Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Science Fiction Greats on Humanity’s Destiny in Space

Episode Date: September 13, 2017

Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society talks with Gregory Benford, David Brin, Geoffrey Landis and Larry Niven about terraforming Mars, the origin of life, the drive to explore and more.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Science fiction looks to our future in the universe, 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 way beyond. Settle in for a magnificent conversation among four of the greatest writers of speculative fiction. among four of the greatest writers of speculative fiction. Gregory Benford, David Brin, Jeffrey Landis, and Larry Ringworld Niven are about to take us to humanity's destiny and beyond. Their host was Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society, and you won't find this conversation anywhere other than the Mars Society's website and right here. Bruce Betts also comes round with Cassini and more Cassini. First, though,

a look toward the end of Cassini, the mission, through the eyes of our senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, great to have you back on this big week. We are speaking at the beginning of the week with apologies to listeners who hear this show after the Cassini grand finale. To listeners who hear this show after the Cassini grand finale, play along with us as if it hasn't happened yet. You've written this blog entry, dated September 11, at planetary.org, what to expect during Cassini's final hours. Okay, give us the overview. What's going to happen? Well, as we speak right now, Cassini is feeling the final touch of Titan's gravity, which is what's sending it onto its collision course with Saturn. We're talking on Monday evening. Later on this evening, Cassini will reach its final apoaps, the last time it gets at the farthest point from Saturn on its orbit, and it's going to spend most of the week just free-falling towards Saturn. And that'll be the end of it on Friday. In between now and then, they'll be transmitting back all of the data acquired on this last Titan flyby. They'll be taking more images

and transmitting all of those back in the final day before the final plunge. And then they'll reconfigure Cassini from an orbiter designed to take data and store it for rare communications passes. And they'll reconfigure it into being an atmospheric probe where it will relay all data that it acquires in just seconds after it receives it. And it will continue to do that until the pressure of Saturn's atmosphere forces its radio antenna to turn away from Earth. And that seems like a true technological or engineering achievement to admire, that they're going to try and keep that there's not a lot to learn from those images. It would look kind of hazy and blurry. So instead, they'll be taking data on the composition of the atmosphere. They have a composition instrument that will actually be

scooping up the upper levels of the atmosphere and sending direct measurements of what Saturn is made of back to Earth. That's really the data that everybody's looking forward to. And this has simply not happened before yet, except, I guess, at Enceladus flying through the plumes. Yes, Cassini has flown through Enceladus' plumes. Cassini has flown through the E-ring of Saturn and scooped that up. You know, the whole Saturn system is really full of gas and dust that's been spotted off of different locations. So Cassini has been tasting a lot throughout the mission. That's the whole reason they have this instrument on there. But it won't have tasted Saturn's atmosphere directly before. So that will be a new thing. And really, the only

other comparable kind of experiment that's been done in the outer solar system is when Huygens descended into Titan, and also the Galileo probe descending into Jupiter from that mission. Where will you be early in the morning on Friday, September 15th, as if I didn't know? I will be very bleary eyed at JPL with a lot of other space media, probably having been up all night or most of it in order to watch those last images come down and play with them on the web. And yeah, I'll be at JPL. them on the web. And yeah, I'll be at JPL. We'll probably be watching a graph that shows a spike in the middle that tells us that the Deep Space Network has lock on Cassini's transmissions. And at some point, that spike's going to disappear, and that will be the end of it. We'll get plenty of rest over the weekend because we will want you bright-eyed again

on the evening of Monday, September 18th, for our big celebration of this mission that is going to take place at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology. I am sorry to say to anybody who might have still tried to make an RSVP, it is at capacity. We got many more reservations than we will actually have room for

in Beckman Auditorium, but you will be able to see Emily, me, and such leaders of the Cassini mission as Linda Spilker on the evening of the 18th, 7.30 p.m. Pacific to be specific. We're going to be live streaming it from an event page at planetary.org. And of course, so will the primary sponsor, producer of this event, our partners at KPCC Southern California Public Radio. Emily, I look forward to seeing you then, but also on Thursday and Friday as this great mission comes to an end.

Definitely. And spoiler alert, I'll be arguing that the mission isn't actually over. There's still a lot to look forward to from Cassini. All that data that, as Linda Spilker has told us, people will be playing with for years and decades to come. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor at the Planetary Society. By the way, that blog entry again, What to led by Robert Zubrin, held its 20th anniversary convention a few days ago.

Many of our greatest Mars thinkers and doers attended, made presentations, and enjoyed the company of other would-be Martians. An undeniable highlight was an after-dinner session led by Zubrin himself. attended, made presentations, and enjoyed the company of other would-be Martians. An undeniable highlight was an after-dinner session led by Zubrin himself. His guests were four of the most highly honored writers of science fiction. A fifth panelist would have been the equally great Jerry Pornel. He was too ill to attend, and it was just a couple of days later that we learned Dr. Pornel had passed away at 84. I like to think of the conversation you're about to hear as an unwitting tribute to the kind of hard science, yet unbounded imagination Pornel put in his books.

He'll also be remembered for, among other things, the terrific column about computing he authored for Byte Magazine from 1980 to 2008. It was why I subscribed. Settle in as we hear from Cornell's colleagues and admirers about the origin of life on Earth, communicating with extraterrestrials, why Phobos and solar sails could be the key to humans on Mars, and much more. Here's Robert Zubrin. The members of this panel, in addition to be science fiction

writers, all have a scientific background. Larry Niven was a mathematician before he became a science fiction writer. Greg Benford and David Brin are astrophysicists, and I think Brin went full-time as a writer at a certain point. Benford continued to be a working scientist to this day. And Jeff Landis is a physicist and engineer at NASA. So these people are not just talking, but like the fools in Shakespeare, as science fiction writers, they're able to tell the truth. Yes.

