SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_3: Hello, San Francisco.
SPEAKER_4: Welcome to the 16th Annual San Francisco Sketch Fest, presented by Audible.
SPEAKER_3: Thank you.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, check out my show on Audible.
SPEAKER_4: Okay, it is now my great pleasure to bring out your host, one of America's and the world's great science communicators and educators.
SPEAKER_3: Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye the Science Guy.
SPEAKER_5: Oh, wow, wow, I love you guys.
SPEAKER_6: Well, welcome, welcome, welcome to 16th SketchFest.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_6: Wow.
SPEAKER_6: Are my arms tired?
SPEAKER_6: No, we have a fantastic show tonight.
SPEAKER_6: We have a fantastic show, so we'll do three segments.
SPEAKER_5: Each more brilliant than the last.
SPEAKER_6: And then we'll have questions and answers at the end.
SPEAKER_6: So if you have brilliant questions that occur to you during this exciting evening, there will be microphones up front at the end.
SPEAKER_6: But now, people, it's time to introduce our amazing panel.
SPEAKER_6: First of all, to my right, Eugene, okay, wait.
SPEAKER_5: No, Eugene's got it going on.
SPEAKER_5: Did they already go on about how great you are?
SPEAKER_5: And he's Gene on Bob's Burger.
SPEAKER_6: And his audio show, Hold On, is available on Audible.
SPEAKER_5: Turn it up loud.
SPEAKER_5: Now, now, now, enough with this exciting thing.
SPEAKER_6: We'll start with a, we have a big treat for you.
SPEAKER_6: Is anybody from Down Under, anybody from Australia?
SPEAKER_5: There you go.
SPEAKER_5: And so is Claudia O'Doherty.
SPEAKER_5: Give it up.
SPEAKER_5: She is on the Netflix's Love Show.
SPEAKER_5: Here she is.
SPEAKER_5: It's three in the afternoon for her tomorrow.
SPEAKER_5: Claudia, welcome.
SPEAKER_5: Thank you, Bill.
SPEAKER_6: Then the woman who started this sketching of Festing, who's on FX's You're the Worst and IFC's Stand Against Evil.
SPEAKER_5: Here's Janet Varney.
SPEAKER_5: Blow it up.
SPEAKER_6: And then, you know, StarTalk has a science theme.
SPEAKER_6: So we're going to have a whole science theme tonight from a woman who is a space innovator, a space explorer, a citizen who engages all of us in the joy of space exploration, Ariel Waldman.
SPEAKER_6: Please come out.
SPEAKER_5: Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to StarTalk.
SPEAKER_5: And we're going to have the times of our lives as is.
SPEAKER_5: Welcome, welcome.
SPEAKER_6: How about this theater, you guys?
SPEAKER_6: Isn't it gorgeous?
SPEAKER_6: So let's get started.
SPEAKER_6: Welcome to StarTalk.
SPEAKER_6: I'm your guest hosting guy, Bill Nye, and I'm very happy to be here.
SPEAKER_6: And we'll start, Ariel, we can start with you, right?
SPEAKER_6: Among the many things you're involved in is hacking our way to the future.
SPEAKER_6: Now, I am of a certain age.
SPEAKER_6: And when I think of hacking, I think of, I think of trouble.
SPEAKER_6: I think of interactions that are stressful.
SPEAKER_6: But you're talking about creating things, right?
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, yeah, no, hacking can be good trouble.
SPEAKER_8: You know, hacking is really about modifying things or breaking into things and using them for a purpose they weren't originally intended for.
SPEAKER_8: And you can do that in a good way or you can do that in a bad way.
SPEAKER_8: So we're not exactly talking about hacking into your email tonight here, Bill.
SPEAKER_6: There's not that much in there.
SPEAKER_4: We'll be the judge of that.
SPEAKER_5: And, you know, I'm a germaphobe.
SPEAKER_6: So.
SPEAKER_6: Sorry, Claudia, it's a local reference, all right.
SPEAKER_5: Thank you.
SPEAKER_6: So, you encourage people to modify things for the sake of exploring space?
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, hacking space exploration is really about creating and prototyping new things, things that are maybe not very elegant, but might be very clever, and new ways of doing things that haven't been considered before, a lot of times through multidisciplinary clever.
SPEAKER_4: Disguising yourself as a space suitcase and stowing away on a shuttle?
SPEAKER_8: That would actually be very clever, but not very elegant, so yes.
SPEAKER_6: So, you're on the council of the NASA's innovative...
SPEAKER_8: Advanced Concepts.
SPEAKER_6: And so, how did you get that gig?
SPEAKER_6: That sounds cool.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, it came through a kind of weird way.
SPEAKER_8: I mean, through my own experience getting the career that I have...
SPEAKER_5: Okay, what's your career?
SPEAKER_9: Yeah.
SPEAKER_8: I'm a space activist of sorts.
SPEAKER_6: Of sorts.
SPEAKER_8: Of sorts, of sorts.
SPEAKER_8: You know, a lot of what I work on is about making space exploration accessible to everyone and getting scientists to realise how they can collaborate with people outside of their discipline to create better things.
SPEAKER_7: Is that like No Man's Sky?
SPEAKER_7: My mum plays No Man's Sky.
SPEAKER_7: Is that what that is?
SPEAKER_8: Hmm, maybe not exactly.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, but, you know, so I came from a completely non-science background and I unexpectedly stumbled into a job at NASA one day and now, as happened...
SPEAKER_8: I don't know why I'm not relatable.
SPEAKER_6: So you're walking down the street or maybe you were hover crafting down the street and you thought, cool, I want to get a job at NASA.
SPEAKER_6: What did you do?
SPEAKER_6: You fired off an email.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, what happened was I was watching this documentary called When We Left Earth and it was about NASA during the early days trying to figure out how to send people into space.
SPEAKER_8: And the thing that I found so inspiring about this documentary was the fact that all the mission control people they were interviewing were talking about how they didn't know anything about rockets or orbits or spacecrafts.
