Danny Jones Podcast - #423 - NASA Investigator: Moon Bases, Mars Anomalies & Uncontacted Tribes | Nadia Drake

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Nadia Drake is an award-winning science journalist who specializes in space exploration, astrophysics, the search for alien life, along with jungle and wildlife reporting for National Geographic. She is the daughter of astronomer Frank Drake who founded SETI and is best known for the Drake Equation. https://www.nadiadrake.com SPONSORS https://dupe.com - 100% free to use. Stop wasting money on brand names and start saving. https://takeultra.com - Use code DANNY for 15% off. https://nobltravel.com - Get 46% off your entire order. https://hims.com/danny - Get access to personalized & affordable care for hair loss, ED, weight loss, and more. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://www.nadiadrake.com https://x.com/nadiamdrake https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/has-nasa-already-found-life-on-mars *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - The Voyager missions of the 1970s 06:49 - We need new rocket propulsion 11:48 - The Drake Equation & finding ET intelligence 17:26 - Searching for life in our solar system 20:56 - The pentagon pyramid on Mars 24:10 - Nuclear element found on Mars 27:16 - Why NASA stopped looking for life on Mars 32:41 - Putting humans on Mars 38:17 - The Order of the Dolphin 42:18 - Self-replicating autonomous probes 44:21 - Golden record time capsules 54:39 - Nadia's obsession with spiders 01:02:09 - Uncontacted tribe murdering local children 01:12:55 - First contact with intelligent life 01:17:14 - Other species of humans 01:26:23 - Scientists vs. science communicators 01:31:53 - The science funding problem 01:35:42 - The Particle Physics feud 01:39:18 - World's most powerful telescopes 01:45:32 - Studying interstellar objects 01:47:51 - NASA's Moon Base program 01:53:35 - China's new reusable rocket booster 01:56:44 - Nadia's take on UFO disclosure 02:07:46 - WSJ alleges UFOs are hazing rituals 02:16:58 - Best movies about alien contact 02:19:53 - Evidence of life on Mars 02:27:48 - Earthrise & Apollo 8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, Nadia, thanks for coming. It's awesome to meet you. It's great to meet you too. Thank you. You were just telling me off camera that you just got back from JPL. What were you doing there? The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Yeah.

NASA's. Jack Parsons Laboratory. We'll go with that too. The center of the universe. I was there interviewing folks who have been working on the Voyager mission since the 1970s, which is a very cool thing. to do. If you don't know what the Voyager mission is, I don't remember. I'm going to tell you. So in 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft to go explore the outer solar system. And Voyager 1 is the

spacecraft that has a big milestone coming up this fall. It was actually the second one to launch, but it flew by Jupiter and Saturn and returned images of the planets and of their moons that showed us so many surprising things about what the outer solar system is like. And Voyager 2 went to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. And so it's still the only spacecraft that has visited Uranus and Neptune. And since then, the two have actually left the solar system. They're interstellar right now. And they've been operating for nearly 50 years.

So they both launched nearly 50 years ago. if you can imagine spacecraft, isn't it? It's like you think about what other pieces of technology we have that last for that long, and there's not much. Can we still communicate with it now that's interstellar? Really? Yeah. So they're both still chatting with Earth.

And what was really cool was while I was there in mission control, both of the spacecraft were actually chatting with Earth. So you can see the animations of them. And what kind of data do they get from it now that it's out of the solar system? Yeah. So they're studying the interstellar medium. And what that's like, and it's at this point mostly just what cosmic rays and energetic particles are doing, because a lot of the instruments that they have had on the spacecraft, they've had to turn off over 50 years.

Yeah, because the power supply is dwindling and you have to shut things down. But the thing that's really cool is that this November, Voyager 1 will be one light day away from Earth, which means that... Wow. Bingo. So every time we send a signal to the spacecraft, it takes 24 hours to get to the spacecraft. And then when it sends something back to Earth, it takes 24 hours to get back. It takes a light day. A light day.

That's far. Yeah, it is. And I mean, it's also really, I think, a great way to demonstrate how big space is. And it took 50 years to get that one? 50 years to get one light day away. That's bonkers. Yeah, it is. It is. And it's just moving based on its trajectory.

So it's not burning any fuel. Once it got out of our orbit, it's just been, it's just been on a trajectory the whole time. Yeah. It's, it will be forever farther and farther and farther away from Earth. So what's the plan with the next Voyager? What do you think? I mean, I can, I can't even imagine. I'm so, this is one of the big questions that I'm working on answering right now because when the. Voyagers were launched, it was such an audacious mission, this idea that every 176 years, the outer planets are aligned in such a way that you can send spacecraft by each of them, just by using gravitational. 176? Every 176 years.

That's wild. So it was like a once in a however many generations that is chance in 1977 to go visit all four planets before that alignment goes away and doesn't come back until like your great grandkids are alive. That's crazy. And thinking about how much we didn't know about the solar system at that point and what it took to actually get those spacecraft built and off the ground in time because there's a hard deadline. You know, what are the big questions today that would be the next Voyager mission?

It may not be a mission. It may be a question. So there's no other actual like ambitial. to do another one? There's people have pulled up plan, the way they've designed plans for something called the interstellar probe. So the idea would be that instead of designing spacecraft to visit the outer planets and then if we're lucky, cross the boundary into interstellar space, that you would intentionally design a spacecraft to go to the next star system or somewhere. So that's the idea with the interstellar probe.

But I kind of wonder, and you can stop me when I'm rambling, the way I like to think about Voyager is that together the two probes colored in our solar system with such an array of unexpected worlds and findings, things that we never could have imagined. And here I'm thinking about Jupiter's Moon, Io, which is the most volcanic place in the solar system. So when Voyager 1 flew by, it saw these plumes erupting off of this tiny little moon that nobody had thought was going to be super volcanic, but it is. It showed us Europa, another moon of Jupiter that has a surface that is bright, it's white, it looks really young. And that was the first hint that there may actually be an ocean tucked beneath the crust on Europa. Because of the color? Because the surface is so young. Oh, oh, okay.

So it's continually getting resurfaced and things that are that have very old surfaces in the outer solar system. They're very cratered. So they have that like record of impacts that goes back billions of years. But Europa doesn't look like that. So like those, Saturn, the rings were revelation, Uranus and Neptune as well, like the really weird moons that orbit these planets. Yeah. So when I think about that, I'm like, what is the next mission? or set of missions that we could do that expand our understanding of the galaxy in the same way.

Because that really helped us to understand our solar system and how surprising it is. Yeah. So if you think about other planetary systems, other stellar systems, what can we do to try and color those in with the same kind of detail that we did here? I think we need a new type of propulsion. We've got to figure out something there than just blasting fire and chemicals out the back of a rocket, you know? nuclear propulsion for example. I don't even know, maybe nuclear.

Nuclear is still like, I don't know. I feel like there's got to be some crazy breakthrough and propulsion or, you know, just ways to get around without combustion. Anti-matter annihilation. Maybe. I guess that's like anti-gravity or something crazy. We need to figure out how to build our own UFOs, maybe. That would be cool.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that would solve a lot of problems. Yeah. Because it's really expensive to build our own. all those rockets and explode them. And I'm sure it's not good for the environment to blast all that, you know, rocket fuel into the atmosphere.

That's correct. It'd probably be less dangerous if we could figure it out. And we could probably travel farther if we don't have to just rely on getting out of Earth orbit and just rely on the trajectory. We could actually like, you know, move, move around and who knows? I don't know what I'm talking about. I want warp drive and I want the Star Trek future. You were actually the other day we had a guy in here who is the he's the head of the electrostatics division at NASA currently.

And he's working on this. He's working on this with another guy. It's not it's not electrogravity. They're not calling it that, but they're using electrostatics. And they've already created measurable force with this. In a lab. In a lab. Yeah.

And they've measured it. And it's, I believe it's like, I forget how they, the scientific terms for all this stuff, but essentially it can create enough force to propel its own thruster that they've created. And if it was on like the moon's gravity, it would be able to get around fine. It's just, it's, it's their biggest hurdle right now is figuring out how to defy Earth's gravity. Yeah. But it's really interesting that they figured it out, you know, at least on a micro level. Yeah. That is interesting. So like, and he's not being funded by this is like his side project. He's doing this like in his garage. You know, they have they built their own lab, him and this other guy that, um, the other guy he's working with is Andrew. Andrew Arrigima. Yeah, something like that. Anyways. So that guy worked for, um, Blue Origin. Mm-hmm. Uh, aerospace genius wizard. And they both are working together on this. And but like they're not being funded by NASA or anything. This is just like, completely.

complete side project. So I was like, why would it NASA fund this? Like if I was NASA, I'd give you guys a billion dollars to figure this out. I have that question a long times. They already did figure it out. They don't want to tell anyone. Wouldn't that be cool? I don't think that's true. We can hope though. It's, you know, talking about the money involved here, I know a billion dollars is a lot of money. Not for rocket people. But it's not. It's not on like the scales at which we're discussing budgets and things and billionaires. It's like a billion dollars for a hundred people on this planet they wouldn't even notice. Yeah.

No. On the scale that we're talking about with the stuff that these people are dealing with, it's not even a, it makes no difference to them. It's just kind of frustrating. It's like we have to fight so hard to get money to do these things that can be so transformational. And it's just, it's already exists. It's already there. So for people that aren't aware, like, what is your specific background in all this stuff? Like, what are your, your credds, if you want to put that way?

For the people who love creeds. Well, let's see, I'm a science journalist. So I've spent the last 15 years diving into different science and exploration. adventures and topics and have ended up serendipitously specializing and covering space exploration in astrobiology. So my background academically is in the life sciences. I did a PhD in genetics and then went to second graduate school for science communication. And from there ended up, my first job right out of the program was as the astronomy reporter at Science News, which happened because the person who'd been in that job previously had retired after 20 years. So the position was

open for the first time in 20 years and I showed up as an intern. They said, we hope you like writing about astronomy because that's what you're going to be doing. I was like, well, I have a background in life sciences, but let's try it and see what happens. And did you ever figure out your dad's equation? And there is that part too. So I grew up with Frank Drake, the father we like, I like to call him the father of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and of me. So I got to learn a lot from him as I was growing up about what it's like to be a pioneer in a field that really for a lot of the last 60 years has been fighting to achieve scientific

legitimacy. What's that like? How do you bring people on board? how do you keep your excitement and enthusiasm for an endeavor that a good chunk of the science community might think is a waste of time and the Drake equation it's funny like the first time I actually kind of sort of conceptualized what that was was when I took one of the two astronomy classes that I've ever taken as an undergrad and the class was called certain for life in the universe. I was like, I cannot fail this glass. This cannot be the outcome here.

But it was the first time I really had thought about the Drake equation, what it's trying to do, how it works. And of course, since then, it's been on my mind pretty much all the time. Yeah. I haven't solved it. It's a very complicated equation. Well, I guess it's not that complicated, depending on how good you are at math. It's not that complicated. But the problem with it is that like a lot of the variables in the equation, we don't know they were answers to, is that right? That's exactly right. Yeah. And at the time that, this was in the 60s, I believe. 1961.

That they were observing these, a couple stars that are pretty close to us. We weren't even aware that they had planets at that point. Is that true? That's true. Yeah, we didn't find the first exoplanets until the 90s. That's crazy. Yeah, isn't it? It would take 30 more years. And look how far we've come since the 90s.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we didn't even know there was exoplanets out there. Right. We thought there probably were. So in 1960, Dad had done Project Osma, the first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And you're exactly right. He targeted two nearby sun-like stars that he reasoned if those stars had planets in orbit around them like our sun does.

And if those planets were anything like Earth with civilizations that were anything like ours, then like us, they might also be producing distinctly artificial. artificial radio waves. And he'd calculated that the telescope that he had was powerful enough to detect those radio waves if they were as strong as what we admit. But we didn't have any evidence for exoplanets in the 60s, right? It was just a guess. Which when I think about the Drake equation, which came about the next years, you know, seven variables, they're all multiplied together.

So the math is actually easier, just multiplying seven variables together. but dad only kind of knew the value for one of those variables in the 19 in 1961 and the rest of them were total question marks which is you think about what sort of insight creativity vision curiosity whatever word you want to use it takes to formulate something like that um i think it really was ahead of its time in many ways absolutely and the fact that they came up with it on a whim, on the way to a meeting. Yeah. Yeah.

