Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Bill Nye and Planetary Radio Live at Extreme STEAM

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

Planetary Radio Live goes on stage at the first ever Fairplex Extreme STEAM Festival in Pomona, California. Host Mat Kaplan and Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye are joined by four young space scientists and engineers in front of hundreds of families.  Chief Scientist Bruce Betts is also on hand for a live edition of What’s Up. The Amoeba People perform the Planetary Radio theme, along with their tribute to Carl Sagan.  Learn more about this week’s guests and topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/03020-2019-planetary-radio-live-extreme-steam.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Planetary Radio Live! Welcome to Planetary Radio Live! Please thank our great band, the Amoeba People! We're going to be hearing from them again very soon. Don't worry, they're going to be back. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, looking out over hundreds of families who have come to Fairplex for the first Extreme STEAM Festival.

We've got a lot of fired-up kids in the audience who love science. You know who else loves science? It's my boss, the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Greetings, greetings. From Earth. It's so good to be here, Matt. You must love seeing events like this celebrating science. Absolutely. We're getting young people excited about science, so

we'll have a better tomorrow for all humankind. I'm not joking you. Science is the key to our future. You've already made a cool presentation of your own, all alone here on stage, and I'm glad that you were able to stay to meet a few of the people who

also want to share what you lovingly call the PB&J. The passion, beauty, and joy. Joy of science. How many of you have heard of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory? Right? Almost everybody. How many of you have taken a tour of JPL or been to one of the lab's open houses? Yeah?

You know, for those of you who haven't done it, I highly recommend a visit. It is the most amazing place, one of the most amazing places that certainly I have ever visited. Our first guest works there as a research scientist. Laura Kerber is a geologist. She's a geologist on Earth, but also for other places around the solar system.

She studies volcanoes, the climate on ancient Mars, back when it had lots of liquid water on the surface, and something I think she's going to talk to us about today, caves on other worlds. She is the principal investigator, that means the leader, of a mission proposal called Moon Diver. And wait till you hear about Moon Diver. Please welcome Laura Kerber. Our next guest is a Martian. Well, Peter Martin comes from a family of scientists. He thought he'd be a professional pilot when he was growing up, but he fell in love with planetary geology as a freshman in college.

He ended up with a double major in chemistry and geology. Now he's close to earning his Ph.D PhD at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology. When he got the unexpected chance to work on Mars, well, with data from the Mars rover, Curiosity, he grabbed it. Now he uses data from Curiosity to learn more about rocks on the red planet, unlocking secrets about Martian water and how old the planet is. He's also helping to prepare the launch of the next Mars rover, the one that will actually look for signs of past life on the Red Planet. Please welcome Peter Martin.

Who knows how many planets there are in the Milky Way galaxy? Are there thousands of planets? Millions of planets? How about billions? Try hundreds of billions of planets just in our galaxy. Jackie Pisato wants to know more about these worlds and especially about their atmospheres. Those atmospheres might tell us if anybody is living there. But how do we learn about planets that are so far away? Well, it helps to work with some of

the biggest telescopes on Earth, and Jackie does. She is also from Caltech, just like Peter, where she is a second-year PhD student in astrophysics, studying and helping to develop new technologies for exploration. Please welcome Jackie Pisato. Daniel Ritchie is not a Martian, but she hopes to build the spacecraft that will take future Martians to the red planet and enable those humans to do great science when they get there. She's a project manager, systems engineer, and architect at Lockheed Martin, where they are working on the path that will take humans to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Daniel has a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado with an emphasis in bioastronautics. Please help us welcome Danielle Ritchie. Okay, let's start with this. What is bioastronautics? It means living things in space. Which is pretty cool.

Well, we're in space and we're living. I love all of you. There we go. Let's start talking to some of our other panelists. Laura, you brought some slides. It looks like you've been to a lot of cool places. Tell us about these. Yeah, so my job at NASA JPL is that I'm a research scientist,

and a big part of my job is that I travel around the world, and I go to the places that are the most alien-looking places that I can possibly find. And so in this slide, I'm showing you some pictures from my trips to Ethiopia. I went to Argentina. I've been to China. There's a picture of me right there from Antarctica. And so I basically, the more alien and strange it is, the more likely you are to find me there. Because these are the places

that are most like some other world. Exactly. Like I was in Argentina, for example, and they have some of the tallest dust devils in the entire world. And so we're out looking at some rocks and not paying attention. We turned around and the dust devil hit us right in the face. What is Moon Diver? Well, so after I had been traveling the world for many years,

I decided what's the one place I haven't been, and that's obviously outside of the Earth and to the moon. So I started planning this mission to the moon. This is not a mission that actually exists, but it's an idea. And we're trying to get NASA to see if they want to accept it. So we've been working on it. So in 2009, they discovered these pits in the moon. They're enormous pits in the moon. You could fit a whole building inside that pit. I like to say you could fit, if you had acrobatic giraffes, you could fit 20 giraffes standing all one on top of the other, and the top giraffe's head would just peek out of the top of that pit right there. And so this is an image of our rover, which is a very extreme terrain repelling rover, and it's kind of like a mountain climber. It goes right with a rope and it goes down into the cave. When you say not very far from the Apollo 11 landing site, how far is not very

far? It's still a couple hundred kilometers. Oh, okay. But it's actually on the same... They didn't almost end up in the cave. Right. Now, that would have been pretty funny if they just missed it. Fuzzy in a way. Is that a version of it that we're looking at? Yes. So we made a prototype of the rover. We're kind of, we're preparing a lot to see, is this mission even possible? And what would we have to do? And what kind of engineering would we have to do in order to make it possible? And so here's an example of the rover. We took it out into the field in Arizona, where there's some really enormous pits, just like we see on the moon. There's some pits in Hawaii. There's pits in different parts of the country.

