SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_1: We are live at the Bell House, Brooklyn, New York.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome back to our second segment of StarTalk Live.
SPEAKER_1: Jim Gaffigan, Sarah Silverman, Eugene Mirman, our comedic panel.
SPEAKER_1: And I've got with me my friend and colleague, David Grinspoon.
SPEAKER_1: Dave, thanks for coming up for this.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_2: This is a blast.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_3: Agreed.
SPEAKER_1: So we've been talking about Mars so far.
SPEAKER_1: There's stuff we haven't talked about yet.
SPEAKER_1: For example, there was this planned mission to Phobos, one of Mars' moons.
SPEAKER_3: Phobos.
SPEAKER_1: Phobos and Deimos.
SPEAKER_1: If you knew your Greek mythology, designers.
SPEAKER_1: you would know that Phobos and Deimos were...
SPEAKER_3: Sex acts.
SPEAKER_5: Monsters.
SPEAKER_2: They're the moons of Mars and they're fear and death, which makes sense because Mars is the god of war.
SPEAKER_2: So Mars is surrounded by fear and death, Phobos and Deimos.
SPEAKER_5: Does it have one of those teardrop tattoos?
SPEAKER_2: We don't know.
SPEAKER_2: That's one of the things we would have found out had this Phobos grunt mission worked.
SPEAKER_1: So what was it going to do?
SPEAKER_2: The Russians had this mission.
SPEAKER_2: It was really an awesome spacecraft that would have gone and landed on Phobos, popped around, and it was even taking bugs, earth bacteria to the moon of Mars to see what would happen to it and bring it back.
SPEAKER_5: Why would they bring?
SPEAKER_5: Why would they do that?
SPEAKER_2: To see what happened.
SPEAKER_2: We're really interested in what happens to life in outer space.
SPEAKER_2: And one way to find out is you take life, even just bacteria, on a journey and you bring it back and see what happened to it.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but why did that journey have to actually land somewhere?
SPEAKER_1: You could just hang out in empty space and then come back.
SPEAKER_1: You didn't have to poison another planet with our bacteria.
SPEAKER_1: That's very Andromeda strain in reverse.
SPEAKER_3: Wait, have we taken like the common cold or some bacteria flown into outer space and brought it back to see if it will create Ebola or something like that?
SPEAKER_2: We've definitely taken lots of common cold to outer space, whether we like to or not.
SPEAKER_1: Because your engineers sneezed on the cameras.
SPEAKER_1: So, the bugs spend years in space.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: And you're waiting to see if radiation will somehow alter the DNA and turn it into another species by the time it gets back.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, we're thinking about sending people there eventually, so, you know.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, but mostly kids.
SPEAKER_2: We want to start out with bacteria.
SPEAKER_3: They learn languages quickly, they adapt.
SPEAKER_2: Or really old people.
SPEAKER_5: To me, it just sounds like you're making monsters.
SPEAKER_1: I got to agree with Jim on this.
SPEAKER_4: But that could be what we're here to do.
SPEAKER_1: We've taken bugs we understand and have characterized, sending them to Mars, hoping, expecting that your radiation will alter their DNA, who's going to open the vial when it comes back?
SPEAKER_1: You?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I would.
SPEAKER_2: It's not my job really to do that.
SPEAKER_3: But we should have David Lee Roth do it.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: We should come up with these people.
SPEAKER_3: I would say he'd enjoy it and if something happened, hmm.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it is a weird thing to do, I'll admit.
SPEAKER_2: And, you know, the Russians do things a little bit differently, but it is a really interesting scientific question, what happens to life in outer space.
SPEAKER_2: It's something we have to understand if we're ever going to send people.
SPEAKER_1: Well, I can tell you this, that the history of our thinking about Mars, practically every Mars movie I've ever seen, something bad happened to people there, or Martians came here and vaporized us.
SPEAKER_1: It's bad.
SPEAKER_3: No one ever shows up at Mars and it's just James Taylor singing a song.
SPEAKER_3: And you're like, this is so nice.
SPEAKER_2: Well, the problem is if you pitched that, it probably wouldn't, you know, wouldn't be a good movie.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_3: But that is the reality.
SPEAKER_2: Of course.
SPEAKER_1: So when are we sending people?
SPEAKER_2: When are we sending people?
SPEAKER_2: When do you want to?
SPEAKER_1: Now.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, now.
SPEAKER_1: Now.
SPEAKER_2: It depends what you mean by we.
SPEAKER_2: If you mean by we, the...
SPEAKER_3: By we, I mean China.
SPEAKER_2: If you mean China, then all bets are off.
SPEAKER_2: If you mean NASA, don't hold your breath.
SPEAKER_2: It's going to be decades.
SPEAKER_2: You know, some of these Silicon Valley zillionaires are talking about mounting their own missions, and there are other countries getting in the game.
SPEAKER_2: People were talking about a new space race.
SPEAKER_2: If somebody decided they wanted to, they could be there in a decade.
SPEAKER_3: What if the five of us agree?
SPEAKER_3: Do you think that would be enough?
