StarTalk Live! from SF Sketchfest 2016 (Part 1)

We’re going to Mars! Join commander Bill Nye and executive officer Eugene Mirman as we explore the Red Planet with NASA Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green, “The Martian” author Andy Weir, and Maeve Higgins. RECORDED LIVE, ADULT LANGUAGE.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:14Eugene Mirman?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye the Science Guy!

• 0:21Bill Nye?

  One-armed guy-hug!

• 0:23Eugene Mirman?

  Yes!

• 0:24Bill Nye?

  Eugene Mirman, ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, kids of all ages. We have a fabulous show tonight, an amazing show. We are all gonna leave this room, spiritually. And go to Mars.

• 0:43Bill Nye?

  The man who created Mark Watney. The man who wrote the book about being the Martian. Give it up for Andy Weir!

• 0:55Bill Nye?

  And the ones who say this is the funniest woman on Earth. But she may very well be. Maeve Higgins! Maeve! Thank you, Bill! Thank you. Alright! Then, straight from the best brand the United States has. From the Science Mission Directorate, Division for Planetary Science. Jim Green! Jim, thank you. So, Andy Weir, you created this amazing character. Mark Watney. Who's...I know a woman who's just super hot for this guy. Not for Matt Damon, but for Mark Watney.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  Well, I'm...I mean, he's based on me, so...

• 1:38Speaker 03

  Just, you know.

• 1:39Bill Nye?

  Now, you wrote this book, you started out online?

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, originally, I wrote The Martian as just a series of blog posts.

• 1:47Bill Nye?

  Who was reading it?

• 1:48Speaker 03

  Well, I'd accumulated about 3,000 regular readers over the course of 10 years of making, like, webcomics and short stories and stuff like that. And, so, they were my regular readers, and they were a bunch of hardcore dorks like me. And so...

• 2:04Bill Nye?

  Ow! There's one in the wild now!

• 2:06Speaker 03

  There's one now!

• 2:08Speaker 03

  And, um, so when I was writing it, I knew I had to be as scientifically accurate as possible, because there's nothing a nerd likes more than calling out scientific inaccuracies.

• 2:16Bill Nye?

  So, it's true.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  That's hot.

• 2:20Eugene Mirman?

  Do you still get people coming to you and going like, "That's not how you'd go to Mars."

• 2:24Bill Nye?

  Sort of, right?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Well, but Jim and I have worked things out now, so it's good.

• 2:31Bill Nye?

  So, along that line, Jim, you, uh, as long as, I mean, you spent a lot of time with Mars. You were there for, you ran Curiosity Landing?

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Yes, I did.

• 2:40Bill Nye?

  You, uh, you got right on?

• 2:46Bill Nye?

  You, uh, ran Messenger, which we

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:50Bill Nye?

  out into Mercury.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:52Bill Nye?

  And, uh, I was there for the launch of Juno. J-U-N-O is not an acronym. It's crazy, that's, that was...

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Well, it's Jupiter's wife.

• 2:58Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  And you know, all the moons that orbit Jupiter are named after the, uh, in mythology, named after Jupiter's lovers? Like, the ones he was cheating on his wife with. Does Juno know what that is? And now Juno's gonna head on over there. And she's gonna kick some ass, I think, you know? So Juno's on her way.

• 3:15Bill Nye?

  Not to get too far afield there, but, aren't there sixty moons of Jupiter?

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Zeus slash Jupiter. He was a busy guy, if you look up the...

• 3:25Bill Nye?

  That's a lifestyle.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  About ninety percent of, ninety percent of Roman mythology is like, Jupiter, no. And Jupiter's like, Jupiter, yes. So...

• 3:33Bill Nye?

  Uh, so, speaking of, of gods, um, Mars is named after the god of war.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:40Bill Nye?

  Uh, which is very troublesome. Why was it named after the god of war?

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Well, that's a Roman name. You know, prior to that, the Greeks named it Ares.

• 3:49Bill Nye?

  Was that the god of war?

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:51Bill Nye?

  Yeah, but it's because it's...

• 3:52Eugene Mirman?

  If you believe DC Comics.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Yes, blood red.

• 3:54Bill Nye?

  Blood red.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Blood red. And you can see it, of course, in January. Beautiful alignment. Go on out, take a look at it, just before the sun comes up.

• 4:05Bill Nye?

  Yes! Uh, so not yet, everybody, wait, uh...

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:08Bill Nye?

  We'll be out at ten thirty.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Stick around.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Stay in your seats. You got time.

• 4:13Bill Nye?

  Uh, um...

• 4:16Bill Nye?

  I was called you Mark.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  That, that, that happens so often, and it's awesome when it's in live radio interviews, too, 'cause you can't just, can't correct 'em, you know?

• 4:25Bill Nye?

  This is live.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  So, Mark, tell, uh, this is live, too?

• 4:27Bill Nye?

  So, you finished this novel in 2011, and, uh, who approached you? Ridley Scott, who approached you?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  No, yeah, he just knocked on my door, no. Um, initially, no. Uh, initially, uh, no one approached me, I self-published it. So, basically, I'd been, um, putting it on my website, a chapter at a time, until I was done, and I thought, "Okay, I'm done, we're done with this, on to my next project." And then I got emails...

• 4:51Bill Nye?

  But didn't you have a job during all of it?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was a computer programmer, the whole time, so this was my hobby.

• 4:54Bill Nye?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Um, somebody was like, "Wow, computer programmer, ah!"

• 4:59Speaker 05

  Now they're interested.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll tell you why, I'll, I'll tell you why base classes always need virtual destructors later. Um...

• 5:07Speaker 03

  The number of people who laughed, those are the ones who got it.

• 5:09Bill Nye?

  They're there.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is Silicon Valley. Okay, so, um...

• 5:13Speaker 05

  This is very specific comedy.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  It's very specific comedy. Um, so, I figured I was done, move on to other serials, other short stories, and then I got emails from people saying like, "Oh, hey, I love your story, but I hate your website," um, which is reasonable, because it's crap. And, um, it's just really ghetto.

