Green Light with Chris Long - Kenny Mayne on NHL Seattle Kraken & Mike Tyson. Astronomer Derrick Pitts on NEOWISE & Light Pollution.

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

0:42 - Open. 4:19 - Derrick Pitts on NEOWISE, Telescopes and Space Exploration. 43:53 - Mailbag for Derrick Pitts. 1:04:00 - Kenny Mayne on Seattle Kraken NHL Team, Pro Sports Mascot Trivia, and Mike Tyson. The Franklin Institute - https://www.fi.edu/ Run Freely - https://www.runfreely.org/ 52-Card Baseball: Kenny Mayne vs. Tony Todd Darrick Pitts - https://twitter.com/CoolAstronomer Kenny Mayne - https://twitter.com/Kenny_Mayne Green Light with Chris Long: Subscribe and enjoy weekly content including podcasts, documentaries, live chats, celebrity interviews and more including hot news items, trending discussions from the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, NCAA are just a small part of what we will be sharing with you. http://bit.ly/chalknetwork Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Celebrity softball, and I went to chase down an Alvin Davis home run. It was probably 40 feet over my head. Like, I had no prayer, but I'm going to put out the effort. Hit my head on this temporary fence, but the kids were holding up so nobody would run through it, so it made it even worse. I remember your dad came up, and he says, are you okay? And I just look, I said, I'm not well. Not the summer any of us planned or imagined, but it's the summer we got.

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Happy Friday, everybody. This is the Greenlight Pod, and I am Chris Long, your host. This might be the chillest pod of all time. We've got Kenny Maine, an astronomer. That's pretty fucking chill, guys. So we'll be talking space needles, Saturn, stuff like that. You know, the dominant sporting news today, Thursday, as we record this, Seattle Cracken. So I brought a friend from Seattle, and that's Kenny Maine.

Dominant kind of outer space news of the week, a comet. And I'm all over that. I told you all I wanted a comic guy. And you guys pointed me in the right direction. So thank you, Greenlight Nation. I hate saying that because obviously there's not a fucking nation yet. But I'm just going to say it speaking into existence, if you will. Yeah, y'all got me an astronomer is what they call it.

And again, you know, not the guy that can read your horoscope or tell you if you're going to get along with or significant other based on what month of the year he or she was born in. That would be a whole other thing. This is astronomy, guys. This is serious business. And you found me a serious astronomer. Derek Pitts of the Franklin Institute right there in Philly. My Philly listeners, this is going to be a treat.

I know this because I did the interview earlier in the week. He was supposed to follow Jim and Pat from my morning jacket. but he was just so good. We kept him on, you know, about an hour and said, let's move to Friday. One note on Kenny Maine. If you don't make it to that part of the pod, we understand. But definitely check out his initiative called run freely. Run freely.org.

It's a great deal he's got going. He's helped a lot of veterans be able to resume athletic activity again, who have had, you know, major lower leg injuries, all types of stuff with these braces that they're making. And Kenny, if you didn't know, Kenny Maine, is not just a sports center anchor. He also was a great athlete back in the day, back college football player. So he found himself trying to regain some mobility and strength and just wanted to run again. And you figured this thing out.

And I'll have him tell you more about it. But if you don't get there, please check out run freely.org. So let's go to Derek first and then we'll have Kenny. So this is such a joy. I can say this. I usually give superlatives to some guests, but this is probably the smartest individual I've ever had on the Greenlight Pod. And as I mentioned, we've got Derek Pitts of the Franklin Institute joining us.

He's the chief astronomer and director of Fells Planetarium at the Franklin Institute, which is right in your backyard. If you live in Philly, if you're an Eagles fan, check this guy out. He is the man. Derek, how are you doing? This is a big week for you, huh? Yeah, things are pretty busy this week, you know, across a number of different platforms. You know, first it's the comet.

And then, you know, there are also these great planets that are out visible as well. So all these things together make it a really busy week. And also, it's the 51st anniversary of the first man landing on the moon. I saw that. I saw you tweeting about that and it almost no pun intended. I don't even know if the pun works in this, but under the radar. It was under my radar. And I love the whole moon landing stuff.

I do want to ask you about movies in a little bit. First Man is one of my favorites and hopefully don't crush my soul and tell me it's inaccurate and horrible. But I'm looking at Neowise all week and I'm in a great place, I think, to see it. I'm in Northwest Montana. I sent you a picture. Probably everybody sends you pictures. Their comic pictures. Is that accurate?

Man, you're killing me. You're killing me with those pictures. That's not what it looks like here. Well, that's one of the. the most unique things, and we'll get into kind of the comet thing, but you know, you are an astronomer in a big city. And anybody who pays any attention knows that light pollution is the enemy of seeing, you know, this stuff with the naked eye. And I just think it's, it's really cool that there's this resource right there for a number of reasons. Obviously, everybody lives in a city,

but there's also a lot of kids in the inner city and Philly that they don't go on field trips. I mean, they don't get the privilege of traveling and that sort of thing. And they live in their little world, whatever part of the city that might be. And you guys presumably provide them with some sort of an outlet. I mean, do you guys drive the youth towards your field and try to expose kids that don't have an opportunity to leave the city with a chance to look up? Yeah, that's a great question, Chris. And it goes like this. You know, I realized a long time ago when I was growing up in Philly that if I wanted to have access to the night sky, I could, but I just had to prepare myself in a different way. You know, the typical experience that everybody wants to have of looking

at the night sky is you see this really gorgeous, dark purple sky with these beautiful stars peppered across like diamonds on a piece of velvet or something like that. That's not the experience in an urban environment. However, as it turns out, there's kind of a benefit to having so much light pollution, and it is that all the extra night light takes away the millions of stars, of the dimmer stars. And so what you're left with is just the brightest stars and the planets. And this in a way makes it easier to identify basic constellation shapes, because all you have is the brightest stars.