SPEAKER_3: Or would we need more?
SPEAKER_3: How much do you need?
SPEAKER_2: It depends.
SPEAKER_2: Are you independently wealthy?
SPEAKER_1: So what's the right number of people, do you think, for such a mission?
SPEAKER_1: And how about the sex ratio?
SPEAKER_1: And is it celibate people for three years or do you expect...
SPEAKER_5: How often are they going to have sex?
SPEAKER_3: When we send people there, will they be having sex?
SPEAKER_3: I'm just wondering.
SPEAKER_1: And the mission will be long enough, because it's a year there, you got to hang out there, because the orbital alignment of Earth and Mars requires you wait another couple of years until the configuration will serve your trip back.
SPEAKER_1: So the total round trip is three, four years, right?
SPEAKER_1: So you could like so have babies on Mars.
SPEAKER_2: Absolutely, but the radiation could be a problem with having babies thing.
SPEAKER_3: But they could also stay inside the ship?
SPEAKER_2: No, inside the ship doesn't help you.
SPEAKER_2: Inside the ship could be even worse radiation wise, because a little bit of shielding makes it worse, because the radiation comes in and splatters the atoms apart and makes neutrons, and it's actually worse to have a little bit of shielding.
SPEAKER_3: When you say we could send somebody there in ten years, do you mean to die right away?
SPEAKER_3: We could send somebody there and they would have about four hours, and I hope they have sex during that time, because they're about to die.
SPEAKER_3: So how long could a person live possibly in a shuttle on Mars?
SPEAKER_3: Like a day, a week, a year?
SPEAKER_2: Well, we're trying to figure that out.
SPEAKER_2: Ten years on Mars might kill you, unless we figure out how to make a shelter.
SPEAKER_2: Now, you probably could make a shelter just by going underground, but we're still working that problem.
SPEAKER_5: What if it was a really good ten years?
SPEAKER_2: Well, exactly.
SPEAKER_2: The interesting thing is people have proposed one-way missions, and there have been lots of volunteers.
SPEAKER_2: In other words, would you...
SPEAKER_1: What's the point of a one-way mission?
SPEAKER_2: To boldly go.
SPEAKER_1: To boldly die, right?
SPEAKER_1: No, but why?
SPEAKER_3: People would write songs about you.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, okay, a one-way mission because it's more feasible.
SPEAKER_2: It's cheaper.
SPEAKER_2: It's hard to bring someone back.
SPEAKER_2: Actually, we can't even bring rocks back.
SPEAKER_2: We tried this sample return mission.
SPEAKER_2: We tried to design them to land something, and then you have to bring another spacecraft, fuel it, and then launch it.
SPEAKER_2: It's technically a lot harder.
SPEAKER_1: If I'm going to Mars, I'll want you to do that.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't cost ten times as much to bring you back, maybe two or three times as much.
SPEAKER_1: It's a factor of a few.
SPEAKER_2: It magnifies, though, because you have to bring the return vehicle and you have to bring the fuel and the complexity.
SPEAKER_2: So do that!
SPEAKER_1: Or make your fuel when you get there.
SPEAKER_1: Live in the future.
SPEAKER_1: Have filling stations en route.
SPEAKER_1: This is the future we all thought we'd be in already, and you're telling me I gotta haul it with me?
SPEAKER_3: Land on an asteroid!
SPEAKER_3: Dig in and eat it!
SPEAKER_3: I thought I could already be eating asteroids!
SPEAKER_3: Get on it, science!
SPEAKER_1: When StarTalk Live comes back, we're going to talk about destinations elsewhere in the solar system beyond Mars.
SPEAKER_1: So we've got spacecraft everywhere now.
SPEAKER_1: There's no place left unlooked at.
SPEAKER_1: We got Messenger, and what's it?
SPEAKER_2: Mercury, the little guy near the sun.
SPEAKER_1: Mercury, and so what do we find there?
SPEAKER_2: Well, there's ice at the poles, we think, which is really weird considering the Mercury's that close to the sun.
SPEAKER_2: There's a much stronger magnetic field in the bottom.
SPEAKER_1: Wait, so that would be ice where the sun doesn't shine.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: OK.
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: It would be a crater so deep that no sunlight reaches the bottom of it, so you can trap water there.
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: OK.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, because you go near the poles, and the sun is very low.
SPEAKER_1: It never gets very high in the sky.
SPEAKER_1: So the rim of a crater permanently shadows the bottom of the crater.
SPEAKER_1: And if you put water there, it will never see sunlight, and it will sink into a deep cold, freeze, and remain there forever.
SPEAKER_1: That's why we think there's water on the moon for the reasons.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_1: We also see, you didn't know about Water on the Moon?
SPEAKER_3: By Gil Scott Heron.
SPEAKER_2: No, that's Whitey.
SPEAKER_1: All right, so what else?
SPEAKER_1: Any other top high points of Mercury?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it's got a much more complex history than we used to think.
SPEAKER_2: We used to think Mercury was just a sort of what we call an end member, just a dead, cold, small world, but it's got a complex, long volcanic history.
