Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Stephen Hawking Accepts the Cosmos Award

Episode Date: March 8, 2010

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A brief visit with Stephen Hawking, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. He is probably the most famous living scientist on Earth. The author of A Brief History of Time received the Cosmos Award last week, and we have exclusive excerpts of his remarks. We've also got an extended visit with Emily Lakdawalla coming up. She'll report to us about her visit to the biggest ever Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Bruce Betts will share an interesting explanation of how the planet Uranus got its name,

and he'll help me give away another Planetary Radio t-shirt. Let's get underway as we open a line to Nye Labs for this week's commentary by Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. I, the planetary guy here, vice president of the Planetary Society, and this week I am excited because NASA is going to reconstitute the Institute for Advanced Concepts, the IAC. This is something they discontinued back in 2007 for budget cutting, but now we're going to put it back in place, and something they're going to work on is an old planetary society idea,

and that's balloons in space. So people would live in very, very large inflatable structures. And by the way, this goes back to the invention of geodesic domes with Buckminster Fuller, the famous architect. These structures would be so low mass, they would literally float on the Earth's atmosphere. And that is an economical way to explore low Earth orbit without having to really get in orbit, without having to have that enormous amount of fuel, and without all the trouble you might have from re-entry. It's a cool idea that the Planetary Society has supported since the days of what they called Space Hab, Space Habitat. Very, very excited that it's going to be back in place so that we can fly above the Earth's atmosphere. It's exciting. I've got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy.

Parenthood kept Emily Lakdawalla from attending the 2009 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. This time, the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator made it to the 41st annual gathering in the woods, Texas. We got her on the Skype connection the day after she got home last week. Emily, welcome home. I guess it was a pretty exciting time there at LPSC. Thanks, Matt. It's good to be home, but it's always good to visit the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. This is my favorite conference of the year. It's where all the planetary geologists gather, and I see a lot of my friends from graduate school, too. And very well attended. I heard there was a good crowd.

Yeah, it was the best attended yet. There were 1,700 abstracts submitted. I think more than 1,500 people attended. So it was a large conference this year. Of course, we only have a little bit of time for an overview here, although we'll take a bit more time than we normally do with you. We'll just encourage people to take a look at the blog at planetary.org. Shall we start with the moon?

Let's start with the moon, which is a good place because I haven't actually had time to write up any of my lunar notes on the blog yet. Hopefully, I will by the time this airs. But, yeah, you know, it's called the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. But I have to say that for years as I've been attending it, there hasn't been a whole lot of the moon. Well, that changed a great deal this year. People like to count the abstracts and the abstract volume. And this year, the moon beat Mars for the first time in a long time in terms of the number of abstracts. There was a lunar session going on every hour of

every day. And there were just so many results. Primarily, this is because of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the LCROSS mission. Those two just sent back, particularly LRO has sent back so much data that now people are really digging into it. There were talks about the beautiful images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera, the amazing impact melt seen in the bottom of craters, fresh craters, old craters, holes down into lunar caverns. There was all kinds of exciting stuff from the camera. Probably the most sensational news, though, came out of an instrument that was actually almost an afterthought on the instrument package on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. And that's this instrument called Mini RF.

Mini RF is a radar imager. It's actually a sister to a similar instrument on the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the Indian Lunar Orbiter, which ended its life last year. And the thing about radar on the moon is that you can see into the bottoms of those perennially dark polar craters that people think may harbor ice. And lo and behold, many RF found pretty clear evidence for quite a lot of ice in the north pole of the moon, about 600 million tons, if I remember exactly. It's a lot of ice. This story got very good play in the regular media. And I guess it's evidence of what you told me was kind of a lunar renaissance. That's right. It's just so exciting now to be,

for all of the people that I know who have been lunar scientists who feel that they've never had very much respect. They're always kind of second to human exploration on the moon. And now that lunar reconnaissance orbiters there, it's just amazing the improvement in tone in those sessions. There's also another orbiter, the Chinese Chang'e orbiter, and there were some results presented from that mission. And as a result of that, there was a huge Chinese contingent at this meeting, many more than I have ever seen before. Well, let's go on to that planet that often gets the lion's share of attention at the LPSC, Mars. That's right. Mars, of course, there's three active orbiters and two rovers and a lot

going on at Mars. And I should mention that while the meeting was going on, the Mars Express spacecraft is in the middle of 12 close flybys of Phobos. And we should be seeing images of Phobos showing up next week on the web as well. But to get the results, both Spirit and Opportunity, of course, were well represented. Steve Squires gave a nice talk on summarizing what Opportunity has been doing over the last year. And one of the most interesting things that came out of his talk was his discussion of a peculiar rock called Marquette Island. Now, Opportunity has passed by several very large boulders, and several of them turned out to be meteorites. But Marquette is not a meteorite.

