The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go by David A. Weintraub

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go by David A. Weintraub Vanderbilt.edu David Weintraub received his Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Astronomy at Yale in 1980 and his PhD in Geophysics & Space Physics at UCLA in 1989. He is a Professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, where he founded and directs the Communication of Science program and does research on the formation of stars and planets. He is the 2015 winner of the Klopsteg Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers, which recognizes the outstanding communication of the excitement of contemporary physics to the general public. His most recent book, Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go was published in 2018, has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Polish, and will appear in a revised, paperback edition in November 2020. His previous books include Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It? (2014), How Old is the Universe? (2010), and Is Pluto a Planet? (2006). He has also co-written seven astronomy books for children.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast hey we certainly appreciate you how many people did you refer the show to this week did you did you grab how did you grab like four or five?

I feel like I'm one of those affiliate marketer things. Ask three to four of your friends to watch the Chris Voss Show and subscribe. Sorry, you don't get a percentage. That's the way it works around here, man. We're not getting paid for this. Are you kidding? We do this for free because we love it. And hopefully you love the Chris Voss Show too.

If you do, go give a great referrals and recommends on iTunes. Give those five-star ratings. We certainly appreciate those that do. Special hug out to you. Of course, we'll all wear masks when that hug takes place. Today, we have a most excellent author. I've been kind of excited to have this gentleman because we're going to talk about space.

We're going to talk about brilliant science stuff. And I think this is a really interesting discussion because I partially believe in a lot of it. We'll talking about brilliant science stuff, and I think this is a really interesting discussion because I partially believe in a lot of it. We'll get into that, but our guest today is David Weintraub. He's the author of Life on Mars, What to Know Before We Go, and it was published in 2018. It's just coming out of paperback, so you can grab either copy. David received his bachelor's degree in physics and astronomy at Yale in 1980 and his PhD in geophysics and space physics at UCLA in 1989. He is the professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University, where he founded and directs the Communication of Science Program and does

research on the formation of stars and planets. He's a 2015 winner of the Klopsteg Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers, which recognizes outstanding communication, the excitement of contemporary physics to the general public. And his book, of course, we mentioned, has been put into several different languages. And he's done previous books as well, Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, How Will We Deal With It, How Old Is the Universe, Is Pluto a Planet? That's got to be a controversial one. He's written seven astronomy books for children, co-written.

How are you doing, David? I'm doing great this morning, Chris. Thanks for having me. Awesome sauce. I've been watching a bunch of your videos, and they are compelling, like the different interviews you've done. So I was excited to have you on. So why do you hate other planets in the universe and you just like Mars? No, I'm just kidding. I think Mars is a fascinating planet, and it's close.

Obviously, as most of your listeners know, NASA, United Arab Emirates in China all sent spacecraft to Mars this month. It's close. There's a lot of exciting things that we can learn about Mars. It's a great planet. As we get into this, let's take your plugs. Where can people see you on the interwebs and order your book? They can get the book, like everything, from Amazon

or from Princeton University Press. My website is just at mynameatvanderbilt.edu. There you go. It's a great website, but they can find me there. There you go. You can find them looking up. This gentleman knows space. And, yeah, so Mars, a life on Mars, I should say. What to know before we go.

And let's talk some more about why Mars. Like, why is Mars an important thing for us to be interested in? Let's start by going back a couple of hundred years when astronomers didn't know much about any of the planets. Mars is bright. Mars is relatively close. Astronomers invented this thing called a telescope 400 years ago and pointed at Mars. And the first thing they discovered about Mars is that it spins in 24 hours. There's another planet you're familiar with that has a 24 hour day.

We're living on it. They next discovered that Mars had polar caps. That's like the one we're living on. Are there 7-11s, 24-hour 7-11s on Mars? We will know soon. Or we'll put them there. That's what we do. So we discovered 200 years ago that Mars is the planet in our solar system

that is most like the Earth. And in the 19th century, astronomers got pretty good at inventing things that didn't exist on Mars. So astronomers, I'll put this in quote, discovered life on Mars. It was abundant. They were engineers. They built canals on Mars. And of course, none of that exists. But astronomers misinterpreted some of the things they saw on Mars because Mars looked like it ought to be like the Earth.

So they interpreted these things to be Earth-like signatures. What we know now, the beginning of the 21st century, is Mars does have a lot of similarities with the Earth. It has water. It has a bit of water. It doesn't have flowing rivers like the Earth does. It doesn't have oceans, but it probably once did. Now, my understanding is there might be stuff under the surface? That's a good possibility. We could start by saying it's very unlikely that there's anything on the surface, because Mars's

atmosphere is very thin. Mars's atmosphere can't protect the surface of Mars from ultraviolet light, which most of your listeners know isn't so good for you, or from x-rays from space. Any life on the surface of Mars would have been sterilized long ago. So if life exists on Mars, it exists under the surface where it's protected. But life could have formed on Mars billions of years ago, and it would have had lots of time to find a place underground where it could hide and thrive. And one of the things we know on the Earth, there's a project called the Deep Carbon Observatory on Earth. It's a collection of more than 1,000 scientists around the world who are trying to search for and discover and catalog the life on Earth that exists far beneath the surface. And there is lots of it, lots and lots of life below the surface of the Earth that does not depend on sunlight, that is hidden from the oxygen in the atmosphere, which for most living things is probably a bad thing, the

oxygen. If life can exist deep below the surface of the earth, then life could exist deep below the surface of Mars. Yeah. That's a intriguing question. Plus, we know Martians aren't into canals. That's not really their thing, from what I understand. I watch a lot of movies on that.

