Madame Saturn: A Conversation with Carolyn Porco (Part 2)

We’ve saved the best for last as Carolyn tells Neil about photographing Earth in the Pale Blue Dot and The Day the Earth Smiled and her involvement in Star Trek and Contact.

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.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Am I getting better Chuck?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. That was extremely James L. Jones.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm working it. You're listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I am your personal astrophysicist. I do that at the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City, where I also serve as Director of the Hayden Planetarium. And in studio with me is Chuck Nice.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one, the only.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  This is true.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As far as you know.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  And you know what? And nobody else wants another one. Let's be honest.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got that one taken, you got that one covered.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I say I'm the one and only. The response is, "Thank God."

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is part two of my interview with planetary scientist, friend and colleague Carolyn Porco. I call her Madame Saturn. She's head of the imaging team for NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn and many of its intriguing moons. In the previous segments, we learned about her education, her work on Cassini, and her life. And now, we're gonna find out about her role in creating the famous photo of the pale blue dot. Let's check it out.

• 1:32Carolyn Porco?

  Immediately after graduating from Caltech, I was made a member of the Voyager imaging team, invited by the team leader Brad Smith. So I went to the University of Arizona to work with him. And only a month or two or three after becoming a team member, I proposed to the Voyager project to look back at the planets, the planets that we could see in the direction of the sun at that time, because I was thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool to show what the solar system looked like from an alien arriving from the outer solar system? What would that being see?" Right?

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you would need Voyager to be far enough away to get that distant vista.

• 2:12Carolyn Porco?

  By the time I joined the team, we were already on our way to Uranus. There really is an interesting backstory to this. In order to look in the direction of the sun, you have to shield the sun because the sun...

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would just blow out the picture.

• 2:25Carolyn Porco?

  Blow out the instruments. The instruments were designed for very faint light levels, right? You can't look at the sun. So that action would have entailed taking the Voyager antenna off Earth line. During the whole Voyager mission, the antenna was constantly pointing to Earth line. So it was a radical suggestion. Take the antenna off Earth line, use it to shield the sun, so you maneuver to put the sun behind the edge of the antenna, and there you're going to see the Earth, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and all the other planets. Okay, well, the Voyager project didn't want anything to do with this. They said, "There's no science in it, so there's no justifications for doing something as radical as this. Try to find something else that would be scientifically fruitful." And I went away and devised this

• 3:09Carolyn Porco?

  other experiment of imaging the asteroid bands that had just been discovered by the infrared astronomical satellite that year. Several years later, I find out that Carl Sagan had proposed the same series of images to the Voyager project two years before I did. Carl Sagan was given the same response. "We're not going to do this."

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if they said no to him, you had no chance.

• 3:32Carolyn Porco?

  Of course. I was just a measly little postdoc. They weren't going to pay any attention to me. So Carl and I ended up joining forces in about 1989, and he went all the way to the NASA administrator to get...

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The head of NASA, in Washington DC.

• 3:46Carolyn Porco?

  Right. And the administrator overruled the people on the Voyager project at JPL and demanded that this picture be taken. And I worked on it with Carl, with other people in executing it. So was born the famous pale blue document.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In 1990, this picture gets taken.

• 4:03Carolyn Porco?

  Valentine's Day, 1990.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by then, you're beyond Neptune.

• 4:06Carolyn Porco?

  By then, the Voyager mission is over.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Voyager tour of the planets is over, yeah.

• 4:11Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, the Voyager tour of the planets.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So wait a minute. So this image of Earth... Got dubbed "The Pale Blue Dot." Carl Sagan writes an entire book with that title.

• 4:20Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, I'm thinking it's like the first cosmic meme, "The Pale Blue Dot."

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, hmm hmm.

• 4:25Carolyn Porco?

  It has become synonymous with planetary brotherhood and protection of the environment.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, as did the original 1968 photo from Apollo 8.

• 4:34Carolyn Porco?

  No one gave that a name that stuck in people's minds.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:38Carolyn Porco?

  And no one romanced-

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a very recognizable photo, but didn't have a catchy name.

• 4:41Carolyn Porco?

  And no one romanced it the way Carl romanced "The Pale Blue Dot." I mean, that was Carl's skill, right?

