Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Celebrating Carl Sagan With Lou Friedman, Lynda Obst, Kip Thorne and More

Episode Date: November 12, 2012

November 9 was Planetary Society founder Carl Sagan's birthday, so we gathered a few of his close friends and several young scientists he inspired in front of a live audience. They also helped us celebrate Planetary Radio's 10th anniversary! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again, podcast listeners. Here's your periodic secret message that we drop in for you folks. A word about our Carl Sagan Day celebration on Friday, November 9. It was terrific. It was one of the greatest evenings of my professional life, really probably just of my life, period. Today's show captures just a few excerpts from that, as you'll hear. There is so much more. I really cannot recommend it highly enough. The sad thing is that our video was lost. The live webcast failed, as some of you probably know, only about two minutes in.

And we thought that we still had a video recording to rely on. Well, unfortunately, our friends at Southern California Public Radio said that that was lost as well. We're still not really sure what happened. Thank goodness we had an audio recording to create this radio show and to put the entire evening up at planetary.org, where you can find this radio show. We'll have a link there, but I think it's also on the homepage. And our friend Liam Kennedy, he had his still camera there, and he took some terrific pictures.

And so it's kind of a pseudo-video that I hope you'll enjoy. It was assembled by my colleague Casey Dreyer. Anyway, here is our celebration of Sagan Day and our 10th anniversary, as you'll hear, during the What's Up segment, also done in front of that audience at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum. As I mentioned last week, we still welcome your support. You can donate directly to Planetary Radio, and if you give us over $50 to support this show,

we'll give you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. And I stand by my offer. Anybody who gives us $5,000 or more, I will come to your hometown and buy you dinner. Thanks for listening. A celebration of Carl Sagan and our 10th anniversary, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Carl Sagan was born on November 9, 1934. Before his all-too-early death, he would do some great science, and he would change the public face of science. That's why we gathered in Pasadena on the evening of November 9th to talk with some of Carl's closest friends and to hear from young scientists he inspired. We're only able to bring you a handful of highlights on today's show.

You can hear the entire more than 90 minute event and enjoy great photos by Liam Kennedy at Planetary.org. It includes Emily Lakdawalla, a cameo appearance by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a blind date many years ago that eventually led to a movie called Interstellar that is currently in development. We began with a welcoming message from the science guy.

Hi, everyone. Bill Nye here from the Planetary Society. Thank you for coming to help celebrate Sagan Day 2012. Now, you know, I had Carl Sagan for astronomy, for one class. And then I corresponded him a little bit after I got out of engineering school, and the guy changed my life. And I imagine the reason you're all here is because he touched your lives as well. So it's a wonderful thing that we celebrate his legacy. And for me, the big message that Carl wanted to share with the world

was that science is this process, this way we know our place among the stars, our place in space. And the process not only leads to these remarkable discoveries, but it brings out the best in us. It's what humans do best. And so it's worth celebrating. So thank you all for being here.

And I believe I would paraphrase Professor Sagan by saying, let's change the world. Carl Sagan, former JPL director Bruce Murray, and Emeritus Planetary Society executive director Lou Friedman founded the society 32 years ago. Lou joined me on stage to share his memories and pay tribute to Carl. At the beginning, we were kind of trying to figure out our way. What were we going to do? But we got great support in the planetary community. Carl wrote some awfully good letters to important people for support, to fellow scientists.

And most of all, he intellectually guided the organization. We didn't know what we were going to be. We had no idea. Remember, hours of discussions, usually arguments. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, you obviously all had a lot of respect for each other, but I have it on good authority that you were, we'll call it, strong advocates for your diverse positions and opinions. I wish I'd been around to watch one of those arguments. Well, Carl and Bruce had strong positions. I never did. Yeah, sure.

And it's really true. I can remember hammering out positions that we were going to take with Congress or writing congressional testimony or advocacy that we were going to do in public op-eds or something like that. It was very hard work to literally to get one sentence done. Sometimes it would take several hours of discussion, usually on telephones or pay phones in some place or another. Con and Bruce were famous for being rivals and advocates of very different positions. Bruce Murray had, and with due respect to the people here in the audience, the somewhat more conservative Caltech position about being skeptical of some of the discoveries that were being made and some of the speculations about those discoveries.

