Live at Awesome Con – To Mars and Beyond

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Hello, everybody. It is my great pleasure to welcome StarTalk Live to the show, to Awesome Con. Ladies and gentlemen, let me bring on your host, one of America's great science educators and communicators, Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Hello. Greetings. Wow, look at you guys, greetings, greetings. I imagine this is not the first time you've heard this this weekend. This is awesome. So speaking of awesome, should we introduce our guests? Let's do it. Well, start out, where should we start? We'll start over here. The most hilarious woman ever. And you know her by her Twitter handle, at King Firestorm. Ladies and gentlemen, Jo Firestone. Next, in this corner, or this chair from the Astrobiology Institute, you know him by his Twitter handle, Dr. Funky Spoon. David Grinspoon. David, David, David. Good to see you, sir, yes. Then in this corner, which is a chair. And I'd give you his Twitter handle, but he said no, just Google him. Hari Kondabolu. Welcome. Hari Kondabolu. And then lastly, everybody, somebody who really works in the business full time. The second in command at NASA, the deputy administrator, Dr. Dava Newman. There it is. Please, everybody, please sit down. Are there any questions on what we've covered so far? No, we're at Awesome Con. This is superhero time. And on stage here with me, I claim are the super heroes of space exploration. So for me, what I'm hoping for is to have superpowers. Right? Now, what do you guys want in superpowers? Main thing for me, I want to be able to fly. And then the next thing down that list for me is to be able to have extraordinary vision. What would extraordinary vision, like how far I would see far or through stuff? Well, I'd like to see other planets. Yeah. And then I'd like to have vision that would find life and stuff like that. So to get this started, Dr. Newman, you are an expert in aerospace and biomedical engineering. Yes. Your research studies include advanced spacesuit design and dynamics and control of astronaut motion, which is not trivial when you're in zero G. Right, or Mars. And you're the director of MIT's technology and policy program. On leave to serve NASA. And as well as your deputy director at NASA. Now Dr. Grinspoon. Sir. You're, of course, you're regular here on StarTalk. That's why you're beloved. And you are, I presume you are funky and you're good with a spoon. And that's why you're Dr. I do my best. Yeah, you're Dr. Funky Spoon. But right now, you're the senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, right? Which is like an amorphous thing. It's distributed. Distributed, because it's the modern world in which we now live. And you're a co-investigator on Mars Curiosity Rover, right? And stuff like that. This is right. So here's the thing, you guys. I want to just ask you to start, because we're at Awesome Con. What would be your favorite, let's see, we'll start with Dava. What would be your favorite superhero? So I'm going to combine a few. So it's Elasti. What, you can do that? Yeah, I'm going to do it. It's Elasti Girl with Spider-Man, because the suit is cool. We came up with it first, you know, for a suit for Mars. And I like to fly, too. So Batman, so Elasti Spider Bat Girl. That's what I'm going with. Batman doesn't really fly as much as he falls incredibly well. And he doesn't ever, seldom gets hurt. What was Elasti Girls? I'm not familiar. Elasti Girl was just kind of bendy, or what was her thing? Super bendy, cool. Super bendy. Yeah, around, yeah. Nothing got in her way. And fast. What was the difference between her and say Gumby? Gumby I think is more Christian. Oh. And green, right. She's red, she's kind of more reddish. Oh, so Gumby's green and she's red. Right. There. Okay. Just start with that. Just start with that. But seriously, you made an allusion to spacesuits that resemble superhero costumes? There you go. But the technology came first, I think. Yeah. The technology came first? I think so. We've been working on the technology for a long time. What technology are you talking about? Advanced spacesuit design. It has to be lightweight, mobile, flexible. We're going to Mars. Did you hear? We're going to become interplanetary. We're going to Mars. Not, you guys, we're not going to Mars during this. Surprise, we're going to Mars. I hope you're with someone you love. Strap in. But what are we doing in Mars? What are we doing? We're setting up shop or what's happening there? Well, we're already there. We've been there for the last 50 years with orbiters and landers. And the next 50 years are even cooler. We're going with people. So first we're going out, Space Station, that's in low Earth orbit, phase one. We've been doing this for 16 years together with the world. Then we move out to Earth, Moon in all the 2020s. Our rovers are still hanging out, doing Mars. We have these great experiments. We keep popping off the robotic missions to Mars. And then boom, boots on Mars with people in the 2030s. This is like stuff. Stuff will be there. What's the year that you think that there'll be boots with people inside the boots? People inside the boots? In the 2030s. In the 2030s, and it's probably not all of us, but it's the Mars generation. It's teenagers today. Is there going to be commercial flights to Mars? Is that the plan? When does that start? Well, government and commercial. So it's public-private partnership. And it's the world, too. I heard Southwest is doing specials. I can't wait till there's some weird line where they have to get into to get a Mars. Great Southwest joke. Watch out for the baggage charges. Before we go too far along, David, you have a favorite superhero? Yeah, I guess my favorite superhero is Planet Girl slash Planet Boy, because... Planet Girl? Slash Planet Boy, because she's transgender and interplanetary. And she's got spectrometer eyes, multi-wavelength imaging spectrometer eyes, and she's got ion drives on her toes. So she can go in orbit around any planet and image just about anything you would want to. Dr. Newman, you are the second in command at NASA. That's like a superpower. It is super cool. I have the best job in the world. Maybe the second best. I think it's the best job in the world. Did you ever go like, get out of here, go to outer space? Not out loud. Because if you did, it would cost a lot of money. So when you say journey to Mars, we spell that J2M. I like that. That's a good acronym. That's my shorthand for it. And so in order to make the journey to Mars, let me ask you a couple things. What do we need to do? We need a big rocket. So we're designing and developing, and this is real. Our space launch system is well under development. How long will it take to travel from Earth to Mars? So round trips, about eight months to get there, but just think of it as about a two-year