Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Conversation with Freeman Dyson

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

There’s so much more to Freeman Dyson than the Dyson Sphere.  The mathematician, physicist, futurist and author is one of the greatest and most original minds of our era.  He has much to say to Mat Kaplan about the future of space exploration and humanity in this week’s show.  NASA has announced two exciting papers based on discoveries by Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Rover.  Emily Lakdawalla has the straight story.  And we’ve got one more signed copy of “Chasing New Horizons” to give away in this week’s new space trivia contest. Learn more about Freeman Dyson and everything else we cover here:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/0613-freeman-dyson.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, podcast listeners. An extraordinary human being is my guest on this week's episode of the show. I hope you will enjoy my conversation with Freeman Dyson as much as I did. It should be shared. I hope you'll feel the same way. And perhaps even more importantly, please consider giving us a rating or even better yet, a review on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, wherever it is that you listen to the show if they provide for such things. It would be much appreciated. Thank you so much. It continues to be a tremendous pleasure to bring you Planetary Radio. Freeman Dyson, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. I have longed to talk with today's very special guest for

longer than this show has existed. Join me for a conversation with one of our era's greatest thinkers about Dyson spheres and Dyson trees, commercial spaceflight, rebellious science, black holes, gravity waves, and humanity's bright future. We'll also give away our last signed copy of that new book by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon called Chasing New Horizons. And Bruce Betts has a plethora of planets to point out. We begin with Planetary Society Senior Editor, Emily Lakdawalla. More exciting news from Mars, Emily.

Perhaps that generated greater enthusiasm and excitement than maybe it deserved, although it is pretty exciting. We'll come back to that topic. But first, tell us, what are these two papers that were released in tandem? There were two papers that came out in Science Magazine last week, long-term results from the Curiosity rover. You know, it's a complicated mission, so it takes a long time to develop the science from it. The first one was about methane on Mars and how they observed it over nearly three Martian years, varying seasonally, which I had heard about before, but this is a peer-reviewed paper. They refined their results. And also, they eliminated one of the explanations that they'd

been favoring in the past. They had seen a match between ultraviolet radiation from the sun being greater and lesser over the course of Mars' year and thought that might explain the varying amounts of methane in the atmosphere in some way. But now they're not so sure. And now they're really favoring releases from Mars itself. There are still non-biological, at least potential explanations for this, right? Oh, you know, considering it's Mars and we have not discovered life on Mars yet, it is much more likely. I think the Occam's razor tells you to look for non-biological explanations very hard. And the other paper, more organics, lots more. Yeah, so this concerned some rocks that they drilled into

quite a long time ago, in fact, at a site called Pahrump Hills, which they reached at the end of the nominal mission after their first Mars year. So two drill sites named Mojave and Confidence Hills, where they found these organic compounds preserved in the rock. There are certain kind of organic compounds that contain a lot of sulfur. What they think was the origin of these materials is that they're probably either they came from space or somehow formed in the lake that originally was there in Gale. And you're talking about quite large organic compounds, something called kerogens, which are just a real mess of carbon atoms all linked to each other in complicated ways. And then when they heated it up in their little oven and

sniffed off the gases, they broke down into these much smaller compounds. And what this tells you is that there were organic materials present in the Martian Lake, and that those organic materials that were there 3 billion years ago are still preserved in the rocks today. So really the great news is that if you send a mission whose mission really is to search for evidence of ancient life on Mars, there are definitely rocks around that will preserve any evidence of that. Back to that first topic. That first topic, you would have thought from some of the media coverage after NASA said that they were coming out with these announcements at a press conference, was that we'd found cockroaches crawling on Mars or some such. This is something that troubles you. It happens a lot. There are a couple of very prestigious peer-reviewed journals, the top two being Science and Nature.

And they're both weekly periodicals, the nature gets published on a Wednesday and science gets published on a Thursday. And if any agency or university or NASA or whatever has some of their researchers have a good paper in nature or science, there's often a press briefing, there's at least a press release. And so NASA announced about a week before the paper was coming out, hey, we're going to have a paper coming out and it's interesting. And so we're going to have this press briefing. And whenever NASA announces the fact that there's a science paper coming out, especially if it's on the Curiosity mission, the speculation that

happens in the media and in the public, it's every time it's like, oh, they're going to announce the discovery of life on Mars. And I'm here to tell you that if we did, in fact, discover evidence for life on Mars, the news would not wait until a science embargo was up. It would have been out a long time before that. So it's kind of frustrating. Some people blame NASA for stoking the hype, but if you look at their release about it, it's really very bland. There was no hyping of it at all. There's a lot of kind of irresponsible speculation that happens on the part of many different people and people just really need to tone it down a little bit.

