StarTalk Radio - StarTalk All-Stars Season 2 Time Capsule

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

Discover some of the best moments from Season 2 of StarTalk All-Stars featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Chuck Nice, Carolyn Porco, Mike Massimino, Eugene Mirman, Heather Berlin, Seth Shostak, Maeve Higgins, and others discussing Mars, climate change, consciousness, Voyager 1, and more.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/startalk-all-stars-season-2-time-capsule/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. StarTalk All-Stars, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I also serve as the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. This year, we launched this brand new series to expand the reach of science and comedy through some of the world's best science communicators. Yeah, we found them, and we're giving them to you. Yeah, we found them, and we're giving them to you. And this week, with our special Time Capsule episode, we wrap up the first season and tip our hats to those hosts and guests who helped bring science down to Earth.

We sent out a survey to all our fans, and you came back to us with your favorite hosts, guests, and episodes. It's no surprise that your number one favorite all-star is StarTalk regular Bill Nye the Science Guy. He's been helping us out on StarTalk from its very beginning. And this year, he kicked off StarTalk All-Stars with an episode about, what else, climate change. Co-host Chuck Nice and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies chatted with him about the state of our climate in your number one favorite episode. Check it out. Paul Bunyan wants to know this, and he is at Matthew Birch. With the rising ocean levels due

to polar melt, how soon before the Hudson River becomes the Gulf of the Hudson? And let me just add an addendum, you know, to that. How soon will this have a verifiable and measurable effect on our coastal regions? Because when you look at all of the world, most people live on the coast of wherever. That's right. So already we're seeing uh um the number of coastal flooding days is increasing all up and down the east coast from miami to newport to uh to boston uh the uh storm surges that we're seeing when you have a storm wherever the storm is it's it it has more damage because the sea level has risen about a foot in the last 100 years. And it's increasing faster now than perhaps any time in the last 3,000 years. And that's because of polar melts. It's because the

water itself is getting warmer and so it's expanding. And it's happening right now. So they have an expression in Florida, nuisance flooding. Nuisance flooding. Nuisance flooding. Now, everybody, when you think of floods, you might get into some biblical thing where everybody's underwater in an enormous, hundreds of feet underwater, 100 meters underwater.

But the nuisance flooding, which is inducing insurance companies not to provide insurance to where you park your car because saltwater is getting in your wheel wells. It's just a few centimeters, a few inches deep. But if you put a few inches of water on the floor of your house, you ruin almost everything. You ruin the stove, you ruin all your furniture, you ruin your carpets, you ruin your bedding, you ruin everything. And so this expression nuisance is kind of shorthand for-

You're not in good hands. You're on your own. Yeah, yeah. And so I said to this guy, Mr. Hill, who's a legislator in Florida, I said, what are you going to do? He represents Pensacola, Florida, and they have nuisance flooding continually. I said, what are you going to do when everybody moves? They're going to move, he says. Where are they going to move to? How are they going to displace themselves? If you're a middle income or lower income person, how do you pick up everything? And where do you go to get a job and so on? And that's in the U.S., which is civilization. Wait till you're in the developing world where you just don't have resources.

Jeez. God. Man. Let's raise awareness, Chuck. Read another query. I'm going to raise awareness. God, this is really serious stuff. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. This is from Benjamin, who is at Benod3 on Twitter. Gavin said, I wasn't giving Twitter any love, so let's go to Twitter. Here's what he says. People emphasize negative aspects of climate change, but are there any foreseeable positives? Hmm. Well, so let me give you one. Please.

So I'm English. Do you know? I do, yes, yes. We hang out all the time at the palace. I do, yes, yes. We hang out all the time at the palace. And for many years, many years, there was such a thing as English wine,

and there was an old joke in Victorian... English wine? Yes, in the Victorian period, that it would take four people to drink English wine. One to drink the wine, two people to hold the person down, and another person to pour it into their throat. Pretty funny. Very troubling. Yes. Okay. But now it turns out that there are more vineyards in England than there have ever been in history. And in fact, that the over 500 years, thousands of years. Yes. We have records of vineyards in England going back to the

Doomsday Book over a thousand years ago. But there's more now. And the wine they're producing in blind tastings against champagne actually wins. So wine quality in England is actually now on a par with the best that the French can produce. Boy, the French people are going to be unglued about that situation. Absolutely. So, in fact, the champagne companies are buying up swaths

of what are called the South Downs in the UK because they know that the temperatures in champagne are now at the limit. So, if it gets much warmer in champagne region, they won't be able to make as good champagne there, and they're thinking about moving their production to the UK. So that will be a foreseeable benefit for English wine drinkers.

