Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Ben Miller Says The Aliens are Coming!

Episode Date: January 10, 2017

We are joined by British physicist turned comedian and actor Ben Miller, author of The Aliens are Coming! The Extraordinary Science Behind our Search for Life in the Universe.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ben Miller says the aliens are coming, 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. Another long episode as we welcome British actor, comedian, TV host and science communicator, Ben Miller. His new book is aptly subtitled The Extraordinary Science Behind Our Search for Life in the Universe. We'll talk with him for nearly an hour. Bill Nye, the science guy, will report on his long talk with NASA's new associate administrator for its science mission directorate.

And we'll learn from Bruce Batts about a remarkable astronaut who is also the oldest woman to go into space. If you've heard the new Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio, you know that NASA made a big decision last week. Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla tells us more. Emily, last week, NASA made a couple of spacecraft teams very happy. What happened? And they made a few spacecraft teams very sad, too, of course. But we'll all be excited for the future of the two missions that NASA selected as the next pair of missions in its discovery program. It was even news that NASA selected

two, although that had been expected for a long time. There had been down to five possible missions, one for near-Earth objects, two for Venus, and two for asteroids. And I think to everybody's surprise, NASA picked for two missions, both of the more distant asteroid missions. One of them is a mission called Psyche, which will go explore an asteroid also named Psyche, which isn't confusing at all. But it's going to be a really cool mission because Psyche is a metal asteroid. We've never visited anything like that before. And so seeing how these metallic asteroids

differ from other asteroids, seeing what their impact craters look like, and maybe getting a chance to see what the core of a terrestrial planet looks like with this mission is going to be really exciting. There was a very, perhaps, fanciful artist concept of what might be seen on Psyche. It included what looked like the result of an impact from something, except it was as if it was frozen, as if it was a very fast shutter speed image of some liquid being hit and splashing out. Do you know the image I'm talking about? I do. And there's no question that impacts on this object

are going to look different from what we've seen before because metals get fluid at higher temperatures, but they also have a lot more strength than the rocky materials we're used to seeing impacts in. But then again, we've never visited a world made of metal before, so maybe we don't understand what they're going to look like at all. So I think that's the most likely possibility. All right. So what's this other group of asteroids that we'll be visiting soon?

Well, this other group is kind of in between asteroids and comets. These are the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter. They're small bodies that are trapped into these gravitationally metastable points 60 degrees ahead of and behind Jupiter in its orbit. And these objects were thought to be trapped there during the early days of the solar system when the giant planets were migrating around. So they're probably relics and can tell us a lot about what conditions were like during the formation of the solar system. There's also a lot of binaries out there. And one of the targets that the Lucy mission is going to visit will be this binary asteroid where the two components are actually pretty much equal in size. And again,

we've never visited anything like that before either. So both of these missions are pretty exciting. All right, Emily, how about those three other missions, which also presented opportunities to deliver terrific science? One of them did get some funding. So NEOCAM, which is a mission designed to look outward from a position closer to the sun than Earth and find near-Earth objects that could be potentially hazardous, is getting continuing funding to keep it going for a little while longer, and hopefully they'll have another opportunity later. The two that got no love at all were intended to be sent to Venus. And once again, Venus is the loser. Everybody, I think, in the planetary science community was really

surprised and dismayed about that. As much as we love these other asteroid missions, they're cool, Venus has not really been getting the respect it deserves. And so now the focus really is on the next New Frontiers opportunity, which will include a couple of great Venus proposals, but they'll be competing against some great outer planets proposals. And I just think it's a shame that we have to constantly choose between outer planets and Venus. I think it's a shame that all five of these couldn't be funded right up front, but NASA does what it can. Emily, thank you so much. I'll look forward to talking again next time. Thank you, Matt.

Emily, thank you so much. I'll look forward to talking again next time. Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, tell us about this meeting that you had last week. John Logsdon, who's a longtime member of the board of the Planetary Society, and I met Thomas Urbuchen, who's the new head of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA.

We had a lovely dinner, and we got to know each other. And his big thing is he wants to tell a good story. He wants the Science Mission Directorate to have a good story. And of course, what did we tell him? We're here for you, man. Right. We're the Planetary Society. And he has kids. And he and I had met many years ago at a science breakfast on Capitol Hill. It was good to see him again. So what he wants is to advance space science and exploration,

just as the Planetary Society does. He really wants NASA to be integrated. That was his expression. He wants everybody at NASA to be working toward one thing. And the thing that I want, just changing the subject back to me, Matt, is the search for life. I want to search for life on other worlds. I think it would be profound if we were to find evidence of microbial life on Mars, evidence of life on Europa, let alone something still alive, which would be wild. It would change the course of history. I've said it many times. I've said it again. It's very hard for me to imagine a better story to tell than the search for life.

Well, there's people that want, the story might be humans need to live on Mars. Humans need to live on the moon. that want, the story might be humans need to live on Mars. Humans need to live on the moon. Humans need to create molecules and microgravity that can't be created on Earth. But that's, that's not what we talked about. We talked about the search for life. And I know he met recently also with the people on the Trump transition team regarding space and was saying... He took the job in October before the election. So he is de facto part of the transition team in a way. And he has excellent credentials and he's studied, he's been in solar physics for many years. And I think it's going to be a good deal. And, you know, John Logsdon is an amazing guy. He's just, he's encyclopedic about the history of space and who worked for which administration when and who replaced whom and whose idea it was to do this.

And it was really, it was fascinating. Love getting John Logsdon on the show. Always look forward to having him back to share that encyclopedic knowledge. And love having you on, Bill. Look forward to talking again. Thank you, Matt. Let's change the world. Let's do that and tell a good story in the process. He's Bill Nye. That's the CEO of the Planetary Society. He joins us most weeks here on the show. We're going to tell a good story in just moments now. We're going to talk to Ben Miller about his new book, The Aliens Are Coming.

