StarTalk Radio - StarTalk Live! from SF Sketchfest 2016 (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 25, 2016

We’re going to Mars! Join commander Bill Nye and executive officer Eugene Mirman as we explore the Red Planet with NASA Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green, “The Martian” author Andy Weir, and Maeve Higgins. RECORDED LIVE, ADULT LANGUAGE. 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. Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye the Science Guy! Eugene, one-armed guy hug. Eugene Merman, ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, kids of all ages, we have a fabulous show tonight, an amazing show. We are all going to leave this room, spiritually, and go to Mars.

Yes. The man who created mark watney the man who wrote the book about being the martian give it up for andy weir i'm reluctant to say this is the funniest woman on earth but she may very well be mave higgins thank you bill all Thank you, Bill! Alright! Then straight from the best brand the United States has, from the Science Mission Directorate Division for Planetary Science,

Jim Green! Jim, thank you! So, Andy Weir, you created this amazing character, Mark Watney, who's, I know a woman who's just super hot for this guy. Not for Matt Damon, but for Mark Watney. Well, I'm, I mean, he's based on me, so.

Just, you know. Now, you wrote this book, you started out online? Yeah. Originally, I wrote The Martian as just a series of blog posts. Who was reading it? Well, I'd accumulated about 3,000 regular readers over the course of 10 years of making like web comics and short stories and stuff like that. And so they were my regular readers and they were a bunch of hardcore dorks like me.

And so... There's one in the wild now. There's one now. And so when I was writing it, I knew I had to be as scientifically accurate as possible because there's nothing a nerd likes more than calling out scientific inaccuracies. So, I know, it's true.

That's hot. Do you still get people coming up to you and going like, that's not how you'd go to Mars. Sort of, right? Well, but Jim and I have worked things out now, so it's good. So along that line, Jim, you spent a lot of time with Mars. You were there for, you ran Curiosity Landing. Yes, I did.

You ran Messenger, which we brought into Mercury. Yeah, absolutely. And I was there for the launch of Juno. J-U-N-O is not an acronym. It's crazy. Well, it's Jupiter's wife. Yeah, yeah. And you know all the moons that orbit Jupiter

are named after, in mythology, named after Jupiter's lovers? Like the ones he was cheating on his wife with? And now Juno's going to head on over there. And she's going to kick some ass, I think. So Juno's on her way. Not to get too far apart. Aren't there 60 moons

of Jupiter? Zeus slash Jupiter. He was a busy guy, if you look up the... About 90 percent of 90 percent of roman mythology is like jupiter no and jupiter's like jupiter yes so uh so speaking of of gods mars is named after the god of war which is very troublesome why was it named after the god of war well that's a Roman name. You know, prior to that, the Greeks named it Ares. Was that the god of war?

Yeah. But it's because it's okay so red. Yeah, it's blood red. It's blood red. Blood red. And you can see it, of course, in January. Beautiful alignment. Go on out, take a look at it,

just before the sun comes up. Yes! So not yet, everybody. Wait. You need to hold on. You're out at 1030. Stick around. Stay in your seats.

You've got time. Who's called you Mark? That happens so often, and it's awesome when it's in live radio interviews, too, because you can't just, can't correct him. This is live. So Mark, this is live, too, because you can't just correct them. This is live. So, Mark, this is live, too. So, you finished this novel in 2011, and who approached you? Ridley Scott.

Who approached you? Yeah, he just knocked on my door. No. Ridley Scott. No. Initially, no one approached me. I self-published it. So, basically, I had been putting it on my website a chapter at a time until I was done. And I thought, okay, I'm done. We're done with this. On to my next project.

And then I got emails. But didn't you have a job during all this? Yeah, I was a computer programmer the whole time. So this was my hobby. Somebody whistled, wow! Computer programmer? Now they're interested. I'll tell you why base classes always need virtual destructors later

the number of people who left those are the ones who got it this is Silicon Valley okay so

it's very specific comedy it's very specific comedy so I figured I was done move on to other serials other short stories

and then I got email from people saying like oh hey I love your story but I hate your website which is reasonable because it's crap and it's just really yeah oh yeah he's a programmer just remember yeah I'm a

programmer not a graphics guy and so they said can you make an e-reader version so I can just download it and read it on my e-reader and so I figured out how to do that and I did you have an income stream for this messing around no this was all just fun my income stream was from being a Silicon Valley software engineer, which is pretty good. Don't worry about me. I did that. I said, okay, here's an e-reader version. Now you can read it on my site for free or download the e-reader version. Then other people contacted, emailed and said, like, hey, love the Martian, hate your site. And I noticed that you have an e-reader version, but I'm not very technically

savvy, and I don't know how to download a thing from the internet. So can you make a movie for me to watch? Does everybody know what happened? Okay. There's a few. Do you guys know what happened? You create a character. You create a whole crew of characters. They're on Mars when it's around 2035 or something like that. Yeah, it's good you checked your watch. Yeah, yeah. It's like Marsha time.