round trip in transit, but hopefully we stay 600 days on the surface of Mars, exploring. And when you say 600 days, 600 Earth days, 600 sols. Yeah, that's debatable. Let's say 600 Earth days, since we're kind of counting in Earth days right now. And 600 days is also just 600 days. I think anybody who's ever seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey would say, that is awesome. That is awesome. And part of the reason it was awesome, it was spinning. The space station is spinning, creating some artificial gravity. But right now, the proposal is to punch it and go to Mars fast enough, exercise enough on the way, and take the right medications to preserve bones. So you can preserve muscles and bones. Musculoskeletal, the bone, we lose, typically you lose one to 2% bone mineral density per month. Here on Earth, that's per decade. But maybe we have some small, you can do small and short arm centrifugation that fits in the craft. That's a really interesting concept. You know, like a spin in the gym. You know, imagine instead of the elliptical, it could be a spinning thing. So we're still, you know, playing around with the concept. You would be in a spinning thing and it would. Well, say the spacecraft, you know, you know what, 2001, that was fantastic. Engineers love it, but that's expensive when you have a two kilometer radius, right? Tell me about it. So let's do a smaller one, because, you know, we have great budgets, but we could spin inside. Just a second, Dava, just a normal blank, what? A normal what? A normal spacecraft, normal Mars spacecraft, size and shape. A normal Mars spacecraft. That's what I think about every day. And then we could have a little, think like little spinning beds inside, see? That's cool, that's still artificial gravity, but within the constraints of a normal Mars spacecraft. So let's say that problem is solved. What is the biggest challenge? The biggest challenge for getting people to become interplanetary, because we will become interplanetary, I hope sooner than later, that's what I'm working on. Biggest challenge is the will. Biggest challenge is the will. We have to focus just deciding yes. The biggest challenge is just saying yes, and getting, all of you, getting all the people behind it say that, first answer why, why are we going? There are the enduring questions. Are we alone in the universe? Is there life, has there been past life? That's the why. Biggest challenge is just say, let's just say yes, and stay the course, and don't get derailed, and just focus, focus, focus, and then we get there. So that's the biggest challenge, yes. Who's saying no to this, like people that are afraid of aliens? It's not no, it's just apathy. Who gets to own Mars? Oh, it has to be global. I mean, at NASA we're saying, here's our plan, here's what we want to lead, we have all of our elements, heavy lift launch, the Ryan capsule on top, we get out, and then we're saying, world, come with us. Even Estonia? Estonia, yes. It's global, it's global exploration. Isn't that a risk? Because that's the way colonialism worked before, all these different countries were going to a land and claiming it, so won't that just happen again with different companies and different like... You know, you think, maybe we can get it right this time. Ultimately, the Martians will probably own Mars. Yeah, but we're going to kill them off. I discussed this earlier. We're going to become the Martians we're colonizing. When we go there, we'll be the Martians. Sorry, really quickly, we're talking about Martians in this scientific form. They're real? What's happening? Well, okay, Earth and Mars, 4.5 billion years, sister planets, beautiful, wonderful. And we think, because we have a lot of scientific data, Mars, 3.5 billion years ago, it was probably wet, wonderful, maybe a little wild. Back in the day. Back in the day, 3.5 billion. Like a little like Costa Rica? Maybe, yeah, Costa Rica. And then something might have gone terribly wrong. Well, what went terribly wrong? Too many parties. We'd like to figure that out, because that tells us a lot, again, about Earth, about Spaceship Earth. And so if there's past life, it's probably kind of fossilized, and that's what we're looking for, past life probably. So a couple things though, literally. There is a space treaty from 1967. Signed by John Lennon. The wording of it is a little bit vague of the space treaty, kind of deliberately, because it talks about going to the moon and other celestial bodies, like people, the Mars was a long way away. Nevertheless, Mars is getting to be within reach. It's getting to be a reasonable thing that people might do. And if we can really do this, I just, my opinion, which as you know is correct, is that it's just not so easy to get to Mars. It's not like these guys came, they came from Europe and they went across North America, they came from Europe, they went to South Africa and they started eating things and setting up tents and stuff. But on Mars, it's a much more difficult deal. Well, there's also a big difference, which is that there were people here when Europeans got here and they weren't always recognized as people and that caused a lot of problems. It seems as though there are no people on Mars so the set up is inherently different. But what about the protecting the role, let's say the objective, to protect Martian life if it's found? Yeah, well that's one of our big scientific objectives now, of course, is to find out if there is Martian life so that we don't inadvertently do something really stupid to it. So along that line, we're sending robots, right? By robots we mean spacecraft that land, drive around, cool tires, and to look for things. But how do we know that those things are sterile, those robots have been made clean enough to land there without contaminating the Martian life when we see it? Well, we work on it, we take it serious, that's planetary protection. When we think about forward protection, we bring life, we're looking for life on Mars, but we sure don't want it to be our life, so we do that. And back contamination, so forward contamination, so it has to be, it's a whole area. There's no way to know for sure, but it is taken seriously, we do our best. There are planetary protection protocols, we try to clean our spacecraft, we don't sterilize them 100%, so we know we've brought some microbes to Mars. When you say we don't sterilize them 100%, I will ask the obvious, why not? Because it's very hard to, in order to sterilize a spacecraft, you would have to cook the whole thing to a point where you would destroy a lot of the scientific instruments. You'd melt the electronics. So we kind of play this game where we get them clean enough so we know how many microbes are on there, and we land them in places where we don't think those microbes would survive. It's a little bit of a game you have to play. So we know there