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so a first pass at "The Pale Blue Dot." But then you said, "I want to do it again." That's audacious, because that was an important icon.

• 4:53Carolyn Porco?

  Well, I wanted to do it again to make it better, because as a picture, to be honest, it sucked. Can I say that on?

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:01Carolyn Porco?

  First of all, Carl, in his proposal, had said that we should take a picture of the Earth awash in a sea of stars. Well, there's not a star to be seen in that picture. And then the dot that is Earth fell on a beam of scattered light. So, it wasn't exactly a good picture, but it didn't really matter, did it? Because what Carl had to say about it-

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What he said mattered more than what the thing looked like.

• 5:23Carolyn Porco?

  And it resonated. People really responded to the whole concept of "The Pale Blue Dot." But I get made the team leader for the Cassini mission at Saturn, and I'm thinking, "I'm going to concentrate on making beautiful images." I also told my team, "Any time variable phenomenon that we can, let's make it a time series, we could turn it into a movie."

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time variable, you mean anything that changes over time. Don't just take photographs of it. Take so many photographs, you can turn it into a movie.

• 5:49Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, yeah. And I wanted to do "The Pale Blue Dot" over again. I wanted to make it right. And so, I finally got a chance to do it right, just recently. I looked into the trajectory that we had planned for Cassini. I think I started about three or four years ago. I found those opportunities when Saturn was eclipsing the Sun. We, of course, did that by design, because it's a very good geometry to be in, to see fine particles that diffract light.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is if you're on the backside of Saturn with the Sun eclipsed, the Sun is still illuminating fine particles that are orbiting the planet, and they get rendered visible to you from that vista.

• 6:26Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, in the same way that if you're with a dirty windshield, you're driving along in your car and in the late afternoon, you drive towards the west. Suddenly, you can't see out your windshield and you think, "Gotta get my car washed," right?

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's the only time of day you'd feel that way.

• 6:39Carolyn Porco?

  Or you could see it early in the morning, driving eastward. You're driving in the direction of the sun. It's a geometry that brings about the process called diffraction. And we see things lit up by diffraction when there's tiny dust particles. That's why the E-ring looks the way it does, by the way, in that picture. But anyway, I'm just saying I found an opportunity in the timeline when we were in the right geometry. And I knew there wasn't a whole lot of scientific observations in there, so I didn't have to arm wrestle my colleagues to get time just to do a beautiful picture.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Earth has to be visible and not blocked by one of your rings.

• 7:12Carolyn Porco?

  That's right. So there were a lot of criteria. And July 19, 2013 is the time that met all those criteria. So that scene has 141 images in it that had to be stitched together, combined. We had to have continuous color from one to the other, continuous brightness from one to the other.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, you didn't have a single field of view that was the picture you published. That's a mosaic set of images. Each one required the full hammer of image processing, so it blends together with all the rest.

• 7:43Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, and then, consider this. During the four hours that that mosaic's made, the geometry is changing. So each image had to be re-projected. It was a lot of work.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more of my interview with Carolyn Porco, Madame Saturn.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Consider again that dot.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering. Thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager. Every hero and coward. Every creator and destroyer of civilization. Every king and peasant. Every young couple in love. Every mother and father. Hopeful child. Inventor and explorer. Every teacher of morals. Every corrupt politician.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Every superstar. Every supreme leader. Every saint and sinner in the history of our species. Live there. On the mote of dust. Suspended in a sunbeam.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck Nice.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Co-host. Do a good job as my co-host here.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, sir.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  I appreciate that.

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just want to say.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  I respond well.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me I don't say nice things to you. That's all. You respond well.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  I got a feeling that that just met your quota for the rest of the year.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the month.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Don't ever say I didn't say anything nice, and now I'm good.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're picking up with my interview with Madame Saturn, planetary scientist, friend, colleague, Carolyn Porco. And in this next clip, she discusses how the pale blue dot image that Cassini reprised turned into something she called "The Day the Earth Smiled." What's this about you trying to get everybody to smile? What's that about?

• 10:04Carolyn Porco?

  That was probably the greatest thing I've ever done. I think.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be the judge of that. Okay?

• 10:09Carolyn Porco?

  (laughing).

• 10:11Carolyn Porco?