And it's also, it tells the future. Tomorrow there will be a 7549. There will be. 754. Two of them. Was there a reason that you chose 2035? Yeah, actually I did all the orbital trajectory analysis and calculation to figure out the best time to go to Mars with the ship that I designed.

Nerd man! Yeah. Yes! I wrote software to do it. It had to be there in Thanksgiving. What's that? It had to be there in November. My constraints were that I wanted to be far enough in the future

that it makes sense for the Ares program to have developed in the intervening time. Ares is the name of the rocket. Yeah, Ares is the name of the ship, or the program, actually. The name of the ship that took him there is Hermes, who is the messenger of the gods. Within Greek mythology, he goes from one god to another. And makes those beautiful scarves in his downtime. Yeah, Hermes.

Yes, he's Hermes. So talented. That was funny because if you watch the movie, in a few places, they call it Hermes. Yes, he's Hermes. So talented. That was funny because if you watch the movie, in a few places they call it Hermes because Ridley Scott directed it and he says Hermes instead of Hermes. Why does he say that? And he also says Martinez instead of Martinez.

But anyway. Are there British people here? Anybody Scottish people? Can we talk? Can we talk back? I Maeve, you know. Can we talk back? If I wake you up in the middle of the night, do you talk the way that people do?

You mean is her accent... Do you talk the way real people do? Ask me that again. You mean, am I dreaming in my accent? No, no, yeah. I mean, do you put it on just for us? No, he really... Oh, like is this this elaborate character

that I've been doing for 34 years? It's a conspiracy among millions and millions of Irish people. What could make us more adorable? No, it's just... I also want to know... So anyway, these guys end up on Mars.

Well, wait, I got one other question for you. What other things would happen if he woke you up in the middle of the night? He's just there, you know. He's right there. I guess, I mean, I'd be surprised. And, I mean, we work together. It's not really, yeah, I guess.

Appropriate? Yeah, it would be inappropriate. But then, like, he's very well-known. I'm at the beginning of my career. Yeah can work it out I really hope my boyfriend hears this I'm not so sure I do so Andy these guys the crew ends up on Mars and something goes horribly wrong and one guy gets left behind. And we spend a book, a movie, trying to resolve this issue. I don't want to give too much away, but Matt Damon plays the lead character.

And he makes it to the end. Okay, he doesn't. Spoiler. I'm sorry. Spoiler. Yeah. Okay, he doesn't... Spoiler! Spoiler!

I'm sorry. Spoiler! Yeah. But... Andy, what drives you? What makes you want to do this? About half the people are just storming out in anger. I had no idea.

What drives me to do this? Well, I mean, I've been a space dork my whole life. I was pretty much doomed to be one. My father's a physicist. My mother's an engineer. The space... I mean, when I was a kid, the space shuttle program was new and exciting, which was probably going to make some people feel kind of old.

I'm all right. Go back to sleep. It's back in my day. Back in your day. For you guys, when you were kids, the space program was Chinese people inventing gunpowder, right? I mean, but so. And Captain Kirk fabricated it. Yes, that's right. To defeat the Gorn, I believe.

Defeat the Gorn. And so I've always been a science dork, and I've always loved this stuff. And I came up with this idea for an astronaut stranded on Mars. But I wanted everything to be physically accurate, just because I always get taken out of a story when I see some blatant physical inaccuracy. The book is fairly accurate, too, right? Or very accurate? Oh, the book's delightful in many ways.

But, you know... Sorry, I meant to say, is the book delightful scientifically? Oh, it is. Oh. Sorry. I meant to say, is the book delightful scientifically? Let me think about that. So, you know, it's science fiction. There are things in the book that, you know, we don't find on Mars. Not yet, anyway.

Might happen someday. Exemplary gradient, for example. Well, Matt Damon's not on there. Yeah. But there is a guy from Boston. Probably buried. Is that what you meant? Buried somewhere in Mars? Yeah, from the Big Dig.