No, the canals didn't work out so well. It is interesting, our fascination with Mars. You know, much like our fascination with beaches and the ocean and stuff, I feel a special connection. Maybe I'm just driving myself mentally but i've i've always felt a special connection to the beach and the ocean and somewhere in our core it almost feels like we know where the birth of our mother and the prior memorial soup is at least that's what many people believe or believe, that we crawled up out of. And maybe that's part of the fascination, too, with Mars,

is somehow deep in our DNA there's this haunting voice that says, your mom's over here. It could well be. We could be descended from Martians. Your grandmother could be a Martian. Now, I have a grandmother, so I'm not trying to be personal with that. But it is quite possible if life needs water to get started, and that's probably where life got started on the

earth in that primordial soup. Mars had a primordial soup too. Mars had oceans when the earth had oceans 4 billion years ago. In those oceans, all the ingredients that you need to cook up life calcium and carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen all of that stuff is in the oceans of mars or was in what were the oceans of mars so mars had a primordial soup life could have started on mars in fact it's possible that life could have started on mars and been kicked off of Mars by an asteroid collision with Mars, and a piece of Mars could have landed on Earth and seeded life on Earth. We truly could be descended from Martian life. Yeah, I've heard Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about that and a few other people about how, yeah,

something could have spit off of Mars come to us. I mean, we have the dust of the stars in our DNA. Is that not correct? We do everything that we're made of was made in stars. Supernova explosions, stars that blow up, are probably the location in the universe where most of what astronomers call the heavy elements, anything heavier than hydrogen and helium to an astronomer is a heavy element. All of that stuff was manufactured in stars that exploded.

And after the stars explode, the material spreads out in interstellar space and then gets swept up into clouds, and those clouds form new stars and planets. As Carl Sagan liked to say, we are star stuff. We truly are. Billions. I used to love the way he said billions. You know, my doctor says I'm fat, but I just tell him I have a lot of heavy elements from space.

So there's that. Yeah, it's very interesting. And I've heard it talked about a lot. Is it possible that Mars is like what our planet will eventually become? Like maybe Mars was like ahead of us, a thriving Earth, as you talked about. And then, you know, it's now died off. And maybe, you know, that's our destiny. Like, I don't know.

It could be. Mars, let's bring Venus into the conversation at the same time. Venus is the planet closest to the Earth that's just a bit closer to the sun. Mars is the planet that's closest to the Earth that's just a bit further to the sun. Mars is the planet that's closest to the earth. It just, it's just a bit further from the sun. The temperature on Venus is almost the same size as the earth, almost the same radius mass. Venus has an atmosphere with carbon dioxide in it. Venus probably was like the earth.

Just like Mars was probably like the earth. Venus looks like it has continent like features features and ocean basin-like features. But the oceans are long gone. Venus lost all its water because Venus got too hot. The atmosphere is now about 900 degrees. A refrigerator would melt on the surface of Venus. So we're not going to Venus. It's a hostile place. The opposite seems to have happened on Mars.

Mars started out like the Earth and it froze. We're pretty sure we know why Venus became such a hellish place. We have good ideas about what may have happened to Mars, but we're not sure exactly why. But those two planets represent two different extremes, either one of which could happen to the Earth. The Earth, if we don't control the environment, we could have a runaway greenhouse like Venus,

and we could boil off our atmosphere in oceans and be like Venus. Or some other kind of atmospheric catastrophe could occur, and the Earth could end up freezing like Mars. Wow. Well, I did read once a book that said, met her from Mars, we met her from Venus, and maybe that's what just happened to Venus. She got too hot.

She was posting her pictures on Instagram and just blew up, basically. I don't know. Could well be. Could well be. So that's a maybe then. Theory, theory. I love science and theory. We need to investigate that one.

You know, so I saw some interviews. You were talking about Elon Musk, and we have this push where people want to go to Mars. Why is this always so important? Because I hear from – I've read several books on why this is important, but for the laymen and people out there, because a lot of people ask, you know, like, why are we spending billions of dollars to go to the moon, go to Mars and all that stuff?

And when people hear, you know, we've got a lot of stuff we've got to fix, why is this important? There are a lot of reasons we could discuss. One of the reasons is this is simply what humans do. We explore, we pursue the unknown, we climb Mount Everest because it's there. We went to the moon because it was there and we thought we could. So we tried to do it. We take risks and we learn how to do new things. In science and engineering, oftentimes we do new things simply because we can. And by doing those things, we learn a lot of important things. We also sometimes do things because we can that we probably shouldn't. Nuclear weapons

are probably a good example. Biological weapons are a good example. Anthrax. So just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do something. But humans do tend to do things because we can. Mars, one of the ideas advanced by Elon Musk with his SpaceX Corporation is that we need to go to Mars in order to colonize Mars because humans need a location that we haven't destroyed in case we destroy the Earth. We're working on it pretty good right now. I think we could probably do a better job investing those billions of dollars

trying to not destroy the Earth rather than trying to colonize Mars. But that is one of the ideas that is advanced for going to Mars. One of the ideas that has not been advanced for going to Mars is economic reasons. There is no justifiable economic reason right now to go to Mars. We're not going to Mars to find space rocks that are going to make somebody rich. We're not going to Mars to mine Mars or to do agriculture on Mars or manufacture things on Mars that we couldn't do cheaper here or on the moon or in Earth orbit.

