Live at Awesome Con – To Mars and Beyond

We explore the mission to Mars and beyond with Bill Nye the Science Guy, co-host Eugene Mirman, astrobiologist David Grinspoon, former NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman, and comedians Jo Firestone and Hari Kondabolu, recorded live at Awesome Con 2017. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/live-at-awesome-con-to-mars-and-beyond/ Thanks to our Patrons Justin Adamson, Forrest Shepard, Andrew Wood, William Price, and Kynan Woodford for supporting us this week. Photo Credit: Elliot Severn.

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.

• 0:16Eugene Mirman?

  Hello, everybody. It is my great pleasure to welcome StarTalk Live to the show, to AwesomeCon. Ladies and gentlemen, let me bring on your host, one of America's great science educators and communicators, Bill Nye the Science Guy.

• 0:35Bill Nye?

  Eugene, Eugene, guy hug.

• 0:37Eugene Mirman?

  Hello.

• 0:38Bill Nye?

  Yes, good to see you.

• 0:39Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome.

• 0:39Bill Nye?

  Greetings.

• 0:43Bill Nye?

  Wow, look at you guys. Greetings, greetings.

• 0:49Bill Nye?

  I imagine this is not the first time you've heard this this weekend. This is awesome!

• 0:55Bill Nye?

  So, speaking of awesome, should we introduce our guest?

• 0:59Eugene Mirman?

  Let's do it.

• 1:00Bill Nye?

  Well, start out, where should we start? We'll start over here. The most hilarious woman ever. And you know her by her Twitter handle, @KingFireStorm. Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Firestone.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  Hello, hello.

• 1:25Eugene Mirman?

  Hello.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 1:29Bill Nye?

  Next, in this corner, or this chair, from the Astrobiology Institute, you know him by his Twitter handle, Dr. Funky Spoon. David Grinspoon, David, David, David.

• 1:52Bill Nye?

  Good to see you, sir, yes. Good to see you too. Then, in this corner, which is a chair. And I'd give you his Twitter handle, but he said, "No, just Google him." Hari Kondabolu.

• 2:07Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome.

• 2:08Bill Nye?

  Hari Kondabolu. And then lastly, everybody. Somebody who's, who really works in the business full-time. Uh, the second-in-command at NASA. Uh, the deputy administrator. Dr. Dava Newman. Give it up. Here she is.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Hi, guys. Thank you, sir.

• 2:30Bill Nye?

  Oh, we'll do this, and then this, and then this. Oh, we messed up our microphones. Look at that. There it is. Now, please, everybody, please sit down. Are there any questions on what we've covered so far? No, we're at Awesome Khan. This is superhero time. And onstage here with me, I claim, are the superheroes of space exploration.

• 2:54Bill Nye?

  So... So for me, what I'm hoping for is to have superpowers. Right? Now, what do you guys want in superpowers? Main thing for me, I want to be able to fly. And then the next thing down that list for me is to be able to have extraordinary vision.

• 3:12Eugene Mirman?

  What's extraordinary vision? Like, how far?

• 3:16Bill Nye?

  Well, I'd like to see other planets.

• 3:18Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:19Bill Nye?

  Yeah. And then, I'd like to have vision that would find life, and stuff like that. So, to get this started, Dr. Newman, you are an expert in aerospace and biomedical engineering. Yes? Your research studies include advanced spacesuit design and dynamics and control of astronaut motion, which is not trivial when you're in zero G.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Right, or Mars.

• 3:42Bill Nye?

  Or Mars. And, uh, you're the director of MIT's Technology and Policy Program.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  On leave to serve NASA?

• 3:50Bill Nye?

  And as well as your deputy director at NASA. Now, Dr. Greenspan. Sir. You're, of course, you're a regular here on StarTalk. That's why you're beloved.

• 4:02Eugene Mirman?

  Oh my.

• 4:03Bill Nye?

  And you are, I presume you are funky and you're good with a spoon. And that's why you're Dr.

• 4:08Eugene Mirman?

  I do my best.

• 4:08Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you're Dr. Funky Spoon. But right now, you're the senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, right? Which is like, an amorphous thing.

• 4:17Eugene Mirman?

  It's distributed.

• 4:18Bill Nye?

  Distributed, because it's the modern world in which we now live. And you're a co-investigator on Mars Curiosity Rover, right? And stuff like that.

• 4:25Eugene Mirman?

  This is right.

• 4:26Bill Nye?

  So, uh, here's the thing, you guys. I want to just ask you to start with, because we're at Awesome Con. What would be your favorite, let's see, we'll start with David. What would be your favorite superhero?

• 4:36Speaker 04

  So I'm gonna combine a few. So it's Elasti-

• 4:39Bill Nye?

  Will you, what, you can do that?

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm gonna do it. It's Elastigirl with Spider-Man, because the suit is cool. We came up with it first, you know, for a suit for Mars. And I like to fly too. So Batman, so Elastispiderbatgirl. That's what I'm going with.

• 4:53Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  That's what I'm going with.

• 4:54Bill Nye?

  Cool. And, uh-

• 4:57Eugene Mirman?

  Batman just doesn't really fly as much as he falls incredibly well.

• 5:00Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah. And he doesn't ever, seldom gets hurt.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  What was Elastigirl's, I'm not familiar, Elastigirl was just kinda bendy? Or what was her thing?

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Super bendy, cool, yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  Super bendy?

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Around, yeah, nothing got in her way. And fast.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  What was the difference between her and say Gumby?

• 5:19Eugene Mirman?

  Gumby, I think, is more Christian.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  And green, right. She's, she's red, she's kinda more reddish.

• 5:27Bill Nye?

  Oh, so Gumby's green and she's red.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 5:30Bill Nye?

  There.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 5:31Bill Nye?

  Just start with that.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  Just start with that.

• 5:33Bill Nye?

  But seriously, you made, you made an allusion to spacesuits? That are, resemble superhero costumes?

• 5:41Speaker 04

  There you go, but the, the technology came first, I think, yeah.

• 5:45Bill Nye?

  The technology came first?

• 5:47Speaker 04

  I think so, we've been working on the technology for a long time.

• 5:50Bill Nye?

  What technology are you talking about?

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Advanced spacesuit design, it has to be, you know, lightweight, mobile, flexible. We're going to Mars, did you hear? We're gonna become interplanetary, so-

• 6:00Bill Nye?

  We're going to Mars, not, you guys, we're not going to Mars during, uh, this-

• 6:06Eugene Mirman?

  Surprise, we're going to Mars, pick a partner. I hope you're with someone you love.

• 6:13Eugene Mirman?

  Strap in.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  Well, what are we doing in Mars? What are we doing? We're setting up shop, or what's happening there?

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Well, we're already there, we've been there for the last 50 years.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  With orbiters, landers, and the next 50 years are even cooler. We're going with people. So, first we're going out. Space station that's in low earth orbit, phase one. We've been doing this for 16 years together with the world. Then we move out to Earth, Moon, in all the 2020s. And our rovers are still hanging out, doing Mars. We have these great experiments. We keep popping off the robotic missions to Mars. And then boom, boots on Mars with people in the 2030s. It's like stuff, stuff will be there.

• 6:48Eugene Mirman?

  What's the year that you think that there'll be boots with people inside the boots?

• 6:52Speaker 04

  People inside the boots? In the 2030s. In the 2030s. It's the 2030s and it's probably not all of us, but it's my Mars, the Mars generation.

• 6:58Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Teenagers, teenagers today.

• 7:01Speaker 06

  Is there gonna be commercial, like, flights to Mars? Is that the plan? When does that start?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Well, government and commercials. So it's public-private partnership. And it's the world, too. I heard Southwest is doing specials.

• 7:14Eugene Mirman?

  I can't wait till there's some weird line where you have to get into to get a Mars. Special TSA. Great Southwest joke, terrible airline.

• 7:22David Grinspoon?

  Watch out for the baggage charges.

• 7:24Bill Nye?

  Before we go too far along, David, you have a favorite superhero?

