Science Friday - Science Goes To The Movies: First Man, Driverless Car Ethics, Beetle Battles. Oct 26, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Damien Chazelle’s film First Man reconstructs the personal trials of astronaut Neil Armstrong in the years leading up to his famous first steps on the moon—as well as the setbacks and losses that plagued the U.S. space program along the way. This week in “Science Goes To The Movies,” our panel of space exploration experts weighs in. Is this an authentic story of Apollo 11’s triumphs and costs? And what are the stories Hollywood could tell—about the history of space exploration, or its present—that we haven’t heard yet? If you’re a casual student of ethics—or just even just a fan of the television show The Good Place—you’ve most likely heard of the trolley problem. It goes like this: A runaway trolley is on course to kill five people working further down the track—unless you pull a lever to switch the trolley to a different track, where only one person will be killed. The trolley problem is designed to be moral thought experiment, but it could get very real in the very near future. This time, it won’t be a human at the controls, but your autonomous vehicle. The United Nations recently passed a resolution that supports the mass adoption of autonomous vehicles, which will make it more likely that a driverless car might cross your path (or your intersection). Who should an autonomous vehicle save in the event that something goes wrong? Passengers? Pedestrians? Old people? Young people? A pregnant women? A homeless person? Sohan Dsouza, research assistant with MIT’s Media Lab, discovered that the way we answer that question depends on the culture we come from. He joins Ira to discuss how different cultural perspectives on the trolley problem could make designing an ethical autonomous vehicle a lot more challenging. The male Japanese rhinoceros beetle lives a life of insect warfare. These large beetles sport elaborate horns that they use in a type of mating ritual joust, defending territories from other males in the hopes of attracting female beetles. But biologist Jillian del Sol noticed that this beetle love fest includes another component—squeaky songs. del Sol, featured in our latest video of The Macroscope series, tells us how males court their potential mates by serenading them and what this tells us about sexual selection among the rhino beetles.   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. Even if you're just a casual student of ethics or just a fan of the TV show The Good Place, you've most likely heard of the trolley problem, a runaway trolley. Here it goes. It's on course to kill five people working down the track. Unless you pull a lever to switch the trolley to a different track where only one person would be killed. Do you intervene to kill the innocent? and bystander?

Michael, what did you do? I made the trolley problem real so we can see how the ethics would actually play out. There are five workers on this track and one over there. Here are the levers to switch the tracks. Take a choice. The thing is, I mean, ethically speaking. No time, dude, make a decision. It's tricky.

I mean, on the one hand, if you ascribe for a purely utilitarian world, huge. Yeah, that was a segment from The Good Place, and you can see it's one thing to imagine the trolley problem with a human at controls, but what about a driverless car, which, you know, controlled by a computer? Autonomous vehicles are set to take over the road in the not too distant future. The UN recently passed a resolution that supports their mass adoption, and that will put the decision of whom to save and whom to kill in the hands of a machine. Who should the car decide to protect? The passengers, the pedestrians, older,

people, younger people, a pregnant woman, a homeless person. My next guest discovered that how we answer that question depends on the culture we come from, and that could make designing an ethical, autonomous vehicle, a lot more challenging. So, Anne Asusa is a research assistant with MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. His research is in the journal Nature this week. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on.

Nice to have you. Why is the trolley problem the best way to think about the future of driverless cars? Well, driverless cars promised to eliminate a large number of accidents, like the vast majority of accidents that currently happen due to human error. But in the small number of cases where you have unavoidable accidents, there may be cases of unavoidable harm. And typically we've had Asimov's laws of robotics. And those aren't really sufficient to look at situations where an AI has to balance risks or balance harm or distribute harm. Asimov's laws, one of its laws of robotics says they will never harm its creator, the robot. And that may not be the case when really when driverless cars come about. Yeah.

So in 2016, we actually released the Moral Machine website, which is the, main source of data for this study. In 2016, as a companion website to a paper that my PI, among others, and others published about the social dilemma of autonomous vehicles. And there was a study about what people think of autonomous vehicles that might have to, say, sacrifice one passenger to, say, five pedestrians. And people were found to want that as the norman. And that as the norm. like sacrificing cars, cars that might sacrifice their passengers, but they don't want to use one or be in one themselves. So that's a bit of a dilemma,

and we wanted to get more data about all the different factors that might go into this equation. And in your study, when you surveyed people all over the world that did not seem to be one philosophy of what should happen in this situation? Yes, there were broad global trends. Like, for example, nearly every country had a preference between male and female characters as morally significant in outcomes. They would prefer to say females, but the relative strengths of that preference varied from country to country. And we noticed that clusters more or less according to some cultural and geographic proximity.