• 5:28Bill Nye?

  Self-admitted.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 5:29Bill Nye?

  He's a programmer, just remember.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm a programmer. Not a graphics guy. Um, and so, they said, "Can you, um, make an e-reader version, so I can just download it and read it on my e-reader?" And so I figured out how to do that, and I did that.

• 5:42Bill Nye?

  Did you have an income stream for this messing around?

• 5:44Speaker 03

  No, this was all just fun. My income stream was from being a Silicon Valley software engineer, which is pretty good. So, don't worry about me. Um, but then, um, but then, uh, so I did that, I said like, "Okay, here's an e-reader version, so now you can read it on my site for free, or download the e-reader version." And then, uh, other people contacted, you know, emailed and said like, "Hey, uh, love the, love the Martian, hate your site, and, um, I, I noticed that you have an e-reader version, but I'm not very technically savvy, and I don't know how to download a thing from the internet, and..."

• 6:13Bill Nye?

  So, can you make a movie for me to watch?

• 6:17Bill Nye?

  Does everybody know what happened? Okay, there's a few. You guys know what happened? You create a character. You create a whole crew of characters. They're on Mars, one's running 2035 or something like that.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, you check your watch.

• 6:29Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, have Martian time. And it's also, it tells the future. Tomorrow, there will be a 7549.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  There will be?

• 6:38Bill Nye?

  754.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Two of them.

• 6:40Speaker 05

  Was there a reason that you chose 2035?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, actually, I did all the orbital trajectory analysis and calculation to figure out the best time to go to Mars with the ship that I designed. Nerd man! Yeah. Yeah. I wrote software to do it. Had to be there in Thanksgiving. What's that? Had to be there in November. My constraints were that I wanted to be far enough in the future that it makes sense for the Ares program to have developed in the intervening time.

• 7:06Bill Nye?

  Ares is the name of the rocket.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, Ares is the name of the ship, or the program, actually. The name of the ship that took him there is Hermes, who is the messenger of the gods, within Greek mythology, he goes from one god to another until people say...

• 7:18Speaker 05

  And makes those beautiful scarves in his downtime.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, Hermes. Yes. He's Hermes.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  So talented.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  That was funny because, if you watch the movie, in a few places, they call it Hermes. Because Ridley Scott directed it, and he says Hermes instead of Hermes.

• 7:33Eugene Mirman?

  Why does he say that?

• 7:34Speaker 03

  And he also says Martinus instead of Martinez. Yeah. But anyway.

• 7:39Bill Nye?

  You know, the British people here, anybody Scottish people.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Can we talk?

• 7:45Bill Nye?

  If I wake you up in the middle of the night.

• 7:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:48Bill Nye?

  Do you talk the way...

• 7:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:50Eugene Mirman?

  You mean, is her accent...

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Do you talk the way real people do?

• 7:53Speaker 05

  Ask me that again. You mean, am I dreaming in my accent?

• 7:57Bill Nye?

  No, no, yeah. I mean, do you put it on just for us?

• 8:00Speaker 03

  No, he really...

• 8:01Speaker 05

  Oh, like, is this this elaborate character that I've been doing for 34 years?

• 8:06Speaker 03

  It's a conspiracy among millions and millions of Irish people.

• 8:10Speaker 05

  What could make us more adorable?

• 8:14Speaker 05

  No.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  And I also want to know-

• 8:17Bill Nye?

  So anyway, these guys end up on Mars.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Well, wait, I got one other question before. What other things would happen if he woke you up in the middle of the night? I just... He's just there, you know? He's just, he's right there.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  I guess, I mean, I'd be surprised.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  And, I mean, we work together. It's not really, yeah, I guess-

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Appropriate?

• 8:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, it would be inappropriate, but then, like, he's very well-known and, um... I'm at the beginning of my career. Yeah, we can work it out. Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  We can work it out.

• 8:50Bill Nye?

  Uh, yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  I really hope my boyfriend hears this.

• 8:55Bill Nye?

  Uh, I'm not so sure I do. So, Andy, these guys, the crew, ends up on Mars and something goes horribly wrong, and one guy gets left behind. And, uh, we spend a book, a movie, trying to resolve this issue. I don't want to give too much away, but Matt Damon plays the lead character. And he makes it to the end, okay? He doesn't-

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Spoiler.

• 9:22Bill Nye?

  I'm sorry.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Spoiler.

• 9:27Bill Nye?

  Uh, but... Andy, what drives you? What makes you want to do this?

• 9:31Speaker 03

  About half the people are just storming out in anger.

• 9:33Bill Nye?

  Yeah, I had no idea.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  What drives you to do this? Um, well, I mean, I've been a space dork my whole life. I was pretty much doomed to be one. My father's a physicist, my mother's an engineer.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  The space program, I mean, when I was a kid, the Space Shuttle Program was, like, new and exciting, which was probably gonna make some people feel kinda old, but, um-

• 9:52Bill Nye?

  I'm all right.

• 9:56Speaker 05

  Go back to sleep.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  It's back in my day. It's back in my day.

• 10:00Bill Nye?

  Back in your day. Back in my day.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we don't got any, you know, for you guys, you know, when you were kids, the space program was Chinese people inventing gunpowder, right? I mean, but, so-

• 10:11Speaker 03

  And Captain Kirk fabricated it.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right, to defeat the Gorn, I believe. Defeat the Gorn. But, and so I've always been a science hawker and I've always loved this stuff and I came up with this idea for an astronaut stranded on Mars, but I wanted everything to be physically accurate, just because I always get taken out of a story when I see some blatant physical inaccuracy.

• 10:34Eugene Mirman?

  The book is fairly accurate too, right, or very accurate?

• 10:37Speaker 04

  Oh, the book's delightful in many ways, but you know...

• 10:40Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry, I meant to say, is the book delightful scientifically?

