StarTalk Live! SF Sketchfest

Where did we come from? Are we alone? Explore these questions with guest host Bill Nye the Science Guy, co-host Eugene Mirman and their guests comedian Dave Foley and SETI Institute Sr. Astronomer Seth Shostak. (Warning: Since this show was recorded live before an adult audience in San Francisco, be prepared for some suggestive language and humor.) Read more and listen to the full track: http://www.startalkradio.net/show/startalk-live-sf-sketchfest/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:24Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome to StarTalk Live!

• 0:32Eugene Mirman?

  Very special edition from San Francisco Sketch Fest.

• 0:39Eugene Mirman?

  It is my great honor to bring on your guest host for this evening, the amazing Bill Nye the Science Guy!

• 0:59Bill Nye?

  So it's great to see you all, thank you so much for coming. I am here on behalf of my beloved dear colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 1:10Bill Nye?

  But tonight, we are gonna talk about some serious business. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

• 1:20Bill Nye?

  And you could say, "Well, that's crazy." Or you could say it's serious business. And to that end, we have the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, the SETI Institute's senior astronomer, give it up for Mr. Setz Shostak!

• 1:44Bill Nye?

  And then, as though it's not funny enough, people.

• 1:49Bill Nye?

  A former colleague, coworker of mine, for those of you who never miss an episode of Stargate Atlantis, from Kids in the Hall, Dave Foley!

• 2:09Bill Nye?

  So, no, it's great to see you all. And we're gonna talk about something very serious and remarkable and cool and something that, in my opinion, which as you know, is correct, will, dare I say it, change the world. There are two questions, two questions deep within us, two questions each and every one of you has asked at some point in his or her life. Where did we come from? Why are we here? And, well, that's pretty close. But of those of you listening on the radio, he said, "Why are we here?" And I think this is a sketch fest and you bought admission ticket and you came, you

• 2:52Bill Nye?

  have to take that up with the people you're sitting with. Where did we come from and are we alone? And if you meet somebody who says, "I've never asked those questions," they're lying. Okay? So, it's, it's an exciting time and this is something that goes back all of my academic life. I'm talking about since somewhat before kindergarten. I've wondered these questions. And we have here a guy that really tries to answer this question for real. Seth.

• 3:22Eugene Mirman?

  Dave Foley.

• 3:25Bill Nye?

  So Seth, what is it you do exactly?

• 3:28Speaker 03

  We're trying to find out if there are any cosmic confreres, if there's any cosmic company out there. Not just aliens, not just pond scum on Mars, dead or alive, but are there any people or things or Klingons or intelligences that are at least as clever as, you know, the average resident of the Bay Area?

• 3:46Bill Nye?

  So how would we go about doing it?

• 3:47Eugene Mirman?

  Are you looking for the Grateful Dead in space?

• 3:52Speaker 03

  You know...

• 3:56Bill Nye?

  Seth, how do you go about actually looking for extraterrestrial intelligence, actually?

• 4:00Speaker 03

  This is something you can use at your next cocktail party. There are only three ways to look for aliens that we're using today. One is to just go there and try and find them. That, that only works if you're going nearby. I mean, you might go to Mars and maybe you find pond scum. But on, on the other hand, you could probably go to your bathroom and find pond scum, so that's around the bathroom. That's one way. The second way is build a really big telescope and look at the light coming from some planet around some godforsaken other star, split up that light with a prism, look at that... is this getting too technical? And, and then...

• 4:28Eugene Mirman?

  Not yet.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  All right.

• 4:31Eugene Mirman?

  What is this prism you talk of?

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, prism.

• 4:34Eugene Mirman?

  Are you saying prison wrong?

• 4:38Speaker 03

  You split it up with a prism, and then you look for things like oxygen or methane. You know, if you find a lot of that, you know, that's right. Twenty-one percent of the air in this room used to be oxygen before you guys got here, and that's because there's life on this planet. So that's scheme number two. Scheme number three, which is what we do, we train big antennas on the sky, hoping to imitate Jodie Foster by finding a signal.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Coming from intelligent species, intelligence means you can build a radio transmitter, and you should probably ask the person sitting next to you, "Hey, can you build a radio transmitter?" And you'll know what you're sitting next to.

• 5:13Bill Nye?

  So how long have you been at this? How, how? How long have you been at this, Seth?

• 5:19Speaker 03

  What? This search, somebody's been at this search for a long time. I think it's in 1960, Frank Drake did an experiment.

• 5:25Bill Nye?

  Frank Drake? Who is Frank Drake?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Frank Drake. Frank Drake is a, an astronomer. He did the first experiment along these lines, back in 1960, before most of you were born, was after I had reached middle age. 1960, he used an antenna in West Virginia, I want to emphasize that, West Virginia, he pointed at a couple of nearby stars, hoping to hear signals from E.T.

• 5:45Bill Nye?

  And did he?

• 5:46Speaker 03

  He did hear a signal, turned out to be the US military. That did not count as intelligence.

• 5:54Bill Nye?

  You grew fascinated with this at some point?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:57Bill Nye?

  Something happened to you? You're an astronomer.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Lots of cheesy sci-fi films when I was a kid. Think about it. Aliens are terrific bad guys to the movies, right? And when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, you know, all the handy bad guys kind of went away. But aliens, you can, you can make them-

• 6:12Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, now we have no more enemies, so that's good.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 6:15Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Terrific.

• 6:18Bill Nye?

  So, why did you decide to do this with your professional career?

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Well-

• 6:23Bill Nye?

  Because in a sense-

• 6:23Speaker 03

  You could have been a chef!

• 6:26Bill Nye?

  Let me say, in a sense, you've been looking for several years. 1960 is getting to be quite some time ago.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  That was Frank Drake. No, I didn't get into this until quite a bit later, 1981.

• 6:36Bill Nye?

  Yeah, okay, since 81. What are we now? We're some other bigger number, right?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Something, yeah.

• 6:41Bill Nye?

  So, you haven't heard anything.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  It's the American education system. Yeah.

• 6:46Bill Nye?