are some microbes on Mars that we've brought there, but we don't believe we've started colonies of Earth organisms on Mars. I would love to beat everybody there and put a bunch of rabbits on Mars. And then you go like, oh my God, there's so many rabbits! What are we looking for as far as Martians? Are we looking for plants or worms or...? Fossilizers. Kind of like think about going to the beach and looking at those cool fossilized shells. Kind of like that. Like something like a muscle. Like a seafood. Harder and flatter and 3.5 billion years old. So you're looking for what was there, not what is there. Past life on Earth. There's nothing there. What is there? Well, what is there we're finding out every day. We know how Mars lost its atmosphere. Our Maven observer just helped us figure that out. And we know there's methane. Mars is breathing, kind of saying hi to us with methane coming out. Think it might be active methane. So when you find... Active methane from what? Toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot. People fighting matches? We don't know. In fact, the existence of the methane itself is somewhat controversial, though. It's looking better and better. There probably is methane. And of course, a long time ago, before we found the methane, that was one of the things that scientists said would be a biosignature on Mars. If you find methane, then there's gases that are weird gases that shouldn't be in the atmosphere. Just like on Earth, there's oxygen in the atmosphere that comes from life. If you find methane on Mars, we used to say, then that will be a sign of life. So now we've found methane on Mars, but we're not sure it's a sign of life. Because there's not much of it, and it behaves in weird ways, and there are some just chemical geological reactions that can make methane inside the Earth. Or inside a planet. But most of the methane in Earth's atmosphere does come from bugs, from life. Just to clarify, we're talking about space farts, right? Yes. And burps. It could be propulsion. Methane would be great propulsion for us. We could use the methane to get back to Earth. There you go, gas station. We have that first gas station on Mars. The first gas station, how cute. Is it going to have a mini-mart? I guess we have to set that up. But imagine this, everybody. You land the right spacecraft on Mars, and you use the chemistry of the rocks and the atmosphere to make rocket fuel to fly back. I mean, that is an extraordinary idea and very cool, and we will talk about that coming up in the next segment you've been watching, you've been listening to StarTalk Radio. We'll be back right after this. We're at the Convention Center in Washington, DC. And I am joined by this fabulous panel, which includes our beloved Eugene Mirman, Hari Kondabolu, Jo Firestone, David Grinspoon, and second in command at NASA, Dava Newman. So, when we left, we were talking about life on Mars. We were talking about what we'd be looking for on Mars. How would we know whether or not we found something alive on Mars? What exactly are we exactly looking for? Well, it's a puzzle, right? Because we don't know if there's any life beyond Earth. And by the way, what is life? Yeah, well, that's the puzzle. How do we define it when we only have one example? You think there's all this biodiversity on Earth, but we know one thing we've learned for sure is that it's all related. So there's one example of life on Earth. How do we know it's all related? Well, chemically, of course, it all uses DNA and proteins. And even better than that, by looking at the sequences of DNA and proteins, you can tell what's related to what. And you can make this tree of life. And we go all the way back and we do not find any organisms that were not obviously related to on a biochemical level. Even my old boss. Even snails are your distant cousins, yep. You and an escargot are just, you know, a few generations removed. So we can't really define something that we only have one example of. It's not very scientific. You want a bunch of examples of something to say what it all has in common. And yet, we want to search for life elsewhere. So we have these sort of provisional definitions. We think we know what its signs will be. We think we know what it is. But in order to really know what it is, we have to find it and then be able to compare it. What would you speculate it would be? Well, I just. What would it take? Present life and past life. Right now on Mars, we really think that it's past life. But we say, when you look for life, the search for life, follow the water. You know, that's kind of rule number one. Follow the water. Now we have water on Mars. Why do you say follow the water? Well, because David was saying, you know, we're kind of looking for carbon-based life. That's what we know. Kind of carbon-based life forms. That's how life is on Earth now. There could be something we haven't thought of. But right now we're saying, go for the water. We have water on Mars. Mars has a carbon dioxide atmosphere. Pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, when we're talking about Mars, we're following the water. We're gonna make oxygen there. If we're talking about just life in the universe, looking at exoplanets and such as well, we tend to take a more general view of thinking, well, life, at least we know is something that perturbs its environment chemically. Sorry, what are, you said exoplanets? Planets around other stars. You know how many we have? Which now we know. They're super cool. Now we know. We didn't know this 20 years ago. This is one of the revolutions of our time is we now that we know that all the stars in the sky, almost all of them have planets, multiple planets. So when I was in school, Joe, people speculated that there might be a planet around one in every hundred stars. Now it's generally agreed in sort of orders of magnitude factors of 10 that every star has at least 10 planets, about 10 planets. And then if you want to get in the argument about Pluto, Sedna, Eris and these other very distant icy worlds, then you're talking about hundreds of planets. Thousands. We just let out, we just categorized and let out 1200 new exoplanets. But let me just say, just to dog-dog-men. For life on those, it would be great if we could detect water, but even if we just see weird chemistry in the atmosphere. So Mars has carbon dioxide atmosphere? And then we can turn that into oxygen. We're going to do that on our Mars 2020 rover. Can I have some of that oxygen? You have to go there. It won't be enough for a person, but we're going to make oxygen on a planet for the first time ever. Hang on, people, hang on, just a minute. Dava, you said, well, you know, we're going to look for life that was once there on Mars. We were back there, you know, back in the old, look, we, there's methane on Mars, people. We have the Maven, it's at Mars, atmospheric