There's no economic justification for going to Mars. We're going to Mars simply because we can, and we will prove things about how to travel through space for extended periods of time, how to live in space. These things may ultimately be very valuable things to learn. We're also going to Mars for scientific, purely scientific reasons. We have a lot to learn about Mars that probably can teach us about the possible future of the earth, the planet earth,

that can teach us how to destroy or not destroy our environment, if we can learn what did happen on Mars. We also will get back to the life here. We also might learn whether life exists somewhere in the universe other than on the Earth. Mars is the closest place in the entire universe where life might exist today or might have existed in the past. And scientifically, it would be incredible to figure that out,

to discover whether we are alone in the universe or not. Especially those Martians. Did you ever see the movie? I know this is science fiction, but I'm just curious, because I watched the movie The Martian, and the concept of him, you know, growing potatoes and, uh,

how like sustainable was that movie or was it just, you know, complete science fiction was very, very accurate scientifically and engineering wise. I don't want to spoil things for someone who might not have seen it, but I do think it's a very good science fiction movie that was well made. The only real gripe I would have scientifically with a movie is the reason Matt Damon gets stranded on Mars is because a giant dust storm blows, that threatens to blow over the rocket that would launch them back off the surface of Mars. And Mars does have giant dust storms, but Mars' atmosphere is so thin,

there isn't enough mass or momentum in the wind to push the spacecraft over. So that was a stretch. But except for that, it's a really accurate movie on what is possible. And, you know, I heard you talk in some of your other interviews, we'd have to keep sending, if we send a manned vehicle there with people, we'd have to keep sending support vehicles just constantly.

For the foreseeable future. But one of the things that worries me about sending humans to Mars is that at the moment we'd be sending them on a suicide mission. We have the ability to get astronauts to Mars almost certainly, well, not today, but within the decade, by the end of the 2020s, we will have the technology that is sufficient to send

astronauts to the surface of Mars. We don't know whether we can keep them alive long enough to get them there, and we don't know if we can safely get them to the surface. But what we do know is we cannot get them off the surface of Mars. We cannot bring them home. So it's a one-way mission, and unless we can continue to resupply them or teach them how to grow enough potatoes, they're going to die on Mars. They need water.

We know Mars has water, but Mars doesn't have wells that you can tap underground to just pull the water up. We have to find the water and get the water. Mars does not have oxygen for the astronauts to breathe. We have to manufacture the oxygen. The surface of Mars would kill them. They couldn't live on the surface. They'd have to build a structure, which we don't know how to do. Or they'd have to find a cave to live in.

And we don't know where the caves are yet. So it worries me that we can't – the likelihood of keeping them alive on the surface of Mars is very small. But even if we could shelter them and provide them with oxygen and water, we're going to have to bombard them with additional supply craft, with food, with energy resources to keep them alive. It'll be a very costly invention. Now, you said it has ice caps. Do ice caps ever melt to create water, or are they in a constant state of ice? They're in a constant state of ice.

Nothing's melting into liquid. The ice caps are partly frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice, and partly frozen water. Mars has summers and winters just like the Earth, so northern summer is the same time as southern winter but in whichever hemisphere it's summer it becomes warm enough that the dry ice evaporates it sublimates and we most people have seen dry ice and it the steam comes off dry ice goes directly from solid to gas it doesn't go through the liquid phase so there

wouldn't be any flowing carbon dioxide on the surface. The water ice is always so cold that the water remains in the form of ice. There's no liquid water flowing on the surface. But there's lots of frozen water ice at the polar caps. There was a point in my life you could have sent me to Mars. I could have survived on vodka as long as I had ice. I actually worked for that too. my life you could have sent me to mars i could survive on vodka as long as that ice i probably want to be on vodka if i was on the martian thing how long if we send a man mission today with today's technology maybe in the next 10 years like you mentioned how long is it would it take for us to send a mission of that i'm i realize there's lots of variables you know size

of planes but how how long would it take to transverse that distance? That's launch windows, as they're known. It takes about seven months. If Earth and Mars are in the right relative positions, you can get to Mars in seven months. So the rover, the Perseverance rover that NASA launched last week is scheduled to get to Mars next February, February 18th, about seven months. If Earth and Mars are not in the right position,

then it can take a whole lot longer. Really? Wow. Seven months is the best trajectory right now. If we can build bigger, faster rockets, we can get there sooner, but we're not going to reduce that travel time by much in the near future. It's probably not possible that the soil, does it have gravity like Earth does or limited gravity? Everything has gravity.

Everything that has mass has gravity. So you have gravity. I have gravity. And mass attracts other things. So yes, Mars has gravity. But because the mass of Mars is about one-tenth of what the Earth has, and the radius of Mars is about half the size of the Earth, Mars' gravity

is weaker than the Earth's. So if you would go to Mars, you'd lose weight. Hey, sign me up, buddy. Let's go. Let's go. You'd still be the same shape and size, but you'd lose weight because gravity is what makes you weigh something.

