StarTalk Live! Citizen Science from San Francisco (Part 1)

Host Bill Nye, co-host Eugene Mirman, space activist Ariel Waldman, SF Sketchfest co-founder Janet Varney, and comedian Claudia O’Doherty team up to talk about citizen science, space innovations and how we hack our way to the stars. Recorded live. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or 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.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:26Eugene Mirman?

  Hello, San Francisco. Welcome to the 16th Annual

• 0:36Eugene Mirman?

  San Francisco Sketch Fest, presented by Audible. Thank you.

• 0:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, check out my show on Audible. Okay, it is now my great pleasure to bring out your host, one of America's and the world's great science communicators and educators. Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye the Science Guy.

• 1:06Bill Nye?

  Eugene, guy hug. Yes, greetings.

• 1:12Bill Nye?

  Whoa, yes, yes. Oh, man.

• 1:18Bill Nye?

  Oh, wow, wow, I love you guys.

• 1:22Bill Nye?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:26Bill Nye?

  Well, welcome, welcome, welcome to 16th Sketch Fest?

• 1:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Bill Nye?

  Wow, are my arms tired? Wait, no, we have a fantastic show tonight. We have a fantastic show, so we'll do three segments. Each more brilliant than the last. And then we'll have questions and answers at the end. So if you have brilliant questions that occur to you during this exciting evening, there'll be microphones up front at the end. But now, people, it's time to introduce our amazing panel. First of all, to my right, Eugene... Okay, wait. No, Eugene's got it going on. Did they already go on about how great you are? And he's Gene on Bob's Burger.

• 2:15Bill Nye?

  And his audio show, Hold On, is available on Audible.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:20Bill Nye?

  Turn it up loud.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22Bill Nye?

  Now, now, now, enough with this exciting thing. We'll start with a, we have a big treat for you. Is anybody from Down Under, anybody from Australia? There you go, and so is Claudia O'Doherty. Give it up, she is on the Netflix's Love Show. Here she is. Thank you, hello. It's three in the afternoon for her tomorrow. It's true. Claudia, welcome. Thank you, Bill. Then the woman who started this sketching of Festing, who's on FX's You're the Worst and IFC's Stand Against Evil, here's Janet Varney.

• 3:02Bill Nye?

  Yes, blow it up, blow it up. Ooh. Oh, yeah. Good evening. And then, you know, StarTalk has a science theme. So we're gonna have a whole science theme tonight from a woman who is a space innovator, a space explorer, a citizen who engages all of us in the joy of space exploration, Ariel Waldman, please come out.

• 3:32Bill Nye?

  Welcome, welcome, Waldman, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you. If we're gonna have the times of our lives as is, welcome, welcome. How about this theater, you guys, isn't it gorgeous? Beautiful. My goodness, my goodness.

• 3:47Bill Nye?

  So, so let's get started. Welcome to StarTalk, I'm your guest hosting guy, Bill Nye, and I'm very happy to be here. And we'll start, Ariel, we can start with you, right? Among the many things you're involved in is hacking our way to the future. Exactly. Now, I am of a certain age. And when I think of hacking, I think of, I think of trouble. I think of, of interactions that are stressful. But you're talking about creating things, right?

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's, hacking can be good trouble. You know, hacking is really about modifying things or breaking into things and using them for a purpose they weren't originally intended for. And you can do that in a good way, or you can do that in a bad way. So, we're not exactly talking about hacking into your email tonight, here, Bill.

• 4:40Bill Nye?

  There's not that much in there.

• 4:42Eugene Mirman?

  We'll be the judge of that.

• 4:44Bill Nye?

  And, and you know, I'm a germaphobe, so...

• 4:54Bill Nye?

  Sorry Claudia, it's a local reference, alright.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 5:00Bill Nye?

  So, you, you encourage people to modify things for the sake of exploring space?

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, hacking space exploration is really about creating and prototyping new things, things that are maybe not very, you know, elegant, but might be very clever, and new ways of doing things that haven't been considered before. A lot of times through multidisciplinary collaboration.

• 5:24Eugene Mirman?

  Like disguising yourself as a space suitcase and stowing away on a shuttle?

• 5:27Speaker 04

  That would actually be very clever, but not very elegant, so yes.

• 5:32Eugene Mirman?

  Oh yeah.

• 5:33Bill Nye?

  You're on the council of the NIAC, the NASA's Innovative...

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Advanced Concepts.

• 5:39Bill Nye?

  Advanced Con, NIAC.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:41Bill Nye?

  And so, how did you get that gig? That sounds cool.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, it came through a kind of weird way. I mean, through my own experience getting the career that I have, I...

• 5:54Bill Nye?

  Okay, okay, what's your career?

• 5:58Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm a space activist of sorts.

• 6:01Bill Nye?

  Of sorts?

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Of sorts, of sorts. You know, my, a lot of what I work on is about making space exploration accessible to everyone, and getting scientists to realize how they can collaborate with people outside of their discipline to create better things.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Is that like No Man's Sky? My mom plays No Man's Sky. Is that what that is?

• 6:21Speaker 04

  Maybe not exactly.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Okay, cool.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, but, you know, so I, I came from a completely non-science background and I unexpectedly stumbled into a job at NASA one day and, and now.

• 6:35Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  As happens.

• 6:37Eugene Mirman?

  The Buzz Aldrin story.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  That's right. I don't know why I'm not relatable.

• 6:44Bill Nye?

  So you're walking down the street, or maybe you were hovercrafting down the street and you thought, "Cool, I want to get a job at NASA." What'd you do? You fired off an email?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, what happened was I was watching this documentary called "When We Left Earth" and it was about NASA during the early days trying to figure out how to send people into space. And the thing that I found so inspiring about this documentary was the fact that all the mission control people they were interviewing were talking about how they didn't know anything about rockets or orbits or spacecrafts.