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Uh, let me think about that. So, you know, it's science fiction. There are things in the book that, you know, we don't find on Mars, not yet anyway, might happen someday. For example. Well, Matt Damon's not on there.

• 11:05Eugene Mirman?

  But there is a guy from Boston.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Probably buried, is that what you meant, buried somewhere on Mars?

• 11:13Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, from the Big Dig.

• 11:16Bill Nye?

  Turns out that's where Jimmy Hoffa is.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  The dust storm, the dust storm. Okay, you know, Mars has famous dust storms, they go, you know, global sometimes. You can see them with telescopes from Earth, right? Yeah, absolutely. And they look gnarly from space sometimes, but, but in reality, the pressure is so low... How low is it? It's very low.

• 11:37Bill Nye?

  It's about 1, 200...

• 11:39Speaker 04

  1.7 atmospheres. Yeah, 1, 200 of what we have, you know, and so although the winds can be pretty hefty, it can be 120 miles an hour, but that's not enough to straighten an American flag, let alone blow away a, you know, a radio dish. Because there's so few molecules going that fast. Right, that's right.

• 11:57Eugene Mirman?

  So, so you did, did you have trouble watching the movie with all its lies then?

• 12:00Bill Nye?

  No, absolutely not!

• 12:02Eugene Mirman?

  Were you like, "Another lie, another lie"?

• 12:07Eugene Mirman?

  Stop lying to me Ridley.

• 12:10Bill Nye?

  Are you gonna put it on Ridley?

• 12:11Eugene Mirman?

  Alright.

• 12:12Bill Nye?

  Yeah, I could.

• 12:14Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Bill Nye?

  Freaking Ridley.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Now, what you gotta do-

• 12:18Eugene Mirman?

  That look looks accurate, delightfully so.

• 12:20Bill Nye?

  Delightfully so.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  But you, you gotta check the science at the door and go on in and enjoy it. It's enjoyable, it's great.

• 12:28Bill Nye?

  You're talking about seeing the movie not your job. Why do I wanna sit in a movie theater and think about some more of it? Andy, as nerd man, you had to work out some serious scientific problems.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did. Um, yes, absolutely, the dust storm is, or the sandstorm is inaccurate. And I knew that at the time, I just didn't care. I wanted a good reason to strand him there, and at the time I wrote it, most people didn't know that. Like, most people thought that a sandstorm on Mars- But then, because The Martian got so popular and became a very popular movie, and then got a bunch of scientists talking about it, now everybody knows a dust storm on Mars can't do that. So I shot myself in the foot.

• 13:04Bill Nye?

  But it was cool, it was, you blew the thing over and you couldn't see.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:07Bill Nye?

  Oh, man.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, what are those chunks, by the way, that were coming out?

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I don't know.

• 13:12Eugene Mirman?

  Space debris.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  One of my favorite things is how JPL almost ruined everything. When I, you know, I wrote the book, it was done, it was already in final editing, I can't make any more changes, or other than like copy editing, and you know. And, and like, at that point, like, they were deciding, they had it down to the final four candidates of where they're gonna land Curiosity. They eventually landed it, you know, near Mount Sharp and Gale Crater. But, um, one of the-

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Mount Sharp.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Mount Sharp, Gale Crater.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  On Mars, you know.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, on Mars.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  The big one.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Right, on Mars. Which is, which is thousands and thousands of kilometers away from all the things that happen in The Martian, not a problem. One of the final four candidates on where they were thinking about landing it was Marth Valis, which Mark drives through. Like, I specifically call it out in the book, he drives through this ravine, Marth Valis. He would've had to have gone around the rover to keep going, and I'm like, "Oh, you guys are killing me with your stupid real-time-" And then my, but my favorite little, little-

• 14:10Bill Nye?

  It's like they didn't even take that into account. It's like me.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Nobody asked me.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking. Sorry about that.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. So Jim, what am I favorite to file on decision?

• 14:22Speaker 04

  No, actually I didn't. But we were down to the last four, and I loved any one of those. So, so my boss did. And that was, um, Ed Weiler at the time. And, uh...

• 14:33Speaker 03

  So, yeah, everybody, this is the real guy. That's all I'm saying. This is the... So, just so we're clear. Just so we're clear. The character in the book, Venkatesh Kapoor, who is in the movie Vincent Kapoor, that's, he holds that position in the real NASA. So if you're curious, that's who he is.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Your tax dollars at work.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  That's right. And they work, too.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  But, um, what, one other, my favorite little, you know, stories of like, you know, space research screwing with me is, um, the, uh, the University of Arizona that runs the Hi-Rise instrument. High-resolution camera. Um, apparently we have like four of their alumni here today. Four people who are great at clapping. They, they, in, in the book...

• 15:21Speaker 05

  They just got the joke Phil made 10 minutes ago.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  In the book, yeah, well, they're U of A, I mean, but... Somebody got it. Yeah. But, um, in the book, I give the exact latitude and longitude of the HAB. And so... The HAB is the Hab... The habitat, the, the main, the, the base where most of the Martian takes place. Where Mark Watney is stranded, where, where, where they are.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  The HAB, the HABNOX.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  The habitat. Um, yeah. And, um, and so I described the terrain as being kind of flat and sandy. There's not much going on in Massedalea Planitia. It's a large, empty desert and stuff like that. And the guys who run Hi-Rise are like, "Let's check." And so they did these super Hi-Rise photos of the HAB's location on the real Mars. And they're like, "Well, that's nothing like he described it."

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, but Ridley got it right.

• 16:10Bill Nye?

  Yeah, with the... There are some beautiful craters right around where that hab would be. Yeah. And the scenery looks great. Yeah, it does.

• 16:18Eugene Mirman?

  Those people almost hate Star Wars.

• 16:23Bill Nye?

  Almost.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  So, they don't have good resolution on galaxies far, far away.

• 16:29Bill Nye?

  They don't have... We don't have a camera for that yet.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're working on it.

• 16:32Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, thank you.

• 16:34Bill Nye?