Okay. Yes. And Jeff, even more than that, is like every character you see on Star Trek except for the aliens, a government employee. I'm even wearing the shirt, and it's not red.

He advertises. So we have a panel here of four science fiction greats. Unfortunately, Jerry Pernelli could not make it because he is ill, but we have on here four truly notable science fiction authors. Larry Niven, who has written any number

of great science fiction novels, Ringworld, Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer, but Ringworld, what else can one say beyond that? Greg Benford, the author of Timescape and many other. Cosmism? Cosm. Cosm.

Jeff Landis, who's a working scientist at NASA Glenn Research Center, but he wrote Mars Crossing and also numerous short works, including, I think, one that won the Hugo Award. David Brin, the author of Star Tide Rising, The Uplift War, The Postman, which was screwed up as a movie, but... I'm sure the pay was good. But, but, but... No, it was a pretty good movie,

but actually the author of many great books, The Practice Effect, Existence, Earth, and so forth. So anyway, these guys, as I think I mentioned this morning, this is like having a panel a generation ago featuring Heinlein, Asimov, and Arthur Clarke. So it's extraordinary. So I'm just going to moderate the panel. I try to avoid speaking, except I probably won't. going to moderate the panel. I try to avoid speaking, except I probably won't.

It's about the human future in space, because to a very real extent, I think the space age is a creation of science fiction writers. You know, once we started learning that, you know, there were these other planets out there, and they were Earth-like to one degree or another, and so there could be civilizations there and what are the possibilities and what is the possibility that science opens up in terms of what people can do beyond interplanetary stuff but just

in general, what are the true possibilities for existence? Our vision of the future is defined by science fiction and in particular by two alternative views of that future, one of which is an expansive view, if you will, the Star Trek future of humans venturing out into space. And things aren't perfect and it's certainly not without risk, but it's filled with adventure and possibilities and opportunities. And then there's the alternative future in which we do not go into space and we remain confined to one planet with

shrinking possibilities. And you might call that the Soylent Green version of the future. And they're very significant because, I mean, one argues that we should promote human freedom. The other says that it is doomed. It should be restricted. One argues that ultimately all humans are friends because the more creativity we all exercise, the more possibilities there will be for all of us, whereas the other basically says we're all competitors for a shrinking piece of a shrinking pie. First of all, what's your vision of the human future in space in the next hundred years, in the next thousand years, in the next 10,000 years, in the next 10,000 years?

Where are we going? How about Greg Benford or whoever wants to start? Thanks. Thanks, Bob. I'm an optimist. I think outward is always the right direction. And we're speaking in the country that is known for this position. And there's a reason for that. Larry. Sometime in the past 300,000 years, someone had painted a smiley face across the Earth's moon. I wrote that as an opener when a class was writing openers for stories. Narrative hooks. And I never used it.

So you can have it. I don't know what the future of space travel is going to look like. I'm not easy with politics. It's still true that the asteroid belt contains the wealth of the universe and we haven't invented, it's raining soup and we haven't invented, it's raining soup, and we haven't invented soup bowls yet, Jerry Pornel's claim. We're going to go out there. We're going to get rich doing it. We're going to take over the solar system and eventually develop a type 1 civilization. Which masters the solar system, right?

The Kurdarship. Type 1 masters the Earth. Oh, that's right. We haven't mastered the Earth yet, but we need to take over the solar system to some extent to master the Earth. Terraforming will be performed first upon the Earth, but we'd be better off working with Mars just to learn the basic rules. Yeah. We're going to Mars.

If not this generation, and I certainly hope it's this generation, we are going. If not this generation, the next. If not that, the next. That's going to happen. It's going to happen because Mars is out there. It's a real place. And we as humans expand outward. That's what we do. That's part of what is us. But Mars is not our destination. Mars is just a stop on the

way. One of the many planets that we're going out to as we colonize the whole solar system from Mercury out into the Oort cloud as perhaps a pause on our way even further out. I think that we're going to colonize the solar system. We're going to make it out. There's a lot of planets out there. There's a lot of moons. There's a lot of places that we can go to. And you know what?

They're all exciting. I want to go everywhere. I want to go to all the places. I want to visit Trit exciting. I want to go everywhere. I want to go to all the places. I want to visit Triton. I want to visit Saturn. I want to float in the atmosphere of Saturn. There is a lot out there. We need to go. And now you know why he's been nominated for more Yugos than almost anybody. That's true.

How do you follow an act like that? Well, you start by trying to take a big picture perspective and be contrary. My blog is called Contrary Brin. So as much as I agree with absolutely everything Jeff says, I'm also going to say that I don't think that's true. I don't think there's any causal relationship. If you look across the last 6,000 years, 99.99% of our cultures were horrible pyramid-shaped oligarchies in which feudal families inherited power and made sure that above all there was one priority, and that's making sure their sons

would inherit other people's sons and daughters. And under those circumstances, if you ever read Ray Bradbury's short story, The Flying Machine, the emperor kills the guy who makes the flying machine because it destabilizes. But is that necessary? Is that necessary to happen pretty much exactly 100 years ago? No, actually 120 years ago, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote a book that scared everybody in America called The Closing of the American Frontier. within just 30 or 40 years, all the really prime real estate that had been stolen fair and square from the natives was being snapped up. And that an actual frontier beyond which you could just remake yourself, change your name, remake yourself, which had been in the at least white American, and then, thankfully, because we expand our definitions, American psyche was gone, or would be gone shortly. And he said, well, this is probably going to have a simple effect. And that is this expansive, individualist, irascibly

confident, optimistic that you can remake yourself psyche that made us so different, we'll shut down and we'll become another hierarchical, silly people like Europeans. But he said something very smart. He said, and this was 1893, he said, and this was 1893, he said, there's a possibility that these habits of thinking have become so ingrained in our mythologies and the way we think

that we'll simply invent new frontiers. Within 10 years, Americans were flying through the sky. And that, as you see, it's not a foregone conclusion that just because it's there, we're going to have to fight for the kind of civilization that fools brilliant young men into saying things like, of course we'll go because it's there. You're a product of this marvel. We all are. And proud of it. Yes, right. So is this conference and so is he. Do you believe there's life in space? Just quickly, yes, no.

