Season 1 Time Capsule – StarTalk All-Stars

Neil Tyson celebrates the first season of StarTalk All-Stars with fan favorite episodes featuring Bill Nye and our other new hosts grappling with climate change, visualizing our universe, listening for aliens, sending human beings to Mars, and much more. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk All-Stars, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I also serve as the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. This year, we launched this brand-new series to expand the reach of science and comedy through some of the world's best science communicators. Yeah, we found them, and we're giving them to you. And this week, with our special time capsule episode, we wrap up the first season and tip our hats to those hosts and guests who helped bring science down to Earth. We sent out a survey to all our fans, and you came back to us with your favorite hosts, guests, and episodes. It's no surprise that your number-one favorite All-Star is StarTalk regular Bill Nye the

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science Guy. He's been helping us out on StarTalk from its very beginning, and this year, he kicked off StarTalk All-Stars with an episode about, what else, climate change. Co-host Chuck Nice, and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, chatted with him about the state of our climate in your number-one favorite episode. Check it out.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Paul Bunyan wants to know this, and this is he is @MatthewBirch. With the rising ocean levels due to polar melt, how soon before the Hudson River becomes the Gulf of the Hudson? And, and let me just add an addendum, you know, to the, how soon will this have a verifiable and measurable effect on our coastal regions? Because when you look at all of the world, most people live on the coast of wherever.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  That's right. So, so already, already, we're seeing the number of coastal flooding days is increasing all up and down the East Coast, from Miami to Newport to, to Boston. The storm surges that we're seeing, when you have a storm, wherever the storm is, it's, it has more damage because the sea level has risen about a foot in the last 100 years. And it's increasing faster now than perhaps any time in the last 3,000 years. And that's because of polar melts, it's because the water itself is getting warmer, and so it's expanding. And that's, it's happening right now.

• 2:17Bill Nye?

  So they have an expression in Florida, nuisance flooding.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Nuisance flooding.

• 2:21Bill Nye?

  Nuisance flooding. Now, everybody... When you think of floods, you might get into some biblical thing where everybody's underwater in an enormous, hundreds of feet underwater, a hundred meters underwater. Uh, but the nuisance flooding, which uh, is uh, inducing insurance companies not to provide insurance to where you park your car.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 2:42Bill Nye?

  Because salt water is getting in your wheel wells. It's just a few centimeters, a few inches deep. But if you put a few inches of water on the floor of your house, you ruin almost everything.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 2:54Bill Nye?

  You ruin the stove, you ruin all your furniture, you ruin your carpets, you ruin your bedding, you ruin everything. And so this expression nuisance is kind of shorthand for.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  You're not in good hands, you're on your own.

• 3:07Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah. And so I said to um, this guy, Mr. Hill, who's a legislator in Florida. I uh, I said, what are you gonna do? He, he represents Pensacola, Florida, and they have nuisance flooding continually. I said, what are you gonna do? And everybody moves, you know, or they're gonna move, he says, they're gonna, where are they gonna move to? How are they gonna displace themselves? If you're a middle income or lower income person, how do you pick up everything? And where do you go to get a job and so on? And that's in the US, which is uh, civilization. Way to, you're in the developing world where you just don't have resources.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Jeez, God, man.

• 3:44Bill Nye?

  Let's get to, let's, let's raise awareness, Chuck, read another query.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  I'm gonna raise awareness, I'm gonna, God, this is, this is really serious stuff.

• 3:51Bill Nye?

  Well, man, yeah, yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Uh, this is from Benjamin, who is at Benod3 on Twitter. Uh, Gavin said, I wasn't giving Twitter any love, so let's go to Twitter. Uh, here's what he says. People emphasize negative aspects of uh, climate change, but are there any foreseeable positives? Hmm.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Well, so let me, let me give you one.

• 4:14Bill Nye?

  Please.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Um, so, so I'm English and uh.

• 4:17Bill Nye?

  Do you know uh?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  I do, yes, yes, yes, we're, we're, we hang out all the time at the palace.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  And and for many years, many years, I, you know, there was such a thing as English wine. And there was an old joke in Victorian.

• 4:34Bill Nye?

  English wine?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Yes, in the Victorian period, that it would take four people to drink English wine. One to drink the wine, two people to hold the person down, and another person to pour it into their throat.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Pretty funny.

• 4:46Bill Nye?

  Very troubling.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Yes, okay, but now it turns out that there are more vineyards in in England than there have ever been in history. And in fact, the the.

• 4:54Bill Nye?

  You say over five hundred years, thousand years.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Thousands of years, yes.

• 4:58Bill Nye?

  Thousand.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  We have, we have records of vineyards in England going back to the doomsday book, uh, uh, over a thousand years ago. Um, but there's more now. And the wine they're producing in blind tastings against champagne actually wins. So, so wine quality in in England uh is actually now on a par with the best that the French can produce.

• 5:20Bill Nye?

  Why, they're gonna, the French people are gonna be unglued about that.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  I, I, absolutely, so I, so, so in fact, uh, the champagne companies are buying up uh swaths of what are called the South Downs in in the UK because they know that the the temperatures in Champagne are now at the limit. So if it gets much warmer in Champagne region, uh, they won't be able to make as good champagne there. And they're thinking about moving their production to the UK.

• 5:44Bill Nye?

  So they.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  That will be a foreseeable benefit for English wine drinkers.

• 5:49Bill Nye?