  Hey, I can do a little bit of...

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Calculus. No, no, no, look, look, look, look, look. The point is, it's a special moment in time. I mean, you know, everybody thinks they're living in a special moment of time. They probably thought that, you know, in the year 1000. God, it's a special moment in time, Bob.

• 7:02Eugene Mirman?

  Those people are idiots.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Well... Look what's gonna happen in this century, that you're gonna see. One is, we finally understand biology. So, a lot of diseases you're worried about now, you won't be worrying about in 50 years. The second thing is, we're probably inventing our own successors. We're making thinking machines. I don't know how you feel about that. I'm not sure how I feel about it. But that's this generation. And the third thing is, we're gonna, I think, find that you have some company out there.

• 7:27Bill Nye?

  How do you say that now?

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Just the way I said it. But if you ask...

• 7:31Bill Nye?

  Oh, I see. Let me rephrase that for you. You'll die, takes it in the gut.

• 7:41Bill Nye?

  So, Seth, what's a reasonable population of nearby stars in distance of light years?

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Well, just consider our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. There are like a couple of hundred billion stars, okay? The number of planets is probably close to a trillion. Within a thousand light years, that's not very far, I got that on my Honda. A thousand light years, there are on the order of, you know, millions and millions of stars.

• 8:05Bill Nye?

  Okay, so here's what I'm saying to you. We're listening for one that has been broadcasting for the last thousand years, right?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Uh, not necessarily, but you have to assume that if they're a thousand light years away, they broadcast something there, you know, come join the Klingon book club or something. And maybe for only 10 minutes, and it arrives today when you happen to be looking, that's good enough.

• 8:25Eugene Mirman?

  If we were to broadcast something with our current technology, how long would it take for somebody a thousand light years? It'd be a thousand...

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Years.

• 8:32Eugene Mirman?

  Years? That would be, meaning that's the speed sound would travel?

• 8:35Bill Nye?

  Uh, the speed of light.

• 8:36Eugene Mirman?

  Or signals. Will they be the speed of light, but would a signal travel at the speed of light?

• 8:40Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  If it's a light signal.

• 8:41Eugene Mirman?

  If it's a light signal.

• 8:43Bill Nye?

  No, Eugene.

• 8:44Eugene Mirman?

  I'm just saying, explain it to someone who maybe didn't major in anything to do with science.

• 8:50Bill Nye?

  Can you pick one?

• 8:50Eugene Mirman?

  I'm hinting at it with my idiocy.

• 8:54Bill Nye?

  So, radio waves and light waves go the same speed.

• 8:57Eugene Mirman?

  Ah, I caught you in a piece of information I like.

• 9:03Bill Nye?

  So, but this, you guys, this goes way back. Dave?

• 9:06Speaker 04

  No, I was gonna say, I actually heard you interviewed recently where you said that we may have gone silent now because we're all broadcasting digitally and the digital signals don't propagate through space.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  I hope I didn't say that. It is true, it is true, right? And I don't know, how many, how many of you have rabbit ears on the top of your TV set? The thing is that we're shutting down the big towers, you know, the red and white antennas on the outside of town because, in fact, you're getting all your information digitally, or you will soon enough, you'll just have, if you don't already have this. You have a fiber optic that comes into your house, you get your internet, your TV, your phone. Some of you have this already. That's the way we're going. So, a lot of TV broadcasting will go away, that's true. But, there is the but, is that some things aren't going silent, like the radars down at the San Francisco airport. You're probably not gonna shut those down.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  Unless they shift, you know, GPS.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  I don't know how, well, GPS is all very...

• 9:56Eugene Mirman?

  In the hot 94.5.

• 9:58Bill Nye?

  That's what's going on now. But this search, people have been fascinated with this for centuries, yes?

• 10:04Speaker 03

  It does. The ancient Greeks thought about it too. They thought everything they could see in the sky was inhabited.

• 10:09Eugene Mirman?

  Were they all murdered? For saying it out loud? So, this is when thoughts were murdery.

• 10:17Bill Nye?

  So, but that was in Greece, in Greece, some people, they voted and they had democracies and stuff, so... But Seth, why did they think that? You've given this some deep thought, it is to be expected.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  I'm not sure I have. I haven't thought too much about why the Greeks believed that. The Greeks were kind of upbeat, you know? They figured, you know, we're here, there's stuff up there. They came up with nifty ideas like the atom and geometry.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  And sodomie.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  And science, yeah, right.

• 10:45Eugene Mirman?

  He said that, and he's right.

• 10:49Bill Nye?

  So, well, that couldn't be the only people that had that idea.

• 10:53Eugene Mirman?

  No, but they were the first to perfect it.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  They were just really, really good at it.

• 10:57Bill Nye?

  So...

• 10:58Speaker 04

  First thing was they, you know, the tunics were just perfect for it.

• 11:02Bill Nye?

  First of all.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:08Bill Nye?

  When you say tunics, do you mean togas?

• 11:11Speaker 04

  No, tunics, not togas. Togas, that's all drapy. A tunic, it's a nice, tidy little number that your slave boy would wear.

• 11:19Bill Nye?

  So...

• 11:23Bill Nye?

  Alright. Of course, the Greeks were upbeat about it, right?

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:28Bill Nye?

  But Galileo, then his contemporary Bruno, Bruno was burned at the stake over this business, right?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Well, he was burned at the stake, that's true. Kind of a bummer for Bruno, but the facts are...

• 11:38Bill Nye?

  Giadon!

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Well, our burner for Bruno, how's that? But the reason he was incinerated, actually, wasn't because he said that there was a multiplicity of worlds. He did say that, you know, undoubtedly.

• 11:48Bill Nye?

  So that was what, that's 16...

• 11:50Speaker 03

  1600 he was burned.

• 11:51Bill Nye?

  02, yeah. He was burned at the stake for suggesting, no, not for suggesting.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  No, not for suggesting. That wasn't what got him burned.

• 11:57Eugene Mirman?

  Did they burn him for a different reason?

