Science Friday - Miscarriage Care, End of Astronauts, COVID Deaths Milestone. May 20, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

A Grim Milestone, As Cases Continue This week, COVID-19 case trackers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hit a grim milestone, logging over one million deaths in the country from the pandemic. The true total is likely to be much higher, as many cases go unreported, or are logged as deaths due to other factors in death certificates. And the pandemic continues, with locations such as New York City reaching “high” transmission levels, and recommending that people mask again indoors. Timothy Revell, deputy United States editor for New Scientist, joins Ira to talk about the groups that have been most affected by the pandemic death toll, and the continuing battle against the coronavirus—including the availability of another round of free tests via the postal service. They also tackle other stories from the week in science, including Congressional hearings on UFO sightings, new theories about what helps make a planet habitable, what can be learned from a fossilized tooth in Laos, and the important psychological question of why some word pairings are funnier than others.   How Texas’ Abortion Restrictions Limit Access To Miscarriage Care As the Supreme Court appears poised to return abortion regulation to the states, recent experience in Texas illustrates that medical care for miscarriages and dangerous ectopic pregnancies would also be threatened if restrictions become more widespread. One Texas law passed last year lists several medications as abortion-inducing drugs and largely bars their use for abortion after the seventh week of pregnancy. But two of those drugs, misoprostol and mifepristone, are the only drugs recommended in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidelines for treating a patient after an early pregnancy loss. The other miscarriage treatment is a procedure described as surgical uterine evacuation to remove the pregnancy tissue — the same approach as for an abortion. “The challenge is that the treatment for an abortion and the treatment for a miscarriage are exactly the same,” said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in early pregnancy loss. Read the rest on sciencefriday.com.   The End Of Astronauts: Why Robots Are The Future Of Exploration Sending astronauts into space is arguably one of society’s most impressive scientific achievements. It’s a marvel of engineering, and it also taps into the human desire for exploration. But just because we can send humans into space, should we? Robots are already good space explorers. And they’re only going to get smarter in the near future. Martin Rees, the United Kingdom’s Astronomer Royal, and Donald Goldsmith, astrophysicist and science writer, argue that the cost of human space travel largely outweighs its benefits. They talk with Ira about their new book, The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   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. This week, COVID-19 case trackers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hit a grim milestone, logging over one million deaths in the U.S. from the pandemic. The true total is likely to be much higher. Many cases go unreported or are logged as deaths due to other factors in death certificates. And the pandemic continues with locations such as Rhode Island and Connecticut, now leading the nation and new cases this week. and the possibility of recommending that people mask again indoors. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from The Week in Science is Timothy Revel, Deputy U.S. editor for New Scientist. He's based in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me. All right, let's talk about these grim statistics. It's really horrible, is it not? A million deaths, a shocking number. Yeah, I mean, it once seemed completely unimaginable. If you sort of think back to the early pandemic, some of the wildest estimates were like in the 200,000 deaths in the U.S. region. And that seemed impossible back then. And then now the CDC announcing this week that the U.S. has reached that very grim milestone, as you put it, of one million deaths. And those deaths are not evenly distributed, are they? No, that's right. So if you sort of look across the demographics on where they fall, something like three quarters of the deaths were people of age 65 and older, more men than women have died. And then if you look at the makeup in terms of terms of ethnicity, white people make up most of the deaths overall in the U.S., but that doesn't really

tell the full story as black, Hispanic, and Native American people have been twice as likely to die during the pandemic from COVID-19. And as I said before, the transmission levels are now going up again in several parts of the country, right? Yeah. So like the good news overall is that, you know, deaths have slowed a lot since some of the worst parts over the last two and a half years. But cases are on the rise again. They're almost. hitting 100,000 cases a day in the U.S. at the moment. And it's the first time it's hit that number since February. So things are definitely on the rise again. The CDC said this week that something like a third of Americans now live in areas with medium to high levels of virus transmission.

And because of that, the United States Postal Service is sending out another round of rapid tests if you fill out the form online. And I did. And boy, it came quickly. They said they were going to send you eight kits. I got 10 tests in the mail this week. Oh, you must be getting some sort of preferential treatment. I've had eight tests as well, and you can get them on the COVID-tests.gov website. It's really, really easy. Yeah. We've all, of course, been watching the devastation in Ukraine now, moving on to other news.