Turns out that's where Jimmy Hoffa is. The dust storm. The dust storm. Okay, you know, Mars has famous dust storms. They go global sometimes. You can see them with, you know, Mars has famous dust storms. They go, you know, global sometimes. You can see them with telescopes from Earth, right? Yeah, absolutely. And they look gnarly from space sometimes.

But in reality, the pressure is so low. How low is it? It's very low. It's about 1,200. 1,200 atmosphere. Yeah. 1,200 atmosphere, roughly. About a percent of what we have, you know.

And so, although the winds can be pretty hefty, it can be 120 miles an hour, but that's not enough to straighten an American flag, let alone blow away a radio dish. Because there's so few molecules going that way. Right, that's right. So did you have trouble watching the movie with all

its lies then? No, absolutely not. Were you like, another lie, another lie. Stop lying to me, absolutely not. Will you like another lie? Another lie? Stop lying to me, Ridley. Are you going to put it on Ridley? Alright. I could. Freaking Ridley.

Now, what you gotta do... That book looks accurate, delightfully so. Delightfully so. But you gotta check the science at the door and go on in and enjoy it it's it's enjoyable it's great you know i do that kind of stuff all day long why do i want to sit in the theater and think about some more of it andy as nerd man you had to work out some serious scientific problems yeah i did um yes absolutely the uh the dust storm is or the sandstorm is inaccurate, and I knew that at the time.

I just didn't care. I wanted a good reason to strand them there, and at the time I wrote it, most people didn't know that. Like, most people thought that a sandstorm on Mars, but then because The Martian got so popular and became a very popular movie and then got a bunch of scientists talking about it, now everybody knows a dust storm on Mars can't do that. So I shot myself in the foot.

It was cool do that blew the thing over you couldn't see right oh man yeah what are those chunks by the way they were coming out yeah yeah you know I don't know space debris it's one of my favorite things is how JPL almost ruined everything when I what you know I wrote the book it was done it was already in final editing I can't make any more changes other than, like, copy editing, you know. And, like, at that point, like, they were deciding they had it down to the final four candidates of where they were going to land Curiosity. They eventually landed it, you know, near Mount Sharp and Gale Crater.

But, you know, Mount Sharp, Gale Crater. On Mars, you know. Yeah, on Mars. The big one. Right, on Mars. Which is thousands and thousands of kilometers away from all the things that happen in the Martian, not a problem. One of the final four candidates on where they were thinking about landing it

was Marth Vallis, which Mark drives through. Like, I specifically call it out in the book. He drives through this ravine, Marth Vallis. He would have had to have gone around the rover to keep going. And I'm like, oh, you guys are killing me with your stupid real time. And then my favorite little... It's like they didn't even take that into account. It's like they...

You know, nobody asked me. Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking. Sorry about that. Yeah, I know. So, Jim, what am I saying? You made the final decision. No, actually, I didn't. But we were down to the last four and I loved any one of

those so so my boss did and that was Ed Weiler at the time and Everybody this is the real guy. That's all I'm saying. This is the so Just so we're clear Just so we're clear the character in the book think, the character in the book, Venkat Kapoor, who is in the movie Vincent Kapoor, he holds that position in the real NASA. So if you're curious, that's who he is. Your tax dollars at work.

That's right. And they work, too. One other, my favorite little stories of space research screwing with me is the University of Arizona that runs the HiRISE instrument. High-resolution camera. Apparently we have like four of their alumni here today. Four people who are great at clapping. They just got the joke Bill made ten minutes ago. In the book.

Yeah, well, they're U of book, I give the exact latitude and longitude of the hab. The hab is the hab. The habitat, the base where most of the Martian takes place, where Mark Watney is stranded, where they are. The habitat. The habitat. Habitats. Habitat.

Yeah. And so I described the terrain as being kind of flat and sandy. There's not much going on in Massadalia Planitia. It's a large, empty desert and stuff like that. And the guys who run HiRISE are like, let's check. And so they did these super HiRISE photos of the HAB's location on the real Mars. And they're like, well, that's nothing like he described it yeah but Ridley got it right you know because yeah beautiful craters right right around where that have would be yeah and

and the scenery looks great yeah it does those people must hate Star Wars so they don't have good resolution on galaxies far far away they don't have we don't have a camera for that yeah yeah we're working on it okay thank you so the guy's on mars he's got a lot of food because there were supposed to be six people but he's only one yeah um and they left in book, they left after six days of a planned 31-day mission, and they had redundant food supplies. So he had enough food to last about 400 souls. A soul is a day on Mars for the four of you who don't know that. And, well, three of you and one of her, I guess.