SPEAKER_2: That's been a surprise.
SPEAKER_2: It's more interesting and much more complex than we thought before we went there with MESSENGER.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so next out we've got Venus.
SPEAKER_1: Who's at Venus now?
SPEAKER_2: Well, there's a spacecraft called Venus Express, a little European space agency.
SPEAKER_2: Because they had like a year to build and launch this thing.
SPEAKER_2: They said, we got a spacecraft, if you can do it quickly.
SPEAKER_2: So they put together.
SPEAKER_3: Why did they have a year to do it?
SPEAKER_2: Because there was a spare from Mars Express.
SPEAKER_2: And they said, whoever can come up with a mission quickly, can launch this thing.
SPEAKER_2: And so they came up with instruments and they sent it to Venus.
SPEAKER_2: And it was actually amazing how fast they were able to do it.
SPEAKER_2: And the thing has been in orbit for years and still working.
SPEAKER_2: So it's basically our first weather satellite at Venus, which is neat.
SPEAKER_5: It's also where we get those razor blades, right?
SPEAKER_2: That's right.
SPEAKER_5: They go up, they get them, they bring them back.
SPEAKER_5: That's some efficiency.
SPEAKER_2: Spin-offs.
SPEAKER_1: So it's monitoring Venus' weather.
SPEAKER_1: The runaway greenhouse effect is there.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, and Venus is a changeable and complex place like Earth.
SPEAKER_1: So Venus has a runaway greenhouse, and there's not even people there.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_2: We can't blame people for the greenhouse on Venus.
SPEAKER_2: Something went wrong on Venus.
SPEAKER_1: Very well.
SPEAKER_1: Venus, we call it our sister planet because it's the same size and gravity and everything, yet it's like 900 freaking degrees.
SPEAKER_2: Some people call it our evil twin because it's the same size as Earth.
SPEAKER_2: It's basically made out of the same stuff.
SPEAKER_2: But it went down this road of extreme greenhouse warming.
SPEAKER_1: It went bad.
SPEAKER_2: Don't let this happen to your planet.
SPEAKER_5: Do you think there are monsters there?
SPEAKER_2: We can't rule it out yet.
SPEAKER_3: Is there like water?
SPEAKER_3: Sorry, is there water?
SPEAKER_3: I should say it under the mic.
SPEAKER_2: Not on the surface.
SPEAKER_3: Not into the drink.
SPEAKER_2: It's 900 degrees on the surface, but there are clouds that are...
SPEAKER_3: It's very hot.
SPEAKER_2: There are sulfuric acid clouds, but there's water in the clouds.
SPEAKER_2: So there is water sort of 30 degrees above the surface in this global cloud deck.
SPEAKER_3: There is no planet you've described so far that it seems great to live on.
SPEAKER_3: You never go like, it's actually like, if you've been to Costa Rica, it reminds me of that.
SPEAKER_3: Everything is just like, it's on fire.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, it's cold like death.
SPEAKER_2: It depends what you're used to.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I'm used to this slash Costa Rica.
SPEAKER_5: Are you into terraforming?
SPEAKER_2: Am I into terraforming?
SPEAKER_2: Well, terraforming is the idea of taking a non-Earth-like planet and engineering it.
SPEAKER_3: We saw the search for a Spock week, didn't we?
SPEAKER_1: It's a Genesis planet.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I think terraforming is a great sort of mental exercise.
SPEAKER_2: It's good to think about because it gets us to think about how we would purposefully change the climate of a planet.
SPEAKER_2: Something we really need to think about because we may need it.
SPEAKER_1: Purposely as opposed to not purposely.
SPEAKER_2: As opposed to inadvertently like we're doing right now.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, someone's falling for liberal propaganda.
SPEAKER_2: So I think it's a valuable exercise to say how would we intentionally alter the climate of a planet?
SPEAKER_1: Geoengineering.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so it's Venus.
SPEAKER_1: What do we have looking down at Earth?
SPEAKER_2: We have a huge number of satellites, weather satellites, land sats, things that are multispectral imagers, things that are looking in different wavelengths at land use and chlorophyll in the ocean.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, Earth is pretty well covered.
SPEAKER_2: We don't have anything like that at any other planet.
SPEAKER_2: We just have these little sentinels, emissaries, out at other planets.
SPEAKER_2: But Earth, we have a pretty good network of satellites.
SPEAKER_2: And those are even the ones that they tell us about, you know, that aren't classified.
SPEAKER_2: There's probably even better ones.
SPEAKER_3: You think like Facebook is?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_5: Google.
SPEAKER_3: Secretly watching us from space.
SPEAKER_2: I think it's Google.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, they're making those, you know.
SPEAKER_5: So there's all these cameras.
SPEAKER_5: They're watching us, right?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_5: That's how it starts.
SPEAKER_5: But then a madman gets control of that.
SPEAKER_1: Then the asteroid belt.
SPEAKER_1: There's like a gazillion asteroids there.
SPEAKER_3: Are you being literal?
SPEAKER_2: That's the technical term, yes.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, gazillion.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: Google's a real thing.
