StarTalk Live! from SF Sketchfest 2016 (Part 1)

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Eugene Mirman, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, kids of all ages. We have a fabulous show tonight, an amazing show. We are all going to leave this room spiritually and go to Mars. The man who created Mark Watney, the man who wrote the book about being the Martian. Give it up for Andy Weir. I'm reluctant to say this is the funniest woman on Earth, but she may very well be. Maeve Higgins. Then straight from the best brand of the United States has, from the Science Mission Directorate, Division for Planetary Science, Jim Green. So, Andy Weir, you created this amazing character, Mark Watney, who's, I know a woman who's just super hot for this guy, not for Matt Damon, but for Mark Watney. Well, I'm, I mean, he's based on me, so, just, you know. Now, you wrote this book, you started out online? Yeah, originally, I wrote The Martian as just a series of blog posts. Who was reading it? Well, I'd accumulated about 3,000 regular readers over the course of 10 years of making, like, web comics and short stories and stuff like that. And so, they were my regular readers, and they were a bunch of hardcore dorks like me. And so, there's one in the wild now. There's one now. And so, when I was writing it, I knew I had to be as scientifically accurate as possible, because there's nothing a nerd likes more than calling out scientific inaccuracies. That's hot. Do you still get people coming to you and going like, that's not how you'd go to Mars? Sort of, right? Well, but Jim and I have worked things out now, so it's good. So, along that line, Jim, you, as long as, I mean, you spent a lot of time with Mars. You were there for, you ran Curiosity Landing? Yes, I did. You ran, you ran, you ran, you ran, you ran, you ran, you ran Messenger, which we, oh yeah, went into Mercury. Yeah, absolutely. And I was there for the launch of Juno. Juno is not an acronym. It's crazy, that's, that was. Well, it's Jupiter's wife. And you know, all the moons that orbit Jupiter are named after the, in mythology, named after Jupiter's lovers? Like, the ones he was cheating on his wife with. And now Juno's gonna head on over there. And she's gonna kick some ass, I think. You know, so Juno's on her way. Not to get too far afield there, but. Aren't there 60 moons of Jupiter? Zeus slash Jupiter. He was a busy guy, if you look up the, about 90% of Roman mythology is like, Jupiter, no. Jupiter's like Jupiter, yes. So, speaking of gods, Mars is named after the God of War, which is very troublesome. Why was it named after the God of War? Well, that's a Roman name. You know, prior to that, the Greeks named it Ares. Was that the God of War? Yeah. Yeah. But it's because it's a- If you believe DC Comics. Yes, blood red. Blood red. And you can see it, of course, in January. Beautiful alignment. Go on out, take a look at it. Just before the sun comes up. Yes! So not yet, everybody. Wait. You need to hold on. We're out at 10.30. Stick around. Stay in your seats. So- We've got time. Who's called you Mark? That happens so often, and it's awesome when it's in live radio interviews too, because you can't just, can't correct them, you know? This is live. So Mark, tell us. This is live too? So you finished this novel in 2011, and who approached you? Ridley Scott, who approached you? Yeah, he just knocked on my door. No. Initially, no. Initially, no one approached me. I self-published it. So basically, I had been putting it on my website a chapter at a time until I was done, and I thought, okay, I'm done. We're done with this. On to my next project. And then I got emails- But didn't you have a job during all this? Yeah, I was a computer programmer the whole time. So this was my hobby. Somebody whistled, wow, computer programmer? Now they're interested. Yeah, I'll tell you why base classes always need virtual destructors later. The number of people who left, those are the ones who got it. They're there. Yeah, this is Silicon Valley. Okay, so- It's very specific comedy. So I figured I was done, move on to other serials, other short stories, and then I got email from people saying like, oh, hey, I love your story, but I hate your website, which is reasonable because it's crap. And it's just really ghetto. Self-admitted. Yeah, oh yeah. He's a programmer, just remember. Yeah, I'm a programmer, not a graphics guy. And so they said, can you make an e-reader version so I can just download it and read it on my e-reader? And so I figured out how to do that, and I did that. Did you have an income stream for this messing around? No, this was all just fun. My income stream was from being a Silicon Valley software engineer, which is pretty good. So, don't worry about me. But then, so I did that. I said like, okay, here's an e-reader version, so now you can read it on my site for free or download the e-reader version. And then other people contacted, you know, emailed and said like, hey, love The