It's a piece of ejecta from a crater that's very far away. And they looked at it with every single one of Opportunity's instruments and have determined that it doesn't match any kind of rock either rover or orbiter has ever seen before, nor does it match any Mars meteorite. It is a brand new Martian lithology, so the scientists were very excited about that. Any Mars meteorite is a brand new Martian lithology. So the scientists were very excited about that. But Squire stood up and said it was obviously an igneous rock, which means it solidified from a melt and was crystalline. Whereas another guy, Dave Middlefelt, stood up later and said it was clearly a clastic rock, which means that it was broken apart crystals from that original igneous rock that were then re-cemented later. So it's always amusing to see those kinds of things crop up at these conferences.

Is this where I saw you use a word I'd never seen before, hackley? Hackley. Hackley describes a very uneven or rugged fracture. It's a word in common use by field geologists. Field geologists have all kinds of great terms for things that they see. They like describing things as mungy, rocks getting squished and squashed over time. They're very onomatopoetic words that geologists are fond of. Mungy, I love it. Okay, how about spirit? Well, spirit, of course, is stuck at Troy. And there was some discussion of that,

although I have to tell you, Matt, that every single scientist or engineer who does anything relating with spirit has never expressed to me any doubt that spirit's going to get out of the sand trap in the spring provided of course that she survives the winter but they talked about how spirit's circumnavigation of home plate has proven that those high silica high sulfur soils are everywhere to be found around home plate and it's really it talks about how there's very likely some hydrothermal alteration of the rocks although the interesting thing is that there's a lot of soluble minerals located below the surface, a few millimeters to centimeters below the surface where Spirit's wheels turn it up. But right at the top of the

surface, it's all insoluble stuff. And Ray Arvidsson talked about how that likely meant that this area likely gets, you know, a little frost, a little snow cover once in a while when the climate changes just a bit. And that as that moisture seeps into the soil, it takes all the soluble stuff away from the very top. So the topmost area looks very dry, no soluble salts. And then as you go down into the soil where spirits' wheels dig up, you get to all those

soluble sulfates and other materials. Emily, there's so much more we could talk about, but we got less than a minute to go. And there was just one other topic that intrigued me. If you could just take 30 seconds to talk about what the heck is shock synthesis. There's a lot of people who are interested in what happens when you slam an impactor into an icy moon or icy satellite. And one interesting question that one British experimenter asked was, could we possibly make the amino acids that were seen in the stardust samples from Comet Vilt 2, could we possibly make the amino acids that were seen in the stardust samples from Comet Vilt 2, could you make them just by smashing something into

an ice? And in brief, his answer was yes. All right. You want the details? We already told you where to go. They're at planetary.org. Just look for the blog. Maintained by Emily, the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and

a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Emily, thanks so much for the little travelogue. You're welcome, Matt. And we'll be back in just a moment or two and take you to Cambridge, England, where Stephen Hawking received the Cosmos Award last week. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. 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. For over 20 years, Professor Stephen Hawking has engaged the public in some of the most profound questions of existence. His book, A Brief History of Time, broke records and led to a documentary film of the same name. He continued to intrigue the public with his television series, Stephen Hawking's Universe, and now reaches an entirely new audience with the children's books he co-authors with his daughter Lucy. Dr. Hawking is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the

highest civilian honor granted by the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge until his retirement last year. That's the position once held by Isaac Newton. On February 27, a large group of Dr. Hawking's admirers gathered in Cambridge to see him receive the Planetary Society's Cosmos Award. Each winner is a personification of the Society's mission

to inspire the people of Earth to explore other worlds, understand our own, and seek life elsewhere. The award also honors the memory of Planetary Society founder Carl Sagan, whose TV series, called Cosmos, remains the most popular in the history of American public television. Joining Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman at last week's ceremony were Sagan's collaborator, Andrian, Society President Jim Bell, and its Vice President, Bill Nye. You're about to hear excerpts of the acceptance speech

made by Stephen Hawking. His complete remarks are available at planetary.org slash radio. As you probably know, Dr. Hawking has been confined to a wheelchair for many years. He speaks via a digital speech synthesizer. Astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson presented him with the Cosmos Award. The Planetary Society presents the Cosmos Award for the Outstanding Public Presentation of Science

to Stephen W. Hawking, February 27, 2010. Thank you very much. I am honored to receive the Cosmos Award, set up in memory of Carl Sagan. I was a great admirer of his television series, Cosmos, and so was very pleased when he agreed to write the foreword for my book, A Brief History of time. I am sure that forward contributed to the success of the book. Satan was a great advocate of space travel, and so am I. I will therefore address my remarks to this subject. Why should we go into space? What is the justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of moon rock? Aren't there better causes here on Earth? In a way, the situation is like that in Europe before 1492.