• 7:16Bill Nye?

  Just like nowadays.

• 7:17Eugene Mirman?

  But it was...

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Well, you know, but so it's like I was watching that and I was like, "Well, I don't know anything about space exploration and I want to work at NASA."

• 7:26Eugene Mirman?

  This is literally how we got the president.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  I'm a little more humbled than that.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  But, but, so I, I got inspired by this and I decided to send someone at NASA an email saying I was a huge fan of what they were doing and if they ever needed someone like me, that I was around. And I ended up getting a job at NASA from that email, so...

• 7:52Bill Nye?

  Whom did you email? Or you'd have to kill...

• 7:56Speaker 04

  [email protected]. You should try it. No, I, I had emailed someone that I had never met. A friend of mine said that they just met someone from NASA and they gave me their email and I...

• 8:08Speaker 03

  They're a little old in this story. It sounds like a big lie.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  I swear, this is all 2008. And I got a job at NASA Ames, down here in Mountain View.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  Can I, absolutely.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  Thank you, NASA Ames fan.

• 8:21Speaker 05

  Can I ask too, Ariel, and maybe if you know, is what you do when you say that you're a space activist, is that something that there would be, was there a version of you from the beginning of kind of US space exploration? Like, were there people who were outside of NASA, who were acting, sort of being activists in that way, in the 50s, in the 60s, in the 70s?

• 8:42Speaker 04

  I, you know, I don't think there's been a lot of people over the last few decades because of the way, the way science trended, but in the early days, I mean, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got started by a bunch of crazy people, you know, experimenting with rockets.

• 8:57Eugene Mirman?

  How crazy, like Sid Barrett?

• 8:59Speaker 04

  They were pretty crazy!

• 9:03Bill Nye?

  No, they were started by the guy, the explosives guy, who was mixing fuels, Parsons, yeah, the Jet Propulsion Lab. And so you say no one knew anything about rockets, for crying out loud, somebody must have had a clue.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  They were, they were interviewing, you know, these people who were, you know, in their 20s, who were getting jobs at NASA in the early 1960s, and, you know, the reality of trying to send a human into space was that they didn't, the people they were hiring, they didn't know anything about orbits and rockets. They were figuring it out as they went along, like they learned.

• 9:34Eugene Mirman?

  But they weren't interviewing like the Trogs, they were interviewing like, you know, scientists of some sort, right? People were, great band reference, but...

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, these were people who worked in mission control, you know, during the Apollo era, during the Gemini and Mercury eras.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  And so do you have a science background before you emailed this great email that got you the job at NASA?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  So, I, I don't, I, I went to art school and got my degree in graphic design.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  This is amazing!

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Thank you!

• 10:03Speaker 05

  This is amazing!

• 10:05Bill Nye?

  But it shows you that people of all kinds are required for this endeavor of space exploration.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  To paint our ways into space!

• 10:15Bill Nye?

  Well, seriously, you want, I bet you want some spaces, some, that's a hilarious reference, you want some interior things to look nice, you want to have a nice design, you want ergonomic shapes and stuff.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  I mean, that's what Virgin Galactic is certainly trying to do, yeah.

• 10:32Bill Nye?

  So...

• 10:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I won't go into, into space unless it looks cool.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, space isn't enough. That's my thing. That's where I stand.

• 10:42Bill Nye?

  But this is, the thing is that NASA reached out to you because they want to do, they want to get people from outside the building, from outside their box, right?

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. They were, you know, it was a very serendipitous experience because the day that I had emailed NASA, they had just posted a job description looking for someone who explicitly had no experience with NASA because they wanted to sort of bridge that gap and create collaborations between communities inside and outside of NASA to create, you know, more new clever awesome stuff.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Do you think they were just looking for someone who wasn't a total nerd?

• 11:19Speaker 04

  I think they may have failed when they hired me then.

• 11:23Bill Nye?

  You have your own nerdy proclivities.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  It's true.

• 11:27Bill Nye?

  So, I mean, we just think about, you know, through history. William Herschel was, it was a conductor, an orchestra conductor, music director, yeah. Charles Darwin, they say flunked out of medical school.

• 11:41Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, because at the time, nobody believed his stuff.

• 11:45Bill Nye?

  And Thomas Edison was a salesman, Einstein was a patent clerk, and you're a space activist. Right there. What? What are you looking at?

• 11:59Bill Nye?

  So, you worked at the COLAB?

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, so COLAB was the program at NASA Ames that was trying to get amateur astronomers to collaborate with astronomers at NASA and trying to get different missions to open up their data, which, you know, a few years ago was still quite a surprisingly monumental task to do.

• 12:20Bill Nye?

  So, when you say amateur astronomers, you know, one of...

• 12:23Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, what does that mean? What is an amateur astronomer? Like, what's the difference between me who looks into the sky and an amateur astronomer who knows something about what he sees?

• 12:32Speaker 04

  I think it depends on who you ask, you know? I mean, I think the amateur astronomer community would say, you know, there are people who have telescopes, they own their own telescopes, and they actually do observations and they actually submit them to NASA or other organizations for, you know, further looking.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  Isn't that a thing where you can sort of take, you can volunteer as a layperson to take a chunk of sky? I'm sure that's the official term.

• 12:58Bill Nye?

  That's right.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  Take it and put it in your purse. Sky chunkers, they call it.

• 13:01Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  Where you can sort of be responsible, you can look from home and say, "I found this."