Carl would keep us, as some people said, at the edge of speculation. And so the two of them would be arguing about the interpretation. Carl, you shouldn't have said it this way. And Carl would say, was there anything incorrect about it? And they would go back and forth on this for quite some time. But the interesting thing is they were absolutely identical in their determination of what we should do and how we should do it. And it all came out, as you can see, with the Planetary Society,

but also with so many other products of space missions and great agreements. And here we are 32 years later. Yeah. By the way, I want to congratulate you on the 10th anniversary of the radio show. I think Bruce Betts pointed out earlier other anniversaries that this is connected with. But this is also the 8th anniversary of the launch of the Venus Express. And that's kind of interesting that that anniversary on this date coincides with the date of Carl's birthday because it was Venus that launched Carl Sagan's scientific career.

His early scientific work was on the study of the Venus atmosphere and the implications of the very heavy atmosphere which led to the creation of a greenhouse, and not just a greenhouse but a runaway greenhouse, which led to, of course, so much of his work in the whole subject of planetary atmospheres and climate change and all of those subjects. Kip Thorne has been with Caltech in Pasadena for over 45 years.

He was named Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics more than 20 years ago. Now, in a busy retirement, he is working with another friend of Carl Sagan's, producer Linda Obst, on that movie I mentioned called Interstellar. Kip met Carl in the 1960s, and they became lifelong friends. By most accounts, Carl was a really smart guy. He was. Yeah, that was a joke. But when he needed to get a fictional character to the other end of the galaxy in 10 minutes or less you were the guy he called. Were you already acquainted? Oh yes. I knew Carl

since before you did Lou. We go back to about 1970. He had just recently moved to Cornell. I was going back and forth between Cornell and Caltech every now and then. I was based at Caltech, but I often visited Cornell. And I got acquainted with him there when I was visiting my colleagues who were also working in similar fields in astrophysics. And then he was spending time out here on the Pioneer 10 mission and then the Pioneer 11 mission, which presaged Voyager. And so I would see him out here. We just became very good friends,

although we were working at opposite ends of astrophysics. Did he just call you up one day and say, I'm writing this book called Contact, and I need a way to get somebody from point A to point B? No, he called me up and he said, I have written this book named Contact. It's in page proofs. but I'm feeling a little uneasy about some of the science of how you get from here to Vega.

I have my crew, which included the heroine who became Jodie Foster. I had my crew going through a black hole and I know you're not going to like that. Can you help me rework it? Get him out of the hole. Yeah, dig him out of the hole, the black hole. I shouldn't have said across the galaxy. I forgot.

It's Vega, which is not too far, right? So he sent me, by overnight express mail, a copy of the whole book. My daughter was just graduating from UC Santa Cruz, I guess the day after that. And so I rode in a car up to Santa Cruz, my daughter's graduation, read the book and struggled, well, how do we make this honest? Because Carl's specialty was not general relativity. It was not curved space time. So I realized that what he really needed was a wormhole to travel through rather than a black hole. But I also realized, just did some back of the envelope calculations on the trip, and there's a major problem how

you hold a wormhole open so it won't implode on itself. And so I sent him a few pages of calculations and a discussion of these issues. And so he actually rewrote, I don't know, maybe five or ten pages of that book in page proof, which did not make his publisher very happy, in order to change from traveling through a black hole to traveling through a wormhole. Had you given any consideration to this theoretical possibility prior to hearing from Carl? Well, the idea of wormholes goes back a long time to Ludwig Flamm, one year after Einstein formulated his general relativity theory. So I was well aware of it. My mentor, John Wheeler at Princeton, had thought some about wormholes and had realized that they will implode on themselves if you don't do something to hold them open.

