- This video is brought
to you by Storyblocks. Chuck, you wanna live on Mars? - Yes! - But you can't breathe the air. - No! (Neil laughing) (upbeat techno music) - All right, so we have two options. - [Chuck] Okay. - If we're all gonna move
to Mars and live there, either we build a bio-dome habitat. - [Chuck] Okay. - [Neil] That's basically Earth on Mars. - I kinda like that idea. - Okay, but then you can't just wander. It's not your planet. The bio-dome is kind of like a global spacesuit for everybody. For me, it would be
hard to call that home. - It'd be like "The Truman Show" on Mars. You can only go to a certain limit. - And then, that's it. (laughs) So, another option would
be to terraform the place. - Okay. - One of my favorite words.
- Get your ass to Mars. (Neil laughing) Terraform, get your ass to Mars! (Neil laughing) Stop hoarding all the oxygen! (both laughing) - So, here's the thing, the-- - Terraforming Mars!
- Terraforming Mars. - Which is? - Here's why everyone's talking
about Mars and not Venus. You ever wonder why? Okay, here's why. - 'Cause men are from Mars? - Venus is 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Runaway greenhouse effect. And I did the calculation. You could put a pizza on the windowsill, it'll cook in nine seconds. - That bad, I like it.
- Now, here's the thing. Mars rotates once about every 24 hours. Did you know that?
- That's kind of what we do. - And it's tipped on its axis. - Kinda like what we are.
- As we are. It has polar ice caps. - So do we.
- As we do. And, on its surface,
there's all this evidence that it once had running water, a meandering river bed, bone dry today. - Hey, we're headed there, too! (Neil laughing) - It's just, so, Mars's just
got everybody's imagination. So, there's no water there
now, but there was once, where do you think the water went? - Underground? - Well, we don't really know. - Okay.
- But we think underground. - Oh, thank god.
(laughing) I was just guessing, wildly. - No, no, if it went
anywhere, it went underground. And Mars is very cold, and so we think it's like a permafrost. - Permafrost, right. - Permanently frozen down there. All right, so what you wanna do is, you wanna warm the planet. Get the water back on the surface, okay? And there's not much atmosphere there, it's mostly carbon dioxide,
which is what kind of a gas? ♪ Greenhouse ♪
- A greenhouse gas. But it's only 1% the
thickness of our atmosphere. So even though it's almost entirely CO2, it's not thick enough to trap the heat coming from the Martian surface, - There ya go.
- That got there from the Sun. - Right.
- So, guess how that works. Sunlight comes in, which
is mostly visible light. - Correct.
- It's absorbed by the soils, and it re-radiates in infrared,
that's what gets trapped by greenhouse gases. - But with no atmosphere,
- with the thin atmosphere, - then what would happen? - there's nothing going on, so it's cold. So, everybody's wondering,
let's warm the place. - [Chuck] All right. - Can we release some of this CO2 that's frozen on the poles? Can we get the water back out? Do you know, the water molecule
is also a greenhouse gas? - That's right. - Did you know that?
- Water vapor is probably the most prevalent greenhouse gas. - [Neil] In our atmosphere, correct. There's more water vapor
than anything else. - [Chuck] Anything else, right. - If you get all the CO2 that we have found in the polar ice caps, because it's like dry ice there. 'Cause dry ice on Earth is CO2, okay? So you get all that evaporated, then get all the water, evaporate that, it's still not enough
to make a big difference in the greenhouse trapping of Mars. - Oh, wow! - So, if we wanna warm the
planet, you gotta B-Y-O. - B-Y-O-G-H-G? - Yes. (laughs) - Bring your own greenhouse gas? - B-Y-O-G-H-G.
- I think we could do that! - You think we could do that, all right. - I mean, methane, we could bring-- - Methane, Methane's
another greenhouse gas! - We could bring some methane.
- How you gonna do that? - Well, it's just eat a lot of chili. (Neil laughing) Meat and beans to methane! (Neil laughing) I believe that's the molecular
combination for methane. (Neil laughing) - In a chemistry book,
- Meat and beans, methane! - So bring everybody
with some chili bowls! - That's it, chili bowl. Everybody gets a bowl of chili! Welcome to Mars, here's
your bowl of chili. - Help out the, (laughs)
help out the locals! - There you go. Help out the ecology. Here's your bowl of chili. (both laughing) - But farm animals also give off methane. You get that from, 'cause
when they digest cellulose, which is the fibers in plant life. So, cows, multiple stomach
animals are burping and-- - All kinds of-- - All orifices are giving off the methane. - Right.
- Termites do it too. - [Chuck] I did not know that. - Big source of methane
in the world actually. - That's what I tell my wife all the time, I'm just like, we have termites. (Neil laughing) That wasn't me. That wasn't me. - We can't blame the dog? - We don't have a dog so I
gotta blame the termites. (Neil laughing) - But, so the problem is,
there's not enough in, on-planet carbon dioxide and
water vapor to pull this off. So you have to bring your own or find some other way to heat the planet. And, Elon Musk has a plan. - Uh-oh! - Okay, so he's thinking of
putting satellites in orbit that have big reflectors
that focus sunlight that would otherwise miss the planet. - Right. - Focus it down on the planet
and just add more energy to the planet, heating it
up, and if you do it right, you might be able to set sort of a - Chain reaction?
