Radiolab - REBROADCAST: Space

Episode Date: August 21, 2012

Celebrate the 35th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2 (it rocketed off Earth on 8/20/77 carrying a copy of the Golden Record), and tip your hat to the Mars rover Curiosity as it kicks off its third week on the red planet, with a rebroadcast of one our favorite episodes: Space.

You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. Public Radio. W. N.Y.C. And NPR. Some people go to therapy. Some to church. Others come here.

To the northwest corner of a parking lot on Fire Island, where most nights, you'll find a handful of people looking up. I come down here quite often. It's a great place to start. You got the sound of the ocean in the background with the crashing waves. So it just adds to the relaxation of it, you know. The night I visited the sky, Ron, was about one of 20 enthusiasts, huddled over astral maps, staring through telescopes of all sizes.

This is quite a telescope. Some so big, you needed a ladder. Wow, that's a big cluster of stars. Yes, it certainly is. Do you get attached to certain stars? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you did begin. You know, the first ones you ever found and stuff like that.

Do you remember your first? Well, yeah, Alberio is one of them I really like. Ron's going to show it to you, I think. I didn't catch your name, actually. John. What it is is that to the naked eye, Albirio just looks like a really faint, single star. But when you look at it through a telescope,

you have a look in there. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God, they're so bright. Like little flashlights. Through the telescope, Alberio looked like a headlight, bright and flat and close, very immediate. But that was nothing compared to what happened next. A woman walks up, points her finger at the star.

Okay, so is that the one up here? And touches it. That one right there. Touches the star. That's really cool. That was one of the coolest people. Describe what you just did, please. I turned on my green laser and I pointed at the star.

It was one of the coolest. things I have ever, ever, ever seen. Her name was Linda. She had a pen that was a laser. When she turned it on, a focused, bright, green beam of lights sprung from her hand to the star. Like a long green finger. She literally touched the star. And for a moment, I forgot the ground underneath my feet and that that star, Alberio, was 50 million light years away. It seemed right there. See, when you look up. Besides, you know, Nebriol, and stars and star clusters, but what do you sort of look for exactly?

Well, you can really see sort of like where you are in the universe, or at least in our own galaxy. And it makes like a very interesting perspective for yourself, you know, and like what life is like here and what life must be like in other worlds and whether or not there's other planets out there with people or different life forms that we can't even comprehend. This is Radio Lab on the chat, Aboumrod. Today on our program, we're going to project our minds. out there to the Great Beyond. And ask some basic questions.

Here to help, as always. Hi. This is Robert Crulwich. And in this hour, we discover how big... Oh, sorry, we... And in this hour, we find ourselves in space. We discover how immense, how huge space is. And then we ask ourselves, now, where does that leave us?

We are a speck on a speck, on a speck, on a speck. And as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will remind us later in the program, it is difficult for little specks like us to find walking, talking, intelligent specs somewhere else in the universe. But say what you will, we are trying. Speaking of which, let's begin by rewinding the clock back to 1977. Okay. This is a big year for the space program because in August of that year, NASA launched a spacecraft carrying a gold record. You remember this, right?

The record carried a message from us to them, our strength. story. You know, it was Carl Sagan. The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Who led the team that made the record, and that team included, actually was headed by Annie Drouyan. I visited Annie at her home in Ithaca, New York, and we sat in the backyard near a waterfall.

In the same spot, she says, where Carl himself would sit and become so absorbed in what he was reading that he would not notice a deer, standing right next to him. My name is Annie Drian, and, um, I was honored to be the creative director of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which began in early 1977. Now, how did this come about? I think about the project now, and it's so exciting to think about.

I mean, it's such a romantic idea. Did you know that at the time? Absolutely. We felt, first of all, that this was a kind of sacred trust, that here we were half a dozen very flawed human beings with huge holes in our knowledge of all of these subjects building a cultural Noah's Ark it was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like

two beings of perhaps a thousand million years from now because the Voyager engineers were saying this record will have a shelf life of a billion years. If that didn't raise goosebumps, then you'd have to be made of wood. It was also the season that Carl Sagan and I fell so madly in love with each other. And here we were taking on this mythic challenge and knowing that before it was done,

two spacecraft would lift off from the planet Earth, moving at an average speed of 35,000 miles an hour, for the next thousand million years, and on it would be a kiss of mother's first words to her newborn baby. Oh, come on now.

Mozart. Bach. Beethoven. Greetings in the 59 most populous human languages. Shalom. Hello from the children of planet Earth.

As well as one non-human language, the greetings of the humpback way. else. And it was a sacred undertaking because it was saying, we want to be citizens of the cosmos. We want you to know about us. Tell me about the moment you fell in love with Carl Sagan.