Gravity is how strong the Earth or Mars is pulling you down. Everyone knows you'd weigh one-sixth as much on the moon. Damn. Everyone heard that when they were six years old. Can I just start saying that's my weight now? I can be people like, how much do you weigh? I'll be like, I weigh 80 pounds on Mars. Yeah, give them your Mars weight or your lunar weight.

There you go, my lunar weight. All right, baby. It has mass. You could jump higher on Mars, but you'd come back down. Note to self, change Tinder profile details. So this is pretty interesting. And one of the things that came out of our space race, the thing that we did in the 60s,

was a lot of great technology and a lot of stuff like cell phones, all the stuff. You know, we talked earlier about why this is important. A lot of the stuff that we get from developing this technology, and, of course, one of the things we had to do in the space race was we had to, you know, take giant things and try and cram them into smaller and smaller pieces so that we could load them up and shoot them into space. Um, and, uh, so this is kind of the interesting things that comes about us. We, I read some different books on how it's important for us to dream big, to shoot for, uh, courageous goals and, and everything else. And, and, uh, somehow

we, we need to balance the two, I suppose, of what we need to fix here first. But is it possible, you mentioned that Mars has got a limited layer of protecting it from the atmosphere, the sun's rays, radioactivity. Could that happen here with our ozone, where we could eventually eat it away and then we're going to have some serious problems? We have made very serious attempts to destroy our atmosphere so yes that could happen the ozone layer is what protects us from dangerous ultraviolet light from space the ozone layer consists of molecules ozone molecules that each have three oxygen atoms we manufactured a lot

of chemicals what known as known as CFCs, chlorofluorohydrocarbons, in the 20th century that were really valuable for air conditioners, for example, for spraying deodorant out of aerosol cans. But those chemicals, the CFCs, got into the atmosphere, and they live in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. And they grab those ozone molecules and destroy them so through much of the 20th century we were destroying the ozone layer until we figured out that we were destroying the ozone layer at beginning in the 1980s

the science community the engineering communities the manufacturing communities all figured out how to replace the dangerous ozone-destroying chemicals with other chemicals. So the ozone is replenishing itself. The ozone holes are closing up. Nice. Probably by the end of the 21st century, assuming we don't screw it up again, the ozone layer will be as healthy as it was in 1900, which is a good thing. But what that does show is that, first of all, we have the potential to destroy the ozone layer. And we also have the potential to undestroy the ozone layer. It's just a question of whether we have the wherewithal

the political wherewithal the ethical wherewithal to not do it if we destroy the ozone layer then we destroy life on earth we die yeah yeah so i mean we've already seen how bad it is where you know now you have to wear uh tanning solution spf 2000 to go out in the sun i mean if you saw mark zuckerberg's picture recently in Hawaii on a board, I think he's got like half of a mask on or something, the gel. We need to protect the environment. The ozone layer is an example of it. The increase in carbon dioxide, global warming, I think that's real.

I think it's overwhelming that it's real. That's something that we could fix if we have, again, the political and the moral fortitude to decide to do it. We'll have to make some sacrifices in order to do it. But if we don't make the sacrifices, we die. Yeah. I grew up in the 70s. I remember Love Canal and I remember all the, you know, how crappy it was. I grew up in, you know, SoCal in the 70s, you know, where you couldn't see the mountains. You couldn't see anything.

You'd see 10 cars in front of you because of the smog back then. You know, now you go to California, and you can see 20 cars in front of you. No, I'm just kidding. You can see the mountains now most times. For example, we can clean this stuff up. We can fix it it we want to but humans do change the earth yeah our presence on the earth has changed the earth how come uranus doesn't get more not uranus but uranus the planet how come that doesn't get more

like uh i was gonna say love wow, that just went weird. What's wrong with Uranus and Pluto? It's cold, and it would take a lot longer to get there. The outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, are known as gas giant planets. They don't have solid surfaces. They don't have atmospheres the way Earth, Mars, and Venus do. But Saturn and Jupiter do have moons, which are extremely interesting to planetary scientists. And at least a few of those moons are very, very interesting because

they also could harbor life. You know, what do you think about mining the moon? I think, from my understanding, there's people that are really exploring that option, trying to mine the moon and go up there and possibly do that. What do you think of that? I think there are people who are actively considering that. When we first put spacecraft in orbit around the moon 50 years ago, we discovered there were things underneath the surface of the moon known as mass cons,

concentrations of mass just beneath the surface. We don't know what those are yet, but most likely they're giant balls of iron or nickel that were asteroids that are buried under the surface because of impact. Almost certainly, we could figure out where those things are and we could learn how to mine them. It would be expensive, but it's low gravity on the moon. We could probably learn how to do that in the next century. I'm not sure that makes a whole lot of sense as a first thing to do.

There are other objects which are worth mining known as asteroids. I'm not sure that makes a whole lot of sense as a first thing to do. There are other objects which are worth mining, known as asteroids. Some asteroids come relatively close to the Earth's orbit. It would probably be cost-effective in the long term to learn how to lasso an asteroid, if you will, bring it into lunar orbit or Earth orbit, or crash it onto the surface of the moon and mine it there. I think we will learn how to do some manufacturing and some mining from asteroids and or the moon.

