Alternative Aliens with Andy Weir and David Grinspoon

[Music] this is star talk i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist i got with me chuck nice jet hey neil what's happening you're my man about town my co-host thank you the man the man about town who stays home all the time okay sorry okay you're mad about home okay there you go the man about house about house you are the man of our house my my co-host and stand-up comedian and today's topic is going to be one of many times we've explored how science is working in the science fiction that we're all exposed to some of us are bathed in and we're going to be featuring my interview with novelist engineer turned novelist andy weir oh your buddy my buddy he's the author of the martian exactly so we're gonna bring him on uh but we have in studio in our sort of virtual zoom studio a friend of star talk david grinspoon david welcome back to star talk dr funky spoon monkey spoon yes and why are we calling it that's you that's your twitter handle right doctor yeah yeah it's great to see you guys and it's great to to be here wherever here is excellent so i think we count you among the ranks of official astrobiologists right you're also an author a writer and with that hat and your twitter handle of funky spoon we also learned that you're a musician so we love that combination uh you're a senior scientist at the planetary science institute i think they're based in in arizona um but you spend most of your time in washington is that correct yeah cpsi planetary science institute has the mothership in arizona but we're sort of a distributed institute and a lot of us are all over and i'm in washington dc we were doing this virtual connection thing before before it was cool before [Laughter] so you've got a recent book author of several books i remember your early book on venus uh that was fun uh aren't many books on venus and you put one out there on it so uh but more recently you've got a book titled chasing new horizons yeah which was new horizons was the actual name of a space mission so you did a double meaning there chasing new horizons inside the epic first mission to pluto and you co-authored that with mr pluto himself alan stern and just a little bit more on your background you won the prestigious carl sagan medal for public communication communication of planetary science so there's no higher award given by the american astronomical society uh for that role and you you play guitar and percussion is that right yeah you know i dabble in a lot guitar is my main instrument but uh you know everybody plays percussion right we all drum on our desk i guess so even if it's in the air we play it and you're and what's the name of your band well house band of the universe is the band that i've actually toured around with some that's a little pretentious i would think i mean i don't i don't think there's going to be like you know a lot of a lot of competition well there might be but so far nobody has you know like complained from another uh part of the universe another galaxy if they did that would be kind of cool so i think with with that name he'd be the shoe-in for the earth representation in the star wars bar scene right it'd be the earth earth folks yeah yeah definitely uh is boba fett a member of your band there's one guy that looks a little bit like boba fett i think it might be related [Laughter] there's one guy that comes to practice with a helmet on every time that's a little i will say this though it would be super cool if some aliens showed up here and they were just like yo man we're the house band of the universe battle of the bands yeah yeah but if you get some alien that has sort of multiple mouths uh they could be their own trumpet section for example you know you got to watch out because we design our instruments to fit our the limits of our own limbs and other aliens could totally uh so for example for example the house band in the movie um little mermaid that sebastian sang with i think the octopus might have been on the drums i i have some memory the octopus in the band and there's no way you can beat an octopus with eight limbs that's not alternative alternative anatomies could have the edge but you know there's this guy i think it's rashawn roland kirk who can play like two or three flutes and saxophones at the same time and he uses like his nostrils and stuff so um we might have to get creative if we want to beat those right so are you a fan of science fiction oh absolutely yeah you know uh i think you'd be hard-pressed to find a space scientist who wasn't on some level uh steeped in science fiction and yeah but if you're an astrobiologist so much of what we're looking for in a sci-fi film is it's not just oh look at the pretty space shots it's how are they representing their aliens so could you give me sort of a starter list of what we think an alien should look like and then later on we'll talk about what they're they might actually look like or sorry or how hollywood might be representing them well you know what they would actually look like it's not even something we spend that much time on where we worry much more about like what would they eat and breathe but as far as what they would look like i go back to like the sort of common like fractal architecture of a lot of earth you know if you look at a lot of life on earth if you look at trees and blood vessels and brains there's the kind of commonality that makes sense if you're making something complex out of simple parts so i i picture that some of that geometry that's kind of universal in life on earth would also be universal for life off of earth so so we might see some familiar forms just because sort of the physics of self-organization leads to kind of common forms i love what you said there and i just want to emphasize it you're talking about fractal structures and what's interesting about fractals is it can give the illusion of complexity but it's really a very simple basic design that gets copied many times