  Well, let me back up. There have been other pale blue dot pictures taken by other missions, right? Mars missions probably took many pictures of the Earth from Mars orbit.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because Earth shows up in the Martian sky.

• 10:22Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, and people, of course, they got moved by the first pale blue dot. They wanted to do it over again, too. So I'm thinking, not only would ours be even more gorgeous because we're going to see Saturn in the field with Earth.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Saturn is unimpeachably beautiful in any shot.

• 10:36Carolyn Porco?

  Right. But I thought, wouldn't it be fabulous if in, well, let me back up. In all those previous.

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the second time you've backed us up. I don't know where I am now.

• 10:46Carolyn Porco?

  In all those previous pale blue dot images, the picture was taken and then afterwards, people were told, "Look, here was the Earth taken three weeks ago." And I'm thinking, well, why don't we tell people in advance? "Your picture is going to be taken from the outer solar system from a billion miles away." And I wanted to use this as an opportunity for people having a communal feeling with the universe.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the spiritual side of you showing up.

• 11:13Carolyn Porco?

  It is, I'm sorry.

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're going up.

• 11:14Carolyn Porco?

  And I thought it would be just fantastic. People could feel a sense of unity with the cosmos. They could feel a sense of unity with their fellow human. And they could also appreciate at that moment their pictures being taken from a billion miles away. How better to let them know how far humans have come in the exploration of the solar system. It becomes something personal to them.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're telling me you've actually got people to go outside and look up at Saturn in the sky and smile at it?

• 11:42Carolyn Porco?

  Well, I, no, no, here, even the people on the other side of the planet smiled. Because the idea was to smile in celebration, to get this communal feeling out of people, this kind of cosmic love. I was after cosmic love.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where were you in the 60s? We needed you there.

• 11:59Carolyn Porco?

  What do you mean? I was about 16 years old, smoking dope. What were you doing? I can say that now because it's legal in my state.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Colorado, yeah, you're from Colorado.

• 12:09Carolyn Porco?

  So anyway, I was after cosmic love and it worked and I was so proud.

• 12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was quite the social media attention given to it in blogs and in the Twitter streams.

• 12:17Carolyn Porco?

  It ended up not being announced as early as I would have liked. We should have done it a year ahead for various reasons I won't go into. It didn't get announced until a month ahead, so there wasn't really as big a campaign and as big an announcement as I would have liked. But nonetheless, we got comments from people that were just beautiful. People saying, "My God, I've never felt a feeling like this. You know, for once I felt so united with everybody around the globe." And one person wrote, "You know, darn it, we may be floating around on a dustmote. We may be transient, but for 15 minutes, we were there, we were aware, and we smiled." And that's exactly the kind of feeling I wanted people to have.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful.

• 12:58Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, thank you, Neil. And I have to say this, for me, it was the same thing. I mean, I'm the one who started this whole thing, but the 15 minutes that it was happening, and I'm looking where Saturn is and I'm thinking, "Wow, there's a camera there taking our picture." And knowing that people all over the world were doing the same thing, it was fabulous. It was so fabulous. So I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. By the way, I called the whole event "The Day the Earth Smiled" because that's what it was.

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that photo made page one of the New York Times.

• 13:29Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, man, was that cool.

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back on November 13th, 2013.

• 13:33Carolyn Porco?

  November 13th?

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  13/11/13.

• 13:35Carolyn Porco?

  That was the very day that I got the phone call from NASA headquarters that I was made the imaging team leader. Is that cosmic or what?

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The day of the year, not, I mean, in what year?

• 13:44Carolyn Porco?

  1990.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1990, okay. So there is cosmic alignment.

• 13:47Carolyn Porco?

  Cosmic love and alignment, Neil, right here on your show.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a holdout from the 60s if there ever was one. Yeah. She's a bit of a cosmic hippie. I like it. It's a hippie in the 21st century. Yeah. "When the moon is in the seventh." Was she back up for the fifth dimension song? I don't know. You know, she was also invited to give a TED Talk about the Cassini mission. And as we are about to hear in the next clip, it not only inspired someone to recreate her talk with a Lego version of herself with Lego audience, but it also led to her involvement in the 2009 Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams. Ah. I don't know, let's check it out.

• 14:30Carolyn Porco?