Martian, hate your site. And I noticed that you have an e-reader version, but I'm not very technically savvy, and I don't know how to download a thing from the internet. And so can you make a movie for me to watch? Does everybody know what happened? Okay, there's a few. Does everybody know what happened? You create a character, you create a whole crew of characters. They're on Mars, one's run 2035 or something like that. Yeah, it's good you check your watch for that. And it's also, it tells the future. Tomorrow, there will be a 749. There will be? There's 54. Two of them. Was there a reason that you chose 2035? Yeah, actually I did all the orbital trajectory analysis and calculation to figure out the best time to go to Mars with the ship that I designed. It had to be there in Thanksgiving. What's that? It had to be there in November. My constraints were that I wanted to be far enough in the future that it makes sense for the Ares program to have developed in the intervening time. Ares is the name of the rocket. Yeah, Ares is the name of the ship, or the program, actually. The name of the ship that took them there is Hermes, who is the messenger of the gods. He's the one who is the most talented within Greek mythology, he goes from one god to another. Yeah, Hermes, yes. That was funny because if you watch the movie in a few places, they call it Hermes, because Ridley Scott directed it, and he says Hermes instead of Hermes. Why does he say that? And he also says Martinez instead of Martinez. Yeah. But anyway. You know, the British people here, anybody Scottish people, can we talk? Can we talk? If I wake you up in the middle of the night, do you talk the way people do? Yeah. You mean as her accent. Do you talk the way real people do? Ask me that again? You mean am I dreaming in my accent? No, no. Yeah. I mean, do you put it on just for us? Just to impress us. Like is this this elaborate character that I've been doing for 24 years? It's a conspiracy among millions and millions of Irish people. What could make us more adorable? No. And I also want to know. So anyway, these guys end up on Mars. Well, wait. I got one other question for you. What what other things would happen if he woke you up in the middle of the night? I just he's just there, you know, he's just he's right there. I mean, I'd be surprised. And I mean, we work together. It's not really appropriate. Yeah, it would be inappropriate. But then, like, he's very well known and I'm at the beginning of my career. Yeah, we can work it out. Yeah, I really hope my boyfriend hears this. I'm not so sure I do. So, Andy, these guys, the crew ends up on Mars and something goes horribly wrong and one guy gets left behind and we spend a book, a movie, trying to resolve this issue. I don't want to give too much away, but Matt Damon plays the lead character and he makes it to the end. Okay? He doesn't. Spoiler. But, Andy, what drives you? About half the people are just storming out in anger. I had no idea. What drives me to do this? Well, I mean, I've been a space dork my whole life. I was pretty much doomed to be one. My father is a physicist. My mother is an engineer. I mean, when I was a kid, the space shuttle program was like new and exciting, which was probably going to make some people feel kind of old. But I'm all right. It's back in my day. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we don't got any... For you guys, you know, when you were kids, the space program was Chinese people inventing gunpowder, right? I mean, but... And Captain Kirk fabricated it. That's right. To defeat the Gorn, I believe. Defeat the Gorn. And so I've always been a science dork, and I've always loved this stuff. And I came up with this idea for an astronaut stranded on Mars, but I wanted everything to be physically accurate just because I always get taken out of a story when I see some blatant physical inaccuracy. The book is fairly accurate too, right, or very accurate? Oh, the book's delightful in many ways, but you know... Sorry, I meant to say, is the book delightful scientifically? Let me think about that. So you know, it's science fiction. There are things in the book that, you know, we don't find on Mars. Not yet, anyway. Not yet. For example? Well, Matt Damon's not on there. But there is a guy from Boston. Probably buried. Is that what you meant? Buried somewhere in Mars? Yeah, from the Big Dig. Turns out that's where Jimmy Hoffa is. The dust storm. Okay, you know, Mars has famous dust storms. They go, you know, global sometimes. You can see them with telescopes from Earth, right? Yeah, absolutely. And they look gnarly from space sometimes. But in reality, the pressure is so low. How low is it? It's very low. It's about 1.7 atmospheres. It's about a percent of what we have, you know. And so, although the winds can be pretty hefty, it can be 120 miles an hour, but that's not enough to straighten an American flag, let alone blow away a radio dish. Because there's so few molecules going that way. Right. So, did