• 7:28David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I guess my favorite superhero is Planet Girl slash Planet Boy. Because...

• 7:35Bill Nye?

  Planet Girl?

• 7:37David Grinspoon?

  Slash Planet Boy because she's transgender and interplanetary. And she's got spectrometer eyes, multi-wavelength imaging spectrometer eyes. And she's got ion drives on her toes. So she can go in orbit around any planet and image just about anything you would want to.

• 7:57Bill Nye?

  Dr. Newman, you are the second in command at NASA. That's like a superpower.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  It is super cool. I have the best job in the world. Maybe the second best. I think it's the best job in the world.

• 8:08Eugene Mirman?

  Can you ever go like, "Get out of here, go to outer space"?

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Not out loud.

• 8:15Bill Nye?

  Because if you did, it would cost a lot of money.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:19Bill Nye?

  So, so when you say journey to Mars, we spell that J two M?

• 8:24Speaker 04

  I like that, that's a good acronym.

• 8:25Bill Nye?

  Is that right?

• 8:26Speaker 04

  That's my shorthand for it.

• 8:27Bill Nye?

  And so, uh, uh, in order to make the journey to Mars, let me ask you a couple of things. What do we need to do?

• 8:34Speaker 04

  We need a big rocket, so we're designing and developing, and this is real, our space launch system is well under development.

• 8:42Eugene Mirman?

  How long will it take to travel from Earth to Mars?

• 8:44Speaker 04

  So, you know, round trips, about eight months to get there, but just think of it as about a two-year round trip in transit. But hopefully we stay 600 days on the surface of Mars, exploring.

• 8:54Bill Nye?

  And when you say 600 days, 600 Earth days, 600 Sol's?

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a, that's debatable. Let's say it's 600 Earth days, since I'm kinda counting in Earth days right now.

• 9:03Eugene Mirman?

  And 600 days is also just 600 days?

• 9:06Bill Nye?

  I think anybody who's ever seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey would say, "That is awesome." And the reason, part of the reason it was awesome, it was spinning. Right? The space station is spinning, creating some artificial gravity. But, uh, right now, the proposal is to punch it and go to Mars fast enough, exercise enough on the way, and take the right medications to preserve bones.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Keeping, preserve muscles and bones. Musculoskeletal, the bone, uh, we lose, uh, typically you lose 1 to 2% bone mineral density per month. Here on Earth, that's per decade. But maybe we have some small, you can do small, short arm centrifugation that fits in the craft. That's a really interesting concept, you know, like a spin in the gym. You know, imagine instead of the elliptical, it's a, could be a spinning thing. So we're still, you know, playing around with the concept.

• 9:53Eugene Mirman?

  You would be in a spinning thing and it would?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Well, say the spacecraft, you know, you know what? You know, 2001, that was fantastic. Engineers love it, but that's expensive when you have a two-kilometer radius, right?

• 10:04Bill Nye?

  Tell me about it.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  So, let's do a smaller one, cause you know, we have great budgets. But we could spin inside.

• 10:10Bill Nye?

  Just a second, David. Just a normal blank? What, a normal what?

• 10:15Speaker 04

  A normal spacecraft, normal Mars spacecraft.

• 10:18Bill Nye?

  A normal Mars spacecraft?

• 10:20Speaker 04

  That's what I think about every day. And we could have little, think of like little spinning beds inside, see? That's cool, that's still artificial gravity, but within the constraints of a normal Mars spacecraft.

• 10:30Bill Nye?

  So, let's say that problem is solved. What is the biggest challenge?

• 10:33Speaker 04

  The biggest challenge for getting people to, uh, become interplanetary, cause we will become interplanetary, I hope sooner than later, that's what I'm working on. Biggest challenge is... The will.

• 10:45Bill Nye?

  The will, deciding to do it.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  We have to focus just deciding yes. The biggest challenge is just saying yes and getting, all of you, getting all the people behind it say that, first answer why, why are we going? They're the enduring questions. Are we alone in the universe? Is there life? Has there been past life? That's the why. Biggest challenge is just say, let's just say yes.

• 11:05Bill Nye?

  So...

• 11:05Speaker 04

  And stay the course and don't get, you know, derailed and just focus, focus, focus, and then we get there.

• 11:11Bill Nye?

  So that's the biggest challenge, yes.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  Who's saying no? Who's saying no to this? Like, people that are afraid of aliens?

• 11:19Speaker 04

  It's not no, it's just, you know, apathy.

• 11:21Speaker 06

  Who gets to, who gets to own Mars?

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Oh, it has to be global. I mean, NASA, we're saying, here's our plan, here's what we want to lead, we have all of our elements, you know, heavy lift launch, Ryan capsule on top, we get out, and then we're saying, world, come with us.

• 11:35Eugene Mirman?

  Even Estonia?

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Estonia, yes.

• 11:39Eugene Mirman?

  Sure, sure.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  Who wants to join? It's global, it's global exploration.

• 11:43Speaker 06

  Isn't that a risk? Because that's the way colonialism worked before, like, all these different countries were going to a land and claiming it, so won't that just happen again with, like, different companies and different, like...

• 11:53Speaker 04

  You know, you think, maybe we can get it right this time.

• 11:55Speaker 06

  Ultimately, the Martians will probably own Mars. Yeah, but we're gonna kill them off, I discussed this earlier.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  It could be, uh...

• 12:03Eugene Mirman?

  We're gonna become the Martians we're colonizing.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  It could be really fossilized now.

• 12:06Speaker 06

  When we go there, we'll be the Martians.

• 12:08Speaker 05

  Sorry, really quickly, we're talking about Martians in this scientific form. They're real, what's happening?

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Well, okay, Earth and Mars, 4.5 billion years, sister planets, beautiful, wonderful, and we think, because we have a lot of scientific data, Mars, 3.5 billion years ago, is probably wet, wonderful, maybe a little wild.

• 12:26Bill Nye?

  Back in the day.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Back in the day, 3.5 billion...

• 12:28Eugene Mirman?

  Like Costa Rica? Like a little like Costa Rica?

• 12:32Speaker 04

  Maybe, could, yeah, Costa Rica, and then something, something might have gone terribly wrong. Well, what went terribly wrong?

• 12:38Eugene Mirman?

  Too many parties.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  Too many parties. We'd like to figure that out, because that tells us a lot, again, about Earth, about spaceship Earth. And so if there's past life, it's probably kind of fossilized and, you know, that's what we're looking for, past life, probably.

• 12:51Bill Nye?

  So a couple things, though, literally, there is a space treaty from 1967.

• 12:58Eugene Mirman?

  Signed by John Lennon.

• 13:03Bill Nye?

  The wording of it is a little bit vague of the space treaty, kind of deliberately, because it talks about going to the moon and other celestial bodies, like people, the Mars was a long way away. Nevertheless, Mars is getting to be within reach, it's getting to be a reasonable thing that people might do. And if we can really do this, I just, my opinion, which as you know is correct, is that it's just not so easy to get to Mars. It's just not, it's not like these guys came.

• 13:32Speaker 04

  It's hard.

• 13:33Bill Nye?

  They came from Europe, and they went across North America, they came from Europe, they went to South Africa, and they did, they started eating things, and setting up tents and stuff, but on Mars, it's a much more difficult deal.

• 13:45David Grinspoon?

  Well, there's also a big difference, which is that there were people here, uh, when Europeans got here, and they weren't always recognized as people, and that caused a lot of problems. It seems as though there are no people on Mars, so the setup is inherently different.

• 14:00Bill Nye?

  But what about, what about the, uh, protecting, the role, let's say, the objective to protect Martian life if it's found?

• 14:10David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, that's one of our big scientific objectives now, of course, is to find out if there is Martian life, so that we don't inadvertently do something really stupid to it.

• 14:20Bill Nye?

  So that, along that line, we're sending robots, right? By robots, we mean spacecraft that land, drive around, cool tires, and, uh, to look for things, but what, how do we know that those things are sterile, those robots have been made clean enough to land there without contaminating the Martian life when we see it?