• 13:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, there's a lot of programs out there, from observing stars to observing even just light pollution, you know, anything where you're just observing parts of the sky and submitting it so that you can create sort of a collective database and kind of expand our knowledge on any of those topics.

• 13:21Eugene Mirman?

  If I sent an email that said like, "I found the Big Dipper again," like, how long before they were like, "Please stop emailing us about the Big Dipper."

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Good thing with federal agencies is they can't exactly tell you to stop emailing them, so, you know, go for it.

• 13:38Eugene Mirman?

  Get ready, Nancy. Because I just found the Big Dipper again.

• 13:44Bill Nye?

  So, we say this all the time, the difference between amateur astronomers and astronomers is not the same as the difference between amateur tennis players and professional tennis players. Amateur astronomers, by long tradition, contribute a great deal, you know, the Hale-Bopp Comet and whatever, these guys are just saying, "That's cool." So, even so, though, those communities can get isolated. Like, the amateur astronomer, astronomer community can get isolated from the normal people.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  Oh, God. I think you just isolated them both.

• 14:17Eugene Mirman?

  I'm very isolated from the amateur surgeon community.

• 14:19Bill Nye?

  Yeah, that's different.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Be glad.

• 14:23Bill Nye?

  That's just what I'm talking about. An amateur surgeon doesn't get a lot of work.

• 14:27Eugene Mirman?

  That's, I know.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  They have to make their own work, Eugene.

• 14:43Bill Nye?

  With your art and design background, and what did you do?

• 14:46Speaker 04

  So, I helped sort of facilitate these collaborations and I consulted with a lot of the missions on how to make their data open but also accessible.

• 14:57Bill Nye?

  What mission, for example?

• 14:59Speaker 04

  So, the El Coss mission. The mission that, if you remember, a few years ago, there was in the news, a big article about NASA's bombing the moon. That was all the headlines and everyone was freaking out at NASA that they were bombing the moon, but they were actually just impacting it with a small spacecraft and sort of looking at the surface of the moon from the debris. And so, one of the problems in science and with NASA is that, you know, a lot of times they think just opening up their data and just, you know, putting it out there and doing nothing else with it is making it accessible, but that's not really true. It's not really until you build interfaces and actually think through how people can use this and make it more accessible so that people with non-technical backgrounds can

• 15:43Speaker 04

  still do interesting things with the data, does it truly make it accessible.

• 15:46Bill Nye?

  So, when you say "data," what are you talking about? Pictures?

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Sometimes pictures, sometimes spectrum analysis. You know, it depends on the spacecraft.

• 15:55Eugene Mirman?

  If you had an art background, how did you learn all this science? Or is that...

• 15:58Speaker 04

  I'm a fast learner. You know, it's funny, getting a job at NASA for me was like getting paid to go to school. I got to learn about dark matter and robots and all this stuff all the time and it was just amazing. And, you know, the science, learning the science was actually, you know, not, it didn't take me that long. It was learning the politics that took much longer for me to learn. Working for the governments, no small thing.

• 16:26Bill Nye?

  But speaking, you don't work there now, speaking of that.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  I advise them now, yeah. But I don't work for them.

• 16:33Eugene Mirman?

  That sounds like the best of both worlds.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  It kind of is.

• 16:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. This is what you should do, but I'm gonna go now.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  That's pretty much it.

• 16:43Bill Nye?

  I told you, I told you.

• 16:46Eugene Mirman?

  That's my role in Aerosmith.

• 16:54Bill Nye?

  But you're, you're working on the future of human spaceflight?

• 16:58Speaker 04

  So I was on a National Academy of Sciences committee about the future of human spaceflight and telling Congress and NASA and the White House about how to build a sustainable human spaceflight program out to the 2050s.

• 17:11Bill Nye?

  And did they?

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Well, we're not in the 2050s yet.

• 17:16Bill Nye?

  Yeah, huh, good point. How many people want to go to Mars?

• 17:20Eugene Mirman?

  As a civilization or personally?

• 17:24Bill Nye?

  That's a great question. Expand on that. Unpack that.

• 17:30Eugene Mirman?

  I would love it if someone here or elsewhere went to Mars. And I think I would stay, but I would love the information back.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Well, if you look under your chairs, you've all want a trip to Mars!

• 17:42Bill Nye?

  Now, we'll, we'll talk about Mars in a little while.

• 17:46Eugene Mirman?

  That's what they all say.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  What's so ominous?

• 17:52Bill Nye?

  Does the, uh, NIAAC still exist?

• 17:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, NIAAC's still around.

• 17:57Bill Nye?

  Uh, but you were saying that something that you worked on, the COLAB doesn't exist anymore.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, COLAB, unfortunately, yes.

• 18:04Bill Nye?

  It was a grimace for the radio listeners. It was a grimace.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, COLAB, uh, the program, uh, unfortunately, didn't, didn't last. Uh, but, um, the people who started COLAB went on to do a lot of awesome things. Uh, one of them, uh, actually went on to, uh, found a startup here in the Bay Area called Planet Labs that does, uh, small satellite exploration, so...

• 18:26Bill Nye?

  We're all about that.

• 18:27Eugene Mirman?

  What's small satellite exploration?

• 18:29Speaker 04

  Small satellites exploring.

• 18:31Bill Nye?

  Look at them.

• 18:33Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Listen!

• 18:35Eugene Mirman?

  I should've said, "How does that work?" And, and does it mean like for people to send small satellites or companies or...

• 18:44Speaker 04

  This is a, this is a startup, so they have a constellation of, uh, small satellites that are the size of...

• 18:50Speaker 05

  Are they really that?

• 18:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, is the size of like a loaf of bread that they send up and they try to, um, get a full picture of the Earth every day. So instead of only getting a full picture of the Earth on Google Maps, you know, once every few weeks or months, they are trying to do it every day.

