StarTalk Live at Town Hall with Buzz Aldrin (Part 2)

Join the crew of StarTalk Live – Commander Neil deGrasse Tyson, Co-Pilot Eugene Mirman Buzz Aldrin, John Oliver and Andrew Chaikin – as they conclude their exploratory mission to Town Hall.

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.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are live from Town Hall, Midtown, New York. Welcome back to StarTalk Live!

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York. Where I also serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium. And I've got with me Eugene Mirman, comedian extraordinaire. Eugene, thank you.

• 0:52Eugene Mirman?

  And with me is John Oliver.

• 0:56Eugene Mirman?

  England's gift to America.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And John, you've got this regular gig on The Daily Show.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  I do, that's right. Normally it would be cooler, but I am sitting with an astronaut.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  So it only compounds the failure that the six-year-old version of myself.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Annie Shaken, you've become a journalist in your later years, an author, writing about space, and a geologist by background, a planetary geologist. Welcome to StarTalk Live.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one, the only, the truly inimitable Buzz Aldrin.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Buzz, in the 1950s and 60s, everybody expected we'd be on Mars by like 1980, given the trajectory we were on. Were you disappointed?

• 1:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I knew we weren't gonna do that, because that's what Spiro Agnew said.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spiro Agnew said exactly what?

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Well, after we came back from the moon, there was a space task study group, and he headed it up. And he said, "If we really work hard, spend a lot of money, maybe we could get to Mars." 1980, 85? If we're kind of lackadaisical about it, it may take until 90, 95.

• 2:21Eugene Mirman?

  We were super lackadaisical.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Do you think that what America always needs is the threat that someone else might do something first? Because it seems like part of the space program that you were able to do, well done by the way, was in competition with the Russians. Do you think it's gonna take someone, be it China or Britain, we could still do it?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  I'm trying to help you guys.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Do you think if we, Britain, said, "We're going to Mars", America would say, "No, we're gonna get there", or do you think America would just laugh and say, "That's sweet"?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Maggie Thatcher kinda screwed you guys up.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Well, in so many more ways than I can even get into now.

• 3:03Eugene Mirman?

  Wouldn't you hook up with her?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  But do you think that would be the best thing for a pioneering American space program? The threat that China may go to Mars first?

• 3:14Eugene Mirman?

  Or Al Qaeda?

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If only Bin Laden were hiding on Mars.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think then there would be the popular will to, "No, we need to do that first"?

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Whatever we do, I think we should have a solid plan that leads to US leadership in what we're doing.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Buzz, you admitted that in the 1960s, we were followers, not leaders. We reacted to everything Russia did. So John's point has gotta be taken seriously.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Here's the thing, and I'm putting on my historian hat. We went to the moon for the first time as a substitute for fighting a shooting war with the Soviet Union. Good thing, glad we did it. But it was funded like a war. And we won that war, we got there ahead of the Soviets.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The money flowed like rivers.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Money was a river, and in fact, it ended up paying for a lot of other stuff like the Mars landing with Viking and the Voyager Grand Tour of the Outer Solar System. But then, once that was gone, once the political imperative was gone, that's not gonna come again. And I think the unfinished business is to lower the cost of getting into space so that we don't have to break the bank to do things like going back to the moon and going to Mars.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  You ever heard of SLS?

• 4:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a mistake, I think.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  My field.

• 4:36Eugene Mirman?

  I can tell by everybody, I'm thinking like, "What's SLN?"

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Tell them.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  It's the Senate Launch System.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Well, that's the nickname. It's the Space Launch System, but everybody calls it the Senate Launch System because the Senate basically rammed it down NASA's throat. And said, "You will build this huge booster and it will cost a billion dollars per launch."

• 4:56Eugene Mirman?

  Buzz disagrees, but go on.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  They mandated, that means they made certain, they passed a law, that it would be

• 5:04Eugene Mirman?

  Mandate has two definitions.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  constructed of heritage components.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Now, that's a fancy word for old stuff.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Right?

• 5:15Speaker 04

  See, we actually agree on this.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  That lets people keep their jobs so that the senators can get the votes. And our space program, is it going to be run by senators who want to get elected at the next election? Or based on a solid American leadership?

• 5:35Eugene Mirman?

