StarTalk Live! from SF Sketchfest 2015

Explore the Moon, asteroids and Mars from the stage of San Francisco’s Nourse Theater with Bill Nye, Eugene Mirman and guests astrophysicist Dr. Yvonne Pendleton, “Mars Czar” Dr. G. Scott Hubbard and comedian H. Jon Benjamin.

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.

• 0:18Bill Nye?

  Greetings. Eugene, Eugene, we're on fire. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Tonight we have a fabulous show. We're gonna be talking about... Space.

• 0:31Bill Nye?

  So our first guest tonight is, may I say, full disclosure? Wait, okay, that would take a long time. Some disclosure. He's a friend of mine. He is former director of the Ames Research Center here in the Bay Area. He was the first Mars program director. He developed the airbag assisted landing for rovers on Mars. He's on the board of the B-612 Foundation. You'll hear about that. He's the editor of New Space Magazine, and most importantly to me, so on the board of the Planetary Society. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Scott Hubbard. Doctor, so good to see you. One-armed guy hug, yes. Thank you. He's the Mars czar. The Mars czar. Well, wait, wait, there's more.

• 1:15Bill Nye?

  Like so many of you, our next guest got her PhD in astrophysics. She's now the head of SIRV, which is a fabulous NASA acronym. She's advancing space science and human exploration into the solar system. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Yvonne Pendleton.

• 1:36Eugene Mirman?

  And we have one more comic guest. It is my great pleasure to introduce. He plays my father on Bob's Burgers, and he is... The voice of Archer, ladies and gentlemen, H. John Benjamin.

• 1:51Bill Nye?

  Wow. You got us a crowd, peoples.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Let's get this started!

• 2:01Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry.

• 2:03Bill Nye?

  Are there any questions on what we've covered so far?

• 2:07Eugene Mirman?

  There will be a quiz.

• 2:10Bill Nye?

  Let me ask you this, Dr. Pendleton, Yvonne.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:13Bill Nye?

  What is this ZRV?

• 2:16Speaker 04

  This acronym stands for the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. And what that means...

• 2:24Bill Nye?

  What?

• 2:25Speaker 04

  And I did not pick the acronym, okay. But what this means is, we have researchers across the country, about 300 of them, but they communicate primarily, you know, through computers and using technology.

• 2:38Bill Nye?

  Like the kids do.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, and we... Yeah.

• 2:42Eugene Mirman?

  Like using Snapchat?

• 2:46Speaker 04

  Something a little different, but we save a lot of money that way, and we get a lot of cross-team collaboration. So you get groups of people who would never really even go to the same meetings, talking to each other and getting new ideas and doing new science.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  I'm skeptical. No, no, not, I'm sorry.

• 3:05Bill Nye?

  I am skeptical.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  That's my go-to thing to say, right. There's gonna be a lot of that.

• 3:12Bill Nye?

  I am skeptical.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  What are you skeptical about?

• 3:17Bill Nye?

  It reminds me a little bit, in the future, the offices will have no paper. So there, you're saying you got 300 people, these are all in the US?

• 3:25Speaker 04

  These are in the US, we also have eight international partners.

• 3:28Bill Nye?

  And what is, what is our goal at ZRV?

• 3:33Speaker 04

  So the goal is, instead of having a bricks-and-mortar institute that you had to build, you bring people together, and they're the best teams that you could make, regardless of where they are, geographically located or what. They might have a lab facility that another group wants to use, or something like that.

• 3:50Bill Nye?

  What have we do, how long have we been in business?

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Well, ZRV has only been up and running for about a year, but it had its predecessor institute, which was only focused on the moon.

• 4:01Eugene Mirman?

  Was that the University of Phoenix Online?

• 4:06Bill Nye?

  No, when you say focused on the moon, it wasn't just telescopes.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  It wasn't just telescopes. It was the same thing. It was a virtual institute called the NASA Lunar Science Institute. And that was around for four years before survey came online. And before that, there was something that Scott Hubbard started, which is the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and it's still going. It's maybe 16 years? 16 years old. Teenager. Yeah. Teenager's doing science.

• 4:37Bill Nye?

  You're an astrophysicist?

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:39Bill Nye?

  So were you working on the moon?

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Not exactly.

• 4:43Bill Nye?

  How many people here are not astrophysicists? A couple, a couple.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  A few.

• 4:49Bill Nye?

  But you guys aren't that into the moon, right? Generally, writ large.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Not usually. We try to go observing when the moon is out of the way, you know? The connection is that I'm really interested in the origin of the basic building blocks of life, the things that make up all of you sitting in the audience and us sitting up here. And where did those come from? They came from the stars? And how did they evolve? And how did they get transported to a place like the Earth? So I studied comets and the stuff that comets bring a long time before I realized that we've got the moon right next door where those comets have been dumping that stuff for four and a half billion years. What a little place. Those bastards.

• 5:28Bill Nye?

  Just dumping.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  Dumping it wherever they want.

• 5:33Bill Nye?

  Okay. So I gotta say, from my own experience, I was very skeptical that there was water on the moon.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:44Bill Nye?

  Because...

• 5:45Speaker 04

  We didn't leave any?

• 5:48Bill Nye?

  Right. And why wouldn't it all evaporate into the icy blackness of space? But your claim, or your observation, or they have found, you know them...

• 5:58Speaker 04

  It's proven, yes. That there's water on the moon? In many different forms. At least three different sources. Is one of the forms water?

• 6:10Eugene Mirman?

  I think it has around three.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Actually, not liquid.

• 6:15Eugene Mirman?

  Not liquid.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  But we found ice in the bottom of the craters where, you know, you kind of expected it should be there.

• 6:21Bill Nye?

  Bottles.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  But there is, there are the makings of water, OH radicals, oxygen, hydrogen, all over the surface of the moon, and that is getting interacted by, with the sun, the solar particles from the sun come, and they bring more hydrogen, and then you get water. So that's another way. And then there's a third part. But wait, there's more.