• 19:05Bill Nye?

  So you need space, a constellation of spacecraft?

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Do you miss the guys from COLAB?

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Do I miss them?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Well, I still see them.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  You stay in touch?

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Did you have a big party on the last day of COLAB?

• 19:18Speaker 04

  I don't know if it was a party so much, but yeah.

• 19:22Eugene Mirman?

  Was there wine?

• 19:26Speaker 04

  Were there more than six people?

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Collab was, I think the actual program was a small group of people, but it had a pretty expansive network across NASA, sort of having NASA ambassadors at each location.

• 19:42Eugene Mirman?

  I love that you're avoiding whether you had a party.

• 19:44Bill Nye?

  I know, yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Sounds like it was an awesome party.

• 19:48Eugene Mirman?

  There was a web of ambassadors, I won't say if there was wine.

• 19:52Bill Nye?

  So what does NIAC do? What kind of things does NIAC do?

• 19:55Speaker 04

  So NIAC, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, is the only program at NASA that funds the more science fiction-like, out there, you know... The cool stuff. The cool stuff that could transform future space missions over the next 10, 20 years.

• 20:09Eugene Mirman?

  Like robots that eat babies, or what's like the good side?

• 20:13Speaker 04

  More, you know, just like bad babies. More things like, you know, using comets as propulsion systems, or how humans might hibernate on the way to Mars. Or turning loaves of bread into small satellites? Yes, I've been listening. Absolutely. I've been listening.

• 20:28Bill Nye?

  I have a list of some of the prize, Super Ball Bot?

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Super Ball Bot, yeah. So the Super Ball Bot is a planetary rover that uses tensegrity, which is essentially tension. And by using like sort of a matrix of joints and tension between those joints, it can sort of bounce on different planetary surfaces. And they think this might be a really cool rover to use, rover of sorts to use on places like Titan where it's kind of more swampy. So this would be a rover that wouldn't actually get stuck because it can sort of bounce around. And its tension structures means that it can crawl up hills and do things that...

• 21:05Bill Nye?

  So it's motorized tensegrity?

• 21:07Speaker 04

  So it's sort of actuators with joints and...

• 21:10Eugene Mirman?

  What do you think an actuator is? Like I have an idea, but what do you think?

• 21:18Speaker 04

  So, so actuators actually, you know, can, can extend and contract the tension in this particular planetary

• 21:26Eugene Mirman?

  Solid guess? And I thank you for it?

• 21:29Bill Nye?

  No, so since, ten segreti, everybody, goes back to Buckminster Fuller. The archi- yeah, Buckminster Fuller. Bucky! Anyway, this was a guy that came up with the geodesic dome. And, so he had this other thing where you have all the, the structural members that are in compression are sticks, are solid, and everything that's in tension is just a rope or string. So they look really cool, because none of the, none of the stiff rods or whatever touch each other, they're all held apart by very tight ropes or cables. And so they are very springy and bouncy because all those ropes are stretchy and boingy. And so, then an actuator-

• 22:14Eugene Mirman?

  I can't tell if you're flirting with me or-

• 22:16Bill Nye?

  It's, it's the way nerds talk sometimes. Then an actuator, everybody, if you've ever seen a bulldozer, the shiny thing that actuates.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Wait, what?

• 22:29Eugene Mirman?

  And that's where it falls apart.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Wait. What is this bulldozer you speak of? Is that-

• 22:36Bill Nye?

  No, you've seen the, the really shiny rods that push the shovel up and down?

• 22:40Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, yeah!

• 22:41Speaker 04

  No, still no.

• 22:43Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry, I graduated high school with a 2.1, so-

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Are you saying, are you saying actuators, how do they actually work?

• 22:50Eugene Mirman?

  I was asking really what it was.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  What, yeah?

• 22:53Eugene Mirman?

  Because I don't know, but that's not that weird.

• 22:55Bill Nye?

  The rod extends out of a tube.

• 22:56Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 22:57Bill Nye?

  It tracks into a tube.

• 22:58Eugene Mirman?

  Thank you.

• 22:59Bill Nye?

  So if you have a bunch of rods that, that extend in and pull, pull in and pull out-

• 23:06Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. It's a-

• 23:08Bill Nye?

  In a coordinated fashion.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  He is for sure flirting with you now. Like, I'm 100% sure.

• 23:13Eugene Mirman?

  I believe you're literally describing space ding-dongs, but I understand.

• 23:19Bill Nye?

  All right, let's move to the next item next.

• 23:22Speaker 05

  That was super, super bot, super ball bot. Super ball bot.

• 23:26Bill Nye?

  Then on from that to, that was gonna go to Saturn, to Titan, moon of Saturn.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  It, uh, it, they think that it might work well on Titan because they've got lakes of methane alongside, I guess, actual methane rocks and, uh, so you've got sort of like a swampy area on Titan and they think a traditional rover would have problems trying to get in and out of a lot of the methane puddles that exist there.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I thought that would probably be the case.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Best to get an actuating ball bot.

• 23:58Speaker 05

  Because of the sprouting and the boing.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  It'll bounce on the, on the space mod. That's gonna be good.

• 24:04Bill Nye?

  So, item next. Water walls. Highly reliable and massively redundant life support architecture.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Yes, so water walls is the concept of actually having, uh, walls of water, uh, that actually, uh, process waste and, uh, produce food for astronauts and kind of do it all in one and why this was, uh, kind of fascinating is because...

• 24:28Bill Nye?

