Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us to 2312

Episode Date: May 28, 2012

Kim Stanley Robinson shares his vision of a brave new solar system 300 years in the future with his new novel, 2312.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Author Kim Stanley Robinson takes us to the year 2312, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier, and this time, 300 years into humanity's future. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. In his new novel, 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson shares his vision of a brave new solar system that is chock full of humanity. He'll tell us about it in a special extended podcast conversation. Bill Nye is back to share congratulations for SpaceX, with its Falcon 9 Dragon capsule, now a full-fledged transportation system. And Bruce Betts will tell us about the Skywonders still in store over the next couple of weeks. We'll start with Planetary Society blogger Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, welcome

back. Looking over the blog, it sure is nice to see this in the brand new website. It is especially good for multimedia. Good place to watch this video that you collected from a student all about Saturn. Yeah, that's right. Not only did I collect it from a student, but I only heard about it because somebody told me about it on Twitter. So there's a lot of social media going on here. It's a lovely video. It uses a device that I have to admit I use an awful lot, which is basically just gathering a lot of Cassini's images from many sequences and just running them together in an animation. It's kind of like a digital flipbook. But this one is an especially nice job. And he put the Moonlight Sonata to it.

And then the way that the video moves and changes, it's just really in rhythm with the music. And it's quite impressive. And you just can't help but watch it all the way through to the end. Yeah, I especially like the interpretation of the music. One of your commenters said, the rough and aggressive interpretation of the Moonlight Sonata. It really works. It's quite lovely to watch. What's interesting about this is that, yes, you've got your blog entries, but we seem

to have a real growth spurt. Lots of other guest bloggers joining in at planetary.org. Yeah, that's something that the new website has really allowed me to do. With the old one, it was hard to feature too many guest bloggers without losing me in the shuffle. But this way, the way that we've managed to actually really feature all the different kinds of authors that we have, It's just really brought forward all of the different voices that there are out there and just kind of shows how many different people are excited about telling people about what's going on in space exploration right now and just want to share their stories personally rather than me taking more of a formal role as a reporter, asking them questions and then reporting what they say.

It's really amazing how well people can tell their stories in their own voices. And I'm kind of sitting back and letting a lot of people do that right now. Of course, I've got a bit of an editorial role in picking the people who tell their stories, and I'll continue to do that. And of course, I'll also continue to write my own blog entries. And that editorial role is a very important one. I look forward to joining in more than I have. Very little up there so far, but I think I'm going to be learning how to do this better. So there'll be some more stuff behind my name on that drop-down menu when you go to blogs at planetary.org. I think we're done, Emily. Thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. She is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary

Society. Emily Lakdawalla is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, I see you via Skype in your hotel room in New York, but I know that you were doing what millions of people around the world were doing a few minutes ago. That's right. SpaceX got its dragon capsule captured by the robotic arm on the International Space Station. Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo, indeed. This is a commercial company. I mean, albeit one run by a multi-billionaire, but the guy built his own, they built their own rocket,

got all the specs, all the specifications lined up with NASA. They go up there and they hook up. And everything worked after, albeit, years of preparation. It's fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. Are you going to mention this in your commencement address in a few minutes? Oh, yes, yes. Albeit, Rochester Institute of Technology, RIT, one of my old rivals when I went to school in New York State. Just remind the students graduating, this is historic.

This is where space exploration is taking a new step. In other words, it's not just the business of governments. Now it's the business of businesses. And this will free up government money to do the next amazing stages of exploration, sending humans out farther into deep space and then ultimately to Mars. It's a big deal! It certainly is.

I guess I should let you get back to preparing that commencement address, although you did just show me your script there, your speech. This is something I very much look forward to. I really enjoy being asked to be a commencement speaker and speaking, because you really feel like

you have this chance to touch the future. As you speak, I am watching the Earth roll by underneath the Dragon capsule and the International Space Station. It's a good time. An exciting time. So everybody just take notice of this. This is where the United States, again, has somehow developed this entrepreneur who became so wealthy that he can try this out. And, of course, he believes it will lead to even greater wealth as he provides launch services to people around, to organizations around the world that need to get into orbit. It's an exciting time. Certainly is. Congratulations to SpaceX and especially to Elon.