  This person, her name is Maya Weinstein. She took my whole entire TED Talk and frame for frame, word for word, exactly the way the TED Talk is with the TED backdrop. She recreated the whole entire thing in Legos with my soundtrack over it. It's amazing.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your little Lego person?

• 14:48Carolyn Porco?

  My little Lego person.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is moving around on the stage.

• 14:50Carolyn Porco?

  Just with the same gestures, at least as much as she could have. It was incredible. And I'm very proud of that talk because even though I don't think it was one of my best, the people loved it at that conference. TED draws all the captains of industry and so on.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're the only one who's going to afford the ticket to attend.

• 15:06Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, it's ridiculous. And not only that, it's by invitation only. But anyway, J.J. Abrams was in the audience and I didn't even know who he was. He gave a talk too. Afterwards, we exchanged emails. I put him on my distribution list. You're on it. My dear friends and colleagues, every time there's a new discovery or image.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A new Saturn development.

• 15:23Carolyn Porco?

  Yes. And nine months later, I get a call and someone on the other end says, "I've got J.J. Abrams on the phone to speak to you." And I said, "J.J. who?"

• 15:34Carolyn Porco?

  You know, I don't watch Lost. I don't watch television. I only knew him from TED, but then I forgot about him. I'm sorry, J.J., but that's the truth. So we get on the phone and he says, "I've been getting your emails about Saturn and I just felt like I had to reach out and involve you in this movie."

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the Star Trek movie.

• 15:51Carolyn Porco?

  In the Star Trek movie. And he says that there has never been a science fiction movie better than 2001. That is absolutely the pinnacle. And I feel exactly the same way. And I'm thinking to myself, "Okay, I'm in because this guy thinks like me." So I'm thinking there's going to be lots of sessions where we're throwing ideas around, brainstorming about what the movie should be like in all the areas that I might be asked to comment, like on the planetary scenes. That's where I thought I'd come in and maybe some science issues. And that wasn't really happening. I had asked him though, "I would really love to see a scene being filmed." I'd never seen a scene being filmed. And I was hoping to get on the bridge. I wanted to see what they were going to do with the bridge. But the day that I was in L.A. and invited to go see a scene being filmed, I saw the fight scene.

• 16:36Carolyn Porco?

  So I saw James T. Kirk as a young man, get the crap kicked out of him. I saw Chris Pine get punched in the face, up against the wall, ricocheted off the wall, fall on the ground, get picked up, punched again, fall on a table.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was in the bar.

• 16:49Carolyn Porco?

  Twenty-six times. And I really thought, man, I'm glad I don't have this job. So, we break for lunch. We're at a very unglamorous lunch, for everybody who thinks movies are all glamorous. We're sitting at cafeteria tables. I sit with JJ and the guy who was the head of special effects at ILM. And JJ says, "I've got a problem." He says, "The Enterprise and the crew are coming back into the solar system to save the Earth, and I gotta know where to hide them."

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why they hid it behind Saturn? You put the Enterprise behind Saturn?

• 17:20Carolyn Porco?

  Excuse me. I put it in Titan's atmosphere. I told him, "Have it come out of warp drive, in Titan's atmosphere..."

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is thick and opaque.

• 17:30Carolyn Porco?

  "And have it rise out, submarine-style, out of the clouds, with Saturn in the rings in the background. It'll be a knockout scene." And JJ says, "Oh my god, that's brilliant." And he decided to use it. That was all I ever got asked to do. The next thing I know, they send me some shots from the scene that they rendered. They'd gone to our website, got some pictures. You know, they did a reasonably good job. And I write back and said, "Well, you know, you got this wrong. Titan's not on an inclined orbit. You gotta fix that, blah blah blah." And they didn't want to fix any of it. The guy says, "Look, if anyone complains about this, just blame it on me." So that's all I ever got to do. But I'm very proud.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's an awesome scene.

• 18:08Carolyn Porco?

  That scene is one of the best scenes in the movie. It made the cover of the rag in Hollywood about visual effects, called Cin Effects. And JJ used that same thing again in the second movie. There's a scene where the Enterprise comes out of an atmosphere. But, you know, they never asked me, "Okay, well, we're hiding it visually. What about the electromagnetic signals?" Of course, any respectable Romulan ship is gonna be able to pick up those signals, right?

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:35Carolyn Porco?