• 6:44Bill Nye?

  Wait, there's more.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Now...

• 6:46Bill Nye?

  Okay, well, then one of those two, enumerate those two. First of all, H2O molecules.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  The ice inside the crater is ice.

• 6:52Bill Nye?

  OHEs that get nailed with an H.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  That's the one on the surface, yeah.

• 6:56Bill Nye?

  And they make some more H2Os. And now the third one.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  The third one. It turns out that the moon wasn't this dry body in the sky that we thought it was.

• 7:07Bill Nye?

  Oh, no.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  No. And, and because the moon and the earth share a history, what we found, when we found water in the rocks on the moon, when Apollo astronauts picked up these rock samples, and later we were able to find out there was quite a bit of water in those rocks, we learned that those rocks came up from deep inside the moon, and it's because the earth was probably wet at the time when that big Mars-sized object hit the earth and created the moon, some of that water went to the moon.

• 7:37Bill Nye?

  So, I look like nobody, but I've hit, I've touched a moon rock, right, okay?

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:43Bill Nye?

  It's not wet. So, what's, what do you say, there's a lot of water in a moon rock? What are we talking about?

• 7:53Speaker 04

  You know, we get excited about a little tiny bit of water, we think is a lot, because we thought it was really dry. So instead of one part in a billion, there are six parts in a billion, or something like that.

• 8:04Bill Nye?

  Hmm.

• 8:05Eugene Mirman?

  But that would be enough for horses to live there.

• 8:11Eugene Mirman?

  Like one horse. Yeah, one horse.

• 8:16Bill Nye?

  So, we are all about, or my understanding is, you're trying to get humans to the moon, right?

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Well, it's not that we, Servey, are trying to get humans to the moon, but should humans want to go back to the moon, or near-Earth asteroids, or the moons of Mars, those are all the things we study, we could help tell you what you need to know before you go.

• 8:35Eugene Mirman?

  That sounds great.

• 8:38Eugene Mirman?

  Like what kind of stuff?

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Well, for instance, space is a pretty harsh environment, and so you need to know...

• 8:43Eugene Mirman?

  As harsh as junior high or worse?

• 8:48Bill Nye?

  So, we're gonna go, hypothetically, we're gonna go to the moon, and you're gonna give me a shopping list of stuff to take?

• 8:55Speaker 04

  What we would do is tell you what to wear, where to touch, and when to flush.

• 9:01Eugene Mirman?

  Are you the Us Weekly of space travel?

• 9:07Eugene Mirman?

  Who wore it best?

• 9:12Bill Nye?

  And the whole, there's a whole outfit you gotta have.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it better have some metal on the outside of it, so that when you go up to that asteroid and you touch something, you know, you don't get zapped.

• 9:22Bill Nye?

  Oh, is it static electricity?

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Well, the thing is, it's kinda complicated, but there are these plasmas in space, and when the plasma field is low...

• 9:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Bill Nye?

  What is a plasma?

• 9:33Eugene Mirman?

  Nice try, just saying plasmas in space like we all knew that.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Well, just think of it as highly energetic particles that are going, zipping around you, and so there are places, for instance, on the moon, there are places where the solar wind comes across the moon's surface, and it can reduce the plasma field, and when the plasma field is reduced, then any rover that's, you know, its wheels are turning along the surface of the moon, it would need to have something to protect it so that you're grounded, once that plasma gets...

• 10:08Bill Nye?

  Oh, so you're gonna get zapped?

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you're gonna get zapped.

• 10:10Bill Nye?

  Your hair stands on end and...

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it turns out the same thing might be true for astronauts going up to an asteroid, they might need to have some sort of protection around their suit, so we're finding out stuff like that.

• 10:20Bill Nye?

  So, I got one number in my notes, on the moon, 600 million tons of water?

• 10:25Speaker 04

  There are lots of numbers like that, that one, you know, various people will say...

• 10:30Bill Nye?

  Seems like there's an infinite number, if I understand.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Okay, peer-reviewed, published numbers. But the thing is, it's ongoing research, and I wouldn't stick with just one number right now because another study could come out soon that might say something different. I don't know. The point is, there's a whole lot more than we thought would be there. And why do you care? You care because water is a resource. I mean, it's something we all need, not just humans, to live, but, you know, if you want to make fuel to go somewhere else, like to Mars.

• 11:03Bill Nye?

  Is this where finesse comes in?

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Finesse, that is a cool name for one of our teams that we have.

• 11:09Bill Nye?

  So, now, Dr. Hubbard, you're on the NAC, for example, right?

• 11:14Speaker 05

  That's right. Not "the group."

• 11:16Bill Nye?

  Oh, yeah. The NAC had one hit.

• 11:21Eugene Mirman?

  My Sharona.

• 11:22Bill Nye?

  Yeah, there he is. There he is.

• 11:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. I mean, science aside, you're in the band The NAC.

• 11:28Speaker 05

  That's right. I'm on the NASA Advisory Council.

• 11:33Bill Nye?

  So, here's...

• 11:34Speaker 05

  Does it play music?

• 11:35Bill Nye?

  Here's just the point I wanted to make.

• 11:36Eugene Mirman?

  They also have a band.

• 11:37Bill Nye?

  Dr. Hubbard, your NAC doesn't start with a K.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  No, it starts with an "N."

• 11:45Bill Nye?

  But just notice that the NAC is an acronym within an acronym.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  It's an embedded acronym, the worst kind, yes.

• 11:51Bill Nye?

  And so then, finesse is, as I understand it, Field Investigations to Enable Solar System Science and Exploration, right? Finesse is a program within your virtual institute.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Right. We have nine teams, and that's one of them, and that one is run out of NASA Ames Research Center.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Wait, so finesse is an acronym, too? Finesse?