Such as. To give me Asia versus Middle East places, Europe, North America, how were they all different? So there were three main clusters. Actually, Asia, as in East Asia and some Middle Eastern countries and South Asia kind of cluster together, as we call that the eastern cluster. And then there's the southern cluster, which is dominated by Latin American countries and countries of French Francophone heritage. and the other countries are in the northern cluster, sorry, the western cluster, which is mostly Western countries of Protestant or Catholic provenance. So the countries in Asia and the Middle East preferred to spare younger rather than older characters?

It was much less pronounced there. Yes, the general preference for sparing younger over older characters was much less pronounced in the case of the eastern cluster. And in Europe and North America, they preferred to spare whom? Oh, I mean, they had more or less that was the average. And then in the southern cluster, that's mostly the Latin American countries, they had a slightly higher propensity to save the young.

Now, I took this test. It was quite fascinating. And I know I had my own personal reasons for making the choices. I made. How can you tell what types of logic people are using to make these choices? There are different equations that might go into this. I mean, the classic one is utilitarianism, as we heard in that clip you played. And deontology, so utilitarianism is, you know, should be save as many lives as possible, even if that means committing to an action, like intervening. And there's also the deontological approach.

which is like do no harm. So those are the well-known ones. And we've noticed, for example, like in different countries, there are cultural factors and economic factors even that influence what decisions people make. For example, in countries with relatively higher economic inequality, they have a relatively higher tendency, relatively higher preference for saving high status individuals

versus low-status individuals. You know, you put that into your tests, but in the scenarios, they include income, gender, physical characteristics, different ages. These aren't things that the current driverless cars can identify, are they? I mean, they're not going to be, you know,

knowledgeable of all those different things when it comes to making a decision. So is that really a practical way to study it? It depends what you use it for. we do not really expect that we'll just take this data and build a model and, you know, plug it into the vehicle, into vehicles, into future autonomous vehicles. What we want to do is understand what the public's reaction to an autonomous vehicle crash might be. We want to understand what fears need to be allayed in order to encourage adoption of autonomous vehicles.

So, yeah, those are the primary goals of this, to kind of see that conversation about, to provide the ground truth for a conversation about autonomous vehicle ethics. Okay, you must talk to everyday people when you talk about your tests and your relatives and friends about getting in a driver-al-lots car. I mean, let's just between you and me, people want to get into a car where they don't have the option of protecting their own life. They know that the car might choose that they die instead of someone on the street. Are they going to want to buy that kind of car?

or get into one? So that's actually what the paper in the 2016 paper looked at, which was do people generally prefer to not buy such a car broadly? And individually, it varies. I mean, it depends on sometimes age or a familiarity with technology has been known to, including, as I've seen, familiarity with AI, and AV technology affects these decisions. I would think that the car engineers must be, as you rightly point out,

doing tests about this, and they are thinking a lot about this topic. Yes. The industry is certainly considering this. I mean, you know, Mercedes, one of their heads of autonomous vehicles, automation said something back in 2016 about autonomous vehicles, like they might have to save the person in the vehicle, if you can save the person in the vehicle. But then there was backlash against that.

And then, you know, Ford, for example, the chief of Ford said that autonomous vehicles, it'll ultimately have to come from a social consensus. And that's kind of the conversation we hope to see here. It's not going to be a commercial someday where the car companies are competing for your business by saying, we'll put you first instead of the pedestrian. Yeah, automakers might have different interests than, say, insurers and policy makers, consumer advocacy groups. There are stakeholders with, and of course the consumers. I mean, there are stakeholders with differing interests.

and they will have to have a conversation to come to a consensus about where to move, and that consensus might, that conversation might look different in different countries because of the different strengths of the preferences along each of these dimensions. Let me see if I can get a quick phone call in. Lee and Tucson, welcome to Science Friday. Hi there, quickly. Hello? Yes, go ahead.

Am I on here? You are. Go ahead. Okay. I guess my question in these ethical considerations in the survey or just in the in the practice itself that your guest is talking about if there's ever actual material consideration of just not doing it at all in other words are the surveys including a question do you think that to just think about actually just dropping this or not doing it at all and do the people that consider the ethics of the whole thing really actually consider just dropping it and not doing it at all and I'm referring to self-driving cars, AI, all that. Okay, yeah.