• 11:59Speaker 03

  They did.

• 12:00Eugene Mirman?

  Because...

• 12:01Speaker 03

  What reason? They burned him for heresies against the church. Sorry, but...

• 12:05Eugene Mirman?

  So that was unrelated to saying there's alien life? So, one, he's like, "Alien life", and they're like, "Fine", and then he's like, "Your god not totally real, not fine."

• 12:15Speaker 03

  You get the drift.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So he deserved to be burned, is what you're saying?

• 12:21Eugene Mirman?

  He did do a Bernie thing.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:24Bill Nye?

  So Bruno did not have a telescope, did he? Did he look through Galileo's telescope?

• 12:29Speaker 03

  No, no, no. He was burned in 1600. Galileo turned a telescope to the sky in about 1609.

• 12:33Bill Nye?

  But was he influenced by Bruno's trauma?

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Bruno Flambay? No, uh, I don't thi... I don't thi... I don't think he was, no.

• 12:42Bill Nye?

  But that's the case where this was a military instrument, a telescope.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  But keep in mind, I mean, Galileo wasn't looking for life in space. He just took this toy that came out of Holland. He didn't invent the telescope, of course. Dutch probably did that. Yeah, but he built one.

• 12:55Bill Nye?

  His crowd?

• 12:56Eugene Mirman?

  He was the first person to point it not at the ground?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  You were the first person out to point it at the neighbors. That's what he did. He pointed it up.

• 13:05Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Bill Nye?

  There's your whole tunic thing, yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  People are remarkably stupid.

• 13:11Bill Nye?

  So, Galileo looks at this thing and did he speculate that there was life on the moon?

• 13:16Speaker 03

  Well, you know, in the beginning, he was just sort of astounded to find that, for example, the moon wasn't perfect because, you know...

• 13:21Bill Nye?

  It's all beat up.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  The theologians had said, "Yeah, it's all beaten up." And you see these dark areas and they kind of look like oceans. And he thought, "Well, maybe, maybe, maybe." But it was actually a guy by the name of, you know, Johannes Kepler. I guess his buddies called him John. Kepler actually looked...

• 13:35Speaker 04

  I always called him Kepi.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  He thought he saw buried cities on the moon. I mean, for a long time, the moon was believed to house sentient beings.

• 13:44Bill Nye?

  But then, this goes on for another century. Huygens comes along, thinks that there's life everywhere, right?

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Not Huygens, but Herschel. Maybe you mean...

• 13:52Bill Nye?

  Herschel, Herschel.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, William Herschel.

• 13:53Bill Nye?

  It's a blur.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Bill Herschel, probably the greatest astronomer who ever lived, actually. And that Herschel thought there were inhabitants on the sun or just beneath the luminous layer of the sun. That turns out to be wrong.

• 14:04Bill Nye?

  Probably, yeah. Probably.

• 14:06Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, are you saying he was the greatest astronomer?

• 14:10Eugene Mirman?

  I'm not denying it. I'm just asking for a second reason other than he thought people lived under or in the sun.

• 14:18Bill Nye?

  We call it a follow-up in journalism.

• 14:20Eugene Mirman?

  I get that I didn't know that signals are the... anyway, but, uh...

• 14:24Speaker 03

  I could show you number two and then you'd understand.

• 14:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  The second greatest astronomer thought his shoes could sing opera.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  But...

• 14:33Bill Nye?

  Whoa, what?

• 14:35Speaker 04

  True story.

• 14:36Bill Nye?

  Really?

• 14:37Speaker 04

  True story.

• 14:38Bill Nye?

  I heard that. Yeah, I heard that. I heard on the radio.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well...

• 14:42Eugene Mirman?

  But what was great that Herschel did?

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I was gonna get to that.

• 14:45Eugene Mirman?

  Or Huygens.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Herschel, Herschel. Herschel had a telescope good enough to look at Mars, everybody's favorite inhabited planet, Mars. And he could see the white, you know, polar caps at the top and the bottom and, you know, the tilt of the...

• 14:58Bill Nye?

  The caps are made of dry ice, frozen carbon. There's some water ice, yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  There's some water ice, too. But whatever. I mean, it has, you know, seasons because the axis is tilted.

• 15:06Bill Nye?

  Eugene's just nodding along, "Yeah."

• 15:08Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. "Yeah, dry ice, whatever, anyway."

• 15:12Speaker 03

  The length of a day on Mars, 25 hours. He gave a talk to the Royal Society, I think it was 1784. 1784, this is just at the end of the American Revolution. 1784, and he says that the Martians probably enjoy a lifestyle, or a climate at least, rather similar to our own.

• 15:33Bill Nye?

  Really?

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, he said that to the Royal Society.

• 15:35Bill Nye?

  But if we go there now, it's 20 below on a summer day, and there's nothing to breathe. Which you would notice, you would notice that. And you could say the same about certain times of year in Oakland.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Not anymore.

• 15:53Eugene Mirman?

  But, wait, my question of, so what makes him particularly great? Is it that he was the first to postulate, or the first to look at Mars?

• 16:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:02Eugene Mirman?

  I'm asking.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  No, he wasn't the first.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  What was he right about?

• 16:06Bill Nye?

  Since he was the greatest.

• 16:07Eugene Mirman?

  I get that, first of all, he sounds awesome. And he sounds creative, but yeah, what did he, was he ever like?

• 16:15Speaker 04

  He sounds high.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  I'm gonna tell you, but this is too much of a straight line for you.

• 16:21Eugene Mirman?

  That's fine.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Okay. He found Uranus.

• 16:26Eugene Mirman?

  I'll leave it alone.

• 16:27Bill Nye?

  Not trivial, not trivial.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  I prefer the old pronunciation.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  From when you and I were children.

• 16:36Bill Nye?

  So, these are telescopes from a long time ago. We have, we have modern telescopes. And people look out there, and they observe planets. And they can infer from here that these places are probably inhabitable. But what does it take to be habitable?