  The first one, sadly.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:37Eugene Mirman?

  To answer the question.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  I'm afraid you're right.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Unless you're provoked.

• 5:41Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Unless America is provoked into looking beyond those things, has a bigger, longer dream.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buzz, our panel here is in consensus when we say, "We do not have the incentive to lead unless someone is chasing us in some kind of way that freaks us out, or where we feel threatened economically, culturally, socially, militaristically." If that doesn't happen, I don't think the evidence shows that we're going to go anywhere.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  But there's other definitions of leadership. Why can't we lead in developing lower-cost ways of getting into space?

• 6:13Eugene Mirman?

  Because no one will get elected.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 6:16Eugene Mirman?

  But I think if the Tea Party tomorrow said, "We're going to space," the rest of America would be like, "We're going to beat you there." Just one plan, the same thing when Mark Delaware did it.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  So you want to be your own pace setter, then?

• 6:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Stephen Hawking, about a year and a half ago, said that the Earth has about 200 years before it should establish a colony off Earth to guarantee the survival of the human race. Why did he say that?

• 6:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's worried about asteroids and runaway viruses and stuff that'll render us extinct, and he wants to protect the human genome.

• 6:56Eugene Mirman?

  But what is that guy?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Not a...

• 7:00Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, everything. Okay, sold.

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just worry that if, in fact, we do colonize another planet, then the asteroid's ready to render one of them extinct. Do you just, does the other planet just say, "Bye"? Well, how about the billions of people that are there? You know what I'd rather do? Rather than think that that's gonna solve our problem, whatever effort it is required to colonize another planet, it's gotta be easier to deflect the asteroid.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  If you know about it in enough advance warning.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The big ones, you know about it. The ones that could render us extinct, we got them.

• 7:31Eugene Mirman?

  How about diversifying between both? I would put enough money to save the human race with both options.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:38Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry if that's insane. Let's put a few people on the moon, some on Mars, and then also a big laser gun.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Give all the money to Bruce Willis. He's done it once, he'll do it again. He's got our back.

• 7:55Eugene Mirman?

  Yippee-ki-yay, mother asteroid!

• 7:56Speaker 02

  That's exactly what he said.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone knows there are dangers going to Mars. The time you're away from Earth, who knows what that means in terms of your physiology? Suppose you catch some disease and you didn't happen to bring that medicine cabinet with you for that problem? And plus, there's the radiation from the sun. What is your plan? To go to Mars with your colony, who never wants to come back, and have them stay alive?

• 8:38Eugene Mirman?

  No, who is legally bound to stay? It's different.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They signed the document.

• 8:42Eugene Mirman?

  They might want to come back.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are no cows, there's no potato plants. How are they gonna survive? We're gonna have to terraform Mars first.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  No, no, you can put in an order and it'll get delivered. Two years later.

• 8:53Eugene Mirman?

  Seamless web in space.

• 8:57Eugene Mirman?

  You owe me one million dollars Seamless Web. Call me tomorrow.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're literally talking about like, you know, room service or delivery, Chinese takeout, right?

• 9:10Eugene Mirman?

  I think they'd be fine with any of that.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  I'm talking about building a base there before you ever go down and land. Now, we didn't do that in Nepal.

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, there was nothing.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  We just landed and we took what we brought with us.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  You build the base robotically before you say?

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, from Phobos, less than a second away.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, so this is setting up an advanced team on the moon of Mars Phobos, where you're not dealing with all the problems of landing, but you can radio control, you can drive the rovers around on Mars.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, the first step.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  From Phobos.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And why can't we drive the rovers from here?

• 9:46Eugene Mirman?

  We can.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Because it takes four minutes.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Or longer.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  If it's closest to us, same side, to get a message there.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the "watch out for the cliff" doesn't work. Because of the travel time of the radio signal, you lose your hardware.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  And there's another problem psychologically with that, because, you know, when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from us, and even when it's close, it's anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes one way to send a radio signal. So you will not have a real-time conversation the whole time you're away from Earth and on Mars. When you're on Mars and the Earth, everybody you know, every place you've ever been, is just that star in the sky. What's that gonna do psychologically?

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's saying it's not any different from the pilgrims. You pitched tent with the people you went there with.

• 10:31Eugene Mirman?

