Alternative Aliens with Andy Weir and David Grinspoon

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

I’m your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

I got with me Chuck Nice, Chuck.

Hey, Neil, what’s happening?

My man about town, my co-host.

Thank you, the man about town who stays home all the time.

Okay, sorry.

Okay, your man about home.

The man about house.

About house.

You are the man about house.

My co-host and stand-up comedian.

Today’s topic is going to be one of many times we’ve explored how science is working in the science fiction that we’re all exposed to.

Some of us are bathed in.

And we’re going to be featuring my interview with engineer turned novelist Andy Weir.

Oh, your buddy.

Andy Weir.

My buddy.

The author of The Martian.

Exactly.

So we’re going to bring him on.

But we have in studio, in our sort of virtual Zoom studio, a friend of StarTalk, David Grinspoon.

David, welcome back to StarTalk.

Yes.

And why are we calling him?

That’s your Twitter handle, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It’s great to see you guys.

And it’s great to be here, wherever here is, in the StarTalk universe.

Excellent.

So I think we count you among the ranks of official astrobiologists, right?

You’re also an author, a writer.

And with that hat and your Twitter handle of Funkyspoon, we also learned that you’re a musician.

So we love that combination.

You’re a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.

I think they’re based in Arizona, but you spend most of your time in Washington, is that correct?

Yeah, PSI, Planetary Science Institute, it has the mothership in Arizona, but we’re sort of a distributed institute and a lot of us are all over and I’m in Washington, DC.

We were doing this virtual connection thing before it was cool, before we all had to.

So you’ve got a recent book, author of several books.

I remember your early book on Venus.

That was fun.

There aren’t many books on Venus and you put one out there on it.

But more recently, you’ve got a book titled Chasing New Horizons, which was New Horizons was the actual name of a space mission.

So you did a double meaning there, Chasing New Horizons, inside the epic first mission to Pluto.

And you co-authored that with Mr.

Pluto himself, Alan Stern.

And just a little bit more on your background, you’ve won the prestigious Carl Sagan Medal for Public Communication of Planetary Science.

So there’s no higher award given by the American Astronomical Society for that role.

And you play guitar and percussion, is that right?

Yeah, you know, I dabble in a lot.

Guitar is my main instrument.

But, you know, everybody plays percussion, right?

We all drum on our desks.

So David, what’s the name of your band?

Well, House Band of the Universe is the band that I’ve actually toured around with some.

That’s a little pretentious, I would think.

Well, I mean, I don’t think there’s going to be, like, you know, a lot of competition.

Well, there might be, but so far nobody has, you know, like, complained from another part of the universe.

From another galaxy.

If they did, that would be kind of cool.

I think with that name, he’d be the shoe-in for the Earth representation in the Star Wars bar scene, right?

It’d be the Earth folks.

Yeah, definitely.

It’s Boba Fett, a member of your band.

Yeah, there’s one guy that looks a little bit like Boba Fett.

I think he might be related.

There’s one guy that comes to practice with a helmet on every time.

I will say this, though.

It would be super cool if some aliens showed up here and they were just like, yo, man, we’re the house band of the universe.

Battle of the bands.

Yeah, but if you get some alien that has sort of multiple mouths, they could be their own trumpet section, for example.

You got to watch out, because we design our instruments to fit the limits of our own limbs.

So are you a fan of science fiction?

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

I think you’d be hard pressed to find a space scientist who wasn’t on some level steeped in science fiction.

Yeah, but if you’re an astrobiologist, so much of what we’re looking for in a sci-fi film is not just, oh, look at the pretty space shots, it’s how are they representing their aliens?

So could you give me sort of a starter list of what we think an alien should look like?

And then later on we’ll talk about what they might actually look like, or how Hollywood might be representing them.

So give me the starter list.

You know, what they would actually look like is not even something we spend that much time on.

We worry much more about like, what would they eat and breathe?

But as far as what they would look like, I go back to like this sort of common fractal architecture of a lot of Earth.

If you look at a lot of life on Earth, if you look at trees and blood vessels and brains, there’s a kind of commonality that makes sense if you’re making something complex out of simple parts.

So I picture that some of that geometry that’s kind of universal in life on Earth would also be universal for life off of Earth.

So we might see some familiar forms just because sort of the physics of self-organization leads to kind of common forms.

I love what you said there, and I just want to emphasize it.

You’re talking about fractal structures, and what’s interesting about fractals is it can give the illusion of complexity, but it’s really a very simple basic design that gets copied many times and in many ways.

Is that a fair characterization of that sentence?

Absolutely.

And it comes out of a lot of sort of the physical need.

If you think of like blood vessels or trees absorbing sunlight, making branches, you’re trying to maximize surface area with the smallest number of modular parts.

And so you evolve this sort of branching structure.

