Visualizing Our Universe, with Dr. FunkySpoon – StarTalk All-Stars

Astrobiologist David Grinspoon and his guest, Carter Emmart, take us behind the scenes to see how Carter creates a virtual “Google Map” of our universe. Plus, Chuck Nice asks them Cosmic Queries about black holes, the Big Bang, and Star Trek’s holodeck.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is StarTalk.

• 0:08David Grinspoon?

  I'm David Grin spoon, astrobiologist. I go on Twitter as Dr. Funky Spoon. Now, some people have asked me, if your name is David Grin spoon, why are you on Twitter as Dr. Funky Spoon? And all I can say to that is like,

• 0:29David Grinspoon?

  understand? All right.

• 0:32David Grinspoon?

  Where were we? We're gonna do, uh, yeah, that's right. We're on StarTalk All-Stars.

• 0:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:38David Grinspoon?

  I'm David Grin spoon and I'm with my awesome co-host, Mr. Chuck Nice.

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man, how are you?

• 0:45David Grinspoon?

  Tell us what's going on, Chuck.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, we're doing some cosmic queries here. And first of all, thank you for, uh, thank you for the blues riff.

• 0:53David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, there's a lot more where that came from.

• 0:56Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's cool. Well, you know, we're talking about, uh, the virtual universe. And, uh, the man sitting next to me is pretty much responsible for the virtual universe itself.

• 1:08David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, we have, we're so happy, so lucky to have with us an old friend and a genius of science communication, Carter Emmert, who is the, get this, the Director of Astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History. How's it going, Carter? Thanks for joining us.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28Chuck Nice?

  So here's the cool thing about having Carter here is, uh, when I saw that we were gonna do a cosmic queries for astrovisualization, and you know, cosmic queries is where we take questions from all over the internet and whatever incarnation where we exist as StarTalk. And, um, our fans ask us things that they want to know. And, uh, I saw that that's what we were going to be talking about. And the first question I had was, what the hell is astrovisualization? Because I had never heard of it before. And of course, I had to go do some research. But, eh, Carter, this is fascinating stuff.

• 2:06David Grinspoon?

  Explain yourself, sir.

• 2:08Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Well, essentially, it's, it's a way using the modern technology and display and data visualization. Hooked into immersive theater, which the planetarium has always been, as a recreation of night sky, but now with video control, controlled by computers, essentially you're staring up into your entire visible field, a construction of the universe as best that we know of, in other words, to visualize essentially that information, to move through it and do that accurately, and also through simulations of astrophysics that talk about the behavior, or that simulate, try to simulate the behavior of the universe across time.

• 2:47Chuck Nice?

  From what I've seen that you have done, I mean, it kind of, would it be kind of weird or crazy to call it kind of like a Google Maps of the universe?

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Well, that's exactly what it is.

• 2:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay, good, no, so I'm not, I am not crazy.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  You may be crazy, but you got that one just right.

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know what, that's, you know what, that's probably more the case, David, is that I am still crazy, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. So, yeah, I mean, now here's one of the things, and we're gonna get into the questions, the cosmic queries, you know, as we, as we talk about it, but when you, the Google Maps of the universe, when I saw your, your TED Talk and I saw your awesome display of this, the, the thing that got me was, just like Google Maps, and you know, Google Maps, when they map an area, they send the Google Maps car, that we all know, is the big car with the dome on it, and it's got all the cameras, and it's taking a 360-degree view of everything that's happening

• 3:49Chuck Nice?

  all around, okay. So now, in your presentation, you take us outside of this, I'll call it, the spacetime containment, and you're showing the universe as contained in this bubble. So, now, how?

• 4:11Chuck Nice?

  One, how do you do that? Two, how accurate would that be? Or three, is that an extrapolation that is more theoretical?

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Well, the thing is, we can, we can plot distances. And so if we know distances, and we know where they are, sort of spherically around us, sort of, you know, like the old planetarium, that's a dome of stars over our head.

• 4:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  And that's, that's essentially what the sky looks like. But as long as we know distances to, you know, the solar system objects, uh, of course, they move, but then stars, which are also, everything's in motion, but moving slower, and then to galaxies even farther away, um, that really, the confluence of these technologies and computer speed, essentially, which has really enabled all of this, uh, from around the turn of, turn of the millennium, where all of this sort of came together.

