StarTalk Live! from SF Sketchfest 2016 (Part 2)

This week we’re still on Mars with Andy Weir, author of “The Martian”, and Dr. Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. Join Bill Nye, Eugene Mirman and Maeve Higgins for Part 2 of our show recorded live at SF Sketchfest. ADULT LANGUAGE.

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.

• 0:22Bill Nye?

  Welcome back, welcome back to StarTalk. This week we're on Mars with Andy Weir who wrote The Martian, Maeve Higgins, Funniest Woman Here.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Oh, aw. That includes all the women in the audience.

• 0:38Bill Nye?

  I think the Earth is pretty good.

• 0:39Speaker 03

  All the women on the panel, one.

• 0:41Bill Nye?

  Jim Green, Division of Planetary Science at the Science Mission Directorate at NASA. And our beloved Eugene Mirman, everybody. So, we've been talking about Mars. Andy, why did you, how did you pick that place on Mars?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Acidalia Planitia.

• 1:03Bill Nye?

  Yeah, Acidalia, Acid Plane. How did you pick that place?

• 1:07Speaker 02

  I want, I had the plot line, hey, more spoilers, he goes to pick up Pathfinder.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  He follows the name.

• 1:14Bill Nye?

  Pathfinder's the name of another spacecraft.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  It's spacecraft landed in 1997. But I wanted him, that was a plot point I wanted right from the beginning, is that he goes and recovers Pathfinder to communicate.

• 1:27Bill Nye?

  Was he looking for life, is that why they were there?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Oh, well, the excuse I gave for why they were in Acidalia Planitia.

• 1:33Bill Nye?

  The motivation.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Okay. The reason I wrote it that way was I wanted him to be a good distance away, but an achievable distance, so there'd be this adventure of getting there and getting back. So I wanted him to be about 800 kilometers away from Pathfinder. So I kind of drew a circle around Pathfinder and said, where's a cool place for him to be? I chose Acidalia Planitia because at the time, before Curiosity went and ruined everything, a lot of people believed that Acidalia Planitia was the, an alluvial plain where water had flowed. And so I decided the reason they chose that landing site was that it would have many, many layers of geological history all in one place and they could sample them all.

• 2:09Bill Nye?

  Just like the Delta.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  It turns out it was just the bottom of the ocean.

• 2:12Bill Nye?

  That's right, it's the bottom of the ancient ocean on Mars.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  It's the bottom of the ancient, of an ancient ocean, so it would still be cool, but there's much better places to go if you're gonna have a manned mission.

• 2:21Bill Nye?

  No.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  But it was there, he's three, I mean, all the good spots had already been taken, right?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  The beautiful landscapes that like I saw in the movie, is that what it looks like?

• 2:31Bill Nye?

  Yeah, Ridley did a really great job because we gave him enormous amount of imaging and things that he could look at. And they ran around the world, you know, Art Max, a production designer who is also up for Academy Award. Went out and they found locations and they went to the desert in Jordan.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Where? In Jordan.

• 2:50Bill Nye?

  Yeah, a desert called Wadi Rum in Jordan. And that's all the exterior shots. Ridley Scott loves practical effects.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Like the sandstorm, you'd think that'd be just a bunch of people walking around in a CGI sandstorm, right? New, big, big sound studio, way the hell larger than this entire auditorium. And a big pile of sand and some really powerful fans.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Those poor actors.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Those actors were falling over and stuff because they were being blown over.

• 3:17Bill Nye?

  So.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it worked.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  I thought that was a set. I can't think that was the place, Jordan.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 3:24Bill Nye?

  On Earth.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  It's the same place they filmed Lawrence of Arabia.

• 3:28Bill Nye?

  Ah.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Love that doc.

• 3:32Bill Nye?

  So, there is a strong argument that our robots, our rovers are doing a great job. But wouldn't it be cool to send people there, right? That would be fantastic because they would make discoveries.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 3:44Bill Nye?

  Hey, so here's what I want to know. We find that weeping craters, right?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:47Bill Nye?

  Can curiosity just drive over to one?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  No, but we are looking for perhaps.

• 3:52Bill Nye?

  What did he say? No? Why not?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Let's get into it. Alright, so he's gotta be nice. He's gotta be nice because he works for NASA and he's gotta be all diplomatic. But I can go ahead and say, I'm not a big fan of planetary protection.

• 4:08Eugene Mirman?

  Dun, dun, duh.

• 4:09Bill Nye?

  So, two things everybody, if just to get here, planetary defense is where we keep the Earth from getting hit with an asteroid.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  I am a fan of that.

• 4:18Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, there is no evidence, no evidence, that the ancient dinosaurs had a space program. Almost early in that, almost.

• 4:27Eugene Mirman?

  Not even the T-Rexes?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  They had stubby little arms and they couldn't.

• 4:33Bill Nye?

  At least that's the speculation, but so anyway, that's a serious matter. But then there's this other expression, which is very important, which is planetary protection, which is essentially the prime directive. Can't violate.

• 4:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is.

• 4:47Bill Nye?

  Prime directive. And so that is where humans show up and contaminate the surface with our microbes and barf and...

• 4:54Eugene Mirman?

  So we're not going to Mars because we're afraid of giving it germs?

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Well, what we are afraid of is taking our germs with it, bringing back samples and say, "Oh, we found Mars germs." We don't want to do that. So planetary protection also...

• 5:09Bill Nye?

  Hold on, we do want to find Mars germs.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  Oh, we do want to do that, but we don't want to farm...

• 5:13Bill Nye?

  Mars germs are our own germs that we think of.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 5:16Eugene Mirman?

  Why don't you use gloves? Problem solved.

• 5:20Bill Nye?

  Eugene, Eugene, you've hit the nail on the head.

• 5:24Eugene Mirman?

  Space gloves.

• 5:25Bill Nye?

  They have space gloves and space solvents that kill everything and space ovens that kill even more stuff.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  They do.

• 5:32Bill Nye?

  It's certainly crazy dead.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  We do.

• 5:34Bill Nye?

  But we cannot send the Curiosity rover over there, which has been on the surface of freaking Mars for three years, irradiated with ultraviolet of death and night and hot and cold, and there's some concern that there's something still alive on the outside of it.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  Well, that's a really good point. Uh, maybe we can, in the sense that we are indeed looking at whatever microbial human life we took with Curiosity, whether it might still be alive or not.