volatile emissions, what's the N? But it's a... Emissary Volatiles and Environmental. Yeah, I think it's Nancy. Nancy, and she's fabulous. She's fabulous. But anyway, if they're finding methane, there's got to be a source of it. I'll give all of you chemists, and I love you all out there. There's some inorganic chemical process that produces methane, right? But everywhere on Earth, we find water. We find living things. Even the tiniest dampness of nothing damp. In Death Valley, there are cyanobacteria that live right, the green, blue-green things that live under the rocks. Rains once every couple years, and something's alive there, right? All right, so if we're finding methane on Mars with, what is it, the Tracegrass Orbiter is out there, and Maven, and we're finding liquid water in these recurring slope lineae, right? And geologists love the Latin. Yeah, exactly, seasonal. So it's a little rivulet, a little rill, a little drip of water every year. Hari, I like it. You can't see it on the podcast, people, but he is Inquisitive Man. He's hanging on this. Like, how much water are we talking about right now? Right now, just a small amount. Briny, salty water, you don't want to drink it yet. But the great thing is, we knew there's ice. There's ice on the poles. But now this is. Almost none on the surface. Yeah, and this is seasonal. So, you know, it's seasonal, but you know. But look, every Martian summer, there's a little waterfall. It's fantastic. I am with you. Wait, are you making, that's true. That's not a thing you just lied about. No, no, not about that. It's true. It's a Martian waterfall. Well, or rivulet. Rivulet, I like rivulet better. But there's a lot of water underground. Flowing seasonal water. We believe, we know, actually. You guys, I am open-minded, of course. But you're telling me that we've got liquid water on Mars and we have methane that we detect, albeit in strange ways, from billions of kilometers away with these extraordinary spacecraft, all right. And you are not optimistically optimistic about finding something still alive? And I think it's gonna be sooner than later. I'm not. I don't think there's life on Mars today. By life do we mean something. And I think, actually, that's a good thing. I'm optimistic that there's no life on Mars today because that makes it much less complicated for us to do the things we were talking about earlier and not be wiping out a biosphere. Okay, just a minute, European immigrant man. Yes. It sounds like you might be saying, well, I'm pretty sure there's nothing alive there. That we're not gonna contaminate it? Let's just show up. No, because I very much support our carefully investigating this question. I think that right now our ignorance vastly outweighs our knowledge. But I am a skeptic as far as the methane we've seen and the water we've seen indicating a biosphere. Why are you skeptical about? Because I think that on a planet like Earth, you look at, if you were a alien. Show here. For instance, this room, if you were an alien looking at our solar system from afar, there'd be this planet Earth that has a flagrant biosignatures. This oxygen is off the charts. Flagrant. You people are flagrantly signing your bio-ness. I don't think a planet like Mars that has very subtle potential biosignatures will ever be alive. Because on a planet like Earth, the biosphere is coupled to the active biogeochemical cycle. For those of you watching the podcast, it's in their arms. I'm waving my arms. Because Earth has... Snow angels in the sky. Earth has this active hydrological cycle with rainfall and evaporation. It has plate tectonics. The geology is alive. The chemistry of the interior is in communication with the atmosphere. He's still waving his arms. I'm waving my arms. And on Earth... We can all be water and dance. On Earth... He's out of his chair to get the arms. Do you think there's like microbes in the water? I guess that there aren't like squirrels? What I'm saying is that on Earth, life rides the cycles of an active geological planet. Mars, in that sense, is a pretty dead planet. I think, as Dava was saying, we will probably find signs of life in the past when Mars was a less dead planet. But if I had to bet, I would bet that Mars does not have life today. So speaking of betting, speaking of betting, they won't take the bet now. I'll bet a dollar and we'll figure it out in, what, 2032. I say I would go with 2033. Okay, 2033 it is. And we'll be there, we'll be there. Well, we are on Mars today with five vehicles in orbit and surface. Sorry, with like a group of kids playing soccer. Group of kids, kids playing Mars generation, the 2030s. So let's back up to the disco era. My favorite time. Yeah, good, you're in the right place. So the Viking landers had these scoops that this was in 1976, July 4th, coincidence, 200 anniversary of the United States. Viking one lands there, has a scoop, can to an ice cream shovel and scrapes into the soil and stuff then it dropped some of that soil into some chemistry experiments that were spacecraft style. There, you can't see them from here, but the scoops dropped the dust in there and something happened, right? And people, for a couple days, for those of you who were not around in the disco era, there were a few days or even weeks when people around the world like totally freaked because it seemed like something was bubbling on Mars that might be alive, right? Now, can you comment on that thing? What happened there? This gets back to this vexing question of how do we look for life when we really don't know anything about life elsewhere? And the Viking biological experiments were a wonderful set of investigations, but in hindsight, they were maybe a little bit naive in that what we were really... What did they really do, really? They were looking for life on Mars that was very much like life on Earth. Essentially, they scooped up stuff, like you said, and they sprinkled it with what they called chicken soup, which was water and nutrients. So right now, it's like Block's sister's papers, his fist has gone into his hand. Yes, they sprinkled up stuff, they put it in this experimental apparatus, and basically, they sprinkled it with water and what the scientists nicknamed chicken soup, which was a set of nutrients which earth organisms would have loved, simple organic compounds, and they looked to see if anything happened, and did it give off gases where the carbon. Which it would if it were, if you put a scoop of earth soil. And they even labeled the carbon with radioactive carbon, heavy isotopically heavy carbon, so you can see if the carbon in the chicken soup. You can see if you have the right instrument. Yeah, you can, with that instrument, you can tell that the carbon in the chicken soup was the same carbon that came out. It was as if this stuff was breathing out carbon dioxide. So they said, aha, there's something in there