you have trouble watching the movie with all its lies then? Stop lying to me, Ridley. Are you going to put it on Ridley? All right. Freaking Ridley. Now, what you got to do... That came up looks accurate, delightfully so. But you got to check the science at the door and go on in and enjoy it. It's enjoyable. It's great. You know, I do that kind of stuff all day long. Why do I want to sit in the movie theater and think about some more of it? Andy, as nerd man, you had to work out some serious scientific problems. Yeah, I did. Yes, absolutely. The dust storm is... or the sand storm is inaccurate. And I knew that at the time. I just didn't care. I wanted a good reason to strand them there. And at the time I wrote it, most people didn't know that. Like most people thought that a sand storm on Mars. But then because The Martian got so popular and became a very popular movie and then got a bunch of scientists talking about it, now everybody knows a dust storm on Mars can't do that. It was you blew the thing over and you couldn't see. Right. Oh, man. Yeah, what are those chunks, by the way, that were coming out? Yeah, you know, I don't know. Space debris. One of my favorite things is how JPL almost ruined everything. When I, you know, I wrote the book, it was done, it was already in final editing. I can't make any more changes or other than like copy editing, you know, and like at that point, like they were deciding they had it down to the final four candidates of where they're going to land Curiosity. They eventually landed it, you know, near Mount Sharp and Gale Crater. Mount Sharp, Gale Crater, which is thousands and thousands of kilometers away from all the things that happen in the Martian, not a problem. One of the final four candidates on where they were thinking about landing it was Marth Valles, which Mark drives through, like I specifically call it out in the book, he drives through this ravine, Marth Valles, he would have had to have gone around the rover to keep going, and I'm like, oh, you guys are killing me with your stupid real time, and then my favorite little… It's like they didn't even take it into account. You know, nobody asked me. I don't know what I was thinking. Sorry about that. Yeah, I know. Well, Jim, you made the final decision. No, actually I didn't, but we were down to the last four, and I loved any one of those, so my boss did, and that was Ed Weiler at the time. So, everybody, this is the real guy. That's all I'm saying. Just so we're clear, the character in the book, Venkat Kapoor, who is in the movie, Vincent Kapoor, he holds that position in The Real NASA, so if you're curious, that's who he is. You're tax dollars at work, that's right, and they work too. But one other, my favorite little stories of space research screwing with me is the University of Arizona that runs the Hi-Rise instrument, high-resolution camera, apparently we have like four of their alumni here today. Four people who are great at clapping. They just got the joke Bill made ten minutes ago. In the book, yeah, well, they're U of A, I mean. Somebody got it. But in the book, I give the exact latitude and longitude of the Hab. And so the Hab is the Habitat, the base where most of the Martian takes place, where Mark Watney is stranded, where they are. The Hab and the Habnots. And so I described the terrain as being kind of flat and sandy. There's not much going on in Macedalia, Plinicia. It's a large empty desert and stuff like that. And the guys who run HiRISE are like, let's check. And so they did these super HiRISE photos of the Hab's location on the real Mars. And they're like, well, that's nothing like he described it. Yeah, but Ridley got it right. Beautiful craters right around where that Hab would be. And the scenery looks great. Yeah, it does. Those people must hate Star Wars. Almost. So they don't have good resolution on galaxies far, far away. We don't have a camera for that yet. Yeah, we're working on it. Okay, thank you. So the guy's on Mars. He's got a lot of food. Because there were supposed to be six people, but he's only one. Yeah, and they left in the book, they left after six days of a planned 31-day mission, and they had redundant food supplies. So he had enough food to last about 400 souls. A soul is a day on Mars for the four of you who don't know that. And, well, three of you and one of her. Wait, I know it is that, but why is that? Why is it called a soul? Soul is Latin for sun. It just means, because day is an ambiguous term. Day, to scientists, means the time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis, just Earth. So Mars rotating on its axis, that's one Martian soul. I remember during the disco era. A different soul. That's right. Tell us what Studio 54 was like, Bill. I don't remember, man. Yep, he was there. Bill the science high guy. Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill. Stereotypes. You don't always do that well with the ladies. This stereotypical male engineer. I know it's shocking. What's worse is a computer programmer, by the way. I'm a computer programmer and I wrote a book about Mars. Keep it calm, ladies. That's right. We're going to take a break and StarTalk will be back right after this. So we've been talking about Mars. Mars, Mars. Hypothetically, the Martian, the movie, the book, this hypothetical character, living, surviving on this hostile world. But Andy, when Viking landed on Mars, 1976, a sol was this hip new word. And the length of a day, a sol on Mars is very much like the Earth, right? Yeah, it's a... So if a guy's gonna find a way to come up with some new food source, he's gonna have sunlight. Yep, but that's not really what our hero does. I mean, he's inside the hab, so he used the lighting of the hab to help grow food. It's much less sunlight. You're one and a half times as far away, right? Right, but he had a huge solar farm. So effectively, it's rather inefficient, but he didn't have a lot of equipment to work with, so he's collecting energy with the solar farm and then using it to power lights inside the hab. What should he have done? Jim, what should he have done? Well, he did exactly what I would have done. However, you know, I'm sorry. You are so diplomatic, I really enjoy that about you. You know how to get more funding. So, you guys, you just don't know, as CEO of the Planetary Society, I can tell you, there is a great deal to that little insight. This is diplomacy man right here. So, what would you do? Would you not send... Well, I would definitely had the imagers see his dead body on Ares 3. I'm playing my part on the movie. But, you know, the soil, the soil where curiosity is, is very acidic. And so, asparagus would grow nice. And, oh my God, asparagus for 500 days. And his pee would have just killed myself. Wait, it really would, asparagus would grow in that soil? Yeah, in the acidic soil. So in the alkaline soils, the potatoes would grow better. So just, you guys, everybody, he grows potatoes. That's how he lives through it. Yeah, spoiler, spoiler. We've literally ruined the movie for you. It's only going to get worse, I'm afraid. So another one of those great things where NASA ruined me was, in the book, he has to go through this huge ordeal to make enough water to survive. The water system within the HAB is self-contained. Humans consume water, humans give out an equal amount of water, so it's fine. But to grow potatoes, he needs a lot more water. He needs to moisten all this soil that he's bringing in. He needs hundreds of liters of water. So, he takes hydrazine from the descent vehicle that had brought him there, goes through this chemical reaction. Yeah, incredibly dangerous. Goes through this chemical reaction to liberate the hydrogen, then collects CO2 from the atmosphere, runs that through the oxygenator to liberate the oxygen, then mixes them together to make water. Okay, that's great. Okay. Turns out, curiosity goes to Mars, scoops up some sand and goes like, there's a shit load of water in here. And it's like 35 liters of water for every cubic meter of Martian soil or regolith, because you're not supposed to call anything off of earth soil. Would he be able to get the water? Yeah, what you do, it's very complicated. You have to bring the soil in, and then you have to heat it. Even I think I could do that. Yeah. I feel like I would do fine on Mars. So to put this into terms that don't require you to do a bunch of math in your head, if you took a refrigerator and filled it with Martian soil, and then got all the water out of that soil, you would have 35 two-liter bottles of water. Just like that. Just like that. That's a pretty good recipe. The entire subplot where he's getting water wouldn't have mattered. And so to answer your thing, since in real life it would be so easy for him to get a hold of that much water, he could have gotten a whole bunch more water than the soil he brought in and used that to scrub the soil. Well, actually, recently we found weeping craters. During the summer season what we believe is happening is aquifers. They miss Mark. Oh, actually there's one. What's a weeping crater? I like that a lot, by the way. Yeah. So during the summer, light from the sun shines on these crater walls and they're what we believe are underground aquifers and the water plug sublimates and it just pours down the side of the craters. So it's like a waterfall? Yeah. Well, it sort of creeps. Not for long because it wets the soil. It wets the soil. And then eventually... So we should have buckets. Well, he would have normally gone to his well, where it would have gone down to the aquifer and pumped out the water. I'm not sure how many recurring slip lineae there are in the relatively flat areas of the... There's one within 100 miles, closer than Pathfinder. Break it up. How about this? There's a sequel to The Martian. Somebody gets stranded and it's like 25 minutes long and he survives fine. Because he's like, oh my God, there's all this water and plus this. Oh, look, the