StarTalk Live! from Future Con: Engineering the Future (Part 1)

How will we engineer our way off this planet and into the future? Commander Chris Hadfield and co-host Scott Adsit explore the options with biorobotics engineer Katherine Pratt, mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudu, Maeve Higgins, and, via holographic projection, Stephen Hawking. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/startalk-live-from-future-con-engineering-the-future-part-1/

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.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Hello, AwesomeCon!

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Welcome to StarTalk Live. My name is Scott Adsit. I will be your co-host this evening. And, um, as you heard from the gentleman from the Smithsonian, uh, it's a science show. We're gonna talk about science, and you're gonna get educated, and you might learn something before it's done. So, um, I want to tell you about our special guest host tonight. Neil is not here because he's out demoting planets and, uh, punching climate deniers in the cerebellum.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Uh, but we do have somebody, as you know, who's a very cool guy. And, uh, you know, he was floating up in his tin can singing to us. Uh, that's pretty incredible. He's done a lot of other things, too. Uh, one of the things, I will tell you, is he broke into the Mir space station. Seriously, breaking and entering with a Swiss Army knife. In space!

• 1:33Speaker 01

  I mean, if, if the Swiss Army knew that they could have taken over the Russian space program, they would have done it a long time ago. He's a great guy, a very interesting and wonderful man, and I'm gonna bring him out right now. Uh, this is Colonel Commander...

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Chris Hadfield.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Thanks Scott.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Good to see you.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Nice to see you also. I don't hear any sound. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Alright, we're getting sound. Thank you Scott. Thank you very much. So this, I think everybody here knows, this gentleman next to me has been on 30 Rock extensively.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  And Baymax on Big Hero 6, right? I am Baymax, yes. And Baymax, and, um, and he's Mr. Everything on Adult Swim. If you stay up late at night on Adult Swim. He's a producer, he's a director, he's an actor, he's a voice actor, he's a writer. Everything on Adult Swim. It is a pleasure to be on stage with Mr. Scott Adsit. Thank you. Thank you sir. Where are you sitting sir?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Uh, we have some interesting folks to be on stage here this evening. Some, uh, some folks to talk different ideas, including one virtual guest that we'll bring up later. But first, I would like to introduce a woman who has dedicated her life to protecting your brain from malicious interference. Uh, she is an electrical engineer, she competes in triathlons, and she's a recovering rocket scientist. Katherine Pratt is here this evening. And, uh, we have a gentleman joining us as well, uh, an engineer.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  He is a man who has done the math, he has measured the weight of Thor's hammer. And I believe rumor has it that at one point, he out-nerded Neil deGrasse Tyson. Which is also saying something. He's a professor of mechanical engineering.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  And maybe more importantly, here for FutureCon and AsimCon, he's a superhero science expert, Dr. Savin Masadew.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Welcome to the stage, sir.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Thank you, sir.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Also tonight, on the non-scientist's side, we have a very special guest. If you've heard StarTalk before, you've obviously heard her before. She's an author, a comedian, and she hosts the podcast Maeve in America. Maeve Higgins.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  Thank you. Hi, everybody. Hi. I'm so jealous of all these achievements on stage. I was so happy I didn't get my white top dirty when I had dinner.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  But we are here to talk about

• 4:42Speaker 02

  engineering the future. I thought I would start a little bit in the past. It's been 500 years since the very first person made it once around the world. One time, they launched out of southern Spain, Magellan and his crew, when they didn't know what they were doing. It was the wild application of engineering the future 500 years ago. They took the best technology they had, the best maps they had, five ships, 243 people, and it took three years to go around the world once. And almost nobody made it. Out of the original 240-odd folks and five ships,

• 5:25Speaker 02

  only one made it around the world. The rest of them were killed or destroyed on the way. And only about 15 people out of the original 240 made it around. But that is what early exploration was like. But we've learned. Our technology's gotten better. Our science, our understanding, our engineering has gotten better. And right now, up above our heads, there are five people that are going around the world every 92 minutes. And they're led by Dr. Peggy Whitson, who's from a farm up in Iowa.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  And that space station has been up there since the late 90s. First piece launched in 98. It's been around the world 100,000 times. And we run about 200 experiments onboard. But the space station is just sort of the next stage. From Magellan, through all the people that got us to where we are. Spaceflight is younger than I am. And now we're to the point where we're starting to colonize off our planet. It's like another door opening to the future. But just like Magellan and his crew, we're just figuring it out as we go. We don't have all the answers.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  And what will the future hold? In order for us to be able to explore further? We need, just like all the explorers have, we need better vehicles. We need better propulsion systems. We need smarter understanding of the universe around us. We need all those things. And as Scott was saying here, we have a couple people on stage that can help us talk about better human interfaces and how to survive long voyages. And so that's why we have Savin and Catherine here, is to talk about those things. But I thought maybe just to get going, let's start with Savin.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  What do you do? You work in a laboratory, right?

