Extended Classic – Cosmic Queries: Colonizing Mars

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. Before we start this Cosmic Query episode, I'm going to answer one question from a Patreon supporter. If you haven't heard of it yet, Patreon is a crowdfunding platform where our fans can support us through monthly pledges. You can choose to pledge as little or as much as you want, and in return, you get access to things like VIP seats at StarTalk Live, and meet and greets with the panel after the show. Also, exclusive interview footage, and in this case, our team selected one Cosmic Query question from a Patreon patron. I've not seen this question yet. It's waiting for me in my email on my computer, and when I open it, I'll answer it right here, right now. So here I go. Here comes the email. Here it is from Patreon supporter Brad O'Brien in Ottawa, Canada. Here it goes. There are some obvious things to overcome when thinking about colonizing Mars or any planet with little or no atmosphere. I have some experience with remote mining operations and mental health of being isolated is always a big issue. How important do you feel it would be to have a psychologist among the first settlers to deal with the emotional changes necessary for living apart from humanity? Brett, that's a great question. I used to think that would be a big deal. And of course, yes, go ahead, send a psychologist. But I'm old enough to remember these episodes of The Twilight Zone. And many of these episodes came out right at the dawn of space travel or when people were talking about it. And there were multiple episodes that addressed the issue of loneliness, being alone in a capsule and possibly going crazy for having no contact with the rest of humanity. And I said, wow, this is gonna be a big challenge for these long voyages through space. And when I became an adult, I met people who would be perfectly happy, never talking to another human being for months and even years on end. Perfectly happy, all right? We call them hermits or the people who just don't care about other people. You give them their book, give them a Netflix account, whatever. And so the isolation might not be the problem for specially selected people, but perhaps the getting along with one another is where you would really need the psychologist. And by the way, NASA has an entire branch of itself at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they concern themselves with the mental health of the astronauts. And so in support of that, the astronauts get, we learn what their comfort food is in advance, and they try to make that work in the menu. They also get a free access to, well, of course it's free. They get to email someone that's on the ground. In fact, one of the American astronauts who was spending a long time on the space station requested that I be his pen pal when he was up in space. And so they gave them my email address, and I had sort of private exchanges with one of the astronauts, and they asked me questions about the universe. It was fun. So yes, definitely send along a psychologist, but then do the psychologist need psychologist? Thanks, Brad, for that question. This is StarTalk. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I'm here with my co-host, Chuck Nice. Yes, Jay Neal. Chuck Nice Comic. That's right, at Chuck Nice Comic. Tweeting. Tweeting away. Love having you as my co-host. Love being here. I feel like I'm like in the hood when you come in. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I hope that hood has a zip code of 90210. They're different hoods, of course, right? So today, we're doing one of our many installments of Cosmic Queries. Yes. And as usual, I don't know anything about the question. No, you have not seen them. And they're called from our social media. That is correct. Facebook and Twitter. And Twitter. And so you just pluck them as you see them and put them on the table. If I don't know an answer, I will tell you. But actually, there hasn't yet been a question where I didn't know the answer. To be honest, there has not. You know, you and I have had this conversation where I said that I don't think anyone has ever stumped you. But that's not the point. But that's not the point. Right, it's not the point to stump me. But, of course, we are soliciting questions on the universe. Exactly. And that is my expertise, so we shouldn't be surprised. However, maybe what I'm doing for some of the questions is answering a question that I know and sidestepping the one that was asked. Like politicians do that. Well, politicians do. Well, no, they don't even answer the question. They just actually make an entirely new question and then answer that. Yeah, at least mine has got some relevance to it. At least yours is relevant. No, I don't think you're doing that because sometimes the answer is, we don't know yet. That is the answer. Right. So you're still like you still know the answer because the answer is, we don't know yet. Exactly. So it's a we rather than an I. Right. Exactly. Let's rock it. Okay. Is there a theme? Is there? Let's see. This one is... No, I mean, is the theme for all the questions today? Today, yes. What's the theme? Mars. Mars? Okay. Yeah. Living. Living on Mars. So it's not just Mars, but there's some questions about the planet. That's because we have all this data on what it is to live on Mars. That's right. Exactly. You get dispatches from the colony that's there and we'll give you full info on this. People watching too many Red Planet movies. That's what it is. Okay, let's go for it. So here we go. All right. This is from Nancy Lilling on Facebook, who wants to know. Do we know where they're from? I love knowing where they're from. No? Let me see here. Some of them say, a lot of them say not. Okay, if you write in, I always like knowing where you're from. Yeah, just remember that. That way Chuck can make fun of your hometown. That's what comedians do. That's why comedians, people don't know this, but that's why comedians say, hey, so where are you from? That and the fact that I am out of material. That's code for I'm out of material. I am done with material or my material is not working. So hey, where are you from? All right. So Nancy Lilling comes to us from Facebook and she wants to know about garbage disposal in space. Because we clearly have a problem with garbage disposal here on earth. So what, how would trash or garbage be disposed of? And if not, what would it do? All right. So here's the problem on Mars. If Mars is sterile, meaning it's got no life anywhere, not even microbes, if that's the case, and we go live on Mars, normally, what do you do on earth with your garbage? You throw it. We don't, we don't burn it anymore. What do we do? We put it in a landfill. Yeah, we bury it. All right. So you bury it and eventually it decomposes, okay? Right. All right, now what's doing the decomposing? Microbes. Microbes, organisms. Organisms. And so to be biodegradable means there's some biological action on your garbage that's turning it back into the soils from which it came. Okay, so if you are on Mars and you bury