Extraterrestrial Oceans – StarTalk Live!

What are the oceans like on Enceladus? Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the oceans of other planets in the search for alien life with planetary scientist Kevin Hand, oceanographer Julie Huber, and comedians, Eugene Mirman, Ellie Kemper, and John Mulaney!

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Live from the Beacon Theater in New York City. And beaming out across all of space and time.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When science and culture collide. Welcome to StarTalk Live from the Beacon Theater in New York City.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tonight, we explore the depths of our search for life on water worlds. From the bottom of the earth's oceans to the icy seas of Jupiter's moon Europa and beyond. My co-host tonight is comedian Eugene Mirman. Eugene, come on out.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, the voice of Gene, the little boy Gene on Bob's Burgers. And one of my favorite comedians, Eugene Mirman. Excellent. Joining us tonight on this subject is planetary scientist Kevin Hand. Kevin, come on out.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kevin.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kevin hails from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And also joining us is deep-sea oceanographer Julie Huber. Julie, come on out.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She hails from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod. So Gene, who do you have for us tonight?

• 1:30Eugene Mirman?

  I have two comedians. The first I'd like to bring out John Mulaney.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  John, pleasure to meet you.

• 1:45Eugene Mirman?

  And she's the star of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Ladies and gentlemen, Ellie Kemper.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's do this! Alright, Julie, Kevin, you do ocean research. You go under the ocean and you find oceans on planets, or moons, or anywhere else you can find them. And how are they related? Other than that, I know they're made of water.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Very good.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, why does your research intersect?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Sure, well, I study life at the bottom of the ocean, where I study single-cell life that basically eats rocks to get energy. And that's kind of a weird way to make a living. But we think-

• 2:30Eugene Mirman?

  For the things that eat the rocks?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  For you, it would, you know, it'd be strange. But we think some of the ways that life works at the bottom of Earth's oceans are applicable to how life might be surviving outside of Earth.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aliens. Say it.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Okay, aliens.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, do you care about the oceans as places where you find water? Or do you also care about life in these exotic spots?

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Oh, both, absolutely. And simply put, when it comes to the search for life elsewhere, if we've learned anything about life on Earth, it's that where you find the liquid water, you generally find life.

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is life that thrives in extreme environments?

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it isn't just the bottom of the ocean. I mean, there are extreme environments everywhere. The New York subway is an extreme environment. I mean, when you think about how life has to get by down there. So there's lots of really interesting examples, but from the bottom of the ocean, to the desert, to the ice, all sorts of places.

• 3:36Eugene Mirman?

  How far down at the bottom? Like-

• 3:39Speaker 02

  At the bottom of the ocean?

• 3:40Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, like, meaning how, like, if you're at the edge, it's very, it's like that much. But then, how far are we talking? Like, miles?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Miles, like, seven miles.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  I always thought we used the term leagues referring to how far deep we were going.

• 3:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, 150 years ago.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh, okay.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  20,000 leagues under the sea-

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Is the only example I have.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Of the ocean.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, let's have some, so, how, how, how big is a league?

• 4:09Speaker 04

  A league is, what should it be, Ellie?

• 4:12Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a, it's pie miles?

• 4:18Speaker 05

  Right?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm not, you can't just throw in pie and think you're getting the right answer here.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  I think I established myself as a scientist by using pie.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Between three and four.

• 4:27Speaker 05

  Yes, roughly.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kevin, if you're thinking about the rest of the universe, but you need representative places on Earth, what place is called to you?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  So, our planet, our beautiful home, is obviously covered in life. And so when we think about building these bridges to assessing whether or not some of these other worlds could be habitable, we look for these environments on Earth that are extreme and don't have too much life. So the bottom of the ocean, the dry deserts of the Atacama, the...

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Miami?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Miami, yeah, potentially. Antarctica, the Arctic, places that are icy, dark, cold, deep. These are some of the conditions that we think exist on these worlds out there in the solar system. And so if life exists in those environments, we can study, as Julie does, the metabolisms, the way in which they feed off the rocks, and then see whether or not, someday, with our robotic vehicles, whether or not life exists under those conditions.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You did say they feed off of the rocks. They eat rocks.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  And...

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's badass if you could just eat rocks.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Sure. So they're eating chemical energy that they're extracting from Earth's crust. And at the bottom of the ocean, you have seawater moving through those rocks, and it releases energy like hydrogen and methane and sulfur. And they're...

