Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Mars Works

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

Sure today Mars would kill you with its thin, toxic atmosphere and cold desert temperature swings of 100 degrees,but early on it and Earth were practically twins. Find out how the two planets diverged and if there might be life on the Red Planet, in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Find the Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Hello friends. Have you ever been to Mars? I haven't. Do you know why? Because nothing ever happens on Mars. Did you catch that reference? If you did, then I'm glad, but I'm not going to spoon feed you and tell you what it was.

This is how Mars works, and it was from April 22nd, 2014, and it is my pick for the Saturday select. So please do enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there.

We all have eye boogers because this is an early morning, unusual early morning edition of Stuff You Should Know. Welcome to Morning Edition. We should just talk like this. We got a... We're on NPR. We got taken to task in a snide email from a morning talk show, TV show host. Did you see it?

About the Inquisition? Yeah, he's like, way to release the Inquisition on Ash Wednesday. It's kind of slapping the face. So I responded. I said, actually, it came out on Fat Tuesday, and by sheer coincidence, he's like, thanks for the reply. I responded to him, too. Yeah.

I was like, man, I wish I was that clever. I had no idea. Yeah. Yeah. It was like our medical marijuana episode being our 420th. Yeah. Utter, complete coincidence guaranteed everybody. I think over the course of 600 plus shows, you're going to have some weird coincidences

like that. You know? Yes. I certainly didn't know it was Ash Wednesday. I didn't either until I went to the mall yesterday evening, and a third of the people were walking around with charcoal crosses on their forehead. Nice. It's like, I had no idea, Atlanta had this many Catholics.

Yeah. Yeah. Good going. They're everywhere. They sure are. Well, I mean, they didn't used to be, because, you know, I grew up Baptist here, and I didn't know many Catholics growing up, but. Well, Atlanta became a transplant town since then.

Yeah, exactly. And I'll tell you about another transplant, Chuck. Yes. Possibly life here on earth from Mars. Oh, yeah? Is this your intro? Have you got breaking news? No, that was it.

Oh. Remember, we did an episode on the origin of life on earth, remember? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And one of the possibilities is that it was from Mars, and one of the pieces of evidence of this possibility was the Allen Hills Rock from Antarctica, a Martian meteorite that was discovered in 1984, that was studied and studied, and they thought in 1996, basically Bill Clinton said, we found evidence of life on Mars, and then they studied it again, and

they were like, maybe not. Another studying it again, they're saying, yeah, it's possible. It's very possible that this 4.1 billion-year-old rock is showing evidence of fossilized nanobacteria. And this is all still Bill Clinton saying this? Yeah. It is underwear at home. He's the authority. He's talking to the TV again.

Nice. But yeah, we're going to do how Mars works. Tom Hanks, this one's for you. Big space guy. Oh, yeah, sure. Okay. I didn't know if I was missing something there like he did some movie that I didn't know about.

No, if I said Gary Sinis, this one's for you, that would be a mission to Mars reference. I did not see that. Mind-bogglingly odd and pretty bad. Yeah, I heard that's why I didn't see it. That and Red Planet, I didn't see either one of those. Red Planet, I don't know about. Yeah. That kind of brings us to a point that we've long been fascinated with the Red Planet going

back to, you know, war of the worlds and early science fiction and Martians and Mars has just always captivated us because, you know, sometimes you can see it with a telescope. Yeah. And it's not like what's on the other side of us at Venus. Venus. Yeah, we don't know much about Venus. Shrouded in mystery. There are no Venusians that we're afraid will come down here and attack us.

I think it's Venetians. Venetians. Yeah. Which is different from Venetians. Yes. Which are people from Venus. Right. Which, strangely enough, kind of coincides with the guy named Giovanni Schiaparelli.

He might not have been from Venice, but that man was definitely from Italy. You think? Yeah. Yeah. He was, can you say his name for everybody, Chuck? Oh, Giovanni Schiaparelli? No, it's good. That guy?

Man, have you been practicing at home? No, I've just been eating a lot of pasta. That's good stuff, man. So, Schiaparelli, in 1877, decided to draw a map of Mars, and his conception of Mars, what became the popular conception, if it wasn't already, was that Mars was a lush planet with civilizations, and he named the regions of Mars accordingly, like Elysium. Which culture believed that that was heaven? I don't know.