Ben Miller is better known to our many British listeners than he is to Americans, which means Brits have enjoyed much more of the work done by this scientist turned comedian and actor turned science communicator. Oh, and musician and director. He wrote the best-selling It's Not Rocket Science and co-hosted the hit TV show of the same name. Ben abandoned his progress toward a Ph.D. in physics at Cambridge when he decided that making people laugh was his destiny. He played second fiddle to Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English, and is half of the comedy duo Armstrong and Miller. His remarkable new book is The Aliens

Are Coming, the extraordinary science behind our search for life in the universe, which contains a lot of science and much more. I talked with him via Skype shortly after it was released in the U.S. Ben Miller, it is a great pleasure to welcome you to Planetary Radio. Well, it's a joy to be here. I'm glad, and I was also very glad to read your book. I will tell you that when it was sent to me, The Aliens Are Coming, I thought, oh good lord, another book about life, the universe, and everything. And I was reluctant to start, but once I got into it, I was pretty thrilled and had a delightful time reading it right to the end. It is a wonderful take on your topic of are we alone, basically, and I highly recommend it.

What occurred to me as I was reading it is to paraphrase one of the Planetary Society founders, someone I think you're probably familiar with, Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan said that if you want to make an apple pie, first you have to invent the universe. And my impression from your book is that if you want to understand the possibility of ET, you really have to talk about life, the universe, and everything. Yes, yes, that's exactly it. We're all fascinated by aliens

and the idea that there might be intelligent life that we can communicate with on other planets and one of the wonderful things about this as a topic is it's rather as you say to take the second quote saying we all love apple pie but if we want to find an apple pie we need to know all the different ingredients that go into an apple pie and in that case you have to really talk about what is life what is you know what were the origins of life so far as we understand them in what way is the universe we find ourselves in attuned to the existence of life. It's a wonderful journey through the rabbit hole, really, because once you really start to ask scientific questions about

what alien life might be like, you learn all sorts of fascinating facts about life on Earth. Not to say that we live in the best of all possible universes because we haven't visited the others yet, but it does seem to be well suited for life as we know it. Yes. You know, I mean, life is an electrical, so far as we know, it depends on electricity. You know, what we think of as animation really is the flow of electrons. It's really an electrical phenomenon life So it's very hard to see how you would have life in a universe that didn't have electricity for example So that's that's one thing that we obviously need to be in a communicable universe But there's lots of other quite quite subtle stuff too and in fact

it turns out that you know when you really get down to it the laws of physics aren't terribly specific about what sort of universe we should be living in you know the universe we find ourselves in is something of a sort of a special case really you know there's a particular strength that gravity has that is much much weaker say, the strength that the electric force has or the forces we find inside the atomic nucleus. We come into a world that's set up in a slightly odd way. When you dig down and you look at the strengths of the fundamental forces, the masses of the fundamental particles, these building blocks, if you like, of the world we find around us, if we had slightly different building blocks, we wouldn't be here. This is the really interesting thing. You have an absolutely fascinating way of illustrating this, and it's one of my favorite parts of the book and it's this tabletop model that you propose for the universe which i want you to describe because frankly i can't imagine why no one has come to you and said let's build this at least

as an app so i was trying to think how you you describe this in a visual way you know i just in an idle moment one day i just thought well what if you could build a model universe that you could that you could have on your desktop like a like a pc or something that would sit on your desktop so it was say about sort of half a meter cubed you know this a model universe so every particle in the universe is modeled within this cube and the life of this universe is scaled in seconds rather than billions of years so you know our universe has been around we think for around 14 billion years so let's imagine that the the life of this pocket universe that i've that i've managed to build let's it maybe it comes from Ikea, Matt.

Doesn't everything. Say it was flat-packed and I assemble it at home and it runs for 14 seconds. Those 14 seconds correspond to the 14 billion years of evolution. And if I like, I can run the universe also to its end. But this will be measured in seconds rather than billions of years. If I like, I can run the universe also to its end, you know. But this will be measured in seconds rather than billions of years. So then what I do is I've got in this box, it's maybe like a kind of almost glass box and it's dark in the room. And, you know, when you're looking at this box, the stars, of course, show up within the box.

To begin with, there's nothing because the universe, this is a slightly tricky point, but of course the universe begins with a big bang. So what I have is I have four dials on the front. On the dials, I can change the strength of the fundamental forces. I can tweak gravity. I can tweak the nuclear strong force. I can tweak the nuclear weak force and I can tweak the strength of the electromagnetic force. Basically, I set all the dials as they are in our own universe. Hey, Presto, what you get is the universe appears out of nothing. The stars light up very early on as gravitational collapse heats up matter and switches on the what we call the population three stars the the very very first stars that there ever were in the universe

those then form supernovae eventually they form galaxies and we start and then after about 14 seconds we see a a universe that kind of looks like ours. And of course, somewhere in there, we know is our sun-like stars. And in particular, for the sake of argument, in my model, right at the center of the model, because that's where we like to put ourselves in the universe, right at the center of the model is the Earth. And we know that on that Earth, there is life.

What happens after that? In the few seconds afterwards, the universe continues to expand, the stars burn out, the universe continues to expand. The stars burn out. Eventually, matter just becomes degenerate and returns really to the building blocks which it started from. Damn that second law. Damn that second law. So now, OK, what I want to do is I want to tweak.

I'm not going to take everyone through every single dial, but let's just say, let's just tweak gravity, okay? So rather than have gravity be such a 10 to the minus, you know, 10 to the minus 40 times weaker than the other forces, which is just quite extraordinarily weak, let's make gravity strong, or let's make gravity weak. And what I take you through in the book is what happens when we do that. Now, you make gravity too strong and you can see what's going to happen. All the matter is going to clump together. We never form the tiny variations in density that there are in the very early universe. Don't collapse conveniently into population three stars and then seed further

galaxies. They just go into one clump of matter and that's it. If it's too weak, you can see if gravity is too weak, then these population three stars never form. The density fluctuations in the early universe is insufficient to produce galaxies. And life loves a galaxy, right? So straight away, we can see, oh, okay, right. If I tweak the strength of gravity i don't get galaxies and if i don't get galaxies then i don't get solar systems and if i don't get solar systems then

i don't get life as we know it of course we're not precluding life as we don't know it we're just talking about life as we know it so it turns out this is the really, really, really, really, really, really fascinating thing. It turns out that these variations that you can make, the variations are so tiny before you end up with no galaxies and no life. This is the really, really crucial thing. So when people talk about the universe almost being, as you say, you know, the universe is one of the nicest places to live as far as we can make out. We don't know about the others yet, although we think they might be out there. So what we discover is that this universe that we find ourselves in is in some senses fine-tuned to the existence of life. Now, of course, there's a very obvious point here, which is for me to be banging on about this on your radio show. For me to be banging on about this on your radio show, the universe had to have come into existence and life had to have existed.