It's insane. Yeah. You know, sometimes that's what you need. Just like insane pressure to come up with those aha moments like that. And then one of like the craziest variables of it is, is, I believe it's how long an advanced civilization will last. Is that right? So the last variable is L, which I think is the one you're referring to. It's the average length of time that civilization is.

are detectable. So it's not just the lifetime of a civilization, it's how long can you detect them for? And it's an average, which means that you, by definition, have to have more than one civilization before you can even try and guess what all might be. So dad used to call that the most vexing variable because it's the least knowable. Like you really, some of the others we can predict and some of the others we have found the values for since dad wrote the equation but that one is like who knows online shopping has gotten ridiculous you find something you love and you have to end up leaving it behind because the price tags are insane and you're left wondering does anyone make an alternative that's why i use dup.com all the time you can take basically anything you're

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you would imagine that because of Earth and the way Earth is teeming with life and has been for so long, that we would be able to find it in close proximity to us. But it doesn't seem to be that way. Yeah. You would imagine like, I mean, I know there are some astronomers that believe that life could have originated even on Mars and like moved here afterwards. But like, wouldn't there be some fossils up there or something? I don't know.

That's what we're looking for. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I think a lot of people would suspect that if we live in a biological. universe, the signs of life would be nearby on Mars, perhaps the icy moons in the outer solar system, nearby exoplanets. And it's true that we haven't found anything definitive yet,

but we've only really just started looking. So in a sense, I think it's very premature to say that it's not there. I was just working on a story about life on Mars and how, how, how, How confounding it is to be looking for a thing that you have a very hard time defining in the first place. So if someone asked you, what is life? Yeah. How would you answer that question? What is life? Something that is a multi-celled organism or a single, even a single-celled organism?

So just some kind of an organism. Something cellular. Mm-hmm. But I can think of things that would be cellular that. would not necessarily fit the definition of life. Really? Oh, okay. Like, what's an example? Well, so a lot of people would say viruses. And then they would say viruses aren't actually cellular because they're not, they don't have a phospholipid bilayer that they're enclosed in.

They're wearing a protein coat instead. Right. But, you know, I think what we mean by cellular is something that's really separated from its environment, it's autonomous. There's a difference between it and not it. And not to get too far down the road into what, is life, which is a question. Yeah, no, that's interesting. Like viruses, yeah, I would consider a virus to be some sort of a life form for sure. But most biologists would say no. Interesting. Because on their own, they don't do anything. They're inert. So you think of them as like a hard drive that needs to be plugged into a computer before it does anything at all before it turns on.

Interesting. And so. Right. Well, it's like an alien. Yeah. They like how do we know what life is outside of the context of the earth. Exactly. Maybe it's something that is, it's just an alien concept of life that we don't understand yet. Yeah. So we're limited in what we

can say because we have one example so far. And so folks looking to get back to Mars, folks looking for life on Mars are really struggling with, okay, so we have sent a rover to Mars specifically to look for ancient biosignatures.

Right. But we don't know what those are. going to look like. Well, if they found a pyramid. That would be, that would be a thing. And they found, there was a bunch of anomalies they found on Mars, right? Such as. The, on the anomalies, like that pyramid structure, there's like a structure that looks like a pyramid. There's a couple like very interesting looking structures on Mars. Geology can do really interesting things too. Yeah. So I think the, the views around those are, well, that's interesting, but it's not not even pointing in the direction of life.

Although, wouldn't it be cool if it was? I mean, it's like, yeah. But it's like the only thing on Mars that looks like that, at least that I've seen photos of, you know?

So, I mean, if I was, if I was them, I would be looking at that closer, right? I think they have. Maybe measuring it or they have?

Yeah, I think they have. But, you know, there's like, there's stuff on Earth, too, that looks super weird.

Oh, yeah. What's the thing? It's like the eye in the desert. The eye of the Sahara? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, which I think is a totally naturally occurring thing.

Yeah. Yeah, I believe some geologists I've spoken to, they think it's the tip of an ancient buried volcano or something. That's like underneath the surface. Some people think it's Atlantis. Also. It's a very interesting looking anomaly for sure. Yeah.

Well, I mean, the thing I like about anomaly, Pull up the Mars, the picture of the anomaly on Mars. The pyramid? Yeah, they picture it. Sedonia, that's what it is. The Sedonia, D&M pyramid. So it's like a hexagonal pyramid, right? Is that one of those things, though, where if you look at it from a different angle,

it starts to look quite normal? I don't know. See if you can find different angles of it, Stephen. It's like, do you remember the face on Mars? I do remember the face on Mars. Yeah, which is not a face at all. It's just geology. It's just not a face at all.

It's not a face at all. Yeah, and it's the same thing. It's like if you look at it with a different, you know, incoming light angle of incidents. That one. It just looks like a face from that angle. I know. Right?

Looks a lot like a face. It does. But we're also so predisposed to see faces. That's true. But like that pyramid, though. This is the face. Oh, that's the face. Interesting.

Yeah. See. Trying to find the, that they recreated the pyramid from a different angle. Like 3D scans. It's very interesting. It is. That pyramid. It is.

And we don't have any ancient like hex. Wait, it's a five side pyramid, right? Yeah. Oh, there's a good one. Yeah. We don't have any pyramids, like ancient pyramid structures that have five sides. All of ours have four sides. Right?

I'm not even sure I see. five sides there. Yeah, this side seems like it's like made up. Just tracing it. I see lines that are trying to indicate that. Yeah. Sorry. Right.

I'm going to be pretty skeptical about that. Yeah. I mean, I wish, you know, it's like, gosh, I wish, I wish we had convincing evidence of life on Mars. In any form, it would be the coolest thing. But not so far. We do have the evidence of that element. right there was a nuclear material that was found on Mars that is also exists on earth but the only place

that you find it on earth is in around the vicinity of when they were doing nuclear tests with detonating nuclear bombs it's called I can't remember the name of that 14 I'm unfamiliar with this observation what is the name of that nuclear the nuclear element or maybe it was like an isotope. Yeah, it's an isotope. A nuclear isotope that was found on Mars that is the exact same isotope we only find on Earth where we've done nuclear tests. Xenon 129. 129.

What is the first part of it? Xenon. Xenon 129, yeah. Yeah, I'm not familiar with that observation. Yeah. Hypothesis of ancient thermonuclear event. This is hypothesized that the Martian atmosphere contains. Oh, the atmosphere of Mars contains this.

Unusually high amounts of Xenon 129. There's so many interesting things. We just can't really piece of the puzzles to, you know, all the puzzle pieces together yet is because we haven't, we don't know enough. Yeah. So we're all just like, oh, maybe it's that. Maybe it's that.

You're right, though. It is pieces of a puzzle that need to be put together. Yeah. As they fit together. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's been, for me, as a journalist, a little bit frustrating to see how long it's taking. Yeah. But then, you know, I understand the realities of science funding, which are getting worse and policy and just how long it takes to put together a big mission to go look for life on Mars.

And, oh, it's also the 50th anniversary of the Viking landings this week. The Viking landings. Yeah. The first two spacecraft to land on Mars safely. No way. In 1977. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. So I've been thinking about that too. And in 19. We did so much stuff in the 60s and 70s. It's crazy. Oh, 1977. Yeah.

76. Sorry. I'm like, what year is it? In 1976. We sent two spacecraft to look for life on Mars that might be alive today. Dang. Look at that thing. In the 1970s.

Badass. The Viking one thing does look badass. Yeah. And we haven't done that since. And it's not like, like most people would suggest that neither Viking found conclusive evidence of life on Mars, but it was ambiguous. Yeah. I mean, it was ambiguous enough that people still talk about it. So why haven't we gone back? Well, we do have like pretty. Something similar. Advanced rovers there now, though, right? Taking like high resolution video and photos. Yep. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So since then, I may get myself in a little bit of trouble here, but I would say NASA kind of pulled back from doing really ambitious life detection experiments on Mars and said, okay, partly because the results from Viking were ambiguous at best and not indicating that there's life on the surface today, most people would say. But they got, the agency, I would say, got a lot more conservative and said, well, okay, we're not going to look for life right away. We're going to first see if we can find evidence that there was water on Mars at one point, which, you know, it's like the running joke now is, oh, we found water on Mars again. Okay, yes. So now we know that three and a half billion years ago, Mars was a much more habitable planet. There was lots of, how many, there was like oceans, even more than the earth, right? oceans, rivers, lakes. It had a thicker, more insulating atmosphere, had a global magnetic field that

shielded the planet circles. So it would have absolutely been habitable for life. Yeah. So that's the idea, that's what people suspect is like ancient Mars. If life had arisen on Mars, it probably would have been then. And then what happened to anything that was alive three and a half billion years ago as the planet went through the evolutionary process that gives us what we see today, which is a very different world. So NASA became a lot more conservative, I would say, and kind of stepped back from doing real life detection work until it landed perseverance on the surface in 2021. And that's the rover right now that's looking for ancient biosignatures that's going around

perseverance. Okay. And it's drilling these rocks. Cours, which in theory will be picked up and returned to Earth where we can study them in labs here and yeah and maybe say something definitive about whether life I think it's not as impressive looking as the Viking it's freaking huge that thing drives around Viking was stationary oh okay yeah that guy's going on a planetary odyssey the top the top one above that it looks pretty cool yeah and then you can see there's an image of the sky crane that is putting the rover on the surface so Oh, whoa. Yeah. This is like, that's real.

I mean, this is an illustration. It's a rendering of what actually happens. Yeah, that's real technology that JPL developed, which we can use now to put heavy things on. And what does that sky crane do after it drops it off? It yeats itself. Really? It yeats and then faceplants. Oh no.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so but the Perseverance Rover will never leave. Mars. Perseverance is going to spend the rest of its life on Mars, but hopefully some of what it's collected can be brought back here because it's found some really interesting, tantalizing stuff. And I want to know if it's... How do we get that stuff back here? That's a good question. They didn't have a plan for that?

They did have a plan for that. NASA had a plan for that. And what it's called Mars sample return, very creative name. The science community said this is actually our number one priority planetary science mission that we want to have funded. And so that went through all of the stages that it needs to go through to become the number one priority flagship mission. And then it got so big and so expensive that Congress defunded it last year. So right now there's no plan. We got wars to pay for, okay? We can't be wasting our money on this Mars bullshit. Coming back to the point, it's, I mean, $10 billion is a lot of billions, but it's 10 billion. Yeah, that's one day the straight being open of Hormuz.

Yeah. Yeah, like, let's put it in perspective. How much money did Elon make when the SpaceX IPO happened? A lot, right? More than $10 billion. Yeah. Yeah, let's put it in perspective. I saw on the news this morning that they were getting ready to launch another Starship test

or do it to Starship test today. Today? I think so, right? See if it was today. I know it was scheduled. for I think last week and it was delayed. Oh, it was delayed? Yeah.

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After you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them, and please help support our show and let them know we sent you. What are your thoughts on putting humans on Mars? Like putting a civilization on Mars? Hmm. Like using it as Planet B? Oh, they're doing it from Texas today. Yeah.

That's for Starbases. Interesting. 5 p.m. central time. Oh, we'll see what happens. Optimistic, pessimistic. Oh. May. Do you think it's a good idea?

Do you think it's a bad idea? Well, I think my answer to that question depends on the why. Why are we doing it? Right. What do you think? I don't want to go to Mars. I don't want to die on Mars. I'll tell you that.

I don't think it was a great idea to send people to the moon if they did send people to the moon. I mean, I think it was just a big PR stunt just to get people more fired up that were better than Russia. Not optimal. I think it's better if you want to do tests and do research. It's easier to send robots and it's a lot safer. I don't see the point to send it. people there. I don't know how people are going to survive there. I don't think, I mean, obviously, you know more about evolution than I do and genetics and stuff like that. So we evolved to

be on this planet under this gravity and the pressure and the amount of UV light we get and all that, all that stuff is like very important to how we survive and how we thrive. And I don't think that we will do well on Mars, especially the radiation part of it too. Yeah. Yeah, I'm out. Yeah, you are correct. And, you know, air that we can breathe is kind of a nice thing to have too. So, yeah, the why for me is a really important question to answer in a way that makes sense. And I don't think that because it's there is really a good enough answer. Yeah, I agree with you there.

And it needs to be a little bit more intention, I think, before you want to go and park a bunch of, of meaty humans on the surface of another planet. And like, we still don't really truly understand what, if anything, is alive on Mars today. Right. Don't we want to figure that out before we go? Probably. I kind of do.

I kind of do. The moon, I can see, you know, that was the space race. It was the Cold War. It was, you know, jockeying for superiority on planet and off. And so we did learn a lot actually about. about the moon from sending astronauts there, not from the moon rocks and the geology that they could do, but your point about rovers and robots being also good

at doing that is true, and they're getting better. Robotic technology, exploration is getting better all the time. My counter argument would be, if we did send humans to Mars with the goal of doing science experiments, like looking at these potential ancient biosignatures, doing experiments similar to what Viking did, then it would be a lot easier to get those answers.