I can't remember. Man. I haven't heard that. We've discussed it before. Elysium. I haven't retained that. Another part was called Utopia, Arcadia, basically all these different names for paradise, reflected the idea that Mars was very similar to Earth, most likely inhabited by intelligent beings,

and as proof, Schiaparelli drew canals that he noticed on Mars, which suggested that this advanced civilization had dug canals to route water from the polar ice caps, which are visible here on Earth, to the central locations where their civilizations were. Yeah. Get water to the Martians. They've published what Earthlings thought of Mars for 100 years almost. Yeah. About 40 years after that, a U.S. astronomer named Persephone Lowell wrote a book also

about Mars, where he actually talked about civilizations, and the problem was he wasn't really based on anything. It might as well have been science fiction. Right. And yet they named the Lowell Observatory after him. Oh, really? I believe so. He was an astronomer, so it's not like he wasn't just making stuff up, but he didn't

have hard evidence. He made a lot of stuff up. Okay. Well, he interpreted it without any evidence, and then wrote a book, and that became the impetus for Mars-based science fiction. Yeah. It really captured folks, and that's when, like I talked about War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Princess of Mars, and it's just always been just out there staring

down at us. Yeah. Speaking of War of the Worlds, it even says it in this article, it did not cause a national panic in 1938. That's a myth. Did you know that? I don't know. I'm not sure I knew the full story.

Supposedly, when who directed Citizen Kane? Orson Welles. When Orson Welles carried out this radio play. Oh, yeah, yeah. It scared everyone, right? It caused a panic. People were wild in the streets committing suicide, like doing all sorts of stuff. No, it isn't true.

Only the newspapers got wind of this rumor and played it up, and the reason they played it up was to prove that radio couldn't be trusted as a source of news, because it was a big competitor to newspapers at the time. Have you done a Don't Be Dumb on that? No, maybe I will. Can I plug that? Go ahead. Josh has a web series called Don't Be Dumb that is very funny and strange, and you learn

stuff. It's like the perfect one, two, three punch, weird, funny, and you walk away with some knowledge. Thanks, man. Everyone likes it. That watches it, so we just need more people to watch it. Give me the weird sausage finger Steve McQueen clap. That is weird.

Go ahead. Oh, the director? Uh-huh. Oh, yeah, he was clapping weird, wasn't he? At the Oscars? Uh-huh. Apparently, he and the screenwriter who won an Oscar for that movie for 12 Years a Slave do not like each other.

Oh, really? So the writing credit, oh, yeah. The writer walked right past him, and Steve McQueen didn't even turn to look at him as he was walking up to get his Oscar. I did kind of notice that. Yeah. Well, if you re-delisted, he rooted it out and found out that it was over a writing credit. Is that why he was clapping weirdly?

Yeah. He was showing his disdain with sausage fingers. So weird. All right. So this weird, early fascinace with Mars, like I said, we didn't have a lot of information other than sort of looking at it from Earth, and it wasn't until the 60s and 70s that we started, and many countries started, exploring Mars, but we started sending orbiters to take a closer peek, and then eventually orbiters led to landers and rovers.

And it's been kind of a prime directive of NASA for a while, one of them. And it was when they scrapped the space shuttle program, I remember NASA was saying, like, don't worry, everybody. We're going to go to Mars. We're going to focus on Mars. That's why we're not doing the shuttle anymore. And apparently they are. There was just as recently as yesterday, NASA testified about its budget, and they were

saying, well, we've got a really great thing planned. We're going to get this asteroid, we're going to maneuver it with a robot into lunar orbit so we can go visit it later. And the senators at this hearing basically said, boring. Really? Yeah. They're like, what's this backup Mars mission listed? And they're like, oh, well, we're talking about doing a man fly by a Venus and Mars in

2021. The senators are like, Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars. So it looks like NASA's going to be forced to go to Mars whether they like it or not. So it's still captivating. If it's captivating the dum-dums in Congress. Well, they even said like the asteroid mission, that's not going to spur the public imagination, like sending a person past Mars. That's what you want to do, NASA.

And NASA's like, all right, but we could probably mine the asteroid. And the senators, I went, Mars, Mars, Mars, and they all went to a bar afterwards. Yeah. Okay. Jim, you want to go to Mars? And he goes, all right. Yeah. I guess so.

All right. Where should we start here? Well, let's start with the origin of Mars. It seems pretty appropriate. Yeah. It's pretty fascinating. I love how scientists piece together ancient history of the cosmos, you know. Yeah.

Without having ever sent a geologist there, it's all, I mean, even before the rovers, it was basically all just based on photographs and surmising from those. Now we've got the Curiosity rover, the third rover up there. It's still up there, right? Wow. Oh, yeah. Oh, it didn't come home, does it? No, it won't.

But it's still operational. Yeah. Yeah. And they were thinking, I think it was a two-year mission, but it could go longer than that. I think it's already gone a little longer than that, because I think it went up. Has it really already? I think it went up in late 2011. Oh, wow.

So I think it's been there a little over two years. Well, good going, Curiosity. I might be wrong. All right. So there's basically five things that they surmise happen to form Mars, which we'll list and then get into in more detail. It initially formed from clumping together of little tiny objects until it made a big round planet.

It was an accretion disk, like just like Earth. Just like Earth. Then there was a lot of meteor bombardment all over the solar system, and Mars was of course affected. Just like Earth. Just like Earth and the moon. The mantle was very hot and pushed through the crust, lifting up portions of it. Just like Earth.

And then there were a couple of, they don't know how many, but at least a couple of periods of lots of volcanoes going on. Say it. Just like Earth. Lava flows. And then finally, the planet cooled down and the atmosphere thinned out to leave this with Mars. Unlike Earth.