It's almost sort of arguing after the fact to say, oh, this universe is special, you know. But there's a very specific sense in which physicists mean this and which cosmologists mean this. And they mean that if you tweak the fundamental forces of nature, you don't end up with galaxies and therefore you don't get life. Would you be shocked and perhaps disappointed if in this ideal universe, so far as we know, we didn't find life elsewhere? I would be shocked. I think that in this universe of ours, this is not a scientific answer to your question. It's a very personal, emotional one. But I just feel that the journey of science has been the discovery that we are not at the center of things. Less and less so, yes. Less and less so. So to begin with, we believe that the sun revolves around the earth, and then Copernicus tells us that the earth revolves around the sun.

Einstein then demotes the sun and says, no, there is no special center of the universe. Motion is simply relative. The progression there is the demotion of mankind. So I would like to demote mankind even further to say that there's lots of intelligent life out there. There's lots of intelligent biological life. There's lots of intelligent post-biological life. What I don't have yet is any evidence for it, but there is equally no evidence against it. And so I'm jumping ahead because there's more I want to talk to you about regarding just this life across the universe,

whether it's intelligent or not. But this brings us to the quote from that famous physicist Enrico Fermi. Where is everybody? Why haven't we heard from them? I know. I mean, this is a really, really interesting question. So at Los Alamos, I believe it was, where they were testing, one of the tests of the hydrogen bomb, Enrico Fermi and some of his colleagues, one of which was Edward Teller, were discussing a cartoon that they'd seen in The New Yorker.

It's a very funny cartoon, and it's still funny today uh there'd been a mysterious disappearance of trash cans in new york at the time and uh the cartoonist pictured a ufo spaceship coming down to earth stealing trash cans and then disappearing off into the cosmos uh which uh you know these eminent physicists joked was quite good science because it explained more than one phenomenon which was firstly the disappearance of the trash cans and secondly the 1947 wave of flying saucer sightings so you have this uh discussion that then takes place as far as it's known, the first serious scientific discussion about the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. And Enrico Fermi sits down and figures out,

so while the others are at lunch, he starts to get an envelope out in the canteen and a pencil. Enrico Fermi is famous among physicists for being one of the greatest intuitive calculators of physical quantities. To put a picture to that, at one of the H-bomb tests, he, I believe, simply dropped a tissue and looked how far the tissue, didn't look at the blast, he just dropped a tissue, looked how far the tissue moved and was therefore able to calculate the strength of the bomb that had just gone off. So this a man who uh is uh is probably the um first and final word in back of the envelope physical calculation so he sits down and he figures okay well how many sun-like stars do i think there might be out there how many of those

sun-like stars might have planets like earth on how many of those planets do we think life might have evolved? What's the statistical likelihood then that when I look up in the sky on any one night, that I'm going to see, I'm going to be able to communicate with that extraterrestrial intelligence, or in fact, see some kind of spaceship, some kind of artifact? As you mentioned in the quote, you know, his conclusion was, where is everybody? There's nothing in this universe of ours, there's nothing that we find in our galaxy, there's nothing in our solar system, there's nothing here on Earth that suggests we are alone. The evidence that we have shows that life began really early on Earth, pretty much as soon as it could have done

and here we are having this uh conversation are we really that unusual surely there are other intelligent civilizations out there that we might communicate with but where are they all where are they i think often there's a uh a misconception. Some people think that they see UFOs and the evidence, unfortunately, for UFO sightings is not great. And you discuss this at some length in the book. We go through this at some length in the book. It's a fascinating story, really, the history of UFOs and is worth serious consideration for this reason. There's no scientific reason why intelligent life should not be widespread and its technology should not be widespread. And yet we don't see anything.

We have, as of yet, we have no evidence whatsoever of any life anywhere else in the universe. This is a really important question. And it's one to which we are devoting more and more energy and understanding and there is a real chance within the next decade we may begin to resolve because we're just starting to build telescopes which are capable of imaging the atmospheres of nearby planets and if there are even bacterial life forms on those planets which it should show up in the atmospheres. Through spectroscopy, we can look at what gases there are in the atmospheres. We can see if those gases are out of chemical balance,

and we can then work back and try and figure out if there might be something causing a disequilibrium on those planets and could that thing be life. So we might, within the next 10 years, have the first indications that bacterial life is as common as at the moment we imagine it is. Just a couple of weeks ago on this program, we talked to Patrick McCarthy, the leader of the project that will build one of those telescopes that may be able to deliver for the first time that level of evidence, possibly of other life,

of other biological activity. It seems that we are circling about here something else that we talk about a lot on this program, and that's the Drake equation, which it sounds like Fermi came pretty close to synthesizing himself. Well, yes. I mean, the Drake equation famously proposed by Frank Drake, who was at the time working at Greenback, and is really the founder of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He had the bright idea of training his radio telescope on two of the nearest sun-like stars to see if, hey, maybe somebody was sending a message, you know, somebody was sending some kind of electromagnetic radio signal, if you like. We don't have Fermi's calculations, so we don't know exactly what he calculated,

but it was presumably something along the lines that Frank Drake worked on. Frank was, of course, calculating the likelihood that if you point a radio telescope up in the sky, you'll pick up a signal. And that's what the Drake equation really is. It's a tailoring of the kind of calculation Fermi made to the case of radio telescopes. And it's quite a smart thing to do if you think about it.

And extraordinary that no one before him had thought to do it. But sometimes, you know, one person can have a really revolutionary idea that, of course, then completely changes the way that everyone else looks at a problem frank drake is one of those people and his his thought was a simple one you or i could have had it if we were working on a telescope except we didn't he pointed uh the greenback telescope at the two nearest sun-like stars to see if they were sending any radio signals they were not sending signals and in, our search of something like 100,000 of the nearest sun-like stars now has still yielded no signals.