the garbage, it will stay that way forever. Nothing decomposes. Nothing will decompose or break down because. Well, not from biological. I mean, there are certain molecules that won't last forever. Okay. But on the time scale, just because of the quantum physics of molecular vibrations. I mean, it's a whole, right, that's a whole other. That's a whole nother thing. That's a whole nother thing, we can get, right. So the actual molecular vibrations may cause the dissolution of some molecules. Correct, and the most stable form of an atom or molecule is when it's in the form of a crystal. And that's stable and then it's not gonna. That's why diamonds are forever. Chuck picked up on that. So, yeah, so unless all of your garbage is in crystalline form. Right. The larger molecules could ultimately decay, but what you're really banking on is biodegradable, which would happen on a relatively short time scale, years or decades, but not thousands of years. So, you need another way to dispose of your garbage. Absolutely. So, basically, you would just turn, so us living there would eventually turn Mars into a dump. Into a complete dump. That's correct. That's exactly right. And what does it mean for there to be fertilizer in the ground? It means, you know, there are microbes interacting. You'd have to create a whole biota there, and you'd have to terraform Mars in advance before you do that. Before you could actually do that. Yeah, yeah, that's why. Or you could just dump your stuff on Pluto. It's not even a planet anymore, right? So we just take our trash from Mars and shoot at the Pluto. Just keep dumping on Pluto. Just dump on Pluto. Now here's, now you might ask, I don't know if they did, but you could ask, why not just send all the garbage to the sun? That'd be the ideal disposal. Now, I can't believe you just said that. Because when I was a kid, and I was very disturbed by the commercials that I saw where there was an Indian who shed one single tear for all the trash that was polluting our earth. I remember that commercial. Yes, and I would get so- Polluting the United States. Right, exactly. There were no Indians, except for in India, but they're different Indians. And back then, not that we're being insensitive, back then the concept of Native American didn't quite kick in yet. No, not at all. There was an Indian guy with a headdress and he saw Americans, gringos, gringos throwing garbage out their window and then he turned to the camera and it was a tear. Right, just one single tear streaming down his face. I remember that. His non-Indian actor face. Is that what it was? Basically, yeah. No, it wasn't. Yeah, he wasn't an Indian. That guy was Italian. No, don't tell me that. I'm not lying, I saw a whole mini documentary on how he was not an Indian. Not even Indian. Or Native American, not at all. He was an Italian guy that actually took on the entire persona. But anyway, I used to see that commercial and I would get. Wait, wait, wait, wait. The Clint Eastwood movies were all Italians, right? Yes. The spaghetti westerns? Spaghetti westerns. Playing Mexicans. Playing Mexicans. So Italians, they got a thing going. Well, yeah, you know what it is because they're white enough to be white, but yet somehow olive enough to play somebody else. Okay, so because from northern to southern Italy, you got the whole spectrum. You got the spectrum. To the Mediterranean ones, to the northern ones. Exactly, so Hollywood was just like, hmm, we can't actually use a Native American. Get me an Italian guy. So your point was about this commercial. I would fantasize as a kid from seeing this commercial about putting all the trash in the world in a rocket and shooting it into the sun and it would burn up before it ever even reached the sun. Right, that's what would happen, that's correct. You lose your rocket too, yeah. So if it's close enough to burn the trash, you're burning the rocket. So this great, brilliant, geeky idea you had as a kid, the problem is it costs a lot of energy, money and energy and rocket fuel just to do that. And it's not quite, no, it's not cost effective. Because first of all, it takes so much fuel just to get the rocket off the ground. Just to get it the hell off of Earth. Right. So let alone all the garbage that would have to be in the rocket. Right now it's $10,000 a pound. And if we put anything just into orbit, forget about even leaving Earth. So is your garbage worth $10,000 a pound? I think not. Yes, and that is why you ended up being an astrophysicist and I ended up being a comic. All right, well, that was great. Fascinating stuff. Who knew we would get all that out of some trash? I didn't mean to beat up the whole segment here. All right. Okay, all right, here we go. This is from Tanner Thompson. Tanner doesn't tell us where he's coming from, but we should- By the way, are you pronouncing these people's names? Well, I don't think I'm screwing up Tanner Thompson. Did I tell you where I was when someone said, I love it when Chuck mispronounces the names? Did I hear somebody say that? No, somebody said that. Well, I'm glad somebody loves it, because believe me, it is not going to stop happening. It will continue to happen. I'm awful at it, but then I saw that Bob Schieffer's was bad at it too, so I feel better about it. All right, so Tanner Thompson says this. We should already be jettisoning garbage into the sun. Oh, I'm sorry, you know what? Forget this question. Sorry, Tanner, we just answered your question. Oh, well, how did he word it? He put it like this. He was like, I'm sure we can streamline the process. He was talking about cost effectiveness. I'm sure we can streamline the process, given some experimentation to make it cost effective. I think you just told us that that's not the case. And there'll be another reason, just what I didn't make clear. Earth is in orbit around the sun. We are not falling straight towards the sun. We are in orbit around the sun. An elliptical orbit too. Indeed, okay. You're showing off, man. Don't do that while I'm drinking. Don't do any spit laughs while you're here. In order to send something towards the sun, you have to undo earth's orbital speed so that it has no orbital speed at all and then it falls straight in. Got you. You have to reverse move it against the orbit of the earth. Right. We're going around the sun, what is it? 18 miles per second, something like that. Last I checked. That's pretty fast. Yeah, that's fast, 18 miles a second. Take your garbage, launch it 18 miles a second backwards. Backwards. And then it'll just fall into the sun. Oh my God, so the answer is, this is never gonna happen. You have to value your garbage so much to want to do this too. Exactly. All right, well then, hey Tanner, I take it back. That was actually a useful question. We got a little more insight, so we appreciate it. The solution is make biodegradable stuff, or stuff that will degrade under ultraviolet light. Ah. Yeah, and on Mars, there's a flow of ultraviolet light. A ton of that up there. They don't have an ozone layer to protect them. Exactly. And there's ultraviolet light coming from the