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Molecules that have energy contained in them.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they can use that to then make enough energy to build a cell and keep growing.

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yes.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, front row, yes.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  I, there's one thing I need to get past. Are we talking about like, they're like chewing on rocks? Or am I totally wrong?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  So you can actually think about it like the microbes that live on your teeth. You know, when you go to the dentist and they scrape all that stuff off?

• 6:26Speaker 04

  I haven't been in two years.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Well, that's what I'm talking about. They're coating the rock and extracting energy from it through seawater or sea ice or things like that.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  And they just absorb it through...

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Well, they bring it into their cell and create energy.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yep. Go to the dentist.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Julie, why is the deep sea considered Earth's final frontier?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  It's so out of sight, out of mind, it's so inaccessible. And if you think about the size of our planet.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is it inaccessible? It's just down a couple of miles.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Right, so.

• 7:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been to the moon. Why is the bottom of the ocean inaccessible to you?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I mean, it's really hard to get there.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So was the moon. Why is...

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Well, well.

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can take an anvil and drop it, it'll get to the bottom of the ocean.

• 7:15Eugene Mirman?

  And I can throw an anvil towards the moon.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Might not work out.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  But a key thing, like, we can point a telescope at the moon and get incredibly high-resolution images of the surface of the moon.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  But the same thing that gives the ocean life, the water, the water gets in the way of our ability to map the bottom of the ocean. On any given dive.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Julie's looking at a few hundred yards, I don't know how many leagues, but. Of space.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I gotta ask both of you. You both think about and have been to these depths where none of us can see, it's where the sun don't shine. Is there any really creepy stuff you've seen?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the most fascinating part of it is once you leave that sunlit zone, and to save battery power, you turn off all the lights, you turn off all the things that make noises. It's very quiet and dark. And then all of a sudden, looking out the windows, it just lights up around you because of all this bioluminescence that these organisms are creating. But you can't actually see the outline of the organism. You just see trails of light everywhere. And your imagination.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bioluminescence.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Bioluminescence.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like, this is like fireflies.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yes, the way organisms who live away from the light can communicate, can find each other, can attract prey, all of these things.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or they can just swim at a higher depth and then.

• 8:45Eugene Mirman?

  They would die there, because I would eat them.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They stay down.

• 8:50Eugene Mirman?

  Or I can't get my little hands on them.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  What does it sound like down there?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  So, in my experience, it's really quiet. Um, to my, to my ears.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boop, boop. We know this on every submarine TV show. There's this sound.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't actually have that.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Just putting it out there.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just putting it out there.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Just putting it out there. But actually, if, we have put microphones on the seafloor and you can hear all sorts of crazy stuff, like the earth's crust cracking and you can...

• 9:22Speaker 05

  That was, that's an automatic...

• 9:24Eugene Mirman?

  And that would be like, you wouldn't believe what some of the fish are saying.

• 9:28Speaker 05

  I can't, I just can't believe, I imagine the earth's...

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just lost your breath on that.

• 9:31Speaker 05

  Pardon me?

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just lost your breath on that.

• 9:33Speaker 05

  I did.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called a nerdgasm, by the way.

• 9:35Speaker 05

  No.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  I am one of you.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, an uncontrolled, guttural...

• 9:40Speaker 05

  I was, just because I always imagine the earth's crust as a graham cracker crust. Simple, simple woman. And so, imagine, I can imagine what a graham cracker crust cracking sounds like. So when you said, "The microphone can pick up the sound of the earth's crust cracking," first of all, it makes it sound very fragile, in a way. I mean, if a microphone can pick that up?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, our, the earth's crust is constantly being regenerated because of plate tectonics.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Which is pretty important.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  It's the reason we have volcanoes and everything. But yeah, it makes a lot of noise, actually. And organisms in the ocean can make a lot of noise. Just a lot of it we can't hear. It's not tuned to our frequency.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Kevin, you had an expedition to something called a lost city? What is that?

• 10:27Speaker 03

  A lost city is a, is a type of...

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently not any longer.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Right, it's found.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The found city.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  And it was, it's a type of hydrothermal vent. You go down there, it's about a kilometer below the, the surface, and it's this beautiful white cathedral of rock on the bottom of the ocean. These, uh, this hydrothermal chimney stands...