SPEAKER_3: You guys are like, gazillion, it doesn't go above trillion or ultradoodle billion.
SPEAKER_1: He said Google's a real thing.
SPEAKER_1: He's referencing the number Google.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: G-O-O-G-O-L, Google, which is one followed by a hundred zeros.
SPEAKER_1: That's a Google.
SPEAKER_1: And then the company Google decided to change the spelling, and then they messed with everyone's auditory expectation.
SPEAKER_3: They ruined it.
SPEAKER_4: It's like kids are us or whatever, you know.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, they just kind of totally...
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: And a Google to the Google power is a Googleplex.
SPEAKER_1: No, it's 10 to the Google power.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, is that true?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: What's a Google to the Google power?
SPEAKER_1: I don't know.
SPEAKER_1: But it's not a Googleplex.
SPEAKER_2: No, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_3: What happened?
SPEAKER_5: Well, Googleplex fight.
SPEAKER_5: I've seen it happen millions of times.
SPEAKER_3: Anyway, so there is life in sulfuric clouds on Venus.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, we're past Venus.
SPEAKER_1: We're in the asteroid belt.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Because there's a g-billion of them.
SPEAKER_1: A gazillion.
SPEAKER_3: Sorry to be wrong about the number.
SPEAKER_1: So what do we have in the asteroid belt?
SPEAKER_2: Well, we actually have a spacecraft out there now called Dawn.
SPEAKER_2: It's been orbiting an asteroid called Vesta for a while now and getting these really amazing 3D close-up pictures, and this is really like a small planet.
SPEAKER_2: You know, we can get into what's a planet and what's not.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe we shouldn't.
SPEAKER_2: But the largest asteroids are these round objects, you might call them dwarf planets, even if you wanted to.
SPEAKER_2: And it's been orbiting it for a while.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_2: And what's cool about this is that this spacecraft has now left this asteroid and is on its way to another asteroid called Ceres.
SPEAKER_2: And it's the first spacecraft we've ever had that visited one object in space, did a mission there, and then took off and is heading to another object in space.
SPEAKER_2: So it's our first time we've actually had sort of an expedition that could explore more than one planetary object.
SPEAKER_3: Biggest space, Kristen Stewart.
SPEAKER_3: Is that her name?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: This thing is promiscuous.
SPEAKER_2: It's not satisfied with just one asteroid.
SPEAKER_1: So Ceres is like really huge.
SPEAKER_1: It's like bigger than all other asteroids combined.
SPEAKER_1: So it's probably not an asteroid.
SPEAKER_2: Well, this is semantics.
SPEAKER_2: You know, what do you want to call it?
SPEAKER_2: In some ways, it's like a planet.
SPEAKER_2: It's large enough so that it's round by self-gravity.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_1: So beyond the asteroid belt, we get to, there's nothing at Jupiter now, right?
SPEAKER_2: Well, no, but we have a spacecraft called Juno on its way.
SPEAKER_2: Well, it hasn't launched yet, but it's about to be launched to Jupiter, and it's a magnificent spacecraft.
SPEAKER_2: It's going to basically probe the interior of Jupiter by orbiting in such a way that we can measure the gravity and learn what it's like on the inside.
SPEAKER_5: Sounds dirty.
SPEAKER_1: See, the word probe today, you know.
SPEAKER_2: Well, we haven't gotten to Uranus yet.
SPEAKER_5: We can leave if you guys want to be alone.
SPEAKER_3: The amount that science's only sex words is upsetting.
SPEAKER_4: It's a mandatory probe.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: So Jupiter's got Europa.
SPEAKER_1: I'd love me some Europa.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, we don't have any missions on their way to Europa now, but we might.
SPEAKER_2: NASA's top priority for a next big, what we call flagship mission, billion dollar plus missions.
SPEAKER_1: Billion plus would be billions and billions.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: OK, thank you.
SPEAKER_3: I'm sure we just shut down the schools in the states that don't matter.
SPEAKER_3: We could easily afford to do this.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_2: You know how little a billion dollars gets you in this country?
SPEAKER_3: Give it to me and I'll find out.
SPEAKER_3: If any billionaires are listening, please give me one billion dollars.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: So what's in store for Europa?
SPEAKER_2: So Europa is NASA's top priority target for next big mission because it's one of the places where there ought to be life if we're right about what it takes for life.
SPEAKER_2: There's an ocean, we think, beneath this icy crust.
SPEAKER_2: In fact, maybe our solar system's biggest ocean of liquid water there.
SPEAKER_2: So we want to know that for sure and we want to understand...
SPEAKER_1: Kept warm not by the sun.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, kept warm by...
SPEAKER_2: But by the core?
SPEAKER_2: No, no, no, by...
SPEAKER_2: Well, kind of, but it's Jupiter's gravity.
SPEAKER_2: It's the flexing of the moons in orbit around Jupiter's massive gravitational field interacting with each other.
SPEAKER_5: What if, in doing this...
SPEAKER_2: That warms them up and melts that water?
SPEAKER_5: And all the monsters came out.
SPEAKER_1: Jim, that's the fifth planet you're worried about monsters.