So I continue my travels by trying to prepare ourselves to go to the moon. So there's a picture of me in a lava tube waving. That was in Utah. That's also you in that one that's making a lot of people claustrophobic right now? Right. So that particular tube is called the button crawl, because as you're crawling along through it, it takes all the buttons off the front of your shirt. And then we built a little wall there, and we practice on the lab going up and down walls as well. Is this a cool mission concept? Like you said, it's only a proposal. But wouldn't that

be cool to crawl down into one of these lava tubes? So what I like about NASA is that it really does give you a chance to dream very, very big. And so someone like me, I could come up with a crazy mission to the moon, and then NASA would say, all right, let's hear you out. Let's see if it's actually possible. Well, good luck with it. If you were going to live on the moon, a cave would be the way to go. And there's probably water ice in there. Yeah, this particular cave is near the equator. Some of the caves that are

closer to the poles would probably have water ice in them. And how did the caves form? These particular caves, what you have is a void under the surface, like a big hole, and in this case probably a lava tube, and then there's a collapse that happens over time and the overlying layers collapse down into the lava tube. And so what we're very interested in with this mission, go into this hole and see how big that space is and see if you could build a base there for astronauts to live in.

Which actually on the National Geographic series Mars, they live inside a lava tube, don't they? Yeah. So it's real then? Yeah, obviously. Good. Thank you, Laura. It's a TV show.

Peter, what are we learning about rocks on Mars from the Curiosity rover? So we're learning a lot of things. I can speak to what I work on, which is how old are the rocks on Mars? The first question to ask, maybe, is how old is Mars itself? So Mars is 4.5 billion years old, which is quite old. So how do you guys know that? You just make that stuff up? Yeah, that's right.

We just wing it. No, basically you know that Mars is the same age as the Earth. It seems reasonable since it formed in the solar system at the same time. And so to do that, we use something called uranium-lead dating, where uranium is radioactive and it turns into lead at a rate that we know very well and that is constant. All you have to do, here's the easy part, you find a meteorite that has a lot of uranium in it that formed at the same time as the Earth. You measure the uranium and the lead in that meteorite, and you can know the age of the meteorite. And then by analogy, we also know the age of the Earth and of Mars.

So we know when the meteorite cooled off. That's right. So it was cosmic dust before that, probably. Sure. There's a few million years here, give or take, at the beginning of the solar system. Yeah, just a couple million years. I got another one for you. Most of us think of chlorine as something you put in a pool to kill the germs or in the washing machine. Why is chlorine something that's becoming so important as we study Mars?

So it's funny you should say that, actually, because the chlorine on Mars that we're worried about is called perchlorate. So it's chlorine with oxygens attached to it. And the chlorine that you put in your pool also has oxygen attached to it. The reason we're worried about it for Mars is the same reason that you put it in your pool, which is that it kills living things. So if you want to go to Mars and be safe on Mars, you need to know where this special kind of chlorine is and where it isn't to be safe. Is it true that if you just dig down a little bit, you can get below that nasty stuff? That is a very good question and one that we don't have a definitive answer to yet.

That's something I'm working on right now. How are you helping with the next Mars rover, the one that we still call the 2020 rover? It hasn't been given a pretty name yet. Who knows? Maybe one of the young people in this audience will help give that next rover its name, just like they did Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. That's right. Yeah, so there will be a naming competition for the rover. Personally, I like 2020 a lot because there's a specific window where you can launch missions to Mars, and they come around every two years. So by calling it the 2020 Rover, we make sure we are going to launch in 2020.

Personally, I'm involved in the 2020 Rover, working on some studies figuring out how there's a bunch of different instruments on the rover and they'll all work together in different ways and they can tell us different things about the rocks my job is to figure out how they work together best and what knowledge gaps each of those instruments

can fill. Thank you Peter Thank you. Jackie, let's talk to you a little bit about the stuff you do studying these worlds that are hundreds, maybe thousands of light years away. How do you do that when all we've got to go on is the light that comes from the star that they're nearby? Yeah, so that's an interesting problem.

The light from an exoplanet has been compared to a firefly next to a spotlight in Los Angeles, and you're trying to take a picture from New York City. So that's what I'm trying to do. So we're taking a picture of a firefly. We're in New York City. We're taking a picture of a firefly next to a searchlight on Hollywood Boulevard. Yes. That's difficult.

Very difficult. A lot of the ways that we've tried to discover exoplanets have been by looking at the way the firefly affects the spotlight itself. But for the type of work that I'm doing, I actually want to capture the light from the firefly. To do that, we have to put in something called a coronagraph, which, like the moon when it blocked the Sun in the solar eclipse in 2017, blocks out the light from the star to let you see things that are nearby. So it's like the outfielder holding up his or her glove to the Sun waiting for the

ball to not hit him in the head. Yes, exactly. Nice baseball metaphor. I played softball, I love that reference. Once we capture that light we can get information about the actual map of the exoplanet. This is really difficult to do. We're not actually getting what you would imagine for when you take a picture of Jupiter. Instead, we can just extract this information from a point of light. By looking at the way that the planet is turning, we can get ideas about storms on those exoplanets, much like the Great Red

Spot on Jupiter. Are we going to be able to do this from Earth, or do we need to look to space telescopes that are more advanced than the Hubble Space Telescope? Yeah, so you can do this from the Earth as well as with space-based telescopes. So the instrument that I'm working on is going to be mounted on the back of a telescope in Hawaii. You have to do a few more tricks to be able to look through the atmosphere because the atmosphere is moving around the points of light and making it really difficult to actually capture the planet light. It's a lot easier to do from space, but you also need very big mirrors that are hard to get out there. And you are also, aren't you, working on what will be one of a new generation of Earth-based telescopes?

One in particular that we've talked about on the show, the 30-meter telescope. Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so the 30-meter telescope is an extremely big mirror. 100 feet? Yeah, 100 feet. Yeah, think of a mirror to gather the light. This telescope is going to use this mirror to gather light. It used to be the 200-inch telescope in Palomar

was the biggest telescope on Earth for a long time. 200 inches is half the size of between you and me, or about the distance between you and me. This is from here to the back of this building. 30 meters, right? And yeah, a mirror that big helps us collect more light quickly. Size matters. Yeah, size does matter when you're trying to look at very faint things.

So in order to collect that light extremely quickly, we go to these extremely large telescopes so that we can gather our data without it taking hundreds of hours. Thanks, Jackie. Before we go to our last panelist, Danielle, I got a question for all of you in the audience. How many of you think that we should send people, men and women, to Mars where they can join the robots that are already exploring there? How many do you think people... That's pretty good. I am with you,

and I think you are too, Bill. Yes, there's a few people I'd like to send right now. We could send people in orbit by 2033 and then land two, four, six years later. That would be cool. Danielle, we hear all the time, it's a cliche, space is hard. Space is hard. On a scale of 1 to 10, how tough is it going to be to get those humans to Mars and back again safely?

