StarTalk Live! Exploring Our Funky Solar System

Join Neil deGrasse Tyson and astrobiologist Dr. FunkySpoon as we explore our surprising, funky Solar System, from Mercury to Pluto and what lies between. With Eugene Mirman, Sarah Silverman and Jim Gaffigan.

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?

  We are live at the Bell House, Brooklyn, New York.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to our second segment of StarTalk Live. Jim Gaffigan, Sarah Silverman, Eugene Mirman, our comedic panel. And I've got with me my friend and colleague David Grinspoon. Dave, thanks for coming up for this.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks for having me. This is a blast.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. Agreed. So.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been talking about Mars so far. There's stuff we haven't talked about yet. For example, there was this planned mission to Phobos, one of Mars's moons. What was that supposed to do? Phobos. Phobos and Demos. If you knew your Greek mythology.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Designers.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would know that Phobos and Demos were...

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Sex acts.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  On Star Trek.

• 1:18Eugene Mirman?

  Monsters.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  They're the moons of Mars and they're fear and death. Which makes sense because Mars is a god of war. So Mars is surrounded by fear and death, Phobos and Demos. Does it have one of those teardrop tattoos?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  We don't know. That's one of the things we would have found out had this Phobos grunt mission worked.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what was it gonna do?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  The Russians had this mission. It was really an awesome spacecraft that would have gone and landed on Phobos, popped around, and it was even taking bugs, Earth bacteria, to the moon of Mars to see what would happen to it and bring it back to Earth. Why would they do that? To see what happened. We're really interested in what happens to life in outer space. And one way to find out is you take life, even just bacteria, on a journey and you bring it back and see what happened to it.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but why did that journey have to actually land somewhere? You could just hang out in empty space and then come back? You didn't have to poison another planet with our bacteria? That's very Andromeda strain in reverse.

• 2:17Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, have we taken like the common cold or some bacteria, flown it to outer space? And brought it back to see if it'll create Ebola or something like that?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Well, we've definitely taken lots of common cold to outer space, whether we like to or not.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because your engineers sneezed on the cameras. So, the bugs spend years in space.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're waiting to see if radiation will somehow alter the DNA and turn into another species by the time it gets back.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we're thinking about sending people there eventually, so, you know.

• 2:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but mostly kids.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  We want to start out with bacteria.

• 2:52Eugene Mirman?

  They learn languages quickly, they attack.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Or really old people.

• 2:56Eugene Mirman?

  To me, it just sounds like you're making monsters.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta agree with Jim on this.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  But that could be what we're here to do. Right?

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've taken bugs we understand and have characterized. Sending them to Mars, hoping, expecting that your radiation will alter their DNA. Who's gonna open the vial when it comes back? You?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Well, I would. It's not my job really to do that, but...

• 3:23Eugene Mirman?

  We should have David Lee Roth do it.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We should all come up with these people.

• 3:29Eugene Mirman?

  I would say he'd enjoy it, and if something happened, hmm.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is a weird thing to do, I'll admit. And, you know, the Russians do things a little bit differently, but it is a really interesting sign to the question, what happens to life in outer space? It's something we have to understand if we're ever gonna send people.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I can tell you this, that the history of our thinking about Mars, practically every Mars movie I've ever seen, something bad happened to people there, or Martians came here and vaporized us. It's bad.

• 3:59Eugene Mirman?

  No one ever shows up at Mars and it's just James Taylor singing a song? And you're like, this is so nice.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Well, the problem is if you pitched that, it probably wouldn't, you know, wouldn't get made.

• 4:10Eugene Mirman?

  It wouldn't be a good movie.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:11Eugene Mirman?

  But that is the reality.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when are we sending people? You are just making it up.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  When are we sending people? When do you want to?

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  I mean, uh...

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yesterday.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  It depends what you mean by "we." If you mean by "we," the...

• 4:28Eugene Mirman?

  China. By "we," I mean China.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  If you mean China, then all bets are off. If you mean NASA, don't hold your breath. It's gonna be decades. You know, some of these Silicon Valley zillionaires are talking about mounting their own missions, and there are other countries getting in the game. People are talking about a new space race. If somebody decided they wanted to, they could be there in a decade.