• 12:13Bill Nye?

  Finesse is an acronym.

• 12:14Eugene Mirman?

  Inside NASA, inside Ames.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Inside SERVI.

• 12:17Eugene Mirman?

  Inside SERVI.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. We love our acronym.

• 12:21Bill Nye?

  Russian dolls of letters.

• 12:23Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Just so that no one can cut funding, because they just, how would you even know where to start? [laughter]

• 12:31Speaker 03

  He has finally figured it out.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  That's good, I like that.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  We need more acronyms.

• 12:37Bill Nye?

  What has Finesse done? What is it doing that enables? It's human, you were trying to enable human exploration, is that right?

• 12:44Speaker 04

  We are. We're trying to address science questions that human exploration needs to know the answers to. And so what Finesse is doing is looking at analog sites on the Earth that would be comparable to, you know, where you might be exploring on an asteroid or on the moon.

• 13:01Bill Nye?

  E.G. Exempligradia. For example?

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Oh, well, in Idaho, there's a Craters of the Moon place in Idaho.

• 13:09Bill Nye?

  That's a state park, or a national park.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Yep, and they go there and they do remote sensing with their robots and things. They have their scientists in what they call the back room, so that if you were on the moon and you were doing this robotically, you wouldn't be able to just run out and turn a switch. So they make themselves do all that kind of stuff here, and they try to figure out, you know, well, what would you really have to do if you were on the surface of the moon and this happened or that happened? Or what would you have to do if you're going up to, you know, a big boulder on an asteroid?

• 13:40Bill Nye?

  Yeah. And so, do you also mess around with those delays?

• 13:44Speaker 04

  They do, they build that in as well, right?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  What are the delays?

• 13:48Speaker 04

  The time delay, so that, you know, when you send a message up to the moon and it comes back, it takes like three seconds, and it turns out that there's a natural built-in computer delay that is almost that long, going, you know, like, across the world, so...

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, we gotta fix that.

• 14:07Bill Nye?

  But the speed of light's still an issue, yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:11Bill Nye?

  Even at the institute.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Gotta finesse it.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  We can't solve everything, yeah.

• 14:16Bill Nye?

  So, what is in the solar wind that we're all, we always talk about the solar wind?

• 14:20Speaker 04

  Electrons and protons, and hydrogen. And so when the hydrogen comes out...

• 14:24Bill Nye?

  Well, hydrogen is a proton, yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Exactly, so, I mean, so we use those terms interchangeably, but with you, I know I could just say hydrogen, right? But electrons and protons are coming through.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, but with me, you can't.

• 14:37Bill Nye?

  So, is there some scheme that you guys work at, work on, they're finessing, to scrape up O-Hs and Hify them into H2O?

• 14:48Speaker 04

  You know, that particular team isn't working on that particular problem, but that is the kind of thing that new teams that come into SURVEY in the future might actually decide to address. So what we do is we provide funding for five years for the current teams, but in another year, we're gonna have another competition, and new teams are gonna come in and join the old ones, so that you always have this memory, corporate memory going on.

• 15:13Bill Nye?

  So when you say "funding," what are my tax dollars doing?

• 15:17Speaker 04

  So NASA provides the funding for SURVEY, for these teams, and it's both the Science Mission Directorate and the Human Exploration part of NASA. And so they together give the funds to us at the central office.

• 15:31Bill Nye?

  But how much money is it? A hundred dollars?

• 15:32Speaker 04

  About fifteen million a year.

• 15:34Bill Nye?

  Fifteen million. What?

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Okay, and the teams only get, you know, there are nine teams, so they get some smaller part of it, right?

• 15:42Speaker 03

  So you split it nine ways?

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. They get most of it, because, you know, we're a virtual institute, so we don't need a lot to run the central office. And so we fund them, and then they have to report back to us what they're doing. And I'm just amazed at how productive these teams have been. In less than a year, there are many hundreds of peer-reviewed publications that have already come out of these teams.

• 16:03Bill Nye?

  Go SURVEY is what I'm getting.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:06Bill Nye?

  So...

• 16:07Speaker 04

  It's a lot of banker bucks.

• 16:08Bill Nye?

  What a she-bear you are.

• 16:41Bill Nye?

  If the earth gets hit with an asteroid, even a small one, like the size of the stage, for those of you on the radio, it's not that big. It would be very troubling. Is that accurate?

• 16:55Speaker 05

  I would say so, yes. If an asteroid the size... Asteroid the size of the stage hits San Francisco... If it hit the stage... Right here, what would happen? You would be obliterated. You would be atoms. We would be, but how, but sure, that...

• 17:09Bill Nye?

  That would be a relief, let's be honest.

• 17:11Speaker 05

  But how far would it go? And the first ten rows, no, this entire, this entire section of San Francisco...

• 17:18Bill Nye?

  So even the balcony?

• 17:18Speaker 05

  ...would be turned to atoms. But meaning for what, ten miles, five miles, a hundred miles? Well, it depends on how big the thing is. If we had something that was about, let's say, fifty feet, would you buy that? Okay, fifty feet, you know? Seventeen meters, that's the size of the thing that blew up over Chelyabinsk in Russia two years ago. And it damaged about a thousand homes. It blew up at sixty thousand feet. It was like an airburst coming down. And about eleven hundred people were sent to the hospital. And if that had gotten all the way to the ground...

• 17:57Bill Nye?

  Nobody died.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Nobody died, but if that...

• 18:00Bill Nye?

  So we're fine?

• 18:02Speaker 05

  As long as it doesn't get to the ground. Well, what happens if it hits the ground?

• 18:05Bill Nye?

  So it has to be bigger in order to get to the ground?

• 18:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, it depends on what it's made of and how it comes in and a whole bunch of...

• 18:11Bill Nye?

  What angle?