12. A 12. But I think we're up to the challenge. Okay. Look at this spectacular spaceship that you're actually working on, right, at Lockheed Martin. Yeah, this is Lockheed Martin's vision for what a spaceship to Mars could look like. It's not an actual program yet, but it's what could take the first humans in 2033 into orbit around Mars.

A lot of people, including the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, they believe that the Moon is where we need to go first so that we can prove out the stuff that we'll need to have working perfectly when we want to go to Mars. I mean, do you think the moon is a good stepping stone toward people on Mars? Yeah, I think that's where NASA on Monday did announce their budget along with the hashtag Moon to Mars. So they still have Mars in their future and they're funding quite a few missions including Mars 2020. And so stopping off at the moon is a great way to start building up these elements. This spaceship behind me will actually need to be assembled in space just like the space station and the moon's orbit is a great place to do that. It's fairly stable. It doesn't come crashing back to Earth.

Got one more slide that I think gives us a good idea of how important STEM and STEAM are to you. What's going on here? Yeah, so one of my passions in life is not just doing deep space human exploration and putting people on moon and Mars, but inspiring you guys to be putting people on Moon and Mars but inspiring you guys to be those astronauts on Moon and Mars. So in the left-hand photos I helped girls in Denver build a lunar habitat and then we put on spacesuits and they went out and got lunar rocks for more

observation perhaps in one of the lava tubes that we were looking at earlier. In the middle photographs, I also get the pleasure of traveling to other countries to talk about going to the moon and Mars. On the right-hand side, I was at the STEM Festival in D.C. talking about NASA and our next generation deep spacecraft, Orion. Before we go any further and I forget, I want to thank the group that actually brought you out to extreme steam,

which is the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Bill, perhaps you've heard of it. I'm a member, people. I have a license. And that's the expression, trust me. So about going to the moon and then Mars, I think politically you just have to go to the moon. In other words, NASA, the United States already sent people to the moon. China, the Chinese space agency is going to send people to the moon.

So I just think for the public acceptance of the whole thing, we have to go back to the moon with people. It's not a bad thing. It's a thing. It's not cheap. Yeah. If it was hard, everybody would do it, right? Sure.

I want to hear from all of you about what really brought you to this, what really generates your passion for the work that you do? You all work on the final frontier, basically, space. Jackie, you told me that when you were about to start college, still in high school, I guess, you were torn between the arts and science. How did you end up an astronomer? Yeah, so I also loved the arts as well as science. I had a really hard time choosing between different career options because a lot of it is all the same

expression of human curiosity. I wound up choosing astronomy because I was very interested in watching programs on TV, like the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel about this for my entire life so I was really interested in popular science and I finally took the chance and took a course in college and was connected with another professor at my university who took me on as a researcher for the next summer and I just fell in love with the idea of research about something that I've been passionate about my entire life. I think I heard also that a certain science guy helped inspire you. Yeah, so part of being really interested in popular science. I love you, man.

Was that seeing Bill Nye and a lot of people who do the sort of outreach that he does on television really just had a major impact on me and I think a lot of my peers. So thank you for everything that you do. Get out there and explore the world. Peter, did you ever become a pilot? I did. I have a private pilot's license. But you do it for fun. I do it for fun. I have a flight planned tomorrow, actually.

But you do it for fun. I do it for fun. I have a flight planned tomorrow, actually. What is it about geology and Mars that kept you out of the cockpit of an airliner? They're very different jobs in many ways, but they also have some similarities. So I tend to be very detail-oriented, and in the cockpit, that means following checklists very completely, making sure that everything is where it's supposed to be. And in science, that means thinking in a lot of detail

about some things that can sometimes be very complicated, like the chemical data we get back from Curiosity. So you feel the passion, beauty, and joy, obviously, in your work. How do you share it? You talked about working with young people. I don't do as much of what Bill used to do at the Science Guy shows. I do more of just direct teaching. So I work with high school students in Pasadena who are struggling in math or science,

and I work with them on their classes and what they're trying to get right. So I work with just a couple of students per quarter, and we work on sort of the basic skills of math and science that are really important. They form the foundation that lets you get to be a professional scientist. So if you're lucky and you're in Pasadena, you might just have Peter helping you out with some of the tough questions now and then. Laura, as the PI, the Principal Investigator for a mission, you pretty much have to nowadays consider the education and public outreach, the EPOs we call it, that would have to be a part of that mission.

But I just kind of wonder, is it a distraction from the science and all the work it's going to take to shepherd a spacecraft into reality? I definitely feel that it's a recharging activity for me. So I spend a lot of time working on the mission. And then I think, do I have enough time to fit in some outreach? I went to Comic-Con last year and talked to all the comic book fans about space. But when I actually go and do it, then I'm so energized when I come back that it actually helps me get all the work done that I need to do in order to see that the mission becomes a reality.

Danielle, do you get that same kind of charge when you're out there with particularly young people? Yeah, I do, especially when I get the question, is NASA still around or are we going to space? I mean, we're in space, but I really enjoy trying to inspire young kids with what's possible of we could send people to asteroids. You know, Bill, I was going to ask them, but I'll start with you. Why is space exploration something that we should care about? Because that's how we know the cosmos and our place within it, Matt. There are people running around on the electric Internet that the kids use with their phone machines claiming that the earth might be flat.

Just that anybody would think that is so, it's extraordinary. All the clothes you're wearing, the plastic in the seats you're sitting in, the metal, all of that came from somewhere else. The clothes generally came from another continent, and it got here because the people who were able to sail on the trackless ocean realized that we live on a big ball. If you tried to do it with a flat map, you're going to fall off the edge, for crying out loud. So furthermore, we all wonder where we came from. We all want to use, let's say, nuclear power.

We all want radiation for medical purposes. To do all that, you have to understand space. You have to understand the cosmos. To do all that, you have to understand space. You have to understand the cosmos. And let me tell you, when you compare the climates of the Earth, Mars and Venus, you can tell you pretty much want to be on the Earth. It is possible that there was once life on Venus and the atmosphere made it run away, as we say, become extraordinarily hot. We wouldn't have that understanding without the exploration of space.