  Kind of do it all in one.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's doing all of these processes together, uh, by using, uh, polyethylene, uh, bags, um, that are filled with water and it can do things like grow green algae for astronauts, which isn't very tasty, but you know, is protein and it can do a lot of those things, um, and, and they're looking into it because the current, uh, life support systems on the International Space Station are all mechanical, they break down easily, but if you look into more bio-inspired designs where you more have, um, a lot of, uh, I guess, bags of water processing everything sort of as one cohesive ecosystem, that they don't break down as much and then when they do, you can easily replace them.

• 25:11Bill Nye?

  There.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Done.

• 25:15Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, and so that department does or does not still exist?

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Sorry?

• 25:20Eugene Mirman?

  The thing that you worked for that was doing that, is that still?

• 25:24Speaker 04

  That, no, this, NIAC is still in existence. COLAB is the, is the program that...

• 25:28Eugene Mirman?

  Is gone, but Water Walls or someone's like trying to make it happen?

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, Water Walls is absolutely someone's...

• 25:32Speaker 03

  How big are the Water Walls?

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Uh, I think in the prototypes that I saw, they were just small bags, but I think the concept is that you would actually surround the entire space station walls with them, so that they would be sort of encompassing.

• 25:45Bill Nye?

  A football field kind of thing.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Well, if you put them on an international space station, absolutely.

• 25:50Bill Nye?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 25:51Eugene Mirman?

  How long till I can have a Water Wall at my house, and why would I need it?

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Well, you know, it has the added benefit of radiation safety, but, you know, you don't need that as much.

• 26:02Eugene Mirman?

  Both helpful and bleak.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  You don't know.

• 26:07Bill Nye?

  It's an added benefit.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you need it.

• 26:08Bill Nye?

  Now, moving on, orbiting rainbows.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Orbiting rainbows.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  She's like, "The deadliest of options." Yes. What? They sound adorable! No, they are adorable. Orbiting rainbows is literally a concept to throw out a bunch of glitter into outer space. It's the rave option!

• 26:29Eugene Mirman?

  Go on, San Francisco!

• 26:33Speaker 03

  It's so hard to clean up glitter, though, so I don't know if that's a great idea.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Well, that is one concern. Oh, that is hard. The idea is to throw out a bunch of glitter into outer space, and then actually shoot a couple of lasers through it, so you've got rainbows, glitter, and lasers.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  I bet you guys did have a party, and it was pretty good.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  And then, you know, and then the concept is, by doing that, you're actually creating prisms, and you might actually be able to image an exoplanet through those prisms.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Take me back a few steps, okay? Okay, so you're imaging an exoplanet?

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:09Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you know, with glitter.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  And lasers! Okay, so we've shot a laser into some space glitter.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  And we're just in, so we're in space.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  But imagine yourself, like, on roller skates, just for fun.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  It feels like it completes this weird 70s picture.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Probably wearing shorts.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Okay, and then you're imaging an exo... okay, I don't know, no! No! What does that mean?

• 27:37Bill Nye?

  I'm imagining...

• 27:38Eugene Mirman?

  Like, Kepler 23b?

• 27:43Bill Nye?

  Is it?

• 27:44Speaker 04

  I think the concept was exoplanet, you know, it didn't matter which exoplanet it was.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Okay, what is an exoplanet, please?

• 27:53Speaker 04

  So, an exoplanet is an extrasolar planet, which just means a planet around a star other than our own.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Okay, great.

• 27:59Eugene Mirman?

  Would one example be Kepler 23b?

• 28:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:04Eugene Mirman?

  Just checking.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  And so, if we shoot a laser through some glitter in space, we can see an exoplanet.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  What?

• 28:14Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Can he even start crying?

• 28:15Bill Nye?

  So here's what I think the concept was, I'm jamming here.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Please jam.

• 28:19Eugene Mirman?

  Jam it up.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  Jam it up.

• 28:20Bill Nye?

  As you know, engineer Phil.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Space jam.

• 28:22Bill Nye?

  You gently...

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Uh oh. Yeah. Yeah.

• 28:28Bill Nye?

  See, it was a party, it's all about the party. So you put the glitter there and you shoot a laser at it, and then you configure the optical properties of the pattern of glitter.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 28:40Bill Nye?

  In orbit. Then you use, then you shoot a telescope at the glitter and mathematically work backwards to use the glitter as a big lens.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 28:52Bill Nye?

  And you figure, you figure out where the glitter is using the laser from Earth. I'm jamming here, as I mentioned.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  And then, like, eventually it becomes a really cool t-shirt.

• 29:03Bill Nye?

  Yes!

• 29:04Speaker 04

  If you have more questions, Mariah Carey made a movie about it, it's called Glitter.

• 29:10Bill Nye?

  Burning Man in Space!

• 29:14Speaker 04

  It's Burning Man in Space.

• 29:16Bill Nye?

  Good to know. Transformers for Extreme Environments.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  So, Transformers for Extreme Environments, so you've got the Autobots and the Decepticon, no. So, Transformers for Extreme Environments is a project which wanted to put these sort of shape-shifting reflectors up on the edges of caves on Mars or on the moon, and by doing that, they could actually reflect sunlight to a rover so that it could go actually explore these caves. Why this is important is because a lot of times without solar power, rovers can't actually work, and so this is a way of sort of reflecting sunlight to a rover in a crater or cave so that it can actually explore those spaces without turning off.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  I feel like I understood that.

• 29:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  We did it!

• 29:59Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, the glitter thing?

• 30:00Speaker 05

  We all did it.

• 30:01Eugene Mirman?

  I was like, "The glitter thing sounds accurate, but I remain confused."

• 30:05Speaker 05

  Fascinating, though.

• 30:07Eugene Mirman?

  I feel a lot better about humanity, hearing about all these projects that are being worked on. It really is...