And, Bill, off to you. break a leg. Go get them. Thank you, Matt. I got to fly. Bill and I are the planetary guy. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Just moments away now from a conversation with one of my favorite authors, Kim Stanley Robinson. If all you've read of Kim Stanley Robinson's work is his terrific Mars trilogy, you've missed several books that have kept him one of my favorite authors. The latest is 2312, a spectacular vision of humanity's future that is solidly rooted in today's best available science. It is an exciting mystery and conspiracy tale that is literally as wide as our solar system.

Even if you read 2312 just for its incredibly rich descriptions of other worlds, you'd be getting your money's worth, but it offers much more. Robinson, who goes by Stan, stopped by the Planetary Society last week for a book signing. I sat down with him for this special extended conversation that includes discussion of several of his other recent novels. Stan, it is great to have you back. It is always a pleasure to talk to you, and an even greater pleasure, I hope you don't mind me saying this, to read your books.

I don't mind at all. I'm really here to write books. That's why I'm here. And you've written a whopper, a blockbuster. And I have to admit up front, as I've told you, I'm only about a third of the way into it because that's all the time I've had. But I am already captivated. Now I see in hardcover for the first time sitting on the table between us. And it is a marvelous speculation looking forward 300 years. It is particularly thrilling to me to see this vision you have built of a solar system that is chock full of humanity in just about every space that we can occupy.

That's right. That was the point of this book. I wanted to go out a good long distance, and for me, 300 years is really a long ways off. Hard to imagine, but I postulated that we pulled our powers together, and even though Earth is rather damaged in this story, high sea levels, environmental problems, population problems, nevertheless, people have gotten out into space. Good space elevators are ringing the Earth's equator, which really is the enabling device to get us out of our gravity well. And then some self-replicating factories and robots to multiply our powers out there. And then all of the literature on terraforming is pretty extensive, and it's very

speculative. But what I did was assume that anything that had ever been proposed is likely to get tried, and ran the terraforming quickly plans that come mostly out of the British Interplanetary Society, people like Paul Birch and Martin Fogg and some other theorists and they applied all of those and so 300 years is actually enough time to do some remarkable transformations if we could pull together the engineering and the sheer power that would be required but I've postulated a very robust technological future and it was a lot of fun So at this time Mars is sort of old news

it's been taken care of. But you've got folks terraforming Venus and there is a city on Mercury, which you got to describe, Terminator, plays a key part in the story, which I won't give away. Well, Terminator is actually an old idea of mine. It comes from one of my first novels, Memory of Whiteness, and I've recycled it a couple of times. It appeared at the end of the Mars trilogy. The idea that Mercury is actually an old idea of mine. It comes from one of my first novels, Memory of Whiteness, and I've recycled it a couple times. It appeared at the end of the Mars trilogy. The idea that Mercury is actually rotating very, very slowly, so slowly that if you put a city on tracks, a city about the size of Venice and about 20 or 30 very thick, powerful, strong tracks of merely stainless steel really is strong enough to withstand the heat of the mercurial day, which surprised me. But my friends at NASA Ames assured me that it was true. So the

city rolls around in the Terminator at about five miles an hour or three miles an hour because it's not right on the equator. It's always being pushed by sunlight, which simply expands the tracks slightly, and the city is sleeved on the tracks, and it just moves forward. So it always gets a tiny touch of the coming dawn, but of course it couldn't be exposed, and it just is always in that zone of the coming dawn, basically. It is a great vision of this city because it's not just, you're not just presenting the concept. I mean, you really get a feel for the people who might someday live in a place like this and how this place is put together. In fact, your central character, at least she appears to be the central character at my point in the book, is this fascinating woman named Swan who, now I can't remember if she was born there, but she was raised there.