Dial it back. I guess the upside of this is that people are still excited about what's going on on Mars. I guess so, but it sets up the cycle of hype and then disappointment and people get mad at NASA for stoking hype about something that isn't important. And it's not really NASA's fault. It's all of our fault. We all just got to stop. All right. There is one more thing to be legitimately excited about on Mars with Curiosity, and that's the drill. Yes, the drill is back in use for the first time in, I forget, like 500 or 600 sols. It's been a long time. They successfully drilled into a rock with their new feed extended drilling technique, and they successfully delivered material to Kamin and Sam, the two laboratory instruments on the rover.

They're back able to use their full suite of scientific instruments, bring them to bear on Martian rocks, and the team could not be happier or more relieved about it. Thank you, Emily. Till next time. Thank you, Matt. She's not an embargo breaker, and she does bring us back down to Earth, even when she takes us to Mars. That's Emily Lachtwala, Senior Editor for the Planetary Society. Now, one of the great minds of this or the previous century, Freeman Dyson. Freeman Dyson was one of the most original, delightful, and delighted thinkers of the 20th century,

and still is exactly that in this new millennium. His biography in the Wikipedia is one of the most fascinating you will ever read, but you could also learn about his life from his latest book, Maker of Patterns, an autobiography through letters. book, Maker of Patterns, an autobiography through letters. He was protege to Richard Feynman and then built his own legacy on Feynman's pioneering physics. At 94, he is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He got the job there in 1949 when he was appointed by J. Robert Oppenheimer. Dyson has worked since then on whatever his mind has been attracted to, whether it's global warming or interstellar travel or a hundred other challenges.

His friends and admirers, including Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, are offended because he has never been awarded a Nobel Prize. Dyson takes this in stride. He has said, I think it's almost true without exception. If you want to win a Nobel Prize, you should have a long attention span, get a hold of some deep and important problem, and stay with it for 10 years. That wasn't my style. He was in Southern California not long ago to participate in the National Space Society's

International Space Development Conference. I was invited by Dr. Dyson and his wife to spend a few precious minutes with him. Dr. Dyson, it is a great honor, and I am a little bit intimidated to have the chance to sit down with you in your hotel room and have a conversation. Thank you very much for this. Good. Don't be intimidated. I'm very harmless. Don't be intimidated. I'm very harmless. I don't know about that. Physically, perhaps, but in the intellectual sense, I think that you can be quite challenging to people.

I think you've almost made a career of that. Well, I frequently disagree with people, but we remain friends. I did get a chance to ask you one question years ago, before Planetary Radio existed. You had visited the Planetary Society. You were in a conversation with my old bosses, Bruce Murray and Lou Friedman. The only question that I got to ask you as I was facilitating the audiovisual for that event was whether the people producing Star Trek The Next Generation had contacted you to say that they had put a Dyson sphere in an episode of that television series.

And what was your answer? No. How did you hear? Oh, I think one of my daughters sent me that part of the program, and so I saw it on the screen. And it was a good joke. I mean, I had no problems with it. So many people who are not mathematicians or followers of physics or all of the other fields that you have explored, may have heard of you just because of that, because of the Dyson sphere, which, of course, science fiction writers ran with.

They love that concept. But is that idea of the solid sphere, is that what you had in mind? No. And, of course, what I was interested in was searching for aliens in the sky. Morrison and Cocconi had proposed listening for radio signals, listening to communications from aliens. And I was then put the question, what if the aliens don't want to communicate? Can you still detect them?

And the answer is yes, you can, because if aliens have a big civilization in the sky, they'll have to radiate away waste heat, and the waste heat you can detect with an infrared sky survey. So that was what I was proposing. But somehow or other, I talked about a biosphere which the aliens would be living in, and that somehow got translated

into a big round ball. And what you had in mind, I think, were more like asteroid particles, right? Circling their sun, capturing all of its energy? Well, any kind of. I didn't have a particular shape in mind, but any kind of a habitat. The main point was it has to have a big surface to radiate away the waste heat. Have you been gratified to learn that in the years since, there actually have been searches for Dyson spheres

by looking for those infrared signatures? Yes. I mean, the joke was, the first one that was done, the sky survey was IRAS, the Infrared Astronomy Satellite. That was about 20 years later. And right away we found millions and millions of these objects in the sky. The sky is just crawling with them. And of course they're not artificial. These are just young stars that condensed out of dust clouds.