• 7:36Speaker 03

  I'm a professor at UC Riverside. My students work in the laboratory, telling them to do what I tell them to do.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  You have students work for you in the laboratory?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  I have students work for me in the laboratory.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Nice. What sort of work are your students doing in the laboratory?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  So I summarize my lab's research with a quote from the Ghostbusters, the external plumbing Ghostbusters, not the more recent internal plumbing Ghostbusters. Ray, so Venkman tells Ray at one point, "Forget that I know anything about metallurgy, physics, or engineering, and just tell me what the hell is going on." And that's what I do. I study the intersection of physics, engineering, and metallurgy to develop novel metallic materials for a variety of...

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Applications.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  And what sort of applications are you developing the equipment for? What sort of stuff are your students working on? Where is it headed?

• 8:29Speaker 03

  So, one of the more recent things we've been working on is ultra-lightweight metals. Magnesium, aluminum, and certain kinds of steels that can be used in the transportation sector and increase our fuel economy tremendously, yet have the same strength and protection as steel and other more expensive, heavier metals that are used in transportation.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  So Catherine, you have worked on rocket ships?

• 8:52Speaker 05

  I have, yes.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  And you've worked on robots?

• 8:56Speaker 05

  Yes, I have worked on many things.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  So, tell us about some of those things you've been working on or you're working on now.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  Sure. So, one of the things you may be familiar with, I work in the bi robotics lab, and we have three investigators, so we look at various things, and one of the things we have is a surgical robot. And how many of you have seen the movie Ender's Game? A couple? Okay. So, there's a scene in the movie after Ender beats the kid up and they have to do the surgery, and there's the kid's head and they've got the arms coming down and moving around. That is our robot. That is the Raven II. That is a surgical, experimental platform. It is not actually approved for human usage, so the kid had his little e-stop button underneath the drop cloth. And it was two graduate students who were back there moving their arms around. So, it is, I love saying this, they put silver tape on it because everything in the

• 9:47Speaker 05

  future is silver, and then they put blue lights on it because everything in the future glows blue. And that's why it looks the way it does in the movie. But that's a great example of something that's futuristic, something that Hollywood needed to show a futuristic thing that already exists. So, we use this in the lab to investigate different techniques for taking out tumors, what happens if someone interrupts the surgery, and other various awesome experiments. So, yeah.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  So, that's a great application of technology. In your robot, how many arms and hands does it have?

• 10:19Speaker 05

  It has two, and then it has two little pinchers or various other attachments. Is your robot single? Sorry? No, it's fine.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  I was just wondering if the robot was single. I mean, I hear about all these, like, robots being built for, like, all these important things, but I'm like, what about a robot boyfriend? There's so many singles.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  So, it is Raven 2.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  They do. They're just different kinds of robots.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  I don't mean that. For the record...

• 10:42Speaker 05

  There are other Ravens, so it is possible that there is some interlab. We haven't seen any reproducing Ravens yet. You do still have to make them and ship them from our manufacturer overseas. There was a spin-off company that now sells them. So if anyone wants to buy a surgical robot that they can practice on at home, Applied Dexterity is where you want to go.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Why do you call it Raven?

• 11:03Speaker 05

  Uh, that is a fantastic question that I should know the answer to.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Is it an acronym?

• 11:07Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Because he loves Raven?

• 11:09Speaker 05

  I'm really sorry, Howard and Blake, I should know the answer to this.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Robotic aid for very exquisite...

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Energetic.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Raven, and Raven 2. And now, so it's reaching inside a person. How does it know where its fingertips are?

• 11:28Speaker 05

  So, that's one of the things we're working on. So, they're, one of the students who just graduated, she was working on path planning. So if you have surgery you want to do up in the nose, you obviously want to be very careful where you're putting your implements. And so, using scans of the head, you can actually plan a path and have the robot know where it's going, and so you do the least amount of tissue damage.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  But, so that's where you know where you're going, but how do you know where you are?