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Couple hundred feet high and it's just stunning. And it's not powered by the spreading rock. The hydrothermalism is powered by a chemical reaction called serpentinization, which is sort of similar. You know the hand warmers that you get on a really cold day to put in your gloves? That's an exothermic reaction, a reaction that creates heat.

• 11:16Speaker 05

  We get those on set when it's below 60 degrees and the actors get cold.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they hand them to you.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Yes, because we're fragile.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  So it's kind of like that at the bottom of the ocean.

• 11:28Speaker 05

  OK.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a chemical reaction that releases energy.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it manifests in the form of heat.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Right, and interesting chemistry.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, is there a life down there?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  And lo and behold, there is.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does that relate to the origin of life on Earth?

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Sure, so a lot of people think very early in Earth's history that the deep ocean was a great place, that life could have begun. It was sort of protected from all the bad stuff that was happening up here. And you had all this chemical...

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like asteroid impacts and things, yeah.

• 11:59Eugene Mirman?

  Noah's Ark, that stuff.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  And you had all this chemical energy that these organisms can extract and it did not rely on photosynthesis or the sun. So scientists are really interested in trying to make that connection as well.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  And so we think a place like Lost City might have been where the origin of life occurred on Earth. And tying it back to our exploration of the solar system, one of the key questions is, is the origin of life easy or hard? If it's easy, then life will be any place where the conditions are right. If it's hard, then life might be quite rare.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we're going to find out more about alien life lurking at the bottom of the sea when StarTalk continues.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Bringing the universe down to earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are talking about the search for alien life on other planets. Julie, you're looking for life not only at the bottom of the ocean, but below the bottom of the ocean. What's that about?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  So, the ocean doesn't stop at the seafloor. So, the seawater is moving through the crust and with it, bringing life, bringing energy, and there's a ton of life actually living beneath the seafloor.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is crazy. So, we have life in the air, on the surface, in the water, and below the water, in the crust that's below the oceans?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Correct. So, life in the dark, very broadly. And this whole program is about studying those life forms at the bottom of the ocean.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this what I've heard of called the deep biosphere?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, the deep biosphere. I mean, we have found evidence for life miles beneath the seafloor.

• 14:14Eugene Mirman?

  And when you say evidence for life, do you mean like microbes, or do you mean tiny... So, not like tiny horses even a little?

• 14:22Eugene Mirman?

  Or any other kind of, just only microbes, not even nothing?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  You know, there's some worms, maybe?

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright!

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Strapping together more than one cell.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we're mainly talking microbial life, which for most of Earth's history was a microbial game. So, the organisms living deep beneath the seafloor, you know, are some of our most ancient relatives to many life forms that we have here now.

• 14:48Speaker 05

  Has anyone discovered a talking crab in any of this?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  A talking crab?

• 14:53Speaker 05

  A talking crab like Sebastian.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be, and was musically inclined.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:02Eugene Mirman?

  I feel like if a crab could say even three words, I'd be like, "That's pretty good crab."

• 15:06Speaker 05

  That counts as a talking crab, yeah.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, what she's finding beneath the ocean, beneath the ocean, does that have any correspondence to what people are trying to find on Mars? Not on the surface, but beneath the Martian surface?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, and so broadly speaking, we're raised, we're educated to think of the food chain as being

• 15:30Speaker 03

  based on photosynthesis, right? So, the plants use the sunlight, the animals eat the plants, and then more animals eat those animals, and so on and so forth. The connection with the rocks has really been...

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would mean we're all solar-powered at some level.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  At some level, right, but this, this...

• 15:49Eugene Mirman?

  Looks like everybody's hungry.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  But so, this kind of food chain at the bottom of the ocean is driven by chemosynthesis. The chemistry coming out of the hydrothermal vents and the rocks, etc. And so, that's a kind of new framework to think about the food chain. And we can take that chemosynthetic food chain and say, "Would it work on Mars or Europa, and so this, these other worlds?"