But there's word this week of a specific scientific and ecological angle and a seed bank issue here. Tell us about that. Yeah, so it's pretty bad news, but maybe not as bad news as it initially seemed. So there was a video going around this week from Sergei Averendon. He works at the National Center for Plant Genetic Resources of Ukraine. And in this video, he shows how part of Ukraine's national seed bank was completely destroyed by a Russian bomb attack on Kharkiv. These seed banks, they're where researchers store often thousands of seeds from different plants

as a sort of repository for genetic diversity so that scientists can study different plants and perhaps restore them if they go extinct in the wild. And Ukraine's national seed bank, it's a really big one. It stores around 150,000 samples from around the world, making it the 10th largest in existence. And in this video, it's quite harrowing. A building has been turned to ashes, as Averimenko describes it. And the footage is pretty devastating. And so initially it seemed like that was the whole seed bank gone.

But one of our reporters at new scientist Michael LePage, he looked into this. And it seems there's a very slither of silver lining in that the video is actually only a single agricultural research station. And so the vast majority of the Ukraine National Seed Bank is actually still intact, though it's obviously still at risk with the invasion ongoing. Wow, that's good news. Yeah, it's sort of like initially bad news, but not quite as bad as it seemed. All right. Let's talk about some other interesting news, something a bit lighter this week. We had congressional hearings about UFOs, which they don't call UFOs anymore, do they?

No, there's a real move, I think, to try and make UFOs. seem less like things associated with aliens. And part of that is instead of using the term UFOs, they use the expression UAPs, which is unexplained aerial phenomena. Doesn't quite roll off the tongue quite as well. No, it really doesn't. And there's like a very specific way that the military generals involved in, you know, researching these unexplained aerial phenomena speak. At one point during this congressional hearing, Rodald Maltry, who was Pentagon intelligence official, he was describing the sorts of events. that they track. And he then used this expression, which I wrote down, as I found quite interesting.

And he says that any object we encounter can likely be isolated, characterized, identified, and if necessary, mitigated, which is very, very mundane language to say, we spotted some UFOs, and then we worked out what they were. Well, so did we move any closer to understanding what these things may be? Yeah. So for, you know, the last couple of years, there's been a bit of an investigation into asking for people to come forward with sightings of UAPs or UFOs and to try and work out what they are. And in this congressional hearing, they showed some videos. And in one of them, there's a video from a cockpit of a fighter pilot. And in a sort of blink of an eye, a metallic object flies past extremely quickly. It's sort of hard to work out what it is. And then there's another one

where there's some sort of strange glowing triangles that appear in the night sky, all very mysterious. But then, as we're spoken about in this hearing, the explanation always turns out to be pretty mundane. It can be things like a drone or another aircraft, a strange weather event, birds, balloons, and often it's just like strange camera effects. You know, there's something in the sky that's causing a bit of reflection on your lens. But there were a few things they said they could not explain. Yeah, exactly. So there's a few things left. And they very much said, you know, they can identify most UAPs, which leaves the option of, well, what about the other ones. They use the expression that the data is not good enough. So it's like very poor quality video,

or they don't really have any other data points they can use to make a more educated guess about what it is. Right. Now, those aliens have to live somewhere if they're out there. You have a story this week about new ideas and what makes a planet habitable. Yeah, so there's a lovely story from my colleague Lear Crane. And she looked at this study where they've tried to work out what makes the chances of a solar system having a habitable planet more likely. You know, with the idea that there's so many options we could point our telescopes out to look for signs of life. so how do we work out the best places? And it turns out that having giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn in your solar system may just be one of those things. Why? Why would that make a difference?

In the study, they basically did huge simulation. So they looked at 140,000 different planetary systems. And then in these systems, they had a star and two giant planets, a bit like Jupiter and Saturn. And then they determined whether those systems would allow a habitable, earth-sized world. And so a world is habitable or considered habitable if it orbits a star close enough to allow liquid water on its surface, but not so close that it all evaporates. And in these simulations, they found that actually most of them didn't have a very good chance of having a habitable planet, but in a small number of them, around 250, the presence of these two gas giants actually enhances the overall habitability of the system, so much so that they called them ultra-habitable systems. And is that because

they have big gravity, some sort of, because they're so big, they can suck up other things? It's like a combination of factors. So part of it is like does having these two giant planets give room for like a smaller Earth-sized planet that could sit at just the right spot in a solar system? And that's what this study looked at. We didn't really know about that before and it seems that absolutely it does. But we also already know that having giant planets in your solar system can have other good effects too. For example, they often have a strong enough gravitational pool to pull in asteroids and other objects flying through the solar system that might otherwise be detrimental to life. Cool. Let's turn from outer space to ancient history because there's news about a possible