  So there's this dumb explanation in the movie about how the magnetic field of the rings hides...

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The electrical signals from the ship.

• 18:44Carolyn Porco?

  From the spacecraft. Well, you know, the rings don't have a magnetic field, and they never asked me that.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they met you halfway. Right, and that's more than meeting you no way.

• 18:52Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, look, I got a whole scene in a major movie that I basically created. I'm proud of that.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're in the credits?

• 18:58Carolyn Porco?

  I'm about two-thirds of the way down, immediately following the Vulcan and Klingon language consultant.

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. More of my interview with Carolyn Porco when StarTalk Radio returns.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. Neil Tyson here, Chuck Nice there. That's right. There is a cross for me. We're listening to my interview with Carolyn Porco. She came to visit me at the Hayden Plantarium, quickly got a StarTalk interview out of that visit, and you're listening to it now. And let's find out about her role in the creation of one of my favorite movies, Contact. Ooh. I know, let's check it out.

• 19:58Carolyn Porco?

  I'm reasonably certain I, with maybe four other women, maybe more, maybe even some males who were scientists who surrounded Carl, were people that he drew from to create that character.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that was Carl's first novel, and they say that your first novel is always strongly drawn from your personal life experience. In the film, if you haven't seen it, she wants to listen for radio signals from intelligent aliens at a time when that's not an entirely embraced thing for a scientist to do.

• 20:29Carolyn Porco?

  Right, and also she has this developing relationship, believe it or not, with a religious cleric, who is the other side of the argument. So to listen to the conversations between Ellie Araway and Palmer Joss, who was her romantic interest and also a cleric, was very much to read Carl Sagan and what he had to say about the juncture between science and religion. But anyway, I digress. When came time to do the movie, Carl called me up. And said, "Out of all the female scientists he knew, I came closest to being like the character he wanted to portray on the screen," which I immediately thought, "Well, of course, it's because I'm just so tactless and in your face and in the book, that's the way the character is."

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're admitting that you're tactless?

• 21:13Carolyn Porco?

  Why would I try to hide it? It's so obvious. Everybody knows this, so there's no point in hiding it. So, I had a fantastic day with Carl, his wife Andrea, and they were both producers. There was the executive producer Linda Opst, there was the then-director George Miller, he got swapped out for Robert Zemeckis.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zemeckis, Bob Zemeckis.

• 21:33Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, later on, and then there was-

• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Known for the Back to the Future trilogy.

• 21:37Carolyn Porco?

  Known for Forrest Gump. We spent a day sitting around a table in Santa Monica, putting together the character of Ellie, and it was for me, very educational to see-

• 21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The creative process of this-

• 21:48Carolyn Porco?

  This process, remember Carl wrote a book and there were five people who go on this journey, okay, and they had to basically condense five people into one.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the film.

• 21:59Carolyn Porco?

  So that's kind of what was going on, but they would ask me, you know, "What kind of experiences have you had? Why do you feel you've done well and have feel dominated with men?" I said, "Well, I grew up with four brothers, for God's sakes, I've been fighting and spitting and kicking ever since I was a kid." And then, you know, at that point Carl said, "Well, why don't we maybe in the movie have Ellie have a lot of brothers?" You know, they would do things like that.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Ellie is spunky in film.

• 22:23Carolyn Porco?

  She's very feisty. In the movie, they didn't give her brothers in the end, and I have to say, the first script I saw, I tore apart, I couldn't stand it, and I was very critical of it, and some of-

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, since Carl is a scientist himself, he didn't need you as a science consultant, he needed you as a character consultant.

• 22:40Carolyn Porco?

  I was brought on to lend authenticity to Ellie's experiences in the movie, and I was supposed to spend time with Jodie Foster, I mean, the way that they do it these days, the actress or actor playing the character-

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They mirror you, yeah.

• 22:55Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, but it was amazing, it took a year of going back and forth with Warner Brothers, they'd call up and say, "Quick, give us your schedule for the next three months, we're going to try to find a time when you and Jodie can spend time together," and then nothing would happen, and then after three months, "Quick, give us your schedule for the next three months," and this went on for about a year, and I never got to meet her. But, you know, I was told that she used Carl himself as her role model for how to behave, so I thought, given that it wasn't Carl's book, exactly- They did a very good job with it and I thought she did a brilliant job and I love that movie.