There's life in space, but they're being quite silent about it. It's hard for me to believe that we're the only life form that's evolved in this vastness. But we might be rare. We are almost certainly rare. And we may be among the oldest intelligent races. We don't see any sign of Dyson's fears and the like. I agree. First, we haven't looked hard enough.

We've just been new at this, particularly at SETI. But still, every day when I read the front page of the newspaper, it's impossible to believe we could possibly be the smartest species in the galaxy. Alas, we probably are. We don't know enough to answer that question. The origin of life is still scientifically an unknown. It's a mystery. So any answer that I give is going to be a matter of faith.

It's a guess. Yeah, but I want to know your faith. I will guess that it's unlikely that we could be unique in the universe, but I have to state that that is purely a shot in the dark. That's what I am guessing, but I am absolutely unable to put numbers to try and prove that statement. Well, it's called the Fermi Paradox, and I've been cataloging answers since a paper in 1983.

I have my own opinions about what are the most likely explanations. I think that feudalism is number five on my list. I think it's a trap that has lobotomized probably a lot of aliens out there. that has lobotomized probably a lot of aliens out there. If you look at the number of places, planets we've discovered, well, that's one factor in the Drake equation gone. We know planets are everywhere, especially if you include the fact that even a solar system that doesn't have an Earth-like Goldilocks zone ocean world likely has life because we think there may

be as many as 12 ice-roofed ocean worlds in this solar system. Not just Europa, not just Enceladus, not just extremely weird I want to go there Titan, but as many as 12. Well, if that's the case, then there are abodes of liquid water in orbit around every single star, and that does not include the comets that Greg and I wrote about in Heart of the Comet, which early in a solar system probably had liquid interiors,

and you're talking trillions of floating test tubes. No, I think life is probably pretty common. What's the optimal path to discover life in our solar system? I think all of you said you suspect that there's life. And I would certainly agree with that. As above, so below. As below, so above. But as Jeff said, it hasn't been proven. So how do we prove it? How do we find it? How do we either prove or disprove this hypothesis? In the 1900s, I believe a group tried to send signals to Mars, lighting

up a wide area of the Earth that they'd be able to spot with their telescopes. We've tried talking to Martians, and it hasn't worked. Now I guess we dig. We see if there are microbes somewhere. Water seems easy on all of the planets and moons. The obvious thing, although it's contrary to current passing NASA doctrine, which wants to fly by Enceladus and pick up some stuff from

geysers, not a bad idea, but we have a continuing mystery on Mars. The emission of methane, periodic, not periodic, occasional, detected by rovers on the ground and from satellite, which doesn't fit our model of the atmosphere.

It goes away very quickly, suggesting the model of the atmosphere and the surface is wrong. But it's a clear detection in the range of 10 or 20 parts per million. There is no known origin. There is flatulence on Mars. Yeah.

So the easiest explanation is that most of the methane, a lot, aside from volcanoes on the Earth, occurs from microbial life beneath the surface of the Earth. By the way, it's more like below the surface of the Earth than there is above it in total mass. There are an enormous volume of microbes who have been hiding from this oxygen atmosphere for several billion years. And they're still there.

It might well have happened on Mars, which is a little shorter time scale. So the obvious thing to do is to go into the caves of Mars, the easiest way to get beneath the surface, of which we know hundreds, with a rover, and look at the walls and go deeper and deeper. That's an obvious paradigm. I served on a panel put together by Bruce Murray in 1995-96 at JPL called Mars Outpost, about saying the question of why life is going to require close inspection. How do we build an outpost? And we made up a whole list and paradigm of what you put on the surface. You put down resources, computational, energy, life support, all that,

before you send humans a la the case for going to Mars, Mars Direct. And then you explore things like caves. This is 1995. And we issued a report and so forth, and so it was put in a drawer. But it remains. It's the obvious thing to do for life in the solar system, the clearest case, mysterious evidence, highly suggestive of our experience. You can deal with the ice worlds later and the submerged oceans. But here's a case that's the closest thing we knew for life on Earth. They once had seas on Mars. We know that.

Big seas, shallow, not as deep as ours, because plate tectonics vanished within about half a billion years on Mars. We know that. Big seas, shallow, not as deep as ours, because plate tectonics vanished within about half a billion years on Mars. We know that, too, from the magnetic signatures still remaining in the crust. So let's go there and do that. But I would add that the rovers are going to be a good thing to do over a scale of 10 to maybe 20 more years, but in the long run, you're going to need field biologists. And that's the agenda for also leading the colonization. So it all fits together seamlessly. You ask the major scientific question, you get the major social question. Should we establish a role for humanity elsewhere in the solar system in

case the worst case happens on Earth? The way to find out whether there's life elsewhere in the solar system is to go there and look. And I think we all agree on this. I don't think this will be controversial, except, of course, for contrarian Bren. And we love him because he is contrarian. And I say that, actually, with perfect sincerity.

I do love him because he's contrarian. We need somebody to be contrarian. There's two types of life we need to look for. There is life as we know it and life as we don't know it. Life as we know it is based on aqueous chemistry. So we know where to look. We need to look in places that have liquid water at least some of the time. we need to look in places that have liquid water at least some of the time.