Denisovan tooth find. Tell us about that. Yeah, I absolutely love this story. And so it starts back in 2018 with archaeologist Laura Shackleford and her team looking for potentially interesting places to dig in northern Laos in Southeast Asia. And so when they were doing this, they came across this cave, which to me sounds absolutely horrifying, but probably was very exciting for these archaeologists, and they described it as being just filled with teeth. And so these teeth, they were from different species, including giant tapirs, deer, and pig, and they were probably gathered by porcupines collecting bones to sharpen their teeth and extract nutrients, which to me only adds to the horror. But among these fossilites teeth was a small, underdeveloped hominin tooth,

and this is the one that they think could well be from the Denisovans. So what's significant about this? We found, right, the evidence of Denisovans around the world before. There's only a very small number of Denisovan fossils in total. And so there are a handful of teeth and bone shards in the original Denisovah cave, which is where we first learned about this strange homin species. And then there's a jawbone in Tibet. But that's it. That's the grand total of denisivin fossils until now with this one in Laos. And it's just one of those remarkable things of like the last 10 years of science where just over 10 years ago, we had no idea that Denisovans existed. Then we found a few bone sharts and worked out, oh, it's actually an extinct hominin species we didn't know of before. But then with genetic analysis, it was worked out that millions of people around the world in Asia, oceania and the Pacific Islands carry traces of Denisovan DNA. So that hinted of where the Denisovans lived in Asia, most likely, and around 2 million to 100,000 years ago.

But this tooth, if confirmed, would be the first fossil evidence that Denise Avon's made it to Southeast Asia. That's very interesting. I see why you're interested in it. Finally, something about psychology and word pairs, why some word combinations sound funny. Yeah, so a team of researchers have done this big study where they looked at why some pairs of words are funnier than others. But one of the amusing parts of it is they've probably used the most unfunny research method known to man, the online survey. And the researchers, they put together a list of around 5,000 words that have previously been studied for their humor or lack of. And then they paired these words together and asked people to say whether they thought the resulting pairs were funny or not. And they ended up looking at about 55,000 pairs of words.

And so I guess what you want to know is what were the funny words. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So some of those ranked as funniest were Playboy Parrot, Weasel Penus and Spam Scrotum, all things I wasn't expecting to say on National Radio anytime. soon. And then some of my other favorites that made the list included gnome bone and funk fungus. And by contrast, the ones that were very unfunny were large, small, schedule year and cell bargain. And those were not very funny. Well, the old comedian Johnny Carson used to say Bayonne, New Jersey was the funniest. Really? That he could come up with. Thank you very much for

taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me. Timothy Revel, Deputy U.S. editor for new scientists. One last note. This week, electronic music and composer Van Gellas died at the age of 79. You might know him for chariots of fire or the soundtrack to Blade Runner, but did you know he also wrote space music, writing pieces for NASA, the ESA, and Carl Sagan's Cosmos, among other things, are condolences to his friends and loved ones. When we come back with new laws outlawing abortions, what does that mean for access to medical care for miscarriages and ectopic? pregnancies. Stay with us.

Hey there, folks. Just a reminder that Science Friday depends on donations from our audience, and that means you. You help fund the radio show each week, plain and simple. So if you find value in what we do, please go to ScienceFriday.com slash support and give what you can. Any amount makes a difference. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Our next story is a continuation of our coverage of the science behind reproductive health and abortion access. As we think about what a post-Rovey-Wa future might look like, it makes sense to turn to Texas, a state that has banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, making it among the most restrictive in the country. But the state's new laws have ripple effects beyond abortion. That's because

one out of ten pregnancies results in a miscarriage. And Texas doctors report facing barriers in providing their patients with medical care for miscarriages, because the medications used to treat a miscarriage are the same ones used in medical abortions. Same for ectopic pregnancies, a rare but deadly complication in which the fetus develops outside of the uterus. My next guest has reported extensively on this potentially deadly dilemma in Texas, publishing her work in Kaiser Health News. Charlotte Huff by freelance science journalist based in Fort Worth, Texas. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Nice to have you. Okay, so let's start with some basics. When we talk about miscarriages, what exactly are we talking about? You know, the popular perception of miscarriage is

that all the pregnancy tissue is immediately lost. Hopefully, when the patient is in the privacy of their own home. I found out there are a number of different scenarios that fall into the category of what they describe as early pregnancy loss, which means it happens during the first trimester. And one of them is that the patient could start to miscarry, but not all the tissue is released.

