Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Looking for Life in Alien Oceans

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

Jet Propulsion Lab astrobiologist Kevin Hand has just written Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. Kevin and Mat explore these seas and whether they may have nurtured organisms with no connection to life on Earth. You may win a copy of Kevin’s excellent book in this week’s What’s Up space trivia contest with Bruce Betts. Take an even deeper dive at  https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0513-2020-kevin-hand-alien-oceans.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alien Oceans, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We now believe that many moons in the outer solar system are hiding warm oceans of liquid water under blankets of ice. Kevin Hand wants to know if any of those oceans are also hiding life. We'll talk with Kevin about his excellent new book. It includes his fascinating speculations about the possibility of intelligent life out there.

Bruce Betts is also standing by with this week's What's Up, including your chance to win a copy of Kevin's book. Headlines from the downlink are moments away, but I've got a couple of special announcements first. The May 14th Planetary Society Live will bring you Space Policy Edition Live. For the first time, Planetary Society Chief Advocate Casey Dreyer and I will take your questions beginning at 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern, and 1600 UTC. I'm sorry I couldn't give you an earlier heads up. The webcast will be available live and later on demand at planetary.org slash live. Then on Tuesday, May 19th, Explore Mars is bringing me back for a live conversation with the great John Grunsfeld.

The scientist, former astronaut, and NASA chief scientist will talk about the 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. This one is set for 10 a.m. Pacific on the 19th. That's 1 p.m. Eastern and 1700 UTC. You'll find it at exploremars.org. 1900 UTC. You'll find it at exploremars.org. Now those downlink headlines, beginning with an update on China's successful test of the Long March 5B heavy lift rocket. A big section of the launcher came down safely in the Atlantic Ocean. Success was vital for the launch this summer of China's Mars mission and construction of its planned space station. Kevin Hand and I will spend a lot of time talking about Europa today. That mysterious moon of Jupiter has never looked better

now that old images taken by the Galileo orbiter have been reprocessed. There's a stunner of the fractured icy surface at planetary.org slash downlink. The old and improved pics will be used to help plan the Europa Clipper mission. NASA, I'm ready for my close-up. The agency announced that Tom Cruise will film a movie aboard the International Space Station. That's about all we know so far, but it's enough to make me envious. That's if Cruise actually gets to visit the ISS, which also isn't yet clear. There's much more to see and read at planetary.org slash downlink.

I don't know of a more passionate or articulate advocate for the exploration of space than Kevin Hand. Kevin is the principal investigator and director of the Ocean Worlds Lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He's also the pre-project scientist for the effort to send a lander to Europa as a follow-on to the Europa Clipper orbiter. The JPL website says he has made nine deep dives to the floor of Earth's oceans, but it's really those dark yet warm oceans on other worlds that fire his imagination and inspired his new book. Alien Oceans, The Search for Life in the Depths of Space has just been published by Princeton University Press. I so look forward to reading it, and as you're about to hear, I wasn't disappointed. Kevin and I talked a few days ago.

As you're about to hear, I wasn't disappointed. Kevin and I talked a few days ago. Kevin, welcome back to Planetary Radio. I love this book, Alien Oceans, The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. I learned a lot, and it was really fun to read, and I'm glad you're here to talk about it. Well, thanks so much, Matt. Pleasure to be with you again virtually, and delighted that you enjoyed the book. I use the word fun. That is the right word. And it also in parts dramatic. I mean, right from the first page in which we very appropriately discover you in a submarine

wondering if you're going to survive. Yeah, well, I kind of wanted to transport the reader into these environments that we think could be analogous to the deep ocean environments out there and these alien oceans in the outer solar system and possibly beyond. And part of what has been exciting in my scientific career has been the opportunity to explore these beautiful and bizarre environments on planet Earth that merit a tremendous amount of study in their own right, but also help provide a bridge when we think about potentially habitable environments beyond Earth. They're all we've got, right?

They're the best analog. They're the only analog that we've found. I mean, we'll get to some of the data that's been collected in moments, but really, we can extrapolate from down here somewhat, right? That's right. physical and chemical conditions that exist within those liquid water oceans may be somewhat comparable to the conditions that we find in the depths of our own ocean. And so there's a beautiful win-win of exploring here with an eye towards there. I got to say, I envy you having had the chance to get down there up close and personal with those hydrothermal vents, but we'll come back to those as well. They are a sight to behold, that's for sure.