• 4:59Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  We were a millennium project in rebuilding the venerable Hayden Planetarium, which opened in 1935, is that the accuracy is there, um, in some cases, in certain interactive shows, not so much our movies that we tend to, um, produce, um, is that we can show uncertainty. And there are ways in which you, that uncertainty shows itself, um, in so far as how we measure distances. And so we can talk about that accuracy. And, um, however, as you go farther and farther out, you're dominated more and more by this look back time, essentially. I mean, we, we see the sun eight minutes in the past.

• 5:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  And, um, but the farthest, you know, sort of utterance of the universe, so far this radiation that we can see, essentially, because it's behind everything. It permeates, it's moving through us right now.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  It's this microwave back.

• 5:50Chuck Nice?

  By the way, it feels really good. I'm just saying.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  I like it.

• 5:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  So.

• 5:53Chuck Nice?

  I'm digging on it right now.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Part of that whole vibration of the universe, which even, even on the low ebb, but, but, um, but.

• 6:00Chuck Nice?

  Soaking in it.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Exactly. We are soaking in it. And, uh, but, but the odd thing is, is we know the universe is larger than that visible bubble that we see, because what we're seeing is, uh, some people call it the world picture, as opposed to the world map. And the world picture is essentially, oh, I, I take a picture, I see the sun eight minutes in the past, and say Jupiter's beyond that. So I see Jupiter, maybe, you know, an hour in the past, or something like this. But that's, that's just the reality of light traveling at a fixed speed.

• 6:28David Grinspoon?

  But I love the fact that you, uh, represent the uncertainty, too, because science is not all just about.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  What we know and some of the best science communication also emphasizes what we don't know because that's what's cool when there's still a puzzle. So I love that you can include that. And another really cool thing about what Carter does is that his database is always changing when we learn something new.

• 6:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  The New Horizons mission to Pluto, Carter and I did a, actually, an interactive event, multi-location event while that was happening. And what is so cool is that as soon as we have the new pictures on the ground, I mean, that's our Google car out in the Cooper Belt now. As soon as you have the new pictures on the ground, Carter can put that in his database and now you go to his show and instead of just this fuzzy blob with the uncertainty of we have no idea, now it's these high-resolution pictures because he can insert that and improve his database as we learn more.

• 7:20Chuck Nice?

  So now, as images come in and what you just said, so your visualization and your whatever, you know, algorithms and, you know, the programs that you're using to make this happen, so they would have to be dynamic in order to receive all this new information and change along with everything that's happening?

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Uh, yes. So as, as, as pictures come in, the idea is to be able to plot them not only just to show the sort of updated map. So, for example, the, the team of New Horizons have now synthesized and put together a very nice sort of global map that you can put on the ball and look at it, study it, fantastic. One of the other aspects of the visualization that we were attempting to show and that David and other mission scientists during the event were actually there to comment on this. We did a global broadcast called Breakfast with Pluto.

• 8:15Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Which we capture, it's on YouTube if you want to look at it.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  I went to one of those on a Disney cruise.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 8:21Chuck Nice?

  Breakfast with Pluto.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  It's like the Jungle Rock.

• 8:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it was awesome. Yeah, it was awesome.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Probably similar, only really different. But, but, but, but the point was to actually show a kind of engineering visualization to, to actually show this very complicated set of tasks that the spacecraft had to do. And, because in that, we're showing the prowess of the ability by humans to actually think this up, plan this, and then carry this off. There was criticism of, during the time, during the actual encounter, that there was nothing to see because we didn't have recent images. And I would take the counterargument that we could actually show the exact planned Because we weren't sure whether it was actually happening or not because the spacecraft

• 9:04Speaker 03

  went completely into action mode and was not in connection, it was not in direct communication with the Earth.

• 9:11David Grinspoon?