Right. And Mars' formation was virtually identical to the process that formed Earth. It's about half the size, but they're in the beginning as far as makeup and the processes that they were undergoing. They were virtually identical. Yeah. And being half the size is pretty key to why it's not like Earth. Yeah.

More. Yeah. One of the reasons. So I guess we should get into some more detail about this, huh? I think we should. The accretion that you talked about, the small objects about, took about 100,000 years. And as the gravitational field got stronger, it kept pulling in more of this stuff and it would crash into the planet and get hot basically and just sort of meld together.

Yeah. I was like, oh, Mars. And that was interesting. I looked up why planets are round and the reason why is because the gravitational field. And the spin. It's sucking everything into the dense core. Yeah. Well, the core, the gravitational field behaves like it's coming from the center and everything

else thinks it's coming from the center. Including me. And the only way to get everything as close to the center as possible is to make a sphere. Like obviously if you had a square, there would be a corner that's not as close as other parts. That'd be a creepy planet. Like a cube. Yeah.

But I wondered it, you know, or why doesn't it look like an asteroid, let's say. But asteroids don't have the kind of gravitational force to draw everything in like that to form that sphere. Right. It's called isotatic adjustment. Nice. Yeah. I just thought, wait a minute.

Well, all these things are perfectly round. Or not perfectly round. I want more pyramid shaped planets. That'd be kind of cool. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb

her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one kids relationships. Life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right. So that was the accretion. And now you have gas being released from cooling after the core and mantle and crust have formed in this hot ball. Right. And as the, as the gases are being released in the hot ball, they are forming this atmosphere. They're supporting an atmosphere. They're floating out and kind of hanging around, you know.

And so you've got an atmosphere in place. You have a molten core, you have a softer mantle and then a crust that formed. Like Earth. Yeah. And as that, that softer mantle and the molten core press up, you have volcanic activity. Yeah. Which releases even more heat and gas, which makes that atmosphere even thicker. And at this point, they think that there is a period of water presence on Mars where it

was raining. So then after you've got a primitive atmosphere and then as it says in the article by Craig, he's great writer for us. Yeah. Ph.D. That's right. He said Mars couldn't catch a break, which was pretty accurate. And it was pounded by meteors in the solar system forming craters and basins and all sorts

of interesting landforms. And, you know, the same thing happened here, but we had like water and things like that to cause erosion and fill it, fill it in on the moon. There isn't anything like that. So you still see those craters. And, but the same thing happened on Mars. Yeah. And actually there was water on Mars.

That bombardment and the, that caused the magma to come up out of the core of Mars, creating volcanic activity and shifts in the mantle and the crust, all released hot gas into the Martian atmosphere, which thickened it and increased its temperature, which led to rain. Yes. Rain, flooding, erosion. So there was like a period at least for a little while of the presence of water on Mars. There still is, dude. The presence of unfrozen flowing water.

Yeah, there's not flowing water, but as of September of last year, they found water in the dirt. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty exciting. Two pints per cubic foot. Yeah. But that's a spoiler.

Oh, sorry. Actually it can't be a spoiler, but it happened in the past. Right. Right. Yeah. If you haven't heard of it yet. Yeah. All right.

Sorry, everyone. So then Craig likens to Mars at this point as a soft-boiled egg. And as the eggshell is cooling, the yoke is going to start busting through the mantle and that's like on earth is what is going to form things like volcanoes. And again, those volcanoes and that activity led to that atmosphere and the periods of rain and flooding and erosion. Yeah. Olympus Mons.

Yeah. That's a good pixie song. Is that a pixie song? Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons. Nice. Yeah. I don't think I knew that one. What was that on?

Tromplemon. Yeah. Okay. Olympus Mons is the largest volcano there and it's like it makes Mount Everest look like a molehill. As a matter of fact, it's the largest point in the known solar system. The highest point? Yeah.

Yeah. Remember our myth-busting episode where we showed that Mount Everest wasn't the tallest mountain but it's Mount Aloha? Yeah. Yeah. On earth, Mount Aloha is something like... I think it's six miles from the ocean floor. Yes.

It rises... To the top. Nice, Chuck. And it's 140 miles wide at its base. Yeah. That's a big mountain here on earth. On Mars, which is, again, half the size of earth in diameter, Olympus Mons is 16 miles tall.

Wow. And that's not from an ocean floor either. No. Because there is no ocean on Mars. Exactly. But if you want to see something cool, type in what would Mars look like with ocean and people have done simulations of it, it looks really neat. Like vacation-worthy?

You would want to go there to vacation? I think that means like a sunny beach with an ocean. It looks like earth but with weird continents. And then it's 370 miles across Olympus Mons'... That's large. It's big. And they have pictures, if you Google it, that compare it to Everest and it just dwarfs it.