• 6:00Bill Nye?

  How do we do that?

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Well, we do that through computer programming. You know, we hire Andy's firm and...

• 6:06Bill Nye?

  Trust me, trust me.

• 6:07Speaker 05

  Bring him back on the job.

• 6:08Bill Nye?

  So you're saying there's an app for that?

• 6:11Speaker 05

  There might be.

• 6:13Bill Nye?

  Sure.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  There's so many. But, but you know, we do that analysis and then we've got to be able to demonstrate what, um, what, what kind of, what we call bioburden, what kind of material might be, uh, on the rover, that, uh, that if it's gone, or it's at such a low level, then we might be able to creak over to, uh, what would be a weeping area and take a good look at it.

• 6:36Eugene Mirman?

  So you're afraid that something would get, would go from the Curiosity?

• 6:38Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 6:39Eugene Mirman?

  And then a bunch of birds would form, or what?

• 6:42Speaker 05

  The, the... The concern is that we will basically infect Mars with Earth life and displace the local population with Earth microbes.

• 6:52Bill Nye?

  Well, that would be the end of the world, evil, mad person scenario. But more likely is, you think you've found something that you really haven't.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  Right. I mean, we really don't want to find life beyond Earth.

• 7:06Bill Nye?

  So that is the significance of water, right?

• 7:08Speaker 05

  That is the significance of water. We believe firmly that at least life that we know has to have water. And so now that we're finding how rich Mars is with actual water, that really bodes well for us giving it a shot to find that, find these places where water exists.

• 7:27Bill Nye?

  Because everywhere on Earth, there's water. Everywhere, there's something alive.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  That's right. Yeah, they're related. We've been following the water concept of how we do Mars research now for well over 10 years, and it's really served us quite well. So, but we're going to have to design something pretty special to be able to do that. And we'll have to bake it, and we'll have to do a variety of things to protect it.

• 7:47Bill Nye?

  To make it super sterile.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  Super sterile. And then go there and find indigenous life.

• 7:52Bill Nye?

  What would be the significance of finding a life on Mars?

• 7:57Eugene Mirman?

  But would prove Buddhism is true.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  Well, only if that was you, that would be...

• 8:05Speaker 02

  It would validate David Bowie's eternal question.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:10Bill Nye?

  No, I think it would change the course of your history.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  It would, absolutely.

• 8:15Bill Nye?

  I think everybody would think differently about what it means to be a living thing in the cosmos.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  If I can offer my opinion on that, it's, if we found actual life on Mars, or fossilized evidence of past life on Mars, we would then very quickly discover one of two things. Either one, Mars was, well, three things, I guess. Either one, Mars was infected by Earth, by some natural process in the past. Like, maybe material from Earth got kicked up by an asteroid collision.

• 8:44Bill Nye?

  That's not so likely. More likely is...

• 8:46Speaker 02

  More likely is, Earth got infected by Mars, meaning that, like, life managed to travel through natural means from Mars to Earth. That's the kind of panspermia theory in that there was, if life evolved in one place once in our solar system, but managed to infect two planets.

• 9:01Eugene Mirman?

  Where the Martians were looking for.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  We are. There is a good chance, if you look around this room, there is a good chance that what you're looking at is a bunch of alien invaders. Are you talking about me? Yes.

• 9:17Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 9:19Eugene Mirman?

  With alien of extraordinary ability visas.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  The rust colored cars.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yes. But, and then, the other opportunity is equally exciting, possibly more exciting, is that if life independently evolved on Mars...

• 9:34Speaker 05

  That's it.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  If that, if that were the case, then that would mean, okay, that we have a sample of two planets here, both of which had, like, have or had liquid water on them, both of them developed life. This implies, does not prove, but implies, that life is almost an inevitability.

• 9:54Speaker 05

  Everywhere.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Every location.

• 9:56Speaker 05

  That's why it's...

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Everywhere, all over the universe.

• 9:58Speaker 05

  So that's why we want to explore.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  That would be a huge, huge discovery.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  So, right on.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  So Jim, one of the traditional supposed evidences of life would be natural gas.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Methane.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  Methane, yeah. And we're finding that now on Mars, too. You know, many years ago, from ground-based telescopes, we, we looked through the methane that's here on Earth in our atmosphere, through that, to Mars. So we made a very difficult measurement and discovered that Mars has vents of methane. Vent? Yeah. How big is a vent of methane?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Well, it just weeps out. I don't know, it could be as big as this auditorium, I, we really don't know. But there is a season for which the methane really takes off. It's in the summer. It's in the summer. So methane can be generated abiotically, you know, you can have...

• 10:52Speaker 05

  How would you make natural methane without living things?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Ah, well, you need water, you need the right minerals, and you need a heat source.

• 11:00Speaker 05

  What's the right mineral?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Olive.

• 11:02Speaker 05

  Olive oil.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  No, no, no, yeah.

• 11:04Speaker 05

  It's in the rock.

• 11:05Eugene Mirman?

  What is it?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Olive. It's in the rock.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  It's greenish under a microscope. It has veins.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has veins, sure, I mean, yeah.

• 11:13Eugene Mirman?

  Tell us the truth diplomat.

• 11:16Speaker 05

  What's in olive? It's carbon.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  If that makes you feel good, Bill, we'll go with that.

• 11:21Speaker 05

  What's in, what's in olive? It's carbon.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  It's carbon, yeah, you gotta have a source of the carbon, you gotta grab the carbon.

• 11:26Eugene Mirman?

  Why didn't you call it carbon the first time, though?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Well, because it's not elemental carbon.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  That's why he called it olivine.

• 11:34Bill Nye?

  No, it's bound up in a mineral.

• 11:36Speaker 05

  Right, and so, you know, that's abiotic, but biology, of course, is really a potential one. We see these methane blooms, so to speak, during the summer months from our telescopes. Very controversial.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  When all the little Mars cows are out to graze.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  Well, we now know there's no Mars cows. Are they, maybe underwater Mars cows? Well, they have to be, you know, when the, when the, when the climate and everything is severe, you go underground. You get into the rocks.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Down to the glacier.

• 12:08Speaker 05

  Pardon?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Down to the glacier.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  Down to the glacier. Well, into the glacier, right. Yeah.

• 12:14Bill Nye?

  But, so you're saying there's possibility, abiotic is no bio, no life.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  No life.