Wait, I know it is that, but why is that? Why is it called a soul? Soul is Latin for sun. It just means, because day is an ambiguous term. Day to scientists means the time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis, just Earth. So Mars rotating on its axis, that's one Martian soul. I remember during the disco era. A different soul. That's right.

The soul train. Tell us what Studio 54 was like, Bill. I don't remember, man. He was there. Bill, the science high guy. Bill, Bill, Bill. Stereotype.

You don't always do that well with the ladies. The stereotypical male in here. I know, it's shocking. What's worse is a computer programmer, by the way. I'm a computer programmer and I wrote a book about Mars, so... Keep it calm, ladies. That's right. To that end, we're going to take a break and StarTalk will be back right after this. So we've been talking about Mars, Mars, Mars.

Hypothetically, the Martian, the movie, the book, this hypothetical character living, surviving on this hostile world. But Andy, when Vikingiking landed on mars 1976 a saw was this hip new word and the length of a day a saw on mars is very much like an earth the earth right yeah so if a guy's gonna find a way to come up with some new food source he's gonna have sunlight yep um but that's not uh not really what our uh hero new food source he's gonna have sunlight yep but that's not not really what our hero does I mean he's he's inside the house so he used the lighting of the hab to help grow because it's a much less sunlight you're

one and a half times far away right and but he had a huge solar farm so effectively he's it's rather inefficient but he didn't have a lot of equipment to work with, so he's collecting energy with the solar farm and then using it to power lights inside the hatch. What should he have done? What should he have done? Well, he did exactly what I would have done. However, you know...

Sorry. You are so diplomatic. I really enjoy that about you. He's a massive voice. You know how to get more funding. So, you guys, you just don't know. As CEO of the Planetary Society, I can tell you there was a great deal to that little insight. This is diplomacy man right here.

So what would you do? Would you not send... Well, I would definitely have the imagers see his dead body on Ares 3. I'm playing my part on the movie. Sorry about that. But, you know, the soil,

the soil where curiosity is, is very acidic. And so asparagus would grow nice. And, oh, my God, asparagus for 500 days. And his pee would just know myself bad wait it really would asparagus would grow in the acidic soil so in the alkaline souls uh the potatoes would grow better so just you guys everybody he grows potatoes that's how he lives through it yeah

spoiler spoiler yeah we've literally ruined the movie for you. Well, what I love is... It's only going to get worse, I'm afraid. So another one of those great things where NASA ruined me was... He landed Curiosity. Yeah, after Curiosity. So in the book, he has to go through this huge ordeal to make enough water to survive. Because the water system within the HAB is self-contained. You know, humans consume water.

Humans give out an equal amount of water. So it's fine. But to grow potatoes, he needs a lot more water. He needs to moisten all this soil that he's bringing in. He needs hundreds of liters of water. So he takes hydrazine from the descent vehicle that had brought him there, goes through this chemical reaction. Perfectly safe. Yeah, like incredibly dangerous.

Goes through this chemical reaction to liberate the hydrogen, then collects CO2 from the atmosphere, runs that through the oxygenator to liberate the oxygen, then mixes them together to make water. Okay, that's great. Turns out, you know, Curiosity goes to Mars, scoops up some sand and goes like, there's a shitload of water in here. And it's like 35 liters of water for every cubic meter of Russian soil or regolith,

because you're not supposed to call anything off of Earth's soil. Would he be able to get the water out of the soil? Yeah, what you do, it's very complicated. You have to bring the soil in, and then you have to heat it. Even I think I could do that. I feel like I would do fine on Mars, hearing that. To put this into terms that don't require you to do a bunch of math in your head, if you took a refrigerator and filled it with Martian soil

and then got all the water out of that soil, you would have 35 two-liter bottles of water. Just like that. Just like that. That's a pretty good recipe. The entire subplot where he's getting water wouldn't have mattered. And so to answer your thing, since in real life it would be so easy for him to get a hold of that much water, he could have gotten a whole bunch more water than the soil he brought in and used that to scrub the soil.

Well, actually, you know, recently we found weeping craters. Yeah. During the summer season, what we believe is happening is aquifers. They miss Mark. Oh, actually, there's one. What's a weeping crater? I like that a lot, by the way. Yeah.

So during the summer, light from the sun shines on these crater walls, and they're what we believe are underground aquifers. And the water plug sublimates, and it just pours down the side of the craters. So it's like a waterfall? Yeah. Well, it sort of creeps. Not for long because it wets the soil. It boils up.

