot characterize life if, as much as biologists celebrate what they call biodiversity, at the end of the day, all life has common DNA and common origin, you are dealing with a sample of one. And when you have a sample of one, you don't really have a science, do you?

• 27:49David Grinspoon?

  No, you've hit on a problem.

• 27:51Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah! That's what I would've said myself, really.

• 27:56David Grinspoon?

  This is a major problem for astrobiology. We're studying something, we have one example, how scientific is that?

• 28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, how you define what life is if you only have one example of it?

• 28:05Eugene Mirman?

  Isn't there like some silicon-based thingamajig in a pond somewhere in California or something like that?

• 28:10David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I saw that episode.

• 28:11Eugene Mirman?

  I know that what I said was vague, but, uh... Do you know what I'm talking about? Where there was like one thing that was found that had like a different element of...

• 28:20David Grinspoon?

  Oh, you're talking about the arsenic-based life?

• 28:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, sorry, arsenic.

• 28:23David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that was really...

• 28:25Eugene Mirman?

  Arsenic-based life?

• 28:26David Grinspoon?

  That was really hyped and possibly interesting, probably wrong, but it wasn't another kind of life. That stuff was still carbon-based, it just maybe had a different kind of DNA. So...

• 28:35Eugene Mirman?

  I tried.

• 28:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get partial credit for...

• 28:38Eugene Mirman?

  You can only learn so much from USA Today.

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, if I may elaborate on that example, though.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The reason why that arsenic result, if it had really been shown to be true, was so interesting is that in life,

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  phosphorus is fundamental to, like, your metabolism or other functions within what it is to be alive as we know it.

• 29:07David Grinspoon?

  It's in every molecule of DNA in your body.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd count that as important, right.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now arsenic kills us, alright? Why does arsenic kill us? Because it sits exactly below phosphorus on the periodic table. And if you are in a line on the periodic table, you have the same number of electrons in your outer orbit, which means you combine in the same way and make the same damn molecules. Your body cannot tell the difference between phosphorus and arsenic because it has the same valence electrons. Arsenic comes in, your body didn't tell the difference, you end up dead. So if you have a microbe that can uptake arsenic just as happily as it uptakes phosphorus, then you have widened the net

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  for what you would use to search for life in the cosmos.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you not?

• 30:03David Grinspoon?

  No, you have. The funny thing is, it's probably wrong because arsenic is really unstable on Earth. Arsenic DNA would just fall apart. But accidentally, they may have found something that would work on Titan.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The moon of Saturn.

• 30:16David Grinspoon?

  Moon of Saturn, where it's way too cold for our kind of DNA, but arsenic DNA, it turns out, is stable on Titan.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars is like a controversial place. Do you remember back in the 70s? Was it the Viking orbiter that took a picture? And there was a face on Mars? Do you remember that? It was like, had eyes and a nose and a mouth? So, what's up with that?

• 30:56David Grinspoon?

  Well, it definitely looks like a face. From a certain angle with a certain blurriness to the picture.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it looks like a simian face?

• 31:04David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah. Looks like a human face. And of course, our brains are designed to recognize faces. So people went, "Hey, there's something up here."

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if we were jellyfish, we would have not noticed it at all?

• 31:14David Grinspoon?

  Probably not. But we probably would have seen there's a lot of other features on Mars that do look like jellyfish, I'm sure.

• 31:18Eugene Mirman?

  But if we were a goat, would we then have noticed it?

• 31:21David Grinspoon?

  Quite possibly.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  It took me about a week to do that face. And, uh...

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While you were there?

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was...

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While you were waiting in line at the Shake Shack?

• 31:31Speaker 03

  I was actually waiting for a phone call from Neil. And I started just doodling.

• 31:38David Grinspoon?

  So we went back with another spacecraft and took more close-up photographs. And there was actually a big debate, should NASA go back and shoot the face? Because they thought, "Well, is that giving credence to..." But of course, we should go look at it. And, uh...