• 11:54Speaker 05

  Uh, cable length. So it's run by cables, and so you measure all of the cables and where things are in their state. So one of the things they have to look at is cable tension. And as cables slack out, how does that affect how you're doing your surgeries?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  It could probably be used for things besides surgery, right?

• 12:11Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Golf? Yeah, yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  See, it's a doctor, isn't it?

• 12:17Speaker 05

  There you go. I mean, I, people have, not with this one, but people have sewn together grapes inside of a bottle. If you happen to have a grape stuck in a bottle that needs to get sewn back together.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  That's a fairly esoteric...

• 12:31Speaker 05

  There you go, exactly.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  You see a different future than the rest of us.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  But can it be used in an application somewhere at a distance? Like, does the surgeon have to see what they're doing?

• 12:43Speaker 05

  So the surgeon does see. There's a 3D camera set that you can use so that someone sitting far away can use the device. We have had collaborators from as far away as Illinois who have the software, because it's open source, run the machine in Seattle. There was a grant to figure out, working with Raven 2 on the International Space Station, so trying to understand being able to use it in remote locations for space.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  And then you end up with time lag.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  You do end up with time lag, yes.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Do you have any time lag problems when you're doing surgery testing?

• 13:13Speaker 05

  So, that's something that we've actually tested. We, several researchers implemented a scheme of hacking the robots. So what happens if you flood the packets, disrupt the packets? Basically make the surgeon's life very difficult and make it very jaggedy. And then they analyzed at what point was the most bothersome for the surgeon in a task of picking up a peg and moving it over into a space. And so they're looking at those challenges of what happens when you don't get immediate feedback.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  And, because that's the sort of technology we're going to need. If we have a very small group of humans in a remote place, we can't bring every single skill set along.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  And so that type of remote skill, remote dexterity is really important. We have, of course, robots up on the space station.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Right now. We have the huge one on the outside, the Canid Arm 2. Canid Arm 2.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  And it is largely operated by people on the ground, in fact. But it's end effect, it's huge. It's the size of a sequoia. And it can grab the whole space shuttle, something that size, quarter of a million pounds, and move it around, and very precisely.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Do they ever do pranks from Earth? Like, they're like, "I'm gonna getcha."

• 14:33Speaker 02

  This is why you don't work in mission control.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  But I have the math. I don't.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, so we have the huge robot arm and we use it like when when one of the unmanned ship comes up and gets close, reach out. It's an interesting problem. How do you dock or grab a spaceship? How do you attach a visiting spaceship? In all of the the science fiction scenarios, in in all of the comic books on Star Trek, everything's in Star Trek is real.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  I promised I wouldn't mention Star Trek.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  You triggered it.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  There's always some sort of common mechanism by which the two ships can dock or or berth or something. But on the space stations where we're sort of inventing that right now. And the way we do it with those ships is they come up close, as close as we can safely bring them from Earth, and then essentially we shut it off. And then the crew onboard the space station, looking through the windows or on TV monitors, grabs the controls, they rotate it with one hand and move it up and down and back and forth with the other, and they reach out and before this little spaceship drifts off, they reach out and grab it and then attach it to the ship. But we're gonna need a lot more than that.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Like a magnet.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  What?

• 16:00Speaker 04

  You should tell them like maybe use a magnet.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Magnets? We should have thought of magnets.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Sometimes it's just the voice of a child.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  But a magnet might erase all the reel-to-reel tapes inside the spaceship. Like a like a virtual fishing rod where you can...

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I hope you're writing this down, Chris.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  I'm making a mental note, yes.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  But, so I went from Magellan originally, through to Star Trek, through to the space station, um, to what Catherine's working on, but in order to go to the moon, not just to visit, but to start colonizing the moon, and to go to Mars, we're gonna need even more robots. And they're gonna need to be made of a whole bunch of different materials. What, uh, what do you foresee is where we're headed with all that?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if we go to your example of Magellan and the explorers, wherever they got, they had to have the materials that they took with them, and some tools, but then they had to use the resources of wherever they got. So I think it's unrealistic for us to think that we're gonna take all the robots that we need into space to get off the blue dot onto Mars. Uh, one interesting thing that I saw this week, from a Canadian university, was a 3D printer printing another 3D printer. And, uh, yeah, I know, it's inception. It's like, it's an inception, like, which is the real 3D printer?