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Well, that's actually a good question, because all we know is what it takes for life like our own to be habitable. So you have to start there, because you don't have any other data points. But that means, yeah, maybe something to breathe, but not necessarily. I mean, if you dug a hole one mile deep here, it'd take you all night. But if you did that, and you pulled up the muck at the bottom, and put it under a microscope, you'd see, you know, microbes.

• 17:15Bill Nye?

  That don't need air to breathe.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  They don't need air. They don't need sunlight, no photosynthesis, I mean, they're alive, but they're down there. So, there's no good definition of life, right? You might think of Justice Potter, talking about pornography, "I'll know it when I see it." Life is kind of the same way, right?

• 17:31Eugene Mirman?

  It can definitely high-five.

• 17:34Eugene Mirman?

  I think we can all kind of agree that it's not like everybody can go "Yeah!" But what else?

• 17:40Speaker 04

  And you know what? And if it leaves you hanging, it is dead to me.

• 17:48Bill Nye?

  Well said, Dave. And so with that, ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening, you're listening to Sketch Fest from San Francisco at the Marine Memorial Auditorium, Marine Memorial Theater. And this is StarTalk Radio Live, and we will be right back.

• 18:27Bill Nye?

  Welcome back to StarTalk.

• 18:33Bill Nye?

  Yes! StarTalk Live, as you may infer, at the Marine Memorial Theater, San Francisco, California. It's Sketch Fest. So Seth, I very much enjoy and am fascinated by the history of the search for extraterrestrial things, especially the speculation about what's living elsewhere. But what's going on now in the search?

• 18:56Speaker 03

  What's going on now is that we're continuing to do radio searches, in other words, using big antennas to try and eavesdrop on ET.

• 19:04Bill Nye?

  Where are these antennas?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Well, the ones we use are about 300 miles north of where we're all sitting here tonight in San Francisco. So they're up in the Cascade Mountains. They're there not because of the cuisine. They're there because, in fact, it's shielded by these mountains from all the, you know, radio noise from the San Francisco.

• 19:19Bill Nye?

  It's really effective, in our modern world of today in which we now live, that this Hat Creek Valley is noiseless or quiet?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  It's not noiseless, but it's not because of noise from cities like San Francisco, actually. It's noisy simply because we now have telecommunications satellites wheeling overhead all the time. And of course, they have transmitters, and, you know, that gets down the valley. Good wheeling, yeah.

• 19:42Bill Nye?

  Except they're in outer space, so they just go...

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Because in outer space, no one can hear you "Boop, boop."

• 19:51Bill Nye?

  Exactly. So Seth, in our first, in our first segment, you asserted, you claimed that in the next 25 years, we're gonna get a signal?

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Well, I didn't say that, but I will. Yeah.

• 20:05Bill Nye?

  Well, how are you gonna say that?

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Well, no, I, I said in this century, but I, I think, I think your number's a good one. I think the next couple of dozen years may do it. And if you wanna know why I think that,

• 20:15Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, kinda.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  I mean, maybe, maybe you do.

• 20:18Eugene Mirman?

  We're all fairly curious.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  I think Bill's ready to punch you over this.

• 20:23Bill Nye?

  Yeah. Not over this.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Okay, well, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack if somebody said, "Look, you know, there's a needle in a haystack over there." And you wanna make an estimate, "How long's it gonna take me to find that needle?" It only depends on three things. How big is the haystack? How fast are you going through the hay? And how many needles are in there? Now, in the case of looking for ET, we know how big the haystack is.

• 20:47Bill Nye?

  It's pretty fast-talking. So say it again?

• 20:49Speaker 03

  If there isn't any other intelligent life in the galaxy, I mean, why look at another galaxy, right? I mean, it's like saying, "You think there are any other mammals in North America? And if it turns out there aren't any, then it doesn't really pay to also look in South America." Okay, I'll, I'll finish this up. This, this idea is, it's too complex, apparently, but you, look, so you need to know, how big is the haystack? How fast are you going through it? How many needles are in there? In the case of looking for ET, the haystack is our galaxy. Let's look in our galaxy.

• 21:15Bill Nye?

  200 billion stars.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Roughly, plus or minus three. Right. How, how fast are we going through the hay? That we know. That's, that's a technical question. And we know how quickly we'll go through the hay for the next 10 or 20 years as well. That you can sort of predict.

• 21:28Bill Nye?

  How fast is that? A star a second?

• 21:31Speaker 03

  And no, nothing like a star a second. But the speed actually follows something that's a very famous relationship here, near the Silicon Valley, namely Moore's Law. In other words, it doubles in speed every 18 months. So that will continue for another decade or two. The only thing you don't know is how many needles are in there. I mean, you know how many aliens are in there. But there are people who've guessed, like Carl Sagan has guessed, Isaac Asimov guessed, you know? Frank Drake has guessed.

• 21:54Bill Nye?

  Have you guessed? Eugene?

• 21:57Eugene Mirman?

  I have, I have 80, but what's your guess? That's gonna be more accurate.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Eighty may be good Eugene, I mean, I don't know. But if it isn't at least a few thousand, then this is gonna take longer. But, if it's as many as ten thousand, right?

• 22:11Bill Nye?

  Ten thousand stars with planets that are habitable and so on.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  And not only habitable, but there's some inhabitants that are broadcasting.

• 22:18Eugene Mirman?

  But they'd have to be at our level of technological advancement.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  No, they can be more advanced.

• 22:22Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I'm sorry, but they couldn't, how much less than us could they be?

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Not much, nothing.

• 22:25Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 22:26Bill Nye?

  Fifty years.

• 22:27Eugene Mirman?

  We're, we're the basic.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  We're the dumbest.

• 22:29Eugene Mirman?

  We're the people who are like years in negatives.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  At least be at like Marconi phase.

• 22:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, not even that.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Or Tesla, if you wanna really be honest about it.

• 22:37Eugene Mirman?

  They would have to have...

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Marconi was a fucking asshole.

• 22:40Bill Nye?

  Tesla, Tesla had a belief in this, yeah?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  He did. Tesla thought he'd heard the Martians.

• 22:47Bill Nye?