curiosity. Now, Andy, where did you get the idea to take potatoes? So potatoes, I went through a bunch of different possible crops. The ones I originally what I wanted to do. But not asparagus. Not asparagus. Thank God. But what I originally wanted to grow, for him to grow was peas. Because it makes perfect sense for there to be peas in the meal pack. And peas are the seeds for peas. I mean, that's you plant peas. That's the thing, I gotta say, you can't tell me about the potatoes. But go ahead. So why were the potatoes still viable? I thought it was a nod to your Irish heritage. It was not. No. I mean, as any normal person would, I try to hide the Irish, you know. You can beat me up later. The potato thing was because there is nothing that... Potatoes have the very highest calorie yield per crop land area of anything. So if he were to grow peas, he would just not... In the land area he had inside the hab and all the volume he had access to, he could not possibly have maintained his calorie needs, but potatoes will do it. But he had to fertilize them. Yeah, well, fortunately he has a method of producing that. No, it is the most popular line in the movie. I think it's the most popular line in the book and it's a meme that's so popular. Everybody hip, I got to science the shit out of this. Well I guess more accurately he science the shit into it, but what's funny is just worth noting people coming to me, I love that line, my favorite line in the whole book is I'm going to science the shit out of it. But yeah, that line is not in the book. That line was made up by Drew Goddard who wrote the screenplay for the film, so I'm like, no, I'm glad you liked it, I'll tell Drew. He's a cool guy. He's a great guy and he's up for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, so. So he pulls it off, our hero pulls it off. Our hero pulls it off. And how long did it take you to figure all this stuff out? Well it took me about three years to write the book. Because you haven't done a lot of farming. Farming? Not a lot. A little? Have you done a little farming? No, no. Nope, nope. I have a brown thumb. I kill anything I try to grow. Are you friends with botanists? Nope. I did all my research on, by the way, I didn't know anyone in aerospace at the time I wrote the book. All my research was just Google. Do you know a farmer? Nope. Hey Jim. I know Google. Have you at this point met Matt Damon? Yeah, lots of times now because of publicity events and stuff like that. Great. Please tell him I say hello. I'll tell him, I'll let him know. You're from Iowa, you were born in Iowa. Born in Iowa. Are you, just to go stereotypical, were you a farmer? No. I was a far, I was a townie. A townie? Yeah. In Burlington? You drove in a convertible hitting people in the face? You probably grew up with shoes and everything, huh? What was your favorite part of the movie? Ah, my favorite part of the movie, actually, is when Mark Watney, after he extracts the rod out of him and begins to survive, and he's thinking about all the things on Mars that would kill him, and he enumerates them, one right after the other. And you can see, he's depressed, probably one of the most depressed moments. And he finally figures out, he becomes the astronaut he really is. And what he's going to do next, and you can see that come over him. It's just wonderful. The transformation. Yeah, the transformation. I am not going to die. And that was it. And that's what they do. You know, NASA's really famous for having the people that take almost insurmountable problems and solve them one at a time along the way. And that's one of the really great things about the book, and really great things about the movie. And that is, that's what you have to do to be able to make it in this environment. For survival, you solve one problem at a time. And you keep your sense of humor. Right. But of course, the great part about the book, of course, is you thought you solved it, and then you'd have another problem, sometimes even bigger than the last. But Jim, what's really going on on Mars right now? And I say going on, what are we doing, what are we learning about Mars? You alluded to the weeping craters. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're making discoveries, you know, at a rapid rate, and that's because we have some wonderful assets at Mars. We have several orbiters. One of these... Ah, yeah, science talk for spacecraft. It's not a person who's there who's like undercover, who you need to wake, and then he'll... Anyway. True, true, true. And these spacecraft are making fabulous measurements. One we just put in orbit not too long ago is called MAVEN. And it's designed to see how the solar wind interacts with the atmosphere. You know, here on Earth, we're so lucky we have our magnetic field. Yes. Yeah. I feel it. We are so lucky. That's something, if you're doing a gratitude list and you're searching for reasons, like you've had a terrible week, you can be like, magnetic field. No, you guys, it