• 17:32Speaker 04

  And was it like, "Mama!"

• 17:34Speaker 03

  It was.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Universal across all languages, including...

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Um, and so, so I envisioned the same thing. We'll have some robots, perhaps, trained to make other robots on, on our mission to get there, for whatever purpose they need. But then, once we get to Mars, we have to use whatever resources we find in the ground.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  But on Mars, isn't there just like, gas and redness? Like, what is up there?

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Red gas isn't a thing, actually.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  I thought you said rednecks, and I was gonna say Arkansas. But, you got the wrong place. That doesn't deserve to be explored. But, anyways.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  What are you gonna find on, on Mars that you could possibly use? Is there metal there?

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. So our whole universe is made up of some simple few elements on the periodic table. Uh, we're talking about mining off of asteroids to get critical things that we have a hard time getting here on Earth. So when you look at things like iron and nickel and silica, and some of the fundamental building blocks of what we have, we just have to learn to take those resources and convert them into the materials that are necessary for us to, to stay there. Now, like any explorer, we have to use the terrain of what we have, without ruining it.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  To live wherever we're gonna go. And so, I think we'll be building our robots out of that first, but then we'll be building our societies out of the resources that we find off the planet.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  And what materials either that you're working on or dreaming of? What are we missing? What do we need? What's transparent aluminum? What's the next thing that we need?

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Transparent aluminum is real.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  A colleague of mine created something called aluminum oxy nitride, which is aluminum with a little bit of oxygen and a little bit of nitrogen, and it becomes transparent. It was originally designed as a transparent armor material for vehicles. It was used in the most recent Jurassic Park, those big indestructible glass things. Those were transparent Alon bubbles that got smashed by a T-Rex.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  So what we're gonna need is very much tied to a prior job that I had. I worked in soldier protection for Department of Defense. So things that can survive extreme environments. We have extreme temperature shifts. We have extreme pressures. We have extreme impacts. Micrometeoroids can move at 20,000 miles per hour. And those can do a little bit of damage when they run into things.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  It's interesting being on the spaceship. If you sit and wait for a while, especially just when you're trying to go to sleep, you can hear those particles hit your ship. It's like a ricochet. It's kind of an interesting sound to hear when you're onboard a spaceship.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Do the sound and bang like that. Something like that? That was like?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yep. It's, it's, it sounds like, like a sudden, like a bullet has just bounced off the ship.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  What if, what if the sound was just like?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  But is it like when you're busy working during the day, you don't really notice and then when you're trying to go to sleep? It's when you hear it.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  That's the only time you're really quiet, yeah. And the quietest place on the whole ship. We have a little tiny sleep berth. Back in the early part of the space program, you just kind of slept rough. When I was on my first two space flights, you just got your sleeping bag and just tied it somewhere and slept there. But the space station, we're there for years and years sequentially. And so we have little tiny sleep berths. And they're the quietest place. You close the little doors, you turn off the fan, it gets a little bit quieter in there. And that's when you hear the meteorites hitting your ship.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  Oh my god, that's so terrifying to me. And that's when you hear the meteorites hitting the ship. It's like, oh my god.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  All right. So that is the first segment. Talking about where we are now and where science has brought us and some of the things we're facing. When we come back, we are going to talk about exploring Mars, looking for life. But we're going to talk about the people that are going to do it as well. When we come back, we will talk about the new NASA astronaut class.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  All right, welcome everybody back to Austin Con, to Future Con and to StarTalk Live. Here we are in StarTalk.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Maeve, Stavine, Catherine and Scott and I are on stage. I'm Chris Hadfield. And you're not only for real a professor and a researcher, but there's a lot of... Superhero materials that are out there. And I imagine the truth and the fiction are getting blended a little bit.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have over time. And one of the interesting things about these comic book writers is they use the science of the time they came up in. And it been in 1940s to the 1970s, it was the heyday of metals development for space, for defense. And so we ended up with Iron Man, we ended up with Captain America's shield, we ended up with adamantium claws. These fundamental metallurgical things that have carried over. Even though we have a whole breadth of materials beyond that. So I like studying how we can make a real cap shield, how can we make a real Wolverine's claws? And inspiring people by saying, how do we make the next generation of materials?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  And you said the age of metals was up until the 70s, then what?