And those kind of physical needs will exist anywhere where there’s life.

So that makes me think, well, maybe there’ll be some things that kind of look recognizable about aliens.

Let me go straight to my first clip with Andy Weir.

The title of his book is Project Hail Mary.

And it’s about an exotic kind of life that’s threatening all life on Earth, possibly rendering it extinct.

So let’s check it out.

Basically, the main problem that humanity is facing is there’s a microbe, an extraterrestrial microbe called astrophage, or at least that’s what humans name it.

It’s only about the size of a bacteria.

It’s about 20 picometers across.

And it lives on the surface of stars.

And so it’s kind of like an algae that lives on stars.

And it collects energy through most of its life and then uses that energy, it stores it as mass, and then uses that energy to propel itself to a planet so it can get the elements it needs to reproduce.

Because there’s really nothing to be found on a star except for hydrogen and helium.

And then the problem is this is breeding out of control in our star and all the local stars, by the way.

And it’s causing the sun to dim.

And once the sun gets dim enough, the food chain on earth will collapse and everything will die.

So this is a twist on ways in which an organism, a microscopic organism could render us extinct.

Right.

It’s not messing with us.

It’s messing with the sun.

My gosh.

But it doesn’t care.

It’s not intelligent.

It’s just living its best life.

Astrophage can travel interstellar distances.

Kind of like mold, it just spores out in all directions.

And one in every ten to the whatever of them will actually find another star.

So, is mold spores the closest terrestrial analog to this?

Either mold spores or algae, oceanic algae.

So, David, Andy Weir’s first book, The Martian, didn’t involve alien life.

It was human life on Mars.

So, with the clever title The Martian, The Martian was humans on Mars.

In that case, Matt Damon, of course.

So, here’s Andy going into alien life.

And so, how do you think about this?

It’s kind of clever that it’s killing us not by attacking us, but by influencing something that we depend on.

So, that’s a nice little sort of alien twist.

But are you cool with how he’s coming at this subject?

Yeah, I like it.

It’s clever.

You know, and it reminds me, there are certainly organisms on Earth that live parasitically and choke off the energy supplies of other organisms.

Whether this could happen on a stellar level, you know, it’s pretty outrageous.

And part of me thinks, well, part of me thinks if something could eat stars, then something would be eating stars.

And then we’d notice, because we understand the energy balance of stars pretty well.

So, I’m reassured that I don’t think this is actually out there happening.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a cool science fiction idea.

Well, wait, so your best evidence is the absence of evidence.

I guess that’s the evidence you’re putting forward.

I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Well, except for, I mean, biologically, life is so opportunistic that if it was doable, it would already be out there doing it.

And then we would, you know, we’ve seen a lot of stars and we understand their energy balance pretty well.

So, I’m skeptical that astrophage is really out there eating a lot of stars in the galaxy.

But that’s okay.

That doesn’t, like, to me diminish the coolness of using this for a sci-fi story as something that would present quite a problem if it were happening here.

So, now, you study atmospheric conditions on other planets.

So, how much have you thought about sort of the climactic catastrophe with regard to aliens?

Because that’s basically what Andy Weir is describing here.

Yeah.

Well, a lot.

I mean, certainly, you know, there’s even a history on Earth of the climate being wrecked by runaway life.

You know, you think of what we call the oxygen catastrophe two and a half billion years ago where blue-green algae, you know, first of all, they poisoned the air with oxygen.

So, a lot of organisms that can’t handle oxygen went extinct.

And we think it also caused a climate catastrophe because it was around when what we call snowball Earth happened.

The Earth went into a deep freeze.

And it was probably the result of those organisms pumping oxygen and messing with the greenhouse effect, messing with methane and plunging the Earth into a deep freeze.

So, the idea that little tiny organisms could screw up the climate of a planet and cause a big problem for life is not at all outrageous.

In fact, I think it happened here.

You don’t even need aliens for that.

That happened here on Earth.

So, basically, all we’re doing when we cause climate change, all we’re doing is returning the Earth to its natural state, right?

I mean, so no problem, right?

To a different state.

That’s one moral you could take away from this.

It’s like, well, hey, it’s been done before.

The blue green algae screwed up the climate.

So, you know.

Yeah, we lost 70, 80, 90 percent of all species at the time.

That’s fine.

That’s fine.

Earth is cool.

Well, let’s find out how…

It’s the circle of life.

We’re not even original.

Original.

It’s a circle that might not include us.

So, Andy Weir told me about how astrophage sort of captures and uses energy.

But there’s also what we know from life as we know it, three properties that seem to be present in all life forms.

So, one is that it’s carbon based.

Another is that it uses liquid water.

And another is that there’s some kind of a metabolism for life as we know it.

So, now here’s another kind of life.

Let’s see what Andy Weir says about it.