It wets the soil. And then eventually... So he should have buckets. Well, you know, he would have normally gone to his, where it would have gone down to the aquifer and pumped out the water. I'm not sure how many recurring slip lineae there are in the relatively flat areas. There's one within 100 miles, closer than Pathfinder. Guys, guys.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Break it up. How about this? There's a sequel to The Martian, somebody gets stranded and it's like 25 minutes long and it's fine. He survives fine. He's like, oh my god, there's all this water plus this. Oh, it's a curiosity. Now, Andy,

where did you get the idea to take potatoes? So potatoes, I went through a bunch of different possible crops. The ones I originally wanted to do. But not asparagus. Not asparagus. Thank god. The one I originally wanted to grow... But not asparagus! Not asparagus! Thank God! The one I originally wanted to grow, for him to grow, was peas, because it makes perfect sense for there to be peas in the meal pack, and peas are the seeds for peas.

I mean, that's, you plant peas, you get people... That's the thing, I gotta say, you can't tell me about the potatoes, but go ahead. Yeah, so why were the potatoes still viable? Well, I can... I thought it was a nod to your Irish heritage. It was not, no. I mean, as any normal person would, I try to hide the Irish, you know. Boo!

You can beat me up later. No, the potato thing was because there is nothing that, potatoes have the very highest calorie yield per crop land area of anything. So if he were to grow peas, he would just not, in the land area he had inside the hab and all the volume he had access to, he could not possibly have maintained his calorie needs. But potatoes will do it.

But he had to fertilize them. Yeah, well, fortunately he has a method of producing that. No, it is the most popular line in the movie. I think it is the most popular line in the movie i think it's the most popular line in the book and it's uh it's a meme it's so popular every hip i gotta science the shit out of this yes well i guess more accurately science the shit into it but um what's funny is just worth noting i people come up to me i love that line my favorite line the whole book is i'm going to science the shit out of it. Yeah, that line's not in the book. That line was made up by Drew Goddard

who wrote the screenplay for the film. So I'm like, I'm glad you liked it. I'll tell Drew. He's a cool guy. He's a great guy. And he's up for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. So he pulls it off. Our hero pulls it off. Our hero pulls it off.

Our hero pulls it off. Our hero pulls it off. And how long did it take you to figure all this stuff out? Well, it took me about three years to write the book. Because you haven't done a lot of farming. Not a lot. A little? Have you done a little farming?

No, no. Did you grow a potato? Nope, nope. I have a brown thumb. I kill anything I try to grow. Are you friends with botanists? Nope. I did a brown thumb. I kill anything I try to grow. Are you friends with botanists? Nope. I did all my research online.

By the way, I didn't know anyone in aerospace at the time I wrote the book. All my research was just Google. Do you know a farmer? Nope. Hey, Jim. I know Google. Have you at this point met Matt Damon? Yeah, lots of times now because of publicity events and stuff like that.

Great. Yeah, he's like that. Please tell him I say hello. I'll tell him. I'll let him know. You're from Iowa. You were born in Iowa. Born in Iowa.

Just to go stereotypical, were you a farmer? No. I was a townie. A townie? Yeah. In Burlington? Would you drove in a convertible hitting people in the face? You probably grew up with shoes and everything, right?

What was your favorite part of the movie? My favorite part of the movie actually is when Mark Watney, after he extracts the rod out of him and begins to survive, and he's thinking about all the things on Mars that would kill him, and he enumerates them, one right after the other. And you can see he's he's uh thinking about all the things on mars that would kill him and he enumerates them one right after the other and you can see he's depressed he's you know probably one of the most depressed moments and um he finally figures out he's becomes the astronaut

he really is what he's going to do next and and you can see that come over him. It's just wonderful. Yeah, the transformation. I am not going to die. And that was it. And that's what they do. You know, NASA's really famous for having the people that take almost insurmountable problems and solve them one at a time along the way. And that's one of the really great things about the book

and really great things about the movie, and that is that's what you have to do to be able to make it in this environment. For survival, you solve one problem at a time. That's right. And you keep your sense of humor. Right. But, of course, the great part about the book, of course,

is you thought you solved it, and then you'd have another problem, sometimes even bigger than the last. Ah, got it. But, Jim, what's really going on on Mars right now? And I say going on. What are we doing? What are we learning about Mars?

You alluded to the weeping craters. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're making discoveries, you know, at a rapid rate, and that's because we have some wonderful assets at Mars. We have several orbiters. An asset is science talk. Yeah, science talk for spacecraft. It's not a person who's there who's, like, undercover, who you need to wake, and then he'll, anyway.