That's right. And you can see pictures of it too. They snap photos of it. It's pretty impressive. Right. It's a big, large volcano. Which eventually went dormant. All the volcanoes on Mars went dormant.

That's right. Somewhere possibly about 3 billion years ago. And as the volcanoes went dormant, the heat was released basically. Mars had no more heat to give from its core, which meant the atmosphere wasn't being fed any longer. So it thinned, which led to a drop in temperatures. Yeah. And how we mentioned earlier, how the fact that it was smaller than earth is one reason

why it's not more like earth. That's the reason it cooled so fast. Yeah. Like earth wouldn't have cooled nearly as fast. No. And it also kept a magnetic field going thanks to its molten core. Mars did not any longer. So you got a thin atmosphere, cold temperatures.

The atmosphere that was there started freezing and falling to Mars and was stored as ice. Any water that was already on the planet's surface turned into permafrost. And it underwent what's called the Great Desiccation Event, where it became a barren, deserted desert planet. Yeah. And before that, this kind of happened in cycles for a while, like the volcanic action. And then the gas is being released and major flooding from water until, like you said, eventually, it's the cold, not hot, but cold, dusty place that we love today.

Yeah, and what's interesting is that earth and Mars were so similar as they formed. And about at the same time, about three billion years ago, Mars underwent the Great Desiccation Event and earth underwent the Great Oxygenation Event, which gave rise to all life here on earth, the appearance of algae, which created a breathable atmosphere, almost at about the same time. So they totally diverged in two different paths at around the same time. I wonder if the main reason was because of its size. Yeah, the cooling.

Like it could have been another earth. Yes. It's interesting. Had it been the exact same size, who knows? Yeah. Maybe we'd be like going there and back right now. Right. On vacation.

Yeah. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah. That was a good one. Or Colin Farrell. Yeah. Did you see the remake? No.

Yeah. Although I heard the Robocop remake was like surprisingly good. I haven't seen it. I was not expecting that. I haven't either. Yeah. That's one. I'll definitely wait for TV for that one.

You know. And you really don't care about seeing that one. No. Not even DVD. Like TV. Well, I don't watch DVDs. Okay. I'm streaming like the rest of the modern world.

Not even a laser disk? Should we talk about what it's like there? Yeah. On the surface? Yes. The surface of Mars. It's divided into three major parts. The southern highlands.

The northern plains and the polar regions, which we already said you can actually see from Earth. Yeah. Polar ice caps. Yeah. Just like Earth. But the ice caps are made of carbon dioxide. So it's dry ice ice caps and then underneath there is water ice.

Yeah. So the southern highlands are vast. I love our morning shows. It's always a little more like laid back, I feel like. Yeah. Like I'm sleepy. Yeah. You're not riddled with anxieties yet?

No. That comes on about noon. Yeah. I haven't had enough coffee yet. So you've got your southern highlands and like I said, they are extensive and vast and it is elevated. It's the highest part of Mars and heavily cratered. And again, the highest part of the solar system.

Right. Because that's where Olympus Mons is. That's right. In the southern region, the southern highlands. And the scientists think it's ancient, these highlands, because of the craters because the cratering happened close to four billion years ago. And that was just meteors kind of just pounding the solar system all over the place. Yeah.

So the southern highlands are high and then there's a very pronounced drop of several kilometers down to the northern plains, which are low lying regions, they're a lot like the seas on the moon, but they do feature raised areas, plateaus, a couple of them. Yeah. The cinder cones. Yeah. Well, the cinder cones are on the plateaus, I think, basically the mantle bulged up through the crust.

It's thinner in the northern region and the mantle just pushed up and formed like continent sized plateaus that are called crustal upwarps. That's a great word. Yeah. I kept thinking I was reading it wrong. Nope. Crustal upwarps. Yep.

And these crustal upwarps, there's two of them. One's a smaller, it's Elysium, remember paradise. That's right. The other one is called Tharsus. Tharsus in the northern hemisphere is divided into eastern and western hemispheres. Yeah. Tharsus is in the west and Elysium is in the east. Yeah.

Celestial names are so cool. They really are. You know? What do we have on earth? New Jersey. Not Tharsus. No. Or Elysium.

We should start a campaign to rename New Jersey Tharsus. And then the main city could be Tharsus City, which sounds super futuristic, when in fact it's Newark. Yeah. Every citizen is issued a sparkly silver jumpsuit. So you've called out Olympus Mons is the highest point. That is where in the... It's in the Tharsus region, which this article is confusing because it mentions the Tharsus

region in the southern hemisphere and in the northern hemisphere. And I looked all over the place to find definitively where it is. And I think the discrepancy comes from the fact that it's equatorial. Oh, okay. It's pretty close to the equator. Olympus Mons definitely is. All right. Well, that explains it.

