Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Director James Cameron Searches for Aliens

Episode Date: January 24, 2005

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Movie maker James Cameron searches for alien life under the ocean this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome back to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the stars, or in this week's show, on a voyage to the bottom of the sea. I'm Matt Kaplan. It turns out that one of the most successful filmmakers of all time is even more excited about questions we frequently talk about on this show. Is there life out there? If so, what will it look like?

And where are we most likely to find it? Lacking the ability to take us to the oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa, Cameron's new film looks beneath the waters of our own planet. Our conversation with him is just a few minutes away. Later we'll get some dry humor from Bruce Betts as we learn what's up in our skies and hear his latest space trivia question. We'll begin with this quick review of the news from beyond our pale blue dot in space. The biggest news is still coming from a billion miles away on Saturn's moon Titan. Scientists are shaking their heads in amazement over the three and a half hours of data returned by the Huygens

probe. There is an extensive update at planetary.org, including many more images and even a movie of sorts that traces the descent and landing of the little spacecraft. More new sounds of Titan, too. Apparently not wanting the outer solar system to steal all the attention, Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity found an iron meteorite sitting on the surface of the red planet. This is the first such find in the history of space exploration. On the other side of Mars, Opportunity's sister continues a spirited climb up a slippery slope called the Cumberland Ridge. Science payload principal investigator Steve Squires says Spirit is now the rover doing the really exciting work. And we may have captured a picture of a black hole's birth for the very first time.

NASA's Swift orbiter was still in initial checkout mode when it detected a gamma-ray burst. The spacecraft immediately pointed its other instruments at the source and snapped an X-ray image of the tremendous explosion. Other space and surface-based telescopes are now having a look while scientists analyze the data. Emily is up next with this week's Q&A. I'll be back with James Cameron right after her visit to Titan.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, What color would Titan's sky look like from the surface? There is actually some debate on what Titan's sky would look like if you were to stand on the surface and look up. From the outside, Titan appears orange. This is because Titan's haze particles preferentially scatter shorter wavelengths of light. The scattering is so effective that photons with blue wavelengths don't penetrate through

the clouds at all. Only longer wavelength green, yellow, orange and red light is able to reach through the atmosphere. But scientists working on the Huygens mission who have performed careful models predict that the scattering of the shortest wavelengths of light will result in a greenish-gray color to the sky. Titan's sky is so thick and hazy that it would be difficult even to see any of the clouds that block our view from above. A bigger question to many who imagine standing on Titan's surface is what else you could see in the sky besides clouds. Titan would be a magnificent vantage point from which to view the giant ringed planet Saturn. But is it in fact possible to see Saturn from the surface of Titan?

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. James Cameron's new movie is coming out. It's not a sequel to Titanic, but it is an adventure at sea, or rather undersea. Aliens of the Deep is an IMAX 3D production that immerses the audience in the most exotic setting in which life has been found, miles below the surface where the inferno inside the Earth leaks into the ocean through cracks or vents. These eerily fantastically beautiful islands of intense heat have been given names like Snake Pit and Lost City. Cameron visits them in a virtual fleet of deep submersibles, bringing along young space scientists,

some of whom have never been deeper than the bottom of a swimming pool. Note my use of the words young and space. These two terms capture what's really going on here. He may have made the most successful movie of all time, but Jim Cameron wants to do more than entertain. James Cameron, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Hey, it's my pleasure. Thanks. Especially at the end of a long day.

I mean, you've done, it must have been 15, 20 interviews so far today. Yeah, well, it's been about eight hours, which is about half of a mere dive. So theoretically, I should still be fresh. Well, hopefully the creatures that you've been meeting today have been at least almost as interesting as what you find and see. They're much more threatening. I saw the film yesterday, and don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan. I think you've made one of the great adventure films of all time with this film.