• 12:20Bill Nye?

  But it's also possible that there's some Mars microbes oozing natural gas.

• 12:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. So, Curiosity has measured that nothing. So now there's no doubt Mars does indeed.

• 12:32Bill Nye?

  How do we measure methane from four billion kilometers away, or whatever?

• 12:37Speaker 05

  Well, we do with Curiosity. Curiosity's sitting on the surface.

• 12:41Bill Nye?

  It's a Mini Cooper on Mars.

• 12:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's Mini Cooper. It brings in that atmosphere and just dissects it and looks at everything in it. And during certain times of the year, it sees some methane. It uses a space nose? Yeah, it sniffs real well. You know, a few parts per billion it can, it can get. Oh, that's very good. Jim, is it, is it a spec, is it a spectrometer, or spectroscopy, or which one is it? So, they actually measure the isotopes. Yeah, so they really handle the individual molecules.

• 13:11Bill Nye?

  By shining a laser through it, or by squirting it at high speed in a vacuum, or something?

• 13:15Speaker 05

  So they have.

• 13:16Bill Nye?

  You'd have to kill us.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  No, we don't have to kill you. Sounds like you may be, too. No murder today, today.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  But the methane that's leaking, you know, we've done the analysis and it looks like it's coming right through the soils where Curiosity is sitting. They measure it during the day and we know the winds during the day in Mount Sharp around where Curiosity is sitting all moves away from the crater. So there's no way that the methane that's being generated at other locations can come down to Curiosity. So it has to be leaking right through the ground. So if we really follow the methane, you know, we might be heating our habs with a source of methane underground. It's another example of how you'd use the environment.

• 14:06Eugene Mirman?

  Follow the methane, I always say that.

• 14:09Speaker 05

  Kind of, and so along that line...

• 14:12Bill Nye?

  How often does that come up that you say that?

• 14:14Eugene Mirman?

  Eight times so far.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  Okay. If you're stuck in an elevator. Along that line, things have come from Mars to the Earth.

• 14:25Bill Nye?

  Absolutely.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  Mars gets hit with something, right?

• 14:27Bill Nye?

  And they... Like ALH 84001.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  Yep. So what happens, of course, is big impacts and Mars' gravity... What meteorites are you talking about? ALH 84001. It's Allan Hills. Allan Hills is a place in the Antarctic. And every summer, we go down to the Antarctic, get in snowmobiles, and we go across the ice sheet. Have you done this for fun? No, not yet. Eugene?

• 14:53Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, no, but it sounds like you're describing G.I. Joe.

• 14:56Bill Nye?

  Oh, yeah, when they had to get one of the parts of that death ray thing, that... Oh, that was awesome.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  So here's the thing, when you find a rock on the ice... It's black. You see it, I mean, it's just right there. I mean, there's no other way to get there. The only way for the rock to get there is from the sky. That's right. So, well, you know, it falls in, gets embedded in the ice, and the ice moves, and then some of that stuff just gets uncovered over time. And so, you know, we'll gather 600 to 800 rocks, you know, meteorites now, and bring them back and analyze them. And in that set, over the years, we've found about 100 meteorites from Mars. How do we know they're from Mars? Ah, so when you look at the gas...

• 15:39Bill Nye?

  Sugar tights.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  So when you look at the gas that's trapped

• 15:44Bill Nye?

  That is some nerd comedy right there.

• 15:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So, so when you look at the gas that's trapped inside the rock.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  They're called sugar tights. It's not a joke.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  They are sugar tights. They had a technical name, you know, when they were first found, and then when we determined that they were from Mars, we call them Mars meteorites now.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  But first they were called sugar tights?

• 16:07Speaker 05

  Sugar tights. Sugar tights?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  You know when Bill Gibson was like arrested for calling the...

• 16:13Speaker 05

  It's not sugar tits. It's sugar tights.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  So it happened once, they found, they were analyzing, back before they knew that they were from Mars, they were analyzing meteors that they'd found all over the world, and they said like, "Most meteors have this kind of chemical composition. A smaller percentage of them have this other chemical composition." That we don't know where it is. And we don't know why they're different. And then there's this teeny tiny percent of them that have this yet more unique one. They found out that the, the big ones come from the asteroid belt, the, the bulk of them, then the, the smaller set come from the moon. That got, you know, things hit the moon, it gets knocked off and comes here. And they're like, "But we don't know where this is." And for years, they speculated on what the sugar type main body was. They're like, "We don't know. Something out there is a single thing that all of these little things..."

• 16:56Bill Nye?

  Was the original one named after a place?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  It was a do- it was a scientist, I think, who isolated it.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  Johnny Sugar. Johnny Sugar Tits, yeah. And then...

• 17:04Bill Nye?

  And he was mostly tight.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:06Bill Nye?

  So, but then, but then when Viking landed...

• 17:09Speaker 05

  You put this, you put this meteorite in an oven and you crack it open?

• 17:12Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, so you, you look at the trapped gases. How do you, you have a vacuum chamber and you have some stainless steel rock cracker openers?

• 17:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. You guys want to science the shit out of this, don't you?

• 17:23Speaker 05

  So, I mean...

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Has that phrase like echoed around NASA's offices since it was in the movie? Like, are you tempted to say it daily?

• 17:31Speaker 05

  No, I try not to.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Really? But it's what you're doing.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  But they don't say it.

• 17:42Bill Nye?

  So, that's ALH 0084.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  ALH, yeah. ALH is a famous one. Yeah.

• 17:49Bill Nye?

  There's Murchison.

• 17:50Speaker 05

  Murchison is a different one. But, you know, when you look at the gas on ALH and the Allan Hills meteorite, and now you've measured the gases, the high percentage on Mars, they're identical. And that's what really was the clue that said, "These are from Mars." Now, Murchison was another meteorite, came down in, you know, 1970s sometime, maybe 77, 79. And it is a completely different type of meteorite. It's a, what we call, carbonaceous chondrites in another pile. It's also small, small number of piles. And this meteorite's got amino acids. This meteorite is really one of the primitive ones. The amino acids like-

• 18:32Bill Nye?

  The building blocks of life?

• 18:34Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 18:35Bill Nye?