and in many ways it might is that a fair characterization of that sentence absolutely and and it comes out of a lot of like sort of the physical need if you think of like blood vessels or trees absorbing sunlight making branches you know you're trying to maximize surface area with the smallest number of modular parts and so you evolve this sort of branching structure and those kind of physical needs will exist anywhere where there's life so that makes me think well maybe there'll be some things that kind of look recognizable about aliens interesting let me go straight to my first clip with andy weir the title of his book is project hail mary and it's about an exotic kind of life that's threatening all life on earth possibly rendering it extinct so let's check it out basically the main problem that humanity is facing is there's a microbe an extraterrestrial microbe called astrophage or at least that's what humans name it it's um you know only about it's about the size of a bacteria it's about 20 pico meters across and it lives on the surface of stars and so it's kind of like an algae that lives on stars and it collects energy um through most of its life and then uses that energy via it stores it as mass and then uses that energy to propel itself to a planet so it can get the elements it needs to reproduce because there's really nothing to be found on a star except for hydrogen and helium and then um the problem is this is breeding out of control in our star and all the local stars by the way and it's causing the sun to dim and once the sun gets dim enough the food chain on earth will collapse and everything will die so that is the problem that they're facing what a happy story thank you that has been andy weir on star talk so you're this is a twist on ways in which an organism a microscopic organism could render us extinct right it's not messing with us it's messing with the sun oh my gosh so but it's not it doesn't care it's not intelligent it's just living its best life um astrophage can travel interstellar distances um kind of like mold it just spores out in all directions and one in every 10 to the whatever of them will actually find another star so is the is mold spores the the closest terrestrial analog to this either mold spores or um or algae oceanic algae so so david andy weir's first book the martian didn't involve alien life it was human life on mars so with the clever title the martian the martian was humans on mars in that case matt damon of course so so so here's andy going into alien life and so how do you think about this it's kind of clever that it's killing us not by attacking us but by influencing something that we depend on so that's a that's a nice little sort of alien twist but are are you cool with how he's coming at this subject yeah i like it it's it's clever uh you know and it reminds me there are certainly organisms on earth that uh that live parasitically and choke off the the uh energy supplies of other organisms whether this could happen on a stellar level um you know it's pretty outrageous and part of me thinks well part of me thinks if something could eat stars then something would be eating stars and then we'd notice because we understand the energy balance of stars pretty well so i'm reassured that i don't think this is actually out there happening but that doesn't mean it doesn't make a cool science fiction idea well wait so your best evidence is the absence of evidence all right i guess that's the evidence you're putting forth i haven't seen it yet so i don't think it's going to happen i don't know biologically life is so opportunistic that if it was doable it would already be out there doing it and then you know we've seen a lot of stars and we understand their energy balance pretty well so i'm skeptical that astrophage is really out there eating a lot of stars in the galaxy but that's okay that doesn't like to me diminish the coolness of using this for a sci-fi story as something that would present quite a problem if it were happening here so now you you study uh atmospheric conditions on other planets so how much have you thought about sort of the climactic catastrophe with regard to aliens because that's basically what andy ware's describing here yeah well a lot i mean certainly there's a history even on earth of climatic catastrophe climactic catastrophe the middle c in there as a musician i should know about middle school the totally get your middle c straight yes so you know there's even a history on earth of of uh the climate being wrecked by runaway life you know you think of what we call the oxygen catastrophe two and a half billion years ago where blue-green algae um you know first of all they poison the air with oxygen so a lot of organisms that can't handle oxygen went extinct and we think it also caused a climate catastrophe because it was around when uh what we call snowball earth happened the earth went into a deep freeze and it was probably the result of those organisms pumping oxygen and messing with the greenhouse effect messing with methane and plunging the earth into a deep freeze so so the idea that little tiny organisms could screw up the climate of a planet and uh cause a big problem for life is is uh not at all outrageous in fact i think it's happened here you don't need aliens for that could that happen here on earth so basically all we're doing when we uh in effect caught not in effect when we cause climate change all we're doing is returning the earth to its natural state right i mean so no no problem right no to a different state that's one that's one moral you could take away from this it's like well hey it's been done before you screwed up the climate so right you know yeah we lost 70 80 90 of all species at times that's fine that's fine earth earth is cool let's find out um it's the circle of life we're not even original it's a circle that might not include us yes right so andy where told me about how astrophage sort of captures and uses energy uh but there's also what we