Maybe it's both. Right. But it's about at that point that the highlands drop off into the northern plains. That's right. In Tharsus, you have some pretty impressive canyons, a system called the Valles Marineris. And it makes the Grand Canyon look like a tiny little hole in the ground. It is 370 miles wide and 26,400 feet deep. Not to slam the Grand Canyon, but if you've ever been there, imagine something dwarfing

that even. Right. And again, Mars is half the size of Earth. Right. And it doesn't even just dwarf the Grand Canyon. It's bigger than the Mariana Trench, which is 1,580 miles long. So it's a good 1,000 miles longer than the Mariana Trench. And the Mariana Trench is 43 miles wide.

The Valles Marineris is 370 miles wide. Yeah, that's nuts. Yeah. So it's a big old trench. Like you can't even comprehend that kind of size when you're standing there. No. Imagine when you're in it, you can't see the edges or anything like that. So you're just...

But you can't be in it because people can't go to Mars, but I know what you mean. We will eventually... You think? Elon Musk predicts he will retire and die and be buried on Mars. He said it's not a certainty, but it's a possibility. But that's his goal? Yeah. Wow.

Well, he's got the dough to make it happen, I guess. And the vision. Like you say the same thing, but you've just got the vision. Right. You don't have the billions of dollars. And it's not even my vision. I'm just reporting what Elon Musk said. Yeah.

Oh, I thought you wanted to do that as well. No, that's... Go to Mars? You wanted to get shot out of a cannon. Oh, no, I abandoned that a long time ago. You did? Yeah. What's the new plan?

Just to be cremated and distributed with Yumi. Okay. Well, that's nice. Yeah. She's really calmed you down. She's like, first things first, this cannonball thing has got to go. The polar regions you can see from Earth, like we've said, and it is surrounded by a bunch of dunes, and they are like...

I think you said it was frozen carbon dioxide, right? Yeah. So it's not like the ice we have here on Earth. No, it's... Well, we have it here on Earth. Dry ice. Well, yeah, but just... It's not our polar ice caps.

Right. And like Earth, depending on the season, the ice caps are going to change shape. In the summertime, the CO2 from the northern caps melt away, and there's water ice below that, so not dry ice. Because they call it in Spanish, agua ice. And that's why apparently we sent the phoenix there. They were like, send that thing up there and dig down into the frozen dirt, and let's see what it's made up of.

Right. And they found water. They found two pints. Phoenix didn't find it. Phoenix found that the Martian soil is filled with perchlorate, which is a big problem for Mars missions. Yeah, that's like very bad for human beings. It's extremely toxic.

It's a thyroid toxin. It has a very quick effect. It has a developmental effect on infants and fetuses, so reproducing on Mars would be a big problem. Yeah. And even in adults, it has a big effect on your thyroid, which affects your hormone production function. And it's everywhere.

It's in the light Martian dust, and Mars has tons of dust storms that envelop the whole planet, which we'll talk about. Yeah, for weeks at a time. Yeah, and there's perchlorate in those dust storms, so it would get everywhere. Yeah. So they just found out a couple months ago that this is everywhere, and it's going to be a huge challenge to Mars missions in the future. But they're saying, now that we know about it, we can design around it.

Yeah. It just seems so uninhabitable at like, I don't know if in our lifetime we're going to see it a manned mission, maybe. We'll definitely see a flyby. Yeah. Yeah. A manned flyby. Yeah.

Okay. You and Elon Musk. I will. That's not even just me. Reaching for the stars. That's me, Elon Musk, and the Senate. Okay. Yeah.

Mars, Mars, Mars. They're all so excited. So Chuckers, up next, we're going to talk about the interior of Mars. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house of her childhood home.

Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass?

And my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so we're back and we're talking about Mars's interior. And to talk about Mars's interior is really boring unless you compare it to Earth. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is cool.

So let's compare it to Earth. Okay. Uh, the Earth's core is, um, has a radius of about 2,200 miles from the center to the surface and is made up of iron in two parts, the solid core and the liquid outer core. Right. And the interplay between those two creates Earth's magnetic field, which allows for the northern lights. Oh, yeah?

And compasses. What else? Uh, that's about it. Okay. The Mars's core, uh, radius is only about 900, um, and between 900 and 1,200 miles. And it is probably made up also of iron, but throwing some sulfur, maybe a little oxygen. And they believe, uh, I don't, I didn't get this. He said it may be made up, maybe molten, but it's unlikely.

So they still don't know, I guess. No. And they think that the reason they don't think that it's molten though is because Mars has a very weak magnetic field. Um, but maybe not always. Yeah. It probably had a strong magnetic field in the, in before the Great Desiccation event. Right.

Um, but now it doesn't have one. And they think that if it is molten, it's not, there's not a lot to it. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Uh, around the Earth's core is softer mantle like toothpaste and, uh, it's way less dense and it is iron and magnesium silicate, uh, about 1,800 miles thick. And that's when you see a volcano and lava flowing from a volcano.

That's where that's coming from. Well, it comes from the magma through there, the liquid. Right. Yeah. Isn't it? I think so. We did a podcast on volcanoes. Yeah.

