Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - André Bormanis and Emily Lakdawalla on Life, the Universe and Everything

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

Join us for a wide-ranging, salon-style conversation about space exploration, science, art and more. Mat’s guests are astronomer, television producer/writer and former Star Trek science advisor André Bormanis and Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A very special talk with Andre Barmanis and Emily Lakdawalla, 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'm back from vacation with a gift for you. from vacation with a gift for you. It's an interview unlike any we've had till now on Planetary Radio, and it took place in a setting unlike any we've recorded in till now. On Saturday, October 14th, friends of the Planetary Society, Sue and Martin, welcomed other friends to their beautiful Southern California canyon home for an evening of conversation about space exploration, science, art, and more.

You're about to hear most of that fascinating and far-ranging exchange. After a lovely informal meal, we sat down with two of the finest science communicators I know. You already know the Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Internationally admired science communicator and educator, passionate about advancing public understanding of space and sharing the wonder of scientific discovery. She got her degree in planetary geology at Brown University, taught school for a while, and arrived at the Planetary Society

not long after I did, in 2001, pretty much simultaneously. She also, as you heard from Jennifer, pretty much created the Planetary Society blog, which now has become a tremendous resource for more than planetary science because we have so many wonderful guest bloggers who Emily brings up to speed and provides editing services. It is really an outstanding way to learn about all of what's happening in space and here on the ground where the money is spent to get us up there. Report there on space news, planetary science, of course, and sharing beautiful space photos, which is something we'll come right back

to. She still oversees that resource. She adds her thoughts to Planetary Radio over most of the episodes that we've done. She also got started with what is now a huge, I don't know if that's the right word, a large international community of image processors, space image processing enthusiasts. And she is the administrator for something called unmannedspaceflight.com. It's a forum online. She's a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Her first book was titled The Design and Engineering of Curiosity, How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job. It comes out next year from Praxis, and we don't have it to hold up because she's still working on it. It's going to be submitted in two weeks.

on it. It's going to be submitted in two weeks. She's turning in the manuscript. 2018 for that. It explains the development design and function of Curiosity with the same level of technical detail that she delivers in the Planetary Society blog. A second book,

Curiosity and its Science Mission, A Mars Rover Goes to Work, will follow in 2019. Is that for more of a popular audience or is it the same crowd? It probably will be. There's more of a story to that one about the adventure of the rover traveling across the surface of Mars. Okay. She didn't know I'm going to say this, but she just got back from the U.K. what, a week ago?

A week ago, where she received an honorary doctorate from the Open University in recognition of her contributions in communicating space science to the public. At last count, and I checked this morning, about 140,000 Twitter followers at E. Lakdawalla. And if you know where to look and have a good telescope, you might find asteroid 274860, formerly named Emily Lakdawalla by the International Astronomical Union in 2014. So I know you've already done it, but please, if you would, welcome once again Emily Lakdawalla. Andre Bermanis. He was a physics undergrad at the University of Arizona,

but while there worked in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, one of the leading research institutions for planetary science globally. He went on to George Washington University where his graduate thesis focused on the NASA Planetary Science Exploration Program. That was under the supervision of a good friend of planetaryary Radio and a board member of the Planetary Society, Dr. John Logsdon, who founded the Space Policy Institute at GWU, which is still going very strong. He's been on this show many times. Andre has written for many space publications,

including our own Planetary Report. And that's just a little piece of the work that he's done for the Society over the last 20 years. You were on our first PlanetF Fest celebration at the convention center. I was, yeah. 20 years ago, hard to believe. I hope we'll do another one of those sometime soon. If you hear about a Planet Fest, and you will if you go to planetary.org

or get on our newsletter mailing list, these are these gigantic celebrations where we come out, and the last one was to celebrate the seven minutes of terror that ended in Curiosity landing successfully on Mars. His book, and it's in my bag. I brought my copy. I'll hold it up a little bit later. His book is called Star Trek Science Logs. It is still available from Amazon. Yes. And it's not even like $150 archive copies of it. You can get it on Amazon, and it uses Star Trek as a jumping-off place to teach real science. If there's any plot in a Trek TV series since Next Generation that had good science in it, you can probably thank Andre.

generation that had good science in it, you can probably thank Andre. Because, you know, of course, otherwise they'd have thrown anything into it. He wrote teleplays for Star Trek Voyager, I think, while continuing to advise them, and then became a full-time writer and producer on Star Trek Enterprise. Took me to see The Bridge, which was pretty cool. Anybody remember the very quirky CBS show that was done way too soon called Threshold? Thank you. Thank you. My wife, ladies and gentlemen. Carla Kujina. This was such a choice show.

Peter Dinklage. Peter Dinklage, Brent Spiner. And it's just, CBS just killed it with all the intelligence that networks usually bring to scheduling and promotion of TV series. He was on that. Now, as you heard, he is the supervising producer for Seth MacFarlane's The Orville, which is kind of like Star Trek on grass.

That's a pretty good description, yeah. 7 p.m. Thursdays on Fox. 9 p.m. Oh, 9 p.m. I put 7 for some reason, and I just watched last night's episode. That's after working with Seth Andrian, who, of course, is the widow of Carl Sagan, our founder, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the host, as the director of scientific research on Cosmos, Cosmos II, Cosmos Jr., following Carl Sagan's pioneering original series.

And let's see what else. He did a lot of great work for telescopes and education, worked on and operated scopes at Mount Wilson, wrote one of the planetarium shows that I think is still running at Griffin Observatory, where I grew up, more or less. And he's on the board of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and was a writer, co-executive producer, National Geographic of Imagine Entertainment series, Mars. Andre Bermanis, everyone.

Thank you. Remind me to hold up the book. Okay. A very general discussion, much less specific than we do in most of the conversations we do on this program, about what our boss, the science guy who sends his regards, likes to call the passion, beauty, and joy of space. The PB&J. The PB&J. So to get into that, I'm going to start with you, Emily. When did you start to look up and look up with

sort of wonder and awe? That's an interesting way to phrase that question because I have always been a morning person, so usually fell asleep before I had a chance to look up at the stars. But I do remember when I was a child having a book in a time-life educational science series that had these kind of blurry photos of these newly imaged worlds photographed by Voyager 2. They had wonderful names like Mimas and Enceladus and Tethys and Rhea. It was these images from the flybys of Jupiter and Saturn by the two Voyager spacecraft. And I always thought it was wonderful to explore strange new worlds. Andre, same question.