Really? Yeah, you'd have a human there with a suite of instruments. Presumably you'd be able to send the stuff that you want to actually use to make those analyses and observations. Right. So I think that would be ultimately quicker, but. Well, what I heard, and I don't know how realistic it is,

but what was explained to me was that if we wanted to actually go to Mars, put like, you know, a large group of people there, we would have to first figure out how to manufacture our own stuff there and use the natural resources, the native materials and resources that exist there already to produce and make everything that we need there, right? We need factories on Mars, but we can't just like lug, luggage full of stuff, multiple cargo ships to Mars. Well, we kind of can, but the big problem right now is we can't get back. off the planet.

So we could send you to Mars tomorrow. You just wouldn't be coming home. So one of the big things that we'd need to figure out is how to make the fuel for the return trip on the surface. Yeah, we need new propulsion. Yeah, going back to your point. Yeah.

That seems like the most important thing. It's important. For all of this stuff. For all of this stuff. Physics, you know, the tyranny of the rocket equation, is a term that exists because it does. It's like you need, and you were talking about it too, the gravity well of Earth is a lot deeper

than the gravity well of the moon. Mars is in between, but you still need to make a certain amount of fuel on the surface of Mars if you want to power a spaceship to get off the planet. Right. And a spaceship that would be able to carry the mass that it would need to carry if humans are on board.

So it's non-trivial. Right. Anyway. Maybe we could figure out a way, if they, maybe we could drill for oil on Mars. Maybe there's oil deposits underneath. Chevron to make their own rocket and send it up there. The extraction industries. Go interplanetary.

Yeah. Your dad worked close with John Lilly. Is that right? Oh, the dolphins. The dolphin guy. They called themselves the Order of the Dolphin or something? The Order of the Dolphin or something. Yeah. So the meeting that dad had in 1961 where he came up with the Drake equation, which was the meeting agenda, he'd invited John Lilly to attend that meeting along with 10 other people. So Carl Sagan was there. John Lilley. It would have been a blast, right? Melvin Calvin was there, biochemist. He actually won the Nobel Prize during the meeting.

Wow. Yeah. Well, John Lilley's blasted on ketamine. He was certainly an interesting choice, but the reasoning I think was actually pretty sound. One of the factors in the Drake equation is F sub I, which is the fraction of ecosystems whose creatures evolve intelligence, however you want to define that. That's another whole camworms. But dad had thought about inviting John Lilly because he was curious about intelligence and, dolphins, cetaceans, you know, other animals. He famously got a huge grant from NASA to study dolphins, study the brains of dolphins. Yeah. I think his work has fallen out of favor in the last couple of decades.

I think that's a fair way to put it. But they did call themselves the order of the dolphin. Yeah. They had little pins made and yeah. Yeah. Lots of interesting dolphin research was going on. Yeah. You know, because they're super intelligent. They're just so much different than us. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it's interesting to think about if you're considering the icy ocean moons and the outer solar system, Europa and Celadus, places that have these global oceans. Yeah. Where we think all of the ingredients necessary for life to evolve exist. If they do have super intelligent creatures, like I like to think about your rope in cephalopods. Yeah. Let's get some really cool smart, gigantic octopi in that sea. Right.

How would we ever know without going there? I mean, it's not like they're going to be probably building technologies that are detectable by us, but they would. Right. And like, what are the chances they're going to evolve to be like bipedal hominids, right? Right. Maybe they just, maybe it's a completely different way of looking at it. You have to look at it through a completely different lens. I had a guy on here a couple years ago now who was a contractor for NASA.

and he was explaining this to me, which kind of blew my mind, he said that if there was advanced extraterrestrial life, and they wanted to hop from planet habitable planet to habitable planet, like across solar systems or across the Milky Way or whatever, he said, all they would have to do is find planets with liquid water. Because they can opt-in-law, because every planet has different pressure, right? Like Venus has, like insane. pressure and they all have different, um, uh, atmospheres, like temperatures in the atmospheres.

You know, some of them have, you know, lots of comets and, you know, debris hitting the earth, volcanoes. What you, what, whatever, whatever it is. He goes, all you got to do, you go in the water, you're not going to be hit by asteroids. You're not going to have to deal with the climate. You're not going to have to deal with volcanoes. And you just dial in the depth to get the right pressure because liquid water only exists between like 30 degrees and 200 something degrees Fahrenheit. So it's like it's the optimal place to go if you are an intelligent species that has the ability to hop around to different planets.

You just be in the water. I mean, why not? Yeah. It's just the planets are far apart, but there's zero propulsion problem again. Yeah. Exactly. Why not? I mean, I think the also, another.

interesting idea that has come up a couple of times in the last week for whatever reason is the idea of self-replicating autonomous probes that travel throughout the galaxy and they are self-replicating so they can basically exist in perpetuity make more of themselves and I could I mean if you were a super intelligent civilization why wouldn't you do that I mean we did it kind of with the Voyager probes. They're not self-replicating, but we are doing the same things right now. We're building spacecraft and sending them out on interstellar trajectories, and they're going to probably outlive Earth. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. You think?

There's some, yeah, there's some simulations about how long the Voyagers will be intact. And, you know, Earth has, what, another five billion years before the sun makes life really uncomfortable here. Yeah, but will the earth will still exist, right? Not just human civilization might not exist anymore. It depends on how big the sun gets. Whoa. So there's questions about when the sun is

in its dying stages. It's going to balloon into a much larger star than it is today. How big is that? And is Earth going to get totally toasted or are we just going to be a little bit crispy? Yikes. So, I mean, Mercury is screwed. Venus is Pretty screwed. Earth and Mars are kind of on the hairy edge if we don't really know. And so we've been

studying other stellar systems where this process happens to try and figure out how screwed Earth is. But the simulations about the Voyager probe suggest that they're going to be a little banged up in 5 billion years, but they're still going to be around. That's fascinating. Yeah. And they each have those golden records on them, which the golden records, golden earth doesn't react with anything, which is why they're made out of gold. So the golden records are going to be around for a really long time. And the golden records are? They're another Papa D project.

I think he was the technical director. I forget his title. But the golden records are, they're basically time capsules that were put together. It's literally a phonograph record with instructions for how to play it. And there's sites and sounds of planet Earth. Whoa. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you play this record, you'll hear music. You'll hear greetings. My mom's voice is on the record. She's speaking the Arabic greeting. Yeah. You'll see images. Dad was the one who was in charge of selecting the images that are on there. And then it's a really cool. Carl Sagan came up with the idea. I think it was him. This is on the on both Voyager spacecraft. On both Voyager spacecrafts. Yeah. And then if you, I'm just gonna nerd out for a minute. If you, do you see that asterisky looking thing? Yes. That's a map that points to the location of Earth, both in space and in time. What? It's like the coolest thing ever, right? So how does that, how do you translate that?

It uses pulsars. Do you know pulsars are rapidly rotating, corpses of stars that were once larger than the sun. Okay. And they each rotate with a very characteristic frequency, a spin rate. Okay. And so simply the spin rates of those pulsars are encoded in the lines that point to them. There's a binary notation in there. You can't quite see it in this image.

But there's a binary notation that tells you the spin rates of the pulsars. And then the idea was if a civil... ever intercepted the Voyager probes. Well, they'd have to have pretty good technology to do that. So they probably are pretty good astronomers, and they've probably figured out what pulsars are, and they act like signposts that point back to the solar system. Because if you think about designing a map in space,

it gets tricky quickly. What is out there that you can use as a signpost? Right. Stars are pretty not good. Constellations are a big no-go. constellations are a no-go? Yeah, because they look different from every perspective. Oh, wow.

And they're evolving too. Everything in space is moving. Everything is rotating around the galaxy, the core of the galaxy. Oh, my God. But aren't we traveling through the arm at a different rate than everything else? Like as you move outside, isn't it like a soup that just kind of mixes together over time? Yeah. Through the arm of the Milky Way?

Yeah. Well, so it has multiple spiral arms. Yeah. And we're in, what's our arm? The Sagittarius, Perse? I can't remember which one. But the whole galaxy is rotating. Right.

And everything in it is moving through like on its own trajectory too, which is why. There's a nice one in the middle. Yeah. With labels. Yeah. Where are we? The sun. That's helpful.

The sun. That's where we are. That's a blurry spot right there. We are right there. So everything is moving at its own pace and trajectory, which is why, you know, in what is it, 10,000, 20,000 years, the North Star is not going to be Polaris anymore. It's going to be Vega. So when you think about trying to make a map to Earth, pulsars work pretty well because they have these fingerprints that you can find. Anyway, that's what Dad did. But that's the golden record. That record is amazing. I've seen photos of that. But I've never.

I never understood what it was. What do you think? I don't know. I'm kind of scared because I don't know if I want the aliens to find us. Because who knows if they're going to be nice? Maybe they're just going to come turn us all into food or something. I keep hoping they're vegetarian. But what about the idea?

That's wild. I mean, it's really cool. Very cool. So, okay, go back to the big photo of it, Steve. So the top, so on the one on the top side of it with all the little diagrams and things like that, on the top right, that's supposed to be music. On the top, so the top has instructions for how to play it. So the thing on the left is a diagram of the record and you can see the stylus. And then those those notches are also binary, which I think is telling you the rotation rate.

Okay. And then there's the waveform and what it's telling you that the rectangle with the square. No, sorry, the rectangle with the circle in it is if you've set it all up correctly and you're playing it as it should be played, the very first image you're going to see is that circle. Oh, my God. So they have to build a record player. Yeah, basically. Well, they put a stylus in there. Oh, really?

Oh, perfect. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. I would love to hear it. Are there any duplicates? Yeah. The music is online.

Oh, really? The voices are online. find this, Steve. Find the golden record on YouTube. So there is a whole team that, a whole small team of people. It was like six people who were given not very much time to put all of this together in the summer of 1977. And I think a couple of them, their jobs were to select the musical pieces. my mom was doing a lot of the help with recording the greetings in different languages and helping with the images.

Wow. How many different languages did she do the greeting? I think there's like three dozen maybe. Three dozen languages. Yeah. The last one says, Hello from the children of planet Earth. And it's Carl Sagan's son who recorded that.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Are you playing it, Steve? If you want to hear it, you can put the headphones on. Please tell me this is real. This sounds so sci-fi. We're going to skip forward. Are those the mud pots, maybe?

It's rain. Is this the sound of rain? Thunderstorm. Go forward, Steve. Go to that first little jump. There you go. So all the sounds of nature. Yeah, so sounds of earth.

Oh, my gosh. How long is the total record? Um, long. Hours. Oh, really? Why couldn't they have vint that technology back in the 70s, huh? Go back. Go back, Steve. So you can find the one of the voices. It's going to be on a different...

It's going to be a whole different YouTube video. Yeah. Yeah. This video is only the sounds of Earth. Yeah. Oh, greetings in 55. I was incorrect. Silima, Yemen. Oitness poteste, hi. Whose voice is this?

that I'm Faisi Félisidajajat Jodhuz Khawai Huma Tukkkovi, Hulmah Adanish Lushulmo Zedratu Vaztwee, Hesdae,

Saha'a Nite Torni here, let's send Mitterchit to all to all That's my mom. That's your mom? Yes, let's your mom.

Samaan. Hello, My Ram Ram, Ponche, we're at the Raja Khushi, ha, hello from the children

of planet Earth. That's Carl Sagan's son? Wow. Yeah. That's wild. I think it's such a... I thought it was a really beautiful thing to do. And you know, aliens are not going to speak any of those languages,

but what a great way to... No. Except math. They'll be able to just look at that thing and just download all the information right off of it. They're like, okay, I see what they're trying to do. There's, they put whale song on there too, which. Oh, really? Yeah, it's, I love thinking that there are whales on the golden record because I love whales and I think they're just fascinating.

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Yeah. So many reasons. Spiders, well, have come up with so many ways to manipulate silk. When you think about it, there's like eight or nine, seven or eight different kinds of silk that spiders can make. Often the same spider uses different kinds of silk for different tasks. So you would use one kind of silk to line a burrow, another kind of kind of silk to snare prey, the different ways in which they've come up with to catch prey. If you just watch them, it's astonishing.

I think it's astonishing. It's crazy how fast they can build their webs. Yes. They're so fastidious about it too. They fix them every night. It's like, come on. It's insane. It's so much work.

In my backyard, there's this area, but like between two hedges, probably like almost, it's probably more than the width of this entire table. And the freaking spider builds the entire. web overnight. I knock it down the next morning. It's there the next day. It's there. Yeah. Are these the like the really cool garden spiders? They're like they're like they're so tiny. They're like little circular ones. Oh they're like kind of spiny looking. Oh like spiky looking backs. Interesting. Oh yeah. What is that thing? That is an amblypididid. It's a it's an arachnid but it's not a spider. Okay. A tailless whip scorpion. They are very docile.

even though they don't look at. And they react really well to, what I would say is probably a pretty strange situation for a bug, which is like finding itself on a human face. Yeah. Like I probably wouldn't like it if someone did that to me. But these guys, they just kind of roll with it. They'll sort of scamper around and then they just chill.