80 years ago. You think we remember. That was a good one. The volcanoes one. I thought so. I was worried about it. The, um, mantle pushing up through the, through the surface accounts for those, uh, crustal uplifts.

Up, up warps. Up warps. Yeah. That's right. Um, and here on Earth, we have things like volcanoes, active volcanoes and earthquakes. And they're largely due to, if not exclusively due to, um, the fact that we have continental plates. Right.

That's why we have a lot of Earth, which Mars also has a crust, but Earth's crust is broken up into these plates that drift and move around solely and rub up against one another. Yeah. Um, and that's where the fault lines exist and along those fault lines, you have volcanoes and earthquakes. Right. Um, Mars, that's not the case. It has a crust, but it's not broken into plates.

It's solid. Yeah. I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah. And that's why there's no active volcanoes right now or one reason. Yeah. Yeah. And while we're talking about Mars, well, we probably should have mentioned it on the

surface, but it's a neat little tidbit. If you ask me, do you know why Mars is rust colored? Uh, no, because it's coated in rust. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's oxidized iron in the soil, which makes it rusted. It's a rusty old planet, a rusty, dusty, cold, windy, uninhabitable, perhaps planet. Yeah.

But again, the reason why it's probably uninhabitable is it lacks an atmosphere or it practically lacks an atmosphere. There is a very thin one still. Yeah. I guess we can compare that to Earth too. Um, Mars's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide 95.3% on Earth. It's less than 1%. Right.

Like you could just stop right there. Yep. Toxic. Yeah. It's a lot less nitrogen, 2.7% compared to Earth 78, not much oxygen at all, only 0.13%. That's a big factor. Toxic again. And, um, about 1 1,000th as much water vapor is on Earth.

Yeah. We need that too, inhospitable, which is why there are proposals to seed Mars, to terraform it. Yeah. And we can go in and like artificially stimulate an atmosphere to form so that in 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 years, it could conceivably be habitable. Yeah. And we, we did a show on that too.

Yeah. It was all coming together. It's a long-term plan, but. Sure. Which means we'll never do it. Elon Musk will. Maybe. His grandchildren.

Uh, so the atmospheric pressure in Mars is interesting too. It's super low and super cold, and that's why there is no water liquid flowing because it's either going to freeze or evaporate and can't just exist as water these days. Nope. But like we said, possibly, probably did at one point. Yep. So you've got a thin atmosphere, which means a lot of solar radiation is not blocked, is not reflected, which means that you have very wild swings in daily average temperature

on Mars because Mars does have a day. It does rotate. Yeah. And actually it rotates at about the same rate as Earth. The Mars Sol, which is short for solar day, it's just about 43 minutes longer than Earth's day. Oh yeah? Yeah.

Because it's further out, away from the sun, it's orbit around the sun takes longer. So its year is about twice as long as the year on Earth, 686.98 Earth days, which means the seasons last longer, which makes it more extreme as we'll see. Yeah. And you talked about the temperature fluctuation. It's almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a daily basis. The difference in temperature. This is nutty.

That's enormous. Again, not very friendly for us humans. No. We'll figure it out. You have to pack a big suitcase. You have to pack your thong as well as your Arctic Explorer coat. Well, you could just wear a thong under your Arctic Explorer coat. Well, of course.

Wear layers. It's the key to Mars. Wear layers. Pack big, wear layers. But like you said, there are seasons in the spring and early summer. The sun heats up the atmosphere and the dust lifts up and makes it even hotter once that dust is in the atmosphere. And it basically is what causes those big dust storms we were talking about.

Yeah. The dust particles get suspended and invite more heat, which suspends more particles than it creates wind. Like 120 mile an hour winds. Yeah. Once you're here on Earth, it creates convection cells, which creates wind. And as those wind speeds whip up, because the atmosphere is thinner, you have to have higher speeds because the wind has less to push against, less dense air to push against.

So it takes higher speed winds. But once they do hit something like 120 miles an hour, the entire planet can become enveloped in a dust storm that can last months. That's crazy. And again, it's not just dust, it's dust with one of the more toxic compounds known to humanity in every bit of it. Yeah. And it's not going to blow off a marge rover.

These things, you know, weigh like in the tons. Yeah. I think curiosity is one ton. One ton. And actually what's strange is the dust storms, it says are beneficial because it'll blow the any Martian dirt caked on the solar panels. Yeah. That makes sense too.

Or maybe it might reveal something. Yeah. That wasn't there before. Like a pyramid. That'd be pretty cool. Chuck, I want to talk about water on Mars. That was NASA's directive, follow the water for many years and still is really because they think therein holds the key to the big question, is there possibilities of having

life on Mars? Is there life? Was there life on Mars? Yeah. And we're not talking about Martians unfortunately, we're talking about maybe bacteria. Which could be Martians? I mean, if it lives on Mars, it's Martian. I guess that's a good point.

Everybody just basically needs to lower the bar for their expectations of what a Martian is. Yeah. Right. You know what I mean? Instead of little green men. Right. It's bacteria.