  And even if it was, it takes four and a half hours to learn if the spacecraft's okay.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Right, right. So, we're looking at the planned sequence of observations and so there are different instruments and they can, they're depicted in different ways and in which that imaging campaign is going across Pluto. In the case of the highest resolution images, because there's a set field of view of the camera effectively, that you see more by putting the camera closer to the object and that's what was happening, we're streaming past Pluto and about 14 kilometers a second. So, it's like seven miles a second we're passing Pluto. So, very fast, it's smaller than our moon and so we got about a distance of one Earth, a diameter away from it.

• 9:52David Grinspoon?

  Okay.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  And so, we're in really close and you could see those pictures being laid down about once every second or coming in. And that's something to celebrate is this human ingenuity. Later, we get the pictures back. In fact, all the data coming back from that mission takes 16 months, so over a year of all this stuff coming back. We're still pictures coming in that we swap in.

• 10:13David Grinspoon?

  Right.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  But we can update the visualization so we can effectively ride along in the sort of simulation of this. I liken it to just a sort of updated and computerized version and rendering of what we had back in the Apollo program when we launched to the moon. The rocket would go out of sight of the cameras and then they would go to like artwork.

• 10:36David Grinspoon?

  Right.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Of showing like it's dropping a stage and it would say simulation. It was like, of course it is, you know, it's a drawing. In this case, we're seeing the computerized visualization of that prowess of having to calculate all that, which the team had to do and carry off. And they practiced it two times before we actually got to Pluto, which is amazing.

• 10:58David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, it was really cool and it probably is the best way to get a sense of what the encounter was really like in real time for the spacecraft and for the people involved. So, it's online as Carter mentioned, check it out, it's called Breakfast at Pluto and you can, you can look at it. Maybe we should go to some of our cosmic queries now and see what.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 11:15David Grinspoon?

  See what our listeners want to know about astro visualization.

• 11:19Chuck Nice?

  All right, all right. So this is from Sonia Swinnyah. It's kind of a cool name. Sonia Swinnyah. Sonia wrote into StarTalkRadio.net and said, "How do you feel about white hole theory in relation to gravitational waves, black holes, and dark matter?" I'm not sure how that relates to visualization, but is there a...

• 11:52Speaker 03

  There are a few things to say about that.

• 11:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay, good.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  I think the white hole theory, if I think back to...

• 12:00Chuck Nice?

  Not racist at all. Unlike the Oscars. We're not breaking this down this way, people. We're not going like that. This is all science, has nothing to do...

• 12:07Speaker 03

  So I started taking classes at the planetarium in the 1970s. I was like 11 years old. And I was saying the black holes, and then the white hole theory was that we saw quasars, and there are these very, very powerful sources. We now seem to understand that those are actually black holes if you pour some gas on them. So if you've got some gas, and you pour it on a black hole, it swirls around, creates this accretion disk. It's extremely bright. And that these supermassive black holes caused by sort of collisions or accretion of black holes tends to happen in the center of galaxies. Okay, fine. So we saw these quasars, and we had this theory of black holes. We saw some X-rays in the constellation Cygnus, which is a summer

• 12:49Speaker 03

  constellation in the northern hemisphere. And so this idea was maybe because black holes bend space so much that maybe the stuff that goes into black holes comes out in a white hole. But I think that's been superseded as we've understood the processes of the astrophysics around black holes better. But... What I would, I would love to see this be the case, but insofar as just black holes are kind of a natural process of gravitational collapse. Okay. After it's been held up by essentially the nucleosynthetic chain of what a star does in its core, is that these black holes, degenerate mass, they, they come together

• 13:33Speaker 03

  and they, they, our notions of space and time break down in a black hole. And also, our understanding of the beginning of the universe is fuzzy, because where did this come from? We know that it started at a certain time, but we can't really understand the conditions from which they come. So if black holes, which are just a natural consequence of what we have in our universe. Right. Are the beginnings of new universes, and that, that, you know, if we were, you know, generated in some other, it's, it's very much like, you know, sort of Brahma waking up. It was very much like a Hindu scriptures, insofar as this repeated notion of.

• 14:08David Grinspoon?

  One of the universe, by the way.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:10David Grinspoon?

  I want one.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  So, so, anyway, a friend, late Arthur C. Clarke, liked to say about gamma ray bursts, which are another very high-energy events. Yeah. I visited him in 2002. He said, well. How the Hulk came into being. He asked me, what do you think of gamma ray bursts? And I said, well, I don't know, Arthur, what do you think? And he goes, I hope they're not industrial accidents.