You said it was during the Voyager compilation. Yes, it was. It was on June 1st, 1977. I had been looking for some time for that piece of Chinese music that we could put on the Voyager record and not feel like idiots for having done so. And I was very excited

because I'd finally found a ethnomusicologist, composer at Columbia University, who told me without a moment's hesitation that this piece flowing streams, which was represented to me as one of the oldest pieces of Chinese music, 2,500 years old, was the piece we should put on the record. So I called Carl, who was traveling. He was in Tucson, Arizona, giving a talk. And we had been alone many times during the making of the record and as friends for three years. And neither of us had ever said anything to the other.

We were both involved with the people. We'd had these wonderful, thawing conversations. But we had both been completely just professional about everything and his friends. And he wasn't there, left a message. Hour later, phone rings, pick up the phone. And I hear this wonderful voice. And he said, I'd get back to my hotel room, and I find this message. And it says, Annie called.

And I say to myself, why didn't you leave me this message 10 years ago? And my heart completely skipped a beat. I can still remember it so perfectly. And I said, for keeps? And he said, you mean get married? And I said, yes. And we had never kissed. We had never, you know, even had any kind of personal discussion before.

We both hung up the phone, and I just screamed out loud. I remember it so well because it was this great eureka moment. It was just like scientific discovery. And then the phone rang, and I was thinking, oh, shit. You know, like, and the phone rang, and it was Carl, and he said, I just want to make sure that that really happened. We're getting married, right? And I said, yeah, we're getting married.

He said, okay, just wanted to make sure. And spacecraft lifted off on August 20th and August 22nd. We told everyone involved, and we were together from that moment until his death in 1996 in December. Wow. Talk about romantic. My God. It was so romantic. And part of my feeling about Voyager, obviously, and part of what I was feeling in the recording of my brainwomen. waves, my heart, my eyes, everything, in that meditation on the record, I had asked Carl whether or not it would be possible to compress the impulses in one's brain and nervous system

into sound and then put that sound on the record and then think that perhaps the extraterrestrials of the future would be able to reconstitute that data into thought. And he looked at me in beautiful May Day in New York City and said, well, you know, a thousand million years is a long time, you know, why don't you go do it? Because who knows? You know, who knows what's possible in a thousand million years? And so my brainwaves and REM, every little sound that my body was making was recorded at Bellevue Hospital in New York. This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other. And so what I often think is that maybe 100 million years from now, you know, somebody flags that record down, and I always wonder it,

because part of what I was thinking in this meditation, was about the wonder of love and of being in love, and to know it's on those two spacecraft. Even now, whenever I'm down, you know, I'm thinking, and still they move, 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great, wide-open, sea of interstellar space. Billions of years from now, the sun

will have reduced this planet to a charred ashy ball. But that record, with Androians, brainwaves and heartbeat on it, will still be out there somewhere intact in some remote region of the Milky Way preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished

on a distant planet. Two hearts on a wing. Very nice. It's lovely, right? Yeah, it is. Although there are six plus billion earthlings right now. And the best thing I think about Earth is that we're so various. So you can get six plus billion versions of being an earthling. Yeah, like if you were Annie Joy in Carl Sagan,

what would your recipe of us be? So we asked a bunch of people. Who? A comedian, Margaret Cho. You know her? Neil Gaiman, this graphic novelist, Michael Cunningham, an author, very famous chef Alice Waters.

They all sort of told us what they would send. A play one. I'm not going to play all because... It would take too long. You can hear all of them on our website, actually, radialab.org. But here is one guy we asked. He's a composer.

This is Philip Glass speaking. The reason I've chosen Bach is that he had the ability to do two things at once. One was to deal concretely with the language of music. almost you can say grammar of music. At the same time, while he was doing that, let's say, with one part of his brain, he was able to create music that we empathize with. He takes you by the hand, as it were, and walks you into states of being that you didn't even know existed.

Bach goes out in the spaceship. What anybody can hear in and that, we'll put it in the station. But I would also... recommend strongly that we bring music in from other world traditions. Whether it's from Africa, or whether it's a kind of a throat singing that you might hear in Siberia or in the Arctic

or a wonderful flute-pline that you might hear in South India. I was in India in 1960, and I was in a small village in the Himalayas called Kalimpunk, on the border of Bhutan and Tibet. And a friend of mine, a rug dealer, I had been in his shop numerous times to look at his rugs. Ranel of the shop and said,

oh, Mr. Glass, come with me, I want to show you a picture. And he had gotten a hold of a film clip of Gandhi. It was a march he took in the 30s called the... It was known as the Salt March. The English had put a tax on the use of salt. Thousands and thousands of people joined him. And they walked into the sea, and they took their garments

put them into the water and harvested the salt. There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. And I saw the picture of this tiny little man, really, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of people leading this march, and it was so moving.