know from life as we know it three properties that uh seem to be present in all life forms so one is that it's carbon-based another is that it uses liquid water and another is that there's some kind of a metabolism for life as we know it so now here's another kind of life let's see what andy ware says about it it has all three of those because as we come to learn here's a spoiler um all of the life in this book the alien life and the earth life came from a single panspermia event so um astrophage in fact has mitochondria and ribosomes and everything so i did that partially to explain why there was life on you know so close together you know the odds whatever numbers you want to put into the drake equation the odds that life would happen you know really really close and one of the stars within 20 light years seems really slim just given this to the size of the whole universe yeah right and so i i decided well it's a panspermia event because something evolved that is able to travel travel interstellar distances so that's what seeded life around our local cluster so it's got dna it's got dna it's got it's got dna rna transcription ribosomes uh mitochondria which are the powerhouse of the cell and everything else now you asked what i added to it i also added um their cell membrane this is the complete made-up part of the physics so i'm sure you'll appreciate it um the astrophage cell membrane has this method of turning heat energy into um it takes a hydrogen ion aka proton collisions and turns the energy of those collisions into two neutrinos um balancing the momentum and and becoming the energy and then the energy for it to live or the energy for it to propulse for pulse this is this is how it stores energy it turns heat energy in other words the the um speed of these hydrogen atoms uh it turns that into neutrinos and it has a magical ability to store neutrinos and so i say that it its cell membrane has a feature which nobody understands how it's doing it uh super cross sectionality it is not possible for anything to quantum tunnel through this wow and so then it sends the neutrinos out for its own um to recoil from that and that's its propulsion not quite it uses a neutrinos to store it then when it wants to do propulsion it it forces the neutrinos to collide into each other because their arena particles so they will self-annihilate because it's an anti-matter antimatter reaction and then they will turn into um photons that work out to be in the infrared spectrum because of the energy so so david before we get into sort of the neutrino physics of astrophage uh could you remind us what the drake equation is because he just made fast uh use of that term sure yeah the drake equation is um a sort of um very simple actually formulation that we use when we're discussing the probability of life and the sort of density the amount of life and intelligent life that might exist in our galaxy or in the universe as a whole so it's a way where we say if we estimate this amount this number of stars have habitable planets and this percentage of the planets have conditions that have actually evolved life and this percentage have complex life etc you put in all your assumptions and you can adjust the levels and then you crank through that and you get uh how much life there is in the galaxy so it's basically just a way of quantitatively having a conversation about how much life there was in the galaxy and so all right so that's the frequency of life now the kind of life that it is so often in science fiction where we're looking for aliens walking with ray guns and here he's describing something algae-like all right and at one point in the interview he had referred to ben bova's great science fiction author ajayid only just in 2020 in 1992 he wrote a book called mars where the life forms there were more like they were sort of algae-like uh living on the surface of a cave so if we want to think of most likely kind of life we might find how does allergy type life compete with other forms of life that you can dream up well i mean algae is a good design for life on planets you know i'm not sure uh how it's going to fair interstellar space but you know algae is basically simple uh very simple uh life that uh uses sunlight and doesn't have to be sunlight starlight of any kind and um you know it's sort of a basic design that we would uh it's very plausible to me that we would find something like it probably wouldn't be exactly terrestrial algae unless you believe in you know this total span of you but but that that kind of design for for a life form makes a lot of sense and i it wouldn't shock me to find something that was kind of algae-like on another world and give me a two-sentence definition of panspermia transpermia well it means uh you know seeds across it's just the idea that life instead of forming uh uh having an independent origin on each world could actually form on one world uh perhaps long ago and then spread from world world naturally so chuck that sounds like a guy came up with that term doesn't it um without a doubt a guy did come up with that term you know what i mean it's not it's not pan ovulation like it's transparent yeah don't get excited we got to take a quick break when we come back we're going to find out what what the aliens in andy ware's book have to do with climate change on star talk we're back on star talk got chuck nice chuck you're tweeting at chuck nice comic let's go check that out yeah very nice nice and we're featuring my interview with andy weir author of the martian book he wrote six seven years ago uh we all most of us saw the film but it has a latest book called project hail mary it's got aliens possibly rendering life on earth extinct and we've got friend of star talk david grinspoon who's going to help us out here david in the first segment you mentioned that your band was called the house band of the universe but during the pandemic i don't suppose you played in many places right no we uh it's impossible or it's been impossible