• 30:13Bill Nye?

  So, as we say at the Planetary Society, space exploration brings out the best in us. By that, I mean humankind. It brings people together from all walks of life, because everybody wants to explore space. Right? It's not called Dirt Talk. Star Talk, for crying out loud. It's cool. Now, we got a lot to talk about. So, this is... You also run the Hack-a-thon.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  Science Hack Day.

• 30:46Bill Nye?

  Hack Day. And this is... Which is derivative of Hack-a-thon. We're in San Francisco. We have Maker Bots, Maker Fairs, we have Hack-a-thoners. So, this is where you take things, you innovate, you make extraordinary new things. So, we'll be back in a few moments to talk about hacking on the way to Mars. This is Star Talk. I'm your host, Bill Nye. Eugene Mirman. You're supposed to be applauding and going crazy. Claudia Darney, Ariel Waldman, Janet Barney. We'll be right back.

• 31:30Bill Nye?

  So, if you remember last time, which was moments ago, we were talking about the charm of hacking, of repurposing a thing to do something new and cool. And what we all want to do is go deep, farther and deeper into space. And where we all want to go is Mars. Yeah? Cha? So, Ariel, how are we gonna hack our way to Mars?

• 31:57Speaker 04

  People are doing a lot of things to hack their way to Mars right now. One of the NIAC projects, actually, that I thought was really interesting, was a project called Urban Biomining, which actually takes synthetically enhanced microbes and has them actually break down electronics to be able to use them and reprint them on the surface of Mars. So, why does...

• 32:20Bill Nye?

  This is digesting electronics?

• 32:21Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, are you saying like... Microbes like eat a microwave and then recreate a microwave on Mars?

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Kind of, in a sense. It's not that far off. It's the concept of actually using these microbes. So you're going to Mars, you have a lot of electronics with you. Some of those electronics are going to break over time. And what if instead of just tossing them aside, you could actually feed them to a bunch of microbes and have those microbes in turn poop out copper and other useful materials that you can actually create to create new electronics and new circuits. Good idea. That's amazing.

• 32:56Bill Nye?

  No, it is a good idea. So, you know, you guys, are you hip to this expression, e-waste? Yeah. Ms. Warren seemed deeply concerned.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  I can't, I have, I have pooping copper ringing in my ears, but in a good way, in a good way.

• 33:12Eugene Mirman?

  What's the difference between what you just said and the wizardry of alchemy?

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:20Bill Nye?

  One might be real.

• 33:22Eugene Mirman?

  Are you describing alchemy?

• 33:24Bill Nye?

  No, but I can get it. It would be a heck of a thing if you had some microbe that would strip a circuit board?

• 33:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:31Bill Nye?

  And get the metal off.

• 33:32Eugene Mirman?

  It eats copper and poops out copper.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Well, it eats mixed metals and can actually then poop out copper. So it can kind of refine it so that you can get the exact type of metal that you want to create a circuit or create some other sort of electronic.

• 33:45Eugene Mirman?

  Or a bunch of them, some poops out iron, some copper.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so essentially, this is what it means to be sort of synthetically enhanced microbes. You sort of train them to do certain tasks.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Oh, you just give them a real taste for copper.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:59Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:01Eugene Mirman?

  You're making like a really good copper fin.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 34:07Bill Nye?

  Okay. But that is a very cool idea, really, that it's because e-waste is a big problem. You know, we grind up electronic circuit boards to recover the metals and they mix together. They're hard to separate. A lot of plastic. It takes a lot of energy. What if we could hire microbes to do it? That would be...

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Do we have to pay the microbes?

• 34:27Bill Nye?

  Uh...

• 34:30Speaker 04

  I don't think so.

• 34:31Eugene Mirman?

  As long as they're American microbes.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  I mean, of course, at some point, they'll turn on us and eat us and all that good stuff. But like, you know, copper.

• 34:44Bill Nye?

  So, right now, though, we don't really, we can't really land people on Mars, right?

• 34:49Speaker 04

  Not yet.

• 34:50Bill Nye?

  And, uh...

• 34:51Eugene Mirman?

  If we can land them, they'll just die right away.

• 34:54Speaker 04

  No, Eugene, I saw that documentary that, where he lived and he survived for a while. Good-looking guy, funny.

• 35:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Remember?

• 35:03Bill Nye?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  You're welcome.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  He talks while he eats a lot.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:08Bill Nye?

  And he listened to disco music, the way you do.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:11Eugene Mirman?

  What else could keep you alive on Mars?

• 35:15Bill Nye?

  Well, we have to do an advanced concept of research on it, so, uh, people want to go to Mars badly. Why?

• 35:24Speaker 04

  I think a lot, uh, people have a lot of different reasons. Uh, in, in the human spaceflight study for the National Academy of Sciences, we defined a lot of different rationales that people have and discovered that there's no one rationale that really, uh, outwins them all. Some people say, you know, inspiration of students, economic return, national security, but then there's the aspirational ones, human survival, or shared human destiny.

• 35:48Eugene Mirman?

  Soon it'll be the only place with a Planned Parenthood.

• 35:52Bill Nye?

  Whoa.

• 35:57Eugene Mirman?

  Lot of reasons to go.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  Not if we fight, not if we fight.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Cancer screenings, mainly.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 36:06Bill Nye?

  No, so, everybody, uh, as we often say, going to the moon was motivated by the Cold War. And so, uh, he's not here tonight, but if Neil deGrasse Tyson were here, our beloved, he would say if, if, uh, the Chinese, uh, Space Administration were gonna send a mission to Mars, boy, we'd get on, the United States would get on it in a second. But the reason that I want to send instruments and then humans to Mars is to look for signs of life. It would be an extraordinary thing to find evidence of life on another world.