sun, and ultraviolet light is higher energy than other kinds of light. Enough energy to break apart molecules if you make the molecules the right way. So if you were able to create a facility where you could maybe magnify or just focus the ultraviolet light, you might be able to just break that. You could tap the garbage or something good. Nice, all right. So it would be UV degradable rather than just bio. Instead of biodegradable, UV degradable. Yes, yeah, that sounds almost like ebonics, UV degradable. Oh no, that's UB degradable. Yeah, correct that, ebonics. Correct that, ebonics. That's not UV degradable, UB degradable. All right, enough of that. Here we go. I haven't heard ebonics in like 30 years. I know. I'm bringing it back. All right, this is from John Huggins. John wants to know, in preparing to go to Mars, are there or will there be a need to be international treaties that dictate the governance of Mars? If yes, what would be the key aspects of those treaties? In other words, do we have a... First of all, we've been on the moon, so I'm sure there's something that governs that. Not really. No, not really. Well, no, it governs it. It says that you can't own cosmic objects. So the Outer Space Treaty has provisions in it that says the universe is a frontier and you can't own it. There's no sovereign control over it. Now, at some point, that's going to have to change. Right, because we have Vladimir Putin now. You go to Mars and people start pitching their flag and they build a home. Well, you can't say that no one owns the home. I built the damn home. That's true. So what is likely or rather what has been proposed is that you put a homesteading kind of rule in place. All right. The homesteading is if you pay the money to get there and you built your own damn house, that's your land. So Bill Gates will be owning Mars. Basically is what you just told me. Just the rich folks. Yes, Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Well, they kind of do that. Richard Branson owns his own island, right? That's right. They kind of already do that. They kind of already do that. Right, but what it means is on that island, he hires servants and gardeners and everything. So, there's a business case for people to do this. And why did the United States promote homesteading? To spread the frontier, to move the frontier, and this is how you grow cities and communities. And so, I'm thinking it'll go that route. Because don't say, well, Earth, we own all little patches of this speck called Earth, but the whole universe, no one owns it. I don't see that as the natural consequence of human exploration. Or human nature. That's what I really meant to say. Because the real deal is, from the time that we are little, teeny kids, one of the first words we say or sentences is, that's mine. That's mine. That's mine. That's mine. Even when it's not yours, it's yours. And especially in America, one of the first games we learn how to play when we know how to play any good game is Monopoly. That's so true. And who wins? The one who has all the property. The game's not over until I win it all. Yes, I own everything and you have nothing. Nothing. Oh my God. Right. Talk about brainwashing. And we celebrate this. We celebrate that. And we say, wow, you were good. That is like the height of capitalism. God, you crushed me. I'm a complete and utter pauper now. You're good. When I was in graduate school, there was a fellow graduate student who was from Russia. And I was describing Monopoly to him. And when I got to that point, and the winner has all the money and all the property. And I thought, wow, this is like before the Cold War ended. Right. And it was like, it was not playing well in his worldview. No, because he was looking at you like you're capitalist bitch. Yeah, because that's basically, wow. I never looked at it that way, but that's a, whoa. Now, let me tell you my favorite Monopoly joke. It was by, it was a dude's name from Boston who's kind of surreal. Steven Wright? Steven Wright. So he said, I'm angry that only one company makes the game Monopoly. That's a good joke. That's not good. That's a good joke. I love the irony of it. All right, let's move on to, okay, here we go. Joseph Magalanis. Just keep trying. Joseph Magalanis. Sure. Anything you say, Chuck. Joseph says, greetings, will we be able to one day grow vegetation outside the conventional greenhouse on Mars? If so, how long would it take and what would we need to do to make it so? Yeah. So I don't claim myself to be a botanist or an expert on this, but let me tell you what I know as a physicist. As a physicist. So plants require carbon dioxide. That's what they take in, and the carbon that's in there becomes fundamental to their molecular structures and the lignin and all. That's why a tree can grow. Exactly. Right? It's not taking soil and turning soil into a tree. No. It's taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And using photosynthesis to turn it. And then releasing oxygen as the by-product. And the oxygen is its waste, and then other animals thrive on that waste. Exactly. Okay. So basically, people, you're breathing in the earth's poop. No. Okay? That's what you're doing. You're breathing their belches, really. Their belches. Yeah, that's true, because it's gasses. It's gasses. We have solid liquid and gasses. That's true. Effluences. So yeah, you're breathing the earth's belches. You breathe it in. Exactly. Just like honey is bee barf, I heard it called, right? So Mars' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. So it's got the carbon dioxide. Very thin, but it's mostly carbon dioxide. So what you need is nutrients in the soil. So it needs the nutrients to then enable all of its chemical processes to occur. But you have to watch out because of the heavy duty ultraviolet light coming in. Ultraviolet is hostile to biochemistry. So in other words, the photon of ultraviolet light comes in and it sees an organic molecule and it just zaps it. It breaks it apart. So you would need a filter for that. A filter, a UV filter, and toss in some nutrients. Some nutrients in the soil. And I think the CO2 might be enough to keep it won't grow fast because it's very thin, but it's going to enjoy the CO2. Nice. So it is possible. And if you do that, then out comes the oxygen and then you wait long enough. And this is the beginning of terraforming. And then the cycle, then that's when the cycle happens. You got it. Well, that's sweet. So Chuck, I blathered for that whole segment. We only got like two or three questions answered. I'm sorry. When we come back, maybe I'll speed up my answers and we'll get more of the questions coming through. On StarTalk, stay tuned. Thank you for that. I don't know if you know, I serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium right here in New York City, which is a wholly owned subdivision of the American Museum of Natural History. And Chuck is here with me in studio. Yes, yes I am. Chuck Nice. Yes. Cosmic Queries edition of StarTalk. Absolutely. Going to Mars. And if I don't know an answer, I'll just say, I don't know. That's