Furthermore, just the discovery that our sun is a star, that alone is pretty profound. And when my grandparents were raising a family, my dad, my mother, they had maybe heard of relativity, but they had no real interaction with it. They never really needed to know much about it. Now, everybody's phone depends on both special and general relativity, two aspects of the theory of relativity, that is a result of the exploration of space. Recently it's been discovered that the universe isn't just getting bigger, it's getting bigger faster and faster. And do you know why? Nobody knows why! But it's very reasonable that in your lifetime, the audience's lifetime, this will be discovered and the consequences of, this will be discovered, and the consequences of that discovery will be commonplace the same way that phones are commonplace.

You explore space to learn more about yourself. What are you going to find? We don't know. That's why we explore. Back to you, Matt. Thank you, Bill. Back to you, Matt. Thank you, Bill. So, Bill may be the world's hardest act to follow,

but I'm going to bet that each of you have also thought about this. Why explore space? Why do the things that all of you do? Anybody want to take that first? Laura? Well, I always think about that there's these moments when the whole world kind of pauses. And a lot of times maybe it's a tsunami or it's a big earthquake or some, you know, 9-11 happens. And for my generation, it was a moment where everyone remembers. And then I think, okay, those are moments that are scary.

But then there are moments in our generation and the generations before us when the whole world stops. And that's like the moon landing. Or for me, it was when we flew past Pluto and for the first time saw a planet that we'd never seen before. My career started when we flew past Mercury in 2009 and saw the other side of Mercury that we'd never seen before. And I just had a moment where I was saying, this is something that everyone pauses, but in wonder and in thinking, wow, the world is amazing. And I'm so glad I'm alive and I'm so excited for the future. And that's what I like about space exploration. Not bad. Anybody else? Yeah, I'm excited to see that very first person walk on the surface of Mars, to see that boot print, that picture that comes back,

and it'll probably be streamed live on YouTube to everybody's devices. But I cannot wait to see those moments. And as we go back to the moon, I've only seen the moon landing through YouTube. I was not privileged to be alive during that time. So we will see the first woman walk on the moon, and I will see it with my eyes for the first time. Danielle, you may be helping to build the ship. Would you take a ride?

Would you go if you had the chance? Of course. I would go as long as I can come back. Yeah, I don't want a one-way trip. There's nothing to eat or drink or breathe there, but it's going to be an amazing place. Yeah, so I mean, I completely agree with basically everything that other panelists have said. And I think that, especially for space exploration, which doesn't maybe have as much of the practical aspect, with the possible

exemption of deflecting an asteroid that could destroy the world. Which is something the Planetary Society cares a great deal about. Bill, I may let you talk a bit more about that in a moment. It's something to think about. But there's also the fact that it doesn't have to be useful, right? This is something that I think is very innate, and it's part of what makes us human, is that we are curious about what's out there in the world. Yeah and to build on that part of what makes us human being curious about what's out there there's literally a whole universe of questions and a whole universe of planets out there a lot like possibly our Earth and a lot that are very different and I

really want to know what's out there. Bill, planetary defense. So we use this expression, planetary defense, to mean keeping the Earth from getting hit with an asteroid. It is, as we say, a very unlikely thing. Very, very unlikely. But if it were to happen, it would be a really bad thing. And so we made this discovery, as I mentioned earlier today.

During my lifetime, people realized that the ancient dinosaurs were almost certainly killed off, finished off by an asteroid. And so finding them is the biggest challenge. As the hilarious expression goes, looking for asteroids is like looking for a charcoal briquette in the dark. Very difficult to find. But with the right instrument, charcoal, what's it called, asteroids, are What's it called? Asteroids are a little bit ever so slightly warmer than outer space. So with the right infrared telescope, you can find them. But these missions have to be funded. The instruments have to be created. The scientists and engineers who understand it all have to be employed. And that's what the Planetary Society does is advocate, U.S. Congress especially,

to look for asteroids and coordinate with other telescope people around the world to keep an eye out for them. And so you don't take all of your tax dollars and put it into asteroid finding, you just make sure you're always looking for them. Because one asteroid can ruin your whole, more than a day, really. Your whole few centuries. My favorite is that, it's getting kind of tired now, but a few people haven't heard it, why did the dinosaurs die? Because they didn't have a space program. Their space program sucked. The ancient, well, their arms, there was difficulties. I got another one that's

really for all of you, because you've all been through this. I'm wondering if you have advice for any of the young people here in the audience today, we've got a couple of hundred at least, if not more, who might be considering following in your footsteps, just as you followed in the footsteps of mentors and teachers that helped to make you what you are today. I mean, what's the best advice you can give them?

Laurel, I'll start with you. Sure. So I often meet kids and they're walking encyclopedias about something, dinosaurs or planet facts or sharks or something. And when I was in first grade, I was a walking encyclopedia about solar system facts. And then what I realized is if I just kept learning solar system facts, then I could just know solar system facts for a living. So what I suggest to people is

if you can find something that you love to read about and know everything about, just read and read and read and read and know everything about it, and then we'll find you very useful at NASA JPL. Thank you. The road to becoming a professional scientist is not always just straight, easy driving, right? It's pretty bumpy. It is bumpy, and this is something I talk about with the students I teach is that you shouldn't be afraid to have a bad day. If you have a bad test or sometimes you're just tired in the morning, that's okay. And it doesn't mean that you're not going to be a great scientist

in the future. So overcoming things that make you feel like you're maybe not going to be be able to get there is part of an important part of the process as well. Jackie. So I think that everyone has in their mind this idea that scientists are just born naturally a scientist and extremely smart and good at math and science the first time they try things. But I actually really didn't like math the first time I took a couple classes, and I didn't like the first physics class that I took.

But I kept in mind that I was really interested in the questions that I was asking, and I stuck with it, and eventually I grew more comfortable. So I guess just don't mistake a lack of expertise when you first start something with not being good at it. Just stay at it. If you really like what you do, then you'll be good at it. And everybody here is nodding in agreement. Didn't you say that you, maybe it was just some parts of math, that when you finally hit geometry and calculus, you took to it? Yeah, I'm an extremely visual thinker,

so the way that math was taught to me in elementary and middle school really just didn't click until I got to work on the math where I could see a picture that related to it. And that's what really clicked with me. So you really just have to stick with things until you find the thing that works, and it'll work out for you.

