Science Friday - Bacteria Extinction, Facial Recognition, Solar Probe. August 3, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

Long before we walked the Earth, bacteria took it over. They’re in every ecosystem on the Earth, and researchers have hopes to someday find them on other planets. The tiny cells have even helped make our atmosphere oxygen-rich and liveable. But do bacteria—numerous and adaptable as they are—ever go extinct? New research suggests they do.  Facial recognition systems—the type of technology that helps you tag your friends on Facebook—is finding its way offline and into real world environments. Some police departments are using the technology to help identify suspects and companies are marketing face-identifying software to schools to increase security. But a study found that facial recognition algorithms lacked in accuracy when it came to assessing different genders and skin tones.  If you want to study something, the best way to do it is to go straight to the source. That goes for bodies in our solar system as well. Over the last several decades, NASA has sent space probes to study Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Pluto, and the objects beyond them. And on August 11th, NASA will launch the Parker Solar Probe, the latest mission to study our nearest star—and every other star in the universe. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Birds do it, bees do it, even bacteria do it. I bet you weren't expecting that. I'm talking about going extinct, kicking the bucket, becoming an ex-species. Up till now, research on bacterial history has been difficult because bacteria do not fossilize well. And you would think bacteria, which conquered the globe long before we arrived, could encounter any new hardship they could have been.

eventually adapt to it if they got in trouble. But according to a new model based on modern bacterial relationships and some advanced math, death comes even for the smallest at a rate that claims nearly as many species as are generated. In other words, most of the bacterial lineages that have ever existed, most of them are already extinct. Here to explain how we know that is Stelianos Luca, a postdoctoral fellow in zoology, University of British Columbia Center for Biological Diversity in Vancouver. He joins us by Skype. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hello, Ira. Hey there. So how do you investigate the history of bacteria without using fossils? Well, the only thing that's pretty much left is to look at the bacteria that exists today because that's the only thing we have. So we looked at phylogenetic trees. are mathematical structures that encode in a very formalized way the evolutionary relationships between bacteria living today.

And so by looking at these relationships with some sophisticated math, over time, we can say something about how evolution generated but also destroyed lineages over time. So your model found that bacteria go extinct almost at the same rate as they speak. but in general are getting more diverse? Is this surprising? Well, if you consider it in the whole context of what we know about life, in particular, plants and animals, where we know much more about their diversification, it's actually in line with what we're seeing there. So that speciation rates are just a little bit above the extinction rates. That has been observed for plant and animals.

It was just widely believed that that is not the case for bacteria. So, but to be fair, that was mostly speculation. It was based on intuition. There was very little data to really answer that question. So for the longest time, we've just been in the dark about what's going on with bacteria. So why didn't they think bacteria when extinct? Two things mainly separate bacteria apart from other larger organisms in that regard. First, their population sizes are immense.

some bacteria have population sizes in the order of billions or trillions of living cells. That is much larger than any other species on this planet. So the high population sizes make their extinction unlikely, at least within the context of what we know about other larger organisms. The second reason people thought bacteria should not go extinct is that they have mostly global dispersal, ranges so you can find the same lineage all over the world and so the chance that a lineage goes extinct just because a specific environment changes let's say there was a flood somewhere or a volcanic eruption you would expect the bacteria are much more able to persist on a global scale simply because they also have representatives on the other side of the planet so to speak and then the third reason was that

they quickly adapt you mentioned that in your introduction they evolved very rapidly so one would expect that perhaps they're resistant to any kind of change, yeah. Yeah, but at the same time, bacteria were not subject to those great mass extinctions, right? We've seen in other kingdoms over time, and even though bacteria sometimes rely on plants or the animal hosts, why would they have been immune to these great extinctions? You know, that was probably one of the biggest surprises for us when we saw that, and we're scrapping our head about this for long. We made sure this is a strong, robust pattern.