I think what you'd have to do is get that piece of footage. It articulates in this very simple act How societies change How people that appear to be powerless and insignificant Can bring about huge changes Chad here, Robert and I will continue in a moment You're listening to Radio Lab From New York Public Radio

WNYC And PR Wait what is Keep listening. I am Candice Crotty, calling from St. Paul, Minnesota. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrad. And I'm Robert Crilwich. And this is our, we're talking about space, sending stuff into space, little messages in bottles or capsules, as it were, so that the extraterrestrials of the future might one day find it. If there are any. Well, yes, yes. But surely there are.

I mean, someday Android in space capsules bound to run into someone, and they'll know about us. Well, just a second here. I know that the Anne's story was beautiful and that you're in some kind of romantic haze. But if you would just get a little more cold-hearted here about solid facts, you might feel differently about this whole thing. What do you mean? Well, what do you think is the likelihood of Anne's message of love ever being read by an intelligent alien somewhere in the other? I see where you're going with us. Why do you have to ask that question?

I mean, it's just a gesture. It's like a romantic thing. No, no. This is an attempt, I think, to be fair to her, at a real conversation. and she wants someone to hear about this, but the chances are so remote when you consider the vastness of space. Suppose, for example,

you wanted to visit, just, I don't know, make it easy, the very next star to us, okay? Actually, it's too lucky. To meet a civilization, I think it would be so odd to come out and find one of the very first stop. Let's go four stars out to a star called Zeta Tukane. I see you, but reading up on it. I admit I looked it out.

If we increase the speed of the Voyager capsule, Andrian's message from 35,000 miles an hour, that's how fast she was going, right? Yeah, that's right. Increase that speed to, say, a million miles an hour. How long do you think would it take for you to get to Zeta Tukande? 300 years. 30,000 years. Seriously? Whoa.

This jet aboomrod is a 1,200-generation trip. Do you know where the aboomrads were, 1,200 generations ago? Where? They were living in a cave, beating on a drum. That's what they were doing. So imagine a space trip in which you have to go forward 1,200 generations. That's a long trip. You're such a downer.

God. You think that's tough? Listen to this. There's a whole other problem we're going to have to deal with. Not the problem of distance. In this case, there's a problem of time. We have one of those, too. Every civilization has an arc.

You can think of it in threes. Step one. Step two. Let's welcome Seth Jackson and his Chesterfield Band of Law. How do you do everybody? And step three. What the hell was that? Well, a million years ago, we were practically apes.

We'd hardly begun to have conversation. Now we have technology. We have radio and TV and the universe can hear us. But how long will it be do, do you think, before either for global warming or for some kind of war, we're... The way the news has been recently, days, leaks. In any case. I'm going to guess like 100 million years or 10 million years.

But that's still a flash of time in a universe. Now, suppose instead of one civilization, let's have two civilizations, another one out there. If they arrive on Earth ready to talk and we're old, then there's no way to have the conversation. Or on the other hand, if they arrive on Earth after... Then there's nobody to talk to. I see. And in a 14 billion year universe, with each civilization lasting in only 10 million years, what are the chances of two civilizations lining up in perfect synchrony

so they can have a conversation? It's almost mathematically impossible. Yeah, fine, fine. But you have to keep something in mind, though, right? What? As a rule, people who make the argument you're making right now, pessimists. as it were. As a rule, those people are usually proven wrong. That's always how it goes. Let me play something.

Well, in the history of human navigation, lots of things have seemed too lonely and too far away until someone did them. This is the guy who produced the Voyager record. His name's Tim Ferriss. I mean, settling Polynesia in canoes, navigating by the stars and the currents alone and hitting a tiny island after crossing hundreds or even thousands of miles of open ocean. That's a pretty lonely, scary thing to do, and yet thousands of Polynesians did it. So I don't know what our future and interstellar spaceflight will be, but it is important to keep in mind that the record of people who said that this or that journey of exploration is impossible or ill-advised. Historically, those sorts of predictions have not fared very well.

Yeah, so you just hold your horses, right? I mean, look, Tim is talking about the Pacific Ocean, which is big, but I'm talking about the fucking universe here. Mine is a much, much, much bigger space, and therefore a much, much, much bigger problem. And when I want to ask questions about space... Uh, yes. I usually go to this guy. See, now I realize why it's harb from here. I hear you through that speaker, but not through my headphones.

Who is this? This is Brian Green, professor of mathematics and of physics at Columbia University. Are we on? Okay. So, Jed, I said to Brian, if we've got a spacecraft crawling through this vast, vast, universe, how long a trip is it for just to start from wherever it is now to the end of the universe? And by the way, where is the end of the universe? That's a very natural question. You know, in most environments, you can walk for a while, but then you hit the end. You hit the end of

the city, the end of the state, the end of the country. But when it comes to the universe, we believe that there's probably no edge. There is no end. Now, how do you picture that? Well, one possibility is it may be that the universe just goes on forever. Space may just carry on. You just keep on going and you'll just never run out of space. The other possibility is it could be that you walk off into space for a while and you keep on walking and after a while you realize that you've actually circled back to your starting point. Sort of like on the surface of the Earth.