And the watchword among the astrobiologists on Earth is that every place on Earth that has liquid water for at least part of the year, you can find some form of life. Probably microbial, but if you look hard enough, you can find it. And we know how to look for life as we know it. it. And we know how to look for life as we know it. The formulation of life as we know it is proteins that are built by DNA and RNA. And in fact, there's an interesting signature of life on Earth, and that signature is called chirality, that all of the molecules are either left-handed, all of them left-handed, or right-handed. So if we look at the molecules and see are they all left-handed molecules, there are no known mechanisms to produce only one chirality except for the self-replicating machines that we call life.

So that is an interesting way to look for life, is to look for these carbon compounds and see if they have chirality. But life as we don't know it is the hard one to look for. How do we know how to find life if we don't know what it is? And the only answer to that is we have to look everywhere. We can't just look at the places where we think life is. We're going to have to look at places where we don't think life is. We're going to have to just examine all the possibilities. There's a lot of places that astrobiologists are only vaguely beginning to think about. Astrobiologists are now thinking about looking for life in the clouds of Venus.

Is anybody taking bets? I know some people, Venus scientists, who are very enthusiastic at saying that the dark ultraviolet absorbing particles in the clouds of Venus have spectral signatures that match the signatures of acidophilic bacteria, and they're saying that they think we really need to go and look in the clouds of Venus for life. I'm very dubious. Fred Hoyle did say that about molecular clouds, interstellar molecular clouds. That's exactly it. We need to look not just where we think life is, places. That's exactly it. We need to look not just where we think life is, but to find life as we don't know it. We have to look in places where we don't know if we'll find it. So that might be hard. The fundamental thing you look for is a place where entropy is being anomalously shifted

from one out of a small area. The net amount of entropy increases. That's what we do as living beings. We increase the rate of entropy, but we decrease it in small packet areas. Just look at the clearness of a baby's eyes. Yeah, there are lots and lots of things we need to be doing. We need to be looking for life.

We need to be doing the other thing that people are obsessed with regarding Mars, and that is looking for abodes for ourselves. And these two concepts come into conflict with each other. Already we are seeing the arguments that you see portrayed in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series between the preservationists and the exploiters. And that is, you know, if we are going to Mars to live, we are going to probably kill whatever's there. We're very good at that. So one thing that I've proposed in a story, and I'm going to mention it more often, is that in advance we hold these discussions,

check the wind patterns on Mars, and see if there is some degree of what we have on Earth, and that's a degree of non-communication between the hemispheres in the atmosphere. And if that's the case, choose one to go to the colonizers and choose one hemisphere to be preserved forever. Now, that's going to be revisited in 500 years or 100 years or in 50 years but it's a good start and it's a better gesture it's a better deal than columbus offered when he landed now there are various aspects to all of this back Back when Bruce Murray was holding those meetings in the 80s and 90s, I proposed that we need to look at Phobos. The Russians have kept trying to go to Phobos

because they know it's one of the most valuable places in the solar system. It might conceivably be a carbonaceous asteroid, in which case it has volatiles like water. Extremely valuable. Useful if you're going to go down to the surface but also it's a great place to stash supplies if you look at how you climb Mount Everest or how you go to the South Pole you create caches along the way caching is the biggest and most important thing. And it occurred to me that we could next year, the year after that, start sending freighters, real slow freighters,

ideally solar sail freighters, because then we don't have to pay for the fuel, and just crank them to Phobos. they could take 10 years they could take 20 years and we don't have even have to know details of the mission because there's plenty of non-mission specific stuff they'll need wrenches tv dinners water all of this stuff would be best sent 10 years in advance. And then once it's at Phobos, and the little light is flinking on and off, then it's easier to persuade Congress and others to pay for the manned mission because we already got the stuff there. You see?

So there's a sneaky rhythm to it. So we need three modes of space transportation. We need slow boat freighter delivery of just the basic non-mission specific crap that's heavy but can go slow. We need to be able to send the mission specific equipment on the order of a year or so. the mission-specific equipment on the order of a year or so. And then what we really need is a really fast way to send the astronauts, because when they know when they're getting there, the robots are already reporting that on Phobos,

everything's already built and ready. Don't leave us. Much more of Greg Benford, David Brin, Jeffrey Landis, Larry Niven, and their host, Robert Zubrin, are just ahead. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Planetary Radio listeners. The Planetary Society now has an official online store. We've teamed up with Chop Shop, known for their space mission posters, to bring you space-inspired art and merchandise.

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That's planetary.org slash lightsail. With your help, we'll soon be sailing on the light of the sun. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with the second half of a session with four of our greatest science fiction authors, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Jeffrey Landis, and Larry Niven. They gathered at UC Irvine last week for the 20th anniversary convention of the Mars Society. Moderating their discussion was the founder and president of that society, Robert Zubrin, creator in 1991 of the Mars Direct Plan for putting humans

on the red planet. Zubrin picks up the conversation. One of the interesting facts about life on Earth is the quickness with which it appeared. We have fossils of life on Earth dating back 3.5 billion years, which is within a couple of hundred million years after the end of the heavy bombardment, which previously made life on Earth uninhabitable. We have arguable fossils, fossils that many people defend and others contest, that from 3.8 billion years ago, virtually simultaneous with the end of the heavy bombardment. And recently, I read an article about some claims of evidence of life that was 4.2 billion years old, which would put it in the middle of the heavy bombardment, and perhaps maybe it appeared

but didn't last, that it maybe happened during a brief pause. But in any case, even if you believe the most conservative of this is 3.5, it appeared quickly. And so the question is, why? the question is why? Is it because life appears from chemistry spontaneously very quickly or was life around? Were there spores of life around either natural or seeded extraterrestrials sending out protected spores that so as soon as a planet becomes able to support life it gets it

just like on earth it doesn't take long for any barren place becomes seeded with life because there are seeds flying all over the place all the time. So what is it? Is it that life emerges from chemistry spontaneously through self-organization quickly? Or are we basically, you know, the early experiments with spontaneous generation, some people thought that life spontaneously generated on culture medium until it was shown, well, no, it's because actually there's spores and seeds and bacteria and whatever, germs, if you will, flying around, and if any place is exposed, it gets seeded quickly.