Those actually have, I think, real potential, economic potential, whereas manufacturing or mining on Mars, not so much. Didn't we just land a probe or something on an asteroid? We have sent multiple probes to multiple asteroids. I'm not sure if we landed on one recently, where recently is this month. But we have landed a few spacecraft on the surfaces of asteroids. The European Space Agency landed one on the surface of a comet. We are learning how to do that.

We've put spacecraft in orbit around small asteroids. These are all baby steps toward learning how to, one, understand what the asteroids are made of to figure out which are the good ones, which are the ones we could mine or harvest materials from. And two, figuring out how we would do that. Could you land some kind of rocket on the surface of an asteroid and learn how to steer the asteroid from the asteroid belt closer to the Earth? Over the next century, we're going to learn how to do those things. Is it possible that when the big asteroid hit that was supposed to kill the dinosaurs, that we could have come in on that asteroid from Mars, or would it have been another event? It would be another event.

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was a big guy. It was probably 8 to 10 miles across. And when that thing hit the Earth, it vaporized. Everything on it was heated up to such high temperatures that any life, if there had been any life on that asteroid that came in with the asteroid, would have been destroyed in the collision. If you want to transport life from Mars to the Earth, you're going to want to do it in a little rock,

maybe the size of a house or the size of a football, something that when it gets to the Earth won't be completely vaporized by the atmosphere or by a collision with the surface. It will just plunk down onto the surface. So maybe we would have come in from inside the rock in some sort of organism or small DNA form. If that happened, it would have been an organism inside the rock. The outside of the rock would be sterilized by the collision with the Earth

and the Earth's atmosphere. But something inside the rock could survive. So one of the reasons i want to have you on is i'm working on my bingo card for 2020 catastrophes and uh which month should i pick on the bingo card for the asteroid that wipes us off the planet is that going to be like november any of the first seven months so there are only five to choose from. Yeah, there's only five. So just tell me which month. I don't see anything in August. So let's go with October.

Okay. All right. Note to self, put down October for the asteroid right after the killer hornets. There are asteroids hitting the Earth every day. Yeah. So you can pick any month you want. They're just not killer asteroids. When you see a shooting star, a shooting star is a tiny little asteroid that's burning up in the atmosphere.

I've always been fascinated by them. When I was a kid and I was a Boy Scout, we used to go up in the U.N.S. And it's so amazing when you go up into areas that aren't, you know, big cities that blot out the sky with their light. And it's always fun to just see the whole – I mean, it's just fascinating. And I think that appeals to us on a chromosomal DNA. I have to ask you now, were you a successful Boy Scout? I guess so.

I don't know. We call it a fiction. I flunked out of Boy Scouts. One of the requirements when I was 12 to become a first-class scout was to identify 10 constellations. I couldn't do it. I'm not sure I could either. I don't know if I got my space merit badge.

The closest I came to real cool space stuff was NASA had me come see the Endeavor when it came to California. And we got a chance to tour, run underneath it through the carrier plane and learn about it and watch it land and stuff. It was really cool. I could almost feel like I could touch it, and they only touch it. That's when they strapped them on the 747 to take them back to Florida. It was extraordinary, the amount of stuff that goes into it. It was, like, really cool. We toured the inside.

They weren't supposed to let us in the back of the 747, but, I don't know, they just said, F it, and they let us in the back. And it was extraordinary. And to be that close to it where you could literally, if I would have had another five feet on my arm, I could have touched the Endeavor from the entrance of the 747. We joke about rocket science and brain surgery as being so hard. I don't know anything about brain surgery,

but rocket science really is hard, and it pushes the limits. What SpaceX is now able to do in returning pieces of the rocket to these graceful landings in the middle of the ocean to reuse the materials, it's incredible. And these advances in technology will be very valuable for us for things other than going to Mars. Yeah, and it'll be an interesting journey. So do you, in your book, do you talk about how to set up, if we do go to Mars, how to set up a community there? Give us more details

what's in the book. What I talk about is what we really need to know before we go. Okay. We need to know that life might exist on Mars. That, to me, is the primary thing. Because if life exists on Mars, we should be asking ourselves whether we have the right to colonize Mars. Because if life exists on Mars, and we colonize Mars, almost certainly we will wipe out

the pre-existing life forms that exist on Mars. So this is one of those scientific things where, like, you shouldn't step into the environment of the organisms because you pollute the environment. We know how it works on Earth. We wiped out the dodo bird, and we wiped out, you name it. As humans explored new parts of the Earth, we wiped out the indigenous life forms in those parts of the earth.

We did it pretty effectively, right? We're good at this. Undoubtedly, if life exists on Mars and we go to Mars, we will wipe it out. The question then is, do we have the right to do that? Now, if no life exists on Mars, if Mars is sterile, then it doesn't matter, right? We can go to Mars, we're not wiping anything out. But if life does exist on Mars, I think we have some incredibly important questions to ask of ourselves before we do that. We have some examples from NASA and space science before. I mentioned Jupiter and Saturn's moons are places

where life might exist. NASA had a spacecraft known as the Galileo mission that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, a while ago. But we knew that mission would eventually end because the spacecraft would run out of fuel. And once it runs out of fuel, we can't control where it goes. It could crash into anything in the Jovian system. One of the moons of Jupiter, known as Europa, has a surface of ice, probably 10 miles thick of ice. And below that, it has a global ocean. We know that.