I'm going to stray again here for a moment. Do you remember your reaction when Cassini first flew through Enceladus' plumes and tasted or sniffed out organic molecules? Well, when that picture came back, I wasn't on the Cassini team. I was at JPL at the time. And when we all saw that picture of the sunlight reflecting off of those jets erupting out of Enceladus' South Pole, I talk about a jaw-dropping image. That is hands down one of my all-time favorite pictures from the history of solar system exploration. Well, what about the organics?

It wasn't able to find ones that were as complex as you and a lot of others might have wished, but it did find organics, right? That's right. And the Cassini spacecraft was not designed with instrumentation that was targeted at searching for large, complex organics. It had some capability. It had two mass spectrometers on it. The original target for organic chemistry was Titan's atmosphere. And so, of course, Cassini studied Titan's atmosphere and revealed some of the organic,

some of the organic tholin type of materials in its atmosphere. But the discovery of organics in the plumes of Enceladus certainly whet our appetite with the potential habitability of that subsurface ocean. But those mass spectrometers were not able to, for example, reveal amino acids or the sort of subunit compounds that we might expect to be associated with life as we know it. So just enough to get us really excited about going back. Wet our appetites. No pun intended, I imagine. 100% intended. was that intended? Were you surprised to learn not how rare ocean worlds are in our solar system, but really how common they are? I mean, you go through the whole solar neighborhood

kind of one by one and there are a bunch. That's exactly right. And this sort of new Goldilocks, as I described in the book, has revealed to us that the tidal energy that helps maintain these subsurface liquid water oceans could be responsible for not just providing the most abundant volume of habitable real estate in our solar system by merit of these large oceans within Europa, Enceladus, et cetera, but it could be that throughout the galaxy, throughout the universe, that the vast majority of liquid water is to be found within these ice-covered moons or planets that are being heated from within by the tidal dissipation that these worlds experience as they orbit their giant planet or some other body that causes them to stretch and relax in a tidal dance.

Hmm. What I'm leading up to now is your portion of the book that helps folks like me understand how we've developed this evidence that there are oceans hidden under the surfaces of all these worlds. And it comes down to, I love it, the rainbow connection, babysitting, and airport security. And I don't want to get us into a lot of technical stuff elsewhere in this conversation, but could you go through those? I mean, begin with what you meant by the rainbow connections. Apologies to Kermit. Right, right. So I'll keep it brief for the sake of your listeners. But as you know, in the book, I go into great detail on this. But in brief, the discovery of the ocean within Europa, which serves as a bit of a template for how we found oceans elsewhere, I like to break into three easy pieces. The first is find a rainbow connection. And by that,

I mean, use spectroscopy, which is an astronomy technique, a chemistry technique. Really, it's a fancy word for saying I study rainbows. And so the rainbow connection is using spectroscopy to determine that the surfaces of these worlds are made of water ice. Then babysitting a spacecraft basically refers to the careful monitoring of a spacecraft and that spacecraft's trajectory as it goes by a world like Europa. And from that careful babysitting, you can then tease out the internal mass distribution of a world. And in the case of Europa, that revealed that not just the surface, but the outer shell of Europa down to a depth of roughly 200 kilometers or roughly 120 some odd miles is water in some phase.

So that was step two. We now know that there's water in some phase down to a significant depth beneath the surface. And then the third piece of the puzzle is to adhere to airport security. And here again, a lot of detail in the book. It's beautiful physics. It's one of my favorite pieces of physics and how the solar system works. But basically, the analogy is that Jupiter has a magnetic field that is time-varying. Jupiter is rotating and it sweeps past Europa. And that

time-varying magnetic field excites induced electric currents and an induced magnetic field within Europa. And that is what the Galileo spacecraft detected. And the physics is very similar to airport security. When you walk through airport security, one of those doorways, you're walking through a changing magnetic field. And if you've got a conductor in your pocket, the alarm goes off, and you get the pat down, and maybe you miss your flight. Who knows?

Well, when the Galileo spacecraft flew by Europa, the alarm went off, and the induced magnetic signature of Europa was telling us that there's a conducting layer beneath Europa's surface. And the best explanation for that conducting layer is a salty liquid water ocean of roughly 100 kilometers or about 60 miles in depth. Wow. It's beautiful physics.