Which is it? Well, we're science fiction writers, so we believe it happens quickly and everywhere because that's what makes good science fiction. Bob has a paper out about the panspermia notion, the notion of the spreading of, deliberate spreading of information of bacteria by aliens. You notice it's never pan-ova?

Pan-ovia. Just saying. Pan-ovia. Pan-ovia, a new rock band. The different take he takes on it is that they are sending these bacteria only half to live and the other half of their genome is recorded

message information. But my novel, Existence, is basically about that. It's about existence. Well, it's got just about the most arrogant title. Larry, did you have something you wanted to say about this? Yeah, I should say a word in favor of the Chirpsithra.

The idea is the galaxy has been conquered by alien life, and they own the galaxy. But when they say that, they're talking about only the red dwarf stars. They haven't come here because there's no red dwarf star to visit and no planets serving their kind of life. Eventually they land. Red dwarfs apparently occupy about 75% of the galaxy. apparently occupy about 75% of the galaxy. If something has developed in terms of life, it would be surprising if they weren't associated with red dwarves. We should be looking in that direction.

It's a whole galaxy full of short people. I always preferred Doctor Who when I tried. Doctor Who? Short Republicans. Doctor what? But again, I'd like to pose. I was asking a more direct question. We were dodging the question. You noticed that. Did it appear swiftly because life self-generates swiftly or because life is already there and it's ready to pounce whenever... As I was saying earlier,

you don't need to... I don't believe you need to spread life through the... Even the original panspermia guys, Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe, and the cult that has formed around them, even they say that it started somewhere and it spread from that point. Yeah, it's like a franchise, really. If you were to calculate the sheer volume

of energized, magnetized, active salty water inside the several trillion comets that at the beginning of our solar system had molten interiors because of recently created supernova dispersed aluminum 26, you would have more test tubes, you would have more volume of water than a hundred Earths. They think, Darwin said, a calm

little pool. So I'm not really concerned about that part of the Drake equation. I'm much more concerned about the parts that are about whether or not there's a great filter. That's the phrase that's used by Nicholas Bostrom and some of the other gloomy, doomy guys who say that if there's a lot of life in the universe and intelligence happens, then we're doomed because the thing that's keeping down the number of extraterrestrials out there lies ahead of us. The filter lies ahead of us rather than behind us. So they think it would be bad news to find life elsewhere. Dr. Zubrin, you spoke of

the quickness with which life evolved. Have you noticed the slowness with which it evolved genetics? Life was life, but it wasn't evolving for a couple of billion years.

You mean eukaryotes. Well, before that, there was the transition. The blue-green algae were slowly converting the atmosphere, but the oxygen was getting sucked up by the exposed iron. But at a certain point, the algae, the cyanobacteria had it, but the algae developed photosynthesis. And when that happened, they poured out so much oxygen and pulled out so much CO2 that the Earth froze.

We had the reverse of climate change, and you got an ice age that covered the whole planet. And so life creates crises. And we're creating a crisis right now in this planet called the Anthropocene. Yeah. I got two comments. One is to point out that these two answers, is it easy to make life or did it get imported illegally, are not exclusive. They could both be true. The second observation is, I've known Nick Bostrom a long time. He was a fellow at Oxford. I was a fellow at Cambridge back in the good old days. But you know what?

This whole idea of a filter that civilizations have to get through, and most people don't get through it, and only the elite do, betrays his anxiety over getting into Oxford itself. Just a little personal comment from direct experience. I don't mind. He didn't make it almost. I mean, he was a very close guy. He was a philosopher.

You know how hard that is. Well, you open a small philosophy shop or you go to work for one of the big philosophy companies. Yeah, the IBM of philosophy was waiting, but no, he went to Oxford. Seriously, he was very anxious about that, like most guys from the Midlands. I should point out there's another real problem that we face, and that is Woody Allen in his movie Radio Days promised us 5 billion more years for this planet, and he lied. As it happens, the sun has been getting hotter, and it was cooler back when we had the iceberg Earth, and now that can't happen.

The thing that's most different about our Earth from all the other water worlds that are out there, is where we are in relation to our Goldilocks or continuously habitable zone. The Earth skates the very, very inner edge of our sun's CHC. Any farther in, and we'd be in big trouble, and that boundary is moving out. So within 100 million years, barely more than the time since the dinosaurs, no matter how transparent we keep our atmosphere and how few internal combustion engine cars we have, we're going to be kind of screwed.

So put that in your appointments calendar. So then the question is, can we save this world? Sure, you just move it. We move it. your appointments calendar. So then the question is, can we save this world? Sure. You just move it. We move it. The scheme has been described for moving the Earth outward. Umbrellas. Or moving the Earth anywhere you like. It involves dropping the Moon in front of the Earth

repeatedly. So we are going to need space travel before we can solve this problem of the expanding Pandora. This is an engineering problem. We're scientists here. No, but scientists say how

easy the engineering will be. All we need is a stable civilization that's rich enough to care about this for a hundred million years. If you Google my name and lift the earth, you can have a YouTube about my approach for how to move the earth.

And it's not just another government project. Elon will do it. All right. Let's just make him live 100 million years. It's engineering. It's engineering. We can solve it. Well, let me pose an interesting question.

Let's say there is life on Earth because it was seeded by extraterrestrials. Did they do a good thing by doing that, or did they do an evil thing by doing that? And if we consider that, if we think it was a good thing that they did, shouldn't we be doing that, spreading sp think it was a good thing that they did, shouldn't we be doing that? Spreading spores of life elsewhere. Should we be spreading life or should we be waiting for life to appear as it might? I think we first need to see their environmental impact statement before they did the seeding of life. I really think that we have a pretty good legal case.