not gonna happen. Let's be for real. All right, bring it on. Yes, that's not gonna happen. Bring it on. All right, here we go. Next question. Next question. Okay, so this is somebody who wants to know about the atmosphere and the gravity on Mars. I love the way that Stephen Matlow phrases this question, somewhat inventive. And this came over which path? This came over Facebook. He says, okay, Neil, when the New York Yankees play a road series against the Mars cosmos, how big will the outfield have to be to prevent everybody from hitting home runs? Also, will the pitcher throw faster in the atmosphere or slower and will he or she, this guy's very liberal, he's got a female pitcher in the major league interstellar baseball, interplanetary, not interstellar, interplanetary baseball league, will he or she be able to throw a ball a curve ball and take it back, Steven is coming from Livingston, Montana. Livingston, Montana. Yes, yes, flat country. Now here's something. I've never seen a mountain in his life. That's why it's called Montana. So I was in Montana recently, I gave a talk in Bozeman, Montana. Oh really? Yep, 6,000 people showed up for it. Nice. I didn't know that many people lived in Montana. I think you had the entire state there to be honest. And by the way, I was joking about mountains, because there are mountains in Montana. That's why it's called Montana. Big sky. Big sky. It's big sky, but there are mountains in Montana. Go ahead. So here's his question. I got the question. I remember. You read it. I got it. I have a good memory. Excuse me. I have an awesome memory from three minutes ago. I know. So a couple of things don't change and other things do. The pitcher does not throw faster because that's just their muscular skeletal capacity to do so. All right. The ball will not slow down as much between release of the fingertip and crossing home plate because the air is thinner. And there is air resistance to the ball. Right. That slows it down. I don't know. It may be 10 miles an hour or whatever it is, five miles an hour. It's not traveling for very long, but it will slow down a little bit. It does that in the majors. It will do that on Mars, but it will slow down by a little bit less. But that's not the major thing going on here. The Martian atmosphere is very thin. It's like 1% of our thickness. And it's the air, the movement of the ball through the air that enables it to curve. So curve balls would be very hard on Mars. Because you don't have the air or the thickness of it. The thickness of the air. For those, what do they call it? Stitches? Stitches, yes. That's what they call the stitches on the ball. The stitches? Do they call the stitches on the ball the stitches? But that's what's causing that rotation. Well, it assists it. Even if it didn't have stitches, you could still move it. Oh, really? The stitches help it. But without the thickness of the air, you can't get that movement? You don't get as much movement. Oh, yeah, yeah. You don't get as much movement. Now, it is windy on Mars, so you could throw an awesome knuckle ball. Because knuckle balls don't rotate, and so they're not stable moving through the air. Rotating things are stabilized. That's why a rotating football is stable. Spinning. A knuckle ball does not spin, therefore it is susceptible to any possible puff of air that comes across its path. So you could use a windy day knuckle ball to create the effect of a curve ball. Well, yeah, but it will curve in a way that you can't predict, and that's why catchers are always dropping knuckle balls, because they don't know where they're held. The ball is jiggling and wiggling, and it comes in, and so the number of pass balls, pass knuckle balls by a catcher, is huge relative to other pitches. Because it's a surprise ball. But it's a surprise ball for everybody, even the pitcher. A curve ball, the catcher calls for the curve ball, so they know where it's coming. See, this is what I love about you, man. I mean this, I swear to God. See, this is what's great. We're talking about baseball on Mars, but yet you know all this crap about baseball. How does this happen? No, you know what it is? It's not like, I mean, who does? I'm a red-blooded American. I like me some baseball and hot dogs, okay? And apple pie. So just start there. Okay, so now the rest of it is just because I go to a baseball game and I'm curious about it. Like, I just ask questions of the game and of myself relevant to the game. So for example, I say to myself, suppose you're hit by a pitch on ball four. Right. You ought to be able to go to second base. Right? Exactly. I'm just saying. Yeah, true. I'm just saying. No, that makes sense when you think about it. These are the kind of questions I asked about the game. That's very funny, yeah. So, now. We got to get that role in baseball. That's awesome. So now, how far, how big a stadium would you have to make? Martian gravity is about 40% of Earth's gravity. So if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you weigh 40 pounds, or 38 pounds on Mars. So 200 pounds, you weigh 80 pounds, which is great because the muscles that you have for carrying a 200-pound body will now be operating in an 80-pound body. So you'd be able to jump higher. Yeah. So maybe you'd make the infield a little bigger because you'd be leaping. You'd have to sort of adjust that. There'd be some trial and error on this to get the ideal field size. Now, when you hit a home run, the ball is doing two things. It's going forward and it's going upwards. Right. And then it finishes going upwards, and then it starts coming downwards while it's still going forwards. Right. Each of those have a different effect. How fast you can hit the thing going forward has nothing to do with being on Mars. That's just how fast did you swing it back. Right, that's your swing strength. It's your swing strength. Now, the ball going up, the same force will have the ball go higher than on Earth, which means it will travel farther simply because it will go higher. Right. All right, and so you got to do the math. I haven't done the math on that. If I were to guess, make it 40% bigger. I mean, just as a first cut. Oh, yeah, as a general rule. Just a first cut. Just a first cut. And probably if I do the math, there are some adjustments in there. So a 400 dead center field, a 40% greater than that would be 160 more feet. And is that right? Yeah, 160 more feet. So it would be 560 feet dead center. Just to recreate the same likelihood of a home run. Now, that means outfield is huge, which means you gotta have some fast outfielders. That is true. You might have to add two more outfielders to it. Because it fans out from home plate. So if it's 560 dead center, you're gonna be missing a lot of balls. Be like Little League, you had a fourth outfielder. You might need two more outfielders. Dude, that's amazing. And a shoestring catch would be awesome. Because you would jump and you just keep going. Exactly. Just out of the stadium, into the locker room. What a catch and he's in the showers. That's fantastic, man. Hey Stephen, what a fascinating question. There