Another one is that the bleeding could become quite heavy. A third scenario, which apparently is quite common, is the patient could go in with what is thought to be just a routine checkup and that there's no cardiac activity detected. And it becomes clear, unfortunately, over time that that is not a viable pregnancy. And so what would be the standard practice then? They're essentially three. One is to wait if that's feasible.

Another one is that medication, and there are two medications that are part of medicine-based guidelines. One is mesoprostol, and the other one is Miphypristone. The third option is a procedure, which is described as surgical evacuation, in which the tissue, the pregnancy tissue, is removed. And both those options are exactly the same treatments that would be used for a first trimester abortion as well. What's the risk to someone's health if they can't use this treatment? If there's still tissue remaining, they need to make sure that it's removed one way or the other. Otherwise, there's an increased risk of infection that can develop.

And, of course, if there is an unusual level of bleeding, there needs to be intervention. in that situation as well. You said your reporting has uncovered instances where pharmacies may have the medication, but they refuse to give it to you. Right. I mean, this story started out as more of a legal, ethical, what are doctors going to be up against? And then as I started reporting it, they began to give me real-life examples.

For example, there was a doctor in a rural area of Texas who said that she normally, longer sends her patients to the local Walmart pharmacy to fill a prescription for mizoprostol, even though she's written that prescription specifically to treat miscarriage because she said that she's had a handful of times where the pharmacist declines to fill the prescription. There's another doctor who's actually a district chair for the American College of Obstetricians and Guidant College. who is quite upset because he got a letter and he shared a copy of the letter with me about a third medication, and that's actually listed in the same law, Texas law SB4.

It's called methotrexate. And that Texas pharmacy alerted the providers that they would not fill a prescription for methotrexate in cases of atopic pregnancy and specifically cited concerns about the. Texas laws. Having an ectopic pregnancy is a very dangerous situation, is it not? It's potentially life-threatening. What it is is that you have a pregnancy that's growing outside the uterus. It's typically, but not always, in the phallopian tube. And so it needs to be treated and the go-to standard of treatment that really the only medication that's recommended in the medical guidelines is methotrexate. Otherwise, the option is surgery, which, of course, is much more invasive.

So what do the doctors then usually do? What are their options if they can't give this medication? I'm not getting a sense where there's a stone wall. They certainly can make sure that it's prescribed elsewhere. I think the concern is that these are early signs of hesitation. They're having ripple effects. And certainly in the case of mesoprostol, I spoke to an OB-GYN, obstetrician gynaecologist in Austin, who supervises residents through the medical school there. And she said that they've had a number of cases where patients have not been able to get that prescription filled. And sometimes they've called back to the prescribing clinic and the clinic straightens it out, but she said she worries about the ones that she doesn't hear about until

later. Was this the intent of the proponents of the law to curtail access to these other forms of reproductive health care for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies? I spoke for some time to the legislative director for Texas right to life when I read him a number of the scenarios in which I had dug up through my reporting, he was very vehement that they were misreading the law, and this was quote, an awful misunderstanding of the law. And I should add that I talked to a law professor at Southern Methodist University regarding the whole situation around the topic pregnancy and methotrexate, and he said his reading of the law is that it's not a concern. But a lot of these nerves or uncertainty or hesitation goes back to a second Texas abortion law. It's called SB8, which says that anyone

essentially can allege that someone is aiding or abetting an abortion. And so the doctors say that with all the eyes on their health care decisions, someone who really doesn't have any sense of what the actual medical circumstances are could allege that they're running afoul of the law. Wow. So what is the take home? What can the current situation in Texas help us understand about what might happen in states, other states, where abortion is banned or severely restricted? I think what's apparent, at least in the Texas situation, is that reproductive care is complex and there are many decisions that occur in the early months of pregnancy. Once these laws are passed, then there can be ripple effects that may impact other types of pregnancy care, including the handling of miscarriage and atopic pregnancy. Well, Charlotte, thank you for your work.

Thank you for your reporting, and thank you for taking time to be with us today. I appreciate the opportunity. Charlotte Huff, a freelance health journalist based in Fort Worth, Texas. and if you'd like to read Charlotte's full story, go to Science Friday.com slash miscarriages. Sending astronauts into space is arguably one of the most impressive scientific human achievements. Not only is it a marvel of engineering, but it plays into the human desire for exploration. But just because we can send humans into space, should we?