  So, the guy's on Mars. He's got a lot of food. Because there were supposed to be six people, but he's only one?

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they left... In the book, they left after six days of a planned 31-day mission, and they had redundant food supplies. So, he had enough food to last about 400 soles. A sole is a day on Mars for the four of you who don't know that.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  And, um...

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Well, three of you and one of her, I guess.

• 17:01Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, I have... I know it is that, but why is that? Why is it called a sole?

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Sole is Latin for sun. It just means... Because day is an ambiguous term. Day to scientists means the time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis, just Earth. So, Mars rotating on its axis, that's one Martian sole.

• 17:19Bill Nye?

  I remember...

• 17:21Eugene Mirman?

  Uh-huh.

• 17:22Bill Nye?

  During the disco era.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  A different sole.

• 17:27Bill Nye?

  That's right.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Different sole. The sole train.

• 17:33Eugene Mirman?

  Tell us what Studio 54 was like, Bill.

• 17:37Bill Nye?

  I don't remember, man.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  He was there.

• 17:42Eugene Mirman?

  You build a science pi guy.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill.

• 17:48Bill Nye?

  Stereotype.

• 17:51Bill Nye?

  You don't always do that well with the ladies. This stereotypical male in here. I know, it's shocking.

• 17:58Bill Nye?

  What's worse is a computer programmer, by the way. Well, until...

• 18:03Speaker 03

  I'm a computer programmer and I wrote a book about Mars, so...

• 18:07Eugene Mirman?

  Keep it calm, ladies.

• 18:08Bill Nye?

  That's right. That end. We're gonna take a break, and StarTalk will be back right after this.

• 18:33Bill Nye?

  So, we've been talking about Mars.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Mars, Mars.

• 18:36Bill Nye?

  Hypothetically. The Martian, the movie, the book. This hypothetical character, surviving on this hostile world. But, Andy, when Viking landed on Mars, 1976, "Assaul" was this hip new word. And the length of a day, "Assaul" on Mars is very much like the Earth, right?

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:57Bill Nye?

  So if a guy's gonna find a way to come up with some new food source, he's gonna have sunlight.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yep. But that's not really what our hero does. I mean, he's inside the hab, so he used the lighting of the hab to help grow food.

• 19:14Bill Nye?

  It's much less sunlight. You're one and a half times as far away, right?

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Right. But he had a huge solar farm. So effectively, it's rather inefficient, but he didn't have a lot of equipment to work with. So he's collecting energy with the solar farm and then using it to power lights inside the hab.

• 19:30Bill Nye?

  What should he have done?

• 19:31Speaker 03

  What should he have done?

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Well, he did exactly what I would have done. However...

• 19:36Speaker 03

  You know?

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 19:41Eugene Mirman?

  You are so diplomatic. I really enjoy that about you.

• 19:44Bill Nye?

  He's a massive voice.

• 19:45Eugene Mirman?

  You know how to get more funding.

• 19:51Bill Nye?

  You guys, you just don't know. As CEO of the Planetary Society, I can tell you there is a great deal to that little insight. This is diplomacy man, right here. So what would you do? Would you not send...

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Well, I would have definitely had the Imager's C's dead body on Ares III. I'm playing my part on the movie. Sorry about that.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  But, you know, the soil, the soil where Curiosity is, is very acidic. And so asparagus would grow nice. And, oh my god, asparagus for 500 days.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  And his pee would smell so bad.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  Wait, it really would? Asparagus would grow in that soil?

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, in the acidic soil. So in the alkaline soils, the potatoes would grow better.

• 20:34Bill Nye?

  So just, you guys, everybody, he grows potatoes. That's how he lives through it.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, spoiler, spoiler.

• 20:41Eugene Mirman?

  We've literally ruined the movie for you.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  Well, what I'm gonna get worse, I'm afraid.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  So another one of those great things where NASA ruined me was they like-

• 20:51Speaker 04

  They landed Curiosity.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  After Curi- yeah, after Curiosity, so in the book, he has to go through this huge ordeal to make enough water to survive. He needs to- the water system within the hab is self-contained. You know, humans consume water, humans give out an equal amount of water, so it's fine. But to grow potatoes, he needs a lot more water. He needs to moisten all this soil that he's bringing in. He needs hundreds of liters of water. So he takes hydroxine from the descent vehicle that had brought him there, goes through this chemical reaction-

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Perfectly safe.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, like incredibly dangerous. Goes through this chemical reaction to liberate the hydrogen, then collects CO2 from the atmosphere, runs that through the oxygenator to liberate the oxygen, then mixes them together to make water. Okay, that's great.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Turns out, turns out, you know, Curiosity goes to Mars, scoops up some sand and goes like, "There's a shitload of water in here."

• 21:41Speaker 03

  And it's like thirty-five liters of water for every cubic meter of Martian soil or regolith, because we're not supposed to call anything off of earth soil.

• 21:50Eugene Mirman?

  Would he be able to get the water out of it?

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, what you do, it's very complicated. You have to bring the soil in, and then you have to heat it.

• 22:00Eugene Mirman?

  Even I think I could do that.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:01Eugene Mirman?

  I feel like I would do fine on Mars, hearing that.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  To put this into, to put this into terms that, you know, don't require you to do a bunch of math in your head, if you took a refrigerator and filled it with Martian soil, and then got all the water out of that soil, you would have thirty-five two-liter bottles of water.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Just like that?

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Just like that.

• 22:21Eugene Mirman?

  That's a pretty good recipe.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  The entire subplot where he's getting water wouldn't have mattered. And so to answer your thing, um, since it's so, since in real life it would be so easy for him to get a hold of that much water, he could have gotten a whole bunch more water than the soil he brought in and used that to scrub the soil.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  Well, actually, you know, recently we found weeping craters.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  You know, during, during the summer season, they, you know, what we believe is happening is an aquifer-

• 22:49Speaker 03

  They miss Mark.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Uh, well, actually, there's one-

• 22:51Eugene Mirman?