That sounds like a lot of stars to search until you consider there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, our own galaxy, and we think hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe the early parts the the sort of left end of that equation frank drake talks about what is the likelihood that there is life even low-end life bacterial life yeah in the universe and that's something you talk about extensively in the book as well and the origin of life on this planet and you say in the book as well, and the origin of life on this planet. And you say in the book something that I thought was still kind of in question, which is that there may have been evidence of what's sometimes called a second genesis or a second line of the origin of life on Earth. Or am I taking that too far? Because I think what you talked about was there's evidence

that maybe cell membranes, which are thought to be pretty damn important may have happened a couple of times on this planet and and if it could happen twice here maybe it it seems like it'd be more likely that it's happened somewhere else well yes i mean you know it's not quite second genesis a second genesis called you know if there had been a different if there had been a different genetic code and a different metabolic system in those two cells, that would amount to a second genesis. But of course, it's pretty close to a second genesis. So you have this situation where the very first life form, we think, this is something that we're hazarding towards it's not something we have or are ever going to have hard evidence for we weren't there we're never really going to know but the way things are looking at the moment it seems like the most likely place for life to have

begun is in a particular kind of volcanic vent that was very common on the seafloor in the very early earth without going into an endless list of details there's a nut there's a lot amount there's a great body of evidence to support that but i'd have to say it's probably the front runner in terms of our theories if if you're coming to this with the idea you know that life began in a pond you know the darwin the darwinian idea you know of a sort of pond which evaporates, becomes concentrated and where molecules bump into one another and life just happens to get started. You've missed the party, basically. Things have really moved on. Mike Russell is probably the is the progenitor, really, of this of this theory.

It's pretty persuasive so you have these uh alkaline volcanic vents in an acidic ocean we said earlier life is electrical well across the tiny little iron sulfide bubbles you get formed uh within the ventricles of your life of these vents within the porous rock of these vents, you get these bubbles formed. You get this electric charge across the membrane of the bubble because you have alkaline fluid inside and acidic fluid outside. Of course, alkaline and acid is just our name for types of fluid which have different electrical charge. Sounds like a battery. It is a battery, exactly. And that battery drives life. We talked earlier about the second law.

You know, one of the things we're all constantly fighting is things fall apart and decay. And it's very hard to, well, as we discovered, it's very hard to get a Skype call going. All these things are part of the second law of thermodynamics, which, you know, you can sum up as things are bad and they're getting worse. It's the universe seeking its ultimate resting place, essentially. So what the universe wants is it wants even temperature everywhere. And it doesn't like things like life because life fundamentally is at a different temperature to its surroundings and insists on keeping things that way by eating food and of course the the universe likes even temperature so is really the

enemy of of life and will do everything it can to try and remove any hot spots or information centers that it can find and dissipate information and energy throughout itself. This is a long way around of saying that you need something to push molecules together, right? Molecules naturally fall apart. What's going to make molecules build, get larger, more complex? For that, you need energy. And the energy comes exactly from this battery, this tiny little difference in voltage across the surface of the membranes of these bubbles in the vent. This is our theory at the moment, anyway. And that energy, that chemical energy, that can drive the formation of long chain molecules. And there's many benchtop

experiments going on at the moment, which are trying to replicate these reactions with some degree of success. You know, we find that we're able to create the kinds of polymers that we find are fundamental to life. So in other words, you've got to have an energy source. And the energy source has to be steady, energy source and the energy source has to be steady because life also takes time you know a bolt of lightning hitting a darwinian pond is not really going to do the job because it's literally a flash in the pan what we need is a steady constant source of energy so that evolution can happen among this family of molecules and eventually they can be selected in such a way that they form a network and that network can then, in everyday language, become living. This is a really, really interesting thing.

So, you know, we now have the first stirrings of life in volcanic vents on the ocean floor. And that life is electric. That life now needs a membrane in order to be able to leave the vent. Because if there's one thing life likes to do, it's to explore its environment and go on excursions in search of food and better places to live. Just see what's over that hill over there. Let's see what's over that hill over there. So life is in the vent and life decides to go and see what's over that hill over there. It needs a membrane to get out of the vent. And a membrane did evolve. Fascinatingly, a membrane appears to have evolved twice. There are two kinds of single-celled organisms on this planet. Bacteria,

who have one kind of membrane and the archaea which have a completely different kind of membrane the polymer that is in the membrane of the bacteria is completely different as similarities but is chemically completely different to the polymer that is in the membrane of the archaeaidentally, the kind of polymers that we're talking about, we're talking about long chain carbon molecules where one end of the molecule doesn't really like water and the other end does, which is stuff that it will be lying around in the vent after a while. So we get these two kinds of membranes formed. And here's the really, really amazing thing. You and I would not be here having this conversation

if two types of membrane had not evolved in the early event because at a later stage of the earth's evolution something like a couple of billion years later an archaea attempted to eat a bacteria and the two set up a kind of working relationship where the archaea harvested the energy produced by the bacteria and the bacteria consumed the food given it by the archaea and that type of cell is the kind of cell that you and i are made of, much more complex cells, cells capable of carrying much more information and are capable of forming complex intelligent life. It's not quite a second genesis because what's under the hood in archaea is pretty much what's under the hood in a bacteria. But you've got two completely different kinds of membranes and these two completely these two related but very different kinds of life formed a kind of uneasy agreement with one another to produce the kind

of cells that we find ourselves made of what an amazing story right isn't it and these are the mitochondria right yes the bacteria became the mitochondria yes this is the literally carry on talking for about an hour the line that i thought of when i read this in the book was that uh we have a bit of archaean indigestion to thank for being here today yeah that's indigestion you're absolutely right yeah i mean the we call these kind of cells the eukaryotic cells. These are really, the cells that you and I are made of, these are not average cells. You know, that's what we need to get really clear. Now, bacteria in archaea, these are like the fighter pilot cells of the biological world. They're incredibly evolved, really stripped down. You know, they have a brutally simple function, these cells.

It's simply survival. They can replicate one another. They have all kinds of really cool features, these cells. But they don't walk around in a big lump talking on their mobile phone. in a big lump talking on their mobile phone um you know when they got together and they and as you say the archaea failed to digest the bacteria and managed to produce a mitochondrion something really really important happened you know we said earlier that really the process that drives the biochemistry of cells is the charge across their membrane. You know, with these single cells.