  The pilgrims didn't know that America was not like Mars, like they were just like...

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, but Mars doesn't look like, you know, trees and rivers and...

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so Buzz, you're saying there'd be cargo with food and supplies. They'd be sent from Earth. It'd be like the care package.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:48Eugene Mirman?

  Land bin delivery every three weeks.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Then you start growing things.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Start growing things.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Grow crops.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  And it doesn't get very hot over the sunbeaming for 14 days the way it does on the moon.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  It's about 24 hours, a little bit more than that.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a day on the moon is 29 days. Day and night, and a day on Mars is like Earth, 24 hours. So would we have Mars cows? Mars farm animals?

• 11:15Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  They would need spacesuits.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a funny picture.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Try milking a cow in a spaceship.

• 11:32Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, how would they have enough water? That's a, I mean, you went just for eight days, so I could imagine that, but how would you have enough water to not come back to Earth?

• 11:40Speaker 03

  There's a lot of water on Mars, and you can see it on the north pole and the south pole.

• 11:45Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, you could go and get it.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's got ice caps.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Well, no, it's down underneath.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Even below the surface at lower latitudes, you can drill it, drill down.

• 11:53Eugene Mirman?

  And you think, and it's water like our water is, or it's water like it's irradiated and you'll get a Martian flu that you didn't bring the medicine cabinet for? Or you just drop a little iodine, like it's the Appalachian Trail of Mars.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure H2O is H2O wherever in the universe.

• 12:10Eugene Mirman?

  And you're pretty sure it's H2O on Mars and not like H2222O? Almost what we can drink, oops, I'm dead.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  There is something called CO2.

• 12:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, don't drink that.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  No, that's.

• 12:25Eugene Mirman?

  That will make you gassy.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  It's colder than water, I think.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  How, how would we maintain the attention of people on Earth? Because we've proven ourselves over the last 50 years to have a great capacity for being jaded with stuff almost instantly. So you think about the Apollo programs. We went to the moon a few times, and that seems to be all the two people to go, oh yeah, that thing we do. How would we get a colony on Mars to entertain us enough so we wouldn't just assume, oh yeah, there's that colony, I wonder what they've been up to? Probably that cow weird, cow milking thing.

• 13:01Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  That was fun the third time I saw it, and then I just got bored.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  You think we're the kind of nation that's gonna send people to someplace at Mars and then forget it?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Not to forget it, but, but I worry that part of a space program now is, the, the key is how to entertain people. It's depressing as it is to say how to entertain people here enough to sustain their interest, because we've become such appalling human beings.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Have you got some tapes of your comedic stuff? Maybe we could send them.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  I would like to know what it felt like to completely die on another planet.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buzz, what are your views on terraforming?

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Takes a long time to do it.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you don't think that's a realistic between step?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Well, I think you can gradually modify things. You can get the soil and you can put some water on it and probably grow things. I'm convinced you can.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah. You'd have to like do it over the whole planet and have the plants get oxygen?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  No, like a greenhouse.

• 14:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, a bubble, a HAB module of some kind.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Neil, can you remind Eugene, you're not telling us. Can you remind us what terraform is?

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, sure.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Terra, terra.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Terra.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Terra, that's the Earth.

• 14:28Eugene Mirman?

  They did like Star Trek III where they were like the searchers where they're like the Genesis program.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it was a Star Trek.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  So that is what it is?

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm just reminding you that it was a Star Trek.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Okay, that jogged the memory, I definitely.

• 14:42Eugene Mirman?

  You just blow up a planet and turn it into Earth and then the Klingons are like, "Ah!"

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Genesis planet, where the Genesis plan was they could take a planet and turn it into an oasis, an Eden, if you will, and then you come in after and live there.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  So Carl Sagan's idea was that you would sprinkle very, very fine black dust on the south polar cap, which is made out of frozen carbon dioxide. It would absorb more heat from the sun, it would evaporate into the atmosphere.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because being white, it reflects most of its energy from the sun.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Make it a little dark, it absorbs.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  And so you liberate all that frozen CO2 to go into the atmosphere. You thicken up the atmosphere and then you can start making Mars more Earth-like.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, you thicken it with CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, trapping more solar energy, warming up the Martian temperature.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  But so, here's two problems with that. Mars is only half the size of the Earth and it has 38% of the gravity, so how does it hold on to that atmosphere? And it has no magnetic field to speak of, so the solar wind, these subatomic particles from the sun, are sandblasting that atmosphere away. So even if you can evaporate all that CO2 into the air, how do you keep it?

