Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Author David Brin Considers and Writes "Existence"

Episode Date: September 3, 2012

Award-winning science fiction author, physicist and futurist David Brin returns to talk about his monumental new novel, Existence. Emily Lakdawalla previews a very busy month of great planetary science, while Bill Nye invites listeners to learn about a campaign to restore funding for the exploration of our solar system. Bruce Betts and Mat Kaplan give away another space pen in this week’s What’s Up look at the night sky, and a look back at this week in space history.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

David Brin considers and writes existence this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Great fun today as we talk with one of my favorite authors. Hugo and Nebula Award-winning David Brin has written a monumental and quite fantastic, though quite plausible speculation about humanity's not-so-distant future and its surprising first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Bill Nye wants to tell you about an effort you can join that aims at restoring NASA

funding for planetary science. And Bruce Betts will share a few timely tidbits about this week in space history and what you can find in the night sky. We've also got another space pen to give away. Emily Lakdawalla gets us started right now. Emily, we've reached the beginning of yet another month, so I think you'd like to tell us what's up in the solar system for September. There's a lot going on in the solar system. It seems like the missions took a vacation in August, same as most of the people on Earth, and now things are getting really busy. Curiosity has started roving toward a destination called Glenelg, which is where they're going to check out their first rocks, probably. So that's getting very exciting.

But at the same time, Opportunity doesn't want to be beaten by Curiosity. So that rover has actually started crawling down the inside edge of Endeavour Crater. And I have to say, the images coming back from that mission are really exciting right now. There's some really unusual looking rocks jutting up out of the ground. Who knows, Opportunity may find some clays. Moving on to the rest of the solar system dawn has just left vesta it spent a long time spiraling in around vesta and then it spiraled very slowly out and just this week it's finally departed the gravitational hold of vesta and is going to be journeying onto series that particular cruise is going to take about three years closer to home here grail has just become its first mission extension. So they're

actually mapping the moon from such a low orbit that at times they get within just tens of thousands of meters of some of the peaks of these mountains. It's incredibly close. And MESSENGER is most of the way through its first mission extension, talking about a second. So it's really a very busy time in the solar system. Oh, and I almost forgot. Juno had its biggest rocket firing since launch. It's way out in the asteroid belt and now has to come back in for an Earth flyby next year before it'll head on to Jupiter. And it reaches Jupiter when? It's going to get there in July of 2016. Lots to look forward to.

Just one more quick mention of something. You found a really terrific Lego model, and then you have a question for, well, readers of the blog, of course, but you might as well ask our listeners as well. Well, I have to give my readers credit for pointing this thing out to me. In fact, probably a dozen people sent me over to the KUSU website. That's C-U-U-S-O-O. It's a website where Lego enthusiasts can submit their own designs and have them be voted upon by the community. And if you get 10,000 votes, they actually consider your design to be built into a LEGO kit. Well, this LEGO Curiosity is awesome.

It got its 10,000 votes a couple weeks ago. It's not a very big kit. It's only about 300 pieces, which is a fairly – it's a medium-sized LEGO kit. But it replicates so many of the functions of curiosity that I really hope that LEGO chooses to make this. As for my question, you know, my daughters are now three and six, and they're definitely ready for the small LEGOs. I have hundreds of pounds of LEGOs stashed away in a closet. And, you know, they're all carefully sorted because I was, like, constructing all kinds of things. I had them all in little hardware parts bins and stuff.

And I don't really know how to introduce my children to my collection. I certainly don't want to bring the whole collection out at once. So I was actually soliciting advice from other parents who, I assume there's many of my readers who have faced the same problem. They have their own Lego collections from their childhoods, and then they want to present them to their kids. So how did you do that? If you have any suggestions for Emily, you can join the, well, several other people so far who've written in to the blog. You'll find it at planetary.org, and that's where you can also check out her complete listing of What's Up for the month of September 2012. Thanks as always, Emily. Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor at the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist. And here's the boss, the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye.