The UK is a little cooler. Yes, it's a little bit further north, but it's very similar soils, very similar terroir, and now it's actually happening. So there's your answer, Benjamin. The positive will be you get to piss off French winemakers. No, we're not going to see any more ice ages. The next one would have been due in about 30,000 or maybe 50,000 years.

Sorry, I'm going to miss it. Yeah, you are going to miss it. But it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen because the timescale for the carbon that we put into the system is hundreds of thousands of years and so no more ice ages no more ice age that is really a striking thing everybody no more ice ages yeah because we we make hilarious jokes about the ice ages i went to school in the finger lakes which were carved by uh glaciers coming south that's not going to happen anymore those were the days are the glaciers all the glaciers we not going to happen anymore. Those were the days. Are the glaciers, all the glaciers we know,

going to go away? So almost all the mountain glaciers that we know are receding, some of them quite dramatically. The only part of the planet where ice is pretty stable is East Antarctica, which is the biggest chunk of ice.

And that's very cold, very stable. And so that's the part that's going to stick around the longest uh but the other bits the ice on the antarctic peninsula greenland is losing mass at about 250 gigatons of uh of water a year um the west antarctic ice sheet is losing mass so everybody if you want to see glacier national park National Park, Forest Mudslide National Park, get going. So can we have three just major points, three major talking points, three tips that we can put out to kind of silence the climate-denying arguments? Well, my big thing is why do you really think that your intuition

about weather and about your whole life is more accurate at predicting the future than the world's climate scientists? And then to follow that up with, do you think the world's climate scientists are in a conspiracy? Gavin, are you in a conspiracy where you guys text each other?

Yes, well, we get signals from the vegetarian overlords. Oh, really? Oh, yes. When he says text, I was thinking, you know, f*** pics, but I'm sorry. Oh, wow. Sorry. Our talk is an entertainment show.

That escalated quickly. You know what? I can listen. I've been hanging with Brett Favre. What can I say? Wow. It's unexpected. But are there three tips?

Gavin, you got any ideas? Look at the evidence. The planet is warming. One. We understand why. Two. We're not stopping our emissions, so it's going to get worse. There you go.

It's that simple. So the whole thing is there's huge economic opportunities, I always say. If we didn't need to buy oil from the other side of the world, we had energy independence. It would free up all these resources here to do extraordinary things. And just think, if the United States or Britain could export this new technology, we could change the world. Next up, former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. Previously, you've heard him as my expert guest. But now he hosts the episode, Putting Humans on Mars, with co-host Maeve Higgins and science guest John Charles, the chief scientist at NASA's Human Research Program.

You didn't know they had a human research program, did you? Mike went to space not once, but twice. And he helped fix my Hubble Space Telescope. So yeah, he's kind of badass. And apparently you all agreed. You voted for Mike as one of your favorite StarTalk Radio Science guests, and you love him still, maybe even more, as a StarTalk All-Star. Check it out. Our goal is to keep people in sufficient condition that they can work as hard as they've ever worked in their entire lives because it's going to be required on the Mars mission to justify the truly tremendous expense and the multinational effort to get there. So our goal is not for you to get there to stumble down the

ladder and plant a flag and then, you know, scuffle a little dust with your boots and get back in the rocket and blast off. Our goal is for you to be on Mars for up to 18 months, working very, very hard, finding whether there's life on Mars, whether there ever was life on Mars, understanding Mars as a planet, and essentially justifying the expense of the mission. That's the challenge. So how long would the mission be altogether? Altogether, it's going to be 30 months, according to NASA's design reference mission. And bear in mind that this is not yet an approved program.

These are study parameters. But we expect a mission to Mars will be on the order of two and a half years, 30 months long with about a six-month or so transit there, which just coincidentally looks like a space station duration. 18 months on the planet. Talk about your layovers at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. This is an 18-month layover on Mars, and then a six- or seven-month transit back to Earth,

a total of two and a half years. John, this 30 months that it's going to take to get there, you explained six, six to go, 18 there, six back. There's only certain times we can go, or it could be even longer than that. But why are we looking at those lengths of time, and why aren't they not longer or shorter? Well, that's sort of the minimum inclusive mission.

The transit from Earth to Mars is dictated by orbital mechanics, and Earth and Mars have to be in the right position for the trajectory to get from one to Mars is dictated by orbital mechanics. And Earth and Mars have to be in the right position for the trajectory to get from one to the other. You'd hate to show up at Mars's orbit and Mars not be there. So there's only a certain number of times in the Earth year and the Mars year when they're in the right positions with each other.