True, true, true. And these spacecraft are making fabulous measurements. One we just put in orbit not too long ago is called MAVEN. And it's designed to see how the solar wind interacts with the atmosphere. You know, here on Earth, we're so lucky we have our magnetic field. Yes. Yeah. I feel it.

We are so lucky. That's something, if you're doing a gratitude list and you're searching for reasons, like you've had a terrible week you can be like It makes the solar with these charged particles come to the poles like this or just go around entirely Miss either way. Yeah. Well, we wouldn't be here talking about it if it if it was another Life probably would not be on this planet if it weren't for their magnetic field Well,, that's one of the things we're finding out, because it's really stripped Mars' atmosphere. How long did that take? Well, it's been going on for billions of years.

How many? Probably the last three and a half billion years that's been happening. But Mars had an enormous magnetic field early on. And so when it was born, along with the Earth... How do we know that? That's cool. How do we know that? magnetic field early on. And so when it was born, along with the Earth... How do we know that? That's cool. How do we know that? Ah! We can actually measure the remnant magnetic field from space that's laying on the surface of Mars. You know, Mars doesn't generate the field anymore inside, but when it did...

Do we know why? Yeah, because... Because it lost its molten core. Yeah. What happened to its molten core? It cooled! Is there anything I can do to help? Heat it back up? I wish you could, but you can't.

I believe you. Even if I summon the powers of Thor? So Mars is smaller than the Earth, right? Yeah, it is, but much bigger than the Moon. Yeah, but this made it cool off, yeah? It does cool off faster than the Earth. That's what our planetary scientists say. But what I'm getting at,

didn't that make the magnetic churning iron inside slow down and cool off and harden up? Well, you know, there's a couple other ideas. There's some huge impacts that are on Mars, a place called Hellas Basin. And it's actually in the opposite hemisphere of where the huge volcanoes were. This is Olympus Mons? Olympus Mons and the Tarsus Ridge and all the beautiful volcanoes.

Was Mars once very fun? Yeah. Well, it used to be very wet, right? Yeah. So, I mean, the Northern Hemisphere, probably 25 or 30% of the Northern Hemisphere was an ocean. And so three and a half billion years ago, we now know Mars looked like the Earth. It had rain. It had clouds. It snowed.

Did it have, like, McDonald's? Yeah, was there Def Leppard? Well, we didn't have it at the time either so it's got rocket we don't know that rocket They've been here forever so what that's the Grateful Dead What are the other explanations for the magnetic field cool enough there's a giant impacts impacts. Anything that would change the differential rotation where the currents are. So an impact, a cooling,

something stopped that current that generates the field. Which we have here on Earth. Which we, thank goodness, we have here on Earth. Yeah, I think the magnetic field has played an important role. And we're just becoming aware of that

because we're at mars seeing what happens with a planet that doesn't have one so it's stripped away the atmosphere most of it yeah water of what happens well as soon as that starts you know evaporates but it also on our ground this is what we also found out from now more and more of our observations, and that is the aquifers. There's ice layers underneath, and in fact, we found a buried glacier. Where is that? Well, it's not where Ares III is,

but it's halfway between where Curiosity is and where... So if I used my cell phone, could I get there? I mean, would the GPS... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I could show you on a map where it's at. But it's on the ancient coastline, where the old coast used to be. Those were the days.

You know, so right now, the resources and things that we're finding on Mars, and I've been telling the astronaut corps this too, is don't bring all your water. Bring a straw. Bring a straw. Bring a straw because we'll tell you where to go to get it. Plenty of resources that are there if we use them.

In-situ resource utilization, ISRU. That's big. ISRU, yes. That's my favorite thing. I love that. No, just ISRU. I'm not making a joke. I know you're used to me just being a smartass all the time.

But no, it's ISRU. I think that's absolutely the key to Mars exploration. There's plenty of water. As long as you have energy, you can do everything else you need. Because, I mean, water, you break water apart, you've got rocket fuel. Yeah. That's it. Or you break water apart and then mix it creatively with methane,

and you've got better rocket fuel. Well, your book has got it. I mean, you know, you've got the oxygenator. And in Mars 2020, which is our next big rover that we're going to launch in 2020, we haven't gotten a great name for it yet. But we'll run a contest. We'll do something. Oh, good, good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need to be the spiritual opposite of curiosity. You want to be called Ennui. It's just like, I do not care about this man. No, yeah. How about Mr. Ding Dong? Submit it. Know it all.