  What's a weeping crater? I like that a lot, by the way.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  So during the summer, light from the sun shines on these crater walls, and they're what we believe are underground aquifers. And the water plug sublimates and it just pours down the side of the craters.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  So it's like a waterfall?

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it sort of creeps.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Not for long, because it wets the soil.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  It boils up. It wets the soil.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  Lovely.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  And then eventually...

• 23:19Speaker 03

  So he should have buckets?

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Well, you know, he would have normally gone to his well, where it would have gone down to the aquifer and pumped out the water.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  I'm not sure how many recurring slipline there are in the relatively flat areas.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  There's one within 100 miles, closer than Pathline.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  Guys, guys.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  Break it up.

• 23:39Eugene Mirman?

  How about this? There's a sequel to The Martian. Somebody gets stranded, and it's like 25 minutes long, and he survives fine.

• 23:46Speaker 05

  He doesn't need to get in the water.

• 23:48Eugene Mirman?

  Because he's like, "Oh, my God, there's all this water, and plus this. I'll look for curiosity."

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Now, Andy, where'd you get the idea to take potatoes? So potatoes, I went through a bunch of different possible crops. Originally, what I wanted to do... But not asparagus. Not asparagus. Thank God. The one I originally wanted to grow, for him to grow, was peas. Because it makes perfect sense for there to be peas in the meal pack. And peas are the seeds for peas. I mean, that's you plant peas. That's the thing, I gotta say, answer me about the potatoes, but go ahead. Yeah, so why were the potatoes still viable?

• 24:20Speaker 05

  I thought it was a nod to your Irish heritage.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  It was not, no. I mean, as any normal person would, I try to hide the Irish, you know.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  You can beat me up later. No, the potato thing was because there is nothing that... Potatoes have the very highest calorie yield per crop land area of anything. So if he were to grow peas, he would just not... In the land area he had inside the hab and all the volume he had access to, he could not possibly have maintained his calorie needs. But potatoes will do it. But he had to fertilize them? Yeah, well, fortunately, he has a method of producing that.

• 25:03Bill Nye?

  No, it is the most popular line in the movie. I think it's the most popular line in the book and it's a meme, it's so popular. Everybody, I gotta science the shit out of this.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Yes, well, I guess more accurately, science the shit into it, but, um, what's funny is just worth noting, people come to me, "I love that line, my favorite line in the whole book is, I'm gonna science the shit out of it," yeah, that line's not in the book. That line was made up by Drew Goddard, who wrote the screenplay for the film, so I'm like, "No, I'm glad you liked it, I'll tell Drew."

• 25:34Bill Nye?

  He's a cool guy.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  He's a great guy, and he's up for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, so.

• 25:44Bill Nye?

  So, he pulls it off, our hero pulls it off.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Our hero pulls it off.

• 25:48Bill Nye?

  And how long did it take you to figure all this stuff out?

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Uh, well, it took me about three years to write the book.

• 25:53Bill Nye?

  Cause you haven't done a lot of farming.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Not a lot.

• 25:56Eugene Mirman?

  A little, have you done a little farming?

• 25:58Bill Nye?

  Did you grow a potato?

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Nope, nope, I have a brown thumb, um, I kill anything I try to grow.

• 26:04Eugene Mirman?

  Do you, are you friends with botanists?

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Nope. I did all my research on, like, by the way, I didn't know anyone in aerospace, uh, at the time I wrote the book, all my research was just Google.

• 26:15Bill Nye?

  Do you know a farmer?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Uh, nope.

• 26:18Bill Nye?

  Hmm, hey Jim.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  I know Google.

• 26:20Eugene Mirman?

  Have you at this point met Matt Damon?

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, lots of times now, because of publicity events and stuff like that.

• 26:25Bill Nye?

  Great, he's like that.

• 26:28Eugene Mirman?

  Please tell him I say hello.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Alright, I'll tell him, I'll let him know.

• 26:32Bill Nye?

  You're from Iowa, you were born in Iowa?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Born in Iowa.

• 26:34Bill Nye?

  Are you, just to go stereotypical, were you a farmer?

• 26:37Speaker 03

  No, I was a far, I was a townie.

• 26:40Bill Nye?

  A townie?

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:41Bill Nye?

  In Burlingdon?

• 26:42Eugene Mirman?

  Would you throw an convertible, hitting people in the face?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  You probably grew up with shoes and everything, right?

• 26:47Bill Nye?

  What was your favorite part of the movie?

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Uh, my favorite part of the movie actually is when, um, Mark Watney, uh, after he, uh, extracts the rod out of him and, and begins to survive and he's, he's, um, uh, thinking about all the things on Mars that would kill him and enumerates them, one right after the other, and you can see he's depressed, he's, you know, probably one of the most depressed moments, and, um, he finally figures out...

• 27:15Speaker 04

  He becomes the astronaut he really is. What he's gonna do next. And you can see that come over him.

• 27:23Bill Nye?

  The transformation.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, the transformation. "I am not gonna die." And that was it. And that's what they do. NASA's really famous for having the people that take almost insurmountable problems and solve them one at a time along the way. And that's one of the really great things about the book and really great things about the movie. And that is, that's what you have to do to be able to make it in this environment.

• 27:51Bill Nye?

  For survival, you solve one problem at a time.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 27:55Bill Nye?

  And you keep your sense of humor.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Right. But of course, the great part about the book, of course, is you thought you solved it and then you'd have another problem. Sometimes even bigger than the last.

• 28:05Bill Nye?

  Ah, gone! But Jim.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 28:10Bill Nye?

  What's really going on on Mars right now? And I say "going on." What are we doing? What are we learning about Mars? You alluded to the weeping craters.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I mean, we're making discoveries, you know, at a rapid rate. And that's because we have some wonderful assets at Mars. We have several orbiters.

• 28:28Bill Nye?

  Asset is science talk?

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, science talk for spacecraft.

• 28:32Eugene Mirman?