that's eating chicken soup and breathing out carbon dioxide. It's alive. But then it didn't really behave like living organisms. There was a big fizz of this carbon dioxide and then it went, it tailed off as if it was more of a chemical reaction. For those of you listening, his hand went way up like he was going to do a hook shot and then it came down like he was going to... Like he was going to... An exponential decline. I feel like it would help the listeners if you just picture one of those things outside car washes. Yeah. You know, like every time, I feel like that's a great visual. Oh, the inflatable guy that just walks around. It first looked like it was behaving like life. It breathed all this stuff out and then it looked more like pop rocks or something where something fizzes or Mentos and Pepsi, where something fizzes all of a sudden and then just dies off. If it was organisms, it would sort of perpetuate longer. So it ultimately had a shape over time where it acted like some chemical in there was really excited to react with the stuff we gave it. We brought pop rocks to Mars and pop rocks were like, we're pop rocks. Exactly. But they didn't find life. So it fizzed, but it didn't really metabolize on fashion. The way we would understand it. Now one should say there are still some holdouts. There's this guy named Gil Levin, who was one of the original investigators on this. He's still alive and he's a smart guy. And he thinks that they found life on Mars with this experiment. And he refuses to be convinced otherwise. And he's a smart guy. And there's still a little controversy about this is an indication of the fact that we don't completely know what we're doing when we're looking for life, which is kind of what's exciting about this. We're on the edge of our knowledge and we're trying to investigate something that we can't completely grasp. So Mars is crazy cold. Venus is crazy hot. We're the classic Goldilocks story. Exactly, that's the word we use. We are the Goldilocks planet. You've convergence of a great scientific mind right here. We got the porridge that's the right temperature to eat. That's what we got. That's the right temperature to eat, gobble gobble. It is, no, it really is. Beautiful planet. Don't tell Galactus. But isn't there, okay, listen, I'm just, my mind is sort of blown from the exoplanet. This is good, this is good. It does seem like exo-gossip girl. Okay, but listen, so exoplanets, there must be, around those stars, a planet that's equidistant from those stars, what's happening? I know, so that's it. So we have an instrument and the James Webb Space Telescope's coming up. Kepler's out there now. But this telescope is gonna look with such sensitivity, how sensitive will it be, that people believe they'll be able to look through the atmosphere of a planet backlit by its star. Are you digging me? Sunlight from a star is gonna go through this planet's atmosphere and this telescope out in space will be able to detect what gases are in that atmosphere. And what everybody's all hot for is water vapor and methane, the natural gas, the stuff in the blue flame of your stove. And oxygen. And oxygen. This would be like so cool. And so my claim everybody is these discoveries, if we were able to discover life on Mars, on Europa, the moon of Jupiter, with twice as much seawater as the Earth, at least. Twice as much seawater as what? As the Earth. All of Earth. Oh, really? And maybe even a little more than twice as much. Great place to go look for life. Oh wow, does Kevin Costner know? We love it. Don't tell him. So anyway, what we want to do, my claim is if we were to find life, if we were to find life on one of these places, it would change this world. So let's say we were going to go do this. David, at Dr. Funky Spoon. Man. Sir. What is your dream scenario? Finding life on Mars. How would you go about doing it? Well, I think that we're going about it the right way. I would love to accelerate. My dream scenario would be that we double or triple the NASA budget for exploration and could do more. I think we know what to do. Thank you. By the way, let me just say. Let me just say, as CEO of the Planetary Society, I spent a lot of time on this stuff, and we've gotten the planetary science budget now up to about 1.7 billion, which I know doesn't sound like much. But everybody, the NASA budget is about 0.4% of the federal budget. 0.4, right. How do we get it to say 2%? Well, so in the Apollo days, it was 10 times that. It was 4% of the federal budget. And so the planetary science line item within the NASA budget is less than 10% of the NASA budget, 9 and plus percent. We do a lot. And so these were the extraordinary discoveries that were made. So your dream scenario starts with getting more money. And then where do we go from there? My dream scenario for Mars specifically is, as I said, I think we're going to confirm that there's no life on Mars today. But I want to be really sure before we go into other things there. So we've got to check out this methane, figure out where it's coming from. If it's not life, it's telling us something really interesting about the geochemistry of Mars that we need to know. But my dream scenario for Mars, as Dava mentioned, the possibility of finding fossils. There should have been life on early Mars given what we know. We'll either find fossil signs of life on Mars or if we study Mars really carefully and understand those early environments and find that there was no life ever on Mars, that is also a really exciting thing to find. It tells us something about Earth, that there's something special we don't understand. Everything we learn about stuff in outer space informs what we know about the Earth. And I claim that the more we know about our solar system and other solar systems with other stars and exoplanets, Jo, the more it informs ourselves and where we all came from. This is the two deep questions. Are we alone in the universe? Here's the big question though. What would we do with life if we found it? And we're going to talk about that when StarTalk Live comes back right after this. We'd like to give a Patreon shout-out to the following Patreon patrons, Justin Adamson and Forrest Shepard. Thank you guys for your support, because without you, it'd be very difficult to do what we do. And if anyone else would like their very own Patreon shout-out, make sure that you go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us. Patreon. I'm here on the fabulous panel with Jo Firestone, Dr. David Grinspoon, Dr. David Newman, Hari Kondabolu and our beloved Eugene Mirman. We're talking about life on other worlds. We're talking about space science super heroes. And this segwayed into this search for life. And now we're talking about how we exactly would actually exactly go looking for life. We have some assets there on Mars right now, right? We have the Curiosity Rover. We