Robots are already good space explorers, and they're only going to get smarter in the future. My next guests argue that the costs of human space travel far outweigh its benefits. Dr. Martin Rees is the United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal and one of the world's most respected and visible cosmologists. And Dr. Donald Goldsmith is an astrophysicist and science writer. And together they have written the book, The End of Astronauts, Why Robots are the Future of Exploration. Martin Donald, welcome to Science Friday. Good to me with you.

Thank you, Ira. Okay, let's talk about it. Martin, you've been one of the UK's most public faces of science for decades, and you are certainly aware of the tug-of-war, the debate among astronomers about whether robots or people do a better job at space exploration. So why a book right now to bring that all up again? Well, let me say first that Don and I are both old enough to remember Neil Armstrong's one small step, and it was a heroic episode.

and I think we both suspected that since it was only 12 years from the first Sputnik to feet on the moon, that maybe within 10 or 20 years more, we'd have had footprints on Mars. But of course, as we know, 50 years later, the Apollo program is still the high point of human spaceflight. And that's really for two reasons. The first reason is that, of course, it was hugely expensive and it was funded by the American Americans as an exercise in superpower rivalry to beat the Russians. And it wasn't worth continuing that, having beaten them in this particular competition. But also the other reason, and it is closer to what our books about, as robots have got better,

then the case for sending humans, the need for humans in space, is far less, either for expiration or for assembling structures and things like that. And so our main point is that given it's a hugely more expensive to send humans, especially on a long voyage to Mars, then the public shouldn't support this expense. Don, can you lay out the basic arguments about why it's so much more expensive to send humans? Well, it's because we're such fragile, sensitive creatures just on eating and breathing and so forth. And also on coming back. In short, a robot goes out in a space and spends six months away to Mars very happily consuming almost nothing.

Think what you have to do for a humanoid on that voyage. So there's also the protection issue, not just the regular holding the air in, but also there are solar storms that can kill an astronaut with radiation should they occur. And you have to, at least if you're being kind of these astronauts, have a structure where they can have a special way to stay safe during the days of a solar storm. all in all, it's really kind of simple. You ask you, why is it easier to send a letter than to send a person across the country? And that goes not only for going to Mars, but for near-Earth orbit.

Is that not correct? Near Earth orbit, of course, is much more expensive. But remember that, you know, the moon is roughly a quarter of a million miles away. The journey to Mars is hundreds of millions of miles. You think of it as a thousand times a factor. So it's a lot more. but as you know, people are now willing to pay these huge expenses. You can talk about pollution and even more space crowding.

Near Earth orbit is getting very full. Someday there will be collisions, if not with human vehicles, that among the myriad satellites we keep putting up there. And the International Space Station, Martin, has cost a lot of money, right, compared to what it would have been to just have robots going around the Earth. It did indeed. It cost a 12-figure sum, if you had in the cost of the shuttle,

and also it wasn't all that inspiring. I mean, it made the newspapers when the toilet didn't work or when Hatfield, the Canadian astronaut, sang David Bowie's songs and played his guitar. But the only worthwhile research was the effects of zero gravity on human beings for a long time. So that's all it did. And it was hugely expensive.

I'm talking with Martin Rees. and Donald Goldsmith about their book, The End of Astronauts, Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So, Martin, is it your mission then to talk NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, out of sending humans into space? Well, to talk NASA out of it, because that's public money. The other reason why we don't need humans is that AI is getting better. at the moment, if we send a probe to Mars, it's not able to decide where to dig, where's an interesting sample. But in 10 or 20 years, the kind of AI that allows machines to look at 100,000 x-rays of your lungs

and decide better than a human whether you've got lung cancer, that sort of technology will enable the AI to do the geology. You don't need the people for that. So I don't really think there's any case for NASA or any public body sending people into space. But on the other hand, I think I'm inclined to cheer on the private ventures for two reasons. First, they can take higher risks. You probably remember that the shuttle failed twice in 135 launches. And each of those failures was a big national trauma because they presented it as safe and they launched a woman's school teacher. all that. But a 2% failure rate is acceptable to lots of adventurers. And that therefore means

that a private exploit by SpaceX or Blue Origin can accept higher risks and launch people who are prepared to take those risks and maybe even on a one-way trip to Mars. Ellen Musk has said he wants to die on Mars but not on impact. And he's now about 50 I think, so 40 years from now, he may be able to do it and what a way to go. But there was a survey, if I remember correctly, a poll of people when the news came out that people were talking about that Mars would be a one-way trip. What, there were tens of thousands of people who signed up for that? I think there will be people who will go to the moon at private expense

and they will accept a high risk. And I think there will be those who take a one-way trip to Mars. was think of the polar explorers 100 years ago. Captain Scott and Edmondson and Shackleton, they accepted a 50% risk of not coming back and they were completely out of touch with the rest of the world. And so there are people without spirit who will want to go. And I think we should cheer them on. And there may indeed be a small colony of what's people by the end of a century living on Mars. But what there won't be, I hope, is mass emigration. And here I strongly disagree with Elon Musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking, who talked about the idea of escaping