You think, well, maybe this is just a bad idea. That, I mean, we think that more knowledge is always good. Ultimately, when self-driving vehicles start to come on the market in greater numbers and maybe even autonomous vehicles without any manual driving options, there's an issue of whether people will actually take to these. And in order for that to happen, I mean, even a default decision, even a random decision, Even a decision to randomize, even a decision to always never intervene. Those are still decisions that have to be made.

And that's a good way. That's a good place to stop because we've run out of time. And this is a topic we will pick up. I want to thank you, Sohan, for taking time to be with us today. Sohan Desuzza is a research assistant with the MIT lab in Cambridge. We're going to take a break and take off with the original moon man, Neil Armstrong, and the new film, First Man. Have you seen it?

What do you think about it? Give us a call. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The type of earth science shocker, ever filmed. The science fiction. Yes, indeed. It's time for another episode of Science Goes to the Movies. And this week, a time-honored story of a man, a plan, and the moon.

I don't know what space exploration will uncover, but I don't think it'll be exploration just for the sake of exploration. I think it'll be more of the fact that it allows us to see things that maybe we should have seen a long time ago, but just haven't been able to until now. That's actor Ryan Gosling, playing astronaut Neil Armstrong. In the new movie, First Man, he's talking about why he wants to be part of the Gemini mission's astronaut crew, which will later find out.

He lands him as the first human. to set foot on the surface of the moon. And we've gathered a stellar panel of space nerds to talk about the film what they liked and maybe could have been done a little bit differently. Maybe there were some errors in the film. I want to hear from you. If you could make a movie about space exploration,

what story would you want to tell? These are the common stories we hear, the famous ones. What about some unfamous people or famous stories that could be from the space race or right now? Now, any decade you're like. Give us a call. Our number is 844-724-8255-8-4-Sai Talk. You can also tweet us at SciFri.

Let me introduce my guests. Miriam Kramer, science editor at Mashable. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. And Najud Moranxi is a human exploration mission analysis lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Welcome to New York. Thank you. Good afternoon.

Yeah. And Asif Siddiqui is a history professor studying space exploration at Fordham University. His most recent book is Beyond Earth, A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration. Nice to have you. Nice to be here. Spoiler alert. That's it. We're deep diving into the movie, and that means we'll be talking about key plot points, including, yes, does Neil Armstrong make it safely back to the moon and back?

If you don't know that, fine now. We're going to be giving that away. So if you want to take part of number 844-724-8255, you can also reach us at SciFRI. Marian, let's start with the review. Thumbs up or Thumbs Down? Oh, I loved it. You loved it. I'm in the tank for this movie.

I really liked First Man. It actually, I've said this, it kind of surpassed my previous favorite space movie and is now in the top spot above Apollo 13. Really? Yeah. That's pretty high break. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I thought that it was sort of the space movie that we needed in a lot of ways. Why?

What do you mean we needed? Feel Good movie? Not so much. More, I really enjoyed the tone of it. I have wanted for a long time for there to be some kind of darker look at space history, and I think that this kind of gave it to us in a lot of different ways from like the creaking metal of the ships as they were launching. I thought it was great. I was, you know, I was wondering if he was going to lay on the moon.

You were really inside that tin can, as it was, you know, get an idea, had the rattling, how much vibration that really was in there. Exactly. Like, I felt it. And just also, like, looking at the portrayal of masculinity and kind of the way that the whole movie came together around that, I thought was really astute in a lot of ways. Majud, what did you think? On a personal level, I really enjoyed it. For me, it's the first-person aspect versus just sort of watching it from the outside. You could really put yourself in the movie, and, you know, most of us will never get to fly in space.

So getting to actually experience it in a way was really a fun way to have a movie made. So throughout the film we see Neil Armstrong as dispassionate, reserved, contained, and that was all part of his engineering mindset. Here's a clip. You're planning on taking some of her jewelry to the moonbuzz? Sure. What fellow wouldn't want to give his wife bragging rights? Neil, will you take anything? If I had a choice, I'd take more fuel.