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so terraforming has issues, but to Buzz's point,

• 15:54Eugene Mirman?

  I can do it.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you make a bubble, the bubble is insulated and that's like the Earth bubble, right? It's the Earth bubble. Then you put your cows in there and you don't have to milk them with...

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Dome cities, you're living in a dome.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dome cities.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  What holds the dome up? Air pressure.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Do you think that people would come? We've seen the pictures of what Mars looks like. And I, you know, I love Mars as a planet as much as anybody. But to look at it every day with the brown dust and the brown sky, which is the dust floating in the air. You think people would learn to love that? People who came from the Earth? Their children, their grandchildren? Would they start to feel like that's home?

• 16:34Speaker 03

  They will be the most remembered, the most talked about pioneers that have ever set foot on Earth. Because they pioneered something that nobody ever did, and they carried it out. The leader who makes a commitment for human beings on the planet Earth. How long we been here? We came down from the trees, whatever, and we've done kind of piddling things. But all of a sudden...

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Couple of cool things, I think.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:08Eugene Mirman?

  Earth's 5,000 years old, but anyway.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Now, thousands of years in the future, the person on Earth that kind of pushed human beings to go and establish a settlement that began to grow and grow. You don't think that's a small thing in the history of mankind?

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Oh, I do, but I think I'm asking for the people who are actually living on Mars. Will they feel that they are happy in their lives?

• 17:38Speaker 03

  There'll be more movies written about them, more books and everything.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's like Leica the dog. Leica died, but it was a mutt stray dog running through the streets of Moscow. And now it's more famous than like Lassie. Alright, so if I were a mutt dog, I'd want to die in space, because people would like talk about me.

• 18:01Eugene Mirman?

  They'll be the velvet underground of space exploration.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  If only that dog could understand the concept of fame and not just the concept of, "Oh my god, what's happening to me?"

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buzz, do you want to go to Mars?

• 18:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No?

• 18:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're writing books about sending people to Mars one way. Why can't you go to Mars?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  It's not one way. It's permanent, settled. It's a movement outward.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why don't you want to be on that first colony?

• 18:47Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna be around that long.

• 18:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you were around that long, would you go?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Probably not.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  But, but, how many people are there here on Earth?

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billions.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  They're a bunch of crazies that would want to go and do that.

• 19:04Eugene Mirman?

  You want to send crazy people... You want to send Donald Trump. Wealthy, crazy, fancy.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Donald Trump, Chad Ocho Cinco. It's quite a team that you could put on up there.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  I want to see what the hair does in Zero Grav.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so to Buzz's point. There was a... Was it a survey or some kind of a poll taken? And people were asked, "If we could send you on a one-way trip to Mars, would you go?" And there was no shortage of people who wanted to go. And perhaps not all of them are crazy. Right. They just liked the adventure. Like the people who dangle off of cliff faces and climb Mount Everest. Like they'd want to do something where their life is at risk.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  Would you do that? You asked me, now would you?

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, you asked...

• 19:47Speaker 03

  I mean, you gotta do something in this life of yours.

• 19:52Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wow. You really should have been looking at us when you said that.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm trying, Buzz.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  He just... He just talked to you like your parents at Thanksgiving. Come on, Neil, do something. It was an expensive education we paid for. You can't play with planetariums the whole life.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  You ought to spend the rest of your life looking at a dome over you.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I could bring my family and get a good Netflix account and some books...

• 20:21Eugene Mirman?

  Ten minutes for it to get there, though.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My wife is very well-educated. We can both totally space school... Space... Homeschool, spaceship school our kids. So, then it's a family trip. I could totally do that.

• 20:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but your kids would be furious.

• 20:38Eugene Mirman?

  They were like, "Yeah, we know all this math now. We have no access to any movies." Before right this moment.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Teach us again how great Earth was.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buzz, three years ago, I was asked by the NewsHour, their online edition, to tell them what I thought were the biggest news stories of the year in science.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  Are they still waiting?