It really is. I don't want to get you in trouble with airport security, but you attempted to conduct this experiment, right, as you went on certain flights? Yeah. This was back in the early 2000s when I was still a grad student and I was doing much of this physics as part of my PhD and never successfully got the alarm to go off just with a bottle of salt water. So, yeah, in the book, I apologize to anybody that I might have held up in those endeavors. So much of this data that we've picked up, not in the Jupiter system, but at Saturn, of course, we've gotten from Cassini, that glorious mission. Are we still learning from the data collected by Cassini? Oh, absolutely. Cassini is going to continue to yield all sorts of exciting results

for at least another decade or more. Think about it. I did much of my PhD work on Galileo data after the Galileo spacecraft had been sent into Jupiter and had finished. These data sets will continue to be mined for years and years, and numerous PhDs and postdocs and interns will help do experiments, do models to better understand exactly what this treasure trove of data is telling us. Let's jump back to Jupiter and Europa. I mean, we could spend the rest of our time just talking about the upcoming Europa Clipper mission that so many of us are looking forward to, but it is an orbiter, a Jupiter orbiter. A lot of people don't realize. What would a Europa lander be able to tell us that the Clipper probably won't be able to realize. What would a Europa lander be able to tell us that the Clipper probably won't be able to? Clipper is a fantastic mission that has an incredible payload of instruments that will

map out at a global and regional scale, just about everywhere on Europa. It'll take images, it'll take spectra and visible to infrared spectra, and it'll also collect mass spectra as it flies by and hopefully finds plumes. And it's got ice penetrating radar on board. So there are many different ways in which the Clipper mission will help us better understand Europa as a world in and of itself. But when it comes to actually searching for signs of life, looking for biosignatures, that's when you really need to get down to the surface and scoop up a sample and look in detail at some material that you've collected. detail at some material that you've collected. And so a lander on the surface of Europa, or any ocean world for that matter, is really the key to searching for signs of life.

And coupled with that, such a mission also provides critical ground truth to all of those remote sensing observations that have been made. And that's really critical. Think about the Mars program. We've had lots of orbiters that have done remote sensing around Mars, but it's really only once you get down to the surface and really put a rover or some sort of vehicle that can sniff around and directly analyze the geology and geochemistry that the full remote sensing data set of the sun makes a lot of sense. So biosignatures and ground truth are the big

ticket items for a lander on the surface of Europa. It was looking pretty good, at least in Congress, Pretty good, at least in Congress, for a Europa lander mission to get some kind of a start a while back and maybe doesn't look quite as good now. But from what you told me when we were talking just before we started recording this conversation, there's still an awful lot of interest in the science community in a lander. That's right. We were planning on having a conference about a Europa lander or more broadly, we like to also refer to it as an ocean worlds lander. That's right. We were planning on having a conference about a Europa lander, or more broadly, we like to also refer to it as an ocean worlds lander. The technology that we developed for landing on Europa can also be used for Enceladus and Ganymede or Pluto. The first mission to land on an ocean world, an airless ocean world, will be the template for many of the ocean worlds. This conference, unfortunately, due to a global pandemic, had to be canceled, but we're hosting a two-hour virtual presentation of the mission concept on May 14th. We were just thrilled to

see how much excitement there was in the number of people that registered for the initial conference and the number of people that are signing up to listen to the latest in the development of the Europa L these mission cycles. And oftentimes the scientific community doesn't want to do one thing. They want to do a different thing. But one of the things that we're finding is that when it comes to the search for life within these alien oceans, the microbiologists, the oceanographers, a whole new sector of the scientific community is getting engaged with planetary science and astrobiology. And that's a really powerful kind of scientific transition. Normally, when we think about planetary science, we think about a field full of remote sensors, of people that are used to flying by worlds and analyzing pictures captured from afar and spectra captured from afar. Obviously, Mars has made a bit of a transition and Mars has become a real world for

geologists. Earth geologists love to work on Mars now because we've got in situ robotic capabilities. But when it comes to landing on Europa or Enceladus or any of these worlds, we're seeing a lot of excitement from the Earth oceanographic community and microbiologists and cryospheric scientists, et cetera, because it represents this possibility of getting down to the surface and really understanding the physics, the chemistry, the biology, and so on and so forth. More of Kevin Hand is coming right up, including his speculations about what intelligent life under the surface of an ocean world might look like. By the way, that virtual conference Kevin