  UK is a little cooler.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a little bit further north, but it's very similar soils, very similar terroir. Uh, and now it's, uh, it's actually happening.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  So there's your answer, Benjamin. Uh, the positive will be you get to piss off French winemakers.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  No, we're not gonna see any more Ice Ages. Uh, the next one would have been due uh in about thirty thousand or maybe ha- maybe fifty thousand years. Um.

• 6:14Bill Nye?

  Sorry, I'm gonna miss it.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you are, you are gonna miss it, but it's, it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen because the, the timescale for the carbon that we put into the system is hundreds of thousands of years, and so no more Ice Ages.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  No more Ice Ages.

• 6:27Bill Nye?

  That is really a striking thing, everybody, no more Ice Ages.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:31Bill Nye?

  Cause we, we make hilarious jokes about the Ice Ages. I went to school in the Finger Lakes, which were carved by uh glaciers, coming south. It's not gonna happen anymore. Those were the days. Are the glaciers, all the glaciers we know, gonna go away?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  So, almost all the mountain glaciers that we know are receding. Some of them quite dramatically. The only part of the planet where ice is pretty stable is East Antarctica, which is the biggest chunk of ice. And that's very cold, very stable. And so that's the part that's gonna stick around the longest. But the other bits, the ice on the Antarctic Peninsula. Greenland is losing mass at about 250 gigatons of water a year. The West Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass.

• 7:17Bill Nye?

  So, everybody, if you wanna see Glacier National Park. Forest Mudslide National Park, get going.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So, can we have three? Just major points. Three major talking points. Three tips that we can put out. To kind of silence the climate-denying arguments.

• 7:42Bill Nye?

  Well, my big thing is, why, do you really think that your intuition? About weather? And about your whole life is more accurate at predicting the future than the world's climate scientists? And then to follow that up with, do you think the world's climate scientists are in a conspiracy? Gavin, are you in a conspiracy where you guys text each other?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yes, well, we get signals from the vegetarian overlords.

• 8:07Bill Nye?

  Oh, really?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  When he says texts, I was thinking, you know, [BLEEP] pics, but I'm sorry.

• 8:12Bill Nye?

  Oh.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 8:16Bill Nye?

  Hard talk is a management show.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  That escalated quickly.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  I've been hanging with Brett Favre, what can I say?

• 8:23Bill Nye?

  Wow. It's unexpected. But are there three tips? Gavin, you got any ideas?

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Look at the evidence. The planet is warming.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  One.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  We understand why.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Two.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  We're not stopping our emissions, so it's gonna get worse.

• 8:38Bill Nye?

  There you go.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  It's that simple.

• 8:40Bill Nye?

  So, the whole thing is, there's huge economic opportunities, I always say. If we didn't need to buy oil from the other side of the world. We had energy independence, it would free up all these resources here to do extraordinary things. And just think, if the United States or Britain could export this new technology, we could change the world!

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next up, former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. Previously, you've heard him as my expert guest. But now he hosts the episode, Putting Humans on Mars, with co-host Maeve Higgins and science guest John Charles, the chief scientist at NASA's Human Research Program. You didn't know they had a human research program, did you? Mike went to space not once, but twice. And he helped fix my Hubble Space Telescope. So, yeah, he's kind of badass. And apparently, you all agreed. You voted for Mike as one of your favorite StarTalk Radio Science guests, and you love him still, maybe even more, as a StarTalk All-Star. Check it out.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Our goal is to keep people in sufficient condition that they can work as hard as they've ever worked in their entire lives, because it's going to be required on the Mars mission to justify the truly tremendous expense and the multinational effort to get there. So, our goal is not for you to get there, to stumble down the ladder and plant a flag, and then, you know, scuff a little dust with your boots and get back in the rocket and blast off. Our goal is for you to be on Mars for up to 18 months, working very, very hard, finding whether there's life on Mars, whether there ever was life on Mars, understanding Mars as a planet, and essentially justifying the expense of the mission. That's the challenge.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  So, how long would the mission be altogether?

• 10:25Speaker 04

  Altogether, it's going to be 30 months, according to NASA's Design Reference Mission. And bear in mind that this is not yet an approved program. These are study parameters. But we expect a mission to Mars will be on the order of two and a half years, 30 months long, with about a six-month or so transit there, which just coincidentally looks like a space station duration. 18 months on the planet. Talk about your layovers at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. This is an 18-month layover on Mars, and then a six- or seven-month transit back to Earth, a total of two and a half years.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  John, there's 30 months that it's going to take to get there. You explained six, six to go, 18 there, six back. There's only certain times we can go, or it could be even longer than that. But that's, why are we looking at that, those lengths of time? And why aren't they not longer or shorter?

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Well, that's sort of the minimum, minimum inclusive mission. It's the transit from Earth to Mars is dictated by orbital mechanics. And the Earth and Mars have to be in the right position for the trajectory to get from one to the other. You'd hate to show up at Mars's orbit and Mars not be there. So there's only a certain number of times, you know, in the Earth year and the Mars year when they're in the right positions with each other. And you can either-

• 11:36Speaker 05

  That would be so awkward if you showed up to Mars and Mars was not there.

• 11:39Speaker 06

  It would be disappointing.