And so the dust is still there surrounding the stars, making them look like aliens. But of course, they're not aliens. And I may come back to some of those stars, those dim stars, because... They're not dim. They're a bit bright. Bright in certain wavelengths? In infrared, yes. Because that may have a bearing on some of the other speculations that you have exercised.

I'm thinking of the titles of so many of your books and collected lectures. They're full of wonder, imagined worlds, dreams of earth and sky, infinite in all directions. You do seem to have great fun with these speculations. Yes, because the universe is just full of things we don't understand. That's what makes it exciting. Not many of us have had as rich a collection of imaginings about all of these as you have. Do you think that that has to do with your, I mean, one of your books was The Scientist is Rebel. Do you think that your rebelliousness has been part of why you have been able to generate all of this? Certainly, yes. But I should say, by the way, that the idea of the alien habitat

being visible was actually not mine. I mean, it comes from Olaf Stapleton, who is a science fiction writer. So it should be called, if you want to have a sphere, you should call it Stapleton's sphere. Wasn't he one of your first favorite science fiction writers? Indeed he was, and still is, yes. And provided inspiration? Yes. No, he wrote, of course, a number of books. The best of them is Sirius, about a dog who is genetically engineered to be

a sort of human intelligence. So he's halfway between a dog and a human, and his life is a tragedy and consequence. I'm thinking of someone else who I think provided inspiration. I know you learned a lot about physics from Richard Feynman. But what did you learn from him about life and how to look at the world? Well, he had a very tragic view of life and still had a lot of joy in it. So he had a combination of awareness of tragedy and still the ability to transcend it. So he was, of course, a fantastic human being

as well as a fantastic scientist. Here's a question that I should have asked you when we were still talking about the Dyson spheres because you said something that I think was very striking, that we should be looking for what's detectable, not possible. What did you mean? Well, that there are all kinds of things you can imagine, which would not be easy to detect. And there are other things which are easy to detect, which you didn't think of. And so if you want to make a search, the best thing is

to assume it's something you hadn't thought of, but just something that will be detectable if it exists. Do you still believe that life may have adapted to thriving in space that we see as this most hostile of environments? Well, it's not particularly hostile. No, I certainly say we don't know I mean we have no idea of where life is or if it exists outside this planet the whole point is we can look and see and and the important thing is to look everywhere not just in the places that are fashionable so I. I think the concentration on planets is probably a mistake.

Everybody thinks life has to be on planets. That's not at all clear. Maybe I have a bet of $100 with somebody that the first life we discover will not be on a planet. So I haven't yet won. Speculating that it will be where? I mean, you've talked about life on comets. Comets would be a good place.

There's lots of real estate on comets, and they're scattered widely over the universe. We know now there are probably trillions and trillions of comets and only a billion or two of planets in our galaxy. So the odds are on comets, if you have to bet. On the other hand, it might be a gas cloud or a dust cloud. It might be an asteroid. There are all sorts of satellites of a big planet.

There are all sorts of places it could be. I suppose comets have the advantage of, well, there's that source of energy, whatever light they're able to collect, but they also have lots of water. Yes, chemically they're good, water being, of course, a primary requirement for life. But comets also have nitrogen and oxygen and other elements which are useful for life. I think you've always been careful to say that we need to look, but that's not really, you're not saying that you believe they're out there, just that we need to look. Yeah, belief is the wrong word. I mean, the whole point about science is you don't

have to believe it. It's all questions, not answers. If this life doesn't exist, life that can thrive in space, do you believe we will create it? Undoubtedly. We are in the process of doing that already. And tomorrow I'm going to give a talk at this conference about things I call Noah's Ark eggs. And these are biologically efficient way of spreading life in the universe. It's an egg which contains millions of species in embryonic form. So it's very cheap to transport.

And when it gets to its destination, it can just burst out of the egg and form a complete biosphere, complete ecology of creatures, plants and animals and microbes, maybe a few humans as well. It's a biosphere in a box. Yes. And so that's the way I think we should go. It'll take maybe 100 years. we should go. It'll take maybe 100 years. We have to do a lot of science first to be able to engineer the embryos so they survive. And there's a lot of work to do. But in principle, it could be

very simple once it gets started. Then these communities that you send out into space will evolve under their own rules. We won't be in control anymore. You know that inevitably these will come to be known as Dyson eggs. I hope not. I think Noah's Ark is a much better analog. I like that. And 100 years, I mean, it may be too long for you and me, but it's not very long.