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because on Mars, without an ozone layer, the UV would be quite hostile to any biology on the surface.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's a lot of talk that if it's going to have life, it would be beneath the surface, and we have the water bias, so let's look for water beneath the surface, and maybe there's life thriving there.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  That's right, and so, if you go down in the surface, there could potentially be life on Mars. We don't currently have a program to dig that deep. Our exploration of Mars with rovers like Curiosity, it's going up a mountain with all sorts of different geological layers, and we're looking for evidence of life in the past, extinct life. So, we're looking for fossilized microbes.

• 16:53Eugene Mirman?

  How do you find fossilized microbes? Seems hard, just from what I know.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  There's actually lots of fossilized microbes in New York.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  You see these patterns in the rocks that are created by the microbial mats. So if you think of microbes as living in a community, they kind of build up their own little cities. And then, something changes, and those microbes...

• 17:21Eugene Mirman?

  Probably the economy.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Well, no, you're absolutely right. The chemical economy changes, and that the microbial...

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, give 'em credit, forget that, right?

• 17:30Speaker 03

  No, but it's a good analogy. And so, the microbes then become lithified, they turn into rocks. And we've got evidence of ancient microbial life on Earth, going back billions of years. And that's amazing. And we look at those rocks, and then the Curiosity Rover is looking for similar kinds of rocks on Mars.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Current rover of record on Mars, yes.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Now, the only problem with that is that you can't go up to one of these ancient rocks and extract DNA, or proteins, or amino acids. So, as exciting as it would be to find fossilized microbes...

• 18:05Eugene Mirman?

  Why not? Because it's not possible?

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Those compounds don't last that long. So you get the fossilized microbes, but no actual biomolecule.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  What if you spit on it?

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Then you would find your DNA, definitely.

• 18:19Speaker 05

  Great, that's all I'm interested in.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  And so, on Mars, we're looking for extinct life. With these oceans beyond Earth, we have the capability to potentially find extant life, life that is alive today, which, if we study it, could then reveal interesting biochemistry.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Mars has all this evidence of what water does when it flows.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dried riverbeds, river deltas, floodplains. And so, at some point, water must have coursed heavily over its surface, right? A water world.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Covered by water.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What might that have been like, long ago?

• 19:04Speaker 03

  It could have been pretty Earth-like. And on Mars, that evidence shows that there might have been an ocean in the northern hemisphere. So Mars would have had all of this water in the north. And that ocean could very well have been habitable for life as we know it. It might have been very Earth-like. Sun could have powered life in that ocean. But there's also one problem. When we think about the origin of life,

• 19:33Speaker 03

  I'm curious if there's a separate, independent origin elsewhere. Is the origin of life easy or hard? Well, on Mars and Earth, we're close neighbors. And so, in the early history of the solar system, Earth and Mars were sending rocks back and forth. And some of the microbes that Julie likes might have been eating those rocks. And they might have hitched a ride, from Mars to Earth, or Earth to Mars. And so, it could be that life on Mars has the same tree as life on Earth. Which would not be conclusive as far as a separate origin.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go beyond Mars now.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, why are both of you so hooked on water? That seems so Earth-life biased. Could you have life based on some other fluids? And are you limiting your search?

• 20:30Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. What about milkshakes?

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh! I love milkshakes, by the way.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  I love a milkshake.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's my favorite thing.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  Something in common.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would, if, it was one of the food groups I would bring on a mission to Mars. It's milkshakes.

• 20:43Speaker 05

  I would too.

• 20:45Eugene Mirman?

  I think we got a movie.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so milkshake world.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me, tell me.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  So the key motivating-

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why are you so biased?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Well, we're not. We're just doing good science. And so the-

• 21:03Eugene Mirman?

  We'll decide, you tell us the reason.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  So it's not that we're not thinking about those things. We are looking for things in the deep biosphere.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  But when we search for life beyond Earth, we have to generate a hypothesis. And the hypothesis is, if you bring together water, some chemical energy or solar energy.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Energy.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Energy and the elements, the building blocks for life. If you bring together those keystones, you can formulate the hypothesis that life as we know it could arise. Saturn's moon Titan.

• 21:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, where you look, what kind of places are you looking?