  Yeah, a bunch of them, too. Carbon double bond, oxygen double bond, some stuff hanging on. And so, the amino acid is like a complicated molecule and it's survived going through the Earth's atmosphere and smashing into some-

• 18:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. And, and so, what we believe is happening here is these amino acids, these basic building blocks of life, are part of our collapsing cloud that created our solar system. And then they are running around seeding all our planets over time. So Mars-

• 19:09Bill Nye?

  Is there a plan with that?

• 19:10Speaker 05

  Well, there might be a grand plan. We haven't uncovered it.

• 19:13Bill Nye?

  So, they hit all these, they hit all these-

• 19:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, the Earth, you know, and, uh, so these are really a particular of interest to us to get more, more information about them. So, we're launching a mission to one right now, a really big one. It's called Benue, the meteorite.

• 19:30Eugene Mirman?

  You didn't hold a contest to name that, huh?

• 19:32Bill Nye?

  Yeah, we did.

• 19:33Speaker 05

  We did.

• 19:34Bill Nye?

  Surely.

• 19:35Eugene Mirman?

  And the winner was Benue?

• 19:36Bill Nye?

  Yeah, it's a-

• 19:37Eugene Mirman?

  All right, you didn't hold a very extensive contest.

• 19:40Bill Nye?

  Well, it's an ancient, an ancient god. Got the, got the name. The name came from an ancient god. And it's a big asteroid. We're gonna try to learn more about the primordial solar system so that we can-

• 19:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:53Bill Nye?

  ...answer these deep questions.

• 19:54Speaker 05

  And that mission is called Osiris Rex that we're gonna launch in September to go to Benue.

• 19:59Bill Nye?

  How hard could it be?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  I, I, my, uh, just my, one little story about ALH84001. I got to go to NASA, it's one of the perks of writing a book that they, um, I got to go to NASA for a bunch of tours and they brought me to the meteorite.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Did they know you were there?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Did, yeah, yeah, right.

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Um, it was just, keeping a step ahead of security the whole time, it was, yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  And, and they gave me a tour of the meteorite lab and, um, the, the guy.

• 20:25Speaker 05

  Where was this in, in, uh?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  At Johnson Space Center.

• 20:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, they, they, they curate all our meteorites.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  In Texas. Yeah, and, um, the guy was showing me various meteorites and, and he's like, and now this one, and I, I could tell, I knew it from the shape. I, I was like, oh, that's ALH84001. He's like, yes. And I was like, I felt a little proud myself.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  Does he hold it?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  No, it's in a bag. It's, it's, it, well, first off, it's a clean room, so you're all dressed up in the bunny suits and then, and then additionally, that, that sample is in a sealed bag, yeah. But, uh, the other, the other silly thing I'll say is that my, you know, once I started making, uh, pretty good money off of the book, my, my, my stupid pointless impulse purchase was I bought a Martian meteorite. I, I own one. It's at home.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  Uh, it's about, it's about thirty-three grams, it's a, it's a little sample.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he didn't buy it from NASA, he got it off of... No, no, no. This is legal, uh, things that just fall to the ground from space are, belong to whoever picks them up first and...

• 21:23Speaker 05

  No, there's raw counts.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yes, this is real.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, no, there's a guy called the Meteorite Man.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  The Meteorite Hunter.

• 21:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  You can just, you can contact him.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  So, so, great, great places to find them because they do look like normal rocks in many ways, you know, like the Sahara Desert. So, there's a lot of, uh, Bedouin tribes that, that will go out and find meteorites and bring them in and, and, and sell them.

• 21:45Eugene Mirman?

  How do they know that they're, how do the Bedouins prove that they're meteorites?

• 21:49Speaker 05

  Well, you see there's sand and then there's a rock sitting on top of it.

• 21:53Eugene Mirman?

  And there's no way that rock would be from Earth, that would be idiotic.

• 21:57Speaker 05

  No, they have, they look different.

• 22:01Eugene Mirman?

  My bad.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  Well, they look different and, you know...

• 22:07Eugene Mirman?

  Sure.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  I don't know how the Bedouins, I don't know how the Bedouins tell them apart, but then the scientists analyze it and the makeup and they can tell whether or not it's from the asteroid field, the moon, the Mars, whatever else. And so my, my little rock comes with all the paperwork to prove it.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  And how much was this?

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Is that rude?

• 22:27Speaker 05

  What?

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Was it like $5,000 or like?

• 22:30Speaker 05

  Oh, it was more than that.

• 22:33Bill Nye?

  33 grams is more than 5K?

• 22:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was about 10,000 bucks.

• 22:38Bill Nye?

  Andy's doing alright, ladies.

• 22:43Speaker 05

  So, I acknowledge, but you know, it's a silly purchase, but man.

• 22:46Bill Nye?

  No, it's so cool!

• 22:47Eugene Mirman?

  Not the couple who wrote The Martian!

• 22:48Bill Nye?

  No, I think it's pretty cool, man!

• 22:51Speaker 05

  No, everybody who comes over to my house, I'm like, "See that rock? That's from Mars."

• 22:54Bill Nye?

  No, really?

• 23:00Bill Nye?

  Welcome back, I'm Bill Nye, hosting this week. Up here on stage, we have Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, the book and the movie. We have Maeve Higgins, who's now a scientist.

• 23:15Bill Nye?

  Maven's a spacecraft, you're working on that. Speaking of which, Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA. Curiosity Green. And MRO.

• 23:27Bill Nye?

  Maven, Maeve.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  No, it's cool, I might change my name to Maven, totally.

• 23:35Bill Nye?

  Well, keep us posted. So, do you guys have, here's what we at the planetary side, representing people in over 130 countries around the world. We want to know what's the specific, we have some milestones, some fuel meter markers.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, we do.

• 23:50Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, while we're doing a number of things in the near earth area, using space station. This includes, you know, growing some food on space station.

• 23:59Bill Nye?

  Figure out how to grow food.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, in hydroponics, we use a water solution with a little soil around the seeds.

• 24:06Bill Nye?

  What about air?

• 24:07Speaker 05

  Oxygen. We have a variety of processes already in place on space station to scrub out the carbon dioxide. But, as I mentioned, Mars 2020 will have its own experiment to bring in carbon dioxide from Mars's atmosphere and split out...

• 24:24Bill Nye?

  The oxygen and then store it. And from that, we can use it for a whole variety of purposes.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  It's basically, it's, it's the real life version of the, what was at the time fictional, the oxygenator from Martian.

• 24:36Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  And it's, it's called Moxie, right?

• 24:38Bill Nye?

