StarTalk Radio - StarTalk Live at Town Hall with Buzz Aldrin (Part 2)

Episode Date: September 22, 2013

Join the crew of StarTalk Live – Commander Neil deGrasse Tyson, Co-Pilot Eugene Mirman Buzz Aldrin, John Oliver and Andrew Chaikin – as they conclude their exploratory mission to Town Hall. 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. We are live from Town Hall, Midtown New York. Welcome back to StarTalk Live. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York, where I also serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium. And I've got with me Eugene Merman, comedian extraordinaire. Eugene, thank you. And with me is John Oliver, England's gift to America. And John, you got this regular gig on The Daily Show. I do. That's right. Normally it would be cool, but I am sitting with an astronaut. So it only compounds the failure that the six-year-old version of myself. Annie Shanken, you've become a journalist in your later years, an author, writing about space, and a geologist by background, a planetary geologist.

Welcome to StarTalk Live. Thank you. A geologist by background, a planetary geologist, welcome to StarTalk Live. Thank you. The one, the only, the truly inimitable, Buzz Aldrin, ladies and gentlemen. So Buzz, in the 1950s and 60s, everybody expected we'd be on Mars by like 1980 given the trajectory we were on were you disappointed yeah but I knew we weren't going to do that because that's what Spiro Agnew said Spiro Agnew said exactly what well after we came back from the moon there was a space task study group and he headed up and he said if we really work hard and spend a lot of money maybe we could get to mars 1980 85 if we're kind of

lackadaisical about it it may take until 1995 we were super lax. Do you think that what America always needs is the threat that someone else might do something first? Because it seems like part of the space program you were able to do, well done by the way, was in competition with the Russians. Do you think it's going to take someone, be it

China or Britain, we could still do it? I'm trying to help you guys. Do you think if's going to take someone with be it China or Britain we could still do it I'm trying to help you do you think if we Britain said we're going to Mars America would say no We're gonna get there. What do you think America would just laugh and say that's sweet Maggie Thatcher kind of screwed you guys up well in so many more ways than I can even get into many more ways than I can even get into now. Wouldn't you hook up with her? Do you think that would be the best thing for a pioneering American space program?

The threat that China may go to Mars first? Or Al-Qaeda. If only bin Laden were hiding on Mars. Do you think then there would be the popular will to no know we need to do that first? Whatever we do, I think we should have a solid plan that leads to U.S. leadership in what we're doing. But Buzz, you admitted that in the 1960s, we were followers, not leaders.

We reacted to everything Russia did. So John's point has got to be taken seriously. Here's the thing, and I'm putting on my historian hat. We went to the moon for the first time as a substitute for fighting a shooting war with the Soviet Union. Good thing. Glad we did it. But it was funded like a war. And we won that war. We got there ahead of the Soviets. The money flowed like rivers.

Money was a river. And in fact, it ended up paying for a lot of other stuff like the Mars landing with Viking and the Voyager Grand Tour of the outer solar system. But then once that was gone, once the political imperative bank to do things like going back to the moon and going to Mars. You ever heard of SLS? Yeah, it's a mistake, I think. Right. My feeling. I can tell by everybody.

What's SLS? Tell them. It's the Senate Launch System. Well, that's the nickname. It's the Space Launch System, but everybody calls it the Senate Launch System because the Senate basically rammed Well, that's the nickname. It's the space launch system, but everybody calls it the Senate launch system because the Senate basically rammed it down NASA's throat and said, you will build this huge

booster and it will cost a billion dollars per launch. Buzz disagrees, but go on. They mandated, that means they made certain, they passed the law, that it would be constructed of heritage components right now that's a fancy word for old stuff right right that let's see we actually

agree on their jobs so that the senators can get the votes and our space program is it going to be run by senators who want to get elected at the next election or based on a solid american leadership the first one sadly i'm afraid you're right unless you're provoked yeah yeah. Unless America is provoked into looking beyond those things. As a bigger, longer dream. Buzz, our panel here is in consensus when we say we do not have the incentive to lead unless someone is chasing us in some kind of way that freaks us out. Or where we feel threatened economically, culturally, socially, militaristically. If that doesn't happen, I don't think the evidence shows that we're going to go anywhere. But there's other definitions

of leadership. Why can't we lead in developing lower cost ways of getting into space? Because no one will get elected. That's right. But I think if the Tea Party tomorrow said, we're going to space, the rest of America would be like, we're going to beat you there. Just one plan, the same thing went work.

