Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - James Cameron on the Science of Avatar

Episode Date: May 24, 2010

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The Science of Pandora, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Is Avatar a fantasy? Perhaps, but if so, it's the most science-grounded fantasy ever put on the big screen. Today you'll hear its creator, James Cameron, talk about the facts behind the fiction. Bill Nye is back with a commentary phoned in from the road, and Bruce Betts will join me on the road to the night sky

when we get together for this week's installment of What's Up. First up is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society blog. Emily, nothing but good news on today's report, beginning with good news about Voyager 2. That's right. It turns out that engineers were quite correct. There was a flipped bit in Voyager's flight data system. They figured out which one it was. They commanded Voyager to flip it back. It did, so it's still not quite transmitting science data yet, but that should start up within a day or two. Excellent. Now, tell us about what was really a whole flotilla of spacecraft that just launched

from Japan. That's right. It was one launch vehicle carrying six different spacecraft. It was quite an exciting launch to follow. The major payload was Akatsuki, which is the Venus Climate Orbiter, also known as Planet C. It's going to arrive at Venus in December of this year and go into an equatorial orbit, which is different from Venus Express that's there now, which is in a polar orbit. Akatsuki was the main payload, but then behind it came Icaros, the Japanese solar sailcraft that hopefully our listeners have heard about before. And then also headed out to Venus is a spacecraft named Unitech-1. Actually, today I heard it has been renamed Shinnon, which is a university-built spacecraft that's broadcasting a ham radio

signal. It's the first student-built spacecraft to be sent to deep space. In addition to that, there are three mini-sats that were left in Earth orbit. So it was six spacecraft for the price of one launch. Yeah, quite a deal. And those must be very proud university students. The other piece of good news comes from a spacecraft that has been sending back nothing but good news for years. And that, of course, is Cassini. Tell us about the latest from Enceladus. That's right. It had its 11th flyby of Enceladus. You'd think these things were starting to get routine, but it's never routine at Enceladus. There is always something new. And this time it returned what I would call the most amazing photo I have seen of Enceladus. It's not the most aesthetically beautiful one, I think, but the most amazing one.

You have in the foreground the black night side of Enceladus. You can see its ridges and silhouette against Saturn's rings, which are lit from behind. And then behind that, you see Titan practically in eclipse with its atmosphere lit from behind by the sun. So it's a ring shape rising behind the rings. And then Enceladus's fountains are crossing the whole image in front of it. It's just an absolutely mind-bendingly stunning image. And please do go to the blog to check it out. It is spectacular. And it's like a four-frame sequence.

You're really flying right toward the plumes. Yes, and Cassini really does, in fact, fly right straight through those plumes to sample, scoop up little particles that have come out of Enceladus and taste them with its science instruments. So it's really that exciting. Very tasty.

Well, how nice just to get good news. But whatever the news is, we'll check in with you again next week. Talk to you then, Matt. Emily Lactual is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. I'll be right back with James Cameron and others talking about the science of Pandora. But first, here's Bill. Hey, Bill and I, the planetary guy here.

I'm on the road. I'm en route. I may be going to Washington, D.C. to attend a hearing where the administrator of NASA, the world's largest space exploration agency, is going to be interviewed by a couple of old astronauts. And by old, I mean people that have been to the moon, have walked on the moon. And everybody's concerned that the deck is stacked against Charles Bolden because these people carry considerable weight with us. They are international heroes.

They were the single combat warriors that went to this desolate place and made these remarkable discoveries. And so we have great reverence for them. Now, the staff of the Planetary Society from time to time criticizes me when I say this is a generational problem or generational feature. Because the implication is that if you're old, you want to go back to the moon. If you're young, you want to go to someplace different. That's not quite right.

If you want to go back to the moon, you're almost certainly an older person or an older thinking person. It's the young thinkers like Dr. Louis Friedman, who's about to retire, Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon. These are generally considered older guys, septuagenarians, octogenarians, but they want to go beyond the moon. Coincidence? You decide. The United States isn't going to be a world leader in space by going back to the moon, a place we went 40 years ago.