Bill, welcome back to the show via Skype. We have something to talk about that I hope if anybody out there wants to take action on, they'll have to hear this show pretty soon because there's a deadline on this. Yes, we at the Planetary Society believe in what, Matt? Planetary exploration. And planetary exploration costs money, although by the U.S. government standards, not that much money. So what we would like you all to consider doing is visit planetary.org and look the situation over. We are, in this case, not trying to influence a specific congressperson or senator. We are trying to

influence the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. These are people that work for, if you will, the president. They work for the administration and they make policy decisions. And we want them to consider funding or restoring the funding for planetary science. Because if we lose this ability to land on Mars, humankind may lose this ability for a long time to come, for decades and years. There's very few people that can land the Curiosity rover on Mars. My understanding, Matt, is I'm not allowed to ask for a call to action. That's correct. My understanding, Matt, is I'm not allowed to ask for a call to action.

That's correct. But if you're of a mind, my listener colleagues, consider visiting planetary.org and looking things over. At least you can learn more. And what you would do is click on the SOS sticker there up at the top of the page. Save our science. It's an important thing. And once again, the discoveries that the Curiosity rover making are amazing. Zap the rocks with the ChemCam laser, hoping to sniff out methane. I mean, if we found methane on Mars, Matt, or found the source of it, not easily explained by geological chemistry, but you would need something else like swamp gas making Mars microbes, it would change the world, change the world at a very reasonable cost. To say nothing of, as you hinted at, the possibility of other major missions, which are not going to be cheap, but the return could be just as stupendous.

For example, sending something to Europa and looking for signs of life there. Oh, under the ocean. Crazy, crazy. It's part of our solar system neighborhood. Thank you so much, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He is Bill Nye, the chief executive officer of the Planetary Society, which is why he's encouraging people this way. You can't really blame him, can you? He is also the science guy, as I suspect you know. I'll be right back with another science guy, David Brin, our special guest, science fiction writer, and much, much more.

David Brin is such fun to read, even when he's scaring you about our precarious future in a vast and threatening universe. His latest work, with the modest title Existence, is no exception, though I believe he has surpassed his past work in considering the challenges and opportunities that face our species in the next four decades or so. that face our species in the next four decades or so. He has built a fascinating, provocative, and supremely entertaining speculation about, well, you name it, society, artificial intelligence, climate change, oligarchies, space travel, what it means to be human, and how we might survive a first-context scenario that is unlike any I've seen before. He mostly writes hard science fiction, stories that are soundly based on real science. No surprise, this physicist and engineer has

several patents and has earned multiples of every major science fiction award. He stopped by the Planetary Society for a conversation about existence a few weeks ago. David, welcome back to Planetary Radio. It's great, and anything for the Planetary Society. Well, thank you so much. I mean, you help us out around here a little bit. I think you're on our board of advisors, so full disclosure up front.

Here's more full disclosure. I love this book. This book is so much fun. There is really something on every page. There's a piece of innovation. There's a pun, which, you know, might at times be a little bit disturbing, but most of them are pretty entertaining. Some new use of the English language, some new synthesis of language and a terrific story. I thought halfway through the book, this is almost every science fiction book that's ever been written. You've got so many different themes covered in there. Yeah, well, you know, I did this once before with my novel Earth back around 1990. And that is following the notion that Dos Passos did in USA and John Brunner did in San Anzibar, of trying to really portray a near future world 30, 40 years from now.

And that's very challenging because if you took your own self from 30, 40 years ago and brought that person up to today, half the time she or he would be saying, wow, I never thought of that. And the other half the time they'd be saying, you mean you're still doing that? wow, I never thought of that. And the other half the time they'd be saying, you mean you're still doing that? And so if you're trying to portray a real world of the near future, you're not doing a dire warning in which everything's stupid.