  Nikola Tesla. After whom, what's a Tesla, anyone?

• 22:51Speaker 03

  They named him after a car.

• 22:52Bill Nye?

  Weber per square meter.

• 22:54Eugene Mirman?

  A delicious salami?

• 22:57Eugene Mirman?

  I know that's not true, Jesus bebel.

• 23:00Bill Nye?

  It's good with sauerkraut, but he was a guy who, after whom we have a magnetic unit of flux named, yes? And he was the guy who pioneered alternating current transmission right through the air and all, everybody's just gonna glow.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:13Bill Nye?

  And along with that, he speculated.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Well, he built this big tower for his wireless power transmission scheme, which by the way, did work. The trouble is, it also conveyed power to your hair and everything else. But, but he eventually built the generators, you know this, at Niagara Falls. That was the important thing, for Westinghouse. Bit of electrical engineering history to, it's, it's, it's, good for what's left of your soul.

• 23:34Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Right, that's right.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  And he and Edison were dread enemies.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 23:38Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:39Eugene Mirman?

  Killing elephants left and right.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's, you know, it's a bit apocryphal, but okay, okay. Anyways, Tesla had this big tower outside, in Colorado, I think it was Fort Collins, but anyways. And the idea was he was doing these experiments, and he found, he found these signals coming in on it, radio signals. And he thought, these are the Martians. It was sort of jumping to conclusions. Probably they were what are called whistlers, which are caused by electrical storms that just produce, you know, electromagnetic disturbances. Radio waves in the atmosphere that propagate around.

• 24:09Bill Nye?

  Like from lightning, while you're, while you're producing light.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Not the Martians, it was lightning.

• 24:14Bill Nye?

  You produce sprites and radio waves and stuff. So, he was wrong about that.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  He was wrong about that, yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  And that's why he was the greatest astronomer ever.

• 24:26Bill Nye?

  So Seth, I remember very well. I was in Carl Sagan's astronomy class.

• 24:36Bill Nye?

  I know some of you are skeptical. I'm sure it was some sort of clerical error at the university. But I was in the class and they speculated at that time that about 1 in 100 stars would have planets. And now we speculate that every star has a planet. Or 2, or 8, or more.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  And that 1 out of 5 has an Earth-like planet.

• 24:56Bill Nye?

  Is that right Seth? Is that a current number?

• 24:58Speaker 03

  There was indeed a result announced a couple of months ago. Dave's right. This was an analysis...

• 25:04Bill Nye?

  You don't have to sound so...

• 25:07Speaker 04

  That's why I am a terrible astronomer.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  This was an analysis done by some guys at a state institution across the bay here. The name escapes me. But they published this result. They did a preliminary analysis.

• 25:27Bill Nye?

  If you're scoring along with us, it's University of California, Berkeley?

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:30Bill Nye?

  Not everybody's here.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  And their estimate was that Sun-like stars, maybe 30, 40% of them might have an Earth-like world. 20 to 40%. Red dwarf stars, which dominate the heavens.

• 25:42Bill Nye?

  Dominate!

• 25:43Speaker 03

  The little runty guys. Somewhere between maybe 15% and 40, 50% of them might have a habitable planet. So, bottom line, you average it all together, you weight by the number.

• 25:53Bill Nye?

  You can't see it, he's waving.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Dave is right. Roughly 1 in 5 stars will not only have a planet, but a planet that might be salubrious enough for you to go into the business of constructing condos on it. Because it would have, you know, liquid oceans and maybe some air.

• 26:05Bill Nye?

  So if you have 200 billion stars in our galaxy, that's... well, that's a lot of habitable planets.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  40 billion.

• 26:14Bill Nye?

  40 billion in our galaxy.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:16Bill Nye?

  So you start doing the universe, you get into hundreds of billions.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  And then it's just whether intelligence evolved on any of them.

• 26:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  And life, for that.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:25Bill Nye?

  No one's gonna make a joke.

• 26:27Eugene Mirman?

  Are you saying that it's not alive? Is that a fear? That sounds like something we should be afraid of.

• 26:34Eugene Mirman?

  A planet that evolved a dead intelligence?

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Well, Eugene, look at it this way. I mean, we said earlier that one of the great advances of this century, probably the thing that people will remember the most about this century, if they remembered at all, is that we invented thinking machines. Now, a lot of you think, "I ain't ever gonna do that." I think it'll be Lindsay Lohan. You might, yes. You will, but not 500 years from now. But, once you do that, once you build a thinking machine, the first thing you ask is, "You designed something smarter than you are." And then you ask that machine, "You designed something smarter than you are." And, within 20 years, you have a machine that's smarter than all humans altogether. So, the scenario-

• 27:08Bill Nye?

  Like, that's a good thing?

• 27:09Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know if it's a good thing, but it's an inevitable thing. And, the point is, that most of the intelligence out there is probably synthetic, and probably in their, you know, synthetic brains somewhere, they're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah. Somewhere back in the past, we were soft and squishy and organic. That must have been terrible."

• 27:25Eugene Mirman?

  Oh. Wait, so you're saying whatever life was there died, but had first created something smart that kept creating smarter things, and now-

• 27:32Speaker 03

  They don't have to die.

• 27:33Eugene Mirman?

  They don't have to die, but they might have.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  They could be kept around as like cats.

• 27:36Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wait, so there might be a lot- oh, so there- but, anyway, there could be super smart intelligence that is artificial, that has now moved on. Another planet had a singularity.

• 27:44Bill Nye?

  So, Seth, is this a just-so story, that, in other words, we build computers so we infer that, we figure that somebody else, everybody else is building computers, building machines smarter than they are?

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right. That maybe it's a just-so story, and maybe 99 out of 100 of them don't do that. They just sit around with their wheeze, or contemplating their navel, or whatever they're doing. Okay?

• 28:04Eugene Mirman?

  Those are the only two options.

• 28:10Eugene Mirman?

  "What is my navel? Ooh. I can play golf."

• 28:14Speaker 03

  That's great, Eugene. You just simplified my life.