• 14:31David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, he would say that. But by the, by the way, the actual question from, from the listener was, how do you feel about the theory?

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:39David Grinspoon?

  I, I feel pretty good about it. I mean, I don't know if it's, if it's correct, but, but, but I like it, but, but.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  It's also the question about dark matter.

• 14:45David Grinspoon?

  But to bring it back, just for a second, back to astrovisualization, I imagine a challenging part of what you do, there's one thing showing what things look like, what we could actually see with our eyes. Here's what Pluto would like, look like if you were flying past it. But then there's this whole other set of phenomena that we could never see with our eyes, that you can bring to light. And I think a black hole must be a good example of that. You can show ways to.

• 15:08David Grinspoon?

  To visualize things that we would never actually visualize with our senses.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  There are two really good examples of black hole visualization. One was done by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And, um, uh, it's Hamilton, um, your colleague, uh, or former colleague at the University of Colorado.

• 15:26David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Um, Alexander, is it, uh, anyway, Hamilton.

• 15:30David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Um.

• 15:31David Grinspoon?

  Dr. Hamilton.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Dr. Hamilton. And, um, they did a, he, he did sort of a sabbatical working with them on the visualization. It's very abstract. It's, it's very fantastical, but it was accurate. Um, and then also in Interstellar where they, they worked on the visualization of the effects as we can calculate that surround a black hole.

• 15:51David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, one of the times when Hollywood actually made an effort to show things the way it, it really is, as opposed to just making it look cool.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  And so.

• 15:57David Grinspoon?

  Now, there's anything wrong with that.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  So, well, and, and, but the, the effort to try to really calculate what one would see, uh, which is now we're capable of doing that because we have greater and greater computing capabilities at our fingertips, um, is, is, is a worthy effort because, you know, what these things look like are, are of great interest to everyone.

• 16:17Chuck Nice?

  And so when you're making these simulations, uh, and you're taking into account all the data that is there, is it something where you theorize mathematically along different tangents and then you create each one of those? Or is it you theorize a most likely case scenario and then you visualize that?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  When we do our show productions, which will focus on particular sort of fundamental aspects of astrophysics or the known universe, we had a show on cosmic collisions, we had another show about, uh, the, you know, what makes stars work. And then we have the show Dark Universes, which is about what we know about the universe. Is that our curators, part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, or Department of Astrophysics, they decide amongst their colleagues what the world's leading research is. We actually convene a scientific symposium at the beginning of any one of these show

• 17:21Speaker 03

  production process. And so that we identify who will be the consultants for the project, but also who are the data providers, the simulations, or the best simulations that around the table we discuss, who is likely to have that best simulation. In some cases, it's a simulation that will fit both that something is available, it's available in the right amount of time, or in some cases, we've actually sort of pushed what was being calculated, so that we would have a high-quality product to visualize.

• 17:57David Grinspoon?

  Carter, I'm sorry, we're gonna have to take a little break here. You are listening to StarTalk All-Stars, and we'll be back shortly.

• 18:09David Grinspoon?

  This is StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grin spoon, and we're here with Chuck Nice and Carter Emmert.

• 18:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 18:17David Grinspoon?

  Carter, the astro- visualization guru, if I can call you that, from the American Museum of Natural History. Carter was just telling us about all the brain power that goes into producing one of the Planetarium shows. You may go there and just think it looks neat and it's fun, but he was just telling us there's this big gathering of the nerds that they convene, where all the scientists get together and talk about the latest theories, and they decide what to show scientifically in all of their shows.

• 18:41Chuck Nice?

  The cool thing is, for those of you who don't have the benefit of watching us on video, and you're just listening to the podcast, the cool thing about Carter is that he's producing these shows that visualize the universe, but he looks like he should be producing a show that visualizes the Grateful Dead. So you know it's good. You know it's good.

• 19:04David Grinspoon?

  I was thinking more Burning Man.

• 19:06Chuck Nice?

  Burning Man, yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  We did take the visualization out, the Burning Man.

• 19:11Chuck Nice?

  Oh, did you?