Submit it. The Planetary Society will run the contest. Submit it, please. Let me. Jim. Yeah. When do you think people will be walking on Mars? Well, I believe it's going to happen in my lifetime.

Yeah. You're a kid. I am. So Jim plans to live to be 500 years old. Yeah. That's why I'm a vampire. And that's why I'm sitting over here. Are you an immortal? Obviously.

But, you know, we're following the president's direction. And, indeed, we want to be in the... Oh, you do everything he... Well, you know. Anything that guy says, you're just like, eh. And, you know, he is... NASA's part of the administration. So the president is, you know, my's part of the administration.

So the president is, you know, my boss's boss's boss. And so we're heading in that direction, and indeed, it's the right direction. So he wants us to be able to have a presence in and around Mars in the 2030s. So that could be, you know, going to Phobos, Deimos, perhaps doing what we did to the moon, going out as a figure eight and coming back. So we want to be able to go out and come back. And then after that, in the 2040s and on, begin to get humans down to the ground. I want to get there sooner than that. But with that said, you know, the Planetary Society, of which I'm the CEO, we did a study in the end of March, beginning of April, where we brought 70 people from around the world.

And we did an analysis, Jim, that we could send people in orbit around Mars in 2033. You can only go to Mars, Maeve, I know you're excited, every 26 months. Journey. Yeah, there's a lot of good orbits, but 2033 is an especially good one. And the premise of the bit, as we say in… Is that when you went in 2035? No, they're assuming home and transfer ellipses probably, and I don't necessarily buy into those as best.

So the deal is, we did this analysis that you don't have to increase the NASA budget except adjusting for inflation. And you could get humans in orbit around Mars in 2033, and they could hypothetically on that trip land on Phobos, which you described as the space station of Mars. The space station of Mars. And so you could land there and study Mars from above, and then subsequently you could go down to the surface if people just decided it was worth doing. Well, you could also study Mars on Phobos because a lot of Mars is sitting on the surface.

But this is with people we're talking about. Yeah, yeah. So Albert, out there, audience, Sartakians, do you want to send people to Mars in 2033? It would be cool. If we increase the budget, could it be much sooner? Like, is the science there and just the money isn't? Well, there are some technologies that we have to work on.

So we're doing the Mark Watney thing, and that is we're solving some technically tough problems along the way. For example? Well, we want to get down on the ground many tons. You know, Curiosity we put down was a one-ton rover, one metric ton. From a sky crane. Yeah, some neat engineering. Wile E. Coyote method of landing things.

It's fantastic. You guys just need to stencil acne on the side of that. It's great. Well, there's a good reason why it was done the way it was. Everything was great. I hope so. I hope there was a good reason. We weren't just jamming. Hey, cool. But you know,

to do this kind of station that Mark Watney's at, that's got to be about 40 ton or so. So we want to be able to put at least... But hold it, 40 tons? Yeah. That's not that... That's not a million times as...

Correct, correct. It's like I can see it from here. And we can see it from here. So there's a variety of techniques that we're developing right now that will be able to put more mass down on the ground. And how long does it take to get there? Well, from the top of the atmosphere

down to the ground, about seven minutes. No, you mean to get to Mars from Earth. How much from Dallas? Yeah. For that area. Seven minutes and... So that is a million dollar question because... Or a billion dollar. Well, a multi-billion dollar

question because it has to do with the propulsion systems that you need to design. So the lowest energy transfer from Earth to Mars is called a Hohmann transfer ellipse, and it takes a little over eight months. And that is the least amount of delta V necessary to get from Earth to Mars. Changing speed. Changing speed. The least amount of oomph that you need. However, if you have ion drives or ion propulsion systems like the fictional one in The Martian, which is a real technology that real space probes have used, just not to that magnitude,

then you could get there much quicker. Bad news is you need an energy source for it, which also means convincing the various nations of the Earth that it's okay to put a nuclear reactor in space and so we use molten salt it's safe yes that's something I learned recently thorium reactors six months in less than a year to get to Mars rice if you punch it yeah you get you get then you can stay there for about 20 days a a short stay. You know, that's what the Ares crew was doing. You get used to the time zone. And then you have to come back.

20 days is enough to, like, really relax, though. That's good. Yeah. You feel better. You get some peace. Oh, yeah, now I feel refreshed. And I'm ready for a six-month trip home. That's right.