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Well, we're work on it, we take it serious, that's, you know, planetary protection. And we think about forward protection, we bring life, we're looking for life on Mars, well, we sure won't, don't want it to be our life, so we do that, and back contamination, so forward contamination, so it has to be, you know, it's a whole area.

• 14:55David Grinspoon?

  There's no, there's no way to know for sure, um, but, but it is taken seriously, we do our best, uh, there are planetary protection protocols, we try to clean our spacecraft, we don't sterilize them 100%, but we, so we know we've brought some microbes to Mars.

• 15:10Bill Nye?

  Well, when you say we don't sterilize them 100%, I will ask the obvious, why not?

• 15:16David Grinspoon?

  Because it's very hard to, in order to sterilize a spacecraft, you would have to cook the whole thing to a point where you would destroy a lot of the scientific instruments.

• 15:26Bill Nye?

  You'd melt the electronics.

• 15:28David Grinspoon?

  So we kind of play this game where we get them clean enough so that we know how many microbes are on there and we land them in places where we don't think those microbes would survive. It's a little bit of a game you have to play. And we don't, so we know there are some microbes on Mars that we've brought there, but we don't believe we've started colonies of Earth organisms on Mars.

• 15:49Eugene Mirman?

  Because I would love to beat everybody there and put a bunch of rabbits on Mars. And then you go like, "Oh my god, there's so many rabbits."

• 15:58Speaker 05

  What are we looking for as far as Martians? Are we looking for like plants or worms or?

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Fossilized, it's kind of like thinking about going to the beach and looking at those cool, you know, fossilized shells, kind of like that.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  Like something like, like a mussel, like a mussel, like a seafood.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Harder and flatter and 3.5 billion years old.

• 16:16Eugene Mirman?

  So you're looking for what was there, not what is there?

• 16:19Speaker 04

  Past life.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  There's nothing there.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  What is there, well, what is there, we're finding out every day. We know how Mars lost its atmosphere. Our maven observer just helped us figure that out. And we know there's methane. Mars is breathing, kind of saying hi to us with methane coming out. Think it might be active methane.

• 16:36Bill Nye?

  So when you find-

• 16:37Eugene Mirman?

  Active methane from what?

• 16:40Bill Nye?

  Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  Oh my god.

• 16:43Eugene Mirman?

  People lighting matches?

• 16:45David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, we don't know. In fact, in fact, the existence of the methane itself is somewhat controversial, although it's looking better and better. There probably is methane. And of course, a long time ago, before we found the methane, that was one of the things that scientists said would be a biosignature on Mars. If you find methane, then there's gases that are weird gases that shouldn't be in the atmosphere. Just like on Earth, there's oxygen in the atmosphere that comes from life. If you find methane on Mars, we used to say, then that'll be a sign of life. So now we found methane on Mars, but we're not sure it's a sign of life because there's not much of it and it behaves in weird ways. And there are some just chemical geological reactions that can make methane inside the Earth.

• 17:29David Grinspoon?

  Inside a planet. But most of the methane- On Earth's atmosphere does come from bugs, from life.

• 17:36Speaker 06

  Just to clarify, we're talking about space farts, right?

• 17:38Bill Nye?

  Yes, that's right.

• 17:40David Grinspoon?

  And burps.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  It could be propulsion, you know, see methane would be great propulsion force, that's why it's a...

• 17:45Eugene Mirman?

  You think if we could use the methane to get back to Earth?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  There you go, gas station, you know, we gotta have that first gas station on Mars.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  The first gas station, how cute.

• 17:54Bill Nye?

  Is it gonna have like a mini Mars and stuff? I guess we'd have to set that up, but imagine this, everybody, you land...

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Run by rabbits.

• 18:02Bill Nye?

  You land the right spacecraft on Mars and you use the chemistry of the rocks and the atmosphere to make rocket fuel...

• 18:10Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 18:11Bill Nye?

  To fly back. I mean, that is an extraordinary idea and very cool. And we will talk about that coming up in the next segment. You've been watching, you've been listening to StarTalk Radio. We'll be back right after this.

• 18:46Bill Nye?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Live. We're at the Convention Center in Washington DC. And I am joined by this fabulous panel, which includes our beloved Eugene Mirman,

• 19:01Bill Nye?

  Hari Kondabolu, Joe Firestone, David Grinspoon, and Second-in-Command at NASA, David Newman. So...

• 19:14Bill Nye?

  When we left, we were talking about life on Mars, we were talking about what we'd be looking for on Mars. How would we know whether or not we found something alive on Mars? What exactly are we exactly looking for?

• 19:26David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's a puzzle, right? Because we don't know if there's any life beyond Earth.

• 19:32Bill Nye?

  By the way, what is life?

• 19:34David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Bill Nye?

  Like, wow.

• 19:36David Grinspoon?

  That's the puzzle. How do we define it when we only have one example? You think there's all this biodiversity on Earth, but we know, one thing we've learned for sure, is that it's all related. So there's one example of life on Earth.

• 19:47Bill Nye?

  How do we know it's all related?

• 19:49David Grinspoon?

  Well, chemically, of course, it all uses DNA and proteins. And even better than that, by looking at the sequences of DNA and proteins, you can tell what's related to what. And you can make this tree of life. And we go all the way back, and we do not find any organisms that we're not obviously related to on a biochemical level.

• 20:10Bill Nye?

  Even my old boss?

• 20:12David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. Even snails are your distant cousins. Yeah. You and an escargot are just, you know, a few generations removed. A little garlic away from being the same. Yeah. So we can't really define something that we only have one example of. It's not very scientific. You want a bunch of examples of something to say what it all has in common. And yet, we want to search for life elsewhere, so we have these sort of provisional definitions. We think we know what its signs will be. We think we know what it is. But in order to really know what it is, we have to find it and then be able to compare it.

• 20:46Bill Nye?

  What would you speculate it would be? What would it take?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Present life and past life. Right now, on Mars, we really think that it's past life. But we say, when you look for life, the search for life, follow the water. You know, that's kind of rule number one. Follow the water.

• 21:00Bill Nye?

  Why do you say follow the water?

• 21:02Speaker 04

  Well, because David was saying, you know, we're kind of looking for carbon-based life. That's what we know. Kind of carbon-based life forms, that's how life is on Earth now. There could be something we haven't thought of, but right now, we're saying, go for the water. We have water on Mars. Mars has a carbon dioxide atmosphere. Pretty cool.

• 21:18David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean, when we're talking about Mars, we're following the water.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  We're gonna make oxygen there.

• 21:21David Grinspoon?

  If we're talking about just life in the universe, looking at exoplanets and such as well... We tend to take a more general view of thinking, well, life, at least we know, is something that perturbs its environment chemically.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Sorry, what are, you said exoplanets?

• 21:35David Grinspoon?

  Planets around other stars.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  You know how many we have?

• 21:39David Grinspoon?

  Which now we know.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  They're super cool.

• 21:41David Grinspoon?

  Now we know. We didn't know this 20 years ago. This is one of the revolutions of our time, is we, now that we know that all the stars in the sky, almost all of them have planets, multiple planets.

• 21:50Bill Nye?

  So when I was in school, Joe, people speculated that there might be a planet around one in every hundred stars. Now it's generally agreed in sort of orders of magnitude, factors of 10, that every star has at least 10 planets, about 10 planets. And then if you want to get in the argument about Pluto, Sedna, Eris, and these other fairly distant icy worlds, then you're talking about hundreds of planets.

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Thousands. We just let out, we just categorize and let out 1,200 new exoplanets.

• 22:22Bill Nye?

  But let me just say, just a doggone minute.

• 22:25David Grinspoon?

  So if we're looking for life on those, it would be great if we could detect water, but even if we just see weird chemistry in the atmosphere.

• 22:31Eugene Mirman?

  So Mars has carbon dioxide atmosphere?

• 22:34David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Eugene Mirman?

  And then we can turn that into oxygen?

• 22:36Speaker 04

  We're gonna do that on our Mars 2020 rover.