• 11:40Speaker 05

  It would be like the worst barbecue ever.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  It'd be difficult to explain to Congress and your mom. But, you know, then you can either swing by Mars or just stay for maybe 30 days at the most and then come back to Earth. But the launch window for that return is rapidly closing by the time you get there. And if you do execute that, that quick return, you have to swing back through the inner solar system as close to the sun as Venus, which brings in problems with radiation exposure and heating and stuff like that. And still takes a long time to get back to Earth. So there's, there's really, if you think about it, there's really not a convenient way to take a short trip to Mars. The shortest trip to Mars is going to be on the order of 500 days. And that's just a flyby, a swing past, and then come straight back to Earth. And if it's going to justify, like I say, the expense of getting there, you may as

• 12:26Speaker 04

  well spend enough time there to do something meaningful. And, and that's really what's, you know, once you stay past the first 30 days or so, you're committed to the 18 months.

• 12:35Speaker 06

  Right. And that window, I mean, so that, that there's a sweet spot when you can do it that quickly and get there in that six months. If you miss that window, you're waiting for a while, aren't you?

• 12:43Speaker 04

  Right, exactly right.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  Yep. So there's a certain times when you can go and you can't miss the, can't miss the train.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  It's so stressful. I mean, when, when you say that, like, do you know how much money has already been spent? Like, when you say it's like a multinational effort and all these, all this expense so far, like, do you have an idea of that money?

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Well, you know, the expense is mostly up until now in research and development.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Research, yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  So the space station is $100 billion worth of investment, as I'm understanding.

• 13:15Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Also, the work in the Orion capsule, which will take the astronauts from the launch pad, presumably at Kennedy Space Center, up to the Mars transit vehicle and then bring them back again at the end of the mission. The space launch system, the next-generation big rocket that's going to look like the Saturn V based on shuttle technology. You know, all those things have several billion dollars a year in budgets and they've been spending for several years. But, you know, the Mars program itself is still in the study phase and so nobody has actually told us to go to Mars yet. We're... It would essentially be illegal for NASA to send somebody to Mars because Congress has not authorized that particular expenditure. So what we're doing, Congress has authorized us to research the problem and that's what we're doing now.

• 13:55Speaker 05

  What are your main, like, research things? You mentioned the radiation problem. What else are you looking at?

• 14:02Speaker 04

  Well, other things are the psychological aspects. Imagine it's just you and four or five of your closest personal friends locked up in a vehicle the size of, let's say, a Winnebago or two for two and a half years, face to face, with only each other to look at. And the longer the mission goes, up until the halfway point, you're going to be getting further and further from Earth.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  I think it would be good if you could choose who you went with. No? If it was like me, Michael Fassbender? I mean, who would you go with, Mike?

• 14:28Speaker 06

  Uh, I'd go with you. You want to go? John will go.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  I'll go.

• 14:33Speaker 06

  They don't usually do that, though.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  You don't get to pick?

• 14:35Speaker 06

  No. That's why we have bosses, and they pick. And then you say, "Why'd you put... What the heck?" So that's probably going to be the tradition will continue.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 06

  How did they put these guys together? Um, but, you know, John, we're going to move on to our cosmic query section, and we've got some related questions from our audience that Maeve will hit us up with now.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  So, um, here's a question. What kinds of people should be sent to Mars? And psychologists, journalists, medical doctors? And what do you think, John?

• 15:11Speaker 04

  Well, my answer to that is NASA does a pretty good job of picking astronauts. And I'm not just brown-nosing with Mike here, but it seems like that NASA can find people that are jet pilot, concert pianist, neurosurgeon, gourmet chefs. And you're gonna need that kind of skill mix with a small group of people going to Mars. Let's say four, or five, or six people. You're gonna wanna have people that can do everything. Even a botanist might be a good idea. But there's probably gonna be at least one doctor in the crew, probably several people trained at the emergency medical tech level. But you need to have people that are gonna be good at fixing things, because inevitably things will break. And there are people that are just good at fixing things, and that's probably gonna be the most important person on the crew.

• 15:54Speaker 06

  All right, it's time for the lightning round.

• 15:56Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 15:56Speaker 06

  Rapid fire. So, John, are you ready?

• 16:00Speaker 04

  I'm ready.

• 16:00Speaker 06

  Okay. So, Mave's gonna answer this question. I'm gonna hit this bell. I think I'm just gonna hit it whenever I want, but apparently there's some method to it. When I'm gonna hit this thing, it's really great. You know, I rode my bike here today, and this bell drives people crazy. I have a bell on my bike. In New York City, it's necessary, because people are always in the way. Get out of the way, and you just do this.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  Hey, do you wear your space helmet when you're on your bike?

• 16:20Speaker 06

  No, I wear a bike helmet, and I need more than that. It's one of the most dangerous things. I'm glad I got here.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  Same.

• 16:25Speaker 06

  New York City's dangerous. All right, on bicycle. All right, so here we go. We're gonna do this, and I'm gonna ring this bell, I guess, for the next question, or whenever appropriate. Hit us, lightning round.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Okay. This question is from Jonathan Laird, and he is asking Mike, and then after, I'm gonna put the question to you, Don, if given the opportunity, would you personally like to be among the first humans to colonize, move to, or visit Mars? Two parts.

• 16:52Speaker 06

  Yes, I wanna go visit, and I wanna come home. John?

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Mike, I don't wanna go to Mars. I would like to go to the moon, and I would like to go to the space station, but Mars is too far away and too dirty.

• 17:01Speaker 06

  There you have it.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  You don't want to go. I want to go to Mars.

• 17:05Speaker 06

  He wants to send other people there. What kind of example is that?

• 17:07Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 17:08Speaker 06

  Scratch that answer.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  I can't believe it.

• 17:10Speaker 06

  You want to send everybody else.