SPEAKER_1: Have you not fully come out of childhood?
SPEAKER_5: There's probably monsters out there.
SPEAKER_3: First of all, if there's life there, I think it's reasonable to say they're monsters.
SPEAKER_5: And a lot of those monsters will look like shellfish.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, but we want to find monsters on Europa.
SPEAKER_3: I want to be the first person to eat a space lobster.
SPEAKER_3: Deadliest catch, Europa.
SPEAKER_2: Ice moon truckers.
SPEAKER_1: On to Saturn.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, we have a spacecraft there now called Cassini, that's one of these Energizer Bunny spacecraft.
SPEAKER_2: It got there in July 2004, and it's been making beautiful images of Saturn in the rings, but the most astounding discoveries have been about the moons.
SPEAKER_2: Titan is a moon of Saturn that is one of the most interesting places for astrobiology because it turns out to be a very Earth-like world in some ways.
SPEAKER_2: It's got rivers, it's got volcanoes, it's got clouds, it's got rainfall.
SPEAKER_1: It's got coastlines too, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: It's got coastlines, but it's all made out of weird stuff.
SPEAKER_2: The rivers are liquid methane, the rainfall is liquid methane, the dunes are organic matter blowing around.
SPEAKER_3: Wait, what do you mean organic matter?
SPEAKER_2: Like carbon stuff, the stuff that we're made out of.
SPEAKER_3: Like life?
SPEAKER_2: Maybe.
SPEAKER_3: Rivers of flowing life?
SPEAKER_2: Maybe.
SPEAKER_3: Literally sounds like a James Taylor song.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_3: How long would it take me to get there and I'm like on a bicycle?
SPEAKER_2: It would take you a long time, it's a billion miles away.
SPEAKER_2: It's very, very cold there, but there's a lot going on on Titan.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so what you're saying is, it's temperature is so cold that what we normally think of as gas has liquefied, and what we normally-
SPEAKER_4: Oh, that's happened to me.
SPEAKER_4: I was 16 and I was really, really sick.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: So things that we think of as gas, there is a temperature at which it would liquefy.
SPEAKER_1: That's what's happened on Titan.
SPEAKER_1: So isn't it true that water there is just simply frozen solid so that it's the bedrock of the planet?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, so it's way too cold on the surface for our kind of life because the water is all frozen.
SPEAKER_2: Could there be some other kind of life in liquid methane?
SPEAKER_2: That's an interesting possibility.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe life doesn't require liquid water.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe it just requires a liquid.
SPEAKER_2: A liquid.
SPEAKER_2: And interesting organic chemistry of which there's oodles on Titan.
SPEAKER_2: But underneath the surface, there is a liquid water ocean on Titan.
SPEAKER_2: So there's probably even geological activity that's mixing those organics from the surface down into the ocean underground.
SPEAKER_1: And if it's so cold and it has volcanoes, then these are like ice volcanoes.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: What's an ice volcano?
SPEAKER_2: Well, picture a volcano where instead of magma, it's liquid water coming out and freezing like magma does on Earth.
SPEAKER_1: And it hurls chunks of ice rather than chunks of rock because the ice is the rock.
SPEAKER_2: Another cool thing about Titan, by the way, is if you did go there, I think human-powered flight would be possible, like those machines that Leonardo da Vinci designed.
SPEAKER_1: Helicopters?
SPEAKER_2: Well, no, like wings because there's very low gravity and there's a very thick, dense atmosphere.
SPEAKER_2: So you could probably strap on some wings and go flying on Titan.
SPEAKER_1: If you first-
SPEAKER_4: Oh my God, I would love that.
SPEAKER_2: Was that because I said strap on?
SPEAKER_4: How dare you?
SPEAKER_4: No, that would be up my alley.
SPEAKER_4: If it was temperature control.
SPEAKER_2: But by the way, there's another problem.
SPEAKER_2: If you bring oxygen to Titan, it's gonna explode.
SPEAKER_2: So a person with an oxygen tank on Titan is a bomb.
SPEAKER_2: So you gotta be careful.
SPEAKER_3: On Titan, you would blow up.
SPEAKER_2: Well, if you lit a cigarette or something, forget it.
SPEAKER_2: You're just gonna...
SPEAKER_5: It sounds pretty dangerous.
SPEAKER_5: It's like, geez, maybe we shouldn't...
SPEAKER_5: It's too dangerous.
SPEAKER_2: Well, maybe, but, you know, people like to do crazy stuff.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, people climb Mount Everest.
SPEAKER_2: Let's get to stop people from going to do extreme sports on Titan.
SPEAKER_1: Just to clarify, on Titan, you have rivers of methane, but you can't just take a match and toss it in and explode the planet because there's no oxygen and it needs the oxygen to combust.
SPEAKER_1: Hence your comment, if you bring an oxygen tank, you are a walking bomb.
SPEAKER_2: So we'd have to give some thought as to how to build a spacesuit that you could bring to Titan.
SPEAKER_5: I wouldn't want to be the guy that tested it out.