I think that's a real quote of his. You met Neil, right? I did, I did. I met him once at a conference. I think, you know, the movie really does justice to his character in a way. I like the movie quite a bit. It's a flawed movie, but it's a really great movie. I really think this is a movie that captures the other side of the right stuff, so to speak,

the engineering technical backgrounds and the kind of commitment these guys needed to have beyond just be fighter jocks and that kind of internal narrative, internal kind of story in this movie about what it took to be an astronaut, I think really is communicated really effectively. Was he as reserved as you knew him? Well, I didn't really, I don't think I knew him that well, but from what I understand he was very reserved, but he was not, I think, as perhaps dour as portrayed in the movie.

He had a sense of humor. He was a funny guy. But I do think he had a lot of struggles in his life and as his biographer Jim Hansen has talked about, you know, there were some serious struggles in his family life and also with his colleagues in the astronaut office. So, you know, I think it's a bit of both. I think he was a bit perhaps reticent,

but I think he was also capable of just being kind of chilling out. You didn't get that impression too much in the movie. Not so much in the movie, but I think the movie was focused on those aspects of his career in life that required concentration and deletion. and diligence. Yeah. And you're an engineer.

Did you feel like that was a fair portrayal of any engineer? I think engineers have a whole variety of personalities. So I think you saw a few different personalities in that movie. And if you look across a lot of movies, you'd see that there's fun engineers. There's a very serious ones. There's ones that are super outgoing. So it's certainly a fair portrayal because pretty much every personality type exists in engineering. And one thing that struck me about this film was how jarring

and difficult all the scenes of space flight were. There you had Nealus cramped, the launches were teeth rattling, and it was just disorienting. Any time we saw people flying. Najude, was that realistic to you? I think there was a lot of realistic aspects that, you know, people assume you have this fun floating feeling, but especially in the Gemini capsules, the mercury,

there wasn't a lot of room. So you were really crammed in there. The cockpit was right in your face, the control panel. So I think that was a very accurate portrayal. all the switches and gauges are just right there. So then, of course, the rocket rides uphill can be very bumpy. So that was certainly true. Let's go to the phones.

Andrew in Sarasota, Florida. Welcome to Science Friday. Andrew, are you there? Oh, hi. Hi. Sorry, I think I got disconnected there for a moment. Yeah, I was saying it just, since you happen to mention the Gemini program, we hear a lot about Mercury and we hear a lot about the Apollo,

but I feel like the Gemini program is. underserved. The first time man stepped out into the void and Americans did spacewalks, I think that's a story worth telling. Thanks for that call. You know, I asked if a lot of people don't realize, you know, in that scene in the movie where he can control the orbiting, the rotation, and he had the right stuff to pull out of that. That's why he got the first seat, you know, to go landing on the moon. Yeah, I think that's definitely one of the factors that kind of made him much more visible in the astronaut office. There were, I mean, there were other candidates for the job.

but for sure the Gemini 8 experience was a really key point. It was a really dangerous mission, and I was just looking up all life magazines from that month, and it was widely reported at the time as a kind of, really an amazing, exciting moment in the space race, a kind of successful failure in that sense, but a fantastic moment, captured really nicely in the movie.

As the one person in the room who remembers that real in real time, I can say that it was very, very exciting. The big emotional punch of the story was Neil's grief over the death of his daughter when she was just two years old. And then the loss of the fellow astronauts and the lead up to Apollo 11, Apollo 1, whatever. How do you think these humans' losses shaped history as it played out? Well, you know, I mean, these things were, as I think is also communicated in the movie, these fighter pilots, test pilots, were very familiar with losses because they had been at Air Force bases and many of their colleagues were

not making it back home from test flight. So in many ways they were used to it, but nobody's really used to losses like that, and especially losing a child is something nobody can really know unless it's happened to them. But I think those things deeply affected Armstrong to the degree that we can say, and those things were communicated really effectively in the movie

in a way that I thought was really poignant and powerful. Merrim, you know, we really don't usually see the personal side of an astronaut. in a lot of films. Apollo 13, we saw some of it, but it was really the heroic victory of getting back. Right. Yeah, for me, I think a lot of these space films tend to be focused more on sort of what the country is going through or the nationalism aspect of it and the pride that these people bring to the country. But for me, the refreshing part about this movie was that it was really about him. It was really about Neil and his struggle and sort of how, in many ways, like, death was. kind of haunting him. And that's something that I don't think that most people think about

when they're thinking about the early days of the space race or even today, that it is this incredibly dangerous undertaking. Because we are a lot of engineering geeks around here. We'd like to know about what things got, the movie got wrong. What do you think, Miriam, the movie, a little quibble. I may be the wrong person to ask about this. A little quibble, maybe. I'll ask, As soon as you were in a safe after you, but did anything jump out at you? I don't know if anything in particular jumped out. I mean, I would say that final scene, I had a lot of questions about historical accuracy and whether or not he actually could have carried what he carried out to that crater

and done what he did at the crater. Ossif, what do you think? What jumps out? You know, I have to add a caveat. This is a movie. It's not a documentary. So I wasn't necessarily vigilant for these kinds of things. But some things stood out.