People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase. waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet the discovery of the new world made a profound difference to the old. Without it, we wouldn't have had the Big Mac or KFC. Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect. It will completely change the future of the human race, and maybe determine whether we have any future at all. It won't solve any of our immediate problems on planet Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them, and cause us to look outwards rather than inwards. Hopefully, it would unite us to face the common challenge. This would be a long-term strategy, and by long-term, I mean hundreds,

or even thousands of years. There will be those who argue that it would be better to spend our money solving the problems of this planet, like climate change and pollution, rather than wasting it on a possibly fruitless search for a new planet. I am not denying the importance of fighting climate change and global warming, but we can do that, and still spare a quarter of a percent of world GDP for space. Isn't our future worth a quarter of a percent of world GDP for space. Isn't our future worth a quarter of a percent?

The space race helped to create a fascination with science, and led to great advances in technology, including the first large-scale integrated circuits, which are the basis of all modern computers. However, after the last moon landing in 1972, with no future plans for further manned spaceflight, public interest in space declined. This went along with a general public swing against science in the West, because although it had brought great benefits, it had not solved the social problems that increasingly occupied public attention. A new manned spaceflight program would do a lot to restore public enthusiasm for space, and for science generally. Robotic missions are much cheaper, and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way.

And they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy. The planned landing on Mars by 2030 would reignite the space program and give it a sense of purpose, in the same way that President Kennedy's moon target did in the 1960s. A new interest in space would also increase the public standing of science generally. The low esteem in which science and scientists are held is having serious consequences. We live in a society that is increasingly governed by science and technology, yet fewer and fewer young people want to go into science. A new and ambitious space program would excite the young and stimulate them to go into a wide range of sciences, not just astrophysics and space science. A high proportion of today's scientists say their interest in science was sparked by watching the moon landings.

What will we find when we go into space? Is there alien life out there, or are we alone in the universe? We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth, so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, but we don't know how life first appeared. The probability of something as complicated as a DNA molecule being formed by random collisions of atoms in a primeval ocean is incredibly small. However there might have been some simpler macromolecule, which then built up to DNA, or some other macromolecule capable of reproducing itself. macromolecule capable of reproducing itself. Still, even if the probability of life appearing on a suitable planet is very small, since the universe is infinite, life would have appeared somewhere. If the probability is very low, the distance between two independent

occurrences of life would be very large. However, there is a possibility known as panspermia, that life could spread from planet to planet, or from stellar system to stellar system, carried on meteors. While there may be primitive life in our region of the galaxy, there don't seem to be any advanced intelligent beings. We don't appear to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports, and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far.

Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development, within a radius of a few hundred light years. Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet. Our observations indicate that a significant fraction of stars have planets around them. So far, we can detect only giant planets, like Jupiter and Saturn, but it is reasonable to assume that they will be accompanied by smaller, Earth-like planets.

Some of these will lie in the Goldilocks zone, where the distance from the star is in the right range for liquid water to exist on their surface. There are around a thousand stars within 30 light years of Earth. If 1% of these have Earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks zone, we have 10 candidate new worlds. We can't envisage visiting them with current technology, but we should make interstellar travel a long-term aim. By long-term, I mean over the next 200 to 500 years. The human race has existed as a separate species for about 2 million years. Civilization began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing.

If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before. Thank you for listening. Dr. Stephen Hawking accepting the Planetary Society's Cosmos Award in Cambridge, England. You can hear Professor Hawking's complete remarks at planetary.org slash radio. What's up in the night sky? Well, that's why we have this segment to answer that very question, courtesy of Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. It's good to see you in person.

Do you have any idea, what was the name of that cat that we just had to shoo out of the room, out of the studio here at Planetary Society headquarters? I got nothing. Some black cat. It was in here and it didn't want to leave. And we don't work with an audience, so. Yes, we drop black cats across our path all the time. What's up? Well, the evening is where it's happening, Matt.