He didn't speculate about what was required to hold them open. But wormholes were such far-out ideas that I don't think anybody, and certainly not me, were paying much attention to wormholes at that stage. We were more interested in things that we were sure are out there like quasars and how quasars can be powered by black holes. And so, no, none of us were thinking about wormholes until Carl called me. And I've read

that this led to a whole new line of theoretical physics investigation which may continue today. Yeah, so Carl sort of broke my mental block of not wanting to think about this. And so I began to think seriously, how do you, can a wormhole be held open? How do you hold it open? And then I realized, you know, we're thinking about issues in warped space and time that are far, far, far beyond what we as human beings can ever do in the laboratory. And yet, thinking about these questions of can a very advanced civilization hold a wormhole open and travel through it,

that is a thought experiment. And working on mathematical calculations with the laws of physics to find answers, that's a powerful way to do research. It focuses the mind on specific issues. You come to realize what is it that governs whether or not wormholes are possible or whether or not time travel is possible. And that leads you, as you struggle to answer those questions from the laws of physics, leads you to a much deeper understanding of the nature of space and time. So I started publishing in this field. And when I started publishing, my close friend Igor Novikov in Moscow phoned me up with great joy. He says, if you can publish about this, then so can I.

I've wanted to for years, but it was never respectable. And so it's now more or less respectable. It has become a very serious direction of research. But it really is all due to Carl breaking our mental block. We as a community work on these issues of warped space and time. Linda Obst was a science writer for the New York Times who suddenly found herself in a strange new land called Hollywood. She was overjoyed when best friends Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

came to town to work on the Voyager mission and Carl's amazing public TV series called Cosmos. It wasn't long before they had begun to create the film version of Carl's best-selling book, Contact. Linda was Contact's executive producer and went on to produce many other terrific movies. And I'm a total Saganite. That's my sort of religion, I call it, if I had a religion. He taught me that the truth, the laws of physics, are more interesting than anything we can make up. In the movie, the narrative is informed not just by a great story, which it is, but by the rule that nothing, no plot point can defy the laws of physics. Just like when he was turning in his galleys, he had to get it right and called Kip and changed the galleys.

You told me that there were other ways in which he participated. Something about Carl participated, something about workshops. What we did is that we began the project before we even had a screenplay, the movie. We had a book, right, but we didn't have the movie yet. We hired the director, and we had a series of workshops where we invited experts in every field that the movie involved, from futurism to religion versus science to planetary astronomy to wormholes.

Kip was part of the workshop, so that we could draw up the wormholes for our production designer, and so our director could understand them. Every expert that Carl could identify, which he really could, sat with us for maybe two days or three days each, and we transcribed them with a court stenographer. And we sat, and we were in a hotel room. We sat through lunch. We worked all day.

And we have, I have the most incredible set of transcripts. And we debated, we talked, we milked and plumbed the depths of every expert we could in all these fields. So before the writing began, both the writer and the director, and Annie and I got in there too, interrogated and imagined every possible facet of the ideas conceivable in every aspect of the material of the film. Linda Obst, executive producer of the movie Contact and a close friend of Carl Sagan's. We've got more to our Carl Sagan Day celebration and our 10th anniversary edition of What's Up when Planetary Radio continues in a minute. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012,

the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Planetary Radio's celebration of Carl Sagan continues. I'm Matt Kaplan. Chas Beischmann studies exoplanets, those worlds that orbit distant stars.

But he also heads the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, or NEXAI, at Caltech. I think it's really a fantastic time for anyone who's interested in precisely the questions Carl was interested in, where the venues for life beyond Earth, whether it's in our solar system or now as we know in other solar systems, the very first extrasolar planet, 51 Pegg, was discovered just a few months before Carl died in 1996. 51 Peg Peg was discovered in 1995 by the Swiss group, the same group that just a few weeks ago found an Earth-sized planet orbiting one of the closest stars to us, Alpha Centauri b. I think Carl would have been thrilled with all the discoveries,

but perhaps that one almost the most. I mean, this is the closest star to us. It's a few light years away. I mean, we could, you know, Voyager, if it was aiming in the right direction, would be there in 40,000 years. MR. No, we've got to get a solar sailhead. MR. Unless TIP intervenes and gets us there quicker. MR. Right. MR. So I think the excitement of that would have thrilled Carl completely. I'll point out that he was on the West Coast

just a few months before he died, sitting in the office with me, and Charles Elachi was soon to become the director of JPL, but then was in charge of doing science missions, was there saying, you know, we ought to do this mission that Bill Beruki up at Ames would like to do called Kepler. And the Kepler mission is now up and has found probably 2,000 or 3,000 candidate planets and is revolutionizing our ideas on planetary systems. At the same time, we are pushing other ways to find planets more close by, At the same time, we were pushing other ways to find planets more close by, identifying planets in the habitable zone,