• 17:11Speaker 05

  Ooh, it's too far away.

• 17:12Speaker 06

  The guy that knows most about it wants to send somebody else. There's something wrong with that. All right. Right.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  It's too far away. Okay, the next one is from Brandon, and he contacted us on Snapchat. This question, John, this is for you. Could we use artificial gravity by either spinning a habitation unit around a central support or by counterweighting it with another mass?

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes, the answer is yes, and we're studying that. The Human Research Program is investigating whether that's a good way to provide countermeasures for people in space and whether it's cost-effective. So, yes, yes, yes.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  Great.

• 17:42Speaker 06

  There was the bell. Go.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  Troy Chu on Snapchat. What should mankind's first words on Mars be? A reference to Armstrong or not? What do you think, Mike?

• 17:49Speaker 06

  What do I think? Uh, Neil Armstrong thought of that stuff after he landed on the moon because he didn't want to get distracted.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  What?

• 17:56Speaker 06

  Do you know that story, John?

• 17:58Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 17:58Speaker 06

  I asked him that question. He did not get a publicist, his wife, no one thought of that. He took care of it after he landed. So, I think what you should do is get there first and then be inspired.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk All Stars. On this time capsule episode, we're revisiting some of your favorite moments from the very first season of that new series. Planetary scientist David Grinspoon has been a friend of StarTalk for a long time, and we like to call him Dr. Funky Spoon, in part because that's his Twitter handle. But, holding that aside, on this episode, Visualizing Our Universe, David takes over the hosting seat to chat with co-host Chuck Nice and studio guest Carter Emmard. He's Director of Astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History, one of the coolest titles you could ever have on a business card.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  So here's the cool thing about having Carter here is when I saw that we were gonna do a cosmic queries for astrovisualization and you know cosmic queries is where we take questions from all over the internet and whatever incarnation where we exist as StarTalk and our fans ask us things that they want to know and I saw that that's what we were going to be talking about and the first question I had was what the hell is astrovisualization? Because I had never heard of it before and of course I had to go do some research but eh Carter, this is fascinating stuff.

• 19:49Speaker 07

  Explain yourself, sir.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:52Speaker 07

  Well essentially it's a way using the modern technology and display and data visualization hooked into immersive theater which the planetarium has always been as a recreation of night sky but now with video control controlled by computers essentially you're staring up into your entire visible field a construction of the universe is best that we know of in other words to visualize essentially that information to move through it and do that accurately and also through simulations of astrophysics that talk about the behavior or that simulate try to simulate the behavior of the universe across time.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Nice, so now and from what I've seen that you have done I mean it kind of would it be kind of weird or crazy to call it kind of like a Google Maps of the universe?

• 20:41Speaker 07

  Well that's exactly what it is.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Okay, good, no ca- so I'm not, I am not crazy.

• 20:46Speaker 07

  You may be crazy but you got that one just right.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Well you know what that's, you know what that's probably more the case David is that I am still crazy but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

• 20:57Speaker 07

  One of the great things about being Carter's friend in addition to his colleague is that sometimes he'll he'll take some of us after hours into and he basically calls it his spaceship and he's even called it his holodeck.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 21:11Speaker 07

  And it's it is that is what you have, you have a holodeck. It's like I kinda like to make a joke if you can if you have a holodeck then you don't need the starship.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  That's so true, yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 07

  But in a in a way that's really true and that's that's what that's what the job is about so you.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  So now what constitutes a holodeck?

• 21:30Speaker 07

  Well it's.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Just for the uninitiated.

• 21:32Speaker 07

  It's to give you. It's a Star Trek reference for the really uninitiated.

• 21:37Speaker 08

  Which is the room that can go in and basically simulate any sensory experience.

• 21:42Speaker 07

  Sure, sure. And so I'd say, okay.

• 21:45Speaker 08

  And Carter's almost there.

• 21:46Speaker 07

  We're almost there. Visually, it's an immersion in the data, in the map, essentially. So if you look at the traditional planetarium, it's stars on the ceiling, you can point out the Big Dipper and Orion, and the motion of the, sort of the diurnal motion in the sky. The stars rise and set, carries the sun along with it, the moon, and, you know, the phases of the moon and the planets and all that. And that's our view from the Earth. It's amazing that the ancients were able to sort of figure out at all that we go around the sun, because the sun obviously goes around us every day, you know. And that the planets go around, and that we live in this broader geography called the galaxy, and then the galaxy is just one of many. Okay, so we sort of have all that information.

• 22:30Speaker 07

  So plotting it accurately and moving out into the data and moving through it is that you see it three dimensionally, so you feel as though you're in the presence of, you are. You're in the presence of that data, and that's what we do. So the dome is the immersive theater that surrounds us. And then we can move out, we can move away from the Earth. We can fly over the surface of planets that we have information for. Mars, we have tremendous information for. Moon, Mercury, certainly our own planet. And Mars is something that's very interesting, because we have this tremendous campaign in support of eventually humans going there and so forth. But we have a six terabyte data set that you can fly over.

• 23:15Speaker 07

  It's a big laptop right there. Of Mars. It's essentially, it's about three quarters of Mars, down to the size of a two-car garage, six meters. Wow. And we can fly for hours over just one section of the canyon. And you get lost, and you can also go to boring parts of Mars, you know, where it's flat. But the thing is, is that... The boring part of Mars. Well, there are... As if.

• 23:38Speaker 08

  You'd be surprised, a lot of it's just flat and natureless.