It has all three of those because as we come to learn, here’s a spoiler, all of the life in this book, the alien life and the Earth life, came from a single panspermia event.

So, astrophage in fact has mitochondria and ribosomes and everything.

So, I did that partially to explain why there was life on so close together.

The odds, whatever numbers you want to put into the Drake equation, the odds that life would happen really, really close and one of the stars within 20 light years seems really slim.

Just given the size of the whole universe.

Right.

And so I decided, well, it’s a panspermia event because something evolved that is able to travel interstellar distances.

So that’s what seeded life around our local cluster.

So it’s got DNA.

It’s got DNA.

It’s got DNA, RNA transcription, ribosomes, mitochondria, which are the powerhouse of the cell and everything else.

Now you asked what I added to it.

I also added their cell membrane.

This is the complete made up part of the physics.

So I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.

The astrophage cell membrane has this method of turning heat energy into, it takes hydrogen ion, aka proton collisions, and turns the energy of those collisions into two neutrinos balancing the momentum and becoming the energy.

And then whatever…

The energy for it to live or the energy for it to propulse?

Propulse.

This is how it stores energy.

It turns heat energy, in other words, the speed of these hydrogen atoms, it turns that into neutrinos.

And it has a magical ability to store neutrinos.

And so I say that its cell membrane has a feature, which nobody understands how it’s doing it, of super cross-sectionality.

It is not possible for anything to quantum tunnel through this.

And so then it sends the neutrinos out for its own…

To recoil from that, and that’s…

No, not quite.

It uses the neutrinos to store it.

Then when it wants to do propulsion, it forces the neutrinos to collide into each other because they’re majorina particles.

So they will self-annihilate because it’s a matter-antimatter reaction.

And then they will turn into photons that work out to be in the infrared spectrum.

So David, before we get into sort of the neutrino physics of astrophage, could you remind us what the Drake equation is?

Because he just made fast use of that term.

Sure.

Yeah, the Drake equation is a sort of very simple actually formulation that we use when we’re discussing the probability of life and the sort of density, the amount of life and intelligent life that might exist in our galaxy or in the universe as a whole.

So it’s a way where we say if we estimate this number of stars have habitable planets and this percentage of the planets have conditions, have actually evolved life and this percentage have complex life, et cetera.

You put in all your assumptions and you can adjust the levels and then you crank through that and you get how much life there is in the galaxy.

So it’s basically just a way of quantitatively having a conversation about how much life there is in the galaxy.

And so, all right, so that’s sort of the frequency of life.

Now, the kind of life that it is so often in science fiction where we’re looking for aliens walking with ray guns.

And here he’s describing something algae-like.

And at one point in the interview, he had referred to Ben Bova’s great science fiction author Agide only just in 2020.

In 1992, he wrote a book called Mars where the life forms there were more like they were sort of algae-like, living on the surface of a cave.

So if we want to think of most likely kind of life we might find, how does algae type life compete with other forms of life that you can dream up?

Well, I mean, algae is a good design for life on planets.

You know, I’m not sure how it’s going to fare interstellar space, but, you know, algae is basically simple, very simple life that uses sunlight.

And it doesn’t have to be sunlight, starlight of any kind.

And, you know, it’s sort of a basic design that we would…

It’s very plausible to me that we would find something like it.

Probably wouldn’t be exactly terrestrial algae unless you believe in, you know, this total pan-spermia view.

But that kind of design for a life form makes a lot of sense.

And it wouldn’t shock me to find something that was kind of algae-like on another world.

And give me a two-sentence definition of pan-spermia.

Pan-spermia, well, it means, you know, seeds across.

It’s just the idea that life, instead of forming…

Having an independent origin on each world, could actually form on one world perhaps long ago and then spread from world to world naturally.

So Chuck, that sounds like a guy came up with that term, doesn’t it?

Um, without a doubt, a guy did come up with that term.

It’s not pan-ovulation.

It’s pan-spermia.

It just means seeds.

It just means seeds, dude.

Don’t get excited.

We gotta take a quick break.

When we come back, we’re gonna find out what…

What the aliens in Andy Weir’s book have to do with climate change.

StarTalk.

I’m Joel Cherico, and I make pottery.

You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com.

Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day.

And I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re back on StarTalk.

Got Chuck Nice.

Chuck, you’re tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic.

Last I checked?

Yeah, very nice, nice.

And we’re featuring my interview with Andy Weir, author of The Martian, book he wrote six, seven years ago.

We all, most of us saw the film, but he has a latest book called Project Hail Mary.

It’s got aliens possibly rendering life on earth extinct.

And we’ve got friend of StarTalk, David Grinspoon, who’s gonna help us out here.

Oh, David, in the first segment, you mentioned that your band was called the House Band of the Universe, but during the pandemic, I don’t suppose you played in many places, right?