  It's called Moxie, yeah. That's right.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Because it's an acronym.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Mars Oxygen.

• 24:43Bill Nye?

  Exchange.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  ISRU.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  And also, isn't it like, isn't it like, she got Moxie?

• 24:47Bill Nye?

  So it's an acronym and an acronym.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Hey, you need Moxie, you want a lot of Moxie.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  I want to invent a scuba radar.

• 24:53Bill Nye?

  Oh, you think you're gonna go to Mars and make oxygen? Well, that would take a lot of Moxie. Yeah, that's right.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Ding!

• 24:58Bill Nye?

  That's right.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. Now you got it.

• 25:00Bill Nye?

  That's where they come from.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  Oh, you're helping her.

• 25:03Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 05

  Okay. So that's very important. Also on 2020 is we have a, a ground penetrating radar. You know, and so for.

• 25:11Bill Nye?

  How far does it penetrate?

• 25:12Speaker 05

  It'll go down 30, 40 meters. And it'll be looking for the strata, but also potentially looking for aquifers.

• 25:19Bill Nye?

  For water firs.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, water firs, aquifers, as we call them here.

• 25:23Bill Nye?

  No, I like aquifer.

• 25:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I'll go with NASA.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  That's wise.

• 25:31Bill Nye?

  So look, with that said, are we gonna send a mission after that to really go look for signs of life, like serious biz?

• 25:40Speaker 05

  Well, we're talking about that right now and what that would look like. You know, life is kinda hard to do if you're making measurements to go there. And the reason why is our astrobiologists have defined life this way. It has three basic attributes. It metabolizes, brings in material, and that's where you need the solvent, you need the water to extract food out of it and dump the waste.

• 26:08Bill Nye?

  And then. Exchange material.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  Exchange material.

• 26:10Bill Nye?

  So astrobiologist is a biologist of the stars out there.

• 26:15Speaker 05

  No, that'd be an astronomer or an astrophysicist.

• 26:18Bill Nye?

  Outside the earth. We're talking about biology. You throw the astrobiology around like it's, yeah, astrobiology.

• 26:23Speaker 05

  Exobiologist, maybe.

• 26:25Bill Nye?

  Well, astrobiology is another one.

• 26:27Speaker 05

  But, so, so you, you wanna metabolize, you wanna reproduce, but you also, life evolves. And so it's hard to build an experiment to go do that. But life has a whole variety of other attributes.

• 26:43Bill Nye?

  No.

• 26:44Eugene Mirman?

  Like, like dancing?

• 26:45Speaker 05

  It does.

• 26:46Eugene Mirman?

  Like if you found like a cat dancing, you'd be like, that's a lie.

• 26:48Bill Nye?

  That's a lie.

• 26:50Speaker 05

  If it reproduced.

• 26:52Eugene Mirman?

  Jim, let me put it this way. I can't have sex and dancing, sorry.

• 26:55Bill Nye?

  Look, let's say, hold on a second. Uh, let's say you found a weeping crater.

• 27:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:01Bill Nye?

  And it's got water.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:02Bill Nye?

  And you got a rover that's got enough power to drive over to the weeping crater walls. Can we just, just for nothing else, can we have a microscope big enough, uh, powerful enough to see a micro?

• 27:13Speaker 05

  Oh, we would scoop up the material and bring it in and, and look at it and tear it apart, look for cells, look for, uh, uh, its composition.

• 27:22Bill Nye?

  Can we just plan to do that? You know, as I like to say, some of my best friends are geologists, you know, and I like rocks, but I want to go up there like we're really going to look for life, like hardcore.

• 27:33Speaker 05

  Well, we are discussing the next generation experiments that would go do that.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  How's this for a scenario? Wouldn't it be cool if there was one of those RSLs, which is what?

• 27:44Speaker 05

  RSL is a recurring slip lineay, which is what he's been calling weeping craters.

• 27:49Bill Nye?

  Weeping craters are real.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Wouldn't it be cool if there was one of those within a reasonable range of curiosity right now?

• 27:55Bill Nye?

  And curiosity's been sitting on the surface and its little drill bit has been hit by ultraviolet light for three years, three sols.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  And wouldn't it be cool if we had this entire Mars science laboratory, if you will, uh, sitting on the surface?

• 28:06Bill Nye?

  And we could just drive over there.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  And we could just drive over there and look at it. Oh, man, that'd be awesome if that were only true.

• 28:12Bill Nye?

  But we don't because, well, we do. No, we haven't, no.

• 28:17Eugene Mirman?

  But we don't want to contaminate.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  Because it's too, because it will infect the planets. So what, what, what we found by our, uh, orbiting satellites is there may be some weeping going on in Mount Sharp, and we haven't studied that enough to really determine if that's water or that's material sliding down the hill. But if it's water.

• 28:38Bill Nye?

  Because you can't, you can't tell the difference from orbiting cameras.

• 28:40Speaker 05

  From orbit, yeah, we have other work, uh, other research.

• 28:43Bill Nye?

  Is it a dust slide or a water slide?

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Right, right, and they're not very long, they're not as long as some of the others that we've seen. But it, but indeed if.

• 28:50Bill Nye?

  It's not very long, this far or?

• 28:52Speaker 05

  Oh, no, well, well beyond the, with the, the length of this auditorium.

• 28:57Bill Nye?

  So if you were up close to it.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  The weeping craters that we see, though, are several football fields long. I mean, they're enormous, come right down the side of the terrace.

• 29:03Bill Nye?

  But we don't have a rover near them.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  No, we don't, but, uh, we do on Mount Sharp, and if there, if there's RSLs there, the weeping, weeping material, we want to go over there. You bet. We just don't know enough about them yet.

• 29:16Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 29:17Eugene Mirman?

  Do you think we will in like, uh, half a year?

• 29:20Speaker 05

  Well, they are several kilometers away and we'll have to plan a route if we really decide to go over there. And it would take probably at least a half a year or a year to get to them, probably.

• 29:33Bill Nye?

  But we got time. We got a gizmo there.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:36Eugene Mirman?

  Are you in favor of it going there? Or you can't answer?

• 29:39Speaker 05

  If that's water and it's flowing on the surface and it's that close, absolutely.

• 29:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah!

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Whoa! Absolutely.

• 29:45Bill Nye?

  Whoa, took a chance. Take that!

• 29:47Eugene Mirman?