makes the solar, when these charged particles come to the poles like this and not hit the Earth. Or just go around entirely. Or it'll miss. Either way, yeah, well, we wouldn't be here talking about it if it... Well, it's another example. Life probably would not be on this planet if it weren't for the magnetic field. Well, that's one of the things we're finding out because it's really stripped Mars' atmosphere. How long did that take? Well, it's been going on for billions of years. How many? Probably the last three and a half billion years that's been happening. But Mars had an enormous magnetic field early on. And so when it was born, along with the Earth... How do we know that? That's cool. How do we know that? Ah, we can actually measure the remnant magnetic field from space that's laying on the surface of Mars. You know, Mars doesn't generate the field anymore inside, but when it did... Do we know why? Because it lost its molten core. What happened to its molten core? Is there anything I can do to help? I wish you could. But you can't. I believe you. Even if I summon the powers of Thor? So Mars is smaller than the Earth, right? Yeah, it is. But much bigger than the Moon. Yeah, but this made it cool off, yeah? It does cool off faster than the Earth. That's what our planetary scientists say. But didn't, hold it, what I'm getting at, didn't that make the magnetic churning iron inside slow down and cool off and hard? Well, you know, there's a couple other ideas. There's some huge impacts that are on Mars. A place called Hellas Basin. And it's actually in the opposite hemisphere of where the huge volcanoes were. This is Olympus Mons? Olympus Mons and the Tarsus Ridge and all the beautiful volcanoes. Was Mars once very fun? Yeah. Well, it used to be very wet. So, I mean, the Northern Hemisphere, probably 25 or 30% of the Northern Hemisphere was an ocean. And so three and a half billion years ago, we now know Mars looked like the Earth. It had rain. It had clouds. It had snowed. Did it have, like, McDonald's? Yeah, was there Def Leppard? Well, we didn't have it at the time either, so. Well, it's got Rockets. We don't know that. Rockets? They've been here forever. So what... Well, that's the Grateful Dead. What are the other explanations for the magnetic field cooling off? There's a volcano. Giant impacts, giant impacts. Anything that would change the differential rotation where the currents are. So an impact, a cooling, something stopped that current that generates the field. Which we have here on Earth underneath. Which we, thank goodness we have here on Earth. Yeah, yeah, I think the magnetic field has played an important role. And we're just becoming aware of that because we're at Mars seeing what happens with a planet that doesn't have one. So it's stripped away the atmosphere. Most of it, yeah. And then the water, what happens to the water? Well, as soon as that starts, it evaporates. But it's also on our ground. This is what we also found out from now, more and more of our observations. And that is the aquifers, there's ice layers underneath. And in fact, we found a buried glacier. Where is that? Well, it's not where Ares III is, but it's halfway between where Curiosity is and where... So if I use my cell phone, could I get there? I mean, would the GPS... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I could show you on a map where it's at, but it's on the ancient coastline where the old coast used to be. Those were the days. You know, so right now, the resources and things that we're finding on Mars, and I've been telling the Astronaut Corps this too, is don't bring all your water, bring a straw. Bring a straw, because we'll tell you where to go to get it. Plenty of resources that are there, if we use them. In-situ resource utilization, ISRU, that's a big... ISRU, yes. That's my favorite thing. I love that. No, just ISRU. I'm not making a joke. I know you're used to me just being a smartass all the time, but no, it's ISRU. I think that that's absolutely the key to Mars exploration. There's plenty of water, as long as you have energy, you can do everything else you need. Because I mean, water, you break water apart, you've got rocket fuel. Yeah, that's it. Or you break water apart and then mix it creatively with methane and you've got better rocket fuel. Well, your book has got it. I mean, you've got the oxygenator and in Mars 2020, which is our next big rover that we're gonna launch in 2020. We haven't gotten a great name for it yet. But we'll run a contest, we'll do something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can play, you can play. You need to be the spiritual opposite of curiosity. You want to be called on we. Just like, I do not care about this Mars. So, how about Mr. Ding Dong? Submit it, submit it. The Planetary Society will run the contest. Submit it, please. Let me. Jim, when do you think people will be walking on Mars? Well, I believe it's gonna happen in my lifetime. So, Jim plans to live to be 500 years