have some, a lot of assets in orbit around Mars. And the idea, let me just start by going back to begin, to start with, why are we all so hot to look for life on Mars? Why not life on Mercury or Venus? Close by Mars is the best place to look for life. And then we get further out into the solar system, and then we go to these ocean worlds, which even look better. But again, Earth and Mars really are sister planets. And it looks like Mars was once wet. It's the most Earth-like environment on the surface of another planet that we know of. And we have a lot of evidence that in the past it was much more Earth-like. Do we have a sense of why it's so sad there now? Yes. It's not as big as the Earth, so it cooled off faster. It does not have the churning iron in the middle that we have on Earth, creating a magnetic field, which makes the solar wind particles go downhill when they get to the north and south pole. But on Mars, apparently, these same particles scraped the atmosphere off, scraped it into space. So it lost its atmosphere. It ablated. It's still going on today. Our Maven spacecraft is in orbit. Check out the stimulus. We can see the ions ablating. It's only a 1% atmosphere. Mars has a 1% compared to Earth. 100% here has 1% in its carbon dioxide. So we see it's not protected by that magnetic shield. We're still trying to figure out when and how. So hang on. So hang on. How are we going to get there, you guys? We just had a humans orbiting Mars workshop. The Planetary Society pitched a humans orbiting Mars architecture, as it's called. And along with all the many things NASA was going to do, was develop these solar electric propulsion spacecraft. And how does that work? And the solar electric was going to go out to an asteroid, the Asteroid Redirect Retrieval Mission, right? How does solar electric propulsion work? And how is it part of going to Mars? Right. So when we go to deep space, we get back Earth, Moon, Cis, Lunar, right? That's the next step. That's phase two. First on space station, low Earth orbit. 2020s we'll be on our space launch system. That's our heavy lift launch. Space launch system is a massive word for big rocket. Big rocket. Big rocket. We haven't had one like this for 40 years. Move over Saturn V. It's more powerful. More powerful than a Saturn V. These rockets are made of your standard metals. Yes. Yeah, using aluminum, using additive manufacturing though to make it, it's much more efficient. So we're using, you know, high tech but big rockets. But we're basically using home depot stuff. You know, we're using the screws and the... Yes, yeah, nice stuff. Yeah, nice, nice. High end, high end. Imagine the fanciest home depot you can and double it. And then we get out to systems. So now we're in deep space, okay? We're in deep space. Not quite yet to Mars. Yeah, that's phase three. But in phase two, we're into deep space. And we have to demonstrate some technologies. Because you don't just get to Mars in one place. No, but here, let me just tie this in. So space electric propulsion. You want to know? In space propulsion. But here's the thing. As Jo just said, home depot style rockets, chemical rockets, is what you're, you know what I mean, Jo? You got a liquid oxygen, you got some other fuel, you mix them with a fuse, and they burn like crazy. And they make their cool noise, and then they go into space. Shh, but it's usually, whoosh. Really, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then what happens after that? Then you're in space, and there's some reason you don't want to use chemical rockets anymore, and that is? Well, we need breakthrough technologies, so we need new technologies, so what we're investing in now, now we're getting to the moon, right? So your deep space, the top technologies we're investing in today, is in-space propulsion. But isn't it that you just can't, it's hard to carry all that much fuel, right? It's hard to carry cargo and fuel. So what is in-space propulsion? In-space propulsion, so there's different ones, but so we're talking about solar electric propulsion. You can move big cargo, lots of mass, heavy mass, go slowly, but that's all right, we'll get there. So it moves a lot of cargo, you know? And we're slowly, we're rockets in space. Yeah, we're more than 17,500 miles per hour, but still slow for space, you know, slow for space speed. So how fast is fast for space for us? Well, you know, light speed is fast, right? Yes. Sorry, but meaning. Joe, Joe. When you say slow, you mean as fast as we can make. Not like we're. Slower, let's say, you know, a little bit, you know, a little slower, because you want to get your people there as quickly as possible. So big rocket, let's go fast. About eight months, you know? That's fast for us. Punch it. Eight month trip, because we've got to get boots on Mars. We'll get in orbit. But this in space propulsion, solar electric, that's a nice candidate. Constant acceleration, so just keep going all the way. You know, let's carry your groceries, you know? Carry the stuff you need with us. We always bring a lot of stuff. Does it arrive later after the people? Well, we would be popping them off, right? So we get this capability. What we want to do is have stuff in place before humans show up. You want to land some tents. And fuel, fuel depots, we said, habitats, so that's what we're investing in. But I just want to talk for a second about the rocket equation. Who doesn't? Oh, love the rocket equation. Yeah, so the big thing that makes a rocket go, and you've seen this, Jo, is the stuff coming out the back is going really fast. The classic orange in the child's drawing. Yes. Yeah, yeah, after burners, yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah. The orange. So it's going really fast out the back. But it takes, you need a lot of fuel, and you reach a point where you can't get the rocket going too much faster because you can't get the exhaust going that much faster. That's called specific impulse. So that's what we call it in the rocket equation. So in solar electric propulsion, we're going to take a big tank of xenon, is that right? For example. So anyway, you get a tank of this stuff liquefied, and you get it by getting the atmosphere, getting a big tank of air on Earth cold, and the xenon separates out in a layer like a parfait, and then they extract it, put it in a tank, and then they put it on this rocket. Sounds delicious. Oh yeah, it's good, it's nothing better. Well, you breathe it all the time in tiny amounts, and look, I've been doing it my whole life, and I'm fine. No, so then you have solar panels. Is this right, Dava? They need electricity, power. Then we have a window screen looking thing, and it electrically attracts the xenon from its little tank and shoots it out the back at super fast speeds, right? And that's really an ion drive. That's really ion propulsion. Like in science fiction. But anyway, the