Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Interstellar Dreams: Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Aurora”

Episode Date: March 1, 2016

Famed science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson is back with Aurora, a cautionary tale about just how difficult interstellar travel may be.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi there, space fans. It's Matt with a special invitation for you. Tuesday, March 8th at 7 p.m. Pacific Time. That's when I'll host a Planetary Radio Live webcast that we're calling All These Worlds, Our Expanding Solar System. My guests at KPCC Southern California Public Radio will be the Planet Nine guys from Caltech, Mike Pluto Killer Brown and Konstantin Batygin. Also our own Emily Lakdawalla and a special live virtual appearance by Bill Nye the Science Guy.

The show is sold out, but we'll be streaming live video from both planetary.org and kpcc.org. I hope you'll join us. Again, it begins at 7 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, March 8th. Here is this week's show. Kim Stanley Robinson and interstellar dreams, 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, ready this time to make some of you a bit crazy. Kim Stanley Robinson published Aurora last year. It is a sweeping story of interstellar pioneers and an instructive fable illustrating in sometimes tragic detail

just how hard it will be to reach the stars. Bill Nye is all in for space, but he questions whether what's needed should be called a renaissance. We begin with the senior editor for the Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we've at least mentioned in passing a few times in the past that you're working on a book, and you have an update about that. It's part of a February 26th blog entry that offers much more, but tell us what's the status. When I sat down to write this blog entry, I was sort of chagrined to realize that it was three years ago that I had signed the contract

to write this book about curiosity. It's not done yet because I didn't work on it for about 18 months straight because various real-life problems intervened, but now I'm back to work on it, and the delay has actually been a very good thing. I'm not surprised by that. I mean, this mission has made so much progress. I was actually a little concerned that you were going to be writing a book before its time. Now I don't feel that way. Yeah, there are actually a whole lot of books about Curiosity that came out in the year after it landed. And the thing is that Curiosity didn't really start the science mission on Mars until a year after it landed. By having delayed getting going on writing about the operational part of the mission, I actually get to write about the fun part, which has been happening in the last year or two after it arrived at Mount Sharp and started really doing this stratigraphic science that it set out to Mars to do.

And you have a new title for the book as well. Yeah, it's not the most catchy title. That's because it's for an academic publisher, Springer Praxis. So the title says exactly what it is, which is Curiosity Rover, Design, Planning, and Field Geology on Mars. There is no question this is going to have all kinds of great stuff in it. In fact, in this blog entry, you've got these terrific annotated images of the spacecraft that point out all the different parts and components. And you're making interesting discoveries. You mentioned one of them here. I think it's a great little piece of legacy.

Yeah, this one was a real surprise when I came across it while reading about it. I was trying to understand all the parts of the descent stage, which was the rocket jetpack that lowered Curiosity to the surface, which turns out to have been a spacecraft every bit as complicated as any other spacecraft I've ever seen launched. And it has one part, the propulsion system had this regulator that was actually a used space shuttle part. And now I have another friend, a space blogger, who's going to go research that and try to figure out exactly which shuttle it came from and what missions it flew to before it ended its existence on Mars. Just great to know that this one little component is up there on Mars now.

When can we expect to see this book? Sometime next year. I'm really going to try to meet my new due date of the end of this year, which means that it'll still need to be edited and everything. So I'd look for it mid-2017. Between now and then, you've got a lot of work to do on this. So we'll still be seeing blogs, right? And you'll be joining us here on the radio show?

I absolutely will. But my output on the blog will be limited while I'm trying to work on the book. Understandable and well worth waiting for. Thanks very much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. She is, of course, our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, and the author of Curiosity Rover, Design, Planning, and Field Geology on Mars. You can follow the progress of that in her blog as well at planetary.org. I'll be back in a

moment with the CEO, Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, you've been checking the space headlines once again, and it's a source that I love as well. Oh, Jeff Faust? Yeah, his first up. Oh, yeah, I love that. Yeah. So this is you guys, you have to be into this to read this. But it's about the politics of international relations and how the money changes hands for building rockets, using government funds to build rockets and so on and so on. But two things, Matt. First of all, as we talk, SpaceX had to postpone again. And it may be because there was a ship downrange and they waited an extra just a couple minutes.

and they waited an extra just a couple minutes. And they're trying to get the liquid oxygen super, super cold because then it takes up less volume and you can put more in there and have essentially more rocket fuel in the same size rocket. And that little delay may be what held things up. It's not clear. They got a helium bubble or something. But it shows you how complicated it is to launch a rocket. On a separate note, a representative in U.S. Congress, Jim Bridenstine, wants to introduce a bill called the American Space Renaissance Act.

The notion that you've got to have a renaissance of space exploration, to me, to have a renaissance of space exploration, to me, speaks to this longing for the Apollo era. Like back in the good old days, we need a renaissance. The good old days, the NASA budget was 10 times what it is today. 10 times. You think that might be a factor? Not 10% bigger, 10 times. If I may, 1000% bigger. And so until people come to grips with increasing the budget even a little bit, it looks like we're doing that this year, and thinking about the budget in a longer term, the world's largest space agency is still going to wrestle with what to do next. And by the way, in our little business, in the planetary space exploration business, it's not so much about low Earth orbit as about getting big rockets built to go farther and

deeper into space. So we're chipping away. But it is an indication, again, of how much people appreciate space exploration. It brings out the best in us. And when you have a robust space program, whether you are the United States, South Korea, or India, all of whom are doing business together now, it advances your society. It brings out the best in your society. It's an exciting time, Matt. It's good to talk with you. You too, Bill. It's a good time for space, even if it is hard. Well said.