to actually perform um but i have been playing with a local pickup band of musicians around washington dc um sort of in a socially distant or online way and we've been calling ourselves a band damage [Laughter] very good yeah i like that pandemic pandemic dude i don't know how that's going to play a few years from now but right now yeah right now yeah get all your gigs in now because yeah people look at you in five years what the hell is wrong with you all right okay well listen if guess what if you said if you told a kid today that you like pearl jam they'd be like we'll put some on my toast so it's that sparkly jam that's right right exactly so what's interesting about andy ware's latest book is it actually touches on climate change and what power we might have to influence it one way or another all caused by this alien organism that's threatening us so let's check out what this connection might be and how it could lead to environmental catastrophe check it out i came up with a problem first and i you know okay it'll affect earth and what's interesting is um it's mentioned in the book that the damage we've done to the climate actually helps make us last longer because the earth has stored up more heat energy than it normally would have as a result and so we actually although it's not much it's like a complete different scale when you're starting to mess with the solar luminance so it's like oh yeah we we get about like one extra month you know because it undoes all of that and actually in the book there are people doing everything they can to increase the greenhouse effect so that we can retain as much of the energy that's hitting earth as possible with the reduced solar output okay so this is a twist on what we're trying to do right now to you know i mean not intentionally i'm not making any sort of political allegory i'm just like these would be the consequences like if the sun started dimming then not enough energy's hitting earth oh interesting we've been collecting too much energy lately oh now we need to really collect a lot more you figured out that the climate deniers are beginning to outnumber the climate scientists and so you want to get all them to read your book well i don't know if my book is a really good uh thing for you know for a science denier right yeah okay well also but also i don't think it's a really good thing because the only way that climate change comes into it is either a as sort of a a good thing that helped by us another month and b as a thing that everybody has to deliberately do to try to make earth last as long as possible during this crisis so they bring out you bring out the the the hummers and worse than that they have to do they have to do global warming on a massive massive scale so i come up with what i think is a pretty clever way um they actually use a bunch of nuclear weapons like a a bunch of nuclear weapons to clean you know all put up in a line to cleave off a big chump a big chunk of antarctic ice shelf which then goes into the ocean and melts over time releasing all the methane that's in the ice wow and the methane is great because it um it is a huge greenhouse gas yeah yeah way bigger than co2 that's right yeah it's a massive greenhouse gas and it will kind of degrade over about 10 years so they're hoping that they can solve the problem and then once they solve the problem then the sun will get back to normal luminance and then they don't want to have all that greenhouse gas but it's great because methane will degrade and go away in about 10 years so what he did say in his book is that the the quantitative effects of this is that earth's temperature would drop by 10 to 15 degrees in the next 30 years so we're talking about re-uh adding all manner of greenhouse gases over a short period of time to counteract this son you're my hero [Laughter] everybody more beef let's eat beef come on let's eat beef in your hummer doing a tailgate party exactly so so yeah but you don't want to kill off all the cows because they're adding methane too so you're adding methane too exactly exactly so so david what is your give me your general thoughts on geoengineering just as a thing well you know geoengineering makes a cool um physics problem in in a simple way you know for like you know that i assigned to my atmospheric science students like how much methane or how much of co2 would you have to add to heat up or how much dust would you have to put in the atmosphere to cool down by so many degrees in a very simple modeling form the problem is when you actually try to do it to a planet there's a lot of complexity that we don't fully understand and um so the way so chuck that's code for we're not smart enough just right yeah when a scientist said well this is not yet understood scientists will never say we're too stupid to figure it out they'll never say that in this case let me tell you something those are the kind of scientists that i really like because when you talk about screwing around with the earth's like you know with its with its weather systems and geoengineering i i'd rather you just go yeah i don't i don't know i don't know people talk about you know putting up dust or aerosols to you know this is a real proposal some people have to fight global warming and it works in a simple energy balanced way you can say yeah you're going to cut down the sunlight that much and the greenhouse would go down this much and it works but the details of earth's uh circulation and the actual motions of the atmosphere you know it's really true we aren't smart enough our best models can't really predict what that's going to do to the monsoon in india and it's going to cause you know it could cause drought and famine and so uh when i hear this it's like yeah if it's a lasted ditch effort because otherwise earth is going to just be totally hosed then we would probably be justified in trying something like that but in any other situation it's really not a good idea to mess with mother nature it's not nice too but and and and