No, it’s impossible.

It’s been impossible to actually perform, but I have been playing with a local pickup band of musicians around Washington, DC, sort of in a socially distance or online way.

And we’ve been calling ourselves a bandemic.

The bandemic.

Very good.

Yeah, I like that.

Bandemic.

The bandemic, dude.

I don’t know how that’s gonna play a few years from now, but right now it seems…

Yeah, right now, yeah.

Get all your gigs in now, because people will look at you in five years and say, what the hell’s wrong with you?

All right.

Hey, well, listen, guess what?

If you told a kid today that you like Pearl Jam, they’d be like, well, put some on my toast.

So…

Pearl Jam, that’s sparkly jam, that’s what I mean.

Right, exactly.

So what’s interesting about Andy Weir’s latest book is it actually touches on climate change and what power we might have to influence it one way or another, all caused by this alien organism that’s threatening us.

So let’s check out what this connection might be and how it could lead to environmental catastrophe.

Check it out.

I came up with a problem first, and I, you know, okay, it’ll affect earth.

And what’s interesting is, it’s mentioned in the book that the damage we’ve done to the climate actually helps make us last longer because the earth has stored up more heat energy than it normally would have as a result.

And so we actually, although it’s not much, it’s like a complete different scale when you’re starting to mess with the solar illuminance.

So it’s like, oh yeah, we get about like one extra month, you know, because it undoes all of that.

There are people doing everything they can to increase the greenhouse effect so that we can retain as much of the energy that’s hitting earth as possible with the reduced solar output.

Okay, so this is a twist on what we’re trying to do right now.

I mean, not intentionally.

I’m not making any sort of political allegory.

I’m just like, these would be the consequences.

Like if the sun started dimming and not enough energy’s hitting earth, oh, interesting, we’ve been collecting too much energy lately.

Oh, now we need to really collect a lot more.

You figured out that the climate deniers are beginning to outnumber the climate scientists.

And so you want to get all them to read your book.

Well, I don’t know if my book is a really good thing for people in that.

For a science denier.

Yeah, right, well, also, but also I don’t think it’s a really good thing because the only way that climate change comes into it is either A, as sort of a good thing that helped buy us another month, and B, as a thing that everybody has to deliberately do to try to make Earth last as long as possible during this crisis.

So they bring out, you bring out the hummers and…

Worse than that, they have to do global warming on a massive, massive scale.

So I come up with what I think is a pretty clever way.

What’s that?

They actually use a bunch of nuclear weapons, like a bunch of nuclear weapons to cleave, you know, all put up in a line, to cleave off a big chunk of Antarctic ice shelf, which then goes into the ocean and melts over time, releasing all of the methane that’s in the ice.

And the methane is great because it is a huge greenhouse gas.

And yeah, way bigger than CO2, that’s right.

Yeah, it’s a massive greenhouse gas, and it will kind of degrade over about 10 years.

So they’re hoping that they can solve the problem.

And then once they solve the problem, then the sun will get back to normal luminance.

And then they don’t want to have all that greenhouse gas, but it’s great because methane will degrade and go away in about 10 years.

So what he did say in his book is that the quantitative effects of this is that Earth’s temperature would drop by 10 to 15 degrees in the next 30 years.

So we’re talking about re-adding all manner of greenhouse gases over a short period of time to counteract this.

Aksan, you’re my hero.

You’re my hero, everybody, more beef, let’s eat beef.

Come on.

Let’s eat beef in your Hummer doing a tailgate party.

So.

Yeah, but you don’t want to kill off all the cows because they’re adding methane too, so.

You’re adding methane too, exactly, exactly.

So David, what is your, give me your general thoughts on geoengineering just as a thing.

Well, you know, geoengineering makes a cool physics problem in a simple way, you know, for like, you know, that I assigned to my atmospheric science students, like how much methane or how much of CO2 would you have to add to heat up or how much dust would you have to put in the atmosphere to cool down by so many degrees in a very simple modeling form.

The problem is when you actually try to do it to a planet, there’s a lot of complexity that we don’t fully understand.

So Chuck, that’s code for we’re not smart enough.

When a scientist said, well, this is not yet understood.

The scientists will never say we’re too stupid to figure it out.

They’ll never say that.

But see, let me tell you something.

Those are the kind of scientists that I really like because when you talk about screwing around with the Earth’s, like, you know, with its weather systems and geoengineering, I’d rather you just go, yeah, I don’t know.

Yeah, so people talk about putting up dust or aerosols to, you know, this is a real proposal some people have to fight global warming.

And it works in a simple energy balance way.

You can say, yeah, you’re going to cut down the sunlight that much and the greenhouse would go down this much and it works.

But the details of Earth’s circulation and the actual motions of the atmosphere, you know, it’s really true.

We aren’t smart enough.