And you can either... That would be so awkward if you showed up to Mars and Mars was not there. It would be disappointing. It would be like the worst barbecue ever. It'd be difficult to explain to Congress and your mom. But then you can either swing by Mars or just stay for maybe 30 days at the most

and then come back to Earth. But the launch window for that return is rapidly closing by the time you get there. And if you do execute that quick return, you have to swing back through the inner solar system as close to the sun as Venus, which brings in problems with radiation exposure and heating and stuff like that, and still takes a long time to get back to Earth. So there's really, if you think about it,

there's really not a convenient way to take a short trip to Mars. The shortest trip to Mars is going to be on the order of 500 days. And that's just a flyby, a swing past and then come straight back to Earth. And if it's going to justify, like I say, the expense of getting there, you may as well spend enough time there to do something meaningful. And that's really once you stay past the first 30 days or so, you're committed to the 18 months. Right. And that window, I mean, so there's a sweet spot of when you can do it that quickly and get there in that six months. If you miss that window, you're waiting for a while, aren't you? Right, exactly right. So there's these certain times when you can go and you can't miss the train. It's so stressful. I mean, when you say

that, like, do you know how much money has already been spent? Like, when you say it's like a multinational effort and all this expense so far, like, Do you have an idea of that money? Well, the expense is mostly up until now in research and development. So the space station is $100 billion worth of investment, as I'm understanding. Also the work in the Orion capsule, which will take the astronauts from the launch pad, presumably at Kennedy Space Center, up to the Mars transit vehicle and then bring them back again at the end of the mission. The space launch system, the next generation big rocket that's going to look like the Saturn V based on shuttle technology,

you know, all those things have several billion dollars a year in budgets, and they've been spending for several years. But, you know, the Mars program itself is still in the study phase, and so nobody has actually told us to go to mars yet we're it would essentially be illegal for nasa to send somebody to mars because congress has not authorized that particular expenditure so what we're doing congress has authorized us to research the problem and that's what we're doing now what are your main like research things you mentioned the radiation problem what else are you looking at well Well, other things are the psychological aspects. Imagine it's just you and four or five of your closest personal friends

locked up in a vehicle the size of, let's say, a Winnebago or two for two and a half years, face-to-face, with only each other to look at. And the longer the mission goes up until the halfway point, you're going to be getting further and further from Earth. I think it would be good if you could choose who you went with. No? If it was like me, Michael Fassbender. I mean, who would you go with, Mike?

I'd go with you. You want to go? John will go. They don't usually do that, though. You don't get to pick. No. That's why we have bosses. They pick. And then you say, what the heck? So that's probably going to be the tradition will continue. How did they put these guys together?

But, you know, John, we're going to move on to our cosmic query section. And we've got some related questions from our audience that Maeve will hit us up with now. So here's a question. What kinds of people should be sent to Mars? And psychologists, journalists, medical doctors, what do you think, John? Well, my answer to that is NASA does a pretty good job of picking astronauts,

and I'm not just brown-nosing with Mike here, but it seems like that NASA can find people that are jet pilot, concert pianist, neurosurgeon, gourmet chefs, and you're going to need that kind of skill mix with a small group of people going to Mars, let's say four or five or six people. You're going to want to have people that can do everything. Even a botanist might be a good idea. There's probably going to be at least one doctor in the crew, probably several people trained at the emergency medical tech level. But you need to have people that are going to be good at fixing things because inevitably things will break.

And there are people that are just good at fixing things. And that's probably going to be the most important person on the crew. All right. It's time for the lightning round. Okay. Rapid fire. So, John, are you ready? I'm ready.

Okay. So, Maeve's going to answer this question. I'm going to hit this bell. I think I'm just going to hit it whenever I want, but apparently there's some method to it. When I'm going to hit this thing, it's really great. You know, I rode my bike here today, and this bell drives people crazy. I have a bell on my bike.

In New York City, it's necessary because people are always in the way. Get out of the way, and you just do this. Hey, do you wear your space helmet when you're on your bike? No, I wear a bike helmet, and I need more than that. It's one of the most dangerous things. I'm glad I got here. Same. New York City's dangerous. Alright, on bicycle. Alright, so here we go. We're going to

do this. I'm going to ring this bell, I guess, for the next question or whenever appropriate. Hit us. Lightning round. Okay. This question is from Jonathan Laird and he is asking Mike and then after I'm going to put the question to you, John, if given the opportunity, would you personally like to be among the first humans to colonize, move to, or visit Mars?