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Physics stuff. Sure, but what happens when it hits the ground? If it had gotten all the way to the ground, it would have been the equivalent of something that would be in thousands of kilotons.

• 18:24Bill Nye?

  Hiroshima, Nagasaki kind of deal?

• 18:26Speaker 05

  Smaller than that, but still... But enough to create...

• 18:29Bill Nye?

  How long would...

• 18:30Speaker 05

  Mothra.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  Against Godzilla, you know, not so good, but...

• 18:37Bill Nye?

  So...

• 18:38Speaker 05

  But in 1908, the famous Tunguska event happened.

• 18:43Eugene Mirman?

  Not so famous, because I'm...

• 18:44Speaker 05

  Okay, that was...

• 18:46Bill Nye?

  30th of June.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Another thing that happened in Russia, in Siberia, unfortunately, it only flattened a couple hundred miles worth of trees and a few reindeer, but if that had hit here, it would have wiped out the entire Bay Area.

• 19:02Eugene Mirman?

  So that was Russia as well?

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 19:04Eugene Mirman?

  So asteroids only hit Russia?

• 19:05Bill Nye?

  Well, John, that's...

• 19:07Speaker 05

  And tornadoes only happen in trailer parks.

• 19:13Bill Nye?

  That's pretty good. Dr. Hubbard, you're from Kentucky, right?

• 19:16Speaker 05

  I know from where I speak.

• 19:18Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah. No, so, but John, you raise a good point. Just if you are...

• 19:23Eugene Mirman?

  Finally.

• 19:23Bill Nye?

  ...an asteroid...

• 19:26Bill Nye?

  You're an asteroid and you're gonna come in from the north, human map north. It's a good chance you'll hit Russia. It's 11 time zones across. The Chelyabinsk blew up, it was about 2 and 1/2 minutes or almost 3 minutes before the sonic boom hit the ground, right? Everybody ran to the windows to watch it and the wham.

• 19:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 19:44Bill Nye?

  But if you get just a little bigger, you're saying Chelyabinsk was 17 meters?

• 19:49Speaker 05

  Thereabouts.

• 19:49Bill Nye?

  Yeah, what if you get into the 30 and 50 meters, like the size of a football field?

• 19:54Eugene Mirman?

  Putin would just punch it.

• 19:58Speaker 05

  It blew his shirt off, that's why he was...

• 20:03Speaker 05

  So if you're in, a size of asteroid's in the miles...

• 20:08Bill Nye?

  5/8 of a mile up to a mile kind of size.

• 20:10Speaker 05

  Exactly. Then you're talking extinction event, as in what happened to the dinosaurs 60 million years ago.

• 20:16Bill Nye?

  Everything going bad for everybody.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  10, 20, 30 kilometers.

• 20:21Eugene Mirman?

  So we'd become like birds and kimono dragons.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  Only the cockroaches would survive, I don't know. And then if you get down to the 100 meter-ish, 300 feet or so, you're talking about cataclysms that are city killers. And then down to the 30, 50 meter range, you have tsunamis.

• 20:42Bill Nye?

  This sounds like science fiction, but it's a real deal.

• 20:45Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 20:45Bill Nye?

  I mean, and...

• 20:46Speaker 05

  There are maybe a million of these near-Earth objects.

• 20:50Bill Nye?

  There you go, Eugene.

• 20:51Eugene Mirman?

  That's thousands.

• 20:53Bill Nye?

  It's a thousand thousand.

• 20:55Eugene Mirman?

  Technically.

• 20:55Bill Nye?

  It's a thousand thousand, that's what it is.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  A thousand thousand.

• 20:58Eugene Mirman?

  There's millions of them headed for Russia.

• 21:03Eugene Mirman?

  And a handful towards Texas.

• 21:06Bill Nye?

  But here's the thing, it could be, this is, you know, people speculate, why haven't we heard from another civilization? People do bring that up, yes?

• 21:13Eugene Mirman?

  I've never.

• 21:14Bill Nye?

  And it may be that you have to pass the asteroid test, right? That if you don't have a space program and a virtual institute, for example, or an astrobiological institute, biology institute, you accidentally let yourself get hit with a big rock and everybody dies, it's like...

• 21:33Speaker 05

  The reasons the dinosaurs went extinct is that they didn't have a space program.

• 21:37Bill Nye?

  As far as we know.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  Right?

• 21:43Bill Nye?

  We want to be, we want to know a lot about asteroids, right?

• 21:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd like to tell you that.

• 21:48Bill Nye?

  And you messed around with Rosetta, didn't you?

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Well, before we go to Rosetta, I'd just like to tell you that not all asteroids are those big, heavy metal kind that we're talking about. And what we're finding out is some of them are big rubble piles. And if you go up to them too fast, or you touch them too hard, they're going to disintegrate into a whole bunch of little pieces. But something is holding them together, and the little ones are spinning fast.

• 22:12Eugene Mirman?

  Is it dark matter?

• 22:13Speaker 04

  And it is, I'm pretty sure it's not dark matter, but...

• 22:16Bill Nye?

  Is it roxy?

• 22:18Eugene Mirman?

  Why wouldn't anyone tell me what dark matter is?

• 22:24Speaker 04

  So anyhow, my point is that this is why we have to study these ahead of time, because you don't want to find one coming towards you and go out after it to try and mitigate whatever's going to happen.

• 22:34Bill Nye?

  Mitigate's the same as Bruce Willis, kind of thing?

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. And go up and touch it and find it's going to break up into big chunks that are all going to come and hit the Earth.

• 22:43Speaker 05

  As, as they say, you can't deflect them if you can't find them.

• 22:48Bill Nye?

  You know, they say that.

• 22:49Eugene Mirman?

  That's unfortunate that they say that.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  Imagine that you're, you know, looking for a piece of charcoal against the black sky, you know, how would you find that? Well, turns out, if you're looking away from the sun, the sun's heating it up, it's glowing because it's hot and so you could look in the infrared, you can find these guys.