old. Yeah. That's why I'm a vampire. So, that's why I'm sitting over here. Are you an immortal? Obviously, but, you know, we're following the president's direction, and indeed, we wanna be in the. Oh, you do everything he's. Well, you know, anything that guy says, you're just like, eh. And, you know, he is, NASA's part of the administration. So, the president is, you know, my boss' boss' boss. And so, we're heading in that direction, and indeed, it's the right direction. So, he wants us to be able to have a presence in and around Mars in the 2030s. So, that could be, you know, going to Phobos, Deimos, perhaps doing what we did to the moon, going out as a figure eight and coming back. So, we want to be able to go out and come back. And then, after that, in the 2040s and on, begin to get humans down to the ground. I want to get there sooner than that. But with that said, you know, the Planetary Society, which I'm the CEO, we did a study in the end of March, beginning of April, where we brought 70 people from around the world. And we did an analysis, Jim, that we could send people in orbit around Mars in 2033. You can only go to Mars, Maeve, I know you're excited, every 26 months. And there's a lot of good orbits, but 2033 is an especially good one. And the premise of the bit, as we say, is that when he, you went 2035. They're assuming home and transfer ellipses, probably, and I don't necessarily buy into those as best. But so the deal is, we did this analysis that you don't have to increase the NASA budget except adjusting for inflation. And you could get humans in orbit around Mars in 2033. And they could hypothetically, on that trip, land on Phobos, which you described as the space station of Mars. The space station of Mars. And so you could land there and study Mars from above. And then subsequently, you could go down to the surface if people just decided it was worth doing. Well, you could also study Mars on Phobos because a lot of Mars is sitting on the surface. But this is what people were talking about. So out there, audience, StarTalkians, do you want to send people to Mars in 2033? If we increase the budget, could it be much sooner? Like is the science there and just the money isn't? Well, there are some technologies that we have to work on. So we're doing the Mark Watney thing, and that is we're solving some technically tough problems along the way. For example. Well, we want to get down on the ground, many tons, you know, Curiosity we put down was a one ton rover, one metric ton. But from a sky crane. Yeah, some neat engineering. A wily coyote method of landing things. Fantastic. You guys just need to stencil acne on the site. It's great. Well, there's a good reason why it was done the way it was. I hope there was a good reason. We weren't just jamming. But, you know, to do this kind of station that Mark Watney is at, that's got to be about 40 ton or so. So we want to be able to put at least... But holding 40 tons? That's not a million times as much. Correct. I can see it from here. And we can see it from here. So there's a variety of techniques that we're developing right now that we'll be able to put more mass down on the ground. And how long does it take to get there? Well, from the top of the atmosphere down to the ground, about seven minutes. No, you mean to get to Mars from Earth. How much from Dallas? Yeah. For that area. Seven minutes ends. So that is a million dollar question because... Or a billion dollar. Well, a multi-billion dollar question because it has to do with the propulsion systems that you need to design. So the lowest energy transfer from Earth to Mars is called a Hohmann transfer ellipse. And it takes a little over eight months. And that is the least amount of delta V necessary to get from Earth to Mars. Changing speed. The least amount oomph that you need. However, if you have ion drives or ion propulsion systems like the fictional one in The Martian, which is a real technology that real space probes have used, just not to that magnitude, then you could get there much quicker. The bad news is you need an energy source for it, which also means convincing the various nations of the Earth that it's okay to put a nuclear reactor in space. And so... If we use molten salt, it's safe. That's something I learned recently. Thorium reactors. It's more than six months and less than a year to get to Mars. If you punch it, yeah, you get faster. Then you can stay there for about 20 days, a short stay. You know, that's what the Ares crew was doing. You get used to the time zone. And then you have to come back. 20 days is enough to, like, really relax, though. That's good. Get some bees. Oh, yeah. Now I feel refreshed when I'm ready for a six-month trip home. That's right. I just turned off my phone and stayed on Mars for a while. I feel much better. Yeah, you could, because when it's on the far side and there's no spacecraft above you, your phone would be off. By the time we sent people to Mars, I guarantee you there