you go. That was great. Great, great, great stuff. All right, let's... By the way, I don't know if I'd call them the Martian cosmos. Why not call them like the Martian... There's got to be a better name for it than just cosmos. Plus, you know, finally, the World Series would apply to something other than the United States. The Mars Reds. We have the Cincinnati Reds. How about the Mars Reds? The Mars are much more justifiably called the Reds. Exactly. You know where the red color comes from? It comes from rust on the Martian surface. Is that just iron, oxidation? It's an oxidized iron. So the Mars Reds would be good. Yeah, the Mars Reds. There you go. Can't wait to buy tickets to that game. Bring oxygen. Yeah, exactly. All right. All right. This is from Mike Draws. Don't ask me. Come on. My question pertains to the potential human offspring on Mars. Has there been any research done regarding a child's physical development in an environment so different than ours? Even if we managed to terraform Mars, we'd still be living in different gravitational conditions. What would that do? Yeah, so our body has evolved for Earth gravity. So what's interesting, and I don't think we have the answer to this, is if you're born in 40% gravity and you spend your whole life in that gravity and you come back to Earth, will the body say, oh, thanks, I'm back to my own 1G force? Or will it say, whoa, this is not good? This is terrible. This is terrible. I am crushing under my own weight. We kind of do that when you send an astronaut in 0G for a year and they come back to Earth. We already know the effects of lower gravity, your bone density drops and other things, and then they come back to Earth and they don't die on the spot. So it might not be as bad as you think. But now with that change, I mean, this is a biological question, but with that change over time through adaptation, so we come back to Earth after being in 0G and your body always seeks an equilibrium. So that's why we go back. Okay, so I got to straighten something out right here. Life does not adapt. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Wait a minute. Hold on for a second. No life form ever adapted to anything. Okay, see, now I have to, see, my whole mind is going blank because I got to change the way I think about everything right now. Adaption implies that you're in one environment and then you go to another one and then you're physiologically adapted to it. That no, that so does not happen. What happens is, in the genetic variation of any generation, some people have certain properties that others don't. Correct. You go into a new environment and everyone who does not have the properties to survive, dies. Dies. They are summarily removed from the gene pool and the one person who had that property in advance, In advance. survives. And so therefore they did not adapt. Right. They were fit to survive. In that environment. Correct. They were the fittest of survival. Correct. And so when the word adaptation, it's true in the broad sense of a species, but there's no active adaptation ever going on at all. So you go to Mars and you might grow accustomed to it, but you're not going to come biogenetically adapted to it. Right. You're not going to come back with three fingers and antenna. Because you needed that on Mars. You needed that on Mars. Right, exactly. Unless you came there with that. Unless you started out. Send the three-fingered, antennaed people to Mars. They'll be just fine. Fantastic. All right. Yeah. So we got 10 seconds left here. So let me add something else to this. So it could be that on Mars, our kind of people fail. You don't mean black people. Thank God. No, regular, quote, regular humans, as we currently know ourselves, doesn't work out well on Mars, but someone gives birth to a kind of human that can breathe a different mixture of oxygen or, you know, a variation that is just natural in what goes on, and then they become the dominant strain of the human species there. That's how you end up speciating. Right. Because then they have a variation that's even better, and even better, and even better. It's a genetic mutation. Essentially. It's not an adaptation. It's a genetic mutation. Correct. That happens to be able to be good for that environment, and then you run it through, and then others die off, and then you have just speciated the human race. Sweet. Yeah. And this is how you get all the weirdest freaking creatures in Australia. Really? Yes. That's why you have like marsupials. I thought you were going to say on Star Trek. In Australia. Australia is a continent island that hasn't touched mainland. Exactly. In millions of years. And the creatures just do their thing. That's so funny. So you have a species that is a mammal where the baby is born outside of the womb and then crawls up into the pouch. And then you have the duck-billed platypus that lays eggs, but it's a mammal. Mammal. Right. That's how weird stuff happens. We'll come back to StarTalk for more Cosmic Queries with Chuck Nice. Yes, I am. You're helping with the Cosmic Queries? Yes, we are. All our listeners send in questions, and they get solicited, and this topic this week is? Mars. Mars, going to Mars, hanging out on Mars. Living on Mars. I got a few answers there, I think. Am I doing okay? I think you're doing great. I gotta tell you, this has been fascinating. The whole baseball thing, when I read the question, I was like, okay, maybe we'll get some. That was amazing. Oh, okay, now someone who just tuned in now, now they can't go back. Well, you know what? That's why you should listen to the whole show. Make people feel bad about tuning in late. Don't tune in in the middle of the show. Stop that. We talked about baseball on Mars. Yes, we did, so back the show up and listen, okay? All right. All right, here's the deal. Let's go to Tony Williams, and the only reason I'm reading his question. Because you can pronounce the man's name, right? Tony Williams. No, he starts it off this. Hey Chuck, over here. He knew it was going to be you. Hey Chuck, over here. Pronounce my name, Chuck. Yeah, exactly. Would it be more practical to send inflatable habitats, or artificial habitats, or send a large scale 3D printer to make the habitats? In other words, how do you build your habitat on Mars? All right, so I think initially you want to send the habitats ahead, and then you get people there who can, and then you know, ship the ingredients for a 3D printer. And I think the 3D printer comes later. That's what I think. You don't want the first thing the 3D printer makes is your housing. You don't want to test it on your housing. Right? You know, it's kind of drafty in here, in this Mars house. I'm thinking you want to go there with a known Hab module, Habitat module. So later on, by the way, I can't imagine life on another planet without a 3D printer. Suppose something breaks, a fan blade or a circuit board, and you just dial it up on the 3D printer, and you pour in the right ingredients. Is it silicon dioxide? Is it some other ingredient to make? Is it metals of some kind, iron, steel, whatever? And