• 4:51Eugene Mirman?

  What if the five of us agree? Do you think that would be enough? Or would we need more?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  How much you need? It depends. Are you independently wealthy? I could throw in, like, five bucks.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Alright, so what's the right number of people, do you think, for such a mission? And how about the, like, the sex ratio? And is it celibate people for three years? Or you expect...

• 5:13Speaker 01

  How often are they gonna have sex?

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 5:16Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. When we send people there, will they be having sex?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:20Eugene Mirman?

  I'm just wondering.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the mission will be long enough, 'cause it's a year there. You gotta hang out there, because the orbital alignment of Earth and Mars requires you wait another couple of years until the configuration will serve your trip back. So the total round trip is three, four years, right?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you could, like, so have babies on Mars.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But the radiation could be a problem with the having babies thing, so...

• 5:43Eugene Mirman?

  But they could also stay inside the ship.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  No, inside the ship doesn't help you.

• 5:46Eugene Mirman?

  Really?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Inside the ship could be even worse, radiation-wise, because a little bit of shielding makes it worse, 'cause the radiation comes in and splatters the atoms apart and makes neutrons, and it's actually worse to have a little bit of shielding.

• 5:56Eugene Mirman?

  When you say we could send somebody there in 10 years, do you mean to die right away?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Basically.

• 6:03Eugene Mirman?

  We could send somebody there, and they would have about four hours.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:07Eugene Mirman?

  And I hope they have sex during that time, 'cause they're about to die. So how long could a person live possibly in a shuttle on Mars? Like a day, a week, a year?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Well, we're trying to figure that out. 10 years on Mars might kill you unless we figure out how to make a shelter. Now, you probably could make a shelter just by going underground. But we're still working that problem.

• 6:28Eugene Mirman?

  What if it was a really good 10 years, though?

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. The interesting thing is people have proposed one-way missions. And there've been lots of volunteers. In other words, would you...

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the point of a one-way mission?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  To boldly go.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, just to boldly die.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but why? Why not come back?

• 6:46Eugene Mirman?

  People would write songs about you.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Oh, OK. A one-way mission because it's more feasible. It's cheaper. It's hard to bring someone back. Actually, we can't even bring rocks back. We tried the sample-return mission. We tried to design them to land something. And then you have to bring another spacecraft, fuel it, and then launch it. It's technically a lot harder.

• 7:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I'm going to Mars, I'll want you to do that. It doesn't cost 10 times as much to bring you back. Maybe 2 or 3 times as much. It's a factor of a few.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  It magnifies, though, because you have to bring the returned vehicle and you have to bring the fuel and the complexity.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do that. Well, make your fuel when you get there. Live in the future. Have filling stations en route. This is the future we all thought we'd be in already. And you're telling me I gotta haul it with me?

• 7:28Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get me started.

• 7:30Eugene Mirman?

  Land on an asteroid. Dig in and eat it.

• 7:37Eugene Mirman?

  I thought I could already be eating asteroids. Get on it, science.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Live in Brooklyn, Bell House.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we've got spacecraft everywhere now. There's no place left unlooked at. We got Messenger, and what's it?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Mercury, the little guy near the sun.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mercury, and so what did we find there?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Well, there's ice at the poles, we think, which is really weird considering that Mercury's that close to the sun. There's a much stronger magnetic field than we thought.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so that would be ice, that would be ice where the sun doesn't shine?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be a crater so deep that no sunlight reaches the bottom of it, so you can trap water there?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Yeah, because you go near the poles, and the sun is very low, it never gets very high in the sky, so the rim of a crater permanently shadows the bottom of the crater. And if you put water there, it will never see sunlight, and it'll sink into a deep cold, freeze, and remain there forever. That's why we think there's water on the moon.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 9:17Eugene Mirman?

  You think there's water on the moon right now?

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't know about water on the moon?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  By Gil Scott-Heron?

• 9:26Speaker 01

  No, that's Whitey.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so what else, any other high points of Mercury?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's got a much more complex history than we used to think. We used to think Mercury was just a sort of, we'll call it an end member, just a dead, cold, small world, but it's got a complex, long volcanic history. That's been a surprise. It's more interesting and much more complex than we thought before we went there with Messenger.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so next out, we've got Venus. Who's at Venus now?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Well, there's a spacecraft called Venus Express, a little European Space Agency spacecraft.