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Well, we expanded into other materials, so polymers. So when polymers came around and composites came around, they started taking a large sector of what was typically made out of metals. Look at any car bumper that you have these days. And like, Dad's Barracuda, it was a steel bumper, and now they're all wimpy plastic. Did you see the Polymer Man film? It was terrible. Was there a Polymer Man film? Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Well, you know Wonder Woman's wristbands, do you know what they're made out of?

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Uh, brass.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  They're just like fashion, they're just like a fashion accessory.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Hey, Saviin, just tip the mic away from your mouth.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  So one of the interesting things, one of the interesting things about DC versus Marvel is DC's rooted in mythos and mythology.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Versus Marvel, which is more rooted in science. So they had, it was a mystical element that was used in her bracelets. But there's been plenty of calculations, if it was strength, if it was steel.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Here, Saviin, just talk into mine.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. So, so we can't do this? Obviously it's working. This is America, we can do whatever we want. Can you just stay there the whole evening?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  So, thank you. Recently onboard the space station, speaking of polymer, they have a non-metal part of the whole spaceship, right?

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, the beam. So the beam module, the Bigelow Exploratory Atmospheric Module, is basically a collapsible lightweight module that can go out in space and then inflate from the inside and be used as a living habitat if we were to get on somewhere like Mars.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  And how does that, I mean...

• 25:33Speaker 04

  So it's like going camping, kind of? It's like you bring a little tent and then you put it up?

• 25:37Speaker 03

  It's exactly like going camping, except you could die.

• 25:42Speaker 04

  Why? Are there bears on Mars, too?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  There's John Carter, who's worse.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  Is that like an inside science show?

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Yes. They thought it was funny, right?

• 25:54Speaker 04

  I know. I love this audience. I really love this audience. I never thought that somebody being like, "Who reads the Smithsonian magazine?" Would get like huge cheers from thousands of people. So cool.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Yes, there are terrible, terrible creatures on Mars called humans.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  No, yeah, so it is like camping in that you have to protect yourself from whatever's outside.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  So, one of the biggest things that we gotta protect against is radiation. The same cosmic radiation that made the Fantastic Four a terrible movie.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  Shade.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  This interstellar radiation does a lot of damage. It can swell materials, it can cause them to embrittle. So we have to have layers of metals and polymers that are very thin that absorb the defects that are caused by radiation. On top of the kind of things that absorb the impact of the micrometeorites, on top of being able to survive temperature shifts from minus 300 to plus 300 degrees Celsius. You understand what that...

• 27:05Speaker 02

  I do. But speaking of interstellar radiation, who's your favorite superhero?

• 27:12Speaker 03

  You want me to say Wolverine?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  My favorite superhero right now is Black Panther, and it's been for a while.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  So I'm...

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Did you see the trailer?

• 27:23Speaker 03

  I have, and I'm really excited. It got my blood going and my blood pressure up. The...

• 27:30Speaker 04

  That's what you want in a relaxing movie.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. It's gonna be a very tranquil movie, very Anne of Green Gables.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And do you have a favorite robot?

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Wally.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Wally?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  So... I wanna get back real quick to why Black Panther's my favorite, because I think it's important.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, alright, alright.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Real quick. So Black Panther was one of the first depictions of a character, a minority character, that wasn't stereotyped. He was a king, he was a technologist, he was a ruler of a country, and he protected that country fairly while dealing with the rest of the world. He sits on top of the most advanced metal that is in everything in the Marvel Universe: shields, claws. He's just a very versatile, non-typical maverick character for Marvel.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Non-typical superhero.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm done. Off my soapbox.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Catherine, same question to you. Who is your favorite superhero? Who's your favorite robot?

• 28:32Speaker 05

  Ooh, okay, so superhero right now would probably be Wonder Woman.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Yeah!

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Very topical choice.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  Very topical. I feel like this is something that Suvie and I are hitting on here. Robot, I was gonna say Wally, but I will say Eva. I will also say that one of my favorite robots right now is Sarcastic Rover on Twitter.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  But also, all the robots that we kind of send out into the universe. So Spirit, Opportunity, all the ones that are sort of doing their thing on the surface of Mars, those are pretty awesome.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Cool. How about you, sir? Do you have a favorite superhero and a favorite robot?

• 29:12Speaker 03

  I have a favorite superhero robot.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Okay, you can combine the answers.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Baymax.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Maeve, how about you?