He's Bill Nye. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. We go now to Kim Stanley Robinson and a discussion about humans going to the stars or not. Kim Stanley Robinson has won every major and most of the minor awards for creating great science fiction. Red Mars, the first book in his wonderful trilogy about the colonization and terraforming of the red planet, is soon to become a major television miniseries. He has just turned his Science in the Capital series into a single volume titled Green Earth. And his most recent entirely new novel is Aurora, and it may have stirred up more controversy than anything else he has written. The book is largely a cautionary tale aimed at the starry-eyed dreamers

who, like yours truly, may have believed or still believe that interstellar travel is inevitable and must be achieved. But it is so much more than that, as you'll hear in this extended conversation I had with Stan a few days ago. I look at it ultimately as a triumph, a human triumph, but not at all the sort of triumph you might expect in a book about humankind's magnificent effort to spread itself to other star systems. In fact, as I was reading the book, the phrase that occurred to me very early on in the book was, magnificent folly. I wonder, I hadn't thought of it that way. I'm wondering if it's magnificent, and I do think it may be a folly. But on the other hand, it's humanity has spread over the earth consistently, a drive that is strong in us from early on when we left Africa.

And 50,000 years later, we were everywhere else on the planet, just walking on foot. So in other words, there's this maybe even genetic urge to look for new territory and spread out. I think it's a question of figuring out when that drive is actually pitched to an impossible place and becomes really some other kind of desire, like for immortality or transcendence that isn't really appropriate to the project as it's being described. I see what you mean. So maybe not Magnificent Folly, certainly not by the protagonist in the book, but maybe some hubris by the people who set them on this course hundreds of years before? Sure. I think that's valid. I think it will be a kind of a religious quest that going to the stars,

for one thing, I think once we truly do put all of the problems on the table and try to solve them, we'll realize in advance that they aren't solvable so that we may never even try it. So that this book describes is a kind of a thought experiment saying, well, what if we did, what would be the consequences? And I'm saying in the book that the consequences for the people that we actually send for the generations that follow in the in a starship and a multi-generational starship would be dreadful like being born and dying in a debtors prison in London and no matter how nice their material circumstances would be they would actually be confined in a bad way, and their environment would be breaking down on them.

This is a bad fate that you wouldn't have chosen for yourself. So there would be hubris on the part of the people that would decide to do it anyway, like religious fanatics deciding that no matter the price for their own kids, they needed to do something bizarre. Hmm. I read Orphans of the Sky by the great Robert Heinlein when I was a kid. It had a profound effect on me, and I bet you did too. Yes, yes. The multi-generational starship literature is filled with great stories, and I think that, you know, Universe or Orphans of the Sky by Heinlein is nearly the start, especially in the mainstream of science fiction for most, you know, American readers, especially of our generation. So yeah, that's a sort of a foundational thing. And I would

also include Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop, which was published in the States as Starship, and The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss, and also The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, a sequence by Gene Wolfe, which is really one of my favorite novels ever. So there is a great line of literature on this topic. But even in Heinlein's book, the one that maybe started this line, it's a pretty troubled society. You have some elements of this in Aurora, but you go beyond it, I think, largely based on the fact that we have so much more science now. We understand so much better just how difficult this would be, for reasons I think that weren't even suspected when Heinlein wrote his book. I think that's right. The whole golden age science fiction was a kind of an engineer's literature,

and it was very urban. It's not a coincidence that a lot of these were men, engineers, or the engineering class, and working out of New York City. And they were thinking of the spaceship as a city. And cities do seem to function. But there's a slippage going on there because cities are actually on Earth and take advantage of the contact with Earth's natural systems that make them much, much less artificial than a starship. There was no reason to worry about it. And I would agree with this, that it's a great story space. So you want to tell this story. You tell the story, you don't look at the physical problems involved. But what's interesting at this point is that a new

story can be told. You can take advantage of what we've learned in the sciences, things about our own bodies, like the microbiome, things about ecology, especially in closed biological life support systems, you know, in which there's been some experimentation, not very much. In general, you can even look at the physics problems. We know more about radiation. We know more about propulsion and acceleration, deceleration type issues. When you add all these together, you get a new story, which is really what I think I'm telling here, that casts doubt on the idea. And because the idea is kind of a cultural meme, you know, this notion through our culture that humanity is going to go to the stars, that this is our destiny or our fate, it's a sign of our success, it's a way of

not going extinct, if the sun were to go nova, blah, blah. It's an unexamined and I would have to say unscientific assumption on the part of a lot of people, at least in Western culture, that this is what humanity is meant to do. And I think it's really a good story to tell to say, no, actually, we can't get out of the solar system. The solar system is our neighborhood. But beyond that, is this enormous gulf of empty space, almost empty, that we can't cross. And then that reorients our thoughts as a species and as a civilization. And I must admit that I am guilty of that line of thinking, as have a number of guests who've been on this show. want to get more into the details of why you feel that actual travel of humans to the stars is likely to never happen, or at least not happen for a very long time. But first, a little bit more

about the book itself, beginning with this central character, who is a fascinating person. Tell us about Freya. Well, thank you. That's hard. She's born and brought up on the ship. And as a young person appears to have some oddities, some developmental difficulties. Her parents are sort of chief doctor, chief engineer, you might roughly say, and they're worried. And they're noticing that their studies of the ship's inhabitants, there's about 2000 people in this starship, and they're about the sixth generation out from the leaving of Earth, that they're seeing changes generationally, and that each generation is getting, well, a little smaller, a little slower. They're wondering about island biogeography impacts, but of course it's only been six generations, and they can't be sure what's going on. It's only been six generations and they can't be sure what's going on.

So Freya is an example of what you do when you aren't sure what's going on with a young person. But on the other hand, they grow up, everybody normalizes, and she becomes a sort of central, maybe a totemic type character for the rest of the people in the ship and becomes an important political figure ultimately. Yeah, I think a heroic figure. Yeah, well, thank you. And I think it's funny because I was thinking of Captain McWhir, who is the somewhat stolid British captain of a little tramp steamer caught in Typhoon in Joseph Conrad's wonderful story, Typhoon, who at the end of it, they managed to make it through. And he says, well, I would not want to have lost her, meaning the ship. And, you know, changing an old British McWhir to a young woman on a starship meant that I had to make it an entirely new character. I was often surprised by what happened to Freya is what it comes down to. There are many other terrific characters in this story. One of them is the ship itself.