• 9:55Eugene Mirman?

  I love that name.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  No, because, because they had like a year to build and launch this thing. They said, "We got a spacecraft, if you can do it quickly." So they put together...

• 10:03Eugene Mirman?

  Why did they have a year to do it?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Because there was a spare from Mars Express, and they said, "Whoever can come up with a mission quickly can launch this thing." And so they came up with instruments, and they sent it to Venus. And it was actually amazing how fast they were able to do it, and the thing has been in orbit for years and still working. So it's basically our first weather satellite at Venus, which is neat.

• 10:23Eugene Mirman?

  It's also where we get those razor blades, right?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 10:27Eugene Mirman?

  They go off, they get them, and they bring them back, you know? That's efficiency.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Spinoffs.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's monitoring Venus weather. Runaway greenhouse effect is there.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Venus is a changeable and complex place like Earth.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, wait, Venus has a runaway greenhouse and there's not even people there.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. We can't blame people for the greenhouse on Venus.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Venus.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Something went wrong on Venus.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very wrong. Venus, we call it our sister planet because it's like the same size and gravity and everything, yet it's like 900 frickin' degrees.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, some people call it our evil twin because it's the same size as Earth. It's basically made out of the same stuff, but it went down this road of extreme greenhouse warmings.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It went bad.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Don't let this happen to your planet.

• 11:08Eugene Mirman?

  Do you think there are monsters there?

• 11:13Speaker 01

  We can't rule it out yet.

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there like water?

• 11:16Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry, is there water? I should say it into the mic.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Not on the surface.

• 11:18Eugene Mirman?

  Not into the drink.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  It's 900 degrees on the surface, but there are clouds that are...

• 11:24Eugene Mirman?

  It's very hot.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  There are sulfuric acid clouds, but there's water in the clouds. So there is water, sort of 30 degrees above the surface in this global cloud deck.

• 11:32Eugene Mirman?

  There is no planet you've described so far that it seems great to live on. Like, you never go like, "It's actually like, have you been to Costa Rica?" It reminds me of that. Everything is just like, "It's on fire. Oh, it's cold like death."

• 11:47Speaker 01

  It depends what you're used to.

• 11:49Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I'm used to this slash Costa Rica.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Probably good skiing. Am I into terraforming? Well, terraforming is the idea of taking a non-Earth-like planet and engineering it to be more Earth-like.

• 12:03Eugene Mirman?

  We saw The Search for Spock.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a Genesis planet, yes.

• 12:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think terraforming is a great sort of mental exercise. It's good to think about because it gets us to think about how we would purposefully change the climate of a planet, something we really need to think about because we

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Purposefully as opposed to not purposely.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  As opposed to inadvertently like we're doing right now.

• 12:25Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, someone's falling for liberal propaganda.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  So I think it's a valuable exercise to say, "How would we intentionally alter the climate of a planet?"

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Geoengineering. Okay, so it's Venus. What do we have looking down at Earth?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  We have a huge number of satellites, weather satellites, land sats, things that are multi-spectral imagers, things that are looking in different wavelengths at land use and chlorophyll in the ocean. I mean, Earth is pretty well-covered. We don't have anything like that at any other planet. We just have these little sentinels, emissaries, out at other planets. But Earth, we have a pretty good network of satellites. And those are even the ones that they tell us about, you know, that aren't classified. There's probably even better ones.

• 13:11Eugene Mirman?

  You think like Facebook is?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 13:14Eugene Mirman?

  Secretly watching us from space.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  I think it's Google, yeah. They're making those, you know.

• 13:18Eugene Mirman?

  So there's all these cameras. They're watching us, right?

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 13:22Eugene Mirman?

  That's how it starts. Then a madman gets control of that.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then the asteroid belt. There's like a gazillion asteroids there.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Are you being literal? That's the technical term, yes.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, gazillion, yeah.

• 13:34Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know! Google's a real thing.

• 13:39Eugene Mirman?