  Alright! And is there a chance that there's something that you won't even need a microscope, that there'd be life that you could see with a camera?

• 29:55Speaker 05

  Very unlikely.

• 29:56Eugene Mirman?

  No?

• 29:57Speaker 05

  No.

• 29:58Eugene Mirman?

  Not even, like a bug? Like a ladybug that's like, like a ladybug?

• 30:02Speaker 05

  No. Now, you'd be looking at four complex carbon compounds that, you know, are down in the water that are telltale signs.

• 30:08Eugene Mirman?

  But there would be nothing living in the water that would be obvious to them?

• 30:11Speaker 05

  Well, no.

• 30:12Bill Nye?

  It's not like there's gonna be like a fish.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  We have absolutely no idea.

• 30:14Eugene Mirman?

  Not a fish! A ladybug! That lives in the water and swims like a fish!

• 30:20Speaker 05

  You know?

• 30:21Bill Nye?

  So, there's people who wanna go to Mars one way.

• 30:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. That's not our plan, though.

• 30:28Bill Nye?

  Yeah, I mean NASA's plan.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  That's not NASA's?

• 30:31Speaker 03

  I could understand, when I watched the movie, I could, I was like, he had such great solitude up there. I live in New York and I was like, oh, the space! Time!

• 30:42Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you had the whole planet.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I could understand, and it's a different thing that you're talking about, but I could understand why you'd wanna go to Mars and die there. That would be incredible.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  Well, he had disco music and you'd have to love that.

• 30:54Bill Nye?

  I think you'd notice it right away, though. You can't eat very easily. You get water.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  It's a really hard life.

• 31:02Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you can't weed.

• 31:03Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, it's not like Costa Rica, but it does.

• 31:06Bill Nye?

  You have to live in a dome or...

• 31:08Speaker 05

  No, it's really all about, you know, you're spending as much of your time surviving. I mean, you have to plan ahead, you have to grow your food, you have to, you know, make sure the solar panels that are receiving light, that you need the energy for, are all dusted off. All the stuff that, you know, is done in the book and in the movie, that's a, you know, sometimes.

• 31:29Bill Nye?

  How many people here want to go to Mars one way?

• 31:32Speaker 05

  One way?

• 31:33Bill Nye?

  Wow, look at all...

• 31:34Speaker 05

  Whoa!

• 31:35Eugene Mirman?

  Are people raising hands?

• 31:36Speaker 05

  We can't see.

• 31:38Eugene Mirman?

  I guess, yeah.

• 31:39Bill Nye?

  How many people want to go to Mars and come back?

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would be cool, huh?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  It was funny when you asked that question and like one wife put up her hand and her husband's sitting right beside her like, "What? You wanna go to Mars and knock 'em back?"

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't buy into the, um, so there was the thing where they, they had the, the sign-ups for, you know, like, "Oh, you're gonna be on a one-way mission to Mars," and like, they had like a hundred thousand people sign up, and I'm like, "Yeah, it's pretty easy to fill out a web form, but when you were actually on the rocket, you'd be like, 'Wait a minute.'"

• 32:14Bill Nye?

  By the way, I just got a message, "Neil's watching you."

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Neil's watching me?

• 32:18Bill Nye?

  "Making sure you get the science right."

• 32:20Speaker 02

  He's watching me, making sure I got the...

• 32:21Bill Nye?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson's keeping an eye on you.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Okay, alright, this is for you, Neil. Well, he, he took me to task last time. I wore these because I knew he would eventually see this. He, my, my last pair of pants at the Planetary Society event were, had like some loose threads on the bottom, and he like...

• 32:38Bill Nye?

  Well, you're a software engineer.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  And you're spending all your money on, on rocks?

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, on rocks!

• 32:45Speaker 03

  You're gonna get a pair of them!

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's one.

• 32:50Bill Nye?

  Well, he took you to task?

• 32:51Speaker 02

  He took me to task because of my, my frayed pants, and he's like, and he's like, "Your mother let you go out in those pants."

• 33:00Speaker 02

  So, Neil, I've got good pants.

• 33:04Bill Nye?

  Good tip. So, with that said, you guys, we are, we're coming to a close. And I just think it's important, just to wanna mention, I cannot help but mention, uh, the recent death of David Bowie. I mean, the guy was a visionary. He talked about life on Mars, he talked about life in space. Uh, Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut, had a multi-million dollar view of his recreation of Commander Tom.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Major, Major Tom.

• 33:31Bill Nye?

  Uh, Major, gee whiz, Bill. Major Tom.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  He's probably a commander by now.

• 33:37Bill Nye?

  Yeah, sure, yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  He's still up there.

• 33:40Bill Nye?

  Killer star. Born in a UFO. He had a lot of cool stuff. So, just to, just to wrap it up. How do people feel about sending people to Mars? Andy, just real quick.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  I definitely think that in the long term, we do need to send people to Mars because I want us to be a two-planet species, which means a catastrophe on Earth, whether it be war, disease, asteroid strike, doesn't eliminate our species. But in terms of scientific discovery, I mean, I hate to go against what most of the people here would want. If all you're doing is trying to discover things scientifically, I don't see a reason to send humans yet. The reason I want to send humans to Mars is to colonize it.

• 34:22Bill Nye?

  Wow. So, you are a computer programmer and back up your software.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, sorry. This is... No, that's a thing I say.

• 34:31Bill Nye?

  So Jim, why do you want to send people to Mars?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Twenty-five years of being a computer programmer has taught me the value of backing up things, yeah.

• 34:40Bill Nye?

  And you're afraid to fly, by the way, right?

• 34:41Speaker 02

  I am, yeah. I'm getting better, though.

• 34:43Bill Nye?

  Good. Jim, why do you want to send people to Mars?

• 34:48Speaker 05

  Well, I think, you know, as explorers, as Americans, this is what we do. You know, you think about America and how it was created over time with people coming in that wanted to explore this nation, that wanted to do the pioneering. It's in our genes. There's a lot of people out there that, "Oh, we can't leave the Earth." Well, it must not be in their genes. They stayed home. We're the ones that have colonized America. We're the ones that keep exploring. We are the nation that has been first to every one of our planets and a couple of our dwarf planets, and we're still exploring. This is what we do.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  I mean, like...

• 35:29Speaker 05

  And it's critical, I think.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  The Soviets got to Venus first.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  No. We flew by Venus.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Okay. I'm just saying. I'm just saying.