Our best models can’t really predict what that’s going to do to the monsoon in India.

And it’s going to cause, you know, it can cause drought and famine.

And so when I hear this, it’s like, yeah, if it’s a last ditch effort because otherwise Earth is going to just be totally hosed, then we would probably be justified in trying something like that.

But in any other situation, it’s really not a good idea to mess with Mother Nature in this way.

It’s not nice.

And David, wouldn’t you agree that a great way of geoengineering would be to stop burning fossil fuels?

If geoengineering is doing something intentionally to fix the climate, then stopping burning fossil fuels, planting trees, those are good forms of geoengineering that are maybe a little less risky.

So David, are there any life forms that could fully exploit a massive geoengineering shift on the short time scale?

Evolution takes longer than that, of course, but are there any life forms that are just on the edge of pouncing?

And then if the world gets warmer, all of a sudden they’re in charge?

Bats.

It’s got to be bats.

The answer is yes, because think about the climate zones on Earth.

Earth does not all have the same climate at different latitudes.

So if you warm up, say, the poles, then organisms that are comfortable in the tropics are going to move in.

So because of that, there are definitely organisms that are poised to exploit any shift in climate.

Life on Earth would carry on.

It’s just it might not include humans after a shift in climate.

Oh, there’s a little detail.

He says that so casually.

Life will thrive, not necessarily with us.

By the way, honey, I’m never coming home again.

I’ll be back never.

So also in Andy’s book, the astrophage creates an arc that connects the sun with Venus’s atmosphere.

Apparently it needs the CO2 in Venus’s atmosphere.

What can you tell us about the possibility of life on Venus in general and its CO2 supply in particular?

Well, there are some scientists, myself included, who have been arguing for the possibility of life in the clouds of Venus.

Just because, unlike the surface, which would be completely off limits to organic life because it’s just too hot for organic matter to survive at all, the clouds are kind of moderate in temperature and there are energy sources, different sort of chemicals that you can imagine something would eat.

There’s plenty of radiation.

So the clouds are an ecosystem unto themselves, is what you’re saying.

Could be, could be.

Yeah, I mean, you would have to survive the extreme acidic conditions.

And there are different opinions on whether life could actually do that, although there are extremophile organisms on Earth that love acid caves and things.

So, you know, interestingly enough, in the context of this story, there’s some mysterious stuff in the upper atmosphere of Venus that’s absorbing a ton of solar energy.

And we call it the unknown ultraviolet absorber.

And at least in my view, it’s fun to speculate that it could be some weird biological pigment that can absorb in the ultraviolet, which of course is the photons in the ultraviolet have tons of energy.

If life could learn to exploit them.

Well, wait, Chuck, doesn’t that sound like the name of a DC superhero villain in DC Comics?

The unknown ultraviolet absorber.

I’m just thinking.

It sounds completely diabolical.

Yeah, but he’s got to be a…

Because he’s unknown, so he has to be a villain.

Yeah, of course.

No, not a superhero.

I’m talking about superhero villain.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I’ve got to tell you, David, you just came up with a better science fiction movie than I’m Sorry, Our Guest.

Because quite frankly, I’m all about the life forms, the cloud people of Venus.

I’m all about that, okay?

Hi, I’m Celestia, one of the cloud people of Venus.

You’ll notice my dewy skin due to the acidic atmosphere that gives me a natural chemical peel.

Like, that’s cool.

So we also talked about the tech in his story, because you can’t have science fiction without technology.

And so let’s find out what he tells us about it.

I try to keep everything as realistic as possible.

The closer you are to real existing technology in your story, the closer you’re going to be to scientific reality and accuracy.

In Project Hail Mary, actually, it’s kind of funny because it’s really the only technology we have in that book is the technology we have right now today plus astrophage.

That’s it.

And so they use, they figure out a way to make a propulsion system that uses astrophage and also like, they’re in a huge hurry to get this mission going.

They’re sending a ship to Tau Ceti with scientists aboard and they want to have a lab.

And they say like, we don’t have time to invent 0G versions of all of this lab equipment.

We don’t have time to invent a 0G scanning electron microscope, a 0G five axis mill, a 0G this, that and the other thing.

So instead they say, we’re going to make the ship have a centrifuge mode and use normal well tested lab equipment.

And so his lab in this extremely advanced spaceship has like 110 AC power outlets.

Because he’s using like off the shelf laboratory technology that’s been tested with like millions of man hours.

And they need him to have reliable stuff.

You know, that’s an interesting point.

Correct me if I’m wrong, David, because we’re about the same age.

I think the Apollo Saturn V rocket was basically off the shelf items.

I mean, I don’t think we had to invent anything remarkably new, unusual or different for that rocket.

Though the rocket was without precedence.

That’s my understanding of that time, which is how we could get it done so quickly.