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, just to be clear. The face was not just a finger painting in the surface. It was a...

• 31:55David Grinspoon?

  Topography.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a topological structure.

• 31:59Eugene Mirman?

  Like mountains.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a mountainous structure. It was huge, right? A huge structure.

• 32:04David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That had like eye sockets, nose and a mouth at that particular angle.

• 32:07David Grinspoon?

  It would take you a good day to hike up the face. So...

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's probably the first time that sentence has ever been uttered in the history of the world. "It would take you a good day to hike up the face."

• 32:18David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a cool sentence. I love that.

• 32:20David Grinspoon?

  Well, what's funny is, so we went back. We photographed in more detail with better angles. And guess what? It's a big eroded mountain.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's because the Martians covered it up. Once they learned we were-

• 32:31David Grinspoon?

  Well, see, the conspiracy theorists, that's what they said. They said NASA blew up the face.

• 32:36Eugene Mirman?

  George Bush knew that face was gonna happen, and he did nothing!

• 32:42David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, NASA blew up the face, NASA faked the pictures, George Bush did it. If you really wanna believe there's a face, then no amount of data is gonna convince you. Otherwise, you just interpret it in your own way. But actually, Jim Garvin, who used to be the chief Mars scientist at NASA, he did make a hiking map for the face in instructions, which included "bring plenty of oxygen."

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, with this face, you take higher-resolution images, and at other angles, and it didn't look like a face. So, the only thing that looks like a face at all solar angles is a face. So, it required just special angling to make that happen. Alright, so, did you convince the-

• 33:19David Grinspoon?

  Oh, no, no, no. You know, you can Google "face on Mars," and you'll find lots of websites of true believers who... You know, it just deepens the conspiracy-

• 33:26Eugene Mirman?

  What do they believe? Someone, like, made a face mountain? A mountain face?

• 33:30David Grinspoon?

  Yes, yes.

• 33:31Eugene Mirman?

  You can take so many pictures on Earth of things and go like, "I see an elephant." "Oh my god, that cloud looks like Led Zeppelin."

• 33:38David Grinspoon?

  Exactly.

• 33:38Eugene Mirman?

  "What the hell does that prove?"

• 33:40David Grinspoon?

  It's a message, it's a message.

• 33:42Eugene Mirman?

  "Zaplin is gassy, floaty."

• 33:43David Grinspoon?

  It's a message to us from-

• 33:44Eugene Mirman?

  "Those people are exhausting."

• 33:46David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, they are. Yeah, but they're amusing sometimes.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you've got these other features. There's Valles Marineris, which is Latin for what?

• 33:54David Grinspoon?

  The valley of the mariners.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How big is the Mariner Valley?

• 33:57David Grinspoon?

  It's ridiculously big. It's about as long as the continental United States is wise. Yeah. You could take our Grand Canyon and put it in there sideways, across it, and it would fit.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, you're saying you could take our entire Grand Canyon-

• 34:11David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, put it in sideways.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put it in sideways, and it would fit in, as like a bridge across it?

• 34:16David Grinspoon?

  Exactly.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's got Olympus Mons, that's Latin for Mount Olympus.

• 34:20David Grinspoon?

  Mount Olympus.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a volcano.

• 34:22David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, it's a volcano, it's the biggest mountain in the solar system. It's about three times as high as Mount Everest. It's massive, but if you're on the edge of it, it wouldn't even, barely know you were on a slope. It's very gradually sloping. Yeah, it's massive.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a big Mons. Yeah, big Mons, Olympus, it's a Mons. So, in like a geologic feature smackdown, we would lose to Mars, big time.

• 34:42David Grinspoon?

  It depends. If you're just into size, then absolutely. Mars has bigger volcanoes, bigger canyons.

• 34:48David Grinspoon?

  But they're old.

• 34:48Eugene Mirman?

  But we have like, we have puppies.