• 35:36Bill Nye?

  Well, just let me say that space exploration brings out the best in us, no matter where we're from. So I'm serious. Exploring the cosmos tells us more about answering these two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone in the universe? And if you want to know the answers to that, you have to explore space. And furthermore, whenever we go out there, we solve problems that have never been solved before. And this is worthy of our intellect and treasure. This is what makes humankind a worthy species on this remarkable planet in the cosmos. So stay tuned, we'll be right back with StarTalk.

• 36:23Bill Nye?

  So now, everybody, it's time for the questions and answers from you. So, there are microphones up here, we do not have two turntables. We've only got a few minutes. So if you were gonna ask a question, just make it crisp, crisp. And please, make it a question. And our hope is that it would be about Mars. It would be about the Martian, it would be about so on. So is this the first question, right here? Go for it, yes.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  Okay, so we've talked throughout the program about you've discovered water on Mars. If we were to somehow be able to transport the water that we found on Mars to Earth, and say you were to make a glass of it, I don't know why, but say you were. What differences from that and Earth water would be apparent if, say, you just had it in your house and...

• 37:12Bill Nye?

  Well, if it's really water, there would be no difference. Would there be a different number of neutrons? It's the impurities in it. It's the salts that are keeping it liquid on the surface. So anyway, what these guys, geologists, or the worship words for these guys, or gals, is "sample return." So everybody who's into it, you meet certain geologists, they believe that if you had a sample of Mars, you could tell who was president of Mars 3 billion years ago, because there's so much information in a rock. So along that line, and maybe not bringing back water, but bringing back rocks, I hope you, as a taxpayer and voter, will support this. That's a cool question. He's probably neither of those things yet.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  He's a child.

• 37:53Bill Nye?

  Well, someday, yeah. No, it's coming, you can count on the tax thing especially. Okay. Who's next? Is it all down here? Here we go. In the middle. Wait, wait, wait, wait. He's got a NASA pin.

• 38:06Speaker 06

  Oh, cool.

• 38:07Bill Nye?

  For you, cool. It's the real deal, from the real man. Cool, next question.

• 38:16Speaker 07

  So, not to knock NASA, but government is Boo! ...absolutely inefficient. And nowadays, we've got the private space race heating up. And Elon Musk with SpaceX has said that he wants to send human beings to Mars by, what is it, 2027?

• 38:33Speaker 05

  Next week.

• 38:34Speaker 07

  Next week?

• 38:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 07

  Do you think that he's going to beat you guys there? And if so, why or why not?

• 38:40Speaker 05

  So, I don't believe it's a race. And we want to help Elon any way we can. Okay? So... (applause)

• 38:49Speaker 05

  He's got some ideas, he's got different approaches, and that's wonderful. We want to see if they work. We want to be able to help him in terms of where he wants to go. We want to give him the information he needs to determine how to do it.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  I just want to jump in as well. No, SpaceX is not going to put humans on Mars in the 2020s, just accept that. Also, I do believe that the first man mission to Mars is... My belief is it's going to be a large international effort, more organizationally similar to ISS than to the Apollo program. And those commercial space companies like SpaceX and their competitors are going to be what NASA and the other government agencies hire to put things into orbit. So what I think the ideal situation is NASA makes the ships that go to Mars and makes the stuff that lands on Mars and trains the astronauts that go, and probably even they're going to want to make the launch vehicle that puts the astronauts themselves up.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  But the just raw freight transport of mass up into orbit will be done by these companies. So I think it'll be just everybody working on it.

• 39:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a team effort. Andy's right. And if we do this internationally, it will lower the cost to everybody. Yeah, let's get to the great question.

• 40:04Speaker 07

  There we go.

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What about Elon Nureyevich and the pole?

• 40:07Speaker 05

  So, hang on, we could take the people who've gotten in line and everything. So, go ahead.

• 40:12Speaker 08

  Can I call you Bill?

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Uh, I guess.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Who are you talking to?

• 40:16Speaker 08

  Quickly, I just want to say for everyone here, thank you for helping us, like inspire us and articulate wonder.

• 40:21Speaker 05

  I love you, man!

• 40:23Speaker 08

  I love you, bro. Phil, Phil, Phil. So, I'm pretty young, and you helped me feel wonder. But as I get older, we also realize that life is full of infinite possibility, but it's also full of risk. Planetary exploration, writing, comedy, it's all full of incredible possibility, but incredible risk. What would you say to all the young people here who are realizing that you have to mitigate risk, but also possibility? Like, does that, like, for young people, what words of encouragement would you give in terms of, when you discover something, there might be risk?

• 40:58Bill Nye?

  Well, just keep in mind, in general, not entirely, but in general, you don't regret what you do, you regret what you don't do. And to accomplish anything, you have to assess the risk, the chances of success. So, this gets into something my parents talked about quite a bit. Common sense. And they always said, "Common sense is not that common." What you want is this mix of fear and a belief that you can accomplish something. So, in general, I would say, "Go for it. You'll surprise yourself. You'll get more done than you think." That's what I would say.

• 41:34Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 41:35Bill Nye?

  Yeah. Here we go. Jim's handing out the pin. Yes, yes, ma'am.

• 41:41Speaker 09

  Um, yes, hello. So, I was wondering, besides things that are already plentiful on Earth, like water, is there anything that would be super valuable to us on Mars?

• 41:51Speaker 05

  Oh, good question. Platinum.

• 41:54Speaker 09

  Is it ill with diamonds?

• 41:55Speaker 05

  To live and work, you know, the methane, in addition to the water, the methane, because we could heat our halves.

• 42:02Bill Nye?

  Oh, but are you talking about bringing stuff back?

• 42:04Speaker 09

  Like minerals?

• 42:05Speaker 10

  Well, I'm saying, yeah, like, do you see a potential for commercial mining, like, in a hundred years or something? Like, is there something on Mars that we would want here, that we don't already have tons of?

• 42:16Speaker 05

  You know, that's thinking out of the box, and I never really thought about it.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  I'm just trying to get there. My guess would be no, because just simply transporting things from Mars to Earth would make it better just to get it from Earth.

• 42:27Bill Nye?

  But if there's some kind of jewelry.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  What Mars?

• 42:30Speaker 10

  Exactly.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  What Mars has right now that we lack is an enormous amount of knowledge about the formation of our solar system and the possible formation of life. So that's the real asset Mars has for us right now.