Wow. Inside that ocean, life could exist. Yeah. So the planetary science community decided that we should not, we dare not risk allowing that spacecraft to crash into the surface of Europa because we could contaminate Europa. So they used the last bit of fuel on the Galileo mission to steer it into the atmosphere of Jupiter and burn it up.

Wow. Basically, we drew a line in the sand into the atmosphere of Jupiter and burn it up. Wow. Basically, we drew a line in the sand in the outer solar system and said, we should not contaminate another world that already has life. Then we sent another spacecraft to Saturn called the Cassini mission, launched in 2003. In 2017, when it was running out of fuel, we steered it into the atmosphere of Saturn to burn it up because we also knew that Saturn has one and maybe two moons

that could have life. One called Enceladus also has a global icy surface with a global ocean beneath the surface. We know life could exist in that environment. Titan, the big moon of Saturn, has an atmosphere. Life could exist on Titan. We did not want to even have the remote chance, whether in 10 years or 1,000 years or a million years, that that spacecraft could crash into those moons that might have life. So now we have Mars, the closest place in the entire universe that might have life.

I think we ought to be asking ourselves the same questions as to whether we have an ethical responsibility to study Mars very, very carefully, long enough to know whether Mars has life before we try to colonize Mars. Do we need to drill into the surface? Is that what we need to do? Do any of the stuff that we've sent so far do any major sort of drilling, or maybe that's unethical? We've drilled a few millimeters into the surface, a fraction of an inch.

The Perseverance rover that's on the way has a drill, which is capable of drilling down about 15 feet into the surface. So that will be our first attempt to actually look beneath the surface. Do we have to drill beneath the surface to find out whether Mars has life? That's one way to do it. If we put robotic dune buggies on Mars and they could travel around Mars and find caves and go in the caves, we might just be able to find life if life exists on Mars, just hanging around underground in the caves. We don't need people on Mars to do that, but we need robotic spacecraft that can explore Mars, find the caves, and go into the caves. We could send robotic spacecraft to the interface between where the

ice caps are and the rock at the polar caps and look at those interfaces, those boundaries, because those are places where chemistry is happening. Life could exist there. We don't need people to do it. We don't need people to do it. We don't need to drill beneath the surface to do it. Those are other ways of exploring. And the last one, which we've been haggling over the meaning of the data for the last several decades, and it's a lot of what I talk about in the book, is Mars appears to have methane in its atmosphere.

And methane in the atmosphere of Mars is not something that can hang around for very long. Ultraviolet light from space would destroy the methane. So methane in Mars' atmosphere has to be continually replenished. The question then is, what's replenishing the methane? Is it life, or is it some non-biological process that's making the methane? So there are two questions involved with the methane. One is, are the measurements right? Does Mars actually have much or any methane? Does it have enough methane that it couldn't be produced by geology?

It could only be produced by biology. If life exists below the surface and produces methane, that methane could bubble up into the atmosphere. We don't need to drill beneath the surface to find the life. The methane would be the signature of that life. It's just extraordinary how scientists are able to look at this. Maybe Martians just have real gas problems

like flatulence. And they're just hiding underneath the surface. Honestly, if I was aliens, I think this is the reason we never have really any contact with aliens. They come here and they go, oh, this is a shit show. We're out. We're out. No, man. A lot of the methane the earth sat was here comes from flatlets from cows there there you go

so if the earth were on the other side of the milky way galaxy yeah we're a hundred thousand light years away we could use our telescopes and point them at that planet earth that other earth and if we detect it in the atmosphere of that other earth oxygen and methane at the same time we know that life exists on that planet a hundred thousand light years away we don't need to send people in spacecraft across the galaxy to ask real meaningful questions about whether life exists in other places we can we can ask the right questions in the right ways we can figure this out it definitely is interesting wow man i've got to get a hold of your book we've got to have the publisher send that baby out um that'll order it uh the uh so this is pretty cool you're talking about all this different stuff

that we need to think about uh SpaceX wants to go by 2024. NASA wants to send astronauts to the Mars orbit in the 2030s. It's an interesting thing. And you've actually brought up a lot of things I didn't know about, like the ethical aspects of us going to Mars. One of the things you just mentioned is SpaceX wants to send humans to the surface of Mars in the 2020s. NASA wants to send humans to orbit Mars in the 2030s. The reason NASA is not talking about landing astronauts on

the surface is because NASA knows they can't get them back off the surface. And if your tax dollars are paying to send astronauts to Mars, you probably want your tax dollars to bring them home alive. We could put them in Mars orbit and bring them home. We couldn't put them on the surface and bring them home. So there's no way you can pull off what we do with the moon. No. Again, because you weigh one-sixth as much on the moon and only half as much on Mars.

You weigh more on Mars. So it's harder to get down to the surface and harder to get back off the surface. You need a bigger rocket to get off the planet. Does that weight differential contribute to, like, say if you had high blood pressure or low blood pressure, like how the functioning of your body would work with the gravity? I don't know enough biology, but if you had high enough blood pressure

with the lower surface pressure of the atmosphere on Mars, maybe you'd just explode. Yeah, that's probably what would happen to me. It would be all the methane probably from burritos at taco time. And, yeah, the ethical thing, I mean, God knows like the ocean planets, if we went there, we'd just fill them with plastic because that's the stupid stuff that we do. Good stuff.