solar electric propulsion idea is going to be used to go to Mars, right? Now what are we going to do with that? We're counting on it. Solar electric propulsion. We're counting on that. Let me tell you a few other ones we're investing in right now. Deep space habitats. Incredible. You know, public, private again. Industries working with us. Deep space HABs. We're sending people what goes on in the deep space HABs. Life support systems. You've got to figure out to get, you know, we're going way beyond low earth orbit. So we need deep space HABs. BIM, Bigelow's BIM just inflated, expanded. This week on Space Station. BIM is an acronym. Yeah, for the Bigelow Expandable Module on Space Station. A nice one. Expandable habitat. It's a big inflatable thing. Attach the International Space, you got me doing it with the hands. But not too big. I mean, Space Station is big, a football field size, right? These are smaller HABs. We need to test them out. Now, number one, radiation. What about radiation protection? What about radiation? I was, years ago, people said, if you tried to go from the earth to Mars, the radiation would kill you. But now people have rethought that, right? It is a problem. The radiation is one of the serious physical problems. It's a problem. It comes with sending people to Mars and we know a lot more about this now because of the Mars Science Laboratory, which is our Curiosity rover, which is on Mars now doing wonderful things. But on the trip to Mars, this instrument called RAD, the Radiation Assessment Detector. Radiation Assessment Detector. Yeah. And I'm actually a co-investigator on that instrument. So it's near and dear to my heart. I'm a co-eye on the RAD team. And one of the things that was cool, we were able to do with RAD. It was designed to measure the level of high energy radiation on the surface of Mars, on the rover, which it's doing in a wonderful way. But we realized that we could also turn it on before we got to Mars. It's the one instrument on the rover that we turned on while it was still in the spacecraft on the trip to Mars because it allowed us to measure the amount of radiation in interplanetary space and basically simulate what a human would experience in terms of radiation on the way to Mars. And so, it's the first time we ever did that and now we really know much more than we did before this mission. Will it kill you or not? It will not kill you, but it will put you at greater risk of getting cancer, which could ultimately kill you. But it's not like just going to Mars is going to fry you and you'll be dead when you get there. But it will by a few percentage points. You'll die when you get back to Earth. Well, it's equivalent to, you know, you go to the doctor and you get like a CAT scan. So, and that, you know, if you do that... If you do that a lot, you're slightly increasing your chances. So you don't want to do that all the time. Chances of getting cancer. So your life's... It's as if you did that once a week. And we look at total life dose, total life radiation dose, and we're going to protect the astronauts. That's what we're mapping. We're taking this data. Now we're looking at the Mars radiation environment. And then it's our job. How can we protect the people? How can we protect the spacecraft? You don't want to fry your instruments either. So we protect the people. And we have some interesting ways to do that. The kind of people that want to be astronauts, if you say, well, you got an extra 1% chance of getting cancer, I'm in. I'm going, man. Yeah. But you still want to protect them. Absolutely. So what are some of the ways that we... Like, is it similar to like when you go to the dentist and they take pictures of your mouth? They put the thing over... Yes. There you go. That's the shielding. So high density is very good for shielding, especially for, you know, galactic cosmic radiation that we're going to see on Mars. Created the fantastic four, for instance. But when we're in this... There you go. Superheroes. So, but in the craft, water, because we like water to drink, it's pretty high density. Yes, I'm a big fan. Yeah, it's a pretty good radiation shield. So there's interesting concepts in the vehicle, high density materials. We're going to take water anyhow. It would be nice to kind of live in the water walls. That will really help the astronauts in the hill. And doesn't it harm the water for it to be radiated for you to drink it though? No, the water doesn't care at all. I was meaning the water doesn't care, but when you drink it, it doesn't matter to you to drink it. You're okay. That's a great question. If anything, if there were any little bugs in the water that you didn't want there to be, it would, you know, make it nice and clean. So you'd have a jacket, you'd have a ball, a sphere, a shell of water around your space grid. Like a waterbed. Waterbed. Like a waterbed to space. It's a good concept. Great MTV Cribs. When we get to Mars, you know, you don't want to put it in the suit because you want to be mobile, lightweight, but, you know, lava tubes and there's a lot of, you know, volcanoes. So where are we going to hide? Where are we going to live? Yeah, underground caves, things like that. These are all actually amazing shields. Is there space underwear? Has that been discussed? Like what are the sexual side effects of radiation and the, I'm just getting to the question I'm sure you were all considering from the get-go, like what happens, you know, like is there extra protection in those areas? How is Scott Kelly's long-term, long-distance relationship? I'm sure he asked that question. There's no way he wasn't asking that question. I think if you're going to have children. Do it before you go to Mars? Or at least put some in the freezer. You know what I'm saying? No, that's a good idea. Have one before and then have one after and see if the second one's a mutant. I think here at Awesome Con, let me rephrase that, a friendly amendment, if the second one has superpowers. Because that's what you get. You know, if you're a superhero, a lot of times you were irradiated. Maybe you were bitten by a radioactive spider. Maybe what's been irradiated is just your father's ding-dong. I like how you used the scientific term for penis. I'm a gentleman. So, just as far as I know, a ding-dong is not an acronym. No, it's just the thing it is. So, you know, when you say ding-dong, I'm looking over at the interpreter here and just wondering what... But anyways. Or if you're a lady, you're Doodle. That was good. She explained. Where were we? I think we were going to Mars. We were on our way to Mars. We were on our way to Mars. Now, you mentioned the radiation detection instrument. What other instruments would you take? Why would you take them? And then fundamentally, everybody, everybody, would you go to Mars if you had a chance to go to Mars? What instruments would