SPEAKER_5: Just like nowadays.
SPEAKER_5: But it was...
SPEAKER_8: Well, you know, but so it's like I was watching that and I was like, well, I don't know anything about space exploration and I want to work at NASA.
SPEAKER_4: This is literally how we got the president.
SPEAKER_8: Oh no.
SPEAKER_8: I'm a little more humble than them.
SPEAKER_8: But so I got inspired by this and I decided to send someone at NASA an email saying I was a huge fan of what they were doing and if they ever needed someone like me that I was around and I ended up getting a job at NASA from that email.
SPEAKER_8: So...
SPEAKER_6: Whom did you email?
SPEAKER_6: Or you'd have to kill...
SPEAKER_8: You should try it.
SPEAKER_8: No, I had emailed someone that I had never met.
SPEAKER_8: A friend of mine said that they just met someone from NASA and they gave me the email and I...
SPEAKER_7: There are e-holds in this story.
SPEAKER_7: It sounds like a big lie.
SPEAKER_8: I swear, this is all 2008.
SPEAKER_8: And I got a job at NASA Ames down here in Mountain View.
SPEAKER_2: Can I ask...
SPEAKER_8: Thank you, NASA Ames fan.
SPEAKER_2: Can I ask, too, Ariel, and maybe if you know, is what you do when you say that you're a space activist, is that something that there would be...
SPEAKER_2: Was there a version of you from the beginning of kind of US space exploration?
SPEAKER_2: Like were there people who were outside of NASA who were sort of being activists in that way in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s?
SPEAKER_8: I don't think there's been a lot of people over the last few decades because of the way science trended, but in the early days, I mean, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got started by a bunch of crazy people experimenting with rockets.
SPEAKER_4: How crazy, like, Sid Barrett?
SPEAKER_6: No, it was started by the guy, the explosives guy who was mixing fuels, Parsons, yeah, the Jet Propulsion Lab.
SPEAKER_6: And so you say no one knew anything about rockets, for crying out loud, somebody must have had a clue.
SPEAKER_8: They were interviewing these people who were in their 20s, who were getting jobs at NASA in the early 1960s.
SPEAKER_8: And the reality of trying to send a human into space was that they didn't, the people they were hiring, they didn't know anything about orbits and rockets.
SPEAKER_8: They were figuring it out as they went along.
SPEAKER_4: But they weren't interviewing like the Trogs, they were interviewing like, sort of scientists of some sort, right?
SPEAKER_9: People were swapping, great band reference, but.
SPEAKER_8: These were people who worked in mission control, you know, during the Apollo era, during the Gemini and Mercury eras.
SPEAKER_7: And so do you have a science background before you emailed this great email that got you the job at NASA?
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, so I don't, I went to art school and got my degree in graphic design.
SPEAKER_2: This is amazing.
SPEAKER_6: But it shows you that people of all kinds are required for this endeavor of space exploration.
SPEAKER_8: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_7: To paint our ways into space.
SPEAKER_6: Well, seriously, you want, I bet you want some spaces, some, that's a hilarious reference.
SPEAKER_6: You want some interior things to look nice.
SPEAKER_6: You want to have a nice design.
SPEAKER_6: You want ergonomic shapes and stuff.
SPEAKER_8: I mean, that's what Virgin Galactic is certainly trying to do.
SPEAKER_6: So...
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, I won't go into space unless it looks cool.
SPEAKER_8: Space isn't enough.
SPEAKER_2: That's my thing.
SPEAKER_1: That's where I stand.
SPEAKER_6: But this is, the thing is that NASA reached out to you because they want to get people from outside the building, from outside their box.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_8: They were, it was a very serendipitous experience because the day that I had emailed NASA, they had just posted a job description looking for someone who explicitly had no experience with NASA because they wanted to sort of bridge that gap and create collaborations between communities inside and outside of NASA to create more new, clever, awesome stuff.
SPEAKER_7: Do you think they were just looking for someone who wasn't a total nerd?
SPEAKER_8: I think they may have failed when they hired me then.
SPEAKER_6: You have your own nerdy proclivities.
SPEAKER_8: It's true.
SPEAKER_6: So we just think about, you know, through history, William Herschel was, it was a conductor, an orchestra conductor, music director, Charles Darwin, they say flunked out of medical school.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, because at the time nobody believed his stuff.
SPEAKER_6: And Thomas Edison was a salesman.
SPEAKER_6: Einstein was a patent clerk.
SPEAKER_6: And you're a space activist.
SPEAKER_6: Right there.
SPEAKER_6: What?
SPEAKER_6: What are you looking at?
SPEAKER_6: So you worked at the CoLab.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_8: So CoLab was the program at NASA Ames that was trying to get amateur astronomers to collaborate with astronomers at NASA and trying to get different missions to open up their data, which a few years ago was still quite a surprisingly monumental task to do.
SPEAKER_6: So when you say amateur astronomers, one of...
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, what does that mean?
SPEAKER_4: What is an amateur astronomer?
SPEAKER_4: What's the difference between me who looks into the sky and an amateur astronomer who knows something about what he sees?
SPEAKER_8: I think it depends on who you ask.
SPEAKER_8: I mean, I think the amateur astronomer community would say, there are people who have telescopes, they own their own telescopes and they actually do observations and they actually submit them to NASA or other organizations for further looking.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, isn't that a thing where you can sort of take, you can volunteer as a layperson to take a chunk of sky?
SPEAKER_2: I'm sure that's the official term.
SPEAKER_2: That's right, no, no, that's right.
SPEAKER_2: Take it and put it in your purse.
SPEAKER_2: Sky chunkers, they call it.
SPEAKER_2: Where you can sort of be a response, you can look from home and say, I found this.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, no, there's a lot of programs out there from observing stars to observing even just light pollution, anything where you're just observing parts of the sky and submitting it so that you can create sort of a collective database and kind of expand our knowledge on any of those topics.