Well, it's time to go someplace new, exciting, and cool. I know I say this often, but the reason is the debate continues. What seems obvious to many, many members of the Planetary Society is somehow not obvious to congressional leaders who have workers in their districts and want to support that instead of doing exploration. We've turned NASA into a jobs program. We're not helping things. Come on, everybody. Let's influence our political leaders and change the world. I got a five, so I'm the planetary guy. A capacity crowd gathered at the California Institute of Technology's Beckman Auditorium a few weeks ago. A panel of Caltech scientists were joined on stage by the man responsible for Avatar, the wildly successful story that takes place on the fantastic moon of a gas giant planet circling a nearby star.

What fascinates me most about James Cameron is that he is both a master storyteller and someone who passionately loves science and the people who conduct it. Cameron was last heard on this program talking about his documentary, Aliens of the Deep. This time, Planetary Radio was given permission to record the entire event. You can find the unedited discussion at planetary.org slash radio. Here are some of the highlights. You'll also hear Caltech astronomer Robert Hurt,

who moderated the conversation that evening. We had to create a lot of backstory for the film, and one of my ideas was instead of zapping around the galaxy and jump through wormholes or jump to light speed and all that very fanciful, more distant future stuff, I wanted to make it a kind of more intermediate future, if you will, where there's some actual technical logic to how they move around. So we made it Alpha Centauri AB system so that it's only 4.4 or 4.5 light years away.

I mean, you guys know these facts better than me. So anything I say that's wrong, just hold it for the question and answer portion. But the idea was we – They're checking Wikipedia, as you taught. Yeah, so we make it the closest star system, which means that if it's a sublight travel, it can be reached in some reasonable number of years, and then we collapse that for the main character by making him a meat sickle

in some kind of cryogenic suspension. So the idea is it takes them five and a half, I think, or six years to get out there at.75 C or something like that. The ship was configured to be a combination antimatter engine and beamed energy from Earth with some giant laser. So that big mirror on the ship is actually a thermal shield. There would have been a big light sail at some point that got cut away or retracted for redeployment later. That mirror just protected the habitable portion of the ship from incineration by the beamed energy. So it would be beamed energy outbound and then use the antimatter engine for deceleration into the Alpha Centauri A system.

Then it kind of works in reverse on the way back. It's not clear you thought about this very much. We thought about it to an unhealthy level. I tried to make it sort of not completely fanciful technology so that it felt a little more near future and so that it put limitations on the future sort of economy of interstellar commerce. Because if you're going to go someplace, first of all, whatever you find has got to be unbelievably valuable,

50,000 times more valuable than gold in the economy of Earth to get it back. Secondly, you're going to refine it there and bring back only the highly refined, maybe even productized, to be brought back. Now, the other thing we never say in the film is what unobtainium is for. be brought back. Now, the other thing we never say in the film is what unobtainium is for. And, I mean, my rationale is that unobtainium, being a room temperature superconductor, is critical to the containment of fusion generating plants, and it's the key to the power, the energy economy of 22nd century Earth. But we never spell it out because the point is that historically it's been gold, it's been spices, it's been animal pelts,

it's been diamonds, it's been all kinds of things that have caused the colonialism and imperialism historically. So we didn't need to say what it was because that just made it specific and it pushed specific buttons as opposed to just there's always some damn thing that one group needs that the other group is sitting on or has that causes them to get in a ship go somewhere and shoot them that's that's my thumbnail history of the last 500 years so the other clip the other thing we see in that clip is, of course, our first introduction to Pandora is the reflection in the radiation shield.

And we don't find a terrestrial planet in the sense of Earth sitting there with maybe a small moon or two, but we see it orbiting a gas giant. Why did you choose this kind of unusual scenario of a moon orbiting a much larger gas giant to be the setting for your world? Initially, really, and this is true of so many of the images in the film, it just looked cool. You know, no, really, I mean, so much of what we did in terms of coming up with this very complex back story was literally just reverse engineering a cool image. Floating mountains. You have to come up with some kind of rationale.