eventually even finding planets where we would find evidence of photosynthetic products in their atmosphere. Terrestrial planet finder. So these were all the sorts of things Carl would, I think, really have loved to have seen. We certainly miss his voice helping to push those in the public arena. Through NASA, we select five or six young students who've just graduated from graduate school, who are their first steps as young scientists, as postdoctoral fellows in what we call the Sagan program. We have a picture of Carl, not this one, but another very nice picture. And underneath it says, somewhere something incredible is waiting to be discovered. And there's one of the, I think, the favorite quotes I have of Carl's. We get typically 75 to 80 applicants

every year. We choose five or six of those students. So it's oversubscribed by 10, 15 of those students, so it's oversubscribed by 10, 15 to 1. And these are the best of the best of the best scientists in either theory, observation, or instrument builders, because we want people to actually build the instruments that do the missions that take the next step. We had Ann Druin at the announcement of starting this fellowship program

at the American Museum of Natural History. She was there, Neil Tyson hosted the event, and all the students really take something away and learn a little bit about Carl, and I think it's really a great testimony to him. Chas Baichman of Nexci, home of the Sagan Fellowship Program. Several of those young fellows were with us for our celebration of Carl Sagan's birthday, and one joined a panel that

included our own Emily Lakdawalla. Melissa Rice was also on that panel. She is part of the science team for Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Melissa told us how a high school astronomy class and learning that the sun would eventually die, taking the earth with it, set her on a path that would be paved for her by Carl Sagan. And it hit me that, whoa, everything I know, everything I'm studying, history, art, philosophy, everything was going to be gone someday.

And what was going to remain? Science. And I had this revelation that the only thing greater than myself is science, and that's what I have to study. So I had this very, you know, it was an intellectual revelation, but it was also an emotional, and I'd call it a spiritual revelation, too. You know, when you're a teenager, you have lots of very strong emotions, and that one might have just been another little blip on my emotional chart at age 16, but I went to the library later, and I was looking for books on astronomy because I had this hunger to learn about it, and I was fortunate enough to pick up Carl's books. And reading Carl's books spoke exactly to

what I was feeling. And it might have been a different story if I had picked up a book that was more of an academic astronomy book because it wasn't facts I was after. It was this sense of something larger than myself, this sense that understanding science can make the experience of being alive better. And so I was fortunate to find Carl's books and to read Broca's Brain and Contact and have a role model of Ellie Arroway as a female scientist

who was studying astronomy and dating Matthew McConaughey. And so I think that really set me on the path that this is what I want to do. This is something worthy of devoting my life to studying. JPL scientist Melissa Rice, part of our panel of young scientists at the Planetary Society's celebration of Carl Sagan. We thank all our guests and Southern California Public Radio for once again hosting us. Please listen to the entire celebration at planetary.org. I think you'll be inspired.

So live from the Crawford Family Forum at Southern California Public Radio, it's time for What's Up with Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome, Bruce. Thank you, Matt. Good to be here again. It's the happy 10th anniversary show. We won't make you sing. It's okay. Thank you. So tell us, what's up?

We've got in the east pre-dawn, we've got Venus dominating the sky. Saturn's starting to come up underneath it, much less bright, but they'll get closer as the weeks go on. And in the mid-evening, we've got Jupiter coming up over in the east, looking exceptionally bright as well. And this week, 1980, Voyager 1 flew past Saturn. And this week, a little farther back in 1971, Mariner 9 becomes the first Mars orbiter. Are you ready? We're going to get some help from the crowd, as we often do. All right.

On three, enthusiastically. One, two, three. Random Space Shots. That was good. Well done. Well done. Did you bring shirts for everybody? No, I thought you did.