• 23:41Speaker 07

  Coming back to the holodeck is just this notion that, you know, we have a tremendous... Tremendous mountain of data that's on the ground. It's in what NASA's Planetary Data Service, the PDS. And it's a matter of taking that information, contextualizing it. I've had an army of high school students who have taken basically the stereo images from the micro imager, it's on the arm of the solar powered rovers. It's Spirit and Opportunity. And Opportunity, Opportunity's still going. We're not messing with the Curiosity rover data yet because it tends to be under scientific embargo. But you're able to take the dual images and use data or use software from NASA to synthesize

• 24:25Speaker 07

  that into accurate 3D models. And so, and then we have to contextualize where they are. But in that sense, we're essentially looking so close, only like three centimeters, so just over an inch, these tiny little targets on Mars. You can see all this incredible detail on a rock, on a planet that no one's been to.

• 24:44Speaker 08

  Right.

• 24:45Speaker 07

  This is, this is what NASA does as it reaches out there and other, and the European Space Agency, the space agencies of the world, we're going to these other places and we're bringing this back. It's our job and obligation to put that into a context that everyone can see.

• 25:01Speaker 08

  Now, let me tell you, I just said- That, that, what you just described really is like being there in a much more fundamental way than a planetarium show used to be. Correct. That leads me to want to ask you a question that's slightly more philosophical, which is, I mean, you and I both are children of Apollo. We grew up dreaming about space and going into space in 2001, A Space Odyssey, and that was going to be the future in our life. And neither one of us has gotten to go into space yet. We're getting a little bit older. Who knows what's going to happen? Well, join me after the show, fellas, and I'll do something for you. Excellent. Look forward to that. But, but I guess what I want to know is, on the other hand, you've gotten more and more into this visualization and this, this ability to go there in this way that is not quite

• 25:45Speaker 08

  being there bodily, but it's more being there than just looking at pictures. And I've heard you say things like, well, we don't need a spacecraft because we've got a holodeck, and you're kind of joking. But I also get the sense that there's a way in which maybe you feel that this is a valid way for human beings to experience space and that we can send our unmanned spacecraft there, our, I'm sorry, our unhumored, our robotic spacecraft, our unpiloted spacecraft. They're not just unmanned, they're unwommed too, so let's say unpiloted. But we can send our spacecraft there and they gather the data, really good data, and then we visualize it and it's as if we're going there, but we don't need to send our frail human bodies there. So do you feel like that is, in a way, the space exploration of the future?

• 26:28Speaker 07

  To some degree, yes, especially when you get beyond the solar system.

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmochemist Natalie Starkey first joined StarTalk as a science guest on a StarTalk live show at the Beacon Theater here in New York City. And our audience loved her so much, we just had to bring her back. And we did. This time as a StarTalk All-Star. She's joined in studio with co-host Chuck Nice and planetary scientist Lindy Elkins Tanton in this episode, Searching for Space Water.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Okay, this is Chris Jacobs coming to us from Twitter. And Chris wants to know this. Do you think we'll be mining from asteroids or meteors in the very near future? It's a good question because we have now landed with Filet.

• 27:18Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  So how far are we from actually going in and mining?

• 27:22Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's really debatable because, I mean, it's something that we've, it's kind of come to the forefront in the last few years. And there's a couple of kind of private companies that are now looking at actually doing space mining. Now, originally, I think they were saying it was going to happen really soon. And I think as scientists, we all stood there going, wow, okay, they're going to do this really quickly and that's going to be very, very impressive if they can do it. And I think their plans have been slightly scaled back when they realized that actually it is going to be a little bit tricky than they thought, they've got to get the funding together. But the potential is that if they were to be able to mine these things, the return economically is enormous. So a small investment to start with, you know, we're still talking billions of dollars.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:06Speaker 09

  Could potentially release many, many more billions of, you know, from these asteroids.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  And that's because, you know, of course, you being a geologist. Inside of these asteroids are the same elements that we find here on Earth.

• 28:21Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Which means the rare elements, the ones that are really expensive.

• 28:26Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  We might be able to find crap loads of those.

• 28:29Speaker 09

  There's so much up there and, you know, quite a lot of the precious metals are so, so important on Earth for making a lot of our electronics.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:36Speaker 09

  And there's a finite amount on Earth, you know, we're going to use it up. It's in seams and stuff and it's concentrated in different areas. That's why we mine in different areas on the surface. But with an asteroid, there's tons of this material. So the potential is that, I mean, there's every potential that we can mine these things. But it's just going to be a case of time and economics. And then we've got to decide how much we need, say platinum, how much we need the platinum. And if we've run out on Earth, what price it's got to on Earth? And whether it's going to be economical to go into space and make this happen. So I think it is going to happen in the future. And I think it's going to be a case of, hopefully, what I hope is private companies working with space agencies. So that we get some scientific return from this, but we also get whatever we need economically.

• 29:21Speaker 09

  So, yeah, do you have anything to add, Lindy?

• 29:24Speaker 10

  Yeah, I can't resist. So they are thinking, they've got even models for how they could go to a rocky asteroid. Take some of that miracle water that's trapped in the minerals and heat it up to release the water. And so it's feasible, it's not economically viable yet, like you say. But the thing I like to think about, we're trying to go to an iron, a metal asteroid right now with a mission to look at it. And if we could bring that back to Earth, you're right, it would be, it would be the equivalent of all the metals we've ever needed. But then you don't really make billions and billions of dollars because what you do is you collapse the global market.