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so they expected, I think, a traditional response. "Oh, the discovery of this." A month before they asked me that question, this is December, Russia came out with an announcement that they were going to fund a mission to deflect asteroid Apophis. This is this 300-meter-class asteroid, size of the Rose Bowl, that pretty much has Earth in its sights. And I thought, "That was the biggest news story of the year." Because they went around saying, "Who's gonna join us?" And America said, "Yeah, we'll join you." And I thought, "Wait a minute, something's wrong." Or something doesn't feel right about that because it means somebody else is leading a space mission and we're following. And I'll share your sentiment here. Where I think it's better to lead,

• 21:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  particularly if you have the talent and the resources and the finance. Lead! Especially if the consequence is you save Earth.

• 21:59Eugene Mirman?

  You could have one ton of obey if you'd saved the Earth.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Buzz, how do you... Yeah, how do we use your celebrity to get America to lead again?

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Do something that nobody else is gonna do. Do what Dennis Tito is saying he's gonna do. He's gonna fly around Mars. If you do it, you're a leader.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but that's, you know... As they said in my neighborhood, you know, I can't repeat it here, but...

• 22:29Eugene Mirman?

  What's the gist of it, though?

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, what's the gist of it?

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The gist of it is, is something walks and something else talks.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  Money talks and...

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, and baloney sandwiches walks. So I'm asking, is he gonna succeed? It's one thing to lead, to say you're gonna lead, and then you just die. All right? You know, how about Arnold Schmednick, who was the first person to go to the New World, and then a hurricane took him? We've never heard of him.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Wait a minute, wait a minute.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There he's in the bottom of the ocean.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  We're not even talking about another possibility. Why can't this be an international effort? Why do we have to do it alone?

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To get it done.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  What?

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It won't get done.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  The thing is, there is something in that though. The way you talk about harnessing asteroids and so on. I'm sure it all sounds fiscally very smart and, or maybe we could go up a little bit cheaper. But there is something about doing something borderline insane that does actually inspire people. Going to the moon was crazy. That was what was so incredible about it. Going around Mars barely makes any sense, so it's kind of...

• 23:39Speaker 02

  It's inherently inspirational. So, having the way Buzz talks is always going to inspire in a way that we could do it cheaper or we could harness energy does not have the same impact.

• 23:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Saying, "We'll do it, because we'll do it, and it'll be great, and we're gonna do it, and it's gonna be fine." I will follow him. You seem great.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, John, your thesis is, the crazier the idea, the more audacious the idea, the more power it has of influence.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  That's what America is built on. It's built on doing something that makes almost no sense to anyone else at the time.

• 24:20Eugene Mirman?

  Certainly not to England.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. It made no sense. We just wanted a little bit of tax... Anyway, I don't wanna go on.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  What you did was unforgivable, but that's not the point.

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Buzz, you like the audacious idea? Absolutely. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Give me five audacious ideas. Do you wanna visit Europa? Not yet, not yet, that's too far away. The moon was far away in 1962.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Sending people one way to Mars wasn't audacious enough for you?

• 25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I wanna hear more, I mean... The colony on Mars, that's audacious.

• 25:14Eugene Mirman?

  The reformation of the original Guns N' Roses.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Okay, flat two.

• 25:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had two.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  So, third one. That just shows how jaded we get, though. Because he's proposing a colony on Mars and you want four other ideas.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's do that. You can't be bored by that. Sure, that's one buzz.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  One is fine when it's that.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  But here's the thing about Mars that's so neat, and this is something that Ray Bradbury pointed out. When you go to Mars, if you can make it on Mars, baby, you can make it anywhere because you've cut the cord with Earth. You have become a multi-planet species and from there, you're on your way to the stars. Once you get the hang of living on Mars, if you can solve all those problems, then the rest of the solar system opens up.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  But Mars is the easiest.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Mars is the easiest.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  It's the closest, it's the most Earth-like.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we learned during the Voyager missions, those old enough in the audience might remember, there were two Voyager missions, and they had enough energy of motion to actually escape the solar system entirely. They're still going. And to their side was attached messages for what we might define as intelligent aliens who would find the craft, and it also gave our return address here, which is a bit controversial. Because you don't give your email address to people you don't want, and here we're giving the address of the solar system.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  You think Facebook is bad.