Yeah, it turns out they are not affected by those mass extinction events that affected larger organisms. Even though many bacteria, but not all, rely on hosts, it could actually be that they're not very host-specific, that the same lineage could survive in many different, host species, there might not even be very closely related host species. And so if one host goes extinct, the same lineage could actually persist in another host species. The other reason is that it could be the same lineage that we think is host-specific,

actually also has representatives that are living outside of hosts. In fact, a very prominent example is E. coli, which is a very well-known mammal gut commensal. It's a human pathogen or some strains of it. But the fact is that there are also E. coli strains that are perfectly fine with living in the soil. We just don't hear about it too much. So if all mammals were, for some reason, to go extinct, the E. coli as a lineage could actually survive just because it has strains that live in the soil. Interesting. And, you know, you keep using the word lineage where I would use the word species.

Why are you using that and not species? I'm using the word lineage simply because our common definition of species, as we know it for plants and animals, or sexually reproducing organisms in general, does not really apply for bacteria. And so while historically people have been occasionally using the word species for bacteria, we now know very well. It's not as easy to define species for bacteria. Bacteria don't reproduce sexually, and therefore it's hard to define two species just based

on reproductive isolation. So lineage refers to a certain cluster of closely related bacteria, and that somehow intuitively corresponds to what we know of species and plants and animals, but it's not really the same, so that's why I'm using lineage. I get it. And I don't want you to take this next question the wrong way, but what does it matter if bacteria go extinct? Well, you know, it's in the same case.

category of questions as how many stars and galaxies are there in the universe, how do galaxies form or die, you know, how does the universe come to be? The only difference is that bacteria are right here on Earth with us. And we estimate that there are more bacteria living today on Earth and there are stars in the universe. Wait, wait a minute. Say that again, there are more bacteria than are stars in the universe? Yes, based on our current estimates of how much.

many stars there are in the universe, there are much fewer stars. So I know it's baffling, but bacteria are really tiny, but they occupy virtually every environment on Earth, even environments where plants and animals couldn't survive. So they are the most ancient, the most widespread, and the most ubiquitous form of life on Earth, actually. We just don't see it. But just as we can't see atoms, but they're still here, we can't see bacteria, but they're still all around us. So they're pretty hardy, pretty hardy, I don't want to say species. But is that why we think that we could find them living, let's say, on other planets like Mars? There might have a history, and we could find remnants of their past fossilized history?

You know, with what we know so far, it could be. Even though, even on Earth, bacteria are very hard to find fossils off. their fossilization properties are very different from those of other organisms. So it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but hey, in principle it's possible. But that brings me to an interesting aspect, namely life on planets in general. And so we know that Earth has been very, very strongly shaped by bacterial evolution over the last few billion years. I mean, it was the invention of different types of metabolisms by bacteria. over time that led to some very dramatic changes in Earth's atmosphere, for example, the accumulation

of oxygen about two and a half billion years ago. That was because a certain type of bacteria invented oxygenic photosynthesis. So just getting an understanding for how that type of life, which as I mentioned is one of the most important parts of life on Earth, if we understand how that aspect of life evolves on planetary timescales might actually tell us something about living planets in general planets with life in general you know how do they change over time if there is life on them how does life on planets change over time when it has you know uh uh occurred on that planet so it gives us a very broad context uh to understanding what is what what what makes a planet alive um and when it's alive, how does it change over time?

Which implies to me that if we were to have another living planet, let's just use Mars, you would have to have bacteria on that planet. Well, we probably wouldn't call them bacteria because they would be very different from bacteria on Earth, most likely. But in terms of general properties,

probably a similar level of complexity, similar size, perhaps. That type of life, we would most likely, that would be the most likely form of life that we would find. Could we bring on purpose bacteria to another planet to start life there, to colonize it, to terraform it? Well, you could bring them.

It's, I would estimate that the probability that they would establish and grow on their own is very low because, I mean, the form of life that we have today on Earth has adapted over time to the type of planet that we have here to, so the chemistry of our atmosphere, the temperatures and so on. And so if we were to take this present form of life to another planet where temperatures are much more extreme, the gases in the atmosphere are very different, in all likelihood, they would just die off. So it's not as easy. What about the Arki? I know they're not bacteria classified. The Archa. Yeah, would they survive? Well, in terms of this question, they would probably face the same difficulties as bacteria. So Arkea are very similar to bacteria in many. different regards in terms of their genome structure and cell structure, especially when compared to other organisms such as plants and animals. So I think there wouldn't be much of a difference for Akea as bacteria.