  You guys are like, "Gazillion, bleh." It doesn't go above trillion. Or ultra-doodle billion.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said, "Google's a real thing." He's referencing the number "Google."

• 13:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  G-O-O-G-O-L, "Google", which is one followed by a hundred zeros. That's a "Google". And then the company Google decided to change the spelling and then they messed with everyone's auditory expectation.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  They ruined it.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  It's like "Kids R Us" or whatever, you know?

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they just kind of totally...

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And a "Google" to the "Google" power is a "Googleplex".

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. It's 10 to the "Google" power.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Oh, is that true?

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  What's a "Google" to the "Google" power?

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, but it's not a "Googleplex".

• 14:19Eugene Mirman?

  Fight, fight, fight!

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Nooo.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no.

• 14:25Eugene Mirman?

  What happened? Well, "Googleplex" fight. I've seen it happen millions of times.

• 14:34Eugene Mirman?

  Anyway, so there's life in sulfuric clouds on Venus.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we're past Venus, we're in the asteroid belt.

• 14:39Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 14:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 14:40Eugene Mirman?

  Because there's a gajillion of them.

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A gazillion.

• 14:45Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry to be wrong about the number.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do we have in the asteroid belt?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Well, we actually have a spacecraft out there now called Dawn. It's been orbiting an asteroid called Vesta for a while now and getting these really amazing 3D close-up pictures. And this is really like a small planet. You know, we can get into what's a planet and what's not.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're getting there.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  But the largest asteroids are these round objects. You might call them dwarf planets even if you wanted to. And it's been orbiting it for a while. And what's

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  What's cool about this

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sounds insulting frankly.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  This spacecraft has now left this asteroid and is on its way to another asteroid called Ceres. And it's the first spacecraft we've ever had that visited one object in space, did a mission there, and then took off and is heading to another object in space. So it's our first time we've actually had sort of an expedition that could explore more than one planetary object.

• 15:41Eugene Mirman?

  Like a space Kristen Stewart, is that her name?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Exactly, this thing is promiscuous. It's not satisfied with just one asteroid.

• 15:50Eugene Mirman?

  I read the news.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so Ceres is like, really huge. It's like bigger than all other asteroids combined, so it's probably not an asteroid.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Well, this is semantics, you know, what do you want to call it? In some ways, it's like a planet. It's large enough so that it's round by self-gravity.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, beyond the asteroid belt, we get to... There's nothing at Jupiter now, right?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Well, no, but we have a spacecraft called Juno on its way... Well, it hasn't launched yet, but it's about to be launched to Jupiter. And it's a magnificent spacecraft. It's gonna basically probe the interior of Jupiter by orbiting in such a way that we can measure the gravity and learn what it's like on the inside.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sounds dirty. See, the word "probe" today, you know...

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Well, we haven't gotten to Uranus yet.

• 16:36Eugene Mirman?

  We can leave if... I just want to be alone. The amount that science is only sex words is upsetting.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  It's a mandatory probe.

• 16:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jupiter's got Europa. I'd love me some Europa.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't have any missions on their way to Europa now, but we might. NASA's top priority for a next big, what we call flagship mission, billion-dollar-plus missions.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billion-plus would be billions and billions.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you.

• 17:02Eugene Mirman?

  I'm sure we just shut down the schools in the states that don't matter. We could easily afford to do this.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know how little a billion dollars gets you in this country?

• 17:14Eugene Mirman?

  Give it to me and I'll find out. If any billionaires are listening, please give me one billion dollars.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's in store for Europa?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  So Europa's NASA's top priority target for our next big mission because it's one of the places where there ought to be life if we're right about what it takes for life. There's a ocean, we think, beneath this icy crust. In fact, maybe our solar system's biggest ocean of liquid water there. So we want to know that for sure and we want to understand...

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kept warm not by the sun.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, kept warm by...

• 17:43Eugene Mirman?

  But by the core?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  No, no, no, by... well, kinda, but it's Jupiter's gravity. It's the flexing of the moons in orbit around Jupiter's massive gravitational field, interacting with each other.

• 17:54Eugene Mirman?

  What if, in doing this, we opened up...

• 17:57Speaker 01

  That warms them up and melts that water.