You're not doing a Star Trek in which everything's solved. What you're doing is what we've got, and that is we've made a heck of a lot of wonderful decisions and breakthroughs over the last 50 years. And it's barely keeping us up to cross this minefield of the 21st century so that our children's children might inherit Star Trek. But to get there, we're the ones who have the real adventure. have the real adventure and so i depict the world of 2048 2050 as being one in which people by then have made an awful lot of really really good decisions and discoveries since now and have been horribly obstinate and stupid and others and it's neither zombie apocalypse nor is it fantastic hope. It's dangerous, but they might make it. But the implication when I deal with the issues about aliens and the state of the galaxy and the

Fermi paradox, why we might be alone in this galaxy is that if we cross this minefield and get to the other side, and the minefield, you know, a hundred different ways we might die, that's the topic of the book. If we cross the minefield successfully, the scary thing is we might be the first in the galaxy to do so. And I don't know whether that's optimistic or it's really, really scary, So whether that's optimistic or it's really, really scary, but some of that fun of dealing with that scariness or optimism or that mix is part of what I wanted to get in the book. There is this first contact scenario that is central to the book, which is unlike any I've ever seen.

It's quite fantastic. And yet, in many ways, it's much more plausible than a lot of other first contact scenarios that I've read. Well, yes, because most first contact implies interstellar travel. And I'm not saying it's impossible. I've used interstellar travel in some of my more sci-fi-ish novels, you know, Dolphins in Space and all that. But in my opinion, sometimes you have to write about the world that Einstein gave us. And in the world that Einstein gave us, you either deal with radio like the SETI people are doing, and I deal with some of the flaws in the logic of SETI in this book, or what seems to be an under-noticed possibility is that pellets, messages in a bottle, will be sent between

the stars. Because the advantage of that is it's more expensive to send a pellet than one beamed message. But once you send a beamed message at another solar system, it just goes on past into outer space. You send a pellet or a message in a bottle or an intelligent probe to another stellar system, it can wait a million years, 10 million years, 100 million years, until somebody intelligent grows up on this nearby planet. And what I posit in existence is that this has happened a fair amount, and that there was first a wave of large machines, like John von Neumann talked about,

that can make copies of themselves. And then came this new wave of these glass crystal pellets that this astronaut pulls in. And they can't do anything to us. They have no physical modality. They can't eat us. But that doesn't mean they can't mess with our heads. Yeah, they do. Yes, they do. Peeling back the layer after layer after layer of motivations

of these aliens. But again, that's just a way of holding up a mirror to the Earth's society of the year 2050. I think the society that I portray in 2050 is more interesting than the aliens. More of author David Brin and his new novel Existence are in your imminent future. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unve to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail.

It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS.

Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Existence is the monumental new book by David Brin. It's hard to imagine how more speculation about humanity's near-term future

could be captured in a single volume. Existence is Brin's first major work of fiction in several years, and in my opinion, it was worth the wait. I was talking to him before the break about the story's crystal pellets, sort of like large glass footballs that finally bring us proof that we are not alone in the universe. Well, and you have in these crystals that proliferate throughout our solar system, apparently, or have come here, there are all these alien species, and yet they are countered by this multitude of species that is inhabiting Earth, some of whom we aren't even fully, most people aren't even fully aware of. Well, you know, the notion that human beings like, can like to be many. Let me explain that. In most human cultures, fear levels were so high that we kept our horizons of what is fellow

tribesmen, and therefore what's murder to kill, really close. But it's a human phenomenon that when fear levels go down, as they have been, at least in Western civilization, and now all over the world, as violence has decreased in the last 50 years, when fear levels go down, we tend to be like monkeys. And when we're less afraid, the horizons move outward. And this is one of the reasons why America moved into the era of repudiating old racisms and sexisms and things that limited the opportunities of other human beings. Because all of a sudden, after several generations of low fear levels, all of a sudden we were saying, well, why shouldn't they be included? Then we get to use their talents. then we get to use their talents. And one of the purposes I did in my Uplift books,

where I portray the genetic engineering of dolphins and chimpanzees and other creatures up to the level of intelligence where they can then be members of our civilization, bringing their own styles of wisdom and old styles of argument and noise into our civilization. And we're certainly going to do this with artificial intelligence. And we do it with every generation with our kids, for crying out loud. The aliens that invade us every generation. And I'm from the 60s. I was one of those invaders.