you take? If I was going to Mars. What are you going to send? What are you going to do? I want to, the thing that I most want to do if I were going to go to Mars is look for fossils. Fossil life. These would be bacteria in a mat. I would take rock hammers and drills and a microscope, a scanning electronic microscope if I can get away with making one small enough. To carry there. Because right now, scanning electron microscopes are big, four or five desks. One thing that NASA is really good at is making things small when we need to and put a little technology development into it. I would want, on my Mars laboratory with my astronauts there, I would want to be able to go out and drill and find samples in the most promising sites. I want to look for the isotopes, so I would want a really good mass spectrometer to look for isotopic signs of life, for signs that life had altered the chemicals in the past. And I would really want to look actually for physical fossils and the right kinds of deposits. Let me say, my father was a rock hound, like the rocks. Every rock tells a story. My uncle was a geologist. And the way you're describing this to me, David, is geology tools. Yes. But what non-geologic instruments would you take? Oh, I thought so. Well, first, we're taking the people. That's what I'm about. We're taking the people and our rovers and machines, because that's how we work better. We will explore tens, a hundred times more of Mars if we get there and we're mobile and we're working in teams, people. I've heard this said that what our best rovers do in a week, a human would do in less than five minutes, maybe even less than a minute. So it's sort of a magnitude. We're much more mobile and quicker. So we're all in this together. And what are their instruments? Our robots and our people. Our robots and people. What instruments would you take? What are their instruments? Well, actually, back to life support systems and bioregenitives. I actually would make sure I could make oxygen. Bring it in. Yeah, you want to start on that. And water, you know, things like that. There's not enough there for us yet. So I'm kind of worried about staying alive. So I'd like some water, like some oxygen to breathe. Well, let's say you got that problem solved. But Bill, you know, it's funny the way you phrase the question, non-geological instruments, because the word geological has geo, which means earth. So any of these instruments on Mars are areological, right? Which ares is Mars and anyways. I was going to say that as well. So if we want to understand the ancient story of Mars, then we're going to apply a lot of the same tools we use to understand the ancient rocks and the ancient story of earth. So we look at ancient sediments because they're what capture the atmosphere too, the bubbles of air. But hang on a sec, the Viking missions had some chemistry thing that everybody got excited about. Right? That was wrong though, right? Well, one guy says maybe not so wrong. So that was a biology experiment. That was the spiritual equivalent of a Petri dish. So what is the spiritual equivalent of a... Let's say Mark Watney has it all figured out. He can breathe and grow potatoes and whatever he's going to do to take care of himself. How is he going to find or she going to find evidence of life on Mars? What instruments do we need? Okay, the instruments, but let me tell you, I want to say, you know, who are the people? Because you asked about, is it the astrobiologist? I hope not. I hope it's not a single discipline of anyone because we need, you know, a whole new education. So this is a point you need to know a little bit of astrobiology, right? You want to know your geology? You know, I'm thinking an MD might be, you know, a little medical knowledge. So we really need cross-disciplinary trained folks. So I hope it's not just an astrobiologist. But what you just described is astrobiology, because astrobiology is a sort of polydiscipline. If you go to an astrobiology meeting, there's people talking about geology, people talking about astronomy, chemistry, glaciology, philosophy, so- But not botany. So you do need a few different people. Well, that too. A few different people. I mean, I agree with what you're saying. We need the STEM fields, but the artists have to be there, the designers, we're all in. We need everyone. Also psychics. Psychics. Comedians, you're going to need some laughs. This is a psychosocial, this is a tough trip. But if we really think we're looking for extant life, then we want to bring, you know, petri dishes and we want to try to culture stuff. Now, what are you going to use for your agar in your petri dish? You don't know what Martian bugs like, so you've got to get very clever there. And that's why I'm drawn more towards microscopes and things where you don't necessarily assume too much about what that stuff is doing chemically. You just want to see if you figure if there's a bug, you're going to recognize it. The geologists all want to bring back samples. They're crazy for it. If you take a geology course, you've got a rock hammer, you go to the rocks and you knock them open and you bring them back to your dorm room and your friends think you're having issues and they want to bring back a sample, it would be three steps, 2020 rover drills into the soil, picks them up, 2022 flies them up into Martian orbit, then 2024 or 5 brings them back to the International Space Station and we open them up and take a meeting. Right? But is there any concern that we're going to bring back the Martian microbes of death? What are you going to do about that? There's a slight concern, but I would say very, very slight. Is it worth the risk, Mr. Bond? Yes, because here's the thing. You can't explore with zero risk. If we wanted to be perfectly safe, we would never bring back a rock from Mars. If you wanted to be perfectly safe, you would never leave the house in the morning, right? So anything interesting involves a certain amount of risk. But we're not going to— Like befriending scorpions. Yeah. Exactly. There could be nasty things, but this is why we're doing the precursor missions. And this is also why we have protocols. If we do bring back a sample of Mars, there are requirements to keep it very carefully isolated. And— And like Area 51. Even— There's like Area 52, man. You haven't even heard of it. It's really secure. So you guys— If you were right. I just want to thank you all. This has really been a cool discussion. Everybody had these terrific insights, asking these fundamental questions about the nature of life on another world. How would we find it? What would it be like? How would it affect us? How are we going to get there? Even how are we going to pay for it? We talked about all this. This has been like the greatest StarTalk live ever. Joe, David, Dava, Hari and Eugene, I've been Bill Nye, your host. Thank you all so much.