david when you agree that a great way of geo engineering would be to stop burning fossil fuels right another kind of engineering yeah right i mean doing something intentionally to fix the climate then stopping burning fossil fuels planting trees those are good forms of geoengineering that are maybe a little less risky wait wait so so david are there any life forms that could fully exploit a a a massive geo-engineering shift on the short time scale uh evolution takes longer than that of course but are there any life forms that are just on the edge of pouncing and then if the world gets warmer all of a sudden they're in charge is there it's got to be fast the answer has to be yes because think about the climate zones on earth earth does not all have the same climate at different latitudes so if you uh warm up say the poles then organisms that are comfortable in the tropics are going to move in you know so uh because of that there are definitely organisms that are poised to exploit any shift in climate uh it's you know life on earth would carry on it's just it might not include humans after it oh there's a little detail who says that look so casually right exactly by the way honey i'm never coming home again like that's i'll be back never never right so also in andy's book the astrophage creates an arc that connects the sun with venus's atmosphere apparently it needs the co2 in venus's atmosphere so is there a um what can you tell us about the possibility of life on venus in general and just and its co2 supply in particular well um there are some scientists myself included who have been arguing for the possibility of life in the clouds of venus um just because you know unlike the surface which would be you know completely off limits to organic life because it's just too hot for organic matter to survive at all the clouds are kind of moderate in temperature and there are energy sources different you know sort of um chemicals you can imagine something would eat there's plenty of radiation uh you would have an ecosystem unto themselves is what you're saying could be could be yeah i mean you would have to survive the extreme acidic conditions and there are different opinions on whether life could actually do that although there are you know extremophile organisms on earth that love acid um caves and things so um you know interestingly enough in the context of this story there's some mysterious stuff in the upper atmosphere of venus that's absorbing a ton of solar energy and we call it the unknown ultraviolet absorber and at least um in my view it's fun to speculate that it could be some weird biological pigment that can absorb in the ultraviolet which of course is the photons in the ultraviolet have tons of energy if life could learn to exploit them but of course chuck doesn't doesn't sound like chuck doesn't sound like the name of a dc superhero villain in dc comics the unknown ultraviolet absorber yeah i'm just thinking that sounds completely diabolical yeah but he's got to be a uh because he's unknown so he has to be a villain yeah yeah of course yeah no not a superhero i'm talking about superhero villain yeah absolutely yeah and i got to tell you david you just came up with a better science fiction movie movie than than i'm sorry i guess because quite frankly i'm all about the life forms the cloud people of venus i'm all about that okay hi i'm celestia one of the cloud people of venus you'll notice my dewy skin due to the acidic atmosphere that gives me a natural chemical peel like that's cool so we also talked about the tech in his story because you can't have science fiction without technology and so let's find out what he tells us about it i try to keep everything uh as realistic as possible and the closer you the closer you are to real existing technology and your story the closer you're going to be to scientific reality and act and accuracy in project hail mary actually it's kind of funny because it's really the only technology we have in that book is the technology we have right now today plus astrophage that's it and so they use they figure out a way to make a propulsion system that uses astrophage and um also like for they're in a huge hurry to get this mission going they're sending a ship to tau ceti with scientists aboard and they want to have a lab and they say like we don't have time to invent 0g versions of all of this lab equipment we don't have time to invent a 0g scanning electron microscope a 0g 5-axis mill 0g this that and the other thing so instead they say we're going to make the ship have a centrifuge mode and use normal well-tested lab equipment and so his lab in this extremely advanced spaceship has like 110 ac power outlets because okay because he's using like off-the-shelf like laboratory technology that's been tested with like millions of man hours and they they need him to have reliable stuff you know that's an interesting point correct me if i'm wrong dave because we're about the same age i think the apollo saturn v rocket was basically off-the-shelf items i mean i don't think we had to invent anything remarkably new unusual or different for that rocket though the rocket with it was without precedence that's my understanding of that time which is how we could get it done so quickly wow yeah certainly a lot of the individual components were things that were being used uh commonly in other you know the electronics and so forth uh i'm not sure about all the the materials in the uh in the um rocket engines themselves that might have been a little bit of required a little innovation but certainly uh you know the bulk of the uh the components were things that already existed now what i like about it is we effectively reverse engineer this this mysterious propulsion system of astrophage and then we then use it for ourself so are you um and it uses light propulsion right or any uh well is it fair to say use light propulsion if it has a matter anti-matter generator inside of it using neutrinos then it's it's uh so let's let's