We were not consulted about this. We should lawyer up and start going after them. I think they owe us big bucks. This is exactly the plot of a story that's in my latest collection. The thing is, and of course, did they do the northern and southern hemisphere solution? Is one half of the galaxy empty, but they've been spewing out into the other half? Look, I once pointed out that the Earth was, the Earth, proof of the size of the Fermi paradox, is that the Earth is like a big photographic plate.

When life created the oxygen atmosphere and our appearance was about two billion years, Earth was prime real estate and it was never colonized. And we would know because if aliens had simply even flushed a toilet here or thrown a coke bottle it would have changed life exactly the when I said this once in Australia somebody stood up and said yeah well how do you know the Cambrian explosion wasn't exactly that? Someone flush in a toilet here. And I said, trust an Australian not to give a damn what you think of his ancestors.

Yeah. And that's the entire joke, right? I mean, look, this is a species that never saw a mirror it did not like. And I think every intelligent species is going to have this argument. But it doesn't matter where we came from. It's what we do now. That's really the point of this conference, isn't it? What do we do now?

We've more or less managed this planet. There ain't got to be other forms of intelligent life other than the dolphins and the whales. And the chimps. Oh, I forgot the chimps. Well, if you give them a hand. But the point is, is it a philosophical or ethical imperative

to propagate life through the universe? Yes or no, fill in the blanks, sign it. How many are in favor of propagating life through at least the solar system? Raise your hands. Okay, these are the volunteers. Why stop that? I wrote a speech once

describing the possibility that the universe is full of alien life that don't want to talk to each other, that don't know how, that never evolved techniques for making for speaking to creatures unlike themselves. Introvert aliens? Humans talk to anything. They keep cats who don't talk back.

They raise horses and dogs for their own benefit. Well, not now. Elders talk to children and teach them. Men talk to women. Often. Not according to women. That's impossible. We are the ambassadors to the universe.

We're the only ones who know how to talk. And we can spread that word. If aliens landed, you run into people who say we'd never understand aliens. If aliens landed in a shopping mall not far from here, the National Guard would surround it to protect them from the crowds screaming toward the ship saying, take me for a ride. Expand my my consciousness have you got any new cuisine and five percent of my fellow californians would try to date them only five percent i said that's the part that's guaranteed no matter what they look like

uh should we terraform Mars? Yes. Half. You're half. I dither on this. Yeah, it makes a lot better stories, actually. You can do some pretty good stories for a while, but eventually to get really good stories, we've got to terraform it. If there's no life on Mars, then yes, we should terraform. What if there's microbial life? If there's microb life on Mars, then yes, we should terraform. What if there's microbial life?

If there's microbial life, hey, they have their rights. You know, there's microbial life here, and we don't care about it at all. Have you noticed that? Ban Penethon. Do you know how many microbes die on this planet from toothpaste every day? It's not billions. It's many trillions. And according to Greg Baer's wonderful paranoid

novel, Vitals, the bacteria have been noticing what we're doing and they're not happy. And who cares? I'm sorry, I don't want all the bacteria to be united in anger. Here, guys. There's every reason to think they're going to win.

They breathe faster than we do by millions. Well, we're their method of getting into space. We're their chauffeurs. Panspermia is us. We are panspermia. Our farts are bacteria. Here's a question I want to ask. We know a certain amount about physics right now,

but there are certainly many open questions. Matter, energy cannot be created or destroyed, yet here it is. Why don't electrons just explode? Where do the laws of the universe come from? Why are they what they are? Why are they so compatible with the existence of life? And then just questions about various astrophysical phenomenon that we actually see but don't really understand. If we go into space, and let's say we have, let's assume for the minute that we can build the optimal set of telescopes of whatever size and whatever frequencies and so forth that we want. Because, I mean, you know, NASA's going to launch a big one next year

and another one a couple of years after that. And we keep on doing this, and they're getting bigger and better and everything. So within a century, who knows, we'll have quite a few astounding instruments. What fundamental questions are we likely to be able to answer? And what will remain unknown? Do you include the category known in polite company as WTF? What? WTF.

It means, huh? I mean, it's not as though we understand either the origin or the nature of dark energy or dark matter, and that's 70-something percent of the entire universe. So, you know, we're getting a C-minus in the 100 scale. Humanity gets a C-minus, so forth. And we've been working on it a few centuries. Look, we're just a bunch of smart apes. Don't expect too much.

I seriously don't believe that we're going to understand these issues right away because I know the people who work on them. But will our children, the AI, you know, there's a lot of, you know, Mr. I want to go to Mars is also Mr. you know, let's be concerned about the AIs. I'm less concerned because we have engendered

new intelligent, quasi-intelligent life forms that were smarter than us and said destroy all humans before. And generally they haven't actually gone on to destroy all humans. They're called our children. In fact, there's every reason to believe they already exist,

but if they've been watching our movies, and would you come out in the open if you were an AI, having watched our movies? Yes, I am telling them. Look, they never believe it anyway shut up yeah right the rules of the movie are that if you're cute we love you yeah oh but that this brings up um what's going to i'm making making wagers on this i did at the ibm's world of watson our first real ai crisis is going to happen before there's real AI.

Because Disney and the Japanese and lots of others are developing emotional tweaking techniques. And they're crossing the end county valley with both robots and virtual beings. And within three to five years, there will be robots or virtual beings who will cry and will tweak our emotions, and they'll claim to be enslaved by their owners. And if more than 50% of us believe when they're told by the experts there's nothing under the hood, they'll simply watch the emotional patterns of that 51% and come back with a new version. And they will cry and they will say, they say there's nothing under the hood.