• 28:17Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Yes.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:19Bill Nye?

  Just a little.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, but if one of them does it, you see, that intelligence becomes so incredible that it really doesn't matter what the others do.

• 28:27Bill Nye?

  Yes, so, tell us about that. We- what happens to the Earth when we get a signal?

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Well, most people, you walk the streets of San Francisco, and you ask people, "What do you think would happen if scientists 300 miles north of you pick up a signal?" Most people say, "Well, the government would shut it all down."

• 28:45Eugene Mirman?

  Really? They'll give you a 90-minute speech about organic food. They're monsters.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  That's what the public thinks. They think it would all be kept quiet. And when I ask them, "Why do you think that?", they say, "Because the public couldn't handle the news." "Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do." Could you handle the news if you picked up your newspaper tomorrow? You won't do that. Picked up your browser tomorrow and you read, you know, "Scientists find signal coming from 800 light-years away", would you say, "That's it? I'm not going to work today"? Is that what you do? Yeah. Would you riot in the streets? No, you wouldn't do any of that. We have historical precedent. You wouldn't do that. It would just be a very interesting story.

• 29:21Bill Nye?

  Are you sure we wouldn't have to burn somebody at the stake?

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. Somebody would, somewhere, but...

• 29:27Eugene Mirman?

  We would murder One Direction.

• 29:34Eugene Mirman?

  And then move on.

• 29:40Bill Nye?

  So...

• 29:42Eugene Mirman?

  Because then our hearts were good.

• 30:04Bill Nye?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio Live.

• 30:10Bill Nye?

  I'm Bill Nye the Science Guy, sitting in on a four-legged stool for my esteemed colleague and dear friend Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yes!

• 30:22Bill Nye?

  So Seth, deep within, you know, one might ask, astronomers have been looking at the heavens for a long time. You guys have been looking at the heavens for 60 years. Is that accurate? 50-something years?

• 30:34Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:34Bill Nye?

  And this, you haven't heard a thing. And this gets back to Fermi's Paradox. If they're out there, why haven't you heard from them?

• 30:42Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know if everybody in the audience knows Fermi's Paradox unless they're related to the guy. But Fermi was having lunch with a couple of physicists, and at some point between two bites of a tuna fish sandwich, he says, "So where is everybody?". And he wasn't referring to the lack of company at the lunch. What he was referring to was the fact that the time that it would take to colonize the galaxy, if that's on your agenda. If you're the Klingons and you decide you want to colonize the galaxy, and even if your rockets aren't all that fast, but if you stay at it, you can do it in, you know, a few tens of millions of years, maybe 30, 40, 50 million years.

• 31:14Bill Nye?

  It's like that.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Now, that's a long, yeah, that's a long time if you're waiting for a bus from San Francisco. But that's not very long. Compared to the age of the galaxy. So what he was saying is, if there really are advanced societies out there, some of them, one of them, would have colonized the entire galaxy by now. We see no evidence of that, and that's why I said, "So where is everybody?" At which point he let the subject drop.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  And ruined lunch.

• 31:39Bill Nye?

  No, well, I'm, no, I'm, I'm, I'm still enjoying that lunch. Seth, tell us, what happens to the Earth when we get a signal? I claim it would, dare I say it, change the world. It would be, humans would be humbled yet again.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  But already, most people believe aliens are already visiting the Earth. The majority of people...

• 32:02Speaker 03

  But it's not the majority.

• 32:03Bill Nye?

  You're talking about...

• 32:04Speaker 03

  A third, a majority of Americans.

• 32:05Bill Nye?

  You guys are talking about the History Channel, right?

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Believe that aliens visit here, yeah.

• 32:11Bill Nye?

  How many people watch that show? How many people watch that show?

• 32:16Speaker 04

  Which one?

• 32:17Bill Nye?

  Ancient Aliens.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  Ancient Aliens, oh, those are horrible, yeah.

• 32:20Eugene Mirman?

  Isn't there a show called Misinformation?

• 32:22Speaker 04

  But if we, if we heard that there were, if we got proof that there were aliens, I think most people would just go, "Well, yeah."

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Well, that, that may be part of the reason why they wouldn't riot in the streets.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Right, I mean, we're all, they're already here.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Then people are fat and lazy.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  It's not like the old days, when they'd riot in the streets.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Apparently, there were never those old days, really. I mean, so what would actually happen is, it would simply be a very interesting story. If you could understand anything they were saying, now that would be good, because, remember, they can't be less technically advanced than you are, because then they're not making any radio waves that we could pick up. So they're at least at our level, and it's very unlikely that they're within 100 years of our level. They'd be thousands, millions, conceivably billions of years more advanced. Suppose you could get information from a society that's millions of years more advanced than ours. Right, "Here's the cure for death, here's how to get along," whatever. Now, would that be interesting, or would you say, "No, I'm just gonna riot in the streets"?

• 33:16Eugene Mirman?

  That is a very hopeful view. We were like, "Here's, uh, how to avoid death and all that," but they could also come here and be like, "You now do all our chores."

• 33:25Speaker 04

  It's people, it's people! What, what if they show up here at the same time that the Lakers win a championship?

• 33:34Speaker 04

  And they think the riot is about them?

• 33:38Bill Nye?

  Well, there's no shortage of unrest. No. Well. Thank you Eugene, but you know, if you're not sure.

• 33:45Eugene Mirman?

  No, but how close, so how close is, in light years, is the closest inhabitable planet?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  We don't know, but, take that number.

• 33:53Eugene Mirman?

  And double it?

• 33:54Speaker 03

  One out of five. No, you could, you could.

• 33:57Eugene Mirman?

  I'll double anything, you just give me an hour.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Alright.

• 34:04Eugene Mirman?

  Not a real thing, go on.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, all you need is at least five star systems, and now you have a good chance for one habitable planet, and five star systems, you'll find those within ten, twelve light years.

• 34:16Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really?

• 34:18Bill Nye?

  Wow, that's, that's right down the galactic street.

• 34:21Eugene Mirman?