Delaware did it. So you want to be your own pace setter then? Yeah. Stephen Hawking, about a year and a half ago, say that the earth has about 200 years before it should establish a colony off earth to guarantee the survival of the human race. Why did he say that? He's worried about asteroids and runaway viruses and stuff that will render us extinct, and he wants to protect the human genome.

But what does that guy know? Not a... Oh, everything. Okay, sold. I just worry that if, in fact, we do colonize another planet, then the asteroid's ready to render one of them extinct. Does the other planet just say, bye? Well, how about the billions of people that are there? What don't I rather do?

Rather than think that that's going to solve our problem, whatever effort it is required to colonize another planet, it's got to be easier to deflect the asteroid. If you know about it in enough advance warning. The big ones, you know about it. The ones that can render us extinct, we got them. Except for comets. I would put enough money to save the human race with both options.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry if that's insane. Let's put a few people on the moon, some on Mars, and then also a big laser gun. Just give all... Give all the money to Bruce Willis. He's done it once, he'll do it again. He's got our back. Yippee-ki-yay, Mother Asteroid. That's exactly what we said. Everyone knows there are dangers going to Mars.

The time you're away from Earth, who knows what that means in terms of your physiology. from Earth. Who knows what that means in terms of your physiology. Suppose you catch some disease, and you didn't happen to bring that medicine cabinet with you for that problem. And plus there's the radiation from the sun. What is your plan? To go to Mars with your colony,

who never wants to come back, and have them stay alive? No one is legally bound to stay. It's different. They signed the document. They might want to come back. There's no cows. There's no potato plants. How are they going to survive? We're going to have to terraform Mars first. No, no.

You can put in an order and it'll get delivered two years later. Seamless web in space. You owe me $1 million, seamless web. Call me tomorrow. So you're literally talking about, like, you know, room service or delivery. Chinese takeout, right? I think they'd be fine with any ethnicity. I'm talking about building a base there before you ever go down and land.

Now, we didn't do that in Nepal. Right, there was nothing. We just landed and we took what we brought with us. You built the base robotically before you sent it. Yeah, from Phobos. Less than a second away. Oh, okay, so this is setting up an advanced team on the moon of Mars, Phobos, where you're not dealing with all the problems of landing, but you can radio control.

You can drive the rovers around on Mars from Phobos. And why can't we drive the rovers around on mars yeah the first from phobos and why can't we drive them drive the rovers from here we can because it takes four minutes or longer if it's closest to us same side to get a message there watch out for the cliff doesn't work because of the travel time of the radio signal you lose your hardware and there's another problem psychologically with that because you know when mars is on the opposite side of the sun from us and even when it's close it's it's anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes one way to send a radio signal so you will not have a real-time conversation the whole time you're away from earth and on mars when you're on mars and the earth everybody you know every place you've

ever been is just that star in the sky. What's that going to do psychologically? He's saying it's not any different from the pilgrims. You pitch tent with the people you went there with. The pilgrims didn't know that America was not like Mars. Like they were just like. Yeah, but Mars doesn't look like, you know, trees and rivers. All right, so Buzz, you're saying there'd be cargo with food and supplies. They'd be sent from Earth. it'd be like the care package yeah start growing things start growing things yeah

and it doesn't get very hot over the sun beaming for 14 days the way it does on the moon right it's about 24 hours a little bit more than that so a day on the moon is 29 days, day and night. And a day on Mars is like Earth, 24 hours. So would we have Mars cows, Mars farm animals? I don't think so. They would need spacesuits. That's a funny picture.

Try milking a cow in a space suit wait how would they have enough water that's a i mean you went just for eight days so i could imagine that but how would you have enough water to not come back to earth there's a lot of water on mars and you can see it on the North Pole and the South Pole. Oh, you could go and get it. It's got ice caps. Well, no, it's down underneath. Even below the surface at lower latitudes, you can drill down for it. And it's water like our water is, or it's water like it's irradiated and you'll get a Martian flu that you didn't bring the medicine cabinet for.