• 30:01Speaker 09

  Yeah. Because then you have too much.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Right, right. Because from an economic.

• 30:05Speaker 10

  Interesting question.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  From an economic standpoint, if we had a crap load of gold here on Earth, gold would no longer be valuable.

• 30:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we'd have to kind of retain it. So there'd have to be, you know, organizations that retained it and released it as we need it. Otherwise.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would have.

• 30:21Speaker 09

  No cost to it.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  The fact is, you would have to, you would own the asteroid. And then you would release the gold as necessary. So you would basically corner the market.

• 30:31Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  On whatever it is, platinum, gold, or whatever it is. And then you would determine how much you're going to release to set the price for it.

• 30:38Speaker 09

  And then there's other problems with who owns this stuff. Because it's space, you know. We understand Earth, we fight over who owns bits of the Earth, and that's bad enough. But we're going to space, well, who owns the stuff? So if a private company goes up, a US company, is it a US asteroid then? Is it a whole, is it all US resources? Or is it the global, you know?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  All I know is if I land on that asteroid.

• 31:00Speaker 09

  It's yours.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  That's my asteroid. And if you think it's not, you can kiss my asteroid, okay?

• 31:08Speaker 09

  Very good.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  All right, let's move on, let's move on. Um, Lucas M. Rodriguez, and he wants to know, which of the two icy moons is more likely to support life? In your opinion, Europa or Enceladus?

• 31:25Speaker 09

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so which one of those two moons, from those two planets, is more likely to have life?

• 31:34Speaker 09

  That is so, I could not decide, actually, between those. They're both quite, I'm gonna say highly likely to, they've got the right conditions almost, so I, I don't know. Do you have, do you have an idea? I, I don't know, I think both could.

• 31:50Speaker 10

  I can't immediately think of a reason why one would be more likely than the other. But the, the thing that troubles me about it is that the very most likely place for there to be life on them is at the bottom of the water ocean next to the rock.

• 32:02Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 32:03Speaker 10

  And how we will ever detect that, I don't know.

• 32:05Speaker 09

  Well, I mean, can we just, so we've got to get through the ice, they've both got an ice layer, I guess, on the outside.

• 32:11Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 09

  So we've got to get through the ice with some kind of spacecraft, and drop it in, and then get that to get to the bottom of that ocean. It's not very easy, because if it's deep, you know, we'd find it hard to get to the bottom of our ocean.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  We can't even get to the bottom of our own ocean.

• 32:24Speaker 09

  So the pressure's crazy, the conditions are gonna be not very conducive to, you know, getting, you know, to get, transmitting a signal back, and to understand what's there. So, so yes, I guess it's gonna be hard for us to tell.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there you have it. Lucas, you have just given our two scientists a Sophie's Choice. They cannot decide. Okay. Both my babies must die. I can't decide. All right. That is fantastic. What is our next question? We'll come.

• 32:58Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Wait, let me see, because I know we're running out of time.

• 33:01Speaker 09

  We are, we are.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  I saw a cool question from someone from the United Emirates. Oh, my God. What they wanted to know was, can we make a substitute for water so that when we are traveling to someplace else, instead of having a waystation, can we make a substitute for water for both here on Earth and for space travel? And I'll look for their name while you guys answer that.

• 33:19Speaker 09

  Okay, but I guess it... Yes, okay, I get the question. But it's understanding like why we need water and what water does on Earth. And water acts as a solvent and it's basically allows us to... for reactions to happen. So, but and there are other solvents as liquids that can exist in the solar system that could do the same job. But we wouldn't be able to drink them or survive on them. But that doesn't mean that other life forms couldn't, but we just haven't seen those life forms yet. We have like just a little bit of time, Lyndee. Do you want to add anything to this?

• 33:54Speaker 10

  No, I think you nailed it. There's nothing else that will do it for people but water.

• 33:58Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  So, water is it? I mean, we could make a substitute, but you know, why would you? Right?

• 34:04Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  That's really the deal.

• 34:05Speaker 09

  Exactly, but it doesn't mean that other organisms can... The other organisms elsewhere, alien organisms, might not need water. That's the thing. But they need something that's liquid that probably that is not going to boil away and not going to freeze too easily that they can survive in and form in.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Got you. And by the way, it came from, okay, here's the name. Shirag Jangla.

• 34:26Speaker 09

  Oh, brilliant.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  From Dubai and the United Arab Emirates.

• 34:29Speaker 09

  Wow. And they've got, you know, quite a lot of desert there, not much water going on there.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Can you, can you, can you just imagine why someone from Dubai might ask a question of, can we make a substitute for water?

• 34:42Speaker 09

  I know.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Because I'm so tired of eating sand.

• 34:46Speaker 09

  They've made a city out of sand.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk All-Stars. You're listening to a special edition, our first ever time capsule episode of this brand-new spinoff of StarTalk. We sent out a survey to our fans, asking you to select your favorite hosts and episodes, and you did. Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco is leader of the imaging science team of the Cassini mission, currently in orbit around Saturn. I call her Madame Saturn, Saturn being my second favorite planet. First, of course, is Earth. But she's got the job maybe I always wanted, because then I'd be in love with Saturn my whole life, and I'd get to look at pictures of it all the time. On this episode of StarTalk All-Stars, Listening for Aliens, Carolyn takes the driver's seat

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  with a little help from co-host Chuck Nice and science guest Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist of the SETI-at-Home program.