We certainly, when we first arrive on Mars, I am sure that our highest priority will not be worrying about polluting Mars. I hope so. So we'll drop packages on the surface of Mars, and we'll take the food out of it, and we'll just leave all this debris all over Mars. Yeah, that's our style. Unfortunately, we're just like cockroaches.

So what is the probability of being able to send people there, circle the planet, and come back? Is that plausible? We're very, very close to being able to do it. Again, I think by the end of this decade, the end of the 2020s, both SpaceX and NASA will have built or contracted for launch vehicles, rockets that are capable of getting to Mars. To put something in orbit around the Earth.

You need a little rocket, if you will. If it's the moon, you remember the Saturn V. That was a big rocket. That's what it took to get to the moon. We do not have a rocket right now that is as big as the Saturn V. So it would take another Saturn V rocket size? It would take a Saturn V rocket to get us to Mars. NASA is working and SpaceX are working on reinventing, if you will, a Saturn V, a rocket big enough to go into what they call deep space,

which is meaning beyond the moon. By the end of this decade we will have those rockets yeah of them within three or four years with spacex so we have we'll soon have the ability to get to mars to go into orbit around mars now once you go into orbit around mars you need to take a rocket with you that can get you back out of orbit. You need to take enough fuel with you to get you out of orbit and bring you home. To take the fuel, you need a big fuel canister, which means you need a bigger rocket to take the fuel with you.

Sounds dangerous, too. Yeah. And you need a fuel canister that doesn't leak the fuel out. If you watch these rocket launches recently, you see they don't put the fuel in until right before launch because it leaks out. Wow. That was one of the things that caused the spatial disaster too, right? Right. We need a fuel tank that can store the fuel for seven months until we're ready to use it again.

Or we need the ability to manufacture the fuel once we get to Mars. We don't have the ability to do any of those things yet. But what we will have very soon is a rocket that's powerful enough to get people to Mars. Yeah. This is where they know we can get them back. You know, I do have a list of people that I want shunned into space that we can send to Mars that if they don't come back i think we're gonna be okay

i think we could get lots of volunteers and between the volunteer and the lists you and i could put together yeah and a lot of people to mars you know i i think that this would be a great thing for science we we should and this it would raise a lot of money too where we could just have like a giant vote of who needs to get shot into space and never heard from again. And then like everybody pitches in five bucks, like think of all the money we could raise that way. And then we could get rid of a few people too.

You know, like anybody who believes in QAnon and stuff, we'd just shoot them into space. And have axers shoot them into space. We've put a few, the ashes of a few people into space yeah the astronomer who discovered pluto a little vial of his ashes went to pluto that's pretty cool that's pretty awesome man that's pretty awesome so uh anything more we need to know about your book what's in it and uh all the good stuff i think we've talked about a lot of the important things in it. There's some other evidence that I talk about in the book,

evidence that is controversial, but is nevertheless evidence we need to understand about the possibility of life on Mars. There's a meteorite that landed on Earth in the late 20th century in which some meteorite chemists think they found evidence of life on Mars. Again, very, very controversial. And I spent some time in the book talking about what that evidence is for and against. There are things like that.

There are a lot of contributing pieces of evidence that certainly suggest that we cannot dismiss the possibility of life on Mars. That's really what I'm talking about in the book. One possibility is that life on Mars is simply an idea that we invented. Another possibility is that life actually did or does exist on Mars. The book's really about all that evidence, trying to understand that evidence, trying to convince people that all that evidence, trying to understand that evidence, trying to convince people that understanding that evidence is important. Because we, I really think that if life exists on Mars, we ought to be debating whether we have the right to colonize Mars, because we will destroy it. Yeah, because that's what we do. know and and uh you know we'll just go there

and you know leave behind big gold cups and 7-eleven uh bags and stuff and plastic we'll bring plastic and right now we'll just bring covid and probably kill the whole planet you can take all the straws that we're not using it so the straws and you know i mean it's about enough what we do to everything else in the oceans and crap i mean i, I think George Carlin did a bit in one of his comedy things about how Mother Earth just kind of let us be created so we should get plastic and a few of the other things that we make. But now she's like done with us. She's like trying to figure out how to get rid of us. She's like, these people are, what's the word, an incessant species or an invasive species. They need to go.

They're not welcome anymore. She's just coming up with stuff like coronavirus just to try and get rid of us now at this point. What I think your listeners should think about and understand, and they can learn some of this from the book, we are busy spending lots of money to send lots of spacecraft to Mars. It's worth understanding why we're doing that, because there really are important scientific questions to be answered, and there's tremendous engineering breakthroughs that will come from doing this.

We're very motivated to study and go to Mars. People ought to understand why. And we talked about a lot of the other planets, but is Mars technically, in your mind, the number one place? If we were to go or consider going, Mars is the one to go to. Mars is the place. Mars, scientifically, the most interesting questions we want to ask can be answered on Mars about life in the universe. In terms of space exploration,

not science, but the engineering of going into space, Mars is the closest place where we would find a reasonably supportive environment. It doesn't have liquid water, but it does have water. It doesn't have an oxygen-rich water, but it does have water. It doesn't have an oxygen

rich atmosphere, but it has an atmosphere. The science fiction stories, I think, are on the mark in that someday we probably could learn how to turn Mars into a second Earth. We can't do that with Venus. We can't do that with the moon. The moon could never have an atmosphere. We could build domes and live in domes on the moon or underground on the moon. But eventually, meaning a thousand years, ten thousand years, it's not going to happen overnight.