You know, I was born in Chicago, but when I was seven years old, my family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Don't remember seeing many stars from Chicago, but once we got out to Phoenix, this was in the mid-1960s, you could see a lot of stars from our backyard. And in fact, in the summer, you could still just sort of faintly make out the Milky Way. I developed an interest in astronomy, I think, around that time, second, third, fourth grade. I saw Saturn through a telescope for the first time when I was 11 years old, and it took my breath away. I still remember that to this day. And then I really saw the Milky Way on a Boy Scout trip, also when I was 11, to an area called Oak Creek Canyon. And this is near Sedona

in Arizona, if you know that part of the country. Again, this was, you know, gosh, early 1970s, 70, 71. Some friends of mine and I wandered away from the campfire to get a better look at the sky, and the Milky Way was a solid white band of light. I couldn't believe just how incredible it was. And I think at that point I was absolutely hooked and knew I was going to be an astronomer or work in some capacity in the world of space. I used to tell people, I said for years, that it was the first time I looked through a telescope and saw Saturn.

There's just something about, even then, long before Voyager and Pioneer, there were still great pictures of Saturn from the Hale telescope and Palomar and other great instruments. But seeing that tiny yellow dot with that little ring of cup handles around it, as Galileo thought, and knowing that those photons coming through that eyepiece had come all the way from a billion miles out there from Saturn. Something very special about that. You know, I got to space and to studying space as an adult in quite a different way because I had been a geologist. I had kept my eyes firmly on the ground for a long time. And then I was a schoolteacher.

for a long time. And then I was a school teacher. And it was when I was a school teacher in 1997, that this little spacecraft called Pathfinder landed on Mars, and through this brand new medium called the World Wide Web, shared their photographs with the whole world shot of this little rover, this robot exploring the surface. And like any other people of my age, I'd been a huge fan of the Transformers when I was growing up. And seeing this autonomous robot moving around by itself, I was like, wow, that's cool. And then Galileo returned new photos of those moons of Jupiter that I'd been so excited about. And I was like, I wonder if I can do geology on other planets. And it turns out you can. So that's what I did. So you will pardon probably not the last Trek reference in this conversation because during Star Trek Enterprise, there's a little throwaway scene,

and I just jumped out of my chair and went nuts and started messaging everybody at the Society where there's a ship in the closing shows of Enterprise where like a shuttlecraft is flying low over the surface of Mars. And there is this little fence around the Pathfinder landing site, placed there by the Mars Historical Society, which is known as the Sagan Memorial Station. Yes, it is. Yeah, a little tribute.

That was a tribute for sure. Yeah. And I was saying, for me, it was looking at Saturn through the telescope, but that's not really true. I realized recently it was Griffith Observatory. It was the planetarium because my parents brought me there before I could walk. So I'm sure that it was looking up at that dome and seeing that sky that this L.A. kid had not really experienced. You're both science communicators as well as scientists.

You're both science communicators as well as scientists. Going back to that topic of the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of science, you wanted to study science. What took you in the direction of wanting to share that with other people, Andre? Yeah, it's a good question. It's kind of like, you know, Andrew and Carl's widow likes to say, it's like falling in love, you want to tell the world. When you see something so's like falling in love. You want to tell the world. When you see something so extraordinary like Saturn in a telescope or you hear about these incredible space missions

or, you know, when I was 10 years old, men first walked on the moon. Oh, my God, you know, it was a mythic accomplishment. How can you not want to share that? It's simply because, I think, it's so exciting and so amazing and you're just kind of bursting with these things that you've learned and discovered that, you know, you just have to share it with other people. It's just part of the fact that I think we're social animals. And if something is exciting and really moves us in a way, we have to tell people about it. When you're in love, you want the whole world to know.

Yeah, exactly. I think for me, I had grown up in museums, not science museums, but art museums. My father's an art historian. And I loved science museums as much as I loved art museums. And I really enjoyed the combination of academic study and public communication that a museum represents, where you can be somebody who is the world's expert in something, and then you get this canvas on which to explain that which you love. And that's what a museum is. And so I had always imagined that that's where I was going to be working,

was in a science museum preparing exhibits and telling people about how these amazing discoveries were made and helping them understand how they could make them themselves. We may be a bit preaching to the choir here, but the old line is even the choir needs to be preached to. Why is it important for our society, for all of humanity, for individuals to understand science and really beyond understand it to appreciate it? I think, who was it, Ray Bradbury or somebody said many years ago, we live in a science fiction world. You know, we are so dependent upon science and technology. It's so critical to every aspect of our lives today. Such an impact socially, politically, every dimension

of society is influenced, affected by, and made possible by the discoveries that have been made over the last, you know, couple of hundred years or so in science. And, you know, and made possible by the discoveries that have been made over the last, you know, couple of hundred years or so in science. And, you know, one of the things that was always a challenge for me when I was the science consultant and eventually a writer on Star Trek was trying to keep ahead of where the real world is going. You know, if you look at the original Star Trek, Kirk and Spock and their communicators,

well, those were really cool back in 1966, and they seemed pretty advanced. And, of course, now we've all got these smartphones that are so much more sophisticated than the Star Trek communicators. And, you know, it's just like trying to stay ahead of the advances that are happening in the world at a breakneck pace, you know, is a real challenge for somebody who writes science fiction. By the same token, you know, we're asked to vote for our elected representatives, and they need to deal with serious issues. Climate change, advances in genetic engineering, all sorts of challenges that are going to face

this country and the world for the next several decades intersect so strongly with science that some degree of science literacy, I think, is absolutely essential for everyone. And it's, you know, discouraging to me to see that we've taken some steps backward in that regard. And that, you know, unlike when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, where we had the space race, and, you know, we realized, you know, after the Soviets launched Sputnik that, hey, you know, maybe we're a little bit behind in this whole science and technology thing. We've become a little complacent.