• 26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, the point is, it was a fortuitous time in the solar system where the spaceship could do sort of triple bank turns around multiple planets and get close-up views before it exited the solar system. From my memory of that era, that was the first time we gave meaning to the moons of the giant planets.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We realized that one moon has a volcano, this has an atmosphere.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Not just a volcano, it's the most volcanic world in the solar system.

• 27:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be Io, I guess.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 27:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Io around Jupiter. So, have you thought about moons? Habitable moons? I mean, why not? No, I've thought about stars. Stars! Stars. So, how do you get to another star? In your lifetime. The speed of Voyager? At that speed? It will get to the nearest stars in seventy-five thousand years. That's somewhat longer than a human life expectancy.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  A little faster.

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how do you pull this off?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Gravity waves. When I wrote my science fiction story, it was zero-point energy. But that isn't as jazzy as gravity waves.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe the emphasis there is on the word fiction in science fiction, is it not?

• 27:57Speaker 03

  The only problem is, in the study of gravity waves, China is ahead of us.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  That's the best thing that could happen.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, who would have thought there's a gravity wave gap in the international politics? So, just to clarify, zero-point energy in the vacuum of space, where there is nothing, quantum physics requires that there are fluctuations in the energy level of nothing. And there's some expectation, particularly from people who would like to write a science fiction story on it, that you can tap that energy rising up into your grasp in the vacuum of space without having to carry fuel tanks with you. So, you want to surf a gravity wave.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  You get the gravity wave in front of you to be a little lower and the one behind, and you...

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fabric of space and time can be distorted in the presence of mass, or any kind of energy at all. And so, if you rapidly disrupt a region of spacetime, you can send a ripple through the fabric of spacetime. So three-dimensional ripple goes out in all directions. So you get two of them, one a little more energetic than the one in front of you, just like Buzz says. In principle, if you know how to ride that ripple, you will go at the speed of light to wherever you want to go. But there's still an issue here. Space is really, really, really big. Vast. Expansive. Possibly infinite. And a gravity wave only goes at the speed of light.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I want to visit the other side of the galaxy a hundred thousand light years away, and I send you and I'm waiting for you to call back, you don't even get there for a hundred thousand years.

• 29:46Eugene Mirman?

  Are gravity waves the thing that can be made or real in any way? Is it just science fiction?

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gravity waves exist. We know what makes them. We don't have the power to make them the way nature makes them, but it's certainly legitimate material for a science fiction.

• 30:01Eugene Mirman?

  Is it something that we could eventually make?

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we...

• 30:04Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We would need much more energy than anything we could possibly dig out under the sands of the Middle East. So, so I like it.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  How about if you frack... can you frack? Gravity waves?

• 30:15Eugene Mirman?

  Can you frack a gravity wave? I think we just started a band.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the news, Dennis Tito wants to send to... what's the latest on this?

• 30:41Speaker 04

  So Dennis Tito had a news conference today. He announced that he and his group want to send a man and a woman from the Earth to loop around Mars and come back in 2018. He is going to put a hundred million dollars of his own money into the project. He wants to get the rest by public donations.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The rest would be most of the money. A hundred million is nothing.

• 31:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A hundred million.

• 31:08Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, sorry, that expression.

• 31:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you go into space?

• 31:14Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you realize when the space shuttle, if it can't land in Florida because it's like thunderstorming and it's got to go to Edwards Air Force Base and it's got to stay in orbit another day, it's a hundred million dollars. Just the extra day it's in space to land.

• 31:28Eugene Mirman?

  It's an insane Kickstarter campaign we're talking about. Unimaginable.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so what is he, how's he gonna do this?

• 31:35Eugene Mirman?

  So...

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If he gets the money, then how's he gonna...

• 31:38Speaker 04

  So, one possible way is, there's a fellow named Elon Musk, who, maybe you guys know about Tesla motor cars, and he also has a rocket company called SpaceX. So SpaceX is the company that is trying to lower the cost of getting into space. They're about to do their second cargo flight to the space station. He's gonna develop a human-carrying version of that capsule. And I think what Tito wants to do is something like, maybe with Musk's company, or maybe with a different company, a capsule on a big rocket, and maybe stick an inflatable habitat at the other end of the capsule. Send the capsule and the habitat off to Mars. Once you leave the Earth, you're committed. You ain't coming back for 500 days.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  And you, and it's gotta happen in 2018 because of the way the planets have lined up to make it the minimum energy requirements. And you aim it just right so that you loop around Mars, and the gravity of Mars bends your flight path to come back to the Earth.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to remind people, you are not aiming for where Mars is, you're aiming for where it will be when you arrive.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  But they'll have GPS or something.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 32:42Eugene Mirman?