• 29:30Speaker 04

  I'm Wonder Woman too.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Wonder Woman?

• 29:32Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm not Wonder Woman, I don't mean to out myself like that. But, um, yeah, always loved, loved her. And I think my favorite robot is like, this is just gonna sound...

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Feel no pressure from the other end of the stage.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  I think my favorite robot, I'm sorry, but it's like those things that vacuum.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're just like, what are they called again?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Roomba.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Roomba, yeah, love them, love them. The future. I'm gonna eventually get two, put them on my feet, travel around, you know, like, I'm saving. They're too expensive, but I'm glad that science is focused on making them cheaper. I think that's the priority in the world right now, since there's no such thing as climate change.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  I know what my next grant is gonna be on.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  You're not gonna trash my Roomba, are you?

• 30:32Speaker 03

  No, I'm gonna make a Roomba that can, you only need one instead of two.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  So, from the ridiculous to the sublime, what, um, what technology besides Roomba are we going to need to go to Mars? What's, just very quickly, what's, what's the number one thing we need?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Netflix, 'cause like, it's so long, takes so long. You know?

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Catherine, do you have a?

• 30:56Speaker 05

  Some way to develop artificial gravity, so that...

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Gravity, artificial control gravity, how about you, Sibby?

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Great power sources that get us there. High energy density power sources.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Power sources, gravity for me, I think, yes, to both of those. We're gonna need radiation protection. How about yourselves? Potatoes that don't require poop.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  As an Irish patriot, I was so proud that he chose to grow potatoes.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Irish expertise. So, just recently, NASA put out a call right across the United States for anybody who dreamed of being an astronaut, who thought maybe they had a chance to be one of the next space explorers. And really, sort of inspired by all of the science fiction and by the movies and by what Matt Damon did on the surface of Mars, all the fantasy of what might be possible, but the underpinnings of the reality of what's going on with not only NASA's rockets, but what SpaceX is doing and what the other new sprocket companies are building.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  When they put all that together, 18,300 people applied for what turned out to be a dozen astronaut positions. It took NASA about a year or more to go through all of those applications. And just very recently, they chose the 12 new NASA astronauts.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Here they are.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Chris, sorry, do you know like what they... could anybody apply? Like, was the application open to anybody?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  The application was open to anybody, but there was a minimum bar of citizenship, being able to pass a physical, having at least a technical university degree as well. But when they got it down to the final 12, they hired PhD biologists, PhD geologists. Yeah, feel free to cheer out if I call you geologist.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  All the geologists in the house.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  They hired test pilots, because we're gonna need test pilots to fly the new ships. They hired a lady who worked as a submariner in the United States Navy. A lot of experience in small vehicles. They hired some doctors. One of the fellows, a Navy SEAL, and a mathematician, and a medical doctor. One guy that they hired.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  And they also had a bunch of auditions for people who were obviously not qualified, and they were just terrible, but they just made fun of them, and it was really, it was great for ratings.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  How cool to be a submariner who has gone down so far, and now she's gonna be like boom the other way.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  So they don't have the equivalent of redshirt astronauts like they do in Star Trek, right?

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Disposable astronauts? No, not yet, anyway.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  However, it's amazing, during the build of the space station, we had, the astronaut corps was up to about 120 people. Now, when they hired 12, that's about 25% of all of the active astronauts in the United States right now. This brand-new group of 12. And the idea is that of that group of 12 people, five women, seven men, they are not only gonna be joining Peggy and her crew up on the International Space Station, but these will be the people that will be starting to set up permanent habitations on the moon, and maybe young enough, some of them are, I think the youngest is 28 or 29,

• 34:51Speaker 02

  maybe the right age to be the very first of us that will travel as far as science fiction has taken us, and actually start exploring Mars. And that's who we've just chosen here in this class.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  And also, it's like, everybody always trashes millennials, but then it's like, oh, excuse me, I'm actually exploring Mars.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  That's the coolest.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  And taking a selfie while doing it.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  Now you can talk about selfies.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  But here's the question.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Should we be sending people to Mars? I mean, you talked, your favorite robot is, which one is it? Curiosity or?

• 35:36Speaker 05

  Spirit and Opportunity. All of them. I love them all.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  And which one is it? Is it Opportunity that's stuck in the sand right now?

• 35:44Speaker 05

  Spirit, Spirit's stuck.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Spirit's stuck in the sand, waiting for somebody to come along.