There was a conscious effort to really raise the game in science education in public schools, in high school, in universities, scholarships for engineers and scientists. And that was a deliberate decision. That was a choice. That's not something that happens by accident. It's not something that's just part of the culture. You have to decide to do it. And I think that we've kind of fallen off that track a little bit over the last few years and don't value it to the extent that we really need to.

And it may take another shock, like another Sputnik moment, to finally sort of shake us out of our complacency and get us back on that track. As you said, you know, science is critically important to helping us understand our modern world, but the process of science, as much as the facts of science, are important. The ability to interrogate the world, to ask a question, figure out whether you're even capable of answering the question with the data that you have. And then also being able to understand how decisions can be informed by science. At the same time, I think while science is incredibly important, it's important for us to be scientifically literate, to understand the processes that are shaping our landscape

that make humans more vulnerable to environmental events, climate events, earthquake events, things like that. Humanities are just as important for our ability to interrogate the quality of sources environmental events, climate events, earthquake events, things like that. Humanities are just as important for our ability to interrogate the quality of sources and be able to ask who is a trustworthy source of information. There's a lot of talk these days about it being a post-factual society, but anytime you're dealing with a body of facts, you also have to question who is creating those facts. So it takes both. As much as I'm a booster for science, I'm a booster for the humanities as well and our ability to understand how to put an argument together. I'm glad you went in that direction because I want to talk about that intersection

of art and science. And then we'll come back to talking about why science is such an effective way of understanding so much of what is around us and ourselves. You, Andre, live maybe as much in that intersection, you know, the overlap of that Venn diagram, as anybody I know. How do they complement each other? In the case of Star Trek, kind of an interesting little bit of history. When Gene Roddenberry created the original show back in the 60s, he did it because he had an interest in space. He'd been like a bomber pilot in World War II, when Gene Roddenberry created the original show back in the 60s. He did it because he had an interest in space.

He'd been like a bomber pilot in World War II, and he read a lot of science fiction, and he had an interest. And certainly the space race was catching everybody's attention back then. And he thought, wouldn't it be fun to do a show about space? And Westerns were very popular at the time, you know, Gunsmoke and Wagon Train and Bonanza. And he thought, we'll do a Wagon Train to the Stars. But his at the time, you know, Gunsmoke and Wagon Train and Bonanza, and he thought, we'll do a Wagon Train to the stars. But his ultimate motivation was, you know, he'd written for television for several years at this point.

He'd written for some shows that, you know, cop shows and a military drama called The Lieutenant was something that he created. And he kept running into trouble with the network censors when he tried to do scripts that had some social commentary. He wanted to do a thing on race relations, I think, in his show Lieutenant. It kind of got quashed by the network. He thought, you know what, I really want to tell these kinds of stories.

I want to talk about the issues that are having such an impact on our world today, things that are going on in society that I have strong opinions about and I want to write about it. I thought if I did it in a science fiction show, I can do things in science fiction that they'll never let me get away with on a straight drama because, you know, it's guys in funny suits and, you know, aliens and pointed ears and the spaceship. Turn the Connie's into Klingons. So they don't pay as close attention to the allegories beneath those, you know, sort of props.

He hid them so well. Yeah, he did. But the other side of that was he wanted adults to watch this show. And he said, if I'm going to have an adult audience for this show, it can't be Captain Video. You can't have flames coming out of the back of the rocket. And it's got to be

thought through. And so he consulted with engineers at JPL and the Rand Corporation, various other places, and really's got to be thought through. And so he consulted with engineers at JPL and the RAND Corporation, various other places, and really put a lot of energy into a credible depiction of the future of space travel. And knowing that chemical rockets will never get us to the stars, he talked to people, well, the most powerful source of energy we know of is antimatter. You're going to have to figure out some way to warp space

if you're going to get from one star to another from week to week. And we don't know how to do that. But here are some things that we know would have to be developed in order for that to be possible. And so he really wanted to make sure that there was a grounding of science purely for the purposes of helping the audience suspend their disbelief for that hour a week that they're watching Star Trek. The audience can basically sit back and relax and think, yeah, I'm on a starship 300 years in the future. You know, you can only do that if the thing looks credible, if it looks like something that could actually be made. And so by talking to real scientists and engineers about those details, I think he made it something that an audience could believe could someday happen.

And that tradition continued on through all of the other shows, and that's why they hired people like me to sort of keep them as honest as possible. And now there were places where we would bend the rules or even break them. And, you know, the audiences have become more sophisticated. You know, if you look at most of you probably don don't remember, like Marcus Welby, MD, and some of the medical shows that were on in the 60s. You look at the way that they talked about medicine and patients and so on compared to a show like ER, which was created by Michael Crichton, who was an MD from Harvard, and got into all of the technical details of what happens in an emergency room, the audience liked that, as it turned out. You know, most of the networks would be like, oh, we're afraid, you know, oh, don't say so much about the, you know, the techno babble,

you know, try to, no, the audience, it turns out, is interested and they're a sophisticated enough audience that they'll know if the people who are writing those scripts have an idea of what they're talking about. And who knows how many young people's appetites, well, we do know, because they used to walk up to Gene Roddenberry and say, you're why I'm a scientist, you're why I'm an astronaut, you're why I'm building rockets. Half of the scientists and engineers that I've worked with over the years, I'd say, who are my age or younger,

have credited Star Trek as an important source of inspiration. A great many of them probably have Trek uniforms in their closets. And the other half go to Bill Nye. I did a talk at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland a couple of weeks ago. And this is the place that manages the Hubble Space Telescope. They built the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble successor. And they took me on this great tour. Had lunch with some of the chief scientists, and they're all just total Trekkies.