• 17:58Eugene Mirman?

  And all the monsters came out.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jim, that's the fifth planet you're worried about monsters. Have you not fully come out of childhood?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  There's probably monsters out there.

• 18:08Eugene Mirman?

  First of all, if there's life there, I think it's reasonable to say they're monsters. And a lot of those monsters will look like shellfish.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we want to find monsters on Europa.

• 18:16Eugene Mirman?

  I want to be the first person to eat a space lobster.

• 18:22Eugene Mirman?

  Deadliest catch: Europa.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Ice moon truckers.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On to Saturn.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a spacecraft there now called Cassini. That's one of these Energizer Bunny spacecraft. It got there in July 2004. And it's been making beautiful images of Saturn and the rings. But the most astounding discoveries have been about the moons. Titan is a moon of Saturn that is one of the most interesting places for astrobiology because it turns out to be a very Earth-like world in some ways. It's got rivers, it's got volcanoes, it's got clouds, it's got rainfall.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, it's got coastlines too, yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  It's got coastlines. But it's all made out of weird stuff. The rivers are liquid methane, the rainfalls liquid methane, the dunes are organic matter blowing around.

• 19:29Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, what do you mean, "organic matter"?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Like, carbon stuff, the stuff that we're made out of.

• 19:33Eugene Mirman?

  Like, life?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Is... maybe.

• 19:34Eugene Mirman?

  Rivers of flowing life?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be scary.

• 19:39Eugene Mirman?

  It literally sounds like a James Taylor song.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:44Eugene Mirman?

  How long would it take me to get there? And I'm, like, on a bicycle.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  It would take you a long time. It's a billion miles away. It's very, very cold there, but there's a lot going on on Titan.

• 19:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what you're saying is, its temperature is so cold that what we normally think of as gas has liquefied, and what we nor-

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Well, that's happened to me.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  I was 16 and I was really, really sick.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, things that we think of as gas, there is a temperature at which it would liquefy. That's what's happened on Titan. So, isn't it true that water there is just simply frozen, solid, so that it's the bedrock of the planet?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, it's way too cold on the surface for our kind of life because the water is all frozen. Could there be some other kind of life in liquid methane? That's an interesting possibility.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe life doesn't require liquid water. Maybe it just requires a liquid.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  A liquid.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  And interesting organic chemistry, of which there's oodles on Titan. But underneath the surface, there is a liquid water ocean on Titan. So there's probably even geological activity that's mixing those organics from the surface down into the ocean underground.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if it's so cold and it has volcanoes, then these are like ice volcanoes.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 21:00Eugene Mirman?

  What's an ice volcano?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Well, picture a volcano where instead of magma, it's liquid water coming out and freezing like magma does on Earth.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it hurls chunks of ice.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than chunks of rock. Because the ice is the rock.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Another cool thing about Titan, by the way, is if you did go there, I think human-powered flight would be possible, like those machines that Leonardo da Vinci designed.

• 21:23Eugene Mirman?

  Helicopters?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Well, no, like wings, because there's very low gravity and there's a very thick, dense atmosphere. So you could probably strap on some wings and go flying on Titan.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Oh my god. I would love that.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Was that because I said strap-on? Oh.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  How dare you?

• 21:45Speaker 02

  No, that would be up my alley. If it was temperature-controlled.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  But by the way, there's another problem. If you bring oxygen to Titan, it's gonna explode. So a person with an oxygen tank on Titan is a bomb.

• 22:01Eugene Mirman?

  So if you exhale on Titan, you would blow up.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Well, if you lit a cigarette or something, forget it. You're just gonna... It sounds pretty dangerous. Yeah, yeah. It's like, geez, maybe we should... It's too dangerous. Well, maybe, but you know, people like to do crazy stuff. I mean, people climb Mount Everest. What's to stop people from going to do extreme sports on Titan?