More about that in a moment, but it's a magnificent creation. I would like to think that we humans could create something this grand someday. Can you just describe the ship to us? Sure. Well, there's two parts. The physical ship is sort of like the 2001 Taurus surrounding a spine so that it's rotating so you get some artificial gravity and the push against the outside. Yeah, the space station, it's even a double Taurus like the 2001 station. Yeah, that's right. It's a sort of standard thing, and I did that because it makes sense. It solves a lot of problems. And in this case, the toruses are broken up so that they're a dodecahedron type.

There's 12 cylinders linked together at angles to make the torus. And each one of those cylinders is a semi-autonomous biome with a different ecology from Earth. So that is a kind of Noah's Ark. As they land wherever they're going, they can bring many, many, many species from Earth. They are trying to keep alive all kinds of ecologies inside this system, old world and new world. That's the two Tauruses. And they're working to feed themselves and to keep alive a kind of Noah's Ark worth of plants and animals along the way. It's powered by nuclear power, and it has a system of acceleration where it's been pushed by laser beams as well as a little sequence of tiny bomblets behind it to get up to one-tenth of light speed headed towards

Tau Ceti. So it's approximately a 200-year voyage. It's 12 light years, but you've got to accelerate and decelerate, so it's not simply 120 years, so a couple hundred years. And all of this is being controlled by a computer that's kind of an artificial intelligence. A quantum computer is included in it, and the quantum computer has enough qubits and is kept in the quantum state. It's a very, very fast computer. And at that point, I had to begin to think about what that would mean in terms of its statements to the humans could easily sound kind of like another human, and it would be a question of what was going on inside that computer's mind. Well, he or it certainly passed my Turing test.

Yes, as she or they, it thinks of itself in the plural and so refers to itself like the royal we. We do this, we do that. It points out that, she points out, that the Turing test is a rather low bar to pass. And what's more interesting is the Winograd test, which, say you're given a sentence like, I threw the bowling ball through the glass table and it broke. And then the question is, what broke? Humans can answer that question pretty much in a snap, but an artificial intelligence needs to have a huge backlog of information and some judgment to be able to distinguish what the

pronoun is referring to. So this Winograd supplement is actually a new test of how intelligent is an artificial intelligence. There you begin to get into super deep waters. And it was a lot of fun. What I had was my chief engineer saying to the computer, have you kept a record of the trip? And the computer says, well, yes, everything that's ever happened has been filmed by my million cameras and tape recorders. So we've got the whole thing. And the chief engineer says, no, make a narrative that includes all the important particulars. So a narrative account that includes all the important particulars is really what Aurora is.

All but the first and last chapters are the computer's attempt to tell the story of what happened. So essentially it has to figure out how to write a novel. And that gave me a lot of laughs because writing a novel is not an algorithm. It's great fun to trace this, as this machine mind teaches itself to write in a way that's worth reading. It's quite fascinating. And of course, we walk a line here between not wanting to give away too much and wanting to talk about this creation of yours. Fortunately, she or they turn out not to have too much in common with Hal 9000. Right. I love the character Hal,

and I think that this mistaken notion of, I'm going to do what's good for the people, you know, you have one, if your algorithm is too simple, then you get into what Karl Popper called monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything. And we all have that. We all would love to have a single cause that explained everything. So we're prone to monocausotaxophilia. But in fact, the universe being what it is, that's not a good way of going at things.

So you need a much more complex algorithm for behavior, for instance. And it quickly goes beyond algorithmic in effect and becomes more like law where judgments need to be made case by case in very subtle ways. So I had a lot of fun with all the aspects of that from telling the story to the AI intervening in the political life and trying to tamp down a little civil war and figure out how to go forward from there when nobody can get away. And there is no internal prison on the ship. The ship itself is a prison. The humans that you've populated this ship with have lost touch with much of their own history, not to the degree that Heinlein wrote about in Orphans of the Sky, or it's the other title for that book, Universe, but still they kind of wonder in some ways about their own past, even though they still have science and they know what they're about.

And I think that it would be different for every person at that point, six generations in. Some people would be scouring the records of the trip itself to try to figure out how they got where they are and what they should do in that moment. They would become historians of the trip with an almost Talmudic intensity. And I didn't really represent any characters like that. But there would be some. And then others are like many people now. What's really important are the people that are right in front of you and the current situation. And whatever happened in the past is really not relevant and not interesting to those people.

And the case of the people on this ship, there has been in their past a couple few generations back, beyond the memory of anybody alive, there was a trauma. Something bad happened that was frightening enough that seemed to threaten the, it was an existential threat in the way that people use it now, in that even knowing what had happened might endanger their ability to go forward successfully. So they repressed that memory. They expunged it from the records, and they didn't tell it to their kids, and the AI was complicit in this. So as they look back at their past, if they do look, some people are going to be able to crack that secret and find out what happened.

Others are not. Others weren't interested in the first place. So yes, I tried to have a complicated internal history going on there. The other great character, I mean, I really think of three lead characters in this story, Freya, the AI, and Freya's mother, who you mentioned briefly as sort of the chief engineer of the ship, probably the most conflicted human on the ship, because she's the only other consciousness that knows all of this truth. Right. That's right. Devi is, I think, the way that a novel calls out characters. And I can say as a novelist that in advance, you don't know these people are going to show up.

But the story calls them out because the story seems to need them and then they develop and seem to take on a life of their own it's a little bit of a cliche but i can say that in certain lucky circumstances it does seem to happen so devi is uh was crucial and was the great gift of that novel for me along with you know her husband badim but Devi is the one that trains the AI and also programs the AI. So it's not, it's sort of like this great Ted Chiang story, the inner life of software, where you don't just program an AI and it pops to life instantly. You also educate it the way you would educate a child. You bring it up, you give it feedback to its first attempts at intelligence, and then it

has a recursive process where it tries to take on board the lessons it's learned. So, Devi was also, well, the AI's mother or teacher, friend, and, you know, it's a huge blow to the AI when Devi dies, because that's what happens to the humans on board, and the AI has to go on. And Devi is aware, she's the engineer but also the ecologist, that understands that they were put in an impossible situation, because there are metabolic rifts, there are choke points in the circling of the elements in an enclosed ecology like that, so that certain elements and chemicals, ecology like that so that certain elements and chemicals, say for instance phosphorus or nitrates,

will get caught in their circling in the system. They'll bond to something else, even to the structure or framework of the ship or else in the soils. And stuck there, it becomes very hard to free them up again without destroying other parts of the process like growing food. So even if you rescue 99.9% every cycle of an element, eventually it's going to clog the system just by a buildup of one thing or another. So she's trying to solve these problems that are essentially impossible to truly solve. What she wants to do is just keep them alive long enough that they get to their target moon, Aurora. And of course what she doesn't know is that Aurora itself is not they get to their target moon, Aurora. And of course, what she doesn't know is that Aurora itself is not the solution to their problems. And, you know, I think the book's been out long enough now that we can talk about these things. Okay, that's a relief.