• 23:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's one of my favorites.

• 23:29Carolyn Porco?

  Don't you think it really depicts science accurately?

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, not only in science, but what everything I understand about human reaction to a scientific discovery was touched upon in that film. Well, the crazy ways people behave in the face of the knowledge that maybe there's a civilization out there more intelligent than we are.

• 23:44Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, and if that ever happens, we'll probably see things like that.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, that's gonna be our playbook for what's gonna happen. Well, so if part of you inspired elements of the main character, does that mean you had a clerical love interest as well sometime in your life?

• 23:59Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, no, he didn't get that from me.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:03Carolyn Porco?

  You know, when I say borrowed, I mean just what you might call ancillary things. Like, you know, I went to Caltech, Ellie goes to Caltech for graduate school, and I think the way she in general looks was more like me than anybody else, and her personality, for years I thought he must have drawn her personality for me. But he might have gotten Ellie's personality from his first wife, who was Lynn Margulis, who was a top-notch biologist. I mean, talk about feisty in your face, man. She was a very, very feisty and brilliant woman. So, anyway, my main message is Ellie Araway in the book, in the movie, is a composite character.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. And some have said maybe Jill Tarter might have been representative, because Jill Tarter is of the SETI Institute.

• 24:44Carolyn Porco?

  Jill does SETI, although actually that I think is kind of irrelevant because Carl was gonna make a character who does SETI regardless.

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's his thing.

• 24:52Carolyn Porco?

  The voice of the whole character is Carl.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is Carl.

• 24:55Carolyn Porco?

  Jill has said her father died when she was young, the character's father died when she was young in the book. You know, Ellie is described in the book as always wearing skirts. Well, there was another woman on Voyager, her name was Candy Hansen, always wore skirts, and Carl was interacting with Candy like he was interacting with me. And then, of course, there's bits of the character's life in the book are drawn from Carl's third wife, Andrian. So, this is why lots of us look at Ellie and wreck it.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, everyone can feel for her.

• 25:24Carolyn Porco?

  We see bits of us in her because bits of us are in her.

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm. More of my interview with Carolyn Porco when StarTalk Radio returns.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. Neil Tyson here. Chuck Nice across from me.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we're here live.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yes, we are.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no other way we could be here.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  I was gonna say.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  And again, we could be holograms. Not that that would work for a podcast or radio.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holograms, is that the same as like, you know, candy grams or any other kind of grams?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Well, at Coachella it is.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we've got my interview with my astrophysicist planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. And she just, uh, she's been part of our pop culture in ways that maybe people didn't know.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Having advised J.J. Abrams on the Star Trek film, creating one of the most awesome scenes.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yes, and then...

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Enterprise rising up out of the clouds to...

• 26:38Speaker 01

  So cool.

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hiding from the, the, you know, the, on its way back into the solar system so it can't be seen.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Detected.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, she's totally into it. I mean, that's great. We need more and more folks like this in all the other fields.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Who knew that J.J. Abrams completely mucked it up scientifically?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Like, just ruined it. "Oh yeah, you know, it's the, uh, it's the magnetic field of the rings of Saturn that made that possible." And then she tells us, "There are no magnetic fields on the rings of Saturn."

• 27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rings ain't got jack other than beauty thing, beautiful patterns to look at.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 27:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all that is. Well, one of my favorite stories about Carolyn, I had to get it out of her for this interview, was that something came up some years back when she was profiled in the New York Times. Yeah, yeah, let's... I had to put, I had to make sure she told me this story again.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's even hard to believe that it happened. All right, let's check it out.

• 27:34Carolyn Porco?

  This woman, her name was Carolyn Neathammer, wrote, "I thought a very good article about me." It was the Scientist at Work series in the New York Times.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what year is this now?

• 27:44Carolyn Porco?

  1999.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's not that long ago.

• 27:46Carolyn Porco?

  It was in...

• 27:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not like in the 80s or the 70s?

• 27:48Carolyn Porco?

  No. It was done to be coincidental with Cassini's flyby of Earth, which happened in 1999. And then, you know, there was a lot of hoopla about whether or not the radioactive material on Cassini was gonna destroy the Earth.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it flew by Earth to gain some extra orbital energy?

• 28:03Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To get out to Saturn?