You don't find an edge. You can't fall off the Earth's surface because when you walk, ultimately you'll come back to your starting point. That idea may apply to the fabric of space, to the entire cosmos. Although the Earth analogy is a little insufficient cause, when I'm walking in Central Park, I am on the edge of the Earth, because when I look down I see Earth, but when I look up, I see non-Earth, I see gas around the Earth.

So I'm at the edge. It's as if I were on a balloon. I'm on the surface of the balloon looking out at non-balloon nest. Yeah, that's where the analogy fails. If you're on the surface of the Earth, If you can jump off, you can jump up. So it feels like you're on an edge. But in the universe, there is no notion of jumping off

because there is nothing beyond the space that we inhabit. It is all there is, and there is nothing outside of it. And now to make things even harder for our little capsule traveling through space, we now know that space that the universe and the space that it is is expanding, constantly expanding. So imagine our little craft all alone in nothingness and every minute there's more nothingness and more nothingness and more nothingness and more. Has this always been happening?

We think it's been happening since the very beginning. So if the Big Bang was the origin of the universe then this expansion has been going on for 13.7 billion years. So there's more space all the time? Yes. Does that mean did it take? takes a longer time to go from one part of the universe to another? Absolutely. Absolutely.

So when you say something like the universe is expanding, what that seems to mean to you is that the empty spaces in the universe are getting bigger? Yes. So the intuitive but wrong picture would be that you picture the universe expanding into a pre-existing space, a pre-existing realm that the universe is now filling. Like a balloon. Like a balloon. Filling, say, the room in which you're blowing it up. But that imagery is wrong in the following way.

It's not that the universe is expanding into a pre-existing space. It's that as the universe expands, it creates more space. It creates the new space that it then inhabits. Does that mean that there's no middle of the universe? Yes. The old idea was that there is a central point in the universe, and the old idea was that we were at that central point in the universe. But in the current way and more modern way of thinking about the universe,

there is no center. The universe is actually expanding, but it's not expanding from a certain point in space. All of space is stretching uniformly. Brian Green is professor of physics and mathematics. mathematics at Columbia University, this leaves us in a sort of strange position. Yeah, lonely position. In the sense that we have this little capsule riding somewhere in a space which just keeps changing, we don't know where it is or where we are relative to other things, and whatever we know is changing all the time.

It used to be so different. Neil de Gras-Tyson, who runs the Hayden Ponditarium in New York City, says once upon a time, we knew where we were, always we thought we knew where we were, and we were the stars. Well, before Copernicus, the idea of our place in the universe was largely accepted to be the center. It looked that way, for sure. You stand here on Earth and look up, and the sun rises and sets, and the moon rises and sets, and the stars rise and set, and the planets rise and set. When Copernicus came around, he put the sun in the middle of the known universe,

allowing the planets to then go around the sun, relegating Earth to the same. status of a planet being one of these objects that goes around the sun. That was a very dangerous idea at the time, apparently. Yes, because that idea conflicted with all prevailing interpretation of Scripture. It had deep societal ramifications. And Copernicus knew this. He knew it so well that he said, I'm going to make sure I'm dead before this hits the bestseller list. You mean he didn't want to publish during his own lifetime?

This book was basically published on his deathbed. Copernicus is 1600s? Oh, 15. 15. Oh, yeah. 1543, I think, was the pub date. So now what happens? So now we're no longer,

humankind is no longer at the center of things. Now what? Well, we're no longer at the center of the then-known universe. The then-known universe was the objects of the solar system, the planets. But you look up at the night sky, beyond the planets, what do you see? stars. There are stars in every direction. In fact, if you count how many stars are to your left, how many are to your right, how many are above and below, it's about the same in every direction you look. Hey, maybe, even if Earth is not the center of the solar system, the solar system

is in the center of the rest of the universe. Yeah. Yeah. There you. That's the ticket, okay? Now we can dig out of this hole that Copernicus put us in. Let's go ahead and do that. That group is king. Oh, yeah. Our little family of planets. We're in the center. And so that prevailed for a while because it's a comforting concept, not only for the public but for the scientists as well. It wasn't until the 1920s where Harlow Shappley, then head of Harvard College Observatory, noticed globular clusters.

Those were more in one direction of the sky than the other. And he deduced that these things ought to know where the center of the gravity is rather than these measly handful of stars that are sitting in front of us around on the sky. I mean these big fat concentration of stars? Big fat, 100,000 star beehive concentrations of stars. Star clusters.

They ought to know where the center of the galaxy is even if these single stars don't. And so he deduced that the center of the galaxy, of the galaxy was off in the direction of Sagittarius on the sky. Okay, so now, people are fighting that, people fighting that, but then all hell breaks loose. Because 1920s come in, Edwin Hubble grabs the business end of the biggest telescope of the day and determines that these fuzzy things among the stars are not the same distance as the stars themselves. They're vastly farther away.