• 23:08Bill Nye?

  Now, when you say glowing and hot, Scott, I've had, I think maybe many of us have experienced a barbecue cookout.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 23:16Bill Nye?

  It's not, it's not like that, is it?

• 23:18Speaker 05

  No, but it is much warmer than the blackness.

• 23:20Bill Nye?

  Let me throw some numbers out here.

• 23:22Speaker 05

  Uh, probably, uh, 300 Kelvin.

• 23:24Bill Nye?

  300 Kelvin? That's like us.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:28Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 05

  Cause it's warmed by the sun.

• 23:30Bill Nye?

  Wow. Uh, Kelvin, anyone?

• 23:32Speaker 05

  250, 300.

• 23:33Bill Nye?

  Yeah, he's a good guy.

• 23:37Bill Nye?

  Zero Celsius is 273 Kelvin.

• 23:40Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, so we're talking.

• 23:41Bill Nye?

  273 degrees Celsius.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  We're talking, you know, 60, 70...

• 23:45Bill Nye?

  So, it's as hot as a regular old day on an asteroid?

• 23:49Speaker 05

  The, the side facing...

• 23:51Bill Nye?

  Facing the sun, so you wanna get in?

• 23:53Speaker 05

  You need a space telescope.

• 23:54Bill Nye?

  Oh, tell, do you have one?

• 23:56Speaker 05

  I just so have... It just so happens, I have the plans here.

• 24:02Bill Nye?

  You do, though, right? It's called Sentinel.

• 24:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's called Sentinel. And it's a, in fact, this was not, uh, invented out of nothing, a National Academy of Sciences about six years ago said, "If you wanna find these things before they hit the earth, put a telescope out in deep space, maybe where Venus is, and look out there with the right size of telescope in the infrared where it's glowing, uh, because of the sunlight, and you can find these. Can't find them from the ground, too much atmosphere."

• 24:30Bill Nye?

  Are you guys at the institute working on this?

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Uh, we don't have a telescope and we don't have, uh, the means to fund a telescope. 15 million dollars a year won't do it.

• 24:38Eugene Mirman?

  What if we got rid of healthcare, would that help?

• 24:43Bill Nye?

  Briefly.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  But the thing is, if you don't find the asteroid that's coming to hit us, you won't need the healthcare.

• 24:50Bill Nye?

  From time to time, the last few months or a year, people at NASA, the asteroid redirect mission. Now, the asteroid redirect mission, the plan is to go out and get an asteroid, a small one, charming one. And this thing, as I recall, is seven meters, which is not very big. I mean, as things go. If seven meter, seven meter rock hits the earth, nothing happens. It just burns up, yeah?

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Well, the idea about studying the asteroid, if you do bring it back, or if you bring a boulder from an asteroid back, is really more about the technology that would be involved in learning how to do all the things you want to do with it, as much as anything else.

• 25:33Bill Nye?

  Okay. This sounds like, I mean, the technology that Bruce Willis needed, for example, would be a lot bigger and more importantly catastrophically huge than this little thing.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Ah, well, so if I put on my Professor Hubbard hat from Stanford.

• 25:52Bill Nye?

  At Stanford.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, at Stanford. But also from Berkeley. The, I, if I were to give the ARM mission grade, I would have to give it a D.

• 26:03Bill Nye?

  That's not very good.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  Why? Well, the reason it's not an F is because there are...

• 26:09Bill Nye?

  Oh, cool.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  It's because...

• 26:10Bill Nye?

  You know how often I ask that question?

• 26:12Speaker 05

  Why isn't it a C minus? Is because there are two technologies that are very useful if we want to send humans to Mars, which is everybody, is the horizon goals, where we want to go. And that's the solar electric propulsion for pushing stuff around.

• 26:28Bill Nye?

  How does that work?

• 26:29Speaker 05

  Well, you bring in sunlight and you use a certain type of gas. You create one of these plasma things.

• 26:36Bill Nye?

  With xenon?

• 26:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, xenon, yes. The warrior princess or something? Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  But the ARM mission, in my opinion, and it's now shared by the NASA Advisory Council, is that...

• 26:53Bill Nye?

  Coincidence?

• 26:54Speaker 05

  Pretty cocky. Perhaps. Pretty cocky. We, we, we took a vote and, you know, wrote, and wrote it down, and it has nothing to do with science. There were two of us there. Yeah, you know.

• 27:09Speaker 05

  And it has very little to do with human exploration. And it has almost nothing to do with planetary defense. And it'll probably go up in cost by a factor of pi. Other than that, it's fine.

• 27:20Bill Nye?

  Factor of pi, like 3 and some change.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 27:22Bill Nye?

  So I have here the asteroid redirect mission recommendation by the NAC thing. Let's see. "There's a risk in meeting the full set of requirements. It includes capturing an asteroid, which should cause the ARM cost cap to be exceeded." Has anybody ever exceeded a cost cap here? Anyone? Yeah. Is that English? Yeah, so...

• 27:44Speaker 05

  We worked hard on that.

• 27:45Bill Nye?

  It means maxing out your credit card. Yes.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 27:49Bill Nye?

  A little more than that.

• 27:49Speaker 05

  Only in this case, the cost cap is $1.25 billion.

• 27:54Bill Nye?

  The budgetary goalposts moving in budget overruns that will threaten other programs. That's a reason to not do it.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. Preserve the two technologies. If you're sending humans to Mars, could be very useful. The other stuff, I don't find the rationale personally for doing.

• 28:12Bill Nye?

  Well, you weren't alone. The whole council said this is madness or not the best idea. You guys both were comet asteroids from two different directions.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  We're trying to study them to find out what they're made of and how they formed.

• 28:25Bill Nye?