We talked about those, you know, there's the archaea and the bacteria. Both of them exploit a chemical charge, an electrical charge across their membrane in order to drive reactions inside the cell. And the problem with that is those cells can't get big. Because the bigger the cell, the surface area is insufficient the energy to drive reactions has to come from that membrane and you get as you increase size you simply don't have the energy overheads in order to be able to continue the reactions in the cell that's why they're small bacteria and archaea are very small so small you can't even see them. But there was a brilliant solution to this problem.

The brilliant solution was enslave the bacteria and make them into mitochondria, and you can have as many as you like in the cell. The cell can be as big as you like, and you now get your energy for the bigger cell, the eukaryotic cell, from the cell membranes of all the tiny little mitochondria that are within the cell. So the cell can now be huge. It can be the size of an amoeba. It can be massive. Or it can be the size of our own skin cells and bone marrow cells and all the lovely stuff that we're made of. This excess energy enables us to start complexity. This is why we sometimes break the two kinds of life down into simple life and complex life, the bacteria, the archaea, and then

the much more complicated eukaryotic life. That's Ben Miller, author of the very entertaining and enlightening new book, The Aliens Are Coming. There's much more to come after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see

each new show. I hope you'll join us. Hi, I'm Kate. And I'm Whitney. We've been building a youth education program here at the Planetary Society. We want to get space science in all classrooms to engage young people around the world in science learning. But Kate, are you a science teacher? No. Are you? Nope. We're gonna need help. We want to involve teachers and education

experts from the beginning to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom. As a first step, we're building the STEAM team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort, check out planetary.org slash STEAM Team. That's planetary.org slash STEAM Team. And help us spread the word. Thanks.

Bye. Bye. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Ben Miller is a funny guy who has fun talking about the bleeding edge of our search for life in the universe. The Conduit is his new book, The Aliens Are Coming. It's a thrilling ride that encompasses thermodynamics, the four basic forces of our universe, the origin of life on Earth, linguistics, the intelligence of other Earth-bound species, SETI, and even UFOs.

He spoke with me from his home in England. Another thing that I had to scribble down as I was reading this section of the book, and it had never occurred to me before, is that one of the reasons holding my new grandson is so divinely pleasurable is knowing that my genetic line has sort of spit in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. But that leap to my little grandson and the rest of us, there's this other major advance of these eukaryotic cells clumping together and becoming multicellular, which a lot of scientists kind of wonder if that isn't a bigger step than the formation of those first cells.

Do you think that we're likely to find more than just bacteria and some amoeba-like stuff on other worlds? The short answer is, yes, I think it's out there, but I think it's extremely rare. And I think this is the answer, really, the resolution to the Fermi paradox. I think there is a lot of life out there, but I think it's single-celled. I think the kind of event that led to the creation of complex life is rare. And you can see that when you look at life on Earth. You know, one of the things that I love doing in the book is always go back to what we know, go back to life on Earth, And let's take a look at that. Well, here we have a really sobering thought, which is every single kind of intelligent life, all animals, they all

date back, we can trace the genetics of all animals, the whole lot. It all comes back to one event. It's literally it's like Monty Python, you know, three thirty seven on a Tuesday afternoon. And Archaea tried to eat a bacteria. I mean, it really is. It was one event on one day. It's never been repeated or at least it's never been exactly repeated something and again you know it's like there is something else which is um something vaguely similar happened with the co-option of a a certain kind of bacteria by a eukaryotic cell to produce a plant so in other words there was a type of bacteria that managed to create photosynthesis to manage to to discover photosynthesis, and that was co-opted by a eukaryotic cell, that line we call plants, basically. That is kind of similar to an archaea enslaving a bacterium. It's a, you know, it's a eukaryotic cell enslaving a different kind

of bacterium so that it could synthesize food from light so it's not entirely true to say nothing like it has ever happened but certainly all animals all intelligent life dates from this one monty python type event how rare is that event well we can never know because we only have one instance of it but you'd have to say it did not happen that early on in earth's history so you have a long period a couple of billion years before before you get uh the eukaryotic cell and in fact not much happened to the eukaryotic cell for about a billion years after it was discovered as well. So us and the life like us have really just shown up incredibly recently in evolutionary terms. So we have to think, well, maybe eukaryotic life is rare,

this kind of cellular life that can afford complexity, maybe this is rare, and maybe it's equally rare to then evolve into intelligent life. We can count the number of species that at the moment we believe to be intelligent probably on the fingers of two hands. And you do that. And now for something not completely different.

There's so much more we could talk about getting to this point because the spine of the book traces this progression. And it ends up talking about how will we communicate with et once we find him her or it you talk as many have about these other species on our planet and we seem to be learning that they are quite a bit smarter than we thought and talk about the example of the crows so much smarter than we thought well there's a example of the crows. So much smarter than we thought. Well, there's a Californian crow, the Western scrub jay,

which is the kind of Einstein of the COVID world. So these scrub jays are super smart. They have really high cognition. In fact, Professor Nikki Clayton, who was, I can't remember which educational institution, but somewhere in Northern California, which is how she came across the scrub J. And she's now at University of Cambridge. She's done all kinds of experiments on crow cognition. My favorite one is the Crow Hotel. Oh, I love this.

Yeah. You have a box and there are two sleeping compartments at either end of the box. And every day they put, the crows would be in, you know, the living area of the box. And every day they'd put, the crows would be in, you know, the living area of the box. They'd put food in there sometimes. And then the crows would go to, the crows would go to nest in either end of the box, right? Let's call the two ends A and B, bedroom A and bedroom B. Bedroom A would always have breakfast, but bedroom B would never have breakfast. And what these crows do is there's food available in the living area, right? So if they're going to spend the night in bedroom B, they take some food from the living area

and hide it in the bedroom so that they can't breakfast. Which is, it's a neat experiment to show how crows are capable of time travel mental time travel they're capable of putting themselves at a time in the future and if you like making a mental model of what their own needs will be and what their circumstances will be at some point in the future which is different to their present that is a a real milestone on the road to cognition, having a capacity for mental time travel. Because if the big flightless bipeds lock me in bedroom B this time, I'll still have a snack.