Yeah, certainly a lot of the individual components were things that were being used commonly in other, you know, the electronics and so forth.

I’m not sure about all the materials in the rocket engines themselves.

That might have been a little bit of, required a little innovation.

But certainly, you know, the bulk of the components were things that already existed.

What I like about it is we effectively reverse engineer this mysterious propulsion system of astrophage and then we then use it for ourselves.

David, where are we now in terms of matter-antimatter drive?

Because Star Trek clearly has it and so does everybody else.

Yeah, I would say it’s not right around the corner.

That was great.

That was the best scientific answer I’ve ever heard.

Not right around the corner.

We have isolated antimatter now, which is pretty cool.

But I mean individual particles, like positrons, which are the antimatter complement of electrons.

We have individual particles.

We’re far from being able to produce or gather somehow a bulk amount of antimatter and then use it as propulsion.

But you understand it makes sense why it’s a good idea in science fiction and why Star Trek was really smart to use it because it’s absolutely true that antimatter exists and the energy density of antimatter is something you can react with ordinary matter and just with a tiniest amount of fuel create unbelievably huge amounts of energy.

And it’s real physics.

So it’s a great idea for science fiction.

I don’t see the practical implementation happening anytime soon.

Not around the corner.

So when we come back we’ll talk more about applying known technologies to the future of space travel with David Grinspoon on StarTalk.

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We’re back, StarTalk.

We’re trying to think about aliens in space and technology in space, and we talked about climate change as how an alien could render us extinct or how we might even render ourselves extinct.

And I’ve got Chuck Nice, as always, and Dr.

Funkyspoon.

David Grinspoon.

Showtime, buck-a-bounce.

That’s very 1978.

That’s the peak funk period right there.

Make my funk the defunk.

Hey, funk never goes out of style.

Yeah, it’s not that it goes out of style.

You might leave it, but it’s always in style, right?

That’s it, that’s it.

So we were discussing, we were featuring my interview with Andy Weir and his book, Project Hail Mary.

And let’s go right into the one and only clip we have of that conversation for this segment.

And we’re just talking about current technologies and how we do it.

What’s our report card on that?

Let’s check it out.

SpaceX really is doing what we should be doing, mostly.

The main thing that SpaceX is doing that I deeply approve of is driving down the price of getting mass into low earth orbit, because that’s the key to everything.

If we can get that price driven down further and further and further, we will eventually reach a point where a middle-class person can afford a space vacation.

Like, you know, it would cost like 10,000 bucks to go, you know, or maybe 20,000 or something like that to go stay in a space hotel for a week or something.

If you can get it down to that level, then you will have a multi-trillion dollar space industry.

It’ll be for profit and that will spur more innovation and in the space technology.

You know, David, here’s a concern I have, which in fact was the subject of more than one film.

If we start sending people into space, could there be space microbes that contaminate them and then they bring that down here to Earth?

Do we know enough about…

Now, Neil has made a better sci-fi movie than Andy Weir.

I’m just saying, is there…

You know, we talk about, oh, someone caught a bug in some other country or some other continent.

Now, space is part of our biosphere, in a sense, now.

Right?

As long as people start traveling.

You have to get tons of shots before you go to other countries.

And that’s what…

So, can you comment on the toxicity of aliens?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the Andromeda strain was, you know…

For one.

It still really holds up as a pretty good film.

Well, wait, Chuck is too young.

He won’t remember.

So, Chuck, do you know who wrote the Andromeda strain?

Oh, heck no.

Okay, well, you should.

The same guy who wrote Jurassic Park.

Oh, get out of, Christian.

Michael Crichton.

And it was…

Crichton.

And Andromeda strain was his first big breakthrough book in film.

And you know when he wrote that?

While he was in medical school.

Get out.

So, here we have talented people who are learning science.

And then they tell it weave a tale of science fiction with the science that they’ve learned.

So, I think there are a lot of untold stories here because not all scientists are novelists.

And then they realize they can make really big bucks.

Yeah, he said forget this medical profession.

Well, I mean, Isaac Asimov was a biochemistry professor at Boston University.

And he wrote his first few science fiction novels under a pseudonym, Paul French, because he didn’t want anybody to know he was writing sci-fi.

And then he was like, hey, I can do pretty well at this.

So tell me about the toxicity of aliens.

How cautious we need to be.

I’m not that worried about life in space being able to survive on Earth and infect us because even though I like the science fiction idea, as we’ve been discussing, of microbes that could possibly find a way to persist in the space environment, I think that they would be fundamentally different physically.

In fact, even the sort of rule of water in organics and energy that we were talking about might not apply.

I mean, that’s a great way to make life on the surface of a planet where liquid water and organic chemistry do well.

But in space, you’ve got all this intense radiation.

And I think if there was life out there, you’d be looking at a really fundamentally different basis.