• 36:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 36:42Bill Nye?

  And if there's something still alive, which we presume would be either copper or iron-loving microbes, it would change the world. It would change the way everybody feels about being a living thing here on Earth. It would be wild. Be like Copernicus or Galileo. It'd just change the way you feel about... The cosmos. And so that's what the advanced concepts business is all about. It's business, right?

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's the business of exploration and making sure that we're actually pushing the boundaries and not just only funding things that seem realistic today, but funding credible research that could be done even though it can't be applied maybe for a couple of decades.

• 37:21Bill Nye?

  For a couple of decades. So when you have your hack-a-thons, hack days, science hack days.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Science hack day.

• 37:30Bill Nye?

  Do people come up with space exploration ideas?

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Sometimes very funny ones. Some of the hacks that I've seen at science hack days, one of my favorite ones was an asteroid lamp, which someone wanted to create that would actually light up every time a near-Earth asteroid flew by the Earth and it would make a loud sound. So it sort of was like a near-death lamp that you could freak your coworkers out with.

• 37:55Bill Nye?

  So what sort of sound, like?

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Whatever sound you want, but it was, you know, a loud buzzing sound. It was like, you know.

• 38:02Eugene Mirman?

  That they conceived of or they built?

• 38:04Speaker 04

  They built. So this was using an Arduino and plastic cups because it's a hack-a-thon and you have to make do with what you've got.

• 38:11Eugene Mirman?

  What was the first word?

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Arduino.

• 38:13Eugene Mirman?

  Right. So what is an Arduino?

• 38:15Speaker 04

  An Arduino, in the sense you can think of it as sort of a tiny dumb computer, I guess. It's a way of actually plugging in sensors and connecting it to data sets. It's very cheap and small. A lot of people here in San Francisco have probably played with one. Yeah, a few nerds.

• 38:34Bill Nye?

  Woo, Arduino! Arduino! So, so we want to, when these people hack, do they have Mars in mind?

• 38:42Speaker 04

  I don't think they...

• 38:44Bill Nye?

  And where do you get the materials? Do people show up with?

• 38:47Speaker 04

  It's a bring-your-own-materials event, you know, with the...

• 38:51Bill Nye?

  You know, B-Y-O-M.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  With the, you know, asteroid lamp. It was an Ikea lamp, plastic cups, some glue, and an Arduino hooked up to a Twitter feed.

• 39:04Bill Nye?

  That sounds gorgeous.

• 39:08Eugene Mirman?

  Hooked up to a Twitter feed? Why the last one? Because it was harassing people?

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Yes, with asteroids. Yeah, yeah. No. People created a Twitter feed that actually hooked into a data set that tells you when asteroids pass by the Earth, which actually happens fairly often. But if you didn't know better, you know, it would be the alarm that lets you know to duck and cover for an asteroid.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  So did it tweets to say now?

• 39:35Speaker 04

  It tweets saying, so the account is called Low Flying Rocks, and it tweets to say how close to the Earth they're coming, when they're expected, and a lot of other information about them.

• 39:48Eugene Mirman?

  So somebody built a lamp that could terrify them as they slept?

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Why not?

• 39:53Bill Nye?

  Or maybe soothe them. Maybe it would be just a happy sound most of the time, like a sss, like a white, pink noise, and then something would go wrong. But if you like to worry about things, everybody...

• 40:06Speaker 03

  It sounds like a great idea.

• 40:07Eugene Mirman?

  Do you have any stuff we could worry about?

• 40:09Bill Nye?

  Asteroids are really good for worrying. They're very unlikely to hit, but they're so-called low probability but high consequence.

• 40:20Eugene Mirman?

  Like, like Trump?

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:32Eugene Mirman?

  The human asteroid.

• 40:37Bill Nye?

  So...

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 40:40Bill Nye?

  Not changing the subject too much, but if you're gonna deflect an asteroid, people talk about this. No, you'd have to see it a long way out, 10, 20 years, 30 years out, and then you could put, like, a mirror on it, a shiny, some glitter, some glitter, and it would reflect sunlight, and that would change its, change the way it reflects sunlight, and it would change its course. So you worked on star shade, right?

• 41:10Speaker 04

  Well, I didn't work on star shade, but that's a project that came out of NIAC.

• 41:14Bill Nye?

  And what was that doing?

• 41:15Speaker 04

  It wasn't deflecting asteroids, but it is about creating images of exoplanets by creating a really long flower-like unfurling shade that goes in front of telescopes. And by doing that, it can block out starlight and actually be able, the telescope can then be able to actually get a picture of the exoplanet. But this is something that would be very large in space, so like the size of a baseball diamond.

• 41:39Bill Nye?

  In space?

• 41:40Speaker 04

  In space.

• 41:41Bill Nye?

  And then we shoot a telescope right at it to block out the star and then the hopes of seeing the planet behind it way, way out there.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so one of the main ways that we discover exoplanets now is that we look at starlight and we sort of infer that a planet is going in front of it because we see dips in the starlight. But we can't actually see the planet itself because we're looking just directly at a star.

• 42:06Bill Nye?

  At this super bright star, yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so by blocking out the light of the star and focusing on the planet itself, we might be able to get a picture of it.

• 42:11Bill Nye?

  But you guys just think about what we are doing, I say we, using our intellect and treasure, our society. We have instruments that can point at a fantastically distant star and see it dim because a planet passes between us and the star. That's like, out there, man. And this would be taking it up another starshade notch.