Yes, that's right. She right. Terminator is her hometown. I think she was born there, although I may not have said that. But she is one of the many sun worshipers and also one of the many people who live in Terminator who go out in spacesuits with little supply carts and actually walk, because the whole thing is happening at a walking pace. So you can walk around Mercury and maybe it'll take you, well, it's 177 days from sunrise to sunrise. And so you could circle the planet in a walk of a few months, a hike where while you're asleep, your friends would have to be pulling you along on the sleeping cart or whatever

because you can't really stop unless you get a good head start on the dawn. And so their lives do revolve around the contemplation of the nearby sun. It's just one of the many places that humanity has occupied in the book, and people like it there. The Mercury is beautifully named in that it is entirely named after artists, composers, writers, and people of the arts. And that was an early decision when they got those first photographs back of the mercurial surface. And I think that they did a wonderful job. It's really evocative to look at the map of Mercury and see how you can be passing between Hesiod and Sibelius, or you can see that

Van Gogh is a little dot in the side of Pushkin. And it goes on and on like that. Well, in fact, your Mercury has become a repository for some of Earth's greatest treasures that you find in the place that coincides to the spot on the planet named after that person, that artist. Yes, this is another named after that person, that artist. Yes, this is another old idea of mine, that Mercury becomes the art museum, and essentially Earth is too volatile of an environment for the great artworks to really be preserved

for centuries upon centuries upon centuries. So they get into a safer environment, which is the surface of Mercury, by being buried underground and in safe conditions. So if you really want to see an artist in their full glory, like a single artist museum, like the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, then you go to Mercury and there you can see the great works of the past all collected in one place. We had to talk about Swan. When I first met her, I wasn't sure I liked her.

And then I didn't like her at all. Now she's growing on me again. She's a fascinating character and somebody who has, in a sense, helped to create this amazing world of the future. Yes, Swan, the original idea for this novel was a kind of a joke. Yes, Swan, the original idea for this novel was a kind of a joke. I had some British reviewer, Adam Roberts, notice that I seem to be over fond of the system of the humors, the Greek system of sanguine, choleric, melancholy, and phlegmatic. And I laughed at that because it's true. And so I thought I would double down. And as a joke, I was thinking I want to have a relationship between a mercurial character and a Saturnine character. It's somewhat astrological,

also Greek. And the idea struck me funny, because although that would be a very odd couple, all couples are odd. So it struck me as just an exaggeration of the norm. And it would be a way to discover how do couples get along at all when they're all odd couples. And this is, you mentioned the other half of this couple, is this fellow, I don't know if I'll get his name right, Waram? Yeah, Waram. And he's the Saturnine, in fact, literally Saturnine. Yes, yes. And so if you're going to, I mean, the joke, typical of my lame humor, was that the mercurial character would come from Mercury and the Saturnine character would come from Saturn, from one of the moons.

But that immediately implied the whole civilization. I needed a solar system-wide civilization or else how would you have someone living on Mercury? How would you have somebody living in the Saturn system? And that, in discussion with my editor, who was a big help to me, said, well, we'll put it out 300 years so there's time to do it. And then we can't just occupy Mercury and Saturn, but everything, including the asteroids. The asteroids are used as little worlds, like city-states, where you hollow them out. You call, many of them are a terrarium that you would as a kid, a miniature environment that is controlled, a work of art, in effect. It's landscape art, like Andy Goldsworthy.

Essentially, I had to build the world so that my essential story would have a proper context to live in. And so Swan is the essence of the mercurial character, very moody, very changeable. Also, she's followed all the fashions in brain augmentations and body augmentations. She sure has. We won't even get into some of the things that she's internalized. No, we better not. She is a wild woman, but she's part of a culture where everybody's trying these things out. And one of the funnest of them that we can discuss on a family program is that she has a quantum computer in the bone of her skull. A friend who was dealing with deafness and essentially has a small computer in his skull behind his ear, helping him to hear. It's really

miracles of modern medicine. And I thought, well, with miniaturization, and if we do get quantum computers at all, you could imagine having one simply resting not in your brain but right next to your brain and in your auditory system. So Swan is constantly dogged by a double, which is an artificial intelligence insider that she herself has programmed. So it's kind of like the old puppets, the marionettes that you manipulate, and that she's talking to herself in a way, but not really because this computer is really, as a quantum computer, has an enormous amount of computing power and some good algorithms. And so it becomes an open question whether this thing in her skull could pass a Turing test or not. Sort of seems like it can. They talk a little bit about that.