And when this article was written, it was pre-curiosity, but just a couple of months ago, curiosity confirmed that there is water present in the soil. Yeah. And they think it's everywhere. Yeah. Basically the soil has a very big leaching property where it absorbs water from the atmosphere and locks it in there so that if we went up there, we could extract about, like I said, two pints of water from every cubic foot of soil that's mined.

That's pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Again though, we have that parachlorate problem. It's everywhere. It would get in the water and one of the ways that it transfers to humans and becomes toxic is through drinking water. So we'd have to deal with that. But ironically, the thing about parachlorate being there, it's also used in solid rocket

fuel here on earth. Oh, really? So we would need it to get to Mars, but once we got to Mars, we wouldn't want to have it. Interesting. That is very ironic. Thanks. So you were talking, Chuck, about how water could considerably lead to life on Mars. Yes.

It's vital to life. It's one of the vital parts of life. Yeah. It's a term for them, not a building block. One of the essential somethings for life. Component? Yes. Yeah.

I think that is it. Essential component for life. We work that out together. This has been morning edition. And now they found water on Mars and confirmed that it is there, and they knew all along that there was water ice on Mars. It makes that Martian rock from four billion years ago seem all the more likely that it is displaying evidence of fossilized microbes.

Yeah. And they used to think that there was methane in the atmosphere or trace amounts, but I think that has been debunked now with... Oh, really? ...upon further research. Yeah. Yeah. Because again, when this article was written, it sounds like they thought it was still...

Like they still had detected methane, and they didn't know whether it was from of biological or chemical origin. Yeah. More recent studies, as of October 2012, they analyzed the atmosphere for methane six times and basically found no more than 1.3 parts per billion. Yeah. That's not good for evidence of life. Yeah.

And that's about 1.6 as much as they had previously estimated, and they thought, well, maybe it went somewhere, and NASA said, no, it wouldn't... It would have been super exciting, but methane doesn't distribute and leave like that that quickly. Right. Like it would still be around. Yeah. So unfortunately, no methane.

Speaking of methane as evidence of life, you remember our termite episode, somebody wrote in to say, did you know termites are like a huge contributor of methane on Earth? They're the second largest contributor of methane after livestock. Huh. Yeah. Wow. Even beating out humans. Wow, that's crazy.

We shoot a lot of ducks. We humans. Some of us more than others. Termites have us beat. They're flatulent insects. So bacteria, Martian soil has been known to be like formerly chemically active, but maybe not biologically, but it is possible maybe because they have a good example in Greenland. They found bacteria that was dormant for 120,000 years frozen in the ice, and when they unfroze

it, it started multiplying again. In the beginning of the apocalypse. Yeah. It's kind of creepy. Yeah. But like it's not stopping. Possibly in the polar ice caps on Mars, maybe that's going on too. Yeah.

We just don't know yet. Yeah. They think that it is very possible that you could take some of the extremophile bacteria, ones that live like in volcanic vents under sea and things like that and transplant them to Mars and some of them would survive, especially mineral thriving bacteria, ones that eat minerals. You could put them on Mars and they would do okay possibly. Well, spaceships, if we could possibly bring our own bacteria there by accident as well. Just from, I think the International Space Station had E. Coli, didn't it?

Yeah. And possibly Legionella, Legionnaires disease on the ISI. Wow. Yeah. Or the ISS. That sounds like a movie waiting to happen. Sure. I guess they sort of did that with Outland.

Was it a disease? No, it wasn't a disease. It was just a cop chasing a bad guy. Yeah. I have to see that again. I wonder if it holds up. I doubt it. Yeah.

If it held up, it'd be alien. Like it would still be in the rotation, but Outland doesn't play on cable very often. No, it really doesn't. It is pretty good evidence too. I remember the Outland Mad Magazine spoof. I didn't have that one. Yeah, that was a good one. So Chuck, you remember we were talking about way back how the Viking and Mariner and Mars

orbiters provided this evidence that Mars was just a dead barren planet and really undermined the idea that there was possibly life there and that it was lush. Well, it also provided some conspiracy theorists, pretty solid evidence that there was or is some sort of civilization on Mars because yeah, Viking 1 in 1976 produced a photo that looked a whole lot like a pharaonic type face, like a statue, the face on Mars. Pretty clearly a face if you look at it. It was two miles from head to toe, from tip to bottom. So it wasn't like Jesus on a piece of toast.

No, I mean, it looked like a artificially constructed monument, a face of a monument, maybe one that had toppled and was now just poking out from the Martian soil. So they looked closer in 1998, but there was a lot of cloud cover, so they got kind of a garbled look. Right. And more recently, maybe 2008 or 2011, and it's very clearly just a mesa. Well, that's disappointing. It is, especially like when you look at that original.

Oh, wow. Looking at it now. Yeah. When you look at the Viking 1 photo. Yeah. It looks like a toppled statue head. Yeah, it does. It actually factored into that terrible movie Mission to Mars.

Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. Which I saw with hippie Rob, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

It was among that. He just walked into the woods after that and never to be seen again. Wasn't that, that was Brian De Palma, wasn't it? I think it might have been. So disappointing. I mean, it had an all-star cast, Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle. Yeah. I think Bill Paxton, maybe.

Or Pullman. I don't think it was Pullman. Yeah. But I might be confusing Bill Paxton from Apollo 13. Anyway, it didn't pan out very well. Yeah. But you got anything else? Yeah.

I don't know why this article doesn't mention it, but Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Oh, yeah. They didn't get into that at all. No. And Mars popped up and pops up in pop culture a lot. There's the Mars Volta. The band? Yeah.

Yeah. David Bowie had a song called Life on Mars. One of the great songs. The Misfits had the greatest Mars song, Teenagers from Mars. That's a great song. Yeah. Oh, what's his name? Jared Leto, right?

30 seconds to Mars? Yeah. Yeah. They're going on tour right after his Oscar win. I had never heard any of his music until the other day. I was like, what do they like? And Emily tried to describe it, and then she just played a song. Yeah.

It's not my bag. No, mine either. But good for him. Oh, yeah. I think they're huge internationally. Yeah. He's got gout. Do you know that?

I did not know that. He needs to lay off the pate. I think it had to do with his weight gain and loss for the John Lennon, the Mark David Chapman movie he did. Oh, really? Yeah. He got all fat to play Mark David Chapman, then got all skinny again, I think got gout because of it.

And then got even skinnier to play Rayon in Dallas Buyer's Club. Yeah. Dude, have you seen it? Yes. How thin can two people get? They're pretty thin. Yeah. Like the two of them together make me.

And there's got to be. There's got to be a safe way to lose and regain weight. Yeah. But I'll bet there's not very many safe ways to gain weight to make yourself look pudgy. No. I mean. And then to lose it again. I'll bet that's not.

When it's been done, like from De Niro to Fat Mac on Always Sunny, I think they say they just eat like lots of garbage and just pile it on. Yeah. That's not healthy at all. No. But you know, that's one of my pet peeves. Like a fit person and like they gain 30 pounds for a movie and it's like, you don't look like a fatter person and you look like a fit person who like has a distended belly.

Right. You know? Yeah. It takes years to get this look. You know? You got to work at it. Sculpt this. Yeah.

Okay. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I think this is better than the sun. Oh yeah. As far as our celestial episodes go. Far less physics that we had to deal with. We haven't done the moon straight up, have we?

I think we have. Have we? Jerry, have we done the moon? I think we did because we talked about its origin, whether it was carved, whether it was a separate accretion. I'm pretty sure we've done the moon. All right. We'll look it up.

It's getting bad. We need to get a list together. Yeah, we do. So we quit boring everyone with this. Yeah. You'd think we'd edit it out, but we just don't. Yeah. If you want to learn more about Mars, you can type that word into the search bar at

HowStuffWorks.com and since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this your theory on eating what you crave. Did you see this email? No. Just listen to the salt podcast dudes and Josh posture that you could get along just fine eating only what you crave. I'm not sure how serious he was though. He was fairly serious.

Fairly. Okay. I'll agree that about. It depends on whether I'm right. I'll agree that 150 years ago this may have been pretty viable, but these days it's a different story. Oh yeah. There's a lot of evidence that points to food manufacturers actually designing junk foods

that make you crave more of them, mainly sugar and fat heavy foods. There's one great book in particular called Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Talbs. Basically tells the story of how a lot of what the FDA and USDA recommends is wrong and how it got that way. For instance, the guy who conducted the seven country study, which is what caused the government to say fat will kill you, simply throughout data that contradicted the result he was looking for. Throw in the fact that corn is subsidized and super cheap and we have the recipe for

an obese, misinformed population that's addicted to sugar and has been fed terribly wrong information about health for a long time. Yeah. I've learned recently you're supposed to have fats and there are good fats and there are bad fats, but low fat is not a good way to go. Yeah. It's pretty sad. It has been foisted on us.

Yeah. Foisted? Gary likes to use that word. That is from Steve Baume, the Baumer in what he calls good old New Jersey or as we call Tharsus. Tharsus. Is he from Tharsus City? That is Steve Baume.

I don't know if he's from Tharsus City or not, but he's from somewhere in Tharsus. There is a really good article about how food scientists engineer foods to make us crave them. It's on the New York Times. It was a couple of years ago by a guy named Michael Moss. Yeah. In your defense, I don't think you were, I think you meant it more along the lines of craving real foods and not necessarily I'm craving Ben and Jerry's or pretzels.

Right. You know, I meant like craving a steak or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Not ignoring that and going with, you know, the head of lettuce. Right. I hear you. I can't find the name of that article, but it's a Michael Moss article and it's from

the New York Times and dude, it is good. It's one of those really extensive long form ones that like should be long form because there's just so much great information in it. Eye-opening. Yeah. So look it up everybody. It will open your eyes. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and me, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

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