Two parts. Yes, I want to go visit and I want to come home. John? Mike, I don't want to go to Mars. I would like to go to the moon and I would like to go to the space station, but Mars is too far away and too dirty. There you have it. You don't want to go to Mars. He wants to send other people there. What kind

of example is that? Scratch that answer. You want to send everybody else. The guy that knows most about it wants to send somebody else. There's something wrong with that. All right. It's too far away. Okay. The next one is from Brandon, and he contacted us on Snapchat. This question,

John, this is for you. Could we use artificial gravity by either spinning a habitation unit around a central support or by counterweighting it with another mass? Yes. Yes, the answer is yes and we're studying that. The Human Research Program is investigating whether that's a good way to provide countermeasures for people

in space and whether it's cost effective. So yes, yes, yes. Great. There was a bell. Go. Troy Hsu on Snapchat. What should mankind's first words on Mars be? A reference to Armstrong or not? What do you think, Mike? What do I think? Neil Armstrong thought of that stuff

after he landed on the moon because he didn't want to get distracted. What? Do you know that story, John? That's right. He asked that question. He did not get a publicist. His wife, no one thought of that.

He took care of it after he landed. So I think what you should do is get there first and then be inspired. Welcome back to StarTalk All-Stars. On this time capsule episode, we're revisiting some of your favorite moments from the very first season of that new series. Planetary scientist David Grinspoon has been a friend of StarTalk for a long time, and we like to call him Dr. Funky Spoon, in part because that's his Twitter handle. But holding that aside, on this episode, Visualizing Our Universe, David takes over the hosting seat to chat with co-host Chuck Nice and studio guest Carter Emmard. He's

director of astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History, one of the coolest titles you could ever have on a business card. So here's the cool thing about having Carter here is when I saw that we were going to do a Cosmic Queries for astrovisualization, and you know, Cosmic Queries is where we take questions from all over the internet and whatever incarnation where we exist as StarTalk. And our fans ask us things that they want to know. And I saw that that's what we were going to be talking about.

And the first question I had was, what the hell is astrovisualization? Because I had never heard of it before. And, of course, I had to go do some research. But, Carter, this is fascinating stuff. Explain yourself, sir. Exactly. Well, essentially, it's a way using modern technology and display and data visualization

hooked into immersive theater, which the planetarium has always been as a recreation of night sky. But now with video control, controlled by computers, essentially you're staring up into your entire visible field a construction of the universe as best that we know of.

In other words, to visualize essentially that information to move through it and do that accurately. And also through simulations of astrophysics, the talk about the behavior or the simulate, try to simulate the behavior of the universe across time. Nice. So now, and from what I've seen that you have done,

I mean, it kind of, would it be kind of weird or crazy to call it kind of like a Google Maps of the universe? Well, that's exactly what it is. Okay, good. So I'm not crazy. You may be crazy, but you got that one just right. Well, you know what? That's probably more the case, David.

I am still crazy, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. One of the great things about being Carter's friend, in addition to his colleague, is that sometimes he'll take some of us after hours into, and he basically calls it his spaceship, and he's even called it his holodeck. Nice. And it is, that is what you have. You have a holodeck. I kind of like to make a joke. If you have a holodeck, then you don't need the starship. That's so true, yeah. But in a way, that's really true, and that's what the job is about. So now what constitutes a holodeck?

Just for the uninitiated. It's to give you a virtual. It's a Star Trek reference for the really uninitiated, which is the room they can go in and basically simulate any sensory experience. Sure, sure. So I'd say, okay. Carter's almost there. We're almost there.

Visually, it's an immersion in the data, in the map, essentially. So if you look at the traditional planetarium, it stars on the ceiling. You can point out the Big Dipper and Orion and the motion of the, sort of a diurnal motion of the sky. The stars rise and set, carries the sun along with it, the moon and, you know, the phases of the moon and the planets and all that. And that's our view from the earth. It's amazing that the ancients were able to sort of figure out at all that we go around the sun because the sun obviously goes around us every day, you know, and that the planets go around. And that we live in this broader geography called the galaxy, and then the galaxy is just one of many.

Okay, so we sort of have all that information. So plotting it accurately and moving out into the data and moving through it is that you see it three-dimensionally. So you feel as though you're in the presence of, you are, you're in the presence of that data. And that's what we do. So the dome is the immersive theater that surrounds us. And then we can move out. We can move away from the earth.

We can fly over the surface of planets that we have information for. Mars, we have tremendous information for. Moon, Mercury, certainly our own planet. And Mars is something that's very interesting because we have this tremendous campaign in support of eventually humans going there and so forth. But we have a six terabyte data set that you can fly over. It's a big laptop right there. It's essentially about three quarters of Mars down to the size of a two car garage, six meters. Wow. And we can fly for hours over just one section of the canyon.

And you get lost. And you can also go to boring parts of Mars, you know, more flat. But the thing is- I love that, the boring part of Mars. Well, there are- As if. But you'd be surprised, a lot of it's just flat and featureless. Coming back to the holodeck is just this notion that we have a tremendous, tremendous mountain of data that's on the ground. It's in NASA's Planetary Data Service, the PDS.