That one stuck a leg up my nose. Oh, nice. in the process of scampering, which was pretty uncomfortable because they have these little barbs on the end. But they're... We have a baked in fear of spiders and snakes for good reason, probably, right? Do you think it's... Probably because they've killed so many people. I'm not so sure it's baked in as much as learned.

Really? Mm-hmm. And I think we learn it really early. But you have kids. Mm-hmm. Have you asked them how they feel about snakes and spiders and bugs? Well, my one kid, every time he sees a bug, a bug, mommy, a bug. I don't know about snakes. One of my kids is not scared of bugs at all, but I don't know about snakes.

I saw my dog jump when it saw a spider. Yes, dogs and cats. Well, the spiders move so erratically. Yeah Yeah Snakes are really cool I hate snakes Why they're so cool Oh god they give me the goosebumps

I just I love watching them move No I can't Snake evolution It's one of those things Where it's like I guess life decided That life is a tube

Is a good idea Right Yeah I hate snakes With every fiber of my being I just cannot deal with snakes I don't know what it is. I have a phobia of snakes.

I know they're so cool. I can handle spiders. There are no snakes in Florida, right? So you're fine. There's snakes here. There's definitely snakes here. We got a lot of black snakes. There's some coral snakes and there's some,

yeah, not many rattlesnakes, but lots of water snakes, but it's not common, you know, like the, like you see in the West. Spiders. You have cool spiders here too. We do have lots of spiders. Yeah. We have lost lots of interesting wildlife here in Florida. That's true.

Especially the Everglades. Yeah. Not all of it is native. Yeah. It's where you get your big snakes. Right. Right, right, right. Yeah.

Yeah. I just think spider. You know, there's this species in Peru that will hang from a tree and hold a net out like this and just like drop it on insects as they go by. And it's so cool looking because the silk that they use to build their net, It has this blue kind of not iridescence, but when you shine a light on it, it's actually a different color than some of the other silk. Oh, wow. I think you have Nephila in Florida, the golden orb weavers.

They're like, they're big kind of meaty spiders. Oh, garden spiders? Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have tons of them. They're beautiful. They're gorgeous spiders. In Peru, there's a species that builds a, a,

a web where the silk is actually, it looks golden in color. And it's this really strong silky thread that's not even that sticky, but things just get caught in it. And it's so, the webs are so big. You know, like here if you're walking- Maybe they're made to catch humans. They almost caught me. These greedy humans love gold.

There was a spider that almost got me. And that spider was probably like, I'm so glad that didn't happen. Because here it's like you walk down a trail first thing in the morning and you're catching like spider web. with your face, but they're not that big. This one there is like, I almost walked in this thing was about this big. Whoa.

And the silk is, it's just gorgeous. Really? Pretty. Yeah. Hey, what was that animal? It was kind of like a spider, maybe not, that Carlton Ward was taking photos of in the Everglades. Remember that? No.

Was that, I want to say it was like some sort of a spider, or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was like some super rare flower or a plant that, an animal that looked like a flower. Oh. Go to Carlton Ward's website. And I'm sure you can find it there. Very interesting. Carlton Ward, he's like a wildlife conservationist photographer based here in Florida.

And he puts these trail cameras all over, all throughout the Everglades where there, he puts like motion sensors with these cameras that are in water. waterproof housings. Yeah, what's that thing? That's an orchid. Okay, that's not even a spider. It looks like a spider. Yeah. Orchids mimic a lot of things. It's a specific type of orchid though, right? Ghost orchid. Ghost orchid. There you go. Yeah. Did you see the movie adaptation? I don't think so. It's a fun one. Is it? Yeah. Yeah, it's a real trip. Adaptations? Adaptation. It's based on the book by Susan Orlean, which is about the ghost orchids. Oh. That's why I thought of it.

But it's also kind of a masterclass in storytelling. Oh, really? Yeah. I'll have to write it down. There's a cool twist that happens about halfway through the movie, which a lot of people... Adaptation. I think there's a period at the end of the name. And a lot of people don't like the way the movie ends, but I think it's brilliant.

Really? Yeah. What is that? Does somebody paint something? Ghost Orchid Care, low light, high humidity. I don't know. Hard work. Jeez.

That's funny. Yeah, so when you were down in the Amazon doing a watch of stuff, like you wrote about an uncontacted tribe. What was that? What happened there? Yeah. Peru, so I like to go, I haven't been there a little, a little while but for a while I was heading down a couple of times a year to report on weird

bugs so spiders that make spider looking decoys in their webs which is that's what actually brought me down there the first time weird bugs um illegal gold mining and then in 2015 um there's a group that started emerging on riverbanks they'd actually been showing up kind of frequently for a couple of years before that. But in 2015, they killed a teenager in one of the native communities that's sort of near where I was going. They killed a native teenager? Yeah.

So this area of Peru is, it's in the south. Here we go, east and west. I have a friend who lives down there. Southeast. Near Manu National Park. Madre de Dios is the state where things are going on to with illegal gold mining. And this group of the uncontacted tribe, and I'm putting it in quotation marks, because they have been in contact.

Right. So I'll go with isolated. Isolated tribe. Folks will say, like, people living in voluntary isolation. They're living in another time. Yeah. They're living a nomadic lifestyle in the forest by choice. Right.

Colloquially, they're called the Mashko Piro. And so they'd started showing up in this area pretty commonly on riverbanks. They were flagging down boats, asking for clothing and supplies and food. And also within the area, there's a number of native communities. So they started showing up as well where the communities are doing the same things, like asking for stuff, occasionally turning violent. Why did they kill the child? because he was there.

Just because he was there. Yeah. So, sometimes, so, 2015, they were pretty unpredictable. People didn't really know which interactions were going to lead to violence and which were not. There had been a guide who was killed

in a different community a few years before. And it had gotten to the point where the Peruvian government was like, we need to actually do something to manage this interaction. Yeah. first contact, but you can kind of think about it in a first contact way. Like, how do we manage a

situation, keep everybody safe? Yeah, how do you do that? It's really hard. Going in there with like the military or something like that. It's really hard. Not get impaled by a seven foot spear. Yeah, that. But also the folks who have been living in the forest, they don't have immune systems that are capable of dealing with even like the common cold. Something that wouldn't necessarily knock us around could be lethal for them. So you have to think about that too. It's like, how do we keep them safe? How do we keep everybody else safe? How does this work? And so I'd had contacts with an NGO that was working with some of the native communities where the Mashko Piro were showing up. And they offered to take me in with them as they were doing work with the communities. And so

that's how that story came about is I just had a chance to be on the ground in Peru going into these places that were impacted by the emergence of the Mashko Piero. And it was interesting because when I got on the ground there and started talking with the people who were working the situation, so much of what had been reported in the popular media was incorrect. Like what? Well, there had been these stories saying, like, oh, they don't speak a language that anyone recognizes.

It's a totally different. Yeah, that's what I've heard too. It's not. It's not. It's like, it's a form of yene. So there's a lot of languages in the jungle too that are still surviving, but you kind of on their way out. So yene is one of them. How do you pronounce it? Y-I-N-E.

Y-N-E. Y-N-A, okay. And the tribe speaks. a version of Yenay that's just like a couple of centuries older than modern Yenay. And so it's a little bit like if you and I were speaking with someone who was talking to us in old English, we would not understand all of it, but we would understand enough. Right. And so the folks down there said, oh, we understand about 80% of what they're saying. So they learn things about them. Like, oh, they name themselves after plants and animals. They do live a nomadic lifestyle. they figured out how to make booze. It's like... How did you figure all this out? I was doing interviews

with the people who've been talking with them. Oh, to the people who've been talking with them. Yeah. So my understanding of it is that like everyone who's tried to make contact has been killed or like chased away. That's not true with this particular group, but it is true with some others.

There's some other tribes that do do that, yeah. I think the Andaman Islands has a group that does that. But these, the Mashko, so they, we also learned, they prefer to be called Nomole, which means Ken or brothers or cousins. Okay. Mashko means like wild savage. So you can imagine why they may not like that title so much. They prefer Nomole.

They actually will have conversations with the government officials who are there kind of managing the situation. They'll talk with people in the native communities. No, so they're speaking that version of Yenay. So the people have to learn how to speak Yenay. So in the native communities, they already do. Oh. And for them, Spanish is the second language.

And most of them don't speak English at all. Got it. Yeah. So is Yenay very similar to Spanish or Portuguese? No, it's so different. It's like, yeah. Where did it originate? That's a good question.

I don't know. I mean, the Amazon Basin has a lot of these native languages, and I don't know where they came from. Interesting. I'd be curious. Yeah. It's a really interesting part of the world, really beautiful, rich in pretty much everything except money. Yeah. But just a beautiful part of the world and the source of so much conflict because there's all of these different pressures that are colliding. So when they talk to, when the government officials talk to people from this tribe, what do they learn from them? And like, what do they want?

And what are they currently doing? So I'm not too familiar with the current situation. I know that there have been reports over the last couple of years of more violent interactions happening. I think a couple of bloggers who'd been encroaching on the protection. territory were maybe killed. I can't remember if they were killed or just really harassed. But apparently the Namole, the Mashko, don't like loggers coming in and taking down the trees, which you can imagine why.

I don't think anybody who lives there likes that. Nope. No, except the loggers. But so they, the government has these folks who just kind of patrol the rivers and make sure that interactions are managed if they happen. and they've been speaking with the Namole, the Masco for a while. And I think it's still an open question about why they've started emerging over, we're going to call it the last decade now. Like, what is it that started to drive them out of the forest?

Right. And wanting to approach modern, civilized human beings. Yeah. Well, so they're asking for pots and pans. They're asking for clothing. It's stuff. Like, they want the stuff. and if you don't give them the stuff, they get angry,

and that's when you start seeing these giant arrows coming out. That's so interesting. They're coming to us for gifts, or are they trying to trade them? They're just trying to ask for gifts. They're just taking stuff. And they're not being kind. Well, I mean, but why would they?

You know? I mean, I don't know. I would just imagine that would be human nature. If you wanted something, like I would imagine trade is even with a with a super ancient culture, trade would be a very basic fundamental way of doing things, right? So like maybe they did they not understand trade? I did read a story this week where a group of them had given a gift to one of the government women who was pregnant. They made her like a baby toy. Oh, really?

And gave it to her. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. And I think a lot of it is if the story about why they're living in isolation is true, which is that they were driven into that lifestyle during the rubber boom of the late 1800s, early 1900s, it was a really bloody horrible time for the indigenous communities there. So they were kind of, they were slaughtered, essentially. So they were driven into the forest by these people who were coming in for extraction purposes.

And so, you know, they're driven away by fear and violence. Right. You know, who knows what stories they've been passing down. Right. They have a, yeah, they could just have like a terrible experience with civilized human beings. Civilized. That's been passed through generations and generations. Yeah.

So, you know, you show up, you get a little demandy fear. is probably a motivator for some of that behavior. And then on the other side, it's everybody's afraid, you know. And I was thinking about when I was doing this reporting that first contact, even on earth between humans is so risky. And there's a lot of folks who've done this kind of work in Brazil for years who will tell you how difficult it is to do this and keep everybody safe. You imagine what happens the first time we may meet aliens.

First contact here is tricky enough to manage. Right. What happens when it's not a human on the other side of that interaction? Yeah, what happens? Yeah. You got to imagine there's some like people high level somewhere who have gamed that out. you know yeah

probably at NASA maybe yeah it's one of those things that just like how people will respond to news that we found aliens you can study that

you can study that ahead of time it's not like we can ask the question and we can actually answer that question the first contact is a little bit like that too it's like it's something that you can study they're to an extent because the other half of that equation is a big question mark. I don't know.

Well, it's a new phenomenon. It's kind of a new phenomenon, right, where there's no more first contact on earth with other intelligent life. Like it used to be like you'd go find intelligent life somewhere else and they were the same species as you just in a different living in a different world or different part of the world. And you never knew they were there. And now like everything is ubiquitous and you can. do a video call with somebody in New Zealand and like connect with them in two seconds. So it's like there's no like that would be a crazy thing to happen today to where we discovered intelligent life, whether it's on the earth or not that we weren't aware of.

Yeah. I think about that kind of in the context of animal intelligence as well. elephants primates cetaceans crows crows and ravens oh yeah so smart crazy smart cephalopods you know there's like this whole cast of species that have what we would say is intelligence and we have a hard enough time talking with them right so there's also people who are studying communication with cetaceans in particular and using that as a blueprint for how we might approach

communicating with an alien civilization because it's just hard yeah also like all the other intelligent life i mean all the other life on this planet seems to be in this like symbiosis with nature right and we seem to be the only species that is not We're the ones perturbing it. Yeah. Like we don't, we're not, we're not, we're not in this cycle of nature that all the, every, every other animal is where they like sort of depend on the environment, the environment depends on them.