They were wearing their pins and asking me all these obscure questions. Do you remember in episode 308? He's like, no, I worked on several hundred of these, and I can barely remember the ones I wrote, let alone. But they're so into it, and it's great. I see what you're doing here, Matt, with the art and the science informed artist. And here I am the, uh, you know, the art informed scientist. But you're an artist as well. I mean, look at that skirt. She made that. Absolutely. Yeah. Since this is radio, I should probably explain that what was just pointed out is a skirt that I'm wearing that features a curiosity panorama printed all the way around it.

And the image processing you do, which, as you have said, is as much an art as it is a science. Absolutely. And there is an awful lot of art, actually, in planetary science. And I started thinking about this when I noticed how many of the engineers and scientists who work on space missions have these side gigs that they do. There's musicians, there's thespians,

there's people who craft and create things in their garages. They get together and sing. Some of the songs that were sung around the end of the Cassini mission were just astounding in four-part harmony with this whole group of engineer singers. And so I thought about, you know, why is this true? And I realized actually that creativity is absolutely required of engineers doing space exploration. Because just imagine, you're building a machine,

you're going to send it out into space. First of all, it has to be very reliable. So you've got to be a good engineer to begin with, right? But then in order to make sure that this thing is not going to die a hundred different ways, you have to imagine a thousand different ways that this thing could come to harm. You have to predict every possible future for this machine. And, you know, I've heard so many stories of engineers just standing in the shower thinking, oh my God, I forgot this thing. I've got to go right. You know, it could like this thing could communicate with that thing in a way that would cause a power surge and that would prevent this thing from working. And they think of all of these things before,

well, maybe not before they launch. There's an awful lot of software for spacecraft that's written after launch and transmitted to the spacecraft on the way. But they do, they have to imagine every possible thing that could go wrong and either prevent it from happening in the first place or program the robot to be intelligent enough

to deal with the problem when it arises. And our robots are getting smarter now to be able to handle problems as they arise. But then the more complex robots get, the more ways things can go wrong that we don't predict. And that's actually a problem that the Curiosity mission has faced is that they have, the robot itself is incredibly robust, but all these little tiny things keep happening to it. And you realize that there's a virtue to a simpler machine that can go wrong in fewer ways that all those smart engineers can predict. So you can't be a successful spacecraft engineer without being a highly creative and imaginative person. And the art and the science and the engineering all go hand in hand. I'll add just one story to this, and it's another one of the going in reverse

from science, excuse me, from art to science. There is a man, a physicist, very accomplished in Mexico named Miguel Alcubierre, and he's been a guest on Planetary Radio, and he's a Trekkie. And he started thinking about warp drive and creating a warp bubble, and he said, well, started thinking about warp drive and creating a warp bubble and he said well, gee, could you warp space in the way Star Trek talks about it being done? Form a little bubble around a spaceship and basically bend space and go much faster than light. You know, break Einstein's speed limit. And he did the math and sure enough it works. Now you need some crazy

stuff like, I don't know, strange matter, what's it called? Exotic matter. Exotic matter, which nobody knows if it really exists. But the fact is it might. That's a small problem. And the math works. And so here was art leading to a development in science

which, you know, who knows? Maybe someday it won't be Zephyr and Cochran who events warped, right? They'll call it the Alcubierre, don't I think? My wonderful conversation with scientists, artists, and science communicators, Andre Bourmanis and Emily Lakdawalla, will continue in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Where did we come from?

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I'm Matt Kaplan, bringing you back to that lovely home in Southern California's Topanga Canyon with Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla and television producer, writer, and science advisor Andre Bormannis. We would soon head outside to view the cosmos through Planetary Society telescopes, but not before we continued our fascinating salon conversation. Sticking with this sharing of science and why it's important,

Emily, something I know that's really important to you is sharing science with underserved communities, as we call them now, particularly women and girls, something that's very important to you. Spacecraft images are kind of like dinosaurs. It's like you don't have to work to get somebody excited about these pictures. You can basically grab any Cassini image from Saturn at random and throw it on a website and say, wow, that is a gorgeous, stunning picture. You can put it on a skirt.

You can use it to make wallpaper. You can do all kinds of artwork with these things. And you can also use fairly simple image processing techniques, playing with contrast, playing with brightness, cropping, rotating things artfully, to make them even more beautiful. And I think that it's a really useful, potentially useful, on-ramp into a lot more technical work with image processing, with data processing. processing, with data processing. And so I'm hoping that I'll be able to continue working at the Planetary Society in order to bring this kind of activity to wider audiences, middle schoolers, high schoolers, to inspire them to, for fun, learn the kinds of skills that could make them really valuable contributors to the workforce in the future, which I guess is not that much of a dream of workforce development. But at the same time, when you think about the inspiration these kids will feel

as they view these amazing spacecraft images, and maybe that will give them a little drive to feel the love for science that will give them the passion to enter that kind of career in the future. You just were acknowledged, I think, at your daughter's school. Yes. I was the subject of a full page, the second page in the Overland Avenue Elementary School newspaper soaring high. My daughter, who's sitting back there, wrote one of the articles. But that reminds me, actually, if you want to help education in your local community, buy some really cool new science books and donate them to the library.

Librarians are always so grateful, and there's really few ways that can potentially reach more school kids than putting new books in their libraries. I keep a list on my website. I review new kids' books every single year. It really helps to refresh and excite kids about what's going on in space. I've been to two Star Trek conventions to cover them. Right. Yeah, right.

And the thing that I think I love the most about those conventions is the diversity. Yeah. You see everyone is there, every racial group, lots of women, many of them in their homemade outfits. It is such a heartening thing, And it doesn't mean they love science, but it does mean something about them appreciating it. Well, that was one of the things that was, you know, kind of revolutionary at the time with Star Trek

is it had a diverse multiracial cast and everybody was treated as an equal. And they made a, you know, Gene and the other writers on that show made a very strong point about that it wasn't just sort of by accident you know it was deliberate you know the fundamental ethic of that show was that in the future will have solved you know the more petty sort of mundane problems of politics and uh and social inequality on this planet. And part of the key to that is recognizing differences and diversity and embracing that and not thinking of people as the other because they have a different skin color or they have a handicap

or whatever the case might be. And you see that, and that was something I never attended, a Star Trek convention myself prior to working on the show, but one of the things that struck me when I first started going to conventions was the fact that there was so much diversity in the audience. There were a lot of handicapped people, and I realized it was a very powerful message of Star Trek that it's like you're okay.