No, these things can go quite fast. I mean, biote be too long for you and me, but it's not very long. No, these things can go quite fast. I mean, biotech has done amazingly well in the last 50 years. It's about 50 years since DNA was discovered, or a little bit more, 70 years. Another 50 years, we probably will be able to engineer embryos to grow in any sort of way we want. What about humans themselves? Those bulky spacesuits are so difficult to wear. Oh, yes. I don't believe we'll be walking around in spacesuits. Fur is much better.

We'll have it your way, Noah's eggs, if not Dyson's eggs, Dyson's fears. I suspect the Dyson's fears are far better known than Dyson trees, but science fiction writers have loved those as well. I'm thinking of the wonderful science fiction series, I don't know if you've heard of it, and the Endymion series, where they have tree ships. Could you describe that and what you had in mind? Well, the point is that any place where gravity is weak, that includes comets or small asteroids

or anywhere where there's not a big mass, gravity is a thousand times weaker than it is here. So that means that a tree can grow essentially forever. It doesn't have to fight against gravity. A tree can be 100 miles high. So it's very easy for trees to grow out into space and collect sunlight from very large areas. That's what you need for life, to collect energy from large areas with a transportation system, which a tree essentially is.

And so you're transporting chemicals from the leaves down to the roots, and life will then be able to flourish under the shadow of these trees, collecting sunlight from a much bigger area. Have you ever suggested to the science fiction writers of the world that they pay you a commission? No. I do it pretty well anyway. I've read your critiques of space exploration, which of course has mostly been conducted by governments, and that you said a major handicap that they have is their fear of failure.

Yes. So I wonder how you feel about this new generation of entrepreneurs in space who seem to be much less afraid of failure. Right, and that's a big advantage. Now, I heard that the chief of a company called Planet Lab, I think they're in San Francisco, and he was on television just recently, and he has 300 satellites belonging to his company, which are all the time, these are little CubeSats taking pictures of the Earth.

And they sell the pictures then to farmers and environmentalists and people in charge of the ocean and all kinds of people who are interested in seeing the Earth every day. So they cover every inch of the ground, more or less, except for where it's cloudy, with little telescopes in space looking downwards. And this is now a commercial venture. And he said, you know, I can tell you about our company that there's good news and there's bad news. And I'll tell you the bad news.

20 of our satellites blew up on the launching pad just this week and we lost 20 satellites just like that. So that's the bad news. The good news is that it doesn't affect our business. So that's the bad news. The good news is that it doesn't affect our business. In fact, we have already 300 satellites up, and the 20 that we lost can easily be replaced. So in fact, the business goes on as usual.

The people get their information. There's no stoppage in the flow of information. So from his point of view, the business is just running. The occasional disaster like that is just part of the cost of doing business. So that's a radical change. If it were a government program, that would have been a major political problem and that would have essentially brought the whole thing to a screeching halt. Certainly would have been congressional or parliamentary hearings. Yes. whole thing to a screeching halt. Certainly would have been congressional or parliamentary hearings. Yes. I mean, it's a totally different frame of mind when you can afford to fail. And that's where we have to go. A rebellious frame of mind. Yes. He used to work at JPL and he said it was

fine working at JPL and they do wonderful science. But now he's much happier running his own company. Is science today, I think I know the answer, as rebellious as you believe it should be? Of course not. But on the other hand, science is doing very well, especially in space. There's a lot of wonderful space missions being done by governments. So for some purposes, government actually works well. Space science happens to be one of those. What would you like to be surprised by? Well, of course, the whole definition of a surprise is you can't tell in advance what it's going to be. The unknown unknowns, as a certain former Secretary of Defense in the United States said.

Yes, those are the really good ones. But, of course, there are lots of expected unknowns, which are also good. So I would say that seeing a new population of black holes is, to me, one of the big things. I mean, we've seen certain types of black holes is to me one of the big things. I mean, we've seen certain types of black holes. There is the kind at the center of galaxies which grow very big,

and there are black holes which are just X-ray sources that we see because debris is falling into them and emitting X-rays as it goes in. But there are all sorts of other black holes. We got a glimpse of them when we saw this gravitational wave a year ago, when a gravitational wave produced by a collision of two unknown black holes with masses of the order of 30 solar masses, which we had not imagined. So the whole populations of black holes, which undoubtedly are there, which we had not imagined. So there are whole populations of black holes, which undoubtedly are there, which we haven't yet seen. I'm glad you brought up gravity wave detection, LIGO, of course.