  And Scott, you're trying to find them.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  Sentinel is going to look out there and find the million that could be a threat.

• 28:32Bill Nye?

  And so we can pass the asteroid test if we can figure out something akin to the asteroid redirect mission that would actually be useful.

• 29:04Bill Nye?

  We have studied asteroids using the Rosetta spacecraft.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  I love the Rosetta mission. I think it's so cool.

• 29:11Bill Nye?

  What did you love about it?

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Well, it's a comet. And they landed on a comet. That is so hard. And it was amazing.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  A comet is not an asteroid, right?

• 29:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  No.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  A comet has a lot of ice in it.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  Asteroids, it turns out, have... Some asteroids have a little bit of ice. So we've got asteroids that are starting to act like comets and comets that look a little bit more like asteroids. So, you know, we say they're different. They are different. They come from two different regions of the solar system, but... They have some similarities. And they both hit the Earth.

• 29:40Bill Nye?

  As the kids say, it's a spectrum.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's some asteroids that are born as comets.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 29:51Bill Nye?

  But can't change themselves.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  No, they can't morph.

• 29:53Bill Nye?

  Yeah. So, but asteroids, if I understand it, are the closer to the sun part of the solar system, and comets are from the farther from the sun part of the solar system.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Right. But in the Oort Cloud.

• 30:04Bill Nye?

  The Oort Cloud.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  Or the Kuiper Belt.

• 30:06Bill Nye?

  Kuiper Belt.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Oh, so it's where they came from, that's where, okay.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Well, because where they came from determines what they're made of, because way, way far out there, you know, beyond Pluto, we're gonna visit Pluto, you know, we're gonna get there on July 15th of this year, we're gonna fly right by it.

• 30:20Bill Nye?

  You guys know that? Yeah, all of us.

• 30:24Bill Nye?

  Well, actually, John, in a sense, yes, everyone, everyone on Earth will be involved in this, so.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:32Bill Nye?

  Dr. Hubbard, you and I crossed paths from time to time. Were you at the launch of New Horizons?

• 30:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 30:38Bill Nye?

  2006, January of 2006. You were there, yes, we partied.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:42Bill Nye?

  Yes. We did, we did, on the deck there.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  I think we did, actually.

• 30:45Bill Nye?

  Yeah. So, you guys, I am not an expert on rocket launches, but...

• 30:51Speaker 03

  But you know when you partied in 2006.

• 30:54Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  New Horizons is in Jamaica, right?

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Where everyone wears no clothes and they, yeah, yeah.

• 31:03Bill Nye?

  This is a NASA party, it's a little different vibe.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Like sandals.

• 31:07Bill Nye?

  Yeah. But, if I may, in all seriousness, New Horizons is the name of the mission, and mission is space people talk for rocket ship. And so, I, as you may know, on the Science Guy Show, I went to a space shuttle launch. There's a huge freaking rocket, and this is radio, our most visual medium.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  It was a windy day.

• 31:39Bill Nye?

  It took it a long time, there was no sock, no foam rubber thing on the microphone. So it took noticeable amount of time to get up through the clouds and up into space. But then, New Horizons in 2006 was like, shoo, and it was gone. It was the fastest rocket anybody's ever shot. The asteroids, astronauts who went to the moon went two and a half days to get there, something like that. This thing went past the moon in nine hours.

• 32:08Eugene Mirman?

  Wow.

• 32:08Bill Nye?

  And yeah, your tax dollars at work.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  And it's been going ever since.

• 32:12Bill Nye?

  Yeah, and it's been going even faster than that because it went by Jupiter and got a shoo, a little, but it's in space, so it just went, uh, past Jupiter.

• 32:26Bill Nye?

  It will arrive in the vicinity of Pluto, Bastille Day, depending on your time zone, 14th and 15th of July of this year. And we will finally get a look at Pluto.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:37Bill Nye?

  And we can all then take a meeting about what actually goes on on Pluto. Icy cloud, watery thing, solid rock.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Let me tell you about the resolution you will see, though. It's the equivalent of if New Horizons were passing that close to Earth with its instruments, it would be able to see the buildings or the skyline of Manhattan, or any city. So it's that.

• 32:58Eugene Mirman?

  So it'll find all the cities on Pluto.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  You'll find all the cities.

• 33:03Bill Nye?

  The ones, the big ones, yeah.

• 33:05Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, things like New York.

• 33:09Eugene Mirman?

  It won't see like Burlington, Vermont.

• 33:14Eugene Mirman?

  It could, no, it wouldn't find the band Phish jamming.

• 33:19Bill Nye?

  The thing that's gonna be extraordinary are the pictures, right? And the thing that has always, I've found so compelling, it makes me so crazy, are the pictures of Mars. And because Mars is a place, I mean if you were dressed properly, your suit, you could walk around, you could have a picnic. And along with some other things that Dr. Hubbard has done, you wrote a book, Explore Mars.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  Yes, and the foreword was written by, I had some guy named Bill Nighy.

• 33:49Bill Nye?

  The foreword really is brilliant.

• 33:51Eugene Mirman?

  I generally buy books in fact for the foreword.

• 33:55Bill Nye?

  But the significance of pictures is huge in our scientific understanding of things, right?

• 34:02Speaker 05

  It carries such a vast amount of information and our eye-brain combination is so good at integrating that into an understanding. I mean you go from just an image to understanding in a blink, so to speak.

• 34:14Bill Nye?

  Along this line, what is next for the Virtual Institute? And what is next on Mars? What are we trying to achieve in both of these things?

• 34:25Speaker 04

  We would really like to understand what you need to know before you go. And so that means that you want, if you're going to send humans beyond low Earth orbit again, whether it's to the moon or to near Earth asteroids or to the moons of Mars and then eventually Mars, you want them to go with the knowledge of what they need to take with them, what they're going to find when they get there, how to protect themselves along the way from radiation, that kind of stuff. That's what our institute's all about, what do they need to know before they go.