Earth's problems by going to Mars. Why don't you think there will be mass immigration to Mars? Well, first of all, living on Mars is less comfortable than being at the South Pole or at the bottom of the ocean or the top of Everest. So it's not a comfortable place to go. But also, it would be hugely expensive. And also, it's a dangerous illusion to think we can escape the Earth. Earth's problems by going to Mars, because it's true. It's hard to deal with climate change and all these problems of the Earth, but that's a doddle compared to making Mars's atmosphere breathable and terraforming Mars. So I think space exploration is for adventurers. It shouldn't be called space tourism. It's never routine. It should be called space adventure, but we should cheer on

brave people who do it. That's Martin Rees, the United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal, who along with Donald Goldsmith, has written a new book, The End of Astronauts, Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk more about space exploration, including some of the places the authors would love to explore with robots. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. case you're just joining us. I'm continuing my conversation with Martin Rees and Donald Goldsmith about the future of space exploration and their argument against sending more astronauts into space.

And their case goes beyond the cost. Martin Rees, the United Kingdom's astronomer Royal, says there could be some long-term unintended consequences of, say, the human habitation of Mars. if we look to the 22nd century and beyond, if there are some people on Mars privately funded, then they will find themselves ill-adapted to life there, obviously, because we've evolved through Darwinian selection to be suited to the Earth. But they will then, 50 years from now, have all the technology of genetic modification and cyborg, etc., to adapt themselves.

And those techniques, we hope, would be regulated here on Earth, but they'd be away from the regulators. And so if there was a colony of people out there, then they might, within a few centuries, evolve into as it were different species, whether flesh and blood or electronic, because they would have the technology, free from regulation, and they would adapt themselves to living on Mars and perhaps going off into the blue yonder. You're talking about genetic engineering-wise? They would genetically engineer their bodies to become more adaptive. Well, they would or their progeny to be more adaptive. And that technology, I think, will be available by the end of a century. And here on Earth, we have less motive for using it. And I think we want to regulate it on prudential and ethical grounds.

But these pioneers on Mars will be away from the regulators, and they have the motive. So I think a feasible scenario is that that community on Mars will eventually develop into a rather different species. And if it's a development into an electronic species, which is what some people like Ray Kurzweil expect as the far future of humanity, then of course they'd be near immortal and then they may not want to stay on a planet at all. They may prefer zero gravity and they may embark on interstellar voyages. that's the scenario for the far future. But all we're talking about in our book is the nearer term when we don't think that public money should be spent

on sending astronauts into Earth orbit or to assemble structures in space or even on the moon. Not to mention, if I may chime in mining the asteroid, which is very big in some people's minds. Again, you don't need, it's really going to do that, machines will do far better than humans. already almost capable of this sort of thing. Who claims to know what the hundred years from now,

let alone a thousand humanity would be like, only the doomsayers, and they're wrong, I hope. After all, in the long run, if private entrepreneurs, including those from many countries, are all going to go to the moon or Mars and do things, it's probably not going to be any wonderful community more than the current international community is and all sorts of problems will arise,

but predicting them or even thinking they'll happen is really not in the cards. Well, on the other hand, we've been pretty peaceful in Antarctica where there are treaties. Yes, the Antarctic Treaty is a single greatest success of the United Nations treaty organizations, as far as I can tell, where people did agree wonderfully that although everyone claimed pieces of Antarctica, and those claims overlap, they'd be totally respected. They only agreed not to do anything about it, and that so far has worked. That's partly because, you know, they haven't found uranium or easy oil deposits in Antarctica. it turns out to be full of cobalt or mineral wealth or something, I'm afraid that treaty is in deep danger. It came to creating a treaty for the moon along similar lines that a big country simply wouldn't

sign on because it was saying it's all for peaceful purposes and not for any one country's benefit and so on. Let's talk a bit about going to the moon. Last year, China and Russia announced the joint program to create the international lunar research station. And of course, NASA is spearheading the Artemis mission to return to the moon. Why now is there interest in humans, do you think, Don, returning to the moon? And might that not be an interesting place to set up a human-habitated moon base? Certainly, if you're going to think of habitats on other bodies in the solar system, the moon is the natural one.