And therefore, the idea that it could come and thrive and infect us here on the surface of a planet seems much less plausible to me.

That’s why my favorite sci-fi films are when the aliens land and they breathe our air or they’re exposed to our elements of any kind, and they die.

Well, no, that would mean they OK, not that they can affect us, but if they can be affected by our microbes, that’s the same two way street.

So from another planet, I think is more plausible.

But actually, microbes that are adapted to the environment in space living on Earth seems harder to me.

But like the idea of Martians, you know, that’s the part of the war of the worlds, right?

The Martians get defeated not by our guns, but by they get infected with a common cold, right?

And, you know, I still don’t know if the metabolism on another planet would be similar enough that animals could be infected by their microbes.

But it seems plausible to me, more plausible than actual space microbes, whatever they might be made out of.

Let me let me ask you both this then.

OK, forget the space microbes.

Let’s say we have a world where over a period of time, that world is slowly losing its atmosphere.

As it does so, it loses its protection against radiation.

And therefore, whatever life is there has been an adaptation to a world that had that that have protection from radiation to a world that has none.

But it continued to live.

Then somehow it lands here.

Would it be able to survive?

Good one.

Really interesting question.

The I would think that whatever adaptation it made to living without air would probably make it harder for it to suddenly live again in a planet with air.

But one thing we’ve learned about life is how opportunistic it is and if it had originally evolved on a planet with air, maybe it would have this sort of vestigial metabolism that could be re-triggered in that environment.

So I don’t know, Chuck, now I think you just came up with a science fiction story that’s even better.

You know, we got five novels here and none of us are novelists.

So let’s geek out here for a minute.

We’re going to have a geek moment.

But before that, David, what are the ethics of either purposefully or inadvertently spreading our microbes to other possible fertile environments out there?

It’s a really interesting question.

And a lot of people are debating this now.

You know, the sort of first blush answer that a lot of people come up with is like, how dare we?

Why should we, you know, screw up other planets?

Look what we’ve done to our own planet.

But there’s a reverse argument that’s pretty interesting, which is that if there’s another environment that is lifeless, maybe Mars is completely lifeless.

Then if we have the opportunity to bring life elsewhere in the universe, then isn’t that a good thing?

There’s kind of a deep ecology rationale.

Deep ecology is the philosophy that reveres life above everything, even above humans.

It says all life is valuable innately.

And if Mars is truly a dead world, then maybe there’s something ethically positive about letting it flourish.

Then again, now we’re the progenitors of panspermia.

Yeah, but in that case, exactly, Chuck.

Right.

Yeah.

So, but is it, am I mistaken if I’m remembering correctly that the reason why we crashed Cassini was for that reason not to infect?

Yeah, that’s right.

We have planetary protection protocols.

We have rules about you do everything you can to avoid inadvertently contaminating a planet, especially a planet where life could possibly thrive.

Wait, wait, wait.

We plunked Cassini into Jupiter.

So by that measure, we contaminated Jupiter.

So what are you saying?

So, well, we plunked Cassini into Saturn, but we plunked Galileo into Jupiter for similar reasons.

And wouldn’t it be ironic if by doing so we had contaminated those worlds?

Because the point of doing that was because that’s a place we surely couldn’t contaminate because those are just going to burn up and those are such weird alien worlds.

But the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are places we imagine there might be underground life in sealed in oceans, you know, both on Enceladus around Saturn, on Europa around Jupiter.

So we’ve been very careful not to crash spacecraft onto those places.

Although, as you point out, Neil, we maybe we just killed off Saturnians.

I was going to say, Neil just exposed a glaring arrogance that we have with respect to where we believe life might be.

We just killed off all the Jupiterians, you know.

We thought we were being so careful, practicing safe planetary exploration.

In all fairness, if you do the math, the kinetic energy of the craft as it collides with Jupiter’s atmosphere is sufficiently high that when all of that gets converted to thermal energy, you basically vaporize the entire craft.

So I think we’re safe here.

You basically burned your garbage.

Let’s geek out for a minute, David.

I’m sure you’ve thought about this.

Since science fiction authors reference you and dedicate their books to you, what’s your most fantastical dreams for space exploration and space travel right now?

Give me most of what we know, but give me a little bit of what we don’t know.

Put it together and dream it.

What comes out of your head?

What is my most fantastical dream for some far future?

That involves what we call generation ships, where groups of humans that are self-sustaining could not only live in space and orbital communities as it has been described, but then those could migrate to other stars.

I think there’s something sort of beautiful about this idea of sort of the slow interstellar migration.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, just to be clear, just to be clear, you are committing an entire generation of unborn people to be prisoners of a spaceship that you came up with to send to another planet.

Yeah, it’s not without its…

Are you saying that’s beautiful?

Well, it’s not without its ethical challenges.