make that the point so so david where are we now in terms of matter anti-matter drive because star trek clearly has it and so does everybody else yeah we're we're we're uh it's i would say it's not right around the corner we have i love the way you two that was great that was the best scientific answer i've ever heard no i mean not right around the corner not right around the corner we have we have isolated antimatter now which is pretty cool but i mean individual particles you know like uh positrons you know which are um [Music] you know the the anti-matter complement of of electrons we have individual particles we we're far from being able to produce or gather somehow a bulk amount of antimatter and then use it as propulsion but you want you understand it makes sense why that um it works why it's a good idea in science fiction and let you know that star trek was was really smart to use it because it's absolutely true that anti-matter exists and the energy density of um anti-matter is something you know you can react with ordinary matter and just with a tiny you know tiniest amount of fuel create unbelievably huge amounts of energy you know and it's real physics so um it's a great idea for science fiction it's not uh i don't see it for practical implementation happening anytime soon not not around the corner okay so when we come back we'll talk more about applying known technologies to the future of space travel with david winston on star talk we're back star talk we're trying to think about aliens in space and technology in space and we talked about climate change as as how an alien could render us extinct or how we might even render ourselves extinct uh and i've got a chuck nice as always and dr funky spoon yes a david grinspoon that's very 1978. ah you know because it's funky baby it's funky yeah that's the peak funk period right there right make my funk the defunct okay my mother never goes out of style there you go yeah it's not that it goes out style you might leave it but it's always in style right that's right that's it so we were discussing we were featuring my interview with andy weir and his book project hail mary and uh let's go right into the one and only clip we have of that conversation for this segment and we're just talking about current technologies and how how how we doing what's our report card on that let's check it out spacex really is doing what we should be doing um mostly the main thing that spacex is doing that i deeply approve of is driving down the price of getting mass into low earth orbit because that's the key to everything if we can get that price driven down further and further and further we will eventually reach a point where a middle-class person can afford uh a space vacation like you know it'll cost like 10 000 bucks to go you know or maybe 20 000 or something like that to go stay in a space hotel for a week or something if you can get it down to that level um then you will have a multi-trillion dollar space industry it'll be for profit and that will spur more innovation and uh in the space technology you know david here's a concern i have which in fact was the subject of more than one film if we start sending people into space could there be space microbes that contaminate them and then they bring that down here to earth do we know enough about now neil has made a better uh sci-fi movie than andy weir i'm just saying is it is there you know we talk about oh someone caught a bug in some other country or some other continent now we're space is part of our our our biosphere in a sense now right as well you have to get tons of shots before you go to other countries and that's what so can you comment on the toxicity of aliens yeah well i mean the andromeda strain was uh you know for one it still really holds up as a pretty good film um well chuck is too young he won't remember so chuck do you know who wrote the andromeda strain oh heck no okay but you should okay well the same guy who wrote jurassic park oh get out of christian michael creighton and that was and andromeda strain was his first big breakthrough book in in film and you know when he wrote that while he was in medical school so here we have talented people who are learning science and then they tell it weave a tale of science fiction with the science that they've learned so i think there are a lot of untold stories here because not all scientists are novelists and then they realize they can make really big bucks [Laughter] yeah he said forget this this medical profession well i mean isaac isaac asimov was a uh biochemistry professor at boston university and he he wrote his first few science fiction novels under a pseudonym paul french because he didn't want anybody to know he was writing sci-fi and then he was like hey i can do pretty well with this so tell me about the toxicity of aliens yeah so i'm cautious we need to be i'm not that worried about life in space being able to survive on earth and infect us because even though i liked the science fiction idea as we've been discussing of microbes that could possibly find a way to persist in the space environment i think that they would be fundamentally different physically in fact even the sort of rule of water and organics and energy that we were talking about might not apply i mean that's a great way to make life on the surface of a planet where liquid water and organic chemistry do well but in space you've got all this intense radiation and i think if there was life out there you'd be looking at a really fundamentally different basis and therefore the idea that it could come and thrive and infect us here on the surface of a planet seems much less plausible to me that's why my favorite sci-fi uh films are when the uh aliens land and they breathe our air or they're exposed to our elements of any kind and they die oh they die well no that would mean they okay not that they can affect us but if they can be affected by our microbes that's the same two-way street right yeah so so from another planet