• 34:51David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, but their volcanoes are just sitting there. They're not erupting. They haven't erupted in hundreds of millions of years.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  You know, we're smaller, but we try harder.

• 34:56Eugene Mirman?

  We had Knight Rider. We have so many things they never had.

• 34:59David Grinspoon?

  Absolutely.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  We have Jack Nicholson.

• 35:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. We had the remake of Knight Rider. Not great, but we had it.

• 35:10David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, but we don't know what kind of movies they have on Mars. We haven't explored that much.

• 35:13Eugene Mirman?

  There's probably a place with a bunch of old VHS tapes there.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  They're probably covered in blood.

• 35:19David Grinspoon?

  Splatter films.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He can't get off the blood thing here. So, water was once on Mars. How long ago? You got your dry riverbeds, your layers. How long ago?

• 35:29David Grinspoon?

  Billions and billions of years ago.

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't say it right. The chin has to come out. I want to hear the whole audience on three. Chin out. One, two, three. Billions and billions. Yeah. So, you take some lessons from Brooklyn here, all right? So...

• 35:44David Grinspoon?

  We know it's been a long time because Mars is covered with craters and it tells us it's an ancient surface. And you can tell how old the rivers are because they're covered with craters too. And there are no young surfaces with rivers. So, it was a long time ago. It was when Mars was a young baby planet. It was a more Earth-like place. The atmosphere escaped, the water's gone, and it hasn't been there for a long time.

• 36:06Eugene Mirman?

  1850, like you're saying, before that, or?

• 36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right, so Mars was once wet and presumably fertile.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Easy. Let's keep it clean, all right?

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said that once to Jon Stewart, and he says, "Why is it that when you talk about the universe, I get horny?"

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When StarTalk Live comes back, we're gonna talk about destinations elsewhere in the solar system beyond Mars. StarTalk Live, Bell House!

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk. Stay tuned for another segment.

• 37:11David Grinspoon?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. You've been listening to one of our classic episodes. I'm Dr. Funky Spoon, astrobiologist David Grin spoon, and now I'm back. I'm calling into the studio from my home to give you a little bit more. And I'm with my co-host Chuck Nice. Chuck, thanks for joining us for this.

• 37:28Chuck Nice?

  Of course, Dr. Funky Spoon. How've you been, man?

• 37:31David Grinspoon?

  I've been great. How are you doing?

• 37:33Chuck Nice?

  Um, you know, I'm all right. Just trying to keep the dream from becoming a nightmare. You know what I'm saying, Dave? That's all.

• 37:39David Grinspoon?

  It's great to see you. You're looking very cosmic, I have to say.

• 37:42Chuck Nice?

  That, that, yes, yes, that is, uh, what is that in the background? What, what, what galaxy? I don't, I can't tell what galaxy. Like Neil would be able to look at this and be like, that's, you know, whatever, whatever.

• 37:53David Grinspoon?

  I think that, I think that's one of ours.

• 37:55Chuck Nice?

  Is that one of ours? Okay, cool. I'll, I'll believe you because, you know, you're, you're an actual doctor.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  So it's good to see you though, man, and, and good to be on and continue to, yeah. Now, what are you up, what are you up to now? I know you got a new job.

• 38:10David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm, uh, now I'm a senior scientist at a place called Planetary Science Institute, uh, which is a really wonderful, uh, place with a, a lot of people doing interesting work all around the solar system. Um, and although we're all located on Earth, we're, we're studying places all around the solar system. And, um, I actually just finished up a book and, uh, the book is called Earth in Human Hands. And it's basically on this topic of how do we, uh, how do we think of ourselves as planetary beings?

• 38:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you know, and it's, I mean, I'm so happy you wrote the book because quite frankly, I think that that type of perspective is what is necessary to change and drive, um, our political direction globally. Because I think that a lot of people don't understand that it is, you know, it's not just science, it's science and politics that drives the behavior of human beings with respect to how we treat the globe. And, you know, without altering our political views about the place we live, this little spaceship that we're on, we're never going to alter our behavior and how we treat this planet.