• 22:39Eugene Mirman?

  Nice. Can I have some of that oxygen?

• 22:42Bill Nye?

  You have to go there.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Won't be enough for a person, but we're gonna make oxygen on a planet for the first time ever.

• 22:47Bill Nye?

  But hang on, people, hang on, just a minute. Davi, you said, "Well, you know, we're gonna look for life that was once there on Mars. We were back there, you know, back in the old..." Look, we, there's methane on Mars, people.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  Methane, I know.

• 22:58Bill Nye?

  We have the Mavon, what's that, Mars Atmospheric Volatile Emissions, what's the N? N D.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  It's Volatile's Environmental.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's Nancy.

• 23:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, we think it's Nancy.

• 23:11Bill Nye?

  Nancy, and she's fabulous.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  She's fabulous.

• 23:14Bill Nye?

  But anyway, if they're finding methane, there's gotta be a source of it. I'll give all of you chemists, and I love you all out there, if there's some inorganic chemical process that produces methane, right? But everywhere on Earth we find water, we find living things. Even the tiniest dampness of nothing damp. In Death Valley, there're cyanobacteria that live, right, the green, blue-green things that live under the rocks. Rains once every couple of years, and something's alive there, right?

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:47Bill Nye?

  All right, so if we're finding methane on Mars with, what is it, the Trace Grass Orbiter, it's out there, and Mavon...

• 23:57Bill Nye?

  And we're finding liquid water in these recurring slope linie, right? And geologists love, they love the Latin.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Seasonal, yeah, exactly, seasonal.

• 24:04Bill Nye?

  So it's a little rivulet, a little rill, a little drip of water every year.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  And lots of ice on the poles.

• 24:09Bill Nye?

  Hari, I like it. You can't see it on the podcast, people, but he is inquisitive man.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm just kind of...

• 24:14Bill Nye?

  He's hanging on this.

• 24:15Speaker 06

  Like, how much water are we talking about right now?

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Right now, just a small amount, briny, salty water. You don't want to drink it yet. But the great thing is, we knew there's ice.

• 24:24David Grinspoon?

  Enough to step in?

• 24:26Speaker 04

  But now this is...

• 24:26David Grinspoon?

  Almost none on the surface.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, and this is seasonal. So, you know, it's seasonal, but, you know, it's seasonal.

• 24:32Bill Nye?

  Every Martian summer, there's a little waterfall.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  It's cool, it's fantastic. I'm with you, Bill. I am with you.

• 24:38Speaker 05

  Wait, are you making... Are you making... That's true. You didn't... That's not a thing you just lied about?

• 24:43Bill Nye?

  No, no, not about that, no.

• 24:46Speaker 05

  It's true. It's a Martian waterfall.

• 24:49Bill Nye?

  Well, or rivulet.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Rivulet, I like rivulet, it's better.

• 24:52David Grinspoon?

  But there's a lot of water underground.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:54David Grinspoon?

  We believe, we know, actually.

• 24:56Bill Nye?

  So, you guys, I am open-minded, of course. But you're telling me that we've got liquid water on Mars? And we have methane that we detect, albeit in strange ways, from billions of kilometers away with these extraordinary spacecraft, all right? And you are not optimistically optimistic about finding something still alive?

• 25:17Speaker 04

  I am completely optimistic, and I think it's going to be sooner than later.

• 25:19David Grinspoon?

  I'm not. I don't think there's life on Mars today.

• 25:22Speaker 06

  By life, do we mean something...

• 25:23David Grinspoon?

  And I think, actually, that's a good thing. I'm optimistic that there's no life on Mars today. Because that makes it much less complicated for us to do the things we were talking about earlier and not be wiping out biosphere.

• 25:33Bill Nye?

  Okay, just a minute, European immigrant man.

• 25:36David Grinspoon?

  Yes.

• 25:39Bill Nye?

  It sounds like you might be saying, "Well, I'm pretty sure there's nothing alive there. We're not going to contaminate it. Let's just show up."

• 25:45David Grinspoon?

  No, because I very much support our carefully investigating this question. I think that right now, our ignorance vastly outweighs our knowledge. But I am a skeptic as far as the methane we've seen and the water we've seen indicating a biosphere.

• 26:00Bill Nye?

  Why are you skeptical of that?

• 26:02David Grinspoon?

  Because I think that on a planet like Earth... You look at, if you were a-

• 26:07Bill Nye?

  Showed here.

• 26:09David Grinspoon?

  For instance, this room. If you were an alien looking at our solar system from afar, there'd be this planet Earth that has flagrant biosignatures. This oxygen is off the charts.

• 26:20Bill Nye?

  Flagrant! You people are flagrantly signing your biomiss.

• 26:24David Grinspoon?

  I don't think a planet like Mars that has very subtle potential biosignatures will ever be alive. Because on a planet like Earth, the biosphere is coupled to the active biogeochemical cycles.

• 26:36Bill Nye?

  Those of you watching the podcast, his arms are just like waves.

• 26:39David Grinspoon?

  I'm waving my arms.

• 26:40Bill Nye?

  There's making-

• 26:41David Grinspoon?

  Because Earth has-

• 26:41Bill Nye?

  Snow angels in the sky.

• 26:42David Grinspoon?

  Earth has this active hydrological cycle with rainfall and evaporation. It has plate tectonics, the geology is alive, the chemistry of the interior is in communication with the atmosphere.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  He's still waving his arms.

• 26:56David Grinspoon?

  I'm waving my arms.

• 26:57Eugene Mirman?

  We can always now become modern dance.

• 27:01David Grinspoon?

  On Earth, life-

• 27:04Bill Nye?

  He's out of his chair to get to arms.

• 27:06Eugene Mirman?

  Do you think there's like microbes in the water and like-

• 27:10Bill Nye?

  That's what I think.

• 27:11Eugene Mirman?

  I guess that there aren't like squalls.

• 27:12David Grinspoon?

  What I'm saying is that on Earth, life rides the cycles of an active geological planet. Mars, in that sense, is a pretty dead planet. I think, as David was saying, we will probably find signs of life in the past when Mars was a less dead planet. But if I had to bet, I would bet that Mars does not have life today.

• 27:31Bill Nye?

  So, speaking of betting, they won't take the bet now.

• 27:37Eugene Mirman?

  I'll bet a dollar and we'll figure it out in what, 2032?

• 27:40Bill Nye?

  I say I would go with 2033.

• 27:42Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, 2033 it is.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  And we'll be there, we'll be there.

• 27:44Eugene Mirman?

  When do you think we'll be on Mars? You're the most qualified.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Well, we are on Mars today with five vehicles in orbit and surface.

• 27:49Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry, it was like a group of kids playing soccer.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  Group of kids, kids playing Mars generation, the 2030s.

• 27:55Bill Nye?

  So let's back up to the disco era.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  My favorite time!

• 28:01Bill Nye?

  Yeah, good. You're in the right place. So the Viking landers had these scoops. This was in 1976, July 4th, coincidence, 200th anniversary of the United States. Viking one lands there, has a scoop akin to an ice cream shovel, and scrapes into the soil and stuff. Then it drops some of that soil into some chemistry experiments that were spacecraft style. You can't see them from here, but the scoops dropped the dust in there and something happened, right? And people, for a couple of days, for those of you who were not around in the disco era, there were a few days or even weeks when people around the world like totally freaked

• 28:45Bill Nye?

  because it seemed like something was bubbling on Mars that might be alive, right? Now, can you comment on that thing?

• 28:50David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, so this gets back to this vexing question of how do we look for life when we really don't know anything about life elsewhere? And the Viking biological experiments were a wonderful set of investigations, but in hindsight, they were maybe a little bit naive in that what we were really...

• 29:07Bill Nye?

  What did they really do, really?

• 29:08David Grinspoon?

  They were looking for life on Mars that was very much like life on Earth. Essentially, they scooped up stuff, like you said, and they sprinkled it with what they called chicken soup, which was water and nutrients.