Well, it certainly felt like an adventure when we were doing it. I mean, it's not like we got into any real life or death skinny situations, but when you're diving a submersible two miles down into the blackness and the unknown, even when you're going to a site that's been discovered by others, such as Lost City or Snake Pit or any one of these deep hydrothermal sites that we visited for this film, you still know you're going to see something you've never seen before. And you may see something nobody's ever seen before,

which I believe we did a number of times. And all of the challenges of lighting it up and imaging it in 3D and supporting the various science missions that we're working in parallel with has made it feel very much like a space expedition to another planet, even though it's right here on our planet. It certainly works almost as a space analog. It feels very much that way. Well, that theme was a key to why you did this film in the first place.

I think I started down the path thinking, well, we could do a kind of space analog story, and we actually worked with Dr. Kelly Snook at Johnson Space Center, who works in their analog activities office there, and we actually had an actual NASA-funded analog space activity with us on this expedition and personnel there to support that. But setting aside the analog portion of it, there's actually a legitimate convergence between marine biology and astrobiology at these hydrothermal vent sites, which is not an analog.

It's very specific, which is that you've got these organisms that are living down there without energy from the sun, surviving by chemosynthesis, meaning their source of energy is the earth itself, chemical energy from the earth, from the heat of the earth, moving the water. This could be a clue to what we might find in, let's say, a hydrothermally heated subterranean aquifer on Mars, maybe under the polar caps, maybe even at lower latitudes. Or what about Europa or Callisto or Ganymede? There are a number of ice bodies in the solar system that are of great scientific interest right now.

Which you pay a lot of attention to in the film. interest right now. Which you pay a lot of attention to in the film. In fact, a beautiful sequence on Europa, which our audiences heard quite a bit about over the course of this program. There is so much beauty in this film, it's hard to single out a single CGI sequence. But if anybody wants to see how it might work on Europa, I'd say you've come as close as anybody. Well, we did spend some time and energy showing a hypothetical sort of two or three generations down the line mission to the surface of Europa. In the same film, in an earlier sequence, we show the Jimmo mission in progress, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. And we worked with JPL and with I think Boeing was bidding on it at the time, and they had some design concepts for the vehicle. We eventually hewed pretty close to the JPL kind of straw man for the vehicle,

their kind of notional design for it, and grand tour of the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter, including Io. Even though Io is not currently, I think, on Jimmo's itinerary, we had to jump in close and show how Io is tidally heated by the gravity field. Had to show a volcano or two. Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, the point is if all you need is gravity and a little bit of an eccentric orbit to generate enough geothermal energy to operate some of the biggest active volcanoes in the solar system, then that means that you've got sources of energy and you've got sources of heat and chemical energy.

And if that's what's going on underneath Europa, and that's why Europa has a liquid water ocean, as they believe it does, then there's no reason why that shouldn't resemble what we're seeing at the bottom of the ocean at these black smoker sites. If that's the case, you've got all the ingredients for life. It doesn't mean you'll have life, but it means that you better damn well find out why you don't have life because it should be there. So either way, either outcome would be fairly profound from a science standpoint.

And you have an astrobiologist who's part of the crew, a fellow who apparently had never been to sea before, who gets to go down with you in those amazing submersibles. We sort of rounded off the facts a little bit there by calling him an astrobiologist. He's actually a grad student who's specializing in the study of Europa as a kind of planetary scientist, planetary geologist with a very, very strong interest in astrobiology and a very, very good understanding of the kind of reductive chemical processes that fuel these bacteria colonies that live in these sulfide-rich environments

around the chemosynthesis animals. So Kevin was fascinated by the biological potential of a Europa environment, but he's really specializing in a study of Europa, and he's currently involved in a kind of Europa jar experiment where they're duplicating Europa surface conditions and bombarding it with the types of ionizing radiation that you get from Jupiter and seeing if that might cause some kind of chemical breakdown that would release oxygen in such a way that, you know, you're trying to find

a mechanism that would support the idea of oxygen in the water column of the Europan Ocean. Because if you've got oxygen, as well as all these other things, now you don't just get anaerobic bacteria, but you get multicellular organisms as well. And that can be really interesting. Of course, we make, as a filmmaker, I immediately make the leap of faith and show the big multicellular organisms swimming around in the oceans of Europa. Don't give away the surprise ending.