For example, the insides of the spacecraft, like the Gemini spacecraft, looked kind of grimy and dirty. And I think they were really clean. I think that was a directorial choice to depict these things as wickety machines. So there's kind of aesthetic choices that he made. But I think overall it's pretty accurate. There's little bits and pieces that he missed, for sure. And a lot of space nerds online are busy uncovering all this stuff.

But overall, I think it's pretty accurate, actually. What do you think of Buzz Aldrin? Is that a trick question? I've known him for years, so I have my own opinion. Well, we can say for sure that this was an exaggerated depiction of Buzz Aldrin in the late 60s. I don't think he would have said the things he said. But that was a choice, a kind of narrative choice from the writers. So, yeah, there's not much to say.

Obviously, he was not like that. But it served a story. Najee, do you agree? I think they did a really good job, especially with the interiors and the window, like details down to the window markings that they used for rendezvous and docking were there. So I really enjoyed that accuracy. There was one sort of technical piece that jumped out to me as a mission designer. When they actually did the trans lunar injection burn, they were pointed at the moon,

which means they would have missed it because it takes three days to get there. The moon's moving that whole time. You really have to aim in front of the moon by quite a bit. So it's like throwing a football in front of the receiver that's running. And so that one went, I kind of chuckled in the theater, but I refrain from commenting for my fellow moviegoers there. Well, you know, just to someone who watched it in real time when it happened, that was the media. That's how they portrayed it. They never really showed you the exact trajectories.

They just showed you how the thing would, you know, circulate around the moon and come back. Let's go to Syracuse, New York. Hi, Mark. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Hi, go ahead. So I remember distinctly watching the landing as an 11-year-old and being so excited in the afternoon to watch the LEM touchdown. And then in the morning, like one in the morning,

the spacewalk, as I recall, was moved up a good number of hours. So it was in the middle of the night. I remember waking up my eight-month-old brother and my year-old sister, so plopping them in front of the TV on my parents' bed so that they would be able to have bragging rights for the rest of their life that they actually watched it. But I was wondering, missing from the movie, was the emotional reasons why that was pushed up so much.

I mean, that I assume would give some insight also into Neil Armstrong's emotions at that moment. Amara Plato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Any reaction about how many? Yeah, from what I remember, the moonwalk was pushed ahead because the guys didn't want to wait. But this was a small operational decision, but I don't think it has to do with any kind of particular emotional issue. They just moved it up. They were there? Let's get this.

Yeah. I think they were supposed to take a nap, if I remember correctly. Kind of hard to sleep on the moon. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're all here. All my guess are space nerds of some kind. And what did it feel like to see that representation of the landing from the, from the,

the astronauts I view. Miriam Lee, go to you first. I was on the edge of my seat. It was so funny. I was like, I knew he was going to land. We all know he lands. But for some reason, I was just like, oh gosh, are they going to make it? I was nervous. I see. Yeah, you know, Equing Meriam, I mean, you know this is going to happen, but it was brilliantly portrayed, I thought, really wonderfully done. You got a sense of what was happening through all the jargon and why Armstrong moved ahead from this crater and what he had to do. I think it was a fairly accurate patrol. My understanding is there was somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds worth of propellant left on the vehicle when they actually touched down.

So I'm sure they were on the edge of the seat as they were doing it. Or standing, there weren't a seat. But it was very well portrayed that there was very high-risk maneuver that Neil was executing. Yeah, if I remember correctly, following over all the years, there was chaos going on back home, which I think you didn't see as much of because you were in the chaos. that much time watching. But the coolness of Neil Armstrong during this whole thing,

you know, hand guiding this down, and you see the fuel ticking down and he's not panicking and he's there, he's finding a spot, and he puts it down. I mean, it was, they captured that very well.

Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. And then the first step off, the famous one small step, No, he did not say one small step for a man. He said one small step for a man. Isn't there been some controversy about what he really said, Asif? Yeah, I mean, for years, yeah.

But I think we can say that, you know, I think the sentiment is more important than the preposition. But, yeah, we're not sure exactly what he said or what didn't say because there was static. I think he said at some point afterward that he said it was a man. Yeah, that was the intention. That was instant. And we look back at the space race this time when the nation and for the Apollo landing, the world was united in one vision. I remember all around, and they showed this in the film,

I cannot remember another moment since then where the whole world was watching one event together. And it was this sort of a unifying experience, Asif. Yeah, absolutely. I think people forget that there were actually, you know, a lot of Americans who were not, were not as enthusiastic about the space program in the 60s. But I think that one moment in July 69, I think there was kind of a cultural consensus. And this was one year after what I consider

the most terrible year, 1968, I ever have lived through. And then there was to have this kind of event that everybody was sitting united together because the country was so divided over the war. It feels a little bit like that now. That's sort of the same feeling. We're going to take a break and talk more about space travel and talk with my guess here about maybe if you saw the movie, please let us know our number 8447-8255.

You can also tweet us at sci-fi. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about Neil Armstrong as portrayed in the new movie First Man. From the personal hardships the astronaut overcame to the jarring, dizzying process of astronaut training. to how that story led to all the missions,

and since that unforgettable July night of 1969. My guests are Miriam Kramer's science editor at Mashabal. Najjad Marenzi's Human Exploration Mission Analysis Lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Asif Siddiqui, a history professor studying space exploration at Fordham. His most recent book is Beyond Earth, A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration. Our number is 844440. 4724-8255. We have lots of tweets that came in. Let's see what we get to, just a few of them.

Tweet from Glenn, it says, No one knows how much Russia put the first spacecraft in orbit or the first human. Where did this knowledge come from? How did it really get us into the space race? I asked you at the beginning of the hour to tell us what kind of film you would like to see that hasn't been made. I think that's his effort at explaining a film he would like to see. Let's go to the phones for another suggestion. and let's go to Allie and Cleveland.

Hi, Allie. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, I love your show. Glad to be on. Go ahead. Go ahead, Alan. Hello? Yes, go ahead.

Oh, I would love for some sort of biopic or something to be done about May Carol Gemison. You know, there are very few African Americans in space exploration, very few women. And she was the first African American woman to go into space exploration. And not only that, she just seems like a really cool person hanging out. out with. I mean, she's done dancing and acting and was on Star Trek, and she graduated high school at 16, and, you know, and she was very inspired by a civil rights movement. I just feel like she's just all around a really multifaceted, fascinating person to do a movie about, and I'd love to just see something about her. Mary, you're nodding very much in agreement.

Oh, yeah. Maye Jemison is very cool. I've met her a few times, and it's just always a treat to talk to her about her life. Can you tell us a little bit about her history at all? I think pretty much what the caller said is what I know of her. She's just a really interesting life filled with a lot of different things from science to the arts. Najee. On Mae Jemison, yeah, there's certainly a lot of background. She flew one of the shuttle blights, early ones for women, and I think there'd be a really interesting story to tell there.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that would be an amazing story. Her life is amazing. Then there's a tweet from Mappas says, how about the early women astronauts who didn't fly or perhaps what would happen would have happened if they did fly? Sounds like an interesting topic. There are all these behind-the-scenes stories, right?

Yeah, there are. I mean, I think that's the Mercury 13, right? So there, I believe, was some kind of Netflix series about them also, some kind of documentary series that was well regarded. Yeah. And all the people who were in that control room and all the other places and, you know, all kinds of stories. It's interesting. This is a movie about the Herogues of Astronauts nearly 50 years ago.

And it'll be 50 years since the moon landing next summer, which I'm having trouble getting my head around. And we also have Apollo 13. We have the right stuff. Why is Hollywood still talking about things? that happened 50 years ago and so much has happened since. What do you think? Yeah, that's a good question.

I think part of it is that, you know, Apollo landing on the moon, that was the big stuff. Like, that was the big stuff that human exploration has done in the last 50 years. I mean, the shuttle was exciting and incredible, but it wasn't as exciting and incredible as, like, actually going to the moon. So I think that it's a deep well that people keep coming back to because of that.