  Do you wanna double-check his math?

• 32:43Speaker 03

  A small correction.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that?

• 32:45Speaker 03

  You don't wanna hit Mars. You wanna go past it.

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wanna aim for it slightly near where Mars was, and will be.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  I, I think it's a neat idea, but I mean, he wants to do this in 2018.

• 32:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is he going?

• 32:58Speaker 04

  No, he is not going.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's picked why a man and a woman.

• 33:02Eugene Mirman?

  The fun.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's heteronormal, I think is the word. Is that the word?

• 33:05Eugene Mirman?

  He should pick just any people who wanna do it.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Do what?

• 33:12Eugene Mirman?

  Nothing. I don't wanna say it, if no one here knows. But there's a super fun thing people can do.

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The idea is that the two people are romantically compatible.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yes, and, and he's, and he also made the point, he would like them to have had children and to have been older, because of course, it is likely to make you infertile, that trip. So he wants an older couple.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  The radiation.

• 33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The radiation. Zap your gonads.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is radiation.

• 33:39Eugene Mirman?

  Now you get it! But not zap the fun.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to clarify.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  That's an important clarification.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  So, I'm not talking about...

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It slips some physics in.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to clarify, the sun gives us not only light, and that light brings warmth, it sends charged particles of very high energy, racing off of its surface, and sometimes those come in huge pulses, and they're called solar flares.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  That's actually not the problem with a mission in 2018, because the sun will be at a minimum of activity.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm just trying to say what happens when the particles get here.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  But why is that bad? That's bad because the sun's solar wind acts to screen out galactic cosmic rays when the sun is active. So if the sun is at a minimum of activity, it means you've got a bigger threat from galactic cosmic rays, which, you know, solar flare particles will kill you if you're exposed to them in a matter of days. But galactic cosmic rays increase your lifetime risk of cancer over many, many years.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And which one of those rays makes you the hunk? That's what people want to know.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  So it's risky.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  So we're gonna tell Columbus to go back. Don't do that, because the world is flat.

• 34:52Speaker 04

  I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm saying how do you do it? How do you make a machine that will be reliable enough to function for 500 days without spare parts from Earth?

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buzz, in 1962, did we know? Did we know how to go to the moon in 1962?

• 35:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. There's your answer.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Oh, come on.

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's your answer.

• 35:09Speaker 04

  That's a very facile answer.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fácil.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Fácil. But if we had tried to send somebody to the moon, we decided to go in 61, if we'd tried to send somebody to the moon in 64 or 65 and they died, how well would that have gone over? We took all that time to figure out how to go in a way that wouldn't kill people.

• 35:29Eugene Mirman?

  Kill joy.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So it's not that we couldn't figure out a way to get there. It has to be, like, human-safe.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  Well, it has to be reasonable. You know, one of the comparisons that people use is, it should be about, like, climbing Mount Everest.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The risk.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  The risk factor. You climb Everest, you know, what is it? One in 20 people, one in 50 people don't come back.

• 35:51Eugene Mirman?

  We should have guides that are already there, Sherpas and Mars. They've come here and they guide us on our little walk to Mars. And they're like, "Oh, you're adorable, European man."

• 36:01Speaker 03

  I thought we're gonna parachute people onto the top of the...

• 36:05Speaker 04

  I mean, I think it's a spectacular idea for the long-term future of humanity, but I think we've got to do the groundwork.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the moon is- So that we don't die. Yeah. So that we don't become sterile. What? So that we have food. Kind of interferes with having a colony. I kinda agree with Buzz. Columbus didn't know there'd be land. Why am I not surprised? Columbus didn't know there'd be tree- he didn't know anything.

• 36:29Eugene Mirman?

  He just knew it was India and here he is.

• 36:35Eugene Mirman?

  And it worked out fine.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Live at the Town Hall, everybody!