Well, you know, these things evolve. I don't have to tell you. You never know. Yeah, you never know. And I mean, bacteria have shown an incredible skill to adopt over Earth's history. So with the right conditions, the right help, it might be possible. but I think it's very speculative at this point. All right, we'd love to find out, wouldn't we?

Yeah. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us, say Dr. Stalianos-Luca, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia Center for Biological Diversity. Of course, that's in Vancouver. After the break, we're going to talk about how facial recognition technology is being used

by law enforcement. What questions come up as these algorithms move into the public? You're going to have, you know, facial recognition, open up your, you know, your smartphone or whatever. So it's here. How to best make use of it. We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. By now, I'm sure you've come across facial recognition technology. It's that little box that pops up in your photos that helps you tag your second cousin. It's the new way to unlock his smartphone. I mean, figureprints are so

1892. That same type of technology is now finding its way outside. of social media, the privacy of your space, and into the wide world. You step out into the street, into an airport or the mall on your face is the place that is getting tracked. For a few bucks, police departments can buy software from Amazon to sort through a database of faces. And you can even buy facial recognition software from Amazon. But facial recognition technology is not without flaws. For example, the ACLU ran Amazon software through images of people in Congress. And it matched 28 members of Congress

to faces of publicly available mugshots. Incorrectly, of course. And when we reached out to Amazon, they sent a statement, I'll read it because it's only fair to do so. The results could probably be improved by following best practices. This is the percentage likelihood

that is used in the test. And while 80% confidence is an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs, chairs, animals, or other social media, uses, it wouldn't be appropriate for identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty.

When using facial recognition for law enforcement, we guide customers to set a threshold of at least 95% or higher. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. What questions should we be thinking about as these technologies are moving into the public

realm? And is there an inherent bias in facial recognition artificial intelligence? That's what we're going to be talking about. If you'd like to join us, the number 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. Let me introduce my guess. Sophia Noble is an assistant professor in communications at the University of Southern California.

She's author of Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Races. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you. You're welcome. Good to be here. Thank you. Natasha Singer is a technology reporter for the New York Times who has written extensively about this.

Welcome to you today also, Natasha. Thank you. Sophia, facial recognition software is a type of algorithm, right? Can you give us an overview of just how facial recognition works? Well, in the simplest terms, we could think of facial recognition technology as kind of a type of software that is mapping various kinds of topographies, whether it's land that we often use mapping technologies on or our faces. It's trying to identify certain kind of distinctive points on the topography of our faces and then match that to known images that might exist in a database.

It's pretty crude, even though we maybe think of it as kind of a sexy type of artificial intelligence. And anyone can buy, Natasha, I can buy and download Amazon's recognition software, which I was talking about earlier. And some law enforcement agencies are using it, right? Is it that easy just to do that? Well, it's online, and you can download and use it, and if you can create a database of photos that you have, then you can compare photos of unknown people

to the people you know in your database, and that's what the ACLU did. They tried to mimic what a police department would do, so they created a database of 25,000 mugshots that were publicly available, and they compared photos of every member of Congress to this database of mugshots, and 28 members of Congress were mistakenly matched with mugshots.

And Amazon says, well, they should have turned it up to 98% recognition. So 95%. I think there's two issues with that. One is that the ACLU pointed out that on Amazon's own site, there was an example of humans set at 80% similarity score. And that was the default. So if it really should be 95% for humans, you know, the ACLU says Amazon should be saying that. And it doesn't tell that to ordinary customers. But I think even more problematic is for Amazon, there is an expert researcher at MIT Media Lab, and she did a crucial study earlier this year showing that Microsoft and IBM's facial recognition was flawed.