• 29:19Bill Nye?

  So right now, it's like rocks, scissors, papers, his fist has gone into his hand.

• 29:22David Grinspoon?

  Yes. They sprinkled up stuff, they put it in this experimental apparatus, and basically they sprinkled it with water and what the scientists nicknamed chicken soup, which was a set of nutrients which Earth organisms would have loved, simple organic compounds, and they looked to see if anything happened. And did it give off gases where the carbon...

• 29:44Bill Nye?

  Which it would if you put a scoop of Earth soil.

• 29:47David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, and they even labeled the carbon with radioactive carbon, heavy isotopic, isotopically heavy carbon, so you can see if the carbon in the chicken soup...

• 29:56Bill Nye?

  You can see if you have the right instrument.

• 29:58David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. With that instrument, you could tell that the carbon in the chicken soup was the same carbon that came out. It was as if this stuff was breathing out carbon dioxide. So they said, "Aha, there's something in there that's eating chicken soup and breathing out carbon dioxide. It's alive!" But then, it didn't really behave like living organisms. There was a big fizz of this carbon dioxide, and then it went... It tailed off as if it was more of a chemical reaction.

• 30:24Bill Nye?

  For those of you listening, his hand went way up like he was gonna do a hook shot. And then it came down like he was gonna, like he was gonna...

• 30:35David Grinspoon?

  An exponential decline.

• 30:37Bill Nye?

  The exponential decline.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  I feel like it would help the listeners if you just picture one of those things outside car washes.

• 30:42David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 05

  You know, like every time, I feel like that's a great visual.

• 30:45Bill Nye?

  Oh, the inflatable guy that walks around.

• 30:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:49Bill Nye?

  There you go.

• 30:51David Grinspoon?

  It first looked like it was behaving like life. It breathed all this stuff out. And then it looked more like, like Pop Rocks or something where something fizzes, or Mentos and Pepsi, where something fizzes all of a sudden and then just dies off. If it was organisms, it would sort of perpetuate longer. So it ultimately had a shape over time where it acted like some chemical in there was really excited to react with the stuff we gave it.

• 31:17Eugene Mirman?

  We brought Pop Rocks to Mars and Pop Rocks were like, "We're Pop Rocks."

• 31:20David Grinspoon?

  Exactly.

• 31:21Eugene Mirman?

  But they didn't find life.

• 31:22David Grinspoon?

  So it fizzed, but it didn't really metabolize, unfortunately.

• 31:26Bill Nye?

  That's the way we would understand it.

• 31:28David Grinspoon?

  Now, one should say there are still some holdouts. There's this guy named Gil Levin who was one of the original investigators on this. He's still alive and he's a smart guy. And he thinks that they found life on Mars with this experiment. And he refuses to be convinced otherwise. And he's a smart guy and there's still a little controversy about this is an indication of the fact that we don't completely know what we're doing when we're looking for life, which is kind of what's exciting about this. We're on the edge of our knowledge and we're trying to investigate something that we can't completely grasp.

• 31:59Bill Nye?

  So Mars is crazy cold.

• 32:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:02Bill Nye?

  Venus is crazy hot.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  We're the classic Goldilocks.

• 32:06Bill Nye?

  Exactly, that's the word we use. We are the Goldilocks planet. You've convergence of a great scientific mind, right here, way to go.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  We got the porridge that's the right temperature to eat.

• 32:17Bill Nye?

  That's what we've got.

• 32:18Eugene Mirman?

  Earth is the right temperature to eat, gobble, gobble.

• 32:20Bill Nye?

  It is, no, it really is.

• 32:22Speaker 05

  Beautiful planet.

• 32:23Eugene Mirman?

  Don't tell Galactus.

• 32:26Speaker 05

  But isn't there, okay, listen, I'm just, my mind is sort of

• 32:30Bill Nye?

  This is good, this is good.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  Exo, exo, exo

• 32:33Bill Nye?

  Planet?

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Exoplanets, yeah.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  It does seem like exo gossip girl. Okay, but listen, so exoplanets, there must be around those stars, a planet that's equidistant from

• 32:45Bill Nye?

  Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  To Earth, what's happening?

• 32:48Bill Nye?

  I know, so that's it, so we have an instrument, and the James Webb Space Telescope's coming up, Kepler's out there now, but this telescope is gonna look with such sensitivity, how sensitive will it be, that people believe they'll be able to look through the atmosphere of a planet backlit by its star. Are you digging me? Sunlight from a star is gonna go through this planet's atmosphere, and this telescope out in space will be able to detect what gases are in that atmosphere, and what everybody's all hot for is water vapor and methane, the natural gas, the stuff in the blue flame of your stove.

• 33:29David Grinspoon?

  And oxygen.

• 33:30Bill Nye?

  And oxygen, this would be like so cool. And so, this, my claim, everybody, is these discoveries, if we were able to discover life on Mars, on Europa, the moon of Jupiter, with twice as much seawater as the Earth, at least.

• 33:45Eugene Mirman?

  Twice as much seawater as what?

• 33:46Bill Nye?

  As the Earth.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  All of Earth.

• 33:48Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really?

• 33:49Bill Nye?

  And maybe even a little more than twice as much.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Europa has filled the ocean world, great place to go look for

• 33:51Eugene Mirman?

  Oh wow, does Kevin Costner know? He'd love it!

• 33:56David Grinspoon?

  Don't tell him.

• 33:58Bill Nye?

  So, so anyway, what we wanna do, my claim is if we were to find life, if we were to find life on one of these places, it would change this world. So, let's say we were gonna go do this. David, at DrFunkySpoon, man.

• 34:17Eugene Mirman?

  Sir.

• 34:18Bill Nye?

  What is your dream scenario, finding life on Mars? How would you go about doing it?

• 34:23Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I think that

• 34:26David Grinspoon?

  We're going about it the right way. I would love to accelerate. If my dream scenario would be, you know, we double or triple the NASA budget for exploration and could do more. I think we know what to do. Um, thank you.

• 34:38Bill Nye?

  By the way, let me just say-

• 34:40Speaker 05

  More sandwiches. Who wants more sandwiches?

• 34:42Bill Nye?

  Yes. But let me, let me just say, as CEO of the Planetary Society, I spend a lot of time on this stuff, and we've gotten the planetary science budget now up to about 1.7 billion, which I know doesn't sound like much.

• 34:59Bill Nye?

  But everybody, the NASA budget is about 0.4% of the federal budget.

• 35:05Eugene Mirman?

  0.4, right. How do we get it to say 2%?

• 35:09Bill Nye?

  Well, so, in the Apollo days, it was 10 times that. It was 4% of the federal budget. And so, the planetary science line item within the NASA budget is less than 10% of the NASA budget. 9 and plus percent.

• 35:25Eugene Mirman?

  We do a lot.

• 35:25Bill Nye?

  And so, these were the extraordinary discoveries are made. So, your dream scenario starts with getting more money.

• 35:33David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Bill Nye?

  And then where do we go from there?

• 35:35David Grinspoon?

  My dream scenario for Mars, specifically, is, as I said, I think we're going to confirm that there's no life on Mars today. Um, but I want to be really sure before we go into other things there. So, we gotta check out this methane, figure out where it's coming from. If it's not life, it's telling us something really interesting about the geochemistry of Mars that we need to know. But my dream scenario for Mars, as, as David mentioned, the possibility of finding fossils. There should have been life on early Mars, given what we know. We'll either find fossil signs of life on Mars, or if we study Mars really carefully and understand those early environments, and find that there was no life ever on Mars, that is also a really exciting thing to find. It tells us something about Earth, that there's something special we don't understand.

• 36:20Bill Nye?

  Everything we learn about stuff in outer space informs, uh, what we know about the Earth. And I claim that the more we know about our solar system and other solar systems with other stars and exoplanets, Joe-

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Exoplanets.

• 36:35Bill Nye?

  The more it informs, uh, ourselves and, uh, and where we all came from. This is the two deep questions. Are we alone in the universe? Just here's a big question, though. What would we do with life if we found it? And we're gonna talk about that when Star Talk Live comes back, right after this.