  It's not a person who's there who's like undercover, who you need to wake and then he'll... anyway.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  True, true, true. And these spacecraft are making fabulous measurements. One we just put in orbit not too long ago is called Maven. And it's designed to see how the solar wind interacts with the atmosphere. You know, here on Earth, we're so lucky we have our magnetic field.

• 28:55Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. I feel it.

• 28:57Eugene Mirman?

  We are so lucky.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  That's something, if you're doing a gratitude list and you're searching for reasons, like you've had a terrible week, you can be like, "Magnetic field?"

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Thank God for the magnetic field.

• 29:07Bill Nye?

  No, you guys, it makes the solar wind, these charged particles, come to the poles like this and not hit you.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Or just go around entirely.

• 29:15Bill Nye?

  Or miss.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Either way, yeah, well, we wouldn't be here talking about it if it...

• 29:20Bill Nye?

  Well, it's another example.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Life probably would not be on this planet if it weren't for their magnetic field.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  Well, that's one of the things we're finding out because it's really stripped Mars' atmosphere.

• 29:29Bill Nye?

  How long did that take?

• 29:30Speaker 04

  Well, it's been going on for billions of years.

• 29:33Bill Nye?

  Well, how many?

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Probably the last three and a half billion years that's been happening. But Mars had an enormous magnetic field early on. And so, when it was born, along with the Earth-

• 29:44Bill Nye?

  How do we know that? That's cool. How do we know that?

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Ah! We can actually measure the remnant magnetic field from space. That's laying on the surface of Mars. You know, Mars doesn't generate the field anymore inside. But when it did-

• 29:58Eugene Mirman?

  Do we know why?

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Because it's molten core. Yeah.

• 30:02Eugene Mirman?

  What happened to its molten core?

• 30:05Speaker 04

  It cooled.

• 30:05Eugene Mirman?

  Is there anything I can do to help?

• 30:08Speaker 04

  Heat it back up? I wish you could.

• 30:10Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  But you can't.

• 30:12Eugene Mirman?

  I believe you.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:13Eugene Mirman?

  Even if I summoned the powers of Thor?

• 30:18Bill Nye?

  So Mars is smaller than the Earth, right?

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is. But much bigger than the moon.

• 30:22Bill Nye?

  Yeah, but this made it cool off, yeah?

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Uh, it does cool off faster than the Earth. That's, you know, that's what our planetary scientists say. But, um-

• 30:32Bill Nye?

  But didn't, hold it. What I'm getting at, didn't that make the magnetic churning iron inside slow down and cool off and hard up?

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Well, you know, there's a couple other ideas. There's some huge impacts that are on Mars. A place called Helles Basin. And it's actually in the opposite hemisphere of where the huge volcanoes were.

• 30:52Bill Nye?

  Which is Olympus Mons?

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Olympus Mons and the Parsis Ridge and all the beautiful volcanoes.

• 30:57Eugene Mirman?

  Was Mars once very fun?

• 30:59Speaker 04

  Yeah! Yeah, it was.

• 31:01Bill Nye?

  It used to be very wet, right?

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, the northern hemisphere, probably 25 or 30% of the northern hemisphere was an ocean. And so, three and a half billion years ago, we now know Mars looked like the Earth. Uh, it had rain. It had clouds. It snowed.

• 31:18Bill Nye?

  Did it have, like, McDonald's?

• 31:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, was there a deaf leopard?

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Well, we didn't have it at the time either, so- Well, it's got Rocket.

• 31:27Eugene Mirman?

  We don't know that!

• 31:28Speaker 04

  Rocket?

• 31:30Eugene Mirman?

  They've been here forever.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Well, that's the Grateful Dead.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  What are the other explanations for the magnetic field cooling off? Giant impacts, giant impacts. Anything that would change the differential rotation where the currents are. So an impact, cooling, something stopped that current that generates the field. Which we have here on Earth. Which we, thank goodness, we have here on Earth. Yeah, I think the magnetic field has played an important role. And we're just becoming aware of that because we're at Mars, seeing what happens with a planet that doesn't have one. So it stripped away the atmosphere. Most of it, yeah. And then the water, what happens? Well, as soon as that starts, it evaporates. But it also on our ground. This is what we also found out from now more and more of our observations.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  And that is the aquifers, there's ice layers underneath, and in fact, we found a buried glacier. Where is that? Well, it's not where Aries 3 is, but it's halfway between where Curiosity is and where... So if I use my cellphone, could I get there? I mean, would it, the GPS? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I could show you on your, you know, on a map where it's at. But it's on the ancient coastline, where the old coast used to be. Oh, those were the days. You know, so, you know, right now, the resources and things that we're finding on Mars, and I've been telling the astronaut corps this too, is don't bring all your water, bring a straw.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Bring a straw. Because we'll tell you where to go to get it. Plenty of resources that are there if we use them. In situ resource utilization. ISRU. That's big.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  ISRU, yes. That's my favorite thing. I love that. No, just ISRU. I'm not making a joke, I know you're used to me just being a smartass all the time. But no, it's ISRU. I think that's absolutely the key to Mars exploration. There's plenty of water. As long as you have energy, you can do everything else you need. Because, I mean, water, you break water apart, you've got rocket fuel. Yeah, that's it. Or you break water apart and then mix it creatively with methane and you've got better rocket fuel.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Well, your book has got it. I mean, you know, you've got the oxygenator.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  And in Mars 2020, which is our next big rover that we're gonna launch in 2020, we haven't gotten a great name for it yet. Uh, it's, uh, but we'll run a contest, we'll do something.

• 34:02Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, good, good.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  You need to be the spiritual opposite of curiosity. You want to be called "on we."

• 34:08Speaker 04

  It's just like, "I do not care about this matter."

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  No, yeah.

• 34:15Eugene Mirman?

  How about Mr. Ding Dong?

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Submit it.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Know-it-all.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Submit it. The Planetary Society will run the contest. Submit it, please.

• 34:23Eugene Mirman?