In fact, you know, they kind of look like what this collection of stars might look like from afar. In fact, maybe they are other Milky Ways. Maybe they are other galaxies. Maybe we're not the whole story. Oh, boy. Man. Meanwhile, the sky keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and bigger and deeper.

Oh, this was terrible for the ego. I can tell you I'm disappointed myself. Oh, man. And so now, okay, maybe. We're in the center of that universe. Yeah, let's hope for that. Because we look this way, we see about the same number of galaxies this way, is that way, is that way, is that way? It kind of looks like we're at the center, and they're all receding from us.

So, hey, we're at the center of that. But now we're smarter than this now. We say, we're not going to fall for that. We fall for that one nine times already. We're not going to fall for this again. You mean somebody's sitting there in the corner thinking every time we make ourselves the star of the show, we're wrong. We're wrong. So we're not going to make that mistake again.

And so you then apply Einstein's general theory of relativity. And it says if you live in an expanding universe in this fabric of space and time, no matter where you are, it will look like you're at the center. Which means what, there is no center? Yes. Every center is an illusion. Yes. And so that's how we could look like we're at the center of the actual universe, even though we're not, because everybody sees the same signature of the expansion. there's an even stronger argument than the numerics.

Let's look at the ingredients of the human body. You learn from biology class we're mostly water. But what is water mostly? Hydrogen. Hydrogen and oxygen. Let's look in the cosmos. The number one ingredient in the cosmos is hydrogen. Next in the universe, oxygen.

Next on earth and in life, oxygen. Next in the universe, carbon. Next in the universe, carbon. Next in the universe, nitrogen. Next on life, nitrogen. One for one, you go down the list. We are not simply in this universe. The universe is in us.

So we're not the center of the universe. We are on the side. Then our gang is not the center of everything, but it's just out on a wing. And then a galaxy that we're a part of is one of many. And the fact that we are alive is maybe not unique. How low can we go? Oh, we can go lower.

You want to go lower? Yeah. Okay. We may not even be the principal stuff of the universe. That's how insignificant we are. Okay? We have learned the universe has this stuff that is gravity but doesn't otherwise interact

with matter as we know it It doesn't shine, it doesn't reflect, it doesn't block It's dark It's called dark matter So how much of the universe is the stuff that we can either see Or that is blocked but we can kind of detect 4%. I told you to sink low

You asked how low can we go 96% of the universe is missing? 96% of the universe is not us. It's something else. Is it your working bias that if I came to you with a new discovery in which we were less important or a discovery which proposed that we were more important, that you would guess that my scientific discovery that said we are less important is more likely to be right? No doubt about it. That's correct.

Now, you call that a bias, but I don't. I call that track record. Okay? Track record. We have among our exhibits here a timeline of the universe that begins with the Big Bang, and you walk the equivalent length of 100 yards, and time goes by with every step you take, 70 million years, depending on how long your legs are, 70 million years per step. Yes.

Per step. And you do that for 100 yards, and you get near the bottom, it's a gently sloping ramp. You get to the bottom of the ramp, and then you're reminded that 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs were roaming the earth, ready to become extinct. And then you take one more step on this ramp, and you reach modern day. Well, at the end of that ramp, we have mounted a single strand of human hair. The left side of that hair, cavemen were drawing cave paintings. The right side of that hair is the right side of that hair is the left side of that hair.

is this conversation right now. So, we are a speck on a speck, on a speck, on a speck. And the speck that you just heard talking, who is over six feet tall, by the way, is Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. See, that right there, though, is why I think a lot of people don't like science.

Because any time that anyone normal wants to say that we are important, there's some scientist in a corner who's yelling, nah. You're just a speck. That's science's preference. But I don't, you know, I think artists, Shakespeare, for example, who says, what a piece of work is man, how noble and reason and all. It seems like it's arts job to say that we are special, significant, glorious,

and it's science's job to say, no, we're not. Right. Well, maybe art is where we should go next. Stay with us. I'm Chad Abumeron. And I'm Robert Quilwitch. And Radio Lab will continue in a moment. You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. Public Radio.

WN.N.YC. And NPR. Hi, my name is Britt Van and I live in Manhattan. My name is Erica Stisser and I live in Brooklyn. We've been best friends since fifth grade. Radio Lab is supported in part by the... the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern worlds.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Aumrod. And I'm Robert Krollwitch. And this hour on Radio Lab we're looking at space. More specifically, our place in it, our place in the cosmos. It's big. We're little. Yes. But since, as you mentioned before the break,

sometimes artists have their own particular ways of tilts. things back in our favor. Let me introduce you to someone. Introduce yourself. He's an artist. I'm Dario Robletto. Dario Robleto. And artist, live in San Antonio, Texas.

I ran into Dario, actually, in New York, at the Whitney Museum. He was 27, and this was his first solo show. My first show here in New York, first solo show at the Whitney. Sculpture, mostly. That's his main thing. But on a side wall, he was displaying some photographs. So tell me what we're looking at, which I asked him to show me. It's a series of seven digital photographs framed on the wall.

Side by side, seven photos. All showing the same thing. Tomato seeds. Seeds. Seeds. That are at different stages of blossoming. Think back to kindergarten. That's what these remind you of.

The day your teacher came in and said, okay, class, we're going to grow some seeds. These pictures are of that day. More specifically, the day the seeds actually grew. Because each photo, and there are seven, shows one. one seed, tiny little seed, poking its head out of a massive cup. So what I did was these are custom-made porcelain cups, if you can imagine the size of a styrofoam cup.

Dario made the cops put some dirt and a seed inside and then cram the top full of cotton. Cotton, which is also another schoolroom element. Final step, when the seeds grew, like right at the moment that they grew, he snapped photos. Each one's at a slightly different stage of development, but basically it's that moment when the least, are pushing it, like, you know, waking up from a long sleep, which that one kind of looks like

yawning and your arms go up in the air. Also, I should point out that there's text printed right on the cups just as if, you know, a kid had written their name or something. And loopy cursive. Can you read me with the names of the people on there? Yeah, so we have MJ Smith, F.R. Scobie, S.C. McCullough, J.A. Resonet, Commission. Maybe you recognize those names. Maybe not. But here's the backstories, Dario tells it. It's 1984. everyone's excited about space and NASA. NASA built this probe. It's called the LDEF, stands for the long duration environmental facility.

This was a probe that was basically meant to store things for long periods of time. So it had all these compartments. 52 compartments, I believe. And NASA, for the first time, opened it to the public. It was brilliant PR. They said, OK, America, we've got this probe with all these compartments. What would you like to send into space? They kind of said, you send in a purpose.

proposal for what you'd like to put on board. And we'll consider it. People of all stripes sent in ideas and farms, paint samples, pond water. All the way to a group of school kids got together and said, hey, can we put some seeds on board? So, NASA's, I think, seeing the great potential and what these children proposed

furthered the experiment a bit and put aboard a lot of seeds for the sole purpose that when they returned, They would be redistributed to the classrooms as a cool space seed artifact. April 6, 1984, the probe filled with seeds and all kinds of things, goes aboard the space shuttle. It goes aboard on the Space Shuttle Challenger. Launches successfully. Probe is deployed from the Challenger, and it was scheduled to be picked up on the next shuttle mission by the Challenger. Well, the day on that pickup mission was the day the Challenger.

are exploded. Coming up on the 32nd point in a countdown, T-minus 30 seconds, and we've had a goal for auto-sequent start. Four, three, two, one. The procedures are in effect. In a flash, seven people were gone, and America changed its mind about space. And the whole space program got put on hiatus for, I think it was almost two years. And meanwhile, that little probe with the challenge had been on its way to get and which was only supposed to be up there for about nine months. Well, it stayed up there.

This is a case where something literally got lost in space because this is floating out there. This probe designed for nine months ends up sitting in orbit for almost seven years. January 19, 1990, the probe was finally brought back after seven years

by another space shuttle mission. This time, without fanfare. Because all the kids that would have wanted those seeds were grown up. They didn't know or care anymore. And the only people that did were collectors, NASA geeks. And Dario. I was able to obtain some of those seeds that went aboard that day. Through an online auction. Luckily, they were vacuum sealed the whole time, but they were incredibly moody little seeds. They did not want to cooperate. He planted the seeds in the cotton-filled cups, and the seeds did break through the cotton like spaceships bursting through clouds.

And right as they did, he snapped photos. But then, days later, and suddenly, they all died. All of them. So none of these seeds are alive anymore. No, and I wanted them to, and like I said, they just, something just wasn't right anymore. I had originally, you know, wanted to take them to full bloom. It just, it wasn't meant to be. But getting it here was quite a miracle.

So I'll take this. The stage. If you willfully invest in the illusion of a photograph, as Dario does, this stage means that the seeds and everything they represent, the lives of the crew, the hope of a class of school kids, is frozen. Alive again, forever. Forever. Then again, this is just an art project.

Sometimes reality doesn't cooperate. Because here's the sad coda to the story. It turns out the shuttle that picked up The probe in 1990 and brought it back was the Columbia. And just before Darya was preparing to show his pictures... Just by coincidence, I had the photographs laid out in front of me going over some framing issues when the tragedy was first reported that morning. We were breaking in with sad news this morning.