Or you just drop a little iodine like it's the Appalachian Trail are pretty sure I'm pretty sure h2o is h2o wherever in the universe and you're pretty sure it's h2o on Mars and not like h2o almost what we can drink oops I'm dead there is something called co2 yeah Yeah, yeah, don't drink that. No, that's... That will make you gassy. It's colder than water, right? How would we maintain the attention of people on Earth? Because we've proven ourselves over the last 50 years to have a great capacity for being jaded with stuff almost instantly. So you think about the Apollo programs. jaded with stuff almost instantly so you think about the Apollo programs we went to the moon a few times and that seems to be all it took people to go oh yeah

that thing we do how would we get a colony on Mars to entertain us enough so we wouldn't just assume oh yeah there's that colony I wonder what they've been up to probably that cow weird cow milking thing yeah that was fun the third time I saw it and then I just got bored. Do you think we're the kind of nation that's going to send people to some place at Mars and then forget it? Not to forget it,

but I worry that part of a space program now is, the key is how to entertain people. It's depressing as it is to say how to entertain people here enough to sustain their interest because we've become such appalling human beings Have you got some tapes of your?

comedic I would like to know what it felt like to completely die on another planet But what are your views on terraforming? die on another planet. Buzz, what are your views on terraforming? Takes a long time to do it. So you don't think that's a realistic between step? Well, I think you can gradually

modify things. You can get the soil and you can put some water on it and probably grow things. I'm convinced you can. Okay. Yeah. You'd have to do it over the whole planet and have the plan on our oxy like a greenhouse Oh a bubble a hab module of some kind yeah you know can you remind you to you're telling us can you remind us what terraform is okay sure terror terror terror that's here they did like

star trek 3 where they were like the searchers but they're like the genesis program duh this is star trek that's what it's so so that is what it is yeah i'm just reminding you that it was okay on that job to the memory i definitely blow up a planet and turn it into Earth, and then the clones are like, ah! So the Genesis planet, where the Genesis plan was they could take a planet and turn it into an oasis, an Eden, if you will, and then you'd come in after and live there. Okay. So Carl Sagan's idea was that you would sprinkle very, very fine black dust

on the south polar cap, which is made out of frozen carbon dioxide it would absorb more heat from the sun it would that evaporate into the atmosphere because being white it reflects most of its energy from the sun right make it a little dark it absorbs and so you liberate all that frozen co2 to go into the atmosphere you thicken up the atmosphere and then you can start making mars more earth-like but in fact you thicken it with co2 which is a greenhouse gas trapping more solar energy warming up the martian temperature but so here's two problems with that mars is only half the size of the earth and it has three 38 percent of the gravity so how does it hold on to that atmosphere and it has no magnetic field to speak of so the solar wind these subatomic particles from the sun, are sandblasting that atmosphere away.

So even if you can evaporate all that CO2 into the air, how do you keep it? Okay, so terraforming has issues, but to Buzz's point, if you make a bubble, the bubble is insulated, and that's like the Earth bubble. Right? That's the Earth bubble. Then you put your cows in there, and you don't have to milk them. Dome cities. You're living in dome cities. Dome cities the dome up air pressure yeah do you think do you think that people would come you've we've seen the pictures of what mars looks like and i you know i

love mars as a planet as much as anybody but to look at it every day with the brown dust and the brown sky which is the dust floating in the air. You think people would learn to love that? People who came from the earth, their children, their grandchildren, would they start to feel like that's home? They will be the most remembered, the most talked about pioneers that have ever set foot on Earth because they pioneered something that nobody ever did,

and they carried it out. The leader who makes a commitment for human beings on the planet Earth. How long we've been here? We came down from the trees, whatever, and we've done kind of piddling things, but all of a sudden a couple of cool things i think yeah yeah her is 5 000 years old but anyway thousands

thousands of years in the future the person on earth that kind of pushed human beings to go and establish a settlement that began to grow and grow you don't think that's a small thing in the history of mankind oh i do but i think i'm asking for the people who are actually living on mars yeah will they feel that they are happy they'll be happy in their lives more movies written about them more books and everything? I think it's like Laika the dog. Laika died, but it was a mutt stray dog running through the streets of Moscow, and now it's more famous than Lassie. So if I were a mutt dog, I would want to die in space

because people would talk about me. They'll be the velvet underground of space exploration. If only that dog could understand the concept of fame and not just the concept of, oh my God, what's want to go to Mars? No. No? No.