And it's a matter of taking that information, contextualizing it. I've had an army of high school students who have taken basically the stereo images from the micro imager. It's on the arm of the solar powered rovers. There's a spirit and opportunity. And opportunity is still going. We're not messing with the Curiosity rover data yet

because it tends to be under scientific embargo. But you're able to take the dual images and use data or use software from NASA to synthesize that into accurate 3D models. And then we have to contextualize where they are. But in that sense, we're essentially looking so close, only like three centimeters, so just over an inch, these tiny little targets on Mars,

you can see all this incredible detail on a rock, on a planet that no one's been to. Right. This is what NASA does, is it reaches out there, and the European Space Agency, the space agencies of the world, we're going to these other places, and we're bringing this back. It's our job and obligation to put that into a context

that everyone can see. Now, let me tell you, I just said that what you just described really is like being there in a much more fundamental way than a planetarium show used to be. That leads me to want to ask you a question that's slightly more philosophical, which is, I mean, you and I both are children of Apollo. We grew up dreaming about space and going into space in 2001, a space odyssey, and that was going to be the future in our life. And neither one of us has gotten to go into space yet. We're getting a little bit older. Who knows what's going to happen? Well, join me after the show, fellas, and I have a little something for you. Excellent. Look forward to that. But I guess what I want to know is, on the other hand, you've gotten more and more into this visualization and this ability to go there in this way that is not quite being there bodily, but it's more being there than just looking at pictures.

And I've heard you say things like, well, we don't need a spacecraft because we've got a holodeck. And you're kind of joking. But I also get the sense that there's a way in which maybe you feel that this is a valid way for human beings to experience space and that we can send our unmanned spacecraft there, sorry, our unhumaned, our robotic spacecraft, our unpiloted spacecraft. They're not just unmanned, they're unwomanned too, so let's say unpiloted. But we can send our spacecraft there and they gather the data, really good data, and then we visualize it. And it's as if we're going there, but we don't need to send our frail human bodies there. So do you feel like that is, in a way, the space exploration of the future?

To some degree, yes. Especially when you get beyond the solar system. Cosmochemist Natalie Starkey first joined StarTalk as a science guest on a StarTalk live show at the Beacon Theater here in New York City. And our audience loved her so much, we just had to bring her back. And we did. This time as a StarTalk All-Star. She's joined in studio with co-host Chuck Nice and planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton

in this episode, Searching for Space Water. Okay, this is Chris Jacobs coming to us from Twitter. And Chris wants to know this. Do you think we'll be mining from asteroids or meteors in the very near future? It's a good question because we have now landed with Philae. Yeah. So how far are we from actually going in and mining? Yeah, that's really debatable because, I mean, it's something that we've, it's kind of come to the

forefront in the last few years. And there's a couple of kind of private companies that are now looking at actually doing space mining. Now, originally, I think they were saying it was going to happen really soon. And I think as scientists, we all stood there going, wow, okay, they're going to do this really quickly. And that's as scientists, we all stood there going, wow, okay, they're going to do this really quickly. And that's going to be very, very impressive if they can do it. And I think their plans have been slightly scaled back when they realized that actually it is going to be a little bit trickier than they thought. They've got to get the funding together. But the potential is that if they were to be able to mine these things, the return economically is enormous. So,

to mine these things, the return economically is enormous. So a small investment to start with, you know, we're still talking billions of dollars, but you could potentially release many, many more billions of, you know, from these asteroids. And that's because, you know, of course, you being a geologist, inside of these asteroids are the same elements that we find here on Earth. Exactly. Which means the rare elements, the ones that are really expensive, we might be able to find crap loads of those. There's so much up there. And quite a lot of the precious metals are so important on Earth

for making a lot of our electronics. Right. And there's a finite amount on Earth. We're going to use it up. It's in seams and stuff, and it's concentrated in different areas. That's why we mine in different areas on the surface. But with an asteroid, there's tons of this material. So the potential is that,

I mean, there's every potential that we can mine these things, but it's just going to be a case of time and economics. And then we've got to decide how much we need, say platinum, how much we need the platinum. And if we've run out on Earth, what price it's got to on Earth and whether it's going to be economical

to go into space and make this happen. So I think it is going to happen in the future. And I think it's going to be a case of, hopefully, what I hope is private companies working with space agencies so that we get some scientific return from this, but we also get whatever we need economically. So, yeah, do you have anything to add, Lindy?

Yeah, I can't resist. So they are thinking, they've got even models for how they could go to a rocky asteroid, take some of that miracle water that's trapped in the minerals and heat it up to release the water. So it's feasible. It's not economically viable yet, like you say, but the thing I like to think about, we're trying to go to an iron, a metal asteroid right now with a mission to look at it.