I think that Pauline, her cube, says that depends on who's asking the questions in the Turing test. Yes, that's right. Can you be a smart enough questioner to break the difference? For years, I thought artificial intelligence is just a big adding machine. It's a search engine. It's not there's not going to be consciousness, there's not even going to be a good imitation of consciousness, I was flat out disbelieving it. But when I began to read more about quantum computers, and I was thinking about the distinction that I used to make between human brains and computers was that human brains are not digital, they're not binary.

And if you believe Robert, Roger Penrose, and his theories that there are quantum entanglement effects going on at the smallest levels of our brain, and that was what made us superposed and kind of quantum creatures so that we're not really digital computers with just a really big base. We're something different. Well, but if you had a quantum computer, then that makes it a moot point, because once again you've got quantum effects. And so the distinction that Penrose was making that I was following between brains and computers begins to fall apart when you have a quantum computer. I suspect, because there are nefarious doings in this tale,

which in fact Swan has been recruited into trying to uncover. She has lost someone very dear to her who had something, has something to do with all this stuff going on around the solar system. And it seems that, at least you're hinting at the point I'm at in the book, that these cubes, these quantum computers have something to do with this central conflict or conspiracy in the book? Yes, that's right. There is a mystery. The plot, as such, hinges on a mystery of who is attacking these little worlds. And, of course, every world in space is extremely vulnerable.

You really only need to puncture them, and it's a deadly accident. So they're vulnerable, and you really need to have the entire world at peace. And that's hard to do, especially with Earth still messed up as it is in this particular scenario. So my detectives are on the hunt for who and why someone is out there popping worlds like soap bubbles. And the cubes are clearly implicated because the kind of calculations that have been necessary to do the sabotages are beyond classical computers' abilities. So they clearly have something to do with what's going on, and that makes it a very problematic mystery

because there are suggestions that the quantum computers are somewhat self-evolving and headed off into a society makes it a very problematic mystery because there are suggestions that the quantum computers are somewhat self-evolving and headed off into a society and world of their own that people don't have a view into. So I pursue that a little bit, which I do think is one of the coming problems. And I tried to pursue what I call the kitchen sink principle, which is that everything in the kitchen sink is thrown into this book so that it isn't a single issue book. It's really about 300 years from now when you look at the incredible technological powers that we're gaining every day, and you also contrast that against the stupendous environmental damage we're doing to Earth itself, you get such a mixed

picture that what I wanted to do was to throw it all out there in one story and see if we could sort out the strands and see if it looked possible to have a high-tech and thriving civilization at the same time that earth is so environmentally damaged and I'm not convinced that it is possible but it certainly is our current plan so if the book lays it out and you read the book and you say, but wait, that couldn't happen, one has to take pause because that's exactly what we're doing right now. So if you say what we're doing right now cannot possibly lead to a civilized result, then maybe we need to do something different. But it certainly is a way to think

about it, to throw it all out on the page at once. That's Kim Stanley Robinson. We'll talk much more about his new novel, 2312, along with some of his other recent work. 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 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. My special guest this week is Nebula and Hugo-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson. His new and brilliant novel, 2312, will blow you away with its vision of a future three centuries from now that finds humanity occupying every corner of our solar system, even as Earth deals with the cumulative and terrible effects of global warming. They are not all there is to the book by any means, but ecological themes are very important

in 2312. Which is not surprising, since this is a Kim Stanley Robinson work. And yet they are, it's not, as you said, you cover a lot of ground in many issues, but they are interwoven beautifully. Well, thank you. And it is a collage. The style of the novel comes from John Dos Passos and his USA trilogy, and he invented this collage method that's very powerful and very fun. So I did weave it all together. And what I

postulated is that what we're doing right now implies almost the necessity of imagining an earth that is heavily damaged, including significantly higher sea levels. So that's something that I've been pounding on ever since the Mars trilogy, as people might remember, where I had a kind of catastrophic single rise of sea level when the West Antarctic ice sheet comes off. Well, in this novel, it's simply a process of climate change and global warming, causing more and more of the Earth's ice to melt, including the Greenland ice cap and the West Antarctic ice cap again. And in the book, 300 years from now, I have sea level being about 35 to 40 feet higher. That's radical, and yet not at all unlikely.