Yes, I think so. If the book isn't fun to read, you know, knowing in advance what's going to happen, then, you know, that would be bad. Okay, Well, that's coming from the author, folks. So all spoilers are his responsibility. Yes, let's spoil it, Will, here. Before we talk a little bit more about Aurora and this sort of complimentary piece that you wrote for Scientific American, a couple more thoughts that I had about the story, I will say, and I'm not going to reveal unless you do, that there is literally a tremendous unexpected change of direction. And I do mean that literally in this story. It's at the core of the story, which makes it absolutely fascinating. And related to that is the fact that these people are going so incredibly fast. You do a good job of establishing for us sort of the scale of their velocity. And it's so far beyond anything that we have any human experience with now.

Their speed, their velocity becomes a really serious problem, doesn't it? Yes, yes. And I guess I'm willing to just tell the story. I am the author. Yes, yes. And I guess I'm willing to just tell the story. I am the author. Aurora proves to be essentially pseudo alive, in any case, poisonous. It's uninhabitable. And so people get an analactic shock. They don't know exactly why. One person proposes it might be a prion, but that's not right. It couldn't be. They end up calling it the bug or the thing. And it's extremely small. And they are not biochemists, and they don't understand,

but they're dying on Aurora. At that point, they've got a terrible quandary. There's a Mars-like moon in this Tau Ceti system that they could possibly terraform. But terraforming, when you've only got one starship worth of equipment is a long process, and probably they will die out before they manage the terraforming, because as I said before, the starship itself has a limited functioning lifetime, including its nuclear power plant. So this could be one of these kind of Samuel Beckett end of the society type novels where they all just went down and said, oh gosh, this is a bad idea, and they all died. I pondered that. And I thought, that's a dismal story to inflict on readers. And if you were in that situation, what would you do? And your best option would be to try to refurbish the starship, point it back towards Earth, and see if you could get back home. Because you know

you can live at home, and every one of their other options is essentially not viable not over the long haul so they try to get back to the earth system well the thing is that they they can recapture some fuel out of the gas giants to power their little bombs to get back up to a tenth of light speed heading back home but then when they get into the solar system they have no fuel to slow down. They are essentially shooting into the solar system at an enormous speed, which I actually had to modulate after discussions with friends at NASA Ames, to make it possible for me to propose a new science fiction story, which people at the Planetary Society and members of the Planetary Society will understand. The using of the sun and the big gas giants as gravity swings

to just swing yourself around in Cat's Cradle style, coming in and shedding velocity at each turn by doing a negative gravity swing rather than a positive gravity swing. My friends down at NASA Ames consulted with me and told me about how fast one could go and still expect that to have even the slightest possibility working. So I had my ship slow down to that speed. Also, the gas giants had to be in the right positions. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune had to be in the right positions for this swing around to work. So I had my friend

Carter Scholes run an astronomical program that puts all the planets through their paces into the future. And some Planetary Society members maybe have these programs. And he told me that the best year for it would be 2894. That's why the ship is coming in in the year 2894. So I did my homework, and I'm irritated extremely with some of my colleagues who have critiqued my science, the physics of trajectory, etc., as if I had just waved my hands when actually I got technical help to run the whole thing through in a way that works. Now, granted— It's brilliant, by the way. Thank you. And of course, these— I need that at this point.

Most of us are fans of the Voyager missions, and we know that there are some pretty fortunate alignments that take place now and then. Yes. And I wanted to make it such that if you looked at it, and here Chris McKay was hugely helpful. He said, Stan, make it so that when they look at it, they see that it would be possible, but don't give them every fact so that they can check your math on it, which was brilliant literary advice. how much the ship weighs. I don't say how close it comes to the sun. I blurred the actual figures involved so that it didn't become a mathematical exercise. But I made sure that it was physically possible by discussing it in detail with my expert consultants. I'll only add that part of their deceleration is thanks to the fact that this ship is a hybrid. As you said, it's driven by, well, really millions of little H-bombs, fusion reactions, explosions, much like the Daedalus spaceship that was proposed decades ago. But it's also a sail-driven ship. Unfortunately,

we humans back here in the solar system, I guess, have dismantled the laser system that helped the ship accelerate toward Tau Ceti. But they do get it going again. Right. That was one factor in that really the negative gravity assist of the planets and the sun would not be adequate, even if I reduced speed to 1% of the speed of light. if I reduced speed to 1% of the speed of light. So I had to introduce a little bit of laser help and also this notion of magnetic drag, highly controversial for the interstellar medium. It works best the closer you get to a star, I was told, by sources I trust. And so I had that deployed at that first passing of the sun, which is really the crucial pass. So in other words, I made an amalgam of methods to slow down, which is really what you would need to do. But it's still a great runaway train type story, I think.

More from Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Aurora, is just ahead. This is Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo. I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days. You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio. Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the Board of Directors. I'll be able to do even more to help the Society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org.