• 28:04Carolyn Porco?

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you didn't have enough fuel to get it there on its own?

• 28:07Carolyn Porco?

  No.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You had to like borrow orbital energy?

• 28:10Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, we borrowed a lot. We're in debt after all.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so what planets did you take orbital energy from?

• 28:15Carolyn Porco?

  We took from Venus twice, would you believe?

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twice? Oh, poor Venus!

• 28:19Carolyn Porco?

  Poor Venus. It's still there, though.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still there, alright.

• 28:22Carolyn Porco?

  And one from Earth, and then we slipped closely by Jupiter. That really helped a lot.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, alright. And that got you to Saturn. Alright, sorry, but we digress.

• 28:31Carolyn Porco?

  So, August 1999, this article is being written, and the woman says truthful things, good things and bad things or whatever, and she submits it to her editors, and they come back and say, "Find out why Porco's not married." And I said to her, "You see? I told you so. I knew this kind of thing was gonna happen, because I knew they would be very sexist."

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, not only not married, but never married.

• 28:53Carolyn Porco?

  Never married.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the real issue. There are plenty of not-married people who have been.

• 28:57Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, how old was I then? I was forty-something.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, in your forties, okay.

• 29:01Carolyn Porco?

  So, I gave her two responses to use, because I was kind of pissed. The first answer was something like, "Well, just tell them I have a different man every night, and I like it that way." You know? And then the other answer was, "There are no high-maintenance items in my house of any kind: pets, plants, or husbands." And Carolyn Neathammer, in her discretion, used that one.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Used the second one rather than the first one.

• 29:24Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, and actually, I got a lot of fan mail from that. People write to me, "Oh, my seventeen-year-old daughter thought that was the greatest thing she ever heard." "At my advanced age, there are still no high-maintenance items in my house of any kind: pets, plants, or husbands."

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. Carolyn Porco. She is a fireball, man! What a feisty woman this Carolyn is. I like her. I'm just imagining in 1999, they'd ask her why she was never married. I know, that is really a sexist question. You know they wouldn't have asked that of a man. That wouldn't even come up. Exactly. We'd just assume you were gay.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all. That's what people do to me. They go, actually, they do it the opposite. They go, "Why are you married?" It's the opposite question. I kept the opposite question. How did you possibly get... How did you possibly get married? Who'd have thought that has an opposite? Exactly. Who the hell would marry you?

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'd forgotten that Cassini actually being launched from Earth went in these loops that came back to Earth to get some more orbital energy. Because it's all about the energy, more than it is about the distance. So if you fly by Earth with energy to reach Jupiter, you're going, you're doing well. So the big concern is Cassini would go so far away from the sun that it wouldn't be able to use solar panels for its energy. Gotcha. So it's loaded with radioactive energy, plutonium. People worried, if you're gonna steal orbital energy from Earth and come nearby to do so, suppose you enter our atmosphere and then disintegrate, then it scatters plutonium around the world, killing everyone. So there was some protests at the time. Oh. That's all. And it didn't happen? No, it didn't happen, because we, because we know Newton's laws of motion, and we

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  got this one. See, it's funny how science can even quell a protest. That's how, at its best, that should be doing that all the time. When we come back, our final segment with Carolyn Porco on StarTalk. We're back on StarTalk. I'm Neil, that's Chuck. Am I getting lazy? I have too many syllables in my name. No, you're just being more efficient. Thank you, thank you.

• 31:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been interviewing my friend and colleague and planetary scientist, astrophysicist Carolyn Porco. Yes, firecracker. Firecracker. And the fun part, because we generally don't interview scientists on StarTalk, it's not about that. Right. It's about interviewing people hewn from pop culture and finding out how science influences their livelihood. But here's a case of a scientist who's influenced by pop culture. Yeah. Yeah, so we turned the tables on that, and it's, and I'm loving it. In our last clip that we're gonna go to... You know, she wants to leave us all with some thoughts inspired by her Cassini image, that the pale blue dot reprise that she, where Saturn is eclipsing the sun and there's this little dot of light in the background there.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's us. And it's us. It's us. And so she, she, she wants to sort of have us think, think about that in, in interesting ways. And Saturn, by the way, has many moons. And when, Jen, we think about life, not only on the planet, but maybe on moon. I mean, it's, there's a lot of ways to, to slice this. Let's see how she does it.