• 19:12David Grinspoon?

  He looks like he just stepped off the playa and into the universe.

• 19:15Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  We're all doing that.

• 19:17David Grinspoon?

  That's right.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  We're all in the universe.

• 19:19David Grinspoon?

  That's right.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  People remember that.

• 19:21David Grinspoon?

  Well, let's burn right along here and get back to cosmic queries. And Chuck, why don't you give us another question?

• 19:28Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 19:30Chuck Nice?

  How about this, let's go to a Patreon patron uh question. And this is from Dylan Hallahan, who uh supports us on Patreon, which you can do as well. And uh by doing so, you will be allowed to have priority given to your particular inquiries. So just keep that in mind. Uh Dylan would like to know this. Are there any ways we can create a virtual singularity where we can represent the beginning? Dylan is coming to us from Washington Township in New Jersey. So would we be able, is there enough information about? You know, uh and of course, the background radiation is always there and it's always happening.

• 20:09Chuck Nice?

  But eh the event itself, the singularity itself, could we, do we have enough information? To recreate a visual representation of that singularity?

• 20:20Speaker 03

  To some degree, I would, I would say a little bit after, you know, and the universe starts to expand.

• 20:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so we can't get the birth, but we could maybe get the slap on the ass. The baby slap on the ass we could get, but we couldn't get the actual, you know?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Pretty much, you get that first cry out.

• 20:37Chuck Nice?

  The first cry, but not the actual, you know, it's crowning like that, that.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I.

• 20:45Chuck Nice?

  I am totally freaking Carter out with my description of the birth of the universe.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Well, we, we don't know.

• 20:53Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Why, we don't know, we, we can sort of describe what.

• 20:58Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 20:59Speaker 03

  And back to a certain point, but uh so that, that, that very beginning. Uh is, is something that, that we extrapolate our physics. To the point of the, the greatest pressure and temperatures that, and then we test this in the largest, you know, atom smashers in the world. You know, like at CERN and, and so forth, uh to really kind of look at what those conditions are.

• 21:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Um but.

• 21:23David Grinspoon?

  Quite a bit of mystery when you try to go all the, all the way back.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 21:26David Grinspoon?

  First tiny fraction of a second.

• 21:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:29David Grinspoon?

  Very hard to get information, and so we're left with theory and. Dearests, of course, like to argue with one another.

• 21:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  And then, and then.

• 21:37Chuck Nice?

  It's fun.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then looking at how the universe expands and that we can track that to some degree.

• 21:45Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  And, and that's a visualization of that by Tom Oble and his visualizer Ralph Kahler is, is in Dark Universe. If you come see that, so.

• 21:54Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  The evolution of essentially structure over time. The universe is expanding, but locally it's contracting because of gravity until you end up with this giant sort of web. This cosmic web, which we actually observe. You can, even in a small telescope, you can go out. I grew up in New Jersey and you, you could look up and the constellation Virgo, that's why it's called the Virgo Cluster. And you see, you see galaxies even in a small telescope. So you're, you're looking at a, a local area of downtown, which we are not. And in the same way that we're sort of in the suburbs of the galaxy is probably a good thing. It's a good place to raise the kids about halfway up.

• 22:29Chuck Nice?

  Why we're so uptight here on earth? Cause we're living in the suburb of the galaxy.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Well, it's a little more stable than the raucous ride in the middle of it.

• 22:36David Grinspoon?

  Maybe someday when we grow up, we can go downtown.

• 22:39Chuck Nice?

  Downtown, right.

• 22:41David Grinspoon?

  The center of the galaxy.

• 22:42Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 22:43David Grinspoon?

  The really good radiation.

• 22:44Chuck Nice?

  But not by yourself and not unaccompanied, young man. And I mean that. Super cool. Well, yeah, that's a great, great answer, man. That is great answer. Let us take another question. Um, and I like this one from Jonathan Galant from Facebook. Uh, and he comes to us from Edmonton, uh, up in the Great White Way. So, uh, this is what he says. How far away from a Star Trek like stellar cartography, uh, room, or better known as a holodeck? Thank you, uh, Jonathan for getting so technical. Uh, are we to creating something like that? So, you know, in other words.