Once the ice starts melting, it may get into a process of a positive feedback loop to the point that humanity simply won't be able to stop it even if they want to and they will surely want to because 35 or 40 feet essentially i have manhattan as a kind of a venice exactly what i was going to refer to yeah yeah but sea levels everywhere i i looked around the world and of course it's like one of those coffee cups you can do this too and most of florida's underwater and. It goes on and on like that. I read somewhere that about a quarter of the world's population lives within 100 kilometers of a coastline.

And so many people would be displaced. Someone calculated that this kind of sea level rise would be the equivalent of, say, 10,000 New Orleans after Katrina's. And we couldn't even handle one New Orleans after Katrina's. So it's very suggestive that this would be disruptive in an extreme way. Now, at the same time, I have a high-functioning space civilization, and they are actually hoping to help Earth out of its troubles by the tail wagging the dog, by space helping in the ways that it can, which are limited but nevertheless might be something that we do need in the real world. can, which are limited, but nevertheless might be something that we do need in the real world. So again, I'm trying to explore that and see if all these things happening at once. Because the thing about the climate change and the global warming is that it's not going to be apocalypse. It's not going to be like we fall over a cliff and are instantly in Mad Max. It's more going to be localized damage. It's going to be increased insurance costs. Everything's going to cost more.

Everything's going to get more dangerous. But everything's going to cost more, everything's going to get more dangerous. But science is going to go on, technology is going to go on, and we're going to be coping with it. So it'll be this race between disaster or catastrophe and a sustainable, decent civilization. And the two are kind of looking like the same thing, fighting in the same history for quite some long time before we come out in the clear or fall off. Or not. Or not.

But I have a lot of confidence that if you give it generation after generation after generation, each generation is going to think, well, this is normal. And we have to cope the best we can. And we're going to throw our technological expertise into the breach of the problem. And I do think that there's reason for hope, even though we're at a dark moment right now. I can't let this conversation end without adding my praise to a couple of other books that I've absolutely loved. And of course, mixed into this is your Science in the Capital series, Mixed into this is your Science in the Capital series, which if anybody wants a good view from the inside, because you were there,

of how science works in Washington, or doesn't, it's a terrific series for that. But I tend toward the fantastic. And so, as I told you before we started recording, years of rice and salt, an amazing view of an alternate present. I really was left on a higher plane, I think, after reading that. And then much more recently, a delightful time reading Galileo's Dream, which jumped back and forth between the life of this irascible, perhaps greatest genius of all time, apologies to Leonardo, and this future that he suddenly finds himself in, which is even beyond what you've depicted in 2312. Yes, well, thank you for that. I'm very fond of both those books, and Science in the Capital coming between them was a mess and an experiment,

and I still will speak for the middle volume. I think you can get what you need out of Science in the Capital by just going to the central volume of it, kind of the middle of the story, 50 Degrees Below, and you can catch what that one's about and then go forward and backward if you want. But with Years of Rice and Salt, that's surely the book that will always mean the most to me. and then Galileo was such a joy I really had a lot of fun and also I did the classic science fiction things that I had avoided up until that point in my career I did a time travel story which of course is a naughty mess you can't help getting in entangled in the paradoxes and that's just the way time travel

is but that's part of the fun yes can you play that game and i did and then also a little bit of the alien as well in galileo's dream a kind of a star maker type uh alien that is bigger or stranger than we can truly comprehend like solaris or star maker and galileo himself what a character what a great character what a gift to the novelist because i the more i read about him the more i I thought that all I need to do is to properly present him, to be the usher that just gives you Galileo. I don't have to work him up. I don't have to tone him down. He himself is just a perfect gift to the novelist and a good person to get to know.