• 37:07Bill Nye?

  We'd like to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons, Justin Adamson and Forrest Shepard. Thank you guys for your support because without you it'd be very difficult to do what we do. And if anyone else would like their very own Patreon shout out, make sure that you go to patreon.com/stargtloradio and support us.

• 37:39Bill Nye?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Live here in Washington DC. I'm here on the fabulous panel with Joe Firestone, Dr. David Newman, Hari Kumbaloo, and our beloved Eugene Merman. So, we're having nothing but fun here on StarTalk this week. We're talking about life on other worlds. We're talking about space science superheroes. And this segued into this search for life. And now we're talking about how we exactly would actually exactly go looking for life. We have some assets there on Mars right now, right? We have the Curiosity Rover.

• 38:23Bill Nye?

  We have some, a lot of assets in orbit around Mars. And the idea, let me just, let me just start by going back to begin, to start with. Why are we all so hot to look for life on Mars? Why not life on Mercury? Or Venus?

• 38:42Speaker 04

  Close by Mars is the best place to look for life. And then we get further out into the solar system and then we go to these ocean worlds, which even look, you know, better. But again, Earth and Mars really are sister planets.

• 38:54Bill Nye?

  And it looks like Mars was wet.

• 38:57David Grinspoon?

  It's the most Earth-like environment on the surface of another planet that we know of. And we have a lot of evidence that in the past it was much more Earth-like. Do we have a sense of why it's so sad there now?

• 39:11Bill Nye?

  Yes. It doesn't, it's not big, as big as the Earth. So it cooled off faster. So it's, uh, does not have the churning iron in the middle that we have on Earth, creating a magnetic field, which makes the solar wind particles, uh, go downhill when they get to the north and south pole. But on Mars, apparently, uh, these same particles scrape the atmosphere off, scraped it into space.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  So it lost its atmosphere, it ablated. We can see it, it's still going on today. Our Maven spacecraft is in orbit. Check out, you know, the, we can see the ions ablating. It's only 1% atmosphere. Mars has a 1% compared to Earth, 100% here, has 1% in its carbon dioxide. So we see it's not protected by that magnetic shield.

• 40:00Eugene Mirman?

  Is there any way to put an atmosphere back on?

• 40:02Bill Nye?

  So hang on, so hang on, how are we gonna get there, you guys? We just had a humans orbiting Mars workshop. Uh, the Planetary Society pitched a humans orbiting Mars, uh, architecture as it's called. And along with all the many things NASA was gonna do was develop these solar electric propulsion spacecraft. And how does that work? And the solar electric was gonna go out to an asteroid, asteroid redirect retrieval mission, right? How does solar electric propulsion work and how is it part of going to Mars?

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Right, so, uh, when we go to deep space, back Earth, Moon, cis lunar, right? That's the next step, that's phase two. First on space station, low Earth orbit. 2020's will be on our space launch system, that's our heavy lift launch.

• 40:50Bill Nye?

  Space launch system is a massive word for big rocket.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Big rocket, big rocket. We haven't had one like this for 40 years. Moveover Saturn V, it's more powerful.

• 40:59Bill Nye?

  More powerful than a Saturn V.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  And these rockets, these are made of your standard metals, your tins, your, your...

• 41:07Speaker 03

  That's a great question, Joe.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, using, using aluminums, using additive manufacturing though, to make it, it's much more efficient, so we're using, you know, high-tech, but big rockets.

• 41:16Speaker 05

  But we're basically using Home Depot stuff, you know, we're using the screws and the...

• 41:20Bill Nye?

  Yes, yeah, nice stuff.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, nice, nice, high-end, high-end.

• 41:24Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, you gotta go to the aisle way at the end.

• 41:26Eugene Mirman?

  Imagine the fanciest Home Depot you can and double it.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  And then we get out to Cisneros, so now we're in deep space, okay? We're in deep space, not quite yet to Mars, yeah, that's phase three. But in phase two, we're into deep space and we have to demonstrate some technologies. Because you don't just get to Mars in one leap.

• 41:41Bill Nye?

  No, but here, let me just tie this in.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Space electric propulsion, you want to know, in-space propulsion.

• 41:45Bill Nye?

  But here's the thing, as Joe just said, Home Depot-style rockets, chemical rockets. It's what yours, you know what I mean, Joe? You got a liquid oxygen, you got some other fuel, you mix them with a fuse, and they burn like crazy, and they make that cool noise, and then they go into space.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  The shhh.

• 42:02Bill Nye?

  Shhh, but it's usually woo.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  Oh, right.

• 42:04Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:05Eugene Mirman?

  And then, and then what happens after that?

• 42:07Bill Nye?

  Then you're in space and there's some reason you don't want to use chemical rockets anymore, and that is?

• 42:14Speaker 04

  Well, we need, we need breakthrough technologies, we need new technologies. So what we're investing in now, now we're getting to the moon, right? So you're deep space. Our top technologies we're investing in today is in-space propulsion.

• 42:27Bill Nye?

  It's hard to carry all that much fuel, right?

• 42:29Speaker 04

  It's hard to carry cargo and fuel.

• 42:31Eugene Mirman?

  So what is in-space propulsion?

• 42:32Speaker 04

  In-space propulsion, so there's different ones, but so we're talking about solar electric propulsion. That can move, move big cargo, lots of mass, heavy mass, goes slowly, but that's all right. We'll get there, so it moves a lot of cargo, you know? You're going on a camping trip.

• 42:48Bill Nye?

  We're rockets in space.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're 17,000, yeah, we're more than 17,500, you know, miles per hour, but still slow for space, you know, so for, so for space.

• 42:56Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wait, so how fast is faster space for us?

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Well, you know, light, light speed is fast, right?

• 43:00Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, sorry, but meaning...

• 43:02Bill Nye?

  Joe, Joe.

• 43:03Eugene Mirman?

  When you say slow, you mean as fast as we can bake, not like we're...

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Slower, let's say, you know, a little bit, you know, a little slower, because you want to get your people there as quickly as possible. So big rocket, let's go fast, about eight months, you know? That's, that's, that's fast for us.

• 43:17Bill Nye?

  Punch it, punch it.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Punch it, eight-month trip, because we got to get boots on Mars. We'll get in orbit, but this in-space propulsion, solar electric, that's a nice candidate. Constant acceleration, so ch-ch-ch-ch, just keep going all the way.

• 43:29Eugene Mirman?

  You get faster and faster as it goes.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  You know, you know, carry this stuff you need with us. We're, we always bring a lot of stuff.

• 43:35Eugene Mirman?

  Does it arrive later, after the people, or before?

• 43:38Speaker 04

  Well, we'd be popping them off, right?

• 43:40Bill Nye?

  So what we want to do... All we want to do is have stuff in place before a human show up. You want to land some tents.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  And fuel, fuel depots, we said, habitats, so that's what we're investing in.

• 43:51Bill Nye?

  I just want to talk for a second about the rocket equation, who doesn't?

• 43:54Speaker 04

  Oh, I love the rocket.

• 43:55Bill Nye?

  Yeah, so the, the big thing that makes a rocket go, and you've seen this, Joe, is the stuff coming out the back is going really fast.

• 44:02Speaker 05

  The classic, the classic orange in the child's drawing.

• 44:06Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 44:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, afterburners, yeah, that's it.

• 44:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  The orange.

• 44:10Bill Nye?

  So it's going really fast out the back. But, uh, it takes, you need a lot of fuel and you reach a point where you can't get the rocket going too much faster because you can't get the exhaust going that much faster.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  That's called specific impulse, so that's what we call it in the rocket equation.

• 44:27Bill Nye?

  So in solar electric propulsion, we're going to take a big tank of xenon, is that right?

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Xenon is good.

• 44:33Bill Nye?

  Yeah, so anyway, you get a, a tank of this stuff liquefied and you, you get it by getting the atmosphere, getting a big tank of air on Earth cold and the xenon separates out in a layer like a parfait and then they extract it, put it in a tank and then they put it on this rocket.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  Sounds delicious.