• 34:58Bill Nye?

  We have four rovers on Mars. Dr. Hubbard, you worked on the first three.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Right, and Opportunity is still operating after 10 years later. Imagine that.

• 35:09Bill Nye?

  You guys, I mean it's amazing.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  The warranty, the warranty was only good for 90 days.

• 35:16Bill Nye?

  I know, 90, so you guys, it's like, it's really, it's like if you had a car with a three-year warranty and you didn't change the oil, didn't rotate the tires for 120 years, that would be, that's a bargain, right?

• 35:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, it's like the original Chevys.

• 35:35Bill Nye?

  That's your tax dollars at work.

• 35:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. The next step is a sample return because we've done the flyby, we've done the orbiter, we've got rovers, we've got still Opportunity and Curiosity is operating.

• 35:49Bill Nye?

  Yeah, huge thing.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  And the next step is now that we've got all this information is to go and pick that piece of Mars that will tell us, are we alone? You know, is that piece of Mars that we pick, we bring back and we see evidence of past life?

• 36:04Bill Nye?

  So why do we have to bring it back?

• 36:06Speaker 05

  Ah, there's a bunch of reasons.

• 36:07Eugene Mirman?

  How else could you put it in your mouth?

• 36:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. You can't taste it.

• 36:14Bill Nye?

  There you go. Have you thought about getting him at the institute?

• 36:20Speaker 04

  I won't now.

• 36:21Eugene Mirman?

  Can I come and taste all the different things you get from space?

• 36:26Speaker 05

  Can you get high from it? Yeah. Right. So imagine if you've got samples here, and we've done this with the samples that the astronauts brought back from the moon, instead of having 10 scientists look at it, can have thousands of scientists look at it. Instead of one moving laboratory, you have dozens of laboratories all over the world. And that's the power of looking at a sample.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  And 10 years, or 15 or 20 years in the future, you can use the new technology and the new instruments to look at those same samples if you took good care of them.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, and find new stuff. Like the water in these rocks. You know, when I was in charge of the lunar prospector mission, we said it was a cup of water and a cubic yard of dirt was what we found in those shadowed craters.

• 37:11Bill Nye?

  That would be detectable, though, yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  But what they found from these old lunar samples that people brought back from the Apollo mission was this parts per billion that nobody even knew was there. And that would not have happened if we didn't have the samples.

• 37:27Eugene Mirman?

  How hard would it be to take the water that does exist on the moon and access it to make water that we could realistically use?

• 37:34Speaker 05

  The stuff that is in the shadowed craters would probably be easier, but you could probably mine the other stuff. But by comparison, Mars has maybe tens of billions of gallons of water. I mean, there are places on Mars that are 80% water ice. And so you just stick in a shovel and warm it up, and there you go, you've got water.

• 37:58Bill Nye?

  Boom, done. So to get the sample, this thing... It's taking a long time. We only do this every, we only go every 26 months because of the orbits of Earth and Mars. So what is the next thing? We gotta get a 2020 rover.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 38:13Bill Nye?

  Which will be like the Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012. 10 years later, or 8 years later, will land on Mars. Does it land in 2020?

• 38:21Speaker 05

  It launches in 2020.

• 38:22Bill Nye?

  Launches in 2020, so it lands in 2021 and a half.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, end of 2020, beginning, it depends on the specific.

• 38:29Bill Nye?

  Yeah, it depends, okay, so.

• 38:31Speaker 05

  But.

• 38:31Bill Nye?

  That thing's gonna get a sample.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  It's going to cache a sample.

• 38:35Bill Nye?

  C A C H E.

• 38:36Speaker 05

  C A C H E, yes, it's gonna put in somewhere between 20 and 40 little sort of chalk-sized chunks of Mars, picked from a bunch of different places.

• 38:46Bill Nye?

  Cause it's driving around picking them up.

• 38:47Speaker 05

  Cause it's moving around.

• 38:48Bill Nye?

  Then what happens?

• 38:49Speaker 05

  Then the second.

• 38:50Bill Nye?

  They're sitting there on Mars.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, so then if you had the budget all lined up, then 2 years after that, you'd send something that would orbit, and then 2 years after that, you'd send the lander that would go out, grab that sample, that little ball, that cache, and put it in a rocket, the rocket would point at the sky and fire, and the ball would go up.

• 39:12Bill Nye?

  Carefully.

• 39:13Speaker 05

  And rendezvous with the waiting orbiter and bring it back. So it's gonna be 2026 or 2028.

• 39:20Bill Nye?

  This is the Mars ascent vehicle.

• 39:22Speaker 05

  The Mars, the M A V.

• 39:23Bill Nye?

  The M A V.

• 39:24Eugene Mirman?

  So basically, in around 2029 or 2030 is when we would get stuff.

• 39:30Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 39:30Eugene Mirman?

  That when we'd get to really look at this one.

• 39:32Bill Nye?

  Get a taste.

• 39:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, get a taste of Mars.

• 39:34Speaker 05

  Taste of Mars.

• 39:34Eugene Mirman?

  Then I could finally open my little bistro taste of Mars. Where I'd have one rock from Mars and everyone would put it in their mouth and put it back down.

• 39:44Bill Nye?

  So couldn't we just go there right now? If we had the chain, the coin, the money? Couldn't, I mean, do we need to know more about it to land there?

• 39:55Speaker 05

  You mean to do the sample return mission?

• 39:56Bill Nye?

  No.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  To send you?

• 39:59Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, yeah, I'm not really, somebody's qualified. Would go there and walk around with a hammer and look for signs of life, right?

• 40:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, maybe Richard Dreyfuss.

• 40:13Bill Nye?

  No, because this is an old thing, and I think, Dr. Ober, I've heard you speak about this. What our very best robots do in a week, a human can do in about a minute.