He himself is just a perfect gift to the novelist and a good person to get to know. So I tried to construct the story to reveal Galileo even more than a biography would by making up some of his dialogue, by putting him in bizarre new situations and seeing how he would react. And I got pretty confident that I was dialed in and that Galileo was somehow speaking in these new situations. And so it could not have been more fun. And what a delightful rascal. I was dialed in, and that Galileo was somehow speaking in these new situations. And so it could not have been more fun. And what a delightful rascal.

I tell people, read Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel's terrific book, and then read Galileo's Dream. Yes. And the Sobel book is very good. What Sobel did was to rescue Galileo's daughter for the English-reading public. And a Victorian woman, Mary Ellen Olney, did the same thing for the Victorians, but she had again been forgotten. She's never forgotten in Italy because her book is a minor classic there, her letters to her father.

But what Sobel did was bring the daughter back into the story, and that brought in the whole human dimension, the home life. And so a lot of the biographies stay in the realm of his ideas, of his struggles with the church, and the home life is something that's in the background. But what Sobel gave to us was his home life. And then as a novelist, I could go on from there and try to cobble together a total picture. And it was an awful lot of fun. Highly recommended. In fact, all of these works that we have talked about, I have been a delight to read, and it is a delight to speak to you once again, especially with this newest work, 2312, in front of us.

I don't remember the publisher. Can you read that off the spine? It's from Orbit Books. Available right now. In audio, e-book, and print. And I'm reading the e-book version, so it's nice to see the cover there in front of me for a change.

Stan, as I said, always a pleasure. I look forward to the next conversation. Well, thank you, Matt. I'll be happy to come back, and I look forward to it, too. Author Kim Stanley Robinson, during a visit to the Planetary Society a few days ago, want to build your own terrarium inside

an asteroid? Go to orbitbooks.net slash 2312. While you're there, you can read a great excerpt from 2312. We'll have that link at planetary.org slash radio, of course, and I'll be right back with Bruce Betts. Such a pleasure to be sitting across the table from Bruce Betts, right where I spoke to Stan Robinson, our guest this week, a little while ago. Hopefully people just heard that. Fascinating guy. Fascinating guy. Love his work. Indeed. Fabulous.

So, the night sky. Would you happen to know anything about it? Why, yes, sir, I would. We've been previewing it, but things are coming. We did the solar eclipse. Now we've got a partial lunar eclipse, and that is coming up on June 3rd, 4th, so the night of June 3rd and over into the morning, for example, our time. It is a partial eclipse, but it still will be about two years, two hours of partiality. And I don't think you call it partiality, but I do. I also say eclipses last two years long. I want to see that two-year eclipse. That would be awesome.

I want to see that two-year eclipse. That would be awesome. So about a third of the moon will enter the umbral shadow, the dark part, the part we see easily. And that's the level of the partial eclipse, but still very cool looking. The partial eclipse will begin on the 4th, basically 10 o'clock UT. And so 3 o'clock for us Pacific Daylight Time people. Greatest eclipse occurs about an hour later and end of eclipse occurs about an hour after that. So that's your partial eclipse. Check that out. That will, I should say, that will be visible from most of Asia, Australia, the Pacific Ocean, and most of the Americas. Now Venus transit is coming up just a couple days after that.

That will be on June 5th or 6th, depending on your time zone. So this is Venus crossing in front of the sun as seen from the Earth, something that will not happen again until 2117. I think I'm going to buy that solar filter for my telescope. It's not cheap, but I think I'm going to get it because this really shouldn't be missed. You should buy it and bring it here. And just wear it.

No, no, no. Use it for the solar eclipse and then get a big chain and hang it around your neck. It would be like a giant monocle that I could just wear on that chain and then lift up to my eye now and then. And see nothing because it would be so dark yeah venus would appear as a small dark disc moving across sun don't stare at the sun kids or adults do things properly but mama that's where the fun is nice nice good reference that was good but seriously whether it's where the fun is or not it's also where eye damage occurs. So either project it onto a wall, check out a feed over the Internet, get a solar filter.