We're not, we just like pave over everything and blow shit up. That is unfortunately what we're doing. It makes me feel like maybe we weren't originally from here. Maybe we are the aliens. If you're referring to life on Earth, maybe sharing an origin with Mars life? Maybe. I think that's an open question, but I think there's good evidence that humans evolved on Earth. Yeah.

Sure, yeah. Maybe we did evolve on Earth, but maybe, I don't know. I don't know. It just doesn't seem like we fit here, you know? I think we fit for a long time, though. Like, we were pretty good. I mean, yeah, it's very clear. evolved here, right? Yeah. Very obvious. We're very adapted to this environment. Yeah. I think we fit for a long. But like there's like so many

species like how many hundreds of species of primates are there? You know, like how many different species of monkeys are, are out there and how many species of humans? There's only one species of one type of homo sapien. There's only homo sapien. There's nothing else. Everything else has this wide variety to it except for us. Yeah. We have been really good. at getting rid of competitors. I'll put it that way. It's like you see that today too, though. We've done a really good job getting rid of predators in most places here in the United States, right? You know, there are no longer Puma's out on the East Coast

except for here in Florida where you have the one population of Florida Panther that's like so inbred. It's not clear if it's going to continue to survive. They're starting to thrive again. They're starting to the population is starting to grow. I think it's up to... It's like a hundred? I think it was 200 now, yeah.

Good. It was in like the teens. And now it's back up to 200. They're doing a lot of, a lot of work. Even like the slimy politicians are doing good stuff, trying to, they're at least working with the conservationists trying to, because the problem with Florida is there's these toll roads.

They go from coast to coast. And they block the corridor. There's this natural wildlife corridor that goes from north to south. And that's what was scurring it up for the, for the Florida Panthers. So there's a big pushback against all that stuff now where they're leaving, they're leaving the, corridor open for the panther and they're doing a lot of work to protect it.

That's great. I'm happy to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. Because we haven't been that great. Right. Elsewhere. Right. Yeah. For sure. And, you know, just like, I don't know. I, what are your thoughts on the possibility of, and I think it was Adam Frank who had this theory that essentially there could have been other previous iterative. iterations of human beings to us. Like right now we have like every, all of our history is based on essentially like, like the,

the written record that we have and the geological record and we corroborate it with different things. And, you know, going back to the Stone Age, but he thinks is possible that millions and millions, possibly billions of years ago, there could have potentially been an advanced human species on Earth that got wiped out by some sort of cataclysm and we got reset sort of. The asteroid reset.

So billions of years, I think that might be implausible. Find his exact hypothesis. So I think it's like, I think he's pointing to 380-ish million years ago. Okay. Something like that. And I don't, I think it's plausible, but I struggle with how it's not, it's not, complete, but the fossil record exists. So if we can see evidence for the fossils of that time, where's the evidence for the technologies and the other things? How come that's not preserved?

And I know Adam has an answer to this because... You find the name of his hypothesis. It's very famous. The Salarian hypothesis. Is that what it's called? Yeah. Let's see what it actually is because I know I butchered it. Okay. It's a scientific thought experiment posed in 2018 by Adam Frank and Gavin. Schmidt named after the fictional reptilian race from Doctor Who that predates humanity. The hypothesis explores the fascinating question. If an advanced industrial civilization lived on Earth millions of years ago, would we even be able to tell? Right.

And what he's saying is that all the evidence would be gone within millions of years, right? There'd be no, there'd be no signature of it. With plate tectonics and volcanoes and all of that stuff, like metal. Yeah. You know, there'd be no toasters left. Yeah. I do struggle a little bit, though, because even though, you know,

we're reading it right here, it says the fossil record is incredibly sparse for complex life. Yeah. It's true. Okay. It is true that Earth

has done a pretty good job erasing a lot of its early history just through plate tectonics and geology. That's true. It's also true that life has like completely taken over and covered the planet. Yeah. And yet we still argue still about the earliest evidence for life on Earth and how long ago that was. It's still really hard to pull that out of the rock record. And so I just, I think it's a plausible idea, but I struggle with why we would see no traces. Yeah. Well, I mean, who knows? Right now the earth is the earth inside one of the arms of the Milky Way or is it outside one of the arms? It is.

We know there's like huge differences, right? And like what the Earth's climate is between when we're in the, in the arms or outside of the arms, depending on the cosmic rays and stuff like that. And like all the variability with like sun burps and belches, you know, the sun activity and all that. So, you know, at one time the Sahara was supposed to be like lush and green. And like now it's a desert.

And one time the ice caps weren't even there. And now we had the ice caps. So like, I don't know. Like imagine how little land there was at certain times. If not none. and the different climates who I just, it's hard to really imagine. It's hard to know.

I think, I just think it's, it's so crazy that like, all the people that are doing all the research with this stuff and like writing the textbooks and all that. It's like we're in this mindset to where like, there has to be a right and a wrong answer, right? Like this is the correct answer or anything else is craziness, kookiness, but like we really have such a vague picture of the past. We people can't even agree on what like different words meant in ancient languages going back hundreds of thousands of

years ago. People that dedicate their lives to it. They all disagree. And I've noticed that too with like archaeologists. They all disagree on certain things. And you know, you name the, you name the scientific vertical and I can find you tons of people that don't agree on anything. Oh, sure. So like it's just it's just a such a funny human thing when it comes to like science and like academia and the, uh, that just appeal to authority. Um, the fact that, you know, human beings do that is very interesting. You know, there doesn't have to be, like it doesn't have to be this way or the highway. Like it's, it's just learn how to say you don't know, but that doesn't work with the system

we live in, you know, like you got to, you have to be able to learn stuff. We have to, we had to tell ourselves a story of the past. And that's a very human thing. Yeah. You know? Yeah. No, I'm with you. I think being able to say, I don't know is really important, especially in science. But I think science is also disagreement is a whole part of the process. It's not a bad thing. It's like you want people to be looking at data and interpretations and really rigorously evaluating what you're saying, because that's how the process works. Right. Right.

We like to say science is self-correcting because when it's working well, it is a self-correcting process. It's also true that science is a human endeavor, and so it's fallible. It's vulnerable to the same things that, Everything that we do is vulnerable to. And so yeah, there's these kind of competing dualities there. Most guys don't notice how much their hair supports their confidence until it starts to go by-bye. And then suddenly, you notice you're investigating your hair line every time you look in the mirror. The problem is there's so much conflicting advice about what actually works and how far you need to go.

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thought about recently is like the difference between people who understand the stuff that's you know behind the ivory tower of the science labs and the people who actually talk about it publicly I wonder if there's a huge difference there. You know, because imagine the people that only stay in the labs working on the, you know, with their nose to the grindstone working on stuff and studying stuff, who don't pay any attention to like the media or the news or reading anything that comes out publicly. Like, are those two separate worlds? I wonder that sometimes.

Like, what is, like, is there any crossover? I'm sure a lot of people, there is crossover, right? There are people who do both. But there's a lot of people who only do one or the other. So I always wonder like what, what's going on there? Well, that's partly why I have a job. It's our job to talk to the people who are in the labs and then bridge that gap. But it's true also that scientists actually going into science communication,

doing their own psychom is becoming a lot more common right now. for a couple of reasons, but one, we've all seen what's happening to journalism in this country and science journalism is no exception. So in a sense, if you're a scientist

and you want to talk about your work and tell your stories, it's almost better for you to develop the skills to do that. Which it is a different skill set in a way than being a scientist. Yeah. There are a lot of similarities,

but... It's very rare you find somebody who it happens it's happened with you know i've met those people before but finding somebody who really like deeply understands something about something and is also very good at communicating it it's usually one or the other well you know have you had adam frank on yeah yeah it was like he's one yeah he's great he's great um but yeah i think there's the stereotype is like the scientist in the ivory tower isolated or like on the mountaintop looking through the eyepiece of the telescope. Right, right, right.

And not really paying attention to anything else. I think that's changing quite a bit. I'm also grateful that I've had the opportunity to go and talk to all of the people that I have. It's like, you know, my job, what I do is I go and I find the experts and I ask them a lot of questions and learn a lot of things and talk to a lot of people who disagree with one another. and gather this entire body of information and then figure out how to synthesize it in a way that makes sense, but Anne tells a good story and is an accurate representation

of controversies and debates and what we know. And it's true that ambiguity in science is this really uncomfortable thing because of what you said. People think there's a right and a wrong answer while forgetting that science is a process. Right? It's iterative and that's okay and that's the way that it's supposed to be and I think a lot of the general public doesn't understand that which is why

When you see something like oh science got it wrong. It's like we shouldn't trust these people. It's like no, that's exactly what science is supposed to be doing Right. The problem with humans is we need religion Yeah, yeah and you have people that work in science labs who don't believe in God But their religion is like their institution and you have the same thing with people who are again the opposite of that. People who live online on forums who believe every crazy, kooky conspiracy theory under the sun. That is also their religion. That's human nature. You know what I mean? So that's a problem. And like that's the price you got to pay for like freedom of speech. But you know, it's a price I'm willing to pay. You just got to be able to, you're going to

be able to do the hard work to cut through the bullshit. You got to cut through the bullshit. And, and, you know, the standards of evidence for the two groups that you just described are slightly different, right? Right. Which I think is... Equal bias, though. Yeah, although it's like I keep thinking about looking for life beyond earth and how if you speak to the scientists who are doing this work, you're like, yeah. I mean, like, we're optimistic. We hope there's something out there.

but science doesn't rely on hope, right? Hope doesn't really have a place in the scientific process. It's just what are the data telling you. And I remember in my PhD, I was doing a set of experiments that were giving me data that I didn't like because it didn't make my life easy and I didn't have an easy explanation for it. And it meant I was gonna have to do more work

and it was like the whole thing was gonna take longer. Nobody likes that in grad school. And my advisor looked at to me and he said, you know what? The data are what they are. And it's your job to make sense of it. Yeah. So I think about that a lot. Yes. And how as we develop sharper tools, new ways of seeing things. I mean, look at what AI is doing. It's like the data are going to be changing. Well, here's the problem, too, is like, you got to make it interesting. You got to jazz it up and make it sellable, make it sexy, or else we're not going to get any money to fund this.

And that's another problem with all of this stuff, is that science is inherently intertwined with money and private organizations and private companies that make trillions and trillions of dollars. And those people have no moral compass. You know, I don't care how moral or, you know, godly you think you are. Like the people that are probably funding you, you can't control what they're doing. You just rely on that money to do the best thing you thought, do the best work you possibly can.

Everyone has a price. So that's the thing. Like if you want to make your work interesting to somebody who's got deep pockets or some corporation that's going to fund your lab for you to have a continue your work, you got to make it interesting. You got to get to sell it to some level. So that's another inherent bias that gets in the way with some of this stuff for sure. It is.

And I think there's science for the sake of doing science, finding knowledge, finding knowledge, for the sake of learning something new is underrated. You know, that's what you're saying. What's the application? How does this change my life? How is this particular whatever I'm developing going to make your life better? And it's like, well, sometimes it's just going to make life better

because it means that your understanding of the universe is richer. Yeah. And that you have a better understanding of the context in which you, a human and planet Earth exist. And why is that not valuable? It's the kind of basic research, the research for the sake of research, for just deepening our understanding.

The childlike curiosity. The childlike curiosity. It's like, you know, you think about the boundary between what we know and don't know and continually trying to push that boundary back and expand the volume of stuff that we do know. Like, why is that not a worthy endeavor on its own? Why does it all have to be moving towards some future utopia is the wrong word? Because that's not the direction we're going in. Police state.

you know future utility i just it's it's depressing sometimes yeah and also science is like also you know from what i've learned from a lot of scientists have talked to here is that's very stove piped to where there's not much interdisciplinary outreach right so a lot of people these people stay in their one lane you know and they never really deviate out of that and look past it look up above the maze. I would say, oh, go on. Yeah, no, I was just going to say, like, it's important to have a big picture understanding a lot of these topics that we're talking about, you know, like, people that are geologists or archaeologists, like, some of them have no idea, like, what the people that are like translating the languages of those cultures we're doing and vice versa.

So it's like it's really interesting or like the The people who were studying like the DNA of the people that were back then and doing like the carbon dating and all that stuff That's so like the lanes are so narrow and They have their blinders on and I think it'd be very interesting if like they were able to all communicate and collaborate on stuff I think there's been a little bit of a move toward Escaping the silos In some fields more than others You know it's like

over some number of years covering science, I can tell you there are some fields that are definitely more contentious where there's a lot of infighting. And the joke kind of is... The archaeology one of them. Paleoanthropology is another. Particle physicists can be brutal.