The point is that in this book, I extrapolate this whole tendency in directions that the readers might find surprising. The extrapolations are pretty magnificent. And there is a good deal in here for fans of your Uplift universe. They can get a good fix out of this one. There's one storyline, plotline. Well, one either could call this book a prequel to my entire Uplift universe, or like Prometheus, a slight offshoot, reboot. I think I'm leaning towards making it an actual prequel and part of it, because it does show the beginnings of the uplifting of dolphins.

There is a huge spectrum just among us human beings in this as well. I mean, everything from this poor downtrodden Chinese peasant struggling to get by to the trillionaires who run most of the world and would like to take over what's left as well. Oh, yes. Well, you know, look, every human civilization was shaped like a pyramid with a few at the top lording it over those below. 99% of human cultures that we know of across the last 6,000 years. We're the first culture that created a diamond-shaped civilization in which a vast and very powerful middle class was actually running things for a while. You mentioned AI, or as you refer to it in the book, I, and I keep

thinking I, I, I was some of the things that you did with this. One of your characters, this poor woman, Tor, and talk about kissing up to your publisher, naming one of your characters, this poor woman, Tor, and talk about kissing up to your publisher, naming one of your major characters after your publisher. She, you know, is this beautiful young woman, and you just do terrible things to her. Well, you know, some of my best characters I do terrible things to. In Glory Season, there was this young woman who just, because I like to see them come back, clawing and scratching.

My best character, I suppose, was Fyben Bulger, the chimp in Uplift War. I had so much fun with him. I treated him like absolute—I was just awful to him throughout the entire book. And then he gets the two most beautiful chimps on the planet as his wives at the end. And he also achieves, what, full sentience upgrade for his species, right? Yes. So I reward my characters. And Tor gets her reward. She does. I didn't want to give anything away, but she really achieves, perhaps, is it our future as humans?

One can hope. In any event, people can see hints on this on the lavish three-minute trailer for the book that Patrick Farley, the wonderful web artist, made. And people can link into it through YouTube or through my website. But a three-minute, lavish, gorgeous. You know, books have trailers now. And hand-painted images from the book. What's the website people should go to?

Can they just Google David Brin? Yeah, well, davidbrin.com or Google David Brin and existence. Either way, they'll find both my website and the trailer. The Freeman Dyson quote that you used to close the book, do you remember enough of it? Can you paraphrase it? Well, Freeman is one of the world's greatest physicists, and he was just in London being honored as being the only member of the Royal Society

who reached 60 years as a member of the Royal Society ever. And probably the greatest theologian of the 20th century because he talked about the eschatology, the way in which godlike beings will survive the heat death of the universe. And another great physicist, Frank Tipler, was his competitor, and it was science that decided which of them was the great theologian. Because we now know that the heat death is going to be through endless expansion. If there had been a big crunch, then Tipler would have been the great theologian.

big crunch, then Tipler would have been the great theologian. Freeman Dyson ends the book, quotation, saying that if we do go forth and fill the galaxy, we will probably become a million different species. And if the universe is as lonely as some people think, then that will give us the others to talk to. And the millions of species that will be, what I contend, includes uplifted animals, artificial intelligences. But if we're smart and we handle this transition right, they'll all think of themselves as human. David Brin, astrophysicist, engineer, futurist, author. I counted five Hugos in your bio. Did I get it right?

No, but almost. His latest novel that we've been talking about largely is Existence, published by Tor Books. It's available everywhere, all the usual places. It is highly recommended. I had a great time reading it. Here's a bonus. Go to planetary.org slash radio, where this episode of Planetary Radio is posted,

to hear David speak eloquently and passionately about his dear friend, the late Ray Bradbury. That's planetary. Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here, not in intensive care, though you've been under the weather for a little bit. I have. I've been trying out the joy of a respiratory flu in late summer. This is terrible. You couldn't even get a flu shot for it.