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to clarify, on Titan, you have rivers of methane. But you can't just take a match and toss it in and explode the planet, because there's no oxygen, and it needs the oxygen to combust.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hence your comment, if you bring an oxygen tank, you are a walking bomb.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Right. So we'd have to give some thought as to how to build a space suit that you could bring to Titan. I wouldn't want to be the guy to test it out. We'll send some bacteria first, you know.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Then how will bacteria change it? It will change its surroundings, right?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  It depends. If they could live there, that'd be kind of awesome. But probably any Earth bacteria we send would not be able to live on Titan.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You genetically engineer bacteria to do this. You can imagine engineering a species that will enjoy that environment and maybe produce oxygen as its byproduct. It'll ignite the methane, that'll get rid of it, and make the place good for us to land in the future.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you don't want to get rid of the methane on Titan because the methane is the greenhouse gas that keeps it from being even colder. So I think we have to give some thought to the unintended consequences of your little scheme here.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait. If you evaporate the methane, then that would warm the moon, not cool it, right?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, because methane is the main greenhouse gas on Titan.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying. So you put it in the atmosphere.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Oh, if you get it out of the lakes and into the atmosphere.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then that could warm it up.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be yes.

• 23:53Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, I am ready to act on this plan. You guys agree? Let's do this? Sounds fine.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  But not by reducing oxygen. I think we gotta work this out a little bit.

• 24:03Eugene Mirman?

  No, no, we're all set.

• 24:06Eugene Mirman?

  You guys clearly have it all figured out.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So moons are cool.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  There's this other place called Enceladus, which is really awesome.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another moon of Saturn.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Another moon of Saturn that is spewing water out into space.

• 24:17Eugene Mirman?

  It's like someone left the water running.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  They left it on.

• 24:20Eugene Mirman?

  We need someone to go up there and turn the faucet off.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  But it doesn't make sense because this is frozen icy moon, but the south pole for some reason is hot and spewing water into space.

• 24:28Eugene Mirman?

  Has it been drinking?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  What's the water doing in space now?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  It makes one of the rings of Saturn. I mean, there's an E-ring, which is fed by the stuff squirting out of Enceladus.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that which Saturn moons spew forth goes into space, and it joins the other material to make the rings of Saturn.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  And some of it snows down on the surface of Enceladus, which is cool because if we want to see if there's life on Enceladus, unlike Europa where we have to drill down through all this ice, if there are microbes in Enceladus, they're literally snowing down on the surface and you could just go with a shovel and find them.

• 25:04Eugene Mirman?

  And scoop them up.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Scoop them up.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So take me to Uranus and Neptune. But we got nothing there.

• 25:26Eugene Mirman?

  You saying Uranus in a way that's like different from how people used to say it? You saying like Uranus or something?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  You want to hear something funny about that? One time Carl Sagan told me that...

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Name dropper.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  I know. But he told me that when he-

• 25:40Eugene Mirman?

  But if you're gonna do it somewhere, this is a good choice.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  When he was in school, the kids got all giggly about calling it Uranus because it had the word urine in it. So you can't win. We don't have anything going at Uranus now. Uranus. One of the Voyagers. Voyager 2 after it flew by-

• 25:58Speaker 02

  I was in a Voyager two-parter. I didn't think anyone was gonna bring it up, so I just thought I should bring it up.

• 26:04Eugene Mirman?

  Alright.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:07Eugene Mirman?

  She was on the, in a two-part episode of Voyager on Star Trek. Everything's Clear Now, next.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 26:14Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, no, I agree.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  We've only had one mission there, a flyby, in the 80s, but in NASA's 10-year plan, the decadal survey that they just came up with, a very influential plan for the highest priority missions for the next decade, one of the top priority missions is a billion-dollar probe to Uranus.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  We need Obamacare.

• 26:43Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, and so now we got a mission to Pluto.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got one Pluto fan.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Pluto the planet.

• 26:53Eugene Mirman?

  Did you make them change the name of Pluto, or just it's not a plan, but we can still call it Pluto?

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't make anybody do anything. All I did, no, no, all I did was offer insight into how to think about the problem, and what you then conclude is inevitable from the facts.

• 27:11Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds like you were mean to a planet.

• 27:15Eugene Mirman?

  And then you justify it or something?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know I had-

• 27:19Eugene Mirman?