There's lots and lots of stuff on the Internet. And if you're going to try to order solar glasses, as I learned before the solar eclipse, do it early. This has taken so long, all this special stuff. You've got to rush through everything else. This is special. I'm not done with the special stuff. You've got to rush through everything else. This is special. I'm not done with the special stuff. It doesn't happen again until 2117. I'll be quick with the rest of it.

Transit, best viewed from the Pacific Ocean. North America will be able to see the start of the transit before sunset, while Southern Asia and Northern Africa and most of Europe will see the end of it. I'm still going. the end of it i'm still going uh the the first contact first contact will occur at 2209 ut or 1509 here in the pacific coast and it goes for about seven hours the whole thing takes about seven hours for venus to rush across no wait i'm sorry i'm the one rushing venus takes about seven years to go across all right seven. Seven years, you said. Did I do it again?

Man, I've got issues today. Okay. I've heard of the seven-year itch, but the seven-year transit? That'd be cool, though. It'd be a lot less pressure to see it. Like, oh, I missed it today. It was cloudy. Big deal.

We'll see it tomorrow and next week and the week after. Speaking of weeks, well, I'll just... Mars, Saturn, still up in the evening sky venus dropping really fast probably out of the view by the time you're hearing it because it has to meet up for that venus transit this week in space history a quick nod to abel and baker the first primates to survive space flight in 1959 we move on to random space fact eclipses christopher columbus in 1504 in jamaica actually had prediction tables with him and used a lunar eclipse to intimidate the natives into continuing giving them food. Like, my God is mad at you. There will be a sign. So apparently there's this reference in Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's

Cluster, a solar eclipse. Well, apparently Christopher Columbus actually pulled this shtick in 1504 on Jamaica, and it worked. Another reason to celebrate his big day. Well, you've got to give him. It's clever. It's very clever. Creepy, but clever. Very clever.

All right, we move on to the trivia contest. What is the value of the Hubble constant? Hubble constant, of course, connecting the distance of galaxies to their velocity. How did we do? I guess the Hubble constant is of great value. It's huge, huge to understanding the evolution and fate of the universe. Well, here's our winner, Ben Owens. Ben Owens of Greensboro, Victoria, Australia, past winner, who said, now, we got a whole range of numbers.

In fact, this led David Kaplan to say, given the amount of variability in this, it should be called Hubble's non-constant or not constant. Well, we think the value is constant. It's the measurement that's having trouble. And we get better and better at it. But yes, there's still slop, which I told people, we just need something close to get the right answer. Well, how's this? Ben said 72 kilometers per second per, is this megaparsec? Megaparsec, yes. Man, yeah, you should do this one in the random space fact voice.

He said, interestingly, most sources acknowledge a range between 50 and 100. Given the extreme precision of some of the results, he said, I would have thought this is pretty big, but not so for cosmologists. Well, that's true. Even planetary scientists' factor, too, is close enough. But the cosmologists have narrowed it down a lot more than that. It's in the low 70s. So he's a winner.

He's a winner. All right, Ben, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. I just want to mention also Joel Tatham, who says that he was discussing this just the other day with his daughter, who was doing her entrance exams for the university, open and closed universe options, as well as the value of critical density. I've never had a conversation like this with my daughters. I'm sorry. Well, congratulations.

But they're wonderful people yes they are I wouldn't give them up for the world but Joel more power to you alright next trivia contest what is the name of the scale commonly used to rate the visual appearance and brightness of the moon during total lunar eclipses so this is a simplified scale.

It's just a 1 to 5 scale of how bright it is, how red it is, that kind of thing. What's the name of that scale? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And you have until Monday, June 4th, Monday the 4th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this answer and maybe win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about how long you can stare at those multi-year eclipses. Only stare at the lunar ones,

not the solar ones. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, fighting to preserve our vision in every possible way. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Another visit with Cassini Project scientist Linda Spilker. That's next week on Planetary Radio, which 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.