• 44:53Bill Nye?

  So, yeah, it's good, it's nothing better. Well, you breathe it all the time in tiny amounts and look, I've been doing it my whole life and I'm fine. No, so then you have solar panels, is this right, David?

• 45:03Speaker 04

  So far, so good. They need electricity, power.

• 45:05Bill Nye?

  Then we have a window screen looking thing and it electrically attracts the xenon from its little tank and shoots it out the back at super fast speeds, right? And that's really an ion drive, like in science fiction. But anyway, the solar electric propulsion idea is going to be used to go to Mars, right? Now, what are we going to do with that?

• 45:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely, we're counting on it. Solar electric propulsion, we're counting on that. Let me tell you a few other ones we're investing in right now. Deep space habitats, incredible, you know, public, private, again, industries working with us, deep space habs.

• 45:38Bill Nye?

  So what goes on in the deep space habs?

• 45:41Speaker 04

  We're sending people, we got to figure out. Life support systems, you got to figure out to get, you know, we're going way beyond low Earth orbit, so we need deep space habs. Beam, Bigelow's beam, just, it just inflated, expanded this week on Space Station.

• 45:52Bill Nye?

  Beam is an acronym.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, for the Bigelow Expandable Module on Space Station.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Expandable habitat.

• 46:00Bill Nye?

  It's a big inflatable thing, attached to international space. You got me doing it with the hands.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  But not too big. I mean, space station is big, a football field size, right? These are smaller halves. We need to test them out. Now, number one, radiation. What about radiation protection?

• 46:13Bill Nye?

  What about radiation? Years ago, people said if you tried to go from the Earth to Mars, the radiation would kill you. But now people have rethought that.

• 46:22David Grinspoon?

  It is a problem. The radiation is one of the serious physical problems with sending people to Mars. And we know a lot more about this now because of the Mars Science Laboratory, which is our Curiosity rover, which is on Mars now doing wonderful things. But on the trip to Mars, this instrument called RAD, the Radiation Assessment Detector.

• 46:44Bill Nye?

  Radiation Assessment Detector.

• 46:45David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, and I'm actually a co-investigator on that instrument, so it's near and dear to my heart. I'm a co-I on the RAD team. And one of the things that was cool we were able to do with RAD, it was designed to measure the level of high-energy radiation on the surface of Mars on the rover, which it's doing in a wonderful way. But we realized that we could also turn it on before we got to Mars. It's the one instrument on the rover that we turned on while it was still in the spacecraft on the trip to Mars, because it allowed us to measure the amount of radiation in interplanetary space and basically simulate what a human would experience in terms of radiation on the way to Mars. And so it's the first time we ever did that, and now we really know much more than we did before this mission.

• 47:30Bill Nye?

  Will it kill you or not?

• 47:31David Grinspoon?

  It will not kill you, but it will put you at greater risk of getting cancer, which could ultimately kill you. But it's not like just going to Mars is gonna fry you and you'll be dead when you get there. But it is, it will by a few percentage points. You'll die when you get back to Earth. Well, it's equivalent to, you know, you go to the doctor and you get like a CAT scan. Yeah. So, and that, you know, if you do that... It feels like getting an eight-month CAT scan. If you do that a lot, you're slightly increasing your chances, so you don't want to do that all the time.

• 48:04Bill Nye?

  Chances of getting cancer.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  So your life, yeah, for radiation.

• 48:06David Grinspoon?

  It's as if you did that once a week.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  And we look at total life dose, total life radiation dose, and we're gonna protect the astronauts. That's what we're mapping. We're taking this data, now we're looking at the Mars radiation environment, and then it's our job, how can we protect the people? How can we protect the spacecraft? Don't wanna fry your instruments either. So, we protect the people, and we have some interesting ways to do that.

• 48:28Bill Nye?

  The kind of people that wanna be astronauts, if you say, "Well, you got an extra 1% chance of getting ca-" I'm in, I'm going, man.

• 48:35Eugene Mirman?

  But you still wanna protect them. So, what are some of the ways that we...

• 48:39Speaker 05

  Like, is it similar to like, when you go to the dentist and they take pictures of your mouth, they put the thing over your...

• 48:44Speaker 04

  There you go. That's shielding. So, high density is very good for shielding, especially for, you know, galactic cosmic radiation that we're gonna see on Mars.

• 48:54Eugene Mirman?

  Created the Fantastic Four, for instance.

• 48:56Speaker 04

  But we're in this, there you go, superheroes. So, but in the craft, water, because we like water to drink, it's pretty high density.

• 49:05Bill Nye?

  Yes, I'm a big fan.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a pretty good radiation shield. So, there's interesting concepts in the vehicle, high-density materials. We're gonna take water anyhow. It'd be nice to kinda live in the water walls. That'll really help the astronauts.

• 49:16Eugene Mirman?

  And does it harm the water for it to be radiated for you to drink it?

• 49:18Speaker 04

  No, the water doesn't care at all.

• 49:20Speaker 05

  Water doesn't care?

• 49:21Eugene Mirman?

  Meaning, the water doesn't care, but when you drink it, it doesn't matter to you?

• 49:24David Grinspoon?

  No, no, no.

• 49:24Speaker 04

  You're okay. Most of it passes right through.

• 49:26David Grinspoon?

  If anything, if there were any little bugs in the water that you didn't want there to be, it would, you know, make it nice and clean.

• 49:32Bill Nye?

  So, you have a jacket, you'd have a ball, a sphere, a shell of water around your spacecraft.

• 49:38Eugene Mirman?

  Like a water bed.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  A water bed.

• 49:40Eugene Mirman?

  Like a water bed to space.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  It's a good concept. Great MTV Cribs.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  When we get to Mars, you know, don't wanna put it in the suit, because you wanna be mobile, lightweight, but, you know, lava tubes, and there's lava, you know, volcanoes, so where are we gonna hide, where are we gonna live? Yeah, underground caves, things like that. These are all actually amazing shields.

• 49:57Bill Nye?

  So, hang on.

• 49:58Speaker 06

  Is there space underwear? Has that been discussed? Like, what are the sexual side effects of radiation and the... I'm just getting to the question, I'm sure you were all considering from the get-go. Like, what happens, you know, like, is there extra protection in those areas?

• 50:15Speaker 05

  How is that Kelly's long-term, long-distance relationship?

• 50:18Speaker 06

  I'm sure he asked that question. There's no way he wasn't asking that question.

• 50:21David Grinspoon?

  I think, I think if you're going to have children...

• 50:25Eugene Mirman?

  Do it before you go to Mars?

• 50:27David Grinspoon?

  Or at least put some in the freezer. You know what I'm saying?

• 50:32Bill Nye?

  No, that's a good idea.

• 50:33Speaker 06

  Have one before and then have one after and see if the second one's a mutant.

• 50:37Bill Nye?

  Oh.

• 50:39Speaker 06

  That's the scientific approach.

• 50:41Bill Nye?

  I think here at Awesome Con, let me rephrase that, a friendly amendment. If the second one has superpowers. Because that's what you get. You know, if you're a superhero, a lot of times you were irradiated. Maybe you were bitten by a radioactive spider.

• 50:56Eugene Mirman?

  So maybe what's been irradiated is just your father's ding dong.

• 51:01Speaker 06

  I like how you used the scientific term for penis.

• 51:04Eugene Mirman?

  I'm a gentleman.

• 51:06Bill Nye?

  So, just as far as I know, ding dong is not an acronym. It's a...

• 51:11Eugene Mirman?

  No, it's just the thing it is.

• 51:15David Grinspoon?

  You know, when you say ding dong, I'm looking over at the interpreter here and just wondering what... But anyways.

• 51:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Or if you're a lady, you're doodle.

• 51:27Bill Nye?

  Let her...

• 51:27Eugene Mirman?

  That was so worth it.

• 51:29Bill Nye?

  That was good. That was good. She explained.