• 23:25David Grinspoon?

  We've done it.

• 23:26Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 23:27David Grinspoon?

  Oh, that's a great question. And, uh, it's in fact, um, I've.

• 23:31Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 23:32David Grinspoon?

  One of the, one of the great things about being Carter's friend, in addition to his colleague, is that sometimes, uh, he'll, he'll, uh, take some of us, uh, after hours into, and he basically calls it his spaceship. And he's even called it his holodeck.

• 23:45Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 23:45David Grinspoon?

  And it's, it is, that is what you have. You have a holodeck.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  It's like, I kinda like to make a joke as if you can, if you have a holodeck, then you don't need the starship.

• 23:53Chuck Nice?

  Well, they have.

• 23:54David Grinspoon?

  The fine line.

• 23:55Chuck Nice?

  That's so true, yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  But, um, in a, in a way, uh, that's really true. And that's, that's what. That's what the job is about. So you So now what constitutes a holodeck? Well, it's Just for the uninitiated. It's to give you

• 24:07David Grinspoon?

  It's a Star Trek reference for the really uninitiated. Which is, which is the room that can go in and basically simulate any sensory experience.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. And so I'd say, okay.

• 24:19David Grinspoon?

  And Carter's almost there.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  We're almost there. Visually, it's an immersion in, in the, in the data, in the, in the map, essentially. So if you look at the traditional planetary, it's stars on the ceiling, you can point out the Big Dipper and Orion and the motion of this, sort of the diurnal motion in the sky. The stars rise and set, carries the sun along with it, the moon and, you know, the phases of the moon and the planets and all that. And that's our view from, from the earth. It's amazing that the ancients were able to sort of figure out at all that we go around the sun because the sun obviously goes around us every day, you know, and, and that the planets go around and that we live in this, this broader geography called the galaxy and then the galaxy is just one of many.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Okay, so we, we sort of have all that information. So plotting it accurately and moving out into the data and moving through it is that you see it three dimensionally. So you feel as though you're in the presence of, you are, you're in the presence of that data. And that's what we do. So the dome is the immersive theater that surrounds us. And then we can move out, we can move away from the earth. We can fly over the surface of planets that we have information for. Mars, we have tremendous information for. Moon, Mercury, certainly our own planet. And Mars is something that's very interesting because we have this tremendous campaign in support of eventually humans going there and so forth. But that, we have a six terabyte data set

• 25:48Speaker 03

  that you can fly over. It's a big laptop right there. Of Mars. It's essentially, it's about three quarters of Mars down to the size of a two car garage, six meters. Wow. And we can fly for hours over just one section of the canyon. And you get lost and you can also go to boring parts of Mars, you know, more flat. But the thing is is that-

• 26:07David Grinspoon?

  The boring part of Mars.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Well, there are-

• 26:11David Grinspoon?

  You'd be surprised, a lot of it's just flat and featureless.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Coming back to the holodeck is just this notion that, you know, we have a tremendous, tremendous mountain of data that's on the ground. It's in NASA's Planetary Data Service, the PDS. And it's a matter of taking that information, contextualizing it. I've had an army of high school students who have taken basically the stereo images from the micro imager, it's on the arm, of the solar powered rovers, the Spirit and Opportunity. And Opportunity's still going. We're not messing with the Curiosity rover data yet because it tends to be under scientific embargo. But you're able to take the dual images and use data or use software from NASA to synthesize

• 27:00Speaker 03

  that into accurate 3D models. And so, and then we have to contextualize where they are. But in that sense, we're essentially looking so close, only like three centimeters, so just over an inch, these tiny little targets on Mars, you can see all this incredible detail on a rock, on a planet that no one's been to.

• 27:19David Grinspoon?

  Right.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  This is, this is what NASA does, is it reaches out there and other, and the European Space Agency, the space agencies of the world, we're going to these other places and we're bringing this back. It's our job and obligation to put that into a context that everyone can see.

• 27:36David Grinspoon?

  Now, let me tell you, I just said- That, what you just described really is like being there in a much more fundamental way than a planetarium show used to be.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 27:45David Grinspoon?