• 35:48Speaker 05

  Exactly, right? Someone's gotta go out there and, you know.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  But, uh, robots, of course, are made of tougher materials. And, uh, and they don't need food. And there are real advantages to, uh, to sending robots. So, why should we be hiring a new class of astronauts? Why, why should we not just be trying to focus completely on, uh, on exploring the rest of the solar system and beyond, uh, tele-robotically? What do you think?

• 36:19Speaker 05

  So, one of the things, uh, I don't know if anyone has seen the videos of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where they try to get the robots to walk around and open a door and drill holes in the wall. Uh, the whole thing is basically like a comic blooper reel. Uh, because it turns out, robots really, if you want to talk about ambulatory robots, they're really not that great. So, we have to get that technology better. Uh, you can make the argument that legged robots would be better in a situation like that than wheeled robots because you can, you can walk around, you, you don't have to worry about obstacles as much. If you have a small wheel and a big rock, you're not gonna have a good day. Um, and humans have a lot more fine dexterity. So, being able to, to pick things up and, and look at things in a real-time situation versus a robot on Mars and a human on Earth, and the delay in trying to advance plans.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  So, those two issues I heard, one is that the robots aren't good enough yet. They aren't dexterous, they don't have fine enough control, they fall over.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  You guys, what if they're listening?

• 37:16Speaker 05

  So rude.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  But the other is, other is, is time lag, right?

• 37:20Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  And, uh, how about yourself, Sabin? What, uh, what do you think?

• 37:24Speaker 03

  I was just thinking, uh, just now, why, why can't we send something in between the two? Send up Octopi into space and let them, they're dexterous, and they're alive, and they're smarter than us. And, uh, yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  The sense of exploration in humans is something that's inherent into all of us. I mean, I do it from a scientific perspective. I want to find out about the world that I live in and I use tools and those tools are my robots and machines. But we send out people because it inspires, it inspires all of us. They are part of us, they're part of humanity. When they explore, we explore. When they find out things, we find out things. And it's exciting to see them do that. Plus, on top of that, they can, they can make decisions that robots can't.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Very complex, tough decisions that, that a robot wouldn't be able to make.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think since the time of Magellan, they couldn't have made that voyage without the technology at the best that had existed back in 1519.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  Did they have like GPS?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, they did not have GPS, no.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  What did they, did they know where they were going?

• 38:36Speaker 02

  There were no maps at all. They just kept sailing west until they ran into Brazil and then they turned left and it took them three months to get down the coast. To get through what became the Straits of Magellan, it took over a month, in fact. They were just, just guessing. And they, they had forgotten what Eretostenes had figured out for the circumference of the world and so he thought the world was way, way smaller and the crew kept starving and people dying of scurvy. They just barely made it. But, they prevailed and we've gotten better and better since. And it's that, that desire and then learning from it and then applying the lessons and inventing that, that exploration is all about.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  And Peggy and her crew up on the space station right now, they, they are using tools, they're using robots, but the fundamental nature of exploration is a human thing. You know, the, the robots help us, but, but the robots don't care. The robots are not interested in what we're discovering, but we absolutely need, I think, the cooperation between the two. And I think we're, we always have and we're always going to.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  I was lucky enough to do two spacewalks. And we understand pretty clearly what causes the northern lights. We know it's energy from the sun being caught by the Earth's magnetic field and reacting with the upper atmosphere and the little electron states going up and down and fluorescing. And that's why the northern lights glow green and glow red. But while I was outside on a spacewalk, we went through the southern lights. And what started out as sort of a robotic, technical understanding of how a planet behaves suddenly became so visceral and so beautiful and so entirely different than just the science that's behind it.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  To be surrounded by and with it flowing between my legs and around the ship, to see our world that way. I think that is very much the essence of discovery and exploration. And I don't think we're going to have robots that are going to appreciate that.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Well, Ray Bradbury always said that we should be sending up artists into space so they could capture the emotion.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  I agree with you.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  But the thing is, we have three artists right here who have a great wealth of knowledge about science, but you all are artists as well, and I think that's very valuable.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  I validate you.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  And when you speak about the two working together, like humans and robots, it makes me think of the photos that we got back from, is it the little voyagers, those two little crafts who went and took a picture of Saturn's rings? And I took a picture. And then when we could see them back here, like people who will never walk in space, that made me feel like, oh, I am actually connected to this and I can picture it and I can see it. And that's magic too. I mean, it's not magic, it's science.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  So, so let's, we have the opportunity, I think, if the technology will allow us, to bring in an expert, who has sort of thought about a lot of different things, and has had time through an extremely long and successful career of invention and discovery and original thought, to, to talk about a lot of different topics, including the idea of, of exploration and life. So, could we ask Dr. Stephen Hawking to join us, please?