You're included. You're part of this future universe. You may not be part of today's world. You may be limited by social conventions in a lot of ways. I mean, again, think back to the 60s. There were no wheelchair ramps that were mandated by the public. There was no American with Disabilities Act. It was a welcoming environment, and they were very explicit about that.

This is one area where a lot of the technological predictions of Star Trek have come to fruition. I mean, we basically have tricorders in our pockets right now. But we haven't made as much racial progress as Star Trek promised, and particularly in my own field, in astronomy and geology, a lot of these scientific fields, the progress even in recent years has been negative. So clearly we all have more work to do to make sure that young students get inspired. And even more importantly, that once they reach college and the graduate level and business, that they don't get pushed out of either academia or industry, because those are problems that are continuing to happen.

We're not making significant enough progress. And clearly it's going to take more conscious effort than we've been applying in the past. I hope that reversal, that negative direction doesn't apply to at least not to women in planetary science, because it does seem like that community has grown a great deal. There are more white women, but there are not women of color. And that's a problem that needs to be fixed. I want to jump back, because I was intrigued by it, to your reference to our post-factual era. Because you have now, from the left and the right, a problem with facts. Fake facts, not to say fake news.

And even in academia, the post-modernist approach, at least in much of the humanities and some of the social sciences, not in the hard sciences yet, at least fortunately, even the claim going as far as saying, yeah, we're post-factual, there really is no such thing as a fact. Which, if you jump out of a building, you're going to learn the gravity as a fact really quickly. Or at least maybe it's just the two beliefs. Or at least the theory of intelligent falling, which is the alternative to Newtonian mechanics. Creative falling, yeah. This makes me think of why science is such a good way. I wouldn't even say good. Such an effective way of understanding all that is around us and ourselves, as T.S. Eliot

said. Well, it's a methodology that was developed over many, many centuries with its roots back in the early days of the ancient Greeks and Plato and Socrates and the development of formal logic and mathematics under Euclid and then, of course, the scientific revolution in Europe, but also in the Middle East. There were great scientists during the Middle Ages. The Dark Ages in Europe were an actual age of enlightenment in many parts of the Middle East, what we, I guess, used to call Persia. There was a famous scientist in the 10th or 11th century, Al-Hazen, who developed a lot of the laws of optics, you know, centuries before they were discovered

or rediscovered in the European world. Algebra. Algebra, exactly. A lot of mathematics. Algebra was developed in the Middle East. And it's a process that has developed and been refined over time. And it's basically, you know, it's a set of rules that demands that you can come up with any crazy idea that you want,

and you have to find a way to test it and develop an experiment that will prove it false or not prove it false. And it's a relatively simple recipe when you get right down to it. You know, the art of scientific investigation. It's a thing that anybody can learn. And in fact, it's really, you know, most children are born scientists. Most children do this with the world by just the nature of their curiosity, right? And they ask typically very intelligent questions. And, you know, if they're answered in a smart way, those kids will readily grow up as very fluent in the ideas of science. The two biggest factors in my mind as we talk about this, you know, fake news and, you know, and everybody's entitled to their own facts, whatever that might mean.

Part of it is fear and part of it is just the information overload. The Internet that we've all been talking about earlier this, you know, over the course of the evening is a wonderful thing, and it's an amazing tool, but it's overwhelming. And there are so many opportunities to spread misinformation with a technology as pervasive as the Internet. And there are so many scary things happening in the world today that a lot of people, I think, just want to kind of close their eyes and check out. I understand that impulse. It's not an impulse we should indulge. But I kind of get where people are coming from. And I understand that if you have a child with autism

and that kid was vaccinated a few months before they started to show the symptoms, that you might draw a connection. And you might look at the fact that, oh my God, the rates of autism have increased geometrically in the last few years. And what does that mean? And what could have caused that? Well, nobody is absolutely sure. And so anybody with a theory or an idea can now put that information out on the Internet and somebody will pay attention. So it's a challenge. And I think that the other side of it is, well, science is not about trying to find the absolute ultimate truth.

Science is about better and better ways of looking at the world that must have some truth in them, because why does my computer work? These ideas that we came up with about quantum mechanics and how atoms work back in the 1920s and 30s were so off base, so completely divorced from reality, then we wouldn't have the Internet. It might not be the only way to describe how things work at that level of nature, but it's obviously a very successful way in terms of how far it's gotten us in technology.

So I'm cautious of defending science as a bastion of fact, because the fact of the matter is science is a process of making inferences from observations. And you have the ability to make observations, but sometimes your observational tools have biases in them. And it's hard to know with incomplete data what inferences you should draw from your observations. data, what inferences you should draw from your observations. I have this sort of philosophical approach to it because the fact of the matter is that nearly every paper that's been published in planetary science is wrong. It's going to be proven wrong in the future with another mission. And I think maybe what we're lacking is the penetration into the public sphere of effective ways to make good decisions based on incomplete information. And right now, instead, we're each agreeing on our own body of facts and disregarding other people's favorite facts.

And instead, things like what to do about global warming. We know about the changes. We can observe changes in temperature. We can observe the northern polar cap is getting smaller each year. We can observe increased numbers of more energetic storms causing more problems. But those observations and those facts don't instantly yield policy. I think that maybe this conversation between art and science is where it really needs to take place. How do you use these observations and the predictions that you can make based on what you've concluded from them?

How do you use that to inform policy? It's a challenge. I know that there are very smart people working on that as well. But everybody needs to be participating in these conversations. And science is conducted by fallible humans. Definitely. And, you know, scientists are humans. And they sometimes deliberately do some bad things.