• 39:32Chuck Nice?

  And right now, we're not doing a very good job. So, that's pretty awesome. So, what, what is the focus of the book, David?

• 39:39David Grinspoon?

  Well, uh, it, it's very much what, what you were just saying. It's, it's about, uh, you know, how we need to think about these problems. I don't really get into politics as far as specific, uh, recommendations on policy, but it's all about how we need to think about these, these, these questions. And, and what I try to do is situate us, humanity, in sort of deep space and deep time. Uh, and then what is happening to Earth now as a result of, of human actions, uh, what, what we sometimes call that, we're calling now the Anthropocene epoch. How does that fit into the big story of Earth? And what kind of changes happening? There's something unprecedented happening on Earth now.

• 40:23David Grinspoon?

  Uh, and if we, if we look at the whole story of Earth, I think we can in some ways see ourselves more clearly and achieve that long-term time scale that we need to have in order to do a good job managing this planet. So, it's not so much about policy. I'm, I'm talking about perspective. I'm trying to promote a planetary perspective on how we deal with the problems that we've created for ourselves here.

• 40:47Chuck Nice?

  And, you know, that's, that's what I meant when I said politics, more of the, the perspective that we have that shapes the politics that we actually, uh, enact. But, uh, go back a little bit for me, man, and talk to me about the, uh, Anthropocene, uh, epoch? Is that it? Because, I mean, you said that like, uh, you said that like you were saying Tuesday afternoon.

• 41:12David Grinspoon?

  Right, right, right.

• 41:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, this book is about last Tuesday afternoon, better known as the Anthropocene epoch, but tell me about that.

• 41:20David Grinspoon?

  From, from the Earth's perspective, it is kind of like Tuesday afternoon. It's just another blip in Earth time. But, you know, we have this, you've seen this geological time scale with all these different layers. Uh, of rock that we give different names to and that represent different times going into the past and you've heard about, you know, the Jurassic and the Triassic and all that.

• 41:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:41David Grinspoon?

  And the epoch that we're in now has been something that we've called the Holocene, which has been 12,000 years, basically, or a little less, uh, since the last Ice Age.

• 41:52Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 41:53David Grinspoon?

  And the proposal is that we're in a new phase of geological history called the Anthropocene, which is characterized by a new geological force.

• 42:02Chuck Nice?

  Which is man.

• 42:02David Grinspoon?

  Changing the Earth, and that new geological force is us.

• 42:04Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah, hence the Anthro, which is, uh, but that's, that's pretty fascinating. That is a very, very small period of time, uh, Dr. Funky Spoon, to have such a great impact on the change. So are you saying that in that 12,000-year period, that our presence has been enough to alter, uh, the, the future of this planet in that short, short period of time? Cause normally when you look at these, when you look at these ages, when you, when you look at these, um, you know, these periods, uh, they're pretty damn long, you know, they seem to last for significant, uh, sums of time.

• 42:49Chuck Nice?

  And when you're talking about 12,000 years, you're talking about, I mean, it literally is a blink, that's a blink. So, uh, do we really have that kind of power and impact?

• 43:00David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's a great question. One thing you can definitely say is we've already left our mark. We've already done things to the Earth that will be recognizable by anybody, uh, you know, digging up the rocks from our time, even millions of years in the future. The way we've changed the atmosphere and changed the climate, we've changed the, the nature of the surfaces of the planet, we, we've altered the hydrological cycle in this huge way. There's five times as much water in reservoirs and behind dams now than, than is in all the natural streams of Earth and rivers. So we've, we've altered these major physical, uh, properties of our planet. Now, is that gonna last for a geological significant amount of time?

• 43:45David Grinspoon?