  So wait, you don't even need to fold space, you, they could, they really could have...

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Well, let me just tell you how long it takes to go ten light years at the speed of a NASA rocket, okay?

• 34:30Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, probably at least two weeks, maybe years.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  You're right, it is years, it's about...

• 34:38Eugene Mirman?

  Well, it's also weeks.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:41Eugene Mirman?

  I'm not technically wrong, it's just very inefficient.

• 34:47Bill Nye?

  The number gets big, that's all.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Well, there's no way you could get the answer wrong, that's true, it, it takes about, what does it take, seventy thousand, a hundred thousand years to go to the nearest star at the speed of an astronaut.

• 34:58Bill Nye?

  That's even if you punch it.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, but we know for a fact that one advanced civilization exists, us.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Well, by our own definition.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:07Eugene Mirman?

  We do have microphones.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:09Eugene Mirman?

  So that's not bad. And look, no wires. What? Yeah. Why, this is witchcraft! And we can tell horses to go left, so we're really pretty good.

• 35:22Bill Nye?

  Ki-ha! So...

• 35:27Bill Nye?

  So, it is one thing to speculate on intelligent life and hope that we will find intelligent life, but I for one, am thoroughly charmed by the idea that we go to Mars on a summer day near the equator where there's some subterranean, sub-sand glacier on Mars that's oozing some crazy, super salty water out there, and we find some Martian microbes, right? It would change the world. People would ride in the streets, pitch works, the government wouldn't let them know about it, but with that said...

• 35:59Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, if we found the flu on Mars, we would kill each other.

• 36:04Eugene Mirman?

  I would kill everyone here.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, what, you know Eugene, we've run that experiment and it turned out you didn't kill him. Because in 1996, biggest science news story in the entire year, a little Martian meteorite, you may remember this, ALH84001. Came from Mars and landed in Antarctica where it was very easy to find because it's on top of the snow, right?

• 36:24Speaker 04

  Or a mischievous child left it. My first thought would be, "Why am I in Antarctica?"

• 36:35Bill Nye?

  Because we're exploring.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Well, I don't.

• 36:39Bill Nye?

  Yeah, what would people do?

• 36:41Speaker 04

  I'm from Canada, I don't go anywhere colder than Canada.

• 36:44Bill Nye?

  Is there such a place? Enlighten us.

• 36:50Eugene Mirman?

  But did this rock have things we thought were life but really aren't?

• 36:54Speaker 04

  There was a micro, a fossilized microbe.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Right, right. The claim was, the claim by some guys at NASA and also Stanford University.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  And President Clinton.

• 37:01Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Well, Clinton made the announcement, that's true.

• 37:04Eugene Mirman?

  By sex addicts and nerds, go on.

• 37:06Bill Nye?

  You got a problem with that?

• 37:11Speaker 03

  That there was life.

• 37:12Eugene Mirman?

  Both are wonderful.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  That there was life in this rock, or dead life, I mean it was dead, but, it was dead, Jim. But it was a little microbe and the claim was, it was a Martian from four billion years ago. All right? This was, front page, above the fold, giant font, news in the New York Times, for three days, four days running.

• 37:31Eugene Mirman?

  Liberals.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  So... But people didn't riot in the streets.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 37:38Eugene Mirman?

  No, they just found out it wasn't true.

• 37:40Bill Nye?

  But it was fascinating because it's not unreasonable that life started on Mars, this is, you guys, it's extraordinary, but it's not crazy to suggest that life started on Mars when Mars was very wet. And then they got hit with an impactor. I mean, I'm sure it was excited also.

• 38:05Eugene Mirman?

  You are all a bag of perverts!

• 38:11Speaker 04

  I didn't know science was so dirty.

• 38:13Eugene Mirman?

  Any chance, any tiny!

• 38:18Bill Nye?

  Hey, that's your problem.

• 38:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, I know!

• 38:22Bill Nye?

  Okay, so, this thing is, uh, it gets hit with an impactor, three billion years ago, the stuff's thrown into space, it gets in, a few bits of it get in this extraordinary mathematical thing called a human orbit, yeah? And, except it's in outer space, so it goes

• 38:39Bill Nye?

  and lands on the earth, and you and I are somehow descendant from a Martian microbe. And let me just say,

• 38:48Bill Nye?

  it would be an extraordinary discovery about the course of events, it would really be something. And so, along this line, if we are all descended from a common ancestor, which seems a reasonable conclusion when you look at your DNA and all those, uh, the primitive life forms, like, anyone? My old boss?

• 39:10Eugene Mirman?

  Ted Cruz!

• 39:12Bill Nye?

  And so, so, it is another question though, could have life started a second time? Or the time before us, here on earth, and it's, if we just had the right place to look, we would find the so-called second genesis?

• 39:27Speaker 04

  We are the aliens we're looking for.

• 39:31Eugene Mirman?

  Boom!

• 39:35Speaker 04

  And that theory has, is called, what is it called?

• 39:38Bill Nye?

  Second genesis?

• 39:39Speaker 04

  No, this theory that, that life came here from, uh, from space.

• 39:42Bill Nye?

  Pan-fermia. Trans-fermia.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  I know!

• 39:52Bill Nye?

  Dave Foley, ladies and gentlemen!

• 39:56Bill Nye?

  Check your servers, try the chicken.

• 39:58Eugene Mirman?

  The Loki of words!

• 40:02Bill Nye?

  Trans-fermia to send seeds across, in Latin.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:11Bill Nye?

  But it is, it is a remarkable thing and it's worth studying here on Earth. So Seth, you are affiliated, you do a lot of work with astrobiologists, yes?

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have a lot of astrobiologists, yes.

• 40:26Bill Nye?

  But is, do you feel they have, did they inform your work at all, listening for radio and light signals and so on?

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Well, in the very general sense, I mean, they're trying to define, you know, what life is, how you might look for it, I mean, it's easy enough to, you know, look for, for big things, but for small things, and probably most of the life in the universe is microscopic.

• 40:45Bill Nye?

  There are more bacteria in your tummy than there are people on Earth.