mentioned, we've got the link on this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio. Hi, this is Kate from the Planetary Society. How does space spark your creativity? We want to hear planetary.org. Thanks. also about the origin of life. Of course, we don't know how that happened on this planet, much less someplace like Europa or Titan or Enceladus, if it's there at all. And you say some fascinating things. For example, that habitability, knowing that a world is or was at some point someplace where life as we know it, in those quotes, might have existed, could have existed, tells us very little about whether a world could have supported the origin of life. What did you mean? That's right.

This is a very important distinction. And it really is at the kind of heart of our search for life beyond Earth. One of the most fundamental questions that lies at the heart of whether or not we live in a universe in which biology is everywhere or in which life on Earth represents some sort of biological singularity is this issue of whether or not the origin of life is easy or hard? We don't yet know the answer to that question. If the origin of life is easy and that arises under a multitude of conditions in a multitude of ways in a multitude of places, then I think we will go to these alien oceans and potentially find life there and maybe find life on Mars, et cetera. And we will discover

that we live in a biological universe, one in which life arises wherever the conditions satisfy what is needed for the origin of life. Conversely, if the origin of life is hard, in other words, if the origin of life on earth required a very, very specific set of conditions, say a tide pool on the shores of an ancient ocean, or a very specific set of reactions to take place in a deep sea hydrothermal vent, then we might see that the origin of life itself is quite rare. then we might see that the origin of life itself is quite rare. And we might go to worlds like Europa and Enceladus and Titan and find that there is no life there, even though those worlds could be habitable for life as we know it.

In other words, we might be able to take some life there and it could survive in the oceans, but it would not be a good place for the origin of life itself to occur. So habitable does not necessarily imply inhabited in part because of the bottleneck of the origin of life itself. Just a few days ago on this program, we featured a conversation with Penny Boston, colleague of yours, astrobiologist, and Jim Green. That's what you've said. Excellent. We talked about biosignatures and figuring out how we're going to recognize life that might be staring us in the face with just something Penny has thought a lot about.

Clearly, you have as well, judging from the book. Another pearl of wisdom from your book is at least paraphrased, if not quoted as this. Don't ask what life is, rather what it does when you're looking for it. That's right. And at the most unglamorous of levels, we can sort of think about biology as being a layer on top of geology. And what I mean by that is that biology alleviates chemical disequilibrium in the environment. Mathematically speaking, physically speaking, what we've learned from life on earth is that life harnesses the negative change and gives free energy in the environment. That's a bit of a mouthful, but basically what it means is that

from microbes to blue whales, the metabolisms of everything on earth depends on finding some sort of geochemical or photochemical battery from which the business of life can harness the energy to get that business done. And so, yeah, I spend a fair amount of time in the book detailing what life does and what life leaves behind as relics of what it does. By way of saying, life kind of runs uphill. I mean, entropy be damned. Well, now to be clear. You can't escape it.

That's a misstatement. Sorry about that. No, no, but it's a good distinction. Locally and temporarily, entropy be damned. Well, and life is always aiding the universe in the production of entropy. Life is always aiding the universe in the production of entropy. But as my friend and colleague Everett Shock likes to say, life finds these reactions. It's a lunch you get paid to eat. In other words, it's energy that's stored in the environment that wants to be released,

but is sort of inhibited due to both physical and chemical limitations. But biology, in part by merit of enzymes that evolve and enhance the pace of reactions, biology can, for example, increase the rate at which your car rusts. Microbes can take care of that reaction faster than Mother Nature can. You know, I keep looking for escapes from thermodynamics, but I guess there's just no escaping. That's right. Second law will always rule. The other statement that you make that correlates with this is that metabolism, you claim, is

kind of the why of life. I mean, the meaning of life? Maybe not that far, but the why of life? I mean, the meaning of life? Maybe not that far, but the why. Right. And this is a question that many in the astrobiology community and the geobiology community ponder. What is it that life does? Did the origin of life arise from sort of a metabolism-first geochemical impetus where there were these reactions just waiting to happen and earliest life was just a bit above geochemistry. And I think when it comes to life as we know it,

that is the case. But let's for a moment think about AI or extraterrestrial intelligence of a form that we can't necessarily imagine. It's not clear to me that they would be limited to that same definition of life where life alleviates chemical disequilibrium in the environment and so on and so forth. environment, and so on and so forth. And there again, that's part of why I think the search for life in our own solar system's backyard within these alien oceans has the potential to yield such profound insights. All life on earth is based on the same DNA, RNA, protein, ATP paradigm. If we do indeed find a second independent origin of life in these distant alien oceans, might it run on some different biochemistry?

Might there be some different game in town? And what might that tell us about what life is? We don't have a good answer to that question of what is life at a universal level. And it's my hope that maybe there's a periodic table out there in our universe, some great tree of life that allows us to compare and contrast different modalities of life from which, just like the chemists did with their own periodic table, from which we can start to distill out the universals of life. And you even provide your own little prototype for this periodic table of life. It's a lot more complex than the one that we're

familiar with. It's 3D for one thing. Yeah. And in the book, in that chapter towards the end of the book, I try and kind of extend my own creative capabilities to think about what that periodic table of life or that great tree of life might look like. And I can only do so much given the information that we have available to us here on Earth. But part of, again, what makes this exploration exciting is the prospect of putting some data to this question of what it takes to get life done, what biology is, and whether or not biology works beyond Earth, and what that tells us about what life is. I'm going to come back to that more speculative closing of the book or last couple of chapters in the book, because maybe that's the science fiction fan in me. But before we do that, I mean, there really has only been one mission that overtly we sent out from our home planet to look for life so far.

And it's one of my favorites. And you talk about it, too. Could you talk about the lessons of Viking? Oh, absolutely. The Viking missions, the two landers down to the surface coupled with two orbiters circulating Mars. with two orbiters circulating Mars, those missions, in my opinion, are like the robotic counterpart to landing humans on the moon. And what I mean by that is that they were just so far ahead of their time. It's an incredible achievement. And so the Viking missions were tasked with looking for signs of life on the surface of Mars. They were doing those experiments in 1977, 1976 on up through the sort of mid to

late 70s. And think about it. We didn't even know about hydrothermal vents until 1977. It wasn't until the mid to late 1970s that we began to understand that third major branch, the archaea, in our own tree of life. So much was happening in the realm of biology and just understanding our own tree of life here on Earth. And yet these missions were searching for life on Mars, and they didn't find anything. Now, one of the limitations of the search for signs of life on Mars with the Viking missions was that most of the experiments were searching for living life. pouring soil and agar, sort of a salt and sugary mixture together to see if we could monitor microbes exhaling and consuming the gases in a little chamber. And nothing definitive was found. We now know that a better way to search for life is actually to look for the relics of life, the large organics or other compounds. In the case of life on Earth, that's things like

amino acids and fatty acids and lipids, et cetera, that are associated with the structures of life. We don't really look for living microbes. And so we've learned a lot since those days of the Viking missions and the Europa Lander mission concept, the dragonfly mission that was selected to go out and search for signs of life on Titan, a flyby mission that would potentially search for signs of life in the plumes of Enceladus. All of those missions leverage a lot of what we learned from the Viking missions and what we've learned in the field of biology in the decades since. I'll note that you're on the Dragonfly mission team, right?

Oh, it's an incredibly exciting mission. Yes, I'm a co-I on that, PI'd by Zibi Turtle out of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. I can't wait until the mid-2030s when that mission's going to parachute down through the atmosphere of Titan and that rotorcraft is going to fire up and set down onto the surface of Titan, looking at the sands of Titan, looking for organics and any biosignatures on Titan,

and then hop along to different sites and give us just an unprecedented view of that bizarre world that I think is perhaps the best place to search for weird life in our solar system. In other words, life that uses completely different chemistry from the water and carbon-based chemistry that we know and love and that takes place here on Earth, but also is a good model for what we think might be happening within the ocean of Europa and Enceladus.

Life as we don't know it. And I'll tell you somebody else who's a big fan of that mission because he brought it up about a month ago, as this is heard, the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, who was pretty thrilled by the Dragonfly mission. the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, who is pretty thrilled by the Dragonfly mission. Before we run out of time, I want to run back to those closing speculations of yours, at least some of them. There's so much we won't have time to cover here.

Let's say that that Europa lander that you're advocating for lands, and sure enough, finds some pretty complex molecules, organics on the surface of that moon, that lead us to believe that something is swimming around in that ocean down below. Now moving into your speculations, do you believe that those oceans, if we had something that melted its way through the ice and went down there, would you be surprised to find that it was more than microbes, that maybe we'd find multicellular life? Well, as you know, I love this question. Through the moon, to use an appropriate phrase, with finding even the tiniest of microbes on or within a distant alien ocean, because such a discovery would revolutionize our understanding of biology. with the case of Europa, there's a really interesting dynamic going on. And that is that the surface ice of Europa is being bombarded by charged particle irradiation from Jupiter's magnetosphere. And make no mistake, the engineers don't like that radiation because it poses problems for robotic vehicles. But when it comes to the chemistry of Europa and perhaps the chemistry

of Europa's ocean, what we see spectroscopically on Europa's surface is condensed phase oxygen, O2, hydrogen peroxide, sulfate, a bunch of compounds that are made as these charged particles split apart water and some of the O recombines into O2 and OH combines with OH to make H2O2 peroxide, et cetera. And if some of those oxidants, if some of that oxygen makes it into the ocean below, now you might actually be charging up that ocean with enough chemical energy to potentially give rise to multicellular life. All we have to do is look at the evolution of life on Earth and see that it was really the rise of oxygen in our own atmosphere,

made possible by photosynthesis, by cyanobacteria pumping oxygen into our atmosphere, that abundance of oxygen helped drive the evolution towards multicellular life. And that's what drove the Cambrian explosion, which of course then led to us and all these large creatures. Well, on Europa, photosynthesis is not likely a viable niche, given that its ocean is beneath a relatively thick ice shell of at least a few kilometers or so. But this radiation produced oxygen might allow for multicellular life to exist there. And so, yeah, in the book, I've got a chapter called The Octopus and the Hammer, where I look at what could play out in an oxygen-rich alien ocean.

And it's a lot of fun speculation, but there's enough tethers there to real data that I think it's fun worth pondering. All right. Then you push the envelope even further. Because if there's enough nutrients, if there's enough of that free O2, could intelligence have evolved down there? Tell me about your hydrothermal vent farmers. You read the whole book. you read the whole book. So yeah, this, these are the things I think about late at night, Matt.

So yeah, just play out the kind of evolutionary scenario of tens of millions, hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of years of evolution without the limitation of chemical energy. Imagine that oxygen is freely available in that ocean. And that perhaps you do end up giving rise to some sort of octopus or cuttlefish-like creature that develops a form of intelligence and problem solving and perhaps even tool use. And then think about what it would mean for that creature to survive in the depths of this alien ocean. And so I go into some detail about how those deep ocean creatures would probably gain a good understanding for the seafloor dynamics and where the chemistry is erupting out of the seafloor in a manner somewhat similar to oases in the sub-Saharan Africa where water was made available and other compounds that life needed was made available. So you might have these oases on the seafloor

that form the epicenter for these colonies of intelligent creatures. And again, as you know, part of what I explore in that chapter is what does it mean to be an intelligent creature in a deep, dark ocean? What does it mean to not be able to look up and see a night sky? How would those creatures think about the universe in which they live? those creatures think about the universe in which they live, a universe which is an ocean, a global ocean that they perhaps can explore in many different ways. But instead of seeing stars above, their universe is capped by an ice sheet, an ice sheet that creaks and cracks. They don't have the cosmos compelling them to explore beyond their world. And I really think that's an interesting thought when you consider what has motivated our innovation, what has motivated our exploration as Australopithecus

on up to Homo sapiens. The night sky has always called us and has motivated our march across horizons and out into the cosmos. Would creatures within Europa or Enceladus or these alien oceans have a similar calling? I think it'd be our moral obligation to introduce them to the universe. I like that. I like that train of thought. Hopefully they are altruistic, intelligent creatures that have figured out many of the things that we still stand to learn when it comes to a long-term sustainable civilization that has developed technologies, but not always the most peaceful of technologies. Well, intelligent or not, finding life elsewhere would certainly teach us a lot. We're the Planetary Society. We believe the public is thrilled by the search for life off of this world.

We know our members are, and certainly you are too. Do you wish we were moving faster? Oh, absolutely. It's, you know, I'm working day and night trying to get these things moving, and I'm incredibly appreciative of the Planetary Society and all its members. There's nothing technologically keeping us from moving forward with these great missions, these missions that aim to achieve civilization scale science, probing questions like, are we alone? Is there life beyond earth? Really the only limiting factor is sort of a large committed vision to help us move forward with this. And so to the extent that you and others are helping to get that vision out there, we're greatly appreciative. We'll keep doing our part. Kevin, I warned you that I would ask you to read the last couple of paragraphs in this book.

Have you got it handy? Sure. I'll dive right in here. Perhaps we are the only ones. Perhaps the origin of life is hard and life is rare. Or perhaps we live in a universe teeming with life, a biological universe of incredible diversity across planets, moons, stars, and galaxies. Perhaps our tree of life, the singular center of biology as we know it, is revealed to be but a tiny twig on a tiny branch joined to a vast and grand tree of life tiny branch joined to a vast and grand tree of life connecting the beauty of all life in the known universe. Looking up at the night sky, seeing Jupiter as a bright point of light above the horizon, I can't help but wonder whether our return to that beautiful planet and its magnificent moons will once again catalyze a scientific revolution in our understanding of our place in the universe. Europa and the many alien oceans of our solar system

await. Beautiful. You passed the audition, Kevin. Thank you for that. Lovely close. Thank you for this book and for this, I knew it would be a fascinating conversation. And if it isn't obvious, I highly recommend the book, Alien Oceans, The Search for Life in the Depths of Space, available now from Princeton University Press in all the usual places. And my guest has been astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab, Kevin Hand. Kevin, I thank you again, and I look forward to talking again. Thanks so much, Matt. And I appreciate your time and all the time that the Planetary Society and its members do to help explore the cosmos. Stay tuned for your chance to win Alien Oceans

in What's Up, which is coming up right now. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. So we are joined once again by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He's also the manager of the LightSail program for us. And he'll be telling us about the night sky in a moment. Welcome back. I wanted to let you know I've heard from a whole bunch more people who really enjoyed What's Up Live, the first installment of Planetary Society Live that people can find at planetary.org slash live. They can see the past performances there,

including our season opener, our premiere of that series. Excellent. That's good to hear. And they're wondering when we're going to do it again. And the plan is that we will. We just don't know the exact date yet. But I don't think it'll be long, maybe two, three weeks. We'll let you know. Stay tuned. And as you stay tuned, Bruce can tell us about the night sky. In the evening sky, Venus is running away.

It's low in the west, still super bright, marching downwards in the sky from night to night rather rapidly at this point. On May 21st, the evening of May 21st, it will be hanging out near the much dimmer but still pretty bright Mercury, making it one of its Mercurian presences known. That was an odd phrase. You can see them close together on May 21st, but you need a pretty clear view to the western horizon.

In the pre-dawn sky in the east, moving southeast, you can check out three planets. We've got from lower left, reddish Mars getting brighter over the coming weeks and months, yellowish Saturn and bright Jupiter, Mars and Saturn and Mars kind of moving away from the other two. It's good. It's good. Are you good, Matt? I'm good with that. Then we're good to go on to this week in space history. 1963 was the final flight of the Mercury program with Gordon Cooper launching in Fate 7. And in 2009, the final Hubble Space Telescope servicing extravehicular activity, Spacewalk, to add more goodies to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Which is going to come up again, I think, next week. Isn't that when you're going to answer your trivia question about how much more massive is the Hubble now? Yes. And in the meantime, I've got a Hubble Space Telescope random space fact. Sprung that one on us. Surprise. Hubble Space Telescope was originally designed, it was designed from the start to be serviced by astronauts in space, including being equipped with over 300 feet of EVA handrails

and 31 portable foot restraint sockets. I don't know, for some reason, when you said portable, I suddenly thought, oh, they put a porta potty on it? But, you know, we were talking about toilets on the ISS a week or two ago. Dang it, that was going to be my trivia question. How many toilets are there on the Hubble Space Telescope? You ruined it. Now that you've diverted us completely,

let's move on to the trivia contest. But seriously, folks, in the trivia contest, I asked you whose silver astronaut lapel pin is on the moon. How'd we do, Matt? The number of entries really rebounded this week, perhaps because people wanted that beautiful print by space artist Michelle Rusch. It's of Neil Armstrong, very appropriately of that pioneer on the moon. This one was not on his mission.

It wasn't Apollo 11. Go ahead. Tell us how this happened and what happened. Apollo 12 was supposed to be scheduled as the lunar module pilot, was Clifton Curtis C.C. Williams Jr. And unfortunately, he was killed in a T-38 crash caused by mechanical failure. He was replaced by Alan Bean. And Alan Bean took Clifton Curtis C.C. Williams' silver astronaut pin, as well as his naval aviator wings, and placed them on the lunar surface in his honor. It's quite a story. We heard from a number of people about Alan Bean.

I'll get back to a couple of them in a moment. But our winner this time, Thomas Fisher, first-time winner. Thomas, we're going to send you that limited edition print by space artist Michelle Roosh. You can check her out online. It's R-O-U-C-H. She has a gallery. Great work. Robert Laporta in Connecticut.

He says he was lucky enough to have met Alan Bean more than a few times. And he has some of his paintings because Alan, of course, became quite an artist. Have you seen some of his work? Yes. No, it's cool combining space with art, having actually been out there. Robert also said he was a true gentleman. Tim Livingston in Oklahoma says, in December of 2015, I was fortunate enough to attend an event at the Oklahoma History Center celebrating the 50th anniversary of Gemini 6A and Gemini 7. Alan Bean, along with Jim Lovell, Tom Stafford, and Buzz Aldrin were the featured guests. I learned that evening that Alan Bean was key in saving two missions. You probably know about this, right?

This is the one where I guess he threw a switch on Apollo 12, SCE, to AUX, and saved that mission from an abort, I think? Yeah, I believe that was after they were struck by lightning twice on launch, but maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I know they were struck by lightning twice, but I can't remember the details of the story of recovery. I'm pretty sure you're right about that. But then, apparently, Alan Bean was also serving as a CAPCOM, the capsule communicator, for Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford in their Gemini capsule. He told them, don't abort. Don't pull that D-ring.

Or at least he didn't tell them to do it. And they decided against it as well. And that became a successful mission instead of a test of the emergency escape system. Do we have an emergency eject system? Yeah, it's right underneath your desk there. Don't pull it. Don't pull the D-ring.

There's no need right now. Okay, it's good to know it's there, though. It's reassuring, isn't it? It is. Just leave it alone. All right. Pavel, recently a winner, Pavel in Belarus, said that later after Apollo 12 returned,

Alan Bean said about it, I often think of my silver pin resting in the dust of Surveyor Crater, just as bright and shiny as it ever was. It will be there for millions and millions of years, or until some tourist finds it and brings it back to Earth. Wait, there's more. Jim Bridenstine gave the following advice to the 22nd astronaut class graduates. Bridenstine, of course, the NASA administrator.

If one of you were on the surface of the moon and you do find one of those pins, if you'd leave it there, we'd really appreciate it. Huh. Well, okay. I guess they have their orders. That's it. We're ready to move on. All right. For those who are noticing, the Cygnus cargo spacecraft NG-13 was recently released from the International Space Station.

Who is it named after? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and don't say it was named after NG-13. I'm looking for an actual different name. You heard him. You've got until the 20th. That'd be May 20th, Wednesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And this is the best part. Win yourself a copy of Kevin Hand's brand new book,

which we were just talking about, Alien Oceans, The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. And you can also get the audiobook version of that and hear it read by Kevin himself. It is published by Princeton University Press. Terrific book. I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and ponder whether you could make a chain link fence out of sausage links. Thank you. That's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, clearly running out of things to do as he shelters in place. Wouldn't keep the dogs out, I can tell you that. Yeah, I don't think it'll last long.

Hey, I'll leave you with this. Listener Sean Schultz in Pennsylvania. In this time when we must remain distant, may the cosmos bring us together. That's quite lovely. Good sentiment. Thank you, Sean. And thank you, Bruce. Talk to you next week. All righty.

That'll be when he's back here for the next edition of What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its carbon-based members. Come on in. The water's fine at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Please help us out with a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. Stay well and Ad Astra.