SPEAKER_2: Let's send some bacteria first, you know.
SPEAKER_3: Then how will bacteria change it?
SPEAKER_3: It will change its surroundings, right?
SPEAKER_2: It depends.
SPEAKER_2: If they could live there, that'd be kind of awesome.
SPEAKER_2: But probably any Earth bacteria we send would not be able to live on Titan.
SPEAKER_1: They would have to genetically engineer bacteria to do this.
SPEAKER_1: You can imagine engineering a species that will enjoy that environment and maybe produce oxygen as its by-product.
SPEAKER_1: It will ignite the methane, that will get rid of it, and make the place good for us to land in the future.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, but you don't want to get rid of the methane on Titan because the methane is the greenhouse gas that keeps it from being even colder.
SPEAKER_2: So I think we have to give some thought to the unintended consequences of your little scheme here.
SPEAKER_1: If you evaporate the methane, then that would warm the moon, not cool it, right?
SPEAKER_2: No, no, no, no, because methane is the main greenhouse gas on Titan.
SPEAKER_1: That's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_1: So you put it in the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, if you get it out of the lakes and into the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Then that could warm it up.
SPEAKER_1: That would be yes.
SPEAKER_3: I am ready to act on this plan, you guys agree.
SPEAKER_2: But not by releasing oxygen.
SPEAKER_2: I think we got to work this out a little bit.
SPEAKER_3: No, no, we're all set.
SPEAKER_3: You guys clearly have it all figured out.
SPEAKER_1: So moons are cool.
SPEAKER_2: There's this other place called Enceladus, which is really awesome.
SPEAKER_1: Another moon of Saturn.
SPEAKER_2: Another moon of Saturn that is spewing water out into space.
SPEAKER_5: It's like someone left the water running.
SPEAKER_2: We need someone to go up there and turn the faucet off.
SPEAKER_2: But it doesn't make sense because this is a frozen icy moon, but the South Pole for some reason is hot and spewing water into space.
SPEAKER_3: Has it been drinking?
SPEAKER_4: What's the water doing in space now?
SPEAKER_2: It makes one of the rings of Saturn.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, there's an E ring which is fed by the stuff squirting out of Enceladus.
SPEAKER_1: So that which Saturn moons spew forth goes into space and it joins the other material to make the rings of Saturn.
SPEAKER_2: And some of it snows down on the surface of Enceladus, which is cool because if we want to see if there's life on Enceladus, unlike Europa where we have to drill down through all this ice, if there are microbes in Enceladus, they're literally snowing down on the surface and you could just go with a shovel and find them.
SPEAKER_3: And scoop them up.
SPEAKER_2: Let's scoop them up.
SPEAKER_1: So, take me to Uranus and Neptune.
SPEAKER_1: We got nothing there.
SPEAKER_3: You're saying Uranus in a way that's like different from how people used to say it?
SPEAKER_3: You're saying like Uranus or something?
SPEAKER_2: You want to hear something funny about that?
SPEAKER_2: One time Carl Sagan told me that-
SPEAKER_1: Name-dropper.
SPEAKER_2: I know.
SPEAKER_2: But he told me that when he-
SPEAKER_3: But if you're gonna do it somewhere, this is a good choice.
SPEAKER_2: When he was in school, the kids got all giggly about calling it Uranus because it had the word urine in it.
SPEAKER_2: So you can't win.
SPEAKER_2: We don't have anything going at Uranus now.
SPEAKER_2: Uranus.
SPEAKER_2: One of the Voyagers, Voyager 2, after it flew by-
SPEAKER_4: I was in a Voyager two-parter.
SPEAKER_4: I didn't think anyone was gonna bring it up, so I just thought I should bring it up.
SPEAKER_3: She was in a two-part episode of Voyager on Star Trek.
SPEAKER_3: Everything's clear now.
SPEAKER_2: That's awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, no, I agree.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: We've only had one mission there, a flyby, in the 80s.
SPEAKER_2: But in NASA's 10-year plan, the decadal survey that they just came up with, a very influential plan for the highest priority missions for the next decade, one of the top priority missions is a billion-dollar probe to Uranus.
SPEAKER_4: We need Obamacare.
SPEAKER_1: All right, and so now we've got a mission to Pluto.
SPEAKER_1: We've got one Pluto fan.
SPEAKER_3: Did you make them change the name of Pluto or just it's not a planet, but we can still call it Pluto?
SPEAKER_1: I didn't make anybody do anything.
SPEAKER_1: All I did, no, no.
SPEAKER_1: All I did was offer insight into how to think about the problem, and what you then conclude is inevitable from the facts.
SPEAKER_3: Sounds like you were mean to a planet.
SPEAKER_3: And then you justify it or something.
SPEAKER_2: That's called bullying.
SPEAKER_2: I had all these kids at the museum coming up and asking me what happened to Pluto.
SPEAKER_2: You know you've been through all that too, but I had to reassure them it was okay.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, Pluto is still there.
SPEAKER_1: But we're headed there.
SPEAKER_1: I'm glad.
SPEAKER_2: Oh yeah, it's going to be awesome.