And she's also looked at the Amazon software, and she found it even more erroneous than the ACLU did. And it's really hard to doubt her research. And Sophia, go ahead, because I know you studied racial bias as an online algorithm. I do. I do. And I think Joy Bolwamini's work from the MIT Media Lab is really the state of the art in terms of understanding the racial and gender biases that are built into these facial recognition software. So her study has found, in fact, that facial recognition software is terrible at recognizing brown faces, brown skin, the darker kind of the tone of your skin. the less likely the facial recognition software will work, and it's even more abysmal when you apply that to women and women of color.

And of course, this is the kind of thing that I also study, which is how is it that we come to have so many kinds of biases built into artificial intelligence and algorithmic kind of sorting platforms and software? And the consequences of that are not insubstantial. What we find, for example, is that many of these technologies are often facing, the most vulnerable people in our societies. So they're deployed, for example, by law enforcement in communities predominantly of color, where poor people live, in communities that are already over-policed.

We see them deployed in terms of immigration, where they're facing the southern border rather than the northern border. So it's not just that the software itself is technically flawed, but it also is used in some rather... egregious ways against the most vulnerable members of our population. And Natasha, let's talk about and expand a little bit about where else are we seeing facial recognition being used in the public? Well, as you mentioned, if you're on Facebook tagging your photo albums and it pops up

and says, is this Jane, that is facial recognition at work? And Facebook has gotten into a bit of trouble for that because it was turned on by default in Europe and they have a new tough privacy law where you have to ask for specific consent to do that kind of stuff. On certain iPhones and Windows laptops, you can open your device with your face instead of your fingerprint or an alphanumeric code. So we're seeing it be normalized in consumer technology as well as in kind of policing. I heard that in schools too.

There are some schools, which they think is kind of a deterrent to shooters, that they have put in face recognition to identify students. But, you know, the problem is that face recognition is also a control mechanism, and I had one face recognition company say to me, sure, and then we close the doors at 8 a.m. And any kid who shows up with their face afterwards, you know, the doors will be locked to them. And so it's problematic both in the consumer space

and in the law enforcement space. Is it, Sophia, is it about improving the data? And we've talked on this program before about the biases and algorithms. And is it, in this case, is it about improving the data that facial recognition algorithms, tough time saying that they are trained on? Well, certainly that's one dimension of it. We know that those of us who work with data know that data is something that is a human

product. It's something that scientists make, social scientists and others. And so certainly data is. constructed in flawed ways, in biased ways, and then machines are trained on flawed data. Machines also detect new patterns, and when we start thinking about things like machine learning and big data, it often is trained and producing new forms of data that are also, you know, whose origin story is biased or flawed. So that becomes even more difficult then to intervene upon because, you know, the promise and perils, unfortunately, of deep machine learning is that new patterns and new data will be constructed, right, that human beings could not process on our own with our brain capacity.

And so it will be increasingly difficult for human beings then to intervene upon and recognize flawed data systems. I think the secondary issue, though, is beyond the kind of training of machines on low-quality data is that there's a broader kind of social, ethical framework that we need to be thinking about, you know, what does it mean to automate decisions and outsource certain types of decisions to artificial intelligence like this and preclude human beings from making certain types of decisions? How will these technologies be deployed, again, in service of whom against which parts of our society. And those, that framework for thinking through the complexity really doesn't exist. I mean, we really don't have an adequate legislative kind of public policy space to talk about the negative

impact of some of these technologies. And touch, what kind of oversight do we need then, this kind of stuff? Well, it's interesting because Microsoft, a couple of weeks ago, called for government regulation, a facial recognition. They said it was too risky for tech companies to regulate on their own. And as I said, in Europe, they already regulate it by requiring consent before you suck up somebody's facial data and identify them. And in the United States, it's a question of, first of all, what kind of government oversight of government use do we need? And then what kind of oversight of consumer use? Because the main issue is, as Americans in a democracy, we have this idea that we have the right to be anonymous in public, to go to the supermarket in our pajamas, to go to a

political protest freely and not be recognized. And the question is, you know, facial recognition threatens that and how important is anonymity to us? The question is, put it simply myself, to myself, is do I own my face anymore? Does my face have its own rights? Well, if face recognition becomes widely normalized, you'll go into a store, you will be recognized and matched with your Facebook account, and then you will pay with your face to check out. So it depends on what we as society decide needs to happen in this technology. I'm watching minority report in real life, in other words, right? I mean, in that movie, they recognize you walking into a store and pitched ads at you,

knowing who you were. Yes. Or you won't be recognized, right? Because the technology is biased and you won't get those services. Well, and we see the outcome of some of that already. For example, in rural India where bio-identification is an important dimension of how you know, poor people get access to food and resources. If your fingerprint, for example, fails in one of the machines you don't eat.