And that said, I think that there are plenty of stories to be told more in the here and now. I mean, I think the robots should get their due. Yeah, you know, that's right. When we were talking about this, I said all those robots, we don't hear any stories about the trials and tribulations of getting those robots. Yeah, and there are many of them. And there are many of them. And other places. Yeah, and you know what?

We also don't hear about any stories of any other countries in this. space race. There are so many other, ask if there are so many countries up there now. I mean, there is a story to be told the tweet about the Russians. I think that would be an epic story to tell

about their chief designer and all their travails and difficulties and the space dog Lika. There's many ways to enter into that story. But I would say that it's not all looking back in the past. If you look at movies like

Gravity and the Martian, And those are sort of maybe imagining a kind of alternative to these sort of looking backward movies. I think maybe there is something to be said about the interest in space in general. But I like to believe we're not just looking back. We're also imagining the future. What do they talk about at NASA these days about? So, well, our big project is actually trying to get back to the moon. So that's the Orion SLS programs and all of exploration systems development.

So, you know, really, I think once we can start. flying those flights, there will be a whole other crop of stories to be told. And one of the things I'd like to see, I don't think the general public really understands engineering and how all of these things take to develop. So on a personal level, I think it'd be great if someone could figure out how to tell what it takes to actually get to the flight for the astronauts to fly on it. Ben and Mesa, Arizona, welcome to Science Friday. Yes, thank you. My name's Ben. And yeah, I would think it'd be interesting. to make a film about the challenger accident from an engineering standpoint.

The engineers actually tried to stop the launch, and unfortunately, that did not happen. And in the end, it affected them in ways that many people didn't know. Of course, it killed the crew, but I think that many of the engineers have a story to tell as well. That's a good point. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that would be an amazing story. But I think there is a plan to make a movie about the Challenger mission, but focused on the school teacher, Crystal McColliffe.

But I imagine the decisions made the day before the launch, which were critical, will be depicted in some fashion in the movie, which were all engineering decisions, and I'm sure will be crucial to understanding the accident. Nizu, you mentioned the Orion mission that wants to get us back to the moon. Is it going to be easier because of the lessons we learned from Apollo? In a word, no. Getting to the moon is just as hard today as it was in the 1960s.

I mean, we know a little bit more. We have an experience base of one to draw from. But actually going to the moon, the mission is going to be just as risky. It's just as hard to do. The amount of prop we need when Neil said he wished for more prop, I wish for more prop every day as well. So it's not any easier getting to the moon, and it's just as risky the second time around. I remember after the Apollo missions were canceled, there were three rockets left over.

We only went to 17. It was supposed to be 20. I remember going to Houston and seeing them lying on their side. One lying outside is a home for nesting birds. And I never thought there was anything as sad as seeing a Saturn 5 being home for, you know, it's nice the birds had a place to nest, but it was the most sad. Fortunately, it's in a building now, and it's been restored. I know that.

I know that has been. Couldn't we just turn that, put it back in the vehicle assembly building and send that back to the moon? So the avionics are quite out of date at this point. I don't think we can control it anymore. What's the schedule for that, and do we have enough money? And is it going to be going? So we're working to a 2020 flight for the first launch of SOS and really the second launch of Orion. We launched in 2014 for the first flight of Orion.

And that'll be an uncrewed flight. We are going around the moon to a distant retrograde orbit, so it'll even go way past the moon, about 70,000 kilometers on the far side. And that will be a long mission just really to shake down all of the vehicle systems on SLS and Orion before we put crew on the next flight. So we're in progress. We have enough money, and it's just a challenge getting there. It's back to the future.

Yes, indeed. We do that. I want to thank all of you for taking time to be with us. It's going to be the 50th anniversary next year. It's really amazing. And we'll all be looking forward to seeing that Miriam Kramer's science editor at Mashable. Jut Marancy, Human Exploration Mission Analysis, lead in NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. Asif Siddiqui, a history professor studying space exploration at Fordham University here in the Bronx.

Yes. His most recent book, Proud Bronx, is Beyond Earth a chronicle of deep space exploration. Thank you all for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Thanks for having it. What's your favorite beetle song? I want to hold your hand in my life. Around Science Friday, this is our favor.