• 40:24Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 40:25Bill Nye?

  Is that right?

• 40:25Speaker 05

  That's right, yeah. If you take a really good field astrobiologist and say, "Go over there and tell me what that rock is," he or she will look around and say, "Oh, okay, pick it up, use the rock hammer, break it open, look at it in the microscope," and "Gerocite, ha!"

• 40:41Bill Nye?

  Gerocite!

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, perfect, just in a minute. It takes the spirit, opportunity, curiosity, rovers, all the commands and all the work they had to do, on the order of days, to accomplish the same thing.

• 40:55Eugene Mirman?

  Is it significantly more expensive to send people because of how you have to keep them alive?

• 41:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, so you're, so assuming you want to keep them alive... They've all died. Yeah.

• 41:06Eugene Mirman?

  But meaning then, like, the three or four trips over a period of like, basically like sixteen years or something?

• 41:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, so if you were, if you had ten to a hundred times more money...

• 41:16Bill Nye?

  Oh, just a second, ten to a hundred, that's a range.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  It is. Because, you know, I mean, do you want to just have linoleum in your spacecraft? Or, you know, a really nice...

• 41:26Eugene Mirman?

  No, you would have really nice, like, Victorian doors.

• 41:32Eugene Mirman?

  We would send a very fancy spaceship.

• 41:35Speaker 05

  I mean, do you want real mahogany or veneer?

• 41:38Bill Nye?

  Yeah, stuff like that.

• 41:39Speaker 05

  Important decisions, so, yeah, because it's very difficult to compare the generic robotic mission with the generic human exploration mission, but sending humans, because of the life support and all the other issues, is at least ten times, maybe as much as a hundred times more expensive.

• 41:57Eugene Mirman?

  So, meaning we could do it in three years if somebody was like, "Here's nineteen million dollars"?

• 42:02Speaker 05

  If you had, if you had, well, Jeff Bezos just wrote a blank check.

• 42:05Bill Nye?

  Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

• 42:06Eugene Mirman?

  Should we try texting him? Has anyone just texted?

• 42:14Speaker 05

  So if you had, you know, at your disposal, you know, many, many tens of billions of dollars, and you didn't care how you spent it, you didn't need to spread it out like the government does, because they have a year-to-year budget. Right. And you could just have one big glob of money, you could do it in a single mission.

• 42:34Bill Nye?

  So a mission.

• 42:35Speaker 05

  That's why you have to wait.

• 42:36Eugene Mirman?

  And how much would that mission cost? Like, maybe we could do a Kickstarter.

• 42:40Bill Nye?

  That's what we're talking about.

• 42:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 42:43Bill Nye?

  The annual budget for planetary science is one and a half billion dollars, which sounds like a lot, but it's not that much. It's nine percent of the NASA, less than 10% of the NASA budget.

• 42:54Speaker 05

  Which is one half of 1% of the federal budget.

• 42:57Eugene Mirman?

  You guys love being bummed about this.

• 43:01Bill Nye?

  Well...

• 43:02Eugene Mirman?

  With good reason.

• 43:03Bill Nye?

  Yeah, so...

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Just to remind you, you're getting a good deal.

• 43:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Eugene Mirman?

  No, I think it's a great deal. I'd give it more money.

• 43:10Bill Nye?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:11Eugene Mirman?

  But I have very little say.

• 43:12Bill Nye?

  You know, we advocate for getting more money for planetary science, because these extraordinary discoveries are made for, not on the cheap, but for a lot less money than a lot of other stuff that we spend, and even NASA spends money on. But here's the interesting thing, that I think people like, in what is called, Scott, I think, New Space?

• 43:31Speaker 05

  New Space.

• 43:32Bill Nye?

  You were editor-in-chief of New Space Magazine?

• 43:34Speaker 05

  That's correct. Peer-reviewed journal.

• 43:36Bill Nye?

  There are people, like, at SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, you just mentioned, Elon Musk at SpaceX, Jeff Bezos, who just want to go to Mars. Let's go, boom, go. Because if we had the cash, the C-A-S-H, and the drive...

• 43:52Speaker 05

  The other cash.

• 43:53Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you could just go there, right? I mean, you could. We know enough about the Martian surface, the Martian atmosphere, the Martian gravity, the radiation environment.

• 44:02Speaker 05

  The one big thing...

• 44:03Bill Nye?

  Oh, that!

• 44:04Eugene Mirman?

  Ah!

• 44:07Speaker 05

  Is right now, nobody's got a single rocket that will get the kind of tonnage you need to Mars to support human beings, A and B.

• 44:16Bill Nye?

  Tonnage is, uh...

• 44:17Speaker 05

  Like, lots of stuff, you know, ten, forty...

• 44:19Bill Nye?

  Tang!

• 44:20Speaker 05

  Forty metric tons of life support. That's what it comes down to, is how do you support someone or a group of four or six people going out, you know, the six, seven months it takes to get there, spending some time there, and then the six, seven months back, so maybe three years round trip.

• 44:37Eugene Mirman?

  Maybe you stop at asteroids and pick up some of the materials you might need.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 44:42Eugene Mirman?

  That's my recommendation.

• 44:43Speaker 05

  Oxygen is us, right, you know?

• 44:48Bill Nye?

  But Yvonne, that's part of the idea, right?

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Exactly, if we understood what was there and where they are.

• 44:55Bill Nye?

  The asteroids.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  We could do that.

• 44:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah, be a way station.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Right, absolutely could be.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  Or you could stop on the way.

• 45:01Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly, and you would get like Kit Kats and then, you know, oxygen and water.

• 45:07Bill Nye?

  And everything you need.

• 45:08Eugene Mirman?

  Fossil fuels.

• 45:09Bill Nye?

  So, you guys, we are on the way to Mars. Here's the plan, right there. I hope you enjoyed StarTalk Radio. Turn it up loud!