And I think these are the kinds of things that we really need to be paying attention to. And also, what does it mean about the fluidity of our identities, of the way we look, of our gender in particular? You know, do people have a right to change the way they look? What will the implications of that be over time? Will databases respond accordingly? And I think these are very sophisticated kinds of questions that have to do with our kind of fundamental right to be the kind of people we want to be, too.

Is there any way? I mean, I would see, you know, the point-counterpoint, the spy versus spy, are people going to start trying to hide their faces? By mask, by makeup, by something like that. and are people who want to do that going to be viewed badly as bad actors? I mean, that's a scary thought. Well, it's a really good question, especially in countries where they're banning people from wearing veils and facial covers, right?

So, you know, the question is also whether covering up certain parts of your face is even going to work, because face recognition, as it becomes more powerful, you know, might be able to identify certain parts of your face, your forehead, your brow. So that might not even work, even if you wanted to do it. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about facial recognition with Natasha Singer and Sophia Noble. Are we in uncharted territory here? Is this something that's just sneaking under the radar and it's going to creep up on us like a lot of other technologies?

Well, we've seen, right, the automobile, we don't even think about it. The cell phone, we don't even think about it. There are technologies that are part of our every lives. The question is, is facial recognition so different? Is there something that so threatens our basic freedoms that we have to do something about it? And Amazon, on a blog post, argued that, like, this was a promising new technology. It's not being misused. It helps find missing children. And that it shouldn't be regulated right now. And then there's another theory that like we shouldn't wait for harm. We can see that there's a potential for great harm and that Congress needs to intervene. You said that deep machine learning and artificial

intelligence will become a major human rights issue of the 21st century and not in ways we're inclined, you know, we're maybe inclined to think. In other words, there are things we haven't thought about that might be useful to facial recognition and suddenly, oh, way, I never thought about that, you know? Well, I do you think that, and I, I do. do make that argument in my work because I think there are so many consequences that we learn about after the fact. We learn about kind of the harms of everyday technologies that we use way far after the damage is done. And it becomes incredibly difficult often to intervene upon damages or harm because private companies have the right to do what they want with their products and services.

They don't belong to the public. They don't, they're not kind of, they don't have a healthy, robust kind of set of consumer protection laws around them. And so this will make it very difficult for us to think about the loss of human rights, the loss of civil rights, as we're engaging with these technologies. Because, again, I think, you know, not only do we not have a legal framework to take those matters up, but we also don't really have kind of a common sense understanding of what many of these technologies are doing. And my concern, of course, is, you know, whether it's that

people are denied food or access to resources that they need, their education, other kinds of employment opportunities, because more and more datification leads to kind of algorithmic decision-making about, you know, fundamental distribution of resources in our society rather than kind of, you human logics or compassion or empathy or other ways of knowing. A lot is at stake as we move forward. I mean, one thing we know, for example, is that computers don't have empathy and they don't really make decisions. They do a lot of matching.

But there are other kinds of ways of human decision making that are incredibly important where we consider factors that machines cannot replicate. And I think these are some of the unintended consequences that we really, really cannot even begin to understand yet. And it's important for us to have these conversations before things go directly from some research and development lab to a venture capitalist boardroom and directly to the marketplace with no kind of research or policy considerations around them. Yeah, it's trying to keep up with stuff as it develops.

We're hoping that you both will follow and come back and talk with us about it again. Thank you very much. Thank you. You're welcome. Sophia Noble is assistant professor in communications at the University of Southern California, author of Algorithms of Oppression, how search engines reinforce racism. Natasha Singer, technology reporter for The New York Times. Thanks again. We're going to take a break when we come back.