• 35:56Speaker 11

  I initiated, just a few years ago, my own message to the Milky Way. We were going to construct a message. And, you know, is the idea really that someone's going to pick this up? Well, who knows? But it's really more to get the humanity on Earth to be more cosmically aware, to realize they are one planet in a big galaxy that might be teeming with life, and so on. But I know that the Breakthrough Listen Project doesn't think that this is a good idea, and they don't like groups like -- I'm not taking this personally, but they don't like groups

• 36:36Speaker 11

  like mine to take it upon ourselves, to put a message together, and use the Aracebo Telescope. So why don't you weigh in on this and say why this is such a hot topic?

• 36:49Speaker 12

  Right, so as you pointed out, it's very controversial. There are informal polls indicate that about 99% of astronomers think that it's a bad idea to transmit. Now, we're not talking about if we receive a message, should we transmit, but just should we take the first action of transmitting messages. Now, of course, Earthlings, as you know, transmit all the time, there's radio and television, but you're talking about deliberate, pointed, powerful transmissions. And most people think that's a bad idea, that we're an emerging, kind of primitive civilization, we should listen at first and see what's out there before we deliberately transmit messages.

• 37:31Speaker 12

  Maybe in a thousand years or so, after we learn a little bit more about the universe, then we could think about transmitting. But most people think it's a dangerous, or potentially dangerous, thing to do.

• 37:40Speaker 11

  Why, why? Why is it dangerous? Why is it dangerous?

• 37:45Speaker 12

  So, some people say that, oh, all the advanced civilizations are gonna be peaceful, and, you know, they've learned to live together in peace, and they're not gonna harm us, or mine our, you know, rape our daughters, or mine all our planet, or blow us up. But we really don't know. I mean, that's sort of, maybe that's naive thinking. We just don't know what's out there. So, there is some danger, because we just really don't know what other civilizations are like. So, most people think that if you wanna transmit, you shouldn't just do it, take it upon yourself to transmit a message, but there should be a, what we call the Asilamar process, where there, if you're doing some dangerous thing in science, like researching, you know, viruses, or doing kind of genetic engineering that's potentially dangerous, then there's a process

• 38:30Speaker 12

  that scientists go through where they talk about the potential risks, figure out how to kind of contain some of those risks, what the potential benefits are. So, we think that this is a potentially dangerous thing, that should be an international body of all kinds of people from different disciplines, should get together, take a few years to figure this thing out, what are the potential risks, what are the dangers, what are the potential benefits. So far, the messages that have been sent by Earthlings have been... Not scientific messages, they've been mostly publicity stunts or fundraising stunts. Nobody's actually done a scientific experiment where they send a message out and then maybe the thing is 10 light years away, so they wait for 20 years because it takes 10 years

• 39:15Speaker 12

  to get there and then 10 years to get back and then they listen. Nobody's done any kind of science. It's so far been just sort of publicity. Most people think that it's a bad idea because of the potential dangers. Stephen Hawking is one of the people that's...

• 39:29Speaker 01

  And that's because, you know, I'm a Star Trek fan and so probably one of the most famous Star Trek episodes is The Borg. And The Borg had no idea that Earthlings or Terrans existed. But then they got, they got a message basically that said, "Hey, these guys are..." And then they were like, "We will not stop until you are all destroyed."

• 39:55Speaker 11

  Okay, but I'm on the other side of this, you see. I'm thinking, I mean, I don't know, can I say this on radio? You all sound like you're members of the National Rifle Association. You know? I mean, there's no reason to be that paranoid. First of all, there's an argument, it's not new with me. It's, and I'm sorry, I meant to come prepared with the guy who wrote this. There's actually a paper on this. But there's an argument to be made that if a civilization were that aggressive, they probably would have destroyed themselves long before they ever got here. And also, the time scales, the time scales are so long.

• 40:36Speaker 11

  And right now, like you said, we're pretty, I mean, sure, Aracibo could get reasonably far, and I was planning to use Aracibo, but I just think it's, it's, it's over the top paranoid.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  I think, I think that you're right. And here's why. For this reason and this reason alone. To find out that you are not alone. I think you would be so happy to go and say hi to somebody. You know, just because when you look at the vastness of the universe. And then you see, oh, my God, there's some people over there. Like, that would be so exciting. That I don't believe, like, let me go and conquer them would be the thing that would pop into your mind. Especially if you're advanced enough to actually make your way there and get to them.

• 41:25Speaker 11

  Dan.

• 41:25Speaker 12

  I think that that's, I think you're probably both right that that's. It's unlikely that advanced civilizations are gonna be dangerous to us. But the problem is, we really, it's a very difficult thing to say, yeah, absolutely. We know that for sure. There are no dangerous civilizations out there that conquer the galaxy. So we just don't know. So I think you need some kind of a Silomar process. The Academy of Sciences from all over the world should get together and assess the dangers. And it shouldn't be up to a single individual to put Earth at risk. But after you get, go through that process and try to assess the risks and the possible benefits. Then, then I, you know, if they say it's okay, there are no risks, then I'm all for it. Or if the risks are minor.

• 42:10Speaker 12

  But right now, we just don't know.

• 42:12Speaker 11

  I wish that this kind of care that you are hoping to see with regard to this issue had been applied to things like the use of fossil fuels and all the, you know, the technologies that have really come back to harm our environment.

• 42:28Speaker 12

  Yeah, but just because other people have made mistakes with technology doesn't mean that we should do that, too. I think.