You're writing books about sending people to Mars one way. Why can't you go to Mars? It's not one way. It's permanent, settled. It's a movement outward. So why don't you want to be on that first colony? I'm not going to be around that long. If you were around that long, would you go?

Probably not. What? But how many people are there here on Earth? Billions and billions. There are a bunch of crazies that would want to go and do that. You want to send crazy people. You want to send Donald Trump. Wealthy, crazy, fame seeker.

Donald Trump, Chad Ochoacinco. It's quite a team that you could put on up there. I want to see what the hair does in zero gravity. Oh, that would be good, yeah. All right, so to Buzz's point, there was a, was it a survey or some kind of a poll taken? And people were asked, if we could send you on a one-way trip to Mars, would you go? And there was no shortage of people who wanted to go. And perhaps not all of them are crazy.

They just like the adventure. Like the people who dangle off of cliff faces and climb Mount Everest. Like they'd want to do something where their life is at risk. Would you do that? You ask me. I mean, you've got to do something in this life of yours. Oh, wow. You really should have been looking at us when you said that. I'm trying, but... He just talked to you like your parents

at Thanksgiving. Come on, Neil. Do something. It was an expensive education we paid for. You can't play with planetariums the whole life. Do something, Neil. I'm looking at a dome over you. If I could bring my family and get a good Netflix account and some books.

Ten minutes for it to get there. My wife is very well educated. We can both totally space school, account and some books because ten minutes for it to get there my wife is very well educated we can both totally space school space home school spaceship school our kids so then it's a family trip i could totally do that yeah but your kids would be furious yeah we know all this math now We have no access to any movies before right this moment. Teach us again how great Earth was. Yeah.

Buzz, three years ago, I was asked by the News Hour, their online edition, to tell them what I thought were the biggest news stories of the year in science. Are they still waiting? So they expected, I think, a traditional response. Oh, the discovery of this. A month before they asked me that question, this is December, Russia came out with an announcement that they were going to fund a mission to deflect asteroid Apophis. This is a 300 meter class asteroid the size of the Rose Bowl that pretty much has Earth in its sights. And I thought that was the biggest news story of the year because they went around saying, who's going to join us? And America said, yeah, we'll join you. And I thought, wait a minute, something's wrong. Or something doesn't feel right about that because

it means somebody else is leaving a space mission and we're following. And I'll share your sentiment here, where I think it's better to lead, particularly if you have the talent and the resources and the finance. Lead! Especially if the consequence is you save Earth. You could have Guantanamo Bay if you'd save the Earth. So Buzz, how do we use your celebrity to get America to lead again? Do something that nobody else is going to do. Do what Dennis Tito is saying he's going to do.

He's going to fly around Mars. If you do it, you're a leader. Yeah, but that's, you know you know no as they said in my neighborhood you know i can't repeat it here but what's the gist of it though what's the gist of it the gist of it is if something walks and something else talks money talks and yeah yeah and bologna sandwiches so i'm asking is he going to succeed it one thing to lead, to say you're going to lead, and then you just die. All right? You know, how about Arnold Schmednick, who was the first person to go to the new world, and then a hurricane took him?

We never heard of him. Wait a minute. There he is in the bottom of the ocean. We're not even talking about another possibility. Why can't this be an international effort? Why do we have to do it alone? To get it done. What? It won't get done.

The thing is, there is something in that, though. The way you talk about harnessing asteroids and so on, I'm sure it all sounds fiscally very smart, and maybe we can go up a little bit cheaper, but there is something about doing something borderline insane that does actually inspire people. Going to the moon was crazy. That was what was so incredible about it. Going around Mars barely makes any sense, so it's kind of...

It's inherently inspirational. So having the way Buzz talks is always going to inspire in a way that we could do it cheaper or we could harness energy does not have the same impact. Saying we'll do it because we'll do it and it'll be great and we're going to do it and it's going to be fine. I will follow him. You seem

great. So Don, your thesis is the crazier the idea, the more audacious the idea, the more power it has of influence. That's what America is built on. It's built on doing something that makes almost no sense to anyone else at the time. Certainly not to England. Yeah, it made no sense.

We just wanted a little bit of tax. Anyway, I don't want to go on. What you did was unforgivable, but that's not the point. so buzz you like the audacious idea absolutely nothing ventured nothing game give me five audacious ideas do you want to visit europa not yet not yet that's too far away. The moon was far away in 1962. Sending people one way to Mars wasn't audacious enough for you? No, I want to hear more. I mean, the colony on Mars, that's audacious. The reformation of the original Guns N' Roses.