  That leads me to want to ask you a question that's slightly more philosophical, which is, I mean, you and I both are children of Apollo and we grew up dreaming about space and going into space and 2001, A Space Odyssey, and that was going to be the future in our life. And neither one of us has gotten to go into space yet. We're getting a little bit older. Who knows what's going to happen? Join me after the show, fellas, and I have a little something for you. Excellent. Look forward to that. But- But I guess what I want to know is, on the other hand, you've gotten more and more into this visualization and this ability to go there in this way that is not quite being there bodily, but it's more being there than just looking at pictures.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:25David Grinspoon?

  And I've heard you say things like, "Well, we don't need a spacecraft because we've got a holodeck," and you're kind of joking, but I also get the sense that there's a way in which maybe you feel that this is a valid way for human beings to experience space and that we can send our unmanned spacecraft there, our, sorry, our unhumored, our robotic spacecraft, our unpiloted spacecraft, they're not just unmanned, they're unwommed too, so let's say unpiloted. But we can send our spacecraft there and they gather the data, really good data, and then we visualize it, and it's as if we're going there, but we don't need to send our frail human bodies there. So do you feel like that is, in a way, the space exploration of the future?

• 29:03Speaker 03

  To some degree, yes, especially when you get beyond the solar system. Because as New Horizons, you and I were at the launch in 2006, and then we were together again, but virtually, sort of on this virtual networking, but then with the simulation of seeing exactly what was happening. And that, you know, it's amazing that we got a spacecraft out there in 10 years. But when you leave interstellar-wise and you look, and if you want to explore in that sense, it's going to be a long time before perhaps we're able to ever do that. And so this information, once again, that's on the ground, that just needs to be put

• 29:47Speaker 03

  into a system like this to be visualized, is a valid way of exploring at many different scales. And to see the beautiful images, say, of, you know, like the plethora of images from

• 30:01Speaker 03

  From now 25 years of the Hubble Space Telescope, that sort of thing is, is that we can see this amazing work, but we see it contextually and how that fits into the rest of the bigger picture.

• 30:11David Grinspoon?

  Has it changed how you feel about wanting to go to Mars? Is it enough?

• 30:14Speaker 03

  It has.

• 30:14David Grinspoon?

  Is it enough for you?

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Now you don't have to go, is that what you're saying? Well, the thing is that... You want to go more or you want to go less? I have to, I have to look at this in my own lifetime. It's just that, um, yes, it was eight years old when we walked on the moon. I could extrapolate and say, well, when we're, we have a Mars mission, maybe I could, I could be there. Um, but I'm not going to go to Mars. But the thing is, is that my job means that we really have to take that amazing amount of information that we have, these incredible vistas that we can see of these other planets, and put that together for everyone to appreciate and see. Because not everybody is going to go to Mars. Some people probably will. I think we're helping to train these, these young minds to sort of desire that perhaps. They see it, they want to go. I totally understand that.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  But, um, this, this valid experience of, it's closer to the science and how science has to explore and has to look at these analogs and, and, and things like this, but pick out these details, um, this fine sifting. We can, we can sort of cut through all of that and present that directly to the, the public and make them amazed at, at, at, at this tremendous amount that we have gathered and we have here that just is not being contextualized properly yet.

• 31:28Chuck Nice?

  So give me a percentage delta between the actual experience and experiencing virtually the, the, uh, going to Mars. Like, as this technology gets, as this technology grows, I'm so sorry, as it grows, the closer we get to being able to send somebody to Mars, how much closer will that be to just experiencing a hero on Earth?

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Well, the thing is-

• 31:53David Grinspoon?

  We only have about 30 seconds for you.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Obviously, we walked on the moon and synthesizing what we can to the moon, which is something we're looking at doing, is not the same as being there, of course. But it's also one that allows us to pause and reflect and really think about these various things rather than being on this time scale, time schedule like the Apollo astronauts were, "Go here, come back."

• 32:16David Grinspoon?

  And a lot more people can do it and they don't fry their gonads with space radiation, so there's that to be said.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Radiation is a big, big issue.

• 32:22David Grinspoon?

  On that point, we're gonna take a little break here. You're listening to StarTalk All-Stars and we'll be back shortly.

• 32:38David Grinspoon?