  That's called bullying.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  I had all these kids at the museum coming up and asking me what happened to Pluto. You know, you've been through all that too, but I had to reassure them it was okay.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Pluto is still there. But we're headed there. I'm glad.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's gonna be awesome. So it's a little spacecraft called New Horizons. It launched in January 2006. I was there-

• 27:39Eugene Mirman?

  It sounds like an airline magazine.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  It was incredible.

• 27:41Eugene Mirman?

  It's called a Delta Traveler thing. Uh, New Horizons for Horizon Airlines. There was a great interview with Matt Damon in Pluto.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  It's the fastest object ever launched from Earth, because it's got a long way to go. And is most of the way there now. It's getting there in July 2015.

• 28:03Eugene Mirman?

  How long does it take to get to planets and stuff generally?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Well, how long is it from 2006 to 2015? But that's a long time, because Pluto is really far away. It's on the edge of the solar system.

• 28:13Eugene Mirman?

  How long does it take to get to like Mars or-

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Oh, Mars takes like two connecting flights. Mars is fast, yeah.

• 28:18Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, ooh, nine months, okay.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  It's a gestational kind of time scale, yeah.

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the human species, yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Pluto's in our sights, in spite of the demotion.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and that's a good thing. However, you're not gonna pull into orbit. This is gonna be a flyby. You're gonna wait 10 years and you got like, what, five hours?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very, very fast. It just whips through the system. And we don't even get the pictures back right away, because it's such a little spacecraft and so far away. It takes like a month after we get there to send the pictures back. But it's gonna be really cool. Pluto, we already know, just from the Hubble Space Telescope, Pluto has a varied surface. It's got light areas and dark areas. We know it's got an atmosphere that is escaping into space.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lame atmosphere.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Well, it depends what you mean by a lame atmosphere.

• 29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What percent of Earth's atmosphere is Pluto's atmosphere?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Oh, it's tiny. It's tiny.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quantify the word tiny.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I don't know, you tell me. It's microbe or something, isn't it?

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One thousandth of Earth's atmosphere?

• 29:16Eugene Mirman?

  What do you mean by lame atmosphere?

• 29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lame, hardly any atmosphere.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Well, you could say that about Mars, and Mars just has-

• 29:22Eugene Mirman?

  I would just say it was deficient. I would call it lame.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. It seems hostile. Really? That's awfully chauvinistic. It's an interesting atmosphere because it's streaming off of the surface into space. And we've never actually visited a place with an atmosphere like that. So I think we're gonna learn some new things.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Pluto's surface is generating its own atmosphere?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 29:42Eugene Mirman?

  And then that atmosphere flies off into space?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Pluto's orbit is so elliptical. When it goes far from the sun, is that when you recover the atmosphere that's left?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's what's weird is that Pluto's atmosphere seems to sort of come and go with its weird seasons as it slowly... It's because of its tilt. In this case, no. But you know, Earth's atmosphere's streaming off into space too, by the way.

• 30:05Eugene Mirman?

  What?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  It is. Sorry. Just slowly.

• 30:10Eugene Mirman?

  So slowly that it's okay? Or like, slow slowly that we really need to convince Republicans of it?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  No, so slowly that it's okay. But it's a normal thing. It's a normal, healthy thing for a planet to be losing atmosphere.

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this mission ought to keep the Pluto lovers happy in spite of the demotion, right?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, the demotion thing, as you know, it's fun to talk about, but it's really kind of silly from a scientific standpoint, which it doesn't reflect really what we've learned about Pluto. In a way, it reflects what we've learned about the rest of the solar system and the rest of the universe. And ourselves. You know, the demotion doesn't change the scientific interest in Pluto.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The more we learn about Pluto, the more we learn about ourselves.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a kind of place we've never been before, so we're pretty excited.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what are the prospects for life on the exoplanets that are now joining the catalogs of what we know to exist in the galaxy?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  I would say almost 100%. In other words, if you believe there's no life on any exoplanet, then it's almost like being a creationist. You have to think that there's something so special, so remarkable about Earth, that's not gonna be met anywhere in the, say, billions and billions?

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billions and billions of...

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Of worlds out there. And that just seems incredibly unlikely. If that were true, it would mean there's something astounding about this planet. But nothing that we've learned about the history of life, about what we think we know about the origin of life, about the conditions for it, suggests that that's true.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about a probe out to leave our solar system and go to another star system?