I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration? Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer and what all the other candidates think at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, talking today with one of my favorite authors across all genres. Kim Stanley Robinson has already delivered several spoilers regarding his latest novel, Aurora, the story of 2,000 men and women and one artificial intelligence that cross the gulf between stars, only to learn that their intended new home is toxic.

stars, only to learn that their intended new home is toxic. Almost incredibly, they decide to begin another epic journey, a return to the green hills of Earth. And I still am so reluctant, even talking to the author, to give away whether they make it. That may become more obvious as we continue this conversation. So you have this hybrid ship that tries to get around the biggest problem here, which is that space is just too damn big. You talk quite a bit, both in the novel, but also in this companion piece that I mentioned in Scientific American, which I highly recommend. People can take a look at it for free online. and we'll provide the link on the show page that you can get to from planetary.org slash radio. Well, it really comes down to the old rocket equation. Bring enough fuel to get your ship there.

You have to bring even more fuel because you keep increasing the mass of the ship. And I guess you get to this problem of the possibility that there's no Goldilocks option, that it's not that it's too big, it's not that it's too small. There may be no just right area sort of in the middle between the two of those extremes. Right. You put it well, because I think what happens is that those two parameters cross each other without ever meeting so that you don't get a Goldilocks, you get a big empty space. You want the ship as big as possible for ecological reasons, for human reasons, and for the success of your arrival, your inhabitation of the new system, as big as possible. In essence, it'd be great to just shoot the earth there into another planetary system. So the ship should be that big.

On the other hand, the bigger it gets, the more fuel to get it going and the more fuel to slow it down. And this is a kind of vicious circle trap where the faster you get it going, the more fuel you need to slow it down. So you want to go very fast to shorten the trip time. You want to go very slow so that you don't have to carry along so much decelerant fuel. So again, you've got parameters that carry along so much decelerant fuel. So again, you've got parameters that work against each other and perhaps never meet. What you get, I think, is an empty hole in the middle where nothing will work. This is the point that I've

been making. And now I want to say, you said this before earlier, I want to pick up on this. For a very long time, say thousands of years pass and we create a viable permaculture on earth everything's going well sustainably and stably on earth then say we have inhabited our solar system with successful space stations on all the big planets and planetary moons everywhere we can do it and we're out there and we're functioning we're testing systems we're seeing what works and what doesn't we've had some tests of the system of maybe enclosing a an asteroid terrarium as i described them in 2312 yeah and and having a something go on in there like you know the russian cosmonauts in the 1970s subjecting themselves to horrific isolation just to test things and you're finding that the system kind of works.

And you work out the gigantic amounts of power it would need to push a starship up to speed with a laser push on its back end. In other words, what I'm saying is not that an interplanetary starship is flatly impossible. It's not like faster-than-light travel. But the difficulties are so extreme that this notion, like there's a hundred year starship group, an advocacy group, there's people talking about doing it as soon as possible, blah, blah. They are deceiving themselves as to the difficulties. They're playing a kind of a game and they're not playing the game with the net up, as some of my colleagues would put it.

You also, I mean, in this scenario that you just painted, we've learned to care for our planet, and we've learned to get the most we can out of our solar neighborhood. You're not a big fan of the argument that says we have to establish a human presence outside our own solar system because we need the plan B, because we may make Earth unlivable. Oh, that's a terrible thought. No, I hate that idea. I think that kills human support for the space program more than any other thing that the space community says. I always oppose that. It's elitist. It's wrong. It's not taking into account the post traumatic syndrome. It's not taking into account the notion that we might only stay healthy on earth itself, that all of these other places are untested. And essentially, it's a dream of escape.

It's like, oh, my problems are so big, I'm just going to move. It's like, you know, in the 19th century, you could say my problems are so big, I'm leaving this Europe, I'm going to the new world, and things will be better there. And this is the analogy that people have when they're thinking, well, let's do it on Mars, or let's do it even in another star system, which is ridiculous, because they're not thinking of the distances involved there. It's a bad analogy. It's an analogy that is deceptive because everything about it is wrong except for the hope to make things better. Here in our situation, we have no planet B. The hope to make things better has to actually curve back in to where the problems are, which is on Earth, and we have to solve the problems on Earth. Now, in that effort, the solar system is a useful part of the neighborhood. I love space science.

I love the Planetary Society because I love all the planets in this solar system. I've done as much thinking about the planets of this solar system as any other living person because I'm a science fiction writer, and a lot of my fiction has been said in the solar system in the next couple hundred years. I'm still a huge advocate of that. I still think we could terraform Mars. If it takes, you know, 20,000 years rather than 200 years, so what? It's still a great idea, and I hope that it happens. So my argument here has to do with two things. In the time of our emergency that we have right now of making a sustainable civilization on Earth where we don't trash the planet and cause a mass extinction event, no other planetary body near or far is going to help us in that cause. We have to solve it here. We can learn some lessons out of the solar system, but we have to solve it here.

Then in the longer term, we can't get out of the solar system, but we have to solve it here. Then in the longer term, we can't get out of the solar system to interstellar space. We can't colonize the rest of the galaxy. It's too big. The distance to even the nearest, well, to Tau Ceti is 10 light years, and it's not the nearest, Alpha Centauri, but let's put it this way. The distance from Earth to the moon, and then the distance from the Earth to Tau Ceti, it's 10 billion times further away. And this is a case of a quantitative difference turning into a qualitative difference. And at that point, you have a completely different problem on your hands that we can't really solve. So when people say, oh, we've got to have a second egg, a place to put ourselves if we destroy the Earth, it's just a false consciousness. It's a bad thought to have. And a lot of people recognize this instinctively and say, oh, you're one of these goddamn space cadets and you don't care about Earth. And you're a fool.