Great. Look at the ceiling. Look at all those angles in the ceiling. It's gorgeous. It's geometry. In this big old hall at Fairplex. Danielle, it's your turn. Any advice?

Yeah, mine along with what Jackie said is to be persistent. I have been told that because I'm a woman that I'm not good enough or I couldn't do something. I was asked if I'm a receptionist when I'm the engineer working on something. And so whatever your background is, be persistent. Do not let people tell you you can't do something because of who you are. You can prove them wrong. So I'm disappointed to hear, even from you, your generation, one beyond myself, I won't speak for Bill, that you still ran into some resistance. Maybe because, is there more of that maybe in engineering than science? I think it's in a lot of professions. It's in the arts, it's in the culinary field, it's in the sciences, it's in engineering. I think it's everywhere and it's not just male and female discrimination or biases. It's

also cultural, it's background. So I think it's pervasive throughout and it just depends on where you live and where you work, and you'll find it in different ways. For the other three of you, we've got a couple of planetary scientists and astronomers. Have you, even in your time, and you're still pretty new at this, you're all young, have you seen the fields opening up more to women, to people of color, to everybody who might have both the interest and the aptitude. From my perspective, absolutely. My experience in the planetary sciences has been you kind of arrive and, you know, maybe the people might look at you like,

oh, you're a very young person. I wonder what you know. And then you kind of show them a bunch of knowledge. And then they say like, all right, we can work with you. Let's go. Let's go explore the planets. And so I found that, you know, as soon as you start saying like, I'm ready to help you guys go to space, and then everyone's on board with that. And I've found it's been a very positive experience for me. Peter, I don't know if you've personally faced this. Maybe you have. But you may have seen it around you. Yeah, well, so I'm very lucky, right? I'm in a position of great privilege.

I come from a family of scientists. I am a white male. You do see things every now and then, obviously. I think to the original question, things are getting better, and we still have a ways to go, but things are improving. And I like the trajectory that we are on. Jackie? Yeah I think I'd agree with that sentiment especially because now that people have been fighting to have women and people of color in these fields in the past there's now a community of us

who are all fighting to make it better for everyone that comes after us. So yeah we've seen that certainly certainly in planetary science, where the percentage of women in planetary science has been climbing steadily. Half the humans are women and girls. Let's have half the engineers and scientists be women. Crying out loud. Sounds reasonable. Yeah.

Bill, you have been watching young people come up, starting out, some of them when they're learning to walk, with their first exposure to science very likely being the Science Guy show. And these are the people who are now the age of the folks who are sitting… Look, they're fine. They're watching it and they're fine. They're productive. They survived. They're fine. They're productive. They survived. I think you probably have more young people coming up to you than I've seen with anybody else, including astronauts, saying,

thank you so much, you're why I'm here. It's amazing, Matt. Still, I try to get it. I try to grasp the influence of the old show. It was big. And it was funny. It was fundamental science it was funny. It was fundamental science and the song is really good.

Bill, Bill, Bill. I wanna hear about where you think you're going in your personal careers. And I can take a good guess at some of them, like in your case, Laura, where you're hoping it'll go. But also where you hope that your field is gonna be going, let's say over the next 10 years. Things are changing so fast. Laura, we'll come back to you to start. Sure. So in the next couple years as a field, I'll start with that question. We have a lot of exciting things going on. Right now at JPL, we're all really, really busy on the Mars 2020 rover. And we're really busy on Europa Clipper, which is a mission that's going to go to the Jupiter's moon of Europa.

And so we see this every time we send a spacecraft anywhere to Mercury, to Saturn. Now we're going to send a spacecraft to Europa. We are just totally astonished by whatever we find. We think after we've seen enough planets and we know what we're looking for. But all of us were completely astonished by whatever we find. We think after we've seen enough planets and we know what we're looking for, but all of us were completely astonished by the surface of Pluto. We had no idea it was going to look the way it looked. And so I think as we go through, kind of during the 1980s, Voyager went through the solar system in 1970s and showing, okay, this is the first cut at what all the planets look like and now we're going through it the second time and

Digging way deep and saying each one of these is a totally different world And so that's where my field is just it's really exciting to be a planetary scientist now because you feel like you're at the you're Still at the beginning and there's so much stuff that people don't know For me personally, I started out working on Mars and Mercury. And then I started going towards the moon because I realized the moon is really the place where I needed to go to look in lava tubes and answer my questions about caves. And so I hope it's such a fun experience to try and do a proposal because NASA puts out a call and says, everyone, give your best proposal. And everyone proposes things from Venus or the moon or the outer solar system. And every single one would be fundamentally changing our view of science. And so you kind

of put out your little idea like, oh, I hope you'll consider me, please, NASA. But you're just so grateful for the chance that they actually will consider you as an idea and you could fly into space. So I don't know what's going to happen with Moondiver, but I hope in the future I'll be able to work on more missions and just be right there at the forefront of exploration as we continue exploring Mars and beyond. And you certainly are doing a lot more than Moondiver.

I mean, you're the deputy project scientist, I think, for Mars Odyssey, the Mars orbiter. Yeah, so Mars Odyssey is one of our oldest spacecraft. It's the oldest spacecraft that's currently in orbit around another planet. It's been there since 2001. We called it Odyssey 2001. And it's just a pleasure to be on a team where they've had a working spacecraft in space for so long They know everything that they're doing and when I look at my own sort of baby mission trying to grow up and maybe someday Be like Odyssey and so we actually recently printed out at

modesty had made a whole map of the surface of Mars and we printed it out the size of a basketballs court and We laid it across a basketball court, and so now we have this map that goes from school to school, and people can walk all over Mars. And the guy who made it, he said, you know, if we printed it out full size, it would actually be the size of a football field. So now we're getting together some money. We're going to try and print it out the size of a football field. That's a little more A for arts in STEAM, I would say.