SPEAKER_2: So it's a little spacecraft called New Horizons.
SPEAKER_2: It launched in January 2006.
SPEAKER_2: I was there at the launch.
SPEAKER_5: It sounds like an airline magazine.
SPEAKER_2: It was incredible.
SPEAKER_5: It's called the Delta Traveler thing.
SPEAKER_5: New Horizons for Horizon Airline.
SPEAKER_3: We'll sponsor it.
SPEAKER_2: There's a great interview with Matt Damon in it, though.
SPEAKER_2: The fastest object ever launched from Earth, because it's got a long way to go, and is most of the way there now.
SPEAKER_2: It's getting there in July 2015.
SPEAKER_3: How long does it take to get to planets and stuff, generally?
SPEAKER_2: Well, how long is it from 2006 to 2015?
SPEAKER_2: But that's a long time, because Pluto is really far away.
SPEAKER_2: It's on the edge of the solar system.
SPEAKER_3: How long does it take to get to Mars?
SPEAKER_3: Mars takes like two connecting flights.
SPEAKER_2: Mars is fast.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, nine months.
SPEAKER_2: That's a gestational kind of time scale.
SPEAKER_1: For the human species.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_1: So, Pluto is in our sights, in spite of the demotion.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: That's a good thing.
SPEAKER_1: However, you're not going to pull into orbit.
SPEAKER_1: This is going to be a flyby.
SPEAKER_1: You're going to wait 10 years and you got like, what, five hours?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it's very, very fast.
SPEAKER_2: It just whips through the system and we don't even get the pictures back right away because it's such a little spacecraft and so far away it takes like a month after we get there to send the pictures back.
SPEAKER_2: But it's going to be really cool.
SPEAKER_2: Pluto, we already know just from the Hubble Space Telescope, Pluto has a varied surface.
SPEAKER_2: It's got light areas and dark areas.
SPEAKER_2: We know it's got an atmosphere that is escaping into space.
SPEAKER_1: A lame atmosphere.
SPEAKER_2: It depends what you mean by a lame atmosphere.
SPEAKER_1: What percent of Earth's atmosphere is Pluto's atmosphere?
SPEAKER_2: It's tiny.
SPEAKER_1: Quantify the word tiny.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know.
SPEAKER_2: You tell me.
SPEAKER_2: It's microbar or something.
SPEAKER_1: One thousandth of Earth's atmosphere?
SPEAKER_2: Is it a millibar?
SPEAKER_3: What do you mean by lame atmosphere?
SPEAKER_1: Lame.
SPEAKER_1: Hardly any atmosphere.
SPEAKER_2: You can say that about Mars.
SPEAKER_2: Mars is as well.
SPEAKER_5: I would just say it was deficient.
SPEAKER_5: I would call it lame.
SPEAKER_5: It seems hostile, really.
SPEAKER_2: That's awfully chauvinistic.
SPEAKER_2: It's an interesting atmosphere because it's streaming off of the surface into space.
SPEAKER_2: We've never actually visited a place with an atmosphere like that.
SPEAKER_2: So I think we're going to learn some new things.
SPEAKER_1: So Pluto's surface is generating its own atmosphere.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_3: And then that atmosphere flies off into space.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: But Pluto's orbit is so elliptical.
SPEAKER_1: When it goes far from the sun, is that when you recover the atmosphere that's left?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, that's what's weird is that Pluto's atmosphere seems to sort of come and go with its weird seasons as it slowly...
SPEAKER_3: It's because of its tilt.
SPEAKER_2: In this case, no.
SPEAKER_2: But you know, Earth's atmosphere is streaming off into space too, by the way.
SPEAKER_3: What?
SPEAKER_2: It is.
SPEAKER_2: Sorry.
SPEAKER_2: Just slowly.
SPEAKER_3: So slowly that it's okay or like...
SPEAKER_2: Well...
SPEAKER_3: Slow slowly that we really need to convince Republicans of it.
SPEAKER_2: No, so slowly that it's okay.
SPEAKER_2: But it's a normal thing.
SPEAKER_2: It's a normal healthy thing for a planet to be losing atmosphere.
SPEAKER_1: So this mission ought to keep the Pluto lovers happy in spite of the demotion, right?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, the demotion thing, as you know, it's fun to talk about, but it's really kind of silly from a scientific standpoint.
SPEAKER_2: It doesn't reflect really what we've learned about Pluto.
SPEAKER_2: In a way, it reflects what we've learned about the rest of the solar system and the rest of the universe.
SPEAKER_2: And ourselves.
SPEAKER_2: You know, the demotion doesn't change the scientific interest in Pluto.
SPEAKER_1: The more we learn about Pluto, the more we learn about ourselves.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, yeah, it's a kind of place we've never been before.
SPEAKER_2: So we're pretty excited.
SPEAKER_1: So, what are the prospects for life on the exoplanets that are now joining the catalogs of what we know to exist in the galaxy?
SPEAKER_2: I would say almost 100%.
SPEAKER_2: In other words, if you believe there's no life on any exoplanet, then it's almost like being a creationist.
SPEAKER_2: You have to think that there's something so special, so remarkable about Earth, that's not gonna be met anywhere in the, say, billions and billions.
SPEAKER_1: Billions and billions of...
SPEAKER_2: Of worlds out there.
SPEAKER_2: And that just seems incredibly unlikely.
SPEAKER_2: If that were true, it would mean there's something astounding about this planet.
SPEAKER_2: But nothing that we've learned about the history of life, about what we think we know about the origin of life, about the conditions for it, suggests that that's true.
SPEAKER_1: How about a probe out to leave our solar system and go to another star system?
SPEAKER_2: It's gonna be hard.
SPEAKER_2: The stars are very far away.
SPEAKER_2: They're not just far away, you know?
SPEAKER_3: But what if we could fold space with all the energy of the universe?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: So if there were some new physics that we don't know about, that we discovered, that's one way to do it.
SPEAKER_2: But the thing is, there are some trends.
SPEAKER_2: If you look at Moore's Law, how fast technology is changing, the miniaturization of technology, if we could make a space probe the size of this Coke can that had the sophisticated instrumentation of the Mars Rover, which we probably will be able to do before too long, and accelerate it at close to the speed of light, which we might be able to do before too long, then it's not gonna take that long.
SPEAKER_2: So-
SPEAKER_3: Wait, how do we do that?
SPEAKER_3: Is that a technology we might have to-
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: It's beyond our current capabilities, but I can't swear to you that in 50 years, that will be true.
SPEAKER_5: Like all this work that's gonna have to happen, I don't have to do any of it, right?
SPEAKER_3: Jim, I'm gonna need you to build a Coke can size probe that travels almost at the speed of light, but I'm gonna give you a month to look into it.
SPEAKER_3: Are we sort of close to anything, or are we like 50 years away, or?
SPEAKER_2: No, I mean, what's gonna happen first is that we're gonna learn a lot about the exoplanets with telescopes and with very clever techniques of looking at the light coming from them.
SPEAKER_2: We're already doing that now, and we're discovering them, and we're starting to learn.
SPEAKER_1: So let me offer some reflective concluding comments here, from what I know of the universe.
SPEAKER_3: Which is a lot.
SPEAKER_5: Probably more than I know, either.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, the cool thing about the universe is something can be rare, yet common.
SPEAKER_1: So something can happen one in a million stars, but when you have 400 billion stars, it's happening all the time in the galaxy.
SPEAKER_3: That's why some people have so many marriages.
SPEAKER_1: It's...
SPEAKER_1: And so...
SPEAKER_4: The older we live.
SPEAKER_1: The good thing about the universe is, you can appeal to the sheer scale of the cosmos to improve the likelihood of finding that which is otherwise highly improbable.
SPEAKER_1: And that's the kind of universe I enjoy living in.
SPEAKER_1: I didn't have a choice, but suppose if we had 10 stars in it, then clearly we'd be the only planet with life.
SPEAKER_1: But when you have billions of stars...
SPEAKER_3: Wait, no, because even this year, we have life maybe on other planets.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe so, exactly.
SPEAKER_3: Sorry.
SPEAKER_3: Good point.
SPEAKER_3: Just to clarify the science.
SPEAKER_1: Good point.
SPEAKER_1: I'm with you, we're good.
SPEAKER_3: That's why I'm here.
SPEAKER_1: So, let me clarify the point, that if there are only a dozen stars, you have room for uniqueness in such small systems.
SPEAKER_1: But when you have a universe, a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars, and a universe of nearly a hundred billion galaxies, then it's just a matter of where you're looking and how long it takes before you find something else just like what you wanted to find.
SPEAKER_1: And so, I would say, yes, a hundred percent chance of finding life, because the universe doesn't make anything in ones.
SPEAKER_5: I just hope they're nice.
SPEAKER_1: Jim, of all you heard, where do you want to visit in the solar system?
SPEAKER_1: From what you have learned, from what you can glean?
SPEAKER_5: I thought there wasn't going to be a test.
SPEAKER_5: I guess Mars, because of the blood.
SPEAKER_4: I'd probably say Mars, because everybody's talking about it.
SPEAKER_3: It's, you know...
SPEAKER_5: I heard Brad and Angelina already have a place there.
SPEAKER_4: Mars' ears are burning tonight.
SPEAKER_1: Mars, okay.
SPEAKER_3: I think, was it Europa that was the ice underneath his lobsters?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, shellfish.
SPEAKER_5: That Europa is not the same as that coffee shop on 57th Street, right?
SPEAKER_1: Europa.
SPEAKER_2: I want to go to Titan and go rafting down one of those methane rivers and try not to blow up.
SPEAKER_5: Sounds dangerous.
SPEAKER_1: I foresee a future where we embrace space exploration on such a scale that it's no longer just sort of one mission here or there that the entire solar system becomes our backyard.
SPEAKER_1: And on that note, thanks for joining us for StarTalk Live!
SPEAKER_1: And thank you to the panel.
SPEAKER_1: And I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
SPEAKER_1: Give it up for the NSF.