then it prints it out, and then you've got your tools. So then all you have to transport is your ingredients. Ingredients. You don't have to transport the actual stuff. Your raw ingredients. And I saw, they didn't call it a 3D printer, but that's what it was. It's called an in situ resource utilization machine at NASA. Really? It has more syllables, so ISRU, right? Which means it's good. Which means it's way better than stuff with fewer syllables. So in that, you pour in aluminum dust, and it takes it and it fuses it by laser into the shape that the CAD drawing tells it to make. Sweet. And so they may, that's why I have examples of this at home. I have a screen, I have a fan blade, I have these shapes that are not even symmetric. And there it is. So yeah, I think that's the future. So send the Habitat and then make sure the next thing you bring is a 3D printer. With raw ingredients. With raw ingredients. Correct. So you can make every, who knew that we would actually have replicators like Star Trek, that Gene Roddenberry was a genius. On many levels, that's correct. In many dimensions. That is unbelievable. All right, man. Hey, Tony Williams, that was a very, very good question. All right, this is Nate Owens. How do you spell that? O-W-N-S-Z, O-W-N-Z. Owens, yeah. Owens. What do you own, Nate? My last name, so. Where is he from, anyway? Nate is from, okay, here's what you do. If they don't see where they're from, say, this is from Earth. Okay, this is Nate Owens from Earth. There you go. Go on. Dr. Tyson, with the financial cost of going to Mars being so high, what are some of the advantage of this mission over sending a dozen other missions to find life on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn? Why is Mars more important or less important or equally important as Jupiter or Saturn, whose moons we think may have life? So if you're only gonna explore, then we're sending robots, and the robots to Mars are a couple hundred million dollars. That's actually cheap in the big scale of space exploration. When we say Mars is expensive, we're not talking about sending rovers, we're talking about sending people. That's what's expensive. You know why? Because the people generally want to come back. Yes. All right? And they want to eat and not die while they're there. Those selfish bastards. It's typically. Always thinking up, that's all you think about. That's where the half a trillion dollar costs come out. So if you're only, quote, only exploring the solar system, you get robots to do that. And yeah, the mission to Mars with a large robot is about the same as a mission to Jupiter, with a medium or small sized robot, to Europa or Io or Enceladus. Enceladus? Yeah, yeah. No, not celibate. Yes, enceladut. That's the planet I'm on. Been married 17 years. I'm enceladus. That's my planet. Go ahead. So, yeah, so that's not the issue. So if you want to send people, there's where the expense is. All right, so now what is more important? Is it more important to explore these moons that either through the gravitational pull or through the fact that they have these oceans? That's a great question. What's more important? When you design a mission, you kind of need to know in advance what questions you want the robot to be asking. When I say robots, I mean space probes. And I don't mean like humanoid robots. In fact, why would anyone make a robot in the shape of a human? We're not the most efficient way to move, to think, to... So give me something that works. Because you want it to look like you. It makes you feel better. No, no, no, yeah, no. I never felt that way. No? I mean, cause then it's like your child. It's like, you know, it's harder to dismantle your baby. Or at least it should be. Well, I didn't finish that. So the real cost is sending humans. And, but with a robot, if you want to explore the rings of Saturn or the magnetic field or the radiation levels or the volcanoes that are on some of these moons, you got to know in advance what package of experiments you're going to put together on it. And my colleagues, they live for that. Right. So, cause they're planetary astronomers. I'm an extra galactic guy. Yeah. I worry about galaxies. Galaxies. Yeah. They do planets. Yeah. Man, go ahead and do your planets. Do your planets. I'm worried about bigger things. You know what I mean? I'm worried about galaxies. So Chuck, we're at the four minute mark. All right. You know what that means. Let me tell you. So Chuck, we're under five minutes. So you know what that means? Yep. The lightning round. Lightning round. I will give sound bite answers to every question you give me. Ready? Go. All right. Tyson McGone or McGown wants to know, is there geological activity on Mars? And if so, what would its impact have on a station there? I don't remember the latest. I know that Mars is more dead than it ever was in the past. And because it's when you cool down from your formation energy, then there's no turbulence under your crust. Earth still has energy deep within, from some leftover energy, a lot of energy from radioactive decay of elements. And so we have convection in our mantle that moves continents, that we have continental drift and volcanoes and every mountain building. So Mars, not so much today. Yeah, so you set up base camp there, you don't have to worry about coming back later and have it being flooded with volcanic lava or have it shifted in some new place. So don't worry about it for Mars. Sweet. All right. Largely because Mars is smaller than Earth and it cools faster because of that. Okay. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Oh, by the way, that's why small potatoes cool faster than large potatoes. Oh, really? Even if they come out of the oven at the same temperature. Ah, well that explains my career. Two small potatoes. Two small potatoes, baby, small potatoes. Okay. All right, go. All right, is there any way to revive Mars' magnetic field? This is from Powell, Powell, Powell, Powell. Powell Carpicci. We could use half our time to listen to new pronounced people's names. So the magnetic field on Earth is sustained because Earth's mantle and Earth's core is alive. What I mean by alive is there's moving material, and in our iron core, if you move iron, which is itself conducts electricity, you drive what's called a dynamo and you create a magnetic field. Nice. Yeah. So if, but if your planet is like dead, it's not, it's geologically dead, so you'd have to like go down to the core of Mars and heat it up and start moving that iron in a liquid, liquefied form again. Okay, so the answer is no. Yes, yes, yes, the answer is no. Yes, the answer is no. Boom, all right, I think we got time for one more, here we go. Brad Smith wants to know, once a colony were established, would it be possible to connect the computers and networks on both planets? In other words, could we have internet on Mars? So this would be interplanetnet. Interplanetnet. So by all means, the problem is there'd be a time delay. When Mars is close, that internet signal would take maybe a few minutes, and when Mars is far, it could take up to 20 