i think is more plausible but actually microbes that are adapted to the environment in space living on earth seems harder to me um but like the idea of martians you know that it's that's the plot of the war of the worlds right the martians get defeated not by our guns but by they get infected with a common coal right nice um you know i still don't know if the metabolism on another planet would be similar enough that animals could be infected by their microbes but it seems plausible to me more plausible than actual space microbes whatever they might be making let me let me ask you both this then okay forget the space microbes let's say we have a world where over a period of time that world is slowly losing its atmosphere as it does so it loses its protection against radiation and therefore whatever life is there has been an adaptation to a world that had um that that have protection from radiation to a world that has none but it continued to live then somehow it lands here would it be able to survive good one really interesting question um the i would think that whatever adaptation it made to living without air would probably make it harder for it to suddenly live again in a planet with air but you know one thing we've learned about life is how opportunistic it is and if it had originally involved it originally evolved on a planet with there maybe it would have this sort of vestigial metabolism that could be re-triggered in that environment so i don't know chuck now i think you just came up with a science fiction story you know we have five novels here and none of us are novelists so let's geek out here for a minute um going on wait wait i have we're gonna have a geek moment but before that um david what are the ethics of either purposefully or inadvertently spreading our microbes to other possible fertile environments out there interesting it's a really interesting question and a lot of people are debating this now uh you know the sort of first blush answer that a lot of people come up with is like how dare we why should we you know screw up other planets what we've done to our own planet but there's a reverse argument that's pretty interesting which is that if there's another environment that is lifeless maybe mars is completely lifeless then if we have the opportunity to bring life elsewhere in the universe then isn't that a good thing there's kind of a deep ecology rationale deep ecology is the philosophy that um reveres life above everything even above humans it says all life is valuable innately and if mars is truly a dead world then maybe there's something ethically positive about letting it flourish and then again we're now we're the progenitors of panspermia yeah but in that case exactly truck right so yeah so so but uh is it is am i mistaken if i'm remembering correctly that uh the reason why we crashed cassini was for that reason not to infect yeah that's right we have we have planetary protection protocols we have rules about uh you do everything you can to avoid inadvertently contaminating a planet especially a planet where life could possibly thrive and because we plunked cassini into jupiter so by that measure we contaminated jupiter so what are you saying right so while we point cassini explain your way out of that one we function into saturn but we plug galileo into jupiter for similar reasons and wouldn't it be ironic if by doing so we had contaminated those worlds because the point of doing that was because that's a place we surely couldn't contaminate because those are just going to burn up and those are such weird alien worlds but the moons of saturn and jupiter are places we imagine there might be underground life in in sealed in oceans you know both on on uh on uh enceladus around saturn on europa around jupiter so we've been very careful not to crash spacecraft onto those places although as you point out neil we maybe we just killed officers i was going to say neil just exposed a glaring arrogance that we have with respect to where we believe life might be we just killed off all the jupiterians you know we thought we were being so careful practicing safe planetary exploration no in all fairness if you do the math the kinetic energy of the craft as it collides with jupiter's atmosphere is sufficiently high that when all that gets converted to thermal energy you basically vaporize the entire craft so i think we're safe here you basically burned your burned your garbage let's geek out for a minute david i'm sure you've thought about this but since science fiction authors reference you and dedicate their books to you could you could you what's your most fantastical dreams for space exploration and space travel right now where would you give me a little most of what we know but give me a little bit of what we don't know put it together and dream it and what comes out of your head well so for you know there's there's what is there's like what is my most fantastic dream for some far future and that involves maybe like what we call generation ships where um groups of humans that are self-sustaining could could not only live in in space and orbital communities as it has been described but then those could migrate to other stars um it's sort of a i think it's just something sort of beautiful about this idea of sort of the slow interstellar migration but if we're talking about wait wait just to be clear just to be clear you are committing an entire generation of unborn people to be prisoners of a spaceship that you came up with to send to another planet yeah you're saying it's beautiful well it's not without this i looked at ethical um challenges but but how is that how is that different really from listen listen you gotta love the way david checked i told him i gotta tell you what what david just said was sometimes when you take a trip that's not right around the corner people know people think about it may not have a choice but how is that really different from people that migrate anywhere and then they assume that their kids