It's so much closer than anywhere else. So much easier to get to, full of solid ground that we understand pretty well. So if you think the humans belong in space and you want to learn how they handle another low-gravity object, Why, of course, you do the moon. It only begs the question, what do you do there? You can walk around geologically exploring. Well, okay, that's what the robots do. You can try to mine important things.

There's a whole thing about helium-3 for nuclear reactors, which is somewhat more abundant on the lunar surface, but just getting at it is no picnic. You learn how to build habitats out of lunar rock, and you learn how to extract even oxygen from lunar rocks. It's a lot of work, and at the initial stages, it would involve enormous amounts of material, ferried from Earth. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, of course. The next question is just why should

it happen with what your point is only to prove that humans can live in space? It's a circular argument. Martin, what about building a telescope, a radio telescope on the other side? Well, I would certainly say that that is a good use of the moon because the far size of the moon is shielded from the radio interference from the Earth, and that's a good case. But that could be assembled by robots, even present-day ones, certainly the kind that we could imagine existing in 10 or 20 years. So the main point is that we can do these things without humans much more cheaply. And of course, beyond Mars, you argue that exploring asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are more scientifically interesting. I think Arthur C. Clark picked

that out first many decades ago. There easily, Those are not places, Martin Yuwata sent a human, are they? No, it would be a multi-year voyage, obviously, which would be even less feasible in sending people to Mars. But not much more difficult for a robot, because, as Don said, robots just hibernate happily on a long voyage. They don't need food or resources, and they could just as easily explore the frozen surface of Europa,

a moon of Jupiter or Enceladus a moon of Saturn, which are exciting places, because if there was any vestige of life there, that would indeed be of huge importance. Which place would you go first? I think exploration of those moons would be very exciting, because, of course, one thing we've learned in astronomy in the last 20 years is that most of the stars are obviously by retinues of planets. there are zillions of places where life could exist. There are millions of planets which are rather like the young Earth, but we don't know if life is there.

But it could be that life is a rare accident, just happened in one place. But the reason it would be great to go to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn is that if you found any kind of life on either of those, it would say straight away that life couldn't be a rare fluke that just happened once, which if it happened twice within one planetary system, they must have happened in a billion places in the galaxy.

So detecting any life on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn would be hugely important because it would say the whole galaxy was teeming with life. Now, I emphasize that because you might say, what about life on Mars, that would be exciting too. But that wouldn't clinch this case in the same way because it's possible that life could move on meteorites from Mars to the Earth. Indeed, some people say that we are all incess Martians in that life started on Mars

and then came to Earth on a meteorite. But if it existed as far away as Jupiter or Saturn, you couldn't make that argument that it meant from one to the other. So that would clinch the case that life was ubiquitous in the galaxy. And that's why, if you ask me where I would send a probe, I would send it to those places. Any one moon in particular? Your favorite? Enceladus and Europa, they're the moons which are covered in ice and there's thought to be water underneath them.

So there may be things swimming around there. Do you think if we found life in our solar system, we could handle that? Yes, certainly. I think people would be overjoyed, and they'd want to. to learn a little more about it and then having learned it was merely microbial life, which it surely would be, they'd be utterly disappointed and said, I thought this is going to be people. Martin? Well, of course, it wouldn't be very exciting, but it would, as I say, indicate that the origin of life, which is still not understood. People know that Darwin explained how

life evolved from simple beginnings, but the transition from complex chemistry to the first reproducing, metabolizing entities you call alive, is still not understood. It could be a rare fluke, it could be ubiquitous, and that's why other instances elsewhere in our solar system, even if it's boring, simple life, would still be important

because they would suggest that if there was another Earth-like planet orbiting another star, then life could very well have started there. I know in the book you described Princeton physicist Gerardo, Neil's idea for a floating, rotating space habitat, which he developed in 1969, the idea. Well, tell me about his vision and why he wanted to create it.