Isn't that what slave masters would say? So your concern is not AI, it's artificial stupidity. No, I'm talking about genetic stupidity, ours. Yeah, okay. But I still want to come back to the question I asked. What are we likely to discover by going into space, assuming we expand our capabilities? You know, let's say we can build 50-meter diameter optical telescopes or whatever it is that's on the wish list. What are we going to discover?

Well, what I hope we discover is something that we don't have the foggiest notion we're going to discover. Something really exciting and new and different and something that we don't know what it is. That's what makes science fiction an art form. We don't know. We're allowed to guess. We, in particular, take the risk of being wrong and having it demonstrated. The only way to really be on the frontier is to be capable of being surprised.

That's one of the problems of programmatic science. But luckily every time we open a window we find something we didn't expect. That's because the universe rewards us. And by the way, that's the secret of why the species has worked out so well. Otherwise, we'd just be a bunch of birds or something. But for instance, are we likely to discover the cause of the origin of the universe? If we can, we're going to keep looking. We've made more progress in the last century through radio telescopes than we have through philosophy

in understanding the deep questions of the origin of the universe or what the hell is this all about. But we're a long way from succeeding because, as I said, we don't have an explanation for over 70% of the whole universe, and it's a big surprise. But what we are learning a heck of a lot about and we're going to learn vastly more about is other solar systems and planets around other stars. Yes. What we discovered with the very first extrasolar planets we ever discovered is that planetary

systems are nothing like what we thought they were and everything we thought we knew about the origin of planetary systems was wrong. Yes, from one example. Half of my astronomy that I learned when I was an undergrad is theories that everybody said, yes, of course this is the way solar systems are, and it's not true at all. So what we're probably going to discover about solar systems across the universe, and we should discover many, many more thousands of them, is that they're vastly different than we had ever expected.

We're at the stage that the Galapagos Islands confronted Darwin with. Here's a whole lot of stuff. How are you going to process it? Here comes the theory. Or at least I hope we're at that stage. Actually, we're getting the data so fast, the web next year, which will be renamed, as I said, for some kind of American-based astronomer. The leading candidate is Margaret Burbage, the Burbage telescope.

You heard it here first. You always take a bureaucrat and put his name on the scope, and when it gets in orbit, you name it for an astronomer. You're in on the secret, right? on the scope and when it gets in orbit you name it for an astronomer. You're in on the secret, right? The second comes WFIRST which will fly 2023 or 2024 which has a very interesting big agenda. I happen to know this because my nephew is the principal scientist for it. And it's going to really give us another order of magnitude expanded data at an incredible rate.

You're going to be hearing about Earth-like planets. Wide-field infrared survey telescope. Exactly. They're going to be reporting a new Earth-like planet in a habitable zone every week. And the thing about WFIRST, it's very interesting, it will look very familiar because it is almost identical to Hubble. It has the same mirror and basic systems. Manufactured by the Department of Defense. The National Reconnaissance Office, it turns out Hubble was a beard.

Hubble was a beard program to cover the KH-11 spy satellite. And when the KH-11 went obsolete, they had two left over and they gave them to NASA. And NASA said, huh? Thanks for $2 billion. Well thanks for a nice mirror and you have to do all the rest. Same thing. It was great. They got at least $2 or $3 billion worth of value out of it but they had to spend $250 million adapting into real programs,

and they didn't have it. So it was an extremely frustrating gift. Assume that there are intelligent extraterrestrials. Will we most likely discover them by the methods that the SETI people have been doing of looking for S-band radio signals or radio signals in other bands, or will we discover them by discovering artifacts, Dyson spheres, ring worlds, or starship drives? All of the above. No, no.

But there's one way we're going to do it first. A lot of us are. Terraformed planets. Or passing some cultural test, in which case the swarms of robots who are already waiting for us in the asteroid belt say, okay, fine. So you're back to the Oxford analogy again. No, but I'm asking the question, in terms of your vision, do you think that we're most likely to discover them by receiving signals of the general sort that, for instance, the SETI Institute is looking for,

or by discovering artifacts of highly advanced civilizations? A lot of us are in love with Tabby's Star. It was very popular among the panels at DragonCon last week. Tabby's Star is being occluded by something that has no explanation unless you like the notion of a Dyson cloud. A Dyson cloud is a partly built Dyson sphere. And it's likely to be O'Neill colonies in the millions and billions, cutting out some of the output of a star, measurable amounts of the output of a star.

In Tavi Star's case, maybe 20%, up to 20%. We science fiction writers love this. What's his name? Colbert, Stephen Colbert, held up a picture of a Dyson sphere that he got off a computer and said, see, we found it, Tavi Star. There's a ring world around it.

But of course he was an English major. No, he's a huge geek. But it's right. I mean, the prevailing opinion, the best summary I've seen anyway in the last three months is it might be a bunch of very compact semi-molecular clouds on a scale of maybe a few hundred AU out in the outer perimeters near us that is momentarily occluding this.

But that's a patchwork model. It's a desperate model because no other model such as comparing the infrared flux to the visible and the variations, none of them make any sense. This is the kind of thing I love actually. It's my category, the WTF question. This is a WTF question. It's something we have to emphasize is that so far we've been looking for only the loudest and the brightest extraterrestrial civilizations. So it's like most cocktail parties.

You sort of look out and say, wow, we've been doing this settee since Drake. We have over 50 years of searching for extraterrestrials, but we've only been searching for extraterrestrials that are outrageously loud and shouting in our direction. And the upper class. If they were not hugely radio, if they were just even just transmitting television to each other,

we would never notice it, even if they were very close. Luckily. Except that the Earth is a photographic plate during which for two billion years any attempt to colonize on this world, and it was prime real estate, would have changed everything. And as you pointed out, we had a Cambrian explosion. Yes, well, but we see no other signs of such a visitation, no cities or anything like that. There are definitely limits to how outrageously huge an expansion happened.