And if we could bring that back to Earth, you're right, it would be the equivalent of all the metals we've ever needed. But then you don't really make billions and billions of dollars because what you do is you collapse the global market. Yeah, because suddenly you have too much of it. Right, because from an economic standpoint, if we had a crap load of gold here on Earth, gold would no longer be

valuable. Yeah, so we'd have to kind of retain it. So there'd have to be organizations that retained it and released it as we needed it. Otherwise, there'd be no cost to it. The fact is you would own the asteroid and then you would release the gold as necessary. So you would basically corner the market on whatever it is, platinum, gold, or whatever it is. And then you would determine how much you're going to release to set the price for it. And then there's other problems with who owns this stuff,

because it's space, you know. We understand Earth, we fight over who owns bits of the Earth, and that's bad enough. But we're going to space, well, who owns the stuff? So if a private company goes up, a U.S. company, is it a U.S. asteroid then? Is it all U.S. resources, or is it the global, you know? All I know is if I land on that asteroid, that's that asteroid. It's yours.

That's my asteroid. And if you think it's not, you can kiss my asteroid, okay? Very good. All right, let's move on. Let's move on. Lucas M. Rodriguez. And he wants to know, which of the two icy moons is more likely to support life in your opinion europa or

enceladus oh that's a good one okay so which one of those two moons from those two planets is more likely to have life that is so you know i could not decide actually between those they're both quite i'm gonna say highly likely to they've got the right conditions almost so i i don't know do you have any do you have an idea i i don't know i think both could i can't immediately think of a reason why one would be more likely than the other but the the thing that troubles me about it is that the very most likely place for there to be life on them is at the bottom of the water ocean next to the rock. And how we will ever

detect that, I don't know. Well, I mean, can we just, so we've got to get through the ice, they've both got an ice layer, I guess, on the outside. So we've got to get through the ice with some kind of spacecraft and drop it in and then get that to get to the bottom of that ocean. It's not very

easy because if it's deep, you know, we find it hard to get to the bottom of our own ocean. We can that to get to the bottom of that ocean. It's not very easy because if it's deep, you know, we find it hard to get to the bottom of our own ocean. We can't even get to the bottom of our own ocean. So the pressures are crazy. The conditions are going to be not very conducive to, you know, getting, you know, to get transmitting a signal back and to understand what's there. So, yes, I guess it's going to be hard for us to tell.

Yeah, well, there you have it, Lucas. You have just given our two scientists a Sophie's choice. They cannot decide. Okay. Both my babies must die. I can't decide. All right. That is fantastic. What is our next question? We'll come. Wait, let me see, because I know we're running out of time. We are, we are. I saw a cool question from someone from the United Emirates.

Oh my God. What they wanted to know was, can we make a substitute for water so that when we are traveling to someplace else, instead of having a way station, can we make a substitute for water for both here on Earth and for space travel? And I'll look for their name

while you guys answer that. Okay, but I guess it... Yes, okay, I get the question. But it's understanding why we need water and what water does on Earth. And water acts as a solvent and it basically allows us for reactions to happen. And there are other solvents as liquids

that can exist in the solar system that could do the same job. But we wouldn't be able to drink them or survive on them. But that doesn't mean that other life forms couldn't, but we just haven't seen those life forms yet. We have like just a little bit of time, Lindy. Do you want to add anything to this? No, I think you nailed it. There's nothing else that will do it for people but water. Yeah. So water is it. I mean, we could make a substitute, but, you know, why would you? Right? Yeah.

That's really the deal. Exactly. But it doesn't mean that other organisms can, other organisms elsewhere, alien organisms might not need water. That's the thing. They need something that's liquid that probably that is not going to boil away and not going to freeze too easily that they can survive and inform it. Gotcha. And by the way, it came from, okay, here's the name,

Shirag Jangla. Oh, brilliant. From Dubai and the United Arab Emirates. Wow. And they've got, you know, quite a lot of desert there, not much water going on there. Can you just imagine

why someone from Dubai might ask a question of, can we make a substitute for water? I know. Because I'm so tired of eating sand. They've made a city out of sand. We're back on StarTalk All Stars. You're listening to a

special edition, our first ever time capsule episode of this brand new spinoff of Star Talk. We sent out a survey to our fans asking you to select your favorite hosts and episodes, and you did. Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco is leader of the imaging science team of the Cassini mission, currently in orbit around Saturn. I call her Madam Saturn, Saturn being my second favorite planet. First, of course, is Earth. But she's got the job maybe I always wanted

because then I'd be in love with Saturn my whole life and I'd get to look at pictures of it all the time. On this episode of StarTalk All-Stars, Listening for Aliens, Carolyn takes the driver's seat with a little help from co-host Chuck Nice and science guest Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist of the SETI at Home program.