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Well, so we've got these ocean worlds of the outer solar system. These are moons of Jupiter and Saturn, possibly.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Name a few.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Europa and Cletus, Titan. Those are sort of the prime ones for the search for life. There's also.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they all have liquid in them.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Right, so these are oceans that are covered in ice, but beneath their icy shells exist vast, global, liquid water oceans. And in the case of Europa, we're talking about an ocean that is 100 kilometers or about 60 miles in depth. That's about 10 times deeper than the deepest part of our ocean.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  You don't even want to know how many leagues.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  A billion leagues under the sea.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  A billion is a conservative estimate.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  So you do the math and it turns out that Europa has about two to three times the volume of liquid water in all of Earth's oceans. And so if there's that much water, could there be life? And that is a motivating question.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That excites you?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. When we come back, we will discuss the search for life in the oceans of worlds beyond when StarTalk continues.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk, live at the Beacon Theater. We're talking about the search for life on Ocean Worlds and Beyond.

• 23:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Julie, we've got a portfolio of space worlds. Which one of those would you want to explore first?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  When I walk through the chemistry, Europa is a great candidate for supporting life forms similar to some of the life forms we find at the bottom of the ocean.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you find life on Europa, you'd have to call them Europeans, right?

• 23:37Speaker 05

  Is there the same, you know how there's Uranus and Uranus? I mean, do people ever pronounce that planet Uranus?

• 23:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, when you're older than eight years old, yeah, you pronounce it Uranus.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  It's called Uranus?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  It's not called Uranus?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Definitely not when you're giving a talk to eight-year-olds.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until you're eight years old, yeah, it's Uranus. But after that, it's Uranus.

• 24:00Eugene Mirman?

  Sometimes you're never corrected.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  This is news to me.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's from the Greek. And if you look at the Greek, spelled in Greek letters.

• 24:10Eugene Mirman?

  It's actually butts.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you pronounce them, it's Oranus.

• 24:17Speaker 05

  Oranus?

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oranus.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  So that was my question. Does anyone pronounce, is it spelled, is it Oropa?

• 24:23Speaker 03

  It's Europa. Europa and Zeus had a little thing.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  OK.

• 24:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get back to where you guys were coming. So where you, you want to go to Europa?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so walking through the chemistry, what we know about Europa from fly-by-missions, what we know about Enceladus from fly-by-missions, there are a lot of good ingredients for life.

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Life as we know it.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Life as we know it. So for example, Enceladus's ocean is being spewed out into space and the Cassini mission was able to capture some of that material and measure it.

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Cassini mission to Jupiter that stayed.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  To Saturn.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But to Saturn. Didn't only look at Saturn, it looked at many of the moons of Saturn as well.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  And in that plume of material, it found things like hydrogen and methane and also little particles that suggest it has a rocky core.

• 25:13Eugene Mirman?

  So why is it spewing oceans into space? That's unusual, or no?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  That's unusual, and I have no idea.

• 25:22Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, isn't it true that the the heating of the interiors can actually trigger evaporation of the water, and it's gotta come out? The pressure has to release. So it punches through the ice, and you get these, basically, these ice volcanoes. Volcano's not the exact right word, but they're geysers.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Geyser, there you go.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  And geyser is even not quite the right physics. The term cryovolcanism is used.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that has more syllables. Yes.

• 25:50Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, thank God we're not saying geyser. We would all maybe remember.

• 25:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, cryovolcanism. Cold volcanoes.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  And we don't yet actually know the detailed physics of what's happening. But on Enceladus, Enceladus is a tiny little moon. It's 500 kilometers, 300 miles in diameter. And it's getting tugged and squeezed by Saturn, that tidal energy. And you look at the surface, and the ice is all fractured. And so, as those fractures open up, the ocean below is exposed to the vacuum of space, and a bunch of that liquid water, it just essentially boils out. And it may also be geyser-driven physics, which has to do with pressure. But that's why it's jetting out, because the ice is fracturing and allowing the ocean to just escape.

• 26:42Eugene Mirman?

  Being sucked into space.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there was a movie called The Europa Report. In fact, it's on...

• 26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It did feel like it needed some kind of reaction. Let's try that again. There was a movie called The Europa Report.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you were a scientific consultant on that thriller. Is that right?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  That's correct. And I've done some science consulting on different things. But when that team came to me and said, "We want to make a movie about Europa," I was like, "Oh." But this is my baby. We gotta get the science. And they were fantastic. They actually got a lot of the science of like the radiation on the surface of Europa. Europa's bombarded by these charged particles, electrons.

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From Jupiter.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  From Jupiter.