• 51:34Bill Nye?

  Where were we? Where were we? I think we were going to Mars. We're on our way to Mars. We're on our way to Mars. Now, you mentioned the radiation detection instrument. What other instruments would you take? Why would you take them? And then fundamentally, everybody, everybody. Would you go to Mars if you had a chance to go to Mars? What instruments would you take?

• 51:54David Grinspoon?

  If I was going to Mars?

• 51:55Bill Nye?

  Yeah. Or what are you gonna send? What are you gonna do?

• 51:57David Grinspoon?

  I want to... The thing that I most want to do if I were gonna go to Mars is look for fossils.

• 52:03Bill Nye?

  Fossil life. These would be bacteria in a mat.

• 52:06David Grinspoon?

  I would take rock hammers and drills and a microscope. A scanning electronic microscope if I can get away with making one small enough and...

• 52:15Bill Nye?

  To carry there. Because right now, scanning electron microscopes are big, uh...

• 52:19David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, but they're... But one thing that NASA's really good at is making things small when we need to and put a little technology development into it. I would want, on my Mars laboratory with my astronauts there, I would want to be able to go out and drill and find samples in the most promising sites. And I want to look for the isotopes. So I'd want a really good mass spectrometer to look for isotopic signs of life, for signs that life had altered the chemicals in the past. And I would really want to look actually for physical fossils and the right kinds of deposits.

• 52:54Bill Nye?

  So, let me say, I, uh... My father was a rockhound, liked the rocks. Every rock tells a story. My uncle was a geologist. And the way you're describing this to me, Dave, David, is, um, geology tools.

• 53:09David Grinspoon?

  Yes.

• 53:10Bill Nye?

  But what non-geologic instruments would you take?

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Oh, I thought so. Well, first, we're taking the people. That's what I'm about. We're taking the people and our rovers and machines, because that's how we work better. We will explore tens, a hundred times more of Mars if we get there and we're mobile and we're working in teams, people.

• 53:29Bill Nye?

  I've heard this said that, uh, what our best rovers do in a week, a human would do in less than five minutes, maybe even less than a minute.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  So it's order of magnitude. We're much more, you know, mobile and quicker, so we're all in this together. And, uh, what are their instruments?

• 53:43Bill Nye?

  Our robots and our people.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Our robots and people. We're, yeah.

• 53:46Bill Nye?

  Well, what instruments would you take?

• 53:47Speaker 04

  What are their instruments? Well, actually, back to life support systems and bioregenitives. I actually would, uh, make sure I could, uh, make oxygen, bring it, you know, make oxygen.

• 53:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you want to start on that.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  And water, you know, things like that. There's not enough there for us yet, so I'm kind of worried about staying alive. So I'd like some water, like some oxygen to breathe.

• 54:05Bill Nye?

  Well, let's say you got that problem solved.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Grow some plants.

• 54:07David Grinspoon?

  Bill, you know, it's funny the way you phrase the question, non-geological instruments, because the word geological has geo, which means Earth. So any of these instruments on Mars are areological, right? They're, uh, which Ares is Mars and anyways.

• 54:23Speaker 04

  I was gonna say that as well.

• 54:24David Grinspoon?

  Okay. So if we wanna, if we wanna understand the ancient story of Mars, then we're gonna apply a lot of the same tools we used to understand the ancient rocks and the ancient story of Earth. So, so we look at ancient sediments, because they're what capture the atmosphere too, the bubbles, the bubbles of air.

• 54:42Bill Nye?

  Okay, okay. But hang on a second. The Viking missions had some chemistry thing that everybody got excited about, right? That was wrong, though, right? Well, one guy says, maybe not so wrong. Okay. So, but that was a biology experiment. That was, uh, the spiritual equivalent of a, of a Petri dish.

• 55:01David Grinspoon?

  Sure.

• 55:01Bill Nye?

  Right? So what is the spiritual equivalent of a, let's say, uh, Mark Watney has it all figured out. He can breathe and, uh, grow potatoes and whatever he's gonna do to take care of himself. How is he gonna find, or she gonna find, evidence of life on Mars? What instruments do we need?

• 55:19Speaker 04

  Okay, do the instruments, but let me tell you, I wanted to say, you know, who are the people? Because you asked about, is it the astrobiologists? I hope not, I hope it's not a single discipline of anyone. Because we need, you know, a whole new education. So, this is, you know, the point you need, know a little astrobiology, right? You want to know your geology? Hmm, you know, I'm thinking an M.D. might be, you know? A little medical knowledge. So, we really need cross-disciplinary trained folks. So, I hope it's not just an astrobiologist.

• 55:44David Grinspoon?

  But what you just described is astrobiology. Because astrobiology is a sort of poly-discipline. If you go to an astrobiology meeting, there's people talking about geology, people talking about astronomy, chemistry, glaciology, philosophy.

• 55:57Eugene Mirman?

  But not botany, so you do need a few different people.

• 56:00David Grinspoon?

  Well, that too.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  A few different people, but I'm all about steamed. I'm all about steamed.

• 56:04David Grinspoon?

  I mean, I agree with what you're saying, obviously.

• 56:06Speaker 04

  We need the STEM fields, but the artists have to be there, the designers, we're all in, we need everyone. Also psychics. Psychics. Comedians, you're gonna need some laughs. We are gonna, this is a psycho, you know, psychosocial, this is a tough trip.

• 56:19David Grinspoon?

  But if we really think we're looking for extant life, then we want to bring, you know, Petri dishes, and we want to try to culture stuff.

• 56:26Bill Nye?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 56:27David Grinspoon?

  Now, what are you gonna use for your agar in your Petri dish? You don't know what Martian bugs like, so you gotta get very clever there. And that's why I'm drawn more towards microscopes and things where you don't necessarily assume too much about what that stuff is doing chemically. You just want to see, if, you figure if there's a bug, you're gonna recognize it.

• 56:44Bill Nye?

  The geologists all want to bring back samples. They're crazy for it. And if you take a geology course, you got a rock hammer, you go to the rocks and you knock them open, and you bring them back to your dorm room, and your friends think you're having issues. And, uh, they want to bring back a sample, it'll be three steps, 2020 rover drills in the soil, picks them up, 2022, flies them up into Martian orbit, then 2024 or 2025, brings them back to the International Space Station, and we open them up and take a meeting, right?

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Take a meeting.

• 57:17Bill Nye?

  But is there any concern that we're gonna bring back the Martian microbes of death?

• 57:23Bill Nye?

  What are you gonna do about that?

• 57:24David Grinspoon?

  There's a slight concern. But I would say very, very slight.

• 57:28Bill Nye?

  Very slight. Is it worth the risk, Mr. Bond?

• 57:33David Grinspoon?

  Yes, because, here's the thing. You can't explore with zero risk. If we wanted to be perfectly safe, we would not, never bring back a rock from Mars. If you wanted to be perfectly safe, you would never leave the house in the morning, right? So, anything interesting involves a certain amount of risk. But, we're not gonna-

• 57:51Speaker 05

  Like befriending scorpions.

• 57:53David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, exactly. There could be nasty things, but, but, this is why we're doing the precursor missions, and, this is also why we have protocols. If we do bring back a sample of Mars, there are requirements to keep it very carefully isolated, and-

• 58:09Bill Nye?

  In like, Area 51?

• 58:11David Grinspoon?

  Even, this is like, Area 52, man, you haven't even heard of it. It's really secure.

• 58:17Bill Nye?

  So, you guys, I just wanna thank you all. This has really been a cool discussion. Everybody had these terrific insights, asking these fundamental questions about the nature of life on another world. How would we find it? What would it be like? How would it affect us? How are we gonna get there? Even, how are we gonna pay for it? We talked about all of this. This has been like, the greatest StarTalk Live ever! Give everybody a hand, this has been a great panel. Joe, David, Deva, Hari, and Eugene, Ivan, Bill Nye, your hosts. This has been StarTalk Live. Thank you all so much.

• 58:57Bill Nye?

  Thank you.