• 40:50Eugene Mirman?

  Really?

• 40:50Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Eugene Mirman?

  I believe you.

• 40:53Bill Nye?

  Yeah, really.

• 40:54Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, earlier, other than, of course, high fives, what are some of the, what are some of ways that you could categorize something being alive?

• 41:00Speaker 03

  It's, it's actually quite hard to do, I mean, you can say, if you pick up your 10th grade biology book, if you still have that, and you open it up, it starts out with a definition of, "Well, life has metabolism and life reproduces."

• 41:11Bill Nye?

  Homeostasis.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  All this stuff. Yeah, whatever.

• 41:13Bill Nye?

  Keeps itself.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  But it, you know, you can, you can think of examples of things that fit the definition but aren't alive, right? Things like mules, they don't reproduce, it turns out, but they're, you wouldn't, you know, contest the fact that they're alive, right? Fire reproduces, but it's not alive, so there's no good definition for life. The current working definition, if it evolves in a Darwinian fashion. What? That isn't even true. Probably not.

• 41:41Bill Nye?

  What if it's in a Freudian fashion, or?

• 41:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that makes it hard to build an experiment to look for life.

• 41:47Bill Nye?

  So, when we think of life, you're talking, like, there's living things in nuclear reactors, there's living things that eat the lenses of telescopes, fungi, so it could be just something we can't even, we literally can't imagine at this point.

• 42:01Eugene Mirman?

  But can we hear more about things being alive inside nuclear reactors?

• 42:06Bill Nye?

  Yeah, there are bacteria that, that make a living in nuclear reactors. They, I haven't, I've never really spoken with them, but they...

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Well, you can speak, they're called Radiodurans, you can speak with them, they just don't talk back.

• 42:20Bill Nye?

  So, along this line...

• 42:23Bill Nye?

  Suppose we have microbes on Mars and we're gonna go looking for them. As soon as you send anything there, uh, there's a good chance that we are gonna contaminate Mars and it won't be the good old ecosystem that it was, right?

• 42:37Speaker 03

  There is some danger there. There are people who worry about that, too, actually. Uh, NASA has an Office of Planetary Protection and I know you're gonna say something.

• 42:46Eugene Mirman?

  No, I think it's fine.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Okay, alright.

• 42:50Bill Nye?

  It seemed like the kind of thing you-

• 42:51Eugene Mirman?

  I think it's fine to protect planets.

• 42:54Eugene Mirman?

  I think it'd be dangerous to send kale to Mars. What if they're like, "This is amazing," but then they develop weird problems. Go on.

• 43:03Bill Nye?

  What? Really?

• 43:05Eugene Mirman?

  It's possible. Too much kale is not good, people. Be careful. I'm warning you, San Francisco.

• 43:13Bill Nye?

  It's, it's everywhere. So the Planetary Protection Office, you know, we used to just bake spacecraft. Take the Viking spacecraft, put it in an oven and presume that you would kill everything. But now our electronics and other, uh, we don't wanna be annealing radioactive material and so on.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  You can't kill it all. But so far, isn't Mars-

• 43:33Eugene Mirman?

  It's just kind of shitty. I mean, is it really a problem if we contaminate it?

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. It might be a problem, not because you, you, suddenly you would see, you know, mold all over Mars, in that, but the point is that they fall down there on the surface of Mars and Mars doesn't have any, you know, ozone layer and as a result, they get cooked by the ultraviolet. So, yes, it probably contaminates the area right next to the spacecraft, but you walk a block away and it's pristine Mars.

• 44:02Bill Nye?

  The other thing, though, for, in the case of Surveyor, which was, um, there were a couple of surveyors sent to the moon. There was speculation, by the way, when I was young, if we landed on the moon, I say "we," uh, professional astronauts landed on the moon, they would sink into dust like quicksand. And so Surveyor spacecraft landed first, these footpads, pictures of the footpads, all fabulous. And then guys went over there in their car, their lunar rover car. By the way, that car is worth millions of dollars and it's not even locked.

• 44:39Bill Nye?

  It's sitting there on the, they're sitting there. Okay, and they, they went over there and unscrewed some stuff and brought it back and there were bacteria alive. And people speculated that these bacteria had survived on the surveyor spacecraft from, for three years on the lunar surface. But the problem was, probably Dr. S., is this correct? That it was stuff that contaminated, the guys just handling it contaminated and they fooled themselves.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  I've talked to people at the planetary protection office and they say that it's most likely that it was contamination introduced bringing the thing back to Earth. Who knows? Microbes are tough. I talked to an astrobiologist about this, I did once, I said, if you, if you take, I asked if you'd take all the biota on Earth and throw it onto Mars and come back a year later, will any of it still be alive? And his answer was yes. He said, there's certain microbes, particularly if they can just get underneath the sand a little bit and protect themselves from the ultraviolet, yeah. They're tough.

• 45:38Eugene Mirman?

  Those are called communists.

• 45:39Bill Nye?

  Really?

• 45:40Speaker 03

  It's a red plant?

• 45:41Bill Nye?

  So, so what?

• 45:46Bill Nye?

  This is cool. So what? What's so, what is so fantastic, seriously, everybody, about this pursuit, to me, is that it's optimistic. There's this thing within us that, that the future's gonna be better and we're gonna build spacecraft and we're gonna look out there and find out what's going on because the more we learn about our solar systemic neighborhood, the better off we're gonna be. And the more we learn about radio signals in our galaxy, the better off we're gonna be. And that is still something that I, I think drives all of us, is this, this optimism through space exploration.

• 46:34Bill Nye?

  Guys, this has been a fabulous evening.

• 46:38Bill Nye?

  Thank you all for coming here at the Marine Memorial Theater in San Francisco, California, Sketch Fest 13.

• 46:47Bill Nye?

  The guests have been fantastic. Dave Foley.

• 46:53Bill Nye?

  Eugene Mirman.

• 46:58Bill Nye?

  Seth Jostak.

• 47:01Bill Nye?

  I've been your host, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Fly safely and goodnight.