• 42:43Bill Nye?

  So the word you used was "commercial," but if you had said scientifically, "that's samples."

• 42:49Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:50Bill Nye?

  Those are a variety of rock samples, soil samples, everything that we can bring back and study here on Earth, far better than we can with our robotic missions.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  If you bring back a rock this big, I can sell it for 10,000 bucks.

• 43:04Speaker 08

  You'd buy it, you got a buyer.

• 43:06Speaker 10

  You know people willing to buy it, right?

• 43:08Bill Nye?

  Yeah. So let's get to the next question. Thank you.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Good question.

• 43:14Bill Nye?

  God, Jim, you're fabulous, man, with the pins.

• 43:17Speaker 11

  It is not...

• 43:18Bill Nye?

  Go a little closer to the microphone.

• 43:20Speaker 11

  It is not really well-known that permafrost in the Arctic is melting very quickly.

• 43:27Bill Nye?

  It is not, or it is known?

• 43:28Speaker 11

  It is not very well-known.

• 43:30Bill Nye?

  Oh, I see, not...people don't realize it.

• 43:32Speaker 11

  People don't realize it, that...

• 43:34Bill Nye?

  Well, we should tell them.

• 43:35Speaker 11

  Yeah, right. Well, hi. So it is not really well-known that that's a really problem right now in the poles. And so I'm asking if you can please prove me wrong that we...that runaway greenhouse gas effect is not...

• 43:52Bill Nye?

  Oh, you mean the Klaathrate gun? We love the methane gun.

• 43:56Speaker 11

  The methane gun, yeah.

• 43:57Bill Nye?

  So everybody that there's methane stored in the ice and the permafrost and maybe in continental shelves, and as the world gets a little bit warmer, these will be released, there'll be a huge amount of methane put in the atmosphere, and the world, the Earth, will get warmer catastrophically quickly. If you like to worry about things, that's a good one.

• 44:17Speaker 11

  Yeah. I worry about it every day, man.

• 44:21Bill Nye?

  So here's the thing, you guys. You can say what you will, but we have people running for president of the world's most influential government, who, right now, at this point in the election cycle, claim they don't believe in climate change. You guys...yeah, okay, just keep in mind that you have a chance to vote. And whatever you want to do, I'm not supporting a candidate...

• 44:50Bill Nye?

  I'm not supporting a candidate, I'm just saying I encourage everybody to take the environment into account, and here's why: we can compare Venus to Mars to the Earth.

• 45:00Speaker 05

  And we're doing that, and it's very valuable.

• 45:03Bill Nye?

  And what we have learned on these other two worlds is that this one is special. So when it comes time to vote, I strongly encourage you to take the environment into account. Thanks for bringing that up.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  You know...

• 45:13Eugene Mirman?

  San Francisco, the notoriously conservative city you are, please.

• 45:19Speaker 05

  We are so lucky to have in our solar system those other two terrestrial planets, because what happened on Venus could happen here on Earth, what's happened on Mars could happen here on Earth. And it's a matter of how these planets evolve over time. They were all so very different, and we're just becoming aware of that. And that is so important for us to study and understand, because it's gonna affect our life in the long run.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Venus's atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and it's hotter than Mercury. Draw your own conclusions.

• 45:50Bill Nye?

  Which is much closer. So comparative planetology is something that Carl Sagan talked about all the time. Know your place in space.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yes, sir, next question. Hey guys, thank you very much. I know it's kinda early, but I was wondering what you guys thought about the Planet 9?

• 46:07Bill Nye?

  Love Planet 9, it's kooky for Planet 9.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Planet 9. Well, first off, I think if you went back in time to like 1960 and said, "In 2015, there'll only be eight planets," they would think something very exciting was gonna happen.

• 46:21Bill Nye?

  But anyway, this is, everybody if you don't know, it's reasonable that there's an enormous body, a planetary body, out beyond the orbit of Pluto, 10 times, 20 times farther from the Sun than we are.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  No, 200.

• 46:38Bill Nye?

  200, that's what I was kidding. 200. You're absolutely right. 200 times farther from the Sun than we are, and this has gravitational influence out there. And it just shows you there's so much that we don't know right in your own solar system. And that discovery was made in your lifetime, and that's pretty cool.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Well, you know, if it's out there, we'll find it. We haven't found it yet, there's always the...

• 46:59Bill Nye?

  That's that NASA confident.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, well...

• 47:01Bill Nye?

  If it's out there, we're gonna find it. We're gonna find it!

• 47:05Speaker 02

  How hard can it be? It's a whole frickin' planet. I mean, what's wrong with you guys?

• 47:09Speaker 05

  How could we miss it? So, we have a huge telescope called James Webb Space Telescope, JWST.

• 47:17Speaker 05

  And what we'd like to do right now is narrow the search area. Because, you know, that whole region is huge out there. And James Webb has got such a beautiful mirror and right in the infrared, right at a... It's gonna be the wavelengths that it'll see it. And we just want to point there and find it and see the disk and understand it and look at it. And really, try to figure out how it got there, because it didn't form there. It had to have formed inside this group of planets we have. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do. I have been informed, this next one's the last question, I'm sorry guys. Striped sweater man, bring it on. This is it.

• 47:56Speaker 12

  Okay, so...

• 47:57Speaker 05

  Close to the microphone, let them hear you outside, blow the roof off the dump.

• 48:01Speaker 12

  So, I was thinking, after humanity colonizes Mars...

• 48:07Speaker 05

  The way we will.

• 48:08Speaker 12

  Yeah. Um, where are we going to go next as a species?

• 48:13Speaker 05

  Where would you like to go?

• 48:16Speaker 12

  Europa, maybe?

• 48:17Speaker 05

  The solar system is ours, let's take it! Oh man, it's a piece of cake! Come on! Anyway, Europa has twice as much seawater as the Earth. Are there European fish people swimming around out there? And if we discovered them, it would change the course of human history and I want to do it in my lifetime. Yeah. So, support the work of space exploration and let's change the world. Thank you all very much for coming. Give it up again for Andy, May, Eugene, and Jim, thank you all so much!

• 48:50Bill Nye?

  And Bill.

• 48:51Speaker 05

  And I'm Bill Nye, we'll be signing books to the lobby in just a few minutes. Thank you all for coming.