I figured if Pandora was going to look Earth-like with continents and oceans and clouds, just cutting to it in space, it would have been hard to notice the specifics that made it another planet. But if I put it in orbit around a gas giant, all of a sudden you know that's not Earth. You know it's something else. And the idea that a habitable moon, you know, to me that was an interesting idea. And when this was first written in 1995, I wasn't even thinking about Europa

or the other possible moons that might harbor life in our solar system. It just seemed like a cool idea. But, I mean, so much has been found about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that there might be life on Enceladus. There might be life underneath, obviously, in the liquid ocean in Europa. These are really cool ideas. So at some level, were you just thrilled that science caught up with your imagination, vindicated the idea of Jovian worlds orbiting in the capital zones

of other stars like we've found examples of? Yeah, I think it's so cool. I mean, I hope what we can do tonight is just sort of reconnect with that sense of wonder about what's out there. Because every time you guys go out and get new data and new images, it asks ten times more questions than you probably had when you started. I love that about the way planetary science works. More from Avatar creator James Cameron when we return. This is Planetary Radio.

I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions.

It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the

internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're listening to excerpts from a panel discussion at Caltech that featured Avatar creator James Cameron. The topic that evening was the science of Avatar and Pandora, the faraway moon on which the dramatic story takes place. But what about those floating mountains suspended by magnetic fields? I think it turns out that the field would have to be strong enough to rip the hemoglobin out of your blood to lift the mountains. But we're not going there. Why are the Navi blue?

And, in fact, someone asks, were you at all inspired by the Ramayana from Hindu mythology? I don't think we ever came up with a good biological reason. There's obviously some... Here's the discussion we had to have internally. Is it the color of the blood that's causing the blue color, or is it the color of a skin pigment that would be the equivalent to melanin in a human? And we eventually went with the idea of a pigment,

and then that determined, with red blood, which would allow the lips the inner part of the lip and the inside of the mouth and the edges of the eyelids and so on to be pink but you have to think through this stuff in order to create a plausible visual

but we never really figured out what the purpose of the blue pigment was other than the fact that their camouflage is remarkably effective even in the green foliage see originally the foliage was supposed to be cyan colored, not sort of the normal palette of greens, but it always looked kind of unreal. So we decided to go with more of a conventional look by day and then a very unconventional look by night. We thought, well, now their blue pigment isn't going to camouflage them. But we found out a few things, like lighting

them to look real required a lot of reflected green light on the face. And so when we bathed them in green reflected light from their environment, the blue colors, the blue patterning on them actually caused them to disappear pretty well. So well chemically I couldn't answer the question well that answers that oh the Ramayana part yeah absolutely obviously I thought that the Hindu pantheon just looked really cool

with the blue skin I even debated giving them extra arms but I figured that that would no no it was a serious consideration for a while but the decision was made that the actors wouldn't be able to physically perform their characters effectively if they had extra

arms, that the animators would have to step in and change the performance too much, so we left it with... Every other critter on the planet's got six limbs, and the Na'vi don't. They have four. So what we did was we showed an intermediate stage with the prolemurus, which is the primate that you see kind of, what do they call it,

brachiating through the tree. It actually has a split forelimb that has two hands on each limb. So it looks like it's a transitional state between six and four. That's the theory there. You showed great, great restraint, not just grafting extra arms onto your cast in order for them to perform for you. You know, we had to have these head rigs that had to locate a camera very accurately in the front. We had these conformal carbon fiber headsets that kind of were based on scans of their, laser scans of their skulls and so on.

And I wanted them to be screwed in with stereotactic screws right through the skin. I thought that that's the kind of sacrifice people should make for their art, you know. But the actors wouldn't go for it. I was going to say the unions again, you know. Yeah, maybe the unions. One of the conceits on Pandora was that there was, you know, you have the major phyla of plants and animals here. And on Pandora, there's actually a third kind of intermediate phylum that we called zooplanty that have aspects of both. It's basically a plant with a nervous system that can be motile and react.