And I wonder about your thoughts about the success of this, this holy grail for so many years of physics, that these have now been detected. And we're actually beginning to be able to learn more about the universe in this new way. Yes, indeed. I mean, that's what we've been waiting for for 50 years, since Joe Weber started with his little detectors, which didn't work. But he set the style. And ever since, the things have been going very slow. And suddenly now we've actually seen some black holes.

It's going to go a lot quicker. And I wasn't going to ask this, but it occurs to me, I was thinking of communicating with gravity waves. What do you think of the SETI efforts that have been underway, looking in the electromagnetic spectrum, at least for visible light and radio waves. Should we be doing other things to see if anyone's trying to say hello? Yes, and certainly one should look in all possible channels. But radio was a good idea,

and the radio searches, of course, have been getting better and better every year. It isn't just listening. We've actually been improving listening for 50 years. So we're now enormously more sensitive than we were at the beginning. It's essentially a data processing problem. There's lots of data out there, radio waves in the universe. And the problem is to process the data so you can sort out some faint little message. And that's what we're getting very good at. So all the time, the chances are actually improving of finding a real message. I'll close with something else that you said, which I also have found very profound, and that is that the pain of childbirth is not

remembered, but the child is. Are we humans, are we still giving birth to ourselves? Yes, of course we are, and we will always do that. I mean, we are, of course, a species which has flourished just by hardship. I mean, the fact that we survived 20 ice ages does a lot to explain what our characters are like. I mean, these have been very tough times the last couple of million years with this succession of ice ages, and there have been all sorts of natural disasters

and also man-made disasters. We are very tough, and we are very good at surviving all these horrible things. And that's what's made us what we are. So we're social animals. We're also fighting animals, and we'll probably stay that way. Are you optimistic about humanity's future? Oh, I'm extremely optimistic, because I grew up in the 1930s,

when things were horrible and much worse than they are now. So having survived the 1930s, I think we'll survive pretty well another couple of thousand years. I wonder if you have anything to say about your latest work, which just appeared this year, Maker of Patterns, an autobiography through letters. Yes, well, this is a surprise to me, because I had written this year, Maker of Patterns, an Autobiography Through Letters. Yes, well, this is a surprise to me because I had written this book. It's just a collection of letters to my own family. And it was really meant to be a family chronicle just for the benefit of my grandchildren to tell them where they come from. And now it's published about a month ago, and the public has responded amazingly positively, and it surprised me that so many people actually find these letters interesting.

Speaking of your autobiography and your own life, there's a lovely photo of you sitting high up in a tree as a little boy. Do you still kind of have that feeling sometimes? Oh, yes. Of course, that's where it all began. Thank you very much for this. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, and look forward to sharing it with our audience. Well, thank you.

I thank you for your questions. I think that it was just right and not too long. Yeah. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We are rejoined by Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who's back to tell us about what's up in the night sky and sometimes what may not be up in the night sky. Welcome, first of all. Thank you. Welcome to you. Garrett Kingman in Stanford, California, a town you know something about.

He wanted to reassure you. Re, he says, the Harry Potter-Venus controversy with some sleuthing. We find that the astronomy exam that Harry Potter took was on June 12, 1996. Two days after Venus passed through inferior conjunction, Harry likely actually saw Jupiter. Bruce is vindicated. Yes. I thought you'd like that. Well, thank you.

That's encouraging, I think. Anyway, we've all learned a lot. We also heard from Devin Kremelbein. She had an entry in this week's contest. We're going to get back to the contest, of course. But she says, my boyfriend makes me listen to this podcast every car ride. And we just want people to know, listening to planetary radio is no longer compulsory. That law was struck down by the Supreme Court. But we hope, Devin, that you're

actually enjoying yourself and that there's evidence of that because you entered the contest. Does it count as torture under the Geneva Convention? I'm not sure. Not anymore. Not anymore. It's enhanced interrogation, I think. All right. You will learn something. Indeed. Tell us what's up. I'm sorry. I'm still so excited about the Planet Festival. In the evening, you can look to the west, see super bright Venus.

You can look to the east, you can see super bright Jupiter. super bright Venus. You can look to the east. You can see super bright Jupiter. It's just a festival. Even Saturn's starting to come up around sunset, low in the east. It's just all sorts of grooviness. And Mars, oh my gosh, Mars coming up around 11 or midnight in the east is now as bright as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. And it is going to get brighter by another two to three times by the time we reach the end of July. Opposition, closest one since 2003. So it's going to be cool. It's already cool.