minutes or a half hour, I'd have to do the math, but it's many, many minutes. So you wouldn't be able to do a massively parallel interplanetary war game, right? Because you get shot before you even knew that you got shot. Because by the time the information got to you, to duck, it's too late, you done got shot. Right. So it would restrict what kinds of instantaneous communication internet may require, but other kinds it doesn't. If you're just watching a YouTube video, sure, go right ahead. So modern combat, no, email, yes. Yes, yes. And there's talk of using pulsars in the galaxy as a kind of GPS for wherever you are in the solar system, no longer requiring on the GPS satellites of one planet or another. Because the pulsars rotate very rapidly and they send out a pulse of radio waves, and so they are precision timing devices. Oh, oh, God. That sit outside of everybody's atmosphere. And so you could have an interplanetary timekeeping system that'll serve almost in the same capacity as GPS. Turn left at the brown dwarf. Bam! Bada, this is, bam! Bada bing. Chuck, thanks for being, as always. It's always a pleasure, man. Rocking these Cosmic Queries. Always fun. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, and I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always, I bid you to keep looking up. Hey, Chuck Nice here. You're listening to an extended episode of StarTalk. When we come back, a brand new segment of Cosmic Queries about the universe with myself and your host, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. What's up, Neil? Hey, Chuck. Bring it on. Mike Maas wants to know if and when we colonize another planet who has political rights over that body. Welcome to the wild frontier of space law. It's not clear, but the outer space treaty stipulates that you can't own anything in space. So the nations cannot declare it their own. So if that holds up, the answer is nobody has jurisdiction. But I think laws imagined many decades ago may need to be updated and modified given what we learn and know about the future of space exploration. So we're in need of some enlightened attorneys to think this through going forward. Oh God, more lawyers. No, better lawyers. So you mentioned space treaty. What is that? The outer space treaty was a UN document drafted in the late 1960s, ratified by today, more than 100 countries. And it's a guidelines for the peaceful use of outer space. And it's very kumbaya. You know, if you're astronauts in trouble, I come help you and I bring you food and water. And it's very beautiful. It's very future thinking, but it leaves open the possibility that you might want to defend your assets in space with some form of weapon or another. And suppose you see a satellite coming towards you and you think it's going to hurt you. Can you preemptively take it out so that you don't get hurt? This is the fuzzy area in that document. But that doesn't subtract from the fact that it really is imagining a future, a very peaceful future of cooperation in space, which I think in the end is a good idea. Look at that. Gene Roddenberry couldn't have done a better job himself. Yep. Jen Shiffred wants to know this. Don't we already use satellites for military action? What other ways will they militarize space? Yeah, when people think of the militarization of space, they're often thinking of Star Wars weapons, missiles and things. Problem is when you're in space and in orbit, you're going 18,000 miles an hour in low Earth orbit. If you start busting stuff up, now you have particles and bits and pieces of formerly operating satellites that are themselves projectiles moving at 18,000 miles an hour. And so you make a mess of things. So space war would last a few hours and then you'd never have another space war again. So space has been the repository of spy satellites ever since we've had satellites. And in that sense, it has been militarized. In fact, the Gulf War of 2003 was completely enabled by space assets with GPS satellites leading the way, which we think of as just helping you get to grandma's house in your car. But it was conceived, launched and operated by the military and was later co-opted by business interests. So yeah, it'll find grandma's house, Uber, their entire business model depends on it. And if you want to find a mate within 1.5 miles of your current location, swipe right. Interplanetary hookups. I like the way you think, Neil. All right, you ready for another one? Jay Tallis asks, what possible injuries or diseases will combat doctors in Space Force find themselves regularly treating? That's a great question. Well, that depends on how much we invoke soldiers in space as opposed to remote controlled satellites in space. You start putting people in space and then they start fighting one another. You might ask, well, why would you do that? Just put a drone, a drone satellite in space. But if you put people in space, yeah, then there's a long-term effects of zero G, the bone density loss, all the same things we currently know about from astronauts and their long-term visits to the International Space Station. So that's the kind of, I wouldn't call them injuries, but they're workplace hazards, I would call them, workplace conditions that are not always in the interest of your health or your longevity. You also have exposure to higher levels of radiation from the sun, so you want to be protected against that. But if a missile hits you and you're blown to bits, same medical needs you might have if that happened on Earth. Hmm, the difference is when you scream medic in space, no one can hear you. Yes, Chuck, that is true. Not only in space can no one hear you scream, no one can hear you explode either. Man, bro, you went dark. Malik Maz wants to know this. Why does gravity produce elliptical orbits? Why aren't they perfectly circular? What's up, Neil? Well, all gravity really does is change the path that you would have otherwise taken through space. I'm trying to go in a straight line, and something down here has got some extra gravity for me. I end up curving towards that object. But if I have high enough speed, my trajectory will curve, but it won't get pulled into orbit. It will just sort of send it in a different direction. And if I don't have enough speed, it will curve me so much, I will come in and crash. It's only in between those two extremes that you end up having any kind of orbit at all. And you can have all kinds of orbits, depending on what kind of speed you have and what your distance is. Comets, typically, have very elongated oval orbits like that. And planets, as we think of them, tend to have much more circular orbits, but they're still ellipses. There's a little known fact that over enough time, the interaction between the object and the host, it could be a moon and a planet or a planet and a star, over time, the orbit becomes more and more circular in their interactions. And depending on how close it started and what the thing is made of, that can happen quickly. And you can end up with a perfectly circular orbit eventually. But otherwise, gravity is just something that changes your