  Let me.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Jim.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  When do you think people will be walking on Mars? Well, I believe it's gonna happen in my lifetime. You know, we're, yeah. You're a kid. I am. So, Jim plans to live to be 500 years old. Yeah. That's why I'm a vampire. Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  And that's why I'm sitting over here.

• 35:05Eugene Mirman?

  Are you an immortal?

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Uh, obviously. But, uh, you know, we're following the president's direction and indeed, we wanna be in the... Oh, you do everything he's... Well, you know.

• 35:17Eugene Mirman?

  Until...

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Anything that guy says, you're just like, "Yeah." And, uh, you know, he is, uh, NASA's part of the administration. So, uh, the president is, uh, you know, my boss's boss's boss. And so, we're, we're heading in that direction and indeed, it's the right direction. So, he wants us to be able to have a presence in and around Mars in the 2030s. So, that could be, you know, uh, going to Phobostemos, perhaps doing, uh, what we did to the moon, going out as a figure eight and coming back. So, we wanna be able to go out and come back. And then after that, in the 2040s and on, uh, begin to get humans down to the ground. I wanna get there sooner than that. But with that said... Yeah. You know, the Planetary Society, of which I'm the CEO, we, uh...

• 36:05Bill Nye?

  We did a study in the end of March, beginning of April, where we brought 70 people from around the world, and we did an analysis, Jim, that we could send people in orbit around Mars in 2033. You can only go to Mars, Mabe, I know you're excited, every 26 months. Truly? And there's a lot, yeah, there's a lot of good orbits, but 2033 is an especially good one. And the premise of the bit, as we say in...

• 36:32Eugene Mirman?

  Is that when he, you went...

• 36:34Bill Nye?

  No, they're assuming, they're assuming home and transfer lifts is probably, and I don't necessarily buy into those as best. But, so the deal is, we did this analysis, that you don't have to increase the NASA budget, except adjusting for inflation, and you could get humans in orbit around Mars in 2033, and they could hypothetically, on that trip, land on Phobos, which you described as the Space Station of Mars, the Space Station of Mars. And so you could land there and study Mars from above, and then subsequently, you could go down to the surface, if people just decided it was worth doing.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Well, you could also study Mars on Phobos, because a lot of Mars is sitting on the surface.

• 37:16Bill Nye?

  But this is with people we're talking.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:18Bill Nye?

  So how about out there, audience, Sartakians, do you want to send people to Mars in 2033?

• 37:24Eugene Mirman?

  If we, if we increased the budget, could it be much sooner? Like, is the science there, and just the money isn't?

• 37:37Bill Nye?

  Well, there are some technologies that we have to work on. So we're doing the Mark Watney thing, and that is, we're solving some technically tough problems along the way.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  For example?

• 37:47Bill Nye?

  Well, we want to get down on the ground many ton, you know, Curiosity, we put down, was a one-ton rover, one metric ton.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  But from a sky crane!

• 37:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah, some neat, neat engineering.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Wily coyote method of landing things, it's fantastic. You guys just need to stench all acne on the side of that thing, it's great.

• 38:07Bill Nye?

  Well, there's a good reason why it was done the way it was.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  Everything's a good reason.

• 38:11Bill Nye?

  I hope, I hope there was a good reason, and we weren't just jamming.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 38:14Bill Nye?

  Hey, cool!

• 38:17Speaker 04

  But you know, to do this kind of station that Mark Watney's at, that's gotta be about forty ton or so. So we want to be able to put at least-

• 38:26Bill Nye?

  But hold it forty tons?

• 38:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:27Bill Nye?

  That's not that, that's not a million times as-

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Correct, right.

• 38:31Bill Nye?

  It's like, I can see it from here.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  And we can see it from here. So there's a variety of techniques that we're developing right now that will be able to put more mass down on the ground.

• 38:40Speaker 05

  And how long does it take to get there?

• 38:42Speaker 04

  Well, from the top of the atmosphere down to the ground, about seven minutes.

• 38:46Bill Nye?

  No, you mean to get to Mars from Earth?

• 38:48Eugene Mirman?

  How much from Dallas?

• 38:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:52Eugene Mirman?

  For that area?

• 38:53Speaker 05

  Seven minutes and...

• 38:55Speaker 03

  So that is, that is, that is a million dollar question because-

• 38:59Bill Nye?

  Or billion dollar.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Well, multi-billion dollar question because it has to do with the propulsion systems that you need to design. So the lowest energy transfer from Earth to Mars is called a Hohmann transfer ellipse, and it takes a little over eight months. And that is the least amount of delta V necessary to get from Earth to Mars.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Changing speeds.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Changing speed. The least amount of oomph that you need. However, if you have ion drives or, you know, ion propulsion systems like the fictional one in the Martian-

• 39:30Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  Which is a real technology that real space probes have used, just not to that magnitude, then you could get there much quicker. Bad news is you need an energy source for it, which also means convincing the various nations of the Earth that it's okay to put a nuclear reactor in space and-

• 39:45Bill Nye?

  Woo! Nuclear reactor in space!

• 39:47Speaker 03

  And so-

• 39:48Eugene Mirman?

  If we use molten salt, it's safe.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:51Eugene Mirman?

  That's something I learned recently.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Ah, thorium reactors, yeah.

• 39:55Bill Nye?

  It's more than six months and less than a year to get to Mars.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  Right.

• 39:58Bill Nye?

  And if you punch it, yeah, you get, you get-

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, then you can stay there for about twenty days, a short stay. You know, that's what the Ares crew was doing.

• 40:07Bill Nye?

  You get used to the time zone.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  And then you have to come back. And that, and, and-

• 40:10Eugene Mirman?

  Twenty days is enough to like, really relax, though, that's good.

• 40:15Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, yeah, now I feel refreshed. And I'm ready for a six-month trip home.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  I just turned off my phone and stayed on Mars for a while, feel much better.

• 40:28Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you could. Because when it's on the far side and there's no spacecraft above you, your phone would be off.