I think I've known financial advisors who give worse advice than putting it away like that. That's a jump, though, from communication, although there are indications that there are species that speak among themselves on this planet. But can we speak to them? I have been dying to tell you that I, when I was far younger, met John Lilly.

Oh, wow, really? Yes, and sadly, he was everything you describe him to be in the book. Kind of a sad case. But I'll let you describe who John Lilly was and what he attempted to do. So John Lilly had a very famous book at the time that Frank Drake was founding SETI, he had a very famous book that was about really his belief that dolphins could communicate with one another using language and that they could learn human language. called themselves the order of the dolphin because the dolphin to them you know was a really i think a wonderfully sort of hippie example of what a an extraterrestrial intelligence might be like and in fact john lilly received seti funding to conduct an experiment where he flooded his he had a seafront building in florida and they flooded a couple of areas of it so that one of his researchers could live with a dolphin and teach that dolphin to talk and she would do

things like paint her lips white so the dolphin could see how her lips were moving and there would be able to mimic the sound she was making using its blowhole and they recorded hours and hours and hours of sound footage of dolphin noises and convinced themselves that the dolphins were uh repeating this researcher's words it's quite an extraordinary story and it it really it really shows the journey that we're on. So we go from attempting to teach dolphins our own language to the stage we're at now where there's a fantastic SETI researcher called Lawrence Doyle who has used communication theory together with a research team who have collected an enormous amount of data about the sounds that dolphin makes and we've almost come full circle because the maths shows that the dolphin clicks and whistles have the same structure as human language in fact they reveal that dolphins have a click and whistle syntax of certainly four symbols at a time to give you a rough idea we use in our own language that syntax is roughly 10 symbols at a time. But it's certainly possible that the more data that we collect on dolphin clicks and whistles,

higher orders of structure could be revealed. So it seems that not only do dolphins have language and are communicating with one another, but nearly every type of creature that can signal has a form of language, sometimes, you know, with remarkably great syntax. So this is a real, this is a real discovery. Humbug whales would be another great example, you see. And this is one of the most fascinating sections of the book, because I was unaware of this research. And all I could do is say to people, read the book because it may sound like crackpot stuff, but it actually is very good science.

It's really good science. You know, I think especially brave science, given how stigmatized dolphin research became in the 60s, because of course, John Lilly's work was completely discredited as the decade went on. And his SETI funding, his NASA funding was cancelled. His beliefs, really, and in fact some of his working practices are, he injected dolphins with LSD, for example, to see whether that would help them understand human language. understand human language. And I think to enter such a discredited area of research with such good sound science and to start to move our understanding on is wonderful. Of course, we end up in a situation now, the most recent one, and this comes onto a lovely topic actually, is the fact that octopuses, it turns out, are intelligent. In you know octopuses use tools they solve problems

like many of the other creatures with high intelligence they are foragers so it turns out there's certain there's certain um traits that we all have in common all all uh those of us organisms that communicate intelligently you you know, we tend to be foragers, we tend to be problem solvers, we tend to be the kinds of creatures that don't eat the same meal twice. So we have to, we have to continually come up with innovative ways to communicate, understand the world around us and to manipulate the world around us. communicate, understand the world around us and to manipulate the world around us. There are just so many other organisms on the planet that, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years time, it's illegal to eat squid. I'll just throw in one other comment about John

Lilly. I met him very late in his life. He had been a hero of mine. I read that book about the woman who lived with the dolphin when I was a teenager. And so there are some somewhat photographic sections. Yeah, I glossed over that, Matt. Yeah. It was quite an amazing experience as a high school boy to read those sections. But by this time, he was still doing the research. In fact, I swam with one of his dolphins. And he thought- You swam with one of his dolphins. And he thought- You swam with one? I did. And it was an amazing experience, but it didn't speak to me. It didn't deign to. But right next door, there was separate research underway by a different group who were using symbols, blocks, basically, of different shapes and colors to attempt communication with California

sea lions. And it was so clear that they were having much greater success than trying to get dolphins to speak the way we do, which leads me to my next question. Have you seen the movie Arrival? I have, and I have to say, I set the bar pretty high for science fiction. And there are now a sort of handful.

Contact, Carl Saganagan great film x machina alex garland fantastic science arrival has just joined this uh this uh hallowed turf because i think it's really thought-provoking and and i it's almost like somebody read my book and come up with a a uh or or the other way around that the film had come out and i'd rushed my book out to try and kind of cash in on it because it's so similar the science of the last few chapters of my book is the science of arrival really which is how do we communicate and what you need is you need some common terms of reference. There's a great moment in the movie where she says, I need to see them.

I need to be face to face. And this is beautiful screenwriting because, of course, what she means is I need more information. I need as much information as I can. I need to try and be able to understand the culture of these aliens in order to be able to understand their language. I need to see how they interact with one another. What I need is what we would call in linguistics is a Rosetta Stone. Yes. It is common ground in culture and in understanding so that I can begin to interpret your symbols

and try and understand the structure of your language. Which again is something you talk about in the book because of these efforts not just to speak to other species but even communication among different human cultures has been such a huge challenge and the story of the Rosetta Stone but go on. I know yeah which is a wonderful you know again I was trying to think think, what's the closest we've ever come to decoding an alien message? And I thought, well, it was probably the hieroglyphs. In Napoleonic Europe, they had this extraordinary period where Napoleon tried to set up a department in Egypt and suddenly had all kinds of Egyptian writing Europeans had not heard up until then. of Egyptian writing Europeans had not heard up until then and one thing that's really clear from communication theory is to be able to it's it's pretty common sense but it's it's true you need

the more information the more writing you have the more symbols you have the more chance you have of cracking the code what's interesting is the own the signals we've sent out into space have not really had enough information in them for any alien, really, to be able to decode them. But that's another story. So in the case of the hieroglyphs, it suddenly had this fabulous Egyptian writing, but no way to understand it because hieroglyphs, as you know, they look like pictures.