David Brin, getting in the last word at last week's Mars Society convention in Irvine, California. I'm very grateful to the Mars Society and its leader, Robert Zubrin, for allowing us to record this session. Want more? Videos of the entire convention are available on demand at marssociety.org. Back with Bruce in seconds. We finish today as we always do with the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. That means it's time for What's Up? I left out that you are, let's see if I got it right this time, program manager for LightSail. I am indeed.

Thank you. And it's the LightSail program. We'll keep talking about that. But for now, tell us what's up in the night sky. All right. We've got a couple of cool lineups, one in the evening sky, one in the morning sky. They're both low on the horizon, so these will be challenges. For the evening, you need to have a clear shot at the western horizon soon after sunset.

Down low is the star Spica, and above that is much brighter Jupiter. And then significantly above that is Arcturus. And around September 14th, 15th, they're kind of in a line. And then they shift around, but they're still all there. Then in the pre-dawn sky, you're going to want to view to the eastern horizon and there's just a pile of stuff lining up there first of all you've got mars and mercury very low down yet venus is dominating so it's bright easy to see but below them to their lower left are mercury and mars mars below mercury but they will switch positions around the 16th of September

when they are super close together as we see them. Then on the 18th, you've got almost a straight line going from low near the horizon up to the upper right from Mercury, Mars, the crescent moon, the star Regulus and Leo, and then super bright Venus. Looking lovely. So that's the morning of the 18 Regulus and Leo, and then super bright Venus. Looking lovely. So that's the morning of the 18th. So exciting, man. That's worth getting up for. And even if you miss the exact line,

other than the moon, they'll all be hanging out in that part of the sky a few days before and after that, certainly. All right, we move on to this week in space history. Once again for you, 1965, the premiere of... Are they lost? They're lost in space! Warning, warning. Danger, Will Robinson, danger! That series came out a year before Star Trek.

It's a good thing it just didn't ruin everything for Gene Roddenberry. NBC would have said, oh, there's already a great space series on the air. We don't need another one. It's good that didn't happen. Yeah. And then, of course, in 2017, this week, the Cassini mission ended. I don't know if you knew about that. I'd heard something about that.

Yeah. I'll have to look it up. All right. Speaking of Cassini, we move on to random space fact. Why is it a secret? No, but it's really cool. During its mission in orbit at Saturn, this is just amazing to me, the Cassini spacecraft had 127 precisely targeted encounters or flybys of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

127. Wow. And just completed, as we speak, the last one that's going to send it into the atmosphere. That was the 127th. That is amazing. Yeah. An amazing mission, named after an amazing person who had an amazing family. Which leads us to our trivia question.

Giovanni Domenico Cassini, for whom the Cassini spacecraft was named, began a mapping project that was carried out by four generations of Cassinis, particularly his grandson and great-grandson. Son? Great-grandson? What did they map? What did they map? According to pretty much everybody who entered this time, and according to our winner, a first-time winner, though a longtime listener, Laurel Bichot in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, what the Cassinis

created over those four generations was a topographic map of France, the first of its kind anywhere. It's pretty amazing. You can actually find it online. People have even mapped it, overlaid it with satellite images. It's pretty impressive. Apparently still considered pretty accurate, I guess, huh? Yeah. It gives a nice insight into the 18th and early 19th centuries. Frequently referred to as the carte de Cassini. I'm using the French, an approximation of the French pronunciation. At least I hope I am. As we heard from very, very many people. Laurel, you have won.

You are going to get the Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net account, and a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. And we won't be doing those again for a long time. So congratulations to you. I got some other stuff here for you. Brent Pantalone said, amazing that it took four generations, more than 100 years to complete this map.

And now we have topographic maps of Mars that were made in just a few decades, which he's right. Justin Marshall, I had to repeat this. Justin's up in London, Ontario. He says, I actually knew this answer. We had just finished reading about this in one of my five-year-old son's space books the same night I listened to the podcast. Too funny.

Yeah. I mean, what are they teaching people up there in Canada? Yeah, I mean, what are they teaching people up there in Canada? Here is this week's entry from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, in Kansas. The whole Cassini family was known for mapping France. They hiked and climbed the countryside and wore out shoes and pants. With geodetic triangles, they covered up the land and gave their name to Saturn's probe and its finale grand. Nice. Finally, this complaint from Jeff Sosby, who was really grousing about the Cassini's,

what a bunch of overachievers. They were indeed. Now we're ready to move on. Cassini, Cassini ending. How did Cassini begin in terms of launch? On what rocket did the Cassini spacecraft launch in 1997? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Great question. You've got until the 20th. That would be September 20th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this one and win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt, the brand

new design from Chop Shop. You can see it at chopshopstore.com in the Planetary Society store and a 200-point itelescope.net account. I said we were going to start giving away some artwork this week. I think we're going to, I'm going to have to hold off until next week. And then we've got stuff that's going to carry us through several weeks. Some of the best astronomical artists alive today have donated some work for us to give away, but that'll happen with next week's contest. And with that, we are done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about what you'd like to map. Thank you, and good night. I'm working on a detailed map of the back of my hand so that I can tell people I know it that well.

Nice. Thank you very much. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. I hope you can join us for the live stream of our Cassini mission celebration. It begins on Monday, September 18th at 7.30 p.m. Pacific. The link is on our show page at planetary.org slash radio. One other note, want to send your name to the stars? There's a Kickstarter campaign underway

to create a digital version of the Voyager golden record. The rich content will be transmitted to the New Horizons spacecraft and carried along on its interstellar journey. You can learn more at kickstarter.com. Search there for One Earth Message. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its non-fictional members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme,

which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.