Venus starting to try to creep up in the west after sunset. So shortly after sunset, it's super bright. So it gives you a decent chance of seeing it low in the west. And Mars still looking quite bright, reddish, and fairly high up in the west and mars uh still looking quite bright reddish and uh fairly high up in the east after sunset now pretty high in the south later in the evening and saturn approaching opposition on march 22nd it will be over there in the east rising just a little after sunset on to this week in space history it's's been four years since Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been reconnaissance orbiting. Reconnaissancing?

Well, it's the orbiting part, yeah. It went into Mars orbit four years ago. We'll come back to that. And absolutely nothing else interesting happened this week. That isn't true. Tons of things happened. I'll mention one other. Of course, in 1781, William Herschel discovered Uranus.

Good job, William. Bill. He's the one whose wife had a big part in that, right? I don't know. All right, never mind. He named it after King George. Uranus? Yeah.

Is named after the king? Yeah, he thought it was a real no it had a different name to begin with because it's like you know here i'll name it after my king moving on georgian georgish georgie hey there georgie planet speaking of which, random space fact! Cool! Thank you very much. Hey, with a diameter of about 750 kilometers, Ceres is by far the largest and most massive body in the asteroid belt. Many of you know that. We may have even mentioned it.

But this always amazes me. It contains almost a third of the asteroid belt's total mass. And, of course course the cool thing fairly recently, it's not only spherical, and it's got water ice on it. And you know, that spacecraft cruising out there. Yeah. Soon. A couple years? Something like that. No, 2015. 2015.

Okay. So. Dawn 2015. 2011. Next year. That's right. It's Vesta first. Then series. And we'll be orbiting. Got it.. It's Vesta first, then Ceres. Then we'll be orbiting. Got it. That ought to be super cool, both of them. We go on to the trivia contest, and we asked you, in the days

of the Mercury program, the NASA's Mercury program, what were the maximum height and weight restrictions for the Mercury astronauts to be able to be shoved into a little tiny tin can? Spam in a can. All right, it wasn't tin. Go ahead. We're going to come back to that, by the way. Not a huge response this time. I don't know why. Maybe it was harder to find, although a lot of people found it in the

usual suspect places. And that must have been what Mark Detweiler did. First time winner, Mark Hales from Eugene, Oregon. And he said, Mercury astronauts couldn't be taller than 5 feet 11 inches or heavier than 180 pounds or with a nod to your interest in the just completed Winter Olympics, Bruce, 4.3 curling

stones. Nice. That's in the house. We also, we heard from several people that you had to be between the ages of 25 and 40. And someone, I don't remember who, pointed out Alan Shepard just made it. He was 5'11". If he'd been another half inch taller, no moon trip for you. Well, he still might have made the moon, but he wouldn't have made Mercury. That's true. This was Mercury. You're absolutely right.

Now, I've got to mention, we also got this entry from William Stewart. Not the winner, but he had the right height and weight for Mercury astronauts. He added to that, though, other requirements included being made of chopped pork shoulder meat with added salt, water, and modified potato starch. You know what else a couple of people asked about? The Mercury 13. What were the requirements for them? Which is, of course, another story for another day. But these are the women who were secretly being evaluated to travel in space. And then the program ended, sometimes called the Mercury 13. You haven't heard of that one?

Yeah, sort of. But I don't know what their height and weight were. Oh, I don't either. I don't think they had to specify a weight, did they? I don't know. I don't know. It's not weight. Oh, I don't either. I don't think they had to specify a weight, did they? I don't know. I don't know. It's not polite. That's what I was thinking.

Anyway, we move on. I mentioned Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Been in orbit around Mars doing great work for four years. In round numbers, how much data has been returned from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter? It is a staggering number in the annals of space exploration. They get a big antenna and they send back a bunch of data including tons and tons of imagery.

How much data, round numbers, has been returned from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter and win yourself a glorious Planetary Radio t-shirt. And you have until the 15th of March at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. And guess what? Next week on this very program, Alfred McEwen, the principal investigator for HiRISE,

that amazing camera on MRO, will be coming back to talk about what it's been up to, including this high wish, the ability to or the opportunity to nominate a spot on the red planet to be imaged by high rise. So that's next week. I wanted a picture of us, but we're not on Mars. Yeah, details, details, whatever. Well, the face on Mars, I think there's a certain resemblance. To who?

To you. I think I'm offended. All right. Sk skipping that thought. Everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and don't think about that. Think about cats near Belfry. Thank you, and good night. I think it's a rather nice image, actually. Anyway, he's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

and he does join us every week here for What's Up? Meow. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Thank you.