So before we move on, what's the next hurdle for Moondiver? Well, so Moondiver is part of a contest called Discovery. And so the deadline is in July. We're writing the proposal like crazy right now. We turn it in in July. And then in December, they take us from about 15 or so missions down to about four or five, and then we get another year where we work on it like crazy, and then they choose one or two from the final number, and then that one would fly into space as soon as 2025. So it seems like a long

time in the future, but even now thinking about it, it's so real. We don't have enough time. A lot to get done. Peter, your turn, both for your field and you personally. What's ahead? So I'll start personally and start small and then move up. So I'm in my fifth year of my PhD program, so I will be graduating this summer, maybe soon after. So currently I'm looking for a job, for my next research job after I graduate.

So if anyone in the audience is hiring, give me a call. We talked earlier about Mars 2020, which is the next rover. So I have some very specific thoughts about that, which is that one of Mars 2020's tasks is that it's going to be preparing both for samples to be brought back to Earth. So it's the first step in returning rocks from Mars to the Earth. And that'll be a mission that goes in the future. And then the biggest vision is something that Bill talked about earlier, which is that we're thinking about bringing these samples back in the 2030s. Bill mentioned humans going to Mars in the 2030s. I think it would be very cool if the samples got picked up by a human and brought back. Jackie, lots to look forward to. 30-meter telescope, giant Magellan telescope, good times for astronomers?

Yeah, yeah. For astronomers, especially for the field of exoplanets, it's extremely young, only about as old as I am. So it started in 1995. There's a lot that still needs to be done, and there are whole suites of missions out there looking to find more like TESS and looking to characterize them like the Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer which I'm working on

right now and then once we get these extremely large telescopes like TMT and GMT we'll be able to characterize planets like Earth so that's that's definitely something to look forward to and personally I'm only in my second year of my PhD program so I've got about three years left so the first hurdle is to get that PhD and then after that I'd love to continue doing research and just be a part of the exploration of exoplanets. How amazing would it be if we were to find signs of life either on an exoplanet, a world going around some other star, or maybe on Mars? Yeah, I mean honestly I would be shocked if we didn't at some point because it's definitely out there and

yeah that is the ultimate goal to be able to find that type of thing but yeah there's a lot of other interesting science that we'll be able to do along the way too. Bill you talk about that stuff all the time if we found life- Change the course of human history everybody would feel differently about being alive and we do it for nothing two billion dollars a year is nothing less than a cup of coffee. Danielle you get this one last and then we're gonna go to audience questions. So be prepared with your question for our panelists.

Danielle, what's ahead? Yeah, my field looks awesome. We are super excited. NASA is full steam ahead, no pun intended. We're sending humans to the moon and Mars. So the next couple decades are going to be super exciting for my field. Personally, I want to be on one of the programs that's landing the first woman on the moon, literally building the lander and then seeing it from the mission support area for NASA.

I want to be in that room to see the first person, first woman walk on the moon. All right. In my lifetime. Sorry. be in that room to see the first person, first woman walk on the moon. All right. In my lifetime. Sorry. Well, let's go ahead and turn to the audience here at the Planetary Society stage at Extreme Steam. Raise your hand if you've got a question. We have a couple of people with microphones. I think we're going to start all the way over here on that corner. Yeah, you who just stood up. Hi there. What is your name? Oh, my name is George. I'll shout out there. What's your question? Wait, sorry, I had to record this. Hi, Bill.

Or William Sanford. Okay, what inspired you to have an interest in the field of science? What got me interested in science? Yeah. Rockets, airplanes, bicycles. Awesome. And then, you know, I spend a lot of time watching bees. Honey bees. They are amazing. They are so cool. If you haven't sat and watched bees, do it this afternoon. Just how they fly is amazing.

Their social organization is amazing. And how they make honey is just amazing. Did I say amazing? So that's why I really, I wanted to work on airplanes. Thank you. Thank you. You are an inspiration. We're going to go to the other side. Hi, what's your name? Roberto. Hey, Roberto. I have a question. What do you all think about Elon Musk? I think he is inspirational for the next generation of engineers, and he's asking the hard questions and figuring out how to help us take one step further along. So I appreciate his inspiration to the next generation of engineers and explorers. Anybody else? Laura? Yeah, I think Elon Musk is awesome.

And I went down to look at the launch. There was a launch kind of recently, I guess in October, and it went across the sky and then formed this giant, like, colorful nebula or something. And I'd seen the eclipse, and it was the most amazing and mind-blowing thing I'd ever seen, and I thought that that was going to be the most amazing thing I will have seen for the next 10 years. And then suddenly this rocket launch came along and blew it out of the water. I was just so astonished.

So anyway, I just think Elon Musk is just pushing everybody forward, which I think is great. And the Planetary Society is especially indebted to Elon and SpaceX for a good reason, Bill. Well, a couple reasons. He's going to fly LightSail 2, our second LightSail spacecraft, any minute. The batteries are charged up, the clock's running as soon as the rocket's ready. And he was on the board of the planetary site for quite a while, and he's still very supportive, but he had to recuse himself but he's a big supporter so way to go elon let's go back to the other side here there's a young

man right down here in the front right on the aisle yes you hi my name is om welcome um i have a question for the for all of you how much What is an estimated quote for the cost of sending humans to Mars? And how much fuel do you think it would take to take them to Mars and bring them back? Danielle, that sounds like it's right up your alley there.

Yeah, the cost part, it's a lot. I mean, it's going to be an international effort. This time the U.S. can't fund it alone, nor do we want to, so it'll be truly an international endeavor. I can answer the fuel question because I can't predict what prices will be in 2033 as easily, but roughly 80 metric tons of fuel if you're using cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen. We'll come back over here. Somebody, I see people pointing right in the middle of the crowd back there on that side.

Thank you. Our great volunteer is rushing over there. Hi, welcome. Hello. I'm currently a mechanical engineering major, and so I'm wondering what kind of steps could students take to work in this type of field in the future? Sure, Laura? Well I specifically for JPL we have a couple different internship programs so we have internship programs for high school students,

for undergraduates and for graduate students in mechanical engineering, robotics, science, everything you can imagine so you can go to our website to look at all that stuff but any sorts of internships you can get where you can get real-life experience working on space projects, it's really valuable. Anybody else? Peter? Yeah, so this maybe falls into the advice for people looking for what to do in the future.