• 42:32Speaker 11

  But, but Dan, the chances, the chance, it's such a low, low probability. It's like, maybe high risk, low probability. It's one of those, falls in that category.

• 42:43Speaker 12

  I just don't think you should put Earth at risk, even if with a low probability. I think, you know, maybe there's a 1% chance that you could wipe out all of civilization. Are you willing to take that risk?

• 42:53Speaker 11

  No, wait, it's way, way lower than 1%.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Listen, life might be better under the alien overlords.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of your favorite episodes featured not one, but two all-star hosts. Astrophysicists Summer Ash and Emily Rice reclaiming the hashtag Women Crush Wednesday on their episode, Women Crushin' It Wednesday, to celebrate women in science. Co-host Chuck Nice joined them in studio to help them answer your cosmic queries. Let's take a listen.

• 43:26Speaker 13

  The thing is with science, it tends to be like the higher you get, the more imbalanced it becomes, yeah, the less the normalization happens. And so for whatever reason, there's, some people call it a leaky pipeline. And the idea is that you have this pipeline from, you know, student through to professor, and that the women drop out for some reason and the men don't drop out.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  I got you.

• 43:47Speaker 13

  And so now that I'm an assistant professor, like I'm one of, I'm the only female physicist in my department. And there's a couple other female engineers and a female geologist. And that's out of, you know, two dozen faculty members.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 44:01Speaker 13

  And so that's a little bit disappointing. You know, and you, but you try to find your tribe a little bit. Like you try to find people that also care about changing the representation and I love, I steal it from Shonda Rhimes, actually, normalizing it. It's not diversifying because we don't just want, you know, we, we don't want like a rainbow box of crayons just for the sake of having a rainbow. Like we want to normalize it. We want to have science be representative of the population as a whole. Because that's actually a scientific thing. If you have a random sample of, you know, people that want to go into science, if you randomly draw from people, then science, you know, people that are scientists should represent the overall population.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:43Speaker 13

  If you don't, if you have only, for example, white males becoming scientists, you have some kind of selection bias. There are scientific words for that. And yet, people say, oh, but women aren't interested and, you know, other people don't have the education or something like that. And it's like, no, there's, it's a selection bias. And, you know, there's a large enough population where we should be able to randomize these things out.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  And so that it would be reflected in the actual field.

• 45:10Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  The field would reflect the population.

• 45:12Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  That makes sense. Summer, you have anything to add?

• 45:15Speaker 14

  Yeah, I just want to add, like, for motivation, you know, what motivates me is that now, because of the internet, there's all these social channels and social communities. And so even if your institution is very imbalanced with women or minorities, you can find those other people that are like you out there in those other departments. And so then, it's kind of like Emily said, you know, you find your group. And I'm motivated every day by the work that they're also trying to do to change how everything is in science and in the world in general.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:47Speaker 14

  And so that, and that's a way that you can cheer each other on. And that's a way that you can also just discover that there are so many other amazing people out there. Like, I've discovered so many amazing women crushing it in science on social media, and that keeps me going.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  It sounds, it sounds to me like what you're both, the common thread through what you both have just said is that community is a big, uh, big, big help in overcoming these challenges. Yeah. All right, we're doing, uh, Women Crushing It Wednesday. Questions from our Cosmic Queries audience, and this is Jay Birchfield, and Jay wants to know this. What seems to be the biggest barriers for women entering STEM fields? Do these barriers seem to be getting any smaller? So, uh, what are the biggest barriers? And are there hope when it comes to the barriers that are being removed?

• 46:42Speaker 13

  I, some people say that the, the, there's barriers in terms of inspiring girls to be interested in science. Like, some people think that, that girls and women just naturally aren't interested in science, which I think is totally wrong. Um, I think, like, everybody is born naturally curious. But somehow, women and, and girls tend to get discouraged away from it more than men are, for some reason, it feels like. And maybe it's, it's a little bit of these kind of unconscious biases. It's also a little bit of, I think, self-doubt that women tend to have more than men have, where they think, oh, I have to be smart to be a scientist, and so I'm not that smart, I'm not gonna bother. It's also been shown that women tend to have a little bit higher expectations for themselves.

• 47:25Speaker 13

  Like, they think, you know, is it maybe in classes, like, oh, I have to get an A, or else I'm not any good at this? Um, you know, or I have to, you know... Like, they underestimate their skills and they kind of overestimate their expectations. Whereas a dude might-

• 47:40Speaker 01

  No, men overestimate everything.

• 47:41Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Seriously.

• 47:43Speaker 13

  And not be bothered by their performance.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  No, they really aren't.

• 47:46Speaker 13

  A C student and be like, "Well, I can be a physicist and a-

• 47:50Speaker 01

  I can be president.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  It's happened, people.

• 47:54Speaker 13

  I wish you were a C student. It's happening. A woman might get a B and be like, "Oh, I'm not any good at this," or something like that, and switch to something that she might think is easier.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 48:03Speaker 13

  And then it kind of, you know, gets harder from there at various different levels. But I think most of the barriers are not actually scientific, but they're cultural.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  So they're cultural, social barriers, psychological barriers. And do you see them, the second part of the question was, do you see them getting better? Is there any empirical evidence that we are getting better at inspiring women going into STEM?

• 48:26Speaker 13

  Yeah, the empirical evidence is there, right? It's the participation.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Okay, there you go.

• 48:29Speaker 13

  Right, and the achievements. And, you know, the participation is increasing, not uniformly across the fields and not as fast as we would like it to, but it's there.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Cool.