I don't think they're out yet. Yeah, well, I just decided this was easier and cheaper. Well, thank you for joining us regardless, and we'll get through this quickly, and you can get back to your sickbed. Please tell us what's up. Well, in the evening sky over in the west, Mars and Saturn getting lower and lower, Saturn on the left, but low

in the west in the early evening. You can still see them. Easy to see in the pre-dawn is Venus pretty high up over the eastern horizon and Jupiter quite high in the sky in the south. And Jupiter actually coming up now around midnight, around the middle of the night, so you can see it if you're up then low in the east, looking like a super bright star-like object. We move on to this week in space history. Viking 2 landed this week in 1976 on Mars, another successful Mars landing.

Then, as you may be aware, Matt, Voyager 1 launched 35 years ago in 1977. you may be aware, Matt, Voyager 1 launched 35 years ago in 1977. And I'm glad you mentioned that because for those people who hear the show in time on Thursday through KPCC, and you can find it at kpcc.org, doing a little celebration of the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Voyager mission, and that should be great fun. They're going to be webcasting it live from their studio in Pasadena. So yes, I'm quite aware of that. This is what NASA and JPL are officially celebrating. I think it's kind of funny. For 35 years now, the Voyager launches have been confusing

because they launched Voyager 2 about two weeks before Voyager one so we it actually celebrated its anniversary a couple weeks ago yeah that's a free random space fact for you uh we're going to go on to uh the the real one now random space fact new depths there that you've reached i think i I could go lower, but I might hurt myself. So the Dawn spacecraft, after its wonderfully successful time at Vesta, right about now is heading off, leaving Vesta orbit and heading off to Ceres, where it will be in 2015. It will be the first spacecraft ever

to orbit two distant worlds. And I throw in distant because you have things that get launched into Earth orbit that have then, say, orbited the moon or something else. But in terms of two bodies outside the Earth-moon system, it will be the first. Another free random space fact, Mariner 10 was the first to do a flyby of two distant worlds, in that case Venus and Mercury. Well, you're doing great. You're really doing yeoman's work here. So let's go on to the trivia and get you back to bed.

All right. We asked you, how long is the reach of Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity's arm from the front of the rover body? How'd we do, Matt? This is so interesting because virtually everybody came up of the rover body. How'd we do, Matt? This is so interesting because virtually everybody came up with the same answer, roughly seven feet, or depending on how you look at it, 2.1, 2.2 meters. Except for one person, we got to give credit to Ron Bask, who went to great trouble to figure out how far the arm reaches beyond the front of the rover since the arm is mounted a little ways back. And he said it's 1.45 meters, the working reach. Ron, if you had been picked by Random.org, we'd have gone with that.

But our winner this time, chosen by Random.org, was Artur Anikyash. He did that very nicely. Thank you so much. He is in the Republic of Belarus, the Minsk region, and he indeed gave us the reach of 2.1 meters. So, Artur, congratulations. We're going to send you a space pen, a Fisher space pen. DJ Byrne, who is, as we mentioned, I think last week on the Curiosity Mention, he said, Its reach does not exceed our grasp, but can it reach the kids in science class? We hope so.

But I especially liked Randy Bottom's response. My simple answer is infinite. Curiosity's reach is infinite, especially if you add our imagination. And then he provided 2.2 meters. So thank you, Randy. Thank you, everybody, for entering. We're going to do it again right now. All right. What was the first spacecraft to successfully do a flyby of another planet?

But wait, there's more. You might know that off the top of your head. But what happened to its identical sister spacecraft? So first spacecraft to successfully do a flyby of another planet. And what happened to its identical sister spacecraft? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. do a flyby of another planet and what happened to its identical sister spacecraft, go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. You have until the 10th of September, Monday, September 10 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this particular answer.

All right, Guy. All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about breathing easy. Thank you. Good night. And I'm really proud of you. I was worried that we might break a nearly 10-year tradition you have never missed at What's Up, and now your record is intact and secure. You've earned your rest.

Yay! He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Do you oowingu? every week here for What's Up. Do you Uyngu? The deadline in this campaign to help a fledgling company get underway is September 14. Uyngu is Swahili for sky,

and its principles want to help make the wonders of the sky available to everyone through unique apps, even as they help fund worthy planetary science efforts. That's Uyngu on the Indiegogo crowdsourcing site. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.