  Hello, this is StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grin spoon, sometimes known on Twitter as Dr. Funky Spoon, and I'm here with Chuck Nice-

• 32:49Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man.

• 32:49David Grinspoon?

  On Twitter as Chuck Nice Comic-

• 32:51Chuck Nice?

  That is correct.

• 32:52David Grinspoon?

  And our very special guest, Carter Emmert, on Twitter as ExploreTheUniverse.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  No, Tour of the Universe.

• 32:59David Grinspoon?

  Tour. Tour of the Universe. And by the way, you may wonder what a self-respecting StarTalk host is doing with this piece of technology. I not only play with scientific instruments, sometimes I play with musical instruments, and actually, I've got a little song that Chuck Nice wrote for me.

• 33:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 33:25David Grinspoon?

  Astrobiology Blues.

• 33:26Chuck Nice?

  I saw that you, you know, you play with the House Band of the Universe and other different groups, and I was like, "Hey, wouldn't it be kinda cool if you did a little something called the Astrobiologist Blues?" And I really appreciate you indulging me by taking my stupid little words and putting some music to it.

• 33:45David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna give that a try. I mean, you know, to me, science, music, it's all waves, right? Interacting with the different forms of radiation in the universe. And so, yeah, I play in this, this group called the House Band of the Universe. Check us out online. We play in Planetarium sometimes, it's a lot of fun. But, but right now, let's- Let's get back to, uh, enough about sound, let's get back to vision. We're talking about astro-visualization here with our guest Carter Emmert, and we're doing cosmic queries. So Chuck, what other questions do we have from listeners about astro-visualization?

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, let's get back to the cosmic queries and, uh, Lenny Waxdeck from Twitter, at Lenny B. Guad, oh, that's weird, Lenny. Uh, Lenny wants to know this, will virtual reality help people truly connect with the cosmos? Do you see a greater connection when you watch people in this immersive effect?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Good question. Um, yes, and that is that, you know, we walk down the street, we don't really encounter aspects of the universe that are there, right? I like to say that people have sort of a Bugs Bunny view of the universe, it's sort of like all that stuff that's up there, and they know Saturn's up there, it's got the ring, you know, and, you know, but it's all sort of a jumble. They've seen pictures in their, in their schoolbooks and stuff like that, but, but to the extent that you can put it together and you have the authenticity of a place like the American Museum of Natural History behind it, just as dinosaur bones are properly referenced to the latest, you know, knowledge, we updated our dinosaurs when we found out they were hot-blooded, and I can pull up the tail of the T-Rex and redo the exhibit, is that, that,

• 35:30Speaker 03

  that layout of the universe and the behavior of the universe that we're showing you is up to date, the latest knowledge, and so that you, hopefully, we're relating it to you in such a way that, you know, it pervades the importance of it. And it's, it's just, we see the sun come up every day and go down, farmers know it has a lot to do with growing their crops and so forth, and at night, it's, we can't see anything because it's dark, and we see the stars and the moon before we had cities, and, um, so that we understand we're sort of in this relationship. But to show you that, and also to bridge from, like, the astronauts who went to the moon, we could see the earth rising above the lunar landscape essentially,

• 36:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  That the moon went from being a celestial object to being landscape, where the earth was suddenly a celestial object, is that we can emphasize that and we can amplify that insofar as our visual journey taking you out. It's authentic, it's backed up by the data. And so it's as close to real as we can depict it.

• 36:33David Grinspoon?

  That's so cool, Carter. What you do for a living is really amazing. In some ways, what you show us is realer than real. We can see the universe better than we can see with our own senses, which is kinda crazy. We could talk to you all day. It's so interesting. Unfortunately, we're basically out of time here. What? Yeah, I know.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  I would like to invite you to come-

• 36:50David Grinspoon?

  I'm fly when you're flying through the universe.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Play with the Mars Band. We've sort of put together a group of musicians to actually fly over Mars as we do this, because we have so much information.

• 37:01David Grinspoon?

  We're gonna do it.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'll have to come.

• 37:03David Grinspoon?

  I'm there. Alright. On that note, thank you so much for listening. This has been StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grin spoon with Chuck Nice and our guest Carter Emmer. Until next time, thank you.