I haven't given away the ending yet. That's kind of the third act, you know, middle of the third act, let's say. Film director and now undersea explorer James Cameron. middle of the third act, let's say. Film director and now undersea explorer James Cameron. When we come back, you'll hear more about his new IMAX 3D documentary, Aliens of the Deep, including the leaky submarine that almost kept him from discovering a new life form. Stay with us.

This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds. And we're building the first-ever solar sail.

You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free 1-877-752-6387.

And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, PlanetarySociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Planetary Radio continues with more from filmmaker James Cameron. Aliens of the Deep is his IMAX 3D production premiering this week. Our conversation turned to the young scientist. He makes the stars of this undersea documentary. This is a film that I enjoyed enormously. Part of it, I think, is, and I think it's also part

of what you were attempting to accomplish with the film, is that you feature these people like Kevin Hand, like Loretta Hidalgo, young people who are excited about this. I couldn't help but think as I watched it in awe about all the young people that are going to see this and got to be some percentage that are going to say, gee, this science stuff is pretty cool. Yeah, it doesn't even matter if it's 1% or 2%. That's 1% or 2% more than are currently being inspired by what's out there. We wanted

to do something that would really grab people and say, hey, this stuff is exciting. And by the way, these scientists are not boring lab smock wearing stick-in-the-mud people. They're exciting. They're flesh-and-blood people. They're passionate about what they do. They're funny. They're charismatic. And we preselected our group for that, to be good communicators and interesting role models. You know, I make no bones about that. We were trying to inspire kids in middle school and high school to have a little bit of that sense of wonder about exploration and about what's out there that, you know, maybe that I had when I was in my teens and the Apollo program was in full swing and Jacques Cousteau had his specials going on, you know, the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau and was bringing the ocean into our living rooms for the first time.

And it just seemed like such a golden age of exploration back in the late 60s. And there's nothing quite like that in the public consciousness. It's not that interesting exploration is not being done. Certainly it is. But there doesn't seem to be as much of an emphasis in the media on it these days. And even some of the outlets gravitated more to what I think of as tabloid science and monster garage type stuff and away from pure exploration. You make a statement somewhere in the film,

along the lines of how important this work is to you and how it compares to the little career you've cut out for yourself on the film side. And I think you sound like you enjoy thinking of yourself as an explorer, and I think you qualify. Well, you know, let's face it. Making Hollywood movies is really difficult, and there's nothing easy about that. But there's something deeply satisfying about doing something that's real, that's not fiction. When you're on a movie set, you have complete control of the outcome, in a sense. You've set up all the parameters.

Everybody's just there to make a film. And you're going to come out of it with that story that you went in, that was on the page, on the script that you went in with. You go out on an ocean expedition, and you can't predict the outcome. You don't know what you're going to discover. You don't know what you're going to see. It could be a complete bust, or you could see the giant squid swim by, you know, or anything in between. And the excitement of that, and in a sense the loss of control of the process, which is the only way that you're ever going to feel a sense of wonder, is if you're not in control, if you're not dictating what's happening in front of that camera.

That's the only way you're ever going to feel a sense of wonder in the filmmaking process. And other than that, you're the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. And while that's fun, it's not as satisfying somehow. Being on one of these adventures, doing real exploration, being cramped up in an uncomfortable steel sphere for 16 or 18 hours going down to the bottom of the ocean and looking out through that window, there's just nothing cooler. And there's nothing that Hollywood can create for me with its inherent falsity that is as exciting as that. Now, notwithstanding, I still love to make movies. I still love to put on a show, and I'm still going to be making Hollywood movies. But in terms of that deep inner satisfaction, it's a different story on an expedition.

Well, there are a lot of us who are happy to hear that you're going to continue with both threads of this life. Oh, yeah. I know that we've got to make way for the next folks coming in here. I wish there was time to talk to you about some of the incredible images in this film, many of them of living things. I mean, I've got to bring up at least the thing that looked like a jellyfish, except it was like a ribbon in a ring. Right. And it sounded like this was one of these organisms that you had not seen before.