People publish stuff that they know to be wrong. It happens. It's like any other human enterprise. I will claim that's rare, but certainly it happens. It's rare, but it happens. No, but what happens more often is that scientists become personally invested in a particular conclusion or set of conclusions. You know, I observed this when I was a graduate student. I worked on Magellan data from Venus. We studied the geology of Venus using radar images

of the surface. And you wouldn't think that this would be a place where politics would much enter into it. You know, both the Russians and the Americans had studied it, but they, even during the Cold War, they were exchanging data with each other and working together on drawing scientific conclusions. And yet there are these two scientific camps, not Russian and American, but just two different American camps, one arguing one thing about how the surface of Venus worked, one arguing another thing about how the surface of Venus worked. And neither one of them would admit that the other people's observations were good observations or correct. And they both just determined that everything that they saw supported their own conclusion. And that too, I think, kind of pushed me away from participating in academic science

and wanting to be more of an outside observer who could say, you know, those people aren't being as objective as they should be. And evaluating actually the quality of the work that's being done. You need to read the scientific papers with a critical eye. And there's not a whole lot of people who have the combination of skills who can do that. You know, it's funny. I think that either by virtue of being a writer or by being somebody who wanted to become a writer from a young age, I'm always able to look at things from multiple points of view. Because when you write a script for a TV show, for example, I have to think of the points of views of all of these different characters, and they're often at odds, because,

of course, conflict is, you know, the essence of drama. So when I look at some of these policy debates, it's like, yeah, I can see the other side. Even on something that, you know, I'm fairly convinced of, the reality of global warming caused by CO2 emission, I mean, that's pretty much a slam dunk. I can understand, you know, some aspects of the other side of that. You know, I disagree, but I can kind of understand where, you know, I mean, a lot of it, I think it's just the greed of people

who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But those few people who I've talked to over the years who really have serious questions about whether or not this could be real and, you know, can we really affect, how could us, you know, puny humans affect the atmosphere on a global scale and so forth?

Well, I mean, I can understand enough of where they're coming from to at least have a conversation with them because I'm sort of trained to see multiple points of view, even points of view I disagree with. I think that there's not very many people who disagree with the essence of the causes and not many scientifically minded people who disagree with the essence of the causes and effects of climate change. But there's a lot of disagreement about what that means policy-wise, a lot of disagreement about what that means in terms of the United States' role in mitigating the effects of it on people who, in largely equatorial regions, who are suffering the effects. And there are always uncertainties in the models. You can only say that there's a range of possible futures. But we've got to plan for the worst. Absolutely.

See, that's always been my argument. It's like, wouldn't the conservative argument be to err on the side of caution when what you're risking is the Earth's atmosphere and the future of the climate? You know what? If we're wrong, if it's not really the fossil fuel emissions, well, worst case scenario, we have green energy and we reduce air pollution to a radical degree. That in and of itself is reason enough to do it.

There's a great cartoon about that where it's a guy at a conference and he's saying, well, what if it all turns out to be a hoax and we've improved the world in so many ways for nothing yeah right see if the fossil fuel advocates are wrong it's hell you know so that's the that's the balance that's what you're looking at progress is made we no longer believe that germs are spontaneously generated or come from noxious vapors. We have some idea of what these are and therefore how to fight them and how to end disease. Science does work.

Does it work in all cases? Are there areas of understanding, of knowledge, of wisdom where science maybe has very little or maybe nothing to say? Yes. Yeah, I think so. I don't know. I think I don't know how much I have to add to that. That's it. They both said yes. We're done with that one. Well, I think... No, please. Are there questions that are ultimately beyond the capacity of science to answer? Probably.

Again, I don't think that there is ever going to be some ultimate theory, even the so-called theory of everything in physics, this holy grail of trying to unite Einstein's general theory of relativity with the quantum mechanics and the standard theory that describes the other fundamental forces in nature. They've been trying to do that for the better part of 100 years, and we still haven't cracked it. That doesn't mean it's not doable, but maybe it

does. Maybe they just aren't united. And the problem of human consciousness, will we ever have a working physical model of human consciousness and be able to understand that in a purely reductionist scientific way? I don't know, maybe. My bet is yes, but yeah, who knows? See, my point of view on this is just as mice can't understand fission, we are certainly not the be-all and end-all of intelligence. There's no way we can possibly understand everything there is to understand, or even a small part of it. We'll have to ask the AIs when they figure it out.

That's right, yeah. After the singularity. Yeah, after the singularity. I'm going to get in trouble if I don't take this conversation back to space. I'll get fired. Why is space exploration important, Emily? Oh, God. Well, mostly because I think it's fun.

As do most of the scientists who conduct it. So I have to answer both first for myself and then for humankind, I suppose. But for me, I'm just inspired by going to new worlds. For me, it's always about seeing a place we haven't seen before. It doesn't have to be a planet. It can be the tiniest body in the solar system. I think one of my favorite missions ever is the Japanese Hayabusa mission that went to a tiny asteroid named Itokawa. It was only 500 meters across. It was very small, a couple of city blocks. And it was shaped like a cheese doodle. And it was just orbiting in space, although the Japanese, being Japanese, saw an

adorable little sea otter clutching a scallop shell in its paws. And they used to make these little cartoons of it. And it's the most wonderful thing. And this thing is 500 meters across. There are thousands upon thousands of worlds that size in our solar system, but they probably look nothing like Itokawa. And if we just keep exploring these different places, we'll keep finding new and different worlds. And so that's, I'm just inspired by that. And I think it probably inspires a lot of people. Why is inspiration good? Well, it makes you feel good. And maybe it inspires people to enter useful careers like that. I don't know, I kind of hate that description of why it's important. I think it's so utilitarian. I think it's just good to feel

good about something. But it does, in the end, the challenge of exploring space does cause us to develop technologies that get useful everyone else. I encourage people to look at spinoff.nasa.gov, where they describe a lot of the different ways in which NASA-developed technology benefits us, everything from medical imaging to new materials that make firefighters safer. Andre, same question. I would absolutely agree with everything that Emily has said, and I would add maybe just that, you know, we explore because we don't know what's out there, and what's out there could be amazing,

We explore because we don't know what's out there. And what's out there could be amazing. And we'll never know unless we go look. And for the more utilitarian sort of side of it, we need to understand the neighborhood that we live in because it's become clear, I think, in recent decades that it can be a dangerous neighborhood, not just the threat of maybe an errant asteroid coming and smacking into us and wiping us out the way that dinosaurs were probably wiped out 66 million years ago.