The space shuttle, Columbia, has been seen apparently breaking up in the skies over Texas as it returned to Earth shortly after 9 a.m. Eastern Time this morning. Search and rescue teams are reported... To know, a set of us... the only two shuttles that these seeds ever had anything to do with were the two that we lost. It really hit me hard. Dario Rebletto is an artist, lives in San Antonio, Texas. Nobody promised that space travel would be safe or pleasant or easy or even rewarding.

All that was promised was that it would be an adventure. And sometimes we were in the mood, and sometimes we weren't. Well, Anne Droyon, Carl Sagan's widow, who began the show, she remembers what it was like at the very beginning. President Kennedy, 1962, makes a speech, which if you read about it in Herodotus, you know, that some Persian king decreed that we would walk on the moon. We choose to go to the moon.

We choose to go to the moon. It was the stuff of dreams. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other. things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. Now, of course, it was, in reality, part of the worst part of the Cold War and the madness

of the nuclear arms race. But it brought out the very best in a whole bunch of people. And I remember feeling, first walking on the moon, when Americans first walked on the moon, I was enraged at my government's conduct in the world, horrified by it, but I had to admit that it made me really proud. And then, as soon as NASA became involved with the space shuttle, we lost the grand purpose.

And it was very much to me, as a mother of two children, remembering when they were young, that when they were toddlers and they were first learning to walk, they would run away from me and encounter some frightening reality 10, 12 feet away, and then turn around and come running back to be around my ankles. And that's what the last 25 years of the space program has been like, a kind of retreat to our mother's skirts. Yeah, according to Annie Droyon,

Somewhere around the space shuttle, we lost our nerve. Yeah, although there is now a new generation of people who would be space explorers and who say, in the loudest possible way, we don't want to be sissies in space anymore. But of course, we've thought about the government always as the person taking us there. Take this guy. But I put forward here, the government is not going to get us there. The government is unable to take the risks required to open up this. precious frontier. The shuttle is costing a billion dollars a launch. That's a pathetic number.

That's unreasonable. That was Peter Diamandis. Remember him? Mm-mm. The guy who offered the X Prize? The X Prize. The X Prize. A global contest to build the first commercially manned spaceship. That space prize? Right. He was at a conference in Oxford, in England, called Ted Global. It was an audience filled with entrepreneurs and technologists, and he said to them, you know why I created this prize? You know what's really going to get people interested in space, exploring space, taking risks in space again. As we go forward. And here, his instinct is kind of different from Annie Durelons.

What's going to bring people back to space, he says? Is wealth. Money. In fact, the greatest wealth. If you think about these other asteroids. Wealth? Asteroids? Think how much you could make if you could own an asteroid.

There's a class of the nickel iron, which in platinum group metal markets alone, are worth something like $20 trillion dollars, if you can go out and grab one of these rocks. My plan is actually buy puts on the precious metal market And then actually claim that I'm going to go out and get one That will fund the actual mission to go and get one Hold on, what are puts? That's what you do to finance grabbing one of those rocks as he puts it But the key here, remember, is that you've got to create a business

And to do that you need a business plan Some reason to invest and build and do And for that he has actually kind of a cool phrase We need what I call an exothermic economic reaction in space Which in ordinary English means there's got to be some way to get entrepreneurs to spend money, their own money, on some kind of space stuff.

And how exactly? Well, his first notion was he would sell tickets to rich billionaires. He sold a seat on the Russian Space Shuttle, the Soyuz, for $20 million. What?

It is expensive. But people are willing to pay that. Not any people I know. Well, but you... Yeah, I guess you're not going to get a whole lot of people at prices like that. So then he came up with a bigger, bolder, broader plan, which was a prize.

A prize. Because remember when Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. No, I don't remember. I wasn't born yet. That's true. Lindberg crossed the Atlantic to win a prize. That's really why he crossed? Seriously?

Yeah, for a cash prize. Peter thought, why don't I create a prize of my own? And he came up with the number 10 million bucks. That would be the prize. Why 10 million? Because it was just big enough to be really attractive to young scientific teams all over the world, $10 million, and just small enough to be boring to conservative, clunky companies like Lockheed and Boeing,

who wouldn't never think of anything interesting anyway. He's trying to split the difference, I guess. Yeah, but, you know, Peter doesn't have that kind of money. He's not a government. So where do you get a $10 million? Probably the most difficult thing that I had to do was raise the capital for this. I went to 100, 200 CEOs, CMOs. No one believed it was done.

Everyone said, well, does NASA think, well, people are going to die? How can you possibly put this? forward. And what I ended up doing was going out to the insurance industry and buying a whole and one insurance policy. You know how rare it is to hit a hole in one on a golf course? Yeah. Well, the insurance industry will make you a betting proposition. If you go to the insurance company and say, I bet that I can go up and down space twice in the same two week period. And they go, no, you can't. They say, well, I'll give you a million dollars in premiums if you give me a $10 million dollar insurance policy. He made the offer. The insurance company said, well, this isn't going to happen,

Right? See, the insurance companies went to Boeing and Lockheed and said, are you going to compete? No, you're going to compete? No. No one's going to win this thing. So they took a bet that no one would win by January of 05, and I took a bet that someone would win. And amazingly. Today, pilot Mike Melville made aviation history.