But don't be afraid to ask your teachers what the next step is. So ask your professors what they think you should be doing to get you to the next level, because they will know and they will be able to help you. They generally want to help you. And as an undergraduate, you can also go after things that are funded by the National Science Foundation

that are called Research Experiences for Undergraduates. They're all over the United States. I did two of them. They really shaped who I am today and how I got here. So I would definitely recommend looking for those types of opportunities in addition to internships. Great. Thanks, Jackie. Let's go back to this side. We have time for two more. There's a young man right in the front here. Yes, you. He's thrilled. Hi, what's your name? My name is Bill. So, Bill, why did you start the show?

Like the origin of why you started it. Why did I stop the show? Well, we did 100 shows, and the people who paid for it, that was enough for them. And I am working on a podcast, Science Rules, which will start May 19th. Last question. We'll come back over on this side. I see a young man who's been waiting a long time, I think, back there. What's your name?

My name's JP. And what's your question? Well, me and my friend came up with this question. I love it how they've all scripted them. They have them on their smartphones. Yeah, me and my friend Alessandro came up with this question. We asked, after we get humans on Mars, what would be our next step in space exploration? After Mars. Wow, there's a whole universe. Who wants to try that? Jackie?

Well, there are a lot of moons in our solar system, I guess, that we could also look at. There's Europa, which has a lot of ice on it that would be really interesting. There's plenty of other bodies in our solar system that are just waiting to be explored. Asteroids are a good one as well. Laura, you already mentioned Europa Clipper. I bring that up in addition to whatever else you were going to say. Yeah, that's right. So there's lots of exploration of Europa. Another really interesting thing that people have talked about for humans is to try and go to Venus. And so Venus is horrible down on the surface and nobody would want to go there. But then in the atmosphere, it's actually not too bad. You can get to a level of the atmosphere

and sort of float there in your spaceship. So if you've seen Star Wars there but then in the atmosphere it's actually not too bad you can get to a level of the atmosphere and sort of float there in your spaceship so if you've seen star wars like a cloud city like sort of thing that's what people have been thinking about i'm going to violate my own rule and we'll do one more because i know there's a young woman right back here on the aisle who was here this morning and was looking forward to participating yes you hi you. Hi, my name is Caitlin and I had a question for Bill. I want to know who would you say most influenced your love for science? Who influenced me the most? Well, I don't have to pick one. Mrs. McGonigal, Mrs. Cochran, Mr. Lawrence in sixth grade, Ms. Barnes for algebra, Ms. Rushka for chemistry, Mr. Lang for physics,

and then, you know, Carl Sagan was a big influence on me. But by then I was almost a grown-up. So you never know who it's going to be that gives you a nudge. Another guy that was very influential for me was Don Herbert. He had a television show called Watch Mr. Wizard, and he was a big influence. So I take it maybe you watch the Science Guy show? Right on. But listen to Planetary Radio.

That's what you should be doing. Anyway, thanks, you guys. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, everybody. Great questions. We're going to need to let our panel and Bill go, but remember, Bill, we'll be back in a few minutes for those of you who are here with us in the audience.

Please stick around because we're not done. We're going to have What's Up with Bruce Fetz, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. I guarantee fun. And you might win yourself a rubber asteroid. First, though, we're going to bring back the Amoeba people, our great band. They've got a very special number for you. You just heard Carl Sagan mentioned.

How many of you know who Carl Sagan was? Well, he was also a founder, one of the three founders of the Planetary Society, and an early supporter, I think, of the Science Guy and putting the Science Guy show together. First, though, please help me thank our terrific panelists, Laura Kerber, Peter Martin, Jackie Pizzotto, and Danielle Ritchie. Richie. And Bill, thank you very much for being part of Planetary Radio Live. Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, here are the Amoeba people.

Oh, yeah. He was born and raised in Brooklyn where he wondered about the stars and say shuffling curious about this universe of ours. Universe of ours. Yes. Universe of ours. No matter where he went, he always tried to understand the mysteries of the stars and the conundrum that is man. Conundrum that is man.

Uh-huh. Conundrum that is man Conundrum that is man Uh-huh Conundrum that is man Straight out of Brooklyn like a comet to the stars Carl's mind wandered from the spare blue dot of ours Mr. Mosley He had ideas about the planets that tested quite well He launched a bunch of missions when he worked with JPL. Yeah, that's right. He worked with JPL.

Mariner, Galileo, Viking, Voyager 1 and 2. He even lent a hand to the manned mission to the moon. Manned mission to the moon. Aw, yeah. Manned mission to the moon. Come on, man. Straight out of Brooklyn like a comet to the moon. Oh, yeah. Man mission to the moon. Come on, man. Straight out of Brooklyn like a comet to the stars. Carl's mind wandered from the

smelting god of ours. Mr. Jordan, it's your turn. He went on TV. He pointed to the sky and said, we're probably not alone, but need a skeptical eye. Need a skeptical eye. Yeah, that's right. but need a skeptical eye. Need a skeptical eye. Yeah, that's right.

You need a skeptical eye. He used Drake's equation to calculate the chance that somewhere there's a planet with impressive intelligence. Impressive intelligence. Yeah, say what? Say what? Impressive intelligence. Let's bring it home now. Straight out of Brooklyn like a comet to the stars.

Carl's mind wandered from this pale blue god of ours. Yo, Mr. H. Break it down otra vez. For a man who spent such time with his eyes fixed above. He kept his two feet planted on the planet that he loved. Planet that he loved. Yes, it was the planet that he loved. Carl surely proved that a skeptical mind

would still be filled with wonder and the mysteries of mankind. Mysteries of mankind. The mysteries of mankind. Now, one more time now. Straight out of Brooklyn like a comet to the stars, Carl's mind wandered from this pale blue dark. The Lars. Puddles man-woven from this pale blue dark The flowers

They are the Amoeba people. Give them a big hand. They brought some free swag that a few of you in the audience can grab, little things about the Amoebas. So watch for them backstage. You can learn more about the Amoeba people where else? The Amoeba people.com or check out their Facebook or Instagram pages, and you can check out their great science songs in iTunes or in Bandcamp. We're going to wrap up Planetary Radio Live as we always do, and that's with our What's Up segment.

And for that, I'm going to welcome my friend and colleague at the Planetary Society. Please put your hands together for the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Fetz. And we can have a seat. Welcome, Bruce. Thank you, Matt. Good to be here. We follow the same pattern with what's up every time, and that always begins with Bruce telling us about what's up in the night sky. So what's up there?