SPEAKER_4: If I sent an email that said like, I found the Big Dipper again, like how long before they were like, please stop emailing us about the Big Dipper.
SPEAKER_8: Good thing with federal agencies is they can't exactly tell you to stop emailing them.
SPEAKER_3: Get ready now.
SPEAKER_4: Because I just found the Big Dipper again.
SPEAKER_6: So, we say this all the time, the difference between amateur astronomers and astronomers is not the same as the difference between amateur tennis players and professional tennis players.
SPEAKER_6: Amateur astronomers, by long tradition, contribute a great deal.
SPEAKER_6: You know, the hail bop comet and whatever.
SPEAKER_6: These guys are just, that's cool.
SPEAKER_6: So, even so, though, those communities can get isolated.
SPEAKER_6: Like the amateur astronomer, astronomer community can get isolated from the normal people.
SPEAKER_2: I think you just isolated them both.
SPEAKER_4: I'm very isolated from the amateur surgeon community.
SPEAKER_5: That's just what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_6: An amateur surgeon doesn't get a lot of work.
SPEAKER_4: That's...
SPEAKER_4: I know.
SPEAKER_2: They have to make their own work, Eugene.
SPEAKER_8: So, I helped sort of facilitate these collaborations, and I consulted with a lot of the missions on how to make their data open, but also accessible.
SPEAKER_8: So, one of the-
SPEAKER_6: What mission, for example?
SPEAKER_8: So, the LCROSS mission, the mission that, if you remember a few years ago, there was in the news a big article about-
SPEAKER_8: NASA's bombing the moon, you know?
SPEAKER_8: That was all the headlines, and everyone was freaking out at NASA that they were bombing the moon, but they were actually just impacting it with a small spacecraft, and sort of looking at the surface of the moon from the debris.
SPEAKER_8: And so, one of the problems in science, and with NASA, is that a lot of times they think just opening up their data and just putting it out there and doing nothing else with it is making it accessible, but that's not really true.
SPEAKER_8: It's not really until you build interfaces and actually think through how people can use this and make it more accessible so that people with non-technical backgrounds can still do interesting things with the data, does it truly make it accessible?
SPEAKER_6: So when you say data, what are you talking about, pictures?
SPEAKER_8: Sometimes pictures, sometimes spectrum analysis.
SPEAKER_8: You know, it depends on the spacecraft.
SPEAKER_4: If you had an art background, how did you learn all this science, or is that?
SPEAKER_8: I'm a fast learner.
SPEAKER_8: You know, it's funny, getting a job at NASA, for me, was like getting paid to go to school.
SPEAKER_8: I got to learn about dark matter and robots and all this stuff all the time, and it was just amazing.
SPEAKER_8: And you know, the science, learning the science was actually, you know, not, it didn't take me that long.
SPEAKER_8: It was learning the politics that took much longer for me to learn.
SPEAKER_8: You know, working for the government is no small thing.
SPEAKER_6: But speaking, you don't work there now, speaking of that.
SPEAKER_8: I advise them now, yeah.
SPEAKER_8: But I don't work for them.
SPEAKER_4: That sounds like the best of both worlds.
SPEAKER_9: It kind of is.
SPEAKER_4: This is what you should do, but I'm going to go now.
SPEAKER_9: It's pretty much it.
SPEAKER_6: I told you, I told you.
SPEAKER_4: That's my role in Aerosmith.
SPEAKER_6: But you're working on the future of human spaceflight?
SPEAKER_8: So I was on a National Academy of Sciences committee about the future of human spaceflight and telling Congress and NASA and the White House about how to build a sustainable human spaceflight program out to the 2050s.
SPEAKER_6: And did they?
SPEAKER_8: Well, we're not in the 2050s yet.
SPEAKER_6: Yeah, good point.
SPEAKER_6: How many people want to go to Mars?
SPEAKER_4: As a civilization or personally?
SPEAKER_6: That's a great question.
SPEAKER_6: Can I expand on that?
SPEAKER_6: Unpack that for us.
SPEAKER_4: I would love it if someone here or elsewhere went to Mars.
SPEAKER_4: And I think I would stay, but I would love the information back.
SPEAKER_2: Well, if you look under your chairs, you've all won a trip to Mars.
SPEAKER_5: Now, we'll talk about Mars in a little while.
SPEAKER_4: That's what they all say.
SPEAKER_7: What a Romanist.
SPEAKER_6: Does the NIAC still exist?
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, the NIAC is still around.
SPEAKER_6: But you were saying that something that you worked on, the CoLab doesn't exist anymore.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, CoLab, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_6: She had a grimace from the radio listeners.
SPEAKER_6: It was a grimace.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, CoLab, the program, unfortunately, didn't last.
SPEAKER_8: But the people who started CoLab went on to do a lot of awesome things.
SPEAKER_8: One of them actually went on to found a startup here in the Bay Area called Planet Labs that does small satellite exploration.
SPEAKER_6: We're all about that.
SPEAKER_4: What's small satellite exploration?
SPEAKER_8: Small satellites exploring.
SPEAKER_4: Sorry.
SPEAKER_4: I should have said, how does that work?
SPEAKER_4: And does it mean for people to send small satellites or companies or…
SPEAKER_8: This is a startup, so they have a constellation of small satellites that are the size of a loaf of bread that they send up and they try to get a full picture of the Earth every day.
SPEAKER_8: So instead of only getting a full picture of the Earth on Google Maps, once every few weeks or months, they are trying to do it every day.
SPEAKER_6: So you need a constellation of spacecraft.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah.
SPEAKER_7: Do you miss the guys from CoLab?
SPEAKER_8: Do I miss them?
SPEAKER_7: Yeah.
SPEAKER_8: Well, I still see them.
SPEAKER_7: You stay in touch?
SPEAKER_7: Because you have a big party on the last day of CoLab?
SPEAKER_8: I don't know if it was a party so much, but yeah, no, I still see them.