NASA is sending a probe to the sun. If you have questions about the Parker Solar Mission, Parker Solar Probe, we have answers 844-8255. Why won't this turn into Icarus? We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. As you know, over the last several decades, NASA has sent space probes to study Mars and Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, even to Pluto and its moons and beyond. In our quest to explore our solar system, we're at last turning inward to the key to all life on our planet, which is, yes, our sun. On August 11th or about that time, NASA will launch.

the Parker's solar probe. It won't be the first spacecraft to get up close to look at our sun, but it will be the nearest we've ever come to touching it, just 3.8 million miles away. So how close is that? Okay, picture this. If the sun in the earth were on opposite sides of a yardstick, the solar probe would be hanging out at about four inches,

four inches away from the sun. Wow, close enough to measure the sun's magnetic field helped scientists answer decades-long mysteries about the sun's corona. Well, how will it do all of this and not become a modern-day Icarus? You can send your burning questions about NASA's solar mission to SciFRI, S-C-I-F-R-I, or give us a call at 844-8-4-Sai Talk. Alex Young is Associate Director for Science in the Heliophysics Science Division at Guttered Space Flight Center. He joins us now.

Alex, welcome back to Science Friday. Oh, thanks for having me again. So tell us about this mission. And where exactly is the spacecraft going and how long will it take to get there? What's it going to do? I'm going to put my feet up on the table. You take it. All right.

So on thereabouts August 11th, we're going to launch the mission from what's called the Delta Heavy. That's our biggest rocket. We're sending it using Venus to help us along the way. We are going to get into a very, very close orbit. As you mentioned, 3.8 million miles. It's going to take us several years. We have 24 orbits. We get to this closest orbit in 2024. And then we're going to be flying through the corona, the region where all the action is, where all the cool stuff is happening. So we can answer these fundamental questions about why is the corona so hot? Why does it solar wind stream away at millions of miles an hour? And what is causing the corona so hot? why does it solar wind stream away at millions of miles an hour, and what is causing all of this crazy activity we call space weather? Solar flares, coronal mass injections, these things that have a huge impact on our technological society.

Let's talk about the heat of the corona. The corona is hotter than the surface of the sun? Is that right? How hot is that? That's right. So the surface of the sun, the visible part of photosphere, is about 10,000 degrees. But as you go up higher into the corona, the temperatures quickly skyrocket up to many millions of degrees Fahrenheit. So just an unbelievable temperatures as these particles are moving super, super fast. And we don't have any idea why that is. Well, we have some idea. We have some very good theories. They're all based. on the release of magnetic energy. The sun's corona is threaded with magnetic fields. These are coming

out of sunspots from the surface. They get all twisted up, almost like a way rubber bands get twisted, and they release this energy in the form of these little tiny explosions. There's waves that are traveling through, and we think there's some sort of combination or maybe one of those two mechanisms, but we really don't understand the details, and that's why we have to go there, because we've been looking at it from a distance. We can only learn so much. Okay. You know the next question I'm going to ask you? I'm going to let one of our listeners do it for us. Let's go to Duffy in West Georgia. Hi, Duffy. Hello. Hey there. Yeah, my question is, how does that thing even get closed before it's turned into a sender?

Yeah, we all knew that was coming. Thanks for calling us. That is the $64,000 question. So that is great. I mean, this is, you know, not only is this an amazing science mission, but it is a technological marvel. Engineers have done amazing things, and the reason we haven't been able to do it until now is we didn't have the technology. So there's a couple of things that are allowing us to do it. The first is a four-and-a-half inch thick carbon shield. It is a composite of carbon fiber, carbon foam. It's actually mostly air, and that is coated with a special coating.

that reflects a lot of the sunlight. And then we also have a cooling system that cools the spacecraft in particular also cools the solar panels. And what's crazy about that is it actually uses just regular water, a gallon of regular water. And so the combination of those two things

do an amazing job. The front of the spacecraft, the radiation heats it up to about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. But behind that shield, and because of the shield and the radiator, it's actually a cozy 85 degrees Fahrenheit where those instruments are.