Well, although I interviewed a man once, I don't really know his inner thoughts, he was an engineer who thought big and he attracted followers of those who thought, this is marvelous. We can live in space. You can simulate the Earth's gravity. None of this evolutionary process the Martin was talking about. You could farm, and you can have all sorts communities, each with their own thing going. This was after all the 60s. And I suspect, I always felt there was an element of, it's the people who leave behind, you also have to take into account that only the right people would go. There's been a psychological profile, no, it's more of a sociological study about what would really be likely to happen as the

strong colonies would over, overshadow the week and take over them as this happened on Earth. But whatever it is, it's a, by the way, it's Jeff Bezos's dream too, in Contrast of Musk, he wants to put billions of people in these habitats. To me, it sounds like a very sad giving up on Earth. We've got a wonderful planet going here. I mean, I see if we could all live in a little more peace and harmony and treat it correctly. To be fair to Bezos, I think he's got an idea that is perhaps slightly more appealing, which is to move industry into space. And if that could be done using robots, that would be good. But again, it doesn't need people. And the O'Neill colonies, they look rather like a sort of Californian suburb, where you're on the inside

of some spinning cylinder, etc. But whether people prefer to be out there rather than down here is unclear. But that's a very far future scenario, certainly not this century. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. My guests are Martin Reese and Donald Goldsmith, and we're talking about their book, The End of Astronauts, Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration. Well, another far future scenario, Martin, is about terraforming Mars. Is that not an idea if we really need an escape hatch? Well, you say it's we.

I think it will be a post-human enterprise. But one important point is that future evolution, is not going to be the slow Darwinian evolution where it takes hundreds of thousands of years for a new species to evolve. It's going to be something that happened on a technological time scale with cyborg and genetic modifications. So I think it's not clear whether humans will evolve into creatures able to live on Mars as it is, or whether the whole of Mars has to be changed so that humans as they are now have to live there. The best argument against terraforming Mars is the horrible job we've done of terraforming Earth. And if you picture these colonies, colonists on Mars, the Earth has been destroyed.

We ruined it. So it's a good thing we have to escape hatch on Mars. How are these people going to settle down cyborg or not and say, well, let's just rebuild a better future? I'm afraid in my sad vision of humanity, they would bring the same personalities with them, the same problems on a very much more limited set of resources and very much tighter schedule as it were to avoid catastrophe. Martin, I can't let you go in the couple of minutes that we have left about getting your opinion about the image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy

that was revealed last week. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I watched the NSF press conference last week, and I have to say, I was slightly underwhelmed, and I didn't really feel that we were going to learn anything new about the black hole at the Galactic Center from these measurements. These measurements are a huge logistical achievement because they tie together huge data streams from seven or eight different radi telescopes around the world.

But the challenge is so huge, and they didn't really get a very sharp image much, but I think that technique is going to have to await having at least one of the antennae up in space. and then you get a longer baseline than the diameter of the earth, and that will be exciting. So I think we've got to wait for that before this particular technique can really give us a map of the immediate surroundings of a black hole. But there are other techniques.

There's another interferometer being used on the European Southern Observatories array of telescopes working in the infrared at about two microns. and this instrument, I think, can perhaps do a better job on our galactic center. When you say a better job, are you saying the image was a bit too fuzzy? Yes, the image was fuzzy, and it was fuzzy for two reasons. First, the limited resolution, but secondly, because the situation is varying on the time scale of the observation. the reason that it was harder to observe our galactic center than the bigger black cone M87

is M87 didn't change very much on a timescale of 10 minutes, whereas the galactic center probably did. So things were blurred because they were measuring something which is moving during the time of their exposure, as it were. And so a technique which can get better time resolution is needed if we want to observe of the galactic center because it's intrinsically changing on timescales down to a few minutes. And that would be by putting radio telescopes out in space? Well, you could, but in fact, already by infrared interferometry, there's a instrument called Gravity, which is an instrument that's been developed by someone called Eisenhower at Munich. and this has proved its ability to actually study moving blobs near the Galactic Center.

And I think probably will do a better job on the Galactic Center than the event horizon telescope has been able to do. Well, I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Nice to have you back, Martin Rees, United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal and Dr. Donald Goldsmith, astrophysicist and science writer. Co-authors of The End of Astronauts. are the future of exploration. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. And that about wraps it up for this hour. Here's Ariel Zitch with some of the folks who make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. Our radio producers are Christy Taylor, Kathleen Davis, Shoshana Buxbaum, and Rasha Aridi. Beth Rami is our

controller. Jordan Smudjik is our grants manager, and I'm Director of Audience, Ariel Zitch. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Ariel. B.J. Leaderman compose our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You can always email us. We love it. Our address is SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.