• 31:51Speaker 01

  It's gonna be hard. The stars are very far away. They're not just far away, you know. But what if we could fold space with all of the energy of the universe? Yeah. So if there were some new physics that we don't know about, that we discovered, that's one way to do it. But the thing is, there are some trends. If you look at Moore's Law, how fast technology's changing, the miniaturization of technology. If we could make a space probe the size of this Coke can that had the sophisticated instrumentation of the Mars rover, which we probably will be able to do before too long, and accelerated it close to the speed of light, which we might be able to do before too long, then it's not gonna take that long, so... Wait, how could we do that? Is that a technology we might have?

• 32:30Speaker 02

  It's gonna be an app.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's beyond our current capabilities, but I can't swear to you that in 50 years, that will be true. Like, all this work that's gonna have to happen, I don't have to do any of it, right?

• 32:44Eugene Mirman?

  Jim, I'm gonna need you to build a Coke can-sized probe that travels almost at the speed of light, but I'm gonna give you a month to look into it. Are we sort of close to anything, or are we like 50 years away, or...?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  No, I mean, what's gonna happen first is that we're gonna learn a lot about the exoplanets with telescopes and with very clever techniques of looking at the light coming from them. We're already doing that now, we're discovering them, and we're starting to learn...

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look for methane on one of the ex... So let me offer some reflective concluding comments here. From what I know of the universe...

• 33:17Eugene Mirman?

  Which is a lot.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  But not as much as...

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Probably more than I know, you know?

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The cool thing about the universe is, something can be rare, yet common. So something can happen one in a million stars, but when you have 400 billion stars, it's happening all the time in the galaxy.

• 33:46Eugene Mirman?

  That's why some people have so many marriages.

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so-

• 33:51Speaker 02

  The older we live.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The good thing about the universe is, you can appeal to the sheer scale of the cosmos to improve the likelihood of finding that which is otherwise highly improbable. And that's the kind of universe I enjoy living in. I didn't have a choice, but suppose we had a universe that had ten stars in it? Then clearly we'd be the only planet with life. But when you have billions of stars-

• 34:19Eugene Mirman?

  Please, no, because then even this here, we have life maybe on other planets.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe so, exactly.

• 34:25Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, good, good point.

• 34:26Eugene Mirman?

  Just to clarify the science.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good point. I'm with you, we're good.

• 34:29Eugene Mirman?

  That's why I'm here.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess I-

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me clarify the point, that if there are only a dozen stars, you have room for uniqueness in such small systems. But when you have a universe, a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars, and a universe of nearly a hundred billion galaxies, then it's just a matter of where you're looking and how long it takes before you find something else just like what you wanted to find. And so, I would say, yes, a hundred percent chance of finding life, because the universe doesn't make anything in ones. I just hope they're nice.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jim, of all you heard, where do you want to, where do you want to visit in the solar system? Where do you want to go? Oh my gosh. From what you had learned, from what you can glean- I thought there wasn't gonna be a test.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess Mars, because, you know, the blood.

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sarah?

• 35:33Speaker 02

  I'd probably say Mars, because like, everybody's talking about it, and, um, it's, you know-

• 35:40Eugene Mirman?

  I heard Brandon and Angelina already have a place there.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Mars's ears are burning tonight.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars, okay.

• 35:49Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, I think, was it Europa that was the ice underneath his lobsters?

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, shellfish.

• 35:56Eugene Mirman?

  That Europa is not the same as that coffee shop on 57th Street, right?

• 36:04Eugene Mirman?

  Europa.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Europa.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I want to go, I want to go to Titan and go rafting down one of those methane rivers and try not to blow up. Sounds dangerous.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I foresee a future where we embrace space exploration on such a scale that it's no longer just sort of one mission here or there that the entire solar system becomes our backyard. And on that note, thanks for joining us for StarTalk Live! And thank you to the panel. Jim Gaffigan. Sarah Silverman. Eugene Mirman. And our cosmic man about town, David Grinspoon.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Give it up for the NSF.

• 37:17Eugene Mirman?

  Communist.