We could, as the science fiction writers call it, we could terraform Mars. That's a real possibility. Can we terraform? So, yeah, we could terraform Mars. That's a real possibility. Can we terraform? So, yeah, we could terraform Mars. But that would be

interesting, I guess. But we'd have to have water, too. The water's there. Okay, yeah, underneath the surface. Mars has a tremendous amount of water at the ice caps and at the surface. Mars probably once had a lot more water than it has. Mars has a lot of water.

And if we get to the point at which we really are capable of trying to colonize Mars, we'll also develop the engineering wherewithal to capture a comet and haul the comet to Mars. And comets are mostly water. And then you've got more water. Most of the Earth's water, and comets are mostly water, and then you've got more water. Most of the Earth's water came from comets crashing into the Earth. Oh, wow. So we could replenish the water on Mars if we went with, let's call it, much more advanced technologies than we have now.

But comets come regularly from the outer solar system. One just came by, is going by right now, comet NEOWISE. It's not near the Earth, but it's close enough to the Earth's orbit that within the coming centuries, we could find ways to send spacecraft comets, orbit around comets, change the orbital trajectories of comets, and drive the comet to Mars if we wanted to. It's a ride, man. Something like that.

This is crazy stuff. I love all the science fiction stuff because it sure is better than what's going on right now in the news. Science fiction stuff is going to happen. It's going to come true. It's going to be awesome. And then you wrote a book in 2006, Is Pluto a Planet? Where do you fall on the line

sir i think pluto is a planet and should be considered a planet i have a nice t-shirt that you know says when i was a kid pluto was a planet i think it is scientists seem to get a lot of fistfights over this one don't they it's like it's like the controversy i think emotional about this when i wrote the book it was because my students were interested in the question so i was trying to provide them with enough information so that they could answer the question for themselves so in the book i try not to answer the question i try to explain the the pros and cons right i try to provide people with an understanding of why we can argue about it and the main reason we can argue about it is because astronomers don't know

how to define what a planet is. And if you don't know what a planet is, how do you know whether to put Pluto in the planet box or out of the planet box? Well, don't they know the difference between a moon and a planet? Sort of a moon orbits a planet. I'm going to have to read your book,

I guess. A moon orbits a planet. Planets orbit stars, like sun's a planet. I'm going to have to read your book, I guess. Moon orbit's a planet. Planets orbit stars, like the sun's a star. But how big does something have to be to be a planet? If I took that cell phone you have and put it in orbit around the sun, would you call it a planet? Mike? It's got a galaxy in it.

That's probably. Yeah, so you're talking put a galaxy on a planet. Some people say the object would have to be big enough. Yeah. If it's too small, it's not a planet. It has to be big enough. If it's too big, it's a star. It's not a planet. Oh, yeah. So

size matters, basically, is what you're saying. Size matters. I think I probably have a... Well, I have a chapter title in one of my books that is Size Matters. Yeah. All right. Well, sounds good then. Check out David's books.

And this has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks for coming on the show, David. What's some plugs where people can look you up on the interwebs and check out your stuff? The best way, if they just take my name and Google it, they'll find the books. If they go to Amazon and Google my it, they'll find the books. If they go to Amazon and Google my name, they'll find the books. Three of my books are from Princeton University Press, and despite being a university press, they're written for you. They're written for a general audience, sort of at a freshman level, but not meant as textbooks. I have a website at

vanderbilt.edu with my name. Not a great website, but they could find out more about me that way. There you go. Life on Mars, what to know before we go. There you go. So, Hope My Honest checks it out. It's definitely fun, and like I said, it's a much more interesting discussion than some of the things that are going on in the news, and certainly gives us a nice vision for the future.

And I think we always have kind of this aspiration, this DNA that we have, that we feel, I think sometimes we feel the stardust in our bones or in our DNA that are inside of us, and part of our lives, we're made up of the stars. So I think that's our fascination. We are part of the universe. Nice. And we're trying to learn more about it. Yeah.

Plus, I love the idea of being one-sixth the weight I am in Mars. I've got to change that on my Tinder profile. What's the moon? Oh, the moon? You don't have to lose half your weight at Mars. Damn it. You want to go to the moon. One-sixth, you're going to have to go to the moon.

Or you just go to the space station and it'll be wait list. That's what I really should do. I'm putting that on my Tinder profile. So thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to just refer the show to your friends and relatives. Go to thecvpn.com. There's nine podcasts there. Holy crap.

You'll probably see this on a few other podcasts as well. Our book author podcast, the Chris Fosh podcast. And also go to youtube.com if you want to watch the video version. probably see this on a few other podcasts as well our book author podcast chris voss podcast and uh also uh go to youtube.com if you want to watch the video version of this youtube.com forward slash chris voss we appreciate my audience sticking in there with us and seeing all these great authors and brilliant minds come on the show and tell us everything we need to know so that we can be so much smarter uh be safe uh stay tuned we'll see you next time