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  And so you don't want to send any astronauts to Europa because they'll get cooked by that radiation very quickly. And so, but that's what happens in the movie. And spoiler alert.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Don't give it away.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta give some of the ending of the film because I want your comments on it. In the Europa Report, they do find life. And it looks for all the world squid-like. Or basically, or what's the general term for these creatures?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Cephalopod.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A cephalopod?

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Cephalopod.

• 28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It looks cephalopoidal, okay? How real... Julie, have you thought about how realistic that is?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  I have thought about it. I don't think it's very likely personally.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there was yet another movie that had a cephalopodal alien. It was the movie Arrival.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  It's a great way to end a movie, right? Cephalopods are...

• 28:28Eugene Mirman?

  If it's in that many movies, it must be a real thing, right?

• 28:33Speaker 03

  But let's not miss the big picture here. Part of what's fun about this is like for so long, we've thought about, you know, little green men on Mars. Now we're thinking about octopi and cephalopods on Europa. And part of why we went with the cephalopod in Europa Report is because if you think about evolution in the ice-covered ocean and you think about evolution of intelligence and then technology, cephalopods can use tools, right? Those tentacles can do things. You can be a tool using octopus. Fish, not so much, right?

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally not.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  And so that was part of the rationale.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I tweeted recently that if an octopus wanted to imprison a human, to jail them, they'll have to put you in a room where the exit door had three doorknobs. And then you wouldn't be able to get out. Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Interesting. I like that. Yeah, yeah.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What? I'm just...

• 29:26Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? It's just kinda cool.

• 29:29Eugene Mirman?

  Just one of the reasons to never be in a room with an octopus.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kevin, what is in store for us? We've been talking about doing this search in the solar system, but what about the doing of it? So what's coming up for... What's the future of Europa?

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. And part of what's exciting about being alive today is that for the first time in the history of humanity, we actually have the tools and technology, the scientific robots, to go out and potentially answer this question of whether or not we're alone. Does biology work beyond Earth? And so, think about it. We've been asking this question forever. Yeah. And now we can potentially answer it. And the way in which we will potentially answer it is by sending spacecraft, robotic spacecraft, no humans, to...

• 30:46Eugene Mirman?

  Boo!

• 30:49Eugene Mirman?

  Lame!

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we'll send Eugene on the next one, yeah. Yeah.

• 30:54Eugene Mirman?

  I am very impressed by robots.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  So first up is a mission that NASA has approved to fly by Europa. It's called the Europa Clipper. And it will orbit Jupiter and make some 40, 45 or more flybys of Europa and map it out in wonderful detail. All sorts of instruments onboard.

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, exploration, generally you want a map of where you will go next.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and so you don't go there and start digging immediately.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to characterize the environment that you are about to occupy.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so the Galileo spacecraft was the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter and to give us the initial reconnaissance of Europa. And then the Clipper mission will do an incredible job of giving us stunning images in close-up detail, spectroscopy to help us figure out the surface chemistry, ice-penetrating radar to figure out the ice thickness and the cracking of the ice. And that information could then feed forward into a mission that goes down to the surface. Where we can then actually dig into the ice and start looking for.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're going from an orbiter to a lander?

• 32:07Speaker 03

  The mission after that.

• 32:08Eugene Mirman?

  And how many years into the future is this?

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Right, so here's where it gets depressing.

• 32:15Speaker 05

  That's where it gets exciting.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Right, so this business is not for the faint of heart.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, there's a first rule of science. Whatever experiment you do, make sure the results come before you die. Okay? This is.

• 32:27Eugene Mirman?

  That's a rule with a lot of jobs.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  So I started working on Europa in, you know, the year 2000 or so. The Clipper mission, if all goes well, it will get to the launch pad in the year 2022, 2023. It then takes several years to pinball through the solar system and get out to Jupiter. But it'll get there, if it launches in the early 2020s, it gets there to Europa in the mid to late 2020s. And then after that, we would potentially send a lander. And that lander wouldn't get there until the early to mid to late 2030s or possibly the 2040s.

• 33:11Eugene Mirman?

  Wow.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  I moved, well, the renovators moved a toilet in our bathroom from this corner to this corner, and it took two years. So that doesn't sound like that long.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  It's very similar.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Julie, if you had the choice, would you pilot a sub in the oceans of Europa? Or would you send robots to do that?