But it's, you know, anyway, so that's what we were going to show was the zooplanty but and those are out there right I mean we've seen those as we dive down in the submarines and you're coming along this sort of barren world and some of those spiral ones right that I've seen those at 3000

meters deep and sure enough you come in too close and they'll even retract just like that. It's a tube worm. Yeah it was awesome when I I saw that in the theater. I thought, hey, he's been the same spot I have. Well, they even, I mean, the small ones, the small Christmas tree worms, are readily, you know, they're quite abundant on coral reefs. Yeah. So another question someone tossed out to get back to a little bit of the geography, the geology of Pandora, is whether you could comment on the volcanic activity that a moon like Pandora would experience due to the tidal

forces. I mean, it's very active, subjected to tidal forces, but we didn't see much in the way of earthquakes or volcanism. Sequel. Kano's just fell off the to-do list. Really, like, it's not a joke. We intended to have them. We were supposed to see them from orbit with

actual active plumes, kind of like what just happened recently in Iceland. I mean, we actually have artwork that shows that. We did the last thousand shots in six weeks. Who would win in a fight between the Na'vi and the aliens, circa 1986 aliens? Sigourney Weaver. She always wins. What holds more significance to you in this film? These technological advances and the changes that's made to the filmmaking process or the philosophical and environmental messaging that you've placed into this film? The reason that we made the film was to get these, they're not even really ideas. It's really to connect people back to an almost

childlike sense of wonder and connection to nature that I think we all feel at some level, and maybe we have layers of denial on top of that, or we've just forgotten it, become disconnected in our technological society. That was the goal of the movie. But I also knew that if you told people it was an environmental film, they wouldn't go see it. So, you know, we had to have a lot of spoonfuls of sugar, and the 3D was part of that, the design was part of that, the adventure, the storytelling the characters, all those things

that can be communicated in a TV spot or trailer or whatever that get people into the theaters and then you have to rely on good storytelling to create an emotional reaction and people cry when the tree falls and so it's working and they're coming

back to see the movie for all of those things, but also because they know that there's an emotional connection to the film, and some would even say a spiritual connection to the film. And if those things weren't working, the film wouldn't have been as successful. If we could take a moment to show our thanks for the panelists tonight who have given a really very fascinating discussion. panelists tonight who have given a really very fascinating discussion. James Cameron at Caltech in Pasadena, California, where he was the guest of honor for a discussion of the movie Avatar. I also got a couple of minutes to ask Cameron about his role in another

project that you've heard about on Planetary Radio. Last time we talked, it was about aliens of the deep. You seem to be pretty comfortable going back and forth between the imaginary and the real world, and now you're on the Mars Science Laboratory team. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's science and there's science fiction, and I understand the boundaries, you know, between them. And being even my tiny, tiny part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission is very exciting for me. You know, I got involved with the Malan Space Science Systems people years and years ago, and they put in a proposal and swept me up in their proposal for the MASSChem,

which is the eyes of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, because they said, well, who do we know that does motion imaging in 3D? Oh, that Cameron guy. I was involved a little bit initially with the kind of setting the parameters for the stereo space of the camera and the zoom group, the zoom optics for the camera. Now, the zoom has been de-scoped out of it. We're trying to re-scope it back in. We don't know how that's going to work out quite yet. I heard you're lobbying. Well, I did lobby and we did present a good case for it because of the push. You know, the mission was pushed two years because of other problems unrelated to mass cam,

but it gave us an opportunity to come back in and say, for a very tiny incremental cost, we can get much, much more interesting imaging. There's a small justification on the science side, an enormous justification on the public outreach and media side. So we made a credible case, and they're exploring it in good faith. And we have some deadlines we have to hit by the end of the year to actually get it integrated into the spacecraft. But we'll see what happens. So we may be shooting the first 3-D motion picture on another planet. For real.

Thank you. By the way, I love Avatar. Okay, yeah. Well, that's a 3-D movie on another planet. For real. Thank you. By the way, I love Avatar. Okay, yeah, well, that's a 3D movie on another planet. Not for real. Thanks very much. Okay, good talking to you. Another lovely day in Pasadena, California. A little freeway noise in the background because we're outside of the new Planetary Society headquarters. On the freeway.