• 40:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  By the time we sent people to Mars, I guarantee you there would be at least one

• 40:41Bill Nye?

  A whole cell tower.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  One telemetry satellite in the sky at all times.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  Then I was gone.

• 40:46Bill Nye?

  Absolutely, so, so, indeed, if you, if you miss that 20-day window coming back, then you're gonna have to stay there for a good 300 or 400 days. And then come back in the next...

• 40:56Eugene Mirman?

  So they're taking potatoes. Maybe do 19 days, just to keep a safe data.

• 41:02Bill Nye?

  Does you oversleep?

• 41:04Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, it's one thing to be like, I have to stay, because there's a snowstorm, another like, I have to stay for one year, because of a snowstorm.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh.

• 41:11Bill Nye?

  Let me ask you guys this, hang on, now, you talk to people, there's these guys who want to go to Mars, one-way, and live, and people want to go there, "I want to go die on Mars." You probably will.

• 41:26Bill Nye?

  What do you think about, I just, I say this only, I have strong opinions, which, as you know, are correct, but...

• 41:35Bill Nye?

  How many people want to terraform Mars? We're gonna make Mars like the Earth, we're gonna take that water, stir up the dirt, the sand, and just to be just like home.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  Well, that may be fine for them, but you know, right now, scientifically, we want to study it in the way it is. We want to understand everything about it before we bring humans there.

• 41:58Bill Nye?

  Those living things that might be...

• 42:00Speaker 04

  They might be there, but I mean, you know, there's resources that we want to know about, so that we can use them. But, you know, Mars is, you know, Mars is gonna change on its own. You know, the temperature of the sun continues to rise, and heats all our planets, and rising the temperature...

• 42:17Bill Nye?

  Solar warming.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Pardon?

• 42:19Bill Nye?

  Solar warming.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  So, by the way, if there's any climate deniers out there, it's got nothing to do with it.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, the sun's gonna do this regardless.

• 42:31Bill Nye?

  Yeah, we're talking four billion years, yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So, but you could change the temperature of Mars in the future with the sun's energy increasing by four degrees C, or about seven degrees Fahrenheit. That takes the CO2 top, sublimates from the pole, leaving this huge ice cap of water underneath it, then to also melt because the CO2 will form a greenhouse. And then Mars will return to a little bit like what it was three billion years ago, with a huge climate, much more extensive atmosphere.

• 43:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, how long will this take? Like, are we talking months, or are we talking weeks?

• 43:11Speaker 04

  No, it's gonna take a while. By 2033? No, it won't be by 2033.

• 43:15Eugene Mirman?

  Millions of years, or billions?

• 43:17Speaker 04

  Several hundred million years.

• 43:18Eugene Mirman?

  That is too long, in my opinion.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's about eight hundred.

• 43:23Eugene Mirman?

  I was really hoping to see a lush Mars.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Sooner rather than later.

• 43:28Eugene Mirman?

  A little bit.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that won't happen in our lifetime, but, you know, that's what exploration's all about.

• 43:34Bill Nye?

  So, Jim, what do you need? Your planetary division of the Science Mission Directorate.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 43:40Bill Nye?

  Adding as many acronym letters as we can get in there. What do you need to pull this off?

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Well, indeed, we benefit from the enormous support by the American people. Now, when you say enormous, you guys, when you say enormous, I am of, I'm of an age where it was routine to hear people say, "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they, blank, make a magic marker cap that doesn't fall off?" Or whatever. Yeah, so, the answer is always obvious. NASA's not in the business of building the magic markers, or we would've.

• 44:15Bill Nye?

  Yeah, right.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, but, not just that.

• 44:18Eugene Mirman?

  You do make great markers.

• 44:22Bill Nye?

  In the Apollo era, the NASA budget was 4% of the federal budget. 4%.

• 44:30Bill Nye?

  Now, the NASA budget is .4% of the federal.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 44:34Bill Nye?

  So it's a tenth of what it was in the Apollo era.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 44:40Bill Nye?

  So what would you guys want it to be? I mean, what is the military, 18%?

• 44:45Speaker 04

  I think it's 22.

• 44:46Bill Nye?

  22%. In other words, the NASA budget used to be a fifth of the military budget. Now it's a 50th of the military budget.

• 44:59Bill Nye?

  But what would you need? You need faster rockets, bigger rockets?

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Well, we're doing the investment right now with the funding. We do get it from the American people through Congress in a really judicious way. From a science perspective, we're studying the heck out of Mars. We want to know everything about...

• 45:16Bill Nye?

  You'll dance.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Okay. We're scienceing the shit out of it.

• 45:24Eugene Mirman?

  If you went on television and swore you would get all the money you need.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know if you noticed, but I just did.

• 45:34Eugene Mirman?

  On the radio. I'm talking about really reaching people. This reaches people, sorry.

• 45:41Speaker 04

  So scientifically, Mars is ours at the moment. We really want to be able to understand it, and that will mitigate risk for our humans to go.

• 45:52Bill Nye?

  Why'd you look at me, mitigate risk? What did I do?

• 45:55Speaker 04

  No, I was just looking around.

• 45:57Bill Nye?

  Stop the bungling idiots from getting... When you say mitigate risk, you mean getting killed being much less likely.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Well, you could take the Mark Watney approach of burning hydroxene, or you could take, you know...

• 46:13Bill Nye?

  A straw.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  A straw, yeah, that's right. So these are the things that we learn along the way. And indeed, that helps us figure out where we want to go. We just had a major workshop with the scientists and the engineers that do a lot of this resource planning and got them together and say, "Here's Mars, where would you put humans and why?" And we got 50 locations of just fabulous places to go on Mars, and we're studying those.

• 46:42Bill Nye?

  This has been StarTalk about Mars. We've had Andy Weir, creator of The Martian.

• 46:50Bill Nye?

  Maeve Higgins, insightful comedian. Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA. And Eugene Mirman. I've been your host, Bill Nye. Listen to StarTalk and turn it up loud. Thank you all very much. Thank you.