• 42:23Speaker 06

  Hello, can you hear me?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yes, loud and clear, can you hear us?

• 42:28Speaker 06

  I can hear you too.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Great.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  I am delighted to have the opportunity to use our media's hologram technology to transcend time and space to be with you today.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Well, if anybody can transcend time and space, it should be you, sir. We have a question for you, and that is, if the combination of humans and their technology and the robots, if it takes us far enough out into the universe, so that someday we eventually can find evidence of life somewhere else, what's it gonna look like? What do you think life in other planets or other solar systems might be like?

• 43:20Speaker 06

  Our civilization is only about 10,000 years old.

• 43:27Speaker 06

  But the universe is about 14 billion years old.

• 43:36Speaker 06

  "Therefore, any other life in the universe is likely to be much more advanced than us, or so primitive that it hasn't even begun to evolve."

• 43:49Speaker 06

  "In the former case, the Breakthrough Listen Project should be able to pick up their radio transmissions, if they are close enough."

• 44:01Speaker 06

  "But in the latter case, one has a rather boring universe, full of potentially dangerous bacteria, or other life forms."

• 44:12Speaker 06

  "Far cry from the usual science fiction picture of glamorous aliens."

• 44:19Speaker 06

  "Any other life we discover is likely to be artificial, because robots with artificial intelligence are far better equipped than biological life to survive the long duration and radiation damage of interstellar travel."

• 44:38Speaker 02

  "Thank you, Professor. That's an interesting thought. Actually, if it's all right, you don't need to sit there the whole time, but if you want to sign off, maybe we'll have a chance to ask you a question a little bit later also, sir. Thank you for the answer."

• 44:55Speaker 02

  "Beam out."

• 44:59Speaker 02

  "I wish I could do that. That's cool."

• 45:04Speaker 02

  "So that's intriguing, that one of the deepest thinkers we have thinks that if we do encounter life, in order for it to have survived over the immensity of distance and time, it will have had to no longer be biological, but will have had to transfer itself into some sort of technical or robotic kind of form. So some sort of hybrid between the two. But for now, we're kind of stuck with these biological forms. We're not far enough along yet. And we're fragile, physically fragile, psychologically fragile." "The crew up on the space station is very much separate from the world. I was talking

• 45:48Speaker 02

  to Susan Helms when she was up there, back on my second spaceflight, and at one point, Susan said to me in passing, she said, 'Hey, Earth said that we need to do this tomorrow.'" And I thought, Earth said?

• 46:07Speaker 02

  That her psychological fragility, just her makeup was such... And she's became a multi-star general in the Air Force. I went to test pilot school with her, wonderful person. But in order to stay healthy, that far away from home, even that close, but that's separate, she had to completely split herself from the rest of humanity. You have to recognize that you are no longer an Earthling. You are a Spaceling. Earth is a separate, discreet entity from yourself, and you and your crew are that way. And I think as we go further, we're gonna have to honor that.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  We put a lot of psychological support equipment up on the spaceship, in fact. We have a big movie library up there. We have a huge audio library of songs, books to read.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yo-yos, yes, which are fun in weightlessness. You can walk the dog forever.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  But there's even a guitar up on the space station. And I think we're about to take a break. When we come back, we're gonna talk about, I think, the next step. We've been looking at this, where we've been, what our science does, what it means to us as people, what this exploration may look like. And when we come back, I want to talk about how we're getting ourselves and those young astronauts ready for the next phase of human evolution. But maybe in preparation for that, we'll just celebrate a little bit with what that guitar... I had a chance to do with that guitar up on the spaceship.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Ground Control to Major Tom.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Ground Control to Major Tom.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Lock your soya's hatch and put your helmet on.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Ground Control to Major Tom.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  I want to thank AwesomeCon, I want to thank FutureCon, the Smithsonian, and the chance for us all to be here on StarTalk. Maeve, and Suveen, and Catherine, and Scott, thank you very much for being on the panel.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  And I'm Chris Hadfield, and you have been listening to StarTalk Live.