And the truth is there's a lot of, they're right. There are elements in what you've just said in a discussion I had with my old boss, Lou Friedman, last fall, who has also written about interstellar travel and how unlikely human interstellar travel is. And there was criticism from our listeners of him as a pessimist. And I suspect there may be some for you this time around. In fact, I know there has been. But just to add more evidence to the fact that you are no pessimist, I mean, you had in Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, that famous Mars trilogy,

they did terraform Mars in record time, which now I guess you're saying, okay, a little bit of dramatic license there. But in 2312, you talked about spreading humans across the solar system. I mean, for goodness sake, in Galileo's dream, you had underground colonies on Io. Yeah. Well, I did. Galileo's dream is more of a Fantasia in the Renaissance style than it is hard science fiction. And great fun, by the way. Great fun. dream is more of a fantasia in the renaissance style than it is hard science fiction and great

great fun by the way great fun i love doing that because it took some restraints off of me um but yes i am not a pessimist and i neither is lou uh lou is a good friend of mine and i um i i respect his judgment in these matters very much and i think we're kind of in concert on this but i've read that I must have turned pessimistic in my old age, and I'm renouncing my old work, etc., etc., something bad must have happened to me, blah, blah, but people aren't thinking. Their notion that going to the stars is a cool thing is a religious idea. What they want is personal immortality, and being secular, rational people are thinking, dang, maybe I don't get personal immortality. being secular rational people are thinking dang maybe i don't get

personal immortality so what's the next best thing well the genetic imperative your genes your species i want species immortality and then you think well wait oh the you know the the earth is going to be engulfed by the sun going nova in something like five billion years and without even thinking about what five billion years represents in a species lifetime oh god that's bad we need to go somewhere else it's very much like trying to encompass the distance to the other stars yes it's a series of category errors and the domino effect of of essentially a religious notion or a plain five-year-old wish. When you first begin to realize that things die and that then the secondary fallout of that, that you too will die someday, then there's a wish. I wish that wouldn't happen. And everybody

has that. What you do with that can be, well, it can be smarter, it can be foolish, it can be realistic or it can be unrealistic. And everybody makes their own judgment calls on these things. But what I'm saying is there's a whole lot of confusion going on. And the space community has an element in it that's saying, well, interstellar travel, it's our destiny. It's a cool thing. It's obvious obvious if you don't like it you're a pessimist but let's just look at the situation as it stands the universe that we've been given the physical laws that we've been given is well we only have these you know eight planets and this most incredible solar system that we're in which really is a basket of marvels and this earth which

looks to be like a miracle, but in any case is the place we evolved and the thing that keeps us alive and healthy. It's not a bad thing just to accept the limits of the physical situation that we're given and say, how do you maximize that? Just very briefly, I want to go back to your comment about faster than light travel. And, you know, people know I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie, and I'd love to see it happen, but listeners to this show will remember the quote-unquote inventor,

physicist Miguel Alcubierre, essentially telling us on this program, don't hold your breath. We are stuck with, if anybody, even if we want to send a robotic craft to another star in any kind of practical time, we do have this problem of propulsion, of course. It doesn't stop there. You mentioned a phrase very briefly, the challenge of, well, what we've learned from island biogeography.

And you need to explain that. Sure, but only to the limits of my understanding, which is small. Sure, but only to the limits of my understanding, which is small. What happens when a species or a biome, a group of species, gets to a new island, like in the Pacific, is evolution takes its course and various processes morph the species that are there into a new type of community. And there are countervailing forces. Sometimes it helps to be a bigger animal on the island. Sometimes it helps to be smaller. So you get both giganticism and dwarfism. But one thing's for sure, you change. And the bacteria that are in us that are now they're saying maybe 50% of the DNA in a human body is not human DNA. Just two weeks ago, I was saying 80%, but they've shifted that.

That may keep on shifting, but for sure we have a big bacterial load that is part of the biome that is us individually. Well, the bacteria evolve too, and they have a rate of evolution that's faster than the bigger creatures that they live inside of. So our bacteria mutate and change and evolve faster than the big creatures. And if you're caught in a small set of rooms, which is what a starship would be, essentially one trillionth of the size of the Earth, even if you've got a nice big starship like mine, the rates of evolution will diverge. There'll be no new inputs from the rest of the planetary systems. You'll only have what you started with. So things will begin to go haywire and to degrade. Bacteria will continue

to do fine for a really long time, but the larger organisms may begin to suffer from various excesses and lacks and the ecological cycles, as I talked about before. So that, say, the bacteria and the plants on board this ship, they last for 10 million years, but the humans have gone extinct in 100,000 years. Is that a success? Well, from human terms, no, it's not a success. No, I would agree. So many challenges that the denizens of this ship would have to face. You make an interesting point that to be able to deal with these shipboard society on a multi-generational starship, it's probably not going to be a freewheeling democracy. In fact, very nearly the opposite. Yes, it just occurs to me. And here,

of course, in sociology, we get into even shakier ground because humans are so adaptable. But let's put it this way, two things, there would be population limits, both a minimum and a maximum in order to keep going. You'd have to keep all the jobs on the ship filled, but you wouldn't want to overwhelm the amount of food involved. So there would be fairly tight parameters on how many people were alive at any one time. That means population control. You would not be free to reproduce at will or not reproduce at will. And then the other thing is a certain number of jobs would be crucial and they have to be filled. You wouldn't just be able to do what you want or do nothing. So work and reproduction would be controlled by the society quite intently for survival purposes.

controlled by the society quite intently for survival purposes. And that, struck me, sounded pretty totalitarian. That's where the society is intervening in individual choice in a way that we in Western democracies aren't really used to. And whether people would like that or not, you can argue about all day. You could say, well, people just adjust to the society they're in. If it's normal when you're a kid, it's normal forever. Maybe so, but maybe not. Because, well, you just can't say. You could say, coming from our perspective, a totalitarian state is a nasty place and there will be rebels. People will be rebels without a cause, except they'll have a cause. that all I can say is that going generation after generation, if some charismatic person were to say, look, this sucks, we've got to revolt, everybody gets to do what they want, and that could crash the whole system. In fact, there is a second starship, which our protagonists, they only learn about late in the story, and apparently that other ship is lost because of some kind of unrest or an uprising. Yes, yes. It made sense to me that you would send two just to be able to exchange DNA and be able to have a kind of a backup and some sense that you're on a shared mission. And the thing is, if two starships are headed off in direction and one of them just, bang, breaks up in flight, the other one is not going to be able to figure out what went on, won't be able to do the forensics. They'll have some records,

they'll have to guess. But it could be that political unrest led to some, you know, suicide bomber, you know, blowing the thing up, or doing something wrong. Or it could be that they ran into something, you know, when you're going at 10th of the speed of light, I was told that you only have to run into something that is a certain number of kilograms. It wouldn't have to be a very big object. And boom, you're done for. Yeah. And space, interstellar space is empty, but it's not quite empty enough.