And the only other objects you have are the planets and the moon. And in those three categories right there, there's a whole plethora of things that can be done from measuring star brightnesses or comparing star brightnesses among the bright individual stars to tracking planets as they move across the sky from observing season to observing season. And then, of course, you can always observe, you know, the moon itself and understand the moon's orbital path and how the phasing works. And that ties into some geometry about the Earth-Sun moon system so that it makes it a little bit easier to understand how eclipses can occur. So you mentioned this week, it's not just, I mean,

we get caught up in NEWISE. And to your point, I mean, like, there is a realization when you finally find it. It's so exciting. And I could stare at it for hours. Last night, I talked about this in the open. I was on a rocking chair staring out into a very dark orchard out here. And it's very dark, you know, up here. And we're near Glacier Park. So, I mean, there's no light pollution. There's no light. Yeah. And you're probably like, when I tell you this, you probably hate even more. But I literally, I literally really got up from my rocking chair and I wasn't even looking for it. I found it on accident. I mean, you know, after five minutes, you're like, okay, this is brilliant, but there are so many awesome things to see in the night sky. And you mentioned planets this week that are very visible.

What could we see? So in the southeastern portion of the sky right after sunset, as soon as the sky gets dark, you'll find the largest planet of the solar system and the ringed planet of the solar system that's Jupiter and Saturn, not too far away from each other over in the southeast. They're so bright, you can easily recognize them separate from stars. So they stand out really easily. And they're also great binocular targets. So if you have a regular pair of binoculars, you can see the four brightest moons of Jupiter without any difficulty at all.

And you can start to make out what could be a ring around Saturn, but you need a little bit more magnification than you typically get out of a pair of binoculars. And so this is the point where I encourage people who might have a small telescope. at home that's been sitting in a closet for the last five years. You know, this is a great summer to drag it out, dust it off, figure out how to use it, and pointed at Saturn. And the story I often tell people, Chris, is that, you know, when Galileo first looked at Jupiter and Saturn 410 years ago with the telescope he had, that telescope was a piece of

crap. Yeah. It had a tiny lens. It had hardly any magnification at all. The eye piece really sucked, but he could still see these moons orbiting Jupiter, and he could tell that there was something going on at Saturn. And so with that equipment, he could see that. So any telescope anybody has today is at least 10 times better than what Galileo had. So if you got something, they get out and use it.

What do you think Galileo would think if he just, you know, kind of like Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, I don't know if you ever seen a movie? And he just zapped in like they had Napoleon zap in and in the phone booth. And he was introduced to you. What do you think the most shocking revelation for him? I think he would be absolutely blown away at the development of the technology. You know, where the state of state of the art and technology is in telescopes these days, I think he would just be blown away because I don't think he could imagine being able to create a telescope and a computer and a. sort of like a computer camera system that allows us to essentially erase atmospheric turbulence

from the sky so you no longer really need a space telescope. I mean, these are all kind of advanced ideas, but that's where we are these days. And, you know, Galileo would be smart enough to get it, but I think he'd just be blown away by how big these instruments have gotten and how much they can see. He had no idea about the true depth of the universe. Right. You know, but he suspected a lot. And I think those are the things that would just like knock him over.

So you talked about dark skies and light pollution. I know there's like a growing awareness, if you will. And excuse me, if I misspeak here. The great thing about this interview is I'm not supposed to know what the hell I'm talking about talking to you. So you can always correct me and my ego won't be bruises. When I do football stuff, if I screw up a take or a stat, people crush me. Hey, guys, I'm not the genius on this thing. But like the Dark Sky Alliance or whatever people are to.

Yes. The awareness that's coming to fruition of a movement of people saying, like, we need to rethink the way we light our cities or our structures. Can you talk about that? Yeah, sure. You know, this idea of the architectural uplighting of buildings at night, along with the, you know, like the wanton use of night. lighting around cities is really way off the mark of what we need to be doing. I mean, we don't really, I mean, if we want to illuminate buildings at night, there are smarter ways for us to do it.

But as far as the street lighting is concerned, everybody thinks when you start talking about changing street lighting, that they think you're talking about reducing the numbers of street lights. And that's not the point at all. The real point is, why not just direct the light down to the ground where you need it, rather than having lighting that shoots a lot of it up to the sky where it serves no purpose at all. And in fact, studies have shown that if you direct the light down to the street, you can cut your lighting budget, your night lighting budget, by significant percentages in different communities.

And, you know, this then puts money back into the system to be used for other things. You get much more effective lighting. And it preserves the night sky, which is starting to become a disappearing recent. source. Right. This sort of all connects back to the first question that you asked Chris about kids in inner city environments. And, you know, while they might not be able to see, you know, a great sky like you're able to see right now, it's still possible. I mean, they can still aspire to eventually go to someplace where the sky is dark. But we have to preserve that now. And, you know, you know, we're finding out that state parks, state parks, state parks,

agencies are beginning to designate their locations as dark sky sites so that they can be used at night and the sky around that park can be preserved for excellent nighttime viewing by restricting any kind of bright illumination at night so that people can come in with binoculars and telescopes and things like that and be able to see this really, really gorgeous night sky. I think that's critically important. I worry that generations of people who live in inner city environments, and I have to be careful to make sure, you know, I'm not sending code word here by saying, you know, underserved audiences. No, I mean, there's all types of people in the high rent districts of, you know.

It's everybody. It's everybody in this environment that's losing out by not being able to see a beautiful night sky. So we're preserving it for everybody. And I think it's really important for those kids to understand that there is a gorgeous night sky out there because I see that as an inspiration for them to consider careers that are going in that direction. Yeah, I do think, you know, well, it's certainly it applies to everybody in an inner city. I could imagine, though, where a kid that doesn't have the geographical freedom and the opportunity to go on a family vacation or pick up and leave, you know, maybe in North Philly or something, we worked with Summer Search before, which is a tremendous organization.

where, you know, kids are getting these experiential, really valuable trips. And I would think that, like, that could, you know, a trip to your institute could be like being in another world. I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable that's right there for kids and not enough is made about it. So I think it's really, really cool. What's the darkest place? You know, I don't know if there is a consensus darkest place in the world, that the sky is

just pitch black or. Is that just the further way generally you are from cities? Oh, there's two ways to parse that. One is, yeah, if you go to outer Mongolia, you know, if you're way up in the Gobi Desert out there where there isn't any light for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles, you've got some pretty dark skies out there. Okay. That's relatively inaccessible.

But there are other pockets of dark skies around. Even in the United States, there are pockets of dark skies, you know, in the northern Midwest. It gets pretty dark out there. In southern Canada, it gets pretty dark over there. Out in Australia, in the Outback, it gets dark out there. Right now, the premier, there are two premier places in the world for professional astronomers to work where the skies are dark, clear, and they have

great elevation. The one that most people are familiar with is Monacaea Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii. The big telescope, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. That's pretty dark. They have great skies out there. It's really a great place. It's a perfect place for telescopes. But like the sleeper place that people aren't really aware of that is beginning to take on almost, I think they're up to maybe 65 or 70 percent of all of the astronomical resources these days, is northeastern Chile?

Really? In the Atacama Desert, elevations are 10,000 feet to 18,000 feet up. It is clear. It's dark and it's dry. And in the Atacama Desert, in some places, it hasn't rained for over 100 years. Wow. So that's like a really ideal place for astronomy. But again, you know what, Chris, there are pockets around that people can get to.

For example, Pennsylvania. there's a state park, north central Pennsylvania, called Cherry Springs State Park. People say it's the darkest location in Pennsylvania. It's about a six-hour drive from Philly. But there are pockets like that all around. And, you know, now what you can do is you can go to your state park website, you know, online resource, and figure out in your state which parks are designated as dark sky sites. Well, there we go.

Yeah, yeah. I think you're right about those kids. We need to do more to get kids out to dark sky sites to just let them see what it looks like. I just feel like it just fosters this big imaginative, you know, landscape that's not access unless they see it. And I think it's really cool. And for you, you grew up in Philly. Okay. So, you know, not only did you grow up in a city where the light pollution is bad, but I mean, you know, how do you foster with your experience?

I know when you started in the 70s, there are not a lot. a lot of black astronomers. I mean, how do you foster diversity and representation in your field? Yeah. You know what it is? It's exposure. It's a couple of things. Number one, it's exposure. And then number two, it is providing the support that non-traditional science students need to have to confront all of the horrible microaggressions and systemic racism that exists in science these days. And in astronomy in particular, it's pretty terrible because, you know, it's physics.

And physics is typically not a field that people of color get into. And most of the reason why is there's no exposure and there's no support once they get in. And so they don't, it isn't sustained. However, you know, we have, we have the wherewithal now to provide extraordinary exposure to show kids what the possibilities are for them in all these different fields. Like, you know, astronomy's been really, really good to me, Chris. I've been all over the world. I've been to a lot of the biggest observatories.

I've been able to do things I only dreamed about when I was a kid, Chris. But I'm no different than any other kid growing up in Philly. You know, it's just that I, for some reason, it was so important to me that I decided to stick with it. But if we expose kids to all of these possibilities that range everywhere from astronomy to space exploration, show them what's out there, make them believe that they can do it and support them as they pursue it. I mean, you know what the outcome is going to be? They're going to go do that. But that exposure, oh my gosh, I can't talk enough about, so here's what I do.

At Franklin Institute, of course, you know, I welcome kids to come and we have evening programming at Franklin. And we have had evening program up until now introducing people and kids to the night sky. But I have also operated NASA funded outreach programs that take astronomy out into the neighborhoods to begin to expose kids to the night sky and what they can do with astronomy right where they are. And this is all along the lines up. I don't want to make it about the big building downtown. And I don't want to make it about this guy over here and he's the only one that can do it and you can only do it with him. Nope, that's not the idea. The idea is that it's your universe.

You can go explore it. Let me help you get started. You already have a batch of this knowledge up here. All I'm going to do is help shape a framework for you to put your knowledge in that you can carry with you. And then you can go start to enjoy this even while you're here. here right now with the idea that later when you have better access to some of these other locations, you'll want to do it and you'll already have some science knowledge within you about what to do when you get there.

Very cool. It is very cool. And I think it's great. It should not take a Herkulean effort to be exposed to your field. I mean, it certainly takes one to become an expert in your field, but, you know, these kids should have, you know, exposure and access. I think that's amazing. So, comets, the topic of the hour, the main event.

All right. So what is, you know, it took 35 years for me to realize that a comet is, it was put to me so eloquently as being a dirty snowball. Yeah. Is that what it is? Is that what it is? Exactly right. Exactly right. I was talking to another friend of mine earlier today.

And I said, you know, let's just have people think of it as being like, you know, that dry-off. that we all get in the summer to keep everything called to think of it as a hunk of dry ice that's been rolled in dirt Yeah, that's what it is you know because comets primarily are hunks of frozen carbon dioxide Same as dry ice same thing. So why not describe it that way or like a dirty snowball because that's what it is Got some carbon dioxide's got a little bit of water in it's got some other Organics it's got some exotic things in it but mostly it's the problem dioxide and then the dust of dirt left over from the beginning of the solar system system all rolled up into it. And that's basically it. As it comes close to the sun, melts out a little bit, the dust gets thrown out. You got a tail. Sunlight reflects off of it. Boom, you got to comment.

See, I like this because, you know, just learning about you, I was reading that, you know, part of the brand is you got to make things digestible for people. And I could even understand that. So that's great. Because like, listen, I try, I've read about this stuff and I'm like, I'm just out of my depth. But, you know, that, that works for me. That, that, that, that works for me. explanation works for me. That kind of, it blows my mind a little bit because, you know, I thought comets come along. They come along. You see them once. I didn't think much about comets until I was an adult, but, but you know, you see a star. We all know that the star may or may not be there anymore. In fact, it's relatively likely it's not where it, where it is in the sky that you see it

or whatever. Yeah. It's not like that though with a comment. It's still going to be the same comet in 68,000 years. So where is it going in between? Yeah, right, right, right. That's That is an intriguing thing about it. You know, we here seeing this comment now, you know, belong to an exclusive club of humans because it's just us, you know, that are going to see it. Now, no other humans will see it for another. It's not 68,000, just 6800. 6,800.

Yeah, yeah. See, you got another chance to see it. Come on. I got a chance here. I got a chance. Maybe my career in the NFL curtails that window for me to see it. But still, I mean, I got a shot. So comets orbit the sun, just like planets do.

The difference is that whereas planetary orbits, you know, that path around the sun, that orbit is much closer to circular. Now, none of the planet orbits are circular, but they're much closer to circular than comet orbits are. And in this instance, this is like an elongated oval. So it has the closer approach to the sun, which it had a couple of weeks ago. Now it's headed on its way out of the solar system. and it's going to take it 6,800 years to make that circuit. It's not the shortest period comet. The shortest period comet that we know of is comet Anki at 3.3 years.

So every three years, this comet makes its orbit around the solar system. And then, you know, if you flare that orbit, you know, that oval out wide enough, what happens is the comet never comes back. So it comes in on a path, swings around the sun, heads out of the solar. system in another direction and never comes back. So those are non-periodic comets. This one is periodic. It's just that the period is 6,800 years long.

So if you see it, good for you. You're part of that special club. Right. But it's just wild to me that like knowing that, I guess reading that the closer gets to the sun, the more burns off. Yeah. So it's not continually burning off at this rate, which is why I can stain a 6,6,800,000.

Why I can sustain a 6,800 year lifespan is it's not continually dusting off behind it like that. Yeah, no. What happens is, you know, essentially, it's like you take the dry ice out of the freezer and it smokes off a bit and then you put it back in the freezer. So when the comet comes into the center of the solar system, it gets close to the sun. It's like taking it out of the freezer. You know, so once it gets past the sun, it heads back out into deep solar system, it's back into the deep freeze. and the whole surface just solidifies down again into that deep freeze. And then it's not for another 6,800 years that it heats up again.

Now, the interesting thing about this, Chris, is that every time it comes around, it melts off a little bit more every time. So eventually that comet's going to be gone because it will have melted away all of its carbon dioxide ice. What does a comet smell like, Derek? Well, let me see. Last time I had my nose up on a comet. I didn't have to wonder because you have you ever thought about maybe what that thing smelled like. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, but you know what? I don't know. I would have I want to say, oh yeah, it smells like space. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. It feels like a good one.

No, but you know what? I would imagine, I would imagine that it smells frozen. It smells like space. It smells like it smells like cold, frozen something. You know, it's got that, not just that it's cold itself, but that it's old and it smells a little metallic. And it doesn't smell smoky like a campfire or a match or anything like that. But it's got this quality to it that makes it smell exotic and different. Yeah. So I'm guessing it's like that.

Nice. We cleared that up. How about the comet omens throughout history? like, I don't know, somebody said to me that the three wise men, they might have been following a comet, like, you know, in theology and history. Like, what, what, what's the back? Is it always, has it always been a negative thing or a positive thing or the mixed reviews historically for comets and what they mean? You know what it's been? It has been mixed reviews depending upon how you wanted to use the information. And so it's a really interesting thing because if you think about it, Chris, the people in civilization that have been able to understand the night sky. And, you know, people were just as smart 5,000 years ago as they are now. They may not have had the technology that we have. But, you know, people were smart enough to figure stuff out. I mean, you know, we know that it was understood that the earth was round, you know, 330 years. before the Christian era. So that kind of stuff was already known

and people had ideas about how plants. So I think what people understood that long ago is that those people who had this understanding of the night sky and how all this stuff worked, they held a very special knowledge. And I think those people might have been regarded as the priests in a society because they had this knowledge and information.

So what you could do with that information is all dependent on how you use it. So for some people, it was considered to be a bad omen to see something like a comet because it meant something horrible was going to happen. However, other people took that same information and said, this is a good sign for us, and we're going to make a difference in this. So if I can get it right, it was William the Conqueror in 1066 AD who used a citing of Halley's comet as a good omen in a battle that he was engaged in and he won that battle. So in that instance, the comet was a good omen.

But in many other instances, that same comet was a bad omen. So it depended how we, you know, we, the humans here, interpreting what's happening in the sky, decide we want to use it. And that makes me wonder, because, you know, you just hit it on the head is that there's certainly a navigational purpose that was very functional for people throughout history with astronomy. I can imagine that the world would be way different without stars in the sky for that very reason, but also as actors of good and evil, how much different would the world be if there were no stars in the sky? Like, would history have completely changed course? I've got to figure

it would have a different. Oh, yeah. Oh, I think so. If there were no stars, I think history would have come out totally differently because, you know, if you think about it, all of us have this connection to the night sky. And it's a very, very kind of primal connection. And I think it's because, you know, when we first began to develop as humans on the planet walking around on the planet in somewhat organized societies, as we gathered together, the first thing we had to do was find safety, find food, protect ourselves. So we didn't spend a lot of time out at night. It was not good for us to be out at night. It's a luxury. Yeah, it's a luxury, right? But, you know, if you were out at night, what you would see is you would see these bright lights in the night sky.

And that, I think, has always caused us to wonder about our place in the universe. So without that driving us as for a way to begin to think about our place in the universe, I think a lot of philosophies would not have developed. And perhaps a lot of religions would not have developed, you know, because everybody has every culture on the planet, Chris, has a creation theory. a creation myth, every, every culture, right? And most of those cultures have a creation myth that involves something about the sky, about the night sky, right?

So if you start from that point, you can see how the sky has shaped us as humans living on this planet. So yeah, I think it would have been very different. I have this tagline that I use on my email. It was written by the Chicago movie reviewer, whose name I'm not going to remember right now, but it'll come back to me. In any case, he said that Isaac Asimov wrote a story, a science fiction story about a civilization on a planet that only got to see the stars once every 10,000 years. on that one night, the people were so amazed by what they saw that it absolutely drove them crazy. Right. Once every 10,000 years.

Here on this planet, we gaze up at the night sky, shrug our shoulders, and look down again as we hunt for a dairy queen. Right. And I thought about that last night because I spent five minutes looking at this magnificent comet. And then I walked inside and watched Philly's highlights. playing in an empty stadium and was enthralled with SportsCenter. So it's just like we go about our lives and we have this, this magnificent, you know, thought-provoking setting, right, right above our heads every night.

That's true. And the other piece that you have to attach always to that is that, you know, we could be the only, we could be the only intelligent life in the universe, you know, not to go way off track and, you know, way down this direction. But we'll get there. If you think about it, it's totally possible that we could be the only intelligent life in the universe. Now, it's not likely that we are. But it's possible.

Okay. So if that's the case, then us as humans who stand upright and who think and reason and create and do all of these other things that are specifically human, I mean, that's an incredible expression. of the universe's development to take all of these chemical elements and pull them together into a creature that has consciousness and can think and can reason and can laugh

and can play a musical instrument. That's remarkable. But if we're the only ones in the universe, that's got to blow your mind. You can't even you can't even begin to prepare to think about it, let alone reason with that reality in your head. And by the way, I'm one of these, I think, I think most people want there to be other

life forms. It just seems so likely. And I'll ask you about that in a moment because we got some great mailbag questions. But it's not just smart people looking in the sky to your point earlier. Like, there's also amateurs that look for comets, right? I mean, there's a big amateur community that's probably found numerous comets and other things in the sky. Oh, man, come on. So the way the comets have been found classically is that enthusiasts identify a section of the sky, a set of constellations that they have become intimately familiar with. They know every star in that constellation. They know what should be and what shouldn't be there. And historically, what they've done is they've used binoculars to hunt down these errant objects in their

constellation. So they were the ones who were identifying comets up until just recently. Now we have these new automated robotic telescope systems that do night sky surveys on a regular schedule, and they have tremendous aperture, like big telescopes, they have digital cameras, and they can sweep up these objects long before a human could see them. So what's happened is that opportunity for discovery by humans has moved into this automated realm. So, in fact, you know, there's a, it's a time. tiny, tiny percentage of the population that is professionally involved in astronomy. And the rest of the community is enormous.

And the amateurs, oh my gosh, those are the people who are pushing the envelope on really what can be done because, you know, amateur astronomers have big telescopes. They have automated telescope systems. They have mastered digital astrophotography in ways that now professional observatories have begun to take on and use in their systems as well. So a lot of this familiarization with the night sky has been driven just by the amateur community, those people who love looking at the night sky.

And face it, Chris, to some degree, we're all amateur astronomers because everybody likes to look at the moon. Everybody likes to look at Jupiter and a telescope. So I think we're all out there doing it. But yeah, comics should be discovered by them. And you get to put your name on it, too. What? I'm asking you this, and you might have already named a comet.

What would you name a comet? Oh. If I was really smart, I'd name it after my wife, Linda, but I wanted to do what I wanted to do. Yeah. You know, I don't know. I'd have to think about that because there are so many great directions to go with that. But you know, I'd probably, I don't know, I'd probably pick something out of, you know, out of some music category that I like or something like that. Yeah, no doubt.

So what artists? What are you listening to right now? I have to say, my latest thing really is a little bit of hip-hop. There we go. Right. But there's a context for that. I'll really quickly mention it. If you haven't seen the movie straight out of Compton,

everybody needs to see straight out of Compton to understand some very, very important and salient points. that we're seeing reflected in our society today. So, you know, a lot about the origins of hip hop and rap, but also a story about how young men in an underserved community created an industry that ran by their rules rather than somebody else's rules. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. And I would guarantee you anybody you mentioned in that, you know, in your musical Rolodex there is really into your field.

Whether they, you know, like, so that's kind of cool. You got to think about it. I mean, any artist, any musician you like. I hope so. This is the last serious question before we hit the quick hitters and we can get you out of it. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned theology.

We talked about theology. Is it possible in your field to be religious, to have a level of faith? And is there more variance in that because of what you guys know, You guys and girls know about the solar system, about space, creation. Yeah, it's a crazy. It's a crazy thing because, first of all, you know, faith and religion, there's religion and then there's faith. And you as an individual can have faith in something, whatever that thing is.

And I have absolutely no right whatsoever to tread on your faith, whatever that is. Yeah. whatever, I can't tread on that, you know. And it's perfectly acceptable to have faith run right alongside of science because faith is a belief system. And, you know, science is a belief system as well. Yeah. Okay. And there's no reason why the two can't mix. And in fact, you know, it's a false dichotomy, Chris, that science and religion cannot coexist, cannot work together. Because if you look at history of the development of science since the, since the dark ages through the Renaissance period, science has always been closely aligned, particularly with the Catholic Church, even though there

had been some fallouts here and there. I mean, if you look at the way that we use our calendars today, this is the easiest example. Calendors are built on astronomy, and the calendar that we used today was shaped by the staff of a pope in the 16th century whose staff realized that an alignment of seasons with the actual calendar year was important to Christianity. And so his guys figured out how to construct a calendar that astronomically matched perfectly and would continue to astronomically match going forward centuries, if not thousands of years into the future. But that's all based on orbital mechanics. So here you have these two put together in such a way that Easter always comes in the spring, right?

Very important because you need the story of rebirth to follow what's actually happening seasonally or else things get all out of whack and it doesn't look, right? So that's one example. So these things have always gone together. So that's the first thing on that side. And then the other side of it is this. Yeah, this is crazy. We look at the universe, we look at all this big stuff happening in the macro universe.

We got galaxies, thousands, millions, billions, hundreds of billions of galaxies, right? And then if you start to look at how everything in the universe works, it requires you to go back and look at the absolute most basic structures of the universe because we don't really understand. I mean, we know how to use gravity, but we don't really understand where gravity comes from. But in order for us to answer that question, we have to dig deeper and deeper and deeper into the subatomic structure of the universe. So we have to get all the way down into quantum mechanics to understand what's going on down there. Well, guess what? The farther down you look through all of what looks like chaos, Chris, the more organized it begins to look. Right. And that organization is difficult.

to explain. Now, I'm not saying, but some people begin to ask this question about something called intentionality. So intentionality is the opposite of the randomness of the universe coming together to create all of the matter that we see. Right. So intentionality suggests that there is a mechanism that's been created and set into motion. Right. And then you ask all the other questions. If there's a mechanism, was it built? Who built it?

Yeah. And frankly, you know, it's impossible. I mean, you can ignore, you could ignore that line of thinking if you wanted to. But I just, I think it makes our existence that much more intriguing if we're willing to, you know, chase this idea of intentionality. Yeah, it could look chaotic to us and certainly the randomness that you touched on, the appearance of randomness, but like if we were much wiser and had a broader scope of time and space and all this stuff and this was elementary to us, this could be very

elementary to us if we were, you know, if we were looking at it from the beginning, you know, and that intentionality. So it's just always interest me, because I'm kind of with you as I explore the meaning of life. And, you know, like everybody does and faith and that sort of thing. It's like, you know, the two can coexist for some of the best and the brightest in the field. And I think that's cool. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you can't, I mean, if you're going to be a, if you are going to be a scientist, there are always questions that you can't answer. Right. You know, and you can't, you can talk about probability, but you can't talk about. absolutes. Yeah. These are the mail bags and the grab bags are going to seem random, but we're rightful through them here. And again, I appreciate the time, Derek. This is awesome. I'm sure this is fun. So best movies set in space that you don't just cringe watching.

Best movie set in space that I don't cringe watching. Okay, I'll do the serious one first. I really like Interstellar. Yes. Really? My favorite movies of all time. No kidding. The soundtrack is fantastic. Matthew's awesome. And I'm glad you so. So why? Well, everybody thinks, this is just me. Everybody thinks that movie is about black holes and what happens when you get near black holes and all that sort of stuff.

To me, that's not what the story is about. Not what it's about. It's about relationships. To me, that's what that story is about. It's about relationships. And this guy had to do this thing of going out into space, but he also had to come back to close the loop on this relationship that he had. And that was more important to him than anything else.

And that's, to me, you know, Blackhalls are great and everything, Chris. They're great and everything. They're great and everything. But, you know, but I got people. I love, man. I have people I love. There's time to chase black holes and there's time to, you know, hang out with folks. Yeah, you know, look, you know what it's like. You're with your people and you're having the best time and you know there just can't be anything better. Yeah. No, no doubt about it, which is the beauty of the universe. All right. So that's my science one. There's a lot of other ones and stuff

like that. You know, the Martian was really good. I really loved the Martian. That was good too. They're a little light for me. I wanted him to be more tortured psychologically being alone. And that's where it was kind of like, it was a little bit more the Disney movie to Interstellar's like Rar. Yeah. My favorite. And this is not my favorite because Interstellar's probably first man needs time.

Okay. I mentioned before. And you talked about the 51 year anniversary. And my son, you know, every kid wants to be an astronaut. And we all imagine that being an astronaut just involves going to space. Like they're hardcore. Oh my God. First man was unbelievably.

jarring from a sense of like look at everything this guy had to go through to become an astronaut. You're right. Becoming an astronaut is that's like a life commitment to wanting to do that. You have to set your targets. If you really want to do that, you have to set your target early. Yeah. And you have to plan everything out in your life to revolve around that. Because it's going to take all of your time to do it. It's going to take all of your commitment. and it's going to require that you sacrifice all of those other things that everybody commonly accepts as part of life. I mean, you have to get into this whole other realm of existence about being either a scientist or being an aviator. And you have to dedicate yourself to that.

You really do have to dedicate yourself. And then you have to get everybody else in your life to understand that the thing that comes first for you is doing that. but also in the 60s it wasn't just it was the risk too. Oh. I mean like I'm watching talking about that yet. People were dying in training like at a like all his friends, not all his friends, but a bunch of women. You're like an extreme athlete.

Yeah. You're an extreme athlete. Yeah. With balls that you could put in a wheelbarrow. Yeah. Like you're literally strapping yourself into a machine and you're saying what happens, happens. I mean.

Yeah. Well, that's not even going to know it when it. ends. I mean, that's, you're right. And that's the other part of it is that you have to resign yourself to the fact that there's a very high probability you're going to die in a very dramatic way. And you, and you're right. And you may it.

And you won't even know it. You won't even know it. But, but were you doing the thing that you'd love to do? Yeah. Where are you doing the thing that you love to do? I've known some, and you know, that thing about, you know, having the balls big enough to roll around in a wheelbarrow. I knew some guys who were fighter pilots in World War II.

And I knew them when they had gotten on in their years and, you know, like when they were in their 80s and 90s. And I'm telling you, man, the people who do that work, they have enormous, enormous egos. Not necessarily twisted, but enormous in the sense of they have to be absolutely 100% certain of their skill level. or they're going to die. Yes, yes. Not arrogant, but extreme functional confidence in your craft, which is a necessity if you're going to do something like that, it blows you way.