No, it's not a squeaky shoe, and it's not the Fab Four. We're talking about the fabulous horned Japanese rhinoceros beetle. That's what you heard in that clip, and these beetles have a very interesting courtship ritual. That's the topic of our latest macroscope video, You can watch it on our website at ScienceFriday.com. And here to tell us about that is Jillian Del Sol. She is a biology PhD student at the University of Montana in Missoula. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, thank you for having me. These aren't your typical beetles, are they? They're the size of an egg and they have horns. Yeah, they have big horns. What do the horns look like? The horns look like these kinds of. kind of thick pitch fork-shaped structures. They have two main prongs, and then those are also forked, so they have these four sharp

points on the end. And you have collected these beetles in the field. Where do you find them? You can find them all over Asia. They're most famous in Japan, but my study sites were in Taiwan and in a few places in Japan, including the small island of Yakushima. So these are not the Asian Longhorn Beatles that were. ravage the woods of America.

No, no. I'm just wanting to get that clear. Beatles use these horns when they're trying to woo a female in a kind of feat of strength contest, right? So that's the fascinating part about these songs, is that

we know that they use their horns, and their horns are important for fighting other males, especially fighting other males away from a sap territory, a food territory. But it seems as if the females don't actually pay any attention. to the horns themselves. So the males sing instead of using their horns with a female courtship at all.

I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So let me get this straight. They have these big, long horns, but to woo the females, you know, it makes sense that they sing instead. And that's the sound that we heard. Let's hear what, listen to the sound of the song. Well, Jillian, I guess to another beetle, that's love. Sure is. Can you decipher anything that's going on in the song, or is it just something that the other Beatles know about?

So right now, we're trying to figure out how the song might be connected to qualities of the male itself, like how big he is, maybe how much energy he has or how well-fed he is. because in courtship songs across the animal kingdom, think about the songbirds in your backyard. These songs and their complexity and their volume and all these other little details of the songs themselves are used to communicate something about the singer to the receiver, and from a male to a female, that might be saying,

hey, I'm big, I'm bad, I'm strong, or something like that. And so right now we're in the process of going through the recordings like you just heard that I've got in my lab to see if there's any patterns between big and small males, how fast they sing, how loud they sing, stuff like that. So you actually have a little Beatles recording studio? I sure do. I made it out of some sound absorbent material,

some nice foam on the inside, and I set up a whole little setup. It had a nice little piece of bark for the Beatles to hang out on and video camera. into microphone, so it was a legitimate setup. I'm fascinated about what they are doing to make that sound. How's that sound produced? So I personally think it's something very similar to a cricket or a grasshopper's

rasp and file. And so I think that there is sort of a ridged washboard structure on the abdomen that they're moving against a hard part of the wing covers, the actual, Elytra that you see on the back of the beetle. So I think they're moving that up and down across much like nails on a washboard. Another way that insects make squeaking sounds, though, is by forcing air out through holes in the abdomen through which they breathe called spiracles. So if you've ever seen a hissing cockroach, they don't have a mouth.

They don't produce that sound with any sort of mouth structure that's actually from their abdomen. So that's another possibility. So the whole ritual goes like, well, you have these two male big beetles with the big horns and they fight for the right to woo the female, the one who wins then plays her a song. Is that basically what we have going here? Yeah, basically.

And what else would you know, would you like to know about them? If I could give you my $64 question and an unlimited check, which I don't have, what would you do, what would you construct, how would you use it? What would you like to know? I would like to know, and this is what we're trying to figure out in the lab, but right now the biggest question is what are females looking for in males? And is it different than the competitive traits that we already know are important in the competition side of things?

Even in the Beatles community, that's what the question is. What are females? Of course. It's the $1 million question. It's the age old question. And so how many Beatles have you studied, do you think? Oh, gosh, over the years. Well, in our first population, we caught at least 800 males. In one summer, they were everywhere.

My old mentor described it as like a plague of beetles. I guess that's a good description of a group of beetles, a plague of beetle. Biblical proportions. Can't top that, Jillian. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Of course. Thank you. Gillian Del Sol is a biology PhD student at the University of Montana in Missoula. And you can watch Gillian and these Japanese rhinoceros beetles

in our latest macroscope video. It's up there at ScienceFriday.com. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, you like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcasts wherever you would like to get your podcasts. And if you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want.

So every day now is Science Friday. And we are in social communities everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. and you can also email us SciFri at ScienceFridy.com go to our website at ScienceFridy.com for all our educational materials. We have hundreds of videos up there. A lot of people don't know

about all the stuff we make for teachers. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.