Well, that was an interesting dive because we were diving the rovers, and we had a lot of technical problems on that dive. As we were descending, we started to have seawater leaking into the sub and uh the pilot and i were trying to figure out where it was coming in and i didn't want to stop and so i encouraged him to partially dismantle the overhead uh the overhead console in the sub and reach around and see if he could find out where the water was coming in we got the leak stopped in that way because it was wow we had We had to sacrifice our depth gauge, but I figured as long as there was another sub right there and we could talk to it and he could tell us how deep we were, we could give that up. And then we had a complete power failure

and we just went black. We went dark. I mean, everything stopped. Camera stopped. Everything stopped. When the camera stopped, I started to really pay attention to the fact that we might be in trouble. So we managed to sort of tear some other stuff apart and get it all booted back up and get it switched on just about the time we thumped into the bottom. And that's when we saw the animal. So if we had aborted, as we probably should have, you know, as things started to go against us, we never would have seen it. But, you know, we persevered. We did it sort of Russian-style, fix on failure. We talk a lot about that.

Yeah, right, exactly. And we proceeded with the dive. And, in fact, we lost one of our horizontal thrusters right before we encountered that organism. And when I saw it, we couldn't reach it. It was about 100 feet away. And so we literally taught ourselves how to fly the sub with only one horizontal thruster by putting it into a crab kind of configuration using the vertical thrusters, and we flew it sideways.

And all those images in the film were done flying the sub orthogonal to its normal way of operation. And this whole adventure is one that you don't know about in the film. No. But it's very exciting to hear about it here. And thank you for adding that little bit to our time because I know we've got to get out of here now. Okay, all right.

We're getting broomed. We are, I'm afraid. But thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. And it would be a delight to talk to you again sometime. I hear that you're familiar with the Society's Solar Sail Project. Sure, absolutely. And the NASA Vision for space exploration. I hope there'll be another opportunity.

Well, let's talk again. Jim Cameron has been our guest. Does he need any introduction? I don't think so. But you will want to see Aliens of the Deep, and you will see the explorer side of James Cameron. And we will be right back with Bruce Betts and what's up after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A.

Is it possible to see magnificent Saturn from the surface of Titan? Again, scientists disagree on the question. We can't easily see Titan's surface from orbit because light that hits the surface is scattered twice by the atmosphere, once on the way down to the surface and again on the way back up. But if you were standing on the atmosphere, once on the way down to the surface and again on the way back up. But if you were standing on the surface, the light only has to make the trip once down through the atmosphere to your eyes. Titan's atmosphere may be just transparent enough for a very dim view of the globe of

Saturn to be visible through the Merc, but even that view may not show you Saturn's rings. Titan orbits Saturn in the same plane as the ring system, so observers standing on Titan would always see the ring system edge on. At best, it would look like a dark line crossing Saturn, but this thin dark line would almost certainly not be visible through Titan's haze. Another oddity about the view is that Titan, like our own moon, is locked into spin-orbit resonance with Saturn, so it keeps the same face pointed at the giant planet at all times. Thus, Saturn would never

appear to move, but would always instead be parked in the same position in the sky, day and night. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio with the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts. Bruce, welcome back. Hey, thank you very much. You want to hear what's up there in the sky? Yeah, okay, what the hell?

Such enthusiasm. All right, well, you can still see some very nice planets in the pre-dawn sky, but now we're down to four instead of five. You might be able to pick up Mercury very low on the horizon right around dawn in the east, but it's going to be tricky with that pesky sun coming up. Venus, however, if you look a half hour or so before dawn, still looking like a bright star-like object up there, also running away from us. We'll lose it in the next few weeks. Above that, Mars, reddish, dimmer, and it's going the right way in the sky, so we'll be seeing it for a long time, and it will just be getting better.

Above that, Jupiter, looking like a very bright star-like object, not quite as bright as Venus, and again, being one of the outer planets, it's friendly and just moving across the sky. And eventually, Mars and Jupiter will come play with us in the evening sky, which is where Saturn is, playing in the evening and pre-dawn skies. You can see Saturn, where, of course, we had that fabulous Huygens entry a little while ago. You can see Saturn in the evening sky, rising around sunset and overhead around midnight. And it is near Castor and Pollux, the bright stars of Gemini.