Check out those planets. I remember how cool it was in 2003. Yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1963 that Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. 1983 that Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. And unrelated to women in space, 2010 when Hayabusa returned the first asteroid samples to Earth. We move on to Random Space Fact.

Ah, that felt like old times. Oh, the diameter of Venus is only about 640 kilometers less than the diameter of Earth, about the same distance as a drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. That's great. I like it, since I just finished more than that drive. Well, it's actually more accurate with where you went. That's true. I got even closer because I was in coastal Northern California. More proof that our planets are virtual identical twins in every way. In every way, except for that hellhole thing.

Yeah, right. Okay, on to the contest, I guess, because we've got some great stuff here. We asked you on which space missions did Alan Bean, who just recently passed away, what space missions did he fly? How'd we do, Matt? Another tremendous response. And I think people were going after Chasing New Horizons, Inside the Epic, First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, the signed copy of that hardcover book. Stay tuned if you find out you didn't win this time because we're going to give away yet another signed copy, the last one of Chasing New Horizons. Helen Reed, Milton, Vermont. She says that Alan Bean flew on only two missions, Apollo 12 and Skylab Mission 2, also known as Skylab 3. Please ask Bruce Betts to explain the weird numbering of the Skylab missions. Truly a random space fact, if there ever was one.

First of all, is she our winner? Yes, she is. That is correct. Apollo 12, Skylab 3. Congratulations, Helen. Oh, the Skylab numbering is funny. Skylab numbering is funny indeed. The second mission of humans was called Skylab 3. But yeah, I believe, as I recall, it's basically the first

human mission. They got Skylab up there. Maybe that was the equivalent of Skylab 1, but the first human mission was Skylab 2, and then you had 3 and 4, three different crews. But just to thoroughly confuse matters, there was confusion when they produced the patches. So the patches have different numbers. I've talked about it before. I don't remember the details. There are even Roman numerals involved, cats and dogs living together. It's just, it's crazy.

Well, Helen, you see your trust in Bruce was well placed. Oh, and by the way, we're also giving Helen a 200-point itelescope.net account. We'll come back to that as well in a moment. Lots of fun stuff from other listeners. Thank you all. Eric Schmidt of Greenbackville, Virginia. He says the Captain Bean logged 1,671 hours and 45 minutes in space, 10 hours and 26 minutes of that on the surface of the moon and in Earth orbit. We also heard from a ton of people about, a metric ton, about this funny story about Alan Bean not being able to find the self-timer for his camera. Do you have that tale?

Indeed. He had a plan to take a self-portrait while on the moon and couldn't find the timer. And so then, as many people know, once he retired as an astronaut, he had a very interesting career as a painter, painting including things on the moon. And he tried to recreate what that picture would have been if he had taken it using his art. And we heard from several people that not only was he unable to find the self-timer when he wanted it, he finally did find it, but it was too late to get the picture. So he threw it as hard as he could. Cyril Antilli in Norway says,

legend has it that that self-timer is still orbiting the moon. He must have been really mad. See, if it had been me, you know, instead of becoming a really skilled, wonderful painter, I would have just waited around and taken a selfie later. Invented the selfie, I suppose. Just tried to turn the camera around. selfie, I suppose. Just tried to turn the camera around. Mark Little in Ireland, who we hear from frequently, he said his favorite quote from Alan Bean, who a lot of people who were able to meet him over the years said that he was just a terrific man. Alan Bean said, it is my dream that on the wings of my paintbrush, many people will see what I saw and feel what I felt. Thank you, Alan. It's as close as most of us will

ever get. Finally, from Clem Unger in Mornington, Australia, he says, so many of my childhood heroes passing on, their legacy is to get out of low Earth orbit and back to the moon and beyond. We owe it to them. Thank you, Clem. We owe you. Now we move on to the next question. Who was in Earth orbit at the same time as the first female in space, Valentina Tereshkova? Who else was in Earth orbit while she was up there? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I wonder if they drop by for a visit. You have until the 20th. That would be June 20th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. As previously mentioned, our last signed copy of Chasing New Horizons,

the great book about the mission to Pluto by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. It's published by Picador. That's what you'll get along with a 200-point itelescope.net account, 200-point account with a couple hundred bucks. For that worldwide network of telescopes, you can point it at Mars during that opposition that Bruce just told us about. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about your favorite thing to look at with polarized sunglasses.

Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Betts, Chief Scientist for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Don't wear those sunglasses when you're using the telescope at night. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members, who aren't afraid to go where their dreams take them. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Ad Astra.