I'm picturing a radiator cap on top of that water. Pretty much. No pit stops. For we geeks in the audience, that thin, the shield is about four inch thick? Is it sort of an aerogel? I remember from... It's very, yes, it is similar to an aerogel.

And it's really, really cool. I've gotten to see a piece of it. Actually, they do a fun demonstration where they take a blow torch and put the blow torch on the front. You can see it getting heated up and you can put your hand behind it. You don't feel anything.

Sounds like the tiles on the space shuttle were made sort of the same way. It's all very similar. And, you know, it looks so simple. It's mind-boggling to think when you see it up close that this piece of foam is actually protecting it

from all of that intense heat and radiation. Cool stuff. Let's move on to the solar wind that you talk about. You want to study the solar wind. What is that and why do we care about? So, you know, the corona is being heated. The corona is made up of mostly hydrogen. Actually, the protons from hydrogen.

There are also the electrons. They've all separated from each other because they're so hot. There's helium, and there's some bigger elements. But all of that stuff is energized in the corona, and it's streaming. away and it's carrying the magnetic field of the sun with it, and this solar wind bathes the solar system. It's covering, you know, it's impacting everything in the solar system. And that wave of stuff that is flying away, it's traveling at speeds of around 2 million

miles an hour. So we expect a hot corona to expand, but why is it accelerating so much in that lower part of the sun's atmosphere. So that is really the question. And the reason we want to know that is the solar wind interacts with atmospheres. With us, we get the Aurora Borealis from it, but the solar wind is stripping away atmospheres of all planets, both those that have magnetic fields and those that don't. And so understanding the solar wind, where it comes from, not only important for understanding the star itself, but it's an important part of life in the solar system.

How far out, are the, is the solar, is the solar wind connected to the corona at all? It is, there's a part at which the solar wind becomes distinctly different. So there's a, there's a region where it kind of changes over and there's no more information that's coming out of it. And that's actually kind of one of the reasons why we have to go there in person because we're, we don't have all the information we need. When we measure it from a distance, there is a bit of a disconnect. And so a lot of the information, the waves and whatnot that are coming out are not there anymore.

And so we have to go in where the acceleration is happening to really understand the detailed physics. Where does the corona end? Does it stop above the surface? It's a little bit of, you know, it's not completely certain. There have been some recent papers. I want to say roughly about 15 million miles or so, and that's based on some of the recent research, actually from a couple of colleagues of mine,

in particular Craig DeForest from Southwest research. So that's kind of the general idea of about where it's happening. Could you go out there? Do you have instrumentation on board that could discover something you didn't know existed around the sun? And how would you know if you discover it? Well, you know, there are things we don't completely know. We know that there is a certain type of dust around the sun that we can't see very easily. It's very, very small.

We'll be looking at it both with these instruments to measure the fields as well as the particles, and we even have some cameras that are looking at stuff as streaming away. I suspect, you know, we're definitely going to find something we didn't expect. And we have these cameras. in fact see something we didn't expect to see. And I think that's the coolest thing about science is we always go in with questions and we always come out with more questions. And that's what keeps us going.

I think one of the coolest things I learned from the years of covering sun, you know, sun science, and this just boggled my mind is how long it takes, you know, you talk about the surface of the sun being 10,000 degrees. No, I mean the corona 10,000 surface, you know, 10,000. But the interior of the sun, because there's a nuclear reaction going on, is $100 million or something like that. We talked about this last time. Yeah. This is so cool.

It's just crazy. And not only that, but the light particles inside the sun, it's estimated, could take anywhere from $100,000 to a million years for them to make their way out to the surface. Yeah. So, yeah, the sun is a nuclear furnace in protons. They're being squeezed together, making helium. and they're producing gamma rays, and those gamma rays are, you know, slowly wandering out. They actually encounter another atom, and then that atom gives off another light particle, and they randomly walk their way out to the surface, and, you know, it takes hundreds of thousands of years.

It's crazy. So the light we're seeing is actually not the light that was created at the center. How is the – how do you know when you're – when you're – you're – you will achieve success with this mission. What will success be in this mission? Well, I mean, success is certainly answering some of these fundamental questions of, you know, is it the waves that it's creating the heating? Is it these tiny little explosions called nanoflars?