• 33:36Speaker 02

  I would send robots to do that. Most of these types of jobs, you should send a robot. I won't even send a person to an exploding underwater volcano on Earth. So I'm certainly not going to send them on a five-year journey out into the outer solar system.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so then, but what's the best, okay, so forget the outer solar system, Earth. What's the best way to explore Earth? Is it without the people? So what's the need to do that if you can just send a robot and you don't even have to worry about bringing it back?

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Well, I think there's an important role for both in all exploration. Humans are wonderful storytellers, and having the experience of doing the exploration and being in the environment you're studying, it's incredibly powerful. But there are situations where it simply doesn't make sense. And you can do better science.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like inside of volcanoes.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Like inside of volcanoes, like Europa. And even some really, really extreme depths if you want to spend a long time on the seafloor.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what are the tech challenges going to Europa and trying to get through the ice?

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Well, there are many.

• 34:39Eugene Mirman?

  Name six.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  So arguably, the biggest challenge is that radiation environment. So unlike the deep ocean, you can't bring a robot back up and, you know, take out your screwdriver and fix it. Once something leaves the launch pad, it's out there, it's done. You're not going to be able to break out the screwdriver. And so you have to have everything tested. The mantra at JPL is test as you fly, fly as you test. And so just get your robot ready for that environment. One of the tricky things is that the robot then has software on it and it's running through programs. And radiation, radiation noise hits on a microprocessor

• 35:26Speaker 03

  can cause the software to do weird things. So once you enter the Jovian environment, the Jupiter environment, the radiation around Jupiter could cause the robot's brain to kind of go a little haywire.

• 35:40Eugene Mirman?

  And be like flirty or like weird, like inappropriate?

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So how is it getting through the thickness of the ice?

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Right, so here's... Part of what's interesting about this kind of exploration is that the technology exists. It's hard. We could melt through the ice with a melt probe that has a nuclear power source or even some variation on a solar power source if you had a big enough array. We don't need to invent warp drive to get to Europa's ocean. The technologies are out there. They're hard, they're expensive, but we can do it. There's not like new physics that we need to invent. And so the Europa Clipper mission will fly by.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Then we'll have a lander at some point, and that will sample the surface and help inform how to design a melt probe that could go all the way through the ice. And then out of that melt probe would be a submersible that would run with a lot of autonomy, a lot of smarts. And that's where the partnership between Woods Hole Oceanographic and JPL comes into play, where we're trying to take some space technologies and apply it to our ocean to design robotic vehicles that are small, tiny, and robust and easily deployable.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Julie, what innovation are you just waiting for?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Well, one of the benefits of working on Earth is that

• 37:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a great sentence.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Is that as hard as it is, I can still go on a ship. I can use a submersible. I can bring samples back. I can sequence the DNA. I can grow the microbes. One of the biggest challenges to working in space is that you have to just bring the whole lab with you out there. And so where we really need the innovation is basically, you know, taking our science to the environment so that we can make the measurements in the environment and get the data back without bringing samples home. And so Clipper's an amazing mission, but we need to get on the surface of Europa. We need to get those samples with the right sensors to try to detect evidence of life.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK. We'll have more for the search for alien life on Waterworld when StarTalk continues.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kevin, Julie, lightning round here. You ready? When might we discover alien life? Kevin?

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Within the next two decades, depending on whether or not we commit to it.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Julie, if we find that life, what might it be like?

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alien life.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  I think it will be using energy in a similar way to how life uses energy here.