• 42:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is a dumb question, but because you're talking about ways to sort of amend existing telescopes, are we, are we sort of, have we reached what we're able to do in terms of like, this is as powerful as this telescope can get? So, this is as powerful as any telescope can get, we can't figure out a way to make it more powerful, thus we need to hack it, right? And make a beautiful flower cloak? I like to think of it in a sort of Harry Potter context.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, in a sense, that's correct. I mean, we can always be building bigger and better telescopes, but I think we've definitely reached a stage where we're looking into how we can augment telescopes or how we can actually create constellations of telescopes to be able to give us more power to do more things.

• 43:20Bill Nye?

  So the other thing is, a star is bright. So if you're pointing, no matter how small or big your telescope, you're still looking at a very bright star. This is solving a little different problem. Use your big telescope to look for the dim planet next to the star. It's a very cool idea. And just changing the subject back to me.

• 43:42Bill Nye?

  This Planetary Society flew our solar sail last year. Thank you. If there are any Kickstarter's out there, thank you. For those of you listening on the bus, I am wearing a light sail tie. And we're gonna fly light sail too, on the next, the second Falcon Heavy, which is the SpaceX rocket, so it doesn't, hasn't flown yet. They're gonna go back to flight any minute, so they got, um... The Falcon 9 has how many engines? If you were shooting from a gun.

• 44:14Eugene Mirman?

  Six.

• 44:15Bill Nye?

  That's pretty good, that's good. Is it two?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Nine engines?

• 44:19Bill Nye?

  Yes, nine.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  Yes! Nice!

• 44:21Bill Nye?

  And the Falcon Heavy has 27.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Heavy engines.

• 44:25Bill Nye?

  It can lift heavier things.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 44:27Eugene Mirman?

  More space sails? Light sails?

• 44:29Bill Nye?

  Yeah, and more small satellites. So the light sail, for those of you, for some reason, are not just totally engaged with the Planetary Society, uh, it's 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 30 centimeters. It's smaller than a typical...

• 44:42Speaker 03

  It's like the size of a loaf of bread.

• 44:44Bill Nye?

  It's a little smaller, yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Right, well, you know, an artisanal loaf of bread.

• 44:48Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 44:56Bill Nye?

  Shiny stuff inside.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 44:58Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Bill Nye?

  Uh, and so, we deploy the sail, and then the light from the sun pushes it. And you would say, "But I thought light has no mass, how can it have momentum?"

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I'd say.

• 45:09Eugene Mirman?

  And then what would you say, say a couple of comic stuff like that? What would you say?

• 45:15Bill Nye?

  Uh, I would say, "Light has momentum, and it's a strange and amazing thing." And it, so it pushes, pushes the solar sail through space. And I will be going to the solar sail conference.

• 45:27Eugene Mirman?

  Is it in space?

• 45:30Bill Nye?

  It's on the way, it's in Osaka, Japan. It's gonna go in really fast. Keep going. So it is, we're very excited about that. And that is something that people have messed around with for a long time. And the idea is you might use a solar sail or something like that in a sort of mundane way to take, to ferry stuff to Mars, right? Use sunlight to push things, if you have time, you can get things with no fuel and send them a long distance in the solar system. But there's also this fabulous idea, Starshot. Right? Did that come out of NIAC? Out of the innovations?

• 46:12Speaker 04

  It was based, yeah, it was based on a NIAC-funded project. So this guy, Philip Lubin, is working with lasers, which is incredibly cool. But he's working with lasers to see how they can propel paper-thin wafer-sized spacecraft.

• 46:26Bill Nye?

  So when you say wafer-sized, do you mean like a saltine?

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, sort of, yeah. Like, you know, looking at how lasers on a very small scale can be able to propel a spacecraft and instead of going to Mars, actually looking into going to Alpha Centauri. So this-

• 46:43Bill Nye?

  How far away is that?

• 46:44Speaker 04

  You tell me.

• 46:46Bill Nye?

  Oh, it's four, I think it's four light years.

• 46:48Eugene Mirman?

  How long would it take a cracker to get there?

• 46:51Bill Nye?

  So that is a great question.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  They hope-

• 46:55Bill Nye?

  That is a great question.

• 46:57Speaker 04

  I believe they're aiming for 100 million miles a second, which would mean you might get there in about 20 years.

• 47:04Eugene Mirman?

  Oh. And then when it gets there and it's seen, would we get a signal?

• 47:08Bill Nye?

  Hold on a second. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  This is a carb-based space program. I'm not sure.

• 47:13Bill Nye?

  You're gonna go four white years in 20 Earth years?

• 47:17Speaker 04

  They're hoping to reach about 30% of the speed of light.

• 47:20Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Bill Nye?

  Whoa.

• 47:22Eugene Mirman?

  These are the fastest crackers you've ever heard of.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's something that, you know, like many NIAC proposals, it sounds crazy, but there's nothing in physics that says it's impossible. And so they're looking into sort of the preliminary, you know, concept studies that can do this. And so this was a NIAC-funded proposal, and then along came a billionaire, Yuri Milner, and he invested $100 million into actually creating a proof of concept of this in hopes that we could perhaps have a very tiny, very thin spacecraft at Alpha Centauri within a lifetime.

• 47:59Bill Nye?

  So it would get out there and it would send a signal back, a picture,

• 48:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 48:03Bill Nye?

  in four years at the speed of light?

• 48:06Speaker 04

  That's what they hope.

• 48:07Bill Nye?

  That is extraordinary and just crazy cool. These are just wild, no, really, it's fantastic. So that is a light sail, star shot, and star shade are going to, dare I say it, change the world. This has been really cool, you guys. This has been really cool. Hand for the panel. Thank you so much. Eugene Cordia, Ariel Janet, Ivan Billi. Let's change the world! Thank you all. Thank you!