Just two months before the deadline. The privately funded rocket plane, spaceship one, flew to the edge of space in a privately funded vehicle. So, and the best thing is they paid off and the check didn't bounce. Plus, he got tons of publicity. He incentivized young scientists all over the world. He did it with other people's money. But then, just as he was finishing the presentation, there was this guy in the room who got up and said,

I almost wasn't going to ask this because I didn't want to end on a negative note. He said, you know, Peter Diamandis, maybe you're not that brilliant. Maybe all you are is lucky. By encouraging innovation so effectively, you are encouraging risk-taking, and it is inevitable that sooner or later there will be deaths as a result of this. Absolutely. And you're also... That was a little too enthusiastic.

You've also made a very coherent explanation of why, frankly, in PR terms, investing in prizes is very, very good value, because you get a vast amount of publicity, and you're assuming it's all good publicity. But I can just see, again, the U.S. broadcast media and the British press media ripping you to shreds because you've encouraged lots of innocent young 25-year-olds from Romania and Argentina and whatever to kill themselves. Quick answer.

Okay, well, it's an important answer. Guys, I'm going to take my head on as American. I am thankful that 500 years ago, thousands of people gave their lives across the Atlantic and explore the Americas. And then thankful that 200 years ago they crossed the great planes. No one has the right to say for my children and their children that we shouldn't take the risk now to open these frontiers.

And if it's up to the individual to risk their life, so be it. Yeah, but that's, that's, that's, that's, that was a cop-out answer, I have to say. Because when those people he's referring to, the people who crossed the Atlantic, cross the plains, when they did all those things, and then when many of them died, you mean, thousands of, I don't know how many. Thousands, I'm sure. Right, right. Well, when they died, those early Americans, they died alone. There were no TV cameras around. There's no Scott Simon on the radio. They were by themselves. I think you're right.

It's a completely different time. When you make it sensational, people will die sensationally. Then what's going to happen to the money and the entrepreneurs and the businessmen? Right. That's exactly right. Businessmen don't exactly have a sterling reputation for sticking by their guns. If you have a small financial problem showing up in Brazil, people all over the way, world pull their money out of Brazil. You get a total rush for the exit. It's true. They're always the first to leave. You know, money and wealth, it's good motivators to get us back to space. But once

you get there, it's got to be about something more than that. Like what, though? Because I agree with you. Well, I don't even know what to call it exactly, but you certainly hear it. Take the last transmissions from the moon in December of 1972. Last time we were there. Yeah, the last time we were there. The voices you hear of those astronauts coming back. When you hear them talking, ignition sequence, all engines are started, you hear something else. 2-10, we have a lift-off.

We have a lift-off, and it's lighting up the areas. It's just like daylight here at Kennedy Space Center. The Saturn 5 is moving off the pad. Roger, Gina, looking great, a lot of good enough fireman. Both, and that looks like Houston's a cover with cloud. Hey, I just saw a flash on the lunar surface. Just a dink of light.

Tellingier, you go for landing. Oh, are we coming in? Oh, baby. Stay by for touchdown. 10 feet. That contact. Hey, Houston, the Challenger has landed. What's your Challenger?

That's super. Houston, you can tell America that Challenger is a tourist literal. We'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible. I come out here? Oh my galling! Unbelievable! Just walk around for that second. I was strolling on the moon one day in America.

Hey! The last transmission from the moon. Produced by Barrett Golding for Hearing Voices.com, thanks to him. If you want to hear that again or anything else on the program again, visit our website. RadioLab.org. We are now podcasting. Oh, and also on our website, there are a couple of things which didn't make it into the program today. Little space capsules.

A little artsy little compositions. Yeah, so famous people saying what they would send into space. I know that you're a favorite. You can find it at RadioLab.org. And last but not least, if you want to send us email, RadioLab at WNYC.org is the address. I'm Chad Abumrad. And I'm Robert Kulwich.

Thanks for listening. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Is it Bumrab or Bumrad? Jad Abumrad and Ellen Horn. With production help from Jocelyn Gonzalez, Sally Herships, Miyuki Yokiranta, Amy O'Leary, Miguel Macias, Trent Wolby, Michael Shelley, Volcanun Sal, Sarah Pellegrini, Alaska Kevel, Amber Sealy, and Lulu Miller. Special thanks to the Amateur Observer Society of New York and the TED Conference. Radio Lab is produced by New York Public Radio and distributed by NPR.

And thanks, I guess, to me, for reading these credits. I'm Neil DeGrasse Tyson. from New York City's Hayden Planetarium. Thanks for listening.