Right. Well, who knows? And you would certainly have a magnetic shielding kind of pushing things aside as you flashed forward. But what if somebody turned off the shield in a kind of political protest at a bad moment. I mean, the thing is, there would be no way of knowing and you would be going on with this mystery and with this existential knowledge that it could happen to you too at any time. I want to come back to this theme. You were just talking about the presence, the growth of rebels in the society, and even more than rebels, people who just sort of sidestep the rules, sidestep the society and try and live in the shadows.

That seems to be a recurring theme with you, I remember it, from the Mars trilogy. Yes. Well, it strikes me that there's a strong contrarian element in all of us, and especially teenage years or the point where you yourself are becoming an independent adult, you want really to have some autonomy. And whatever system that you're in, it begins to look like the dead hand of the past. And people begin to look like they're messing with your head and with your business. This is a very natural urge that I think all of us have felt and maybe always feel. You never know. People are different on that. But if it got even slightly organized or if it got exacerbated by a really controlling society, then you would have dissatisfactions that would

manifest in various ways. Like they repressed the knowledge of the ship that died. Well, the return of the repressed is a very common psychoanalytical term that seems to have a lot of reality. And the return is often more violent than the original thing that got repressed. It's sort of like we're steam engines in a way. You build up pressure and then it explodes. book that I highly recommend. There was only one thing that bothered me, and I've since learned that other people made this criticism and that you've addressed it, and that is that so much of the technology that's available to the people on the ship just doesn't seem as advanced as it ought to be for people living so far in the future. Yes. Well, I wonder about that. I guess what I'm thinking is that at a certain point, our technological advances are going to run into various limits that are based on physics itself. That when things get small enough, they begin to get squiggly and act different. The different physical laws seem to come into play so that things like friction or mass change. And our ability to understand and control, particularly control what goes on, will get less and less powerful.

So in other words, I'm talking about rates of change in terms of the logistic curve, which is the S-curve, that as you begin to gather power in some ways, you get a curve that begins to rise over time. So you get the extrapolative curve that is curving upwards, and it looks like it's shooting towards the heavens, like, say, human population. Just plot human population over time. You see it shooting off towards the sky. And so there's 7 billion people now. If you just were to follow the curve in the way that it's been going, then in 50 years, the population would be 50 billion. But you think of the limits involved of what the planet can give you, and you get the logistic curve. You can look it up on Wikipedia. can give you, and you get the logistic curve. You know, you can look it up on Wikipedia. The logistic curve shows up everywhere in nature. As you begin to exploit all the resources,

you are less and less likely to go into geometric or even arithmetic expansion. You're likely to get into an asymptotic approach to flatlining, or even have a rise and a crash, as in population dynamics. So, you know, as a science fiction writer or just as a human being, what you have to do is realize that there's hardly ever straight line extrapolation. There's hardly ever increasing returns that keep on increasing forever. It's more likely than this universe to be the logistic curve, the S-curve. So, okay, we're in a period of great technological advances. Is that going to go on forever? No, it's not. We're going to reach the limits of how we can manipulate

physical matter. So we might be able to even know through our electron microscopes how things work and not figure out a way to manipulate them because they're at too small of a scale or too large of a scale. So you can't get to the stars. You can't actually do building atom by atom because things squiggle around at that level. There are things we're not going to be able to do. Stan, Ray Kurzweil is on the phone. He says he wants to have a word with you. Okay. Well, I wonder what he would say to this. There's this sort of, I call it this MIT viewpoint, which I think is radically anti-real. In other words, these people are science fiction writers, and I'm a science fiction writer. And when I see science fiction writers saying, this isn't just a science fiction story, this is what's really going to happen. There's going to be a singularity, There's going to be a this or that. We're going to live forever, blah, blah. It's a science fiction story. I see it. I recognize it on site. And I don't like it when people pretend that science fiction is more than science fiction, because there you get Scientology. There you get frozen heads and we'll bring you

back to life 10,000 years later, as long as you pay us $10,000 right now. In other words, these are scams. And I would be happy to get on stage with Chris Weiler or anybody else and talk about science fiction turning into scams. That is a debate I would love to moderate. You have been so generous with your time. I hope and trust that our listeners will enjoy this conversation as much as I have. There is just one other thing I want to bring up. And again, I'm not going to give away the context, but you and I talked a few days ago about something that's in the book. It's actually a key passage in the book. And it is the most accurate, evocative, frightening, and joyous account of body surfing that I'll probably ever read.

You've obviously been there and done that. Yes. Well, thank you for that. I have. I grew up in Orange County, and really my salvation as a teenager was my love of body surfing. Anything else going wrong in high school life and reality was utterly and completely overwhelmed by the joy of body surfing down at San Clemente, Newport Beach. These were the main places for us. So the ocean taught me a lot, which is you get 50 yards offshore and a lot of problems slip away. But some new problems come into play, which is that Mother Ocean is a powerful, powerful thing and dangerous. Cowabunga, Stan.

Yeah. Outside. Thank you so much. This has just been delightful. Thank you, Matt. Kim Stanley Robinson is the best-selling author of novels that have won him the big three in science fiction, Hugo's, Nebula's, Locus Awards. His more than 20 books, the mars trilogy that we mentioned

a couple of times in this conversation uh there's 40 signs of rain a part of another very well known and and wonderful trilogy gosh so many books that i love the years of rice and salt uh fantastic alternate history story and uh 2312 to say nothing of galileo's dream which is just a romp. His latest book that we've been talking about is Aurora. Do you want to say anything before we go about Green Earth, which has come out even more recently? Oh, yes.

That trilogy, 40 Signs of Rain, 50 Degrees Below, 60 Days and Counting, I took the opportunity to compress it by about 15%. I edited it down so it would fit into a single volume. It's called Green Earth, and I think that's embarrassing, though it might be to confess it. I think the compression did the story a lot of good. I love this new version of it most of all and prefer it to the longer version, and I'm happy to have it out there.