A couple of nights ago, I got the telescope out, had to check it out, because it was an incredibly clear night in Southern California. And, of course, with the planets, the city lights don't matter as much. And it took a while because my little finder scope thing was broken. But I managed to get it. And it was right where you said it would be, near Casper and Pollux. And it just looked great. And to think that we have so much going on up there a billion miles away.

It was so exciting. It's true. Sights and sounds from a billion miles away came back from there. And did you see Titan or not? I think I did. That was in the evening. It looked like a little white speck out in the same plane as the rings. Yeah, I wouldn't guarantee it, but I suspect it was.

Yeah, you can actually see Titan through a relatively small telescope. There's a little white dot. If you have a small telescope, go out and look at Saturn. It's a little bit yellowish as you look in the sky, yellower than Castor or Pollux. So good stuff, still fun. On to this week in space history. Unfortunately, this week is, we remember, the three biggest accidents in U.S. space history, the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, the Challenger disaster in 1986, and the Columbia disaster in 2003, all within the same week, but obviously spread

out by many, many years. So our thoughts go out to all those who lost their lives. There was some good news. Well, actually, there were several things, but I'll tell you one thing that happened this week, which was Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, giving us our first and only spacecraft view of Uranus for the foreseeable future. Cool stuff. On to random space fact!

You know what's cool? Mars Exploration Rover is still plugging around doing cool stuff. Opportunity just found an iron meteorite on the surface of Mars. Yeah, we talk about that in the headlines. Pretty incredible. How funky is that? Well, along that line, of the 22,000 or so meteorites that have been discovered on Earth, as opposed to the one on Mars,

only about 30 of those have been identified as originating from the moon, and 32 as from the planet Mars. So we do have samples of the moon and Mars that have come to Earth as meteorites, but a tiny little fraction of the total amount of space crud that's crashed down and been found. Wouldn't it be cool if this one turned out to have come from Earth? That would rock, dude. Not bloody likely, but that would rock. Trivia. Trivia.

Trivia. Under the trivia contest, we asked you before, what was the name of the comet that Deep Space One spacecraft flew by and imaged? How'd we do? I don't think we had any incorrect answers. Way to go, people. Yeah, smart group out there. And our winner, randomly chosen from among all of the answers,

because they were all correct this time, is a guy who was a runner-up in our come up with a new title for the NASA Administrator Contest. Ah, yes. Stephen Witte, or Steve Witte of Allen Park, Michigan, had the correct answer, Comet Borelli. And he added, in the extended mission, The best resolution attained was 47 meters per pixel. So Steve, congratulations. A shirt will be on its way to you in the mail. Cool tunes! Alright, for our trivia contest this next time around, we take you back to the mysterious but somewhat less mysterious world of Titan, where theorized are exotic things like methane rain and possibly

still ethane lakes or seas. Maybe with some methane in there, too. Methane's chemical formula is CH4, a hydrocarbon. I knew that. Hey, nice. Well, do you know this one? If you do, don't say it. Okay.

What's the chemical formula for ethane? Oh, luckily I don't know because I would blurt it out for sure. You would. You just can't trust you. I bet some of our listeners know. I bet they do. I bet some don't even have to look it up. If you know what the formula for ethane is or if you're going to look it up

or if you just want to make up something that will make us laugh, go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to email us your answer to the trivia contest and try to win the Glorious Planetary Radio t-shirt. And you want to get that to us by Monday the 31st. Monday the 31st of January at noon Pacific time so that you can be eligible to

win the next Planetary Radio t-shirt from What's Up. And that's it, Bruce. All right, everyone. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about turtles. Thank you, and good night. Crawling back into a shell there is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Crawling into a shell? I don't think so.

He joins us each week here for What's Up. What? We're out of time. As always, you can hear past editions of Planetary Radio at our website. Point your browser to planetary.org slash radio. And we'd love to hear from you. Write us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. That's the same address you use to enter the trivia contest.

Planetaryradio at planetary.org. Thanks very much for listening. Have a great week, everyone.