  Well, our signature will last, you know, the, the, the, the trash we've left, if you will, the, the mark we've left. Even if we all went away tomorrow and the effect on the climate would last for hundreds of thousands of years. Now- Well, our society or something that we create out of it lasts for geological geologically significant times. That is a really interesting question. You know, and I think a lot of it hinges on what happens in the next couple of centuries. If we figure out how to do this, this thing we're trying to do, which is have a civilization with the technological power to change the planet, that could do us in, or it could allow us to survive for a long time.

• 44:28David Grinspoon?

  There are ways we could use that technology that would allow us to stick around. So we're at an interesting branching point, I would say, where we could, we could, this could be the beginning of a long-term change in the earth where cognitive processes, technological life becomes uninfluenced for a long period of time.

• 44:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:49David Grinspoon?

  Or this could be just, you know, a burst of cleverness that then writes its own epitaph, you know? So the future is unwritten.

• 45:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:00David Grinspoon?

  You know, there's no fate but what we make, but.

• 45:02Chuck Nice?

  So we could go one of two ways. We could either be like Jay-Z, brilliant and have longevity, or Kanye, flash of brilliance and then just blow yourself up. So now let me ask you this, because and this is what I want to know from an astrobiologist's standpoint. So you talk about certain things when it comes to human impact, like, okay, climate change, when we look at the amount of methane and the amount of carbon dioxide that we are releasing into our atmosphere, and the parts per million are, you know, just way too much, and of course, that's going to have an effect.

• 45:45Chuck Nice?

  Juxtapose that against the amount of plastic and pollution that we are dumping into the ocean. Which one of those two things will have a more long-lasting, because I know the climate change will be more immediate, but which one will be more long-lasting in terms of violating our ecosystem when you think about it?

• 46:11David Grinspoon?

  Well, uh, uh, there, there, uh, it's an interesting comparison. They're two different kinds of phenomena. Uh, you know, the plastic, physically materially, plastic lasts a long time. And there are even rocks, there's a new class of rocks that's been, um, identified and labeled plastiglomerites. What? Which, plastiglomerites, like plastic conglomerates. Wow. And, and they're, they're rocks that are found on some islands where they've made bonfires where plastic has melted together with rock and then formed literally a new kind of rock that will, those plastiglomerites will be in the geological record for, you know, I don't know, millions, hundreds of millions of years into the future. Those are basically,

• 46:56David Grinspoon?

  you know, almost permanent features of Earth that people will dig up a long time from now, or, or not necessarily people, but whoever is investigating the Earth will say, there was a race at that time that made plastic. That is kind of permanent now. Wow, wow. The, the climate change, uh, is, if we stopped right now with our emissions, our out of control emissions of CO2 and methane, there'd be a period of about a hundred thousand years, or a few hundred thousand years, less than a million, where the Earth would draw that back down to equilibrium. And the carbon, the natural carbon cycle of the Earth would regain control and climate would pull itself back to normal.

• 47:42David Grinspoon?

  So, as far as the threat to, uh, the well-being of the biosphere, I'm gonna say that, that, that climate is a bigger problem. Okay. Uh, you know, the plastic is something we have to deal with, for sure, but it's not, uh, you know, there's, and there's certain species that are being drastically affected by it. Seabirds on certain islands are having a really hard time with our, our garbage, but, uh, but as far as a global threat, it's really those gases you mentioned in the atmosphere that we have to pay the most attention to and sort of, uh, regain control of ourselves so that the Earth can, uh, can kind of do what it does and cyclically take care of its own climate. Cool, man, cool.

• 48:20Chuck Nice?

  Man, I wish we had more time to talk about this, you know, but, but, but we are, we're done, but we, we, you know, it's always a pleasure, man, talking to you. I, I just love it, you know?

• 48:30David Grinspoon?

  It's great to talk to you, Chuck, always. You've been listening to StarTalk. I'm astrobiologist David Grin spoon with my co-host Chuck Nice, and thank you very much for listening.