We've got great planets to look at, particularly if you're up before dawn. If you look in the pre-dawn east, you will see down low on the horizon super bright Venus. And then go to its upper right, you'll see yellowish Saturn looking like a fairly bright star. And then very bright Jupiter to its upper right. So a nice line of planets. And then in the evening sky, in the evening west, we've got Mars looking like a kind of bright star, but it'll look reddish because, you know, it's the red planet. That's what we got, Matt.

Good start. All right. We move on to this week in space history. It was 2001 that the Soviet and later Russian Mir space station reentered the Earth's atmosphere. Whoa, that was a big piece to be coming home. That was a big chunk of space stuff. All right, we move on. And if I can get the audience's help, I'm going to say one, two, three, and then you're going to say random space fact.

Ready? One, two, three. Random space fact. Oh, come on. You can do better than that. Don't you want to be on the radio? Let's do it again. Matt has such high standards.

All right. One, two, three. Random space fact. That's what we want. So we're going to talk about young people in space. The youngest person in space ever was German Titov. He was 25. He was from the Soviet Union. He was also the second person to orbit the Earth and the first to vomit in space. What a distinction. He must be so proud.

All right, we move on to the trivia contest. Now, this is the contest that we started two weeks ago, right? Yes. I asked, what are the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft five-gram bullets made of? The way that Hayabusa 2 samples an asteroid surface is it puts a cone down on the surface, fires a bullet into the surface, and collects material that comes up. And what are they made of, Matt? And Hayabusa 2 is the Japanese probe. Japanese probe currently at the asteroid Ryugu and collecting samples for return next year. Here is our winner. Out of all the people who wrote in to Planetary Radio with the correct answer,

our winner was chosen, as always, by Random.org. If you're ever in need of a random number, Random.org is a good place to find it. It's Tony Knudsen, a first-time winner, in Stewardsville, Minnesota, A first-time winner in Stewardsville, Minnesota, because he told us that those bullets, those five-gram bullets, were made of tantalum. Indeed, tantalum. Why tantalum? Because it sounds funny. Has to be more than that. No, it's a very non-reactive metal, but why exactly they chose it, I am not sure. Ah, well, that's how Hayabusa has now collected the first of its samples from asteroid Ryugu. But we always get other answers,

other responses from our listeners that we want to read a little bit of, like this one from Dennis Hands in Greensboro, North Carolina. He says, okay, tantalum, ground chuck hamburger is about $3.99 a pound. A Maserati car is $32.43 a pound. Did you know that? Tantalum is $130 a pound. Saffron goes for up to $2,000 a pound. Is that what they made the bullets from initially? And it just didn't work out.

Tasted delicious, though. Kay Gilbert in Manhattan Beach, California, not far from where we are now, she says, tantalum, it's such a cool name for an element, probably explains why they changed it from the far dorkier tantalium. She's right, I looked it up. Yes, they did name chins.

I had a dog named tantalium once. We have to pose the question for next time. Do not shout out the answer if you think you know it, because this is for the folks at home. Bruce? Who was the second youngest person to orbit the Earth? The second youngest person to orbit the Earth? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Alright, you have until Wednesday. That's Wednesday, March 27th at 8 a.m. Pacific time

to get us this answer. And you will win yourself a Planetary Society kick asteroid rubber asteroid and a 200 point itelescope.net account. And itelescope is a non-profit networkelescope.net account. And iTelescope is a nonprofit network of telescopes all over the planet Earth.

You don't even need your own telescope to use these telescopes remotely to look at things all across the universe. So we thank iTelescope for making those prizes available to us every week on Planetary Radio. And with that, Bruce, I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what it would be like to hang upside down on another world. Thank you, and good night. Do I get my choice of worlds? Yes, you do.

He is Bruce Fetz, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. who joins us every week here for What's Up. And that is the end of our time here on the Planetary Society stage at the very first ever Fairplex Extreme Steam Festival. We hope this won't be the last. We hope that not only will Fairplex do this again, but that we'll be back here once again with all of you who've come out to participate in this event

that celebrates science, technology, engineering, agriculture in this case, the arts, and mathematics. Hope you've had a great time here today. We've had a wonderful time with you. We will simply say goodbye and hope that you'll tune in every week to Planetary Radio

check us out at planetary.org that is the website of the Planetary Society Planetary Radio is produced by the Society our associate producer is Mary Liz Bender here they are once again the Amoeba people, Ad Astra, everybody. Thank you. Modern to cosmology and how we're tiny specks that are up in space. And to realize where you sit is really just the start of it, as your mind begins to wander from this place. Throw your futons in a room, and the room is in a house,

or an apartment on a block in a neighborhood. And whether homely, plain, or pretty, it's in a town or in a city, just like you'd expect a neighborhood would. And at this time, I should relate. The city's in a county, and the county's in a state. The state's in a country, and the country's in a continent, no matter how you get it. And I'd like to make it clear

the continents in a hemisphere, which is part of a bigger sphere we call a planet. And you're sitting on your feet, and you're talking to the Milky Way. And you're listening to Cosmology. Planet Earth is in a system which revolves around a star called the sun,

which is 93 million miles away. That's far. And the sun's in the outer arm of a spiral-shaped galaxy of stars, which the ancient Greeks named the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is part of something called the Local Group, which contains our galaxy and roughly 30 more.

And the most important question. Galaxies, nebulae, and quasars. Everywhere in the Earth you look, and every cranny and every good are superclusters brimming with billions of stars. And you sit there on your two cars. And your thoughts are too cosmology. Here's the trippy part, the part that may just blow your mind.

First, stars are made of elements, as you may know. I knew that. The elements found in stars are in birds and trees and cars, as well as rocks and air and Grandma's cookie dough. Disney blocks of the sun are everywhere, and in everyone, including you and me and your crazy Uncle Leon. They have names that are quite common, like helium, hydrogen, and carbon, and stranger ones like beryllium and neon.

But to see the magic of these stars, you need to travel so far, or blast off in your custom-made spaceship. And neon. Crunchy. and your doctrine to plasmody as you sit there on your futon and you wonder what exactly is a futon as you sit there on your futon and your doctrine to plasmody as you sit there on your futon and you wonder what exactly is a futon Thank you, humans of Earth. Thank you so much.