That just... Okay, so that's two. That's it. So, third one. That just shows how jaded we get, though. Because he's proposing a colony on Mars, and you want four other ideas. Let's do that. You can't be bored by that.

Sure, that's one buzz. One is fine when it's that. But here's the thing about Mars that's so neat, and this is something that Ray Bradbury pointed out. When you go to Mars, if you can make it on Mars, baby, you can make it anywhere, because you've got the cord with Earth. You have become a multi-planet species, and from there, you're on your way to the stars.

Once you get the hang of living on Mars, if you can solve all those problems, then the rest of the solar system opens up. So Mars is the easiest. Yeah, so Mars is the easiest. It's the closest, it's the most Earth-like. What we learned during the Voyager missions, those old enough in the audience might remember,

there were two Voyager missions, and they had enough energy of motion to actually escape the solar system entirely. They're still going. And to their side was attached messages for what we might define as intelligent aliens who would find the craft. And it also gave our return address here, which is a bit controversial because you don't give your email address to people you don't want. And here we're giving the address of the solar system. You think Facebook is yeah yeah yeah so the point is it was a fortuitous time in the solar system where the spaceship could do sort of triple bank turns around multiple planets and get close-up

views before it exited the solar system from my memory of that era that was the first time we gave meaning to the moons of the giant planets. That's right. We realized that one moon has a volcano, this has an atmosphere. Not just a volcano, it's the most volcanic world in the solar system. That would be Io, I guess. That's right. Io around Jupiter.

Around Jupiter. So have you thought about moons? Habitable moons? I mean, why not? No, I've thought about stars. Stars! Stars! Stars! So how do you get to another star?

In your lifetime. The speed of Voyager? At that speed? It will get to the nearest stars in 75,000 years. That's somewhat longer than a human life expectancy. Okay, so how do you pull this off? Gravity waves. When I wrote my science fiction story, it was zero point energy. But that isn't as jazzy as gravity waves.

Maybe the emphasis there is on the word fiction in science fiction, is it not? The only problem is in the study of gravity waves, China is ahead of us. That's the best thing that could happen. So who would have thought there's a gravity wave gap in the international politics? So just to clarify, zero point energy in the vacuum of space where there is nothing, quantum physics requires that there are fluctuations in the energy level of nothing. And there's some expectation, particularly from people who would like to write a science fiction story on it, that you can tap that energy rising up into your grasp in the vacuum of space without having to carry fuel tanks with you. So you want to surf a gravity wave.

So you want to surf a gravity wave. You get the gravity wave in front of you to be a little lower and the one behind and you. The fabric of space and time can be distorted in the presence of mass or any kind of energy at all. And so if you rapidly disrupt a region of space time, you can send a ripple through the fabric of space-time. It's a three-dimensional ripple that goes out in all directions. So you get two of them, one a little more energetic than the one in front of you, just like Buzz says, in principle, if you know how to ride that ripple, you will go at the speed of light to wherever you want to go. But there's still an issue here.

Space is really, really, really big. Vast. Expansive. Possibly infinite. you want to go but there's still an issue here space is really really really big vast expansive possibly infinite and a gravity wave only goes at the speed of light so if i want to visit the other side of the galaxy a hundred thousand light years away and i send you and i'm waiting for you to call back you don't even get there for a hundred thousand years are gravity waves the thing that can be made or real in any way is it just science gravity waves exist we know what makes them we don't have the power to make them the way nature makes them but it's certainly legitimate material for a science fiction is it something that we could eventually make if we we... Maybe. We would need much more energy

than anything we could possibly dig out under the sands of the Middle East. So, I like that. How about if you frack? Can you frack a gravity wave? Can you frack a gravity wave? I think we just started a band. In the news, Dennis Tito wants to send to, what's the latest on this? So Dennis Tito had a news conference today.