Really? Yeah. I heard particle physics is all fake. You can't see it. How do you know it exists? There's a big feud going on. You write about that actually. Now, it's, I actually remember there's a, there's a huge feud between, uh, Mityukaku and, uh,

Eric Weinstein and Eric Weinstein believes that particle physics and string theory is all like a dead end. Oh, yeah. That's, that's an ongoing debate. Yeah. String theory, I think is having like a little bit of a resurgence. I don't think particle physics is fake. I think it's in trouble. Um, because it's not, I think at this point clear.

where the field is going and what their next big thing is. It's like they built the LHC over Europe, the particle collider. Well, it found the Higgs boson really early on. It's like, okay, now what do we do? We're going to keep trying to figure out what other new particles we can find or ways that we can revise the standard model. And we've done that, and now what? Right.

And so, you know. What's the goal here? Particle physics tells you, I would say, about the most fundamental fabric of reality, even though it's really hard to conceptualize. It's like you know all these things and it's really hard to conceptualize, but that's the field that gives you that information. And so when they say the next thing is we have to build an even bigger collider. It's like, okay.

Like, yeah, I can see how a bigger collider would lead to new physics and a new understanding of physics. but $16 billion. Did they make a black hole or something? They made like a little miniature black hole I heard. I don't know. I thought I saw, I thought I read that somewhere. That would be interesting.

I don't think that would be a good thing. CERN. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe we should look that up, Steve. Look that up. Yes and no is the answer. Yes and no.

CERN has not definitively created. a miniature black hole, but they have conducted experiments designed to see if it is possible to create a black hole. Yeah. God damn it. Instagram lied to me. Shocking. CERN has run experiments specifically with the CMS and Atlas detectors, skinning the debris of high-energy proton collisions for signatures of these micro black holes. So far they've not found evidence.

So they're trying to create a black hole. That's nice. Trying to. That's great. I mean... Is it dangerous? I have some ideas for things we could put in one of those. Yeah

All the world leaders We could throw them in the black holes In some cases Things may be people Yeah Also feel free to go to Mars anytime Right

You just got to stay there Right Yeah no coming back No coming back I was going to say though That astrobiology is one field That's like super interdisciplinary Where

Oh really Yeah there's I think a recognition that if we want to understand life's origin, which is a big part of the field too, as well as its distribution throughout the cosmos. You have to have a really good understanding of chemistry and geology and biology and physics and planetary processes and all of these things that come together to make a living world, which we still don't really have a good understanding up here. And so I think people are much more used to working together and crossing those boundaries. I think it's very interesting

interesting how that we have that new telescope and where is it Peru? Or maybe Chile? Chile. We're looking at it yesterday? Chile. And that's the one that's discovered the three interstellar objects that have been moving through our solar system. Yeah. That's crazy.

Yeah. Since 2017, I think it's been installed. Well, if you're thinking of Vera Rubin, which is the new one that just came online within the last year or so. Oh, no. Maybe. So there's now, that's now the most powerful one. Yeah. Okay.

Vera Rubin is new in Chile. Really, really cool. It's, yeah, it's ability, I think, to survey the solar system. The small bodies in the solar system is like unprecedented. Yeah, this is it. This is what we were looking at. Yeah. That's a massive.

Massive. It's like spits out like 11 terabytes per image. Yeah. Yeah. And it does the whole sky like all the time. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

It's kind of shaped. like the sphinx. Kind of looks like a shoe. Yeah, it does. So what's so great? This thing can image our solar system and beyond? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So it's an example kind of of what I was saying of like each time you build a new thing, you're going to find new stuff that makes you revise what you thought you already understood. Yeah. And that being a really good thing for science. Mm-hmm. So is it true Steve? Did we've looked, I remember we looked this up recently.

Every picture they take in this satellite, they have to get cleared by the Pentagon before it can be made public. You know about that? Yeah. So it's so sensitive. They find a UFO. They don't want people seeing it. It's not UFOs.

It's spy satellites, right. Yeah. UFOs. Spy satellite. Or spy satellites. Or spy satellites. Say that. They're IFOs.

Right. They just don't want them to be IFOs. Yeah, no, that's a thing with this with this telescope is that the images before they're released, they have to remove instances of classified satellites. Classified stuff. Just satellites, though. Stuff. Don't worry, nothing else.

Just satellites. Again, I would be psyched if there were something else up there. Have you ever heard of what's that guy's name, Steve? the guy who hacked NASA. Gary McKinnon. Have you heard of him? This guy hacked NASA in the 2000s, I believe.

And I forget the reason why he was in the UK. What do you find? Young kid and was like a super genius. And he was like bored, I guess, one night. And he was trying to hack. He was trying to breach like Pentagon computers and see if he can get it breached like one of the computers of the Pentagon.

He had no luck. And he's like, screw it. I'm going to try NASA. So I guess he watched an interview with somebody who was talking about a specific building at NASA in relation to UFOs on like some some crazy documentary he watched or whatever. So he's like, you know what? I'm going to try to find that building. So in his search trying to find the hack the database, he was typing in queries for that building. And he tried a bunch of computers and couldn't get in any of them finally found one.

he was able to breach, got into the debt on the desktop of that computer. And he found a folder. And he double-click the folder, but he had like a dial-up connection. It was like super slow. And it was like loading like bar to time. And it was taking forever. And finally he got like two thirds down the screen. And it was a picture of the earth from like low earth orbit. And there was this like metallic cigar shaped object that he had never seen before. And there was also the name of the file that that was in was called, uh, extra terrestrial officers or something like this.

Is the image available? No, because he couldn't screen. No, he never took the name. He never, he just saw it with his eyes and he explains it. Cause this was in like long time ago. Uh, this was probably before they had the ability to screenshot on a computer. And so anyways, that was his story, right? Cooke, right? Who's going to believe this guy? The United States pursued probably one of the most aggressive extradition campaigns against this guy in history, like on the level of Julian Assange.

I mean, he hacked into him. And he finally won it, like last minute. I think he not too long ago finally won that case because he had like a really badass lawyer over in the UK who was fighting the U.S. and they went in front of a judge and basically they said that he has Asperger's or like some other like mental things going on to where he like he would become extremely suicidal because they wanted to go to prison for 80 years the US wanted to lock him up for 80 years for this

and they eventually won and he gets to stay in the UK so that's nice. But if he made that all up, why the hell? It makes you go like, you know, people have their reasons. What's going on here? Yeah, people have reasons to do things that we don't always have to understand. I want to understand it. I'd pay these days. I pay the taxes for NASA. I want to know what the hell they're trying to put this guy into prison for 80 years for. Well, hacking into a computer system, a government computer system, probably even especially back in the early 2000s. Find out what year that was, by the way.

2002. 2002? That makes sense. It wasn't like it was happening every day like it is Yeah. But what were we talking about before? Gary McKinnon? Oh, the spy satellites. Yeah. And Rubin and interstellar asteroids. Yeah, the interstellar objects are also very interesting. This whole class of thing that we're going to learn a lot more about because we built something new that can see them now. So what's the idea we need to send a probe out to land on one of those interstellar objects to like study it? That would be cool. Yeah, I've seen that proposal. Because we did it with an asteroid, right? We have.

Benu? Multiple. And comets. Yeah. So it's like, it's not out of the question. But I think typically we don't see these interstellar objects coming in until it would be way too late to launch something. Oh, okay. You should check me on that, though.

But it would be really cool. I mean. The last one, the three Atlas was in our solar system for months, right? That's still not enough time. I don't remember. We have to be out there ready. I don't remember. I don't.

The orbital dynamics guys, the ones who like do the calculations to figure out how to intercept the stuff, which I think is probably all done on a computer now. But it's like, it's like magic to me. It's like how do you put together these trajectories that get you to where you want to go, where there's such a small margin of error. It's like you're either going to impact the planet or miss the planet. But you have to just do it perfectly to pull into orbit. Yeah.

How do you do that? That stuff is crazy. It's in, yeah, it's cool. Like figuring out exactly where it's going to be aligned with your trajectory when you shoot out of Earth. And they have to go like, they have to, when they shoot the rockets and stuff, they have to like refuel in Earth's orbit, right? We have not. That's what we're working on for something like the moon base is doing on orbit refueling. And that would also help with getting to Mars and things like that too.

I thought that we had to do that for the Artemis missions. We had to refuel in the Earth's atmosphere. That's the idea, but we don't have the technology. Yeah, there's a few things that need to happen for that. Why is that that we have to start refueling in Earth's atmosphere to get back to the moon? Is there a conventional? I mean, I might have heard this before.

It's escaping me right now. I think it has to do with the amount of mass that's going up. And if you think about, like, having... It's crazy also. Just a side note that 95% of a rocket's mass is fuel. I know, right? The tyranny of the rocket equation is real. Yeah.

That's why you can't go to Mars and come. come back from Mars on the same tank because you just, you can, it doesn't work. Right. But yeah, the Artemis program slash moon base. You've heard about moon base. Maybe. This new proposal from NASA to build a base on the moon. Oh.

And do it by like 2030, 2030. 20, 20, 30. I saw something about Elon basically saying like, I'm pulling back from Mars and I want to focus on the moon now. Maybe that was similar to what that moon base thing was. Yeah, the moon base is a new NASA initiative that we'll see if it goes, how it goes. First step is the next Artemis mission in the cadence, which is Artemis 3, which used to be the moon landing, but they've added an intermediate mission. So now the moon landing is Artemis 4.

Artemis 3 is going to practice rendezvousing with the two. The last one was two. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There's moon base. Moonbase. Wow, what a cool website.

Yeah. That's a crazy cool. That's a really good looking video. That must be AI. It's real. No, it's not real. So Moonbase's Humanity's first lunar outposts, a place where astronauts will live, work, and explore near moon's south pole through a series of crude and uncrewed missions. NASA and its partners will build the infrastructure needed to support the enduring human presence on the moon.

unlock new scientific discoveries and prepare for future exploration on Mars. Yeah. Let's go down. They got a whole trailer for it. Wow. Yeah. What is that thing? Oh, here's your timeline.

Oh, look at that. There we go. Yep. So now until 2029, so for the next three years, secure reliable access to lunar surface and experiment. Between 2020 and 232, we want to establish. initial moon base operating capability. 2023 and beyond is activate.

Oh man, it's really hard to read that, bro. Achieve semi-permanent crew presence. Okay, so 2032 is when they're planning to actually keep people there. Yeah. But they want to, between now and 2029 is when they want to secure access to the lunar surface and experiment. So sometimes between the next three years, they want to start. experimenting there. But I guess...

You see, if you look on the right, though, you see the number of launches and landings that are planned for each phase. There's a lot. Oh, my gosh. 25, 27, 29? 25 launches between now and 2029. 21 lunar landings. Not all of them are crude. I mean, they do launches almost every single day at the Cape.

They do. It's crazy. Startling. Yeah, I know I get the alerts. Yeah. Yeah, but this is a little bit different. Right. For sure, if you got people on them.

Yeah, we're good at low Earth orbit. But we haven't had a lot of luck recently getting stuff to the lunar surface with the eclipse program. So it's ambitious. It's ambitious. Well, we did it, what, six times in a row with no flaws 50 years ago? I know. We'll figure it out eventually. Yeah.

We'll get there. We'll get there. And what's this thing? You also wrote a story all about, I mean, the New York Times. You wrote something about like rules or laws on the moon because you think that the boot prints are still there. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

There's this question about how to and if we should preserve the landing sites that are already there. So not just Apollo, but, you know, what Russia has put down. now what China has put down. There's still hardware on the moon from all of those things, in addition to soft things like the boot prints. And this question of... Charlie Duke's family photo that he left there. That would have burned up in a second, by the way.

It was 250 degrees in the sun. Well, there's a lot of stuff on the lunar surface. Bags of poop. We'll preserve that as well. Right. It's preserved up there. Yeah. But yeah, the idea that right now there's no legal protection for any of those sites.

And so it's really just a question of behavioral norms, whether you're going to go in and mess with them, or if you're going to respect what's there and treat it like an archaeological site. Well, if they want to go down towards the poles, then they won't even be, right? Or was that they want to go down lower, right, a completely different area of the moon. So the target is the South Pole now because the idea is that's where the resources might exist to support. a moon base or continued exploration onto Mars. So the target is the South Pole. So yeah, I guess in theory no one's going to be landing

anywhere near the Apollo sites, but you could see that happening in the future. If travel to the moon becomes as routine as it has become to low Earth orbit, where you don't just have government agencies going up, but you have commercial companies as well. Yeah. The idea is you need some kind of a framework to guide behavioral norms and principles on the moon just as we do here on Earth. Yeah.

Yeah, people from different countries that are up there 24-7. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm not going to say we do a great job on this planet either. No. It was actually nice to see China launch and land a rocket booster. I don't know if you saw that video. I don't think I saw that. They did recently.

and I thought that was, they did it remarkably fast. It worked really well. I think it was the first time. And it's a nice change from just letting their boosters do an uncontrolled reentry through this atmosphere where then suddenly you have everybody along the past looking up and going, is this thing going to hit my house? Is this it?