• 32:56Carolyn Porco?

  Can I leave people with a interesting thought in their head?

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so as we end our StarTalk interview, Carolyn, what wisdom, what insight, what sense of our place in this universe can you share with us?

• 33:11Carolyn Porco?

  I wasn't going there.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Okay. What parting words do you have?

• 33:19Carolyn Porco?

  Just that beautiful blue E-ring. We call it the E-ring.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the glowy thing on the outermost perimeter of the rings.

• 33:25Carolyn Porco?

  Right. That ring is created by a hundred geysers erupting from the south polar terrain of a tiny moon called Enceladus, which is no bigger across than Great Britain. And those geysers, we are virtually certain, erupt from a reservoir of salty liquid water laced with organic materials and bathed in excess heat. And that is exactly the kind of environment that we have long thought could be inhabited by living organisms. Okay? It's watery. The salt in it tells us that the water's in contact with rocks, so there's

• 34:06Carolyn Porco?

  available chemical energy for organisms to live if they can't live off sunlight. And there's organic materials. So to me, it is the most accessible habitable zone in our solar system because here this body of water is gushing its materials out to space. And that material, a small fraction of it, by about 4%, goes into orbit and makes that beautiful blue ring.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's spraying its organic matter into orbit around Saturn?

• 34:34Carolyn Porco?

  That's what it's doing. And here is a crazy thought. It's not out of the question that if there are organisms and microbes in that liquid environment, under the south polar terrain, they could be in orbit around Saturn in that ring. Now, is that not the coolest thing you could possibly imagine? Look at that picture. Know that the only place in our solar system we are certain there is life is that little dot to the right and below Saturn.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That dot we call Earth.

• 35:02Carolyn Porco?

  And then that blue ring also might have organisms in it. So, there's a lot in that picture. There's more in that picture than meets the eye. It's beautiful.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're tearing up.

• 35:13Carolyn Porco?

  I can't help it.

• 35:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. There it is. That is, uh, that is actually very cool. The universe, offering up its, its glory. Yeah. Now, you gotta go there to know it, that's the thing. You need a frickin' space program to get there. You could, you could wax poetic all you want, but all you're gonna draw is a Hollywood alien, right? You wanna, you're not, you gotta go there and get, and embrace those vistas. And then, poetry just rolls out of your mouth when that happens. Yeah, 'cause, I mean... So, here, we, we need to take some articulate people and send them into space. They'll come back speaking poetry of Yates and, and, and, and, and Milton. It's true. Maybe we can get a little funding for this thing. If I say Yates, his name is Yeats. Yeats.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thank you, yeah. Is it Yeats or Yates? I've heard it both ways. Is it Yates? I've heard it, I've heard Yates. Okay, let's ignore them both. Poetry of Shakespeare, Sonic. There you go. Screw you, Yates, Yeats. Yeast? Yeast. No, so, uh, it's, it's, it's, uh, the universe has the power to do this to you. And I think there's not enough of the public who understands, or is exposed, to, to how often that happens, to astronomers. Yeah. That's why we do what we do. Yeah, I don't even think there's enough of the public that actually just looks up. Period. Yeah. Just actually look up in the night and, you know, just see what... Chuck, what are my ending words of every StarTalk podcast? I bid you to keep looking up. Oh, you can do, you can sub for me on that one.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do that today. You never heard my Neil deGrasse stuff? No, I haven't. (laughing)

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good. Well, yeah, okay. You can do my whole stick next time. That's fine. I'll teach you some astrophysics first. Yeah, I was gonna say, there's a small problem with me substituting for you. That would be the whole astrophysicist Dr. Neil Dyson thing.

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But to Carolyn's point, when we think of life, we think of the right temperature, the right ingredients, the right circumstances, and the more we study the moons of these outer planets, the more we find places where life might thrive. My favorite among them is one of the moons of Jupiter, Europa. Europa? Yeah, where Jupiter is keeping warm what would otherwise be a totally frozen world. And then it's melted the ice and it's got an ocean of liquid water that's been liquid for billions of years. I want to go ice fishing on Europa and see if you find life. You know what you call it? What? Europeans.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to Star Talk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck, always great to have you. My pleasure. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.