There was an old joke about how the dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program. Maybe, maybe if they'd had one, things would be different today. But also the sun. The sun is capable of doing these storms and what are called coronal mass ejections that could wipe out our, in Quebec a couple of decades ago, that wiped out the power grid in Quebec for a couple of days. That was a solar flare that happened to be pointing in our direction.

And we got lucky just a few weeks ago. There was one that was not pointing in our direction, but would have taken out most of what we call modern society. And we didn't know that such things existed 100 years ago, right? So we don't know what we'll discover next that could be crucial to our future success as a species on this planet.

There's a very entertaining book that I don't recommend you read if you suffer from anxiety, but it's called Death from the Skies. And it's written by a guy named Phil Plait. It's all about all the different ways that different cosmic events could kill you. Things like supernovae and merging black holes and solar flares. It's a very entertaining book. And some of them, we wouldn't be able to do a damn thing.

Most of them, in fact. They're all low probability events for anybody who's concerned. And some of you may know Phil Plait as the bad astronomer, which is not at all what he is. He's a very good astronomer, but he writes very, very clever stuff. If you would imagine a sort of glorious Pollyannish future, we won't look as far out as Star Trek, but maybe 100 years from now. We've done what we can about climate change. We've even started to turn the corner on it 100 years from now,

which I hope is not too optimistic. Earth is more at peace. Humanity is more at peace than it's ever been. And humanity has continued to explore. Where do you think we will, we, men, women, our robots, will be in a century's time? Where would you like to see us, Emily? One of the things that I'm excited about

is the way that humans and robots are working more and more and more closely together over time. So I think we'll see a future in which humans are able to explore all kinds of worlds, but they don't necessarily have to physically be there. They can be exploring these worlds through robot bodies, basically. Robot bodies that are designed to deal with the kinds of environmental challenges that you have in these places. And transmit a virtual reality experience back to the operator. That's right. And I hope that we will have orbited and thoroughly explored Uranus and Neptune, the last two planets that have never had orbiters, and all of their moons. I hope that we will have followed up on the great success of New Horizons by visiting many of the other weird Kuiper Belt worlds, particularly Haumea, which is one you may have heard of in the news this week, is an egg-shaped world with two moons.

It rotates very quickly. And now we know that it has a ring. And so there are worlds like this. They have wonderful names, Sedna, Varuna, Ixion, Quawar. There are all these wonderful places left to explore in the Kuiper Belt. And I hope that we'll see, you know, human migration to some of the asteroids and maybe the moon. And I'm ambivalent about Mars because if there was ever life on Mars, it would be much harder to find if we put humans down there. But I suspect that people who want to go to Mars are not going to listen to my misgivings about that, and they're going to go anyway. Well, you put people on Mars.

I did. In the National Geographic series. They were actually in Budapest in Morocco, but close enough. Could have fooled me. Oddly enough, that's where we shot the thing. I thought they were in a sinkhole on Mars. Do you see a future for humans physically occupying the solar system system or maybe just Mars? Oh, I think so. I think so. And I think that it's, I don't know to what extent, to what scale.

And I agree that, you know, we need to tread carefully on a world like Mars or Europa or Titan or Enceladus. and that we should be very careful not to dirty those places up with our earthly bacteria in environments where those organisms could thrive and potentially disrupt any life that might still be there or confuse the whole question of whether there's indigenous life today on those worlds. The other part of it, though, I would say is trying to think a little bit farther. No way to anticipate what kinds of breakthroughs we might have in the next hundred years in terms of technology. I mean, think about a person in 1917 trying to anticipate the world of 2017.

Pretty hard to imagine that they would have a strong sense of what our world is really like. Some of the things we do know that are happening, we're building bigger and more capable telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope that Misha and I saw components of at Goddard a couple of weeks ago we will probably have

100 meter or larger class telescopes in space at that point space interferometers I suspect we'll have images of the surfaces of earth-like planets orbiting other stars at that point we'll know whether there is life on those planets maybe be able to resolve details on the surfaces of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars at that point. We'll know whether there is life on those planets, maybe be able to resolve details on the surfaces of those worlds.

There's an opportunity that a Russian philanthropist and multimillionaire billionaire is developing to use lasers to propel microscopic spacecraft to 20% the speed of light to send a flotilla of these things to Alpha Centauri or Proxima Centauri on a 20-year mission, and that these things would be designed to work together to send back telemetry data and images of any planets. We think there's at least one planet orbiting Proxima Centauri,

and that could conceivably happen in the next 100 years. We could build something like that 50 years from now, 60 years from now, launch it to Alpha Centauri, and then have a direct experience of an extrasolar planet, which I think would be amazing, astonishing, more so even than colonies on the Moon or Mars. I think that's the kind of thing that excites my imagination. I'll close with this.

You think life is out there waiting for us to find it? I think life is out there. Whether or not it's waiting for us to find it is anybody's guess. But certainly, it would be astonishing to me to find out that would be a more sort of profoundly world-shattering result than the opposite. One of the biggest breakthroughs in science, I think, in the last 20 years is the discovery of just how many other planets there are out there. If you look up at the sky, every single star that you see, for every star in our galaxy, there is roughly one planet. Not every star has planets, but the ones that do have many of them. And so for every star, there's a planet. There's just so many

opportunities out there for different kinds of environments that could support life that I think it's inconceivable that life doesn't exist out there. Again, whether we'll ever find it, I don't know if we're capable, but maybe one day we will. I have faith. And I have faith in people like you leading us in that search, not just the people doing the science, but those of you who help bring it to the rest of us. And so I thank you for that, and I thank you for being part of this tonight very much. And please help me thank Andre Bermanis and Emily Lacalala. Thank you.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Vets is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He is standing by. Bruce, if you hear doorbells in the background, it's because we're recording this on Halloween. Mwahahahaha! Well done, well done. I would be frightened to go to your door. What's up in the sky over those little kitties' heads?