I initiated just a few years ago my own message to the Milky Way. We were going to construct a message. And, you know, is the idea really that someone's going to pick this up? Well, who knows? But it's really more to get the humanity on Earth to be more cosmically aware, to realize they are one planet in a big galaxy that might be teeming with life and so on. But I know that the Breakthrough Listen Project doesn't think that this is a good idea, and they don't like groups like, I'm not taking this personally, but they don't like groups like

mine to take it upon ourselves to put a message together and use the Arecibo telescope. So why don't you weigh in on this and say why this is such a hot topic? Right. So, as you pointed out, it's very controversial. Their informal polls indicate that about 99% of astronomers think that it's a bad idea to transmit. Now, we're not talking about if we receive a message, should we transmit, but just should we take the first action of transmitting messages? Now, of course, earthlings, as you know, transmit all the time.

There's radio and television. But you're talking about deliberate, pointed, powerful transmissions. And most people think that's a bad idea, that we're an emerging kind of primitive civilization. We should listen at first and see what's out there before we deliberately transmit messages. Maybe in a thousand years or so, after we learn a little bit more about the universe,

then we could think about transmitting. But most people think it's a dangerous or potentially dangerous thing to do. Why is it dangerous? Why is it dangerous? So some people say that, oh, all the advanced civilizations are going to be peaceful and they've learned to live together in peace and they're not going to harm us or rape our daughters or mine all our planet or blow us up. But we really don't know. I mean, that's sort of – maybe that's naive thinking.

We just don't know what's out there. So there is some danger because we just really don't know what other civilizations are like. So most people think that if you want to transmit, you shouldn't just do it, take it upon yourself to transmit a message. But there should be what we call the Asilomar process where if you're doing some dangerous thing in science, like researching viruses or doing kind of genetic engineering that's potentially dangerous, then there's a process that scientists go through where they talk about the potential risks, figure out how to kind of contain some of those risks, what the potential benefits are. So we think that this is a potentially dangerous thing that should be an international body of all kinds of people from different disciplines should get together, take a few years to figure this thing out. What are the potential risks? What are the dangers?

What are the potential benefits? So far, the messages that have been sent by Earthlings have been not scientific messages. They've been mostly publicity stunts or fundraising stunts. Nobody's actually done a scientific experiment where they send a message out and then maybe the thing is 10 light years away. So they wait for 20 years because it takes 10 years to get there and then 10 years to get back. And then they listen. Nobody's done any kind of science. It's so far been just sort of publicity. Most people think that it's a bad idea because of the potential dangers.

Stephen Hawking is one of the people that's. And that's because, you know, I'm a Star Trek fan. And so probably one of the most famous Star Trek episodes is The Borg. And The Borg had no idea that Earthlings or Terrans existed. But then they got a message, basically message basically that said hey these guys are and then they were like we will not stop until you are all destroyed okay but i i'm on the other side of this you see i'm thinking i i mean i don't know can i say this on radio you all sound like you're members of the national rifle association you know mean, there's no reason to be that paranoid. First of all,

there's an argument. It's not new with me. And I'm sorry, I meant to come prepared with the guy who wrote this. There's actually a paper on this. But there's an argument to be made that if in a civilization were that aggressive, they probably would have destroyed themselves long before they ever got here and also that the time scales the time scales are so long uh and right now like you said we're pretty i mean sure the arecibo could get uh reasonably far and i was planning to use arecibo but um i i just think it's it-the-top paranoid. I think that you're right, and here's why. For this reason and this reason alone,

to find out that you are not alone, I think you would be so happy to go and say hi to somebody. Just because when you look at the vastness of the universe, and then you see oh my god there's some people over there like that would be so exciting that i don't believe like let me go and conquer them would be the thing that would pop into your mind especially if you're advanced enough to actually make your way there and get and get to them dan i think that that's i think you're probably both right that it's unlikely that advanced civilizations are going to be dangerous to us.

But the problem is we really, it's a very difficult thing to say, yeah, absolutely, we know that for sure. There are no dangerous civilizations out there that conquer the galaxy. So we just don't know. So I think you need some kind of a Selimar process. The Academy of Sciences from all over the world should get together and assess the dangers. And it shouldn't be up to a single individual to put Earth at risk. But after you go through that process and try to assess the risks and the possible benefits, then if they say it's okay, there are risks and i'm all for it or if the risks

are minor well right now we just don't know i wish that this kind of care that you are hoping to see with regard to this issue had been applied to things like um the use of fossil fuels and all the you know the technologies that have really come back to harm our environment yeah but just because other people have made mistakes with technology doesn't mean that we should do that too. I think... But Dan, the chances, the chances, it's such a low, low probability. It's like maybe

high risk, low probability. It's one of those, falls in that category. I just don't think you should put Earth at risk even if with a low probability. I think, you know, maybe there's a 1% chance that you could wipe out all of civilization. Are you willing to take that risk? No, wait.