Okay, again, Chuck, Chuck, you got to love the way David said, talk.

I got to tell you what David just said was, sometimes when you take a trip that’s not right around the corner, people may not have a choice.

But how is that really different from people that migrate anywhere and then they assume that their kids and their grandkids are going to want to live there?

People have done this…

Because you could get on an airplane and go back.

Well, yeah.

Okay, all right, I was going to say, David, that’s an excellent point.

However, that’s kind of checkmate there, you’re right, because you can’t come back home.

But hey, my dream for the next, you know, few decades involves the fact that miniaturization is getting so good and that we can do so much.

You know, in my own field of planetary exploration, there are these really far out ideas that are becoming plausible, where we can send tiny spacecraft to other planets.

You know, things like CubeSats that are cheap, that we can put around Earth, we can send CubeSats to Venus and Mars and other places.

And then there’s this concept now of Chipsats, which are literally, you know, postage stamp sized, tiny little spacecraft basically that you can drop into a planetary atmosphere.

And they have scientific instruments built onto a chip that can do pretty sophisticated things.

And you could drop a swarm of these into the atmosphere of Venus or Mars or Jupiter and learn all kinds of things about the chemistry and the circulation.

And it wouldn’t be very expensive, so I feel like the innovation that’s coming just from our being able to make really sophisticated, really tiny things is going to allow us to explore the solar system in a more thorough way without sending all that much stuff or spending all that much money.

Low mass payloads are highly, they do very well with acceleration and propulsion, because the same force will accelerate it much higher than if you’re sending a whole human being, for example.

Right.

And that means it’s just going to not cost nearly as much, and that is very enabling.

So if you were to go, I mean, just what is so I guess Proxima would be about four light years or Proxima Centauri.

Yeah.

Four light years.

So would we be able to would we be able to do anything in our lifetime?

Let’s say we had that capability.

That’s the other side of this miniaturization technology.

You know, there’s this group now with Breakthrough with Starshot where they’re talking about using postage stamp sized spacecraft and accelerating them with powerful lasers from Earth to some significant fraction of the speed of light and getting to the nearest planetary systems in something like, you know, in decades rather than centuries.

So, this is an array of very high powered lasers being sent from Earth to these traveling mini spaceships, dare we call them that, and that will accelerate them from what I’ve read, maybe as high as 20% the speed of light, correct?

Yeah, so it will be 20 years there, right?

Because it’s 20% of its four light years.

That is so dope.

Yeah, it is.

And people will be alive today who will be around.

But then you only get confirmation of it when it tells you back at the speed of light.

So it’s a 24 year confirmation.

And there’s no magic involved.

It’s all known physics.

The technology is pushing things, but there’s no magic tricks.

It’s just developing things we already know how to do to some extreme capability.

Okay, Chuck, I got to hear David’s response to this, ready?

Okay, so David, what happens to an airplane that flies accidentally into the laser beams that are propelling these?

Oh, that would be an unfortunate day.

20 years later, that laser beam is impossible.

You lose at 747 every now and then, but that’s worth it.

Mistakes were made.

That’s hilarious.

All right, we’re going to have to actually call it quits there.

But Chuck, always good to have you as my co-host there.

Always a pleasure.

I want to thank Andy Weir for agreeing to jump into our StarTalk universe and share with us his latest projects.

He’s been a fan of our work and we’re definitely a fan of his.

So we don’t ever want to miss whatever he’s up to.

And David, always good to see you and to talk to you.

We go way back, even well before StarTalk.

And so it’s great to see you still connected with us.

What I’d like to do to end is give a recitation of one of the concluding passages of HG.

Wells’ War of the Worlds, just to take us out, if you will indulge me.

War of the Worlds has a narrator in the movie, the Tom Cruise version of it.

There’s a narrator, you know who narrated it.

Wait, give me a second.

Oh, God, Morgan Freeman.

I remember Andy Dufresne and his alien friend.

So, generally, if you have to guess a narrator, 50% chance it’s going to be Morgan Freeman.

In fact, it was him.

I’m not going to read his ending narration because it made some changes from the original.

Here’s the original and this will take us out.

Just to remind you, aliens from Mars attacked humans.

They fell sick and died because they caught some microbe that we all had immunity to and it did not.

So here it goes.

For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen, had not terror and disaster blinded our minds.

These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things, taken toll of our pre-human ancestors since life began here.

By virtue of this natural selection of our kind, we have developed resisting power to no germs do we succumb without a struggle.

And directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed.

Our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.

Already when I had watched them, they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro.

It was inevitable.

By the toll of a billion deaths, man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers.

It will still be his, where the Martians ten times as mighty as they are, for neither do men live nor die in vain.

There’s HG.

Wells for you.

Had a way with words.

Man!

All right, this has been StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

As always, keep looking up.