Almost. We should do that in the center divider sometime. We'll do that some other time. We're not actually on the freeway. Just kidding, Caltrans. CHP. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, because it's time for What's Up. Welcome back. Thank you. There's a little bird tweeting too. Isn't that nice? Yeah, it is very lovely here. Let's talk about the lovely night sky, shall we? Please. Check out extremely bright Venus over in the west after sunset. Can't miss it. Go to the

upper left of Venus, you will find Mars looking kind of reddish and keeps dimming. And if you look to the upper left of Venus, you will find Mars looking kind of reddish and keeps dimming. And if you look to the upper left of Mars, not as far, you'll see Regulus. And so that's your bright star for the episode. And then keep going. You'll find Saturn looking yellowish. And over the coming weeks and months, Mars, Saturn will be coming together. And then they'll be parting with Venus, and it'll all be very exciting.

Yeah, it's one of those when the moon is in the seventh house, era's coming again. You're going to start singing, aren't you? Not yet, I'll wait. In the pre-dawn, check out Jupiter in the east, looking extremely bright, can't miss it. And if you check out Saturn these days, with a small telescope, rings nearly edge-on,

as much as they're going to be for 15 years. Check that out. On to this week in space history. In the Mercury program, 1962, Scott Carpenter launched with Aurora 7. A lot happened during this week. It was one of those big weeks two years ago. Phoenix landed on Mars.

We also had Abel and Baker, the monkeys, flew to space in 1959. You ever see the Road to Hong Kong? Where Bing Crosby and Bob Hope are put into a space capsule, but it was really made for monkeys. And so there's this robotic device that's trying to feed them banana paste. Yes, I did see it. We should try that sometime. Abel and Baker loved that movie.

It was huge with them. We move on to Random Space Fact. And by the way, I don't know if you noticed that last week you went unplugged because the echo was so good in that room. I don't want to reveal any trade secrets here, but let's just say that you were au naturel. Cool. Harkening back to the time in the racquetball court. That's right, many years ago. Vesta, second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt after Ceres, depending on how you measure it, but certainly mass-wise.

Weird thing. It's got a crater, it appears, on a near-south pole that is huge compared to the size of the object. It is almost 80% of the diameter of the whole object. And this crater, which is through people waving their arms and making some guesses, educational guesses, perhaps a billion years ago. And it also kicked off a bunch of material, which we think is why there are Vesta meteorites. There are like 100 meteorites that we think are from Vesta based upon their spectral signature. And, of course, Dawn spacecraft going to Vesta.

We'll get there in about a year to go into orbit. Show us how cool this really is, and we'll learn real stuff. That is quite fascinating. I love random space fact. Oh, thank you. We move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, what was the largest optical telescope in 1940? How'd we do, Matt?

We bounced back this week. Lots of entries. Our winner, and lots of other people, said that it was the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, which we can almost see from where we're sitting. It's true. If it weren't for those pesky trees, we could at least see Mount Wilson Observatory, which we can almost see from where we're sitting. It's true. If it weren't for those pesky trees, we could at least see Mount Wilson. 1917 to 1948, it was the record holder before being replaced by the same guy, George Ellery Hale, with your former plaything, the Hale. The 200-inch Hale telescope, another amazing beast, which held the title for decades after that.

George Ellery Hale. Amazing guy. You know what they say about George Ellery Hale? No, what do they say about George Ellery Hale? GE. He brings good light to things. Well, that's a hell of a thing. Guess what?

Scott Borgsmiller. Scott Borgsmiller, who is... You're really impressed with yourself, aren't you? I loved it, yeah. Thank you for that opportunity and bearing with me. Scott has been listening, I think, since, like, the beginning of the show. As far as I can tell, he's never won the contest. Scott, you're the winner.

Egymsville or Igymsville, Maryland, he is getting The Eerie Silence, the terrific book about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, by Paul Davies, who was a guest on this show about three weeks ago. So congratulations, Scott. Groovy tunes. We move on to the next trivia contest. I take you back to Vesta meteorites. What are they called?

What are the classes of Vesta meteorites? And there's three initials or three words for what these beasts are called, at least the things that we believe are from Vesta. Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. And that shouldn't be too hard to find. Be sure that you get us your entry by Monday, May 31, 2 p.m. on May 31st. And we'll make sure you're part of the contest. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky,

and think about palm trees. Thank you, and good night. Those aren't coconut palms, are they, that we're sitting under? Bad dates. Write to us if you get the reference. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова