Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Science Fiction Author Kim Stanley Robinson Saves Earth!

Episode Date: April 23, 2007

Science Fiction Author Kim Stanley Robinson Saves Earth!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcription by CastingWords Thanks for watching. is what it might take to stave off the ravages of climate change. He returns to Planetary Radio to talk about completion of a new trilogy of novels about that global challenge and the kind of leadership that may be required inside the famous beltway surrounding Washington, D.C. We've also got a brand new Q&A from Emily Lakdawalla that will have you turning topsy-turvy, and this week's What's Up View of the night sky from Bruce Betts, along with a new space trivia contest. Just time enough for one bit of space news. NASA has announced target dates for the next several space shuttle launches,

beginning on June 8 with a mission for Atlantis. Not yet on the schedule is next year's expected repair trip to the Hubble Space Telescope. You'll find much more news at planetary.org, including a story about why you never want to start a solar system too close to any hot-headed neighbors. Emily has some great stuff on her blog, too, including new pictures from Cassini and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Here's her Q&A contribution. I'll be right back with Kim Stanley Robinson.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, how can Pluto have a greater than 90 degree tilt? Pluto and its giant moon Charon both have axes that are tilted more than 90 degrees. About 122.5 degrees, in fact, meaning that their north poles are both pointed toward the south side of the solar system. What does it mean for a planet to be tilted upside down? A greater than 90 degree tilt comes from the assumption that all the stuff in the solar system started out with the same sense of spin. in the solar system started out with the same sense of spin. All of the planets and asteroids revolve in a counterclockwise direction around the Sun when viewed from a point above the Sun's north pole.

In addition, most of the planets also spin in a counterclockwise direction, meaning that to an observer on the ground, the Sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west. Since most of the solar system's stuff rotates in the same direction, for anything to be rotating the opposite way, something pretty dramatic must have happened to counteract that natural spin and rev it up in reverse. How did Pluto come by its backwards spin? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson

has just finished Saving Our Planet. It took him five years and three novels to do the job. The third book in that series is just out in hardcover from Bantam. Stan visited the Planetary Society on Earth Day to sign copies of 60 Days and Counting. It was a great way to mark the Society's recent addition of planet Earth to its realm of study and concern. Stan, welcome back to Planetary Radio. The last time you were on, you said something that has since then made us call you the man who ate Mars. Oh, yes, that's right. When I was finishing Blue Mars, I was in a kind of an overwrought state, but also flying high.

And one of the readers of the Mars series has sent me a piece of Mars, one of the SNC meteorites. Little fragments were for sale on the meteorite market at that time. And I got another one inside a necklace for my wife. And so as a kind of ritual on my birthday, as I was in the last stretch on blue Mars, I went up on my roof and I ate one of the pieces of Mars at sunset in hopes that it would help me. And who knows, maybe it did help me, but I, uh, the, the notion would be that maybe my body would have incorporated some of that into my bone structure. No doubt. A few, a few Martian atoms in me for at least seven years, or maybe for good.

I'm happy at the thought, and I also, maybe I'm the first human being to have ever eaten a piece of Mars, at least on purpose. And so how often do you get to do something for the first time? I think you're it. As far as I'm concerned, it's a Guinness book. It's qualified for that level of attention. I have to thank my colleague, Terry Bisson, a fine science fiction writer, for giving me the idea. It was truly, when I told him about it, it's he who said, you should eat it. All right. Credit where credit is due.

Yes, yes. The great Terry Bisson. Shortly after that, you returned with a vengeance to your home planet, to Earth. returned with a vengeance to your home planet, to Earth, did The Years of Rice and Salt, an absolutely outstanding and very affecting novel of an alternative history of our planet and civilization on our planet. But that's not what we're here to talk about. What we're here to talk about is the completion of your latest series of books, which began in 1990, excuse me, 2004, I guess, with 40 Signs of Rain.

And, in fact, you're at the Planetary Society today to do a book signing for the book that closes out this series, 60 Days and Counting, which I'm sorry to say, particularly as a big fan, that I only got the book last week and then discovered immediately, well, I can't start with the third book in this trilogy. I've got to go to the beginning. And I'm very much enjoying Forty Signs of Rain. Thank you. You're welcome. And thank you.

And what I am discovering is that while this is a story of climate change, cataclysmic climate change, and what we may still be able to do about it. It is, at least in this first book, very much also a story about how science works, and often doesn't work, and how it is wrapped up in what happens in capitals like Washington, D.C. The way this came about was that the Mars books made me interested in this concept of terraforming, and while I was doing the Mars books, I already was noticing that the Antarctic scientists in particular were talking about humans changing Earth in a way that resembled the way that my characters were changing Mars. In other words, that we were already terraforming Earth, so to speak. For the worst. Yes, but doing it by accident and for the worst and without any knowledge of what we were up to. So that I got interested, but then years

passed. I had other projects like Years of Rice and Salt, but I remained interested. And then in 2002, this analysis of the Greenland ice core data showed that abrupt climate change was really even more abrupt than scientists had ever thought. The climatologists were amazed, and it represented a paradigm shift in their field because they found that the drop into the Younger Dryas, a little ice age that we dropped into as we were coming out of the Big Ice Age, had started up and gone into full severity in three years. And so at that point I had a science fiction story there

because climate change is a little bit vague and might take 100 years before you get to the most radical effects. So it's hard to know how to make a novel out of it. But if you have abrupt climate change happening in three years and they had the causal mechanism, which is the stalling of the Gulf Stream, then you have a story to tell in novel terms. So I thought, okay, let's tell that story. It's not the only thing that could happen out of climate change. It's not even the worst thing that could happen out of our climate change, but it is very rapid.

It's proven to have happened in the past, and so I could write it up as happening in the very near future or right now. The story begins, at least as far as I can tell, oh, maybe ten years ahead of the current day. I try to make that a vague zone. When you do near-future science fiction, I think I've discovered that in aesthetic terms, the important thing is to not give it a date and to put it into an uneasy space where it seems like it's right now, especially in Forty Signs of Rain, it's almost just a domestic realist novel about how science works in D.C.

and around this world right now. And it goes along rather peacefully and normally, you might say, until suddenly you fall off into a science fiction novel. And I wanted that effect. And so I can only just say that it's happening in the very near future, particularly since there's a presidential election at the end of the second volume in which the administration changes to a kind of a dynamic FDR style figure. So that we can all kind of date, but I want to leave it fuzzy. The machinations that take place in the book, it really started to make me think of this as sort of a west wing for science.

Yes. You know, I spent some time at NSF after they sent me to Antarctica in 1995. I went back twice to be on panels to do the peer review process for the next wave of Antarctic artists and writers. And they run that panel the same as they run all of their grant panels. So I got to see how NSF works. And paying attention to that process and to the rest of the ways in which we try to integrate science into the running of our society, and particularly in our federal government, I thought there's a story here that's interesting. It has elements of the espionage, elements of the West Wing-type political story, and then also science fiction

in the purest sense of being fiction about science and how science runs right now. And I'm not saying that all science fiction has to be like that and be so focused in on the present. That would sort of defeat the purpose of taking all the future on as your field. But sometimes it ought to do that. And this time, I decided to give it a try. And this was a time to do that because of your personal concern about what you see happening to our planet. Yes. well, we are already embarked on climate change. I mean, the parts per million of CO2 have gone from 280 to 380, and the scientific community and everybody is talking about,

can we stop it at 450 parts per million, given the way that we power this civilization and the way we move things around? Maybe we can't stop it until we get to 560 parts per million. And they're beginning to do their analyses based on projections to quite a higher level of CO2 than we've had for about 600,000 years. And it's all happened about 50 times faster than it's ever happened in the natural history of Earth. So we're already in it. And the interesting question is, what can we do as a civilization? And at that point, you have to look to government. Government in particular here is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

And all of the privatization attacks on government that have been so successful in the last 20 years are actually damaging our ability to react to this crisis as a collective. So I needed to write about how government can work right and how science and government need to align, along with business and everything else. All aspects of the society, as if we were in some kind of World War II moment, need to be mobilized for us to swap out our energy system

and our transport fleet in about 10 years. When I put it that way, it almost looks flat impossible. It's physically possible, but is it societally possible or politically possible? Well, that's an open question. It would first take us agreeing it was necessary, and then take us agreeing that government plays a super important role in this. I'll be right back with author Kim Stanley Robinson. This is Planetary Radio.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble?

Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty and joy of space exploration. You probably do too or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets and search for

extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. 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.

With publication of 60 days and counting, author Kim Stanley Robinson has just completed his trilogy of novels about sudden climate change and how our society may need to respond if we're going to save our own necks. He told us before the break that it may be an insurmountable challenge in economic and political terms. And yet it is infused with this optimism that, yes, we can still deal with this. Yes, that's right. And as I went on with the trilogy, I felt like I was justified in that optimism.

For one thing, I was just doing it as policy, that you need a positive vision of what could happen, and you need it written out as a narrative or a scenario so that you can kind of envision it and begin to believe in its possibility. So I was deliberately saying, okay, let's make this a utopian novel in the end and say that climate change is basically forcing utopia because it's either utopia or catastrophe. And then on the other hand, in this last five years of writing the book, what I've seen is the scientific community rising up and going off like a fire alarm in a hotel. They have never done this in human history.

We've never seen scientists speak as one like they have in the last three, four years on this issue. Really, almost vehemently issue, really almost vehement, well, definitely vehemently and almost violently proclaiming we have to change. We have to change really, really soon. And they're putting it in so many different ways and in so many different media that I'm beginning to think if we are a technological society that is fundamentally based on science, are the scientists going to be able to, in a certain sense,

grab the wheel when they see us going over a cliff together and make a hard left turn out of this trajectory over a cliff? I'm not talking about a coup. I'm not talking about scientists hijacking the process, but merely that they are pointing out something to us that we cannot ignore. You have some very interesting and very strong characters in the book. One of them, Frank, makes this statement in the first book, 40 Signs of Rain, where he writes this note to the fictional head of the NSF about what's wrong with the agency

and how it needs to react to this. By the way, what is this thing about crusty, cynical, intelligent guys named Frank? Well, all of my liars are named Frank. It's a little joke of mine. People who've read the Mars trilogy know what we're talking about. Yes, yes. And it's not just those two, but there are a couple more Franks through the course of my fiction. And it amuses me, and I figure, why not?

The only person you can plagiarize from with a clear conscience is yourself, and so I do it all the time. But Frank gets very angry and thinks, oh, NSF could be doing more. NSF is, after all, the National Science Foundation, and he thinks it could coordinate this effort, and in some senses he's right,

but when I published that book and went and read from it at NSF back in 2004, the people at NSF were raising their hands. They were very uncomfortable. They were saying, Stan, wait a second. We have a $5 billion a year budget. We are told by Congress what to spend that money on. NSF is not going to save us from this problem. It's Congress that's going to save us from this problem. And we, of course, will do it if we're told to. But you've got to talk about Congress. And in fact, in the second and third volumes, that had a big effect on my thinking and on my plotting. I had to make it explicitly political to the point of a presidential campaign and

election, be part of the story, or else I wasn't going to be true to the situation that we're in. part of the story or else I wasn't going to be true to the situation that we're in. But it's not all, we should say, political backroom politics and jawboning and so on. Far from it. There are cataclysmic events in this. And it occurred to me you started the series not that long before Katrina. Yeah, well, in fact, 40 Signs of Rain came out before Katrina happened. And at the end of 40 Signs of Rain, spoiler alert here,

I have Washington, D.C. flooded by a kind of hurricane and thunderstorm that hits the Potomac. The mall, with all of its monuments, is only 10 feet above sea level. It's called the Tidal Basin because it is a tidal basin, even though it's 90 miles upstream. So the flood is theoretically possible. And so I had D.C. be flooded, and then the results are bad, although not as bad as Katrina, and I must say I have my excuses there because it's a freshwater flood that only lasts for about three days as opposed to a saltwater flood that lasts for about six months.

We should say D.C. isn't the only place on earth that has to suffer through something like this in the books. The West Coast gets its share as well. And along with a little country that you imagined up that plays a fairly key role in the series, Kembalung. Yes. You know, the Tibetan Buddhists that have been exiled out of Tibet and live in India, they live all over India, including down in the south where it's super hot. And so I picked one of the Sundarbans Islands

and just called it Kembalang, which is the Sherpa word for Shambhala. So it's kind of the Buddhist utopia. So Shangri-La. Shangri-La is another word for Shambhala. That's right. But my Kembalang, like all the Sundarbans, is a kind of tidal island that's only two feet above sea level. And while I was finishing 60 Days and Counting,

I saw over the Internet news that the first inhabited island on this planet has gone under, and the inhabitants have had to leave, and it's one of the Sunderbans. So I picked the right archipelago, and all the low-lying places on Earth are in terrible trouble because of sea level rise, and that is one quarter of the Earth's population. So that you have to scale up to 10,000 New Orleans to talk about the human displacement that might occur. And when you put it like that, you begin to see what kind of danger we're in and how we do have to respond to this issue. Well, I put my Kambalis in there because I wanted to suggest that there's a spiritual element to science.

Similarity is between Buddhism and science. similarity between Buddhism and science so that when we go after this problem of climate change and saving a civilization, it's not just a utilitarian thing. It's also a kind of a spiritual quest. So this is what I wanted the novel to at least discuss, to have characters banging into each other, living with each other,

and having them taking action so that my little group of Buddhists are like the Dutch. They're like anybody in low-lying countries. They come to Washington, D.C. to say, we need action, and we need it now. We're just about out of time. Where do you go from here, having completed this third book in this series? Well, with a huge sigh of relief and pleasure, because although I've loved doing these books, it was also kind of a burden or a problem. If you have to write a good novel, that's one problem.

But if you have to figure out how to save the world from climate change at the same time, then that's too many problems. So I'm happy to be done, and I'm pleased with these books. But now I'm off to something that is really fun, which is a science fiction novel about Galileo. It has a strong historical element, and I'm not going to change a single iota of Galileo's real story. And he himself is a fantastically wonderful character, hilarious and bigger than life in a way that we don't often see these days. I look forward to it. Thank you for the preview. And I hope it'll come soon after I finish the current series of books, which you've

unofficially, at least, thought of or called on your own, Science in the Capital. Yes, I would call the trilogy Science in the Capital. I'm a kind of plain-spoken titleist at times, and I think that's the best description of them. Plain-spoken, though he may be, you will find

them in bookstores and online as first 40 Signs of Rain, followed by 50 Degrees Below, and just published and now out in hardcover from Bantam, 60 Days and Counting, which is why Stan Robinson has come to the Planetary Society today to sign a few of these books for some of his fans. Thanks very much, Stan, for coming back on the show. Thanks, Matt. Really a pleasure to be here. Stan Robinson, Kim Stanley Robinson, or KSR, as he is variously known, multi-award-winning science fiction author with this brand-new finish, rollicking, I don't want to put it that way.

Rollicking is a silly word to use. Let me put it differently. No, no, I think it's good. You think rollicking, you like rollicking? It is rollicking. I'll leave it in. All right, a rollicking series of books looking at the

challenges that we face as a species, challenges that we very likely, according to the vast majority of scientists, have put before ourselves, and we have to find our way out. It is a hyper-realistic series of books about how we just might be able to do that.

We'll be looking at the night sky with Bruce Betts and this week's edition of What's Up, right after a return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. How did Pluto and Charon end up with upside-down axes and backwards spin? The general idea is that a catastrophic off-center impact with another large body could have given Pluto its backwards spin and upside-down axis. The same event could have sent a lot of Pluto's material into orbit around the dwarf planet, material that eventually coalesced into its giant partner of a moon, Charon.

What other bodies in the solar system rotate against the flow? Uranus is another planet with a famously tilted axis. It's tilted just about 8 degrees past horizontal, giving it the solar system's most dramatic seasons. But the winner for the most tilted of them all is Venus. Venus's axis is just 3 degrees shy of being perfectly upside down. Some ancient impact almost completely zeroed out its spin, making

it rotate very slowly backwards, so slowly that Venus's days are longer than its years. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Planetary.org.

And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. We're on the phone with Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Must be time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. How are you doing? I'm doing quite well. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. I'm doing very well. Can't see much in the sky. It's pretty gray here in Southern California, but I know they're up there. Good, good. I'm glad you have faith. They are indeed, and I'm guessing it's not cloudy everywhere. So if it's not cloudy where you are, go out and take a look at the sky.

Venus, of course, still a dominant object in the early evening off there in the west, looking like an extremely bright star. evening off there in the west, looking like an extremely bright star. If you look at it through a telescope, you can actually see the phase. It's kind of similar to a quarter phase of the moon. It's also sliding by a first magnitude star, Beta Tauri, just above it over the next week or two, so you can see them not too far apart. And Venus in general is in Taurus, of course, since the star is beta Tauri. We've also got Mars still in the pre-dawn sky, low. It'll just keep hanging out there, low and dim and reddish for a while in the east-southeast. And then Jupiter is rising around 11 p.m. or midnight-ish, dominating the south before dawn. Saturn still hanging out there.

Look over in the southwest during the evening. It looks good. It looks pretty again, especially through its telescope, or even a nice set of binoculars held quite steadily. I know you've taken looks at it yourself there, Matt. I have, and I might tonight if it wasn't gray and cloudy outside. I'll take your word for it. You should check out Venus while you're at it. Well, probably not tonight, but

at some point, I have no doubt it will clear. That's another prediction I'm making. Thank you. Sometimes in the next couple weeks, it's going to be clear in Southern California. All right. Because, you know, we were talking about climate change today, and so I'm going to hold you to that. That's really more of a weather issue, by the way.

I'm very impatient, so weather is pretty much climate to me. All right, well, shall we move on? Let's go to Random Space Fact! Starring Commander Cody. And Commander Cody might be flying in a space shuttle. And the space shuttle orbiter wingspan is 78 feet. And its dry weight, 180,000 pounds. Excuse the Imperial units for those who don't use it.

And I knew you'd ask, well, how does this compare? So I took, well, 737, also a Boeing product there. The modern 737s have about a 112-foot wingspan as opposed to the 78 feet of the shuttle. And the shuttle outweighs it by about 100,000 pounds dry weight. One of the reasons, the shuttle flies like a rock. Like a rock. Okay, we're not in violation of Ford's trademark there, are we? No, I don't think so.

Okay. It's a contextual thing, the way the law is written. This is different. And I think most cars actually fly like a rock. That's true. I don't think that's really the place their trademark is going. Is that what Ford means, maybe? I don't think that's their intention, no.

Quiz time. Quiz time. We asked you in our trivia contest, what constellation is Sirius, otherwise known as the Dog Star? What constellation is it in? Give us the Latin name. How'd we do? You got chastised by a number of people for this being so easy this time, because a lot of our smart listeners were able to do this off the top of their heads.

I suspect that one of them was Tom Hendricks, who did say that Sirius, the dog star, is in Canis Major. And then he said, are you serious? Soitenly. Yes, Canis Major, we're serious, meaning the big dog, of course. Kind of a weird one from Greg Winkler. Now, neither of these guys won this week, but he says, the star Sirius is in the constellation of Canis Major, Latin for big dog, dogs, dogs big dogs landing on my face sorry small channeling of robin williams

there he said got a switch nerve agent so greg don't call us we'll call you uh but but our winner big dog small dogs black and white dog stop dogs stop go dogs. John Calderwood III, he went for the win and got it. He's from Levittsburg, Ohio. John Calderwood III. We won't do our Thurston Howell III impression because he's heard it a million times before, I'm sure. Congratulations, John. You got it. Canis Major.

Excellent. John's going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Planetary Radio t-shirt if you want to win one of those, answer the following question. Name the two astronauts or cosmonauts who've had the most accumulated time spacewalking. So the top two in EVA, extravehicular activity, if you add up how many hours they've been outside their spacecraft, who wins? Who are the top two? Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to send us your entry and compete in our trivia contest.

And as if you didn't know, you've got until Monday, April 30, last day of April, Monday, April 30 at 2 p.m. Pacific time, to get us those entries. And I think we're done. All right, everybody. Thank you. Everybody, go out there. Look at the night sky and think about black paint.

Thank you. Good night. Black paint in the skies. You know, that's what the ancients thought the gods painted the heavens with. And if they'd done a better job, they wouldn't have had little pinpoints of light shining through. It explained everything, didn't it? It still does.

Oops. Good night, Bruce. Good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's here every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.