SPEAKER_4: Was there wine?
SPEAKER_7: Were there more than six people?
SPEAKER_8: CoLab was, I think the actual program was a small group of people, but it had a pretty expansive network across NASA, sort of having NASA ambassadors at each location.
SPEAKER_4: I love that you're avoiding whether you had a party.
SPEAKER_4: If there was a web of ambassadors, I won't say if there was wine.
SPEAKER_6: So what does NIAC do?
SPEAKER_6: What kind of things does NIAC do?
SPEAKER_8: So NIAC, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, is the only program at NASA that funds the more science fiction-like, out there, you know, the cool stuff.
SPEAKER_8: The cool stuff that could transform future space missions over the next 10, 20 years.
SPEAKER_4: Like robots that eat babies or what's like the good side?
SPEAKER_7: But, you know, just like bad babies.
SPEAKER_8: More things like, you know, using comets as propulsion systems or how humans might hibernate on the way to Mars.
SPEAKER_2: Or turning loaves of bread into small satellites.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: I've been listening.
SPEAKER_6: I have a list of some of the price.
SPEAKER_6: Super Ball Bot?
SPEAKER_8: Super Ball Bot.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah.
SPEAKER_8: So Super Ball Bot is a planetary rover that uses tensegrity, which is essentially tension.
SPEAKER_8: And by using like sort of a matrix of joints and tension between those joints, it can sort of bounce on different planetary surfaces.
SPEAKER_8: And they think this might be a really cool rover to use, rover of sorts to use on places like Titan, where it's kind of more swampy.
SPEAKER_8: So this would be a rover that wouldn't actually get stuck because it can sort of bounce around.
SPEAKER_8: And its tension structures means that it can crawl up hills and do things that...
SPEAKER_6: So it's motorized tensegrity?
SPEAKER_8: So it's sort of actuators with joints and...
SPEAKER_4: What do you think an actuator is?
SPEAKER_4: Like I have an idea, but what do you think?
SPEAKER_8: So actuators actually can extend and contract the tension in this particular planetary...
SPEAKER_4: Solid guess?
SPEAKER_4: Did I thank you for it?
SPEAKER_6: No, so tensegrity, everybody, goes back to Buckminster IV.
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, Buckminster IV, Bucky.
SPEAKER_6: Anyway, this was the guy that came up with the geodesic dome.
SPEAKER_6: And so he had this other thing where you have all the structural members that are in compression are sticks or solid and everything that's in tension is just a rope or string.
SPEAKER_6: So they look really cool because none of the stiff rods or whatever touch each other.
SPEAKER_6: They're all held apart by very tight ropes or cables.
SPEAKER_6: And so they are very springy and bouncy because all those ropes are stretchy and boingy.
SPEAKER_6: And so then an actuator-
SPEAKER_4: I can't tell if you're flirting with me or-
SPEAKER_6: It's the way nerds talk sometimes.
SPEAKER_6: Then an actuator, everybody, if you've ever seen a bulldozer, the shiny thing that actuates.
SPEAKER_4: That's where it falls apart.
SPEAKER_2: What is this bulldozer you speak of, is that-
SPEAKER_6: No, you've seen the really shiny rods that push the shovel up and down?
SPEAKER_2: No, still no.
SPEAKER_4: Sorry, I graduated high school with a 2.1.
SPEAKER_8: Are you saying actuators, how do they actually work?
SPEAKER_4: I was asking really what it was.
SPEAKER_4: Because I don't know, but that's not that weird.
SPEAKER_6: They extend, a rod extends out of a tube.
SPEAKER_6: It tracks into a tube.
SPEAKER_6: So if you have a bunch of rods that extend in and pull in and pull out, in a coordinated fashion.
SPEAKER_2: He is for sure flirting with you now.
SPEAKER_2: I'm 100% sure.
SPEAKER_4: I believe you're literally describing space ding-dongs, but I understand.
SPEAKER_5: Let's move to the next item next.
SPEAKER_6: That was going to go to Saturn, to Titan, moon of Saturn.
SPEAKER_8: They think that it might work well on Titan because they've got lakes of methane alongside I guess actual methane rocks.
SPEAKER_8: So you've got sort of like a swampy area on Titan and they think a traditional rover would have problems trying to get in and out of a lot of the methane puddles that exist there.
SPEAKER_7: Yeah, I thought that would probably be the case.
SPEAKER_7: Best to get an actuating bullbot.
SPEAKER_2: Because of the springing and the boinging.
SPEAKER_7: It'll bounce on the space mine.
SPEAKER_7: That's going to be good.
SPEAKER_6: So item next, water walls.
SPEAKER_6: Highly reliable and massively redundant life support architecture.
SPEAKER_8: Yes, so water walls is the concept of actually having walls of water that actually process waste and produce food for astronauts and kind of do it all in one.
SPEAKER_8: And why this was kind of fascinating is because...
SPEAKER_6: Kind of do it all in one.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, so it's doing all of these processes together by using polyethylene bags that are filled with water.
SPEAKER_8: And it can do things like grow green algae for astronauts, which isn't very tasty, but is protein.
SPEAKER_8: And it can do a lot of those things.
SPEAKER_8: And they're looking into it because the current life support systems on the International Space Station are all mechanical, they break down easily.
SPEAKER_8: But if you look into more bio-inspired designs where you more have a lot of, I guess, bags of water processing everything sort of as one cohesive ecosystem, that they don't break down as much.
SPEAKER_8: And then when they do, you can easily replace them.
SPEAKER_3: There.
SPEAKER_3: Wow.
SPEAKER_3: Done.
SPEAKER_4: And so that department does or does not still exist?
SPEAKER_8: Sorry?
SPEAKER_4: The thing that you worked for that was doing that, is that still?
SPEAKER_8: No, this, NIAC is still in existence.
SPEAKER_8: Colab is the program.
SPEAKER_4: It's gone, but water walls are someone's like trying to make it happen.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, water walls is absolutely someone's problem.
SPEAKER_7: How big are the water walls?
SPEAKER_8: I think in the prototypes that I saw, they were just small bags, but I think the concept is that you would actually surround the entire space station walls with them so that they would be sort of encompassing.
SPEAKER_6: A football field kind of thing.
SPEAKER_8: Well, if you put them on an international space station, absolutely.
SPEAKER_6: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_4: How long till I can have a water wall at my house and why would I need it?
SPEAKER_8: Well, you know, it has the added benefit of radiation safety, but you know, you don't need that much.
SPEAKER_4: You know, both helpful and bleak.
SPEAKER_9: Yeah, if you need it.
SPEAKER_6: Now, moving on, orbiting rainbows.
SPEAKER_8: Orbiting rainbows.
SPEAKER_2: She's like, the deadliest of options.
SPEAKER_9: What, they sound adorable.
SPEAKER_8: No, they are adorable.
SPEAKER_8: Orbiting rainbows is literally a concept to throw out a bunch of glitter into outer space.
SPEAKER_2: It's the rave option.
SPEAKER_7: It's so hard to clean up glitter though, so I don't know if that's a great idea.
SPEAKER_8: Well, that is one concern.
SPEAKER_8: The idea is to throw out a bunch of glitter into outer space and then actually shoot a couple of lasers through it.
SPEAKER_8: So you've got rainbows, glitter and lasers.
SPEAKER_7: I bet you guys did have a party and it was pretty good.
SPEAKER_8: And then, you know, and then the concept is by doing that, you're actually creating prisms and you might actually be able to image an exoplanet through those prisms.
SPEAKER_7: Take me back a few steps.
SPEAKER_7: So you're imaging an exoplanet.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah.
SPEAKER_6: You know, with glitter and lasers.
SPEAKER_7: So we've shot a laser into some space glitter.
SPEAKER_7: We're just in so in space.
SPEAKER_2: But imagine yourself like on roller skates just for fun.
SPEAKER_2: It feels like it completes this weird 70s picture.
SPEAKER_7: Probably wearing shorts.
SPEAKER_7: And then you're imaging an exoplanet.
SPEAKER_7: I don't know.
SPEAKER_6: No.
SPEAKER_6: I'm imagining.
SPEAKER_4: Like Kepler-23b?
SPEAKER_6: Is it?
SPEAKER_8: I think the concept was exoplanet, you know, it didn't matter which exoplanet it was.
SPEAKER_7: Okay.
SPEAKER_7: What is an exoplanet, please?
SPEAKER_8: So an exoplanet is an extrasolar planet, which just means a planet around a star other than our own.
SPEAKER_7: Okay.
SPEAKER_7: Great.
SPEAKER_4: Would one example be Kepler-23b?
SPEAKER_8: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: Just checking.
SPEAKER_7: And so if we shoot a laser through some glitter in space, we can see an exoplanet.
SPEAKER_8: What?
SPEAKER_6: Yeah.
SPEAKER_6: So here's what I think the concept was.
SPEAKER_6: I'm jamming here.
SPEAKER_7: Please jam.
SPEAKER_2: Jam it up.
SPEAKER_6: As you know, engineer Bill...
SPEAKER_7: Space jam.
SPEAKER_5: You gently...
SPEAKER_5: Uh-oh.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_5: See, it was a party.
SPEAKER_6: It's all about the party.
SPEAKER_6: So you put the glitter there and you shoot a laser at it, and then you configure the optical properties of the pattern of glitter in orbit.
SPEAKER_5: Then you use...
SPEAKER_6: Then you shoot a telescope at the glitter and mathematically work backwards to use the glitter as a big lens.
SPEAKER_6: Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_6: And you figure out where the glitter is using the laser from Earth.
SPEAKER_6: I'm jamming here, as I mentioned.
SPEAKER_7: Eventually it becomes a really cool t-shirt.
SPEAKER_6: Yes!
SPEAKER_2: If you have more questions, Mariah Carey made a movie about it.
SPEAKER_2: It's called Glitter.
SPEAKER_2: It's Burning Man in Space.
SPEAKER_6: Good to know.
SPEAKER_6: Transformers for extreme environments.
SPEAKER_8: Transformers for extreme environments.
SPEAKER_8: You've got the Autobots and the Decepticon now.
SPEAKER_8: Transformers for extreme environments is a project which wanted to put these shape-shifting reflectors up on the edges of caves on Mars or on the Moon.
SPEAKER_8: By doing that, they could actually reflect sunlight to a rover so that it could go actually explore these caves.
SPEAKER_8: Why this is important is because a lot of times without solar power, rovers can't actually work, and so this is a way of sort of reflecting sunlight to a rover in a crater or cave so that it can actually explore those spaces without turning off.
SPEAKER_2: I feel like I understood that.
SPEAKER_2: We did it!
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, the glitter thing.
SPEAKER_2: We all did it.
SPEAKER_4: I was like, the glitter thing sounds accurate, but I remain confused.
SPEAKER_2: Fascinating, though.
SPEAKER_4: I feel a lot better about humanity hearing about all these projects that are being worked on.
SPEAKER_4: It really is...
SPEAKER_6: So, as we say at the Planetary Society, space exploration brings out the best in us.
SPEAKER_6: By that, I mean humankind.
SPEAKER_6: It brings people together from all walks of life because everybody wants to explore space.
SPEAKER_6: Right?
SPEAKER_6: It's not called dirt talk.
SPEAKER_6: StarTalk, for crying out loud.
SPEAKER_3: It's cool.
SPEAKER_6: We got a lot to talk about.
SPEAKER_6: You also run the hackathon.
SPEAKER_8: Science Hack Day.
SPEAKER_6: Hack Day, which is derivative of hackathon.
SPEAKER_6: We're in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_6: We have Makerbots, Makerfares, we have hackathoners.
SPEAKER_6: So, this is where you take things, you innovate, you make extraordinary new things.
SPEAKER_6: So, we'll be back in a few moments to talk about hacking on the way to Mars.
SPEAKER_6: This is StarTalk.
SPEAKER_6: I'm your host Bill Nye, Eugene Mirman.
SPEAKER_6: You're supposed to be applauding and going crazy.
SPEAKER_5: Claudia O'Doherty, Ariel Waldman, Janet Varney.
SPEAKER_5: We'll be right back.
SPEAKER_6: So, if you remember last time, which was moments ago, we were talking about the charm of hacking, of repurposing a thing to do something new and cool.
SPEAKER_6: And what we all want to do is go deep farther and deeper into space.
SPEAKER_6: And where we all want to go is Mars.
SPEAKER_6: Cha.
SPEAKER_6: So, Ariel, how are we going to hack our way to Mars?
SPEAKER_8: People are doing a lot of things to hack their way to Mars right now.
SPEAKER_8: One of the NIAC projects, actually, that I thought was really interesting was a project called Urban Biomining, which actually takes synthetically enhanced microbes and has them actually break down electronics to be able to use them and reprint them on the surface of Mars.
SPEAKER_6: So, why is this digesting electronic?
SPEAKER_6: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: Wait, are you saying microbes eat a microwave and then recreate a microwave on Mars?
SPEAKER_8: Kind of.
SPEAKER_8: In a sense, it's not that far off.
SPEAKER_8: It's the concept of actually using these microbes.
SPEAKER_8: So, you're going to Mars, you have a lot of electronics with you.
SPEAKER_8: Some of those electronics are going to break over time.
SPEAKER_8: What if instead of just tossing them aside, you could actually feed them to a bunch of microbes and have those microbes in turn poop out copper and other useful materials that you can actually create to create new electronics and new circuits?
SPEAKER_6: Good idea.
SPEAKER_6: Wow.
SPEAKER_2: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_6: No, it is a good idea.
SPEAKER_6: So, you guys, are you hip to this expression e-waste?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_6: Ms.
SPEAKER_6: Varney, you seem deeply concerned.
SPEAKER_2: I can't.
SPEAKER_2: I have pooping copper ringing in my ears, but in a good way.
SPEAKER_4: What's the difference between what you just said and the wizardry of alchemy?
SPEAKER_6: One might be real.
SPEAKER_4: Are you describing alchemy?
SPEAKER_5: No, but I can get it.
SPEAKER_6: It would be a heck of a thing if you had some microbe that would strip a circuit board and get the metal off it.
SPEAKER_4: It eats copper and poops out copper.
SPEAKER_8: It eats mixed metals and can actually then poop out copper.
SPEAKER_8: So, it can kind of refine it so that you can get the exact type of metal that you want to create a circuit or create some other sort of electrical.
SPEAKER_4: Or a bunch of them, some poops out iron, some copper.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, so essentially this is what it means to be sort of synthetically enhanced microbes.
SPEAKER_8: You sort of train them to do certain tasks.
SPEAKER_7: Oh, you just give them a real taste for copper.
SPEAKER_6: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: You're making like a really good copper fidea.
SPEAKER_6: Because e-waste is a big problem, you know.
SPEAKER_6: We grind up electronic circuit boards to recover the metals and they mix together.
SPEAKER_6: They're hard to separate.
SPEAKER_6: A lot of plastic.
SPEAKER_6: It takes a lot of energy.
SPEAKER_6: What if we could hire microbes to do it?
SPEAKER_6: That would be...
SPEAKER_7: Do we have to pay the microbes?
SPEAKER_8: I don't think so.
SPEAKER_4: As long as they're American microbes.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, of course, at some point they'll turn on us and eat us and all that kind of stuff, but like, you know, copper.
SPEAKER_6: So right now, though, we can't really land people on Mars, right?
SPEAKER_8: Not yet.
SPEAKER_4: If we can land them, they'll just die right away.
SPEAKER_2: No, Eugene, I saw that documentary where he lived and he survived for a while.
SPEAKER_2: Good-looking guy, funny.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Remember?
SPEAKER_2: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: You're welcome.
SPEAKER_7: He talks while he eats a lot.
SPEAKER_6: And he listened to disco music the way you do.
SPEAKER_4: What else could keep you alive on Mars?
SPEAKER_6: Well, we have to do an advanced concept research on it.
SPEAKER_6: So people want to go to Mars badly.
SPEAKER_6: Why?
SPEAKER_8: I think people have a lot of different reasons.
SPEAKER_8: In the human spaceflight study for the National Academy of Sciences, we defined a lot of different rationales that people have and discovered that there's no one rationale that really outwins them all.
SPEAKER_8: Some people say, you know, inspiration of students, economic return, national security, but then there's the aspirational ones, human survival or shared human destiny.
SPEAKER_4: Soon it will be the only place with a Planned Parenthood.
SPEAKER_8: Not if we fight, not if we fight.
SPEAKER_7: Kansas screenings, mainly.
SPEAKER_6: No, so everybody, as we often say, going to the moon was motivated by the Cold War.
SPEAKER_6: And so he's not here tonight, but if Neil deGrasse Tyson were here, our beloved, he would say if the Chinese space administration were going to send a mission to Mars, boy, we'd get on it, the United States would get on it in a second.
SPEAKER_6: But the reason that I want to send instruments and then humans to Mars is to look for signs of life.
SPEAKER_6: It would be an extraordinary thing to find evidence of life on another world.
SPEAKER_6: And if there's something still alive, which we presume would be either copper or iron loving microbes, it would change the world.
SPEAKER_6: It would change the way everybody feels about being a living thing here on earth.
SPEAKER_6: It would be wild.
SPEAKER_6: It would be like Copernicus or Galileo.
SPEAKER_6: It would just change the way you feel about the cosmos.
SPEAKER_6: And so that's what the Advanced Concepts business is all about.
SPEAKER_6: It's business, right?
SPEAKER_8: Yeah.
SPEAKER_8: Well, I mean, it's the business of exploration and making sure that we're actually pushing the boundaries and not just only funding things that seem realistic today but funding credible research that could be done even though it can't be applied maybe for a couple of decades.
SPEAKER_6: For a couple of decades.
SPEAKER_6: So when you have your hackathon, hackdays, science hackdays.
SPEAKER_8: Science hackday.
SPEAKER_6: Do people come up with space exploration ideas?
SPEAKER_8: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_8: Sometimes very funny ones.
SPEAKER_8: Some of the hacks that I've seen at science hackdays, one of my favorite ones was an asteroid lamp which someone wanted to create that would actually light up every time a near earth asteroid flew by the earth and it would make a loud sound.
SPEAKER_8: So it sort of was like a near death lamp that you could freak your coworkers out with.
SPEAKER_6: So what sort of sound?
SPEAKER_8: Whatever sound you want but it was a loud buzzing sound.
SPEAKER_8: It was like, you know.
SPEAKER_4: That they conceived of or they built?
SPEAKER_8: They built.
SPEAKER_8: So this was using an Arduino and plastic cups because it's a hackathon and you have to make do with what you've got.
SPEAKER_4: What was the first word?
SPEAKER_8: Arduino.
SPEAKER_4: Right.
SPEAKER_4: So what is an Arduino?
SPEAKER_8: An Arduino in the sense you can think of it as sort of a tiny dumb computer I guess.
SPEAKER_8: It's a way of actually plugging in sensors and connecting it to data sets.
SPEAKER_8: It's very cheap and small.
SPEAKER_8: A lot of people here in San Francisco have probably played with one.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah.
SPEAKER_6: So we want to, when these people hack, do they have Mars in mind?
SPEAKER_8: I don't think they.
SPEAKER_6: And where do you get the materials?
SPEAKER_6: Do people show up with?
SPEAKER_8: It's a bring your own materials event.
SPEAKER_8: You know, with the...
SPEAKER_5: You know, B-Y-O-M.
SPEAKER_8: Well, with the, you know, our asteroid lamp, it was an Ikea lamp, plastic cups, some glue, and an Arduino hooked up to a Twitter feed, you know.
SPEAKER_7: Sounds gorgeous.
SPEAKER_4: Hooked up to a Twitter feed?
SPEAKER_4: Why the last one?
SPEAKER_4: Because it was harassing people?
SPEAKER_8: Yes, with asteroids.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, yeah, no, people created a Twitter feed that actually hooked into a data set that tells you when asteroids pass by the earth, which actually happens fairly often.
SPEAKER_8: But if you didn't know better, you know, it would be the alarm that lets you know to duck and cover.
SPEAKER_7: So, it is a tweet to say now.
SPEAKER_8: It tweets saying, so, the account is called low flying rocks, and it tweets to say how close to the earth are coming, when they are expected, and a lot of other information about them.
SPEAKER_4: So, somebody built a lamp that could terrify them as they slept.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah.
SPEAKER_8: Why not?
SPEAKER_6: Or maybe soothe them.
SPEAKER_6: Maybe it would be just a happy sound most of the time, like a pink noise, and then something would go wrong.
SPEAKER_6: But if you like to worry about things, everybody.
SPEAKER_7: It sounds like a great idea.
SPEAKER_4: No, do you have any stuff we could worry about?
SPEAKER_6: Asteroids are really good for worrying.
SPEAKER_6: They're very unlikely to hit, but they're so-called low probability but high consequence.
SPEAKER_4: Like Trump.
SPEAKER_3: The human asteroid.
SPEAKER_6: So not changing the subject too much, but if you're going to deflect an asteroid, people talk about this.
SPEAKER_6: No, you'd have to see it a long way out, 10, 20 years, 30 years out.
SPEAKER_6: And then you could put like a mirror on it, a shiny, some glitter, some glitter, and it would reflect sunlight and that would change the way it reflects sunlight, and it would change its course.
SPEAKER_6: So you worked on StarShade, right?
SPEAKER_8: Well, I didn't work on StarShade, but that's a project that came out of NIAC.
SPEAKER_6: And what was that doing?
SPEAKER_8: It wasn't deflecting asteroids, but it is about creating images of exoplanets by creating a really long, flower-like, unfurling shade that goes in front of telescopes.
SPEAKER_8: And by doing that, it can block out starlight and actually be able, the telescope can then be able to actually get a picture of the exoplanet.
SPEAKER_8: But this is something that would be very large in space, so like the size of a baseball diamond.
SPEAKER_6: In space.
SPEAKER_6: And then we shoot a telescope right at it to block out the star and then the hopes of seeing the planet behind it way, way out there.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, so one of the main ways that we discover exoplanets now is that we look at starlight and we sort of infer that a planet is going in front of it because we see dips in the starlight.
SPEAKER_8: But we can't actually see the planet itself because we're looking just directly at the star.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, so by blocking out the light of the star and focusing on the planet itself, we might be able to get a picture.
SPEAKER_6: But you guys just think about what we are doing.
SPEAKER_6: I say we, using our intellect and treasure, our society.
SPEAKER_6: We have instruments that can point at a fantastically distant star and see it dim because a planet passes between us and the star.
SPEAKER_6: That's like out there, Matt.
SPEAKER_6: And this would be taking it up another star shade notch.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, this is a dumb question, but because you're talking about ways to sort of amend existing telescopes, have we reached what we're able to do in terms of like, this is as powerful as this telescope can get.
SPEAKER_2: So, this is as powerful as any telescope can get.
SPEAKER_2: We can't figure out a way to make it more powerful, thus we need to hack it, right, and make a beautiful flower cloak.
SPEAKER_2: I like to think of it in a sort of Harry Potter context.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, I mean, in a sense that's correct.
SPEAKER_8: I mean, we can always be building bigger and better telescopes, but I think we've definitely reached a stage where we're looking into how we can augment telescopes or how we can actually create constellations of telescopes to be able to give us more power to do more things.
SPEAKER_6: So, the other thing is, the star is bright.
SPEAKER_6: So, if you're pointing, no matter how small or big your telescope, you're still looking at a very bright star.
SPEAKER_6: This is solving a little different problem.
SPEAKER_6: Use your big telescope to look for the dim planet next to the star.
SPEAKER_6: And just changing the subject back to me.
SPEAKER_6: This Planetary Society flew our solar sail last year.
SPEAKER_6: There are already Kickstarters out there.
SPEAKER_6: Thank you.
SPEAKER_6: For those of you listening on the bus, I am wearing a light sail tie.
SPEAKER_6: And we're going to fly light sail 2 on the next, the second Falcon Heavy, which is the SpaceX rocket.
SPEAKER_6: So it hasn't flown yet.
SPEAKER_6: They're going to go back to flight in a minute.
SPEAKER_6: So they got the Falcon 9 has how many engines?
SPEAKER_6: If you were shooting 6.
SPEAKER_6: That's pretty good.
SPEAKER_6: That's good.
SPEAKER_7: Is it nine engines?
SPEAKER_6: Yes, nine.
SPEAKER_6: And the Falcon Heavy has 27 heavy engines.
SPEAKER_6: It can lift heavier things.
SPEAKER_7: Yeah, yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_4: More space sales, light sales.
SPEAKER_6: Yeah, and more small satellites.
SPEAKER_6: So the light sales, for those of you for some reason are not just totally engaged with the planetary side.
SPEAKER_6: It's 10 centimetres by 10 centimetres by 30 centimetres.
SPEAKER_6: It's smaller than typical.
SPEAKER_7: It's like the size of a loaf of bread.
SPEAKER_6: It's a little smaller.
SPEAKER_6: Yeah.
SPEAKER_7: Well, you know, an artisanal loaf of bread.
SPEAKER_6: With shiny stuff inside.
SPEAKER_7: Exactly, yeah.
SPEAKER_6: And so we deploy the sail and then the light from the sun pushes it.
SPEAKER_6: And you would say, but I thought light has no mass.
SPEAKER_6: How can it have momentum?
SPEAKER_7: Yeah, that's what I'd say.
SPEAKER_4: And then what would you say?
SPEAKER_4: Say a couple of comics or something like that.
SPEAKER_4: What would you say?
SPEAKER_6: I would say that light has momentum and it's a strange and amazing thing.
SPEAKER_6: And so it pushes the solar sail through space.
SPEAKER_6: And I will be going to the solar sail conference.
SPEAKER_4: Is it in space?
SPEAKER_6: It's on the way.
SPEAKER_6: It's in Osaka, Japan.
SPEAKER_6: It's going really fast.
SPEAKER_6: Keep going.
SPEAKER_6: So we're very excited about that.
SPEAKER_6: And that is something that people have messed around with for a long time.
SPEAKER_6: And the idea is you might use a solar sail or something like that in a sort of mundane way to ferry stuff to Mars, right?
SPEAKER_6: Use sunlight to push things.
SPEAKER_6: If you have time, you can get things with no fuel and send them a long distance in the solar system.
SPEAKER_6: But there's also this fabulous idea, star shot, right?
SPEAKER_6: Did that come out of NIAC, out of the innovations?
SPEAKER_8: Yeah, it was based on a NIAC funded project.
SPEAKER_8: So this guy, Philip Lubin, is working with lasers, which is incredibly cool, but he's working with lasers to see how they can propel paper thin wafer size spacecraft.
SPEAKER_6: So you say wafer size, do you mean like a saltine?
SPEAKER_8: Sort of, yeah.
SPEAKER_8: Like, you know, looking at how lasers on a very small scale can be able to propel a spacecraft and instead of going to Mars, actually looking into going to Alpha Centauri.
SPEAKER_8: How far away is that?
SPEAKER_8: You tell me.
SPEAKER_6: I think it's four light years.
SPEAKER_4: How long would it take a cracker to get there?
SPEAKER_5: So that is a great question.
SPEAKER_8: They hope.
SPEAKER_6: That is a great question.
SPEAKER_8: I believe they're aiming for a hundred million miles a second, which would mean you might get there in about 20 years.
SPEAKER_4: And then when it gets there and it's eaten, would we get a signal?
SPEAKER_2: This is a car-based space program, I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_6: You're gonna go four light years in 20 Earth years?
SPEAKER_8: They're hoping to reach about 30% of the speed of light.
SPEAKER_9: Yeah.
SPEAKER_9: Whoa.
SPEAKER_4: These are the fastest crackers you've ever heard of.
SPEAKER_8: Yeah.
SPEAKER_8: So it's something that, you know, like many NIAC proposals, it sounds crazy, but there's nothing in physics that says it's impossible.
SPEAKER_8: And so they're looking into sort of the preliminary, you know, concept studies that can do this.
SPEAKER_8: And so this was a NIAC-funded proposal.
SPEAKER_8: And then along came a billionaire, Yuri Milner.
SPEAKER_8: And he invested $100 million into actually creating a proof of concept of this in hopes that we could perhaps have a very tiny, very thin spacecraft at Alpha Centauri within a lifetime.
SPEAKER_6: So it would get out there and it would send a signal back, a picture in four years at the speed of light.
SPEAKER_8: That's what they hope.
SPEAKER_6: That is extraordinary and just crazy cool.
SPEAKER_6: These are just wild.
SPEAKER_6: No, really, it's fantastic.
SPEAKER_6: So that is a light sail, star shot and star shade are going to derisant.
SPEAKER_5: Change the world.
SPEAKER_6: This has been really cool, you guys.
SPEAKER_5: This has been really cool.
SPEAKER_6: A hand for the panel.
SPEAKER_5: Eugene, Claudia, Ariel, Janet, I've been Bill Nye.
SPEAKER_5: Let's change the world.
SPEAKER_5: Thank you all.