I think they're in the back of Matt's car. He said he'd give them to you after the show. We'll put them in the mail. thought you did. I think they're in the back of Matt's car. He said he'd give them to you after the show. We'll put them in the mail. There you go. So, usually this is where I give a space-related fact, and in fact, I consider planetary radio to be space-related. Planetary radio has had more than 500 unique shows, has had hundreds of unique guests,

airs on 150 radio stations and SiriusXM, and is available via podcast. It's had 101 reviews on iTunes, of which 97 are five-star and the other four are four-star. I want the names of those four. And every

single show has been produced, edited, and hosted by the man next to me, Matt Kaplan. Please give this man a round of applause. Space and radio, I'm very nearly the luckiest man on Earth. That's nice. Shall we go on to the trivia contest? Yeah, let's do that.

Do you remember what you asked two weeks ago? I do indeed. I asked, what's the orbital period of Ceres, the dwarf planet asteroid used to be a planet, and how'd we do? We did very well because we had a 10th anniversary prize to give away, and that always encourages a big reaction. So we had about double the normal number of entries in this. of entries in this. And I want to say that that special prize of a Celestron First Scope Telescope with the accessory kit is going to this week's winner, chosen by Random.org, Pat Foster, a regular listener, but has not won

in well over a year. I couldn't really even tell if he'd ever won. But Pat said the orbital period of Ceres is roughly 4.6 years. That is indeed correct. Excellent. Hanging out in the asteroid belt. Pat, we're going to put that telescope in the mail to you very soon. I do want to mention that we got from lots and lots of people like Mark Wilson.

They said, you know, what is the orbital period? It's one Syrian year, actually. Well, that is correct. I really need to remember to specify units. David Kaplan pointed out that it has been 2.17 Syrian years that planetary radio has been on the air, and I'm sure it's very popular on series. I'm sure it is. We'll have to have a three Syrian year anniversary. There is one other that I'm playing with my papers here because you just have to hear this. This is really pretty cool. The question was from Kurt Lewis in Missouri City, Texas.

He wanted to know if he wins the first scope, will he be able to actually use it to see the dwarves that live on Ceres? That's going to require a much larger telescope. Sophisticated audience. It's a dwarf planet, people. You wondered where all the munchkins went, right? I want no part of this. Go ahead and give them the next contest, the new one, and then we'll have a couple of more things to give away. All right, as I mentioned,

now Planetary Radio airs on 150 radio stations, as well as SiriusXM. But what was the first radio station to air Planetary Radio? So non-internet. The first radio station, go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. And it aired the only radio station to air the very first episode. You have until Monday, November 26th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. What are we giving them, Matt? What?

What are we giving them? Well, we can give them a shirt, but we also have those great new year in space calendars to give away. And they're really cool, the big large format ones. I think we should give away one of those. All right. Year in space wall calendar. New item. Really cool.

We have some other stuff to tell you about that we're going to give away. For our 10th anniversary, we asked people to send us their greetings. A lot of people who just wrote to us and said congratulations. Many more people who sent us special stuff. Here's one of them, Steve Lehman. He left a message on our Planetary Radio 10th anniversary line. A lot of other people did too, but his was the only one that was both multilingual and even interstellar. Matt, Steve Lehman from Charlottesville, Virginia, wishing you a happy 10th birthday.

And in Latin, Felix, it's Deitimus Natalis Dies. And in Klingon, happy birthday. So, kapla, Steve Lehman. Happy birthday. So, kapow, Steve Lehman. We had to send him a shirt. Very nice. Let's send him a shirt. That's our runner-up. Now, there were lots of other cool things.

James Newberg created a cool 10th anniversary graphic, and we've got to put that on the website somewhere. We'll try and have that up by the time people hear this. But our grand prize, and what a cool prize, of Bill Nye's greeting on your answering machine, in other words, people will hear Bill when they call your phone, goes to Corey Chaplin. Corey created this little beatnik tribute to our show. In a world of cluttered airwaves Full of meaningless chatter We are thankful for a radio show that truly matters

Not an arbitrary commentary of contrary opinions on this or that But an enlightening discussion of a scientific fact If you have a thirst for knowledge and exploring the cosmos There is only one place you need to go to find out what you need to know. To the cosmic dignitaries of a show most extraordinary, the visionary revolutionary, dare I say necessary, happy 10th anniversary to Planetary Radio. Okay, OMG, does he deserve a prize or not?

And with that, we're all done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about Matt Kaplan, of course, but also, particularly with this show, think about Carl Sagan. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the inspired and inspiring members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.