would be at least one telemetry satellite in the sky at all times. Absolutely. So, indeed, if you miss that 20-day window coming back, then you're going to have to stay there for a good 300 or 400 days and then come back in the next... So they're taking potatoes. So maybe do 19 days just to keep a safe day to... Just oversleep. Yeah, it's one thing to be like, I have to stay because there's a snowstorm, another like, oh, I have to stay for one year because of a snowstorm. Now let me ask you guys this, hang on, you talk to people, there's these guys who want to go to Mars one way and live, and people want to go there. I want to go die on Mars. Well, you probably will, but what do you think about, I say this only, I have strong opinions which as you know are correct, but how many people want to terraform Mars? We're going to make Mars like the earth, we're going to take that water, stir up the dirt, the sand, and just be just like home. Right now, scientifically, we want to study it in the way it is. We want to understand everything about it before we bring humans in. Those living things that might be there. They might be there, but there's resources that we want to know about so that we can use them. Mars is going to change on its own. You know, the temperature of the sun continues to rise and heats all our planets and rising the temperature... Solar warming. By the way, if there's any climate deniers out there, it's got nothing to do with it. The sun's going to do this regardless. We're talking 4 billion years. Yeah, yeah, so, but you can change the temperature of Mars in the future with the sun's energy increasing by 4 degrees C or about 7 degrees Fahrenheit. That takes the CO2 top, sublimates from the pole, leaving this huge ice cap of water underneath it, then to also melt because the CO2 will form a greenhouse. And then Mars will return to a little bit like what it was 3 billion years ago with a huge climate, much more extensive atmosphere. Yeah, how long will this take? Are we talking months or are we talking weeks? No, it's going to take a while. By 2033? No, it won't be by 2033. Millions of years or billions? Several hundred million years. Oh, that is too long in my opinion. I was really hoping to see a Luch Mars. Sooner rather than later. A little bit. Yeah, well, that won't happen in our lifetime. But, you know, that's what exploration is all about. So, Jim, what do you need? Your Planetary Division of the Science Mission Directorate, adding as many acronym letters as we can fit in there. What do you need to pull this off? Well, indeed, we benefit from the enormous support by the American people. Now, when you say enormous, you guys, when you say enormous, I am of an age where it was routine to hear people say, if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they blank, make a magic marker cap that doesn't fall off? So the answer is always obvious. NASA is not in the business of building the magic markers, or we would have. You do make great markers. In the Apollo era, the NASA budget was 4% of the federal budget, 4%. Now, the NASA budget is 0.4% of the federal budget. That's right. So it's a tenth of what it was in the Apollo era. That's true. So what would you guys want it to be? I mean, what is the military, 18%? I think it's 22%. 22%. In other words, the NASA budget used to be a fifth of the military budget. Now it's a fiftieth of the military budget. But what would you need? You need faster rockets, bigger rockets? Well, we're doing the investment right now with the funding we do get from the American people through Congress in a really judicious way. From a science perspective, we're studying the heck out of Mars. We want to know everything about it. We're scienceing the shit out of it. If you went on television and swore, you would get all the money you need. Well, I don't know if you noticed, but I just did. On the radio, I'm talking about really rigid people. Just rigid people, sorry. So scientifically, Mars is ours at the moment. We really want to be able to understand it, and that will mitigate risk for our humans to go. Why did you look at me, mitigate risk? What did I do? No, I was just looking around. Stop the bumbling idiots from getting... When you say mitigate risk, you mean getting killed being much less likely. Well, you could take the Mark Watney approach of burning the hydrazine, or you could take... A straw. A straw, yeah, that's right. So, these are the things that we learn along the way. And indeed, that helps us figure out where we want to go. We just had a major workshop with the scientists and the engineers that do a lot of this resource planning and got them together and say, here's Mars, where would you put humans and why? And we got 50 locations of just fabulous places to go on Mars, and we're studying those. This has been StarTalk about Mars. We've had Andy Weir, creator of The Martian, Maeve Higgins, insightful comedian, Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA, and Eugene Mirman.