Everyone's frightened to go to my door. You've got Saturn in the evening sky over the kitties' heads. If the kitties happen to be west of you in the southwest is Saturn. Pre-dawn sky, which hopefully you won't get any trick-or-treaters in the pre-dawn, but that's where things are happening and partying. We've got Mars looking reddish, not super bright, but looking like a fairly bright reddish star in the east in the pre-dawn. Below it is super bright Venus, and it's going to keep dropping in the next two or three weeks until it's pretty much not visible. But before it does

that, on November 13th, Jupiter will be coming up gradually, Venus will be going down. And so the two of them are going to meet on November 13th, very, very close to each other, very low to the horizon in the pre-dawn east, but quite the groovy, spectacular scene. Sounds lovely. We move on to this week in space history. It's the 100th anniversary of the Mount Wilson 100-inch telescope's first light, the 100-inch that's given us so many big discoveries, including expansion of the universe. And they're having a big celebration up there this week. I know there's a public event on Saturday, which would be what? The 4th of November. If anybody happens to be in Southern California, it's well worth going up to Mount Wilson.

We move on to random space fact. Spooky kitties. The plane of the ecliptic in which all the planets in our solar system approximately orbit, in that one plane essentially, is actually tilted about six degrees compared to the sun's equator. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Indeed. Indeed. We move on to the trivia contest.

What two moons, one moon, two moons. contest. What two moons, one moon, the two moon, what two moons in our solar system have the highest and second highest densities? How'd we do, Matt? Well, Count, we got many, many people making a large number that you would love who responded this week. Bill Connors was chosen by Random.org. Bill Connors in New Hope, Pennsylvania. I think if he got this right, a first-time winner, this is the answer most people delivered. The moon with the highest density in our solar system is Io, I believe, followed by the moon. Here are the numbers, 3.528 and 3.346 grams per cubic centimeter, respectively. That is correct. Bill, you have now won yourself a Planetary Society t-shirt,

a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, and that beautiful mounted print from an original painting of the Kelly twins, those identical astronaut twins, Mark and Scott, created by space artist Michelle Roosh. And we will get that out to you. Bill says, I've been listening for a couple of years now. Always enjoy the program. Keep up the great work.

Bjorn Getta, he says that the density of Io is exactly the same as diamond. Can you confirm that? No, I just know planets, not valuable jewels. But it, of course, confirms my theory that no one has listened to that Io is completely made of diamond. Quite dense. Ilya Schwartz in Columbia, Maryland, he says the only objects denser than these two are the four inner planets themselves,

Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. And then if you follow out beyond those two moons, it goes Europa, Haumea, which we just learned has that ring, Eris, and Orcus. So there's your top 10 most dense objects in our solar system, apparently. Cool.

Dense. Norman Kassoon says the lowest density moon in our system is Tethys at 0.984, which I guess is the same as ice. Is that mostly what Tethys is made of? It is indeed. A lot of these have ice on the exterior, but it depends on how much rock they have on the interior. Finally, this from Torsten Zimmer, one of our listeners in Germany.

He says, Yet across the gulf of space, moons immeasurably denser than ours may circle Planet Nine right now and slowly and surely turn their planes against us. It's a pretty obscure reference. It's the War of the Worlds, as told by Orson Welles in 1939, on October 30th, 1939, except, of course, it was the Martians turning their big eyes on us. Thank you, Torsten. I love the War of the Worlds so much. I was actually at a performance of it, got to do a little presentation about Mars here in Southern California at the Long Beach Shakespeare Company last Sunday

afternoon. So it's fresh in my memory. Put another question in my memory. What is the designation, basically the current name, the designation of the first observed interstellar asteroid detected coming through our solar system just in the last couple weeks. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I'm looking for the second designation since it was incorrectly identified at first. Give me what the current designation is for that interstellar asteroid. I also just read about this. Pretty exciting. You have until Wednesday, November 8th

at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And you will win yourself, if you're correct, that Chop Shop Design Planetary Society t-shirt, the one that's a Venn diagram of Mars and Earth, the one that's a Venn diagram of Mars and Earth, the one with the Planetary Society and the intersection of those two worlds, very appropriate, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. iTelescope is the non-profit network for astronomy, amateur astronomers, all over the world. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what costume you'd like to see Matt wear when he trick-or-treats up to your door. Thank you, and good night.

I'll just keep it simple. I'll wear my Star Trek bathrobe. You're wearing that right now, aren't you? Live long and prosper. He's Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for

What's Up. I still have one remaining special treat for you. Singer-songwriter Chevy Smith joined us in Topanga Canyon for the Planetary Society Salon. Chevy opened the evening with her performance of a song she wrote and recorded about 10 years ago for her album of the same name. Ad Astra Per Aspera is the state motto of Kansas, where Chevy grew up, but it's also the unofficial motto of many who aspire to fulfill the vision of the planetary society, to know the cosmos and our place within it. Ad Astra Per Aspera, through hardships, to the stars. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.

I am a man, not a machine. Sometimes the world treats my back like a balance beam. Sometimes I want to collapse, then create a world with all of this joy. of the weight that defines me You remind me Ad Astra Per Aspera To the stars, to the stars we are going Ad Astra Per Aspera To the stars we are going At Astro Paraspora

Baby don't give up, don't give in now At Astro Paraspora To the stars, to the stars we are going At Astro Paraspora are going even when we don't know how I once had helium dreams but time has filled them with lead I live for weeks at a time

all up inside my own head then you pull me in tight say it's part of the design that it always works out all of the time if you say so i'll believe you you Peraspera To the stars, to the stars We are going

At Astro Peraspera Baby don't give up, don't give in Now At Astro Peraspera To the stars, to the stars We are going At astral peraspera Even when we don't know how And sometimes it feels like I'm getting it back

The belief in the unknown that these days I lack Well, it turns out the scar tissues simply a star issue I wanna go with you I wanna go with you to the stars to the stars we are going Baby don't give up, don't give in now To the stars, to the stars we are going At astral peraspera. Even when we don't know how. Thank you.