direction. That's all. So maybe that's why Pluto's orbit is different than any other planet. Did I say planet, Neil? Oh, I'm sorry. Its orbit is so elongated, it crosses the orbit of Neptune. There ain't no kind of behavior for a planet. I'm just saying. I'm joking, Neil. I'm joking. No one go there. Are you ready for another question? Yes. Matt Herefield wants to know why do planets orbit in the direction that they do, or is it a 50-50 chance? An answer to that question was first posed more than 250 years ago. In mid-1700s, Emmanuel Kant, the philosopher, as well as Laplace, a French mathematician, physicist, proposed something called the nebular hypothesis. Because how else do you get all the planets orbiting in the same direction? Who ordered that? And it turns out if you have a gas cloud that is the parent object that becomes the star and its orbiting planets, and this gas cloud rotates as everything does in the universe, and it's out of that gas cloud that you make your planets and moons and other objects, then anything you make out of that gas cloud is going to have an orbit in the same direction around the host star. And the star will be rotating in that same direction. So this was an idea 250 years ago, but later on more thought invested in it, computer models, bears this out. And so that's how you can have an entire family of objects, everybody going in the same direction. And in fact, that's so strong is that concept and that idea that if you find something orbiting the other way, you probably captured it later, and it did not have anything to do with the formation of the system itself. That's how you know who's got birthright to the system and who came in later. As usual, Neil, that was a little mind blow. That was just a little one. Aaron Kennedy wants to know this. Could you please explain the significance of the heliosphere and how it's made? So the sun, as we know, is a ball of gas, but it's not just all stays that way. Some gas gets like ejected. And so there's a stream of particles that come from the sun that we call the solar wind. And you might have heard of the solar wind because it makes aurora. The particles stream and collide with our atmosphere near the poles, and it renders it aglow. Very beautiful. Well, this solar wind moves completely through the solar system. And it goes beyond the planets, beyond the comets, and there is a point where this solar wind can no longer be distinguished from the medium that permeates between the stars of the galaxy. That is the actual edge of the sun's influence, the sun's sort of particle influence on its environment. And we call the size of that volume the heliosphere, and the boundary of that volume the heliopause. And on September 12, 2013, Voyager 1, the intrepid Voyager 1, crossed the heliopause. And only then could you say, it has left the solar system entirely. It's not just, oh, let's go beyond the last planet and now you've left the solar system. No, no. The sun reaches out far beyond. And there you have the heliosphere. And it's always there, by the way. And as we move through the galaxy, it can take on different shapes, depending on what's going on around us and depending on the strength of the wind at any given moment. So, it could be a sphere, but it's usually a teardrop as the solar system moves as we orbit the center of the galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. There you have it, Chuck. Okay, Pedro Duran Montalione wants to know this. What can Drake's equation tell us about aliens? Oh, so Drake equation was a way to organize our ignorance of the universe when we're trying to figure out if we can communicate with intelligent aliens in space. It was named after Frank Drake. He first wrote this equation. You start out with the number of stars in the galaxy. Then you say, well, what fraction of those have planets? What fraction of those that have planets have life? What fraction of those have intelligent life? What fraction of those have intelligent life with technology? What fraction of those might actually be listening for us at any given moment? You start hacking away at this number, and what's left at the end is an estimate for how many civilizations are out there that you might want to talk to. Each one of these terms is an astrophysical question. You can back it up further and say, what is the rate that stars are being born? Because that will tell you how many stars you have to search for. So when you put all these terms together, you get an estimate of how many intelligent civilizations might be out there. And right now, in one of my recent books, we actually give the very latest calculation for this, and there's like billions, so we're good. Do we really want to talk to billions of other people? Yeah, I don't know if you were telling where you live, that would be bad. You don't give strangers who are your own species your email address, much less sending the return address to Earth out to aliens across the galaxy. Who? Alien-stranger danger. Alien-stranger danger! And Chuck, you know what the last term in the Drake equation is? It's how long the intelligent civilization might be around at all. It could be that achieving high intelligence, you now know enough how to render yourself extinct. So just because you became intelligent with technology doesn't mean you will keep that for all the rest of time. Maybe you have an expiration date. Well, hopefully we don't push that date up further than it has to be. Alright, let's move on, Neil. Bring it on. Don Rim wants to know this. How likely is the theory of panspermia for the genesis of life on Earth? It's really good. If you look at microbes, not all microbes, some microbes, are just fine in the high radiation, low temperature, dehydrating conditions of space. And we have them here on Earth. And you say, why do you have this ability to resist this? That's not a natural force operating on your evolutionary history here. But you would need that getting through the vacuum of space. Asteroid impacts kick rocks into interplanetary space, and they travel and they land on other planets. There's some number of tonnage of rocks on Earth that actually came from Mars, came from other planets in the solar system. So panspermia is the movement of microbes from one planet to the other in the nooks and crannies of the rocks. Alright, you ready for another one? From Sanjeev Bhaskar, This is a question from my 10-year-old son. Considering the environmental conditions of Mars versus Europa, where are we most likely to find aliens? My bet is on Europa, because that has an ocean of liquid water beneath a frozen layer of ice, maybe a kilometer thick. But that ocean has been liquid for billions of years, billions of years. And on Earth's oceans, that's where all evidence points to life having begun. So if you want to find life as we know it, we're going to look for conditions as we know it. And that would be these oceans in Europa. And then the only thing left is if you do find life, what do you call it? And I think there's no choice but to call them Europeans. I might have a moment of silence for that joke.