It's way lower than 1%. Listen, life might be better under the alien overlords. One of your favorite episodes featured not one, but two all-star hosts. Astrophysicists Summer Ashe and Emily Rice. Reclaiming the hashtag Women Crush Wednesday on their episode, Women Crushing It Wednesday, to celebrate women in science. Co-host Chuck Nice joined them in studio to help them answer your cosmic queries. Let's take a listen. The thing is with science, it tends to be like the higher you get the the the more imbalanced it becomes yeah the less the normalization happens and so for whatever

reason there's some people call it a leaky pipeline and the idea is that you have this pipeline from you know student through to professor and that the women drop out for some reason and the men don't drop out gotcha um and so now that i'm an assistant professor like i'm one of, I'm the only female physicist in my department. And there's a couple other female engineers and a female geologist. And that's out of, you know, two dozen faculty members. So that's a little bit disappointing. You know, but you try to find your tribe a little bit. Like you try to find people that also care about changing the representation.

And I steal it from Shonda Rhimes actually normalizing it. It's not diversifying because we don't just want, you know, we don't want like a rainbow box of crayons just for the sake of having a rainbow. Like we want to normalize it. We want to have science be representative of the population as a whole. Because that's actually a scientific thing.

If you have a random sample of, you know, people that want to go into science, if you randomly draw from people, then science, you know, people that are scientists should represent the overall population. If you don't, if you have only, for example, white males becoming scientists, you have some kind of selection bias. There are scientific

words for that. And yet people say, oh, but women aren't interested. And, you know, other people don't have the education or something like that. And it's like, no, there's, it's a selection bias. And, you know, there's a large enough population where we should be able to randomize these things out. And so that it would be reflected in the actual field. Yeah. The field would reflect the population. Yeah. Summer, you have anything?

Yeah, I just want to add like for motivation, you know, what motivates me is that now because of the internet, there's all these social channels and social communities. And so even if your institution is very imbalanced with women or minorities, you can find those other people that are like you out there in those other departments and so then it's kind of like Emily said you know

you find your group and I'm motivated every day by the work that they're also trying to do to change how everything is in science and in the world in general and so that and that's a way that you can cheer each other on and that's a way that you can cheer each other on. And that's a way that you can also just discover that there are so many other amazing people out there. Like I've discovered so many amazing women crushing it in science on social media. And that, it sounds to me like what you're both, uh, the common thread through what you both have just said is that a community is a big, uh, a big, big, big help in overcoming any of these challenges.

Yeah. All right. We're doing Women Crushing It Wednesday. Questions from our Cosmic Queries audience. And this is Jay Birchfield. And Jay wants to know this. What seems to be the biggest barriers for women entering STEM fields? Do these barriers seem to be getting any smaller?

So what are the biggest barriers and are there hope when it comes to the barriers being removed? Some people say that there's barriers in terms of inspiring girls to be interested in science. Some people think that girls and women just naturally aren't interested in science, which I think is totally wrong. I think like everybody is born naturally curious. But somehow women and girls tend to get discouraged away from it more than men are for some reason it feels like.

And maybe it's a little bit of these kind of unconscious biases. It's also a little bit of, I think, self-doubt that women tend to have more than men have where they think, oh, I have to be smart to be a scientist and so I'm not that smart, I'm not going to bother. It's also been shown that women tend to have a little bit higher expectations for themselves. Like they think, you know, maybe in classes,

like, oh, I have to get an A or else I'm not any good at this. Or I have to, they underestimate their skills and they kind of overestimate their expectations. Whereas a dude might- Men overestimate everything. Yeah. Seriously. And not be bothered by underperforming. No, they really aren't.

They'll be like a C student and be like, well, I can be a physicist and a- I can be president. It's happened, people. I wish you were a C student. A woman might get a B and be like, oh, I'm not any good at this or something like that and switch to something that she might think is easier. And then it kind of gets harder from there at various different levels. But I think most of the barriers are not actually

scientific, but they're cultural. So they're cultural, social barriers, psychological barriers. And do you see them, the second part of the question was, do you see them getting better? Is there any empirical evidence that we are getting better at inspiring women going into STEM? Yeah, the empirical evidence is there,

right? It's the participation. Okay, there you go. Right, and the achievements. the empirical evidence is there, right? It's the participation. Okay, there you go. Right, and the achievements. And, you know, the participation is increasing, not uniformly across the fields and not as fast as we would like it to,

but it's there. Cool.