By the way, I saw you retweet Leland Melvin. Yeah. You know, Leland lives right down the road for me in Lynchburg, and I'm in Charlottesville. I didn't know that. Yeah, I spoke at a thing with Leland, and I felt way out of my league. Yeah, well.

But we kept in contact. and before he was supposed to come on the show, but eventually I'll get him on the show. Leland is a great dude. He is a great guy. Leeland, I've done, Leland and I shared, how do I say this?

We were both invited to participate in a program in Philadelphia, and I got to be on the same bill with him, which was really great. And then he invited me to come down to NASA's Black History Month programming about two years ago, three years ago now,

at headquarters in D.C., and I got to hang out with him and a few other folks there. And, you know, we chat back and forth, you know, every now and then. And you're right. He's a, he's a superior individual. He really is. And such a nice guy. Just such a nice guy. You know, for somebody you think would be so intense, it would almost like his stare would cut you in half because he's, you know, he's one of these guys that is so resolute in what he's done and so confident and knowledgeable. He's so down to earth and normal. How do you go to outer space and just, you know, shoot the shit.

shit with people like it's nothing it's it's unfair that's an interesting point though Chris because that I think is one of the one of the defining changes in the evolution of the space program is that you know early in the space program in the 60s like you said you had to have guys that were hard cold steel fighter pilots yes you know who had the nerve to do this stuff and you know lay their life on the line all that other sort of stuff uh not that that's small potatoes. But nowadays, what you have is you have many more people who are becoming career astronauts that haven't had military service like that. And are scientists or come from some other discipline that's directly related to what the mission is of the space program at that time.

You know, nowadays, I was just looking at one of the members of the crew on board international space station right now whose time on space station is going to be six months. It says first flight into space. First flight, six months on Space Station, right? And, you know, so the changing face of astronauts that we see, I think, reflect

people who are much more dimensional than the original group of astronauts were. This wasn't your main career, but this turned out to be a side track in your career because you really are an aeronautical engineer in something else. Or you're a

computer scientist or you're, you know, a geologist, you're a planetary geologist. And so you're on this mission because you're going to go to the moon and look at rocks or whatever. Yeah. So I think we're getting that much more rounded sort of personality coming out of it now. So Leland, I think, is a really great example of that. Got out to Leland. This is me testing to see if Leland listens to the pod. He'll let me know. So full moons. If they can affect the tide, can they affect behavior? Yeah. Wow. Wouldn't that be? The lunar cycle. Wouldn't that be a great thing if it could? And the answer is no, no.

So I don't have any excuse. I'm sorry, call out, figure out something else. If you could, if you had superpowers, and that means you're, you're impervious to suffocation or gravity or anything like, and you could walk on one planet, which would it be, or swim on one planet, or float. Oh, why? Why is it always just one? Okay, so here's what I want to do. Give me your top three, then.

I got, okay. Okay, so I want to go to the moon. I want to walk on the moon because I want to go to the lunar museum. I want to go to the Apollo 11 site and see what's there. Okay, that's fine. But what I really want to do is I want to go to Mars. I want to go to Mars and I want to walk around on the surface of Mars because Mars is such a strong Earth analog.

The geologic processes that took place on Earth and took place on Mars are so similar because of the water that was on Mars at once. one time that Mars is geomorphology, geomorphologically, I'll say, you know, the landforms and stuff like that, so similar to Earth. And I'd love to see that stuff up close and in person. Last thing I want to do is I want to go to one of the moons of Saturn that has that really thick ice crust with the liquid water ocean underneath because I want to go down in that ocean and find out if there's any living creatures there. And by living creatures, do you mean microscopic topic or they're conceivably ones that you could see with the naked eye.

Ah, yeah, right. I want to go see what's evolved there because they've been around as long as the solar system has been around. It's a liquid water environment. And the liquid water environment at those moons is not wildly dissimilar from the liquid water environments in the very deepest regions of oceans here on Earth. Oh, wow. Where there's plenty of life, plenty of life that has never been to the surface, never seen light, you know, none of that kind of stuff. So those environments are similar and I'm thinking to myself, wouldn't it be cool if there was some evolution that happened there that we don't know about yet? I'd love to go check that out. What, uh, Kaysen Sharp on Instagram asks aliens, yay or nay,

we've already kind of touched on that UFOs kind of where are we on that? Uh, hey, unidentified flying objects. Yeah, there have been some things that we have not been able to identify. I love that. Does it mean that it's, you know, aliens from some of the planet? No, it just means we haven't been able to figure out what these things are. But on the alien tip, hey, like I said, this is all about probability rather than anything else. You know, if you've got a billion galaxies and each star in those galaxies, you know, has one planet that's a billion planets per galaxy, it's a numbers game. Now, have we found anything yet? No.

We have found absolutely nothing to indicate that there's. any life anywhere else except here. And we can even question about whether or not this life here is intelligent. Right. We sure can. Yeah. But probability says eventually something should turn up. Now, this is complicated by one thing, Chris.

We as humans cannot understand. We just cannot wrap our heads around how big the universe is. Yeah. So it's totally possible that there are plenty of alien civilizations. civilizations, but they are so far between, the distances between them are so enormous, we never find out about it. My hot take is this. If there's a UFO that we're pretty sure is an alien spacecraft, and they came all this way

from a galaxy far, far away or a place that we can't conceive, why would they mean us harm? They would have already had us. You know what I mean? Like, they would have already done whatever we're fearful of. They probably buzzed by and they were like, what the hell are these? people doing down here. Are they doing down there?

I'm going home. There's a bunch of other Earths. Right. And the other thing is, if you came that distance, if you came all that distance, why wouldn't you land down on the front lawn of some place that looked like it was the center of civilization on the planet and introduce yourself? I mean, ancient aliens on history channel, Derek, I'm just. Yeah, but, you know.