and their grandkids are going to want to live there people because because you could get on an airplane and go back back well you okay all right i was going to say david that's an excellent point however that's uh that's kind of checkmate there you're right because you can't come back but hey my my dream for the next you know few decades it involves the fact that miniaturization is getting so good and that we can do so much you know in my own field of planetary exploration there are these really far out ideas that are becoming plausible where we can send tiny spacecraft to other planets you know things like cubesats that are cheap which are literally um you know postage stamp sized um tiny little um spacecraft basically you can drop into a planetary atmosphere and they have uh scientific instruments built onto a chip that can do pretty sophisticated things and you could drop a swarm of these into the atmosphere of venus or mars or jupiter and learn all kinds of things about the chemistry and the circulation and it wouldn't be very expensive so i feel like the innovation that's coming just from our being able to make really sophisticated really tiny things is going to allow us to explore the solar system in a more thorough way without sending all that much stuff or spending so low mass payloads so yeah they do very well with acceleration and propulsion because the same force will accelerate it much higher than if you're sending a whole human being for example so yeah so if and then it comes and that means it's just going to not cost nearly as much and that's that is very enabling so what uh if you were to go i mean just what is so i guess proxima would be about four light years or four years proxima century yeah yeah four likes so so would we be able to would we'd be able to do anything in our lifetime let's say we had that capability i mean that's that's the other side of this uh that's the other side of this miniaturization technology you know there's this group now with a breakthrough um with starshot where they're talking about using postage stamp size spacecraft and accelerating them with powerful lasers from earth to some significant fraction of the speed of light and getting to the nearest planetary systems in something like um you know in decades rather than so this is this is an array a very high powered lasers being sent from earth to these traveling um mini uh spaceships they were there we call them that and and that will accelerate them from what i've read maybe as high as 20 the speed of light is that wow correct right yeah so it'll be twenty years there right because it's twenty percent of you know light years yeah so it's five oh that is that is so dope yeah it is alive today who will be around but then you only get confirmation of it when it tells you back at the speed of light so it's a 24-year confirmation that it that it arrived yes and there's no there's no magic involved it's all known physics the technology is pushing things but there's no magic tricks it's just developing things we already know how to do to some extreme okay chuck i gotta hear david's response to this ready okay so david uh what happens to an airplane that flies accidentally into the laser beams that are propelling these oh that would be an unfortunate [Laughter] 20 20 years later that laser beam is on proxima oh man you're losing 747 every now and then but that's worth it right okay mistakes were made that's hilarious all right we're gonna have to actually call it quits there but um but chuck always good to have you as my colleagues a pleasure i want to thank andy weir for agreeing to you know jump onto our our into our star talk universe and share with us his latest projects uh he's been a fan of our work and we're definitely a fan of his so we don't even want to miss whatever he's up to and uh david always good to see you and to talk to you we go way back even well before star talk and so it's great to see you still connected with us um what i'd like to do to end is give a recitation of uh one of the concluding passages of h.g wells war of the worlds just to take us out if you'll indulge me go for it and by you know war of the worlds has a narrator in the movie the tom cruise version of it there's an error you know who narrated it uh was it um wait give me a second um oh god more morgan free man okay so i remember andy dufresne and his alien friend so generally you if if you have to guess a narrator it's 50 chance it's going to be morgan freeman in fact it was him i'm not going to read his ending narration because it it made some changes from the original here's the original and this will take us out okay just to remind you aliens from mars attacked humans they fell sick and died because they caught some microbe that we all had immunity to and it did not so here it goes for so it had come about as indeed i and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds these germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things taken toll of our pre-human ancestors since life began here by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power to no germs do we succumb without a struggle and directly these invaders arrived directly they drank and fed our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow already when i had watched them they were irrevocably doomed dying and rotting even as they went to and fro it was inevitable by the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth and it is his against all comers it will still be his were the martians ten times as mighty as they are for neither do men live nor die in vain there's hg wells for you yeah had a way with words man all right this has been star talk neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist as always keep looking up

Channel: StarTalk

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Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, aliens, scifi

Id: mOMJWHmt_Ps

Length: 54min 50sec (3290 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021