It is some combination of those. Are we seeing the signatures when we measure the plasma? So when we measure the solar corona, we're actually going to be able to measure the detailed ways in which that plasma is distributed. Interesting. And so does that structure match with the theories that we have, are there new things that we see that we then have to go back and take our theories and rework them? And so this is sort of the iterative process.

Talking with Alex Young of the Heliophysics Science Division at the famous Guidered Space Flight Center. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WN1.1. IC Studios. Now, will the space probe be on the other side of the sun a long time from the Earth? I mean, and if it's out of touch, who controls it? Well, that's a great question because this is one of the things that's unique about the spacecraft. This is the most autonomous spacecraft ever, because it will be out of touch. You know, its primary science phase is roughly 11 days or so when it's over in that region on the other side of the sun. And so

the spacecraft has to be completely self-sufficient. She is her own spacecraft. She takes care of herself, and that is one of the sort of amazing engineering aspects of it. Now let's go to the phone. Let's go to Jesse in Anchorage. Hi, Jesse. Hello. Hey there. Go ahead. Okay. So I was wondering, the electronics on the probe, is the heat shield and cooling system? Does it cool everything down enough or did you have to come up or did they have to come up with like new technologies for like the motherboard and wiring and everything on the probe? Well, I don't know all the details, but I know that, you know, in general, space technology is a little bit behind the stuff that, you know, you can buy off the shelf.

This all has to be radiation hard. A lot of the technology here has been designed for planetary missions. You know, the kind of environment that we actually see for places like Jupiter is actually even, in some ways, the radiation is even worse inside Jupiter's magnetosphere. So all of that instrumentation has been designed for that. So that's not really new in terms of the emissions we already have. It's really the cooling system. It does have to make sure that everything is behind that and in the shadow of it to protect it. But the instrumentation itself is really pretty well established.

Here's a tweet from Laura, and she says, isn't there something? like a big candle. As a child, I figured out when flame met Wick, that was not as hot as the spot over the apex. Seems like Corona would be the same. Why waste money and resources to play Icarus? Stick a thermometer over a candle. Well, the problem is, is that, you know, the heat source, when you walk away from it, the temperature goes down. I mean, when you have an atmosphere, when you move away from the earth, from the ground, as you move up higher, it gets cooler. As you move away from the flame, okay, is you move away from the heat source. The heat source is really the big ball of nuclear furnace. When you move away from it, it should get cooler, and it doesn't

do that. And that's really one of the mysteries. Exactly. And that's a mystery that's been around for a long, long time. It was discovered a while back. That's right. This is actually a pretty cool year because, you know, 1958, 60 years ago was really when a lot of all of this, the genesis of a lot of this. This is when Eugene Parker wrote his famous paper about the solar

wind. This is when NASA was formed. This is when the Simpson Commission came together with the bucket list of things to do, and this is one of the key items that's finally being achieved on that bucket list. This is when the Van Allen belt was discovered? Exactly. And this is the

beginning of Explorer 1, 16, years ago. So this is such an amazing time for the culmination of all that incredible work to come to fruition. And so you're sending this probe to our own star. How much can you extrapolate to every other star in the universe? You can extrapolate a lot. And that's one of the things that really makes this so much, you know, so much more than just a heliophysics, a solar mission. This is a universe mission. This is a mission that's telling us about the stars in the universe. The lucky thing is we have a star close by. We can study it in detail. So it's a fundamental laboratory, and it is going to provide, and it does provide information that we then do extrapolate to other stars and other solar

systems. You know, you had a great discussion earlier about bacteria and about the formation of life. understanding this the sun its history applies to this solar system but it also applies to other solar system extra solar planets yeah it's because that's where all our energy comes from that's right isn't it

wow it's a good way to end Alex Alex Young Associate Director of Science for Science in the heliophysics that means solar sun or something like that right heliophysics science division at the Goddard space flight center Alex always a pleasure to talk to you same here I love it we can't wait to talk again We'll do it again.

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