This is from 13 days ago. I'm not going to watch the whole freaking minute, but... It's really impressive. So this is a reusable rocket? Yeah, there it is. It's coming back down. And they did it the first time. that we know of.

Well, good for them. Yeah, I thought so. Elon just really ramped up his security. It's like, those damn spies stole all our blueprints. They're using a completely different system. Are they? Yeah. It's being caught in a net.

Oh, it's in a net. We will do a net. It will look so much different. They will never suspect we stole it. Why is it smoking off the top? I don't know. Interesting. They definitely made it look quite a bit different.

Yeah. But I think that's an improvement over the uncontrolled boosterie entries that have been going on. So we drop them, or SpaceX catches them in this like little squeezer like crab claw thing, right? For Starship. For Starship. Yeah. Yeah. So that's in Texas.

And then here on the other coast, it's just to come back down. Yeah. It lands on a barge over here. Yeah. I think there may be. I wonder why we don't have the crab claw here. There's also a... Oh, there it is.

It's not even a claw. It's just like two. No, it's on the tower. It's on the tower. That's freaking crazy looking. It is crazy. It does move in. And then you can see the thing moving on the bottom.

Yeah. That's nutty. You know, people are really clever. Yeah. Like, we've done a lot of really clever things. Did you see that they are? I read or somebody told me that they were using for the Artemis rockets. They were reusing the space shuttle engines for the Artemis rockets.

On the SRBs, on the boosters. On the two boosters, they have some of the engines that flew on the shuttle program. And then they recovered them and refurbished them. It's crazy that they're like still reusing all that stuff from back in the day. They need to just remake the Saturn 5. Doesn't that present a problem, though, because there's only so many of those engines and, you know, how many launches do they, does Artemis take? And then what happens when they run out of those engines? Well, I think they've, so they've been recovering and reusing them.

I don't actually know what they're doing with the ones that are coming off of the Artemis stack, though. That's a good question. I should know that, but I don't. Interesting. Yeah. So what is your view or do you pay any attention? to this whole like UFO topic? I do pay attention to it.

I will say I haven't really been following the recent data releases because I don't think there's been much in there that's been like rising above the noise. No, all the stuff that was released in the quote unquote UFO files that Trump released, all that stuff was publicly available before. Yeah. The only difference is it's like now it's on the White House website and it's like official. But all that stuff has been out. Yeah.

I remember there being a lot of discussion about the Apollo era. It's kind of similar to when they released those fake Epstein binders and they were showing them like this. Like, woohoo, we got the Epstein binders. It's kind of like that. Well, you know, in principle, initially, and you know I served on NASA's UAP independent study team. So I went through that. What was it called? The UAP what?

The UAP Independent Study Team. Okay. A couple of years ago. So initially when I heard that this was going to happen, I kind of went, oh, God. Here we go again. And then I thought, you know, it's actually... Look at the shiny object over here, people. It's actually, it's a fine thing to do.

Like, put the things out there, let people evaluate them, give them the information that they need if they want to. to have a look on their own. I don't think that's a bad thing to do. I think what's inevitable and disappointing is that the people who want to find the proof in those files are always going to say, well, it's in the stuff that you didn't release. And that's just the way it's going to keep going. So ultimately, I'm not sure what we're trying to accomplish here.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a very counterintuitive idea. to want to rely on the government to release the secrets. Because that's the nature of the government is to keep secrets. They're not there to give you all the secrets. Like, if you want to get all the truth from these people, like, what are you doing? Well, and that's assuming that there are secrets there, which in this case, it's like, we know that a lot of what's not being released has to do with military applications.

Of course. That makes sense. Like, yeah, you probably don't want to let the entire world know about our sensor capabilities. Just keep that to yourself. fine. You know, I'm curious about why, actually I'm not curious. I have a good understanding. I think of why the idea that the government is hiding intentionally knowledge about aliens has been so persistent. I mean, it's a very sticky, tenacious idea. And it makes sense. It's like people are really interested in whether we have been visited by extra

terrestrials, whether just spacecraft or, you know, squishy alien bodies themselves. It's a really compelling question that we want to know the answer to. And so I get why it continues to stick. And a question that the founders of NASA were fascinated by, you know. I mean, who isn't? Right. It was like one of the big things that they were interested in is that kind of stuff, you know, not just doing seances in the woods, but they were, you know, like NASA was started by occultists and Nazis who were fascinated by UFOs and, you know, extraterrestrial life. And that, uh, whether that's real or not or if it's like some sort of crazy limited hangout, like the fact that you have people in Congress and like decorated military people.

And I don't really, the Congress people, they don't do it. They don't, like, I don't give that much credence. the fact that they're talking about it because those people are kind of just like influencers but like some of the other people like Dave Grush and some of these other like older long time military intelligence people are coming out and talking about this stuff and even like the Air Force Navy the Air Force and the Navy pilots who are talking about this stuff that stuff I kind of like I can't ignore that you know the fact that all these people are trying to talk about this and you know explain it to Congress what they've seen and get it

declassified. Like it's, I feel like there's something there. I just don't know what, but I'm definitely more inclined to believe that it's like top super secret military stuff that is probably being controlled by private contractors, like big aerospace contractors, you know. Yeah, I think there's a couple directions to go in.

The first that I wonder about, because it's what we do in journalism is like we follow the money. So the folks in Congress who continue to bring this up, like what's in it for them kind of question, like where, you know, who's actually making bank by continuing these conversations? Because there's gotta be some return on it for someone. And it may not be monetary, but in what form is it power?

Do you get reelected if you can? continue to stoke these fires. I don't know. But it's like, you know, follow the money. Who's benefiting? Sure. Definitely with Congress people. Yeah. See that. Who's benefiting? The testimony, and it's a little bit why I asked, like, if the image from the guy in 2002 is available, the testimony that's hearsay is just hearsay until you produce evidence. So that is, I mean, it's interesting and it raises that same question. Like, why would somebody, make this up if it's not true. But again, like people have reasons to do things that we don't have to fully understand or agree with. But until you produce that evidence, a satellite can take

like a 4K photo of you sitting in the park having a picnic, like in full resolution, but we can't get better than a Nokia photo of a UFO. Yeah. And then so as part of the NASA team, like we heard from the pilots and some of those folks about what they'd seen. And it's like, yes, these are very compelling stories. And the witnesses are credible. And they're all describing something that they can't readily explain. That's fine.

Like we see things that we can't explain all the time. And it's, most of them will stop there. And they'll say, like Alex Dietrich, who saw the Tic Tac, she says, she's aggressively agnostic about what it is that she saw. It's provenance, whether it's terrestrial or not, aggressively agnostic. But she knows that she can't describe what she saw.

Right. That makes sense. Yep. I have no problem with that. I just, it's the leap from I can't explain this to, therefore it must be otherworldly in origin. Well, here's the problem. When the government gives you no answers or no analysis,

and just gives you like crazy little like bits and pieces of evidence that are crazy and has no fundamental. There's no like rational explanation for it, nor do they provide a rational explanation for it. You're going to get people speculating crazily. Yeah. Yeah. And it's again, it's like such a compelling idea. Yeah.

That we would have evidence of alien visitors already. Like how cool would that be? I get why people cling to that idea. I get it. I just wish that we were using critical thinking skills a little bit more when it comes to evaluating reports and then remembering that like... I think it's all part of their strategy too, right? Like flood the zone.

Flood the zone. Yeah. Make so much noise. Make so much noise to where they can't separate the wheat from the chaff. Exactly. It's going to be so easy to call people crazy. Yeah. But I think there's also,

Where was I going with that? I'd had a thought and it just went, poof. Critical thinking. Critical thinking. People being able to understand what it's going, what's going on. Well, like, if you start to like peek, do any kind of homework on this stuff and you realize like how credible some of the witnesses are for this stuff, like not just the Navy pilots, but there's also Air Force officers who were in charge of,

managing the nuclear Minutemen missiles, like in Montana and Malmstrom Air Force Base, who report a lot of them in different countries in Russia and in the U.S. I don't know if there was any in China, but they all report like weird orbs coming and shutting down their nuclear missiles, like, you know, and those guys, those guys aren't cooks. Those guys are like the tip of the spear when it comes to being psychologically sound. Like they have to go through a lot. They have their fingers on the nuclear button. I mean, we hope.

So like, you know, if these guys are are testifying that this is all happening to them and they're seeing this kind of stuff and, you know, multiple officers on multiple Air Force bases, there's like a famous one at Vandenberg or something similar happened at the Vandenberg Air Force Base, it's something there, you know. And you want to think it's our military probably. Like I think that's like the most logical. explanation for it, like maybe testing stuff or whatever. But like there's also like accounts and journals written from sailors on ships in like the 1600s talking about this stuff. So I don't know.

It's all, I think it's all really interesting. It is for sure. I remember what I was going to say, which is that I think a lot of people don't understand why images and, you know, some testimony is classified here. Because, you know, the assumption is like, oh, it's classified because it shows us something that's like we would not be able to handle seeing. And it's like, no, it's classified because the sensor that took the image is classified. And it could be an image of absolutely nothing. It could be an image of me. And it would still be classified because of what made the image and not because of what it shows.

Right. And so that's something that I think a lot of people don't understand. there was also a story in the Wall Street Journal, I think maybe it was last summer. And I don't know if you read it, but it's the one that was basically saying that the call is coming from inside the house when it comes to UFOs

because the whole thing started off as like hazing within the Air Force. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I remember this one very well. In the 50s and 60s and it's like hazing rituals. Yeah, where like newbies were hazing. hazed by being told about UFOs and all of the evidence that was in there. They were saying it was

either hazing rituals or they were wheeling out an EMP in front of the nuclear sites and testing out a novel EMP weapon on their own nukes. I don't know why that story didn't get more play, though, because it was well reported and it connected the dots in a way that actually makes a lot of sense. So I heard from people who were analyzing that story that know stuff about these types of things that testing an EMP device on a nuclear weapon is like super dangerous and not anything that's like practical. It doesn't really make sense. And also I think one of the things that Jesse Michaels pointed out about that article was

one of the authors on that New York Times article or maybe I don't know if it was an author or if it was a source that was used it might have been the author it was a wall street journal article about the hazing and the emps used on the nuclear sites that's like a UFO sciop thing he did the homework on the lady who was the author of that that wall street journal article and he looked up her lincoln and her job one of her recent jobs was, or maybe it was our current job, we have to double check me on this, was the head of psychological warfare operations at Northrop Grumman. Okay. So do with that what you will. Interesting. Yeah. I'm going to use the restroom a quick.

Quick break. This was the article you were referring to, I think, right? Yes. Let me put my phone on. So, okay. Yeah. And it's multi-part, right? I think there's a couple of times.

Yeah, I believe there was a second part to this. Yeah. But part of this was basically talking about the, it might not have been this one, but the people at the nuclear basis trying to, you know, say that what they saw was not legitimate. It was a hazing ritual or an EMP. Robert Salas. Yeah, I just saw, I just saw Robert Salas's name. Yeah.

I just saw Robert Salas's name. Yeah, I typed in, was it EMP? Yeah, there you go. Oh, no, no, no. Solace. EMP. Show me. Okay.

Maybe not. Okay. Anyways, find that lady. There you go. Robert Salas 84 was an Air Force captain sitting in a walk-in closet-sized bunker, mainly controls of 10 nuclear missiles in Montana. And basically the story is all of his missiles got shut down,

and that's never happened in his life. He's never seen anything systematically go offline like that. And the second that happened, he got a call from the security officer on the top because he was underground. The guy on top, like at the entrance of the Air Force Base called him. He's like, boss, we got this crazy big light in the sky that's hovering above us. We don't know what to do. What do we shoot it? I think one of them actually shot it.

And that's like, that's when everything went offline. And then the next day, he told me, he goes, he goes the next day, Boeing. showed up at the Air Force base and brought everyone in for interviewing and made us made them all sign NDAs and he goes, I refused to sign the NDA. Good, I like that. So what happens if you scroll down? Scroll down. Yeah.

That's Robert Solis right there. That's him. Okay. Okay. So it says he was interviewed by Kirkpatrick about the events. The point I wanted to make though is find out this lady Sue. Okay. Sue. Where does it talk about Sue? Oh shit. Type in Sue. Go.

G.O. What's her last name? Sugo. Right there. Sugo. Okay. In this statement, a defense department spokeswoman acknowledged that Aero had uncovered evidence of fake classified program materials relating to extraterrestrials and that briefed and had briefed lawmakers and intelligence officials. The spokeswoman Susan Goh said the department didn't include that information in its report last year because the investigation wasn't completed but expects to provide it. in another report scheduled for later this year. So Jesse Michaels, what does this say?