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and likely to be microbes, not whole macroscopic.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Microbial life, yes, single cell life.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Single cell life, okay. When we discover life, what then? Is that a good or bad thing? And the reason why I ask that is NASA has a branch of itself called planetary protection. And it does two things. When we leave Earth and go to places, it wants to protect those environments from our contamination so that when you do study it scientifically, you're not accidentally studying your own rhinovirus that you sneezed on the spaceship before you launched it.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A, B, if you bring samples back, you don't want that to contaminate us. So, is it a good thing or a bad thing that you want to go find life and study it and bring it back here?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  So, let's put this in the context.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Over 400 years ago, Galileo turned the telescope to the night sky and discovered the moons of Jupiter. And in so doing, we were able to then understand that physics, the science of physics, works beyond Earth. And in the decades after that, with spectroscopy, we would come to learn that the principles of chemistry work beyond Earth. And then with our robotic exploration of the solar system, we would come to appreciate that geology works beyond Earth. But when we think of that fourth fundamental science, biology, when we think of the phenomenon that is us, life, we have yet to make that leap. We don't yet actually know whether or not biology works beyond Earth.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas the same elsewhere as it is on Earth.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  That's right. But we have this potential to revolutionize our understanding of whether or not biology is a singularity on our home planet or a universal phenomenon throughout the universe.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Julie, are you on the universal side of that argument?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Well, and also to be clear, I don't want to bring it back to Earth. I think we need to be able to study it out there because of exactly what you're talking about. I think we need to... Preserve and protect on both ends of it. And so I think we need to raise a generation that first cares about this ocean and this planet and wants to understand how it works. And then we can take all of those lessons in technology and put them out in space.

• 40:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want people to care about the oceans.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  I want people to care a lot about the oceans.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the future in your field?

• 41:00Speaker 03

  I think we're looking at a new age of ocean exploration. And it's one where we develop new technologies, new robotic capabilities to explore our ocean. And those serve as a bridge for someday exploring these oceans beyond Earth. And so there's this beautiful partnership where we learn more about the home planet while also building the capabilities to explore these worlds beyond Earth.

• 41:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So valuing home, you suspect will empower us intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, to value other things that we find out in space?

• 41:41Speaker 03

  100%.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me get some parting thoughts from you guys. Ellie?

• 41:45Speaker 05

  Well, I want to thank you guys because I read a lot. I'm not a scientist. Finally, I'll come out and say it. And I have read a lot of things that sound scary and hopeless. And so hearing you guys speak intelligently about life on Earth and life beyond Earth, possible life beyond Earth, has given me great comfort this evening. So thank you for letting me listen to it and every now and then talk about milkshakes.

• 42:15Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I...

• 42:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene?

• 42:18Eugene Mirman?

  I would say that listening to both of you, it makes the search for extraterrestrial life very practical. Like, it sounds like, it's like you're looking for microbes, you're not looking for people to, or creatures to destroy us. And there's something really just kind of life-affirming about it.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I... So, John, I save you for that. Just because you're so well dressed all the time. Thank you, sir. While I wore ocean blue.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  I'll say this. I know many people are looking for ET or a way to live on Mars like Matt Damon, but I think that if we can just find the smallest microbial or IKEA-like life,

• 43:07Speaker 04

  we'll achieve something that a little guy named Galileo achieved. And that was knowledge.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'd like to offer some parting thoughts of my own. Anytime you read about a scientific discovery in the paper, someone was working on it for 10 years. And you never saw or heard of them because they were busting their ass trying to get a satellite to fly, trying to get a submersible to get to the bottom of the ocean, trying to get data that you can trust and then understand it and interpret it and then publish it. So I'm delighted to have the two of you on this program. And I think of what your exploration has done

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  for the world. Consider, if you go far enough back in time, the academic scientists of the day, they were called natural philosophers. Philosophy, you break that word apart, is lover of knowledge. And if you were a natural philosopher, you were in search of knowledge that came to you from nature. Back then, there were no sort of stovepipes of one science versus another. That would come later. As people who studied life, they realized they needed different methods and tools, different tactics to understand life. Then the chemist needed to understand chemicals. Then the physicist needed

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to understand matter, motion, and energy. So what arose in recent centuries is that the natural philosopher split out. And then you got the biologist publishing their own works. The chemist, the physicist, the astronomer, studying everything that's not on Earth.

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then what happens? Wait a minute. Does nature split up into these professions? Does nature care that your textbook looks different from that person's textbook? No. Nature is one. Nature is a whole. And so what began to happen in the 20th century? You started finding previously distinct fields coming together. We start stapling together previously distinct paths of inquiry.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now we learn that life isn't just separate from even the rocks. Oh my gosh. There are rocks you wouldn't have had unless life had been operating and you have life that you wouldn't have had unless you had the rocks for them to thrive on. So now we have, is it biogeology? What's the new thing we're stapling together because of the work you're doing? So I foresee a time, in the not-so-distant future, when all the scientific professions are stapled together as one.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just as nature had intended all along. That is a cosmic perspective. Thanks for coming out tonight. Join me in thanking our panel.