to send to what's the latest on this so dennis tito had a news conference today he announced that he and his group want to send a man and a woman from the earth to loop around mars and come back in 2018 he is going to put 100 million dollars of his own money into the project he wants to get the rest by public donations the rest would be most of the money. $100 million is nothing. Yeah. $100 million. Oh, sorry, that big spread. When you go into space, do you realize when the space shuttle, if it can't land in Florida because it's, like, thunderstorming and it's got to go to Edwards Air Force Base and it's got to stay in orbit another day it's a hundred million dollars just the extra day it's in space it's a insane kickstarter

campaign we're talking about unimaginable yeah right yeah okay so what is it how does he get the money then so one possible way is there's a fellow named Elon Musk, who maybe you guys know about Tesla motor cars. He also has a rocket company called SpaceX. So SpaceX is the company that is trying to lower the cost of getting into space. They're about to do their second cargo flight to the space station. He's going to develop a human carrying version of that capsule. And I think what Tito wants to do is something like, maybe with Musk's company or maybe with a different company, a capsule on a big rocket and maybe stick an inflatable habitat at the other end of the capsule. Send the capsule and the habitat off to Mars. Once you leave the Earth, you're committed.

You ain't coming back for 500 days. And it's got to happen in 2018 because of the way the planets have lined up to make it the minimum energy requirements. And you aim it just right so that you loop around Mars and the gravity of Mars bends your flight path to come back to the Earth. And just to remind people, you are not aiming for where Mars is. You're aiming for where it will be when you arrive. But they'll have GPS or something. That's right. Do you want to double check his math?

A small correction. What's that? You don't want to double check his math? A small correction. What's that? You don't want to hit Mars. You want to go past it. You want to aim for slightly near where Mars was. I think it's a neat idea, but I mean he wants to do this in 2018.

Is he going? No, he is not going. He's picked why a man and a woman. The funds. That's heteronormal I think is the word. Is that the word? You should pick just any people who want to do it. Yeah. Do what?

Nothing. I don't want to say it. If no one here knows. But there's a super fun thing people can do. The idea is that the two people are romantically compatible. Yes. And he also made the point he would like them to have had children and to have been older. Because, of course, it is likely to make you infertile that trip. So he wants an older couple.

The radiation. The radiation. Zap your gonads. This is radiation. Now you get it. But not Zap the Fun. So just to clarify. That's an important clarification.

So we're not talking about. It slips in physics in. So just to clarify, the sun gives us not only light, and that light brings warmth. It sends charged particles of very high energy racing off of its surface. And sometimes those come in huge pulses and they're called solar flares that's actually not the problem with a mission in 2018 because the sun will be at a minimum okay of activity well i'm just trying to say what happens when the particles get here but why is that bad that's bad because the sun's solar wind acts to

screen out galactic cosmic rays when the sun is active. So if the sun is at a minimum of activity, it means you've got a bigger threat from galactic cosmic rays, which, you know, solar flare particles will kill you if you're exposed to them in a matter of days. Galactic cosmic rays increase your lifetime risk of cancer over many, many years. And which one of those rays makes you the Hulk? That's what people want to know. So it's risky. So we're going to tell Columbus to go back.

Don't do that because the world is flat. I'm saying how do you do it? How do you make a machine that will be reliable enough to function for 500 days without spare parts from Earth? Buzz, in 1962, did we know how to go to the moon in 1962? No. No. There's your answer.

Oh, come on. That's your answer. That's a very facile answer. Facile. Facile. But if we had tried to send somebody to the moon, we decided to go in 61. If we tried to send somebody to the moon in 64 or 65 and they died, how well would that have gone over? We took all that time to figure out how to go in a way that wouldn't kill people.

Kill joy. Okay. So it's not that we couldn't figure out a way to get there. It has to be like human safe. Well, it has to be reason. You know, one of the comparisons that people use is it should be about like climbing Mount Everest. You know?

The risk factor. The risk factor. You climb Everest. You know, what is it should be about like climbing mount everest you know the risk factor you climb everest you know what is it one in 20 people one in 50 people don't come back we should have guys that are already there sherpas and mars that bring them here and they guide us on our little walk to mars and they're like oh you're adorable i thought we're gonna parachute to parachute people onto the top of the moon. I think it's a spectacular idea for the long-term future of humanity, but I think we've got to do the groundwork. So that we don't die.

So that we don't become sterile. So that we have food. Kind of interferes with having a colony. I kind of agree with Buzz. Columbus didn't know there'd be land. Why am I not surprised? Columbus didn't know there'd be land. Why am I not surprised? Columbus didn't know there'd be trees. He didn't know anything. He just knew it was

India, and here he is. And it worked out fine. This is StarTalk Live at the Town Hall, everybody!