And everyone just assumed that these were pictorial representations of objects that they were symbols you know so if there was a picture of a bee that that that bee either represented a bee or represented the idea of a part of egypt where bees were common this is really fascinating because it turned out that was partly true but mostly wrong because actually a very very large number of the hieroglyphs were just phonetic. In fact the picture of the b just meant b the consonant b and you could then use the the hieroglyph of a b in three different ways it could mean a b it could mean a region of egypt where bees were common or it could just mean but and so of course how did they

crack this code well they couldn't and they couldn't crack it until they found at a fort in rosetta just before they evacuate the uh the french evacuated egypt they found a stone in that fort where there was the same piece of writing was there in three different kinds of language. One was, of course, ancient Egyptian. Another was ancient Greek, which they could understand. And there was a third inscription, again, the same piece of writing, but in a third intermediate style of writing, which was somewhere between ancient Greek and contemporary Greek. So they had, suddenly they had the chance, okay, so I've now got the same bit of information in two languages.

Now I can get somewhere with understanding Egyptian communication. And it's, of course, similar. When we get the alien message, we're not going to know anything about the aliens, you know, unless they land. And like in Arrival, we can go and have a chat to them face to face. Incidentally, I just think the way they realize, what they do is wonderful. We talked about how octopuses were another intelligent life form here on Earth. And they do this wonderful thing where these, if it's a word, octopoid aliens arrive in this spaceship and communicate with one another using ink. Ink jets that come from the ends of their tentacles it's absolutely fascinating and i think whoever made the film has seen this a spectacular piece of footage which everyone if everyone can look up if you look up dolphin

research there's a fantastic one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen is a dolphin making a bubble ring just look up dolphin bubble rings absolutely extraordinary and it seems like magic when you see them do it and they can create these rings of tiny tiny bubbles and fire them underwater at one another and I defy you to be able to see how they're making them or how they direct them it really does look like that's one of the closest things I've ever seen to an intelligent alien. Turning to us initiating the communication, I wonder if you fall more on the side of my friend Seth Shostak, who says,

let's just send the Wikipedia because then they'll have plenty of data about us to try and figure us out. Or on the side of Stephen Hawking, the polar opposite, who says, no, we need to shut the hell up because if we speak, the Klingons will know where to find us. Yeah. I think, you know, look, we live in a universe full of horrors and of beauties, and I think probably both are true. If we find a benevolent, if there's a benevolent alien and we want to communicate, we need to send the internet.

Seth Shostak has it exactly right. If they, as they might be, happen to be hostile in some way, yeah, then you don't make a noise in the jungle. You just sit there on a leaf quivering. I mean, I think, you know, the truth is nobody knows you know nobody knows what's out there i wouldn't want to go too near a black hole and i i love to

sit on a mountaintop on a sunny day you know you know the the universe is uh you it's a dark and dangerous place it's also a you know a magnificent and beautiful place i think probably the likelihood is that both kinds of intelligence are out there thankfully they're probably so far away we will never ever we will never ever come then there's a tremendous timing problem i think they're just these these interstellar these these distances we're talking about are so enormous and i think the rarity of complex intelligent communicable life is is so so immense it's so immensely rare that they're a very, very long way away and a very long time in the past or the future.

But I wouldn't like to guess of what kind they are. I imagine it's a bit like walking down the high street on a sunny day. You take your chances. You basically adopt a positive attitude hoping you're going to find something nice but you're not an idiot either. And you're wary of the strangers that you talk to.

I mean, I just don't think it's going to be any different. What is probably going to be different is probably not going to be biological, any life that we come into contact with. That's where arrival is probably a little bit fanciful. arrival is probably a little bit a little bit fanciful it the way things are going here it seems like biological life will soon be extinct extinct and uh it'll be robots and um you know silicon-based life that takes over so well there you agree with sesh shostak who thinks well that's exactly yeah so i think when as to whether to whether those intelligences are benign or indifferent or godlike. Or have a sense of humor. Or have a sense of humor. Or like Monty Python, yeah, exactly. I wouldn't like to say.

You clearly have as much fun talking about this stuff as I do, if not more. And you find humor in it i mean that's not just from from this book which is delightfully entertaining the aliens are coming but also from your previous work it's not rocket science i watched a little bit of the the tv show as well that you did do you wish more people realize that there was this kind of fun in talking about these things. Well, I think people are realizing, and I think this is just one of the great joys of the time that we're living in, is that we've reached a point, I think, in science where we're ready to take our science seriously,

but not take ourselves too seriously. And I think that's a wonderful thing. And I think science has got much better at communicating. I think particularly we have the US to thank for this. There's been some really great science communication coming out of the US. And-to-earth manner that I think is really right and proper because we are all passionate about what we're studying, but we're human as well. And there is, as you say, a great deal of fun and joy to be had. That doesn't mean there's not hard work to do and there's not um some pretty tricky concepts to understand or you know there's not some pretty convoluted maths to get your head around but really what we're connecting here with is the joy of being human the joy of discovering

as we always have as a species the incredibly unpredictable nature of the universe that we find ourselves in. This place is not what we thought it was. Ben, thank you so much for helping to make this hard work more understandable, more fascinating, and very entertaining. And I look forward to the day, hopefully when both of us are still here to enjoy it, when we find somebody else out there who's having just as good a time. Wouldn't that be great? And when we know that they're out there and, you know, I have to say just as one last word, it's wonderful to hear praise for the book, but really what I had was

access to the most extraordinarily generous experts in their field worldwide. I spoke to some of the most engaging, motivated, clear-thinking, imaginative scientists you could possibly hope to meet. And I hope a little bit of that comes across in the book. It's been a joy to write and to meet such extraordinary alien intelligences. Exactly my feeling almost every week on this show, including this week. The book is The Aliens Are Coming, the extraordinary science behind our search for life

in the universe by our guest today, Ben Miller, the author also of It's Not Rocket Science. It is published in the United States or distributed anyway by Workman Publishing Company and in Canada by Thomas Allen and Son. But actually published by, what is this publishing company, The Experiment? What an interesting name. I know. It's a lovely little independent publishing company. Fascinating titles they have.

fascinating titles they have. I'm really delighted to be working with them because they really do do some really great titles in, well, all sorts of areas, really, but particularly in this one, Popular Science. Fascinating stuff. You want to get your hands on the Mindfulness Coloring Book. They're the absolute alpha and omega. You have all sorts on there.