I have a lot to thank Anne Grohl at Random House and Jane Johnson, my editor at HarperCollins UK, for letting me do this. And anybody interested, this is my Washington DC climate change novel and I think the green earth version is actually quite a corker. So I'm really happy to have it out there. I'd also like to add that, hey, terraforming Mars, I'm still completely on board with it, but the percolates in the soil and the apparent lack of nitrogen mean that it's more complicated than we knew when I wrote my Mars trilogy. But these are not stoppers. These are just slower downers or little problems that I trust that we will solve. So in case people are wondering

that if I've become a nattering nabob of negativism on everything, no, I still am a great fan of the Mars project and hope we get there as soon as possible. Thank you for that, Stan. And after all, Earth will still just be a few measly tens of millions of kilometers away. Next door. So, Aurora, the book that we've spent most of our time talking about, was just published last year by Orbit.

It's available in all the usual places. Kim Stanley Robinson lives in Davis, California, annoyingly far from the Pacific Ocean that he loves. We're going to visit with another guy who I know has done his share of body surfing. That's my friend Bruce Batts as we go to this week's edition of What's Up. Another week, another What's Up with Bruce Batts on the Sky Blind. So once again, no JPL gift for you. Maybe next week I'll see you in person and be able to hand it over. But welcome.

But I'm right where I'm supposed to be, in the office and everything. Yeah, I'm the one who's not. So sorry about that. What's up? Well, if you're in the right location on the planet, on March 9th or 8th, depending on your location, there is a total solar eclipse visible from parts of Indonesia and the Pacific Ocean, with a partial solar eclipse visible from Eastern Asia, much of Australia, and Hawaii. Check that out.

If you're not there and not planning on traveling there, you can still check out the planets that are easy to see. Jupiter now coming up on its March 8th opposition when it's on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. So it'll be rising around sunset and setting around dawn. And then Mars comes up around midnight in the east and Saturn comes up a couple hours later. Venus is low in the eastern horizon in the pre-dawn. Alright, we move on to this week in space history. In 1979 Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter. Yay! And one year ago, Dawn became the first spacecraft to orbit Ceres and the first spacecraft to orbit

two bodies outside the Earth-Moon system, having already orbited Vesta. Quite an accomplishment, something we will talk with Mark Raymond again about very soon. And now, of course, it's just flying, skimming the surface of that big object. We move on to random space bag. I don't remember rhythm being a part of this in the past. I like it. Just start introducing instruments. It's about time. In this case, the instrument was my desk just seemed appropriate considering the day we're recording this to say an earth year is about 365 and a quarter days long which is why we add a leap day to make up for that quarter and now and

then a few more seconds we do that's why you got the few seconds here, a few seconds there, the occasional hundred years where there's no leap day, but there are others where there is. So you got to tweak it because it's not exactly 365 and a quarter, but it comes awfully close. Seems kind of an embarrassment. You know, the aliens might want to make fun of us about, but okay, we just maybe someday we'll go by stardate or something like that. We're ready for the contest. We asked you, what is the approximate peak wavelength of the sun's electromagnetic radiation, say, to the nearest 100 nanometers? How do we do, Matt?

This one threw people a little bit. I think it held down the numbers a bit, though not much. Still had a very big response. And it was Melody Chan in British Columbia who was chosen by Random.org as this week's winner. That is, if she got this right, she said the sun's peak wavelength is about 500 nanometers, and you only wanted it within about 100. So is it close enough? Yeah, close enough. I just wanted to, that's why I was shooting for 500 nanometers. It's pretty approximately close. Well then, Melody, congratulations.

You are the winner of a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, and I think this is the last week for a while, a set of those year-in-space wall and desk calendars from yearinspace.com. We will put those in the mail, get everything off to you very soon. Then we had people who talked about the color that 500 nanometers represents. And the plurality of people seem to agree, as did Todd Yampole and Stephen Coulter. They described it in the same way. It's not that easy being green.

It's not indeed. So, yeah, it peaks roughly in the green. A few people thought it leaned more into the yellow. One of those, and this is becoming a weekly thing, although I can't promise that, Dave Fairchild in Shawnee, Kansas. He's the guy who's been sending us these little limericks and poems. Here's this week's. The answer to your question is 500, which is right, and that's the color yellow, though our sun is really white. The reason it looks yellow is our atmospheric haze, at least until it moves into its red gigantic stage. All right, so Dave, really got to send you a T-shirt, I guess. He has also done a poem, an epic poem, that you're in.

You get a stanza, I get a stanza, Bill, Emily, Casey. We'll have to put that up on the website, maybe on the show page. That's pretty cool. And you get a stanza, and you get a stanza. Planetary.org slash radio, where the show page is, and we'll post it there. I'll copy it over. It's pretty entertaining. So thank you, Dave. And congratulations, Melody. We're ready for the next one. Who was the first person to do an EVA, an extravehicular activity in space, in a spacesuit that did not have life support coming from an umbilical? Though there was a safety cord, safety umbilical, oxygen and the like was self-contained in the spacesuit?

Who was the first person to do that? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 8th. That'd be March 8th, Tuesday, March 8th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And if you're the winner, if you're chosen by Random.org and have the right answer, you'll get an itelescope.net account, access to that worldwide network of telescopes, take some pictures, look at some stuff, anything you want, northern, southern hemisphere, you'll find them at itelescope.net

and, of course, a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Everybody got my joke last show. So many people. Yes, my joke. Yes, yes, you're a funny man. Yeah, when I said it's... It's all planned. Yeah, absolutely, of course.

Everything's planned on this show. I said the deadline was February 30th, which, of course, doesn't exist in this universe as far as we know. Leap, leap day. Leap day day. I like that. Okay, we got it right, though, this time. Well, you know, it did exist back in the days of Julius Caesar before Augustus moved the days to August. Oh, so that was in the Julian calendar, there was a 30-day February?

That is my understanding, and that Augustus was ticked off that July had more days, Julius July, than Augustus is August. So we have one emperor to thank and one to feel bad for. And I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about bleach. Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who knows that cleanliness is next to godliness. He joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its Star-Crossed members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.