- Chain reaction in place. If everything is frozen
and it gets warmer, you'll evaporate more carbon dioxide and that'll help trap more heat, and then that'll make it harder to evaporate even more carbon dioxide. You get all of that out of the system and into the atmosphere. Then now it's warm enough, now you're still mostly greenhouse gases, you still need oxygen to breathe. - Right. - So now you put microorganisms
that eat the CO2, and they release oxygen.
- They release oxygen. - Like, plants do that, but on Earth, there's something called cyanobacteria. - [Chuck] Right. - They changed the ecology of the Earth more than anything else that has ever happened, including humans. - Wow. - We had a mostly
carbon-dioxide atmosphere, the cyanobacteria said
I'm eating some of that. - This sounds good.
- It sounds good and out comes oxygen, they
created an oxygen atmosphere. - Oxygen rich atmosphere. - Right. - Wow, and then everything else
is kinda based off of that. - Based off of that. Everything else we know and love, right? - Here's the question
- What? - How long does this take? (both laughing) - So I don't, that's the big problem. Is it a thousand years? Is it a million years? Or, can you (snapping)
speed it up with some, fast acting microbes? This remains to be established. - [Chuck] Cool. - But, I'm telling you that if we're gonna be a two
planet species, I'm thinking, you gotta terraform
Mars for that to happen. - Nice, and is Mars, the best planet of all the planets to Terraform? - I'm not burning my ass on Venus, A. - Okay. - B, I'm not going to Mercury, - That's true. - 'Cause it's three inches
from the surface of the sun. - [Chuck] Okay. - Okay. Maybe, there could be
moons of outer planets. - [Chuck] Like moons of Jupiter? - [Neil] Moons of Jupiter and Saturn. - [Chuck] Okay. - [Neil] Titan has an atmosphere Okay, you might be able to terraform that, if we have the right formulas and recipes, but we're not really there yet. - Not even there yet. - It's way in the future. - So Mars is the closet thing to us, with the best possible results. - Correct and it's nearby and it's got, as close as
we could have ever wanted, I think, to pull off this experiment. So, yeah. - And has it occurred
to anyone that perhaps we should just take care of this planet? (Neil laughing) - No, here's the thing. The day we have the
power to terraform Mars, turn Mars into Earth, we'll have the power to turn Earth into Earth. - Oh, that is awesome! - See what I'm saying there?
- I never thought of that! If we could terraform Mars-- - 'Cause people saying oh
we're gonna terraform Mars, move there, because we've
trashed Earth, then I'm saying-- - It means that we're able to geo-engineer our own
planet to a place where we could live! - Turn earth back into earth. - It's not a bad answer,
it's a good answer, but here's another problem. Escape plan, we need a place to go because we'll get hit by a giant asteroid that destroys-- - So you wanna become
a two planet species, - Right! - In case there's a risk of-- - [Chuck] Catastrophic collision
with some celestial body. - [Neil] Okay, so what you're saying is, we ship a billion people
there, we got billions here, and then one of 'em goes
extinct while the others watch? - You know, I kinda like that. (Neil laughing) I'm just saying, that's kinda cool. If I'm on Mars and Earth gets hit with an asteroid,
- You're cool with that? I am so cool with that! (both laughing) - So here's the thing. - Go ahead. - I don't know if it's just me, - Right. - Whatever it takes to terraform Mars-- - Right. - From advanced geo-engineering. - Yes. - It seems to me that by then, we can just bat asteroids
out of the sky as they come. It seems to me we'll be
advanced enough to have a perfect anti-virus serum so that there's no killer
virus that takes it out. It seems to me, we have the power to protect either planet from anything that could render us extinct. - Something's telling me you
have a bias towards Earth. - I like me some Earth. (both laughing) Earth is good. So Chuck, we done here? - Oh, we're done. (mimicking exploding) So let's say you just wanted to get some video footage of Mars, you would have to build a space ship, commission NASA to do your
mission control work, go to Mars, have a special camera, take
actual footage of Mars, who do you think you are, NASA? Or you could do what we did,
Storyblocks, that's right, that's how we got access
to shots like this and this and this. We got them all from Storyblocks. Storyblocks video has video and images and audio and templates
for anything you want. Mars stuff, boom. Scary stuff, boom. Clowns. (Neil laughing) - [Neil] Scary clowns. - Yes, yes unfortunately, even that. Some of the video in this
video came from Storyblocks, so head to storyblocks.com/StarTalk
and sign up now. Check out their unlimited plan for all the royalty free
media you could ever wish for. Check out the link in
the description below, and learn more about Storyblocks video! - And as always, I bid
you to keep looking up. (upbeat techno music)