Yeah, no, I'm with you. I'm with you. So Corey Mulliken asked, and we got two more after this, how realistic is your private, is a private industry to be able to mine precious materials from asteroids and comets? I've seen it discussed, but is it science fiction? So we're talking about a buildup of infrastructure to make this happen. And, you know, you need all the equipment to make that work. You need all the launch capability. You need, you know, all the spacecraft and you need the mining equipment, all that stuff.

And you need the crew to be able to do that. but most important more than anything else is you need a financial model that's going to work. Right. You know, if you're not making money, if you can't make money at this, nobody's going to do it. Oh, yeah, for the joy of scientific research and, you know, edification about the solaceous and all that stuff. Yeah, that's great and everything. But if you're not making any money, nobody's going to chase that. So I love the idea of that, but it's a mathematical model.

doesn't work, forget it. 2020 seems like an appropriate year to ask this question. Chance is an asteroid. I can't tell if this person is asking, hopefully, chances an asteroid can have life on Earth or change it? Please, end it all. Elrod asks, is there any chance that, and obviously there's a chance, but is that exaggerated?

Because I keep looking at these asteroids, I'm like, don't stop talking about it, be about it. Yeah, you know what? Right now, we're pretty safe because as a result of some flybys and really as a result of the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabins, Russia in 2014. A number of agencies around the world have set up surveys of the night sky looking to see what's out there in terms of asteroid and size. And we've been able to determine a catalog and are keeping track of the very biggest and the most dangerous, possibly dangerous ones to us.

And we've been able to rule out that there's any concern about anything doing any serious damage to the planet for the next hundred years or so, easily. Okay. we have to do better at identifying the small stuff. So planet killers, we don't have to worry about planet killers. City killers, there's a little bit of concern about something that could put a crimp in your style for a day. But we don't have to worry about anything serious for quite some time. And our ability to spot these and identify them is getting better.

And we're also in the process of developing technologies that might help us mitigate something, you know, like push it off course is the most likely thing we might do if we see something that's headed towards us and it's going to cause us some more problems. So we couldn't Bruce Willis this thing. I'd like to send somebody better if we had to.

And I'll say one last thing about that. Bruce Willis, you know, my other movie that I really like, Fifth Element. Fifth Element, yes. It's a dope movie. That movie's pretty cool. It's a movie that got better and better with time.

If you watch Fifth Element in 2020, like it's aged well compared to some of those movies of that time period. Yeah, it has. Yeah, it has. And it contains this really interesting concept from way back then that is closer to becoming a reality. And that is space tourism. Yeah. Yeah. I got, I hate to end it on that one.

But one more here. If you met an alien life form, you got two questions. What are you asking, assuming they can understand your language? my first question would be do you know of other alien civilizations and my next question would be do you have a better understanding of how this all came into existence than we do can you tell me anything about intentionality yeah and then the third might be pets or genos did you say d'alessandro i didn't but they're going to hate me down there they're just going to hate me down there no here's the deal Here's the funniest thing that I've admitted this to a few friends.

I have not had a cheese steak in Philly and I played there the tail end of my career and fell in love with the city. But I was so afraid of getting, you know, those uniforms are not real forgiving in your 30s. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that sort of thing. So I never wanted to be kind of bloated out there in the field. Look good. But I'm coming back. I'm going to get a cheese steak.

Listen, is there anything that, you know, people should know, listeners should know about the Franklin Institute or how to support it and so on? Man, so, you know, right now with what's going on here, Chris, it's changed how we do business. It's changed how all of cultural institutions in the city do business, all around the country, really. Franklin Institute just opened two weeks ago after having been closed since March 13th. And we're now open Wednesday through Sunday. And if you go to our website, which is fI.edu, you can find information about making a visit to the Franklin Institute coming to check us. out, check out our hours and things like that. And we still have great programming, of course.

And after all, it's the Franklin Institute. It's a great place people know it and love it, and we'd love to have people come back. But the other thing is, we have a tremendous amount of online content that we have been cranking out since March 13th to help keep our audience connected with science, even though the museum hasn't been open. I've been doing a weekly astronomy. I had been doing a weekly astronomy thing since March 20th all the way up until about three weeks. ago, just covering all kinds of topics in astronomy to get people outside to look at the sky. So that's one thing. And we can certainly use your support. You know, our situation is a serious

one. And we can, we would accept all the support we can find. If you go to our web page, you can find out how to support the Franklin Institute. Send us a check. Send us some money. We greatly appreciate it. That's awesome. Yeah, definitely do that. And then, you know, the other thing that I want everybody to remember, Chris, is that I said this a little bit earlier. This is your universe. You should explore it. And you don't have to be some kind of egghead genius in astronomy or mathematics or something like that to appreciate the beauty of the universe. Like you're talking about, Chris, all you need to do is go out and sit on the back step and take some time to look up. And if you don't have a pair of binoculars, that's great because you can still see a lot of

cool stuff. If you do have binoculars, you don't need to know what the thing is. Just scan along and look at the sky and you'll be amazed. And you'll get a little bit of spiritual relief from being out under a beautiful sky. You'll reestablish a connection with the universe. And you can just have some peace and quiet looking at a beautiful sky. And you can be present and you can reverse your tech neck, which is terrific. I mean, staring at the comet for five, 10 minutes last day, but my neck feel better. Exactly. Yeah. And you can support the Franklin Institute. So check out the web page and also follow Derek Pitts at a cool astronomer on Twitter. I mean, he is a cool astronomer. This was great. Derek, I hope you come back next time we got something to talk about.

You know, I'll be, I'll be there to visit you when I get back up to Philly. It's been a real honor to be able to talk to you. Thank you very much for everything you did for us. when you were here. We'd love to have you back. And in the meantime, enjoy Northwest Montana. And when you come back, look me up. We'll go get a cheesecake at Dallas andro. Yeah, Philly, Philly.

Hey, great having you, Derek. Thank you, man. Take it easy.