I just turned off my phone and stayed on Mars for a while. I feel much better. Yeah, you could. Because when it's on the far side and there's no spacecraft above you, your phone would be off. Yeah. By the time we sent people to Mars, I guarantee you there would be at least one telemetry satellite in the sky at all times. Then I would have. Absolutely. Absolutely. be at least one whole cell tower one telemetry satellite in the sky at all times absolutely so so uh indeed uh if you if you miss that 20-day window coming back then you're going to have to

stay there for a good three or four hundred days and then come back in the next so they're taking potatoes maybe do 19 days just to keep a safe day to like just over sleep yeah. It's one thing to be like, I have to stay because there's a snowstorm and another like, I have to stay for one year because of a snowstorm. Oh my God.

Let me ask you guys this. Hang on. You talk to people, there's these guys who want to go to Mars one way and live and people want to go there. I want to go die on Mars.

You probably will. But what do you think about, I say this only, I have strong opinions, which, as you know, are correct. How many people want to terraform Mars? We're going to make Mars like the Earth. We're going to take that water, stir up the dirt, the sand, and it'll be just like home. Well, that may be fine for them. But, you know, right now, scientifically, we want to study it in the way it is.

We want to understand everything about it before we bring humans here. Those living things that might be there. They might be there. But, I mean, you know, there's resources that we want to know about so that we can use them. But, you know, Mars is going to change on its own. You know, the temperature of the sun continues to rise and heats all our planets. And rising the temperature. Solar warming.

Pardon? Solar warming. No problem. So, by the way, if there's any climate deniers out there, it's got nothing to do with it. Okay, get over it. Yeah, the sun's going to do this regardless. Yeah, we're talking four billion years, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So, but you could change the temperature of Mars in the future with the sun's energy increasing by four degrees C, or about 7 degrees Fahrenheit. That takes the CO2 top, sublimates from the pole, leaving this huge ice cap of water underneath it, then to also melt, because the CO2 will form a greenhouse. And then Mars will return to a little bit like what it was 3 billion years ago, with a huge climate how much more expensive atmosphere yeah how long will this take like are we talking months are we talking weeks no it's gonna take a while by 2033 no

they've made millions of years or billions several hundred million years hundred that is too long in my I was really hoping to see a lush Mars sooner rather than later a little bit yeah well that won't happen in our lifetime but you know that's what it's not without technological intervention so Jim what do you need your planetary division of the science mission directorate that's right adding as many acronym letters as we can get in there. What do you need to pull this off? Well, indeed, we benefit from the enormous support by the American people.

Now, when you say enormous, you guys, when you say enormous, I am of an age where it was routine to hear people say, if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they blank, make a magic marker cap that doesn't fall off or whatever. So the answer is always obvious. NASA's not in the business of building the magic markers, or we would have. You do make great markers. In the Apollo era, the NASA budget was 4% of the federal budget. 4%.

Now, the NASA budget is 0.4% of the federal budget. That's right. So it's a tenth of what it was in the Apollo era. That's true. So what would you guys want it to be? I mean, what is the military? 18%? I think, what is the military, 18%? I think it's 22%.

22%. In other words, the NASA budget used to be a fifth of the military budget. Now it's a 50th of the military budget. But what would you need? You need faster rockets, bigger rockets? Well, we're doing the investment right now with the funding we do get from the American people through Congress in a really judicious way. From a science perspective, we're studying the heck out of Mars. We want

to know everything about it. Okay. We're sciencing the shit out of it. of it. If you went on television and swore you would get all the money you need. Well, I don't know if you noticed, but I just did. On the radio, I'm talking about really rich people. Just rich people, sorry. So, you know, scientifically, you know the scientifically you know mars is ours at the moment we really want to be able to understand it and that will mitigate risk for our humans to why'd you look at me mitigate risk what did i do no i was just looking around i just stopped the bumbling idiots from getting when you say mitigate risk you mean get mean getting killed being much less likely. Well, you could take the Mark Watney approach of burning hydrazine, or you could take a straw. A straw, yeah, that's right.

So these are the things that we learn along the way. And indeed, that helps us figure out where we want to go. We just had a major workshop with the scientists and the engineers that do a lot of this resource planning and got them together and say, here's Mars, where would you put humans and why? And we got 50 locations of just fabulous places to go on Mars. And we're studying those. This has been StarTalk about Mars. We've had Andy Weir, creator of The Martian, Maeve Higgins, insightful comedian,

Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, and Eugene Merman. I've been your host, Bill Nye. Listen to StarTalk and turn it up loud. Thank you all very much. Thank you.