The department, so this is a quote from Sue. She said the department is committed to releasing a second volume of its historical record report to include Aeros findings on reports of potential pranks and inauthentic material, Go said. Okay, maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong. Jesse Michaels did a great video breakdown and he referenced a bunch of these specific,

news pieces that she's been referenced in. So he Googled her. He found he tried to find out who she was. And we found her LinkedIn. This is her. This is her LinkedIn right here. Hello, Sue. Now, punch in a little bit and scroll down to her experience. Right there. Associate, I mean, do, I mean, this is neither evidence or non-evidence of any wrongdoing. I'm just pointing this out. she provided expert advice to the DOD and other U.S. government agencies on strategic communication, organizational change, psychological operations, and information operations policy, concept, doctrine, plan, and strategy development and implementation. For Booz Allen Hamilton.

Yeah, that seems like a pretty normal job description to me, though. Yeah, psychological operations. It's interesting that that's in there, but the rest of it is like kind of bog standard. Yeah, that's what you would do if you're on a comms team. Well, I mean, the consensus among rational minds seems to be that this stuff is being developed by companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, because they are the ones that have the biggest contracts and they are the ones that are immune to FOIA requests. So if this stuff is being held secret, it would make the most sense to hide it underneath all those corporations and let them compete. to develop this stuff. To the point about follow the money,

they do have the biggest contract. Yeah. So. Yeah. So there's that. And there's also, um, six or seven trillion dollars missing from the Pentagon budget.

Since 9-11. Unaccounted for it. So if you had black projects. Now we're talking about real money. Yeah. Instead of. So where did that money go? I don't know.

Follow the money. Yeah. A lot of money. It's, yeah. again, I think this idea that the government is hiding evidence of aliens is sticky and compelling. I'm not convinced. Yeah.

I know a lot of the people in that story. I'm not convinced it's aliens either. I'm not convinced. But I'm, I'm, I'm pretty much there. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm almost right across the line to be like 100% convinced that they do have some sort of, advanced propulsion that is not known to like the mainstream science. To me, that's a lot more plausible. And I think, I think that one of the major problems with disclosing that is it would disrupt

the economy and us being relying on fossil fuels and all this, the motor vehicle industry, everything, right? Contractors. And also on top of that, if it became, evident that they were hiding this stuff for 50 years, people could have their heads on the chopping block. They could go to jail. So there has to be some sort of like a blanket immunity

given to these contractors for hiding this stuff. It's really tricky. And I think it's like we can speculate a lot about what's actually going on. But typically when I have conversations about the conspiracy theory aspect, it's here, it's like, we're not going to resolve that right now. Right. Right. But let's talk about what we're actually doing to try and find signs of alien life

because that's also really interesting. And there's a lot that people can learn. I don't necessarily want to do that now, but I do want to ask you if you saw Disclosure Day, the movie. I haven't. I watched it yesterday because I thought we might talk about it. Oh, really? Tell me about it.

Was it good? So. I found it was very interesting that it came out. around this, like right after they released these UFO files? The timing is, yeah, interesting, coincidental, I'm sure. So I thought, without spoilers, the message of the movie was actually a really good one. I really, really liked that.

It was definitely like Spielbergian action thriller types of things. It wasn't exactly the movie that I was expecting to see. but I really love what they ended up doing without spoilers yeah he's been Spielberg's always been obsessed with aliens yeah but I guess maybe maybe mild spoiler here one of the things that I think the movie really asks us to consider is how much we learn about ourselves as we're looking outward and trying to find signs of life is like how much do we actually learn about ourselves in the process. And what can we do with that knowledge?

Right. And I think that's really interesting. Did it beat contact? There's no alien movie beats contact. What about Arrival? Which one was that? Arrival is the one with the shadows going up against the glass. The cephalopods.

Yes. The one with the language learning changing. That one was okay. That one was good for sure. I thought it was gorgeous. I don't think it was a level of contact. What do you like? about contact. Everything, but.

It's just like more of a human story, you know, like the arc of the story and the way it ends is just like so deep, you know, and it's just also a classic, probably one of the first ones movies I've seen on that subject ever. Yeah. So it's just one of the ones that sticks with you. Yeah. And it's like also, and I haven't seen Disclosure Day yet, but I feel like the best ones are the ones that don't show the aliens. Hey, y'all's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old.

You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. Yeah. In a way. Yeah.

Although I did love a rival. Yeah. Yeah, contact. But, you know, also Independence Day is one of the best as well. I just watched that a few months ago too. I hadn't seen it in a long time and I was really excited to see it again. Yeah. It is.

There's some pretty good movies out there that have to do with aliens. But yeah, you should check this one out. I will. See what you think. I will. Let me know. It's a great story. It's a really interesting story.

What did you just say? What's coming out tomorrow? You're publishing something tomorrow? Oh, yeah. We have a story about life on Mars coming out tomorrow. Oh, okay. And kind of what we started off talking about, what's some of the evidence that we have that points in that direction, both from the Viking landers and from the search for ancient biosignatures. And how much evidence like that would it take to convince us?

So it's a little bit like, we often will say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is something that you'll hear invoked with respect to UAP. UFO a lot. But on Mars, we're looking at it a little bit differently. Like, how much ordinary evidence would we need to prove something extraordinary? You know, how much really compelling, if not convincing observations, each of them on their own, how much of that would you need before you can say, yeah, there's a really good chance that all of this is telling us that Mars was an inhabited world? So it's kind of looking at standards of evidence.

It's sort of challenging people to reconsider whether extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is what we need on Mars when, you know, life on Mars may not even be an extraordinary claim. Right. If we think that we live in a biological universe or if we think that we live in a universe where like physics and chemistry and geology behave the same way, then we would expect that there was an origin of life on Mars. because ancient Mars and ancient Earth were so similar. Right. Did I just say that right? And so if there wasn't an origin of life on Mars, then we are fundamentally misunderstanding something about

what we think is our own origin and how life originated here. Right. Like were we seated from Mars? Yeah. You know, that's an open question is do Mars and Earth, if there is life on Mars, does it share an origin with Earth life? Do we have that same, you know, single genesis and then Pants Bermere, or whatever we want to call it, was responsible for distributing life on both planets? Yeah.

Then ancient aliens would become a real thing. They'd get the last laugh. Y'all made fun of us for so long. Right. Yeah. But if it's not so extraordinary to think that life evolved on Mars, then do we have what we need? Right. Already.

And I don't think we do. but it may not be that far off. Right. I think, I mean, it seems like we would be closer to that than even proving that life existed on Earth millions and millions of years ago. Four point, what are they at right now? 3.8 billion years is like the oldest degree upon time.

Yeah, I mean, it's just as crazy of an idea. Yeah. That there could have been civilizations past that. The problem is it's just like not, it's already, that, the answer to that is printed, right? Like we already know the answer to that. We don't really know the answer to ancient Mars yet. Right. So the story's yet to be written. Yeah, yeah. And it's, I mean, it's fun to kind of hitchhike along as scientists are writing that story. I just am impatient,

and I want to know the answer. I want to know what this. I want to know how it ends. I want to know how that story ends. I want to know it like now preferably. Right. I need it right now. So that's, I want to know what. that's all. I knew it right now too. That's all. It's like, anyway, that's, that's kind of what we're thinking about starting tomorrow online. Fantastic. What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, we've got, this fall, we have, that's, that we were talking about. So, I'm working on, kind of an onstage presentation about that, about the mission, about what the next Voyager is, which is why I love that you ask that question.

That'll be really fun. And I'm doing that with some colleagues in Switzerland. So that'll be overseas. Still working on a book proposal about looking for life beyond earth. Okay. How we're doing that. Fantastic. What it teaches us about ourselves, which is important.

Do yourself a favor and stay far away from the UFO world. I mean, it has to go in there, right? Yeah. You have to put it in there. And it's okay because I think it's actually a great teaching tool. Yeah. It's like if we wanted to harness the power of the scientific method to figure out what it is that we're seeing up there, this is how we would do it. Either that or a big waste of time, one or the other.

Or both. But as we've said, every time you start looking at stuff using a new set of tools, you're going to learn new things. Right. So if we go and we, and when this is what we're supposed to tell NASA whether they should do or not on the study team, was like, if the agency does want to address the question of UAP, how should it do that? And what can we learn? And so if you can imagine like all of the earth observing satellites that NASA has, that NOAA has, you start asking them like, okay, so there's been sightings reported here, here, here, here, here. here, like what kinds of data can we get from around the time of that sighting? We're going to learn new stuff because we're looking at the earth.

And, you know, we're using tools and we're looking at either our earth or the sky in different ways. It's like, we learn new things all the time. So it's not really, it's kind of a win-win. Yeah, totally. But I didn't explain that very well. No, I understand what you're saying. Like the development of technology is going to help us answer a lot more questions for sure. But, yeah, I mean, like, I still find it very interesting.

I think there's, like, a very human aspect to this stuff as well. And, you know, like, when you hear the stories of the astronauts coming back and experiencing that, like, overview effect and how it, like, rewires their brains and their view of everything, and there seems to be, like, a very, like, deeper layer to this stuff, like, a consciousness shift to understanding this stuff. that can't be understood with, you know, basic material physics and, like, material matter and technology. Like, I feel like there has to be like a, I don't know.

I just feel like there's another kind of like squishy layer to all of this stuff that we're going to have to understand to really get a grip on it. You know, I don't know, I don't know if we're going to get all the answers to all of this stuff like the stars and whether UFOs are real and how all of this works just with developing better telescopes or better satellites or all of that stuff it's just i don't know there's something to like the human story of you know what happens to these people and like what they experience when they when they go to these places at least some of them maybe Maybe not all of them, but for sure, like Edgar Mitchell

and some of the other people that went to space and went to the moon, I feel like we need to listen to them more about this stuff. Because a lot of these guys got really interested in weird stuff after they did that. That's true, yeah. I wonder though, how much of that is a result of just a new perspective? I think about Earthrise,

the image from Apollo 8 that really was the first time that we had an image of our Earth rising over the limb of the moon and it was actually taken by a human. And how that like kick started the environmental movement because it showed our planet in its cosmic context for the first time. And then the pale blue dot image from... Oh yeah, that one's crazy. Right? You know, from Voyager.

That one, it was near Saturn for the first time. that right it was beyond Neptune find that pale blue dot image dude it's insane it was taken on valentine's day and how that shows our planet as just like one member of the solar neighborhood it's just a world among worlds but it's our world and it's special and yeah look at so look at the one with saturn in the foreground so that's from cassini that one's really good too click on the big version of it steve that's a big photo yeah that's cassini's pale blue dot and that's that spacecraft was at Saturn. So that is earth. Yeah. Wow. Holy crap. And just how like even even you and I sitting here all of us right now are just like that's amazing. And then and I also

think about this in the context of you know how excited you get when you see your house from the plane if you do. Yeah. You're like oh that's my town that's where I live. That's you know, I'm trying to figure out, oh, there's Main Street. That's the coffee shop. Like, here's the root in and out. It's like you're just seeing this place that you know so well from a completely different perspective. And it's exciting. And it forces you to ask new questions and

think about things. And so I just wonder if that's a whole part of it too. Like you were saying, it's a human story. It's humans going pushing themselves to go into unfamiliar places. And what happens to you when you do that? 100%. So this was not Voyager this one?

That's Cassini. Yeah, that was a spacecraft that was orbiting Saturn until... That image of Saturn looks so insane. It's so pretty. Cassini is also a really, really cool mission. When I was at JPL, I was chatting with the woman who was leading that mission. She's now also leading the Voyager mission. Really?

And I was like, you know, I used to think Cassini was my favorite mission, but now it's Voyager, and she was like... Me too. Yeah, but yeah, the pale blue dot, which if you go back to the the other selection of images, the one, Carl Sagan described it as a moat of dust suspended in the sunbeam, that one. And I think that's actually just like stray light from the camera, but it's a nice poetic description. But that one like really rocked people.

And if you look at the entire solar system family portrait, you know, it gives you a sense of how fragile the planet seems, how small it is, how insignificant, but how important to each of us it is. Right. And, you know, Carl says, everyone you ever know, everyone you've ever loved, every war that's ever been fought has taken place on that pale blue dot. That mode of dust suspended in a sunbeam. And it's like, yeah, like that's a shift in the moment. perspective. Very. That is a crazy way to think about it. Well, Nadia, thank you so much for doing this. That's a great way to wrap this up. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. It's been wonderful chatting with you. Where can people find more of your work and all that stuff? Oh, well, I need to update it because it's way out of date, but Nadia drake.com is the website that I have and I will update it soon.

And your new thing coming out tomorrow on Mars, where's that going to be? Scientificamerican.com. Okay. And then, yeah, that's coming out tomorrow. Cool. Yeah. We'll make sure we link it all below per people.

Awesome. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for coming. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Good night, folks.