Politics, science. It's a fascinating, very eclectic mix. Have you made it on to the Infinite Monkey Cage yet? Oh, yes. Yeah, I've been on it quite a few times. In fact, what I did this summer was we did the Infinite Monkey Cage at Jodrell Bank at a festival called the Blue Dot. I heard that one. I heard that one.

I didn't realize you were there. Sorry about that. Yeah, so we did a radio show to 12,000 people. It's quite remarkable. Absolutely brilliant program, and I am not a bit surprised that someone of your bent has been there. I'm going to look back over the episodes and check it out. Bennett has been absolutely delightful. Thank you so much. Well, thank you too, Matt. I mean, I must admit the time has absolutely flown by and I'm a little frustrated I don't get to hear more about John Lilly. I can't believe that you actually sort of

swam with the dolphins and saw the experiments that were going on there. I can't believe that you actually sort of swam with the dolphins and saw the experiments that were going on there. I need to interview you now to find out how that came about. Maybe another time. Please return the favor. I would love that. Thanks again. Bruce Betts is on the Skype line once again. He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. And he must be here because it's time to review the night sky once again in our regular What's Up segment. Welcome back. Yay!

I know, highlight of the week, right? Totally. I'm glad, I'm glad. And so is the sky. It's high, too. It's totally high, dude. The sky. Venus looking beautiful over low. Well, it's pretty high in the west, looking super bright. Get a telescope on it. You'll see that it's right around half lit right now. So like a quarter phase moon because Venus goes through phases since it's right around half lit right now so like a quarter phase moon because venus goes through phases since it's closer to the sun than the earth also you can see mars looking much dimmer to its upper left and we've got in the pre-dawn sky very low tough to see but low in the pre-dawn

east both mercury and saturn saturn will get easier to see in the coming weeks. And then Jupiter coming up around the middle of the night in the east and in the south in the pre-dawn looking super bright. If we ever get over our rain and cloudy skies here in Southern California, I'm going to drag my telescope out again. I went to a planetarium show at the Fleet Museum here in San Diego. And it was really outstanding. It was so nice to see, you know, a star-filled sky and the Milky Way. And it's a shame I have to do that via a projection system. Well, you could always move. Yeah, I could, but I did already. So that ain't going to happen again for a while. All right. Moving on to this week in space history, it was 2005 that the Cassini Huygens probe went through the Titan atmosphere and landed on the surface of Titan, becoming the

first outer planet lander. 2006, Stardust returned samples from a comet. Big successful missions. We move on to Random Space Fact. Before its plunge into the Saturn atmosphere on September 15th of this year, the Cassini spacecraft will complete 22 orbits of Saturn inside the rings. Inside the rings. That'll start April 22nd, 2017. We missed out once because she wasn't feeling well. But Linda Spilker, project scientist for that mission, will return to this show again very soon and hopefully at least a couple more times before the grand exit of that incredibly successful spacecraft. Such an amazing mission in space for 20 years now.

All right, we're moving on to the trivia contest. years now. All right, we're moving on to the trivia contest. And I noted that John Glenn flew in space at the oldest age of any person, 77. Who flew in space at the oldest age of any woman? How'd we do? A very fair question to ask. And as it turns out, the person who has that title, she's up there right now, isn't she? She's in space right now, every day making an older age. I don't know how to phrase that properly. She's in space right now. It's Peggy Whitson. She is 56. In about a month, she will turn 57 while still on board the International Space Station. Has extensive experience in space, just did a spacewalk in the last very few days. Also is, for NASA, female astronaut has the most time in space, over a year in space,

combined in our different missions. In fact, I read somewhere here that very soon, I think it came from Norman Kassoon, listener Norman Kassoon, that she will, by the end of this stay, have spent more total time in space than any other American astronaut, man or woman. Very cool. Let's see. She just beat out Barbara Morgan for this because Barbara Morgan was 55 when she visited the International Space Station. when she visited the International Space Station. I should let you know, and I especially should let Casimir Bednarski know,

that he's won this week. Casimir lives in La Crescenta, California. He's a next-door neighbor to the Jet Propulsion Lab, apparently. Because he mentioned Peggy Whitson as picked by Random.org, he is going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, that worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes that you can use to point anywhere that you want in the universe, and, of course, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. Congratulations, Casimir.

Drop in sometime. Poor Elizabeth Garcia. She had the correct answer but wasn't picked by Random.org. Her special greeting or message, Random.org hates me. So I reassured Elizabeth that Random.org hates everyone equally. And so everybody has a shot. Hang in there. Wow, it's kind of like me. And so everybody has a shot. Hang in there. Wow.

It's kind of like me. Hating everybody equally. I mean, except you, Matt, and, you know, my immediate family. Yeah, I understand. Oh, no, we love everyone. No, it's just. I didn't mean to interrupt. Everybody knows that you just have that crusty exterior and And deep inside, you're as warm and liquid as Europa.

Ha! Thanks? Here's what we got from Amanda Holland. She says, Peggy gives me hope as a late 20-something space geek that I can still have my chance to fly in the cosmos. Well, I'm glad you feel that way, Amanda. I'm well beyond the late 20s, and so I'm beginning to have doubts about my opportunity. Jenny King apparently wants the same thing. She even dreams about it. She says, one recent night I dreamed a very vivid dream in which I myself was preparing to travel to the ISS. None other than Peggy Whitson served as my space mentor who encouraged me on the

journey. I woke up feeling infinitely inspired. Wow. Good on you, Jenny. Cool. I know. I know. I want that dream. All right. Shall we move on to the next question? Please. Probably has much less possibility of inspiring dreams, possibly nightmares, though, about how many squished-up Earths would fit inside the planet Saturn. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Do we have to be squished? Can't we just be kind of poured in? If that makes you feel better. It's a hypothetical, just to be clear. Well, you have until the 17th this time.

That would be January 17th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And we'll go with the traditional prize package of the Planetary Radio T-shirt, Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and an itelescope.net 200-point account. I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about stripes. Thank you and good night. Early Bill Murray movie, not as good as Caddyshack. I meant like, you know, parallel lines. Well, so did I.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, who has joined us every week here and will continue to on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its lively members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.